Reznikoff is
not the poet as hero,
he is a distinct member of a tribe of poets,
an American-Jewish member who has helped found and continue poetic traditions—
both Jewish and American.
[Robert Manaster*) ]
he is a distinct member of a tribe of poets,
an American-Jewish member who has helped found and continue poetic traditions—
both Jewish and American.
[Robert Manaster*) ]
Zijn ouders waren voor de Russische
pogroms van de 1880-iger jaren naar de VS gevlucht. Hij werd geboren in wat hij
noemde het joodse getto van Brownsville, in Brooklyn, New York. In “Early
History of a Writer,” beschrijft hij zijn jeugd en zijn ervaringen met
jodenhaat. Hij gaf als dichter stem aan
deze joodse ervaringen. Zijn bundels Testimony:
The United States, 1885-1915 (1934-1979) en Holocaust (1975) zijn Reznikoff’s belangrijkste werken. [Van poetryfoundation]. Charles Reznikoff was advocaat en z'n hele leven inwoner van New York. Hij was een van de grondlegers van de artistieke beweging van het 'objectivisme' (dat niets te maken had met de gelijknamige politieke beweging van Ayn Rand).
In Stephen Fredman, A Menorah for Athena: Charles Reznikoff and
the Jewish Dilemmas of Objectivist Poetry [University of Chicago Press,
2001 – books.google], komt, zoals de titel al zegt het poëtische
werk van Charles Reznikoff uitgebreid aan de orde en daarin blijkt Spinoza voor
te komen, zoals ik in het blog van gisteren, waarin het gedicht "Jerusalem the Golden", al heb laten zien.
Ik citeer hieronder
uit dit werk een interessante passage waarin Charles Reznikoff’s gedicht “Jerusalem
the Golden”, waar dat over Spinoza een onderdeel van vormt, aan de orde komt en wordt
toegelicht.
Maar eerst neem ik een kort stukje over uit de inleiding op zijn werk van
de website "Of Things Exactly As They Are": American
Poetry of the 1930s” dat een fraaie korte duiding geeft:
Jewish history plays a significant
role in Reznikoff's poetry of the 1930s. Jerusalem
the Golden, published in 1934 evokes both that long history and the
intimate details of modern, everyday life. The first half of the book is
composed largely of short poems, often as short as two lines, though a number
of these follow a common subject and build toward a thematic resolution. […]
The longer poems toward the end of
the book continue this theme of the divine in the midst present. The title
poem is composed of four brief sections, titled respectively "The Lion
of Judah," "The Shield of David," and "Spinoza," and
"Karl Marx". Taken as a whole they present a narrative of evolving
conceptions of the divine in relation to the Jewish people. The progress of
this is from retribution and war to righteousness to dispassion and finally
to equity with Marx. There is a parallel transition here from king to prophet
to philosopher to communal existence as the concept of God becomes
increasingly remote, until the human assumes the mantle of the absent
divinity under Marx, innately following the precept "From each according
to his strength, / to each according to his need." From the perspective
of 1934, Reznikoff's move in positioning a socialist communion as the
culmination of a specifically Jewish, and specifically religous, history is
both an ingenious rhetorical and poetic device and also a useful window into
the political culture of that desperate time.
[cf.]
|
Nadat
Stephen Fredman
uitgebreid gebruik heeft gemaakt van Yirmiyahu Yovel’s uit twee delen bestaande
SPINOZA AND OTHER HERETICS, begint
hij met de volgende uiteenzetting over de ontwikkeling van het godsbegrip,
waarna hij toewerkt naar Charles Reznikoff’s gedicht
De invloed van het immanentistisch
denken op de Romantische poëzie.
