সাহিত্যমূল্যে তোরাহ্ /The Torah as Literature
‘স্বরান্তর’ পত্রিকা, তাদের নববর্ষ সংখ্যায়, জানতে চায় কোন বই পড়ে এখনো বিমূন্ধ বা বিস্মিত হই. আমার নিজের একান্ত ভাবনাই বা কি সে বই সম্বন্ধে. কেন পাঠক নতুন করে সেই বইয়ের প্রতি মনোযোগী হবেন . এসব প্রশ্নের উত্তর তো ঠিক দেওয়া সম্ভব নয়. তবু… Sahityamulye Torah ___________________________ The English Version: Swarantar, the Bangla magazine, asked me to name a book that still staggers my sensibility. Why should readers return to such a composition? Naturally, these are partly rhetorical questions. Still… The Torah as Literature ____________________ A literary appreciation of the Hebrew Bible/Tanakh– and especially the first five books of the Old Testament called the Pentateuch (the five scrolls) or the Torah (teachings/laws) – risks blasphemy. But it also risks something more fundamental: how to remain true to the spirit of the Torah and yet reserve an aesthetic sense while reading and immersing in an ancient journey. Harold Bloom had long ago observed that though Homer and Plato have turned safely secular for us, the Bible still retains an aura, even if one is not a fundamentalist. Does Yehwah’s numinosity disturb us in the same way as Lear’s or Prince Myshkin’s? What was that world of strange ordeals and aims that seems universal and yet so distant from our modern conditions of living and acting? How can one get closer to the literal sense of the Hebrew original and yet indulge in a cognitive music that is largely metaphorical and interpretative? Shakespeare or Homer does not help us to solve our problems, and neither does the Bible. On the other hand, the ethical urgency in the Torah is a consideration that one might like to address, especially since its ambit does not tally with modern expectations: it therefore creates an altogether different order of human and natural interaction, worked through a terse and coiled energy that comes from its language, narrative and worldview. The Torah can and must be looked at separately since strictly speaking the Bible is not a book at all but an anthology and “a set of selections from a library of religious and nationalistic writings produced over a period of one thousand years.” So there are diverse styles and points of view, though there have been certain attempts to homogenize it, like that of the whole ideological project in commissioning the King James’ version. There are also a series of textual issues like duplication, omissions, redactions, interpolations and contradictions. In this context, it is particularly important to dwell upon the forms that engage the Bible. For instance, many of the compositions in the Psalm-book, which were often used in the ceremonies of the Second Temple, are what modern literary scholars call lament. Similarly the whole text, especially the Torah, is filled with prophecies and oracles, short narratives (etiologies) and patriotic poetry, hero-stories, trickster-episodes, proverbs, pronouncements, and parables. This does not mean that the Torah is purely a sequential narrative. Each of the five books in the Torah—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy—are complete in themselves. In fact, the question of literary form in the Bible is complicated by the fact that Biblical writers often wanted to submerge their individuality in the chosen form. The personal stamp therefore, is concealed in the communal narrative. To make a journey through the Torah is also to be aware of the history of a people and how the God of ancient Israel, their deity, stepped into human history and arranged events in their midst and in the process revealed himself to his people. To quote from the Talmud about the origin of the narrative—“God spoke them and Moses wrote them with tears.” We start from a point with an understanding at which Yahweh chose one man Adam (later Abraham) as a special entity and promised that Adam’s descendents would one day become part of a great nation. The narrative of the Torah is constructed out of the stories of Israel’s ancient heroes and covers the first 700 years of Israel’s existence. After the creation of the world and humankind and its spreading all over the world, the account follows Abraham’s descendents into slavery and out of it and their gradual welding into a nation with a covenant relationship with Yahweh. Finally they come to the verge of a land (Canaan) that they have been promised as their own. This extended narrative has also been called a salvation history. Along with the narrative we also encounter two other gifts to humanity in the Torah: one, a sense of the gradual ritualization of an ancient travelling people and two, an understanding of civil laws (halakah) that becomes part of a commune as it evolves and matures. Reading the Torah is a basis of Jewish public life. Needless to say, the Torah was actually composed over a period of many centuries by a process of culling, patching, rewriting and amplifying by anonymous