Symbolism 12/13: [Special Focus – Jewish Magic Realism] 9783110297201, 9783110297010

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Symbolism An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics

Symbolism

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics Editorial Board Ackbar Abbas, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong; Heinz Antor, Universität Köln, Cologne, Germany; Susan Bassnett, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK; Wilhelm Benning, University of Athens, Athens, Greece; Roy Boyne, University of Durham, Durham, UK; Daniela Carpi, Università di Verona, Verona, Italy; Marc Chénetier, Université de Sorbonne, Paris, France; Kevin L. Cope, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA; René Gallet, Université de Caen, Caen, France; Christina Giorcelli, Università di Roma, Rome, Italy; Yasmine Gooneratne, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia; Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA; Ihab Hassan, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA; Maria Herrera-Sobek, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA; Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada; Christopher Innes, York University, Toronto, Canada; Eva-Marie Kroeller, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada; Francisco A. Lomelí, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA; M. Mukherjee, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India; Susana Onega, Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain; Andrew Parkin, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong; Clive T. Probyn, Monash University, Clayton, Australia; Eric S. Rabkin, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA; Frédéric Regard, Université de Lyon, Lyon, France; Kiernan Ryan, Royal Holloway College, London, UK; Ronald Shusterman, Université Michel de Montaigne, Bordeaux, France; Barbara Stafford, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illlinois, USA; Franz K. Stanzel, Karl-FranzensUniversität, Graz, Austria; Stefanos Stefanides, University of Nicosia, Nicosia, Cyprus; Toshiyuki Takamiya, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan; Kwok-kan Tam, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong; Qing Sheng Tong, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong; Robert Weimann, University of California, Irvine, USA; Richard H. Weisberg, Yeshiva University, New York, USA; Walther Chr. Zimmerli, Private Univ., Witten/Herdecke, Germany

Symbolism

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics Volume 12/13 Edited by Rüdiger Ahrens and Klaus Stierstorfer Assistant Editor Florian Kläger

ISBN 978-3-11-029701-0 e-ISBN 978-3-11-029720-1 ISSN 1528-3623 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2013 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: jürgen ullrich typosatz, Nördlingen Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Foreword from the Editors Symbolism appears with this volume in a slightly changed appearance and with a different publisher’s label, as it has moved from AMS Press, New York, to De Gruyter, Berlin and Boston. While the thematic trajectory of the annual remains unchanged and will continue to develop its profile and scope on the extended exploratory venture of theories and practices of the symbolic, the move mainly constitutes a regional repositioning. While distribution in America and the involvement with American scholarship remain of high importance, the exchange with European scholarship as well as with people interested in further regions worldwide will hopefully be stimulated and intensified by this relocation. New voices, new perspectives and new contributors will address new readerships without disrupting ongoing lines of inquiry and research which readers of existing volumes of Symbolism have come to appreciate. At this moment of a new departure the Editors wish to take the opportunity to express their gratitute to AMS Press for more than a decade of excellent cooperation and inspiring teamwork, as well as to thank De Gruyter publishers for welcoming the annual for the recalibration described. The editors are delighted to present the substantial double volume 12/13 as the launch pad, so to speak, for the newly refurbished annual. On the thematic side, few topics could be better suited to highlight this turn than the essays around Jewish Magic Realism assembled in this volume’s focus by Axel Stähler. As becomes clear from Axel Stähler’s introduction to the focus and as the following expert articles testify, Jewish Magic Realism is a most exciting special case in magic realist writing that has never received the consolidated attention which it truly deserves and which it is finally granted here. However, Jewish Magic Realism is shown to be more than just another variant in the long line of magic realist literature; with its negotiations of the Bible and of major Jewish cultural traditions it clearly emerges as a foundational exploration to the very roots of Western culture with, potentially, a world-wide impact and relevance. This stimulating focus is thematically complemented in the general section by a study in religious symbolism in Angelica Michelis’s, Hester Jones’s and Andrew Shanks’s contributions. Jack Stewart on Virgina Woolf’s ‘surrealist’ imagery, Sebastian Domsch in the symbol in graphic narratives and Patrick Gill on the English elegy widen the general scope while Puschmann-Nalenz’s study on the liminal in Postmodernism fits well with the liminal position of this new volume in the series of Symbolism annuals. The editors thank Dr. Manuela Gerlof and Christina Riesenweber at De Gruyter for their expert guidance in the transfer of the annual and for bringing this volume about so smoothly. Axel Stähler has proved a focus editor of astounding

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efficiency and inspiration, turning our cooperation into sheer pleasure. As always, Chris Wahlig in the English Seminar at the University of Muenster has been the reliable mainstay of the organisational side of Symbolism. Finally, it is our pleasure to announce that Dr Florian Kläger, who has been on the Symbolism team for several years, now joins us officially as assistant editor of the annual. Ruediger Ahrens University of Wuerzburg

Klaus Stierstorfer University of Muenster

Contents Foreword from the Editors

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Special Focus: Jewish Magic Realism ed. Axel Stähler

Axel Stähler Introduction: A Jewish Magic Realism?

3

Clive Sinclair Is Magical Realism Kosher? A Conversation

18

Sue Vice Universalism and Symbolism in Holocaust Fiction

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Jenni Adams Intertextuality and the Trace of the Other: Specters of Bruno Schulz Vered Weiss Generic Hybridity, or Mediating Modes of Writing: Agnon’s Magical Realistic and Gothic National Narration

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69

Michael Lejman Dreams in the Desert: Searching for Identity in Albert Memmi’s Experimental Fiction 91 Efraim Sicher and Shuly Eilat Inception of a Nation and the Birth of the Hero: Magic Realism in Meir Shalev’s A Pigeon and a Boy and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children 107 Axel Stähler The Search for M…: Magic Realism in Doron Rabinovici and Benjamin Stein 121

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Meyrav Koren-Kuik Displacement and Jewish Identity: Magical Realism in the Novels of Dara Horn 150 Aaron Tillman “Jewish, Here in the Back”: The Magical and Comical Call of an Enigmatic Difference in Nathan Englander’s “The Gilgul of Park Avenue” and Steve Stern’s “The Tale of a Kite” 170 Kitty Millet Can the Holocaust Novel be a Magical Realist Novel? H. G. Adler’s The Journey ‘after Auschwitz’ 192 Irmtraud Huber The Usual Suspects: Jewish Magical Realism, Trauma and the Holocaust Diana Popescu Magic and Realism in the Art and the Memoir of Samuel Bak

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James Jordan “A Strange, Special Day. Playing a Ghost, Yet Haunting Myself.” The Holocaust, the Magical and the Real in Elijah Moshinsky’s Genghis Cohn (1993) 245 Rachel S. Harris Ahoti Hayafa (2011): Magical Realism and Marginalization in the World of the Mizrachi Woman 261

General Section

Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz On the Edge of No Place. Liminal Spaces and Fictional Representation in the Age of Postmodernism 281 Jack Stewart Virginia Woolf’s “Surreal” Imagery in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse 299

Contents

Sebastian Domsch Halftone Reality: Icon and Symbol in Graphic Narrative Angelica Michelis “Where Bees Pray on Their Knees”: Spiritual and Religious Symbolism in Carol Ann Duffy’s The Bees

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321

336

Hester Jones The Language of the Deep: Symbolism and Its Place in Twentieth-century Religious Poetry 352 Patrick Gill “Across the Divide”: The Contemporary English Elegy

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Andrew Shanks Hope, Incandescent Yet Contained: A Hegelian Reading of Hölderlin’s “Celebration of Peace” 380

Book Reviews Deborah Parker. Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xi + 152 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-76140-6, 53 GBP. (Brendan Dooley) 397 Keith A. Sandiford. Theorizing a Colonial Caribbean-Atlantic Imaginary: Sugar and Obeah. New York: Routledge, 2011. 194 pp. ISBN 978-0-415-87689-6, 90 GBP. (Supriya Nair) 400 The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, ed. Ato Quayson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 2 vols, 1391 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-51749-2, 200 GBP (310 USD). (Klaus Stierstorfer) 405

Contributors Index

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Special Focus: Jewish Magic Realism

Axel Stähler

Introduction: A Jewish Magic Realism? “Behold me here” – Abraham’s words in answer to the summons by his God take on in Erich Auerbach’s reading of the akedah, the Sacrifice of Isaac, the utmost significance.1 In a dazzling analysis of the biblical narrative, Auerbach takes the stark sparseness of the hidden and formless divinity’s call – “Abraham!” – and of the old man’s submissive acknowledgement as his point of departure to ascertain a specifically Jewish mode of the literary representation of reality. “The concept of God held by the Jews,” he says, “is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and representing things” (M, 8/10). The Jewish realism he perceives in the narrative of the akedah is one which is characterized by the reduction to the absolute essentials, it is a bare bones fragmentary representation of slivers of reality which forces the reader to fill in the gaps imaginatively; as such it is permeated with suspense and “fraught with background” – it is “hintergründig” (M, 12/14). Yet what the biblical narrator produced was not, as Auerbach insists, “primarily oriented toward ‘realism,’” but rather toward “truth.” In fact, the bible’s “claim to truth” is “tyrannical” in Auerbach’s reading, to the exclusion of all other claims: “The world of the Scripture stories is not satisfied with claiming to be a historically true reality – it insists that it is the only real world, is destined for autocracy” (M, 14–15/16–17). However, the very multiplicity of meanings embedded in the fragmentary representation of the biblical narrative demands interpretation and therefore intrinsically challenges its own claim to tyrannical authority (M, 15/18). Thus was initiated a process of “interpretative transformation” – “ausdeutende Umformung” – which historically produced a tension and an increasing disjunction between narrative and doctrine that resulted, in Auerbach’s reading, in the transmutation of the former into “ancient legends” and of the latter into “a disembodied image” (M, 16/18). It may seem counterintuitive to embark on an exploration of Jewish magic realism with an exposition of Jewish realism. Yet Erich Auerbach’s extraordinary proposition that there is an essential affinity between the Jewish perception of the world and its representation in Jewish literature would suggest a priori that the notion of a Jewish magic realism is a contradiction in terms which goes far beyond

1 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature [1953], trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1974): 9. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “M”; divided by a forward slash, page references to the American translation will be followed by those to the German original, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur [1946] 10th ed. (Tübingen and Basel: Francke, 2001): 10. See also Genesis 22:1.

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the frequently emphasized oxymoronic nature of the term magic realism.2 However, is the Jewish method of representing reality described by Auerbach really so far removed from what may be designated magic realism? The following discussion seeks to approximate an understanding of Jewish magic realism in conversation with Auerbach’s suggestions. These were advanced by the philologist in Mimesis, his seminal study on the representation of reality in Western literature, published in 1946, and it will be useful to recall, very briefly, the circumstances of its genesis. It so happens that Auerbach was Jewish himself. Forced to vacate his Chair in Romance Studies at the University of Marburg in 1935 after the rise of National Socialism in Germany, the exiled philologist found refuge in Istanbul where he lived until 1946.3 It is here that he wrote Mimesis during the decisive years of the Second World War, between May 1942 and April 1945. In the first chapter of his study, called “Odysseus’ Scar,” Auerbach engages in a comparative analysis of Homer’s Odyssey and the bible (M, 3–23/5–27). Both are discussed as embodiments of two very different styles of the representation of reality. Recent readings of Auerbach’s study, and its first chapter in particular, have re-situated Mimesis in its historical production context. More specifically, it has been argued that “Auerbach’s juxtaposition of the two traditions, Homeric and Jewish, is a pointed and polemical one.”4 Indeed, the suggestion is that with the “willful perversity” of his first chapter,5 Auerbach effectively pursues what James I. Porter has called “a Jewish philology or a Judaizing of philology.”6 This may require some further explanation. According to Auerbach, the representation of reality in the Odyssey is defined by “externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feelings completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little suspense” (M, 11/13–14). This is confronted with the stark and fragmented but psychologically profound style of the bible. The inner emotional reality suggested

2 See, e.g., Stephen Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke UP, 1995): 407–426, 411 and Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): vi. 3 Earl Jeffrey Richards, “Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis as a Meditation on the Shoah,” German Politics and Society 19.2 (2001): 62–91, 64–67. 4 James I. Porter, “Erich Auerbach and the Judaizing of Philology,” Critical Inquiry 35.1 (2008): 115–147, 120. 5 Porter, “Erich Auerbach,” 115. 6 Porter, “Erich Auerbach,” 117.

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in the biblical narrative is inaccessible to the Homeric (in)sensibility which has been read as representative of the German tradition of classical philology.7 In Porter’s interpretation of Mimesis, both emerge as incommensurable. In effect, the contrast is one “between two conceptual schemes or psychologies that are being shown to be mutually untranslatable.”8 Porter concludes that [b]y investing the Old Testament narrative with perspectival depth, historical possibilities, and a quest for moral truth, not ingratiating and entertaining lies, Auerbach is inverting the modern edifice of philology; he is Judaizing it and thereby enacting a kind of philological revenge in the name of a tyrannical, terrifying, all-seeing but hidden Jewish god.9

The reading of Mimesis as a “‘Jewish’ project of literature” has been challenged by Galili Shahar who suggests that [o]ne should rather think of Auerbach’s project in terms of modernist interpretation in which identities are revealed as mixed, unstable textures, and traditions are experienced from a distance, through a process of radical transformation, denial, and openness.10

By the same token, Shahar also rejects Earl Jeffrey Richards’s suggestion that Auerbach’s study is “a highly sublimated allegorical meditation on the contemporary murder of Europe’s Jews,”11 and that – for all its despondence in the face of contemporary reality – it envisages a tikkun olam, a mending of the world.12 It is surely advisable to observe some caution in attributing an overtly political agenda to Auerbach’s study and Shahar’s suggestions have their own merit. Yet to imagine the philologist musing on the representation of reality in the seclusion of his Turkish ivory tower, entirely bereft of any sense of the reality that had forced him to leave Germany and that made him reflect in the epilogue to Mimesis on the chances of any of his “friends of former years” to have survived (M, 557/518), would seem rather innocuous.13 In addition to explicit, though infrequent references such as this,14 Auerbach’s choice of textual samples for his discussion has also been interpreted as a response to contemporary events, in

7 Porter, “Erich Auerbach,” 120. 8 Porter, “Erich Auerbach,” 134. 9 Porter, “Erich Auerbach,” 137. 10 Galili Shahar, “Auerbach’s Scars: Judaism and the Question of Literature,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 101.4 (2011): 604–630, 624. 11 Richards, “Meditation,” 62. 12 Richards, “Meditation,” 86. 13 As James I. Porter has observed, Willard Trask’s translation obscures the doubt expressed in the German text about the survival of Auerbach’s friends, or their failure to survive, “Erich Auerbach,” 119. 14 For further examples, see Porter, “Erich Auerbach,” 117–121.

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particular the prominent reflection on the akedah.15 As Richards argues, Auerbach sought “to find concrete examples from the past that function as figural analogies to contemporary history.”16 In this way, Mimesis offers “fragments of figural insight”17 which may then – in analogy to the fragmentary character of the biblical narrative – be read as an attempt to represent the reality or, perhaps, rather the “truth” of his own times. Reality, though central to Auerbach’s study, is a concept which the philologist quite deliberately chooses not to delimit with either an “arduous” and “tiresome” definition or an “unusual” and “clumsy” terminology (M, 556/510). Instead, his “method of textual interpretation” (M, 556/510) reinforces the notion of the context-determined constructedness of representations of reality. The two psychologies mentioned by Porter are clearly delineated by Auerbach in “Odysseus’ Scar” as binary oppositions and they patently inform alternative systems of “comprehending reality,” or “Wirklichkeitsauffassung” (M, 16/18–19). With the notion of alternative systems of comprehending reality, we have finally reached the point of intersection with magic realism. There is, of course, a fine distinction between alternative realities and alternative systems of comprehending reality. More specifically, and adapting a thought of Emmanuel Levinas, the absolutely other is, and remains, inaccessible because as soon as comprehension sets in, it ceases to be other.18 Accordingly, magic realism – understood to be “accepting both realistic and magical perspectives of reality on the same level”19 – does not so much offer the representation of alternative realities but rather the narrative reconciliation of different systems of comprehending reality. Christopher Warnes has similarly emphasized the crucial importance of the capacity of magic realism “to resolve the tension between two discursive systems usually thought of as mutually exclusive.”20 In his “basic” definition, magic realism is characterized as “a mode of narration that naturalises or normalises the supernatural,” which means that “real and fantastic, natural and supernatural, are coherently represented in a state of equivalence.”21 To Warnes, magic realism therefore “designates a narrative strategy that stretches or ruptures altogether the

15 See Richards, “Meditation,” 71–78. 16 See Richards, “Meditation,” 83. 17 See Richards, “Meditation,” 85. 18 See Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other” [1963], trans. Alphonso Lingis, in Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986): 345–359, 346. 19 Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004): 4. 20 Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel, 2. 21 Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel, 3.

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boundaries of reality.”22 This, however, seems an unfortunate way of putting it and it might be more accurate to refer, once again, to the stretching or rupturing of the boundaries of the perception or comprehension of reality rather than of reality itself. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris accordingly suggest that magic realism may be considered as “an extension of realism in its concern with the nature of reality and its representation.”23 Even if taking into account that the authors qualify their observation with the remark that magic realism simultaneously “resists the basic assumptions of post-enlightenment rationalism and literary realism,”24 its implications are crucial and pervasive. For the suggestion is then that in a subtle shift realism is once again recognized as the dominating principle of representation. Different manifestations of reality may be acknowledged, but they continue to be represented in what is, then, effectively still a mimetic approach. It is a matter of Wirklichkeitsauffassung rather than different realities, albeit of different Wirklichkeitsauffassungen integrated seamlessly into the narrative, or, more accurately, of a new hybrid Wirklichkeitsauffassung which blends and reconciles alternative and potentially even contradictory systems and methods of the comprehension of reality.25 Inevitably, Auerbach and his identification of mimesis as the governing principle of the representation of reality in Western literature come to mind at this juncture. When Zamora and Faris identify as one epistemological objective of critical engagement with magic realism the exploration of “how Western realism is subverted, mimesis displaced by poesis,”26 the question rather seems to be in how far mimesis is extended to accommodate and amalgamate different systems of comprehending reality. Similarly, they propose that the widespread appeal of magical realist fiction today responds not only to its innovative energy but also to its impulse to reestablish contact with traditions temporarily eclipsed by the mimetic constraints of nineteenth- and twentieth-century realism.27

It seems important to recognize that Auerbach by no means confuses the representation of reality with (modern) realism; hence the title of his monumental

22 Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel, vi. 23 Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, “Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke UP, 1995): 1–11, 6. 24 Zamora and Faris, “Introduction,” 6. 25 See Zamora and Faris, “Introduction,” 5–6. 26 Zamora and Faris, “Introduction,” 7–8. 27 Zamora and Faris, “Introduction,” 2.

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study. He is very clear on the emergence of (modern) realism, in the more narrow sense of a literary style, in the nineteenth century (see M, 491–492/458–459, 554/515). In “Odysseus’ Scar,” Auerbach furthermore notes that “as late as the European Middle Ages it was possible to represent Biblical events as ordinary phenomena of contemporary life” (M, 15/18). This integrative approach to the biblical narrative and the interpretive methods applied to it was altered, according to Auerbach, “through too great a change in environment and the awakening of a critical consciousness” (M, 15–16/18). Yet in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), an icon of magic realism, Gabriel García Márquez has one of his characters reaffirm the amalgamation of magic and reality in the bible in relation to narrations of the supernatural real: “If they believe it in the Bible,” she says, “I don’t see why they shouldn’t believe it from me.”28 To re-establish contact with earlier traditions not subsumed under the label of realism therefore does not necessarily connote the rejection of mimesis altogether, because the mimetic principle as informing the periods prior to realism proper is a much more inclusive concept than the earlier quotation would have us believe. Not a few of the texts discussed in the contributions to this special issue as Jewish magic realist writing do indeed seek to connect with earlier literary traditions, many of them of a ‘Jewish’ provenance. The Israeli writer Meir Shalev, discussed in the contribution of Efraim Sicher and Shuly Eilat, consciously seeks to re-connect with his magic realist approach to the bible. S. Y. Agnon similarly engages with religious Jewish traditions, as emerges in the essay of Vered Weiss. The notion of gilgul, a Kabbalistic concept of reincarnation, informs a short story by Nathan Englander, compared by Aaron Tillman to another magic realist short story by Steve Stern which uses fabulist elements reminiscent of Chasidic tales. The use of the possessing spirit of the dybbuk in the 1993 BBC TV adaptation of Romain Gary’s novel The Dance of Genghis Cohn (1968) is investigated by James Jordan. Doron Rabinovici, discussed in Axel Stähler’s essay, evokes with the figure of Mullemann in his novel The Search for M (1997) the specter of the Golem. Finally, Clive Sinclair’s imaginative enquiry into the great Isaac Bashevis Singer’s use of magic realism reveals a fabulism steeped in the Jewish narrative tradition. No less pervasive, however, is the influence of more recent magic realist writing of a non-Jewish provenance. Zamora and Faris have observed that magic realism has evolved into “an international commodity.”29 Indeed, the internationalization of the magic realist mode and its global dissemination in the works of

28 Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude [1967], trans. Gregory Rabassa (London: Penguin, 1973): 305. 29 Zamora and Faris, “Introduction,” 2.

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authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez or Salman Rushdie have made it a pattern of engagement with reality that is readily available and accessible anywhere in the world. Evidence of the finely spun web of intertextual connections which link Jewish magic realism with other manifestations of this mode surfaces in various contributions to the special issue. Efraim Sicher and Shuly Eilat, for instance, draw a connection between the work of Meir Shalev and Salman Rushdie. The degree of importance that might be attributed to the magic realism of Bruno Schulz’s work in his appropriation by a later generation of Jewish writers is investigated by Jenni Adams. Outside the established parameters of magic realism, the significance of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) as an inspiration for the adoption of the magic realist mode to Doron Rabinovici and Benjamin Stein is discussed by Axel Stähler. Is the proliferation of Jewish magic realism in recent years then no more than just a confirmation of the recent trend observed by Zamora and Faris? It seems to me that the discussion of Auerbach has suggested otherwise. Admittedly, Auerbach emphasizes the totalizing character of the biblical narrative and this aligns it with the notion, advanced by Zamora and Faris, that “realism functions ideologically and hegemonically.”30 Magic realism, they assert, “also functions ideologically” but, in contrast, “less hegemonically, for its program is not centralizing but eccentric: it creates space for interactions of diversity.”31 This is strangely reminiscent of Auerbach’s analysis of the biblical narrative, from which it emerges, paradoxically, that its method of the representation and of the comprehension of reality engenders a “multiplicity of meanings and the need for interpretation” (M, 23/26). With a realism such as this, one might say, who needs magic realism? Yet in addition to the biblical narrative and its particular method of mimesis, fantastic or fabulist elements which, depending on their context, may well be read as magic realist, have informed Jewish tradition for a very long time and a claim might even be made that it in fact contributed crucially to the emergence of magic realism. Daniel M. Jaffe has emphasized in the introduction to his anthology With Signs and Wonders (2003) the fabulist tradition evident in the “Bible, Talmud, Midrash, and early body of kabbalist literature.”32 There is a strong fabulist element in evidence for instance in the stories of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772–1810), collected and retold by Martin Buber in 1906. In an essay on the Chasidic rabbi and Jewish mysticism prefaced to The Tales of Rabbi Nachman, 30 Zamora and Faris, “Introduction,” 3. 31 Zamora and Faris, “Introduction,” 3. 32 Daniel M. Jaffe, With Signs and Wonders: An International Anthology of Jewish Fabulous Fiction (Montpellier, VT: Invisible Cities Press, 2003): xvii.

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Buber not only identified the mystic disposition as a specifically Jewish characteristic but suggests that it is, in fact, “a significant peculiarity of the Jew, which hardly seems to have changed in thousands of years, that with him one extreme quickly and powerfully enkindles another.”33 Reminiscent of the claim to absolute authority ascribed by Auerbach to the biblical narrative, Buber recognizes in Chasidism – interpreted by him as “the Kabbala become ethos”34 – the fervid yearning for the transformation of the world: “the absolute must become reality.”35 Rabbi Nachman’s fabulist tales are an expression of desiring the impossible,36 with magical elements inserted into representations of reality to presage in the narrative the longed-for transformation. The Chasidic rabbi is acknowledged by Buber as a nodal point in the evolution of a Jewish narrative tradition in that he gave it recognizable literary shape: Rabbi Nachman found an already existing tradition of Jewish folk tales and joined with it. But he is the first real storyteller [Märchendichter] among the Jews. All earlier tales were anonymous creation; here there is present, for the first time, the person – personal intention and personal formation.37

Facets of the fabulist narrative tradition embodied in Rabbi Nachman’s tales can be traced to modern(ist) Jewish writers, such as Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, and Leo Perutz who have themselves been credited with the use of the magic realist mode,38 long before the more widely recognized Latin American explorations of magic realism, commencing with the works of writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Miguel Ángel Asturias, and Jorge Luis Borges in the 1940s.39

33 Martin Buber, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman [1956], trans. Maurice Friedman (London: Souvenir P, 1974): 4; see also Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman: Ihm nacherzaehlt [1906], fifth ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Literarische Anstalt Rutten and Loening, 1920): 5–6. 34 Buber, Tales of Rabbi Nachman, 10 and Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman, 13. 35 Buber, Tales of Rabbi Nachman, 6 and Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman, 10. 36 Buber identifies “das Wollen des Unmöglichen” as a peculiarity informing as “Pathos” the core of the Jewish soul, Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman, 7; this passage is omitted in the English translation. 37 Buber, Tales of Rabbi Nachman, 44–45 and Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman, 41. 38 See, e.g., Irene Guenther, “Magic Realism, New Objectivity, and the Arts during the Weimar Republic,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke UP, 1995): 33–73. For the literary influence of Rabbi Nachman and the Kabbala, see, e.g., Joseph A. Kanofsky, “Kafka, Nahman of Bratslav, and the Judaic Literary Imagination,” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 52.4 (1999): 196–203 and Bożena Shallcross, “‘Fragments of a Broken Mirror’: Bruno Schulz’s Retextualization of the Kabbalah,” East European Politics and Societies 11.2 (1997): 270–281. 39 For the “Origins of Magic(al) Realism,” see the eponymous chapter in Bowers, Magic(al) Realism, 8–19.

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All this may not be enough to dispel in the Jewish context of magic realist cultural production proposed here the suspicion articulated by Christopher Warnes that [t]he desire to affirm the category of magical realism often takes place at the expense of developing an understanding of the particular ways in which each work of magical realism uses the mode for its own ends: texts are used to understand magical realism, rather than magical realism being used as a tool to unpack and interpret texts.40

More specifically, therefore: are the texts discussed in this volume – novels, short fiction, films, and art works – legitimately identified as examples of magic realism? In which ways can the category of magic realism then be used “as a tool to unpack and interpret” these texts? More confusingly, if they are, is there then indeed a specifically “Jewish” type of magic realism, as suggested by the essentialist notions of both Auerbach and Buber, and how can it be identified? And even further: if Jewish writers of widely different backgrounds employ the magic realist mode to articulate their concerns in so many different ways, should we be talking about Jewish magic realisms in the plural rather than in the singular? Moreover, accepting the versatility of the magic realist mode and observing its application in specific contexts, such as the postcolonial, is its use by Jewish writers and artists then intrinsically an argument for extending the category of the postcolonial to the Jewish context? As Warnes suggests, magic realism “in its postcolonial forms” can “be seen as a response to the ‘othering’ that accompanies Western colonialism.”41 Does the work of Jewish writers and artists from the diaspora and, more controversially, from Israel articulate such a response? Moreover, does “Jewish” use of the mode suggest a completely new set of parameters or does the magic realist mode appear to be particularly useful and popular in some contexts because they reveal affinities with others in which the mode has been successfully employed? This, of course, leads to the question in which contexts the specifically “Jewish” use of this narrative strategy can be observed and in which ways it can, or should be, compared to its use in non-Jewish cultural production. Besides the Jewish engagement with the fabulist and magic realist tradition mentioned above, it is in particular the response to the Holocaust which has led to the proliferation of magic realist approaches in Jewish cultural production. It has been argued that the fragmentary and figural reference to the Holocaust in Auerbach’s Mimesis amounts effectively to “a meditation on the difficulty, rather than the impossibility, of representing that contemporary reality of his that we

40 Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel, 18. 41 Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel, 152.

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now fifty years later call the Shoah.”42 As Richards suggests, the textual interpretations offered in Mimesis demonstrate that “we can only apprehend fragments that all point to the enormity of the evil.”43 With the interpretation of seemingly disparate textual evidence, originating in different systems of comprehending reality across the millennia, the representation of reality in Auerbach’s study arguably seeks to articulate a “truth” which lies far beyond its individual parts or historical authenticity and which, in effect, demands an imaginative interpretation in the same manner in which the biblical narrative of the Sacrifice of Isaac demands the imaginative recreation of the story along the few carefully chosen nodal points it presents to the reader. It is tempting to discern a methodological affinity between Auerbach’s philological approach and more recent magic realist approaches to the representation of the Holocaust. As Jenni Adams has argued in her seminal study on Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature (2011), in Holocaust writing the magic realist mode “enables imaginative reconstruction to take place whilst graphically signifying these constructs’ fictive dimension.”44 Significantly, in the context of the postmemorial other this ensures that the magic realist mode at the same time foregrounds “both the lack of availability of the other’s experience to postmemorial knowledge, and the illusory nature of any identifications which may occur in and through the process of postmemorial reconstruction.”45 As suggested, to some extent these points also apply to the admittedly oblique engagement of Mimesis with the Holocaust, with the obvious proviso that this is not postmemorial but comemorial, yet as such no less removed from the actual experience it arguably tries to reconstruct. The diversity of magic realist approaches to the Holocaust in Jewish cultural production is to some extent mirrored in the contributions to this special issue. Jenni Adams explores the talismanic status of the pre-Holocaust European Jewish magic realist writer Bruno Schulz in post-Holocaust Jewish American literature, with a particular focus on Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010). Jewish American writer Dara Horn’s use of magic realism to explore issues relating to the formation of Jewish identity as marked by trauma and displacement is investigated by Meyrav Koren-Kuik. H. G. Adler’s project of turning with his novel The Journey (2002) to literature to shift the ground of representation from a mimetic and epistemological model in order to produce a “literary ontology” for 42 Richards, “Meditation,” 85. 43 Richards, “Meditation,” 85. 44 Jenni Adams, Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature: Troping the Traumatic Real (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 175. 45 Adams, Magic Realism, 175.

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victims and thus to elevate art to “sacred obligation” is discussed by Kitty J. Millet. Axel Stähler argues that within the larger context of coming to terms with the past Doron Rabinovici in The Search for M (1997) and Benjamin Stein in The Canvas (2010) resort to the magic realist mode in order less to articulate trauma but rather to engage with its (trans-)generational impact and to explore its nature. On the margins of what may be designated magic realism, Sue Vice argues that the location and psychology of the protagonists of Haim Gouri’s The Chocolate Deal (1965), Jiří Weil’s Life With a Star (1964), and Piotr Rawicz’s Blood from the Sky (1961) adopt a symbolist approach to the events of the Holocaust, giving apparently absurd symbolism a historically specific content. Introducing another medial perspective, the use of ghosts in Elijah Moshinsky’s BBC TV production Genghis Cohn (1993), a comedy which deliberately conflates the real and the imagined, blurring the distinction between the two, is discussed by James Jordan. Diana Popescu enquires into the symbolic links created by the artist Samuel Bak between his painting and his autobiography, demonstrating that the magic realist mode serves to develop a memory narrative in order to render the trauma of childhood separation and loss. Developing a more critical perspective, Irmtraud Huber challenges the potentially rash reproduction in the Jewish context of familiar interpretive maneuvers, such as those connected to magic realism. She suggests that they may be in need of reassessment in the face of narratives such as Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002). The postcolonial dimension of Jewish magic realism and in particular its subversive potential for resistance is another prominent subject in the contributions to this special issue. It is explored, for instance, by Efraim Sicher and Shuly Eilat in their comparative discussion of representations in the work of Meir Shalev and Salman Rushdie of Israel’s War of Independence and of the Partition of India in 1947, respectively, as acts of inception within love stories that question the ties of body and nation and undermine the official narrative about the birth of the nation. Vered Weiss argues that generic hybridity in the work of S. Y. Agnon, the oscillation between the imperialistically engaged Gothic and (post)colonial magic realism, reflects the unsettled essence of Jewish Israeli identity. Sociologist, writer, and postcolonial theorist Albert Memmi’s discussion of Jewish cultural production, his role as a writer, and his use of magic realism are compared by Michael Lejman so as to situate the author’s experimental fiction in the context of his life-project. Another contribution to film studies, Rachel S. Harris investigates the ways in which magic realism, filtered through a Jewish and a Mizrachi cultural lens in Marco Carmel’s Ahoti Hayafa (2011), is used to comment upon the physical and social marginalization of Arab-Jews within Israeli society and Israeli cinema. The fundamental dichotomy of religious and ethnic identities is further examined

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by Aaron Tillman who demonstrates how magic realist and comical modes are uniquely able to illustrate the enigma of difference that permeates contemporary Jewish American literature and culture. As will already emerge from the plurality of approaches to and aspects of magic realism in Jewish cultural production explored in its individual contributions, this special focus of this issue of Symbolism on Jewish magic realism does not elaborate a particular hypothesis beyond the suggestion that magic realism is, indeed, present in Jewish cultural production and that this phenomenon has not yet been sufficiently explored. Indeed, the collected essays offer the first concentrated multi-perspectival approach to the topic. When engaging with individual contributions, it will be useful to bear the questions suggested above in mind. It is not, however, the objective of this special issue to develop a systematic approach and to give specific answers to these questions. This is also reflected in the application of the term magic realism, used synonymously in this volume with that of magical realism. No particular definition was prescribed to individual contributors. Accordingly, across the volume, the term magic realism emerges rather as a semantic cluster of slightly diffuse yet intricately linked characteristics which are encompassed by the common notion of the narrative reconciliation and amalgamation of different and potentially even contradictory systems of comprehending and representing reality. Obviously, a venture such as this cannot aim to be exhaustive, nor is its subject matter ever to be exhausted. The scope of this volume has, moreover, ineluctably been curtailed by the exigencies of an entirely unmagical reality in which unexpected health issues and chronic fatigue in the face of proliferating deadlines foiled the completion of essays, among others, on the Jewish fabulist tradition in relation to the magic realist mode and on magic realist elements in Rabbinic literature as well as on magic realism in klezmer music. Their inclusion would without doubt have added further colorful pieces to the fragmentary mosaic laid out in this volume. Yet even in their absence, it is to be hoped, that a multihued if perhaps to some extent impressionistic picture of Jewish cultural production that may be designated as magic realist will emerge. While some of the origins of magic realism may perhaps be located in the Jewish tradition, it is of course in mid-twentieth-century Latin America that the narrative mode flourished most vibrantly and where, one imagines, its gravitational pull may be strongest. Another conspicuous absence from the volume is accordingly the magic realist writing of Latin American Jewish writers. Here, too, a contribution was envisaged but, due to unforeseen external factors, could not be completed. In conclusion, if all too briefly, mention will therefore be made of a novel by the Brazilian Jewish writer Moacyr Scliar. The Centaur in the Garden (1980) is not only intriguing for being an integral part of the Latin American

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tradition of magic realism and yet being also “Jewish.” It is moreover significant for its negotiations of Jewishness and its use of the magic realist mode as a tool to fathom Jewish identity. The central image is that of the Jewish narrator and protagonist born as a centaur. The plot follows the experiences of the hybrid creature from the shelter of family life in the remote pampas into a difficult freedom and finally the surgical restitution of, at least, physical normality. Yet the Jewish centaur, Guedali, remains troubled by his remembered otherness. The novel is a frequently unsettling meditation on negotiations of identity within the parameters of normality and otherness. While the hybrid creature remains ultimately inexplicable – “Psychoanalysis, dialectic materialism, nothing; laws of supply and demand, nothing, nothing; fiction, nothing. Nothing seemed applicable to my case. I was a centaur, irremediably a centaur. And without any plausible explanation”46 – the recurring images of the winged Pegasus and the thundering hooves of Cossack’s horses suggest that Guedali is the product of the dual influences of a creative force and of destruction as remembered in a collective unconscious. He is, as such, a metaphor of ‘the Jew’ in history. And as such, his natural otherness is contrasted in the course of the novel with other manifestations of hybridity. In particular, the enforced hybridity resulting from medical experiments perpetrated on victims of the Holocaust is mentioned in relation to Guedali’s own otherness: They made strange transplants, uniting the upper half of a man with the lower half of a woman, or the hindquarters of a goat. Fortunately these atrocious operations caused the death of the patients, who expired as human beings and were not obliged to live as monsters. (CG, 45)

The allusion is highly ambivalent. It suggests constructions of the Jew as a monstrosity to be the product of the absurd and literal translation of myth into reality, a process of the willfully perverse appropriation, and indeed inversion, of the mimetic principle, which, arguably, is a characteristic of Nazi ideology. As such it suggests also an inversion of magic realism in that it attempts to reduce the magical into the real. Yet the attempt is bound to fail because reality reasserts itself and with it the inalienable dignity of humankind. The metafictional implications are obviously ambiguous: the magic realist narrative seemingly insists on situating the magical real firmly in fiction and not in reality as this would entail the violation of the natural order.

46 Moacyr Scliar, The Centaur in the Garden [1980], trans. Margaret A. Neves (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2003): 44; further references in the text, abbreviated as “CG.”

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Yet the challenge to a hybridity based on imaginary constructions is also extended to other conceptions of Jewishness which are based on the transformation of the imaginary into the real. Thus, the proclamation of Israeli independence in 1948 similarly appears to generate a strange and potentially monstrous otherness: My father was enthusiastic about the new state: in Israel, he explained, live Jews from all over the world, white Jews from Europe, black Jews from Africa, Jews from India, not to mention the Bedouins with their camels – strange types (CG, 45).

Though it seems an attractive proposition, for a while, Guedali will not go to Israel where, he assumes, he might blend in without attracting too much attention. Is the suggestion that the chimera produced with the establishment of the Jewish state may be no more able to survive than the horrifying creations sprung from the perverted Nazi imagination? Guedali eventually leaves the confines of his family’s farm in search of freedom. The narrative is complicated by the fact that he later meets Tita, a centauress, who is not Jewish but whose origins are in the violation of a native Indian woman by a white settler. Together, the pair eventually decide to have their equine parts removed in a surgical operation, though Guedali remains skeptical: “I had the sense of violating a work of nature that perhaps was the result of a superior will – a divine will, who knows” (CG, 81). In the end, however, Guedali goes along and the successful operation gradually effaces all physical traces of their past as centaurs. Yet in Guedali’s memory his past as centaur lingers on, if ever more feebly. He begins to succumb to the narrative manipulation of Tita and their friends: The story is as ingeniously woven as a soap opera. With one single objective: to convince me that I never was a centaur. And they’re doing it, at least in part. I still see myself as a centaur, but a centaur growing constantly smaller, a miniature centaur, a microcentaur. (CG, 214)

Indeed, Guedali acknowledges the expediency of yielding to a consensual perception of reality: Maybe it would be better […] to accept this reality they want to impose on me: that I am a human being, that the mythological creatures that so marked my life don’t exist, neither centaurs, nor sphinxes, nor winged horses. (CG, 214)

But this would mean to give up the last trace of his otherness, to completely efface his identity. It would mean to assimilate into a normality that denies individual freedom. The concluding pages of the novel abound in contradictory indicators as to the truth of Guedali’s story. His quandary, whether to believe in his own unbelievable story, is palpable. Yet whatever narrator and reader will choose to

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believe, the final suggestion is that Guedali will make his escape, as he did once before: “Like a centaur in the garden, ready to jump the wall in search of freedom” (CG, 216). Arguably, The Centaur in the Garden is paradigmatic of a “pure” form of Jewish magic realism, if that is not also an oxymoron. It incorporates all the various influences discussed so far: it is steeped in the Latin American tradition of magic realism; a specific suggestion in this direction is given with one of the epigraphs to Scliar’s novel, a quote from Jorge Luis Borges, which alludes to the terrified perception by the Indians of the mounted conquistadores as single animals able to divide themselves into two.47 Indeed, the very title of Scliar's novel invokes a fictitious text, “Mme. Henri Bachelier’s Le jardin du Centaure,” mentioned by Borges in his playful interrogation of literary authenticity in “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.”48 Yet the novel also alludes to the akedah when Guedali sacrifices part of himself on the operation table to effect the division of the centaur which, however, results in the destruction of the equine part, still ominously present with the haunting sound of drums fashioned from its hide. Finally, Guedali’s otherness is also reminiscent of that of Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915). As such, Scliar’s The Centaur in the Garden is in itself a monument of hybridity which is reflected even in the kaleidoscopic shifting of its narrative mode. While amalgamating magical and realistic elements throughout, its magic realist character is challenged by the novel’s frame narrative which produces a sense of hesitation in the reader and thus, in the Todorovian sense, transforms the magic realist narrative into a fantastic tale.49 Yet the very notion of hybridity is of course controversial in a Jewish context. We may remember Auerbach’s insistence on the autocratic claim of the bible to a truth of its own. And Jews, we know, do not – or should not – mix things which do not belong together. Is thus the oxymoronic nature of magic realism more oxymoronic still when talking about Jewish magic realism? Finally, then, a question which should perhaps have been asked first and which, in a manner, will indeed be asked first – even after all this – in that it is posed by the first contribution to this special issue. It is another question that will not elicit a simple answer: is magic realism kosher? Or is its use equivalent to the centaur’s jump over the wall of the garden? – a leap of faith beyond…

47 See the entry on “The Centaur” in Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings [1967], ed. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (London: Vintage, 2002): 37–39, 37–38. 48 Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in Fictions (London: Penguin, 1998): 33–43, 42. 49 See Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre [1970], trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1975): 31–32.

Clive Sinclair

Is Magical Realism Kosher? A Conversation Interviewer: To begin at the beginning: what do you make of the term “magical realism”? Sinclair: It’s an oxymoron. The two words are hardly complementary. On the contrary, they are poles apart, like Zadie and Smith. But that’s the point, of course. You only have to look to the literatures of South America and the Indian sub-continent to see that they can fruitfully co-exist. Reality saying to magic, “Get me out of here.” You could say that the dirtier the reality the greater the effect of the magic, just as a dunghill showcases a diamond. But the effect is not guaranteed, and the diamonds can easily turn to rhinestones. In which case the effect will appear artful and artificial, and even imply a certain laziness on the writer’s part, a sleight of hand to conceal a lapse of imaginative energy. Writing about Franz Kafka’s story, “Description of a Struggle,” Gabriel Josipovici suggested a reason for its incomplete state. He points to the fact that the narrator only has to wish for something for it to be so. He wishes to fly? Well, all he need do is to make swimming movements with his weary arms and he is airborne. “[O]ne wonders if the main reason why Kafka abandoned the work was that it was too easy to do this sort of thing in fiction,” writes Josipovici: [I]f you can make the body fly just by wishing it, you can do anything – but by the same token you have done nothing. Kafka was looking for a form of art that would be true to all our desires – including the desire to escape the body – but would also be ready to examine these desires.1

If I have understood Josipovici correctly, magical realism fails if it is merely a form of escapism, if it does not interrogate the motivation and mechanics of the process. Icarus is the patron saint of magical realists who ignore reality. To put it another way; to write “with one bound he was free” does not suffice. Interviewer: You mention South Americans and Indians. Is there such a thing as Jewish magical realism? Sinclair: You mean: is magical realism kosher? Well, we are commanded never to mix milk and meat, or wool and linen, so the precedents are not good. Incidentally some say that the latter prohibition – Shatnez – is designed to avoid rekindling the fratricidal fury that caused Cain to slaughter Abel; Cain having offered flax – the origin of linen – to the Almighty, while Abel sacrificed a lamb – the

1 Gabriel Josipovici, “It must end in the inexplicable,” (London) TLS (September 7, 2012): 7.

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source of wool. But it seems to me that this same text – the Tanach – offers plenty of evidence that realism and magic do mix, being a melange of the heavenly and the quotidian. B’reshit. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Like the narrator of “Description of a Struggle,” God only has to say the words – “Let there be light” – and it is so. Great whales spring unmediated from the divine mind, followed by beasts of the earth, cattle, and finally male and female, created after His own image. As a matter of fact, creation is such a success it is described twice. Chapter I is the macrocosmic version, short on close-ups, and reading like the overture to a nineteenth-century three-decker. Chapter II is the same, but in microcosm, focusing on a couple. Later we learn – en passant – that the male is called Adam, and the woman Eve. In Chapter I men and women are created simultaneously, and seemingly en masse: “male and female created He them.” But in Chapter II we are furnished with a great deal more detail: Adam is formed from the dust, and Eve is born of Adam’s rib. The procedure, as described, is a surgical delivery, but more ambitious than a caesarian, as you would expect when Jehovah is the obstetrician. The created world too is distilled, and compressed into a single garden, Gan Eden, which is described with topographical nicety. We learn that it is irrigated by a single river, which later divides into four tributaries, one of which is the famous Euphrates; we learn that it contains trees, which are either pleasing to the eye, or bearers of nutritional fruit; we learn that Adam’s raison d’être is to be the garden’s custodian, and Eve’s to be Adam’s “help meet.” In this sense Adam is the chosen one; he is the prototype Jew. Only one prohibition curtails Adam’s complete freedom: “of the tree of knowledge thou shalt not eat.” But the “subtil” serpent arouses Eve’s appetite, so that she recognizes the desirability of its fruit, eats of it, and persuades Adam to do likewise. Eve’s transgression is called (by Christians) the Original Sin, and Adam’s compliance, the Fall of Man. According to their doctrine God expels the errant pair because they have disobeyed Him, and in so doing invited evil to spoil the idyll. But this reading traduces the text. Evil is already latent, since the forbidden fruit contains knowledge of not only good but also evil. Moreover, God’s reason for the expulsion is occasioned by self-interest, as He freely admits: having eaten of the fruit “the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.” The implication of this, of course, is that death – like evil – was already afoot in the garden. But an immortal, with a working knowledge of evil, would be a dangerous rival indeed. In short, Eden wasn’t big enough for two gods. We die not because Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge, but because Adam didn’t have wit enough to sneak a quick bite from the tree of life.

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Even if this episode does not contain the original sin, it is certainly the first story. I do not think it an exaggeration to say that the whole of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s oeuvre is an off-shoot of seeds planted in the Gan Eden. Perhaps this is what I had in mind when I composed a story of my own, called “For Good or Evil.” It is narrated by the tree of knowledge itself, and I like to kid myself that it meets Josipovici’s exacting criteria. While still a seed the narrator struggles between incapacitating self-consciousness and instinct, but finally can resist the latter no longer, and – despite itself – begins its ascent. Once full-grown it is attracted to Eve, all her natural splendor fully revealed, but it takes the snake to sell her its fruit. The fates of Adam, Eve, and the beguiler are universally known, but that of the tree is recorded for the first time. It is felled by a flaming sword, pulped by God’s mighty heel, and rolled into paper, upon which God begins to record the sum of His achievements. These are its concluding words: “Thus I, too, went into the world, for good or evil. The first book.”2 Interviewer: I’m sure it’s a wonderful story, but I’d like to push you a little further on your remarks about Singer. What did you mean by claiming that the whole of his work is engendered in Genesis Chapter II? And how can such a claim be justified? Sinclair: Let’s begin with the sexual politics; the dynamic between Adam and Eve. It is Eve who first falls for the lure of emancipation, and who leads Adam into temptation. Having tasted of the forbidden fruit first, she has the advantage of self-knowledge, knows that she is naked, and as such an object of desire. Adam, still innocent, has no idea why he is so easily manipulated. Singer’s sons of Adam are all equally vulnerable, and having enjoyed their tumble, full of guilt and loathing toward their seductresses, and the lapsed world they represent. Some are so disgusted that they turn their backs upon it altogether, and return to the world of their fathers, where the cycle of prayer is unchanging. But for the writer these devilish Eves, these Liliths, are essential; they are the sine qua non of story. Sans Eve there would have been no Bible; no Moses, no Joseph, no David, no Solomon; no stories, only prohibitions. And no Singer with his anguished songs of illicit pleasure and despair. A close reading of his most famous story, “Gimpel the Fool,” will provide evidence enough. Gimpel’s foolishness consists of excessive credulity; that is, he believes every story his neighbors in Frampol feed him, including the one that rebrands the town whore, his bride-to-be, as a virgin. After twenty years of marriage Elka takes sick. On her death-bed she confesses to Gimpel that he is father

2 Clive Sinclair, “For Good or Evil,” in For Good or Evil: Collected Stories (London: Penguin, 1991): 272–275, 275.

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to none of their children. She dies with a smile on her face, a smile of triumph (thinks Gimpel), as though to deceive him was the meaning of her brief life. But her lies have another purpose too; they have structured the story Gimpel is narrating. In effect she is a surrogate for Singer, a metaphor for the author. When his spirits are at their lowest the devil comes to tempt Gimpel, arguing that paradise is yet another bill of goods. Won over by sulphureous sophistry Gimpel – the town baker – decides to revenge himself by peeing into the dough. But the spirit of his wife intervenes, and at last performs a good deed. Chastened by the description of her struggles in the world-to-come, Gimpel destroys the dough, quits Frampol, takes to the road, and embraces a new career: “Going from place to place, eating at strange tables, it often happens that I spin yarns – improbable things that could never have happened – about devils, magicians, windmills, and the like.”3 Gimpel’s late-life career-change is, in effect, the only legitimate offspring of his marriage to Elka. He even makes a living of sorts: I wandered over the land, and good people did not neglect me. After many years I became old and white; I heard a great deal, many lies and falsehoods, but the longer I lived the more I understood that there were really no lies. Whatever doesn’t really happen is dreamed at night. It happens to one if it doesn’t happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year. What difference can it make? Often I heard tales of which I said, ‘Now this is a thing that cannot happen.’ But before a year had elapsed I heard that it actually had come to pass somewhere.4

In describing his working methods, Gimpel provides as good a definition of – and justification for – magical realism as you are ever likely to read. The male-female dynamic picks up another theme mooted in Genesis; that an Eve or an Elka – a touch of evil – is required to add friction to the slow moving wheels of the quotidian, and thereby create the unpredictable momentum of fiction. Others have noted this strange requirement. For example, the necessity of evil enables Kabbalists to reconcile an omnipotent and merciful God with injustice and suffering. The credo is called Tzimtzum, and Singer provides the following definition: God had to subdue His power and to dim His infinite light before he could create the Universe. Without this act creation would have been impossible because the light that emanated from God would have engulfed the Universe and caused it to disintegrate. Creation, like a painting

3 Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Gimpel the Fool,” in Gimpel the Fool, trans. Saul Bellow and others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006): 3–21, 21. 4 Singer, “Gimpel,” 21.

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by an artist, must have both lights and shadows. The shadows are the source of all evil and the powers that hold creation together. When God created the world He had to create evil.5

Without it there would have been no world and no stories. “In other words,” Singer told Irving Howe, “the Cabala teaches us that Satan makes possible creation.” He then added: “I feel sometimes I am half a devil myself.”6 The other half being a rabbi, of course. So enamored was I with this concept that I called one of my own stories, “Tzimtzum.” It opens with the words, “Sometimes people act out of character.”7 Actually the narrator is thinking of one person in particular: his wife, a teacher. Her uncharacteristic act is to become a local – and vocal – La Passionara, when semi-legit fascists attempt to hold a rally in her school. Later she acts out of character again when she commits adultery with one of her colleagues. More characteristic is her defense of a pupil – some urchin out of Caravaggio – caught molesting women in the neighborhood park. I suppose Tzimtzum resides in the interplay between characteristic and uncharacteristic behavior. Magical realism enters the picture in the last paragraphs when the narrator’s wife is raped in the park, whether by the angelic boy or the narrator acting uncharacteristically remains ambiguous. Either way, the rapist calls her a whore. Interviewer: Isn’t this pathology made flesh, rather than magical realism per se? Sinclair: No. On second thoughts, yes. Pathology made flesh is an apt definition of magical realism. It is certainly a way of empowering the powerless, turning the formerly disenfranchised into writers and righters of wrongs. And if you were to transport Gimpel’s descendants to a distant country – say America – and fill their heads with dreams of regeneration, you might get a more aggressive form of magical realism – a sort of advanced wish-fulfillment – so that Gimpel becomes Superman’s pacific grandpa. Interviewer: I’d rather concentrate upon Singer, if it’s all the same to you. Can you expand upon the link between magical realism and Jewish mysticism? To what extent was Singer influenced by the Kabbalah? Sinclair: A great extent, I’d wager. Back in 1978 – when I was in your role as the Grand Inquisitor – Singer explained to me why living in America had not diminished his belief in dybbuks, imps, and other demonic types: “I really believe that what we know about life is an infinitesimal part of life itself […].” As his answer

5 Isaac Bashevis Singer and Ira Moskowitz, The Hasidim (New York: Crown, 1973): 17. 6 Isaac Bashevis Singer and Irving Howe, “Yiddish Tradition vs. Jewish Tradition, A Dialogue,” (New York) Midstream (June/July 1973): 33–38, 35. 7 Clive Sinclair, “Tzimtzum,” in For Good or Evil: Collected Stories (London: Penguin, 1991): 167– 181, 167.

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progressed I recognized that he was sounding more and more like his creation, Gimpel the Fool: Now, say, three hundred years ago no one would have believed that in a bit of mud there are millions of living microbes and bacteria. So many microbes in a little mud? And no one would have believed that electricity would be able to heat your room, to cool your room, to move your machines. For the last few hundred years so many powers have been discovered, so many […] Children going to school five hundred years from now will know thousands of things which we today don’t know, and which if somebody told us about then we would say, impossible. Every day impossible things become possible. So what we call actually supernatural means the things that we don’t know today but we may know in the future.8

So, he concludes, referring back to the existence of ghosts and hobgoblins: “Today it is supernatural; it may one day be a part of nature.”9 And yet as Dr. Ying Han points out, in her doctoral thesis, “A Study of Jewish Mysticism in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Works,” whenever a character claims contact with mystical powers in his fiction, Singer invariably casts doubt: “all the seances in his novels and stories turn out to be shams.”10 Perhaps it’s as Herman Broder describes it in Enemies: A Love Story: “Those who doubt everything are also capable of believing everything.”11 A more elaborate variant is offered in the Preface to A Little Boy in Search of God: “In essence every mystic is a doubter. He is by nature a seeker. Mysticism and scepticism are not contradictory.”12 Another paradox, like magical realism itself. It is as though Singer had internalized all the confusion and conflicts in his childhood home. His father, Pinchos Mendel, was descended from a long line of Chasidic rabbis, and sure enough became one himself. Bathsheba, Singer’s mother, was no less devout, but her belief began in the head, not the heart. Her father was the headstrong Rabbi of Bilgoray, who counted himself among the Mitnagdim, or rationalists, fundamentally opposed to the ecstatic excesses of the Chasidim. Singer was one of four siblings; the older two – Hinde Esther and Israel Joshua – both became writers, whereas the younger – Moishe – became a mystic like his father. Pinchos Mendel’s outlook was other-worldly, which meant he lacked the skills necessary to prosper in the real one. Bathsheba, more practical by far, did the best she could, but was limited by convention. In his memoir – Of a

8 Clive Sinclair, “My Brother and I: A Conversation with Isaac Bashevis Singer,” (London) Encounter (February, 1979): 20–28, 28. 9 Sinclair, “My Brother and I,” 28. 10 Ying Han, “A Study of Jewish Mysticism in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Works,” Doctoral Thesis, Beijing Foreign Studies University (2011): 150. 11 Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies: A Love Story (London: Penguin, 1996): 111. 12 Isaac Bashevis Singer, A Little Boy in Search of God (New York: Doubleday, 1976): ix.

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World That Is No More – Israel Joshua speculates that the genders of his parents had been accidentally transposed in heaven, so that the paternal attributes had been placed in a woman’s body, and the maternal into that of a man.13 His younger brother seconded that opinion, but with a certain unease, as any reader of his memoir, In My Father’s Court, will recognize. In the episode entitled “Why the Geese Shrieked” a terrified congregant brings a brace of decapitated birds to Singer’s father. She demonstrates the cause of her fear: when flung together the corpses howl. Equally terrified young Singer runs to his mother – not his father note – for protection. There is fear in Pinchos Mendel’s eyes too, but also vindication, because he recognizes in this posthumous duet evidence that there are still “mysterious forces at work in the world.”14 On the contrary, Bathsheba’s eyes betray no fear, “only something like sadness, and also anger.” For her the dead geese are a challenge. If their cries are what they seem, then the belief of the Chasidim in miracles and wonders is sanctioned, and the rationalism of the Mitnagdim brought low. The realization fills her eyes “with something like shame.” For her husband there can be but one explanation: the shrieks come from unbelievers at the gates of hell. Singer translates the look he gives Bathsheba as: “You take after them.” In response her face grows “sullen, smaller, sharper.” But then, like a madwoman, she laughs; a laugh that makes them all tremble anew. She asks the woman if the windpipes have been removed, is told they haven’t, and sets to work extracting them. “On her face could be seen the wrath of the rationalist whom someone has tried to frighten in broad daylight.” Watching her Pinchos Mendel’s heart is chilled by the knowledge that “logic, cold logic, was again tearing down faith, mocking it, holding it up to ridicule and scorn.” Bathsheba returns the geese to their owner, with the request that she whacks them together once again. Young as he is, Singer recognizes the crucial significance of the wager: “If the geese shrieked, Mother would have lost all: her rationalist’s daring, her skepticism which she had inherited from her intellectual father.” And yet, and yet. “Although I was afraid, I prayed inwardly that the geese would shriek, shriek so loud that people in the street would hear and come running.” But the rest is only silence. In that little scene – played out in a rabbi’s kitchen – Singer seems to suggest that magic and realism are irreconcilable. Singer wants magic to triumph – who wouldn’t? – but is compelled by crude science to accept a rational explanation. And when he becomes a writer he appends a version of his mother’s name – Bashevis – to his own. Guided by her spirit, he exposes charlatans and others who

13 Israel Joshua Singer, Of a World That Is No More (New York: Vanguard, 1979): 29–30. 14 Isaac Bashevis Singer, In My Father’s Court (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966): 15.

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claim to know God’s wishes. But this is only half of Singer: as I have attempted to show in my analysis of “Gimpel the Fool,” he is a binary character. And, as Dr. Ying Han shows in her thesis, he is beholden not only to Pinchos Mendel, but also to the texts that offer glimpses of a sphere outside known reality. Inspired by them, Singer seeks to smuggle magic into the quotidian, and by marrying magic and realism, thereby honor both his parents. I discovered his work during those formative years when I first decided to set my hand to writing. In the late 1960s his books were not widely circulated in England, so it was not until I went to the University of California in 1969 that I found a whole shelf of his titles in Bookshop Santa Cruz. Magic, as well as the scent of marijuana, suffused the air in those days. On my very first visit to San Francisco, in the fall of that year, I had a Chinese meal with a young woman, and split my first Fortune Cookie. Inside was a strip of paper which read: “You have literary talent you should take pains to develop.” I still have it, to confound the skeptics. After dinner we went back to her apartment on Hyde Street, where she played a record by a vocalist new to me: Buffy Sainte-Marie. The enchantress sang about vampires – the subject of my first short story, still two years in the future – and magic. “God is alive, magic is afoot,” she sang (quoting Leonard Cohen), “God is afoot, magic is alive.” While she sang the building shuddered, and my companion turned white, recognizing the signs of an earthquake (in fact the biggest in a couple of decades). In ignorance I listened on: “And mind itself is magic / Coursing through the flesh / And flesh itself is magic / Dancing on a clock / And time itself / the magic length of God.”15 It sounded beautiful. I didn’t know what it meant, but I wanted it to be true. I was at an impressionable age. Returning to Bookshop Santa Cruz I acquired a slimmed-down edition of the Zohar, which also made an impression. The Torah, I read, discloses her innermost secrets only to them who love her: She knows that whosoever is wise in heart hovers near the gate of her dwelling place day after day. What does she do? From her palace, she shows her face to him, and gives him a signal of love, and forthwith retreats back to her hiding place. Only he alone catches her message, and is drawn to her with his whole heart and soul, and with all of his being. In this manner, the Torah, for a moment, discloses herself in love to her lovers, so as to rouse them to renewed love?

It proceeded to compare the acquisition of knowledge, textual familiarity, with disrobing a woman, progressing metaphorically from veil to veil, each one thinner than its predecessor, until all was revealed. Wow! That quote went straight

15 Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers [1966] (New York: Vintage, 1993): 157.

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into my first novel, Bibliosexuality, which I began working on that same year, in obedience to the Fortune Cookie.16 Interviewer: This is academia, Mr. Sinclair, not Chinatown. No offense to Dr. Ying Han, of course. Perhaps you could enlighten us as to the exact nature of her thesis, explain just how the metaphysics of the Kabbalah underpin Singer’s fiction? Sinclair: May I remind you that I have already introduced the concept of Tzimtzum? But I’ll concede that Dr. Ying Han is considerably more knowledgeable on the subject than me. In fact she begins by acknowledging an even greater expert than us both. I am referring, of course, to Gershom Scholem. Dr. Ying Han accepts his division of Jewish mysticism into unequal parts; pre and post expulsion from Spain. The second period further triplicates into Lurianic Kabbalah of the sixteenth century, Sabbatianism of the seventeenth, and Chasidism of the eighteenth. According to Dr. Ying Han, this trio – both holy and unholy – had the most profound influence upon Singer. Lurianic Kabbalah derives its name from Rabbi Isaac Luria, a sort of Jewish Socrates, in that he left no written legacy. His Plato was Rabbi Chaim Vital, who recorded his zugerts or sayings. It was Luria who first dreamed up the concept of Tzimtzum, basing it upon an earlier Kabbalistic accommodation of evil. In the new version of creation, the ten attributes of God – the Sefirot – were poured into kelim or vessels, until they were filled with divine light, but the smaller of the vessels were not fitted to contain it; overwhelmed, they overflowed and cracked. Mankind’s duty, in the “finale of this vast cosmic drama” (as Dr. Ying Han calls it), is to repair the damage; tikkun olam, to heal the world.17 Of course, as everyone knows, Singer’s heroes prove incapable of healing themselves, let alone the world. They are walking embodiments of Tzimtzum, wherein devils and angels battle it out, the former ably assisted by latter-day Liliths. As a matter of fact, Lurianic Kabbalah often displays the ten attributes of God in the form of a man. His left arm is tattooed with the words Binah, Gevurah, and Hod; on his right are Hokhmah, Hesed, and Netzah. The middle line, beginning above his head, consists of Keter (a crown), Da’at, Tiferet, Yesod, and Maikhut. Now it happens that the words on the right side – the side of Hesed – represent unfettered energy, while those on the side of Gevurah represent restraint. The middle line stands for harmony. Did Freud know of this model when he invented his own trio: the id, the ego, and the super-ego? Is psychoanalysis more real and

16 Clive Sinclair, Bibliosexuality (London: Allison & Busby, 1973): 75. 17 Ying Han, “Jewish Mysticism,” 39.

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less magical than the Kabbalah? Is the id and the ego easier to touch than Hesed and Gevurah? And which system helps us better understand the malfunctions of the world, and the characters with which Singer peoples it? The chief villains of his books (murderous antisemites excepted) tend to be those who – like Sabbatai Zevi – try to second-guess divinity and hasten the end of days. They see themselves as the right arm of God. Their impatient passion generally manifests itself as political zealotry or sexual frankness, often both. The sole antidote to overflowing desire, to human excess, that Singer allows is religion, specifically the Chasidism of his father. Only in that community, constrained by ritual and commandment, can the individual live life in a self-respecting and godly manner. The trouble is that a life repressed by God’s left hand lacks buzz; cannot compete with Storyville, that region where Singer became a crowned head. Dr. Ying Han illustrates her presentation with an excellent analysis of an uncharacteristic Singer tale, “Short Friday,” in which he translates these Kabbalistic concepts into that rare thing (for him), a couple in perfect harmony. Though one not blessed with children: he is a tailor, but no craftsman, she a housewife. Both are devout, but neither is scholarly. Their lives are simple, but loving and content. The eponymous day – the shortest Friday of the year – begins – as every day does – with Shmul-Leibele thanking God for life’s continuance. The remainder of the day is a progression of thanksgiving, in which love for God must take precedence over his love for Shoshe. Even in the matrimonial bed, Shmul-Leibele knows that – despite his urge to seek immediate satisfaction – he must postpone copulation until words of affection have been spoken. He must praise his wife’s breasts, before he can touch them. “Shmuel-Leibele and his wife love each other deeply and affectionately,” observes Dr. Ying Han, “but their passion is under restraint of laws, as Hesed (infinite love), is balanced with Gevurah (law).”18 The Kabbalah proposes that such congress, performed in accordance with holy writ, may “catalyze the union of God and His beloved.”19 God’s beloved is Shekhinah, the divine presence, exiled from the Promised Land since the destruction of the Temple. Even as ordinary a tailor as Shmul-Leibele and his equally ordinary wife can, Dr. Ying Han asserts, “induce the supernal union in the divine realm,” can reunite – albeit temporarily – God and Shekhinah.20 Their reward? To die in conjugal bliss, having been suffocated by fumes from the stove. Their bodies may have been returned to dust, concludes Singer, but their souls have ascended unto

18 Ying Han, “Jewish Mysticism,” 88. 19 Ying Han, “Jewish Mysticism,” 89. 20 Ying Han, “Jewish Mysticism,” 89.

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paradise. “Short Friday” is Genesis without the talking snake. And without the talking snake there is no magic. This is the paradox that lies at the heart of magical realism, not to mention human existence. Interviewer: I don’t recollect any talking snakes in Dickens or Tolstoy, nor in Scott Fitzgerald or Chekhov. How on earth did they manage to instruct and entertain without such uncanny devices? And if you want to stick with Jews, Saul Bellow – who translated “Gimpel the Fool” – also seemed to manage well enough without. Sinclair: You haven’t been listening properly. Let me remind you of Professor Josipovici’s comments on Kafka; that a writer cannot fly without first explaining how and why. Then if he can somehow summon the imaginative energy for propulsion, actual take-off isn’t required. In this context, one could say that the words themselves become snakeskin. Think of Ramona in Herzog: At this moment Ramona appeared. She thrust the door open and stood, letting him see her in the lighted frame of the bathroom tile. She was perfumed and, to the hips, she was naked. On her hips she wore the black lace underthing, that single garment low on her belly. She stood on spike-heeled shoes, three inches high. Only those, and the perfume and lipstick.21

Eve, or what? But in terms of the Kabbalah she is Herzog’s Torah, ready (to paraphrase the words of the Zohar) to disclose herself in love to her lover, so as to rouse him to renewed love. In Singer’s Satan in Goray the identification between the distressed heroine – Rechele, an orphan, raised by her uncle, the town’s shochet or ritual slaughterer – and the scrolls is made explicit. Singer writes that when the poor girl collapses in the prayer-house, having just delivered prophetic utterances, she is lifted through the crowd, “as though she were the sacred Torah.” Lest the identification is incomplete, Singer adds: “Some even touched her with their fingertips as she passed and bore their fingers to their lips, as when a scroll is taken from the Ark.”22 Of course in 1935 – the year in which Satan in Goray was first published – no one had heard of magical realism. But it is hard to think of a better way to categorize the novel. It certainly begins as if it were a chronicle, or historical document, with the words: “In the year 1648.” Why 1648? That was the year in which Bogdan Chmielnicki led a revolt of Ukrainian peasants against their Polish overlords. Their behavior towards the Jews has been rationalized – the Jews were

21 Saul Bellow, Herzog (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965): 203. 22 Isaac Bashevis Singer, Satan in Goray (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1955): 157. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “SG.”

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the creatures of the aristocrats, for example – but the irrational obviously played a bigger part in the killings, as it always does. Let us just say that contagious homicidal mania caused the death of about 100,000 Jews, and the destruction of the 300 or so communities in which they lived. These are the events that fourword opening sentence encompasses, corrals. Thus, by the time the novel starts the town in which it is set – Goray – is already a ruin. Cossacks have massacred its men, and violated its women. Nor does the degradation cease there; having used the women they “ripped open their bellies and sewed cats inside” (SG, 4). Savage dogs, meanwhile, feast upon dismembered limbs. After these events the critical faculties of the survivors are – needless to say – severely handicapped; having witnessed such unspeakable horrors, nothing seems unimaginable or beyond the realm of possibility. If the devil can dance in their streets, why not God? Alas, Satan likes Goray too well. His chosen partner is poor Rechele. Already subject to fits, she becomes the battleground between good and evil, the sacred and the profane. The sacred is all face, the profane a shape-shifter. The former belongs to the town’s rabbi, Benish Ashkenazi. As it happens, Singer’s maternal grandfather was the righteous Rabbi of Bilgoray, whose stern judgments all respected and feared. Rabbi Benish Ashkenazi, his fictional counterpart, is but a pale reflection; a leader whose faith and power has been shaken by the catastrophe that has befallen his community. In truth, he no longer retains the power to shield Rechele. Against him are protean forces – some in the guise of hairy and naked men – who violate Rechele, causing her to swell, vomit reptiles, bark like a dog, and moo like a cow. Into this world of lost souls – into this post-1648 chaos – come messengers with news that their sufferings have been but the birth pangs of the Messiah, and that a man, Sabbatai Zevi, has arisen to fulfill their longings for redemption. A traveller from the Yemen reports to Rabbi Benish’s congregation that the Great Fish that lurks in the river Nile had succumbed at the hands of Sabbatai Zevi […]. In Miron a fiery column has been seen stretching from earth to heaven […]. The full name of God and of Sabbatai Zevi were scratched on it in black […]. The women who divine by consulting drops of oil have seen the crown of King David on Sabbatai Zevi’s head. (SG, 42)

Benish banishes the Yemenite, knowing full well that the Messiah will only appear “in God’s own time,” and that any attempt to “force the Lord” will only bring about disaster. But the damage has been done. A local Kabbalist proclaims, “Benish, the dog, denies the Messiah!” (SG, 49). After the Yemenite comes Reb Itche Mates. Rabbi Benish is warned that his history is that of a forger and a seducer:

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In every town he comes to he speaks upon the heart of some woman to join him in the bond of matrimony, but his purpose is to make her unclean and to give her a bad name. For after the marriage his wives all move away from him, because of his ugly ways; from too much magic working, he has himself been caught in the web, and no longer has the strength to act the man’s part. (SG, 91)

But the rabbi is powerless to stop even the betrothal. As he rushes to her house a tempest tosses him in the air and smashes him down so that his bones shatter. Exit Rabbi Benish. As predicted, Reb Itche Mates fails to consummate the marriage, and is usurped by the satanic Reb Gedaliya, who informs the people of Goray that the world has been turned upside-down, that princes and kings now come to prostrate themselves before the Jews, on account of Sabbatai Zevi, who has been universally accepted as the Messiah. Now that the End of Days had come, explained Reb Gedaliya, men were permitted to know strange women: “Such encounters might even be considered a religious duty; for each time a man and woman unite they form a mystical combination and promote a union between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the Divine Presence” (SG, 147). In such a way does Reb Gedaliya traduce the sensual but constrained acts of Shmul-Leibele and his loving wife. With every passing day Reb Gedaliya encourages more license, at the same time as silencing his opponents, burning books, and even resorting to violence. Nor does the news that Sabbatai Zevi has converted to Islam embarrass him in the least: “This dog barks lies and deceit. Not Sabbatai Zevi, but Sabbatai Zevi’s shadow was converted. There is an explicit passage in the Zohar! The Messiah has ascended to Heaven! He will soon descend and redeem us” (SG, 194). Finally, he declares that the generation welcoming the Messiah must be utterly sinful. It is his wretched ornament, poor put-upon Rechele, who pays for his sins. A dybbuk enters her and sports with her body in the most shameful of ways – none of which the reader is spared – until he is done with her, whereupon the evil spirit exits “in a flash of fire from that same place,” in a gross parody of birth. I suspect Singer experienced certain misgivings about causing Rechele such undeserved humiliation and degradation. Perhaps that is why he chose to deliver the novel’s horrid climax in the form of a witness statement, as if to absolve himself and his imagination of responsibility. It shows that from the first Singer knew perfectly well that the form of magical realism he practiced was indeed unkosher. As I have tried to explain, such mixed feelings, such misgivings, remained with him throughout his career. But there was no denying the fact that his inclinations resembled those of Reb Gedaliya. He knows that it is wrong, but he cannot resist what his father called “sweetened poison,” the forbidden fruit of literature, in which evil – as it was in the creation of the world – becomes a necessary evil.

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Throughout Satan in Goray there is a tension between restraint and license; between Rabbi Benish and Reb Gedaliya, of course, but also between the Talmud, which teaches by reason and example, and the Kabbalah, which seeks knowledge through intuition and poetic imagery. These, in turn, lead to the disciplined mind, and the unrestrained imagination. As a writer, Singer feeds upon the unrestrained imagination; in short, he uses the same devices to ensnare the reader as the disciples of Sabbatai Zevi use to enrapture their hearers. But at his back Singer could always hear the hooves of the Cossacks hurrying near, not to mention the jackboots of the Nazis. Like it or not, Hitler also practiced a form of magical realism. Interviewer: Really, Dr. Sinclair! Let me be frank. I know the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer inside out, and I have familiarized myself with one of your novels: Blood Libels, in fact. In my opinion it is not magical, barely realistic, and – according to Singer – not Jewish either. Perhaps you are familiar with his response to a question about Jewish writers: To me there are only Yiddish writers, Hebrew writers, English writers, Spanish writers. The whole idea of a Jewish writer, a Catholic writer, is kind of far-fetched to me. But if you force me to admit that there is such a thing as a Jewish writer, I would say that he is a man who is really immersed in Jewishness, who knows Hebrew, Yiddish, the Talmud, the Midrash, the Hassidic literature, the Cabbala, and so forth. And if he writes, in addition, about Jews and Jewish history and Jewish life, we can call him a Jewish writer. We can also call him just a writer. But a writer who happens to be Jewish and writes in English, is an English writer; if he writes in Spanish, he’s a Spanish writer; or in French, a French writer.23

By this definition Singer is a Jewish writer, and you are not. Furthermore, your novel, if I may say so, is not the work of an original mind, but the bastard child of better mens’ books. Everything about it is second-hand, not simply its Jewishness. And its shocks are the shocks of a frightened child. In my opinion your entire oeuvre is juvenilia. Sinclair: Well, you are certainly right to characterize the author of Blood Libels as a scare-baby. I’ve always identified with the boy referred to at the beginning of “The Turn of the Screw,” who upon waking from a nightmare, calls for his mother, not that she might comfort him, but that she might share his fear. Of what was I frightened? Let’s begin with my innards, and work out from there. In particular I was frightened of what I called my devilish kidneys; presciently, as it turned out. I was right to predict a civil war among my organs. My less self-interested fear concerned the future of Israel. As I saw it in the early 1980s, Ariel Sharon – architect of Israel’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon –

23 Harold Flender, “An Interview with Isaac Bashevis Singer,” in Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations, ed. Grace Farrell (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1992): 36–48, 36.

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was a dictator-in-waiting. If only, […]. Things have deteriorated so badly since then, that now he seems more like Israel’s King Arthur, slumbering on until – at the moment of greatest danger – he receives the call to save his nation, to save it from those who have replaced his brutal empiricism with an even more brutal ideology. However, you would be right to characterize the destruction of Anglo-Jewry by the arch-fiend Bruno Gascoyne and his crazed followers, the Children of Albion, as a fictional device, not a paranoid fantasy magically made real; one that grew from the demands of the story, not my deepest fears. And you would also be right to recognize in its finale a debt to Isaac Bashevis Singer – one of your better men – whose description of pogroms in Satan in Goray served as an inspiration for my own. Nor, God help us, are they far-fetched, anything other than real. Only this morning I heard on the BBC World Service that Syrian Army irregulars had introduced rats and mice into the vaginas of women they had just raped. No doubt you will see this admission as less than an expression of gratitude, and more of an attempt to shift the moral responsibility for a diseased imagination to another. So let me make it clear; I plead guilty for every word I have ever written. And I would like to add – in my own defense – that some combinations, whole paragraphs even, show evidence of beauty, even originality. In particular, I should like to take credit for what the narrator of Blood Libels calls the “psychosomatic approach to history.”24 Seeing the macrocosm in his own hypochondria, he introduces the concept thus: Just as the mind, knowing the symptoms, has no need of bacillus or virus to counterfeit an illness, so history does not need facts to proceed. What people believe to have happened is more important than what actually did. Without a shred of evidence Gascoyne has persuaded the British to accept the ancient libels and forced the government to set up a Commission of Inquiry. In the meantime his followers continue to kill Jews with impunity, convinced they are purging the body politic. My own body, I may add, is still plagued by the flu virus, against which it seems to have no resistance.

Thereby leaving open the possibility that the events he has just described are not real, but the product of a feverish mind, and a febrile imagination. But “ambiguity” is not a strong enough word to encompass what I hope to achieve when I write. Allow me to echo Coleridge, who wrote of his ambition, “to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of

24 Clive Sinclair, Blood Libels (London: Allison & Busby, 1985): 188.

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disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”25 I too would wish to create in my readers a semblance of that poetic faith. Once I wrote a story called “Bedbugs,” in which an Anglo-Jewish lecturer teaches a course on World War I poetry to a class of German students.26 Because he is Jewish, and they are German, he takes a perverse pleasure in focusing on the work of Isaac Rosenberg. During a bout of illicit intercourse with the most attractive of the females, some lines from Rosenberg’s “Louse Hunting” enter his mind unbidden. In early drafts they remained just that: words. Then my imagination gave me a push, and pointed out that they would be much better spoken by Rosenberg’s ghost. And so he appears to the adulterous lecturer, dressed for the trenches, as the former plunges his bayonet of flesh into Inge. I have discussed this story on numerous occasions. Many have found fault with it, but no one has yet said, “But Mr. Sinclair, there are no such things as ghosts.”

25 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria: Or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, eds. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984): 6. 26 Clive Sinclair, “Bedbugs,” in Bedbugs (London: Allison & Busby, 1982): 9–21.

Sue Vice

Universalism and Symbolism in Holocaust Fiction This article analyzes three novels from the 1960s, each of which adopts a symbolist approach to the events of the Holocaust. While Haim Gouri’s novel The Chocolate Deal (1965) focuses on the reactions of survivors to the immediate post-war world, Jiří Weil’s Life With a Star (1964) represents the life of a man in what is clearly occupied Prague, and Piotr Rawicz’s Blood from the Sky (1961) details the efforts of its protagonist to evade the Nazis in Ukraine. None of these novels details the universe of the concentration camps, each eschews specific historical detail and ends ambiguously, in a way that has led critics to argue that their concern is philosophical and that they depict the existential plight of humans in an indifferent universe. I argue that, on the contrary, the location and psychology of the novels’ protagonists gives apparently absurd symbolism a historically specific content. In this article, I analyze three examples of Holocaust fiction, all of which have been critically feted yet are also practically neglected: Haim Gouri’s The Chocolate Deal (1965), Jiří Weil’s Life With a Star (1964) and Piotr Rawicz’s Blood from the Sky (1961).1 While Weil’s work has a champion in the form of Philip Roth and Rawicz the critical advocacy of Anthony Rudolf,2 Gouri’s work has yet to find a mentor of this kind. I argue that this combination of high regard with actual disdain can be ascribed to the novels’ ambivalent generic status, one that arises from style as well as content. One of these novels was written by an Israeli who worked with displaced persons after the war, the other two by Holocaust survivors; however, none takes a testimonial or conventionally realist approach to the events of the

1 For instance, Haim Gouri’s journalism but not his fiction is mentioned in David G. Roskies and Naomi Diamant, Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide (Waltham, MA: Brandeis UP, 2012); in her review of Weil’s Life With a Star Hilary Daninhirsch refers to the author as “one of the most remarkable Jewish writers that you’ve never heard of,” Jewish Chronicle (September 10, 2011); and although Rawicz is praised in passing, his work has not been analyzed by such critics of Holocaust literature as Lawrence Langer: see Sue Vice, “Fascination et malaise: La réception du Sang du ciel au Royaume-Uni et aux États Unis,” in Un ciel de sang et de cendres: Piotr Rawicz et la solitude du témoin, eds. Anny Dayan Rosenman and Fransiska Louwagie (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2013): 111– 129. 2 See Philip Roth’s preface to Jiří Weil, Life With a Star, trans. Rita Klímová with Roslyn Schloss (London: Flamingo, 1988); and Anthony Rudolf’s new edition of the English-language translation of Piotr Rawicz, Blood from the Sky, trans. Peter Wiles (London: Elliott and Thompson, 2004).

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war. Rather, each novel represents the experiences of their protagonist in a way that appears to conform to Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic: “The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.”3 In these cases, it is as if the historical events of war, enemy occupation, the institution of racial laws and threat of mass death, constitute the “apparently supernatural event” which Todorov describes, and the three novels center in different ways on their protagonist’s, as well as the reader’s, “hesitation” over such epistemological confusion. I will argue that the omission of overt historical detail in these novels and its replacement by elements of the fantastic, makes these works examples of individualized and psychological views of the Holocaust world, rather than the “universal” or existential portraits of an “abject humanity” as which they have been described.4

Oblique Historicism: Haim Gouri, The Chocolate Deal The Israeli writer Haim Gouri has been described as a central exemplar of the socalled “Palmach literature”5 that shunned the Diaspora in favor of an Israeli future. However, Gouri’s work with Holocaust survivors in Displaced Persons camps in Europe in 1947, and as a correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Lamerhav at the Eichmann trial of 1961, meant that he did also broach the subject of the Holocaust, in film and his early volumes of poetry as well as in fiction.6 Gouri’s post-Holocaust novel The Chocolate Deal takes a form that appears to be radically different from his factual account of the Eichmann trial, yet the often dreamlike world of the former has more in common with the journalism of the latter than might at first appear.

3 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975): 25. 4 Steven Jaron, “At the Edge of Humanity: The Dismissal of Historical Truth in Piotr Rawicz’s Novel Le sang du ciel,” in The Conscience of Humankind: Literature and Traumatic Experiences, eds. Elrud Ibsch et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000): 37–46, 44. 5 Dvir Abramovich, “Haim Gouri,” in Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work, vol. I: Agosín to Lentin, ed. Lillian S. Kremer (London and New York: Routledge, 2003): 451– 453, 451. 6 See Gouri’s statement that the encounter with survivors in Vienna in 1947 “changed his life,” quoted in Reuven Shoham, “Haim Gouri and ‘the Jewish people who have been seriously injured,’” Association of Jewish Studies Review 24.1 (1999): 73–100, 79.

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In The Chocolate Deal, we read of an apparently chance meeting between two refugees in an unnamed European city’s railway station after the war’s end. As a result of this meeting, Mordechai Neuberg brings his old friend Reuben Krauss to stay with him in a cellar at the convent of The Sisters of Mercy. Rubi’s failure to admit to himself the significance of the Holocaust years – a term that is never used in the text itself – is made immediately clear, as he describes to a skeptical Mordi his plans to effect a reunion with his Uncle Salomon and his family. Mordi’s way of dissuading his friend from calling at the Salomons’ house unannounced is couched in the double-voiced terms of both social nicety and historical loss: “Just like that, to knock on the door, it isn’t done. Those days are over.”7 When Rubi does try to look forwards, by planning a way to make money and by enacting the heroic rescue of a little girl from a burning house, both events turn out to be about the war years after all. The fact that Rubi’s efforts to leave the past behind simply end up returning him to it constitutes a version of the pattern traced by Gouri in his newspaper articles on Eichmann’s trial, in which the demonstration of present-day Israeli heroism in capturing the defendant ironically led straight back to a contemplation of Europe and “immersion in the tragic past.”8 Although in his foreword Geoffrey Hartman argues that the “chocolate deal” of the title is significant only in the novel’s last quarter (CD, ix), it is in fact crucial to its entire ethical and literary meaning. The market-fixing “chocolate deal” depends on Rubi ensuring that rumors are spread about sedatives in the excess of military chocolate that has flooded the market; his get-rich-quick plan is to stockpile the chocolate and then sell it at a profit when the rumor has been disproved. However, the notion of a “deal” of this kind resounds with echoes of such details of Holocaust history as the “organizing” of food and other essentials in the world of the camps, as Hartman argues (CD, ix), or what Gouri himself describes elsewhere as “that monstrous ‘trucks-for-blood’ deal” struck between Joel Brand and Eichmann in Hungary during the war.9 Such a resonance of the “chocolate deal” with the Holocaust years is made all the clearer since its success depends upon Rubi’s recognizing and blackmailing a former Nazi to take part by providing a false scientific opinion on the chocolate’s contaminated nature. Charlotte, the young girl Rubi rescues from “that terrible fire” (CD, 26), is the daughter of Dr. Karl Hoffmann, who is ominously described

7 Haim Gouri, The Chocolate Deal, trans. Seymour Simckes (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1999): 11. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “CD.” 8 Alan Mintz, foreword to Haim Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth: The Jerusalem Trial of Adolf Eichmann [1962], trans. Michael Swirsky (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004): ix–xii, xi. 9 Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth, 277.

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as a “successful skin doctor” (CD, 29). Rubi’s growing awareness of Hoffmann’s true identity takes the form of a version of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of inner dialogue,10 since the former “assigns thoughts to his dear friend [Mordi] and explains to him with a certain formality: ‘I hate the combination, girl and fire’” (CD, 40). Despite the novel’s eschewing “circumstantial reality,”11 such that Rubi himself describes the story of his rescuing Charlotte as “like a dream” (CD, 85), the historical circumstances of Hoffmann’s requisitioning the apartment of Uncle Salomon and his family during the war emerges in an instance of understanding that is constructed dialogically, and which does so in reverse, for both the reader and Rubi. The latter suggests to his friend Gerti, who was once the Salomons’ maid, that “the doctor” may know something about the letters he wrote to the Salomons that were sent back to him: “What doctor?” “The one who had their apartment after they left it.” “They didn’t leave it.” “You said they left.” “I said they were taken away. I think the reason they gave no forwarding address was that they didn’t know where they were being taken.” (CD, 88)

This dialogue, in which each question elicits a darker detail, prompts Gerti’s own recall of her “bird’s eye view” (CD, 105) of the Salomons’ deportation which she was unable to prevent, her present role as Dr. Hoffman’s maid making clear her own post-war bystander guilt. Although, as Reuven Shoham argues, in his prose Gouri sheds the “autobiographical and lyric ‘I’” of his poetry, in which the persona views survivors from a distanced, external perspective,12 in The Chocolate Deal the narrative viewpoint remains hard to establish. At several times it takes the form of a literal or inner dialogue, and shifts are enacted between different speaking subjects. This supports the characters’ invocation of dreams, fairy tales and a “false play” (CD, 129) by making the status of events unclear. Even Rubi’s transaction with Dr. Hoffman gives the impression of being a staged ethical debate. Rather than constituting an actual dialogue, it is another example of dialogically enacted understanding, based in equal measure on the polyphonic construction of consciousness and the format of a trial, and the reader is led to conclude that both the fire and Hoffman

10 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984): 163, 200. 11 Edward Alexander, The Resonance of Dust: Essays on Holocaust Literature and Jewish Fate (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1986): 91. 12 Shoham, “Haim Gouri and ‘the Jewish people,’” 99.

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himself might be the products of Rubi’s wishful, if also guilty, thinking. Yet Rubi’s knowledge of Hoffmann’s past does not prevent his trying to profit from the indebtedness the former Nazi feels towards him, and it is this decision, rather than the scheme he proposes, that constitutes the novel’s eponymous “chocolate deal.” Indeed, as Edward Alexander argues, the very concept of such a transaction, with its suggestion of sweetening a pragmatic exchange, implies that, in the wake of the Holocaust, “to remain alive is to betray the victims and embrace the murderers.”13 Some critics even view the “chocolate deal” as a coded critique of Israel’s acceptance of German reparations payments.14 However, the historical roots of the phrase may lie elsewhere, in a detail cited by Gouri in Facing the Glass Booth, where he describes the witness Michael Podchlevnik, one of only three survivors of the death-camp at Chelmno: he “works in a chocolate wafer factory and lives in Bnei Brak. This man removed bodies from the gassing vans at Chelmno.”15 Such a stark juxtaposition of the everyday with the exterminatory in the mention of “chocolate” alongside “Chelmno” implies a historical incommensurability in the person of a survivor, rather than criticism of those survivors’ postwar life. In Gouri’s novel, the uncertain status of Rubi’s encounter with Dr. Karl Hoffman is crucial, as is its composition out of a variety of internal discourses. Rubi’s regret at Uncle Salomon’s disappearance is couched partly in terms of losing the chance to better himself in the post-war world: “I would have turned to him, asked for a short-term loan […] In clothes like these it’s hard to conduct business with respectable people” (CD, 114), an observation that establishes the narrative and moral groundwork for his turn to Hoffman. The act of rescuing Charlotte Hoffman, on which the business proposition rests, highlights the irrecoverability of wartime losses, as revealed by Rubi’s ventriloquizing of Mordi while in conversation with the doctor: “‘In what way did the other girls sin, those who didn’t merit a rescuing angel of the Rubi Krauss sort?’ That’s Mordi’s sentence. I’m quoting” (CD, 130). Yet it is not only the fictional Mordi whose voice forms a part of Rubi’s “internal debate.”16 The Chocolate Deal has a historical substratum, one

13 Alexander, The Resonance of Dust, 96. 14 Abramovich, “Haim Gouri,” 452; Roskies and Diamant describe the mass protests against reparations that took place in Israel and elsewhere in the 1950s, Holocaust Literature, 9. 15 Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth, 116. “Michael Podchlevnik” is the same Michael Podchlebnik who is interviewed in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), where he describes his appearance as a witness at the Eichmann Trial and his memories of having to empty the gas vans at Chelmno of people including his own wife and children. 16 The phrase is Nissim Calderon’s from his review of Gouri’s autobiography, “The man who was a ‘civil war,’” Ha’aretz (November 24, 2008).

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that is unexpected given its fractured and modernist representation of what Shoham calls “the impossible and surrealistic world of the survivors.”17 Rubi’s declaration that he will send Charlotte a bouquet on her wedding-day is followed by his apparently oblique question to Hoffman: “By the way, how many young girls never reached the canopy because of you?” (CD, 133). This exchange, which reveals to Hoffman the fact that Rubi knows about his past, has its origins in Gouri’s reportage on the Eichmann Trial. Carl Clauberg, the historical figure upon whom Hoffman is based, is mentioned only once in Facing the Glass Booth, in the context of Gouri’s comment on the lack of histrionic testimony from survivorwitnesses at the trial: “Not one man has been seen embracing his only daughter, a young woman who is to be sent to Dr. Carl Clauberg’s experimental station instead of the wedding canopy.”18 The first name that the fictional Hoffman shares with Clauberg is an oblique signifier of atrocity, in this case Clauberg’s mass sterilization “experiments” on Jewish women in Auschwitz, in a novel which does not directly represent the detail of “circumstantial reality.”19

Absent addressees: Jiří Weil, Life With a Star Jiří Weil’s novel is characterized by two symbolic patterns: one is, once more, the withholding of specific historical detail, the other the construction of an animal allegory. Although the former might appear to relate to the novel’s factual setting and the latter to the affect it provokes, both together constitute the way in which Weil’s protagonist Josef Roubicek views his situation. The setting of Life With a Star is that of Nazi-occupied Prague, and its first-person narrator, a former bank clerk who now earns his living sweeping up leaves in the cemetery, lives in constant fear of deportation as a Jew to Terezín and thence to Auschwitz: yet none of these proper nouns appears in the text. Such a technique has undoubtedly contributed to the novel’s being described as “existential” or “absurd,” since Josef’s plight in a “cold” world may thus appear ahistorical,20 and his first name a link to the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925). However, such intertextual reference to Kafka does not in itself deny the novel’s historicist basis. Knowledge of Kafka’s novels gave some of the prisoners of Terezín, who included the

17 Shoham, “Haim Gouri and ‘the Jewish people,’” 100. 18 Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth, 152. 19 Alexander, The Resonance of Dust, 91. 20 See David Mesher, “Jiří Weil,” in Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work, vol. II: Lerner to Zychlinsky, ed. Lillian S. Kremer (London and New York: Routledge, 2003): 1297.

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writer’s sister Ottilie, a framework within which to understand their incarceration, such that the camp’s fortress was known to them as “the castle.”21 Thus Life With a Star represents a world in which the absurd has become full of a historically specific meaning. Withholding the context of such details as the “NO ADMITTANCE” sign outside a cafeteria, and Josef’s aunt’s fear that her nephew’s pet cat Tomas will bring ruin on their family,22 is both to defamiliarize the racial laws of the Holocaust world, and to satirize Josef’s conversion of a shared fate into a series of inexplicable individual affronts. He transforms general laws into ones directed against him alone: “There was a law that I wasn’t allowed to be on the streets after eight o’clock in the evening […] For a long time I didn’t hear about this law, but then I heard it whispered about” (LS, 46). The precise referents of Josef’s story are closer to the surface, and the distinctions between fantasy and reality more consistently emphasized, than they are in Gouri’s The Chocolate Deal. David Mesher argues that, since Josef finds the “jagged” word on his yellow star and the inscriptions on Jewish graves equally illegible and “foreign,” he comes across as a monolingual Czech patriot,23 and indeed it is partly his ignorance of “foreign languages” that prevents his fleeing his occupied homeland (LS, 31). However, it is also possible to see Josef’s inability to read these words in terms of his oscillation between different positions. The German word on the star is foreign and alienating to him, while the Hebrew lettering has been judged as alien and unutterable by others. Such an internally divided and contradictory stance underlies Josef’s suffering. The absence of naming has a psychological significance, implying that Josef, for superstitious and fearful reasons, is enacting such linguistic substitutions as “them” for “Germans,” “the Community” for the Czech Judenrat, “fortress town” for “Terezín” and “east” for “Auschwitz.” Anxiety that such lack of naming may make the text indecipherable is revealed by the translator’s note, which “translates” such referents: “Throughout the book, the unnamed ‘they’ are the Germans who occupied Czechoslovakia from March 1939,” we are informed (LS, 8), thus, as Anne Tyler puts it, “sabotaging” the text’s construction of Josef’s experiencing a communal fate in terms of the idea “that he, as an individual, has somehow been found personally odious.”24 The irony of Josef’s subjective view of a communal tragedy is one that works against a universalist reading of the novel, since the “bureaucratic eagerness” (LS, 19) that he observes at the Community offices may

21 22 23 24

See Helen Finch, “Prague Circles: H. G. Adler’s Kafkaesque Hope,” forthcoming. Weil, Life With a Star, 19, 61. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “LS.” Mesher, “Jiří Weil,” 1297. Anne Tyler, “Pursued by they,” New York Times (June 18, 1989): Book Reviews sect., 3.

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have its origins in the unmotivated practices of modernity, but such practices and “questionnaires” have been filled in with specific historical detail. The indeterminacy of the distinction between “daydreams” and reality in The Chocolate Deal is replaced in Life With a Star by a clearer, although not always explicitly narrated, distinction between the voices of Josef’s interiority and those of the external world. This is the case in relation to his extended “internal debates” with Ruzena Pospichalova, who is introduced in the uncertain terms of the Todorovian fantastic: Ruzena could not answer. She was not in the room, she was not with me at all. I didn’t know what had happened to her. I hadn’t seen her for a long time. Perhaps she was not on earth any more, perhaps she had never even lived. (LS, 11)

Just as the discourse of social nicety overlapped with that of understanding mass death in The Chocolate Deal, so here Josef’s questions to himself about Ruzena’s fate are at once emotive responses to losing touch with his married lover, and a specifically Holocaust-related anxiety. Both meanings are present alongside a third, ontological meaning that is apparent when Josef wonders whether Ruzena ever “even lived”: the question is both a confession that she might be invented, and an expression of regret at her reduced chance at life. The historical and the romantic frequently overlap when Josef thinks of Ruzena: her threat to “leave” him is not a way of ending their liaison but of fleeing the country (LS, 31). Indeed, Ruzena’s presence in Josef’s mind signifies the nagging memory of an actual, rather than just imagined, alternative to his reduced and dangerous circumstances. While standing in a queue to complete some forms at “the Community” offices, Josef conjures up the memory of his first meeting Ruzena in order to “forget the dirty corridor” where he is waiting (LS, 23), and the strength of his vision is reflected by an abrupt narrative transition in which a flashback does not emerge from but collides with the present: There was nothing to focus one’s attention on, just a dirty corridor and a sign on a door that I really couldn’t read. I didn’t want to keep looking at all these people. When we came back from dancing that time we were a bit high but neither Frantisek nor [Ruzena’s husband] Jarka took any notice of us. (LS, 23)

Ruzena’s significance in keeping at bay the reality of Josef’s “life with a star” is revealed when her voice is replaced by that of Death, by contrast an “inattentive” female companion (LS, 29). If the fantastic represents an attempt to screen out the Holocaust setting, then the substitution of Ruzena’s voice with that of Death suggests a suppressed knowledge on the part of Josef, who after all narrates his story in the past tense from an unknown point in the present. Indeed, his description of himself as “probably already dead […] perhaps I am able to speak only to

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the dead,” a category that includes Ruzena (LS, 74–75), has its own double meaning. Josef’s conviction that his fate is already determined coexists with the reader’s suspicion that his is a posthumous narrative, related from a point beyond meaningful life, if not bodily death. Josef’s descriptions of atrocity and cruelty are not as extreme as those given by Boris in Piotr Rawicz’s Blood from the Sky, but he uses a series of animal metaphors to convey a similar awareness of the transformation of humans into commodities. Once more defamiliarizing the occupiers’ actions, Josef’s recommendation is that “people could be robbed without being killed if the lust for things was so strong” (LS, 159), but he also recognizes the fact that categories have become blurred, and that people are already equivalent to “things” or to animals. Josef can only afford to buy “blood,” not meat (LS, 14), while his report on announcements threatening death for various infringements is followed by one that he describes as “mild”: “it explained how and when gas could be used and the punishments for those who exceeded their quota” (LS, 154). Imagery hinting at the reality of humans being slaughtered or gassed simultaneously expresses Josef’s narrative of his own increasing hunger and the difficulty of buying food or cooking it. Animals are transitional creatures in relation to the Jews in Josef’s world, a truth that is expressed here in terms of an implicit anxiety about the kosher food laws. People are to be killed, as if they are the victims of the fact that the consumption of blood outlawed in Leviticus (for instance, 7:26) is no longer taboo.25 Josef’s insight that he might have to pay for the Community’s official “certificates” with his own “scrawny neck” (LS, 38) evokes the killing of a chicken, while his childhood memory of rabbits that “were always being slaughtered” (LS, 87) offers a simile for his realization that hiding in his broken-down apartment is not enough of a refuge: “they pulled me out by the ears, like a rabbit from its pen” (LS, 99). It is not just the use of animals for food that forms the signifiers with which Josef’s anxiety and suppressed knowledge are expressed. In a version of the kind of dark carnival imagery that is also present in Rawicz’s Blood from the Sky, Josef thinks of the conditions of his life as akin to a circus or menagerie. While the circus might seem to be a space for the “licenced” revelry of carnival, it fails to conform to Bakhtin’s definition of it as “a pageant without footlights and without a division between performers and spectators,” the location of “free and familiar contact between people.”26 As Josef acknowledges when looking back on his childhood experience, the performances in a circus are anything but “free,” since 25 See also Sue Vice, “Claude Lanzmann’s Einsatzgruppen Interviews,” in Representing Holocaust Perpetrators in Literature and Film, eds. Jenni Adams and Sue Vice (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2013): 51–74. 26 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 122.

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the animals “are always forced out into the arena” (LS, 128) and cannot reverse the species hierarchy encoded in the “division between performers and spectators,” even for a day. As in the case of the rabbits, Josef’s experience underlies the analogy he sees between the circumstances of circus animals and people “with a star.” At first, the two halves of this simile remain separate in Josef’s description to his friend Materna of “their” plans to construct transit camps, except that it is not clear whether his final remark is a literal or satirical quotation: “There are wooden pavilions, just nailed-together boards really. There’s no heating because the place would catch fire. They’ve brought straw there from the Community. They say they’re organizing a circus” (LS, 126). Such unclarity increases in parallel with Josef’s wish to evade deportation, so that the discourse of the circus overtakes that of literal narration. We learn that “the people in the circus froze” on the straw of the wooden pavilions, while others “went to a fortress town where a menagerie had been set up. A person was very lucky to become an animal assigned to this menagerie,” since it meant evading the journey east (LS, 140). Here, Josef’s simile has turned into a metaphor in which the likeness between the cruelty and spectacle of a circus, and the present circumstances of those “with a star,” is blended. In this way, the development of the animal allegory mirrors that of its counterpart, the suppression of concrete historical detail. Cruelty is expressed by this means, as Josef simply refers to another man’s punishment as “[having] to participate in circus acts” (LS, 142). The novel’s end is represented with a narrative ambiguity, which has the effect that the fantastic is replaced by a more specific historical uncertainty. Although several critics read Josef’s refusal to obey his summons to a deportation and burning of all his documents as his decision to save himself by going into hiding,27 his insistence that he will now “follow Ruzena” (LS, 247), whose advice to flee he had ignored, seems equally to suggest that Josef will choose his own death. He has thus, perhaps, evaded an animalian end.

Implicating the Reader: Piotr Rawicz, Blood from the Sky Piotr Rawicz’s novel Blood from the Sky presents an exaggerated version of the tropes of isolation and alienation, along with narrative and historical indetermi-

27 See for instance Robert Alter on Josef’s final “act of defiance,” in his review “Paying for the paper,” London Review of Books 14 (August 6, 1992): 15.

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nacy, that we have seen in Gouri’s and Weil’s fiction, to an ethically challenging effect that implicates the reader. The protagonist Boris is, like Rubi Krauss and Josef Roubicek, a lone figure, this time living in the wartime ghetto of an unidentified “average-sized town” in Ukraine.28 The novel draws attention to its own withholding of historical detail, as shown by Boris’s providing an incomplete date for the onset of deportations: “On July 12, 194–, we were ordered to pack our belongings […] and assemble in the main square” (BS, 9). This detail implies a fictive version of the author’s life, since Rawicz was living in Lvov when the Nazis invaded on July 1, 1941; soon after, he was sent to Auschwitz and then to Leitmeritz, a camp near Theresienstadt, as a political prisoner with false papers, not as a Jew. In Rawicz’s novel, we witness Boris’s efforts to “pass” as a nonJewish Ukrainian, an effort that is represented with grim farcicality as he undergoes an interrogation to establish his Ukrainian cultural credentials, and a physical examination to determine whether he has been halachically or medically circumcised. Yet, like Life With a Star, Blood from the Sky draws on its author’s biography only as one element of its varied discourses. The novel’s frame narrator is an unnamed man who meets Boris in a café in 1961 and who relates the novel’s events. While the first half of the novel is the transcript of a conversation between Boris and the café-goer, the second consists of extracts from Boris’s notebook, effected by this narrator-editor who admits to excisions and deletions. Such a reliance on multiple and mediated source-material makes Blood from the Sky “not a report but a reconstruction” of the events of the Holocaust in Ukraine,29 a meditation on how it is possible to relate such events at all. The café-going narrator is a cynical and untrustworthy figure, who presents a bleak view of the ‘present’ of the post-war world as “like a lump of dead meat dried up by the malevolent sun” (BS, 7), and the survivor, Boris, as an unlikeable commodity to be palmed off onto the reader. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin quotes from the prologue of Pantagruel, where praise of the book and of the reader “are composed in the advertising spirit of the barker at a show or the hawker of chapbooks” in a “typical example of the tone and style of the fair,”30 and Blood from the Sky opens with a version of such a “fair,” since the narrator opens his story “as one would open a shop”; yet this narrator cannot at first distinguish his potential customer from “an item of merchandise” (BS, 4). In constrast to the utopian fairground scene imagined by 28 Piotr Rawicz, Blood from the Sky, trans. Peter Wiles (London: Secker and Warburg, 1964): 11. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “BS.” 29 Lawrence Langer, “Introduction,” in Rawicz, Blood from the Sky: v–xvii, ix. 30 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (New York: Wiley, 1984): 160.

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Bakhtin, in which “the exalted and the lowly, the sacred and profane, are leveled,”31 in Rawicz’s novel it is the objects for sale and human beings that are interchangeable. Boris reports a joke told by his friend Abracha: “Well, young Boris, next time we meet, it will be on the shelves of Smiechowski’s shop” (BS, 60), in a reference to the owner of a soap factory. Indeed, the reader is quickly drawn into this process of reification, as the narrator puts it early on: “Here comes my customer, the merchandise I’m on the point of selling you” (BS, 6). It is the reader who is the real customer, made indistinguishable from Boris and his mores. Blood from the Sky is constituted out of an extreme polyphony. The café-goer adds a footnote to one of Boris’s poems, to the effect that, “Our customer’s narrative begins in quotation marks. I hope these quotation marks will get lost as we go along” (BS, 7). However, there is a consistent blurring of voices and perspectives between editor, Boris and his alter-ego, the “clodding, anti-Semitic Ukrainian farmhand” Yuri Goletz ,32 whether or not the quotation marks vanish; even where they are not present, the café-goer frequently is, as in this example: “And I am too weak, I always was – my customer continued – to live without an alibi” (BS, 10). His comments on Boris’s own estimates and omissions may make us pause for thought. While Boris does not let us know of his girlfriend Naomi’s fate, at times it may sound as if the café-goer is either implying a dark truth concealed by Boris, or has made an excision himself. After the liquidation of the Garin workshop and just before the scene of the massacre of children hiding in a cellar, the narrator observes: “Boris and Naomi survived. How? Boris remains silent on the subject” (BS, 148). This is followed by a similar rhetorical question: “How did Boris discover the existence of this makeshift kindergarten? He is content to refer to a late-night jaunt […] embarked on after a quarrel” (BS, 150). While these remarks imply the unknowability and contingency of events, and the narrator’s only partial access to them, they also lead towards and culminate in a moment where the narrator’s rhetorical questioning is much more damning of Boris, as we will see below. Indeed, the café-going narrator presents the novel’s most horrifying moment of complicity elliptically, so that the reader cannot be sure exactly what has happened. In what Rudolf calls one of the “six great set-piece tableaux” of the novel,33 we read of the horrible cruelty and murder meted out against a group of

31 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 160. 32 Alfred Alvarez, “The Literature of the Holocaust,” Beyond All This Fiddle: Essays 1955–1967 (London: Allen Lane, 1968): 22–33, 32. 33 Anthony Rudolf, Engraved in Flesh: Piotr Rawicz and his novel ‘Blood from the Sky’ [1996] (London: Menard P, 2007): 24.

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children and the women looking after them by the Nazis who find them hiding in a cellar. Critics of Rawicz’s novel point to the moment of shocking ambiguity that follows the soldiers’ rape of one of the women, when the “amiable” Colonel invites Boris “to share in the general merrymaking”: Boris doesn’t say whether he declined the invitation. At a given moment, he sensed something like a veiled threat in the kindly Corporal. As though to say: “The gentleman doesn’t deign to participate in these vulgar manly festivities. That could cost the gentleman dear.” (BS, 156)

This scene is narratively and morally ambiguous. It seems that Boris may have taken part in a sexual assault in order to adhere to his masquerade as a non-Jew; this makes for uncomfortable reading, and our suspicion that his recording the Colonel’s blackmail is an excuse for doing something he was not averse to, may be supported by the knowledge of Boris’s ability to sexualize any situation. Before the Nazis arrive in the cellar, Boris’s “inevitable” thought about one of the children, a weeping girl who is “fair and pale,” is whether “this blond squirrel, must this blond squirrel go the same way as the rest?” (BS, 153–154), might make us ask who “the rest” are, and remind us of an earlier perception during a roundup: There were some quite acceptable-looking girls, whose breasts and hips were just beginning to fill out. Unripe apples that were soon to be picked. I was overcome by a feeling of jealousy at the thought of their end, of the flame that was to usurp my place and lick these breasts and hips to death. (BS, 11)

Here we see a clear instance of what Stanley Kauffman describes Boris as undertaking: to “pretend in a deliberate, grim way – to smile” at the events he recounts.34 As in the scene in the cellar, it may be hard at first to determine which loss Boris is recording when he looks at the young women, that of their lives or of his own romantic opportunities, but in the case of the round-up it seems clear that romantic regret is a way to express horror at the imminence of death. Boris’s recognition of the transformation of his fellow townspeople “into past history before one’s eyes” (BS, 9) is typified by the death of these young women, as he puts it: “these young girls were to become, forthwith, as ancient as Astarte and as divine” (BS, 11). In the cellar scene it is not the “festivity” of killing that Boris is challenged to take part in, and this is both an alibi and a moral liability: we know he is not a murderer, but he may be a rapist.

34 Stanley Kauffmann, “Season in Hell,” New York Review of Books (February 20, 1964), his italics.

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However, as on other occasions, Boris’s actions imply compassion even if we gain no access to his interior expression of it. He returns some time later to the cellar with a nurse who gives the surviving children lethal injections, “distributing death, like portions of gingerbread stuffed with darkness” (BS, 156). The verb here uncannily echoes that used by Boris in describing the round-up with which his story began, where he observes: “I stood distributing smiles. I was not brandishing any papers. My empty hands were a betrayal, a betrayal of the others’ hopes” (BS, 11). It seems that both usages of “distribute” suggest survivor rather than perpetrator guilt. The round-up smile registers Boris’s knowledge that he can pass for gentile while “the others” cannot. The scene in the cellar registers again the outcome of Boris’s exemption from a common fate: it also starts with the observation that there is “Not a single ‘valid’ document on Boris’s person” (BS, 153), simply because he does not need such a document. The violence against his own people that Boris observes and in which he perhaps participates is an extreme expression of this gulf, between victims and witnesses. It is chillingly summarized by the Corporal’s falsely decorous utterance: “You are free to go […] As for these ladies and children […]” (BS, 154). Rudolf declares: “I bless Piotr for his courage in addressing the problem of complicity,”35 and his emphasis on the importance of representing but not resolving this issue demonstrates that it is the very raising of suspicion about Boris’s actions that is significant in the cellar scene. Boris’s complicity in this case is not a fact, but a thread of undecidable meaning that forcefully binds the reader to the events of the novel. Rawicz’s refusal to present a saintly or heroic Holocaust victim, nor to simplify the account of his protagonist’s suffering, may not have had a popularizing effect. However, as with the novel as a whole, Boris’s moral faltering is both personal and symbolic; the novel is a character-study, as well as a representation of a certain kind of ethical compromise in wartime. This double function is what makes this character, according to Rudolf, a “brilliant literary device,”36 forcing us to confront our own capacity for nihilism and violence as well as the specific historical calamity. Rawicz’s novel fluctuates between “universalism”37 and specificity in a way similar to Weil’s, by invoking the specific events of the Holocaust in Ukraine even as it appears to repudiate them, as the book’s Postscript demonstrates:

35 Rudolf, Engraved in Flesh, 39. 36 Rudolf, Engraved in Flesh, 282. 37 Jaron, “At the Edge of Humanity,” 43.

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This book is not a historical record. If the notion of chance (like most other notions) did not strike the author as absurd, he would gladly say that any reference to a particular period, territory, or race is purely coincidental. The events that he describes could crop up in any place, at any time, in the mind of any man, planet, mineral … (BS, 316)

This Postscript is in part a reflection on the novel’s own genre, affirming that it is a fictional representation of historical events, as well as relying upon the reader’s knowledge of just which particular period, territory or ‘race’ it represents, while constituting a chilling refusal to absolve that reader from the idea of recurrence, and to deny that the events described are safely concluded.

Conclusion None of the three novels I examine here is set in the world of the camps: while Gouri’s The Chocolate Deal takes place in Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war, Rawicz’s and Weil’s are concerned with the threat of deportation whose realization is not represented within either novel’s diegesis. Rawicz’s novel, for instance, concludes with the assurance that the narrator is doing readers a favor by “sparing” them an account of “The great Plain of the Birches,” that is, Birkenau (BS, 313). The remit of Holocaust literature itself is altered by this means, as well as by the novels’ concern with individual interiority and the eschewing of the “minimalist”38 reportage that has led to their being criticized as existential or universal. Unlike Weil’s other novel Mendelssohn on the Roof (1960), in which magic powers are attributed to a statue, all three of the novels discussed here adopt instead what could be described as a psychological symbolism, in which a dialogue takes place with the outer world of historical atrocity.

38 Carolyn J. Dean, Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010): 101.

Jenni Adams

Intertextuality and the Trace of the Other: Specters of Bruno Schulz This essay explores the talismanic status of the pre-Holocaust European Jewish magic realist writer Bruno Schulz in post-Holocaust Jewish-American literature, with a particular focus on Tree of Codes (2010) by Jonathan Safran Foer. Key issues to be addressed include the precise source of this fascination, as well as the degree of significance that might be attributed to the magic realism of Schulz’s work in his appropriation by a later generation of Jewish writers. Furthermore, what are the ethical and postmemorial resonances to the encounters these writers stage, and what might be read into Foer’s decision to rework Schulz in ways that nevertheless refuse the magic realism of Schulz’s own representations? Drawing these issues together in an analysis of the relationship between intertextuality, magic realism, and the (Levinasian) trace of the other, this essay offers a detailed analysis of Schulzean reverberations in recent Jewish American literature.

