30
PARTISAN REVIEW
the victim of slander, of false accusations. By an ironic perforation of the
prophetic delirium, I tried to infiltrate the possibility of another plot,
another multiple Biography.
Biographies exert a spell on their readers. They call for constant sus–
picion and breaking loose. This is how
r
understand the way Jewish tra–
dition developed its unique techniques of writing and reading of the
Jewish Biography; narrative techniques that arc linear and nonlinear, an
ongoing, multi-vocal debate which is palpable in the Talmud page, from
its intimate texture to its layout-as if the Jewish textual legacy were
saying: "Yes, there is one plot of one biography. Yet, there are so many
ways it can and should be heard." These interpreting, rewriting voices
can be extreme, they can shatter the Biography, tear it apart, keep an
ironic distance from it. Yet, in a paradoxical way, fidelity was deepened
through this overt betrayal. And, by the inventive power of controversy,
the complexity of meaning and of Text was renewed and multiplied. I'll
claim that this testifies to a distinct, original, subversive poetics.
It
bal–
ances human freedom-with its unreverential chutzpah-against "God
the plotter," in the ongoing writing of the Jewish Biography. This Jew–
ish way reminds me of a joke about the Jew who was found on a
deserted island after he was shipwrecked. Very proudly he showed his
rescuers what he constructed: his hut, his oven, his shower. And then,
he pointed to two additional small huts: "Here is a synagogue," he said,
"and here is another one." The rescuers asked him, "Why do you need
two synagogues?" And he answered, "This is the synagogue where I go
to pray. And in that one, I'll never set foot!"
Arguing, even within one's self. In this sense I find a correlation
between the Jewish poetic strategies and some of the great narrative
devices. They are all writing and un-writing the plot, leaving the reader
with a freedom of sight, untangling him from the hold of a hagio–
graphic, fictional spell. I'm thinking of Proust's
A
fa recherche du temps
perdu
with its exposed waves of "new starts" brought about by the
explosions of fresh, crucial intuitions. Beckett, who was a great student
of Proust, shows in his early book,
ProLlst,
how, along this fictional
autobiography, the plot is torn seven times, exposing the "backstage" of
the present moment of writing, and providing a unique meditation on
the incommensurable tension between life and plot. I think about Don
Delillo's technique in
Underworld,
with his way of tearing apart and
reconstructing the American Biography. These and other techniques
provide us, I believe, with an indispensable, critical suspicion for writ–
mg or reading biographies, autobiographies, or fictional autobiogra–
phies.
