Fault Lines of Modernity: The Fractures and Repairs of Religion, Ethics, and Literature 9781501316654, 9781501316678, 9781501316685

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Part One: The transcendental and transcendence
1. Rewriting grand narratives as a supratemporal mystical competition: Illustrations from Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Goethe, Proust, Mann, and Joyce
2. “Clearer awareness of the . . . crisis”: Erich Auerbach’s radical relativism and the “wealth of conflicts” of the historical imperative
3. Secularism and post-secularism
Part Two: Literature
4. Redemptive readings between Maurice Blanchot and Franz Rosenzweig
5. “So what if you are big?”: The ethics of plurality in Indian literatures of devotion
6. Alterity and the ethics of the novel in J. M. Coetzee’s quasi-realism
Part Three: Religion
7. Asmodeus, the “eye of providence,” and the ethics of seeing in nineteenth-century mystery fi ction
8. Modernism’s religious rhetorics: Or, what bothered Baudelaire
9. Poetry and religion: Approaches to Christian transcendence in late-twentieth-century poets
Part Four: Ethics
10. Instituting the other: Ethical fault lines in readings and pedagogies of alterity
11. Thinking God on the basis of ethics: Levinas, The Brothers Karamazov , and Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism
12. An ethics for missing persons
Index

Citation preview

i

Fault Lines of Modernity

ii

iii

Fault Lines of Modernity The Fractures and Repairs of Religion, Ethics, and Literature Edited by Kitty Millet and Dorothy Figueira

iv

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Kitty Millet, Dorothy Figueira, and Contributors, 2019 Cover design: Toby Way and Eleanor Rose Cover image: Cracked Concrete Wall © Johnny Lopez/EyeEm/Getty Images; San Andreas Fault in California, circa 1930 © Hulton Archive/Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Millet, Kitty, editor. | Figueira, Dorothy Matilda, 1955- editor. | International Comparative Literature Association. Congress (20th : 2013 : Universitâe de Paris IV: Paris-Sorbonne) | Fault Lines of Modernity (Conference) (2014 : San Francisco State University) Title: Fault lines of modernity : the fractures and repairs of religion, ethics, and literature / edited by Kitty Millet and Dorothy Figueira. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Based on papers presented at the conferences, 2013 International Comparative Literature Association Congress (ICLA) held in Paris, and, the 2014 Fault Lines of Modernity conference, held at San Francisco State University. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018033784| ISBN 9781501316654 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501316685 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Literature and morals. | Religion and literature. | European literature--History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN49 .F38 2018 | DDC 809/.93353--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018033784 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-1665-4 PB: 978-1-5013-6282-8 ePDF: 978-1-5013-1668-5 eBook: 978-1-5013-1666-1 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

v

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction

1

Kitty Millet

PART ONE The transcendental and transcendence 1 Rewriting grand narratives as a supratemporal mystical competition: Illustrations from Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Goethe, Proust, Mann, and Joyce 33 Gerald Gillespie

2 “Clearer awareness of the . . . crisis”: Erich Auerbach’s radical relativism and the “wealth of conflicts” of the historical imperative 45 Geoffrey Green

3 Secularism and post-secularism

63

Wlad Godzich

PART TWO Literature 4 Redemptive readings between Maurice Blanchot and Franz Rosenzweig 79 Shawna Vesco

5 “So what if you are big?”: The ethics of plurality in Indian literatures of devotion 95 Ipshita Chanda

vi

vi

CONTENTS

6 Alterity and the ethics of the novel in J. M. Coetzee’s quasi-realism 121 Christopher Weinberger

PART THREE Religion 7 Asmodeus, the “eye of providence,” and the ethics of seeing in nineteenth-century mystery fiction 149 Sara Hackenberg

8 Modernism’s religious rhetorics: Or, what bothered Baudelaire 163 Hope Howell Hodgkins

9 Poetry and religion: Approaches to Christian transcendence in late-twentieth-century poets

183

Stephanie Heimgartner

PART FOUR

Ethics

10 Instituting the other: Ethical fault lines in readings and pedagogies of alterity 199 Dorothy Figueira

11 Thinking God on the basis of ethics: Levinas, The Brothers Karamazov, and Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism 217 Steven Shankman

12 An ethics for missing persons Kitty Millet Index 247

227

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This collection came into being through the encouragement and support of a cohort of colleagues and interlocutors. At San Francisco State University, Julietta Hua and Rachel Gross offered gracious and thoughtful insights not only about the merits of the project, but also about discrete essays. Dane Johnson, chairperson of Comparative and World Literatures, has always been a challenging and reflective interlocutor. Likewise, Fred Astren, the former chair of the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University, found unique and thoughtful ways to support this project. His forethought and counsel have been greatly appreciated. Michael Berkowitz, of University College London, remains a constant provocateur, whose serious questions reflect repeatedly the necessity of interdisciplinary dialogue. Susan MacReynolds and Soelve Curdts have continuously reminded me that there are many ways to think about the themes of the collection. The collection’s breadth has required contributors to think across disciplines, through various theoretical givens, and conflicting methodologies, to permit the destabilization of their own objects of knowledge and subfields, in order to start a dialogue between colleagues. While disagreement became the only “shared sentiment” within the cohort, the collection’s contributors demonstrated that even in such disagreement, they could still bring collegiality and commitment to the conversation. They were all agreed on one tenet, in order to speak to each other, academics have to know the contours of individual positions, their boundaries within the capacious and expansive topic of religion, ethics, and literature. We would also like to acknowledge the gifts of the Department of Jewish Studies, the Department of the Humanities, and the Program in Persian Studies, who initially supported the “Fault Lines of Modernity” conference at which several of these chapters were first conceived. We would like to thank Paul Sherwin, the former dean of the College of Liberal and Creative Arts at San Francisco State University. His insight and encouragement provided the impetus for Professor Millet to accept the chairpersonship of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) Research Committee on Religion, Ethics, and Literature, and to host its inaugural event at SF State. Dean Sherwin’s encouragement of faculty has left a lasting imprint on all those who have ever worked with him.

viii

viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Individual members of the ICLA Executive Council remain thoughtful partners in this endeavor. The editors thank especially Professors Sowon Park, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Haun Saussy, of the University of Chicago, and Liedeke Plate, of Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands. Additionally, the editors are grateful to the global cohort of researchers, both within the the ICLA Research Committee on Religion, Ethics, and Literature and outside of it, who have at times weighed in on our research, argued with us, and helped us generally clarify our thinking on the many contexts confronting us. While this project has never attempted to be exhaustive or comprehensive in scope, we have benefitted greatly from the multiple perspectives disseminated through these conversations and debates. A collection of this kind requires significant library resources. Consequently, Professor Millet thanks Nga Tran, part of the library staff at UC Berkeley, for her helpful suggestion, as well as Aleta Asbury, and Ned Fielden, at San Francisco State University, for their insights into how best to fulfill the demands of scholars in a digital age. We would like to thank Bloomsbury’s anonymous referees, whose care and constructive critical suggestions encouraged Professor Millet to see this project through to its end; Haaris Naqvi, whose insights about publishing and the market were apt and thoughtful; his assistant, Katherine De Chant, who responded each time to Professor Millet’s requests for changes with optimism and graciousness, as well as Bloomsbury’s copyeditors—their herculean efforts made this book a better one. Bloomsbury as an academic press remains a fantastic facilitator for scholarly work. Finally, we thank our families who have been routinely patient and encouraging.

ix

CONTRIBUTORS

Ipshita Chanda teaches Comparative Literature at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India, and has served as Indian Council of Cultural Relations Chair of Indian Culture at Georgetown University, USA, in 201314. She works between English, Hindi and Bangla. Her translations include works by Mahasweta Devi, Satinath Bhaduri, Sukumar Ray, and Phaniswarnath Renu. Recent publications include Selfing the City: Single Women Migrants and Their Lives in Kolkata (2017) and two edited volumes published entitled Emotion, Expression and Aesthetics (2018) and Literature and the Other Arts (2019). Dorothy Figueira is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia, USA. She is author of numerous books, including Otherwise Occupied: Theories and Pedagogies of Alterity (2008), and has edited several volumes. Gerald Gillespie is Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, USA, and a former President of the International Comparative Literature Association. His latest book is Living Streams: Continuity and Change from Rabelais to Joyce (2018). Author or editor of some three dozen works, the revised second edition of his study Proust, Mann, and Joyce in the Modernist Context appeared in 2010. Wlad Godzich is Distinguished Professor of General and Comparative Literature and Critical Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. The former co-editor of the benchmark History and Theory of Literature series (Minnesota), Professor Godzich has published, co-edited, and translated numerous texts. With over one hundred scholarly articles, Godzich’s intervention in the humanities has been transformative. His books The Emergence of Prose: an Essay in Prosaics (1987), co-written with Jeffrey Kittay, and The Culture of Literacy (1994) remain important challenges to the instrumentalization of language. Geoffrey Green’s books include: Novel vs. Fiction: The Contemporary Reformation; Literary Criticism and the Structures of History: Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer; Freud and Nabokov; The Vineland Papers: Literary Takes on Pynchon’s Novel. His most recent books are: Voices in a Mask (a short story cycle devoted to themes of identity and disguise in opera and drama); and the edited volume, Scholes Loves a Story: A Book for Bob. He is Professor of English at San Francisco State University, USA. A member of PEN, he is Executive Editor of Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. Sara Hackenberg is an Associate Professor of English at San Francisco State University, USA. She has published articles on Victorian statuary and visual culture; 19th-century mystery narratives; early film serials; and transatlantic serial publications by Louisa Alcott, Charles Dickens, Thomas Frost, Edward Lloyd, G. W. M. Reynolds, and James Malcolm Rhymer. She is currently completing a monograph on the genre of mystery, titled The Mysteries of Modern Life: Popular Narrative and

x

x

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

the Politics of Vision, that moves from the urban mysteries of the 1840s to early cinema. Her next project is tentatively titled Serial Narratology. Stephanie Heimgartner teaches and conducts research at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany. After completing her M.A. in German Philology at Dalhousie University, Canada, and her Ph.D. at Heidelberg, she worked as an editor for a publishing house. Since 2009, she has been working in the field of Comparative Literature studies. Her main interests include translation theory, theory of and intertextual phenomena in lyrical poetry, and, more recently, literature about identities formed by migration and multiple belongings. Hope Howell Hodgkins (PhD, University of Chicago) has published essays on James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, poetics and rhetoric, religion, women writers and dress style, and early-American literacies. Her recent book is Style and the Single Girl: How Modern Women Re-dressed the Novel, 1922-1977 (2016). Hodgkins is retired from the English Department at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA. Kitty Millet is Professor and Chair of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University, USA. Her publications include The Victims of Slavery, Colonization and the Holocaust, a Comparative History of Persecution (Bloomsbury, 2017), “Our Sabbatean Future,” in Scholar and Kabbalist, the Life and Work of Gershom Scholem (2018). She edits Comparative Jewish Literatures, a new series with Bloomsbury. She is also on the editorial boards of Dapim, the Journal of Holocaust Research (Routledge) and Monitor, Global Intelligence on Racism (European University Institute). Her next book is Kabbalah and Literature (Bloomsbury, 2021). Shawna Vesco is a writer and curator who currently works at the Tenderloin Museum, supporting its efforts to preserve the multiplicity of histories and stories of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. She earned a Ph.D. in Literature from UC Santa Cruz, USA, with an emphasis on language as a technology through which we (individuals and communities) fashion ourselves and make sense of the world around us. She has curated several exhibitions including “Kurdish ‘WarriorDivas’” (Berlin, apexart). Publications include “Collective Disindividuation and/or Barbarism: Technics and Proletarianization” (Boundary2), and “The Task of the Beloved Translator: Agha Shahid Ali as Poet and Witness” (Interim Magazine). Christopher Weinberger teaches Comparative and World Literature at San Francisco State University, USA. He has published in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Narrative, Representations, and positions: east asia cultures critique on the ethics of novel narration. He is currently finishing a book manuscript, Imaginary Worlds and Real Ethics in Japanese Fiction. The book calls attention to the ethical value of formal experimentation in metafictional writing and addresses key issues that have arisen in cross-cultural studies of novel ethics. Steven Shankman holds the UNESCO Chair in Transcultural Studies, Interreligious Dialogue, and Peace at the University of Oregon, USA, and is co-director of the Crossings Institute. His books include Pope’s Iliad: Homer in the Age of Passion (1983), In Search of the Classic: Reconsidering the Classical Tradition, Homer to Valéry and Beyond (1994), The Siren and the Sage: Knowledge and Wisdom in Ancient Greece and China (2000), Kindred Verses (2000), Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking through Comparisons (2002), Epics and Other Higher Narratives: An Intercultural Approach (2010), Other Others: Levinas, Literature, Transcultural Studies (2010), and Turned Inside-Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison (2017).

1

Introduction Kitty Millet

This collection offers a conceptual cartography of how humanist scholars perceive not only the relationships between religion, ethics, and literature, but also the philosophical principles that underwrite those posited relationships. The chapters reveal that familiar and unfamiliar theories about the interactions of these disciplines with each other are tied ultimately to the values scholars attribute to literature as an entity: how it works, for whom it works, and why it works. To some degree, these values suggest a “conflict of the faculties” in which literary value is never far from the discussion of literature’s efficacy for individuals and communities. Thus literature’s significance informs both the ways we imagine the worlds we live in and the future worlds we hope to inhabit. These two aspects, our imagination of and our hope for are too often juxtaposed to life circumscribed by modernity’s fault lines, those divisions predicated on segregation and separation, expressed as racial or ethnic difference. The world in which we live offers stark contrast to the world we imagine we inhabit.

The world we live in In 1979, Pope John Paul II returned to his native Warsaw for the first time in his tenure as pope. Met by thousands of Poles, the Pope, recognizing this unique moment in history, This collection maps religion as a modern fault line, whose social fissures have split the earth into separate and permanently disconnected sectors, and asks whether or not literature can be reconceived, reimagined, or repurposed as repair in such a world where religion appears to isolate its adherents, disconnecting them from other communities. It further posits that if literature acts as an agent, is this action an ethical alternative to the religious “object of dogmatic knowledge,” a phrase Gershom Scholem coined to describe the values underpinning Jewish mysticism, and one pertinent to our investigation into a transformed role for literature in the world.

2

2

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

spoke openly on such sensitive themes as human rights, freedom of conscience and the church’s ancient role in the state. “Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe,” the pope said in his homily, at mass, touching off applause and chants from worshipers of “We want God,” which resounded in the cavernous square.1 Thousands of Poles associated their religious freedom with the Pope’s demand for “human rights,” and “freedom of conscience.” Folded into his “homily” was the injunction that providential agency could not be excluded from human narratives. The state had a social duty to recognize freedom of religion, as that duty obligated the political state to uphold Christ’s presence in the “history of man.” Decades later, on November 11, 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported that “tens of thousands of Poles” again “marched across downtown Warsaw” in an “independence-day procession organized by the nationalist youth movement” the National Radical Camp and cosponsored by All Polish Youth.2 People carried banners, with the slogans, “White Europe,” “Europe Will Be White Again,” and “Clean Blood.” Participants flew in from all over Europe, especially from those countries whose histories of fascism had been particularly virulent during the Nazi Reich. They wore tee shirts and carried posters with the symbols and phrases popular during the Nazi era in their host countries so that they appeared like sports teams, with each faction wearing their team’s “colors” proudly. In fact, one reporter remarked that the crowd was overwhelmingly young because the organizers recruited members through soccer leagues. In a gesture of imagined kinship, the sponsors had even invited the American neo-Nazi leader Richard Spencer to speak.3 America was an inspiration for this rally. Although the “procession” included many people who did not belong to a “neo-fascist or racist organization,” they were “fine with it . . . just happy to be here.”4 As the rally moved to one specific area of Warsaw where a 1930s pogrom had happened, groups affixed placards and banners, celebrating the attack on Jews, but now in addition to the anti-Semitic rhetoric, there was a new banner, “Pray for Islamic Holocaust.” On the Radical Camp’s social media sites, a Wall Street Journal reporter explained, the group asserts that the “influx of Syrian refugees into Europe is part of a conspiracy driven by 1

Peter Osnos and Michael Getler, “Polish Throngs Hail Pope,” Washington Post, June 3, 1979. See Drew Hinshaw, “Polish Nationalist March Draws Thousands in Capital,” The Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2017. Both groups adopted the names of fascist movements from the 1930s “which fought to rid Poland of Jews in the years before the Holocaust.” 3 Osnos and Getler, “Polish Throngs Hail Pope.” Although Spencer didn’t attend, the invitation for his participation was suggested because of the Charlotteville “Unite the Right” rally that culminated with the murder of Heather Heyer. 4 Hinshaw, ibid. 2

3

INTRODUCTION

3

Jewish financiers, who are working with Communists.”5 The chilling end to the article was the reporter’s observation that in addition to the recycled Nazi rhetoric, the crowds had adopted a new catchphrase, a chant thundering throughout the city again, “We want God.”6 The phrase, as one Pole described it, came from Donald Trump’s speech in Warsaw, on July 6, 2017. Speaking at the site of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, Trump linked Polish nationalism to the Poles’ religious identity. The 1979 event, its narrative context for “We want God,” had been eclipsed by the crowds who saw in Trump’s use of the phrase, the legitimacy of and inspiration for their own racial hatreds. Joining “We want God” to a narrative in which ethnic nationalism implicitly found its validity in Christianity, Trump fused race to religious identity. He reinforced the crowd’s belief in ethnic nationalism as a divine and politically expressed right. Consequently, racial hatred and nationalism became constitutive elements not only to religious expression, but they were believed to be the valences of sacred narratives. At the November rally, the crowds, emboldened by this sentiment, screamed it for the world to hear: “We want God” became synonymous with “Make Europe White Again.” Older Poles, whose memories might challenge the crowd’s re-valenced fascism, stayed away from the rally. In the absence of their personal memories, the crowd was free to adopt another narrative about the past, a fiction that linked America and Poland together through a calculus of ethnic nationalisms sutured to religious identity. On August 14, 2017, in the United States, the Patriot Prayer Group, the KKK, and other neo-Nazi factions descended on Charlottesville, to protest the University of Virginia’s removal of a statue of the confederate general,

5

This rhetoric was exactly the argument used by Hitler in Mein Kampf, but then it was Africans on the Rhine, brought there by a Jewish cabal of “bankers, Bosheviks,” in league with the French, who operated as a puppet government for Jews. 6 In the New  York Times’ coverage of the event, the reporter noted that the phrase came from “an old Polish nationalist song” and that Trump quoted it. Ostensibly, Trump wanted to show the connection between Polish nationalism and Trumpism. In fact, he declared the phrase in front of the memorial commemorating Poles’ attempts in 1944 to revolt against Nazi occupation. The other Warsaw Uprising, the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto destroyed the ghetto where they were incarcerated awaiting the selections to death camps, was omitted from Trump’s visit to Poland. He chose not to go that that monument, breaking with a tradition of every US president and vice president since the end of the war in 1945. By choosing the 1944 monument, Trump made it the occasion to commemorate Polish nationalism: the Uprising became an expression of Poles wanting political autonomy. The country where Hitler had four designated death camps, Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, where 1.5 million Jews alone perished in their gas chambers, was now the site of extremist race-based nationalism. The monument symbolized Poles’ historic desire to be “safe, strong, and free.” In this callous appropriation of history, he helped Poles erase the memory of Jews’ extermination on their soil.

4

4

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Robert E. Lee. Calling their rally, the “Unite the Right” demonstration, the alt-right groups claimed a post-confederacy modernity and liberal education as social fault lines that led directly to godlessness, and as representatives of God, their specific disenfranchisement. They associated the removal of the statues with an attempt to “remove them” so that the godlessness of a liberal education was linked in the crowd’s mind with the chant, as the Washington Post reported, “Jews will not replace us.” Brandishing torches and screaming this chant, the white nationalists espoused only one remedy:  they would take back their spaces, occupied by “Jews,” through violence. “Jews” became a signifier of white disenfranchisement:  Jews were an illegitimate occupation, which displaced the historical rights of white communities. The attitude motivated a white supremacist to plow his car through a group of counter-protesters, purposely murdering Heather Heyer, a young woman standing against “Unite the Right.” During the months of August and September 2017, campuses across the country saw these “alt-right” rallies led by different factions who promoted race-based violence as a strategy in their plan to “make America great again.” Many justified their intentions through the assertion of divine entitlement: they were authorized by God to promote “whiteness” and that entitlement sanctioned violence as a divinely prescribed means to an end. Those who were not white or did not identify with their aims were ungodly. In Charlottesville, as in Warsaw, religion underwrote violence in order to repair a “broken” nation-state. With similar conflicts erupting in Myanmar, and Gujarat, Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan explain that today’s religious conflict is no longer “primarily waged over matters of belief,” but “it is instead religion as the basis of identity and identitarian cultural practices—with co-religionists constituting a community, nation, or ‘civilization’—that comes to be the ground of difference and hence conflict.”7 Needham and Rajan highlight how communities construct a collective narrative around race as a sanctified and political expression that permits them to use violence as an intuited and divinely inscribed mandate. This collective narrative exposes a fault line of racial hatred, recuperated as the foundation of community. The essence of that mandate hinges on the belief that today’s narratives not only seek to remove one group’s past, made visible through its icons and signifiers, but also that the removal is akin to pushing God “out of the history of man.”8 Consequently, Warsaw and Charlottesville are emblematic examples of global crisis, where religion no longer repairs social injustice, but has evolved into a political “fault

7

See Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s The Crisis of Secularism in India (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 3. 8 Pope John Paul II, 1979 speech in Warsaw.

5

INTRODUCTION

5

line” itself, whose advocates endorse hatred and violence, a fracture among communities.9 Since universities have become de facto spaces where historical entitlements are examined and called into question, where counter narratives to the status quo become visible, universities are often politicized targets and conflicted spaces. At any time, institutions of higher learning can be recuperated as places where anti-nationalist, anti-religious, liberal ideologies flourish, promoted by “leftist” university professors who indoctrinate naive and vulnerable youth or as institutions of privilege and power, where privilege is held in place through narratives of racial, patriarchal, cis-gendered, or class-based segregations.10 In this way, universities specifically and higher education abstractly exist as contested sites of the narratives of exclusion and inclusion. In the middle of these events, literature professors appear either as accused propagandists, and advocates of partisan stories, or as “ivory tower” pundits espousing elitist cultural agendas. The world we live in today is one in which specific communities characterize their experiences of disenfranchisement as a result of “others” gaining voices, disputing the legitimacy of narratives

9

Myanmar, China, India, Pakistan, the Middle East, the number of countries affected by narratives of social exclusion grounded in ethnic purity fused to religious identity has overwhelmed news cycles recently. 10 Examples of both reflexes in higher education are prevalent. Two come to mind here. The first example concerns the recent closure of English and Comparative Literature departments because, as Nina Handler has argued in Chronicle of Higher Education (https://www.chronicle. com/article/Facing-My-Own-Extinction/241988), [T]his is a bad time for my species—and a bad time for the study of English. In academe, we are witnessing an extinction of fields of study once thought essential. I teach at a private university that has just canceled majors in English, religious studies, philosophy, and music. The English major is becoming the useless gentleman, the Charles Smithson, of the modern university. Handler describes that the devalorization of the literature degree is tied to student interest in “health sciences,” that “students don’t want what I have to offer” because such a degree does not provide “a well-paid job tied directly to their major.” Without popular majors, administrators and politicians deem such departments “underperforming,” and it constitutes evidence that they are not productive. The reflex is then to determine reasons why they “lack productivity,” and this trajectory inevitably leads to an accusation regarding political temperaments and biases. The second example occurred recently and surfaced at Cambridge University over the absence of “black authors” in syllabi for the English curriculum. One hundred and fifty students published an open letter to English department faculty citing Cambridge’s history of “teaching English” as a “ ‘traditional’ and ‘canonical’ approach that elevates white male authors at the expense of all others.” Students concluded that even though some attempts had been made to teach women writers, the continued curricular absence of black authors “risks perpetuating institutional racism.” In this argument’s analysis, those in power determine cultural value so that the excluded remain as such because they are without power, that is, weak (“Decolonizing the English Faculty, an Open Letter,” https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Qji9ojNzumOeKb oLLBBWs5fxJfEPVAw4JDNtdz2yAtU/edit).

6

6

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

about their pasts. Whether it is referred to as “victor’s justice” or oppression, history has become reducible to an idealized fantasy framed against an illegitimate present that threatens previous entitlements. Within a fraught public sphere, this dialectic of exclusion and inclusion are affectively linked in the public’s mind to formal and informal narratives about race, religion, and entitlements and the linkage produces the context for this collection, The Fault Lines of Modernity:  The Fractures and Repairs of Religion, Ethics, and Literature, because as literature professors, the contributors are invested in the value of literary study as a means of understanding human crisis. This context suggests that we need new ways of reading not only the “other” in literature, but also the “other” in religion. Hence my introduction hopes to ground the collection’s focus on how literature shapes “other” modes of reading in the lecture hall, and by extension, in public arenas. In other words, it might appear marginal to, but literature is at the center of debates concerning global crisis. This ambitious scope requires that I  foreground some of the reasons for contributors’ various positions, as well as rehearse the tradition against which several scholars take exception, and to which several scholars appeal. To some extent, literature has been caught in a dialectic of subject and object. It is uncomfortably positioned as the object of a subject who holds power over it. Although literature as an object of knowledge lends itself to the mimetic reflection of oppression—it can mirror the values of slavery, colonization, and persecution—the collection’s authors argue that the time to find a new way to read literature, to uncouple it from its static epistemological status, is desperately needed now. However, their appeal does not necessarily echo Richard Kearney’s call for “a narrative understanding capable of casting rope ladders and swing bridges across opposing extremes” in order to promote a “hermeneutics of understanding” because that project depends on communities—as “opposing extremes”— and their willingness to embrace “a Transcendent Other.”11 In Kearney’s argument, the Transcendent Other would reunite “again the weaves of transcendent and incarnate existence,” restoring human connection. Essentially, Kearney suggests an investment in the logos of representation as a condition of the pleroma, a “shared sentiment.”12 However, several scholars in this collection contend that literature must not surrender itself to any Transcendental power at all, that such surrender is unethical. Thus how literature represents its worlds, how literature negotiates modernity’s fault lines, how literature constitutes subjects and communities are crucial questions for the imagination of repair and fracture in human history. 11

See Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters:  Interpreting Otherness (New  York: Routledge, 2002), 229–31. 12 Ibid., 12.

7

INTRODUCTION

7

The contributors to this volume, Fault Lines of Modernity, probe the tension between repair and fracture as a key effect of literature, but this tension is only part of the collection’s foci because as these scholars have studied literature as an object, competing theses about literature’s significance for changing the world have emerged. These claims coalesce around literature’s ontology and by extension, how literature acts in relation to religion and/or ethics. The first thesis promotes literature as an instrument, embodiment of a providential or transcendental power; whether or not that power is represented as Divine, global, racial, or gendered Being, it is always reducible to a vehicle for another. In the service of the providential, literature transmits allegorically or mimetically the Transcendental’s values. In this way, the Transcendental “legislates” literary value and communicates “truth.” Transcendence is then literary affect that enables the erasure of the boundary between the Transcendental and the human as a consequence of reading the logos. In opposition to literature as an instrument of some power, a second thesis sees in literature an ontology that operates according to its own laws. The world of representations is dizzyingly liberated from any rule or legislative principle. In the suppression of any external legislating rule, literature is liberated to promote its own conditions and these new conditions trigger newly conceived discrete ethical obligations. Under these terms, transcendence is a thoroughly human experience made available because texts produce worlds. In the generation of these textual spaces, a literary ethics becomes intuitable, leading readers away from allegory toward a subject position of the “other.” Subsumed under these two perspectives, the collection offers competing and conflicting theories, in which literature is either an object of knowledge, controlled by a third party, or a dynamic creative force, whose ontology produces its own terms of existence. As the collection’s chapters demonstrate, the debate about literary ontology is implicated in many of the current tensions within the humanities so that contributors’ disciplinary methodologies inform their arguments about the ideas of fracture and repair in relation to modernity’s fault lines.

History The collection’s history begins with a conversation between comparative literature scholars, at the International Comparative Literature Association Congress (ICLA) in Paris, in 2013, and in San Francisco, at the “Fault Lines of Modernity” conference, in 2014. On these occasions, scholars discussed the merits of founding an ICLA research committee on the intersections

8

8

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

between Religion, Ethics, and Literature, with the purpose of highlighting literature as a critical nexus between the disciplines. At the time, the research committee’s interests did not extend to an engagement with political events or an appeal for literature to intervene in global crisis. The initial conversation hinted though at diverse practices within literary analysis—those disciplinary methodologies with their own discrete conceptual frameworks—so that literary analysis shifted in value in relation to how literature was constituted. Moreover, scholars’ theoretical and disciplinary inclinations proved to be extremely important for understanding literature’s status. This realization has translated into the chapters for this collection having heterogeneous methodologies and disparate ends. If scholars investigate religion’s stake in the maintenance of enlightenment and colonial sensibilities through narratives of encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples—literature’s instrumentality for the purposes of a Transcendental power whether that power is divine, political, or racial—literature serves as evidence of or a collaborator in oppression.13 It reinforces the hegemony and values of a Transcendental power, from which “natives” and “others” have been excluded. In his benchmark Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (2002), Richard Kearney describes this use of literature in relation to an historic problem of “the other” originating in “the beginnings of western metaphysics in Parmenides and Plato.”14 Appealing to a Transcendental power, communities exclude the “other” in order to protect, save, redeem communities from external forces whose difference communities intuit as palpable threat to the self or “the Same.”15 In this case, literature as a fault line preserves the boundaries of power for an agent outside of literature. Like Kearney, some of the collection’s contributors advocate for a different mode of understanding religion; they contest the status of religion as a social fault line, compromised by doctrines of social exclusion and oppression.16 Pointing to the “resurgence of religion” globally, they argue that its relevance to the study of comparative literature exceeds simply the identification of compromised religious tropes within texts and/or the association of religion with colonial conquest because as Talal Asad characterizes their objections, religion proffers “a needed moral dimension 13 See Thomas A. Lewis, Why Philosophy Matters for the Study of Religion & Vice Versa (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2015), 3. Lewis identifies a “focus on belief and faith” to illustrate that the perspective “marginalized concerns with practices and objects—whether conceived in terms of rituals, spiritual exercises, disciplines of subject formation, or material culture,” and it was grounded “in large part in the Protestant Reformation’s emphasis on faith” and “deeply interwoven with anti-Catholic polemics.” 14 Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, 13. 15 Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, 14. 16 See Emma Mason, Abrahamic Religions (London:  Bloomsbury, 2015). Mason’s collection advocates that religion and human ontology work more for good than the West might think.

9

INTRODUCTION

9

to secular politics and environmental concerns.”17 They support their claims by pointing to communities’ renewed religious sentiment as signs of a sea change in religion’s promotion of social justice and the restoration of traditional societies.18 The debates reflect as well Emma Mason’s thesis in Reading the Abrahamic Faiths, Rethinking Religion and Literature in which Mason, echoing Kearney, claims that the study of “religious practice in context” promotes “an hermeneutics of trust rather than suspicion” since whatever failures religion might signify, God is not a fault line for communities necessarily.19 Communities have collectively found and can find “again” reconciliation transmitted and promoted in literature.20 Here literature is a divinely inspired repair that “bridges” social fracture, akin to the “rope bridges” of Kearney’s project, so that God reterritorializes text in order to unite humankind. Religion’s efficacy in literature is purposely “communitarian.” Corollaries of each other, both perspectives depend on literature as a determinate force under the control of an external Transcendental power. They constitute one position, even though these positions do not share the same goals or have the same valences. Additionally, disciplinary methodologies have punctuated the discussion by drawing attention to the kinds of objects collected and categorized as canon. For example, within the past twenty years, comparatists have called into question even the process of comparison as the bailiwick of the discipline. The ease of synthesis, synthetic judgement as the comparatist’s particular skill, has produced a self-conscious critique that asserts comparison’s complicity in the establishment of epistemological hierarchies.21 These hierarchies endorse an academic elitism because their objects mimetically reflect the values attributed to a Transcendental Subject. 17

See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1. In this respect, the debates reflected Emma Mason’s thesis in Reading the Abrahamic Faiths, Rethinking Religion and Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Mason claims that the study of “religious practice in context” promotes “an hermeneutics of trust rather than suspicion” (2). She cites Richard Kearney’s Guestbook Project as a prime example of how such hermeneutics of trust works globally. 19 See Emma Mason’s thesis in Reading the Abrahamic Faiths, 2. 20 Ironically, Richard Kearney’s Hosting the Stranger is also of note here. In this text, and following on his Guestbook Project, Kearney outlines how conversations between the stranger as guest and the believer as host structure multiple religious traditions on the Other. Unlike his earlier Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, in his later projects, Kearney is committed to destabilizing the received tradition of the Other in favor of “forgotten” or occluded projects. 21 This has become the effect of the ACLA Bernheimer Report, as well as numerous other evaluations of Comparative Literature in the United States that target comparison as necessarily a colonial endeavor. See also David Damrosch, Natalie Melas, and Mbongiseni Buthelezi (eds), The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, from the European Enlightenment to the Global Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 18

10

10

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Consequently, all comparison becomes suspect either as a promotion of a compromised hierarchy, with the West at the top, or as a strategy of colonization, imposing its own values of exclusion on indigenous peoples.22 Since the modern West has levied its values on the colonized, religion’s renewal in a postcolonial era is implicitly connected with the rejection of colonization as modernity’s unique mode of oppression. The fault line is the West because its colonial intervention divests communities from religion. An adjunct to this argument is the contention that secularism is Western colonization’s instrument. Hence religion as a social fault line expresses a Western fantasy, tied more to a colonial epistemology of knowledge than to religion’s efficacy for communities globally. As Asad observes, “[T]he opponents of secularism in the Middle East and elsewhere have rejected it as specific to the West.”23 This “western problem” premise sets up a further claim in which adherence to the separation of religion from literature is inherently unethical because it reimposes the terms of colonizer and colonized, binding communities and subjects to a dialectic of oppression. Some Indian scholars have recently maintained that within Hinduism, there is no separation between religion and literature. Both are the instruments of God and any attempt to separate them by their respective differences not only reiterates the narrative of colonialism, but also attempts to sever key connections between Hindus and the many religious minorities within Indian society.24 However, again following Talal Asad, another approach has emerged, subsumed under secularism, that “presupposes new concepts of ‘religion,’ ‘ethics,’ ‘politics,’ ” and by extension, literature.25 By extending the secular to literature, scholars remove the privilege of the Transcendental so that literature gains agency. It has its own dynamic and logic. This approach freights representation itself with an internal legislative principle. This transformation of what literature is has shifted the conversation among scholars away from the empirical function of literature, to a reassessment of why literature matters, especially in relation to religion and ethics. Thus unlike other texts examining relationships between religion and literature, or even literature and ethics, this collection insists on bringing all three disciplines close to each other before any attempts to broach a synthesis of the disciplines’ aims. As a result, the issues evoked by the chapters of Fault

22

See Dorothy Figueira, Otherwise Occupied: Pedagogies of Alterity and the Brahminization of Theory (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008). 23 Asad, Formations of the Secular. 24 For a challenge to this thesis, see Needham and Rajan’s The Crisis of Secularism in India. The collection of essays underscores acutely the need for secularism in India as specifically a way to combat Hindutva-generated violence against minorities. Taking their primary example as Gujarat, the contributors demonstrate the political and legal stakes of the “reconstituted” role of religion in the modern world. 25 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 2.

11

INTRODUCTION

11

Lines allude to a need to identify discrete positions. In this way, the chapters constitute an initial cartography of scholarly constituencies globally, with the expectation that this volume is not comprehensive, but a nascent attempt to map positions as they have developed and continue to develop over time. The questions before the contributors focus on whether or not religion is a social fault line, if literature offers repair or exacerbates fracture within or between communities, and do scholars have an obligation to judge literary representations ethically? Is God a social fault line or is the system that has developed around the idea of Divine Being the real problem? These challenges presuppose that scholars neither share a universal concept regarding how and if Being exists in or even works through literature, nor agree on the nature of religion and ethics in relation to literature. Due to this lack of a shared orientation, “a shared sense,” literature’s ontology in relationship to religion and ethics has emerged as a key focus for contributors to consider in this volume and it has provided a basic scaffolding for negotiating the chapters’ different assertions.

The structure This volume is organized around four basic divisions, “the Transcendental and Transcendence,” “Literature,” “Religion,” and “Ethics.” However, these sections are not discrete in and of themselves, but instead reflect how different authors have weighted the relationship between these three disciplines, that is, all contributors see their interventions as utilizing the three disciplines of religion, ethics, and literature, but they insist on different legislative principles that underwrite these interventions. “The Transcendental and Transcendence” draws implicitly then on what the Transcendental has meant to a Western tradition historically. The Western tradition precludes literature from acting within religious purview because literature is produced by the imagination to elicit the subject’s “disinterest” in aesthetic judgment. Essentially, literature’s ontology prevents it from being subsumed under religion, knowledge, or the moral. In fact, Kant argues that if art is categorized by these systems, such epistemological interventions undermine the efficacy of the imagination’s “higher power” in aesthetic experience by constraining the imagination to work only as the understanding’s determinate instrument.26 26 See Jean-Francois Lyotard, “The Interest of the Sublime,” in Of the Sublime:  Presence in Question:  Essays by Jean-Francois Courtine, Michel Deguy, Eliane Escoubas, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Louis Marin, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacob Rogozinski, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 113. See also Jean-Francois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant’s Critique of Judgment, [sections] 23–29 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994).

12

12

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Following Kant, Jean-Francois Lyotard observes that this constraint enables individuals to equate imagined identification with “the good.” However, for Lyotard, the separation between epistemology and the aesthetic is necessary not only to preserve the subject’s “disinterestedness,” that Kantian principle that protects aesthetic judgment from ideological overreach, but also to preserve the imagination’s experience of “liberation.” To put it another way, the subject imagines a personal interest of the self to be applicable universally to all others as a necessary and constitutive good, “or as Lacoue-Labarthe would say, if one fictions or figures the given tastefully, in accordance with beauty, one moralizes individual ethos or communal politikon.”27 Following Lacoue-Labarthe, Lyotard links an “aestheticization of ethics or politics” to “a transcendental ‘illusion’ or ‘appearance.’ ”28 He suggests that the subject essentially “aestheticizes” the ethical or the political, in that one extrapolates from a personal judgment between “heterogeneous things,” the possibility of one unified judgment applicable to all peoples. It is a “transcendental illusion.” This ideological trap is of such concern to Kant that he stakes the imagination’s liberation on the inability of the understanding to recuperate aesthetic experience as its object of knowledge. In order for the imagination to produce literature—its “object”—the imagination must violate the understanding’s organization of or hegemony over knowledge. The imagination’s “higher power” demands the understanding’s displacement and the transcendence of epistemological constraints. Literature must be a space unlegislated by the understanding in any of its epistemological axes, an act that appears transgressive to the understanding. As a result, religion becomes part of the understanding’s purview because it proposes a system of rules that govern objects in the service to a Transcendental Being. Religion operates epistemologically. In that operation, the imagination must remain suborned to the understanding as a legislative faculty. However, the question lingers, can the subject gain something from exercising the imagination’s liberation from rule-based judgments? In the imagination’s liberation, the subject violates essentially the Transcendental and forecloses a role for the understanding in aesthetic experience. The imagination is free to produce a space liberated from external fault lines. Art in its most expansive mode opens up a space for the subject away from the limitations of knowledge and the material world to embrace another dimension entirely, a world outside of the understanding’s purview.

27

Lyotard, “Of the Sublime,” 113. Lyotard, “Of the Sublime,” 113. See Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political (London: Blackwell, 1990), for the position to which Lyotard refers. Another pertinent analysis of Lacoue-Labarthe’s theory is Wlad Godzich’s “The Holocaust: Questions for the Humanities,” Partial Answers 7.1 (2009): 133–48. 28

13

INTRODUCTION

13

Kant posits that if the imagination is liberated from the boundaries, if not the hegemony, of constructing the object, in its liberation, the imagination posits, represents, exhibits (darstellen) the “new,” the unfamiliar, a world external to physical substance, a world that could, but may not exist. This world’s mental or phenomenological dimensions enable subjects to reposition themselves vis-à-vis imagined phenomena. In its most optimistic and idealistic sense, in the process of discovering a new orientation with which to negotiate such phenomena, the subject moves necessarily to the realization of new beings or even new predicates of being. This phenomenological possibility underwrites the imagination’s liberation; it makes liberation absolutely necessary for the subject’s ability to imagine human diversity. In this way, Kant leads to a nascent speculation about literature as a signifier of repair to social fault lines in that literature makes visible the production of new beings. Hegel saw this production as a result of all three disciplines—religion, philosophy, art—sharing “the same truth,” in spite of possessing different relationships to that truth.29 Consequently, as Stephen Houlgate demonstrates, “Art, for Hegel,” expresses “spirit’s understanding of itself. It differs from philosophy and religion, however, by expressing spirit’s self-understanding not in pure concepts, or in the images of faith, but in and through objects that have been specifically made for this purpose by human beings.” It exhibits this “self-understanding” in order to “render the freedom of spirit visible or audible to an audience” and “this sensuous expression of free spirit constitutes beauty . . . the creation of beautiful objects in which the true character of freedom is given sensuous expression.”30 The art object’s unique exhibition of “the freedom of the spirit” is not Divine transcendence, but rather “the true character of freedom,” human freedom. In such exhibition, in this case, literature, its representations are revelatory because they are permeated with the aura of human Geist so that subjective liberation from any legislative principle, any law, “is given sensuous expression.” For Hegel, literary representations absorb being as the synthesis between reality and the subject’s imagination of reality in that literature models Geist in ways at once unique and heteronomous because of the uniqueness of synthesis. Thus literature propels a being into substance. However, within this “revelation” is the tension between the awareness that a transcendental—the revelation of freedom expressed in sensuousness—is not the Transcendental, a placeholder for the Divine. Hegel notes the tension

29

See Stephen Houlgate, “Hegel’s Aesthetics,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford, CA: The Metaphysics Research Lab, Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2016), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/plato-rhetoric/. 30 See ibid.

14

14

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

is due to the transformation of the Transcendental in the progress of history. It is the result of secularization, and as Wlad Godzich demonstrates in his chapter, “Secularism and Post-Secularism,” Hegel deems it a critical step to realizing human potential. In this way, literature opens a place for a transcendental, but does this place demand that the transcendental space be occupied by some entity? To some extent, literature produces the coordinates for a transcendental to be housed among mere mortals whether or not that being occupies the space, whether or not that space is filled in by the Divine, whether or not it is ethical to appropriate this position.31 This short genealogy of how a Western tradition has imagined literature hints at the implications of the collection’s chapters.

The Transcendental and transcendence In the first division, “The Transcendental and Transcendence,” Gerald Gillespie, Geoffrey Green, and Wlad Godzich reflect on how literature—its aesthetic—is authorized, negated, and suppressed through the figure of the Transcendental. To understand the stakes of these different dimensions of literature, Gillespie, Green, and Godzich ponder the effects of the aesthetic working with and without religion, in order to get at whether it is ethical for literature to be exhibited as the Transcendental’s instrument, effect, or property or if literature produces its own conditions specifically to counter the occupation of the Transcendental space. Essentially, these three chapters explore what is to be gained through the inhabiting of the Transcendental space or figure in the aesthetic, and inferentially, how that “gain” informs the imagination’s experience of transcendence. In Gerald Gillespie’s “Rewriting Grand Narratives as a Supratemporal Mystical Competition:  Illustrations from Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Goethe, Proust, Mann, and Joyce,” Gillespie construes this transcendental space as the fulfilment of the promise of the logos in the arc of literature from Dante to Joyce. The logos leads naturally from the pleroma or fullness of being. Literature is underwritten by its Christological power; however, that power does not necessarily reduce to the importance of Christ as pleroma, inhabiting the logos. Rather than an emphasis on the Divine using flesh as its instrument, Gillespie suggests that the poet’s embodiment of representation, of the literary text, reveals the real fullness of meaning. Drawing on Arrianism, Gillespie argues that the logos inhabits literature in order to articulate Divine Being for humans. Humans need form and 31 What I am getting at here should be recognizable to readers familiar with Harold Bloom’s theory of Gnosticism, both Christian and Jewish forms of Gnosticism. See “Gnosticism: The Religion of Literature,” Harold Bloom, Gnosticism: the Religion of Literature, Genius (New York: Warner, 2003).

15

INTRODUCTION

15

literature’s ability to produce an imagined physicality; this need freights textual expression as the critical component to Divine revelation. In Gillespie’s genealogy of texts, literature imposes the necessity and desirability of supersession: it is a “supratemporal mystical competition” in which the poet foregoes bearing witness to worldly events, mimetically pointing to reality, in order to gain Transcendental agency. Hence the poet becomes an actor in the human drama whose role is none other than the Divine agent, “hero of the narrative.” Beginning with Dante’s supersession of Virgil in the Commedia, and ending with the modernist, James Joyce, Gillespie suggests that the logos-animated text presents a “supratemporal imperative” so that each subsequent text reaches beyond the past; it is obligated to go beyond the mortal and in that way, literature’s efficacy exceeds history, human limitation, and mortal failure. The logos pushes readers to dive into texts in order to transcend. Under this new term, the West’s “grand narratives” promote a mysticism whereby readers are “perfected” in the logos itself. Readerly redemption becomes contingent on a mystical journey in text rather than a recognition of human weakness, or even an awareness of discursive structure. Gillespie’s nuanced handling of Christological themes implies that Christianity has been necessary to literary transcendence. In fact, he implies that a Christian residue redeems aesthetic representation, enabling readers and writers to occupy the space of the Transcendental. It is a body for the logos because literature without the transcendental is reducible to a fault line transforming texts into empty, meaningless historical artifacts. Without “supratemporal mysticism” to animate the text, human beings would lack the means for gaining transcendence. Essentially, if we were to take the idea back to an original source, when God says, “Let us make man in our image,” the image to which God refers is narrative. Literature’s production of the Transcendental space appears as fulfilment of an ancient promise made in the Garden of Eden. While sin might be the fault line, literature still possesses the keys to Eden’s restoration; it repairs the world. In Geoffrey Green’s chapter, “ ‘Clearer Awareness of the . . . Crisis’: Erich Auerbach’s Radical Relativism and the ‘Rich Tensions’ of the Historical Imperative,” Green probes literature’s interaction with the space of the Transcendental to explore Erich Auerbach’s “radical relativism,” a principle that sees revelation as a contingent experience. This critical principle demonstrates the extensive differences between Gillespie’s “supratemporal imperative,” a progressive move through time to the future, and Auerbach’s “historical imperative,” a move that not only looks backward, but that also is aware of the present context of Auerbach’s writing. In this way, Auerbach articulates an obligation to communities and subjects whose immediate, present experience is at risk. Green’s Auerbach places the temporality of representation at the center of literary analyses. This “radical relativism” emerges within literature

16

16

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

to save texts, communities, and diversity for history and for the future. Literature proffers a position in which it is an ethical responsibility to accept that the diversity of humankind and the realization of that diversity is sutured to the revelation that we “do not know” the Transcendent although we must negotiate a place for the Transcendental. Green locates the necessity of Auerbach’s perspective of literature by juxtaposing E. R. Curtius’s mode of reading with Auerbach’s own fraught sense of the loss of human diversity through the extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust. As a German citizen during the Reich, Curtius stays in Germany and devotes himself to his research, writing in fact Essays in European Literature during that time. With that text, Curtius “seeks to find, recover, and cast light upon eternally abiding harmonies, rather than chronicling change across time.”32 In fact, in his introduction to the text, he emphasizes his concern with “the consciousness of Europe and the tradition of the West” so that in his investigation “further in time and space,” “continuity became more important to me than actuality.”33 For Green, as for Auerbach, Curtius’s approach inscribes an “as if” into a collective subject position so that the reader can follow the pattern or arc of a tradition over all of its permutations, to posit a continuity as if the “historical landscape was not scarred by the Holocaust.” In essence, Curtius encourages readers to imagine the world as if history proceeds without persecution. Literature persists even though historical agents have destroyed millions. Consequently, the pursuit of transcendence enables Curtius to pave over social fault lines, essentially reducing literature to an instrument of the Transcendental.34 Such an approach proposes that one ignore “individual historical contexts” in order to imagine an ahistorical continuity. Against this orientation, Auerbach’s “radical relativism,” as Green points out, is the necessary antidote. Literature must fracture the possibility of Curtius’s “as if” revision, and expose modernity’s fault lines. The place of the Transcendental is also of concern for Wlad Godzich in “Secularism and Post-secularism.” Godzich begins his chapter with a survey of how the secular as a concept circulates in our contemporary moment. Against this survey, he juxtaposes the reemergence of religious movements globally. For Godzich, the move to post-secularism was met by secularists as a “non-event” in which secularists “no longer thought of themselves as

32

See Michael Kowal, “Introduction,” to E. R. Curtius, Essays on European Literature, trans. Michael Kowal (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1973), xv. Originally published in 1950. 33 Ibid. 34 This is the eerie echo of Faust, who commits murder with Helen in Book 2 in order to gain a desired house in the Netherworld, and yet is forgiven by God, because his quest for transcendence is redeemed by his repentance.

17

INTRODUCTION

17

secularists in the same way that most of us do not think of ourselves as Galileonians or Newtonians” because “the intellectual work of secularism” was complete.35 Godzich juxtaposes the emergence of post-secularists though to the genealogy of the secular in order to identify the unarticulated concepts in which post-secularists are invested. This genealogy is the heart of Godzich’s chapter and it provides the critical scaffolding for his call to keep the Transcendental space empty. In his survey of the history of the secular concept, Godzich draws attention to the term’s use in the relation to two forms of history, “providential” and “human.” Godzich traces how providential history had been associated with Divine time, a “cosmopological” time, and an “anti-human” time in which religious authorities used “secular” to distinguish between living in “providential time” and living in “human time.” In “opposing two notions of time,” Church authorities asserted that “secularism was an attitude,” “the preference for human-based measurement.” Implicitly, secular “meant vacating the realm of the transcendental.” This “transfer” from providential to secular time leads Godzich to trace the development of secular as a philosophical principle in Kant and Hegel. For these philosophers, secular opens up an empty space of the Transcendental. By the Transcendental remaining “empty,” literature preserves that which is particularly human so that Godzich’s “secular” anchors literature to an ethical realization of the need for human particularities, pluralities. In this way, “secular” acts as a necessary fault line for the preservation of human difference. From this vantage point, Godzich moves into a discussion of post-secularism, globalization, and the implications of a modern desire to “fill in” the Transcendental.

Literature The second part, “Literature,” begins with Shawna Vesco’s “Redemptive Readings between Maurice Blanchot and Franz Rosenzweig.” Vesco examines how Blanchot’s writing, ecriture, fissures traditional concepts of community in much the same way that Franz Rosenzweig’s reading of Bible and Isaac Luria’s reading of Zohar undermine a monolithic Judaism. She connects this unique aspect of writing’s ontology to Judaism as a specific case study grouped under religion. For Vesco, religion is a monolithic structure that imposes membership through the notion of a shared identity. Judaism is just one object within that category. Following Gershom Scholem, Vesco sees all three writers trying to free religion from its epistemological incarceration,

35

Godzich, “The Holocaust,” xx.

18

18

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

what Scholem calls “empty ritual.”36 Thus literature, in the form of ecriture, intervenes, fissuring epistemology in order to liberate the human, a necessary fault line in the destruction of dogma. However, the key to Vesco’s argument is in the dynamism of the Hebrew letters as writing, the constitutive parts of words, that proceed from En Sof or “the Infinite Being” directly.37 Her thesis builds on a kabbalistic theory of the Hebrew alphabet in which the letters flow from Divine Being; they animate written representation with holy shefa or Divine flow so that in “the creative vigor of Torah interpretation,” the kabbalist can “align himself with the cosmic flow” and arouse “in The Zohar’s pages . . . the shefa, the endless flux of divine bounty.”38 The kabbalist renews shefa through reading. Vesco uses reading, then, to pivot to her discussion of the Holocaust as historical context for Blanchot’s writing the disaster.39 Consequently, she identifies in the dynamism and being of literature, a “writing drive” that requires readers to restore the projects of Luria, Rosenzweig, Blanchot to their chronological order. That order begins with Luria’s theory of destruction in which God obligates Himself to create humankind, but His kavod or glory overwhelms creation and so he withdraws into himself. This process of tzimtzum both starts the migration of the Hebrew letters flowing from his Being into creation and obligates Divine Being to concentrate and retract Being into Himself. It is, to quote Gershom Scholem, a “double strain,” so that Luria’s project produces the creative coordinates for human connection before the Fall. The letters themselves are the fault lines proceeding from Divine Being. They inscribe Divine memory before the Fall into human existence. However, by the early twentieth century, Rosenzweig sees a people without imagination who fulfil their religious practices, but lack a dynamic link to shefa or cosmic renewal. This becomes the context for Rosenzweig’s “star of redemption.” The inscription of Divine memory, previously displaced by “empty ritual,” now comes flooding back into human existence, available through the reading of biblical narrative. The restoration of human existence before the Fall is then taken up implicitly by Blanchot. Coming after the Holocaust, Blanchot points to writing as not only a destructive, but also a procreative force.40 Under Blanchot’s terms, writing has an ethical obligation 36

See Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New  York:  Schocken Books, 2011), 10. 37 An even more literal translation would be “the Being who is No Thing,” that is, unrecuperable as an object of devotion. 38 Daniel Matt, The Zohar, Volume 1 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), LXXI. 39 See Maurice Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1995). 40 This is really one of the most controversial aspects of Vesco’s chapter since the typical reading of Blanchot focuses on writing the destruction of the Jews, but Vesco implies a much more radical conclusion.

19

INTRODUCTION

19

to fissure a construction of community, a world, without Jews. By linking Blanchot to Luria, Vesco presents another narrative about writing:  the Nazis exterminated the Jews. They imagined a world that was “Jew-less”; community would be homogenous and pure, but in that moment, writing the disaster has come into being. It “destroys” this concept of community and it restores not only Jews, but also non-Jews, to being through texts. This is the ethical implication of Vesco’s argument, writing redeems the world because it insists that we are obligated to remember, to reject a world predicated on the absence of a people. In this way, writing proposes a necessary fault line, a redemptive and necessary fault line. Ipshita Chanda’s “ ‘So What if You Are Big?’ Divisive Identities and the Ethics of Pluralism in Indian Literatures of Devotion” proposes a theory of literature that repairs the fractures of unarticulated and inherited consequences of British colonialism, its impact on Indian aesthetics, and its severance of connection between Hindu and minority communities within India. She reminds readers that “although modern nomenclature” recuperates Indian literature as one category, the writers of her study, “composed in different languages, in different regions of the geopolitical space we now know as India, and across eight centuries.” The only commonality between these diverse groups is their goal of producing poems in “the outline of an ethics that transcends the morality imposed by hegemonic Brahmanical religion.” Provocatively, Chanda suggests that for India to embrace modernity, a signifier for colonial and Brahmin epistemologies, Indians must turn their backs on the repairs of their historical literary and religious traditions. In that gesture, Indians forfeit the power of literature to embrace Western modernity. Her chapter proposes that disciplinary distinctions between literature, ethics, and religion are artificial and do not exist within Indian devotional literatures. Consequently, a Western perception of difference among these three disciplines reflects a colonial epistemology when applied to Indian aesthetics. She argues that within such aesthetics, literature is a metaphor for the being of the other, “its unique presence irreducible to the self.” As such, literature opens up a space external to the self in order to constitute the other. It is a different end or telos for aesthetic experience entirely since the West posits it as constitutive both for the subject and the imagined community to which the subject belongs. In other words, for the West, literature enables the subject to recognize the self and to posit that self as the basis for a likeminded community. In this respect, Chanda aligns herself with aspects of Richard Kearney’s and Dorothy Figueira’s hermeneutical projects. Her perspective shifts the discussion of an Indian aesthetics away from its relationship or comparison to Western models by positing a wholly different aspect of literature, she contends, often occluded by Western writers, the love and necessity of plurality. Implicitly, Chanda indicates that the constitution of the subject is a colonial act,

20

20

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

effacing the constitution of the other, an aim or telos that was integral historically to Indian aesthetics. The implications of Chanda’s chapter are striking because they represent a modern critique of Hindutvan nationalism as the legacy of British colonialism as well as making aesthetic experience the constitutive act for the Other and not the subject. Bracketing India’s experience between the historical events of colonialism and nationalism, Chanda posits the sant and Bhakti traditions of love poetry as a literary drive to undermine these historical events, and suggests literature as the only way out of colonialism’s legacy. Since this repair has been at the heart of the multiplicity of Indians’ identities from its earliest iterations when Bhakti poets chastise Brahmin sensibilities over their hierarchical posturing, Chanda infers that in attempts to shift the foundations of aesthetic experience away from the Other, India has been coerced into the mimicry of colonial sensibility and has abandoned the core of its religious obligations. In Chanda’s argument, literature repairs the fault lines of caste, hierarchy, and segregation. Christopher Weinberger’s “Alterity and the Ethics of the Novel in J.M. Coetzee’s Quasi-realism” thinks literature as an experience of “radical alterity” in order to undermine its traditional bases in empathy and identification, bases that are reinforced by aesthetic experience’s culmination in judgment. Weinberger’s indictment of aesthetic judgment as a constitutive part of subject constitution hinges then on two moments, liberation of the imagination, and its ensuing judgment about liberation’s value for the subject that he places in relation to political histories of imperialism. These histories he argues leave their imprint specifically in the way the subject comes into being through art, that is, the subject’s introspective turn away from the art object enables the subject to posit an imagined liberation while simultaneously imposing a boundary between the object per se and the subject. Weinberger sees in the distinction between the literary text and the reader an implicit judgment about the object’s “difference” in relation to the subject’s own imagined reality. It is a devaluation process in which the art object, the literary text, is diminished in relation to the self. Thus it is “deficient” and in this way, the text and its characters become deficient bodies whose subordination to the subject is necessary since the subject cannot come into being unless the object is constructed and controlled along these lines. For Weinberger, this judgment colludes with and expresses histories of oppression because it encourages the subject to impose his fantasies on historical “objects” through allegory. The text’s importance is tethered almost exclusively to its ability to elicit significance through allegory. Consequently, Weinberger proposes an immanent textual universe, unavailable to allegory, in which characters model their subject positions, at once violent, and traumatic, to get at the paucity of imperial aesthetics, that is, an aesthetics constituted as secular, but nonetheless, an instrument

21

INTRODUCTION

21

of empire. By shifting the entire discussion of literary ethics away from its traditional tether of allegory in literature, Weinberger gives the imagination an “outside” in which it can produce a new subject position no longer contingent on a Western model compromised by imperialism. The paradigmatic example of Weinberger’s strategy is Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians in which the magistrate begins the text as the typical Enlightenment subject, and ends with the magistrate, broken, and redeemed. He is “liberated to” be ethical, but only after being tortured and ostracized; in order for the magistrate to recognize the constitutive aspects of the violations in which he had previously engaged, he must experience similar violations. The Magistrate’s transformation occurs because he can no longer turn inward and ignore violation. Consequently, readers witness the modeling of new subject positions via fiction’s virtual reality. By foreclosing aesthetic judgment, the original fault line, readers, like the characters themselves, are immersed in the actions of the novel. They forfeit the safety of turning inward. Hyper-intensified, these actions result in readers’ adoption of characters’ attitudes and actions as part of their own experience of the fictional world, stopping short of imposing these attitudes on the world external to fiction and because of this stop, they experience a new, more ethical dimension of the imagination.

Religion The third part, “Religion,” presents readers with the fundamental questions around how literature is a repository of religious material and how religious residue relays its significance through aesthetic experience. Sara Hackenberg, Hope Howell Hodgkins, and Stephanie Heimgartner agree that literature has absorbed religious elements historically so that religion remains an agent in modernity through literary representation. All three writers work from the given notion that literature remains an instrument of a transcendental power who offers either transcendence or transgression to readers. Working from the notion that the artist or writer identifies religion’s failure as the reason behind the adoption of literary expression, each scholar posits literature either as a repair of religion’s failure or of the poet’s mistaken belief in that failure. The text is not immanent in and of itself, but rather it is a receptacle for this residual religious material necessarily; it is an embodiment of the Transcendental. In this way, literature’s capacity for transcendence hinges on the author’s use of religious idioms and language in which a Divine or supernatural being can inhabit. For Sara Hackenberg, in “Asmodeus, the ‘Eye of Providence,’ and the Ethics of Seeing in Nineteenth-Century Mystery Fiction,” the biblical and Talmudic figure of Asmodeus, with his magical and demonic powers, is recuperated by nineteenth-century mystery novelists to posit the desirability

22

22

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

of an ability to see through the trappings and disguises of religious hypocrisy. Asmodeus knows the real core of human beings; he reveals their thoughts, desires, and judgments. In this way, Asmodeus becomes associated with technology and science so that his revelation of what is below the surface, hidden by religious ritual, social convention, and communal tradition, appears akin to a supernatural being making legible what has been previously occluded, and unaccessible. The promise of seeing past deception freights the mystery novel’s motif of science as a type of revelation. Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, Asmodeus epitomizes the hope of seeing beyond the circumstances, context, and environment of individuals in order to demonstrate their “real truth.” Asmodeus is the signifier of the need for modernity to correct the fault lines of archaic and medieval history; the valorization of the past with its empty rituals, religiosity, is proposed as inherently unethical. In this respect, Hackenberg isolates Asmodeus’s genealogy with its religious antecedents in order to demonstrate that the modern technè of aesthetic experience is not a secular process, devoid of religious intent, but rather an enduring partner of religion. God has liberated Asmodeus to fulfil the purpose of modernity, to repair humanity’s historical faults through science. By the end of Hackenberg’s chapter, Asmodeus, with his demonic knowledge, is a redemptive figure, whose compassion for human frailty and misery stands sharply against a religious establishment, whose representatives are not only incapable of human mercy, but are also mired within their own transgressions. They represent a concept of god without sympathy for human existence. Thus religion is a fault line that science must challenge through literature even if construed by religious authorities as sin. In this way, nineteenth-century mystery fiction proposes transgression to work on behalf of humans. Asmodeus serves humans by revealing the illusions that previously constrained them. Hope Howell Hodgkins begins “Modernism’s Religious Rhetorics:  Or, What Bothered Baudelaire” with a simple premise: because artists and critics believe they know what modernism is, they read the tradition according to their preexisting biases in which religion is simply a throwback position and art is the new sacrament. She proposes that modernism in all of its variants reflects a religious dynamism that she traces through Baudelaire and other writers’ language use. Identifying the compromised signifiers of religious speech, Howell Hodgkins argues that literature’s fluidity relies on religion, specifically Christianity, even though modernists reject religion overtly. They appeal to the Transcendental subconsciously even though they consciously reject its power. Thus Howell Hodgkins suggests aesthetic transgression merely refigures the Transcendental. Literature is never separated from its service to religion; it reanimates the dynamism of spirituality through the secular text. Literature exists as a necessary aesthetic stratagem for spiritual and hence religious

23

INTRODUCTION

23

renewal. In other words, it offers through its own logos, an experience of the pleroma, even though its illusion is the rejection of God. Neither art nor religion are fault lines, but instruments of Divine purpose. In Baudelaire’s attempt to distance himself from religion, and by extension, all of modernist artists, Howell Hodgkins suggests that the poet creates the deception of a subjective fault line in order to present his aesthetic intervention. Likewise, in “Poetry and Religion: Approaches to Christian Transcendence in Late-Twentieth-Century Poets,” Stephanie Heimgartner uses the work of four contemporary poets, Wisława Szymborska, Inger Christensen, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Les Murray, to demonstrate the stakes of poetry as a necessary redemptive instrument of religion, even when, as Howell Hodgkins and Hackenberg also note, several of the authors do not espouse religious affiliations. In that register, Heimgartner’s theoretical frame begins with a historical gloss about a modern disavowal of religion in which that system’s organization of knowledge, its epistemology, is construed as oppressive. Like Howell Hodgkins, she too identifies this modern “tradition” as a familiar theme in literary criticism and aesthetics. However, she sees the poet poised to redeem through the text rather than its violation. This redemption is particularly apt in her analysis of Inger Christensen’s retelling of the Garden of Eden story from Genesis with that poet’s emphasis on the act of naming. Heimgartner underscores how Christensen links the Edenic narrative to The Book of Job, telegraphing the foundational scene of Eden into history so that evolution and human history, with its suffering, become God’s “work of art.” In an echo of the thirteenth-century kabbalistic Zohar, Christensen grounds human experience in the necessity of the text. For the Zoharic writer, God must stare into, read ha-torah, in order to create “his work of art.”41 God’s “work of art” is contingent on His ability to read the text, His “Torah.” Indeed, for the author of Zohar, aesthetic experience begins with God. Consequently, when Christensen recuperates The Book of Job and human suffering historically, her allusion is to the first act of creation as

41

Matt, The Zohar, 29; 1:5a. The reference to the female pronoun in the passage is due to the Torah being a feminine noun: ha-torah. Come and see: With the Torah, the blessed Holy One created the world. This has been established, as it is written, I was with Him as a nursling. I was a daily delight (Proverbs 8:30). He gazed upon her once, twice, three and four times, then spoke, creating through her. To teach human beings not to err in her, as it is written: Then he saw and declared her, arranged and probed her. He told humanity (Job 28:27). The blessed Holy One created what he created corresponding to those four times: He saw and declared her, arranged and probed her. Before generating His work, He introduced four words: ‫אֱֹלהִים אֵת‬, ‫ ָב ָּרא‬, ‫שׁית ְ ּב‬ ִ ‫ֵרא‬ (Be-reshit bara Elohim et), In the beginning God created. First these four; then, ‫ש ַמי ִם‬ ּׁ ָ ‫ַה‬ (ha-shamayim), the heavens. These correspond to the four times that the blessed Holy One contemplated Torah before actualizing His work of art (emphases in the original).

24

24

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

the first aesthetic experience. Eden is God’s literary expression. Humans are but aesthetic representations of the Divine. For Heimgartner, Christensen’s revelation makes evolution part of a Divine “work of art.” She develops the trajectory of implications for this claim in her analyses of Szymborska, Enzensberger, and Murray so that poetry repairs the fault lines of human existence.

Ethics The fourth part, “Ethics,” asks what kind of ethical project is necessary for literature to constitute a social repair? The question implies though that literature scholars feel compelled to take on the ethical act since literature has been burdened by an action formerly outside of its purview. As noted in my discussion of Lyotard, ethics introduced into the aesthetic violates aesthetic disinterest because it privileges a personal commitment to performing the right action over the freedom of the representation, but as the three contributors, Dorothy Figueira, Steven Shankman, and Kitty Millet, demonstrate, the violation does not preclude literature entirely from offering ethical insights. While all three writers make an appeal for ethical projects radically different from each other, their differences highlight the many registers, obligations, and historical moments imbricated in literary criticism. For those familiar with Professor Figueira’s previous publications, her chapter, “Instituting the Other:  Ethical Fault Lines in Readings and Pedagogies of Alterity,” rehearses several themes that she has explored elsewhere. However, while she has analyzed the implications of these themes in earlier iterations, the implications of this recent chapter are marked by an allusion not found in her previous texts. While Figueira situates the notion of “reading the Other” in relation to current academic debates within comparative literature and their resonance with disputes in French sociology, she focuses on the university and a “conflict of the faculties” that she anchors to a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” While necessary, the model has had a secondary and unintended effect in that it has shifted scholarship away from the very populations it espouses to serve. More specifically, a conflict between faculties and the notion of “best practices” reveals an “ethical fault line” in the methodologies that disciplines use to “read the Other.” These methodologies are often compromised by conceptual investments, still tied to a colonial subject and a colonized object. She argues that the social institution of higher education has coalesced around an unarticulated notion of racial inferiority in which “minorities could enter the groves of academia if they settled for studying themselves . . . fields for which they were deemed genetically predisposed.” In other words, implicitly higher education has mimicked the slaveowner’s manuals, familiar to scholars who work

25

INTRODUCTION

25

on transatlantic slavery and its legacy, where slaves were adumbrated by physical characteristic, labor to maximize that characteristic, and type of diet to encourage that capacity for labor.42 To counter this unarticulated notion of racial inferiority, she argues that ethical obligations ensue because of the study of literature and she points to the ease with which the rejection of those obligations has produced one-sided and exclusionary theoretical projects. Following Richard Kearney, Figueira notes that from antiquity to modernity, Western literatures have routinely characterized the Other as monstrous and alien.43 This recuperation of the Other as that which poses a threat to “me” is then relegated to the margins, “the trash heap of history.” She enlists the example of Paul Ricoeur’s lecture hall experience in France when student activists mocked him and placed a trashcan on his head to illustrate the claim and to emphasize how the lecture hall and the public sphere are very much connected in the legacies of exclusion, persecution, and marginalization. For Steven Shankman, in “Thinking God on the Basis of Ethics: Levinas, The Brothers Karamazov, and Dostoevsky’s Anti-Semitism,” the crux of difference between Dostoevsky the Christian, or non-Jew, and Emmanuel Levinas, the Jewish philosopher who penned his first book in a Nazi POW camp, resides in the ethical obligation. The Jew is required to be responsible for the Other and Cain’s rejection of that obligation transforms him into someone who would destroy his family, his community, commit murder, because of it. Shankman reads the Hebrew phrase, ‫הנני‬, “Here I am,” in order to articulate the ethical obligation. Used this way, Levinas undoes the Christian profession of faith as the marker of religious identity and goes back to the articulation of the mitzvah. This shift from faith, belief, to obligation to the Other is key to understanding Shankman’s claim about Dostoevsky and the basis of that author’s anti-Semitism for it highlights the difference between Christian and Judaic relationships to the Transcendental. Judaism posits that humans exist in another ontological dimension; our being is not Divine Being, can never be Divine Being. This ontological difference underwrites Mosaic, Levitical, and Talmudic Law, collectively

42

In fact, as I have shown in Kitty Millet, The Victims of Slavery, Colonization and the Holocaust, a Comparative History of Persecution (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), and following Elsa Goveia’s benchmark The West Indian Slave Laws of the Eighteenth Century (London and Tonbridge: Whitefriars Press, 1970), as well as Sally E. Hadden, “The Fragmented Laws of Slavery in the Colonial and Revolutionary Eras,” in The Cambridge History of Law. Vol. 1, ed. Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Vernon Valentine Palmer, “The Origins and Authors of the Code Noir,” Louisiana Law Review 56.2 (Winter 1996):  363–407, all of our Western social institutions incorporated residual aspects of slavery even though slavery had been abolished. This aspect is evident in Figueira’s allusion to how American academics of color are tracked into ethnic studies in certain circumstances. 43 Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (New York: Routledge, 2002).

