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PARTISAN REV1EW
In
the matter of mystiCIsm and metaphor, consider for a moment
Herman Melville, among the most sublime of American literary figures.
In
his dithyrambs on Moby Dick, he writes rapturously of the White
Whale's godly emanations. The Whale, he tells us, is "at once the most
meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of Deity." But on
a journey to Jerusalem in
1850,
he commented in his journal that the
whole city of Jerusalem is "gray and looks at you like a cold gray eye in
a cold old man." And further: "In the lifeless antiquity of Jerusalem the
emigrant Jews are like flies that have taken up abode in a skull." The
big fish is the very veil of deity; but Jerusalem in all its holiness is a fly–
blown skull.
Well, now it is out: that word . Holiness. I have dared to utter it to the
offense of the stiff-neckedly secular, the coolly pragmatic, the indiffer–
ent, the skeptical, the ironical-all those to whom the idea of the holy
is anathema, or, at the least, unreal. To the denizens of this camp,
Jerusalem may indeed be alive and beautiful in a worldly way, it may
even echo ancient resonances; but always the argument will go against
transcendence. I am told that there is a woman who stands at the mar–
gins of the Western Wall plaza and sells talismanic red ribbons, to ward
off the evil eye. To such a merchant and her customers, it is likely that
the red ribbons are the most meaningful symbols of spiritual things, the
very veil of deity; and I conjecture that there are some who think holi–
ness is like those powerless magical strings : empty and false and remote
from what we count as reality.
Yet if you are among those who stringently demand reality, you are
already on the side of the argument for holiness. Reality clings, incon–
trovertibly, to investigation and a deepening of rational understanding.
Erich Auerbach, the author of
Mimesis,
a remarkable volume of reflec–
tions on the representation of reality in literature, takes up the narrative
of the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac, and notes how sparse is the scene,
how sparse are the words that are spoken, how sparse are the descrip–
tions. "They do not even admit an adjective," he says; "they are serving
men, ass, wood, and knife, and nothing else, without an epithet...we
are told nothing about the journey except that it took three days, and
even that we are told in a mysterious way," as if "the journey took place
in a vacuum, as if, while he traveled on, Abraham had looked neither to
the right nor to the left, had suppressed any sign of life in his followers
and himself, save only their footfalls."
It
is a story, Auerbach points out,
that is "mysterious, merely touched upon, fraught with background,"
and therefore "will require subtle investigation and interpretation....
Since so much in the story is dark and incomplete, and since the reader
