MARK SHECHNER
539
brand of electric naturalism that Rosenfeld 's Chicago friend, Saul Bellow,
working out the terms of such a secular enthusiasm, has exploited most
successfully in his novels. The language of the urban erotic in
The Adven–
tures ofAugie March
is applied Chassidism of a son that Bellow may well
have owed to the influence of Rosenfeld. Indeed, the logic of
this
enthusiasm,
its potential for epiphany, is developed further in the closet transcendental–
ism of
Herzog
where the noumenal world peeps out shyly from behind
Chicago'S phenomenal skirts, and , most recently, in
Humboldt 's Gift,
where it blossoms into a full-blown Platonism.
It
is not surprising that
Rosenfeld , in praising Peretz, turned
to
religion for the language of secular
vitalism since only'religion has the conceptual tools
to
exploit the experience
of ttue elation, the sense of ineffable fullness . "The vision is strictly of
appearances in actual historical time , but they are seen under a holy light."
Chassidism and liberal pragmatism meet in the' 'power of love, drawn from
the eros of Chassidism, and fulfilling for Peretz the function of attracting
the nations into brotherhood ."
This was the expansive Rosenfeld, riding the crest of an ecstasy which
was the fullness of God, and yet it was the same alienated Rosenfeld who
was so haunted by loneliness and hunger. The vital and the desolate were
the same man, just as Franz Kafka and the Chassidic wonder rabbis are
phases of a common Jewishness, the depressive and manic potentials of the
same culture. Rosenfeld was given
to
wild swings of mood-from exaltation
to despair or terror from which middle terms were readily cancelled out.
That instability at one point got sublimated into theory and Rosenfeld
became for a while a totalist of the emotions and an enemy of mediated
feelings, which he equated with disguise and avoidance . In 1948 and 1949
his contemplation of the Holocaust and recent revelations about labor camps
in the Soviet Union brought the polarizing tendency of his imagination to
the surface in the form of a proposal for a new totalist ethics. In a 1948 re–
view ofJacob Pat's book
Ashes and Fire,
he argued that the knowledge of
the destruction of Europe's Jews, which the world now possessed, was suf–
ficient cause to scrap " the wilderness of good and evil, of ethics and morality,
of reason, science, method , history, sympathy and mercy, the whole human
world , or what was, until now, human. " For the whole symbolic super–
structure of civilization had been laid bare and shown
to
be inadequate to
reality; it lacked the power to explain, or mitigate, the terror of the zero
moment when all had failed, and , at the edge of the grave, there was only
the scream of ultimate terror. The only choice for the survivors was to face
and accept this new reality and reach beyond obsolete emotions and consola–
tions to the only good that is adequate to such a reality: joy. "How shall we,
living in comfon, we American Jews and Gentiles, with brotherhood and
