A Voice Still Heard

by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)

  The Catholic imagination straining against the limits of the Catholic institutional presence—this is something we certainly know about from many Western writers. On first encountering Endo one may therefore experience a certain relief of familiarity, but mostly it’s an illusion.

  In an early novel, Volcano (1959), Endo’s Catholic preoccupations tend, through sheer earnestness, to overwhelm the often vivid materials of the book. In another early novel, Wonderful Fool (1959), the theme is more successfully, perhaps because less explicitly, realized. Endo pits ambiguous Christian sentiments against an indifferent modern Japan, often with pleasing comic effects. He places in the chaos of postwar Tokyo a sweet-tempered Frenchman named Gaston, something of a holy fool “who, no matter how often he is deceived or betrayed, continues to keep his flame of love and trust from going out.” Charming and touching as Gaston is, he cannot really carry enough fictional weight to sustain that emulation of Christ which Endo evidently desires for him; nor can he serve to embody Endo’s obsession with the entanglements and ultimate irreconcilability between Christianity and Japanese tradition.

  It is in two later books that Endo fulfills himself as a novelist—Silence, first published in Japan in 1966, and The Samurai, first published there in 1980 and now available in a fluent and persuasive English translation. Both novels are set in or near early seventeenth-century Japan, when the Christian missionaries gained successes only to suffer brutal persecution, and both are partly based on historical fact. Silence I regard as a masterpiece, a lucid and elegant drama about a Portuguese missionary tormented by Japanese inquisitors. The missionary agrees finally to apostatize, not merely or even mainly because he cannot bear his ordeal but because he hears a voice of Christ telling him that to relieve the torments of his Japanese flock it is right that he place his foot on the fumie—a wooden box bearing the image of Christ which the inquisitors use to enact their victims’ apostasy. “Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world.”

  Less well formed than Silence, The Samurai is a more ambitious and complex work, richer in contemplative matter though also more uneven in its effects. The Samurai contains episodes set in Japan, Mexico, and Spain; there is a striking variety of Japanese and European figures; but parts of the novel suffer from a “documentary” inertness and the narrative as a whole lacks the single-track rapidity of Silence.

  The story of The Samurai is simple enough. In 1613 there sets sail from Japan a ship laden with emissaries and merchants, their declared aim to open trade relations with Nueva España (Mexico). As interpreter and guide (also, misleader), a Franciscan missionary, Father Velasco, accompanies them. He has, naturally, purposes of his own: to gain for the Franciscans, in opposition to the more fanatical Jesuits, a monopoly of the Japanese mission and for himself the title of Bishop of Japan. But there is a trick all along: the emissaries are of low rank, a group of samurai chosen by the Japanese rulers as decoys in a scheme to appropriate Western technology (plus ça change . . .). The central figure among the samurai, and in the book, is a stolid, honest retainer named Hasekura, whose whole life has been devoted to work and obedience.

  This journey, which takes them round the world, lasts four years: they have experiences at once comic and painful in Mexico and Spain. Hoping that a formal conversion to Christianity will help them fulfill their political mission, the emissaries are baptized—though with only the slightest interest in Christian mystery or faith. Finally back in Japan, they encounter a new regime that is bitterly hostile to opening any relations with the West and determined to uproot Christianity by force.

  Through the journey it charts and the lengthy stops along the way, The Samurai offers numerous set-pieces: the impoverished and long-suffering Japanese peasants, with whom Hasekura shares an obscure marshland; the Japanese nobility caring for nothing but the consolidation of its power and regarding Christian converts quite as if they were alien “cosmopolitans”; the minor Japanese officials surrounding Hasekura, all neatly distinguished within their hierarchical order; the Catholic bureaucracy of Spain, sodden with worldliness yet still open to memories of faith.

  Hasekura and Father Valasco dominate the book: their contrasting steadiness and stealthiness, Japanese rootedness and European impatience, come together, more or less, in a culminating martyrdom. At this point Endo presses too hard, the theologian in him overcoming the novelist. Hasekura, in his humiliation on returning to a Japan that has become anti-Christian, finds some glimmers of sympathy for Jesus, a faith or at least an acceptance of martyrdom which conventional Christian preaching could not give him. But the novel hardly provides enough preparatory cues to enable us to give this ending full credence.

