The Ritual of New Creation (22 page)

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provides the setting for all of his stories. This bizarre contraption thus is designed as if it were an apocalyptic proof of Benjamin's belief that the profane is a counterforce which produces the messianic. When the messiah collapses in upon itself at the end of Ozick's wild midrash, it gives birth to a bird, a symbol of hope and regeneration. But Lars cannot stand such a resolution: justly suspecting a forgery, the tortured book reviewer sets fire to the manuscript, angrily accusing the Eklunds that "You want to be in competition with God."
³⁸Of course, so did his purported father.

Nevertheless,
The Messiah,
mad synthesis of the sacred and the heretical, does not survive to enter literary history. Only Lars's own story remains, the story of an orphan sadly "cured" of his delusions of paternity, moving from the role of inspired, ignored critic to that of mediocre, successful journalist. As in the case of Joseph Brill (but with even greater pathos, since Lars is in every respect a more sublime figure), Ozick's most recent protagonist fails in his struggle for a "time without boundaries," that personal state of messianic temporality that is free of the implacable forces of historical limitation.

The Messiah of Stockholm
takes us to the farthest reaches of Ozick's wildly contradictory imagination, an inevitably contradictory imagination given the historical, theological, and literary matrix from which it springs. Her engagement with Schulz and what he represents as a storyteller proves that Bloom is right when he argues that Ozick's strength as a writer comes from her trust in "the narrative tradition's power to both absorb and renew her."
³⁹What this means, however, is that as a self-consciously Jewish writer, her fiction will always incorporate formal and thematic elements which have the potential to undo what she understands to be the basic premises of her work. Ozick, no doubt, would credit whatever power she has as a storyteller to the degree to which she successfully joins "monotheism-imagining" to "story-imagining"both of which are related to the historicity of Jewish culture only in the most oblique ways. In other words, Ozick has developed an "authorial ideology" (I borrow the term from Terry Eagleton) that is superbly capable of producing a powerful aesthetic response in numerous readers, many of whom share neither her religious beliefs nor her attitude toward the story-telling imagination.

Yerushalmi tells us that we must understand Jewish culture as the accumulative product of a series of historical ruptures, a truth which Ozick confirms in a narrative art consciously designed to resist

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if not deny such breaks as strenuously as it can. Indeed, as he says in the passage I have used as the epigraph to this chapter, it is precisely the novel toward which modern Jews turn to provide "a new, metahistorical myth." Thus Ozick's notion of liturgical literature may itself prove to be a useful fiction, as well as another proof of Bloom's contention that in the world of the imagination there is no difference between sacred and secular texts. Fortunately, there is no need to resolve such antinomies. Perhaps we should even seek to preserve them if they are the source of Cynthia Ozick's splendid inspiration.

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Chapter 5
Lost and Found: Hollander, Mandelbaum, and the Poetry of Exile

The Book In Tatters

If it is true, as I have been arguing, that a theoretical understanding of modern Jewish literature (I hesitate at this point to call it secular Jewish literature) comes into being when Walter Benjamin observes that Aggadah no longer modestly lies at the feet of Halakah but instead raises a mighty paw against it, then in what ways can this initial insight be developed or refined? In Ozick's case, we have seen that her narrative genius lies precisely in her resistance to this historical rupture and what might be called her divided loyalties, despite her vociferous denials, between halakhic restraint and aggadic freedom. As the most recent in a line of writers who have had to negotiate what I take to be a given of modern Jewish culture, Ozick challenges us to rethink our received critical assumptions, no matter how useful they may be.

