Into the Looking-Glass Wood Read online

  As every child knows, the world of experience (like Alice’s wood) is nameless, and we wander through it in a state of bewilderment, our head full of mumblings of learning and intuition. The books we read assist us in naming a stone or a tree, a moment of joy or despair, the breathing of a loved one or the kettle-whistle of a bird, by shining a light on an object, a feeling, a recognition, and saying to us that this here is our heart after too long a sacrifice, that there is the cautionary sentinel of Eden, that what we heard was the voice that sang near the Convent of the Sacred Heart. These illuminations sometimes help; the order of experiencing and naming doesn’t much matter. The experience may come first and, many years later, the reader will find the name to call it in the pages of King Lear. Or it may come at the end, and a glimmer of memory will throw up a page we had thought forgotten of a battered copy of Treasure Island. There are names made up by writers that a reader refuses to use, because they seem wrong-headed, or trite or even too great for ordinary understanding, and are therefore dismissed or forgotten, or kept for some crowning epiphany that (the reader hopes) will one day require them. But sometimes, they help the reader name the unnamable. “You want him to know what cannot be spoken, and to make the perfect reply, in the same language,” says Tom Stoppard in The Invention of Love. Sometimes a reader can find on a page that perfect reply.

  The danger, as Alice and her White Knight knew, is that we sometimes confuse a name and what we call a name, a thing and what we call a thing. The graceful phantoms on a page, with which we so easily tag the world, are not the world. There may be no names to describe the torture of another human being, the birth of one’s child. After creating the angels of Proust or the nightingale of Keats, the writer can say to the reader “into your hands I commend my spirit,” and leave it at that. But how is a reader to be guided by these entrusted spirits to find his way in the ineffable reality of the wood?

  Systematic reading is of little help. Following an official book list (of classics, of literary history, of censored or recommended reading, of library catalogues) may, by chance, throw up a useful name, as long as we bear in mind the motives behind the lists. The best guides, I believe, are the reader’s whims—trust in pleasure and faith in haphazardness—which sometimes lead us into a makeshift state of grace, allowing us to spin gold out of flax.

  Gold out of flax: in the summer of 1935 the poet Osip Mandelstam was granted by Stalin, supposedly as a favour, identity papers valid for three months, accompanied by a residence permit. According to his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, this little document made their lives much easier. It happened that a friend of the Mandelstams, the actor and essayist Vladimir Yakhontov, chanced to come through their city. In Moscow he and Mandelstam had amused themselves by reading from ration books, in an effort to name paradise lost. Now the two men did the same thing with their identity papers. The scene is described in Hope Against Hope:

  It must be said that the effect was even more depressing. In the ration book they read off the coupons solo and in chorus: “Milk, milk, milk … cheese, meat …” When Yakhontov read from the identity papers, he managed to put ominous and menacing inflections in his voice: “Basis on which issued … issued … by whom issued … special entries … permit to reside, permit to reside, permit to reside …”

  All true readings are subversive, against the grain, as Alice, a sane reader, discovered in the Looking-Glass world of mad name-givers. A Canadian prime minister tears up the railway and calls the act “progress”; a Swiss businessman traffics in loot and calls it “commerce”; an Argentinian president shelters murderers and calls it “amnesty.” Against such misnomers a reader can open the pages of his books. In such cases, reading helps us maintain coherence in the chaos, not to eliminate it; not to enclose experience within verbal structures but to allow it to progress on its own vertiginous way; not to trust the glittering surface of words but to burrow into the darkness.

  The poor mythology of our time seems afraid to go beneath the surface. We distrust profundity, we make fun of dilatory reflection. Images of horror flick across our screens, big or small, but we don’t want them slowed down by commentary: we want to watch Gloucester’s eyes plucked out but not have to sit through the rest of Lear. One night, some time ago, I was watching television in a hotel room, zapping from channel to channel. Perhaps by chance, every image that held the screen for a few seconds showed someone being killed or beaten, a face contorted in anguish, a car or a building exploding. Suddenly I realized that one of the scenes I had flicked past did not belong to a drama series but to a newscast on Bosnia. Among the other images which cumulatively diluted the horror of violence, I had watched, unmoved, a real person being hit by a real bullet.

  George Steiner suggested that the Holocaust translated the horrors of our imagined hells into a reality of charred flesh and bone; it may be that this translation marked the beginning of our inability to imagine another person’s pain. In the Middle Ages, for instance, the horrible torments of martyrs depicted in countless paintings were never viewed simply as images of horror: they were illumined by the theology (however dogmatic, however catechistic) that bred and defined them, and their representation were meant to help the viewer reflect on the world’s ongoing suffering. Not every viewer would necessarily see beyond the mere prurience of the scene, but the possibility for deeper reflection was always present. After all, an image or a text can only offer the choice of reading further or more profoundly; this choice the reader or viewer can reject since, in themselves, text and image are nothing but dabs on paper, stains on wood or canvas.