  The strand of Catholic sensibility that Endo has made his own dominates both Silence and The Samurai, though mainly through negations—doubt and muted despair. Perhaps sensing that his austere version of the faith is more appropriate for the training of martyrs than the worship of common mortals, Endo gives way to an inner Christian grieving over the helplessness of a Christianity that demands more of men than they can give. The historical clash between the Christian mission and Japan thus becomes for Endo an instance, though the crucial one, of a universal predicament.

  Europeans are often central figures in these novels, and Endo is remarkably gifted at a sort of Western impersonation, and edging into alien consciousness. He writes with considerable humor about the mixture of submissiveness and worldliness animating the missionaries, so that unexpectedly one comes rather to like these stranded Fathers.

  Yet if one supposes that Endo is writing here “as a European,” that is a misconception quickly to be put to rest. It helps a Western reader to situate himself through the references to Mauriac; it may even help to notice that Endo’s conception of Jesus as the deformed and weak victim has something in common with Silone’s. But one soon recognizes that, while marked by the West, Endo is not of it. He is a very strange figure, profoundly alienated, and moving in ways I can’t entirely explain.

  What puzzles and obsesses him is the apparently unshakable Japanese “essence,” a national character that has been formed by centuries of historical and geographical isolation. He keeps calling Japan “the mudswamp,” a place, that is, where everything sinks and loses its identifying shape. He speaks about the “threefold insensitivity” of Japan, “the insensitivity to God, the insensitivity to sin, the insensitivity to death.” He believes Christianity must fail in Japan because it cannot bring itself to see the Japanese as they really are, in their radical otherness. It must fail because its institutions, theologies, and practices keep even its Japanese converts apart from the one thing that might (and in The Samurai finally does) break past the stolidity of the Japanese character—and that would be an act of piercing empathy with Jesus. Most Japanese, according to Endo, tend to be contemptuous of so passive and weak a figure as Jesus: what sort of a God can this “emaciated man” be? Yet precisely this contempt may, through the traumas of history, turn at least a few of them to an imitation of Christ.

  Like all serious novelists, Endo prompts one not only to live with his fictions but to engage with his thought. One wonders, then: Is it really true that the Japanese character is so hopelessly locked into the triple insensitivity that Endo attributes to it? One is repeatedly struck by the fact that in both Silence and The Samurai Buddhism rarely, if ever, makes a strong appearance, speaking in its own right and from the depth of its own traditions. For Endo, apparently, Buddhism possesses little moral or metaphysical authority: it offers, in these novels, no crucial reply to the claims of Christianity. But it seems hard to believe that this is really so. Might not a writer like Kawabata, in the gentlest of replies to Endo, have identified authentic values within the Buddhist traditions—values that might be set against Endo’s rigid polarities of “the emaciated man” and “the mudswamp”?

  And another point: if institutional Christianity must fail and all tha
t remains is the example of the forlorn Jesus, where does that leave all those who lack the vocation of sainthood or the talent for martyrdom? Can Jesus survive without Christianity, without the very institutions, rituals, and doctrines that must often twist his word? To such questions Endo offers no answers, at least in these two of his novels, and from a strictly literary point of view it hardly matters. But the power of a first-rate work of fiction lies partly in its capacity to make us think beyond fictions, and there Endo leaves one uneasy.

  Distinguished as The Samurai is, it seems too much the product of a mind lost to itself. I have before me the image of a remarkable figure, standing neckdeep in his native mudswamp, but head still aflame with stories of the crucified god. It is hard to believe that more than a few can live by so lacerating a vision.

  Absalom in Israel: Review of Past Continuous

  {1985}

  SO MANY SECRET DISAPPOINTMENTS and betrayed visions accumulate over the years and bear down upon the consciousness of people who may not even know the source of their dismay. In the culture of Israel, this burden is perhaps the very idea of Israel itself, as if people—at least, some people—were haunted by a vision of what Israel was supposed to be but, in the nature of things, never could become.

  This weight of feeling clouds, yet ultimately defines, Past Continuous, an Israeli novel of great distinction which was first published in 1977 and has now been put into fluent English. (But with one “concession” to American readers: the occasional paragraphing of what in the Hebrew text is an unbroken flow of language.) I cannot recall, these past several years, having encountered a new work of fiction that has engaged me as strongly as Past Continuous, both for its brilliant formal inventiveness and for its relentless truth-seeking scrutiny of the moral life. While a difficult book requiring sharp attentiveness on the part of the reader, it still satisfies traditional expectations that a novel should lure one into an imaginary “world.”

  Until this book Yaakov Shabtai had been an Israeli literary figure of middle stature. A tremendous breakthrough, which can be compared to that of Faulkner when he moved from his early novels to The Sound and the Fury, occurred in Shabtai’s middle age, the kind of breakthrough that becomes possible when a writer gains possession of his own culture, uncovering its deepest sentiments and secrets. Shabtai died of heart disease in 1981 at the age of forty-seven, leaving behind another unfinished novel.

  The opening pages of Past Continuous plunge us into a bewildering mixture of fact, memory, reflection. A voice speaks, and it is of an omniscient narrator who seems in complete control. Nothing can be heard or seen except through its mediation. Neither colloquial nor very eloquent, it is self-assured, exhaustive. It records; it quietly corrects both itself and the book’s characters; and, although rarely, it keens over their fate. Above all, this voice tries to get things exactly right, as if some higher power had assigned it the obligation of making final judgment.

  The opening sentence—“Goldman’s father died on the first of April, whereas Goldman himself committed suicide on the first of January”—sets the bounds of time and the tone for all to follow. The present in Past Continuous consists of the months between the deaths of father and son, with the speaker, whose identity we don’t yet know but whose authority we accept, leading us back, through his own associations of events and impressions, to events in the past. As the relatives and friends of Goldman’s father, Ephraim, gather after the funeral, there begins an unraveling of shared memories. The local detail is very dense, matted into synoptic vignettes of the characters’ lives. There are dozens of characters, though strictly speaking they are glimpsed rather than developed. Shabtai offers only sparse physical descriptions of these people, yet one soon comes to feel that one “knows” a good many of them, for his is an art of the representative, an art of the group. A community is releasing its experience, a generation is sliding toward extinction: the community, the generation of “labor Israel,” socialist Zionism, which was central in the creation of the young country but has by now—say, the late 1970s—succumbed to old age and debility. If there can be such a thing as a collective novel, then Past Continuous is one.

  The book takes off from one of the conventions of Western literature: a myth of historical and moral decline. By no means (and this is worth stressing) should it be taken as a straight account of Israel’s recent condition. It offers something more complex and ambiguous: a voice of the culture quarreling with itself, an evocation of buried yearnings and regrets, a social elegy whose tone is somber and unsentimental. Like Faulkner, Shabtai subjects to merciless scrutiny the very myth upon which his book rests and to which he seems residually attached. The griefs weighing upon his characters may thereby, perhaps, be unpacked and allowed to settle in the calm of memory.

  In the forefront, though not quite at the center, of Past Continuous stand three men in early middle age: Goldman, a reflective and melancholy man, Chekhovian in the way he registers losses, and the book’s uncertain center of intelligence; Caesar, whose lechery is almost comic and who registers nothing, but serves, in the novel, as a kind of foil to Goldman; and Israel, a pianist of sensitivity but feeble will, who forms a connecting link with the other characters. These three can be seen as “representing” a generation that has inherited the life of Tel Aviv but not the strength of its founders, a generation, indeed, that in moments of self-pity feels crushed by that strength. As in all myths of decline, the sons have been weakened. Behind this myth there is history, but history bent and misshaped.

