So we are not yet Ingathered; and perhaps our destiny in another place is history’s reason: that America shall, for a while, become Yavneh. For a while: while the State consolidates itself against savagery. We in Diaspora are not meant by this to be insulated from the savagery: we are one people, and what happens in one part of our body is suffered in another part: when the temple is wounded, the heart slows. I do not mean that Jews in America are intended to be preserved while Jews in Israel bleed. What I mean is this: for the moment our two parts, Diaspora Israel and Jerusalem Israel, have between us the responsibility of a double reconstruction—the healers, the health-bringers, the safe-keepers, in Jerusalem; the Aggadists,8 the makers of literature, just now gathering strength in America. This is not to deny culture-making to the Land of Israel! The orchestras go forth; Agnon was and is and will be; painters proliferate; a poet of genius resides in the Land. Torah continues to come out of Zion, and what immensities of literary vision lie ahead is an enigma that dazzles: one does not preclude even a new Psalmist. All this is, for Israel, corollary to restoration.
For us in Diaspora cultural regeneration must be more modest: as Yiddish with all its glories, for instance, is nevertheless second to Hebrew. “Yavneh” is of course an impressionistic term, a metaphor suggesting renewal. The original Academy at Yavneh was founded after the destruction of the Temple: the new one in prospect coincides with the restoration of Zion. We are, after all, the first Diaspora in two millennia to exist simultaneously with the homeland: we are not used to it yet, we have not really taken it in, neither in America nor in Russia, and we do not yet know what the full consequence of this simultaneity can be. The informal liturgical culture rapidly burgeoning among American Jews is as much the result of the restoration of Israel as it is of the Holocaust. And yet it appears to have its own life, it is not merely an aftermath or backwash, it has an urge not to repeat or recapitulate, but to go forward—as at an earlier Yavneh Yohanan ben Zakkai plunged into the elaboration of Aggadah and preserved Torah by augmenting it. It seems to me we are ready to rethink ourselves in America now: to preserve ourselves by a new culture-making.
Now you will say that this is a vast and stupid contradiction following all I have noted so far about the historic hopelessness of Diaspora culture. I have already remarked that “there are no major works of Jewish imaginative genius written in any Gentile language, sprung out of any Gentile culture.” Then how, you will object, can there be a Yavneh in America, where all the Jews speak a Gentile language and breathe a Gentile culture? My answer is this: it can happen if the Jews of America learn to speak a new language appropriate to the task of a Yavneh.
This new language I will call, for shorthand purposes, New Yiddish. (If you stem from the Sephardic tradition, New Ladino will serve just as well.) Like old Yiddish, New Yiddish will be the language of a culture that is centrally Jewish in its concerns and thereby liturgical in nature. Like old Yiddish before its massacre by Hitler, New Yiddish will be the language of multitudes of Jews: spoken to Jews by Jews, written by Jews for Jews. And, most necessary of all, New Yiddish, like old Yiddish, will be in possession of a significant literature capable of every conceivable resonance. But since New Yiddish will be a Jewish language, the resonances will be mainly liturgical. This does not mean that all kinds of linguistic devices and techniques will not be applicable: a liturgical literature is as free as any other to develop in any mode. To speak for the moment only of the experience of old Yiddish: the Yiddish writer A. Tabatchnik reveals in an important essay that the opening-up of Yiddish poetry to modernist devices such as symbolism and impressionism not only did not obliterate the liturgical qualities of Yiddish, but in fact heightened them remarkably. There is nothing artistically confining about a liturgical literature: on the contrary, to include history is to include everything. It is the nonliturgical literatures that leave things out, that narrow themselves to minute sensuous perceptions, and commit huge indifferences. A liturgical literature has the configuration of the ram’s horn9: you give your strength to the inch-hole and the splendor spreads wide. A Jewish liturgical literature gives its strength to its peoplehood and the whole human note is heard everywhere, enlarged. The liturgical literature produced by New Yiddish may include a religious consciousness, but it will not generally be religious in any explicit sense: it will without question “passionately wallow in the human reality”; it will be touched by the Covenant. The human reality will ring through its novels and poems, though for a long time it will not be ripe enough for poetry; its first achievements will be mainly novels. These novels, the product of richly conscious literary artists, will utilize every innovative device, not excluding those now being tested in the novels of aesthetic paganism; but device will not be a self-rubbing Romantic end in itself, verbal experiment and permutation will be organic, as fingers are to the principle of the hand. Above all, the liturgical mode will itself induce new forms, will in fact be a new form; and beyond that, given the nature of liturgy, a public rather than a coterie form. Unlike the novels of aesthetic paganism, liturgical novels will be capable of genuine comic perception in contrast to the grotes-queries of despair that pass for jokes among our current Gnostics and aestheticians: compare, to see the point, the celestial Joseph comedies of a freely Judaized Thomas Mann with the narrow and precious inwardness of much of Barth, Barthelme, and Gass. Here I insert a warning to the trigger-happy: it is important not to confuse the liturgical novel with the catechistic novel, which is so delightful to both the Vatican and the lords of Soviet Socialist Realism. The liturgical novel, because of its special view of history, will hardly be able to avoid the dark side of the earth, or the knife of irony; the liturgical novel will not be didactic or prescriptive: on the contrary, it will be Aggadic, utterly freed to invention, discourse, parable, experiment, enlightenment, profundity, humanity. All this will be characteristic of the literature of New Yiddish. And it will characterize a new Yavneh preoccupied, not by Talmud proper, but by fresh Talmudic modes that, in our age, take the urgent forms of imaginative literature.
You will say: how can you command such a fantasy? How can you demand such a language? True, you might concede, if there were such a language it might produce such a literature. But who will invent this language, where will it be born? My answer is that I am speaking it now, you are hearing it now, this is the sound of its spoken prose. Furthermore, half the Jews alive today already speak it. Only 20 percent of us are Hebrew-speaking, but it is centuries now since Hebrew was anything other than the possession of a blessed minority. In the Diaspora we are condemned to our various vernaculars: even Rashi referred to French as “bilshonenu,” “in our language.” The example of Yiddish is predominant. After all, it was not philological permutations that changed a fifteenth-century German dialect into Yiddish. The German that became Yiddish became Jewish: it became the instrument of our peoplehood on the European continent, and when a spectacular body of literature at last sprang out of it, it fulfilled itself as a Jewish language. I envision the same for the English of English-speaking Jews. Already English merits every condition of New Yiddish, with the vital exception of having a mature literature. But even now for Jews the English vernacular is on its way toward becoming Jewish; already there are traces (in the form of novels10) of a Jewish liturgical literature written in English. As for essays, there are dozens, and several actually contain, as in old Yiddish, numerous Hebrew words essential to their intent. And there already exists an adversary movement hostile to the language and culture of this incipient Yavneh: eminent Gentile intellectuals complain in print of “the rabbinical mind,” “minority-group self-pity,” “the New York intellectuals.” Opposition is at least proof of reality.
When Jews poured Jewish ideas into the vessel of German they invented Yiddish. As we more and more pour not merely the Jewish sensibility, but the Jewish vision, into the vessel of English, we achieve the profoundest invention of all: a language for our need, our possibility, our overwhelming idea. If out of this ne
w language we can produce a Yavneh for our regeneration within an alien culture, we will have made something worthwhile out of the American Diaspora, however long or short its duration. Besides, New Yiddish has a startling linguistic advantage over old Yiddish, which persecution pushed far from its geographic starting-point: New Yiddish can be understood by the Gentile culture around us. So we have a clear choice, to take up an opportunity or to reject it. We can do what the German Jews did, and what Isaac D’Israeli did—we can give ourselves over altogether to Gentile culture and be lost to history, becoming a vestige nation without a literature; or we can do what we have never before dared to do in a Diaspora language: make it our own, our own necessary instrument, understanding ourselves in it while being understood by everyone who cares to listen or read. If we make out of English a New Yiddish, then we can fashion a Yavneh not only for our own renewal but as a demonstration for our compatriots. From being envious apes we can become masters of our own civilization—and let those who want to call this “re-ghettoization,” or similar pejoratives, look to their own destiny. We need not live like ants on the spine of the earth. In the conflict between the illuminations of liturgy and the occult darknesses of random aesthetics we need not go under: by bursting forth with a literature attentive to the implications of Covenant and Commandment—to the human reality—we can, even in America, try to be a holy people, and let the holiness shine for others in a Jewish language which is nevertheless generally accessible. We will not have to flatter or parody; we will not require flattery; we will develop Aggadah bilshonenu, in our own language, and build in Diaspora a permanent body of Jewish literature.
If we blow into the narrow end of the shofar,11 we will be heard far. But if we choose to be Mankind rather than Jewish and blow into the wider part, we will not be heard at all; for us America will have been in vain.
_____________
1 For one thing, I no longer believe that the project of fashioning a Diaspora literary culture, in the broadest belles-lettres sense, can be answered by any theory of an indispensable language—i.e., the Judaization of a single language used by large populations of Jews. The enrichment of any existing language is of course not to be despised, and if English is widened and further nourished through the introduction of Jewish concepts, mores, sensibility, and terminology (the last being the most prevalent and influential and yet the most trivial), that can only be its good fortune. English has already had the historic good luck (derived from historic bad luck: many invasions) to be richer than other languages. English, in fact, is perhaps the luckiest language with regard to “richness,” and we English speakers are, as writers, probably the luckiest language-inhabitors, simply because English is really two languages, Germanic and Latinic: so that there are at least two strains of nuance for every noun, fact, feeling, or thought, and every notion owns a double face.
Hebrew is a lucky language in another way: it was the original vessel for the revolution of human conscience, teaching the other languages what it early and painfully acquired: moral seriousness. Because of the power of scriptural ideas, there is hardly a language left on the planet that does not, through the use of its own syllables and vocabulary, “speak Hebrew.” Though the genius of Abraham and Moses and the Prophets runs like mother-milk through the lips of Hebrew, all languages have a Hebrew-speaking capacity, as the literatures of the world have somewhat tentatively, yet often honorably, demonstrated. Language is the wineskin, thought the wine: this of course is the point of “Toward a New Yiddish.” Yet all that is required of any language for it to carry a fresh and revolutionary idea—the Jewish recoil from idols remains such an idea—is for the language in question to will itself not to be parochial.
Published in Judaism, Summer 1970.
2 In answer to a question at a P.E.N. meeting, New York, June 3, 1970. I record it from memory.
3 In 1970 this word was not so familiar, and therefore not so comically debased, as it now seems.
4 William H. Gass, “The Concept of Character in Fiction,” New American Review 7.
5 Hear, O Israel,” the Unitary Credo.
6 Liturgical poetry of chiefly medieval composition.
7 Yavneh was a small town where, with Roman permission after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai and his students established an academy. It was out of Yavneh that the definition of Jewish life as a community in exile was derived: learning as a substitute for homeland; learning as the instrument of redemption and restoration.
8 Aggadah comprises the storytelling, imaginative elements in Talmud.
9 See footnote, p. 178.
10 Among them, Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet.
11 The ram’s horn, an instrument blown at the New Year, is a liturgical symbol recalling the ram that substituted for Isaac.
Literature as Idol: Harold Bloom
Over the last several years, little by little, progressively though gradually, it has come to me that the phrase “Jewish writer” may be what rhetoricians call an “oxymoron”—a pointed contradiction, in which one arm of the phrase clashes so profoundly with the other as to annihilate it. To say “Jewish writer,” or “Jewish poet,” or “Jewish artist” is—so it has begun to seem to me—to retell the tale of the Calico Cat and the Gingham Dog: when they have finished chewing each other over, there is nothing left.
Encountering the work of Harold Bloom tends to reinforce these still-shadowy views. Bloom, a professor at Yale (who in his own person is, in fact, the entire Department of Humanities), is a singular figure. Bred like the rest of his graduate-school generation on the New Criticism, he increasingly represents its antithesis—but no, not its antithesis after all, because a thesis can imagine its opposite, and Bloom is not so much opposite as other. Bloom represents instead a frame of mind and of reference, and a source of fantasying power, that the New Criticism could by no stretch of its position or fancy arrive at. At the age of forty-nine, he is already outside the recognizable categories of American historical, psychological,1 or textual literary criticism. The New Criticism, though it is by now more than thirty years since it was new, remains the model of literary text-analysis. Even when “psychology”—i.e., the writer’s biography—is permitted once again to surround explication de texte, the habit of belief in the power of the text to mean its own meaning, which the student must pry out through word-byword scrutiny, persists.
The New Critical formulation of how to read a page of literature was carried out against a background of nineteenth-century impressionistic “appreciation,” which included not only the words of the poem, but speculations about the “mood” of the poet, with appropriate allusions to the poet’s life, and often enough an account of the state of mind or spirit of the reader while under the mood-influence of the poem. The New Criticism, puritan and stringent, aimed to throw out everything that was extravagant or extraneous, everything smacking of “sensibility” or susceptibility, every deviation from biographical or psychological allegation. The idea was to look at the poem itself, rather than to generate metaphors about the poem.
The ideal of “the poem itself” has been with us for so long now, and is so bracing, that it is difficult to dislodge. Nevertheless, it is true that biography and psychology have begun to seep back into academic readings of texts, and some belletrists—one thinks immediately of William Gass—have even dared to revive the subjective style of impressionism, wherein the criticism of the text vies as a literary display with the text itself, and on a competitive level of virtuosity, even of “beauty.”
The vice of the New Criticism was its pretense that the poem was a finished, sealed unit, as if nothing outside of the text could ever have mattered in the making of the poem; and further, it regarded the poem as a presence not simply to be experienced in the reading, but as an oracle to be studied and interpreted: the poem’s real end was hermeneutic, its ideal state hermetic. The virtue of the New Criticism was a consequence of its vice—not only did it deny the opport
unity, at least in theory, for displays of rivalrous writing (“beautiful” essays about “beautiful” poems), but in keeping out too much of the world, it also perforce kept out what was largely irrelevant to the poem and might, like a bumptious lodger with too much baggage, wreck the poem’s furniture.
Into this devotedly swept and sanctified arena strode Bloom. Lacking verbal fancifulness, he was plainly no kin to the Gass school (a contemporary school of one or two, perhaps, but larger if one includes an army of literary ancestors, Virginia Woolf among them). He had little in common with the Trilling school of meticulous social understanding. He was overwhelmingly dissimilar from the early pure New Critics with their strict self-denials. He was not like any of these, yet somehow suggestive of each of them, and again light-years beyond the imaginings of all of them. Like Trilling and his students, Bloom made connections well out of the provincial text itself; like the New Critics, he paid fanatic homage to the real presence of palpable stanzas, lines, and phrases; like the most subjective and susceptible of poet-readers, he conceived of poetry-reading as a kind of poetry-writing, or rewriting. And still he resembled no one and nothing that had come before, because, though he stuck to explication de texte in the old way, he made connections outside of the text in a new way—and, besides, he raised the subjectivist mode of vying with the original to a higher pitch than ever before, while draining it of all self-indulgence. Meanwhile, the connections beyond “the poem itself” that he found were neither social nor psychobiographical; they were entirely new to American literary criticism; they were, in fact, theological.
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