From Continuity to Contiguity

Miron's is a failed, brilliant book. On the one hand, at well over five hundred pages (with notes), it comes across as a data dump, perhaps, before anything else, the occasionally bitter, at times frantic, and often unedited efforts of a monumental scholar to make sure he's been understood (and to settle some old scores). On the other hand, anyone who thinks at all about Jewish literature, anyone dedicated at all to theorizing this category we too easily call Jewish literature, should be glad to have Miron's text. It is one of the rare works that actually aims to think—let alone succeeds in thinking—critically about the field. If intelligent Jewish literary study is going to have a future, surely Miron's book will be part of its archive.One of the frustrating things about the book, I think, is that it aims to accomplish two discrete tasks that, surprisingly I guess, don't necessarily support each other. It offers at once a history of Jewish literary criticism and a critique of Jewish literary history. Though the theory of Jewish literature Miron proposes—which replaces, as his title suggests, a metaphorics of continuity with one of contiguity—is supposed to serve as the interlock between these two tasks, the book gets awfully ungainly at times. One might want to venture that Miron, emphasizing the spatial over the temporal, has written an untimely book, as this frequently—and anachronistically—looks like the kind of encyclopedic treatise I thought we weren't supposed to be writing anymore. I write this with tongue in cheek of course, but the fact remains that a much shorter and more focused monograph could have more successfully served the polemical heart of this book. I don't want to devalue the important historical work Miron accomplishes here; I only want to point out that the reader constantly has to recalibrate as the book cycles repeatedly, and not always smoothly, between historiography and theorization. I'm going to concentrate here on the theory bit rather than on the history bit because there's more at stake in it, I think, for a field such as Jewish literary study that seems right now—at least in the American academy—to be poised at a significant tipping point between a reactionary historicism and a really interesting critical future. But that's also just how I roll, and I certainly don't want to dissuade potential readers from exploring the fantastically rich history of Jewish literary criticism Miron provides.Miron's book is organized around the correct presumption that any properly critical consideration of Jewish literature qua Jewish must begin in a twinned theorization of Jewish identity and of the Jewishness of Jewish literature. First, the book advocates thinking about the totality of Jewish literature as more an irregular assemblage contingently cobbled together than a coherent unity persisting over time. (Incidentally, Miron is decidedly dialectical here. We see this in even the first few pages of the prologue, where he begins by describing the conflict between Hebraists and Yiddishists about the authentic linguistic home of Jewish writing: this conflict is overcome in the more general and critical question of whether a specific and definable brand of Jewish writing existed outside the boundaries of Jewish languages; and then the yet more fundamental question of whether there's an essence in Jewish writing; and then finally, back at the particular space where he started, the newly formulated, and now self-consciously political, critical question of whether the problems that occupied Hebrew and Yiddish literary scholars before the Israeli era deserve to be salvaged from oblivion and rendered once again an integral part of the theoretical literary agenda of the twenty-first century.) Challenging the institutional hegemony exercised by the concept of a canon of Jewish literature, a tradition that, structured arboreally, unifies all properly “Jewish” writing by way of an understanding of time as coherent and continuous and of a self-evident Jewish historical subject that occupies it (and taking a well-justified jab at Ruth Wisse while he's at it), Miron proposes as an alternative his innovative idea of a “Jewish literary complex.” Mindful that Jewish writing cannot be meaningfully unified along linguistic, national, or doctrinal lines, or indeed by any “simplistic formulae predicated on the existence of self-evident continuities and discontinuities,” Miron argues that concepts such as causality, developments, continuities, and progress represent in the study of Jewish literature “at best only one aspect of a multifaceted reality.... [T]hey could never offer a comprehensive view of the literary phenomenon, particularly when it was worth studying” (271).Miron challenges the kind of reductive thinking in which the concept of “canon” inheres: “A complex, a multifarious entity consisting of different connected, semi-connected, and unconnected particles, and as such complex, that is complicated, difficult to understand and analyze,” the totality of Jewish writing is most certainly not a system, and it is not programmed to discover or reveal order and