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.
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