Co[s]mic Sonnet

We do not live in expectation that the sky will fall

But fear the oceans will rise up, break their bonds,

And surge across the sand; that volcanic rivers roll

In deathly red upon our cities, then slowly crawl

To a rigid stop; and that tremendous rocks

Will shatter our protracted lives, and throw

Out of kilter everything drawn upon the maps.

Temperatures rise and sacred sediments collapse.

Outrageous growths appear inside out souls

And nothing more coheres except the scars

That form on lesions, like grassy knolls

Where we imagine murders and the lapse

Of all morality, wild tracing on the stars,

Still floats above, lingers forever, then snaps.

Secret and Obvious Crypto-Jewish Writing

The Jewishness of Cervantes and Don Quixote

On 17 February 2014, Benjamin Ivry published a little essay following the reprint of Dominque Aubier’s 1966 study Don Quichotte Prophet d’Israel, one of many books that argue both for the author of the early seventeenth-century Spanish satirical romance Don Quixote’s author being a converso Jew and even possibly, as other scholars claim, such as José Faur, a Crypto-Jew; and for the narrative itself to be a secret Jewish book influenced by rabbinical traditions of midrash, kabbalistic ideas in the Zohar, and the experience of Sephardic Jews during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, not least the Expulsion of 1492 from Spain, the mass forced conversion in Portugal three years later, and the long and troubled existence pursued by the Inquisition and harassed by the laws of “blood purity.” 

Ivry notes many authors who argue one way or the other in regard to both of these propositions—about the author and his work—indicating that the debate has a long history itself, although he hardly goes back to the late nineteenth century and opening years of the twentieth, at a time when Spain opened its borders to Jewish immigration—as today when it invites Sephardim who were forced to leave to leave five hundred years ago; and even when Portugal contemplates a similar move. 

What this writer for the Forward (or if not Ivry himself then the editor of the once purely Yiddish newspaper) calls his essay is “The Secret Jewish History of Don Quixote: Was Cervantes’s Hero the Mensch of La Mancha?” A clever play of words in the sub-title, to be sure, but it raises one of several questions about the review. 

(1)  The headline for this essay points towards Ashkenazi Yiddish tradition and not Sephardic Ladino, as though to be Jewish, you have to like pastrami on rye, but you must have ancestors in Eastern Europe who entered the USA by living on orchard Street, reading Der Forwartz, and laughing at comedians who spoke with the sing-song accent of your zayda and bubbie on the stage in the Catskills.  Anything else, as Woody Allen knows, means white-bread and mayonnaise assimilation, neurotic love affairs with shiksas  and falsification of your own guilt-ridden identity.

(2)  For all its awareness of the debates on Don Quixote, Ivry’s essay and the editors of the newspaper in which it appeared, find the idea of a Jewish writer in Spain four or five hundred years ago both a strange one and necessarily a secret.  The book is indeed strange, but because it plays with new ideas about the emergent novel notions of realistic fiction and interiorized personalities, self-reflexive mockery of older romance in medieval Spain and Renaissance Italy (the kind of books Quixote reads and dreams of reliving in the harsh, materialistic world of his own times), not because it takes as comical characters Jews, Moors and the in-betweens created by the need for people to disguise themselves from the familiars of the Holy Office and nosy, jealous neighbors.  It is secret, too, not because no one ever suspected that Cervantes or any other New Christian in Iberia would dare write about himself and his family, whether in the “Lands of Persecution” or in their other European territories (such as the Low Countries or Sicily), but because hiding your true identity, which began with the hunting down of renegade conversos throughout the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, spread to the mutual persecutions of Catholics and Protestants elsewhere in Europe, and eventually created the Angst-ridden modern personality itself. 

(3)  There are other reasons than given in Ivry’s essay and in some of the commentators who put their two cents’ worth in the Forward.  For instance, though there can be adduced many cogent reasons for reading Don Quixote in a Jewish way (however we take that to mean) and so against the grain of many formal, academic interpretations, the question comes up as to why this book and not all the others published by Miguel de Cervantes, most of them far more popular (at least in his own lifetime) than the history of the Knight of the Sad Countenance.

(4)  Do readers of William Shakespeare’s plays denigrate all his comedies, tragedies and histories because they see in one of them, The Merchant of Venice, an anti-Semitic screed? 

(5)  If so, why did the Bard of Avon’s Humanist scruples collapse before the character of Shylock the Jew and yet remain steady with Othello the murderous and uncontrollable Moor of Venice?  If Cervantes was so subtle and devious as to insinuate Jewish values—and psychology—into his famous anti-romance, how was it missed by generations of trained Jew-hunters, hordes of self-hating Jewish renegades who supplied the Inquisition with directions on how to interpret Talmudic language and concepts, and ordinary well-read Spaniards? 

 I am all for reading Don Quixote as Jewish in a broad sense and without reductionism.  Whether that was what Cervantes meant or how the first readers understood it are another kettle of fish.

Strange Cities

When I arrive in a new city on my own, all is strange, and I seek to orientate myself slowly.  I walk out of the hotel, turn right for a block, then make another right, and eventually go all around the block and come back to the entrance where my journey of exploration began.  If I am not too tired or hungry, I set off again, this time walking two blocks around, and so on, if not that first day, then over the next two, until I have noticed the basic landmarks and do not feel strange and without any bearings.  Even if the city is in a country whose language I do not speak, the exercise of locating myself in a series of concentric walks he

To be sure, if I am in that city only for a very short time and have to meet people or carry out some specific task, then I may not be able to go through my process of orientation completely.  When there is travelling involved and no friend, colleague or guide is sent to pick me up and then to deliver me back to the hotel, it is necessary to ask directions from a hotel clerk, either on how to use the public transport system or to find a taxi.  However, while my appointments are kept, the feeling of anxiety remains, and my sense of bewilderment and fear mounts up as the hours and days pass. I can taste the emptiness and smell the silence.  Because of this, when not at meetings or visiting libraries, museums or art galleries, I tend to stay in the hotel, take my meals there, and wait for the next scheduled event to take place.  No conversations.  No human encounters. 

If someone gives me directions, when possible I ask them to write them down for me in big black letters or to mark out the route on a map with red ink, giving street names, metro station stops, clearly visible landmarks.  Then, while I keep checking my movement on the map or list of directions, I have to stop every few minutes to reassure myself by asking a policeman, a passer-by or a shopkeeper, someone who looks like they speak my language and shows some possible knowledge of the area.  I breathe in the words spoken.  This is the sum of social interactions. 

Once when I was doing this usual way of getting to know a strange city and had a newly found friend going with me, also a stranger, an older woman with a strong and pungent perfume, we had a disagreement.  I said that we had to walk straight ahead for two blocks and she said for only one and then turn left.  Before I could steady my nerves enough to provide a cogent reason why we should try my way first and then, if that were wrong, to return to this very spot and start off again in the way she suggested, she went off on her own—with a determined and quick pace.  She simply walked on and on leaving a quickly dissipating trail of scent, while I waited, trying to catch my breath and control my heart beats.  Some people have a great deal of self-confidence, and also very little patience with my quirky ways. 

