The Ritual of New Creation (37 page)

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As Eagleton understands, this leads us back past Marxism to Benjamin's theological roots, for Benjamin, despite his Marxismand despite Scholem's judgment thereuponis no heretic. Benjamin's faith in the revelatory power of commentary, which can consist as often of the reconstructive constellations or juxtapositions of fragmented texts as of direct interpretive discourse, shows us just how literal, how free of metaphor, the notion of redemption remains in his work.

In his desire to blast open the continuum of history, securing a messianic cessation of happening through the abrupt appearance of a dialectical image, Benjamin seeks for
tikkun
or restoration, despite his obvious fascination with the destructive character. As he says in his brief essay defining that figure, "The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away."
¹³As Eagleton would have it, the machismo of the historical materialist's notorious refusal of the whore called "Once upon a time" enables him to violate or "blast open" the virgin of history. But this feminist interpretation should be augmented by a kabbalistic reading: the destructive historical materialist is an agent of
tzimtzum,
the withdrawal of God that opens a space wherein creation may unfold. In the Lurianic Kabbalah, the subsequent "breaking of the vessels," the cosmic catastrophe which leads to our own fallen world, inevitably impels the faithful to "raise the sparks,'' the shards of emanated light from the broken creation. Through their obedience to the Torah, religious Jews participate in the gradual process of universal redemption. Equally obedient to the text, Benjamin ceremoniously forms constellations which raise the sparks of the broken image-worlds, setting them in renewed patterns so that their messianic potential for liberation may be seen. Against the dull background of historicism's
Immergleich,
these interpretive patterns suddenly shine forth, positive images born out of violence and negation. And if history is like a woman, then she must be none other than the Shekinah, who suffers in Exile but may likewise be redeemed through devotion to the text.

VIII

It is good to put a truncated end to materialistic investigations.
¹⁴

December 22, 1989. While American troops are fighting in Panama, in Rumania the people have swept one of the last Stalinist dictators in

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Europe out of power. The most dismal and the most hopeful decade since the end of World War II comes to a close with the United States still rehearsing its old imperialistic ways in Latin America and the countries of Eastern Europe daring to create their own future. Who can safely speak of Marxism or messianism now? What texts are calling for redemption? Who dares pronounce upon the past when in moments of crisis,
even the dead
are not safe? Nor is there a clear-cut enemy, as there was when Benjamin wrote his
Theses
. Instead, we must content ourselves with a different sort of heroism.

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Chapter 8
Nostalgia and Futurity: Jewish Literature in Transition

In Philip Roth's "The Prague Orgy," the epilogue to
Zuckerman Bound,
there is an extraordinary passage which sums up the state of contemporary Jewish writing in the Diaspora, at least as I have constructed it in this book. It is 1976, and the hapless Nathan Zuckerman has gone to Prague on a secret mission: he intends to rescue the manuscript of stories written by the father of the half-Jewish émigré author Zdenek Sisovsky, whom Zuckerman has met in New York. These stories, written in "the Yiddish of Flaubert," are presently in the possession of Olga, Sisovsky's embittered, half-crazy, and outrageously promiscuous ex-wife, a woman who, despite her obvious attraction to Zuckerman, could lead him into a disastrous entanglement with the Czech authorities. Frustrated by his encounters with Olga, trailed by police agents, Zuckerman loses his way in the old city of Prague. Wandering about the "tunneled alleys and medieval streets," Zuckerman recalls how "as a Hebrew-school student of little more than nine" he would go from house to house collecting money for the Jewish National Fund, dreaming of the ''used city" that the Jews would be able to buy with the nickels and dimes he gathered. The decay of the Czech capital, both picturesque and miserable to the eye of the affluent American writer, reminds him of his imaginary Jewish homelandnot Palestine, where "hearty Jewish teenagers" are busy "reclaiming the desert and draining the swamps," but an Old World town, archaic and dilapidated, where nothing is produced but stories:

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all the telling and listening to be done, their infinite interest in their own existence, the fascination with their alarming plight, the mining and refining of tons of these storiesthe national industry of the Jewish homeland, if not the sole means of production (if not the sole source of satisfaction), the construction of narratives out of the exertions of survival. ¹

Despite Roth's usually more caustic attitude, it is one more version of the textual homeland, as suffused with nostalgia as any of the formulations we have encountered up until nowBloom's patriarchal agon, Steiner's autistic clerics, Mandelbaum's pedantic Chelm, Ozick's Schulzian messiah. And of course, Benjamin's aura, that light filling an impossible distance as the past, with all its stories, recedes from view.

In all these instances, linguistic production, this "national industry of the Jewish homeland," comes to be associated with loss and deprivation. There was a time when the Jews, however much they suffered in exile, were able to master their verbal circumstances to such an extent that they could dwell in the Word, buoyed up in an endless stream of discourse as bountiful as Scholem's Ur-Torah from which God read to begin the original ritual of creation. But that time is gone. For the poets, the unifying symbol is lost, and the play of words offers little compensation. For the critics, the obsessive text-centeredness of an intellectual elite gives way before the blandishments of popular culture. For the novelists, the cultural authority of the tale is broken and the narrative splinters or turns in upon itself. The Jewish writer may be more secure, but that very security counts for very little except, perhaps, the writer's actual decline in literary strength. In every case, the current act of writing is marked by the imagination of past wholeness, a melancholy longing for irretrievable conditions that were somehow more conducive to the writer's task, and a nagging sense of diminishment or inadequacy. The work, in short, is premised upon nostalgic remembrance. Like Benjamin's angel, it is always looking backward toward Paradise, from which a disastrous wind hurtles it into the future.