writers (this is sometimes called the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis). This is not to undermine the authority of the scripture but in fact to strengthen the power and force of numerous believers over centuries coming together to forge an extraordinary document. One can see right from the first book—Genesis—that a literary artist of great acumen composed it. The organization is precise, separate acts of creation are carefully set in parallel form and the movement austere, solemn and dignified. The deity creates Adam by descending to the barren earth, getting hold of some clay and then breathing life into it (the Hebrew word used is yatsar—to mould). The creator himself is one of the actors in the drama. While the first account of creation is complete in itself, the second in Genesis is an etiology bringing man to the threshold of history– and all of earthly time is now before him. The two voices that we hear in the opening chapters continue to be heard in the whole of Torah. The first voice seems to be preoccupied with order and regulation, a voice that often produces genealogical lists. At appropriate intervals this voice issues sweeping laws—for observing
Hayden White’s Interpretive History
Aniruddha Chowdhury [Aniruddha Chowdhury received his PhD from the Graduate Program of Social and Political Thought at York University. He is the author of Post-deconstructive Subjectivity and History: Phenomenology, Critical Theory, and Postcolonial Thought (Brill, 2014)] _________________________ Hayden White has challenged the veritable intellectual tradition that since the time of Aristotle rests on the distinction of poetry (imaginary) and history (real). According to White, the modern positivism on the one hand and the Philosophy of History on the other consolidate the oppositions (fact and interpretation, objectivity and imaginary, scientific and artistic). However, it is not only the critics of history, White’s favourite example is Claude Levi-Strauss, who insist on the “mythopoetic” aspects of the historical discourse, but the great practitioners of history themselves, say, Jacob Burckhardt or Ranke, to take two distinct examples, dwell on the artistic and the poetic, if not the speculative-theological, ground of history. Now, If White is intrinsically a hermeneutic thinker who questions the separation of fact and interpretation his hermeneutic enterprise has a Kantian aspect (of historical reason) of a transcendental-formalist kind. What characterizes White’s interpretation, I argue, is a catachrestic formalism. The objectivity, in White’s account, is not erased, but appears as figural object. If White is a transcendentalist, as I think he is, then it is quasi-transcendental as the nature of the ground is figurative. When White wrote his essay ‘The Burden of History,’ in 1966, much of the claims of either the scientific or the aesthetic conception of historical work had been considered antiquated in the sense that what was outmoded was history’s attempt to combine a late-nineteenth century social science and a mid-nineteenth century art, which had led the historiography to an essentially positivist distinction between scientific objectivity on one hand and imaginary on the other. 1 Now, it is not only the philosophers of history — Hegel, Nietzsche, Croce, Dilthey, Spengler, Foucault et al– who have challenged the non-discursive claims of the historians either from cognitive-philosophical or from artistic perspectives, but the distinction between objectivity and imaginary in the historical discourse has been refuted from within the “proper” historical discourse itself. Even if we set aside the work such as Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance which experimented with the most advanced artistic techniques of his time and with an aesthetic conception of science not in order to tell the whole truth about the Italian Renaissance but one truth about it, the very notion of objectivity to which Rankean positivism appealed and the radical self-effacement that his (Ranke’s) method implied was supplemented by the theology on the one hand and literary hermeneutics on the other, as Gadamer has shown perspicuously. Even if Ranke rejects speculative philosophy of history of the Hegelian kind he nonetheless grounds universal history in a certain Lutheran theology. The notion of the singularity of each period and its immediacy to God, which the historian chronicles was not sufficient to mark a break with speculative philosophy of history since in Ranke’s universal history, as Gadamer argues, the universe is raised to a consciousness of itself in a manner close to German Idealism. This consciousness is an empathic co-knowledge of the universe in the context of which Ranke’s famous self-effacement should be understood. 