Traditonal Jewish Jokes and Anecdotes, No. 19

What Are Friends For?

In late 1943, Satan was sitting in his kitchen, sipping some tea over a lump of crystal sugar, when he received a phone call from the fellow upstairs.  They usually had little to do with one another after a bit of contretemps a few billion years ago, but still they were related in a sort of a way, so it was with a big smile that the Fallen Fellow picked up the phone.  He always knew who as calling, and this was way back before call-answer and digital identification let others enjoy the same privilege. 

“My old friend,” the Holy Name said, “long time no see.  What’s new by you?”

The Other One gave a deep sigh.

“Listen, please, I know we have not always been on the best of terms, but sometimes, well, you know, a friend has to help a friend, right?”

Satan took a big deep breath and maybe a little smoke came out too.

“So what is on your mind, you make a phone call after all these years, as if I didn’t know?”

“Do I have to tell you or is it enough that I should call?” said The Holy One Blessed Be He.

“Please, I don’t want to have fights these days—enough of that going on in that place over there, you know which one I mean.”

The Fallen Fellow gave another deep sigh.

“Oy, let me just tell you why I called,” said God,  “and then some other time we can discuss the old business between us.”

“Go ahead,” answered the Satan. “I won’t say a word until it is necessary.”

“Thanks.  Now here is the problem.  I need from you a favor.”

“A favour—from me? God wants from me a favour?  Ho-ha, this is a big deal!”

“You said you would let me speak.”

“I am sorry.  I forgot for a moment.  So, nu, go on, I am listening.”

“OK, if it weren’t so important, believe me I wouldn’t be making this call.  Anyway, what I need from you is this.  We are getting people up here faster than we can properly process.  I can’t just put these Children of Israel any old place.  I need to build proper apartments and houses, fix up lounges, swimming pools. libraries, study halls, you know, the whole shlamozzle.”

“So what do you want me from, a loan?  I am busy myself with the war you know, and those crazy followers of the guy with the little moustache, I am working hard to build proper chambers for them.”

God laughed.  “I don’t want to know from such things.  It is not good for my ulcers.  Anyway, now here is what I would like from you, if you don’t mind.  All I want, if you don’t mind, is that you take in a few hundred thousand of these men, women and children, take care of them for a few months, until I am ready, and then they can come here.  This would be a good deal for you, too, as it would speed up your preparations for the other ones, only, of course, you’ll have to change some of the fixtures.”

Satan laughed in turn, in his own peculiar way.

“That’s a good one, my old friend.”

“So what is your answer?  You can do this or not.”

“For you, how can I turn you down?  But this is just for a few months, right?”

“Absolutely,” said God, “I guarantee.  Even a pinky swear.”

“Fine, then I agree, you can start to sending them down here tomorrow morning.  I will warn my helpers that these people are your friends and their stay here is just temporary.”

God sighed.

“Thanks.  This is something I won’t forget.”

Well, the very next morning, the angels started bringing in loads of Jewish souls from the horrors of the Shoah, and true to his word, believe it or not, Satan gave them a proper welcome, had them fixed up in nice houses with gardens and plenty of food.  Then he had one of his special assistants send upstairs a report that all was going well.

However, not even three weeks later, God gets an urgent call from the Guy in the Basement.

“Hello,” the Master of the Universe says, “it’s you I know.  What can I do by you now?”

“Givalt,” says the Satan in a desperate way, “Please, is there any chance you can get these crazy people out of here soon—like maybe this morning?”

“What do you mean?” asks God.  “I told you I need a few months to set up evetything perfect for them after all they have gone through.”

“I know, I know.  With my sympathies.  But they are driving me and all my little helpers meshuggah.”

“Well,” says The Other Fellow, “ you know this is a special kind of establishment and we have to maintain a certain brand identity and all that.”

“Yes, I know all that, but—“

“Please, get these people out of here.  They are ruining everything.”

“What do you mean ruining?”

“What I mean ruining is that they have started to install air conditioning in all their houses and apartments.”

With a new determination in his voice, the upstairs boss said: “Not to worry.  I will get Eliyahu HaNavi and Moshe Rabbenu right down there to sort things out and bring my people home.” 

Aphra Behn, Part 9

So Rude and Wild were the Rabble

Just as the earlier instances of emblematic composition turn the narrative text of Behn’s book into a series of satirical revelations of the weakness, arrogance, and violence of European systems of knowledge, so the final episode of the book, with its series of scenes of romantic sacrifice, heroic self-mutilation, and the cruelly violent and grotesque pulling apart of the African Prince’s noble body can best be understood in the epistemological terms we have been developing. 

One further emblematic scene from the narrative is needed before we continue with the theoretical matters of the last few sections.  Under a disguise of conformity and submission to the colonial slave regime, Oroonoko or Caesar made plans to elad his fellow Africans in a rebellion, and especially to rescue his wife and the child developing in her womb.  To the other slaves, Oronooko appeals to their sense of honor and indignation at being treated in such a bloody and cruel manner, totally unbefitting their own traditions and status in Africa.  The narrator loads the heroic and glorious epithets on the Black rebels and describes the colonial militia as “a comical army.”   However, the battle, such as it is, goes against the slaves because of the timidity and cowardice of many of the Africans, especially of the women—except for Imoinda, though she was with child.  Duplicity and trickery on the part of the Europeans also leads to the defeat of these noble savages.  Oroonoko cannot believe that so-called noble gentleman among the colonial leaders would tell lies and make promises they did not mean to keep.

The narrator, her mother, and other women in her company, who had been frightened by news of the rebellion, come to see the captured leader, Oroonoko, and are shocked by the state he is in.  Their respect for the handsome Black Prince leads them to give all sympathy to his condition and to see the colonial council and its officers as a farcical or burlesque band of village idiots.  They are appalled not just by the lack of honesty, honor and dignity amongst their own menfolk, but fearful of the common people, the “inrag’d multitude” or “Fury of the English Mobile,” that is, a mob.