  The images I watched that night were, I believe, nothing but surface; like pornographic texts (political slogans, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, advertising pap), they offered nothing but what the senses could apprehend immediately, all at once, fleetingly, without space or time for reflection.

  Alice’s Looking-Glass Wood is not made of such images: it has depth, it requires thought, even if (for the time of its passage) it offers no vocabulary to name its proper elements. True experience and true art (however uncomfortable the adjective has become) have this in common: they are always greater than our comprehension, even than our capabilities of comprehension. Their outer limit is always a little past our reach, as the Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik once described:

  And if the soul were to ask, How much further? You must answer: on the other side of the river, Not this one, the one just beyond.

  To come even that far, I’ve had many and marvellous guides. Some overwhelming, such as Borges; others more intimate, such as Cortázar or Cynthia Ozick; many vastly entertaining, such as Chesterton or Stevenson; a few illuminating more than I could hope to see, such as Richard Outram. Their writing keeps changing in the library of my memory where circumstances of all sorts—age and impatience, different skies and different voices, new and old readings—keep shifting the volumes, crossing out passages, adding notes in the margins, switching jackets, inventing titles. I’m reminded of the moralist Joseph Joubert whose reading habits were described by Chateaubriand: “When he read, he would tear out of his books the pages he didn’t like, assembling in this way a personal library made up of gutted volumes bound under baggy covers.” The furtive activity of such anarchic librarians expands my limited library almost to infinity: I can now reread a book as if I were reading one I had never read before. In Bush, his house in Concord, the seventy-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson began suffering from what was probably Alzheimer’s disease. According to his biographer, Carlos Baker:

  Bush became a palace of forgetting … [But] reading, he said, was still an “unbroken pleasure.” More and more the study at Bush became his retreat. He clung to the comforting routine of solitude, reading in his study till noon and returning again in the afternoon until it was time for his walk. Gradually he lost his recollection of his own writings, and was delighted at rediscovering his own essays: “Why, these things are really very good,” he told his daughter.

  Something like
Emerson’s rediscovery happens now when I take down The Man Who Was Thursday or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and meet them like Adam greeting his first giraffe.

  Is this all? Sometimes it seems enough. In the midst of uncertainty and many kinds of fear, threatened by loss, change and the welling of pain within and without for which one can offer no comfort, readers know that at least there are, here and there, a few safe places, as real as paper and as bracing as ink, to grant us roof and board in our passage through the dark and nameless wood.

  On Being Jewish

  “Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the Unicorn, “if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?”

  Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter VII

  ONE AFTERNOON, when I was seven, on the bus back from the Buenos Aires English high school that I had started to attend, a boy whose name I never knew called out at me from the back seat, “Hey, Jew, so your father likes money?” I remember being so bewildered by the question that I didn’t know what to answer. I didn’t think my father was particularly fond of money, but there was an implied insult in the boy’s tone that I couldn’t understand. Above all, I was surprised at being called “Jew.” My grandmother went to the synagogue, but my parents were not religious, and I had never thought of myself in terms of a word I believed was reserved for the old people of my grandmother’s generation. But since the epithets applied to us imply a definition, in that moment (though I didn’t know it then) I was forced into a choice: to accept this vast, difficult identity, or to deny it. The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, in an effective mingling of sociological essay and autobiography, The Imaginary Jew, tells of a similar moment and acknowledges the universality of such an experience, but his subject is not the inheritance of hatred. “I myself” writes Finkielkraut, “would like to address and meditate upon the opposite case: the case of a child, an adolescent who is not only proud but happy to be Jewish and who came to question, bit by bit, if there were not some bad faith in living jubilantly as an exception and an exile.” These individuals of assumed identity, the inheritors of a suffering to which they have not been personally subjected, Finkielkraut, with a flair for the mot juste, calls “imaginary” or “armchair Jews.”

  I am struck by how useful this notion is to address a question that troubles me: how does the perception of who I am affect my perception of the world around me? How important is it for Alice to know who she is (the Victorian child that the world perceives her to be) when wandering through the Looking-Glass Wood? Apparently, very important, since this knowledge determines her relationship to the other creatures she encounters. For instance, having forgotten who she is, Alice can become friends with a fawn who has forgotten it is a fawn.

  So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice’s arm. “I’m a Fawn!” it cried out in a voice of delight. “And, dear me! you’re a human child!” A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed.