Then, because the street was crowded and evening was coming on, she disappeared.  There were no longer any wisps of her perfume.  I forced myself to step out. But when I reached the corner, I stopped.  My new friend was still nowhere to be seen, her brightly colored dress was lost in the crowds and the shadows, though she said she would be turning left.

“Please,” I said to a man standing in front of a shop, “do you speak any English?”  He touched his hat and mumbled something which I took to be an affirmative reply, and so I asked him for such and such a street.  He pointed ahead, indicated the next corner, and then pointed to the right.  I could see the blinking red and green traffic lights.  Saying thank you to my helpful informant, I set out with a little more confidence, assuming somehow that my directions had been correct, and my friend, wherever she have disappeared to now, would be waiting for me at the address we were looking for.  In addition to the evening shadows, a light mist flowed through the streets. 

At the next corner, however, rather than turning right as the man in front of the shop had confirmed I should, I hesitated, stood still, examined the directions on the paper still clutched tightly in my hand, and waited.  I then saw a few paces away a policeman, clearly recognizable in his uniform, and especially by his cap.  Every country has its unique shape to police helmets, some round, some square, some triangular.  This man’s uniform was dark blue, his kepi a nearly silver shade of blue.  There was a little green and red  star in front.  I walked up to him, said as slowly and clearly as I could in the language I really did not know, that I wanted some directions and held out to him the paper and pointed to the address written in large letters at the top.  He did not seem very pleased to see me nor to have something strange pushed in front of him.  Probably in this city and in this country people did not casually go up to men in uniform and address them the way I had done.  He looked at the paper, took out his truncheon from his belt, pointed it towards the left, and said what I believe was “Go this way.”  The wind picked up.  Sharp needles pricked my face.

Though it did not at all seem right—as it was neither what I had assumed nor what my friend had suggested before she went off so abruptly—I felt obligated to follow the directions of the officer of the law.  I could see that the name of the street on the overhanging green sign and on some large public buildings was not the same as on the paper held in my hand, and the numbers were also way off the mark of the address I was looking for.  Moreover, my friend was still not visible.  The lights sparkled through the mist.  It smelled as though snow ere on its way.  Yet I felt compelled to go on a bit further.

Then I saw another policeman dressed in dark blue but with a blue and yellow helmet.  In fact, several officers, male and female, were walking in and out of building, and the first officer was carrying a large black rifle slung over his shoulder and seemed to be guarding this edifice, which I also now presumed to be a police station.  When I walked up to him, my approach was not now casual, as my nervousness was evident in my trembling and frightened look on my face, or so I assumed.  I could taste his raw suspicion.

“Please,” I said, and showed him my uncrumpled paper.

I don’t think he understood English, but now pointed with his free hand at the door at the top of the steps through which other officers were walking in and out.  Obediently I obeyed.  There seemed no alternative whatsoever. 

It was cool but dimly lit. There was an odor of something unpleasant in the air, a mixture of urine and disinfectant.  A wooden reception desk stood at the center of the entrance-hall.  It was rather small and one woman sat behind it.  She was reading a newspaper.  She wore a soft red dress and had long blond hair.  I walked up to her, held out my paper, and tried to smile an ingratiating smile and to seem calm. 

“Please,” I said.

 She took the address from me, holding it between her fingers, as though it were a piece of dog poo.  She looked at it.  She curled up her nose.

“You want something?” she said.  She spoke a sort of English.  Her breath was loaded with garlic.

“Please,” I said, “where is this address?”  I pointed to the words and numbers written at the top of the paper.  I smiled again.

“Who is for this address?” she said.  “Is this the person you know and who knows you?”

“Yes,” I said.  This time I didn’t smile.

“Give me passport,” she said.

I slid it across the desk, with its bright blue covers and the emblem of my country. Then she opened it, leaving it on the desk, and looked up and down at my photo and at me.  Her breath was heavy and it colored the space between us with a sickly palor.

“Here,” she said, sliding it back to me, “you go up and talk to man in first door.  Make a knock first.”

I turned away, mumbling my thanks.  The stairs were steep.  The wooden boards creaked as I climbed to the first floor.  A different stench filled my nostrils, the smell of tobacco.

When I knocked, a voice from within said something I could not understand.  I knocked again.  The voice became more threatening and angry.  I turned the knob and walked in.  It was dark.  A small lamp with a green shade sat on a desk piled with papers.

The voice looked at me.  It said something loud and motioned for me to sit down.  There was not enough light for me to see who was speaking.  The voice was that of a man, deep, thick, angry. The stench of old cigars formed a halo around the man.

I held out my crumpled paper and said, “Please.” 

He grabbed the paper out of my hand.  He said something which I didn’t understand.  I stared into the splotch of light and darkness where he was sitting. 

“Please,” I said, “it’s important for me—“

He banged his hand on the table.

Bang.

“No talk,” the voice said.  It banged the table again.

Everything became very quiet.  The greenish glare from the lamp on the desk was shrouded with mist.  I felt as though I were in some strange dream.

He picked up a phone on his desk.  He made strange noises, his voice somewhat less rough as the conversation went on.  Then he put down the receiver.  He looked at me and his face shone through the vague and now very reddish mist, so that it almost appeared human. 

“You downstairs go,” his voice said.  He slid the passport back across to me, pointed at the door and repeated, “Downstairs go you please.”

So when I got downstairs again, there was my friend waiting for me.  This woman who had seemed to walk away from me, left me alone to face the madness of a strange city, was there.  She explained that there were two streets with very similar names and that I had misread the paper.  When she arrived at the proper destination, my contact there understood immediately what had happened.  He called around, and was told at the police station I was there.  No one had known who I was or what I wanted, but it was all clear now.  Not to worry.  Well, to say I was humiliated and felt deeply ashamed—I am sure I blushed a bright red—would be an  understatement. 

Outside the air had cleared.  There were a few flakes of snow falling.  The bright moon was shining down on the streets, the city, the world.  

“I will take you to the address now,” my friend said.  “The right one.  Don’t worry.”  

She put her arm in mine and we walked together around the corner.  Her scent was  pleasant.

Tomorrow would be another day.

Texts and Attitudes, Part 6

In Self-Defence of my Three Studies of Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus

Your writing is dense, they say.  It is too difficult for the ordinary reader, claims a reviewer.   I was swimming in mud, says another. Why didn’t you write a completely different kind of book? For that is what they mean.

Perhaps, say I.  It is not my job to argue with such reactions.  They are honest, one must suppose.  But—always a but—did you read carefully, especially where I give directions on what I am doing and not doing, and how the books should be approached.  That is, I never claim to be a historian, a philosopher, a sociologist or anything other than a reader myself.  Is the text dense because I have gone very slowly, over and over the target passages, set them in context, argued with alternative points of view?  Do I presume too much for the common reader, when I have stated clearly my books on Dreyfus are not about the Affair and consequently give very little attention to the political, juridical and philosophical aspects or consequences?  If literally scores of studies come out every year on the Dreyfus Affair  and myriads of commentators mention it for their own purposes in regard to current events, do I have to rehearse the whole business yet again, and at an elementary level? 