In her account of what Oronooko did to try to save his wife from the obloquy and outrage of the savage colonists—the normal terms of praise and blame being reversed to cast the Africans as heroic and noble lovers—Aphra Behn’s persona explains how the Royal Slave gained permission to take a walk in the woods, during which he led his wife Imoinda

…into a Wood, where, after (with a thousand Sighs, and long Gazing silently on her Face, while Tears gusht, in spite of him, from his Eyes) he told her his Design first of Killing her, and then his Enemies, and next himself, and the impossibility of Escaping, and therefore he told her the necessity  of Dying; he found the Heroick Wife faster pleading for Death than he was to propose it, when she found his fix’d Resolution; and on her Knees, besought him, not to leave her a Prey to his Enemies.  He (griev’d to Deth) yet pleased at her noble Resolution, took her up, and imbracing her, with all the Passion and languishment of a dying Lover, drew his Knife to kill this Treasure of his Soul, this Plweasure of his Eyes, while Tears trickl’d down his Cheeks, hers were Smiling with Joy she shou’d dye by so noble a Hand, and he sent in her own Country, (for that’s the Notion of the next World) by him she so tenderly Lov’d…. (p. 60)

 This passage owes much to the exalted language and images of Italian heroic poetry of the Renaissance and to the prose versions of “tender” love expanded upon by French women authors of the early seventeenth century such Madeleine De Scudery.  It draws on the earlier passages in Oronooko describing the heroic feats of military valor and the courtly intrigue displayed in the African kingdom from which the hero and heroine were ignominiously betrayed as slaves to the European merchants.  Some of this is evident, though not as developed, in Dryden’s heroic plays set in Oriental Lands or in the New World kingdoms of South and Central America.[i] 

At the same time as this mode of discourse is exotic and romantic (in the sense of medieval and Renaissance love romances), it is also permeated by cross-currents of the scientific (the asides on the anthropological characteristics of the two black lovers’ religious beliefs) and by a sense of the satiric in the burlesqued inversion of roles—the slaves as exalted heroes, the colonists as crude and savage bumpkins.  But text also carries a vein of the grotesque in several senses, not just that of interwoven incompatible characters and actions and contradictory generic tones, but also in a deeper sense that comes close to the tragic and the bizarre.[ii]

This may be seen in the way the narrator continues the description of how Oronooko killed his beloved and willing wife Imoinda.

All that Love cou’d say in such cases. Being ended, and all the intermitting Irresolutions being adjusted, the Lovely, Young, and Ador’d Victim lay her self down, before the Sacrificer; while he, with a Hand resolv’d, and a Heart breaking within, gave the Fatal Stroke, first, cutting her Throat, and then severing her yet Smiling Face from that Delicate Body, pregnant as it was with Fruits of tend’rest Love. (p. 61)

As speech yields to action, the details of the sacrifice move from a clean death to a grotesque action: the cutting of her throat as the least painful of means of killing is followed by the removal of her face—not a beheading but a stripping off of the mask of her beauty, youth and loyalty. 

And then what does Oronooko do with Imoinda’s face?

As soon as he had done, he laid the Body, decently on Leaves and Flowers of which he made a Bed, and conceal’d it under the same cover-lid of Nature: only her Face he left yet bare to look on. (p. 61)

 The passage seems fairly clear, but does not stand up to close-reading, and instead becomes disturbingly ambiguous at best.  The dead wife is “decently” buried under a natural covering to prevent it from being gazed on by unworthy others and to protect it from predatory beasts.  The face, however, peeled from the pregnant corpse and from the head, is set up as “to be look on,” the incomplete passive voice suggesting either some kind of shrine to be worshipped by the husband and perhaps other noble personages who once knew her or as a type of apotropaic fetish, something to shame and harm the ignoble European savages who brought on this monstrous action.  This sense of the grotesque goes beyond any satirical intent.

Oronooko, following the burial of corpse and the setting up of the face-mask,[iii] stares at the relic of his beloved Imoinda.  He makes a formal speech to it, finding that the search for glory that he wanted to achieve once he removed his wife from the place where her body would be disgraced and violated and he need not worry about her honor is now impossible: he rages in frustration because any attempt to act further is blocked since he has been abandoned by his supporters and the rag-tag enemy, though fools and knaves, are overwhelming in number.  In addition, his own physical strength has ebbed away, due to his untended wounds.

And however bent he was on his intended Slaughter, he had not power to stir form the Sight of his dear Object, now more Belov’d, and more Ador’d than ever. (p. 61)

The sacrifice seems as though it were in vein, making his grief now unsustainable.  If he cannot take revenge on the Europeans, what is left to him?

After two further days of frustration and pointless rage, he

...found his Strength so decay’d, that he reel’d to and from, like Boughs assail’d by contrary Winds; so that he was forced to lye down again, and try to summon all his Courage to his Aid; he found his Brains turn round, and his Eyes were dizzy; and Objects appear’d not the same to him they were wont to do; his Breath was short; and all his Limbs surprised with a Faintness he had never felt before… (p. 61)

Weak and giddy, he is rapidly approaching a point of madness and death.  Such a state exceeds the condition reached by Othello after he was driven to distraction by Iago’s deceptions and slew his beloved Desdemona in Shakespeare’s tragedy, a play Aphra Behn alludes to in order to call to mind appropriate images of her hero’s plight.  Oronooko, unlike Othello, does not remain strong enough to defy the authorities that gather to arrest him for the murder of his wife but sinks into physical decay, left with almost no resources to challenge the colonists who capture him and put him on display before his inevitable execution.  Imoinda’s corpse, meanwhile, is discovered in the jungle by the stench from her own decaying body.  There are really no passages of this sort in the heroic or even Gothic books of the seventeenth and eighteenth century to match what Behn creates here; it will not be until the nineteenth century that authors revel in such fantastic grotesquery. 

Lying in a near stupor near to the corrupt flesh that was his wife, Oronooko can only defy the Europeans and African slaves who surround him with an even more grotesque set of actions.  While they hang back from taking hold of him, he “cut a piece of Flesh from his own Throat, and threw it at ‘em” (P. 62).  He speaks a few words to curse them and mock their lack of heroism, and then acts again:

…he rip’d up his own Belly; and took out his Bowels and pull’d ‘em out, with what Strength he cou’d… (p. 63)

There then ensues a struggle when one of his captors, a former companion among the slaves, lunges at him, but is killed, leaving Oroonko to be carried away back to the settlement.

Meanwhile, the narrator and other women who had been absent during this scene—and the others of the sacrifice and its aftermath—come running when they learn that the Royal Slave is about to be brought back.  The question of how the persona of Aphra Behn came to give such a vivid account of these grotesque events will need to be discussed later.  For the moment, it is sufficient to note the juxtaposition, overlaying and melding of the various genres, tones, levels of mimetic representation of reality, and themes that are in play here. 

But before we can examine this last section, it is best to go back to clarify several theoretical issues: not least the question of generic categories appropriate to discussion, but also the question of how appropriate or legitimate are interpretations that breach normal protocols of historicity and literary evaluations in a post-modern (and politically-correct) period, namely, our own.  These theoretical points contain within them the most important of all: the construction and justification of a Jewish model of analysis and discussion for authors and works neither explicitly Jewish or normally recognized by authoritative scholars to be Crypto-Jewish.

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[i] Behn refers to some of these heroic plays and takes credit for providing some of the exotic feathers and other material used in the first productions, remarks that cut through the distinction between fictional reality and historical, as well as scientific discourses. 

[ii] These horrors can be found in Roman writing, such as Virgil’s descriptions of the Underworld in the Aeneid, or Apuleius’s scenes of mutilation and dismemberment in The Golden Ass.  They are sometimes alluded to in Jacobean tragedies, but more in the imagery than in the actual representation on stage.  Only perhaps Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus seeks to show so much blood and guts to the audience.

[iii] On the role of masks and masquerades in Crypto-Jewish literature, see my Masks in the Mirror: themes to be returned to later in this essay.

Aphra Behn, Part 8

  

A Look Back at the Numb Eel 

and the Parallel History of the Cocoon Lady

I think the numbness occasioned by touching this eel continues longer than that from an electric shock of the same degree of force, and I have been assured by a person of good sense and veracity, that a negro fellow formerly being bantered by his companions for his fear of this eel, determined to give a proof of his resolution, and attempted to grasp it with both hands.  The unhappy consequence was, a confirmed paralysis of both arms.  I hear this fellow is still living in the island of St. Christopher’s; if so, I can obtain more satisfaction, for I have my doubts of the negro’s honesty.⁺ (p. 171)

⁺ This account was afterwards confirmed to me, with the further information, that after several years the negro recovered the use of his arms by slow degrees, and I think without any assistance from medicine.[i]

Before we return to the text of Oroonoko, in particular her emblematic account of the electric (or “numb[ing] eel”) we discussed earlier, it may be useful to look closely at a similar passage taken from an explicitly scientific essay published about hundred years later in the newly independent United States.  Appearing in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Volume 2 (1786) pp. 170-173, “Observations on the Numb Fish, or Torporific Eel,” by Henry Collins Flagg of South Carolina allows us to see the nature of the language, the sense of objectivity and authority in natural history, and the significance of such an observation to science to set beside the passage by the Crypto-Jewish Aphra Behn.  It is made more apt by Flagg’s own allusion to this same ambiguously fictional book: “Mrs. Behn, in her Oroonoko, gives a description of this fish, which she calls the numb-eel, and says it is taken in the river Surinam” (p. 173).

Whereas Behn’s narrator or persona representing her fictional self at a young age reports the event of Ornooko’s encounter with the numb eel is given as a personal witness, Flagg reports an anonymous source, though one he considers of good character and reliable authority, but whose knowledge is limited, so that the continuation of the narrative depends on an even more pair of witnesses: on the hand, an indeterminate source (“I hear…”) and then on the other, the Black victim whose honesty the writer has “doubts” about and therefore he cannot receive full “satisfaction.”  Most of Flagg’s discussion relies on his own experiments in touching the eel and he remains very cautious in imputing any clear proof of the electric nature of the shock he experienced when touching the creature. 

That he adduces Behn’s Oroonoko as one of his circumstantial pieces of scientific evidence is also interesting because many contemporary scholars have noted that Oroonoko contains details on the flora, fauna and anthropology of the region that accurate and can be confirmed by published accounts by travelers, missionaries, government officials and scientists—but that such accounts would either have been extremely rare during Behn’s own lifetime or available only decades later in the eighteenth century.  Just as the episode of the royal slave’s own personal adventures or journeys as the narrator’s companion and guardian integrates such specific local detail into a coherent text, unlike the essay by Flagg whose intentions are to compile a series of related particles of knowledge and treat each as dependent upon different kinds of “experimentation” and evaluation of secondary sources in a paradigm of  skepticism, each of the passages we are examining has a structure which goes beyond the scientifically factual or accurately historical to suggest something else—another kind of discourse—that is never made explicit.  This reminds us too of the several lapses in the personal letters and journals of Maria Sybilla Merian, another female European traveler into the same part of Dutch Guyana (still known then because of the recent and tenuous Dutch occupation of the future French colony as Surinam). 

Scientific artist (daughter of the well-known seventeenth-century Dutch lithographer and publisher of travel and scientific books, Matthaüs Merian) whose fame grew significantly with the publication of her folio albums of South American birds, insects and small reptiles, each picture not only integrating these creatures into a single environmental scene (rather than set out logically in typological sequence of anatomical relationship) but indicative of their organic interactions (habitat, food sources, behavior, atmospheric conditions, and so on), Maria Sybilla[ii] gives some small clues as to the sources of her information beyond personal experience in the jungles, particularly from local indigenous women; but leaves us two key factors most notable about the particular district she lived in for several years (with one of her daughters as assistant) shortly after Behn published Oronooko in London.  So successful were these books that she earned the soubriquet of the Cocoon Lady.

The first factor is the large number of African slaves maintained in the religious plantation she stayed on—her affiliation to this strict sect of Dutch Protestants seeking an ideal pious community in the New World somewhat ambiguous and perhaps more for the opportunity of an unattached woman to visit South America than faith commitment.  This pseudo-edenic settlement was notorious for its ill-treatment of slaves, and Merian’s account barely mentions either the slaves or their conditions of work, although she does rarely let drop details of speaking with some of the female Africans and seeking their guidance as she searched for subjects to draw. 

The second factor, something she shares with Behn, albeit Oronooko is set some thirty to forty years earlier than Merian’s visit, at a time when the English jurisdiction over this area was contested by both French and Dutch colonists, seems more important to our understanding of the author and her ambiguously fictional narrative; namely, that events transpire in that part of the later Dutch controlled region of Guyana that was coming to be known as Judensaavan, Jewish Savannah, because of the large number of Jewish slave-owning plantations to be found there.  It is likely that many of the original Sephardic families to arrive in this area came either directly or indirectly from the failed Dutch colony near Reciffe and Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil, the same pool of New World Jewish settlers who went on to the Dutch West Indies and Nieu Amsterdaam (New York).  Merian’s lapsus in this regard may be due to her general shift in focus from her own daily experiences in the region on to the specifics of how she came to compile her folio of drawings that she and her daughter then worked up into full-colour lithographic print collections at the turn of the seventeenth into the eighteenth centuries.  Behn’s concerns were quite different and suggest that her suppression of any hints at the Jewish presence and participation in the European colonization of the area have been deliberate. 

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[i]  This essay is reproduced in facsimile by the American Philosophical Society in collaboration with JSTOR online at http://www.jstor.org/stable/1005175.

