The Ritual of New Creation (38 page)

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the religious commentators of old, modern Jewish writers cannot accept the historical construction of an eternal present in which all the generations, together, as it were, at Sinai, simultaneously contribute to the unfolding of the Word. In this respect at least, modern writers' experience of rupture, of the breakages of history and tradition, is much less repressed. A work like "The Prague Orgy" is obsessed with discontinuity; its very existence as verbal form depends upon the constant awareness of rupture and loss.

Nostalgia comes into play at just this point. Nostalgia, especially for an unbroken cultural tradition, is for secular Jewish writers what the eternal present of the religious tradition was for their rabbinic forebears. In the latter instance, a literary ideology (for that, I think, is what Scholem means when he says "historical construction") of unending verbal plenitude inspires generations of devout yet frequently audacious commentators. In the former instance, under conditions which obtain from the Haskalah to the present, an ideology of loss and absence (however tempered by broad comedy or acerbic wit) enables secular authors to manipulate their relation to the past, writing out of their melancholy sense of temporal distance. Susan Sontag tells us that the saturnine Walter Benjamin "adopted a completely digested, analytical way of relating the past. It evokes events for the reactions to the events, places for the encounter with oneself, feelings and behavior for intimations of future passions and failures contained in them."
⁶Something of the sort was adopted by subsequent Jewish writers as well. It may be difficult to think of nostalgic discourse as analytical, but given the conditions of exile under which modern Jewish intellectuals do their work (Benjamin's case being one of the most extreme), Sontag's formulation makes a great deal of sense. Nostalgic writers appear to give themselves to the past, but their real concern is less with the past per se than with their efforts in the present and future. Writing about the past with a controlling sense of loss and melancholy is not only a matter of analysis; it demonstrates what Benjamin calls "a tactical instinct" as well.

Because they self-consciously nurture an idealized image of the past, the authors I have discussed in this book possess, to borrow another of Benjamin's terms, "a
weak
Messianic power." As he explains:


our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it

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a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that. ⁷

Benjamin believed that it was the Marxist in him who gauged the present by the redemptive image of the happy past, but as is true throughout the
Theses on the Philosophy of History,
it was as much the Jew, secularized but still yearning for theological truth. In their attempt to reclaim what they have been denied, reconstitute what has been scattered, Benjamin and his literary descendants do not retreat from the present into the past but rather maintain an oppositional stance: what they perceive to be the cultural poverty or sterility of the present cannot compare to the richness, the vitality of the cherished image-world of the past; therefore it is the task of nostalgic writers to expose the present using whatever means and genres available to them. In doing so they seek to remake the present in their own image, while at the same time settling the claims of past generations.

A recent essay by Cynthia Ozick epitomizes this temporal dialectic. Ozick works harder than any other figure under consideration here at establishing links between modern writing and older Jewish traditions of textuality; she is constantly uncoveringor inventinghistorical parallels between earlier and more recent linguistic circumstances, lines of influence from past to present generations. As we have seen, she is a relentless revisionist in both her criticism and her fiction. Her career-long "denial of rupture" and faith in a literary version of the Covenant are certainly signs of nostalgia, but what marks her work as a particularly refined and nuanced version of this condition is what she calls in the essay "Bialik's Hint" (1983) "the Jewish Idea." More abstract in its conception and application than any other version of nostalgia as a literary strategy, "the Jewish Idea" may well represent a turning point in the development of modern Jewish literature. And this is precisely how Ozick would have us regard her formulation.

"Bialik's Hint" revises "Toward a New Yiddish" (1970), but in doing so, it only makes Ozick's nostalgic sensibility and tactics more subtle. Looking back to her earlier work, Ozick reminds us of how