26

26

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

understood as ha-torah, because it has been given to Jews for them to fulfill. Consequently, Jews interpret these obligations or mitzvoth as the essence of their capacity to draw near to God, to repeat as every prophet, every patriarch, before them, ‫הנני‬, “Here am I.” The performance of these duties is not contingent on belief. In fact, in the absence of belief, the mitzvoth take on an added dimension by suggesting that the Jew articulates them regardless of a personal investment in their expression.44 This paradox is at the heart of Shankman’s analysis of Dostoevsky. He explains that in Jews’ ability to draw close to God, Dostoevsky recognizes the outlines of the mitzvah, the obligation, that is not dependent on the Jew’s belief, or faith. In fact, as Shankman has analyzed elsewhere, Dostoevsky “can’t imagine the existence of atheists, of ‘godless ones,’ even among secular Jews.”45 The degree of secularism is unimportant because it does not intimate a Jew’s abandonment of the ‫הנני‬, “Here am I.” In this way, the articulation of the mitzvah conflates with the necessary recognition of the middah. It also enables readers to adopt another way of reading religious affiliation, focusing instead on an obligation to the other rather than individual belief. The last chapter in the collection, Kitty Millet’s “An Ethics for Missing Persons,” examines two writers from the Holocaust era, Jorge Semprun and H.  G. Adler, to get at what it means for literature to bear witness and why that action imposes its own ethics upon readers. By juxtaposing both writers’ attempts to analyze their memories of being in camps, Millet explores survivors’ often overlooked use of literature to focus attention on the residual subjective experiences of camp life for non-Jews and Jews. Millet’s chapter juxtaposes two passages, Semprun’s memory of discovering a dying Jew, found beneath corpses in Auschwitz’s Little Hut, in Literature or Life and H. G. Adler’s fictional survivor, Paul Lustig, who climbs up out of the ashes of an unnamed death camp in The Journey. This juxtaposition contrasts Semprun’s intuited obligation to the Jew he cannot save, with Paul’s awareness of an obligation he feels for himself and his missing family. Semprun, a survivor of Buchenwald, and a non-Jew, brackets his memory of discovering a dying Jew, saying Kaddish, to the moment he goes to see Maurice Halbwachs for the last time in Buchenwald’s infirmary. At the infirmary, he is able to restore a sense of community to Halbwachs before his teacher’s death by reciting a stanza from Baudelaire, but holding the dying Jew in his arms, and listening to the man say his own Kaddish,

44 This realization becomes the basis for kabbalah as a spiritual movement within the Jewish community since its practitioners look, as Gershom Scholem notes, at the “empty rituals” of Judaism, the “object of dogmatic knowledge,” and move toward transforming such knowledge into “a novel and living form of intuition.” See Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 10. 45 Steven Shankman, Turning Inside Out:  Reading the Russian Novel in Prison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 100.

27

INTRODUCTION

27

Semprun recognizes the burden of his failure: he has neither been able to save this man nor restore a sense of community to this victim. This doubly articulated failure becomes Semprun’s obligation to repeatedly tell this story in fiction and nonfiction for the rest of his life. His survival is constitutively grounded in the “many smells of death,” the many lives whose loss he has witnessed, and this one dying Jew, for whom he could do nothing, but write the memory of his failure. For Adler, the survivor of Auschwitz and Theresienstadt, his character, Paul, feels the ghosts of his family cling to him as he moves through ashes, trying to find “a foothold” in order to escape a death camp. His memories are punctuated by the screams of his sister on the platform, begging to live as the Nazis’ “pet” rather than die as their victim. As he climbs out of the pit and joins himself to an open road, full of anonymous stragglers, refugees, returning soldiers, he realizes that he owes it to himself and the victims of the ash pits to force the world to know him as the Nazis’ particular victim. His experiences cannot be shared; they are not interchangeable. In this moment, Adler uses literature to rephrase the death camp survivor’s obligation, articulated in text: “he will live by his own law now.” In other words, literature posits a radical antinomianism because of the imagination’s liberation and this condition provides the possibility of voicing Paul’s ethical obligation for the self and for the “others” whose ashes cling to him. In this way, literature posits that an “ethics for missing persons” enables the text to be a home, a community, an origin for beings who have been denied existence.

Concluding thoughts At the beginning of the introduction, I describe this collection as a conceptual cartography of global constituencies whose approach to literature does not suggest a community of scholars with a “shared sense,” but rather reflects the interests of an independent cohort of researchers. I emphasize this absence of a “shared sense” because of its centrality to the idea of community; the notion of community, as Karin Schutjer reminds readers, is an “essentially contested” site, characterized by “the act of the imagination that constitutes them.”46 She observes that while “no single example of community underlies public discourse and debate in pluralistic Western societies,” there are still “literary . . . models that have had a sustained hold on the ways people imagine community.”47 Schutjer’s insight speaks directly to what I  believe

46

See Karin Schutjer, Narrating Community after Kant, Schiller, Goethe, and Hölderlin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 14. 47 Ibid.

28

28

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

makes this collection so very important: all of these chapters make visible how different communities imagine and have imagined their worlds in relation to crisis, whether it is the lecture hall, the colony, a sea of ashes. Perhaps my initial call to discover new ways of reading stories would be better framed as the discovery of new ways of imagining the subject as other. Consequently, as all of these chapters illustrate, whether in the repair of modernity’s fault lines, or the exacerbation of modernity’s fracture, literature provides a necessary space for readers and writers to address social crises in “radically relativist” terms, exhibiting different remedies for the uniqueness of each situation. These chapters suggest moreover that societies need this expansive array of reading strategies for stories, familiar and unfamiliar, sacred and secular, because in their multiplicity, subjects discover new modes of possibility, new modes of being, new ways of reorienting the self in relation to crisis.

Bibliography Asad, Talal (2003), Formations of the Secular. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bernheimer, Charles (1995), Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. Blanchot, Maurice (1995), Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Bloom, Harold (2003), Genius, a Mosaic of One Hundred Creative Exemplary Minds. New York: Warner Books. Damrosch, David, Melas, Natalie, and Buthelezi, Mbongiseni (eds) (2009), The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, from the European Enlightenment to the Global Present. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. “Decolonizing the English Faculty, an Open Letter,” https://docs.google.com/ document/d/1Qji9ojNzumOeKboLLBBWs5fxJfEPVAw4JDNtdz2yAtU/edit. Figueira, Dorothy (2008), Otherwise Occupied: Pedagogies of Alterity and the Brahminization of Theory. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Godzich, Wlad (2009), “The Holocaust: Questions for the Humanities,” Partial Answers 7.1: 133–48. Houlgate, Stephen (2016), “Hegel’s Aesthetics,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: The Metaphysics Research Lab, Center for the Study of Language and Information: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/ entries/plato-rhetoric/. Kearney, Richard (2002), Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness. New York: Routledge. Kearney, Richard and Taylor, James (eds) (2011), Hosting the Stranger: Between Religions. London and New York: Bloomsbury (formerly Continuum). Kowal, Michael (1973), “Introduction,” in E. R. Curtius, Essays on European Literature, trans. Michael Kowal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

29

INTRODUCTION

29

Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillippe (1990), Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political. London: Blackwell. Lewis, Thomas A. (2015), Why Philosophy Matters for the Study of Religion & Vice Versa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1993), “The Interest of the Sublime,” in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question: Essays by Jean-Francois Courtine, Michel Deguy, Eliane Escoubas, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Louis Marin, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacob Rogozinski, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Mason, Emma (2015), Abrahamic Religions. London: Bloomsbury. Matt, Daniel (2007), The Zohar, Volume 1. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Needham, Anuradha Dingwaney and Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder (2007), The Crisis of Secularism in India. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Rosenberg, Yair (August 14, 2017), “Jews Will Not Replace Us.” Washington Post. Scholem, Gershom (2011), Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken Books. Shankman, Steven (2017), Turning Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

30

31

PART ONE

The transcendental and transcendence

32

33

1 Rewriting grand narratives as a supratemporal mystical competition: Illustrations from Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Goethe, Proust, Mann, and Joyce Gerald Gillespie

Preamble Retrospective awareness of classical civilization, biblical tradition, and intervening centuries of Christianized culture in Europe has created the platform on which our current discussion of so-called grand narratives is based in Eurocentric cultures. Because it happened, we accept the grand Dantesque gesture of the Divina commedia at the beginning of the fourteenth century as part of our heritage, supplemented by other gestures beyond that of Dante Alighieri, such as the epic poems Orlando furioso (Raging Roland, 1516)  by Ludovico Ariosto and Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1575)  by Torquato Tasso in the sixteenth century among those who recapitulated the Middle Ages and the emergence of early modern European culture for sophisticated Renaissance readers. In the flow from the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries François Rabelais and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra complicated the game by contrasting repertories and strata of cultural evolution and, in the process, elaborating profound metaphysical discoveries regarding “modern” humanity.

34

34

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Eventually down the road, and spanning the crisis of the Revolutionary period in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the non-Christian Johann Wolfgang von Goethe recapitulated all the intervening line of recapitulators and opened up his Gesamtkunstwerk, Faust I  and II, to all genres and all ages, and gave its poetic cross-section of over three millennia an open ending which summed up and plumbed the deepest legacy of antiquity and the Middle Ages with a famous mystical, both spiritual and cosmological, insight. Many eminent modernists accepted that the poetic imagination could only approach the titanic task of defining the ontological pathway of their own world by (re-)using epical vehicles, as we see in Pound, Proust, Mann, Joyce, and a host of others in the twentieth century. As Romantic theorists of the novel had already surmised in the early nineteenth century, and as the humoristic-encyclopedic tradition had demonstrated via Rabelais, Cervantes, and Laurence Sterne, the metamorphosing European grand narrative required a grand container. Upon closer inspection, readers today will discover that most major novelists in this line of descent, for example, the American John Barth, have struggled to express and ultimately arrive at a mystical sense of their own struggle and mission in a long line of descent. I  hope to characterize this moment particularly in Proust, Mann, and Joyce. Strains of contemporary postmodernism that attempt to express apocalyptic supersession or to deconstruct the heritage, in the final analysis, actually help us to (re-)discover cultural consciousness caught in the non-paradox of its dependence on the chain of grand narratives whose disintegration some believe or fear is at hand, but which in a future century may well still be ranked by cultural historians as significant way-stations in a continued flow.

New Europe in its medieval youth and Renaissance maturation Bear with me as I rapidly sketch a few reminders of the evolving European super-system and its eventual extensions overseas in the so-called Common Era. Only from around the year 1000 onward, though considerably earlier in Denmark, was Christianity finally reaching into the Scandinavian north and Slavic east; and there were extensive reception gaps and retardations, as well as overlappings, of subject matters in literature and art in central and western areas because of Europe’s territorial complexity and unevenly accruing memory strata. For example, the Nibelungenlied (Song of the Nibelung) written in Middle High German toward the end of the twelfth century, still deals with events of the fifth and sixth century after the collapse of the Western Roman empire, whereas the roughly contemporaneous Spanish

35

REWRITING GRAND NARRATIVES

35

Cantar de mio Cid (Song of My Chief) already treats the Christian-Muslim interface of the later Middle Ages. However, lest anyone doubt whether the concept of a greater Europe was well established prior to the Renaissance, let him or her reread the likewise late-twelfth-century Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland), in Old French; for, in chronicling the time of Charlemagne from several centuries earlier, this epic already lists the new main peoples of Christendom and draws the southern and eastern borders of Europe more or less as they appear in the Renaissance. In the early-fourteenth-century masterpiece Dante’s Commedia, later known as La divina commedia (Divine Comedy), the author’s intense consciousness of the cultural history of a Christian Europe as successor to classical antiquity sets a new epochal standard. In the Commedia we experience the brilliant cooptation of a major predecessor, Virgil, who in his own earlier epochal turn as author of the Aeneid had achieved confirmation of the historical mandate of a new great era of civilization, while subsuming Homer’s totalizing vision as set forth in the Iliad and Odyssey. Early modern Europe inherited the concept of a translatio imperii (transfer of mandate) from the Roman era, previously proclaimed as the destined successor to the Greek world. Moreover, in Homer and next in Virgil, their main venturing protagonists, Odysseus and Aeneas, experience numinous encounters in the course of our, that is, their readers’, regaining conviction in a terrestrial order that is intermeshed with a divine order. Now, in the Commedia, the poet Dante himself boldly serves as protagonist in his own saga of the traversing of hidden realms and of achieving insight into what the unfolding of Providence in history is bringing about. The pattern of his being guided initially by Virgil, or in general by ancient pre-revelation, and later by Beatrice in the new era is readily understood in the light of the primary Christian paradigm of the passage from the Old to the New Testament, a narrative framework Northrop Frye and others have copiously analyzed as widely applicable in European literature down through the centuries.1 My main interest here is in the way that Dante’s astounding pilgrimage occurs. Immediately in canto 1 of the Inferno he exits from normal time into his vision of an eternal order that subsumes normal time in its onward march, and the Commedia conducts us through an orchestrated suite of epiphanies, right up to the moment when we glimpse the mysterious beauty of heaven and the radiance of love in the final tercets of the Paradiso. As Dante transitions from Hell to Purgatory on the way to Paradise, he leaves behind and trumps his guide Virgil, without discarding or demeaning him. Thereby the Christian poet absorbs the already established authority that 1

Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).

36

36

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

is foundational for his own authority. R.  Rawdon Wilson has studied the phenomena of many an author’s ineluctable capture in labyrinthine exploration as a recurrent basic pattern in European literature,2 and Manfred Schmeling has shown the durability of this pattern into our own times.3 When in the later-seventeenth-century Milton revisits Hell in its inaugural days and exposits what he discovers in a more distanced third-person voice, yet flamboyantly, and how Hell’s being built coincides with the fortunate fall of humankind, he undertakes an awesome challenge, insofar as Dante has already staked out the infernal territory in detail in the high Middle Ages. Having started in Paradise Lost with a poetic expansion upon the book of Genesis, Milton very logically elects no less a champion than Christ as the triumphant protagonist in the defeat of Satan which is depicted boldly in Paradise Regained. Knowing how to survive as a discreet Arian in a Trinitarian society during the tumultuous civil war period of the seventeenth century, Milton reveres Christ as the chosen hero of God, although tacitly not as the second person of the Trinity. That is, Milton practices a subtle kind of one-upmanship in being the writer who is capable of offering us, in many intimate, close-up scenes, a protagonist, the divinely appointed hero Christ, who is a distinct cut above a mere poet like Dante or himself. As Milton was well aware, there were several varieties of epics in his times celebrating cosmic order besides those which mainly assert supersession in religious authority. Europe was still producing philosophic celebrations of the numinous love principle and cosmological glory such as we find in Giambattista Marino’s epic poem L’Adone (Adonis) in the earlier seventeenth century and Daniel Casper von Lohenstein’s Venus in the later seventeenth century. They renew the line that descends from Lucretius’s De rerum natura in antiquity. But here I want to dwell a moment on the preceding incredible plenitude of the Renaissance writer Rabelais, who both extols nature and celebrates the grand historical drama of history and salvation, by playing with a jocoserious doctrine of rebirth in his great five-part novel of the 1530s, a kind of supplementary New Testament reinstating and explicating the New Testament. Right before our eyes, Rabelais’s indefatigable Gargantuan-Pantagrueline family rediscovers and asserts the divine plan of achieving harmony between the laws of nature and revealed religion. Their story, besides promising to overcome mankind’s fall from Paradise, performs in colossal detail the epochal transition out of the Middle Ages into Renaissance aspirations and standards. In the course of examining the challenge of cultural rebirth, Rabelais displays and contrasts whole

2

R. Rawdon Wilson, In Palamedes’ Shadow: Explorations in Play, Game, and Narrative Theory (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990). 3 Manfred Schmeling, Der labyrinthische Diskurs: Vom Mythos zum Erzählmodell (Frankfurt a.M.: Athenäum, 1987).

37

REWRITING GRAND NARRATIVES

37

repertories of the European heritage. Rabelais’s is a Dionysian Christianity,4 drinking the wine of good books—not to be confused with Nietzsche’s later idea—and culminates in the ecstatic dance of the Renaissance explorers who reach the temple of the Divine Bottle in book five and sense the numinous profundity of their venture, voyaging far out on the world’s oceans and living on the cutting edge of cultural consciousness. If some true-believing postmodernists feel uneasy at this point, I  can readily sympathize with their discomfiture over the sheer vivacity of Rabelais’s faith in a meaningful destiny for humanity. He explicitly names the utopian Thomas More and the praiser of folly Desiderius Erasmus as guides for his joyous evangelical romp. Today it may hurt to realize someone could feel that way in the past. As the sixteenth century beyond Rabelais ends its quest for apotheosis in baroque complexity, we encounter a wealth of densely concentrated expressions of the task imposed upon human actors to find their true roles in history, the possible joyous pathway. One of the finest works in the genre of the martyr drama about the actor sui, the actor of himself, the actor who discovers that he has a destined role, is Lope de Vega’s lyrical martyr play Lo fingido verdadero (The True Feigned or the Feigned True). When ordered by the emperor Diocletian to mock the noble martyr Adrian, the drunkard pagan actor Ginés so thoroughly studies his way into the role that, prompted by angels and now experiencing a divine intoxication, he gradually becomes Adrian and suffers death as part of his supreme performance. Lope achieves a majestic close to the play when we witness, as a dumb show staged in the background of Ginés’s crucifixion, the actual passage of history, a future bringing about the fall of the arrogant Roman world and the rise of Christianity. Ginés is transfigured by this light invading the darkness. Here the author allows the whole audience to peer through a window in time and to behold the larger picture of the plan in history that the actor Ginés intuits in a personal triumph, a mystical illumination finally outside of time. This radical act of opening a window in time is analogous to the mythic act of entry into a labyrinth in search of a hidden relevation or a descent into the underworld, like Dante’s, whereby the poet’s or his character’s mind is vouchsafed a miraculous connection with past time or all time, liberation from bondage to time. This recurs on a gigantic orchestral scale in the moving close to Marcel Proust’s Le temps retrouvé (Time Refound), the posthumous final volume of À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Time Past), when the narrator Marcel taps into the eternal flow in himself and realizes that he is qualitatively eternal, fulfilling his dream states which we were privileged to eavesdrop on in the overture to volume one, Du côté

4

Florence Weinberg, The Wine and the Will:  Rabelais’ Bacchic Christianity (Detroit:  Wayne State University Press, 1972).

38

38

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

de chez Swann (Swann’s Way), where he was carried back to the earliest moments of mankind, to even before cave dwellers, to the primordial androgyne Adam and Eve. A  simpler form of looking through windows in time is well established also in secular literature of the Renaissance and Baroque as a means of reminding contemporary audiences of their own connectedness to historical development and destiny. For example, in Daniel Casper von Lohenstein’s tragedy Sophonisbe, a play contemporary with Milton’s Paradise Lost, as the defeated Carthaginian heroine Sophonisbe, queen and high priestess of her land, prepares to die by immolation on the temple pyre, she is visited by her ancestress Dido who reveals to her in some detail that haughty Rome, too, which now demands her sacrifice, will itself fall and that the mandate which Aeneas passed to Rome will next be bestowed on a newer, worthier people. This validating vision (formalistically shadowing the epiphanies experienced by Christian martyrs like Lope’s Ginés) hints at the larger context in which Europeans of the seventeenth century should understand their roles in history. As the bigger outline of European cultural history accrued, it became clear retrospectively to heirs of the Renaissance that the foundational romance of their civilization is the super-story, indeed, a grand narrative that begs retelling and amplification. And the multiple regional sub-stories and reportorial clusters it entails, such as Vaz Luis de Camoens’s Os Lusiadas (The Lusitanians), Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, and many another construct are ancestral to such modern foundational romances in the New World as Alejo Carpentier’s El siglo de las luces (The Age of Enlightenment) and John Barth’s humoristic variant The Sot-Weed Factor.5 But permit me to revisit another axial moment when Renaissance impulses eventuated in a methodology for investigating our consciousness in the face of our heritage. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, another admirer of Erasmus, is rightly celebrated as the genius who understood how powerful the tool of contrasting and testing cultural repertories was, as Rabelais had demonstrated. Harry Levin has placed special emphasis on how Cervantes, in exercising this instrument, also built a self-critical cultural awareness into the genre of the novel that has remained potent down to the present, despite countercurrents such as so-called socialist realism.6 R.  R. Wilson has argued further that Rabelais and Cervantes so expanded the scope of our readerly ludism that it swallows such notions as Bakhtinian dialogism and carnivalesque transgression.7 The storytellers Rabelais and Cervantes lure us—and likely lured themselves—into wandering through intertextual

5

See Gerald Gillespie, Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context, 2nd rev. and aug. edn (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), chapter 5. 6 Harry Levin, “On the Dissemination of Realism,” TriQuarterly 14 (1968): 163–78. 7 Wilson, In Palamedes’ Shadow, passim.

39

REWRITING GRAND NARRATIVES

39

labyrinths, which suggest a totality beyond the contents of any single fiction and intimate a godgame with no exit, because as we search we discover the conceptual mind-mazes that are produced by our groping for the hidden rules behind life and history. We cannot simply exit back into reality unaffected when, as is inevitable, we are obliged to abandon the vision—if only to use the toilet, wash, eat, sleep, and do the standard things we do incarnated in bodies and in the time-space condition. Hence there is something deeply moving in the moment ending the novel when a battered Quixote abandons his idealist quest and asks forgiveness for his erring, whereas the formerly sly and pragmatic, but now Quixotized Sancho Panza begs him not to give up and even promises to join him in pastoral games. We readers may well weep when Cervantes himself, joyous but awed over the fact he has been the father to his complex self-critical work, resolutely hangs up his pen. Our author, our guide, himself is resolved to exit from the virtually infinite labyrinth, the amazing dream of life and time, the vision that conditions us to enter the higher truer light. In The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel (1968), Herman Meyer has traced the lineaments of this humoristic-encyclopedic tradition beyond Cervantes over major exponents such as Laurence Sterne, down to such modern authors as Thomas Mann.8 If Meyer had written a few years later, he might well have included such novels as Giles Goat-Boy; or, the Revised New Curriculum (1966) by John Barth, the conscious American continuer of the tradition who openly avers his debt to the great baroque novelists Cervantes, author of the two-volume Quixote, and Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, author of the six-volume Simplicissimus.

Refusal of senescence by modernist inheritors One of the hallmarks of the Western stream of self-critical narrative, ingrained after Cervantes followed upon Rabelais who followed upon Dante, is the habit of naming one’s predecessors and alluding to their works both explicitly and implicitly. And, the poetics of quotation, as we encounter it already in Dante, contains within itself the potential for rivalry. I  refer to a kind of rivalry that in its more exalted examples goes beyond a mere anxiety of influence as proposed by Harold Bloom and amounts, rather, to an unquenchable yearning for spiritual insight and worthiness.9 It is natural

8

Herman Meyer, The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel, trans. Theodore and Yetta Ziolkowski (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). 9 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

40

40

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

that artists who experience this desire will at propitious moments grasp at contrasts and resonances that supervene because of perceived historical movement and will grasp for some kind of measuring stick by which to reassure themselves of a place in the tides of time. One extreme program for securing a hold in the annals of literature is James Joyce’s simulacrum of the entire human record in Finnegans Wake, a colossal synecdoche of all utterance since time immemorial. Well the most moving epiphany of the many in this unusual work is the loving desire of the river Liffey, or the flow of consciousness, to merge back into her “feary father” (feary < Latin vir, Gaelic fear = male adult) in the oceanic depths at the novel’s non-close, for her prayer becomes the original birth of the “riverrun” in the opening line of the novel, in a magical closing that conjures the beginning of creation and the strangeness of the primal fall. Very few writers have reinvoked the unio mystica in our times with greater feeling. Yet being himself all too human, Joyce, the self-fashioned heretic, felt more comfortable thinking of Christian Dante as a major predecessor than of Goethe, the non-Christian giant who loomed so large at too close a place to him in cultural history. It does not seem odd to me that Joyce’s non-ending to Finnegans Wake reverses the directional flow of Goethe’s own non-ending in the “Mystical Chorus,” explicitly so named, which closes Faust. If Goethe’s final line in Faust II tells us that “the eternal feminine draws us onward/upward,” Joyce’s last paragraph in the Wake lets the mother be attracted to the father in the depths. This inversion guarantees that Joyce can stand proudly with his own formulation next to Goethe, but of course it is the story of the soul, its attraction toward God as it climbs the ladder of love, which is the shared mystery that has endured over the centuries.10 I shall speculate at this juncture by suggesting that when Joyce read the penultimate scene, “Mountain Gorges,” in Faust, he may well have recognized himself in the character of the mystic and anchorite Doctor Marianus as who Goethe figures in this remarkable passage, where the Virgin Mary is resplendent at the top of the mountain of the soul up which lovable sinners like Margarete pilgrim. It is the Virgin Mary, at least as powerful here in Goethe’s play as she is in Dante’s Paradiso, if not more so, who is running the show and gives the key instructions. Leopold Bloom, whom we have met seventeen years prior in Dublin in the novel Ulysses, is the oddball modernist clone of Doctor Marianus. Because Joyce was determined to fit himself as an apostate in the grand line from Homer over Virgil and Dante down to the twentieth century, it must have seemed a terrible obstacle to have on his doorstep a great non-Christian poet who could respectfully co-opt Dante. By his grumbling, Joyce pays respect to a predecessor master in cooptation who sought to make sense of millennia of efforts to grasp the deepest mysteries.

10

Gillespie, Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context, passim.

41

REWRITING GRAND NARRATIVES

41

I shall exit from this brief meditation by invoking the help of Thomas Mann, whose fragmentary last novel Felix Krull, which ends with the pícaro Felix embracing the mother goddess Ceres, reconnects us both with the Iberian world of the actor Ginés as well as with Goethe, the newer archaeologist of modern consciousness, whose Doctor Marianus acknowledges the Eternal Feminine. The writer Mann was someone who wrestled with his own demons but strove to grasp important lineaments in the saga of human development and to discern higher values achieved by civilization. In the overture to his Joseph tetralogy, we are invited to accompany the author-narrator on a Proustian and Joycean descent into the remotest evolutionary origins of mankind before we ascend again to the archetypal moment in the ancient Near East when in a particular people a crucial step occurs in the story of the soul and religion. In the Joseph novels, Mann’s affirmation of our precious Judeo-Christian inheritance in the face of the Nazi aberration exhibited a confident solidity and solidarity. Published as the Second World War reached its grisly climax and German cities burned, his later novel Dr.  Faustus reexamined the cultural history underlying the catastrophes of the modernist period. In Dr. Faustus, the author, struggling against despair, juxtaposed two main figures. Zeitblom, the narrator, is keenly aware of his roots in the religious past and Enlightenment liberalism, but recognizes his essential failure along with other intellectuals, as part of German society, to have checked the inroads of totalitarian madness in the modern world. Indirectly, through Zeitblom, we observe the extraordinary spiritual suffering of Leverkühn, the challenged modernist composer who dies of syphilis before the horrors of the war period erupt. His painful death loops all the way back to the feverish passing of young Hanno Buddenbrooks in Mann’s (1901) early novel named after his fictional family, closing out the nineteenth century.11 Leverkühn’s life, as another Wagnerian-Nietzschean avatar, reenacts the Reformation-era Faust tragedy as a martyrdom, but Mann has the modern composer’s last major work end not in the hideous outcry and dismemberment of a wicked overreacher as in Christopher Marlowe’s play, but rather in a desperate musical gesture that is a heart-wrenching prayer for mercy and understanding by an artist who died before the Second World War, a gossamer thread still connecting to heaven. To this extent Mann was able to salvage the fundamental warning message of his great symposium novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924), which analyzed the peril to which Europe succumbed in 1914 and might again fall prey. The educational protagonist, the young bourgeois engineer Hans Castorp, recovers essentials of the European and world story in a period of enchantment leading up to the explosion of the First

11

Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie (Berlin:  S., Fischer Verlg, 1901).

42

42

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

World War. Mann spins a tight framework of alchemical, numerological, cabalistic, and other symbolism around the larger psychohistorical drama in which decent inheritors of Europe such as Hans find themselves in the first decade of the twentieth century. In the celebrated “Snow” subchapter toward the conclusion, Hans has grown so sensitized that he experiences a vivid communal dream in which he reconstitutes the religious evolution underlying his own endangered civilization. This grand epiphany in the novel permits the reader to visualize the enormous miracle of the passage beyond the archaic effort to understand our world, the transition into classical antiquity, and to the promise-laden boundary where we sense the potential of the Christian era. As a direct heir to such key Romantics as Novalis, Mann assembles this “dream poem of humanity,” as Hans names it during the course of his vision, out of pieces of cultural memory imbedded in art—in architecture, sculpture, painting, literature, even in opera and film—as well as retrieved by researchers in history, anthropology, myth studies, and other fields. In The Magic Mountain, we encounter a valiant effort on the part of a Western author to reapproach our enormous cultural repertory and to present the problem faced by an ordinary citizen who senses that there may be, must be, a deeper, more important plotline in cultural metamorphoses which it is vital to grasp. During his exile in California, Mann felt close enough to one strain, an American kind of religiosity that had emerged with the Transcendentalist movement in New England, that he joined a Unitarian Universalist church in Pacific Palisades and never formally broke with it during his final years in Switzerland. The testament of faith already laid down by Mann in The Magic Mountain intimates that the deeper message is embodied in a series of sacramental moments in our past and that, cumulatively and ultimately, these elements of a big story thus provide us in our present moment with sacramental, divine nourishment. Mann invites us to draw the analogy between sacraments instituted by religion and the sincere efforts of all-too-human artists to acknowledge them as such and to point to the difficult moral decisions which generations of human beings have faced and still face. The call to awaken spiritually seems to hover over The Magic Mountain not just as an immediate historical imperative after the Great War, but as a supratemporal imperative.

Bibliography Balsamo, Gian (2004), Rituals of Literature: Joyce, Dante, Acquinas, and the Tradition of Christian Epics. Lewisburg, PN: Bucknell University Press; Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses. Bloom, Harold (1997), The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press.

43

REWRITING GRAND NARRATIVES

43

Frye, Northrop (1982), The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Gillespie, Gerald (2010), Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context, 2nd, rev. and aug. edition. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Gillespie, Gerald (2011), “ ‘Paradox Lust’: The Fortunate Fall according to Joyce in Finnegans Wake,” Neohelicon 38.1: 161–75. Gillespie, Gerald (2015), “Newer Archaeologies of the Soul: Avatars of Religious Consciousness in Modern European Fiction,” in Dorothy Figueira (ed.), Religion and the Novel. Special issue of Neohelicon 42.2: 415–23. Levin, Harry (1968), “On the Dissemination of Realism,” TriQuarterly 14: 163–78. Meyer, Herman (1968), The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel, trans. Theodore and Yetta Ziolkowski. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schmeling, Manfred (1987), Der labyrinthische Diskurs: Vom Mythos zum Erzählmodell. Frankfurt a.M.: Athenäum. Weinberg, Florence (1972), The Wine and the Will: Rabelais’ Bacchic Christianity. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Wilson, R. Rawdon (1990), In Palamedes’ Shadow: Explorations in Play, Game, and Narrative Theory. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

44

45

2 “Clearer awareness of the . . . crisis”: Erich Auerbach’s radical relativism and the “wealth of conflicts” of the historical imperative Geoffrey Green

“[T]he greatest writers possess a realistic knowledge of the human heart which, though it is soberly based on experience, is never mean.” [zu diesen Eigenschaften gesellt sich, bei den grossen Autoren, eine realistische, aug Erfahrung beruhende, nüchterne und doch nie kleinliche Kenntnis des menschlichen Herzens.]1 “In any event, what we understand and love in a work is a human existence, a possibility of ‘modifications’ within ourselves.” [Jedenfalls aber ist das, was wir an einem Werk verstehen und lieben, das Dasein eines Menschen, eine Möglichkeit von uns selbst.]2 —ERICH AUERBACH

1

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2003 [1953]), 40. Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1967 [1946]), 43. 2 Erich Auerbach, “Introduction: Purpose and Method,” trans. Ralph Mannheim, 12, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

46

46

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

The outward movement that advances from explicating specific literary texts toward making larger descriptive, even diagnostic, observations about the culture from which these texts emanate proceeds in part from readers’ inherent assumptions. This is incontrovertible. When we formulate generalizations about cultural representations within literary texts and how these representations inform the culture that interprets these literary texts, we rely partly on ingrained values and beliefs. Such innate inner suppositions come into play forcefully when literature along with its various interpretations and analyses converge with ethics and religion. As we read literature, literature reads us reading; it displays the qualities of the individuals who read it, as well as the world in which the process takes place—and, therefore, literature discloses to us through its lens not only its representational world, but also our innate premises, inferences, appropriations, and ideals. Whether acknowledged or not, whether conscious or covert, our religious beliefs and assumptions and our ethical premises are accentuated by these fault lines of modernity. Ultimately, this intersection produces debate and controversy: literature has nothing whatsoever to do with ethics and religion; literature is based entirely upon assumptions of an ethical and religious nature, and all points in between. Tenets, convictions, ideals, matters of faith held dear tend to be mutable, subject to allegations of ideological rigidity or dictatorial intolerance. “Everywhere, conceptual clichés lie in wait. Although seldom exactly appropriate, their fashionableness and the way they sound can be seductive; in any case, they are ever ready to interject themselves into our writing as soon as we drift away from the energy that the tangible exerts.”3 So the great literary historian and Romance philologist Erich Auerbach expresses the tension of these convergences in his landmark 1952 essay, “The Philology of World Literature.” But what is the object of study? Which concepts are deceptive? We find in Erich Auerbach’s work a rich meditation on precisely these quintessentially modern stresses and intersections. Erich Auerbach conceived of art and the interpretation of art as striving to achieve “self-expression”—of a culture, of a historical period, of the unfolding of a tradition and counter-tradition within history and culture, of the artist’s hypothetical and imaginative concerns, as well as those of the contemporary audience and interpreters. The grandeur of Erich Auerbach’s reputation endures despite the fault lines of modernity, which he documents—in a unique manner—by chronicling the literary

University Press, 1965 [1958]), 5–24. Erich Auerbach, “Über Absicht und Methode” (1958), 14. Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter, 9–24 (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1958). 3 Erich Auerbach, “Philologie der Weltliteratur” (1952), “The Philology of World Literature,” trans. Jane O. Newman, 264. In Erich Auerbach, Time, History, and Literature, ed. James I. Porter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 253–65.

47

“CLEARER AWARENESS OF THE . . . CRISIS”

47

history of Europe. His stature, his achievement, his themes: all of these are admired and held to be exemplary, even as the admirers differ as to what his writing achieves, its ultimate and underlying purposes, and its value to comparative literature, literary criticism, and meta-criticism. Value existing simultaneously with controversy is an encapsulation of posterity, of the test of time. Evoking Goethe’s term “Weltliteratur” (encompassing not merely “world literature” in its cultural specifics, but also the transcendent “general human quality” uniting all peoples), Auerbach proposes that art provides us with a “diverse backdrop to a common human fate.”4 In order to understand art most authentically, Auerbach formulates the idea of an “extreme” or “radical relativism” (radikaler Relativismus), relative both to the “understanding historian as well as the phenomena to be understood.” According to Auerbach, in the process of such interpretation, the historian “does not become incapable of judging; he learns what judging means.” In “esthetic matters, our historicistic capacity of adaptation to the most various forms of beauty is almost boundless; we may make use of it more than once within a few hours or even minutes, during a visit to a museum, in a concert, sometimes in the movies, or leafing through a magazine, or even looking at travel agency advertisements.”5 For Auerbach, the general human quality (related to Vico’s sensus communis) is grasped through the particular interpretive setting, a continual process involving the consideration of what great art meant to its own historical period, contextualized by how this is placed within the history of ideas, and conversant with what the art means to us in the present. Our sense of the general human quality, however, involves a number of hermeneutic pivots along the fault lines of modernity. How does his objective to write history square off with his affirmation of the “self-expression” of the “human race”? How does his methodological starting point—his Ansatzpunkt—in its precision and particularity achieve an “intellectual and spiritual history” of humanity?6 How does a philologist working with and within the hermeneutic circle of Herder, Schlegel, Dilthey, and Nietzsche embody a prescience and anticipation of globalization and its associated implications? How does a writer in perpetual exile nevertheless formulate a shared human “myth” (Mythos) of history? I would like to contemplate a

4

Auerbach, “The Philology of World Literature,” 257. Erich Auerbach, “Einleitung: Über Absicht und Methode,” 15. Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter, 9–24 (Bern:  Francke Verlag, 1958). See Geoffrey Green, Literary Criticism and the Structures of History:  Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). See Erich Auerbach, “Vico’s Contribution to Literary Criticism,” 35, in A. G. Hatcher and K. L. Selig (eds), Studia philologica et litteraria in honorem L. Spitzer (Bern: A. Francke, 1958), 31–7. 6 Auerbach, “The Philology of World Literature,” 255. 5

48

48

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

few of these tensions in relation to Auerbach’s radical relativism, exploring the “wealth of conflicts” of human capabilities along the “intricacy of its twists and turns” to “becoming aware of their condition as humans and thus to realizing their inner potential.”7 I shall consider Auerbach’s method, and also compare his approach to modernism and a few of its exemplary texts to his contemporary (and foil), Ernst Robert Curtius, in the hope that Auerbach’s perceptiveness and prescience help illuminate the fault lines wherein literature, religion, and ethics intersect. Auerbach is wary of an “ethically oriented historiography,” believing that such an approach “is bound to use an unchangeable system of categories” that is antithetical to modern “synthetic-dynamic concepts.”8 Instead, Auerbach commits himself to examining “phenomena in motion” along with their “growth and transformation,” a progress that is “contained in them, is conceived as part of their content.”9 Auerbach concerns himself with the response of the reader to representations that “arouse in us the most serious and most significant sympathy.”10 He focuses on scenes “written from within the emergent growths and directly for everyman.”11 Looking back at his method as he employs it in Mimesis, Auerbach recounts: “I call the realism that is alien to antiquity serious, problematic, or tragic; I set it in express opposition to the ‘moralistic.’ ”12 Auerbach, in other words, employs an Hegelian opposition between the utterly static and rigid highly stylized texts of antiquity (the “moralistic”) and the dynamic, humanistic historicistic texts he sees as deriving from the Judeo-Christian tradition (the “problematic”). Moreover, he employs this perspective from his vantage point of exile—in Istanbul, during the Second World War II—in order to seek to preserve the historicistic tradition under peril by the conflict between fascism (and its excessively ritualistic cult of a spurious “morality” of exclusion) and democracy (with its “tragic” and “problematic” devotion to a humanism of inclusion). In hindsight, he ponders, “perhaps I  would have done better to call it ‘existential realism,’ but I hesitated to use that all too contemporary term for phenomena of the distant past.”13 And yet, from our contemporary perspective of the fault lines of modernity, perhaps existential realism is a term more germane and apposite to the nuanced implications of his legacy.

7

Ibid. Auerbach, Mimesis, 38. 9 Ibid., 38–9. 10 Ibid., 42. 11 Ibid., 47. 12 Erich Auerbach, “Epilegomena to Mimesis,” trans. Jan M. Ziolkowski. Appendix to Mimesis (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2003), 561. Originally published in Romanische Forschungen 65 (1953): 1–18. 13 Ibid. 8

49

“CLEARER AWARENESS OF THE . . . CRISIS”

49

As I argue in Literary Criticism and the Structures of History: Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, Auerbach’s observation is appropriate, since he highlights the existential significance of the personal discernment when embroiled in the dramatic flow of “historical diversity” (geschichtlicher Mannigfaltigkeit) and its unfolding in time.14 Such a vantage point, Auerbach believes, is unique to the modern era of the hermeneutical writing of history. Auerbach’s invocation of existential realism enunciates an analytic vault he felt impelled to make that nevertheless remains metaphysical and transcendent.15 To Auerbach, “scientific research into the realities of the world crowds in on and controls our lives.” He terms this claim as our human “Myth” (Mythos).16 But this myth, this fiction of order and understanding, Auerbach affirms as being sufficient to form the basis of human judgment! A  very different writer would play with apparent paradox, embracing language as being (existing for its own sake) and construct a veritable barricade locking out the secular world. Auerbach is not such a writer, however. In contrast, an appropriate comparison is evident with the example of Auerbach’s fellow exiled philologist, Leo Spitzer, who declared, in “History of Ideas versus Reading of Poetry,” that “art and outward reality should, at least while the work of art is being studied, be kept separate.”17 As Auerbach stresses in his “Epilegomena to Mimesis,” that book “is quite consciously a book that a particular person, in a particular situation, wrote at the beginning of the 1940s.”18 In Literary Criticism and the Structures of History, I  argue that Auerbach, in Mimesis, when faced with the unprecedented conflagration that was the Second World War and the Nazi “Final Solution”—in spite of his extreme relativism, or, perhaps, because of it—felt impelled to address his contemporary era and its ongoing struggle to preserve the humanities from the oblivion of an Axis victory and a rigid, overly totalizing purging of the Classical and European philological canon. Indeed, Auerbach becomes a partisan advocate for the preservation of the democratic diversity of mixed styles, for the serious treatment of human beings regardless of rank or privilege, for the rejection of hierarchical rules of ornamentation and style, and for the meaningful ambiguity that highlights aspects of a scene—for the privileging of the Judeo-Christian tradition over the rigidities of the ancient world that are uncannily proleptic of the Nazi era—all the while maintaining that the humanistic tradition leaves exegesis open and participatory. After the war, when he is able to change the site of his exile from Turkey to the United States, the historical and political

14

Green, Literary Criticism and the Structures of History. See ibid. Auerbach refers to “geschichtlicher Mannigfaltigkeit” in “Philologie der Weltliteratur.” 16 Auerbach, “The Philology of World Literature,” 255. 17 Leo Spitzer, “History of Ideas Versus Reading of Poetry,” Southern Review 6 (Winter 1941): 595; emphasis in the original. 18 Auerbach, “Epilegomena to Mimesis,” 574. 15

50

50

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

circumstances modify his expressive mode of upholding the ongoing health and dynamism of the humanities, but not his commitment to his advocacy of democratic humanism. Auerbach emphasizes (as early as 1952, and even earlier, in Mimesis) the “standardization” of global culture, the “homogenization of human life the world over” that results in the “eclipsing of local traditions” and their “erosion.”19 He underscores in his Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages that the entirety of his work “shows a much clearer awareness of the European crisis.”20 Employing a point of departure (Ansatzpunkt) that is “focused and concrete,” maintaining an “objective quality,” Auerbach undertakes to achieve “synthesis.”21 In hermeneutic fashion, he selects a starting point that “grow[s] out of [the object of study] organically, like a part of the whole.”22 A  disparate writer would obscure the apparent paradoxes, the fault lines, between specific and general, between inner and outer, between the worldly and the spiritual. Auerbach draws comparison with Leo Spitzer, who, he asserts, is “concerned primarily with an exact understanding of the individual forms.”23 But Auerbach is not such a writer. Instead, with Olympian detachment and restraint, he acknowledges the task as being “difficult.”24 It is my contention, however, that Auerbach’s point of origin reveals not only an indication of his hope for the continuity of European humanism, but also—in the midst of the crisis of modernity—his affirmation of the enduring transcendence of the human values underlying European literary culture and European literary realistic representation. I do not mean to suggest that Auerbach envisions something like our present European Union; rather, I  would propose that he conceives of the path, whose idealism not only necessitates a human union, but a universality of shared human values. From Vico, Auerbach learned that “the simple fact, that the work of a man is a fruit of his existence, an existence which once was here and now; that therefore everything one finds out about his life may serve to interpret the work—this should not be neglected merely because naïve and overspecialized scholars without sufficient inner experience made bad use of it.”25 The historian, Auerbach maintains, “does not leave the world of mankind to which he belongs,” and holds out the hope “that others will understand his

19

Auerbach, “The Philology of World Literature,” 253. Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, 6. 21 Ibid., 262–3. 22 Ibid., 263. 23 Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, 19–20. 24 Auerbach, “The Philology of World Literature,” 261. 25 Auerbach, “Vico’s Contribution to Literary Criticism,” 34. 20

51

“CLEARER AWARENESS OF THE . . . CRISIS”

51

understanding.” Literary understanding, along with historical understanding, is “understanding that can seize its human object.”26 In this regard, “the historian does not become incapable of judging; he learns what judging means.”27 Echoing Vico, Auerbach asserts that “the dialectic relation between imagination and reason is not a purely temporal succession, and the two do not exclude each other; very often they collaborate, and reason may well enrich imagination.”28 Unlike some sympathetic comparative philologists like Leo Spitzer, Auerbach’s purpose, he asserts, is always “to write history.”29 Auerbach’s history, however, “can be grasped only in its particular forms, or else as a dialectical process in history; its abstract essence cannot be grasped in exact significant terms”; it stems from a process wherein the historian “will learn to extract the categories or concepts which he needs for describing and distinguishing the different phenomena. These concepts are not absolute; they are elastic and provisional, changeable with changing history.”30 Examining literary texts within their individual historical contexts and particular modes of expression “enable[s] us to discover what the different phenomena mean within their own period, what they mean within the three thousand years of conscious literary life we know of; and finally, what they mean to us, here and now. That is judgment enough.”31 Auerbach’s approach therefore unifies a conception of the greatest writers as human beings in history with an unparalleled respect for and interest in the reception and response of readers and those readers’ capacity for inner change as human beings. Such an approach stands in marked contrast to the emphasis of Ernst Robert Curtius. For Curtius, according to Michael Kowal, the “object of criticism [is] to demonstrate configurations, to delineate patterns.”32 Curtius

26

Ibid., 35. Ibid. 28 Ibid., 36. 29 Here is how Auerbach distinguished his starting point (Ansatzpunkt), purpose, and method from Leo Spitzer’s: although both begin with the interpretation of textual passages, “Spitzer’s interpretations are always concerned primarily with an exact understanding of the individual linguistic form, the particular work or author. Quite in accord with the Romantic tradition and its impressionist and individual developments, he is concerned primarily with an exact understanding of the individual forms. I, on the contrary, am concerned with something more general, which I  shall have occasion to describe later on. My purpose is always to write history” (“Immer wieder habe ich die Absicht, Geschichte zu schreiben . . .”). Auerbach, “Introduction:  Purpose and Method” (1958), trans. Ralph Mannheim, 19–20. Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, 5–24. Erich Auerbach, “Über Absicht und Methode” (1958), 20. Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter, 9–24. 30 Auerbach, “Vico’s Contribution to Literary Criticism,” 35. 31 Ibid. 32 Michael Kowal, “Introduction,” to E.  R. Curtius, Essays on European Literature, trans. Michael Kowal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), xxiv. 27

52

52

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

stresses the “restoration of a primary unity, perceived in a moment and pursued through all its significant manifestations, in the work of an author, of a country, of an age, until the original vision has been recovered—but now illuminated, as it were, from within.”33 Both Auerbach and Curtius (as well as Spitzer, to be sure) employed the hermeneutic circle and its Ansatzpunkt. But Auerbach’s self-stated purpose is historical, while Curtius’s approach, in Kowal’s view (and my own), is “essentially unhistorical” because he seeks to find, recover, and cast light upon eternally abiding harmonies, rather than chronicling change across time.34 Curtius introduces his personal collection of Essays on European Literature with this summary of his own career: “My concern has always been the same: the consciousness of Europe and the tradition of the West. But with advancing years I was compelled to dig deeper, to reach out further in time and space. Continuity became more important to me than actuality.”35 A  brief comparative scrutiny of each great critic’s approach, within a three-year period, 1946–49, to exemplary modernist texts will demonstrate and highlight Auerbach’s focus on the crisis of modernity—the fault lines wherein literature, ethics, and religion intersect—from a crucially historical perspective. I  hope also to display Auerbach’s dignified concern with the humanity of his entire representational tableau—author, characters, reader, world—from the vantage point of Weltliteratur (world literature). Curtius characteristically summarizes a writer’s career, surveying selectively what is important as well as what is not—based on his own considerable erudition, but also almost entirely on his own impulsive predispositions. Here he is, providing in 1949 a sense of T. S. Eliot’s 1915 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: An October afternoon. The evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized on an operating table. We walk through the byways of cheap vice: “The muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells.” A  tea party. The women speak of Michelangelo. Yellow fog licks at the windows. Prufrock’s inner monologue discloses banal sorrows. Should he declare himself to his lady? He is inhibited and feels worn out. His hair is growing thin, his days are empty, he thinks of himself as old. Once it was otherwise. Then he could hear the mermaids singing. But now?36

33

Ibid., xv. Ibid. 35 E.[rnst] R.[obert] Curtius, Essays on European Literature, trans. Michael Kowal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), xxvi. Originally published in 1950. 36 Ibid., 375. 34

53

“CLEARER AWARENESS OF THE . . . CRISIS”

53

And then he quotes the concluding lines of Eliot’s poem. Curtius feels obliged to provide a sense of the rest of Eliot’s early poems contained in the 1917 Prufrock and Other Observations collection as “a masked procession of satirical figures” including “a Boston family and educational tradition already in decay . . . and its opposite, a set of socially rootless Bohemians.”37 He then quotes from what is surely one of Eliot’s weakest and most distasteful poems, “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”: But this or such was Bleistein’s way: A saggy bending of the knees And elbows, with the palms turned out, Chicago Semite Viennese.38 His characterization is that Eliot presents us with “an international caravan of shabby tourists . . . demonstrating the questionable and trivial nature of the modern world through its typical figures.”39 Curtius sees this passage from Eliot as indicating merely “typical figures,” without feeling any need, any obligation, writing after the Second World War and its concomitant horrors, to comment on the poem’s repellent anti-Semitism, or to quote its other, even more problematic lines: Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot. Money in furs.40 For Curtius, Eliot’s egregiously offensive and caustic categorizations of Jews are “not dramatic characters but tragi-comic marionettes [whose] shadowlike and grotesque contortions are the screen on which Eliot has projected his nervous reactions.”41 Curtius sees Eliot, in this early poem, as “react[ing]” to “typical figures”:  Eliot’s poisonous stereotypes of Jews for Curtius are indications of the way things are; the Holocaust’s profound changes wrought upon the historical landscape are not part of Curtius’s stress on “continuity”

37

Ibid., 376. T.[homas] S.[tearns] Eliot, “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” (1920), 24. In T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1971), 23–4. 39 Curtius, Essays on European Literature, 376. 40 Eliot, “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” 24. 41 Curtius, Essays on European Literature, 376–7. 38

54

54

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

above “actuality.” To be sure, Curtius discusses Eliot’s more accomplished poems—The Waste Land, Four Quartets—but he sees in them, as an expression of their inherent modernism, “contemporaneity of all times—that also means depriving time of its reality, an ir-realizing of time.”42 He dismisses Eliot’s late dramas as containing “elegant puppets [lacking] the indefinable aura of life.”43 For Curtius, “the task of criticism consists in preserving the continuity of the European tradition.”44 And thus, of Eliot’s oeuvre, Curtius ranks the poetry above the drama and the literary criticism, and The Waste Land as his greatest work, displaying Eliot as “the discoverer of a new tone which can never be forgotten. He has heard the mermaids singing.”45 A comparison of Curtius’s 1949 treatment of Eliot’s modernist texts with the final chapter of Auerbach’s Mimesis, Auerbach’s 1946 discussion of the modernist method displayed in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse reveals key distinctions between the two critics regarding modernity and its fault lines. The passage quoted from Woolf is lengthy (the measuring for a brown stocking by Mrs. Ramsay of her young son James) and, like Curtius, Auerbach depicts the scene for us; but, unlike Curtius, his focus is on worldly observations—for instance, that the narrative and its observations “take up far more time in the narration than the whole scene can possibly have lasted. Most of these elements are inner processes, that is, movements within the consciousness of individual personages.”46 Auerbach then proceeds to inquire as to the speaker of the observation, “never did anybody look so sad”: “Who is speaking in this paragraph?” he asks, reflecting: “Never did anybody look so sad” is not an objective statement:  In rendering the shock received by one looking at Mrs. Ramsay’s face, it verges upon a realm beyond reality. And in the ensuing passage the speakers no longer seem to be human beings at all but spirits between heaven and earth, nameless spirits capable of penetrating the depths of the human soul.47 Auerbach’s concern here is with time, its esthetic representational duration as compared with its comparable earthly one. He is careful to describe the modernist technique as precisely as possible, “the design of a close approach

42 Ibid., 382. Curtius further describes this as a “telescoping of time and space” that he finds particularly “poetic.” Needless to say, such an emphasis depends upon the effacement of the historical representation and context. 43 Ibid., 390. 44 Ibid., 398. 45 Ibid., 399. 46 Auerbach, Mimesis, 529. 47 Ibid., 531–2.

55

“CLEARER AWARENESS OF THE . . . CRISIS”

55

to objective reality by means of numerous subjective impressions received by various individuals (and at various times) is important in the modern technique which we are here examining . . . the time the narration takes is not devoted to the occurrence itself (which is rendered rather tersely) but to interludes.”48 Auerbach stresses that this technique is new and innovative:  “in a surprising fashion unknown to earlier periods, a sharp contrast results between the brief span of time occupied by the exterior event and the dreamlike wealth of a process of consciousness which traverses a whole subjective universe.”49 He sees the measuring of the stocking as “an occasion . . . [wherein] the stress is placed entirely on what the occasion releases, things which are not seen directly but by reflection.”50 His analysis seeks to tease out the artistic design of the author’s technique, situate it within both its representational landscape and its worldly one, and then draw observations from these human interactions: “the novel has come to be more clearly aware than ever before of the limitations in space and time imposed upon it by its instrument, language.”51 The epigraph for Mimesis from Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” is also concerned with time, in its abundance of earthly implications: “Had we but world enough and time.” Auerbach first describes an analogy between the modernist technique of stream of consciousness evocation of the random occurrence and his own critical method in Mimesis: “letting myself be guided by a few motifs which I have worked out gradually and without a specific purpose,” motifs that would be “demonstrable in any random realistic text” with the historical contingency, “provided I have seen them correctly.”52 But then he attempts to extract human implications from the modernist technique and his critical application of it in the text we are reading:  “Life has always long since begun, and it is always still going on. And the people whose story the author is telling experience much more than he can ever hope to tell.” Indeed, he concerns himself with “the order and the interpretation of life which arise from life itself . . . which grow up in the individuals themselves which are to be discerned in their thoughts, their consciousness, and . . . in their words and actions.”53 This is a back-and-forth historical comprehension between the historical context of the critic in time and the representational historical depiction of the author in time. Such an approach leads Auerbach to consider “crises of adjustment,” “upheavals,” and the Great War, for example, as significant contexts for exegesis of a literary stylistic passage. Such worldly

48

Ibid., 536–7. Ibid., 538. 50 Ibid., 541. 51 Ibid., 546. 52 Ibid., 548. 53 Ibid., 549. 49

56

56

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

paroxysms Auerbach sees as leading to the “temptation to entrust oneself to a sect which solved all problems with a single formula.” Auerbach views fascism as a consequence of such totalization. He situates modernism within a world “unsure of itself, overflowing with unsettled ideologies and ways of life, and pregnant with disaster.”54 We see here that Auerbach’s emphasis is “nothing less than the wealth of reality and depth of life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without prejudice”; he seeks to shed “light” on the “elementary things which our lives have in common.”55 Auerbach’s humanism is amply evident in his embrace of a serious and significant literary treatment of all human life, regardless of class or status. Yet beyond his humanism, he foresees that the “strata of societies and their different ways of life have become inextricably mingled,” perhaps resulting in an “economic and cultural leveling process.”56 And he embroils deliberately his own worldly stance regarding his time with the artistic technique of the modernists for representing the world of theirs. Citing Mimesis as an “illustration” of the modernist technique, Auerbach recounts, “I could never have written anything in the nature of a history of European realism; the material would have swamped me.” Instead, he commits to a “philological activity” that establishes “basic motifs in the history of the representation of reality” by means of the stylistic explication of “any random realistic text.”57 Entwined as his method is with literary modernism, Auerbach nevertheless envisions himself as a human being in time, milieu, and historical circumstances. His historical perspective impels him to affirm however ambivalently an obverse conclusion. This process of mingling and leveling may not “please those who, despite all its dangers and catastrophes, admire and love our epoch for the sake of its abundance of life and the incomparable historical vantage point which it affords.”58 Auerbach, for all his critical insight, implicates himself in modernity, enmeshes his stance and his writing with the esthetic creations and conceits of the writers he describes. He acknowledges that “studies of this kind do not deal with laws but with trends and tendencies, which cross and complement one another in the most varied ways”; his goal, therefore, is “to find the reader”—“both my friends of former years, if they are still alive, as well as all the others for whom it was intended.”59 Auerbach’s concern for

54

Ibid., 550–1. Ibid., 552. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 548. 58 Ibid., 553. 59 Ibid., 556–7. Willard Trask’s admirable translation in this one instance minimizes the profundity of Auerbach’s engagement with history. Rather than his “friends of former years, if they are still alive,” Auerbach writes “überlebenden Freunde” (surviving friends), those of his friends who have managed to escape the devastation of the Holocaust and the war. 55

57

“CLEARER AWARENESS OF THE . . . CRISIS”

57

his readers—his specific engagement of reader with text as a life affirming, generous activity—is ineluctably connected to his explication of the literary representation of reality:  a purposeful use of representation as mode and method of preserving its historical reality. As I note in my earlier book on Auerbach, “in a time of crisis and fluctuation, his resolve was to renovate the priorities and values of Western civilization and thus preserve them.”60 Whereas Curtius places emphasis on the “preservation of Western culture” and seeks to “illuminate the unity of that tradition in space and time,”61 Auerbach concentrates, as he expresses it in an essay on Proust, on the “pathos of the earthly course of events, a real, inexhaustible and ever-flowing pathos that at once oppresses and sustains us without end.”62 Curtius, in 1949, declares: “We have learned (have we not?) to criticize the notion of linear progress in history. And we no longer feel it incumbent on us to justify the ways of God to man.”63 Auerbach, in contrast, advocates “finding unusually fertile areas or key problems on which it is rewarding to concentrate, because they open up a knowledge of a broader context and cast light on entire historical landscapes.”64 The validity of such explications, Auerbach asserts, “matters little.”65 What does matter? His “own experience” is “responsible for the choice of problems, the starting points, the reasoning and intention expressed in my writing.”66 Lacking the “unity” of a Mimesis, or else possessing the “loose” unity of that masterpiece, Auerbach’s work calls on its readers to “sense the unity behind it.”67 This challenge, this fundamental interpretive imperative, is at the crux not only of Auerbach’s vision, but also of our apperception of modernity and its fault lines. Auerbach’s heroic detachment—his stoic poise, if you will—enables him to enunciate clearly what is at stake: the “more that the globe contracts” or standardizes, the “greater the imperative will be to expand our efforts to engage in synthetic and perspectival work.”68 Although this might appear to be an impossibility, especially in light of Auerbach’s detachment, Auerbach urges us to consider that we have no alternative, the

60

Green, Literary Criticism and the Structures of History, 82. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953; 2013), xxiv. Originally published in 1948. 62 Erich Auerbach, “Marcel Proust and the Novel of Lost Time” (1927), trans. Jane O. Newman. Auerbach, Time, History, and Literature, 162. “Marcel Proust: Der Roman von der verlorenen Zeit,” Die Neueren Sprachen 35 (1927): 16–22. 63 Ernst Robert Curtius, “The Medieval Bases of Western Thought” (1949). Appendix to European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 588. 64 Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, 18. 65 Ibid., 22. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., 24. 68 Auerbach, “The Philology of World Literature,” 264. 61

58

58

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

mammoth enterprise is more like a “renunciation”: when we “consider that we live not just on the earth, but in the world, in the universe.”69 As prescient as he is eloquent, Auerbach grasps the paradox of our human condition. We are “diverse” in our particular points of origin, but we “stem” from a common “process”; when we “participate” in this process, we may achieve a “definition of our present situation and also perhaps of the possibilities for the immediate future.”70 Humans need to “look within ourselves” and express “our consciousness of ourselves here and now,” “in all its wealth and limitations.”71 To be explicit, Auerbach inspires us because he embraces paradox; he situates himself deliberately on the fault lines. He employs a methodology that is both historical and hermeneutical. He is detached and stoic, even cynical, but also passionate and hopeful. To embrace one component of Auerbach is to stake out a more coherent position, but Auerbach is not interested in such illusory coherence:  that is what he terms as a myth, a fiction of rational truth. Auerbach is dedicated to the “connecting thread that unites the whole,” even when that whole is “still in search of its theme.”72 Edward Said is surely eloquent in his characterization of Auerbach’s method that, “in order to be able to understand a humanistic text, one must try to do so as if one is the author of that text, living the author’s reality, undergoing the kind of life experiences intrinsic to his or her life . . . all by that combination of erudition and sympathy that is the hallmark of philological hermeneutics.”73 Auerbach’s great gift, in addition to intellect, erudition, and insight, is, most assuredly, empathy, albeit an empathy that, in addition to its deep compassion, is seasoned with a measured detachment. In Said’s words, Auerbach is a “man with a mission”:  the “possibility of understanding inimical and perhaps even hostile others despite the bellicosity of modern cultures and nationalisms, and the optimism with which one could enter into the inner life of a distant author or historical epoch even with a healthy awareness of one’s limitations of perspective.”74 For it is in the to-and-fro hermeneutical voyage from the inner life to the outer historical epoch that we find in Auerbach the fault lines, which still characterize and typify our conceptualization of modernity. Despite his considerable expertise in languages and literatures, Auerbach concludes that “our philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the

69

Ibid. Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, 21. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 24. 73 Edward Said, “Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition,” in Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, xiii. 74 Ibid., xvi. 70

59

“CLEARER AWARENESS OF THE . . . CRISIS”

59

nation.”75 Nevertheless, for the philologist (and all comparativists), the “most precious and necessary thing that philologists inherit may be their national language and culture.”76 This knowledge becomes most truly valuable when we are “separated” from it (“Trennung”)—and then “overcome it.”77 For Auerbach, this transcendence is something to “secure,” along with a “proper love for the world.”78 Again and again, he enumerates that “the spirit [Geist] is not national.”79 And today, along the fault lines of our own (as Auerbach would say) unique vantage point, we must redouble our efforts to earn what he earned: nothing less than a full and profound appreciation of “the oneness within the divine plan, of which all occurrences are parts and reflections.”80 Auerbach understands (as should we all, still, today) that there is always going on within us a process of formulation and interpretation whose subject matter is our own self. We are constantly endeavoring to give meaning and order to our lives in the past, the present and the future, to our surroundings, the world in which we live; with the result that our lives appear in our own conception as total entities.81 The implications of Auerbach’s understanding are profound: that our work as interpreters of literary texts is multiply relative, a radical or extreme relativism that is relative to our times, to ourselves, to our inner and outer history, as well as to the time, history, and spirit of the literature whose essences we contemplate. This is what Auerbach means by the drama of historical and literary unfolding, and we are still living in such a world today. Despite the “overlapping, complementing, and contradiction” embodied by “not one order and one interpretation, but many,” Auerbach teaches us that, in addition to the many “dangers and catastrophes” of our lives, we are able to embrace the potentiality of a “synthesized cosmic view.”82 Even today, Auerbach still calls on us as “readers [to] help in the search.”83 There are no “foreign artifacts” for those who earn this perspective, but rather, we encounter perpetual “variations of a common humanity, each with its own beauty, virtue, vitality, and capacity to evolve organically, to which we must 75

Auerbach, “The Philology of World Literature,” 264. Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., 265. 79 Ibid., 264. It would be appropriate to view this as Auerbach’s pointed reference to Heidegger. 80 Auerbach, Mimesis, 555. We see reflected here Auerbach’s nuanced expression of his Jewish identity and world view. 81 Ibid., 549. 82 Ibid., 549, 553. 83 Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, 24. 76

60

60

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

surrender ourselves if we are to be permitted to understand them.”84 This is what Auerbach teaches us, if we are willing to learn, and in this lesson there is contained the totality of our lives within these “wealth of conflicts” of the historical imperative.

References Auerbach, Erich (1927), “Marcel Proust and the Novel of Lost Time,” trans. Jane O. Newman. Erich Auerbach, Time, History, and Literature, 157–62. “Marcel Proust: Der Roman von der verlorenen Zeit,” Die Neueren Sprachen 35 (1927): 16–22. Auerbach, Erich (1946), Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur. Berne, Switzerland: A. Francke Ltd. Auerbach, Erich (1952), “The Philology of World Literature,” trans. Jane O. Newman, in Erich Auerbach, Time, History, and Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Originally published in Weltliteratur: Festgabe für Fritz Strich zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Walter Muschg and Emil Staiger (Bern: Francke, 1952), 39–50. Auerbach, Erich (1953), Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Auerbach, Erich (1953), “Epilegomena to Mimesis,” trans. Jan M. Ziolkowski. Appendix to Mimesis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003, 561. Originally published in Romanische Forschungen 65 (1953): 1–18. Auerbach, Erich (1955), “The Idea of the National Spirit as the Source of the Modern Humanities,” trans. Jane O. Newman, in Erich Auerbach, Time, History, and Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Auerbach, Erich (1958), “Vico’s Contribution to Literary Criticism,” in A. G. Hatcher and K. L. Selig (eds), Studia philologica et litteraria in honorem L. Spitzer. Bern: A. Francke, 31–7. Auerbach, Erich (1958), Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter. Bern: Francke Verlag. Auerbach, Erich (1958), Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Mannheim. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. Auerbach, Erich (2014), Time, History, and Literature, ed. James I. Porter, trans. Jane O. Newman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Curtius, Ernst Robert (1948), European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953; 2013. Curtius, Ernst Robert (1949), “The Medieval Bases of Western Thought,” Appendix to European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages 587–98.

84

Erich Auerbach, “The Idea of the National Spirit as the Source of the Modern Humanities” (1955), trans. Jane O. Newman. In Erich Auerbach, Time, History, and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 59.

61

“CLEARER AWARENESS OF THE . . . CRISIS”

61

Curtius, E[rnst]. R[obert] (1950), Essays on European Literature, trans. Michael Kowal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973. Eliot, T. S. (1930), Selected Poems. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1964. Green, Geoffrey (1982). Literary Criticism and the Structures of History: Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Green, Geoffrey (1996). “Erich Auerbach and the ‘Inner Dream’ of Transcendence,” in Seth Lerer (1996), 214–26, 295–6. Kowal, Michael (1973), Introduction to Curtius (1950), ix–xxiv. Lerer, Seth (1996), Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Said, Edward (2003), “Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition,” in Erich Auerbach (1953), Mimesis, ix–xxxii. Spitzer, Leo (1941), “History of Ideas Versus Reading of Poetry,” Southern Review 6 (Winter): 584–609.

62

63

3 Secularism and post-secularism Wlad Godzich

For several years now, a debate has been taking place in various parts of the world about the role and place of secularism.1 As a matter of historical contingency, it may be observed that the trigger for this ongoing debate was the downfall of the Soviet Union, more so than the resurgence of fundamentalist Islam following the overthrow of the Shah in Iran. The combination of these two events led to the spread of challenges to secularism in other parts of the world, from India to the United States.2 It is as if the collapse of the Soviet Union freed anti-secularism from a limited region and authorized its spread across the globe. Let us briefly recall that the momentous events which marked the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire were interpreted and described as partly fueled by the resurgence of religion, with the role of the Polish Pope given pride of place, but with other religious leaders, such as the East German Lutheran ministers, also being acknowledged.3 The embrace of the Russian Orthodox Church by Boris Yeltsin was reciprocated by the Moscow 1

See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2009); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (Palo Alto:  Stanford University Press, 2003); David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, Powers of the Secular Modern, Talal Asad and His Interlocutors (Palo Alto:  Stanford University Press, 2006); Jürgen Habermas, An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age (Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010); Sandra Richter and Sandra Pott, Säkularisierung in den Wissenschaften seit der Frühen Neuzeit, Volume 1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2002). 2 Taylor, A Secular Age, 3–4; see also Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, The Crisis of Secularism in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 3 For example, such rhetoric was often reported as historical fact in the American press. See “The Church That Helped Bring Down the Berlin Wall,” USA Today, November 5, 2009.

64

64

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Patriarch who conferred religious, if not divine, legitimacy on the insurgent former Communist. Throughout the rest of the world, church leaders could only look with envy and admiration as their counterparts in Russia, Poland, Serbia, Romania, Hungary, and the Baltic States seemed to enjoy a prestige and to wield a power that they had lost in the nineteenth century and had given up hope of ever regaining. Suddenly, at the dawn of the third millennium, such a reversal of history looked possible. Secularists had argued for 200  years that the epoch of religious domination had passed and was destined to the ‘dustbin of history.’ Anti-secularists saw their opportunity: let us turn the table on the secularists and declare secularism to be a historical movement whose force is spent. We are no longer anti-secularists, they proclaimed, because secularism’s day is done. We are post-secularists. Never mind that post-secularism could look suspiciously like pre-secularism. Did not Russia show that one could sandwich the epoch of Communism between two layers of Orthodoxy? The high point of this triumphalism occurred when the Russian Orthodox Church canonized the last tsar and his family, proclaiming them to be saints and martyrs.4 Secularists were taken by surprise, first and foremost because most of them no longer thought of themselves as secularists in the same way that most of us do not think of ourselves as Galileonians or Newtonians. In fact, most secularists if challenged on their allegiance to secularism would consider the challenge anachronistic and say that they were “post-secularists” in the sense that they considered the intellectual work of secularism to have been done. To be sure, since the 1970s, there had been challenges raised to Darwinian theory and loud affirmations of Creationism but these were considered vestigial manifestations of intellectual crankiness confined to certain unenlightened and benighted regions of the world and particularly of the United States. The rise of the Evangelicals and their establishment of media empires, universities, publishing houses, followed by their embrace by the Republican Party, changed the situation.5 Teachers of evolution were put on the defensive; Creationism claimed the right to be taught in the schools and textbooks espousing it were adopted. Proponents of something called “Intelligent Design” conducted a well-financed campaign of propaganda for their views on campuses around the country. Within professional academic organizations suppressed religious realities were brought back to the fore, particularly in Art History and Music, but also in Literature. The Secularism 4

It must have harbored some doubts however since the ceremony took place in the Orthodox Cathedral not of Moscow but of San Francisco—in matters of religion, in California, it is well known, anything goes. 5 Breitbart and Fox News, for example, have become the leading proponents for American conservatism. Trumpism is a signifier for extremist ideology wedded to religious moral outrage.

65

SECUL ARISM AND POST-SECUL ARISM

65

versus Post-secularism debate was on. Historians, anthropologists and sociologists, political scientists, and even postcolonial scholars who insisted on reminding all of us of the role played by Liberation Theology in South Africa and in South America, all joined the fray. This is where we are today, and the debate is given greater urgency by the course taken through the events we call the “Arab Spring.” It is time to take a step back and remind all of us, secularists and post-secularists alike, what secularism was all about. Let us start with the simplest:  the word “secularism” belongs to the legal vocabulary of the medieval Catholic Church. It is part of Canon Law. It refers to a formal religious-legal procedure by which a member of the clergy is released from his or her vows. Such a person, a priest, a nun, or a monk, is said to have been “secularized.” Why this term? As in so many other areas of law, the Church was drawing on Roman legal tradition and vocabulary.6 The underlying word here is the Latin word “saeculum.” Interestingly, this is a word of Etruscan origin, rather than a Latin one. The Etruscans used it as a measure of time.7 Specifically, it named the time that elapsed from the occurrence of an event to the moment when the last person who lived at the time of the event died.8 For instance, in Etruscan terms, when the last person who was alive when humans first landed on the Moon in 1969, dies, a saeculum will have passed. Note that saeculum as a measure of time is thoroughly linked to human life and human experience. It differs from the Ancient Greek measure of time called the Eon, which is defined without reference to humans but is linked to changes in the cosmos. For the Etruscans, when the last person of a saeculum dies, a new saeculum begins. The Etruscans believed that the gods allocated a limited number of saecula to any given people. They thought that they themselves were given ten saecula.9 The Romans took this term over and tried to incorporate it by deploying it into a chronology (ab urbe condita—from the foundation of the city, meaning Rome), and to quantify it in terms of years, eventually settling for a 110  years (they liked to exaggerate their longevity).10 This number was challenged by the more realistically minded who thought that a life expectancy of 90 years was more reasonable. Eventually, the number was rounded out to 100 and “saeculum” acquired the meaning of a century. When the Church Canonists looked for a term to describe the operation whereby a member of the clergy was released from his or her vows, they

6

D. C. Feeney, Caesar’s Calendar:  Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 144. 7 Ibid., 146. 8 Ibid. Feeney uses saeculum to demonstrate how Censorinus linked the natural saeculum with the civil through the example of the founding of the city. 9 Feeney says eight and that Varro and Censorinus were incorrect in their estimation of ten. 10 Ibid., 147.

66

66

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

settled on saeculum. Why? Because they were opposing two notions of time. When one took one’s vows, one entered the economy of divine time, the time of Providence; when one was released from one’s vows, one was returned to human time, to the time of the world. For the Canonists, saeculum meant “world,” “human world,” that is, a world where the human was the measure, unlike the Providential realm of God where God is the measure if the infinite can be said to have a measure. This is why secularization was a formal operation: it marked the transfer from one realm to another, and these realms differed by how they accounted for temporality. In one realm, the human was the measure, in the other, the divine. For Canonists, secularism was an attitude, a stance that consisted in the assertion of the preference for human-based measurement. More precisely, it meant vacating the realm of the transcendental. A good example of the shift from Providential history to human history is provided by Balzac’s decision to name his project La Comédie Humaine, the Human Comedy, echoing Dante’s Divina Commedia, but secularizing it. Balzac was very conscious of what he was doing. Although he was a monarchist, he acknowledged that the French Revolution had revealed that there was a difference between the order of Creation as Christians conceived of it and the order of the world. Indeed in the preface11 in which he introduces the title of his magnum opus, he opposes Creation, as the work of God, and World, as the work of Man. This opposition will be fundamental to the rise of secularism. Let me stress this point: secularism is about worldliness, and worldliness is about man as the measure of the world. Hegel spoke of Säkularisierung and of Verweltichung, literally, ‘worlding’, a term to which I shall return.12 Since secularization is a process, it unfolds over time, and it is a progressive operation. It suggests that some things are secularized while others are not yet. In other words, secularization implies that there are always remains, what Jacques Derrida calls a politique des restes. As many of us know Carl Schmitt thought that these remains preserved the essence of the old order, which is why he spoke of a political theology to emphasize the dependency of apparently secular notions on their Providential past.13 The issue of ‘the remains’ proves problematic, especially for the representation that modernity has about itself as “radical novelty.”14 If 11

Avant-propos in French. Although both terms mean secularization, Hegel has in mind a more grounded idea of “world.” See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Fr. Fromanns Verlag, Günther Holzboog, 1961) 437–569. 13 Heinrich Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt:  Four Chapters on the Distinction Between Political Theology and Political Philosophy (Chicago: UNCH, 1998), 4. 14 Jonathan Hess, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2002), 22. Hess’s argument about Germans, Jews, and modernity focuses on the illusions modernists have about the emergence of anti-Semitism. 12

67

SECUL ARISM AND POST-SECUL ARISM

67

there are remnants of theological systems of comprehension and practice, how can modernity still persist in defining itself as absolute novelty? Is, then, modernity an unfulfilled project also in the sense that secularization is not and probably cannot be accomplished? The first contestation of the pretense to autonomy that modernity claims comes from these problematic “remnants.” The phenomenon that we ambiguously call a “return to religion” is a second contestation; all the more difficult to accept today when, instead of celebrating their fulfillment, the emancipation programs of the Enlightenment and their revolutionary successors of the nineteenth century are exhausted by the political experiences of the twentieth century. The situation is rendered even more moot and more complex by the ambiguity that attends the history of secularization. Fichte’s early studies of Kant’s philosophy led him to visit Kant in Koenigsberg.15 He spent several weeks talking to Kant, and he kept pressing Kant on the matter of religion. Kant had written and published his famous three Critiques.16 Fichte felt that another one was needed, the Critique of Religion.17 We do not know what exactly happened next. It appears that Fichte took it upon himself to write such a Critique and that he showed it to Kant who apparently approved of it. The book was published by Kant’s publisher, Hartung, but without the name of any author. It was widely assumed that Kant was the author, but that he had withheld his name because he feared possible political reprisals for his views.18 The moot nature of the circumstances of this work is of more than anecdotal import. A major shift in the understanding of secularization takes place between Fichte and Hegel. For Fichte, secularization is an active process to be led and carried out by secularists, that is, by individuals committed to the values of Enlightenment Reason as expounded in Kant’s three acknowledged critiques. Secularization, in other words, is the progressive conquest by the faculty of human understanding (Kant’s Verstand) of the

15

Fichte began as a theology student at Jena, but by his studies’ end, he was engaged in philosophy. He then moved to Leipzig and studied there. Upon completion of his studies, he took a job tutoring in Zurich. From Zurich, he moved as a tutor back to Leipzig where he taught, for the first time, Kant’s philosophy. The experience pushed him to go to Königsberg in 1791 to speak to Kant. The “interview went poorly” and he decided then to write anonymously the text, Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (1792). For a full account, see Wilhelm G. Jacobs, Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Eine Biographie (Berlin, Insel, 2012), p. xx. See also See Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (1792; 2nd ed., 1793). 16 1781, and 1787, Critique of Pure Reason; 1788, Critique of Practical Reason; 1790, Critique of Judgment. 17 More properly understood as a treatise resolving Kant’s philosophy with divine revelation. 18 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation, ed. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. ix. Wood notes that Kant actually published a letter the following month after a review of Fichte’s text that Fichte was the real author and that he, Kant, had no hand in the text.

68

68

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

domain of the transcendental. Hegel understands this move and reserves the term Verweltlichung for this process, but he provides a different account of Säkularisierung. In his view, it is religion that retreats in front of art and philosophy, so much so that the place formerly occupied by the transcendental becomes vacant. In Hegel’s system, this place will eventually be taken over by Absolute Knowledge. Hegel’s account of secularization does not vest agency in the process in the secularists; it preserves it for God and his human agents. In effect, Hegel embraced a doctrine that had been brewing in Christianity since the High Middle Ages and came out in the open at the time of the Reformation. In the discussion leading to the determination of what was the canonical composition of the Christian Bible, a preliminary debate took place in the twelfth century over the question whether Revelation, as contained in Scripture, was complete. It was decided that it was, meaning for practical purposes that no new prophet would appear and add to the body of Revelation. But it also meant that God was done with his Creation: He would not alter it and would not intervene in it (hence the designation of such suspected interventions as “miracles” and their assignment to saints, eventually making miracles into one of the conditions for the recognition of sainthood). Similar conversations took place in Judaism and in Islam, and similar conclusions were reached.19 The three great Semitic monotheisms had separately concluded that God was now retired. There was much speculation about the nature of this retirement. Among Christians, the doctrine of the Deus Absconditus was generally adopted. According to this doctrine, God had gone into hiding (absconditus) and would not come out of it until the end of time, or as Christian theologians preferred to say, in “the fullness of time,” meaning human historical time, or as Hegel preferred to say, “at the end of history.”20 The adoption of this doctrine ushered in a period of ambiguity. Were we, historical humans, to continue to let ourselves be governed by Providence (i.e. by faith)? Or more accurately by those who claimed to be its earthly representatives (the institutional structures of the Church)? Or could we strike out on our own and attempt to ground our order in principles of our own design? The choice was between heteronomy, or law received from a non-human elsewhere, or autonomy, self-governance? Active secularists

19 There are some caveats:  in Islam, Creation is not finished; human beings, believers, are supposed to carry it on in the name of God. Judaism articulates a related project in late kabbalah. If Jews commit to the Judaic mitzvah or obligation, they can undo time so to speak and restore creation. Creation is restored through the diligence of Jews’ fulfillment of their obligations. 20 To put it in perspective, in Judaism’s Kabbalistic tradition, the gap between the Hidden God or Eyn Sof and the human remains unresolvable even in the Messianic Age. It is a gap, Scholem tells us, that can never be erased.

69

SECUL ARISM AND POST-SECUL ARISM

69

embraced the latter, as, for example, Voltaire who thought that he had an obligation to beat back the Church. For Voltaire there was no doubt that the doctrine of Deus Absconditus had changed the game into a struggle for power.21 Those who cloaked themselves in the mantle of preservation of Providence and its ways were theocrats, their opponents had to be democrats. This binary formulation—Verweltlichung vs Säkularisirung—is, like all binaries misleading. It suggests that Säkularisirung is a process in which authentically theological content somehow alienates itself from itself and becomes “lay.” In effect, the positions occupied by theological answers are imagined as being reinvested with “lay” answers. This is the basis of the Schmittian position. But the process is both more complex and more radical as Max Weber recognizes with his theory of the “disenchantment of the world.”22 The “disenchantment of the world” does not mean that the old transcendental answers are no longer operative—as it is commonly taken to mean, but rather that the old transcendental questions are gone. The world is disenchanted because nothing remains of the place of the old transcendental, except its empty space. This is the crux of the matter for us. I will make a programmatic statement here: Secularists today are those who want to insure that the place of the old transcendental remains vacant. Secularists are not those who fight the old occupant of this place, that is, God and the religions that invoke him. They fight all and any new claimants for the locus of the transcendental. Who are these claimants? Today, they are the proponents of globalization. Globalization may present itself as an offspring of techno-science and as a human endeavor, but in fact it seeks to impose an order in which the global is the measure. Like the Providence of old, it claims to be immanent, which is the same as claiming that it is transcendental to us, as Spinoza taught us to recognize a long time ago.23 It reduces all that is human-scaled to the status of the local, to that which needs to be integrated within the global. Post-secularism is the result of an odd alliance between advocates of “Globalism” and those committed to the old Providential order. At first glance, one would imagine them to be enemies, but both sides are committed 21

For Voltaire, the deist, the Hidden God (Dieu caché or deus Absconditus) was prevented from intervening in human history. Furthermore, humans created in the image and likeness of God had the freedom to act like God because of this Divine incapability to intervene. See Voltaire, The Works of Voltaire. A Contemporary Version. A Critique and Biography by John Morley, notes by Tobias Smollett, trans. William F. Fleming (New York: E.R. DuMont, 1901), in 21 vols. Vol. V. 4/6/2018. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/354#Voltaire_0060-05_691. 22 Weber Max, Wissenschafts als Beruf (Tubingen:  Mohr Siebeck, 1992), 16:  “Entzauberung der Welt.” 23 For an overview of Spinoza’s theory of immanence and its relationship to the transcendent, see Spinoza, Benedictus (Baruch), The Collected Writings of Spinoza, Vol. 1, The Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, vol. 1: 1985).

70

70

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

to the occupation of the place of transcendence, and the question of who or what occupies it is secondary to that occupation itself. Secularists who want to insure that the place remains forever vacant, and thus that the questions, as well as the answers that this place it generates are nullified, are their enemies. Some twelve years ago, my University of California at Santa Cruz colleagues Chris Connery and Rob Wilson formulated what they called “the Worlding Project.”24 This project was meant to develop a mode of resistance to globalization. They mobilized the term “world” for this purpose. To them, this term evoked the old saeculum, “the measure of man.” They had recognized that globalization, like all forms of transcendentalism, was antihuman and they were attempting to invent “a humanism for our age.”25 While the qualifier “post-secular” has been around for quite a while, it is Jürgen Habermas who has given it a philosophical standing. In 2008, he recalled one of the corollaries of his earlier description of modernity:  as societies modernize, the role of religion inevitably declines.26 This is known as “the secularization thesis.”27 Habermas acknowledged that world historical trends did not seem to register a decline of religion, except in Europe, but he attributed this hiccup in steady decline as a sort of rear-guard action, almost a last hurrah. After all, the process of modernization was advancing everywhere and there was no reason to question “the secularization thesis.” We are presently in “a post-secular” era, he concluded.28 This was an odd statement from someone who had relentlessly chastised Post-Modernism by asserting that the project of Modernity was not done. I draw attention to this little episode because Habermas’ intervention is far from trivial. He certainly was not embracing Post-Modernism in spite of his recent reconciliation with Derrida (not that the latter was a Postmodernist, but Habermas thought he was after reading Jonathan Culler on the subject).29 To borrow a phrase from the economists, he was “uncoupling secularism” from the project of Modernity, also known as modernization. Since he was doing so without renouncing “the secularization thesis,” his puzzling assertion can escape the charge of confusion and self-contradiction only if there are two distinct types, or more likely, two moments of modernization, one in which “the secularization thesis” holds, and one in which it does not.

24

Christopher Connery and Rob Wilson (eds), The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2007). 25 See ibid., 214–16. 26 Jürgen Habermas, The Dialectics of Secularization: on Reason and Religion (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2006). 27 Ibid., 47. 28 Ibid., 46. 29 Jonathan Culler, “Preface to the 25th Edition,” in On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).

71

SECUL ARISM AND POST-SECUL ARISM

71

There had been numerous attempts to periodize Modernity, but Habermas had steadfastly rejected all of them until then because he thought they were aimed at diluting what he saw as the essence of Modernity: the promotion of a public sphere. If this essence could be preserved and perhaps even made to flourish, he would be open to the periodization of Modernity to the point of abandoning secularization. What led him to the conclusion that is now the case? The text suggests that Habermas was taking seriously Carl Schmitt’s periodization of Modernity as first formulated in his 1932 article entitled “Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und Entpolitizierungen.”30 Schmitt, who was worried about the emergence of social processes possessing their own inner logic and thus escaping determination in and by the political sphere, had suggested that the course of the Modern Period, as he preferred to call it, was divided into five parts, each corresponding to a century.31 In his account, the sixteenth century was still in thrall to theological thought and the institutions that derived from it.32 The seventeenth century marked a liberation of thought from theology and the advent of a metaphysical age, ushered in by Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, and Spinoza. The eighteenth century he characterized as governed by what he called a humanistic (or humanitarian) moral impulse, best exemplified by the Enlightenment and particularly by Immanuel Kant. By contrast to these three centuries in which thought was anchored in human experience and was the object of political contestation, the nineteenth century moved boldly toward the auto-telic processes he dreaded. He saw it as an era subjected to economic rationality, whether of the liberal or of the socialist kinds. And things were only getting worse in the twentieth century with the imposition of technological rationality, a rationality that had not yet produced its eponymic thinker and perhaps would not because it did not need one. In spite of their obvious political differences, Habermas does not repudiate Schmitt’s characterization. In fact he embraces it when it comes to the last two centuries, bemoaning their orientation to be sure but admitting their facticity. But why would he jump from there to the conclusion that this is a post-secular age? A clear answer is not to be found in his published work but some interviews hint at what it may be. It is his thinking about the public sphere that has evolved. It will be recalled that Habermas’s original position with respect to the public sphere was resolutely secularist. It was the function

30

Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen Mit einer Rede über das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und Entpolitisierungen (MÜNCHEN UND LEIPZIG:  VERLAG VON DUNCKER & HUMBLOT, 1932). 31 Schmitt, Carl. Römischer Katholicismus und politische Form, 2nd edn (Hellerau:  Jakob Hegner Verlag, 1925). 32 Ibid., x.

72

72

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

of the public sphere to destitute the despotic systems of rules, most grounded in some form of sacred revelation, for the conduct of private and collective life. Habermas’s conception of religion at this point is a codified set of instructions for practices of the self, although he did not use this Foucauldian vocabulary, which, in any case, was introduced later. Religions prescribe these practices, define their nature, and judge their performance. They do so on the basis of a Law—Schmitt called it a Nomos, received from a transcendent elsewhere. The function of the public sphere was to nullify such a Law or Nomos, and to replace it by a deliberative process in which a new set of rules for the practices of the self would be elaborated. The new set would always be a provisional one and therefore highly adaptive. As an heir to the project of the Enlightenment, Habermas focused his attention on the formal condition of the deliberative process—what he called rules for proper communication, rather than on the content of the rules for the practices of the self. This formalism led him away from the cultural critique of his Frankfurt School predecessors, particularly Adorno, and aligned him more with Schmitt’s constitutional concerns. In his early work, he was an advocate for small communities, almost harkening back to the Germanic Gemeinde still active in some remote mountain regions of Switzerland where direct democracy was practiced—though he never embraced the latter’s traditionalism and misogyny. Progressively, his attention shifted to larger entities and much of his mature work focused on the definition of what he called “Constitutional Democracy” (Verfassung Democratie)33 which he advocated for relentlessly during the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, from the student movement and the Rote Armee Fraktion. He does not abandon the focus on the defense and consolidation of constitutional democracy in Germany, but in the early 1980d he begins to pay more attention to the process of European integration and beyond it to the emerging form of globalization. He seems to have been quite taken with the account of the latter provided by Anthony Giddens as well as with Giddens’s analysis of the Constitution of Society (1984). Giddens was responding to the French Structuralists by offering his own theory of structuration. You may recall that there was a significant confrontation between advocates of structure and advocates of agency. Giddens analyzed both and asserted that neither had supremacy over the other. In a phrase that would make him famous and lead to his serving as Tony Blair’s eminence grise, there was a “Third Way,” where agency and structure collaborated dialectically in a process of structuration. Similarly, globalization, as he understood it, involved the same dialectical collaboration, with a qualification: advanced 33

See Jürgen Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” European Journal of Philosophy 14 (2006): 1–25.

73

SECUL ARISM AND POST-SECUL ARISM

73

societies would serve as the agents, and less advanced societies would be the loci of structuring, with the extent of advancement determined by the society’s degree of modernization. Habermas did not agree with all of Giddens’s analyses but he was taken with two of his theses: 1. The boundaries of the nation state were being rendered obsolete by the emergence of a knowledge economy. 2. Functions that once had been within the purview of religion and had been slowly appropriated by the state were now assumed by media with a global reach. These functions include the definition of forms of life, from family structure to gender; the cultivation of behaviors at all levels of social interaction; attitudes toward the body, one’s own as well as that of others; attention to the senses and shifts within the sensorium; the realignment of sensibilities; the development of a body of beliefs and assumptions forming a worldwide doxa. For Habermas, the first thesis meant that the formal rules of communication that he was trying to establish would now have to have a global scope. The second thesis meant that the struggle between the state and religion over the definition and control of practices of the self had to give way to the struggles of states and transnational global media. If the struggle between state and religion was secularist, then the struggle of states and global media had to be post-secularist. The secularism versus post-secularism debate is thus a triangular affair, with three distinct structural positions. The secularist position is committed to keeping the locus previously occupied by religion and the transcendental vacant, refusing the answers provided by Revelation and its derivatives as well as the questions they have raised. The religious position is committed to a return to the status quo ante. In its most direct form it advocates for a return of theocracy, whether in the form of a Salafist Caliphate or the proclamation of the United States as a Christian nation, or even the adoption of constitutional language acknowledging the Christian heritage of Europe. The globalist position seeks to occupy the place vacated by the transcendental and bring about an immanent order in which the WTO and other regulatory mechanisms will insure what the proper questions are and what answers they should receive. In this triangulation, alliances are possible between the globalists and the religiously minded because they both oppose the secularists’ determination to keep the place of the transcendental vacant. Some secularists, like Habermas, think an alliance with the globalists is possible because globalists are interested in the formal approach they advocate themselves. One could at this juncture examine a number of concrete cases around the world and see how the confrontation is configured

74

74

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

in each one of them. I will not do so. I am more interested to bringing this discussion closer home, to the domain of literary studies. For quite some time there have been voices raised among literary scholars for greater engagement with religion. A Society for the Study of Literature in the light of Christianity has had a long existence, and it is not uncommon to have sessions of the MLA or the ACLA devoted to discussions of religion and literature. The situation is perhaps even more complex in Jewish Studies where the lay orientation of a Gershom Scholem has progressively given way to ever larger injections of theology.34 More recently the call for engagement with religion within literary studies has taken an important turn. Whereas most studies till now have focused on religious themes and motifs, this turn is taking reading, the central activity of literary studies as its object. Similarly, the recent rise of the study of the history of the book is entangled in the simultaneous rise of the production of sacred and profane books. But it is the question of reading that requires the most attention. Post-secularists have no difficulty pointing out that the two most powerful approaches to literary texts, namely, philology and hermeneutics, have roots in religious practices of reading. As a result, they claim, literary scholars should abandon their current modes of reading, in which the nation state and its putative transnational successor serve as the horizon of reading, and return to reading practices that examine the mutual dependency and the symbiotic relationship of literature and religion. They concede, for example, that the Bible can be read as literature, but only if literature is read with the Bible as a background. At first sight, this may strike us as a benign condition, but it does not take long to realize that such a mode of reading surrenders the vacant place secularists want to keep vacant. In my view it is incumbent on secularists to push back against these post-secularist forays, challenging their assumptions as well as their conclusions. For instance, it is simply not true that philology was first deployed in the context of religion. The term “philologos” was forged in Alexandria when it was the capital of the empire founded by Alexander the Great. Alexander wanted his capital to be an accurate reflection of his empire and decreed that sample artifacts from the empire be sent there, eventually to be stored in its famed Museum, with the written documents sent to the even more famous library. The handlers of the manuscripts and

34

See Gershom Scholem, Major_Trends_of Jewish Mysticism (New York: Shocken, 1946), 10. With this text, Scholem warned of the dangers of imposing a rigid religious framework on the nascent field of kabbalistic scholarship. Such an imposition would reflect adhering to “an object of dogmatic knowledge” rather than experiencing a dynamic, living and “novel intuition” of the Divine. The desire to reimpose dogma was central to his critique of rabbinic scholarship in the modern period. since he felt that Judaic scholarship hewed unnecessarily toward restricting Jewish religious experience to a lack of affect.

75

SECUL ARISM AND POST-SECUL ARISM

75

the rolls that flowed in were called philologoi and we owe to them a number of terms we use to this very day: anthology and canon, to mention but two. When the church theologians of the High Middle Ages decide to determine which of the accounts of the life of Jesus are authoritative and which are not, they invoke the Alexandrine term “canon” and the protocols associated with it to do so. Philology was never the handmaiden of theology or of religious institutions. The Florentine Valla used philological methodology to prove that the Donation of Constantine, a document whereby the Roman emperor purportedly donated the empire to the church, was a medieval forgery.35 Valla was persecuted by the Inquisition and nearly paid with his life for this act of philological reading.36 The Dominicans who ran the Inquisition were not confused about the difference between a religious and a secular reading, and thought that bonfires of manuscripts, books, and heretics were the best expressions of post-secularism. Later philologists like the seventeenth-century Frenchman Simon faced charges of heresy when they did a comparative study of Bible translations and pointed out the flaws in Jerome’s Vulgate.37 By then, the Church had taken the position that Jerome’s translation was as divinely inspired as his originals and thus had to be flawless. Such philological activity was not the mark of the entanglement of sacred and profane writings. It was a secularist critique, to use a mild word, against claimed divine authority. A cursory analysis of the history of hermeneutics reveals a similar arc of development. To be sure, the origins of hermeneutics are to be found in the mystery religions of the Ancient World, although within them hermeneutics was used on so-called Orphic texts, that is, texts that were poetical and assumed to have a religious message. In the Middle Ages, when the Platonists of the School of Chartres decided that profane texts like the Dialogues of Plato should have an authority approximating that of the biblical books, they relied on hermeneutics to show the similarities between the story of Creation in both books.38 Hermeneutics was recognized as a mode of reading profane texts; it was mobilized in the service of making them compatible with religious ones. Present-day post-secularists do not differ from their Chartrian predecessors on this score, except in one 35

Lorenzo Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, 1440 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 36 The best example of his philological reading was his commentary on Jerome’s Vulgate. He pointed out, inter alia, that the church’s doctrine of indulgences was based on a mistranslation of Greek “metanoia” (repentance) as penance. See Collatio Novi Testamenti, ed. A.  Perosa (Florence: Sansoni, 1970). 37 See Richard Simon, Critical History of the Text of the New Testament wherein Is Established the Truth of the Acts on which the Christian Religion Is Based, ed. and trans. Andrew W. R. Hunwick (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 38 Wintrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1972).

76

76

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

respect:  where the Chartrians sought a similarity or a reconciliation of content, our contemporaries look for formal similarities. On this score they differentiate themselves from the pre-secularists in the current triangular confrontation, and they align themselves with the formally oriented globalists. This neo-formalism deserves a discussion in its own right.

Bibliography Asad, Talal (2004), Formations of the Secular. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Cammel, Paul (2016), Reinterpreting the Borderline: Heidegger and the Psychoanalytic Understanding of the Borderline Personality Disorder. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Connery, Christopher Leigh and Wilson, R. (2007), The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Feeney, D. C. (2007), Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (2010) Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation, ed. Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, Jürgen (2008), Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press. Habermas, Jürgen, et al. (2010), An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age. [“Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA,” “Cambridge, UK; Malden, Mass.”], Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity. Hess, Jonathan (2002), Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jacobs, Wilhelm G. (2012), Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Eine Biographie. Berlin: Insel. Kosik, K. (1976), Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World, Volume 52. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Pub. Meier, Heinrich (1998), The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction Between Political Theology and Political Philosophy. Chicago: UNCH. Richard, Simon (2013), Critical History of the Text of the New Testament wherein Is Established the Truth of the Acts on which the Christian Religion Is Based, ed. and trans. Andrew W. R. Hunwick. Leiden: Brill. Strauss, William and Howe, Neil (1997), Fourth Turning. New York: Doubleday. Taylor, Charles (2009), The Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

77

PART TWO

Literature

78

79

4 Redemptive readings between Maurice Blanchot and Franz Rosenzweig Shawna Vesco

There is a crack a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in That’s how the light gets in —LEONARD COHEN

The writings of Maurice Blanchot and Franz Rosenzweig propose the exigency of the literary-experience as intimately tied to the imperative ethicity of the question of community. Though they approach the themes of language, alterity, and radical ethical responsibility from different conceptual traditions, Blanchot from literature and Rosenzweig from Judaism, they each situate practices of reading and writing as the opening of ethics and community. In Blanchot’s case, the ethics of écriture (translated here as “reading/writing”1) that he approaches through the themes of disaster and literary communism is a response to a troubling modern epistemological

1 While the French word écriture linguistically maintains a relationship to “writing” (écrire), Blanchot’s usage of écriture suggests a practice that is entangled (in the quantum physics sense of the term) with reading.

80

80

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

humanism that, as a “theological myth,”2 undermines finite, human integrity and activity by proposing a transcendent divine essence of man, world, or history. From Blanchot’s perspective, écriture un-works the theological structure at play within humanism that simply exchanges the concept of “God” for any number of undifferentiated grounds or epistemological closures like being, meaning, the “Self,” the “Subject,” the Truth, or the One. Écriture, as a force of disaster, troubles such structures of modernity by opening a dispersed way of being-in-relation to oneself, the world, and to others that interrupts paradigms or sensations of unity and totality. Rosenzweig’s thought is similarly a response to modern idealist philosophy that, through its denial of God, sinks into an ontological nihilism which likewise dissolves finite integrity. Rosenzweig reimagines the theological operation of revelation as a type of dynamic literary-experience that opens community by establishing the ethical exemplarity of practices of reading that, while historically situated, partake in the divine. In both cases, the “relationality” at the heart of reading signals reading as an unending redemptive praxis that does not produce subjects, discourses, identities, communities, institutions, and so on, but rather renders such closures un-worked. The dynamism of écriture and revelation, perhaps ironically, also un-works the discourses of Literature and Theology, both of which are founded on the stability of static and unchanging blocks of texts: the Great Work of Art, which is an absolute structure and considered complete within itself, and the Book, or “the law.” Between Blanchot and Rosenzweig, which is to say between écriture and revelation, reading emerges as an experience of being-in-relation that troubles unities, totalities, antinomies, and binaries (particularly of immanence and transcendence, reader and writer, self and other, nothingness and being, and so on). The redemptive force of écriture and revelation, which hinges upon their ability to hold open relationality or “the between,” finds an earlier parallel in the Kabbalistic theosophy of Issac Luria (1534–72). While ostensibly a story about the creation of the cosmos and All that exists, Luria’s theosophy can also be read as a philosophical treatise on language, meaning, and the role of creative activity within the human realm. For clarity, each stage of Luria’s story will be referenced by its featured movement: the first stage presents the contraction of the godhead (tzimtzum); the second phase involves the breaking of vessels (shevirat ha-kelim); and the final but

2

The phrase “theological myth” (Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. S. Hanson [Minneapolis and London:  University of Minnesota Press, 1990], 247) signals an acknowledgment and dismissal of the supposed atheism of secular humanism. Blanchot is suggesting that humanism smuggles in theological operations and categories. Humanism preserves the principle of God when it substitutes the “I” for God, a transcendent essence by which all operations of meaning and identity can be grounded and by which all lived human experience is eclipsed.

81

REDEMPTIVE READINGS BETWEEN BL ANCHOT AND ROSENZWEIG

81

unending stage concerns reparation (tikkun). The combinations of certain elements, like sefirotic vessels, and movements of the cosmic process that Luria describes bear striking similarities to Blanchot’s understanding of the space of literature and Rosenzweig’s notion of revelation. In fact, Luria’s story provides an approachable way to understand some of Blanchot’s and Rosenzweig’s theoretical claims about language, as well as my own claims about the ethics of écriture because while Luria and Rosenzweig appear to produce total systems, they rely on a dynamic notion of language that instead builds detours or loopholes in the system that mirror the movement of Blanchotian “un-working.” The “totality of the All” turns into a question about the possibility of such a totality. Blanchot poses écriture in relation with disaster in order to indicate both the idea of a violently disruptive force and the idea of a de-star-ification as indicated by the French, désastre. He never explicitly states that “écriture IS ____” or “disaster IS _____” because that would be grammatically incorrect and have inaccurate ontological implications. Rather, he deftly avoids the problems bound up in the word “is” by explaining disaster with the help of a colon when he aphoristically writes, “The disaster: break with the star, break with every form of totality.”3 Through the mark of the colon, Blanchot here stages his own break with “the star” of modern philosophies of Being and existence. There are many other such stars in the firmament above, or what Blanchot calls the “whole which shelters us,” and in which “we dissolve.”4 The “star” is anything that is totalizing and unifying, anything that generalizes particulars and universalizes singulars; the star is God, the Absolute, or such substitutes as suggested by the Modern Project: the Nation, the Subject, System, Concept, History, and, particularly, the Work (l’oeuvre) of art. Where Blanchot and Luria converge is around the movement of what Blanchot calls un-working (désoeuvrement). In the French word, one can see the “oeuvre” that rests in the middle. The Work already contains within itself its own un-working, and the revelation of this through practices of écriture is the opening of community. Un-working renders “stars” and “works” inoperative, and it essentially loosens the bonds of a supposedly closed, completed, or otherwise unified concept or structure. Un-working isn’t an active practice one undertakes, it is rather simply the force of disaster that takes place or befalls you through écriture. When one reads or writes, you aren’t “producing” outcomes or products, you are rather involved in a passive revealing of the negativity at the heart of representation and our relation to ourselves, the world, and others in it. In this way, Blanchot’s

3

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. A. Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 3. 4 Ibid., 75.

82

82

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

un-working is closely aligned with Luria’s story of Ein Sof and the movement of tzimtzum. In the first part of his narrative, Luria introduces the concept of tzimtzum which suggests that creation begins with an act of withdrawal or contraction of the godhead rather than an extension. Ein Sof limits its own divine essence by withdrawing into itself to make space (makom) for creation. Tzimtzum is a movement of un-working in which the absolute totality of Ein Sof is fissured to make the space of nothingness (ayin) in which relationality can even emerge. Luria, who grapples here with the problem of Ein Sof’s omnipresence, poses tzimtzum not as a solution to the antinomy of the omnipresence of God and the being of creation, but as the movement that maintains the antinomy as essential to creation. The relationality implied within the singular and infinite movement of creation/effacement renders totality un-worked. Rupture, disaster, and the ethicity of creative human activity are tied together in similar terms in both Luria’s and Blanchot’s imaginaries. Just as écriture for Blanchot bears the force of disaster, so too does language, represented as vessels, in Luria. The limiting of divine essence that occurs in tzimtzum repeats itself in the second phase of Luria’s theosophy in the emanation of “vessels” (kelim). During tzimtzum, Ein Sof simultaneously withdraws and issues forth into the world the letter “Yod,” the first letter of His name in the tetragrammaton YHWH. In some sense, signification and nothingness appear in the same movement. Also sent into the physical world are the sefirot, or divine attributes of Ein Sof. These attributes are figured by Luria as vessels through which the divine-influx (shefa) of Ein Sof flows, but the intensity of the light of shefa is too great and the vessels break. Shards of the vessels, some of which are filled with sparks of divine light, fall to the physical realm and it becomes the labor of humans to repair the world (tikkun ha-olam) by releasing the sparks through the fulfillment of various obligations and duties. The disaster-movement of shefa makes human activity and history possible. If the light of Ein Sof had made it into the physical realm without mediation and the subsequent disaster, there would be no activity or dynamism within the physical realm. However, the process of tikkun that follows shefa needs to be read through Blanchot and Rosenzweig in order to see the un-working and relationality in it that rescues Luria’s theosophy from turning into an absolute (or Hegelian) system in which human activity is co-opted into and synthesized into an ultimate Spirit, History, or redemption. Luria’s “breaking of the vessels” (shevirat ha-kelim) gives material “fragments” or shards that indicate non-totality. But it is in the movement of tikkun, that is, the reparative act that restores shefa back to its source, that Luria’s story of the All risks becoming a story of reification and stagnation. However, if one refracts the movement of Luria’s shefa through Blanchot’s un-working and Rosenzweig’s revelation it becomes clear that

83

REDEMPTIVE READINGS BETWEEN BL ANCHOT AND ROSENZWEIG

83

Luria gestures toward an emergent process of becoming for both Ein Sof and the created. The movement of shefa, made possible by disaster, shows that Ein Sof only attains itself through the creative activity, or écriture, of humans just as humans must be readers of Ein Sof. Much like Rosenzweig’s revelation, the relationship between the upper and lower realms in Luria is exactly that: a being-in-relation. Like Luria’s theosophy, the story of the “All” that Rosenzweig presents in Star of Redemption is a dynamic becoming made possible by the un-ending recurrence of revelation which, for Rosenzweig, is the redemptive and infinite un-working that holds an opening within the All. Rosenzweig’s notion of revelation proves quite disastrous to figurations of unity and wholeness created by modern philosophical, existential, aesthetic, and theological systems. Rosenzweig, if he is couched in Blanchotian terms, finds several “Stars” of modernity problematic, especially the star of Reason, as represented by the entire German idealist tradition. The problem with German idealism, in short and as it is articulated in Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, is that it produces systems that fail to account for the concrete, ordinary, and everyday experiences of man. From Kant through to Hegel, the attempt to capture and deliver knowledge of the “All,” also known as “truth,” schematizes and falsifies “the bubbling plenitude” of reality, turning it “into the dead chaos of givens.”5 The givens are dead because to say they exist implies their relationship to the subject to which they belong, and they are chaotic until personal consciousness unites them as knowledge. Rosenzweig’s critique here is of course of the Self as the ontological foundation for a knowledge that schematizes and falsifies the plenitude of reality. And how he formulates his critique, namely, through a saturation of metaphors in what is ostensibly supposed to be a text of “philosophical” prose, is part of his critique.6

5 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. W. Hallo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970), 47. 6 Throughout Star of Redemption rivers, streams, oceans, and currents come into play against “stasis,” usually represented by images of rocks or stagnant water. Rosenzweig is drawing a line from the immanent static schema or mathesis proposed by German idealism back to Thales’ “first sentence of philosophy”:  “All is water.” Levinas explains that Thales famous dictum is problematic for Rosenzweig because it “denies the truth of experience, reducing dissimilarities, saying what all reality encountered is fundamentally, and incorporating all phenomenal truth into this Whole” (Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. S. Hand [Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997], 188). Rosenzweig’s return to water is thus a commentary that attempts to un-work Thales’ statement. The coursing, bubbling, streaming, and gushing of water to which Rosenzweig appeals draws motion, the reality of experience, and time back into the world. In fact, revelation is described as the “pouring forth” of god that “turns that which is stagnant in us into something active” (Rosenzweig, Star, 400). Revelation is the active “bubbling” in the plenitude that troubles and muddies the seemingly transparent still or “stagnant water” (25) of Thales’ All.

84

84

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Metaphor in Rosenzwieg, Luria, and Blanchot is part of the performance of a redemptive écriture. Where Luria uses the imagery of light (shefa) to un-work absolutist thought, Rosenzweig will use silence, the cosmos, and water to tell the story of the “bubbling plenitude” of reality, and Blanchot will approach the movement of un-working through a variety of metaphorics related to stars and books. Against the supposed purity of the philosophical “concept,” Rosenzweig and Blanchot mobilize metaphor to maintain the residue or figurative stain of language and writing. For them, metaphor is not aid or adornment to expressing the Idea, it produces an excess. Instead of just explaining they are against systems of totality, they leave in their wake, by way of écriture, remainders that can not be totalized. Metaphor, unlike the concept or idea, cannot be reified and consummated as a finished product because it is contingent and emergent. Metaphor signals a particular kind of being-in-relation that is the impossibility of totalization. Blanchot’s notion of the Book attempts to detour the metaphorical content of “sphere” and “circle,” while his “disaster,” which lays waste to unified “Stars” or “astres,” aims more specifically to un-work what Hans Blumenberg refers to as the “ethical and aesthetic dignity accorded the ‘starry sky’ in Stoicism.”7 Blumenberg, in his Paradigms for a Metaphorology, argues that Plato “prescribes for astronomy a theoretical ‘program’ ” that lasts from antiquity to Kepler that consists of “referring the movements of the planets back to pure circular motions.” As evidence, Blumenberg cites the “Timaeus” in which the cosmos is described as a sphere, “spinning uniformly in the same spot and within itself and . . . revolving in a circle.”8 His rather lengthy analysis of the “Timaeus” quotation concludes that “[t]he circular motion of the stars becomes the sign of their divinity and assumes normative character of human reason, which is invited to contemplate the celestial pageant because it finds the inner lawfulness of truly rational Being paraded there before it: reason must imitate the strictly regular revolutions of the divine in order to give itself this ‘form.’ ”9 The coincidence of reason and circular motion, that is, sameness and unity, is articulated in Blanchot through the metaphor of the Book or Bible (“le Livre”), which indicates “an[y] order that submits to unity.”10 Individual works can be published as a book (livre) but “Book” raised to the capital-B is the “civilisation of the Book (le Livre)” in which “we still are.”11 The “civilization of the Book” echoes Blumenberg’s diagnosis of the program that runs from “antiquity

7

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. R. Savage (New  York:  Cornell University Press, 2010), 118. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. S. Hanson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), xxi. 11 Ibid., xi.

85

REDEMPTIVE READINGS BETWEEN BL ANCHOT AND ROSENZWEIG

85

to Kepler.” Moreover, as Blanchot explains, “the book (livre) begins with the Bible (Livre) in which the logos is inscribed as law” but the Bible (Livre), which “offers us the preeminent model of the book (livre),” also “encompasses all books, no matter how alien they are to biblical revelation, knowledge, poetry, prophesy, and proverbs, because it holds in it the spirit of the book.”12 The Bible here is the ultimate figure and operation of unity whose infinite growth, while encompassing a multiplicity of books, leaves it identical to itself: the “pure circular motion” of the “Timaeus.” The upshot of Plato’s “program” is that the “starry sky” becomes a “metaphor for the immanent homogenous structure of the divine and the human, the cosmos and reason, theory and ethos.” Bound up in the task of Blanchot’s disaster is a deprogramming of the cosmos and reason through the ethical practice of écriture. Dangerously, the inner cohesion and integrity granted to the cosmos by way of the “starry sky” program is extended centripetally until the structure of the universe and the individual are isomorphous. In each case, the integrity of the system, whether of the cosmos or individual, demands some form of unity, sameness, or eternality that forecloses difference. The task of écriture is to expose the (dis)unity at the heart of such systems, that is, to expose that unity only knows itself as such if it is violently subsuming and nullifying irreducible multiplicity. And Blanchot relies on Lurianic theosophy, specifically tzimtzum, to subvert the starry sky of Stoicism. Luria’s tzimtzum underwrites Blanchot’s notion of writing as a kind of oscillating un-working that has absence and withdrawal at its heart. Explicitly drawing the connection between art and tzimtzum, Blanchot writes, “Withdrawal and not expansion, such, perhaps, is art, like the God of Isaac Luria who creates only by excluding himself.”13 Like tzimtzim, Blanchot’s écriture proposes a circulatory (note:  not “circular” because circles are closed) modality of exile, effacement, or absence, that attempts to escape every economy of binary, dialectic, and so on. For Blanchot, unethical and unpolitical writing is writing that, in its unquestioned and unquestioning orientation by meaning, forgets its negating force and proceeds along the model of expansion as creation and not withdrawal as creation. This type of unethical writing, which arrives by way of a literary-labor, what he calls oeuvre, is made manifest in the book, le livre. Unlike the being-in-relation demanded by écriture, there is only solitude for “the writer [who] belongs to the oeuvre” because “what belongs to him is only a book (le livre), a mute accumulation of sterile words, the most insignificant thing in the world.”14

12

Ibid., 424. Ibid., 13. 14 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. A. Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 23. 13

86

86

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Consistent with tzimtzum, écriture is not involved with the production of the book (le livre), but in the production of its absence. In Infinite Conversation, Blanchot explains that “to write is to produce the absence of the work (the un-working)”15 /“Écrire, c’est produire l’absence d’oeuvre (le désoeuvrement).”16 This “absence” is a non-absent absence which is still not a presence: it is an absence that is wholly other, a pure exteriority, an irreducible alterity:  “Writing, (pure) exteriority, foreign to every relation of presence, as to all legality.”17 In this way, the work, as the absolute of writing, always un-works itself before it has been accomplished in the manner suggested by the “Timaeus.” Écriture, like Luria’s tikkun, cannot be “put to work,” or reconciled by “history,” “being,” or a restored vessel. Écriture, like Ein Sof’s creative act, is a movement of withdrawal that avoids “completion” or fulfillment” in a work (oeuvre). And écriture, because it incessantly signals the failure of totalization (oeuvre into le livre), is for Blanchot the only redemption we can practice against le livre and le Livre. The kind of unity implied by le livre and le Livre cannot simply be denied by “negation alone”18 because the system already accounts for and subsumes that dialectical movement. Écriture is a redemptive force precisely because it frustrates and un-works the “law of the book” (la loi du livre) by revealing how writing aimed at the perfection of a work (oeuvre) is already drawn outside of the work in transgression of the law of the book which demands the internal coherence and stability of a closed organ. Blanchot explains that the book is in fact a “ruse” by which “writing goes towards the absence of the book.”19 In trying to be operative, writing only ever reveals its energy as the inoperative force of disaster: an encounter with the outside that language itself is. Language, because it conveys more than it states, brings with it an experience of the outside that fractures any sense of totality and disorients any stable bearings of meaning, signification, or identity. The movement of tzimtzum that Luria’s Ein Sof undergoes mirrors a similar movement of effacement that “befalls” Blanchot’s figure of the writer/reader through disastrous écriture. Blanchot’s description of Ein Sof’s “mysterious willingness to be exiled from the all that he is, and efface and absent himself”20 maps onto how he imagines the ethical literary community as the “negative” community or even the “absence of community.”21 Unlike 15

Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 424. Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 622. 17 Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 426. 18 Ibid., 427. 19 Ibid., 424. 20 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 13. 21 The term “the negative community” is articulated in Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community to indicate that community can never be actualized, which is to say, a community that has no foundation, redemption, or communion. The moment in which community can be named such is already beyond Blanchot’s notion of community. 16

87

REDEMPTIVE READINGS BETWEEN BL ANCHOT AND ROSENZWEIG

87

the proper author who would sustain and ultimately fulfill himself through the literary-labor involved in the production of the book, those who experience the disaster of écriture are exposed, that is, posed in exteriority to a “Self,” and to the text. Blanchot best captures the problem with fulfilling oneself in a product of a creative act (work, world, or community) by referencing Schleiermacher, who, in the trend of German idealists, believed in the integrity of human experience as the unity of thinking and being: Schleiermacher: by producing a work (oeuvre), I renounce the idea of my producing and formulating myself; I fulfill myself in something exterior and inscribe myself in the anonymous continuity of humanity—whence the relation between the work of art and the encounter with death:  in both cases, we approach a perilous threshold, a crucial point where we are abruptly turned back (brusquement retournés).22 Blanchot uses Schleiermacher’s proper name to make it a point that dying like writing refuses the power of the name and essentially the power of the unified “Subject.” One cannot not gain one’s identity through a relation to death or art, which in both cases is a non-relation.23 For Blanchot, dying and writing are experiences that reveal to me an anonymous power separating me from myself. Writing (which shares a similar movement to death) is for Blanchot the practice that opens community because it is a dispersed way of being-in-relation to oneself, others, and the world. For Rosenzweig, who like Blanchot resists the idealist conception of death as a philosophical ground for identity, revelation (love) likewise resists immediacy and immanence, thus opening relationality and drawing in history. In the opening pages of Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig launches his critique against the German idealist tradition by showing that, against its own claims, idealism cannot account for the “All” of knowledge because death is always outside of the Subject, outside of experience, and outside of knowledge. However before bursting the “bubble” that idealism creates, Rosenzweig plays out all of his themes in the absolute world imagined by idealism in order to show how that world forecloses the possibilities of them. “Absolute” here means ab-solute, or without relation, like the starry sky of Stoics. Rosenzweig names the absolute world the “proto-cosmos,” and features it as both act and result of creation. Like Blanchot’s notion of the Work (L’Oeuvre), the proto-cosmos was founded and completed in some immemorial past. Within the closed-system of the proto-cosmos there 22

Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 7; emphasis in the original. Performing a bit of détournement on Edmond Jabès, who asks, “Is dying in the book, to become visible for each, and for oneself, decipherable [déchiffrable]?” Blanchot asks, “Might it be that writing, in the book, is to become legible for each, and for oneself, indecipherable [indéchiffrable]?” (ibid., 2).

23

88

88

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

is a supposed stability of meaning and identity guaranteed by absoluteness. Articulated from Parmenides to Hegel, the proto-cosmos “had been securus adversus deos . . . ‘secure against the gods’ because it itself encompassed the absolute.”24 The “star” of Philosophy, formed from Ionia to Jena, denies all forms of transcendence, especially that of god, in the same way that the author and reader of the Work of Art simply “belong” to it and its absoluteness. Rosenzweig wishes to demonstrate the impossibility of ethics or community within such a metaphysic idealism and he does so first through a discussion of the greek polis and second through the individual he views as proper to the polis: the figure of the isolated and silent “metaethical man.25” The figure of the metaethical man allows Rosenzweig to articulate a critique of modern idealist notions of the Self, which he views as the epitome of isolation, encirclement, and non-relation. It is perhaps as a commentary on dialogues of Volk that Rosenzweig reaches back to the individual of the ancient state, to describe how in his ipseity and in his pure immanence the “metaethical man” can never open community. The ancient people-state is described by Rosenzweig as “simply the whole whose configuration absorbs its parts.”26 In this system man is but a part vis-à-vis the “wholes” or “categories” of community. The upshot of this, Rosenzweig writes, is that “the ancient individual loses himself in the community in order to find himself but rather, quite simply, in order to construct the community; he himself disappears.”27 Categories or wholes, because they are “outwardly exclusive and inwardly unconditional” become “configured individual beings . . . which evoke the comparison with the work of art.”28 In the same way that the work of art is known to be such only because it is “closed off by crystal wall from all that it is not”29 a “whole made up of parts can never be more than part of a Whole—it can never be the All.”30 Lacking relation, the individuals collected up in a 1+1+1n fashion and made operative under a category (State, Nation, Community) can never open onto an ethics. The “created world” of the proto-cosmos, in which individuals exist without relation, is also the silent world of the tragic hero, Gilgamesh, whose lineage places him on the border between divine and human. Early

24

Rosenzweig, Star, 15. It is unclear if for Rosenzweig the metaethical man is synonymous with the subject of the Greek polis, where individuality is tied to losing oneself in the State, that is, where the right to be an individual springs from military service and the willingness to sacrifice the self in that machine. The figure of the metaethical man seems to mediate between the more fascistic elements of the citizen of the Greek polis and a more modern, solipsistic liberal humanist subject. 26 Ibid., 55. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 46. 30 Ibid., 56. 25

89

REDEMPTIVE READINGS BETWEEN BL ANCHOT AND ROSENZWEIG

89

in the story an encounter with Eros, through his friend Enkidu, causes his nature to transform and develop from a beast-like creature into something resembling more of a human. The journey continues, hijinks ensue, and then enters Thanatos. Rosenzweig illuminates the critical aspect here:  “it is, initially, not his own death which directly confronts the hero, but the death of his friend; in the friend’s death, however, he experiences the terror of death in general. In this encounter his tongue fails him; he ‘cannot cry, cannot keep silent.’ ”31 According to Rosenzweig, by having his whole life hemmed in by the fear of his own death, Gilgamesh enters the sphere where the world “becomes strange to man with its alternation of screaming and silence, the sphere of pure and lofty speechlessness, the self.”32 Gilgamesh’s fear of death and his subsequent silence recalls the opening line of Star: “All cognition of the All originates in death, in the fear of death.”33 Gilgamesh who “by keeping silent . . . breaks down the bridges which link him to God and the world”34 is also representative of the tragic human who inhabits the schematic world of German idealism as presented by Rosenzweig in Part I of Star. The rupturing of the proto-cosmic world and subsequent drawing into configuration of man, god, and world that happens through the experience of Rosenzweig’s revelation is quite distinct from traditional determinations of revelation. Revelation as a static-theological category and not as an experiential Rosenzweigian revelation is not enough to un-work the silent world of the proto-cosmos. It is not enough, from Rosenzweig’s perspective, to assert that there is a commanding voice from the outside. Mitzvot might disclose both the rule and the rule giver, but what interests Rosenzweig is the nature of the relation, and its implications for daily living. The relation and its impact could not and would not be accounted for by the historicist and scientific trends in modern Judaic thought, as represented by the Wissenschaft des Judentums, which ultimately led to the study of Torah as an historical document. This approach, with its focus on the content and interpretation of revelation, relegates Law to the category of ritual, custom, or folkway (indicative of nineteenth-century theology, an atheistic theology), and ultimately fails to take the eventfulness of revelation seriously. In this case, reading Rosenzweig’s revelation through Blanchot’s écriture helps make legible in Rosenzweig an experience of reading, that is, revelation, that reaches beyond interpretation and hermeneutics and instead back “INTO LIFE.”35

31

Ibid., 76. Ibid., xx. 33 Ibid., 3. 34 Ibid., 76. 35 Ibid., 424. 32

90

90

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

It is impossible to offer a full account of the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible, Die Schrift, and the critical fallout in German-Jewish intellectual circles that its publication in 1925 produced. Recasting the German language on a model of biblical Hebrew, the Buber-Rosenzweig translation attempts to maintain the spoken quality and poetic devices of the original text. In preserving the aural/oral quality of the text, Rosenzweig and Buber hoped to retain the “experience” of revelation. The “voicing” element that they try and imbue the text with also points to Rosenzweig’s larger theoretical whatever that revelation is renewed in each voicing in every moment of its occurrence. A comparison of Luther’s translation of Gen. (Im Anfang) 1:3 to the Buber-Rosenzweig translation, shows how the experience of the voicing of revelation is encouraged to emerge in the latter: Buber-Rosenzweig translation: Gott sprach: Licht werde: Licht ward. Gott sah das Licht: daß es gut ist. Gott schied zwischen dem Licht und der Finsternis. Gott rief dem Licht: Tag! Und der Finsternis rief er: Nacht! Abend ward und Morgen ward: Ein Tag. Luther’s translation: Und Gott sprach: Es werde Licht! Und es ward Licht. Und Gott sah, daß das Licht gut war. Da schied Gott das Licht von der Finsternis Und nannte das Licht Tag und die Finsternis Nacht. Da ward aus Abend und Morgen der erste Tag. The text itself is not revelation, but the encounter with it is. Rosenzweig takes the experiential dimension of revelation seriously, and indicates through the use of a colon in first line of the script the equivalence between god speaking and light becoming. Revelation is a speaking-becoming in which the voicing of yehi-or is the very becoming. God’s voice does not transmit content in revelation, it is revelation itself. Rosenzweig and Buber draw out the importance of voicing as creation itself through their use of “rief” (rufen/calling) which stands in stark contrast to Luther’s “nannte” (nennen/ naming) which shows the universe as a response to God’s command. In this way, the human voicing of the text, which occurs in a real here and now as well as in voice particular to the one who is speaking, is an ever-renewing experience of revelation. The deictic dimension of revelation (i.e. hereness and nowness) that Rosenzweig attempts to perform through his translation is theorized in Star of Redemption as the central modality of un-working that rests at the heart of the language-experience.

91

REDEMPTIVE READINGS BETWEEN BL ANCHOT AND ROSENZWEIG

91

Revelation is an ever-renewed and ever-renewing experience that occurs in the presentness of experience but simultaneously gestures toward another horizon. Similarly, if one thinks back to Luria’s broken vessels, the encounter with a spark of shefa is both an encounter with revelation and the redemptive practice of releasing the spark of shefa back up to Ein Sof’s feminine aspect, Shekinah. Thus, in the repetition and experience of revelation “[man] has a feeling that both the waiting and the having are most intimately connected with each other. And this is just that feeling of the ‘remnant’ which has the revelation and awaits the salvation.”36 The recurrence of revelation, for Rosenzweig as well as Luria, is in fact also redemption (tikkun in Luria). Redemption might traditionally be thought of as an ultimate event beyond which history and time collapse into eternity, but revelation is redemptive for both thinkers precisely because language is an endless “holding open” and not a subsumption or synthesis or any other movement of unification. In much the same way for Blanchot how écriture always gestures to an outside, for Rosenzweig, “[t]he relationship between God and remnant points beyond itself.”37 Revelation, écriture, reading, and writing are all experiences that incessantly signal the impossibility of totality. For Rosenzweig, Luria, and Blanchot, redemptive-revelation is possible through language because, to borrow Rosenzweig’s phrase, as “more than analogy”38 it bears a remainder which resists totalization. Language is a ceaseless reference to that which is outside of it, and the experience of language maintains this experience of disorientation. Rosenzweig’s bible project reflects his insistence that language is more than analogy in two ways. The first way, which draws on mystical conceptions of language, shows that language is creation; the second way, which manifests itself through his bible translation itself, performs the experience of revelation through the voicing of the words. In Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig raises the stakes of the experience and moment of revelation (i.e. its deictic dimensions) by positioning human language as that which bears traces of concrete human reality and as that which is radically new, that is, not bound up in an eternal structure or transcendent language (like a Heideggerian essence of language that unfolds, for example). It is to concrete human reality that

36

Ibid., 405. Ibid., 410. 38 Rosenzweig writes that the constellation formed between the vocalization of revelation, the written form of revelation, and the experience of revelation shows that language is more than an analogy: “If language is more than only an analogy, if it is truly analogue—and therefore more than analogue—then that which we hear as a living word in our I and which resounds toward us out of our Thou must also be ‘as it is written’ in that great historical testament of revelation whose essentiality we recognized precisely from the presentness of our experience” (ibid., 198). 37

92

92

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Rosenzweig refers in the famous last line of Star of Redemption:  “INTO LIFE.”39 Rosenzweig’s entire project in Star of Redemption is to demonstrate how revelation is an experience that holds open totality by drawing in the contingency of the here and now. While Rosenzweig approaches language from the theological operation of revelation, the ethics implied remain true in Blanchot’s écriture, which does not retain “the divine” in the same theological mode as Rosenzweig. In fact, it is not in a shared epistemology, but rather in a shared moment of anti-Heideggerian solidarity that Hans Blumenberg’s work on metaphorology helps show how Rosenzweig’s theological operation of revelation and Blanchot’s écriture both open the question of community and ethics. Essentially, when Blumenberg argues for metaphor as Halbzeug, or “semi-finished product” that designates “material that is midway between a raw and a finished state,”40 he makes a move that parallels the anti-hermenuetical stance of Blanchot and Rosenzweig. Blumenberg who rails against the notion of metaphor as mere ornament demonstrates that one cannot simply brush aside the concrete experience of language’s emergence. In other words, between Blumenberg, Blanchot, and Rosenzweig language (metaphors, écriture, and revelation, respectively) indicates “leftover elements”41 that prevent absolutist thought from fully encompassing the world. Metaphors, argue Blumenberg, are history’s legible evidence or are historical matter. In Paradigms of Metaphorology, Blumenberg elaborates the notion of absolute metaphors as historical matter when he writes, “[Metaphors] have a history in a more radical sense than concepts, for the historical transformation of a metaphor brings to light the metakinetics of the historical horizons of meaning and ways of seeing within which concepts undergo their modifications.”42 Where concepts attempt to provide a complete and definitive account of the world, absolute metaphors are images that attempt to represent the totality of the world, thus leaving remainders or a surplus of referentiality in their deployment. While we cannot grasp the totality of the world through concepts, we can furnish images that represent the totality. There are elements of human experience that cannot be reduced to concepts, but that can be accessed through absolute metaphors. In this way, the lifeworld as Blumenberg conceives of it is not “given” (as it is for Heidegger with “thrownness”) but rather is the infinite source of our capacity for givenness. In this way metaphor for Blumenberg, écriture for Blanchot, and revelation for Rosenzweig avoid reification and consummation as finished

39

Ibid., 424. Blumenberg, Paradigms, 135. 41 Ibid., 143. 42 Ibid., 5. 40

93

REDEMPTIVE READINGS BETWEEN BL ANCHOT AND ROSENZWEIG

93

products because they are emergent—they are practices that lead us back “INTO LIFE.”43

References Blanchot, M. (1969), L’Entretien infini. Paris: Gallimard. Blanchot, M. (1980), L’écriture du désatre. Paris: Gallimard. Blanchot, M. (1983), The Writing of the Disaster, trans. A. Smock. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Blanchot, M. (1988), The Unavowable Community, trans. P. Joris. New York: Station Hill Press. Blanchot, M. (1989), The Space of Literature, trans. A. Smock. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Blanchot, M. (1990), The Infinite Conversation, trans. S. Hanson. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Blumenberg, H. (2010), Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. R. Savage. New York: Cornell University Press. Buber, M. and Rosenzweig, F. (1929), Die Schrift: www.obohu.cz. Dan, J. (1966), The Early Kabbalah, trans. Ron C. Kieber. New York: Paulist Press. Idel, M. (1999), Messianic Mystics. New Haven: Yale University Press. Klein, E. J. (2000), Kabbalah of Creation: The Mysticism of Isaac Luria, Founder of Modern Kabbalah. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Levinas, E. (1997), Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. S. Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Luzatto, M. (1970), General Principles of Kabbalah, trans. Philip Berg. Jerusalem: Research Centre of Kabbalah. Menzi, D. and Padeh, Z. (2008), The Tree of Life: Chayyim Vital’s Introduction to the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria. New York: Arizal Publications. Rosenzweig, F. (1970), The Star of Redemption, trans. W. Hallo. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Scholem, G. (1987), Origins of Kabbalah, trans. R. J. Zwi Werblowski. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

43

Rosenzweig, Star, 424.

94

95

5 “So what if you are big?”: The ethics of plurality in Indian literatures of devotion Ipshita Chanda

In this chapter, I attempt to map, through the devotional poetry composed in different Indian languages, a repertoire of signification that transmits a common set of beliefs across time, space, and language. This repertoire is created through what Merleau Ponty calls “sedimentation,”1 a phenomenon we can discern in reading the devotional poetry written in the middle period in the history of many Indian languages. Thus I  attempt to see how this phenomenon allows poetry to echo and re-form a critique of the hierarchical social practices legitimized and supported by institutionalized religion contemporary to each poet’s times. It is important to note that this grand narrative of “institutionalized religion,” in the entire period in which the poets considered in this chapter wrote, that is, between the eleventh and the seventeenth centuries, refers to what Jha has called Brahmanism.2 Jha not only distinguishes this from what is called Hinduism, he also shows the genesis of this ill-informed blanket term, linking it to the discourse of Hindutva which threatens the plural fabric of Indian society today.

1 Maurice Merleau Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language,” in Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 84–97. 2 Dwijendra Narayan Jha, “Looking for a Hindu Identity,” General Presidential Address, Indian History Congress, 66th Session, January 28–30, 2006, Santiniketan. Available at:  www.sacw. net/India_History/dnj_Jan06.pdf (accessed on October 15, 2017).

96

96

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

The word “Hindu” is rarely seen in the medieval vernacular bhakti literature as well. Ten Gaudiya Vaishnava texts in Bengali, their dates ranging from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, were examined. The word “Hindu” was found forty-one times, and Hindudharma seven times, in the 80,000 couplets of only five of the ten texts. Apart from the small number of occurrences, the interesting aspect of the evidence is that there is no explicit discussion of what “Hindu” or Hindudharma mean. The word “Hindu” is also used in different contexts by Vidyapati (early fifteenth century), Kabir (1450–1520), Ekanath (1533–99) and Anantadas (sixteenth century). On this basis a scholar has argued that a Hindu religious identity defined itself primarily in opposition to Muslims and Islam and had a continuous existence through the medieval period. This argument is seriously flawed because it is based on the patently wrong assumption that all non-Muslims were part of the postulated Hindu identity and ignores the basic fact that the medieval sants and bhakti poets used the term “Hindu” with reference to adherents of the caste-centric Brahmanical religion, against which they raised their voice.3 Instead of caste-centered Brahmanism, the poets professed Bhakti or devotion which led the human being to establish a human relation with the divine. A vocabulary for plurality as a social condition emerges from this poetry of devotion extant in almost all Indian languages, between the eleventh and the seventeenth centuries. The writers explain and justify faith by interrogating and condemning oppressive social institutions like caste that used religion to buttress their power. Bhakti as practice comprised the selfless devoted love of god and of His creation, regardless of self-seeking man-made hierarchies. Through a repertoire of signification used by the poets, we see this practice of devotion as the true religion, contrary to the religion subverted by power-seeking institutions contemporary to their times. For example, Kabir, an unlettered fifteenth-century Sant4 poet says: Where are you looking for me, o bandaa,5 I am within you 3

Ibid., 76. Sant refers to those ascetic devotees who worship the “nirgun” or god beyond attributes; they refuse to name their teacher or guru, saying that the “sadguru” or Supreme Being is the only teacher, and that the shabd (word) inside them is their mantra for worship. The idea of the shabd or word as life-force comes from Tantric Yogic practice; the Sant path of devotion may include the bodily training or Yoga that Tantra practice implies. See, for instance, Karine Schomer and W. H. Mcleod (eds), The Saints:  Studies in a Devotional Tradition of India (Motilal Banarsidas, 1987), 1–20. 5 Bandaa literally means “bondsman”; it also refers to humans in general as man may be described as “khuda ka bandaa,” the bondsman of god. Though khuda is a Persian word originally used in pre-Islamic Persian to refer to the king, after the advent of Islam, the word became interchangeable with the Arabic Allah. However, its use in speech or writing is common 4

97

“SO WHAT IF YOU ARE BIG?”

97

Not in temple or mosque, not in the Ka’aba or in Kailas Not in any ritual of worship, nor in yoga or renunciation. If you do search, you will find me at once, Kabir says, listen, o good people, I am the breath of your breath.6 Declaring empty of divine presence places of worship taken over by religious orthodoxy, like the temple or the mosque, or places identified with the rituals and spiritual dictates, like Kailas, the abode of the god Shiva, or Ka’aba, the pilgrimage recommended for Muslims, Kabir questions rituals and observances in the voice of god Himself. God calls to his devotee from within, asking why He is being sought in the world outside, in all the obvious places, when He is present in the devotee’s heart, using the very experience of being—“I am the breath of your breath”—to establish the presence of the divine within the human form, and simultaneously rejecting the injunctions of the Brahmans who upheld institutionalized religion of Kabir’s times. In this way, D. N. Jha’s distinction between Brahmanism and Hinduism,7 referred to above, also traces the colonial history of the word “Hindu.” “The British borrowed the word ‘Hindu’ from India, gave it a new meaning and significance, reimported it into India as a reified phenomenon called Hinduism, and used it in censuses and gazetteers as a category in their classification of the Indian people, paving the way for the global Hindu religious identity.”8 The poetry of devotion we are discussing is composed in modern9 Indian in many Indian languages, and may not be exclusively ascribed to Islamic culture. The plurality of Indian languages does not as a rule make this distinction rigidly in either colloquial or literary registers. 6 All quotations are from compositions in the original languages, popularly transmitted; unless otherwise mentioned, all translations are my own. 7 See also Vasudha Dalmia, “The Only Real Religion of the Hindus: Vaisnava Self-Representation in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Vasudha Dalmia and Heinrich von Stietencron (eds), Representing Hinduism:  The Construction of Religious Traditions and National Identity (Sage Publications, 1995), 176–210; Robert Frykenberg, “The Emergence of Modern ‘Hinduism’ as a Concept and as an Institution,” in Günther-Dietz Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke (eds), Hinduism Reconsidered (Manohar, 1997), 82–107; John Stratton Hawley, “Naming Hinduism,” Wilson Quarterly 15.3 (1991): 20–32; Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries:  Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1994), 16–17; and Heinrich von Stietencron, “Hinduism:  On the Proper Use of a Deceptive Term,” in Günther-Dietz Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke (eds), Hinduism Reconsidered (Manohar, 1997), 32–53. For a contesting view that holds the rise of Islam as the cause for the formation of a Hindu identity, see David N. Lorenzen, “Who Invented Hinduism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41.4 (1999): 630–59. Also see David N. Lorenzen, “Introduction,” in David N. Lorenzen (ed.), Bhakti Religion in North India:  Community Identity and Political Action (State University of New  York Press, 1996), 1–34. The point however remains: that there was no “Hinduism” at the time of the poets, that references to Hindu were to diverse entities and groups and had nothing to do with religion. 8 Jha, “Looking for a Hindu Identity,” 17. 9 B. Mallikarjun, “Languages of India according to the 1991 Census,” Language in India, November 7, 2001. See also Jyotirindra Dasgupta, Language Conflict and National

98

98

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

languages, and in many cases, are the first instances of poetic composition in those languages. They are simultaneous with the period of formation and consolidation of these languages. Hence Merleau Ponty’s process of sedimentation is not only a diachronic or linguistic one. We are attempting to understand this phenomenon synchronically as well as diachronically in a plural society where differences in language, belief, and culture are the norm and coexistence is an issue of daily relevance. The power-seeking hegemonic Brahmanical culture is reviled by the poets. They mock institutionalized religion, directly claiming from the divine the authority to criticize all established norms of social and economic hierarchies, though divinity is imagined in myriad forms. This opens up the question of literary modernity in the Indian context: the equalizing pluralist view of human life in this world that characterized earliest devotional poetry in “modern” Indian languages was derived from one set of religious beliefs and questioned another set of religious beliefs, reinterpreting or repudiating faith in practices which contradicted the idea of plurality and equality in the eyes of God. The belief in equality before God and service to Him through His creatures became current from the “premodern” or “middle”10 period in Indian literature, with poets criticizing social practices of discrimination that were, then as they are now, legitimated by Brahmanical religion. The devotional poetry, written in many ‘modern’ Indian languages, traversing time and space, advocates a form of sociability tied to a spiritual economy that contradicts the social and moral demands of modernity acquired in contact with the colonizing West. Situated within this spiritual economy, this poetry concretizes that contradiction inherent in the relations between man, god, and the world in a plural society forced to abide by stringent social hierarchies in the name of God. Thus a critique of all forms of hypocrisy and show, of dogma and blind convention is directed against such a society as a rejection from God himself, through His devotee the poet. Consequently, whether such a critique can be a general attribute of literature in the “modern” period, that is, following colonial contact, is a question we must raise here. In order to answer it, the claims made for the devotional poetry of the “middle” period to be called “modern” must be examined from the poetry itself.

Development: Group Politics and National Language Policy in India (University of California Press, 1970); Naheed Saba, Linguistic Heterogeneity and Multilinguality in India:  A Linguistic Assessment of Indian Language Policies, September 18, 2013:  http://hdl.handle. net/10603/11248 (accessed on October 15, 2017). 10 See K. M. Munshi, “Introduction,” in Suniti Kumar Chatterji (ed.), Cultural Heritage of India Vol V:  Languages and Literatures (Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, 1937, revised 1978), 3–12; Satya P. Mohanty, “Alternative Modernities and Medieval Indian Literature: The Oriya Lakshmi Purana and Radical Pedagogy,” Diacritics 38.3 (2009) 3–21.

99

“SO WHAT IF YOU ARE BIG?”

