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PARilSAN REVIEW
humanity." I think, for instance, of the literature of midrash, of
parable, where there is no visible principle or moral imperative. The
principle does not enter into, or appear in, the tale; it
is
the tale; it
realizes the tale . To put it another w.ay: the tale is its own inter–
pretation. It is a world that decodes itself.
And that is what the corona is: interpretation, implicitness, the
nimbus of
meaning
that envelops story. Only someone who has
wholly dismissed meaning can boast that the Holocaust and a
corncob are, for art, the same. The writers who claim that fiction is
self-referential, that what a story is about is the language it is made
out of, have snuffed the corona. They willingly sit in the dark, like
the strict-constructionist Karaites who, wanting to observe the
Sabbath exactly, sat in the lampless black and the fireless cold on the
very day that is most meant to resemble paradise. The misuse of the
significance of language by writers who most intend to celebrate the
comeliness of language is like the misuse of the Sabbath by the
fundamentalist Karaites: both annihilate the thing they hope to
glorify.
What literature means is meaning.
But having said that, I come to something deeply perilous: and
that is imagination.
In
Hebrew, just as there is
t'shuva,
the energy of
creative renewal and turning, so there is the
yetzer ha-ra,
the Evil
Impulse - so steeped in the dark brilliance of the visionary that it is
said to be the source of the creative faculty. Imagination is more
than make-believe, more than the power to invent.
It
is also the
power to penetrate evil, to take on evil, to become evil, and in that
guise it is the most frightening human faculty. Whoever writes a
story that includes villainy enters into and becomes the villain.
Imagination owns above all the facility of becoming: the writer can
enter the leg of a mosquito, a sex not her own, a horizon he has
never visited, a mind smaller or larger. But also the imagination
seeks out the unsayable and the undoable, and says and does them.
And still more dangerous: the imagination always has the lust to tear
down meaning, to smash interpretation, to wear out the rational, to
mock the surprise of redemption, to replace the fluid force of
suspense with an image of stasis; to transfix and stun rather than to
urge; to spill out, with so much quicksilver wonder, idol after idol.
An idol serves no one; it is served. The imagination, like Moloch,
can take you nowhere except back to its own maw. And the writers
who insist that literature is "about" the language it is made of are
offering an idol: literature for its own sake, for its own maw: not for
the sake of humanity.
Literature is for the sake
if
humanity.