[ii] For further details and sources, see Norman Simms “Maria Sibylla Merian in the Cocoon: Childhood Confusions: Part 1”  and “Maria Sibylla Merian: Crises in Spirit, Intellect and Marriage: Part 2”  Iakov Levi, ed. Psychohistory online at  (July 20, 2009 )

Traditional Jewish Jokes & Anecdotes, No. 18

Bringing Home Gifts

Lionel Smithfield was on his way home from a two week business trip to London.  It had been enormously successful, several vital contracts signed, important contacts made, and the promise of more in the near future.  As he walked around the departures lounge of Heathrow Airport filling in the remaining hour and a half before his flight back to Chicago, feeling rather good about himself and optimistic about the years to come, he decided that, instead of the usual little touristy gift for his wife, he would get her something really good.

He drifted towards a jewellery boutique and glanced at the items on display.  A rather good-looking young woman behind the counter eyed his movements and came over.  “Looking for a gift for someone special,” she said, partly as a question and partly as a guide to his intentions.

“Yes, for my wife,” he said.  “I want to get her something really nice.”

“Do you want to choose a ring or a bracelet or a watch or…?”

“What about a necklace,” he said. “Something small, discreet but also elegant.  The price doesn’t—well, it matters a little, but I want something that isn’t cheap.”

“I understand perfectly,” the young woman said, though he could sense that this was just a patter and she had been trained to inveigle men like himself into spending more than they intended.

“Yes,” he said, “could you show me something that isn’t gaudy.”

The woman motioned for him to follow her, and she opened a tray full of small objects on gold, silver and platinum chains.

“Perhaps one of these,” she said, lifting up a small crucifix.

As she did so, Lionel felt a clutch in his stomach.  Some ancestral feeling was lurking down there and it was beginning to awaken.  He knew it occasionally, this old self he once was, when he was still called Leopold Schmidt, or Little Leo, by his parents.  They themselves had changed their name from Schartzfeld when they migrated from the Old Country in the early 1920s.  But what had this feeling to do with him now and certainly it had no meaning for his wife—one of those shicksas his parents took some while to accept.

“Yes,” he said.  “That’s nice.  But can you show me some others.”

“Of course, sir,” she replied unctuously now, sensing a sale in the wind.  “Take a look at these.”

She took out a few of these crosses, some with diamonds or rubies and other jewels incrusted on them.

He backed off a little.

“No, I think they are a bit too gaudy, you know.  Do you have any in a more smart, elegant style.”

The young woman warmed to the occasion.

“We certainly do, sir,” she said, and she slid open another draw, took out a small tray, and laid it on the counter.  “Take a look at these.  Feel the weight and the smoothness.”

Lionel felt them in his hands, and he started to sweat and to feel his heart pounding irregularly.

“I am not sure,” he said.

“Well,” said the saleswoman, “I think I know what you would like, or rather, would please your wife immensely.”

Lionel coughed and almost choked.  The woman caught the signal.

“Oh, but they aren’t much more expensive than the crosses I have shown you already.”

She took out a tray from an even deeper draw and laid it before him.

“You and your wife are sure to like these.  Look, they have a little man on them.”

Little Leo could sense the vomit in his throat, backed away, and managed to say, ”O dear, I very sorry. I must catch my plane,” and he ran quickly towards his gate.

As she gathered the crosses, put them back in their trays, and deposited them in the appropriate drawers, the young woman muttered under breath. “Cheapskate Yids.”

Traditional Jewish Jokes and Anecdotes, No. 17

The Secret of Good Deportment

Little Shermie was a pain in the you know where.  Especially at school, there didn’t seem to be a teacher in a public school. who could control him.  Maybe some big shot doctor today would talk of attention deficit disorder or asparagus syndrome or some other fancy shmancy term.  The problem was he never shut up, stopped moving, or arguing with everybody who tried to teach him something. 

His poor father went from one school to another, moved house often, and spent up such a storm he thought he would end up in the poor house before too long.  Every principal at first promised that his school and teachers could handle a boy like Shlermie.  But within a week, or at most two, there came the same phone call: We are sorry but we must ask you to withdraw your son, Mr. Ginsburg.

After six public schools, Shlermie’s father started with private schools, sometimes with and sometimes without special tutors—and you know what they cost!  Nothing worked.  The kid was incorrigible.

Desperate, Mr. Ginsberg swallowed his pride, and started to try parochial schools.  First he went to the Friends, but not even the Quakers could handle such a bondit. Then he went to a Presbyterian School, a Lutheran School, a Baptist School, a Salivation Army School —and from all of them, nothing at all.  A few days, maybe a week, but never more than ten teaching days before a principal asked Shlermie’s father to come take him away before everyone, other students, teachers, guidance counsellor, supervisors of all sorts and even janitors, would go out of their minds.

Then Mr Ginsberg tried sending the boy to live-away military schools, out-in-the-wilderness tough-love schools, in fact, any kind of educational institution that he could think of.  No luck at all.  The kid was impossible.

At last, at the end of his tether, not knowing where to turn next, he went to the one place he would never have gone if everything were not so helpless.  He drove the boy to a convent school in a country town where he heard they were both pious and disciplined. 

When he got there, the two of them, Shlermie and his father, were ushered into a small dark office by a nun in an old-fashioned wimple and long black dress.  There was a priest sitting at the desk.  A tall, middle-aged man who looked like he stepped out of a lithograph of the Spanish Inquisition.  Next to him, a woman, also dressed like a nun, but with a different style of costume and peering out of thick glasses with a stare that could knock over a plow-horse.  Everyone looked at each other expectantly.  He didn’t have to explain to these mamzerim that he was a Jew, and likewise his son.

You should keep in mind, by the way, that throughout this preliminary discussion, Shlermie was wriggling about, pulling chochkas off the priest’s desk and dropping them on the floor, and making quite a racket, saying things like “Help, get me out of this crazy place” and “What kind of people are these, wizards and witches?” and “If you don’t get me out of here, I will shit all over the floor.”

Then the priest, Father Dominic O’Leary, he said he was, announced “Sister Anastasia, please take this child around and show him the school, while I discuss certain pertinent details with his father.

As the nun took Shlirmie around the establishment—and she was a strong woman, who also carried a little whip tucked into her belt—Mr Ginsburg and Father Dominic began to discuss costs, restrictions on visits from parents, and special food preferences they could possibly respect.  Mr. Ginsburg, as a businessman, was quite impressed and felt his fingers itching to sign the contract and get the kid off his hands for a whole school term, whether everything worked out or not.

About an hour later, when Sister Anastasia brought Shlirmie back into the office, he was quite subdued.  He sat up, kept silent, and behaved with polite gestures.    Mr. Ginsberg was so impressed he signed the contract on the spot.