Nor is it my job to write to every reviewer, scholar, attendee at a seminar or a conference and say: Please, o pretty please, read my book.  After all, you claim to be an expert, and yet you have never heard of my books and essays.  But then what would you get out of it? I ask them, meaning only myself.  I have no jobs to give you, no influence to pedal, no insider knowledge to pass on.  No, we never met at such and such a place, sat on the same discussion panel, or schmoozed in the corridors.  I am too old to travel.  There are no funds for retired altakakas to participate in these grand conferences.  No, there is no reason why in the world you should know about my books—I can’t ask you to like them or even to understand them—except perhaps that you are the experts and claim to keep up with scholarship.

You don’t like it when I set a variety of contexts around Alfred and Lucie and when I examine them closely to see how Jewish they are, indeed, how they rediscover their Judaism through the struggle and the long ordeal.  Their love-letters to each other, repetitive to be sure, but also incremental in developing a kind of secret code through which they reassured each other of their love and loyalty, and recollected the Jewish backgrounds they both shared—though Lucie’s was more structured than Alfred’s.  How unique their love was may be seen by comparing it to what we find in novels of the period, such as those by Paul Bourget (who, by the way, was the son of Alfred’s favorite teacher of mathematics in secondary school). 

When I write I do something similar to the process outlined earlier for reading.  I slowly layer in new information, intercalate different points of view, and often imply the connections rather than make them explicit—except in footnotes sometimes.  The reader I want will not be skimming for facts or looking for a narrative, but become absorbed in the process, and thus participate in new ways of seeing, thinking, and remembering the people, places, ideas and feelings that are created in and by the text.  Maybe it seems more like a poem or a joke, or more accurately, like a midrash itself.  It may be like a poem in that its structure often depends on the sounds or appearance of words and its development works through the explosion of surface effects, images and sound-patterns in order to recreate whole new ways of seeing, hearing and thinking.  It is like a joke insofar as it surprises or shocks with sudden revelations of unexpected and apparently outrageous meanings and implications.  It is like a midrash because, like a poem and a joke, the original and given meanings of a text (including a textualized set of events or personality) is fissured, recontextualized and reconstituted; and then, as well, it revitalizes the older senses to make them expand and deepen their implications. 

In terms of Dreyfus and his family, while my books do not address the Affair and the political contexts that gave rise to it and were transformed by it as well, the new ways of looking at the individuals, their personalities, and their intellectual roots within both the cosmopolitan European and especially French culture and the deeper, more long-existent Jewish civilization come into greater focus.  Alfred was not the stiff, narrow and unimaginative figure almost all historians claim him to be, but a very thoughtful, well-read and sensitive man.  Lucie was more than just roused to action on his behalf; she was the conduit through which the Jewish and the Parisian cultures her husband lacked when they met became operative in his life.  The Hadamard family (Lucie’s parents and other relatives) and the Valbrègue clan (through Alfred’s older sister Yetti’s marriage) also did more than give support and refuge suring the Affair and its immediate aftermath: they also provide links into the intellectual, aesthetic, religious and social networks that can now be seen manifest in the personalities who survived and outlived the Affair.

When reviewers fail to grasp this, who apparently cannot do more than stumble or rather get stuck in what they perceive as sludge (slough) in style and argument, I am at a loss.  The clues are there in the prefaces to all three books, in the explicit commentaries both in the main text of all the chapters and in the footnotes that have been strategically placed to guide the perplexed reader. Perhaps most people have forgotten or never known how to read midrashically—how to pick up clues and follow them, how to listen to distant echoes and wait for their reappearance in patterns of significance, how to feel the synechdochic part that may be providing the taste of a madeleine in the tissaine of these studies that should awaken memories of time past.  Unless I have failed altogether, this is the best I can do after a lifetime of trying.  

Texts and Attitudes, Part 5

Reading Clusters of Titles 

as a Defensive Strategy

Sometimes there are conjunctions or happenstances that illuminate what you are reading. For one project I have been going through the essays in the catalogue for the important Te Maori (1984) exhibition that toured New York and other overseas cities.  Though I had often looked through the book, examined the pictures and their captions with interest, I never bothered to study the essays on Maori art and culture.  One essay by a famous anthropologist in New Zealand, proved very interesting, but like the other authors in the museum catalogue, something didn’t seem right.  Not that they were poorly written or seemed weak in their presentation of facts, but after twenty years the shine has gone off the arguments, at least for me.  I have grown older, matured (I hope) in my understanding of art and anthropology, and made sensitive to the implications and sources of post-modernism and its politically correct ideology.  So when she capped off her essay by citing from Martin Heidegger, the light went on—brighter than usual, as a few hours earlier on the same day I read a brief discussion of a translation of the German philosopher’s Black Notebooks. 

It is not that everyone interested did not know about Heidegger’s collaboration with the Nazis in the early 1930s and his role as a university chancellor in dismissing his Jewish colleagues, but most people—meaning most of the post-modernists who felt drawn to his basic ideas—tried to rationalize away his political propensities.  Like his one-time graduate student and long-time mistress Hannah Arendt, they made themselves believe that his racist views and cooperation with Hitler’s regime were, if not aberrations, then at most strategic acts, and that he really was not an anti-Semite or a fascist himself.  The Black Notebooks clinch the matter.  They reveal his deep-seated hatred for Jews and his commitment to National Socialist ideology.  Heideggerian ideas are deeply embedded in post-modernism, manifested in his idealization of unreason, and thus in the tendency to be anti-American and anti-Zionist, as well as anti-Semitic which marks so much of contemporary (extreme) left-wing thinking and teaching in academia these days.

Thus what had seemed twenty years ago like real insight into the nature of Maori art and the rejection of Eurocentric paradigms of art history and anthropology and also a willingness—an enthusiasm—to accept the tribalism and so-called spirituality of indigenous traditions in the place of scholarly objectivity, logical analysis and historical relativism, becomes suspect.  Some of this also is now bolstered by Edward Said’s ideology of Orientalism, not only rejecting western science and historiography as products of colonialist, imperialist and racist politics, but accusing the great pioneers of linguistics, ethnography and iconography of working on behalf of insidious or at least cynical European governments in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.  There are, to be sure, many reasons, for treating those early efforts with caution today: information was far from complete, knowledge of the indigenous languages still in formative stages, overly logical positivistic ideas clashed with Darwinian notion of progressive evolution; but the anti-Orientalist ideology goes much further in imputing secret agendas, conspiratorial actions, and complete arrogance in the minds of the individual scholars, their various institutions and associations.  All colonial “projects” are treated as equally pernicious, and even as equal, though many western nations did not create their colonial empires until quite late in the nineteenth century. 

