CONCLUSION—
MARGINAL PROTOTYPES, PROTOTYPICAL MARGINS

My friend tells an old Yiddish joke about a rabbi who comes into the synagogue during the Days of Awe, prostrates himself in front of the Holy Ark and says: “Master of the universe, forgive me for I am nothing.” A few minutes later, the chazn (cantor) walks in, prostrates himself in front of the ark of the Torah and says: “Master of the universe, forgive me for I am nothing.” After yet a few more minutes, in comes the lowly shammes (synagogue sexton), who prostrates himself in front of the ark and says: “Master of the universe, forgive me for I am nothing.” Hearing this, the rabbi sits up, pokes the chazn, and, pointing to the shammes, says: “Look who's a nothing!” (ze nor ver s'iz a gornisht ).^[1]

I wish to use this story, to enlist it, for the conclusion of this study of marginal modernist prototypes in order to sound a cautionary note. Discussions of marginality face an almost unavoidable temptation to treat the “minor” condition of a literature or a writer as an achievement, a nothing which is something, a status attainable only by an elite consisting of the “marginally correct”^[2] (those who currently qualify as “marginal,” “peripheral,” “decentered,” “ec-centric,” in a culturally acceptable way).^[3] Like the rabbi in this story, who excludes the lowly shammes from the class of “true nothings” while signaling in gesture and tone the chazn's privileged inclusion, contemporary critics may be engaged in a classist appropriation of the marginal. Reading this joke as a parable on marginality in the hands of a powerful center, we can see the rabbi reinscribing the self-effacing, common gornisht of Yiddish slang as the Jewish mystic's highest achievement, the rare and

blissful state of spiritual ayin —a nothing that is everything, a void that is plenitude.^[4] We might also focus on the elitist duplicity of the rabbi's self-deprecation, a duplicity that reveals itself fully in the scornful use of the presentative ze nor (roughly, “just see”) in the punchline of the Yiddish original, ze nor ver s'iz a gornisht. Both perspectives expose how those in the know, by setting the terms of the discussion, deny the margin's right to its own marginality, perhaps the only property that truly belongs to it. As long as exclusionary practices figure so dominantly in canon formation, the process of “revising” or “reforming” the literary canon runs the risk of duplicating or “re-circulating the domination”^[5] it has set out to subvert.

In particular, this note of caution may be useful for Hebrew literary studies today. With the recent burgeoning of scholarly, biographical, and publishing interest in works by historically marginalized authors (David Fogel, Dvorah Baron, Chaim Lensky, and early modernist women poets and critics), Hebrew literary historiography appears to be entering a more inclusive phase. Moreover, the relative visibility of contemporary Hebrew writers whose marginality is due to “extraliterary” factors such as ethnicity, gender, or politics contributes to the creation of a seductively misleading impression: that this is an open, nonexclusionary contemporary canon, a canon which is actively and vigorously revising its own literary history, allowing in those who only yesterday were marginalized or ignored altogether.

Yet these recent revisionary moves, important as they are, mark only the first steps in a long overdue process, a process that is itself not independent of the cultural power dynamics it is struggling to alter. It is we, the academic elite (which, truth be told, amounts to close to nothing—gornisht —in its power outside the literary system), the publishers, the literary public-relations people, and the canonical writers, who all participate in creating what Russell Ferguson has aptly termed “the invisible center” of the literary-cultural system.^[6] And this invisible center, not the marginal voices themselves, gets to decide how far the canon is going to open up, what will now become central, what will retreat to the margins, and who will still remain beyond the pale.

The invisible center—which, to quote Ferguson (in Ferguson et al., 1990:9) again, “whenever we try to pin it down, always seems to be somewhere else”—has a vested interest in periodically revising the canon, both diachronically and synchronically. A controlled influx of “counternarratives” into mainstream culture is “essential to its health

and survival…. The vital, independent cultures of socially subordinated groups are constantly mined for new ideas with which to energize the jaded and restless mainstream of a political and economic system based on the circulation of commodities” (Ferguson, in Ferguson et al., 1990:11). Phrased in semiotic rather than economic system-theoretical terms, this is precisely the role of the periphery in literary dynamics according to the Israeli neoformalist model of Itamar Even-Zohar, which I discuss in Chapter 4: the margins provide a much needed deautomatization of a literary norm whose continued atrophying dominance would have destabilized the system.

My account, like those of Ferguson and Even-Zohar, intentionally brackets the impossibly muddled question of the role of intrinsic aesthetic value in canon formation. This is not to say that I believe poetic greatness to be purely a matter of convention, nor that I claim poetic marginality to be independent of issues of aesthetic inferiority and epigonic repetition. Clearly some works have maintained a dominant position in the canon because they have been consistently experienced as possessing great aesthetic power.^[7] I believe a discussion of modernist marginalities can be conducted separately from squabbles over intrinsic aesthetic value.^[8] It is well and good to equate canonicity with greatness by pointing to the really good poets who are placed at the center of the canon. But what is one to make of the really good poets who are not? If, as this study argues, even at the very center of the international modernist canon various trends often cluster around marginal, minimally representative, or even completely unaffiliated and atypical prototypes, then both modernism and marginality—as well as the methodological concept of a prototypical example itself—need to be historicized and contextualized. This need suggests the dual role of my own concluding remarks: to alert us to the temptation of regarding any partial representation (the present one included) of Hebrew and Yiddish literary marginality as if it were the whole picture; and, while illustrating those aspects of the marginal that are now culturally more visible, to offer a glimpse, if even that, of the invisibility that still remains.

