5
Christian Myths and Jewish Archetypes A Remembered Future: A Study in Literary Mythology by Harold Fisch Review by: HERBERT J. LEVINE Prooftexts, Vol. 6, No. 2 (MAY 1986), pp. 185-188 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20689152 . Accessed: 15/06/2014 14:07 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Prooftexts. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 14:07:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Christian Myths and Jewish Archetypes

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

Page 1: Christian Myths and Jewish Archetypes

Christian Myths and Jewish ArchetypesA Remembered Future: A Study in Literary Mythology by Harold FischReview by: HERBERT J. LEVINEProoftexts, Vol. 6, No. 2 (MAY 1986), pp. 185-188Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20689152 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 14:07

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Prooftexts.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 14:07:26 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Christian Myths and Jewish Archetypes

REVIEWS

Christian Myths and Jewish Archetypes Harold Fisch, A Remembered Future: A Study in Literary Mythology. Bloomington:

Indiana Univ. Presss, 1984.

Whether there is a specifically Jewish way of interpreting literary texts has been the subject of considerable recent debate, some of it in these pages. Harold Fisch, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Bar Han University, author of previous book-length studies on the "Hebraic factor" in seventeenth

centrury English literature, the covenant pattern in Hamlet, the figure of the Jew in English and American literature, and S. Y. Agnon, is well-poised to contribute to that debate his own powerful synthesis of European and Jewish learning.

His latest study brings together Shakespeare, and major figures of European and American literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and virtually the entire corpus of major Hebrew writers during the same period, to make several related arguments: first, that the diachronic flow of history offers a better lens for studying literature than do the synchronie patterns of myth; second, that such historical understanding is deeply conditioned by the biblical

paradigm of covenant, which sees history not as timeless, but as open to the

challenges of human trial and error; third, that Jewish writers have shared in the "historical archetypes" through which the general culture has reflected its self-understanding; and fourth, that whereas gentile authors have often

attempted to persuade themselves that a timeless, mythic world could assuage the metaphysical loneliness of modernity, Jewish writers, especially those writing in Hebrew, have never been able to evade the acute burdens of their history.

While mythic archetypes are said by structuralists (literary and psychological) to reveal permanent aspects of human consciousness, historical archetypes,

according to Fisch, reveal and seek to define the specific tensions of historical time. Fisch argues that the literature of modernity is characterized by such

archetypes, many of them originating in the Renaissance, and some of them, like the Faust archetype, terminating in the twentieth century, overtaken by the dreadful consummations of history. Most of his analyses focus on nineteenth and twentieth-century writers, because writers in this period, in Fisch's view,

have been acutely conscious of living in an age of change and crisis and have therefore needed historically-specific archetypes to reflect and to deal with their historical situations.

The book characterizes seven such historical archetypes, virtually all having biblical roots, and for each, Fisch provides examples from European, American, and Hebrew literature. They are: The Faustian pact with the devil; the double,

PROOFTEXTS 6 (1986): 185-188 ? 1986 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 14:07:26 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 3: Christian Myths and Jewish Archetypes

186 REVIEWS

and its Jewish version, the dybbuk; the Wandering Jew, as both Ahasuerus and

Elijah; the conflict of fathers and sons, imaged in the binding of Isaac and in its dark shadow, the crucifixion; the conflict of mothers and sons, in the family and in the mythology of nation and land; the desert, as scene of suffering and

redemption; and finally, the anti-myth of a world of chaos, irredeemable through any ordering paradigm.

Under the sign of these archetypes, Fisch assembles a great variety of texts, whose collocation is itself a contribution to literary history. He identifies type scenes peculiar to each archetype and, what's more, to specific historical moments.

For instance, a mother embraces her young male child, while an unsympathetic father glowers in the background in novels by Proust, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia

Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, and Henry Roth, all written between 1913 and 1934.

Freud, Jung, Robert Graves, and Erich Neumann all find their way to an interest in the Great Mother in the very same period. Fisch wisely notes that her day of

triumph occurred just after the overbearing Victorian father had been expelled from the household.

While Fisch's historical archetypes greatly illuminate the Zeitgeist of specific moments in European and American culture, they also serve him as a framework

against which to contrast the leading themes of modern Jewish literature. In

describing the various demonic bargains of the Faust archetype, he notes the

power of the legend to characterize the autonomous modern man, especially in

America (pace Melville, Hawthorne, Dreiser, Cahan, Faulkner). He contrasts

this with the refusal on the part of Jewish writers (outside America) to embrace the opportunities for power elevated by the myth, in works by Yaakov Gordon,

Meir Letteris, Shin Shalom, and S. Y. Agnon. Several other chapters are organ ized around pointed contrasts of the same sort. The crucifixion story offers

writers the circularity of myth, while the Akedah paradigm offers the open endedness of pilgrimage. gentile wasteland poems, like T. S. Eliot's, the land scape of rock and no water is inevitably a landscape of metaphysical and historical

despair, but in the Jewish imagination, according to Fisch, desert imagery is

inevitably connected to the redemptive experience of the Exodus and Sinai, as he shows with reference to poems written seventy years apart: Bialik's "The

Dead of the Desert" and Abba Kovner's "Canopy in the Desert."

Even where Fisch finds more prominent similarities between Jewish and

gentile literary patterns, he never fails to illuminate the differences. Jews and Gentiles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries both use the archetype of the double, especially the ghostly revenant, as a myth of historical rupture; but Fisch notes how much easier it is for gentile writers to throw off the past than it is for Jewish writers, especially those writing in Hebrew, who are bound to the language of covenantal encounter even in their rebellions against that pre contract. He elucidates the motif of pre-existent documents and contracts that

continue to dominate the lives of subsequent generations in works by Blake, Hawthorne, and James, by Ansky, Agnon, Megged, and Yehoshua. The young Jewish lovers of Agnon feel the same needs as their gentile counterparts to

escape the domination of the past, but nowhere in Jewish literature can Fisch

find any hermeneutic moves to parallel the gnostic ease of Blake, who proclaims a total freedom from "The Rock Sinai."

In addition to the string of explicit contrasts between Jewish and gentile

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 14:07:26 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 4: Christian Myths and Jewish Archetypes

Prooftexts 187

writers, the book also presents more implicit contrasts between Jewish authors

writing in Hebrew and those writing in non-Jewish languages. Where Fisch reserves Hebrew writers for the end of each chapter, he includes the diasporans side by side with their gentile neighbors as carriers of the same historical arche

types. This organizational choice is indicative of the author's Zionist perspective. He treats the writings of Kafka and Bellow, for instance, as expressive of a need to transform the general cultural archetypes to Jewish purposes, but without their quite knowing what those Jewish purposes are. By contrast, Bialik and

Agnon emerge clearly as writers who embraced their role in the Jewish historical

destiny and were therefore able to shape historical archetypes to distinctly Jewish ends. This contrast is clearest in the chapter dealing with mothers and sons. While Bellow and Roth write fictions in which husband/sons struggle with the domination of wife/mother, contemporary Hebrew writers, like Oz and Yehoshua, translate the general cultural rebellion against the mother figure into national and territorial terms. For Fisch, these Israeli contemporaries retain

only two sides of the traditional Jewish triangle?God, land, and people?and therefore have a diminished potential for wholeness; but for the American

writers, who occupy no points on this triangle, he points to a deeper lack. For them, all archetypal roles are fallen and their culture offers no alternative myths to satisfy their needs for wholeness.

This sensitivity to the dynamics of Jewish historical experience is especially evident in Fisch's treatment of the Holocaust, which pervades the book, without

becoming its explicit subject. For many of the writers whom Fisch studies, it is an historic event that defines itself as a mode of understanding history. Mann's Doktor Faustus (1947), because of its understanding of Nazism, is for Fisch the Faust novel to end Faust novels, replacing the exaltation of Faustian man with a lament for the civilization that produced both the myth and its horrifying out come: the destruction of European Jewry. Post-Holocaust myths of continuance,

notably Eli Wiesel's, present the Jew merely as wandering survivor, a keeper of the human image in a time of barbarism, but Wiesel's Jewish wanderers also

metamorphose into versions of Elijah, harbingers of the Messiah. The complete

generational hiatus represented by the Holocaust allows Aharon Appelfeld in The Age of Wonders to attempt a fictional healing of the usually intractable conflict between fathers and sons. At the same time, the unimaginable reality of Auschwitz makes the nihilistic Job and the skeptical Ecclesiastes our postmodern contemporaries in a host of contemporary fictions, Jewish and non-Jewish alike.

Insights like these are related to Fisch's almost religious faith in the vocation of literature. Because the Holocaust can so easily represent the negation of

human memory and hope, it is crucial that the written word after the Holocaust continue to affirm a future. Fisch quarrels with pagan myth and with its latter

day structuralist disseminators, precisely because they deny history, both the historic past and the historic future. For history is the realm in which we can

imagine the potential for growth and change. The retelling of stories, even comfortless tales of intolerable suffering, turns the teller and the reader into witnesses who remember the past for the sake of some hope in the future. The biblical Job, Shakespeare's Gloucester, Kafka's Joseph K, and stories told by survivors of Auschwitz are all equally relevant to this enterprise. If literature is to perform this significant cultural function of creating continuity between past

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 14:07:26 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 5: Christian Myths and Jewish Archetypes

188 REVIEWS

and future, then it behooves us, in Fisch's account, to attend to all the stories of

our cultural past, for the fate of our common planetary culture hangs in the

balance.

The origin of Fisch's view of literature, he plainly tells us, lies in biblical stories, which were told in order to perpetuate the ongoing covenantal history of promise and struggle, suffering and redemption. It is not fanciful therefore to claim that this study in literary mythology is written under the sign of

Deuteronomy: a book about the past, written for a generation that did not

experience that past, but who are instructed by the text to regard that past as if it were their own. For it is always in the hands of a future generation to continue or to abrogate the covenant. Hence, the moving title of this book,

which pays its tribute to a remembered future.

For all of its claims to represent the universal moral function of literature,

this genteel, idiosyncratic book may not win a universal audience in the literary academy. Through the writings of Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman and others, that audience has begun to be receptive to midrash and kabbalah as hermeneutic

models, acceptable to the relativistic secular establishment because of their

seeming challenges to orthodoxy of all kinds. But that same audience has not

put modern Hebrew literature on its mattering map. The integrity of Fisch's book depends on its readers' regarding Jewish writing as supremely important testimony from a once-endangered, but still surviving people. How many non

Jewish literary scholars are likely to agree with such an assessment? And con

versely, how many scholars of Jewish writing are impelled or prepared to understand its significance in the context of European and American literary history? There may be so few qualified to evaluate all the book's claims that

they will go unheard. That would be a real loss to our common culture, for Fisch's deuteronomic blend of historical acuity and moral vision is always in

short supply.

HERBERT J. LEVINE Department of English Franklin and Marshall College

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 14:07:26 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions