An Essay on Shadows: Part 1

What Colour Are Shadows?

L’“inter-dit” et l’ëntre-dit ne sont jamais—ou plutût ne doivent jamais être—un discours périphérique, mais un parole qui prend naissance dans le texte et qui continue à habiter le texte: va-et-vient incessant entre le texte et cet “autre-texte” auquel il donne naissance.  L’ ”autre-texte” n’est pas un orphelin: il est une généalogie de dire.[1]

“The ‘word-between’ and the ‘word-across’ are never—or rather should never be—a peripheral form of speech, but a statement that takes its birth in the text and that continues to inhabit the text: coming-and-going incessantly between the test and the other-text’ to which it gives birth.  The ‘other text’ is not an orphan: there is a genealogy of speaking.”

But what was this existential reality?  Does it include the shadows that flitted through it as well as the more usual topics that historians and literary historians deal with?  The point of this book, as we have remarked from the first words set down, has been that nothing is as it seems to be, and therefore any account of the Dreyfus Affair and the people and events associated with it has to be constructed and constituted through other methods than those normally manipulated by historians and critics.  Speaking of the Crypto-Jews and Marranos of the Iberian Peninsula and in their long exile throughout the world, José Faur describes them as living in the shadow of history.  By this, of course, he means that they have deliberately chosen to hide their Jewishness in a variety of ways and consequently to maintain that inner faith in the Law of Moses from the prying eyes of the Inquisition, nosey neighbours jealous and fearful of their otherness still somehow visible in their successful way of life, and often, too, from their own sense of guilt or shame when they feel deeply in their intelligence and spiritual hearts the power of the Christian religion they or their ancestors chose—or had imposed on them. This situation is complicated enough.  When it comes to talking about Alfred Dreyfus, however, our notion of his life in the shadows requires even more complex patterns of thought. Let us begin with five ways of conceiving shadows.

The rain shadow is a metaphoric use that addresses the problem of regions of the world shielded by mountains, strong oceanic currents or wind-patterns that keep sufficient amounts of precipitation from falling and thus allowing rich agricultural farming to occur.  In this sense, a shadow does not mean, as we normally use the word, a deprivation of light but of something else, here rainfall.

Ghosts, phantoms and other imaginary beings who normally dwell on the other side—the side beyond normal life, which is death in some form or another—whether it be below or beyond our commonsense reckoning are supposed to bring in their appearance or unseen presence the dark shadow of this otherness.  Shades are the washed out, faded, desiccated, not quite transparent residue of what they once were as living creatures in our world, or what can be faintly and eerily of their other-world reality when visiting this place of our existence.  They are like shadows insofar as they do not seem to have substance and only glide over and through the realities of what living beings must confront as tangible objects.

Such negative presences—returning revenants of past life or foreshadowings of what lies in our own inevitable future lives—are not the same as the shadow-drawings or cut-outs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries known as silhouettes, a term given after Etienne de Silhouette, a mid-eighteenth-century Minister of Finance in France.  Such silhouettes or Schwarzkoppfen, to use the German term, not only give a more or less reductive outline of a person’s head and bust, but in removing all the subtle textures, tones and shadows that individualize the face and posture of the model come to depend on careful attention to contours of the side-long image.  The surprize in the making and viewing of such drawings—or occasionally woven or metal-crafted pictures—lies in the emergence of specificity from what at first seems only a non-descript blob of solid black or other dark tint.  Unlike the shadow puppets in Southeastern Asia and the Ottoman Empire where articulated shadow-forms are elaborated into lengthy and intricate dramatic performances, thus circumventing Islamic objections to depictions of human or divine figures, or, in earlier manifestations, seeming to represent shamanic illusions of the other side of life or history, the fashionable portraits produced in the years prior to—and perhaps evoking the invention of—photographs. 

Ironically, then, it may not at all have been the increasing emphasis on realistic portraiture which developed the taste for photographic realism, with its sense of documentary permanence—formal pictures of the bourgeois family and its possessions, momento mori of deceased children, legal records of significant historical events—but the silhouette as the foreshadowing of the photographic plate and the film negative, the inverted image of black and white that waits to be developed into an illusion of still life (nature morte) and. somewhat later, the trick of motion pictures, flickering images projected on a screen, as the magic lantern once cast its shadows on smoke-filled rooms¸ often with their mediation of mirrors or other distorting lenses.

