Here we Go Again
Reading Chaucer’s
heart-rending portrait of a child
ritually murdered by
Jews in The Pardoner’sTale….[1]
Oh really? Has this
author, who claims that he spent four years studying the “classics of English
Literature” actually ever read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales? Go back to the text and look at what is there
in the strange narrative recounted of how a little Christian scholar at a choir
school somewhere in the East is killed, not by the Pardoner , but by the
Prioress. The boy, barely old enough to
memorize the Latin hymns he is learning to chant, walks through the central
street in a Jewish quarter of his city singing Alma Redemptoris (Mother of
Mercy) in praise of the Virgin Mary.
Though this little clergeon has no idea of what the words mean,
the people who hear it do, and one of them is enraged, pulls the child off to
the side, stabs him and throws him in a privy.
One ordinary Jew, not the whole community or a cabal of rabbis; a crime
of passion carried out in secret, not a ritual act. There is no drawing of blood to make matzoh,
no attempt to parody or repeat the Crucifixion.
If there is anything religious in The Prioress’s Tale
it is in her attempt to provide an occasion for a miracle by the Virgin Mary
because the not-quite-yet-completely dead victim lying in the open sewer
continues to sing his hymn. When this is
is heard, it is heard by Christian officials in the town who then call upon the
Muslim rulers—for this is an Eastern place where Jews and Christians live by
sufferance under Islamic rule. The boy’s
corpse is carried out of the Jewish quarter to the Christian neighbourhood and
placed in a church. Investigating the victim,
the clergyman removes a piece of the Eucharistic wafer from the child’s mouth
and the singing ceases. The Christian mob, with the tacit approval of the qadi
or Islamic judge, race back to the juderia or calle , grab a group of Jews, and kill them
on a public pyre.
If you look closely at Chaucer’s text and see how he
deliberately avoids all the specific markers of a Blood Libel narrative, you
still have to wonder why he makes the Prioress—that rather foolish, snobbish
and hypocritical woman who was once Lady Eglyntine before she was put into a
convent as its head—tell such a bloodthirsty tale. Not only do we know from her introductory
description in The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales that she has no religious calling and still tries to
maintain her courtly mannerisms, being more concerned with etiquette than faith
or spirituality, and if she has any mercy in her soul, it is squeamishness
about mice caught a trap. But we learn from her own Prologue to
her Tale that she is obsessed by mouths and what goes in and out of
them, and not only words. In fact, a
very close and symptomatic reading of the text indicates that she was probably
abused as a child, if not by her father or brother, then by someone else who
forced her to have oral sex; and her neurotic traits may be why she was taken
off the marriage circuit and placed in a religious house where, too, her own
sexual frustrations fester.
Like those commentators who continue to read The Merchant
of Venice as though it were a vicious slander against Jews, Shylock in
particular, and castigate Shakespeare as an anti-Semite—as certainly T.S. Eliot
and Ezra Pound later were—the author of this essay on Martin Heidegger
undermines his own argument by such an obvious and egregious error. Again a close reading of Shakespeare’s
tragedy (or is it more a tragi-comedy?) can see that whatever Shylock’s faults,
they are given motivation in his environment—a Venice which is ruled over by a
love-sick neurotic Duke, under the thumb of a local Inquisition, and peopled by
Christian hypocrites of various sorts, not least by young lovers who lack
scruples, principles and refined feelings—thus will go against the stipulations
of a will, falsify legal interpretations in court to win a case, and
misconstrue the traditions of courtly love to seduce one another.
As for Adam Kirsch ‘s evaluation of Martin Heidegger as a
Nazi, he is certainly correct there. But not quite so when he tells us that
Heidegger is nonetheless a preeminent twentieth-century philosopher, and that
he still has trouble reconciling his very negative feelings about the man who
joined the Nazi party and oversaw the dismissal of its Jewish professors and
has never felt the need to apologize for his collaboration with the
perpetrators of the Holocaust—and his admiration for Being and Time,
Heidegger’s magnum opus. Perhaps
the “refreshment” of old ideas that Kirsch finds so important in this
philosopher’s work need to be reconsidered in the light who are the actual
followers of Heidegger in the Post-Modernist pantheon of writers (one hesitates
to say “thinkers”), beginning with Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher’s
student mistress. As Stephen Hicks puts it:
Heidegger is notorious for the obscurity of his prose and for
his actions and inactions on behalf of the National Socialists during the
1930s, and he is unquestionably the leading twentieth-century philosopher for
the postmodernists. Derrida and Foucault identify themselves as followers of
Heidegger.[2]
These people started
a movement which these days push for the anti-Israeli measures, make excuses
for terrorism and anti-Americanism, and generate further ideas inimical to the
essential Jewish ideas of truth, justice and mutual responsibility. Kirsch rightly points out that the recently
published and translated Black Books of Heidegger leave no doubt that he
was an out-and-out anti-Semite, tended towards and often coincided with Nazi
principles, and blamed the Jews for any misunderstandings of his work. The conclusion Kirsch reaches then?
Heidegger’s Nazism does not mean we should stop thinking
about him: on the contrary, it is all the more urgent to think about him so we
that we can learn how to think against him.
Is that it? Learning to think against him, not doing
anything at all to counter the pernicious influence he had and still has on so
many of the so-called great great thinkers in the universities and media
today? With misunderstandings of
Chaucer’s tale and Shakespeare’s play constantly recurring in terms that call
for them not to be taught any more or produced on the public stage, resistance
to repeated explanations of how the poem and the tragedy are about
rather than for Judeophobic themes and images that run through most of
our own high culture—and therefore ought to be topics for discussion in classes
and newspapers so as to teach how great writers oppose pernicious ideas—why does Heidegger get away with
it? Of course, I am not arguing for
censorship but for cogent, incisive and sensitive readings of all texts which have
great influence on the world we live in.
If Chaucer and Shakespeare should be taught and produced in terms of
their real meanings, and that includes how generations have misunderstood them
and misused them, why should Heidegger be allowed to stand as an unquestioned major
source of contemporary thought and not be revealed through his disciples and
avatars and thus downgraded to the dangerous background?[3]
[1]
Adam Kirsch, “Heidegger was really a Nazi” The Tablet (26 September
2016).
[2]
http://www.stephenhicks.org/2009/11/30/heidegger-and-postmodernism-ep/
[3]
A convenient list of who these pleasant folk are can be found in Giulio Meotti,
“Meet the Western Charlatans Justifying Jihad” Gatestone Institutre (28
September 2016) online at https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8741/western-intellectuals-jihad;
they include Michel Orfray, Thomas Piketty, Peter Sloterdijk, Jürgen Habermas,
Slavoj Zisek, José Saramago, Jean Baudrillard, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dario Fo…
No comments:
Post a Comment