2 The Whitean formalism is to show that it is discourse that constitutes the source and the ground of the opposition of history and metahistory. White’s intervention consists in the fact that he represents a kind of Copernican turn that unravels the discursive ground of historical reason and, may I say, of historical being. In Metahistory, White writes an ambitious history of the historical consciousness of the Nineteenth Century Europe. It is a discursive history of the already discursive historicities (on the historicity later). This is precisely what his formalism amounts to. The discursive historicities (the object of White’s history) include the historical practitioners such as Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt and the philosophers of history such as Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce. It is White’s point in the masterwork that the real or the actual in historical discourse has no pre-critical, transcendent status as opposed to the imaginary but is constituted in relation to what is imaginable. They are dependent upon not only the figurative discourse that the historian uses but also, on another level, upon the linguistic tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche etc. These two levels — the verbal discourse of figuration as narrative plots and the linguistic forms– constitute, for White, the ideal-type structure of the historical work. 3 The turn from the one level to the other is one meaning of what White calls troping. Even though White never denies the objective pole of the historical discourse, the referent, he insists on the discursive nature of the actuality. There is something profoundly inventive about the discourse that constitutes objects of history. It has to be said that in White the temporality of the historical discourse belongs to the instance of imagination and invention in figurative discourse. Discourse, for White, is a movement of meaning from one notion to another notion with the acknowledgement that things can be expressed otherwise (TD 2). “A discourse moves “to and fro” between received encodations of experience and the clutter of phenomena which refuses incorporation in to conventionalized notions of “reality,” “truth,” or “possibility”(TD 4). The possibility of other expression belongs to the inventiveness of discourse, especially the verbal, figurative, discourse. There is no transcendent (which we have to distinguish from the notion of the transcendental) referent in which discourse must be grounded. Following Barthes White too would suggest that the real in a discourse is a certain “unformulated signified, sheltering behind the apparently all powerful referent.” 4 It is White’s influential point that the content of the historiography is indistinguishable from the discursive form in which the ‘real’ is articulated. A history, especially a classic, is not a picture that resembles the object it depicts but a complex linguistic form, allegorical in nature (more on this later), which is “dense and opaque” (Frank
The Feel of Not to Feel It (Classics of Literary Criticism Revisited III)
Susan Stewart, The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011] “to compose is the verb applied to the making of poem” Along some seashore, sometime, we detect a young boy who, after working on a sand-castle for a whole day, goes on to destroy the same structure by the evening. Once gone, the sandy walls and turrets and moats of the castle are then barely distinguishable from the sand surrounding them. This routine, the idea of erring voluntarily, for Susan Stewart, shows “…a certain relation we have to making. Without the freedom of reversibility enacted in unmaking, or at least always present as the potential for unmaking, we cannot give value to our making.” By annihilating the mere thing, the boy seems to be restituting the power of the form back to his own self, as if what he had been practicing all along was a mode of memorization or learning. Once the artistry used in making the castle in its entirety was internalized, the same set of skills was set to be used again: “Unwilling or unable to be the curator of his creation, the boy swiftly returned it to its elements, that is, to its pure potential.” How free is the artist in making? How far can human action, circumscribed by divinity, nature and history, be free in order to fashion itself, so that it can choose to make? Freedom, for Stewart is an act of affirmation. Humans are living, willing intelligences, and hence, their freedom to make and act arises out of their interaction with the wider world. For example, Schelling bequeaths us with a notion of a consciousness that emerged in nature; prior to existence proper.And a felt sense of peril is part of a certain kind of freedom. So, Schelling describes the free person as a dizzy man poised on a precipice who has a desire to jump into the abyss. In order to make, one must be “…mortified in all his ownhood, for which reason he must almost necessarily attempt to step out of it and into the periphery, in order to seek rest there for his selfhood.” This relay race between unmaking and making is what makes art a process of continual beginnings.’ Susan Stewart’s works (I am also thinking of The Fate of the Senses and On Longing) are testaments to a powerful definition of the act of poetic making, a definition that she builds up painstakingly in this classic work too. The relay between making and breaking and a gradual building up and reaching to our readers and interlocutors about our apprehension of the world through metaphors are recurring openings for her: “… art as a summons to apprehension—to call, to speak, to hear, to touch—reveal the etymology of aesthetics in sense experiences. Whether we are reflecting on our own artistic practice or the works of others, our freedom in aesthetic activity is exercised as well in the interpretive task of receiving finite forms, imputing intention and purposiveness to them and then our jarred and anxious apprehensions are transferred along the lines of face-to-face encounters with other persons.” Absorption is a release. Only through art therefore are free associations of an open future formed. Thanksgiving/praise is the oldest mode that keeps the relay going. The most fundamental act of artistic making is the act of creating value by praising. Praise is the poet’s obligation of naming, judging, withholding, and giving. Indeed, human praise cannot approach the scale of the gods, but humans can praise with things they have made—things that are an accomplishment of generations who have practiced and refined their mastery over materials. We are thunderstruck by the ancient crafts of the rope-maker and the potter. The devices of yoking, binding, and containing—devices that run through all weaving, printing, painting, molding, and sculpting foremost leave us awed. These objects thereby hold the forces of heart, tongue, hand, and eye that were involved in their own making. Hence praise. And praise is judgment. Praise travels from praising specific objects in their respective milieus to praising creation itself by means of forms and modes of praise that will praise the praiser—the one who has mastered these epideictic forms. A certain relation between making and being follows this reflexive turn from the qualities of objects to the qualities of expression. In praise judgment is not linked to deliberative thought or appetite or other desires to possess and consume. One purely judges the integrity of the form, an appreciation that follows contemplation. Praise is not wrested from the world but drawn from within. Since it is given, it also may be withheld. The oldest public forms of praise are sung. As we know from the Hebrew psalms, what is surrendered in praise is sound—praise is sounded by speech and singing, by the “joyful noises” of lyres, timbals, and drums, and by the human drums of clapping and rhythmic shouting. Such sounding emphasizes all the more that there are no restrictions on praise’s production and no restrictions on its distribution. What is sent out returns not only concretely but also in multiple form: like the psalmist declares in Psalm 34, “Oh taste and see that the Lord is good.”The volitional nature of praise lies in its being freely, liberally, and continually offered and drawn from the energies of the person who praises. Allen Ginsberg in Kaddish writes: “Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some of my Time, now given to Nothing—to praise Thee—But Death.” And Stewart reads these lines by relating it to the freedom of making: “Ginsberg brilliantly weaves the querying, death-obsessed thoughts of the mourner into the dignified unfolding lines of the prayer until the prayer seems to speak as the voiceover that the lyric “I” once was. The incongruity of the mourner’s kaddish, like the punctuation of experience and suffering exemplified in the progress of the Psalms, returns us to the sheer inutility of praise—its freedom from
The Vibration of the Perishable Minute (Classics of Literary Criticism Revisited II)
Jean Starobinski: Enchantment: The Seductress in Opera. [New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.] One can imagine a certain immobile time, a time of eternal present.In such a time there are no battles or notions of property. No death, only easy sleep. There are free moments of song and dance, music rather than work. Men and beasts understand each other perfectly—in music and in melody. The eternal present moves out and back on itself in sinuous folds of flowing arcs and circles. Becoming for each creature is a light movement in this present, a fluid élan. Only an interval is sometimes required in order to renew such moments of plenitude and felicity. But such a golden age is only the retrospective consolation of an unhappy humanity. Jean Starobinski begins his remarkable tour de force on operatic synesthesia by wondering whether human beings tried enacting such brief rest periods through their festivities right