“Good,” said the priest, “he can start at once.  Please, come back tomorrow morning to drop off his things.  Here is a list of what he is allowed to bring with him in the way of clothes and accessories.  No contact allowed, except in the case of a dire emergency”

“Come with me, child,” said Sister Anastasia.  “You may say good-bye to your father.  You will not see him for three months, you understand?”

When they were alone for the permitted five minutes, Mr. Ginsberg looked at Shlirmie, and said:

“You like this place?  You will be maybe now a good boy?”

Shlirmie wiggled and whimpered a little, but said, “Yes, tattale.”

So tell me, please, what did this Mother Shapiro or whatever, show you that makes you now suddenly behave like a mensch?”

“Oy, tattele, she took me to one classroom after another, into a library room, into a dining hall, into a chapel where they pray their goyisha prayers, and everywhere, tattele, they have on the wall a kind of cross thing and on it some little man is hanging, you can see plainly the pain on his face, and also by him the blood coming out of wounds.  So I figure, if they do that their own people what are naughty, I better be a good boychik here or else they are going to hang me up on the wall too.”

Mr. Ginsburg gave the boy a smoochy kiss and a tight hug, and shoved him back in the room with the nun and the priest.  He then himself turned away and walked back to his car, and as he did so, he let his eyes turn upwards a little and whispered, “Denken Gotts.  I think this time it’s going to work.”

Aphra Behn, Part 7

Paradise and Surinam

The various modes of rabbinic interpretation that are abbreviated in the epigrammatic word Pardes or paradise (an enclosed garden, an orchard, a grove of sacred trees) need to be elaborated on.  PaRDeS or p-r-d-s פרדס  is an anagramme of four separate words: pshat, remez, drash and sod.  Each represents a process of analysis and interpretation, as well as a guide for application of the laws they contain.  Unlike the Christian version of four levels of scriptural exegesis—literal, figurative, allegorical and sacramental—the Jewish approach does not imagine a basic historical moment to be elaborated through interpretation, but an elaborate text to be increasingly broken apart and reassembled in a variety of ways.  In other words, the basic reality of the world and its sacred history is textual. Which is not to say, though, that the world is an illusion, as in a form of Docetism or Gnosticism; but rather that reality is a matrix of constituent letters, a language, in the sense that DNA is a language or the chemical table.

Pshat referees not to a literal meaning but to the first kind of interpretation of a sacred and/or rabbinical text.  Before interpretation can begin, the student learns to read the letters, studies the grammar and syntax, and identifies people, places, things and events mentioned in the passage under scrutiny.  This k-r-t is similar to what was taught in grammar schools in Europe: the basics of identifying letters with sounds and the formation of those sound pattern s into words and longer lexical units.  What is different in Jewish tradition lies in the further need to teach the various extra-lexical markings on the manuscript or printed page: the markers for voicing the words (since Hebrew, as other Semitic written languages, does not inscribe vowels) the cantillation (melodic and rhythmic singing and accompanying bodily movements) marks, varieties of enhancements of the ciphers used to form a filigree on certain letters, and the numerical equivalents of sounds (since Hebrew letters are also numerical figures).  Students will also be taught the meaning and use of abbreviations.  All this may be subsumed under the category of philology.  But pshat renders something beyond merely reading aloud of the silent—and unspeakable—text because it imparts to beginners and uneducated readers the received interpretation, that which, in a certain time and place has been deemed authoritative by rabbinical authorities as to form the basis of application in the mitzvoth (613 commandments)  and minhagim (customs and traditions) of normal life. Such a reading informs these non-specialist Jews that what they see is not always exactly what they speak, that what is there needs correction and adjustment, and that what may be applied cannot always be literal because time, place and political and moral circumstance have changed.

Remez, in asking what something is like, begins by discovering other places in Scripture where similar words, phrases, references are made, as well as similar grammatical, syntactical or orthographical peculiarities may be found; and moves towards the discovery of narrative, logical and imagistic ambiguities may be resolved in recontextualized settings.  Since it is assumed that all of the Torah is one continuous name, word, gesture, event, argument, conversation, passages—words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, units of narration, description, speech and analysis—they may be juxtaposed, inserted, interpolated or overlaid  and melded into one another.  For instance, the fragments of archaic speech and ritual description of action in the Song of Songs can be made to yield meaning and relevance by being imagined as occurring during the Children of Israel’s passage through the Red Sea. Other statements that seem to have no context can be shown to belong in other more developed scenes, or actions which appear to lack motivation or consequences can be explained by events whose narrative voice has over-determined the immediate event, so that two or three or more separate passages can be revealed to form a cohesive body of sacred text. 

Drash, expanded into midrash, is a mode of expanding the text into more explicit terms or of propounding a figurative parallel or supplemental text through variety of metaphoric, parabolic, and allegorical means; such inventions re-imagine the original troublesome passage in such a way as to resolve gaps, contradictions and impossible-to-solve riddles. The midrash proper, of course, is a figurative enhancement of a scriptural passage in order to bring out its vague or incomplete basis as an application into law or custom, to give it vivid relevance into current circumstances, or to justify its seeming contradiction to another legally-binding statement of the Law.  Often, but not always, the midrash (or drash), transform syntactic, orthographic, grammatical or misplaced allusions into extra-historical persons, non-geographical places, anachronistic actions and fantastic events that have no contextual justification: they offer temporary aid to understanding but do not set ethical, legal or spiritual precedents. For example, the prologue to the Book of Job, with its conversation and bargain between God and the Shatan, establishes the grounds on which Job’s moral testing are based, but does not recur in the book as part of its dramatic, logical or narrative structure; the passage seems to respond to the implicit question, to what may we may scribe the divine motivation in testing Job? Let us imagine that once…  The midrash has now entered into the text proper, but only as a figurative preliminary, not as a constituent part of what the rabbis call the mashol, the exemplary scenario of the book.

Sod reveals a secret or occluded meaning in the text, what is more or other than the pshat, what is hidden in the sound and appearance and signification of the written and physical appearance of the words. Though a variety of word and letter manipulations, interpretations of the peculiarities of size, shape and even ink color used on the page, games such as gematria (where numerical equivalents of letters lead to finding equivalent totals for different otherwise unrelated words), extending and condensing letters to make anagrams, abbreviations and puns, other tricks such as sticking a pin through several folios in order to find various terms, allusions and values at similar points on the different pages of text—through all this wholly new texts are constructed, juxtaposed to the originals, and made to enter into dialogue with one another.  When dealing with a Crypto-Jewish book, such as Aphra Behn’s Oronooko, it is wide to be cautious and not to expect too many explicit clues, and yet to be sensitive to the subtle evidence of what is said in places where you don’t expect there to be such things, where the absence of or completed statements signals something awry, and other small bits of uncanniness.