Let us return to Zuckerman in Prague. How is Zuckerman's quest a matter of nostalgia? How is Roth's presentation of that quest likewise nostalgic? And most importantly, how does nostalgia further Roth's literary ends, making not only "The Prague Orgy" but all of his recent works such riotous, soul-searching reflections of the contemporary

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Jewish consciousness? For surely Roth's goal in the passage with which we began is to represent a critical, emblematic moment for that consciousness, one acutely aware of itself as divorced from Old World Jewish traditions and doubtful of the modern attitudes and institutions which have taken their place.

In Zuckerman's second-hand city (the description is somewhat reminiscent of Bruno Schulz's vision of Drohobycz in
The Street of Crocodiles
), "What you smell are centuries and what you hear are voices and what you see are Jews, wild with lament and rippling with amusement." But these Jews with their jokes and stories, barely getting by on the margins of European society, are really a "Jewish Atlantis of an American childhood dream"; their existence in Zuckerman's imagination is a measure of both the living reality of the Jewish past and its inexorable distance from secular Jewish life in the present. Zuckerman, the modern Jew, is linked to the past by his particular linguistic abilities: his mordant wit, his dialogic subtlety, his vivid storytelling imagination. Indeed, it is through these very powers, which he believes he has inherited, that he creates a nostalgic version of the enduring Jewish traditions of narrative, humor, and verbal tenacity in the face of disaster. As Gershom Scholem says, speaking of innovation in the development of sacred Jewish textuality, "The desire for historical continuity which is of the very essence of tradition is translated into a historical construction whose fictitious character cannot be doubted but which serves the believing mind as a crutch of external authentication."
²But in the modern case of Zuckerman (and Roth), the tradition is understood to be a fictional construction; hence their doubt regarding its ultimate strength to endure. Nostalgia for a discursive tradition becomes, in effect, the fuel for the new work of the imagination.

The stories which Zuckerman hopes to retrieve were written by a man described by his son as having "belonged to nothing," a man suffering from "homelessness beyond homelessness," an author even more homeless than Kafka. Among his tales is "Mother Tongue," "Three pages only, about a little Jewish boy who speaks bookish German, Czech without the native flavor, and the Yiddish of people simpler than himself.''
³The son, Zdenek Sisovsky, may not be trustworthy, but his account of the father's life, death, and secret literary achievement, is enough to inspire Zuckerman's quest. (This is, of course, the same Zuckerman who has lived through the monstrous physical comedy, the somatic crisis of faith of
The Anatomy Lesson
.) Everything about the situation, from the father's Gentile wife (whose

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presence always reminds him of his Jewishness) to his murder by the Gestapo (a death which the son may be inventing, drawing on the famous shooting of Bruno Schulz), to Zdenek himself (whose identity as an émigré writer persecuted by the Czech Communist regime evokes envy in his new American friend) seems tailormade for Zuckerman, who seeks links with his Jewish literary past which will also help him distinguish his own Jewish identity in the present. Yet that Jewish past, as symbolized by the manuscript which Olga finally gives him, is literally inscrutable: Zuckerman, the typical American Jew, cannot read Yiddish. When the stories are confiscated by the Czech police, one feels as if the brute hand of History itself is breaking the chain of Jewish culture which Zuckerman hopes to keep intact. But this is hardly a matter of tragedy: as Zuckerman himself observes just before his last encounter with Olga, it is a case of "
The soul sinking into ridiculousness even while it strives to be saved
."
⁴What Roth knows, what Zuckerman and the reader learn, is that Jewish homelessness, endlessly reinforced by such tragicomic episodes as these, is just what furthers Jewish devotion to the text. However ridiculous the modern Jew appears (and in his alien enthusiasms, is he any more or less ridiculous than his Old World forebears?), devotion to the Word remains the test of his faith.

In the hands of a Jewish author like Roth, nostalgia is not merely a mood which hovers about the work; it partakes in a more or less conscious literary strategy, a means of furthering the task of writing and of making a place for oneself in the tradition, or as Harold Bloom would say, of seeking more life. Bloom is fond of quoting Rabbi Tarphon in the
Pirke Aboth:
"You are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it." In older modes of Jewish writing, as we have seen Scholem demonstrate, this reverence for tradition, experienced as a kind of living simultaneity of all the generations, actually allows forindeed, imposes an obligation forfurther textual invention.

Modern, that is, post-Enlightenment Jewish literature is in a somewhat different situation. Speaking of Yiddish, the first Jewish language to see the birth of a truly secular literature, Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg observe that the Haskalah contributed "the
idea
of writingthat is, the idea that a secular career as a writer was worthy of a mature Jewish intelligence."
⁵Yet since the Haskalah, Jewish writers, however secure they might be in their identities
as
writers, are still anxious about their relationship to tradition. Unlike

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