The Demon in the Machine
Near the end of the nineteenth century, artists in France were still
talking about their paintings—the subjects and the rendering of them in form,
shape, color, texture and perspective—as machines. This is an old use of the word, one that
antedates our mechanistic industrialized world’s notion of the machine as an elaborate productive
mechanism, a steam or electrically driven engine. Epic and dramatic poets also spoke of the machinery in their works by which they
meant the supernatural beings and devices that provided the supports, the
meaningful structures, and the illusion of mythic grandeur to these works of
art. Hence the notion of the deus ex machine: a god who appears out
of the machinery is a providential power that rescues heroes and heroines from
the entanglements of tragic Fate, that is, who manifests in visible form the
spiritual guiding hand otherwise unavailable to the mortal players on the stage
of life. In a darker sense, as in
Goethe’s Faust, the divine being who steps on to the stage of normal experience
is a devil and the play shows him manipulating the protagonist’s mistaken
desire for absolute knowledge and who reveals the pettiness and ridiculous lack
of perspective in Dr Faustus’s greed, lust and pride. So too in Singer’s Satan in Goray, albeit with the main characters, human and
demonic, cast in a set of Jewish lights that play through the pages of the
novel. Instead of a well-calibrated
machine, such as one might see in Leonardo da Vinci’s dream designs of a
mechanized world, Singer’s machinery seems an old-fashioned creaking
contraption, one imagined by superstitious rabbis and kabbalists—as well as
uneducated or rather half-educated dwellers in the isolated little shtetl.
If we were to ask ourselves what is the relevance of this bizarre tale
of ignorance, fear, and communal disappointment in the new millennium, perhaps,
without even dealing with the book’s merits as a work of literature, as a work
of art, we would have to credit Isaac Bashevis Singer with a deep intuitive
grasp of collective madness—and then turn that insight on our own world
problems. For those of us in the
Humanities, and especially literary studies, we can feel confirmed that the
imagination and the creative mind can still provide better ways of
understanding human beings, individually and in groups, than most other
disciplines. The imagination—fanciful
and dangerous, on the one hand, because of its affinity to madness; yet, on the
other, because of its freedom and creativity, full of insights and dynamic
approached to the hidden forces of nature—is not to be put aside in the
formulation of history because it seems subjective and idiosyncratic; but
embraced instead precisely because it fills out an otherwise colourless and
fragmentary picture of human realities.
Such enthusiasm, though, must be tempered by recalling that only a very
few authors achieve this level of sophistication and insight into the world and
into their own minds.
In what follows, I want to review quickly the main points in the
historical background—no, I don't think we can say that history is the
background to this novel: it is, rather, its matrix, the stuff out of which the
fictional narrative is comprised. First
of all, it has been pointed out by Robert Bonfil that Jews do not appear in
European historiography as active agents; they are the passive objects of
hegemonic custom and law. Why?
Certainly, if traditional history is essentially the description of great men
performing great deeds, with greatness compromised of political power, economic
manipulations and statecraft, war, and diplomacy, then Jews stopped being
princes, generals, and diplomats a long time ago. However, if history is a development of ideas
and institutions, then Jews must be seen to play more than their fair part in
the game. Moreover, if history
becomes—as it does after the middle of the eighteenth century—virtually a
novelistic account of how societies, cultures, nations and civilizations rise
and fall on the analogy of individual men and women being born and nurtured,
growing up and becoming educated, acting on their community and eventually
reaching old age and dying, then, Jews have their history as well—and can be
seen operating inside the parameters of European nations and civilization.
Thus, when Singer recounts the history of a single shtetl in the
mid-seventeenth century, he does something far more than Sholem Asch does with
his grandiose, artificial attempts at epic and tragedy: he creates a texture of
human psychology, emotional relationships, and intellectual debate that informs
the text with all the density of real experience we expect from a novel—and
that, too, is history. Gershom Scholem,
Matt Goldish and others who write about the Shabbatean phenomenon—its trancelike
states, its collective delusion, and its mass disappointment—do not so much
write history, either, as they collect, collate, and interpret documents.