Figure 5 is therefore not a model of marginality which I would advocate but rather a schema of those cultural formations of marginality which are now visible within the literary system I am most familiar with, Hebrew. But although the particular formations will be different for other literatures, the structure will be similar. In its schematic structure, Figure 5 reappropriates for the margins the same

Fig. 5.
Formations of marginality in modern Hebrew literature.

cartographic metaphor that this study criticizes in the historiography of the center (see Chapter 3); and it coordinates different types of marginality with the theoretical contexts within which they are most often discussed. Moving for once from right to left as in Hebrew, the intraliterary marginalities of genre and trend, as well as the linguistic marginality of translated works or biand multilingual writers, are the formations of marginality which the more “scientific” literary theories have dealt with (within a Russian formalist, a semiotic, or an Israeli neoformalist context).^[9] The “extraliterary” formations of marginality, which underscore the minor status of the writers' social and political affiliations, are typically (though not exclusively) the focus of poststructuralist discussions.

That these formations always crisscross and combine is perhaps most dramatically illustrated by the example of the Hebrew poet Avot Yeshurun (1904–92). This great and difficult poet, whose struggle with the literary canon straddled at least three successive literary trends, received his long overdue recognition only on his deathbed in the form of the prestigious Israel Prize. His position as the odd man out had its start, as Michael Gluzman has shown,^[10] in a critical stance on the margins of the moderna. As the moderna was losing its hegemony, Yeshurun developed into a peripheral paragon for some Statehood Generation poets who occasionally used his divergence from the dominant poetics of his contemporaries as a justification for their own generation's rebellion against the Shlonsky/Alterman prototypes of modernism. In order to recover Yeshurun's poetics for Hebrew literary history, a project which has only just begun, the marginality of his work needs to be reconstructed in its diverse yet intersecting dimensions: a poetics of antipurist trilingualism which returns the Hebrew literary system to its earlier diglossic stages (injecting a richly allusive, historically stratified Hebrew with a heavy dose of Yiddish and Arabic); a poet who starts out as an atypical modernist trend member (of the moderna ) and continues, over the next two literary generations, to be both an unaffiliated modernist and a sidelines paragon for avant-garde groups, maintaining, thanks to his (biological and literary) longevity, a critical position on the margins of both the Statehood Generation and the neo- and postmodernism of the 1970s and 1980s; most important perhaps, a poet who throughout this long period (but in particular until the 1960s) was consistently condemned and spurned by the “invisible center” for the radical nature of his political, ethical, and linguistic critique of Zionism. Thus,

for this one poet, the relevant formations of marginality in Figure 5 would include all of the following: under “linguistic marginality,” both bi- and multilingualism of individual writers and of the literary system; under“‘intraliterary’ marginality/trend,” unaffiliated writers, atypical trend members, and avant-garde groups; and under “‘extraliterary’ marginality/politics,” the critique of Zionism.

Figure 5 records only those formations of marginality that have been operative within the changing conditions of modern Hebrew literary history and that can be defined as marginal against the background of what has served internally as the norm. For example, “exile” does not appear as a single formation on the chart simply because it is the underlying normative condition of many of the other formations. Indeed, exile has been constitutive of the production of most Hebrew literature for a good part of its history. It is not surprising, therefore, that during the periods when exile, uprootedness, and immigration are the norm, being a native poet can be a condition that marginalizes—to wit, the modernist canon's blindness to the great poetry of the first native Hebrew poet in the modern era, Esther Raab.^[11] It is thus ironic, though by no means accidental, that patriotic nativists like Raab occupy the same marginal position in the canon as poets who have dissociated themselves from the Zionist project (Fogel) or who actively critique its ethical foundation (Avot Yeshurun).

The need to historicize and contextualize all formations of marginality is further underscored when a parameter such as exile is considered in the framework of international modernism. Given the normative status of exile within the modernist Hebrew literary system, one might have expected Hebrew poetry to have become one of the most instructive examples of decentered, deterritorialized writing. In the ways in which it associates exile with modernism, bilingualism, cultural intertextuality, and issues of national and personal identity, Hebrew poetry captures some of the most representative features of both international modernism and marginal literatures. But these facts in themselves are not sufficient to make Hebrew poetry salient as a marginal modernist prototype. In valorizing Jewish exile, in turning the uprooted, bilingual Jew into the metonymic representation of the modernist human condition par excellence, discussions of modernism, marginality, and minor literature have tended to universalize the Jewish “example” out of existence. It is much simpler to use the Jew—not the literature written in the Jew's language—as paradigm or as loose trope for all that is other in a privileged, modernist, antithet-

ical, universally marginal sense. But in this tropological embrace (from James Joyce's Bloom as “modernist man” to Lyotard's postmodernist declaration, “We're all jews”), the literality of Jewish cultural discourse is blatantly denied.^[12]