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she once conceived of a midrashic literature, a literature of fictive commentary written in a liturgical tongue, a Judaized English, a New Yiddish. The literature of the New Yiddish would go beyond the writing of "ethnicity," of the post-immigration experience, as best represented by Bellow, Malamud, Paley, and (presumably the early) Roth, which could not be continued without lapsing into "ventriloquism, fakery, nostalgia, sentimentalism, cardboard romanticism." The new literature would not be
ethnically
Jewish but
conceptually
Jewish, ruled by two of Ozick's by now familiar ideals: "the standard of anti-idolatry" and "the standard of distinction-making." Whereas the older literature was
local,
the new literature would be
universal:
because it was guided by enduring historical principles rather than specific sociological conditions, it would bring modern Jewish literature from the margin into the center. This new literature would reveal, as the older literature could not, that "to be a Jew is to be a member of a distinct civilization expressed through an oceanic culture in possession of a group of essential concepts and a multitude of texts and attitudes elucidating those concepts.''
⁸A literature of meaning, it would oppose the aestheticism and idolatry which Ozick saw in fashionable Postmodern writing.

Such was Ozick's previous theorizing. What she offers in "Bialik's Hint" is less programmatic but even more culturally ambitious. Drawing on Bialik's essay on Aggadah and Halakah (known to Benjamin as well through Scholem's German translation), Ozick argues that Bialik's dialectical understanding of these two modes emerges from his modern, post-Enlightenment mentality. The intermingling of imaginative freedom (Aggadah) and legalistic responsibility (Halakah) which Bialik expounds actually represents a fusion of Western Enlightenment ideals and the values of traditional Jewish thought. "Bialik's hint," according to Ozick, is just this fusion. Just as Judaism merged with Hellenic philosophy to produce the rabbinic idea of textual devotion, so we must now work "for Enlightenment ideas of skepticism, originality, individuality, and the assertiveness of the free imagination to leach into what we might call the Jewish language of restraint, sobriety, moral seriousness, collective conscience."
⁹Once again, the Jewish Idea endures the sea-changes of history, asserting its centrality in the development of Western culture.

This is Jewish literary nostalgia on a grand scale. I have already identified Ozick's resistance to historical rupture and her insistence upon the continuity of Jewish literary traditions as constituting an authorial ideology: "the Jewish Idea" extends this formation beyond

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the realm of Jewish letters into the larger domain of cultural politics. Mark Krupnick has pointed out how Ozick's interest in T. S. Eliot (about whom she has recently published a long essay) is as much a matter of emulation as critique, the shtetl replacing the organic Christian society, the Jewish Idea succeeding Anglo-Catholic authority.
¹⁰Eliot transformed Christian nostalgia into an aggressive, and for a time hegemonic modernist program. Ozick cannot expect to meet with quite the same success; besides, she is willing to fuse her Jewish cultural model with that of the Enlightenment, which Eliot utterly despised. Nevertheless, this comparison provides us with a means of judging the present state of Jewish writing, as represented by one of its major practitioners.

From the 1930s through the 1960s, ethnically Jewish writers and intellectuals dramatically changed the landscape of American culture. The Jewish-American novel redefined American fiction, and the impact of the New York intellectuals upon the field of cultural criticism was no less important. By the time Ozick arrives on the scene, these powerful influences are on the wane, and she is probably correct in her assumption that ethnic writing is a dead end. By proposing a new literary vision that is more firmly based on abstract Jewish ideas and more comprehensive in its historical perspective, Ozick believes that she can bring about a shift in the cultural values of both Jewish and non-Jewish readers to an even greater extent than did her predecessors. Writers of the older generation (novelists like Bellow and Malamud, critics like Trilling and Howe) transformed identifiably Jewish values into "moral seriousness," a cultural coin of the forties and fifties which lost a good deal of its value with the advent of high-spirited Postmodernism in the sixties. Ozick returns moral seriousness to its Jewish context but maintains its centrality for the entire culture.

Turning somewhat from her earlier position, which had revived the uncomfortable tension of the Hebraism versus Hellenism dispute, Ozick, by positing the fusion of Bialik's hint, presents herself as thoughtfully righting the balance. Without necessarily downgrading the achievements of Christianity or of the secular Englightenment, Ozick appears as a fairly liberal arbiter of culture, at least in comparison to Eliot with all his well-known prejudices. I suppose that culture must have its arbiters; indeed, their arbitrations constitute culture as a transmissible entity. Still an advocate of what Eliot calls "the main current," Ozick regrets "the diminishment of history and tradition: not to incorporate into an educable mind the origins and unifying

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