Moreover, as in the case of the essay we started to discuss above what is left out are the efforts of non-scientists, especially philosophers, poets and artists to make sense of the creative efforts of so-called “primitive” or “exotic” peoples: they wished often to do something other than disparage, trivialize or expropriate such art—turning the works of art into specimens of undeveloped “savage” thinking processes, flattening out distinctions between very different kinds of societies with varying geographies and histories, placing them in “storerooms” or display cases in museums, and stripping them of their cultural and psychological contexts.  That is certainly not what Gauguin, Matisse or Picasso were doing when they tried to integrate African or Oceanic art into their own work, or to seek through imitation to cleanse their own minds of what they understood to be the detritus of a dominant bourgeois and materialistic culture in Europe, to reach some original and purified human vision. 

The question therefore is how much do we take into account the political motivations or implications of an author, be it scholar or artist or critic, when judging his or her work?  A recent drive to counteract the drive to boycott, divest and censure Israel (BDS) by asking university authorities, scholarly editors and trade publishers by authors for revision of theses and articles written in the past--to delete or modify annotations, references and citations from formerly respectable sources now tainted by their political views and actions; this is being asked for on the grounds that such morally offensive and politically dangerous positions undermine the authority of those sources and place any use of them by other parties suspect at best and collusive at worst. 

In other words, there comes a time when reading discloses undercurrents and crosscurrents of relationship less on the surface where they can be monitored and evaluated properly but of out of immediate sight—hidden in jargon, disguised by fine liberal-sounding discourses, manifest only in the deepest swirls of allusion and implication; located, that is, at second and third levels of influence. In those places where paradigms of persuasion and concentric circles of coherence lock into shape the invisible metaphors, myths and metonyms of delusionary common sense and constructed naturalness.  Though accidental conjunctions sometimes spark the light that reveals these subversive aspects of cultural activity, self-trained exercises in juxtaposition and inter-textuality force the unseen into the light, make the fragments of distant speech fit together in audible patterns, and refocus the mind so as to shift attention from the periphery to the centre and vice versa, invert and elongate the surfaces, and so upset the illusions of stability and logic.

Texts and Attitudes, Part 4

Literature, Philology and Rhetoric

As I have said before, my reading over the years changed from individual, almost random texts to more complicated patterns.  Rather than choosing books by chance from the racks in bookshops or trawling through the boxes in second-hand stores, I started to look for specific titles and authors.  Every time I read something I liked, I tried to find more books by the same writer or searched out similar topics or time periods. 

I studied dedications, acknowledgments, prefaces, epilogues, footnotes and the puffery on book jackets, seeking to find out the milieu in which these authors worked and their books came into being.  Always one things leads to another. Often the very best of texts requires that you plough through the popular, the second rate and the best-forgotten.  Then you hear the resonance, understand the implied questions, see through the mists of time to what was the everyday out of which the  unusual, the unique and the superb arose. 

Sometimes, when I was setting up the syllabus for literature courses, I moved away from chronological presentation altogether, though I was usually stuck in the paradigm of periods—Sixteenth-Century,  Eighteenth-Century, Modern Literature—and tried to set up the clusters mentioned in an earlier part of this essay.  Where possible, I would want students to read—and for me to teach—books that answered one another (such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela being responded to by Henry Fielding’s Shamela and then Richardson trying to answer that satire with The Second Part of Pamela and Fielding publishing a retort in Joseph Andrews , and then with graduate students throw in several Anti-Pamelas from the same period).  In addition, I could show how different authors went over the same grounds, occupied the narrative-space and recreated the characters of each other (for instance, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (in all three of its parts), and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels).

This is the way I taught Biblical and Classical Literature in Translation for nigh on to forty years. Not as random texts, not as individual books arranged in some formal chronological sequence. Not even as separate entities such as Ancient Greek, Classical Roman, Hebrew Bible and New testament: but interwoven as aspects of a relatively large and at the same time intertextual East Mediterranean civilization.  Some years the various books, clusters and woven tapestries of material were chosen on the basis of key ideas (such as creations of the world, nations, cities and peoples), other years by dominant images (such as mountains, gardens and watercourses), and then sometimes by generic categories (such as romance or love stories, epic or wars and warriors, prophecy or preachers and teachers).  One of the great problems is that year by year, as I grew to know, understand and ponder more deeply the questions within these texts, the students came for the first time, less and less prepared to read such ancient, archaic and classical materials; so that it took more and more time to prepare them for deep reading, contextual comparisons, and intellectual discussions.  Thus the chosen books, books became chosen passages, the range of materials more restricted, and the time spent on close-reading and explication de texte extended, almost to the exclusion of analysis and interpretation.  This, however, was not only the case with that course, which also climbed up from a first to a second and finally a third year level—and in the end I contemplated making it a graduate seminar—but with other syllabuses for medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment Literatures.  On the eve of my retirement I had to concede, at least to myself, that the way of reading I had shaped over the years, was no longer (if ever) possible for students.  Every course at every level had to be taught as though it were an introduction in regard to knowledge and skills required. 

Yes, there are skills that need to be honed, as there is knowledge to be learned and digested. The skills involve mastery of foreign languages (ancient and modern), grammar, philology, and what used to be called philosophy (the art of thinking clearly, coherently and systematically, as well as the history of institutionalized ideas and religions) and rhetoric (the art of using language effectively and logically).  The knowledge includes history, geography and a great deal of biology—so as to be able to recognize persons, places, events and ideas.  I would add the studies of iconography and iconology.

Even now, well into my seventies, when I start new projects of research for myself, I have to think in terms of being at once the experienced guide as teacher and the inadequately prepared beginning student.  I know more than anyone each time I start these plunges into virtually new fields that what must be done necessitates a vast programme of reading of basic and background texts and that it will take more years than I can optimistically depend on to get myself ready to do the kind of analyses and interpretations proper to such an investigation.  

Sometimes to humble myself more than anyone should treat a gentleman of my age I confess that, not only are there long lists of authors and texts I have not yet read, but whole shelves of books in the library I never heard of, and even more of archival materials not edited, transcribed or heard of, only some of it lurking in the vast and ever-expanding resources possible to access on the internet.  Reading, as I envisage it, therefore is an ideal, a wonderful dream to tantalize the scholar, but ultimately impossible. Except for a very few highly trained geniuses, those lucky enough to be born amongst the right institutions, and endowed with degrees of chutzpa beyond my imaginings.  And except for those who have had the self-discipline to specialize ever more narrowly throughout their lifetimes.

Modern Jewish Literature

Or: Modern Literature by Jews

Lately I have been reading essays about Modern Jewish Literature by respectable critics, scholars and writers—poets, novelists, playwrights—themselves.  At times I have a sinking feeling that I have lost all touch with what is going on, both in terms of the texts themselves and in regard to the scholarship being generated by increasing numbers of Jewish Literature courses and Jewish Culture departments in the universities.  Either I have simply never heard of 80% or more of the authors mentioned or those being discussed are all pretty much of a piece, that is, American Jews from East European backgrounds who more or less fit into the models set up in the 1950s and 1960s by men and women seeking to find their place within the contours of a post-War, American bourgeois tradition based on Ashkenazi Yiddish-speaking backgrounds. 

