I poked about a village church
And found his family tomb
And copied out what I could read
In that religious gloom;
Found many a famous man there;
But fame and virtue rot.
Draw round, beloved and bitter men,
Draw round and raise a shout;
The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.
I find that one of my problems in absorbing Sebald is that in his end is his beginning. Here is the close of The Rings of Saturn:
Hence the Reich ministers of food and agriculture, of labour, of forestry and of aviation had launched a sericulture programme, inaugurating a new era of silk cultivation in Germany. The Reich Association of Silkworm Breeders in Berlin, a constituent group within the Reich Federation of German Breeders of Small Animals, which in turn was affiliated to the Reich Agricultural Commission, saw its task as increasing production in every existing workshop, advertising silk cultivation in the press, in the cinema and on radio, establishing model rearing units for educational purposes, organizing advisory bodies at local, district and regional level to support all silk-growers, providing mulberry trees, and planting them by the million on unutilized land, in residential areas and cemeteries, by roadsides, on railway embankments and along the Reich’s autobahns. According to Professor Lange, the author of educational pamphlet F213/1939, the significance of silk cultivation in Germany lay not only in obviating the need to buy from abroad, and so easing the pressure on foreign currency reserves, but also in the importance silk would have in the dawning era of aerial warfare and hence in the formation of a self-sufficient economy of national defence. For that reason, it was desirable that schools should interest the youth of Germany in silk cultivation, although not under compulsion, as in the days of Frederick the Great. Rather, the teaching staff and pupils should be motivated to practise sericulture of their own accord. Schools might do pioneering work in this sector, suggested Professor Lange. Schoolyards might have mulberries planted along their perimeters, and silkworms could be reared in the school buildings. After all, the Professor added, quite apart from their indubitable utility value, silkworms afforded an almost ideal object lesson for the classroom. Any number could be had for virtually nothing, they were perfectly docile and needed neither cages nor compounds, and they were suitable for a variety of experiments (weighing, measuring and so forth) at every stage in their evolution. They could be used to illustrate the structure and distinctive features of insect anatomy, insect domestication, retrogressive mutations, and the essential measures which are taken by breeders to monitor productivity and selection, including extermination to preempt racial degeneration.—In the film, we see a silk-worker receiving eggs despatched by the Central Reich Institute of Sericulture in Celle, and depositing them in sterile trays. We see the hatching, the feeding of the ravenous caterpillars, the cleaning out of the frames, the spinning of the silken thread, and finally the killing, accomplished in this case not by putting the cocoons out in the sun or in a hot oven, as was often the practice in the past, but by suspending them over a boiling cauldron. The cocoons, spread out on shallow baskets, have to be kept in the rising steam for upwards of three hours, and when a batch is done, it is the next one’s turn, and so on until the entire killing business is completed.
Today, as I bring these notes to a conclusion, is the 13th of April 1995. It is Maundy Thursday, the feast day on which Christ’s washing of the disciples’ feet is remembered, and also the feast day of Saints Agathon, Carpus, Papylus and Hermengild. On this very day three hundred and ninety-seven years ago, Henry IV promulgated the Edict of Nantes; Handel’s Messiah was first performed two hundred and fifty-three years ago, in Dublin; Warren Hastings was appointed Governor-General of Bengal two hundred and twenty-three years ago; the Anti-Semitic League was founded in Prussia one hundred and thirteen years ago; and, seventy-four years ago, the Amritsar massacre occurred, when General Dyer ordered his troops to fire on a rebellious crowd of fifteen thousand that had gathered in Jallianwala Bagh square, to set an example. Quite possibly some of the victims were employed in silk cultivation, which was developing at that time, on the simplest of foundations, in the Amritsar region and indeed throughout India.
Fifty years ago to the day, British newspapers reported that the city of Celle had been taken and that German forces were in the headlong retreat from the Red Army, which was advancing up the Danube valley. And finally, Maundy Thursday, the 13th of April 1995, was also the day on which Clara’s father, shortly after being taken to hospital in Coburg, departed this life. Now, as I write, and think once more of our history, which is but a long account of calamities, it occurs to me that at one time the only acceptable expression of profound grief, for ladies of the upper classes, was to wear heavy robes of black silk taffeta or black crêpe de chine. Thus at Queen Victoria’s funeral, for example, the Duchess of Teck allegedly made her appearance in what contemporary fashion magazines described as a breathtaking gown with billowing veils, all of black Mantua silk of which the Norwich silk weavers Willett & Nephew, just before the firm closed down for good, had created, uniquely for this occasion, and in order to demonstrate their unsurpassed skills in the manufacture of mourning silks, a length of some sixty paces. And Sir Thomas Browne, who was the son of a silk merchant and may well have had an eye for these things, remarks in a passage of the Pseudodoxia Epidemica that I can no longer find that in the Holland of his time it was customary, in a home where there had been a death, to drape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors and all canvasses depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the field, so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now being lost for ever.