from the outset of community life. But will that not be a mere echo, a ritualized commemoration, a souvenir of some fabulous origin? Or are there also moments of the body and voice in such reenactments which might help cross the threshold of the realm of the dead? Is the moment of performance also a moment to witness the abolishment of the mortal consequences of time? Perhaps the performance that reconquers a parcel of eternity also witnesses its own duration measured. Is it that the poet and the musician who have relived the atemporal plenitude of the origin only turn and fall back into time and death? Surely, they must at first hold onto the temporal space and build their fable there. But they must also know how to close off such enactments, with a final cadence and a lifting of the masks—a salute to the public. The spectators applaud the enchantment that was, the very exploit of art. Ulysses has strapped himself to the mast of his ship to resist such an experience. What is so dangerous about this song, for one who has succeeded to resist the temptations of immortality? The Sirens, triply perfect epic minstrels, companions of Persephone, would live as long as they could stop every passer-by, but as soon as one passed without stopping, they would perish. The enchantment was so complete that the travelers would be bewitched, and forgetting their homelands, oblivious to food and drink, they would die from starvation: “Come here, renowned Ulysses, honour to the Achaenean name, and listen to our two voices. No one ever sailed past us without staying to hear the enchanting sweetness of our song—and he who listens will go his way not only charmed, but wiser, for we know all the ills that the gods laid upon the Argives and Trojans before Troy, and can tell you everything that is going to happen over the whole world.” (The Odyssey, Book XII). If Ulysses had listened to the Sirens, he would have encountered the image of his own past transfigured by music. He would have believed that his life to be forever saved from oblivion, and he would have forgotten to live—like all other travelers whose white bones litter the Sirens’ shore. Here is a fascinating music that develops another relationship to time outside of the one that emanates from the golden age, a music linked to narrating speech that can only deploy itself within a succession of temporal events: a happy fluidification, in Starobinski’s words. This is the music of becoming, a music that elevates to the perfection of song, bloody entanglements and heroic patience and suffering. We now enter into a time that will be transmitted to future generations by enacting the glorious immortality of the hero who has gone through the test of time and whose existence is saved by song. For having accepted death, he will live eternally in and through speech. But Ulysses is also bitter since he is stripped and solitary. The pleading castaway and the hero in the minstrel Demodocos are there the same: “His glorious song celebrates a past action, and the surviving hero, if he is to avoid demeaning himself, must take the place of the minstrel and become the narrator of his own miseries…and elevate them to the plane of musical immortality, just as the minstrel did for his military services.” Here is a particular mode of deliverance, of spirit rendered in and through an immaterial sonorous condition. Time is simultaneously imagined as the age of heroes, subsisting in our past as sheer memory and yet it destroys all our illusions by asserting its own dominance only through lived temporality.There is an interior historicity to the operatic time. This is the most sensual and fragile of durations: the vibration of the perishable minute. Indeed singing and seducing are intimately related. To seduce, etymologically, means to lead aside. What is the force that attracts one away from the straight and narrow? There emerges a fatal creature of shattering beauty, speaking in silken voice and offering unknown pleasures. You should have listened and avoided its glance. One step off the sure road leads to another and suddenly you find yourself wandering in a state of perdition. At the end a kind of dizziness sets in—a concoction arising out of ecstasy, enthusiasm and intoxication.When the hero travels by road, through the wilds or by sea, the enchantress watches for him by the side of the road or haunts him, lurking over the island when he comes ashore. One can also see that sometimes the reverse happens and vulnerable heroines are seduced by wicked suitors. This has been the fate of the girls who listened to Don Juan’s compliments or those who had accepted Faust’s gifts. To be enchanted is to give in to a strange foreignness. But it would be erroneous to describe it through drives and beliefs and phobias. Nor are these moments’ anxiety dreams. Such moments of foreignness of a legendary past are transformed into a present enchantment in the opera—as one sees action