The philosophical shift from a conception of God as wholly transcendent (Judaism) or as transcendent / incarnate (Christianity) to one that sees God as, in Spinoza's words, "the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things" (Spinoza 100) resonates deeply in literature as well. For someone attuned to literary history, the significance of a philosophy of immanence to the entire field of Romantic and post-Romantic poetry cannot be overestimated. Major critics such as M. H. Abrams, in Natural Supernaturalism; J. Hillis Miller, in Poets of Reality; and Charles Altieri, in Enlarging the Temple, have traced the development of immanentist thought in Romantic poetry and its successors. In the twentieth century, the philosophy of immanence has become so dominant in poetry that Altieri can distinguish two opposing kinds of poetry, "symbolist" and "immanentist," within the ongoing tradition of immanentist thought. Using Coleridge as the model for a symbolist poetry of structuration and Wordsworth as the model for an immanentist poetry of discovery, Altieri delineates the Wordsworthian side, to which the Objectivists belong, as follows: "Here poetic creation is conceived more as the discovery and the disclosure of numinous relationships within nature than as the creation of containing and structuring forms. Hence its basic commitment is to recovering familiar realities in such a way that they appear dynamically present and invigorate the mind with a sense of powers and objective values available to it" (17). The Objectivists represent the most dedicated application of these principles in American poetry—so much so that critics have come to denote the immanentist strain in American poetry as "objectivist."
The philosophical shift from a conception of God as wholly transcendent (Judaism) or as transcendent / incarnate (Christianity) to one that sees God as, in Spinoza's words, "the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things" (Spinoza 100) resonates deeply in literature as well. For someone attuned to literary history, the significance of a philosophy of immanence to the entire field of Romantic and post-Romantic poetry cannot be overestimated. Major critics such as M. H. Abrams, in Natural Supernaturalism; J. Hillis Miller, in Poets of Reality; and Charles Altieri, in Enlarging the Temple, have traced the development of immanentist thought in Romantic poetry and its successors. In the twentieth century, the philosophy of immanence has become so dominant in poetry that Altieri can distinguish two opposing kinds of poetry, "symbolist" and "immanentist," within the ongoing tradition of immanentist thought. Using Coleridge as the model for a symbolist poetry of structuration and Wordsworth as the model for an immanentist poetry of discovery, Altieri delineates the Wordsworthian side, to which the Objectivists belong, as follows: "Here poetic creation is conceived more as the discovery and the disclosure of numinous relationships within nature than as the creation of containing and structuring forms. Hence its basic commitment is to recovering familiar realities in such a way that they appear dynamically present and invigorate the mind with a sense of powers and objective values available to it" (17). The Objectivists represent the most dedicated application of these principles in American poetry—so much so that critics have come to denote the immanentist strain in American poetry as "objectivist."
Reznikoff's own unswerving commitment
to "recovering familiar realities in such a way that they appear
dynamically present and invigorate the mind" makes him the model
Objectivist. In his conception, divinity can only be recovered immanently, by
an ethical immersion in the details of mundane existence. Looking to figures
such as Da Costa and Spinoza, Reznikoff plumbs the sources of immanentist
thought in Jewish history and brings them into an American context that weds
Judaism and natural supernaturalism.
Over "Jerusalem the Golden”
In "Jerusalem the Golden," the title poem of the 1934 book he published with the Objectivist Press, Reznikoff places Spinoza within a genealogy of immanentist thought in Jewish culture. The four sections of the poem, respectively titled "the Lion of Judah," "The Shield of David," "Spinoza," and "Karl Marx," move from biblical scenes to modern philosophy, stressing the progressive influx of the divine into ethical acts of daily life. In "The Lion of Judah," the setting is war, and everyone—the soldiers, the prophet Samuel, and King David himself—seems driven by bloodlust. In the final lines of the section, though, the prophet Nathan insists that even the king of Israel, who has arranged the death of Bathsheba's husband, must submit to justice; he will not be the one to build the Temple because of his excessive recourse to bloodshed:
In "Jerusalem the Golden," the title poem of the 1934 book he published with the Objectivist Press, Reznikoff places Spinoza within a genealogy of immanentist thought in Jewish culture. The four sections of the poem, respectively titled "the Lion of Judah," "The Shield of David," "Spinoza," and "Karl Marx," move from biblical scenes to modern philosophy, stressing the progressive influx of the divine into ethical acts of daily life. In "The Lion of Judah," the setting is war, and everyone—the soldiers, the prophet Samuel, and King David himself—seems driven by bloodlust. In the final lines of the section, though, the prophet Nathan insists that even the king of Israel, who has arranged the death of Bathsheba's husband, must submit to justice; he will not be the one to build the Temple because of his excessive recourse to bloodshed:
But Nathan said to the king, even
David, the great king,
You have dealt deceitfially with the Hittite, your faithful servant;
and you shall not build the Lord's house,
because your hands have shed much blood.