Meanwhile, as the techniques of photography advanced, impressionist painters discovered that shadows were not black areas where light did not fall, their presence in an outdoor scene of country or city life indicating an interference, a complete lack of colour and light, as was always assumed—in the same discrepancy from what was truly to be seen in the most familiar of appearances, say, of horses legs while galloping, flowers unfolding to the sunlight, or droplets of water crowning upward on a pond.  Instead, what these artists found themselves able to see was that shadows were part of the colourful scene, a modality of light, a continuation of the total picture. 

In modern popular thought, the idea of a shadow, then, can stand in for a negative light, hidden beneath the surface of ordinary reality, able to reveal things that normally pass unnoticed, as the comic-book and radio hero detective, Lamont Cranston, himself the hidden one who sees into the dark shadows others believe to be the truthful and real substance of life.  Thus the ominous voice at the start of each evening broad cast would intone these words:

“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Only the shadow knows.”

—Lamont Cranston, The Shadow

It is only one kind of shadowy being that can recognize the presence of the other, one on the side of justice and moral order, the other a manifestation of evil and disorder. 

Another truism found in song and film versions of reality presents the shadow as the virtual twin of an ordinary person, the friend who is so close that he or she shares the same space, thoughts and motivations of the other, as in this version of a song from the late 1920s updated in the next generation by Sammy Davis Jr and Frank Sinatra, playing on the racial contrast in the appearance of them both:

Like the wallpaper sticks to the wall

Like the seashore clings to the sea

Like you’ll never get rid of your shadow

Frank, you’ll never get rid of me.

Me and my shadow.

—Dave Dreyer, Billy Rose and Al Jolson [2]

The cartoon cliché of a person trying to walk away from his or her own shadow but which clings to them like flypaper suggests how the image does not depict a phenomenon of blocking out the rays of light or shielding an area from the burning sun, but rather as an extruded portion of the object itself, a mysterious dark and featureless doubling of a person’s outline.  This song also hints at another concept of the shadow, that of a complementary or alternative version of the self, an embodied syntagmatic form shaped by its relationship to the original. 

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[1] Marc-Alain Ouakin, Le livre brûlé: philosophie du Talmud (Paris: Lieu Commun (1993)  p. 69.  Ouaknin explains that he uses “inter-dit” in the sense of a negative mitzvah, a proscription in the Law, an interdiction.  Our usage is somewhat different; see discussions on text and anti-texts,  non-texts and un-texts.  What is important here, however, is the sense of a dynamic, inter-textual relationship that generates new words, meanings and implications, on the one hand, and on the other, a continuously cybernetic, reflexive and self-correcting process that, while expanding and contracting, also refines, renews and enhances thoughts and feelings.  As one discourse casts its shadow over and through the other, there is a mutually refractive, reflective and prismatic merging of light and darkness, color and its absence.  The shadow here is akin to the Shekhinah, both the presence and the absence, the point of intersection and the impasse which cancels out signification. 

[2] Wikipedia: "Me and My Shadow" is a 1927 popular song. Officially the credits show it as written by Al Jolson, Billy Rose, and Dave Dreyer; in fact, Billy Rose was exclusively a lyricist, Dreyer a composer,^[1] and Al Jolson a performer who was often given credits so he could earn some more money, so the actual apportionment of the credits would be likely to be music by Dreyer, lyrics by Rose, and possibly some small contribution by Jolson.

Dear Readers and Not so Dear Readers

To My Dear Dear Readers and the Others who Really do Matter

Few and far between as you are, my dear critical audience, that is, aside my long-time friends who have actually read my books and made pertinent comments about them, but, you others, alas, what have you done?  You have missed the point over and over again.  So I am writing to you—not to those others who I am deeply indebted to for your loyalty and support over many years, although, alas, that none of you (my critics, in the bad sense as well as the good) will ever read this letter.  Or if you do read this, I am sure you will not catch the ironies, let alone the sarcasm, or see yourself in the distorting mirror of satire.  My true friends, however, may enjoy this exercise in undisguised spite.