Introduction: Textual Resurrections In Shalom Auslander’s 2012 novel Hope: A Tragedy, we find a startling yet at the same time strangely familiar narrative scenario: an American man discovers, to his surprise and horror, an aged (and somewhat grotesque) Anne Frank residing in his attic.1 Strangely familiar, because Anne’s reappearance in this text arguably exemplifies a sustained preoccupation of Jewish-American literature with the imaginative recovery of the Holocaust dead, specifically dead writers who occupy a position of posthumous, post-Holocaust cultural privileging. The sphere of Anne Frank reimaginings includes such much-examined works as Roth’s The Ghost Writer;2 this essay, however, will take as its focus textual resurrections of the Polish Jewish magic realist3 Bruno Schulz, a topic which has received less

1 Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy (London: Picador, 2012). 2 Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979). 3 In brief, the term magic realism refers, as William Spindler summarizes, to “texts where two contrasting views of the world (one ‘rational’ and one ‘magical’) are presented as if they were not contradictory,” “Magic Realism: A Typology,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 29 (1993): 75– 85, 78. I use this term rather than “magical realism” since, as Anne C. Hegerfeldt states, “magic realism” “can be read as a double noun phrase and thus better reflects the relationship of equality

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critical attention despite Schulz forming what seems to be a major touchstone in post-Holocaust narrative. The Israeli writer David Grossman, for example, imagines Schulz’s survival of the Holocaust in the form of a salmon in his novel See Under: Love (1986; translated 1989);4 in America, reimaginings include Roth’s nod to the writer in his novella The Prague Orgy (1985) when the Czech writer Sisovsky falsely appropriates the narrative of Schulz’s death to the biography of his own father.5 Cynthia Ozick, in The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), stages the scenario of the potential reappearance of Schulz’s lost novel, The Messiah,6 while more recently, Jonathan Safran Foer published the intricate Tree of Codes (2010), a paring away of Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles to produce a new text that both is and is not the original.7 Perhaps a little more tenuously, Philippe Codde traces an underlying preoccupation with Schulz in Nicole Krauss’s 2005 novel The History of Love,8 locating him at the root of the protagonist Leopold Gursky and stating that “Krauss uses fiction to reverse history and preserve Schulz’s voice against all odds.”9 Schulz’s apparently talismanic status within recent Jewish-American literature will be the focus of this essay, which will confine itself for the most part to a discussion of Foer, but nevertheless aims ultimately to address larger questions in this field. Tree of Codes is a cut-up version of Schulz’s collection The Street of Crocodiles, such that the stories are reprinted complete with physical gaps in the pages where parts of the sentences have been removed to produce new juxtapositions. So, for example, in “Cinnamon Shops,” the kind of vision experienced by the protagonist is (re)articulated in a potent and concentrated form, as in Foer’s reduction of “I saw on the far side of the living room”10 (which occurs in relation

between magic and realism that is a fundamental aspect of the mode,” Lies that Tell the Truth: Magic Realism Seen through Contemporary Fiction from Britain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005): 1. 4 David Grossman, See Under: Love, trans. Betsy Rosenberg (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990). 5 Philip Roth, The Prague Orgy (London: Vintage, 1985). 6 Cynthia Ozick,The Messiah of Stockholm [1987] (New York: Vintage Books, 1988). 7 Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes (London: Visual Editions, 2010); further references in the text, abbreviated as “TC.” Comparisons might be made in this sense to William Burroughs’s cutups of Rimbaud, which he viewed as collaborations between them; see Edward S. Robinson, Shift Linguals: Cut-up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011): 29. 8 Nicole Krauss, The History of Love (New York: Norton, 2005). 9 Philip Codde, “Keeping History at Bay: Absent Presences in Three Recent Jewish American Novels,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 57.4 (2011): 673–693, 684. 10 Bruno Schulz, “Cinnamon Shops,” in The Fictions of Bruno Schulz: The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, trans. Celina Wieniewska (London: Picador, 1988): 59–68, 65; further references in the text, abbreviated as “SC.”

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to the protagonist’s trespassing in his headmaster’s apartment) to “I saw on the far side of / living” (TC, 83).11 Tree of Codes, as a consequence, both is and is not Schulz’s text: it uses Schulz’s words, and arguably asks to be read in dialogue with its precursor, but at the same time offers new inflections and distillations of the original tales. Most notable in Foer’s revision is the removal of the magic realism from Schulz’s stories: Father no longer becomes a bird and a cockroach in the stories of those names; “Tailors’ Dummies” is abstracted to such a level that the transfigurations of matter outlined in the original barely feature, and the strange journey of “Cinnamon Shops” becomes something more oblique. Questions that will be asked in the course of this essay include the following: wherein lies the fascination with Schulz, and what does this reveal about the postmemorial process itself? What might we read into Foer’s decision to employ intertextual resonances of Schulz that nevertheless refuse the magic realism of Schulz’s own creations? And finally, what ethical difficulties frame the project of intertextual postmemory literature (magic realist and otherwise), and how valuable might the notion of intertextual resonance as trace prove to its theorization?

Postmemory, Magic Realism, and Intertextuality It seems appropriate to begin, however, by briefly glossing the notion of postmemory. “Postmemory” is Marianne Hirsch’s concept for the form of “memory” of the traumatic and pre-traumatic experience of members of earlier generations held by their descendants. It is composed both of traces of this past (oral narratives, photographs, historical records, museum exhibits) and the “imaginative investment and creation” which elaborates, develops and cements such traces into what Hirsch terms “something akin to memory.”12 Although Hirsch’s definition initially restricts postmemory to the children of Holocaust survivors,13 her suggestion that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum would, “[a]t its best, […] include all of its visitors in the generation of postmemory”14 indicates the applicability of this notion beyond these confines. While it is important to

11 I have chosen to use a “/” to separate the different fragments of Foer’s text, as a way of signifying that the text is not continuous but is interspersed with sections of excised text. Please note too that the separate story titles are omitted from Foer’s text and are hence not provided in references. 12 Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” Poetics Today 17.4 (1996): 659–686, 659. 13 Hirsch, “Past Lives,” 662. 14 Hirsch, “Past Lives,” 667.

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remain cognizant of the heterogeneity and differing degrees of urgency among postmemorial relationships (where taken to include both the experience of descendants of survivors, and that of individuals and communities who are “heirs” to Holocaust experience in a broader cultural sense), the concept may be fruitfully deployed in this broader sense as a means of articulating wider cultural attempts to engage with these events and the irrecoverable times, places, and communities prior to their eruption.15 Foer’s Tree of Codes in a sense bridges this spectrum, as a work by a descendant of Holocaust survivors that is nevertheless concerned not with a specific family history but with the imaginative engagement with a context of pre-Holocaust European Jewish culture to which the textual remnants of Schulz’s writing offer a point of entry. Whether considered in terms of immediate familial relationship or broader cultural inheritance, however, postmemory is a necessarily composite and provisional construction which combines a number of different forms of knowledge and imagination. As a consequence, as argued elsewhere,16 literary postmemory constructions need carefully to acknowledge their composite, provisional and partially-imagined status in order to mitigate the risk of overwriting the inaccessible experiences of the survivor other and/or the Holocaust dead with a misleading sense of accessibility and accuracy on the part of the later-generation “agent of postmemory.”17 The risk of appropriation also needs to be carefully handled, an imperative which becomes more compelling where we move further away from an immediate and perhaps therapeutic drive towards postmemory construction into broader cultural applications of the term. Magic realism, I have suggested, offers one strategy by which this composite and potentially illusory form of knowledge/memory can be acknowledged as such, a phenomenon evident in the work of writers like Foer and Joseph Skibell. In his novel Everything Is Illuminated, Foer’s reconstruction of the history of the destroyed shtetl Trachimbrod, home to his grandfather prior to the Holocaust, is populated with such supernatural occurrences as the prophetic dreams of Trachimbrod’s inhabitants; the posthumous political interventions staged by the philosopher Pinchas T.; the impossibly comprehensive “Book of Antecedents” in

15 It is this sense in which the work of writers like Roth, for example – frequently concerned, particularly in his earlier writings, with the response to such European Jewish precursors as Kafka and Anne Frank – might be considered postmemorial. See, for example, Philip Roth, “‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka,” in Reading Myself and Others (New York: Vintage 2001): 281–302. 16 See Jenni Adams, Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 55. 17 This term is Hirsch’s; see “Past Lives,” 666.

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which every detail of the Trachimbroders’ lives is recorded; and the light produced during copulation, which can be seen from space years later during the moon landing.18 Not only does the magic realist register of the reconstruction highlight the impossibility of the forms of knowledge that comprise it, but the precise nature of the magical events further underscores the element of fantasy surrounding the enduring accessibility of ancestral experience.19 Similarly, Skibell’s novel revisits the home of his Polish great-grandfather Chaim Skibelski, but only via a magic realist conceit in which the deceased ancestor must first drag himself from a mass grave. Both writers answer the “ambivalent longing”20 to remember, but use magic realism to qualify the resulting constructions. Nevertheless, magic realism is not the only means by which such ethical negotiations can occur. To return to another of the keywords of this inquiry, intertextuality, where self-consciously employed, possesses comparable potential, a fact that is perhaps unsurprising when we consider that it is precisely the intertextual nature of postmemory that needs acknowledgement. As an example, one might cite Bernice Eisenstein’s I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors, a secondgeneration postmemory text which attempts to draw together, supplement, and reflect upon, the traces of Eisenstein’s family’s history during the war. Eisenstein clearly feels it important to highlight the inevitable gap between her reconstructions of her parents’ experience, and the experience itself (for example, a sketch of their arrival in Canada is prefaced by the caption: “This is not what my parents looked like when they originally arrived in Canada”21). This divided project of imaginatively reconstructing while highlighting the necessary gulf between one’s imaginative reconstructions and a first-generation reality is continued through the text’s intertextuality, at both a narrative and a visual level, with illustrations drawing on the style of artists including Van Gogh and Chagall to emphasise the extent to which existing representations mediate the reimaginings the work performs.22 Eisenstein’s self-conscious references to the work of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Paul Celan and others23 also highlights the encompassing by intertextuality in postmemory constructions of broader literary and cultural as well as immediately familial sources, offering useful context to the functioning of figures like Schulz in postmemorial writing.

18 19 20 21 22 23

Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated (London: Penguin, 2003): 272–273, 50, 196, 99. For a further discussion of some of these issues, see Adams, Magic Realism, 33–35, 65. Hirsch, “Past Lives,” 684. Bernice Eisenstein, I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (London: Picador, 2006): 74. See, for example, Eisenstein, Child, 90, 39. See, for example, Eisenstein, Child, 7, 88.

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Schulz as Talisman From this perspective, then, magic realism and self-conscious intertextuality are devices which assume a comparable ethical function in postmemory discourse, highlighting the composite, provisional, and internally heterogeneous nature of postmemory. In the context of a proliferation of representations which draw on the work of Schulz, however, the question remains: wherein, beyond the ethical potential of magic realism and intertextuality in themselves, resides his peculiar talismanic status in this cluster of postmemorial practices?24 One key aspect of Schulz’s status in this project is undoubtedly the striking degree to which his writing anticipates postmemorial themes. His stories demonstrate an overriding concern with the imaginative reconstruction of the father, with a tale like “Cockroaches” being a case in point. This narrative begins with a statement of the absence of the father, Jacob, but proceeds in the face of this ambiguous disappearance/death (and maternal silence regarding its circumstances) to pursue a number of attempted reconstructions. These occupy a magic realist register, in the suggestions that Father has metamorphosed into either a large stuffed condor or one of the cockroaches with whose infestation he had become obsessed. While the mother’s eventual statement that Jacob has in fact not died but obtained “a job as a commercial traveller”25 brings these speculations down to earth, the vivid descriptions of the Kafkaesque metamorphosis (“He lay on the floor naked, stained with the black totem spots, the lines of his ribs heavily outlined, the fantastic structure of his anatomy visible”26) remain powerfully present as a response to paternal loss. These reconstructions echo the notion of postmemory as a construction arising, often in the absence of traces or inability of family members to communicate, to bridge an experiential and memorial gap, and also with the idea of magic realism as a key strategy in this endeavour. Coupled with the nostalgic-elegiac register of Schulz’s writings (as Schwarz notes, “The Street of Crocodiles is an elegy for a way of life that has disappeared”27), Schulz’s already-postmemorial stance goes some way to explaining his appeal for the writer seeking to mediate their response to the Holocaust via antecedent

24 It should be acknowledged that reimaginings of Schulz are diverse in their precise attitudes and aims; for example, texts like Cynthia Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm might more properly be said to be about the postmemorial relation instead of, or as well as, straightforwardly embodying this relation; nevertheless, it is hoped that this discussion of Schulz and Foer will bear wider relevance. 25 Schulz, “Cockroaches,” in SC, 78–81, 81. 26 Schulz, “Cockroaches,” 80–81. 27 Daniel R. Schwarz, Imagining the Holocaust (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1999): 318.

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writers. Schulz in this sense not only offers a model for postmemory but combines the status of postmemory’s agent with that of its object (the postmemorial other), embodying the proximity between these positions wished-for on the part of the post-Holocaust post-rememberer. This postmemorial aspect to Schulz’s writing is, indeed, further drawn out in some of the reworkings of The Street of Crocodiles in Foer’s text. For example, Tree of Codes’s version of “August” contains some interesting echoes of the postmemorial project in its treatment of Joseph’s Aunt Agatha. The aunt, whose complaints in Schulz proliferate, “ready to multiply, to scatter”, in response to such “whiff[s] of masculinity” as tobacco smoke,28 becomes a vulnerable figure in Foer’s text: “her29 / boundaries / held only / loosely / , / ready to / scatter / as if / smoke” (TC, 17). Following this loaded image, the story goes on to assume the position of an intergenerational attempt to connect to this figure: My eyes followed / the tortures / , / the breath / left in the air. / my eyes / were / naked / . I stood / looking at those / distant, unseeing eyes, / all / of a sudden / the air / reached me / . / that ghost of a smile / fell away / and / receded / and / finally faded / . (TC, 20–21)

The selections and combinations made from Schulz’s text (which here concerns the display of pornographic pictures by Joseph’s cousin) seem implicitly to recast the story within a postmemorial perspective, the narrator attempting to trace the vestiges of past suffering (“the breath / left in the air”); there is a sense of engagement with photographic traces in the phrase “I stood / looking at those / distant, unseeing eyes”, a moment of potential connection, and a culminating sense of irrecoverability. Likewise, in his version of “Night of the Great Season,” among the words retained by Foer are those which articulate a quasi-postmemorial desire to commemorate the antecedent: “when writing / these tales / about my father / , / I / surrender to the secret hope that they will / merge / into the / rustle of / pages [of the calendar] and become absorbed there” (TC, 110). In this case, the original is not substantially altered; Foer draws out and intensifies Joseph’s postmemorial desire to solidify his father’s presence within the historical/calendrical record, highlighting the degree to which Schulz’s text already contains implicitly postmemorial orientations, one potential reason for later appropriations of these writings in postmemory discourse. 28 Schulz, “August,” in SC, 15–22, 20. 29 In qualification of this point, it should be noted that this is, in Foer’s text, an unnamed “her”: perhaps, in dialogue with Schulz’s tale, the aunt, perhaps “mother” (who is the only female character named in this version of the tale), or perhaps a more abstract other.

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Schulz and the Semiotic Nevertheless, we can go further still in speculating as to Schulz’s postmemorial appeal. Schulz’s evocations of anteriority extend beyond the immediate context of the attempt to reconstruct the father and the Drohobycz of Joseph’s childhood. The stories also offer inklings of another kind of previousness, a space prior to the imposition of the symbolic order and its accompanying demarcations, categorizations, and rules. According to Julia Kristeva, the pre-verbal semiotic, a stage from which the infant passes upon the occurrence of the thetic break precipitated by the mirror stage (and the subsequent attainment of subjectivity within the symbolic order) nevertheless remains capable of reappearing within language via such extra-verbal attributes as intonation and rhythm: Indifferent to language, enigmatic and feminine, this space underlying the written is rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation; it is musical, anterior to judgement, but restrained by a single guarantee: syntax.30

While restrained and made legible by syntax, Kristeva traces a “space underlying the written” that is musical, rhythmic, and ultimately able to make its presence felt in poetic expression; it at once exists as symbolization’s precondition and its relativizing, unseating other. In attempting to trace the transgressive, palimpsestic presence of the semiotic and its associated preoedipal drives in Schulz’s work, we might consider a passage like the following, taken from the story “The Comet”: [T]he enormous pathos of all these scenes proved that we had removed the bottom of the eternal barrel of memories, of an ultra-barrel of myth, and had broken into a prehuman night of untamed elements, of incoherent anamnesis, and could not hold back the swelling flood. Ah, these nights filled with stars shimmering like fishscales! Ah, these banks of mouths incessantly swallowing in small gulps, in hungry draught, the swelling undrunk streams of those dark rain-drenched nights! In what fatal nets, in what miserable trammels did those multiplicated generations end?31

In this passage, the notion of the “swelling flood” is made tangible in the rising rhythm of the multiply-claused, anaphoric sentences, the sensuous nature of the sound-patterning (as in the sibilant “stars shimmering like fishscales,” in Celina Wieniewska’s translation), and in the emphatic, monosyllabic, unpunctuated

30 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia UP, 1984): 29. 31 Schulz, “The Comet,” in SC, 97–111, 108.

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incantation of “those dark rain-drenched nights.” This sense of a space beneath the structures and codifications of the symbolic order is echoed in the passage’s concern with something prior to the “miserable trammels” of the conventional existence to which Drohobycz returns after the mythical era described: “the prehuman night of untamed elements,” an image which might apply equally well to the stage of existence in the semiotic. Schulz’s writing therefore arguably also evokes an anteriority of a more psychoanalytic kind. The semiotic aspects of Schulz’s work are closely connected to his use of fantasy, as Jerzy Ficowski’s observations intimate: Schulz creates his own mythology and returns to his childhood, the “genial epoch” that mythicizes reality and recognizes no boundaries between the innermost psyche and the outer world, between dreams and reality, between intellectual and sensual processes.32

Ficowski’s remarks, which bring together the semiotic’s sensual generosity and fantasy’s inclusive gaze, recall the established critical tendency to read irruptions of the magic real in terms of the subversion of the adult rationalist order by aspects of a childlike perception, something which might be linked to the relativisation of the symbolic by the semiotic. Hegerfeldt states, for example, that “the mental features attributed to children specifically correspond to the techniques of magic realist fiction,”33 with these features including a lack of distinction between reality and fantasy34 and a propensity to animistic beliefs, which she summarizes thus: “failing to completely distinguish between itself and its surroundings, the child endows the inanimate world with a will and a purpose.”35 While Hegerfeldt cites studies disputing a number of these assumptions, their firm association with popular conceptions of childhood makes them powerful evocations of this pre-adult (and, in the sense of continuity between self and world, perhaps preoedipal) mode of experience. Schulz’s magic realism can be viewed in precisely this light. To offer just a few examples, we can trace this posited child perspective in the animism of “Tailors’ Dummies” (“In apartments of that kind, wallpapers […] are susceptible to distant, dangerous dreams”36), and the dreamlike disruptions in causality and logic in “Cinnamon Shops”:

32 Jerzy Ficowski, “Introduction,” in The Collected Works of Bruno Schulz, ed. Jerzy Ficowski (London: Picador, 1998): 3–7, 4. 33 Hegerfeldt, Lies, 148. 34 Hegerfeldt, Lies, 146 35 Hegerfeldt, Lies, 150. 36 Schulz, “Tailors’ Dummies,” in SC, 34–48, 45.

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I got out of the cab. The horse was panting, hanging its head. I hugged its head to my breast and saw that there were tears in its large eyes. I noticed a round black wound on its belly. “Why did you not tell me?” I whispered, crying. “My dearest, I did it for you,” the horse said and became very small, like a wooden toy.37

If such deviations from realism, logic, continuity and causality are to be understood in terms not merely of the oneiric but of the child’s perspective specifically, Schulz’s work becomes an access point to a sense of anteriority not only in its glimpses into the semiotic, but also (and relatedly, in terms of the relativisation of systems of structure and categorisation) in the close connections between its magic realism and the posited child perspective. In Kristeva’s terms, his writing recalls a state prior to the thetic break – the entry into the symbolic order – which, it might be speculated, is able, in postmemorial reimaginings of Schulz, to stand in for another kind of break: that which Hirsch terms “the radical break of unknowable and incomprehensible persecution.”38

Intertextuality and the Semiotic Schulz’s talismanic appeal has been traced in terms of his own status as an agent of postmemory, as well as the other senses in which his writing recalls an irrecoverable “before.” It is noteworthy that intertextuality in itself might be viewed in this context as an opening of the symbolic order to (or a revelation of its constant contingency upon) that which resists and stands outside codification. Kristeva employs the term (and her alternative, “transposition”) to refer to a property of all language, to “the ‘literary Word’ as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings.”39 In more concrete terms, she asserts: “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.”40 Graham Allen summarizes the subversive potential of intertextuality understood thus: “intertextuality encompasses that aspect of literary and other kinds of texts which struggles against and subverts reason, the belief in unity of meaning or of the human subject, and which is therefore subversive to all ideas of the logical

37 Schulz, “Cinnamon Shops,” 67. 38 Hirsch, “Past Lives,” 662. 39 Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” trans. Alice Jardine, Thomas Gora and Leon S. Roudiez, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986): 34–61, 36 [Kristeva’s emphasis]. 40 Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” 37.

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and the unquestionable.”41 In other words, intertextuality challenges notions of stability and unity in both textuality and subjectivity; the symbolic order and the subject constituted in and through it are destabilized by a consciousness of the multiple discourses which comprise it, relativizing the authority and totalizing force of the sign systems deployed and recalling the “semiotic polyvalence” that precedes them.42 While, as noted above, intertextuality for Kristeva is a property of all language, it is nevertheless clear that some texts are more intertextual than others, as evident in the particular attention Kristeva pays to the output of the literary Modernists. In this context, it is arguable that self-conscious intertextuality takes on a heightened significance in foregrounding the intertextual status of writing per se and the concomitant forms of subversion Kristeva traces. In this reckoning, self-conscious intertextuality alludes more insistently still to the semiotic before, a speculation that might further illuminate its significance within postmemory literature. Intertextual reference to Schulz’s work hence carries the potential for heightened, multilayered resonances of previousness; herein lies its compelling nature to a postmemorial project concerned with bridging temporal and experiential lacunae and positing in these scenarios seemingly unattainable possibilities of continuity, encounter, and interrelationship with the other. As a final theoretical move regarding intertextuality, and one to which I will return later, the intertextual presence of the precursor’s writing might be examined in terms of the Levinasian trace, as a “trace of the other” which does not offer a token of the (absent) other’s presence but a point through which their unassimilable otherness might manifest itself (as Levinas states, “the signifyingness of a trace consists in signifying without making appear […] Disclosure, which reinstates the world and leads back to the world and is proper to a sign or a signification, is done away with in this trace”43). The way in which the trace signifies as trace is not by revealing a content, but by instantiating (in a comparable way to the Levinasian face) an absolute sense of ethical obligation to the other, “disturb [ing] the order of the world”44 in its contestation of the primacy of subjectivity. To what extent might the intertextual presence of the other’s discourse be read in terms of the Levinasian trace? Self-conscious intertextuality, as discussed, contests the authority of the unified subject with multiple assertions of alterity,

41 Graham Allen, Intertextuality (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000): 45. 42 Kristeva, Revolution, 60. 43 Emmanuel Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” trans. Alphonso Lingis, revised by Simon Critchley and Adriaan T. Peperzak, in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996): 33–64, 61–62. 44 Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” 62.

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and also of subjectivity’s advent and precondition, recalling Levinasian considerations of the encounter with the other as a precondition for the coming-intobeing of (ethical) subjectivity as such. Such a reading is echoed in a number of critical accounts, with Michael Riffaterre, for instance, comparing an intertext to the imprint of a body: “the object of desire, reduced to an outline, is both represented and missing; it is literally visible in its very absence.”45 In this image, the intertextual allusion points towards the absent other not only of the original text, but arguably (in Riffaterre’s corporeal image) of its creator. Likewise, John Frow has described literary texts as “not structures of presence but traces and tracings of otherness.”46 If intertextuality can be linked to the trace of the other in this way – a question I will return to later – and hence to the project of facilitating ethical engagement with the absent other, then another potential reason for intertextual reference to Schulz in postmemory discourse might be identified.

Intertextuality and Magic Realism Having examined potential reasons for Schulz’s privileged position in intertextual postmemorial literature, it is now fitting to turn more directly to Tree of Codes. Given both the ethical potential of magic realism in postmemory discourse, and the fact that Schulz’s magic realism (in its connection to the child’s perspective and the semiotic) forms part of his significance as intertext, it is striking that Foer’s reworking of The Street of Crocodiles systematically excises the supernatural from the original. The remainder of this essay will investigate why this might be, attempting in the process to subject the ethical aspects of postmemory, intertextuality and magic realism to further scrutiny. In addressing the question of why Foer omits a magic realist register in his reworking of Schulz, it is important to delve further into the precise relationship between magic realism and intertextuality as conventionally theorized. Considerations of magic realism within its best-known (postcolonial) context habitually read it as a kind of intertextuality, combining ontological discourses from two markedly different sources: the Western rationalist tradition and the mythic worldview of specific indigenous societies. Amaryll Chanady notes, for example, that “Magic realism is often defined as the juxtaposition of two different rationalities – the 45 Michael Riffaterre, “Compulsory Reader Response: The Intertextual Drive,” in Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, eds. Michael Worton and Judith Still (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990): 56–78, 73. 46 John Frow, “Intertextuality and Ontology,” in Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, eds. Michael Worton and Judith Still (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990): 45–55, 45.

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Indian and the European – in a syncretic fictitious world-view based on the simultaneous existence of several entirely different cultures in Latin America.”47 The critical propensity to read magic realism in these terms is further highlighted by Brenda Cooper, who notes that “Magical realism has very often been seen as steeped in the beliefs, the point of view, of an indigenous, peasant class, like the Indians of South America or the Aborigines in Australia.”48 Such readings of magic realism as a combination of ontological discourses from the different cultures which comprise a postcolonial society point to a decidedly intertextual understanding of the mode. When transplanted from a postcolonial to a post-Holocaust context, however, this reading of magic realism (a reading I do not wholly assent to, but one which attains some validity when the supernatural vocabulary is associated with “the other” in a more fluid sense) becomes decidedly problematic. If magic realism is linked to the worldview of the marginalised other, in what ways does the mode signify when this other is a lost one, an irretrievably past-other rather than an other whose perspective forms part of the living heterogeneity of the present? Arguably, magic realism in this context (and read in this way) becomes an assertion of an illusory plenitude, an illusory heterogeneity. These issues offer a means of approaching Foer’s hesitation to retain the magic realism of his precursor: in the case of Schulz’s fantastic register, what is at stake is precisely the worldview of a lost other. While magic realism in postHolocaust literature more widely might allow the inaccessibility of the lost other and their experiences to be inscribed, in the case of a postmemorial other identified so closely with a mythic or supernatural worldview, the deployment of such techniques could only risk, in place of a self-problematizing reconstruction, the false restoration or recovery of the other’s voice. This possibility suggests a necessary qualification to existing accounts of magic realism and postmemory, where magic realist postmemorial writing involves the intertextual reconstruction of specific mythic worldviews associated with particular lost others.49 This essay has suggested, then, that one way of reading Foer’s eschewal of magic realism in Tree of Codes would be as a refusal of the possibility of restoring a dangerous sense of false plenitude. The final part of the essay will explore two

47 Amaryll Chanady, “The Origins and Development of Magic Realism in Latin American Fiction,” in Magic Realism and Canadian Literature: Essays and Stories, eds. Peter Hinchcliffe and Ed Jewinski (Waterloo, Ontario: U of Waterloo P, 1986): 49–60, 55. 48 Brenda Cooper, Magical Realism in West African Fiction (London: Routledge, 1998): 16. 49 A text like Grossman’s See Under: Love is interesting to consider from this perspective, although, as I have discussed elsewhere, this novel is in fact acutely sensitive to the ethical difficulties of postmemorial Holocaust representation; see Adams, Magic Realism, 50–81.

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further ethical issues raised by Foer’s text that may be helpful in investigating the ethical parameters of intertextual postmemorial literature: firstly, foreshadowing, and secondly, the potential appropriation of the trace of the other.

Foreshadowing Foreshadowing is a mode of writing in which the experience of the Holocaust’s victims prior to these events is framed in terms of their subsequent “fate.” In Foregone Conclusions, Michael Andre Bernstein argues powerfully against such retrospective rewritings: [E]very interpretation of the Shoah that is grounded in a sense of historical inevitability resonates with both implicit and often ideological implications, not so much about the world of the perpetrators of the genocide, or about those bystanders who did so little to halt the mass murder, but about the lives of the victims themselves.50

In other words, foreshadowings of the Holocaust in the presentation of preHolocaust Jewish experience risk implying that the victims’ “fate” was inevitable, that they themselves should have realised this and acted accordingly, and that consequently, they are responsible for their own victimhood. These implications, whose full articulation in narrative Bernstein refers to as “backshadowing,”51 are obviously objectionable, resulting in a blame-the-victim ideology that is both offensive and misleading. The first part of this section will ask to what extent Foer’s Tree of Codes participates in these questionable discursive moves, and what wider conclusions might be drawn regarding the intertextual presence of pre-Holocaust Jewish writers in postmemorial texts. At first glance, it appears that Foer does indeed risk a foreshadowing approach through the way in which his recasting of Schulz’s stories seems implicitly to draw out resonances of the Holocaust. In the story “August,” the sense of unrestrained fertility in Schulz’s original becomes a far more abstract sense of fragility and impending disintegration (“An enormous / last / day / of / life” [TC, 11]). More concretely, aspects of mass violence in “The Night of the Great Season” (which describes an overwhelming influx of customers to Father’s shop)

50 Michael Andre Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley and London: U of California P, 1994): 13. 51 Bernstein defines backshadowing as “a kind of retroactive foreshadowing in which the shared knowledge of the outcome of a series of events by narrator and listener is used to judge the participants of those events as though they too should have known what was to come,” Foregone Conclusions, 16 [Bernstein’s emphasis].

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are further drawn out; descriptions of the gossiping crowd (“It seemed as if a mob of dry poppy-heads, scattering their seeds – rattleheads – was on the march”52) become blunter, devoid of their endearing aspects (“a mob / on the march” [TC, 114]). Without the emphasis on the sale of cloth, the description by Foer’s narrator of his helpless encirclement by the feverish mob (“i / saw that resistance would be useless” [TC, 116–117]), similarly, invites a connection to mob-perpetrated historical violence. Within the context of these reworkings, details such as the discussion of the relationship between humans and mannequins in “Tailors’ Dummies” take on new meaning. Father’s assertion of the life of all matter and subsequent conclusions about the morality of all (even apparently violent) transformations of life (“Homicide is not a sin. It is sometimes a necessary violence on resistant and ossified forms of existence”53), reiterated in Foer’s story’s assertion that “reducing life / is not a sin” (TC, 49), assumes an ironic echo of Nazism’s justificatory rhetoric. It does not need to be added that the “dummies” themselves, when placed in an implicitly Holocaust context, offer powerful echoes of dehumanizing Nazi language. Father’s eventual dwindling and disappearance is also recast in the stories in a way which draws on Holocaust imagery. In “Cockroaches,” the removal of magic realism makes Father’s demise if anything more sinister, and more inviting, in its abstractedness, of a Holocaust-inflected reading: “I once saw him / on the floor naked, / his ribs / visible through the skin / . / we gave Father up” (TC, 101). In “The Gale,” a fantastic description of a storm, Schulz has Joseph’s brother and the shop assistant, Theodore, leave the house in the gale to rescue Father, who is stranded at the shop: The door leading into the night was opened cautiously [as Theodore and Joseph’s brother leave]. […] Having swallowed them, the wind quietened down for a while. Adela and Mother again tried to light the fire in the kitchen range. All the matches went out […]. We stood behind the front door of the house and listened. In the lament of the gale one could hear all kinds of voices, questions, calls and cries. We imagined that we could hear Father, lost in the gale, calling for help, or else that it was my brother and Theodore chatting unconcernedly outside the door.54

In Foer’s version, this becomes: “The door leading into the night / opened cautiously. / All the matches went out / . / i / listened. I / could hear / questions / and / cries. / i / could hear Father / calling for help” (TC, 105). While the story

52 Schulz, “The Night of the Great Season,” in SC, 87–96, 90. 53 Schulz, “Tailors’ Dummies,” 39–40. 54 Schulz, “The Gale,” in SC, 82–86, 84–85.

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later returns to the topic of the wind, in abstracting the scene from its original context, the passage arguably reframes it in a manner allusive to the Holocaust (the exit from the door becoming an unwanted entry, an interrogation overheard from a hiding place), or at least invites the post-Holocaust reader to supply this kind of context to the decontextualised “questions / and / cries.” To offer such a reading is uncomfortable, as it seems to make one complicit with the ethically-problematic project of foreshadowing, yet Foer’s reworking of the tales does appear calculated to provoke these contextualizations. Tree of Codes might hence be read as either exemplifying, or pointing to (and the distinction here is important) the way in which intertextual evocations of pre-Holocaust Jewish writers are frequently inflected by knowledge of the catastrophe. Such inflections are, indeed, present in a number of responses to Schulz’s work by post-Holocaust critics. Gillian Banner describes Schulz as an “elegiac prophet,”55 reading his stories as anticipations of future Jewish suffering (for instance, on Schulz’s description of plants in “Pan” she writes, “This depiction of a swelling mass may be seen as an extreme representation of the camp population”56). Daniel Schwarz, similarly, attributes to Schulz’s stories “a strange anticipatory intelligence,”57 and asks, among other things, whether the comet in Schulz’s story of that name can be read as “a possible metonymy for Hitler’s coming to power.”58 This mode of reading is also arguably evident elsewhere in the widespread treatment of Kafka and his writing in terms of events many years subsequent to his death.59 The extent to which Foer is complicit in this ethically-problematic mode of response to pre-Holocaust Jewish literature is debatable. Elsewhere, his work appears to consciously critique fore- and backshadowing, as in Everything Is Illuminated, when Brod (one of “Jonathan Safran Foer”’s posited ancestors) is able to anticipate her later rape by Sofiowka, but only through a magic realist device which enables her to see into the future,60 clearly signalling such anticipation as beyond the boundaries of available knowledge. Furthermore, the Trachim-

55 Gillian Banner, Holocaust Literature: Schulz, Levi, Spiegelman and the Memory of the Offence (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000): 41. Banner does highlight problems with this idea of prophecy (42–43), yet ultimately persists in reading Schulz’s stories as anticipations of the Holocaust. 56 Banner, Holocaust Literature, 51. 57 Schwarz, Imagining the Holocaust, 317. 58 Schwarz, Imagining the Holocaust, 328. 59 For a discussion of Kafka in relation to foreshadowing, see Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions, 17–21. 60 Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, 89.

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broders’ immobilising helplessness once the historical possibility of genocide does begin to loom is sensitively handled (“They waited to die, and we cannot blame them, because we would do the same”61), even as the temptation towards an opposing viewpoint is acknowledged (“And here it is becoming harder and harder not to yell: GO AWAY! RUN WHILE YOU CAN, FOOLS! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!”62). In the context of the resistance to foreshadowing elsewhere in Foer’s writing, the drawing-out of the Holocaust resonances in Tree of Codes might be considered something other than a straightforward susceptibility to this pitfall: as a comment upon both the inevitability of reading writers like Schulz in the knowledge, and retrospectively-applied context, of the Holocaust, and a simultaneous statement – if we consider the wounded nature of the text in Tree of Codes – that to do so is also to inflict a kind of violence upon the precursor.

Intertextuality and Ethics This sense of simultaneous inevitability and problematization in turn points up wider issues regarding the presence of intertextual reference to the work of preHolocaust Jewish writers in postmemory literature. While it would be possible, as discussed above, to view the interpolated discourse of the other as a kind of trace, a locus for the manifestation of the absent other’s unassimilable alterity, these suggestions of inevitable foreshadowing highlight the possibility that in such constructions, the other’s word will always be subjected to an integration within the concerns, perspectives and temporal viewpoints of the later-generational self. To what extent, therefore, is a sense of the absent other’s unassimilable alterity maintained; to what extent do elements of assimilation, integration and instrumentalization inevitably surround their treatment when their discourse is drawnon in later post-Holocaust writing? Coupled with the issues of foreshadowing his work foregrounds, Foer’s name on the book as author of Tree of Codes might be read as an assertion of the latter possibility. These issues of appropriation are taken up in other intertextual post-Holocaust writings, most notably those of Roth and Ozick. In The Ghost Writer, Nathan’s reflections on the possibility of Anne Frank’s survival imply that uses of her work in post-Holocaust culture have become detached from a concern with Anne herself and serve functions, however admirable in their intentions, remote

61 Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, 262. 62 Foer, Everything Is illuminated, 269.

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from any attempt merely to commemorate or mark her absence: “[D]ead she had something more to offer than amusement for ages 10-15; dead she had written, without meaning to or trying to, a book with the force of a masterpiece to make people finally see.”63 In such a situation, Anne’s life (and the ongoing life that Nathan postulates) becomes shockingly irrelevant in the context of the uses to which her posthumously-circulated discourse has been put.64 As Emily Miller Budick notes, this idea of an appropriation that serves different ends to the apparent commemoration and rescue of discourse often used to justify it is further foregrounded by Olga at the end of The Prague Orgy: So that’s what you get out of it! That’s your idealism! The marvellous Zuckerman brings from behind the Iron Curtain two hundred unpublished Yiddish stories written by the victim of a Nazi bullet. You will be a hero to the Jews and to literature and to all of the Free World.65

Finally, in Ozick’s Messiah of Stockholm, we might also read an attempt to question the idolatry of the “significant Holocaust dead,”66 in addition to the potentially Messianic stance of the agent of intertextual Holocaust postmemory. Ozick’s protagonist, Lars Andemening, imagines himself to be Schulz’s son, and becomes embroiled in a plot to pass off what seems to be a forgery of Schulz’s lost novel, The Messiah, as the recovered original. Ozick’s description of The Messiah involves the population of Drohobycz by idols, increasingly fascistic in their interrelation (“The more diffident among them […] undertook to adore the more aggressive”; “The taller and stronger idols began seizing the smaller and lesser idols and casting them into the flames”67). The presentation of this vision of idolatry as the ultimate object of Lars’s quest for traces of Schulz has led critics to comment on the novel’s status as a warning against idolatry as regards the orientation of post-Holocaust culture to

63 Roth, The Ghost Writer, 145–146. 64 For a discussion of these issues, see Alexis Kate Wilson, “The Ghosts of Zuckerman’s Past: The Zuckerman Bound Series,” in Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author, ed. Derek Parker Royal (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005): 103–117, 106. 65 Roth, The Prague Orgy, 75. This reflects interestingly on Roth’s own work as general editor of Penguin’s “Writers from the Other Europe” series. For Emily Miller Budick’s discussion of this passage, see “Guilt, Mourning, Idol Worship, and Golem Writing: The Symptoms of a Jewish Literary Canon,” in Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon, eds. Juston Cammy, Dara Horn, Alyssa Quint and Rachel Rubinstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2008): 517–531, 525. 66 Sanford Pinsker, “Jewish-American Literature’s Lost-and-Found Department: How Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick Reimagine Their Significant Dead,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 35.2 (1989): 223–235. 67 Ozick, The Messiah of Stockholm, 108, 109.

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such privileged precursors as Schulz; Budick, for example, states that “Ozick’s rendition of Schulz’s Messiah has a lot in common with her own novel entitled The Messiah, especially as pertains to idols, which come, through her own novel, to include the idolized Schulz himself.”68 The implication here is that the postmemorial intertextual relation risks a veneration of the precursor which stands counter to the ethical relation and, indeed, neglects the unassimilability of the absent other him/herself. Given that, as Miriam Sivan has observed, Lars himself can be read in the novel as a kind of false Messiah (as self-appointed son-ofSchulz),69 one might posit the risk of a potentially Messianic posture amid the intertextual postmemorial relation, which would seek to invest oneself with the aura of an inappropriately venerated other, whose actual alterity and fragile humanity is here obscured – in short, with a kind of narcissistic investment in the precursor.

Conclusions The issue of whether or not intertextual reference to literary precursors permits an ethical relationship to these absent others or merely instrumentalizes them to the purposes of later writers is thus an open and complex one. Much arguably depends on the precise nature of the unassimilablity the trace possesses, and the issue of whether this unassimilability remains regardless of a writer’s ostensible attempts to assimilate the perspective of the precursor to specific ends. For Levinas, the encounter with the other results in a sense of ethical obligation that may not be acted upon but nevertheless underlies even unethical responses to its injunctions,70 and the intertextual trace might be similarly read as a point at which alterity inescapably manifests itself, whether recognized or not; nevertheless, outside of this Levinasian framework, the question of appropriation remains pressing. To return to Foer’s Tree of Codes, however, I would like to conclude by suggesting another way of reading this relationship. If we consider Schulz’s magic realist register as, or in terms of, the trace, we might look for the trace in Foer’s text not in the words of Schulz that are retained, but in those words – including the magic realist aspects of the text, with all the associations of alterity

68 Budick, “Guilt, Mourning,” 524. 69 Miriam Sivan, “Cynthia Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm,” in Literary Canons and Religious Identity, eds. Bart Philipsen and Erik Borgman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004): 163–178, 167. 70 For a useful discussion of this, see Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004): 270–271.

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they carry – that are absent: the absent presence of the very visceral cut-outs in Foer’s rewriting. The trace might hence be productively considered in this context as precisely the shape of an absence, and the remaining text as a means of framing that absence, perhaps recalling Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s suggestion that “measuring silences”71 may be one of the only means of seeking out the trace of the silenced subaltern other. Such a reconsideration of intertextuality in Tree of Codes indicates that magic realist representation may be as ethically significant in its absence – or, perhaps, in its absent presence – than in its very incidence.

71 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999): 284.

Vered Weiss

Generic Hybridity, or Mediating Modes of Writing: Agnon’s Magical Realistic and Gothic National Narration S. Y. Agnon (1888–1970), winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, is well known in Israel and beyond as the national author of the early Israeli nation. His work has been perceived as magical realist as well as Gothic and neo-Gothic. This paper explores a dual generic reading of Agnon’s work as both Gothic and magical realist. Specifically, the analysis focuses on two of his stories, “Avi Hashor” [“The Ox’s Father”] (1945), which has been mostly neglected by critics, and “Tehila” (1950), which has been subjected to numerous readings from various perspectives, yet not in comparison to the earlier text under consideration in this paper. The following examination of the location of these narrative moments in both generic rubrics allows for a more productive exploration of personal and national identities in these texts. The possibility of the movement from the imperialistically engaged Gothic into (post-)colonial magical realism and back again reflects the unsettled essence of the Jewish-Israeli identity. The manifestation of this generic hybridity of the Gothic and magical realism in Agnon’s work echoes the tensions within JewishIsraeli identity, which attempts to (re)construct itself upon the land of PalestineIsrael, within the new Israeli nation-state. S. Y. Agnon’s work has been perceived as magical realist,1 as well as Gothic and neo-Gothic.2 The Gothic reflects the fears of the colonizer3 and magical realism has been interpreted as a mode of writing that allows the former colonized to

1 Tamara Kaye Sellman, “Jewish Magical Realism: Writing to Tell the Tale,” in Margin: Exploring Modern Magical Realism, revised December 16, 2005, http://www.angelfire.com/wa2/margin/ nonficSellmanJewishMR.html (accessed February 28, 2013). Sidra Ezrahi links Agnon’s work also to the fantastic and to magical realism in “Sentient Dogs, Liberated Rams, and Talking Asses: Agnon’s Biblical Zoo or Rereading ‘Tmol shilshom,’” AJS Review 28.1 (2004): 105–135, 130. 2 Arnold Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare: a Study in the Fiction of S. Y. Agnon (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1968): 37–38, 47, 57, 67, 261–262; Robert Alter, “Magic Realism in the Israeli Novel,” in The Boom in Contemporary Israeli Fiction, ed. Alan L. Mintz (Hanover, NH: Brandeis UP, 1997): 17–35, 17. 3 Andrew Smith and William Hughes, Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003): 1–2; Angela Wright, Gothic Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): 1–2.

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explore identities within the discourse of postcolonialism.4 Yet “identity” itself is no longer perceived as a rigid, fixed, or stable term. Rather, it has in recent research been formulated as fluid, embracing several, sometimes contradictory notions, ideas, and characteristics. For example, both Robert Young and Anthony Smith question the core of a stable Englishness or British identity.5 Furthermore, Young argues that “fixity of identity is only sought in situations of instability and disruption, of conflict and change.”6 Within postcolonial discourse the term “hybridity” refers to the effects of synthesis upon identities and cultures of the colonized.7 Moreover, hybridity, suggests Young, alters the different components that might have originally been its parts in a way that makes it hard to discern and differentiate them from one another.8 Following Young’s exploration of hybridity in the postcolonial context with regard to theory, culture, and race, in this article I will apply the concept in relation to literary genres, or modes of writing. Particularly interesting for this examination is Young’s analysis of linguistic hybridity. Based on Bakhtin’s conceptualization of “hybridity” as a philosophical notion that explains linguistic multilingual, or polyglot, instances, the kind of hybridity Young outlines “describes the condition of language’s fundamental ability to be simultaneously the same but different.”9 Young and Bakhtin analyze language itself, discerning how “hybridity delineates the way in which language, even within a single sentence, can be double-voiced,”10 and suggesting that “this double-voiced, hybridized discourse serves a purpose, whereby each voice can unmask the other.”11 In this article, I take a further step, suggesting that a similar process occurs in Agnon’s writing with regard to two modes of writing, the Gothic and magical realism. Since Agnon produced his work at the spatial and historical junction between the British imperialist hold of Palestine and the emerging

4 Stephen Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke UP, 1995): 407–426, 408; Theo D’haen, “Magical Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged Centers,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke UP, 1995): 191–208, 195. 5 Robert Young, Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995): 2–3, 17–19; Anthony Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999): 164. 6 Young, Desire, 4. 7 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982): 132; Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990): 4. 8 Young, Desire, 26. 9 Young, Desire, 20. 10 Young, Desire, 20. 11 Young, Desire, 21.

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Israeli nation-state, his work may be read as a hybrid between the Gothic and magical realism. The dual generic location of Agnon’s works reflects his engagement with the complexities of the emerging hybrid Jewish-Israeli national identity, which is the product of both aspects of colonialism, as the Jews in Mandate period Palestine were subject to British colonialism, and then became colonizers themselves, as they settled in Palestine-Israel. This paper explores a dual generic reading of Agnon in “Avi Hashor” [“The Ox’s Father”] (1945), and “Tehila” (1950), as both texts offer instances of what might be read as either magical realism or Gothic elements, and both texts explore issues of nationalism as part of a (post)modern narrative. The following examination of the location of these narrative moments in both generic rubrics allows for a more productive exploration of personal and national identities in these texts. Though the attribution of one generic rubric or another to a text or author might seem arbitrary at times, as these labels are devised by critics (as well as some writers, and booksellers) in order to organize and categorize the literary world, there is some merit in these generic categories. This is because they allow for a comparative evaluation of literature in relation to geo-historical locations as well as structural and thematic differences and similarities. Furthermore, the investigation of the works of one author in relation to different generic categories reveals certain tensions within the author’s work that might otherwise remain hidden. Before proceeding with the examination of Agnon’s texts as Gothic and magical realist, a working definition of both genres is required. The definition of both modes of writing is problematic, as both have been subjected to numerous, and sometimes conflicting interpretations.12 Since its emergence in the twentieth

12 In addition to the debate regarding the Gothic and magical realism, there are several interpretations of the term “genre.” The definition of the concept as it appears in textbooks might shed some light upon the term and the manner by which it is used. These sources suggest that it is “a French term for kind, a literary type or class. The major Classical genres were: epic, tragedy, lyric, comedy and satire, to which would now be added novel and short story” (J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory [London: Penguin, 1999]: 342). Another definition suggests that genre, which is initially “a kind or type of literature” (Martin Gray, A Dictionary of Literary Terms [Beirut and Harlow: Longman York Press, 1992]: 127), can also be perceived as one of three major categories: poetry, drama, and the novel, which are then subdivided into: lyric, narrative verse, tragedy, comedy, short story, autobiography, etc. (Gray, Dictionary of Literary Terms, 127). While “from the Renaissance till well into the eighteenthcentury the genres were carefully distinguished, and writers were expected to follow the rules prescribed by them” (Cuddon, Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 342), modern literature permits and even embraces intermingled and hybrid genres as a reflection of

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century, magical realism has been established in critical thought as a “kind of fiction,”13 or a “‘label’ for some forms of fiction.”14 Over the years, it has been subject to numerous interpretations and reconfigurations. While Wendy B. Faris argues that “magic realism combines realism and the fantastic in such a way that magical elements grow organically out of the reality portrayed,”15 Stephen Slemon asserts that the term is an oxymoron, “a binary opposition between the representational code of realism and that, roughly, of fantasy.”16 The very basic definition of the term, as a combination of, or tension between two conflicting realms, neither of which dominates the other, renders it both alluring and challenging. Also, it bears an affinity to an essential aspect of the Gothic as integrating contradictory notions.17 As Slemon notes: In none of its applications to literature has the concept of magic realism ever successfully differentiated between itself and neighboring genres such as fabulation, metafiction, the baroque, the fantastic, the uncanny, or the marvellous, and consequently it is not surprising that some critics have chosen to abandon the term altogether.18

While acknowledging the problem of its definition as a genre, Slemon locates the magical realist mode of writing within postcolonial narrative.19 Furthermore, Slemon argues that the established systems of generic classification are examples

the ever-changing and (re)constructed (post)modern identity. While it appears that the rigid definition of “genre” denies both the Gothic and magical realism the title, both are “kinds of writing” and therefore can be referred to either as “modes of writing,” or “genres.” The various literary techniques these modes of writing utilize, as well as recurring themes and motifs establish them as distinguishable modes or kinds of writing, which allots them a place alongside other genres. Both the Gothic and magical realism are referred to as “genre” by scholars such as Stephen Slemon, and Chris Baldick, and the terms “genre” and “mode of writing” will be used interchangeably in this paper. 13 Cuddon, Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 448. 14 Cuddon, Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 448. 15 Wendy B. Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke UP, 1995): 163–190, 163. 16 Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” 409. 17 The affinity between both genres and the Freudian uncanny has variously been noted, see Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth Century Writing (New York: Oxford UP, 1987); Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse”; Lucie Armitt, “The Magical Realism of the Contemporary Gothic,” in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford, MA: Blackwell, 2001). 18 Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” 407. 19 Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” 408.

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of centralized totalizing systems, because they have been constructed primarily through readings of European or American provenance.20 Slemon suggests that the use of the concept “magic realism” “can itself signify resistance to central assimilation by more stable generic systems and more monumental theories of literary practice.”21 In addition, Slemon suggests that [t]he incompatibility of magic realism with the more established genre systems becomes itself interesting, itself a focus for critical attention, when one considers the fact that it seems, in a literary context, to be most obviously operative in cultures situated at the fringes of mainstream literary traditions.22

Magical realism, according to Slemon, is first and foremost a nationalistically subversive genre. Continuing Slemon’s line of argument, Theo D’haen contends that magic realism “reveals itself as a ruse to invade and take over dominant discourse(s).”23 As such it is a genre that offers an avenue for authors from the cultural fringes to enter Western literature without adopting hegemonic perspectives. This aspect of magical realism is a subliminal, though potent, presence in the Agnon texts examined in this article. For the purpose of this analysis, the interpretation of magical realism as a fundamentally decentralizing concept will be key. Additionally, it will rely upon Rawdon Wilson’s reflections on the spatial elements in magical realism. Wilson argues that “literary space, in being conceptual, cannot be measured, but it can be experienced,”24 and therefore “space is invariably present in literature though never precisely so.”25 Space, he argues, “is a rudimentary fictional world.”26 Accordingly, as Wilson suggests, the term magical realism “can be, and indeed is, used to describe virtually any literary text in which binary oppositions, or antinomies, can be discovered.”27 Wilson questions the imprecise use of the term as historical-geographical criterion that obscures its textual implications.28 Likewise, Jeanne Delbaere-Grant challenges the historical and geographical specificity of magical realism. In addition, while acknowledging Slemon’s “indisputable 20 Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” 408. 21 Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” 409. 22 Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” 409. 23 D’haen, “Magical Realism and Postmodernism,” 195; emphasis in the original. 24 Rawdon Wilson, “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space: Magical Realism,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke UP, 1995): 209–233, 215; emphasis in the original. 25 Wilson, “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space,” 215–216. 26 Wilson, “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space,” 216. 27 Wilson, “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space,” 216. 28 Wilson, “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space,” 216.

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merit of breaking new ground and encouraging a comparative analysis across postcolonial cultures,”29 Delbaere-Grant claims that “magical realism is not exclusively a postcolonial phenomenon, but a much older one.”30 Hence definitions of the genre should be limited neither to one particular area nor period. Furthermore, a fundamental aspect of magical realism is its use of the setting in order to explore and reflect individual questions as well as social and political issues. The particular importance of the setting is noted in Wilson’s discussion of magical realism, which suggests that it requires “a faculty of boundary-skipping between worlds.”31 The “irreducibly hybrid nature of experience” in magical realism allows for diverse spaces and “different geometries [to] superimpose themselves upon one another.”32 The setting in magical realism facilitates, and even invites, subversion of spatial assumptions. Delbaere-Grant notes the connection between characters and the landscape in magical realism, specifically in relation to myths and superstitions.33 Magical realism utilizes the setting in order to explore and undermine the readers’ grasp of reality. As in magical realism, the setting is crucial for the Gothic: “the buildings are as important as the protagonists”34 because we construct our sense of self through the use of metaphorical settings.35 Also, like magical realism, the Gothic has always been an unruly concept, and there have been many attempts to define it. Primarily, the Gothic novel or fiction is “a type of romance.”36 Based upon its initial meaning of that which is opposed to the Roman or Classical, the Gothic is the rejection of the norms of the prevailing social order. The Visigoths were a Germanic tribe that was to some extent responsible for the downfall of the Roman Empire, and their name came to connote an antonym to Roman, with the implication of anticlassical.37 The term Gothic, relating to genre, was transferred from

29 Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” 249. 30 Jeanne Delbaere-Grant, “Psychic Realism, Mythic Realism, Grotesque Realism: Variations on Magic Realism in Contemporary Literature in English,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke UP, 1995): 191–209, 249. 31 Wilson, “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space,” 210. 32 Wilson, “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space,” 210. 33 Delbaere-Grant, “Psychic Realism,” 252. 34 Wright, Gothic Fiction, 36. 35 Lacan argues that the formation of the “self” in relation to the Other in dreams is conducted within spatial symbolism, such as the fortress, lofty remote castle, and marshes, see Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I” in The Symbolic Order: Ecrits, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1966): 6. 36 Cuddon, Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 355. 37 Wright, Gothic Fiction, 1.

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architecture to political and literary discourses, and was initially attributed as a pejorative term to politics and novels that appeared to subvert in some manner the prevailing social order and its norms.38 During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel gained shape in England as the new canonical literary form, and the Gothic novel proliferated.39 Due to the contempt it elicited in the academic and literary circles of the time, in contemporary British politics the Gothic was used to express scorn and repulsion.40 The two discourses, the political and literary, reinforced the perception of the Gothic as unsettling and harmful. The Gothic suggested an aesthetic representation of political turmoil that was tied to the French Revolution (as well as to modern changes such as the industrial and mass-print revolutions), and reflected fear of change. Maggie Kilgour connects the Gothic directly with the French Revolution, as well as internal political issues and social concerns.41 Furthermore, the Gothic has been linked with the colonial enterprise and its critique. For example, the two quintessential Gothic novels, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), reflect social and racial anxieties as well as fears from the encounter with the Other that was colonized.42 This perception of the Gothic has been rooted in contemporary literary analysis, as is evident from M. H. Abrams’s textbook, which asserts that much of the eighteenth-century and long Victorian era’s writing dealt with or reflected the social, economic, religious and intellectual concerns of the Victorian era.43 The rise of the novel, and more specifically the rise of the Gothic novel, was the literary response to contemporary socio-political changes. Yet, while David Punter asserts that the Gothic is, indeed, political,44 Elizabeth Napier claims that it is not essentially about politics, but is a conglomeration

38 Wright, Gothic Fiction, 1–2. 39 Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (London and New York: Routledge, 1995): 66, 73; Wright, Gothic Fiction, 1–2. 40 Mary Shelley: Frankenstein. A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism, ed. Berthold SchoeneHarwood (London: Icon Books, 2000): 13–29. 41 Kilgour, Rise of the Gothic Novel, 73. 42 Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow; Smith and Hughes, Empire and the Gothic, 1–4; John Bugg, “‘Master of their language’: Education and Exile in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Huntington Library Quarterly 68.4 (2005): 655–666, 665; Adriana Craciun, “Writing the Disaster: Franklin and Frankenstein,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 65.4 (2011): 433–480, 470; Joseph Valente, “Double Born: Bram Stoker and the Metrocolonial Gothic,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 46.3 (2000): 632– 45, 632–634. 43 M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, eighth ed. (Boston: Thompson, 2005): 117–118. 44 David Punter, The Literature of Terror a History of Gothic Fictions From 1765 to the Present Day, second ed. (London: Longman, 1996): 14.

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of frightening elements that result in a genre of imbalance.45 The Gothic is considered by some a category of prose fiction that flourished through the early nineteenth century in which “the locale was often a gloomy castle furnished with dungeons, subterranean passages, and sliding panels”;46 however, as Abrams notes, many of the novels are now read “as period pieces, but the best opened up to fiction the realm of the irrational and of the perverse impulses and nightmarish terrors that lie beneath the orderly surface of the civilized mind.”47 The Gothic itself, like many of its characters, is torn between conflicting ideas; and it disturbs and unsettles preconceived notions. Nevertheless, Chris Baldick cautions that “under the old Freudian dispensation, Gothic fiction could readily and often simply enough be diagnosed as an instance of the ‘return of the repressed.’”48 Baldick rejects criticism that suggests that the virtue of any given [Gothic] novel or poem, and the only quality that makes it valuable or even interesting, is invariably the degree to which it can be made, by whatever ruse of contemporary unreason, to appear “subversive” or “transgressive.”49

Nonetheless, Baldick acknowledges that these subversive elements are a part of the Gothic. This mode of writing may therefore be defined as “a language of panic, of unreasoning anxiety, blind revulsion, and distancing sensationalism, as well as a particular ‘literature of terror.’”50 Fundamentally, the Gothic is a platform that explores individual and social concerns, particularly through the use of setting, in order to question the formation of modern religious and national identities. The comparison between the Gothic and magical realism reveals that both share two fundamental characteristics: both are inherently political and reflect social critique, and both use the settings in order to marshal these subversive perspectives. The supernatural or unnatural elements have an opposite parallel function. As the supernatural appears to threaten social norms or social structure, in the Gothic it is perceived as malign or threatening, while in magical realism it appears to be benign and constructive. The links between the Gothic and magical

45 Elizabeth R. Napier, The Failure of Gothic: Problems of Disjunction in an Eighteenth-Century Literary Form (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford UP, 1987): 5. 46 Abrams, Glossary of Literary Terms, 117. 47 Abrams, Glossary of Literary Terms, 117–118. 48 Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow, 225. 49 Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow, 225. 50 Howard LeRoy Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-century Britain (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996): 4; emphasis in the original.

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realism have been noted by Lucie Armitt, who suggests the two genres are located upon a spectrum of generic production.51 The following analysis of Agnon’s texts will argue that both “Avi Hashor” and “Tehila” are located upon this spectrum, that they explore and express subversive elements, and that they use their settings in order to undermine preconceived notions of reality and to question conventional social structure. In both texts, we come across elements that can be read both as Gothic and as magical realist. The supernatural or unnatural in the two texts can be perceived as both benign and malign, and both narratives offer instances of subverting, and tampering with, the Jewish notion of the word as sacred in conjunction with the relationship with the land. Though the particular two Agnon texts examined here were not read previously as Gothic literature, Gothic elements in Agnon’s work have been noted. For example, though “Helena of ‘The Lady and the Peddler’” (“Ha-’Adonit ve-harokhel”) is not immediately identified as the vampire she is,”52 the lady is, indeed, a vampiric character that feeds on the peddler. Similarly, Harold Fisch’s examination of Gemulah, the demon-haunted wife of the antiquarian bookseller Gamzu in “Ido Ve’enam” (Edo and Enam) (1950) asserts the story’s Gothic essence.53 In a manner reminiscent of the characters in Stoker’s Dracula, “every month on the night of the full-moon [Gemulah] rises in her sleep, leaves her home, and wanders about the city in a trance-like state.”54 Even while Robert Alter claims that until the 1980s it would have been a “contradiction in terms” to read Israeli fiction within the bounds of magical realism,55 he nonetheless acknowledges that Agnon’s work is an exception, and includes clearly fantastic and neo-Gothic elements.56 The two texts explored here, “Avi Hashor” and “Tehila,” share not only some of the frightening elements and the use of setting that align them with the Gothic tradition, but also the preoccupation with the tensions between the self and the Other, specifically within a political nationalist context, which is also very much a defining feature of the Gothic. Yet, as noted above, these very elements can, and I would argue that in Agnon they, indeed, should be read, as magical realist as well.

51 Armitt, “The Magical Realism of the Contemporary Gothic,” 306. 52 Esther Fuchs, “Ironic Characterization in the Works of S. Y. Agnon,” AJS Review 7.8 (1982/ 1983): 101–128, 120. 53 Harold Fisch, “The Dreaming Narrator in S. Y. Agnon,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 4.1 (1970): 49–68, 49. 54 Fisch, “The Dreaming Narrator in S. Y. Agnon,” 49. 55 Alter, “Magic Realism in the Israeli Novel,” 17. 56 Alter, “Magic Realism in the Israeli Novel,” 17.

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“Tehila” follows an unnamed narrator’s visits to Jerusalem, where he encounters Tehila, a seemingly righteous old woman. As the novella progresses, we learn that, as a child, Tehila was promised in marriage to a young boy called Shraga,57 but that the engagement was broken when her father heard the boy’s father was following the Chasidic movement. She later married another man and suffered several misfortunes, which she blames upon her father’s reluctance to ask forgiveness from Shraga’s family, as was the custom in cases of broken engagements. Her last wish is for the narrator to help her prepare a letter of apology she will take to her grave. This notion of taking an urn with the letter to her grave with the belief that it will be possible to meet someone in the land of the dead and present him with the letter in order to obtain redemption, can be read as either a Gothic or a magical realistic element, as it is supernatural or unnatural. Yet whereas the supernatural or superstitious element would be read as an integral part of magical realism, in a Gothic text it would be a subversion of a religious doctrine. The text lends itself to both readings, leaving the verdict with regard to the benign or malign essence of the supernatural elements to the reader’s discretion. As noted above, if the supernatural element is benign, the texts will be aligned with the magical realist tradition, and if it is malign it will be more in accordance with the Gothic. This allows the reader to align the narrative with both traditions, and consequently, by extrapolation, the text can be read within its production context as both a rejection of British colonialism as well as, simultaneously, an assertion of the Israeli new colonialism. This supernatural element can be read as a superstitious belief, which is a subversion of both the secular, (post)modernist post-Enlightenment notions of reality, and the Jewish religious tradition’s set of beliefs and doctrines. According to the Jewish tradition, one can only be redeemed and forgiven by God after having been granted the wholehearted forgiveness by the person sinned against. This rule applies to the yearly Day of Atonement as well as to the final one. The rationale for this obviously is that people ought to be better neighbors, husbands and wives, and treat each other with dignity and respect; it is not possible to behave immorally all year and then attain easy forgiveness from God.58 By contriving to take the letter to her grave, Tehila tries to bypass this fundamental

57 The name Tehila, apart from meaning fame, connoting the renown of the city, is a direct reference to Psalms, which is Tehilim in Hebrew. The book of Psalms tells the praise of the Lord, and the story tells the praise of the woman, who is an embodiment of the city. The book is constantly evoked through the numerous allusions and specific quotes, and Tehila reads it daily. Shraga in Aramaic means the useless candle at noon, and indeed, he is a useless light she follows to her grave. 58 Leviticus 16:23; Masechet Yoma 85b.

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aspect of Jewish tradition which insists on righteous earthly conduct rather than to rely on divine redemption. Tehila treats the letter of forgiveness as a “ticket” into the world of saintly redemption and subverts one of the main ideas of the Jewish tradition. Moreover, though the narrator accedes to her request, indeed producing the letter, the narrative undermines the direct connection between the breech of promise and the misfortunes that befell Tehila, suggesting these might have been unrelated, and that in many ways she had a successful and full life. Thus, it is doubtful whether the restoration of order through the written letter of apology will ensure that Tehila may enter the realm of the holy and be worthy of resurrection on the last Day of Atonement. Rather, the story implies, it might be due to the many charitable actions and her humble character that she will find her peace in the Mount of Olives. Tehila is in a way a representation of the Holy City, righteous and merciful, and like the city, she combines both the “earthly” and “heavenly” aspects, secular and sacred. Jewish tradition distinguishes between the “Earthly Jerusalem” and the “Heavenly Jerusalem.” The former is the tangible city in PalestineIsrael and the latter an imaginary space. These imaginary and real spaces coexist, and form a complete unity under the sovereignty of God. Jewish tradition suggests that the deeds of the people in the earthly Jerusalem are reflected in heaven, and either hasten or defer the salvation and redemption of Jerusalem and the people of Israel. In correlation to this myth, Tehila believes that her deeds in the earthly Jerusalem might either hasten or delay her salvation, and is therefore eager to rectify any wrongs that might prevent her from entry to the kingdom of heaven and deny her the ultimate redemption. Tehila’s character has been subject to many conflicting and contradictory readings. Her character has been understood to be an expression of the shechina;59 her death has been read as a gniza60 until the coming of the messiah,61 as well as an articulation of a rejection of life.62 The alignment of Tehila with the

59 The shechina is the feminine compassionate aspect of God. The Jewish God can be a wrathful vengeful God, but it has a kinder side that, according to tradition, used to reside in the temple in Jerusalem. The temple was the house of God, the place of residence and manifestation of the sovereignty of God and the Jewish nation over the Holy City and Holy Land. 60 Geniza is the internment or safe keeping of scriptures that are no longer in use. 61 Hillel Weiss, “Mota Shel Tehila Kebitui Legnizah ad Biat Hagoel” [Tehila’s Death as Expression of Geniza till the Coming of the Messiah] in Parshanut Lechamish Mesipurei Agnon [Interpretation of Five Agnon Stories] (Tel Aviv: Aked, 1974): 75–93, 76. 62 Amos Oz, “Laag Hagoral Veterufa shel Hatzadecket” [Destiny’s Scorn and the Righteous’ Madness] in Shtikat Hashamayim: Agnon Mishtomem al Elohim [The Silence of Heaven: Agnon’s Fear of God] (Jerusalem: Keter, 1993): 19–38, 19.

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shechina suggests there is something unreal in her, an un-earthly essence that renders her ethereal. Yet this aspect of her is a part of her realistic character. Hence, this aspect of her can be read as magical realist. Additionally, if one accepts her death as gniza, she becomes in a sense, dehumanized, like a scroll or book that should be interned after they are no longer in use. This can reinforce the reading of her character as an element of magical realism, as she becomes neither entirely human nor an object. Yet, this can also be read as a Gothic element in which the woman is dehumanized. While Hillel Weiss considers the denial of the righteous aspects of Tehila’s character a rejection of the messianic elements in Agnon’s work (and in Hebrew literature at large), Eddy Zemach and Moshe Granot reject her depiction as an almost saintly woman, suggesting she conducts all her charity merely in order to attain redemption as a reward and therefore is not really righteous.63 Arye Nave reveals heretical tendencies in Tehila’s conduct, such as seeking death in order to reunite with her lover. The absence of God’s name from the last part of the story supports the suggestion that Tehila is, in fact, rebelling against the divinity.64 Alongside the previous reading of Tehila as near angel, and her alignment with the divine dwelling, the shechina, these rebellious, subversive qualities, render Tehila a quasi or neo-demonic character. Tehila can be read along the angel-demon axis, allotting her a place on both sides of this non-human spectrum. Tehila’s character is utilized in order to explore possible connections between the holiest place for the religious Jew, Jerusalem, and total rejection of Jewish doctrine. Since Agnon was a religious man, one ought to be careful with these claims; nevertheless, the implication is present, if subtle. The debate regarding Tehila’s character reflects the problematic tensions between the religious and secular sects in the Jewish-Israeli community (in Israel and worldwide). The novella lends itself to both readings – of Tehila as righteous or as manipulative – and reflects the possibility of subtly undermining or questioning Jewish belief in the power of charity and the written word when it is perceived within a superstitious context. Once again, these explorations can be read as either Gothic or magical realism, and taking into consideration Agnon’s particular spatial and historical situation, they should be read as both.

63 Eddy Zemach, Kriah Tama Besifrut Ivrit Bat Hameah Veesrim [Fine Letters: Hebrew Literature of the Twentieth Century] (Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 1990): 119; and Moshe Granot, “Tehila Hacazav Shemeachorey Habdaya” [Tehila the Fraud Behind the Fiction] in Agnon Lelo Masve [Agnon Revealed] (Tel Aviv: Yaron Golan, 1991): 23–27, 23. 64 Arye Nave, “Tehila – Ha’moredet Hakdosha” [Tehila – The Holy Rebel] in Bamikhlala 9 (1997): 33–37, 34.

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When the narrator and Tehila commence the writing of the redemptive letter asking for forgiveness that she intends to take to her grave, Tehila tells the narrator that she will speak to him in Yiddish, but that he should write in “the holy language.”65 She adds that she heard that now “they teach the girls to speak and write in the holy language.”66 This is an innovative approach to the education of women in the Jewish community. Traditionally, women were excluded from the study of the Talmud as well as Hebrew; they were usually assigned to the domestic realm and the Yiddish language. As Daniel Boyarin explains, in the Ashkenazi Diaspora, “[w]omen of the learned classes were encouraged to become competent scholars of everything except the Talmud itself.”67 Tehila did not attend the yeshiva, where the Mishnah (Jewish oral tradition fixed in writing) is read and explored in depth. Yet she inherits her father’s books, and appears to be well-versed in the scriptures. This is not explained in the narrative, and the reader may conjecture as to the reasons. The only explanation we are given is the fact that her brothers gave up the books and that Tehila brought them along when she came to Palestine-Israel (“T,” 198). Nevertheless, a clue to the reason why she inherited the books instead of her brothers might be that her father used to write the dates of each of his children’s birth in the chomesh.68 According to some traditions this would be considered a sacrilege, as one must neither add to nor subtract words from the Holy Scriptures. In addition to subtly questioning Jewish norms and beliefs, the novella undermines the validity of the British Mandate, which was in place from 1918/ 1922 to 1948. Walking in the streets of Jerusalem, the narrator notes the neverending masses of immigrants flooding the city, and acknowledges their ethnic diversity and homelessness (“T,” 183). The narrative depicts Diaspora Jews as they come to Palestine in an attempt to find a home, followed by a pivotal scene that depicts British soldiers by the Western Wall on Temple Mount. As they attempt to uphold British Mandate law that does not allow anyone to make seating arrangements in the square in front of the Wall, they knock a very old

65 “‫”לשון הקודש‬ 66 Shmuel Yosef Agnon, “Tehila,” in Thus Far, vol. 7 (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1977): 178–206, 194; further references in the text, abbreviated as “‘T.’” 67 Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997): 179; emphasis in the original. 68 The chomesh are the first five books of the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), which are considered the basic learning of the Jewish tradition, the torah. The word chomesh comes from the root for the word five, chamesh.

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woman off her stool. Tehila arrives and stares at the soldier until he contritely retrieves the stool for the other old lady (“T,” 183). The political potential of this episode is explained by the narrator: “the power of your eyes is better than all of England’s promises, as England has given us the Balfour Declaration and lashes her clerks at us to no avail, and you my old one fixed your eye upon that bully and undid his evil plotting” (“T,” 183).69 The narrative suggests that Tehila has some kind of magical power over the soldier, and indeed, by extrapolation, over the British colonial enterprise. This magical power can be read as either part of a rejection of the British colonial oppressor, or as part of the assertion of the new Israeli colonizer. Indeed, it becomes clear that Tehila’s magical powers, her power as the manifestation of the female Jewish divine dwelling in the Holy City of Jerusalem, should be read as both Gothic and magical realistic. This magical power is both malign and benign, as it simultaneously asserts the sovereignty of the new settler even while rejecting the previous colonizer. In the Balfour Declaration (1917), Britain had promised Lord Rothschild as a representative of the Zionist Organization to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Agnon refers dismissively to the failed political promise. His rendering suggests instead the Jewish religious right to sovereignty over Jerusalem. This is embodied by Tehila in the novella; she is the symbolic representation of the shechina and imbues the declaration with authority, and not vice versa. Agnon’s story merges with the Zionist master narrative in insisting on the legitimacy of the Jewish claim to the land; yet while the Zionist master narrative attributes this claim to modern nationalism and the British declaration, Agnon attributes it to religious right. Similar questions regarding the moral validity of Jewish settlement in Palestine-Israel arise from “Avi Hashor.” Like “Tehila,” this story is located in Jerusalem. As a significant part of the Holy Land, Jerusalem occupies a unique place and is sacred to all three monotheistic religions. Legend has it that Jerusalem was built on the place where the universe was created, and where Abraham went to sacrifice his son. Another myth suggests it is the place where Abel constructed his altar, and the ascension of the prophet Elijah to heaven is linked with Jerusalem as well, as the city is considered a pathway to the heaven. As noted above, one of the main reasons the city of Jerusalem has a special status in Jewish tradition is that it is considered the place where the feminine aspect of God, the shechina, resides. The importance of Jerusalem as the center of the home of the Jewish people is addressed in “Tehila” by the alignment of Tehila

69 “‫ שאילו אנגליא נתנה לנו דקלרציא של בלפור ומשלחת בנו את‬,‫ יפה כח עיניך מכל הבטחותיה של אנגליא‬,‫פקידיה לבטלה‬ ‫”ואת זקנתי נתת עיניך באותו רשע ובטלת את מזימותיו הרעות‬

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with the shechina and Jerusalem.70 In “Avi Hashor,” the merging of the protagonist’s identity and the place occurs as the name of the place is the old man’s name. Avi Hashor [The Ox’s Father] is a Hebrew translation of the Arabic Abu-Tor, which is the name of a neighborhood in Jerusalem. Abu-Tor has a unique history, as it is one of the first attempts at an Arab-Jewish hybrid neighborhood in Jerusalem. It is situated on the outskirts of the city and is the signifier of the border between countries, cultures, and peoples. One of the folk traditions related to the place suggests that when Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn placed the siege on Jerusalem, one of his officers bragged that it would be so easy to conquer Jerusalem that he would be able to do it on an ox. According to Band, Agnon’s story resembles the political parables he wrote in the 1930s, referring to the Arab Jewish tensions.71 Band suggests the story is a parable and an “etiological myth purporting to explain the name of the Abu-Tor district of Jerusalem near Agnon’s home.”72 During the time the story was written, the neighborhood was literally partitioned and divided between the Emirate of Transjordan and the British Mandate; today it is in Israel, and represents an attempt at coexistence. Agnon’s translation of the name of the neighborhood into Hebrew is a linguistic appropriation of the place, and after the heroic act in which the ox saves the town from raiders, the narrator reiterates the appropriated name of the place. Agnon offers a new myth to explain the name of the place, which locates it within Jewish culture and hence suggests that it should be under Jewish-Israeli sovereignty. This linguistic appropriation can be read as a rejection of the Arab hold on the land, as well as an attempt to assert a Jewish right to the territory. In relation to the linguistic aspect of hybridity, this philological maneuver is both the assertion of a new territorial colonialism as well as the rejection of previous claims to the land. “Avi Hashor” is one of the most intriguing and potentially subversive texts Agnon ever wrote. The story tells of an old man who had neither wife nor children, but had an ox. Since the Jewish tradition considers marriage, procreation, and the communal aspects of life the most important in a person’s life, the old man’s solitude locates him on the margins of the socially acceptable. Furthermore, the Talmud aligns the home with the wife. One without the other is not complete; hence, though the old man might have a home, his home is an empty shell. David Aberbach notes that Agnon’s characters,

70 Weiss, “Mota Shel Tehila Kebitui Legnizah ad Biat Hagoel,” 76; Werses, Shy Agnon Kepshuto, 44. 71 Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare, 409. 72 Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare, 409.

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for various reasons and to varying degrees, are deflected from normal heterosexual attachments and are inclined, for this reason, to forms of perversion which at times mirror the distortions and breakdown in the societies in which they live.73

The old man is a recluse, and his marginality already undermines Jewish social conventions. One day, when the city is raided by enemies, the old man mounts the ox.74 They charge into the city, attack the enemy and save the day. At this climactic moment of the story the old man is united with the ox to the point of being transformed into a minotaur-like creature that charges triumphantly into the battle. However, the old man and the ox enjoy their heroic status only briefly, as soon after the ox is slaughtered in a socially charged maneuver by the old man’s neighbor. The second chapter of the story furnishes the necessary background and tells of the neighbor who marries another wife.75 When, after seven days of feasting, he runs out of cattle and can no longer feed all his guests, he finds and slaughters the ox.76 The animal is killed neither as an acceptable religious sacrifice nor as substitute for a human sacrifice; rather than actual cruelty or lack of moral stature, its slaughter is an act of moral negligence. As the ox was the old man’s substitute for family, servant, and perhaps even lover, the irony of the neighbor’s slaughtering the animal for the celebration of an additional wife renders the act even more cruel. This is despite the neighbor’s later attempts to redress his transgression by compensating the old man’s loss with land and cattle. The ox represents both the old man’s family and his link to the land. Indeed, as the ox is the beast that is used to farm the land, in the unification with the ox the old man is fused with the land. The literal and allegorical unification of the ox and the old man as the reunion of the Jews with the land reflects Agnon’s (and the yishuv’s, the Jewish settlement in Palestine) exploration of a yearning for the connection with the land. The minotaur-like creature, which is comprised of man and ox, redeems the land from the enemy, and consequently is entitled to appropriate it as part of war-spoils. This new mythology supports the Zionist enterprise, as it participates in constructions of the national identity of the sovereign “new Jew” as a courageous warrior creature.

73 David Aberbach, “Fantasies of Deviance in Mendele and Agnon,” AJS Review 19.1 (1994): 45– 60, 45. 74 The old man mounts the ox following the inarticulate “request” of the beast. 75 It is permitted according to Muslim tradition to marry up to four wives, while the traditional Jewish interpretations of the Torah usually negate or advise against polygamy. 76 Shmuel Yosef Agnon, “Avi Hashor,” in Thus Far, vol. 7 (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1977): 336–342, 337; further references in the text, abbreviated as “‘AHS.’”

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With the unification of man and ox, “Avi Hashor” reworks several old myths about oxen whose origins can be traced back to both Jewish and Greek mythology.77 Found both in the Greek and Roman mythologies, the Minotaur is a creature part-man and part-bull, which was the product of two sinful actions: first Minos’s defiance of the divine decree and then Pasiphaë’s copulation with the bull. The former is a sin against the gods; the latter a moral transgression. The ethical question resonates in Agnon’s texts and beckons the reader to choose between a religious and secular narrative; between social injustice and religious entitlement. Similar mythical creatures existed in other Mediterranean cultures, such as the moloch of the Canaanite culture. This is one of the idols mentioned in the bible and whose worship the Jewish tradition attempted to eliminate. In one of the references, as part of elaborate rules and regulations regarding copulation, we find a decree that forbids the insemination of the moloch.78 The word in Hebrew, moloch,79 comes from the same root as king, melech.80 The word “king” is one of the names for the Jewish God, which is equivalent to another, ribbon,81 which comes from the same root as the word for sovereignty, ribonut.82 The moloch is connected to notions of sovereignty on several levels: first, linguistically, as it is linked to the word for king, the sovereign; second, as the King of Kings decrees it an abomination; third, the rejection of the moloch is part of the rules and regulations given to the Israelites in relation to processes of the conquest of the Promised Land. The importance of sovereignty for this discussion lies in the crucial role it plays in both Gothic and magical realism. Both genres are, as noted above, a reaction and exploration of issues of sovereignty, hence the significance of these themes. In the Jewish tradition, the adamant negation of bestiality is connected to the conquest, and later the redemption of the land. Interestingly, while Agnon’s narrative appears to subvert the social conventions that require a man to have a wife and children, the result of this abominable union is yet the redemption of the

77 The Minotaur was created as the result of copulation of Pasiphaë and the bull. The bull was supposed to be sacrificed by Minos to the god Poseidon for the triumph in the battle, but Minos defied the decree and kept the bull alive. In order to punish Minos for this act of defiance, Aphrodite, the goddess of love made Minos’s wife, Pasiphaë, fall in love with the bull. The fruit of this love affair, the Minotaur, was imprisoned by Minos in a labyrinth. Ariadne, the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë later assists Theseus to kill the Minotaur (see Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII). 78 Leviticus 18:21. 79 “‫”מולוך‬ 80 “‫”מלך‬ 81 “‫”ריבון‬ 82 “‫”ריבונות‬

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land. Aberbach suggests that “[c]ertain obscure features in […] Agnon become clearer if the possibility of latent deviance, homosexuality in particular, is taken into account,”83 and though one ought to be cautious in suggesting that Agnon consciously intended to explore issues of bestiality, the story arguably lends itself to such a reading. Though Agnon attempted to create a myth of himself as a writer who rejected the non-Jewish tradition, he was well-versed in Western culture.84 Nonetheless, Agnon was a religious Jewish man, and it is not likely that such a scandalous subversion of the Jewish tradition could have been his deliberate intention. Therefore, though the story may support this reading, one might consider an alternative, which suggests that the ox represents the old man’s holy sacrifice for the redemption of the land. This reading implies that Agnon offers an allegory of legitimate sovereignty, as the old man receives the land in compensation for the loss of his beloved ox. The themes of sacrifice, sacrificial acts, and redemption are prevalent in Agnon’s work, reflecting a similar pervasiveness in the Jewish scriptures.85 Reading the slaughter of the ox as an integral part of the Jewish tradition suggests that the old man is required to sacrifice everything the ox means to him – his wife, son, servant and lover – in order to redeem the land. The narrative echoes the sacrificial act Abraham is required to commit in Genesis.86 This sacrifice follows the initial promise God made to Abraham upon his departure from Ur87 and precedes the promise of the land.88 However, while in the biblical narrative, Abraham was required to sacrifice his son and was given a ram as substitute, in Agnon’s narrative, since the old man has no family, the ox is taken as the substitute for family. Also, while in the biblical narrative Abraham was blessed with prolific procreation, as well as triumphant glory,89 in Agnon’s narrative, the old man receives land, seven healthy cows, and seven calves. Furthermore, among these calves there is an innocent calf, which is presented in the narrative as an equivalent to the neighbor’s little daughter (“AHS,” 342). The narrative suggests a substitution between the little girl and the calf, as if the neighbor recognizes the importance of the ox as substitute for the old man’s

83 Aberbach, “Fantasies of Deviance,” 59. 84 Alan Mintz and Anna Golomb Hoffman, “Introduction,” in The Book that Was Lost: Thirty-Five Stories (Tel Aviv: The Toby Press Schocken, 2008): 14–18. 85 Fuchs, “Ironic Characterization in the Works of S. Y. Agnon,” 120; Aberbach, “Fantasies of Deviance,” 45. 86 Genesis 22:1–20. 87 Genesis 12:1–4. 88 Genesis 15:7–13. 89 Genesis 16–18.

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family. While in the biblical narrative Abraham sacrificed the ram instead of his son, in Agnon’s story, the old man receives a young innocent calf that is supposedly the equivalent of the neighbor’s daughter. The old man substituted family with an ox, and then the ox is substituted with land. While in the biblical narrative the substitution was between cattle and family, and then Abraham was rewarded with both the promise of land and virile productivity, eventually, at the end of Agnon’s narrative the old man does not have any offspring, but only land. Hence, even when read as a continuation of the Jewish tradition, the story offers a problematic subversive narrative in that it replaces the man’s healthy procreation with the attainment of the land and cattle. The land, in both “Avi Hashor” and “Tehila,” is utilized in order to marshal subtly subversive ideas and to question social and religious notions. These subversions operate specifically in relation to the land, and issues of sovereignty, and therefore should be read as either Gothic or magical realist and, in Agnon’s specific case, as both. Tehila is an embodiment of Jerusalem, and Avi Hashor is, literally and figuratively, the old man and the place. The characters are the settings – Tehila is an embodiment of the holy city, and the ox’s father is Avi Hashor, which is Hebrew for Abu Tor. These are mythical and mystical representations of the Jewish nation and its connection to the land. In addition to questioning the communal role of man and his relationship with the land, like “Tehila,” “Avi Hashor” offers certain elements that can be read both as Gothic and magical realist. When the old man discovers that his ox is gone, he cries, roams the fields, bellowing like his ox, and finally finds the animal’s severed horns in a pile of garbage (“AHS,” 338–339). As the old man howls and weeps for his ox, he hears a haunting howling that seems to come from horns, like the sound of the Jews’ shofar. The Gothic scene of the grieving old man roaming in the darkness (both literally and allegorically) is linked to a linguistic confusion regarding the severed horns. Linguistically speaking, the horns are animated, as the old man wonders why the horns “left their owner” and the narrator suggests that the ox abandoned them (“AHS,” 339). While the ox was everything to the old man, the animal’s horns on their own are useless to him90 and bring nothing but grief. The element of the bellowing and howling in the night is not a “scare”; rather, it functions as ironic amplifier of the readers’ unease as they know what happened to the ox. Like the supernatural elements in “Tehila,” these elements can also be read as either magical realist or Gothic. The

90 Horns, as in the shofar, are the Jewish way to call upon God, and therefore are perceived as sacred; however, as opposed to other horned animals like the ram whose horns are hollow, the ox’s horns are solid and cannot be used to make a shofar and call upon God.

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texts lend themselves very well to both these readings, yet the two are distinctly different in meaning. The Gothic is related to fears of the colonizer, and magical realism allows for the colonized to explore identity. As noted above, the particular spatial and historical location of these texts by Agnon require the reader to permit both readings, creating a kind of hybrid genre that conjoins the Gothic and magical realism. After the miserable discovery of the horns the old man suffers several nights of torment as he hears the bellowing of his beloved ox. He is tormented by these sounds and consults his Jewish friend (“AHS,” 339). This is the first time religion is explicitly mentioned in this story. The point of doing so is that something beyond reason, something inexplicable has occurred. The rupture in the natural world leads the old man to seek the assistance of his Jewish friend, as if the Jew holds the secrets of natural philosophy and, even more importantly, beyond. The reader wonders for the first time to which religion the old man belongs and, based on phrases and the cries to God in the Jewish format, “see the salvation of the Lord that the Lord hath done for us,” (“AHS,” 337) concludes that he most probably is Jewish as well. Omitting to mention the religion of the old man may raise doubts regarding the potential subversive reading of the text. Indeed, as Ezrahi points out, doubts have been expressed about the alleged ironic undertones in Agnon’s work.91 Furthermore, the premise of the story is a linguistic and mythical appropriation of the land, and undermining the power of the word places the entire credence of this linguistic appropriation in question. The narrative explores the core of the Jewish tradition, which is its sanctification of the word. Questioning this aspect of the Jewish tradition is, in fact, undermining its very base. Like in “Tehila,” we find instances of subtle subversion or questioning of the Jewish belief in the power of the word. Specifically, in the manner this power might be perceived as part of superstitious beliefs, rather than a true respect for the word. The Jew advises the old man to seek the advice of “a wise one, Docsostos, the writer from Kiryat Sefer,92 who was removed from his craft, because he used to write charms of healing verses, we shall go to him for he is a deeds-man, he might tell you something” (“AHS,” 339–340).93 The “Docsostos” is the part of a beast’s skin used to produce the scroll on which the scriptures are written. There is a controversy regarding the “Docsostos”; most rulings deem it flawed for writing the Torah and say it is only suitable for secular uses. The 91 Ezrahi, “Sentient Dogs,” 115. 92 The name of the place translates as “the town of book.” 93 “‫בהם נלך אצלו אחד דוכסוסטוס הסופר מקרית ספר שהעבירוהו מאומנותו מפני שהיה כותב קמיעין של פסוקים להתרפאות‬ ‫”שהוא בעל מעשים אפשר שיזדקק לך ויאמר לך דבר‬

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controversy surrounding the occult in Jewish tradition is represented by the name given to “Docsostos,” one who was rejected from the mainstream religious apparatus because he was dabbling in the occult. In Agnon’s narrative, however, in order to solve the conundrum of the howling in the nights, the narrative passes into the occult, the Kabbalistic part of Judaism that maintains the power of the word to cause action and create reality. At Docsostos’, as the old man touches the horns they produce a sound like the shofar, and the wise man deduces that the ox has been slaughtered and this is the beast’s cry to his beloved master. This supernatural element, once again, can be read either as Gothic or magical realist, and again offers simultaneously a possible subversion of both the secular reality as well as the Jewish religious norm. Both “Tehila” and “Avi Hashor” undermine the readers’ preconceived notions of reality – whether within or outside the Jewish tradition; both offer elements that can be read as both Gothic and magical realist. In addition, both stories use space as a means to question fundamental notions of reality and identity. Both texts are set in Palestine-Israel, The Holy Land, which is the quintessential legendary land, and functions both on the real and imaginary axes. The actual territory has been subject to many interpretations. The initial biblical reference maps it “from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates,”94 which would locate it between the Nile at the heart of present day Egypt in the West and the Euphrates in the East, a river that runs through modern Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. The land in the biblical promise is not given any northern and southern boundaries, leaving this imaginary map open to even further expansion, both literally and metaphorically. In conclusion, this analysis of “Tehila” and “Avi Hashor” reveals that both can be read as samples of the Gothic and of magical realism. In addition to unnatural or supernatural elements, such as the “curse” Tehila believes she has to undo by taking a letter of apology with her to her grave, or the severed horns howling in the night in “Avi Hashor,” both texts can be read as both Gothic and magical realist due to their essential link with social reconfiguration. Moreover, both narratives disturb preconceived notions, as they undermine the boundaries between realms through the use of settings. Reading Agnon as writing within both the Gothic and magic realism enables us to recognize his attempts to create continuities within Jewish culture. Agnon’s work reflects the tensions between perceptions and notions of the “old” and “new” Jew, the Ashkenazi Diaspora and the yishuv in Palestine-Israel, and the British Mandate, exploring the (re)construction of a new Jewish-Israeli identity. Moreover, Agnon’s works should be read

94 Genesis 15:18.

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both as Gothic and as magical realism, as they reflect as well as participate in the construction of Jewish-Israeli identity which is simultaneously the product of British Imperialism, postcolonialism, and the Zionist enterprise. The texts are a product of the shattered world Agnon was trying to depict and come to terms with. The collapse of the reading from the imperialistically engaged Gothic into (post-)colonial magical realism and back again suggests the unsettled essence of the Jewish-Israeli identity.

Michael Lejman

Dreams in the Desert: Searching for Identity in Albert Memmi’s Experimental Fiction Albert Memmi is known for moving autobiographical depictions of Jews in colonial North Africa and thorough yet accessible analysis of colonialism and the Jewish condition. Sociologist, novelist and philosopher, he explores mechanisms of cultural expression and transference while open to stylistic innovation of both the literary and physical text. Several scholars, most recently Lia Brozgal in a 2010 article in French Studies on visual themes in Memmi’s novels, have mentioned his discussions of multi-colored text as a method for enhancing dialog or employing multiple narrators. Memmi’s work also forms what Debra Kelly refers to as “a life project from which the individual concerned and others who read the work can learn something, at both private and public levels, concerning the functioning of human interactions,” with a series of characters and themes that exist both in the context of each work and in a metanarrative that spans the course of Memmi’s career. Memmi has been both a practitioner of literary arts and an analyst, a dual role that resembles his engagement with subjects such as colonialism and decolonization. As such, examining Memmi’s work provides scholars with a unique combination of the author’s literary contributions, a sizable collection of self-reflective pieces, and topical analysis on both literary and socio-cultural subjects. In this article I will examine Memmi’s own discussion of Jewish cultural production, his own role as a producer, and his magical realism within his works as well as in the larger frame of the metanarrative that connects these works. In order to locate Memmi’s experimental fiction in the context of his life-project I begin by discussing the foundational texts of Memmi’s career: his novel Pillar of Salt (1953), in which I identify the first example of a fantastic element in Memmi’s literary career, the essay The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957), and his essays on Jewish identity. I then present the novels The Scorpion (1969) and The Desert (1977) as the most vivid displays of Memmi’s metanarrative and themes resembling magical realism, concluding with a broader assertion regarding Memmi’s journey of self-discovery and the relationship between the individual and the universal in his work.

Representing Everyone, Belonging to No One In 1920, forty years following the Treaty of Bardo under which Tunisia became a French colony, Albert Memmi, the son of a Jewish saddle-maker, was born in

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Tunis. Forty years later, political prisoners in French North Africa were reading Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) in their cells as “a handbook for national liberation struggles.”1 In the over fifty years since, Memmi has produced over twenty novels and book-length essays. Memmi’s life and career illustrate the complexity of postcolonial identity. Whether Tunisian, Jewish, or French, Memmi has spanned multiple worlds and provided incisive commentary and vivid images of each. His qualifications as a voice for the colonized were initially questioned due to his interstitial position, summarized by Albert Camus: “here is a French writer from Tunisia who is neither French nor Tunisia. It is only with difficulty that he is Jewish, since in some sense he would not like to be.”2 However, this background has proved a compelling lens rather than a hindrance. In his preface to The Colonizer and the Colonized, Jean-Paul Sartre cited Memmi’s ambiguity as his primary qualification: “he represents no one, but since he is everyone, he will prove to be the best of witnesses.”3 While it is possible to focus on specific aspects of Memmi’s own identity, they can never be truly separated. Memmi completed his first two books, The Colonizer and the Colonized and The Pillar of Salt (1953), during the height of the Algerian War of Independence in the era of African anti-colonial revolutions. While Memmi was particularly sensitive to the specificity of his background, rather than denoting his archtypes as “Tunisian” and “French,” he called them “Colonizer” and “Colonized,” portraying colonialism as a transformative, and ultimately self-destructive, relationship

1 Gary Wilder, “Irreconcilable Difference: A Conversation with Albert Memmi,” Transition 71 (1996): 158. 2 Guy Dugas, Albert Memmi: du malheur d’être Juif au bonheur sépharade (Paris: Alliance israélite universelle, 2001); Albert Camus, preface to The Pillar of Salt (Paris: Gallimard, 1953): xxi–xxix. A rift developed between Camus and Memmi in the years following over Memmi’s characterization of poor pied noirs in Colonizer and the Colonized. Debra Kelly, “‘An unfinished death’: the legacy of Albert Camus and the work of textual memory in contemporary European and Algerian literatures,” in The International Journal of Francophone Studies 10.1/2 (2012): 217–235. 3 Jean-Paul Sartre, “forward” in Colonizer and the Colonized/Portrait du colonisé précédé du portrait du colonisateur [1957] (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1965). French literature scholar Richard Watts mentioned Sartre, among others including Leopold Senghor, Edouard Glissant, Mohammad Dib, and a variety of other postcolonial and French intellectual writers in Richard Watts, Packaging Postcoloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005). Watts considers the paratext in Francophone postcolonial literature, he does not reference Memmi or Sartre’s introduction specifically but he notes Sartre’s fondness for colonized writers during the 1950s and 1960s citing authors such as “Sartre, Andre Gide, Andre Breton, Francois Mauriac, Jean Cocteau, and others whose endorsements in the form of prefaces attracted significant attention to these texts” and their difficulty in reconciling their support of colonized authors with the impression that French intellectual patronage represented a form of intellectual colonialism (15).

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that created these two figures. A compelling aspect of that analysis was Memmi’s emphasis on the choices faced by individuals as well as groups politically, economically, and culturally. The Pillar of Salt and The Colonizer and the Colonized are the foundation of Albert Memmi’s work. They introduced Memmi to a broad spectrum of readers from revolutionary activists to consumers of popular literature and they remain his most successful in terms of sales, reprint editions, and translations. Memmi has revisited both in most of his other works either directly or thematically, responding to reviews, reexamining his own ideas, or developing briefly mentioned themes into narratives and broader analysis. Memmi’s fictional characters resemble the archetypes described in The Colonizer and the Colonized and deal with many of the same challenges presented there and in the lives of the characters in The Pillar of Salt. In addition, these books established Memmi’s reputation, and their reception by the literary public as well as oppressed peoples inspired by his work convinced Memmi that he could speak to an audience beyond colonial Tunisia.4 Limiting a discussion of Memmi’s work to specific genres of literature or historiographical categories is challenging – without even breaching his psychological examinations of dependent relationships in Dependence (1979).5 However two subjects replete throughout Memmi’s work are the colonial condition and Jewish identity. While he has addressed race specifically – particularly in a 1982 monograph entitled Racism6 – as well as other forms of oppression based on gender or colonialism more broadly interpreted,7 it is the colonial and Jewish perspectives which permeate Memmi’s work. The colonized and the Jew cannot be completely separated in analyzing Memmi’s texts insomuch as they are dual aspects of his own identity – to which myself and scholars such as Lia Brozgal, Isaac Yetiv, and Lawrence Schehr would add French.8

4 Albert Memmi, Preface to the 1965 edition of The Colonizer and the Colonized, vii–xx. 5 Though, as at least one reviewer has observed, these may be more suited for a sociological discussion of performative relationships rather than “true” psychological analysis, as Memmi neither cites sources with any frequency nor applies commonly used psychological methods in a prominent manner, i.e. the Gestalt theory prevalent at the time Dependence was published in 1979 (Edouard Roditi, “Review: Albert Memmi’s Dependence,” in World Literature Today 54.3 [1980]: 400). 6 Albert Memmi, Le Racisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1982). 7 See Albert Memmi, “A Tyrant’s Plea” and “Are the French Canadians Colonized?” in Dominated Man: Notes Towards a Portrait (Boston: Beacon P, 1968): 72–83. 8 Schehr in particularly argued that Memmi’s work is a series of attempts to reconcile these three identities through the written word in the tradition of a tikkun olam. Lawrence Schehr, “Albert

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It is in the Colonizer and the Colonized, his celebrated 1957 debut analytical monograph depicting the colonial world in terms of the relationship between colonizer and colonized, where Memmi established himself as a deft sociological analyst, developing meaningful portraits of social archetypes without losing the diversity and richness extant in the interstices between categories. Memmi is rightly credited for his innovative use of dualities to discuss key relationships – i.e., colonizer/colonized – and Guy Dugas, French literary scholar specializing in Mediterranean literature at the Université Paul Valéry, called Memmi “the philosopher of duos.”9 Memmi empathized dualistic relationships in order to consider how these individuals and groups shape one another, their identities created by a larger system such as colonialism, “the duo is not a simple encounter, accidental and without consequences, between two partners or two adversaries: it transforms them both.”10 While Memmi and so many of his characters tend to defy these distinctions through their existence in the between spaces and on the margins of societies his use of the “duo” allows him to articulate the opportunities and choices that define identity and social standing. This construction serves as a useful reinforcement of Memmi’s belief in humanist universalism and one explanation for social forces that defy strictly materialist interpretations.11 Memmi’s use of the duo is an expression of his broader insistence that examining relationships between individuals is central to understanding groups with greater specificity.12 A certain pride in evenhanded criticism accompanies this method. He is both an assertive defender of Jewish culture, and a scathing critic of that culture’s historical production.

Critique of Jewish Culture In Memmi’s judgment, the limiting effects of the Jewish condition permeated Jewish art and culture through extremes of parochialism and self-denial: “I never

Memmi’s Tricultural Tikkun: Renewal and Transformation through Writing,” French Forum 28.3 (2003): 59–83. 9 Guy Dugas, Albert Memmi, écrivain de la déchirure (Sherbrooke: Naaman, 1984): 31. 10 Albert Memmi, Testament insolent (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2009): 34. 11 Memmi’s dissatisfaction with Communism derives from several sources including Marx, Lenin, and the USSR’s mixed record on imperialism and the French left’s behavior during the wars of independence. However, on a philosophical level Memmi has embraced the value and relevance of non-material needs, insisting that there is something that motivates us beyond the rational. 12 Essentially, Memmi argues that his portraits are archetypes based on an object appreciation of the lived experience.

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wanted to become a Jewish writer, nor for that matter a North African novelist.”13 Though skeptical regarding the value of culture as unifying concept in the absence of strong historical and social bonds, he bemoaned the limited number of Jewish writers to achieve worldwide distinction, despite a long literary tradition.14 He ascribed this dearth of strong literary representatives to stigmatization which bred an unfocused secular tradition of writers who “happen to be Jews” rather than confronting the Jewish condition directly. On the other hand, Memmi also referred to a defensive parochialism – writers who did not address the conditions of Jews but simply defended tradition: “worst of all are the professional Jews, those who believe they must staunchly defend the institutions and values of the group; who live off it.”15 In a series of particularly reflective statements in Liberation of the Jew (1966), Memmi identified characteristics he admired and sought to emulate: “I have greater instinctive esteem for the writer who, without ceasing to be himself, wishes to address himself to the world at large.”16 Writers from oppressed groups are caught between the exacting standards of their own people and the need to relate the concerns of the oppressed to a general audience: “in short, for an explicitly Jewish writer there was no public, either Jewish or non-Jewish.”17 This is another restatement of Memmi’s continual problem; bridging the gulf between the oppressed and others requires activists, be they writers or political leaders, to risk becoming interstitial figures. Memmi believed the great Jewish writers were analysts rather than literary figures because the most powerful creative endeavor seeks to provide solutions rather than escape: “I do not believe in a great literature of avoided or accepted oppression […]. That is why Marx, Einstein, even Freud were Jewish, but there has never been a Jewish Dante or Shakespeare.”18 As an example, Memmi identified Jewish Holocaust literature as palliative rather than liberating19 and

13 Albert Memmi, The Liberation of the Jew (New York: Orion, 1966). 14 Albert Memmi, Dependence [1979] (Boston: Beacon P, 1984): 167–168. He argued a successful humanist conception would be based primarily on our mutual need for each other. 15 Memmi, Liberation, 172. 16 Memmi, Liberation, 175. 17 Memmi, Liberation, 178. 18 Memmi, Liberation, 179. The author of a 1978 review essay on Memmi’s work on Jewish identity questioned the wisdom of judging a literary culture based on “the masterpieces it produced or did not produce” (A. B. Magil, “The Hairshirt of Albert Memmi,” Jewish Currents [May, 1978]: 10–11). 19 While Memmi is not making a statement regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, here his concern regarding the Holocaust resembles Said’s statement that “there can be no way of satisfactorily conducting a life whose main concern is to prevent the past from recurring” (Edward W. Said and Jean-Claude Pons, The Question of Palestine [New York: Vintage Books, 1980]: 231).

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even welcomed by the West as fetishes of European guilt. On the other hand, writing Liberation of the Jew, he had begun to “hope that we have at last entered a Jewish Renaissance: the liberation of the contemporary Jew, and that of the colonized, has really begun. And perhaps it will grow to be one of the great marvels of our time.”20 However, his reason for hope was the state of Israel, a representative national state whose very existence would empower cultural narratives. In a standard nationalist claim, Memmi also addressed lack of a unifying language as a barrier to Jewish international solidarity: “the absence of a unique and stable language is the absence of communication, with all the catastrophic consequences such a deficiency entails.”21 In a 1996 article in Le Monde Diplomatique, he addressed the difficulties of producing affirmative literature in cultures whose common language was imposed from without: “To write for whom and in what language? The authors of the third world, of oral tradition, are trying to respond, but often in torment, to this universal question.”22 This is not the first time Memmi mentioned language in this context, having identified bilingualism as an impediment in The Colonizer and the Colonized. He believed the lack of a common language was both an ambiguity that impeded attempts to create a nation and an example of a common issue linking the Jewish condition to general categories of oppression – gender, race, and colonialism – as opposed to specific examples of local ethnic discrimination. Memmi dismissed Hebrew as superficial and forced. He tried to learn it but “it was further from me, stranger, infinitely less malleable than Italian or English which I heard in the street or at the movies, and which evoked familiar civilizations. Hebrew led nowhere.” And what success Hebrew has attained Memmi attributed to the

20 Memmi, Liberation, 179–181. 21 Examples of Jewish public figures’ concerns regarding the tendency of Holocaust memorializing to use “the Shoah as the model for Jewish destiny” include the Reform Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf as well as the renowned Polish-born social activist and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel. See Unfinished Rabbi: Selected Writings of Arnold Jacob Wolf, ed. Jonathan S. Wolf (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998) and Morris M. Faierstein, “Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Holocaust,” Modern Judaism 19.3 (1999): 255–275. 22 Albert Memmi, “Dans quelle langue écrire? La patrie littéraire du colonisé,” Le Monde Diplomatique (September 1996). Conscious of the economic disparity between the former colonies and European Jewish communities when linking these groups in Liberation of the Jew, Memmi repeated his admonition that one group’s misfortunes do not justify those of another but “simply means that the difficulties of a bilingual Jew belong to a larger category, that of linguistic and cultural deficiencies in every oppressed person” (Memmi, Liberation, 187, 190).

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existence of Israel: “In fact, outside of a Jewish nation, Hebrew was nothing but the mythical language of the Jew.”23 Provocatively, Memmi concluded his account of responses to the Jewish condition with inflammatory musings on the very existence of a Jewish culture, suggesting that “Jewish philosophy has been nothing but one long rumination on the law,” and broadly characterized Jewish culture as a response to the culture of others. In Memmi’s discussion of oppressed cultures there is an insistence on the contrast between active and reactive approaches to oppressive conditions. In each case Memmi shuns reaction as passive and self-defeating while action is only genuine when it takes the form of rebellion or institutional development – though he also attributes this passivity as a part of the cycle of oppression that must be escaped through revolutionary means: “does the Jew not share that resigned passivity, that timid behavior, with many of the weak throughout history?”24 Memmi indicated that accepting oneself as a Jew is analogous to the passivity of the colonized accepting their oppression: “in an oppressive situation self-affirmation generally runs the risk of becoming a confirmation of that oppression.”25 In an author’s note in the 1973 edition Memmi stated that, while he believed Liberation presents an honest assessment of a culture crippled by domination, he regretted the lack of positive commentary in this chapter.26 Both his initial pessimistic assessment and this qualified apology reflect a belief that cultural production may serve as both a defensive reaction-imposed condition and the primary means by which peoples actively claim a position in the world. Thus when Memmi offers answers, the actual liberation of the Jew, his politics and his culture are intertwined in a national solution which, though built from the organic material of Jewish history and culture, must be actively constructed. He also believed that Judaism itself could be an active or passive force, promoting either further encystment or liberation.

23 Memmi, Liberation, 192–193. This is somewhat circular logic, based on current discourse on nationalism and the artificiality of created or “historical” language, i.e., the standardization of French as national language in the late nineteenth century, see Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1976), the reinvention of Polish as a common tongue rather than a peasant dialect, or the invention of previously unwritten languages in Southeastern Europe, see Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983). 24 Albert Memmi, Portrait d’un juif (Paris: Gallimard, 1962): 63. 25 Memmi, Liberation, 223. 26 Memmi, Liberation, 225.

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Metanarrative and Magical Realism Defining magic is a matter of some difficulty; it is possible to observe fantastical elements in the distorted scenes of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) or Orwell’s dystopian scenes. These are more antecedents or thematic fellow-travelers than actual examples of magical realism, though the Latin American literary critic Angel Flores claims a close connection between the surrealism, perhaps more specifically the exaggerated realism or hyper-realism, of Kafka and the magical realism associated with Latin American fiction.27 Memmi employs surrealist or mystical elements in a variety of forms – as specific elements within a realistic scene, as a function of the setting or narrative itself, and as a bridge between texts. In each case, he reframes literary conventions or the reality of the worlds he creates in order to further the introspective pursuits of his characters whose quests for self-identity resemble Memmi’s own life project.

The Pillar of Salt – the Mystical Dance The protagonist in The Pillar of Salt, Alexandre Mordechai Benillouche attempts to escape from a tradition he views as backward, stifled by poverty. He does not yet associate his economic and social status with colonialism, but rather with a choice to accept ignorance and find comfort in ritual. By embracing French culture and a scholarly career he believes he can avoid his family’s fate. In turn, his intense pursuit of French education replaces the religious beliefs and figures of his youth with the giants of French literary culture and Republican universalism.28 While acculturation proves impossible, the pursuit of education is both Alexandre’s (and Memmi’s) natural inclination and the only foreseeable possibi-

27 An example of Kafkaesque surrealism in the Francophone world is Axel Gauvin’s surrealistic trial narrative in his 1990 semi-autobiographical novel L’Aime. 28 Isaac Yetiv described Alexandre’s attempted assimilation dramatically in a 1974 analysis of self-alienation in Memmi’s novels. Yetiv’s use of the word “stranger” here connects this view of Alexandre to the Memmi novel of the same name in which the narrator becomes estranged from his family through the pursuit of a French education and French wife: “The French philosophers supersede the Hebrew heroes of the Bible; the French language makes him despise the Arabic dialect spoken at home, and the slogans of the French Revolution make obsolete the religious teachings of his childhood. He watches, day by day, his own metamorphosis; he becomes a stranger to his family; he comes to hate the tribe and its backward traditions, and in the process, he hates himself too” (Isaac Yetiv, “Albert Memmi: The Syndrome of Self-Exile,” International Fiction Review 1.2 [1974]: 125–134, 128).

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lity for a fruitful intellectual life that only appears to exist within the world of the colonizer. As Alexandre redoubles his efforts, becoming physically as well as mentally remote, tensions grow within the Benillouche household. His father notes Alexandre’s absence: “all his colleagues had put their eldest sons to work and my father was sorry he hadn’t taken me into his store.”29 His father’s financial concerns, frustration with Alexandre’s distance from family life, and illness grow more serious as Alexandre’s studies progressed, heightening internal and social tension. At the same time, a series of incidents distances Alexandre from his family through his opposition to customs and religious observations. Following the death of an uncle, Alexandre returns home late and shows disdain for the histrionics of his family’s funeral ceremony. He cannot imagine being mourned in such a way. His father’s depression is visible over a meal the following day as he contemplates the likelihood that his eldest son will not give him a proper funeral: “he saw that I, his oldest son, his heir, would not render to him the last honors due, and would let him die alone” (PS, 138). In another example of the divide between Alexandre and his family, he challenges his parents by turning off the lights during Shabbat. In order to reconcile a rule against making a fire on the Sabbath with modern electric lighting, the families in the apartment building pay a young, non-Jewish, grocer’s clerk to visit each flat and turn off the lights during the end of the Sabbath feast. Alexandre recognizes the perfect chance to pick a fight, as “for me this was too fine an opportunity, an additional proof of their hypocrisy and duplicity” (PS, 142). He turns off the light and makes pedantic arguments regarding the nature of electricity versus oil lamps and the restrictions on the handling of fire, attacking tradition by accusing his community of compromising their own rules. His family retaliates by excluding him from a family gift-giving ritual and pointing out his isolation: “Everyone wants his Sabbath present except Mordekhai! It’s all the same to him, he’s not a Jew!” (PS, 146). Through this conflict Alexandre begins to realize that while attacking tradition, “I had nothing to offer in its stead” (PS, 151). This discovery, that he cannot substitute acquired knowledge for the cultural practices of his community,30

29 Albert Memmi, The Pillar of Salt [1955] (Boston: Beacon P, 1992): 117; further references in the text, abbreviated as “PS.” 30 In Decolonization Memmi discussed the malleability of culture in reference to the former colonized adopting aspects of the colonizer’s language and institutions: “culture is a kind of curio shop where each of us can pick and choose according to our desires and fears” (Memmi, Decolonization, 41). Here he suggests culture is adaptable; however, I believe this is distinct from Alexandre’s attempt to reject his Jewishness.

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signals a transition through which Alexandre grows to appreciate the significance of the rituals he derided. Soon after, he attends an exorcism – the women of the family had concluded that the bad financial and romantic luck of his Aunt Maissa was caused by demonic possession. Though initially horrified by the superstition as well as the wanton dancing and shrill noise of the ritual, he becomes convinced that this dance awakens feelings more authentic than anything he could experience through French culture. In particular the contortions of his mother manifest an otherworldly quality and for a moment the skeptical intellectual depicts the traditional magic of the ritual as fact.31 Memmi does not identify it as such but this dance is the Stombali, a Tunisian healing dance, and a case study published in 2000 by two Israeli researchers on the Stombali as an example of dissociative trance healing uses Memmi’s description along with firsthand accounts transcribed by the authors’ interviews to describe key parts and aspects of the dance.32 Alexandre admits he is moved by the music and dance; however, after recovering he now claims that this is evidence of his own irredeemable backwardness: after fifteen whole years of exposure to Western culture, of which ten were filled with conscious rejection of Africa, must I now accept this self-evident truth, that all these ancient and monotonous melodies move me far more deeply that all the great music of Europe… yes, I suppose I am an incurable barbarian! (PS, 165)

Alexandre is horrified at both his inability to escape this connection and the magnitude of his failure to replace that tradition with the French culture he believed represented the only path to material and intellectual liberation.33 Humbled by his inability to challenge the superstitions his family holds so dearly, he is forced to admit his failure to replace them in his own life. The Western culture he associates with progress and enlightenment is not something he can make himself appreciate in the same manner. He feels the power of the

31 Eli Somer and Meir Saddon, “Stambali: Dissociative Possession and Trance in a Tunisian Healing Dance,” Transcultural Psychiatry 37.4 (2000): 581–602. 32 See Somer and Saddon, “Stambali.” 33 In his introduction to Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World, Neil Lazarus invokes Theodor Adorno’s admonition “one must have tradition to hate it properly” because according to Lazarus “he believes it is only from the ground of this tradition that the thoroughgoing, preservative yet emancipator critique of its social conditions of possibility can be staged.” This was in reference to Western bourgeois tradition but I see parallels in Alexandre and Memmi’s rebellion and eventual reevaluation of Jewish tradition (Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999]: 1–3, referencing Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott [London: Verso, 1992]: 52).

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culture he was raised in. Alexandre contemplates the closeness of this cultural bond while watching a group of boys mime the circumcision ritual.34 He ponders the physical binding of the people to god: “can I ever forget the Orient? It is deeply rooted in my flesh and blood, and I need but touch my own body to feel how I have been marked for all time by it” (PS, 169).

The Scorpion – Experimental Text Memmi’s 1969 novel The Scorpion is a complex and multi-layered work primarily consisting of the narrator Marcel reviewing the notes and writings of his absent brother Emile (whether he is still alive is unclear). The text transitions between Emile’s voice, Marcel’s commentary on Emile’s writings, and Marcel’s ruminations on his own life in post-independence Tunisia. Marcel, an ophthalmologist, faces an archetypal postcolonial quandary.35 He is forced to choose between accepting the removal of Niel, a highly skilled French colleague, from his administrative position at the major hospital where Marcel practices, or protesting the dismissal and risking the ire of the new government.36 While initially assuming that Niel had been fired due to the general removal of French professionals from significant positions following independence, Marcel begins to see a deeper issue, a particular sort of effectiveness that got in too many people’s way. He took care of every kind of family in every class of society and every community in the country. He knows too many secrets and he knows about too many tragic situations, too much poverty. (TS, 88)

34 While this reenactment of the circumcision ritual is presented as an uncomfortable subject for Alexandre and the boy “playing” the victim, it was an act in the end. Memmi has rarely addressed taboo sexuality outside of intermarriage, as opposed to another North African novelist, Rachid Boudjedra who scathingly critiqued “respectable” colonized society through a narrator’s account of being sexually pursued as a young boy by an upstanding member of the community (Rachid Boudjedra, La Répudiation [Paris: Denoel, 1969]). 35 Marcel’s decision to become an optometrist was inspired by his father’s eye condition, his criticism of his prodigal brother is tinged with envy. Memmi himself underwent cataract surgery in 1997 (Robequain, “Jalons Bio-Bibliographiques,” in Lire Albert Memmi, eds. David Ohana, Claude Sitbon and David Mendolson [Paris: Editions Factuel, 2002]: 231). For more on Memmi’s work regarding the themes of blindness and vision as well as his interest in using color and nonstandard text to convey perspective, see Lia Brozgal, “Blindness, the Visual, and Ekphrastic Impulses: Albert Memmi Colours in the Lines,” French Studies 64.3 (2010): 317–328. 36 Albert Memmi, The Scorpion (Chicago: Grossman, 1971): 65; further references in the text, abbreviated as “TS.”