All very fine, so far as it goes…  but I have been away from North America almost fifty years, and my readings have been elsewhere.  When I sit down, as I used to do when preparing undergraduate and graduate courses in Jewish Literature, the names I listed then—and would still list now—seem not to be the same as those about whom these contemporary scholars, critics and writers  considered to be standard, mainstream and interesting.  For instance, for the twentieth century, my syllabi would always include: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Albert Cohen and Elias Canetti, and then sometimes names such as André Suarès, Catulle Mendès, Gustave Kahn, André Maurois, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth. 

Probably most ordinary readers in America will recognize the names in the first part of that list, although they might not guess which ones won the Nobel Prize for Literature or whose books have been turned into films, but may not know the authors in the second part—though each of these writers was praised and influential in their own time, and yet were made to suffer for their racial/religious identity, forced out of their editorial positions, and had their titles removed from publishers’ lists, and themselves died under tragic circumstances or worse during the Holocaust. 

What does not appear here in my “dream” syllabus, or actual ones in some years of my teaching, are the most familiar North American and Israeli names; nor have I put in the important and influential titles within the category of “Holocaust Literature.”  I have kept them out here for shock value.  By focusing on European authors whose reputations were once important in France, Germany, Austria and elsewhere during their lifetimes but who are now mostly forgotten and whose works have become hard to find in print, I want to emphasize a key point: that Modern Jewish Literature does not begin with I. B. Singer, Bernard Melamud, the other Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick and so on, that is, it does not grow out of, as a conscious or unconscious continuation of Yiddish storytelling and does not have to be about immigrants, survivors or rebellious anxiety-ridden adolescents.  That many of the authors in my listing come from non-Ashkenazi backgrounds—Sephardim, Italianate, Levantine—should act as a salutary reminder that there is more to Jewish culture than Yiddishkeyt.  Think, for instance, of Elias Canetti growing up in Bulgaria and his parents inducting him into a wider European culture, not just their own Ladino speaking hometown, but also German-speaking Vienna.  Or Albert Cohen migrating from a small community of Sephardim on a Greek island to metropolitan France and then living in Switzerland.  Franz Kafka became a German-Jewish writer but lives almost all his life in Czech-speaking Bohemia, and though an admirer of Yiddish theatre and a would-be Zionist who studied Hebrew, he is shaped by Mitteleuropa’s multi-culturalism and multilingualism.  

These writers are not just Jewish because they grew up in Jewish environments and were confronted by a hostile, anti-Semitic world, sometimes smugly bigoted and other times violently driven by hatred.  They often thought of themselves as assimilated and secular, but always as assimilated Jews and secularized Jews.  They were peculiarly outsiders and insiders both of their own family backgrounds in Judaism and of their cosmopolitan, sophisticated European civilization. 

To understand some of this, I was happily able to read in the memoirs of Gustave Schlumberger[i] an account of what happened on the evening when, at least for him the Dreyfus Affair became real and painful.  Schlumberger was an Alsatian wit family connections also in Switzerland and Germany, but he grew up in Pau in southern France (where his parents had taken him as a child for health reasons, and where his father became a leading figure in the Protestant community there) believing himself to be a true-blue Frenchman, and devoted himself to the study of its coins, medals and seals, as well as to Byzantine history,  It was in late October 1897 in Paris at a regular Sunday evening soirée hosted by Monsieur and Madame Emile Straus.  At about eleven in the evening, Mme Straus called for silence and announced that one of their guests, Joseph Reinach, had some important news to share with them.  Reinach said that he now had proof that the real culprit in the case of treason and espionage that had led to Alfred Dreyfus’ court martial and exile to Devil’s Island was Esterhazy.  His handwriting had been identified on the infamous bordereu that had been the only solid piece of evidence upon which Dreyfus’s guilt had been produced.  When Reinach was finished, Schlumberger tells us that he raised, very courteously, an objection to the certainty of what had just been said. 

At that point, seemingly out of the blue, Emile Straus said something very rude to him, and Schlumberger writes that he was startled to find himself not only spoken to in such a manner by his host and friend of long-standing but shocked to realize he was being accused of anti-Semitism.  He then says all the Jews in the room, including those who had heretofore prided themselves on their lack of religious beliefs or racial identities, agreed with Straus.  From then, Schlumberger decided he could have nothing to do with the Strauses and soon found himself also “forced” to distance himself from all his other Jewish friends and acquaintances, as he found the Affair to be dangerous to the security of the Army and an insult to the principles upon which France was founded.  While nowhere in the many hundreds of pages that precede this account of the events at the salon, pages wherein he occasionally hints at many wonderful, charming and intelligent people he had known and with whom he had felt compelled to break off relations because of the sad little Affair, does he exhibit signs of anti-Semitism, neither in a religious or a racial sense.   

However, reading this passage carefully, and several others that follow, as his Souvenirs detail the events of the Dreyfus Affair, it becomes clear that all along he has not understood what motivated Jews to behave the way they do—he rarely and casually mentions some of the old clichés about the tribal loyalties, the predilection for making money, and the gross lack of civil behaviour he sometimes see among men and women otherwise respectable and talented, such as Sarah Bernhardt.  Nor in this instance does he show any sympathy for what has just happened.  These rich, successful and influential Jews in the room, artists, bankers, politicians, journalists, scholars have kept their silence as the news about Dreyfus was made public and the rising tide of anti-Semitism in the press, in the National assembly and senate, and in the streets became more strident.  The accusation against Dreyfus first came in 1894 and it took more than three years, against all the odds, as it were, since no one wanted to believe that the high officers and leading politicians had built their case on forgeries, perjury and sheer bigotry.  The assimilated Jews, as Proust shows in many scenes of his In search of Lost Time, were biting their tongues and hoping the inevitable would not happen: that large-scale Jew hatred would make itself felt and they lose their sense of safety in France.  When Reinach broke the news that the traitor and spy had been found out and that there was no substantial proof to support the guilty verdict against Dreyfus, the dam burst: they could express in public their belief in the Jewish Captain’s innocence and join others in calling for a revision of his trial.

Schlumberger could not sense the anxiety and fear mounting amongst his Jewish friends for all those years—and the rise of anti-Semitism was evident before the Dreyfus Affair with the publication of Drumont’s terrible slanders in France juive or his founding of a newspaper called Libre Parole to vent his spleen everyday, as well as in various Catholic newspapers in France and Italy hurling abuse against modernism and cosmopolitanism and socialism, all code words for Jew.  He also shows no sympathy for his Jewish friends when they reject his little courteous hesitations at Reinach’s report.  Nor does he see in his response the animus that they can sense, and his explicit and implicit comments on their lack of real French character, their detachment from its soil, its history, and its religion.