Limited to conventions of archival historiography, they do not give the
density, the texture, the realistic feel of human events developing, of minds
and souls caught up in fear and hope, confusion and disappointment.
Satan in Goray is a
novel without a central protagonist. The
main character is, as it were, the village of Goray and all the people in
it. Just look at the passages in which
Singer describes the madness that comes to grip this little, out-of-the-way shtetl,
a madness that does not only come from outside as the news of Shabbatai Tzvi
arrives in wave after wave of vague, conflicting, frightening information, but
also wells up from within the individuals and from their collective anxieties
and experiences. Singer does not write
as though demons and spirits were real, but in a way that shows the traumatized
Yiddish-speaking community of Goray could come to see, feel, and hear the
presence of such supernatural phenomena.
The power of the Yiddish text, even more than the English version of the
novel, creates the impression of such pre-modern, non-western ways of
experiencing the world.
I want to argue therefore that what has seemed like questions of the
text in terms of both historiography, especially psychohistory, with its
concerns for both affective and cognitive developments in the group, and
phenomenology, that is, the dynamics of delusion and disappointment:—that these
are, in Singer’s hands, at the very same time artistic techniques. In other words, that there is no way to read
this novel only as a work of fiction, and that there is no way to separate the
history and the impact it has on a small frightened Jewish group, from the
fictionality of its presentation.
The last two chapters of the novel offer what seems like a completely
different stylistic and perspectival discourse.
Chapter 13 “The Dybbuk of Goray” and Chapter 14, “The Death of
Rechele” form a continuous version of what purports to be an official
rabbinical history of the events partly alluded to and partly narrated in the last chapters of the modern
text. Written in a language pretending
to be that of the ornate, artificial pseudo-biblical phraseology of such
pre-modern chronicles, the last two chapters seem to put aside the modern
novelist’s techniques and rhetoric. The
new section is introduced as
A marvellous tale treating of
a woman that was possessed of a dybbuk (God preserve us): Taken from the worthy
book The Works of the Earth and rendered into Yiddish to the end that women and
girls and common folk might perfectly comprehend the wonder of it all and that
they might set their hearts on retuning to God’s ways…[1]
By integrating this local history (or pseudo-history) of Goray into the
more general narrative of Shabbatai Tzvi, the text takes on another dimension
than that of a modern novel, albeit a fantastic one. This fantasy is more than a compound of
folklore and superstition, like the one treated satirically by Mendele Moykher
Sforim and more sentimentally by Sholom Aleichem. As Wolfitz points out,
Singer’s texts move from the
external depiction and social critique typical of these earlier writers to the
inward, moral, imaginative, and speculative elements of the Yiddish cultural
whole. Bashevis uses imagery and
concepts derived from kabbalistic texts and Hasidic tales, as well as materials
absorbed from Slavic folklore and literature.
Adopting the multi-layered and multi-angled perspective of modern
fiction, Satan in Goray provides an opportunity to look back over the
characters and events so far followed by the sophisticated Yiddish narrator
from a position that is essentially imbued with a secular European sense of
reality and psychology and thus to see those characters and events as they were
perceived by the enclosed and frightened Jewish community itself. By perception here, I do not mean that this
was how the trauma was experienced—for that is precisely what the modern
novelist attempts to do in his pseudo-history, his grasp of inward feelings and
thoughts that in themselves could not find a discourse of expression either in
the Yiddish language spoken and written at the end of the seventeenth century
in Poland or even, as we know from other literatures of the same period, in any
conscious mind operating in those same years, whether fictional or
biographical; but in these last two chapters, imitating the terms, images, and
concepts that Yiddishkeyt offered, the novelistic insight and
enlightenment is made clear.
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