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His knowledge of the problems which the new regime cannot fix, combined with his French origins, causes Niel to lose his job. Marcel, with a strongly developed dedication to providing quality care, questions the firing of a good healer; however, he grasps the apparent and deeper reason for his colleague’s dismissal. While Memmi’s accusations against postcolonial regimes’ attempts to “promote distractions” and “a natural tendency to exaggerate one’s pains and attribute them to another”37 in Decolonization (2006) can appear overly polemic, this subplot in The Scorpion provides an evocative example of this dysfunction. Emile’s pieces include details of his childhood, his own travels, and a series of fictional narratives of a medieval kingdom – Marcel assures the reader that this is a sparse selection from a substantial quantity of loosely related notes. In the sections of The Scorpion featuring his study in France, Emile portrays himself as a perpetual stranger in an unwelcoming French university system that failed to provide a sense of belonging amongst the intellectual community he sought after rejecting the traditions of his family. Reading these accounts, Marcel sardonically dismissed his brother’s travels as another example of his irresponsibility and wayward personality (TS, 73). Emile could not shed his former identity or return home, though again Marcel provides a counterpoint by insisting that Emile’s stories of their family are dramatized at best and fiction at worst. In many ways Emile’s life appears to be a continuation of Alexandre’s following the conclusion of The Pillar of Salt – with similar academic interests and a period spent in South America.

Uncle Makhlouf One portion of the writings Marcel encounters feature Emile’s discussions with “Uncle Makhlouf,” a prototypical wise older Jew and Kabbalist mystic. Uncle Makhlouf is also blind and, although there is no supporting commentary from Marcel in this case, Makhlouf’s blindness is inseparable from other equally apparent visual references in the text – Marcel’s decision to become an ophthalmologist resulting, as he later admits, from feelings of helplessness following his father’s debilitating eye disorder. Amidst allegorical stories, axioms, and sage observations, perhaps the most pertinent fragment from these conversations with Uncle Makhlouf is Emile’s query regarding the mystic’s ability to present observations of human behavior despite physical blindness. Maklouf responds: “m’oblige maintenant à me concentrer sur les seuls textes que je connaisse par

37 Memmi, Decolonization, 19.

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cœur. C’est certainement un progress” (TS, 69). Alone, this might be dismissed as a fairly traditional assertion of scriptural authority; however, in conjuction with Memmi’s pursuit of the visual and exploration of textual dynamism, Brozgal’s assertion that “by limiting himself to the texts he knows by heart – sacred texts from the Torah – Uncle Makhlouf develops an inner vision as his physical vision becomes increasingly compromised” places this conversation in the wider context of Memmi’s oeuvre.38 The text is an interplay between worlds, as is the case with so many of Memmi’s characters and Memmi himself. In the course of his writings, as encountered by Marcel, Emile himself also experiences a gradual loss of sight: “his prose suggests that blindness does not presage utter darkness, but rather a new enlightenment.”39 Makhlouf demonstrates vision beyond the scope of one man’s experiences, identifying him as the only character in Memmi’s novels who may, in his blindness, perceive the metanarrative across Memmi’s texts. His wisdom derives from stories and he perceives multiple paths for young Sephardic Jews like Emile, each ending in its own form of exile. A thorough examination of Memmi’s novels set in twentieth-century Tunisia reveals a significant array of parallels between Memmi’s characters – not to mention his own life, though I hesitate to attribute specific details regarding the autobiographical nature of these figures. However, the interplay between characters across novels creates a fascinating continuity without requiring the reader to perceive these connections. Emile and Marcel are certainly their own duo – the former pursuing his fortunes abroad while the latter directed his talents towards family and homeland. As a novelist, Memmi follows many of the same tropes to which he attributed a lack of noteworthy Jewish literary production: an obsession with exile and instability as well as a penchant for guilt-tinged psychological analysis. He also attempts to reconstruct a semi-mystical past.40 Scenes of this past are featured in the short pieces from the latter chapters of The Scorpion entitled “Chronicles from The Kingdom of Within” which appears to presage the collection of more cohesive stories unified in The Desert.

38 Brozgal, “Albert Memmi Colours in the Lines,” 319. 39 Brozgal, “Albert Memmi Colours in the Lines,” 319. 40 In the context of Memmi’s assertions that national identity is the necessary means for political and social liberation of peoples, these forays into a constructed past become more prescient. In addition to his discussion of nationalism in The Colonizer and the Colonized, advocacy of the state of Israel in Liberation of the Jew, and more bitter reflections on the necessarily risks of nationalism in Decolonization, this wary belief that nationalism is necessary appears in both his critique of the French left, “The Colonial Problem and the Left” and his prediction of violent large-scale racial conflict in the United States, “The Paths of Revolt,” in Dominated Man, 3–15.

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The Desert Memmi’s 1966 novel The Desert features a series of firsthand tales from the life of the narrator Jubair Ouali El-Mammi, a fifteenth-century North African prince.41 ElMammi is an exile who has lost his kingdom, Le Royaume-du-Dedans (the Kingdom of Within as mentioned in The Scorpion), most likely a metaphor for a search for self-identity in line with Alexandre Benillouche’s journey in The Pillar of Salt and Memmi’s own project. Following a life of trials and adventures, he was captured by the conqueror Tamerlane, who employed him as a political advisor. After a brief exposition, the novel proceeds with a series of episodes which form the remainder of the work. Mammi recounts his life to Tamerlane episodically, each story concluding with a lesson on morality, wisdom, or the weakness of the individual. The prevailing theme is a pessimistic view of humanity punctuated by man’s savagery, ingratitude, and lust for power. For example, in a story of a rebellion against an ostensibly benevolent king, “in the same morning, some rebels were hung, tongues of blasphemers were pulled off, hands of little thieves were cut off” and of a kingdom where “in order to ensure political stability, it was customary to gouge out the eyes of all potential rivals to the throne” (TD, 182). In a particularly damning summation, a minor character laments that “history is made of darkness and gloom; generosity and goodness are no more than rare flashes of lightning” (TD, 85). This continues Memmi’s habit of associating positive characteristics with the fleeting, malformed, and unstable. The name of the protagonist is blatantly self-referential and there is continuity between The Desert and parts of Memmi’s other novels. In addition to the references to the “Kingdom of Within,” there is also a section of The Scorpion in which the eye doctor Marcel reads a detailed account of his brother Emile’s research into the history of the family name (also Memmi) in which Emile considers detailed histories dating the family back to the Roman colonization of Africa or the Renaissance Italian painter Lippo Memmi as well as a position of some local prominence among the region’s Jewish community (TS, 17–21). As is often the case when reading Emile’s notes, Marcel finds this commentary highly speculative. Memmi offered two explanations for his last name: that he is related to the Kabyle people of northern Algeria, a Berber group in which Memmi is an old and respected family name.42 He also hypothesized that Memmi is a derivative of the 41 Albert Memmi, Le Désert (Paris: Gallimard, 1977); further references in the text, abbreviated as “TD.” 42 Michele Robequain indicates Memmi means “baby” in Kabyle in “Jalons Bio-Bibliographiques”.

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Roman “Memmia.”43 His mother Marguerite (Maira) Sarfati hailed from a Berber ethnic group in Tunisia who spoke Judeo-Arabic. The closest to an actual reference to Mammi is a brief mention in the novel Strangers (1955) wherein the narrator indicates that his ancestors served the pre-colonial rulers of Tunis.44 The novel does not rely on a central magical element to further its premise. The most apparent example of a complete departure from the real is “The Prince Magician,” in an eponymously entitled chapter, whose work is accepted without great surprise by his people. He appears in the book as an example of blind selfishness, controlling the elements but using these powers to subdue or punish enemies rather than improve the kingdom (TD, 158–168). More commonly, The Desert is a teaching epic in the vein of Candide (1759), with a framing device resembling that of The Arabian Nights. Mammi’s life is fantastic and his perspectives appear unique and fruitful for the reader, but he remains a fairly mundane figure in the context of his own world. Like Candide, Mammi travels far and wide, exposing the absurdity and manipulation behind religious and social practices. One scene particularly evocative of Candide is a chapter entitled “A la Cour de Castille.” Mammi witnesses a grand Catholic ritual at the Spanish court and is told that “this is the procession of the God of the Spanish.” Mammi is confounded by the idea of “taking God to a walk […] a statue of plaster representing a man lying on a stretcher and carried by men who walked despondently, a dead man […] pallid and covered with a thousand little wounds oozing with blood and pus.” He then concludes that this must be a “pagan and cruel people who represents its Creator in this manner” (TD, 108).

Conclusion – Dreams of the Self, Dreams of the Future The Desert ends with Mammi redefining the terms of his quest. He realizes that the search for his lost kingdom has become a search for his own self-identity – the

43 Albert Memmi, Le Nomade immobile (Paris: Arlea, 2000): 15. 44 Albert Memmi, Agar (Paris: Correa, 1955). Strangers features an unnamed narrator who attends medical school in France and returns, like Memmi himself, with an Alsatian wife named Marie. The novel is an account of the narrator’s inability to translate this education in a successful career and the failure of the couple’s marriage as the toll of familial expectations and foreign environment prove too much to overcome. There is a Spanish princess in The Desert, the subject of Mammi’s only emotionally compelling romantic relationship, who somewhat resembles Marie (TD, 168).

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true kingdom, evoking the “kingdom of within” from The Scorpion. Mammi’s travels convince him not only of man’s cruelty, but of his commonality. Race mixing, religious conquest, and shifting boundaries of all kinds have rendered ancient claims spiritually unimportant even if they remain socially and physically relevant. Mammi’s conclusion: the common fate of man is this uncertainty. In his introduction to a 1965 edition of The Colonizer and the Colonized, Memmi hoped that he might “represent everyone, because I belong to no one.”45 In his novels, Memmi’s characters undergo a tumultuous process of rejection, disillusionment and actualization. Through magical realism and metanarrative he shows his characters the substance of the traditions they deny as well as the junctures between individual experience and the universal. Ultimately, Memmi has embraced a universalist conception of the future, with the assertion of self – i.e. anti-colonial nationalism – as a stage of liberation ultimately resulting in the acceptance of our common humanity. Thus he has argued that accepting, rather than eliminating or obscuring, difference is the key to defeating racism and prejudice. In the end, a better world would then be made by decisions, relying on the willful participation of individuals: [I]n the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice, a just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.46

Despite Memmi’s pessimism in The Desert, and throughout much of his work, he remained certain that the active choice to accept differences without prejudice remained both a possibility and the only viable means for a complete liberation from discrimination and cycles of oppression. Memmi’s life project has taken a similar course – the realization that the past cannot be escaped, the future cannot be magicked or tricked into perfection, and the difficult emphemeral dreams must be pursued. From ideals to invented tradition, the persistence of these dreams proves their substance.

45 Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized, preface to the 1965 edition, xvi. 46 Memmi, Racism, 165.

Efraim Sicher and Shuly Eilat

Inception of a Nation and the Birth of the Hero: Magic Realism in Meir Shalev’s A Pigeon and a Boy and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children 1

Meir Shalev’s A Pigeon and a Boy (Yona vana’ar, 2006) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) both relate love stories to the inception of a nation, but in doing so present postmodern notions of love which are inextricably bound up with acts of violence. In Midnight’s Children Rushdie’s magic realism describes the birth of the protagonist and a nation ripped apart by political conflicts through the motifs of blood, land, sperm, death, and birth. Similar motifs run through Shalev’s novel. The Partition of India in 1947 and Israel’s War of Independence are each presented as acts of inception within love stories that question the ties of body and nation and undermine the official narrative about the birth of the nation. Moreover, conception takes place through an irrational fantasy or a magical act. In each of these novels, though with very different ideological and aesthetic implications, the search for a home questions what a homeland is, and engages with postmodern concerns with globalization and a lack of roots. This essay compares a prize-winning Hebrew bestseller by one of Israel’s leading contemporary novelists that has been made into a play, Meir Shalev’s A Pigeon and a Boy (Yona vana’ar, 2006),2 with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), a classic of postmodern and postcolonial literature that no contemporary writer could fail to have read. The comparison, though surprising at first sight, can tell us much about the way their shared magic realism transforms foundation myths and parodies the individual’s place in history, a disturbing trend in contemporary Israeli fiction which critiques the narratives on which the existence of the state is based, despite the fact that Hebrew literature has always been identified with the national narrative. The influence of Gabriel García Márquez

1 An earlier version of this essay was read at an international conference on “Love and Theories,” Hebrew University of Jerusalem, June 2012. We are grateful to Yael Halevi-Wise for her comments during the course of revision. 2 Meir Shalev, Yonah vana’ar (Tel Aviv: ’Am ’Oved, 2006).

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has been noted by the eminent Israeli critic Gershon Shaked,3 but Shalev denies this and ascribes his “magical realism” to his imagination and the influence of the Bible.4 In both novels love stories leading to the birth of the protagonists coincide with the nation’s historical inception, the Partition of India (1947) and Israel’s War of Independence (1948), thus raising questions about the relationship between body and nation, personal life story and history, subjective narrative and collective identity. Both writers describe personal relationships as acts of consummation that are bound up with the violent inception of the nation – in Rushdie’s novel the bloody sectarian violence that wrenched apart India and Pakistan, Hindus and Muslims; in Shalev’s novel the War of Independence, which followed Arab rejection of the Partition Plan, and in particular the battle of San Simon on April 28, 1948, a central episode in Shalev’s novel in which the “Baby” (hatinok) or “Boy” of the English translation’s title is killed. Each of these novels presents the entwining of personal lives and stories in national histories, but also deconstructs the relation of the individual to the nation. Rushdie illustrates the fallacy of a pure national identity through Saleem’s multiple identities: he is British and Hindu by birth, brought up as a Muslim by his Christian aya, Mary Pereira, and then taken from his native Bombay to Pakistan, where he serves in insurgent operations in the breakaway Bangladesh. Yet from the moment Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight, together with the new state, and receives the letter from Nehru as the midnight child, family history is inextricably intertwined with the fate of the nation. And Saleem’s love affairs are intricately linked with ideological, class, and sectarian strife within India and the Indo-Pakistan war. The parallel between the two novels is quite striking. Rushdie undermines the mythical binding of national histories and personal stories through the parallelism of blood and death in the two inceptions, of Saleem and India, as a critique of the mythical binding of individuals to nations. As if to underscore this, Saleem is released from any attachment to a biological mother or to a “motherland.” The

3 Gershon Shaked, Tmunah qvutsatit: hebetim besifrut yisrael vetarbutah, ed. Giddon Ticotsky and Malka Shaked (Tel Aviv: Kinneret/Zmora-Bitan, 2009): 249. 4 See for example Shalev’s comments in Andrea Crawford, “Home Alone,” Tablet – A New Read On Jewish Life (December 12, 2007), http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/ 964/home-alone (accessed November 8, 2012). Shalev names among his influences Gogol, Mikhail Bulgakov, Nabokov, Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Melville. He has rejected critics’ comparison of his earlier novels with One Hundred Years of Solitude, saying that the mythology of Israel’s pioneers gave him sufficient material (interview with journalist Carmit Gai, July 15, 1988, quoted in Smadar Shiffman, Tvi’ot ’etsba’o shel hamekhaber: Faulkner, Hemingway, Meir Shalev [Tel Aviv: Haqibuts hameukhad, 1999]: 198).

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declared attachment to the nation in Nehru’s letter is undermined by the actual detachment from biological family through Mary’s deception and Vanita’s death. Saleem’s birth, like most of the events in Rushdie’s novel, is an accidental intervention in history, like his grandfather’s happening to be at the Amritsar massacre (April 13, 1919) or his own later participation in the Pakistani coup d’état (1958), not to mention his fantasized or actual interventions in the lives (and deaths) of others. Yet, despite the emphasis on incidental ties between Saleem and national history, the individual nevertheless cannot break free from his identification with the nation. Saleem’s face is likened by one of his teachers to the map of India. On his return from Pakistan, he regards India as his birthsister, later to be betrayed by the Widow (Indira Ghandi/Indira-India) during the State of Emergency, and he embodies the sectarian conflicts that divide the sub-continent – so it is no wonder that his body, like that of the nation, is in a process of decay. Saleem’s factual errors in his fragments of memory are not accidental. Rushdie described Midnight’s Children as “a novel of memory and about memory,”5 written from distance of time and location: This is why I made my narrator, Saleem, suspect in his narration; his mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory compounded by quirks of character and of circumstances, and his vision is fragmentary. It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost.6

Shalev also questions personal and collective memory by having Yair imagine his mother’s story of his birth, and, although he is not physically in exile, Shalev too fragments both the official narrative of the birth of his homeland that was conceived in blood and the story of the birth of his protagonist, likewise conceived in violence and death. The narrator Yair’s conception results from his father’s gruesome death in battle, when, in an act of love, in one of the novel’s moments of magic realism, a dove delivers the Baby’s sperm to Ra’aya, who thrusts it in her vagina with a syringe. In A Pigeon and a Boy the circumstances of the narrator’s conception place the events at a crucial historical moment, the battle of San Simon and the birth of the state. The lovers, Ra’aya and the “Baby,” work for the Palmach, the clandestine armed forces against the British, training homing pigeons to carry essential mes-

5 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–91 (London: Granta, 1991): 10. 6 Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 11.

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sages. The “Baby” is an anti-hero, sent into battle ill-prepared, maltreated by a callous officer, mocked because of the dovecot he carries around on his back, and becomes a nameless victim, caught in a brutal war machine, whose untimely death ends his love story with Ra’aya in a sexual and emotional climax. Yair Mendelssohn, the son born of this fantastic union, is trapped in the cycle of historical violence not only in the story of his birth, but also in his relationships with domineering women, and he cannot free himself from these ties except by eliminating the figure of the father in an Oedipal love-hate relationship with the mother and the nation. The “murder” is acted out in Yair’s ritualistic killing of the dove and cannibalistic eating of the Christological symbol of divine conception. It is the mother’s story of this almost immaculate conception which Yair is narrating in the plot of the novel, but also resisting in his reimagining of the self as a homing pigeon who is always seeking a home, as in the symbol of Israel returning home in Isaiah and Bialik.7 He circles like a vulture, looking for a home that “would wrap itself” around him, a “refuge of sorts,”8 and finds an abandoned house in a village which his childhood lover Tirzah rebuilds with his mother’s money and the connivance of her father Meshulam, who has a long and dubious relationship with Yair’s mother. In a scene referring to the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with the angel (PB, 159), Tirzah’s love enables him to let go of his mother’s ghost, and to inhabit the house which inhabits him and in which he is “the man and the house” (PB, 159). In ironic allusion to Sarah’s taking of Hagar as surrogate mother in the Bible, Yair builds and is built by his lover Tirzah’s construction of his house, after he leaves his attractive, sexually empowered wife, Liora, a business executive. However, the domineering relationships in which he is trapped make it difficult for him to totally break free from the mythical structures that have shaped his life and, at a different level, from the history of the nation. While Yair seems to have found a home, it “shifts in a slow, never-ending dance, while we, – the houses, the trees, the people, the animals – are carried about in its arms, moving on its thin outer crust” (PB, 179). In Midnight’s Children, Saleem never manages to build a home or find love, but, like Yair, feels estranged from his family, whom he constantly accuses of betraying him. Saleem seeks both sexual relief and nurturing in the women in his life, whom he can never satisfy, yet he cannot break free from strong manipulative women – Evelyn Lilith Burns, his grandmother, his aunt, or Padma, the dung-lotus who is the reader of his story:

7 See Shalev’s comments on this in Crawford, “Home Alone.” 8 Meir Shalev, A Pigeon and a Boy, trans. Evan Fallenberg (New York: Schocken, 2007): 103. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “PB.”

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(Women have always been the ones to change my life: Mary Pereira, Evie Burns, Jamila Singer, Parvati-the-witch must answer for who I am; and the Widow, who I’m keeping for the end; and after the end, Padma, my goddess of dung. Women have fixed me all right, but perhaps they were never central – perhaps the place which they should have filled, the hole in the centre of me which was my inheritance from my grandfather Aadam Aziz, was occupied for too long by my voices. Or perhaps – we must consider all possibilities – they always made me a little afraid.)9

The love stories in the background of Saleem’s birth of Nadir Khan and Amina, of Vanita and Methwold, of Mary and Joseph – all tell of abandonment, of disappointment, of untimely deaths, impotence, and failure. The Witch and the Widow are ultimately sinister figures in the love story and in the story of the nation, whereas Shalev’s strong nurturing women who define the lives of men also have positive, creative roles in the story of the nation: Ra’aya participates in the Haganah, Tirzah is a building constructor. Of course, these stereotypes of the powerful muscular Israeli female pioneer only make Yair feel more emasculate and impotent as one who does nothing to build the nation or his own life. In both novels, though with very different ideological and aesthetic meanings ascribed to home and homeland as illusionary constructs, the search for love expresses postmodern concerns with rootlessness and fragmentation. In discussing his reimagining of India and his ties with the land of his birth, Rushdie speaks of “not actual cities, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.”10 While Yair’s rootlessness, his sense of homelessness in his native homeland, is not identical with Saleem’s drifting between two countries and several identities, it does share in the postcolonial sense of homelessness and rootlessness, as well as the ongoing search for home through relationships with women. In each of these novels, desire is never fully consummated and the love stories run counter to romantic narratives of national self-determination, presenting instead the fragmentation of body and self, and the impossible satisfaction of desire.11 If the family romance was the backbone of the nineteenth-century

9 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Vintage, 1995): 192. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “MC.” 10 Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 10. 11 Much could be said here about postmodern love, which has become a commonplace of the novel plot as a commoditized object of desire, impossible to attain; see Catherine Beasley, “Postmodern Love: Questioning the Metaphysics of Desire,” New Literary History 25 (1994): 683– 705. See also Stephen Kern’s account of the shift in representation of love from the Victorian novel’s dramatization of power conflicts to the modernists, who seemed preoccupied with a highly sexualized discourse about love and the psyche, The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992).

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Bildungsroman, which constructed in its fictions the “imagined community” of the nation,12 magic realism deconstructs the myth, showing the narratives which construct a sacred ancestral past to be unstable and untrustworthy, but also exploiting the possibility that family secrets can be freely imagined as erotic fantasies, a staple of the family romance, which centered on the Oedipal complex.13 In Midnight’s Children and in A Pigeon and a Boy, history is fatally coincidental with personal lives. Homi Bhabha reminds us that the discursive identification of the nation with the individual has given way to postmodern gatherings of scattered migrants: The focus on temporality resists the transparent linear equivalence of event and idea that historicism proposes; it provides a perspective on the disjunctive forms of representation that signify a people, a nation, or a national culture. […] it is the mark of the ambivalence of the nation as a narrative strategy – and an apparatus of power – that it produces a continual slippage into analogous, even metonymic categories like the people, minorities or “cultural difference” that continually overlap in the act of writing the nation. What is displayed in this displacement and repetition of terms is the nation as the measure of the liminality of cultural modernity.14

The nation, concludes Bhabha, is a “metaphor”; among his examples is Midnight’s Children, but also Middlemarch and One Hundred Years of Solitude.15 Contrary to Nehru’s vision of the Indian nation as “unified in diversity” Rushdie illustrates the ideological, class and sectarian conflicts that subvert the official version of unity in diversity. In Rushdie’s novel ancient India is about to be reborn, but is nevertheless quite imaginary. The birth of the nation is a new festival in the calendar catapulting us […] into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will – except in a dream we all agreed to dream; it was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat, and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood (MC, 112).

12 Pieter Vermeulen and Ortwin de Graef, “Bildung and the State in the Long Nineteenth Century,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 10.2 (2012): 241–250; see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991). 13 Marthe Robert, Origins of the Novel, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980): 21–31. 14 Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990): 291–322, 292. 15 Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 293.

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Anna Guttman reads Midnight’s Children as an explicit endorsement of Benedict Anderson’s concept of the imagined community and comments on these “rituals of blood” in Midnight’s Children: The “rituals of blood” in which the nation is performed inevitably threaten the very fabric of the nation, as they lead to the death both of its citizens and of the ideals on which the nation is founded. […] If for Rushdie, India’s espousal of hybridity is always juxtaposed with Pakistan’s self-declared purity, then any conflict between the two nations inevitably represents a rivalry of competing national myths.16

During his brief flirtation with Evelyn Lilith Burney (two mythical women in one!), which ends with his sister’s bloody vengeance, Saleem muses on the interconnection of blood and death, realizing that Evie’s kicks were aimed at him and that his sister’s devotion was sibling love, that “her act of war was actually an act of love”: There were bloody murders, and perhaps it is not appropriate to end this sanguinary catalogue by mentioning, once again, the rushes of blood to my mother’s cheeks. Twelve million votes were coloured red that year, and red is the colour of blood. […] Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form. (MC, 226).

It is as if Saleem has been predestined, despite his misbirth into another family, to be fated by blood type and, on a national level, by bloodshed. The parallels between the two historical events of inception, in India and Israel, emerge from a postcolonial discourse that rewrites history from a subaltern viewpoint as a struggle against imperialism. For Aamir Mufti, in his book, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (2007), the Enlightenment project’s handling of the “Jewish Question” offers a paradigm for the colonization of the Indian sub-continent. In this conflation of two thousand years of Jewish history, the establishment of the Jewish nation-state is presented as a result of the European solution of the Jewish Question in the Holocaust, and it is chronologically (but not causally) parallel with Partition in India: The history of Zionism and Indian Muslim separatism unfolded over almost precisely the same period of time, that is, the first half of the twentieth century, and of course the establishment of the (European) Jewish state and the creation of the (Indian) Muslim state occurred less than a year apart in its fifth decade, both through massive transfers of population and the partitioning of territories in the process of their abandonment by the

16 Anna Guttman, The Nation of India in Contemporary Indian Literature (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): 63.

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British Empire […]. They are both signs of a crisis in the nation-state system at a specific moment in its history.17

For Mufti, the twentieth-century crisis of nationalism resulted in violent solutions of industrialized genocide and population transfer. Of course, in 1948 Jews saw themselves returning to their ancestral homeland, so the parallel with Partition is quite false. Nevertheless, in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988) a similar parallel is made between the Partition of India and Nazi genocide in imagery of bloodshed and sacrificial rites, and here too we are made to feel that the Muslims have displaced the Jews’ role as victims of persecution. “M USLIMS ARE THE J EWS OF A SIA ,” reads a slogan painted on walls during the Partition riots in Midnight’s Children (MC, 72; capitals in the original). For Shalev, the inception of the nation is also a violent act of rupture and bloodshed, but it is one that rewrites a master-narrative in national mythology. The archetypal story of the Binding of Isaac, the ’aqeda, is for Shalev the violent ritual of love in the mythical story of Israel’s inception as a people. As Shalev explains in his iconoclastic rereading of the biblical story, Isaac – or for Muslims, Ishmael – is Abraham’s beloved son, the “na’ar” (as in the Hebrew title of Shalev’s novel), whom God commands Abraham to offer as a burnt offering.18 As we know, that sacrifice did not take place and the Boy was saved, unlike generations of Jewish martyrs in modern history and the many Isaacs who did not return from the front in the War of Independence. This was a topos of modern Hebrew drama and poetry, which built on a convention of the hero as scion of the Maccabees but also a martyr for the cause. That convention drew on Christian tropes and owed something to the Russian religious notion of the podvig.19 However, in the euphoria of the victory in the Six-Day War it became transformed into a controversial figure of sacrifice in the name of patriotism, and, in anti-war polemics, it was used to challenge the original sacred myth after the rupture of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which fractured all serious attempts to salvage some heroism in the Israeli ethos. In the 1990s, A. B. Yehoshua turned the topos around to express the fear that next time Abraham’s hand would not be stayed by

17 Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007): 175. 18 Meir Shalev, “Haahavah harishonah,” in Reshit: paamim rishonot batanakh (Tel Aviv: ’Am ’Oved, 2008): 11–32. Translated as “The First Love,” in Beginnings: Reflections on the Bible’s Intriguing Firsts, trans. Stuart Schoffman (New York: Doubleday, 2011): 1–26. 19 Yael S. Feldman, Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010). See also Emmanuel Sivan, Dor tasha”kh: mitos, dyokan, vezikaron (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1991).

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an angel and that this foundation myth hovered “over our history like a black bird.”20 Sacrifice in the name of political and religious values that left-wing intellectuals no longer believed in was presented as a heavy price to be paid for the stubborn devotion to a piece of land. Judaism regards the binding of Isaac, which has a central place in the liturgy of the Jewish High Holidays, as a story of God’s love and mercy. Christians, on the other hand, read it as a prefigurement of the crucifixion. In his highly imaginative and playful reinterpretation of the ’aqeda, Shalev speaks of it as driving a wedge between Abraham and his son, the seed of the hate and bloodshed of the sectarian violence and religious wars of the Middle East. Shalev retells Abraham’s last years, spent with his concubines, as free from the encumbrance of symbolism, free of the covenant of the circumcision, and wishes somehow that Abraham was not buried in Hebron alongside Sarah, perhaps wishes that Israel’s binding to its ancestral sacrificial cult with its terrible stories of the binding of Isaac and Jephtah’s daughter could be undone.21 As it is, in Shalev’s rescripting of scripture, the inceptive act of violence which gave birth to the Jewish people and severed Ishmael from the birthright is an almost unforgivable act of love that (according to Shalev) has cost Israel, in the forty years since the Six-Day War, so much grief and bloodshed, a moral burden that Israel must carry.22 While it captures the rugged despair of the period, Shalev’s novel, contrary to the official Zionist narrative, describes the birth of the nation as an unforgiveable act of violence. Yair Mendelssohn is conceived out of that violent act of inception, much as W. B. Yeats imagines the copulation of Leda and the Swan as a violent event of historical and mythical consequences: A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?23

The sudden blow in this modernist view of history finds a parallel in Shalev’s novel when the American Palmachnik touches Yair intimately, a gesture repeated

20 Quoted in Feldman, Glory and Agony, 220. 21 Shalev, “The First Love.” 22 Meir Shalev, “Israel’s Lost 40 Years,” trans. Evan Fallenberg, Los Angeles Times (June 5, 2007), http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jun/05/opinion/oe-shalev5 (accessed November 8, 2012). 23 The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1950): 241.

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later in the novel, to indicate the manner of the Baby’s fatal wound which leads to his death and fathering of the narrator. Here we have a symbolic rupture of love, as well as a disruption of the love-plot. Saleem describes himself as the paschal lamb sacrificed to his parents’ love. In Midnight’s Children love has to be learned, as Amina Sinai learns to love her husband’s body part by part and learns to love him again after his rehabilitation following his “heartboot.” His parents have to learn to love Saleem and do not seek to reclaim their natural child, the discarded, brutal Shiva, Saleem’s nemesis who wreaks vicious revenge in the end. In a somewhat different way to Amina’s tryst with her first love, in Shalev’s novel Yair is brought up as a replacement for his mother’s first love, the “Baby,” also called Yair, and Yair Mendelssohn addresses his narrative to his domineering mother, who holds the secret of his origins, which Yair narrates in his imagination (though, unlike Padma, she does not comment on the narrative). She provides a role model as the destructive and willful mother, who eventually walks out on the successful pediatrician Dr. Mendelssohn and spends Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) smashing up disused buses in a local depot, transmitting to her children her wanton disregard for a stable family structure and social conventions. Yair’s mother is clearly one of the dominant women in Yair’s fantasy life. Ra’aya, Liora, and Tirzah all manipulate him and subordinate Yair to their emotional and sexual needs. The identification with his mother is so strong that Ra’aya and Yair vomit in unison when she miscarries. It seems Yair has difficulty in separating his self from his family/nation and this may be refracted in patterns of incestuous relations in the novel. Yair and Tirzah imagine each other as brother and sister and have had incestuous relations with her brother, Gershon, who later died in battle; this is mirrored after Yair’s death when the two Ys (Yoav and Yariv) have sex with a female student in the outdoor shower. The new generation born with the state, represented by Yair, experiences relationships as an ongoing struggle with deception and futility. Yair is unfaithful to his wife and remains childless, blaming his mother for his dissatisfaction in love. The following generation apparently repeats this legacy in an endless cycle. In each of these novels relationships are troubled, problematic, incestuous. Saleem, in Rushdie’s novel, cannot break free from his family complexes, even though he is not their natural offspring; yet when he is moved on or moved out of home, he reacts with anger at the betrayal. The pivotal moments of his maturation also bring revelations of sexual knowledge, as in the incident in the washing chest (imitating Nadir Khan’s own earlier escape and refuge in the bathroom), or his sexual embrace of his aunt. Saleem’s incestuous feelings for his sister are connected with his perception that he has been discarded in favor of her singing career.

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In Shalev’s novel Ra’aya has sex with the Baby in the zoo, watched by the animals (she jokes about this) and feeds him his own seed, like a pigeon, so that they commune on the same level as creatures of nature. Tirzah’s ritual acts of sex as she inaugurates each threshold of Yair’s new house present love as a primal instinct, an animal satisfaction of desire that appeases, or more precisely, domesticates the house spirits, allowing the adulterous lovers to appropriate this space as their own love nest – Ra’aya has taught Yair that houses are inhabited by spirits, they have souls to whom one can speak. To be free of his origins in the nation’s inception, Yair must symbolically kill the Father/Phallus, which he does ceremonially and brutally, as if expiating the unspeakable rites in the collective psyche that presumably have justified the necessary violence in the creation of the state and in his birth too. The grotesque killing of the dove (Christian symbol of the Holy Spirit but also carrier of the seed that conceived Yair) at the end of Chapter 24 seems to say something about the love-hate relationship with the nation/mother that has caused Yair such anguish and guilt and is responsible for him being what he is, that has in fact conceived his story. The dove, a plain pigeon decorated with what looks like a prayer shawl around its wings and tail, announces “I am the flesh and the soul […] I am the breeze of the body and the burden of love” (PB, 300).24 After roasting the bloody insides of the dissected carcass, Yair lights a memorial candle, but, standing naked in the shower, he cannot be cleansed of the blood and he is haunted by the cooing of a dove. Shalev’s protagonist/narrator, like a homing pigeon, seeks a home but he is caught up in the siege mentality of the pre-1967 Jewish state, evoked so well by Amos Oz in My Michael (1968) and A. B. Yehoshua in Three Days and a Child (1967). That nostalgia for the tiny refuge in time and space (done so well in the descriptions of Jerusalem’s Bet Hakerem neighborhood) and the estrangement of a decent, unaspiring individual caught up through his birth in a history not of his choosing characterize the dor hamedina – the generation of the state, born (as Shalev was) in 1948, who fought in the Yom Kippur War (coincidentally, codenamed Operation Dovecote) and who questioned the Zionist narrative when Israel waged war in Lebanon (Operation Peace for Galilee). The achievement of estab-

24 Cf. Shalev, Yonah vana’ar, 352. The Hebrew original of this passage is replete with inversions of biblical references, such as the dove sent from Noah’s Ark after the flood, as well as pagan and Christian expressions of the Eucharist or communion. Intertextual allusions to the Bible and to Bialik’s poem “Behind the Gate” (“Meakhorai hasha’ar”) recur in the novel; for a study of intertextuality and ironic use of the Bible (especially Genesis) in Shalev’s earlier novels see Smadar Shiffman, Dvarim sheroim mikan – David Grossman, Orly Castel-Blum, veMeir Shalev: me’ever lemodernizm? (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2007): 159–217.

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lishing a state through violence damaged their sense of moral integrity, sensing, as S. Yizhar did in his much-cited story of the 1948 war, “The Prisoner” (1948), that instead of salvation and miraculous survival Zionism had delivered a calamity on the Jewish people. Indeed, the consensus on the establishment of the state was challenged by intellectuals on the left, though Tom Segev’s controversial account of the reality behind the Zionist view of history which justified the founding of the state could still shock Israelis in 1986. The second intifada of 2000 seemed to echo the anxieties of a new post-Zionist generation that the endless struggle with the Arabs over the land of Israel (“Palestine”) endangered the future of the nation. In David Ohana’s account, the two counter-narratives to Zionism, Canaanite and post-Zionist, express different fears that undermine confidence in Israeli Jewish existence: one looks back to mythical origins in a pagan, non-Jewish past in the Middle East, the other represents Zionism as a foreign “crusade” implanted in the Middle East which (from a left-socialist ideological perspective) could only repeat compulsively the fate of European Jewry.25 Yosef Oren reads Meir Shalev’s first four novels as representative of the post-Zionist wave of disillusioned writers who rejected Zionism; they tell love stories in which the Zionist dream of settling the land is shown to fail over three generations.26 Indeed, as Chaya Shacham suggests, Shalev’s rewriting of the biblical story of Jacob in his 1991 novel Esau seems to trace back to the pioneering days of the 1920s modern Israeli conflicts of identity and tells of escape from Jerusalem/Zion where a disaster was about to happen.27 In The Loves of Judith (Keyamim akhadim, 1994), too, the tale of decay of a rural village idyll and death of the founding idealists push the traumatic War of Independence into the background, heard in a few shots from the road; of more interest is the love story and the lamb brought for slaughter from an Arab village (an allusion perhaps, but if so an elusive one). In this novel, as well as in The Blue Mountain (Roman russi, 1988) and Esau, Gershon Shaked saw a common shattering of dreams in the loves of the founding fathers and in their parallel ideological disillusion.28 Of course, the erotic, while focusing on intimate lives and pleasure, does not exclude ideology, but, as Shaked has commented, the carnivalesque,

25 David Ohana, Origins of Israeli Mythology: Neither Canaanites nor Crusaders (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011): 13–51. 26 Yosef Oren, “Post-Zionism and Anti-Zionism in Israeli Literature,” in Israel and the PostZionists: A Nation at Risk, ed. Shlomo Shara (Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic P, 2003): 188–203, 196–198. 27 Chaya Shacham, “Jew, Zionist, Hebrew, or Israeli? Transformations in the Identity of Jacob in the Novels of Benjamin Tammuz and Meir Shalev,” AJS Review 28.1 (2004): 173–188. 28 Shaked, Tmunah qvutsatit, 260–261.

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almost Rabelaisian treatment of historical events and the parody of biblical plots (as in Esau) lends a danse macabre feel to Shalev’s novels, whose neo-realism nevertheless, like some Brueghel canvas, affirms life in all its grotesqueness and reveals the bestiality and destructiveness within the human psyche; love is understood as a tribal, not a personal or national affair.29 The Yom Kippur War was, indeed, the turning point in collective consciousness when the cracks appeared in the ethos of the Sabra, the new Israeli man, the muscular Jew who had, in the official discourse of the early years of the State, erased the Diaspora past and proudly worked the land with the sweat of his brow, who fought and won the battle for survival. The official Zionist discourse which glorified those who died for their country (the last stand at Masada, the BarKokhba revolt, and Trumpeldor’s heroic death defending Tel-Hai) was now being challenged by counter-memories and alternative forms of national commemoration.30 The counter-imagery in Shalev’s novel of the dove, not a symbol of peace but of both creation and destruction, draws on different myths and cultures, like the chutney mix of pagan deities and legendary creatures which occupies Saleem’s imagination. This is in line with the generational unease with their heritage of some post-1973 Israeli intellectuals (Shalev began writing novels in the 1980s and so properly belongs to this new wave). While the intellectual’s homeless yearning recalls Heine and Wordsworth (the romantic “home within”), the postcolonial agenda is evident in the guilt associated with the origins of the nation-state. In adopting a postcolonial agenda, Shalev seems to have internalized the rootlessness of the global cosmopolitan of the kind we find in postcolonial readings of Rushdie. From his outsider-insider position, Rushdie critiques the sectarian violence and the gradual dissolution of India’s secularism. At the end, Saleem is fatalistically pessimistic about the continuity of his generation or his own survival. The optimistic promises held out at the birth of the Children of Midnight are undermined by history and circumstances ultimately beyond Saleem’s control. Saleem’s wife, Parvati, is killed and

29 Gershon Shaked, Modern Hebrew Fiction, trans. Yael Lotan, ed. Emily Budick (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000): 233–234; Shaked, Tmunah qvutsatit, 249–250; see Smadar Shiffman, “On the Possibility of Impossible Worlds: Meir Shalev and the Fantastic in Israeli Literature,” Prooftexts 13.3 (1993): 253–267; Shiffman, Tvi’ot ’etsba’o shel hamekhaber: 183–211; Robert Alter, “Magic Realism in the Israeli Novel,” in The Boom in Contemporary Israeli Fiction, ed. Alan L. Mintz (Hanover, NH: UP of New England/Brandeis UP, 1997): 17–34, 32–34. 30 Emmanuel Sivan, “Private Pain and Public Remembrance in Israel,” in War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999, 177–204. See also Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995).

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Saleem, who has passed for impotent, is sterilized. Yair casts off his childhood love Tirzah and invites his wife Liora to their Edenic love nest. In the end, he dies alone, in a traffic accident, bequeathing to his heirs the legacy of uneasy personal loves and unease with national destiny. Love in Shalev’s novel seems to be that empty category we find in Grossman’s See Under: Love (’Ayen ’erekh “ahavah,” 1986), the object of the endless search to satisfy desire and come to terms with a traumatic past. Shalev’s characters are not fully developed, but history has in any case made it impossible for Ra’aya’s love for the “Baby” to come to fruition and grow into a relationship beyond the exchange of letters or sexual gratification. Consummation of love comes only with death. Shalev’s novel, it would seem, fits into the paradigm Yael Halevi-Wise has discovered in the modern Hebrew novel from S. Y. Agnon to A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz of double love triangles across two generations which rewrite the redemptive narrative of Zionism and probe the disillusion with its messianic promise.31 Perhaps Shalev has even named Tirzah for the lover in Agnon’s novella In the Prime of Her Life (B’dmey yameha, 1923)! In Shalev’s novel, Yair is the replacement child for the Isaac figure who is killed in a dubious sacrifice to save the nation. Yet in inscribing in his novel the existential anxiety of the generation of 1948 tinged with the historical revisionism and post-Zionist skepticism of the post-1973 generation, Shalev seems to be voicing a characteristically postmodern uncertainty in his view of both politics and love as a series of sexual entanglements involving incest and violence. In this, Shalev’s Yair is, like one of Rushdie’s Midnight Children, a child of his time, burdened with repairing a past that can never be fully known, but impotent to mend the ruptures of a dysfunctional family and of history.

31 Yael Halevi-Wise, “The ‘Double Triangle’ Paradigm: National Redemption in Bi-generational Love Triangles from Agnon to Oz,” Prooftexts 26 (2006): 309–343.

Axel Stähler

The Search for M…: Magic Realism in Doron Rabinovici and Benjamin Stein Magic realism has recently been recognized for its potential of facilitating instances of traumatic representation which would otherwise remain impossible. As such it has proved to be particularly productive in representations of the Holocaust. Although not Holocaust novels in the more narrowly defined sense, Doron Rabinovici’s The Search for M (1997) and Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas (2010) are discussed in this article as examples of Jewish writing in which this pattern is continued to subtly different effect. It is argued that within the larger context of coming to terms with the past, magic realism provides a vehicle for both less to articulate trauma but rather to engage with its (trans-)generational impact and to explore its nature. The magic realist inflection of The Search for M, and in particular its central phantom character of Mullemann, is read in relation to the trans-generational transmission of trauma and phantom theory, the concept of the carnivalesque, and the superhero comic. More specifically, it is argued that the Levinasian concepts of the other and the trace are useful for an understanding of Mullemann as well as the use of the magic realist mode in The Search for M. An important intertext for both Rabinovici’s and Stein’s novels is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) which appears to have been read by both authors as a text suggesting the use of the magic realist mode. Stein’s novel, arguably inspired by Rabinovici’s, is moreover analyzed in particular in relation to Binjamin Wilkomirski’s controversial Fragments (1995). It is suggested that The Canvas offers a re-appraisal of the allegedly testimonial text, which has frequently been maligned after its authenticity – and that of its author – was challenged in 1998. It subverts the photographic hyper-realism of the earlier novel through what is, in effect, a transposition into the magic realist mode in order to admit alternative truths into the discourse on trauma. At the same time, Stein’s novel investigates the notion of a reality in which magic intervenes through the “poetic hand” of God. Exploring notions of guilt, memory, and identity both novels utilize magic realism in order to enquire into the nature of trauma in relation to which they gain a therapeutic dimension. “Was he always to be burdened by his past? Was he really to confess?” These are the questions haunting the protagonist of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) toward the end of Oscar Wilde’s novel. The answer, rendered in the same train of free

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indirect speech, is unequivocal: “Never.”1 The troublesome past referred to is that of the beautiful young man who has secretly metamorphosed into a murdering monster of depravity and debauchery. The only piece of evidence left against the wicked old man with the unchanged face of his youth is his portrait. Well hidden away in the attic of his house, it records the ugly and repellent lines which by rights should have been carved into his visage by age and his evil deeds. “It had been like a conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience.” The solution seems simple: “He would destroy it” (DG, 263). Dorian finds the knife with which he already killed the portrait’s creator: As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter’s work, and all that that meant. It would kill the past, and when that was dead he would be free. It would kill this monstrous soul-life, and, without its hideous warnings, he would be at peace. (DG, 263)

In a desperate attempt to dispense with his conscience and to escape from its haunting persistence, Dorian eventually stabs the painting. Alerted by the most horrendous scream, servants and the police enter the secret room in the attic, where they found, hanging upon the wall, a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. (DG, 264)

Of course, the unknown body is Dorian’s, though “[i]t was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was” (DG, 264). As an opener to an article on Jewish magic realism, the reiteration of the wellknown and well-deserved end of Dorian Gray may require some explanation. Wilde’s novel is usually neither considered to be a magic realist text, nor, of course, was its author Jewish. Yet, both Doron Rabinovici’s The Search for M (1997)2 and Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas (2010),3 which I propose to discuss in

1 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray [1891] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987): 262; further references in the text, abbreviated as “DG.” 2 Doron Rabinovici, The Search for M, trans. Francis M. Sharp (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 2000). Further references in the text, abbreviated as “SM”; divided by a forward slash, page references to the English translation will be followed by those to the German original, Suche nach M. Roman in zwölf Episoden [1997] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999). 3 Benjamin Stein, The Canvas, trans. Brian Zumhagen (Rochester, NY: Open Letter at the U of Rochester, 2012). The novel is split into two separate, yet converging narratives with independent pagination, commencing at either end and told by Jan Wechsler and Amnon Zichroni, respectively. Reflecting its bipartite structure, further references to the novel in the text will be abbreviated as either “C/W.” or “C/Z.”; divided by a forward slash, page references to the English

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this essay as examples of Jewish magic realist writing, allude overtly to the earlier text. It is, as I would suggest, primarily but not exclusively the unexplained and unchallenged magic power of the painting, ultimately a moral power, which imbues The Picture of Dorian Gray with significance for the two Jewish writers. Both their novels arguably represent an extrapolation of the correlation between guilt and memory and the intervention of potentially retributive magic indicated by Wilde’s text. With Rabinovici’s The Search for M arguably being an intertext for Stein’s novel, both engage with the legacy of the Holocaust and are, more specifically, explorations of processes of what has been called Vergangenheitsbewältigung, of coming to terms with the past, in particular that of the Holocaust. In both novels magic realist elements are employed to facilitate, to monitor, and to comment on those processes. Unlike the strange and inexplicable bond between painting and protagonist in The Picture of Dorian Gray which might, conceivably, be interpreted as magical in an otherwise largely realist text, in Rabinovici’s and Stein’s novels magic realist elements are introduced with the supernatural abilities of their protagonists. In The Search for M, guilt reveals itself to Dani Morgenthau in the bodily discomfort of a nervous rash, it is inscribed, as it were, onto his body; he feels the compulsion to take upon himself, and to confess to, any guilt he senses in those around him, sometimes even before it has been incurred. Arieh Scheinowiz (later Arieh Arthur Bein), in turn, has the ability to recognize those who are guilty; he tracks them down and then commits them to the vengeance of the Mossad in whose service he employs his talent. Both Dani and Arieh, in a way, have the ability to assimilate guilt and to assimilate the perpetrator’s mind; both metamorphose virtually into simulacra of those who feel, or at any rate should feel, guilty. As such, they are in effect embodiments of the two functions of Wilde’s painting: Dani personifies the others’ conscience; Arieh marks them for the punitive death blow. In The Canvas, Amnon Zichroni has a similarly distinctive gift, which also confuses identities: he is able to experience the memories of others. While in Rabinovici’s novel the supernatural abilities of his protagonists are used to reveal identity crises, trauma, and hidden guilt and to challenge (the lack of) the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Austria, Stein uses Zichroni’s talent to question notions of the authenticity of memory and identity within the larger context of an exploration of trauma and guilt as well as atonement and regeneration or purification.

translation will be followed by those to the German original, Die Leinwand [2010] (Munich: dtv, 2012).

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With this in mind, looking more closely at the passages from Wilde’s novel quoted above and identifying their main thematic concerns, the choice of both authors to allude to The Picture of Dorian Gray in the context of Vergangenheitsbewältigung may appear less arbitrary. In Wilde’s novel, the futile attempt to destroy the portrait and the perpetrator’s death invoke notions of guilt, of the compulsion to confess and of the impulse to evade responsibility, of the past and of memory, of deceptive appearances and of identity, of retribution and, last but not least, of the power and function of art. All of these are not only explored at length in both Rabinovici’s and Stein’s novels but are arguably relevant to the literary engagement with the Holocaust and with Vergangenheitsbewältigung at large. In what follows, I will explore the opportunities afforded the authors by using the magic realist mode, which may serve to explain their choice, and the ways in which both have made use of The Picture of Dorian Gray and of the magical real. A useful way of beginning this exploration is to have a closer look at the description of another portrait. Executed in mixed technique, it shows a human figure all wrapped up in bandages, with actual gauze applied to the oils on the canvas and obscuring the features of the sitter. It is a painting with which Rabinovici, in The Search for M, quite clearly alludes to Wilde’s novel as an intertext, for instance when it is described at length through the focalizer figure of art theoretician Sina Mohn: The oil painting bore the title “Ahasuerus.” It was constantly changing and aroused in Sina a series of diverse impressions. She continuously discovered something new in it. The character of “Ahasuerus” shimmered in the succession of changes within her, her thinking, her look – it reacted to her point of view. The depiction flowed into several vanishing points and, with every new position of the observer, the portrait was transformed. Ahasuerus turned his masked face in Sina’s direction, and she returned his gaze. As she began the slightest bow, Ahasuerus rose up. His figure grew into a threat, an accusation. […] It was a painterly trick that in some mysterious way Toot had accomplished, amplified, even perfected in his “Ahasuerus.” It was not only because the sense of Ahasuerus’s face had been narrowed to a slit – the masked figure looked down at her through a darkened crevice – and not only because the visual sensibility behind the crack as well as the entire figure moved with Sina, but rather because his attitude and impact changed with each new perspective. […] The truly unique thing about “Ahasuerus” was that it returned her gaze. […] She now felt her thoughts were being shadowed and exposed. She had set out to discover him, but in the meantime, it was she who had been discovered. The figure forced her into an inexplicably sad state of mind and her vision became blurred. It dawned on her that Otto Toot’s “Ahasuerus” was a kind of mirror that, instead of the observer’s exterior, reflected an inner light and blind spot: one’s own conscience. (SM, 138/200–201)

Ostensibly, the painting owes its perplexing power not to magic but to the skill of its creator. Nevertheless, even as Sina is able to rationalize its effect on her as an illusion achieved by the use of multiple vanishing points, the painting retains a

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mysterious force which produces an inexplicable sadness in her. Indeed, her realization that the portrait reveals her innermost feelings, that it confronts her with the blind spot in her vision of herself, with her conscience, imbues it with a magic of its own. As such it is closely linked to the figure of Mullemann, the “M” of the novel’s title,4 “this guilt phantom that has the whole city in a fever” (SM, 119/173). As Mullemann, Dani Morgenthau emerges as the articulate conscience of perpetrators in the past and in the present. His compulsory confessions reveal hidden crimes and threaten the complacency of the guilty. Like the portrait, Mullemann is wrapped in gauze (“Mull,” in German); his identity is completely hidden by the winding swathes which cover his skin and the putrid blossoming of his angry rashes. Even Mullemann himself, waking up in hospital, is no longer able to distinguish between himself and the layers of gauze applied to his suffering body, onto which are inscribed the traces of the fabric: Mullemann soon no longer knew where his dressing ended and where his skin began. It seemed to him that he could take off his own upper cell layers by unrolling them with the gauze. He saw his body surface banded by lines, as if his skin grew in spirals and swerves, as if it were following the tracks of the fabric. (SM, 74/111–112)

It is in this, the sixth, eponymously entitled episode of the novel, that the phantom first gains consciousness and that the narrative voice surreptitiously and intermittently changes to that of “Mullemann” with all the implications this has on the pattern of identification suggested to the reader: “Mullemann is lying in the hospital, yet I no longer know who is underneath all those layers of material.” And: “I don’t know whether I have turned completely into gauze” (SM, 74–75/112). The perplexing figure of Mullemann has been read by Denise Dick as an embodiment of the trans-generational transmission of trauma.5 More recently, this notion has been further developed by Daphne Seemann, who convincingly applies the phantom theory formulated by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok to

4 Rabinovici’s title alludes to Fritz Lang’s film M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (1931) as has been variously pointed out by critics; it has been explained with the film’s “questioning the adequacy of the judicial system versus personal revenge in confronting a serial killer” (Cathy S. Gelbin, “The Monster Returns: Golem Figures in the Writings of Benjamin Stein, Esther Dischereit, and Doron Rabinovici,” in Rebirth of a Culture: Jewish Identity and Jewish Writing in Germany and Austria Today, eds. Hillary Hope Herzog, Todd Herzog, and Benjamin Lapp [Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2008]: 21–33, 29). 5 Denise Dick, “Inheriting the Holocaust: Transfer of Trauma in Doron Rabinovici’s Suche nach M.,” Holocaust Studies 11.2 (2005): 103–115.

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Rabinovici’s construction of the gauze-shrouded figure.6 Focusing on the writer’s “psychoanalytical approach to explore the mechanics of transgenerational traumatization and the eerie re-emergence of an unmastered traumatic event through pathological symptom formations in the following generations,”7 Seemann interprets Mullemann as personifying the “final stage of severe transgenerational haunting”8 and argues that “the visible figure appears as a physical analogy to an invisible psychic reality.”9 While the psychoanalytical reading of Mullemann is convincing, it amounts in effect to a delimiting interpretation of Rabinovici’s novel as realist. Dick and Seemann consequently would find themselves at a loss how to explain those elements in the novel which elude rational enquiry.10 Another reading, more attentive to the supernatural dimension of The Search for M, has been proposed by Robert Lawson. Applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque, Lawson suggests that Rabinovici, like other contemporary Austrian and German Jewish writers, employs the principal elements of the carnivalesque, such as masquerade, role reversal, and grotesque realism, “as a means of expressing the incomprehensible nature of twentieth-century chaos and atrocities and as a vehicle for social criticism.”11 More specifically, the use of the carnivalesque, he argues, allows these writers to reflect that which is indescribable using other more traditional formulations, namely the horror of the Holocaust, the post-war failure of justice, and the inability of survivors and their descendants to deal with unimaginable trauma.12

Within this interpretive roster, Mullemann is read by Lawson as an inversion of the stereotype of the Wandering Jew which originates in the projection of guilt onto the figure of Ahasver who, in Christian lore, was condemned to eternal

6 Daphne Seemann, “Moving Beyond Post-Traumatic Memory Narratives: Generation, Memory and Identity in Doron Rabinovici, Robert Menasse and Eva Menasse,” Austrian Studies 19 (2011): 157–172, 158–161. For the phantom theory, see Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994). 7 Seemann, “Moving Beyond,” 158. 8 Seemann, “Moving Beyond,” 160. 9 Seemann, “Moving Beyond,” 158. 10 This is acknowledged, though not further pursued, by Dick when she observes in relation to Arieh’s supernatural ability that “[t]his aspect of Arieh’s personality goes beyond a realistically plausible description of the second generation and into the uncannily fantastic” (“Inheriting the Holocaust,” 110). 11 Robert Lawson, “Carnivalism in Postwar Austrian- and German-Jewish Literature: Edgar Hilsenrath, Irene Dische, and Doron Rabinovici,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 43.1 (2007): 37–48, 37. 12 Lawson, “Carnivalism,” 46.

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restlessness for denying Christ. With his supernatural ability of mirroring the guilt of others, Mullemann embodies for Lawson a role reversal; Arieh demonstrates a similar characteristic in that he is able “to transform himself into his polar opposite.”13 Yet the perpetrators into which Arieh transforms himself are never quite his “polar opposite,” although it is suggested that one of them has anticipated and mirrored Arieh’s every move in determining his identity (SM, 108/158). His real “polar opposite” is Dani Morgenthau, or Mullemann, who compulsively confesses to any guilt: “It was me. I’m the one. I did it” (SM, 162/233 et passim). However, Mullemann eludes Arieh’s attempts to identify and, initially, to neutralize him. He remains inaccessible to Arieh, and when he seeks to assimilate Mullemann, applying layers of gauze to his own face in an attempt to trace the phantom and to fathom his nature (SM, 147/213), he finds his endeavors frustrated by the elusive moral amorphousness of someone who “had committed no crime, yet who incessantly confessed to others’ crimes” (SM, 149/215). Yet Mullemann’s compulsion to confess to the crimes of others makes his true self invisible not only to Arieh but also to himself. I will return to the significance of this elusiveness and of the ambivalence of Mullemann’s shrouding in conjunction with a more detailed discussion of the painting of “Ahasuerus.” Lawson reads Mullemann’s gauze-shrouded appearance somewhat reductively merely as an instance of the grotesque. Indeed, elements of grotesque realism are most evident, in The Search for M, in the errant mummy-like figure of Mullemann. While Arieh has a similar supernatural ability, an “intuition” which he experiences as “a kind of allergy, a symptom, a hypersensitivity” (SM, 42/66), his external appearance is inconspicuous. Though initially developing a fever, a limp, and a speech impediment when confronted with documented crimes, once his ability is put to practical use, he is unencumbered by the sort of bodily discomfort experienced by Dani (SM, 42/66). Dani, too, finds partial and temporary relief in the seclusion and shelter of Sina Mohn’s flat and her love (SM, 133/ 193); but when he is arrested by the police, his condition reverts and he turns once again into the disfigured mummy, desperate for ever more bandages and continuously confessing to everything: “It was me. I’m the one. I did it” (SM, 162/233 et passim). Mullemann’s skin condition might conceivably be explained as a psychosomatic reaction, yet the supernatural phenomenon of which it is a symptom remains inexplicable. As such, Mullemann’s grotesque appearance is similar to that of other “magical real bodies” which, as Wendy B. Faris observes, “are literally inscribed with their social, political, cultural and geographical coordi-

13 Lawson, “Carnivalism,” 43.

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nates.”14 As exemplified by the smooth convergence of grotesque and magic realist elements in the figure of Mullemann, both modes exhibit significant similarities. Indeed, Jenni Adams has suggested that both are “structurally comparable, with both modes relying on a hybrid and internally-conflicted narrative dynamic for their disorientating effect”15 – magic realism integrates the magical and the real, grotesque realism amalgamates the horrific and the comic. Indeed, the “shared preoccupation with borders and their transgression is one of the most significant intersections between grotesque and magic realist narrative modes.”16 As Adams notes, both magic and grotesque realism “enable acts of traumatic representation that are otherwise impossible.”17 Both are therefore in recent Holocaust writing preferred modes of engaging with what has been designated as the ineffable or unspeakable, and both facilitate in this way, to borrow Adams’s words, a “bodily troping of trauma.”18 Yet, as emerges from Adams’s perceptive exploration of magic realism in Holocaust literature, ultimately the magic realist mode is the more appropriate of the two because of its more metaphorical nature and, accordingly, the greater distance between historical trauma and the magical.19 It needs to be remembered, of course, that Rabinovici’s The Search for M is not a Holocaust novel in the more narrowly defined sense. It never enters the concentration camps, and the only accounts of atrocities are much abbreviated and hidden in oblique references. It is situated in a discourse of postmemory and explores the posttraumatic impact of the Holocaust on following generations within the framework of the magic realist mode. However, the bodily troping of trauma within the compass of this mode as exemplified in the figure of Mullemann does not preclude the inclusion of grotesque realist elements, nor does it prevent the use of psychologically realist aspects. As Dick and Seemann have observed, the trauma it engages with is one that is trans-generationally transmitted. Indeed, the novel itself supports a psychoanalytical reading of Dani Morgenthau when it elaborates on the guilt complex which eventually creates the phantom figure of Mullemann through the unbearable burden placed upon him from early childhood. “Since the time he was born,” Dani had appeared to his parents

14 Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2004): 188. 15 Jenni Adams, Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature: Troping the Traumatic Real (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 84. 16 Adams, Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature, 84. 17 Adams, Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature, 109. 18 Adams, Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature, 111. 19 See Adams, Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature, 111.

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as the reincarnation of various relatives, as a recurrence in multiple forms, as compensation for those who had been destroyed and murdered. They secretly felt that Dani’s existence repudiated all of the plans for extermination, every sentence about the inferiority of Jews and their lives, the mutilations, the sterilizations, the murders, the eradication – everything. It was not only Mr. and Mrs. Morgenthau who lived on in him, but all the family ancestors, no matter whether they had been shot, beaten to death, gassed, or had been ravaged to death by hunger. Dani Morgenthau was to be the resurrection of the Jews, their beliefs, their way of thinking and their dignity. (SM, 46/71)

Overwhelmed by this terrifying and utterly impossible responsibility, Dani internalizes and amplifies survivors’ guilt: “In a certain way he thought he had to justify his whole existence” (SM, 54/83). The damage his psyche sustains is described with excruciating precision and an ever increasing sense of inescapable catastrophe: Every rebellion that existed in him roused his conscience and seemed to be a threat of extermination against the survivors, against the victims, against his parents. His failure made him into a perpetrator, into an accomplice of all individuals who still today are filled with hatred. His flaws appeared to confirm all prejudice and all contempt. (SM, 54–55/83)

There is no way out for Dani, and in the end: “He absorbed all their feelings of guilt” (SM, 54/83). Phantom theory, as suggested by Seemann, clearly contributes to an understanding of this process of deterioration in Dani. Moreover, it also explains in the context of the novel the function of Mullemann, into whom Dani metamorphoses as a result of his crisis. Maria Torok defines the phantom as “a formation in the dynamic unconscious that is found there not because of the subject’s own repression but on account of a direct empathy with the unconscious or the rejected psychotic matter of a parental object.”20 The phantom’s diverse manifestations are called “haunting” by Abraham and Torok, and its “alien nature” is seen as resembling “the indirect characteristics of phobia.”21 Mullemann, as an embodiment of the phantom, does indeed haunt the city (SM, 119/173). His grotesque appearance in the shape of a mummy – immediately recognizable from, and calling to mind, countless horror narratives and films – strikes fear into the hearts of its inhabitants. Yet there is a therapeutic purpose to his appearance: “Phobiainduced phantoms,” as Torok explains, “haunt in order to move the haunted 20 Maria Torok, “Story of Fear: The Symptom of Phobia – the Return of the Repressed or the Return of the Phantom?” [1975] in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994): 177–186, 181 [emphases in the original]. 21 Torok, “Story of Fear,” 181 [emphases in the original].

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person to expose a concealed and unspoken parental fear.”22 Significantly, the phantom must vanish before access to “the patient’s own conflicts is possible.”23 According to Seemann’s reading, this is exactly what happens in Rabinovici’s novel: “In the end, the social phantom,” that is, Mullemann, “disappears as society embarks on a path towards healing and reconciliation.”24 Yet, significantly, before he chooses to disappear at the very end of the novel, with his gauze cover intact if hidden underneath his clothes, Mullemann is domesticated and re-invented. In the interviews after his arrest, Inspector Siebert of the Austrian police and Arieh recognize not only his innocence but also both the necessity and the obligation to protect him; their strategy is narrative: The two friends invented “Mullemann.” They cloaked him in legend, wove a wreath of heroic stories in which he had forced murderers to surrender and had thwarted the plans of organized crime with his special talent. (SM, 171/245)

Their intervention highlights the manipulative power of narrative. The narrator acknowledges: “The most important things we know today about Mullemann really come from that night at the police station” (SM, 171/245). More significantly, the result of the transformative magic of their words, which affects even their own perception, is effectively a re-interpretation which, at least implicitly, suggests yet another frame of reference for an appreciation of Mullemann: “While Siebert and Bein wrote the report, they succumbed to the magic of their words, and suddenly the sinister apparition turned into a white knight” (SM, 171/245). As already indicated by the, if slightly ironic, construction of his cognomen, metonymically emphasizing one of his defining characteristics, the figure of Mullemann demonstrates a clear resemblance to the protagonists of superhero comics. The affinities are even more striking when comparing Mullemann with the very first comic book superhero. Superman made his appearance in the first issue of Action Comics in 1938. It has been argued that the character, originally invented by the Jewish American writer-artist team of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1933, has been informed by Jewish values and was conceived in analogy to Moses,25 a notion delightfully satirized in Eli Valley’s comic “Jews and Super

22 Torok, “Story of Fear,” 181. 23 Torok, “Story of Fear,” 180. 24 Seemann, “Moving Beyond,” 161. 25 For a survey of this strain of interpretation, see Arie Kaplan, From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2008): 14–15. See also Danny Fingeroth, Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero (New York: Continuum, 2007): 44, and Siegel and Shuster’s Funnyman: The First Jewish Superhero, from the Creators of Superman (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2010).

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Heroes” (2011), when he lets his Superman pastiche claim: “You know, it’s an open secret that superheroes are metaphors for Jews!”26 Superman’s unwavering adherence to a strong moral code, arguably also a Jewish characteristic, makes him a defender and an avenger of the victims of oppression and crime. This is a character trait which aligns Superman with another mythical figure of Jewish lore. The Golem is said to have been created by the Maharal of Prague, Rabbi Judah Löw, in the late sixteenth century to serve as protector of the Jewish community.27 Formed of clay and animated by means of the inscription of the word emeth (truth) onto his body, the Golem, as Robert G. Weiner has observed, may be considered “as the first superhero prototype.”28 Indeed, although Superman usually protects the community at large, he too “has had the ‘golem treatment,’ being viewed as a golem figure and protector of Jews.”29 Mullemann has been given the “golem treatment” as well – at the hands of Cathy S. Gelbin.30 Gelbin suggests that in creating Mullemann, Rabinovici drew “on the rich secular tradition of literary writings about the Golem as a figure of doubling, haunted memory, and return.”31 The function of the Golem motif in The Search for M is ambiguous in Gelbin’s reading. She argues that it “signifies the inscriptions of the deadly past on the body of the postwar Jewish generations,”32 but that it also “configures the return of a guilt that haunts postwar society through the visible sign of the second Jewish generation.”33 Ultimately, however, the Mullemann figure is more ambivalent than that and it, too, like Superman, fulfills the function of protector, if much less physically. The more violent aspect of the protector is channeled in The Search for M through Mullemann’s polar opposite, Arieh, who commits perpetrators to the deadly vengeance of the Mossad. Mullemann, with his compulsive confessions, develops his impact on a mental plane instead. His intervention as an external conscience, similar to the

26 Eli Valley, “Jews and Super Heroes: ‘Another Earnest Yet Ultimately Off-the-Mark Survey of America’s Two Favorite Obsessions,’” Shofar 29.2 (2011): 73–76, 74. 27 For a literary engagement with this legend, see Yudl Rosenberg, The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague [1909], ed. and trans. Curt Leviant (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008). 28 Robert G. Weiner, “Marvel Comics and the Golem Legend,” Shofar 29.2 (2011): 50–72, 50–51. Weiner refers to Jon Boganove and Louise Simonson, Superman: Man of Steel #80–82 (New York: DC Comics, 1998). 29 Weiner, “Marvel Comics and the Golem Legend,” 72. 30 Gelbin, “The Monster Returns.” 31 Gelbin, “The Monster Returns,” 29. 32 Gelbin, “The Monster Returns,” 30. 33 Gelbin, “The Monster Returns,” 29.

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function of the portrait in Wilde’s novel or that of the dybbuk in Jewish lore, precipitates the perpetrators’ breakdown, rendering them inoperative and subject to judicial prosecution. The figure of Mullemann as conscience personified may then also be read as a sardonic response to Hitler’s notorious remark that conscience was a Jewish invention,34 a chimera “of a dirty and degrading selfmortification […] called conscience and morality,” of which he proposed to free humankind.35 The figure of Mullemann reasserts moral universalism in the face of its cynical denial by the perpetrators of the Holocaust – the chimera triumphs and in the process may absolve humankind of the soiled bandages which simultaneously hide and display their guilt. The transformation of Mullemann into a kind of superhero engenders an intriguing tension in that his magical ability, which remains unexplained, is reinterpreted to correspond to the superhero pattern. Mullemann, echoing Valley’s satirical gibe, may metamorphose into a metaphor for Jews, but he is also turned into a “white knight.” Yet, he is the champion not only, or not even primarily, of the Jewish community, like the Golem; rather, the diviner of guilt is universalized and becomes the defender of society as a whole, even internationally, and in this he resembles Superman and his ilk.36 It has been pointed out that the superhero genre is to be distinguished from the magic realist mode as the superheroes’ supernatural abilities, while seamlessly merging into perceptions of everyday reality, are logically explained.37 Thus, Superman’s strength and his power of vision are the results of his birth on the far-away planet Krypton – which, even so, requires some leap of faith in order to suspend disbelief and does not change the supernatural character of his abilities as they are manifestations of an alternative reality blending into that of Clark Kent and Lois Lane. More importantly, the implied affinity of Mullemann with both the superhero and the Golem, both of which are enduring creations of the “magic” of words and both of which border on the magical real, suggests a metafictional dimension. The legend devised by Arieh and Siebert, created by the “magic” of their words and constituting most of what “we know today” about Mullemann, is implicitly confronted with the narrative developed in the novel as

34 Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on His Real Aims, fifth ed. (London: Taylor and Francis, 1940): 220. 35 Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, 222. 36 Batman, for instance, has also been read as informed by the Jewish background of his creators, see Derek Parker Royal, “Jewish Comics; Or, Visualizing Current Jewish Narrative,” Shofar 29.2 (2011): 1–12, 3. 37 Gabriel Greenberg, “Comicology: The New Magical Real” [2005], www.slought.org/files/ downloads/exhibitions/SF_2005[Comicology-Essay].pdf (accessed February 5, 2013).

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a whole. The Search for M not only self-referentially emphasizes its fictionality but by the same token also validates fiction as the medium of a truth that is larger than “real” life. Magic realism emerges as the appropriate vehicle of expressing this truth. Because of its simultaneously transgressive and integrative nature, it is signally well suited to accommodate all of the diverse readings of Mullemann considered so far and is open to further, potentially even conflicting, interpretations. A similar point is argued in The Search for M with the extended discussion of the painting of “Ahasuerus.” In some ways it represents a distillation of Mullemann’s characteristics into a “pure” art form which facilitates intellectual analysis and debate of the uncanny phenomenon without diminishing its magical impact and suggests, moreover, once again a metafictional dimension. Trying to explain the extraordinary power of the painting on the individual to another visitor of the exhibition – “You see, that’s your self-portrait!” – Sina enthuses: “The painting touches on our own conscience, on all the guilt and shame that we have to bear and face. It speaks to everything we’ve denied, concealed, and falsified” (SM, 139–140/202–203). What Sina does not know is that the woman she addresses is Navah, the Israeli wife of Arieh. Navah is scandalized by the painting’s title no less than by Sina’s claim that it might be her self-portrait, too. To the young Israeli woman, this is the continuation of millennia of stereotyping the Jew as “an Ahasuerus, an eternal Jew, a ghetto figure” (SM, 140), and of herself as precisely such a Jew. Yet her internal response is little more than a substitution for these stereotypes with those of Zionist ideology: “No one here is interested in what’s going on in TelAviv, in Jewish survival, Jewish self-awareness, the Jischuw, the pioneers, the Chaluzim from Petach Tikvah or the kibbutzniks from Degania” (SM, 140/203). Navah is, however, self-critical enough to reflect that, maybe, “she was just defending herself against the expressive power of the painting. Maybe she was unable to bear the representation of suffering, the persecution, and victimization that she saw there” (SM, 140/203). What Navah sees in the painting is thus crucially different from what Sina sees. It is not her guilt she sees in the painting but that of the others. When Sina continues to draw the connection between the portrait and Mullemann – “The painting reproduces his secret skills. […] He can see others’ guilt. He finds it. That’s his idiosyncracy, his distinguishing characteristic” (SM, 141/ 205) – this initiates an acrimonious misunderstanding between the two women because Navah recognizes, mistakenly, her husband Arieh in Sina’s description of her lover. While the two women still engage in the attempt to determine the identity and the function of “Ahasuerus,” Arieh tries – in a parallel strain of the narrative –

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to divine the identity of Mullemann. Unsuccessfully, as we know. Yet the way in which he seeks to uncover the other’s identity is crucial: he winds around his own body and face bandages and eventually is confronted in the mirror with another image reminiscent of “Ahasuerus.” While his method does not help him to come any closer to the phantom of Mullemann, Arieh nevertheless gains an important insight: gauze bandages absorb a body’s signature. They disclose all of its injuries, lay open its breakdowns and defects, but its recovery as well. The blood, the pus, the ointments – they’re all memory traces. You should be able to identify anyone on the basis of this material and texture shouldn’t you? You can hide and distinguish someone by bandages, or recognize him. You can mask and reveal him at the same time. (SM, 149–150/216)

This passage seems to be key to an understanding of Mullemann. The more so, as it also recalls at least implicitly Emmanuel Levinas’s notions of identity and the other, of the face and responsibility, and of memory and the trace.38 While certainly not applicable in the strict sense of their original context, Levinas’s deliberations are suggestive in relation to the unravelling of Mullemann. They also, if perhaps less palpably, reveal an unexpected affinity with magic realism which may lend further credence to a Levinasian reading of Mullemann or, conversely, a magic realist reading of The Search for M. In Totality and Infinity (1961), Levinas suggests that there is a totalizing impulse, seeking boundaries and limitations, which, attempting to comprehend all of reality in a unifying vision, is in fact a shutting down of possibilities. Yet, as Levinas demonstrates, there is always something beyond, some other, which confounds the totalizing impulse and confronts its construction of reality with infinity which is “produced in the relationship of the same with the other.”39 Distilled like this (perhaps not entirely legitimately) and applied to artistic production, the Levinasian conception of totality and infinity reads almost like a definition of magic realism which, in a similarly distilled formulation, seeks “to expand existing categories of the real” or “to rupture them altogether.”40 In The Search for M, Arieh’s usual method of identifying perpetrators is by involuntarily assuming their way of thinking, their posture and habit and, in effect, by transforming himself into the other. As Levinas suggests, “the world

38 Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other” [1963], trans. Alphonso Lingis, in Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986): 345–359. 39 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority [1961], trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969): 26. 40 Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 151.

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understood by reason ceases to be other,”41 and this is exactly the way in which Arieh, now very deliberately, also attempts to comprehend Mullemann: by means of “the transmutation of the other into the same,”42 or, more precisely, by transmutation of the same into the other in order to make it the same. Yet Mullemann is hidden under swathes of gauze, and the application of bandages to Arieh’s body too produces not a face in the mirror, the form in which the other manifests itself, but a mask. Still, “a mask presupposes a face,”43 and Mullemann, the other, remains other – or would, if it were not for the trace. But first, in a move which in effect contradicts the assumptions of Levinas, it will be necessary to suggest what constitutes the otherness of Mullemann in The Search for M. The psychoanalytical reading outlined above will be useful here, inasmuch as Mullemann as an embodiment of the phantom appears to be trauma incarnate. This, however, is as far as we may go. The exact nature of the trauma he personifies eludes not only the characters in the novel but also the reader. It is at this junction that it will be useful to reconsider the notion of the Levinasian trace, which signifies “beyond being”44 and thus relates to the “absolutely other.”45 As such, it is not a sign that is similar to any other sign, although every trace can also be taken for a sign. Rather, when a trace is taken as a sign, “it is exceptional with respect to other signs in that it signifies outside of every intention of signaling and outside of every project of which it would be the aim.”46 Its specific purpose, as Richard Sugarman notes, is “to explain how the past can be preserved,” how it “remains in the present even if it appears as a kind of absence.”47 Significantly, the trace “effects a relationship”48 with the other as moral responsibility: “The I before another is infinitely responsible.”49 The command, “Thou shalt not kill,” is the ethical imperative which comes into being at the precise moment of the encounter with the face of the other.50 Mullemann himself, as much as the traces of the gauze inscribed onto his body and the traces of his body seeping into the bandages, is a trace and effects a

41 Levinas, “Trace of the Other,” 346. 42 Levinas, “Trace of the Other,” 348. 43 Levinas, “Trace of the Other,” 355. 44 Levinas, “Trace of the Other,” 356. 45 Levinas, “Trace of the Other,” 357. 46 Levinas, “Trace of the Other,” 356–357. 47 Richard Sugarman, “The Ethics of ‘Face to Face’/The Religious Turn,” in Phenomenology World Wide: Foundations, Expanding Dynamics, Life Engagements. A Guide for Research and Study, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002): 409–429, 417. 48 Levinas, “Trace of the Other,” 357. 49 Levinas, “Trace of the Other,” 353. 50 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 199.

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relationship of the other to the self. As a trace, he is a conduit to the countless others violated in the Holocaust and after (see SM, 46/71). Dani, enshrouded and lost in the trace that is Mullemann, is the other, and it is essential that he remain so. As the other, even though his face is visible only in the way the bandages have absorbed his body’s signature, he embodies that very command: “Thou shalt not kill.” At the same time, the otherness of Mullemann is not fully a self. As Arieh realizes, as Mullemann, Dani may confess to everything, but he takes responsibility for nothing (SM, 180/259); he seeks to efface his self. In an undelivered letter to Dani, Arieh suggests that he admits his “guilt simply in order not to love, never to act and never to keep faith,” because: “you fear only one thing: you, your existence, Dani Morgenthau.” Dani’s fears are recognized by Arieh to be deeply rooted in his anguished evasion of taking any responsibility and thus – in the Levinasian sense – to enter the reality of I and other: “you feel nothing beyond the happiness not to be recognized, not to be identified and found guilty as the person who you are and who you could be” (SM, 181/260). Arieh’s own resolve is therefore to abjure any disguise and dissimulation. He concludes: Not to be tied down by the shackles of time like a mummy, to reject all the techniques of preservation, to shed the layers, undo the knots, to go after the knotting together, to feel for the lumps, to unlace and remove the straps: this is the work of memory. (SM, 180–181/259)

For Levinas, memory “as an inversion of historical time is the essence of interiority,”51 which suggests an outside-of-timeness, as interiority is “the very possibility of a birth and death that do not derive their meaning from history.”52 This is where the usefulness of Levinas for an understanding of The Search for M becomes more tentative. While Rabinovici’s use of the term may include this meaning, it seems to be based predominantly on the Freudian notion of repressed memory and the therapeutic value of its recovery. Nevertheless, by unravelling the bandages, the effaced identity is reconstituted and simultaneously, as a necessary corollary, also the other as well as the “primordial expression”53 of the “Thou shalt not kill.” In a similar duality, in the face of the commandment, guilt – even though it can only be defined as transgression of, and in relation to, a commandment – loses its actuality. The trace of the bandages fulfills one last function by yielding relief and release. Like Ariadne’s thread, they show the way out of the shrouded and labyrinthine prison of trauma. In Arieh’s imagination

51 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 56. 52 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 55. 53 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 199.

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the Mullemanns of the world throw off the bandages, roll them up again while following where they lead and returning on the paths that they marked out with muslin and find their way out of the labyrinth. (SM, 181/259)

In order to reveal the face, to re-establish the ethical duality of I and other, Mullemann must be unravelled and the phantom needs to disappear. Yet while Mullemann does indeed wander off into obscurity at the end of the novel, he remains shrouded in gauze, an absent presence, a trace, and as if poised for his return. A similar fate awaits Otto Toot’s painting of “Ahasuerus.” Challenged at the exhibition in front of his self-portrait by the assassin Georgi Antonov, who mistakes it for a representation of Mullemann, the painter crows: “Ahasver is Toot!” (SM, 154/222). The artist’s pseudonym is of course not only an anagram, as is pointed out by Sina Mohn in the novel (SM, 139/202). It also is a homophone of the German words for dead and death, “tot” and “Tod,” respectively. Toot’s scream, ascertaining on one level that the painting is a self-portrait, on another level therefore reads as: “Ahasuerus is dead!”54 With his cry, the artist, in another case of mistaken identity, becomes the assassin’s target as he is among those pursuing the phantom of Mullemann. Yet the outcome is unexpected: when an eruption of lightning is unleashed by mistake, Antonov, looking up in confusion, is surprised by the bandaged face of Ahasuerus, the uncanny figure looming above him and glaring at him – aghast, he loses hold of his stiletto. Toot picks it up and, wielding it like a brush or palette-knife, stabs him, “with thirty stab wounds, covered him completely in red” (SM, 154/223). Following his defensive frenzy, Toot turned around and, without looking, plunged the knife up to its handle into the painting. He left the stiletto sticking in the canvas and drops of Antonov’s blood ran off the knife out of the gash. Over “Ahasuerus.” (SM, 154/223)

The knife’s final thrust into “Ahasuerus” is equivalent to an affirmation of Toot’s cry: Ahasuerus is dead! But it is also an indication of the painter’s own fate who, fleeing the scene, will meet his death only weeks later under the wheels of a lorry in Hungary: Ahasuerus is Toot, Toot is dead! The suggestion may be that after a final act of protecting his creator, there is no further need for the Golem-like figure while at the same time, with Ahasuerus, a tradition of Jewish stereotyping is laid to rest. The disappearance of Ahasuerus

54 This meaning is regrettably lost in Francis Michael Sharp’s otherwise very sensitive translation.

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prefigures that of Mullemann at the end of the novel and the disappearance, with him, of the phantom haunting the city. However, the damaged portrait ultimately ends up in Sina’s flat, out of circulation but extant, similar to Mullemann who simply walks away unchallenged but remains a hidden presence. Just like the portrait might conceivably be redeemed from its refuge, the novel suggests the possibility of “The Return of Mullemann” if ever it should become necessary. The stabbing of “Ahasuerus” is, of course, also another overt allusion to The Picture of Dorian Gray which, yet again, suggests the significance of this novel as an intertext for The Search for M. Indeed, beyond the arguably “banal morality” of its magical conclusion,55 Wilde’s novel and the writer’s theoretical reflection on what seems to be another formulation of what Adams has called the “hybrid and internally-conflicted narrative dynamic”56 of magic realism appear to be pertinent to the further exploration of the mode and its application by Rabinovici. In the aphoristic “Preface” to his novel Wilde observed with customary wit and aplomb: “The nineteenth-century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth-century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass” (DG, 21). Although the terms used by the late Victorian writer are not those employed in recent discussions of magic realism, the reconciliation of the binary opposition between realism and romanticism implied in relation to his own novelistic project seems to envisage precisely the sort of hybrid and internally-conflicted narrative dynamic observed by Adams in magic realist texts. It should also be remembered that, as Christopher Warnes has recently pointed out, the very term magic realism originates in the early romantic period in Germany and was, in fact, coined by Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, better known by his pen-name, Novalis.57 However, it is not my purpose here to reflect any further on the magic realist nature of romantic literature, nor on the romantic character of magic realism.58 I rather wish to make the point that Wilde’s novel employs the magic realist mode with the awareness both of its internal tension as well as the challenge it provokes

55 Jacob Korg, “The Rage of Caliban,” University of Toronto Quarterly 37 (1967): 75–89, 89. See also Nancy Jane Tyson who recognizes in the novel’s conclusion a “highly effective melodramatic sensationalism,” but deplores that “in the larger context it is a disappointment” (“Caliban in a Glass: Autoscopic Vision in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” in The Haunted Mind: The Supernatural in Victorian Literature, eds. Elton E. Smith and Robert Haas [Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1999]: 1–21, 13). 56 Adams, Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature, 84. 57 Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel, 19. 58 For some further reflections on this topic, see Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel, 19 et passim.

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externally. As such it is one of the many formative intertextual influences on Rabinovici’s The Search for M. The notion of Caliban in front of the mirror is furthermore useful to reflect on Wilde’s approach and to sketch its significance also for a reading of Rabinovici’s novel. There is something between Caliban and the mirror, an in-between space which defies optical principles, and the interaction between him and the mirror is one of intense emotional investment that may even be remotely reminiscent of the ethics as optics suggested by Levinas.59 But first, we should remember that in Shakespeare’s The Tempest Caliban himself is part of a magical story situated within the realist framework of early modern political power play. He is a hybrid monster with a psyche deformed both by nature and nurture. Wilde’s identification of the general contemporary readership with Caliban is illuminating. Caliban’s rage, signifying his inarticulate response to his perception of self and the other, indicates that there is significant incongruity between what he imagines himself to be and what he is – hence his rage when he sees his reflection in the mirror, which is unacceptable to him. It also suggests that Caliban lacks any appreciation of what is other than he – hence his blindness and his ire at not being able to conceive of himself within another, imaginative framework; the absence of transcendence is similarly unacceptable to him. Wilde clearly meant his reference to Caliban to be understood in the context of a debate of aesthetics. The conclusion to his “Preface” – “All art is quite useless” (DG, 22) – has gained some notoriety. Similarly, the writer’s denunciation of any “ethical sympathies” in an artist as “an unpardonable mannerism of style” (DG, 21), and his assertion that “moral life” is only ever part of the subject matter (DG, 21) have frequently been invoked to indicate his insistence on the moral freedom of the artist. Jacob Korg, for instance, argues: In spite of its heavily conventional ending, Dorian Gray is substantially an uncommitted work, exactly reflecting that unlimited liberty of conscience which is possible only to the multiple personality, and which Wilde always claimed as the right of the artist.60

Nevertheless, the “conventional ending” of Dorian Gray is sufficiently illustrative of another of Wilde’s aphorisms to reaffirm its place within a moral framework: “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors” (DG, 22). If applied to the novel, this suggests that it confronts the reader in a manner similar to the portrait of Dorian Gray, a reading that is supported by yet another of the writer’s aphorisms in which he claims that “All art is at once surface and symbol” (DG, 22).

59 See Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 23. 60 Korg, “The Rage of Caliban,” 89.

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Ethical sympathies are clearly articulated in The Search for M. In Rabinovici’s novel, the function of the painting is obviously derived from Dorian Gray and the earlier novel may also have suggested the use of mirrors to the Austrian Jewish writer; moreover, his novel has arguably been informed by Wilde’s use of the magic realist mode. Yet there is no hesitation in The Search for M to take an unequivocal ethical stance. Without doubt, one of its objectives is to confront the contemporary Caliban with a mirror. Indeed, the novel may provoke Caliban’s rage, that is, the rage of those incorrigibles who prefer to shroud the past in silence; but it also draws a distinct picture in the glass which, if he will just look, may suggest to Caliban salutary anger management. Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas also makes extensive reference to Oscar Wilde’s novel. It is not only experienced by one of his characters as a temptation, similar to the books by which Dorian Gray is “poisoned” (DG, 179). It also is used in The Canvas – the novel’s title itself potentially an allusion to Dorian Gray – to insinuate a perception of the magical in real life. The poetic truth of its “conventional ending” derided by Korg is identified in the novel as a truth that defies the emptiness and nothingness of scientific constructions of reality. As Jenni Adams has argued, in Holocaust writing the magic realist mode “enables imaginative reconstruction to take place whilst graphically signifying these constructs’ fictive dimension.”61 Significantly, as noted by Adams, in the context of the postmemorial other this ensures that the magic realist mode at the same time foregrounds “both the lack of availability of the other’s experience to postmemorial knowledge, and the illusory nature of any identifications which may occur in and through the process of postmemorial reconstruction.”62 In Fragments (1995), Binjamin Wilkomirski chose to do the very opposite.63 The short text, originally published as a survivor’s testimony (and thus allegedly not postmemorial), is narrated in retrospective from a child’s perspective, purporting to relate the author’s memories. The narrator acknowledges, as indicated already in the title, the fragmented nature of his memories and that his text is, in effect, an attempt to make sense of his childhood by revisiting the past. He asserts: “If I’m going to write about it, I have to give up on the ordering logic of grown-ups; it would only distort what happened.”64 Simultaneously, he lays

61 Adams, Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature, 175. 62 Adams, Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature, 175. 63 Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939–1948, trans. Carol Brown Janeway (London: Picador, 1996), first in German as Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit. 1939–1948 (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995). 64 Wilkomirski, Fragments, 4. This echoes Primo Levi who emphasized in the preface to his iconic testimonial text If This Is a Man (1947) its “fragmentary character” and that it had been

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claim to the irrefutable authenticity of his memories by emphasizing that they have not been permeated and warped by linguistic constructions but are “planted, first and foremost, in exact snapshots of my photographic memory and in the feelings imprinted in them.”65 His narrative, this suggests, is a faithful reproduction of the traumatic reality he experienced.66 It correspondingly employs a realist or even hyper-realist mode which privileges graphical descriptions of violence and atrocities of a frequently disturbing, occasionally almost expressionist, quality. An evocative example of this style is the narrator’s description of rats seemingly born from the decomposing bodies of dead women in a concentration camp: Now I can see the whole belly. There’s a big wound on one side, with something moving in it. I get to my feet, so that I can see better. I poke my head forward, and at this very moment the wound springs open, the wall of the stomach lifts back, and a huge, blood-smeared, shining rat darts down the mound of corpses. Other rats run startled out of the confusion of bodies, heading for open ground. I saw it, I saw it! The dead women are giving birth to rats!67

Witnessing this gruesome labor challenges the narrator’s notions of his identity to the core: “Am I a rat or a human? I’m a child – but am I a human child or a rat child, or can you be both at once?”68 Initially acclaimed for the authenticity of its representation of the Holocaust and awarded prestigious literary prizes, Wilkomirski’s novel has since been revealed to be a falsification.69 Indeed, when it was discovered, in 1998, that the author of the allegedly autobiographical Holocaust novel was not, in fact, Jewish, nor a Holocaust survivor, a literary scandal ensued that rocked the world of publishing. The affair was heatedly debated in the media and finally resulted in

written “not in logical succession, but in order of urgency” (Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf [London: Abacus, 2006]: 15–16). 65 Wilkomirski, Fragments, 4. 66 It has been shown that trauma victims remember descriptively rather than photographically and it has accordingly been suggested that Wilkomirski’s style, supposedly replicating the photographic processes of remembering experienced by victims of trauma, is thus used as a misguided authentification strategy by the author, see Harald Merckelbach, “Die Affäre Wilkomirski,” Skeptiker 15.2 (2002): 92–96, 96. 67 Wilkomirski, Fragments, 86. 68 Wilkomirski, Fragments, 87. 69 For an overview of the affair, see Andrew S. Gross and Michael J. Hoffman, “Memory, Authority, and Identity: Holocaust Studies in Light of the Wilkomirski Debate,” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 27.1 (2004): 25–47.

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the prestigious Suhrkamp Verlag taking the book off its list and recalling those copies still in the shelves in bookstores.70 The whole controversial and frequently polemic debate about Wilkomirski’s text hinges on the “authenticity” not only of the narrative but also of the author – the “author” being resurrected here in force in spite of his or her alleged demise. It had been triggered by the Swiss Jewish journalist and writer Daniel Ganzfried, himself the child of a Holocaust survivor, who was the first to expose Wilkomirski as an impostor and who accused him of being a coldly and systematically scheming falsifier.71 The historian Stefan Mächler’s painstaking investigation of Wilkomirski’s biography, commissioned by Suhrkamp, confirmed that the supposedly Jewish Holocaust survivor Wilkomirski is in fact Bruno Grosjean, born out of wedlock, sent to an orphanage and later adopted by an affluent elderly Swiss couple by the name of Doesseker who did not have any children of their own. Mächler suggested that Wilkomirski had rewritten and reframed his own traumatic experience in the orphanage in the terms of a Holocaust autobiography and that it was open to debate how consciously he had done so.72 But whichever way one chooses to look at it, the question of the “authenticity” of the author and of the narrative (whether directly or by association) looms large. In The Canvas, Benjamin Stein approaches this question in a fictional narrative which offers a conciliatory reading of the historical precedent which it reframes in that it admits the notion of alternative truths into the discourse on trauma through the use of the magic realist mode. In the novel, the character of Jan Wechsler is to some extent based on Daniel Ganzfried, while Binjamin Wilkomirski is cast in the character of Minsky. Stein’s model for Amnon Zichroni, the narrator of the converse narrative, is the Israeli psychoanalyst Elitsur Bernstein, with whom Wilkomirski had been in contact since the late 1970s, seeking to recover his repressed memories. As Andrew S. Gross and Michael J. Hoffman note, Bernstein’s therapeutic approach has become extremely controversial in the United States, in great part because the evidence obtained has been used (some would say abused) in both criminal and civil litigation, and also because the methods used to retrieve the memories frequently involve a great deal of

70 Suhrkamp incorporates the imprint of the Jüdischer Verlag (the Jewish publishing house) which was first founded in 1901 by Martin Buber, Berthold Feiwel and others and which was, in fact, the imprint under which Wilkomirski’s novel appeared. 71 Daniel Ganzfried, “Die geliehene Holocaust-Biographie,” Die Weltwoche 65.35 (September 27, 1998): 45. 72 Stefan Mächler, Der Fall Wilkomirski: Über die Wahrheit einer Biographie (Zurich and Munich: Pendo, 2000): 287–288.

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intervention on the part of the therapist, sometimes in conjunction with hypnosis and psychotropic drugs.73

In The Canvas, Amnon Zichroni is gifted – or cursed – with a supernatural ability that to a large degree establishes the magic realist character of the novel. It is introduced with the very first sentence of his narrative: “For a long time I believed that I had something like a sixth sense” (C/Z., 3/7). The narrator’s implied skepticism of his gift is later allayed and it turns out that he has “a sense of memory” (C/Z., 4/8), which he initially experiences, like Arieh in Rabinovici’s The Search for M, as “a disorder or a sickness to be overcome, or a temptation to be resisted” (C/Z., 70/88). What it amounts to is that Zichroni is able to experience the memories of others and thus, by implication, to validate their authenticity. The phenomenon of memory and his sixth sense is further explained by Zichroni at the beginning of his narrative: [W]hat I am talking about here can’t be grasped with the senses that are normally available to us. It’s the mélange of all the touches, smells, sounds, images, and tastes that our senses have encountered over time, the ones that haven’t been forgotten. It is our memories that make us what we are. Our minds are where our selves truly reside. (C/Z., 3/7)

Surmounting his initial doubt and confusion about his gift, he eventually turns it into his profession and becomes a psychoanalyst. His talent proves invaluable in his practice, yet he also realizes its limitations: But memory is volatile, always ready to change. Each time we remember, we reshape, filter, separate and connect, add in, take out, and replace the original bit by bit over time through the memory of a memory. Who, then, can say what really happened? (C/Z., 4/8)

This is an explicit refutation of the notion of photographic and unchangeable memory as it is posited in Fragments. Indeed, recent neuronal research suggests that memories stored in the brain change because the brain itself keeps changing. One conclusion to be drawn from this observation is that false memories cannot be distinguished from real memories.74 In what appears to be a form of retributive poetic justice, this very phenomenon is experienced in the converse narrative of The Canvas by Jan Wechsler, whose changeability is suggested by his very name. Wechsler, as emerges in the course of both narratives, exposed Minsky, the author of a testimonial account of his

73 Gross and Hoffman, “Memory, Authority, and Identity,” 30–31. 74 See Hannes Fricke, Das hört nicht auf: Trauma, Literatur und Empathie (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004): 84.

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childhood experiences during the Holocaust, as an impostor. Yet he has completely repressed the memory of doing so and it is only with the unexpected and unaccountable delivery of a mysterious suitcase to his flat that his own identity is devastatingly challenged and that confusion and turmoil enter his life. Apparently signifying the return of the repressed, the suitcase contains, next to the manuscript of a case study by Amnon Zichroni and some other objects which play a role in the converse narrative, also a battered copy of Dorian Gray. The full significance of Wilde’s novel to the story, as with the other objects, emerges only from Zichroni’s narrative. Growing up in an orthodox family in Jerusalem, Zichroni succumbs to the temptation to explore a shelf with forbidden books in the bedroom of his parents when the opportunity unexpectedly presents itself. The book he chooses is Dorian Gray. Fascinated with the novel, he takes it to the yeshiva and, instead of the religious study he is expected to engage in, begins to read the secular novel, hiding behind the holy tomes. In parallel to the encroachment of evil in Wilde’s novel, he too yields to the “evil inclination” and immerses himself in the world of the novel to the point where he “wasn’t sure whether the transgression that had become visible and palpable” in the painting was Dorian Gray’s or his own (C/Z., 13). Found out by the rabbi, he is expelled from the yeshiva and the course of his life changes dramatically. Sent by his understanding father to a family friend in Zurich, Zichroni is introduced to an observant life which yet integrates the secular. His Uncle Nathan (not really a blood relative but his father’s friend) takes responsibility for his further education. With his appreciation of art, Uncle Nathan has a profound impact on Zichroni: The basis for his passion was that he considered all artists to be spirits that were subservient to Hashem, the moment they created something of unmistakable depth and beauty. It hardly mattered whether it was music, a picture, a specially cut stone, or a poem. In every true work of art he saw the face of Hashem shimmering; and so art was liturgy for him, and the artist was an assistant to Hashem in the unending work of perfecting the world. (C/Z., 22/30)

It is Uncle Nathan who gives Zichroni another book to read, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1966–1967; written between 1928 and 1940). In the ensuing discussion of the novel, and drawing on the familiar distinction between the Hellenists and the Jews, Uncle Nathan denounces the former, the yevonim, for their reductive and limiting perception of the world: Everything that is vague, or doesn’t fit into the current theory, or defies measurability and categorization, in short, the fantastic, or let’s call it the magical, which has moved the mystics of all religions for millennia – there is no room for all that out there in the yevonish world of the supposedly precise sciences.

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Uncle Nathan’s immediate point is to rebuke those who banish the divine from their lives: And people will hold you up to ridicule if you persist in believing that there is something superior to you and other people, and that we humans can at best be partners of Hashem, but certainly not the ones steering or controlling, the ones with the overarching plan.

He then proceeds to develop a “theory of relativity” which not only echoes the narrator’s earlier perception of the processes of memory but which, in the wider context of the novel, must be seen as a reflection on the authenticity of Minsky’s – and Wilkomirski’s – fragmented memories: What’s treacherous is the fact that they continually try to put their minor insight into display as truth. But this truth does not exist. It belongs to no one. We all hold fragments [Bruchstücke] of it in our hands. And because we do not know what is true, we have to decide what counts for us. And whether something counts or not doesn’t depend on measurements and certificates. It’s weighed on a different kind of scale: meaning against emptiness, for example, or the idea of an eternal will outside of us, against sheer nothingness. (C/Z., 48/61)

Clearly alluding to the title of Wilkomirski’s novel, the emphasis on a plurality of truths chimes with the defining characteristic of magic realism, which has been interpreted as subversive.75 Like Uncle Nathan, Zichroni develops an appreciation of different truths and their potentially divine origins. Frequent intertextual references to Bulgakov’s and Wilde’s novels sustain the implied challenge to a merely “scientific” world view and to a world in which the notion of inexplicable divine intervention is derided: When I thought of fantastic things, then I thought of pictures growing old in place of the people portrayed in them, or I thought of spilled sunflower oil – in short, I thought of fiction, of magic that possibly emanates from the human imagination, but maybe not. (C/Z., 49/63)

The magic in fiction is correlated with the magic in real life. Stein’s novel is subversive not so much in a political sense as rather in its emphasis on a religiously informed revaluation of reality which perceives “the sometimes grim, poetic hand of Hashem” in life (C/Z., 95/119). The magic realism of The Master and Margarita and The Picture of Dorian Gray, with the alternative realities it suggests, provides a rationale not only for understanding the world within the novel but also a key for the understanding of the novel and its own use of the magic realist mode.

75 See, e.g., Stephen Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke UP, 1995): 407–426.

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When Zichroni recalls Wechsler’s attacks on Minsky and how he “invoked the truth” (C/Z., 145/179), he asks: “But what was he talking about?” (C/Z., 145/179). Once again, with reference to Wilde, Zichroni insists on the plurality of different truths: Of course he didn’t mean the poetic truth – that a knife used to destroy the picture of a person will kill the person in the picture. He meant the truth of the scientists, who finally concluded, through a court-ordered DNA analysis, that Minsky’s father was a Swiss citizen from the Jura Valley. (C/Z., 145–146/179)

From the seemingly irreconcilable confrontation between these different truths – echoing the distinction by psychologist Donald P. Spence between “narrative truth” and “historical truth”76 – Zichroni deduces an ethical question which balances them against their psychological impact. “What,” he asks, “is the value of a truth that kills, compared to a truth that allows a person to live?” (C/Z., 146/ 179). Magic realism is a tool for Stein to articulate and to validate opposing truths. In particular, it becomes a vehicle for him to revaluate and to vindicate Minsky’s testimony. Yet, more importantly, with Amnon Zichroni’s magical – and God-given – ability which allows him to affirm the subjective truth of Minsky’s memories, Stein by extrapolation inserts the magical into Binjamin Wilkomirski’s hyper-realist text and thus reinterprets his controversial testimony. Paradoxically, by doing so he authenticates the inauthentic as something other than it is. As Michael Bernard-Donals has suggested in his discussion of the Fragments controversy, it is not its accuracy by which the authority of testimony should be determined, but its potential to “allow a reader to glimpse a trauma.”77 Like a composer may transpose a musical piece into another key and thus more or less subtly change its effect on the listener, Stein transposes Wilkomirski’s “testimony” into the magic realist mode. The musical metaphor is not entirely out of context. Minsky, like Wilkomirski, is an instrument maker. He has found a method to reproduce the proportions of the celebrated Cremonese Amati violins and painstakingly has concocted an almost identical varnish. His passionate ambition is to build a new Amati. In the novel, he refuses to play the instrument for Zichroni. “Oh no,” he says, “it’s too soon for that. It isn’t ready yet” (C/Z., 138/ 170). Will it ring true once it is ready? It is a question left for the reader to decide, 76 Donald P. Spence, Narrative Truths and Historical Truths: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1982). 77 Michael Bernard-Donals, “Beyond the Question of Authority: Witness and Testimony in the Fragments Controversy,” PMLA 116.5 (2001): 1302–1315, 1303.

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and one that entails some other probing questions: If it does, what are the implications? Is the violin a forgery? Does it really matter, as long as its tone is pure? Will it challenge the uniqueness of the “real” Amati and devalue the original? Of course it is questions such as these which the novel as a whole begs of false memory testimony and our reading of it. The insistence on the magical reality of the divine in our world should perhaps be no surprise in the novel of an observant Jew such as Benjamin Stein. The mikvah, the ritual bath, emerges in The Canvas as a space in which divine intervention becomes palpable. Eli, a friend of Zichroni’s, is healed of cancer after his immersion in the purifying water of the ancient mikvah at Moza in Israel. With his faith in the power of the mikvah, he has achieved tikkun. Tikkun olam, the mending or healing of the world, is a concept originating in Rabbinic Judaism which suggests the shared responsibility of humanity to heal, repair and transform the world.78 When Zichroni experiences his immersion in the memories of his friend Eli as similar to that of the other’s immersion in the mikvah, this indicates the healing potential also of his gift. Mikvaot, and in particular the one at Moza, play an important role in the novel. They become an obsession of both narrators and either narrative ends with the suspected death in the mikvah of the respective other at the hands of the narrator. In Zichroni’s narrative, Wechsler is pushed under in the mikvah by the therapist in order to punish him for his denunciation of Minsky which entailed his own professional disgrace: “Did he think he could wash himself clean of the act of destruction that he had caused and could never make up for?” (C/Z., 158/193). The converse narrative to some extent provides an answer, though it ends with an unexpected twist which, once again, disorientates the reader. The significance for Wechsler of the purification promised by the mikvah is indicated in his narrative with a final implicit reference to The Picture of Dorian Gray when, wondering whether he killed Zichroni in the ritual bath, he reflects: “I have still only seen a fragment from the image of my past. The largest part is still covered with a black cloth” (C/W., 168/203).79 The suggestion is that, like Dorian Gray has shrouded his portrait and thus his evil nature behind a cloth, separating himself from this aspect of his self (see DG, 152–153), Wechsler too awaits the removal of this cloth and the vision of his true self. To find this true self and to achieve a form of tikkun is his objective in visiting the mikvah. Acknowledging

78 See, e.g., Tikkun Olam: Social Responsibility in Jewish Thought and Law, eds. David Shatz, Chaim Isaac Waxman and Nathan J. Diament (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1997). 79 Brian Zumhagen’s translation indirectly references Wilkomirski’s Fragments, an allusion not made in the original, where the respective term is “Ausschnitt”; yet it obscures the reference to Wilde with the term image instead of “Bild.”

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that “You can’t wash yourself clean of shame and disgrace,” he still feels: “But if the mikvah is a gateway to another life,” as it is said to be in Kabbalistic lore, “then there is a way out – the possibility of getting away from the memory of your own mistakes” (C/W., 140/171). And so he aims to find a mikvah “that was almost overflowing with memories and inspirations from other souls. I wanted to go through a gate of reincarnation” (C/W., 141/171). Revisiting the mikvah at Moza with a police officer who investigates his role in the disappearance of Amnon Zichroni, Wechsler hopes to be given a last chance to find his true self. Pushing aside the police officer, he runs to jump into the cold water. Yet Wechsler’s narrative ends in suspense: “But I don’t sink. I fall. The pool I’m plunging into is empty” (C/W., 168/204). Is this the emptiness invoked by Uncle Nathan in his diatribe against the yevonim? Informed alike by the allusion to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, both Doron Rabinovici’s The Search for M and Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas offer explorations of the nature of trauma in the face of the other. Alert to the potential of magic realism of facilitating acts of traumatic representation which would not otherwise be possible, they approach questions of memory, guilt, and conscience as well as identity in the aftermath of and in relation to the Holocaust and inflected through the use of the magic realist mode. With the creation of the complementary figures of Dani Morgenthau and Arieh Scheinowiz, and in particular with the former’s metamorphosis into the central phantom character of Mullemann, Rabinovici emphasizes the trans-generational dimension of trauma and insists on the need to acknowledge and to address trauma in order to facilitate a process of healing. Arguably, following the Levinasian reading of Mullemann proposed in this article, recognition of the trauma incarnate represented in this figure as the other re-asserts the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” While much in The Search for M can be explained with reference to alternative models and frameworks of interpretation, such as the psychoanalytical, the concept of the carnivalesque or even the Golem of Jewish lore and the superhero comic, the novel relies absolutely and irreducibly on the magic realist mode for its fundamental premise: the sensory perception of guilt and the corpo-reality of trauma. While The Search for M proposes a therapeutic effect in a psychological dimension, Benjamin Stein elaborates in The Canvas on the religious concept of tikkun olam. Bound to the notion of the mending of the world, the magic realist mode enables the writer to offer a re-appraisal of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s controversial Fragments as an instance of tikkun. It subverts the photographic hyperrealism of the earlier novel through what is, effectively, a transposition into the magic realist mode. At the same time, Stein’s novel explores the notion of a reality in which magic intervenes through the “poetic hand” of God, which manifests

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itself in Zichroni’s supernatural gift, in order to authenticate alternative truths in the discourse on trauma. Like Rabinovici’s novel, The Canvas relies on the magic realist mode to realize its otherwise unattainable objectives. The magic realist mode is employed in both novels to rupture perceptions of reality. The purpose of this rupture seems similar to the surgical practice of osteoclasis, in which a bone is intentionally fractured to correct a deformity. The use of the magic realist mode by Rabinovici and Stein is thus a clear articulation of hope. It suggests that what is broken can be healed.

Meyrav Koren-Kuik

Displacement and Jewish Identity: Magical Realism in the Novels of Dara Horn Magical realism plays a major role in the first two novels by author Dara Horn, In the Image and The World to Come. In both novels the different narrative strands exhibit instances of magical realism, and the novels culminate in chapters of fantastic settings that echo the thematic concerns expressed in the stories. Horn uses magical realism to explore issues relating to the formation of Jewish identity, and consequently the chronotope (space/time construction) of her narratives emerges as one of spatial and temporal instability. This chronotope relays a Jewish identity which is marked by trauma and displacement, and the characters in the novels become symbols of the different paths taken in the development of identity in light of Jewish history and heritage. One might infer that the engagement with magical realism in Dara Horn’s debut novel In the Image (2002) and her second novel The World to Come (2006) is reserved for the concluding chapters of the novels. In both books, the tone of the narrative is deceptively realistic, while the last chapters are set apart by their otherworldly settings and clearly resonate with the fantastic. However, closer examination reveals that the narratives are generously peppered with instances of magical realism, to the extent that the overall reading experience becomes a prism of imbricated symbols and perspectives. In the Image closes with two explicit sequences of magical realism: a fabricated conversation between the novel’s main characters, styled after the biblical Book of Job, and a fantastic visit to a submerged metropolis of lost choices. Similarly, the final chapter of The World to Come details the wondrous adventures of a yet-unborn child in a surreal version of paradise. Consequently, the novels’ thematic concerns, handled elsewhere in the novels by subtle interweaving of magical realism, conclude in a concentrated phantasmagoric reflection. Horn uses this structure to explore Jewish identity and draw conclusions regarding the forces that shape it in a cross-cultural context; magical realism is thus used in her novels as a mode for expressing what Maggie Ann Bowers refers to as “non-Western mythological and cultural traditions.”1 In her book Ordinary Enchantments, Wendy B. Faris tells us that “briefly defined, magical realism combines realism and the fantastic so that the marve-

1 Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism (London and New York: Routledge, 2004): 65.

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lous seems to grow organically within the ordinary, blurring the distinction between them.”2 She further observes that in narratives written in this mode “The narrative voice reports extraordinary – magical – events, which would not normally be verifiable by sensory perception, in the same way which other, ordinary events are recounted.”3 Consequently, “magical realism constitutes a narrative space of the ineffable in-between,”4 thereby enabling “realistic details to reach beyond the real.”5 Faris’s astute observations suggest that merging the polarities of realistic and fantastic into one fictional world generates a narrative that is both temporally and spatially in flux. This dynamic of fluidity within the narrative’s chronotope6 (space/time construction) gives ordinary events and objects a symbolic/metaphoric dimension, and enables a reevaluation of consensus reality in a different light. It is therefore particularly suited for investigating the complexities of unstable paradigms such as identity in general and Jewish identity in particular. Dara Horn harnesses the inherent temporal and spatial instability of magical realism to present a picture of Jewish identity from a contemporary as well as a historical perspective. Subsequently, displacement occasioned by historical trauma emerges as a seminal marker of Jewish ontology. Displacement in the novels takes a broad meaning, ceasing to be a mere indication of movement from one position to another, but rather a phenomenon expressed through fragmentation, polarization, blurring of boundaries and shifts. This practice of displacement within the narratives projects an overall chronotope which is continuously mutable. Jewish identity emerges as a void in flux: temporally existing in the past, present and future simultaneously, and spatially never belonging to just one place. This state of incessant instability and change is explored in the novels by utilizing multiple points of view and different historical perspectives. When discussing the idea of displacement in connection with Jewish identity and the Jewish spatial/temporal perception, it is necessary to acknowledge the concept of diaspora or galut (place of exile). Diaspora suggests, as Howard Wettstein notes, an “involuntary dispersion from a center, typically a home-

2 Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2004): 1. 3 Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 7. 4 Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 88. 5 Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 90. 6 Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin defines “chronotope” as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationship that are artistically expressed in literature,” see “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics,” in Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure and Frame, ed. Brian Richardson (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2002): 15–34, 15.

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land”7; thus, displacement is embodied within the mechanism of diaspora. Wettstein further observes, “galut became not an exception, but the rule for Jewish life. To be in galut is to be in the wrong place, it is to be dislocated, like a limb out of socket.”8 Erich S. Gruen adds: “Diaspora lies deeply rooted in Jewish consciousness […] The images of uprootedness, dispersal, and wandering haunt Jewish identity throughout.”9 The concept of galut as a backdrop to the emergence of Jewish identity is further compounded by the dichotomy diaspora/Promised Land which increases the sense of instability upon which Jewish identity hinges. Additionally, as Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt and Alexandra Nocke discern: The interrelated motifs of “people of the book” and the book as a “portable homeland” – together with the stereotype of “the wandering Jew,” have conveyed the pervasive impression that the Jewish experience – except the Israeli one – is of profound displacements, lacking not only a proper territory but also a substantial spatiality or attachment to place.10

Marking Jewish ontology with the label “people of the book” detaches its communal and historical identity from any connection to tangible space and time. The Jewish homeland becomes a space located within the pages of books, a locality which exists in the Jewish collective consciousness as a comforting notion to help ease the burdens of an uprooted existence. Nevertheless, the construction of individual identity is not merely a reflection of a communal thematic backdrop. Depending on circumstances and choice each person possesses a singular identity, which ties into a wider set of communal and historical consequences, as no “single or privileged Jewish identity exists.”11 Moreover, the establishment of the state of Israel as a concrete spatial hold available to all Jewish people made the hypothetical-imaginary quality of the dichotomy diaspora/Promised Land a reality, and demanded a reevaluation of the idea of galut in relation to contemporary Jewish identity. Accordingly, in the introduction to their book Boundaries of Jewish Identity, Susan A. Glenn and Naomi B. Sokoloff comment: “Recent scholarship points to a heightened awareness of translingual, transnational, and multicultural aspects of Jewish heritage

7 Howard Wettstein, “Coming to Terms With Exile,” in Diasporas and Exiles, ed. Howard Wettstein (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: U of California P, 2002): 47–58, 47. 8 Wettstein, “Coming to Terms,” 1–2. 9 Erich S. Gruen, “Diaspora and Homeland,” in Diasporas and Exiles, ed. Howard Wettstein (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: U of California P, 2002): 18–46, 18. 10 Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt and Alexandra Nocke, “Exploring Jewish Space,” in Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, eds. Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt and Alexandra Nocke (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008): 1–23, 1. 11 Wettstein, “Coming to Terms,” 57.

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and with sifting boundaries of belonging.”12 Hence, when a communal existence in diaspora is a matter of choice, diaspora becomes a home rather than a way station. Indeed, both of Horn’s novels present a picture of Jewish identity drawn from a Jewish-American perspective which views the United States as home rather than galut. The temporal and spatial instability in Horn’s portrayal of Jewish identity stems from the rift between the contemporary Jewish-American Promised Land and the horrors and tragedies which befell Jews outside this haven. In utilizing the tropes of magical realism to explore this chasm, Horn exposes the chronotope of Jewish identity as one that corresponds to what Bakhtin terms “the chronotope of threshold,”13 a chronotope of crisis in which spatial and temporal instability permeate the entire array of narrative components: settings and plotlines shift, and characters are presented as emotionally scarred and struggling to achieve an identity equilibrium. Moreover, in accordance with the genre of magical realism, Horn’s characters are oblivious to the fantastic undercurrents in their own narratives. Serendipity, which plays a crucial role in many of the stories’ events, is neither perceived nor recognized. Horn opens what might be described as small windows of magical realism in her texts that transport the readers into different realities, and often into other fictional worlds, using various different techniques: dreams, hallucinations, embedded stories, recurring objects and depictions of the visual arts. The following analysis of Horn’s novels will demonstrate how this interweaving of magical realism within the novels is used to highlight themes relevant to the perception and formation of Jewish identity, both from the perspective of the contemporary/individual as well as the historical/communal. In the beginning of In the Image, Dara Horn brands the two main characters of her novel with an identity marker rooted in displacement; she calls them “tourists”. At seventeen, Leora – a Jewish girl from New Jersey – witnesses the senseless death of her best friend Naomi in a hit-and-run accident. Deeply traumatized, Leora begins her personal journey of becoming; a process of bildung14 that will shape her character and her understanding of who she is. Leora becomes a “tourist” not just in the physical sense (travelling to Europe with her parents) but in the psychological sense, distancing herself from actual experiences and becom-

12 Susan A. Glenn and Naomi B. Sokoloff, “Introduction: Who and What is Jewish,” in Boundaries of Jewish Identity, eds. Susan A. Glenn and Naomi B. Sokoloff (Seattle and London: U of Washington P, 2010): 3–11, 5. 13 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope,” 21. 14 I am referring to the concept of ‘Bildung’ as one which includes both the psychological maturation of a character and his or her assimilation into and coming to terms with a certain socio-cultural ideology.

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ing an observer. This narrative of tragedy and withdrawal links identity and the development thereof to trauma and displacement. Horn uses her protagonist Leora to explore the development of individual Jewish identity in contemporary America, while giving her readers a broader take on the same issue from a historical perspective through the character of Bill Landsman. Bill’s narrative provides a century-long kaleidoscopic view of Jewish experiences in both the European and the American diasporas. His story exemplifies the reciprocal relationship between trauma, displacement, and the development of identity from the perspective of community. Bill, the grandfather of Leora’s deceased friend, reaches out to her in a futile attempt to establish a relationship with her. Baffled by Bill’s awkward efforts, Leora rejects his friendship. Spatial and temporal displacement underlines every narrative aspect in In The Image: focalizers, plotlines and settings shift from nowadays America to interwar-era Western Europe to turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York. The narrative dynamics are defined by temporal and spatial flux, which is further augmented by instances of magical realism. These instances are anchored in objects that become leitmotifs in the narrative and further increase the sense of displacement by offering visual shifts into vortices of different realities: slides, windows, paintings, tefillin, and dollhouses become symbolic and suffused with a metaphorical essence that illuminates characters’ motives, actions and thoughts. Just before he breaks up with her, Leora’s college boyfriend Jason, gives her a kitten as a present. Caring for the kitten becomes Leora’s refuge after their eventual breakup. While everyone around her clearly sees that the kitten has grown into something entirely atypical of the normal household feline, Leora refuses to recognize the anomaly. The cat (ultimately revealed to be an ocelot) symbolizes Jason’s identity crisis. A normative secular Jewish-American youth and a talented athlete, deprived of his physical prowess due to an injury, Jason turns to ultra-orthodox Judaism and reinvents his identity – a kitten turned ocelot, both spiritually and mentally displaced. Sometime after their separation Leora comes across Jason in a Costco shop and finds out that as part of this transformation Jason changed his name to Yehudah. When Leora first encounters the new Yehudah she recalls Naomi’s account concerning the forming of ones’ individuality, she augments it by adding her personal observation: Young people […] are like blind heaps of clay, formless, and in that formlessness lies an infinite number of possibilities. Some seize that wet potential in their hands, sculpting shapes never seen before. Others bewildered by choice, simply pour themselves into a mold. Still others are afraid to commit to even the slightest dent, mercilessly kneading and unkneading every last piece, dreading the moment when they will inevitably harden. […] after Jason Leora had to revise Naomi’s theory. Some people who had been so gently

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sculpted before, Leora added, are suddenly squashed – or squash themselves – into something new, throwing themselves into the kiln by force to harden themselves forever.15

This theory about the forming of identity, alludes to both the story of the Maharal of Prague and the golem,16 (in itself a reference belonging by its storytelling technique to the realm of magical realism) as well as the biblical reference to the creation of humankind “of the dust of the ground.”17 It juxtaposes two distinct and mutually exclusive directions the development of personal identity can take in light of tragedy or trauma: Jason’s reversion to antiquated tradition and rigidlystructured doctrine, and Leora’s withdrawal into herself in order to observe, learn and eventually heal. Horn gives both cat and clay a fantastic flavor by forming extradiegetic connections: the ocelot is linked to the carnivalesque nature of Jason’s and Leora’s zoo visits when they were still dating, and the clay is connected to both the figure of the Golem and the creation of humankind. The tefillin represent another vortex of symbolic meaning to which Horn ascribes a quality of magic realism; a holy Jewish cultic object consisting of three small leather boxes which men tie onto themselves when praying. In the novel the tefillin are marked by serendipity – they surface as if by magic at crucial junctures in characters’ lives. The displacement of the tefillin within the narrative, becomes synonymous with historical and traditional elements of Jewish identity, as well as being given dimensions relating to the cultural foundation on which new contemporary Jewish identity can be constructed. The tefillin are established as both a symbol of the undesirable diasporic identity and as nostalgic reference to mutual origins. The first mention of the tefillin occurs when Jason, who works as a volunteer in a Jewish home for the elderly, is told by Mr. Rosenthal (one of the residents) that he should become a “deep-sea diver” (ITI, 51). In a state of delirium, Mr. Rosenthal insists that the tefillin must be rescued from the bottom of the ocean: They were throwing their tefillin overboard. Because tefillin were something for the Old World, and here in the New World they didn’t need them anymore. […] Mr. Rosenthal told Jason. “I want you to dive down to bottom of New York Harbor and bring those cast-off tefillin back up to the land.” (ITI, 52)

15 Dara Horn, In The Image (New York and London: Norton, 2002): 38; further references in the text, abbreviated as “ITI.” 16 The Maharal of Prague, Rabbi Judah Löw (c. 1520–1609), is said to have created a golem out of clay to help protect his community from its enemies. For a literary engagement with this legend, see Yudl Rosenberg, The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague [1909], ed. and trans. Curt Leviant (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008). 17 Genesis 2:7.

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Mr. Rosenthal’s story refers to the casting-off of the tefillin by Jewish people, upon arriving in America from the European diaspora: throwing these relics into the ocean symbolized a change of identity. Jason believes Mr. Rosenthal’s story to be a figment of the old man’s imagination; he listens patiently to the request but does not attempt to rescue the tefillin. However, Jason’s conversion and subsequent spiritual displacement from the New World back to the ways of the Old World is in itself an act of preservation, and can be viewed as a metaphor for saving the tefillin. Another character, Leora’s future husband Jake, eventually rescues the relics. When Leora first meets Jake she asks him to bring her the one item she covets from a small pawnshop in Manhattan as a token of his seriousness and investment in their budding relationship. Jake brings Leora a set of tefillin which was retrieved from the bottom of New York harbor. The novel later establishes that this particular set of tefillin was cast into the ocean by Leah, Bill Landsmann’s grandmother, not upon arrival to the “Promised Land” but upon departing it: But when her ship began sailing out of New York Harbor, a giant empty ocean liner where she had the once crowded steerage levels almost all to herself, she climed up on deck to look out at the grimy, burning city. As the ship passed under the Statue of Liberty, she took the box with her father’s tefillin and tossed it overboard. (ITI, 161)

After her Shidduch (match) to a seemingly suitable but abusive man was annulled, Leah falls in love with Aaron Cohen only to find out that she is unable to marry him because of a Jewish law which stipulates a Cohen18 cannot marry a divorcee. Leah’s parents forbid the marriage, forcing her and Aaron to defy tradition and marry in secret. When Leah finds out that she is pregnant, she sees no other way to hide her shame save returning to Austro-Hungary. Disillusioned with the American dream and its promise of freedom from the burdens of the Old World and old ways, Leah throws the tefillin into the ocean as an act of defiance upon leaving New York and returning to diaspora. Twice displaced, Leah finds dubious refuge with the family of her lover’s brother, where she and her son Nadav are treated as second-rate relatives. The tefillin also play a role in Nadav’s story of trauma, displacement and search of identity. Nadav and his cousin Isaac are best friends and grow up as brothers. As they grow older Isaac becomes increasingly engrossed in the traditional studies of Torah, Mishnah and Talmud, while Nadav finds the Judeo-centric education limiting and suffocating. This difference in attitude causes an irrepar-

18 In Jewish tradition the name “Cohen” marks the descendents of the people who served in the Temple.

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able rift between the cousins: on a winter night when the danger of man-eating wolves is upon their shtetl, Nadav is sent out into the cold to bring Isaac home from the cheder (the locale where the rabbi is teaching the youth). Terrified by the horrors outside, and frozen half to death, Nadav returns home without his cousin only to find out that Isaac made it home safely. Nevertheless, Nadav’s behavior marks him as a coward and the relationship between the cousins is damaged even further. Both young men are drafted into the Russian army and fight in the deathfilled trenches of World War I. In the heat of battle, Nadav witnesses Isaac’s death, whose body is blown to bits by enemy fire as he adorns himself with his tefillin in a futile attempt to pray: When the smoke cleared, Nadav saw Isaac’s body on the ground, his legs burning and his neck severed by shrapnel, his dark mop of hair, grown back to its old length in the trenches, soaked with a blast of blood. The lacquered box of the tefillin anointed his forehead with blood. (ITI, 255)

Traumatized, Nadav turns into a wanderer. Settling first in Vienna, he marries into a wealthy Jewish family and becomes a successful businessman and an abusive husband and father. As antisemitism in Austria worsens, Nadav discovers that despite his assimilation into Western European culture he is still viewed and treated primarily as a Jew; a disillusionment which exacerbates his crisis of identity. Nadav abandons his wife in a mental institute and takes his son Wilhelm (Bill) to Amsterdam. With the help of his American aunt, Nadav and Bill arrive in New Jersey, where Nadav works as a teller in his aunt’s candy shop – a position which he finds degrading and humiliating. Nadav is a man so thoroughly displaced that he is described as lacking a tangible spatial existence: his passing leaves no footprints in the snow: “As if he had never existed” (ITI, 247). Unable to overcome his trauma and resolve his spiritual conflict, Nadav decides to end his own life. Horn shapes Nadav’s suicide as a snapshot image of magical realism where time has no meaning: he finds himself in the trenches again next to the corpse of his dead cousin. “Then, in a single leap, he stepped out of the image” (ITI, 255). At the moment of his death Nadav manages to move beyond the traumatic image of his dead cousin, covered in blood and adorned with the tefillin, the lost relic of the Old World Jewish identity. It is the element of serendipity that assigns magical realism to the tefillin; their “lost and found” role in the story makes them an object that links people’s lives and helps define identity conflicts. As a symbol of lost culture and tradition, they represents, in the stories of Leah and Nadav, the painful connection between the abandonment of the old ways and the loss of one’s identity – the cultic object becomes a prism through which historical and communal forces that shaped Jewish identity may be glimpsed. In contrast, the tefillin in the story of Jake and

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Leora’s relationship become a beacon of hope, a sentimental relic of another time and place that brings two people together. Horn designed the last chapter of In The Image to reflect the thematic concerns relating to identity and choice. The instances of magical realism centered on objects lead to a phantasmagoric scene which takes place in an underwater New York, a distorted reflection of its land-bound twin. On the night before her wedding, Leora visits the submerged metropolis; as a tourist of the imagination she explores the underwater city of lost possibilities. Like the tefillin, everything that was abandoned and forgotten in the world above exists in the fantastic city: lost opportunities, discarded choices and extinct species. Leora realizes that many versions of herself exist in the submerged city, all the choices she could have made and the different personalities she might have adopted. Only one’s true identity, based on choices made, can exist in the real world: She suddenly realized what she was looking at. The people behind the windows, the people in the street, absolutely everyone she had seen in the lost city – they were living through all the things that hadn’t happened in the city above, all the choices that hadn’t been made, all the lives abandoned, to be lived out only on the forgotten ocean floor. (ITI, 278)

Like the cast-off tefillin, forgotten choices and abandoned identities belong in the underwater city. One of the highlights of Leora’s fantastic tour is her meeting with Bill Landsman, who reveals that their friendship lives in the submerged metropolis. It is the one choice that requires redemption, one last circle Leora must close before she moves away from the struggles of her youth towards family and a life with Jake. Through the characters of Leah, Nadav and Bill, Horn offers a look at the turmoil of Jewish identity from a historical perspective. To illustrate the struggle of faith, she uses an allusion to the Book of Job which tells the story of a man who suffered for no apparent reason and yet his faith did not waver. Chronologically, Leah’s path of struggle and suffering makes her the story’s first Job. Her son Nadav, afflicted by association, suffers because of his mother’s choices but ultimately inflicts the greatest suffering upon himself by adopting an identity that is thoroughly divorced from his Jewish background only to discover that completely severing the connection to his Jewishness is impossible. Nadav chooses to solve this conundrum by inflicting pain on others and ultimately ending his own life. Bill, the last Job in his family line, spends his life as a tourist, a perpetual “Wandering Jew” collecting images, slivers of lost identity forever branded into slides. In his lifelong search to understand who he is and preserve an imaginary Jewish past, he visits the four corners of the earth, eternalizing in slides not beautiful places, interesting people and structures of historical significance, but what he perceives to be snapshots of Jewish identity. In the story Horn constructs for Bill, slides

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become little windows to different realities: a goat becomes the sacrificial goat, a stream behind a house is the Biblical flood, and a black slide is the moment before creation began. After being forced to spend his youth uprooted from his mother and his home, Bill chooses to travel across the world looking for his lost identity. Bill tries to use slides to connect with Leora, but Leora, still traumatized by the death of Naomi, cannot understand the meaning of the slides and the struggle they represent. Her journey to define her character and identity takes a path which looks upon her Jewish heritage not from the perspective of a wanderer but from that of an observer: someone who watches, deciphers and then carefully chooses when to step back in. In Leora’s story small openings to other possible realities take the shape of paintings and windows. Leora recalls Naomi’s sketch book, full of miniature reproductions of classic Dutch painters: Naomi would sometime allow her to look at her drawings: perfect replicas in gray and white of paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt, or on rare occasions, an original work of her own. Naomi loved to tell Leora about the histories and contexts of the paintings she had copied, the tiny framed world of seventeenth-century Amsterdam and places like it. (ITI, 19–20)

Upon visiting Amsterdam, Leora sees the real paintings hanging on the walls of the Rijksmuseum. Naomi’s simulacra become full-sized paintings, providing magical glimpses to imagined or long-gone realities and people. Leora visits Amsterdam as an investigative journalist to compose an article about the city’s infamous drug scene, but her real purpose is to attend a conference on the Jewish outcast thinker Baruch Spinoza. Her journey to Amsterdam is connected to her search of identity, an investigative route to gain insight and help reconcile the segments of her own self: the secular American and the traditional Jewish. It is in the Rijksmuseum that she finds both dollhouses and love. Dollhouses have a symbolic purpose in the novel: they provide windows into a serene and stable family reality. When Bill visits the Rijksmuseum he is a wandering, homeless abused boy, and the dollhouses in the museum stir in him a longing for normalcy, roots and safety. For Leora, everything in the museum turns into windows to what was and what might have been. The paintings and dollhouses are all suffused with memories of Naomi, as the girls had shared a dollhouse which they furnished and cherished not only as a symbol of their friendship but as a window to a happy family future they had anticipated. Dollhouses become a projection of part of Leora’s character which connects to nostalgia, friendship and family – the Jewish/communal aspect of her identity which was all but shut down since Naomi’s death. In front of the dollhouses in the Rijksmuseum Leora encounters Jake, the man who will help her reconnect to this lost part of herself. The individual/American part of Leora’s identity is represented by Costco, the vast all-purpose store, a giant leviathan’s belly where every item can be found

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and bought. Like a Costco store, “America was Big, New, Open 24 Hours, Costeffective, Buy It in Bulk, Members Only, Anyone Can Join, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave!” (ITI, 64 [capitals in original]). Costco and the dollhouse also exemplify the two dissimilar chronotopes conjured up by the individual/ American and the communal/Jewish: the former of vast space and forward-gazing temporality, the latter minute, nostalgic and with an eye on a rich past of tradition. Leora must find a way to reconcile the two, to displace the communal/ Jewish not by casting it away, as Nadav did, but by relocating it and including it in the vast spaces of her individual/American Costco-like space. In order to reconcile the fragments of her identity Leora must let go of her childhood’s dollhouse which represents the pain relating to the loss of her best friend. In a flood caused by a hurricane Leora’s and Naomi’s dollhouse, restored to its former glory by Jake, is drowned in the overflowing basement. It becomes another lost outcome in Leora’s submerged metropolis of discarded possibilities. The only salvageable remnant is a doll crowned with an engagement ring which Jake bought for Leora echoing the original hope for a happy future. Leora finally reconciles the two parts of her identity by absorbing the communal/historical and choosing to let it function as a beacon lighting her future. Unlike Leora, Bill’s quest to bring peace to his troubled and fragmented identity is unsuccessful. His slides, the objects he prized in his quest for meaning and preservation are destroyed in the hurricane’s flood and even the slides depicting his dead granddaughter Naomi are lost – Bill remains a Job, a suffering martyr. Horn concludes Bill Landsmann’s narrative in a magical realism sequence titled “The Book of Hurricane Job” (ITI, 256). It is the loss of his slides that finally prompts Bill to voice his complaints. Three people come to listen to his grievances, each marked by the space most relevant to their identity: “Leora the New Jerseyite, Yehudah the Brooklynite, and Leah the Austro-Hungarianite” (ITI, 259). Bill laments the loss of his slides: 18. My slides preserved a world that could be lost, And now those slides themselves have disappeared, Wrenched from me by the arm of God, Whose work of preservation I had hoped to do. (ITI, 264)

He refuses to listen to Leora, Yehuda and Leah when they try to tell him how futile it is to hang onto a lost past. In a whirlwind God answers Bill: 19. These are my images, my universe, my eternity That I have planted here upon the dry land in your midst. 20. I created you in my image. (ITI, 269)

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Bill must let go, and turn his gaze towards his own universe, his own community and family. It is not for him to preserve God’s creation for all eternity. Thus, Bill Landsmann renews his connection with his son and finds out that, before she lost her memory to dementia, his wife Anna preserved the only part of Bill’s slide collection which had real meaning: the images of their granddaughter Naomi. The images of Jewish diaspora depicted in Bill’s slides have little significance in establishing what it means to be Jewish. Diaspora is no longer a real tangible space, but a space that is part of the spiritual ontology of a nation, thus it permeates every individual belonging to this vast community, every family, memory and shared experience. The cultural heritage of diaspora provides an emotional backdrop to contemporary Jewish identity, but it no longer defines it. Similar to the way the narrative of In The Image is constructed, The World to Come consists of multiple spatial and temporal shifts: from contemporary America to Bolshevik Russia to the jungles of the Vietnam War. This is the story of the Ziskind family across three generations, as well as that of the treasures of lost Yiddish literature. Loss and choice both play a major role in exploring the intricacies of Jewish identity. In The World to Come, displacement takes on a broader scope which includes the blurring of boundaries and fragmentation. While still anchored in personal and historical traumatic events as a formative basis for constituting identity, the temporal and spatial properties of displacement become in themselves instances of the fantastic. Touches of magical realism in the story manifest as spatial overlaps between the physical and the metaphysical, as well as distortions in the perception of time. Horn further augments this practice by weaving stories of Yiddish writers and the visual vista of Marc Chagall’s works into her tale. The obscurity of the Yiddish stories is contrasted with the well-known images of Chagall’s paintings in order to explore issues of identity in general and Jewish identity in particular. The individual/contemporary perception of Jewish identity is explored through the Ziskind family twins, Ben and Sara, while the communal/historical perception of Jewish identity is demonstrated in the story of Boris Kulbak, the twins’ maternal grandfather, as well as the tragic story of the Yiddish writer Pinchus Kahanovich (Der Nister). The Yiddish stories embedded in Horn’s narrative form minute openings into fantastic worlds; these combine with the dreamscape vistas of Chagall’s art to serve as a connecting agent between past and present. A small painting by Marc Chagall, “A Study for Over Vitebsk” (depicting of a man flying above the snowy streets and tombstones of a shtetl), becomes the object that amalgamates the different narrative strands. The small painting is continuously displaced: from Chagall’s studio to the possession of Boris Kulbak in post-revolution Russia, and back and forth between Russia and the United States – it becomes a vortex of displacement within the narrative.

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The novel opens with Benjamin Ziskind sensing the presence of the dead around him: Lately it had begun to seem to Benjamin Ziskind that the entire world was dead, that he was a citizen of necropolis. While his parents were living, Ben had thought about them only when it made sense to think about them, […] But now they were always here, reminding him of their presence at every moment. He saw them in the streets […] his father sitting in the bright yellow taxi next to his, […] his mother – dead six months now, though it felt like one long night – hurrying along the sidewalk on a Sunday morning.19

This mixing of the dead with the living presents the first instance of magical realism within the text. It also stands as an instant of displacement: the dead no longer occupy the afterlife alone, but freely roam the streets of New York. This blurring of boundaries creates a single continuous space rather than two separate spheres, in a symbolic gesture that indicates one’s undeniable connection to the history of one’s family, a theme relating to the formation of personal identity which Horn explores throughout the novel. Deeply scarred by the loss of his parents and disillusioned with life after an ugly divorce, Ben Ziskind, a Jewish-American wonder boy who writes questions for a television quiz, goes to a singles mixer in the Museum of Jewish Art. There he meets Erica Franc, a museum worker, who sparks in him a romantic interest. The exhibition in the museum is titled “Marc Chagall’s Russian Years” (WTC, 11) and as Ben glimpses the painting “A Study for Over Vitebsk,” he is convinced this is the same painting he saw hanging in the living room of his parents’ house as a child. On a whim, Ben decides to steal the painting, and the narrative shifts to the past to give the readers an account of how the Ziskind family came to possess an original painting by the renowned Marc Chagall. This account is the tragic story of Boris Kulbak, Ben Ziskind’s maternal grandfather in post-Revolution Russia. After witnessing the murder of his father, mother and unborn sibling in a pogrom, Boris is left for dead by his attackers. He spends months surviving a nightmarish existence in the streets until one night he decides to lie in a grave: After that everything turned into a long dream. Months of crawling around the city, stealing food, stealing money, stealing anything, sleeping in stables, sleeping in alleyways, eating trash. […] He thought of going to the forest, but there were animals there, and bandits, and he was too afraid. Instead he went to the Jewish cemetery. He had once been afraid of the

19 Dara Horn, The World to Come (New York and London: Norton, 2006): 9; further references in the text, abbreviated as “WTC.”

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dead, but now they seemed benign to him, familiar. […] he found an empty grave. Boris lay down inside it […] and closed his eyes. (WTC, 20)

Boris is found and sent to Malakhovka, a colony for Jewish kids orphaned by pogroms located near Moscow. There he impresses his art teacher, Marc Chagall,20 by pouring his trauma onto the canvas: Boris paints a picture of his unborn sibling sitting inside his mother’s womb among a multitude of bookshelves, a magical realist depiction of the yet-unborn that appeals to Chagall. The artist offers to exchange Boris’ painting with one of his own, and Boris chooses “A Study for Over Vitebsk.” At Chagall’s apartment Boris meets the writer Der Nister who offers Boris a story of his own to go with the painting he has just received. After seeing the two artists together and upon leaving Chagall’s apartment, Boris, as if magically seeing the future, conjures up a prediction in his mind: For what he had seen up above was now seared forever into his mind: the man who laughed at him, who he knew would last, and the man who praised his imagination, who he already saw disappearing. (WTC, 41)

With this prediction Horn foreshadows not only the endurance of Chagall’s artistic creation, but the fading away of the Yiddish language and its rich cultural heritage. Horn invokes the meeting between Chagall, Der Nister and Boris in order to give her story, and the issue of Jewish identity, a historical-cultural perspective. Chagall’s choice of breaking the boundaries of his own heritage is juxtaposed with Der Nister’s dogged persistence in clinging to an old language in order to tell his stories. In addition, both Chagall’s paintings and the stories in the Yiddish language are vistas of magical realism. In her article “Soulful Modernism,” Anne Goldman makes an observation regarding Chagall’s circumstances and art: Chagall paints dreams, the language of space speaking for time. The high-flown perspectives of the canvases carrying us away from the present […] To be a Jewish painter in Russia at the turn of the century was to cast off the religious strictures of familial embrace and to defy the legal prohibition denying Jews the liberties other Russian citizens enjoyed.21

This highlights the fantastic elements in Chagall’s works as well as the crisis of identity he underwent as an artist in early twentieth-century Russia. Jonathan

20 Chagall’s presence at Malakhovka is historically accurate. In his biography of the painter, Jonathan Wilson writes: “Chagall took a position in Malakhovka teaching art in an orphanage for Jewish children who had lost their parents to the recent maelstrom of pogroms, war, civil war, and revolution” (Marc Chagall [New York: Schocken, 2007]: 83). 21 Anne Goldman, “Soulful Modernism,” Southwest Review 93 (2008): 13–30, 17–19.

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Wilson points out that “Chagall resisted fixed identity whenever one seemed to be on the point of closing around him.”22 Indeed, Chagall’s life story seems to designate him as an identity chameleon: he felt at home in Russia, Germany and France and created art that was appreciated by his contemporaries. However, it is Chagall’s demonstrated ability to reconcile his Jewish origin and identity with the secular world around him, both in his personal life and in his artistic endeavors, which ultimately gave his art an enduring quality. Much like the other modernist artists of his era, Chagall instinctively understood the dynamics of fragmentation and segmentation in the world around him and expressed them in his art. His canvases often encompass Christian elements alongside with Jewish ones; as Barbara E. Mann notes, “Vitebsk is remembered as if in a dream for its small homes and looming church steeple.”23 Chagall was able to reconcile the chronotope of the communal shtetl space and its traditional backward-looking temporality, with the open-space pluralistic forward-gazing chronotope represented by modernist art. Rather than reject his past and his Jewish heritage, he turned it into the background of a new cosmopolitan identity and incorporated it in the dreamscapes of his canvases. Unlike Chagall, Der Nister clings to tradition, using the Yiddish language to write stories which are suffused with both symbolism and magical realism. His life and his writings represent an incessant quest for meaning. In Horn’s story, Der Nister asks Chagall: “This picture you made. I was wondering – what does it mean?” (WTC, 86). Chagall shrugs and answers: “It means blue” (WTC, 86). Meaning is subjective, as is identity. Der Nister’s stories become more bizarre and obscure in his overzealous search for meaning, he begins to lose touch with reality. His days become a vista of nightmares and ghosts mirroring the phantasms of his stories. Der Nister belongs to the group of Jewish writers, poets and artists who were consistently persecuted, and executed, by Stalin in connection with their involvement in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Horn uses Der Nister’s tragic life to represent the lost generation of people who died unable to reconcile their Jewish identity with the forces of a changing world. The Yiddish language, which for Der Nister represents an identity prison, becomes an agent of connection and nostalgia in the story of Rosalie and Daniel Ziskind. Horn manipulates temporality in relaying the story of Daniel Ziskind and Rosalie Kulbak, thereby creating a magical realist dimension to the unfolding tale of their relationship. To add a further fantastic allure to her narrative she uses a

22 Wilson, Marc Chagall, 94. 23 Barbara E. Mann, “Visions of Jewish Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 13.4 (2006): 673– 699, 677–678.

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fairytale allusion – Daniel and Rosalie meet and fall in love in the woods, a contemporary “Hansel and Gretel” who will grow up together and find their way out of the forest. For Daniel Ziskind time did not exist until the moment he found Rosalie: Daniel noticed time didn’t pass […] And then, one afternoon when Daniel decided to wander into the woods behind the house […] he entered the gate of the forest, looking up at the ancient trees towering like the columns of a temple above his head. […] When he saw her, he froze, frightened. The thick braid swung against her back like a pull for a theater curtain, closing before him, and she seemed about to turn around. […] He waited for her to run into the house, but to his surprise she smiled – and time was created. (WTC, 141)

Daniel and Rosalie speak Yiddish and spend their time together reading the stories of the lost Yiddish authors. The forest becomes their own haven of Jewish tradition, hinging on language and imagination. Like the biblical Jacob who had to wait for seven years to marry his beloved Sarah, Daniel must wait to marry Rosalie. Since his father objects to the marriage he reneges on his promise to fund Daniel’s studies. Forced to find another financial solution to complete his education in order to marry Rosalie, Daniel enlists for a tour in Vietnam. In a nightmarish incident in the jungles of Vietnam, Daniel loses his leg falling into a tiger trap inside a cave. While waiting to die or get rescued, Daniel has a vivid hallucination in which he meets his future children, the twins Ben and Sara, in a cave full of books, reminiscent of the womb drawn by Boris Kulbak after his traumatic pogrom experience. This hallucination represents an instance of magical realism designed by Horn to illustrate that these unborn children exist somewhere on some other plane. In The World to Come, the deceased and the yetunborn have access to the world of the living, as Rosalie tells her daughter Sara: “I believe that when people die, they go to the same place as all the people who haven’t yet been born” (WTC, 124). This quality of displacement between the two worlds dominates many of the Yiddish language stories. “The Dead Town,”24 for example, is a story about a town in which the dead exist among the living. In the story “The World to Come,”25 an accidental tourist is asked to drive a dead woman to Necropolis, and ends up doubting whether it is he or the corpse on the back seat of his car that is actually alive. In an attempt to rescue these stories from oblivion, Rosalie Ziskind translates them, adds illustrations and publishes them as children’s books under her own name. When Erica, the museum worker who implicates Ben in the theft and

24 “Di toyte shtot” (“The Dead Town”) by I. L. Peretz; see WTC, 313. 25 “Oylem habo” (“The World to Come”) by Sholem Aleichem; see WTC, 313.

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becomes his love interest, confronts him about his mother’s plagiarism, he responds by saying: “my mother rescued all these stories that were buried in library vaults and no one would ever read again” (WTC, 206). Rosalie Ziskind resurrects the dead Yiddish stories and sends their ghosts to roam among the living again. The same motivation underlines Ben’s theft of “A Study for Over Vitebsk,” a desire to restore what was lost to him: the happy family existence of his childhood. For Ben, the painting symbolizes a time when his father was still alive, a time when his identity made sense. After his father’s death, Ben was diagnosed with a spinal problem and was forced to live inside a back-brace for six years: “Some people are uncomfortable in their own skin, but Ben was uncomfortable far deeper than his skin. He was uncomfortable in his own bones” (WTC, 52). Ben’s spiritual and physical tragedies, the loss of his father and the loss of free movement, define his identity. Philosopher John Locke’s observation that “a person is constituted by temporal stages – time-slices […] linked by memory”26 accounts for the condition of Ben’s identity. Ben wishes to exist in a past where his identity made sense to him. Retrieving the painting is a symbolic act, meant to restore him to a time in which his body and spirit were yet undamaged. His father’s death and his physical imprisonment in a supporting brace signify a point of displacement in Ben’s life. Torn from his supportive family existence and deprived of his physical liberties, Ben’s predicament becomes a metaphor for the condition of the Jews in Bolshevik Russia. A connecting line is drawn between Ben, his maternal grandfather Boris, and the author Der Nister; the three characters are bound by the limitations of their identity. As opposed to Ben, his twin Sara finds a way to cope with her father’s death in a constructive way, through art. A talented painter, she transforms her father’s study into a tomb, mimicking the Egyptian tombs she had seen in the museum. She paints the walls of the study with images of family members and scenes from their lives together, and furnishes the makeshift burial chamber with everything her father will require for his journey to the afterlife. In creating this space, Sara finds a way to incorporate her father’s passing into her emotional inner life in a way that does not fracture her spirit. Sara’s narrative is tinted with magical realism throughout, as she begins to perceive time in colors and immensities of temporality open to her artist’s mind-eye: She discovers, to her joy, that she could picture her father – not “imagine” him, but actually see him – at all ages, knew what he looked like from every angle even in the years before she knew him […] Once Sara discovered how to see time, she rarely closed her eyes. As she grew older, everything, not merely time, but everything, turned into color, or light and shadow.

26 Wettstein, “Coming to Terms,” 2.

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Sounds were colors, flavors were colors, even the touch of her mother and Ben and Leonid […] were colors, shimmering colors. (WTC, 246)

Philosopher Immanuel Kant surmises that in connection with identity, “the task of imagination is to express unity of consciousness,”27 thus imagination becomes “a kind of glue connecting pure concepts to sensible intuition.”28 For Sara, her artistic imagination, which composes the core of her selfhood, becomes the agent of solace and understanding. Her life can progress naturally forward and create a new family circle. She marries Leonid, himself a displaced Jew who emigrated to America from Russia, and the couple eagerly awaits the birth of their first child. It is Sara who comes up with a solution to Ben’s predicament: she offers to forge the Chagall painting. Ben will return the copy to Erica in the museum while the original will be kept by the Ziskinds. Sara clearly remembers the day her mother was forced to part with the painting – after the death of the twins’ father, Rosalie made a deal to sell the painting, only to find out that the Russian art collector who bought it was the man responsible for the death of her father Boris Kulbak. To add insult to injury, the Russian art collector claimed that the painting was not an original Chagall but a forgery, allowing him to keep the painting without giving Rosalie any financial compensation. Consequently, forging “A Study for Over Vitebsk” seems to Sara a matter of poetic justice. As the twins and Leonid come to the museum to view the substitute art piece which Sara had created, terrorists bomb the museum. Ben frantically tries to rescue Erica, whom he assumes to be trapped in her underground basement office. Horn constructs the moments of his death as a scene of magical realism: “‘Erica?’ he called, and listened for her answer. And then he opened the door and entered the world to come” (WTC, 282). Ben finally joins all the ghosts he had been seeing in their proper place of dwelling. Displacement and identity are investigated in the novel through the idea of ‘the world to come.’ The dead, representing the past can trespass this world as well as the next, a metaphor for the role which both family history and the history of a nation play in the creation of one’s identity. However, it becomes clear that the choices one makes, regarding the way in which to weave this history into the self, become a deciding factor in the development of individual identity. In a closing chapter constructed as a short magical realist sub-narrative which alludes

27 Kim Atkins, Narrative Identity and Moral Identity: A Practical Perspective (New York and London: Routledge, 2008): 23. 28 Atkins, Narrative Identity, 24.

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to the Yiddish storytelling tradition, Dara Horn relates to her readers how the notyet-born meet their deceased family members who expose them to their historical heritage and guide them in the art of making good choices. Daniel Ziskind, the unborn son of Sara and Leonid, receives his education in the world to come before he can descend to the world of the living and be born. From his grandmother Rosalie he learns to “drink” the poignant and aromatic Yiddish language, from his grandfather Daniel he learns what it feels like to “eat” a Chagall painting, and from his great-grandfather Boris he learns to appreciate the warmth of family love. For Daniel Ziskind, a symbol of all the Jewish not-yet-born, the world of the living is the world to come. Magical realism in the narratives of In the Image and The World to Come is used by Horn to similar effect. In both novels instances of the fantastic are woven into the story and the narrative ends with fantastic scenes that reiterate the main thematic concerns. However, each novel has its own distinct approach. While In the Image relies on a sense of serendipity embedded in objects, and its two closing chapters are reminiscent of biblical stories (Job and the Great Flood), The World to Come relies on art and spirits and ends with a scene based on Jewish mysticism. Additionally, the narrative of The World to Come possesses gothic qualities; orphans, family secrets, underground spaces, ghosts, a sense of horror and persecution and nightmarish reality are all tropes of gothic storytelling. The chronotopes of both novels are in constant flux as the story shifts between past and present and unfolds across a multitude of spaces; Horn creates stories that are best described as a narratological stream of consciousness. Displacement, which underscores Jewish identity, may become a hindrance, but can also be absorbed and transformed into a positive force which connects people to culture and heritage. Kim Atkins expresses this by observing: Our lives are always already entangled with the lives of others […] life experiences set up psychological, affective, physical, agential, and moral structures that tie us inextricably to others throughout our entire lives. For this reason, questions about who I am and how I should live need to be addressed in the context of an inter-personal, cultural and historical setting.29

In many ways the two novels mirror each other: the characters of Bill and Nadav Landsmann, and the triad of Boris Kulbak, Ben Ziskind and Der Nister, emerge as the Job of their personal narratives. Leora, Sara and Chagall conversely demonstrate a positive construction of contemporary Jewish identity; these characters manage to reconcile the tragedies of the past and convert them into a tapestry of

29 Atkins, Narrative Identity, 1.

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heritage which informs their identity and serves as a background for personal growth. Envisioning a new Jewish literary language, Cynthia Ozick once wrote: “As we more and more pour not merely the Jewish sensibility, but the Jewish vision, into the vessel of English, we achieve the profoundest invention of all: a language for our need, our possibility, our overwhelming idea.”30 Dara Horn’s novels certainly speak in this unique language of Jewish tradition.

30 Cynthia Ozick, “Towards a New Yiddish” [1970] in Art and Ardor (New York: Knopf, Random House, 1983): 151–177, 176.

Aaron Tillman

“Jewish, Here in the Back”: The Magical and Comical Call of an Enigmatic Difference in Nathan Englander’s “The Gilgul of Park Avenue” and Steve Stern’s “The Tale of a Kite” This essay examines how the tensions between religiosity and ethnicity contribute to an enigmatic difference for contemporary American Jews. The “enigmatic” relates to the uncertain “sense” of associating or being identified with something that resists categorization – an identity defined by what it is not. Anchoring the discussion in analyses of Nathan Englander’s short story “The Gilgul of Park Avenue” and Steve Stern’s short story “The Tale of a Kite,” the essay demonstrates how magical realist and comical modes are uniquely able to illustrate the enigma of difference that permeates contemporary Jewish American literature and culture. A prominent argument made in the essay is that the perceptions and practices of Judaism and Jewish ethnicity complicate the “fundamental dichotomy” of religious and ethnic identities, reinforcing the enigmatic difference that marks contemporary Jewish American communities. Studies of Jewish American identities often reveal more questions than concrete articulations, more statements about what Jewish Americans are not than what they are. A review of contemporary writings about Jewish American literature and culture bares a residue of paradoxical phrases – “comfortably uncomfortable,” “insider-outsider,” “ambiguously located,” “near invisible territory of literary limbo.”1 Laura Levitt discusses several “contradictions” unique to American Jews, suggesting “Jews do not fit into the now long accepted litany of differences – race, class, gender, sexuality.”2 For Levitt, “religion […] and even ethnicity have never

1 The phrases noted come from: Dean Franco, “Re-Placing the Border in Ethnic Literature,” Cultural Critique 50 (2002): 104–134, 114; Victoria Aarons, “The Outsider within: Women in Contemporary Jewish-American Fiction,” Contemporary Literature 28.3 (1987): 378–393, 382; Deborah Dash Moore, “Introduction,” in American Jewish Identity Politics, ed. Deborah Dash Moore (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008): 1–20, 9; Andrew Furman, Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: Return of the Exiled (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2000): 4. 2 Laura Levitt, “Impossible Assimilations, American Liberalism, and Jewish Difference: Revisiting Jewish Secularism,” American Quarterly 59.3 (2007): 807–832, 807.

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been able to fully or accurately describe what it means to be a Jew in the United States.”3 In the same vein, Debra Renee Kaufman identifies “patterns of engagement that do not fit comfortably within any one of the so-called two identity packages (ethnicity and religiosity) that currently dominate inquiry into contemporary Jewish identity.”4 Discussing this common dichotomy, Calvin Goldscheider contends that focusing on ethnic and religious identity “is not as useful among Jews as it may be among other groups. Because of their ethnic identity and culture, Jews are not simply a religious group like Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and Muslims. But because of their religious culture, Jewish Americans are also not an ethnic group like Italian Americans or Hispanic Americans.”5 The complexities and classification challenges raised by Levitt, Kaufman, Goldscheider and many others speak to the elusive difference felt by many American Jews. There is an edge of self-consciousness that goes along with this feeling, a “sense of unease” from “occupying an anomalous status,” and from the “very lack of belonging to a recognizable category.”6 In this essay, I examine how the tensions between religiosity and ethnicity contribute to this “sense of unease,” demonstrating how magical realist and comical modes are uniquely able to illustrate the enigma of difference that permeates contemporary Jewish American literature and culture. Anchoring my discussion in analyses of Nathan Englander’s short story “The Gilgul of Park Avenue” and Steve Stern’s short story “The Tale of a Kite” – stories that marry magical and comical modes in comparably effective fashions – I argue that the ways in which Judaism and Jewish ethnicity complicate the “fundamental dichotomy” of religious and ethnic identities reinforces the enigmatic difference that marks contemporary Jewish American communities. What I am characterizing as “enigmatic” is the indefinite yet undeniable difference that informs the way Jewish Americans imagine and understand themselves. The enigmatic relates to the uncertain “sense” of associating or being identified with something that resists categorization – an identity defined by what it is not. It comes from a “lack of belonging to a recognizable category”; from

3 Levitt, “Impossible Assimilations,” 809. 4 Debra Renee Kaufman, “The Place of Judaism in American Jewish Identity,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism, ed. Dana Evan Kaplan (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005): 169– 185, 181. 5 Calvin Goldscheider, “Judaism, Community, and Jewish Culture in American Life: Continuities and Transformations,” in Religion or Ethnicity? Jewish Identities in Evolution, ed. Zvi Gitelman (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2009): 267–285, 268. 6 David Biale, Michael Galchinsky and Susannah Heschel, “Introduction: The Dialectic of Jewish Enlightenment,” in Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, eds. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998): 1–13, 5.

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eluding a “long accepted litany of differences”; from exhibiting “patterns of engagement that do not fit comfortably within […] identity packages.” The enigmatic subverts efforts to label and to generalize. What results are paradoxical descriptions of an ethnic, religious, and national amalgamation. As I will show in this essay, magical and comical modes are effective at conveying the enigma of Jewish American difference because of their respective correlations with incongruity and the ways in which they are often, if not always, subversive. Similar to the indefinite position of Jewish Americans, the magical realist mode does not fit easily into any singular category. It is often defined as a mode of literary expression, rather than a genre within literature, which suggests that it “can characterize works belonging to several genres, periods or national literatures.”7 Although it is commonly described as a mode, magical realism has been used to label fictional and filmic works (as well as other works of art) and fiction writers and filmmakers (as well as other artists). Scholars such as Jeanne Delbaere-Garant note how “magic realism is often used only sporadically in an author’s oeuvre, and sporadically even in those of his or her texts commonly regarded as ‘magic realist.’”8 We see this sporadic use most noticeably in Englander’s story, which – as discussed below – opens with a magical premise and then proceeds on realistic grounds. While works associated with magical realism tend to be those that possess a “co-presence” of the natural and supernatural, it is the narrative treatment that allows the extraordinary to come across as ordinary. The untroubled narrative, which never pauses to question the supernatural presence in the natural world, keeps the focus on the tensions, clashes, and complications rather than on the fantastical occurrences. This narrative voice is evident in both of the stories I analyze in this essay, and is key to identifying the tensions between the magical and the real, which parallel the tensions between religiosity and ethnicity, between Judaism and Jewishness. Together, these stories highlight the fallacy of a stable Jewish American identity – or the equivalently aberrant idea of a purely religious or a purely ethnic Jewish American identity – and illustrate the heterogeneous and continuously changing character of contemporary American Jewry.

7 Amaryll Beatrice Chanady, Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antinomy (New York: Garland, 1985): 2. 8 Jeanne Delbaere-Garant, “Psychic Realism, Mythic Realism, Grotesque Realism: Variations on Magic Realism in Contemporary Literature in English,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke UP, 1995): 249–266, 249.

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Nathan Englander’s “The Gilgul of Park Avenue” opens in a New York City taxi, just as the protagonist, Charles Morton Lugar, is imbued with a “Jewish soul.”9 Following the internal metamorphosis that opens the story, which in the magical realist context is related to the reader as a narrative fact, we follow Charles as he struggles to feel comfortable with his new-found Jewishness. He never doubts the authenticity of his new Jewish soul, but he does struggle with the best way to share the newest reality of his life with his wife, Sue. Charles enlists the help of Rabbi Zalman Meintz who, we are told, underwent a similarly sudden transformation before moving from Bolinas to Brooklyn. Zalman implores Charles to tell his wife about his new soul as soon as possible. With comical timing, Charles shares the news after Sue has returned from the dentist, her mouth slack with novacaine. Sue and Charles agree to host Zalman and Charles’s psychiatrist, Dr. Birnbaum, to a kosher dinner. The story ends after Zalman and Dr. Birnbaum have gone home, and Sue and Charles are left alone. Wallowing in the tension of this new situation, Charles longs “to be wholly seen, wanting her to love him changed” (“GPA,” 137). Similar to Englander’s story, Steve Stern’s “The Tale of a Kite” is set in a city, only “Kite” is grounded in the “Pinch” district of Memphis during the early twentieth century. The story is narrated by a secular Jewish businessman named Jacob Zipper who associates with “an enterprising” bunch of Jewish business owners, all of whom are upset when they discover that the Chasidic Rabbi Shmelke “has begun to fly.”10 Zipper’s obsession with and distress over Rabbi Shmelke, exacerbated by the enthusiasm displayed by his son Ziggy, becomes the principal concern of the story. Eventually, Zipper is anointed the leader of his band of businessmen and is given the task of cutting the rope that has been keeping Rabbi Shmelke connected to the synagogue. The story ends after Zipper severs the connection between the celestial rabbi and the terrestrial world, allowing the rabbi to float away from the synagogue; the rabbi’s followers, led by Zipper’s son Ziggy, jump onto the end of the rope, becoming a human tail on this ascending kite, which is wafting away to Paradise, leaving Zipper alone to wallow in sadness and regret. Both stories, Englander’s “The Gilgul of Park Avenue” and Stern’s “The Tale of a Kite,” establish magical realist contexts – featuring authoritative, unquestioning narrative voices – from the outset. In “Gilgul,” the magical premise is embedded in the opening details: 9 Nathan Englander, “The Gilgul of Park Avenue,” in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (New York: Vintage, 1999): 109–137, 109; further references in the text, abbreviated as “GPA.” 10 Steve Stern, “The Tale of a Kite,” in The Wedding Jester (Saint Paul: Graywolf, 1999): 3–20, 3; further references in the text, abbreviated as “TK.”

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It was then, three stars visible in the Manhattan sky and a new day fallen, that Charles Morton Luger understood he was the bearer of a Jewish soul. Ping! Like that it came. Like a knife against a glass. Charles Luger knew, as he knew anything at all, that there was a Yiddishe neshama functioning inside. He was not one to engage taxicab drivers in conversation, but such a thing as this he felt obligated to share. A New York story of the first order, like a woman giving birth in an elevator, or a hot-dog vendor performing open-heart surgery with pocketknife and Bic pen. Was not this a rebirth in itself? It was something, he was sure. So he leaned forward in his seat, raised a fist, and knocked on the Plexiglas divider. The driver looked into his rearview mirror. “Jewish,” Charles said. “Jewish, here in the back” (“GPA,” 109).

The details and the tone that open Englander’s story keep our focus on the consequences of the magical occurrence, rather than on the nature of the occurrence itself. As we are directed toward the thoughts and actions that follow the magical “Ping,” we are struck by the comical analogies – “like a woman giving birth in an elevator, or a hot-dog vendor performing open-heart surgery with pocketknife and Bic pen” – rather than the inclination to interrogate the logic of what has taken place. The location – Manhattan, in this case – also plays a role, as it grounds us in a specific setting that is familiar yet mysterious at the same time – a place where extraordinary things really do occur. Steve Stern has spoken explicitly about the extraordinary potential of cities. In an interview with Derek Parker Royal, Stern suggests that cities “can achieve immortality in ways that human beings cannot, although human beings who dwell in such places can partake of eternal and universal elements, thus extending the possibilities of their own lives beyond the bounds of the ordinary.”11 After referencing the extraordinary potential of cities such as London, Dublin, and Odessa, Stern discusses how writers such as “Dickens and Joyce and Babel […] have distilled real cities into places as fantastical as they are historical and geographical; and by the same token the characters that inhabit these cities may display, beyond the merely terrestrial, celestial and infernal attributes as well. This is the sort of thing I was hoping to do […] with the Pinch” (“ISS,” 153). Such a timeless and magical infusion, grounded in an historical location (notably the Pinch), is evident in several of Stern’s short stories and novels. Similar to Stern’s Pinch, many of Englander’s stories are set in a fictionally named, yet markedly familiar section of Brooklyn called “Royal Hills.” Although Englander’s work generally does not bend the boundaries of realism as often as Stern’s – of his

11 Derek Parker Royal, “Tugging at Jewish Weeds: An Interview with Steve Stern,” MELUS 32.1 (2007): 139–161, 152–153; further references in the text, abbreviated as “ISS.”

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three published volumes of fiction, there are few overt examples of the supernatural – the “fantastical” potential of The City is evident in “The Gilgul of Park Avenue,” in which the major magical event is characterized as “[a] New York story of the first order”; and in his most recent collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, the story that most prominently employs magical realist techniques, “Peep Show,” is likewise set in Manhattan. For Englander and Stern, the city settings allow the supernatural to be perceived as extraordinarily real, helping to establish the magical realist contexts that are crucial to each story. The ways in which the magical realist narratives subvert conventional notions of realism help to emphasize the ways in which Jewish American identities subvert conventional notions of ethnic and religious classification. Describing how “[m]agical realist texts are subversive,” Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris suggest “their in-betweenness, their all-at-onceness encourages resistance to monologic political and cultural structures.”12 Implicit in such resistance is the inclination to re-evaluate and imagine anew. As Shannin Schroeder contends, “[l]iterary modes like magical realism play an important role in the reviewing and revision of our ‘selves’ […] resulting in cultural corrections and forcing readers to reconsider reality as they know it.”13 The enigma of difference for contemporary American Jews comes out of the persistent re-evaluations, re-imaginations, and re-articulations that epitomize contemporary Jewish American communities. Just as magical realist narratives subvert stable structures, “humorous incongruity disorders what had been ordered, breaking open the frame and scattering its elements. […] [I]t takes its character from what it is not – that is, ordered, and therefore expected, experience.”14 In “Gilgul” and “Kite,” the comical and magical modes highlight the illusion of stable, often polar classifications (i.e. Jewish as either religion or ethnicity), while demonstrating how Jewish American identities resist efforts to be placed within fixed categories. In “Gilgul,” we see such resistance personified in Rabbi Zalman Meintz who (as mentioned earlier) underwent a transformation similar to Charles’s before he moved from Bolinas to Brooklyn and opened “the Royal Hills Mystical Jewish Reclamation Center.” This story-fact is significant on many levels. First, the comical details, such as the description of the Center as “a sort of clearinghouse

12 Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, “Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke UP, 1995): 1–11, 6. 13 Shannin Schroeder, Rediscovering Magical Realism in the Americas (Westport: Praeger, 2004): 64. 14 Murray Davis, “Wit’s Weapons: Incongruity and Ambiguity,” in Laughing Matters, ed. Marvin Diogenes (New York: Pearson, 2009): 13–36, 16.

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for the Judeo-supernatural,” help to normalize the presence of the magical, by coupling the “supernatural” center with the mundane description of a “clearinghouse,” casually gesturing beyond the realms of realism. Along similar lines – making the extraordinary ordinary – Zalman’s transformation, and the presence of the Reclamation Center where the phone seems to ring incessantly, reinforce the magical realist “co-presence” of the natural and supernatural: what Charles has experienced is not so unique. In fact, it is common enough to establish the Center and list it in the Manhattan yellow pages where one can “find anything” (“TK,” 112). It also gives Zalman an opportunity to state most explicitly that what Charles has experienced is “miraculous” but “not unbelievable” (“TK,” 114); the potential for such a transformation was “always already” there. The only question now is how to proceed. Most significantly, however, the Royal Hills Mystical Jewish Reclamation Center speaks to the changing face of contemporary American Judaism – an example of one of the “communal institutions and social and family networks,” which bolster (or in this case, reclaim) contemporary American Jewish communities.15 As Goldscheider posits, such “institutions” and “networks” – regardless of how secular or non-traditional – help to “sustain the ethnic and religious continuity of American Jews in the absence of overt discrimination and disadvantage,” and function as one of the “structural and cultural forces [that] sustain continuity in the face of pressures toward the disintegration of the uniqueness and distinctiveness of their communities.”16 In “Gilgul,” Charles’s discovery is described as a “small miracle” and “exactly why he’d moved to New York” (“GPA,” 112). Once again, the city space helps to normalize the supernatural while highlighting the diversity and continuous transformations that contribute to the constitution of contemporary American Jewry. Similar to “Gilgul,” “The Tale of a Kite” opens with narrative details and a narrative tone that help characterize the protagonist, Jacob Zipper, and establish a comical and magical realist framework: “Boss Crump and his heelers, who gave us a dispensation to stay open on Sundays, have declared more than once in our presence, ‘Our sheenies are good sheenies!’ So you can imagine how it unsettles us to hear that Rabbi Shmelke, head of that gang of fanatics over on Auction Street, has begun to fly” (“TK,” 3). The magic is embedded within the comical voice and narrative details. By emphasizing his desire to assimilate, we are compelled to consider Zipper’s regrettably familiar, yet still comical point of view and less inclined to question the magical flight that drives the actions of the story. It is through the first-person presentation of the circumstances –

15 Goldscheider, “Judaism,” 269. 16 Goldscheider, “Judaism,” 269.

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where the narrator is ostensibly trying to persuade readers of the soundness of his perspective (most evident in his second person appeal: “you can imagine how it unsettles us”) – that, ironically, compels readers to sympathize with Rabbi Shmelke. Zipper comes across as the misguided one, more unsettled by the power and allure of Shmelke and his growing group of followers than by the backhanded and demeaning “compliment” that he and his cohorts are “good sheenies.” In each story, “The Gilgul of Park Avenue” and “The Tale of a Kite,” religiosity seems to be pitted against ethnicity, and in each story, this apparent tension is highlighted through magical and comical means. While the religiosity-ethnicity dichotomy is portrayed differently in each piece, the degree of comically discriminatory rhetoric is similar. In “Kite,” Zipper and his cohorts share their “apprehensions [about Shmelke and his followers] to the courtly Rabbi Fein, who runs the religious school in the synagogue basement. At […] [their] urgency he lets it be known from the pulpit that fraternizing with Chasids, who are after all no better than heretics, can be hazardous to the soul. He hints at physical consequences as well, such as warts and blindness” (“TK,” 6–7). While humor is used to emphasize the perceived divide between the secular and the religious, it also pulls from a history of discriminatory mythology and touches on the reality that certain Jewish stereotypes have been perpetuated by other Jews. In “Gilgul,” Charles’s wife Sue confronts Charles about the mezuzah he has nailed to the frame of their door, anxious to know why it has “‘blue paint on it. Where does one buy a used mezuzah?’” she asks him. Charles admits that he “‘pried it off eleven-D with a letter opener. They don’t use it. Steve Fraiman had me in to see their Christmas tree last year. Their daughter is dating a black man’” (“GPA,” 127). As with “Kite,” the humor emphasizes the tensions that can surface over religious and secular practices and values. Of course the irony and humor are not only found in Charles’s attempt to discredit Fraiman’s Jewishness – as if Charles, who recently and instantaneously became Jewish, is suddenly an authority on Jewishness and would properly “use” this stolen mezuzah – but more significantly that desecration of property and theft of this religious object (not to mention coveting a neighbor’s possessions and spreading discriminatory gossip) would be acceptable, even righteous, and somehow more Jewish. Just as the magical realist narratives found in “Gilgul” and “Kite” subvert conventional notions of reality (as well as “monologic political and cultural structures”), humor can also subvert stable structures, classifications, and categories. Discussing Ben Katchor’s graphic narrative The Jew of New York and Jewish humor more generally, James Bloom discusses “the commitment among funny Jews both to sustain and discredit nearly three millennia of ‘lost tribe’ myth making.” Bloom contends that “[t]hese two mutually offsetting moves,

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sustaining and discrediting, require a renunciation of home and identity.”17 Such a renunciation is on display with Charles Lugar’s “offsetting” move to steal the mezuzah from someone’s home in an effort to make his own home more Jewish. Bloom follows his contention about “sustaining and discrediting” by pulling from a 1955 essay by Irving Kristol who suggests that Jewish humorists maintain “a knife edge between faith and nihilism.”18 Just as the humor in “Gilgul” emphasizes that liminal territory between the sacred and profane, “between faith and nihilism,” the humor in “Kite” rises out of that same inbetween space. Describing the march to cut the rope tied to the ankle of Rabbi Shmelke – almost literally applying “a knife edge between faith and nihilism” – Zipper tries to justify his impending actions: “We’re all of one mind […] though yours truly has been elected to carry the hedge shears – donated for the deed by Hekkie Schatz of Hekkie’s Hardware. Ostrow our titular chair, Nussbaum the treasurer, Benny Rosen the whatsit, all have deferred the honor to me, by virtue of what’s perceived [my emphasis] as my greater indignation” (“TK,” 17–18). Zipper’s unwillingness to take ownership of – to fully claim – the “greater indignation” that others have “perceived” betrays his own uncertainties and misgivings about the supernatural occurrence that has taken place and his own uncertainties and misgivings about his identity and responsibility as an American Jew. Stern admits that he’s “partial to the idea of the marriage of the ordinary and the extraordinary,” suggesting “the union, put that way, remains in the realm of the secular. The wedding that interests me more, in life as well as literature, is the marriage of the sacred and the profane” (“ISS,” 149). While the magical realist narrative “remains in the realm of the secular,” Zipper is presiding over that wedding “of the sacred and the profane,” and his uncertainty about his role in this magical union is featured through his comical narrative, the diversions of which (telling us who donated the hedge shears, grasping for and commenting on committee titles, sharing how he has come to be holding the hedge shears – all while he is en route to cut the rope tied to the ankle of the levitating rabbi) emphasize the ambivalence that characterizes contemporary Jewish American identity. Although both Englander and Stern incorporate religious figures and events into their stories, the magical realist context keeps their stories outside of the realm of the religious, and away from theological or mythological explanations

17 James D. Bloom, Gravity Fails: The Comic Jewish Shaping of Modern America (Westport: Praeger, 2003): 157. 18 Quoted in Bloom, Gravity Fails, 157.

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and interpretations. “The Gilgul of Park Avenue” is not a Kabbalistic reincarnation tale (as the “Gilgul” might suggest), but a “New York story of the first order,” not reliant on religious mythology for its magic. Similarly, “The Tale of a Kite,” also grounded in an historical city district, is very much an American story about assimilation and the struggle to discern one’s cultural identity, rather than a religious fantasy, allegory, or fable. By incorporating religious aspects into a mode that subverts and works outside of any theological or mythological realm, these stories implicitly demonstrate the paradoxical construction that complicates efforts to understand and describe Jewish American identity – a construction that contributes to the enigma of difference for contemporary American Jews. Despite the discriminatory rhetoric directed toward secular Jews (in “Gilgul”) and Chasidic Jews (in “Kite”), neither Charles nor Zipper really understands their own religious and cultural identities. When Zalman asks Charles how he feels, Charles answers “‘Jewish and content. Excited. Still excited. The whole thing’s ludicrous. I was one thing and now I’m another. But neither holds any real meaning. It’s only that when I discovered I was Jewish, I think I also discovered God” (“GPA,” 119). In this case, Charles not only demonstrates his inability to express what being Jewish means – he uses “Jewish” as an adjective to describe his state – he also makes the distinction between being Jewish and practicing Judaism, saying that when he became Jewish he thinks he “also discovered God.” As he describes it, discovering God is more incidental than integral, yet the obvious, if not intrinsic association between Jewishness and God reinforces the conflation of religiosity and ethnicity. When confronting her husband, Sue asks: “‘if you have to be Jewish, why so Jewish? Why not like the Browns in six-K? Their kid goes to Haverford. Why […] do people who find religion always have to be so goddamn extreme?’” (“GPA,” 122) In Charles’s case, adherence to Halacha (religious law) becomes the most concrete and accessible expression of Jewishness. And yet, Charles is still not certain that he discovered God, only that he has a Jewish soul. Soul, in this case, is the perfect word – the ultimate enigma – as ordinary and extraordinary as almost any human concept, inherently defying concrete definition. The questions about what makes someone Jewish or how to characterize American Jewishness sprout out of the persistent changes – new and exhausted affiliations, modernized and increasingly personal interpretations, interfaith marriages with integrated holidays and rituals – that have marked the Jewish experience in the United States. Advocating the use of “multiplicity” over “hybridity” when describing “Jews in the modern period,” David Biale suggests that in contemporary times, “intermarriage needs to be seen […] as creating new forms of identity, including multiple identities that will reshape what it means to be Jewish

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in ways we can only begin to imagine.”19 With diminished pressure to marry inside the faith – today, few face the harsh judgments of old when some Jews would suggest an interfaith marriage was a victory for Hitler – Jewish Americans can more freely express their individual and communal characters and embrace the “multiplicity” of their identities. The continuous changes taking place in American Jewish communities are, ironically, a sign of an increasingly fixed place within American society. Vivian Klaff contends that “the Jewish population has become much more diverse in terms of culture and religious identification” and the findings are consistent with “the general American population where religious identification is in constant flux.”20 Responding to the tendency to see changing Jewish communities as a sign of the end of Jewish religion, culture, and identity, Goldscheider and others suggest it is rash to “define change as decline […] or the development of new forms of Jewish culture and religion as secularization”; in the contemporary United States especially, it is prudent to consider “a more dynamic view of change that implies the value of choice, diversity, and creativity in the emergence of new forms.”21 These “new forms” have been enriched and expanded by those who have chosen to become Jewish (or in the case of Charles, been imbued with a Jewish soul). In an interview with Random House (boldtype), when asked about the sudden transformation that takes place in “Gilgul,” Englander responds: Religion got a lot more religious while I was growing up. Mostly because we were a bunch of little zealots coming home on the school bus and announcing things, like, “It’s a sin to rip toilet paper on Shabbos, there will be no more toilet paper ripping under this roof.” We’d out-religious the next guy. And it was the people who came from the least religious homes who often got the most religious the quickest and that is a lot to deal with for the folks in their world. I’ve watched a lot of people turn very religious very quickly, and it always interests me, this change. And especially having turned very not religious, very slowly, I can obviously empathize with the act of changing.22

It is “the act of changing” that lives at the heart of the contemporary Jewish American community. Descriptions and characterizations that try to capture or

19 David Biale, “The Melting Pot and Beyond: Jews and the Politics of American Identity,” in Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, eds. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998): 17–33, 31–32. 20 Vivian Klaff, “Defining American Jewry from Religious and Ethnic Perspectives: The Transitions to Greater Heterogeneity,” Sociology of Religion 67.4 (2006): 415–438, 418. 21 Goldscheider, “Judaism,” 281. 22 “An Interview with Nathan Englander,” RandomHouse.com, April 1999 (accessed April 1, 2010).

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freeze complex identities must stay mindful of the consistency of change that is one of the markers of American Jewishness. Goldscheider notes how “People’s ethnic and religious identity is often in flux, and their communal commitments throughout life are difficult to forecast.”23 Part of what “Gilgul” depicts is the flux of “ethnic and religious identity,” most significantly the impact of sudden turns toward religiosity, which can be “a lot to deal with for the folks in their world,” and “a lot to deal with” for those who try to define or attach stable terms to the contemporary Jewish American community. Englander can “empathize with the act of changing” since he was raised orthodox and is now secular, but has always been (and will always be) Jewish. The enigmatic difference felt by many American Jews is tied to the fluidity of “ethnic and religious identity” and can be hard to capture and “difficult to forecast”; it is a difference that emerges out of the coexistence (to use a term often associated with magical realism) of ever-evolving Jewish American factions and individuals, more diverse and complex than “ethnic” and “religious” tags would suggest. Contemporary American Jewishness can accommodate rigid observance but it presents a direct challenge to rigid thinking that refuses to acknowledge the diversity and flexibility of contemporary American Jewry. For Steve Stern, who grew up in Memphis and later in life (as noted earlier) became fascinated by the city’s old Jewish district, the Pinch, his own “life course transition” would have been exceedingly “difficult to forecast.” In his interview with Derek Parker Royal, Stern describes how a job as Ethnic Heritage Director at “a local folklore center” (“ISS,” 141) opened his eyes to a part of the city and the Jewish past that instigated a change in his awareness and involvement in the diverse, contemporary Jewish American community – seen most poignantly in his fiction, so much of which is written in magical and comical modes. According to Stern, his “characters are frequently torn between two worlds – the one they’re born into where they tend to feel awkward and uncomfortable, and the one they are trying to enter by means of Rube Goldberg vehicles assembled out of bootlegged myths and dreams” (“ISS,” 146). While this complicated dichotomy is notable in many of Stern’s stories, a similarly divided trajectory can be identified in Englander’s piece. In “Gilgul,” Charles moves out of the security of the gentile mainstream and into the “awkward and uncomfortable” world where he has to grapple with his new Jewish soul, leading to his efforts to observe Jewish rituals and laws – trying (one might imagine) to enter a world “by means of Rube Goldberg vehicles assembled out of bootlegged myths and dreams.”

23 Goldscheider, “Judaism,” 282.

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Both Stern and Englander draw their material from assorted Jewish American communities, which they have participated in, read about, researched, and observed from the periphery. In his discussion of Lenny Bruce, who once tagged “observe” as a Jewish word, James Bloom suggests [t]o observe even religiously […] involves acknowledging change, usually coupled with a wish for permanence, while to observe perceptually readies observers for change. These lexical ambiguities of observe, its meaning at once ‘honor,’ ‘watch carefully,’ ‘notice,’ and ‘comment,’ make it the foremost imperative of funny Jewishness.24

Indeed, it is the patience and ability to observe, note incongruities, and convey these incongruities on the page that allows us to see – just a tad more clearly – the changes and tensions that contribute to the enigma of Jewish American difference. Comical and magical modes allow these incongruities – a foundation for much humor and an integral component in magical realism – to become more evident; these modes offer textual space to present and observe the changing face of American Jewry. Describing the world conjured in magical realist stories, Rawdon Wilson suggests “[t]he hybrid nature of this space becomes evident when you observe the ease, the purely natural way in which abnormal, experientially impossible (and empirically unverifiable) events take place.”25 For Wilson, [i]t is as if they [the supernatural entities and events] had always already been there; their abnormality normalized from the moment that their magical realist worlds were imagined. The narrative voice bridges the gap between ordinary and bizarre, smoothing the discrepancies, making everything seem normal.26

Established in and sustained by discrepancies, magical realism – especially when coupled with humor – possesses the unique ability to expose and subvert ostensibly stable labels and structures. In “Gilgul,” after Charles undergoes his radical transformation, he is compelled to share the change immediately – in this case, to the New York City taxi driver who is taking him home. What he says after the “Ping” of his Jewish soul has reclaimed his identity – “Jewish, here in the back” – has several pertinent meanings. In the context of the story, and for many contemporary American Jews, it demonstrates a desire and an inability to express or define one’s Jewishness; it is just a fact: Somewhere in the back of it all, I am Jewish. It also refers to the reality

24 Bloom, Gravity Fails, 159. 25 Rawdon Wilson, “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space: Magical Realism,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke UP, 1995): 209–234, 220. 26 Wilson, “Metamorphoses,” 220.

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that for many American Jews, Jewishness is always there, but often in the background, occasionally calling out for recognition or emerging from an assortment of disparate ingredients: like a distinct spice in a robust soup. Such calls for recognition – reminders of Jewish identity – are disseminated within public and private documents, asking for religious preference; they stream out of countless news sources, spinning and reporting stories about Israel or national and international anti-Semitism; they are broadcast from entertainment media sources – in movies and on television, in magazines, web zines, and newspapers – they are embedded in holiday decorations and salutations: at department stores, office parties, and public squares. These reminders of difference may leave some contemporary American Jews feeling disconcerted, yet most are just hit with a Ping, unsure exactly what it means or how to act, react, or respond. Of course, deciding how to respond to a fairly innocuous salutation (“Merry Christmas, Mr. Goldberg!”) may be a luxury of our contemporary time – in the United States, at least. In the time period of “Kite,” Jewish difference elicits more fears and insecurities for Zipper than it generally would today for most Jews. In Zipper’s case, his distress over Rabbi Shmelke stems from fears of a sweeping and discriminatory reaction to the Chasidic group in town – one which would jeopardize his business and overall “good standing.” Upon first entering the dark room of the Chasidim, Zipper is unsettled by “all the blind superstition of our ancestors preserved in amber” (“TK,” 11), revealing his paranoia: But how did it [the collection of cultural artifacts] manage to follow us over an ocean to such a far-flung outpost as Tennessee? Let the goyim see a room like this, with a ram’s horn in place of a clock on the wall, with the shnorrers wrapped in their paraphernalia mumbling hocus-pocus instead of being gainfully employed, and right away the rumors start. The Yids are poisoning the water, pishing on the communion wafers, murdering Christian children for their blood. Right away somebody’s quoting the Protocols of Zion. A room like this, give or take one flying rebbe, can upset the delicate balance of the entire American enterprise. (“TK,” 11)

Zipper’s use of the first-person plural (“how did it manage to follow us”) sets up a crucial irony. On one hand, Zipper links himself to the Chasidic group. The artifacts are a reminder of who he is and where he comes from – a reminder of the Jewish diaspora in the United States and beyond. On the other hand, some of the stereotypes and discriminatory mythology he mentions – most significantly, the reference to the 1903 anti-Semitic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which suggests that Jews have a secret plan to rule the world – rival the absurdity of the words that come from Zipper’s own Rabbi Fein who warns of “warts and blindness” for those who are “fraternizing with Chasids.” In this case, Zipper either wants the religious group to abandon their cultural history (and the accompany-

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ing “paraphernalia”) and blindly follow his own path toward secularization and assimilation, or he wants to imagine that (and proceed as if) there is a genuine divide between the secular and religious, one so evident and irreconcilable that the connection is severed and there is no longer an association. But the “us” gives him away. Indeed, Zipper’s distress comes from the deep-seated understanding that the divide he imagines does not exist – secular and religious American Jews are inextricably bound in Jewishness – and despite individual values and behaviors, he may always be subject to the generalizations of an-at-least-partlyimagined anti-Semitic mainstream who tend not to make distinctions when unleashing discriminatory rhetoric. This is not to say that anti-Semitism is the great equalizer, but a Jewish joke or an anti-Semitic slur does have the power and potential to offend all Jews equally. Sensitivity to difference is still a common theme in Jewish American literature. Stern’s “Kite” falls into, what has become – at least since the novels of Abraham Cahan – a Jewish American literary tradition, featuring stories of assimilating or assimilated Jews working hard to downplay cultural and religious differences to “pass” as an equal part of the mainstream – different from the practices and appearances of “greenhorn” or more religious Jews. In a brief analysis of Stern’s story, Andrew Furman notes the striking similarities between “The Tale of a Kite” and Philip Roth’s story “Eli, the Fanatic.” As Furman notes, both stories focus on towns where assimilated Jews live in relative harmony with gentiles, and in both stories, the secular Jews are disturbed by the arrival of a religious sect of Jews who – by ritual behaviors and appearance alone – threaten to undermine the relationship between the Jews and the gentiles (at least in the minds of the secular Jewish population). In each story, the secular Jews appoint a representative to try and convince the religious group to leave, and in each case the representative is in some way transformed – or at least affected – by his interaction with the spiritual leader and the commitment of this leader’s followers. There are two primary differences. The first difference is in the understood times and places of these stories: “Eli” takes place in Woodenton, NJ, during the second half of the twentieth century, while “Kite” takes place in Memphis, TN, during (what seems to be) the years just before the Second World War. The second difference is in Stern’s magical realist narrative, which portrays a world in which a rabbi can fly. While Furman suggests that the flight of Rabbi Shmelke indicates a “narrative awe in the transcendent powers of the holy,”27 his discussion does not delve into great detail about the significance of that awe, which is most evident in the concluding fantasy where Zipper imagines he is floating away to Paradise with Rabbi Shmelke and his

27 Furman, Contemporary Jewish, 148.

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followers. Part of the argument I have been making here is that the flight of Rabbi Shmelke – and the presence of the magical – is used to illustrate and emphasize the ironic tension between religiosity and ethnicity. The taut rope connecting the terrestrial synagogue to the celestial rabbi is a manifestation of that tension, and the characters in “Kite” – Zipper, especially – do not know how to negotiate the space between the magical and the real (between religiosity and ethnicity). It is the illusion that the religious and the ethnic are separate that contributes to the difficulty that Zipper and his associates are having. In “Kite,” Zipper tries to sever a part of his own identity, unwilling or unable to see how intertwined he and Rabbi Shmelke and the entire Jewish American community really are. The irony of this illusory tension is reinforced by and consistent with the inherent irony of magical realism where the magical and the real would seem to oppose one another, yet are inextricably bound to the same world – coexisting as integral parts of one complex entity. In many ways, Rabbi Zalman Meintz – who comes from Bolinas, talks like he’s “never been out of Brooklyn” (“GPA,” 116) and runs a “clearinghouse for the Judeo-supernatural” (“GPA,” 111) – represents just how complex and diverse the contemporary Jewish American community has become; he is an example (along with Charles) of how the comical and the magical are brought together to highlight the enigma of difference for contemporary American Jews. After Zalman experiences his own magical transformation, he becomes a rabbi who is strictly kosher and mindful of Jewish law – encouraging Charles to wear “a prayer shawl and phylacteries,” recite the “Eighteen Benedictions,” and make “ablutions” – yet has no patience “for the litigious and stiff minded” (“GPA,” 116) Jews who put the strict adherence of rituals above “Jewish pride” (“GPA,” 116). As a contemporary Jewish American, Zalman does not fit into any stable religious or ethnic category; he embodies, and helps others negotiate, the complex space between (what appears to be) opposing religious and ethnic – supernatural and natural – worlds. He posits “the sacrifice of Jewish pride” as the “one thing the tender soul can’t bear” (“GPA,” 116), but what is meant by “Jewish pride,” to say nothing of “the tender soul,” is never, and perhaps could never, be expressed explicitly. However his point still comes across: “Jewish pride” embodies all – every variation of Jew. Although cultural and religious calls – the calls of Jewish identity – may get pushed to the background for many Jewish Americans, they cannot be ignored or denied. They have persisted throughout history, and history, along with the fluctuations of contemporary culture, have a way of being heard. Discussing how he came upon the remnants of Memphis’s historical Jewish ghetto community, Stern describes how “the past with its ghost population […] began to assume more life in my mind than the desolate present. I felt as if I’d tossed my line into the past, expecting to snag a quaint memory or two, and

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hauled up the lost city of Atlantis” (“ISS,” 142). For Stern, “the discovery of the Pinch felt like a homecoming, a place where my stories (which had been searching for somewhere to belong) could happen” (“ISS,” 142). Part of what I have tried to demonstrate in this essay is how the coupling of magical realist and comical modes – a combination found in Englander’s “Gilgul” and Stern’s “Kite” – can harbor and highlight incongruous conditions, creating complex spaces where the multiplicities and contradictions of Jewish American identities have “somewhere to belong.” Describing the presence of “characters commuting between worlds,” Stern suggests their journeys are not so much between opposing orders of reality as between the present and the past. They often dwell in places where the membrane between the here and now and a yesterday in which the citizens of the Pale of Settlement, both natural and supernatural […] is quite thin” (“ISS,” 153).

He goes on to describe how [a] haunted past invades and occasionally occupies a pedestrian present for good or ill […]. This is seldom a cozy cohabitation. To pursue a dubious metaphor, the penetration of that aforementioned membrane is often a violent rupture, prompting an abrupt end of innocence and perhaps the beginning of a painful wisdom (“ISS,” 153–154).

For Zipper, the “painful wisdom” comes after he tries to sever the connection between Rabbi Shmelke and followers (including Zipper’s own son) and the “enterprising bunch” with whom Zipper associates. It is not until the “violent rupture” of Smelke’s rope when Zipper realizes that his actions and outbursts have been in vain, that religious and secular American Jews are inexplicably and inexorably bound in American Jewishness. Efforts to divorce Judaism from the Jewish, or to renounce secular Jews from a Jewishness steeped in Judaism are, comically and fantastically, futile. In “Kite,” Zipper is most distressed by the participation and support of his son Ziggy whom he sees hovering in a crowd around Rabbi Shmelke: I can hardly believe this is my son. What did I do wrong that he should chase after motheaten yiddishe swamis? Did he ever want for anything? Didn’t I take him on high holidays to a sensible synagogue, where I showed him how to mouth the prayers nobody remembers the meaning of? (“TK,” 12).

Not only is the criterion for a synagogue not based on something spiritual, but knowing “how to mouth […] prayers” is meant to be more “sensible” than the actual prayers of the “moth-eaten yiddishe swamis.” For Zipper, synagogue is a place to mimic and delude more than to seek any religious identity or connection.

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Yet, despite the way Zipper’s actions are lampooned through the narrative, it is more his judgmental attitude toward his son’s interests and actions that warrant scorn, not the ritual “acting” he indulges at his local synagogue. For contemporary American Jews, certain synagogues may serve more as “communal institutions and social and family networks” than houses of worship; while for many others, synagogues remain the center of religious lives: sacred spaces where individuals who do more than just “mouth the prayers” – but know, believe in, and form their identities from and through them – willingly congregate and observe. What should be questioned (by Zipper and others) is not why Ziggy wants to practice his faith, but why Zipper is so threatened by his son’s interest and faith, even while he continues to attend a synagogue where he goes through the ritualistic motions. Questions like these, even more than the range of answers, have come to define contemporary American Jewry. For Zipper, the act of gathering at his synagogue is important for his individual and cultural identity – important for Jewish “continuity” and community – but the purpose for communing has started to shift (or has never stopped shifting for many Jews in the United States). As with many Jewish American communities, there has been some movement toward a more secular perspective; however, religious and ethnic elements still remain linked. Rituals that were once exclusively religious – Passover Seders, for instance – have become cultural for unaffiliated, atheistic, or even some Reform Jews who ritually congregate with family during Jewish holidays and foster cultural identities from these practices and performances. The practices and priorities may be different from congregation to congregation and individual to individual, but each group and each individual contributes to the diverse and fluctuating face of the Jewish American community. Similar to those who might attend the Royal Hills Mystical Jewish Reclamation Center, Zipper’s tenuous affiliation with his synagogue helps to keep Jewishness alive in the United States. But just as Zipper represents a faction of the diverse Jewish American population, so does his son Ziggy who perceives something marvelously compelling in Shmelke’s more traditional rituals and behavior. Ziggy is taken in by the “magic,” claiming his father “‘wouldn’t know magic if it dumped a load on […] [his] head!’” (“TK,” 16) In this case, Ziggy’s interests are consistent with Marcus Lee Hansen’s famous thesis from “The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant” where he suggests “what the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember.”28 For

28 Marcus Lee Hansen, “The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant,” in American Immigrants and Their Generations: Studies and Commentaries on the Hansen Thesis After Fifty Years, eds. Dag Blanck and Peter Kivisto (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990): 195.

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“Kite,” the son refers to the second generation Zipper who wants to distance himself from a religious past and a culture linked to historical persecution; Zipper’s son Ziggy, born into a more stable national environment – before the atrocities of the Holocaust come to affect the entire world – is more prone to indulge his curiosity, lacking the fear and paranoia of his father who worries that the flying rabbi will undermine the stability and security he has had to earn, in part, by assimilating and shedding the appearance of ethnic and religious difference. The generational tensions highlight the changes indicative of contemporary American Jewishness and expose the problems with conclusions based on “snapshots” rather than “dynamic moving pictures.”29 Regarding the children who have begun to follow the rabbi, Zipper contends, “[f]or them rebellion is a costume party. They revel in the anomalous touch” (“TK,” 13). The “anomalous touch” is a wonderfully slippery tactile expression marking the point where the divine and the human or the religious and the ethnic come together. It emphasizes the liminal ground on which contemporary Jewish American communities exist and contributes to the enigma of difference for contemporary American Jews. Although we might not all be reveling, Jewish Americans are all aware of that anomalous touch, either nudging from the background, or pushing through the rituals of daily lives. To return to the characterization asserted by Biale, Galchinsky, and Heschel, contemporary Jewish Americans, as a group, hold “an anomalous status” and “represent that boundary case whose very lack of belonging to a recognizable category creates a sense of unease.”30 We can see how a “sense of unease” drives the actions in “Gilgul” and “Kite,” and by extension, how this sense has extended through the twentieth century and – as evidenced by the rich scholarship of Goldscheider, Biale, Levitt, Kaplan, Kaufman, Furman and many others – is prominent even today. But with the “emergence of new forms” of Jewish culture and religion – whether from assimilating into and absorbing aspects of contemporary American society or carrying over traditions and artifacts from the “old world” – “choice, diversity, and creativity” must be recognized as vibrant parts of contemporary American Jewishness. Efforts to deny change or restrict religious or cultural expression will ultimately lead to a “violent rupture,” which may, in the most hopeful circumstances, spark “the beginning of a painful wisdom.” In “Kite,” Zipper’s efforts to deny change are stated most explicitly. Describing his response to the flight of Rabbi Shmelke and the “antics” of his followers, Zipper declares: “those of us with any self-respect have stopped looking up”

29 Goldscheider, “Judaism,” 282. 30 Biale, Galchinsky, and Heschel, “Introduction,” 5.

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(“TK,” 14). But such abstinence can only last so long before a consummating confrontation becomes unavoidable. As mentioned earlier, Zipper’s perceived indignation earns him the right to cut Shmelke’s rope. Once the line has been severed, Zipper imagines joining his son and the others who have latched on to the tail of the ascending rabbi. “Across the river the sunset is more radiant than a red flare over a herring barrel, dripping sparks – all the brighter as it’s soon to be extinguished by dark clouds swollen with history rolling in from the east” (“TK,” 20). History, the impending Holocaust in this case, acts as one of the most significant – unavoidable and undeniable – aspects that melds Jewish religiosity and ethnicity together, and demands that Jewish identity remain alive to combat the cycles of death that took away religious rights and inflicted shame, as well as resilient pride, in Jewish communities throughout the world. This is particularly prescient in the time period of “Kite,” just before the most profound atrocity in Jewish history, one which shifted the concentration of the world’s Jews from Europe – where the greatest majority of Jews lived before the Second World War – to the United States, where the majority of the world’s Jews have lived since. This shift changed the dynamic for Jewish Americans. Nazi laws made no distinction between religious and secular Jews; Jews were a race who needed to be exterminated. While the racial suggestions are dubious, the continuity of a diverse and evolving Jewish American identity remains. It is a failure or unwillingness to see the Jewish American community as a multifarious and modulating entity, where religious and secular concerns are “intertwined,” that leads to the tensions and comically futile efforts featured in “The Gilgul of Park Avenue” and “The Tale of a Kite.” Englander and Stern have each experienced and observed ethnic and religious transformations that are characteristic of the range of Jewish American identity. With these transformations in mind, it is worth considering the contrasting sympathies they project in their stories. In Stern’s “Kite,” Zipper’s zealous, secular perspective broaches the absurd, while in Englander’s “Gilgul,” the religious efforts advocated by Rabbi Zalman Meintz and attempted by Charles are comparably absurd. I cite these examples not to suggest that being raised religious (as Englander was) makes one more sympathetic to the secular and vice versa, but rather to demonstrate further how both sides can be depicted as extreme and absurd, yet neither side can exist in isolation from the other – each a part of the diversity and flux of the contemporary Jewish American community. Jewish identity in the United States involves a complex mixture of secular and religious concerns. Yet many American Jews – some who consider themselves more secular, others more religious – continue to imagine themselves as worlds apart from each other, at times, articulating their thoughts on the other in the elitist and discriminatory terms of superiority and inferiority. As Adam Chalom

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notes, Chasidim have been known to refer to secular Jews as “apikorsim,” or Jewish goys, and “[v]ersions of secular Judaism have […] defined themselves by their rejections of Jewish law, rabbinic authority, and the constraints and theology of traditional Judaism.”31 Addressing the challenge of “differentiating between expressions of ethnic and religious identity,” Herbert Gans suggests “that Jews not only ‘share elements of a common past or present non-American culture,’ but that the ‘sacred and secular elements of the culture are strongly intertwined.’”32 As Goldscheider illustrates quite well, “the secular activities of Jewish life reinforce the religious and vice versa, because so many Jews participate in them. The intensities often go together because they lead to the same place – the Jewish community.”33 Among other things, what we see in the stories by Englander and Stern is just how diverse the “Jewish community” has become and how magical and comical modes can be used to highlight the tensions and contradictions that make Jewish identity so hard to define. While few would condone the divisive actions and rhetoric of the more extreme factions of religious and secular American Jews – despite the compelling fiction it can inspire – Zvi Gitelman puts a positive spin on the tension between religiosity and ethnicity, suggesting that “[a]s long as significant numbers of people debate the issue, the survival of Jewishness is assured.”34 What is also assured, despite the well cited and vigorously challenged claims that Irving Howe makes in his 1977 “Introduction” to Jewish American Stories about the dearth of worthy experience for contemporary Jewish American literature, is that the evolution and array of Jewish American individuals and communities leave a substantial amount of material about which to write.35 Significantly, the well documented use of humor and the creative use of the magical realist mode – to portray aspects of the enigmatic difference that has led to, and is a product of, classification challenges, feelings of unease, and continuous debates – are just two of many angles (literary and otherwise) through which to consider contemporary Jewish American literature and contemporary Jewish American communities. No matter how dead the literature may be deemed, or how assimilated the communities may

31 Adam Chalom, “Beyond Apikorsut: A Judaism for Secular Jews,” in Religion or Ethnicity? Jewish Identities in Evolution, ed. Zvi Gitelman (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2009): 286–302, 286. 32 Quoted in Kaufman, “Place of Judaism,” 172. 33 Goldscheider, “Judaism,” 281. 34 Zvi Gitelman, “Conclusion: The Nature and Viability of Jewish Religious and Secular Identities,” in Religion or Ethnicity? Jewish Identities in Evolution, ed. Zvi Gitelman (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2009): 303–322, 319. 35 Irving Howe, “Introduction,” in Jewish American Stories, ed. Irving Howe (New York: Mentor – New American Library, 1977): 1–17, 16.

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become, the Jewish community is not going away. One does not have to listen too hard to hear it, calling across the amorphous membranes of past and present, sacred and profane: “Jewish, here in the back.”

Kitty Millet

Can the Holocaust Novel be a Magical Realist Novel? H. G. Adler’s The Journey ‘after Auschwitz’ H. G. Adler’s The Journey maps the ontological position of a Jewish survivor of the Shoah against the backdrop of the fictional Lustig family’s deportation to Ruhenthal, a place akin to Theresienstadt, where Jews, existing as “rubbish” (67), have been consigned for collection and disposal. Skeptical of the effects of realist portrayals of the Jewish victims’ experiences in the camps, Adler turns to literature, its liminality, primarily to shift the ground of representation from a mimetic and epistemological model in order to produce a “literary ontology” for victims. Thus “literary ontology” not only produces the subjective experiences of the family’s lone survivor, Paul, but it also redeems his family members from being permanently sutured to the sign of their extermination. Therefore, Adler proposes art’s full resources to be a prosthetic for Paul; tacking between Kantian aesthetics and magical realism, art allows Paul to recognize the victims’ interiorities. In this way, Adler elevates art to sacred obligation. His mitzvah is to create the aesthetic conditions for Paul >to recognize his “ghosts” and this multivalent subject position becomes visible through a variant of magical realism. Consequently, Adler demonstrates how the Holocaust novel shifts the ground of magical realism necessarily to encompass a Jewish aesthetics. H. G. Adler’s The Journey1 maps the ontological position of a Jewish survivor of the Shoah against the backdrop of the Lustig family’s deportation to Ruhenthal, a fictional place where Jews, existing as “rubbish” (J, 67), have been consigned for collection and disposal. They are deportees sent, as Richard Lourie, observes, “to a place something like Theresienstadt” that “ends with a lone survivor [the son, Paul] wandering in the immediate postwar landscape of […] displaced persons.”2 Relying on the kinship between literature and experience, Adler creates Ruhenthal specifically because of the liminality of literature’s aesthetic form. A “half-

1 H. G. Adler, The Journey (New York: Random House, 2009); further references in the text, abbreviated as “J”. Familiar to readers of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, H. G. Adler remains largely unknown to English-speaking audiences despite his translator’s efforts to bring him before an English-speaking public. The Journey represents the first of these efforts. 2 Richard Lourie, “Book Review: H. G. Adler’s ‘The Journey’” in New York Times (January 11, 2009): Arts (accessed March 29, 2013).

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life,”3 literature not only represents the subjective experiences of the novel’s characters, but also exhibits their ontologies. Adler proposes, then, an aesthetics, extending well beyond the mimetic representation of the Jewish victims’ objective experience in order to get at the need for a literary ontology for the dead.4 Lourie notes that Adler freights Paul with “the displacement of minds thrust into the ultimate meaninglessness of the Holocaust.” In this way, Lourie hints at not only Adler’s aesthetics, but also a subject position in which communities persist as “ghosts” that accompany Paul’s thought; “the displacement of minds” pushes them untethered “into nothing” (J, 148), but seeking to redeem them, Paul imposes an “I” on the dead around him in the “ark,” Ruhenthal’s nickname. Scooping up fragments from the ashes at his feet, Paul perceives their voices, their ideas, their ontologies, and binds them, affixes them to his thought. He intuits his recognition of the dead as a part of his obligation to them. His mitzvah is impossible though to fulfill if he remains only one half of a pair that emerges from “the ark.” Paul’s singular emergence leaves him without a community on which to lean, a damage that requires art to act as a prosthetic limb. Paul bears the burden of the dead, therefore, by producing a literary ontology for a community whose oppressors have relegated them to rubble, rubbish, and ash. Adler depicts how art enables Paul to recognize and hear “the dead who are there with him” (J, 283), but Paul’s realization occurs in the moments just before his liberation, at the moment when Paul has been reduced to “an eye” whose “empty gaze” searches for “Being” (J, 198). It is a subject position, tenuously posed between pre- and post-liberation whose roots extend into the death camp’s depths. By defying mimesis in a realist mode, its articulation enables Paul to apprehend what had been “unrecognizable.” Paul’s subjectivity persists in seeing the particular being “after Auschwitz” when the world would see only ash. Adler elevates Paul’s recognition of the individual members of the Lustig family to the level of a sacred duty. The Journey begins when the Lustig family is to be deported from Stupart to Ruhenthal “the town of visible ghosts” (J, 67). Dr. Leopold Lustig, the first

3 Hölderlin’s poem, “Half-Life,” is relevant here for two reasons: 1) the poem suggests that literature elicits transcendence in its readers; and 2) Jean Améry uses the poem to depict Auschwitz as a place of “half-death.” See Kitty Millet, “Contemplating Jean Améry’s Transcendence,” in On Jean Améry, ed. Magdalena Zolkos (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011): 21–37, 22. 4 Although Adler’s focus on Paul’s subjectivity indicates any one of many aesthetic registers that sees mimesis in terms of its shortcomings, it still indicates his skepticism of a purely “realist” aesthetic project to present the subjectivities of characters under extermination.

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casualty, cannot accept the change in his status and he dies. His wife, Caroline, and her sister, Ida Schwartz, represent two characters who understand their new statuses, but who also do not survive. The Lustigs’ daughter, Zerlina, imagines transforming herself into a rabbit, but like the Nazis’ other Kaninchen, Zerlina is killed and eaten, her fantasy transpiring in the gas chamber.5 Paul, the family’s only survivor, emerges from amid Ruhenthal’s rubble, an unnamed fragment. It is hard not to be cynical about what has happened to the Lustigs. With the exception of Paul, who still shares their fate, the characters all go to their deaths clinging to an unfulfilled hope. They all imagine theirs to be a “journey” that will, like Odysseus’, end with their return to home. Adler describes how Paul at the end of his “journey” holds on to the memory of his family through his obligation to them. A submerged Jewish identity becomes visible; Paul intuits a secular mitzvah — it “must” be done.6 Adler sutures that obligation to the “literary memory” of art. Through the different stops on Paul’s journey to becoming “a person again” (J, 275), art helps Paul fulfill his mitzvah to them.7 Art’s full resources are necessary for moving Paul from extermination to the damaged places of memory. His memories of his family, his identity, require him to reconstruct his consciousness with the knowledge that he must sift the “left-over detritus,” Ruhenthal’s “abnormal rubbish,” to find the fragments necessary for bringing his “ghosts” with him. Thus Paul stops the Nazis’ “tragic dialectic”8 that begins with the family as subjects in Stupart, opposed antithetically to themselves as objects in Ruhenthal, their synthesis recasting them as “abnormal rubbish” (J, 67). Rubbish triggers a final dialectic, in which it is opposed to crematoria, ending with the final synthesis, ash. Jeremy Adler has linked this novel to magical realism.9 If magical realism has a place in these dialectics, when, where, and what is it? Which part of Paul’s narrative does it encompass? The temptation to leave the world in ashes, to forget the particular is always seductive. However, as Jeremy Adler contends, “it metaphysically reasserts the position of the perpetrators and perpetuates their own

5 Jeremy Adler, “Good Against Evil?,” in Social Theory after the Holocaust, eds. Robert Fine and Charles Turner (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2000): 71–100, 86. 6 Jeremy Adler, “Good Against Evil?,” 73. 7 In this way, Adler’s journey resonates with the train station tropes in Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995). 8 Jean Améry, “At the Mind’s Limits,” in At the Mind’s Limits. Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Alvin Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980): 1–20, 10. 9 Jeremy Adler, “Good against Evil?,” 85.

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master-slave ideology: the perspective of the prisoners as victims becomes absolute at the expense of their humanity.”10 Essentially, three conditions intersect with whether or not the Holocaust novel can formally be a magical realist text: what magical realism is intrinsically; what it offers readers and writers generally; and if the nature of magical realism is appropriate to the Holocaust novel, specifically Adler’s novel. Thus magical realism’s main characteristics should intersect with The Journey necessarily. In an early essay, “Scheherezade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction,”11 Wendy Faris argues that readers of magical realist texts “inherit the literary memory, if not the actual experience, of death camps and totalitarian regimes.” She suggests that magical realism equips readers who discover these events “belatedly” with the phenomenology necessary for imagining “depersonalized death.” Thus “depersonalized death” is a key signifier. Holocaust survivor and writer, Imre Kertész, has described it as one “from which the PERSON in capital letters (and with it the idea of the Human as such)” has been removed.12 Kertész emphasizes the loss of “the Human” by noting that the Nazis fundamentally damage its idea. Similarly, Jean Améry, also a Holocaust survivor and writer, characterizes his experience at the Auschwitz death camp, as an attack on the ontologies of Jewish victims.13 In the camp, it was more convincingly apparent than on the outside that beings and Being got you nowhere. You could be hungry, be tired, be sick. To say that one purely and simply is, made no sense. And existence as such, to top it off, became definitively a totally abstract and thus empty concept […] a game that was not only worthless and an impermissible luxury but also mocking and evil.14

Améry observes that Being, “a totally abstract and empty concept,” is acceptable to those outside Auschwitz because they are beings who are not “hungry, […] tired, […] sick.” Theirs is a natural and unarticulated entitlement of which Auschwitz’s victims have been stripped, just as they have been stripped of belongings

10 Jeremy Adler, “Good against Evil?,” 77. 11 Wendy B. Faris, “Scheherezade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995): 163–190, 164. 12 Imre Kertész, “Who Owns Auschwitz?,” trans. John Mackay, Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1 (2001): 267–272, 270. 13 Améry’s analysis occurs in relation to a critique of Heidegger and Being, “Mind’s Limit’s,” 18. 14 For an analysis of Améry’s critique of Heideggerian ‘Being’ at Auschwitz, see Millet, “Contemplating,” 31.

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and will be stripped of life. The victims intuit ontological entitlement as a flexing of the Nazis’ power against them. By restoring an ontological integrity to victims, Faris suggests that magical realism supplies an imagined depth not only to the death camps’ victims, but also to the objective worlds in which these imagined subjects are found. The restoration of the missing “worlds” in which such subjects and objects are found presumes phenomenal detail that Faris associates implicitly with “richness.” Citing that magical realism emerges “often from the ‘peripheral’ regions of Western culture – Latin America, the Caribbean, India, Eastern Europe […] (most recently called […] the subaltern, the liminal, the marginal),”15 Faris connects it to populations who have borne the brunt of Western colonialism historically. Thus magical realism generates subject positions whose defining features explicitly include subjectivities excluded from the hegemony of western political structures and dominant cultures. They encompass representations of the subjective experiences of the abject, the powerless. Magical realism’s representation of individual experiences challenges a dominant culture’s perspective of its margins. Therefore, Faris brackets magical realism between “Eastern Europe” and a Western “periphery,” presupposing individual agents who resist or negotiate colonial power, who imagine surviving it, and whose ontology remains intact throughout its oppression.16 In Ordinary Enchantments, Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative, Faris expands on her definition of magical realism as a “decolonizing agent”: Magical realism radically modifies and replenishes the dominant mode of realism in the West, challenging its basis of representation from within. That destabilization of a dominant form […] a particularly effective decolonizing agent […] combines realism and the fantastic so that the marvelous seems to grow organically within the ordinary […] Furthermore, that combination of realistic and fantastical narrative, together with the inclusion of different cultural traditions, means that magical realism reflects, in both its narrative mode and its cultural environment, the hybrid nature of much post-colonial society. Thus the mode is multicultural in its very nature […] a multicultural literary sensibility.17

Magical realism’s combining of “realism and the fantastic” as well as “its inclusion of different cultural traditions” within the “dominant” West proposes an 15 Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 165. 16 See Padma Anagol, The Emergence of Feminism in India, 1850–1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). Anagol critiques a scholarly trend to see only silent colonials during the time of the Raj. 17 Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2004): 1–42, 1. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “OE.”

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“ordinary reality” with “the marvelous” pulsating through it. This marvelous element disrupts the “basis of representation from within.” Faris points to a necessary relationship, then, between periphery and center in “ordinary reality”; they exist in contiguous relationship to each other. This rationale presumes as a given that the “dominant” West includes its “periphery” so that distance between dominant and peripheral is measured not only in physical, but also in subjective proximity. Furthermore, the “multicultural sensibility” negotiates the distance between periphery and center in order to “decolonize” the dominant society. Hence magical realism “replenishes the dominant mode of reality” through its “destabilization” and this action occurs in “ordinary reality.” In the earlier essay, Faris observes that magical realism becomes necessary because of the “death of fiction.”18 Literature is freighted with the realization of its own catastrophe. Magical realism indicates a caesura in narrative in which a modernist literature, disconnected from the human, becomes mysteriously “renewed,” a world of magical objects. The core of magical realism is then magic’s redemption of a modernist universe that has become detached from the human. Indeed, Faris posits magic, the “irreducible element,” as the first of five principles defining magical realism” (OE, 7). “The irreducible element” pulsates beneath the surface of the “phenomenal world,” the “realism in magical realism” (OE, 14). Of the remaining constitutive traits, “unsettling doubts” (OE, 17), “merging realities” (OE, 21), and “disruptions of time, space, identity” (OE, 23), Faris’s fourth attribute, “merging realities,” hints at the stakes of magical realism for Holocaust narratives since it foregrounds the possibility of liminal characters who are unrecognizable to a dominant culture and who “destabilize” it “from within.” In this way, magical realism becomes a necessity for victims because it enacts a process of recovery: it produces the affect and phenomenology of silenced peoples; readers can “inherit” the “literary […] experience of death camps.” By tethering magical realism to the “death camp,” Faris proposes that the reader’s intuition of the “actual experience” recovers the “magic” of a missing world. Thus magical realism restores both the victims’ diverse subjectivities, and the objective worlds from which they come. However, we have to ask ourselves if this restoration is appropriate to the subject matter? The question broaches three major objections: first, magical realism has “occasionally compromised itself […] with Nazi Neo-Classicism.”19 This “occasionally compromised” element suggests that the instrument of oppression can18 Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 164. 19 Irene Guenther, “Magical Realism, New Objectivity, and the Arts during the Weimar Republic,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995): 33–73, 56. She quotes La Réalisme Magique:

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not be seamlessly transformed to serve its former victims.20 In fact, many survivors and writers argue that “taint” makes art unacceptable “after the Holocaust” because at that time, it appeared “repugnant, disgusting […] linked in our minds with a sphere of European culture of which we had been the victims.”21 Even if magical realism today includes “different cultural traditions,” its “compromised” roots still prohibit its use. Theodor Adorno goes even further and rejects poetry “after Auschwitz.”22 Without rehearsing Jeremy Adler’s essay on the AdornoAdler conflict,23 we should note that Adorno expands his prohibition to address Adler’s insistence on aesthetics as an ethical obligation, both during and “after Auschwitz.” A second objection arises in connection with magical realism’s substitution of invention for historical fact. Faris remarks that characters weighed down by “memory and knowledge,” find themselves inventing narratives to alleviate their burdens.24 Citing Brian McHale’s analysis of Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! in relation to “postmodernist fiction,”25 she notes that “Quentin and Shreve leave off their attempts to remember and reconstruct, and begin self-consciously to invent.”26 The sentence wavers uneasily between the tension of desiring to reconstruct the past with its exhaustiveness, the way such an activity burdens existence, and then, the freedom from the burden of remembering by reconstructing a past via the imagination’s liberation. Art displaces “uncertainty” through Quentin and Shreve’s invented narrative, appended to the story of Sutpen, Henry, and Bon. They are liberated from the past through a narrative displacement. McHale marks their displacement as a conflict between epistemology, associated with modernism, and ontology, associated with postmodernism. Faulkner’s novel “foregrounds such epistemological themes as the accessibility and circulation of knowledge.”27 When knowledge can’t be “accessed,” Quentin and Shreve recognize their own “intractable epistemological uncertainty”28 until

roman, peinture, et cinema, ed. Jean Weisgerber (Brussels: Le Centre des Avant-gardes littéraires de l’Université de Brussels, 1987): 15–21, 12. 20 While my discussion concerns itself specifically with the Holocaust novel, the question circulates in a variety of post-war literatures. 21 Berel Lang,Writing and the Holocaust (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes and Meiers, 1988): 89. 22 Theodor W. Adorno, “Culture, Criticism, and Society,” trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber, Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1983): 17–34. 23 Jeremy Adler, “Good against Evil?,” 71–82. 24 Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,” 165. 25 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987): 9–21. 26 Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children,”166. 27 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 9. 28 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 11.

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finally the burden of uncertainty gives way at a precise point: the two men have to invent or speculate about what the unarticulated history might be.29 Overwhelmed by what they cannot know, they are plunged into the fantastic, the speculative. In other words, their lack of knowledge requires a narrative displacement that carries with it the full force of “it must have happened this way.” Their narrative intervention does not occur because they are obligated to finding out what has happened, but rather because they just don’t know. In this way, the literary text’s epistemological failure produces a literary ontology, another “world.” McHale notes that “the ontology of the world” exists often in open conflict with other “kinds of world”; one world’s boundaries violate another’s. For him, the question becomes, then: “What happens when different kinds of world are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?”30 Violation is key, since the “different kinds of world” exist contiguously to each other. Consequently, McHale’s ontological question presents a history, or a character, within a text, whose very existence violates “pre-existing worlds,” both phenomenal and phenomenological. Such violation makes visible the other world’s “seams”; it is postmodernism’s “fissuring” power.31 Faris understands it as “magic,” an “irreducible element,” emerging at the dominant culture’s seams. It appears between historical knowledge and Quentin and Shreve’s imagined memories. Quentin and Shreve imagine what could have happened although it did not, and they are liberated from the past because of it; they can create an alternative narrative to substitute for what did not happen. Simultaneously, their invented narrative becomes as privileged as the historical record with its glaring absences. For Holocaust narrative, privileged, imagined experiences could resonate more with an audience’s expectations – their capacities for identification – than with the actual memories of the camps’ victims.32 Under the weight of the Holocaust’s legacy, we are tempted to construct a better narrative about what has happened,33 to impose our narrative on, rather than listen to, the “unrecognizable

29 Of course, Kant claims that art has been historically the marker for “epistemological uncertainty” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, ed. and tr. Werner Pluhar [Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1986]: section 74). 30 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 10. 31 Jean François Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984): 71–84. See also Wlad Godzich, “Afterword: Reading Against Literacy” in Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997): 109–136, 128. 32 Ironically, an audience steeped in Adorno’s “negative dialectics” rejected Adler’s aesthetics precisely in these terms, see Jeremy Adler, “Good against Evil?,” 92. 33 Kertész, “Who Owns Auschwitz?,” 270. He makes this point explicitly in his analysis of kitsch.

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voices” complicating the past (J, 216). Kertész notes that this practice already punctuates the reception of the Holocaust since “the authentic witness is or will soon be perceived as being in the way, and will have to be shoved aside like the obstacle he is.”34 A third objection derives from Faris’s claim that magical realism restores missing objective worlds, in this case, “the death camp.” The problem is really whether or not the subject begins at Auschwitz or exists before Auschwitz. Ruth Klüger notes in Still Alive that “she is not from Auschwitz, but […] Vienna.”35 She not only refuses being a victim, but also implies that her identity remains intact throughout the camps. She is a subject before deportation, during her internment, and after her liberation. Nevertheless, magical realism offers a unique perspective on Holocaust narrative if we concede that the implications of magical realism shift when “the dominant form” is not “an ordinary world.” The imagined world of the death camp might be where the subject is found, reemerges, but it is not the place that produces the self. In fact, Paul’s journey “to become human again” (J, 283) might become intuitable through magical realism if we rethink “hybridity” as not the site of, or a signifier for, “a multicultural sensibility,” but rather as a multivalent subject position, shaped by Paul’s losses. Therefore, we must recognize how these losses still factor in his reemergence as a subject. At their deportation, the Lustigs represent a normative, upper middle-class family, living in the city of Stupart. The father is a doctor. His wife, Caroline believes that “reality doesn’t exist for him […] [he] only thinks about his work” (J, 71). Caroline manages the home, the doctor, their children. Their daughter, Zerlina, posits her father idealistically as a “caregiver” and not a disinterested professional. The son, Paul, is simply an assimilated, upper-middle class boy. Caroline’s sister, Ida, a widow, depends on her sister to mediate the deportation for her. Bracketing the Lustigs’ fate between their reactions to deportation and Ruhenthal’s “ghosts,” the narrator describes the fate that awaits them and their recuperation as “abnormal rubbish” (J, 67): Existence is all that remains, an almost incomprehensible collection of detritus left over. The one who lives, who cannot live there […] He still has eyes and can see, he’s not dead, even if he can do no more than express what he observes, thus becoming a ghost imprisoned and dressed as a living figure […] The ghost newly transformed is added to many other ghosts of

34 Kertész, “Who Owns Auschwitz?,” 268. 35 Ruth Klüger, Still Alive (New York: Feminist P, 2001): 61.

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his own kind […] since they are not things and therefore do not exist [they] can no longer be […] recognized[ed] as a people. (J, 63–64)

An “existence” that is an “incomprehensible collection of detritus,” the inmates have become “abnormal rubbish.” They live, “but cannot live there”; the force of “there” accents the “tired souls’” lack of place. Being is “there,” but they exist as Being without “thereness.” They just “are not.” Juxtaposed to this description of Ruhenthal’s “ghosts,” the first victim, Leopold, presumes that as a doctor he remains a valuable resource. He tells his daughter, Zerlina, “I will be needed there. Prisoners also get sick and have illnesses like normal people. They’ll be happy to have an experienced doctor and a former surgeon major among them” (J, 74). Adler emphasizes that the deported believe their captors still measure them according to their merits, “there” implying that Ruhenthal retains the parameters of a “normal,” ordinary existence. However, Lustig’s captors only mock him; he “is no longer a doctor” (J, 67). Assigned to the rubbish detail, Leopold joins the “ghosts” who collect corpses, dragging the rubbish carts. He rationalizes his “assignment” as a task that’s “easy, certainly much easier than taking care of grumpy patients” (J, 68). It must be “an unknown sickness” that prevents the authorities from seeing him as an asset (J, 75). Eventually, they will come to their senses even though now he endures humiliation. The “abnormal rubbish” detail will end when his captors discover his identity. He continues to make diagnoses to show his relevance even in the collection of bodies. At his death, Leopold holds on to this illusion. Dying of starvation, physical abuse, and forced labor, he recognizes neither his loss of identity, nor his pending death (J, 125). The second victim, Caroline’s sister, Ida, presents another kind of loss. Ida, a widow, learns that she will leave Ruhenthal by train for an unknown place because she “is a widow on her own who can travel. Nobody will miss her since she has no family here. A sister with children doesn’t count” (J, 144). The outline of the death camp emerges in both Ida’s and Caroline’s minds. Despite Caroline’s concern about Ida’s “selection” — “she is so sick and helpless” (J, 145) —, Caroline tells Ida, she must “be brave,” because after the war, “there will be a welcome awaiting […] back home […] Life begins at sixty. Your neighbors will take care of you” (J, 145). Ida must “not overexert herself […] take care of herself”; she should “eat regularly” (J, 148–149). Caroline reminds her to take her medicine, encourages her to hide something away in her clothes, since with hidden resources, Ida will be prepared for the worst. Ida recognizes that “it’s a trap”; her captors’ promises of “old folks homes with silky gardenias. Sanatoriums with community rooms and numerous good

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doctors! […] a new home, comfortable, friendly, and healthy” (J, 146) are really designed to mock her. In reality, she realizes she is being sent “off into thin air, into just nothing” (J, 148). When Ida finally receives the official notice of selection, “the little piece of paper,” in the middle of the night, it only lists “Schwartz, Ida — 6/1/1882” (J, 147). Ida’s story ends with the blunt reduction of Ida’s identity to her name and birthdate. The narrator adds that Ida’s belongings will become part of a museum display and because no one will know what exactly happened to her, her story will remain excluded from the exhibit (J, 160). Adler underscores that Ida’s narrative is, then, doubly-excluded. The third victim, Caroline, Leopold’s wife, believes that while she won’t survive her deportation, she can “take things as they are” and “can come to terms with it all […] at least carve out a bit of happiness” (J, 139) because she has hidden resources (J, 136–137). Although it doesn’t save her, Caroline’s trust in her cleverness enables her to imagine outwitting her captors. She has hope, not in survival, but rather in postponing extermination. However, she dies and her death happens without witnesses. Her story line cut off, the only evidence of her existence resides in her children’s memories and the ashes scattered throughout the town. The undifferentiated ash is the sign of the particular loss of Caroline. While considering her father’s recent death, Paul’s sibling, Zerlina, fantasizes the end of the war, and her return to Stupart. However, even this fantasy comes with the awareness that she and her family can never be restored to the reality outside Ruhenthal: Their absence is forgotten, since between then and now there is nothing that one can remember, and in between nothing had happened, only a gaping emptiness, incoherent and senseless, just empty time running on, time that didn’t exist, not time at all. That’s why no one can say anything about it. How then can someone demand an account? […] Yet she knows nothing of what happened, it was too dark […] she doesn’t want to recall it. (J, 181)

Existing outside time, theirs is a world never meant to intersect with the world outside. Completely enclosed, Ruhenthal will never merge with Stupart. With this realization, Zerlina’s fantasy ends: “she doesn’t want to recall it.” However, the narrator intervenes to force the continuation of Zerlina’s story. It begins with her real memories.36 Aunt Ida sits at the sewing machine; the

36 Adler sutures Proust’s Remembrance of Lost Time to an experience in which the fundamental nature of time and space has been undone. With Proust, characters recover time through sense memories. The dipping of a madeleine cookie in lime blossom tea triggers vivid memories of Marcel’s childhood. However, for the inmates at Ruhenthal sense memories don’t trigger vivid recollections of the past. These perceptions retain a feeling, but there is no conceptualization of

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children listen to its “ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk” and the memory of Ida’s likening the sound to a train. She asks them where they would like to travel (J, 182). As the memory unfolds, the neighborhood comes into view. Adopting Zerlina’s voice as well as her memories, the narrator wonders: “is any of it recognizable?” Do any of these metonyms still conjure her past? Those who have remained safely in Stupart know that Zerlina has “no way of proving identity,” that she has been “only hauled off from here in order to spare us the repulsive sight of your extermination” (J, 183). She has “no way” of exhibiting existence; thus the imagined narrative constructed of fragments of her memory becomes necessary for “proving” she was “there.” Echoing many survivors’ narratives,37 the narrator depicts what could have happened if Zerlina had survived Ruhenthal and shown up in Stupart. She “turns pale, all the joy of having returned now drained from her. People don’t believe Zerlina” (J, 185). Accused of lying, making up stories, “Zerlina must flee, just as she fled Ruhenthal” (J, 187). Her only escape is the adoption of an alternative identity. The narrator tells us that in Zerlina’s final moments, she imagines herself “a rabbit,” living in a cardboard box. She had been working with other women, but after “work is done Zerlina inconspicuously stays behind, now a rabbit who hides in a box” (J, 189). Zerlina’s metamorphosis proposes a being willing to live as a pet in order to survive. In her “narrow box,” Zerlina the rabbit “is confident and full of hope. It does not know what will be done with it” (J, 190–191). By becoming “it,” the girl no longer poses a threat to them. It’s only a rabbit; in this new state, “it” can live, but the fantasized survival fails. The rabbit is killed, Zerlina’s narrative, a fantasy of the gas chamber. The narrator discusses the stakes of this kind of loss, one in which only ashes and fragments of a “fantasy” are available. The “official version” of history cannot encompass these experiences because they exist outside of time. Zerlina’s narrative doesn’t fissure the official version because it is incomplete. There’s not enough of it in its fragmented state to create “an alternative history.” Actors and audience have dissipated […] It’s all in the past, long gone, finished, utterly changed, outside of time. Ruhenthal now gone and Leitenberg gone […] instead they just keep traveling from rubble to rubble, from one spot to another, the rubbish of reality all that there is, and yet not even that, because there’s also the nothing that hides in the face of nothing […] the fairy tale of nothing, the fairy tale devoid of magic. (J, 198)

the memory. In a very Kantian way, Adler suggests that Zerlina’s memories are cut off at the roots, i.e., they cannot reproduce what once was, the world of her family. 37 Primo Levi, Survival at Auschwitz [1947] (New York: Summit, 1986).

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An unspecific “they” traverses “from rubble to rubble.” Named places “gone,” the emerging narrative is a “fairy tale devoid of magic.” Faris’s “irreducible element” doesn’t exist here. This reality is unredeemable; nothing pulsates beneath its realism and yet, the narrator’s troubling fantasy still persists. If the novel ended here, The Journey would be just another novel proposing multiple histories of victimization, interchangeable with any other, notable for the identification elicited between reader and character, a kind of “Holocaust modernism.”38 All the voices share competing stories; no narrative is privileged over any other. The shared sense of loss would be equally distributed not only to Ruhenthal’s victims, but also to its neighboring Leitenburg’s returning war heroes, parents who have lost their sons to the front, wives whose husbands no longer come home. It would end, furthermore, by accenting detachable elements, signifiers that circulate an unknown history, while the actual victims’ narratives remain unrecognizable. After all, the persistent theme of Jean Améry, Imre Kertész, Charlotte Delbo, Jorge Semprún, Primo Levi, is the unrecognizability of the survivors among us. Against this dizzying modernism, Adler places all of Paul’s losses, Zerlina’s last moments, her fantasy of “being animal” in order to survive, and the “nascent idea” of Paul’s reemergence.39 Juxtaposed to these losses, the narrator transitions to Paul by analyzing how an “eye” moves from “an empty gaze” to “the first moment of creation”: If an eye looks at a hand it’s with an empty gaze that does not recognize it or anything else. Yet an idea is still there, itself the first moment of creation, as it looks, imagines itself, and seeks to imagine, and since it wants to look, then, something is again there. It wants to know itself, and in doing so gives rise to something more than itself, a being, whether it be a being that consists of nothing or is indeed a being, an idea that dares to exist, a nascent idea. It roams around outside, it cannot remain buried. It wants to make sense of the hands that cannot be untangled, that point their fingers in no direction that can be found on any map. Yet the idea grows stronger because it is. It doesn’t give up and keeps trying, finally sorting through the images before it says, “There!” (J, 198–199)

The notion of an “eye” that does not “recognize” its own hand “or anything else” indicates an existence, reducible to fragments. Composed of detachable, inanimate parts, the limbs appear external to the “gaze,” yet a desire to look “is still there.” The narrator collapses idea into desire, implying that desire renews Being because the eye “wants to know itself, and in doing so gives rise to something 38 Lourie, “H. G. Adler’s ‘The Journey.’” 39 Adler is not the only survivor to mark Being as a central point of concern deriving from the Nazis’ use of extermination and concentration camps. See also Améry, “Mind’s Limits,” 18, and Jorge Semprún, Literature or Life, trans. Linda Cloverdale (New York: Penguin, 1997): 133.

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more than itself, a being.” The naked gaze of the eye elicits the recognition of “a being.” The idea proposes a literary ontology for the self, “an idea that dares to exist.” Strikingly, Adler’s “nascent idea […] grows stronger because it is”; the desire to be stronger continues because it is an ontology. Being cannot be negated: “it doesn’t give up.”40 Something behind the gaze “keeps trying, finally sorting through the images before it says, ‘There!’” Adler evokes a desperate transcendence. Hitting several registers simultaneously, “There” recalls Ruhenthal’s “tired souls […] who cannot live there” (J, 67), but the “eye” still searches for a way to reenter time and space. The reemergence in time and space alludes as well to the legislative capacity of the imagination in aesthetic experience, familiar to readers of Kant. Before the unfamiliar object, the imagination generates images trying to exhibit to the faculties a representation of its experience. Both pleasurable and painful, the experience seems interminable, provoking a sense of sublimity. Adler traces normative aesthetic experience intimately here. Unafraid of the implications, Adler’s “eye” has to invoke the idea of sublimity in order to regain “being there.” The experience ends with recognition. From Aristotle to Kant, recognition remains the end of aesthetic experience, the moment when the mind finally intervenes and designates one image as “There!” The noumenal reaches into the phenomenal so that the mind can imagine that anyone who would be a subject as he is now, “can proclaim his judgment as a rule for everyone else.”41 Kant calls it a “subjective universalism”; it anchors the subject to an imagined community of “like-minded beings” who share the sensus communis, or “common sense.” The eye’s election of one image expresses the discovery of “there.” It attempts to imagine a relationship connecting itself to time and space: The hands also point in that direction. And whatever once was reawakens again and exists once more, a “there” that is once again where it used to be. Yet what once was meant to follow the idea no longer exists. The immense effort now appears to have been in vain, a moment of creation that led to no creation, such nothingness being immensely powerful as it threatens Being with forgetting. (J, 198–199)

As the gaze recognizes the hand, its relationship to the abstract idea, desire, and self, the narrator identifies a tension between “whatever once was,” its appearance again “where it used to be,” and the further recognition that “what was meant to follow,” exists no longer. It is a crisis of Being since the principle for

40 We can’t ignore the implied critique of Adorno’s negation of art here. 41 Kant, Critique of Judgement, 144 §23.

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imagining a specific subject in relation to a community has been exterminated; “such nothingness being immensely powerful” indicates an apodeictic “forgetting,” as its effect. Being “forgets” its reach into the world through predicates, forgets its relationship to the phenomenal. Cut off from this process, reality becomes detachable, interchangeable, without history. Into “such nothingness,” recognition moves the mind to see the absence of extermination. The entire subject position of a people has been excised from the sensus communis. The promise of a literary ontology founders and hitches at the narrator’s realization that “such nothingness […] threatens Being with forgetting.” In a nuanced parsing of aesthetics, Adler’s narrator suggests that without the ability to produce “what was meant to follow,” the “nascent idea” articulated by desire and expressed through art, will be forgotten. The Nazis’ victims demand the aesthetic: the imagination must be authorized to initiate “creation” of a community. Under the weight of this demand, and lingering over the void of ash, “he” returns. Yet the idea does not shrink, goes not give in. It wants to belong to someone and command him. It’s a person. He is not happy, but the idea makes him happy. He wants to follow it yet he is too tired […] and what the chopped off hands point to doesn’t make sense. (J, 109)

The personal pronoun stands uncomfortably poised between the self as “it,” the desire to “belong to someone,” and being “tired.” As the lines syntactically shift from “it” to “he,” the “he” ascertains “names next to the hands.” The subject recognizes a place. The “hands” are signs that “once named roads,” but “the gaze still cannot figure out how they belong to each other; they are so badly injured that they no longer mean anything” (J, 199). The world from which “it” comes is ash and rubbish. The world in which “he” emerges is populated by “Anybodys,” moving “from rubble to rubble”: Anybodys, who are not names and not hands, but rather figures that belong to no one and which creep between the hands and names, looking for a direction in which to head […] Each Anybody appears to be in the same situation. Perhaps each one knows that he has never been here, but rather has been transformed here […] This one with an idea is unsure of what is Nothing or what is Something, then he chooses Something. He feels overwhelmed by a past he does not know, yet which he can sense. (J, 199–200)

Adler charts the character’s trajectory from an “eye,” a “gaze,” an “it,” a “he,” and then to “Anybody.” Emerging from “the ark of Ruhenthal’s ashes,” the mind tries to fit fragments together, to get them to “belong” to each other. The character realizes that he could be “Anybody”; he exists without defining predicates. Phenomenology, under these terms, proposes interchangeable, “history-less” beings.

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When “this one […] chooses Something, he feels overwhelmed by a past” that he “senses,” but that he cannot know. In purely philosophical terms, the character intuits the idea of the sensus communis of a community, only to realize that the sensus communis itself is missing. In conjunction with realizing its loss, “he” keeps sifting through the images before him, “the hands and names,” until he finally stumbles upon the sign for Unkenburg, a town eight kilometers away and halfway to Stupart. Fleeing “the ark” and its “bunker of ashes,” for Unkenberg, he becomes aware of “unrecognizable voices” around him (J, 205). They “are now the masters of the fallow fields” who will “found a new order” (J, 207). While he debates their success, he recognizes that he too has “a new beginning […] Paul has lived through the moment of birth. He had stepped from nothing. He has sensed the wounds of a new being that spread through every limb, and so being was indeed there” (J, 208). Paul’s being is “indeed there.” His proper name finally restored, Paul “is a new being,” and “the wounds of being” flow “through every limb.” Implicitly, Adler asks how can “the wounds of being” be addressed? Consequently, Paul’s narrative doesn’t end with the recovery of his name. He is still surrounded by “voices” that make no sense, voices that declare “Liberation […] something that none could grasp” (J, 208). Its unintelligibility enables liberation to be reduced to a “plague memorial” in a museum whose signification circulates, shared by “Anybody” and this reality prompts Paul to call into question whether it “can save the new world?” (J, 209). The reader is forced to ask whether or not the signifier of the victims, “its memorial” can destabilize representation and “save the world?” At the “plague memorial,” Paul confronts the crowd preparing to eat a “freshly-killed” rabbit (J, 209). In the ensuing cacophony of voices, fragments of the narratives about Zerlina and Caroline float untethered. Some voices claim they “knew nothing,” they were “all blended together” (J, 211). In their attempt to absolve themselves, these voices imply a shared victimization. It is distributed to anyone who has lived through the war. With losses “akin to Paul’s,” they deserve accommodation. They are entitled to eat the rabbit because they are hungry. Paul is too “literal” in his prohibitions; they eat out of necessity. The crowd echoes the narrator’s earlier observations that those outside Ruhenthal “want to make their claim” regarding its victims (J, 63). Paul’s presence elicits their confessions because of his “being […] there” among them. They exclude Paul’s loss as unreasonable because it denies them compensation for their losses and then, Paul thinks of his sister: “there is no memorial for her, only for the victims no one is willing to eat” (J, 212). Her exclusion propels him along a “road that doesn’t exist” to Unkenburg (J, 222).

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“There,” he discovers an abandoned garrison where “a door stands open”; he selects “a dream of a room, one that must have belonged to an officer” (J, 254) and then he glimpses himself in a mirror: An old, dirty man appears in the glass, older than Leopold on his deathbed and almost as used up. Paul lets out a scream then he quickly shuts up. Should he close his eyes? […] Throw the mirror out the window? […] Paul is spellbound, he can’t help but look […] his gaze is completely spellbound, something bothers him about it, he doesn’t really know why and feels ashamed […] nor can he prevent himself sobbing […] a silent unstoppable weeping, an infinite sadness that has no reason at all and cannot cease. (J, 261)

As Paul studies himself in the mirror, he contrasts the images of his transformation. At Ruhenthal he existed in negation – “he was not there” – now he sees the empirical articulation of that negation, “an old […] man […] in the glass.” The mirror’s image reflects a being “older than Leopold on his deathbed.” No longer “an empty gaze,” Paul can’t stop looking. His “scream” is followed by his “unstoppable weeping.” Like a prosthetic limb, the mirror enables Paul to recognize “the wounds” of his being.” As a boundary between the world of ashes and the world of rubble, the reflection forces him to join the “old man” to Paul’s new identity. The mirror is the site where these realities come close to merging. Gradually over days, Paul stops needing to stare at himself in the mirror and recognizes that he “needs no witness to confirm that he has become a person again” (J, 275). The ark’s refugee doesn’t need a witness to the legitimacy of his new being, his identity. In this way, Adler depicts Paul’s aesthetic reemergence as a redemptive act, despite the fact that he leaves the ark alone: “He lives by his own laws now; it’s the only way possible if what he wants is more than to be called by just any name like all the others” (J, 277). Thus Adler suggests the ontological dimensions of Paul’s experience. His persistent existence, the desire to impose an “I” on the “abnormal rubbish” amid the ark’s ashes, his journey to Unkenburg, all of these existential strands indicate that Paul’s dignity demands “his own law” as well as his own “name.” What Paul wants, what his ontology demands, is to be more than an interchangeable victim in the circulation of knowledge. But the memories of his family tug at Paul’s “new reality”: a lost people, a lost history, a lost future. In this way, Adler’s “displacement of minds” resonates with the image of an unrecoverable community, whose memory becomes contingent on individual subjects imagining the spaces of their absences. Paul is “filled” literally with these missing “minds” and this is the upshot of tracking magical realism’s tropes in Adler’s The Journey. It no longer allows us to speculate about what could have happened, to invent them in order to free ourselves from their past. It requires us to recognize their “ghosts,” to “consider the dead who are” with us (J, 283).

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Thus if The Journey is a magical realist text, when and where does magical realism become pertinent? In Paul’s case, “irreducible magic” emerges outside Ruhenthal, when an “eye” realizes “There.” Before this moment, Ruhenthal is a sealed enclosure, “a fairy tale without magic.” Likewise, phenomenal details come into focus outside Ruhenthal. “There,” Paul becomes aware that “Being” and “being” still exist. In Ruhenthal, he was “detritus”; outside Ruhenthal, like other untethered voices, Paul moves “from rubble to rubble.” Thus the “unsettling doubts” don’t erupt until Paul begs the voices not to “eat the body too” (J, 209). In other words, “unsettling doubts” conflate with the near “merging of realities” when the “lone survivor” appears in the crowd. Paul’s reemergence signals the “closeness” or merging of Ruhenthal with the outside reality of “voices.” However, he chooses “his own law” rather than “a multicultural sensibility.” Zerlina’s fantasy, like Ida’s, Caroline’s, and Leopold’s, came close to merging realities, but the camps’ existence is predicated on invisible extermination, a lack of subjective proximity between victim and perpetrator, “sparing us the sight of your extermination” (J, 183), and readers too are spared. Finally these “ghosts” among us “disrupt our sense of time, space, identity” because they force the recognition of their absences. We must give aesthetic dimensions to loss, to see their missing boundaries. As Jeremy Adler has pointed out, The Journey articulates aspects of magical realism after liberation because “we must remove them from the clutches of their murderers.”42

42 Jeremy Adler, “Good Against Evil?,” 77.

Irmtraud Huber

The Usual Suspects: Jewish Magical Realism, Trauma and the Holocaust Jewish magical realism is often associated immediately with the historical trauma of the Holocaust. This article sets out to point to some of the problems and limitations such an interpretive approach may bring. After a reconsideration of the allegedly inherent subversive qualities of the mode and a discussion of its frequent association with trauma narratives, especially in the case of Jewish texts engaging with the Holocaust, the discussion will focus on two examples, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002). The aim throughout is to caution against rashly reproducing familiar interpretive maneuvers, which may be in need of reassessment in face of recent fictions like the ones under discussion in this article. When Jewish writers turn to magical realism, the subject of the Holocaust, so it seems, is seldom absent from the discussion. At first glance, this may seem an uncomfortable mix: did not Theodor W. Adorno caution about poetry after Auschwitz? And wasn’t Saul Friedlander, as late as 1993, making a valid point when he diagnosed a “‘moral imperative’ [that] seems to impose limits on aestheticization” and which, by “this very limitation seems particularly at odds with what may sometimes appear as the playful experiments of post-modernity?”1 Nevertheless, among such texts by Jewish authors employing magical realist techniques many might be called Holocaust narratives in a broader sense. Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, David Grossmann, Dara Horn, Nicole Krauss, Cynthia Ozick, to list but a few of the better known names, all have drawn on magical realism to engage in some way or another with the dark legacy of death and trauma looming in the history of European Jewry. And indeed, they have frequently done so to broad critical acclaim. As Annette Kern-Stähler and Axel Stähler suggest in their discussion of the positive critical reception of Foer’s first novel Everything Is Illuminated, this may indicate a significant change in the critical attitude towards Holocaust narratives. Nowadays, the exploration of other forms of aesthetic expression beyond the testimonial apparently becomes ever more viable.2 1 Saul Friedlander, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993): 53–54. 2 See Annette Kern-Stähler and Axel Stähler, “The Translation of Testimony and the Transmission of Trauma: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated and Liev Schreiber’s Film

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It is rather intriguing, though, that of all things Jewish authors should be exploring magical realism in this context. After all, a look at the critical discourse about the mode over the course of the last few decades does not make the connection all that obvious. The most frequent critical claims about magical realism are its association with marginalized voices and its subversive effect. Maggie Ann Bowers thus summarizes the typical train of arguments when she explains that [t]he characteristic of magical realism which makes it such a frequently adopted narrative mode is its inherent transgressive and subversive qualities. It is this feature that has led many postcolonial, feminist and cross-cultural writers to embrace it as a means of expressing their ideas.3

Neither of these two claims easily contributes to an understanding of the appeal of the mode to Jewish writers in their fictional engagements with the burden of the past. Most of the writers mentioned above come from comfortable social backgrounds, have university degrees and could only be called marginalized by stretching the latter term to the point of absurdity. At the same time, the most common claim about the rationale behind magical realism, namely that it serves to question historical certainties, subverts rational and scientific truth-claims and gives voice to silenced alternative narratives which go against the grain of documented official history, seems little suited to account for the mode’s employment in engagements with an event whose historical reality is not to be questioned and which is perhaps unspeakable rather than silenced. In this article, I would therefore like to propose that the obvious appeal magical realism has for Jewish writers engaging with the Holocaust calls for a reconsideration of some of the by now almost automatic assumptions about the functions and effects of magical realism. Such a reconsideration, I would suggest, may offer some points of departure for a broadening of the critical perspective on the mode itself and for alternative interpretations of its employment in Jewish writing. In order to develop my point, I will first recall and reassess some of the arguments that established magical realism as a discourse of the margins with subversion as its prime goal. While these aspects undoubtedly demonstrate the potential of the mode, I will point to some of the problems and limitations they imply, which often enough become all too apparent with regard to the mode’s role in Jewish Holocaust narratives. This kind of incon-

Adaptation,” in Voices and Silence in the Contemporary Novel in English, ed. Vanessa Guignery (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars P, 2009): 160–184, 165. 3 Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism (London: Routledge, 2004): 66.

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gruence is then, for the most part, bridged by the introduction of a mediating third term: trauma. In trauma, postcolonial and post-Holocaust narratives, the silenced and the unspeakable, appear to find a common denominator. In order to show that this interpretive move, while doubtlessly elegant and intriguing, may also sometimes serve to short-cut other viable interpretive possibilities, I will finally briefly discuss two contemporary novels which both are, and are not, Holocaust narratives: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002)4 and Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000).5 I will suggest that a critical approach which deliberately steps outside the framework of trauma and subversion can offer alternative readings and add insights both to the critical discussion of the novels and to the mode in general.

The Question of Subversion To begin with, the correlation of magical realism with marginal discourse and subversion may require some explanation. Partly, this association has its roots in the postcolonial, specifically Latin-American context in which the term magical realism was first introduced in relation to literature. Partly, it arose from a critical discourse which, under the influence of postmodernist philosophical attitudes, tended to value subversion as the primary litmus test of literary quality. From its very beginnings, the mode has been almost inextricably associated with a project of rewriting history, of giving voice to hitherto repressed versions and voices. Magical realist texts, such as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), have served as prime examples of what Linda Hutcheon has called “historiographic metafiction,” a literature that subscribes to the postmodernist agenda of contesting master narratives by foreground[ing] the process of meaning-making in the production and reception of art, but also in broader discursive terms: it foregrounds, for instance, how we make historical “facts” out of brute “events” of the past, or, more generally, how our various sign systems grant meaning to our experience.6

4 Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated (London: Penguin, 2002); further references in the text, abbreviated as “EII.” 5 Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (New York: Picador, 2000); further references in the text, abbreviated as “KC.” 6 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2000): x.

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More specifically, the combination of the marvelous and realist mimesis in magical realism has frequently been interpreted as a combination of the rationality of the colonizer and the magical beliefs of the colonized or, alternatively, as the restricted logic of patriarchy and the deviant illogic of the feminine. In both cases, the marvelous aspects are understood to have beeen introduced to express a marginalized point of view and thus to occupy the position of the other of dominant discourse. Thus, since the 1980s, broad critical consensus has gradually been established, maintaining that not only magical realism but fantastic literature more generally is “most centrally about what it cannot provide: alterity itself”7 and that the primary function and main ethical potential of the mode lies in its ability to “erode the pillars of society by un-doing categorical structures.”8 Such a focus on alterity and marginalized voices became so central indeed to the understanding of the mode that Theo D’haen could argue in a much-quoted essay that “[i]t is precisely the notion of the ex-centric, in the sense of speaking from the margin, from a place ‘other’ than ‘the’ or ‘a’ center, that seems to me an essential feature of that strain of postmodernism we call magic realism.”9 In a later article D’haen suggests further that a clear dichotomy seems to be shaping up, with on the one hand orthodox postmodernists, who are largely white, male and Euro-American, and who un-write Western modernity’s universalizing metanarrative of Science, and on the other hand the counter-postmodernists, who are largely non-white, and/or female, and/or non-Euro-American, and who counter the same Western metanarrative-as-narrative with alter-native but equi-valent narratives.10

Thus defined, magical realism is a mode that is not primarily characterized by certain formal qualities, which would, at least theoretically, be available to anyone, but is tied to marginal positions and to a clear political agenda. From such a perspective, it remains an open question whether one would be justified to speak of a Jewish magical realism at all, or whether one should rather stick to alternative terms, such as “fabulism” (as Daniel Jaffe prefers to do for his recent anthology).11 7 Brett Cooke, “Introduction: Deception, Self-Deception and the Other,” in The Fantastic Other: An Interface of Perspectives, ed. Brett Cooke (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998): n. p. 8 Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981): 176. 9 Theo D’haen, “Magical Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged Centers,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke UP, 1995): 191–208, 194. 10 Theo D’haen, “Dis/Coursing Post-Modernism: Science, Magic, (Post)-Modernity,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 23 (1996): 189–197, 195. 11 Daniel M. Jaffe, With Signs and Wonders: An International Anthology of Jewish Fabulous Fiction (Montpellier, VT: Invisible Cities P, 2001).

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However, the distinction itself has its problems and is not easily upheld. Anne Hegerfeldt, for example, agrees with D’haen insofar as she calls magical realism an “essentially postcolonial mode.”12 Consequently, she feels obliged to justify the focus of her own study, in which she concentrates on British fiction, by arguing that “regardless of the author’s place of birth, magical realist fiction indeed is decidedly postcolonial in that it re-thinks the dominant Western world-view” because it “insists that the concept of reality cannot be confined to the empirically perceivable.”13 This move, though ingenious and well argued in Hegerfeldt’s study, in the end risks leading into a tautology. After all, a re-thinking of dominant discourses and a radical undermining of empirical and ontological certainties are central features of postmodernism in general. While Theo D’haen thus claims that every postcolonial text using postmodernist strategies is magical realist, Hegerfeldt ultimately argues that every postmodernist text using magical realist strategies is postcolonial. The same considerations have led Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris to declare a need to “[re]negotiate the nature of marginality itself”14 since, according to this logic, authors such as Salman Rushdie, Gabriel García Márquez, Angela Carter, Günther Grass, D. M. Thomas, Franz Kafka, J. M. Coetzee, John Fowles and Virginia Woolf (and one could add to that the Jewish authors mentioned above) must all be granted marginal, ex-centric or even postcolonial voices, a claim that could be argued controversially in every single case and becomes even more problematical if one considers all of them together. Rather than to stretch definitions of marginality to the point where the centre begins to disappear entirely it may be time to rethink the conditions of the association of magical realism with the margins. Beyond their undoubted historical correlation (those texts which are widely considered as prototypical for the mode come with a markedly postcolonial agenda, especially Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children), the claim is mainly based on the allegedly inherently subversive nature of the mode. Magical realism, so the argument, derives its subversive potential from an amalgamation of two literary stances, one mimetic, one marvelous. Instead of the clear hierarchy favoring the mimetic which governs classical, nineteenth-century fantastic literature, in which the marvelous irrupts as a fantastic intrusion,

12 Anne C. Hegerfeldt, Lies that Tell the Truth: Magic Realism Seen through Contemporary Fiction from Britain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005): 346. 13 Hegerfeldt, Lies, 3. 14 Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, “Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and Flauberian Parrot(ie)s,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke UP, 1995): 1–11, 4.

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magical realism tends to set the stances on an equal footing, in a balance in which neither is privileged over the other.15 The clash between the mimetic and the marvelous is no longer the central conflict in the plots of magical realism, but has become a basic feature of the narrative world. It is this dissolution of the classical hierarchy and its potential to undermine dominant epistemological and ontological certainties, so critics widely agree, which accounts for the appeal of the mode for marginalized writers. As Maggie Ann Bowers explains, one can claim that magical realism is subversive because it alternates between the real and the magical using the same narrative voice. In this sense, magic remains identifiable as magic and real as real but, unlike in a realist narrative, they are given the same serious treatment. The extent to which one should accept the real as the version of events or the magical as the version of events is continuously undermined by the existence of the other version in the text.16

Since “the magical is presented as a part of ordinary reality,” so the claim, “the distinction between what is magical and what is real is eroded.”17 This erosion of categories makes it possible not only to challenge accepted representations of the world, but also to rewrite history from another perspective. Since it destabilizes the boundaries between the real and the supernatural, magical realism is thus said to unsettle presumptions about what reality is and to find means to express ex-centric and excluded otherness. The problem with the logic of this argument is that magical realism, just like all fantastic literature in fact, ultimately depends on the continuous existence of a distinction between the magical and the real. Again Bowers: “The oxymoron ‘magical realism’ reveals that the categories of the magical and the real are brought into question by their juxtaposition.”18 Magical realism disappears if the boundaries between mimesis and the marvelous are entirely dissolved, since it is absolutely inseparable from their basic incompatibility, which constitutes its very existence. Without juxtaposition, no oxymoron and no more friction. Indeed, a mode like magical realism, which sets mimesis and the marvelous on equal footing, can only be subversive as long as it disturbs a hierarchy of stances that is external to the text, grounded in historical and cultural preferences. Thus magical realism depends on a continuation of the structures of dominance it allegedly aims to get rid of. It derives its effect and arguably most of its aesthetic impact

15 See Amaryll Beatrice Chanady, Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy (New York: Garland, 1985). 16 Bowers, Magic(al) Realism, 67. 17 Bowers, Magic(al) Realism, 67. 18 Bowers, Magic(al) Realism, 66.

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from a contradiction it is claimed by many critics to attempt to counteract. Therefore, as Tzvetan Todorov has already pointed out for the fantastic more generally, while the mode undermines and questions boundaries, it simultaneously reinforces them.19 Rather than being necessarily subversive, the mode can easily become affirmative and conservative. Indeed, this is the perspective Eric S. Rabkin privileges in his early study of the fantastic (preceding the heyday of postmodernist theory), which he understands the beneficial aspects of fantastic escape to lie first and foremost in its establishment of “an ordered world, a world that, despite its horror, gives us faith.”20 An alternative approach to understanding magical realist subversion tries to avoid this problem by situating it precisely in a move beyond the discourse of binary opposition. Bowers outlines this argument thus: On the other hand, one can claim that magical realism is transgressive since magical realism crosses the borders between the magic and real to create a further category – the magical real. This form of magical realism is often discussed by critics in terms of post-structuralist theory which proposes that there are multiple eligible interpretations of a narrative and has become the most frequently adopted approach to magical realism since the 1980s. These theories see the categories defining the difference between the magical and real being dismantled in contemporary culture.21

This second approach claims that the oxymoronic structure dissolves in a reality in which contradictory world-views (mostly that of the colonizer and that of the colonized or the male and the female) have merged. This results in a reality that is substantially different from dominant Western experience and that is adequately expressed by the mixing of the marvelous and the mimetic. Magical realism is accordingly claimed to be more truly and adequately mimetic than realism itself. This raises two problems. On the one hand, this second argument for subversion clearly tends to reassert the primacy of a mimetic reading stance as the only valid one. We are ostensibly to accept the text’s form of representation as mirroring reality and thus to experience no more clashes between incompatible elements, that is, to read the texts as no longer magical realist but essentially, as purely realist. This eventual bias towards a mimetic reading stance thus effectively downplays the feature of ambiguity and sustained doubt and ultimately cannot address the specific effects of the mode’s juxtaposition of stances. Propagating a purely mimetic reading when confronted with any fantastic text, be it a 19 See Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995): 168. 20 Eric S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977): 53. 21 Bowers, Magic(al) Realism, 67.

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classical, a magical realist or a radical postmodernist one, appears to undervalue the ability of literature to do more than merely mirror reality. On the other hand, but closely connected to this, establishing such a third realm of the magical real runs the risk of being precariously exoticist and escapist. Unsurprisingly then, exoticism is a frequent accusation against postcolonial magical realism.22 Though the claim that indeed magical realist texts are not fantastic at all but accurately mirror a different conception of reality is made precisely to counter this accusation, it strengthens the very premises on which the charge is based, namely that the only way for literature to matter socially and politically is for it to be mimetic. In view of the above, it seems that the transgressive nature of magical realism may be better understood as not necessarily subversive but rather as a continuous dialogue in process. It crosses boundaries per definition, but such a transgression can have various results: its escapism can be subversive, but it can just as easily be conservative. Of course, this is not to say that interpretations stressing the subversive qualities of magical realism have been misleading, nor to deny that many magical realist texts often do subscribe to a markedly subversive agenda. Far be it from me to devaluate the substantial and highly stimulating critical discourse about the mode that has been going on over the course of the last decades. However, I would like to complement the interpretative perspective that has so far for the most part been taken by developing an alternative perspective. Rather than to emphasize the mode’s potential to subvert mimetic representation, I foreground the ways in which magical realism, as a continual transgression of the boundary between mimesis and the marvelous, makes this boundary and its axioms visible and exploits its effects and functions. Magical realism is thus truly dialogic. It does not lend itself easily to a didactic purpose or a definitive political agenda since in its very transgressive nature it must per definition remain ambiguous and is thus never merely subversive or merely reactionary. After all, it is not so easy to draw the line between escapism and subversion. If the fantastic makes it possible to express sexual excess in a society that strictly regulates sexuality, is this subversive or escapist? And does it matter that such sexual excess is in many cases associated with

22 See, for example, Brenda Cooper, Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye (London: Routledge, 1998): 31; Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991): 65; Ursula Kluwick, Exploring Magic Realism in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2012). More generally on the problem of exoticism in a postcolonial context, see Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001).

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violence, sadism and errand sexual desires such as necrophilia? If people can bodily ascend to heaven in One Hundred Years of Solitude and ice is more incredible to the inhabitants of Macondo than flying carpets, is this subversive or exoticist? If Indira Gandhi is turned into a supernaturally evil force in Midnight’s Children, is this effective criticism or does it turn history into fate and efface personal responsibility? The answer in all cases is probably both yes and no. Indeed, it is arguably this very ambiguity from which magical realism derives its primary appeal. However, if subversion is identified as the mode’s main rationale and legitimization, this feature must appear to be somewhat problematic and scholars have frequently felt uncomfortable with it. As Maggie Ann Bowers concludes in her study: Ultimately, the problems of magical realism are inherent in its contradictory and multiperspectival form and this may, in the future, be its nemesis. As it does not impose a judgmental attitude towards either its realist or magical aspects, it allows itself to be open to multiple interpretations, and this possibly includes those that oppose diversity. Its liberating and transformative powers are latent in the work, and yet can only be activated by the act of reading or viewing by a sympathetic public.23

In the end, the reader is given a choice between possible readings; some, as the case may be, subversive, some conservative. Magical realism thus brings to the fore the strategies of communication and interpretation which structure our encounter with fictional texts and through it with the other and with ourselves. As the choice of an appropriate stance of reception is made deliberately problematic, readers are forced to become aware of and question their approach to the textual representation. Consequently, reception has the potential to become a conscious act of taking readerly responsibility.

The Question of Trauma It is this ethical potential of magical realism and not its propensity for subversion, I would like to propose, that may serve to account for its appeal to writers struggling with the topic of the Holocaust. To claim this is to depart from concerns of representability that continue to govern the discussion and to argue that, instead of ontological and epistemological problems, the questions that are often at stake are predominantly pragmatic and ethical. Such an approach would eschew the interpretive option widely pursued to reconcile magical realism’s

23 Bowers, Magic(al) Realism, 127.

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alleged subversive nature with the topic of the Holocaust: the recourse to trauma theory. Trauma theory seems an obvious and well-suited candidate for a solution to the problem. After all, the Holocaust continues to figure as the paradigmatic collective trauma, if not of history, then at least of the twentieth century. In its cultural and literary application, trauma theory developed mainly within the context and as a result of the referential problems central to any attempt to represent the concerted mass-killings during the Third Reich. Per definition, trauma eludes representation, explodes available systems of signification and denies the logic of linear narratives. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s explanation merits quoting at length, not only because it is typical (and seminal) for the discussion, but also because it makes the affinities of trauma theory to magical realism as a mode strikingly visible: The traumatic event, although real, took place outside the parameters of “normal” reality, such as causality, sequence, place and time. The trauma is thus an event that has no beginning, no ending, no before, no during and no after. This absence of categories that define it lends it a quality of “otherness,” a salience, a timelessness and a ubiquity that puts it outside the range of associatively linked experiences, outside the range of comprehension, of recounting and of mastery. […] The survivor, indeed, is not truly in touch either with the core of his traumatic reality or with the fatedness of its reenactments, and thereby remains entrapped in both. To undo this entrapment in a fate that cannot be known, cannot be told, but can only be repeated, a therapeutic process – a process of constructing a narrative, of reconstructing a history and essentially, of re-externalizing the event – has to be set in motion. This reexternalization of the event can occur and take effect only when one can articulate and transmit the story, literally transfer it to another outside oneself and then take it back again, inside. Telling thus entails a reassertion of the hegemony of reality and a re-externalization of the evil that affected and contaminated the trauma victim.24

Both for the sake of testimony and for therapeutic reasons the traumatic event has to be narrated, but it eludes the chronological and coherent nature of realism. It calls for some kind of expression that would allow to both re-externalize the event and to avoid what Caruth calls the “danger of speech” which may “understand […] too much” and thus lose “the event’s essential incomprehensibility, the force of its affront to understanding.”25 Magical realism’s circular and cyclical narratives, its inexplicable events, uncertainties and ambiguities, its affinities with myth and mysticism, with alterity 24 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992): 69. 25 Cathy Caruth, “Part II, Recapturing the Past: Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995): 151–157, 154.

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and knowledge beyond logic and reason seem singularly well suited to address the difficulties of trauma narratives. “Magical realism,” so Eugene L. Arva claims, “as a mode of textual representation, gives traumatic events an expression that traditional realism could not, seemingly because magical realist images and traumatized subjects share the same ontological ground, being part of a reality that is constantly escaping witnessing through telling.”26 Its ability to give expression to alterity, for which the mode has been so widely hailed within a postcolonial context, appears to offer itself well for an address of the absolute traumatic other as an unrepresentable and inaccessible event. Arva therefore sees in magical realist writing “one of the most effective means of re-creating, transmitting, and ultimately coping with painful traumatic memories.”27 Indeed, Arva and others have pursued the association of magical realism with trauma theory so far as to turn the argument around and to suggest that it is, in fact, this feature of the mode which accounts for its postcolonial manifestations. From this perspective the mode’s appeal for postcolonial writers lies not so much in its ability to express alterity as such, but more specifically in that it allows them to “re-possess [their history] in imaginative terms, to articulate the trauma of conquest and deprivation so that at least that part of their collective memory be not confiscated entirely” [my emphasis].28 If one follows these arguments, magical realism seems an almost obvious choice for writers engaging with the massively traumatic events inadequately subsumed under the term Holocaust. The convenience of this fit, however, entails some danger. For one, Felman and Laub speak of therapeutic situations with actual victims, people who survived atrocious events in a highly traumatized state. In how far or in what way these therapeutic experiences are transferrable to literary texts which are written as fiction (not testimony) by authors who engage with traumatic events imaginatively (not autobiographically) remains an open question. While the recourse to trauma theory may often render useful insight into magical realist texts, an overemphasis on its importance can also foreclose alterative perspectives and readings. A rash assumption that every magical realist text must be aiming for subversive alterity or that every fiction that involves the Holocaust must be about trauma and the difficulty of representation can be equally misleading.

26 Eugene L. Arva, The Traumatic Imagination: Histories of Violence in Magical Realist Fiction (Youngstown: Cambria, 2011): 6. 27 Arva, Traumatic Imagination, 5. 28 Jean-Pierre Durix, Mimesis, Genres, and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic Realism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002): 156.

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Raising Different Questions: Magical Realism in Everything Is Illuminated and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay In order to illustrate these claims, let me now turn to my two examples, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000). Both these novels, I would claim, employ magical realism in a way that can hardly be accounted for by calling it subversive. Moreover, I propose that, although the Holocaust is a central event affecting characters’ lives in both texts, neither is primarily a Holocaust narrative. The frequent recourse to trauma theory in discussions which attempt to account for the novels’ use of magical realism thus leaves many questions about the functions of the mode unanswered. Magical realism enters Foer’s novel in form of an embedded narrative, a novel within a novel, which the protagonist “Jonathan Safran Foer” writes after his return from a trip to the Ukraine in search of his grandfather’s birthplace, the shtetl Trachimbrod. The Trachimbrod chapters clearly draw on magical realism, not only in their presentation of the marvelous “as a part of ordinary reality”29 but also in their recourse to myths and folk-tales as well as in their overall narrative tone. However, if this is magical realism it is one that is neither postcolonial, nor otherwise marginal, nor particularly subversive. The Trachimbrod story focuses mainly on two of Jonathan’s ancestors: the matriarchal progenitor of his family line, Brod, who was miraculously born from the waters of a river and, jumping several generations, his grandfather Safran. Though the description of the shtetl and its inhabitants abounds in absurdities and implausibility, it is thus presented as the story of the narrator’s (and, by implication, the author’s) own ancestors and situates the recounted mythical events in a historically precise setting and time-span, starting March 18, 1791 and ending, exactly 151 years later, on March 18, 1942 with the destruction of the shtetl. The narrated incredible events are often described and dated with apparent historical precision. For example, a brief history of the shifts of the Jewish-Human Fault Line that separates the religious and secular regions of the shtetl lists dates and historical detail with meticulous care: As the ratio of sacred to secular shifted – usually no more than a hair in this or that direction, save for that exceptional hour in 1764, immediately following the Pogrom of Beaten Chests,

29 Bowers, Magic(al) Realism, 66–67.

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when the shtetl was completely secular – so did the fault line, drawn in chalk from Radziwell Forest to the river. And so was the synagogue lifted and moved. It was in 1783 that wheels were attached, making the shtetl’s ever-changing negotiation of Jewishness and Humanness less of a schlep. (EII, 10)

While the idea of a moving synagogue is obviously absurd, it is recounted as a fact, supported by historical dates. In clear contrast to the implausibility of the narrated events, the possibility of historical precision is forcefully asserted by the tone of confident report employed by the omniscient narrator, who keeps absolute sovereignty over his narrative. In a typically magical realist manner, the narrative thus asserts accuracy and truthfulness. However, in the case of this novel, this assertion is qualified from the outset by the narrative frame, in which the story is exposed as purely fictional, as a novel within a novel. Presented as the product of Jonathan’s imagination the magical realist narrative never hides its own fictionality. Indeed, it is, somewhat paradoxically, by flaunting a pretence of omniscience that the narrator of the Trachimbrod chapters exposes his free invention. Not only does he render an utterly improbable portrait of the shtetl, he also puts a twist on typical authenticating devices, like an ostensible reliance on historical documents, to openly undermine the truth claims his narrative only pretends to make. For example, Jonathan accounts for the suspicious absence of any reference to the hyperbolic sex-life he attributes to his grandfather from the latter’s journal – which is, after all, allegedly “the only written record” (EII, 169) he has of his grandfather’s past – by claiming that Safran was too afraid of discovery to ever mention it. The text simultaneously refers to an anchoring in reality (by drawing upon the journal and referring to Safran’s post-war life) and marks its own imaginative transgression from documented events. Since the fictionality of the Trachimbrod chapters is thus made explicit, the central questions raised by the text are, so I would argue, no longer primarily ontological or epistemological. They do not so much concern the relation of the narrated events to extratextual reality, or the means of historical investigation. The central problem the novel negotiates is not how the past can be recovered in representation but which ethical considerations should govern the latter. In the passage quoted above and throughout the novel, deeply serious and often violent events lurk behind the somewhat ridiculous surface of representation. Thus, the incongruity typical for magical realism arises here not from the incredibility of supernatural events in a realist setting and tone, but out of the seeming inadequacy of form in relation to content. Precisely because the Trachimbrod chapters are exposed as the product of an author’s imagination, the questions presenting themselves turn out to be primarily in how far such

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an approach might be ethically acceptable and what effects would justify its use.30 After all, one feature of the narrative tone developed in this part of the novel, which becomes in this context potentially problematic, is a certain comic detachment that is rather typical for magical realism. In an article on One Hundred Years of Solitude, Edwin Williamson called this a “humorous complicity” between the narrator and the reader, “behind the backs of the characters who remain circumscribed by an elemental innocence which charms but is not, of course, meant to convince.”31 In his evaluation of the effect of magical realism, Williamson thus markedly differs from other critics who have emphasized subversion, which must rely on a certain degree of identification with the presented world-view. Williamson claims instead that [t]he effect upon the reader of such a fusion of fact and fantasy or innocence and knowledge is […] not one of absolute identification with characters but rather a mixed reaction of sympathy and comic detachment.32

Precisely such a tone pervades the Trachimbrod chapters, even when they address deeply serious issues, as can be easily seen from the example of the moving synagogue quoted above in which not the horrors of the pogroms are mentioned, but the tedious task (the “schlep”) of relocating the synagogue. Clearly, magical realism is not used in this context to assert its own veracity and to offer its vision of the world as an alternative to a rational world-view. In accordance with the lines of Williamson’s argument, the innocence of the inhabitants of the shtetl charms but is clearly not meant to convince. Though the 30 The decisive difference between Foer’s use of magical realism and that of such classic magical realist texts as, for example, Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, does not lie in its multilevel narrative structure as such. Indeed, unreliable narration and multiple narrative frames are by no means an exception in magical realist texts, many among which employ embedded narratives to establish the unreliable voices and narrative ambiguities that are so characteristic of the mode. Thus, it is not the fact of framing that distinguishes Everything Is Illuminated from its postmodernist predecessors, but Foer’s use of the frame: its explicit bracketing gesture and the relations it establishes between what it contains and what it excludes. While the narrators of the embedded narrations of typical magical realist texts forcefully assert their truthfulness, often casting their stories into doubt precisely because of their profuse insistence on sincerity (Midnight’s Children or Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus would be obvious examples), Everything Is Illuminated openly admits to the fictionality of Jonathan’s narrative from the outset. 31 Edwin Williamson, “Magical Realism and the Theme of Incest in One Hundred Years of Solitude,” in Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings, eds. Bernard McGuirk, Richard Cardwell (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987): 45–63, 47. 32 Williamson, “Magical Realism,” 46.

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Trachimbrod story does, in its way, give a voice to the silenced and the ex-centric, it does not offer its depiction of shtetl life as an alternative history, writing against official discourse. It does not use its magical realism to “question […] the very bases of any certainty (history, subjectivity, reference) and of any standards of judgment.”33 Accuracy or constructedness of historical representation is quite simply not its concern. After all, it talks about events in which certainty is imperative and standards of judgment should be ethically indubitable. In fact, the novel’s magical realism serves precisely to elicit such judgment by foregrounding its narrative choices. As it consciously inscribes itself into a literary convention, it not only presents itself as a “creative process of (re-)inventing the past that is exposed to inevitably rely on culturally predetermined patterns of interpretation”34 but opens its own selection of patterns to an ethical scrutiny. Such scrutiny is not subversive and differs markedly from an unreserved celebration of ambiguity and unlimited pluralism of meaning. The justification and legitimisation of the kind of story that is being told is of central concern to the novel’s interweaving narrative voices as Jonathan’s fantastic tale is supplemented by the account of his heritage trip, narrated by Alex, the young and linguistically challenged Ukrainian translator who accompanied him on his search for his grandfather’s home. Alex values referential truth in fiction highly, usually admits to his own departures from faithful report in letters directed to Jonathan and frequently comments critically on Jonathan’s flights of fancy. Thus the novel combines two kinds of narrative approaches which can in many ways be understood to stand in a chiastic relation: while one is presented by an extradiegetic, omniscient narrative voice confidently employing and playing with form and content, the other features a homodiegetic narrator whose English is clumsy, who is often uncertain about word choice and who constantly struggles to find the right way, both linguistically and structurally, to tell his story. One playfully imagines the (comparatively) distant past, in absolute control of his narrative material, the other reports a recent journey, continually uncertain about what to include and frequently retracting and adapting his story subsequently, always relying on Jonathan’s advice. The often achronological narration of 151 years in the history of Trachimbrod, a place that no longer exists, is contrasted with the strictly chronological account of the contemporary journey, two days filled with spatial dislocations. The latter plotline moves back and forth (and in circles) just as much spatially as the Trachimbrod chapters do in time.

33 Hutcheon, Poetics, 57. 34 Katrin Amian, Rethinking Postmodernism(s): Charles S. Peirce and the Pragmatist Negotiations of Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Jonathan Safran Foer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008): 167.

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Both gradually approach the cataclysmic event of the shtetl’s destruction, but while the first does so by moving forward through time, Alex’s tale is one of retrospection and gradual revelation. One, in a word, draws on imaginative dreams; the other on testimony. Both these narrative alternatives, however, are presented as equally viable (or objectionable, for that matter). Both are exposed as being to a lesser or greater extent fictional, and the question that the novel continually poses and discusses is not in what way and to what degree they adequately or accurately present traumatic events but rather what the writer’s and the reader’s responsibility both toward the story and to its historical referent is. Alex poses these questions concisely in one of his letters: We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes? The both of us? Do you think this is acceptable when we are writing about things that occurred? If your answer is no, then why do you write about Trachimbrod and your grandfather in the manner that you do, and why do you command me to be untruthful? If your answer is yes, then this creates another question, which is if we are to be such nomads with the truth, why do we not make the story more premium than life? (EII, 179)

Since the novel strikingly stresses the inaccessibility of the past (Trachimbrod, when it is finally found, is no more than an empty field in the night, absence made palpable), both approaches can find only indirect ways to approach it: through imagination and a prophetic dream in one case, through multiply mediated acts of testimony on the other.35 While the text thus points to the equal fictionality of both approaches, it does not grant a privileged position to magical realism. Indeed, as the narrative nears its apocalyptic end the narrative voice increasingly loses the detachment and humorous distance magical realism thrives on. In the representation of the shtetl’s destruction the narrative’s magical realism reaches its limits and the potential of escape it offers is in the end repealed. Although the Trachimbrod chapters conclude fantastically enough in a prophetic dream told from the perspective of the river in which the inhabitants of the shtetl drown, the dream is a merciless depiction of mass death. Dissolving syntax and sentence division, it breathlessly describes the horror in a narrative style that echoes the two testimonial accounts of Nazi crimes which the novel presents in the course of Alex’s narration. But even in its basic marvelous nature the prophetic dream eventually

35 The testimony of the sole survivor, Lista, is translated by Alex for Jonathan and then later reported in its translated form, and the confession of Alex’s grandfather is translated by Alex, then recorded by Jonathan in his diary, which Alex allegedly quotes in his narrative.

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denies the solace of miraculous birth from disaster that the first chapter of the shtetl’s history still offered. The miracle that makes Brod’s birth from water possible, namely the absence of an umbilical cord, does not reoccur in the birth of Safran’s daughter who is pulled back under the water toward her drowning mother. Instead of deciding for one or the other approach and thus proclaiming either the testimonial or the magical realist as the more adequate mode of representation, the novel develops a continual self-criticism and self-interrogation of its own aesthetic strategies. The novel’s contradictory aesthetic statements concerning the combination of the tragic and the comic mode illustrate this well. In his second letter to Jonathan, Alex quotes Jonathan’s opinion that “humorous is the only truthful way to tell a sad story” (EII, 53) while later in the novel (but earlier in the plot) Jonathan opines: I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. […] But now I think it’s the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world. (EII, 158)

To sum up, I propose that while the Holocaust is certainly a central event in this novel, its main concern is not what (really) happened, who is guilty and who innocent, who died and who survived. Though it recounts some traumatic tales, it is not in effect a trauma narrative. Whereas the acknowledgement of the impossibility to access the past indeed gives rise to the magical realist narrative elements, this inaccessibility is not primarily addressed as an ontological or epistemological problem but rather as an ethical task. Thus, eventually, Everything Is Illuminated is not so much a novel about the past as a novel about an ongoing project of creative imagination and collaborative authorship. It does not subscribe to a postmodernist agenda of subversion, irony and scepticism but engages in a continual constructive dialogue between different narrative voices and attitudes. To read the text from such an interpretative angle may serve to highlight the ways in which it invites ethical evaluations of its narrative choices and turns to an optimistic profession for meaning and communication in the very face of the latter’s impossibility. I do not have the space here to develop such a reading of the novel beyond these few initial hints. Rather, I would like to give some further support to my objections against a precipitous interpretive association of the Holocaust topic, magical realism and trauma by turning to a second example, Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. However, such a discussion needs to be preceded by a disclaimer, since the degree to which this novel is magical realist is questionable at best. For the most part, the novel spins a largely historical realist narrative, set in New York in the 1930s and 1940s, about two

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young Jewish men: Josef, who has just escaped from Prague, and his American cousin, Sam. Desperate to earn money in order to help the family Josef left behind, the cousins venture into the comic book business, inventing the superhero character of the “Escapist.” The whole novel poses as fan-history of the genealogy and development of the comic book series that the cousins create in the course of their partnership. It is this concern with superhero stories which brings the novel in proximity to magical realism. While set in an alternative version of New York – “Empire City, home of the needle-tipped Excelsior Building, tallest ever built; home of the Statue of Liberation, on her island in the middle of Empire Bay, her sword raised in defiance to the tyrants of the world” (KC, 123) – these stories also cross over into historical reality; for example, when the Escapist starts fighting in the Second World War or is depicted personally punching Hitler in the face. Furthermore, the novel repeatedly blurs the boundaries between its relation of comic book tales and its historical narrative: Josef, for example, becomes closely associated with the character of his invention and assumes traits that border on the marvelous. Indeed, the novel reveals its proclivity to magical realism early on since the legendary Golem of Prague plays a pivotal role in Josef’s miraculous escape from Prague. The association of the marvelous with escape in this episode sets the tone for the rest of the novel. Throughout, Chabon avoids any direct representation of the Jews’ desperate situation in Europe and develops instead an elaborate exploration of escapism. Kavalier & Clay focuses on the escapee in America, who is entirely and painfully unable to obtain any kind of precise information about what is happening to his family. The fantasies Josef spins out in the course of the novel are, in contrast to Jonathan’s, not directly concerned with representing their unknown fate but to vent his own frustration and helplessness. As Lee Behlman points out: “The Escapist, like America itself, is always set in contrast to the Holocaust experiences of Josef, and is never used as vehicle for the depiction of those experiences, indirect or otherwise.”36 Indeed, to be more precise, Josef himself has no “Holocaust experiences” at all. Although he already suffers some discrimination, he leaves Prague as early as 1939, even before his family is forced to move into a ghetto. The Holocaust, though continually present as a subtext, is therefore entirely absent from the surface of the narration. Instead, the utter distance between events in Europe and the life and culture of New York City becomes one of the defining tensions of large parts of the text.

36 Lee Behlman, “The Escapist: Fantasy, Folklore, and the Pleasures of the Comic Book in Recent Jewish American Holocaust Fiction,” Shofar 22.3 (2004): 56–71.

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By continually insisting on Josef’s repeatedly frustrated attempts to help his family, the novel provides a bitterly ironic counter-current to its nostalgic celebration of the heydays of comic books. After all, the commercially most successful period in the Kavalier and Clay partnership – narrated in part four of the novel, bearing the rather cynical title “The Golden Age” – coincides with Josef’s receipt of the last letter from his mother and thus quite probably with the death of all members of his family back in Europe. With regard to this, D. G. Myers quite acrimoniously suggests that Chabon “can devise no other way to express the infinite sadness of the failure to acknowledge the comics’ artistic greatness than by exciting a secondhand frisson at the Nazi destruction.”37 In contrast to this, I would argue that this use of historical background serves primarily to aggravate the central questions about the role of the fictive that the novel raises in this context. Similarly to Everything Is Illuminated, Chabon’s novel explicitly explores the ethical and pragmatic consequences and justifications for its flights of fancy. The conclusion that the novel finds this justification in an acknowledgement of “both the urgency of representing trauma, and trauma’s seeming unspeakability”38 easily suggests itself. Consequently, critics who read the novel in the context of a more general defence of the fantastic usually tend to stress its relation to traumatic experiences. As both Hillary Chute and Behlman have emphasized, Josef’s spirited defence of escape is contingent on his loss and his attempt to deal with his grief and anger.39 Both in his own creative work, in which he fights an extended and increasingly violent “funny-book war” (KC, 163), and in his intensive reading of comic books Josef finds a way to momentarily forget his grief about the loss of his family and his frustration about his inability to help them. The novel’s strongest defence of escapism thus evokes its therapeutic value, its potential to console and to distract from loss: Having lost his mother, father, brother, and grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history – his home – the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf. (KC, 575)

His art provides Josef with a means of self-expression that culminates in his creation of a novel-length, highly unconventional comic book – a “secret record of his mourning, of his guilt and retribution” (KC, 579) that, he feels, “was helping to heal him” (KC, 577). Indeed, Chute reads Josef’s entire artistic development 37 D. G. Myers, “Michael Chabon’s Imaginary Jews,” Sewanee Review 116.4 (2008): 572–588, 580. 38 Hillary Chute, “Ragtime, Kavalier & Clay, and the Framing of Comics,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 54.2 (2008): 268–301, 287. 39 See Behlman, “Escapist,” 69.

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(from popular comics, to modernist aesthetics, to book-length graphic narrative) as a successive progression, as he “searches for the form that best registers his traumatic experience.”40 However, once again, there are some limitations to such a reading of Chabon’s novel. Josef’s loss is certainly of importance, but the value the novel ascribes to the fictive, I would argue, cannot be limited to a therapeutic one. Especially so since trauma is, in fact, not of central concern to the novel at all. Indeed, trauma is not even necessarily an adequate descriptor of Josef’s situation. Josef does not celebrate escapism as the most “noble [and] necessary service” (KC, 583) of fiction in order to work through or escape from traumatic memories but in order to escape from the stifling impotence and restricted agency of his comfortable American life. In fact, a perspective focusing on trauma and the therapeutic use of the fantastic as a way to mark the inaccessibility of the real threatens to lead into contradictory claims. After all, Chabon develops his defence of escapism by means of a novel that is itself quite blatantly fictional, indeed bordering on the magical realist. If the novel’s defence of escapism is therefore limited to a therapeutic value that is “‘especially’ worthy for survivors immediately after the war,”41 how is Chabon’s act of writing the novel, or indeed, the reader’s pleasure in reading it justifiable? Especially since the text repeatedly makes a point to emphasize the common fictional nature of its different narrative strands. By analogy, its meditation on escapism certainly applies no less to the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay than to the “Amazing Adventures of the Escapist” (KC, 297), the comic-book series its plot revolves around. How, then, can the novel’s nostalgic turn toward comic-book history and a sentimentalized golden age of pre-war American culture – in which capitalism was benign, initiative and artistic creativity paid off and good and evil were apparently so easy to distinguish – be justified in terms of their therapeutic value? After all, neither the author – in his own words “a lucky man living in a lucky time in the luckiest country in the world”42 – nor the majority of the novel’s probable readership can claim any direct experience of the war. And why make a point of blurring the distinction between the escapist superhero stories and the historical realist narrative, if this turns the therapeutic defence of the fantastic, arguably, into a rather self-defeatist argument? Such questions, I would suggest, can only be answered

40 Chute, “Framing of Comics,” 286. 41 Behlman, “Escapist,” 70. 42 Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing along the Borderlands (San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books, 2008): 165–166.

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by reconsidering the novel’s exploration of escapism in terms that go beyond a celebration of the healing qualities of the fictive. By way of a conclusion let me therefore urge the exploration of other interpretive perspectives in an assessment of Jewish magical realism than the usual recourse to subversion, alterity and trauma. For works of fiction which no longer agonize over postmodernist challenges of the inaccessibility of the real by language, fiction whose main concerns are no longer primarily epistemological or ontological but instead pragmatic and ethical, different arguments and frameworks of explanation will have to be found.

Diana Popescu

Magic and Realism in the Art and the Memoir of Samuel Bak When describing Jewish painter Samuel Bak’s style, critics refer to the “surreal,” “fantastic,” “eerie” atmosphere created in his paintings. While the artist acknowledges that his work indeed “borders on the surreal,” Bak argues that his vision is nevertheless deeply “rooted in the facts of modern history.” The striking beauty, clarity and sadness of his paintings have been recently complemented with the autobiography Painted in Words: A Memoir (2001) which gives a detailed account of his and his family’s experiences during the Holocaust. This essay explores the tension between the “real” and the “magic” emerging in Bak’s oeuvre in relation to childhood trauma. By creating symbolic links between painting and writing, I argue that the magic realist mode serves to develop a memory narrative that Bak, the adult painter, employs to reconnect with Bak, the child survivor, and to render the trauma of childhood separation and loss. I will show how both image and text, by utilizing elements specific to the magic realist style, complement each other and fuse one into another to create a unified work. In the interplay between the realist documentary style of the memoir and the fantastic and metaphoric world of the image, a “displaced” magic realism takes shape, by means of which Bak attempts to reconcile a deeply painful and ambivalent relationship with the past, and equally important, to repair the past, in the Jewish mystical tradition of “tikkun haolam.” Born in Vilna in 1933 Jewish artist and child survivor of Nazi persecution, Samuel Bak is mostly well-known for his monumental series of paintings Landscapes of Jewish Experience (1997) analyzed in great detail by Lawrence Langer in his essay of the same title.1 Bak’s art has been defined as a haunting visual testimony of a world shattered by the catastrophic events of the Holocaust. The artist himself speaks of his work as being indelibly marked by the “moment of destruction.” He explains how his landscapes convey a sense […] of a world that was broken, of a world that exists again through an enormous effort to put everything together, when it is absolutely impossible to put it together because

1 See the essay and commentary by Lawrence Langer in the art catalogue Landscapes of Jewish Experience (Boston, MA: Pucker Gallery in Association with Brandeis UP, 1997).

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the broken images can never become whole again. […] Even if I do it with very happy and gay colours, it has always gone through some catastrophe.2

The “moment of destruction,” as an underlying theme of Bak’s work and life, has been tackled in both Langer’s poetic essay and more recently in Kimberly Socha’s exploration of Bak’s series of paintings In a Different Light (2001).3 Socha has favored an approach which foregrounds the “surreal” quality of Bak’s painting style. In this essay, I will pit against the use of the term “surreal” in relation to Bak’s oeuvre, arguing instead that “magic realism” is a more befitting concept by means of which one can gain a deeper understanding of the identity of Bak as a child witness and survivor of the Holocaust. Hence, I am interested in exploring the psychological function of the magic realist mode in the context of Bak’s traumatic experiences. I argue that, in his recourse to magic realism, Bak does not search for a way out of history and a position of safe distance from it. Instead, his intention is to linger on the past, examine, interrogate and disentangle it in order to present it to us in all its minute detail. The obsession with capturing the past in its most nuanced shape and color finds its realization within the magic realist mode. More importantly, through the adoption of this mode, Bak the adult painter gives a voice to Bak the child survivor. It is from the perspective of the child survivor that the magic realist depictions of a lost world come to life. The magic realist mode makes possible the identification with a child’s perspective. It is the child’s witnessing of the catastrophe that is faithfully rendered by the adult Bak in both visual and written form. Adopting a psychoanalytic interpretation of Bak’s relation to his art, I shall argue that the empty canvas and the blank page serve as a mirror reflecting the trauma of childhood. Hence, my argument is that magic realism offers the language by means of which Bak attempts to undo the catastrophe and repair the broken Jewish self.

Magic Realism’s Origins in Visual Art Despite its proliferation in literary studies, magic realism has its origins, often neglected by literary critics, in the visual arts. In his 1925 book Nach Expressionis-

2 Bak quoted by Langer, Landscapes of Jewish Experience, 2–3. 3 Kimberly Socha, “Outside the Reign of Logic, Outside the Reach of God: Hester Panim in the Surreal Art of Paul Celan and Samuel Bak,” War, Literature & the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities 22.1 (2010): 77–93, http://wlajournal.com/22_1-2/images/socha.pdf (accessed on April 12, 2013).

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mus: Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei (PostExpressionism, Magic Realism: Problems of the Most Recent European Painting), German art historian Franz Roh used the term “magic realism” to refer to a new form of post-expressionist painting that emerged during the Weimar Republic.4 The magic realist style, argued Roh, intended to capture the “mystery” of the real world in a deeply realistic and photographic manner. He further explained that “for the new art, it is a question of representing before our eyes, in an intuitive way, the fact, the interior figure of the exterior world.”5 Key artistic traits of the magic realist style include sober subjects, the object clarified, representational, puristically severe, static, quiet, thorough, close and fair view, miniature, cold, thin paint surface, smooth, effacement of the painting process, centripetal, external purification of objects.6

It is worth recalling that magic realism emerged during the Weimar Republic, an era marked by political fragility, national anxiety, violence and extreme economic difficulty leading to the National Socialist party’s rise to power in 1933. The mood of the times surely influenced German painters who adopted the magic realist style as a way to reflect upon the historical realities they lived through. Art historian Sergiusz Michalski describes magic realist painting as “a reflection of German society at that time, torn between a desire for and a simultaneous fear of unconditional modernity, between sober, objective rationality and residues of Expressionist and rationalist irrationalities.”7 It was the product of a moment of deep national and personal crisis, when reality, as one knows it, becomes strange, when the sense of security in the world is replaced by loss of faith and a deep anxiety in relation to the future. No wonder then that German painters Otto Dix, George Grosz and Georg Schrimpf developed a style of painting that would capture the mood of the new post-World War I reality. In retrospect, their paintings announce the cruelty and violence that followed with the coming into power of Nazism which had dramatically changed Samuel Bak’s life. Similarly, in Bak’s

4 Christopher Warnes locates the origin of the term within the context of German romanticism, in particular in the work of Novalis, see Magic Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 5 Franz Roh, “Magic Realism. Post-expressionism,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke UP, 1995): 15–32, 24. The term magic realism was soon replaced with the concept of “new objectivity,” introduced by art historian G. F. Hartlaub, and also adopted by Roh. 6 Seymour Menton, Magic Realism – Rediscovered 1918–1981 (Philadelphia: Art Alliance/London and Toronto: Associated UPs, 1983): 18. 7 Sergiusz Michalski, New Objectivity: Painting, Graphic Art and Photography in Weimar Germany, 1919–1933 (Cologne: Taschen, 1994): 13.

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case, magic realism becomes a response to an extreme history, as shall be presented in more detail in what follows. One may add that “magic realism, as a mode of painting, has a slight chronological edge on Surrealism, while both styles are profoundly influenced by metaphysical art,” explains art historian Jeffrey Welscher.8 Despite the common grounding in Giorgio de Chirico’s scuola metafisica art movement, magic realism differs from surrealism in fundamental ways. Unlike surrealists, magic realists, argues H. H. Arnason, do not indulge in Freudian images. Instead, they are interested in “translating everyday experiences into strangeness.”9 Hence, magic realism deals with a “strange reality, not a surreality.” Furthermore, “it does not invent a new order of things; it simply reorders reality to make it seem alien.” In this sense, magic realism is an art of “the implausible, not the impossible; it is imaginative, not imaginary.”10 In relation to Bak’s oeuvre, magic realism more accurately captures the artist’s intention to refer to the real world of historical events as he experienced it as a child survivor. Bak observes: “I am dealing with things that come to the level of my consciousness. I am using symbols and metaphors that represent reality which is a little shifted.”11 The magic realist element of Bak’s paintings, I argue, emerges in the accuracy of the minutely detailed objects and landscapes he imagines. It is the exaggeration of the realistic detail which creates the magic realist quality. The unusual proximity to the subject calls into question the reality that Bak’s paintings confront us with. There is no doubt that Bak refers to the lived reality of his personal history as a child survivor of the Holocaust. The landscapes he paints have a defamiliarizing effect due to their strange beauty, as Bak does not refrain to use bright colors, and sadness as he conveys the stillness of a broken world, a photographic depiction of a reality in disintegration, a vivid portrayal of the remains of what was once a whole. Nevertheless, without having read Bak’s memoir, one can easily misjudge his art as surrealist.12 I argue that both his painting and writing present a world scarred by trauma and depict a universe as it was in retrospect perceived by Bak.

8 Jeffrey Welscher, “Magic Realism: Defining the Indefinite,” Art Journal 45.4 (1985): 293–298, 294. 9 H. H. Arnason, History of Modern Art (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1977): 376. 10 Welscher, “Magic Realism,” 293. 11 Samuel Bak quoted by Elizabeth Pols, “Beyond Time: The Paintings of Samuel Bak,” Pakn Treger, Magazine of the Yiddish Book Centre 21 (2010), http://www.yiddishbook center.org/pakntreger/05-10/beyond-time-paintings-samuel-bak (accessed on April 14, 2013). 12 See Meir Ronnen, “Samuel Bak: Surreal but Real,” (Jerusalem) Jerusalem Post (December 28, 2006), http://www.jpost.com/Arts-and-Culture/Arts/Samuel-Bak-surreal-but-real (accessed on April 12, 2013).

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Ann Bowers reminds us that magic realism can provide children with a “perfect means to explore the world through their imagination without losing a connection to what they recognise as the real world.”13 Magic realism, argues Roger Drury, is congruent with children’s need to “experiment with ways of looking at the world, to rearrange place and time, to challenge the stable and predictable frame of experience.”14 Their natural inclination to interpret reality by means of imagination is part of the process of learning about the surrounding world, assuming ownership over it. Magic realism also provides an opportunity for the child to construct reality anew, by creating alternative versions of it. Hence, a child’s view of the world can be associated with the art technique called defamiliarization,15 as magic realism too, radically emphasizes elements of reality which have become invisible because of their familiarity. In the context of the traumatic events experienced by the child Bak, magic realism is no longer a playful form of appropriating reality, but becomes a mode by which one can obtain a sense of distance from it. Furthermore, as I shall argue below, for Bak the artist it represents a way of translating trauma into narrative form.

Trauma and Magic Realism In his investigation of how the mind processes memory, Pierre Janet speaks of “narrative memory” as a mental construct used to make sense out of experiences. While familiar and expectable experiences are automatically assimilated within the narrative memory and without much conscious awareness of details, frightening or novel experiences may not easily fit into existing cognitive patterns. Disturbing experiences may be remembered either with particular vividness, or may entirely resist integration. Furthermore, under extreme conditions, existing meaning schemes may be entirely unable to accommodate frightening experiences, which causes the memory of these experiences to be stored differently and not be available for retrieval under ordinary conditions: it becomes dissociated from conscious awareness and voluntary control.16

13 Maggy Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism (London: Routledge, 2004): 104. 14 Roger Drury, “Realism Plus Fantasy Equals Magic,” in Crosscurrents of Criticism: Horn Book Essays, 1968–1977, ed. Paul Heins (Boston, MA: Horn Books): 178–185, 180. 15 See Victor Shklovskij, “Art as Technique,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden: Blackwell, 1998): 17–23. 16 Pierre Janet paraphrased by Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995): 158–182, 160.

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Theorists Cathy Caruth and Laurence Kirmayer further suggest that narratives of individuals who have undergone trauma are characterized by incoherence, gaps and absences which demonstrate “frailty and im-persistence of memory.”17 On the other hand, argues Elizabeth Waites, “memory of traumatic events can be extremely veridical.”18 The particular vividness and precision of Bak’s paintings allude to the overwhelming presence of trauma. Samuel Bak’s monumental memoir, exceeding four hundred pages, is a faithful rendering of his paintings. More importantly, both painting and autobiography testify to what Dori Laub calls “the imperative to tell” which the survivor takes upon him/herself as a mission in life. Laub explains that this imperative to tell and to be heard can become itself an all-consuming life-task. Yet, no amount of telling seems to ever do justice to this inner compulsion. There are never enough words or the right words, there is never enough time or the right time […] to articulate the story that cannot be fully captured in thought, memory and speech.19

The imperative to tell reverberates in both Bak’s art and writing. When one examines Bak’s recent paintings collectively called Icon of Loss (2008), the imperative to paint a visual testimony, driven by an inner compulsion, is made apparent in the frequency with which the image of the Warsaw Ghetto boy – who could have been Bak himself or his murdered best friend Samek Epstein – with his hands raised in resignation, reappears to haunt every one of 75 paintings which make the series. The persistence of this image and the frequency with which it reappears in different landscapes, taking different shapes and forms, ultimately testifies to the impossibility of Bak’s telling. The excess of images and of words becomes a way of expressing Bak’s inability to fully grasp the past, or the truth about himself, as a child survivor. The very condition of having survived is marked by a continuing crisis. Caruth reiterates Sigmund Freud’s disturbing insight into the enigmatic relationship between trauma and survival, explaining that “for those that undergo trauma, it is not the moment of the event, but of the passing out of it that is traumatic, that survival itself, in other words, can be a crisis.”20

17 Laurence Kirmayer, “Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative, and Dissociation,” in Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, eds. P. Antze and M. Lambek (New York: Routledge, 1996): 173–198, 174. 18 Elizabeth Waites, Trauma and Survival: Post-traumatic and Dissociative Disorders in Women (New York: Norton, 1993): 28. 19 Dori Laub, “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995): 61–75, 63. 20 Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995): 3–12, 9.

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For Bak, painting and writing are intrinsically connected to the notion of having survived, as they provide a way of managing the crisis of survival. The adoption of magic realism marks not only the so-called “return of the repressed,” but is a form by means of which Bak comes to deal with the trauma, and define his identity as a painter. By adopting the magic realist style, Bak returns to his childhood persona, retrieves his memories, perceptions and feelings and renders them with extraordinary accuracy. Both his painting and writing fuse and cannot be discussed in separation. His memoir explains the development of the magic realist style as being intrinsically related to his coming to terms with the trauma. Bak explains the shift from semi-abstract art to his present style as having taken place around the age of thirty when, he states: I realised that I had a very special story to tell. There was a past that had been lying dormant in me. Indeed, my abstract canvases were letting it emerge, and as a result they were becoming more and more somber. To me their language seemed understandable but was it understandable to others? I had a feeling that instead of unfolding my story, the abstract paintings was suppressing it. Now this part that was stirring and searching for expression made me ask myself how to let it speak.21

The shift to another mode of expression is hence entirely realized through a process of inner-searching for his truth as an artist and child survivor of the Holocaust: I decided to let my paintings tell me what to do, to let my story or was it their story, to come without forcing […] mine was a story of a humanity that had survived two great wars and whose world now lay in shambles. Survivors were trying to repair the damage, to reconstruct what was lost, to recreate something that would resemble in their eyes what was gone forever. […] Their story was my story. And in me it was also a story about a trauma that had been silenced for too many years. Now its emergence could be seen as a sign of resilience. These were the elements of my inner self that were asking to be communicated through my art. (PW, 479)

The newly found magic realist style becomes a means of translating an extreme and amplified state of mind, and a way of explaining the grave alterations in reality witnessed by the child Bak. His monumental autobiography brings to life, by means of ellipsis and free association, the vibrant world of the Jewish community of Vilna. It paints a detailed and endearing collective portrait of his extended family, both maternal and paternal grandparents having perished in the Holocaust. Samek (Samuel)

21 Samuel Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002): 478; further references in the text, abbreviated as “PW.”

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Bak was born in 1933 into a secular Jewish family in Vilna, the Jerusalem of Lithuania. With the outbreak of the war in 1939 Vilna, till then part of Poland, was transferred to Lithuania. In June 1940, Lithuania became part of the Soviet republic, and from June 1941 until July 1944 it was under the control and terrorregime of Nazism. From his earliest years, Bak had shown an interest in and talent for painting which his parents Mitzia Nadel and Jonas Bak encouraged. Painting becomes the child Bak’s only retreat, providing him with a sense of comfort. As he spent his days drawing, Bak recalls: my protected childhood knew little of what went on beyond the walls of my home. The sword of virulent anti-Semitism that hung over our heads, the antagonism between Poles and Lithuanians, the collaboration of the latter with the Germans, the secret agreements among enemies like Hitler and Stalin – all were beyond my domain. (PW, 312)

As the conditions aggravate and Jews are evacuated from their homes and forced in the Vilna ghetto, Bak’s exposure to a brutal history becomes unavoidable. The accounts of the painful separation from his grandparents, the witnessing to his parents’ worries and desperate attempts to escape, the deportation to the ghetto followed by his and his mother’s rescue and hiding in the Catholic monastery run by Sister Maria, are interspersed with reflections upon art, descriptions of landscapes, and the people that populated his childhood, and most prominently the figure of his mother. Above all, as Amos Oz argues in his foreword to the book, “it is a portrait of the artist as a young man in circumstances that Joyce would never have dreamt of.”22 Despite the many forced changes in his early life, painting remains a constant presence. Among the most memorable drawings are those on the Pinkas, an old Jewish manuscript dating from the nineteenth century and containing a wealth of records of the Jewish community in Vilna. The Pinkas was handed in to child Bak for safe keeping by Yiddish poets Avrom Sutzkever and Schmerke Kaczerginski just before the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto. He was asked to draw on it, “whatever arose from his imagination.” Bak confesses: “I was happy to add my childish drawings to its yellowing pages […] thus we became constant companions […], the Pinkas became a faithful friend and a guardian of my art” (PW, 5, 6). It is in the space of the canvas that Bak firstly attempted to record the historical events his family were going through. Painting, which accompanied the child artist during the years of hiding, became a prominent part of his life after the end of the Second World War, when he and his surviving mother found themselves in Landsberg, the DP camp near Munich, where they spent two years before

22 Amos Oz, “Foreword,” in Bak, Painted in Words, viii.

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they moved to Israel in 1947. Bak’s most memorable work of this period represents a mother and son arriving at Landsberg, a first disguised account of his survival. Bak’s painting changed throughout the years, assuming in the 1960s a semiabstract style, only to reach the present style in the 1970s. Bak explains his newly found style, as being shaped by a kind of “realism.” He states: “my semi abstract art has transformed itself into the present realism which describes a vision that could only exist in the mind, yet, is very specific in texture and detail. In it the precision of the pictorial imagery is mandatory.” The vividness of his imagery mirrors the experiences of trauma. Bak argues: my painted images were to be sharp and clear, immediately and unavoidably present to the viewer. Yet, in the context of modern art this technique also provided the estrangement that I sought, a means of forcing viewers to see freshly those painful matters that have been dulled by habits of denial. (PW, 437, 479)

The central terms used by Bak to describe his work, namely, a “sense of immediacy,” “estrangement,” the attempt to force viewers to “see freshly,” are also stylistic devices of the magic realist mode. Instead of departing from reality, I argue, that Bak’s use of magic realism conveys how deeply his vision is rooted in “the facts of Jewish modern history.”23 The adoption of a realist style, marked by an exaggerated attention to detail, is inextricably related to the realization that his life’s work returns to and revolves around his experiences as a child witness of terrible events. Bak the adult reflects upon this matter in the following way: “my work reveals a reality observed through the eyes of a child who had suddenly aged. Some might call it elaboration of trauma; I hope that my art is more than that.”24 Painting and storytelling are the two central axes of his life. Through storytelling, an extraordinary sense of lived experience is rendered, especially by using the present tense and through a detailed description of sites, surroundings and people. Each sequence of events experienced by the child Bak is captured by the adult writer as if through the lens of the camera. Indeed, Bak’s prose presents a dynamic and intensely visual character that borders on cinematography. Furthermore, the narrative does not follow a chronological order. Instead, his stories have grown, as Bak explains, “into a flow of reminiscences and associations.” They are, similar to his paintings, “pictures painted at different times, sometimes over a span of many years, self-contained units enriched by the connections that 23 Samuel Bak, “Speaking about the Unspeakable,” http://www.chgs.umn.edu/museum/ responses/bak/ (accessed on April 12, 2013). 24 Statement in interview, http://www.chgs.umn.edu/museum/responses/bak/ (accessed on April 13, 2013).

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bind them together” (PW, 1). The memoir contains stories gathered from both Bak’s present and past in an apparently disorderly manner. At close inspection, however, each chapter deals with a certain theme, person, or moment that marked Bak’s existence. Chapter One, entitled “The Pinkas: A Book of Records,” for instance, while following the history of the old Jewish book of records, moves freely from present time, namely March 4, 1999, in Weston near Boston, where Bak currently resides, to the moment of the liquidation of the ghetto, when young Bak came into possession of the Pinkas, to his life in Israel, the Six-Day War, and the decision to leave Israel for Rome. Bak then returns to his first exhibition in the Vilna ghetto, life in the ghetto and the portraits of Yiddish poets, his tutor-teacher Rokhele Sarosvky, his father, the bourgeois atmosphere of his parents’ home, following with a section on his thoughts about his current art and the image of the Warsaw Ghetto boy with his surrendering arms, to reflections on the Holocaust experience. This is again followed by a return to the moment of the first day of Vilna’s liberation by the Red Army, which he describes with a keen sense of observation, sensitivity to the aesthetic qualities of landscape and architecture, and remarkable attention to detail: Mother and I leave the bombed and partly destroyed premises of our last hiding place in the former convent and venture into freedom. The center of the city is terribly damaged. Wherever my eyes turn I see the wounds inflicted by heavy artillery, shelling and air-raid bombing. An acrid smell of smoke hangs in the air […] mother’s hand clings to me forcefully. We pass the building of our prewar apartment. The walls bear hundreds of bullet wounds. Big chunks of mortar have been blown away, but the edifice still stands.

Moving on from a seemingly realist documentary style, the following description already makes apparent the presence of the magic realist style of his paintings: While mother speaks, I observe my surroundings. The intense devastation reveals fascinating forms, shapes, and colors. Desolate window frames looks like huge wounds that have leaked their black blood in rising smears. They tell of recent fire and smoke. We pass a procession of tall chimneys. Ignorant then of what I now know about the death camps, I do not yet read in them the signs that will testify in my future paintings to the horrors of the crematoria. I take them only for what they are, domestic chimneys that formerly sent up the ordinary smoke of fireplaces and cooking stoves. (PW, 41–43)

When reading Bak’s monumental memoir, one is immediately struck and convinced by what seems to be Bak’s infallible memory. So vivid and enthralling are his depictions of a complex array of situations, events, and people that populated his childhood that one cannot but ask how a child witness of trauma can retrieve, as if with a camera’s eye, all the details of a terrible past. Bak’s irregular digressions, and the back and forth movement between present and past, gives

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the impression of an uncontrolled and impulsive writing of an individual consumed by memory. Despite the irregularity of the writing style, there is a remarkable sense of clarity, precision and coherence that dominates the narrative. It appears that by both painting and writing the broken pieces of the world that had been shattered are reconstructed with profound care and reverence. More importantly, Bak’s oeuvre has a therapeutic function, as it attempts to mend the broken self. Writing, similar to painting, originates in the need to recuperate the past, and present it to the reader or viewer in all its incomplete wholeness. This leads me to the importance of tikkun ha-olam in Bak’s work.

Tikkun Ha-Olam The phrase tikkun ha-olam refers to “the process of making God, world, and humanity as well as the relationship that bind them together, once again hale, whole, and holy,” explains David Patterson.25 Thus, essential to tikkun ha-olam is the Jewish return to Torah and to prayer. However, the wounding caused by Auschwitz, notes Patterson, “cuts through God and humanity […] with this wounding, mending itself is undermined. The post-Holocaust tikkun ha-olam seeks a tikkun of a tikkun, a mending of the very notion of mending.”26 The notion of repair emerges with prominence in Bak’s reflections upon his painting and writing. In relation to painting, Bak explains that “the possibility of repair, the repair of a broken world is an important meaning contained in my numerous variations on the subject of still life” (PW, 373). On the other hand, Bak describes his memoir as “a journey into memory that is more than an attempt to save the past from oblivion; it searches for some kind of restoration or mending. Probably aspiring for a tikkun ha-olam, the repair of a whole world” (PW, 6). The preoccupation with the mending of a world shattered by the Holocaust is visibly present in Jewish thinker Emil Fackenheim’s theological reflections upon the experience of the Holocaust. For both Fackenheim and Bak, tikkun ha-olam is a response to the radical assault caused by the Nazis, and an attempt to “undo” what was done, despite the awareness that the undoing is impossible to complete. Lacking a religious identity, Bak employs artistic expression as a tikkun ha-olam and arguably a form of prayer. He confesses that even though

25 David Patterson, Emil L. Fackenheim: A Jewish Philosopher’s Response to the Holocaust (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2008): 157. 26 Patterson, Fackenheim, 158.

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the question of God receded to a sphere beyond my reach […] I do practice a ritual of painting, I have a belief in the possibility of human decency, and I produce works that are anchored in what I understand as being a meditation on the Jewish experience of my century. (PW, 434)

Painting as an act of tikkun is a way of recuperating the broken self. The repetition of the imagery of destruction, and more recently the frequency with which the iconic image of the Warsaw Ghetto boy populates Bak’s landscapes, denotes the compulsive need and imperative to tell but also the despair of being entrapped in the past. Even though it is impossible to realize tikkun, Bak continues to paint and write as a form of dealing with the crisis of survival. Bak confesses: I have never clarified to myself all the reasons behind my obsessive need to produce art. Partly it must be a desire to give meaning to my miraculous survival. Like a Jew who visits the cemetery and leaves small stones on the graves of his beloved ones, I add painting upon painting as acts of remembrance. (PW, 435)

Both storytelling and painting are put to use to render the crisis of witnessing. In his most recent series of paintings displayed at Pucker Gallery in Boston, Icon of Loss (2008), Bak returns time and again to the figure of the child as the witness of catastrophic events. Bak reproduces the image of surrender and helplessness as if in a compulsive attempt to unravel the mystery of witnessing. Yala Korwin’s poem “The Little Boy with His Hands Up” is representative in this context. A Holocaust survivor herself, Korwin is similarly entrapped by the image of the Warsaw Ghetto boy. She writes: All the torments of this harassed crowd Are written on your face. In your dark eyes – a vision of horror. You have seen death already On the ghetto streets, haven’t you?27

For Bak, gazing at the Warsaw Ghetto boy, means going back to the place of trauma. The figure of the boy “triggered in me a chain of associations and uncontrollable reflections that projected me far, far off.” In the act of painting Bak attempts to heal the wound. He explains: with his arms raised in an attitude of resigned and bewildered surrender and his spent gaze focused on the viewer, he has never stopped questioning me. So I paint him again and again

27 Yala Korwin, To Tell the Story: Poems of the Holocaust (New York: Holocaust Library, 1987): 75.

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as if the process of letting him materialize on my canvases were going to supply the two of us with an answer to his silent query. (PW, 299)

A solitary figure in Bak’s painting, the Warsaw boy is transposed, as Marianne Hirsch argues, “into a variety of well-known iconographic motifs, ranging from crucifixion, to the felled tree of life, to more specific representations of concentration camp life – the striped uniform, the so essential shoes.” It becomes an image of Jewish crucifixion, alluding to Chagall’s painting White Crucifixion, as well as to Christian motifs, such as outspread arms, the cross, and the nails.28 The Warsaw Ghetto boy, an emblem of Jewish martyrdom standing for the fate of the half million children who perished in the Holocaust, is deeply entrenched within global popular culture. Is Bak only reproducing a commemorative practice? Does the artist engage critically with the historical photograph, by raising questions in regard to the problematic viewing of the Warsaw boy from the point of view of the Nazi? By the strategy of cropping the image of the boy from the context of the photograph,29 Bak symbolically liberates it from the gaze of the Nazi. Is the disassembling and reassembling of this figure a form of tikkun ha-olam, or rather a testimony to the elusiveness of memory and the impossibility to contain the past? Yet again, is Bak’s obsessive recreation of this image a kind of “fort-da” situation,30 a way of mastering the uncontrollable avalanche of vivid memories from the past? Similarly to the fort-da game explained by Freud, I argue that the compulsive return to the image of the boy is a form of coping with the trauma of loss. The Warsaw Ghetto boy becomes an icon of loss, and a mirror by means of which Bak readdresses the crisis of witnessing. The very repetitiveness of the image suggests that the wounds cannot be healed. Dory Laub writes about those who watch survivors rebuild their lives that “in the center of the massive dedicated effort remains a danger, a nightmare, a fragility, a woundedness that defies all healing.”31 In his painting and writing, Bak projects this woundedness with a great degree of vividness, which, as this article has argued, renders Bak’s oeuvre a magic realist quality. In his search for a means to “tell the special story,” the magic realist mode emerges as the found

28 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia UP, 2012): 140. 29 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 140. 30 Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, ed. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth P, 1955): 7–64. 31 Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness and the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Psychoanalysis, Literature and History, eds. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992): 57–74, 73.

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style. Bak explains how “now this past that was stirring and searching for expression made [him] ask [himself] how to let it speak.” He decided to let the painting “tell him what to do,” “to let [his] story (or was it their story?) come without forcing” (PW, 478). The newly-found means of expression carries the formal characteristics of the magic realist style. Magic realism, as a narrative mode, allows the adult painter to meet yet again with the child Bak, whose vision of the world he faithfully depicts with such precision.

James Jordan

“A Strange, Special Day. Playing a Ghost, Yet Haunting Myself.” The Holocaust, the Magical and the Real in Elijah Moshinsky’s Genghis Cohn (1993) This article discusses the presence of magical realism in Elijah Moshinsky’s Genghis Cohn (1993), the BBC television film based on Romain Gary’s The Dance of Genghis Cohn (1968) in which a Holocaust victim returns as a dybbuk to haunt his Nazi murderer. Drawing on the work of Avery Gordon and Stephen Frosh, it analyses the film’s use of ghosts to demonstrate how the past continues to haunt the present in a comedy which deliberately conflates the real and the imagined, blurring the distinction between the two.* Perhaps every generation has something that haunts it. Stephen Frosh1 Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as transformative recognition. Avery Gordon2

Magic(al) realism, as Christopher Warnes explains in his preface to Magic Realism and the Postcolonial Novel, is an oxymoron, a term that “designates a narrative strategy that stretches or ruptures altogether the boundaries of reality” through its acceptance of the magical as neither impossible nor disruptive.3 It is a genre that embraces the natural and the supernatural simultaneously, offering a version

* I am grateful to Axel Stähler and Clare Mence for their help and support in writing this article. 1 Stephen Frosh, Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013): 1. 2 Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination [1997], with a new introduction (London and Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008): 8. 3 Christopher Warnes, Magic Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009): vi. There has been much written on magical realism. For a general introduction see Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism (London and New York: Routledge, 2004): passim.

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of the world that is realistic and recognizable and yet different and unfamiliar. Operating at that point of rupture and challenging the conventional modes of representation, it is perhaps unsurprising that in recent years there has been an “emerging tendency” towards magic realism in Holocaust literature, with a number of literary works utilising “the supernatural, the magical and the unreal in dramatizing the ethical and representational difficulties which surround the Holocaust’s literary representation.”4 Indeed Jenni Adams’s study of the subject has argued that “the Holocaust’s extremity renders it a particularly appropriate context for magical realist inversion of the magical and the real.”5 The bestknown and most critically acclaimed of these recent works is probably Everything is Illuminated (2002), Jonathan Safran Foer’s innovative novel that combines fact with fiction, truth with untruth, the real with the imagined, using “magic realism to both affirm and subvert a realist attitude towards the possibility of knowing and representing the Holocaust.”6 Adams suggests that this trend within Holocaust literature is connected to the fact that we are now moving into the “post-testimonial era,” and yet, as she also makes clear, both in her argument and through her choice of texts, this is not an entirely new development, with earlier works also engaging imaginatively with the Holocaust in a similar way.7 As an example, Adams makes reference to Romain Gary’s 1968 novel The Dance of Genghis Cohn, a dybbuk story “in which a former SS officer is possessed by the spirit of one of his Jewish victims [Cohn] to satirical (if histrionic) effect,” combining the fantastic with the real in a story that satirizes the 1960s and asks questions about guilt and responsibility for both the past and the present.8 The following article continues that analysis, looking however not at Gary’s novel, but the 1993 film adaptation produced by BBC Television in association with the Arts and Entertainment

4 Jenni Adams, Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature: Troping the Traumatic Real (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011): 1. 5 Adams, Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature, 10. 6 Adams, Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature, 12. In addition to Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (London: Penguin, 2002), other recent examples include Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (London: Fourth Estate, 2000) and Markus Zusak, The Book Thief [2005] (London: The Bodley Head, 2007). For a discussion of Zusak’s text see Adams, Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature, 144–172. 7 It is a view shared by Eli Pfefferkorn, who in 1980 suggested that the use of the imagination has been far more prevalent in Holocaust literature than is usually acknowledged (Eli Pfefferkorn, “The Art of Survival: Romain Gary’s The Dance of Genghis Cohn,” Modern Language Studies 10.3 [1980]: 76–87). 8 Adams, Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature, 6. See also Jonathan Schorsch, “Jewish Ghosts in Germany,” Jewish Social Studies 9.3 (2003): 139–169.

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network.9 It argues that the film embraces a deliberately ambiguous conflation of the magical and the real in its telling of a ghost story which in its memorable closing scene collapses the boundary between fact and fiction, the real and the imagined.

Genghis Cohn, BBC2, tx. March 2, 199410 In 1994 BBC television’s successful drama strands Screen Two and Screenplay merged under the Screen Two title, with a new series of seventeen original dramas, promising to bring “the best of single drama to BBC2.”11 These diverse feature-length one-off films, some of which were also given a limited cinematic release, were to combine “powerful storytelling and vividly imagined worlds,” transporting the viewer “from post-war Germany to inner-city Liverpool; revolutionary France to the corridors of Whitehall; New Age communes to the St Petersburg Metro; rural Ireland to the streets of Bradford, London and beyond.”12 The first film in the series was Genghis Cohn (BBC2, tx. March 2, 1994), directed by Elijah Moshinsky and written by Stanley Price. It was a “dream come true” for Price who had taken nearly fifteen years to complete the screenplay, a reflection of the challenge he faced in transforming the book into a film.13

9 Magical realism has its own set of challenges for the filmmaker. Some films, for instance Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), openly embrace the more magical elements, while others will be less certain. Liev Schreiber’s version of Everything is Illuminated (2005), for example, bypasses many of the more fantastic aspects of Foer’s text, offering a simplified narrative that focuses more on the events of the Holocaust and Holocaust memory than on the interconnected use of history and mythology as seen in the book. In particular the film does not recreate the history of the shtetl Trachimbrod and what did (or did not) happen. 10 Genghis Cohn is available on DVD as part of the Diana Rigg at the BBC collection. 11 Both series had by that point established a reputation for delivering intelligent and original one-off film-length dramas. Screen Two, for example, had produced Truly, Madly, Deeply (dir. Anthony Minghella, tx. November 10, 1990), The Grass Arena (dir. Gilles Mac Kinnon, tx. January 19, 1992), Memento Mori (dir. Jack Clayton, tx. April 19, 1992) and The Snapper (dir. Stephen Frears, tx. April 4, 1993). Similarly Screenplay had delivered The Trial of Klaus Barbie (dir. Gareth Jones, tx. July 15, 1987), Antonia and Jane (dir. Beeban Kidron, tx. July 18, 1990), Journey to Knock (dir. David Wheatley, tx. September 18, 1991) and most recently Boswell and Johnson’s Tour of the Western Isles (dir. John Byrne, tx. October 27, 1993). 12 Press release, BBC Written Archives Centre (BBC WAC), T66/61/1 TV Press Office Screen Two 1986–1995. Cast members for the new series included established and rising stars such as Rachel Weisz, Bernard Hill, Rufus Sewell and Whoopi Goldberg. 13 Helen Jacobus, “Ghostly Comedy in a Nazi Setting,” Jewish Chronicle (February 11, 1994). Price refused to call this an adaptation, considering Gary’s source novel impossible to adapt. For more

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Promoted by the BBC as a “tale of murder, schizophrenia, lust, Jewish cooking and general mayhem,” Genghis Cohn, like its literary antecedent, relates the story of the life, death and afterlife of the eponymous Cohn (played by Antony Sher), a Jewish comedian and ventriloquist who “inevitably […] ends up top of the bill at Dachau concentration camp in 1942 where his act finally dies in front of an SS firing squad.”14 Sixteen years after his death, Cohn re-appears, returning as a dybbuk to haunt Otto Schatz (Robert Lindsay), both the Police Commissioner of the Bavarian town of Licht and the SS officer who gave the order to fire.15 Together Schatz and Cohn, deceased, form an unlikely double-act as they endeavor to solve a series of sex-murders. As Cohn and Schatz spend time together, it becomes evident that Cohn’s aim is not to solve the murders but to rehabilitate Schatz by “turning [him] into a Jew,” teaching him Yiddish words and phrases (for example, tokhes, shlemiel, shtup, meshuggener), showing him how to cook and prepare kosher, and instructing him in the saying of Kaddish.16 The film ends with the completion of Schatz’s transformation and Cohn’s transference to haunt another victim. The sex murderer is never found, a deliberate decision on behalf of Price who refused to name the killer in the script and spent two years “fighting […] off” the suggestion that there should be a resolution: If I had said who committed the murders the parallel would have been lost. People are more interested in solving serial killings than they are in finding out who killed six million Jews or two million Cambodians. We don’t know who did those murders. I mean, Genghis Cohn isn’t Agatha Christie, it’s not a whodunit.17

Instead a coda at the film’s conclusion sees Sher walking through the streets of Munich in the present day, dressed as Cohn in a striped concentration camp uniform and wearing a yellow star, his voiceover telling the audience that “When it comes to mass murders, you don’t ask ‘Whodunit?,’ you ask ‘Why?’” Genghis Cohn is a funny and thoughtful film. The BBC’s continuity announcer on the evening of March 2, 1994 introduced it as “a provocative dark comedy” that “brings together both sides of the Holocaust. The ghost of the past lives on in

on his own past see Stanley Price, Somewhere to Hang My Hat: An Irish-Jewish Journey (Dublin: New Island, 2002). 14 BBC WAC T66/61/1 TV Press Office Screen Two 1986–1995. 15 Dybbuk stories had been seen on BBC television as early as 1939 with a screening of extracts from the Habimah’s version of Ansky’s classic. Jewish ghosts would have been surprisingly familiar to British viewers at the time of Genghis Cohn’s broadcast , with the third and final series of the comedy series So Haunt Me (1992–1994) having finished its run in February 1994. 16 Amanda Lipman, “Genghis Cohn,” Sight and Sound 5 (1994): 62–63. 17 Jeremy Lester, “Ghost Story with Gefilte Fish Balls,” Jewish Chronicle (March 4, 1994): 36.

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Genghis Cohn.” Broadcast on television in the wake of the UK premiere of Schindler’s List, Genghis Cohn had already been a controversial success when premiered at the London Jewish Film Festival in November 1993. Like Train of Life (dir. Radu Mihaileanu, 1998), the American re-make of Jakob the Liar (dir. Peter Kassovitz, 1999), and most famously Life is Beautiful (dir. Roberto Benigni, 1997), this controversy stemmed from the film’s use of humor. But whereas Benigni’s film in particular was critically condemned even though it was well-received by the public, the limited reviews of Genghis Cohn were far more favorable, a reflection of the film’s success in combining humor and the Holocaust in such a way as to be both funny and respectful. Jeremy Lester’s review in the Jewish Chronicle, for example, argued that “sometimes […] it is healthier to laugh at a Nazi,” with the comedy providing “a third dimension to the portrayal of the Holocaust on film,” adding to the “graphic drama” of Schindler’s List and the “emotional bombardment” of Shoah.18 Indeed for Robert Lindsay, who played Schatz, much of the film’s power came from the fact that comedy offered a way for the audience to connect, albeit to themselves rather than the horror of Nazi Germany: “A lot of people just go blank when you start talking about the Holocaust; humour is a way of getting into their psyche.”19 Lindsay recognized that finding humor in such horrific events was counterintuitive and potentially offensive: Many people who saw the film said that they couldn’t enjoy comedy that focuses on a man who shot men, women and children. I lost a lot of confidence about it until a woman stood up at the end of the London Film Festival screening and announced that she was a holocaust survivor. She said everyone ought to see Genghis Cohn because it’s about forgiveness. I find that extraordinary.20

While the film is unquestionably about forgiveness, it also raises questions of guilt and responsibility in a way that complicates notions of the real and the imagined, what is seen and unseen. The opening credits are accompanied by Bei Mir Bist du Schoen (“To Me You’re Beautiful”), the Yiddish music hall song by Jacob Jacobs and Sholom Secunda that was adapted by Saul Chaplin and Sammy Cahn, becoming a hit for the Andrews Sisters in 1938.21 It is a song that with its theme and mixture of Yiddish and English captures the relationship between Cohn and Schatz (including the stirrings of forgiveness), the spirit of the 1930s and the mingling of Jewish and non-Jewish culture. It is also a reference back

18 Lester, “Ghost Story,” 36. 19 Rupert Smith, “Nazi Business,” Radio Times (February 24–March 4, 1994): 6. 20 Unknown, “Screen Two: Genghis Cohn,” Radio Times (February 24–March 4, 1994): 70. 21 Jack Gottleib, Funny, It Doesn’t Sound Jewish: How Yiddish Songs and Synagogue Melodies Influenced Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and Hollywood (New York: SUNY P, 2004): 57–60.

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to the source novel in which Cohn reflected on the changing world order of the 1960s: I can still catch a few glimpses of the vanishing Jew carried away by the irresistible tide of the brotherhood, here is Germany singing to Israel Bei mir bist du sheyn, and here floats the 1940 smile of the Hasidic Jew who the grinning German soldiers are dragging along by his beard towards posterity; the smile is immortal and the shame is such that we must be approaching eternity.22

Annette Insdorf has provided an excellent summary of the film’s structure and key moments, arguing that the transformation of Schatz suggests that “the Jewish spirit cannot be killed.” In that analysis she explores how the film’s opening scenes “prepare us for [Moshinsky’s] effectively sardonic treatment of serious themes” and, moreover, foreshadow the narrative that is to follow with their introduction of performance, ventriloquism, humor, violence and transformation.23 The first of these vignettes is set in Berlin 1933 as Cohn, a comedian and ventriloquist, performs a routine that uses a Hitler dummy to ridicule the Führer’s beliefs, with Sher’s portrayal of Cohn playing Hitler owing much to Chaplin’s parody in The Great Dictator (1940). From 1933 the action moves to Vienna 1936. The stage and the backdrop are unchanged, but Cohn is now on his knees and dressed as an Orthodox Jew, with an untrimmed beard and side curls: Listen, listen. You know why Hitler doesn’t like the Jews? It is because they are small, and they are dark, and they talk too loud, and, and, and they gesticulate too much. Yes, they are small… and they are dark… and they gesticulate too much!!

As he delivers this routine he pauses and gradually removes his costume to reveal another one underneath: a Nazi uniform, with the beard replaced by a Hitler moustache. The wooden ventriloquist’s doll has become a living and breathing parody, a grotesque Pinocchio, as the Nazi-strereotyped image of a Jew (the one being dragged towards posterity in Gary’s original text) gives way to the caricatured Nazi. Cohn returns in one final performance: Warsaw 1939. The humor of the Hitler parody has now been removed entirely. The camera is positioned behind Cohn, sharing his place on the stage looking out at the darkened hall. In the space of six years – only a few moments for the audience – Cohn has gone from the naive playfulness of Chaplin to the world-weary cynicism of Lenny Bruce, from 1930s 22 Romain Gary,The Dance of Genghis Cohn [1968] (London: Penguin, 1978): 199; further references in the text, abbreviated as “DGC.” 23 Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust [1983], third ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003): 283–285.

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Europe to 1960s America. Cohn, now a satirist, is dressed in black tails and bow tie. “How do you kill a Jewish comedian?,” he asks, lighting a cigarette, the smoke a visual metaphor foreshadowing the crematoria as he answers his own question: “You don’t laugh at his jokes.” Cohn continues: “[As a performer] I’ve died in some of the classiest places in Europe, but in the end… in the end I finally died in…” The camera then cuts to a new scene. After each of the first two performances, the lone Cohn had been attacked by a group of Brownshirts as he left the theatre. When the camera cuts to Cohn this time, however, he is not alone in an unlit backstreet, but is one of a group of men, women and children disembarking in daylight from a truck in an unidentified forest, the non-diegetic music of the earlier scenes replaced with the sound of a baby crying. Cohn is now dressed in a striped concentration camp uniform with a prominent yellow star on his chest. As he surveys the forest he sees a number of armed soldiers and a large pit being prepared with lime – there is no doubt for him or us as to what will happen next. Lined up alongside the pit an SS officer (Schatz) gives the order to fire. Cohn is killed, with the camera focusing first on a soldier and then Cohn as he shouts defiantly “Kich mir in tuches!,” Yiddish for “Kiss my arse.” It is a brutal introduction but rather than linger on the bodies, the camera cuts abruptly to “Bavaria 1958” and, as Insdorf remarks, “a very different spectacle” of a group of synchronized swimmers seeming to perform Nazi salutes as part of their routine, with the choreography and overhead camera angle calling to mind the celluloid fantasies of Busby Berkley, particularly those of Footlight Parade (1933). Around the pool are assembled the great and the good of the town of Licht, there to attend the grand opening of the community centre by Hans Dieter Pohl, Minister of the Interior (Paul Brooke). As Pohl begins his speech the camera shows the faces of the townsfolk before cutting to an establishing shot of Licht, in reality the old town of Berching, Bavaria.24 Pohl continues to speak as the camera takes a tour around present-day Licht/Berching: Like so many towns and villages in our state, you have through your own diligence and hard work, rebuilt our fine cultural and architectural heritage. May we all continue to enjoy it in peace and prosperity.

One of the key differences between the book and the film is the year in which they are set. Whereas the events of the book take place in 1968 and therefore deal with generational shifts, the television film moves events forward by ten years, with this ceremony taking place in June 1958. The events come, therefore, before

24 The film was shot mainly in England, with only three days on location in Germany (Jacobus, “Ghostly Comedy”).

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Eichmann and perhaps more significantly before the Auschwitz trial. There is a sense here of a country still trying to forget rather than face up to the past, hence the rebuilding and emphasis on cultural reconstruction. Certainly for Amanda Lipman the “mechanized synchronized swimming in the recreation centre… [and] the picture-book town’s ultra-cleanness” create “the impression of a sanitised dream world that has hastily patched over the cracks of the past.”25 There is indeed a pervading suspicion that this is a Bavarian Stepford, with the everyday lives of the townsfolk concealing something darker beneath the surface. That is confirmed in this opening scene if one considers the shift from the forest to 1958 to be a form of shock cut. One of the most familiar and disturbing of images from the Allies’ liberation footage is that of the disposal of bodies by the British at Belsen, including pictures of former guards being forced to watch the bodies of the dead being placed in mass graves. The cut to the swimming-pool that follows Cohn’s murder encourages the audience to recognize parallels between the two scenes, with the pit becoming the pool, the guards being replaced by the privileged members of Licht’s community, and the dead becoming the young swimmers. If this seems an unlikely connection that expects too much of the imagination, then Antoine Capet’s analysis of Leslie Cole’s painting One of the Death Pits, Belsen: SS Guards Collecting Bodies provides some support: The most horrid “detail” is of course the actual throwing of a female body into a grave by a former SS guard. To make things even more horrible, Cole has chosen to draw her in a position which suggests somebody diving into a swimming-pool. But of course the swimmer is dead and the reception material will not be water but a sea of corpses.26

The swimming pool is therefore a visual reminder that the re-generation of the town has been built on the horrors of the Holocaust, with the swimmers not waving but drowning as they too perform, eventually disappearing below the surface, haunted by an unspoken guilt which suggests that the past and the present co-exist. During the opening ceremony Schatz is introduced to Baroness von Stangl (Diana Rigg), a widow whose husband, an Obergruppenführer in the SS, was killed leading the attack on Vitebsk. In conversation they bond over their dislike of American films and love of Wagner, and agree to continue their discussion at the Baroness’s home. There she laments that “men no longer wear medals” and shows Schatz a photograph of her late husband which she keeps in a mirrored 25 Lipman, “Genghis Cohn,” 62–63. 26 Antoine Capet, “The Liberation of the Bergen-Belsen Camp as Seen by Some British Official War Artists in 1945,” in Belsen: New Historical Perspectives, eds. Suzanne Bardgett and David Cesarani (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006): 170–185, 177.

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reliquary. Attracted to each other, the Baroness wants Schatz to perform as her husband, both in the bedroom and in person, and so she asks him to change into her husband’s SS uniform, a uniform that she keeps hidden but on display in her wardrobe. Having donned this new costume, Schatz moves to consummate their relationship, but as he does so he is distracted by a reflection. In the mirror the camera, capturing Schatz’s own perspective, sees the recognizable figure of Genghis Cohn, an ashen-faced ghost dressed in a striped concentration camp uniform complete with bullet holes and tattered star. Here is a man who continues to wear medals. Schatz flees from the Baroness’s house, “still wearing the SS uniform […] and looking like the Hitler dummy in the opening scene.”27As he navigates his way across the town’s public square he tries to remain unnoticed, only starting to relax once he reaches the sanctuary of his own home, where he partially draws the curtains to leave himself in half-light. In this liminal state he turns and looks through an aquarium to see Cohn for a second time, his view partially obscured by the oxygen bubbles in the tank. It is an intentionally ambiguous scene that creates uncertainty over Cohn’s status, but also calls to mind the work of Primo Levi and actor Antony Sher’s life outside of the film. Ten years after Genghis Cohn, Sher returned to the subject of the Holocaust when playing Levi in Primo at the National Theatre (adapted for the BBC in 2007). In Primo Time, his account of the writing of the play and its staging, Sher reflected on the feelings that were stirred within him whenever he told Levi’s story: When I do it, my overwhelming sense is still of floating in space, and of the distinctive stillness which the material engenders in anyone who’s listening. It’s like what Primo describes on the railway platform when they arrive at Auschwitz [in If This is a Man]: “Everything was silent as an aquarium, or as in certain dream sequences…”28

Much later in If This is a Man (1947), Levi describes being examined in order to ascertain his suitability for work. He stands before the Doctor who is making notes: When he finished writing, he raised his eyes and looked at me. From that day I have thought about Doktor Pannwitz many times and in many ways. I have asked myself how he really functioned as a man; how he filled his time, outside of the

27 Insdorf, Indelible Shadows, 284. Given the subsequent sex murders the disruption of Schatz’s intentions means that Cohn may have saved Schatz’s life. 28 Diary entry for Wednesday September 8, 2004 cited in Antony Sher, Primo Time (London: Nick Hern Books, 2005): 131–132. Sher’s engagement with the subject also continued in God on Trial (dir. Andy De Emmony, 2008).

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Polymerization and the Indo-Germanic conscience; above all when I was once more a free man, I wanted to meet him again, not from a spirit of revenge, but merely from a personal curiosity about the human soul. Because that look was not one between two men; and if I had known how completely to explain the nature of that look, which came as if across the glass window of an aquarium between two beings who live in different worlds, I would also have explained the essence of the great insanity of the third Germany.29

Genghis Cohn permits that meeting to take place, with the positions reversed as it is the perpetrator who is now the hunted and the haunted, searching for an explanation for the look that he sees being returned from the other side of the glass. While Cohn has become visible in response to Schatz’s wearing of the SS uniform – “You just became a Nazi again with the full uniform, the iron cross and the huh and the hmm – the full shtick” – they have in fact been a part of each other ever since the “memorable day” of Cohn’s murder, a consequence of Cohn’s defiance in the face of death which meant that Schatz could not forget him: You still remember… I’m touched. I mean how many people did you kill in that camp? A thousand? A hundred-thousand? Nameless faceless people, but once you can put a name to a face, now that makes things different, eh.30

The two men start their new relationship seemingly as opposites (victim and perpetrator), become colleagues, friends and finally join together. They are initially paired in this way in order to solve the series of sex murders that commence at the same time as Cohn becomes manifest, with the implication being that the two are in some way connected. These are apparently motiveless murders, with the men of the town being killed while having sex by an unknown and unseen assailant. It is the motiveless nature of the killing that provokes Schatz and the Police to ask why for the first time, a question that leaves Cohn outraged: “If you can kill people for being Jewish, reds, homosexual, you can kill them for shtupping!” After this confrontation Schatz strides angrily back into his office. He looks directly into the camera, with the camera’s adoption of his point of view confirming for the first time that Cohn is real. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing?,” Schatz asks. “This oy, the meshuggener, eating kosher, never shtupping

29 Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, translated by Stuart Woolf [1958] (London: Abacus, 1987): 111–112. 30 In the book it is made more explicit that Cohn and Schatz have been “inseparable” since Cohn’s murder in 1944: “Schatz has sheltered me ever since: for almost twenty-four years he’s been hiding a Jew” (DGC, 10). The relationship between Cohn and Schatz seems to serve as a template for that between Odilo Unverdorben and the unnamed narrator/soul of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991).

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again…” The reverse shot confirms that he is addressing Cohn as the two continue to argue: SCHATZ: COHN: SCHATZ: COHN: SCHATZ: COHN: SCHATZ: COHN: SCHATZ: COHN:

You won’t succeed in your miserable revenge, Cohn. This… is revenge? No, this is a little joke. Where’s your sense of fun? Fun! You little Jew bastard! We should have got rid of you all. You in particular! You did. Remember! You didn’t die with dignity, not even in the face of death. Not even for your country. I didn’t have a country. Your religion, then. I didn’t believe in it. What sort of Jew are you, then? Jew enough for you to kill.

But Schatz is slowly recognising that he too is in a sense a Jew, reflecting that he has a complex personhood, a term that Avery Gordon uses to mean that “those called ‘Other’ are never never that.”31 After the eighth murder, Cohn and Schatz visit a local synagogue, one that has apparently remained open and functioning even though there are no Jews left. Inside Schatz tells the synagogue’s warden that he has come to pray “for a friend. It’s the anniversary of his death.” Schatz is given a prayer book, tallith and yarmulke, and he and Cohn then dress beside each other, their synchronized movements recalling those of the swimmers in the opening scene. Cohn begins to say Kaddish and Schatz eventually follows, but as he does so the words come from within and not from the text he holds in his hands. It is Cohn who is left silent, regarding Schatz with a smile as he recognizes that the unspoken and unseen past is now being remembered, even as their increasingly shared identity elides the victim and the perpetrator. Eventually Schatz’s behavior leads him to be sent to see a psychiatrist (Frances de la Tour) and then to a sanatorium, where he is given treatment in order to stop his hallucinations. This seems at first to have worked, suggesting that Cohn was simply a product of Schatz’s fractured mind after all. Having been discharged from the sanatorium and relieved of his duties, Schatz returns home to discover that he has been the victim of an anti-Semitic attack: his house has been vandalized, the aquarium shattered and a Star of David daubed on his wall. Before there is time for him to dwell on the meaning of all this, Schatz is arrested on suspicion of being the sex-murderer. Taken to the police interview room he sees Cohn for the last time, realizing now that he has been “set up,” the latest in a line of scapegoats. He pleads with Cohn for his help. “Schatz, Schatz, Schatz,” Cohn replies. “You

31 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 4.

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shoot me, you electrocute me and I must help you?” There is no answer. Instead the camera cuts to the home of Herr Kruger (Matthew Marsh), a face that has been seen somewhere before. As Kruger and his young family enjoy lunch, Kruger’s peace is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a familiar stranger who greets him with a salute. A flashback – this time in black and white – re-plays Cohn’s death, revealing that Kruger was one of the soldiers who shot Cohn sixteen years before.32 The process then begins again. Under Cohn’s control Kruger goes to buy chopped liver, his shop of choice being a nearby Kosher food counter run by former Police Commissioner Otto Schatz. Cohn looks for recognition from Schatz, but there is none. Schatz is no longer haunted by his memories, but he has not forgotten what has gone before. Walking home in the dark that evening, he turns down an alley, the setting recalling the assaults on Cohn in pre-war Germany and Austria (indeed one of the bill posters in the alley features the smiling face of Cohn). In an echo of those earlier scenes Schatz is set upon by gang of neo-Nazis. Badly beaten, a prone Schatz turns his head to the camera to whisper “Kich mir in tuches.” Is Genghis Cohn a magical realist world or a story that presents an imagined world that is the product of a psychotic episode? Are Cohn and Schatz “two beings who live in different worlds” or are they two halves of the same whole? Is Cohn a hallucination or a dybbuk? It is hard to decide. Certainly they tend to be seen through reflections, glass or water, creating ambiguity for the viewer and hindering resolution.33 The differences that separate the two men disappear as the film progresses and Schatz heads towards contrition and forgiveness. In fact Sher and Lindsay play both Cohn and Schatz as a mixture of Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin and Jack Benny, in the process bringing together To Be or Not to Be (1942) and The Great Dictator, two other comedy films that complicated victim and perpetrator identity. The initial sense is that Cohn is simply a figment of Schatz’s imagination. Certainly he is not visible to the Baroness and there are numerous scenes throughout where the humor rests on the fact that only Schatz can see and hear Cohn, but being unseen does not mean that he is absent or not real.34 Avery Gordon has argued that “that which appears to not be there is often

32 Kruger was also seen seated next to Schatz in the scene shot at the swimming pool, his presence confirming his guilt. There is no explanation in the film as to why Cohn should choose to appear to Kruger now. Kruger is not suddenly dressing in a Nazi uniform as far as we know. The suggestion is, however, that Cohn has developed a taste for forgiveness. 33 In the opening fifteen minutes there are, for example, the windows of the Community centre; the swimming pool; mirrors at the Baroness’s; the glass panel in Schatz’s front door; the mirror in his hallway; the living room window and blinds. 34 There are scenes with the psychiatrist, the reporter in the synagogue.

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a seething presence,” with ghosts “just the sign […] that tells you a haunting is taking place.”35 More recently Stephen Frosh, building on the work of Gordon, has written of how ghosts “are real because they are manifestations of actually existing, present-tense losses, resistances and suppressed wishes.”36 Moreover, Ghosts come from somewhere, and if one treats them seriously it becomes apparent that this somewhere is not located within the individual’s mind. It is instead to be found in the fabric of history and culture, embedded in the symbolic structures of society that maintain the liveliness of some memories whilst marginalising others. […] What haunts us psychically is, in this rendering, some injustice, something that has not been dealt with rightly.37

The idea of being haunted by the dead in that way was central to Gary’s original novel in which Cohn described Germany in 1968 as a country entirely inhabited by Jews. Of course you can’t see them, they don’t have any physical presence, but… They make themselves felt. Walk around in German cities, as well as in Warsaw and other places rich in German history, and you feel a strange, heavy, Jewish presence in the air. (DGC, 23)

It was a presence that could be felt in a very different way twenty-five years later during the filming, when Lindsay ran through the streets of Berching dressed in an SS uniform: People seemed mildly amused, nothing deeper than that. I don’t think the mere fact of seeing someone in a Nazi uniform tapped a nerve or anything like that. […] We met the mayor and people in the village and almost 90 per cent of them would come up and say: “You know I had a Jewish grandmother.” The first one I believed, but after a while, I thought: “There seems to be an awful lot of Jewish relations in these people’s pasts. They’re somehow justifying themselves a bit.”38

But that was not the only account of the effect of the location filming. Lindsay remembered that Not everyone in Berching […] saw the funny side. We were surrounded by police for a lot of time. When I had to walk through the streets in SS uniform, or Tony appeared as a Dachau victim. I could see the police “moving along” groups of troublemakers, neo-Nazi types. And there were three old ladies sitting in their garden drinking schnapps who took one look at me and started screaming.39

35 36 37 38 39

Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8. Frosh, Hauntings, 4. Frosh, Hauntings, 44–45. Jacobus, “Ghostly Comedy.” Smith, “Nazi Business,” 6.