continuity. He writes, “Vast, disorderly, and somewhat diffuse, this complex was characterized by dualities, parallelisms, occasional intersections, marginal overlapping, hybrids, similarities within similarities, mobility, changeability, occasional emergence of patterns and their eventual disappearance, randomness, and, when approximating a semblance of significant order, by contiguities. The latter concept, contiguity, I believe should replace that of continuity in our search for whatever moment of tangible contacts between the many players in the drama of the modern Jewish literary complex. It is a concept that a new theory of Jewish literatures must adopt, explore, and develop” (275–76). The “anthologizing” energies of a concept of canon, by contrast, can do little other than “superimpos[e] an illusory order upon a vast cultural space where neither the concept of continuity nor that of discontinuity sheds much light” (305).In order for contiguity to replace continuity, Miron understands the Jewish literary complex as occupying a space that allows mobility rather than a time that fixes a tradition. Contiguity cannot be conceptualized within the “matrix of continuity”: to be a useful concept, contiguity must imply a kind of light or diminished contact that would not throw us back into that trap; a contact that avoids all permanencies, is in flux, can be seen as random, and yet indicative of mobility—free and unfettered—within a space that is vast and open, but then also, in the final analysis, not infinite, because it is circumscribed by a borderline.... [T]his is the borderline of Jewishness; not of Judaism as a religious, civilizational, or national entity, “essence,” or system, but of the perception of reality through (or also through) the screen of the experience of being “a Jew in the world.” (307) In this appeal to Buber, we have the second prong of Miron's theorization of Jewish literary study. Concomitant with his shift to a spatial metaphorics of discontinuous contiguity from a temporally structured concept of canonical tradition, Miron insists on an existential rather than essential understanding of Jewishness or Jewish identity: “Once we make the Jewish literary complex as a whole our subject of study ... what really counts is the dynamics of the complex as dictated by the movement of diverse entities within it, the brands of contiguity these entities formed when coming in touch with each other, and their mutual ‘sympathies’ and rejections” (312–13). As he continues this sentiment ninety pages later, the “modern Jewish cultural tradition resembles a heap of metal chips strewn over a wide plane on which different and often contradictory magnetic forces exercise contradictory influences. Most of these chips never constituted a single, solid object.... [T]he Jewishness of these cultures cannot be defined by extrinsic and fixed criteria, for they are Jewish because Jewish communities, as well as individuals at different times and places defined them as such” (403). This is why the administrative concepts of canon and tradition fail for Miron. Without a self-evident, fixed, and above all essentialist theory of the identity of literature, canon remains incoherent and inoperative. Miron's definition of Jewish literature, and perhaps more to the point, the Jewish writer, is radically contingent, dependent almost entirely on context, and this is why continuity fails as an organizational rubric: we can point to no actual coherent or unified essence that persists across time and space—“A Jewish writer (who can, as a matter of course, be also an American or a French or a German writer) is a writer whose work evinces an interest in or is in whatever way and to whatever extent conditioned by a sense of Judesein, being Jewish, or is being read by readers who experience it as if it showed interest and were conditioned by the writer's being Jewish.” Miron goes on to add that “this gives rise to any number of literary hybrids, and excludes in advance any essentialist notion of a Jewish literary ‘purity’” (405). This argument, with its theorization of identity, is where the critique of Jewish literature must begin; it's regrettable that we have to wait more than four hundred pages for it.Jewish literary study these days too often manifests itself in a reductive historicism that understands literature as part of a fairly unproblematic history of The Jew. Historicism is unquestionably a powerful interpretive instrument, but the field of Jewish literature now often cedes its ability to contest what Jacques Rancière calls in The Politics of Aesthetics (Continuum, 2004) the distribution of the sensible, the “delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience.” A reactionary and bureaucratic nationalism is the inevitable result of this abdication of aesthetics and criticism; we get what Sara Horowitz, in her contribution to Insider/Outsider (University of California Press, 1998), describes as Jewish studies: “the study of Jews in their (or our) own terms.” Miron's book is a powerful weapon to defend against such critical impoverishment

History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies