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SUSAN SONTAG
most deeply removed from the world of modern fiction, whose principal
subject is the failure of appetite and passionate feeling.
In the treatment of his recurrent theme of the temptation of
demonry, the strength of Singer's fiction lies in his exploration of
the demonic not as a function of individual aberration but as
the
aberration of a community. The Jewry of which he writes is saturated
with magical superstition, and convulsed by the inexplicable sorrows
of persecution and the exhaltations and hysterias of Messianic hope.
It is an era magnetized by the mystery of transgression--enthralling as
a subject of fiction and of great interest also as a crucial, but largely
suppressed, chapter in Western religious history which reached its climax
in the seventeenth century, the century in which Lurianic Cabbalism,
with its indeterminate borderline between mysticism and magic, was the
dominant spiritual influence throughout the Jewish Diaspora.
Usually in Singer's fiction, the devil has the last word, and
his
human characters do not survive the paradoxes of their humanity.
However, in Singer's latest novel,
The Slave,
as the author himself
is
reported to have said, for a change God has the last word. The novel
is
again set in Poland, over a period of twenty years following the Chmiel–
nicki massacres, and traces the fortunes of a virtuous man both desperate–
ly encumbered and supremely graced by his own spiritual scruples, who
struggles with physical bondage, prohibited love, the perverseness of
oppression, and the coercions of his own oppressed community. Perhaps
precisely because it is a study in goodness,
The Slave
differs from most
of Singer's previous work in having a less hectic, less exotic atmosphere.
The novel has a warmth, a wholesomeness which befits a work which
dares to tell a passionate, exalted love story and to end with a large
romantic gesture of reunion-in-death as tearfully satisfying and old–
fashioned as the end of
Wuthering Heights.
The demonic is more alien here, for the main representatives of
superstition are the un-Christianized Polish peasants to whom the hero
is sold as a slave, rather than the
shtetl
Jews. There is less dwelling
on ethnic eccentricity, and more emphasis on the beauty and equanimity
of nature. The tone also is more neutral, more classically "novelistic"–
it is neither the chatty tone of the folk narrator of some of Singer's
stories nor the ironic tone of the malicious spirit or demon who narrates
others. The novel also has a greater inwardness of characterization, which
follows on the fact that the two main characters are from the inception of
the story separated off from their communities. The devout hero, Jacob,
is twice alienated from the Jewish community from which he was tom
by the Chrnielnicki massacres: by solitude and the absence of his
books
during the period of his slavery, and by love for a Gentile woman,