99

Reading this poetry will help us understand the distinction made by the poets of the middle period in the history of Indian language literatures, between the “true” religion on the one hand and the “institutionalized religion” on the other. They advocated an ethos which we claim for modernity and which is an aspect of the discursive construction of modernity itself. Thus, if Indian language cultures are to be considered, the role played by literature in repairing the fault lines caused by religion does not seem a particularly modern phenomenon. Devotional poets, whether they were of the Bhakti, Sufi, or Sant traditions, advocated coexistence in a plural society by legitimizing social equality as a reflection of the equality of all creatures in the eyes of God. The first section of this chapter locates these poets,11 from among the different Sant,12 Bhakt,13 and Sufi14 orders in time, place, and language. These poets constructed and shared a particular structure of feeling grounded in similar beliefs and practices sedimented within the literary tradition of the languages in which they composed. In the second section, we read the poetry, varied in time, place, language, and religious denomination, sharing a similar vocabulary and referential world, echoing one another in their belief in the efficacy of “bhakti,” that is, an emotional relation with the divine. The speaking “I” or the seeing eye of this poetry is situated in a philosophy of religion that is distinct from the orthodox, which is one reason for indicating the humanist and critical vision of these poets as the ethos of modernity. We have hitherto claimed that modernity was inaugurated through contact with the colonizing European cultures. Bringing together the poets from various languages, religious denominations, and periods, I  submit that these poets imagined a plural society and espoused religious doctrines that professed equality in the eyes of god, and hence, respect for diversity as well as the repudiation of man-made hierarchies. Thus, the poetry represents an ethos that developed in a period long before colonial modernity, and was meant, at that time too, to address the fault lines caused by institutionalized religion. The poet’s faith in a benevolent god, who responds to the devotee regardless of his social location, found expression through poetry. By “social location” I  do not mean the caste system alone, but the overlapping structures of gender, class, 11

The poets discussed in this paper are Kabir (fifteenth century, Khadi Boli/Hindi), Namdev (thirteenth to fourteenth centuries, Marathi), Tukaram (seventeenth century, Marathi), Bulle Shah (seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, Sindhi), and Rahim (sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, Hindi). 12 See Schomer and McLeod, The Saints. 13 John Hawley, A Storm of Songs:  India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Harvard University Press, 2015); Lorenzen, Bhakti Religion in North India (SUNY Press, 1996); Neeti M. Sadarangani, Bhakti Poetry in Medieval India (Sarup & Sons, 2004); Krishna Sharma, Bhakti and the Bhakti Movement: A New Perspective (Motilal Banarsidas, 1987). 14 Annemarie Schimmel, Islam in the Indian Subcontinent (Brill, 1980); Annemarie Schimmel, As Through a Veil: Mystical Poetry in Islam (Oneworld Publications, 1982).

100

100

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

and caste. The poet addressed these forms of discrimination as man-made vitiations of the equality of all beings before the creator; the creator’s name was often different for different worshippers, as a study of the addressee in the poems will show. But despite the varied forms of worship, or the community affiliations and geographical location of the poets, their poems are singular articulations of a common spiritual and human vision, expressing a mode of devotion and worship distinct from that of institutionalized religion. The poets were characterized as devotees (bhakt) or saints (sant) and were all described as mystics because their poetry thematized the search for divine grace through the vocabulary of human relations. The common set of beliefs referred to earlier, consisted in the equality of all in the eyes of god, the single godhead, regardless of different names of god, different forms of worship, and different institutionalized religions which different poets called their own. These common beliefs are the ways in which devotional poetry addresses social fault lines caused by difference, by concretizing traditions of coexistence and mutuality which I term the “ethics of pluralism.”

I Kabir and other subcontinental15 poets who lived between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries were of different “religious” persuasions, that is, they described themselves as belonging to different religious denominations. Some, like Kabir, professed to eschew the very idea of a religious sect or denomination. Yet, their views regarding the relations between god, self, and world led them to eloquently reject all earthly hierarchies and to preach the equality of all creation in the eyes of God. This is not to claim that they believed in the same form of God, or in a form at all; accordingly, their concept of the self and world changed too. The self-God relation also inspires a different structure for the self-world relations, based on human relations in the world. For example, the trivialities of the world and those who are caught in them, the people who lust after wealth and power, become the butt of criticism. These poets composed16 poetry in different languages and in different parts of the subcontinent, at different times, tracing their lineage to one another, learning each other’s songs, and collecting the poetry of other groups which shared their principles of faith. Their beliefs do not form an “alternate” religion,

15

I use the word “subcontinental” instead of “Indian” as many of the languages used by the poets—Bengali, Punjabi, Sindhi—are used across the subcontinent and not limited to India alone. 16 Many of the poets were unlettered, and orally composed their poems which were remembered through performance and passed on until they were collected. The Sikh holy book the Guru Granth Sahib, compiled in 1604 ce, includes, for example, the first written text of the verses of Kabir, Namdev, and Tukaram. ‘Composed’ is therefore the term preferred to ‘written’.

101

“SO WHAT IF YOU ARE BIG?”

101

nor are they a secular alternative to repair the “fault lines” caused by religion in modern times. Rather, the diversity of their religious practices and persuasions questions a uniform logic of historical periodization and of categorization in literary studies, even as the ethical import may be called “modern” in nature, as we have tried to point out and will attempt to substantiate further below. I would like to open to question the conceptualization of the ‘modern’ in South Asian literary cultures. In histories of Indian literatures,17 regardless of the language in which the literature is written, the modern period is associated with secular humanistic beliefs, which “modernizing” Indians acquired under the influence of the civilizing mission of colonization. But the period between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries, when the Sant and Sufi poets flourished across India, shows us that the poetry of devotion already proclaimed the ideals of humanism and equality and repudiated social hierarchy in the name of equality before god. These beliefs gave rise to a poetic idiom of spiritual faith and worship based in love that subverted the social hierarchy legitimated by the Dharmashastras,18 the oldest going back to Apastambha, dated 400 years before the Christian Era and in practice in the times contemporary to the poets. Since I  argue that faith itself enjoined upon the devotee the belief in equality before god and a consequent form of social behavior, that is, equal treatment of all castes and classes, the historical specificity of the “religion” that the poets criticized and the kind of religious practice and belief they professed in its place must be explicitly clarified. It is necessary, hence, to reiterate that the use of the word Hinduism to refer to any religion in the time in which the poets under discussion lived, is an anachronism.19 The Brahmans controlled the society through what they claimed was divine sanction, and used religion in their favor, while the tradition of devotion, that is, the Sant and Bhakti traditions, challenged just that use. The latter’s test of true worship and true devotion, as distinct from rituals and conventions empty of spiritual content, is the emotional surrender of the devotee to god. God may be formless, a creative principle, an incarnation of a principle, its reincarnation: a relation with god is analogous to a human relation, and the latter serves as a metaphor for it. Jha’s use of Brahmanism as a descriptive term for the social organization headed by the Brahmans distinguishes it from the vast number of sects

17

Sisir Kumar Das, A History of Indian Literature, 1800–1910:  Western Impact Indian Response (Sahitya Akademi, 1991); E. V. Ramakrishnan and Udaya Kumar. “Modernism in Indian Literature,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Literary Modernism (Taylor and Francis, 2016). 18 P. V. Kane, History of Dharmasastra (Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1973); Patrick Olivelle, Dharmasutras: The Law Codes of Ancient India (Oxford University Press, 1999). 19 Peter Gottschalk and Mathew N. Schmalz, Engaging South Asian Religions:  Boundaries, Appropriations, and Resistance (SUNY Press, 2011); see also Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-colonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East” (Taylor & Francis, 2001).

102

102

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

and belief systems spawned by the different schools of philosophy20 that are basically distinguished by their belief in the authority of the Vedas as sources of knowledge, belief in the atman and Brahman, and belief in the pantheon of gods. Those who hold these beliefs are members of the six orthodox schools and are grouped as “astik,” while those who do not hold these beliefs are among the heterodox schools, and called “nastik.” However, identifying the Vedas with Hinduism automatically pushes all these schools into the Gladstone bag of Hinduism too. In fact the idea of a single homogenous Hinduism flowing seamlessly from the Vedas is just historically nonexistent until the nineteenth century, as we have noted above. Up to the present times, the idea that “Hindu” refers to a single monolithic religion and is synonymous with India as a homogenous whole misrepresents the history and reality of the subcontinent and has been identified with the politics of communalism. The religious practices dominating the caste-divided society in which these poets wrote were structured and regulated by the Brahmans who claimed, as a class, to be divinely appointed and scripturally authorized to mediate between god and devotee. The caste hierarchy gradually crystallized during this period, and the devotional poets from different languages and regions struck out against it, professing faith in the single god, despite His many names, and insisting that His mercy was for all, down to the lowest and the ostracized, those who find no place in the caste and class hierarchy which the Brahmans use scriptures and other religious institutions to legitimize. The Brahmanical religion imposed upon human communities hierarchies held to be inherent in the very structure of society itself, legitimized by reference to the ‘divinely given’ nature of such a structure. This very structure of worship and the religion of which it was a part were opposed by what are often called “reform” movements by historians, the earliest being Jainism and Buddhism.21 Engaging with the ideas of human endeavor and material reality in the orthodox schools, the heterodox schools such as Buddhism and Jainism were in time structured into separate religions with institutional forms of worship and internal hierarchies according to different stages of spiritual progress.22 Through a rereading of the Vedanta, Shankaracharya23 20

The six orthodox schools are Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Yoga, Samkhya, Mimamsa, and Vedanta and the heterodox schools are Jain, Buddhist, Carvaka, Ajivika, and Ajnana. 21 Vijay Nath, “From ‘Brahmanism’ to ‘Hinduism’:  Negotiating the Myth of the Great Tradition,” Social Scientist 29.3/4 (2001): 19–50. See also Naomi Appleton, Shared Characters in Jain, Buddhist and Hindu Narrative: Gods, Kings and Other Heroes (Routledge, 2017). 22 For a comparison of beliefs, see John C. Plott et al., Global History of Philosophy: The Axial Age, Volume 1 (Motilal Banarsidas, 2000). Also, S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy, Volume 1 (Oxford University Press, 2008). 23 Shankaracharya or AdiSankara lived in the last part of the eighth century ce and is credited with founding the philosophy of Adavaita Vedanta through Brahmasutrabhasya, a commentary on selected Upanishads. See Y. Keshava Menon, The Mind of Adi Shankaracharya (Jaico

103

“SO WHAT IF YOU ARE BIG?”

103

attempted to neutralize the criticism leveled by the Buddhists and the Jains against the polytheism and anthropomorphism of the Brahman-controlled religious practices. He propounded the philosophy of Advaita, or monism, literally meaning “without a second.” Shankaracharya thus posited monism, imagining a single creative power that transcends all deities and is the source of all representation. This idea found echoes in many other religious communities, for example, in the monistic faith of the Sufis who professed Islam, and among the iconoclastic Sant poets who refused to bow to the tyranny of hierarchy and ritual. Some of the beliefs encapsulated in the Brahmanical response to Buddhist interrogation, therefore, could be traced to the Vedanta,24 accepted today as “Hindu” scripture. Additionally, some sects traced their deities to the Puranas,25 also accepted as part of “Hindu” scripture, but placed them within a framework that amounted to an almost total refiguring of the belief-system from which they were drawn.26 The common faith in the immanence of the divine in all creation and in love as the path of spiritual self-transcendence, rather than belief in the performance of rituals presided over, directed by and beneficial to the highest caste, the Brahmans, led to a rejection of the existing religious sanction for social hierarchies, proclaiming the equality of all modes of worship and all sects of people. Often, as, for example, in the lines by Kabir with which this chapter opened, all modes of institutionalized worship today labeled “Hindu” were satirized by these poets for their equal uselessness as paths to spiritual fulfillment. Thus although one group of poets, the Veerashaivites27 in twelfth-century Karnataka,28 drew their lineage from the Shaivite Nayanars of eighth-century Tamil Nadu, and wrote during the time of Shaivism, the religion of royal power, they rejected the caste structure of mainstream society.

Publishing House, 2011); Daniel H. H. Ingalls, “Śaṁkara’s Arguments against the Buddhists,” Philosophy East and West, University of Hawaii Press, 3.4 (1954): 291–306. 24 Vedanta is one of the schools of orthodox Indian philosophy, another name for the Upanishads, which appear at the end of the Vedas. See Suniti Kumar Chatterji (ed.), Cultural Heritage of India Vol. V: Languages and Literatures (Calcutta: Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, revised 1978). 25 Ibid., 64–71. 26 See, for instance, John Stratton Hawley and Vasudha Narayanan, The Life of Hinduism (University of California Press, 2006); Janmajit Roy, Theory of Avatāra and Divinity of Chaitanya (Atlantic Publishers, 2002). 27 See K. Ishwaran, “Bhakti Tradition and Modernisation: The Case of Lingayatism,” in Jayant Lele (ed.), Tradition and Modernity in Bhakti Movements (Brill, 1981), 72–82. For a separate view and translations, see A. K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva (Penguin, 1973). Also, Jan Peter Schouten, Revolution of the Mystics (Motilal Banarsidas, 1995). 28 Formerly the state of Mysore.

104

104

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

The Varkari29 poets of Maharashtra, Namdev and Tukaram among them, addressed their deity as Vithal, the child-form of Krishna, reincarnation of Vishnu, but their rejection of Brahmanism was equally strong. As Tukaram says, “What do I want with these people? I must get going now and search for Vithal.”30 He mocks the religion, institutionalized by the Brahman priests and preachers, calling them miracle workers and mass hypnotists, patriarchs, necromancers, exorcists, witch doctors, and seers. He advocates instead the simple love of god, in which there is no magic or artifice. But these “two and a half syllables of love,” as Kabir puts it, are totally foreign to a great pandit or scholar, stewed in dialectics.31 The common belief shared by devotee, saint, and mystic is that institutionalized religion impedes the path of love and installs the ego as an obstruction in the self’s journey to the divine. All these poets were members of religious communities which drew their iconography, ideas, and concepts from established Brahmanical practices and inverted them, symbolically but explicitly, to reject these very practices and proclaim everyone as equal in the eyes of god. Their compositions form the outline of an ethics that transcends the morality imposed by hegemonic Brahmanical religion. Though we loosely refer to these poets as participants in a single movement, we have also emphasized above that they composed in different languages, in different regions of the geopolitical space we now know as India, and across eight centuries. Their opposition to Brahmanism, and its patrons, the royal and aristocratic class, their common insistence on personal and direct communication with the divine, formed a heterogeneous, plural tradition. Among them were the Sant poets like Kabir (fifteenth century) and the Sufi poets like Bulle Shah (seventeenth to eighteenth century)32 who did not belong to any sector movement that could be identified as Hindu. In this ethical scheme, the ritualistic worship instituted by the religious power-mongers is replaced by individual or community expressions of personal devotion. Love is professed as a path to god, as a means to 29

Jayant Lele, “Community, Discourse and Critique in Jnaneshwar,” in Jayant Lele (ed.), Tradition and Modernity in Bhakti Movements (Brill, 1981), 104–12; Bhalchandra Nemade, “The Revolt of the Underprivileged:  Style in the Expression of the Warkari Movement,” in Jayant Lele (ed.), Tradition and Modernity in Bhakti Movements (Brill, 1981), 113–23; Shima Iwao, “The Vithoba Faith of Maharashtra: The Vithoba Temple of Pandharpur and Its Mythological Structure,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 15.2–3 (1988): 183–97. See also Karine Schomer and W. H. Mcleod (eds), The Saints: Studies in a Devotional Tradition of India (Motilal Banarsidas, 1987), 3–4. 30 See Iwao, “The Vithoba Faith of Maharashtra,” 183–97. 31 “Logic in Classical Indian Philosophy”: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-india/. 32 Bulle Shah is representative of the Sufi poets of northern and western India who composed in Sindhi, Hindi, Punjabi, and Saraiki. Bulle Shah composed in the tradition of Shah Hussain (1538–99) and Sultan Bahu (1621–99), and his contemporaries were the Sufi poets Shah Saraf (1640–1724), Shah Abdul Latif (1689–1752), and Sachal Sarmast (1739–1827) as well as Waris Shah (1722–98).

105

“SO WHAT IF YOU ARE BIG?”

105

transcendental knowledge of the divine as well as a way of living in society. The god to whom love and complaints were addressed by the devotee, and whose love legitimized their view of human equality, could be the formed deity, as we find in Tukaram, or beyond imagined form, as in Kabir, or a form special to a particular place, for example, the various local forms of Shiva worshipped by the Veerashaivites. At the core of these diverse cultures of devotion, identified somewhat reductively and as we have seen with reference to the Sufi poets, wrongly, as “Hindu,” lies the necessity to engage with difference as a lived reality. A daily life-world shaped by conversations across difference forms the context of religious faith and devotional practice in the period under consideration. The poetry expressing that devotion finds the source for this conversation beyond the empirical world by addressing itself to god. This is necessary because the rulers of this world have institutionalized oppression in the name of god. The “true” religion then is not a single name-able religion but a common understanding of the concept of god through self-world relations, which form the core of faith and the ground for practices of worship. The poetry of devotion is a manifestation of this faith; its transmission and survival across time, space, and language occurs through the formation of a repertoire of signification that interrogates the role of religion in establishing fault lines in the modern world. This task is undertaken, furthermore, earlier than the time designated as historically modern, by the poetry of devotion. For the Bhakti, Sant, and Sufi poets, a common set of beliefs in the relation between god and creation, and god and the individual, impacts relations among individuals in society, superseding any differences imposed upon individuals by social hierarchy. Scholars33 have proposed models for the complex interactions of various traditions, milieux, value systems, and modes of discourse which together constitute “Indian” culture, to explain the religious import of the poetic expression of the particular relations between individual, world, and god. This common belief generates a repertoire of signification expressing faith in god’s powers, regardless of His attributes and extending to the rejection of hierarchies, most especially those propagated in God’s name. Distancing the practices and rituals identified with the hegemonic Brahmanical religion through poetic resignification, these poets imagine a community based on god’s love for all beings. This love fosters a commitment to ontological pluralism, whose source is monistic faith whether it is the Advaitavad from which some Bhakti sects draw their spiritual philosophy, or the worship of the one god by the Sufis. Followers of these paths advocated equality before god and rejected social hierarchies as well as the “fault lines” caused by institutionalized religions. 33

See, for example, F. Hardy, “From the Illness of Love to Social Hermeneutics: Three Tamil Customs with Some Reflections on Method and Meaning,” in Richard F. Gombrich (ed.), Indian Ritual and Its Exegesis (Oxford University Press, 1988), 113–69.

106

106

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Thus a modern politics of fundamentalism uses religious difference as a rigid marker of identity, and claims that spiritual purity comes from maintenance of this difference. Difference becomes a religiously sanctioned source of social fissure, the basis of exclusion and inclusion from which power is derived and promotes an identity politics. But the persistence of the beliefs of the Bhakt and Sant poets into modernity, and the existence of communities formed around them, prompts us to enquire into ways of coexisting with difference, in opposition to identity politics. Hence this devotional poetry proposes pluralism as a response of repair, as a way of meeting and living with difference in a society which is plural in nature, but not as a modern response by any means. As we have indicated above, such a tradition of pluralism runs through religious beliefs and practices prevalent in “India”34 from precolonial times. The question, to which we now turn, is, what is the role played by the poetry of devotion in creating and perpetuating this tradition.

II The burden of this section of the chapter is to show the relation of the poetic word to the received tradition, which Merleau Ponty describes as “sedimentation.” Citing Husserl, he describes “tradition” as “the power to forget origins and to give to the past not a survival, which is the hypocritical form of forgetfulness, but a new life, which is the noble form of memory.”35 This “new life” is its “significative intention.”36 It is a matter of realizing a certain arrangement of already signifying instruments or already speaking significations (morphological, syntactical, and lexical instruments, literary genres, types of narrative, modes of presenting events, etc.) which arouses in the hearer the presentiment of a new and different signification, and which inversely (in the speaker or

34 Inasmuch as we can speak of an India before the anti-colonial movement bore fruit in defined boundaries, still contested, and a constitution. One of the uses to which the poetry and the doctrines discussed in this paper were put was to propose a spiritual nationalism. The Bhakti poets were used as examples by Gandhi to answer Ambedkar’s critique of the caste system. Ambedkar replied by showing that equality of worship did not translate into social equality. His examples came from the Varkari poets. See B. R. Ambedkar, “A Reply to the Mahatma,” Annihilation of Caste, 1936:  http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/index. html (accessed October 15, 2017), point 7 onward. 35 Merleau Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language,” 85. 36 Ibid., 90.

107

“SO WHAT IF YOU ARE BIG?”

107

the writer) manages to anchor this original signification in the already available ones.37 Thus “resignification” occurs in the very act of speech. The world is appropriated or grasped through speech that recreates the given of language into a singular utterance. It speaks the unique encounter between the world and the human being. “This act of expression—this joining through transcendence of the linguistic meaning of speech and the signification it intends,”38 characterizes all speech. Its relation to tradition, as we have seen earlier, begins with the learning of language itself, which Merleau Ponty describes as the operation of language. Language is the availability of significations “which in their time, were established as significations I can have recourse to—that I have—through the same sort of expressive operation. It is this operation which must be described if I want to comprehend the peculiar power of speech.”39 An aspect of the “peculiar power of speech” shines forth in poetry because as poetic utterance, it draws attention to the phenomenon of “resignification.” As Merleau Ponty points out, “The French language from the moment it was born, did not contain French literature; I had to throw them off center and recenter them in order to make them signify what I intended. It is just this coherent deformation of available significations that arranges them in a new sense and takes the speaking subject as well through a decisive step.”40 Similarly, in devotional poetry, despite differences in religious affiliation, languages, beliefs, and eras, a repertoire of signification grounded in shared spiritual aims and the means of attaining them is made visible. Thus we can locate poetic expression in a structure of feeling that foregrounds a special relation of devotion which not only concretizes the spiritual quest of the human being, but also grounds it in worldly relations with other human beings. In Merleau Ponty’s view, this is the result of sedimentation: For from this point on, the preparatory stages of expression that make up a literary sign, from the first lines to the emergence of meaning at the end of a whole—are directly given as derivatives of that meaning which is now installed in culture. The way is open for the speaking subject and for others to go directly to the whole. He will not need to reactivate the entire process; he will possess it eminently in its result. A  personal and interpersonal tradition will have been founded . . . Sedimentation occurs and I shall be able to think further. Speech, as distinguished from language, is that moment when the significative intention (still silent and wholly in act) proves itself capable of incorporating itself into my culture and the culture of others—of shaping me and others by transforming the

37

Ibid. Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 91. 38

108

108

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

meaning of cultural instruments. It becomes available in turn because in retrospect it gives us the illusion that it was contained in the already available significations, whereas by a sort of ruse it espoused them only in order to infuse them with a new life.41 For Merleau Ponty, sedimentation entails a contraction of all of the steps leading up to the subject’s return to the well of “significative intention.” Hence the subject does not need to return to the original context, but rather she can draw from this repository of signification and as a result, she can “think further” than the original intent of any one author. The “new life” with which the poetry of devotion “transforms the meaning of cultural instruments” is an inversion of the prevailing significations associated with religious and social hierarchies. Thus word, language, and writing are contentious sites in this poetry, as Tukaram, the seventeenth-century Marathi poet, reminds readers: Without a word I have spoken At best I have presented what was absent The poem occurs says Tuka, unknown to my ears.42 In this way, the devotee takes precedence over the poet, the primordial word over the event of poetry. The pride of the poet or his power to evoke is suspended in favor of the power of the divine word to create, leaving the poet as a vehicle. Likewise, the Sufi poet Bulle Shah proclaims, “Stop all this learning my friend / All you need to learn is just one thing / The first letter of the alphabet”—in order to attack institutionalized religion, as well as the consequent social and political hierarchies often articulated by the learned and literary elites. Bulle Shah invokes alif, the first letter of the alphabet which begins Allah, the name of god. Bulle Shah says there is no end to learning, and those who read books and commentaries by the pile ultimately do nothing but mislead and exploit the poor and the ignorant. His critique is echoed by Kabir who declares, “Two and a half syllables of love are enough to make one learned—but the world has lost its intelligence reading and reading, more and more.” Historically, the caste hierarchy was maintained by invoking the so-called language of the gods, Sanskrit, to legitimize the power of the Brahmans who could perform the required rituals in this language because they could refer to texts written in it. But a radical critique of this use of literacy in the service of institutionalized social 41

Ibid., 92. Translated by Arun Kolatkar, “Translations from Tukaram and Other Marathi Poets,” Journal of South Asian Literature 17.1 (1982): 111–14.

42

109

“SO WHAT IF YOU ARE BIG?”

109

domination was provided for common people by thinkers and poets who counted as their strength their willingness to succumb to an overpowering love for god and for his creation, unmediated by ritual or hierarchy. Regardless of whether the poets are Sufi, Sant, or Bhakt poets, they reimagined knowledge as coming from love, and rejected knowledge legitimized by hegemonic institutions. They are severely critical of the external obstructions put in the way of the seeker after the spirit by religious, social, and linguistic hierarchies. They foreground the fact that faith is neither institutionalized, nor is spirituality generated by institutions. The practices and beliefs these poets espoused and propagated as religion stem from different visions of the fundamental relation between man and god: for a relation as close and as mysterious as this, can there be only a single description? In response to this question, we may contrast Tukaram’s vision of god as the supreme poet, with Namdev’s (thirteenth to fourteenth century) address to god, in the voice of a wife speaking of her husband: I am a married woman, Ramu is my husband I carefully adorn myself for his love Go to sleep, sleep deeply, people In my body and heart, beloved Ramu will awaken. Namdev,43 venerated in western India, is credited with having begun the tradition of devotional music in the Indian state of Maharashtra and recorded, as many other Sant poets of western India are recorded, in the Guru Granth Sahib, the book that the Sikhs of Punjab respect as their eternal teacher. It is difficult to retain in translation the layers of allusion that construct this poem, but since our task as students of literature is to see how it achieves the effects that it does which enable it to fulfill whatever greater goal it has, we must try to hear resonances in some specific words. “Main bauri mera Ramu bhataru” or “I am a married woman, Ramu is my husband.” Ramu is a diminutive, a term of endearment for god—not the Pauranic Rama, because the speaker of these verses is an unlettered devotee of the single god, for whom Rama is just another name for god.44 “Ramu is the one who provides me food”—the literal translation of bhataru, and it alludes to the husband’s charge of keeping the woman to whom he is married fed. “Rachirachi ta kau karau singaru” or “I carefully adorn myself for his love.”

See Winand M. Callewaert and Mukunda Laṭh, The Hindi Songs of Namdev (Peeters Publishers, 1989); Christian Lee Novetzke, Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India (Columbia University Press, 2008). 44 Christian Lee Novetzke, “A Family Affair,” in Guy L. Beck (ed.), Alternative Krishnas: Regional and Vernacular Variations on a Hindu Deity (State University of New  York Press, 2005), 113–38. 43

110

110

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Derived from the Sanskrit, in local usage, Sringar is transformed to singaru. It is a rasa, one of the nine types of aesthetic apprehension theorized by Bharata in the Natyashastra, coming from the ratibhava or erotic potential in human feelings. Sringar signifies the emotion of erotic love—it is also ornamentation, decoration, perhaps to beguile and seduce the lover, here it conflates with the legitimate husband who provides sustenance, the image of god which the devotee worships. As the woman wishes that everyone fall asleep, the devotee poet refers obliquely to the sleep of weariness, the sleep of ignorance, the sleep of worldliness, the sleep that the rest of the household must sink into, before in soul and body, the tan and man of the devotee, the love of Ram awakens.45 Awakens suggests the desire that awakens in the body of a wife awaiting her husband when the household has sunk into sleep. It awakens as the flame of knowledge, as awareness of one’s unending love for Ramu, god, the beloved. This ideal of love as worship is the pivot of devotion across communities belonging to different faiths because, as described by Krishna in the Bhagwat Gita,46 the path of love has as much power as the path of knowledge. This love is expressed through personal devotion to a mystic, a deity, a saint, or to the power of creation. The embodiment of the divine in the devotee is akin to the possession and madness of love. For Bulle Shah, the call of god occurs in the form of a flute, the defining instrument of Krishna, the “Hindu” avatar of Vishnu, a Pauranic deity.47 But here the player is Ranjha, a legendary lover popularized by the long ballad or dastan of Heer and Ranjha, an allegorical story composed by Waris Shah, Bulle Shah’s contemporary. These lovers defy all worldly obstacles, uniting in death. Bulle Shah calls the player of the flute a “good, beautiful Ranjha,” and asks the young man why he suddenly plays his flute. Speaking in the voice of a female to her beloved, the male poet describes the effect of love that the flute-player invokes, “My heart stirs up at the sound of this flute, my whole being answers the call/How you break and make relations with a single tune, into a single tune you meld all being.” The player of the flute, the Krishna figure in the poetry of a Sufi devotee, has the same power that Krishna’s flute has: “[I]n this tune the cosmos, the good world and the stars pour their own beings/Their mingled breath circles in the living world, intoxicating creation.”

45

But manu may also be simply my self. For a discussion of Gita’s role in bhakti, see Karen Pechelis Prentiss, The Embodiment of Bhakti (Oxford University Press, 1999), 6. 47 I use quotation marks with the word “Hindu” here to emphasize that different religious traditions are brought together in the verse  – Bulle Shah follows a Sufi order, composes in an Indian language, and evokes the image of an anthropomorphic god who is known as an incarnation of Vishnu, the preserver in the Hindu pantheon found in the Puranas. 46

111

“SO WHAT IF YOU ARE BIG?”

111

Like the Sufi poets of Punjab, Namdev, who I  mention above, is also revered as a teacher among the Sikhs of Punjab. The Sikhs are followers of a religion founded by Guru Nanak, a teacher and a Sant.48 They apply the same honorific to Namdev, although he belongs to the Varkari denomination which worshipped Vithoba, a form of Vishnu. The temple for the deity is located in Pandharpur in Maharashtra, an area identified cartographically as a Hindu state. This location would make Namdev a Hindu, since Vithoba is known as a form of Vishnu, a deity traceable to the Puranas; the Vishnu Purana, the Bhagwat Purana, the Padma Purana, all mention the deity, known as the preserver of the world. However, even though Namdev and the Varkari saints, like Tukaram, who follow him worship a formed god, a form of Vishnu, they reject caste and class hierarchies and advocate, through the tenet of “loksangraha,” a community based on love. In addition to Nanak’s Sikh followers, the Sufi, Bulle Shah also echoes Namdev’s sentiments about love as a form of worship. Bullah is the lover of him who has made the world He conceals his love from everyone People keep calling him an unbeliever And he keeps calling out to Allah. Love is the shared basis of the ethics preached by these different communities of devotion spanning different regions, religions, and languages of the subcontinent. The egalitarian view of humanity held in the Qur’an, which asserts that all humans are created equal and the monism that emerges from Sankaracharya’s reading of the principal Upanishads both appear to have an important role to play in the crystallization of these similar beliefs. Historically, it has been easy for readers to infer from these tenets that humans different from oneself whether by caste, religion, or community are manifestations of the divine formless power, and hence can equally serve as vehicles of the divine spirit. This ability opens up an ongoing conversation with diversity, a daily necessity in a multicultural society. A  large part of the poetry of devotion composed in this period treats god as one would treat another human being in a variety of social relationships; consequently, devotion takes on the feeling appropriate for that social relationship. In other words, the different kinds of bhakti—dasya, vatsalya, sringara, and sakhya—address him as friend, master, lover, child, and is common to the repertoire of the Vaishnav poets. In the tradition of Namdev, Tukaram writes in the same language in the seventeenth century so that god is a debtor and

48 Susan Prill, “Representing Sainthood in India: Sikh and Hindu Visions of Namdev,” Material Religion 5.2 (2009): 156–79.

112

112

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

he owes his devotee repayment for love: “You pawned your feet and got my faith/Love is the interest: shell out.”49 Lest this be construed as the esoteric mysticism of the east, let us turn to the social consequences of this belief. The belief that the formless god is present in creation and that all who submit to the will of god are equal in his eyes, leads to these devotee-poets seeing the presence of the divine in oneself as well as in other human beings, no matter how different. This presence automatically demands of the devotee two things: first that they honor the other as the created form of a formless god. As Kabir declares, humans are made of clay which takes on different disguises among Hindu and Muslim. He enjoins us to recognize the formless god in this clay, lift the veil of worldliness in order to see reality. This is only possible if we are able to see beyond the letter, and beyond the outer trappings of identity. Bulle Shah characterizes it as the need to see others as friends: Who is your best friend? The one who holds the Qur’an or the one who wears the zunnar, the sash worn by unbelievers? Let us go, says Bulle Shah, to that place where all are one, where no one asks your status, your caste, and none asks after your humanity. This love does not recognize caste or community Love is the enemy of the Shariah The Shariah of action tells the man’s religion and makes all pure.50 Thus the second demand on the devotee is an iconoclastic view of human society and its hierarchies. Religion decrees that the devotee take it as god’s work to debunk all those who insist on their own superiority because all humans are equal in the eyes of god, and anyone who asserts his superiority on the basis of caste or class is immediately a sinner. As Kabir says: “So what if you are big, like the tall date-palm tree / You can’t give shade to the weary traveler and your fruit is too high to reach.”51 In other words, if one is of no use to the human community, one may as well not exist; being big is an earthly attribute which will fetch one no gain. Thus religion that equalizes through the presence of the divine in every living being also legitimizes social

49

Kolatkar, “Translations from Tukaram,” 111. Bulleh Shah oh kaun hai, utam tera yaar  Osey ke haath Kuran hai, Osey gall Junnar. Available at http://bababulleshah.blogspot.in/p/ blog-page_9.html. This and the translations that follows are mine. 51 “bada huya toh kya huya, jaise per kazur/panthi ki chhaya nahi, phal lage ati door.” This and other translations of Kabir’s poems that follow are mine. 50

113

“SO WHAT IF YOU ARE BIG?”

113

critique against institutionalized difference leading to inequality. In a society that has been construed as essentially hierarchized, the poetry of devotion produced by these preachers of equality claims that love of god’s creatures is the way to express faith and devotion to god himself. Religious belief thus decreed a certain kind of social conduct as a means of negotiating the fissures that Brahmanical institutions created and encouraged. All the poets we have referred to were quick to point out these fissures engineered by the powerful, and even more alert in exposing the hypocrisies and the arrogance of power. As Bulle Shah says, “If you become a ghazi, a religious warrior who extends the faith, take up your sword / First kill those who are pretenders, then you can kill the unbeliever.” Pretenders are more dangerous than unbelievers because they mislead in the name of god. Bulle Shah’s warning echoes across religious differences, and can be heard in Kabir’s warning too. Kabir warns those who wear the pagdi, the headgear of the powerful, saying that when one dies, the crows will peck at his skull, just the same as they do to any other corpse. The power of the pagdi will not protect one from becoming carrion—only a foolish person will take it seriously and accumulate sins in this world by clinging to material wealth and status. Tukaram announces the ethics governing a community based on equality in the eyes of god. How singular Panduranga Are all things The world belongs to no-one in particular We are all about bejeweled, bespangled Each one of us sparkles like a jewel on the other.52 This egalitarianism forms the basis of an ethics that values impoverishment in literal and metaphorical terms. As discussed above, the poets constantly berate those who cling to the material world and exalt those who are able to renounce everything for love of god; the criticism of the socially powerful and corrupt is related to the repudiation of status and wealth, the willing submission of the individual to god. An individual ought to live in the world only on the strength of necessities:  as Kabir says, laghuta, smallness, is the best form of existence—when the moon appears on the second day of the waxing cycle, people immediately bow down to its slim form, because despite its barely perceptible presence, it marks an auspicious period. These simple courtesies define communal living; compassion and help for the small and weak also form part of this ethics. “Don’t trouble the weak,” advises Kabir, “for the sighs of those who cannot speak in their own defense

52

Kolatkar, “Translations from Tukaram,” 113.

114

114

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

have great power. Haven’t you seen that the flames of the fire have no tongues yet they melt the hard iron?” This verse functions on the resonance of a single word—hai—or alas, the sighs of the voiceless are the tongues of flame that do not speak but have the power to destroy the hardest metal. With Kabir, a plural repertoire of signification emerges across languages and religions. “Water does not stand still on high ground,” says Kabir, “it always comes to rest at the lower level.” The word paani, water, has many meanings in the language of the Sant poets. For example, in the couplets of Rahim, it means first paani, the natural element, water; second, paani, refers to the human quality to respect people and be humble; and third, paani means the sparkle of a jewel. The Persian word aab, which means honor and water at once, is likewise the source of multiple meanings. Kabir uses this multiplicity to imply that those who inhabit the higher levels of society sacrifice their self-respect in clinging to power, just as those who live at the lower levels can drink to their fill because even nature seems to favor the weak and poor. Nature causes water—self-respect, dignity, humility—to come to rest at the lower levels. The celebration of the “lower depths” includes, as we have seen, satisfaction with the basic necessities, and the consequent freedom of a spirit that cares not a whit for hierarchy. This freedom gives Kabir the power to challenge the caste-class hierarchy by using his profession of weaving as a metaphor for the fabric of life and as a satirical reference to caste-marks like the sacred thread of the Brahman, woven by the poor untouchable in Benaras, the holiest of cities. I hold in my hand the weft and warp and weave the sacred threads that you wear around your chest and neck You are a Brahmin, and I am a weaver of Benaras, listen to what I know You pander to all the kings and landlords, but I only bow to Hari This irreverence for the authority of any but god himself makes the poet a dreaded plain-speaker, even a derided madman. Accepting poverty, material and spiritual, also frees the seeker from submission to anyone on earth because it is only god to whom he submits. The literal meaning of the word muslim is one who submits. The submergence of self into divine, in Sufi terminology called fana or annihilation of self may often become, in the terminology of the bhakt poets who worshipped the formed deity, the imagery characteristic of the rasa of sringar, eroticism. The established images of Sufi poetry—the yearning of the moth for the flame, and its willingness to be scorched in the fire of love, the yearning of the nightingale for the rose,53 unrequited yet undiminished, have become entrenched in the 53

Schimmel, As through a Veil.

115

“SO WHAT IF YOU ARE BIG?”

115

contemporary popular imagination and expressions of divine and earthly love, but their roots go back to an austere belief in the nothingness of the self when faced with the power and majesty of god. This experience is recounted by Tukaram: I retain my lineaments like a charred cloth its creases I’m insubstantial, like ashes to the world I disown my lineage, My name, my mien. I restore my body To whom it belongs. Now all is well and Effortlessly ash. The guru graced the lamp With a flame, says Tuka.54 Modernity intensifies the idioms of existential agony felt by the medieval poet yearning to reach out toward the divine from the confines of the mortal body. But the reality out of which the agony is born has traversed the distance between faith and doubt. This may prove the premise of this volume, that religion produces a grand narrative which leads to fissures that literature is tasked with filling. The poetry I discuss, however, points to a different possibility. In India, as the caste hierarchy crystallizes across time, plurality as a social condition where each individual is equal in the eyes of god is imagined and legitimized by opposing religious movements. It serves as an alternative form of sociability to the oppressions engineered by the hegemonic caste, by bigotry and religious fundamentalism. Equality as the ground for a plural society has been advocated by the Sant, Sufi and Bhakti poets since “medieval” times as rejection of a society based on caste and class hierarchies. Through their poetry I have tried to trace a repertoire of signification interrupted and refigured by time, place, and language, but germinating from a common ethos of pluralism resulting from diversity, underlining the necessity of dialogue and coexistence. Despite the differences of religion, language and culture across the country, despite their surrender to God in various forms, whether a Pauranic god, or a formless principle, or Allah, all devotees repudiate social and religious hierarchies in his name. Hence they advocate selfless love and service to humans as the means of worship. They address god in terms of human relationships, as friend, lover, and playfellow, repudiating 54

Arun Kolatkar, Collected Poems in English, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), 307.

116

116

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

the distance imposed by hierarchy, wealth, language, and institutions. Thus an ethics of plurality and humanism, which we might now recognize as “modern” concerns, emerges and survives through the poetry of devotion. However, in terms of literary periodization, this devotional poetry is located in the medieval period, though the values it espouses are modern concerns. Ironically, these very values are at the center of violent conflict, not only in modern India, but the world over. For example, the sociability that arises out of the poetry of devotion is necessarily tied to an economy that contradicts the social and moral economy of modernity which resulted in India through colonial contact with Europe. In the compositions of the medieval poets, worldly poverty is the goal. By emptying the fleshly form of “self,” the devotee prepares it to be filled with the alms of spiritual riches, finally culminating in the human becoming the vessel of the divine. But the affective economy of modernity is centered on the aggrandizement of the self. We who live within this affective economy cannot accept our spiritual poverty any more than we can condone material poverty as a goal of human existence. The tragic irony of modernity is that the more we grasp at selfhood, the more we seek to establish the certainty of identity, the more we want to transcend the intangibility of faith, the more we are thwarted by our own insubstantial nothingness in the face of time and creation. Ultimately, the opacity of literature serves as a metaphor for the separate, intractable being of the other, its unique presence irreducible to the self. In the literary text, we as readers, as humans engaging with speech, are faced with alterity: language is with the other and with me simultaneously, as the medium of both our intersubjectivity and interiority, which emerge in relation to each other. Should we then pursue difference for its own sake or should we welcome the possibility of establishing a community, in the present? I propose that the ethics of pluralism arises in answer to this question. Contemporary literature enables the self to enter into a relationship with an entity that is another, with a right to the same selfhood that one claims for oneself. Modernity has revealed to us the wilderness of the isolated self. Going back to Kabir’s poem: where there is aapa, the acute consciousness of self, there is also aapda—obstruction, difficulty. Where there is doubt, there is disease. It is in the light of this that we must examine ourselves as “modern,” despite our location in time and language. Cross-cultural literary research brings us face to face with what Merleau Ponty calls “variants of the same being.” All cultures are variations of the historical life-world, concretely located, all on an equal footing. Each may be confronted by all the others to enable both to get a more complete understanding of the human world and our condition as human beings sharing it with all beings. The questions that arise in cross-cultural research in literature have to do with the identification of comparable structures. We attempt to understand from our vantage point in our own culture, the extensional applicability of a proposition offered as a common point

117

“SO WHAT IF YOU ARE BIG?”

117

of reference. The material discussed above prompts us to ask whether in literary studies, we can conceptualize the “modern” as a phenomenological category rather than a temporal one. The answer to this question is relevant to the direction we choose for cross-cultural literary research in particular and for the study of cultural phenomena in general. In the specific context of the project of which this chapter is part, our foundational assumptions link religion and literature in a conceptual framework that is contradicted in application to a lateral universe despite the incidence of sustained contact between the two. Indian society from the time of colonial contact and through postmodernity, contemporary with globalization, is struggling to resist oppressive hegemony of interlinked social hierarchies. The philosophy and poetry of several medieval religious sects across the Indian subcontinent have been trying to repair the fault lines created by institutionalized religion. The fact that they have the potential to perform this task as well as “modern” literature, and have been doing so for centuries, may lead us to refigure the paradigm from within which we address literary texts across language-cultures, and open the way to a deeper understanding of difference.

Works cited Ambedkar, B. R. (1936), “A Reply to the Mahatma.” Annihilation of Caste: http:// ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/index.html (accessed on October 15, 2017). Appleton, Naomi (2017), Shared Characters in Jain, Buddhist and Hindu Narrative: Gods, Kings and Other Heroes. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Callewaert, Winand M. and Laṭh, Mukunda (1989), The Hindi Songs of Namdev. Leuven: Peeters Publishers. Chatterji, Suniti Kumar (ed.) (1978), Cultural Heritage of India Vol. V: Languages and Literatures. Calcutta: Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture. Dalmia, Vasudha (1995), “The Only Real Religion of the Hindus: Vaisnava Self-Representation in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Vasudha Dalmia and Heinrich von Stietencron (eds), Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious Traditions and National Identity. New Delhi and California: Sage Publications, 176–210. Das, Sisir Kumar (1991), A History of Indian Literature, 1800–1910: Western Impact Indian Response. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Dasgupta, Jyotirindra (1970), Language Conflict and National Development: Group Politics and National Language Policy in India. Oakland: University of California Press. Frykenberg, Robert (1997), “The Emergence of Modern ‘Hinduism’ as a Concept and as an Institution,” in Günther-Dietz Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke (eds), Hinduism Reconsidered. New Delhi: Manohar, 82–107. Gottschalk, Peter and Schmalz, Mathew N. (2011), Engaging South Asian Religions: Boundaries, Appropriations, and Resistance. Albany and New York: SUNY Press.

118

118

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Hardy, F. (1988), “From the Illness of Love to Social Hermeneutics: Three Tamil Customs with Some Reflections on Method and Meaning,” in Richard F. Gombrich (ed.), Indian Ritual and Its Exegesis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 113–69. Hawley, John (2015), A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Hawley, John Stratton (1991), “Naming Hinduism,” Wilson Quarterly 15.3: 20–32. Hawley, John Stratton and Narayanan, Vasudha (2006), The Life of Hinduism. Oakland: University of California Press. Ingalls, Daniel H. H. (1954), “Śaṁkara’s Arguments against the Buddhists,” in Philosophy East and West. University of Hawaii Press, vol. 3, no. 4, 291–306. Ishwaran, K. (1981), “Bhakti Tradition and Modernisation: The Case of Lingayatism,” in Jayant Lele (ed.), Tradition and Modernity in Bhakti Movements. Leiden: Brill, 72–82. Iwao, Shima (1988), “The Vithoba Faith of Maharashtra: The Vithoba Temple of Pandharpur and Its Mythological Structure,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 15.2–3: 183–97. Jha, Dwijendra Narayan (2006), “Looking for a Hindu Identity.” General Presidential Address, Indian History Congress, 66th Session, January 28–30, Santiniketan. Online available at: www.sacw.net/India_History/dnj_Jan06.pdf (accessed on October 15, 2017). Kane, P. V. (1973), History of Dharmasastra. Pune: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. King, Richard (2001), Orientalism and Religion: Post-colonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East.” Oxford and New York: Taylor & Francis. Kolatkar, Arun (1982), “Translations from Tukaram and Other Marathi Poets.” Journal of South Asian Literature 17.1: 111–14. Kolatkar, Arun (2010). Collected Poems in English, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books. Lele, Jayant (1981), “Community, Discourse and Critique in Jnaneshwar,” in Jayant Lele (ed.), Tradition and Modernity in Bhakti Movements. Leiden: Brill, 104–12. Lorenzen, David N. (1996), “Introduction,” in David N. Lorenzen (ed.), Bhakti Religion in North India: Community Identity and Political Action. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1–34. Lorenzen, David N. (1999), “Who Invented Hinduism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41.4: 630–59. Mallikarjun, B. (2001), “Languages of India according to the 1991 Census,” Language in India, November 7. www.languageinindia.com/ nov2001/1991Languages.html (accessed on October 15, 2017). Menon, Y. Keshava (2011), The Mind of Adi Shankaracharya. Mumbai: Jaico Publishing House. Merleau Ponty, Maurice (1964), “On the Phenomenology of Language,” in Signs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 84–97. Mohanty, Satya P. (2009), “Alternative Modernities and Medieval Indian Literature: The Oriya Lakshmi Purana and Radical Pedagogy,” Diacritics 38.3: 3–21.

119

“SO WHAT IF YOU ARE BIG?”

119

Munshi, K. M. (1978), “Introduction,” in Suniti Kumar Chatterji (ed.), Cultural Heritage of India Vol. V: Languages and Literatures. Calcutta: Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, revised 1978, 3–12. Nath, Vijay (2001), “From ‘Brahmanism’ to ‘Hinduism’: Negotiating the Myth of the Great Tradition,” Social Scientist 29.3/4: 19–50. Nemade, Bhalchandra (1981), “The Revolt of the Underprivileged: Style in the Expression of the Warkari Movement,” in Jayant Lele (ed.), Tradition and Modernity in Bhakti Movements. Leiden: Brill, 113–23. Novetzke, Christian Lee (2005). “A Family Affair,” in Guy L. Beck (ed.), Alternative Krishnas: Regional and Vernacular Variations on a Hindu Deity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 113–38. Novetzke, Christian Lee (2008), Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Oberoi, Harjot (1994), The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Patrick Olivelle (1999), Dharmasutras: The Law Codes of Ancient India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Plott, John C., et al. (2000), Global History of Philosophy: The Axial Age, Volume 1. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas. Prentiss, Karen Pechelis (1999). The Embodiment of Bhakti. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Prill, Susan (2009). “Representing Sainthood in India: Sikh and Hindu Visions of Namdev,” Material Religion 5.2: 156–79. Radhakrishnan, S. (2008), Indian Philosophy, vol. 1. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ramakrishnan, E. V. and Kumar, Udaya (2016), “Modernism in Indian Literature,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Literary Modernism. London and New York: Taylor and Francis. Ramanujan, A. K. (1973), Speaking of Siva. India: Penguin. Roy, Janmajit (2002), Theory of Avatāra and Divinity of Chaitanya. Chennai: Atlantic Publishers. Saba, Naheed (2013), Linguistic Heterogeneity and Multilinguality in India: A Linguistic Assessment of Indian Language Policies, September 18: http://hdl. handle.net/10603/11248 (accessed October 15, 2017). Sadarangani, Neeti M. (2004), Bhakti Poetry in Medieval India. Sarup & Sons. Schimmel, Annemarie (1980). Islam in the Indian Subcontinent. Leiden: Brill. Schimmel, Annemarie (1982), As through a Veil: Mystical Poetry in Islam. London: Oneworld Publications Bloomsbury Street. Schomer, Karine and Mcleod, W. H. (eds) (1987), The Saints: Studies in a Devotional Tradition of India. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas. Schouten, Jan Peter (1995), Revolution of the Mystics. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas. Sharma, Krishna (1987), Bhakti and the Bhakti Movement: A New Perspective. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas. Stietencron, Heinrich von (1997), “Hinduism: On the Proper Use of a Deceptive Term,” in Günther-Dietz Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke (eds), Hinduism Reconsidered. New Delhi: Manohar, 32–53.

120

121

6 Alterity and the ethics of the novel in J. M. Coetzee’s quasi-realism Christopher Weinberger

Theories of novel ethics in the past decade,1 including those by Shameem Black, Joshua Landy, C. Namwali Serpell, and Heather Love, attempt to divest themselves of what they see as the bad hermeneutics of classical 1

Definitions of ethics can differ sharply according to discipline and tradition of thought. I focus here, following Coetzee, on how we comport ourselves toward others and negotiate differences among points of view and value systems with maximal respect for the autonomy and rights to self-determination of all involved and with minimal violence to freedoms of expression and pursuit of desired ends. When I  speak of ethics, I  almost always mean this general interpersonal sense rather than any of those espoused within a particular philosophical tradition. However, one distinction requires attention. I make a case here for what I see as an immanent ethics that obtains when reading novels, a situation which I suggest may demand ethically freighted response despite the fact that true interpersonal interaction does not occur. Working out my sense of how reading can be ethical despite the absence of others is the chief task of this chapter. My approach to this special sense of “novel ethics” owes very much to Adam Zachary Newton (1995), who lucidly tackles the topic of “narrative ethics,” and J. Hillis Miller (1987), who argues for an immanent “ethics of reading.” It also finds inspiration in Simon Blackburn’s (1993) challenging and much-challenged sense of ethics as a cognitive (and even meta-cognitive) process. In particular, my thinking is informed by his notion that ethical statements project emotional attitudes rather than expressing propositions; I  believe that this idea has fascinating implications for the kinds of projections invited by certain kinds of literary experience, especially the quasi-realisms and self-consciously performative modes of contemporary metafiction.

122

122

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

models of comparative literature.2 They fear that to compare, as Thomas Claviez reminds us in a 2013 PMLA article, is to assume some underlying likeness as the basis of comparison.3 On such views, comparison privileges some particular measures of sameness in the very gesture with which it purports to value difference. In this chapter, I  argue that J.  M. Coetzee has blended realism and anti-realism, mimetic and metafictive devices that both invite and forestall comparison, leaving criticism to face what I will argue is an ethically productive self-consciousness that challenges its methodologies. With postcolonial lessons about the colonizing force of the way we represent and imagine others in mind, late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship on ethics in the novel or “novel ethics” turns increasingly to theories of alterity. These theories emphasize incomparability and the unknowable qualities of others, to supplant models of novel ethics predicated on empathy and identification. Claviez himself speculates that only the radical alterity of Levinasian ethics might avoid prizing similarity as a normative standard of judgment.4 But of course, Levinas notoriously resists any application to novels; theories of alterity generally mistrust forms of representation designed to make Being available to consciousness. As a genre partially defined by its creation of a sustained framework for representing characters and human interaction—its mimesis—the novel depends upon and naturalizes given representational systems that privilege certain values over others. Moreover, novels inscribe in the very

2 Each of these scholars warns of the dangers of presuming likeness as a means of sympathizing or empathizing with others, and develops alternative models for imagining ethical relationships and the role that literature can play in developing them. In her book Fiction across Borders:  Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels (2010), Black asserts that the formal rendering of selves in contemporary novels pluralizes the very notion of identity and confounds binary, self-other models of ethics through the presentation of “crowded selves.” In his book How to Do Things with Fictions (2012), Landy suggests that literary form itself can force us to revise our habits of interpretation and therefore to refine our capacity to recognize alterity regardless of our feelings about fictional beings. In a similar vein, Serpell (2014) suggests in her book Seven Modes of Uncertainty that literature can confront readers with ethically productive ambiguity rather than models of ethical behavior; one such literary method that she singles out and which strongly informs my perspective on Coetzee is that of “adjoining,” whereby through juxtaposition different perspectives or subjects occupy adjacent positions without any clear organizing structure that would allow clear distinctions between subject and object, good and bad, and so on. Finally, in her article “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn” (2010), Love argues for the critical practice of surface reading whereby a conscious effort to divest from close or deep interpretation productively suspends judgment and fosters more holistic and open-ended forms of apprehension 3 Thomas Claviez, “Done and Over With—Finally? Otherness, Metonymy, and the Ethics of Comparison,” PMLA 128.3 (2013): 609. 4 Ibid., 611.

123

ALTERITY IN J. M. COETZEE’S QUASI-REALISM

123

language and structure of narration implicit standards of judgment and norms of recognition that determine what counts as human and worthy of fellow-feeling. Scholarship on novel ethics has overwhelmingly focused on the mimetic capacity of the genre—its presentation of human-like characters in worlds comprising social, cultural, and ideological structures that reflect aspects of our own. As George Eliot famously argued, following in an Aristotelian tradition, the novel (purportedly) allows readers to “imagine and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves.”5 Imagining that novels give us such verisimilar models sets up a comfortable analogy between novel worlds and real conditions of living. Criticism on this view involves the practice of translating values and value systems encountered within (or through the representation of) verisimilar worlds into those relevant for the actual conditions of real life. Wayne Booth and Martha Nussbaum, for example, assume analogical relationships between characters and people when they argue novels can model, represent, and train readers to adopt ethical sensibilities by fostering cognitive and emotional investments in the lives of others. Such assumptions have enabled powerful arguments for the real-world value of reading, and have allowed scholars to make compelling cases for the ethical efficacy of novel representation. This more classical approach to novel ethics has proven susceptible, however, to criticisms like those made by Candace Vogler in her article “The Moral of the Story,” that what novels really provide are non-generalizable and potentially exclusionary terms of recognition and valuing (12–15).6 In other words, novels might only help readers become proficient in ultimately narcissistic processes of affective response that cannot translate into extratextual ethics. We see characters as comparable to ourselves only insofar as we discover in them similarities that we prize. Those who read to better understand and empathize with others attain only the self-congratulatory illusion of having deployed emotions on behalf of imaginary “others” who exist as nothing but fictions at the disposal of the reading self. For Vogler, there can be no ethical engagement with “inked marks” that lack the autonomy to respond to readerly empathy—such experiences can never be the same as, nor should we believe that they can model or foster real engagement with actual other human beings. The novel singles out particular aspects of consciousness and of human interaction to the exclusion of all others, providing a false framework within which readers may deploy self-gratifying pity or “understanding”

5

George Eliot, in The George Eliot Letters, vol. 9, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1978), 220; emphases in the original. 6 Candace Vogler, “The Moral of the Story,” Critical Inquiry 34.1.3 (2007): 12–15.

124

124

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

of fictional beings in artificially circumscribed contexts which differ categorically from those encountered in real life.7 Note, however, that Vogler’s objections to an ethics of identification do not contest the assumption that novel ethics take shape in and through the representation of a fictional world like but apart from our own; they simply deny that such representations can afford real-life ethical practice. Fortunately, skepticism about the ethics of identification has led scholars to develop alternative approaches. Those alternatives Dorothy Hale has dubbed “new ethical theorists” attend to the discursive and social operations of power at work in novel representation to reconceive novel ethics as a kind of negative capability that requires the eschewal of identification.8 Judith Butler, for example, argues that novels can engage ethics by immersing us in imaginative projections only to confront us with the limits of our capacities to know or identify with others.9 By dramatizing the potential violence with which the freedom to perform one’s identity may be circumscribed by normative standards of judgment that inhere in the very language of narrative, and then reminding us of our own complicity in promulgating such norms by imagining others as novel narration directs us to do, Butler’s ethically effective novel challenges us to rethink our value systems and not just our values. Other writers turn away from identification by directing our attention to the pressures that literary form can put on our habits of understanding. In his book Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel (1999), Andrew Gibson contends that the “writerly” novel can help disrupt the objectifying discursive formations through which we make cognitive claims to knowledge about others.10 And for David Palumbo-Liu, the novel historically has functioned as a genre that can make us “fess up to [the] standards of measurement” by which we recognize and value difference in others—that is, by playing on and drawing attention to the language and conventions through which others become legible to us, novels can occasion reflection on the limitations and biases that condition our stances toward them.11 In contrast

7

Vogler extends her argument via a powerful joke: in novels, she notes, we are quite literally given every shred of ethically relevant information that exists and can be known. Therefore, were we to try to translate such novel ethics into real-life situations, we would have to stalk our ethical quarry relentlessly, hiding in their closets, reading their diaries, and recording all of their conversations in order to understand and thereby empathize with or respect them as fully as possible (ibid., 15). 8 Dorothy Hale, “Aesthetics and the New Ethics:  Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century,” PMLA 124.3 (May 2009): 899. 9 Judith Butler, “Values of Difficulty,” in Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb (eds), Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 2003), 208; qtd in Hale, “Aesthetics and the New Ethics,” 900–901. 10 Andrew Gibson, Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel (London: Routledge, 1999). 11 David Palumbo-Liu, The Deliverance of Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 15.

125

ALTERITY IN J. M. COETZEE’S QUASI-REALISM

125

to theories of identification, “new ethical theories” (some nearing two decades old at this point) typically assert that novels fall short of ethically representing others because they participate in the restrictive ideological and disciplinary power that operates through linguistic representational forms and literary convention. However, such theories recuperate the ethical value of reading by maintaining that such ethical failure can, in the hands of skilled and ethically minded novelists, instructively model the limitations of those extratextual forms of representation and social conventions that similarly do violence to the alterity of others in real life. The otherwise widely differing principles of new ethical theorists of the novel converge in privileging readers’ self-consciousness vis-à-vis complicity in restrictive habits of interpretation as the ethical dénouement of novel experience. That is, for these thinkers, novels remind readers how the acts of imaginative projection that novels invite operate through and thereby reinforce potentially restrictive and exclusionary conventions of recognition and valuing. Contrary to the willed credulity in fictional characters envisioned by theories of ethical identification, new ethical theories tend to advocate a kind of “hermeneutics of suspicion” that Paul Ricoeur attributed to literary criticism, and which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick later imagined as a practice of “paranoid reading.”12 In other words, they make the deconstructive argument that novels work within given conventions of recognition and identification to expose their restrictive force or pernicious ubiquity. As Charles Altieri maintains, then, new ethical theorists emphasize the “freedom from” operations of social power that literature makes possible, but generally stop short of conceiving more positive ethical contributions in terms of a “freedom to.”13 Although they make vastly different assumptions about the capacity of the novel to represent alterity, both theories of ethical identification and new ethical theories share two core methodological tendencies. They tend to take mimetic fiction as their principal exemplars, and they assume that novels achieve ethical effects by engaging readers in oscillation between states of immersive involvement and self-conscious reflection—a model of “ethical take-out” in which the novel’s effects become valuable through transposition into real-life cognitive, emotional, or interpersonal activity. The two oppositional critical camps differ chiefly in emphasis and judgment about the value of such oscillation. As we have seen, empathy and identification theories stress the positive value of the immersion, whereas new ethical theories stress the negative capabilities of reflection. 12

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. David Pellauer and Kathleen McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–51. 13 Charles Altieri, “Taking Lyrics Literally: Teaching Poetry in a Prose Culture,” New Literary History 32.2 (2001): 273. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20057658.

126

126

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

These theories’ shared assumption that ethics obtains through oscillation between text and real life smuggles a problematic logic of comparison back into the heart even of scholarship opposed to it. Theories of novel ethics overwhelmingly imagine the emotions, judgments, and responses represented or solicited by literary texts to be like those we might experience or deploy in real life—whether this is good or bad, liberating or restricting. This chapter attempts a double shift, away from assumptions that novels become ethically effective through the oscillation they occasion (and the idea that reader response necessarily entails oscillation at all), and from the logic of comparison underwriting both models of self-other relationships and those of the ethical value of the novel. I follow the lead of a number of contemporary writers acutely conscious of the ethical problems that attend novel representations of alterity. Authors like J. M. Coetzee, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, Ruth Ozeki, and Murakami Haruki present readers with self-consciously “novel” ethics that take shape in manifestly fictional worlds which cannot be disentangled from the realities in which they are produced. The binary that scholarship tends to posit between novel representation and real-life ethics becomes untenable within their quirky, self-consciously literary, and often metafictional worlds. These writers all inscribe into their writing and sometimes the consciousness of their characters the kinds of explicit reflections on the relationship between experiences of alterity in fiction and those of real-life that are often theorized as the ethical effect that novels can produce in readers. For example, characters find themselves entangled in relationships with others across ontological planes (as when an author moves in with the character she has written in Coetzee’s Slow Man). They thus confront urgent questions about what are already, in the stories themselves, irreducibly novel ethics, and yet which matter immanently and immediately for their “real” lives. The diegetic imbrication of situations in such novels, and the formal complexity of metafictional narration more generally, forestalls the logic of transposition whereby represented experiences of alterity in mimetic worlds can be translated into the language of theory as a guide for real life. Situations in these metafictional texts directly pose the very problem of ethical transposition between fiction and reality within the worlds that they represent, prior to any critical operations we might perform. By representing worlds that are already explicitly fictional, these authors explore core ethical questions about novel alterity from within novel representation. Against binary models that posit similarities between purportedly separate realms of real and represented ethics, these authors insist on the coincidence and covalence of the real and the fictional.

127

ALTERITY IN J. M. COETZEE’S QUASI-REALISM

127

Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) makes an ideal pivot point for transitioning from the more conventional mimetic interests of ethical criticism to focus on the representational strategies of contemporary ethical metafiction.14 The novel balances realism and literary self-reflexivity through its quasi-allegorical tale-telling; its story of violence and narrative manipulation raises ethical questions that bear directly on the novel’s own narrative strategies. This chapter uses Coetzee’s work to explore the kinds of adjustments we might need to make to our critical models of novel alterity in order to deal with the “reflexive realism” of such self-consciously fictional worlds.15

Deconstructing allegories: Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians in ethical criticism J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians famously examines the complex interrelation of many pressing contemporary ethical issues, including colonialism, torture, gender politics, questions of sexual and political power, and of course self-other relations. The story takes place on the remote frontier outpost of an empire that sets itself against largely unseen “barbarians.” Told from the perspective of the town’s magistrate, the text chronicles tensions created by imperial forces that march to the town and escalate hostilities against a people living in the nearby environs they call “barbarians.” The magistrate finds himself drawn to one of these so-called barbarians, a woman whom they have captured and tortured. He takes her to live with him while wrestling with his own guilt over both his conflicting desires and the deep asymmetry in power and autonomy that make reciprocity between them impossible. He is fascinated by what he cannot understand about her, and spends countless hours in a stupor over her body, which he finds unattractive but irresistible, and which is covered in markings he longs to decipher. Eventually he undertakes a journey to return her to her people, and finds himself branded traitor and tortured as a result.

14

J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (New York: Penguin Books, 1982). Elsewhere I  argue that other contemporary novelists similarly pursue ethics by borrowing formal structures from metafiction. They situate characters not in the mimetic security of some supposedly “real world” but in essentially and irreducibly fictive “realisms” whose fictional, constructed nature can never be fully forgotten by readers and, sometimes, by characters. Please see Christopher Weinberger, “Reflexive Realism and Kinetic Ethics:  The Case of Murakami Haruki’s 1Q84,” Representations 131.1 (2015): 105–33. 15

128

128

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

On the one hand, Waiting for the Barbarians deals with large-scale historical, political, and cultural evils like imperialism, colonialism, and torture; on the other, it deals with questions of intimacy, violence, care, responsibility, and interpersonal communication between individuals. The very scalability of its ethical interests alone suggests allegorical leanings—it seems that each particular moment functions as instance and microcosm of a larger ideological situation. Moreover, there are only a few named characters in the text. Examinations of the town’s technological and cultural developments make it difficult to place precisely in history. The geography described feels both intensely specific and also nondescript—a host of real locations could fit the bill. Many of the conversations double as both practical argument and existential philosophy. For these and other reasons, including the magistrate’s ceaseless efforts to abstract from the particular and to find grand meanings in local events, the text has largely been treated as a case study in the ethics of allegory. Such criticism tends to approach the novel as a symbolic code to be translated into real-life ethical significance, and hence repeats the logic of ethical translation typically brought to bear on more realist texts. Some critics have read the invitation to allegorize as a failing of the text. James Wood, for example, finds allegory inadequate to the questions of otherness and alterity that Coetzee explores.16 But most scholars, arguing from nonetheless similar premises, see this invitation to allegorize as what Berys Gaut has called a “seduction strategy,” an invitation that must be provisionally accepted, discovered upon reflection to lead readers into some kind of complicity with ethical error, and ultimately rejected—but for the greater good of producing an ethical self-consciousness.17 Derek Attridge and Stef Craps among many others, including Deepa Jani, Brian May, and Cecile Birks, differ markedly in their approaches to allegory in this text, but agree on precisely what I would like to question: that the novel ultimately rejects allegory in its strenuous efforts to do justice to the literal, and to those aspects of encounter that defy reduction into discursive representation. For both Attridge and Craps, allegory translates personal experience into broader ideological formations of social and political power; it subsumes the singular into a network of assimilation that poses as universal. Allegory may be attractive to critics, they acknowledge, not only because it yields the pleasure of cognitive mastery through the acts of deciphering it invites, but also because it promises a means of tethering present fiction to real history through its reliance on anterior narratives. But Coetzee, they claim, ultimately refuses allegory by insisting on its problematic complicity in preexisting formations of power, and by attending to the value of what

16

James Wood, “Parables and Prizes,” The New Republic, December 20, 1999, 199. Ibid., 197.

17

129

ALTERITY IN J. M. COETZEE’S QUASI-REALISM

129

allegory cannot accommodate. Coetzee leads readers to reject allegory, these scholars conclude, to push past the kinds of comparative reasoning that make possible but also delimit our understanding of others. Craps argues that the magistrate ultimately experiences an abjection that expels him from the epistemological security of his mental efforts to read and interpret signs on the body of a barbarian woman.18 The magistrate becomes receptive to ethical encounter, Craps contends, only when torture by that empire reduces him to the “prelinguistic zone, an area outside the categories of language,” so that he is made into “a witness to the untold and untellable suffering of the barbarians.”19 In short, giving up the will to cognitive power implied by acts of rational understanding makes possible modes of reception inaccessible to him at first, just as giving up the will to knowledge motivating our efforts to make allegorical sense of textual experience might inaugurate a similar transformation in readers. Attridge makes a similar case, proclaiming the failure of allegory, but with an emphasis on cognitive and interpretive postures vis-à-vis textual alterity rather than feelings of empathy for characters. In J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading:  Literature in the Event, Attridge suggests that the magistrate’s eventual recognition of his desire to interpret others on his own terms is what enables his ethical growth.20 By reflecting on his own colonial impulses, and finally subverting them by refusing the will to mastery that such understanding implies, the magistrate shifts toward what Attridge calls a more “literal” approach, one that “finds interpretation simultaneously invited and baffled.”21 For Attridge this bafflement has value because it suggests the authenticity of encounter without reducing it to “meaning” in a narrative of self-understanding. Attridge concludes that readers should likewise attend to the rich singularity of the text that transcends any given account of its significance. Each scholar imagines a kind of back-and-forth dialectic movement figured in the story, between the magistrate’s involving encounters with others and his cerebral self-reflection on the processes of apprehension brought to bear in such encounters. The magistrate experiences; then he reflects. He experiences then differently; he reflects then differently. Each scholar also theorizes this essentially hermeneutic movement as one required for the ethical progress of readers, who must return to the text increasingly divested of the will to align novel experience with extratextual ethical frameworks. Craps emphasizes the affective transformations that can result

18 Stef Craps, “J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and the Ethics of Testimony,” English Studies 88.1 (2007): 59–66. 19 Ibid., 65. 20 Derek Attridge, J. M.  Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading:  Literature in the Event, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 21 Ibid., 47.

130

130

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

from divestment of a will-to-knowledge, whereas Attridge emphasizes the deconstruction of ideological regimes of understanding required for more authentic encounter.22 But both see the magistrate as embodying, through his own back-and-forth swings between self-forgetful immersion amid the bodies of others and overly intellectualized reflection, progress toward the ethical divestment that the narrative itself seeks to produce in readers.23 Craps and Attridge thus suggest that reading Coetzee can train us ethically by revealing to us the complicity of our interpretive practices in oppressive regimes of understanding. They invite us to appreciate the singularity and irreproducibility of our (literary) experience of alterity rather than to “decipher” ethical messages in the text. Although I find their readings of the magistrate’s character compelling, the hermeneutic back-and-forth movement that these scholars posit, one that eventually allows us to “get it right,” strikes me as reproducing models of reading and ethics that Waiting for the Barbarians, as well as much of Coetzee’s oeuvre, strives to push beyond. To “reject” allegory and embrace the literal in the end does disservice to some crucial functions of the allegorical, to the exploratory mode of apprehension it invites by insisting that representation involves displacement. Moreover, and more crucially, these accounts still work through a comparative logic, assuming an analogical relationship between the magistrate and the reader and between real-life and textual experience. While the novel does indeed invite us to adopt such a logic, it also profoundly unsettles analogical models of literary ethics by conflating the real and the imaginary for both narrator and readers. Thus Waiting for Barbarians occludes ethical judgment predicated on the distinctions between real people and characters. It privileges a metonymic rather than metaphoric mode of representation, and thereby confronts readers with the failures and risks of ethical judgment. To propose a mode of ethical criticism that might accommodate the metafictional turns of this text, then, I will draw the concept of “simultaneity” developed by Richard Wolheim. My goal is to develop a critical posture that does not treat

22 For Attridge such deconstructive yields ultimately the singular “event” of reading, a kind of ethical dénouement made possible by the text. While I  differ from Attridge by emphasizing the meta-textual rather than the textual, I find his argument about the “ethics of the event” compelling and compatible with the idea of “simultaneity” that I propose replace models of reader response based on binarism and oscillation. 23 For both scholars, the magistrate demonstrates ethical growth by reflecting on the problems latent in his own efforts to understand the barbarian girl. This self-consciousness is followed by returns to immersive experience increasingly stripped of the critical desire to reduce her to an object of understanding. In short, for both Attridge and Craps, the dramatized action models the stance that the text invites readers to adopt: in ceding interpretative authority and yielding to the ineffable, the magistrate enters a dialectic cycle, one that ends finally in a transcendental moment of holistic apprehension.

