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
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.
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