How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms
360
How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms
360eBook
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Overview
In this book, Marc Caplan argues that the literatures of ostensibly marginal modern cultures are key to understanding modernism. Caplan undertakes an unprecedented comparison of nineteenth-century Yiddish literature and twentieth-century Anglophone and Francophone African literature and reveals unexpected similarities between them. These literatures were created under imperial regimes that brought with them processes of modernization that were already well advanced elsewhere. Yiddish and African writers reacted to the liberating potential of modernity and the burdens of imperial authority by choosing similar narrative genres, typically reminiscent of early-modern European literatures: the picaresque, the pseudo-autobiography, satire, and the Bildungsroman. Both display analogous anxieties toward language, caught as they were between imperial, "global" languages and stigmatized native vernaculars, and between traditions of writing and orality. Through comparative readings of narratives by Reb Nakhman of Breslov, Amos Tutuola, Yisroel Aksenfeld, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Isaac Meyer Dik, Camara Laye, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Wole Soyinka, Y. Y. Linetski, and Ahmadou Karouma, Caplan demonstrates that these literatures' "belated" relationship to modernization suggests their potential to anticipate subsequent crises in the modernity and post-modernity of metropolitan cultures. This, in turn, leads him to propose a new theoretical model, peripheral modernism, which incorporates both a new understanding of "periphery" and "center" in modernity and a new methodology for comparative literary criticism and theory.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804782555 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/14/2011 |
| Series: | Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| File size: | 852 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
How Strange the Change
Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral ModernismsBy Marc Caplan
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7476-5
Chapter One
Defining Peripheral Modernism
The terms "tradition" and "modernity," to say nothing of "transition," are complicated and procrustean enough to elude succinct definition. One can nonetheless summarize the aspects of life transformed through modernization in terms identified by Michel de Certeau: "The generalization of writing has in fact brought about the replacement of custom by abstract law, the substitution of the State for traditional authorities, and the disintegration of the group to the advantage of the individual." Certeau's synecdochal model for modernity as the transition from orality to literacy can be characterized as "supersessionist." Where previously a culture functioned exclusively through the oral transmission of information, values, and collective narratives, the introduction of writing, whether gradually through technological development or suddenly through the imposition of a new social order, fundamentally transforms the formerly traditional culture. This model seems to be apt for understanding the dramatic transition that took place in the purely oral Yoruba culture when it was subjugated in the nineteenth century by the modern, literate British Empire.
With respect to Eastern European Jewish culture, however, writing was always a factor in cultural life, though Yiddish was primarily reserved for oral purposes (with Loshn-koydesh being used primarily in written contexts). In the context of Eastern Europe, it is helpful to modify an apparently rigid dialectic between the oral and the written with reference to an observation by the medievalist Brian Stock: "Understanding how a textually oriented society came into being presupposes a basic chronology of medieval literacy. If we take as our point of departure the admittedly arbitrary date of A.D. 1000, we see both oral and written traditions operating simultaneously in European culture, sometimes working together, but more often in separate zones, such as oral custom and written law." Stock's starting point coincides with Max Weinreich's ultimately no less arbitrary date of 1000 C.E. for the birth of Yiddish, and underscores therefore both the mediating function of Yiddish between "oral custom and written law," as well as the essential proximity of Reb Nakhman's writing, eight hundred years later, to medieval cultural norms.
In terms of the transition from tradition to modernity, however, it is important to stress that for both Eastern European Jews and Independence-era Africans—in contrast with, for example, Western Europe during the Industrial Era, or China in the postimperial era—tradition and modernity do not separate into discrete, generational demarcations, but rather continue to coexist, interact, and compete with one another for several generations. In fact, in imperial contexts such as colonial Africa and nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, tradition is often a site of political contestation, and is itself a means of resistance against a modernity imposed from above. The reconfiguration of "tradition" from a position of authority within a culture to an oppositional force in the face of an imperial hegemony will be a recurring concern of this comparison.
The use of tradition as an oppositional force takes on added significance when one considers that ethnic-Yoruba writers such as Tutuola are preeminent among Africans in using folk traditions to illustrate the transition from tradition to modernity. In a characteristic strategy for peripheral literature, the Anglophone writing of Yoruba authors has typically used the motifs of folklore to apprehend modernity, rather than using the language of modernity—as in the case of, for example, Chinua Achebe's use of narrative realism in Things Fall Apart, or Camara Laye's use of quasi-anthropological discourse in L'enfant noir—to interpret an ostensibly closed-off past. The decision, therefore, to begin this examination of postcolonial African literature with Tutuola not only accords the author appropriate historical status as a pioneer, but also identifies him as a representative of the enduring and adaptive folk tradition itself. The Anglophone literary tradition that he calls into being derives from oral narrative not only themes or examples of "local color," but a formal model for the evolving relationship between tradition and modernity, orality and literacy.