The Jewish writers we introduced at the start of this essay were like those educated, cultured and assimilated Jews in the home of the Strauses on the Boulevard Haussmann in 1897.  They often spoke dismissively of their ancestral heritage and denied any belief in its religious or cultural values, without realizing that only Jews have to keep asserting that they are not really Jewish in their minds and hearts.  Some became quite aware and changed tack.  André Suarès, for one, when he could see that in the 1930s his intellectual friends on the left were all making as many excuses for Hitler as they were for Stalin, he wrote against their  obtuseness; with the result that publishers stopped printing his essays and novels.  Stefan Zeig thought he and his wife could be safe in South America, but the news of the Holocaust followed them across the Atlantic, and they committed suicide rather than face the lack of sympathy and understanding around them.  Elias Canetti arrived in England to escape from the Nazis and was shocked to discover no one had ever heard of him, let alone read his books; he refused to write in English, and continued to write in German, though he knew they could not be published in Germany or Austria.  In one of the final scenes of Proust’s long multi-volumed novel, the people he knew as a young man and who had fought bitterly on different sides of the Dreyfus Affair could no longer recall whether they were for or against the Captain.  Albert Cohen in Belle de Seigneur and its supplements imagines that his protagonist’s elderly cousins from the little island community he grew up on followed him to Geneva where he was a powerful figure in the League of Nations, but they are so bizarre he has to hide them—as he tries to do his own Jewish identity: a wonderful satire on the Jew who tries not to be one in pubic and only exposes his own foolishness in the process.

---

[i] Gustave Schlumberger, Mes Souvenirs (1844-1928) , 2 tomes.   Paris: Librairie Plon, 1934.

Texts and Attitudes, Part 3

Reading and Unriddling the Book

If sometimes the modes of reading—the discovery of new contexts, the breaking apart of old paradigms through the juxtaposition of texts we have grown familiar with and feel as close to our hearts and souls with those that seem to have fallen out of the sky from some distant planet, not to mention word-play turned into multiple layers of allusion and parody, letter manipulation understood as transference of characters and personalities—in brief, a very unorthodox rabbinical style of midrashic commentary.

To make any sense of what I am trying to do, it is important—for me, at any rate—to avoid the jargon terms and the concepts behind them, such as narrative, project, and conversation; instead, the terms I use come out of rabbinics, such as aggadah, midrash, , and mitzvoth.  What I am doing is neither some sort of sociological field investigation or survey, however it may be conceived by the politically correct and the conservatively regress.(Jargon galore!)

By reading, then, I do not mean the simple and passive act of turning marks scratched or printed on paper into words that silently enter the mind and are interpreted as words, sentences, and different kinds of argument.  I take reading, in the etymological series that includes reading, riddling,  and unriddling , to means to interpret, interpolate, expand, enhance and enrich the texts: to see (the size, shape, colour, and arrangement of the letters and words, and so the paragraphs on the page, with all the tension between filled and empty spaces), feel (the texture and weight of the various kinds of paper, parchment, cloth or other substances used to write on) , hear (not just reading aloud, sometimes in a dull steady tone but with rhythms and sound-effects, when called for), taste (you wet your finger to turn the page and so absorb some of the flavours absorbed over the years of its existence) and even smell them (as one does with newly printed books where the ink and glue are not yet completely dry).  I recall when buying my first books as a teenager how certain editions of paperback had a wonderful feel and look to them that changed my way of reading the contents if I then went to an older leather-bound volume or was given a typescript copy. 

Sometimes to force myself to stop racing along a passage and glossing over details, I write out the sentences, speak them aloud, and break up the lines into different lengths, not according to the grammar or syntax, but the sense that I can feel deep inside myself.  Then, also, as I read, I scribble down comments, words as that I have to look up in the dictionary, memories of other books read a long time ago, situations in which the earlier readings occurred, people I once knew and discussed things with.  If I hesitate, make mistakes, change words or punctuation, it is necessary to stop, make a mark in the margin where such a breakdown occurs, and then later return to see if there is any pattern to my resistances, my inner need to transform the text to something my unconsciousness wishes were there.  At times I write down page numbers on the inside covers of the book, so I can come back later to re-read them, to compare them because they at first struck me as odd, unclear, or particularly valuable.

Sometimes I am very lucky when I purchase used books because they come with extra-textual aspects.  A person may have inserted bus tickets, newspaper articles, photographs or letters into the volume to use as page-markers or to associate their own souvenirs with the narrative or description or whatever argument appears.  I take these objects from then on as part of the reading experience.  Or in other volumes the previous owner or owners have put their own ticks and underlinings in, added personal comments in the margin or endpapers, and so enhanced and personalized the book.  One of my friends used to put a date in the margin to signify that he had an idea at that point or, as he explained, to mark the first time so important idea appeared to him.  If an old book once belonged to a library, there are often date stamps, or occasionally names of borrowers scribbled on cards: so I have discovered that for a period of ten years a book was taken out regularly and then there is a gap of twenty or thirty years before the next borrower came along.  Sometimes, picking out a book from my own collection not seen for a while, I see strange lines scribbled over the pages, then realize these are my own squiggles made when I was an infant.  I also enjoy finding Ex Libris seals pasted into books, notices of awards given for special occasions, inscriptions of love and respect from one person to another, addresses written from surprising places. 

Texts and Attitudes, Part 2

Intesections and Concentric Circles

Another book, Sir Gawain and the Knight of the Green Chapel (more familiarly known under its nineteenth-century name Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) stands at the centre of my dreams and literary proclivities.  Because it is such a complicated alliterative poem that exists in only one manuscript from the mid-fourteenth century, it defies the usual categorizations as a local Christian poem in the Middle English canon: and it makes most sense to me as a cri du coeur of a secret Jew or Marrano just a generation or two from the great expulsions at the end of the thirteenth century.  This unnamed poet—for want of an alternative known as the Gawain-poet, usually to identify him with his poem, but as I take it, because of his self-creation and projection into the character of the young knight who sets off to prove himself on behalf of the Arthurian court of Camelot, but then in failing that quest, discovers himself in the failure as a Jew manqué.  Thus he is forever burdened with guilt and anxiety, aware of all that literary tradition wants to make of him as the standard-bearer of Christian courtly morality and his own rejection of those values in favour of another ethic, another morality, another spirituality in Jewish tradition.  Once the narrative poem is thought of in this way, then it fits with other Marrano texts, those that follow the devious paths of self-revelation, self-deception, and self-disillusionment, such as Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, and of course Cervantes’ Don Quixote. 

There are other books which because they are so long and take years to read they fill up great slabs of one’s life and consciousness just to complete—and, often enough, having been put aside for an extended period, have to be started again and again, each time gradually inching towards the end.  As you read them, you also read other books, you also grow older, have new experiences, come to see life in other ways than you did when you fgirst cracked open such texts: all the volumes of Proust’s A la recherché de temps perdu, for instance, of Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe, Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers, Doctor Faustus, The Magic Mountain….  Or the life-long experience of reading, one at a time, out of order, searching for the missing volumes, Balzac’s whole Comédie Humaine or Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart, going back to novels read so long ago they need to be re-read so as to bring them into alignment with one another…

Still another way to read I discovered was by plunging into the vast autobiographies of great writers, such as Elias Canetti, and then attempting to follow through with all the authors and texts he mentions.  One thing leads to another—novels, plays, poetry, essays, science, histories, religion, and on it goes.  This a journey to Serendip.

