Vitality of New Jewish Ideas
There are times when people tell me that I am too intellectual. What can I do? Pretend that I am something else. I try to speak clearly and trust that the people who care about what I am talking about are smarter than my critics think they are. All of which I say to introduce a quote that is altogether intellectual:
"The poet derives his conception of a poem from those of other poets, the novelist his idea of a novel from his predecessors. An author always creates in a tradition, and his work has an international context. For obvious reasons, this holds true for such primordial literary elements as line, meter, plot, and dialogue, which are directly connected with the idea of the work; but it also holds good for the great variety of forms and themes that are the tools of the literary trade. …texts are situated in the midst of a set of conventions with regard to techniques, imagery, and stylistic devices as colored by the literary presuppositions of the period …[Subject] matter has a formal value; it cannot, therefore, be placed opposite to, or side by side with, form." [Forgive the very gendered quality of the citation.] From, Introduction to the Comparative Study of Literature, by Jan Brandt Corstius.
Comparative literature is a specialized field of academic study where a work from one national literature is compared with that of another national literature. This is difficult, because the person doing the comparison needs to have a strong background in both national literatures and each of the languages associated with them. While this is viewed in academia as something that one would only do in academia, for Jews this is absolutely not the case. While the average Jew of today will not have a high level of competency in multiple languages, the average Jew will be trying to integrate the literature of their cultural surroundings with the large body of Jewish texts, from the Hebrew Bible up to Nathan Fielder’s “The Rehearsal.”
The body of Jewish textuality is quite diverse. Within the Hebrew Bible there are a variety of genres, uses and styles. There is poetry and prose,song, narrative, law, philosophy, theology, proverb and parable.The language that is used and the way that it is used changes within the body of the Tanakh. There is a genre of ancient novels that is outside of Biblical canon but not that much later than the Biblical era. There is Midrash, otherwise known as Aggadah, or Rabbinic Literature that remixes the elements of the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew of the Mishnah clarifies and simplifies Biblical Hebrew and breaks free of complete attachment to the Biblical text and precedent. Talmud interprets the Mishnah. Formally, it is tied to the Mishnah, but in reality it introduces a dialogic style into Judaism in a way that seems old, but is really new.
The language of Jewish prayer began within the Hebrew Bible, but it has become ever more complex, detailed and sprawling. The medieval period saw a culture of great Jewish poets who worked as religious poets, religious poets and philosophers. Even as the body of Jewish legal writings and encyclopedic codes of Jewish law were accumulating, the Zohar and other kabbalistic texts emerged in Hebrew or in pseudo-ancient Aramaic. In Italy, history and the language of history entered Hebrew and enriched the Jewish imagination. Yiddish became the first language of Jewish theater, cabaret and popular song. Throughout the Diaspora hybrid Jewish languages emerged and accumulated speakers and texts, Yiddish and Ladino most prominent among those languages. The revival of Hebrew as a modern language and the repurposing of Yiddish as an engine of high culture revolutionized the range of those languages. As they became modernizing engines they absorbed the idea of journalism and used that platform to bulk up the vocabularies of each. They accepted external forms into their vocabularies like the feuilleton and the sonnet.
Yiddish popular culture helped create the language of modern theater, film and especially, comedy. Jewish writers began to create substantial bodies of works in many genres in vernacular languages like English, German and Russian.
The sense that Jews have ever lived in a situation where the texts that a Jew encountered would not require some kind of internal habit of cultural comparison, at least over the last 2000 years, seems unusual and uncommon: a kind of aphasia of the Jewish mind.
That Jews are exposed to such a broad range of forms leads to a truth that we can observe about our people, as a whole, are ready to take on any subject matter.
Corstius, further on in his survey, breaks down the periodization of literary criticism. This is a very long discussion that is truly too intellectual to deal with. But what I learned from that periodization is that we are somewhat limited in what we can do by the place in which we find ourselves in that periodization. Just as the later books of the Hebrew bible pretend to use the Hebrew of the earlier books while proving that they no longer have a perfect understanding of that Hebrew, the author of the Zohar proved from their Aramaic that they are not from the early Rabbinic period as they claim to be.
Corstius provides his own example in the Poems of Ossian, purported to be translated from earlier Scottish sources, but actually composed by James Macpherson in the late 1700s. Macpherson made continuous use of Celtic folklore and Biblical. However, rather than using them to illustrate God’s hand in the world, he used those themes to explore the emotions of the narrator. While sticking to the forms of his times and disguising the time of his work’s composition he created an innovation, romanticism, that created a new era in literary theory. Thus, even when we are tied to the forms of our age it is possible to bootstrap ourselves into new approaches to those forms. Since we live within history we are always going to be better able to understand our times if the tools that we have (in this case, literary forms) work for us well.
Although we continue to live in a literary era defined by romanticism the forms that we have available to us have been beaten into new shapes. Many of these forms exist across the artistic range from art to literature to music and dance, even into architecture. I have written about some of the significant events and movements that have expanded our range of expression: Futurism, Suprematism, NO! Art, Fluxus, and Outlaw Poetry for example. I might also have written about Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Jazz (Black Classical Music), Gospel, Modern Classical Music, Cabaret, Punk and Hip Hop/Rap/Electronica.
We exist today in a world where these are forms with vitality. We can continue to derive [subject] matter from the older forms that come out of our tradition and try to keep those forms “pure” even as our use of them will be, as ever compromised with the forms of our own era. However, I think that, in the long run, Jewish culture will be enriched by serious encounters with the forms that are most alive and young in our times. We do not need to revive or renew our own culture, or create a template for interaction with recent developments in world culture. Our culture is as alive and new as the amount of time we engage with it, but we will benefit from the added depth that a continued engagement with the forms of our time will provide.
