In the Phantasmagoria of History
La perspective n’est pas un
instrument des représentations exactes, mais un mensonge.[1]
Perspective is not an instrument of precise representation, but a lie.
Anamorphosis
The Baroque mentality thinks, feels, remembers and articulates itself
through what Jurgis Balstruŝaistis calls
“depraved perspectives,” not so much attempting to represent the world
as it really is or seems to be, but what it hides inside itself. An offshoot of the Tridentine shift in
sensibilities that reacted to the reformation’s turn against imagery and ritual
transformations, anamorphoses attempt to show how appearanfes are by definition
deceptive and demonic, and therefore must be manipulated so as to release the
powers of truth shackled to illusion an delusion. The anamorphotic artist stretches
commonsense perceptions out of shape, squashes them into deceptive and
seemingly meanings lines, shadows or glimmers of light; so that it takes the
power of mirrors, physical and moral squinting, and intellectual faith to open
them up to understanding.
Phantasmagoria
A phantasmagoria goes beyond the notion of phantasms and
hallucinations. It is, for the
nineteenth century especially, the predecessor of the kind of motion pictures
that reprodue, enhance and deepen the mystery of prestigitation, as in the
silent films of George Méliès—unlike the motion pictures or images in motion
from Mery through to the Lumière Brothers that claimed a scientific accuracy in
representation. In the 1790s a fantasmagorie was an elaborate
multi-media performance—musical and tactile, acoustic and visual—creating an
atmosphere where the expectations of the real were exploded into fragments of
illusion, the contours of history shredded and released into the winds of
anxiety and fear. For some historians
and scientists, the metaphoric use of the term phantasmagoric became a label
equivalent to fantastic or extravagant, in both a positive way (when the world
of nature revealed all its unforeseen and unexpected dimensions to the
microscope, telescope, and photographic lens) and a negative way (when the
Kantian and Nietzschean sense of trust in positivism broke apart into
uncertainty, relativism and skeptism).
For others, the term became a pure pejorative, a put-down for the
unrefined, irrationalism of the popular mind, the unsophisticated would-be
thinker, and the believer in all the pseudo-sciences the century was prone to
explore.
Palimpsest
The palimpsest, as we have seen, extrapolates from the economic use of
expensive vellum or parchment the way in which manuscripts were scraped clean
of previous writing and then fresh text was inscribed on the supposedly tabula rasa. The point of the general use of the term
derives from the fact that the cleared page is not really a blank sheet at
all: whatever is written over it is at least physically changed in its
appearance through the indentations, bumps and stains left on the original
manuscript. Moreover, when Freud tried
to describe the layering of memories in the mind, he used a variation on the
palimpsest: the magic writing tablet, the kind children use, where after
pressing with a stylus on a waxed tablet covered by a transparent sheet, that
sheet is then raised, apparently clearing the tablet for fresh writing, but
actually leaving traces of previous impressions—and the longer the tablet is
used the more likely the smooth surface will have disappeared altogether.
Returning to the concept and metaphor of the palimpsest, it is now
possible, through electronic filters and magnification, to discover under the
latest writing all or some of the previous content of the pages. In the same way, too, modern art historians,
prior to restoration work or as aids to the establishment of questionable
authorship and provenance, x-ray canvases in order to reveal prior works or
rough sketches or shifting methods of brushwork and color application. But there were fashionable instances, along
with strategic usages in the service of intelligence networks, to write two or
more textual discourses over one another, perhaps each slanted in different
directions. A further extension of the
idea occurs when old manuscript pages, whole or in fragments, are used as stiffening
for the binding of new books; they may subsequently be excised and restored to
readability.
Each of these devices and figurative uses of the mechanical term leads
towards greater understanding of the “nationality” here in discussion.
The Evidence and its Commentaries
A section of Ammiel Alcalay’s Memories
of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999 called “The Quill’s Embroidery:
Untangling a Tradition” cites part of an argument that takes place in Albert
Memmi’s novel The Scorpion (1969) in
which Uncle Makhlouf responds to his young nephew, Alexandre Mordechai
Benillouche’s complaint that rabbinic writings are nothing but commentaries and
commentaries on commentaries, with nothing original in them. In Alcalay’s paraphrase—or commentary on this
commentary—the older man explains the position of traditional Sephardic rabbis:
Poor and almost blind, a
tireless weaver of silk, Uncle Makhlouf, although his text is specific and his
presence may be our absence, effortlessly eclipses us: having skipped modernity
altogether, he is already well on his way into the “postmodern.” His sense of palimpsest, that beneath one
text there is always another, strikes the bedrock of Jewish thought but without
implying the presence of an Ur-language, as many considered Hebrew “man’s” or,
more precisely, Adam and Eve’s first tongue. [2]
In this kind of palimpsest there is no original writing. The text is always already writing new text
over itself and weaving out of its own threads new patterns of meaning. Nothing is scraped away, just as in
history—that of a people or nation, like that of an individual and a family—is
ever completely left behind and forgotten.
In regard to the Jews of the Peninsula from the end of the Middle Ages,
the palimpsest is even more complex and tightly woven. Trying to grasp what this phenomenon is,
Alcalay uses a different metaphor:
…forged in the cauldron of the
Inquisition, little attention has been paid to the writing of marranos, conversos, and crypto-Jews as
reactions to catastrophe, whose works created by those who were, as Shmuel
Trigano writers in The New Jewish Question, “both the prototype and the
anguished laboratory of modernity; the ‘political animal’ divided into a
private, fantasizing persona, and the universal citizen, abstract and
theoretical. Like their more glorified
and well-known predecessors in Islamic Spain, Sephardic Jews writing during and
after the Inquisition faced this new state
of being polymorphously, in many guises and under many rubrics: as
crypto-Jews or the offspring of conversos bearing secret messages…. [3]
This takes us back to our distinction between conversos or New Christians, both a general term for all the
Sephardim forced to the baptism fount or voluntarily submitting to conversion
for strategic, cynical or spiritual reasons, and the two other categories:
Crypto-Jews, the polymorphous individuals and families that attempt to show a
Christian exterior and maintain a Jewish interior—in their homes and in their
souls; and Marranos, the anamorphotic individuals and families that are forever
changing their shape, their belief, and their practices, while maintaining as
orthodox an external appearance as Catholics as necessary—and sometimes
believing piously in it, though sometimes they allow their profound doubts or
their radical revisions of Judaism and Christianity to show through because
they can no longer tell the difference.
In these latter senses, what seems best is the figure of the palimpsest
as the superficial text through which a variety of prior discourses shows
through and whose very shape and texture constrains the mode of the newest form
of writing.
There is continuity in the DNA of Jews that defies historical
expectations. To outsiders Jews seem a
coherent, mystiufying whole, but from within to individuals, small communities
and cultural units it seems like a phantasmagoria—an overwhelming, often
blinding confusion of twisted historical threads. Thus, on the one hand, the genetic code
indicates that despite all the wanderings and transformations in superficial
culture that Jews have undergone—including intermarriage with non-Jews and rape
by persecutors—the similarities of Jews to each other, Sephardim and
Ashkenazim, is more than with any of the peoples amongst whom they have lived
for centuries or millennia. Yet, on the
other hand, there are significant
cultural distinctions between these two major streams of the Jewish people, and
often quite disparate personality types, with emotional and intellectual
proclivities that stand out to those who see the two communities interact. We know today that evolutionary developments
can often be quite sudden in terms of geological time—or even historical longue durée. Briefly put, three
positions need to be stated:
- Darwinian evolution occurs along three trajectories: (a) species
differentiation based on natural selection, (b) species specializations
and refinements based on sexual selection, and (c) cultural fine-tuning
based on historical circumstances and choices.
- The changes caused by the last two modes of evolution are both
punctual and reversible, that is, they occur to meet crises and often
include regressions to previous forms of lesser specialization in order to
confront dangerous shifts in the environment or in political situations.
- These last kinds of genetic shifts, which take place in terms of
the expression of genes rather than in terms of genetic modification of
the genome itself, can be seen in very short periods of historical time,
sometimes within one or two generations; as for example, the lowering of
the age of menarche, the immune response to new diseases, and the
dominance of certain personality traits created by traumatic events, such
as exile, massacre and loss of social or financial status for specific
groups.
When the Sephardim caught up in the maelstrom of sixteenth and
seventeenth-century Iberian persecutions found themselves divided between
states, religions, languages and cultures, they nonetheless felt deep within
themselves sufficient historical identity to call this diverse, fuzzy set of
peoples a naçio. Inadvertently, too, because they could not
have been conscious of the implications of what they were experiencing and
doing, they also created themselves as a new nation. How so?
1. A careful selection of
marriage partners that cut across international boarders and divisions of
religion, often with community funds to support poor or orphaned young brides
with dowries and to ensure legacies preserved despite conversions and
departures by individuals and branches of the family.
2. A selection of children to be
removed from the gene-pool by commitment to Christian religious life (e.g.,
priests, monks, nuns), often where parents could not entrust the boy or girl
with the family secrets.
3. Preference for children and
marriageable age sons and daughters who survive frequent voyages back and forth
to diverse parts of the world, with different climates and epidemiological
environments.
4. Emphasis on cleverness with
languages and adaptability to changing, often dangerous circumstances, and an
ability to keep secrets, perform divergent public and private roles, and keen
sense of loyalty to the family and the larger network of relatives and business
associates.
5. Development of new
childrearing practices which emphasize training in obedience to commands in
times of danger but seeking out creative and witty modes of lateral
thinking.
6. Rebellious adolescents who
might divulge secrets or seek revenge on parents, siblings or other members of
the group would be ostracized, expelled or disposed of in other ways.
Throughout these circumstances, it is important to remember,
individuals, families and the larger community of Sephardim underwent nothing
short of a series of repeated, often intensified traumatic experiences, each of
which created disruptions of any normality within the development of the child
and the family, caused new kinds of anxiety as parents could no longer trust in
and became frightened their sons and daughters’ innocence and childish
garrulity, and, above all, forced people to remain forever on the alert for
signs of jealousy, envy and spite in near and close relatives, in servants and
associates, and in friends and neighbors.
In brief, as the Sephardim reconstituted themselves in the wake of the
initial crises and the long series of aftershocks over many generations, the
core of the new identity as a secret nation was not merely the secrecy and
duplicity that was demanded of its members but the painful memories and the
anxious anticipations of persecution and betrayal that was always imminent. Unlike other nations which seek to broadcast
their national identity and character in public symbols and celebrations, as
well as give it permanence and effect in state and civil institutions, the Homens de Nação had to hide their
collective status from outsiders and signal its existence by covert and coded
words, images and rituals.
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