Aphra Behn, No. 6

A Play on Genres

The generic distinctions between grotesque, tragic, pastoral and satiric discourses.  This discussion is based distantly on Northrop Frye’s structuralism and seasonal calendar of genres.  But, of course, I have long since moved beyond and away from his concepts.  These four categories are somewhat fluid, more dynamic than usually set out, and clash on the matter of how to control and keep intact the presence of contradictory elements.

Grotesque, sometimes referred to by Renaissance authors like Shakespeare as antic, the term seems to have arisen following excavations in Rome by popes seeking to restore and exploit ancient ruins; the characteristic of discovered sunken gardens near the Holy City were murals painted of intricate, interwoven patterns of vegetation, animals and some humanoid figures,  It was this intricate and mixed imagery, along with the half-hidden emplacement of the ancient and archaic features that gave a term for the sense of uncanny, wild and pagan works of art, so that what was like these grotto-like (grotesque) places seemed to open up Europeans eyes to the long-lost world of their ancestors, something still lurking heretofore mostly unrecognized, if not completely unseen, in the uncivilized zones of the Continent—in faraway mountain valleys, forests and politically isolated or contested areas—and in the reports appearing in travelers’, pilgrims’, merchants, explorers’ and conquerors’ books, and then eventually within the dark shadows of each individual’s mind, soul or dreams.  These ‘antique” visions were in many ways, too, like the festive processions, masquerades and plays performed in small villages, towns, courts and urban areas during carnival time. Such antics” could be taken, because of their constant threat of breaking into more normal, profane, controlled activities, as experiences of the insane and sacred—with sacred returning to its older etymological sense of what was sacra, split, juxtaposed, or superimposed of incompatible holy and demonic qualities.  In a general sense today, stripped of most of its archaic and carnival dimensions, the grotesque refers to the conjoining of unassimilable qualities.

Tragic elements derive from the archaic processions that began with ceremonial expulsion of uncomfortable, unwanted and designated characters—or surrogate creatures—to be sacrificed, killed in order to shed their blood and thus redeem the populace from the burden of filth and sin; in order for these victims to be most efficacious they would be treated as honorable and holy, their expulsion and destruction marking the intensity and depth of loss the community demonstrated to placate the supernatural forces causing such harm, pain and humiliation.  Sfter the sacrificial shedding of blood, all participants would then share in the meal prepared, sometimes wholly given up to the gods in a holocaust, sometimes divided in a communion-meal wherein the divine offering was of the smoke of fat and bones, the mortals taking and sharing the flesh, while the skin might be donned as memorial restoration of the creatures sacrificed.  The act having served its temporary purpose of relieving the populace of its bad feelings, the procession returns home in joyful celebration, the victims who had been at once vilified—the community’s collective sins, dirt and hatred invested in their bodies-and worshiped as chosen gifts and emissaries whose passage through death and into the realm of the holy by transformation into smoke or into the digestive system of the body politic—now are brought home in some disguised format, as well as in the dance-song orchestration of the comos, or comedic procession.  Tragic therefore came to be the enactment or recitation of events, characters and themes appropriate to the mysterious (sacred) conjoining of the vilified victims whose death makes them recognizable as heroic, saintly and godlike beings.  Such heroes stand up against the forces that seem on the point of annihilating the populace and in their refusal to accede or compromise madly, foolishly or selflessly affirm the right of the group to be purged, reinvested with glory and returned to ordinary peaceful pursuits.  The comic elements are separated into separate performances, leaving tragedy as the site of loss—death through sacrifice (including suicidal acts), expulsion (or self-imposed exile) or some kind of magical disappearance (apotheosis or occlusion).  Tragic persons, places, objects, actions and meanings therefore are those which build up the grotesque contradictions of the festival, climax in the despair and exaltation of the loss, and leave unresolved the significance of the moment of absence or disappearance of the hero.

Pastoral, taken as a mode of comedy, is a form of activity and a place of controlled isolation for the kinds of characters whose loss from the community remains always ambiguous.  Though defined by its setting among shepherds and their flocks, supposedly peaceful and free from the serious historical problems of the city, the court and the world that needs the cleansing sacrifices of tragedy, swains and nymphs frolic in their small feelings about love, jealousy, rivalry, and need to protect their sheep from wolves and other small predators, storms and periods of drought.  Yet because many of the inhabitants of this pastoral landscape are refugees or exiles from the places of confusion, humiliation and ambitious rancor, they retell and thus relive their ordeals and humiliations, read into the simple activities of the local people the deeper significations of their own previous lives.  A set of variations on the shepherding life of the pastoral is found in those poems of more complex rural activities, the bucolic and the georgian, that is, the people and labors of herders and of crop-farmers; and because these last two modes of activity and life require more settled types of governance, control and class-structure, they slide easily into what Horace called “the mean estate”, the place where urban and court people take temporary retirement, to live off the produce of, while governing the relationships and overseeing the agricultural actions of the peasantry: this enclosure of moderation requires sufficient wealth, status and maturity to remain protected both from the long-grasp of the city and the imperial powers and the natural flaws, weaknesses and ignorance of the local peasantry. A different set of variations, anterior and outside of the increasingly complex and therefore disguised slave-based systems of the bucolic and georgian genres, in the arcadian and the edenic.  Whereas Arcadia was an isolated, sometimes unreachable land—not the real geographical part of the southern Greek peninsula, but the hypostasized mythical landscape of a primary zone—in which undifferentiated and unsustainable mixed-creatures lived together in alternating or overlapping bouts of contention, fauns, satyrs, uneducated and uncivilized humans without useful occupations and subject to unruly passions was the more sheltered, garden or orchard, enclosed by walls, rivers or guardian creatures, in which primary human beings lived in a peaceful harmony with nature and themselves, not yet entered into history and devoid of the need for government, occupations or culture. In Arcadia, the unruly and irregular elements of life remain unimpeded by the themes and activities of civilization. and the passions race about freely, colliding often, and not yet subject to the forces of either permanence or change, the inhabitants of Eden are grotesque only to the extent that they are naïve, innocent and unaware of the powerful contradictions always at the point of breaking out of themselves or breaking in from the outside, so that this paradise—on earth or in heaven—can be seen from without as a fool’s dream or a form of sacred madness.

Satiric comes from satire as satura, an overstuffed, supersaturated container of mixed ingredients that, like a pot of stew that boils over or sizzled sausage that explodes, on other words, a mismatched, incongruous and seething mass of tones, topics and activities; sometimes a parody, wherein the hodge-podge on the inside bursts through the apparent seemliness of the generic covering.  During the Renaissance, critics misconstrued the relationship of satura to satyr, thus bringing into play the images and acts of sexuality, gluttony and subversive politics.  Now whereas in tragedy the uncoordinated clash of cultural motifs leads to the death, exile or disappearance of the offending persons, so as to leave in the wake of their collision an inconsolable grief and sense of emptiness, at the same time as there is an appreciation for the sacrifice made, however foolish or ecstatic, in satire the explosive bursting apart of normal distinctions, boundaries and categories leaves an exposure of the folly, duplicity, hypocrisy and malice of the offenders, the resulting laughter—rather than sorrow and admiration—seeks to purge away the pains and humiliations of established and institutionalized society.  Moreover, whereas pastoral games and comedic celebrations balance out loss with gain, disorder with controlled containment, the satire keeps boiling, seething and sizzling, until the very idea of order, containment and closure overtakes the desire for control and balance.

Again, these terms and concepts derive from Classical and Christian literatures, although it is possible to find them useful in discussing Jewish literature.  More importantly, it helps us approach the kind of Marrano or Crypto-Jewish texts created by Aphra Behn.  But before that, we need to examine some rabbinical concepts as models of interpretation.

Traditional Jewish Jokes and Anecdotes, No. 16

 How Not To Tell A Joke

One never knows where to begin a joke.  The traditional: There was this guy, see, well, he comes down the road, sees an old friend, and calls to him.  That just won’t work.  Who is the guy walking down the road, and who is this old friend?  Where are they? What time of the day, one day of the week, what month, year, let alone century?  So many complications, although the “this” seems to give us a familiar time and place.

Now something has to establish a pattern: two or three efforts to make contact, three questions and replies, and three seemingly normal moments following in succession.  Then will come the break, the shock, the sudden reversal of expectations, the breakthrough of the hidden and the repressed.

“Hey,” he says, “what’s new?”

“Hey, what’s new? This is the way you talk to me these days? What are we teenagers, modern jerks who can’t conduct a regular conversation?”

“George, that’s you, and you ask me such a thing when all I do is make a friendly gesture?”

“Herby,” the other replies, “you think it’s friendly to talk in such a way nobody of our generation would ever do?”

“For goodness’ sake, George, don’t be a stuck up prig.”

“What kind of a talk is this to an old friend? Suddenly it’s hey and stuck up?  Tell me, you aren’t sick are you, Herbie?”

So on they go and before you know it they have a fight, turn away, and that’s the end of a lifelong friendship.

Except on the next day, which is not necessarily one day following, but only the next time they meet, which could be weeks or months, there is this guy walking down the road and sees his old friend, though actually by now his ex-friend, and says to him, “Hey. What’s new?”

They repeat the same routine as above, though this time they add allusions to the last time they met and put in some new insults.  Neither of them is quite sure why this has happened.  But this is just the way it is.  Otherwise, of course, there would be no joke.  For the moment it doesn’t seem like a joke.

Then comes the third encounter.  Maybe two or three years later.  The same two friends, Herbie and George, the same strange way of speaking and the even more bizarre violent reactions.  And then, what everybody has been waiting for, the meeting of the two friends which breaks the pattern and gives the shocking revelation of what it is all about.

“Hey, what’s new?”

“No start that again.  Let’s settle this once and for all.”

“Settle what? I still don’t know what is upsetting you.”

“Nor I you.”

“Well, let’s go sit down somewhere, in a café, have a cup of something, and talk this out.”

“You really think we can? After all, this crazy stuff has been going on for far too long.”

“Why not?” asks Herbie.

“Why not?” asks George.

So that’s what they do. Perhaps they are still talking, for all I know.

But if you don’t see any point and don’t think this is a joke, probably not only do they—and I am having my doubts as well. 

The only thing to do, therefore, is this:

One guy walks down the road.  He sees someone on the other side and calls out a greeting.  The other guy rejects the greeting. 

“What’s the matter, George?” says Herbie.

“What do you mean? My name is not George.”

“Are you sure?”

“But you know me, I am Herbie, your old friend.”

“I don’t think so.”

Well, pardon me, Mr High-and-Mighty.  I guess you are too much a big shot to recognize your old friends.”

Aphra Behn, Part 5

Clarification of Terms: Scarification of the Flesh of Experience

Now for the clarification of terms, at least insofar as they are proper within a Classical-Christian milieu, that which seems appropriate for Aphra Behn taken at face value as an Englishwoman of the mid-seventeenth century:

Fable is today a popular term and a classical category for the kind of brief narrative—usually no more than two or three scenes, though sometimes only one, and a small cast of characters, again in the range of two or three at most—that sets forth some moral or thematic meaning.  It is assumed mostly that the characters are not human beings, although they may be—and usually are—anthropomorphized animals, plants or even non sentient beings (such as leaves, implements, or natural forces like the wind).  The etymological root of the term itself derives from the Latin verb feri = to speak or the  Greek phēmē = an utterance or a report. Hence the earliest recorded usage of the term fable means nothing more than a narrative stripped to a simple statement of its plot.  It is thereby related to the word fame from fama in the sense of a report (an articulate statement of something that has happened and is worthy of hearing) or a rumor (a murmur that is heard unclearly and without authority).  Fabula develops into a more specific semantic zone of meanings that at once particularize the report, rumor or narrative as more than just the method of hearing and remembering, passing on and discussing the statement, but the content and the significance of the message.  Because through fable and fabliau, the content becomes restricted to non-representational characters, settings, events and meanings, the sense of the term enters an area of unreality, mystical or fantastical reports. 

Meanwhile, other earlier near synonyms for the fable as a plot or a report or a reputation develop other special qualities, it must be distinguished from the parable, the anecdote and the allegory.  These three sub-types of brief narratives designate, in the sense of parable, a story whose characters tend to be domestic, social or occupational types—a father and son, a rich man and beggar woman, a farmer and a priest; an anecdote, a typical action occurring in the recognizable present of the teller and listener with or without actual historical basis—Mr Jones and his wife travelled towards a big city to meet with the king; and an allegory, wherein the names applied to people, places and objects tend to be either their “real” names—Christian and Christiana, Sloth and Diligence—or symbolic allusions to some external argument that is enacted by the plot.  Finally, though the allegorical or symbolic names of the characters, places and actions may only appear in this last category, all the forms of such fabulation carry an explicit or an implied “message”, moral, or meaning. 

