In their study of the letters between Sarah Bernhardt, the Jewish
actress of the nineteenth century known as the Divine Sarah, and Samuel Pozzi,
her lover and friend, whom she often addressed as Doctor God, the two
authors—Caroline de Coste and Francesca Miller write:
Despite France being the birthplace of the
Enlightenment, anti-Jewish sentiments were deeply embedded within the French
psyche and nurtured by the most reactionary elements of the Catholic church…[i]
What exactly does this mean? It
is a wonderful conceit, that is, a complicated metaphoric figure of speech with
resonance going out in many important directions. Or is it? Perhaps it sounds more impressive than it
really is.
First of all, the opening metaphor is that of France as a birthplace of
the Enlightenment. Usually, the term is
taken to mean a geo-political and historical moment when some new set of ideas
come into being. But a birthplace can
also be a room or a bed or a body in which an infant is born, emerges from its
mother’s womb.
Secondly, the passage develops that birthing image into an experience
that precedes the moment of emergence from the mother’s body, something
contrary and hostile transforms the birthplace into an unwelcoming environment,
a place where the foetus—not yet born at all—lies embedded in a poisonous,
noxious matrix, the French psyche; or, the neonate child, having passed through
the birth canal and entered into the world of reality, politics and religion is
immediately removed from the protective warmth of the mother’s person and
embedded into the mentality of the French nation.
The newly born Enlightenment thus is adopted by a wicked step-mother,
placed in her bed which is filled with most reactionary elements—anti-Semitic
sentiments—of the French Catholic Church, there to be suckled not on the
nutrient rich and comforting milk of her breasts but by two dugs of
superstition and calumny; and what should have been a loving environment is now
one that seeks to poison the ideas of freedom, tolerance and rationality, the
hallmarks of this period of Light.
Coming back to the original statement, what exactly do these writers (or
any others who use this common expression) mean when they say that a nation, a
country, a historical moment is the birthplace of some intellectual
movement? Most likely they wish to say
in this figurative way that a significant number of persons and institutions
are in a state of mind ready to change their basic paradigms for understanding what
is natural, normal and reasonable from an inherited set of cognitive and
affective models to something more satisfying and stimulating. The country would then mean less the
geographical features and the climatic conditions under which people live than
emotional and social attitudes that are shared by those who are considered
authorities. When these paradigms start
to shift and the leading thinkers of the age are prepared to entertain and
develop new ideas, then the time is right; or, to put it negatively, when the
political and spiritual leaders cannot muster sufficient power to resist the
new ideas, then the innovators find they have room to manoeuvre, communicate
with one another, and begin to
consolidate a new set of paradigms.
And when the authors here state that, despite this revolutionary shift
in power and paradigms, the new ideas begin to emerge in recognizable form and
to influence the day to say life of the people who constitute the nation, a
counter-revolutionary event happens, and the older ideas and feelings
return—the reactionary elements re-assert themselves. They snatch the new-born infant from its
mother and make it their own. These
negative attitudes, emotions and institutionalized forces prove to be more
deeply embedded in the bed of the nation’s psyche to be over-ridden, and when
they take charge of the baby they change it into something ugly and hateful
because they nurture it on old ideas, images and attitudes of anti-Semitism.
Yet does this mean that the Enlightenment in France can be imagined as a
Jewish phenomenon? Or rather that the essential element constituting it is a
willingness to embrace the Jew, tolerate the religion, and allow its adherents
to flourish as equal citizens of the post-Revolutionary society? In other words, that the recrudescence of
Jew-hatred in its new guise of nationalistic reaction, religious bigotry, and
racial biology is at once made possible because of the Enlightenment and at the
same time a denial of its very heart and soul?
All of this is figurative, as said from the very beginning. It is an elaborate conceit pulling together
two different kinds of metaphor, one of birth, the other of embedding. The first is physiological and therefore
physical, the second is social, cultural and therefore political. In the opening gambit, the country—the place,
the time and the people then living and thinking and feeling there at a given
moment—give birth to a set of enlightened ideas and attitudes. In the next, the bed-psyche of the nation
remains hostile and is in fact more noxious than ever because unquestioned,
deeply-held ideas and beliefs, have been put on the defensive, have reacted
with new rationalizations, and self-consciously seek to purify themselves by
purging the unwanted, dangerous and disease-ridden other they suddenly feel
about to destroy everything they hold dear and true.
To speak of a national consciousness or unconsciousness can only be
taken as a figure of speech itself.
Individuals have minds, collectivities, large and small—from couples,
families, neighbourhoods and up—have something else which they share more or
less in a generalized sense. It depends
on what is heard in church, at school, along the streets, and on radio or
television. Much more it depends on
kinds of child rearing practice, wherein the more interfering and violent
discipline involved, the more likely people grow up susceptible to shared
trance-like states, regressive visions, and mob reactions. Yet even earlier
modes of domestic abuse—from neglect, abandonment to overly-controlling—create
collective dependencies to the point of diminished independence and
individuality. States then are set up
with more than just hierarchical structures to which most subjects find their
normal affects and intimate awareness shaped by authoritative models. But these versions of collective behaviours
become most acute in times of public crisis: war, famine, plague, drought,
flood, sustained deprivation of all manner of necessaries. All this, by the way, is commonplace
psychohistorical explanation for interactive fantasy life. How else explain the historical occasions
when large proportions of a population act out the dreams of a few neurotic or
psychotic individuals or when crowds consistently make decisions contrary to
common sense and their own best interests as expressed in earlier paradigms of
normal morality?
Such may be the basis for the conceit of painful, extended birth of new
ideas and the humiliating and grief-filled sense that all that has been
promised and brought into view as a better world is snatched away by old devils
in guises.
[i] Caroline de Coste and Francesca Miller, The Diva and Doctor God: Letters from Sarah Bernhardt to Doctor Samuel
Pozzi (XLibris, 2010) p. 207