  Through these younger characters Shabtai reaches toward the older generation, which engages him more keenly. Men and women in their sixties and beyond—one can see them sitting at the beachfront cafés of Tel Aviv, soaking up the sun and reading Davar, the labor newspaper—this older generation consists of an elite in an advanced stage of decomposition. Nothing about the manners or appearance of these people would suggest this, and they would hotly deny they ever did form an elite, except perhaps an elite formed to eliminate all elites. Israeli readers would have no more trouble in recognizing these figures—the people of the Histadrut, the cadres of labor Zionism—than southern readers a few decades ago would have had in recognizing the aristocracy of the Sartorises and the Compsons.

  Mostly, Shabtai’s older characters come from Eastern Europe and have settled, not quite at ease, in Eretz Yisroel with a budget of expectations as wildly improbable as they are (for some of us) affecting: to establish a Jewish nation, to live by an egalitarian ethic, and to create a new kind of Jew, standing erect, doing his own work with his own hands. To put it this way is to yield to abstraction, for what was really involved was a tremendous yearning for social and moral transfiguration, a leap through history, a remaking of souls.

  This “design,” to lift a phrase from Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen, was partly realized, but for the plebeian veterans of Tel Aviv, stirred in their youth by a whiff of the absolute, the very process of realization brought disappointment. History gave a little but not enough, and now it has left these people—Shabtai’s people—with a grief they cannot comprehend or shake off. They seldom talk about it any longer, and some of them have begun to doubt the genuineness of their own feelings, but this hardly matters since those feelings continue to oppress them.

  What—as Sutpen asks in Absalom, Absalom! about a very different sort of “design”—what went wrong? External circumstances? Strategic blunders? Impossible expectations? Or some deep flaw in the original “design”? Shabtai’s older figures have put these questions largely behind them, for it’s as if he had deposited them at a point where neither asking nor answering can do much good. Political people stranded in a post-political moment, either they cling to their received values, tightening themselves into righteousness as their world slips away from them, or they slump into an irritable mixture of rectitude and cynicism, a condition Shabtai is very shrewd in depicting, as if it were the atmosphere of his own years.

  After Ephraim’s funeral the mourners sit in the Gold
man apartment, nibbling cakes and chatting emptily. There is little for these people to look forward to, but there is little pleasure in looking back, so they become entangled in foolish quarrels, as blocked in their love as in their enmity. Individually, Shabtai’s characters are mostly pitiable, but collectively they bear the stamp of history—history the destroyer—and this lends a certain magnitude to their plight. By its technique, the book creates an enlarged reflection of its theme, with the intricacies of memory cast as emblems of human entanglement. Voice gives way to voice, through the narrator’s “overvoice.” Goldman’s father, Ephraim, a tyrant of idealism who feels “his anger had to be everyone’s anger” and believes “in a world order with good and bad and no neutral ground between them,” towers over the book, and it’s around him that a good many of the other figures turn. The pianist Israel recalls that as a child he had seen Ephraim kill a neighbor’s dog because the neighbor, a “dissolute” woman, violated the standards of the “new society.” Later, this trivial, chilling incident comes to seem a preparation for a terrible moment illustrating the costs of fanatic purity: Ephraim refuses to meet his brother Lazar, who years earlier, against Ephraim’s Zionist advice, had gone off to fight in the Spanish Civil War, ended somehow in Stalin’s arctic wastes, and has finally been freed. Ephraim is a man of strong feelings, but they have been corked and soured by the monolith of a redemptive faith.

  It is, or was, a faith calling for self-transformation, and the desire for this goal, at once noble and destructive, has many versions, twisted and parodied. Manfred, the old lover of Ephraim’s wife, Regina, had begun as a Communist, only to become a student of Christianity “mapping hell as it was described in lay and ecclesiastic literature,” and now, stripped of belief, he returns to a love that is nothing but the love of loving “the memory of their love.” Shortly after Ephraim’s death, Regina acts out a fantasy in reply to the mania for self-transformation: she regresses into the Polish past, calling herself Stefana, “painting her lips in a subtle shade of violet-red,” wearing “old silks and velvets,” as if to undo all the grim years of Tel Aviv.