From this exercise, I learned to start going through other autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, journals, letters and collected prefaces, allowing myself to go down a thousand paths it would never before have entered my consciousness to follow.  Here it is not a matter of following up on every second and third rate volume and purveyor of popular nonsense that we should track down, but to seek out the most articulate of those writers whose modes of expression have all but sunk into oblivion.

Sometimes, to be sure, I have found myself reading old essays and books of criticism, volumes printed before the middle of the twentieth century, as well as reminiscences by journalists, essayists and artists.  Not uncommonly, let me confess, these books have been filled not just with piffle and time-worn gossip, but with malicious, spiteful and hate-ridden prejudices.  Still, if taken in small enough doses from time to time, such for-the-most-part better to be forgotten do give a flavour of times past, the range of bigotry that was prevalent and even acceptable in ordinary discourse.  Such tastes, attitudes, and frames of reference, while not to be emulated by any means, can provide the matrix in which the books and authors I am most interested in to gain new valence.  One hears the voices they were hearing, answers the questions they felt they had to respond to, and the dying ideas they were helping to give the coup de grace.  

On Developing Clusters of Texts

Tastes, Attitudes and Interests

Somewhere on the internet or social media there is a place where one is supposed to enter the books being read, movies seen, television programmes watched and so forth.  My efforts to make entries has always proved futile, frustrating and enraging, insofar as even before I make my own lists and comments the computer generates its own responses, thinking—is this the right word?—it knows better than I do what my tastes and interests are.  I don’t believe it has ever entered a title or a topic at all remotely like what my own would be if I could master the system.  The only relief from the annoyance this causes is the fact—perhaps this is the right word now—that it makes clear how out of step I am from all other list-makers and monitors that go into formulating these places in the digital world.

 It is not, of course, that I never see and occasionally enjoy films that are current, watch television shows that appear on the free-to-air channels and are available through paid-for satellite channels, or order books from the usual big retail sites online: but these are not the titles and topics I would list which are supposed to give my profile, outline my character or personality, and define my place in the world.

The books I like to read, that please me and shape my personality and character, and thus which should be read regularly, or at least thought about and dreamed on many nights; their characters, narratives and descriptions provide me with references from which the real world of my own experiences take on meaning and shape.  I do not think of them so much as single books by known individual authors, but rather as clusters, skeins of interwoven texts.  The more I think and dream about them, the more they interweave, interinanimate (as John Donne said about the lovers whose eye-beams twisted into creative new images, the babies in their eyes) each other.  Thus, for instance, I assimilate myself into the Iliad and Odyssey , as well as the Aeneid, and cannot really tell where one begins and another ends; they do not begin any more, though surely there was a time before I had read them and took them into myself and myself a part of them, and for that reason they don’t end, but always appear as commentaries and enrichment of the other.

So too is it with more modern books—note that by modern is meant, not our own contemporary authors or literature since the Renaissance or the Enlightenment or the Romantic period, but since Antiquity, the ancient and classical worlds.  I cannot red or recreate Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and his dream vision poems again without at the same time experiencing the Roman de la Rose in its two parts and its endless expansions.  They do not exist in chronological order or in separate cultural or linguistic zones, but all at once, throbbing with insights, echoes and further allusions to their mutual sources.  Nor can I read Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream without at the same time having Apuleius’ Golden Ass, and then Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Balzac’s Peau d’åne` emerge and play around and through all these texts.  While it is easy to see how Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra fits with Dreyden’s  All for Love; or, The World Well Lost and G.B. Shaw’s Cleopatra, there are perhaps special elective affinities between Cervantes’ Don Quixote in its two main parts and various expansions, and then Lasage’s Gil Blas, and then over and around and back to the Italian romances in the endless series of Roland and Orlando books of courtly love and erotic madness and high adventure, going as far back to the Chanson de Roland itself. 

From time to time, not only do I re-read and re-dream these kind of clusters of books, but new texts swim into my ken, and then almost at once they stand out, they fit into the existing clusters, or create expected additional patterns.

—To be Continued—

Fairy Tales revisited, Part 2

The Dangerous Vows

In another of his Spinningwheel Tales, Cautulle Mendès tells of how two fairies met on the edge of a wood near a large town. As usual in such encounters, one of the magical beings was grumpy and mean-spirited, harboring long-standing grudges against all the other fairies, as well as the beautiful young princesses and handsome princes who always passed through their ordeals successfully and won each other’s love in order to live happily ever after; the other was a younger, more sweet-tempered  creature. 

Though they greeted each other amicably enough, the pretty little fairy suspected some trick from her older acquaintance when she brought up the topic of a newly-born daughter for the local royal couple. 

“You’re not going to give one of your curses disguised as a gift, are you?” she asked, with a look of accusatory pain in her face.

“Of course, not, my dear,” the elderly being responded.  “I know much better than to call down the wrath of my sister fairies after all these years.”

“Can I really trust you?” asked the sweet diaphanous creature. 

The older fairy pursed her lips, tut-tutted, and said, “I just want to look at this lovely little baby and give her a gift that will please her parents and the entire court.”

Then the two flew into the city, right through the gates of the palace, and into the large room where the proud parents sat on either side of their darling child.  Many people were there, courtiers, diplomats, important citizens, representatives of various trade and neighborhood societies, all offering their best wishes and congratulations, smiling down at the child, and presenting various presents appropriate to their station in life. 

The Good Fairy’s turn came and she waved her wand and promised the King and Queen that their daughter would grow up beautiful, wise and generous in all things.  The parents thanked her profusely, but then noticed the infamous old fairy and began to tremble a little

.

“Now, now, please don’t worry everyone,” she said.  “I am not here to make trouble.”

Now I should remind my readers at this point that the real author of this tale, way back in the 1860s, used all his skills as a Romantic poet and member of the newly founded movement known as the Parnassians, to embellish all the descriptions and speeches in an ornate, precious language, so that everything in the story was cast in the mode of superlatives—all the words are colorful, metaphoric, and studded with jewels, flowers, butterflies and everything else that is considered beautiful.

But just as everyone in the great hall of the palace was starting to breathe a sigh of relief, the old wicked fairy began to whisper over the golden cradle where the little princess was sleeping.

“What is that you are saying?” asked the Good fairy.

“Heavens, what is she doing?” asked the Queen mother.

“Up to your old tricks, are you?” muttered the King father.

“Nothing much,” said the old magical person.  “I just am saying that when this gorgeous and wonderfully delicate child reaches the age of marriage and finds her Prince Charming, at that very moment, instead of being a bride, she will become a groom.”

Everyone in the room gasped.

“Hahaha,” said the Wicked Fairy.  “That’s right, as soon as some handsome young prince asks her to marry him, your daughter will become your son.  A handsome prince himself, more handsome than any.”

Well, as is to be expected, Good Fairy herself bent down and whispered her own words over the young royal infant.  However, as everyone else was in a commotion, wailing, tearing out their hair, and searching for the terrible creature that blighted the life of the princess, no one noticed what the Good Fairy did and no one knew what she said to ameliorate the terrible doom pronounced a few minutes earlier.

Then the years passed.  All the courtiers and servants were instructed to guard the growing princess and to make sure that she received no suitors, in the hope that she would in this way not undergo the horrible sex-change that would come about as soon as someone asked to marry her and she accepted.  In fact, all young men were forbidden entry to the palace, and only old or malformed servants were allowed to work there any longer. 

This was not too bad while the princess was still too young to understand the oddity of the court and the absence of young men.  But when she passed into adolescence and started to read books, listen to songs and feel the promptings of certain feelings in her body and mind, she started to ask embarrassing questions which her nurses, maids and parents found difficult to parry.  They made up stories for a number of years.  Then her father took her apart and said that there was a curse over her head and it was important for her not to see young men at all because something very unpleasant would happen if she should meet such a person.  No one could bring themselves to tell her what that unpleasant change would be.

Now as you read this story, my dear readers, being denizens of a very different kind of world, well into the sexual revolution and imbued with politically correct ideas about gender equality and the nature of homosexual desires, you don’t perceive anything really untoward in the impending transformation of the sweet little princess into a handsome young prince nor even ion the prospect of two healthy, well-educated and amiable young men meeting, falling in love, and entering into a single-sex marriage or civil union, whichever is available in your jurisdiction.

As it was bound to happen, according to the generic laws of fairy tales, albeit somewhat filtered through a mind-nineteenth-century lends of idealism and conformity to bourgeois norms, just before she turned eighteen and at the height of her innocent beauty, the princess chanced to meet a young man.  He was a Prince Charming in every way, and as he was leading a small army across the territory of the King and Queen who were in alliance with his father, they could not forbid his entry into the city nor insult his parents by refusing him hospitality in their home.  So there he was in the palace.  After dinner—which the Princess did not attend on some excuse made up to keep her away from this dangerous young man—he went for a walk in the garden, and while there, by sheer chance—or by the inevitable fate wound up into the curse of the Wicked Fairy—the two young people bumped into one another—quite literally.

This proved to be the first contact, and physical contact at that, between the adolescent girl and the somewhat older but also rather naïve Prince.  They looked at one another, were entrapped by love, and somehow started to stammer out words of love.  At that very moment, the King and Queen who had become aware of what might happen and thus rushed out into the garden to prevent a catastrophe, and arrived, alas, just too late.  The fatal words of love had been spoken and the deep metamorphosis in body and soul of the Princess had started to occur.  This was visible at once, as everyone could see who had gathered around the couple, with the breasts of the girl shrinking, a beard sprouting on her face, and a new strength coursing throughout her body. 

Sighs and cries of grief went all around the group.  It was too late.  The curse had taken effect. 

Then, for this is, to be sure, a fairy tale, something else happened, and in a few moments everyone noticed it too, thus realizing what words the other fairy, the sweet and good one had uttered eighteen years earlier.  The visiting Prince also was undergoing a change.  His blood slowed down and his whole body became softer.  His whispers shrank into his cheeks and chin.  His contours became rounder until he took on the shape of young woman. 

All this can be considered an illusion, the magic of suggestion and dream-fulfilment, or perhaps some strange hormonal reaction to an awakening for sexual instincts too long repressed, an expression of genetic peculiarities occasioned by the shocked look on all the gathered audience around the young man and young woman, as they assumed the gender identities they had always had but could not reveal until this moment.  We can never know for sure because for all his poetic creativity and later understanding of psychology which he showed in his later novels and plays, often about sexual changes, homosexual relationships, and repressed desires, Catulle Mendès never tells us.

Fairy Tales Revisited, Part 1

Sleeping Beauty

When Catulle Mendès retold the fairytale of Sleeping Beauty in his collection of Spinning Wheel Tales published in the middle of the nineteenth cnetury, he has the Prince Charming kiss the young princess awake from her enchanted sleep after a hundred years.  As she comes out of her trance, he tells her all the wonderful things she will have if she marries him and comes to his kingdom; she will have all kinds of pretty and dainty things, and above all she will have his love.  She looks at him through her still sleepy eyes.  Then she says that perhaps she doesn’t want to go off with him.  Instead, she tells him she has been having a wonderful dream, wherein everything he said seems a bit shoddy compared to the riches he has described, and above all she will be a queen and have a king for a husband who has already proved his loyalty for a whole century.  So turning her face away from the disappointed young man, she shuts her eyes and drifts back off into her trance. 

As I was reading this precious little tale, my own thoughts kept going in another direction, showing just how different we are from France in the 1860s.  Mendès accepts along with Madame D’Aulney, Perrault and even the Grimm Brother, that there is no change between the time when Sleeping Beauty fell asleep under the Bad Fairy’s curse and the moment the handsome young Prince Charming made his way through the twisted trees and prickly vines that had grown up over the original palace where the young girl of fifteen or sixteen years drafted off into slumber.  As a child of the twentieth century, this is something that cannot be accepted: time is time.  Though she may have been in some sort of suspended animation for a hundred years, it is not possible for me to imagine that she has not aged at all, and that when she is awoken she would not, as one can read in the story of The Portrait of Vivien Grey (written perhaps only a generation later), immediately start to age and very quickly turn into Mrs Haversham from Great Expectations and then crumble into ancient dust. 

But maybe we can force ourselves to accept some kind of preservation of the princess’s looks and bodily organs during that century of suspended animation.  Can we entertain as a possibility that nothing else in the world has changed?  After all, the fancy gardens of her palace have grown up into a jungle and a few generations have passed during which the story has been retold and the young aristocratic youth has heard her mentioned—and fallen in love with the legend.  She will be close to a hundred years older than him and completely out of touch with all the developments that have occurred.  Anyone who has studied history closely knows that, even assuming a somewhat slower pace of change, styles, tastes, and ideas do change and develop over the years, as does language and modes of perception. 

When Sleeping beauty opens her eyes, rubs the century’s worth of sand away, and blinks herself into a focus on the young man, can she recognize his hairstyle, cut of clothes, and manner of speaking to her? Do his words make any sense to her?  Wouldn’t she be frightened and look about desperately for her parents, her courtiers, her servants—anyone and anything that she was familiar with?  Lying stiff for a hundred years, she would surely want to stretch herself, stand up, walk about a little—even quickly find a privy to relieve herself—and then ask for a bit to eat.

In Mendès’ text, Sleeping Beauty says t hat she has been enjoying such wonderful dreams she never wants to return to normal waking life again.  That means, too, that she has a certain consciousness of the years that have passed bhy.  When she looks at the Prince Charming who has come to rescue her, she feels not only contempt for him as a spoilsport and a callow youth who has no idea of the better vision she has enjoyed, but she realizes she has grown mature and he will never catch up with her.  It wouldn’t take long either for this boy to see that what he fell in love with was something unreal and the woman he has dragged out of the idyll of her own dreams is an irritable old hag.  And should they have both attempted to depart from the Princess’s castle, the world around them would have no sympathy for such a grotesque couple.

So much for fairy tales.