For both Yiddish and African literature, one of the ways that oral, folkloric culture exerts a structural and thematic influence on written narrative is through the pronounced fantastic, supernatural character of the first books in these respective traditions. It thus comes as no surprise that both the Hasidic worldview from which Reb Nakhman emerged and the traditional Yoruba culture of Tutuola's youth are distinguished by the prominent role each accords to modes of esoteric knowledge that combine features of oral transmission with written semiotics: kabala (in general, the mystical "branch" of the tree of Jewish knowledge) for the Hasidim; divination and transformation rituals among the Yoruba. In Tutuola's example, particularly, despite the power disparity between native and imperial belief systems inherent in the colonial situation, a synthesis between the Yoruba and Christian religious traditions in which he was raised was possible because of the syncretism of Yoruba culture as well as the heterogeneous pluralism of modern life. Both Reb Nakhman and Amos Tutuola, with apparently quite different aims, have therefore fashioned literature out of the folkloric traditions of their cultures. In each instance the narratives that these writers create highlight fantastic situations and spontaneous, supernatural transformation. In the narrative world of both Tutuola and Reb Nakhman, anything can happen, and therefore the formal contours of their writing are distinguished by open-ended, rhapsodical structures and development that is analogical, rather than logical.
That Tutuola and Reb Nakhman should fashion their narratives as associative juxtapositions of sacred and profane sources within their traditions, incorporating both autochthonous and coterritorial folkloric motifs, comes as no surprise, given the relative absence of autonomously literary models in either colonial Africa or Jewish Eastern Europe. Belletristic literature both in Africa and among Jews in Eastern Europe was, after all, a new concept when Tutuola and Reb Nakhman, respectively, began writing. This points to two trends simultaneously within "minor" literatures: their dependence on oral sources for much of their subject matter, particularly at their inception, and their social function as an agent of collective consciousness—though often in parodic, anti-authoritarian terms—in the breakdown of traditional hierarchies at the onset of modernization. As Deleuze and Guattari write: "[B]ecause collective or national consciousness is 'often inactive in external life and always in the process of breaking down,' literature finds itself positively charged with the role and function of collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation. It is literature that produces an active solidarity in spite of skepticism, and if the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community, this situation allows the writer all the more the possibility ... to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility" (Toward a Minor Literature, 17). In Tutuola's Nigeria and Reb Nakhman's Eastern Europe, the "collective consciousness," when conceived along religious or ethnic lines rather than national ones, was in fact neither inactive nor in the process of breaking down, but was being repoliticized through conflicts within the writers' respective communities and between these "minor" cultures and the dominant hegemony. The writing of Reb Nakhman and Tutuola serves as an artistic correlative to these political struggles.
The political motivations of modern Yiddish literature were not lost on the first critics of Yiddish literature—although the political implications of Reb Nakhman's stories often were. Soviet critics during the 1920s and 30s, the only period in which an objective study of Yiddish literature was permitted there, were particularly acute in articulating the sense that Yiddish literature, with its strong emphasis on parody and satire, was the product of what could be termed a "minor" sensibility. Thus Meir Wiener (1893-1941), the most talented of the Soviet Yiddishists, writing about the emergence of Yiddish satire during the haskole, the so-called Jewish Enlightenment, concludes: "These maskilic [proponents of haskole] writers ... used 'humoristic irony,' each in his fashion and each according to his circumstances, so that in the Jewish setting they could overcome the backwardness of [traditional] life." Wiener recognized the political significance of maskilic satire, though not of Reb Nakhman's stories. The modern reader, however, can understand the "revolutionary" character of Reb Nakhman's stories. One reason for adapting Deleuze and Guattari's model to interpret Reb Nakhman, therefore, is the need to liberate him from the conventions of a religious "orthodoxy"—to invoke an anachronism—that he neither identified with nor was accepted into and, at the same time, to resist the agonistic psychoanalytical readings of twentieth-century scholars such as Joseph Weiss or Arthur Green (however impeccable their research), in order to recognize Reb Nakhman, like Kafka, as "an author who laughs with a profound joy" (Toward a Minor Literature, 41). In so doing, Reb Nakhman emerges, like Tutuola, as a new paradigm for "minor" literature. In order to demonstrate the relevance of this paradigm, it is necessary to consider the three essential characteristics of "minor" literature, as Deleuze and Guattari define it: the "deterritorialization" of language, the connection to a political "immediacy," and the "collective assemblage of enunciation" (18).
Considering the first of these characteristics: Tutuola represents more conventionally the type of deterritorialization that Deleuze and Guattari have in mind, that of a colonized writer "forced" to use the imperial language and thus displaced from his native means of expression. For want of more precise terminology, one might refer to this type as "extrinsic deterritorialization." Reb Nakhman's language, whether Yiddish or Loshn-koydesh, represents, by contrast, a kind of "intrinsic deterritorialization" in the sense that both languages are identifiably and deliberately Jewish, yet both are unbound by national borders or political authorities. Reb Nakhman further deterritorializes both languages, and in so doing modernizes Jewish writing, by eroding the traditional division of labor that had instituted a hierarchy of dominant Loshnkoydesh and subordinate Yiddish. Both Tutuola's English and Reb Nakhman's bilingualism represent, to use another Deleuzian term, "paths of escape," and it is clear that each writer plays his linguistic status against the stylistic norms of either language that he draws from. Thus Tutuola consciously bends English to the rules of Yoruba syntax and grammar, reterritorializing the colonial language under the auspices of the colonized. Reb Nakhman, analogously, lets Yiddish determine the Loshn-koydesh versions of his stories, literally and figuratively, from below.