Myth, though the term we tend to use ever since the nineteenth century to designate a narrative that has gods, spirits and heroic human beings in its cast of characters, and deals with world-transformative actions set on the boundary between cosmic or divinely creative events and those within normative history, was rarely used in ancient, medieval or even Renaissance times with any other sense than fable, that is, a plot, a report or a rumor of things that have happened or are in the process of happening outside of the ordinary and profane reality.  In a sense, then, mythus could be a word, an utterance, or a report of an action; something to be enacted in tragedy or comedy, that is, a drama, drumenon, or recited in a poem, especially an epic poem—a long narrative of world-transformative and world-historical events by characters who live at the meeting of the supernatural and the natural and often merge the two realities or cross over from one to the other.  Whereas fable came to create a category of the fantastic, unbelievable, and either purely literary or merely exaggerated, myth developed around itself an aura of the serious, spiritual and cosmic, until it too was crushed by the positivistic philosophy of the nineteenth century and became a “mere” myth, an invented, unreal and foolish story, including the kind of characters, events and meanings assigned to it.

Poem, however, from its roots in ancient Latin poiein and Greek poietes with the sense of to make, the thing made, and then the creative act, gathered into itself the basic meaning of a verbal making, a product of language manipulation—its resources of measure (“numbers”), patterning (verses) and figurative expression (imagery)—other than and sometimes above that of normal day-to-day discourse or formal and professional rhetoric.  By the early nineteenth century, thanks to Romantic theory and practice, the poetic became the synonym or enhancement of the terms creative, inventive, speculative and even prophetic.  Poems were removed from the category of public, traditional rhetoric as learned speeches and became expressions of private, individual and spiritual minds.  The poet came to replace the priest and the prophet as the source of higher insights and natural energy to move other minds and hearts.  The poetic thereby stood opposed to the ordinary, the common sense, and the rational or bourgeois mentality, and by the middle of the nineteenth century could stand as an alternative to science as a revelation of how the universe worked and what it meant. 

Rhetoric is the name for a way of arguing, a manner of expressing traditional and collective truths, a body of knowledge taught in schools and granted authority by formal institutions, and thus a set of rational standards to evaluate people, places, things, events and feelings or passions.  While the rhetor was the teacher of the principles and practice of oratory, orations were words shaped by the mouth (oris, os), such shaped and vivid speech was memorable and authoritative until the late Renaissance, when the reform in education separated out rhetoric from logic, and logic proceeded to develop into science, a scientia that sought its authority in experience (engagement with nature and testing of the self in controlled circumstances) and non-verbal language (mathematics).  Without logic (dialectic)—the invention or discovery of knowledge in traditional paradigms, the disposition of topoi or arguing points in a sequential order from the known to the unknown or from the familiar to the shocking, moving and convincing and the choice of language in literal, figurative and allusive expressions—rhetoric became mere rhetoric; that is, it was reduced to the choice of  decorations and adornments to already always known truisms, the strategies of formal delivery in oral or written format, and the techniques of memorization.

Three other terms we introduced earlier in this essay indicating at the same time that they need some meditation in order to allow our approach to Aphra Behn to be undertaken, first, in the terms that superficially mark her out as the wom,an behind the persona of the young traveler from Surinam who arrived out of nowhere and suddenly to become a denizen of the theatre district, to have skills as a playwright, translator and government intelligencer for the newly restored monarchy of Charles II—and yet a woman also marked by the taints of immoralty and perhaps inversion for her strident “masculinity”.

History to us today tends to be taken as an account of what went on in the past and by extension that matrix of events and ideas in which we travel towards the future, so that it overlaps with our own existential present and sometimes carries forward into the projects understood as occurring in the future (which therefore begins as we experience it now and trails off behind us into the past).  It is also the term used for the discipline of recording and preserving narratives, monuments and other relics of the past, usually the stories, opinions and learning in documents that constitute more or less formal archives; the standards and techniques for interpretation of such material constitutes historiography.  But there are two hints of earlier meanings to this term that signal its primary significance in those many ages before the Darwinian model of progress made scholars almost implicitly and without question seek for an understanding of the past, present and future in moments or movements of “origin” out of which all else develops in slow, gradual and logical stages of improvement and refinement.  One of these hints is in the theatrical zone of semantic usage wherein the players or actors are known as historians, in the sense that they embody personages of the past, both fictional and real, whose acts, words and “presence” they imitate and thus make meaningful in the present of the audience or spectators reality.  The other lies dormant in the classical usage of historia as a juridical account of events that prove or disprove the guilt or innocence of a lawyer’s client, that is, as an argument meant to be so vivid and persuasive that it cancels out or overrides the version of historical events, political character and moral personality of the person laying a complaint or adduced as the voice of the state or crown or imperial persona which lays charges against the accused.  Both of these older meanings place a quality of fabrication and some degree of falsification on the sense of history long before it carries the weight of indisputable truth, verifiable through logical analysis of archival documents, and thus firmly registered as that past upon which the present plays itself out and thus opens the world of men and institutions to its future. 

Fiction, with the sense of what is made or constructed, comes into its own when rhetoric and poetry as creative literature are pushed aside as the proper discourses of science and philosophy, when, that is, logic as an academic course of study, as institutionalized paradigms of truth, and as a body of information out of which reality is constituted, give way to natural modes of speech, apprehension, memory and evaluation of character or personality.  Fiction comes to mean less imitation (mimesis) of past experiences recorded in books, speeches, and non-verbal works of memorial art, than imitation of nature herself, including human nature.  As the modern age we live in comes into focus, the nature to be imitated is one to be interpreted from symbols, signs and symptoms of superficial experience, to be found deep within the body of activity, language and imaginary mental activity, so that every expression becomes increasingly eccentric and individualistic.

Science, though it at first means only what is known and then logically achieved or interpreted categories of knowledge, in the modern world comes to point towards a process of discovering, interpreting and then applying what is known to useful technologies.  The discourses of science turn away from those of rhetoric, on the one hand, because the paradigms that allow one only to know what is memorable and therefore already known, no longer fit a world where new discoveries everyday invalidate what is known from yesterday and must be submitted to constant rigorous testing to have any application in the future; and on the other, from poetry, in the broad sense of creative activities based on inspiration, figurative enhancement, and private verification of emotional states.  Thescei.ntific discourse we see in Behn’s narrative is not only to be found in her careful descriptions of natural phenomena or anthropological details, but also in her evaluation of the colonial economic advantages to be gained through settlement of the land, foundation of towns, and use of slave labor. But such discourses stand in juxtaposition to those of epic or romantic adventures, erotic feelings and poetic responses to the exotic and colorful places the narrator sees.  Such jarring juxtapositions can be described as grotesque, satiric or even pastoral, as we shall discuss in the next section.