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Later in the film Schatz returns to the Baroness’s house, where his wartime exploits are dismissed by Cohn as “shmaltz,” reminding Schatz that he was “never in Warsaw. You were too busy killing Jews.” For Schatz the incessant presence is too much. His exasperated cry of “Jews, Jews, everything is Jews” is however countered by the Baroness who reassures him that “There aren’t any Jews here. Not any more.” But as has been seen, “the ghost[s] of the past” did indeed “live[s] on in Genghis Cohn” and, as Frosh explains, his words reading as if they were written specifically with Genghis Cohn in mind: To be haunted is more than to be affected by what others tell us directly or do to us openly; it is to be influenced by a kind of inner voice that will not stop speaking and cannot be excised, that keeps cropping up to trouble us and stop us going peaceably on our way. It is to harbour a presence that we are aware of, sometimes overwhelmed by, that embodies elements of past experience and future anxiety and hope, and that will not let us be.40

That sense of discomfort in an embodied presence is played out in Genghis Cohn’s final scene, one that comes after Schatz has been left badly beaten, his whispered rejoinder of “Kich mir in tuches” confirmation of his transformation from SS officer to Jew, from perpetrator to victim. With a trumpet fanfare and sudden cut that once again recalls the transition to the swimming pool in the opening scenes, the camera moves from the staged Bavaria of 1958 to presentday Munich, firstly a tram carrying people on their daily routine, and then a busy street filled with shoppers. “What’s that you say,” comes Cohn’s by now familiar voice as he continues to haunt the audience, “Who really committed the murders? You mean mine?” And as Cohn continues the camera cuts to a busy street and the figure of Antony Sher, dressed as Cohn in his concentration camp uniform with yellow star and bullet holes, a lone figure among all the others working in the crowded precinct. The disembodied voice continues, now a ghost that haunts not only those on screen but also the watching audience: “The six million? Oh, no, the interesting ones, the sixteen sex murders. Was it really the police surgeon or was he just a scapegoat? Either way he got a life sentence. But really you’re asking the wrong question. When it comes to mass murders you don’t ask whodunit you ask why. Why? But why worry, it couldn’t happen again could it?” This final scene was filmed with a hidden camera and Insdorf suggests that the looks are “more curious than shocked.”41 According to Elijah Moshinsky, only one person paid Sher any attention during the filming: “She looks as though she’s

40 Frosh, Hauntings, 2–3. 41 Insdorf, Indelible Shadows, 285.

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going to have a heart attack. But she was the only one who reacted.”42 In his 2001 autobiography Beside Myself, Sher recalled the filming of that final “troubling” scene, memories that are indicative of his own complicated relationship to the past: Genghis has finished haunting his persecutor and this ghost now walks the streets of modern-day Germany. Our location was Munich. A couple of sustained shots were needed: Genghis, with shaved head and emaciated features, wearing the striped-pyjama uniform of the camp, slowly drifting through crowds of pedestrians. We wanted real people, not extras, and they were not to know this was a film – the camera would be hidden, to catch spontaneous reactions if they happened. Munich’s in Bavaria, home of old and new Nazis. Bodyguards and plain-clothes policemen would mingle with the crowd, staying close to me […]. It took about two minutes to walk to the appointed end position. I was walking slowly, in oversized boots, doing the “Auschwitz shuffle” I’d read about in Primo Levi […]. I kept my eyes unfocused. It suited the look. And anyway I didn’t want to see the expressions of people I was passing.43

Sher repeated the filming in several different locations, staying in the unit van between shoots. Locals would come and stare at him through the window. I kept my head down. The feeling of shame was intense and terrible. Talk about racial memory – this certainly felt like some kind of public humiliation from the not too distant past. I was shaken by huge inexplicable emotion. It made me tremble, I emitted sudden sobs. Yet it was nothing to do with me somehow.44

Afterwards he returned to his hotel to remove his make-up and costume. At that point: I felt fine again. Once more it came: the sense that the person out in the precinct hadn’t been me. Yet there had been an invasion of me somehow, a surrendering of me, a disappearance of me. Me as actor? Me as Jew? Don’t know. We were only making a film, a piece of entertainment, yet some barrier had been crossed. I can’t explain it. Maybe it was mixed with South African guilt too. Here, feel what it was like to be a kaffir – that’s you and your family walking by, fat and well-dressed, wrinkling your noses at this dirty, starving creature – here, feel it, how d’you like it?45

It was, he concluded, “A strange, special day. Playing a ghost, yet haunting myself.”46

42 43 44 45 46

Jacobus, “Ghostly Comedy.” Antony Sher, Beside Myself: An Autobiography (London: Arrow Books, 2001): 246–247. Sher, Beside Myself, 247. Sher, Beside Myself, 247. Sher, Beside Myself, 247.

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Amanda Lipman has written of the film’s final message as being that Nazis could continue to exist, even in the present. “And that,” she writes, “makes the final scene all the more shocking. […] Suddenly we are catapulted into the real world where those horrific events actually happened.” This suggests a distance between the real and the imagined worlds of Genghis Cohn but I would argue the film suggests that these are the same world, a world in which haunting is real.47 The ghosts seen in Munich in 1993 are the same as those in Licht in 1958, and they are ghosts of both victim and perpetrator - both real and imagined. The audience and the people of Munich can now see the dybbuk, triggering a transformative recognition that calls to mind for the audience, as it did for Sher, the ghosts of their own past. As Stephen Frosh writes in the conclusion to his recent book: We must recognise that we are ghosts too. There is little distinction between the haunted and the one who haunts; the former turns into the latter soon enough. Perhaps our capacity to recognise ghosts is what determines the likelihood that we too will be recognised in our struggle to be heard and seen.48

Genghis Cohn therefore breaks down the barriers between fact and fiction, appearance and reality, suggesting that the magical is as important as the real in helping us to understand the past. By crossing over into modern day Munich as Cohn, Sher brings the past into the present as well as the imaginary into the real, haunting not only those in the shot around him, but the audience at home and himself, haunted by the legacy of the Holocaust as both a Jew and a South African, a position which compromises his sense of self as it makes him indirectly both victim and perpetrator. That uncomfortable ambiguity is also shared by the audience. In the earlier scene the adoption by the camera of Cohn’s point of view suggested that the audience was haunting Schatz, trying to transform him into a Jew. In this final scene it is the audience who see Cohn, perhaps for the first time, extending the guilt to include those who are watching.

47 Lipman, “Genghis Cohn,” 62–63. 48 Frosh, Hauntings, 170.

Rachel S. Harris

Ahoti Hayafa (2011): Magical Realism and Marginalization in the World of the Mizrachi Woman Ahoti Hayafa (2011), Israel’s first magical realist film, presents the breakdown of two Moroccan-Jewish sisters’ relationship as a result of the younger sister’s marriage to an Arab. The elder sister Rahma must confront her own ghosts facing her husband’s infidelity, her jealousy towards the younger Marie and her daughter’s rejection of the family and culture from which she came. The film’s ostensible domestic drama belies its sharp political critique of race within the Israeli cultural discourse. Drawing on the tropes commonly found in films portraying the Mizrachi community, including deprivation, isolation, poverty and criminality, Ahoti Hayafa confronts the audience’s perceptions of Arab-Jewish life. Moreover, the representations of Moroccan females as witches and funeral wailers, common stereotypes for Mizrachi women in several recent films, including Sh’chur, Shiva, Turn Left at the End of the World and Sima the Witch, are exaggerated to the point of fantasy. This article investigates the ways in which magical realism, filtered through a Jewish and a Mizrachi cultural lens in Ahoti Hayafa, is used to comment upon the physical and social marginalization of Arab-Jews within Israeli society and Israeli cinema.* The Israeli film Ahoti Hayafa (My Beautiful Sister, 2011), written and directed by Marco Carmel, presents the breakdown of two sisters’ relationship as a result of the younger sister’s marriage to an Arab. Magical realism becomes the vehicle through which the marginalized position of these women of Moroccan-Jewish origins are able to overcome their differences and resolve their alienation from one another. Breaking down the boundaries of the real world through fantasy is effective precisely because it engages with a population (female and Mizrachi, i.e. Jews from Arab lands) who fall outside of the hegemonic Israeli framework. Simultaneously, the magical elements feed an orientalist narrative about Mizrachiut (Mizrachiness) which places the folk tale in a romanticized space further marginalizing the very population it seeks to bring to the center. In many ways, Ahoti Hayafa may be considered Israel’s first magical realist film. This stylistic tradition, most associated with Latin America (though it has appeared in other literatures), was late to develop in Israeli culture. It first

* With thanks to Dan Chyutin for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

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appeared in the mid-1980s in David Grossman’s novel See Under: Love (1986) but, as Robert Alter reminds us, “it is important to keep in mind that any manifestation of fantasy in Hebrew fiction has to be made against the heavy weight of a dominant tradition of intent realism that goes all the way back to Hebrew writing in nineteenth-century Russia.”1 Within Hebrew literature, magical realism has appeared in novels that engage with significant historical moments of the Jewish experience throwing into sharp relief the extremes of the situation, and humanity’s capacity to grasp the inconceivable. Grossman’s novel layers multiple experiences of the Holocaust. Each of the four sections explores a different manner of engaging with the terror and absurdity of the events of Nazi atrocity, as well as the impact of trauma on the survivors and the generations that followed them. The imaginary Bruno Schulz, who is unassailable and cannot be killed by the bullets fired at him, appears to live in a world of fantasy as wild as his own literary creations. Thus, the actual murder of the real Bruno Schulz during the Holocaust disarms the reader while heightening the sense of loss, both of this seemingly gentle, charming and brilliant man constructed in his parallel fictional form, and of the tragic death of the literary genius in the figure of the author who was killed. Similarly, Meir Shalev’s novel Roman Russi (The Blue Mountain, 1988) explores the ways in which the historical narratives of Zionism offer an ordered, rational and logical framing of the past, which may be at variance with real life in Palestine among the pioneers; as well as serving to undermine the ideological illusions of this generation. Hence, magical realism offered a way to disrupt rational constructions of Israel’s sense of self. As with Shalev’s novel, the rural idyll serves as the landscape of Ahoti Hayafa, though unlike the former, which is situated in the lush green valleys of Israel’s farming and agricultural landscapes, Ahoti Hayafa is set in an undetermined southern and somewhat barren, desert-like environment. Whereas Shalev’s novel presents the early moshavim (farming collectives), the middle eastern town evoked in Ahoti Hayafa lies outside of the Zionist national discourse, offering not an ideological landscape, but one empty of the nationalist fervor generally associated with Israel’s geography. Fredric Jameson’s argument that “magical realism now comes to be understood as a kind of narrative raw material derived essentially from peasant society, and drawn in sophisticated ways on the world of village or even tribal myth”2 certainly pertains to the Israeli form of magical realism, applying to both the green pastures of Shalev’s world and that of Ahoti Hayafa. Yet there is a vast difference between these two Israeli geographical and

1 Robert Alter, “Magic Realism in the Israeli Novel,” Prooftexts 16 (1996): 151–168, 151. 2 Fredric Jameson, “Magical Realism in Film,” Critical Inquiry 12.2 (1986): 301–325, 320.

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anthropological landscapes. While Shalev engages with a “white” narrative of Zionist settlement, in Ahoti Hayafa, as with the magical realism of South American literature in which, as Jean Franco has discussed, race is an inherent part of the origins,3 this genre’s “blackness” is the underlying narrative. The ArabJewish element, encapsulated by the desert, the town, and more broadly the film’s treatment of race may be seen as the key to reading this text. Moreover, Ahoti Hayafa’s treatment of color functions within Israeli cinema’s already well-established handling of the socio-economic positioning of Mizrachi Jews who were generally resettled after immigration around the country’s periphery in development towns which often lacked agricultural or professional opportunities. This geographical marginalization is part of the larger critique of the way Mizrachim have been treated by the Ashkenazi (white) hegemony. Like Hebrew literature, Israeli theatre offered absurdism, fantasy and social critique packaged through an anti-realist lens. Cinema, however, rarely propounded such a model and instead it was through comedy that Israeli society was most bitingly critiqued in film. Nevertheless, theatre and literature almost entirely ignored the presence of the Mizrachi figure, and it was through cinema and the comic genre that Mizrachim were first portrayed in Israeli culture. Satire served up a double-edged sword of entertainment and criticism that was not always acknowledged either by audiences or scholars. Since comedic films, particularly in Israel’s cinematic heyday of the 1960s and 1970s, were targeted at the lower classes, who often belonged to the ethnically marginalized sectors of Israeli society (Mizrachim) and had generally been housed in Israel’s periphery outside its social and political centers, cinema’s commentary on Israel’s racism was generally directed at an audience personally experiencing this discrimination. “While directed mostly at Mizrahim, the bourekas were mainly produced and directed by Ashkenazi filmmakers and often used Ashkenazi actors to play both the roles of Mizrahim and Ashkenazim.”4 Ella Shohat, in her seminal work Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (1989), has claimed that the Ashkenazi film industry recycled stereotypes about the Mizrachi community, and in so doing any critique of the establishment was diffused and hence marginalized.5

3 Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002). 4 Dorit Na’aman, “Orientalism as Alterity in Israeli Cinema,” Cinema Journal 40.4 (2001): 36–54, 37. 5 Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and The Politics of Representation, second ed. (London and New York: I. B. Taurus, 2010); particularly Chapter 3, “The Representation of Sephardim/ Mizrahim,” 105–161, and revisited in the “Postscript” to the second edition.

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Nevertheless, filmmakers such as the inordinately successful Ephraim Kishon did create powerful moments within their films in which race, color, and prejudice in Israel were challenged. His most famous film, Sallah Shabbati (1964), won him an Oscar despite receiving no funding from the ministry of commerce who deemed his comedy frivolous in contrast to the “serious” films that were funded in this period; films that dealt with “the myth of the war of independence and with personal Ashkenazi dramas (the effects of wars on soldiers and widows, the personal versus the collective in postsocialist Israel).”6 Through monologues Kishon challenged the racial status quo, though they were discreetly hidden within comedic moments. In Sallah Shabbati the Mizrachi buffoon title character, of no clearly defined national origin though suggesting something north-African, appears lazy, irresponsible, a clown, and a drunk. Yet, as with a Shakespearian fool, his comic utterances screen his wisdom. Like a naïve child, Shabbati holds up a mirror to the Israeli establishment, critiquing housing plans, the corruption behind charitable solicitations abroad, the kibbutz movement, and institutionalized racism. Through comedy, prejudice, discrimination, and conflict between different segments of Jewish Israeli society were exposed, though in the final account the reconciliation between disparate groups, often through the medium of a wedding, undermined the harshest of criticisms. The presence of the marginalized Mizrachi in these films, captured in poverty, limited education, religious traditionalism, and operating in a patriarchal (and hence highly gendered society) created two key tropes around the Mizrachi in development towns: isolation and deprivation. Shohat’s overly monolithic construction of the bourekas genre and the Askhenazi comedies of Kishon, Zielberg and Davidson ignores the presence of indigenous filmmaking within the bourekas genre inspired by Turkish and Iranian melodramas, such as those of George Ovadiah, which explored the Mizrachi experience of migration representing the changing fortunes of the Arab-Jew on his journey from exile to Israel. These films focused on the Mizrachi’s experiences and the cycles of his fortune without depending on the need to merge with an Ashkenazi world. But while comedies offered positive endings, and were considerably more popular than their melodrama counterpoints, it was not until the 1980s that the representation of Mizrachi experience took a more critical look at the long-term results of Zionism for Arab Jews. Though Nissim Dayan’s work, particularly Or Min Hahefker (Light Out of Nowhere, 1973) and his television series Michelle Ezra Safra and his Sons (1983) paved the way, it was Ram Loevy’s television drama Lehem (Bread, 1987) which evoked the poverty and lack of opportunity for the isolated develop-

6 Dorit Na’aman, “Alterity in Israeli Cinema,” 40.

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ment town, where crime and violence had become the social currency of those unable to escape. When the only factory in town, and the area’s sole employer, closes rather than pay workers a living wage, the town starves to death. The rise of the Israeli Black Panther movement which came out of Jerusalem in the 1970s and which grew out of contact with the American Black Panthers indicated the ways in which Mizrachim began to identify their experience of exclusion and racism in terms of the American Black power movements of the 1960s onwards. These comparable protest activities gave Mizrachim language and an ideological frame with which to challenge the status quo. Like earlier bourekas films these new films by Israeli directors were responding to this political wave and called attention to the long term impact of racially motivated urban planning solutions. Later films, such as Turn Left at the End of the World (2004) and The Band’s Visit (2007), repeat the trope of the stagnating Mizrachi existing in an undisclosed barren location, limited economically and socially. Turn Left at the End of the World extended the metaphor of “non-whiteness” to Indian Jews, who were treated like Arab, Turkish and Iranian Jews within Israeli society more generally. This film emphasizes the tradition of dividing Israeli society into Mizrachi/Ashkenazi, and ignoring the multiple differences between groups within that binary division. Not only did Indian and Moroccan Jews have different religious and cultural traditions, languages, patterns of dress and social dynamics, the film highlights the gap between the different colonial experiences of each group. While the Moroccans were raised within a Francophone society, demonstrated through their love of music, perfumed soap, and an ever present eroticism, a stereotype that further suggests a sexualized romanticism of Oriental Jews, the Indians by contrast speak English, drink tea and play cricket. Though there is an apparent dislocation of the Mizrachi/Ashkenazi division onto the Moroccan/Indian division of this film, suggesting in the spirit of colonialism, that the Indians are portrayed as more Westernized (the “civilized” native) nevertheless, the Indian is then also corrupted by contact with the “Arab native.” The Indian man is seduced by the Moroccan woman, while the Indian woman is forced to turn to the local Moroccan witch-healer for a magical potion to win her husband back. As this film suggests, the only solution for the individual who wishes to advance socially and rid themselves of this backwards, rural and primitive society is to flee. Nicole’s final bus voyage away from the forgotten southern town in Turn Left at the End of the World and her move to a new boarding school becomes a repeated image for films depicting the Mizrachi experience. As with Sallah Shabbati, Kazablan, Sh’chur and Lehem it is always the female who is offered an opportunity for education, and therefore escape. This suggests Ashkenazi filmmakers, while critiquing much of the treatment of Mizrachi society by the white

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establishment, continue to view women as oppressed within Mizrachi patriarchy. The boom in women’s filmmaking during the 1990s, in which films were increasingly made for women (though not necessarily by women), echoes a trend that had been happening in British cinema during the 1980s, with films such as Educating Rita, Shirley Valentine, and Truly Madly Deeply.7 Israeli cinema, like the earlier British filmmaking transformation, now tackled head-on the conflicts and vicissitudes of contemporary gender relations; they foregrounded charismatic and transgressive female protagonists; and they offered what were, within the context of mainstream cinema at least, refreshingly radical resolutions to the conflicts they portrayed.8

Most significantly, as with British cinema, Israeli filmmakers allowed “their respective female protagonists to resist the generically conventional drive towards a reinscriptive and punitive ideological and narrative closure.”9 Instead, they offered the women an opportunity for escape which Justine Ashby has described as a movement through a liminal space, a realm of possibility. Once this threshold has been crossed, once she enters this realm of possibility, the female protagonist is able to remove herself from her initial narrative (and cultural) situation, distance herself from the demands and entrapment of everyday life, and undergo a redefining and re-empowering transformation of identity or rite of passage.10

While leaving, and particularly education, offered the Mizrachi woman an alternative and hopeful future, not all endings to these films offered a positive fate; in The Band’s Visit the departure of the Egyptian Police Band who had accidentally appeared and stayed for the night, demonstrates the final impossibility of liberation for the Mizrachim who remain and are imprisoned within a powerful socioeconomic trap. By the 1990s a trend had developed in which the Mizrachi family and particularly its women, located in an impoverished and peripheral landscape, served to depict the oriental experience. “[A]ll of them take place in a vague unidentifiable and nameless geographic space that serves as a background for the deconstruction of the Israeli subject as well as the investigation of the origins of

7 For a discussion of Shirley Valentine, Educating Rita, Wish You were Here, Letter to Brezhnev and Pink Pyjamas, see Justine Ashby, “‘It’s been emotional’: Reassessing the Contemporary British Woman’s Film,” in British Women’s Cinema, ed. Melanie Bell and Melanie Williams (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010): 153–169. 8 Ashby, “Reassessing the Contemporary British Woman’s Film,” 153. 9 Ashby, “Reassessing the Contemporary British Woman’s Film,” 153. 10 Ashby, “Reassessing the Contemporary British Woman’s Film,” 155.

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his existential malaise.”11 Focusing on Mizrachi primitivism, particularly represented through witchcraft, a new element of fantasy developed within the realist film tradition depicting Mizrachi women as witches. In performing black magic (schur) they were enacting power within a community in which they were powerless as women and as Mizrachim. In Sima Vaknin Machshefa (Sima the Witch, 2003), the widowed Sima is searching for love but is a stern and angry woman whose children are leaving the unidentifiable development town to start a new life in Tel Aviv. This symbolic move from the periphery to the geographical center represents the same escape as that evident in Turn Left at the End of the World. Determined to keep her grandchild close, and fighting her son’s relocation, which suggests a breakdown in the traditional family values of the Mizrachi community, Sima asks her son to build an extension to her apartment. To the chagrin of the upstairs and symbolically Ashkenazi neighbor, the son uproots the building’s only tree and begins to lay foundations for the new room. When the neighbor takes every measure to stop them, and Sima risks losing her family, her anger boils over and she curses him, his wife, and his father, the local mayor. When events start to take place that suggest her curses have been fulfilled, she is designated “a witch.” Her son commercializes this arrangement and his increasingly gratuitous behavior, including yelling, rudeness, laziness and stupidity, evokes the Shabbati character of an earlier generation. But without the wisdom and sympathy that Haim Topol had created with his ethnically marginalized character, the parody becomes simply a racist farce. Sima, moreover, accomplishes a series of rebellions against the vulgarities of her society, though it is unclear whether she does this through stupidity, or with a clear awareness of her community’s racist attitudes. Shohat evokes the Bakhtinian model of the grotesque to explain the bourekas films’ subversive power, yet seems to flinch in the end, fearing that celebrating the bourekas as purely subversive would lead to the celebration of Mizrahi stereotypes. But what if we take this model to its expected end, and do not conceive the characters’ stupidity as fundamentally espousing conservative ideals? Sima and her son Avi represent the two poles of Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque body. Sima is mostly interested in participating in the entire enterprise as a way to facilitate her quest for love, which she has failed to find by other means. Though her reasons are innocent, the situation ultimately results in corruption and humiliation. Avi’s vulgarity suggests the degradation of humanity, further evinced in the political vitriol and racist remarks made by the figures who visit Sima, such as

11 Yael Munk, “The Postcolonial Function of Television’s Virtual Space in ’90s Israeli Cinema,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49.1 (2008): 83–92, 85.

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the Russian call to evacuate all Israeli and Palestinian Arabs to Jordan as a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. When Sima’s grandson Bibi finally begins to chant all of the political rhetoric of racism, intolerance and corruption mentioned by each of the customers who have visited the witch, while the audience of local inhabitants chants “Bibi,” the film becomes a satire of the current Israeli political climate and its slogans. Its mockery of Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, serves as a critique of the ways in which he has courted rightwing voters; also serving as a condemnation of these segments of the Israeli population. Sima’s decision to walk away and escape to a Mediterranean island with the town’s mayor, pretends to a romantic ending of the film – though it also suggests the sea as an escape from the oppression of the Middle East, and particularly its sandy Arab environs and its bigotry. Like other Mizrachi witches, the women are neither good nor evil in the traditional Hollywood fairytale mode, but practitioners of a traditional folk wisdom in which their temperaments as women have the greatest impact on the kind of magic they perform. Like the bourekas comedies of an earlier generation, the misadventures, disasters and family dynamics continue to satirize the Mizrachi world. Sh’chur (Black Magic, 1994) is a darker film exploring violence, rape and abuse within a Moroccan family. While Sima’s magic is predominantly of the cursing kind, in Sh’chur magic can be evoked through amulets, incantations, spells and potions. With power over love and death (the thanatos/eros bind) the mother and her mentally disabled daughter Pnina control the secrets to the unknown. In addition, Pnina has telekinetic power, which later her sister Cheli’s own disabled daughter also seems to share. In the modern world this familiarity with the supernatural is preserved by those who do not have other forms of traditional mainstream knowledge. Anthropological research on witchcraft and “healers” in Israel reveals an ongoing belief in the power of the supernatural among low socio-economic and ethnically Arab populations, both Jews and Palestinians. The magic is composed of a triumvirate of powers, the evil eye (ayin hara), witchcraft (schur) and demon possession (jinn). Though it is rare that all three methods appear together in Israeli films, the representation of any one form functions as a metonym of Arab-Jewish attitudes to magic, and a way of indicating social backwardness. While in reality male healers are a feature of this discourse in Israel, within cinema set in a Mizrachi context only females are represented engaging in mystical practices. Ahoti Hayafa recycles many of the tropes commonly found in Israeli films representing magic and witchcraft: the Mizrachi woman with a low socio-economic status, usually part of a large and ever-present family appears to have control over the supernatural world. Following the conventions, whereby a moment of emotional trial precipitates the engagement with the spirit world, Rahma’s fight

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with her husband (and her sister) at her grandson’s brit (circumcision) becomes the trigger for her supernatural episode. She talks to the wall. Though the audience hears a voice calling her, and sees her engagement in a conversation, it is only after a few moments that we realize her conversational partner is the wall, and that she hears the wall talking back to her demanding baked goods, which she quickly sets out before it. This act is an externalization of processing, memory and experience, evoking the British film Shirley Valentine’s household wall, and through this encounter the audience sees a lonely woman, rejected in her marital relations, who feels deeply unloved. The wall serves as an emotional and spiritual sounding board, providing the psychological support, through folk means, that marks out Rahma’s traditional way of life. However, by contrast with Shirley Valentine, for whom the wall serves as a vehicle by which to depict a psychological portrait of the protagonist, the wall’s response to Rahma elevates Ahoti Hayafa to the magical realist form. Furthermore, the wall in Shirley Valentine is also a pun on the notion of the theatre’s invisible “fourth wall” since she repeatedly breaks this imaginary boundary which is a mark of cinema’s intended realism, both by addressing the wall, and in an act of meta-cinema addressing the audience directly. The breakdown of realism in Ahoti Hayafa, through its heightened connection with magic, nevertheless maintains the illusion of a closed environment in which such activities (the wall responding) are logical given the rules of this world. Thus Ahoti Hayafa remains magical realist, though not hyper-conscious meta-fiction. Moreover, Rahma’s daughter’s response to her mother’s relationship with the wall is to advise her mother to see a therapist, as she has done, representing both the normalization of Rahma’s conversation with the wall by mocking modern therapy practices, but also denoting that the change between generations has led to the end of an authentic Mizrachi culture in which the magical exists. The wall’s response to Rahma answers Alter’s contention that: “A recurrent principle of much magic realism is that the physical universe of the fiction is in part governed by psychological rather than physical laws.”12 As with Shirley Valentine, before the film’s close the husband will also talk to the wall, and in a local variant will offer it an uncooked chicken soaked in Arak. In a Jewish context, Rahma’s pleas that the wall protect her husband and keep him safe, also speak to the symbolic relationship between the Jewish people and the Kotel (Wailing Wall) in Jerusalem. This last remaining wall of the ancient temple serves as a site of pilgrimage and religious prayers in Israel, and it is customary for supplicants to write wishes on pieces of paper and put them in the cracks between the stones. Ahoti Hayafa therefore translates other cinematic

12 Alter, “Magic Realism,” 161.

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experiences (magical realism, ghosts, women’s drama) through a Jewish cultural lens. In the morning, when Robert returns from his nightshift, the cakes are gone and instead he picks up an amulet left on the plate, which we presume the wall has left him for protection. As with most of the witchcraft in these kinds of films, it is often enacted over matters of romance and health, and can frequently be connected to cursing, the evil eye and other superstitions; nevertheless, it is rarely used to garner wealth for the family. When used for matters other than sex and health, it is often used for the betterment of the family or extended social group. In Ahoti Hayafa Robert is protected by his wife’s magical relationship with the wall. When he offers up the amulet for a night of passion in a brothel, his protection is removed and he is struck by a skin rash that signifies the wall’s punishment. In his doctoral thesis, Yaron Shemer argued that when competing claims of identity (sex, race, social class) interact in Israeli film Mizrachi women can be seen to share the experience of Ashkenazi women, choosing gender over race in their hierarchical identity construction. “[T]ime and again women are pitted against men – spouses, partners, or fathers – and often, these films’ central conflicts revolve around the war between the sexes.”13 Shemer’s claim fails to acknowledge the ways in which these films establish an “Ashkenazi” woman to contrast their own “Mizrachi” position. As with Turn Left at the End of the World the move to an Ashkenazi boarding school in Sh’chur provides the possibility of social mobility and a determination to reject traditionalism (and hence racial origins). The eldest daughter attends an Orthodox Yeshiva and, returning home, rejects the religious customs and traditions of her family, instead choosing to dress, pray, and eat according to the laws of Ashkenazi Judaism. The youngest daughter Rachel passes the entrance exams for a prestigious Ashkenazi boarding school specifically designed for underprivileged Mizrachi Jews where she adopts the “more Israeli-sounding – less Oriental and diasporic – nickname Cheli, and eventually becomes a successful television personality.”14 The film, which Yosefa Loshitzky has described as “a form of ethnic document through its unusual juxtaposition of fantastic realism with a simulacrum of anthropological-like observation of ethnic rituals and daily activities,”15 presents the ways in which Cheli has become the model of “whiteness” until she is forced back into a world that she has entirely rejected by the death of her father and his upcoming funeral.

13 Yaron Shemer, “Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel,” unpublished doctoral dissertation (Austin: Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin, 2005): 310. 14 Yosefa Loshitzky, Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (Austin: U of Texas P, 2012): 73. 15 Loshitzky, Identity Politics, 73.

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Carol Bardenstein has shown that passing in an Israeli context happens along a scale of identity from Palestinian Arab, Israeli Arab, Mizrachi, to Ashkenazi. Among the reasons for engaging in passing is that such acts may “substantially or even radically challenge or subvert hegemonic configurations of social identity – or blur fixed categories and hierarchies.”16 The acts of impersonation, mimicry and passing in Israeli and Palestinian cinema created a layered and multi-dimensional notion of the act of integration, demonstrating not only slippery, indeterminate and malleable social boundaries, but also internal fluidity of identity that “can be pointedly effective in exposing essentialized or reified social identities as constructed performative fantasies.”17 Therefore, cinema is particularly adept at highlighting the ways in which “passing” identity is constructed and performed, while simultaneously stressing that success at passing threatens the stability of these defined boundaries.18 Sometimes, both the essentialized, socially sanctioned identity and the new one created in the response to it are fluid performative fantasies that fluctuate with the ebb and flow of political and social changes. This image of passing is pronounced in Ahoti Hayafa where the modern daughter who rejects her mother’s traditional world and way of life is called Levana (white). Rahma’s daughter offers a contrast to the traditional way of life. She drives a 4x4, the only car seen driven in the film, she talks of psychologists and important work projects, thereby dismissing the economics of her family. She lives in Tel Aviv, wears sunglasses and sports a tattoo on her leg, suggesting symbols of the modern world; and she wears tailored fashionable contemporary clothes. By contrast, the wardrobe of the other characters has a pronouncedly vintage feel, constructing an aesthetic landscape outside of particular time. Like Ben Lulu’s bicycle, the characters’ names (Robert, Marie, Rahma), Marie’s desire to do “the 60s dance,” Robert’s suits, and the women’s dresses, all suggest an Arab-Jewish world that has been forgotten by time. This immutability adds to the overall impression of a world disconnected from the modernity that Levana offers. Moreover, her way of life is mocked and dismissed by the two sisters who laugh at her seriousness when she visits the grave in a formal act of commemoration that is radically different from that of both her parents. Its sterile formula (lighting a candle) is contrasted with the passion (both love and anger) that Robert and Rahma express toward Marie. Levana’s pattern of mourning may also be reminiscent of Holocaust memorialization, and by evoking the Ashkenazi, and therefore

16 Carol Bardenstein, “Cross/Cast: Passing in Israeli and Palestinian Cinema,” in Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture, eds. Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005): 99–125, 100. 17 Bardenstein, “Cross/Cast,” 102. 18 Bardenstein, “Cross/Cast,” 101.

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“correct,” form of commemoration, serves to distinguish Mizrachi from Ashkenazi, and engage with the formal expectations for a “proper” Israeli citizen. Even the film’s title “Ahoti” (sister) evokes connotations between the Mizrachi community, and its family dynamic. Like the Hebrew “Ahi” (my brother) drawn from military slang and influenced by Arabic (and American slang: bro), the film’s title evokes the informality and tribalism that stands in contrast to the Zionist ideals of modernization and Westernization. “Ahoti” is also the name of a woman’s charity in Israel, devoted to raising feminist awareness of women from non-European backgrounds living in the peripheries and disadvantaged neighborhoods, who are deprived of their labor rights, and whose voices go unheard. Ahoti is dedicated to closing the economic, social and cultural gaps, managing projects, workshops and conferences, empowering them personally, informing them of their rights, and developing alternative economic solutions.19

Despite the proactive and politically resonant title of the film, its modifying adjective Yafa (beautiful) reconnects the film to the legacy of the sexualized oriental Jewess. The filmmakers’ consciousness of the language and position of Mizrachi women, their customary depiction in Israeli cinema, and the overt (or covert) tone of racism generally used to address them, highlights their subjugation within Israeli society for being Mizrachi, and within the patriarchal Mizrachi community for being female. Like Ahoti Hayafa, and Sh’chur, Shiva similarly brings together the Mizrachi family through the death of a family member. Though Shiva (2008) steers away from the magic seen in other films conveying witchcraft, the family dynamics, and the constant threats of curses and evil eyes, evokes a similar atmosphere. “Shiva” is the seven days of religiously prescribed mourning for immediate relatives or for a spouse following the funeral. Though this religious practice is common to all Jews, these three films share the mourning ritual of prostration and loud wailing characteristic of Arab-Jewish societies. A custom common to Moroccan Jews of the Atlas Mountains, it was not widespread among other Moroccan Jews, and despite a decline in this practice within Israeli society generally, it continues to serve as a symbol of Mizrachi mourning within literature and cinema. Parodied in Turn Left at the End of the World when Nicole’s mother, dying of cancer, summons the wailers so that she can inspect their performance and supervise the comments that will be made upon her death, this ritual has become a symbol of Moroccan-Jewish primitivism. Part of the extended liturgy of Jewish death ritual, it is the area of women and is conducted in the local language

19 http://self-help.sheatufim.org.il/detail-orgeng.php?id=127&idtop=25 (accessed April 8, 2013).

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and dialect of the ethnic group (e.g. Judeo-Arabic), in contrast to men’s formal eulogies whose reading of religious texts (study) and formal prayers take place in Hebrew. Yet the wild prostration, digging in the sand and staged hysteria, for an audience not moved by this ritual, highlights the exoticism of the women engaged in its practice.20 Ahoti Hayafa opens with a funeral, setting the surreal tone of the entire film. A man addressed as Bouskila stands at a bus stop when Ben Lulu pulls up riding a tricycle and pulling a makeshift tilbury carriage. Bouskila gets in and asks if he is dead. Ben Lulu replies in the affirmative and advises him that they are off to his funeral. As they watch the procession of mourners, the dead man is honored by the good showing, commenting on his wife’s melodramatic weeping and the appearance of an old friend with whom he has not been on speaking terms. In death they have resolved their previous dispute, which will later serve as a foreshadowing for Rahma’s relationship with her sister Marie. Thus the opening scene, through the woman’s wailing, the sandy landscape, and the domestic familiarity, establishes the poverty and north-African-Jewish ethnicity of the Israeli town. By capturing the impression of a rural community, steeped in tradition, the film constructs the expectations of superstition, folk ways and ignorance. But by virtue of Bouskila and Ben Lulu’s conversation the film also creates an imaginative world in which reality and fantasy live together. The relationship to the dead who are absent, though recalled through memory and conversation, which is the process of the shiva in Sh’chur and Shiva, does not happen in this film. Instead the dead are awake and present. Like the British Truly Madly Deeply (1990), or the American Ghost (1990), the specter is connected to the living participant through love. This cinematic trend which was popular in the 1930s and 1940s (in British and American cinema), in which a ghostly apparition would help the living often as his final mission on earth before being able to move on (such as Here Comes Mr. Jordan [1941] and Stairway to Heaven [1946]) had not been previously used in Israeli cinema, and is a unique feature of Ahoti Hayafa.21

20 Tova Gamliel has argued that a social contract exists between wailers in the Yemenite-Jewish community who have learnt their skill as a craft often handed off between generations, and the audience who is obliged to be moved by the words and music of the professional mourners’ performance. This however, assumes that the audience has the cultural knowledge to understand and appreciate this ritual. For an Ashkenazi viewing public among whom quite crying or restraint is the expected response in grief these mourning rituals may seem alien, barbaric and staged (Tova Gamliel, “Performed Weeping: Drama and Emotional Management in Women’s Wailing,” The Drama Review 54.2 [2010]: 70–90). 21 With the possible exception of Enrique Rottenberg’s The Revenge of Itzik Finkelstein (1993), which does portray a ghost with a mission of vengeance, though not exactly in the format of Hollywood films, more reminiscent of Dybbuk possessions, a staple of Yiddish theatre.

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Helped by Ben Lulu’s carriage, which serves as a motif of this link between life and death, the audience, who sees his rejection of a passenger as an indication that the person will live, understands that Robert is saved from the wall’s wrath at the end of the film when Ben Lulu will not give him a ride. Similarly, the exhausted and dying Marie, rests at the bus stop and Ben Lulu’s arrival offers her a gentle journey to the end. However, unlike Bouskila in the opening scene, the dead Marie does not rest in peace since her sister will not allow her to be buried in a Jewish ceremony or, more particularly, next to her mother. In lingering within the living world, Marie’s role is to help the bereaved move through the stages of grief, to understand the mistakes of both Robert and Rahma’s pasts and to find peace in the present in order to move into a future in which the ghost will be laid to rest, and the connection between the living and the dead will be severed. It is only following Marie’s death that the two sisters finally begin to speak again after twenty years, during which time Rahma rejected her younger sister, following Marie’s marriage to Ali, because he was an Arab man. Though she accuses her sister of shaming her parents, through the course of the film it becomes increasingly clear that Rahma’s racism and prejudice were a pretext to rid her of the sister who she felt threatened her own marriage – but this jealousy and suspicion ultimately result in her creating barriers with her own husband, and it is she who is the obstacle to her own joy. Only by liberating herself from these feelings is she able to find happiness. At the same time Robert must also resolve his feelings towards Marie. He develops a skin ailment following Marie’s death, though he is told by a doctor that his red blotches are psychosomatic, or as his son Kobi explains to his father: “It’s like when someone can’t get it up, and it is not because of what’s in his pants but because of what is in his head.” This explanation which effects a psychological account for Robert’s affliction, circumvents the apparent cause which is the sexual relationship with an apparition of Marie – who may or may not be a figment of his imagination, and may or may not be a ghost, during which time he surrendered his amulet. The spots become a physical manifestation of Robert’s psychological trauma – but also serve as a mark, a symbolic scarlet letter, of his sexual betrayal. Chasing his vision of Marie night after night, he becomes increasingly cruel towards Rahma until she finally walks out on him – drunk, pacing the streets looking for her, he yet again sees Marie, but he finally rejects her, choosing to run after Rahma instead. This moment of crisis transforms their marital relationship. In the morning, finding his wife prostrated over her sister’s grave, he sends her home and proceeds to dig up Marie’s body for reburial, with the help of her husband Ali. The previous days of visits to the grave sitting in mourning, during which Marie tears Rahma’s dress, and Rahma rolls in the mud and wails over her sister’s

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temporary grave, evoke the same rituals enacted in other films depicting Mizrachi women. But now the sisters have reconciled and Rahma finally consents to have her sister buried alongside her mother within the boundaries of the cemetery; Robert has understood that he must choose his wife, and finally all the characters’ dramas are resolved. It is at this stage that the fantastical mourning at the graveside, transforms into the ordered rituals of the realist world. Finally, the shiva practices take on their formal, Jewish religious frame in the last scene of the film. Robert and Rahma are reconciled, Rahma’s severe personality, represented in her makeup and dress in the opening scenes, is now relaxed, and the estranged brother-in-law Ali is invited into the house to sit with the family and mourn for his wife. The appearance of Ahoti Hayafa occurs within a cinematic tradition of representing the semi-rural and domestic life of Mizrachi Jews, within which family quarrels are resolved following the death of a loved one. Moreover we expect to see a community which is superstitious, engaged in at least one form of witchcraft and is itself racist. Though Ahoti Hayafa has all these elements, by using the medium of magical realism, it is able to disrupt audience expectations of the grotesque evidenced in Sh’chur, Turn Left at the End of the World and Sima the Witch and move beyond the conventions of Israeli cinema. In recasting the landscape from the barren desert of Turn Left at the End of the World, The Band’s Visit and Sima the Witch the notion of a backwards, isolated and peripheral town is abolished. As with Sima’s final embracing of the Mediterranean, the portrayal of the sea in Ahoti Hayafa, which is connected to Ali and his life as a fisherman and offers a view from the cemetery, is an unusual addition to the landscape of the Mizrachi town. The beauty of the scenery transforms the geographical experience, and it also evokes the north-African communities which were located in porttowns from which Robert and the sisters originally came, engaging with a Mizrachi tradition beyond their current discrimination in Israel. In addition, this link to life in an Arab world, further supported by the presence of an Arab with his own home and profession, disrupts the present boundaries between Arab and Jew, recalling a time of collaboration. As an open landscape with a horizon reaching beyond the town’s limits, the possibilities remain positive and infinite, in contrast to the habit of representing trapped Mizrachi communities. Arabic is painted on the wall of Ali’s home by the sea, and the characters move frequently between Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, French and Hebrew as they do in Sh’chur, Shiva and other films depicting Moroccan Jews. However, these languages are generally not subtitled for Hebrew audiences, only the English subtitles offer a translation of all the conversations taking place, and for the untrained ear, these linguistic nuances are then made invisible. For the Hebrew audience, who recognizes the changes, but may not speak/understand the other languages, the use of

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Arabic and particularly Judeo-Arabic exoticizes the characters, making their world inaccessible. This both heightens the magical elements of the film and speaks of the impossibility of Ashkenazi Jews penetrating the life of the Mizrachi Jew they have long sought to control and assimilate into Israeli (meaning Ashkenazi) culture. As with the Latin American tradition of magical realism, this film ultimately seeks to comment on the silenced voice of the colonized. Whereas the previous tradition of representing Mizrachi women (and the family more broadly) has focused on traditional Arab-Jewish practices as archaic, presenting a people in need of civilizing and modernizing, Ahoti Hayafa departs from this stance. It offers a Moroccan Jewish perspective that resonates not with the Ashkenazi fantasy of comedy and satire, but with the melodrama of the bourekas’ early years which attempted to present the Arab-Jews’ own experience of migration. However, in contrast to that genre, which played well for a Mizrachi audience but was critically rejected among an Ashkenazi cultural elite who found its violence, crassness, and vulgarity alienating, this experiment in magical realism offers a warm but gentle world. Though it recycles many of the traditional tropes common among films about Mizrachim (poverty, witchcraft, lack of education), it deviates from these conventions through its charming exploration of a town filled with kindness and affection. Though the people love and hate to extremes, their behavior inverts traditional stereotypes of the community in myriad ways. Kobi’s pornography business functions as a symbol of this non-traditional mode of representation. When he offers a wheelchair-bound man sexually explicit DVDs the audience is surprised to learn that this is an enhancement for his active sexual relationship with his wife. Rather than presenting pornography as deviance, conveying the criminality of a Mizrachi youth, Kobi is a warm and thoughtful boy. The Ashkenazi’s perception of the immorality of the Mizrachi with his dissolute behavior is internalized by Robert, who assumes his son has come to tell him that he has gotten a girl pregnant, rather than that he is in love. The audience expectation that she will then reject him when she discovers his sideline, is defied by Carmel’s sensitive rendering of Kobi’s ideals. Instead, he takes her to hear the town at night and to listen to the sexual joy that can be heard from the windows and in response they drive through the town on his moped throwing the sexual paraphernalia into the street for the residents to enjoy. Finally, watching the sun set in the sea, they kiss. Like Almodovar, Carmel challenges our notions of sexual love and engages with a landscape and a people who appear hyper-real in their passion. Throughout this film Carmel uses the real and the fantastical as a way to confront the hierarchies of culture within the Israeli cinematic tradition. In this film, Ashkenazi experience, often depicted within films that depict Mizrachim negatively, stands as the social pinnacle offering an escape from the magical

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world – a place of barbarism – to a place of civilization. However, this dominant and “civilizing” force is also shown to eradicate the traditional culture of northAfrican Jews replacing it with empty values and a breakdown in community networks. In a “white” culture of modernization, it remains the political fantasy of the “black” Moroccan to reclaim his own narrative within that of Israeli society and to tell the story that has not yet been told.

General Section

Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz

On the Edge of No Place. Liminal Spaces and Fictional Representation in the Age of Postmodernism The sea has always been seen as a mysterious space and a space of Otherness. Both as a natural phenomenon and as a source of metaphorical representations of human life, including death, it has contributed to the performance of the postmodern condition throughout contemporary fiction. Its thematization of blurred boundaries and indeterminacy of meaning shows a special affinity to the sea as symbolic signifier, where novels by four contemporary British and Irish writers – John Fowles, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift and John Banville – exemplify how especially the topics of love and death are encrypted in narratives representing the sea and the shore. The article shows how these are made into a liminal space which challenges the quest for a telos without offering answers. To gain control over the chaos and unpredictability of the ocean with its potential of an incalculable threat to civilization and humanity has recently become an objective of renewed scientific research and technological efforts after the devastating tsunamis of 26 December 2004 and 11 March 2011. In the present narratives the maritime discourse is extended into the presentation of inscrutable loss of control, when the sea and the coast epitomize borderlines and formlessness, cause insecurity of the individual as well as longing. Linked to life and death in equal measure it reveals itself as a highly signifying space whose enigmatic nature has an ambiguous appeal for man. The conceptualization of seascape can be approached from two sides. One is the anthropological, dialectic and at many points Marxist philosophy that underpins the theories of space of Henri Lefèbvre and Michel Foucault, which explore the relations man has established towards space in the course of (pre-)history and its different stages of cultural development. Both argue that space, even sea-space, is “socially produced.”1 Beside the purposes of exploitation for nourishment, geographical exploration and discovery, imperialism and trade the sea, Lefèbvre states, also became a site of leisure and tourism. This “consumption of space”

1 Edward W. Soja, “Vom Zeitgeist zum Raumgeist. New Twists on the Spatial Turn,” in Spatial Turn. Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften, ed. Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielmann (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008): 241–262, 252.

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historically followed after the stages “space of consumption” and “the space of production” had been passed through. This moment is the moment of departure – the moment of people’s holidays, formerly a contingent but now a necessary moment. When this moment arrives, ‘people’ demand a qualitative space. The qualities they seek have names: sun, snow, sea. Whether these are simulated or natural matters little. Neither spectacle nor mere signs are acceptable. What is wanted is materiality and naturalness as such, rediscovered in their (apparent or real) immediacy.2

“Materiality and naturalness” or the elements in their “immediacy” reveal themselves as something “people” desire without rational explicability, even though mystery, if we follow the above quote, is not taken notice of. In what is imaginary, however, in fiction, the sea has forever proved its mythological identification with the ancient god of the sea, Proteus. If we approach its conceptualization from the side of creativity and art it is “one of the most ‘universal’ symbols in literature” and “most protean,” i.e., changeable, in its symbolic complexity.3 Although the representation of the sea as a holiday destination also occurs in fiction, Lefèbvre’s concept of space as produced or formed by the “energies of social interaction”4 is not its most important concern. In much contemporary literature, the “naturalness” of the sea and the shore seems to resist the dominant impact of society, often in contrast to eighteenth- or nineteenthcentury fiction. The narrative representation of the sea is described by sociology as “shaping itself newly for every writer and every generation.”5 ‘Nature’ as a historically and culturally changing construction is a concept that may include ‘nature’ as the a-historical, untamable other. After the most outstanding works of modernism associated their stream-of-consciousness with a voyage at sea, seaspace now mainly manifests itself as spatial strangeness or otherness. The sea turns out, in recent fiction, not as something ruled, man-shaped, explored or ready for consumption, but as escaping acculturation and affirming uncontrollable independence. It becomes the abysmal space of nothingness: “How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life.”6

2 Henri Lefèbvre, The Production of Space [1974] (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003): 352–353, emphasis in the orginal. 3 Jonathan Raban, “Introduction,” in The Oxford Book of the Sea, ed. id. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993): 1–34, 3. 4 Paul Smethurst, The Postmodern Chronotope: Reading Space and Time in Contemporary Fiction (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000): 51. 5 Lefèbvre, Production of Space, 353. 6 Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea (London: Chatto and Windus, 1978): 15.

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Undefined space like the sea and the sky with a hardly visible horizon not really separating or dividing them – this image of borderless, shapeless vastness has a mythical dimension in itself and can exert threat or morbid attraction on account of its destabilizing boundlessness. It might symbolize calm or turbulence, cause vertigo or bliss. As I am about to show, several contemporary fiction writers have demonstrated that in the age of postmodernism it presents itself as an obvious signifier where Eros and Thanatos, love and death, are the subjects of narrative prose. This article offers an interpretation of the semantization of the sea and the shore as the “setting” in four novels published within a time-span of almost forty years. Though metamorphoses take place, all narratives are concerned with the seaside as borderline, and none of them deals with crossing the sea, shipwrecking or pleasure-cruising. Its diverse semantic functions in the representation of the general themes of love and/or death seem to converge on a very ancient aspect of the ocean: “its chaotic lack of structure (a reminder of unfinished creation) and its imposition of natural and moral limits on the human world”7 to which one must add that facing the ocean can also lead to a suspension of the “limits o[f] the human world.”

The Sea as the Unknown Starting with a reading of two novels that deal with the themes of love and erotic desire, the texts chosen for this purpose also epitomize the literary developments of an epoch. John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) is a landmark in the history of twentieth-century British narrative literature, since it first shows the essential characteristics of postmodernism and its intricacies. It is moreover, without doubt, one of the earliest and subtlest historical metafictions regarding Victorianism, which Victorian novelists had failed to write, as its author observed.8 To write it became a high priority at a moment of cultural and sexual liberalization in Britain and of American and French turns to postmodernism in fiction. Ian McEwan’s novella On Chesil Beach (2007) also narrates a moment of cultural history that now seems fairly distant: the early nineteen-sixties. McEwan does it in a way that several critics called “pure comedy”9 or pure irony in a

7 Bernhard Klein, “Introduction: Britain and the Sea,” in Fictions of the Sea. Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture, ed. id. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002): 1–12, 3. 8 Quoted in Geoff Dyer, review of Atonement in Guardian (London), 22 September 2001, (accessed 29 March 2010). 9 Colm Tóibín, “Dissecting the Body,” London Review of Books 29.8 (2007): 28–29, 29.

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retrospective picture of the state of the nation in spite of its universally praised masterly prose. In fact, a tinge of irony also accompanies the representation of the seaside as a setting for these two love-stories which contain tragic moments if viewed from the perspective of the protagonists. Surprisingly, both narratives are set – in part or completely, respectively – in the same coastal region of Dorset in Southern England: When he [Charles] turned he saw the blue sea, now washing far below; and the whole extent of Lyme Bay reaching round, diminishing cliffs that dropped into the endless yellow sabre of the Chesil Bank, whose remote tip touched that strange English Gibraltar, Portland Bill […].10

While in this passage from Fowles’s novel the Channel coast is viewed from above and a distance On Chesil Beach places the hotel room “that gave onto a balcony and a view of a portion of the English Channel, and Chesil Beach with its infinite shingle” close to the shore.11 There the protagonists of this short novel want to pass their wedding night, and the strand becomes the site of their last encounter.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman Though linked by the same geographically verifiable location, the representation of the sea reveals diverse aspects in these two novels. In Fowles’s narrative it is the opening and the first appearance of Sarah where the sea is most significant,12 because it is so closely connected to her person that the woman belongs to the sea and is separated from the rest of mankind: “It [the figure of Sarah] stood right at the seawardmost end” of the Cobb (FLW, 9), the narrator tells the reader, following the direction of Charles’s gaze. “Poor Tragedy” is her nickname, as Ernestina further informs her friend. As we learn much later, Sarah’s whole life story is fictive and her banishment from polite Victorian society therefore self-inflicted. It

10 John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman [1969] (London: Pan, 1987): 62– 63. Further references in the text abbreviated as FLW. As part of the Jurassic Coast, the beach and the Fleet have been declared UNESCO World Heritage Site; they are famous for the morphology and of greatest interest to paleontologists. 11 Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007): 4. Further references in the text abbreviated as OCB. 12 For the importance of other settings cf. Simon Loveday, The Romances of John Fowles (London: Macmillan, 1985): 51-52.

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serves as a peculiar measure for her identity-construction; her tragic face and sorrowful expression (FLW, 13) are also enigmatic. Only a second reading of the novel after the revelations of its last parts offers a clue to the comprehension of this scene: the view of Sarah’s face and the sea at first presents to Charles, the internal focalizer of the narrative, a contradiction: “There was no artifice there [in her face], no hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask; and above all, no sign of madness. The madness was in the empty sea, the empty horizon” (FLW, 13). Thus, paradoxically, Sarah, whose life story is based on a lie – in fact she is a virgin (FLW, 307) – becomes the only truthful character in a world of appearances and circumscribed indignation. The sight of her face leaves Charles not only “pierced,” but “deservedly diminished” (FLW, 13). Madness is in the sea, hypocrisy and masks rule in his social environment, while in Sarah’s facial expression a sorrow wells up as pure, natural and unstoppable as the water of a spring (FLW, 13). When the internal focalization shifts to Sarah and to different observers, the construction of the sea also changes. While for Sarah the sea has a mysterious attraction and is one of the reasons why she agrees to live in Marlborough House overlooking Lyme Bay (FLW, 37) the Victorian ladies, above all Sarah’s employer and landlady Mrs Poulteney, can see no reason for her walks on the Cobb except the affair with the phantom-like French Lieutenant. Sarah re-emerges “standing where Charles had first seen her; there, it was supposed, she felt herself nearest to France” (FLW, 58). Confronted by Mrs. Poulteney with a reproach for these walks and her gaze out to sea (“You look to sea” [FLW, 58]), because she ascribes both to Sarah’s sinful conduct the girl again reminds her of her story of social ostracism and misery as a fallen woman; but the dignified lady insists that at least with the common people, her walks cause rumors that she might be yearning for a second coming: “I’m told they say you are looking for Satan’s sails” (FLW, 58). Only “[b]y walking elsewhere” (FLW, 59) can she escape renewed slander and moral condemnation. To “show” repentance, the lady explains, is everything, appearances have the highest priority, and thus Sarah consents to give up her walking by the sea, if not entirely, but almost. She will just catch a glimpse of the ocean from time to time. Instead, to the utmost horror of the ladies, she frequents another place of chaos: the Undercliff (FLW, 61–62), only to be found there, a ‘Sleeping Beauty’, by Charles. The topos of the ‘Sleeping Maid’ enjoyed great popularity in the visual and literary imagination of the Victorians and inspired artists to represent a woman as an icon of seductive innocence. For Charles, the scientist, their second encounter therefore is the look into an abyss “poised seconds above the waiting sea” (FLW, 66). His Victorian upbringing and background are henceforth lost upon him, and the moral principles of society are in danger of being cancelled.

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The Cobb as well as the Undercliff reveal themselves as heterotopias in Michel Foucault’s sense (FLW, 17), as real spaces of radical difference situated on the margins of society. Both the seacoast and Ware Commons in the Undercliff are predestined as places fit for the “socially Othered.”13 As a second reading of the novel starts on a more advanced level of reader information, a re-interpretation of Sarah’s being attracted by the sea has to be the result. Again we find clues in the text for a revision. Her view of the sea is linked to images not of turmoil or anxiety – unlike Charles’s – and certainly not of suffering, but authority and power instead. Besides mentioning the commanding prospect from her new home, Sarah’s repeated arrival at the starting-point of her walks is compared by the narrator to “the careful appraisal a ship’s captain gives when he comes out on the bridge” (FLW, 58), before she walks to the pier. It is during the above-mentioned conversation with Mrs Poulteney that Sarah expresses doubtful hesitation about the superior authority of “One Above” (FLW, 58) in her murmured rhetorical question by which she answers the landlady’s moral reproach. It can hardly be overlooked that in the complex texture of this novel, the sea is an archetypal symbol of sexuality and woman.14 “The sea’s moods and changes sex it,” writes John Fowles in his 1974 essay “Shipwreck”: “It is the […] place of pleasure; the gentlest thing on earth, the most maternal; the most seductive whore, and handsomely the most faithless.”15 Accepting and warm, even embracing, yet also seductive and treacherous is the aura of both the ocean and female nature. For Charles, the sea at Lyme Bay and his addiction to Sarah finally merge into one. Sarah’s search for identity – including her sexual identity – which she achieves by “spatial segregation and Othering” herself,16 is connected to her loneliness and to ‘nature’ in its un-acculturated state. Her reflectiveness and resolution for a self-fashioning as Fallen Woman – to become the New Woman later on – find confirmation and a caesura in the view of the sea and in her sleep 13 Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace. Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-And-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996): 160. 14 This conjunction can also be found in other narrative texts, e.g. in Bernard McLaverty’s Grace Notes (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997): 274; “The rhythm of woman’s life is sychronised with the moon and the moon is synchronised with the sea, ergo – a woman is synchronised with the tides.” Maurice Beebe points to Swinburne’s use of the woman-sea equation in late Victorian literature (in Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts. The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce [New York: New York UP, 1964], 280). 15 John Fowles, “Shipwreck,” in The Oxford Book of the Sea, ed. Jonathan Raban (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993): 494–495, 494. 16 Soja, Thirdspace, 160.

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outdoors in a wilderness, defiant of the regulations and provisions of society.17 Freedom and initiation are tangible in these liminal spaces; “silence only broken by the waves’ quiet wash” (FLW, 66) overrides all boundaries. Silence, similar to the sea, expands beyond view or comprehension, is undifferentiated, shapeless, faceless. In semantic terms it is unspecified and changes meaning according to the focalizer of the narrative and his/her empirical charge with meaning. That silence and the sea in the story of Florence and Edward in On Chesil Beach signify the end, not the beginning, of an experience will be demonstrated in the following section.

On Chesil Beach Silence, in this novel, is an oppressed and embarrassed silence: it mars the scene at the beginning of the novel when Florence and Edward sit down for dinner, and it changes their lives significantly as they find no words to break the silence following their row and failure. Edward later clearly recognizes that his silence, the fact that he did not again speak to Florence upon her departure from the beach, has ruined their marriage and spoiled his own life. Not far from a personal tragedy, the novel ends with a melancholic resignation following the speechlessness of its male protagonist. To start with a by now almost popular interpretation of the beach and the sea in McEwan’s 2007 novel, I quote two examples from recent criticism and a poem contemporaneous to the time of the story: the summer of 1962. The novel, set in the “pre-liberation Sixties” is, to one reviewer, “a romance that has taken place between the devil of Middle English rectitude and the deep blue sea of the coming sexual revolution.”18 The setting, according to another critic, becomes metaphorical, since the coastline symbolically signifies the watershed between the two eras before and after the sexual revolution.19 Thus, instead of being a merely geographical setting, the borderline assumes a historical meaning. The poem that celebrates the year 1963, the year the protagonists, like the poet persona, just missed out on, is by Philip Larkin; several reviewers20 allude to it and it deserves a full-length quotation:

17 In this sense, “wilderness” is itself also socially or culturally produced as a mental or “conceived space” (Soja, “Raumgeist,” 251). 18 Tim Adams, “Innocents Abroad,” (accessed 29 March 2010). 19 Dominik Head, “On Chesil Beach: Another Overrated Novella?,” in Ian McEwan, ed. Sebastian Groes (London: Continuum, 2009): 115–122, 118. 20 E.g., Tóibín, “Dissecting the Body,” 28.

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Annus Mirabilis (1967) Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me)— Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP. Up till then there’d only been A sort of bargaining, A wrangle for a ring, A shame that started at sixteen And spread to everything. Then all at once the quarrel sank: Everyone felt the same, And every life became A brilliant breaking of the bank, A quite unlosable game. So life was never better than In nineteen sixty-three (Though just too late for me)— Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP.21

Larkin’s poem provides a good example of literature’s self-referential habit to associate a signifier – this poem – with other well-known symbolic signifiers: D. H. Lawrence’s hero/ine and the Beatles’ songs. The less well-known pre-text, John Dryden’s poem “Annus Mirabilis,” written exactly three hundred years before Larkin’s in 1667, praises the year 1665/1666 in spite of the Great Fire of London and the Great Plague which both occurred in that year – in Dryden’s view, the nation defied these afflictions and avoided a breakdown of the restored monarchy and the concomitant cultural flourishing. The Annus Mirabilis of Larkin’s poem was the year of President Kennedy’s assassination and the Profumo scandal in Britain. But more significant than these near-catastrophes proved, for the lyrical I, the controversial release of a paperback edition in the USA and the UK of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the short-term effects of oral contraception after the Pill had been launched in the UK in 1961.

21 Philip Larkin, “Annus Mirabilis” [1967] in High Windows (London: Faber & Faber, 1974): 34.

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On Chesil Beach takes place one year short of the liberation celebrated by Larkin the disaster of Edward’s and Florence’s wedding night.22 According to Foucault, the ‘honeymoon’ represents one of those undefined yet real spaces serving sexual initiation: For girls, there was, until the middle of the twentieth century, a tradition called the ‘honeymoon trip’; it was an ancestral theme. The young girl’s deflowering could take place “nowhere” and, at the moment of its occurrence the train or honeymoon hotel was indeed the place of this nowhere, this heterotopia without geographical markers.23

The topographically inimitable shore between Abbotsbury and Portland is in this novel the most important manifestation of the sea-scape and the demarcation line between two opposed states, two eras, two characters, two upbringings, and two individuals with gendered and class-related experience. “Chesil Beach with its infinite shingle” leading into the unknown metonymically points to an uncertain future for the protagonists (OCB, 4), while for geologists it has scientific importance and for fishermen and smugglers it provides useful orientation marks because of the distribution of pebbles of different size in varied spots of the coast. To walk along the beach rather than eat a formal dinner none of them requires would mean liberation from conventional expectations, the protagonists know, but neither of them dares offend the provisions for upper middle-class honeymooners (OCB, 18–19). Instead of a place of freedom, the beach becomes the site of their argument, almost leading to physical violence on Edward’s part (OCB, 156). An extradiegetic narrator eyes the young lovers as it were from far away now: “The lower clouds parted again, and though there was no direct moonlight, a feeble glow, diffused through higher strata, moved along the beach to include the couple standing by the great fallen tree” (OCB, 156). The romantic panoramic view is misleading: disappointment and mutual injury escalate and overwhelm both protagonists. Edward’s walk along the strand ends in a lonely and revengeful mood that will poison much of his later life. Infallibly, he revokes the image of Florence turning away from him on the beach, after failure and distress, “until she was a blurred, receding point against the immense straight road of shingle gleaming in the pallid light” (OCB, 166). Sight is lost as well as sound. The

22 The narrator of On Chesil Beach mentions several times the imminent liberalization, though he dates the fundamental change in sexual morals to the later sixties, five years after the central events of the story. In Martin Amis’s novel, The Pregnant Widow (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010), the crucial year is dated similarly: “Then the arrival of sexual intercourse, in 1966, and the full ascendancy of the children of the Golden Age” (307). 23 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” in Heterotopia and the City. Public Space in a Postcivil Society, ed. Michiel Dehaene and Lieven de Cauter (London: Routledge, 2008): 13–30, 18.

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romanticized setting, the reader recognizes, does nothing for the alleviation of a bad situation. The figure of the hitherto beloved girl dissolves in the endless expanse of stones and water, “the sound of her difficult progress lost to the breaking of small waves” (OCB, 166). Florence is irrecoverable for her newly-wed husband.

The Sea as the Undefinable Other Love as a thematic focus is not banished from the two novels which follow, but it is death as the central subject of Swift’s and Banville’s narratives that is linked to the sea as an objective correlative of emotions that are hardly explicable. In both narratives, death and remembrance emerge as a compulsory, inevitable connection in the minds of narrators and narratees. Paradoxically, the experience of death as the threshold, the absolute ‘deadline,’ is merged with the ocean where all boundaries are blurred; going down and perishing by it are the principal notions it conveys.

Last Orders Graham Swift’s earlier novel Waterland has been recognized as focusing on space as much as on time, the significance of the sea, from which the fenland of East Anglia was laboriously reclaimed by building dikes and locks is pointed out already by its title.24 Nevertheless, memory and the past are still considered the core themes of Swift’s narratives. Last Orders has received much critical attention for its narratological complexity, its literary motifs and topoi, its treatment of the issues of class, war, and family conflicts, of masculinity, and of Englishness. The construction of the sea as the destination of the four men’s journey is examined by Joanna Rostek, who juxtaposes its positive and negative aspects and emphasizes the ambiguities inherent in the sea-space.25 Graham Swift himself regards the thematic focus on the ocean as fundamental for several of his works. In a 1998 interview for the journal Writer, he explained that for him water does “play some deep part in our sense of the overall direction of life: where do we go to, where do

24 See Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz, “The Signifying Landscape: Contemporary British Fiction and Its Use of Landscape,” Symbolism 4 (2005): 247–270, 254–258. 25 Joanna Rostek, “Dreamland or Wasteland? Constructions of the Sea in Graham Swift’s Last Orders,” in Insular Mentalities. Mental Maps of Britain. Essays in Honour of Bernd Lenz, ed. Jürgen Kamm and Gerold Sedlmayr (Passau: Stutz, 2007): 157–170.

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we come from? The sea, in particular […] has always represented the ‘beyond’; what, if anything, lies beyond life.”26 Its seeming infinity makes the ocean an image of the ‘beyond.’ Birth and death, origin and end are thus identified with the sea, and the individual fate conforms to the phylogenetic development of life and humanity. Even though not foregrounded for most of the text of Last Orders, the sea as the “overall direction,” where “we go to” never gets out of the four men’s minds; the journey of life parallels the ‘last journey.’ Getting to Margate in spite of distractions, diversions, booze and crises remains what Ray, Vic, Lenny and Vince set out for and feel under an obligation to reach, because they agree that “you cannot deny a dying man a favour, any crazy thing he asks.”27 The favor here is that “he wants his ashes to be chucked off the end of Margate pier” (LO, 13). A sense of irrelevance and disappointment accompanies the arrival at their destination. The final act of throwing Jack’s ashes into the sea from the jetty – not even a real pier, as has repeatedly been stressed – becomes the anti-climax the reader has been led to expect by now. Trivialized to a fault, the same tragicomedy that characterized the topic of death on the novel’s opening pages emerges when Ray at last throws Jack’s ashes into the sea: “I know in the end I’m going to hold up the jar and bang it like you do when you get to the bottom of a box of cornflakes” (LO, 294). He almost flings the container into the sea, too, in a gesture which contradicts this travesty of the journey of life, because it would be “a message in a bottle, Jack Arthur Dodds, save our souls” (LO, 294) – a dislocated prayer and signal of distress to the unknown shore, as it were, and therefore not trivial at all, as Ray well knows. The sea as “conceived space” or “spatial representation” of emotions28 assumes diverse meanings in the course of the novel. Ray, when he first saw Jack’s picture of a joyful Amy taken at the seaside in the summer before World War II, felt a hopeful certainty to survive in the midst of war in North Africa: “Ray, boy, you weren’t meant for scrap” (LO, 280). Later, in their married life, when Jack and his wife Amy were still young, the sea itself became the aim of a yearning, a token of happiness and a better life. Margate was also the destination of a trip where Jack took her to make her forget their handicapped daughter June and which turned out a failure (LO, 252–255). But in spite of the characterisation of the sea as an aim of hopes its association with death is in the narrative already summarized

26 Quoted from Pamela Cooper, Graham Swift’s Last Orders: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2002): 9. 27 Graham Swift, Last Orders. Waterland, Last Orders (London: Picador, 1999): 265. Further references in the text abbreviated as LO. 28 Soja, “Raumgeist,” 253, emphasis in the original.

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at the “moment of departure” in the dead man’s rhetorical question remembered by Ray, the pub called “The Coach and Horses” in South London: “Where do you think it should be going, Raysy? Where d’you think we’ve all got to get to that the bleeding coach should be taking us?” (LO, 9). That they “all” finally go in a Mercedes of the S-class instead of a a coach and four, which one inevitably associates with a hearse, hardly makes any difference and could be part of the involuntary jokes and blunders surrounding death. Yet forty-five years ago the seaside was even a destination not everyone could afford to reach for a Sunday outing, as Lenny remembers. The Dodds were able to go there as a young couple; it was regarded as a sign of their financial status: “Like Amy was getting above herself. She and Jack had been to the sea for the day and me and Joan had been to feed the ducks in Southwark Park” (LO, 40). When both couples have a growing child – the Dodds’s being a Pritchett, whom they adopted after his parents died in an air-raid – they also take Lenny’s daughter to the sea for a day. The seaside then is everybody’s place of fun. In the early nineties it is still Margate where Jack wants to live with Amy after his retirement.29 The sea at Margate remains his last destination where his friends take his ashes. The sea is many a man’s grave, too. Vic, the undertaker, had joined the navy, while all the others, including Jack, had been in the army. After their visit of the War Memorial at Chatham he remembers the “floating coffins” (LO, 123) in which soldiers of the navy like himself had to do military service in the war. The sea itself was his enemy: “you didn’t need another enemy to fire off shells and torpedoes at you, the sea was enough” (LO, 123). For Vic, death and the sea also eventually become one. In one of the shortest chapters of the novel, he reflects that the dead lose their individuality and join a multitude one cannot discern any more, can only think of as a number nobody is able to count. Death, the Great Leveller, “makes all men equal forever and always. There’s only one sea” (LO, 143). If what lies beyond life is the water of the sea, we can only describe it as an a-topia, a non-place.30 It is as different from place as eternity is from time, huge and empty.31

29 The sea as “a mental space of longing” and the discrepancies between dream and illusion are studied at length in Rostek, “Dreamland or Wasteland?”. 30 I borrow the term “non-place” from the title of Marc Augé’s well-known essay (Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity [Oxford: Blackwell, 1995]), in which he defines spaces that are everywhere and nowhere, such as airport lounges, supermarkets and hotel foyers, as non-places, because they are anonymous and featureless. The infinity of the sea and what is beyond life can be evoked only as non-places. 31 Like Rostek in “Dreamland or Wasteland?”, 162–163, Emma Parker points to the proximity of Last Orders to T.S. Eliot’s poem Waste Land, quoting the line “On Margate Sands | I can connect |

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Ultimately an emotion that does not deny spiritual contemplation dominates the act of throwing Jack’s ashes into the wind, rather than the sea. “I [Ray] say, ‘Goodbye Jack.’ The sky and the sea and the wind are all mixed together but I reckon it wouldn’t make no difference if it weren’t because of the blur in my eyes” (LO, 294). The reflection that life is circular, that “what we’re made of” (LO, 295), dust, is what “the Jack that once walked around” (LO, 295) has become, parallels Swift’s idea quoted above that we, like all organic life, are born from the sea and return to it. The circularity of life is imitated by the novel itself, in spite of the fact that in the plot a linear journey has been completed. The destination mentioned by Jack at the beginning, “where we’ve all got to get to” (LO, 9), is this non-place. Mortality as a central aspect to human life lies at the core of this novel, and the blurring quality of water accounts for the sadness and melancholy which it spreads regardless of the coarseness of speech and roughness of manners.

The Sea While Swift’s novel is linked, through the multiplicity of narrators and the recourse to early twentieth-century literature, not only to postmodernism32 but also to modernism, John Banville’s narrative abandons realist storytelling to a large extent and associates itself with what Theo D’haen calls “the cutting edge of Postmodernism,” namely Magic Realism.33 The sea here is a magic space and an apocalyptic space.34 This aspect, which I regard as central to this novel, will mainly be focused on in the following, while the analyses by Hedda Friberg and Susanne Peters primarily deal with memory, the quest, identity, the interdependence of past and present, and the metaphorical use of the sea. Peters also recurs to the model of I. A. Richards and states that the sea is a metaphor with “mytho-

Nothing with Nothing” (Emma Parker, “No Man’s Land: Masculinity and Englishness in Graham Swift’s Last Orders,” in Posting the Male: Masculinities in Post-War and contemporary British Literature, ed. Daniel Lea and Berthold Schoene [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003]: 89–104, 99). 32 See Roland Weidle, “Humanistische Utopie oder historiografische Metafiktion? Graham Swifts Last Orders,” in Cool Britannia. Literarische Selbstvergewisserungen vor der Jahrtausendwende, ed. Norbert Greiner and Roland Weidle (Trier: WVT, 2006): 127–145, passim. 33 Theo D’haen, “Irish Regionalism, Magic Realism and Postmodernism,” in British Postmodern Fiction, ed. Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993): 33–46, 40. 34 Other recent literary examples of the sea as magic and symbolic of death are the Venetian lagoon in Tóibín’s The Master (2004) and the Atlantic ocean of the early years of Sylvia Plath in Emma Tennant’s The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted (2001). Kate Chopin’s novella The Awakening (1899) on the threshold to the twentieth century repeats the Ophelia-motif of a woman’s death by drowning charged with overtones of liberation and dissolution.

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logically charged tenor and vehicle”35 in order to stress the metaphor’s two components of being a symbolic signifier of ‘memory’ on the one hand and aiming at a specification of ‘ocean’ as “conceived space” on the other. Like Fowles, John Banville makes the sea a symbol of woman and her enigmatic nature, thus linking up with the early modern and modernist tradition.36 At the same time, the sea symbolically expresses “the radical otherness of death.”37 Paradoxically, yet also naturally, it is his own death Morden feels in the presence of the sea. “They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide” starts the opening paragraph,38 which already contains most of the subject matter.39 What the reader today would likely expect to be a tsunami reveals itself as something more mysterious for the narrator Max Morden: “Someone has just walked over my grave” (TS, 4). The theme is set, the sea no longer a place of pleasure and vacational bliss. The circle of enigma, terror and incomprehensibility closes with Morden’s compulsive return (TS, 26) to the place of his childhood holidays after his wife’s death when “whole churchyardsful of mourners traipse back and forth unfeelingly over my grave” (TS, 64). He returns to the place where he, paralyzed, once watched the death by drowning of his teenage love Chloe Grace. “Spectral” is the attribute suitable for most of this representation of love, loss, death and mourning. Upon his return after an absence of several decades, Max Morden finds that the elderly landlady at The Cedars, the former summer house of the Grace family whom he befriended, is Miss Rose Vavasour, who many years ago was “the Sphinx” (TS, 237) that minded the Grace children and desperately witnessed their death by drowning, “like poor demented Ariadne on the Naxos shore” (TS, 245–246). To the boy Max, who grew up without a father, the family members resembled mythological creatures: “faintly satanic” (TS, 8) Mr Grace, the “goatish husband” (TS, 86), “a satyr with furred hind legs” (TS, 79) and “hairy paunch” (TS, 90), an “old grinning goat god” (TS, 125); Mrs Grace, Morden’s first “object of helpless veneration, a faceless idol,” who is “transformed from woman into demon” (TS, 118) under the gaze of the boy’s awakening pubertal desire;40 but

35 Susanne Peters, “John Banville, The Sea” in Novels, vol. 1, ed. Susanne Peters et al., (Trier: WVT, 2008): 37–54, 40. Emphasis in the original. 36 Katharina Bauer, Spectral Mourning in Contemporary British Fiction: John Banville’s The Sea, Tim Parks’ Destiny, and Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (Saarbrücken: Südwestdeutscher Verlag, 2009): 106. 37 Bauer, Spectral Mourning, 106. 38 John Banville, The Sea (London: Picador, 2005): 3. Further references in the text, abbreviated as TS. 39 Peters, “John Banville,” 43. 40 Friberg quotes from a review by David Grylls in The Sunday Times in which the members of the Grace family are defined as gods (Hedda Friberg, “In the Murky Sea of Memory: Memory’s Miscues

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before these mental metamorphoses he had already been frightened by the appearance of Myles, Chloe’s mute twin-brother, whose toes are webbed like those of a sea-creature (TS, 38, 61, 82) and with whom the girl is linked in an unbreakable and unspeakable bond. This renders her a chimera or fabulous creature, too, a “creature of the wild” (TS, 238) that paralyzed the childlike protagonist who watched her rising from her sleep. Ancient gods have returned, but only for a limited time. A young woman, still almost a child, and “all that water” (TS, 240) become one in a scene of sexual approaching between Morden and Chloe, in which, again, Myles is physically inseparable from his twin sister. Immediately after this encounter of first love, merman and mermaid, “their backs turned to the world” (TS, 244), go into the sea, there to die. The “feeling of unreality, infusing the ordinary with a sense of mystery,”41 which is characteristic of magical realism, becomes overwhelming here. Death appears as the only possible response to love.42 The narrator himself, a youthful lover, feels spectral, “as if I were myself a thing of air, a drifting spirit, Ariel set free and at a loss” (TS, 247). Years later, on the level preceding the narrative present, the death of his wife Anna and another brief stirring of the sea coincide. Following it, “as if nothing had happened” (TS, 264), the narrator is left behind. He goes back to the deathbed “as if I were walking into the sea” (TS, 264). In the end, several months later at The Cedars, this is what he actually does quite literally, and is found unconscious lying on the beach in the night. Not only does the novel’s circular structure evoke the beginning and end of life in the sea, but, as has been argued, the commemorating narrative itself, just like the reading process, also recreate or perform the sea with its rhythm and motion.43 Wave after wave runs up to the shore, like the memories of those whom we have known: “I remember Anna, our daughter Claire will remember Anna and remember me, then Claire will be gone and there will be those who remember her but not us, and that will be our final dissolution” (TS, 119). The gods that departed are the gods of King Lear or of Oedipus Rex, who do not care about human beings: “And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world’s shrugs of indifference” (TS, 119). The human condition is unsheltered and uncertain, with man standing power-less in regard to nature, including

in John Banville’s ‘The Sea’,” An Sinnoach. A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts 1.2 [2005]: 111–123, 113 and n. 2). 41 D’haen, “Irish Regionalism,” 35. 42 It is interesting to note that “to die” also meant “[t]o experience a sexual orgasm” until the eighteenth century (see Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “die, v.1” 7.d, with examples of this use cited into the late twentieth century). 43 Peters, “John Banville,” 42–45.

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his own, as a mortal being. The mythologized augmentation of the setting and the characters has an effect of alienation on the reader, which as such duplicates the distancing which Morden experiences in regard to his dying wife and “by a mysterious process of transference” (TS, 70) towards his own physical nature, when he sees how her body betrays her “and she became afraid of its alien possibilities” (TS, 70). The familiar turns into the strange(r), the frightening other correlates with the sea, and the sea itself, which also produced life, becomes death, indifferent and unalterable. The imminent dissolution of the unified self seems threatening. When we are introduced to the psychoanalytic depths of death-wish and a longing for death, however, we see an ambivalent attitude which both young Morden and his childhood love felt. Whereas Morden, as an older man, and his wife experience the fear of death, the young Max had known and loved an enigmatic young girl who wished death for her guardian Rose (“I hope she gets drowned” [TS, 237]) and then after her own and Max’s initiation to love-making drowns herself together with her sea-creature twin. Going back to where they came from is expressed with stunning intensity in the irrational images of mythology, which also, as psychoanalysis teaches us, reach into the subconscious.

Conclusion Although several studies emphasize that England and Ireland as islands surrounded and largely determined by the ocean, England moreover as a seafaring nation, have an affinity to choosing maritime settings and exploring the representational possibilities of the sea, I would plead for a wider, more general understanding of the sea-space in contemporary fiction. The metaphorical use of the sea voyage, its fascination, promise of hope and its dangers, of coast, harbour and shipwreck, is as old as European literature itself. The inherent ambiguities of the sea and expressions of ambivalence towards it start with Homer’s epics and continue with the description of the Greek expedition of The Ten Thousand into Persia by historian Xenophon of the fifth century B.C., who knew for certain that they were saved from the perils of the enemy in hostile territory when they finally came in sight of the Black Sea and, released from agony, raised the shout “The sea! The sea!” (Thalassa! Thalassa!). In what has often been called the first English novel, the adventurous protagonist violates his father’s order (and thus one of the Ten Commandments) by going to sea, ending up in a shipwreck and therefore leading to his enduring exclusion from human society – a warning and chilling example to all those who read about it. To go on board a ship and cross the sea may be semantically charged in quite

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diverse ways: as a sign of courage and audacity, of need or greed and imperialism, of the urge for territorial expansion or spirit of discovery, and thus, I would like to add, a long-time domain and attribute of masculinity. In any case it represents a crossing of boundaries that have or had to be considered as givens by human beings, the last-but-one of these natural frontiers before aviation and space-travel became feasible. That such an overbold frontier violation caused the poetic imagination to speak of fabulous monsters and demons lurking out there, that even in the twentieth century it has been considered hubris by those who never believed that modern technology could build an unsinkable ship, stands to reason. Going to sea and even looking at it from the shore imply victory or defeat as its potential, but doubtless an insecurity which entails threat to life and self or a paradoxical longing for its dissolution. From a heterotopia, a place on the edge of human society, such as the ship or the lighthouse also present it, the vast sea becomes an atopia, a non-place, where human beings simply disappear without leaving a trace. To begin with the most recent novel, The Sea reveals itself as the most uncanny representation of the themes of love and death in this selection. Like Last Orders, it reminds the reader of our common heritage, the development of life on this planet and the undeniable mortality of human kind, by which man is part of organic nature. Both novels render the seashore a liminal space by depicting it as a place of withdrawal and moreover of a return to a far earlier stage of life. The feeling of déjà vu, but at the same time of the inevitable unknown, which places their destiny in the sea, prevails in those who die or are yearning for death. The cycle of natural life emerges in the sea-imagery of these two novels and, while the sea-coast loses its everyday semantization as a place of pleasure, it increasingly regains the metaphysical meaning of a borderline for human capacities. Fowles’s and McEwan’s novels centering upon the love-theme use the seascape in different ways. It signifies the beginning of a love affair in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and the end of one in On Chesil Beach, where after the dismay of the wedding night in the hotel the dead tree on the strand seems to offer a possibility to retreat. Whereas Fowles illustrates by his novel the statement made in “Shipwreck” that the sea stands for woman and the male protagonist’s return to a pre-conscious state – an idea also hinted at by Banville – Ian McEwan emphasizes the sea-shore as the boundary between a here and beyond, indicating a borderline situation and liminal experience in life. Especially Florence winces and shudders from the unknown. Both protagonists, Edward on account of his pigheadedness and Florence out of fear, after all prefer to rest on ‘firm ground’ instead of embarking into something turbulent, variable and dizzying. To conclude: ‘Nature’, epitomized for humanity most strongly and permanently in desire and mortality, finds its pointed representation in the sea: beauti-

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ful and gentle, cruel and insurmountable. Man is confronted with it most strongly in crucial situations which mark the crossroads of life: love and death.44

44 After this article had been submitted Joanna Rostek’s monograph Seaing through the Past. Postmodern Histories and the Maritime Metaphor in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011) was published.

Jack Stewart

Virginia Woolf’s “Surreal” Imagery in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse “Modern Fiction” (1919), Virginia Woolf’s manifesto for new forms of subjective expression, appeared five years before André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). In it, Woolf embraced “aberration or complexity,” declaring that “no experiment, even of the wildest is forbidden […]. [E]very feeling, […] every quality of brain and spirit is called upon; no perception comes amiss.” Rejecting logocentric controls and linear sequence, she affirmed that “life is a luminous halo.” Whereas Breton wanted to liberate the mind from conscious control and opposed any revision of the products of automatism, Woolf created aesthetic patterns from the images she culled from hypomania, dreams, hallucinations, memories, or flashes of insight. These symbols of the unconscious were linked in seemingly incongruous combinations that revealed inner workings of her mind. There are striking affinities between these condensed or occulted images and surrealist form-language, despite the fact that Woolf was not influenced by the movement. Drawing on studies of manicdepressive illness and art, I examine Woolf’s expression of subjective consciousness by comparing selected images in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse with the philosophy and iconography of Surrealism. Privileging subjectivity,1 Virginia Woolf displays an affinity for the surreal. In her manifesto “Modern Fiction” (1919),2 written five years before André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)3 and revised the following year, she proclaimed: “Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide” (E4, 160). She wanted modern fiction “to resemble the vision in our minds” and embrace even “aberration or complexity” (E4, 160). Images unleashed from the unconscious without logical structure, but saturated

1 Woolf constructed her subjectivity in the process of writing. Julia Kristeva maintains that “[the] questionable subject in process […] constitutes poetic language” (Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora et al. [New York: Columbia UP, 1980]: 124). 2 Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 4: 1925–1928, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth, 1994): 157–165 (hereafter cited as E4). 3 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1969): 1–47 (hereafter cited as M).

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with affect,4 demanded expression. “[T]here is no limit to the horizon […] no experiment, even of the wildest—is forbidden […]. [E]very feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss” (E4, 164). Woolf wanted the novel “to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain” (E4, 161). Rejecting logocentric linearity, she insisted that “life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (E4, 160). While Breton aimed to liberate the mind from conscious control through automatism that would reveal the “psychic reality” of the libido, his First Manifesto left no room for shaping this material. But Woolf, wanting to make the novel more like an artwork, strove to develop formal designs around the images that emerged from her unconscious. “[T]he mind receives a myriad impressions” (E4, 160), but the writer-as-artist selects, connects, cuts, chisels, and refines. Whereas Breton endorsed “vigorously opposing any effort to retouch or correct” (M, 24), Woolf painstakingly created patterns from lucid fragments. Breton’s treatment of shell-shocked soldiers as a psychiatric orderly in World War I interested him in phenomena of mental derangement and contributed to his invention of Surrealism. At the beginning of his First Manifesto, he proclaims: “I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane […]. It is not the fear of madness which will oblige us to leave the flag of imagination furled” (5, 6). In Nadja5 he entered the other world of madness through obsession with one of its denizens. His experimental unleashing of words and images from the unconscious was designed to bypass censorship of reason and access psychological “sur-realities” beyond the reach of conventional thought. Breton’s and Soupault’s method of instant composition produced “the illusion of an extraordinary verve, a great deal of emotion, a considerable choice of images of a quality such that we would not have been capable of producing a single one in longhand, a very special picturesque quality and, here and there, a strong comical effect” (M, 23). All these are features of Woolf’s style, where the relaxing of logical control and highlighting of emotions and memories reveal marked affinities between manic-depressive aberration, hypomania, and Surrealism. In hypomania, “an extraordinary verve” lights up hidden areas of the mind where reason is blind.6 As Thomas C. Caramagno observes, “Woolf’s fiction tends to use symbols

4 Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness (Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis), trans. Martha Noel Evans and id. (New York: Cornell UP, 1985) sees “madness” in writing as expressing an excess of pathos (feeling) over logos (thinking, knowing). 5 André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove, 1960): 19. 6 Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire. Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Free-Macmillan, 1993) notes that the illness encompasses extremes of mental experi-

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and images […] to create more ambiguity and incoherence than they can resolve.”7 The reader is invited to animate oscillating expressions with his own subjectivity. But where Breton’s First Manifesto promotes incoherence and absurdity, Woolf’s “surreal” imagery puts a premium on vivid but harmonious circuitry. Dream and hallucination are foregrounded in Surrealism and also in Woolf’s fiction. Hallucination appears as early as The Voyage Out,8 where the focus turns inward on Rachel’s delusional state (346–347). According to Taine, “the image, like the sensation it repeats, is, in its very nature, hallucinatory. Thus the hallucination, which seems a monstrosity, is the very fabric of our mental life”9 – a fabric that Woolf strove to express in her fiction. In Surrealism, as in manic-depressive art, dividing lines between creative imagination, hypomania, and madness are often invisible. Salvador Dalí, who invented the “paranoiac critical activity” for stimulating latent imagery, declared that the only difference between himself and a madman was that he was sane – he could conjure up images from the unconscious at will. The method in his madness was to illustrate his obsessions with hallucinatory or grotesquely distorted imagery. Arthur Rimbaud, whom Breton hailed as a forerunner of Surrealism, wanted to “arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses”; Paul Eluard saw the surrealist poet as “halluciné par excellence”; Breton himself claimed that “everything in the end depends on our power of voluntary hallucination.”10 The unconscious sources of Woolf’s art were disturbing and powerful enough to cause hallucinations, with novels stemming from nuclear images such as the “fin in the waste of waters”11 that signaled the emergence of The Waves (1931).

ence, “rang[ing] from florid psychoses, or ‘madness,’ to patterns of unusually clear, fast and creative associations, to [profound] retardation” (47). 7 Thomas C. Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992): 94. 8 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (London: Hogarth, 1915): 346–347. Woolf’s other novels cited in my text are Between the Acts (London: Hogarth, 1941); Mrs. Dalloway (London: Hogarth, 1925), hereafter cited as MD; Orlando (London: Hogarth, 1928), To the Lighthouse (London: Hogarth, 1927), hereafter cited as TTL; and The Waves (London: Hogarth, 1931). 9 Hippolyte Taine, qtd. Marcel Jean, The History of Surrealist Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (London: Weidenfeld, 1960): 117. 10 Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations and Other Prose Poems, trans. Louise Varèse, rev. ed. (New York: New Directions, 1957): xxvii; Paul Eluard, qtd. J. H. Matthews, An Introduction to Surrealism (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1965): 128; André Breton, qtd. J. H. Matthews, Toward the Poetics of Surrealism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1976): 35. 11 The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 4: 1931–1935, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth, 1982): 10. Hereafter cited as D4.

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Woolf exercised her craftsmanship within manic-depressive cycles, achieving equilibrium between vision and design by coupling vivid images and non-rational associations with rhythmic syntax and fluid structures. Caramagno maintains that “disturbances in emotion” – as caused by Woolf’s drastic mood changes – “require of fiction an asymmetrical form; its incoherence is not a neurotic evasion, not a loss of control, but a translation, an expressive discourse similar to the visual disjunctions of the surrealists” (92). Woolf exploited flashes of insight (“matches struck unexpectedly in the dark” [TTL, 249]), that leapt across logical synapses creating “surreal” conjunctions that seem bizarre, yet reveal inner workings of the mind. Her access to psychological and ontological dimensions through illness, hallucination, and mental hyperactivity create marked parallels between her expression of the “innermost flame” of consciousness and the imagery of Surrealism. In her fiction, unfettered right-brain activity12 took on its own momentum; then came the excruciating task of imposing aesthetic order on her “madness.” Woolf’s imagery articulates her experience in condensed structures that illuminate wider contexts. Drawing on studies of manic-depressive illness and art, I will examine Woolf’s rhetorical expression of inner states by comparison of selected images in her fiction with the philosophy and iconography of Surrealism. Many critics have noted affinities between Woolf’s style and impressionism, post-impressionism, or even cubism13 and several have suggested the influence of avant-garde films.14 In her essay, “The Cinema” (1926),15 Woolf responds to Robert Wiene’s surrealist/expressionist The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. She is interested in cinema’s potential for creative visual expression, but critical of the backward state of the medium in the 1920s. A statement by a clinical psychiatrist suggests a possible link between manic-depressive illness and cinema: “The

12 Anne-Marie Priest, “Virginia Woolf’s Brain: Mysticism, Literature, and Neuroscience,” The Dalhousie Review 89.3 (2009): 289–305, notes that “the right brain [sees] the self [as] fluid and interconnected with its environment, a perception completely alien to the left brain” (301). 13 See Jack Stewart, “Impressionism in the Early Novels of Virginia Woolf,” Journal of Modern Literature 9 (1982): 86–107 and “Cubist Elements in Between the Acts,” Mosaic 18 (1985): 65–89; Diane Filby Gillespie, The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1988); Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). 14 See Leslie Kathleen Hankins, “Virginia Woolf and Film,” The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, ed. Maggie Humm (Edinburgh UP, 2010): 351–374; Maggie Humm, Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography, and Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2003); Laura Marcus, “The Shadow on the Screen: Virginia Woolf and the Cinema,” The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford UP, 2007): 99– 178. 15 Essays 4, 348–354.

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fluidity, change, and movement of the emotions, as they occur in the everchanging cyclothymic process, may be compared to the pictures of a cinema, as contrasted with a still photograph.”16 In Dr. Caligari, Woolf was struck by a looming shadow that suggested powerful abstraction of feeling. Leslie Kathleen Hankins notes that Woolf “received information about Surrealism and Surrealist films” from Clive Bell, who “prided himself on being the first in England [in 1924] to understand Surrealism.”17 Bell identified “the super- or contranatural” and “the aesthetic possibilities of surprise”18 as surrealist qualities in film. But what Woolf gleaned from Bell about Surrealism is subject to speculation. Hankins refers to Woolf’s Orlando as a “‘surréaliste’ novel […] which plays with the ‘contranatural’ and projects mini-films onto the natural landscapes throughout.”19 The cinematic form of Surrealism is certainly relevant to Orlando which, with its sweeping changes of scene and gender, is a surrealist fantasia in fiction. But cinema, as Maggie Humm observes, “was only one of a number of visual cultures that Woolf enjoyed and that impact on her work.”20 Despite numerous interarts studies, very few critics have observed the marked affinities between Woolf’s imagery and surrealist poetry and painting. Marianna Torgovnick tentatively links surrealist collage with “the complex manipulation of time in the first two sections of To the Lighthouse.”21 Patricia Ondek Laurence relates Rachel’s feverish dreams in The Voyage Out and Rhoda’s alienated state in The Waves to Max Ernst’s graphic collages of women in distorted postures in Une Semaine de Bonté (1934), and compares Woolf’s physical images of disturbed mental states to Frida Kahlo’s paintings of pain, (re)birth, and nightmare.22 But there is no evidence that Woolf was influenced by Surrealism. Roger Fry, followed by Vanessa Bell, rejected Surrealism as re-injecting “storytelling” into the formalist realm of “plastic values” and when Fry encountered Surrealism in Paris in 1925 “it seemed […] to be directly opposed to all that he had striven to establish in England.”23 The images that I examine are all the more striking in their structural

16 Dr. John Campbell, qtd. Jamison, Touched with Fire, 34. 17 Hankins, “Woolf and Film,” 361. 18 Clive Bell, qtd. Hankins, “Woolf and Film,” 361. 19 Hankins, “Woolf and Film,” 362. 20 Maggie Humm, “Virginia Woolf and Visual Culture,” The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Sellers, second ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010): 214. 21 Marianna Torgovnick,The Visual Arts, Pictorialism, and the Novel (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985): 9. 22 Patricia Ondek Laurence,The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991): 125– 138, 151, 159–165. 23 Frances Spalding, Roger Fry: Art and Life (London: Granada, 1980): 250.

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and psychological parallels with surrealist painting and poetics, a fact that I attribute to the unusual working of Woolf’s imagination. By the time of the Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, Woolf had established her own stylistic parameters, starting with experiments on time and self in Jacob’s Room (1922) and going on to mental aberration and spatio-temporal complexity in Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Her remarkably “surreal” constructions derive from subjective experience that ignites revelations by fusing widely separated moments in time, space, and being. Remote as her creative experiments are from surrealist automatism, her imagery shows striking similarities with the principles of Veristic Surrealism,24 as practiced by Ernst, Tanguy, and Dalí. Woolf’s radically intuitive style shares certain formal qualities, such as dreamlike conjunction of incongruous objects, with Surrealism. I wish to underline “surreal” elements in her style – where “the light of the image [springs] from the fortuitous,” or at least surprising, “juxtaposition of the two terms” (Breton, M, 37). But functional distinctions can be drawn at the signifying level, where Woolf’s images generate symbolic resonances lacking in the “fortuitous” products of surrealist automatism. I bracket “surreal” in quotation marks when applied to Woolf’s imagery to indicate that I am not referring to the stylelanguage of Surrealism as prescribed by Breton, but to structural equivalents deriving from psycho-biological and aesthetic sources. Woolf’s desire “to reveal […] messages [flashing] through the brain” and her ontological vision of “moments of being” make the visual image the central node of her style, as in Surrealism.25 The vital energy that erupts from the unconscious in mental illness or hypomania fuses disparate entities, while lightning-swift perceptions and surprising connections short-circuit tedious logic. Gemma Corradi Fiumara affirms that, “[from] an ontogenetic […] perspective,” “use of metaphoric language appears […] profoundly interwoven with the actual development of our inner life.”26 “Metaphors,” she maintains, “provide a mediation between [abstract and concrete] levels and thus appear ‘alive’”; they display “creative agility” and “[the] intensity which [they] engender enhances the life of the focused and uninhibited

24 According to Werner Haftmann, Painting in the Twentieth Century, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Lund Humphries, 1960), Veristic Surrealism “creat[es] a chaotic, hallucinated, absurd dream world that is rendered with a meticulous realism; fantastic perspectives in which incompatibles are brought together […]” (191). Haftmann contrasts Veristic with “Absolute” (i.e., abstract) Surrealism, as practiced by Arp, Miró, and Masson. 25 Cf. Mary Ann Caws, Surrealism and the Literary Imagination. A Study of Breton and Bachelard (The Hague: Mouton, 1966): 21. 26 Gemma Corradi Fiumara, The Metaphoric Process. Connections Between Language and Life (London: Routledge, 1995): 6, 55.

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exploring mind.”27 Metaphor animates ideas, striking vital sparks through the friction of similitude and dissimilitude. Woof’s metaphors achieve “surreal” intensity by condensing memory and sensation in a-logical, a-temporal units that reveal the hidden flow of consciousness. Etymologically and figuratively speaking, metaphor “transports” meaning across a gap, and the wider the gap, the more striking the imaginative connection. Breton celebrates the “marvelous instrument” of metaphor (M, 268) for surrealist creativity, while Karsten Harries sees metaphors as “instruments to break the referentiality of language […] and thus to confer on the poet’s words a magical presence.”28 The kind of image that the poet Pierre Reverdy prized and Breton fetishized is not “born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities.”29 Reverdy’s concept of an encounter between “distant realities” that reveals startling and unsuspected affinities is crucial to Surrealism and also provides a vital clue to the structure of Woolf’s imagery. From the point of view of poetics rather than novelistic discourse, I want now to examine a constellation of images in Woolf’s novels that stimulate and surprise by short-circuiting logic. The surrealist image in poetry and painting shatters boundaries, initiating a process of disorientation and reorientation that deepens imaginative grasp of the object while reflecting subjective responses. “Surreal” metaphor is an essential tool by means of which Woolf transmutes inner experience into art. The conjunction of disparates is elastic, the stylization condensed, the effect “surreal.” A flash of recognition connects diverse memories and perceptions, spatializing time and emotion while condensing personal narratives. A visual, aural, or tactile image triggers a memory and the significance of a whole pattern of experience flashes before the mind’s eye with unsettling, if exhilarating, suddenness. Woolf reconstructs experience through verbal images whose startling economy incorporates surplus energy in visual figures. A complex interaction of linguistic, psychological, and visual factors renders her style painterly and “surreal.” External reality is subsumed in an inner world of “surrealization,” as Woolf’s imagery pushes “the metaphoric process” toward self-discovery. I will focus on Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) – novels in which the inexhaustible fertility of Woolf’s imagination reveals “the flight of the mind” in visionary images that embody the creative process. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf dramatizes the hallucinations of a shell-shocked exsoldier, Septimus, whose disordered imagination signifies a kind of holy madness. 27 Fiumara, Metaphoric Process, 69, 10, 81. 28 Karsten Harries, “Metaphor and Transcendence,” On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (U of Chicago P, 1980): 78. 29 Pierre Reverdy, qtd. Breton, M, 20.

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His surreal visions take the form of paranoid delusions with apocalyptic overtones: “The world wavered and quavered and threatened to burst into flames” (MD, 18). Septimus joins lunacy and poetry, “of imagination all compact,” and his disoriented sensibility gives him the illusion of being a seer.30 Hyper-sensitivity to sounds, sights, and kinesthetic stimuli is the basis of hallucination and of aesthetic imagination. “Hallucination begins by a reading of signs”31 and, for Septimus, the simplest stimulus, such as a nursemaid spelling out sky-writing, ignites visions: [He] heard her say “Kay Arr” close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvellous discovery indeed – that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions […] can quicken trees into life! (MD, 25–26)

Disjunction of sound and meaning in the spaced-out letters – subjectively reified as textures, tones, and physiological responses – defamiliarizes language, putting verbal consciousness outside the self. Aural, tactile, and visual responses are “conjugated,” as if their arbitrary conjunction contained the clue to a mysterious revelation. The letters blowing across the sky and sounds grating in Septimus’s ears form no coherent pattern, because the synapses that connect sight, sound, touch, and meaning have broken down. It is a case of clinical synaesthesia expressed in the “curious synaesthesia” of Woolf’s style.32 Ramifying paths of metaphor connect different senses, demonstrating a close relation between Septimus’s schizophrenic visions and Woolf’s aesthetics. To a writer, the floating signs might suggest the emergence of language from a primitive psychological matrix, but letters detached from words have no signifieds; they simply awaken an intensely animistic yet potentially creative response that hovers between madness and prophecy. Woolf wrote in her diary: “I believe these illnesses are […] partly mystical. Something happens in my mind. It refuses to go on registering impressions. It shuts itself up. It becomes chrysalis. […] Then suddenly something springs.”33 Caramagno observes that “[in] mania, the imagination seems to go into overdrive.

30 Caws claims: “Surrealism is dedicated to initiation by poetry and art into the world of the seer[] […] where nothing is disconnected or gratuitous and all has the color of the first time” (Surrealism and the Literary Imagination, 64). 31 Felman, Writing and Madness, 71. 32 Laurence, Reading of Silence, 117. 33 The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol 3: 1925–1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth, 1980): 287. Hereafter cited as D3.

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[…] The individual experiences seemingly profound but inexpressible insights (e.g., the meaning of life), delusions, or vivid hallucinations. […] The manic self […] may feel mystically ‘at one’ with the universe.”34 So Septimus participates mystically with his surroundings. Woolf’s image of “elm trees rising and falling” would do credit to an impressionist painter like Monet, yet the seesaw rhythms, combined with animistic images betray a manic state closer to the surrealist primitivism of Masson or the lucid insanity of Dalí: “But they beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made that statement” (MD, 26). He is experiencing the “mystic participation” of inner and outer, human senses and nature that Lévy-Bruhl attributed to “primitive” peoples.35 A surreal animism brings objects to life. Extreme dissociation from normal rationality immerses the mind in a flood of sensations. To Septimus, “[t]he sparrows fluttering, rising, and falling in jagged fountains were part of the pattern; the white and blue, barred with black branches. Sounds made harmonies with premeditation; the spaces between them were as significant as the sounds” (MD, 26). Woolf aimed at achieving “a symmetry by means of infinite discords […] some kind of whole made of shivering fragments; to me this seems the natural process; the flight of the mind.”36 A startling new pattern is created from atoms falling on the mind: sensory phenomena, disjoined from meaning, make a “surreal” design, in which movement, color, and contrast are heightened by staccato rhythms. While expressing a paranormal state, Woolf’s kaleidoscopic imagery has the clarity and precision of a Japanese woodcut and the sophistication of avant-garde music. Her aesthetic sensibility creates a “surreal” order out of the “dérèglement de tous les sens.”37 Discounting manic delusions – “All taken together meant the birth of a new religion” – Septimus’s mad vision is the counterpart of Fry’s “creative vision”: “This,” Fry writes, “is the furthest perversion of the gifts of nature”: Almost any turn of the kaleidoscope of nature may set up in the artist this detached and impassioned vision, and […] the (aesthetically) chaotic and accidental conjunction of forms and colours begins to crystallize into a harmony; and as this harmony becomes clear to the

34 Caramagno, Flight of the Mind, 41–42, 43. 35 Cf. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think (1926), trans. Lilian A. Clare (New York: Arno, 1979): 129–130. 36 Virginia Woolf, qtd. Caramagno, Flight of the Mind, 93. 37 Rimbaud declares: “The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, a prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses” (Illuminations, xxx).

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artist, his actual vision becomes distorted by the emphasis of the rhythm which has been set up within him.38

Distortion and exaggeration are tropes of “creative vision” and also (in more extreme form) of Surrealism. Despite his strictures on the surrealists, Fry emphasizes the aesthetic necessity of deviation from natural vision. If his “creative vision” sets the pulse beating to a different than normal rhythm it has structural parallels with the disorientation and uncontrolled freeplay of Surrealism. Septimus, with his paranoid delusions, and Woolf’s narrator, with her visionary design, are psycho-aesthetic counterparts, representing dual capacities of a single mind. Involuntarily shedding Fry’s “practical vision,”39 Septimus penetrates the veil of custom to uncover a primary world of colors and forms: He lay very high, on the back of the world. The earth thrilled beneath him. Red flowers grew through his flesh; their stiff leaves rustled by his head. Music began clanging against the rocks up here. […] [It] cannoned from rock to rock, divided, met in shocks of sound which rose in smooth columns (that music should be visible was a discovery) and became an anthem […]. (MD, 76)

In manic delusion, “[s]trong emotion skews perception, creating an obscure symbolism, solipsistic and misleading.”40 So “surreal” or manic animism connects Septimus’s body with the earth, while clinical synaesthesia fuses color and sound, music and sculpture in rapturous vision. Sublimating his repressed love for Evans, his commanding officer killed in the war, Septimus bestows a divine significance on random atoms of sensation. Woolf’s painterly and musical landscape subsumes objective reality in lucid surreality heightened by aural and visual hallucinations. Her “creative vision” shares elements of the surreal with Septimus’s paranoid delusions. But the conscious craftsmanship with which Woolf shapes this psychic material distinguishes her art from surrealist automatism, which simply seeks to release unconscious imagery. Like “a match burning in a crocus” (MD, 36), Woolf’s “moments of being” fuse sensory and spiritual. Her reification of complex experience in stark images and vividly fresh conjunctions has a “surreal” impact that makes the invisible visible and stimulates the imagination. Structural equivalence with surrealist form-language marks some of Woolf’s more strikingly poetic imagery. Hallucinatory visions linking past and present bypass time and logic as Clarissa Dalloway remembers her childhood:

38 Roger Fry, Vision and Design [1920] (Harmondsworth: Pelican-Penguin, 1961): 48. 39 Fry, “Artist’s Vision,” 46. 40 Caramagno, Flight of the Mind, 45.

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“Do you remember the lake?” she said, in an abrupt voice, under the pressure of an emotion which caught her heart, made the muscles of her throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as she said “lake.” For she was a child throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, “This is what I have made of it! This!” (MD, 48)

Words, sounds, memories, and muscular sensations fuse in a curiously naïve vision of life as a freestanding biomorphic object that can be lifted, carried, and restored to its source with a ritual gesture. The identification and dissociation of childhood and adult, physical and psychic selves, is virtually schizophrenic, but Woolf’s dream imagery condenses emotional experience in forms that have the startling economy of the “surreal.” Peter Walsh’s return has revealed to Clarissa that she has not molded her life as she might have done if she had accepted his proposal and so her idea of offering it back to its source functions as compensating fantasy. The pathos and nostalgia of Clarissa’s experience seem real enough, but the subjective intensity of her memory and sensation can only be expressed in a “surreal” phenomenology that links dream, gesture, speech, and being. Reshaping the world to fit imagination and desire is an act of rebellion against iron decrees of time (Big Ben booming the hours), space (the other room), and reason (repressive doctors). Surrealism conforms the life-world to inner surrealities that have the power to rearrange sensory data. While Clarissa’s intuitive faculty is controlled by social and rational sensibility, Septimus is swamped by vividly disoriented impressions. Juxtaposing two modes of consciousness on a “razor edge of balance” (TTL, 296), Mrs. Dalloway shows Woolf’s creative affinity with Breton’s almost forbidden world of sudden parallels, petrifying coincidences, and reflexes peculiar to each individual, of harmonies struck as though on the piano, flashes of light that would make you see, really see, if only they were not so much quicker than all the rest.41

By a psychological strategy of doubling, Woolf strikes chords between opposing sensibilities, harmonizing opposite sides of her being at a deeper level. Surrealists heralded “the omnipotence of dream” (M, 26) and wished to explore buried strata of the unconscious. Hypnagogy, which blurs boundaries between waking reality and dream, plays a key role in Woolf’s novels: “A great brush swept smooth across [Peter’s] mind, sweeping across it moving branches, children’s voices, the shuffle of feet, and people passing […]. Down, down he

41 Breton, Nadja, 19.

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sank, into the plumes and feathers of sleep, sank, and was muffled over” (MD, 63). Rather than interpreting the sleeper’s unconscious, Woolf’s narrator shares the poetic spell that enfolds him in childhood memories. Hypnotic rhythms contribute to a “surreal” enchantment: In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, [the grey nurse] seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveller, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of great hemlock plants, looking up suddenly, sees the giant figure at the end of the ride. (MD, 63)

This dream-world of depersonalized archetypes has the magic aura of Max Ernst’s strange forests,42 where the mind, dominated by ruling obsessions, is lulled back to an enchanted state of childhood. The emotions of the traveler in this dim domain are a complex of loneliness, curiosity, fear, and wonder. Giorgio de Chirico in his early phase wanted “a work of art [to] go completely beyond the limits of the human, to where good sense and logic are absent. In this way it [would] come close to the dream and the mentality of childhood.”43 Woolf’s reverie shows a similar urge to overcome everyday reality and replace this world of “miserable pigmies” (MD, 64), shrunken by reason, with an oneiric world fashioned by delirium and desire. In fever or trance, she experienced altered states of consciousness that provided her with “surreal” – fantastic, hypnotic, disjunct – imagery. Hyperaesthesia, articulated in metaphoric elaboration, produced “surreal” landscapes: “what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us […].”44 In the hypomanic phase, Woolf revels in such aberrations when “responsibility [is] shelved and reason in abeyance” (“OBI,” 324), allowing irrational moods a “sudden, fitful, intense” life. Her “surreal” imagery illustrates the visionary tendency of a traveler in the mental underworld to invent fantastic figures: Such are the visions which proffer great cornucopias full of fruit to the solitary traveller, or murmur in his ear like sirens lolloping away on the green sea waves […] or rise to the surface like pale faces which fishermen flounder through floods to embrace.

42 See Grey Forest (1927), Forest and Sun (1932), La Foresta Imbalsamata (1933), and Forest (1935), in Edward Quinn, Max Ernst (Boston: New York Graphic Soc., 1977): no. 163, 214, 215, 229. 43 André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Harper, 1972): 1, no. 1. Hereafter cited as SP. 44 Woolf, “On Being Ill” (1926), Essays 4, 317. Hereafter cited in text as “OBI.”

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Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of, the actual thing; often overpowering the solitary traveller and taking away from him the sense of the earth […]. (MD, 64)

This animistic chain of self-generating verb-phrases (“proffer,” “murmur,” “rise to the surface,” etc.) suggests an “involuntary inspiration” akin to automatism. But the sleeper awakes and the dream dissolves in the light of day. In Woolf’s metaphors, vehicles often outrun tenors, replacing the original object and generating a “surreal” life of their own. The function of such figures is not to signify ideas, so much as to create an ambience in which imagination can gambol and unfold: For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, our self, who fish‑like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sunflickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping. (MD, 177)

The topic is the odd disjunction of inner and outer, private and social, depressive and manic selves that inhabit different spaces in the topography of the soul. The creative self swims like a fish in a subaqueous world of strange flora and fauna, as in Klee’s The Goldfish (1925), Masson’s Battle of Fish (1927), or Tanguy’s A Large Painting which is a Landscape (1927).45 Surrealism is not interested in illustrating facts, but in activating startling images and associations. So Woolf records the associative flexibility of her mind while reading in illness: “We break off a line or two and let them open in the depths of the mind, spread their bright wings, swim like coloured fish in green waters” (“OBI,” 324). Her poetic immersion in the stream-of-consciousness enacts a metamorphic process that parallels surrealist invention of alternative worlds. Her images overshoot reality to externalize the play of consciousness in daring acts of transmutation. As the surrealist writer Paul Nougé observed, “words are living things closely involved with human life.”46 They are a writer’s means of expression and in Woolf’s novels they often develop autonomous life. She reports having “a feeling of transparency in words when they cease to be words and become so intensified that one seems to experience them; to foretell them as if they developed what one

45 Uwe M. Schneede, Surrealism, trans. Maria Pelikan (New York: Abrams, n.d.): colorpl. 16; William S. Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art (New York: Abrams, n.d.): colorpl. 27; Will Grohmann, Paul Klee, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York: Abrams, n.d.): 105. Grohmann calls The Goldfish “[a] metaphor of the world explored poetically and pictorially by the artist” (104). 46 Paul Nougé, “Notes sur les échecs,” qtd. Matthews, Toward the Poetics, 108.

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is already feeling.”47 Language and being, medium and self are identified. Clarissa Dalloway’s “fantastic dreams of great Greek letters stalking round the room”48 suggest a disordered psyche, like that of Septimus who hears birds singing in Greek (MD, 28), as Woolf did in her manic phase. Clarissa quickly rationalizes her experience, but Septimus, whose paranoid delusions overlap with the narrator’s visions, builds grotesque prophecies from his. Woolf transposes ideas of time, number, and meaning into visual images, as when Septimus reifies language in an extended metaphor of dehiscence: “The word ‘time’ split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable, words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time […]” (MD, 78).49 In this surreal image, Septimus, who experiences a sensuous vision that only the narrator can express in words, sees himself as a divinely inspired poet-craftsman-seer. The verbal abstraction “time” germinates a crop of sensory images among which artistic craftsmanship figures as wood-carving. While the form and initial impact of the image are “surreal,” its substance condenses a complex of meanings concerning the nonrational nature of poetic imagination. Woolf embodies emotion and idea in images that concretize mental activity. Such visualization marks the elegiac language of To the Lighthouse, where William Bankes muses: “there, like the body of a young man laid up in peat for a century, with the red fresh on his lips, was his friendship, in its acuteness and reality laid up across the bay among the sandhills” (37–38). A striking fusion of inner and outer, past and present, concrete (body/earth/color) and abstract (friendship/ reality/memory)50 renders the image oneiric and “surreal.” The unconscious content of Bankes’s mind declares itself in a flash, projecting a spontaneously generated memory-image onto the landscape. Lily Briscoe’s mind traverses the dead space between points in time – “this appalling narrative business of the realist” (D3, 209) – “surreally” connecting separate moments in a single luminous image. This quasi-magical distillation of being and time takes place in the midst of a “dumb colloquy with the sand dunes” and some of the external scene still clings

47 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Hogarth, 1978): 93. 48 Woolf, The Voyage Out, 55. 49 Caramagno reports a manic-depressive case where “[h]eightened perceptions inspired ‘animistic conceptions,’ in which objects literally became such entities as time, love, God, peace” (Flight of the Mind, 42). 50 Jean Guiguet identifies the central paradox of Woolf’s art as “how to express the inward by the outward, depth by surface, silence by words, the abstract by the concrete” (Virginia Woolf and Her Works, trans. Jean Stewart [London: Hogarth, 1965]: 368).

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to the image that retrieves lost memory and condenses personal history in a spiritual/sensory gestalt. In To the Lighthouse, keywords severed from dialogic contexts spring into “surreal” life. Lily transforms Mr. Ramsay’s vocal “Castaway” motif into an hallucinating visual image: “(‘Alone’ she heard him say, ‘Perished’ she heard him say) and like everything else this strange morning the words became symbols, wrote themselves all over the grey-green walls” (TTL, 227–228). Woolf’s intense will-to-create in words, sounds, and colors generates an autonomous act of language. Echoing and germinating in Lily’s mind, the words have an animistic force that links them with the poetic alchemy of the surreal. “In illness,” Woolf wrote, “words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning […] a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause […] [evoking] a state of mind which neither words can express nor the reason explain” (“OBI,” 324). Aural hallucination plays a part in such poetic visions. In the latency phase, words take on sensory density, investing language with expressive potential and surreal life. Words become “saturated” with preverbal feeling.51 So Miss La Trobe’s creative unconscious, emphasizing weight and sound, engenders a script in Between the Acts: “Words of one syllable sank down into the mud. […] Words rose […] Words without meaning – wonderful words” (247–248). Such words are non-referential symbols of language and being, whose hidden energies are hard to access but powerful when aroused. Surrealists are allied with “the gifted, the inspired who, miraculously, lump all the letters together in one flash – the way of genius” (TTL, 58). Breton similarly claims that “[at] the crisis of the discovery, the shadow and the substance [are] fused in a superlative flash of lightning.”52 Rhetorically, “the way of genius” is “the metaphoric process”53 that provided Woolf with the perfect means to translate moments of inner life into words and images. For the surrealist, rationality accounts for only a limited part of the mind’s activity, yet tyrannizes over wideranging intuitive functions. In Mr. Ramsay’s obsessions with knowledge, authority, and reputation, Woolf satirizes an intellect limited to a rigidly constructed alphabet: “After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance” (TTL, 57). A zone of understanding beyond the reach of Mr. R’s intellect is symbolized by the red aura. This absurd apotheosis of the unattainable logos falls within the comic tradition of

51 While preparing to write The Waves, Woolf noted: “What I want now to do is to saturate every atom […] to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole” (D3, 209). 52 Qtd. Yves Duplessis, Surrealism, trans. Paul Capon (New York: Walker Sun, 1962): 124. 53 Aristotle saw metaphor as “a sign of genius,” Wittgenstein as “the flashing of an aspect on us [that] seems half visual experience, half thought” (qtd. Fiumara, The Metaphoric Process, 1, 31).

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Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, where language and writing display a weird autonomy and linear sequence is anathema.54 Mr. Ramsay, who crushes his son’s hopes of tomorrow and “damns” his wife for flouting facts, exerts a tyrannical super-ego that reduces creative illusions to the status of lies. He rejects or represses the creative intuition that synthesizes fact and fancy. Like the surrealist painters Max Ernst and René Magritte, Woolf sometimes displaces objects, subverting normal relations as a short-cut to revealing mental processes. As an explanation of his father’s work, Andrew tells Lily to “[t]hink of a kitchen table […] when you’re not there” (TTL, 40).55 Lily then transposes the philosopher’s abstract theme of “[s]ubject and object and the nature of reality” (TTL, 40) into her own visual terms, creating the concrete image of “a scrubbed kitchen table” floating before her mind’s eye “in the fork of a pear tree” (TTL, 40, 41). Surreal condensation of thought in a material object projected onto a background of localized space makes the image stand out as paradoxically “real.” Lily’s visual image fleshes out Andrew’s verbal cue, metonymizing Mr. Ramsay’s mental activity through concrete spatial qualities. With a disruptive “flash of genius,” the artist displaces the symbolic object from the philosopher’s study into the context of fruitful nature from which it was first extracted. This “surreal” projection of table into tree reverses the process whereby nature is subjected to human use. Woolf’s comic dialectics contrasts the philosopher’s rationalism with the artist’s sensuous imagination. The signifying power of the displaced table outdoes philosophical cliché or surrealist disjunction: Lily’s response to Andrew’s challenge simultaneously illuminates contrasting states of mind. Mr. Ramsay’s philosophy is parodically reduced to a hard, bare, geometric object, hoist with its own petard into alien space, where it hovers incongruously. The iconic object signifies a “surreal” conjunction of rational and irrational, imagination and reality. Such are the zen-like tactics with which surreality out-matches rationality. Surrealist strategies of displacement show acrobatic versatility in re-deploying objects in space. In the significantly titled Hegel’s Holiday (1958),56 Magritte places a glass of water on top of an umbrella, juxtaposing contraries and subvert-

54 Woolf, “The ‘Sentimental Journey,’” The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 5: 1929–1932, ed. Stuart N. Clarke (London: Hogarth, 2009): 401–410, admires Sterne’s style because “[he] transfers our interest from the outer to the inner,” combining “[t]he utmost fluidity […] with the utmost permanence” (404, 403). 55 The status of objects in the absence of perceivers is an old conundrum in British philosophy. See Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000). 56 See A. M. Hammacher, René Magritte, trans. James Brockway (New York: Abrams, n.d.): colorpl. 42.

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ing the relation of objects. Breton observes that Magritte “violate[s]” expected order, but posits the existence of a “semantic bridge which allows us to pass from the proper to the figurative meaning and to conjugate these two meanings with a single glance” (SP, 270). So the reader instantly conjugates abstract with concrete in Lily’s image of the table. Such insights undercut the philosopher’s laborious pursuit of truth. Just as “Magritte’s painting attempts to make thought visible,”57 so Lily’s “visual thinking”58 embodies epistemology in sensuous forms. By an act of “surreal” levitation, philosopher’s and artist’s minds meet in midair, supporting the “phantom table.” Intuition seizes on chance occasions for understanding; it knows no law of gravity, but triumphs over the gravitas of reason. The imagemaking faculty that assimilates objects through sense perception will not let them be tied down. Yet the “phantom table” retains its stubborn reality even when hijacked by the artist’s imagination.59 Its dualistic potential foreshadows James’s realization on the way to the lighthouse that “nothing was simply one thing” (TTL, 286). Any surface event, such as Mrs. Ramsay’s conversation with Bankes about the Mannings, carries its undertow of associations. In the alembic of imagination, time becomes space as passing moments coalesce in visual images. The flow of reverie suddenly surfaces in an image that gathers up and universalizes experience: “life, which shot down from the dining-room table in cascades, heaven knows where, was sealed up there, and lay, like a lake, placidly between its banks” (TTL, 145). Reflecting the rhythmic ebb-and-flow of the mind between motion and stasis, memory and association, the image-cluster life-table-waterfall-lake illustrates Mrs. Ramsay’s visual way of thinking. The reader need not clarify its exact meaning, but analysis suggests a metaphysical contrast between conservation of moments in memory, where they take on spatial form, and their rapid dissolution in time. Woolf reifies the stream-of-consciousness in images that are formally “surreal,” but functionally symbolic. Her metaphors of cascading stream or static pool imply a philosophical speculation on being and time. Again “nothing [is] simply one thing”: contrasted ways of looking and thinking dramatize perceptual and mental processes that interact in a complex intellectual and artistic design. Woolf’s intrinsically “surreal” images are integral to a larger signifying process that employs the full sweep of the mind.

57 Suzi Gablik, Magritte (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Soc., 1972): 11. 58 Cf. Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley: U of California P, 1969). 59 Gablik observes that “[w]hen objects are isolated […] both from their usual surroundings and from their recognized function or role, a certain ambiguity is produced, and an irrational element is introduced on the plane of concrete reality. The resulting image thus escapes from the principles of reality, but without having lost its reality on the physical plane” (Magritte, 46).

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The experimental bridge passage “Time Passes” begins like a séance with ritual extinction of consciousness in sleep. Critics have used paradoxical terms such as “continuity […] of the discontinuous”60 to convey the “surreal” impact of reading space in terms of time and time in terms of space. The whole enterprise involves a hallucinatory dream state. An impersonal intelligence enters the realm of sleep and passes through the subconscious, where dreams cross in a “profusion of darkness” (TTL, 106). While composing “Time Passes,” Woolf wrote in her diary that it was “the most difficult abstract piece of writing – I have to give an empty house, no people’s characters, the passage of time, all eyeless and featureless with nothing to cling to” (D3, 76). The challenge was to represent the phantom house as it exists in raw time and space, beyond the reach of human consciousness. The writer’s ontological quest for “the nature of reality,” when subject is disconnected from object, matches the philosopher’s quest for truth. Absence can only be mediated by a faceless, anonymous presence, so a “surreal” atmosphere pervades this night journey. Shadowy personifications replace human agents and nature sheds an oblique light on human fate: “The spring without a leaf to toss, bare and bright like a virgin fierce in her chastity […] was laid out on fields wide-eyed and watchful and entirely careless of what was thought or done by the beholders” (TTL, 204). The narrator foregrounds natural forces and human archetypes, reinforcing their impact on individual lives by framing references to marriages and deaths within parentheses that relate metonymically to social rituals and historical events. In “Time Passes,” the “eyeless” narrator’s trancelike vision is mediated by “surreal” imagery. The invisible focus inhabits “a wedge-shaped core of darkness” (TTL, 99) that signifies unconscious being. Imagination apotheosized, like Breton’s “inveterate dreamer” (M, 3), remakes the world: [T]here came to the wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations of the strangest kind – of flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind, of stars flashing in their hearts, of cliff, sea, cloud, and sky brought purposely together to assemble outwardly the scattered parts of the vision within. (TTL, 204)

This mingling of inner and outer in a swirling cosmic dream recalls the “profound […] occultation of surrealism” (M, 178). According to Breton, the painter Roberto Matta Echaurren “plunged into the agate” in search of “the philosopher’s fire” (SP, 178) – as Woolf’s anonymous seer plunges into apocalyptic visions. A creative desire for order and harmony amid the destructive welter of time and space brings Woolf’s eyeless eye “the extraordinary stimulus to range hither and thither

60 Guiguet, Woolf and Her Works, 288.

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in search of […] some crystal of intensity […] single, hard, bright, like a diamond in the sand” (TTL, 205). As a visual correlative, Matta’s crystalline painting The Earth is a Man (1942)61 suggests cosmic forces disintegrating and refashioning nature. This macrocosmic vision features luminous fragments that compose an embryonic cosmos, through which an asymmetrically placed diamond or heartshaped sun scatters its seeds of light.62 In such works, Absolute Surrealism “extend[s] the field of vision” (Breton, SP, 187), uniting the invisible world of spirit with the no less invisible world of molecular forces. Anatomical fragmentation is a key motif in surrealist painting and graphics: like Woolf’s seer, surrealist artists want “to assemble outwardly the scattered parts of the vision within,” projecting dreams onto a visible backdrop of space. Breton, who believed in “[a] principle of perpetual mutation,”63 saw Surrealism as “annihilation of the being into a diamond […] which is no more the soul of ice than that of fire” (M, 124). Woolf’s crystal of intensity involves a similar conjunction of fiery light with watery matter, symbolizing a purely visionary fusion of opposites – life and death, permanence and flux. Crystallization signifies spiritualization: Woolf’s microcosmic crystal appears to symbolize a magic transmutation. The experiment of “Time Passes,” with its cosmological imagery, shares common ground with surrealist iconography that draws on magic and alchemy and features mirror images.64 Woolf’s visionary presence-in-absence links dreams with creative illusions “[in] those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which clouds for ever turn and shadows form” (TTL, 204). This oneiric dimension of Surrealism is the matrix of Woolf’s ontological vision in “Time Passes.” Woolf’s similes often juxtapose mundane with exotic in “surreal” combinations. A cleaning-woman sweeping in a “yellow haze” barred with shadows “look[s] like a tropical fish oaring its way through sunlanced waters” (TTL, 206). Such subaqueous imagery calls for visual development in the aquarium of the reader’s mind. The flash of analogy springs from an abstract play of light and movement, compounded by the displaced metaphor “oaring.” The extended simile is based on visual perception and the resulting fusion of disparates, charwoman and fish, is consequently much more natural than Lautréamont’s “chance

61 Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art, colorpl. 46. 62 Cf. Matta’s Inscape (Psychological Morphology No. 104) (1939; Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art, colorpl. 45), in which apocalyptic forces disrupt the microcosmic landscape of man. 63 Matthews, Toward the Poetics 99. 64 André Masson declares, in Anatomy of My Universe (1943): “I am the mirror in which the fraternal kingdoms and the four elements are reflected” (qtd. William S. Rubin and Carolyn Lanchner, André Masson [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976]: 183).

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encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”65 Woolf’s (trans)figuration of the object conducts the reader from immediate reality through the sunshine of a digression,66 where imagination sports freely and “a myriad impressions” (Essays 3, 33) are refracted from the sensitive plate of the writer’s mind. Subject transforms object into something completely different, yet connected to its source by an elastic mode of perception and association. Comic hyperbole tilts many of Woolf’s metaphors toward the surreal: “[Mr. Ramsay’s] immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at [Lily’s] feet, and all she did […] was to draw her skirts a little closer around her ankles, lest she should get wet” (TTL, 236). Emotion is ludicrously externalized as the suppressed cliché “overflowing” takes on surreal life and a trickle becomes a tide. The embarrassing dream-fixity of the scene evokes the fantasy-land of Lewis Carroll, whom Breton admired as a precursor along with Swift and Sterne. Startling juxtapositions or displacements galvanize moribund language into life. Lily’s chance reference to Mr. Ramsay’s “beautiful boots” is the Open Sesame that transforms the philosopher’s gloomy intensity into radiant good humor: “They had reached, she felt, a sunny island where peace dwelt, sanity reigned and the sun for ever shone, the blessed island of good boots” (TTL, 238). Woolf’s trope combines hyperbole and synecdoche with bathos, matching Breton’s Kantian analysis of a species of surreal image that, “presenting itself as something sensational […] seems to end weakly (because it suddenly closes the angle of its compass)” (M, 38).67 Mr. Ramsay’s soul retracts from tragically sublime to laughably ridiculous at the drop of a word that gives balm to his ego. The energy of the unconscious that generates images is the driving force of the creative process. Woolf records the manic sense of triumph, shot through with fears of disintegration, with which she gave herself to the flow of words toward the end of The Waves: [I] reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity & intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice, or almost, after some sort of speaker (as when I was mad). […] What interests me in the last stage was the freedom & boldness with which my imagination picked up used & tossed aside all the images & symbols which I had prepared. (D4, 10)

65 Qtd. J. H. Matthews, The Imagery of Surrealism (Syracuse University Press, 1977): xx. 66 Cf. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; – they are the life, the soul of reading” (Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman [1759– 1767], ed. James Aiken Work [New York: Odyssey, 1940]: 73 [bk. 1, ch. 22]). 67 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911), offers a similar definition of comic bathos: “Laughter is an affection arising from a strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing” (199).

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In a parallel passage, Breton describes “the wave of words which, outside all conscious direction, breaks each second in our ears and which the majority of men hold back by means of the dike of immediate sense.”68 Breton acknowledges “the deep individual tensions that graphic or verbal automatism brings to the surface,” but maintains that it satisfies “both eye and ear by achieving rhythmic unity” (SP, 69–70). In contrast with such automatism, Woolf emphasizes her constructive role in preparing forms of expression that ultimately generate their own free-wheeling energy. Rhythm in composition was a key value for Woolf, as she strove “to make the blood run like a torrent from end to end” of her novels and “[to] keep the lilt, & join up & expand” in the process of revision (D3, 343; D4, 25). She advised a young poet to “stand at the window and let your rhythmical sense open and shut […] until the taxis are dancing with the daffodils”69 – an animistically “surreal” image that integrates natural and mechanical in a striking dramatization of poetic inspiration. Surrealist dialectic attempts to bridge the gap between subject and object, internal and external. So inside and outside intersect in Magritte’s The Human Condition, I (1934),70 where a painted landscape on an easel overlaps with a “real” landscape outside a window, seamlessly fitting art and nature within the same illusory frame. Mr. Ramsay’s rationalist brain insists on separating ideas logically and sequentially, looking for causal connections or distinctions. But Lily’s artistic intuition, unbound by linear sequence, revolves like the lighthouse beam, fusing conscious and unconscious in visionary unity. Artistic creativity transcends straight lines and separate units in wavelike rhythms71 and sudden flashes of insight. For Joan Miró the creative process was “always born in a state of hallucination, provoked by some shock, objective or subjective.”72 Woolf’s epiphanies similarly arose from shocks of recognition that she strove to assimilate in imaginative structures of metaphor. In Moments of Being, she observes that “the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. […] [It] is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words.”73 So Woolf “surrealizes” by fusing perception and imagination with verbal expression. Magritte’s “moment of lucid-

68 Breton, qtd. Matthews, Toward the Poetics, 99. 69 Woolf, “A Letter to a Young Poet,” Essays 5, 315. 70 Gablik, Magritte, 77. 71 Caramagno observes that “Woolf attempted to make literature radial rather than lineal, to describe the waves which were the motion of mood, the turbulence of self, the uncertainty of perception” (Flight of the Mind, 93). 72 Qtd. Lucy R. Lippard, ed., Surrealists on Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970): 172. 73 Woolf, Moments of Being, 72.

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ity, or genius, when the power of the mind declares itself by revealing the mystery of things,”74 is equivalent to Woolf’s spiritual “moment of being,” when fragmentary experiences cohere to form “one of those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays” (TTL, 296) – a symbol of the artwork. Her “surreal” imagination assembles dissimilar fragments in compact units that reveal subliminal connections, transcending immediate sense perceptions like those of post-impressionism in a freeplay that merges intellect and intuition. Struggling to resolve antinomies, Woolf’s volatile unconscious ignites “surreal” images that light up the mind’s dark places to reveal invisible moments of being, as if with the flare of a match.

74 Gablik, Magritte, 71.

Sebastian Domsch

Halftone Reality: Icon and Symbol in Graphic Narrative The visual language of comics is characterized by the fascinating and complex interaction between the iconic and symbolic properties of the signs used. Part of the appeal of graphic narrative is that it represents a visual likeness of what is narrated – readers can actually “see” the narrative. But, far from being a purely representational medium, the best comics draw much of their power of meaning production from the abstraction of visual signs and the foregrounding of their nature as created signs, loading them with symbolic content. This symbolic content is integrated into the more general symbolism of the narrative’s meaning. At the same time, comics use the most symbolic sign system available, written language, in a way that integrates it into iconic storytelling. This essay analyzes how graphic narratives productively use the iconic and symbolic properties of signs to create narrative meaning in a specific way that is not possible in other media. An understanding of how icons and symbols function in comics is a necessary precondition for appreciating the artistic potential of comics as a medium.

The Sign in Comics Comics have long since become a legitimate subject for scholarly inquiry, and the analysis of comics has become increasingly popular. In addition to the attention to the historical genesis of the medium, there has thus far been a considerable and logical focus on the specific ways of storytelling that comics use. Most analyses acknowledge the importance of comics’ dual nature as textual and pictorial, and thus as an integration of two different sign systems. Monica B. Pearl, for example, writes that “[t]his is what an illustrated narrative allows most of all: juxtapositions of text and image, to make distinctions and parallels at the same time.”1 Mila Bongco emphasizes the interdependency of the two sign systems: The key to understanding comic art does not lie in the words or pictures alone but in the interaction between them. The expressive potential and uniqueness of the medium lie in the skilful employment of not one but two sign systems. Interestingly, the relations between the

1 Monica B. Pearl, “Graphic Language. Redrawing the family (romance) in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home,” Prose Studies 30:3 (December 2008): 286–304, 302.

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divergent “languages” of comics reflect the simultaneously competitive and complementary relationship which exists between comics and other genres, other popular forms of expression, other forms of literature.2

But even though Bongco talks about “sign systems,” it soon becomes obvious that she – as, I would argue, most analysts of graphic narrative – is really talking about two different media. She tacitly assumes that comics employ different and distinct sign systems, instead of looking directly at the semiotic properties of signs in comics. This becomes even more obvious somewhat later, when she describes the reading of comics as “a complex semiotic process,” but immediately reduces this process to the distinction between words and images: [I]t involves understanding how the interactions between words and images have been manipulated in order to achieve a story or joke. The appreciation of comic books is not possible without the recognition that its language and grammar consist of not one but two elements: words and images.3

Altogether, Bongco only has about two pages on this relation between words and images, and she makes no explicit references to how they might function differently as signs. Even Thierry Groensteen, who declares at the outset of his study that “Comics will be considered here as a language, […] as an original ensemble of productive mechanisms of meaning,”4 is reticent in talking about the function of signs in comics. One exception is Stephan Packard, who distinguishes along the lines of semiotic properties and talks about the iconicity of signs in comics.5 Packard applies Peircean terminology to comics, but is dismissive in his discussion of icons and symbols, because he wants to establish the importance of indexical signs as a psychoanalytical, Lacanian way of understanding the reading of comics. Thus, he focuses exclusively on the relation between interpretant and sign, a relation that is understood in psychological terms, to the detriment of questions of meaning production. This general unwillingness to look specifically at signs and their properties in comics is unfortunate, because comics do not simply use two different sign systems at the same time; instead, they productively take advantage of the

2 Mila Bongco, Reading Comics: Language, Culture, and the Concept of the Superhero in Comic Books (New York and London: Garland, 2000): xv. 3 Bongco, Reading Comics, 46. 4 Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2007): 2. 5 Stephan Packard, “Was ist ein Cartoon? Psychosemiotische Oberlegungen im Anschluss an Scott McCloud,” in Comics: Zur Geschichte und Theorie eines populärkulturellen Mediums, ed. Stephan Ditschke, Katerina Kroucheva, Daniel Stein (Bielefeld: Transcript 2009): 29–52, 39.

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very differences between those systems. In order to understand how comics generate meaning, how they “signify,” we need to ask what kinds of signs they use. And to restrict our focus to the differences between words and images simply does not do justice to the comic sign’s complexity. It is the very fusion of words and images into the integrated medium of comics that makes discussion of distinctive categories less useful. Rather, I suggest that we should look at the category of signs and see how comics use, relate, and mix these categories. One productive way to examine the use of signs in comics is to apply Charles Sanders Peirce’s categories of signs, especially his distinction between “icon” and “symbol.”6 In Peirce’s system, icons are signs that create a direct connection to the object they are referring to by some similarity that is discernible by the senses. In this sense, any visual sign that “looks like” what it tries to depict can be seen as an icon, or as having iconic properties. The same goes for imitative sounds. Symbols, on the other hand, have a meaning that is not dependent on any similarity, but is ascribed to them purely by convention. That is, they are only signs insofar as someone understands them as a sign because they know the association. Language signs are symbols in Peirce’s sense, as they are the perfect example for the arbitrariness of the signifier-signified relation: That a table is adequately described by the word “table” is purely conventional, and it is understood without any difficulty only because the convention has become automatized. It should be obvious that the two media that comics employ – visual and textual – are dominated by icons and symbols, respectively. Comics use both icon signs as well as symbol signs extensively, and it is safe to say that most icon signs are found on the visual level, while the majority of the symbol signs are formed by the textual level. Still, it is wrong to assume that the sign categories are identical or consigned to these respective levels. Any closer look at how signs work in comics will show that it is much too restrictive to simply identify category and medium without allowing for any forms of interplay. On the contrary, the generation of meaning in comics strongly relies on a constant process of “iconizing” symbols and of “symbolizing” icons. The only comics scholar thus far to have pointed towards this fluidity of the comic sign’s nature is Scott McCloud in his influential Understanding Comics. McCloud deals extensively with the semiotic properties of comics, and he must still be regarded as the authority when it comes to the semiotics of comics.

6 Cf. e.g. Thomas Sebeok, Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994): 50– 59.

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However, this leaves his imprecise terminology all the more in need of further clarification. In order to avoid confusion, my different usage of McCloud’s terms “icon” and “symbol” requires explanation. McCloud simply calls all possible signs “icon,” and then further distinguishes these in a rather imprecise way into “non-pictorial icons” (which nevertheless contain pictorial ones like the fish as a symbol for Christianity), “abstract icons” (by which he means language signs, and what in Peirce’s terminology would be symbols) and “pictures,” which are closest to Peirce’s concept of icons.7 But what is more important than questions of terminology is McCloud’s claim that there is a gradual progression of increasing abstraction toward the symbol. This observation – that similarity and arbitrariness are not absolutely distinct properties in signs, but can rather be arranged on a gradual scale – also forms the basis for this analysis. Much more problematic, because highly reductive, is his conclusion that the difference between iconic signs and the system of language is merely one of degree in abstraction. This claim surely oversimplifies the genesis of language and is unfitting for an analysis that is concerned not with historical developments but the functioning of signs at a given moment.8 Before continuing, it should be noted that this essay should in no way be understood as an attempt to exhaustively define what comics are or how they work. While comics’ specific use of different kinds of signs is one of their main distinguishing features, it is neither the only nor the most important. The aspect that is necessary and indispensable to any definition of comics, namely sequentiality, is simply not addressed here. The omission of sequentiality might explain why I have fewer problems with talking about (individual) signs in comics than Thierry Groensteen in his The System of Comics. Since Groensteen wants to get at the core of comics as a unified system, and sequentiality is an integral part of this endeavor, he refuses to isolate signs (as a smallest unit of signification analogous to morphemes, lexems or phonemes in language) within the image. For him, “[t]he image provides the example of a semiotic system devoid of signs, or at least not reliant on a finished system of signs.”9 But even given the basic impossibility of clearly delineating one sign from another in an image, or of differentiating them as clear-cut, small units, it is undeniable that

7 Cf. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994): 27. 8 Cf. McCloud, Understanding Comics, 48. Possibly worse is McCloud’s continuation of the “abstraction-scale” beyond the image/language divide, where he seems to claim for this purely abstract sign system some form of semantic iconicity according to its “directness.” Since McCloud is obviously no linguist, one does best to ignore this part of his theories. 9 Groensteen, System, 4.

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there are signs in comics, they have functions, and that they work in different ways.

Iconization What is perhaps most obvious even to casual readers of comics is that they take signs that are normally understood to function completely as symbols (such as language signs) and “iconize” them. In other words, comics add a direct similarity that is not necessary for the original sign’s function. The most important condition for this process is that in comics, the textual level is usually integrated into the visual level; it is, though a different sign system, part of the visual depiction. Text is painted into the picture and therefore becomes part of the picture. This trend towards integration marks the development of comics into an independent and original medium of storytelling. This feature is also one possible demarcation for the elusive definition of comics. Media history accounts for many cases in which a text and a spatial medium (such as images or sculptures) are related to each other, but not all of them reveal the same degree of integration as in comics. A case in point is what is usually referred to as “illustration.” While the very point of an illustration is that it is directly related to some verbal description, both are experienced by the recipient as occurring on two distinct levels of mediation. Even when combined on a single page, they exist in their independent medial realms – a fact that is underscored by their spatial separation, and often by distinct methods of production.10 This lack of integration is usually detectable through the independence of the information conveyed by both levels. Children’s picture books are a perfect model. The prototypical example would show a picture of an apple together with the caption “This is an apple.” The information contained in word and image is identical, because the aim of such books is to gradually replace the image with the word. The child is to learn to understand the linguistic sign “apple”: first with the help of iconic similarity, but then without being dependent on it, relying instead purely on symbolic convention. The history of early comics is partly a history of the integration of text and image into a single medium, from Wilhelm Busch and Rodolphe Toepffer to the

10 For an example, one might compare the 1797 edition of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, illustrated by William Blake, with Blake’s own illuminated prints. Edward Young, Night Thoughts or, The Complaint and The Consolation, ed. Robert Essick and Jenijoy LaBelle (Mineaola: Dover Publications 1996). William Blake, The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001).

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Prince Valiant comics (which do not contain any speech bubbles) and the “Yellow Kid” comic strips, in which the kid’s spoken words are written on his yellow nightshirt. In the resulting medial form that has developed as a generally accepted convention, comics depict text as graphics: the text (as a symbolic sign system conveying some form of meaning that bears an arbitrary relation to the signs used) is both “written” (even if only as a mental activity) and “drawn” (as visible signs with a concrete spatial form, the creation of which is part of the artistic act). In the functionally differentiated work environment of comics production, “letterer” is a separate job description, a task that is even honored with independent awards. But even though today the lettering is often done automatically by computers instead of drawn by hand, the concept of the medial integration of text into image is far too established to be dependent on the actual methods of production of a specific text. The text has intruded irrevocably onto the visual level and is therefore always doubly present – as a symbolic sign with meaning and as a visual form. Given this double presence, the comic text can be said to highlight its own mediality. The abstract textual sign usually subordinates the sign’s materiality to its semantic content, but as a drawn object, this subordination is much less complete. As the materiality of the sign can no longer be ignored, it can be understood as carrying semantic content of its own. Comics, as is well known, make abundant use of this property. The most well-known and consistent example is a kind of text that is itself a borderline phenomenon, being both part of the textual and the descriptive level: the verbal imitation of sounds. Early on, comics had become distinctive and notorious for their inclusion of “sound-words” – to the point that words like “Pow!”, “Bam!” or “Whaam!” (immortalized by Roy Lichtenstein) immediately trigger associations with comics. But what is often taken as another indication of comics’ immaturity and emphasis on mere physical action (which is, after all, the kind of narrative event that produces sounds) should rather be regarded as the most obvious indication of the successful integration of text into the image and assimilation of their respective semiotic properties. Such onomatopoetic signs are fabricated from “language material” (and are therefore symbols) but are iconized in two ways. First of all through sound: There is an iconic relation of similarity between the way that the sound-word sounds when pronounced and the sound it is supposed to represent. But because they are an integral part of the visual presentation, they are also iconized visually: The visual form of the letters creates similarities to aspects of the sound they are supposed to represent. Their size within the panel can suggest volume; their length (sometimes across multiple panels) can suggest the sound’s persistence, or even its direction (e.g. the sound of a passing car); the form of the letters can show whether a sound is piercing, shattering, or smooth, whether it increases or decreases, and so on. Comics have

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developed a vast range of expressive styles for rendering sound-words, just as they have been highly inventive in the creation of the sound-words.11 Howard Chaykin’s comic series American Flagg (published between 1983 and 1988) is one of the best examples for this kind of inventiveness and also for how iconized text can enhance the overall meaning of graphic storytelling.12 The series is an incisive satire on the American culture of the 1980s, especially on the interrelations between politics, media, and consumerism. This is partly transported through the setting, a dystopian rendering of America in the year 2030 and through the stories. But it is also strongly conveyed through the artwork and especially the rendering of text within the artwork. The visual display constantly includes advertisements, slogans, billboards, and other media displays to an extent that makes them an integral part of the storytelling. To this purpose, Chaykin employed a letterer, Ken Bruzenak, who designed countless different fonts and integrated them into the page layout so successfully that he became the first famous letterer in the history of comics. Comics have long since begun to reveal diversity in terms of how strongly they emphasize the iconic properties of their textual symbols. While some tend to exclude all onomatopoetic words and restrict the graphic rendering of all text, others use both expressively for artistic purposes. Notable artists in this respect are Frank Miller in his Sin City comics or Dave Sim for Cerebus.13 The hybrid status of text in comics between symbol and icon can be used toward artistic effects, since it foregrounds intermediality. A minor example can be found in Uli Oesterle’s German-language graphic novel Hector Umbra. At one point, the protagonist enters his apartment, turning on the light. In the panel, the word “klick” is written to indicate the sound of the switch. A few panels later, Hector turns on his answering machine, and again a word is included to indicate the sound, but this time it is spelled “click.”14 This is paradoxical on several levels. If the word is merely an iconic sound-word, it is meant to be pronounced, and since “klick” and “click” are homophones, the different spelling is superfluous. The difference is one of purely symbolic value, showing that this sign indeed oscillates between both symbol and icon. It is a symbol (word) that turns into an icon (sound) that “re-turns” into a symbol (spelling).

11 For extensive lists of onomatopoetic words, see and . 12 Howard Chaykin, American Flagg (Berkeley: Image Comics 2008). 13 For example Frank Miller, Frank Miller’s Complete Sin City Library (Milwaukie: Dark Horse, 2005) and Dave Sim, High Society (Kitchener: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1994). 14 Uli Oesterle, Hector Umbra (Hamburg: Carlsen, 2009): 37.

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A more substantial example may be found in Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical Fun Home. The narrator at one point relates her problems with obsessive compulsive disorder, and tells the story of how she started keeping a diary at the age of ten. Although her entries are at first restricted to factual accounts, she soon experiences what she herself calls (in retrospect) “a sort of epistemological crisis.”15 Since she cannot guarantee the absolute truth of her assertions, she starts to insert the words “I think” after every proposition. From the start, she writes these words “minutely-lettered.” The panels show some of her entries together with the “I thinks” as part of the visual depiction of her past. This verbal caveat is gradually reduced in visual form, until it is no longer recognizable as the symbolic sign that it was originally. As the narrator comments: “My I thinks were gossamer sutures in that gaping rift between signifier and signified. To fortify them, I perseverated until they were blots.”16 The symbols with which she used at first to express her epistemological doubt become iconically recognizable blots in her recounting of her daily experience, as the visual depiction of the diary in the comic makes clear. In the next step, the blots turn into a shorthand, “a curvy circumflex,” as she calls it: in fact a new sign that symbolizes the formerly verbal and then visual qualifications. But this is not the end of the process, for she then goes on to overwrite her diary entries with the new symbol, once more making her meaning recognizable in an iconic way. An even more explicit play with words and images, icons and symbols, can be found in Paul Karasik’s and David Mazzucchelli’s 1994 comic adaptation of Paul Auster’s novel City of Glass. At one point,17 the text (based on Auster’s novel) describes a prelapsarian state in which Adam not only (arbitrarily) gives names to the things, but where the connection between signifier and signified is necessary and absolute. The example that is given is the word “shadow.” To illustrate, the visual depiction shows Adam in one panel, looking at his own shadow (rendered as a series of black strokes that distinguish it from the ground), pointing at it, and calling it “shadow.” This act of naming is rendered in a speech bubble within the panel, the letters having a distinct font. In the next panel, we again see Adam standing, but this time, the form of the shadow is rendered graphically by the very word “shadow” – recognizable by the use of the same font that Adam had used earlier. The word (symbol) takes the place and the form of the formerly purely iconic sign for the shadow. Thus the symbol is iconized in that it visually resembles the shadow it is meant to represent. Here, the semiotic “language” of

15 Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Boston: Mariner, 2006): 141. 16 Bechdel, Fun Home, 142. 17 Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, City of Glass (New York: Picador, 2004): 39.

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comics – the oscillation of signs between icon and symbol – is used to render a theoretical state in which the original symbol (language) was not a symbol at all, but a different, pre-Saussurean kind of transcendental sign. In this religious account it is only later that, with the fall, the connection becomes as arbitrary and conventional as it is today. As a meta-comic, the panels are at the same time a reflection on the interrelations between the iconic and the symbolic properties of signs in comics.

Symbolization The predominance of iconic signs in the visual presentation of comics routinely leads to the assumption that their mode of presentation is dominantly “realist,” tying them to media like photography and film. This is, as will become clear, a double-bind for comics, as well as a double misunderstanding. When judged under a realist paradigm (that is, the assumption that comics are trying to represent “things as they are”) they cannot but fail, appearing to be reductive or even stereotyped. At the same time, the realism assumption is brought forth against comics through one of the most common critical arguments against them, namely that they demand a lower engagement of the imagination than purely textual media. In addition to the fact that this argument completely ignores the way that sequentiality functions in comics,18 it is also based on a misunderstanding of signs in comics: It systematically ignores the range of symbol signs, as well as the complicated interrelation between the icon and the symbol in comics. Furthermore, the claim assumes that the icon in comics is not merely iconic (similar) but rather mimetic (identical). If things depicted in comics truly “appeared as they are,” then we would indeed have little left to imagine or to understand except to make the (necessary) connection. But how “realistic” are comics? Iconic signs work through similarity. The stronger the similarity, the more “realistic” a sign is. But this claim begs the question: Can there be something like a “mimetic sign” in the sense of a sign whose similarity with the object it signifies is absolute? This mimetic sign’s ideal would not only be similarity, but sameness with its signified. Obviously, as an abstract sign system, language can never be

18 Comics only work if the reader actively provides what McCloud calls “closure” from each panel to the next (McCloud, Understanding Comics, 63ff.), while Groensteen calls comics “a genre founded on reticence” (Groensteen, System of Comics, 10). See also Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle, “Le fantasme de la parole,” Europe 720 (1989): 54–65 and Federico Fellini, “Federico Fellini sage comme la lune,” (Paris) Le Soir (August 1, 1990).

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composed of mimetic signs, for the connection between signifier and signified is overwhelmingly arbitrary. But what about visual signs? In order to answer this question, one might refer to René Magritte’s famous painting The Treachery of Images (1928–1929), where the image of a pipe is captioned with the text “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” And indeed, it is not a pipe, because it is the representation of a pipe. Visual mimetic signs are just as impossible to reduce as textual ones, because as representations they cannot be the represented without becoming it first. This property begs the question of totality, as discussed below and famously explored by Jorge Luis Borges in his story on the map/territory relation, “On Exactitude in Science.”19 Realism (or naturalism for that matter) always involves the presentation of reality, and as such, it presupposes someone who presents, and who consequently influences the presentation. Comics are never a perfect mimetic depiction of reality; on the contrary, they are quite emphatically a form of subjective realism. In this respect, they do not differ from other representational media in kind, but rather in degree, especially when compared to photographic media such as film or photography. In contrast to the latter, comics (usually) do not even try to create the illusion of being a “mirror to nature” but instead almost aggressively flaunt their artificiality with every drawn line. When looking at the vast majority of art styles employed, it is impossible to ignore the fact that in comics, every part of the visual presentation is created. The term realism has been used with widely differing meanings and often to conflicting ends. What most scholarly usages have in common is the aspiration for an objective depiction of things in the sense that nothing is added or subtracted from the thing depicted. If we relate this common denominator to the Peircean idea of the sign it is noteworthy that such concepts of realism focus exclusively on the relation between the sign and its object, the signifier and the signified. The interpretant plays no active role. But this model ignores that all signs in comics are made, and are therefore subjective and in need of interpretation. All mediated depiction is a selection made according to personal choices of the mediator, a phenomenon that narratology has tried to capture with the concept of focalization, highlighting that the world is not depicted as it really is, but as it appears to a specific perceiving consciousness. As a result, the way that reality is depicted can become a cognitive or psychological message in itself. This is obvious and unquestionable when the perspective is recognizable as that of a fictional character. In prose fiction, this would be the case of homodie-

19 Cf. Jorge Luis Borges, A Universal History of Infamy, trans. Thomas de Giovanni (London: Penguin, 1975).

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getic narration. To the extent that readers perceive the narrator as having a distinct personality, they assume that his or her depiction of reality is subjective, i.e. is filtered by a personal focus. In their earliest phases, graphic narratives appear to have abandoned the narrator through the de-emphasis or elimination of narratorial text. In recent decades, they have increasingly embraced distinct first-person narration, especially through the ever more popular genre of autobiographical comics that started with Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972) and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor (1976–2008).20 The use of this kind of narration may also be found in masterpieces such as Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) and Craig Thompson’s Blankets (2003).21 Blankets, the story of Thompson’s childhood in rural, fundamentalist America, drawn and written by Thompson himself, is especially rich in examples of interior focalization: Craig the child perceives the world around him, while some of his misperceptions are obviously not shared by Craig the grown-up narrator. Although subjectivism is unproblematic and might even be expected from single-authored autobiographical comics, it is equally to be assumed in any form of extradiegetic narration – even with narrators that cannot be personalized at all with the exception of being seen as the “eye of the camera.” All comics constitute a form of subjective realism, as Douglas Wolk has pointed out: [C]artooning is, inescapably, a metaphor for the subjectivity of perception. No two people experience the world the same way; no two cartoonists draw it the same way, and the way they draw it is the closest a reader can come to experiencing it through their eyes[.]22

In comics, the visual depiction of reality is (almost) always completely created, voluntarily constructed. This makes comics one of the heirs of modern art history’s attempts to turn the subjectivity of supposedly realistic depictions into an artistic program. Like impressionism, it insists on visually rendering things not as they are, but as they appear, to render sense impressions (and artistic interpretations of these impressions) rather than “realities.” And like expressionism, comics claim an individual style’s right to presenting the world as being expressive of something, to convey meaning in itself that is not bound to any kind of naturalistic or photo-realistic faithfulness; or in other words, in a way that gradually de-emphasizes iconic similarity. The expressive qualities of style may be seen as one of the means of promoting the shift in visual signs from icon

20 Justin Green, Binky Brown meets the Holy Virgin Mary (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2009). Harvey Pekar, Best of American Splendor (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005). 21 Bechdel, Fun Home; Craig Thompson, Blankets (Marietta: Top Shelf, 2003). 22 Douglas Wolk, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and what they Mean (Cambridge: Da Capo, 2007): 21.

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towards symbol. The use of colors or physical distortions, or different styles of outlines, when not based on likeness, is increasingly in need of convention so that they may be “understood” in their expressive potential. McCloud has elaborated on comics’ indebtedness to twentieth-century expressionism, a movement that developed such concepts as “angry reds […] placid blues […] anxious textures […] loud shapes […] quiet lines […],”23 all of which are set somewhere on the border of iconic similarity and symbolic convention. While some comics artists like Rory Hayes, David Hine, or Art Spiegelman in “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” show the direct influence of expressionist art, all comics art styles can be seen as carrying such expressive potential.24 Besides the subjective drawing style that leads to the creation of individual artistic symbolic conventions, abstraction is most conducive to the movement of the iconic sign towards more symbolic properties. In terms of visual presentation, abstracting means selecting some (and consequently ignoring other) differentiations. The process of abstraction begins as soon as one chooses to ignore, and therefore not depict, a differentiation. Arguably, since every depiction is finite, there is also a necessary limit to differentiation. The halftone printing technique, so very common throughout the history of comics and their production, is a perfect example for this inevitable necessity of the finiteness of differentiation. Halftone is a reprographic technique that is used to create the illusion of continuous tone gradations. The range from pure black to pure white alone theoretically contains an infinite amount of different grades of grey, and thus an infinite amount of differentiations between these tones. In order to approximate this range, the halftone technique reduces visual reproductions to a binary differentiation, using only two colors (in this case, black and white). Through the size, arrangement, and proximity of very small black dots on a white page, the human eye, unable to distinguish the individual dots’ form a certain distance, is tricked into seeing multiple shades of grey where there really is only one distinction. Thus, the very materiality of comics printed with the halftone technique necessitates an end to differentiation, as does the materiality of all created depiction. Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, in their groundbreaking graphic novel Signal to Noise (1992), have commented in a playful fashion on the finiteness of depiction that ultimately frustrates human attempts at reading meaning out of visual signs. The protagonist, a movie director with a terminal disease, at one point has what appears to be a stroke. Bent over, he starts to look intently at his own hand, commenting: “At a traffic light, I stole a glance at the lines on my palm – as I look

23 McCloud, Understanding Comics, 123. 24 Cf. McCloud, Understanding Comics, 126.

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at them now.”25 The next eight panels show what would in film terminology be called a “zooming in” onto the protagonist’s hand. The first panel, recognizably the close-up depiction of a hand, is captioned with a musing on the physical traces that life has left on it, such as scars. Thus, iconic visual signs enable a reading of the past. The second panel, an even more magnified view of the palm, asks “But my future?”, alluding to the practice of chirology, where a close reading of the lines on a hand is supposed to contain meaning about the owner’s future. This implies the hope that, upon close enough scrutiny, the visible will reveal some kind of crucial information. But in the graphic novel, this desire is frustrated in a telling and self-reflexive way: The next panel is indeed a further magnification, but not, as one would expect, of the physical object that is being depicted, namely the hand. Instead, it reveals the image of the hand as rendered through the graphic novel’s printing technique. In this panel and even more so in the four following, the reader becomes aware of the halftone printing technique used to render the image of the palm in the first place. That is, the visual scrutiny comes to a frustrating end with the realization that all depiction is an abstraction and cannot be taken for the thing it depicts. In a final twist of irony, the continued zooming into the halftone dots amounts to a completely black final panel. Here, suddenly, what was merely the increasing foregrounding of the limitations of iconic similarity becomes readable as purely symbolic: Finally, the protagonist gets his answer as to his future, in the symbolic association with black and (his own impending) death. This last point shows that the fluidity of signs leads not only from the symbolic to the iconic, but also vice versa. Abstraction demands an acceptance on the part of the viewer that gradually leads from illusion to convention, as the example from Signal to Noise has shown. Douglas Wolk describes this differentiation with the terms “retinal simplification” and “symbolic abstraction”: Cartooning is a whole different game. Its chief tools are distortion and symbolic abstraction […]. The simplifications of cartooning are symbolic even more than they are retinal: there are universally accepted scribbles that stand in for what mouths and noses and motion and sweat look like. Other kinds of visual shorthand imply other temporal, spatial, and emotional effects.26

Wolk uses this explanation to attempt a clear distinction between “drawing” and “cartooning,” though what he is actually talking about is a realist approach to depiction on the one hand (that therefore tries to restrict the necessary abstraction

25 Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, Signal to Noise (London: Victor Gollancz, 1992): 20. 26 Wolk, Reading Comics, 120.

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to retinal simplification) and an approach that embraces the symbolically creative potential of abstraction on the other hand. The terms work much less well for what Wolk’s primary purpose, since there are countless “drawings” by modern artists that could hardly be reduced to his first category. Like the game of fiction, the game of visual depiction (with its necessity for abstraction) is based on the participant’s willingness to be cognitively satisfied with what he gets – because this is all that constitutes the presented. Thus, a child that continuously interrupts a storyteller with demands for further information about the fictional world that is irrelevant to the telling of the story is not participating in the game correctly (or rather, the child is playing a different game). In the same sense, a viewer who is dissatisfied with the fact that a cartoon image of a face does not contain eyebrows and demands that they be drawn in before he continues to read can be said to “misuse” the image. As this example shows, abstraction is closely tied to the presentation of details, to the question of an image’s totality. The aspect of totality strongly divides visual and textual media: While language is efficient in its omissions, images are efficient in inclusion. Language can evoke details that are not directly mentioned (we might think, for example, of all the associations that come with the word “house”), but it necessarily leaves most of these unspecified. The attempt to exhaustively transpose the amount of detail possible to visual (and therefore spatial) media into the temporal medium of language would quickly become unmanageable. In order to get a sense of the length a textual description must have, and in order to adequately represent the original visual representation, we might recall Lichtenberg’s elaborate descriptions of Hogarth’s print series.27 Neither pole of the opposition between inclusion and omission is ever reached absolutely in depiction, whether verbal or pictorial. Without inclusion, there can be no depiction, even if the image is reduced to a single word (“house”) or a single stroke of a pen.28 But the image’s totality is, as we have seen, far from being absolute, as well. For a “total image,” or what we have called here a “mimetic sign,” would also be infinite in detail, like a Mandelbrot set. This kind of image is not only impossible to create (the Mandelbrot set, though theoretically infinite in detail, is only ever as detailed as the level of observation; everything

27 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Lichtenbergs Hogarth (Munich: Hanser, 1999). 28 A blank page cannot be easily said to constitute complete absence (only an absent page can), since it creates a certain ambiguity itself: whether it is supposed to be a depiction of nothing or of whiteness, such as a piece of paper or snow. Blankets continuously reflects these ambiguities in that it is both obsessed with the depiction of snow (rendered by not drawing anything where the snow is supposed to be) and of tracks in the snow, the tracks being absences in the snow, that are nevertheless depicted by a presence on the page, namely black markings.

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below that falls prey to “retinal illusion”), it would also be impossible to perceive. How long does it take to see everything that can be seen on Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus (1529)? The evaluation of the relative importance of details is an essential cognitive activity when perceiving images. We “understand” images, that is, we cognitively process them, by recognizing the relevant and ignoring the irrelevant. This ignoring is facilitated by the fact that we “read” images spatially and therefore nonlinearly. No sign can therefore be completely mimetic in respect to its details, though throughout art history, painters like Canaletto or Altdorfer have pursued this Holy Grail. Some comics (following Hogarth) have adhered to this tradition through elaborate drawing styles and an obsession with detail, but these are clearly in the minority. In general, comics profit strongly from subjective aesthetics that do not regard a hierarchization of the elements of an image (including the omission of details) as a problem. In early comics, abstraction through omission was often born of necessity: Tight schedules, cheap means of production, as well as mere artistic ineptitude led in the worst cases to the kind of reduced and clumsy visual style that is still sometimes associated with the claim that comics in general are geared towards children. But by now, while developing more and more elaborate and meticulously detailed styles, comics have long since found their masters of abstraction, with whom every omission is a strategic aesthetic decision and an artistic triumph. To this end, they have developed a plethora of visual signs that were mostly derived from icons, but that have become more or less symbols through abstraction. To the uninitiated reader, it might not be immediately clear that a speech bubble with a pointer, or tail, that points to the speaker is meant to imply speech, while a bubble that is connected to the speaker through a chain of smaller bubbles is meant to imply thought, or that the jagged outline of the bubble implies screaming, and so on. Comics have developed their own symbolic sign language – or rather languages, as there are significant cultural differences, for example between western comics and Japanese manga.29 These conventionalized symbols are seamlessly integrated with iconic signs that rely purely on similarity, as well as a whole different set of symbols (textual language signs) that are frequently iconized. Signs in comics oscillate constantly between these two poles, making the reading of a comic a highly complex (though effectively effortless) semiotic process indeed.

29 Cf. McCloud, Understanding Comics, 131.

Angelica Michelis

“Where Bees Pray on Their Knees”: Spiritual and Religious Symbolism in Carol Ann Duffy’s The Bees The relationship between poetry and religion has been a persistent theme and creative motivation in British poetry from the Renaissance onwards. The spiritual in poetry and poetry as spirituality ignited the imagination of the poets and became, furthermore an enduring subject of a wide range of essayistic writing on the meaning and role of poetry. In these creative and programmatic texts poetry has often been imagined as a carrier of spiritual truth for the present and, even more importantly so for the future. From the nineteenth century onwards religious and poetic language are conceived of as coinciding increasingly when it comes to the message itself and even more so when it comes to the way in which the message is enunciated. But, what happens to poetry as a source of moral and aesthetic guidance at a time of increasing secularism? Can poetry function as a secular prayer? The following article will discuss a selection of poems from Carol Ann Duffy’s The Bees and the ways in which they re-define and comment critically on the relationship between poetry and religion. The focus will be on how the eponymous bees and their symbolic power create meaningful links between the various poetic texts and by doing so inspire connections between the poems themselves and furthermore, encourage the development of overarching themes and arguments. Religions are poems. They concert our daylight and dreaming mind, our emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture into the only whole thinking: poetry. Nothing’s said till it’s dreamed out in words and nothing’s true that figures in words only.1

For Les Murray the relationship between religion and poetry is performed on a level of transformation, if not transubstantiation where both elements of the equation – religion and poetry – are given equal value and power: religion comes into being in and as poetry and vice versa, poetry’s rhetoric and meaning is directly

1 Les Murray, “Poetry as Religion,” in Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1998): 267, ll. 1–6.

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contingent on the discursive power of religion(s). If religions are poems no symbolic language is required since, as Murray’s poem suggests, it is via its poetic conventions and features that the reader will approach ‘the meaning’ of religion. Naturally, it is not suggested here that Murray’s poem is meaningful in itself and therefore not in need of a critical and aesthetic enquiry. On the contrary, the simplicity of the opening statement, “Religions are poems,” is deceptive and hides a much more complicated and complex analogy. Whilst Murray does not ‘need’ symbolism when proposing an aesthetic and semantic correlation between the two discursive practices, he equally does not provide an ontological account of religion or of poetry that can exist independent from each other: Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition; like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete, with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that? (ll. 10–12)

Whereas the opening gambit – equating religion with poetry – insinuates that the poem will come up with a meaningful definition of both, the above quoted stanza puts paid to such expectations. Rather than being poetry, as suggested in the first line, now religion is like poetry, implying a comparison that works more on a level of contiguity than similarity. In order to create a relationship between the two, the poem has to separate the two spheres by introducing symbolic value via the meaning of “like.” Furthermore, it seems that poetry as such is given the onerous task to symbolize how religions work when the poem concludes: Both are given, and intermittent as the action of those birds – crested pigeon, rosella parrot – who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut. (ll. 22–24)

It is only via the poetic conventions of metaphor, metonymy and symbolic substitution that religion comes into being, and although the poem sets out to talk about “Poetry and Religion” (as indicated by its title) and then equates religion with poetry (“Religions are poems”), what we are left with in the final stanza is semiotic deferral and symbolic imagery. Murray’s attempt to synonymize poetry with religion in his poem implies that there is something fundamental and profound that connects the two spheres. The theory that there is a special spiritual and philosophical link between poetry and religion has played a crucial part in western culture and can be regarded as central to the history of poetry as a genre. Sidney’s Defence of Poetry emphasizes their mutual roots by referring back to biblical and classical texts and, later on in the nineteenth century intellectual debates and religious poetry reflected

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with new vigor on the significance of the connection. As Cynthia Scheinberg argues: Victorian religious poetry became an important site for presenting divergent religious perspectives, providing a dynamic forum where writers frequently explored the fraught experience of living as a religious ‘other’ in England.2

In addition to its function as a site where religious diversity could be explored and discursively lived, poetry in the Victorian age was also gradually given the task of providing spiritual guidance for a populace that found itself living in an increasingly secular world. In 1888, at the end of a century shaped by the turmoil of industrialization, revolutions and Darwinism, Matthew Arnold not only envisaged poetry as the future of creed and faith but, furthermore, could see the future of religion only as an attachment to poetry: The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. […] But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry.3

Arnold’s look at the future is influenced by and contributes to the atmosphere of doubt and skepticism typical for the transitional period of the Victorian fin de siècle. However, the special relationship between religion and poetry featured also in earlier intellectual writing on the subject. Carlyle famously associated poetry with a spiritual prophecy that was defined by the underlying discursive structures of the classic epos and the biblical narratives of the prophets. As he writes in 1841 in the “The Hero as Poet”: Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of them. In some old languages, again, the titles are synonymous; Vates means both Prophet and Poet: and indeed at all times, Prophet and Poet, well understood, have much kindred of meaning. Fundamentally indeed they are still the same; in this most important respect especially, that they have penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of the Universe; what Goethe calls ‘the open secret!’ […] This divine mystery is in all times and in all places; veritably is. […] But now I

2 Cynthia Scheinberg, “Victorian Poetry and Religious Diversity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000): 159–179, 160. 3 Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” in id., English Literature and Irish Politics, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1960– 1977) 9:161–188, 161.

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say, whoever may forget this divine mystery, the Vates, whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it; is a man sent hither to make it more impressively known to us.4

For Carlyle the link between poetry and religion is fundamental and based on the common factor they share: access to the divine. In order to explicate their mutual root, Carlyle interestingly refers to a poet – Goethe – and thus, similar to Arnold, prioritizes a poetic and not a religious discourse as context. A decade and a half later, Elizabeth Barrett Browning further develops this notion of poetry as prophecy when her eponymous heroine Aurora Leigh describes poetry as defined by a divine insight that allows the poet a unique access to reality: […] Natural things And Spiritual, – who separates those two In art, in morals or the social drift, Tears up the bond of nature and brings death, Paints futile pictures, writes unreal verse, Leads vulgar days, deals ignorantly with men, Is wrong, in short, at all points. […] […] Without the spiritual, observe, The natural’s impossible – no form, No motion: without sensuous spiritual Is inappreciable, – no beauty or power: And in this twofold sphere the twofold man (For still the artist is intensely a man) Holds firmly by the natural, to reach The spiritual beyond it, – fixes still The type with mortal vision, to pierce through, With eyes immortal, to the antitype Some call the ideal, – better called the real […].5

For Barrett Browning prophesy, like poetry, speaks in tongues and employs the same coded and symbolic language that gives poetry its distinct generic identity. And although she is at great pains to provide proof that “That very natural flower which grows on earth | Implies a flower upon the spiritual side,6 “Aurora Leigh” is, as Cora Kaplan suggests, a text whose meta-narrative is much more concerned with poetry as a public rather than a spiritual discourse: “Gender difference, class

4 Thomas Carlyle, “The Hero as Poet,” in id., On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896–1899) 5:78–114, 80–81. 5 Elisabeth Barrett Browning, “Aurora Leigh,” in Aurora Leigh and Other Poems, ed. Cora Kaplan (London: Woman’s Press, 1978): 38–390, quot. at 302–303, ll. 763–783. 6 Browning, “Aurora Leigh,” 304–305, ll. 840–841.

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warfare, the relation of art to politics: these three subjects […] are all engaged as intersecting issues in the poem.”7 Whilst Carlyle, Arnold and Barrett Browning are not in complete accordance when they reflect on the role of poetry and the poet, what all three have in common is a deep confidence in the way poetry can be a carrier of spiritual truth for the present and, even more importantly, will be so for the future. From the nineteenth century onwards, one might argue, religious and poetic language are conceived of as coinciding increasingly when it comes to the message itself and even more so when it comes to the way in which the message is enunciated. Furthermore, towards the end of the Victorian age Arnold is convinced that as a cultural and spiritual discourse religion will be surmounted by poetry, the latter becoming the main source of moral and aesthetic guidance: We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.8

Thus, modern poetry is conceived of as inheriting the social and cultural umbrella function hitherto provided by religious discourse. To a certain extent, it wants to lay religion to rest but, at the same time, cannot deny that its own sense of being is deeply indebted to religion as a discourse of spirituality. Torn by this ambiguity, poetry, one might argue, will always suffer from a Bloomian ‘anxiety of influence’ when it comes to its relationship to the discourse of religion since, whilst being a source of inspiration, it will also always make it suffer from the ‘burden of belatedness,’ to remain in Bloomian terminology. Although Bloom is mainly concerned with the struggle between master and ephebe poet, I suggest religion and poetry are organized in similar battle lines since both, at least to a certain extent, are vying for the position of main spiritual instructor. From a Bloomian perspective, poetry could therefore be understood as an incarnation of religion on a level of discursivity and would thus be affected by similar oedipal anxieties as are master (religion) and ephebe (poetry):

7 Cora Kaplan, “Introduction” to Browning, Aurora Leigh, 5–36, 5. 8 Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” 162. Arnold’s examples of poetry are part of what he refers to as “classic” poetry (Milton, Shakespeare, Dante and Homer) and what he is looking for is above all timelessness. However, what is of interest here is the way in which he sees religion as the source of and as that which has to be overcome by poetry for the latter to emerge as the discourse that will “interpret life for us.”

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All poetic odes of incarnation are therefore Immortality odes, and all of them rely on a curious divinity that the ephebe has imparted successfully, not to himself, but to the precursor. In making the precursor a god, the ephebe already has begun a movement away from him, a primary revision that imputes error to the father, a sudden inclination or swerve away from obligation.9

Whereas Bloom talks of individual works of poetry by singular poets one could also transfer the relationship between incarnation and immortality to the way in which the discursive power and meaning of religion inhabits the genre of poetry as its own internal division and disruption. This disruptive moment, which also works self-referentially as a discourse of creativity, I would argue, is of particular aesthetic relevance and most visible in secular poetry in which specific tropes and symbols constitute a constant oscillation between the spiritual and the profane. In the following I will present a reading of a selection of poems from Carol Ann Duffy’s most recent collection The Bees, where I will take a closer look at the use of symbolic language and the way in which religious and secular meanings grate against each other and by doing so open up the poems to a meta-poetical reading. The blurb of Duffy’s collection introduces The Bees as: a work of great ecological and spiritual power, and Duffy’s clearest affirmation yet of her belief in the poem as ‘secular prayer,’ as the means by which we remind ourselves what is most worthy of our attention and concern, our passion and our praise.10

Clearly indicating that Duffy’s poetry should be understood as a poetry of guidance, this introduction also refers directly back to her earlier poem “Prayer” in which the sound of trees, a piano, trains, the radio, and poetry itself are presented as secular prayers in a world where religion has lost its role as a spiritual leader. Its final stanza not only injects the monotonous litany of the fishing forecast with the sublime of poetry, it also seems to suggest that the only spiritual safety net a post-modern world can provide is the aesthetic and volatile predictability of language: Darkness outside. Inside the radio’s prayer – Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.11

The poems gathered in The Bees often come across like a variation of this theme, in terms of the subjects they introduce and discuss but also in terms of structure and formal organization. The last stanza of the poem “Luke Howard, Namer of

9 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003): 13. 10 Carol Ann Duffy, The Bees (London: Picador, 2011). 11 Carol Ann Duffy, “Prayer,” in Mean Time (London: Anvil, 1993): 52, ll. 13–14.

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Clouds,” for example, not only echoes the rhythm and structure of the aforementioned poem, it also plays on a similar combination of unreliability (the constant change of cloud formation) and a feeling of certainty inculcated by the use of repetition: And knew love goes naming, even a curl of hair – thus, Cirrus, Cumulus, Stratus, Nimbus.12

This see-sawing between uncertainty and a sense of confidence provided by the aesthetics of poetry is further intensified by presenting Howard as a secular Adam. In the Old Testament one of Adam’s first acts is the introduction of a nomenclature system of all things: “And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field” (Gen 2:20). This act of naming can also be understood as an act of creativity which binds humanity into the divine and by doing so establishes the link between god and man (and it is explicitly man in a purely masculine sense) on the level of creation and reproduction. In 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson picks up this notion of creative naming by associating it directly with the role of the poet: the poet is the namer, or language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own and not another’s, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary. […] For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. [… B]ut the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expression or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree.13

Similar to Emerson’s concept of the poet as a secularized god,14 Duffy sees the poet as a namer of things and emotions, but in her poetry the emphasis is often shifted onto the act of naming itself. It is not the given certainties of the sky that the Luke Howard of her poem is interested in, but the changeable nature of the

12 Carol Ann Duffy, “Luke Howard, Namer of Clouds,” in The Bees, 46, ll. 20–23. 13 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003): 259– 285, 271. 14 In his essay Emerson also refers to language as “fossil poetry” and follows up this Darwinian image in the following way: “As the limestone of the continent consist of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now in their secondary use have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin” (Nature, 271).

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clouds; and rather than the simple act of perception when looking at the sky, it is the act of interpretation, that enchants the “sky’s lad”: but loved clouds most – dragons and unicorns; Hamlet’s camels, weasels and whales; the heads of heroes; the sword of Excalibur […].15

Referencing myths and fables and a piece of dialogue between Hamlet and Polonius at a point where Hamlet’s mental state is questioned by the authority figures of the play, re-imagines the act of naming and, as a corollary the role of the poet, not only as an exercise in intertextuality but, furthermore, questions the finality and stability of names. This rather tentative approach to the divine act of naming can be linked to the role of the female poet who, although central to Barrett Browning’s ideas developed in “Aurora Leigh”, is not included in the intellectual musings of Carlyle, Arnold, Bloom and Emerson. As I have argued elsewhere,16 whilst the aspect of gender difference, and therefore access to a different kind of experience compared to the one of male poets, has an important impact on what is traditionally referred to as “women’s poetry,” the work produced by female poets cannot (and should not) be reduced to them just adding a ‘female voice’ to aspects of meta-poetical ideas. Apart from the rather difficult and complex relationship between lived (female) experience and poetic discourse, poetry written by women is often at its most interesting where it interweaves different, and sometimes contradictory, aspects of the construction of subjectivity in order to question the notion of a stable fixed self, be it one based on gender identity or the figure of the poet. Rather than offering simply an alternative view of reality, many of Duffy’s poems in the current as in previous volumes explore and lay bare the very processes of identity construction, and by doing so examine the genre of poetry as a discursive space which allows for a tentative probing of the possibilities and limitations of poetic and symbolic language. By imagining poetry as a tentative and continuously deferred naming, the poems collected in The Bees also re-define and comment critically on the relationship between poetry and religion. It is the eponymous bees and their symbolic power that create meaningful links between the various poetic texts and by doing so inspire connections between the poems themselves and furthermore, encou15 Duffy, “Luke Howard,” ll. 11–14. 16 Angelica Michelis, “‘Me not know what these people mean’: Gender and Identity,” in The Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy: ‘Choosing Tough Words,’ ed. Angelica Michelis and Antony Rowland (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003): 77–98.

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rage the development of overarching themes and arguments. In Duffy’s collection some poems reflect directly on bees (“Bees,” “Virgil’s Bees,” “Hive,” “Telling the Bees,” “The Bee Carol,” “The Human Bee,” “The Rare Bee”), whereas in others bees appear fleetingly and at times unexpectedly. Interestingly, the poems often create a connection between bees, poetry, words and writing which seems to suggest that the symbolism works in a rather self-referential manner. In order to discuss these connections further, it is necessary to approach the bee as a specific symbol genealogically and contextually. Michael Ferber in a Dictionary of Literary Symbols refers to a wide range of meanings of bees in relation to literature, religion and mythology: Bees have been highly prized for their honey and wax as long as we have record, and much beekeeping lore can be found in ancient literature […]. They are social insects with a highly organized hive ‘government’, they cull nectar from many kinds of flowers, and they are both useful and dangerous to people. These obvious characteristics and others less obvious have made them frequent emblems or analogues in literature.17

For the Greeks, as Ferber goes on to explicate, the bee symbolized “eloquence or poetic gifts”18 and “the poet himself or herself might be called a bee”19 and poets such as Wordsworth, Dickinson and Rilke establish links between bees and poetry. The self-government of the hive provides analogies to human social organization and because of their proverbial busyness / business, the bee became an appropriate symbol for the ideology of capitalism during the Industrial Revolution.20 In addition, bees were often seen as warlike and aggressive, an aspect that contributed to their ‘two-sidedness’ and the general ambiguity underlying their symbolic meaning (“honey and sting”). In the context of Christian religion, bees can symbolize the immortality of the soul and the resurrection, Christian forgiveness and justice, and in many other religions, bees symbolize fertility, chastity, purity, and the soul. More currently, bees have also become an emblem for apocalypse and ecological catastrophe since in recent years there has been a mysterious disappearance of bees and deaths of entire colonies all over the world. The global decline in the bee population has far reaching consequences

17 Michael Ferber, “Bee,” A Dictionary of Literary Symbols (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007): 21– 24, 21. 18 Ferber, “Bee,” 21. 19 Ferber, “Bee,” 22. 20 The bee was, for example, adopted as a symbol for Manchester during the Industrial Revolution, and in 1842 seven bees were included in the crest of the city’s arms.

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for agriculture, food supply and ecosystems and there is a danger that by losing the bees as pollinators, human survival in the long term will be jeopardized.21 The depth and complexity of the symbolic meaning of bees does not allow for a narrowing down of its semantics, on the contrary it directly encourages an opening up of the reading and understanding of the poems. Furthermore, since the bee as a symbol is so strongly intertwined with religious and mythological systems and has, at the same time, gained a very particular contemporary ecological relevance, it could be read as being part of and contributing to the tension between religion and secularity that itself is so particular to poetry. Eavan Boland comments on this tension when referring to Arnold’s idea that the strongest part of religion is its unconscious poetry. She rather shrewdly points out the irony underlying such thinking: To invest the imagination with sacramental powers restores to poetry, not its religious force, but its magical function. Poetry, after all, has always had a connection with magic. In the oldest societies they were part and parcel of each other. But magic is the most inferior of all the past associations of poetry, and of all the present temptations for the poet. Magic after all is the search for control over an unruly environment; and that control is achieved in part by secret words known only to a few men.22

By associating poetry directly with religion, poets lose their humanity, according to Boland. And rather than leading “through the rite of poetry […] to the ritual and from the ritual to the reality,” the best a poetry based on the search for control can achieve is “a decorative simplification of life based on the dread of it.”23 Whilst Boland further on in her essay is more interested in reflecting on the relationship between truth and beauty in order to define the role of poetry, what is interesting in the present context is Boland’s emphasis on doubt and ambiguity, or as she later on calls it “the dual possibilities within poetry.”24 By forcing a simplistic link between poetry and religion and turning it into “the religion of poetry” or “poetry as religion,” as Boland argues, one loses sight of the complexities underlying the connection, and by doing so squanders the opportunity to explore the creative potential that emerges when focusing on the friction and tension between the two discursive systems. In Duffy’s poems, the bee is utilized as a symbol that emphasizes crisis rather than cohesion. This is partly because of the way in which it is

21 For a further discussion of this issue, see Alison Benjamin’s article, “Last Flight of the Honeybee?” (London) Guardian (May 31, 2008), available online at (acc. March 5, 2013). 22 Eavan Boland, “Religion and Poetry,” The Furrow 33.12 (1982): 743–750, 744. 23 Boland, “Religion and Poetry,” 745. 24 Boland, “Religion and Poetry,” 748.

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used structurally as a means of both conjoining and separating the various poetic texts and partly because of the multifaceted and polysemic genealogy underlying the symbolism of the bee in western culture. By focusing on the plethora of meanings associated with the bee, the opening poem “The Bees,” for example, encourages a reading that rather than developing in a straight and singular line of flight, simulates the swarm of the bees that is one and many at the same time: Here are my bees, brazen, blurs on paper, besotted; buzzwords, dancing their flawless, airy maps.25

The flow of alliteration plays on the bumbling flight of the bees and by doing allows the words to fly off the page only to be re-rooted back onto paper when poetry is linked symbolically to the bee. Bees act as a symbol for poetry and the meaning of poetry but also as a symbol for the poet: the “poet bees” (l. 5) create poetry by gathering pollen in the parts of flowers, in daffodil, thistle, rose, even the golden lotus […]. (ll. 6–8)26

Associating the bees with the act of creation and creativity bestows a divine wisdom on them (“thus – || wise – and know of us”, ll. 9–10) which is then further linked to aesthetic production as such: “and honey is art” (l. 13). By utilizing the bee as a symbol for poetry, creation, creativity, divine knowledge and religious belief and placing it at the core of the poem, its poetic discourse comes into being as a constant oscillation between different meanings and aesthetic systems. Whereas for Murray religion is poetry, for Duffy the bees enact poetry as religion and vice versa. This performative moment is always on display and thus ensures that the poem operates as a ‘secular prayer’ with the bee as a volatile signifier whose meaning cannot be subsumed by either system. Moreover, because of its over-rich connotations with, for example fertility, immortality and resurrection, the bee is always visible in its symbolic artificiality and as a cultural construction and is therefore never meaningful ‘in itself.’ The poem attempts to utilize this polysemy of the bee in relation to its own parallel discourse of self-referentiality:

25 Duffy, “Bees,” in The Bees, 3, ll. 1–4. 26 Singling out the lotus is of particular interest here since in Buddhism this is the flower of purity and spontaneous generation and therefore a symbol of divine birth.

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it wants to talk about poetry, what poetry is (bees are poetry, poets are bees), but can only do so in reference to the constant deferral and oscillation of meaning underlying the symbol of the bee. In “Che cos’è la poesia?” Jacques Derrida points out that the definition of poetry can only ever be achieved as and in the poetic paradigm and as an on-going referring back to itself: You will call poem a silent incantation, the aphonic wound that, of you, from you, I want to learn by heart. It thus takes place, essentially, without one’s having to do it or make it: it lets itself be done, without activity, without work, in the most sober pathos, a stranger to all production, especially to creation. The poem falls to me, benediction, coming of (or from) the other. Rhythm but dissymmetry. There is never anything but some poem, before any poiesis.27

Presenting poetry as “the religion of the future,” as has been done in so many metapoetical and meta-religious essays in the Victorian age, is a clandestine, if not unconscious acknowledgement that by drawing religion into the realm of the prosaic its spiritual essence will be lost. By “translating” religion into and as poetry, the two systems are set up as rivals (in a Bloomian sense) but, paradoxically, also understood as sharing a sense of spirituality that cannot be transferred into the mode of, for example, philosophy or prose. Whilst the essence of poetry is not the essence of religion, one could argue, both discourses know intuitively that they cannot communicate outside themselves and that they are therefore beyond definition. The symbolic value of the bee and the way it is utilized in Duffy’s volume seems to reinforce the religious / secular division that inhabits the bee but also, paradoxically, represents an attempt to eradicate this internal rupture by drawing together the mundane and the sacred (“secular prayer”). In addition, many of the poems are overtly self-referential in their attempt to communicate and establish the function of poetry in relation to social and historical reality. “Last Post” is a direct reference to Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” and as an intertextual exercise brackets the lament for two of the last three surviving veterans of the First World War between a reflection on the mnemonic function of poetry: If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin […]. If poetry could truly tell it backwards, then it would.28

27 Jacques Derrida, “Che cos’è la poesia?,” in A Derrida Reader. Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991): 221–273, 221. 28 Carol Ann Duffy, “Last Post,” in The Bees, 4–5, ll. 1, 27–28.

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The six octaves of “Scheherazade” and their intricate and semi-regular rhyme scheme contemplate imagination by pairing and contrasting opposites in order to question the very difference on which they are built: Talking lips don’t grow cold; babble and jabber. Inside a beehive, a fortune. Abracadabra. What was lost was held inside a tale. The tall stories I told utterly real.29

Other poems, such as “Ariel,” exploit in depth the way in which poetry plays with double meanings, paradox and opposites. The title is not only an intertextual reference to Sylvia Plath’s famous poem and the collection in which it was published, but points also to Blake’s poem “And did those feet in ancient time” and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Ariel is a prophetic name for Jerusalem (hence the reference to Blake) and as such opens up the poem’s reading to a wide range of interpretation by transferring Blake’s satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution to environmental and ecological destruction in late capitalism. The link to Plath’s poem evolves on a level of literal mimicry (the title) and one of structure since both poems use a dual register where images of bucolic / sexual pleasure are counterbalanced with fear of annihilation. A further context emerges when Duffy’s poem is read in relation to Plath’s sequence of Bee poems in which bees and bee keeping are symbolic of a wide range of psychological and emotional frameworks. “Beekeeping,” as Christina Britzolakis argues, “is associated for Sylvia Plath not only with the infantile fantasy of the omnipotent father – bees were the academic specialism of Otto Plath […] – but also with female fertility and reproductive power.”30 The polysemic value of the bee and its ability to combine contradictory meanings turns it into a symbol that when used in a poetic context will always bring into play a continuous deferral of meaning. Britzolakis refers to this in her analysis of Plath’s Bee poems when she discusses the meaning of the beehive: The beehive with its highly structured division of labour, is a classical trope of the hierarchically ordered, industrious collectivity. Yet it is also a rich source of paradox and contradiction. For example, it is a matriarchal society of female producers, a detail which is crucial

29 Duffy, “Scheherazade,” in The Bees, 7–8, ll. 33–40. 30 Christina Britzolakis, “Ariel and Other Poems,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, ed. Jo Gill (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006): 107–123, 119.

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to Plath’s reflection on power. It is also, of course, an authoritarian society. The hive allows the poet to assume multiple and constantly changing points of identification […].31

The constant shift of meaning in Duffy’s “Ariel” occurs on a meta-poetical level when the poem situates itself in the context of other poetical works, and by doing so asks the reader to take into account other perspectives and texts. This moment of oscillation is then reinforced by the structure of the poem itself which is dominated by images that combine traditional pastoral poetry with a postmodern language of apocalypse: Where the bee sucks, neonicotinoid insecticides in a cowslip’s bell lie, in field purple with lavender, yellow with rape, and on the sunflower’s upturned face; on land monotonous with cereals and grain, merrily, merrily; sour in the soil, sheathing the seed, systemic in the plants and crops, the million acres to be ploughed, seething in the orchard now, under the blossom that hangs on the bough.32

The pastoral bliss introduced in the first line is systematically undermined and overshadowed by images of destruction and a natural world that is at breaking point, the latter visually emphasized by the line breaks in the poem. Lines such as “yellow with rape” further reinforce the poem’s dual register and add more layers to the constant shift between representations of aesthetic beauty with those of violence and imminent apocalyptic catastrophe. The bee as an over-rich and contradictory symbol with its genealogical roots in religion and the spiritual transfers its plethora of significations to scenarios of ecological and economic disaster and thus turns the poem into a secular lament. Furthermore, the various links to other poetic texts and the way in which those are embedded in their own specific cultural, literary and historical contexts provide a self-referential state-

31 Britzolakis, “Ariel and Other Poems,” 119–120. 32 Duffy, “Ariel,” in The Bees, 11, ll. 1–17.

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ment about the role and function of poetry in a modern world. By doing so, the poem creates a link with literary-historical and literary-theoretical debates about the relationship between poetry and religion referred to earlier on since its main rhetoric engages with the idea of poetry as inheriting its role of spiritual guidance. In addition to the texts discussed above, many other poems in Duffy’s volume use the bee and its complex symbolism in order to comment on the state of the society, the environment and the spiritual health of a post-modern world. Some of them use the trope in an explicit and overt manner (“Virgil’s Bees,” “Hive,” “The Bee Carol,” “Telling the Bees,” “The Human Bee” and “A Rare Bee”); others are visited by bees and make use the symbol in a more subtle and elusive way (“Poetry,” “Snow,” “Sung,” “Valentines”). And whilst not all of these poems engage in depth with the complex subject of the poem as a “secular prayer” and the relationship between poetry and religion, the subject does inhabit the themes and poetic structures to a great extent. By using a potent symbol such as the bee, itself saturated by meanings that often grate against each other, Duffy’s poems allow the emergence of new contexts and debates in relation to the historical and discursive links between poetry and religion. This is of particular relevance when reflecting on the meaning of poetry as a ‘secular prayer’, a phrase that comes across as deceptively simple and uncomplicated. However, not unlike Murray’s attempt at placing poetry and religion symmetrically next to each other, the notion of ‘translating’ religion into poetry is much more complex than it seems at first glance. If poetry as a secular prayer is able to translate religion into poetry – or even to replace religion, as Arnold suggested – the process of translation itself will leave its traces. As Jacques Derrida in his discussion of Walter Benjamin’s essay on translation argues: [A] translation espouses the original when the two adjoined fragments, as different as they can be, complete each other so as to form a larger tongue in the course of a survival that changes them both. For the native tongue of the translator, as we have noted, is altered as well. Such at least is my interpretation – my translation, my ‘task of the translator.’ It is what I have called the translation contract: hymen or marriage contract with the promise to produce a child whose seed will give rise to history and growth.33

Duffy’s bees in their attempt to wed the mundane with the sacred in order to create a poetry that is indebted to both are in a constant process of transubstantiation as symbols: their symbolic power is part of the religious as well as the secular

33 Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours Babel,” in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (New York: Cornell UP, 1985): 165–207, 190–191.

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sphere but they do not belong to either. And the translation of religion into poetry by transforming the poems into ‘secular prayers’ can only be accomplished as “a poetic transposition (Umdichtung),”34 as an aesthetic of failure.

34 Derrida, “Des Tours Babel,” 189.

Hester Jones

The Language of the Deep: Symbolism and Its Place in Twentieth-century Religious Poetry This paper explores the use of symbolism in religious language. It begins with a discussion of theological accounts of symbolism in religious writing, and focuses especially on the work of Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner. It acknowledges the decline in such religious symbolism in modernist and post-modernist writing, and, following Tillich, asserts the need for a renewal of symbolic language in Protestant writing in particular. It draws on Rahner’s interest in the idea of depth, to indicate that this symbol may be viewed as densely and imaginatively significant, and of especial interest in poetry informed by a protestant sensibility. The article begins, therefore, by exploring briefly some critiques of the idea of depth, both alert to its potential (Catherine Keller’s, for example) and also more challenging of its assumptions (Eagleton’s account) before proceeding to discuss the use of the symbolic term ‘depth’ and its cognates (‘the deep’, for example) in some poems and prose work by the twentieth-century poet W. H. Auden, whose sensibility was closely informed by his reading of the theologian Kierkegaard. In these cases, ‘depth’ and ‘the deep’ acquire powerful resonance and become the means by which the poet, despite perceiving his culture as predominantly secular, may nonetheless imagine the workings of grace amidst such complexity. In his essay “Religious Symbolism,” the theologian Paul Tillich writes that religious symbols, in common with all symbols, point beyond themselves, but, unlike signs, also participate in the reality and power to which they allude. They “open up, so to speak, in two directions – in the direction of reality and in the direction of the mind,” and, being religious, the reality they point to is that of the ground of being, ultimate reality. Theology is able to conceptualize, explain and criticize such symbols, as Tillich puts it, “from the inside” the bounds of its symbolic meaning. However, Tillich goes on to argue that many such symbols have become meaningless because removed from this conceptual framework, and disintegration has followed. Furthermore, he suggests that Protestantism has contributed significantly to this process of gradual decay and urges for “an attitude in which it is again able to accept symbols.”1

1 Paul Tillich, “Theology and Symbolism,” in Religious Symbolism, ed. F. Ernest Johnson (New York: Kennikat P, 1969): 107–117, quotations at 109, 113, 116.

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Echoing this sense of a need to “discover a new respect for sacred symbols” and be “alert to the emergence of new or recovered symbols of the sacred,” Paul Avis draws on some of Tillich’s distinctions and, in particular, his concern with the willing cooperation of the reader or audience in the reception of symbolism. He writes: “we are not passive in symbolising, we have to exert our creative, constructive powers […] we need to participate in it by imaginative indwelling.”2 Following Tillich, Stanley Hopper also invokes Carl Jung in understanding how the resorting to the unconscious may be viewed as a consequence of the collapse of religious symbolism. Hopper particularly focuses on Jung’s remark that: Whoever has chosen the state of spiritual poverty, the true heritage of a Protestantism lived out consistently to the end, goes the way of the soul that leads to the water […]. Water is the commonest symbol for […] spirit that has become unconscious.3

Hopper argues that this Protestant crisis reacts against the conversion of symbols from means of communication to “false centers of objectivization,” an alteration that comes about when religious symbols cease to communicate the nature of transcendence and instead themselves become a focus of attention. Hopper concludes, therefore, that the Protestant protest’s call to people to come to themselves and be “exposed to the real abyss” may lead to maturity and strength, but that as often the call is resisted or, having found themselves, such people then dispense with the restrictions of the institutional church. By contrast, Catholic witness offers a “mystical security” amidst the encounter with the abyss, a way of, as it were, holding off the radical challenge of the present through an affiliation with a mother-substitute. Hopper understands Tillich as asserting, however, that Protestant protest “engages” with what is present, however great its weakness, and sees grace as appearing through this situation. Tillich writes: “the depth of every present is its power to transform the past into a future.” Such depth can only be discovered through an act that “penetrates to the deepest level of reality, to its transcendent ground. Such an act is what is in the religious tradition is called ‘faith’.” Protestantism, therefore, challenges the claims of symbols that aspire to absolutism; and Protestant symbols themselves are “at work wherever reality is transformed into an active expression of a Gestalt of grace.” Such a process necessarily involves contradiction, since the Protestant principle aims to form people who as Christians are artists, rather than to make art:

2 Paul Avis, God and the Creative Imagination: Metaphor, Symbol and Myth in Religion and Theology (London and New York: Routledge, 1999): 112, 103. 3 Stanley Hopper, “The Future of Religious Symbolism – A Protestant View,” Religious Symbolism, ed. F. Ernest Johnson (New York: Kennikat P, 1969): 225–245, quot. at 227.

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Its symbols, in short, will be the old ones and the new, symbols of journey and return, symbols that symbolize the dangers of symbolism, symbols which draw men upon the ultimate crux of the human predicament in such a way as to effect there a transformation and deliverance into the open and the new.4

Such discussion, therefore, identifies some important contrasts between “Protestant” and “Catholic” uses of religious symbolism, and, in particular, identifies Protestant symbolism in its wariness of symbols and openness to the new forms of expression of the transcendent. Paul Avis, in his discussion of religious symbolism, adds to these aspects a consideration drawn from the work of Susanne Langer, the reminder that attention to the form of a symbol distinguishes its use,5 an area explored particularly fully in theological discourse by the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar.6 Avis goes on, furthermore, to engage thoughtfully with Ricoeur’s distinction between metaphor which, he argues, belongs to the “sphere of words,” and symbol which is “rooted” in life, and for this reason, therefore, a means by which the sacredness and “translucency,” to use Coleridge’s wellknown word, of the world is made known.7 Avis understands this as leading to an emphasis on the means by which religious imagery (for example, the understanding of God as father) becomes symbolic, rather than merely metaphorical – i.e. through tradition and a sustained, evolving use. In this way, unlike signs, symbols are dynamic, vital and are the means by which the connection between mundane and transcendent is made. They are revelatory, not merely an arbitrary representation of transcendent reality but an epiphany of it. Again, this focus on dynamic, evolving use seems both significant and instructive. One more theological discussion may perhaps be of use in clarifying the kinds of meanings and uses religious symbolism may carry, before proceeding to some poetic examples of this use. Karl Rahner explores the question of poetic language more than once, including in chapter nine of his Theological Investigations, “The Theology of the Symbol,” and in his essay “Poetry and the Christian.” Here the influences of both German idealism and perhaps English Romantic thought (or an inheritance held in common by literature and theology) by may be

4 Hopper, “Future of Religious Symbolism,” 237, 241, 243–245. 5 Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1956); she draws on work by Ernst Cassirer in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1955). 6 Avis, God and the Creative Imagination, 104. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord 1: Seeing the Form, ed. Joseph Fessio and John Kenneth Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius P, 1983). 7 See Coleridge’s account of symbol in “The Statesman’s Manual: Appendix C” (1816) – a key text in subsequent debates over literary symbols and symbolism; see Lay Sermons, edited R. J. White, Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 6 (Princeton, NJ and London: Princeton UP, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).

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observed.8 In the former, he asserts that the symbol is “the self-realization of a being in the other, which is constitutive of its essence.” For Rahner, symbolism and religious truth are interdependent, since each being, as a unity, also possesses a plurality, and so must “realize itself through a plurality in unity.”9 The interdependence between symbol and thing signified is the crucial consideration: for Rahner, the symbol also enables the mystery and depth of other’s being to be known, without its being reduced or short-changed.10 For Rahner, then, the form in which the divine is encountered is not to be regarded as superficial or inferior; it is, rather, to be seen as the ultimate expression of the divine, the way in which the transcendent makes itself known. Symbolic religious language, therefore, is at once both immediate and accessible, and also attentive to the depths and the mystery of truth. In the second essay mentioned, in somewhat similar terms, Rahner powerfully describes language’s ability to “strike the inmost depths of man, killing and bringing to life,” and, furthermore, its intrinsically symbolic and therefore incarnational nature: more than a “silently signalling finger” it “brings on what it proclaims.” Further, “[d]eep down within the narrow earthly well of the human word the spring that flows for ever gushes forth”; as readers, we are asked, therefore, to attend to the “silent mystery” present within the depths of the word. And within this attention to the silent mystery, both of language and of being, poet and reader may also find himself, Rahner suggests, facing “what he is.” For The more deeply great poetry leads man into the abysses which are the foundations of his being, the more surely it forces him to face those dark and mysterious acts of self-realization, which are shrouded in the fundamental ambiguity in which man cannot certainly say if he is saved or lost.11

In this essay I shall hold on to these two focuses mentioned by Tillich and by Rahner: from Tillich, the understanding of symbolic currency being under challenge, particularly in “Protestant” culture; and from Rahner, the understanding of symbols as essential, not just as signs, pointing to an understanding of the

8 For further discussion of symbolism’s Romantic provenance, see M. Jadwiga Swiatecka, The Idea of the Symbol: Some Nineteenth-Century Comparisons with Coleridge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980). 9 Karl Rahner, “The Theology of the Symbol,” trans. Kevin Smith, in Theological Investigations (London: DLT, 1966) 4:221–252, quotations at 234, 229. 10 See also Richard Lennan, “Ecclesiology and Ecumenism,” The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner, ed. Declan Marmion and Mary E. Hines (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005): 128–143, 130. 11 Rahner, “Poetry and the Christian,” trans. Kevin Smith, in Theological Investigations (London: DLT, 1966) 4:357–367, quot. at 360, 361–362, 365.

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difference of the other, but themselves embodying and expressing the other to us, and so also expressing the mercy of God at work in creation. As a way of exploring further these two aspects of religious symbolism in twentieth-century writing, I shall take as a test-case a symbol that has already appeared in our discussion in relation to the ineffable and dark places within language, within ourselves and within God: that of the deep. We have seen already that the word has a number of cognates that are sometimes used interchangeably, and sometimes acquire a different shade of meaning: ‘depths’, ‘deeps’, or merely ‘deep’ used adjectively. I shall suggest that this symbol, in its very richness and many-sidedness, can be seen to express both the decay of religious symbolism, as Tillich saw it, and the potential still existing for a vital and robust symbolic language of religious experience, one wary of the risk of symbolic idolatry, and intent also on revealing the grace or transcendence immanent within the world and human experience. I shall use as a primary focus some moments from the work of the poet W. H. Auden, who re-converted to Protestant Christianity in mid-life, examples which may illustrate the manner in which this familiar and even potentially hackneyed symbol may discover new life and substance. In “New Year Letter” (1940), W. H. Auden writes that “truth, like love and sleep, resents | Approaches that are too intense.”12 Auden is of his time in expressing an understanding that religious experience and language can be cheapened by excessive solemnity or gestures towards ineffability, while “the Janus of a joke” can more effectively hint at the transcendence that is imagined. Nonetheless, at many points Auden, like Eliot and others of his time, looks to indicate numinousness or mystical transport. In these cases, ‘the deep’ and its cognates, ‘deep’ and ‘depth’ are in some cases used, both to indicate the ineffable in this way, and also to acknowledge the uncomfortable tensions that accompany the artist who desires to use a ‘religious’ language. As an intensive word, ‘deep’ can be overused; it can be vague and its reference unclear. But it also enjoys a well-established heritage on which, I suggest, Auden, like other contemporaries, draws, despite the risks inherent in the word. Auden is not alone, furthermore, in his unease with attempting to write poetry that is explicitly, let alone exclusively, religious or Christian. Indeed, that poetry cannot without loss be straight-forwardly ‘Christian’ or even ‘religious’ has been acknowledged by many writers in the area. R. S. Thomas in the Introduction to the Penguin Book of Religious Verse describes the two as “an ill-assorted pair of horses bridled together”; “with the increasing secularisation of

12 W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson, revised edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1991): 206 (hereafter CP). Lines in the text are unnumbered.

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life neither is very tolerant of the other.”13 Thomas invokes Coleridge’s account in Biographia Literaria of the God-like and unifying work of creative imagination, in defence of his own attempt through his selection of such “religious” verse to “broaden the meaning of ‘religious’ to accommodate twentieth-century sensibility.” Thomas also returned to this topic in a later essay published in 1966, “A Frame for Poetry,” again wrestling with the intransigence, vagueness and unhelpful rigidity of his terms, before stating that “religion has to do first of all with vision, revelation, and these are best told of in poetry.” He argues that such poetic transformation is also integral to Christian communication: The interesting feature though of a missionary religion such as Christianity is the way it maintains a reciprocal relationship with the culture of its converts. The main reason for this surely is the poetic nature of the original message, which allows itself to be interpreted and expressed in an infinite number of new ways.14

In this way, Thomas works to bring together two areas of thought and writing which he intuits to be antipathetic; the expression of a religion for whom missionary intentions are central, with the openness to cultural and inter-personal dialogue and exchange. And as has been suggested, the word, ‘deep’, is one sometimes subjected to clichéd use, employed to stand in for numinousness when language seems to balk at articulation, so a little elaboration may at this point be called for. A recent book by Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep,15 attempts to redeem and reconstruct an idea of depth, exploring the erasure of deep chaos from theological accounts of creation, and linking this to the patristic construction of creation ‘ex nihilo’ which dispensed with a gendered deep. The book goes on to trace the deep at work in Augustine, Job and Melville, as well as through Genesis. Its theoretical approach challenges the opposition conventionally made between ‘depth’ and ‘surface’, so that internal depth is co-terminous with its manifestation. Its thinking is informed by, among a number of sources, the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose work Difference and Repetition was originally published in French in 1968.16 In this book, Deleuze sets out a number of distinctions between what he calls “extensity,” a term corresponding with surface manifesta-

13 R. S. Thomas, “Introduction,” Penguin Book of Religious Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963): 8. 14 R. S. Thomas, “A Frame for Poetry”, Selected Prose, ed. Sandra Anstey (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1983): 89–94, quot. at 90. 15 Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep. A Theology of Becoming (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). 16 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 1994).

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tion, and depth, associated with intensity. Extension and the particular “individuations” that make it up – for example, “high and low, right and left” – arise from this “deeper instance, depth itself.” [For] once depth is grasped as an extensive quality, it belongs to engendered extensity and ceases to include in itself its own heterogeneity in relation to the other two. […] Extensity as a whole comes from the depths. Depth as the (ultimate and original) heterogeneous dimension is the matrix of all extensity, including its third dimension considered to be homogeneous with the other two […]. Depth is the intensity of being, or vice versa.17

I have quoted this at some length, dense and elusive as it sometimes is, as it offers some propositions that assist an understanding of depth, as well as on Keller’s paradoxical definition of her topic. Keller argues that “[t]he Melvillian vortex […] expresses and generates a surface of turbulent depth.” That “more primary depth” suggests not a mono-dimensional depth but the chaoid Deleuzian heterogeneity of the pro/found, the pre-foundational. In this, Keller argues, Melville’s novel reflects Bakhtinian ideas of the dialogic: “Every event, every phenomenon, every object of artistic representation loses its completedness, its hopelessly finished quality and its immutability that had been so essential to it in the world of the epic ‘absolute past.’”18 Keller’s analysis of Melville’s Moby Dick thus enables her to reformulate her definition of depth, as a quality existing not in dichotomous opposition with surface but rather as something “death-drenched,” not “breaking through” the face of phenomena but rather a “nothingsomething breaking as every finitude, every wave of becoming.” It is characterized by an “infinite complexity” which exceeds our understanding; often, we respond to its elusiveness with “fear and blankness” that desire to override and destroy its unfathomable darkness and brilliance.19 Such fear of course points up the connection between depth and death, a connection exploited poetically in various cases through assonance.20 Keller, however, perceives depth as emerging through the “wavebreak of transformation.” However, when we come to some critical discussion of this symbol, we find ourselves hampered, since, in particular in recent critical debates, “the deep” is far from being an uncontested term. Terry Eagleton, for example, has written:

17 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 288–290. 18 Keller, Face of the Deep, 146, quoting from Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination. 19 Keller, Face of the Deep, 154. 20 See Keller, Face of the Deep, 229–238. David Gascoyne’s poem “De profundis” illustrates this assonance: “Because the depths | Are clear with only death’s | Marsh-light,” (Penguin Modern Poets [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973]: 37).

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[T]he traditional metaphysical mystery was a question of depths, absences, foundations, abysmal explorations; the mystery of some modernist art is just the mind-bending truth that things are what they are, intriguingly self-identical […]. [P]ost-modernism preserves this self-identity, but erases its modernist scandalousness.21

I would suggest that a language of depth has more complexity and contradictoriness within it than Eagleton’s theoretical position concedes. More recently, Michael Doylen, in a thoughtful and, in my view, nuanced response to Jonathan Dollimore, has taken issue with his, at points itself, “hollowed” reading of Oscar Wilde’s letter De Profundis, and suggested that for Wilde the idea of depth indeed held more potential for complex self-individualization and construction than Dollimore recognizes.22 Auden’s poetry clearly owes much to Wilde, and, I would suggest, to the latter’s appropriation of an aestheticized language of Christian katabasis, by which Wilde’s entry into the abyss of subjection may become instead a descent into the depths. In the 1951 work The Enchafèd Flood, subtitled “The Romantic Iconography of the Sea,” for instance, Auden explores a number of different symbolic understandings of the sea, beginning with the deep in Genesis and the “primordial undifferentiated flux” described there, and looking also to the end of Revelation where “there was no more sea” as an indication of the essentially hostile nature of the sea.23 He goes on to identify the sea in the later plays of Shakespeare as also, however, a symbol of purgatorial suffering; not merely a source of danger and chaotic loss, but also potentially the means to healing and liberation. He concludes that, like the desert, the sea – the deep – is a place both of trial and of redemption; a place of freedom – of individual autonomy and self-determination and of potentiality – but also one of primitive power that may overwhelm.24 For Auden, then, the deep is ambivalent and contradictory; a rich and essential symbol for post-romantic literature, yet at the same time Auden also

21 Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain (London: Verso, 1986): 133. 22 M. R. Doylen, “Wilde’s De Profundis: Homosexual Self-fashioning on the Other Side of Scandal,” Victorian Literature and Culture (1999): 547–566. 23 W. H. Auden, The Enchafèd Flood. Or, The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (London: Faber and Faber, 1951): 18–19. 24 In ways I do not have the space to discuss properly, Auden’s sense corresponds to the psalms’ sense of the “deep” as a place of entrapment, of desolateness and of isolation. It is a place from which the self craves liberation: a place of abandonment, though almost never one that is beyond the scope of God. The self continues to hope for release from the deep; but in the course of his lament and protest his journey of faith grows and emerges. In this sense the deep both oppresses and reveals the selfhood of the faithful; it is both an antagonist and a strange companion along the way.

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remains suspicious of the self-deception and self-aggrandisement that belief in purgatorial depths may lead to. A little later in the book he describes a cartoon by Charles Addams, in which a man in the street is being attacked by a large octopus: the crowd watches, and two men continue to walk along the street, remarking on the scene as they go. In this scenario, rather as in the parable of the Good Samaritan, some respond to another’s affliction as a passive spectator, some seek to act but are inhibited by others; only the single man acts as an individual. Auden suggests, however, that “desiring to become an individual yet unable to do so by himself, he has conjured up a monster from the depths of the sea to break the spell of reflection, and free him from just being a member of the crowd.”25 In this case, the depths of the sea connote for Auden the possibility of illusion or narcissistic fantasy. The “monster” imagined assures the individual of his heroism, since the “depths,” in their darkness and vagueness, hide the superficiality of the individual’s courage and desire for heroic status. There is always the chance that “depth” is merely the brittle reflection of the individual’s unacknowledged needs, though Auden leaves room at the same time for depth to contain its own rich otherness. Such a shady, sometimes chilling, quality attached to the deep in Auden’s imagination persists even as he continues nonetheless to make use of the symbol. For him, as for Keller, in these cases the deep is not merely presented in opposition to the eternal and the divine, but it is the means through which divine light may be glimpsed. As Keller says, the deep “faces us in confrontation or attraction; but it faces us amidst – not below or above or beyond” the turbulent uncertainties within which every one of us is “moving and changing every part of the time.”26 Auden’s re-conversion to Christianity seems to have been a response to various experiences, and it’s an area Arthur Kirsch and others have discussed quite fully and with some agreement; the shock of the Nazis, the closing of the churches in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, Auden’s meeting with Charles Williams, whose personal sanctity as well as his novels and theology impressed him powerfully; finally, at a personal level, the death of Auden’s mother Constance, and the breakdown of his relationship with Chester Kallman were all contributing elements that culminated in a quasi-mystical experience that seems to have been formative.27 Readers disagree to a greater extent, however, about the nature of Auden’s ‘religious’ writing and the forms it finds to express that belief. Richard Ellmann remarks that it “tends towards a recognition

25 Auden, The Enchafèd Flood, 37. 26 Keller, Face of the Deep, xx. 27 Arthur Kirsch, Auden and Christianity (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2005): 22–26.

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of general guilt rather than of individual ecstasy,”28 for example; while Humphrey Carpenter, Auden’s biographer, mentions the “leap of faith” that requires an acceptance of something more than reason, and perhaps arises in Auden as in other poets of the time out of a dissatisfaction with the liberal humanism of midtwentieth-century cultural life.29 As Gareth Reeves, among others, has pointed out, however, in the light of his reading of the theologian Kierkegaard, Auden began to see the life of faith as one in which existential choices must be made; and therefore a life that is at odds with the reality of what the poet calls the “fait accompli” of poetry.30 Following Matthew Arnold it became possible to see poetry as an alternative to religious expression. Following Eliot, poetry could itself become the place in which religious allegiance is affirmed and the world held at bay. But, as Mendelson has carefully asserted, Auden does not in fact lose touch with his social engagement. Rather, and I agree with Stan Smith here, Auden seeks to differentiate himself from the impulses to quietism present in Eliot and other artists of the 1940s, and strives for a continuity with earlier writing that had asked robust questions of society, but also remained true to his earlier experience of mystical union, as he described it.31 Following Charles Williams’s lead, Auden gravitates towards a strongly incarnational theology, in which redemption is worked through the fallen, bodily exchanges of human beings, expressed in a doctrine Williams called ‘co-inherence’, or the mutual bearing of burdens most perfectly expressed for Williams in the eucharist: “He in us and we in Him.”32 “As I Walked Out One Evening” (CP, 135–137), a quatrain poem dated “November 1937,” a date just preceding the period of Auden’s re-engagement on a more formal basis with Christianity, indicates the impulses lying behind Auden’s conversion which came to characterize his faith. The poem invokes time’s chilling

28 Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain. Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot (New York: Oxford UP, 1967): 122. 29 Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981): 282– 284. 30 Gareth Reeves, “Auden and Religion,” The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden, ed. Stan Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004): 188–199, 191. 31 Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (Faber & Faber: London, 1981): 362–366; see also Kirsch, Auden and Christianity, 110. Stan Smith, W. H. Auden (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985): 176. See also Tony Sharpe, W. H. Auden: Life and Contexts (London and New York: Routledge, 2007): 33–38. Auden was, however, frequently accused of a quietist retreat from politics when he withdrew to the United States during World War II. 32 See Carpenter, W. H. Auden, 284, quoting Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964): 69.

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inexorability and humankind’s deafness to its call; but it also demonstrates the absurdity of its call to “plunge your hands in water” and “Stare, stare in the basin,” as if suggesting that such summons to wakefulness, conventional and tired as the carpe diem theme may be, are themselves as hollow as the idolatry they challenge. The poem’s moral authority is compromised: “O look, look in the mirror, | O look in your distress; | Life remains a blessing | Although you cannot bless”, blurs the distance between self and other (“look in your distress”), and coldly “reflects” in its stilted, end-stopped lines the speaker’s inability to reach out, imagine and so “bless” the suffering of others. Here too the repeated imperative verbs have a similar impact; the command is urgent yet also resigned to its weakness, as if internal and not fully realized. The final verse ends, however: “It was late, late in the evening, | The lovers they were gone; | The clocks had ceased their chiming, | And the deep river ran on.” (CP, 137) Carpe diem invitations disappear; time and its warnings cease; but a shift in vision is, perhaps, effected within the enjambment of “And the deep river ran on.” This line has been read as a reference to the cold indifference of the natural world; however, I think one can see also here an alternative to the superficial constructions of culture, and the moralism or quietism of some religious responses to it; an expression, perhaps, of the enduring vein of “being,” separate from and also within, amidst and despite the fractures of society and selfhood, a source of present energy to which the speaker has previously been impervious and which may, nonetheless, animate and transform him.33 A similar shift from the perception of social fragmentation to a vision of enduring and grounded, if contradictory and potentially chaotic, being, occurs in the 1940 poem, “Lady Weeping at the Crossroads” (CP, 279–280) Also written in quatrains, this poem envisages the call of the ocean, suggestive of the immensity of death, and imagines its “cry” to the self. Fleeing, the self in flight both seeks this cry and seeks refuge from it. But the answer comes: “Run until you hear the ocean’s | Everlasting cry; | Deep though it may be and bitter | You must drink it dry”. This impossible command thus confronts the terror of the speaker with the fragile suspension of his poetic strategies – internal rhyme and enjambment in particular: “Push on to the world’s end, pay the | Dread guard with a kiss, | Cross the rotten bridge that totters | Over the abyss.” (CP, 280) Acknowledging their fragility, the speaker nonetheless derives direction from the conflicted and contradictory message of the “deep”: the bridge seems both to crumble (“totter”) and

33 A parallel might be found with the last stanza of “The Fall of Rome” (CP, 332–333) in which “Altogether elsewhere, vast | Herds of reindeer move across | Miles and miles of golden moss, | Silently and very fast,” utterly beyond the grasp of the speaker.

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successfully to walk on air, to overarch the chasm; and from this perspective, those poetic strategies, though fragile, acquire some weight. We have already mentioned that Auden’s Christian thinking was colored by his reading of Kierkegaard, and that he was in particular struck by Kierkegaard’s image of the self, “always being out alone over seventy thousand fathoms.”34 Auden’s rhyme in “abyss” and “kiss” points up the corrupted pathos and the courage of love’s “leaps,” attempted despite the knowledge of death and betrayal. He is alert to, yet still in part sustained by, the illusions and self-fulfilling dramas of love; and clear-sighted too as to how these lead so easily to violence and oppression of the other person. But love, whether for God or another person, cannot ignore the “desperate catabasis | Into the snarl of the abyss | That always lies just underneath | Our jolly picnic on the heath”;35 it is a question of how it may be imagined or incorporated. “Leap Before You Look” (CP, 313–314) again another quatrain poem, works around and with the rhyme words “leap” in a somewhat similar manner to “Lady Weeping at the Crossroads,” and again makes use of the symbol of the “deep” to suggest both the superficial and the eternal in one moment. The word “leap” connotes risk and blindness, as in the Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’;36 but also brings within its grasp antithetical rhymes such as “keep,” “heap,” and damningly, “cheep,” “cheap” and “sheep,” as well finally of course, as “deep.” “No one is watching, but you have to leap” (CP, 314); faith, as the beginning of “The Sea and the Mirror” (CP 401–445) goes on to elaborate, requires trust without the proof or the approval of others (see CP, 403–404). I think it is the gently persistent rhymes, however, the work of the poetic hand, that reassure the reader of the truth of love’s, as of poetic, order. In the final verse, therefore, Kierkegaard’s “fathoms deep” become not an empty, vertiginous abyss, but a “sustaining” support, an unseen “bed” of eternal reality: A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear: Although I love you, you will have to leap; Our dream of safety has to disappear. (CP, 314)

Here, “deep” makes contact both with the comfort and domestic intimacy, and domestic illusions, contained within the phrase “we lie,” and also touches the grandeur and poetic richness of “ten thousand fathoms,” bringing the transcen34 See Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1999): 159. Auden used the phrase in a 1941 review of Niebuhr’s Christianity and Power Politics. 35 Auden, “New Year Letter,” CP, 217. 36 See Carpenter, W. H. Auden, 286 and Kirsch, Auden and Christianity, 46.

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dent realm within reach of the immediate. Such depth has an end and content, as “sustains” dares to hope. Both “leap” and “deep,” bring together domestic and sublime, the containment (and its content) offered by aesthetic form, and the heady ineffability of God. Such a use of the symbol, I would also suggest, has much in common with Rahner’s understanding of the religious symbol as explored earlier; and also offers a response to Tillich’s identification of the lack of Protestant symbolism. Here, the individual’s journey and encounter with the sublime is imagined as being undertaken in solitude, and in the hope of progressive truthfulness; yet, the solitude is also a companionable one: the speaker is “In solitude, for company”, as Auden writes in “Lauds” (CP, 641). In this respect, words by Gaston Bachelard about the “intimate immensity” created by poetic language in relation to different kinds of space are of relevance: “when human solitude deepens, then the two immensities touch and become identical.”37 For Auden, however, as the long poem “New Year Letter” makes explicitly clear, the place of the deep is also often a place in which guilt, whether primitive (or in Auden’s case associated with his mother and imagined in terms of the caverned and rocky landscape of his childhood), or more universal, is encountered and resolved. The language in which this deep place is inscribed, above all in the “New Year Letter,” also owes much, I would argue, to the work of Charles Williams. Kathleen Bell has recently pointed out the overlap in terms of the two poets’ representations of the body and its place in the spiritual life; and Auden, I think, also draws on Williams’ inscription of evil in his accounts of catabatic journeys, above all perhaps in his spiritual novel All Hallows’ Eve.38 In “New Year Letter,” however, the speaker enters a derelict mill, and drops pebbles into a well and “reservoir of darkness.” His guilt rises to the surface of the mind. But, in a section in which depth is clearly imagined, it is worth noting that the word is not used at this point, but rather turned to some lines later. The word is used, tellingly I suggest, as the poem envisages and describes a desired state of wholeness and innocence, expressed through the symbol of the “Unicorn among the cedars,” or sophisticated innocence, the animal self transmuted by spiritual and imaginary wisdom:

37 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space [1958], transl. Maria Jolas (Boston MA: Beacon P, 1984). 38 See Kathleen Bell, “‘If sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead’: Forgiveness and the Body in Auden’s Post-Conversion Poems,” in Ecstasy and Understanding. Religious Awareness in English Poetry from the Late Victorian to the Modern Period, ed. Adrian Grafe (London: Continuum, 2008): 84–104. See also Charles Williams, All Hallows’ Eve (1948) (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 1981).

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O Icthus playful in the deep Sea-lodges that forever keep Their secret of excitement hidden, O sudden Wind that blows unbidden (CP, 242)

The Christian symbol of the “Icthus,” the fish of the resurrected Christ and an early symbol of Christian allegiance, is here imagined transforming and at ease in the dark and hidden places of the self and of the world: the deep is receptive to this animating spirit and movement, neither empty nor stagnant as the abyss, but open to communication and hospitable to God and humanity. There is a further reason why Auden was drawn to the symbol of the deep as a way of figuring the divine at work within the world’s conflicts and contradictions. The symbol of wholeness and innocence most often used in his poetry is that of the circle – traditionally, of course, an image of eternity or perfection. This symbol recurs many times; for example, in the “ring” of love described in the early poem “A Summer Night” (CP, 117–19) and in the beautiful villanelle that forms Miranda’s monologue at the conclusion of Part two of Auden’s long poem “The Sea and the Mirror,” a poem he described as “really about the Christian conception of art,” arising from a sense that a “satisfactory theory of art from the standpoint of the Christian faith has yet to be worked out.”39 In this concluding section, for example: So, to remember our changing garden, we Are linked as children in a circle dancing: My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely, And the high green hill sits always by the sea. (CP, 422)

Auden here draws on the Christian idea of perichoresis, of the Trinitarian intermingling of father, son and spirit, re-enacted in the dance of love Miranda describes and embodies. Such a dance, these lines suggest, draws on and does not negate the narcissism of the lonely ego: it incorporates, builds on and expands on the self’s loneliness, expressed in the poem by Antonio’s choice to remain “myself alone.” The symbol of the deep for Auden draws on and attempts to reconcile both the edenic image of the dancing circle (achievable once again through religious dedication) and that of the lonely mirror of art. The poem concludes with a long prose monologue spoken by Caliban, whose Jamesian rhetoric skirts around an abyss of despair and of reality – reality that art can offer to hold at bay. Art offers an ordering of the chaotic forces, epitomized in

39 See Kirsch, Auden and Christianity, 57; 57–72 of Kirsch’s study offer for a valuable introduction to this poem.

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Caliban; but, as Prospero’s initial speech of farewell to Ariel makes clear, it is always confined by its occupation of the realm of possibility, not of reality. Following Kierkegaard, Auden comes to understand art’s purpose in revealing the real to humanity, stripped of illusions and egoistic pretensions; but also art’s need in turn to yield to what Kierkegaard called the religious sphere, in which “the rest is silence” (see CP, 404). In Miranda, the poem imagines the paradise of innocence in which desire and duty are perfectly reconciled; in Alonso’s speech, the sea is figured as “the cold deep that does not envy you” (CP, 416) or as “shiftless water” (CP, 410), as the song following Prospero’s speech puts it. Both the edenic garden and the fantasy of invulnerable solitude, expressed most insistently by Antonio, may be surpassed by the way of purgatorial transformation, and this too is symbolized by “sailing along, out over seventy thousand fathoms.” But Auden acknowledges the romantic allure even of such a symbol, and begins to suggest that he now realizes “the way of truth | Was a way of silence,” a way that points to the religious sphere the poem imagines. Against this religious way, Antonio expresses the possibility of self-enclosure in fantasy; this way is also a possible one, but it serves to point up the way of openness, relation and forgiveness, as potentially redemptive. It is the richness and the openness of the symbol of the sea, and in particular when it is expressed poetically as the deep, that allows Auden to imagine this shift beyond art to the real of truth, a move made possible by the deep “shifts” of art, even while the poem recognizes the limitations to its own scope. In using this symbol in the way in which Auden does, he reinvigorates one with roots deep in biblical and literary tradition, but not over-familiarized through explicitly ‘religious’ usage. The symbol allows him to imagine a uniting of immanent and transcendent realms, in a manner that is incarnational and in line with the thinking of Tillich alluded to earlier. The term retains its ‘secular’ or illusory associations in Auden’s use of it, as has been suggested; but this enables Auden to imagine the working of grace within, and, to quote Keller once again, ‘amidst – not below or above or beyond” our complex and chaotic lives.40

40 Keller, Face of the Deep, xx.

Patrick Gill

“Across the Divide”: The Contemporary English Elegy Traditionally drawing on Christian faith in the Resurrection for its consolatory powers, the English elegy underwent radical changes when the role of religion in literature and culture receded in the course of the last century. The essay reexamines that development and provides a discussion of approaches to the elegiac form chosen by two contemporary English poets, James Fenton and Simon Armitage. As a topic of artistic expression, death has always been intimately connected to religious thought and discourse, and thus the elegy1 has tended to reflect religious ideas and to be conditioned by prevalent schools of religious faith and doctrine. Consider the example of Ben Jonson’s epigram “Of Death,” which illustrates “the notion that mourning was unchristian”2 in a number of contexts throughout English religious and literary history: He that feares death, or mournes it, in the iust, Shewes in the resurrection little trust.3

Given the rich tradition of the poetry of mourning in the years since, it should be obvious that attitudes have hardly remained the same. One eminently useful illustration of this fact is provided by a poem composed in the year of Ben Jonson’s death, John Milton’s Lycidas. Of course, there is no shortage of conten-

1 The term “elegy” is used throughout this essay in the narrow sense of “the poetry of mourning for the dead” in which it is used in: Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1994): 1. Other meanings of the term, with particular reference to earlier stages in literary history, are elaborated on in: David Kennedy, Elegy, The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2007): 10–12. 2 G.W. Pigman, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985): 1. 3 Qtd. in Pigman, Grief, 1. Pigman goes on to point out, however, that the attitude displayed by Jonson in this instance is much more typical of the mid-sixteenth century than of the seventeenth. These sixteenth-century attitudes are adumbrated by him as follows: “The sixteenth century inherits some important assumptions from ancient consolation. First, man is distinguished from the beasts by his possession of reason, a higher faculty than the ‘passions’; man is most human when most rational. Second, the pain of bereavement stems from mistaken ideas about death, not from the rupture of an emotional bond. Third, it is shameful and egotistical to feel sorrow for one’s own loss” (11).

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ders for the title of greatest English Renaissance elegy, but since, as Kennedy states, Milton’s elegy for his friend Edward King “revived and reworked the tropes of pastoral elegy into a well-defined progress from grief to consolation and detachment,”4 it would appear a particularly suitable poem to consider in the context of the present essay. So what does this “well-defined progress” look like, and, more importantly, what does the reworking entail? In his Life of Milton of 1779, Samuel Johnson had this to say on Lycidas: Among the flocks, and copses, and flowers, appear the heathen deities; Jove and Phoebus, Neptune and Aeolus, with a long train of mythological imagery, such as a College easily supplies. Nothing can less display knowledge, or less exercise invention, than to tell how a shepherd has lost his companion, and must now feed his flocks alone, without any judge of his skill in piping […]. He who thus grieves will excite no sympathy; he who thus praises will confer no honour.5

Johnson’s criticism may seem churlish in its attack on Milton’s use of the conventions of pastoral poetry in the seventeenth century, but it has to be remembered that far from being a popular device in elegiac poetry of the time, pastoral was the exception rather than the rule. In fact, “Milton was conspicuously alone among more than a score of elegists in his choice of what by 1637 was regarded as an unconvincing, even trivial, form for a poem of mourning.”6 But while Johnson criticizes Milton’s copious references to ancient deities, it is in the infusion of his poem with Christian ideas that Milton sets out to modify the elegiac pastoral: “Milton has questioned the efficacy of pastoral, its assumptions and value, even more than Virgil, but rather than abandoning it despondently, Milton transcends it.”7 This ostensible yoking together of pagan pastoral and Christian faith becomes most conspicuous in the final quarter of the poem with its “leap from plaintive helplessness to authoritative consolation,”8 a sudden transition taking the reader from a disconsolate litany of mythological figures both Greek and British to the exhortation to “[w]eep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more.”9 It is thus that Lycidas can “look towards the future with a vigor and confidence that have been

4 Kennedy, Elegy, 5. 5 Qtd. in Scott Elledge (ed.), Milton’s Lycidas: Edited to Serve as an Introduction to Criticism (New York: Harper & Row, 1966): 229–230. 6 Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985): 90. 7 Pigman, Grief, 124. 8 Pigman, Grief, 1. 9 John Milton, Poetical Works, ed. Douglas Bush (London: Oxford UP, 1966): 147.

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hitherto absent.”10 Only with the certainty of the Resurrection in mind can Milton’s speaker in Lycidas find consolation and closure, and redirect his thoughts toward life at the end of the poem: “To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.”11 The fundamental importance of Christian faith for the traditional form of the elegy has thus been demonstrated, but what are the most central structural aspects to be discovered in this form? As the present essay cannot provide a detailed discussion of the historical genesis of those aspects thought of as most characteristically elegiac, an already abbreviated intimation of the complexity of this subject in the words of Sacks will have to suffice: [T]he elegy, as a poem of mourning and consolation, has its roots in a dense matrix of rites and ceremonies, in the light of which many elegiac conventions should be recognized as being not only aesthetically interesting forms but also the literary versions of specific social and psychological practices. Among the conventions to be interpreted in this way are the use of pastoral contextualization […], the movement from grief to consolation, and the traditional images of resurrection. We also need to interpret […] the unusual degree of selfconsciousness regarding the actual performance of the work at hand. One aspect of this last feature is the elegist’s need to draw attention […] to his own surviving powers.12

While the idea of an elegiac “movement from grief to consolation”13 may be fairly unremarkable, there are a few points that need to be elaborated on in this admittedly selective list of generic traits. The first is that the traditional aspects of praise for and lamentation of the dead can – in the context of the present essay – safely be considered two sides of the same coin: praise leads to lament since it is the praise of something that is lamentably absent. Conversely, lamentation implies praise since only what is praiseworthy becomes lamentable in its absence. The simple idea of the elegy as a “serene progression[] from grief to comforting resolution”14 is somewhat complicated by the idea of the speaker’s implication in the lamented person’s death. As Ramazani elaborates: “Every elegist, in 10 Pigman, Grief, 124. 11 Milton, Works, 147. 12 Sacks, English Elegy, 2. 13 In discussing this movement or any other aspect of elegiac poetry, my primary concern is with the poetic form, not with any psychological process in real-life mourners. Most commentators on this topic, including the authors of what I would consider the two standard texts, Sacks (English Elegy) and Ramazani (Poetry of Mourning), assume that elegy closely follows the psychological processes of individual mourners. While I will readily acknowledge that the elegy is a particularly problematic literary form as it is in most cases based on a non-literary and non-imaginative event, my main interest lies with forms of artistic expression. 14 Pigman, Grief, 67.

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Shelley’s phrase, ‘in another’s fate now wept his own.’”15 As will be observed in the further course of the present essay, this relatively marginal feature of traditional elegiac poetry, a particular form of “self-absorption,”16 becomes ever more frequent in recent elegies. But it is only one symptom of the speaker’s acute awareness of their own mortality, impressed upon them by the occasion of someone else’s death. Another such symptom to be detected in the form of the elegy is what Sacks calls “the crucial self-privileging of the survivors,”17 which entails a movement distancing the mourners from the mourned: “Indeed, few elegies or acts of mourning succeed without seeming to place the dead, and death itself, at some cleared distance from the living.”18 Finally, while this is not made explicit in Sacks’s list of characteristic features quoted above, it is important in the context of the present essay to note that by taking recourse to “the traditional images of resurrection” in order to elicit a sense of consolation, the speakers in traditional English elegy reach a point at which they have to surrender influence and responsibility to a higher power. They themselves cannot effect a life everlasting for the deceased, their lamentation in itself cannot bring about any acceptable resolution. Thus line 165 of Milton’s Lycidas quoted above (“Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more”) turns out to rely on the agency of Christ and the saints for its reassurance. As the poem continues: So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high, Through the dear might of him that walked the waves, Where, other groves and other streams along, With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves, And hears the unexpressive nuptial song In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love. There entertain him all the saints above, In solemn troops and sweet societies, That sing, and singing in their glory move, And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.19

With its explicit mention of Christ and the saints as well as its forceful allusions to the Book of Revelation, this passage unequivocally places the burden of consolation into the hands of the speaker’s faith – his faith in outside agencies and sacred

15 Jahan Ramazani, Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990): 26. 16 Ramazani, Yeats, 27. 17 Sacks, English Elegy, 19. 18 Sacks, English Elegy, 19. 19 Milton, Works, 147.

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texts rather than his faith in his immediate work of mourning. Physically removed from the world of the living, the deceased is instead transferred into the midst of a different – and far superior – community. As we shall see, this transfer of responsibility is a determining feature in the development of the elegiac form from early modern times to the present. It would no doubt be an oversimplification to say that the English elegy changed in outlook and tone with the outbreak and continuation of the First World War, and yet this appears to be the one culminating event most critics point to when trying to locate the origins of modern ideas of death and dying. As Sacks explains in more general terms: Sociologists and psychologists, as well as literary and cultural historians, consistently demonstrate the ways in which death has tended to become obscene, meaningless, impersonal – an event either stupefyingly colossal in cases of large-scale war or genocide, or clinically concealed somewhere behind the technology of the hospital and the technique of the funeral home.20

The starting point for these increasingly anonymous ways of dying is no doubt to be found in the two World Wars, which did not only visit “large-scale war or genocide” upon the world but – in Britain at least – also resulted in the establishment of the welfare state which, for all its indisputably laudable endeavors, cannot be said to do overly much for family cohesion and interdependence. In view of these developments, literature in the early twentieth century faced “a moment when the traditional elegiac myths and ceremonies were regarded with a new level of incredulity or contempt. The tendencies noted then continue throughout the century, eroding the generic resources of consolation.”21 It is little wonder, then, that poets soon cast about for new forms of elegiac writing. Nor should it come as a surprise that the most enduring expressions of grief and mourning of that period were occasioned by instances of violent death, that is, by the victims of war and genocide, or by the deaths of children. Confronted with such traumatic deaths, poets cast about for adequate forms of expressing grief and frequently admitted defeat, often fashioning a poetry of mourning out of their very inability to find or provide consolation. Thus it is that modern elegy has become an “‘antielegy’ […] [b]ecause it cannot accept traditional religious and ethical certainties.”22 The result of this inability to embrace these traditional

20 Sacks, English Elegy, 299. 21 Sacks, English Elegy, 299. 22 Patricia Rae, “Double Sorrow: Proleptic Elegy and the End of Arcadianism in 1930s Britain,” Twentieth Century Literature 49.2 (2003): 246–275, 247. Emphasis in the original.

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certainties leads poets to employ forms of expression that “have tended to attack convention and often leave their readers and themselves inconsolable.”23 The most famous expression of this twentieth-century reluctance to mourn and console is perhaps to be found in Dylan Thomas’s “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” first collected in the volume Deaths and Entrances. With its opening adynaton extending to thirteen lines, this particular poem expends most of its energy on the vow not to mourn the “majesty and burning of the child’s death” (l. 13).24 In determining the far-off point at which the speaker will allow himself to mourn over the child’s death and by making that point the time of his own death, the speaker’s fate becomes intimately intertwined with that of the victim and “his own surviving powers”25 are highlighted. The poem can even be thought to trace a “movement from grief to consolation,”26 and to include the transfer of responsibility of the dead child, “London’s daughter” (l. 19) to a list of relatively unspecified entities, “the first dead,” “the long friends,” “grains beyond age,” “her mother,” and “the riding Thames” (ll. 19, 20, 21, 21, 23). While the resurrection consists solely of the transformed survival of the particles and energy making up a human being, what is perhaps most conspicuous here is Thomas’s self-conscious reluctance to break into traditional mourning or at least to be seen to do so. Thomas’s mourning in this poem is complicated to an insurmountable degree by his reluctance to be seen to turn others’ misfortunes into artistic profit.27 Where the progress from mourning to consolation does not lead to a definitive resolution in the form of promises of resurrection, the focus of modern elegy shifts from the traditional formula to other, erstwhile lesser, concerns. An even more conspicuous example of this is another poem mourning the death of a young victim of not only violent conflict but genocide. Geoffrey Hill’s “September Song”28 commemorates a ten-year-old child deported and killed during the Holocaust. By adding the child’s date of birth – which happens to be very close to his own birthday – as a subtitle to the poem, Hill establishes a connection between his persona in the poem and the dead child early on. This,

23 Kennedy, Elegy, 6. 24 Dylan Thomas, Deaths and Entrances (London: Dent, 1946): 8. All subsequent references are to this text. 25 Sacks, English Elegy, 2. 26 Sacks, English Elegy, 2. 27 Cf. Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning, 6–8. 28 Geoffrey Hill, “September Song,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, sixth edition, vol. 2, ed. M.H. Abrams et al. (New York: Norton, 1993): 2383.

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however, is nothing compared to the sudden interruption of the despondent tone of the poem’s first two stanzas describing the horrors the child had to endure at the hands of a frighteningly efficient bureaucracy of death: As estimated, you died. Things marched, sufficient, to that end. Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented terror, so many routine cries. (I have made an elegy for myself it is true) (ll. 5–11)

The sudden self-reproach interrupts the direct address of the dead child and brings with it the realization that artistic acts of mourning in the face of such misery and tragedy are mere self-indulgence on the part of the artist. Thus “September Song” is so radical in its rejection of the standard formulae of mourning that it does not only fail to offer consolation – it discredits the act of mourning itself. To varying degrees, then, staple elements of the English elegy are questioned, ignored, displaced or distorted beyond recognition in its more recent exemplars. This form of elegy will raise more questions than it answers: [I]n the case of an anti-elegiac or self-elegiac elegy – one that hardly mentions the deceased, one that foregrounds the poet-speaker’s own vision of death, and one that communicates the futility of consolation with its pervasive sense of loss – the same question persists: what consolation does such an elegy bring about, or intend to bring about, if any?29

Thomas can point out the cyclical nature of all life, offering at least a biological rebirth of the body’s particles in other organisms, but that is the extent of this type of elegy’s efficacy: being able to point out empirical facts about nature. It is hardly surprising, then, that the mid-twentieth-century elegy displays a strong tendency toward navel-gazing: Having very little real consolation to offer in the face of war, genocide and religious skepticism, poets turn instead to contemplating the form as such. In itself, this is nothing new. As we have seen, the elegiac form has always been characterized by an “unusual degree of self-consciousness.”30 What is new is the extent to which this self-consciousness is on display and the fact that

29 Toshiaki Komura, “Modern Elegy and the Fiction and Creation of Loss: Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Owl in the Sarcophagus,’” English Literary History 77 (2010): 45–70, 45. 30 Sacks, English Elegy, 2.

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it is indulged to the exclusion of other elegiac elements one might have considered more integral to the form. Any extended lament seems to have disappeared from the genre, along with any praise of the dead. While Yeats at least attempted to dignify the deceased31 by bestowing on them a “heroic individuality,”32 neither Thomas nor Hill will reveal any personal details about their objects of mourning: We never learn the children’s names, their personal properties, not even – at least in the case of Hill’s poem – their sex. Praise, lament and consolation all seem to have been purged from the mid-twentieth-century elegy. A genre ostensibly committed to self-contemplation may sound like quite an unedifying object of investigation, but in recent years attitudes toward mourning in poetry seem to have shifted once again. As Kennedy explains: Where commentators […] were able to write with some justification of the denial of death and mourning throughout the twentieth century this is no longer the case. Death and mourning have become participatory, public spectacles. Live television coverage of events such as 9/11, the Beslan school siege and the 2004 Asian tsunami […] have detached grief from personal loss.33

While it may yet be a little early to assess the precise impact of these public tragedies on literary history, the general tenor of Kennedy’s assertion will be widely accepted and changes in English elegiac poetry will no doubt continue to be traced back to these historical circumstances. However, a timely reminder that literary genres, besides being influenced by larger socio-economic developments, also have a tendency to change from within may be in order. In this concrete case, the idea of contemporary poets continuing to concentrate on the refusal and/or inability to mourn indefinitely is as outlandish as the idea of a sudden pastoral revival in the literary mainstream. After all, poets of the last century adopted this stance as a means of breaking with the clichéd forms of the past – availing themselves of those exact same means, contemporary poets would simply be engaged in perpetuating a new cliché. Those global events listed by Kennedy aside, then, it should come as no surprise that contemporary poetry has to some extent reinvented the elegy. In order to investigate the qualitative nature of this act of reinvention, this essay will in the following discuss two specimens of late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-century poetry. The selection of poems by James Fenton, a writer not part of the Martian group of writers like Craig Raine and Christopher Reid but

31 Cf. Ramazani, Yeats, 201. 32 Ramazani, Yeats, 203. 33 Kennedy, Elegy, 7.

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“sympathetic to them,”34 and an erstwhile Oxford Professor of Poetry; and Simon Armitage, a poet of the so-called New Generation,35 rests on the consideration that both are fairly canonical mainstream writers of two distinct generations.36 Given their current critical standing, their work can be assumed to be original without being eccentric, to reflect majority views or interests without being bland. “The Shout”37 by Simon Armitage first appeared in book form as the opening poem of a collection entitled The Universal Home Doctor in 2002. Initially addressed at a third party, the reader, the poem tells of two pupils undertaking a science experiment at school: in order to discover “the range | of the human voice” (ll. 4–5), the two pupils – speaker and classmate – move further and further apart. With its insistence on words denoting distance (“across the divide,” “out of bounds,” “end of the road,”) the poem foreshadows the physical separation of speaker and addressee when the latter turns out to be twenty years dead with a gunshot hole in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia (ll. 16–17)

However, the title and the central conceit of the poem (“the range | of the human voice”) imply a lasting connectedness of speaker and addressee. This tension between distance and proximity, between absence and presence is reflected in the use of personal pronouns throughout the poem: the word “We” opens the poem and governs the first two stanzas up to the point of their first separation, the sentence itself reflecting this by extending from the last line of stanza two to the first line of stanza three: We were testing the range of the human voice: he had to shout for all he was worth, I had to raise an arm From across the divide to signal back That the sound had carried. (ll. 4–9)

34 John Redmond, “Lyric Adaptations: James Fenton, Craig Raine, Christopher Reid, Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry, ed. Neil Corcoran (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007): 245–258, 246. 35 Cf. Redmond, “Lyric Adaptations,” 246. 36 James Fenton was born in 1949, Simon Armitage in 1963. 37 Simon Armitage, The Universal Home Doctor (London: Faber, 2002): 3. All subsequent references are to this text.

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This sequence (“he” and “I”) is repeated as the experiment runs its course, the boy actively shouting, the speaker passively picking up those sounds. The roles are reversed, though, after the reader is informed of the former schoolmate’s suicide – the pronouns now occurring in the sequence “I” and “you.” Although the addressee is told “you can stop shouting now,” the reader knows that he is no longer capable of speech. His presence, however, continues to be felt, as the poem ends with the pronoun “you”: Boy with the name and face I don’t remember, you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.

As a “serene progression[] from grief to comforting resolution”38 this may be less than satisfactory. After all, the poem’s speaker may not necessarily want to still be able to hear the boy “whose name and face,” moreover, he cannot recall. So neither praise nor lament or even consolation make a strong return in this poem: the memory of the boy remains impersonal, restricted to one particular encounter. Nothing is said of his particular qualities, no one is convincingly consoled to the extent that there is a believable resolution. And finally, the speaker here is as self-involved as the speaker in Thomas’s “Refusal to Mourn”. But where the speaker in Thomas’s poem manages to extricate himself (after vowing to be forever connected to the girl’s death) by leaving nature (the soil and the river) in charge of her further fate, “The Shout” leaves the burden squarely on its speaker. At the heart of this – as of any other – elegy is the absence of the deceased person. And though the speaker in Armitage’s “The Shout” may not wish to have this burden thrust upon him, within the world of the poem he alone is responsible for overcoming that absence. As Wordsworth has it in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, it is in the poet’s “disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present.”39 And nowhere in poetry is an absence felt nor performed more insistently than in elegiac writing. James Fenton’s “For Andrew Wood”40 opens up a telling discrepancy between its title and subject matter. Ostensibly a poem addressed to a specific person, “For Andrew Wood” offers not a word of personal lament, commemoration or consolation in the course of its five stanzas. Instead, this poem sets out to develop ethical guidelines for our dealings with the dead. The opening lines introduce both the guiding question and the major conceit of the poem:

38 Pigman, Grief, 67. 39 Qtd. in Sacks, English Elegy, xi. 40 James Fenton, Out of Danger: Poems (London: Penguin, 1993): 22–23. All subsequent references are to this text.

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What would the dead want from us Watching from their cave?

By imagining a community of the dead in the first instance and by then imagining them in a cave, the poem proceeds from the idea of a separation between the living and the dead. In order to provide means of overcoming this separation, the poem employs two related strategies. Firstly, it imagines the dead as living beings with desires and wishes, as constant onlookers of the world of the living. Secondly, it consistently transfers what could reasonably be expected to be the perspective and emotions of the surviving mourners onto the dead, as in the third stanza: I think the dead would want us To weep for what they have lost. I think our luck in continuing Is what would affect them most. But time would find them generous And less self-engrossed. (ll. 13–18)

And later on, in stanza five: “And so the dead might cease to grieve” (l. 25). Of course, these considerations are always kept in the conditional, so that there is never even the slightest suggestion that the dead might actually continue to exist as distinct sentient entities, watch us and display any emotional responses to the goings-on in the world of the living. But the fact that it is the dead who do the grieving in this poem, that it is the dead who are seen as temporarily self-obsessed in their grief, that it is the dead who are affected at all – these features establish an impression of interchangeability between the living and the dead. As Kennedy rather flippantly observes: The unwillingness of […] elegists to abandon their dead […] has been replaced by a desire for the dead to continue to walk among us. Indeed, reading many contemporary elegists, it almost seems as if we need a new generic term for a literature of the undead.41

With reference to Fenton’s “For Andrew Wood,” this is only half true. After all, for all its preoccupation with the wishes of the dead, the poem emphatically ends on “living friends,” rounding off the initial question with a life-affirming response. Even in the final stanza, where they seem to occur as equal partners in a “pact” with the living, are the imagined dead used only as a canvas onto which the hopes and wishes of the living are projected:

41 Kennedy, Elegy, 145–146.

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And so the dead might cease to grieve And we might make amends And there might be a pact between Dead friends and living friends. What our dead friends would want from us Would be such living friends. (ll. 25–30)

While outwardly focusing on the dead – or, according to Kennedy, “the undead” –, “For Andrew Wood” is clearly not a poem for the deceased but for the living, as all elegies in the final analysis must be. It is a sensitive warning against overpowering grief, an exercise in role reversal supposed to illustrate to the bereaved that what the dead command is “an honoured place in our memory” – no more and no less. As in “The Shout,” there is no personal commemoration or mourning, no praise or lament in this poem. The absence at the heart of all elegiac writing is temporarily overcome by means of an imagined community of the dead, which is also imaginatively given its share of the burden of mourning. A few common threads characterizing the contemporary English elegy already seem to emerge, then. The following observations will try to draw some conclusions from the developments outlined above. As literature is bountiful, I would by no means be surprised if it were possible to find exceptions to every single one of these conclusions in contemporary English poetry, and I make no claim to the utter universality of my observations. I am confident, however, that the shifts to be outlined in the concluding remarks are representative of both the influence of wider cultural developments on elegiac forms and of the thrust for renewal emanating from within the genre itself. What is perhaps most immediately conspicuous in the examples discussed above is the consistency with which elegy continues its struggle to overcome the absence of the deceased. Various strategies lend themselves to this struggle and they have certainly changed over time. Traditional elegy invoked the characteristics and physical properties of the dead, praising their qualities and lamenting their passing. Dylan Thomas’s poem stages a ceremony at the center of which lies the dead girl, Geoffrey Hill and Simon Armitage both directly address the people they mourn, and James Fenton conjures up an entire community of the dead negotiating terms for a peaceful coexistence with the living. But where traditional elegy can rely on religious doctrine to provide an enviable resting place, where Thomas’s pantheism turns the burial site of “London’s daughter” into her mother’s womb, and where Geoffrey Hill can end his poem commemorating the Holocaust victim with a sudden “This is plenty. This is more than enough,” contemporary elegists seem to lack access to an instance that would let their speakers turn their backs on the dead to establish “some cleared distance from

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the living.”42 The lack of recourse to religious concepts that would allow such a resolution results directly in a consciousness of the speaker’s continued responsibility toward the dead. Having conjured up memories of the deceased person from, as Armitage has it, “across the divide,” the contemporary elegy’s speaker becomes a repository of those memories. The realization and acceptance of this responsibility – reluctant, perhaps, as in the case of Armitage’s poem – has become a central trait of the contemporary elegy, turning the focus of the elegy not just from “dead friends” to “living friends” but from the absent deceased to the present speaker. What is surprising about this is that it has developed out of the relative marginality of the speaker’s role in the traditional elegy. But with its focus now so clearly on the speaker and their responsibility toward the dead, the contemporary English elegy seems to have inverted the priorities of the traditional form. All those features that come immediately to mind in the context of elegiac poetry, such as lamentation, consolation, and resurrection have gradually lost dominion over the form, while the role of the speaker – a necessary feature of lyric poetry but by no means the central preoccupation of the traditional elegy – has increased. Those who will champion considerations of wider cultural contexts will see this as a result of the fact that “the consolatory powers religion traditionally brings to bear against death have faded.”43 With no widely accepted instance of authority and omnipotence available to transfer responsibility for the deceased to, the role of the speaker naturally grows beyond what would have been recognizable to earlier generations of elegists. Those who prefer the view that genres predominantly change from within as new practitioners seek to distinguish themselves from their forebears will opine that in this process of continuous change, genres are naturally endowed with a tendency to become ever more selfreflexive. The growing role of the speaker in this view would be a natural outcome of this tendency. Readers of the present essay will hopefully acknowledge that both aspects have their part to play in the continuing development of one of poetry’s oldest and perhaps most problematic genres.

42 Sacks, English Elegy, 19. 43 John Burt, “Book Review: Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Yeats to Hardy,” Modernism/Modernity 1.3 (1994): 285–286, 285.

Andrew Shanks

Hope, Incandescent yet Contained: A Hegelian Reading of Hölderlin’s “Celebration of Peace” Where, if at all, is ‘prophetic’ truth to be found in modern poetry? It is a rare quality. But a prime possible instance is the work of Hölderlin. Here, Hölderlin’s lyrical religious thinking is set alongside the contemporary evolving philosophic thought of his friend and ally, Hegel. Both are responding to the same twofold ‘revelatory’ historic moment: on the one hand, the intoxicating sense of quite new religious possibilities associated with the French Revolution, promising liberation from the banalities of traditional church ideology; on the other hand, the chastening spectacle of the Revolution’s descent into violence, prompting fresh respect for the truthpotential of well-rooted folk religion. Hölderlin’s ‘Celebration of Peace’ (‘Friedensfeier’) pictures the imminent advent of the kingdom of God as a great feast. A ‘Youth’ (Christ?) is invited to the feast by the poet; and it is presided over by a ‘Prince’, whose identity has been much debated by commentators. But do not these two figures directly correspond to the two aspects of the revelatory moment? Are they not both Christ, in two aspects; yet also both Dionysos? The poem is presented in a fresh English translation. Consider the sheer poetic-religious ambition of Ancient Hebrew prophecy; especially in its two most pioneering texts, the book of Amos and the work of Second Isaiah. This is poetry which is also revolutionary manifesto. The revolutionary message here appears in poetic form because, in the absence of any specific, detailed policy proposals, what is called for is just a whole new quality of theological pathos. No text written prior to Amos in the mid-eighth century BCE envisages a god even remotely like the one who appears in that first great satire: so scathingly indifferent to the mere flattery of his devotees, but so ferociously insistent, instead, on the infinite demands of true ‘justice’ for the poor. Nor does any previous text anticipate the quite astonishingly defiant spirit of hope to which Second Isaiah bears witness, a little over two hundred years later. These are writings conceived with a view to initiating a wholesale transformation in the ways of the world; suggesting hitherto undreamt-of notions of the sacred. The authors of Amos and Second Isaiah are indeed very different sorts of poet. But their work, I think, shares a rare quality. To a pre-eminent degree, one might say that it shows the true, primordial nature of authentic ‘revelation’. It is revelatory not only in its revolutionary religious ambition – but also by virtue of

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the way it so decisively transcends any mere expression of the poet’s own vanity. Neither of these prophets is saying, “Look at me, what a superior kind of mortal I am!” They are simply pointing to God; and, in the case of Second Isaiah, to that general, anguished human type, the “servant of YHWH.” What is there in modern literature which might be compared to this? There are, of course, the great lyric prophets of nihilism: Nietzsche and Rilke, for instance – brilliantly original poetic visionaries who however systematically confuse true intellectual integrity with the dictates of overweening showmanvanity – projected onto the fantasy-figures of the “overman” or the “angel.” Set them aside! Who else is there? Above all, I would argue, emerging out of the great traumas of the midtwentieth century there is the work of Nelly Sachs – a crying shame that she is still so neglected in the English-speaking world! And before that, by way of urgent critical response to the original upsurge of utilitarian Enlightenment: on the one hand, the epics of William Blake; and, on the other, the ‘hymns’ and elegies of Friedrich Hölderlin. To me, these are the writings which constitute the latter-day prophetic canon.1 The case of Hölderlin moreover possesses an especial fascination, due to his intimate friendship with the greatest of all modern philosophers. He and Hegel were for seven years, 1788–1795, fellow-students at the Tübingen Stift, ostensibly training to be Lutheran ministers; and then again for three years, 1797–1800, were closely associated, Hölderlin having helped Hegel find employment as a house tutor in Frankfurt, where he at first also was, until the fateful discovery of his affair with his employer’s wife, Susette Gontard, after which he retreated to nearby Homburg. Both men were born in 1770: exact contemporaries, as it happens, of William Wordsworth. So Hölderlin was just nineteen when, in Paris, the gates of the Bastille were forced open; Hegel still eighteen. As Wordsworth declared, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, [b]ut to be young was very Heaven!”2 Certainly, that was how the two young Swabians also experienced it. Nor were they by any means alone in this. Quite a number of their fellow-students at the Stift shared the same response; notably their mutual friend, the rather younger F. W. J. Schelling, a youthful prodigy who at first outshone them both. The official theology of the Stift was for the most part very conservative. Right from the outset, Hölderlin’s thinking, like that of Hegel and Schelling, was informed by a passionate movement of recoil from what they all felt to be the sheer banality of the prevailing

1 See Andrew Shanks, ‘What Is Truth?’ Towards a Theological Poetics (London: Routledge, 2001). 2 The Prelude, lines 108–109.

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ethos there. Why settle for such banality? They heard what was happening in France – and everything seemed possible. So they dreamed of revolutionary new beginnings, not least in the domain of religion.3 In the period 1790–1793, Hölderlin wrote a series of entirely post-Christian “hymns”: dedicated to “Beauty” (two versions), “Freedom” (twice), “Friendship,” “the Genius of Audacity,” “the Genius of Greece,” “the Genius of Youth,” “the Goddess of Harmony,” “Humanity,” “Immortality,” “Love,” and “the Muse,” in addition to a number of other, similar “songs.” With their rather clunky rhymes, and their recurrent exclamations (“Hallelujah!” oddly abbreviated to “Ha!”) these early so-called “hymns” are a good deal more conventionally hymn-like in form than any of his later ones. But there is also much less real emotional substance to them. They seem as if designed for the sort of post-Christian festivals organized by the French Revolutionaries: the atheistic Cult of Reason which became liturgically creative in the autumn of 1793, and the deistic Cult of the Supreme Being which superseded it in the spring of 1794. But that period, of course, precisely coincided with the Terror. The Tübingen students recoiled in horrified disgust from the Revolution’s descent into such extreme violence. And so they were driven deeper. Reacting, first, against the banality of their own immediate religious environment – but also, then, against the all too evident danger of mere religious deracination, as in France – their thinking essentially takes shape as a developing interplay between these two opposing negations. Hegel, for his part, begins from a concern with the requirements of popular religious reform, mediating between the two; before, at length, turning to philosophy as a way of carrying forward that concern. Hölderlin, by contrast, as he moves on from his first hymn-writing phase, is rather less interested in solidarity-building strategy per se – more in an attempt to evoke the immediate pathos of his own inner tornness, as he registers both pulls. But right up until the onset of Hölderlin’s final collapse into insanity and the end of his major work in 1803, he and Hegel remained close allies. Hölderlin’s strangest, and greatest, poetry was all written in a very brief period of intense creativity, immediately predating his collapse, in 1800–1803. Compare the trajectory of Hegel’s thought, through his numerous draft manuscripts of the 1790s, to the published essays and draft lecture notes of his Jena period, culminating in the Phenomenology of Spirit, which appeared in 1807. Hegel’s theological starting point is set out at some length in his Tübingen essay, ‘Religion ist eine’, dating from 1793. Here he specifies three fundamental criteria for an ideal form of ‘folk religion’:

3 For a detailed account, see for instance H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight 1770–1801 (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1972).

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I. Its doctrines must be grounded on universal Reason. II. Fancy, heart and sensibility must not thereby go empty away. III. It must be so constituted that all the needs of life – the public affairs of the State are tied in with it.4

Initially he understood the first of these criteria very much in accordance with the abstract post-Christian Enlightenment ideology of Kant and Fichte.5 So he launches a dismissive attack on what he calls the ‘positivity’ of the Christian religion as a whole: that is, its corruption into an essentially arbitrary, authoritarian system of dogma.6 But the second and third criteria, on the other hand, together for him serve to define the ideal form of concrete ‘ethical life’, or ‘Sittlichkeit’, the proper conversational coherence of a truly free community; which, in the first instance, he associates with a somewhat fanciful picture of Ancient Greek paganism. This serves to represent everything furthest removed, especially, from the typical imaginative sterility (as he saw it) of late eighteenth century Lutheranism. Hegel’s Kantian / Fichtean critique of ‘positivity’ and his idealization of ancient Greek Sittlichkeit are, however, initially two quite separate principles of critique. Indeed, they are in clear tension with one another: the Kantian / Fichtean notion of ‘universal Reason’, in itself, leaves so little for ‘fancy, heart and sensibility’ to work with; it is so aggressively cerebral, one can scarcely imagine such a doctrine ever gaining the sort of popular appeal required truly to permeate ‘public affairs’ at large. The mixture here is, thus, very unstable. And as, over the following years, he seeks to weave the three criteria together, Hegel’s attitude to Christianity also starts to shift. For what real prospect was there of a renewed Sittlichkeit in his world, other than by way of a rationally transfigured Christian faith? Crucially, as he ponders this, he begins to develop a pioneeringly acute sense of the basic ineradicable ambiguity intrinsic to all religious thought as such. This, in the end, is what constitutes his true greatness as a philosophic theologian. But he arrives at the underlying insight here above all because of the necessary

4 Harris provides a full translation of this text as an appendix to Hegel’s Development, pp. 482– 507; for the three criteria in context, see p. 499. 5 Fichte’s work, Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation had been published in 1792; Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone first appeared in1793. 6 There are two key texts for this, neither of them published in Hegel’s own lifetime: an essay on “The Life of Jesus,” (Theologische Jugendschriften, ed. H. Nohl [Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1907]: 75– 136), written in May–July 1795, oddly portraying Jesus as a pure proto-Kantian; and the draft book, “The Positivity of the Christian Religion,” (Theologische Jugenschriften, 152–313), written 1795– 1796. The former is translated by P. Fuss and J. Dobbins in Hegel, Three Essays 1793–1795 (Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1984); the latter by T. M. Knox, in Hegel, Early Theological Writings (Philadelphia, PA: U of Pennsylvania P, 1971).

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wriggle room it starts to afford him, towards a renewed Christianity. So, the way I am inclined to express the matter: he moves away from the concern with rigid, because abstract, propositional truth-as-correctness which still preoccupies Kant and Fichte, to a theologically much more appropriate focus on conversational truth-as-openness; a quality not at all of propositions in themselves, but of the concrete manner in which they are appropriated. In his essay on “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate,” written in 1798–1800, he explicitly repudiates the antitheology of Kant and Fichte, arguing that, if misappropriated – as it very well may be, by the conversation-closing mere scorn of the ‘enlightened’ for the ‘unenlightened’ – their doctrine may, in actual practice, prove to be just as spiritually enslaving as even the very crudest shamanic superstition, or church-ideological dogmatism.7 And then, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, he sets out systematically to analyze the appropriative work of the impulse to perfect truth-as-openness, which is what he means by “Spirit,” at every different level of human thought. This is an ascent to “absolute knowing”: beyond every last metaphysical or antimetaphysical clutching at supposedly ultimate truth-as-correctness, the ultimate trans-metaphysical recognition of perfect truth-as-openness, purely and simply in itself, as in fact the proper essence of the sacred. Viewed in retrospect, the Phenomenology as a whole is an account of the sheer ubiquity of God, struggling, within all that is human, for the opening of closed minds. It shows God, thus, everywhere at work; and also everywhere resisted, by a range of counter-impulses which are here catalogued. And so it opens up a theological discipline precisely of sustained attentiveness, as never before, to ubiquitous ambiguity. The result is a much greater openness to the latent truth-potential of Christianity: which is inevitably forever ambiguous at the popular-religious level; and endlessly distorted into various forms of rigid ‘positivity’; but never, Hegel now acknowledges, altogether reducible to such distortion. For does not the manifestation of God here, incarnate in the figure of a human individual, represent the proper claims of human individuality as such, in general? In principle, for instance, it overthrows the institution of slavery. The actual campaign to abolish slavery had only just appeared, in Hegel’s own lifetime.8 But it was the work of devout Christians; quite rightly, Hegel thinks, invoking the gospel. Divine revelation takes time, it is on-going: we need to trace its slow unfolding through the

7 “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate” (Theologische Jugendschriften, 243–342), is also translated in Hegel, Early Theological Writings. For this particular remark, which alludes to Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, IV 2 § 3, see Early Theological Writings, 210–212. 8 The Committee for Abolition of the Slave Trade had been founded in London in 1787; and the first large public meeting of the campaign took place, with Thomas Clarkson as preacher, at the Manchester Collegiate Church on October 28th that year.

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whole of history. So Hegel also proceeds to develop a vast grand narrative, on this theme. The fulfilled Sittlichkeit of the Christian ‘kingdom of God’ may still be a long way off; but its achievement will decisively surpass the lovely Sittlichkeit of ancient Greece, inasmuch as the latter still depended on slavery. This is where Hegel ends up. He began writing the Phenomenology in the spring of 1805; and it is in his Realphilosophie lectures of 1805–1806 that he finally for the first time affirms the truth-potential of Christianity, so interpreted, as the “absolute religion” and aspires to relate it to “world history” as a whole. During the period 1800–1803, however, the brief moment of Hölderlin’s great work, the transition is still underway. In Hegel’s lecture notes for a course on “Natural Law,” dating from the summer of 1802 or perhaps a little later, we still find him explicitly clinging to his original dream of a “new religion,” to supplant that of the church. What would that “new religion” look like? Presumably, it would be very much the sort of thing we see in Hölderlin’s poetry of the same time.9 In a hymn dating from 1800, “Wie wenn am Feiertage”, Hölderlin celebrates the revelatory historic moment in which he finds himself. The poem is unfinished; it breaks up at the end. From a joyous beginning, it surges to a tremendous Promethean crescendo. But then it abruptly disintegrates – as though shattered from within by the excess of its own ambition. Thus, beginning from line 54: Indeed, today it seems the sons of earth May drink, unscathed, of heavenly fire. And we – my fellow poets! – are called to stand Beneath God’s thunder storms bareheaded, Seizing the Father’s lightning bolt itself With our own hands, to wrap the heavenly gift In song, and pass it to the people. For, if we’re only pure in heart And child-like, if our hands are guileless, then The Father’s bolt, the pure, will never singe us, And, even if convulsed, in anguish, sharing the Almighty’s Anguish, yet, in all the steep down-rushing storms

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9 For the “Natural Law” lecture notes (actually preserved only by the report of Hegel’s first biographer Karl Rosenkranz) see Hegel, System of Ethical Life (1802/03) and First Philosophy of Spirit, ed. and trans. H. S. Harris and T. M. Knox (Albany: State U of New York P, 1979). They are notably discussed by Stephen Crites, Dialectic and Gospel in the Development of Hegel’s Thinking (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1998): 231–242. A curious detail, in view of Hegel’s usual preference for Protestantism over Catholicism, is his passing reference here to the “Mother of God” – as a vital aspect of the divine! Hölderlin at the same time (autumn 1802) set to work on a major hymn “To the Madonna”, although only fragments were ever completed.

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Of God’s approach, the heart will still hold fast. Although – oh no! When of Oh no! And I’ll not hide, When I drew near to gaze upon the Heavenly, They, themselves, they threw me down, amongst the dead, Me, the false priest, down into the dark, that I might Sing, to those with ears to hear, the warning song There10

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What has happened? The exuberance of the prophetic moment seems suddenly to have elicited a sharp reflux of guilt – as Hölderlin (I guess) remembers the earlier, somewhat kitsch revolutionary hymns he had written whilst still at Tübingen, and as he observes the potential complicity of such poetry with the bloody chaos of the Jacobin Terror. Elsewhere, therefore, in his work of 1800–1803 he turns back toward Christ: as a manifestation of the divine essentially, he thinks, in tune with his prophetic enthusiasm; and yet also a symbol of its potential integration into a stable and peaceable Sittlichkeit. This is the poetry of an utterly solitary, alienated individual, yearning for a form of Sittlichkeit into which even such a loner as he might be integrated. Hölderlin, like Hegel, is an impassioned devotee of perfect truth-as-openness, and like Hegel he too dreams of a community which would, as a whole community, religiously share that devotion. But no such actual community exists. And so, for the most part, he situates it imaginatively far away, in a long-lost golden age. Like Hegel, he identifies it – for symbolic purposes – with the religion of ancient Greece. However, the ideal community of which he dreams will also honor the virtues of a robustly autonomous individuality; for which Christ, above all, stands. Again like Hegel, Hölderlin is determined to rescue the truth of Christ from its prevailing corruption into mere church-ideological “positivity,” and essentially to that end therefore displaces Christ from the all too familiar context of church ideology – into the unfamiliar company of the Greek gods! Here we have his signature act of poetic protest. Sometimes – as in the great elegy “Brod und Wein” (1800) and the hymn “Patmos” (1802) – that protest takes shape as a world-historical lament. The modern world is godforsaken. Once upon a time the gods walked the earth, among us; but

10 The translation is mine.

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now no longer. It is not only the Greek gods who have departed from us. So has Christ, along with them. Even in these laments, though, there still lingers some hope of the gods’ return. And uniquely in one poem, “Friedensfeier,” the element of hope here bursts forth with the most extravagant apocalyptic urgency. The final complete text of “Friedensfeier” (“Celebration of Peace”) was lost, and was only rediscovered in 1954 – poignant fate for what is, at least ostensibly, the announcement of an imminent apocalypse. There are also numerous drafts; Hölderlin evidently worked at it for quite a considerable time. It began, we know, as his response to news of the Treaty of Lunéville: the peace sealed between Napoleon’s France and the Holy Roman Empire of Francis II on February 9, 1801. Seen in retrospect, of course, what followed from the Treaty of Lunéville appears to us as a mere brief interlude in the otherwise constant savagery of the Napoleonic period. But in Paris later that year – on November 9, the second anniversary of Napoleon’s seizure of power – it was celebrated in a grand ceremonial Jour de la fête de la paix. And Hölderlin’s hyperactive imagination rendered it something infinitely more. In the third stanza (translated below, lines 25–38) we hear distant “millennial” thunder. The same thunder had also, earlier, rumbled in “Wie wenn am Feiertage.” Ancient prophecy is about to be fulfilled. And by the time we arrive at stanza ten (lines 117–128) the return to earth of all the departed heavenly powers seems imminent. Steam is rising from the valley – like smoke from a battlefield. But this is the final, cosmic triumph of peace. “And it seems that death’s in retreat” (literally, “few now seem to be dying”). At all events, so it feels, to those whose “cheeks are flushed with a fever of hope.” We are, here, as if back in the emotional world of the first Christians: caught up into an exhilarating hope of everything being utterly transformed for the better, very soon. How literal were the apocalyptic expectations of the first Christians? We cannot tell. Literal or not, they were certainly disappointed. Yet, it is nevertheless to a very large extent surely the effect of those expectations, as they still surged, which confers on the New Testament its real abiding authority. For such hope – even if in a certain sense foolish, because so excessive – does at any rate, sublimely, tend to dissolve the banality of everyday existence, governed by the mere inertia of unexamined norms; the moral inertia within which we, of less volatile generations, by contrast remain trapped.11 And so, too, here: Hölderlin is, as it were, rekindling the original New Testament fire, which in the world of the Tübingen Stift had, to him it seemed, almost entirely burnt out.

11 Compare St. Paul on “the foolishness of God” in 1 Corinthians 1:18–31.

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Indeed, the poem itself already sacramentally enacts, by anticipation, the hoped-for consummation that it celebrates. Thus, in lines 90–93, the coming revelation is compared to the original birth of language itself, set on the same level, no less: For, see! How it breaks: the race’s second dawn. As on the pregnant day when we were made A conversation – now we’re to be a song!12

“Friedensfeier” is a feast of a song, about a feast, representing the ultimate fullness of divine truth; just as Jesus, in his parables, repeatedly compares the moment of true revelation, the coming of the kingdom of God, to a feast. The sumptuous first stanza (lines 1–12) is, in fact, typical of Hölderlin’s initial procedure in his hymns generally: establishing a vivid here-and-now, an imaginative base so to speak, before roaming off into general reflections, and historic memories. And then two messianic figures appear. First: “the Prince, whose feast it is” (line 15). Next: a “Youth,” initially glimpsed sitting beside a well, “beneath a Syrian palm” (line 42). At first, these look like two quite separate figures. Yet, surely there can only be one messiah at a time – and so how are they related? The question has been much debated.13 Much depends on how one understands lines 108–111: in the original: “denn darum rief ich […] | O Jüngling, dich zum Fürsten des Festes.” Addressing the “Youth,” I have rendered this as “I’ve set you beside the Prince of the Feast”. But it is ambiguous, and could just as well mean “I’ve called you to be the Prince of the Feast.” Actually, I think that both the Youth and the Prince, alike, are aspects of Christ; but different aspects of Christ, which Hölderlin has juxtaposed. And for my part I have opted to accentuate the difference, rather than the identity, because the difference is what is interesting. The Youth (in stanzas four and nine) is especially associated with popular liturgy. But the Prince (in stanzas two, three, six and seven) differs, in that he is patron of the Feast which is inspired prophetic poetry itself. Both figures are Christ; and both are also Dionysos. Hölderlin, I think, carefully leaves both identifications open. This would for instance explain the “Syrian” palm of stanza four (line 42), in what otherwise looks very much like the scene in John 4:6. Dionysos, after all, has an association with Syria; as well as with other parts of Asia, and Egypt. At the end of “Brod und Wein,” likewise, Hölderlin again speaks of Christ, harrowing Hell (on earth), as “the Syrian.” In “Der Einzige” he 12 The translation is mine; for the full text, see below. Emphasis added. 13 For an overview of the discussion, see for instance P. W. Maloney, Hölderlins ‘Friedensfeier’: Rezeption und Deutung (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 1985); Mark Ogden, The Problem of Christ in the Work of Friedrich Hölderlin (London: The Modern Humanities Research Association, 1991).

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speaks of Christ and Dionysos as “brothers”; but in both “Friedensfeier” and “Brod und Wein” the “brothers” have, in effect, more or less merged. The Prince: Dionysos-Christ. The Youth: Christ-Dionysos. Again, this merger is surely intended as a poetic gesture of defiance against all the many closures of standard un-Dionysian church ideology; its various refusals of fresh inspiration. As I have said, the revelatory moment which Hölderlin’s poetry as a whole articulates is essentially constituted by two balancing movements of recoil. First comes his furious turning away from the banal church ideology propagated by the Tübingen Stift – but is not this, and everything akin to it, just what the Prince has so gloriously overthrown? Then: his chastened return, nonetheless, to the never quite extinguished truth-potential of popular Christianity, recognized as a necessary bulwark against the sort of violent anarchy the Jacobins had unleashed, all the many dangers of deracination. And that is what the liturgyinspiring Youth, as such, appears to represent. The two-foldness of the Prince and the Youth thus, I think, directly corresponds to the general two-foldness of Hölderlin’s core religious inspiration. In Hegelian terms, this poem surely hails the breakthrough insight of “absolute knowing” – which (again as I have said) means knowing the imperatives of perfect truth-as-openness, and rightly acknowledging them to be the one and only true essence of the sacred. Thus, it celebrates the unique historic moment which was eventually to render possible, if not heaven on earth, then at any rate the writing of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The extravagance of its hyperbole captures the boundless hope that went into that truly prodigious intellectual achievement. Spirit’s progress toward “absolute knowing” involves on the one hand a profound, fresh reconnection with the primordial Edenic principles of Mother Nature herself; necessarily calling all given forms of moral culture into question. Stanza eleven (lines 129–139) evokes that reconnection. But then, on the other hand, in stanza twelve (lines 140–151) Hölderlin immediately turns back to consider the concomitant risks of such questioning (already, in fact, alluded to in stanza five). So Nature appears as a lioness, roaring in lament at the terrible mischief worked by one that she has herself nurtured; once again, surely, a reference to the false idealism which had issued in the Jacobin Terror.14 His whole poetic thinking is rocked between these two quite opposite, yet complementary

14 In “Wie wenn am Feiertage” Nature is acclaimed as the patron deity of “the poets” and is also described as having recently been “roused amidst the clash of arms.” So too, the proper “naming” of Nature is said, in “Am Quell der Donau,” to be the special vocation of modern thought, transcending the heritage of the past. And in “Der Rhein” Rousseau, in particular, is hailed as a leading figure among those who have contributed to this.

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impulses: the intense anarchic idealism characteristic of the ‘ingenuous soul’, represented here by the Prince; and the chastened response to Nature’s woundedlioness roar, represented by the Youth. It is, fundamentally, that rocking back and forth, rendered lyrical. Here then is my version of “Friedensfeier” in English; including Hölderlin’s own little prose preface:

Celebration of Peace I ask only for the reader’s indulgence. In which case, these lines will by no means prove incomprehensible; still less, objectionable. But should some folk, nevertheless, find them too unconventional in style – then let me confess: I cannot help it. On a fine day there should be room for almost every sort of song. And Nature, whose bounty they express, will accept them all. The author intends to lay before the public a whole collection of such pieces. So let this one serve as a sample. Soothing, melodious reverberations Wreathe themselves around the breeze that airs The custom-hallowed, antique hall; while, Over the green carpets, uplifting clouds of fragrance Fold and drift; and glittering tables, piled ith chalices of patterned gold, platefuls of ripest fruit, Stand splendidly arrayed, to frame, beneath, In lengthy vistas stretching all around, A spacious level floor. For now, as evening falls, From far and wide The eager guests arrive. And there, already, in the dark I think I see him, smiling now, After the day’s hard slog: the Prince, whose feast it is. Prince, such loftiness is yours, although you like, With lowered gaze, to disavow your foreign origins And, tired (it seems) of heroism, to assume The role of being, self-forgetfully, at home With us – still, it compels our homage. Bewilderment cries out, this is no mortal! A human sage may teach me much; yet, when A god’s involved, there shines Another quality of light.

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Here is no one-day wonder; but, a prophecy fulfilled. Nor could we help, in retrospect, but be amazed At one like this: the great Subduer of our bickering Pettiness; whom neither fire nor flood could quell. And only now can we discern The long maturing work which brought us where we are: Hearing the echoes of millennial thunder, Immeasurably distant, as they sink, under the exultant Lullaby of bells, which sing out our release. And you, O happy childhood days, when we remember you, It brings a sweet nostalgia to the feast. O friends, let age give way to agelessness! Grey hair is no excuse, the time has come To see to garlands and to merriment! And of the many guests one might invite, You surely must come first, grave advocate Of friendship: whom now I see beside the well, Out at the city’s edge, beneath a Syrian palm. The cornfield rustles round about, a quiet coolness Breathes from shadowed sacred slopes. Meanwhile, the clouds with intimate affection Supply you with their shade, to veil and civilize That sharp prophetic desert-glare you radiate. O holy Youth – But even as you speak, behold, the crisis looms! That deadly, swelling darkness – so swiftly comes and goes Whatever heaven sends. Yet, not in vain – For no god ever oversteps the mark. And it’s to spare us, they curtail Their various rare incursions here below. Then, yes, crass insolence may have its day. Rough-fingered vandals, come from who knows where, With crazy spite pillage the sanctuary. Things follow their allotted course – and who Shows proper gratitude for what’s been given? But, still, we need to think this through. For, had the giving been too urgent – Long since, our hearth’s heaped up excess Would have set everything ablaze: floor, roof and all.

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And we’ve received great blessings, Even so: one gift was fire; Others, the shore and sea, Mysterious powers, which speak to us Of more than merely human wants. Then, too, the sky at night, To speak of otherness. Until – at last – we had God’s Son. Fresh from the song-filled court above, He’s heaven’s ambassador, plenipotentiary; Whom now we welcome, Seeing who sent him. Whereupon, Whilst we in festive mood applaud him – He, the World-Spirit, majestically Draws near, to greet us. Long, long, he waited, patiently sovereign, Aloof from the world. Since, though, Truth Springs from exposure – and from The consequent sympathy, never quite lost – Why, even a god may, just for once, choose to share Our mundane, everyday subjection to need. And, where the Spirit’s at work, we’ll join in, as well. We’ll say what we think. So, now, let me add How good it does seem that, the time being right, The Artist should thus have arisen, transfigured By Art, and, quitting the studio’s quiet, set forth To arrange what needed arranging. For, see! How it breaks: the race’s second dawn. As on the pregnant day when we were made A conversation – now we’re to be a song! And the unfolding work of history reveals The primal pact between the spirit of humanity And all the other natural powers. Here, God’s indwelling everywhere is finally Made manifest; much as the flowers signify Not just what light and air have done, but also Mother Earth. And these are, then, the further sign of our response to you, You holy ones, the proof that we Still hold you sacred: Our liturgies. Where we commune With you, close up. And you draw near, Not in magic or thunder –

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But in the sheer lift And surge of the choir, in our pleasure At humanly being together, in the welcome, The friendship. Which you, gentle Youth, Uniquely inspire. Which is why I couldn’t forget you; Why, now that time draws to an end and the banquet’s prepared, I’ve set you beside the Prince of the Feast. Nor shall we, our kind, ever be able to rest Until the time comes when you all, You immortals, you that were Promised, together descend, As our guests, to instruct us. Light-breathing winds, Already, announce you, And signs of your advent appear In the steam of the dale and the echoing hillside. Our cheeks are flushed with a fever of hope. And mother and child, As they sit at the threshold, Gaze out upon peace. And it seems that death’s in retreat; As though those on the brink were held back By the hint of some promise Conveyed in the sunrise. Truly, the gusto of life Derives from the down-thrust, The schemes and trouble of Spirit. And all now is fine. But most pleasing of all, When found, it being So rare, is the windfall from Eden After the tempest, that treasure Which Fate has ever so gently Preserved from the rage of the world: An ingenuous soul. Like a lioness, Nature, Our mother, you roared, in lament For all your lost children; When, too loving, you’d nurtured, Almost like one of your own, the one Who afterwards stole them, causing gods To consort with mere satyrs. So much civilization

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You’ve had to erase, all because That sophisticate’s so full of hatred, Whom, divinely incautious, You raised too soon to the light. Now, though, you see it, and wait. For courage comes slowly, down here; And, in the meantime, the need is for soothing routine.

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Book Reviews

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Deborah Parker. Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xi + 152 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-76140-6, 53 GBP. “Read the heart and not the letter,” Michelangelo wrote in a draft letter to his close friend Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, quoting Petrarch, “since ‘my pen cannot follow closely my good will’” (116). And indeed, the circa 500 extant letters by Michelangelo Buonarroti constitute an extraordinary testimony not only regarding the life and work of an iconic figure in Renaissance art but also regarding the problem of communicating ideas and emotions via script, as experienced by a key figure of fifteenth and sixteenth-century literary style. In this compact and tightlyargued study Deborah Parker demonstrates how Michelangelo’s activity as a letter writer and poet intersected with his activity as a visual artist. Although the aim here is not to engage in “explaining” artistic productivity, if such were possible, this study invites reflection on the way the artist’s mind worked across different media and makes a convincing case for a more nuanced reading of epistolary evidence, when such is available to accompany other sorts of documentation about a life. As in all matters of expression, in his letter-writing, too, Michelangelo was a careful craftsman of his own image, and Parker directs attention to how he wrote as well as to what he wrote. His signature, a key visual now nearly as ubiquitous as the images of some of the artworks, bears scrutiny here as an act of selfpresentation. Likewise, the body of a letter reveals visual as well as verbal cues: the formation of the letters, the slant of the penstrokes, the upward or downward direction of the lines, evidence an awareness of the formal appearance as viewed by a reader as well as a transition, after century’s end, from a mercantile to a humanist type of script. Parker stops short of divining character from handwriting style in any systematic way, but she is able to reveal mental states which might otherwise escape attention. Some of the circa 800 letters sent in the other direction (i.e., to Michelangelo) might bear rereading along similar lines; and researchers now have this text for inspiration and advice. Although Michelangelo’s letters have only become available in their entirety in the twentieth century, Giorgio Vasari was already conscious of their value as a biographical source during the lifetime of their writer; and Parker elaborates here on material from her 2005 Renaissance Quarterly article concerning the use of the letters from time to time in scholarship. Use often involved citation; and citation might include modification to suit a particular interpretation. Vasari for instance changed some salutations in order to indicate a greater degree of familiarity than he had actually enjoyed. He also tacitly shortened portions of letters that did not interest him, such as Michelangelo’s criticism of the festivities for the birth of a grand nephew, and added portions

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of one letter (of 22 August 1551) on to another (of April 1554), to draw attention to material about himself. He discretely removed the portion of the letter of 22 June 1555 where Michelangelo expressed his unwillingness to leave Rome in spite of encouragements from the Medici family in Florence. If Vasari’s Life seems at times more of a “poetical exercise” (as Paul Barolsky has suggested) than a history strictly speaking, any suggestive fictions had plenty of precedent in the figure of Michelangelo himself, who was nearly as careful an entrepreneur of his own reputation as he was of his visual artistry, even when it came to deception, as in the famous Soderini episode, where he pretended to modify a work to accommodate the wishes of a critic by only going through the motions of making a requested correction. That did not mean Michelangelo was particularly fond of what Vasari was writing about him; on the contrary, he preferred to encourage the parallel effort by Ascanio Condivi, whom he found more congenial. After the two Renaissance biographers there is a hiatus, and the late nineteenth-century reawakening of interest in Michelangelo at first was not profoundly influenced by the availability of a good portion of the letters in an edition by Gaetano Milanesi. However, based on other sources, in work by Hermann Grimm and Aurelio Gotti the picture of Michelangelo began to take on new contours. John Addington Symonds was the first to use the corpus of available letters to the full extent, in a 1892 biography that long remained the standard; and the brooding figure he traced (with “admirable objectivity,” in Parker’s view, 38) has only recently given way to the astute businessman or brilliant networker evidenced in work by more recent scholars (respectively, Rab Hatfield’s The Wealth of Michelangelo, 2002 and William Wallace’s Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man, and His Times, 2009). Epistolary and artistic expression share a single pattern of here. Aphorisms from popular speech, significant oppositions of concepts, repetitions and embellishments, are aspects equally of verbalization and of artistic imagery. Michelangelo’s furious letter of June 1509 does not simply call his brother Giovansimone to account for bad behavior. It is a carefully bundled quiver of concepts designed to strike and hurt in order to correct and reform. It begins with the saying, “if one treats a good man well, he becomes better, but a wicked man becomes worse” (63). We wonder whether Michelangelo’s disappointments in regard to his family may in some way have constituted a source of energy: an area of disquiet in contrast to the beauty and order in his mind, or from which his art might divert attention. Good-bad, friend-traitor, hero-slacker; the concepts drive a juxtaposition between the brother’s wickedness and the writer’s attempt to teach self-sacrifice by example. Oppositions abound also in the artwork: the two sides of Paradise in the Sistine ceiling; the saved and the damned in the Last Judgment; in sculpture, the paired figures of Leah and Rachel on the Tomb of Julius II. In architecture,

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inversions form a different type of opposition: pilasters in the Laurentian Library vestibule seem upended, tapered at the bottom rather than the top, pressing down on the structure and our senses. Colossal weights are being moved or leveraged, in the projects and in the mind. Repetition, too, is a significant aspect of visual expression, Parker asserts, pointing to the tumbling ignudi in the Sistine ceiling. If aphorisms, finally, are concentrated gestures, such gestures may be found in such images as the opposing outstretched arms in the Creation of Adam, or in the tersely articulated right hand of the David sculpture. Particularly noteworthy in Michelangelo’s repertoire of verbal and artistic gesture are the themes about captivity and bondage. They often come up in the poetry, and apart from Neoplatonic echoes of the soul’s captivity in the body, they often refer to states of mind induced by circumstance. Even more earnestly they occur in the midst of other themes of freedom and constraint in the letters, when Michelangelo is speaking of duties to family and orders from patrons. They lead us, Parker shows, to another intersection between words and artworks, and indeed, between expression and life experience. Themes of bondage and captivity in painting and sculpture, slaves with their tied hands and bound bodies, sybils and other figures bearing symbols of constraint in the form of lateral bands across the chest or thorax, all lead us back, in Parker’s thoughtful combination of verbal and visual evidence, to reflections upon Michelangelo’s work ethic, his notion of duty and reciprocity, and his idealization of the never-achieved life without toil in the midst of a hard life well lived. Brendan Dooley

University College Cork

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Keith A. Sandiford. Theorizing a Colonial Caribbean-Atlantic Imaginary: Sugar and Obeah. New York: Routledge, 2011. 194 pp. ISBN 978-0-415-87689-6, 90 GBP. In his previous book The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Keith Sandiford explored colonial narratives from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries by Richard Ligon, Charles de Rochefort, James Grainger, Janet Schaw, William Beckford, and Matthew Gregory Lewis. Ligon and Lewis return in Sandiford’s recent book, Theorizing a Colonial Caribbean-Atlantic Imaginary: Sugar and Obeah, but with a significant difference. While the former book presented the various accounts largely from the point of view of the European writers, here Sandiford is more interested in the ways in which their voices are dialogically inflected by the usually invisible, silent, or otherwise peripheral Amerindians and slaves, including women who were even more relegated to the background in early colonialist literature, historiography, and criticism. These two British authors, Ligon who published the True and Exact History of Barbadoes in 1657, and Lewis, a wellknown writer of Gothic fiction whose Journal of a West India Proprietor Kept During a Residence in the Island of Jamaica was published posthumously in 1834, bookend the period of British settlement and slavery in the region then known as the West Indies. In tracing such an “arc,” one of the spatial, kinetic, and dialogic conceits that Sandiford borrows from Wilson Harris, the former theorizes a tradition of what he calls a “Caribbean-Atlantic Imaginary,” by which he means complex, unstable, but “common meaning systems, discovered in patterns of political and social relations that undergirded the slave societies of colonial Barbados [Ligon] and Jamaica [Lewis]” (3). One of Sandiford’s aims is to insert these early texts not just into Atlantic paradigms, but “as prime agents in a worldmaking (globalizing) discourse” (99), usually associated with the time frame of late capitalism and postmodernity. The focus on the early period of settlement, colonialism, and slavery is very much needed in Caribbean and postcolonial fields that tend to lean toward postfifties literary production, particularly from the period of rousing anti-colonial upheaval. In the racialized nationalist politics of Caribbean literary periodization, white authors, particularly those from the metropolis, would not be considered as necessary for Caribbean literary study. But Sandiford is right in arguing for their inclusion, since they demonstrate a longer literary history and illuminate an important historical period. Recently the lens has been trained on nineteenthcentury writing from the Anglophone Caribbean. But Sandiford’s work on even earlier centuries – arguably the formative period of Caribbean modernity – is invaluable on a number of counts.

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There are very few scholars who work on the literature of this period as it is related to the Caribbean, or even locate such works in broad Atlantic networks, although that seems to be changing with growing interest in Atlantic paradigms casting a wider net across Africa, the Americas, and Britain. Even those who do work on these relatively understudied authors are selective in their vision. As Sandiford points out, Lewis is better known in literary circles for his Gothic fiction and his place in the English literary tradition. Ligon tends to be more narrowly associated with Barbados for obvious reasons. Instead, Sandiford locates them in a wider circulation as Atlantic writers of the early period and also analyzes them through contemporary figures more familiar to the modern Caribbean and postcolonial canon such as Homi Bhabha, Kamau Brathwaite, Paul Gilroy, Édouard Glissant, and Wilson Harris, among others. Each field is thus enriched by the other. Each historical perspective is complemented by its previously missing angle: the postcolonial critique that escapes a Euro-American master narrative and the early colonialist discourse that is generally overlooked in postcolonial scholarship are effectively entwined together. Such entanglement on several different levels is a key strategy in Sandiford’s rhizomic approach to the multiple figures, histories, lived experiences, and ideologies he engages here. Glissant’s catholic, open sense of the Caribbean as a culturally teeming, creolized entrepôt pervades the text. The elastic intertextuality of primary and secondary sources from different periods is fascinating, if a tad difficult and dense for the reader. Sandiford exercises an acrobatic agility in keeping an eye on the multiple balls he juggles, but he demands the same of the reader who may occasionally get lost in the tangled thickets of literary theory, material culture, period details, and other elements of his multiple readings. The outcome is often rewarding, though, as in the thick descriptions of commodities such as sugar and cassava, which feature both as toxin and sustenance; of the West African reparative symbolism of the oceanic, which allows us to read the watery suicide of the slaves as a kind of birth; of obeah, which haunts the guilty and fevered imagination of the slave owners but provides agency to the slaves; of the slave woman’s corporeality, ranging from the conventional racist grotesque to the equally stereotypical but less discussed lyrical celebration of her well endowed charms, and the white man’s fascination with both images. These topics are not unfamiliar in the field, but Sandiford provides highly original, richly suggestive close readings whose drawback may be how thick and fast they sometimes come at the reader, although such a surfeit also implies the embarrassment of riches in this material. Sometimes the signposts whizz past, often gesturing toward possible directions – “poison and obeah; poison, obeah and myal; myal and marronage; myal, obeah and marronnage” (115) – rather than pursuing them at any great length. More leisurely discussion may overturn the

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proposed binary of sugar as indicative of healing and obeah of disease for the slave masters (50). Lewis, for instance, seems remorsefully aware of sugar’s bloody history. And obeah was used not just for poison, but also for healing; however much the masters scoffed or fretted, some of them did use their slaves’ dual knowledge. But there is plenty to digest in this packed narrative. In some ways, the individual texts of the two primary authors, while interesting enough, become more so when laced with the various theoretical threads that lend texture and depth to the texts and form chapters of their own. Nothing stays fixed, the movement is almost dizzying, and rapidly itemized statements of intention in the same paragraph embody the way the author sometimes darts from one possibility to another: “Sugar is evaluated…,” “The ocean is established…,” “The map is shown to be…,” “The text is read…” (76–77). In the expansive scope of such “epistemic vitality” (150), people (along with objects and tropes) ingest, bleed, copulate, intermingle, desire, fantasize, fear, feed, poison, heal, abscond, pursue, resist, fail, revive, in a word – flow – in a dynamics of circulatory arcs (Harris), tidalectic waves (Brathwaite), and relational poetics (Glissant). One of the highlights of the book is the way it draws attention to Caribbean intellectuals and the wealth of their insights on regional specificities, which are generally silenced when posed against the theorists more cited in the US academy. Not that Western academics are eschewed in some kind of nativist pose, although here too Sandiford favors the theories of philosopher and psychoanalyst Cornelius Castoriadis, not as well known as the usual suspects Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, who also appear here, but less centrally. Sandiford borrows the central matrix of his propositions not from the Lacanian concept of the Imaginary, but from Castoriadis, in that the imaginary is “the magma or creative force from which a society’s cultural origins may be traced” (1). The “instituting” power of European social forces in the establishment of empire is destabilized by the “counterorders” of Amerindian and African epistemes and practices in pre-colonial and colonial Barbados and Jamaica. The desperate attempts to fix social order and individual bodies never succeed in any stable way, although they certainly extract a high cost in mortality and coercion. Sandiford does not deny these costs, even if they are not his focus here. He suggests that precisely because the social and material realms were so policed, the imaginary as a more intangible, “an-archichal” sphere was harder to suppress (9). It must be noted that by imaginary he does not mean simply the visionary imagination or fantasy, but a more multifarious, constitutive, creative synergy of ideology and practice, thought systems and material cultures. Another void in postcolonial scholarship is addressed here, although much of what can be retrieved speaks to the still uncharted knowledge of precolonial consciousness before the modern nations came into being: the myths and folklore

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of a people that have largely been assimilated, pushed into remote reserves, or have disappeared from these islands they once inhabited. In some ways, given the virtual absence of the direct voices of the indigenous people and the slaves in the colonial archive, and the mediated, even distorted, access we have to them in the colonial narrative, the imaginary is the primary means of their recovery, implies Sandiford. While Amerindian kinship myths and dietary practices are mentioned, the slaves leap into more vivid and threatening being, as Lewis, in particular, is torn between abolitionist ideals and fears of insurrectionary slaves who practice obeah, poison their masters, and burn down plantations. Chapter 6 focuses on Lewis’s poem The Isle of Devils, the longest poem of those that appear in his prose journal, which was based on a couple of visits made to his Jamaican holdings. The shift from prose to poetry, from memoir to myth, provides a fruitful avenue for discussions of generic variation. The split voice of such texts, which echoes both the paranoid official discourse of slave rebellion and the romantic, abolitionist sentiments of the “noble negro” narrative evident in colonial legends of Plato and Obi or Three Fingered Jack, suggests yet another rupture of colonial fixity. Sandiford argues for “an axiomatic postmodern” reading in which “what we see in these performances is not a single immutable identity but multiple identities, and often several within the same performance” (107). The intertextuality of this long poem with an old Italian text, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Ligon’s History (in which Bernardo Mendez de Sousa, the mixed-race, Machiavellian Portuguese historical figure appears as a Calibanesque threat to English dominance), and the various versions of Obi, or Three Finger’d Jack gives a longer provenance to such allegorical interpretations than later proponents such as Roberto Fernández Retamar and George Lamming would suggest. The Gothic mode in which Lewis is proficient makes itself available to the terror of slavery (and more to the point, the terror of slave revolts). This final chapter is possibly the finest close reading in the book, saving the best for last, as Sandiford dexterously weaves together history, cultural studies, and literary analysis, moving seamlessly from early text to contemporary theory and unfolding the poem in all its fullness. Ultimately, he argues in the conclusion, the oceanic imaginary he traces prefers Harris’s sentient “crosscultural bridge” over “[Derek] Walcott’s grey vault” (150), which is not to say that Walcott’s work does not also perform a miraculous animation of its own. Critics who would focus on the deathly horror of genocide and slavery will not find that Medusa fixation in Sandiford’s approach to the period here. Against a larger narrative of silence and disappearance, indeed, through this colonial narrative of the blaring master’s voice, he resurrects “the Amerindian and African legacies as persistent agential powers” (23). His deconstructive strategy of prising open these fugitive, occult, and errant “counterorders” from the more estab-

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lished, “instituted” documents of empire leads him to suggest that these legacies function essentially like a “numinous author, though one without a human written identity” (12). Try as they might, colonial authors like Ligon and Lewis could never reproduce a univocal master narrative but are submerged in “the counterpoetics of the imaginary” (90). They are forced by those they try to control to become “irresistibly inclusive” (66), even if in sometimes unconscious ways. While not everyone may share this subversive view of the imaginary and its counterorders, I find Sandiford’s arguments powerful and persuasive. His book is a significant contribution to the early colonial, Atlantic, Caribbean, and postcolonial fields that it draws upon and, in turn, enriches. Supriya Nair

Tulane University, New Orleans, LA

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The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, ed. Ato Quayson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 2 vols, 1391 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-51749-2, 200 GBP (310 USD). The publication of a History of Postcolonial Literature by Cambridge University Press (CHPL) carries significance beyond the merits which the work under review undoubtedly displays. It is a milestone event in the field of postcolonial studies, as the publisher is not only one of the major, time-honoured university presses in a major former colonial metropolis; in the development of the (sub)genre of history of literature, Cambridge University Press has the distinction of having shaped the format of the multi-volume, collaborative history of literature in Britain with the publication of the first Cambridge History of English Literature (1907–1916), only the second successful attempt at a major, expansive history of English literature after William Courthope’s six-volume History of English Poetry (1895–1910). The work under review is therefore also an important factor in the process of ‘canonisation’ of postcolonial literature and postcolonial studies as an academic field of research and teaching. This is not to say that postcolonial studies had been in dire need of such confirmatory action. Variously traced back to the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, but in fact of course much older in its interests and research questions, postcolonial studies have developed into a widely accepted approach to understanding the history and practices of literature not only written in former colonies, but as much in the centres of former colonial powers as in the peripheries and beyond national boundaries and confines of cultures. Thus, the CUP publication can be seen as the final seal in the ‘rise’ of postcolonial studies which have long arrived in the core curriculum of Western university education. It is geared to set out, definitively and in a historical, expansive gesture, the field of research in postcolonial studies. While consolidation and confirmation constitute one aspect of this landmark publication, there is also the impression of a final stock taking of a development which is already moving on and possibly elsewhere, or which is at least undergoing major changes. That was the case with the conceptualisation of the history of British literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the first Cambridge History of English Literature appeared, and that may well be the case with postcolonial literature now, signalled by the publication of this history. Placed in that time-honoured tradition of comprehensive histories of literature, the CHPL also shares in the difficulties and challenges with which this tradition is fraught. The fact that these ventures usually fail is probably the most obvious of such difficulties, and, to anticipate the outcome of the following considerations, the CHPL also ultimately fails, but it does so reflectively and most productively.

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The CHPL is a failure of sorts in so far it does not deliver a cohesive historical narrative of postcolonial literature. It is biased, as it privileges some languages, cultures, regions and periods over others, and its unifying feature, the postcolonial and the concepts of literary history, appear, for all the valid attempts at definition in the editor’s introduction, insufficiently mapped out and contextualized. That a historical narrative of any domain of literature will mostly remain fragile and patchy, is part of the long experience of this genre, and failing to provide such a stringent narrative puts the CHPL in good company: The first major attempt in British literary history, Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry (1774–1781), got bogged down by the mass of material and never reached Shakespeare even with its (unfinished) fourth and last volume; and the grand and all-encompassing Histoire Litteraire de la France, which was started in 1733, is still being written and has now reached its forty-third volume, but has only just left the fourteenth for the fifteenth century. Such attempts at narrative literary history only became somewhat more successful (and succinct) in the course of the nineteenth century, when the emphasis on the nation state on the one hand and the necessities of educational functions became more pronounced. Here, Robert Chambers’ History of the English Language and Literature (1836) in Britain and Georg Gottfried Gervinus’ Geschichte der poetischen Nationalliteratur der Deutschen (1835–1842) present successful examples, with the former reflecting the striving for a wider British national identity (from a Scottish point of view) and the latter taking a major part in actually shaping such an identity in Germany leading up to the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871. CHPL’s editor, Ato Quayson, is fully aware (CHPL, I:21) of the lack of the nation as such a unifying agent which could hold a history of postcolonial literature together, but the recognition of this lack is not followed by convincing conceptual and narrative strategies that might take its place. While the CHPL is very strong in pointing out historical perspectives on postcolonial literature as well as on colonial and postcolonial historical contexts and on historical developments in certain geographic regions and when focusing a particular theme, it nevertheless lacks a clear concept of what ‘the history of postcolonial literature’ in the singular means, what overriding functions it could fulfil and how it could be held together to form a coherent and meaningful narrative, i.e., a narrative which provides a productive and insightful interpretation of the development of postcolonial literature in the past. At the end of the day, the CHPL emerges as a gallimaufry of various approaches to postcolonial literature, various project lines of literary and historical scholarship and various understandings of what a history of literature means and entails. Confessing this heterogeneity, as Quayson repeatedly does in his introduction, is not in itself already a solution to this problem. Thus, Quayson professes a reflective gesture in the “rigorous interrogation of the sources and historical

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dispositions of the main assumptions of the writing of literary history” (I:22); he understands (and presumably gave his contributors leeway to deploy) the word ‘literature’ in the wider meaning of the term, but then has genre-focused chapters which subsequently widen the view again to many other forms of writing. These, he avers, “all had an impact on the constitution of postcolonial literary studies” (I:22), again a remark which leaves the reader unclear whether this is a history of postcolonial literature, or a history of postcolonial studies, or of both: but if both, then how are the two levels interrelated? At the end of the day, the two volumes of the CHPL do not constitute a proper history at all; at best, they appear as a tool kit for readers who wish to shape and develop their own ideas of what a history of postcolonial literature could look like. Its character is, for all its asseverations of presenting a history, more that of a handbook or companion than anything else. The generic demarcation line between the set-up of the Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (ed. Neil Lazarus, CUP 2004) and Quayson’s venture is, albeit still visible, tenuous, and chapters could easily be interchanged between the two works without much unpleasantly sticking out. CHPL shares many of these problems with The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, ed. F. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi (2 vols, CUP 2004), which also more or less unsystematically mixes historical with thematic, genre-based and geographically oriented chapters. Irele and Gikandi’s approach is perhaps more convincing in view of representative inclusiveness, as it radically turns away from centring its interests on literature in English and includes a host of literatures in other languages. Although the CHPL also does bring in several other languages, notably the entire Hispanic field in the Americas but also some aboriginal and native languages, and it also has a chapter explicitly dealing with the language issue, the majority of writings considered is still Anglophone, as much as the majority of colonial and postcolonial situations is focused on the histories of British and other European colonisations and imperialisms, while literatures which have emerged in colonial contexts in other areas and other periods do not receive the same attention, notably those further back in history (what about Greek and Roman colonialism in Europe?) or those regions less in the focus of Western scholarly attention. There is not much being said about Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire, although this may well be the research area with the most interesting and exciting growth in postcolonial studies. Further seemingly relevant Asian contexts, such as Chinese and Japanese colonisations and the literatures these produced, get similar short shrift. In sum, CHPL is not a history of postcolonial literature as it might have been written with a view to creating a historical narrative showing a clear-cut focus on the postcolonial (which need not only be a quality in the texts themselves but can also be a specific way of reading and interpreting) and with a view to producing a

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coherent narrative history of the postcolonial phenomenon in literature from its beginnings through its various interrelations and intertwinings to the present day. Despite all these difficulties, CHPL is a highly informative and massively helpful work for students and researchers in the field. Many of the ‘failures’ pointed out above seem almost unavoidable, others point to different ways of approaching the topic but can still highlight important issues and open up new directions. The fact, for instance, that some bias towards European or Europeanderived colonialism is clearly detectable does not devalue the entire enterprise. It is the area where most readers of these volumes will have their main point of interest and it is also what the editor and authors are best qualified to write about. The bias is as much due to market forces as it is to the current state of (mainly Western) research in the field. Awareness that this is not “the postcolonial literature” tout court which is being historicized here is occasionally being raised and could, perhaps, have been more pronounced. Similarly, if readers are prepared to accept the lack of, or do not even expect, a coherent historical narrative, then the value of the individual contributions in this collaborative effort are highly informative; they move the limelight with great agility to the many refractions of today’s postcolonial studies and address an impressive array to major research interests in the field. Even if CHPL is far from comprehensive and catholic in its approach to postcolonial literature, it does open up new vistas in pushing back the curtains further, as it were, on a wider window on the world of postcolonial writings. The Arabs come in (ch. 9), new approaches are offered (e. g., ch. 28), and the material and media basis of postcolonial literature is taken into account (esp. ch. 35 and 36). The postcolonial in the metropolises is acknowledged and extensively dealt with (esp. ch. 18–20) and the realisation that postcolonial literature is also a transnational phenomenon, as analysed, for instance, in the burgeoning field of diaspora studies, is acknowledged and present through most of the contributions. In this respect, nobody working in postcolonial studies will easily bypass the CHPL. Whether the two volumes signal or even help to bring on a paradigmatic shift, perhaps not beyond postcolonial studies, but beyond the stage of a monofocal post/colonial perception of some literatures towards seeing them in a new light increasingly unimpressed by the colonial past, the “certain coming of postcolonial age” which Ananya Jahanara Kabir refers to when writing about postcolonial literature in India (I:439), remains to be seen. Klaus Stierstorfer

Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

Contributors Jenni Adams is Lecturer in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature at the University of Sheffield, where her research addresses the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in Holocaust fiction and twenty-first century literature more broadly. She is the author of Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature: Troping the Traumatic Real (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and co-editor with Sue Vice of Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2013). Sebastian Domsch teaches Anglophone literatures at the Ernst-Moritz-ArndtUniversity Greifswald. He holds a PhD from Bamberg University, and a Habilitation from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. His major fields of interest are contemporary literature and culture, graphic novels, the history and theory of literary criticism, Romantic literature and eighteenth-century literature. He is the author of a book on Robert Coover, Absenz – Simulation – Karneval: Eine Untersuchung der postmodernen Erzählverfahren in Robert Coovers gesamtem Romanwerk (2005), a book on the formation of eighteenth-century literary criticism, and two forthcoming books, one on Cormac McCarthy (2012) and one on video games and narrative (2013). He is editor of a collection on American twenty-firstcentury fiction, Amerikanisches Erzählen nach 2000: Eine Bestandsaufnahme (2008), and of the Kritisches Lexikon zur fremdsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (Anglophone literatures). He has worked as a freelance reviewer for several German-wide newspapers and journals. Shuly Eilat is an independent scholar and a freelance translator. Patrick Gill is a lecturer in the Anglophone Cultures section of the Department of English and Linguistics at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz in Germany, where he also received his PhD. His monograph on the history and theory of poetic ambiguity with particular reference to the poetry of Dylan Thomas is set to appear in 2012. English poetry of all periods aside, his research and teaching tend to engage with contemporary British literature, all forms of literary translation and adaptation, and various aspects of popular culture. He has published essays on twentieth-century poetry, contemporary drama, and British and American TV culture. He has enjoyed periods as a visiting lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and Jagiellonian University, Krakow. Rachel S. Harris is Assistant-Professor of Israeli Literature and Culture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is co-editor of Narratives of Dissent:

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War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture (Wayne State Press: Detroit, 2013) and her monograph An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature is forthcoming with Northwestern University Press. Her articles have been published in JOJI, the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Shofar and Israel Studies. She has edited journal special issues on “Russian-Jewish Diaspora Post-1970” Journal of Jewish Identities Vol. 4, No. 1 (Jan, 2011); “The Jewish Woman and Her Body” Nashim 23, (Spring-Fall 2012) and the forthcoming “Hebrew Literature Now: Israeli Writers of the 21st Century” Shofar (Jun 2015). She is the series editor for the Dalkey Archive Press Series Hebrew Literature in Translation. Irmtraud Huber holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Berne, where she is currently employed as a lecturer, teaching a broad range of topics from Romantic to contemporary literature. She has studied Comparative Literature, English Literature and Theatre Studies in Munich. Her dissertation, for which she has spent six months as a visiting scholar at Columbia University, New York, on a scholarship from the Swiss National Fund, focused on the role of fantastic elements in recent literary attempts to go beyond postmodernism. She has published various articles on magical realism, contemporary literature and on authenticity. Her further research currently focuses on changing metaphors and imaginaries of time. Hester Jones has been Senior Lecturer in English in the University of Bristol (UK) since 2007; before this she was Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool (1994–2007) and Title A Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. She is completing a monograph on ‘Twentieth Century Poetry and Christian Belief’ and has published in the areas of Anglican writing, poetry (including several articles on Alexander Pope), ecospirituality and women writers (including Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich). James Jordan is Karten Lecturer in Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton. He is researching the role and representation of Jews in British television from 1936–1979 and working on a related project on the Holocaust and the BBC. He is the author of From Nuremberg to Hollywood: The Holocaust in the Courtroom of American Fictive Film (forthcoming, 2013), and co-editor of Governments in Exile and the Jews of Europe (with Jan Lanicek, 2013), Jewish Journeys: From Philo to Hip Hop (with Tony Kushner and Sarah Pearce, 2010) and The Memory of the Holocaust in Australia (with Tom Lawson, 2008). He is Editor of the journal Holocaust Studies.

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Meyrav Koren-Kuik is currently working on her doctoral dissertation, which centers on Victorian Literature and the perception of space. Her research interests include narrative theory and the intersection between the visual arts, literature and space. She contributed essays to the edited collections Film and Literary Modernism (Cambridge Scholars), Camelot on the Small Screen (Boydell and Brewer, forthcoming 2013), and Fan CULTure: An Examination of Participatory Fandom in the 21st Century (McFarland & Company, forthcoming in 2013). In addition, she presented papers at conferences both in Israel and the UK and taught basic academic composition classes at Tel Aviv University. Michael Lejman is a doctoral candidate in Modern European history at the University of Memphis, specializing in the postcolonial world, immigration, and nationalism with an interest in comparative studies between European and American contexts. Angelica Michelis is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University. She studied at the Universitaet des Saarlandes and the University of Essex and taught at Anglia John Ruskin University and the Open University. She has published widely on contemporary British and American poetry, Victorian literature and critical theory. With Antony Rowland she coedited ‘Choosing Tough Words’: The Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy (Manchester University Press, 2003). She is currently working on a monograph for Manchester University Press entitled Eating Theory: A Theory of Eating. Other publications include contributions to European Journal of English Studies (New Poetics), International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies, and The Canarian Review of English Studies. She was contributing editor to The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (History of Art and Visual Culture) from 1999–2004. Kitty J. Millet is Associate Professor of Comparative Jewish Literatures at San Francisco State University. Tenured in Jewish Studies, she is also appointed to Comparative Literature. Her publications usually concern Holocaust Narrative, Literatures of the Americas and Europe. Her most recent articles include: “On Contemplating Jean Amery’s Loss of Transcendence” in Zolkos, On Jean Amery (Lexington, 2012); “Caesura, Continuity, and Myth: the Stakes of Tethering the Holocaust to German Colonial Theory” in Langbehn and Salama, German Colonialism, Race, the Holocaust and Postwar Germany (Columbia UP, 2011). While finishing her book on Holocaust literature and the concept of anagnorisis, or recognition, she has recently signed a contract with Bloomsbury for a book contrasting the subjective experiences of victims in extermination camps, under slavery, and colonialism.

412

Contributors

Diana Popescu is a cultural historian specializing in Jewish cultural studies. She completed her PhD in 2012 at Parkes Institute for Jewish/non-Jewish relations, University of Southampton. Her research interests include Jewish modern and contemporary history, Holocaust representation in art and popular culture, Israel and Diaspora studies, and are uniquely shaped by a multidisciplinary outlook drawing on art historical, literary and linguistic theories. Several of her contributions can be found in the Jewish Renaissance Magazine, Images. A journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, and Jewish Culture and History. Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz worked as a senior lecturer (Akademische Rätin) in the English Department of Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, until her recent retirement. Her Ph.D. with a thesis on gender in Shakespeare’s sonnets first showed her lasting concern with this author’s poetical and dramatic works. She also held positions as visiting lecturer / visiting professor at Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, as well as at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. Her main fields of interest in research are early modern English literature and contemporary English and American fiction. She published a monograph on Science Fiction and Postmodern Fiction: A Genre Study (New York: Peter Lang, 1992) and coedited a collection of critical essays with Wolfgang Karrer on The African American Short Story, 1970-1990 (Trier, Germany: WVT, 1993). Recently, she coedited Portraits of the Artist as a Young Thing in British, Irish and Canadian Fiction after 1945 (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012), a volume on the female artist figure in contemporary fiction (with Anette Pankratz). She is currently editing a collection of essays on the “Feminisation of Fiction Today,” set to appear in 2013 as a special issue of Anglistik, the journal of the German association of university teachers of English. Andrew Shanks is a Church of England priest; currently working as Canon Theologian at Manchester Cathedral. His most recent book, Neo-Hegelian Theology: ‘To worship only what belongs to perfect open-mindedness’ is due to be published by Ashgate in 2013. He has written extensively on philosophic theology, from the perspective suggested by that title. Other works include Hegel and Religious Faith: Divided Brain, Atoning Spirit (London: T. & T. Clark, 2011); Faith in Honesty: The Essential Nature of Theology (Ashgate, 2005) and ‘What Is Truth?’ Towards a Theological Poetics (London: Routledge, 2001). ‘What Is Truth?’ includes a discussion of Hölderlin, alongside Nelly Sachs, William Blake and the prophet Amos, as so many diverse representatives of the ‘pathos of shakenness’, understood to be the proper essence of ‘revelatory’ poetic truth.

Contributors

413

Efraim Sicher is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel. He has published widely on modern Jewish culture, Holocaust literature, and the nineteenth-century novel. His most recent books are The Holocaust Novel (2005); Rereading the City/Rereading Dickens (2nd revised edition, 2012); Babel in Context (2012); (as editor) Race, Color, Identity (2013). Clive Sinclair is the author of three collections of short stories, all of which have won – or been short listed for – literary prizes, including the Jewish Quarterly Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Dylan Thomas Award, and the PEN Silver Pen. His new collection – Death & Texas – will be published by Peter Halban next February. As well as those books he has produced ten others. In 1983 he was nominated as one of the Twenty Best of Young British Novelists. He also holds a doctorate from the University of East Anglia. He lives in London with the artist Haidee Becker. Axel Stähler is Reader in Comparative Literature in the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent, Canterbury. His particular research interests are in intermediality and the literary construction of identities. He has published widely on Jewish writers from the Anglophone and Germanspeaking diasporas and from Israel as well as on fundamentalism and literature, the eighteenth-century novel and early modern festival culture. Among his most recent publications are a monograph on literary constructions of Jewish postcoloniality, Literarische Konstruktionen jüdischer Postkolonialität (2009), and edited collections of articles on Anglophone Jewish Literature (2007) and on Writing Fundamentalism (with Klaus Stierstorfer, 2009). A monograph on Modernism and Fundamentalism and The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Anglophone Jewish Fiction (co-edited with David Brauner) are forthcoming. His current research concentrates on the convergence of Zionist, racial, and colonial discourses in early twentieth-century German-Jewish literature and culture. Jack Stewart professor emeritus, University of British Columbia, is the author of Color, Space, and Creativity: Art and Ontology in Five British Writers (2008; illustrated in color), on visual elements in texts by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Lawrence Durrell, Joyce Cary, and A. S. Byatt; The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence: Vision and Expression (1999; with 23 black-and-white illustrations); and The Incandescent Word: The Poetic Vision of Michael Bullock (1990). His research focuses on interrelations of literature and painting, ekphrastic poetry, landscape and travel writing, art and ontology, and his essays have appeared in D. H. Lawrence Review, Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal, Journal of Modern Litera-

414

Contributors

ture, Twentieth Century Literature, Style, Mosaic, Canadian Literature, Canadian Poetry, Canadian Fiction Magazine, Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in Short Fiction, Studies in the Novel, Studies in the Humanities, Journal of Narrative Theory, Philological Quarterly, and Symbolism (vols. 8 & 11). Aaron Tillman is an Assistant Professor of English at Newbury College. His research interests include Jewish and U.S. ethnic literature and culture, magical realism, humor studies, and creative writing. His essays have appeared in Studies in American Humor, The CEA Critic, and The Intersection of Fantasy and Native America (Mythopoeic 2009). He received a Distinguished Achievement Award from The University of Rhode Island and a Short Story Award for New Writers from Glimmer Train Stories. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Carolina Quarterly, The Drum Literary Magazine, Opium Magazine, The Ocean State Review, Scrivener Creative Review and Glimmer Train, and he has recorded two stories for broadcast on the Words & Music program at Tufts University. Sue Vice is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her most recent books are Shoah (2011) and, co-edited with Jenni Adams, Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film (2013). She is currently completing a study of fake memoirs and false testimony, to be called Textual Deceptions. Vered Weiss is an Assistant Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury. After earning her BA in Comparative and English Literature at Tel Aviv University (Israel), she completed her MA in Comparative and World Literature at San Francisco State University. Her main research interests include nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature in English, Hebrew, and Spanish; literature and nationalism; postcolonial literature and theory; gender studies; and critical theory. Her doctoral research incorporates the works of Jacques Derrida, Benedict Anderson, and Edward Said.

Index Abraham, Nicolas 125–129 Action Comics 130 absurdism 13, 34, 39–40, 189, 263 acculturation 98, 282, 286 Addams, Charles 360 Adler, H. G. The Journey 12, 192–209 Adorno, Theodor 198–199, 205, 210 Agnon, S. Y. 8, 69–90, 120 “Avi Hashor” 82–90 “The Lady and the Peddler” 77 “Ido Ve’enam” 77 In the Prime of Her Life 120 “Tehila” 69, 71, 77–82, 87–90 Ahasver 126, 137 akedah (’aqeda) 3, 6, 12, 17, 114–115, 120 Altdorfer, Albrecht 335 alterity 59, 65, 67, 213, 219–220 alternative history 203, 224 ambiguity 32, 43, 46, 54, 92, 96, 131, 182, 216–219, 223–224, 247, 253–254, 256, 260, 290, 296, 301, 340, 344–345, 383–384, 388 Améry, Jean 193–196, 204 Amos, book of 380 Ángel Asturias, Miguel 10 Arabian Nights 105 Arab Jews 83, 261–277 Armitage, Simon 367 “The Shout” 375–379 Arnold, Matthew 338–340, 343, 345, 350, 361 Ashkenazi Jews 81, 89, 263–265, 270–276 Auden, W. H. 352, 356, 359–361, 363–366 Auerbach, Erich Mimesis 3–12 Augé, Marc 292 Auschwitz 39, 40, 44, 193–203, 210, 241, 252, 253, 259 Auslander, Shalom Hope: A Tragedy 49 Auster, Paul 328 Austria 123, 157, 256 Avis, Paul 353–354

Bachelard, Gaston 364 Bak, Samuel 13, 231–244 Icon of Loss 236, 242 In a Different Light 232 Landscapes of Jewish Experience 231– 232 Painted in Words 237–244 Bakhtin, Mikhail 37, 42–45, 70, 126, 151, 153, 267, 358 Balfour Declaration 82 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 354 The Band’s Visit (film, 2007) 265–266, 275 Banville, John 281, 290 The Sea 293–296 Bar-Kokhba revolt 119 Batman 132 Bechdel, Alison 328, 331 “Bei Mir Bist du Schoen” 249–250 Bell, Kathleen 364 Bellow, Saul Herzog 28 Belsen 252 Berlin 250 Bernstein, Elitsur 142 Bialik, Hayyim Nahman 110, 117 Bible 3, 4, 8, 9, 17, 20, 85, 98, 108, 110, see also individual books bilingualism 96 Birkenau 48 Black Magic (film, 1994) 265, 268, 270, 272–273, 275 Blake, William 325, 348, 381 blindness 101–105, 139, 177, 183, 363 Bloom, Harold 340–341, 347 Boland, Eavan 345 Borges, Jorge Luis 9–10, 17, 330 bourekas films 263–268, 276 Bowers, Maggie Ann 6, 10, 150, 211, 215–216, 218, 221, 235, 245 Breton, André 299–305, 309–310, 313, 315–319 Britain British colonialism 71, 78, 82

416

Index

Broder, Herman Enemies: A Love Story 23 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett “Aurora Leigh” 339–340 Brueg(h)el, Pieter the Elder 119 Bruzenak, Ken 327 Buber, Martin 9–11, 142 Bulgakov, Mikhail 109, 144–145 The Master and Margarita 145 Busch, Wilhelm 325 Cahan, Abraham 184 Cahn, Sammy 249 Caliban 138–140, 365–366 Camus, Albert 92 Canada 53 Canaletto 335 Caramagno, Thomas C. 300–302, 306–308, 312, 319 Carlyle, Thomas 338–340, 343 Carmel, Marco Ahoti Hayafa (film, 2011) 13, 262–277 carnivalesque (Bakhtin) 118, 121, 126, 148, 155 Carpenter, Humphrey 361 Carpentier, Alejo 10 Carter, Angela Nights at the Circus 223 Celan, Paul 53 Chabon, Michael The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay 13, 226–230 Chagall, Marc 53, 161–168 “A Study for Over Vitebsk” 161–168 “White Crucifixion” 243 Chaplin, Charles The Great Dictator (film, 1940) 250, 256 Chaplin, Saul 249 Chasidism 8–10, 23–27, 78, 173, 177, 179, 183, 190 Chaykin, Howard 327 de Chirico, Giorgio 234, 310 Chmielnicki, Bogdan 28 chronotope (Bakhtin) 150–153, 160–161, 164, 168 cinema 13, 239, 261–277, 302–303 Cohen, Leonard 25

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 32–33, 354–355, 357 colonialism 11, 71, 78, 83, 91–98, 196, 265 comic books 130, 228, see also graphic narrative consolation 367–379 Costco 154, 159–160 crisis of survival 237, 242 crisis of witnessing 242–243 cubism 302 Czechoslovakia 40 Dalí, Salvador 301, 304 Dayan, Nissim 264 defamiliarization 40, 42, 234–235, 296, 306 Delbo, Charlotte 194, 204 Deleuze, Gilles 357–358 depression 99, 299–302, 311–312 depth 352–366 Derrida, Jacques 347, 350–351 Desai, Anita Baumgartner’s Bombay 114 diaspora, Jewish 11, 35, 81, 89, 119, 151–156, 161, 183 displacement 12, 35, 150–169, 193–194, 198–199, 208, 314, 318, 386 Dix, Otto 233 Dollimore, Jonathan 359 dor hamedina 117 Dorset 284 Doylen, Michael 359 Drohobycz 56, 57, 66 Dryden, John “Annus Mirabilis” 288 Duffy, Carol Ann The Bees 336–351 dybbuk 8, 22, 30, 132, 245–248, 256, 260, 273 Eagleton, Terry 358–359 Educating Rita (film, 1983) 266 Eichmann, Adolf 35–39, 252 Eisenstein, Bernice I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors 53 Eliot, George Middlemarch 112 Eliot, T. S. 292, 356, 361

Index

Ellmann, Richard 360–361 Eluard, Paul 301 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 342–343 England 25, 75, 82, 296, 303, 338 Englander, Nathan 8, 170–191, 210 “The Gilgul of Park Avenue” 174–192 What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank 175 Enlightenment 100, 113, 381–383 epistemology 7, 12, 35, 198–199, 215, 218, 222, 226, 230, 315, 328 Ernst, Max 303, 304, 310, 314 escapism 18, 217, 227–230 exoticism 217–218, 273, 276 fabulism, fabulation 8–11, 14, 72, 213, see also magic(al) realism face 24–25, 29, 59, 109, 124, 127, 135–138, 148, 242, 251, 254–256, 285 Fackenheim, Emil 241 fantastic (literature) 6, 9, 17, 35, 41, 43, 54, 69, 72, 77, 98, 144–145, 150–169, 175, 196–197, 199, 213–217, 224, 228–231, 246, 270, 276, 304, see also marvelous Faulkner, William Absalom! Absalom! 198 Fenton, James 374–375 “For Andrew Wood” 376–378 Fichte, Johann G. 383–384 Foer, Jonathan Safran Everything Is Illuminated 13, 210, 212, 221–230, 246–247 Tree of Codes 12, 49–68 Footlight Parade (film, 1993) 251 Foucault, Michel 281–282, 286, 289 Fowles, John The French Lieutenant’s Woman 283–285, 297 fragmentation 3–4, 11–12, 109–111, 145, 151, 160, 161, 164, 195, 204–208, 300, 317, 320, 350, 362 Frank, Anne 49, 52, 65 French Revolution 75, 98, 380, 382 Freud, Sigmund 26, 72, 76, 95, 136, 234, 236, 243

417

Gaiman, Neil 332 galut 151–153 Ganzfried, Daniel 142 García Márquez, Gabriel 8–9, 107–108 One Hundred Years of Solitude 8, 212–214, 223 Gary, Romain 8, 245–260 The Dance of Genghis Cohn 246, 250, 254, 257 Germany 4–5, 126, 138, 164, 233, 247–260 Ghost (film, 1990) 273 gilgul 8, see also Englander, Nathan, “The Gilgul of Park Avenue” gniza 79–80 Golem 8, 131–132, 137, 148, 155, 227 Gothic 13, 69–90, 168 neo-Gothic 69, 77 Gouri, Haim The Chocolate Deal 13, 34–41, 48 Facing the Glass Booth 36, 38–39 graphic narrative 177, 229, 321–335, see also comic books Green, Justin 331 grief 275, 368–379 Grosjean, Bruno 142 Grossman, David 210 See Under: Love 50, 61, 120, 262 Grosz, George 233 grotesque (Bakhtin) 120, 126–129, 267, 275 guilt 20, 37–38, 47, 96, 117, 119, 123–136, 148–150, 226, 228, 246, 249, 252, 259–260, 361, 364, 386 Halacha 179 Han, Ying 23, 25–27 Hayes, Rory 332 Hebrew language 78, 81, 83, 96–97, 273, 275 Hebrew literature 31, 80, 107, 114, 120, 262–263, 380 Hegel, G. W. F. 380–394 Heidegger, Martin 195, 205 Heine, Heinrich 119 Here Comes Mr. Jordan (film, 1941) 273 hesitation 17, 35 heterotopia 286, 289, 297 Hill, Geoffrey “September Song” 372–378

418

Index

Hine, David 332 historiographic metafiction 212 Hitler, Adolf 31, 64, 132, 180, 227, 238, 250, 253 Hogarth, William 334–335 Hölderlin, Friedrich “Celebration of Peace” 380–394 “Half-Life” 193 Holocaust 11–13, 49–68, 188–190, 210–220, 221–230, 226–231, 231–234, 237, 240– 244, 245–260, 263, 272, 372–373, 378 Holocaust fiction 34–48, 95–96, 113, 124–145, 149, 192–209, 210–230, 232–244, 245–260 Holocaust survivors 15, 51–53, 141–142, 194–195, 231–232, 234, 236–237, 242–243 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 51 Homer 4–5, 296 Hopper, Stanley 353–354 Horn, Dara 12, 150–169, 210 In the Image 150, 153–161, 168 The World to Come 150, 161–168 Howe, Irving 22, 190 Hutcheon, Linda 212, 224 hybridity 7, 13, 15–17, 69–90, 113, 128, 138–139, 179, 182, 196, 200, 327 hyper-realism 98, 121, 142, 147, 148, 276 hypomania 299–304, 310 icon (Peirce) 321–335 identity, see Jewish identity, postcolonial identity imagined community 112–113, 205, 378 impressionism 302, 307, 331 India 18, 266 Partition 13, 107–120 intertextuality 9, 39, 49–51, 53–54, 60–68, 117, 139, 145, 343, 347–348 Isaac, sacrifice of, see akedah (’aqeda) Isaiah, second book of 380–381 Israel 11, 13, 16, 31–32, 35–36, 38, 69, 71, 77–85, 89–90, 96–97, 103, 107–120, 147, 152, 183, 239–240, 261–277 War of Independence 13, 107–120 Istanbul 4

Jacobs, Jacob 249 Jakob the Liar (film, 1999) 249 Jerusalem 78–83, 87, 117–118, 144, 265, 269, 348 Jewish American literature 12, 14, 49–68, 130, 170–191 Jewish identity Jewish American identity 49–68, 153–154, 162, 170–191 Mizrahim 83, 261–277 Jewishness 15–16, 31, 172 Jewish magic(al) realism 3–17, 18–33, 49–68, 69–90, 98–106, 107–120, 121–149, 150–169, 172–191, 192–209, 210–230, 231–244, 245–260, 261–277 Jewish realism 3–4 Job, book of 150, 158, 160, 168, 357 Johnson, Samuel 368 Jonson, Ben “Of Death” 367 Josipovici, Gabriel 18, 28 Judaism 89, 97, 115, 147, 154, 170–191, 270 Jung, Carl G. 353 Kabbalah 8–10, 21–22, 26–29, 31, 89, 102, 148 Kaczerginski, Schmerke 238 Kaddish 248, 255 Kafka, Franz 10, 39, 52, 64 “Description of a Struggle” 18 Metamorphosis 17, 54, 98 The Trial 39–40 Kahlo, Frida 303 Kant, Immanuel 167, 199, 203, 205, 318, 383–384 Karasik, Paul 328 katabasis 359 Katchor, Ben The Jew of New York 177 Kelim 26 Keller, Catherine 357–358, 360, 366 Kertész, Imre 195, 199–200, 204 Kierkegaard, Søren 361, 363, 366 Kirsch, Arthur 360, 361, 363, 365 Kishon, Ephraim 264 Klüger, Ruth Still Alive 200

Index

Korwin, Yala “The Little Boy with His Hands Up” 242 Krauss, Nicole 210 The History of Love 50 Kristeva, Julia 56, 58–59, 70, 299 Lang, Fritz M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (film, 1931) 125 Langer, Susanne 354 Larkin, Philip 287–288 Latin America 10, 14, 17, 61, 98, 212, 261, 276 Lebanon 31–32, 117 Lefèbvre, Henri 281–282 Leitmeritz 44 Lenin, Vladimir I. 94 Levi, Primo 53, 140–141, 203, 204, 253–254, 259 Levinas, Emmanuel 6, 59–60, 67, 134–136, 139, 148 Lichtenberg, Georg C. 334 Lichtenstein, Roy 326 Life is Beautiful (film, 1997) 249 Lindsay, Robert 248–249 Lithuania 240 Loevy, Ram 264 Löw, Judah (Rabbi) 131, 155, see also golem Luria, Isaac (Rabbi) 26 Lvov 44 madness 300–306 magic(al) realism 3–17, 18–33, 49–68, 69–90, 98–106, 107–120, 121–149, 150–169, 172–191, 192–209, 210–230, 231–244, 245–260, 261–277 Magritte, René 314, 315, 319, 320, 330 margin, marginalization 13, 61, 83–84, 94, 196, 211–220, 221, 261–277, 286 marvelous 196–197, 213–217, 221, 225–227, see also fantastic (literature) Marx, Karl 94–95 Mazzucchelli, David 328 McEwan, Ian On Chesil Beach 283, 287–290, 297 McKean, Dave 332 Melville, Herman 358

419

Memmi, Albert 13, 91–106 The Colonizer and the Colonized 92–94, 96, 106 Decolonization 102 Dependence 93 The Desert 104–106 Liberation of the Jew 95–97 Pillar of Salt 92–93, 98–101, 102, 104 Racism 93 The Scorpion 101–104, 106 Strangers 105 Memmi, Lippo 104 memory 13, 51, 54, 96, 109, 119, 123–124, 131, 134, 136, 141–149, 161, 166, 194–209, 235–244, 256–259, 269, 273, 290, 293–295, 300, 305, 309–315, 372–374, 376–379, see also postmemory Memphis 173, 181, 184, 185 Mendelson, Edward 361, 363 Messiah, messianism 29–30, 67, 79–80, 120, 388 metaphor 74, 112, 128–132, 234, 293–294, 304–320, 337, 354 mikvah 147–148 Miller, Frank 327 Milton, John Lycidas 367–370 mimesis 7–9, 193, 213–217, 224, 329–330, 334–335, see also realism, magic(al) realism, and Auerbach, Erich minotaur 84–85 Mishnah 81, 156 Mizrahim 261–277 modernism 39, 59, 78, 111, 115, 164, 197–198, 204, 229, 282, 293–294, 299–320, 352–366 mortality 367–379 Moses 130–131 Moshinsky, Elijah 13, 245–260 Mufti, Aamir 113–114 Munich 238–239, 248, 258–260 Murray, Les 336 mysticism 306–307, 313, 353, 356, 360–361 Jewish mysticism 9–10, 22–23, 26, 87, 98, 102–103, 144–145, 168, 219–220

420

Index

mythology 15, 16, 56–62, 79, 82–88, 108–120, 131, 150, 177–183, 247, 282–283, 293–296, 343–345, 368, 371 Nachman of Breslov (Rabbi) 9–10 narrative narrative frames 223 unreliable narration 223 nationalism 71, 73, 77, 82, 96, 97, 103, 106, 114, 262 Nehru, Jawaharlal 108–109, 112 Netanyahu, Benjamin 268 Nietzsche, Friedrich 381 Nister, der (Pinchus Kahanovich) 161–169 Novalis 138, 233 Oesterle, Uli 327 Ohana, David 118 ontology 12, 41, 60–61, 151–152, 161, 193, 195–199, 205–208, 215, 218, 222, 226, 302, 304, 316–317, 337 Oren, Yosef 118 other, the 12, 59–62, 65–67, 74–77, 134–149, 213–218, 355–363 Ovadiah, George 264 Oz, Amos 79, 120, 238 My Michael 117 Ozick, Cynthia 65, 169, 211 The Messiah of Stockholm 50, 54, 66–67 Painting 122–124, 133, 137, 140, 144, 159–168, 231–244, 252, 303–305, 311, 317, 330 Pakistan 108–109, 113 Palestine 70, 71, 79, 81–84, 89, 118, 262, 268, 271 Palmach 35, 109, 115 pastoral 349, 368–369, 374 Peirce, Charles S. 321–324, 330 Pekar, Harvey 331 Perichoresis 365 Perutz, Leo 10 phantom theory 125–129 phenomenology 195, 197, 199, 206, 309 see also Hegel, G. W. F.

Plath, Sylvia 293, 348–349 postcolonialism 11, 13, 60–61, 70–74, 90, 92, 102, 107, 113, 119, 196, 211–219 postcolonial identity 92, 101, 111 postmemory 12, 49–68, 128, 140 postmodernism 78, 198–199, 212–214, 223, 226, 230, 281–298, 352–366 Price, Stanley 245–260 Promised Land 27, 85, 152–153, 156 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion 183 Proust, Marcel Remembrance of Lost Time 202 Rabelais, François Garagantua and Pantagruel 44 Rabinovici, Doron 8, 9, 13, 121–149 The Search for M 123–140, 148–149 Rahner, Karl 354–356, 364 Raine, Craig 374–375 Rawicz, Piotr Blood from the Sky 34, 42, 43–48 realism 3–17, 18, 25, 37–42, 53, 57, 72–89, 98, 126–149, 175–178, 182, 186, 197–209, 210–230, 231–244, 299–320, see also mimesis, magic(al) realism, Jewish realism, hyperrealism Reid, Christopher 374–375 revelation 380, 384, 388 Revelation, book of 359, 370 Ricoeur, Paul 354 Rigg, Diana 252 Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) 159 Rilke, Rainer M. 344, 381 Rimbaud, Arthur 50, 301, 307 Roh, Franz 233 Rosenberg, Isaac “Louse Hunting” 33 Roth, Philip 34, 52 “Eli, the Fanatic” 184 The Ghost Writer 49, 65–66 The Prague Orgy 50, 66 Rottenberg, Enrique The Revenge of Itzik Finkelstein 273 Rushdie, Salman 9, 13, 107–120, 214 Midnight’s Children 107–114, 116, 120, 214, 223

Index

Sabra 119 Sachs, Nelly 381 Sainte-Marie, Buffy 25 Sartre, Jean-Paul 92 Schelling, F . W. J. 381 Schindler’s List (film, 1993) 249 Scholem, Gershom 26 Schrimpf, Georg 233 Schulz, Bruno 9–10, 12, 49–68, 262 “August” 55, 62 “Cinnamon Shops” 50–51, 58 “Cockroaches” 54, 63 “The Comet” 56 “The Gale” 63 “Night of the Great Season” 55, 62–63 The Street of Crocodiles 55, 60 “Tailors’ Dummies” 57 Scliar, Moacyr The Centaur in the Garden 14–17 sea 281–298 Sebald, W. G. Austerlitz 192 secularism 119, 336 Secunda, Shalom 249 Sefirot 26 Semprún, Jorge 204 serendipity 153, 155, 157, 168 Shacham, Chaya 118 Shaked, Gershom 108, 118–119 Shakespeare, William 340, 359 The Tempest 139, 348 Shalev, Meir 8, 9, 107–120, 262–263 The Blue Mountain 118, 262 Esau 118 The Loves of Judith 118 A Pigeon and a Boy 107–120 Sharon, Ariel 31–32 shatnez 18–19 Shekhinah (shechina) 27, 79–83 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Frankenstein 75 Sher, Antony 248, 253, 258–260 Shirley Valentine (film, 1989) 266, 269 Shiva (film, 2008) 272–275 Shoah, see holocaust Shoah (film, 1985) 249 shtetl 52, 157, 161, 164, 221–225

421

Shuster, Joe 130 sign systems 321–335 Sidney, Sir Philip 337–338 Siegel, Jerry 130–131 Sim, Dave 327 Sima the Witch (film, 2003) 267, 275 Sinclair, Clive 8, 18–33 “Bedbugs” 33 Bibliosexuality 26 Blood Libels 32 “For Good or Evil” 20 Singer, Isaac Bashevis 8, 20–32 “Gimpel the Fool” 20–22 In My Father’s Court 24–25 A Little Boy in Search of God 23 Satan in Goray 28–32 “Short Friday” 27–28 Singer, Israel Joshua Of a World That Is No More 24 Six-Day War 114–115, 240 Skibell, Joseph 52–53 Soja, Edward 281, 286, 287, 291 space 42, 56, 73–74, 89, 147, 168, 176, 178, 182, 187, 197, 202, 205, 208, 209, 266–267, 281–298, 309, 314–317, 364, see also chronotope (Bakhtin) Spiegelman, Art 332 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 68 Stairway to Heaven (film, 1946) 273 Stein, Benjamin 9, 13, 121–149 The Canvas 122–123, 142–149 Stern, Steve 8, 170–191 “The Tale of a Kite” 177–179, 184–191 Stoker, Bram Dracula 75, 77 Stombali dance 100 stream-of-consciousness 282, 311, 315 subjectivity 56, 59–60, 193, 299, 301, 331, 343 subversion 13, 57–59, 73–90, 146, 173, 176, 210–230, 270 Suhrkamp Verlag 142 Superman 22, 130–132 supernatural 6, 8, 23, 35, 52, 60–61, 76, 78, 87, 89, 123, 126–127, 132, 149, 172, 175–176, 178, 182, 185, 186, 215, 218,

422

Index

222, 245–246, 268–269, see also fantastic (literature) surrealism 98, 232–234, 273, 299–320 Sutzkever, Avrom 238 Swift, Graham Last Orders 290–293, 297 symbol (Peirce) 323–335 synaesthesia 306, 308 Talmud 9, 31, 81, 83, 156 Tamerlane 104 Tanguy, Yves 304, 311 tefillin 154–158 Terezín, Theresienstadt 39–40, 44, 192 testimony 34, 39, 140, 144–147, 210, 219–220, 225–226, 231, 236, 243, 246 therapy 52, 129, 136, 142–143, 147–149, 219–220, 228–229, 241, 269 Thomas, Dylan “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” 372–379 Thomas, R. S. 356–357 Thompson, Craig 331 tikkun olam (tikkun ha-olam) 5, 26, 93, 147–148, 241–244 Tillich, Paul 352–356, 364, 366 To Be or Not to Be (film, 1942) 256 Todorov, Tzvetan 17, 35, 41, 216 Toepffer, Rodolphe 325 Topol, Haim 267 Torah 25, 84, 88, 103, 156, 241 Torok, Maria 125–130 trace (Levinas) 6, 49–68, 134–137 Train of Life (film, 1998) 249 transcendent reality 352–366 trauma, trauma theory 12–13, 51, 121, 123–149, 150–169, 210–230, 231–244, 262, 371 Truly Madly Deeply (film, 1990) 247, 266, 273 Trumpeldor, Joseph 119 Tunisia 91–93, 100–105 Turn Left at the End of the World (film, 2004) 265, 267, 270, 272, 275 Tzimtzum 21–22, 26 Ukraine 44, 47, 221 unconscious, the 15, 129, 299–320, 353

Van Gogh, Vincent 53 Vergangenheitsbewältigung 123–124 victimization 133, 204, 207 Vienna 157, 200, 250 Vital, Chaim (Rabbi) 26 Voltaire Candide 105 Warsaw 250, 257, 258 Warsaw Ghetto boy 236, 240–243 Weil, Jiří Life With a Star 13, 34, 39–43, 48 Mendelssohn on the Roof 48 Wiesel, Elie 53 Wilde, Oscar 9, 121–149, 359 The Picture of Dorian Gray 9, 121–124, 138–140, 144–145, 147–149 Wilkomirski, Binjamin Fragments 140–148 Williams, Charles 360–361, 364 Wirklichkeitsauffassung 6–7 Wordsworth, William 119, 344, 381 Lyrical Ballads 376 World War I 33, 157, 300, 347, 371 Woolf, Virginia 299–320 Mrs. Dalloway 305–312 To the Lighthouse 312–320 Xenophon 296 Yeats, William B. 115, 374 Yehoshua, A. B. 114, 120 Three Days and a Child 117 Yiddish language 81, 163–169, 248, 249 Yiddish literature 31, 66, 161, 163–169, 238, 240, 273 Yizhar, S. “The Prisoner” 117–118 Yom Kippur War 114, 117, 119 Young, Edward 325 Zevi, Sabbatai 27, 29–31 Zionism 82, 84, 90, 113, 115–120, 133, 262–264, 272 Zohar 25, 28, 30 Zurich 144