Consider the aggadic nature of modern Jewish literature. In raising its mighty paw, is such writing anything more than another participant in the traditional interpretive process of midrash? Characterized by elaborate verbal play,


Midrashthe act and process of interpretationworks in both the halakhic and agggadic realms. Curiously, both halakhic and aggadic sorts of Midrash develop out of the same set of forces. Primarily we can see the central presence

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of cultural or religious tension and discontinuity. Where there are questions that demand answers, and where there are new cultural and intellectual pressures that must be addressed, Midrash comes into play as a way of resolving crisis and reaffirming continuity with the traditions of the past. ¹

Modern Jewish life is preeminently an experience of such cultural tension and discontinuity. Given the last hundred years of Jewish history, is it any wonder that Jewish writers, however imbued with a midrashic sense, can hardly resolve crisis and reaffirm tradition in their narratives and parables? Instead, the
act
of writing, the
attempt
at cultural transmission in itself, as Benjamin sees in Kafka, must usually suffice.

And it does suffice, at least among Jewish storytellers. The tale, however inconclusive, however resistant to closure, however estranged from the old ways, is spun out and embroidered so as to memorialize the event. Truth, wisdom or proper conduct in the traditional sense of these terms, is harder to ascertain than ever before. But in the midrashic recitation of the narrative in all its ambiguities, the storyteller compensates for historical loss and personal disruption. Gimpel the Fool, a paradigm of the modern Jew despite his life in the shtetl of Frampol, becomes just such a storyteller when he wanders out into the world. Gimpel, who by the end of his tale is as much a con man as a dupe, understands that the recounting of elaborate liesfictionsmust make due in place of metaphysical certainties. "No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world."
²With these words as their motto, writers of fiction take on unprecedented importance in modern Jewish culture.

This is not the case, however, for Jewish poets. Granted that in one sense, all literature is "fiction," we can still make important distinctions between prose narrative and verse in regard to matters of certainty and truth. The music of poetry requires linguistic certainty of a different order from that of prose. This is not to say that modern Jewish novelists do not seek for
le mot juste:
witness the verbal precision of Kafka (who admired Flaubert) and his descendants. But poets cannot rest content with the gradually unfolding ambiguities, the layered midrashic conundrums of modern Jewish prose rhythms. They long for a kind of positive assertion which, if it is to be found anywhere in the Jewish canon, is located in Halakah, which has always been there to guide Jews in their social attitudes and consequently shape their states of feeling. Modern Jewish poets suffer the absence

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of halakhic certainty more acutely than their storytelling counterparts. It is easier to tell tales
of
loss than to compose psalms
to
loss: in prose narrative, rhythms of event mediate and disseminate emotion, but given the concentrated formal and generic demands of poetry, this is simply not the case.

What is probably the greatest Jewish poetry of loss in our time, that of Paul Celan, achieves its power only through massive linguistic disruption, its integral lyric structure wrenched from within by psychohistorical forces that are virtually unspeakable. Celan's
Niemandrose,
which, as George Steiner observes, "flowers
against
its Maker,"
³is for obvious reasons outside the compass of Jewish-American poetic experience. The loss of halakhic certainty is felt acutely among Jewish-American poets, but the results are bound to be different: they are operating under what could be called normal conditions of diaspora, rather than those imposed upon Celan, who is compelled to face and accuse the Source of meaning directly:


Your being beyond in the night. With words I fetched you back, there you are, all is true and a waiting for truth. ⁴

Jewish-American poets do not and perhaps need not seek for such a confrontation. But because they too are aware, in the words of John Hollander, that "the Book of the People of the Book is in tatters,"
⁵they embark on a different quest, seeking for other compensation. Theirs is a quest for symbolic substitutions for the Law that has gone beyond their grasp.

"The great narratives are of finding and of founding," Hollander declares. "What was hidden in our case had already been found, what was to be established has been long since. Our romance is of raising and bearing, the undoing of histories" (23). Both Hollander's
Spectral Emanations
and Allen Mandelbaum's
Chelmaxioms
are ambitious poems which attempt to raise up and bear aloft elaborate symbols derived from Jewish lore but altered, reinterpreted, in order to compensate for profound historical and spiritual loss. Such reinterpretation involves "the undoing of histories" because the tales, rituals, and wisdom which stem from the Law must all be revealed as inadequate, cast into doubt, when the Law itself is perceived to have withdrawn from the arena of human experience. But unlike midrashic reinterpretation

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