As a corrective to this universalizing mood, this study has been intently focused on the particular formations of privileged and unprivileged marginality in, not of, modernist Hebrew poetry. When our view is limited to the specific conditions of the Hebrew literary system, as it is in Figure 5, the formation of exile which has the capacity to marginalize is internment, or exile within exile (as in the case of Lensky writing Hebrew poetry in a Russian prison^[13] ). Just like exile, exterritoriality in general does not appear as a formation of marginality in modernist Hebrew poetry until quite recently, for the simple reason that it was the normative general condition of writing in Hebrew prior to the shift of the literary center to Eretz Israel. Yet this condition too cannot be generalized, for within the necessarily duplicitous model of a cartographic historiography not all exterritorial writing is similarly normative. When the territorial displacement is geographically dissociated from any of the canonical centers (in Europe or Israel), we find marginalized or even completely excluded foci of literary production. For example, this is the case with Hebrew literature in the United States, an ironically asymmetrical condition given the centrality of American modernism to the Hebrew literary system in its Israeli formation.

Examples such as these illustrate my (decidedly programmatic) claim that modern Hebrew poetry can call into question contemporary theories of the margin. In particular, modernist Hebrew poetry may make us rethink the assumptions that underlie views of marginality within the left-hand (“extraliterary”) portion of Figure 5, views which often presuppose a rather simplistic colonial model of nationalism and minority literature, and which identify exile with the need to write in the language of the occupier—but which, like Deleuze and Guattari in their famous book (1986), focus on centrally canonical prototypes such as Franz Kafka using German in Czechoslovakia.^[14] At the same time, contemporary theories of marginality that work within a colonial model may, quite ironically, become increasingly applicable for one marginal sector within contemporary Israeli literature—namely, the Hebrew literary production of Arab and Druze writers such as Anton Shammas and Na'im Areydi.^[15] Thus, it is quite likely that, in the transition from modernism to neo- and postmod-

ernism, the Hebrew literary system will also “normalize” its formation of marginality and, in the process, gradually lose what Deleuze and Guattari (1986) have so problematically described as a “truly minor” status (see Introduction).

Much more even than Hebrew poetry, marginal prototypes within Yiddish modernism provide a profound challenge to current conceptions of decentered discourse. Yiddish, the quintessential landless language, always has exile and exterritoriality as its normative conditions, ironically even when it is written—as in the case of Avrom Sutzkever—in Israel, against the grain of the dominant Israeli Hebrew literary system. Modernist Yiddish poetry, in its unparalleled diversity and richness, is perhaps one of the strongest counterexamples to any geographical or chronological model of literary historiography. In its elaborate, self-conscious groupings, its jointly authored manifestoes, and its sophisticated explicit poetics, Yiddish poetry presents a striking illustration of what Fokkema (1984:1–18) has termed the “socio-code” of modernism. And yet this radically experimental impressionist, expressionist, futurist, and imagist poetry was produced in the absence of any one hegemonic territorial—or “colonial”—center. Rather, it appeared on the international margins of multiple, partially overlapping modernist centers: in the United States, Poland, and Russia. Like many other decentered modernisms, perhaps earlier than some, Yiddish poetry reached its apex during the years between the two world wars, one brief historical moment before it was destroyed by Nazism and Stalinism. It conducted its modernism not, as Deleuze and Guattari mandate, as “a minor practice of a major language” (Ferguson et al., 1990:61) but defiantly and selfconsciously in a language that was marginalized and was considered inappropriate for sophisticated modernist production both within the international literary community and within an increasingly militant Hebraist Jewish culture.

This book has addressed only a few peripheral paragons of this rich marginal modernism, hinting in a few places at the work that remains to be done. The historiography of Yiddish modernist poetry needs to be taken beyond the graph and the map, exposing not only its complex links to mainstream Euro-American trends but also the exclusionary practices which its own canon has maintained. Specifically, we need to explore the persistent marginality of women's poetry in a literature that could produce, as early as 1928, a 390-pagelong anthology of Yiddishe Dikhterins (Yiddish women poets).^[16] This is

a project that has only just begun, yet again the scholarly tendency has been to look at individual contributions rather than at the liminal roles that women poets consistently play in the transitions from one Yiddish modernist phase to another.^[17] Similarly, the intricate relationship between Hebrew and Yiddish modernist poetry during a period when both literatures are emerging from their mutually dependent, diglossic state still remains to be explored. We need to understand more systematically the different formations of marginality that have affected the reception of bilingual (Hebrew-Yiddish) modernist poets like Uri Zvi Greenberg and Gabriel Preil, formations which have enabled a belated canonization of Greenberg as a post-1977 poet laureate but have yet to allow Preil, a Hebrew poet in New York, anything but peripheral access to the canon. Literary historiography needs to build a critical reading of its own practices into the discourse of the profession, to expose and resist the drive to erase some forms of marginality (“Look who's a nothing!”) while privileging others.