  Around this notion of constructed identity, Finkielkraut has assiduously elaborated a sequence of questions about what it means to be Jewish (or, I would add, to be Alice or a fawn) and, since every definition is a limitation, he has refused to give these questions definitive answers. Central to Finkielkraut’s interrogation is the seemingly trite statement that the Jews exist, that whatever their identity may be, individually or as a group, they have a presence that not even the Nazi machinery was able to erase. This existence is not easily borne, let alone categorized. “Listen, Doctor,” wrote Heinrich Heine, “don’t even talk to me about Judaism, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Slurs and shame: that’s all that comes of it. It’s not a religion, it’s a misfortune.” The cry “Why me?” uttered by every persecuted Jew, the imaginary Jew picks up with a sigh of ennui. Using himself as an example, Finkielkraut confesses that on the one hand he broadcasts his wish to be a Jew, while on the other hand he de-Judaizes himself, transforming himself into the Other and becoming a messenger of his gentile companions: in this I vividly recognize myself. When his parents refer to the Holocaust, he responds with Vietnam; when they mention anti-Semitism, he points out that there are no Jewish garbage collectors in France. “Why me?” has become “Why am I not someone else?”

  In this Looking-Glass Wood, the imaginary Jew has lost all sense of belonging; for him there is no possible Jewish “we.” The conventions of prejudice understand this “we” to mean a secret society of infamous plots and world domination; his response has been to deny solidarity. “There is no ‘we,’ ” he declares, “for Judaism is a private affair”—even though today it once again widely recognizes itself as a community. But why, Finkielkraut asks pointedly, must collective expression “always remain the exclusive province of politics? Why would anything that is not T necessarily be a question of power or of state?” Why can the Jew not be “I” without either going into hiding or making claims to belonging to the slaughtered millions of the past?

  These are dangerous waters. Perhaps it is not the necessity to remember the ancestral persecutions that is called into question, but the illusion of heroism it so often entails. Those who profess contempt for their fellows living “in the forgetfulness of history,” forget in turn that their own precarious identity rests on “the phantasm of history.” On the vaporous webbing of such a past, a past that blesses all Jews with a multitudinous family far in time and vast in space, younger Jews sometimes feel they are nothing but spectators. Watching my grandmother light the Shabbath candles, say the ritual prayers as her hands drew opposing circles over the startled light, I felt no connection to the dark, ancient places of wood and winter mist and ancient languages from which she had come. She was my grandmother, but her existence started and ended in my present; she rarely spoke of her ancestors or of the place where she was born, so that in my mythology her brief, piecemeal stories had far less bearing on my life than the landscapes of Grimm and Alice.

  If Judaism has a central injunction, Finkielkraut argues, it should be not “a matter of identity, but of memory: not to mimic persecution or make theater of the Holocaust, but to honor its victims,” to keep the Holocaust from becoming banal, so that the Jews are not condemned to a double death: by murder and by oblivion. Even here, my connection to those horrors was vicarious: to my knowledge, we lost no immediate family to the Nazis; both my mother’s and my father’s parents had immigrated long before World War I to one of the colonies set up by Baron Hirsch in the north of Argentina, where gauchos with names like Izaak and Abraham called out to their cattle in Yiddish. I didn’t learn about the Holocaust until well into my adolescence, and then only by reading André Schwarz-Bart and Anne Frank. Was this horror then part of my history too, mine beyond the call of a shared humanity? Did the epithet hurled at me insultingly on that remote school bus grant me citizenship in that ancient, beleaguered, questioning, stubborn, wise people? Was I—am I—part of Them? Am I a Jew? Who am I?

  Alice, a human child, and the fawn, one of the hunted, echo this last question, and like me are tempted to answer it not with words born from what they know themselves to be, but with words coined by those who stand outside and point. Every group that is the object of prejudice has this to say: we are the language in which we are spoken, we are the images in which we are recognized, we are the history we are condemned to remember because we have been barred from an active role in the present. But we are also the language in which we question these assumptions, the images with which we invalidate the stereotypes. And we are also the time in which we are living, a time from which we can’t be absent. We have an existence of our own, and we are no longer willing to remain imaginary.

  Meanwhile, in Another Part of the Forest

  The Seventh Square is all forest—however, one of the Knights will show you the way.


  Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter II

  IN THE DAYS WHEN I was an avid reader of comic books, the line that thrilled me most, because it promised to reveal something that had been taking place beyond the more obvious bits of the plot, was “Meanwhile, in another part of the forest …”—usually inked in capital letters in the top left-hand corner of the box. To me (who, like any devoted reader, wished for an infinite story) this line promised something close to that infinity: the possibility of knowing what had happened on that other fork of the road, the one not taken, the one less in evidence, the mysterious and equally important path that led to another part of the adventurous forest.