In general terms, such deterritorialization serves four functions, all of them relevant in varying degrees to understanding the peculiar linguistic character of both Tutuola's and Reb Nakhman's respective work: "vernacular, maternal, or territorial language, used in rural communities or rural in its origins; a vehicular, urban, governmental, even worldwide language, a language of businesses, commercial exchange, bureaucratic transmission ...; referential language, language of sense and of culture ...; [and] mythic language.... [V]ernacular language is here; vehicular language is everywhere; referential language is over there; mythic language is beyond" (Toward a Minor Literature, 23). Thus, the fusion of native Yoruba grammar and imperial English vocabulary ensures for Tutuola an underlying vernacular to an otherwise foreign, vehicular language, while his free and fantastic mix of modern technology and traditional cosmology provides simultaneous referential and mythical layers to his discourse. For Reb Nakhman, similarly, Yiddish is both a maternal vernacular and a vehicular language of commerce linking Jews, at least throughout the Eastern Europe of Reb Nakhman's day, otherwise separated by governmental boundaries and local customs. Like Tutuola, Reb Nakhman's Yiddish moreover is often referential in its frequent mention of non-Jewish customs, political institutions, and instruments of warfare and mythical in its extravagant dependence on the Loshn-koydesh component of its fusion vocabulary.
Furthermore, between the two versions of his stories, there is a continuous linguistic porousness: thus, Yiddish words and even whole phrases appear throughout the Loshn-koydesh versions, while unusual and occasionally even unique verbal coinages from Loshn-koydesh are one of the stylistic markers for Reb Nakhman's Yiddish. Both the interrelationship of the Loshn-koydesh and Yiddish versions of these stories, and their subversive potential as deterritorialized discourses, have been overlooked by all but two recent commentators—the major exceptions are David Roskies and Chone Shmeruk—who have usually focused on the Loshn-koydesh versions, to the exclusion of the Yiddish. According to the "conventional wisdom" of these commentators, the Yiddish versions of these stories were published merely to make them accessible to an audience unable to read Loshn-koydesh.
In this manner, Arnold Band writes, "The Hebrew text [of Reb Nakhman's stories] ... conveys a dimension of connotations lost in the Yiddish.... 'Ilan' in Hebrew means a tree and is translated or appears as 'boim' in the Yiddish, but the Hebrew 'ilan' evokes associations with the Kabbalistic 'tree of the spheres' (the world-tree in folklore and anthropology) while 'boim' remains nothing but a tree. In this sense, the Hebrew text must be treated as the primary text first consulted by the translator...." By way of response, just as one can ask of Freud, "when is a cigar just a cigar," so too must one wonder when a tree is merely a tree! The exegetical method that Band's comments exemplify—in which virtually every word of sipurey mayses derives from a previous mystical source—denies, unwittingly, the creative force and bewildering originality of Reb Nakhman's narration, and often distorts a basic comprehension of the stories themselves. Considering the Yiddish version of these stories, analytical deadwood for too many commentators, offers a solution to the dilemma of the Jewish tradition and Reb Nakhman's individual talent. Thus, the Yiddish version of these stories possesses an independent status, though not an autonomous function, from the Loshn-koydesh. If the Loshn-koydesh version of these stories more fully conveys the "multiple levels of Scripture, Talmud, and Zohar operating beneath the narrative surface" (A Bridge of Longing, 30), then the Yiddish version more fully articulates equally important aspects of social satire, creative improvisation, and moral challenge. In such terms, Reb Nakhman's imagery should not be understood as allusions to the tradition so much as metaphors derived from the tradition that reflect the crisis of values confronting Jews at the onset of modernity in Eastern Europe. By focusing exclusively on the Loshn-koydesh and its points of correspondence to the Jewish tradition, contemporary commentators ignore the significance of oral discourse to the structure of the tales and their commentary on the social landscape opening up around Reb Nakhman. To overlook either of these versions is to misapprehend the full range of implications of these stories and their centrality to the development of modern Jewish literature.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from How Strange the Change by Marc Caplan Copyright © 2011 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................xiIntroduction: Apples and Oranges: On Comparing Yiddish and African Literatures....................1
1. Defining Peripheral Modernism....................25
2. One Tale, Two Tellers....................52
Conclusion....................71
3. Haskole and Negritude Compared....................83
4. Education and Initiation in the Narratives of Haskole and Negritude....................120
Conclusion....................156
5. Mendele's Mare and Soyinka's Interpreters....................167
6. Mendele's Benjamin the Third and Kourouma's Suns of Independence....................210
Conlusion....................242
The Future of the "Minor" in Minority Literatures....................245
Notes....................259
Bibliography....................325
Index....................337