131

ALTERITY IN J. M. COETZEE’S QUASI-REALISM

131

occurrences in fictional worlds as ethically “similar” to those of real life, but rather recognizes an immanent ethics of reading not ultimately dependent on analogies between fictional beings and real people even though our understanding of it may require working through such analogies. This approach can shed light on the odd confluence of ethical interest and metafictional play in much contemporary fiction.

Presenting representations of others: Literalness in Waiting for the Barbarians “I have never seen anything like it.”24 Waiting for the Barbarians begins with a powerful statement of incomparability, one that quickly modulates into what appears to be an allegorical defamiliarization of symbolic instruments of status, insight, and power:  the sunglasses of the brutal colonel Joll. The ensuing description, which abuts the opening phrase by a colon, breaks the object down into pieces the narrator has seen:  “two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire.”25 The sunglasses are described through a lexically emphasized turn to metonymy whereby the components of the sunglasses are narratively traced over in relations of contiguity, breaking down the unfamiliar into familiar parts. We begin this novel, then, with a turn to metonymy that permits the narrating magistrate’s insight to take shape in the form of a question at once symbolic and literal: “Is he blind?” The metonymic movement of that passage as it follows the loops of wire and composes the unreadable face behind the lenses they fix in place coincides with a clear invitation to read the passage as symbolic foreshadowing of the colonel’s function in the text as a whole. This, I suggest, is the hallmark of Coetzee’s method as well as his thematic focus in many works: he conflates metonymic and metaphoric representation, insisting on the persistence of the literal through the irreducibly figural milieu of novel representation. Objects, settings, and characters in his novels obviously accrue “meanings” as elements of a larger narrative structure, but part of the meaning they accrue resides in their ineffability as presences whose effects are at least partially inimical to symbolic description. The literal and the figural prove both antonymic and inextricably bound, though not in any dialectic sense; they coexist as if in some quantum state. The ineffable permeates but refuses to yield itself to the symbolic

24

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 6. Ibid.

25

132

132

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

understandings afforded by acts of apprehension on the part of the narrator. In later texts this proves explicitly the case, as when in Slow Man painfully real, physical events—a violent bicycle crash, for instance—that have literal impact on the character Paul Rayment have a purely symbolic meaning for his author, the also-fictional Elizabeth Costello. For readers of the novel, the tension between the competing literal and symbolic experiences of events does not invite any kind of cognitive resolution to privilege one over the other, nor oscillation between the one and the other; the ethical experiences of his life are irreducibly both literal and figurative, real and symbolic, at the same time. Even in Waiting for the Barbarians, symbolic and literal effects coincide for characters as well as readers, largely due to the self-consciousness of its narrator. For example, the sunglasses of Colonel Joll physically alienate the magistrate, precluding his vision of the colonel and darkening the colonel’s own view. They thus symbolize for readers something of the character of each person, as well as a certain relation of power and blindness that exists between them. However, it is partly the magistrate’s own mindful apprehension of the symbolic suggestions of the glasses, as well as his awareness of how the object both materially obscures the colonel’s face and symbolically distances them in terms of class and proximity to the cultural heart of the empire, that situates the magistrate in such a tense and ultimately violent relationship with the colonel. Even for the magistrate, who is turning life into narration while simultaneously living it in the present tense, the literal and the symbolic refuse separation. Although the magistrate seeks to turn everything into an object of abstract cognitive reflection, the mere presence of objects and persons relentlessly imposes itself on his thoughts as well as actions. He is constantly brought out of reveries by physical sensations, and recoils or finds himself compelled to act as a result of physiological stimulation. Moreover, his cerebrations themselves follow a metonymic inclination that constantly renders spaces, objects, and people in terms of contiguous parts or directly associated features, such as the injured foot of a young boy or the formation of a scar on the body of the barbarian woman. He cannot grasp the barbarian woman as a full being, and cannot even remember his face when out of her presence; imagining her thus, he declared to himself She is incomplete! . . . I have a vision of her closed eyes and closed face filming over with skin. Blank, like a fist beneath a black wig, the face grows out of the throat and out of the blank body beneath it, without aperture, without entry. I shudder with revulsion in the arms of my little bird woman [a prostitute], hug her to me.26

26

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 42.

133

ALTERITY IN J. M. COETZEE’S QUASI-REALISM

133

A metonymic logic infects and refutes even his imaginary appropriation of the woman’s body, rendering her impenetrable to the colonizing gaze of his mind’s eye. According to Eelco Runia, in his essay “Presence,” metonymy counterposes the abstracting function of metaphor, rendering presence itself rather than translating referents into decipherable symbolic terms. Whereas metaphor is instrumental in the “transfer of meaning,” metonymy brings about a “transfer of presence.” . . . “Presence,” in my view, is “being in touch”—either literally or figuratively—with people, things, events, and feelings . . . It is having a whisper of life breathed into what has become routine and clichéd—it is fully realizing things instead of just taking them for granted.27 For Runia, metonymy makes presence manifest regardless of whether it denotes real or fictional, literal or symbolic subjects; what matters is the felt encounter with “presence in absence” that metonymy produces in staging relationships of “continuity and discontinuity.” In other words, metonymy can transmit presence, and therefore experiences of alterity, regardless of the ontological status of its referents or the meaning made of it through interpretive reflection. In Coetzee’s fiction, the presence of others often confounds the kinds of abstract understandings that characters and readers attempt to bring to bear on their experiences. His characters are disoriented both by the disconnect between their immersive experience of and desires for other bodies, and by their desires to cast nets of meaning on those with whom they come into contact. What they must discover is a sufficiently holistic and adaptive mode of apprehension that does not merely comprehend but responds with immediacy to both the literal and the symbolic, as well as the physical and the metaphysical, dimensions of their encounters with others. It is a tragic ethical flaw that in his thinking and writing the magistrate consistently falls back into imagining others as either physical presences reassuringly opaque to understanding or as symbolic figures enmeshed in greater networks of ideological significance that conditions the possible forms that interpersonal, social, and political relations may take. At one extreme, the magistrate exhibits a desire to lose himself in the immediacy of the sensation of proximity, and, through the self-forgetting enabled by such sensation, to absolve himself of responsibility for his actions. “ ‘Wouldn’t you like to do something else?’ she asks. Her foot rests in my lap. I  am abstracted, lost in the rhythm of rubbing and kneading . . . I  shrug it off, smile, try to slip back into my trance.”28 While enjoying this immersion in 27

Eelco Runia, “Presence,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 1, 5. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 55.

28

134

134

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

the sensation of her presence, the magistrate shrugs off any demand for responsiveness. At the other extreme, he often reflects on the woman as the key to an ethical puzzle that makes significant demands on his attitude toward her body. It has been growing more and more clear to me that until the marks on this girl’s body are deciphered and understood I cannot let go of her . . . (31). While I have not ceased to see her as a body maimed, scarred, harmed, she has perhaps by now grown into and become that new deficient body, feeling no more deformed than a cat feels deformed for having claws instead of fingers. I would do well to take these thoughts seriously (56). The form of his reflections bears scrutiny. Even while acknowledging the potential difference of her point of view and its challenge to his own, he retains, in the description of that point of view, the demeaning standard of judgment against which he implicitly measures hers. It is a “new deficient [emphasis mine] body” into which he imagines her having grown—even though the very idea of deficiency is precisely what he suggests does not accord with her sense of selfhood. The comparative form of his abstract and supposedly ethical imagination here, as he strains to see her point of view, merely reinscribes the value system on which his own judgment is premised. He fails to rise to the challenge of intimacy because his approach precludes apprehending her in the fullness of her own sense of selfhood. Only once the magistrate journeys outside the province of the empire to escort the woman home, under the pressure of natural elements and through shifts in physical as well as social and, literally, sexual positioning, does his ethical bearing begin to change. Outside the aegis of the empire, he discovers that his failure to relate to the barbarian woman has stemmed all along from a failure to escape his own terms of imagining. In a telling moment of realization, whose very terms of articulation conflate the physicality of the body and abstraction of language, he laments: “I think: ‘she could have spent those long empty evenings teaching me her tongue!’ ”29 It is, of course, his very failure of openness to being taught her “tongue” that prevented physical reciprocity, just as the language barrier, and his failure in willingness to cross it, prevented his cognitive understanding.30 In part by shifting the physical scene of encounter outside the province of the empire into a zone of contact with the barbarian lands, the magistrate 29

Ibid., 72. She takes an active role in refusing the very premises and fact of his questioning as well, although he neglects to see the provocation in her responses. For example, she answers the interrogative “Where do you live?” with a deliberate deflection that undermines the valuation of property and possession latent in the query: “I live.” 30

135

ALTERITY IN J. M. COETZEE’S QUASI-REALISM

135

discovers the latent imperialism within himself that has precluded intimacy and reciprocity. This imperialism inheres in every aspect of his approach to the woman, from his adoption of the term “barbarian” to his constant oscillations between possessive proximity and demeaning distance. That is, the magistrate had constantly swung between intensities even in his best efforts to create genuine intimacy or understanding; he brought her close to his body for the pleasure of possession and immersion in her presence or else fell into detached reflection on her as an abstract objection of intellection. Yet once the magistrate and the woman journey together outside the province of the Empire, and especially once the woman finds occasion to speak her own language, the magistrate realizes how thoroughly conditioned by the imperial regime of understanding even his most supposedly other-oriented feelings and thoughts had been. It is only at the point of irretrievable separation, once he can no longer position her within his familiar horizon of understanding, that she begins to emerge for him as a subject in her own right. Coetzee, however, is not content merely to point out the bad faith of hermeneutic imagination, and the need to deconstruct the ideological systems that alienate and relegate others to the status of objects by escaping to idyllic heterotopic spaces. The journey is brutal and damaging, and they cannot remain long in this barren wasteland. “Freedom from” the empire cannot be maintained; neither can the magistrate’s turn to relentless self-critique as a means of mitigating the colonizing force of his conduct. The magistrate must return to the empire, and there face from within its delimiting system of power the difficult question of conceiving an ethical “freedom to.” When the magistrate returns, around the mid-point of the novel, he is imprisoned and tortured for many weeks. Thus dislodged from his office and reduced to a state of abjection, he is forced to find both physical and psychological means of reestablishing himself as a subject (and not just a body in pain) in the town. At one point he briefly gains freedom, thanks to his knowledge of keys to the buildings of the outpost, and literally revisits the physical spaces in which his former relations took place—but from startlingly new perspectives and a much less secure subject position. For example, he finds himself in one instance hiding under, rather than enjoying himself on, the bed of a prostitute he had visited often. Such awkward physical positioning turns out to induce new, if inchoate, modes of receptivity and understanding. He had always known his relations with the prostitute to have consisted as much in imaginary fantasies as they did in material transaction; he knew that she was pretending to enjoy their interactions, but nevertheless believed that in and through the illusion they had formed some kind of bond. Now, however, the shaking bed that supports the woman and her lover hammers the reality of her distinctiveness from his image of her into his skull.

136

136

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

The narrator had formerly enjoyed a kind self-soothing dualism in his stance toward the prostitute. He had taken physical comfort in the self-forgetful pleasure that such imbalance enabled him to take from her. But then he had also taken a kind of retrospective cognitive comfort in his reasoning that the relationship was mutually beneficial, that his economic support of the prostitute and the meagerness of his sexual demands somehow mitigated the imbalance of power that structured their relationship, despite the knowledge of his gross imposition. When one of those pleasures began to fade, and the reality of their situation began to insist itself on his thinking, or else the pleasure of physical intimacy dissipated, he could swing to the other pole. Now, however, he cannot come or leave at will, and the pressing reality of the prostitute’s presence prevents his fantasies. In this moment he experiences the prostitute as both forcibly proximate and yet completely unavailable, separated from him by a barrier that precludes his gaze and might as well be ontological in its absolute refusal of access—a scene we shall find repeated with key differences later in Coetzee’s Slow Man. This experience involves no direct interaction, but nevertheless produces in the magistrate a new ethical orientation: he literally sets out in a different direction that directly leads him to take a public stand against the torturers, despite the consequences for his newfound freedom.31 He is recaptured. Under the more brutal torture that results, the magistrate begins to undertake a new kind of delusional imagining, one in which the absent barbarian woman now appears to him as less of a blank abstraction and more as a concrete, physical presence that elicits autonomous responses from his body. In contrast to earlier fantasies wherein he pictured the woman as a mute object of his gaze, so as to descry meaning in the marks on her body, in these hallucinations imagined female figures sometimes address him; their bodies are hidden by garments, rather than envisioned for the sexual and metaphysical lure of their surface markings; and he experiences the barbarian women through the imagined presence of other female figures—for example, as a child who is making something. He exerts little control over each imagined or hallucinated scenario, and in each one the female figure imagined differs from others, possessing a particularity even while obviously embodying in some form his vision of the same woman. He had formerly seen her as occupying a deficient body, even while intuiting that his awareness of her deficiency might contradict her

31 His experience of her private life in this fashion is arguably as invasive as his former solicitations—indeed, the very example that Candace Vogler uses to decry so-called novel ethics is the monstrosity of presuming one has the right to access the private lives and desires of others in the voyeuristic fashion that narration provides. But his involuntary entrapment in this position stems not from voyeuristic desire or even a presumed prerogative to “better understand” the woman, but rather from helpless capture in events that have overtaken him.

137

ALTERITY IN J. M. COETZEE’S QUASI-REALISM

137

emerging sense of selfhood. Partly because circumstances have divested him of his position within the empire, and partly due to the pressures of torture, he can no longer hold her in his imagination as a single object. Now, she appears in the fullness of many bodies. He experiences her presence, rather, in several discrete figures whose imaginary nature puts no less pressure on his body than her real physical presence had done. These differently imagined figures mark a shift in the power dynamic undergirding his approach to others. For example, in one hallucinatory moment the figure belies her appearance as a child by proving herself capable of baking bread (“A surge of gratitude sweeps through me. ‘Where did a child like you learn to bake so well in the desert?’ ”) and providing the magistrate with succor, rather than requiring his aid in the fantasy of empowerment with which he deluded himself that he was helping the woman in the first place. This new manner of imagining produces real results, and even provokes a physiological response in which he drools in the waking world. The manifestly imaginary presence of the woman performs actual work on both his thinking and his body, now that he no longer has the faculty to reduce her to a merely symbolic figure or a physical presence. His interpretive posture toward the figure has lost its will to knowledge; he no longer tries to make distinctions between her body and its meaning, and no longer seeks to secure his own identity and position with respect to her through the dual modes of appropriation that distinction enabled. In the rest of this essay I  will endeavor to describe how Coetzee’s self-consciously literary—and especially his blatantly metafictional—writing works to produce a resonant state of responsiveness in readers.

Imaginary others and real ethics: Simultaneity in Coetzee’s metafictional encounters As I argue in an article tracing a similar turn to ethics through metafiction in the work of Japanese author Murakami Haruki, For most theorists we either read immersively or reflectively, apprehending characters as human beings or elements of fiction, but never both in any given moment—much as we can only see either a duck or a rabbit in the famous optical illusion (Brooks). The ethics of reading thus appears to require oscillation between immersion and detachment; the critic must move back and forth between representation and reality to better ascertain the relationship between the values we adopt as immersed readers and those adduced by critical reflection. This approach meshes

138

138

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

conveniently with the proclivity of ethical criticism to view novel alterity through hermeneutic models, imagining that readers acquisitively expand their fields of knowledge in a cycle of tentative appropriation and then reflective reconsideration of otherness that eventually gets it right.32 Coetzee, by contrast, urges us to accept the idea that real ethical force can be exerted by imaginary encounters in the moment of imagining, as an immanent function of literary experience rather than the retrospective work of critical reflection. Richard Wolheim suggests, contra Cleanth Brooks, that we imagine figures in art, and by extension literature, as both real and unreal at the same time. We take figures as the literal entities they represent even while we know them to be mere representations. We might only be able to see either rabbit or duck in a given instant, but while imagining the duck we still possess awareness that it is a drawing rather than a painting or a real duck. Moreover, our awareness of the kind and quality of artistic representation affect the sensibilities we bring to bear on it; an impressionist painting of a young girl in distress invites interpretive postures quite different from those that solicited by a Nihonga rendering of a similar subject. Wolheim invites us to think of our awareness of artistic form as a lens through which we experience the vividness of represented figures, and not something we must “forget” in order to imagine those figures more fully. The self-consciously literary and often metafictive novels of Coetzee, I argue, push us to develop more holistic dispositions in our apprehensions of represented characters; we must accept what Wolheim calls the “twofoldness” of their appearance as simultaneously aesthetic elements in a literary work and human beings whose lives have consequence. The narrator of Waiting for the Barbarians is moved by his partly imaginary experiences to take up new positions vis-à-vis real others in the town. But how can a mere representation of ethical transformation, even a transformative manner of imagining and representing others, become for readers anything other than a symbolic element in a reflective approach to ethics that is the very mode of understanding the magistrate must move beyond? Coetzee attempts to address this question through the hybrid structure of his fiction, which undergirds its symbolic significances with metonymic invocations of presence that supersede the meanings they produce to present a twofold experience of its represented subjects. In the final passages of Waiting for the Barbarians, we encounter a “real” manifestation of the recurring dream that the narrator has been seeing and relating since the start of the novel:  his approach to a young girl, a child, involved in some other activity. In this final scene, the narrator

32 Christopher Weinberger, “Imaginary Worlds and Real Ethics: Alterity and Transpositioning in Murakami Haruki's Fractal Realism.” Novel 49.3 (2016): 424.

139

ALTERITY IN J. M. COETZEE’S QUASI-REALISM

139

actually approaches real children who turn out to be creating the figure of a person, a snowman. “Anxious not to alarm them, but inexplicably joyful, I approach them across the snow . . . ‘Someone fetch things for the mouth and nose and eyes,’ says the child who is their leader. It strikes me that the snowman will need arms too, but I do not want to interfere . . . This is not the scene I  dreamed of.”33 The sequence, like the opening, breaks an obviously symbolic object—an imaginary, human-like figure whose features are partly blank and who lacks wholeness—into metonymic parts whose arrangement literally and figuratively organizes the scene. We experience a metaleptic breach in the structure of the novel, whereby what has been until this moment a meta-narrative motif superimposed on experience by the reflecting narrator irrupts into the story world as literal occurrence. The text thus folds the immersive and reflective postures that have been both subject of its thematic inquiry and effect of its representational methods into one and the same experience, for both the narrator and readers, in this final scene of encounter. As a conclusion to the novel, it serves a traditional, mimetic function by demonstrating some limited ethical growth on the part of the narrator. He does not interfere with the scene. He still thinks in terms of “deficiency” (noting that the figure is missing arms) but declines to impose his vision of how best to conceive and represent the subject. He no longer self-consciously turns the scene into an emblem of his own growth or occasion for reflection on his own desires. Moreover, he does not attempt to understand the motivations or experiences of these others through comparison to his own judgments. Thus a conventional reading of the novel, one focused on the ethics of what happens in the story, can justifiably argue for some ethical growth on the part of the narrator. But the reflexive narration of the novel renders any realist approach to ethics in the novel incomplete. The conflation of narrative motif (repeated discussions of the narrator’s recurring dream) and story told (its actual occurrence at the end of the present-tense story) effaces the distinction between the imaginary and the real so often posited as a premise for the kinds of interpretive postures brought to bear by critics invested in the ethics of identification. Readers must accord this self-consciously symbolic scene, heretofore related as symbolic visions or dreams by the narrator, the same measure of reality as the narrator and the rest of the world he inhabits. The distinction between real and imaginary bodies becomes trivial in this conclusion; both the proximity and tangible reality of the scene, and the self-conscious unreality of its allegorical suggestiveness and relation to the dream sequences, are essential for our experience of the promise it holds for the construction of novel alterity. Like the snowman, we must

33

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 155.

140

140

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

apprehend the figures in the novel as both real and unreal, representations and present-in-themselves, at the same time. The novel Slow Man begins where Waiting for the Barbarians leaves readers: in a self-consciously literary world in which distinctions between the real and the fictional are subordinated to questions about the ethics of encounter. In the later novel, real and fictional beings share physical space, personal crises, and interpersonal dilemmas. The manifestly fictional quality of beings in the text do nothing to diminish the ethical force of their interactions, the demands for responsibility and responsiveness that they make, or even the physical effects of their presence on one another. The very idea of an opposition between imaginary and real relations is rendered not only untenable but pernicious, as it fails to do justice to the complex role that fiction plays in composing the scene of relations established within the supposed reality of the novel. Like the magistrate, Slow Man’s protagonist Paul Rayment is an aging, introspective man who struggles intellectually with questions of ethics that abstract him from real-life relations. The text opens with the scene of a bicycle accident that results in the removal of Paul’s leg, marking once again the strong metonymic focus on bodies or parts of bodies. As Paul flies through the air, the narrator makes for him this helplessly recursive narrative statement:  “If he has a last thought, if there is time for a last thought, it will simply be, So this is what a last thought is like.”34 Thus lost in reflection on his own patterns of thinking, Paul has trouble mindfully engaging with his local situation. The novel emphasizes the role of “locale” in terms of nationality, geography, class, language, and the “foreignness” of Paul and many of those he encounters. Similarly, the narrator seems to have trouble fully engaging with Paul, casting this thought itself in a projective, conditional form that distances the protagonist in the very gesture of claiming uncertain access to his interiority. We will find that Paul’s trouble apprehending the distinctions between proximity and intimacy, care and love, that inform his relationship with his nurse turn out to mirror narrative concerns with novel representation as well. Slow Man amplifies and casts in a more overtly metafictional light the concerns of Waiting for the Barbarians with interpersonal violence and the apprehension of others. Paul, again like the magistrate, undergoes intense physical pain that transforms his overly intellectual cogitations and distanced manner of approach to others. He develops a distressingly one-sided and obsessive romantic interest in the foreign woman who comes to care for him, a woman whom he misreads and with whom he exists in an asymmetrical relation of power. But the asymmetry we discover in in

34

J. M. Coetzee, Slow Man (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 27; emphasis in the original.

141

ALTERITY IN J. M. COETZEE’S QUASI-REALISM

141

this text soon reaches dizzying heights that far surpass its predecessor: in a surprising moment, when a certain Elizabeth Costello, recognizable to Coetzee’s readers from other work, knocks on Paul’s door and demands accommodation, we discover that Paul is a fictional being, the subject of a novel she is writing. Yet despite the ontological divide separating author and character, they somehow come to occupy the same diegetic space, and must consequently confront the ethical implications of their interactions. The existential and ethical challenges that their coexistence raises take shape in large part through the seemingly ordinary, mundane demands for responsiveness that their brief cohabitation produces. The novel relates scene after scene in which characters must accommodate the bodies of others under restrictive circumstances that prohibit the modes of understanding and forms of physical reciprocity that we normally envisage as fundaments of ethical relations. For example, Paul is pushed by Costello into a literally blind date in which he must wear a blindfold, to have sexual relations with a supposedly blind woman whose name is strikingly similar to that of his nurse. This contrived mechanism does not somehow allow him to “see” from her perspective, and thereby provide more mutual ground for the liaison. Rather, it impresses upon him, and readers, the degree to which the forms of recognition and understanding that we often bring to encounters as measures of ethics fail in the face of the kinds of asymmetry and unfathomability that fiction provides. Throughout their date Paul is conscious that the scene is part of the novel by Costello. He also feels acutely the limitations of the scene; the woman remains knowable to him only in terms of the forms of flailing physical contact and halting conversation they share, and insofar as he recognizes that failures in his own responsiveness have disappointed her. She has no substantial reality for him beyond the fleeting contact this scene of encounter affords. Yet unlike the magistrate under the bed, here Coetzee’s protagonist is more immediately responsible for his comportment toward the woman he cannot see, but who solicits from him physiological as well as emotional responses despite her being inaccessible in certain crucial senses. The magistrate, in part because his capacity to apprehend others was broken down by torture, eventually began to realize more fully the immanent responsibilities entailed in imaginative projection. For Paul Rayment, however, the very distinction between the real and the imaginary does not even obtain. His author has arranged the affair with the unseen blind woman; she does not merely figure but essentially “is,” even within the diegetic world, a character in Costello’s novel about Paul’s slow journey to develop real connections. His knowledge of her potential unreality, however, does not somehow absolve Paul of responsibility in his bearing toward her, nor does it diminish the reality of the physiological, affective, and cognitive responses that her presence

142

142

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

solicits from him. The narrative description in which the scene is rendered is in fact laden with ethically inflected language that draws attention to his disposition and inability to think of her as other than an invisible, sightless, and deficient body. To her he must be even more of a jumble of sense-data . . . Is that enough for her to construct the image of a man from? Is it an image she would be prepared to give herself to? . . . How long since she lost her sight? Can he decently ask? . . . Does intercourse with the beautiful elevate us, make better people of, or is it by embracing the diseased, the mutiliated, the repulsive that we improve ourselves? What questions! Is that why the Costello woman has brought the two of them together? . . . [I]n order that . . . they can hold a philosophy class, lying in each other’s arms discoursing about beauty, love, and goodness? From his envelope of darkness, not yet giving up hope of forming a picture of her, he reaches out again to touch her face; and in the act plunges into a dark gulf of his own . . . Blindness is a handicap, pure and simple. A man without sight is a lesser man, as a man with one leg is a lesser man, not a new man.35 His thinking remains hopelessly analogical; he compares her experience of blindness to his own lameness and temporary sightlessness. His reasoning is comparative in the ethically suspect sense of which Claviez warns; he still privileges sight as the measure of value in apprehension, wondering how she might “form an image” of him from a “jumble of sense-data.” Rather than reaching out differently—for example, through other senses—he imaginatively projects onto the woman the deficiency he feels in himself. His speculations on the ethics of their situation are predicated on these flawed efforts to “see” her and to imagine how she sees; the limitations in his thinking prevent him from recognizing her as a real, autonomous being and potential partner. She remains for him a character in the scene concocted for him despite the undeniable physicality of their entangled bodies. While he shares with the magistrate a latent colonialism in his apprehension of others, Paul seeks the source of his ethical failure not within himself but rather in the structuring context of the scene of encounter. Even after a brief moment of immersive pleasure, Paul cannot rid himself of concern with the fictional, contrived nature of the arranged scene and the mockery it makes of intimacy.

35

Ibid., 106–13.

143

ALTERITY IN J. M. COETZEE’S QUASI-REALISM

143

What a pleasure, and how unexpected, to have the freedom of a woman’s body again, even if the woman is invisible! “Does she [Costello] intend, do you think, that you and I should become a couple? For her entertainment perhaps? The halt leading the blind?” The remark is meant lightly, but he can feel her stiffen. He hears the lips part, hears her swallow, and all of a sudden she is crying . . . At least, he thinks, she has tear ducts left. “[W]hy are we letting someone we barely know dictate our lives? . . . She issues instructions, we follow. Even when there is no one to see that we obey.” See. Not the right word, but he lets it stand. She must be used to it by now, to people who say “see” when they mean something else.36 The phrase “the freedom of a woman’s body” ironizes the meaning of “freedom,” since what he really enjoys is subjecting that body to his own impositions. By pointing to the way both of them are subject to the authorial will of Costello, and then furthermore by persistently apprehending her through visual metaphors, he reduces her to an object of perception within an imperializing gaze liberated by the potential unreality of the scene. He conceives her as being there-for-him, rather than an autonomous person in her own right, because that is permitted by the fictional context of the scene itself—much the way that characters in novels are there-for-readers rather than autonomous beings. Whereas the magistrate needs to learn to undo a persistent dualism divorcing his ethical imagination from his physical interactions, Paul needs to learn to navigate more kinetically, less slowly, and less cerebrally, a world in which the imaginary and the real are hopelessly entangled. The overt metafictional hybridity of the novel forces readers, likewise, to think about the question of novel alterity even if we adopt immersive, self-forgetting postures. The close attention that the novel pays to the affects and circumstances of others that Paul misapprehends, and whom he suspects may be mere characters, leads us to feel that Paul errs in believing that because the scene of interaction is a fiction, ethics do not obtain. Of course, this indicts readers for the same failings. For readers, like myself, to reduce the woman’s role in the novel to a supportive one with symbolic meaning relevant for fleshing out Paul’s character, and to place her in an analogical relationship to real-world human beings as an illustrative point, reproduces the ethical failing of Paul Rayment. Paul disappoints both the blind woman and his author, as well as readers, precisely because he cannot but think of the scene of encounter as arranged for the larger narrative of his own life,

36

Coetzee, Slow Man, 114.

144

144

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

in which the woman figures as a substitute for the “real” love of his life, the nurse. But the novel in its very form privileges certain points of view at the expense of others, and thus mirrors the insidiousness of a problem that can only be worked through by recognition and acceptance of responsibility for violence done even in the pursuit of ethical understanding. The affective force of the novel sets readers against the logic of Paul Rayment, who views his own and the woman’s imaginary state of being as ontologically inferior and deficient with regard to a presumed authenticity from which he too feels displaced, thanks to his accident and the intrusion of his author. Paul assumes the woman to be “less” than a full subject in her own right, and cannot but fathom him on terms that perpetuate that diminishment. The descriptions of her response to his halting actions and speech ensure that we feel the wrongness of his comportment in this scene. But in feeling that wrongness we set ourselves against whatever assumptions about the unreality of novel mimesis that we might bring to the scene of reading. We are forced to recognize the hypocrisy of a position that relegates characters to states of “similarity” to real people in a text about the damaging regime of understanding in which such logic participates.

Conclusion The last few decades have seen the rise of a new wave of ethically minded metafiction. As I  suggest elsewhere, a number of contemporary novelists, including Murakami Haruki, Zadie Smith, and Mark Z. Danielewski, have increasingly drawn on the anti-mimetic rhetorical strategies of metafiction for expressly ethical purposes.37 No longer can we consider metafiction an essentially “narcissistic” form which eschews ethics in favor of self-involved play. Here I have argued that Coetzee’s writing can help wean ethical criticism on novels from its focus on the verisimilar. Waiting for the Barbarians in particular invites us to start from more conventional interests in the ethics in character-level interaction, but then confronts us with transformative moments of narrative self-consciousness that preclude comparing novel worlds to our own. That is, comparative reasoning becomes the point of entry into moments of encounter afforded by Coetzee’s fiction that are not merely “like” real life but are part of a contiguous experience of immanent and formative ethical encounter. Both theories of ethical identification and new ethical theories concerned with alterity tend to premise their arguments on mimetic fiction, under the assumption that fictive worlds offer models for real life. They examine the

37

Weinberger, “Reflexive Realism and Kinetic Ethics.”

145

ALTERITY IN J. M. COETZEE’S QUASI-REALISM

145

operation of ethics within verisimilar worlds to discuss the implications for real life. However, if along with Coetzee, we posit a model of ethics in which encounters with others are always simultaneously and self-consciously both real, as events of physiologically direct contact between persons, and imaginary, as affective, perceptual, and cognitive events occurring within individual horizons of experience, we discover a more direct and vital role that the novel can play in evoking self-consciousness vis-à-vis readers’ ethical dispositions. Coetzee’s reflexive, self-conscious fiction effaces distinctions between real and represented alterity, for both characters and readers. It forces us to become aware of the often insidious processes of imaginative projection that encounters with others can entail. But at the same time, Coetzee’s writing persists in valuing the forms of contact made possible through those imaginary relations. The inextricable coincidence of immersive and reflective modes of apprehension in which his texts involve readers requires us to revisit the common assumption that literary experience attains ethical relevance through oscillation between these postures, an assumption that bundles into critical conclusions the logic of likeness that Coetzee’s ethically minded metafictive writing productively disrupts.

Bibliography Altieri, Charles (2001), “Taking Lyrics Literally: Teaching Poetry in a Prose Culture,” New Literary History 32.2: 259–81. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/20057658. Altieri, Charles (2002), “The Literary and the Ethical: Difference as Definition,” in Elizabeth Beaumont (ed.), The Question of Literature: The Place of the Literary in Contemporary Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 19–47. Attridge, Derek (2004), J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Black, Shameem (2010), Fiction across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels. New York: Columbia University Press. Blackburn, Simon (1993), Essays in Quasi-Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Booth, Wayne (1988), The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brooks, Peter (2013), “Persons and Optics,” What Is the Nature of Literary Being? Center for the Study of the Novel Annual Conference, Stanford, CA. Butler, Judith (2003), “Values of Difficulty,” in Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb (eds), Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 199–215. Claviez, Thomas (2013), “Done and Over With—Finally? Otherness, Metonymy, and the Ethics of Comparison,” PMLA 128.3: 608–14. Coetzee, J. M. (1982), Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin Books. Coetzee, J. M. (2006), Slow Man. New York: Penguin Books.

146

146

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Craps, Stef (2007), “J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and the Ethics of Testimony,” English Studies 88.1: 59–66. Crowther, Paul (2001), “Twofoldness: From Transcendental Imagination to Pictorial Art,” in Rob Van Gerwen (ed.), Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting: Art as Representation and Expression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 85–100. Eliot, George (1978), in Gordon S. Haight (ed.), The George Eliot Letters, vol. 9. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gibson, Andrew (1999), Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel. London: Routledge. Hale, Dorothy (May 2009), “Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century,” PMLA 124.3: 896–905. Harpham, Geoffrey (1999), Shadows of Ethics. Durham: Duke University Press. Landy, Joshua (2012), How to Do Things with Fictions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Love, Heather (2010), “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41: 371–91. Miller, J. Hillis (1987), The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin. New York: Columbia University Press. Newton, Adam Zachary (1995 [1987]), Narrative Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, Martha (1990), Love’s Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press. Palumbo-Liu, David (2012), The Deliverance of Others. Durham: Duke University Press. Ricoeur, Paul (1990), Time and Narrative, trans. David Pellauer and Kathleen McLaughlin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Runia, Eelco (2006), “Presence,” History and Theory 45.1: 5. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2003), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press. Serpell, C. Namwali (2014), Seven Modes of Uncertainty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vermeule, Blakey (2010), Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Vogler, Candace (2007), “The Moral of the Story,” Critical Inquiry 34.1.3: 5–35. Weinberger, Christopher (2015), “Reflexive Realism and Kinetic Ethics: The Case of Murakami Haruki’s 1Q84,” Representations 131.1: 105–33. Weinberger, Christopher (2016), “Imaginary Worlds and Real Ethics: Alterity and Transpositioning in Murakami Haruki's Fractal Realism,” Novel 49.3: 409–28. Wollheim, Richard (1987), Painting as an Art. London: Thames and Hudson. Wood, James (1999), “Parables and Prizes,” The New Republic, December 20, 42.

147

PART THREE

Religion

148

149

7 Asmodeus, the “eye of providence,” and the ethics of seeing in nineteenth-century mystery fiction Sara Hackenberg

Mystery—originally a religious term—exploded into a powerful secular metagenre in the nineteenth century. It was so popular a narrative mode that it stimulated the century’s greatest thinkers:  we can see it shaping Darwin’s announcement of his investigation into the “mystery of mysteries” of evolution, in Marx’s attempts to unveil the “secrets” of capitalism, in the links between Freud’s psychoanalysis and the methods of Sherlock Holmes. In this chapter, I  explore how the fictional mysteries of the nineteenth century exhibit a distinct faith in visual epistemology that fuses the eye of the natural or social scientist with the eye of “Providence.” The nineteenth-century fictional mystery both depends on visual empiricism and meditates on the ethics of seeing, regularly using religious imagery to figure the powers of its master-perceiver characters and justify their use of their “microscopic eyes” (the phrase is G. W. M. Reynolds’s in The Mysteries of London, 1844–46). From the “urban mysteries” of the 1840s and 1850s to Sherlock Holmes, the mystery’s master-perceivers are regularly likened to demons and gods. The mischievous x-ray vision of Asmodeus, a demon who delights in seeing voyeuristically through roofs and walls, is repeatedly invoked by these mysteries in their descriptions of their master-perceivers’ powers. However, these narratives counter the satirical gaze of Asmodeus

150

150

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

by also figuring their master-perceivers as earthly extensions of Divine Providence. As the mystery’s master-perceivers attempt to use their skills in visual empiricism to punish the wicked and reward the virtuous, the mystery becomes a vehicle for popular considerations of the relationships between social knowledge and ethical behavior.

Mystery and Asmodeus In 1842, Eugène Sue launched a new kind of mystery novel that soon took Europe and America by storm. Sue’s suspenseful, sensational, serialized Les Mystères de Paris triggered an explosion of translations and a host of new “urban mysteries” narratives across mid-century Europe and America. The new narratives of urban mystery provided readers with diverse plots that depended on a variety of discourses—from Gothic sensation to melodrama and newspaper reportage—as they explored a host of social issues such as seduction, rape, burglary, murder, gambling shenanigans, aristocratic excesses, exploited workers, capitalist corruption, secret societies, international intrigues, republicanism, revolution, blackmail, and fraud. Manifesting as both massive, multi-year serials and brief forty-page pamphlets, they range in tone from conservative and reactionary to liberal and revolutionary and are set in burgeoning metropolises (Paris, London, New  York, Philadelphia, New Orleans) as well as small, industrializing hamlets (Lowell, Fitchburg, “Papermill Village”). Despite their remarkable diversity, the mid-century Mysteries consistently agree on one thing: on the need to develop perceptive vision—“eyeology,” as Osgood Bradbury terms it in his Mysteries of Lowell (1844)—in order to navigate successfully the rapidly urbanizing modern world.1 The modern mystery’s most powerful and compelling characters all exhibit acute visual discernment or “eyeology,” and the genre also repeatedly exhorts readers to develop their own visual abilities. The narrator of Philip Penchant’s The Mysteries of Fitchburg (1844), for instance, commands the reader to “cast your eye over the busy crowd,” asking, “Can you read it?”2 George William MacArthur Reynolds’s wildly popular 1844 mysteries novel The Mysteries of London relentlessly instructs readers in “microscopic” vision. After announcing that “the visitor to the Polytechnic Institution . . . has doubtless seen the exhibition of the microscope” in which “a drop of the purest water, magnified by that instrument some thousands of times, appears filled with horrible reptiles and monsters of revolting forms,” the narrator ominously asserts that “such is London.” For “fair and attractive

1 2

Osgood Bradbury, The Mysteries of Lowell (Boston: Edward P. Williams, 1844), 28. Philip Penchant, The Mysteries of Fitchburg (Fitchburg, NY: Charles Shepley, 1844), 14.

151

NINETEENTH-CENTURY MYSTERY FICTION

151

as the mighty metropolis may appear to the superficial observer,” the city actually “swarms with disgusting, loathsome, and venomous objects, wearing human shapes.” Thus, the narrator concludes that “all the features, all the characteristics, all the morals, of a great city must occupy the attention of him who surveys London with a microscopic eye.”3 With such observations, The Mysteries of London, along with most other mysteries-of-the-city novels of the mid-century, firmly fuses the scientist’s technology-aided eye with the eye of the social moralist. Indeed, we might see the mystery genre in general, which came into its fully modern form on the heels of the mid-century urban mysteries, as constituting a popular narrative meditation on relationships between penetrative social knowledge and ethical behavior. While “mystery” was originally a religious term, arising within the cults devoted to ancient Greek gods and goddesses, as the word was adopted into the developing European languages it gradually secularized. By the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of “mysteries” had come to describe a popular and very worldly narrative metagenre.4 It was so popular a narrative mode that we see it helping to shape the century’s most influential thinking:  Darwin’s announcement of his investigation into the “mystery of mysteries” of evolution; Marx’s attempts to unveil the “secrets” of capitalism; the links between Freud’s psychoanalysis and the methods of Sherlock Holmes.5 The fictional mysteries of the nineteenth century thus exhibit a distinct faith in visual epistemology—the clue, the discernable trace—that reflects

3 G. W.  M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, vol. 1 (London:  George Vickers, 1844), no. 8, 58. 4 Mysteries originally were unknowable mystic secrets that referred to the inscrutable workings of the gods and demanded special celebrants (initiates, priests) to realize and honor them. Classical and early Christian cultures of the Mediterranean used the ancient Greek word musterion (Latinized as mysterium) to designate a genre of active but secret religious practices, ceremonies, and counsels open only to the initiated. As the Greek and Roman words for mystery were adopted into Old English, Old French, and other early European languages, they came to refer to a more exclusively biblical set of religious enigmas and revelations. The idea of mysteries began to secularize in the early modern era, and texts were produced that explored the “mysteries” of such things as statecraft, courtship, and guild practices and skills. In the eighteenth century “mysteries” were for the first time fictionalized (as seen in many titles of Gothic novels); by the middle of the nineteenth century, the current sense of the mystery genre was established with the rise of the novel of “urban mysteries,” which moved “Gothic” mysteries from an imaginary middle ages into an urbanized, industrialized modern landscape. 5 In Darwin’s “Introduction” to On the Origin of Species (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2003 [1859], 95), he notes that his time as a naturalist on the H.  M. S.  Beagle “seemed . . . to throw some light on the origin of species—that mystery of mysteries.” Section 4 of the “Commodities” section of Capital (1867) sees Marx exploring “The Mystery of the Fetishistic Character of Commodities” ([New  York:  Everyman’s Library, 1972], 43). See also the conclusion to Freud’s first chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) about elucidating “the mystery of dreams.”

152

152

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

the century’s general shift from the authority of religion to the authority of science, but also simultaneously reflects and reveals the necessary persistence of religious models for ethical thinking and acting. For despite their reliance on scientific empiricism—their endorsement of looking at the world with a “microscopic eye”—the master-perceivers of the modern mystery are so very powerful that they are never just natural scientists or social investigators; rather, they are consistently understood to be supernatural:  magicians, witches, and especially demons and gods. Indeed, across the genre, the mystery’s visual empiricism is figured even more persistently by demonic than technologic analogy. The favorite demon of nineteenth-century mystery was Asmodeus. An ancient talmudic and biblical figure, Asmodeus was transformed by Luis Vélez de Guevara’s El Diablo Conjuelo (1641) into a playfully devilish social commentator whose supernatural ability to fly over the city and see through its roofs and walls fueled his caustic analysis of society.6 De Guevara’s story inspired Alain René Le Sage’s 1707 Le Diable Boîteux, and Le Sage’s Asmodeus was translated into English by Tobias Smollett in the mid-eighteenth century.7 These influential transformations and translations turned Asmodeus into a staple of popular nineteenth-century culture. Revolutionary newspapers in Paris used his name (perhaps because of this, the idea of the “Asmodeus flight” appears in Carlyle’s influential 1837 The French Revolution).8 Asmodeus’s soaring gaze also informed what Walter Benjamin called the “panoramic” literature of France and England, such as the 1831–34

6 Luis Vélez de Guavara, El Diablo Conjuelo (1641, Project Gutenberg, 2011). Asmodeus earlier appears in the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit, where he is named the worst or the king of demons (Tobit iii.8). Raphael Patai’s Encyclopedia of Jewish Folklore and Traditions (New  York:  Routledge) notes that he also appears in “The Testament of Solomon,” the Babylonian Talmud, and talmudic legends about the construction of the Temple of Jerusalem (51–2). 7 In the mid-eighteenth century, Tobias Smollett translated Le Sage’s Asmodeus into English; a nineteenth-century English translation was made by Joseph Thomas in 1841. For more on Asmodeus, newspapers, and the urban sketch, see David Pike’s Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell, 2007); and Martina Lauster’s Sketches of the Nineteenth Century:  European Journalism and Its Physiologies, 1830–50 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 8 Toward the end of volume 2 of The French Revolution (book 6, ch. 6), in Carlyle’s account of the eve of the Insurrection of August 10, 1792, he exclaims:  “Could the reader take an Asmodeus’s Flight, and waving open all roofs and privacies, look down from the Tower of Notre Dame, what a Paris were it! Of treble-voice whimperings or vehemence, of bass-voice growlings, dubitations; Courage screwing itself to desperate defiance; Cowardice trembling silent within barred doors;–and all round, Dulness calmly snoring; for much Dulness, flung on its mattresses, always sleeps. O, between the clangour of these high-storming tocsins and that snore of Dulness, what a gamut:  of trepidation, excitation, desperation; and above it mere Doubt, Danger, Atropos and Nox!”:  https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/carlyle/thomas/ french_revolution/v2.6.6.html.

153

NINETEENTH-CENTURY MYSTERY FICTION

153

sketches of Paris in Le Livre des Cent-et-un (originally titled Le Diable Boîteux), Bulwer-Lytton’s 1833 miscellany Asmodeus at Large, and Le Diable à Paris (1845–46).9 Such radical and innovative urban writings quickly caught the attention of writers interested in the mysterious iniquities and inequities arising from rapid urban growth in the mid-century. Writers of city-mysteries narratives, perhaps also responding to the etymological root of “detect” (the Latin “detegere,” to expose, to uncover, and to unroof), quickly adopted Asmodeus as their own. Asmodeus-titled and even Asmodeus“authored” mystery fictions appeared in abundance in the 1840s. Harrison Gray Buchanan’s Asmodeus; or Legends of New York. Being a Complete Exposé of the Mysteries, Vices, and Doings of that city was quickly joined by George Thompson’s 1849 New  York mysteries novel Revelations of Asmodeus; or, Mysteries of Upper Ten-dom; Thompson himself regularly used the pseudonym “Asmodeus,” as did other city-mysteries writers, such as the author of Sharps and Flats; or, The Perils of City Life, by Asmodeus (1850), and Thomas Frost, author of The Mysteries of Old Father Thames. These writers’ embrace of Asmodeus indicate the extent to which Mysteries writers, even as they eagerly turned to eyeology and microscopic vision, also present readers with a modern world rendered so very opaque that its penetration might be beyond the scope of science. Indeed, Asmodeus provided a powerfully supernatural version of the scientific, penetrating eye of the master-perceiver, the central character of the modern mystery. Frost opens his Mysteries of Old Father Thames by promising that, “Asmodeus-like,” he will “penetrate the abodes of vice and misery” to expose the mysteries of the city.10 The Baron von Reizenstein, in his 1855 German-language Die Geiheimnisse von New Orleans (or The Mysteries of New Orleans), also aligns the writer of mysteries with “Le Sage’s limping devil” who “understood the rare art of lifting the roofs from houses, revealing things to his favorites that gave them more experience and wisdom in a matter of minutes than Doctor Faustus and his guide learned

9

In The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), Benjamin cites Le Livre des Cent-et-un and Le Diable à Paris as originating “panoramic literature,” opening the city “out,” and paving the way for the “socially panoramic” newspaper serial (or feuilleton) (5–6); Bulwer-Lytton’s Asmodeus at Large (Philadelphia:  Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1833) was likewise a collection of urban sketches concerned with the inner workings of the city. See Paul K Saint-Amour’s “The Vertical Flâneur:  Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis” (in Maurizia Boscagli and Enda Duffy [eds], Joyce, Benjamin and Magical Urbanism [Amsterdam:  Rodopi, 2011]) for a discussion of Asmodeus and flânerie. See also Jonathan Arac’s Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979) for an account of Asmodeus and modes of literary realism. 10 Thomas Frost, The Mysteries of Old Father Thames: A Romance (London: W. Cafflyn, 1848), no. 1, 4.

154

154

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

through deep contemplation.”11 Thompsons’s Revelations of Asmodeus begins: “[T]here is a spirit that in all times has inspired and guided the pens of those who have written of the follies, vices and crimes of society, holding them up to the light . . . That spirit is Asmodeus. . . The roofs of houses are all glass to him, and so are the thickest walls of all our dwellings.”12 In Dickens’s novel of urban mysteries, Bleak House, the “magic” Inspector Bucket not only emulates Asmodeus by literally ascending to the rooftops and peering through skylights at his quarry, but he is also able to (imaginatively) fly over London in his powerful mind’s eye: he “mounts high tower in his mind and looks out far and wide” seeing “many solitary figures . . . creeping through the streets; many solitary figures out on heaths, and roads, and lying under haystacks.”13 Asmodeus continues to inform mystery fiction throughout the rest of the century: Conan Doyle’s third Sherlock Holmes story, “A Case of Identity,” for instance, begins with Holmes observing to Watson that life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.14 While in Conan Doyle’s first Holmes story, Watson describes Holmes as “a sensitive instrument” with “high powered lenses” and a “reasoning and observing machine,” Holmes himself suggests here that perceiving the “infinitely” strange nature of the modern world demands more the magical gaze of Asmodeus than the machinery of a microscopic eye.15 As these examples suggest, the demonic Asmodeus provides a compelling way to extend supernaturally the eye of the dispassionate seeker of knowledge—the detached eye of the natural or social scientist who seeks

11 Ludwig von Reizenstein, Mysteries of New Orleans (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002 [1853–55]), 261. 12 George Thompson, Revelations of Asmodeus; or, Mysteries of Upper Ten-dom, (New York: C. G. Graham & Co., 1849), 5–6. 13 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (New  York:  Modern Library Edition, 2002 [1852–53]), 344, 753. 14 Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Case of Identity,” in The Original Illustrated Strand Sherlock Holmes (Ware, Herts, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1989 [1891]), 147–58), 147. 15 Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” in The Original Illustrated Strand Sherlock Holmes (Ware, Herts, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1989 [1891]), 117–31, 117.

155

NINETEENTH-CENTURY MYSTERY FICTION

155

to penetrate the outré hidden details of commonplace existence. However, by aligning the scientist’s detached, microscopic gaze with that of a mischievous, socially focused demon, and by focusing on modern vice and crime, nineteenth-century mysteries inextricably entangle the knowledge produced by penetrative vision with issues of morality. These narratives further address the ethics of seeing by significantly enlarging Asmodeus’s abilities, regularly figuring the godlike Asmodeus gaze as able to penetrate not just roofs and walls but also human exteriors. Thompson’s opening to Revelations of Asmodeus notes that “more” than simply seeing through buildings, “Asmodeus looks with clairvoyant power through the embroidered mantle of pride, and the sable cloak of hypocrisy” and thus “Asmodeus . . . looks deep into the hidden thoughts of man.”16 In 1841, Edgar Allan Poe’s famous proto-detective C. Auguste Dupin chuckled to his companion that “most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms.”17 The “microscopic eye” that structures The Mysteries of London is focused primarily on the “loathsomeness” that lurks under “human shapes.”18 Asmodeus’s greatest glee, in these narratives, is to expose the immorality of society and its rampant hypocrisy and imposture; the mystery suggests that much of the ethical work of the Asmodeus gaze is to bear witness to the many false fronts of modernity. Asmodeus, however, in exposing seemingly limitless imposture, also exposes the central paradox of the mystery genre. The main lesson that Asmodeus’s supernatural x-ray vision teaches in the nineteenth-century mystery involves less the particular revelations of inconceivable “queer things” than the idea that nothing is ever what it appears to be, and that despite the mystery’s faith in the visual clue, any “truth” is extremely difficult to discern visually, invisible to most. The mystery’s pervasive faith in visual epistemology is inevitably yoked to its attention to opacity and delight in disguise. The master-perceiver, in fact, is almost always also a master of disguise, resulting in the paradox that the penetrator of all disguises, who demonstrates the genre’s faith in penetrative vision, can also adopt impenetrable disguise, and thus foil penetrative vision. The tension that results from this paradox fuels the mystery’s plots and complicates its moral meditations. Across the body of nineteenth-century mystery, the Asmodeus gaze serves to emphasize how everybody gets away with imposture of one kind or another and no body is ever really who or what it appears to be. This state of affairs can produce a frisson of narrative confusion as to both the social and moral identities of characters. In many

16

Thompson, Revelations of Asmodeus, 6. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Mysteries of the Rue Morgue,” in Graham Clarke (ed.), Tales of Mystery and Imagination (London: Everyman, 1994 [1841]), 411–44, 415. 18 Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, vol. 1, no. 8, 58. 17

156

156

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

cases, such as in George Foster’s 1850 Celio, or New York Above-ground and Under-ground—or with Sherlock Holmes—we often don’t recognize, or we misrecognize, the master-perceiver under his impenetrable disguises, and we often remain unclear about his moral agenda. In the early stories, Holmes is motivated far more by his detached drive for knowledge than by any discernable moral compass; indeed, in only one of the first twelve Holmes stories are wrongdoers actually turned over to institutions of earthly justice.19 In the aforementioned “A Case of Identity,” after deducing that a woman’s loyalty to her mysteriously vanished fiancé is misplaced, for the “fiancé” is actually her conniving stepfather in disguise, Holmes even decides not to reveal the truth to his own client despite remarking that “there never was a man who deserved punishment more.”20 In Celio, Foster’s master-perceiver “Captain Earnest” eventually is revealed as a crusading do-gooder social activist only after appearing for the first half of the narrative as a dangerous, devilish, cavalier ringleader of a criminal gang, and throughout the course of the narrative, even after his social “earnestness” is exposed, he fuels his philanthropic actions with a scurrilous-but-lucrative scandal sheet.21 Such complications of moral categories and motivations also complicate fictional form:  as Holmes observes to Watson in “A Case of Identity,” the wonders revealed by the Asmodeus gaze are things we do “not dare to conceive” or invent, and renders “all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.” Or as H. M. Rulison puts it in The Mysteries and Miseries of the Queen City: Your fashionable story writer, or novelist, who taxes his prolific brain for ideas, instead of going out into society and delineating its innumerable varieties, would make you believe that virtue must, as a natural consequence, in the end triumph over vice. But how far is this from the truth! Almost every one who is at all versed in the ‘mysteries and miseries’ of city life, will bear us out in the assertion, that nine times out of ten instances, the ends of justice are defeated, and good intentions and pious deeds foiled.22 19 The one instance in the first year of the Holmes chronicles in which criminals are actually caught and taken into police custody occurs in the second story, “The Red-Headed League,” in which Holmes foils some would-be bank robbers. All the other outré plots of the first twelve stories either concern no actual crime (“A Scandal in Bohemia”; “A Case of Identity”; “The Man with the Twisted Lip”; “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor”), or the criminals get away with it (“The Boscombe Valley Mystery”; “The Blue Carbuncle”; “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”; “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet”), or the punishment of wrongdoing occurs by divine rather than earthly justice (“The Five Orange Pips”; “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”; “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”). 20 Conan Doyle, “A Case of Identity,” 157. 21 George G. Foster, Celio; or, New York Above-ground and Under-ground (New York: Dewitt & Davenport, 1850). 22 H. M. Rulison, The Mock Marriage; or, the Libertine’s Victim. Being a Faithful Delineation of the Mysteries and Miseries of the Queen City (Cincinnati: Barclay & Co., 1855), 82.

157

NINETEENTH-CENTURY MYSTERY FICTION

157

The Asmodeus gaze thus at once ambiguously moralizes the detached, scientific, microscopic gaze and provides authors with a new form of literary realism that departs from more Manichean moral narrative frameworks, such as might be found in sentimental or melodramatic treatments of virtue and vice.

Asmodeus and providence Even as the Asmodeus gaze helped modern mystery writers articulate a new kind of literary realism, however, the very figuration of this realism as supernaturally produced returns the mystery to metaphysical and theological frames. Mystery writers grappled with such religious, moral implications by attempting to transform the demonic energies of Asmodeus into that of a powerfully “good spirit” or even into an extension of Divine Providence itself (thus following a Miltonic strain of literary theology in which the devil is an agent of God). Thompson, in his opening description of Asmodeus, notes the demon’s kinship with ministry, how he shares the minster’s knowledge of his flock: his Asmodeus “bends over the confessional of the Catholic priest, and treasures up the confidential revelations made to the protestant divine” and “in his small way” Asmodeus is thus also “a preacher of righteousness.”23 The Asmodeus-like narrator of the anonymous 1848 Mysteries of Philadelphia calls himself a “minister of virtue”; the novel’s subtitle claims it is “an accurate history of this great moral world.”24 James Rees sets up his 1849 Mysteries of City Life as relating experiences of a “Home Missionary” who, like Asmodeus, can readily penetrate abodes, and in doing so, exposes the agonies of poverty in his social work. Charles Dickens, in another of his urban-mysteries inflected novels Dombey and Son, imagined a new kind of “good” Asmodeus:  the narrator calls for a “good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a more potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale” and “show a Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes, to swell the retinue of the Destroying Angel . . .!” This kind of Asmodeus-generated vision, Dickens suggests, would cause all men to “apply themselves, like creatures of one common origin . . . to make the world a better place!”25 In these renderings, the nineteenth-century mystery attempts to recuperate the detached, satirical, and ambiguous Asmodeus gaze into an unambiguous force for social

23

Thompson, Revelations of Asmodeus, 6. Mysteries of Philadelphia; or, Scenes of Real Life in the Quaker City, Containing an Accurate History of this Great Moral World, by an Old Amateur (Philadelphia, n.p., 1848), viii. 25 Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 [1846–48]), 540–1. 24

158

158

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

good rather than simply a mechanism for exposing human hypocrisy and imposture. As the mystery reimagines Asmodeus as a “good spirit,” it begins to merge the demonic Asmodeus with Providence. In Sue’s Les Mysteres de Paris, the novel that sparked the mid-century urban mysteries phenomenon, a buffoonish earthly Asmodeus—a porter whose lugubrious entertainment is to peep through a hole in the wall at the pitiful sight of his building’s most impoverished tenants—quickly gives way to the powerful, Providential gaze of the novel’s hero, the master-perceiving master-of-disguise Prince Rodolphe. By using the porter’s peep-hole just long enough to determine the virtue of the impoverished tenants before jumping out from behind the wall to foil a plan to frame them for theft and also generously ameliorate their penury, Rodolphe transforms the peep-hole (and, by extension, the genre) from a source of woeful entertainment into a tactical vehicle for ethical and charitable activity. Rodolphe also works Providentially to punish the vicious. In a famous scene from the novel, commented on in italicized horror by readers such as Thackeray and Marx, Rodolphe convenes a secret tribunal and condemns one of the novel’s arch-villains to be blinded, a punishment that underlines the mystery’s general equation of vision with social power.26 Like Sue’s Rodolphe, countless master-perceiver/detective characters in nineteenth-century mystery consider themselves agents of divine Providence. In Reynolds’s Mysteries of London, the heroic Richard Markham, having escaped a perilous situation by the skin of his teeth, finds himself “impressed with the idea that Providence had that night favored his escape from the jaws of death, in order that he might become the means of rooting up a den of horrors.”27 The Mysteries of Old Father Thames supports the necessity of such earthly agents of Providence, and the merging of theological and human forms of justice, by meditating on the illogic of human justice serving only to punish wrongdoing: True justice requires, not only the restraint of vice, but the reward of virtue—and, indeed, such a course would be the best preventive of crime; but our legislators and our spiritual instructors point upward, and tell us that the virtuous shall have their reward beyond the grave. How

26 Thackeray ended his short summary of the first part of The Mysteries of Paris with one bald sentence in exclamatory capitals: “RODOLPH PUTS THE SCHOOLMASTER’S EYES OUT!” (“The Mysteries of Paris,” in The New Sketch Book [London:  Alston Rivers, Ltd.,  1906], 189). In his first collaboration with Engels, The Holy Family (Moscow:  Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956), Marx is also horrified by Rodolphe’s blinding of the villain and how it “emasculates him . . . robs him of a productive organ, the eye” (237); emphases in the original. 27 Reynolds, Mysteries of London, vol. 1, no. 17, 129.

159

NINETEENTH-CENTURY MYSTERY FICTION

159

inconsistent, then, to punish crime on earth; if the reward of virtue be left to Providence, why not the punishment of vice?28 Frost’s narrator, musing here on the mystery’s insistence on the interchangeability of earthly and heavenly forms of justice, begins to blur the lines separating detectives and gods. Such blurring shows how the modern mystery genre—despite its empiricism, its interest in technology, its attention to ratiocination—indicates that the religious connotations of “mystery” never really disappear. Just as the genre works to fuse earthy master-perceivers with divine agents of justice, it also suggests that we might understand earthly enigmas as simply extensions of inscrutable cosmic designs. Theodore Bang, in the introduction to his 1845 The Mysteries of Papermill Village, articulates this idea. The wide universe is full of mysteries, which perplex the wise, and keep the inquisitive in a state of deep anxiety. There is a great design in all the works of Jehovah. All that renders his works, or the phenomena of the material world mysterious, is a lack of ability to comprehend the great design of the great Creator . . . Man, then, is an enigma; and every mystery that astonishes him, is not of heavenly, but earthly origin. His daily life is made up of mysterious contrarieties. More might be said in detail, but let it suffice, by saying: Man is ignorant of himself; hence his contradictory actions are mysterious to him.29 To be scientifically “inquisitive,” to pursue comprehension of the “mysterious contrarieties” of “daily life,” or to investigate “the phenomena of the material world” is here rendered as both starting to “know oneself” rationally and beginning to “comprehend the great design of the great Creator.” The mystery’s blurring of detectives and gods extends through the century to Sherlock Holmes, who, as earlier noted, is initially more interested in using his Asmodeus eye to discern and solve puzzles arising from the seeming commonplaces of everyday life than to meditate on the ethical or moral complexities of his cases. Even Holmes, however, eventually transforms into an extension of Providence. In his (seemingly) fatal encounter with Professor Moriarty in “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” the story in which Conan Doyle infamously attempted to end the career of his famous character, Holmes suddenly comes to devote his “whole energy” to working

28

Frost, Mysteries of Old Father Thames, no. 6, 44. Theodore Bang, The Mysteries of Papermill Village (Papermill Village NH:  Walter Tufts, 1845), i.

29

160

160

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

“in the interests of the public” to vanquish a “Napoleon of crime” who “is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city.”30 Affirming that he has never “used his powers upon the wrong side,” Holmes proclaims he would “cheerfully bring his own career to a conclusion” if he “could be assured that society was freed from Professor Moriarty.”31 And, after disguising himself as a “venerable Italian priest,” Holmes does indeed sacrifice himself to “free society” and to save his world.32 Holmes, here, becomes a “good spirit” indeed. The nineteenth-century mystery shows us how the genre embraces an anarchic and demonic Asmodeus gaze that insists that things are never what they appear to be, and that one must somehow cop the powers of the supernatural scientist to be able to achieve any idea of “truth.” In doing so, however, the mystery also actively works to transform Asmodeus into a “good,” heavenly force—into the Eye of Providence rather than the eye of the devil. This yoking together of demonic and god-like viewpoints accomplishes several complex things. It infuses the Asmodeus gaze with a sense of ethics: in the mystery, looking penetratively becomes inevitably linked to moral action. However, it also works to confuse moral identity. As Asmodeus shows us, deception is so rife that we can no longer trust who is good and who is bad; the Providential master-perceiver might appear to be a criminal; the criminal is never who he or she seems to be. The mystery thus upends ideas about visible morality, actively asks what causes crime—societal forces or personal character?—and meditates on the idea that all crime both depends on and might be a “false front.”

Bibliography Arac, Jonathan (1979), Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bang, Theodore (1845), The Mysteries of Papermill Village. Papermill Village, NH: Walter Tufts. Benjamin, Walter (2002 [1999]). The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bradbury, Osgood (1844), Mysteries of Lowell. Boston: Edward P. Williams. Buchanan, Harrison Gray (1848), Asmodeus; or, Legends of New York. Being a Complete Expose of the Mysteries, Vices, and Doings, as Exhibited by the Fashionable Circles of New York. New York: John D. Munson.

30 Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” in The Original Illustrated Strand Sherlock Holmes (Ware, Herts, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1989 [1893]), 435–46, 437–8. 31 Conan Doyle, “The Final Problem,” 443. 32 Ibid., 440, 446.

161

NINETEENTH-CENTURY MYSTERY FICTION

161

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward (1833 [1832–33]), Asmodeus at Large. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard. Carlyle, Thomas (2015 [1837]), The French Revolution: A History,.ebook. University of Adelaide Library: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/carlyle/thomas/ french_revolution/. Chesterton, G. K. (1935), “Sherlock the God,” C. K.’s Weekly, February 21, 403–404. Chesterton, G. K. (1998 [1910]), “The Blue Cross” (1910), in The Annotated Innocence of Father Brown. New York: Dover, 115–40. Conan Doyle, Arthur (1989 [1891]), “A Case of Identity,” in The Original Illustrated Strand Sherlock Holmes. Ware, Herts, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 147–58. Conan Doyle, Arthur (1989 [1891]), “A Scandal in Bohemia,” in The Original Illustrated Strand Sherlock Holmes. Ware, Herts, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 117–31. Conan Doyle, Arthur (1989 [1893]), “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” in The Original Illustrated Strand Sherlock Holmes. Ware, Herts, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 435–46. Conan Doyle, Arthur (1989 [1891]), “The Red-Headed League,” in The Original Illustrated Strand Sherlock Holmes. Ware, Herts, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 132–46. Darwin, Charles (2003 [1859]), On the Origin of Species, ed. Joseph Carroll. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Dickens, Charles (1991 [1846–48]), Dombey and Son. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dickens, Charles (2002 [1852–53]), Bleak House. New York: Modern Library Edition. Foster, George G. (1850), Celio; or, New York Above-ground and Under-ground. New York: Dewitt & Davenport. Freud, Sigmund (2014 [1899]), The Interpretation of Dreams, trans A. A. Brill, ebook. University of Adelaide Library: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/freud/ sigmund/interpretation-of-dreams/. Frost, Thomas (1848), The Mysteries of Old Father Thames: A Romance. W. Cafflyn: London. Ingraham, Joseph Holt (1844), Rodolphe in Boston: A Tale. Boston: E. P. Williams. Le Sage, Alain René (2014 [1707]), The Devil upon Crutches, trans. Tobias Smollett (1750); rpt, ed. O. M. Brack, Jr. and Leslie A. Chilton. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Lippard, George (1969 [1850]), The Empire City, or, New York by Night and Day. Its Aristocracy and Its Dollars; rpt of T. B. Peterson & Brothers edition (1864). American Fiction Reprint Series. Freeport, NY: Books For Libraries Press. Lippard, George (1970 [1853]), New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million; rpt of H. M. Rulison edition (1853). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Literature House, The Gregg Press. Marx, Karl (1972), Capital, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul. New York: Everyman’s Library. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (1956 [(1844) 1845]), The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Critique. Against Bruno Bauer and Co, ed. and trans. R. Dixon. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

162

162

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Mysteries of Philadelphia; or, Scenes of Real Life in the Quaker City, Containing an Accurate History of this Great Moral World. By an Old Amateur. Philadelphia, n.p., 1848. Patai, Raphael (ed.) (2015 [2013]), Encyclopedia of Jewish Folklore and Traditions. New York: Routledge. Penchant, Philip (1844). The Mysteries of Fitchburg. Fitchburg, NY: Charles Shepley. Poe, Edgar Allan (1994 [1841]), “The Mysteries of the Rue Morgue,” in Graham Clarke (ed.), Tales of Mystery and Imagination. London: Everyman, 411–44. Rees, James (1849), Mysteries of City Life; or, Stray Leaves from the World’s Book, Being a Series of Tales, Sketches, Incidents, and Scenes, Founded upon the Notes of a Home Missionary. Philadelphia: J. W. Moore. Reynolds, George William MacArthur (1844–46). The Mysteries of London, series one, 2 vols. London: George Vickers. Rulison, H. M. (1855), The Mock Marriage; or, the Libertine’s Victim. Being a Faithful Delineation of the Mysteries and Miseries of the Queen City. Cincinnati: Barclay & Co. Saint-Amour, Paul K. (2011), “The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis,” in Maurizia Boscagli and Enda Duffy (eds), Joyce, Benjamin and Magical Urbanism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 224–49. Saler, Michael (2003), “Clap if You Believe in Sherlock Holmes: Mass Culture and the Re-enchantment of Modernity, c. 1890–c. 1940,” The Historical Journal 46.3: 599–622. Sharps and Flats; or The Perils of City Life. Being the Adventures of One Who Lived by His Wits. By Asmodeus. Boston: William Berry & Co., Publishers, 1850. Sue, Eugène (1844 [1842–43]), Les Mystères de Paris, 4 vols. Bruxelles: Meline, Cans et Compagnie. Sue, Eugène (1906), The Mysteries of Paris, 6 vols, trans. Anon. Boston: Francis A. Nicholls & Co. Thackeray, W. M. (1906), “The Mysteries of Paris. By Eugène Sue,” in Robert S. Garnett (ed.), The New Sketch Book: Being Essays now First Collected from “The Foreign Quarterly Review.” London: Alston Rivers, Ltd., 179–202. Thompson, George (1849), Revelations of Asmodeus; or, Mysteries of Upper Ten-dom. Being a Spirit Stirring, a Powerful and Felicitous Expose of the Desolating Mystery, Blighting Miseries, Atrocious Vices and Paralyzing Tragedies Perpetrated in the Fashionable Pandemoniums of the Great Empire City. New York: C. G. Graham & Co. Von Reizenstein, Ludwig (2002 [1853–55]), Mysteries of New Orleans, trans. and ed. Steven Rowan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

163

8 Modernism’s religious rhetorics: Or, what bothered Baudelaire Hope Howell Hodgkins

To study religion in modernist literature is to enter a forest set thick with histories and ennui. We think that we have read it all before: the glorification of aesthetics, in place of traditional religious faith, particularized in grandiose claims such as those of James Joyce’s Dedalus that the artist is a priest and the artwork a sacrament.1 Yet the very imposition of those claims hints at bad faith, at playacting, at the sophistry that many moderns despised in organized religion and believed they had escaped. This chapter assumes that religious belief and ethics exist on a continuum, with the latter often, though not always, grounded in the former. As separate systems, religion and ethics may peacefully coexist in literature, but—because religion claims to be ultimate—such a harmony will disturb those whose very ethic disallows totalizing claims. Modernism did distrust such claims, in addition to suspecting individual desire, as this chapter will describe. Yet modernist literary artists responded to the crises of modernity with alternative absolute claims about aesthetic meaning. Even the common modern adaptation of “artist” for “literary writer” exemplifies this ambitious totalizing: where philosophers had long considered poetry an art, only in the nineteenth century did novelists led by Gustave Flaubert begin to claim this

1

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 240.