(CP 1.127)
You have dealt deceitfially with the Hittite, your faithful servant;
and you shall not build the Lord's house,
because your hands have shed much blood.
(CP 1.127)
"The Shield of David"
continues the theme of righteousness in daily life, depicting God as preferring
to be worshipped "in kindness to the poor and weak, / in justice to the
orphan, the widow, the stranger among you, / and in justice to him who takes
his hire from your hand" (1.128), rather than honored through ritual
correctness in sacrifices, festivals, feasts, and fasts. This preference is
similar to Reznikoff's opting in "Kaddish" for direct communion with
his dead mother over the "trifles" of "prayers and words and
lights" (2.56). After narrating the two biblical scenes in "Jerusalem
the Golden," he speaks in the voice of Spinoza, suggesting that the
philosopher, like a new prophet, makes the next major step in bringing God into
the mundane world:
Spinoza
He is the stars,
multitudinous as the drops of rain,
and the worm at our feet,
leaving only a blot on the stone;
except God there is nothing.
multitudinous as the drops of rain,
and the worm at our feet,
leaving only a blot on the stone;
except God there is nothing.
God neither hates nor loves, has
neither pleasure nor pain;
were God to hate or love, He would not be God;
He is not a hero to fight our enemies,
nor like a king to be angry or pleased at us,
nor even a father to give us our daily bread, forgive us our trespasses;
nothing is but as He wishes,
nothing was but as He willed it;
as He wills it, so it will be.
(1.128)
were God to hate or love, He would not be God;
He is not a hero to fight our enemies,
nor like a king to be angry or pleased at us,
nor even a father to give us our daily bread, forgive us our trespasses;
nothing is but as He wishes,
nothing was but as He willed it;
as He wills it, so it will be.
(1.128)
The Deity who says in "The Shield
of David," "I am the God of Justice, I am the God of
Righteousness," has become the God of nature, who no longer speaks through
Scripture but rather inhabits the entire created universe. Spinoza's God has
lost his anthropomorphic qualities but retains his ability to be everywhere and
to make everything happen: "Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or
be conceived without God" (Spinoza 94). As Reznikoff interprets it, this
marks the ultimate expression of the sanctity of the ordinary: no matter where
we turn—toward the stars, the rain, or the worm passing underfoot—there is
nothing but God anywhere.
Yovel designates Spinoza's conception
of God's immanence as his most radical contribution to philosophy, a
contribution expressing a rejection of both conventional Christianity
(represented in Reznikoff's poem by echoes of The Lord's Prayer: "a father
to give us our daily bread, forgive us out trespasses") and conventional
Judaism (whose images of God as hero and king are also negated in the poem).
Such a rejection, Yovel argues, could have been made at this time only by a
Jewish thinker. Although Descartes, Leibniz, and the skeptical deists all
postulated a "God of the philosophers" in their rational systems,
they placed his metaphysical role as Creator and First Cause outside creation.
Spinoza was the only philosopher who refused God any particular role, seeing
God instead as the totality of the universe:
The identification of God with the
world implies a more profound rejection of Judaism and Christianity than
ordinary atheism. Spinoza does not contend that there is no God, only the
inferior natural world. Such a contention is itself steeped in a Christian
world view. Spinoza contends, on the contrary, that by virtue of identifying
the world with God, immanent reality itself acquires divine status.
(Yovel 1.175)
(Yovel 1.175)
Like many Jewish intellectuals of the
past two centuries, Reznikoff is drawn to Spinoza for the way he shifts the
religious categories of sanctity, justice, mercy, and righteousness into the
mundane world, where the poet believes the deepest religious obligations reside.
Milton Hindus confirms this reading of Reznikoff's religious position, noting,
"His God, except in direct translations from the Bible, is perhaps nearer
to the God of Spinoza and of Whitman than He is to the God of Jewish tradition"
(Hindus, Charles Reznikoff20).
Discounting the personal God of the Bible, Reznikoff himself says, "To me
God is not a human being, that is, talking of putting his hand over
anyone" (MP 120). In his
rejection of a personal God, Reznikoff follows a tradition established by
Spinoza in his Theological-Political
Treatise, where he argues that our "personal" relationship to God
is a matter wholly of superstition, based upon our desires and fears (Spinoza
6-10). If God is not personal, then the modern Jew can focus personal relations
not outwardly toward the transcendent realm but inwardly toward the immanent
realm of other human beings and nature.
In "Karl Marx," the final
section of "Jerusalem the Golden," Reznikoff speaks entirely from
within the immanent realm, as one of the workers for whom Marx's vision of
justice has become operative. Sharing Marx's wholly immanentist philosophy,
Reznikoff's speaker anticipates an end to alienated labor, war, hatred, hunger,
drudgery, and private property, reaching a prophetic climax with a central
communist dictum:
Proclaim to the seed of man
throughout the length and breadth of the continents,
From each according to his strength,
to each according to his need.
(CP 1.129)
throughout the length and breadth of the continents,
From each according to his strength,
to each according to his need.
(CP 1.129)
These final lines of "Jerusalem
the Golden" (and of the volume bearing its name) carry Reznikoff's
historical vision of the evolving understanding of justice in Jewish thought
into the era of the Great Depression, when the desire for work was a palpable
need and the possibility of revolution was a mounting hope. By its placement
after "Spinoza," "Karl Marx" also ties the contemporary
revolutionary movement to the tradition of Jewish secularism, with its central
emphases upon justice and social belonging.
Reznikoff is not the only
Jewish-American intellectual to link Spinoza and Marx to a chain of Jewish
revolutionaries. Isaac Deutscher (1907-67), author of the famous essay
"The non-Jewish Jew," also constructs a secular Jewish tradition
running through these two major figures. A child prodigy, ordained at thirteen
as a rabbi in his native Poland, Deutscher became in succession a poet, a communist,
and an anti-Stalinist. His "non-Jewish Jew" has gone beyond local
identifications and embraces universal liberation, following in the footsteps
of Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Freud: "They all
found Jewry too narrow, too archaic, and too constricting. They all looked for
ideals and fulfilment beyond it, and they represent the sum and substance of...
the most profound upheavals that have taken place in philosophy, sociology,
eco-…
______________
*) Robert Manaster, « Opening Up a
Tradition, a Return from Exile: The Vision in Charles Reznikoff's "Jerusalem
the Golden". » In: Shofar, Vol.
21, No. 1, Special Issue: Jewish Poetry (FALL 2002), pp. 44-62
Enige sites over Charles Reznikoff:
Volgens worldin80poems zou de bundel Jerusalem the Golden zijn belangrijkste werk zijn.
Reznikoff was advocaat 'dus' is er deze aardige pagina over hem op "Lawyers and Poetry" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Reznikoff
Joshua Clover Jan. 22, 2006 in The New York Times over 'The Poems of Charles Reznikoff
1918-1975'
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