Take a for instance.  In my study of the letters written between Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus, I argued that they developed a secret language and reinforced their own commitment to carry on in the fight to prove his innocence—and to carry on, that is, not to give in and die; and they did this, I claimed, through close and careful reading and contextualizing of their epistles, using a language saturated with Jewish feelings, images and ideas.  In each of the three studies of Dreyfus, I went over these letters again and again, adding new information, drawing new analogies, and discussing the implications of what this couple did.  Did any of the reviews even see this?  Did anyone say I was wrong and show why?  No.  I would be glad if someone took issue with my argument, and then there could be an advance in understanding.  Or when I spent long chapters discussing what books Alfred read and commented upon his prison cahiers, I spoke at length about what his tastes were, how he evaluated the historiography, and the ethical issues, and thus he was not a dull and narrow-minded engineer, as historians usually say.  Did they notice, either, that I moved Lucie Dreyfus up from the footnotes or closer to front stage, because she was not just the little dutiful mother and wife taking care of things at home—she moved in with her parents, the Hadamards, after Alfred’s arrest—but an active participant in the Affair.  And she chose the books to be sent to her husband on Devil’s Island, knowing what he liked, what they had read together before, and what would help him to read.  He had asked for “easy books”, but she sent him substantial titles.  She responded to his comments and encouraged him say more.  But do the reviewers mention any of this?  Not a one.

mide

 I even looked at the poems Alfred Dreyfus read and the poems he wrote in those notebooks.  I spent hundreds of pages discussing the drawings he made and what they might imply, above and beyond the simplistic notion that they are merely empty doodles, obsessional markings of a defeated and broken man. I also argued at length that Alfred’s preference in painting was for Meissonier rather than the Impressionists or Neo-Impressionists, and that this was not a sign of tastelessness or ignorance, but a deliberate choice and shows him as a particular kind of intellectual of the 1890s ; and I even ventured several times to consider what also might be considered a Jewish sensibility to the arts evinced in his personality and why this is important for assessing his capacity to survive the long ordeal he was subjected to during his court martials and his tortured stay on Devil’s Island.  Did any book- reviewer take issue with these opinions?  They never touched on the matter, even though these are points at the heart of my studies.

Or did any of the reviewers consider what the discussions of how Dreyfus, while appreciating the efforts of Emile Zola on his behalf during the Affair to have him released from prison and given a fair trial on the original charges, never mentioned any of Zola’s novels; but rather, again, as a matter of literary taste and ethical predispositions as a Jew, he remarked on other nineteenth-century novelists?  He especially liked George Sand, and also read Paul Bourget and Jules Verne.  Not a word from the critics.  And when, despite Alfred’s own preferences, I analysed in great detail some of Zola’s novels and showed that he provides a psychological lens through which we can evaluate Dreyfus’s mind during his life.  Not a word.

Apologia pro vita sua:

Moreover, I tried to show how important it is to embed the Affair and the persons concerned in it within the literary strategies of the time, even going so far as to show through a point by point comparison how the most dramatic scene in the second military tribunal at Rennes in 1899 reproduced the dynamics of fictional and even fantasy works of the time, as though, on the one hand, it was only possible for the journalists in the courtroom to register what they were witnessing in the terms of such a scenario as a bull-baiting or a lovers’ quarrel; and on the other for the actors in the historical event to perform their official roles and deep psychological performances of defending the principles that thought were at stake in those terms—and in those actions, images and words. 

It isn’t as though I have kept my method and theory a secret.  In the introductory statements, in the summing up of conclusions in the last chapters, and throughout the body of the text and especially in long footnoted commentaries, I write out precisely what I was trying to do, how and why it seems to me important to do so.  At best, the reviewers—and you can count them on the fingers of one hand—pick up a word (like midrash or Marrano), wrench it out of context, and read it in precisely the way I say I will not use it. Yes, I know it is often said that reviewers want authors to write a different book altogether, the one that the reviewer wishes he had—or actually had—written himself. In the case of my books, it seems, they create the kind of text they think they can easily hate and try to demolish my efforts on the basis of such a false perception. 

Eiron versus Alazon

Not that everyone has done that.  As mentioned, there are a few reviews and comments that are positive, and that make helpful suggestions,.  But I already know who they are, and they know who I am.  They don’t take me for a novice, but know I am already past 75 years of age.  They know that I am not ambitious to flatter or to garner points towards a promotion, since my retirement from the university is already well in the past. My friends are my friends because we have discussed literature and ideas, sometime argued, but enjoyed our conversations.  We also know that the world is in a parlous state and that what is needed is style and humour, insight and understanding, things not locked into fundamentalist ideologies, not tortured into fatuous discourses, as well as variety, wide-reading and patience.  Can it be that there are only a few dozen of us left in the world?  Can we confront the huge onrush of bad taste and censorship that is sweeping down to inundate the world?

Alas, I have learned to my own regret over more than fifty years of fighting the system or the establishment that, because I am not well-known, do not have ambitious graduate students fighting for jobs, and am very very far away from all your seminars, conferences and confabulations, you can use me as the whipping boy for ideas and styles you cannot risk castigating in other scholars. The very first adverse comment ever made about an essay in the 1960s I had submitted to a learned journal was that “you young scholars” all do such and such and have no respect for real (that is, the evaluator’s) knowledge: in other words, I was typical of the new generation and yet, because nobody knew who I was, or who were my academic advisers, mentors or advocates were, I could be attacked and made the representative of the new school that threatened the old guard.  Well, of course, I was flattered by the inclusion in a list of the brilliant minds whom the writer of that report made of what he was frightened and appealed by, though crushed by my first real rejection letter as a new player in the field.  Though I knew the names on the person’s list as types of the new school, I never imagined myself as one of them; and indeed, even back then, considered myself a maverick resisting the turgid linguistic formulas they used and the conceptual procrustean beds they were forcing all of literature (or literary criticism) to lie down on, nevertheless I had an inkling that my career was not going to be an easy one. If only, the wish came then and then again for a number of years, the critics would speak about what I actually had submitted and tell me what could be done to improve my approach. 

Well, the years went by, and my career trajectory, as they say, led me down some pretty strange byways and off into even more bizarre parts of the world, so that—I can’t say, I took the path of least resistance—my interests and my tastes, as well as my scholarly predilections and propensities were shaped by research visits in Romania, Yorkshire and Malaysia, my topics shifted towards folklore, oral literature and psychoanalysis, and my publications seemed to become more and more eccentric.  But while the specific topics moved from geographical or cultural zones to others seemingly more bizarre, and historically bounced from medieval through Enlightenment back to classical and biblical times, anyone can see who bothers to look can see a consistency of approach and a coherence of concern outside of the usual parameters of academic specializations.  Stories from the Solomon Islands, legends of first contact between Australian Aborigines and Dutch sailors, Romanian fairy tales and fourteenth-century English romances, the preaching of fourteenth-century friars and string-games among Papua New Guinea tribesmen—no wonder the conservative thinkers of the new post-modernism couldn’t figure out what I was doing! Then when I started to write about Marrano authors in the seventeenth and eighteenth century in England, or about Crypto-Jews in the American Southwest as continuing the old medieval Maimonidean debates of four hundred years earlier in Iberia, or Alfred Dreyfus and his wife composing kabbalistic lover-letters to one another in the late 1890s—how can conventional bourgeois eyes see what I was doing.  The critics looked at the page and didn’t recognize anything there that looked like history, biography, sociology or whatever. 

One reviewer in a philosophical journal (of all things) said, as he couldn’t make any sense of my book, he decided to read it aloud to his little son in the bath tub, and this infant by his yowling confirmed to him that what I wrote was incomprehensible.  A most astute point. 

Then in an annual summing up of research in Middle English Studies, a scholar wrote that my book on Geoffrey Chaucer as a Secret Jew had no new ideas at all: in other words, instead of saying that my interpretation of the fourteenth-century poetry or the few facts of the poet’s life were utterly outrageous and untenable, there was nothing at all worth commenting on. Another important critical insight for which I am deeply obliged.

I also know that you take your professions very seriously and have no time for upstarts, but how can you miss out on my jokes and quips, or accuse me of not having a sense of humour when I take up the pose of a prancing fool and posturing madman and you think I am speaking in some flat and unselfconscious way?  For the past twenty years, especially, I have developed—or at least tried to—a particular style, technique and voice.  And as I do so, I alert the critical commentator, again in the body of the text and in the footnotes (which are so previous to me as alternative and ancillary textual spaces).  How can you not notice, dear reader?  It’s not because I am being perverse—no, maybe I am, in the most recent of my books, and so I do want to throw these squishy pies in your face—but because I want to knock over the idols, strip away the veils of post-modernist jargon and neologisms, throw some light into the dark corners of arcane scholarship, or rather, having smashed the shells of old-fashioned pedantry and academic seemliness, I want to reassemble those shards into new potent shapes and to extract from the musty crevices and greasy stains, a different kind of light—or at least to direct those remaining little beams of original light through a series of witty lenses so as to give them new potency.