164

164

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

status for their creations too. By the early twentieth century, it was common for avant-garde prose writers such as Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence casually to describe themselves as artists and their work as art. In fact, the very assumption that literary prose might claim equal artistic status with poetry fomented a quiet struggle among high-modernist poets and novelists.2 Thus the modernist movement demonstrated both its alienation from, and its dependence upon, the past. Ironically, despite modernist writers’ suspicions of rhetoric, as inevitably corrupted by desires to covertly influence another, they famously employed sacralizing language to suggest the all-importance of their creations. In sum, the power of high-modernist literature particularly relied upon its religious rhetoric, which implied that the supreme fulfillment once offered by religion might be attained in or through art. This contradictory ethic is captured in Charles Baudelaire’s uses of prostitution imagery for the divine, and what bothered the French poet then would later become explicit in twentieth-century suspicions of all kinds of desire. Modernist literature relies upon a promise. Over and over, modern fiction offers specific images as metaphors of ineffable fulfillment: Gatsby’s green light at the dock’s end, Grete Samsa’s violin music, Lily Briscoe’s desire to “be one” with Mrs. Ramsay. Each longing is figured as material or sexual, yet it also is aesthetic and spiritual. Each goal seems just within fingertips’ grasp but, as in Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, each is unattainable because of the logic of infinity: the longed-for entity retreats evermore, even as the protagonist advances. And the desire is not really for union with a person: Daisy cannot satisfy Jay Gatsby. If the desires depicted in these fictions were material, our longing protagonists might be able to grasp their objects. But the metaphysical natures of these desires inspire readers precisely because each promise’s fulfillment is infinitely deferred. Modernist rhetoric and promises began with a French poet in a garret. After the 1857 publication of Les Fleurs du Mal, and the notorious obscenity trial over its contents, Charles Baudelaire was endeavoring to fulfill his own promise by constructing “a book of rancours.”3 Calling 2 Among novelists, see Henry James’s well-known summation of Gustave Flaubert’s constant references to his work as art in Henry James, “Gustave Flaubert,” in Essays in London and Elsewhere (New  York:  Harper and Brothers, 1893), 121–50; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Orlando and London: Harcourt, Inc., 1929, 1957), 56; 107 (“the art of fiction”); Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 56, 62, 363–4; D. H. Lawrence, To Henry Savage (October 31, 1913), The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, vol. 2, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 95; and James Joyce, as cited above and throughout the Portrait. Modern doubters that fictional art equated to poetry range from Ezra Pound to Jean-Paul Sartre. See Hope Howell Hodgkins, “Rhetoric versus Poetic:  High Modernist Literature and the Cult of Belief,” Rhetorica 16.2 (Spring 1998): 213–14. 3 Joanna Richardson, Baudelaire (New  York:  St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 378. For details on the obscenity charges, see Claude Pichois, Baudelaire, trans. Graham Robb (London:  Hamish Hamilton, 1989), 223–45.

165

MODERNISM’S RELIGIOUS RHETORICS

165

his never-completed manuscript “Mon Coeur mis à nu” (My Heart Laid Bare), the poet—impoverished, growing ill, and increasingly bitter—jotted epigrams on his favorite subjects, including art, politics, dandyism, women, God, and the Devil. He also played to the fullest his obsession with prostitutes, moving from poems about his mistress Jeanne Duval, that most tarnished of Dark Ladies, to a mingling of the grossly material with the ideal:  “Qu’est-ce que l’art?” (What is art?) he had asked in his journals, answering himself, “Prostitution.”4 All love is prostitution too, he muses in “Mon Coeur,” since it involves “the need to come out of oneself” and “sacrifice oneself” (Le besoin de sortir de soi and se sacrifier).5 Thus Baudelaire broadens the term “prostitution” to signify the inevitable corruption of all transactions between humans, whether in the rhetorical communication of art or the more intimate communications between lovers. But he does not stop with human entities, continuing, “The most prostituted being is the most excellent being, that is, God—since he is the supreme companion for each individual, since he is the common reservoir of inexhaustible love.”6 Evidently the poet means that the greatest prostitute is God, who in Catholic doctrine condescends to hear and love every sinner. Therefore God must be corrupted by his attachment to human beings. Yet Baudelaire does not quite say that; the use of “prostituted” (le plu prostitué) suggests that he is speaking of rhetorical uses of the supreme being—indeed, of the human tendency to make God, as supreme lover available to all, over into one’s own image. Certainly Baudelaire’s progression—art, love, God—is rhetorical: he is not making an analytical sociological or theological claim. His claims also are about rhetoric, which is, according to Richard Weaver, “an art of emphasis embodying an order of desire.”7 A speaker or writer always chooses certain words in order to succeed with his or her anticipated audience, desiring to move his or her audiences toward a particular vision. Weaver believes that an “honest rhetorician” may employ this art of emphasis.8 Yet the term “desire” is heavily freighted, after Sigmund Freud, for modern and postmodern readers. If we squirm when Baudelaire spells out those modern assumptions, mingling the exalted with the basely physical by declaring that God is prostituted, it is because we too smell decay in all human transactions. When Baudelaire uses the term “prostitution” to describe, in both art and

4

Charles Baudelaire, “Fusées,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 649. 5 Charles Baudelaire, “Mon Coeur mis à nu,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. I, 692. 6 “L’être le plu prostitué, c’est l’être par excellence, c’est Dieu, puisqu’il est l’ami suprême pour chaque individu, puisqu’il est le réservoir commun, inépuisable de l’amour” (Baudelaire, “Mon Coeur,” 692). 7 Richard Weaver, Language Is Sermonic (Baton Rouge: LA State University Press, 1970), 211. 8 Ibid.

166

166

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

love, “the need” (le besoin) for connection to another, he brands such desires as illegitimate. Baudelaire’s own artistic desires are arrestingly dual: he both resents and bitterly longs for connection with his “hypocritical reader” (hypocrite lecteur). In fact a suspicion of desire, that basic mover of rhetoric, is foundational both to modernism and to modern uses of religion. Thus Baudelaire’s bifurcated rhetoric, involving contradictory orders of desire, prefigured the religious rhetorics of high modernist literature, with its cold disclaimers of interest and irrepressible appeals to the reader.9 And in claiming that God serves as the supreme lover, Baudelaire presented the “Most High” as the greatest rhetorician, and religion as everyman’s reservoir of rhetorical topoi for inexpressible hopes—a reservoir to which modernists would regularly resort.10 Accordingly, this chapter proposes that modernism’s chief power may be found in the ultimate, otherworldly fulfillment implied by those religious rhetorics. We may understand these rhetorics, first by examining how some modernists use religious language to imply promises; then by identifying potential links between religion and rhetoric; and finally by examining the ethics of desire in rhetoric. Modernism’s powerful rhetorics depend upon the large promises implied in its art, promises noted by many critics. For example, Frederic Jameson proposes that modernism offers “[u]topian compensation for increasing dehumanization on the level of daily life.”11 But there is something off-base about a materialist critique of an art that, as Virginia Woolf famously announced, sought to capture spiritual rather than material realities.12 We need not accept John Middleton Murry’s boast that the great writer “like Jesus” is “the prophet and priest of God” who “drops the seed of the Word into the earth of our being,”13 but we should take his extreme religious

9 “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality,” declared T. S. Eliot in 1922, in a much-admired example of religious language used to glorify literary modernism’s supposed impersonality and objectivity. “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Frank Kermode (ed.), Selected Prose of T.  S. Eliot (New  York:  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 40. Peter Nicholls offers a cogent explication, in his discussion of high modernists’ dislike of Freud: “The modernist will therefore go in search of objects sufficient to the task of stabilizing the self, closing it to the turbulent movements of desire by discovering that desire as the property of some external object.” “At a Tangent: Other Modernisms,” in Tim Middleton (ed.), Modernism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 5 (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 169. I will, however, argue that the desires modernists sought to obscure extend beyond psychoanalytic familial or sexual urges. 10 An important concept for religious rhetoric, which employs the superlatives Kenneth Burke called “god-terms,” as described later in this chapter. 11 Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 42. 12 Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in Andrew McNeille (ed.), The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 4: 1925 to 1928 (1919, 1925; London: The Hogarth Press, 1984), 161. 13 John Middleton Murry, Things to Come (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 176.

167

MODERNISM’S RELIGIOUS RHETORICS

167

rhetoric seriously. Modernist writers used these overweening religious terms both for self-exaltation and for compensation. “I always feel,” wrote D. H. Lawrence, “as if I stood naked for the fire of Almighty God to go through me—and it’s rather an awful feeling. One has to be so terribly religious, to be an artist.”14 Obviously the modernist artist claimed a holy calling in order to glorify the art and its creator. Moreover, for a disaffected chapel-goer such as Lawrence, the religious imagery aimed to replace more traditional devotional objects. Similarly, the young lapsed Catholic in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man determines to become “a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life,”15 compensating for the orthodoxy that Joyce, like Lawrence, had relinquished. It may seem odd that these writers perpetuated religious language at all, since modernism was anti-absolutist and often antagonistic to religious orthodoxies. For European modernists, raised in the Western tradition, religion entailed not merely a general concern with ultimate values or the metaphysical but specific historical and communal creeds demanding belief.16 In fact, belief and unbelief were significant categories in the modern years, for nearly everybody—intellectuals and artists included—regarded religion in these absolute terms: one either was a religious believer or one was not. “You’re not a believer, are you?” the crass Englishman Haines asks Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. “I mean, a believer in the narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a personal God.” To which Joyce’s prickly young writer answers stiffly, “There’s only one sense of the word, it seems to me.”17 Accordingly Bertrand Russell extended his philosophical skepticism to a blanket critique of all religion as both sentimental (Buddhism) and fear-mongering (Catholicism).18 Russell’s negative ecumenism, which included the claim that religion does not support morality since “in central Mexico children are killed as sacrifices to God,”19

14

D. H. Lawrence, Collected Letters, vol. I, ed. Harry T. Moore (New York:  The Viking Press, 1962), 89. 15 Joyce, Portrait, 240. 16 That is, for Joyce, Jesuit-influenced Irish Catholicism; for Lawrence, Methodism; for Proust, Catholic training, perhaps influenced by his Jewish mother. Franz Kafka felt his Jewish heritage strongly but was also influenced, not to say oppressed, by the rigid Christian structures all around him, and fascinated by church buildings. Even Virginia Woolf, raised in unbelief by an agnostic father and a mother who lost her faith before Virginia’s birth, makes certain assumptions about the totalizing claims of Christianity. 17 James Joyce, Ulysses:  The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New  York:  Random House, 1986), I: 611–14. 18 See Bertrand Russell, “The Essence and Effect of Religion” and “Why I Am Not a Christian,” in Russell on Religion: Selections from the Writing of Bertrand Russell, ed. Louis Greenspan and Stefan Andersson (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 74; 89–90. 19 Ibid., 75.

168

168

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

typified, in its scattershot approach, those moderns who condemned each and any religion. Their generalized disdain would have been incomprehensible in an earlier, theologically concerned age, but it simplified the dispute. Frequently the objections articulated by modern unbelievers were rationalist not ethical—but Russell managed to cover both. In fact, even in their unbelief the modernist users of religious language tended to the traditional and the orthodox,20 which was vital to modernist rhetorics of fiction. Early in A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), Proust employs precise liturgical structures and imagery for his sensuous memories; his narrator observes that the hawthorn decorating the church altar seemed “inseparable from the mysteries in whose celebration it was playing a part,” (inséparables des mystères á la celebration desquels elles prenaient part) and transformed the hedgerows into a series of chapels.21 Franz Kafka repeatedly asserted that art should be “like prayer,” according to his friend Gustav Janouch, “a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace.”22 Neither writer, in his analogies, shook the scaffolding of traditional religion, since a secure referent was vital to the success of his rhetoric. Appropriately then, of all modernists, it is the Catholic rebel Joyce who knew religious rhetorics best and employed them most deliberately. Educated in rigorously analytical Jesuitism, Joyce, in describing the deconversion of Stephen Daedalus in Portrait, successfully converted his own rejected past into an aesthetic for the future. He not only described the artist as a new form of the priest he once aspired to become, he adapted Thomist terms such as claritas to define beauty.23 “Christianity had subtly evolved in his mind,” Richard Ellmann explains, “from a religion into a system of metaphors, which as metaphors could claim his fierce allegiance.”24 Thus religion became for Joyce an integral and integrating element of his art. Nor can this aesthetic religion be separated from the

20 See Cleo McNelly Kearns’s discussion of links between theological and literary modernism:  “[non-absolutist modernized religion] was in many senses counter to the interests of art and artists. Demythologizing? The reduction of complex symbols into linear propositions? The cleansing and rectifying of tradition? A sense of the datedness of the past and its lack of pertinence to the present? Optimism about the forward march of progress? Rejection of apocalyptic sensibility? Philosophical idealism? Pure science? None of these gestures or positions or projects entirely suited the book of a modern writer.” “Modernism,” in Andrew Hass, David Jasper, and Elisabeth Jay (eds), The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 171–2. 21 Marcel Proust, “Du côté de chez Swann,” Première parte, A la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard, 1946–47), 238, 292. 22 Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, trans. Goronwy Rees, 2nd edn (New York: New Directions, 1971), 47–8. See also 54, 113. 23 Joyce, Portrait, 230–1. 24 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, new and rev. edn (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 424.

169

MODERNISM’S RELIGIOUS RHETORICS

169

enormous influence of Joyce’s stylistic innovations. His fiction set the essential standards for the modern artist, described by Stephen as “like the God of the creation,” who “remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”25 It is this intimation of an indifferent, Godlike, nail-paring author, who stuffed Ulysses full of puzzles for the professors, that has led Joyce’s readers ever since to seek to know the mind of God—that is, the author. Here we approach the heart of modernism’s darkness: the ways in which its rhetoric continually entices readers to seek the author, as if he or she were the divine. In making this claim, I am delineating a rhetorical appeal that still speaks to readers today, covertly and paradoxically. In the 1960s Lionel Trilling remarked of modernist fiction, “No literature has ever been so shockingly personal—it asks us if we are content with our marriages, with our professional lives, with our friends . . . It asks us if we are content with ourselves, if we are saved or damned—more than anything else, it is concerned with salvation.”26 But how could the detached, absent, objective author of modernist art ask such questions? Even if emotionally engaged in his or her creations, the “serious artist” was supposed to be, as Ezra Pound put it, “scientific in that he present[ed] the image of his desire, of his hate, of his indifference, as precisely that, as precisely the image of his own desire, hate or indifference.”27 Yet the modernist writer’s double-pronged relation to the reader involved an approach both authoritarian and longing, and a stance both distant and startlingly intimate. That is to say, the modernist artist offered to be like Baudelaire’s God “the supreme companion for each individual” and like Joyce’s God a mysterious but absolute authority. The double-barreled effects of modernism’s religious rhetorics appear even in the critical debates of the 1990s and 2000s. These debates often are definitional but they perpetuate the original arguments. As Astradur Eysteinsson points out, literary modernists were from the start criticized by readers who looked to them for radical political change and were disappointed.28 Eysteinsson also notes a perfectionist distress over seemingly incongruous aspects of modernist literature, in that “while modernism is often accused of being a cult of form, it is also (not infrequently by the same critics, such as [Georg] Lukács) attacked for formlessness and for distorted and anarchic representation of society, disintegration of outer reality, and disorderly manipulation of language.”29 Many students of modernist

25

Joyce, Portrait, 233. Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 8. 27 Ezra Pound, “The Serious Artist,” in T. S. Eliot (ed.), Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (1913; New York: New Directions, 1968), 46. 28 Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca and London:  Cornell University Press, 1990), 61. 29 Ibid., 15–16; emphases in the original. 26

170

170

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

literature were and are unable to reconcile high modernism’s self-explicated aesthetic idealism with its self-evident avant-garde status, as Eysteinsson delineates. In his analysis of avant-gardism’s incipient postmodernism, Matei Călinescu proclaims that it is “difficult, from a European point of view, to conceive of authors like Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, or Ezra Pound as representatives of the avant-garde”—a seemingly odd judgment in light of these writers’ radical experimentalism, but one that attests to the contradictions they often embodied.30 An eternal cult of beauty, ranging from Pound’s troubadours to Proust’s recollected meditations, seems at odds with T. S. Eliot’s fragmented Waste Land, with Joyce’s notoriously explicit stream of consciousness in Ulysses, and with the explosive Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis’s Futurist journal Blast. In commentators’ angry voices—the stringent criticisms of Georg Lukács, the sarcasms of Jean-Paul Sartre—we also hear disillusionment with what they had perceived as modernism’s political potential, arising from a rhetoric that makes huge promises but never fulfills.31 In sum, although high modernists’ art is now over eighty years old, for those who study it, clearly modernism lives: its promises (however defined) still resonate and disturb. Scholars continue to hunt the real modernism in newly recovered writers and texts—or they review and attempt to redeem the canonical writers. They want modernism to speak to their deepest concerns and often express an intense, vexed concern over the movement’s contradictions. Yet 150  years earlier Baudelaire had, in “The Painter of Modern Life,” noted the paradox of modernité:  “Modernity is the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent half of art whose other half is the eternal and immutable.”32 Even Ezra Pound’s famous admonition to “Make It New” was based upon medieval Confucian texts and referred to reworking history and using the past in new ways, rather than destroying it altogether.33 Modernist art’s avant-garde style did not necessarily imply

30

Matei Călinescu, Five Faces of Modernity:  Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Post-modernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 140. 31 See Lukacs’s critique of “ ‘modernist’ antirealism” in novelists ranging from Kafka to Samuel Beckett. Georg Lukács, “The Ideology of Modernism,” in David H. Richter (ed.), The Critical Tradition:  Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, 3rd edn (Boston:  Bedford/St. Martins, 2007), 1218–32. Or his complaint that modernist avant-garde pastiche is not a revolutionary break with the past but merely uses history as “a great jumble sale.” Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” in Ronald Taylor (ed.), Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1980), 54. Also see Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York:  Harper and Row, 1965), 117. 32 “le transitoire, le fugitive, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable.” Charles Baudelaire, “Le painter de la vie modern,” L’Art romantique. Oeuvres Complètes, vol. III (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1925), 69. 33 See Michael North, Novelty: A History of the New (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 162–71. Make It New (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1935) was

171

MODERNISM’S RELIGIOUS RHETORICS

171

revolutionary or Marxist politics; as Christopher Butler notes, modernists of both the left and the right redefined aesthetic conventions and critiqued the “social and political values” of the majority population—which is what Pound was doing when he incorporated “Make It New” into his praise of Mussolini’s Fascism.34 Nevertheless Susan Stanford Friedman observes in dismay that the word “modernism” may mean “not just different things, but precisely opposite things.” “I expect differences,” she explains. “But opposition of meanings is something else.”35 In his postmodern effort at reconciling modernism’s contradictions, T. J. Clark describes the modernist imagination as “a desperate, marvelous shuttling between a fantasy of cold artifice and an answering one of immediacy and being-in-the-world.”36 Clark proposes that modernism struggled “with a modernity not yet fully in place,” while the postmodern “is modernity’s triumph,” thereby asserting that modernist artworks are not quaint historical artifacts.37 Clearly, for these present-day interpreters of modernism, the era is not yet concluded. Even redefinitions and recastings, such as Clark’s, demonstrate modernism’s durability, as does the powerful disappointment created in some readers. Yet contradiction should not surprise: literary modernism was celebrated originally for its uses of irony and paradox. Early advocates such as Cleanth Brooks found “ambiguity and paradox” the method through which the poet may “return to us the unity of the experience itself.”38 Brooks and other New Critics, taking their cues from the preeminent modernist poet T. S. Eliot, read paradox religiously, as a sign of truth beyond the power of words or logic, not as indicative of a postmodern radical indeterminacy.39 Decades later, and less piously, we find Paul de Man also observing that “the question of modernity reveals the paradoxical nature of a structure that makes lyric poetry into an enigma which never stops asking for the

the title Pound chose for his collection of essays on troubadours, Elizabethan writers, and classicists. 34 Christopher Butler, Modernism:  A Very Short Introduction (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2010), 92; see Ezra Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini:  L’idea Statale, Fascism as I Have Seen It (London:  Stanley Nott, 1935): “Make it new, make it new as the young grass shoot” (112). 35 Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions:  The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/ Modernism,” Modernism/modernity 8.3 (September 2001): 494, 497. 36 T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 10. Clark’s use of Heideggerian phraseology suggests his optimistic project of claiming modernism as a kind of incipient postmodernity. 37 Ibid., 3. 38 Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), 194. 39 Brooks refers to Eliot throughout Well Wrought Urn, including in his readings of John Donne, Alexander Pope, and William Wordsworth (8, 22, 26, 71, 140, 141, 192, 210, 227–9). Brooks’s emphasis on Donne also signals his debt to Eliot, who was largely responsible for popularizing that neglected seventeenth-century poet.

172

172

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

unreachable answer to its own riddle.”40 This enigma, demanding but forever withholding an answer, indicates once more that modernist promise, forever receding over the horizon and enticing readers to follow. Neither Brooks nor de Man extended this structure past lyric poetry, and yet the paradoxes and mysteries of high modernist fiction may have endured more completely into our own time, particularly because of fiction’s rhetorical propensities,41 which enabled novelists to offer readers the enigmas of religious paradox, thereby intimating a grandeur at the heart of their literature. Above all, the totalizing properties of religious experience enabled modern artists to employ it for their own purposes, so that the concept of God became, in Baudelaire’s terms, a “common reservoir” of inexhaustible modernist terminology. This terminology is wonderfully elastic because religion, while claiming to be transcendent and ultimate, also is specific, private, and personal. This vacillation between large and small also occurs on the level of language, as Kenneth Burke describes in his analyses of religious rhetoric: on the most general level, all words along with the most commonplace ideas can embody the sacred, as Burke notes of Augustine’s rhetorical theory:  God serves as “the universal Quaestio behind each local Causa,” the general topic underlying each local case.42 Yet words are only words; thus they provide both freedom and import for the writer. Rhetoric is instrumental in the classical sense, a means rather than an end. Moreover, rhetoric must reflect the concerns not only of its producers but, as Baudelaire knew, of its interpreters. And while writers and readers may veer far from one another in their understanding or valuation of a particular text, the producers and consumers of modernist texts agree in desiring a deeply significant experience. Accordingly religious terminology, used metaphorically, frees its user from expectations of precision; but as a rhetoric it gestures toward an absolute, universal referent somewhere beyond the language. Observe Lily Briscoe, longing for the dead Mrs. Ramsay in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: What did it mean? Could things thrust their hands up and grip one; could the blade cut; the fist grasp? Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and 40 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn, rev. (London: Routledge, 2005), 186. 41 On modernist distinctions between poetic and rhetoric, see Hodgkins, “Rhetoric versus Poetic,” 210–12. 42 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University of CA Press, 1969), 76. Burke’s linguistic theory, in which the ultimate words are “god-terms,” is a more complex version of my brief summary. The Rhetoric of Religion:  Studies in Logology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 33, 175, 272.

173

MODERNISM’S RELIGIOUS RHETORICS

173

leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?— startling, unexpected, unknown? For one moment she felt that if they both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings from whom nothing should be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return.43 This remarkable passage encapsulates the modernist religion of art, beginning with that fundamental question of meaning and proceeding to equate beauty—or its culminating result—with the longed-for presence. That Mrs. Ramsay, once the center of a family’s existence and now a vortical absence, should embody the supreme companionship of divinity, ushers the reader into Lily’s desire. Yet the imagery—“Miracle,” “leaping from the pinnacle of a tower”—frees us from doctrinal (that is to say, procedural) concerns, since it is only generally religious. We know that although Woolf was raised outside religion she was capable of using its language unselfconsciously, as in her call for modern English fiction to march “into the desert, the better for its soul.” “[L]ife is a luminous halo,” she wrote; the novelist should be “spiritual” rather than “materialist”; the great Russian writers are “saints” to be emulated; and so on.44 But here in her fiction, we find questions with no answers, only a proposal that deep human longing (love, perhaps) and beauty might impel a now-impossible human connection, joining the individual to ultimate meaning. In figuring the explanation of “short,” “inexplicable” life as the hoped-for return of Mrs. Ramsay, Woolf juxtaposes the general and the specific; and this juxtaposition, which as Samuel Coleridge described characterizes the literary symbol, is constructed with religious elements. This juxtaposition of the general and the specific—through which the ultimate explanation of life is figured as the resurrection of Mrs. Ramsay—also is a religious construction.45 So are paeans, by Joseph Conrad and Franz Kafka, to the unknown possibilities of a transcendent ethic. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, whatever its limitations in depicting indigenous Africans, despairs of Western values. Perhaps consequently, if ethics is to be set as a counterbalance to religion, this seminal modernist narrative offers a perspective largely freed from Western religious assumptions. Nevertheless, when Marlow speculates

43

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927; San Diego and New York: Harcourt, 1981), 180. Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” 158, 160, 161, 163. 45 The symbol “is characterised by a translucence of the Special in the Individual, or of the General in the Especial, or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal.” Samuel T. Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1972), 80. 44

174

174

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

about the underfed “cannibals” working the steamer, he appeals to an ideal inexplicable in terms of the text. Why, he asks, did not those enslaved persons attack and eat the European imperialists on board? Was it superstition, disgust, patience, fear—or some kind of primitive honour? . . . I would just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield. But there was the fact facing me—the fact dazzling, to be seen, like the foam on the depths of the sea, like a ripple on an unfathomable enigma.46 The terms of ethical behavior—“honour,” “restraint”—build to metaphors of “dazzling” light and the “unfathomable” sea, the extreme and arational imagery of religious awe. Yet the very term “religion” comes from the Latin Religare, meaning to tie together or bind back, to restrain—in fact an ethical action. For Marlow, the “dazzling” enigma of the Africans’ restraint comprises the only unalloyed good in the whole narrative. But that good lies beyond language, an “unfathomable enigma.” That enigma also appears in Kafka’s repeated gestures toward the ineffable. It is “a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the door of the Law” (einen Glanz, der unverlöschlich aus der Türe des Gesetzes bricht); but it also is the “unknown food” (unbekannten Nahrung) that Gregor Samsa senses in his sister’s violin music, and the mysterious gift of Josephine the Mouse Singer, whose singing “is supposed to save” (rettet uns angeblich) her people.47 Kafka tends to refer ineffable beauty back to art itself. And yet his artists are excruciatingly dependent upon their audiences, in a tragic rhetorical exchange, as enacted in “The Hunger Artist.” Yet Kafka, like Woolf, also suggests the possibility of a great truth behind the art, an escape hatch for his suffocating world—while shading that truth in mystery, question, and gesture. Not only high-modernist fiction but modernist poetry made free with religious imagery, in ways that suggest that maintaining the mystery is crucial. Think of the gestures toward ineffable transcendence in The Waste Land: “the heart of light, the silence”; the never-specified “third who walks always beside you”; and the final “Shantih shantih shantih.”48 Even after his Christian conversion, Eliot followed an apophatic theology whose negation is captured in “Ash-Wednesday” which renounces “the blessèd face” and voice and celebrates “speech without word and / Word of no speech.”49 Ezra

46

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899; Boston and New  York:  Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996), 57–8. 47 Franz Kafka, Sämtliche Erzählungen (New York: Schocken, 1970), 49; 104; 199. 48 T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971), I.41; V.360; V.434. 49 Eliot, “Ash-Wednesday” in The Complete Poems and Plays, I.21–22; I.43–44.

175

MODERNISM’S RELIGIOUS RHETORICS

175

Pound’s Cantos employ a neoclassical religion whose “Gods float in the azure air”—more imaged but still mysterious, compounded of light and water and wind.50 Together with Pound’s concluding confession, “I have tried to write Paradise,”51 the Cantos suggests both the epic hubris of the modernist project and modernist art’s necessary refuge in obscurity, if not failure. Why must the subject of modernist religious rhetoric remain ineffable, an epistemological shell game? Certainly, just as they were reluctant to tie themselves to traditional religious constructs, so modernist writers also disclaimed the use of rhetoric, which implied not only wooden, artificial language but a didacticism that they hoped to leave in the Victorian era.52 Yet novelists may have sensed dimly that they could not truly escape rhetoric. Where poetry only depicts “a kind of thing that might happen,”53 the novel, in Aristotelian terms, incorporates both particular and general significance into its discourse. Prose fiction, like history, employs rhetoric and requests belief. Thus modernists suspected both religion and rhetoric, since both entities claim larger realities outside of the artwork. Yet, as Renato Barilli puts it, rhetoric is “a comprehensive, total way of using discourse.”54 If so, all language is rhetoric and we all are rhetoricians. Writers, then, along with other word-users, are dependent upon their audiences. In fact rhetoric itself, thus described, is totalitarian, because we cannot escape human communication or frequent failure. Does rhetoric also implicate its user in religion—and modernists in religious belief, despite their disclaimers? Famously, Wayne C. Booth argued that Kenneth Burke’s fascination with totalizing “god-terms” logically entails a belief in the Absolute referent of those terms.55 In so arguing, Booth echoed Anselm’s proof that God must exist as the “something than which nothing greater can be thought.”56 For Anselm, God must be an “intentional object,” and—in the process of ranking intentional objects—always will be the greater entity.57 But we need not follow Anselm’s ontology, or charge Burke with a belief he himself denied, to find his discussion of religious

50

Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1983), III.7. Ibid., notes for CXVII et seq. 52 See Hodgkins, “Rhetoric versus Poetic,” 201–204. 53 Aristotle, “Poetics,” in Introduction to Aristotle, 2nd edn, rev. and enlarged (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 681. 54 Renato Barilli, Rhetoric (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), vii. 55 Wayne C. Booth, “Kenneth Burke’s Religious Rhetoric:  ‘God-Terms’ and the Ontological Proof,” in Walter Jost and Wendy Olmstead (eds), Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry: New Perspectives (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 25–7. 56 Anselm of Canterbury, “Proslogion,” in Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (eds), The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 87. 57 See Peter King, “Anselm’s Intentional Argument,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 1:2 (April 1984): 153–4; 159. 51

176

176

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

rhetoric significant for modernist usages. Burke’s “logology” depends, as he himself writes, upon “a reverse process whereby the theological term could in effect be aestheticized.”58 In this process, a word such as “grace” loses its original religious meaning but carries its connotations into the secular world. Burke’s etymological dependence is clear: grace is not a high quality with its referent entirely erased. Likewise, in employing absolute terms, the modernist writer retains the ghost of a reference to the Absolute. But that ghost is not precisely what bothered Baudelaire. He knew that linking oneself to others through language is no innocent practice: it entails not merely the hope but the inevitability of influence, as Plato unashamedly observed. His Socrates describes “the rhetorical art” as “a certain leading of the soul through speeches” both public and private, “concerning both small and great things.”59 The ancient rhetor was a psychagogue, a teacher who leads the soul, and rhetoric was originally a religious project of influence. Rhetorical influence operates through two religious elements that we—though not the ancients—find embarrassing: authority and desire. In our day, hierarchies of authority are figured as shameful secrets, because they are seen as stemming from desire to take power over others.60 Moreover, desire itself appears irretrievably sexualized and therefore irretrievably selfish and shameful. Certainly early rhetoricians from Socrates to Augustine mused over the entanglement of good and bad desires in each person. And, in an odd prefiguring of modernist fiction, each thinker privileged the desires for intangible objects: the good, the true, and the beautiful. Socrates’ famous metaphor in Phaedrus describes the soul as a charioteer pulled by the twin horses of erotic lust and love of beauty, suggesting that in Plato’s view even lust may offer a necessary energy to the chase.61 Similarly, for Augustine, desire was not necessarily sinful because its source and goal is God.62 Augustine built on the ancients, explicating a Christian view of

58 Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion:  Studies in Logology (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1970), 7–8; emphases in the original. 59 Plato, Phaedrus, tran. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca and London:  Cornell University Press, 1998), 261a–261b. 60 See Michel Foucault’s well-known theory of the power hierarchy implicit in confessional rhetorics. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:  Random House, 1978), 61–2. 61 Ibid., 253d-256c. 62 See St. Augustine’s Confessions, vol. 1, trans. William Watts (Loeb Classical Library No. 27; Cambridge, MA:  Harvard UP and London:  Heinemann, 1988), 1:1. See also William S. Babcock, “Augustine and the Spirituality of Desire,” Augustinian Studies 25 (1994):  179–99. Certainly Augustine—famously—acknowledged evil desires, observing that in Scripture the terms cupiditas and concupiscentia tend to be negative; still he insisted that desire is sinful or virtuous according to its object—which ideally is God. See Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, and NY: 1986), XIV.7, 8.

177

MODERNISM’S RELIGIOUS RHETORICS

177

desire in which eros (desire) might rise to caritas (charity), a concept we may trace from Plato’s fourth-century bc Symposium, through Augustine, to the Ladder of Love in Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528). Augustine’s City of God proposes the heavenly city as the long-sought “land of happiness” (beatae uitae regionem solumque) and “land of desire” (optatissima terra).63 Since “all men agree in desiring happiness” (omnes beatos esse velle consonant), even the desires of evil men are not technically “effective” but “defective,” looking for happiness in the wrong places.64 Augustinian desire then, as Jean-Luc Marion observes, is desire for the happy life, which is a desire for God. Augustine finds the basis of human selfhood not in a Cartesian cogito (I think) but in amo (I love)—and the fulfillment of the ego as amans (lover) would be caritas, a desire without possession.65 Contrast these ideal desires with the despairing Baudelairean prayer at the conclusion of “Un Voyage à Cythère” (A Voyage to Cythera), where the speaker expresses loathing of fleshly desires:  “O Lord! Give me the strength and the courage / To contemplate my heart and my body without disgust!”66 Baudelaire holds Plato’s disdain for the body, minus the philosopher’s compensatory ideals; he also offers a proto-modern perspective on desire. While we might assume that liberated moderns had no problem affirming bodily desires, they clearly found “virtuous desire” an oxymoronic concept—especially in an author, who should rather emulate Joyce’s indifferent nail-paring creator. Western religious faith had recognized human evil but proffered stringent cures: Judaism’s adherence to God’s law and ritual, Christianity’s salvation through Christ’s sacrifice. The gradual destruction of this common cultural assumption, about a sacred remedy for warped human desires, moved through eighteenth-century rational empiricism, to Romanticism which insisted upon the original innocence of human nature, to full skepticism about the previous pious assumptions in the nineteenth-century thinkers who would become the gurus of modernism. Karl Marx’s secular eschatology and Sigmund Freud’s grim view that civilizations must control social relationships because, in Plautus’s words, “Man is a wolf to man” (Homo homini lupus),67 underwrite modernist endeavors to deal with desire.

63

John O’Meara, “The Charter of Christendom:  The Significance of the City of God,” in Understanding Augustine (1961; Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), 12–19. 64 St. Augustine’s Confessions, vol. 2, X.21; City of God, XII. 7. 65 Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 96, 102. 66 Ah! Seigneur! Donnez-moi la force et le courage / De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégout! (Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, in Oeuvres complètes, vol I, 132). 67 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (1930; New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 42, 58 fn3.

178

178

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

We postmoderns too may suspect “the absolutism” of authorial desire, as Peter Brooks describes it, “the desire to be heard, recognized, understood, which, never wholly satisfied or indeed satisfiable, continues to generate the desire to tell the effort to enunciate a significant version of the life story in order to captivate a possible listener.” This authorial urge is, in Brooks’s account, not innocent but “a primary human desire that seeks to seduce and to subjugate the listener, to implicate him in the thrust of a desire that never can quite speak its name.”68 In this formulation, fiction is fired by an authorial desire that is cast as a shameful lust for dominance. But desire need not subjugate its object:  readers’ desires might coalesce with the writer’s longings, as Booth suggests in commenting that ethical reading may mean striving to become “the kind of desirer required.”69 Perhaps it is possible, as Augustine proposed long ago, for rhetorical eros to be converted into a generous caritas, a love that mutually communicates.70 While acknowledging the fall of Babel, we also may hope to translate our words and those of our fellow humans, that is, to connect in ways that obviate rhetorical power structures. If rhetoric is a transmission of love, not power, it is ethical, ideally proposing a free exchange rather than coercion. The rhetorics of modern fiction are riddled with subtexts of power and persuasion, because the modernist project by its very nature endeavors both to suppress and to arouse desire. “Art is a solution to the problem of desire,” writes Michael Levenson, “not because it eliminates the press of want, but because it changes the objects of desire and the terms of satisfaction.”71 Modernist fiction, especially, employed religious rhetorics to change those “terms of satisfaction”—and herein lies the ethical quandary of modernist art, which also is its power. Finally this fiction succeeds in its failures, through the never-concluded promise of its religious rhetorics. Promise of what? Ultimate meaning, deep understanding, fulfilling beauty in (not apart from) our own lives; and guidance in the quest. Above all, the great promise

68

Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York:  Vintage Books, 1985), 53–4; 61. 69 Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep:  An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 201. 70 J. Hillis Miller seems to have been the first literary critic to present this ideal, in an essay published in the 1960s: “The proper model for the relation of the critic to the work he studies is not that of scientist to physical objects but that of one man to another in charity . . . As St. Augustine puts it, the lover says to the loved one, ‘Volo ut sis!’—‘I wish you to be.’ ” “Literature and Religion,” in James Thorpe (ed.), Relations of Literary Study: Essays of Interdisciplinary Contributions (New  York:  MLA, 1967), 126. Other writers more recently have taken up Augustine’s proposal; see, for example Alan Jacobs, A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001). 71 Michael H. Levenson, Modernism and the Fate of Individuality:  Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf (New  York and Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1991), 191.

179

MODERNISM’S RELIGIOUS RHETORICS

179

implied by that Baudelairean “supreme lover” held out a hope of connection between the individual and the Absolute, figured in the never-concluded connection between reader and writer. This rhetorical link, the images implied, would be the most deeply satisfying of all possible connections: the green light reached, the violin music fully heard. Having begun in proto-modernist poetry, with Baudelaire’s shocking references, I  will end with Joyce who, after acknowledging an almost ineffable caritas, through Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, moved away from love as a theme even as he moved further from the reader. The dissociated rhetorics of Finnegans Wake punctured the promise of modernism. “Nothing would be worth plowing through like this, except the Divine Vision,” Ezra Pound observes, accurately fingering both the Wake’s religious framework and the ways in which it overtly denies its readers access to the mind of the author.72 By contrast, in 1968 the aging Graham Greene, last of the modern novelists, still proffered the promise:  “I think love may fail at moments, but I see no reason why one should say that love is doomed to failure.”73 Greene like Baudelaire had carried a literal and symbolic fascination with prostitution; Greene too had suspected all desires of corruption. In the end, however, he insisted that his rhetorics might after all consist not of prostitution but of love. Finally, successful religious rhetoric is a promise of love, which is a promise of connection, which is a promise of, as St. Paul put it, knowing fully even as we are fully known (I Cor. 13:12). This rhetoric constitutes the final incalculable power, and the unfulfilled desire, of modernism.

Works cited Anselm of Canterbury (1998), “Proslogion,” in Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (eds), The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 82–104. Aristotle (1973), “Poetics,” in Richard McKeon (ed.), Introduction to Aristotle, 2nd ed., rev. and enlarged. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 670–713. Augustine (1986), Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, and New York: Penguin. Augustine (1912, 1988), St. Augustine’s Confessions, trans. William Watts. 2 vol. Loeb Classical Library No. 27. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann. Barilli, Renato (1989), Rhetoric, trans. Giuliana Menozzi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

72

Ellmann, James Joyce, 585. Henry Donaghy (ed.), Conversations with Graham Greene (Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 60.

73

180

180

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Baudelaire, Charles (1975), “Fusées,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, 649–67. Baudelaire, Charles. “Les Fleurs du mal,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. I, 1–145. Baudelaire, Charles. “Mon Coeur mis à nu,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. I, 676–708. Booth, Wayne C. (1988), The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Booth, Wayne C. (2000), “Kenneth Burke’s Religious Rhetoric: ‘God-Terms’ and the Ontological Proof,” in Walter Jost and Wendy Olmstead (eds), Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry: New Perspectives. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 25–46. Brooks, Cleanth (1947), The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock. Brooks, Peter (1985), Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage Books. Burke, Kenneth (1969), A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Burke, Kenneth (1970), The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clark, T. J. (1999), Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Conrad, Joseph (1996 [1899]), Heart of Darkness, ed. Ross C. Murfin. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s. Donaghy, Henry (ed.) (1992), Conversations with Graham Greene. Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi. Eliot, T. S. (1971 [1930]), “Ash-Wednesday,” in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 60–7. Eliot, T. S. (1971 [1922]) The Waste Land, in The Complete Poems and Plays, 37–55. Ellmann, Richard (1983), James Joyce, new and revised edn. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Eysteinsson, Astradur (1990), The Concept of Modernism. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Freud, Sigmund (1961 [1930]), Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton. Friedman, Susan Stanford (2001), “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,” Modernism/modernity 8.3 (September): 493–513. Hodgkins, Hope Howell (1998), “Rhetoric versus Poetic: High Modernist Literature and the Cult of Belief,” Rhetorica 16.2 (Spring): 201–25. Jameson, Frederic (1981), The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Joyce, James (1986), Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Random House. Joyce, James (1992), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane. New York: Penguin Books. Kafka, Franz (1970), Sämtliche Erzählungen. New York: Schocken.

181

MODERNISM’S RELIGIOUS RHETORICS

181

Kearns, Cleo McNelly (2009), “Modernism,” in Andrew Hass, David Jasper, and Elisabeth Jay (eds), The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 164–79. Lawrence, D. H. (1962), Collected Letters, vol. I, ed. Harry T. Moore. New York: The Viking Press. Levenson, Michael H. (1991), Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc (2012), In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Murry, John Middleton (1928), Things to Come. New York: Macmillan. Plato (1998), Phaedrus, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Pound, Ezra (1968), “The Serious Artist” (1913, The Egoist), in T. S. Eliot (ed.), Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 41–57. Pound, Ezra (1983), The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions. Richardson, Joanna (1994), Baudelaire. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Russell, Bertrand (1999), Russell on Religion: Selections from the Writing of Bertrand Russell, ed. Louis Greenspan and Stefan Andersson. London and New York: Routledge. Trilling, Lionel (1965), Beyond Culture. New York: Viking Press. Weaver, Richard (1970), Language Is Sermonic. Baton Rouge: LA State University Press. Woolf, Virginia (1981 [1927]), To the Lighthouse. San Diego and New York: Harcourt. Woolf, Virginia (1984 [1919; 1925]), “Modern Fiction,” in Andrew McNeille (ed.), The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4: 1925 to 1928. London: The Hogarth Press, 157–65.

182

183

9 Poetry and religion: Approaches to Christian transcendence in late-twentieth-century poets Stephanie Heimgartner

Jürgen Habermas has argued that the last, postwar phase of secularization has not taken away what religion had to offer, but instead has liberated its highly versatile discourse to recur in individual and collective use.1 Narratives, metaphors, concepts, and practices of religious discourse are still used widely to communicate certain ideas among individuals or groups although users are self-consciously not religious in any traditional sense. The process of modernization begins in the late eighteenth century with the gradual metamorphosis of religious into aesthetical paradigms.2 In contrast, secularization has been taking place since Lutherʼs time when that writer places the individual at the center of the salvific event. Luther ultimately causes the Christian theological focus to move from God and the Church to the individual believer. This individual of the renaissance, now author of his own beliefs and convictions, extends his observations and judgments on the world as a whole. In tandem with the evolution of science 1 Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, Dialektik der Säkularisierung:  Über Vernunft und Religion, ed. Florian Schuller (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2005), 31–3. 2 Hans Robert Jauß, Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik (Frankfurt a.M.:  Suhrkamp, 2007), 37. Kant’s aesthetics of the sublime, for example, argues that awe is caused by natural phenomena whose cause is not necessarily godly and which, when they are not accompanied by actual danger, lead to an aesthetical response in the observer. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Karl Vorländer (Hamburg: Meiner, 1990), § 28, 106.

184

184

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

in the seventeenth century, the idea that God is found in Nature takes root, and later develops into the notion that Nature alone suffices as a means of attaining transcendence. From Romanticism onward, religious experience is projected onto Nature because a natural state of human life in harmony with its surroundings seems more and more unattainable. Art, then, becomes the means of an experience that transcends everyday life. Only that here, instead of traditional religious practice, one is free, that is, not forced to experience epiphany.3. Considering the great extent to which the Judeo-Christian tradition relies on sacred texts, literature not surprisingly still contains many examples of religious language, of handed-down stories and beliefs. The approaches of post–Second World War poets from Christian backgrounds to this heritage are strikingly diverse, but they share the tendency that religious language, instead of being the means of redemption (as in a prayer), becomes a code for speaking of redemption. For some, this results in an ironic treatment of Christian beliefs and motives; for others it represents an, albeit skeptical, return to its roots. Traditional religious language and practice partially survive even where orthodox beliefs have long been discarded. Remnants of litanies, invocations, and professions are examples of the use of traditional rhetorical forms that still serve efficiently to authorize and authenticate poetic speech. Although Les Murray is a devout catholic, the remaining authors of this study, Wisława Szymborska, Inger Christensen, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, find their personal convictions far outside the creeds of

3

Martin Seel, Ästhetik des Erscheinens (Frankfurt a.M.:  Suhrkamp, 2003), 31–2; Heinz Schlaffer, Geistersprache:  Zweck und Mittel der Lyrik (München:  Hanser, 2012), 31–4. In traditional religious practice, individuals are part of a community which engages in certain rituals. These, whether solitary like some forms of prayer or communal like sacraments, are the declared and only means to experience the godly; if you don’t experience God in these practices, you don’t at all. In contrast, a work of art may or may not “speak to you” in the sense of an elevating experience. This attitude has then been adopted for religious “content” as well: within a secularized context, it is a matter of personal choice to accept a spiritual interpretation and experience the godly while engaging with religious texts, rites, or practices—or, for that matter, even for secular ones. In fact, in Western societies the boundaries between the religious and the secular may presently not be as relevant or reliable anymore. Seel refers to Heidegger (Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes): Die bedeutungsgeladenen Erscheinungen des Kunstwerks basieren auf einem Erscheinen des künstlerischen Materials . . ., das alle Bedeutung zum Verschwinden zu bringen droht. Aber diese Bedeutungen verschwinden nur, um wieder und wieder zu erscheinen—als Sinnzusammenhang einer kulturellen “Welt”, die aufruht auf einer widerständigen, unbegreiflichen, sich verschließenden “Erde” . . . Im Kunstwerk ereignet sich das Entstehen und Vergehen kultureller Sinnhorizonte. Wer dies an einem Kunstwerk erfährt, hat selbst teil an den Veränderungen, die durch das Kunstwerk hervorgebracht werden.

185

POETRY AND RELIGION

185

institutionalized Christianity, they are still rooted deeply in the imaginative realm of traditional religion, refusing to abstain from the use of its poetic material. Their work has generated a lot of response from readers as well as from academics. On aesthetical grounds, these texts can be considered as some of the most valid contributions to the poetry and poetics of the late twentieth century. They also represent a diversity of backgrounds, of stylistic decisions and poetic forms and techniques and they all integrate material from religious texts or discourse.4 Thus in four emblematic texts, I demonstrate a persistent desire among poets to speak of redemption as still a possibility for the modern era. Polish poet Wisława Szymborska rephrases the Book of Job ironically in “Streszczenie” (“A Tale Retold”) in order to posit another answer to the question of why humans live in pain. Inger Christensen’s “alfabet” imitates forms of religious speech to describe the process of destruction through scientific knowledge. By combining the language of science and the language of religion, she adds an unusual element of religious celebration to her pessimistic diagnosis. This enables her to point to the dangerous human quest for world appropriation both through language and science that in spite of its consequences cannot be discontinued. Les Murray’s poem “Poetry and Religion” is the only affirmation of religious faith among the chosen poems. It contradicts postmodern theories about the relativity of knowledge in favor of a model of universal human experience that relies on revelation and the beauty of language. Finally, German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger draws on a traditional form of religious speech, the prayer. Like Christensen, and like Szymborska, he expresses an ironical view of self as well as of religion in order to inquire about the liberation of the unbeliever.

Poetry, pain, and God’s work of art In 1962, the Polish poet and later Nobel Prize laureate Wisława Szymborska publishes a collection of poems entitled “Sól” (“Salt”). The volume, among others, contains four “poèmes en prose,” a form that Szymborska shortly experimented with at the beginning of the 1960s. One of them is entitled “Streszczenie,” “A Tale Retold”5 in which Szymborska’s poem gives an “abstract” of the biblical book of Job by making an ironic use of the modern

4

The poems are here presented in the chronological order of their publication in a volume, starting with the earliest. 5 Wisława Szymborska, Wiersze wybrane:  Wybór i układ Autorki (Kraków:  Wydawnictwo a5, 2000), 104; English translation in Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems by Wisława Szymborska, trans. Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 55.

186

186

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

convergence between art and religion through creation as a work of art (“To wielka poezja” / “That is great poetry.”). Her careful abridgments from and additions to the biblical story highlight the importance of the human condition in the face of great poetry, for which Job, in Szymborska’s poem, must step aside. While initially protesting violently against a reduction “na ciele i mieniu” / “in body and possessions”— an unjust punishment—he resigns himself to speechlessness in the end. In contrast to the biblical model, what is overwhelming in “Streszczenie” is not Godʼs justice that exceeds human understanding, but Godʼs will to create the flawless picture, or rather, poem, the work of art. The perfect poem stands metaphorically for creation as it is summoned up in God’s speech at the end of the biblical book of Job,6 as well as for the biblical book itself, one of the Old Testament’s “poetic books.” Human protest against a plan considered perfect is not only unwelcome, it is quietly rebutted because it interferes with the “perfect poem”:  “nie na temat pragnie mówić Pan” / “The Lord does not wish to speak to the point,” as the poem states. Szymborska exploits a mistrust that has befallen the modern reader concerning the answer given by God in the Book of Job: God could certainly justify himself by giving an answer that refers directly to Job’s question about the reasons for his suffering, but He considers it unnecessary, and while in the Christian interpretation Job is content with what he gets and the reader has to accept God’s answer, Szymborska reads Job’s behavior as resignation and humility—Job does not insist because he does not want to spoil God’s greater work of art. The differences to the biblical account of events are minimal, yet decisive. First, the poem leaves out the narrative frame of the deal between God and Satan. It commences with Jobʼs lament after he has lost everything but his life.7 The ironical remark that Jobʼs bitter résumé is a case of great poetry marks the distance that literary texts generally have from the reality of human suffering, and which becomes most obvious when those texts attempt to mirror some of the pain that is present in the world—a problem well known and much discussed since Sophoclesʼ Philoctetes.8 6

Job 38–41. The beginning of God’s speech is especially relevant here (Job 38.1–11). The poem states that Job curses the fate of men while in the biblical book he curses only his own. In the Bible, Jobʼs lament takes place in front of his friends and not before their arrival, as Szymborska writes. Before Elihu, Bildad, and Zofar come to visit, his nameless wife recommends Job to “curse God and die”—which he refuses. The friends tear their clothes and sit with him for seven days and seven nights before the lament, which is all but the story this poem tells:  here, the manifestation of grief and compassion is immediately followed by an assignment of guilt. 8 Philoktetes, according to Homer, takes part in the Greek punitive expedition to Troy, but is exiled on a desert island on the way because of an ill-smelling wound. In Sophokles’ drama, his bow has to be recovered because, according to a prophecy, the Greeks cannot conquer Troy without it. The uneasiness of his fellows when they are confronted with his unquenchable pain 7

187

POETRY AND RELIGION

187

The Book of Jobʼs twenty-four chapters between these events and Godʼs answer to Jobʼs appeals are left out in Szymborska’s poem as well.9 The Lordʼs speech is summarized into a few words in which he rejoices in his ability to create some “dumą napawające bestie” / “pride-inspiring monsters,” obviously a skill essential to “great poetry.” Job accepts whatever comes from above. He is restituted to his goods and health, and strangely enough he chooses to acquiesce—not because he experiences God as Almighty, but because he does not want his pain to stand in the way of the godly masterpiece which includes his suffering as necessary. What is here attributed to God can also be applied to the poet:  the portrayal of suffering is necessary for the grand œuvre. Only the form of the summary reveals the absurdity of this interrelation and signals one of the most important attitudes toward the formerly sacred text: that of irony. Not only the once holy book is read from a skeptical point of view; but also by referring to the book of Job as “great poetry,” an analogy is drawn from the workings of God to the workings of man. Modern man, seeing himself as a creator, does not find remedies for human suffering either, but, like the God he disdains, tries to sublimate it into something “more advanced,” the grand poem. In scorning God, the poet therefore scorns herself as well. The ironic recourse to one of the most famous stories about God and man does not become a testament of human liberation, but a testimony for human arrogance.

Poetry as deadly reassurance While Szymborska minimally changes a biblical story, Inger Christensenʼs poem “alfabet” operates with the characteristics of religious speech. From the first line, “alphabet” formally alludes to the technique of litanies and catalogues which are customary to Christian texts.10 Such genres traditionally serve as devices to invoke the Godhead by calling the whole of creation or all the saints by their names and thus figuratively bringing them all before God—a reminder of the naming of the animals by Adam in Genesis and of the naming of the redeemed in the “Book of Life” in the Book of Revelation. as well as his often wordless lament illustrate the uncommunicability of individual suffering and have become a widely used example of the difficulty to show suffering in literature or on the stage (see, e.g., Lessing’s Laokoon). 9 A radical condensation, similar to the one that occurs in articles 3 and 4 of the Apostlesʼ Creed concerning the life of Jesus: “born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate.” 10 For example, in the earliest poem in Italian vernacular, Saint Frances of Assisiʼs “Canticle of Creation,” God is praised for his creation in repetitively organized stanzas. Sun, moon, fire, wind, and so on are addressed as fellow creatures, brothers and sisters.

188

188

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

In Christensen’s poem, things of the world are summoned by the poet simply stating and repeating their names. Their existence emerges in a twofold semiotic organization of the alphabet and the Fibonacci sequence. On the one hand, the poet uses the alphabet to mimic Edenic creation; on the other hand, she employs the Fibonacci sequence, a term appearing in Western mathematics at the beginning of the thirteenth century, but first theorized in India, so that Edenic creation and the poetic text appear to reproduce, evolve, by building on its antecedents.11 1 apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist 2 bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries; bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen 3 cicadas exist; chicory, chromium, citrus trees; cicadas exist; cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cerebellum 4 doves exist, dreamers, and dolls; killers exist, and doves, and doves; haze, dioxin, and days; days exist, days and death; and poems exist; poems, days, death12 11

The Fibonacci sequence is represented by the formula Fn = Fn-1 + Fn-2, thus resulting in a row of numbers in which one is always the sum of the prior two: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and so on. Amazingly, the sequence is the closest rational possibility to represent the golden ratio, but it also applies to the organization of certain plant structures, as, for example, pine cones. In our case, this means that the first part of the poem has only one verse, the next one two, then three, then five, then eight, and so on. 12 Inger Christensen, Alphabet, trans. Susanna Nied (New York: New Directions, 2001), 11–14. 1 aprikostrærne finnes, aprikostrærne finnes 2 bregnene finnes; og bjørnebær, bjørnebær og brom finnes; ob hydrogenet, hydrogenet 3 cikadene finnes; sikori, krom og citrustraer finnes, cikadene finnes; cikadene, seder, cypress, cerebellum 4 duene finnes; drømmerne, dukkene dreperne finnes; duene, duene; dis, dioxin og dagene; dagene finnes; dagene døden; og diktene finnes; diktene, dagene, døden (Inger Christensen, alfabet: digte (2. ed. København: Gyldendal, 1982), 7–10.

189

POETRY AND RELIGION

189

As the poem proceeds, the seemingly idyllic nature called into text is increasingly threatened by change that human beings have introduced. The apricot of the first verses, a highly cultivated fruit-bearing tree and therefore not a wild plant, is already a symbol for a nature under the influence of human beings. In the second part of the poem, still in the context of nature, chemicals are evoked as resources of natural origin that subsequently turn out to be the primary source for life-destroying weapons, forming an alphabetic structure of their own from the second third of the poem on,13 thus illustrating that a human discovery develops a dynamism of its own. Human beings appear only in synecdochical constructions, first as a psychophysiological part of the individual in the “cerebellum” (part 3) and later as part of the species in “dreamers” and “killers” (part  4). Already the fifth part of the poem mentions the biblical Fall of humans and angels; therefore, Christensen marks the poem as explicitly engaged with biblical themes. These themes have been present from the beginning in the poetical structure of a litany or chant that Christensen chooses. As the poem continues, from part  7 (g)  on, the Fibonacci sequence is not continued from part to part of the poem, but integrated into the single parts. The number of verses per stanza remains equal in several stanzas following each other, thus continuing and extending the sequence within the single component.14 Christensen breaks her system then by introducing unnumbered poems after part 10, which also do not obey the alphabetical order. Nevertheless, these also use the mathematical structure displayed before, but the unnumbered parts are devoted to a different topic.15 They reflect on the fears and catastrophes of human life from a personal point of view. Interspersed dates suggest a timeline that does not reveal itself as coherent.16 The intertwining of the more general, numbered parts which assign names to earthly things with the parts that seem to reveal individual experiences results in the impression of a speaker who, through the practice of nomination, reassures herself of the existence of the world and its phenomena while at the same time facing and commemorating the inevitable fears and catastrophes, contaminations and decrepitudes of life on this planet. 13 Cf. Heike Depenbrock, “ ‘Alle Verdinglichung ist ein Vergessen’: Inger Christensens alfabet,” Skandinavistik 21.1 (1991): 2. The first unnumbered part of the poem, situated behind section 10, sets off with the line “atom bombs exist,” several pages later “hydrogen bombs exist” (26), clearly referring to the hydrogen introduced at the beginning (8). The bombs later turn out to form their own alphabet within the poem. 14 That is, while the first parts had 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 verses respectively, part 7 has stanzas of 1, 2, 3, 3, 5, 5, part 8 of 2, 3, 3, 5, 5, 8, 8, verses (the first of these parts consisting of 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 5, 5, 5, 5 lines), and so on. 15 The first of these unnumbered parts consisting of 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 5, 5, 5, 5 lines, the following ones adapt this system. 16 Cf. Depenbrock, “Alle Verdinglichung,” 19.

190

190

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

By cataloguing and systematizing from different semiotic registers, without forming them into a whole, Christensen implies the idea of unity is an illusion, a deception.17 While Christensen cites the Western tradition of subjecting the world to human knowledge and use, she also denies this tradition. By applying ancient techniques of religious invocation and allusions to well-known biblical stories and texts,18 the author gives the impression of common ground and relevance to her poem. However, she simultaneously criticizes these same textual traditions that have played a major role in the subjection of the world at the hand of humans that she denounces. The use of the Fibonacci sequence works in much the same way; you could not call it a “text” from a linguistic perspective, yet it is a semiotic system that serves to describe and subject worldly phenomena for human use. Heike Depenbrock has therefore argued that “alfabet” theorizes the history of human concepts of reality and its perception, presenting itself as a model of the growing complexity of intellectual efforts to subsume or appropriate the nonhuman world.19 Thus, while the naming of nature for Christensen is still a fundamental and widely practiced human operation of organization and appropriation, it has also become impossible for ethical as well as intellectual reasons precisely because it will only continue the intellectual and environmental damage that has already been done. Naming and destroying are two sides of the same coin.

A God caught in human nets While Christensen draws on seemingly simple nomination as one of the popular forms of religious speech and uses it as an element in a reflection about semiosis, Australian poet Les Murray constructs a systematic poeto-theology in carefully built verses in order to oppose postmodern thought. Both are concerned with knowledge, but the two poets use almost contradictory approaches:  Christensen, herself a studied scientist, alludes to scientific knowledge, but presents it in the form of simple enumeration borrowed from religious speech. In Murray’s poem “Poetry and Religion,” textual construction follows the order of rhetorical argument, beginning with the central thesis that “Religions are poems” and then proving its point

17 The sequence stops at “n” and is not completed. Except for practical reasons, it might also have been a strategic decision to omit the alphabet at the number “n,” which in mathematics indicates that a sequence can continue indefinitely. 18 Some examples for the allusion to biblical texts, figures, and places (parts of the poem in brackets):  angels (5), “in the flesh” (6), Armageddon (8), “on earth as it is in heaven” (8), crucifix (9), Jacobʼs ladder (10), Judas and Jesus (10), Jerusalem (10), the feeding of the 5000 (11), manna (12), and so on. 19 Cf. Depenbrock, “Alle Verdinglichung,” 22.

191

POETRY AND RELIGION

191

not by logical argument or mathematical structure, but through figures and tropes, ending in what could be called the most traditionally Christian of all figures: an elaborated allegory.20 In the opening line of this famous poem, Les Murray offers a forceful metaphor for the Western world of thought:  “Religions are poems.” He implicitly refers to French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard who, speaking of how knowledge is produced, validated and discussed in Western societies, has propagated the end of what he calls “Grand Narratives.” Traditional knowledge, Lyotard argues, is molded into narrative form and needs no legitimation beyond the ongoing process of narration.21 The scientific and epistemological form of knowledge that modernity has developed, its “grand narrative,” has disqualified traditional, mythical world models, but lacks their self-sufficiency. It not only needs to be retold, but also it always needs to be extended. It has consequently generated two narratives of legitimation: knowledge has to be produced in order to promote universal human enlightenment as well as to serve the necessities of the nation-state.22 However, these narratives have proven inadequate, revealing instead that the disciplines of science are specialized “language games” which are not based on an ultimately legitimizing “meta-discourse.”23 Les Murray alludes to Lyotardʼs thesis by reflecting upon another great form of human insight that stands apart from scientific or scholarly knowledge:  poetry. Religions, according to Lyotard, are traditional world models discarded in the course of modernity; they are not the grand narratives of the eighteenth century, argues Murray. Instead, they are poems, “language games” that work differently and include a non-linguistic aspect. Murray’s poem demonstrates this claim by intricately interweaving the two great discourses poetry and religion and what is ascribed to them: religion and poetry, Murray states, have in common that they sum up our entire possibilities of experience. They are therefore, not only as a whole, but also in their individual forms, an incommensurable and ever surprising reservoir. They are something to come back to and to repeat. To our life, they work as different mirrors do: while poetry is the more flexible mode of experience, religion observes fixed forms, but nevertheless leaves the world open to what is locally and temporarily outside. You cannot define either experience, because either tends to be intermittent.24 20 Les Murray, Collected Poems (Melbourne:  William Heinemann, 1994), 267. Also available online: https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/murray-les/poetry-and-religion-0572031. 21 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition:  A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 19. 22 Ibid., 31–3. 23 Ibid., 43. 24 In Murray’s words:  “Religions are big slow poems, while most poems are short, fast religions.” Les Murray on http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/19775 (June 30, 2014).

192

192

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Arguing from the angle of experience instead of epistemology, as Lyotard does, Murray nevertheless confirms or at least attunes to the postmodern condition, even if he does so by echoing words of the apostle Paul, “[W]e are not masters of our own experience and learning. We are merely glancers into different mirrors.”25 Poetry and religion are instruments of experience that keep the world open toward an indeterminate end. Finally, Murray argues for the possibility of experience instead of knowledge leading to truth. The forms of experience most likely to arrive at truth are those which for him make lying impossible: prayer or the writing of poetry. However, both are determined by the human use of words, and, as this poem states, “nothingʼs true that figures in words only.” As a gift, truth adds an inexplicable surplus to human speech. Thus Murray offers a theory of the theological experience that only poetry can provide, the liberation of an inexplicable surplus, Divine Being.

Poetry and the liberation of the unbeliever German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger describes poetry’s spiritual experience from the perspective of the longtime agnostic. A well-known and sometimes polemical political thinker, Enzenberger had been understood as an incorruptible skeptic who has always rejected religion. However, after four decades of mostly skeptical writings, Enzenberger broaches issues that could be labeled “spiritual” through the publication of Kiosk (1995). Maybe the most explicitly “religious” or rather religiously informed of these poems is “Empfänger unbekannt—Retour à lʼexpéditeur” (“Addressee unknown—return to sender”) which alludes to the postmark of the same wording. The title suggests that the subsequent lines are without recipient, and in relatively simple words express gratitude for the good things in life.26 Among the things for which the poet thanks the “unknown addressee,” the simpler items like “Winterstiefel”/“winter boots” are mentioned with the hint of doubtfulness, to which the inserted question “warum nicht”/“why not” points; the more refined tastes like caffeine and wine are mentioned without such reluctance. Less material or immaterial things like clouds and

25 Ten years prior to the publication of Murray’s poem Richard Rorty deconstructed the traditional epistemological metaphor of the mind as reality’s mirror (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [Thirtieth anniversary edition Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009], 12–13). But Murray’s mirrors are still instruments in which a transcendental reality is reflected; human beings are only spectators. (See 1 Cor. 13.12: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.”) 26 Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Kiosk: Neue Gedichte (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995), 124, trans. under the same title: Michael Hamburger, additional trans. Hans Magnus Enzensberger (London: Bloodaxe, 1997), 88.

193

POETRY AND RELIGION

193

music occupy the first lines. Enzensberger includes even “objects” which escape our grasp like sleep and the workings of our own brain, human achievements in both the sciences and arts, the well-tempered Clavier by Bach,27 a painting by Chardin,28 the transcendental number e first theorized by Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler in 1748.29 The genuinely Christian approach to which this poem testifies comes to the surface in v.  8, emphasized through repetition:  a thankfulness for regret—even though Enzensberger does not use the common term “Reue” (contrition/regret), “Bedauern” (sorrow/regret) may stand here as a secularized remnant of Christian penitentiary practice, in which contrition is ritualized as a sacrament. Luther even promotes repentance as a continuous attitude of the believer.30 What remains here is only a mild memory of this practice without personal or ethical consequences. Before the end of the poem gives the whole an ironic turn, thanks for all of life is uttered, condensed into “den Anfang und das Ende / und die paar Minuten dazwischen” / “the beginning and the end / and the few minutes in between.” There is, obviously, no God for the speaker of these lines—but that does not keep him from wanting to address someone. As the ironical tone of the poem shows, even this impulse is the object of self-ridicule. In his book Geistersprache or Ghost Language, Heinz Schlaffer suggests that invocation is still a constitutive element in lyrical poetry, and the genre cannot but echo its traditional forms and sources.31 Although who can be addressed or rather invoked about all that has been good in life remains the unknown addressee, the message must be sent, as the title implies. Since the rhetorical environment of giving thanks for good things is traditionally a prayer, the reader identifies the poem with a religious gesture. Irony makes it possible for Enzensberger to utter an invocation to an unknown and possibly divine addressee with all possible seriousness while at the same time undermining it with signals of doubt. These signals culminate in the thankfulness for voles at the end of the poem, but are already manifest in the self-ironic attitude toward the cliché-lifestyle of the elderly well-off bourgeois who can afford his Bordeaux, listens to Bach, and enjoys classicistic still-life paintings.

27 Johann Sebastian Bach, Das Wohl-Temperierte Clavier, BWV 846–893, a collection of fugues and preludes for solo keyboard; part I finished in 1722, part II in 1740/42; first printed in 1801. 28 Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, Le panier de fraises des bois (A basket of wild strawberries), 1761 (Paris, Private Collection). 29 Enzensberger is also a prolific mathematician. Euler’s definition is to be found in:  Leonhard Euler, Einleitung in die Analysis des Unendlichen:  Erster Teil der Introductio in Analysin Infinitorum (Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer, 1983), § 122, 226–7. 30 According to the first of his ninety-five theses. The authoritative translation into modern German can be found online: https://www.ekd.de/95-Thesen-10864.htm. 31 Heinz Schlaffer, Geistersprache: Zweck und Mittel der Lyrik (München: Hanser, 2012), 13–28.

194

194

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Of course, the examples given here offer only minimal insight into the possible uses of traditional religious thought and language in contemporary Western poetry. They use the religious “material” as a source for narratives when considering the human condition; its traditional modes of speech are consciously cited with the intention of evoking habitual reader response through the use of forms that have become part of cultural memory; the theological and philosophical knowledge connected to Christianity is combined with and contrasted to newer or different statements on (the formation of) knowledge and its structures; and the religious heritage is cited when it becomes necessary to explain modes of experience that remain unexplainable without recurring to traditional forms and habits. While traditional religious forms might not fulfill their social function as instruments of moral control, as a general fundament of convictions or as a language game regulating discourse anymore, they still remain a resource for language-based or cultural tasks, because most of the contents and practices are still identifiable by many readers, and they are handed down and combined with concepts from other sources to adapt them to a changed cultural environment and changed expectations concerning spirituality.

Works cited The Bible. English Standard Version: http://www.bibleserver.com/text/ESV (accessed June 30, 2014). Christensen, Inger (1982), alfabet. digte. 2. ed. København: Gyldendal. Christensen, Inger (2001), Alphabet, trans. Susanna Nied. New York: New Directions. Depenbrock, Heike (1991), “ ‘Alle Verdinglichung ist ein Vergessen.’ Inger Christensens alfabet,” Skandinavistik 21.1: 1–29. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus (1995), Kiosk: Neue Gedichte. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus (1997), Kiosk, trans. Michael Hamburger. Additional translations by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. London: Bloodaxe. Euler, Leonhard (1983), Einleitung in die Analysis des Unendlichen: Erster Teil der Introductio in Analysin Infinitorum. Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer. Reprint of the Berlin, 1885 edition. Habermas, Jürgen, and Ratzinger, Joseph (2005), Dialektik der Säkularisierung: Über Vernunft und Religion, ed. Florian Schuller. Freiburg i.Br.: Herder. Jauß, Hans Robert (2007), Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Kant, Immanuel (1990), Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Karl Vorländer. Hamburg: Meiner. Luther, Martin (2006), “Disputation zur Klärung der Kraft der Ablässe” (short title: “95 Thesen”), trans. Johannnes Schilling and Reinhard Schwarz, in Martin Luther, Lateinisch-deutsche Studienausgabe, vol. 2: Christusglaube und

195

POETRY AND RELIGION

195

Rechtfertigung, ed. Johannes Schilling. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1–15. https://www.ekd.de/95-Thesen-10864.htm (accessed August 30, 2017). Lyotard, Jean-François (1986), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Murray, Les (1994), Collected Poems. Melbourne: William Heinemann. Murray, Les. [Author page]: http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/ item/19775 (accessed June 30, 2014). Rorty, Richard (2009), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Thirtieth anniversary ed. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Schlaffer, Heinz (2012), Geistersprache: Zweck und Mittel der Lyrik. München: Hanser. Seel, Martin (2003), Ästhetik des Erscheinens. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Szymborska, Wisława (1981), Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems by Wisława Szymborska, trans. Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Szymborska, Wisława (2000), Wiersze wybrane: Wybór i układ Autorki. Kraków: Wydawnictwo a5.

196

197

PART FOUR

Ethics

198

199

10 Instituting the other: Ethical fault lines in readings and pedagogies of alterity Dorothy Figueira

As a discipline, Comparative Literature (CL) has been lately the subject of a certain type of criticism aimed at questioning its viability as a discipline. CL has been called “elitist” because it demands knowledge of foreign languages that scholars can supposedly only adequately gain in certain institutions.1 CL has also been accused of being Eurocentric by Eurocentric comparatists unaware of the work being done by their Asianist and Africanist CL colleagues.2 CL is thought not to be “democratic” and “inclusive” enough.3 It has been proposed that CL models itself on Area Studies (AS),4 a Cold War Pentagon construction aimed at containing foreign populations. Unfortunately, none of those finding this suggestion interesting realized that AS had fallen into disrepute decades ago. Like anthropology,5 AS was forced 1 David Damrosch, Keynote Address, American Comparative Literature Association, 2011. Le Débat, no. 197 (November–December 2017). 2 Emily Apter, “Comparative Exile: Margins in the History of Comparative Literature,” in Charles Bernheimer (ed.), Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 86–96. 3 Damrosch, Keynote Address, American Comparative Literature Association. 4 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2003). 5 Roger Sanjek, “Anthropology’s Hidden Colonialism:  Assistants and Their Ethnographers,” Anthropology Today 9.2 (April 1992): 13–18.

200

200

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

to question the colonizing impulses that underpinned its methodology as well as its use (or exploitation) of native informants to perform the actual labor for white Western academics. Despite this critique of AS, a number of scholars have nevertheless answered the call to retool CL as AS, particularly in its American reformulation as World Literature (WL),6 a bureaucratic structure under which the literary production of the world is exclusively read in English translation.7 To anyone with knowledge of the social sciences, American WL appears as nothing but a rebranding of AS with the native informants now functioning as translators.8 As I  have argued elsewhere, the shift from CL to WL/AS begs the question:  Why, in this age of globalization, when we are presumably engaging the world in a more informed manner and on its own terms, are literary studies buying into a pedagogy in which the literatures of the world are promoted in English translation? Why is an academic study of literature that follows a Cold War political project of managing the other in the language of the hegemon not deemed an imperialist venture? Why should CL, a discipline focused on reading literatures in their own context and language, be replaced by such a pedagogy?9 What is at work in this leveling out of the world’s literary production and the linguistic triumphalism of the English language? How is WL’s project of “doing” the world’s literatures in translation and in the fragmentary form offered by WL anthologies not cause for ethical concern? The ascendency of WL has a lot to do with the role and function of English Literature departments in the United States. As I have argued previously, WL is the offshoot of English and American Studies departments’ “colonization”

6

This movement has been spearheaded by new institutes of world literature (Harvard, Simon Fraser) and European Americanists who see in this rebranding a revalorization of their discipline. It can be witnessed in the number of publications and conferences devoted to WL in recent years. 7 I wish to distinguish the American versions of WL from what one finds in Europe and particularly in Central and Eastern Europe whose model is fashioned after the Soviet variation of World Literatures or the Chinese version, found in Ethical Literary Criticism (ELC). For a discussion of the Chinese variation, see Dorothy Figueira (eds), “Comparative Literature: Can This Marriage Be Saved?” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 44.3 (2017a): 420–35. 8 In a curious parallel movement, Western social scientists, sensing that their fields were slightly tainted from years of speaking on behalf of mute subalterns, are now rehabilitating themselves as newly minted comparatists (one thinks of scholars such as Sheldon Pollock in the field of Indology). As CL scholars became Area Studies enthusiasts, Area Studies scholars yearned to be comparatists. Neither seems to realize exactly what the other was doing. 9 Other national literature disciplines also run the risk of being supplanted by WL. The only difference between CL and single national literature departments is that CL works in the plural and seeks to understand by comparing. Comparatists aim for the same linguistic competency and the same grasp of the sociohistorical context as the national literature scholars. But, with a difference: CL does it in the plural.

201

INSTITUTING THE OTHER

201

of literary studies. In the 1980s, English departments sought to take over the teaching of literary theory. In this era of fiscal retrenchment, theory was a fertile field for increased enrollments and recruitment. The vogue in French theory, in particular, was sensational. Why leave it in the hands of Romance Languages and CL departments? What did it matter if they could read Derrida and Lacan without a dictionary? Theory was profitable; it opened new faculty lines, filled classroom seats, and was “sexy.” When the theory craze finally crested in the 1990s, English departments, flush with the success of having appropriated continental theory as a profitable means of remaining cutting edge, turned their attention to the world. But, unlike the world’s literatures as they were linguistically and contextually studied in CL, this was now a world understood by scholars trained in English literature and read in English.10 This process was abetted by the arrival of postcolonial theory on the critical scene.11 This theoretical school enabled English departments now to engage large sections of the globe, such as the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, and India, without any linguistic or historical grounding outside the narrow scope of postcolonial theory. The model is largely based on the colonial experience of nineteenth-century Bengal, since this is a form of colonialism with which Indian critics are familiar; but unfortunately, it is usually taken as a universal model for all forms of colonialism. In short, these cultures and communities could be read in a vacuum and according to the dictates of postcolonial criticism as if its theoretization, based on the model of nineteenth-century Bengal, was universally applicable.12 English departments thus successfully waged turf wars against national languages and CL programs because they were large and often used their heft to define how the humanities are configured, especially when administrators are hard scientists in need of some coaching.13 The world’s literature in English translation occurred on those campuses where strong and sizable English departments could appropriate the fields of smaller and vulnerable foreign language units and even absorb them. Monolingual administrators, whose

10 As in the case of interdisciplinarity and theory, an English scholar’s grasp of sociology, continental philosophy, or any other field need only be strong enough to impress other English professors, unlike the expertise of CL scholars who seek in their interdisciplinarity to dialogue with experts in the other disciplines. 11 A theoretical school spawned from Edward Said’s book Orientalism (1978). It is worth noting that Said himself was an English scholar initially without a grasp of Arabic. His vision of orientalism was notably Eurocentric. 12 A number of Commonwealth-based critics sought pedagogical representation in groups such as The Subaltern Studies Collective which served to standardize this model for criticism. 13 For example, the closing of the CL department at University of Illinois, Urbana Champagne, in 1994, illustrates my point. Although the department was closed and then reopened as a program years later, it now has mimicked its English counterpart and has its own Institute of World Literature.

202

202

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

main task was budgetary oversight, immediately recognized the advantages of such co-optations. If English departments could “do” English literature, why should they not handle other literatures? With such logic, there was really no reason to retain those “boutique” national language and CL departments. With the colonization of theory and the world’s literatures, English departments discovered new avenues of research that made their degrees once again marketable.14 They could now recruit scholars trained in English literature from “postcolonial” areas and thereby diversify their faculty. Such “diversity” often involved elites from the “Third World” rather than members of traditional American minority groups, who remain grossly underrepresented in American universities.15 But this imbalance did not particularly matter, since the swapping out of Anglo-Saxon faculty with foreign English-literature trained scholars from “postcolonial” sites provided a rather ideal solution to institutional racial politics.16 University administrators could now transform their monochromatic campuses into something more “colorful” without having to confront the racism still operant in American universities or address the continued disenfranchisement of America’s traditional minorities.17 Yes, faculties were racially enhanced by the presence of scholars from abroad, who inevitably stemmed from privileged segments of the population (where the study of English literature is still an elite venture and carries a significant class marker) and could “represent” their country of origin and all its cultural production by their mere presence, even if they had actually never studied their home cultures.18

14 However, as Nina Handler recently argued in the Chronicle of Higher Education, English departments now appear to the same administrators that lauded them as no longer relevant to the market. Their emphasis is on computer science and technology; thus literature and by extension English is no longer useful academically. I thank Kitty Millet for pointing out this recent development. 15 Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action around the World: An Empirical Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 16 Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2000); “Spokespersonship in Literary Theory: The Act of Elites Speaking for Minorities,” in Anisur Rahman, Supriya Agarwal, and Bhumika Sharma (eds), Discoursing Minority:  In-text and Co-text (Jaipur: Rawat, 2014), 12–22. 17 While Campuses become less monochromatic, the numbers of African American, Hispanic, and Native American faculty and students (particularly male) in institutions of higher education between 1970 and the present plummeted as has their representation in underrepresented fields, such as the hard sciences. For a summary of this literature, see Dorothy Figueira, Otherwise Occupied: Pedagogies of Alterity and the Brahminization of Theory (New York: State University of New York Press, 2008). 18 In the age of identity studies, ethnics are thought to be genetically suited to teach their own ethnicity, hence the numerous interviews I personally experienced where someone on the hiring committee would ask me, as someone trained in Hinduism, how I  would teach Liberation Theology assuming it to be my natural field of expertise.

203

INSTITUTING THE OTHER

203

I wish to emphasize here that the problem was not the increased hiring of immigrants and certainly today, with the controversies surrounding anti-immigrant sentiments, I am not suggesting any such thing, as a child and parent of immigrants myself and a practitioner of CL, a largely immigrant discipline. The problem centers on the discrepancies between the practices of hiring and the discourses of institutional multiculturalism.19 There is a clear disconnect between espoused “diversity initiatives” and administrative window-dressing, as any perusal of university publications advertising an institution’s diverse population will attest. In Otherwise Occupied (2008), I examined this bureaucratic manipulation of race and how, aided by various theoretical and pedagogical strategies, it has further undercut Affirmative Action. Institutionalized multiculturalism “diversified” predominantly white universities and departments with non-domestic persons of color and thereby avoided having to confront issues of race as they pertained to traditional American minorities. These minorities, when they appeared on campuses, were usually routed to ethnic studies.20 The rise of identity studies abetted this process. One need not hire an African American chemist, if an American Black could be found in African American Studies. As in all corporate offices of diversity management (and universities are corporations), the minority presence on campuses was thus effectively contained. Minorities could enter the groves of academia if they settled for studying themselves. They remained underrepresented in “real” fields of study. Racialist institutional politics, the balkanization of minorities in fields for which they were deemed genetically predisposed, and the further erosion of Affirmative Action define the situation as we find it today in many institutions.21 Theories and pedagogies of the Other have played a significant role in what amounts to be an exclusionary process and, as a consequence, reveal a fault line in what we might term the ethical stance 19 There is a vast literature on multiculturalism in American academia; see, in particular, Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield (eds), Mapping Multiculturalism (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Steven C. Rockefeller, “Comment,” in Amy Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”:  An Essay (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1992), 87–98; Joan Wallach Scott, “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity,” October 61 (Summer 1992):  12–19; Joan Wallach Scott, “Higher Education and Middle Eastern Studies Following September 11, 2001,” Academe 88.6 (2002): 50–5; Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”:  An Essay, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1994); and Figueira, Otherwise Occupied. 20 Hired as a comparatist with skills as a Sanskritist at the University of Illinois in the 1990s, I questioned the dean as to where I might be reassigned when they closed the CL department into which I was hired within weeks of my arrival on campus. It was suggested that I should find a home in the Spanish department. 21 Thomas R. Roosevelt, “From Affirmative Action to Affirming Diversity,” Harvard Business Review 69 (March–April 1990): 107–17.

204

204

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

of universities with regard to minorities and, in particular, those disciplines that purport to “speak for” or “represent” the Other.

A shared crisis In order to contextualize this fault line further, we might want to draw a parallel between the relative silence regarding what has occurred in literary studies with regard to its emplotment of the Other and the debates that are currently raging in the field of sociology. In sociology, critics have begun to question the degree to which their discipline actually engages alterity. Some sociologists have argued that the primary focus of their field now centers on the unveiling and denouncing of structures of domination within society and emancipating victims of systemic violence. They see gestures of militancy as the operative agenda today in sociology, rather than inquiry and analysis. A summing up of this debate recently appeared in Le Débat (2017). I could not help but draw a parallel between sociology and literary studies. Both fields have experienced a similar intellectual shift in their disciplinary contours from analytic research toward ideology. Both sociology and literary studies promote militant subjectivity over critical objectivity. Both disciplines, significantly influenced by the theory of domination articulated by Pierre Bourdieu, are indebted to a strain of criticism that involves the unveiling of hidden power differentials and the denunciation of hegemonic forces. Just as Bourdieu sought to redo sociology in response to his elders (i.e. just as he had to inter Raymond Aron after 1968), so too do those heralding the death of CL seem motivated by the same need to “kill the fathers” and “discover’ a new discipline (WL) touted as more progressive than its predecessor. Like professors of sociology, literary scholars also feel they can speak for the less-voiced victims of epistemic violence and unveil for them the inequalities under which they suffer. Ever wary of hegemonic plots, such scholars conveniently ignore issues of their own classist social and professional trajectories as well as the positions they actually occupy in their given scientific spaces.22 In Le Débat, the sociologists Gerald Bronner and Etienne Géhin question the social determinism which they see sociology positing as the origin of all the miseries from which people suffer. In the same issue, Dominique Schnapper views sociology as enthralled by the illusion that its fight against discrimination and racism is easy and sufficient, while Olivier Galland shows the degree to which it is not. The point I wish

22

For examples of epistemic violence, see Wilfried Fluch, “Literature, Liberalism and the Current Cultural Radicalism,” in Ruediger Ahrens and Lauren Volkmann (eds), Why Literature Matters: Theories and Functions of Literature (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1996).

205

INSTITUTING THE OTHER

205

to make by comparing this French debate in sociology to the current state of affairs in literary studies is the following: the degree of introspection and critical distance evinced in the field of sociology today is absent in literary studies. Literary scholars have not reached this level of self-inquiry. The politicization of sociology and literary studies has instilled in scholars the desire, a vestige of the 1960s, to appear always and everywhere politically correct. It was important for critics positioned in First-World metropolitan centers to show that they were connected to and could relate to or “inhabit” the experience of the world’s less privileged. Another carry over from the 1960s was that you could become whatever you wanted—all you had to do was claim the desired positionality. Theoretically, the First World could legitimately speak for the Other. Whites could channel the black experience. Foreign-born scholars who vacation in America suffer as “nomads.”23 Coming to graduate school in New York or Palo Alto makes one an “exile.” All of a sudden, everyone seems to be a victim. No one seemed to notice that this general movement of relatively privileged individuals minoritizing themselves was in very poor taste, given the continued racial discrimination one still finds throughout America today. It should come as no surprise that the self-minoritization of often privileged academics occurred at the same time that minority representation was plummeting in US universities.24 All these gestures in victimhood by proxy25 bear witness to a shocking lack of self-reflection that is noteworthy in individuals whose profession it is to interpret. Yet, this gestural life in academe, this “speaking for” the Other is not only acceptable but even preferable for the individuals benefitting from the process and the administrators who cynically buy into the charade. It is in the context of this politicization of alterity that the study of the Other has become paramount in universities. Theories and pedagogies of alterity reflect institutional mandates for diversity, inclusiveness, and greater tolerance as they are conceptualized in recent critical trends such as identity studies, multiculturalism,26 postcolonial studies, World Literature in English,

23 See Joris for nomads on vacation. Also see nomads in Figueira, Otherwise Occupied. These texts demonstrate what happens when the idea of nomadic literature as articulated by Djelal Kadir, of whom I have the greatest respect, is repurposed in an identitarian universe, so that the individual extrapolates from the fictive, the allegorical belief that he or she is the real nomad and displace their actual privilege or status. 24 Sowell, Affirmative Action around the World; E(pifanio) San Juan, Jr., Racial Formations/ Critical Transformations; Articulations of Power in Ethnic and Racial Studies in the United States (Atlantic Highlands:  Humanities Press, 1992); E(pifanio) San Juan, Jr., Racism and Cultural Studies:  Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Difference (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 25 Deepika Bahri, “Once More with Feeling: What Is Postcolonialism?” Ariel 26.1 (1995): 51–82. 26 I am referring here to the American context where the focus of multiculturalism is multicultural and multiethnic America, that is, the assimilative power of American culture and society. This

206

206

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

and the academic discourse on globalization. Yet, these exchanges pay scant attention to the ethical judgments that inform the very understanding of heterology (or the study of the Other). Before examining in greater depth how we might recuperate sensibilities absent from the current academic discourse, I offer an historical overview of how the Other has been emplotted in philosophy and hermeneutics that derives from my recent Hermeneutics of Suspicion. I will then offer a blueprint for how we might conceptualize our readings of the Other.

Theoretical configurations of the Other Classical conceptions of the Other27 focus primarily on its relationship with the Self. “In the Sophist, Plato put the discussion regarding the Other in the mouth of the Eleatic Stranger”:  does the existence of the xénos demand the establishment of another category (héteros génos) beyond Being?28 The Stranger argues that all kinds of beings blend with each other. This mixing of the same (autos) with the Other (héteron) makes speech possible (Soph. 259e) and enables us to distinguish between what is true and what is false. Without such blending, the Other is literally unspeakable and unrecognizable.29 This pattern, set in place by Plato, of seeing the Other as a reflection of the self continues in modern philosophy. One finds in the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey the concept that the consciousness of one subject can unite with that of another through a process of appropriation (Aneigung).30 Schleiermacher explored the retrieval of estranged consciousness in terms of a theological reappropriation,31 whereas “Dilthey analyzed alterity in terms of the historical resolve to reach some kind of objective knowledge about the past.”32 Hegel further “historicized alterity in model differs considerably from a more globalized view of multiculturalism that one finds in Europe. 27 For a more detailed discussion of the Other in literary theory, see Dorothy Figueira, The Hermeneutics of Suspicion:  Cross-Cultural Encounters with India (London:  Bloomsbury, 2015), introduction; and Dorothy Figueira, “Whose World Is It Anyway?” in Anne Tomiche et  al. (eds), Le comparatisme comme approche critique/Comparative Literature as a Critical Approach (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017b), 5. 364–77. 28 Richard Kearney, “Between Oneself and Another: Paul Ricoeur’s Diacritical Hermeneutics,” in Andrzej Wiercinski (ed.), Between Suspicion and Sympathy:  Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium (Toronto: Hermeneutics Press, 2003), 14. 29 Ibid., 153. 30 See ibid., 17. 31 Qtd in Wilhelm Dilthey, Aus Schleiermachers Leben (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1974), 117. 32 Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. H. P. Richman (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1976), 66–105; Kearney, “Between Oneself and Another,” 17.

207

INSTITUTING THE OTHER

207

terms of the master-slave dialectic.”33 Through his analysis of fetishism and ideology, Marx then addressed the concept of the Other.34 Husserl saw the Other as “never absolutely alien, just other than the Self.”35 In each of these formulations, the Other is viewed by analogy. Existentialist philosophers, such as Sartre36 and Heidegger,37 radically extended the notion of the Other as alter ego, describing it in the context of their theories regarding inauthentic existence and bad faith. The Other is mediated and reduced to the ego’s horizon of consciousness. It mirrors the ego, having no intrinsic value in itself. These philosophical contemplations of alterity feed into politicized “constructions” of the Other. In my Hermeneutics of Suspicion, I demonstrate how the Other continues to be mediated. Now, however, it is understood to function as a gross distortion of the Self, narcissistic and aggressive projections onto this Other are understood as compensations for a perceived lack in the European “individual.” Said’s Orientalism claimed to reveal the extent to which the Other was monolithically constructed to support imperial hegemony.38 Borrowing from structuralism’s reduction of individual action, cultural forms, and social institutions to stable essential elements, Said defined East-West encounters in terms of a Foucauldian drama where dominion, restructuring, and wielding authority over other cultures enabled the actual deployment of European colonialism.39 Said’s critique of orientalism, grounded in a hermeneutics of suspicion visibly rooted in the works of Marx, Freud, and Gramsci, has informed most subsequent scholarship. Bakhtin’s critique of a hierarchical and centripetal ordering of the world, where all authority is vested in a singular hegemonic ideology that suppresses dissent, also comes into play. This hermeneutics of suspicion (critical consciousness) approach has influenced postcolonial criticism, multicultural debates, and invigorated Asian Studies.40 It has become the master narrative of current-day cross-cultural encounters where interpretations of the non-Amero-European Other are judged as forms of subterfuge created to

33

G. W.  F. Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. Howard P. Kainz (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1994); Kearney, “Between Oneself and Another,” 15. 34 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: Penguin, 1990); Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: Ideologie Publishers, 1970). 35 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations:  An Introduction to Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 112–17; Kearney, “Between Oneself and Another,” 16. 36 Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Être et le néant: essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris:  Gallimard, 1943), 413–29. 37 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). 38 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 39 Ibid., 3. 40 Figueira, Otherwise Occupied, 32.

208

208

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

consolidate Amero-European power and domination. Individual theorists have added their own blend of spices to this heady brew.41 In this criticism, one can recognize the influence “Frantz Fanon’s perception of the subjugated as a phobic object”42 and Jacques Lacan’s theory of the way in which individual subjects are constituted.43 “Henry Louis Gates borrowed from Lacan’s understanding of subject formation to map a Self-Other model”44 and “Homi Bhabha added Freud’s concept of the fetish to Fanon’s schema of the imaginary.”45 Bhabha’s facile formulation defines the Other, as a recognizable subject that is almost the same, but not quite.46 Such poststructuralist approaches all tend to focus on psychologizing modern fantasies of alienation. “Their starting point can be situated in a pathologization of the classical era as the origin of a climate culminating in nineteenth-century imperialism.”47 Like their classical and early modern precursors, poststructuralist conceptions of the Other also focus on the Self, specifically the impossibility of portraying the Other as anything but a translation of the European familiarity with the Self. As opposed to earlier formulations of the Self/ Other dyad, the more recent formulations acknowledge that the process of understanding involves issues of appropriation (“colonization”). In fact, Foucault’s assertion that power and knowledge are entwined is here celebrated.48 In this recognition and its implications for interpretation, the critical consciousness approach distinguishes itself from the other significant mid-century hermeneutical stance, the hermeneutics of belief (hermeneutical consciousness) promulgated primarily by Hans-Georg Gadamer,49 which posits a circular structure of hermeneutical understanding.50 As Paul Ricoeur would explain, this movement (represented by the concept of Bildung) provides a structure of excursion and reunion51 where the spirit moves to the strange and unfamiliar, finds a home there, and makes it its own or recognizes what was previously perceived as alien to be its genuine 41 These paragraphs and the one following were formerly published in my book, Hermeneutics of Suspicion, 3; and with “Venturing into Risky Zones,” in Monika Schmitz Evans (ed.), Literatur als Wagnis/Literature as a Risk: DFG-Symposium 2011 (de Gruyter, 2013), 393–4. 42 Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farmington (New York: Grove Press, 1963). 43 Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966). 44 Henry Louis Gates, “Critical Fanonism,” Critical Inquiry 17.3 (1991): 463. 45 Figueira, Hermeneutics of Suspicion, 3. 46 Homi K. Bhabha, “Postcolonial Criticism,” in Steven Greenblatt and G. Gunn (eds), Redrawing the Boundaries:  The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (New York: MLA, 1992), 437–65. 47 Figueira, Hermeneutics of Suspicion, 3. 48 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970). 49 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (Tubingen: Mohr, 1960), 305–24. 50 Ibid., 11. 51 Paul Ricoeur, Le Conflit des interpretations (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 16–17.

209

INSTITUTING THE OTHER

209

home. Such hermeneutical understanding, then, consists of a movement of self-estrangement in which one must learn to engage and know the Other in order to better know oneself. Selfhood is by nature dialogical and thus suffused with otherness. “Gadamer’s hermeneutics of belief pursued the idea of a reconciliation between our own understanding and that of strangers in terms of a fusion of horizons.”52 What I  want to stress here is how we might theoretically engage with alterity. At one pole of the hermeneutical field, there is the hermeneutics of belief (hermeneutical consciousness) directed at recovering a lost message and animated by a willingness to listen. At the other pole, we find a hermeneutics of suspicion (critical consciousness) aimed at demystifying and animated by distrust and skepticism. In broad terms, these two hermeneutical positions define how we can approach the Other today.53 And I  think that what we need to understand is that most recent forms of criticism (Foucualdian, post-Foucauldian, Saidian, post-Saidian, multiculturalism, colonial discourse analysis, postcolonialism, and the critique of globalization) have all opted for a hermeneutics-of-suspicion approach, one that was informed by Foucault’s quest to unmask power structures, but was also indebted to Jürgen Habermas’s view that all communication is distorted by ideology.54 A  hermeneutics of suspicion approach presented itself as politically righteous and thus became quite useful to those individuals sitting in Ivory Towers and aching to man (at least metaphorically) some barricade somewhere. We should make no mistake about there being a qualitative distinction between such philosophies and identitarian politics. The critique of ideology was simply too attractive and too rich. It overflowed with so many abuses, self-obsessions, and projections of the Amero-European sense of superiority and intellectual imperialism which scholars could claim to battle. Significantly, with this theoretical approach, scholars could presume to engage in a viable form of social action. So, scholarship dealing in any encounter with the Other or with cross-cultural encounters simply adopted, with varying degrees of sincerity and efficacy, the critical-consciousness stance, even though it was often quite self-referential and self-serving. In his later work, Paul Ricoeur countered this trend. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics sought a dialogue between the two hermeneutical stances. His intervention developed out of what transpired in the debate between Gadamer and Habermas in the 1970s,55 where the implications of the critique of ideology

52

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 273–4, 337–8, 358; Figueira, Hermeneutics of Suspicion, 4. The hermeneutics of belief is distinguished from Kearney’s hermeneutics of trust, though through the sense of belief that I propose. 54 Jürgen Habermas, “The Hermeneutical Claim to Universality,” trans Josef Bleichner, in J. Bleichner, Contemporary Hermeneutics (London: Routledge, 1980), 181–211. 55 For a more complete discussion of this debate, see Figueira, The Hermeneutics of Suspicion, 148–50. 53

210

210

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

for hermeneutical understanding was first problematized and he developed it in his subsequent work.56 Ricoeur proposed a middle path between the two hermeneutical positions by charting the ontological and ethical categories of Otherness and advocating for dialogue between the Self and the Other. Ricoeur claimed that one of the best ways to de-alienate the Other is to recognize and treat oneself as another and the Other as (in part) another Self. This ethical stance also enjoins the Self to recognize the Other as someone capable of recognizing it in turn. The Other is thus configured as a Self capable of both recognition and esteem. For Ricoeur, it is the concept of narrative memory that allows us to preserve the trace of the Other (especially the victims of history) who would, if unremembered, be lost to the injustice of nonexistence. Through narrative mimesis, the Other within calls us to act on behalf of the Other without. However, in order to be faithful to this Other, one has to have a Self and, once again, it is narrative that creates a sense of identity and allows one to sustain a notion of selfhood over time. This developed sense of identity also produces the self-esteem that is indispensable to ethics and serves as a guarantee of one’s fidelity to the Other. Let me here call to mind the overriding argument I  am constructing with regard to the relevance of ethics in our discussion of alterity. At the beginning of this chapter, I tried to show some of the reasons why academic discussions of the Other have been politicized and how the study of the Other has been institutionalized in American academia. I maintain that this study of the Other has not been subject to the same level of self-inquiry in literary studies, as it has in sociology, a discipline that shares some of the same theoretical presuppositions. I have tried to show how the manner in which the study of the Other has been emplotted and institutionally mobilized raises serious ethical concerns that literary studies do not appear to address. This lack of concern reflects the relative disinterest in ethics as a field of inquiry in general and is an issue that is too complicated a problem to examine here. Suffice it to say that the submersion of ethical debate parallels the rise of secularism in American culture and in the university setting.57 I have outlined the theorizing and manipulation of the Other in the American university setting as a cautionary tale. For every theory, there is a praxis. So, perhaps it is time to consider reintroducing an ethical dimension into our thinking, particularly our thoughts on literature (and especially the study of the Other). The hermeneutics of consciousness approach can help 56

Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, trans. and ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1981); Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, 1985, 1988). 57 Dorothy Figueira, “Kurestia religii I  literatury:  Narzeczeni I  precepcja katolicyzmu Manzoniego,” Italica Wratislavinesia (2016/17): 87–104.

211

INSTITUTING THE OTHER

211

us recuperate this ethical dimension, particularly through its formulations regarding our encounters with alterity. According to Ricoeur, the indispensable critique of the Other is necessary in order to supplement the critique of the Self. The hermeneutics of suspicion must, therefore, operate in both directions and on both fronts simultaneously. Real relations between humans demand a double critique, with both the Self and the Other entering into a dialectic relationship of mutual responsibility. In this respect, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics not only differs from those theories of alterity based on a Foucauldian conception of power dynamics, but also challenges the fluid notion of hybridity and its “constructiveness” which seems to define so much of how we think of ourselves and the world around us these days. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics alerts us to the irreducible alterity of all incomers. His embrace of the double critique gracefully moves us away from the rule of the Self towards a focus on the Other. It is not, however, as radical as the minimized role of the Self in relation to the Other that we find in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. For Ricoeur, the stranger is relatively Other. For Levinas, it is so radically Other that I cannot even represent it to myself or enter into a relationship with it. To do so would assimilate the Other and, thereby, reduce it to the same.58 Levinas envisions a loss of selfhood and terror through immersion in the lawless chaos of what he terms il y a (“there is”). In On Escape (2003), Levinas instructs us how to evade this chaos.59 The source of light can only be found in something other than Being: I see another as someone I need in order to realize certain individual and personal wants. By looking at the face of the Other, I should be able to transform it into a moment of my own material or spiritual property. Instead, the appearance of the Other, in fact, breaks, pierces, and destroys the horizon of egocentric monism. The Other invades my world; its face or speech thus interrupts and disturbs the order of my ego’s universe. Something present in the Other manifests itself and I am chosen to discover myself as someone who is totally responsible for this determinate Other and who must bow before the absoluteness revealed by its look or speech. In other words, the Other makes me accountable for my life. The self is thus linked ab initio to the Other from which it is radically separated, yet unable to escape. Levinas posits the relation of the Self and the Other as the ultimate horizon.60

58 It is not happenstance that both Ricoeur and Levinas offered ethical approaches to our engagement with the Other. Both were the chief proponents of phenomenology in France in the postwar period and very early on in their publishing careers, they addressed the ramifications of Edmund Husserl’s philosophy. 59 Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 2003). 60 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh:  Duquesne University Press, 1969), 3/33ff.

212

212

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Levinas thus connects the Other with an ethics of generosity: to recognize the Other is to give. Generosity to the Other is, however, a one-way movement.61 The Other is not a member of my community, but a stranger who cannot be reduced to any role or function in my world. To do justice to Others, we must come face to face with them, become subordinated to their vocative address, and speak to them. Most importantly, however, we cannot reduce the Other to a textual element in a narrative on the Other. As an interlocutor, Levinas’s Other is not an object of discourse.62 In radical opposition to Ricoeur’s concept of engaging alterity through mimesis, Levinas’s Other can neither be grasped nor objectified; it cannot be reduced to any textuality or reinscribed in narrative form. According to Levinas, the only possible response to this Other is respect, generosity, and donation—which brings me to my conclusion. There are several points we can take from the discussions concerning alterity outlined above. Hermeneutical consciousness does not foreclose engagement with the Other. However, this approach has been overshadowed by the critical consciousness approach that has almost exclusively informed the past forty years of scholarship. The critical consciousness approach views such encounters as acts of intellectual and cultural mastery. As a critique of ideology, it severely limits the possibility of cross-cultural understanding. Ricoeur proposed a middle path between hermeneutics and the critique of ideology. He maintained that creative discourse permits us to recognize and accept that we are confronted both by ideological distortions and utopian ideations. The former strives to dissimulate legitimate power and the latter questions authority and seeks to replace the reigning power structure. Ricoeur, therefore, acknowledged the need for a hermeneutics of suspicion. This acknowledgment allows us to transform the absolute Other into a relative Other so that we might be able to see it as another Self. However, Ricoeur also saw that the Self’s mastery of the Other is usually disrupted. Even while maintaining the necessary suspicions aimed at demystifying it, one can recover a text’s lost message through narrative. Levinas presented us with a radically different perspective on our ability to engage the Other. In the first place, he speaks of the irreducibility of the Other to any text about him or her. Ricoeur set certain limits to our engagement, but they never denied the very possibility of such an encounter.63 Levinas, however, claims that we cannot grasp or assimilate the Other who, in turn, breaks and destroys our spiritual horizon of egocentric monism. Whereas Ricoeur

61

Ibid., 349. Ibid., 69. 63 It is not surprising that Emmanuel Macron, the current president of France, claims inspiration for his political project of renewal in the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, whose research assistant he was while a student in the 1990s. There is considerable discussion these days in France on Ricoeur’s reputed influence on what would become macronisme. 62

213

INSTITUTING THE OTHER

213

emphasizes the dynamics of reciprocity with the Other, Levinas has us held hostage by the Other. There is an important lesson taught by the fruitful complications that Ricoeur and Levinas brought to notions of alterity—complications that expanded the abstract politicization of the Other found in the post-structuralist criticism I have outlined in this chapter: the Other is not a purely political concept but rather relational and, as such, any serious engagement with the Other will necessarily entail an ethical dimension. We began by looking at how the role of the Other in the humanities has been affected by institutional biases, disciplinary doxa, and pedagogical fads. We also examined how the political and institutional imperative to engage with the Other has been ill-served by much of theoretical discourse because of its inability to provide a legitimizing space for the validity of relational experience. By shifting direction from the exclusive embrace of a hermeneutics of suspicion, we make room for the ethical possibilities inherent in the path of hermeneutical consciousness. In the work of Ricoeur and Levinas, the ethical structures of meaning make convincing claims for relevance and provide grounds for a more nuanced inquiry. In my own teaching, I try to venture down the middle path between the hermeneutical consciousness and the hermeneutics of suspicion championed by Ricoeur and seek guidance from the respect Levinas demands vis-àvis the Other. I  try to investigate how a text can be both a success of the hermeneutical process (in the form of some fusion of horizons) and a product of ideological discourse to solidify the imposition of power between the Self and the Other. But, I also recognize the danger inherent in reducing the Other to any role or function in my world. Believing in the possibility of encounter and refusing to objectify the Other provides a fruitful and moral response to what might otherwise devolve into our present situation—where the other is tokenized and heard only when she speaks English. This approach certainly does not solve all the political problems alluded to at the beginning of this chapter nor does it address my real concerns with issues of false consciousness among theorists and pedagogues. It can, however, serve as the linchpin for greater understanding of the world’s differing approaches to transcendence or expanding the horizon of one’s being, as well as a necessary corrective in these troubled times. In the final analysis, our engagement with the Other is the primary task facing us today both inside and outside the university.

Bibliography Apter, Emily (1995), “Comparative Exile: Margins in the History of Comparative Literature,” in Charles Bernheimer (ed.), Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 86–96.

214

214

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Bahri, Deepika (1995), “Once More With Feeling: What Is Postcolonialism?” Ariel 26.1: 51–82. Bernheimer, Charles (ed.) (1995), Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bhabha, Homi K. (1992), “Postcolonial Criticism,” in Steven Greenblatt and G. Gunn (eds), Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. New York: MLA, 437–65. Bourdieu, Pierre (1982), Ce que parler veut dire: l’économie des échanges linguistiques. Paris: Fayard. Bourdieu, Pierre (1984), Homo academicus. Paris: Minuit. Bourdieu, Pierre (1987), Choses dites. Paris: Minuit. Bourdieu, Pierre (1988), Homo academicus, trans. Peter Collier. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1991), Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1993), The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press. Damrosch, David (2017), Keynote Address, American Comparative Literature Association, 2011. Le Débat, No. 197 (November–December). Dilthey, Wilhelm (1974), Aus Schleiermachers Leben. Berlin: De Gruyter. Dilthey, Wilhelm (1976), Selected Writings, ed. and trans. H. P. Richman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fanon, Franz (1963), The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farmington. New York: Grove Press. Figueira, Dorothy (2008), Otherwise Occupied: Pedagogies of Alterity and the Brahminization of Theory. New York: State University of New York Press. Figueira, Dorothy (2014), “Spokespersonship in Literary Theory: The Act of Elites Speaking for Minorities,” in Anisur Rahman, Supriya Agarwal, and Bhumika Sharma (eds), Discoursing Minority: In-text and Co-text. Jaipur: Rawat, 12–22. Figueira, Dorothy (2015), The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Cross-Cultural Encounters with India. London: Bloomsbury. Figueira, Dorothy (2016/17), “Kurestia religii I literatury: Narzeczeni I precepcja katolicyzmu Manzoniego,” Italica Wratislavinesia 87–104. Figueira, Dorothy (2017a), “Comparative Literature: Can This Marriage Be Saved?” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 44.3: 420–435. Figueira, Dorothy (2017b), “Whose World Is It Anyway?” Le comparatisme comme approche critique/Comparative Literature as a Critical Approach, ed Anne Tomiche et al. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 5. 364–77. Foucault, Michel (1970), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1960), Truth and Method. Tubingen: Mohr. Gates, Henry Louis (1991), “Critical Fanonism,” Critical Inquiry 17.3: 457–70. Gordon, Avery F. and Newfield, Christopher (eds) (1996), Mapping Multiculturalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

215

INSTITUTING THE OTHER

215

Habermas, Jürgen (1980), “The Hermeneutical Claim to Universality,” trans Josef Bleichner, in J. Bleichner, Contemporary Hermeneutics. London: Routledge, 181–211. Hegel, G. W. F. (1994), Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. Howard P. Kainz (University Park: Pennsylvania State University). Heidegger, Martin (1962), Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row. Husserl, Edmund (1960), Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Joris, Pierre (2003), A Nomad Poetics: Essays. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Kearney, Richard (2003), “Between Oneself and Another: Paul Ricoeur’s Diacritical Hermeneutics,” in Andrzej Wiercinski (ed.), Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium. Toronto: Hermeneutics Press, 149–60. Lacan, Jacques (1966), Écrits. Paris: Seuil. Levinas, Emmanuel (1969), Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel (1986), Trace of the Other, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levinas, Emmanuel (2003), On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel (1997), Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Marx, Karl (1990), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. New York: Penguin. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (1970), The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur. New York: Ideologie Publishers. Oleander, Maurice (1992), Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Prashad, Vijay (2000), The Karma of Brown Folk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ricoeur, Paul (1969), Le Conflit des interprétations. Paris: Seuil. Ricoeur, Paul (1973), “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” in John B. Thompson (ed. and trans.), Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 63–100. Ricoeur, Paul (1974), Political and Social Essays, ed. David Stewart and Joseph Bien. Athens: Ohio University Press. Ricoeur, Paul (1981), Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, trans. and ed. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur, Paul (1984, 1985, 1988), Time and Narrative, 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rockefeller, Steven C. (1992), “Comment,” in Amy Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”: An Essay. Charles Taylor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 87–98.

216

216

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Roosevelt, Thomas, R. (1990), “From Affirmative Action to Affirming Diversity,” Harvard Business Review 69 (March–April): 107–17. Said, Edward W. (1978), Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Said, Edward W. (2000), Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sanjek, Roger (1993), “Anthropology’s Hidden Colonialism: Assistants and their Ethnographers,” Anthropology Today 9.2 (April): 13–18. San Juan, Jr. E(pifanio) (1991), “The Cult of Ethnicity and the Fetish of Pluralism: A Counter Hegemonic Critique,” Cultural Critique 18 (Spring): 215–29. San Juan, Jr. E(pifanio) (1992), Racial Formations/Critical Transformations; Articulations of Power in Ethnic and Racial Studies in the United States. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. San Juan, Jr. E(pifanio) (1995), Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression: Essays in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press. San Juan, Jr. E(pifanio) (1998). Beyond Postcolonial Theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press. San Juan, Jr. E(pifanio) (2002). Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Difference. Durham: Duke University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1943), L’Être et le néant: essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard. Scott, Joan Wallach (1992), “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity.” October 61 (Summer): 12–19. Scott, Joan Wallach (2002), “Higher Education and Middle Eastern Studies Following September 11, 2001,” Academe 88.6: 50–5. Shohat Ella (1995), “The Struggle Over Representation: Casting, Coalitions, and the Politics of Identification,” in Román de la Campa, E. Ann Kaplan, and Michael Sprinker (eds), Late Imperial Culture. London: Verso, 166–78. Sowell, Thomas (2004), Affirmative Action around the World: An Empirical Study. New Haven: Yale University Press.. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2003), Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press.. Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari (1997), “The Third World Academic in Other Places; or, the Postcolonial Intellectual Revisited,” Critical Inquiry 23.3 (Spring): 596–616. Taylor, Charles (1992), Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”: An Essay. Ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Taylor, Charles (1994), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

217

11 Thinking God on the basis of ethics: Levinas, The Brothers Karamazov, and Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism Steven Shankman

For Emmanuel Levinas, theodicy—a providential view of history that allows us to see, in apparent evil, the working out of a divine plan—is no longer possible after the Shoah. For Levinas, after the Shoah we have witnessed the death of God precisely in Nietzsche’s sense. We have witnessed “the death of a certain god inhabiting the world behind the scenes.”1 But to “think God” outside of ontology and on the basis of ethics is, for Levinas, another matter. This was, in fact, the subject of the last set of lectures Levinas gave as professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne (in 1975–76), and it was a preoccupation of his later thought, including his second magnum opus, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. The question of God’s existence or nonexistence, and the relation of this question to ethical responsibility, preoccupies Dostoevsky throughout his life and his fiction, including the final two great novels of his maturity—Demons (1871) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879). As early as 1854, just after his 1

Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA:  Duquesne University Press, 1981), 185. For a more detailed treatment of the topic of this chapter, see Steven Shankman, Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), chapter 4.

218

218

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

release from a four-year prison sentence in Siberia, Dostoevsky remarks, “I am a child of this century; a child of disbelief and doubt I have always been and shall ever be (that I know) until they close the lid of my coffin. What terrible torment this thirst to believe has cost me and is still costing me! And the stronger it becomes in my soul, the stronger are the arguments against it.”2 In 1870 Dostoevsky tells his friend Maykov that “[t]he main question . . . that I  have been tormented by [ya muchilsya] . . . my whole life is the existence of God.”3 The following year Dostoevsky begins Demons. In this novel Dostoevsky creates the character Kirillov, who precisely echoes the author’s own confession to Maykov when Kirillov says that “God has tormented me all my life [Menya Bog vsyu zhizn’ muchil].”4 Note the repetition, in this sentence from Demons, of the verb muchit’ (to torment). In Kirillov, Dostoevsky has created a character who, despite his own moral goodness, is so tormented by the abstract question of God’s existence that he absurdly commits suicide in order to prove to himself and to others that he does not believe. “It is my duty to believe that I do not believe,” Kirillov asserts. And then, just before he goes through with killing himself, Kirillov works himself up into a frenzy and shouts, “I believe! I believe!”5 Kirillov is here enunciating his belief, his credo, that he does not believe. In The Brothers Karamazov, the tormented, usually skeptical religious thinker Ivan Karamazov on more than one occasion in the novel asserts that he believes in God.6 In trying to explain his views on theology to his pious brother Alyosha fairly early on in the novel (II.5.4), Ivan explicitly says, “I am a believer.”7 In the previous chapter, Ivan had insisted, despite the atheistic remarks he acknowledges he had previously made in Alyosha’s company, that he believes in God, though he cannot accept the world that God has created, a world in which the innocent suffer. While insisting that he is a believer, in this very same chapter he at the same time bristles at the expectation that, as the Bible commands, he should be his brother’s keeper. “Am I my brother Dmitri’s keeper or something?” Ivan asks Alyosha,

2

Joseph Frank and David I. Goldstein (eds), Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 68. 3 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Complete Letters, III, ed. and trans. David A. Lowe (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1990), 248; the Russian text is cited from Dostoevsky, Pis’ma, vol. 2 (1867–71), ed. A. S. Dolinina (Moscow and Leningrad: State Publishing House, 1930), 2:248. 4 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1994), 116. 5 Ibid., 619. 6 For a fine presentation and analysis of the many Kantian “antinomies” of belief in Dostoevsky’s thought and fiction, see Steven Cassedy, Dostoevsky’s Religion (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2005), especially chapter 4 (“Belief is Expressed in Antinomies”). 7 Brothers Karamazov, 2nd edn, ed. Susan McReynolds Oddo, with a revised translation of the Constance Garnett version by Ralph E. Matlaw and Susan McReynolds Oddo (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), 211.

219

THINKING GOD ON THE BASIS OF ETHICS

219

clearly repeating Cain’s fatal question (Gen. 4.9), the question that is the paradigmatic evasion of the very ethical responsibility commanded by the God of the Hebrew Bible. “Well, damn it all,” Ivan says, “I can’t stay here to be their [i.e. my brothers’] keeper.”8 While Ivan insists he believes in God, his actions, thus far in the novel, do not, as it were, bear witness to God, for—as Levinas writes in Otherwise than Being—the witness to holiness, or to God, says “Here I am” before the face of the Other; “Here I am,” ready to serve and even substitute for the Other. For Levinas, I am true to the meaning of the word God, as it first becomes involved in words in the Hebrew Bible, when I say “Here I am” before the face of the Other rather than by stating, “I believe in God.”9 The ethical witness, through his or her voice, testifies to the dissolution of an imperial self that is transformed into a self that has been turned “inside out”10 by its responsiveness to, by its responsibility for, the Other. Toward the end of the novel, Ivan enters the courtroom to testify at the trial of his brother Dmitri, who has been falsely accused of murdering their father Fyodor. Ivan shockingly announces to those present at the trial that his father was murdered not by Dmitri but by Smerdyakov. “I got this money,” Ivan tells the court, “from Smerdyakov, from the murderer, yesterday. It was he, not my brother, who killed our father. He murdered him and I incited him to do it.”11 “Come,” he tells the court, “take me instead of him!”12—that is, instead of his brother Dmitri. Ivan, at long last, is here responding to the command to be his brother’s keeper. Ivan’s defiant rejection of the world created by God, in whom Ivan claims to believe, is fueled, in large part, by his outrage, shared by Dostoevsky himself, against a world in which innocent children suffer, and are even tortured. It is surely incumbent upon me as a moral being to express such outrage but not, Dostoevsky is suggesting in his portrayal of Ivan’s character over the course of the novel, at the expense of evading my own personal responsibility for alleviating another’s unjust suffering. Ivan finally becomes a responsible subject here, singled out, accused, and thus referring to himself in the accusative—“me” [menya]13: “Come, take me instead of him!” “Me

8

Ibid., 200. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 149. Cf. Sam. 3.8: “HASHEM continued to call, ‘Samuel!’ a third time, and he arose and went to Eli and said, ‘‘Here I am ‫הנני‬, for you called me.’ Then Eli realized that HASHEM was calling the lad” (Tanach 652–3). My thanks to Kitty Millet for this reference to Samuel as biblical example of what Levinas means by saying “Here I am” before the face of the other. 10 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 117. 11 Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 577. 12 Ibid. 13 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Brat’ya Karamazovy (Moscow: Eksmo, 2003), 704. 9

220

220

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

voici!” The brilliant theological thinker Ivan, a witness at his brother’s trial, is here bearing witness to the binding force of the injunction that he must be his brother’s keeper. He is also thus retracting, by example, his earlier dismissal of this command. In Levinas’s late work, the philosopher boldly attempts to think God, as he puts it (minus the preposition “of”), beginning with, and on the basis of, the ethical relation. Obedience to God, for Levinas, translates into responsibility for the Other, into Father Zosima’s statement, in The Brothers Karamazov, that “[e]ach of us is guilty [or responsible] before [the faces of] everyone for everything, but I more than all the others.”14 In this statement of Dostoevsky, the I is defined and singled out in its responsibility for the other. It is one thing for Ivan to announce his adherence to the universal proposition that “each of us is responsible for everyone and for everything,” but that is not the same thing as to step up and say “I am responsible.” In The Brothers Karamazov, then, Dostoevsky powerfully thinks God outside of the ontological question that so tormented Kirillov. He thinks God on the basis of ethics. Dostoevsky thus goes very far in his last and greatest novel toward equating God with conscience, toward thinking God on the basis of ethics. The Brothers Karamazov inspired and profoundly influenced the thought of Levinas, the aim of whose late work was, in large part, to recover the word God in a secular age by thinking God outside of the ontological tradition, by thinking God on the basis of ethics. Dostoevsky did not, and perhaps could not, go quite this far in consistently thinking God outside of ontology. For Dostoevsky, in contrast, a doctrinal adherence to a belief in God and in immortality remained crucial. The importance of a strict adherence to doctrinal truth seems to be the point, in part, of the novel’s conclusion, which asserts the certainty of immortality and of resurrection. Alyosha and the friends of the young boy Ilyusha have gathered around the stone that marks the boy’s sadly brief life and recent death. Kolya, the boy who had served as Ivan’s atheist double in the novel, asks Alyosha, in the wake of Iluysha’s death, if “we shall all rise again from the dead and see each other again, all, Ilyushechka too?” Alyosha replies, “Certainly [Nepremenno] we shall all rise again, certainly [nepremenno] we shall see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened!”15 Kolya, the erstwhile atheist, has now come fully around and, as the novel concludes, shouts a loud “Hurrah for Karamazov!” and “once more all the boys joined in his exclamation.” Dostoevsky here, through Alyosha, appears to be asserting a literal belief in the resurrection. “Certainly” [Nepremenno], Alyosha asserts,

14

My own translation of the Russian, Brat’ya Karamazovy, 297. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 735.

15

221

THINKING GOD ON THE BASIS OF ETHICS

221

we shall all be resurrected and we shall all “certainly” [nepremenno] see each other again.16 Here we have a very different response to the meaning of resurrection than that of Tolstoy who, in conversation with his friend the philologist I. M. Ivakin, remarked at virtually the same moment (1881): “What is it to me if [Christ] is resurrected? If he was resurrected, then God bless him! The questions important to me are: What should I do? How should I live?”17 In his last novel, Resurrection (1899), Tolstoy thinks resurrection on the basis of ethics, that is, of a moral regeneration. Despite its title, the novel says nothing about the resurrection of Jesus in the doctrinal sense. What we witness as readers of the novel, rather, is the awakening of the conscience of the novel’s protagonist, Nekhlyudov. The “entirely new life”18 that begins for Nekhlyudov at the end of the novel is a moral regeneration that results from of his having taken absolute and infinite responsibility for the harm he had done to a young woman from a lower social rank whom he had seduced when he was a young man (Resurrection, Book One, Chapter XVII), as well as for all the others he had harmed through his privilege as an aristocrat. What might Dostoevsky’s assertion of doctrinal certainty at the end of his last and greatest novel have to do with the virulently expressed anti-Semitism of Dostoevsky’s later years? I am thinking here, in particular, of Dostoevsky’s reflections on “The Jewish Question” in A Writer’s Diary in the late 1870s at precisely the same time that he was writing The Brothers Karamazov. The Soviet novelist Leonid Tsypkin, himself a Jew, sees these late anti-Semitic fulminations of Dostoevsky as the culmination of a lifelong antipathy for the Jews. In his novel Summer in Baden-Baden, Tsypkin is visiting the wife of a deceased friend, a fellow Jew who owned a collection of Dostoevsky’s complete works. Tsypkin takes off the shelf the volume containing Dostoevsky’s comments on “The Jewish Question,” which he had not read before. “I should not have been surprised to discover” this article, Tsypkin writes, because Dostoevsky was bound after all somewhere or other to have gathered together in one place all those “Jews, Jewesses, Jew-boys and Yids” with which he so liberally besprinkled the pages of his novels—now as the poseur Lyamshin squealing with terror in Demons, now as the arrogant and at the same time

16 The Dostoevsky of this passage brings to mind the Dostoevsky who, in a letter to a mother who had asked his advice about bringing up her eight-year-old boy, recommended, a year before he published The Brothers Karamazov, that she “acquaint him with the Gospels, teach him to believe in God, strictly, according to the Law. This is a sine qua non, because, without that, he cannot become a good man” (Frank and Goldstein, Selected Letters, 450). 17 Leo Tolstoy, The Gospel in Brief: The Life of Jesus, trans. Dustin Condren (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), viii. 18 Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (New York: Penguin, 1966), 568.

222

222

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

cowardly Isaiah Fomich in Notes from the House of the Dead who did not scruple to lend money at enormous interest to his fellow-convicts, now as the fireman in Crime and Punishment with that ‘everlasting grief, so sourly imprinted on all members of the tribe of Judah without exception,’ and with his laughable way of pronouncing Russian which is reproduced in the novel with such particular and fastidious pleasure, now as the Jew who crucified the Christian child and then cut off its finger, relishing the child’s agony (Liza Khokhlakova’s story in The Brothers Karamazov)—but most often he would depict them as nameless money-lenders, tight-fisted tradesmen or petty thieves who are not even fully portrayed but simply mentioned as little Jews or some other term implying the lowest and basest qualities of the human character—no, there was nothing surprising about the fact that the author of these novels should somewhere or other have finally expressed his views on this subject, have finally expressed his theory—although in fact there was no special theory—only fairly hackneyed arguments and myths (myths which have not lost their currency to this very day, incidentally).19 For Tsypkin, the anti-Semitism Dostoevsky expresses so virulently toward the end of his career in his remarks on “The Jewish Question” in the Writer’s Diary is hardly new. Tsypkin rather sees these late remarks as the culmination of a mindset that had stained Dostoevsky’s works for many years. I do not wish to discount the reason traditionally given for Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism, namely, his suspicion of, or rather his pathological convictions about, alleged Jewish materialism and greed that, he asserted (in his articles, contemporary with The Brothers Karamazov, in the Writer’s Diary, for example), were responsible for the exploitation of Russia’s venerable and vulnerable peasant class who had only recently been freed from years of serfdom. There is yet another aspect of Dostoevsky’s relationship to Judaism that the obsessive and perhaps always insecure spiritual seeker Dostoevsky might well have found particularly threatening. I  shall draw inspiration here from Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, first published in 1921, forty years after Dostoevsky’s death. In Part Three, Book Two of The Star, Rosenzweig makes some trenchant comparisons between Judaism and Christianity, the religion to which Rosenzweig very nearly converted. I wish to focus here very briefly on Rosenzweig’s analysis of the place of “belief” in Judaism and Christianity. For Rosenzweig, “belief” is crucial in the case of Christianity, “in which a community founded on dogma gives itself reality.”20 19

Leonid Tsypkin, Summer in Baden-Baden, trans. Roger and Angela Keys (London:  Hamish Hamilton/Penguin, 2005), 215. For other assessments of Dostoevsky’s attitudes toward the Jews, see David I. Goldstein, Dostoevsky and the Jews (Austin:  University of Texas Press, 1981); and Joseph Frank, “Dostoevsky and Anti-Semitism,” Between Religion and Rationality (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010). 20 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985 [1970]), 341.

223

THINKING GOD ON THE BASIS OF ETHICS

223

The belief of a Christian, Rosenzweig continues, “is belief as the content of a testimony (eines Zeugnisses). It is belief in something. That is exactly opposite of the belief of the Jew. His belief is not the content of a testimony, but rather the product of a reproduction (einer Zeugung). The Jew, engendered a Jew, attests his belief by continuing to procreate the Jewish people. His belief is not in something: he is himself the belief. He is believing with an immediacy which no Christian dogmatist can ever attain for himself. This belief cares little for its dogmatic fixation: it has existence and this is worth more than words.”21 Christian belief, Rosenzweig later asserts, “is dogmatic in the highest sense, and must be so.”22 For Rosenzweig, Judaism and Christianity were two related but different and equally valid spiritual paths. For Dostoevsky, in contrast, Judaism was a threat to the utopian future which, in his eschatological fervor, he imagined for Russia alone. But perhaps Dostoevsky resented the Jews as well and most unforgivably for what he might have perceived as their unearned closeness to the eternal, to God. The Jew’s belief, for Rosenzweig, “is not in something; he is himself the belief. He is believing with an immediacy which no Christian dogmatist can ever attain for himself.” Dostoevsky makes a similar claim in discussing “The Jewish Question” in Diary of a Writer. “[I]t’s impossible,” Dostoevsky observes, “even to imagine a Jew [evreya] without God; moreover,” Dostoevsky continues, “I don’t believe that there are godless people even among educated Jews: they are all of the same essence.”23 21

Ibid., 340; Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), 380. Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 342. 23 Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Gary Saul Morson, trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 359; translation slightly altered. There are no godless people (bezbozhnikov [Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridstati tomakh, 25:82]), Dostoevsky writes, even among educated Jews. It is worth observing that “a godless person” (bezbozhnik) is precisely what Raskolnikov’s fellow prisoners, in the epilogue to Crime and Punishment, angrily call him (Prestuplenie i nakazanie [Moscow:  Russian Language Press,  1984], 405). Raskolnikov’s “godlessness,” according to them, is what most alienates them—many of whom come from a less educated social class—from Raskolnikov. The “people” feel a closeness to God denied the arrogant Raskolnikov. Dostoevsky the prisoner felt that same alienation from most of his fellow inmates. Dostoevsky resented their persecution of him and no doubt envied their solidarity with each other, as he envied Jewish solidarity and the closeness to God that, he imagined, accompanied this solidarity. Susan McReynolds makes the provocative case that Christians’ access to God was marred, from Dostoevsky’s perspective, by the crucifixion, which Dostoevsky sees as benefiting believers—through their gaining eternal salvation—from the torture of a “child,” that is, Jesus, the son of God. See Redemption and the Merchant God. From McReynolds’s perspective, to benefit from Christ’s crucifixion would be tantamount to making the morally unacceptable choice, as articulated by Ivan in the chapter just preceding “The Grand Inquisitor,” of assuring happiness for myself and for all at the necessary expense of the torture of “just one tiny little . . . child” (Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 213). Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism, from this perspective, might be seen to be a consequence of Dostoevsky’s 22

224

224

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Levinas makes a similar claim about the Jew and belief in the following anecdote that he tells about the famous political philosopher Hannah Arendt: “Hannah Arendt, not long before she died, told the following story on French radio. Once when she was a child in her native Königsberg, one day she said to the rabbi who was teaching her religion:  ‘You know, I  have lost my faith.’ And the rabbi replied, ‘Who is asking you for it?’ ” Commenting on this story, Levinas remarks, What matters is not “faith” but “doing.” Doing, which means moral behavior, of course, but also the performance of ritual. Moreover, are believing and doing different things? What does believing mean? What is faith made of? Words, ideas? Convictions? What do we believe with? With the whole body! With all our bones! (Psalms 35:10). What the rabbi meant was: “Doing good is the act of belief itself.”24 And then there is the moving witness of Sigmund Freud who, despite being (along with Karl Marx) perhaps the most famous of Jewish nonbelievers firmly considered himself a Jew (unlike Marx) to the end not only because he was forced, by the German invasion of Austria, to emigrate from his native Vienna to London in 1938, and was therefore persecuted as a Jew. But Freud also clearly acknowledged that, in Judaism, ethics trumps belief, and he deeply sympathized with this predilection for ethics over belief. Freud worked on Moses and Monotheism as he was making preparations to leave Vienna. He finished the book in London after he had moved there. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud expresses his strong sense of sympathy with the ethical demands of Judaism which, he writes, require “abstention from the gratification of all impulses that . . . are to be condemned as vicious.”25 In Part III of this book, published after he moved to London, Freud remarks that “[t]he [Hebrew] prophets did not tire of maintaining that God demands nothing else from his people but a just and virtuous life . . . And even the exhortation to believe in God seems to recede in comparison with the seriousness of these ethical demands.”26 Doing good is, however, not good enough, according to Rosenzweig, for the Christian dogmatist. Nor was it good enough for Dostoevsky, who was unacknowledged resentment of a people who have access to God without having to confront Christ’s crucifixion. 24 Emmanuel Levinas, “Judaism and Christianity,” In the Time of the Nations, trans. Michael B. Smith (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 164. 25 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Alfred A. Knopff, Inc. and Random House, Inc., 1967), 152. Parts I and II of Moses and Monotheism were published in German in 1937. Freud wrote Section II of Part III of Moses and Monotheism, from which the citations in this paragraph are drawn, after he had immigrated to London in 1938. Freud died the following year. 26 Ibid., 152.

225

THINKING GOD ON THE BASIS OF ETHICS

225

tormented, precisely as was his character Kirillov in Demons, by the question of God’s existence. The belief in God that Dostoevsky struggled, with great and punishing difficulty to attain is, according to Franz Rosenzweig and to Dostoevsky in his Diary of a Writer, of less concern to the Jew whose closeness to God is not dependent on belief. The question of belief or of faith is, for Levinas, a matter less of faith than of faithfulness to a tradition that commands the faithful to be and to do good and to perform religious rituals that train the sensibilities of the faithful to pursue goodness in the world. For the Christian dogmatist, however, faith or belief is critical. In his Notebooks, Dostoevsky defends himself against those critics who imagine that he has “an uneducated and retrograde faith in God.” Quite to the contrary, Dostoevsky insists, his secularly inclined critics “have never conceived so powerful a rejection of God as exists in the Inquisitor and the preceding chapter [of The Brothers Karamazov].”27 Throughout all of enlightened, secular Europe, Dostoevsky writes, “[T]here has not been and does not exist so powerful an expression [of ideas] from the atheistic point of view as mine . . . My hosannah has passed through a great furnace of doubt.”28 Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism perhaps bears witness to the fact that he never quite passed all the way through that furnace, that he kept feeling its heat, which stoked his resentment of the Jews who were, Dostoevsky believed, far surer than he—in his agonizing struggles with religious belief—about their closeness to the eternal.

Bibliography Cassedy, Steven (2005), Dostoevsky’s Religion. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dostoevsky, Fyodor (1930). Pis’ma, vol. 2 (1867–71), ed. A. S. Dolinina. Moscow and Leningrad: State Publishing House. Dostoevsky, Fyodor (1983), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridstati tomakh. Volume 25: Dnevnik pisatelia za 1877 god. Ianvar’—avgust. Leningrad: Nauka. Dostoevsky, Fyodor (1984), Prestuplenie i nakazanie. Moscow: Russian Language Press. Dostoevsky, Fyodor (1994). Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Dostoevsky, Fyodor (2003), Brat’ya Karamazovy. Moscow: Eksmo. Dostoevsky, Fyodor (2009), A Writer’s Diary, ed. Gary Saul Morson, trans. Kenneth Lantz. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Dostoevsky, Fyodor (2011). The Brothers Karamazov: A Revised Translation; Contexts; Criticism, 2nd edn. Edited with a Revised Translation by Susan McReynolds Oddo. New York: W.W. Norton. 27

Second Norton Critical Edition, 666; emphasis in the original. Ibid, 667; emphases in the original.

28

226

226

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Frank, Joseph (2010), “Dostoevsky and Anti-Semitism,” in Between Religion and Rationality. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Frank, Joseph and Goldstein, David I. (eds) (1987), Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky, trans. Andrew R MacAndrew. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. Freud, Sigmund (1967), Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones. New York: Alfred A. Knopff, Inc. and Random House, Inc. Goldstein, David I. (1981), Dostoevsky and the Jews. Austin: University of Texas Press. Levinas, Emmanuel (1981), Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel (1994), In the Time of the Nations, trans. Michael B. Smith. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Lowe, David A. (ed. and trans.) (1990), Fyodor Dostoevsky Complete Letters, III: 1868–1871. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis Publishers. McReynolds, Susan (2008), Redemption and the Merchant God: Dostoevsky’s Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Rosenzweig, Franz (1985 [1970]), The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo. Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press. Rosenzweig, Franz (1988), Der Stern der Erlösung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Scherman, Rabbi Nosson (ed.) (2003 [1996]), Tanach: The Torah, Prophets, Writings. Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications. Shankman, Steven (2017), Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Tolstoy, Leo (1966), Resurrection, trans. Rosemary Edmonds. New York: Penguin. Tolstoy, Leo (2011), The Gospel in Brief: The Life of Jesus, trans. Dustin Condren. New York: Harper Perennial. Tsypkin, Leonid (2005), Summer in Baden-Baden, trans. Roger and Angela Keys. London: Hamish Hamilton/Penguin.

227

12 An ethics for missing persons Kitty Millet

Jorge Semprun’s Literature or Life (1998) and H.  G. Adler’s The Journey demonstrate that Holocaust survivors adopt literature as their chosen form of representation because of literature’s capacity to exhibit a condition eliciting an ethics unique to itself. In this way, the survivor’s need to tell becomes the linchpin to a literary ethics, grounded in singularity, akin to what Geoffrey Green in this volume associates with Erich Auerbach as a “radical relativism.” This singularity sets up for both Jorge Semprun and H. G. Adler two different notions of obligation, unique to each respective author. The importance of this act suggests that their respective literary ethics cannot be extended to encompass the whole, a collective body because each one articulates a different end. In other words, the ethical judgment does not lend itself to an epistemology. These judgments don’t carry the force of the Law although the individual subject perceives them to be akin to a mitzvah. For Semprun, the obligation marks his failure to save a community emblematically figured by one Jew, who dies in his arms. For Adler, his character, Paul Lustig, the only survivor of his family, intuits an obligation to his community, emblematically expressed as an obligation to himself. What we as readers might understand as a duty applicable to all is recuperated in literature, as solely applicable to one. It is singular and only imaginable in one specific context, the context of the narrator. In Literature or Life (1998), Jorge Semprun brackets his incarceration at Buchenwald between 1943 and 1945 with his discovery after liberation of a Jew among a pile of corpses, reciting his own kaddish, and the death of his mentor, Maurice Halwachs, in Buchenwald’s infirmary, during his incarceration.1 These 1

Jorge Semprun, Literature or Life (New York: Viking, 1998), 25–7.

228

228

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

two episodes frame how the camp continues to inform his work decades after the Holocaust, how he struggles with these two disjunctive memories. In his account of the “dying Jew,” Semprun recalls that his liberators task Semprun and another inmate, Albert, to search for life among the bodies strewn about Auschwitz’s Little Camp. The soldiers call it a rescue mission for “regrouping the Jewish survivors.”2 As the two men, inmates themselves, move through the huts of the Little Camp, they see only “wasted bodies, covered in rags . . . on three tiers of bunks aligned in rows. The corpses were all mixed up with one another, and sometimes stiffened into ghastly immobility.”3 The Nazis have left their victims as a nameless, indistinct mass. The two men determine that no one remains alive there. These corpses are unrecoverable victims. They have no purchase on time and space. After exiting the hut, they hear a “voice . . . a bestial moan . . . a bloodcurdling wail of lamentation” around them, but they can see no one to whom the voice belongs.4 Semprun and Albert reenter the hut, to search among “eyes that do not see,” bodies contorted on bunks, necks turned permanently toward the barracks’ aisle, stamped with the recognition that no one comes for them.5 The two men realize that the voice emerges from within a pile of corpses, a mass of bodies indistinguishable from each other. As they get closer to it, Albert recognizes that the voice speaks Yiddish and then the words of kaddish, the Jewish prayer said as part of the ritual of mourning.6 They follow the sounds of the prayer, unearthing a body from “whose mouth death is singing to us . . . We carry the man out in front of the hut, into the April sunshine. We lay him down on a pile of rags that Albert has collected. The man doesn’t open his eyes, . . . he doesn’t stop singing, in a rough, barely audible voice.”7 Semprun does not recognize the song. It does not belong to him or to his tradition. The stranger’s song belongs to a community with which Semprun is unfamiliar. While he stares at the body on the ground, at that moment, he feels obligated to listen to its lament. In despair that the man dies before them, Albert runs for a doctor; he commands Semprun to not let him die, but Semprun has seen enough of death at Buchenwald to understand its smells, even its taste. Albert issues

2

Ibid., 26. Ibid., 27. 4 Ibid., 25. 5 Ibid., 25. 6 Although kaddish is normally said in Aramaic, at least one group, the Berditchever hasids, used to mix Yiddish with Aramaic in the tradition of Rabbi Yitzak Levi’s kaddish. For a description of this practice, see Samuel Dresner, Levi Yitzak of Berdichev (Bridgeport: Hartmore House, 1974). The Berditchever tradition emphasizes the vernacular element of kaddish; therefore, the use of Yiddish is justified in place of Aramaic. However, Semprun doesn’t give us any details about Albert’s level of observance of Judaism. Thus it is entirely possible that Albert conflates Aramaic with Yiddish since the prayer shares sounds associated with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish. 7 Ibid., 30. 3

229

AN ETHICS FOR MISSING PERSONS

229

a commandment to Semprun that he cannot fulfill. This Jew’s death at Auschwitz has already occurred. It is an impossible obligation levied on him, yet Semprun accepts it. In Albert’s absence, the kaddish prayer encloses Semprun and the dying Jew, binding them together: Semprun with his inability to save and the man with his inability to survive, but both pledged to each other through the impossible obligation, the unfulfilled commandment to preserve the Jew saying his own kaddish from within a mound of corpses. Instinctively, Semprun links the dying man’s prayer to a memory of his last meeting with his former professor, Maurice Halbwachs. Halbwachs has been confined to Buchenwald’s “invalids’ huts.” As Semprun enters the hut, Halbwachs, like the dying Jew, doesn’t open his eyes because Halbwachs has “arrived at the limit of human resistance . . . slowly emptying out.” Watching his dying professor, Semprun wonders how to bear witness to Halbwachs’s death for Halbwachs.8 It is such a simple phrase, for Halbwachs, that readers could easily overlook its significance. His debt to Halbwachs is expressed simply in his desire to restore to his mentor a dignity withheld from him at Buchenwald and in terms that resonate with Halbwachs’s own sensibility. At first, Semprun rambles “just so that he would hear the sound of a friendly voice.” Halbwachs opens his eyes briefly; Semprun sees in them, “unspeakable misery, and shame over his disintegrating body, but also a gleam of dignity, of vanquished, but undiminished humanity.”9 Semprun has chosen correctly. His actions restore “a gleam of dignity” to Halbwachs. Staring at his former teacher, Semprun desires to give Halbwachs something more, to accompany Halbwachs into that dying, “not knowing whether I might call on some god to accompany Maurice Halbwachs, yet aware of the need for a prayer.”10 Halbwachs, who argued that human memory is contingent on collective social experience, needs Semprun to offer a prayer from a tradition they both share.11 This realization leads Semprun to recite “a few lines of Baudelaire.”12 Literature is the prayer with which Semprun redeems Halbwachs.

8

Ibid., 22. Ibid. 10 Ibid., 23. Semprun uses language reminiscent of the classical tradition of heroes in which the hero’s body is accompanied to the funeral pyre by his fellow heroes. Each one would then cut a lock of his hair and lay it on the body as a sign that each hero accompanied their dead comrade to Hades. Thus Semprun recognizes in Halbwachs’s death a similarity between the fallen heroes and his dying professor. 11 Lewis A. Coser, “Introduction:  Maurice Halbwachs, 1877–1945,” in Halbwachs, Maurice, On Collective Memory (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1992), 6. Halbwachs was deported to Buchenwald at 66 years of age in 1943. His deportation was a result of his protests at a Vichy police station regarding the murder of his Jewish in-laws. 12 Ibid. 9

230

230

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Semprun’s recitation elicits a “delicate tremor” from the former professor. Halbwachs, “dying, . . . smiled, gazing at me like a brother.”13 The poem triggers Halbwachs to open his eyes and to smile in identification with his former student. Realizing that he has become “like a brother,” Semprun returns Halbwachs subjectively to a world before their imprisonment at Buchenwald. In this way, literature enables Semprun to cross a boundary between his own subject position and Halbwachs’s dying. He can perform this obligation for his former teacher because he can remember with his professor what they share:  a sensus communis.14 Halbwachs can be remembered as an individual because Semprun shares with him the sense of their own human existence, iterated in Baudelaire’s poetry. That “shared sense” underwrites Semprun’s ability to breach Buchenwald’s isolations. In the breach of boundaries, Semprun restores “belonging” to Halbwachs by not only reminding him of their shared past, but also by producing that “shared sense” as a literary space between them.15 The scene hinges on the poem reminding Halbwachs of a “sense” they hold in common. Thus Semprun imagines the poem to be a prayer to an unnamed and “missing god.” How to understand Baudelaire’s poetry as a prayer? It is neither the poem’s content nor the importance of Baudelaire as a poet that pledges Semprun’s “soul to hope” (44). It offers instead a unique way to enter Halbwachs’s death because it renews Halbwachs’s imagination at the last moment. It provides him with the comfort of memory, community, transcendence, a subject position previously inhabited, but at Buchenwald, permanently displaced.16 Literature returns an imagined connection that the Nazis have withheld from Buchenwald’s victims. Consequently, Semprun places literature into the space of Halbwachs’s pending death, a “prayer” that accompanies Halbwachs into death while simultaneously, it restores for Halbwachs, a sense of his dignity. In order to redeem Halbwachs in death, Semprun violates the safety of his own subject position to extend to his former professor the shared memory of their lives together. Redemption, though, does not restore Halbwachs to health:  Semprun cannot give him back his life. He cannot save him. For Semprun, Halbwachs’s 13

Ibid., 23. It echoes, as Dorothy Figueira designates it in her essay, “a hermeneutics of belief.” 15 It is tempting here to read Semprun’s account of Halbwachs’s death as just one example of many deaths, all interchangeable, all the same, all scattered over the very public spaces of the Nazi camps, so that one story could stand for many, the one making knowledge of the others incidental because the reader has heard it before. But this narrative isn’t emblematic in that way; it doesn’t offer the reader such entitlements. In fact, Semprun will do much to undercut the tendency to make all of these deaths interchangeable. 16 Although Semprun describes communal experiences in the invalids’ huts on Sundays when he and others meet to discuss how they will represent their experiences after liberation, by the end of his memoir, he makes it clear how the tradition of the “sensus communis” has been fundamentally destroyed by the Nazis. 14

231

AN ETHICS FOR MISSING PERSONS

231

redemption resides in Semprun’s ability to identify for Halbwachs that he has not lost their “shared sense.”17 Taking the poem up and using it as the sign between them, Semprun implies that theirs is an imagined kinship that retains its validity in spite of Halbwachs’s pending death. We could read this kinship as an ordinary function of literature in which literature elicits identification through recognition. Semprun’s gesture simply repeats Achilles’ exchange with Priam.18 In that context, identification licenses each character’s imagination to see another’s suffering as an opportunity to mourn the self’s own sufferings. After all, literature’s traditional entitlement—its effect—is elicited identification.19 It is the basis for sensus communis; thus literature offers us a sensus communis. Historically, our identification has been a sign of that “shared sense.” Semprun appears to lean toward this interpretation even though there are problems with assigning the traditional entitlement of literature to Semprun and Halbwachs at Buchenwald. If the reader superimposes Achilles with Priam on to Semprun and Halbwachs’s final meeting, both men’s losses at Buchenwald become akin to any number of losses in any number of imaginable experiences. They are essentially interchangeable with other tragic experiences of death.20 The memory itself, Semprun’s cradling of Halbwachs as his mentor lay dying of dysentery, seems to allude to the Pieta, a scene of dignified and tragic suffering. While communities absorb this kind of project, it ignores the extraordinary nature and impact of Buchenwald on the two men. Theirs is not a common loss, an ordinary experience of death and war.21 In other words, readers 17 We can’t fail to see the implicit obligation Semprun takes on here: it is the structure of the mitzvah. 18 Priam has come to claim Hector’s body from the man who killed him. As Priam begs for his son’s corpse, he asks Achilles to imagine his own father and his losses. As the two men recognize their shared experiences of mourning, they turn inward and away from each other. Each one laments his personal loss. Iliad, book 24? 19 Robert Alter, Pleasure of Reading in an Ideological Age (New York: Norton, 1997); Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 20 This is essentially the moment in which we live now: we retroactively cast a net of suffering over the events of human history and discover our kinship with the past through their imagined similarities. In fact, one scholar has recently invited anyone who has lost a family member in death to bring the lost family member’s picture to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC and to place the picture side by side with the pictures of murdered Jews in the Museum’s Tower of Faces. See Laura Levitt, American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust (New York: NYU Press, 2007). 21 The French debate between Racymouw, Coquio, and Courtois in Le Monde is particularly relevant here. In his review of Courtois’s Black Book of Communism, Racymouw took issue with Courtois’s claim that the starvation of a Kulak child in Ukraine because of Stalin was the same as a Jewish child starving to death in the Warsaw Ghetto under the Nazis. Racymouw claimed that the two deaths were incommensurable and his argument hinged on the West’s need to forget the Jews by embracing commensurability as the new watchword of Western experiences of oppression. Coquio, a comparative lit. professor at the Sorbonne, descried that Racymouw privileged Jewish children over others:  “he says that a non-Jewish child’s life is

232

232

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

might recognize Semprun’s use of literature to reiterate literature’s primary function, the reinforcement of imagined belonging to a larger community, predicated on an assumed subjective homogeneity, but Semprun undercuts this conclusion with his insistence that his ability to restore to Halbwachs the memory of a “shared sense” was not transferable to the dying Jew in a pile of corpses at Auschwitz.22 Readers must ponder how Semprun’s use of literature with Halbwachs bears the burden of other camp experiences without reducing them to an imagined interchangeability, an effect of the sensus communis? How does a restored memory of a “shared sense” inform his realization that he could not offer a similar moment to the dying Jew, left to him by Albert with the command, “do not let him die”? In other words, while we might discover Halbwachs’s losses in the ordinary circumstances of reading Semprun’s memoir, Semprun suggests that we are not entitled to imagine them under the terms of our normal identification. This implication freights a change in literature’s being, its internal condition, because it insists on transforming the effects of the sensus communis. As Semprun resumes his recollection of “the dying Jew,” and the kaddish, his memory of Halbwachs and what he could restore to him in dying imposes itself on this being whose body he holds expiring in his arms. He recognizes that he has a share in the anonymous man’s death. Even though the man dies, Semprun performs the obligation charged to him by Albert: he bears witness both to the loss of the Jew’s world and to his own failure to restore him. In this failure to save, Semprun intuits a doubly articulated and ongoing obligation that structures his relationships long after Buchenwald. He is ethically bound to tell both stories, his failure and his redemption. Semprun describes his return to life outside of Buchenwald, always with the memory that this story, within his own narrative of survival, imposes its own obligation on him. Since he did not know the man’s prayer, he must repeat his lack of knowledge. In that repetition, Semprun articulates a mitzvah, a duty that he chooses not to displace; he cannot be liberated from this obligation even though he has been liberated from Buchenwald. In this way, literature does not mute the voice of that dying Jew although it restores Halbwachs’s dignity. Thus Semprun writes novel after novel, essay after essay—even his memoir, Literature or Life, is a performance of this duty.23 In the repeated gesture of writing and rewriting this narrative, he sifts through his memories of the corpses of Buchenwald and Auschwitz, in search of the traces of his

worth less than a Jew’s.” The debate became personal very quickly for Racymouw’s opponents. They argued that Jewish suffering was being privileged over their own losses. 22 A condition first described by Kant as subjective universalism and analyzed by Benedikt Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso Books, 1983). 23 In fact, he states that he constructs a Jewish character in The Longest Journey, purposely to address the need for literature to preserve another form of literary ontology.

233

AN ETHICS FOR MISSING PERSONS

233

failure and of his redemption. He must remember that he did not know that “dying Jew,” whose kaddish mingles with the memory of the crematoria in his senses, but he did remember Halbwachs and the shared sense between them, how literature made their bond tangible even amid “the many smells of death.” Implicitly, the memory of Semprun holding Halbwachs as he recites Baudelaire to his dying professor, with its allusions to the Pieta, suggests that what was ethical for Halbwachs was foreclosed to Jewish victims. In this respect, Semprun’s sense of religion coalesces around an authorized perspective that coincides with shared social values. Thus Semprun is able to offer Halbwachs something akin to what Halbwachs might need—not for survival—but for at least passing into death with dignity. Unfortunately for the dying Jew, the Pieta doesn’t apply and the reader can feel coming off the pages of Semprun’s text, that writer’s absolute despair that he cannot give anything amounting to a religious accompaniment to this man’s victimization. This realization is the necessary contrast, its ethical stake, behind Semprun’s compulsive writing and rewriting. In this way, Semprun recovers what he could not perform for the dying Jew. He could not say the prayer for him. He could only give him a new text, a narrative about Semprun’s own failure and his inability to know this anonymous victim. Consequently, literature does not offer him a way to recover missing Jews, or to fill-in Jews as “ambivalent voids,” what he would like Jewish victims to be.24 Instead the dying Jew recites the kaddish and Semprun’s narrative marks it as an impossible obligation inscribed within his memory. In fact it is akin to a religious duty that he imposes on himself. Semprun forces himself to accompany “the unknown Jew” into death. He ends his account with a memory of a Jew whose loss he is required to remember, but who remains unknown to him. He is the victim without a story and Semprun must repeat that absence. H. G. Adler’s novel, The Journey (2009), tells the last stories of the Lustig family before their murders by the Nazis. They are Jewish deportees sent to an unnamed family concentration camp. Father, mother, daughter, and son, all are left inside an “ark” of destruction, surrounded by a sea of ashes. By the novel’s end, the family’s sole survivor, the son, Paul, tries to climb out of the “ark” looking for footholds in these ashes. Like Albert and Semprun searching among corpses, he “sifts” through a pit of ashes looking for life. His escape is contingent on moving through and beyond these ashes.25 The being who escapes from this “ark” emerges nameless, a monad, without connection to anyone. 24

See Axel Stähler , “The Holocaust in the Nursery:  Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46.1 (2010): 76–88. DOI: 10.1080/17449850903478197. 25 In his review of the novel, Richard Lourie notes that the “ark” is “a place something like Theresienstadt” (NYT 2009; qtd in Kitty Millet, “Can the Holocaust Novel be a Magical Realist Novel?” H. G. Adler’s The Journey ‘after Auschwitz’,” Symbolism. An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 12/13 (2013): 192–209).

234

234

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Thus Adler presents a being who sifts through ashes, “left-over detritus,” and “abnormal rubbish.”26 Readers do not know who this being is, only that the being has been reduced to an “it.” Being’s naked desire for life pushes it (darstellen) out of the ash pit.27 As being searches for a way through the ashes, fragments of ownerless belongings cling to “it.” “It” realizes that its family’s ashes are mingled within these mounds of detritus so that ashes, victims, and memories conflate, haunt, torment. They are meaningless predicates to being, but they belong to “it.” Being imagines the family lost in these discrete pieces of things. Thus “it sifts” the detritus for a connection. In the moment of reemergence outside the camp, the “it” surrounded by “ghosts” becomes an “eye.” The “ ‘eye’ moves from an ‘empty gaze’ to a first moment of creation.”28 Adler sutures consciousness to the moment when the eye realizes the presence of more detached predicates around itself and their unarticulated relationship to its own desire to be. 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!”29 The “eye” does not “recognize” its own hand “or anything else” because it exists as one of many inanimate objects. It has lost both extension and intension.30 Limbs appear external to its “gaze,” yet a desire to look “is still there,” to find significance in the emptiness, “it cannot remain buried.” The “eye” desires to unite the empty space with what has been lost. Memories, 26

Millet (2013), 194. Eden has been transformed to the ash pits of the death camps; Noah’s ark to the place of their extermination, not their preservation. Adler alludes to the destruction of biblical entitlements, history, and their fundamental places within Jewish memory. In order for Being to push out (darstellen) from this place of a new original sin, the “it” must abandon the site of destruction, even though elements of that destruction still cling, adhere to “it.” For Adler, the sentiment behind darstellen is key to understanding what the rebuild of Being demands. 28 Millet (2013), 204. 29 H. G. Adler, The Journey (New York: Random House, 2009), pp. 198–199. 30 Adler, a trained philosopher and himself a survivor of Auschwitz and Theresienstadt, purposely links desire, the empty gaze, and an existence without predicates or extension. He uses the Kantian terms intentionally to underscore the stakes of survivor reemergence from death camps. These beings have to reestablish a relationship to space and time. See Andrew Janiak, “Kant’s Views of Space and Time,” SEP, October 10, 2016. 27

235

AN ETHICS FOR MISSING PERSONS

235

ashes, the “hand” whose “fingers” point “in no direction,” all constitute unresolvable fragments that nonetheless belong to the “eye.” The idea’s collapse into desire implies that Being is renewed because the eye “wants to know itself.” Desire pushes the fragment to be “more than itself, a being.” From that moment of desire, the “eye” shifts to a “he.” In other words, the surviving “eye” concludes that if “he” is to emerge, he must force the fragment to become “more than itself.” However, Adler does not have this isolated being attempt to force all the fragments into one mosaic of his victimization. It is only this one fragment that must be reconstituted according to his “nascent idea.” Strikingly, Adler’s “nascent idea . . . grows stronger because it is”; the eye posits an ontology that cannot be negated because “it doesn’t give up.”31 Something behind the gaze “keeps trying, finally sorting through the images before it says, “There!”32 Adler evokes a desperate transcendence in which “There” recalls both the camp’s “tired souls . . . who cannot live there,” the “eye” pondering a way to reenter time and space as itself, and the demand that life must start “there.”33 As the eye posits that there must be other eyes who see, a sensus communis, it imposes an obligation on an imagined world: it must belong to a community of “eyes” who see. This moment is perhaps the only one in which Adler’s “nascent being” imagines that there must be a community still outside the “ark,” and its sea of ashes. That imagined existence acts as a locus for the possibility of a community’s reemergence. The eye elects one image to represent “there.” It attempts to construct a relationship between 31 Implicitly, Adler suggests that desire must posit ontology in the text; it is the obligation to create Jewish life again. 32 Millet (2013), 206. 33 Adler (2009), 67; see Millet (2013); Ibid., In my earlier analysis of Adler, I note that the constitutive categories of time and space are linked by Adler to the Jewish writer’s intervention in text or art to produce the conditions for Jewish existence (ibid).

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.” As an adjunct to Adler’s “revelation” of how a subject after internment in a death camp reconstitutes the self, extension, and intension is further developed in Levinas’s Existents and Existenz. That text written while he was in the Nazi POW camp Fallingsbotel, traces this trajectory. Bettina Bergo observes that “there is no doubt that the uncertainty about his wife and daughter, not to mention rumors about the liquidation of the Jews of Lithuania, influenced his work at this time.” In other words, Jews in a variety of camps realize not only the stakes of the Nazis’ intended extermination plan, but also the steps they will have to take in order to regain identity and subjectivity. For an overview, see Bettina Bergo, “Levinas,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford, CA:  The Metaphysics Research Lab Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, 2015).

236

236

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

itself, and imagined other beings in time and space. This next step requires the still unnamed narrator to become aware that these hands are external to itself. In other words, Adler illustrates the narrator’s conversion of the eye’s sentient apprehensions into a phenomenal world and then a phenomenological experience. 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.34 Adler’s anonymous narrator intuits a rupture in being because extension has been withheld from “the eye.” It exists in isolation even though it imagines that there must be others in time and space. As the gaze recognizes the hand and 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,” imbricated with the further recognition that “what was meant to follow no longer exists.” It is a crisis of Being since the principle for imagining a specific subject in relation to a community has been exterminated; “such nothingness being immensely powerful” indicates an apodictic “forgetting,” as its effect. Being “forgets” its reach into the world through predicates, forgets its relationship to the phenomenal and to the phenomenological. Cut off from time and space, the residue of being becomes detachable, interchangeable, without history.35 Adler’s text echoes and critiques Heidegger’s thesis in his suppressed Black Notebooks of 1938–9.36 As I  have argued elsewhere, the journals represent 34

Ibid., 198–9. This is exactly the characterization Heidegger used to describe Jews in relation to ontology. They were residue, illegitimately clinging to being. Hence Being had to discharge this illegitimacy in order to save itself from pollution. LaCoue-Labarthe made this point when he critiqued Heidegger and linked it to a Nazi theory of spirit that isolated Jews as detritus that had to be eliminated in the camps. For a fuller discussion, see Wlad Godzich, “The Holocaust: Questions for the Humanities.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 7, no. 1 (2009): 133–48; Philippe LaCoue-Labarthe, Fiction du politique. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1988; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics. Trans. Chris Turner. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990; Kitty Millet, ‘Caesura, Continuity and Myth: The Stakes of Tethering the Holocaust to German Colonial Theory’. In German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Post-War Germany, eds. Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, pp. 93–119. 36 Many thanks to Richard Polt for his generosity in sharing several of his translations with me. See Martin Heidegger, Martin Heidegger: Überlegungen VII–XI (Schwarze Heft e 1938/39) Gesamtausgabe v. 95 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014), 97. Unpublished translation 34

237

AN ETHICS FOR MISSING PERSONS

237

Heidegger’s theory of Jewish existence in history. They “intermingled their essence with the German soul in order to destabilize the ‘world of being.’ Jews were ‘historyless,’ ‘bound to nothing,’ and made ‘everything serviceable to itself (Jewry).’37 Since they were being’s residue, they ate away at the ‘world’ of humankind.”38 They “could not ‘venture be-ing’ because they were incapable of constituting it.”39 Thus Adler’s “eye” rejects being reconstituted as “such nothingness.” 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.” Under the weight of this sign of forgetting, and lingering over the void of ash, “he” returns. It’s the first time a personal pronoun has been used by this narrator. Yet the idea does not shrink, does 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.40 The personal pronoun, “he,” stands uncomfortably poised between the “idea,” its desire to “belong to someone,” but “he is too tired.” As the lines syntactically shift from “it” to “he,” the “he” identifies “names next to the hands.” 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.”41 The landscape outside the camp also bears the marks of destruction; its fragments are senseless, meaningless. into English by Richard Polt; Martin Heidegger, Ponderings VII–XI, Black Notebooks 1938– 1939. Tr. Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. 37 See Kitty Millet, The Victims of Slavery, Colonization, and the Holocaust:  A Comparative History of Persecution (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 124. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. Alfred Rosenberg, someone whom Heidegger considered disreputable as a philosopher, argued something similar in his Myth of the Twentieth Century. Rosenberg’s theory posits that Jews are incapable of ontology; they are essentially the discharge of being who through miscegenation have managed to survive as a parasite of the human. For an extended analysis of Rosenberg, see Philippe LaCoue-Labarthe, Fiction du politique. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1988; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics. Trans. Chris Turner. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990. See also Kitty Millet, ‘Caesura, Continuity and Myth: The Stakes of Tethering the Holocaust to German Colonial Theory’. In German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Post-War Germany, eds. Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, pp. 93–119. 40 H. G. Adler, 2009, 109. 41 Adler, 2009, p. 199.

238

238

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

The world from which “it” has come is ash. The world to which “he” arrives is now populated by “Anybodys,” moving “from rubble to rubble.” For Adler, the “eye” confronts two untenable positions: either he can accept life as an interchangeable anonymous subject with all other “Anybodys,” indistinguishable from any of the bodies roaming the countryside, or remain the “it” of dissolution, left undiscovered and buried in a sea of ashes. The first position is the emblematic identity of any survivor of persecution, in which no one victim is different from any other victim because individual victimization is a known quantity. The second position proposes an emblematic, mute victim whose victimization is unbounded, the nature of which forecloses even constituting the victim as an object of knowledge.42 Thus Adler positions the eye, as a monad that examines these two choices before it. 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.43 Adler charts a “journey” from an “eye,” a “gaze,” an “it,” a “one,” a “he,” and then to “Anybody.” Emerging from “the ark of Ruhenthal’s ashes,” the “one” tries to fit found fragments together, to get them to “belong” to each other. The character realizes that he might be “Anybody” since his only defining predicate is the prospect of shared persecution. A modernist phenomenology, under these terms, proposes interchangeable, “history-less” beings. When “this one . . . chooses Something, he feels overwhelmed by a past” that he “senses,” but that he cannot know. In other words, the character intuits the idea of the sensus communis of a community, only to realize that the community itself is missing. There is no extension of the self to other beings. In conjunction with realizing its loss, “he” keeps sifting through the images before him, “the hands and names,” until he finally stumbles upon a sign for Unkenburg, a town eight kilometers away from the death camp from which he escapes and halfway to Stupart, his hometown.

42 This is the reality of the victims lost to Treblinka’s, Sobibor’s, Belzec’s and Chelmno’s ash pits; they are unrecoverable. Their victims cannot be identified and mourning for these victims is either collective and undefined or singular and unimaginable, that is, without end. For development of the effects of ashes on the remnant of survivors of these camps, see Millet, The Victims of Slavery. 43 Ibid., 199–200.

239

AN ETHICS FOR MISSING PERSONS

239

On his way to Unkenburg, he becomes aware of “unrecognizable voices” around him.44 They also belong to Anybodys and they “are now the masters of the fallow fields” who will “found a new order.”45 While he debates their success, he recognizes his own “new beginning,” he has endured “the moment of birth . . . He had stepped from nothing”46 and “sensed the wounds of a new being that spread through every limb, and so being was indeed there.”47 Paul’s proper name finally restored, Paul “is a new being,” who chooses to be known again. Implicitly, Adler reprises the eye discovering “there!” in the trajectory of Paul’s own self-discovery of “thereness.” It is a repetitive act the “new being” reproduces in order to gain purchase on being-in-the-world. However, Paul’s narrative doesn’t end with the recovery of his name and an identity. He is still surrounded by “voices” that make no sense, voices that declare “Liberation . . . something that none could grasp.”48 The voices attest to a principle that no longer seems relevant to the internee. As the voices gather around a “plague memorial,” they assert liberation without recognition of the specific losses of individuals in the nearby camp. In other words, the voices attest to a cathartic and unbounded knowledge of liberation whereas Paul perceives his specific experiences, excluded from their experience. Adler uses this tension between the knowledge of general suffering and the specificity of camp victims to identify a connection between the crowd’s sentiment and the reduction of camp experiences to a preexisting narrative about historical victims of epidemics and “natural” disasters. As Paul listens to the voices, he finds himself staring at the “plague memorial,” the organizing signifier within the scene. Known to Europeans as commemoration pillars to victims lost to epidemics, “plague memorials” are familiar in central Europe where they appear often as collectively endorsed markers for anonymous victims in history.49 No one victim is usually the focus of the memorial; thus the sentiment for the commemoration is that all share equally in the plague’s victimization. For the anonymous voices, liberation’s unintelligibility enables it to circulate as an empty signifier that they share. Its signification is shared by “Anybody” so that Paul questions whether such a remembrance of victimization “can save the new world?”50 Adler’s pointed critique of a liberation without victim specificity is then emphasized by Paul’s reaction to the crowd of “Anybodys” standing near the “memorial,” eating a “freshly-killed” rabbit.51 He begs them to stop 44

Ibid., 205. Ibid., 207. 46 Adler, 2009, 208. 47 Ibid., 208. 48 ibid. 49 Many thanks to Axel Stähler for his insight on these memorial pillars. 50 Adler, 2009, 209. With him, the reader is compelled to ask whether or not the signifier of the victims, “their plague” can destabilize representation and “save the world?” 51 Ibid., 209. 45

240

240

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

eating “her.” This intimate pronoun is the telling feature of the sentence. In the ensuing cacophony of voices, snippets of narratives mingle with all the other fragments of stories being told around him.52 Paul hears his sister, Zerlina, her voice pleading that she’s “their little pet rabbit,” as she dies on the platform at Auschwitz53; he hears his mother, Caroline, instructing her son on how she will outwit the SS at Theresienstadt. Other voices claim that they “knew nothing”; they are entitled to “share” in his history of victimization. They demand the right to apply victimization to Anybody who has lived through the war because they have losses “akin to Paul’s.” “All blended together” the voices tear into the rabbit.54 They are entitled to eat it because “they are hungry.”55 While Paul sees them as cannibals, they complain that Paul is too “literal” in his prohibitions: they eat out of necessity. The crowd echoes the narrator’s earlier observations that those outside the camps “want to make their claim” regarding its victims.56 Paul’s presence elicits their reactions because of his “being . . . there” among them, because he occupies time and space once again. The world to which he has returned imagines suffering as a shared concept for their own good. Paul’s refusal to let them continue to imagine their losses in place of his own invalidates the foundation of a western tradition of aesthetic judgment; it forecloses the moment when Achilles, for example, permits Priam to grieve with him. Consequently, they accuse Paul of holding on to unreasonable losses because they deny Anybody, compensation for loss. Paul thinks of his sister; [T]there is no memorial for her, only for the victims no one is willing to eat.”57 He begins walking away from the crowd down a “road that doesn’t exist” to Unkenburg.58 Adler’s blunt characterization of what Paul has to do—he has to reject the consumption of his sister’s victimization by traveling “a road that doesn’t exist”—hints at the challenges imposed on Paul if he wants to rejoin human society. The rest of the novel maps Paul’s attempted return to Stupart, his hometown. Along the way, he takes up residence in an abandoned military barracks halfway home. The horror of seeing his reflection in a mirror gives way to the recognition that he “needs no witness to confirm that he has become a person again.”59 The ark’s refugee doesn’t need a witness to the

52

See Millet (2013), 208. Jeremy Adler, “Good Against Evil?,” in Social Theory after the Holocaust, eds. Robert Fine and Charles Turner (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2000): 71–100, 86. 54 H. G. Adler, 2009, 211; Ibid., 211. 55 Ibid. 56 Milet, 2013, 208; H. G. Adler, 2009, 67. 57 H. G. Adler 2009, 212. 58 Ibid., 222. 59 Ibid., 275. 53

241

AN ETHICS FOR MISSING PERSONS

241

legitimacy of his new being, his identity; “he lives by his own laws now.”60 In this way, Adler depicts Paul’s aesthetic reemergence as a redemptive act, despite the fact that he leaves the ark alone—“it’s the only way possible if what he wants is more than to be called by just any name like all the others.”61 The stakes of his return to human existence is in his desire to remain outside the undistinguishable and the anonymous. The constitutive element of his subjective survival rests on “he lives by his own laws now” because this assertion reveals that he desires to be more than the “Anybodys” he has met “on the road” to his home. Although Adler uses the common German term, Recht, for laws, his emphasis focuses on law as a regulating principle, singularly defined.62 It is not a system of laws, not an epistemological lever that enables him to reject others’ laws, and that legislates objects, but rather Adler presents Paul as articulating his own subjective principle. In this respect, the imagined principle is the “only way possible” to prevent him from being reduced to interchangeability, “called by just any name like all the others.” Thus Adler maps 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.” This “revelation” suggests that neither a preexisting law nor an imposed consensus narrative about what has happened to Paul is acceptable to this victim. What Paul wants, what his being demands, is to be more than an interchangeable entity in the circulation of knowledge about the war’s victims. Literature authorizes him, then, to define “his own law”; it is the only ethical alternative. Richard Lourie’s review of The Journey designates the novel to be a kind of “Holocaust modernism.”63 Modernism appears to accent the novel’s multiple histories of victimization, interchangeable with any other, notable for the identification elicited between reader and character. All the voices share competing stories; no narrative is privileged over any other. The shared sense of loss is equally distributed not only to the unnamed camp victims in “a place like Theresienstadt and Auschwitz,” but also to the neighboring town of Ruhenthal’s returning war heroes, to parents who have lost their sons to the front, wives whose husbands no longer come home. Modernism recasts all of these groups as commensurable victims, detachable elements,

60

Ibid., 277. Ibid. 62 H. G. Adler, Eine Reise: Roman. (Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002). 63 Richard Lourie, “Book Review: H. G. Adler’s ‘The Journey’” (New York) in New York Times (January 11, 2009): Arts (accessed March 29, 2013). 61

242

242

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

signifiers that circulate in the known history of the war, while the entity, emerging from the ashes, remains unrecognizable.64 Indeed, all of Paul’s losses, his sister, Zerlina’s last moments, her fantasy of “being animal” in order to survive, and the “nascent idea” of Paul’s reemergence appear to be just these kinds of detached, ownerless signifiers, floating in history.65 Since Paul has been a silent figure for the majority of the novel, a bystander to the murder of his family, one could presume that Paul occupies the same subject position that readers occupy as they witness his story. Indeed the two subject positions could seem to be commensurable, except that Paul’s “new reality” is shaped by the loss of a people, a history, and a future. Hence the memories of his family tug at Paul’s “new reality.” What Lourie calls Adler’s “displacement of minds” resonates with the image of an unrecoverable community, whose memory is contingent on an individual subject, like Paul, imagining the spaces of their absences in narrative. He is “filled” literally with these missing “minds” and this realization presents us with another subject position emerging in Adler’s The Journey. Using literature to restore missing ontologies, Adler suggests that we must recognize their “ghosts,” to “consider the dead who are.”66 Adler and Semprun’s two narratives reflect subject positions that each author identifies as a mode of negotiating a personal relationship to the abandoned, excluded, and unknown Jewish victims. In their intuitive differences, each author proposes the need for an ethical action toward the victim that is specifically unique to the representation. There is not one ethical project here, but two. As a survivor of Buchenwald, Semprun recognizes that his text must bear witness to the dying Jew, for whom he could do nothing. This individual, saying his own kaddish, from within a pile of corpses, recites a prayer about which Semprun knows nothing. It is a lament, a song, and Semprun in that moment thinks of what he has done for his dying professor, Halbwachs. He stitches these two episodes together so that his capacity to share Baudelaire with Halbwachs is never far from his incapacity to share kaddish with the anonymous Jewish victim. He is ethically bound to keep the two memories together, to place the Jew reciting his prayer, within the brackets of his failure.

64

For the implications of this lack of recognition, see Millet (2013), 205. 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 Jean Améry, “At the Mind’s LImits,” in At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations of a Survivor of Auschwitz and its Realities, trans. Sydney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 1–20. See also Jorge Semprun, Literature or Life, trans. Linda Cloverdale (New York: Penguin, 1997), 133. 66 Adler, 283. 65

243

AN ETHICS FOR MISSING PERSONS

243

Literature becomes the field in which these discordant memories are bound together: the memories of the shared redemption of Halbwachs and his singular failure to save the dying Jew produce in Semprun the realization that this victim went unaccompanied into death. Since there was no poetry that he could recite to act in the place of kaddish, Semprun freights his subsequent texts with the ethical awareness that his writing can never restore the excluded. This exclusion must in and of itself be remembered. H. G.  Adler presents an even more extreme rendering of an ethics in literature. Like Semprun, he notes that literature must stand in not only for a missing “law,” an absent principle, but it also has been required to represent Paul’s “ghosts.” After looking at his emaciated reflection, Paul, the only member of his family to survive, determines that he “lives by his own law now.” He is not obligated to the world around him to represent his experiences in terms they accept. It would be unethical to force his narrative to conform to their expectations.67 The excluded and the abandoned have returned to take up their places in literature, a field of spectral memories and literary ontologies. For Adler, it is his right as the survivor victim to insist on these representations. Thus literature in these circumstances constitutes its own singular ethical stance. These writers produce an ethics for missing persons in which an interiority without predicates is revalenced by the texts themselves. Literary ontologies are the traces of this ethical project. These narratives articulate absence as a tangible reality and this constraint proposes a new internal law. In this way, one is sent on a “rescue mission,” and the other pulls himself out of the ash pit in order to “be.” Literary ontologies posit a “being there,” a “thereness” bracketed by the survivor’s own unique predicates. Semprun writes because he doesn’t know the kaddish that would redeem his companion. Adler writes into being Paul’s reality that while he has no one left with whom he could say the kaddish, there must be other “eyes” who would see as he sees. He emerges alone from “the ark.” Consequently, while both writers are survivors, they remain uniquely different: they must not be folded into each other, fusing them together into one identity that can emblematically substitute for all of them. That act would be unethical. In a subsequent interview conducted by Semprun with Elie Wiesel, Semprun informs Wiesel that he was at Auschwitz too.68 Wiesel corrects him—Semprun was not at “his Auschwitz”—and Semprun agrees. The conversation between the two men hinges on the notion of victimization and the contrasting subject positions of Semprun at Buchenwald versus

67

See Dennis Klein, The Second Liberation (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 3. Semprun, Jorge and Elie Wiesel (1995), Semprun, Wiesel: Se taire est impossible. Madrid: Editions Mille et une nuits. 68

244

244

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Wiesel, who characterized himself as a “ravenous hole” at Auschwitz.69 The willingness of Semprun to accept a qualitative difference between their two positions while simultaneously insisting that they belong to each other freights the interview with both men insisting on uniquely-intuited obligations to the camps’ dead that the living are obligated to bear. It’s not surprising that Adler sees in fictional narratives a philosophical first step toward performing a mitzvah of remembrance, a tikkun or repair. A foundational concept of Talmud and Jewish culture since antiquity, the tikkun has had a prominent place in halakhah, kabbalah, as well as Jewish notions of social responsibility in the Americas. In all of these arenas, the tikkun has been tied to the Jew’s personal obligation, the mitzvah, to mend a breach because in this way, as Emil Fackenheim reminds, we “repair the world.”70 However, Semprun’s adoption of the mitzvah of tikkun is a radical revision of the obligation since he is not bound to Judaism in any way. Semprun declares the experience though to be blanketed by this obligation: his concept of repair is the admission that there is no repair and he is commanded to write this failure. He must bear witness textually to what has happened. The text becomes, then, a space to perform the witness; it enables the mitzvah to be the failure that it is while nonetheless demanding its articulation. This is the crisis of the Holocaust narrator’s literary ontology:  the text relocates being in a place where the predicates of human experience have been removed, denied to the Nazis’ victims, yet the imagination produces new predicates.71 It is authorized to do so because Paul remembers. Adler describes this moment as Paul’s realization of “a ‘there’ that is once again where it used to be. Yet what once was meant to follow the idea no longer exists.”72 Consequently, Paul experiences a “thereness” unmoored from a people, but it still compels itself to be expressed in the phenomenal world. It is also a disassociated space in which ‘to be’ requires the narrator to accept his radical singularity. He is alone and “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.”73 He imagines what he is, what he will be, what he was.

69 Kitty Millet, “Elie Wiesel’s Night and Dying in the Present Tense.” In Bloom’s Literary Themes, on Death and Dying. Ed. Harold Bloom. (New York: Chelsea House, 2009), 78. 70 Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994), 254. 71 This resupplying of new predicates is not unique to the Holocaust survivor’s literary experience; it is in fact a familiar trope associated with African American literary texts. Octavia Butler uses the prosthetic arm as one such example of the trope. See Octavia Butler, Kindred (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1988). 72 Adler 198. 73 Ibid., 277.

245

AN ETHICS FOR MISSING PERSONS

245

Literary ontologies in Holocaust narratives propose a diverse array of tikkunim or “repairs,” not only for readers, but for writers as they imagine characters whose injuries need the intervention of an ethics in order to redeem them. Thus Adler proposes revalenced religious obligations that extend beyond Judaism’s boundaries; they act akin to mitzvot, but they are ethical obligations, middot. Both Adler and Semprun recognize that the Holocaust presents victims with losses that mitzvot are incapable of bearing; literature constrains itself to represent that incapacity so that each textual iteration posits a singular “ethics for missing persons.” As a result, literature intervenes through Holocaust narrative to propose an appointment between readers, characters who are familiar and those who are not.74 As Emil Fackenheim observes, “[N]o Tikkun is possible of that rupture, ever after. But the impossible Tikkun is also necessary” (emphasis in the original).75

Works cited Adler, H. G. (2009), The Journey. New York: Random House. Adler, H. G. Eine Reise: Roman. (Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002). Adler, Jeremy (2000), “Good Against Evil?,” in Social Theory after the Holocaust, eds. Robert Fine and Charles Turner (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2000): 71–100, 86. Alter, Robert (1996), Pleasure of Reading in an Ideological Age. New York: Norton. Anderson, Benedikt (1983), Imagined Communities. London: Verso Books. Bergo, Bettina (2015), “ Levinas, ” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: The Metaphysics Research Lab Center for the Study of Language and Information: Stanford University. Bliss, Corinne (1988), “Against the Current: A Conversation with Anita Desai,” The Massachusetts Review 29: 521–37. Boyarin, Daniel (1994), Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Butler, Octavia (1988), Kindred. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1988. Chandwani, Ashok (1988), “Hero an Unconvincing Symbol of Alienation,” Halifax Daily News, October 16, 16. Confino, Alon (2014), A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Da Silva , Tony Simoes (1997), “Whose Bombay Is It Anyway? Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay,” ARIEL 28.3: 63–77.

74

Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony (New York: Routledge, 1993). Fackenheim says: “Among philosophers and theologians, however, the phenomenon (of Heil Hitler salute on German streets) should above all provoke thought. The past has evidently not yet been mastered, even in the limited sense in which one can speak here of ‘mastery’ at all. This calls for deep, sustained, and above all relentlessly honest reflection” (To Mend the World, xxxiii). See also Fackenheim’s discussion of our obligation to “repair” described earlier. (254). 75

246

246

FAULT LINES OF MODERNITY

Desai, Anita (1988), Baumgartner’s Bombay. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc. Dresner, Samuel (1974), Levi Yitzak of Berdichev. Bridgeport: Hartmore House. Dyson, Ketaki Kushari (1989), [Baumgartner’s Bombay.], Wasafiri 4.9: 29–30. Elon, Amos (2003), The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743–1933. New York: Henry Holt. Fackenheim, Emil (1994), To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought Bloomington: Indiana UP. Godzich, Wlad (2009), “The Holocaust: Questions for the Humanities.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 7, no.1: 133–48. Heidegger, Martin, Martin Heidegger: Überlegungen VII–XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938/39) Gesamtausgabe v. 95 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014), 97. Unpublished translation into English by Richard Polt. Heidegger, Martin, Ponderings VII–XI, Black Notebooks 1938–1939. Tr. Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. LaCoue-Labarthe, Philippe (1988), Fiction du politique. Paris: Christian Bourgois. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe (1990), Heidegger, Art and Politics. Trans. Chris Turner. Oxford and Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. Levitt, Laura (2007), American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust. New York: NYU Press. Lourie, Richard (2009), “Book Review: H. G. Adler’s ‘The Journey’” (New York) in New York Times (January 11, 2009). Mason, Emma (2015), Reading the Abrahamic Faiths. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Millet, Kitty (2009), “Elie Wiesel’s Night and Dying in the Present Tense.” In Bloom’s Literary Themes, on Death and Dying. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 171–182. Millet, Kitty (2013), “Can the Holocaust Novel be a Magical Realist Novel? H. G. Adler’s The Journey ‘after Auschwitz’,” Symbolism. An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 12/13: 192–209. Millet, Kitty (2015), “Halakhah and Literature,” in Encyclopedia of Bible Reception. Berlin: DeGruyter. Millet, Kitty (2017), The Victims of Slavery, Colonization and the Holocaust: A Comparative History of Persecution. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Potok, Chaim (2001), “Interview with Elaine M. Kauvar,” in D. Walden (ed.), Conversations with Chaim Potok. Jackson : University of Mississippi Press, 63–87. Semprun, Jorge (1998), Literature or Life. New York: Viking. Semprun, Jorge and Wiesel, Elie (1995), Semprun, Wiesel: Se taire est impossible. Madrid: Editions Mille et une nuits. Stähler, Axel (2010), “The Holocaust in the Nursery: Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46.1: 76–88. DOI: 10.1080/17449850903478197.

247

INDEX

absolute knowledge 68 absolute metaphors 92 absolute world 87 absolutism 82, 88, 175, 176, 178, 179, 211 academic elitism 9 ACLA Bernheimer Report 9 n.21 actor sui 37 Adler, H. G. 26, 27, 227, 233–44 L’Adone (Adonis) 36 Adorno, Theodor W. 72 Advaita Vedanta 102 n.23, 103, 105 aesthetic experience 11, 12, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23–4, 235 n.34 aesthetic idealism 170 aestheticization 12, 176 aesthetic judgment 11, 20, 21 aesthetics 11–12, 14, 15, 19, 20, 22–3, 110, 163, 164, 168, 170, 183 n.2 and ethics 24 À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Time Past/In Search of Lost Time) 37, 168 Alexander the Great 74 “alfabet” 185, 187–90 “All” 80, 81, 82, 83, 83 n.6, 87, 88 allegories 7, 20–1, 110, 127–31, 139, 191 All Polish Youth 2 alterity and ethics 210, 211–13 see also Other historization 206–7 and literal text 116 novel representations of 122, 122 n.2, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 139, 140–1, 143, 144–5

politicization of 205, 206–7 theoretical engagement with 209 Altieri, Charles 125 anachronism 64, 101 Anantadas 96 Anselm of Canterbury 175 anthropomorphism 103, 110 n.47 anti-human time 17 anti-secularism 63, 64 anti-Semitism, of Dostoevsky 25, 221–2, 223 n.23, 225 Arab Spring 65 Area Studies (AS) 199–200, 200 n.8 Arendt, Hannah 224 Ariosto, Ludovico 33 Arouet, François-Marie (Voltaire) 69, 69 n.21 Arrianism 14 art 11, 12, 13, 20, 22, 23, 34, 46–7, 68, 88, 163, 164, 167, 168, 170, 174, 184, 185–6 and cultural memory 42 and identity 87 imagination of figures in 138 modernist 178 modernist art 167, 168–9, 170, 173 rhetorical communication of 165–6, 176 as self-expression 46 and tzimtzum 85 understanding of 47 Asad, Talal 8–9, 10 Asmodeus 21–2, 149, 152 n.6 and mystery 150–7 and providence 157–60 Asmodeus at Large 153 atman 102

248

248

INDEX

Attridge, Derek 128, 129–30, 130 n.22, 130 n.23 audiences 13, 37, 38, 46, 65, 174, 175 Auerbach, Erich 15–16, 45, 54, 227 approach towards history 51 on art 46–7 concern for readers 56–8 and Curtius, compared 57 European humanism 50 on existential realism 48–9, 50–1 on fascism 56 heroic detachment 57–8 on humanism 56 human myth 49, 58 on imagination and reason 51 on modernism 56–7 as partisan advocate 49–50 radical relativism see radical relativism representation of reality 57 Said on 58 on standardization of global culture 50 starting point (Ansatzpunkt) 50, 50 n.29, 51 synthesized cosmic view 50, 59–60 on time of narration 54–6 Vico, learning from 50–1 Augustine, Saint 176–7, 176 n.62, 178 rhetorical theory 172 authorial desire 178 author in time 55 avant-garde 164, 170–1 Bakhtin, Mikhail 38, 207 Balzac, Honoré de 66 Bang, Theodore 159 Barilli, Renato 175 Baroque 38 Barth, John 34, 38, 39 Baudelaire, Charles 22, 23, 164–5, 169, 170, 172, 176, 177, 179 Being 11, 12, 14, 18, 25, 81, 84, 122, 192, 206, 211, 234, 234 n.27, 235–7, 241 n.67 being 9, 13–14, 28, 87, 234–44 being-in-relation 80, 83, 85–6, 87 Bengal, colonialism in 201

Benjamin, Walter 152, 153 n.9 Bergo, Bettina 235 n.35 Bhabha, Homi 208 Bhagwat Gita 110 Bhakti (devotion) poets/traditions 20, 96, 101, 106, 106 n.34, 111, 115 Bible 74, 84–5, 86 Buber-Rosenzweig translation 90 Jerome’s translation 75 translations 75 Birks, Cecile 128 Black, Shameem 121, 122 n.2 Blackburn, Simon 121 n.1 Blair, Tony 72 Blanchot, Maurice 17, 18–19, 79–87, 91–2 on dying 87 écriture see écriture un-working see un-working (désoeuvrement) on writing 18–19, 85–6 Bloom, Harold 14 n.31, 39 Blumenberg, Hans 84–5, 92 Book of Job 23, 185–7 Book of Revelation 68, 187 Book of the Courtier 177 Booth, Wayne C. 123, 175, 178 Bourdieu, Pierre 204 Bradbury, Osgood 150 Brahman 102 Brahmanism 95, 96, 98, 101–2, 113 and Hinduism 97 rejection of 104 Brahmans 101, 102, 103, 108, 114 Brahmasutrabhasya 102 n.23 breaking of vessels (shevirat ha-kelim) 80, 82, 91 Breitbart 64 n.5 Bronner, Gerald 204 Brooks, Cleanth 138, 171, 172, 178 Brothers Karamazov, The 217, 218–19, 220–1, 221 n.6, 222 Buber, M. 90 Buchanan, Harrison Gray 153 Buddhism 102, 103, 167 Bulle Shah 99 n.11, 104, 104 n.32, 108, 110, 110 n.47, 111, 112, 113 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 153, 153 n.9

249

INDEX

Burke, Kenneth 166 n.10, 172, 172 n.42, 175, 176 Butler, Christopher 171 Butler, Judith 124 Călinescu, Matei 170 Cambridge University 5 n.10 canon 5 n.9, 9, 49, 64, 65–6, 68, 74–5 Cantar de mio Cid (Song of My Chief) 35 Cantos 175 Carlyle, Thomas 152, 152 n.8 Carpentier, Alejo 38 Carus, Titus Lucretius 36 caste system, in India 29, 96, 99–100, 101, 102, 103, 106 n.34, 108, 111, 114, 115 Castiglione, Baldassare 177 Castorp, Hans 41–2 Catholicism 65, 157, 167, 167 n.16, 168 Celio, or New York Above-ground and Under-ground 156 Cervantes, Miguel de 14, 34, 38–9 Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland) 35 Charlottesville 2 n.3, 4 Chartrians 75 Christensen, Inger 23–4, 184, 185, 187–90 Christianity 3, 15, 22, 34, 68, 74, 167, 168, 177, 222–3 Clark, T. J. 171, 171 n.36 class hierarchy, in India 20, 96, 99–100, 101, 102, 103, 106 n.34, 108, 111, 112, 114, 115 Claviez, Thomas 12, 122 Coetzee, J. M. 20, 21, 121 n.1, 122, 126, 127, 131, 133, 135, 144, 145 rejection of allegory 128–9 simultaneity in metafictionals 137–44 Cohen, Leonard 79 Coleridge, Samuel 173 collective narratives, of communities 4–5 colonialism 10, 127, 128, 142, 200–1, 207 British colonialism 19, 20, 200–1

249

colonization 6, 10, 24, 98, 99, 101, 122, 133, 135, 200, 202, 208 communitarianism 9 communities 4–5, 8–9, 10, 11, 15, 16, 19, 26–8, 72, 79–81, 86–8, 92, 100, 102, 103, 104–5, 106, 110, 111–13, 116, 184 n.3, 201, 212, 222, 227–8, 230, 231–2, 235–6, 238, 242 Comparatists 200 n.9 Comparative Literature (CL) 8–9, 9 n.21, 24, 47, 52, 199–200 comparative reasoning 129, 130, 134, 142, 144 Concerning the City of God against the Pagans 177 Connery, Chris 70 Conrad, Joseph 173 consciousness 55, 58, 83, 122, 123, 126, 170, 206–7, 234 hermeneutics of 208, 209, 211, 212, 213 constitutional democracy 72 Coquio, Catherine 231 n.21 cosmopological time 17 cosmos 65, 80, 84–5, 87–9 Courtois, Stephane 231 n.21 Craps, Stef 128, 129–30, 130 n.23 Creationism 64, 66, 68 n.19 critic in time 55 cultural history 34, 35, 38, 40, 41 cultural memory 42, 194 cultures, as variants of the same being 116–17 Curtius, Ernst Robert 16, 48, 51–2, 57 on Eliot’s poems 52–4 on The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 52–3 on Prufrock and Other Observations 53 starting point (Ansatzpunkt) 51 on The Waste Land, Four Quartets 54 Daedalus, Stephen 168 Danielewski, Mark Z. 144 Dante Alighieri 15, 33, 35, 39, 40 Darwin, Charles 149, 151

250

250

INDEX

Darwinian theory 64 Le Débat 204 de Camoens, Vaz Luis 38 de Guevara, Luis Vélez 152 de Man, Paul 171, 172 democracy 48, 49, 50, 69, 72, 199 Demons 217, 218, 225 Denmark 34 Depenbrock, Heike 190 De rerum natura 36 Derrida, Jacques 66, 70 Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) 41, 42 Descartes 71 destruction, theory of 18, 177, 185 Deus Absconditus 68, 69 de Vega, Lope 37 devotional poetry 95, 98–9, 100, 102 periodization of 116 plurality 106 signification 106–7, 108 Dharmashastras 101 Le Diable à Paris 153 Le Diable Boîteux 152–3, 152 n.7 Diary of a Writer 225 Dickens, Charles 154, 157 Die Schrift 90 Dilthey, Wilhelm 47, 206 disaster, and écriture 81, 82 disenchantment of the world 69 Divina commedia 33 Divine 9, 13–14, 15, 18, 21, 23, 26, 66, 68, 69, 80, 90, 97, 98, 101, 172, 184, 187, 187 n.10 ethical relation 220 in terms of human relationships 115–16 work of art 23–4, 80, 184 n.3, 185–7 Divine Being 14, 25, 192 kabbakustuc theory of Hebrew alphabet 18 Divine grace 102, 176 Divine memory 18 Divine Providence 150, 157–60 Divine time 17 Dombey and Son 157 Dominicans 75

Dostoevsky, Fyodor 25, 26, 217–18, 219–23, 221 n.16, 224–5 Doyle, Conan 154 Dr. Faustus 41 Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way) 37–8 dying, death 87, 89 écriture 17, 18, 79–80, 79 n.1, 85, 86, 91, 92 and disaster 81, 82, 87 dynamism of 80 redemptive 84 and revelation 80 egalitarianism 113 egocentric monism 211, 212 Ekanath 96 El Diablo Conjuelo 152 Eliot, George 123 Eliot, T. S. 52–4, 166 n.9, 170, 171 Ellmann, Richard 168 El siglo de las luces (The Age of Enlightenment) 38 empty ritual 18, 22, 26 n.44 Engels, Friedrich 158 n.26 Enlightenment 4, 21, 67, 71, 72 entitlements 4–5, 6, 230 n.15, 231, 234 n.27 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 23, 24, 184, 185, 192–4 Eon 65 epistemic violence 204 esoteric mysticism 112 ethical identification 124–5, 139, 144–5 ethical literary community 86 Ethical Literary Criticism (ELC) 200 n.7 ethics 113 and aesthetics 24 of allegory 128 alterity 210, 211–13 see also Other and Divine 220 of generosity 212 of identification see ethical identification Levinasian ethics 122 metaethical man 88, 88 n.25 new ethical theories 124, 125, 144–5

251

INDEX

novel ethics 121, 121 n.1, 122–4, 126, 130, 136 n.31, 144–5 of pluralism 100 real ethics, and imaginary others 137–44 unethical writing 85 ethnic nationalism 3 Etruscans 65 Europe 2–3, 35, 36, 38 Evangelicalism 64 existential realism 48–9 Existents and Existenz 235 n.35 eyeology 150, 153 Eysteinsson, Astradur 169 Fackenheim, Emil 243, 244, 244 n.77 Faerie Queen, The 38 Fanon, Frantz 208 fascism 2, 3, 48 Auerbach on 56 Faust 40 Faust II 40 Feeney, D. C. 65 n.8, 65 n.9 Felix Krull 41 Fibonacci sequence, in Chrisensen’s poem 188, 188 n.11, 189, 190 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 67, 67 n.15 fictional mysteries 149 visual epistemology 151–2 Figueira, Dorothy 230 n.14 Finnegans Wake 40, 179 First World 205 Flaubert, Gustave 163, 164 n.2 Florentine Valla 75 Foster, George 156 Foucault, Michel 208, 209 Fox News 64 n.5 Frances of Assisi, Saint 187 n.10 freedom 20 of conscience 2 of spirit 13 freedom from/to performance 69 n.21, 122, 125, 135 French Revolution 66 Freud, Sigmund 149, 151, 165, 177, 224 Friedman, Susan Stanford 171 Frost, Thomas 153, 159

Frye, Northrop 35 fundamentalism 106, 115 Islamic 63 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 208, 209 Galland, Olivier 204 Gates, Henry Louis 208 Gaudiya Vaishnava texts 96 Gaut, Berys 128 Géhin, Etienne 204 Geist 13 Gemeinde 72 generosity, ethics of 212 German idealism 83, 83 n.6, 87, 89 Gibson, Andrew 124 Giddens, Anthony 72 global culture, standardization of 50 globalism 73–4 globalization 69, 70, 72–3, 206 Gnosticism 14 n.31 God see Divine godhead (tzimtzum) 80, 82, 85, 86 godlessness 4, 26, 223 n.23 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 40 grand narratives 15, 33, 34, 95, 191 Great Work of Art 80 Greene, Graham 179 Gujarat, India 4, 10 n.24 Guru Granth Sahib 100 n.16, 109 Guru Nanak 111 Habermas, Jürgen 70–2, 73, 183, 209 Hale, Dorothy 124 Handler, Nina 5 n.10, 202 n.14 ha-torah 23, 23 n.41, 26 Heart of Darkness 173–4 Hebrew alphabet kabbalistic theory 18 Hegel, G. W. F. 13–14, 17, 66, 67–8, 206–7 Heidegger, Martin 92, 207, 236 “Here I am” 25–6 hermeneutics 74, 75, 209–10 of belief 230 n.14 of consciousness 211 Hermeneutics of Suspicion 206, 207 Heyer, Heather 4

251

252

252

INDEX

higher education 5, 5 n.10, 24–5, 202 n.17 Hinduism 10, 10 n.24, 95, 101, 102 and Brahmanism 97 scriptures 103 Hindutva 95 Hindutvan nationalism 20 historical imperative 15, 42, 45, 60 Hitler, Adolf 3 n.5, 3 n.6 Hobbes, Thomas 71 Holocaust narratives 18, 227, 228, 244 Houlgate, Stephen 13 human beings 13, 14–15, 22, 42, 49, 51, 54, 56, 58, 68 n.19, 96, 107, 111–12, 123, 137, 143, 165, 189, 192 n.23 general quality 47 human equality 104, 105, 111, 115 humanism 48, 49, 50, 56, 58, 70, 71, 80, 80 n.2, 101, 116 humanitarianism 71 human justice 158–9 human myth 49, 58 human rights 2 Husserl, Edmund 106, 207 idealism aesthetic idealism 170 German idealism 83, 83 n.6, 87, 89 identity politics 106, 210 see also ethical identification identity studies 202–3 imaginary others, and real ethics 137–44 imagination 11–12, 18, 21, 235 n.34 experience of transcendence 14 higher power of 11, 12 liberation of 12–13, 20, 27 imperialism 20–1, 128, 135, 208, 209 India 4, 19–20, 201 caste system, in India 29, 96, 99–100, 101, 102, 103, 106 n.34, 108, 111, 114, 115 class hierarchy, in India 20, 96, 99–100, 101, 102, 103, 106 n.34, 108, 111, 112, 114, 115 language plurality in 97–8 secularism in 10, 10 n.24

social hierarchies 117 spiritual economy 98 Inferno 35 Inquisition 75 institutionalized Christianity 185 institutionalized difference 112–13 institutionalized religion 95, 99, 100, 104, 105, 117, 185 institutional multiculturalism 203 “intelligent design” 64 International Comparative Literature Association Congress (ICLA) 7–8 Islam 68 on Creation 68 n.19 fundamentalism 63 Jabès, Edmond 87 n.23 Jainism 102, 103 James, Henry 164 n.2 Jameson, Frederic 166 Jani, Deepa 128 Janouch, Gustav 168 Jerome, Vulgate 75, 75 n.36 Jesus Christ 36, 74, 223 n.23 as pleroma 14 Jews 4, 25–6, 223, 236 Jha, D. N. 95, 97, 101 John Paul II, Pope 1 Journey, The 227, 233–44 Joyce, James 15, 40–1, 163, 164, 164 n.2, 167, 168–9, 170, 177, 179 Judaism 17–18, 25, 26 n.44, 68, 68 n.19, 79, 177, 222, 223, 224 Kabbalistic tradition 68 n.20 Judeo-Christian tradition 184 kabbalah 26 n.44 Kabbalistic tradition 68 n.20, 80 theory of Hebrew alphabet 18 Kabir 96–7, 99 n.11, 100, 103, 104, 105, 108, 112, 113–14, 116 kaddish 26, 227, 228, 228 n.6, 229, 232, 233, 242, 243 Kadir, Djelal 205 n.23 Kafka, Franz 167 n.16, 168, 173, 174 Kant, Immanuel 11, 12, 13, 17, 67, 71, 183 n.2 Kearney, Richard 6, 8, 9, 9 n.20, 25

253

INDEX

Kearns, Cleo McNelly 168 n.20 Kiosk 192 Kowal, Michael 51 Krishna, Vishnu’s incarnation 110 Ku Klux Klan (KKK) 3 Lacan, Jacques 208 La Com é die Humaine (Human Comedy) 66 Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillippe 12 La divina commedia (Divine Comedy) 35 Landy, Joshua 121, 122 n.2 language 86, 91–2, 91 n.38, 108, 116 see also speech, and traditions and redemptive-revelation 91 and tradition 107 Lawrence, D. H. 164, 167 Lee, Robert E. 4 leftism 5 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 71 Le Sage, Alain René 152, 152 n.7 Les Fleurs du Mal 164 Les Mystères de Paris 150, 158 Levenson, Michael 178 Levin, Harry 38 Levinas, Emmanuel 25, 122, 211–12, 213, 217, 220, 224, 235 n.34 Lewis, Thomas A. 8 n.13 Lewis, Wyndham 170 likeness 122, 122 n.2 Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages 50 literary studies 204–5 politicization of 205 and promotion of militant subjectivity over critical objectivity 204 literary texts 20–1 cultural representations within 46 literature 6–7, 14–15, 22–3, 46 as an instrument 7 as an instrument of a transcendental power 21 as an ontology 7 temporality of representation 15 Transcendental space 15

253

Literature or Life 227–33 le Livre (Book) 84, 86 le livre (book) 85–6 Lo fi ngido verdadero (The True Feigned or the Feigned True) 37 logology 176 logos 6, 7, 14, 15, 23 Lourie, Richard 241 love 104–5 and knowledge 109 as worship 110, 111 Love, Heather 121, 122 n.2 Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The 52–3 Lukács, Georg 170, 170 n.31 Luria, Isaac 17, 80–1, 81–2, 84, 85, 86, 91 theory of destruction 18 Luther, King 183 Lyotard, Jean-François 12, 191, 192 lyric poetry 171–2 Macron, Emmanuel 212 n.63 macronisme 212 n.63 Mann, Thomas 39, 41–2 Marino, Giambattista 36 Marion, Jean-Luc 177 Marlowe, Christopher 41 Marx, Karl 149, 151, 158 n.26, 177, 207 Mason, Emma 8 n.16, 9, 9 n.18 May, Brian 128 McReynolds, Susan 223 n.23 meta-discourse 191 metaethical man 88, 88 n.25 metafictions 144 see also novels simultaneity in 137–44 metaphors 84, 92, 133 metonymy 130–1, 132–3, 138, 139, 140 Meyer, Herman 39 microscopic eye/vision 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154–5, 157 Miller, J. Hillis 121 n.1, 178 n.70 Milton, John 36, 38 Mimesis 48, 49, 54, 55, 56 mitzvah 25, 227, 232, 243, 244 mitzvoth 26, 89

254

254

INDEX

modernism 22, 56, 163, 167, 170 darkness of 169 religious rhetoric 169–70 rhetorics 166 self-explicated aesthetic idealism 170 modernist art 170, 173 modernity 66–7, 70–1, 115, 116 periodization of 71 modernization 70–1, 183 “Mon Coeur mis à nu” 165 monism 103, 105, 111, 212 Moses and Monotheism 224 multiculturalism 205–6 n.24 institutional multiculturalism 203 Murakami Haruki 126, 137–8, 144 Murray, Les 23, 24, 184, 185, 190–2 Murry, John Middleton 166 mysteries 149, 151 n.4, 174 and Asmodeus 150–7 fiction see fictional mysteries fictional mysteries 149, 151–2 master-perceivers 149–50, 152, 153, 155 secularization of 151, 151 n.4 and supernatural 152 urban mysteries 149, 150, 151, 151 n.4, 153, 154, 158 visual empiricism 152, 155 Mysteries and Miseries of the Queen City, The 156 Mysteries of City Life 157 Mysteries of Fitchburg, The 150 Mysteries of London, The 150–1, 158 Mysteries of Old Father Thames, The 158 Mysteries of Papermill Village, The 159 mysticism 15 esoteric mysticism 112 Myth of the Twentieth Century 237 n.40 Namdev 99 n.11, 104, 109–10, 111 National Radical Camp 2 nation-state 191 Nature 184 Nazism 2, 19 see also Holocaust narratives Needham, Anuradha Dingwaney 4

negative community 86, 86 n.21 neo-Nazism 3 new ethical theories 124, 125, 144–5 Newton, Adam Zachary 121 n.1 Nibelungenlied (Song of the Nibelung) 34 Nicholls, Peter 166 n.9 nihilism 80 nomadic literature 205, 205 n.23 Nomos 72 Notebooks 225 novel ethics 121, 121 n.1, 122–3, 126, 130, 136 n.31, 144–5 criticisms 123 and identity 124 novels 123, 175 characters and fictional beings 123–4 imaginary others and real ethics 137–44 metafictional narration 126, 127 n.15 and realism 127, 127 n.15 reflexive realism 127 Nussbaum, Martha 123 oeuvre 85, 86 On Escape 211 oppression 8 and colonization 10 Orientalism 207 Orphic texts 75 Os Lusiadas (The Lusitanians) 38 Other 25, 204, 205, 206, 219 see also alterity in religion 6 theoretical configurations of 206–13 Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence 217, 219–20 Ozeki, Ruth 126 Palumbo-Liu, David 124 Paradigms of Metaphorology 92 Paradise Lost 36, 38 Paradise Regained 36 Paradiso 35 Patai, Raphael 152 n.6 Patriot Prayer Group 3 Penchant, Philip 150 people-state 88

255

INDEX

Phaedrus 176 Philoktetes 186, 186 n.8 philology 74–5 philosophy 13, 68, 80, 102–3, 105, 206, 212 n.63 plague memorials 239, 239 n.50 Plato 84, 85, 176, 177, 206 Plautus 177 pleroma 6, 14, 23 Christ as 14 pluralism 100, 105, 106, 115, 116 Poe, Edgar Allan 155 poetic imagination 34 poeto-theological experience 192 poetry 52–4, 175, 185 as deadly reassurance 187–90 devotional see devotional poetry; India and liberation of unbeliever 192–4 lyric poetry 171–2 poet’s embodiment of representation 14–15 “Poetry and Religion” 190–2 Poles 2017 rally 2–4 religious identity 1–3 polis 88 Pollock, Sheldon 200 n.8 polytheism 103 Ponty, Merleau 95, 98, 106, 107–8, 116 Portrait 168 postcolonial theory 201 post-modernism 70, 170 post-secularism 16–17, 64, 70, 73, 74 and globalism 69 and modernism 70–1 poststructuralism 208 Pound, Ezra 169, 170, 171, 175, 179 poverty, spiritual and material 116 prose fiction 175 prostitution imagery, for divine 164 proto-cosmos 87–9 proto-modernist poetry 179 Proust, Marcel 37, 168, 170 Providential history/human history 66 Providential order 69–70 Prufrock and Other Observations 53 Puranas 103

255

Qur’an 111 Rabelais, François 33, 36–7, 38 race collective narrative 4 and religious identity 3–4 Racymouw, Henri 231 n.21 radical alterity 20 see also alterity; Other radical relativism 15–16, 48, 227 Rahim 99 n.11 Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder 4 reading 91 reading the Other 24 real ethics, and imaginary others 137–44 reality, bubbling plenitude of 84 redemption 91, 185 Rees, James 157 reflexive realism 127 relationality 80 religion 13 institutionalized religion 95, 99, 100, 104, 105, 117, 185 Other in 6 resurgence of 8 and state 73 true religion 105 religious freedom 2 religious identity 4 religious speech 190 Renaissance 35, 36, 38 reparation (tikkun) 81 resignification, and devotional poetry 106–7 revelation 73, 82–3, 83 n.6, 89, 91 dynamism of 80 Reynolds, George William MacArthur 150, 158 rhetorics and art 165–6, 176 Augustine’s theory 172 of modern fiction 178 Ricoeur, Paul 25, 125, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212–13 Romanticism 177, 184 Rorty, Richard 192 n.25 Rosenberg, Alfred 237 n.40

256

256

INDEX

Rosenzweig, Franz 17, 18, 79, 80, 81, 83 n.6, 84, 87–9, 90, 91–2, 91 n.38, 222–3, 224, 225 Rote Armee Fraktion 72 Rulison, H. M. 156 Runia, Eelco 133 Rushdie, Salman 126 Russell, Bertrand 167–8 Russian Orthodox Church 64 Saavedra, Miguel de Cervantes 33, 38 sacraments 22, 42, 163, 184 n.63, 193 saeculum 65–6, 65 n.8, 70 Said, Edward 58, 201 n.11, 207 Säkularisierung 66, 68, 69 Samsa, Gregor 174 Sanskrit 108, 110 Sant traditions/poets 20, 96 n.4, 101, 104, 106, 109, 114, 115 Sartre, Jean-Paul 170 Schlaffer, Heinz 193 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 87, 206 Schmeling, Manfred 36 Schmitt, Carl 66, 71 Schnapper, Dominique 204 Scholem, Gershom 1 n., 17–18, 26 n.44 Schutjer, Karin 27–8 secularism 10, 10 n.24, 16–17, 26, 63, 64, 73, 101, 210 Church authorities on 17 claimants 69–70 description of 65–6 human form of history 17 providential history 17 and worldliness 66 secularization 14, 66–8, 183 thesis 70–1 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 125 sedimentation, poetry/tradition 95, 98, 99, 106, 107–8 seduction strategy 128 Seel, Martin 184 n.3 Self 83, 87, 88 and Other 206, 207, 208, 210, 211, 212, 213 self-consciousness 9, 121 n.1, 122, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130 n.23, 132, 137, 138, 139–40, 144–5, 183

self-critical narrative 38, 39 self-esteem 210 self–God relation 100 selfhood 116, 134, 209, 210, 211 self-minoritization 205 self-understanding, of spirit 13 Semprun, Jorge 26–7, 227–33, 228 n.6, 242, 243–4 sensus communis 231, 235 Serpell, C. Namwali 121, 122 n.2 shabd (word) 96 n.4, 108 Shaivism 103 Shaivite Nayanars 103 Shankaracharya (AdiSankara) 102, 102 n.23, 111 shared sense 231, 232, 241 shefa (cosmic renewal) 18, 82–3, 84, 91 Sherlock Holmes stories 149, 151, 154, 156, 156 n.19, 159–60 signification, and devotional poetry 106–7, 108 Sikhism 111 Simon, Richard 75 simultaneity 130–1, 130 n.22, 137–44 slavery 24–5, 25 n.42 Slow Man 126, 132, 136, 140–4 Smith, Zadie 126, 144 Smollett, Tobias 152, 152 n.7 socialist realism 38 sociology 204–5 politicization of 205 and promotion militant subjectivity over critical objectivity 204 Socrates 176 “Sól” (“Salt”) 185–6 Sophokles 186 Sophonisbe 38 Sot-Weed Factor, The 38 Soviet Union, collapse of 63 space and time 16, 52, 54 n.42, 55, 57, 98, 228, 234 n.30, 235–6, 235 n.34, 240 speech, and traditions 107, 116 see also language; rhetorics peculiar power of speech 107 Spencer, Richard 2, 2 n.3 Spenser, Edmund 38 Spinoza 69, 71

257

INDEX

Spinoza, Baruch theory of immanence 69 spirit, self-understanding 13 spirituality 22–3, 109, 192 spiritual nationalism 106 n.34 Spitzer, Leo 49, 50, 50 n.29, 51 Sringar 110 Star of Redemption, The 83, 83 n.5, 90, 91–2, 222–3, 876 “starry sky” program 84, 85, 87 state, and religion 73 Sterne, Laurence 39 Stoicism 85, 87 structuration 72–3 subjective universalism 232 n.22 subject/object dialectic 6, 20 Sue, Eugène 150, 158 Sufi traditions/poets 101, 103, 104, 105, 108, 114, 115 Summer in Baden-Baden 221 supernatural being 21, 152 supratemporal imperative 42 supratemporal mysticism 15 Symposium 177 Szymborska, Wisława 23, 24, 184, 185–7 Tantric Yoga 96 n.4 Tasso, Torquato 33 technological rationality 71 telos 19, 20 Le temps retrouv é (Time Refound) 37 Thackeray, W. M. 158 n.26 theological myth 80, 80 n.2 Thompson, George 153, 154, 155, 157 tikkun 82, 243 “Timaeus” 84, 85, 86 time and space 16, 52, 54 n.42, 55, 57, 98, 228, 234 n.30, 235–6, 235 n.34, 240 Tolstoy, Leo 221 Torah 18, 23, 23 n.41, 89 totalization 86, 91, 92, 172 To the Lighthouse 54, 172–3 tradition, as new life 106–7, 108 Transcendence 6–7 Transcendental 13–14

257

empty space 17, 69, 235 Transcendental Being 12 Transcendental illusion 12 Transcendental power 8 Transcendental space 14, 15 emptiness 17 Transcendent Other 6 Trask, Willard 56 n.59 Trilling, Lionel 169 Trinity 36 true religion 96, 99, 105 Trump, Donald 3, 3 n.6 Trumpism 64 n.5 truth 7, 13, 22, 58, 80, 83, 155, 156, 160, 171, 174, 192, 220, 833 n.6 Tsypkin, Leonid 221–2 Tukaram 99 n.11, 104, 105, 108, 111–12, 113, 115 Ulysses 167, 170, 179 unethical writing 85 unified subject 87 United States 2, 64 conservatism 64 n.5 “Unite the Right” demonstration 2–4, 2 n.3 unity 52, 57, 80, 83, 84–7, 171, 190 universities 24–5 see also higher education politicization 5 “Un Voyage à Cythère” 177 un-working (désoeuvrement) 80–2, 83, 84, 85, 86, 90 Upanishads 103 n.24, 111 urban mysteries 149, 150, 151, 151 n.4, 153, 154, 158 Vaishnav poets 111 Varkari poets 104, 106 n.34, 111 Vedanta 102, 103, 103 n.24 see also philosophy Vedas 102 Veerashaivites 103, 105 Venus 36 Verweltlichung 66, 68, 69 Vidyapati 96 virtuous desire 177 Vithoba 111

258

258

INDEX

Vogler, Candace 123, 124, 124 n.7, 136 n.31 Volk 88 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 34 von Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoffel 39 von Lohenstein, Daniel Casper 36, 38 von Reizenstein, Baron 153 Waiting for the Barbarians 138–41, 144 in ethical criticism 127–31 literalness in 131–7 Waris Shah 110 Warsaw Pole’s procession in 2017 2–4 Warsaw Ghetto 3 n.6 Waste Land, Four Quartets, The 54, 170, 174–5 Weaver, Richard 165 Weber, Max 69

Weltliteratur 47 Western tradition 11, 14, 19, 190 white supremacism 2–4 Wilson, R. Rawdon 35, 38, 70 Wissenschaft des Judentums 89 Wolheim, Richard 130, 138 Wood, Allen 67 n.18 Wood, James 128 Woolf, Virginia 54, 164, 166, 167 n.16, 172–3 Worlding Project 70 World Literature (WL) 200 and English Literature departments 200–2 World War II 41 writing 87, 91, 108 Yeltsin, Boris 63 Zohar 23

259

260