Every sentence, indeed every phrase, in this passage carries a catastrophic burden but one sentence is the matrix of everything that Sebald wrote:
They could be used to illustrate the structure and distinctive features of insect anatomy, insect domestication, retrogressive mutations, and the essential measures which are taken by breeders to monitor productivity and selection, including extermination to preempt racial degeneration.
I never met Sebald, but I recall conversations with his friend Michael Hamburger in both England and the United States at various times from 1955 through the late 1990s. After that we lost touch, and he died in 2007 at his home in Suffolk. I admired Hamburger’s own poems as well as his translations, which included Sebald and Paul Celan. We never discussed Sebald, but I remember listening to Hamburger closely as he recited Celan, first in German and then in Hamburger’s own arresting versions. Celan drowned himself in the Seine at the age of forty-nine, taking with him a poetic gift almost incommensurable. Like Kafka, Celan writes German as if he is writing in Hebrew. Celan’s image haunts me as I conclude The Rings of Saturn.
CHAPTER 48
Book of Numbers (2015)
JOSHUA COHEN
A NOVELIST WHO HAS just turned thirty-eight, Joshua Cohen has a charmed and doomed gift for evoking equivocal emanations from excessively eminent essayists. I cannot exert enthusiasm for these ambivalent echoing reverberations, but, then, I do not possess extensive erudition on the question of our younger American novelists. In addition to Cohen, I admire William Giraldi and Nell Freudenberger, among others.
I agree with William Giraldi’s exaltation of American audacity. Joshua Cohen is audacious beyond audacity and doubtless will remain so. In order to become an aesthetic value, audacity must acquire authentic freedom.
My former student Andrew Ford, in his book Homer: The Poetry of the Past (1992), mulls over the contest that Iliad and Odyssey had to conduct with prior epics now lost to us. Agon, the competition for the foremost place, is the center of ancient Greek culture. Pindar strives with Hesiod and with Homer, and the Athenian tragedians chal
lenge one another. Joshua Cohen has a double burden as a novelist. On the one side, he contends with the earlier Thomas Pynchon, the maker of The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon. More darkly, he is the inheritor of the Jewish American novel: Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933); Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934); Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant (1957); Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift (1975); Cynthia Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm (1987); Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater (1995).
As befits Joshua Cohen, I will take the end of Book of Numbers as my beginning:
A body was hauled out of the river Ganges, Varanasi, India, 11/19 or 20, apparently. This was just downstream from the Manikarnika Ghat, the main crematorium ghat, a perpetual stream of burning bodies plunging down the stairs but not plashing at bottom because by the bottom all was ash, a cloud of flies scattering across the waters.
I can only assume that the Indian authorities wouldn’t ordinarily bother with a floater, but he was white, or what was left of him was white, apparently. Other or the same Indian authorities, evincing impressive operational prerogative, ordered an autopsy that determined the COD as accidental/suicide, ordered a DNA test and copied both the results and report to the US State Department, which matched the genetic markers as being Principal’s. Sari Apt Le Vay petitioned for the body’s return, but it was in such a bitten crocodilian or ultimately imaginary condition that it was cremated, not at the Manikarnika but in a facility. No pics or vids of the body exist or have—like a missing pancreas—leaked yet.
It was Moe all over again—but because I switched off the TV after PBS had on Seth without Lisabeth, I can only piece this together from scrap bits of the Asbury Park Press, the NJ Jewish News, and whatever general interest nonpotting rags Moms still subscribes to, though delivery’s been iffy. And the house modem, which has been broken since I got here—Moms doesn’t even remember it breaking.
I couldn’t go to Wawa and couldn’t have Moms go for me, so I quit drinking, quit smoking, I guess. I made myself useful in the attic department, heirloom rearrangements. Suddenly everything heavy in the house had to be moved. The coverage didn’t leave the lawn until purdah season’s winter storm advisory.
Cal called and left a msg, and I still haven’t gotten back to him. Finn called and left a msg saying he’d consider a reprint of my book, be sure to be in touch.
I haven’t been. I never made a statement—I wrote.
Consider this: A dozen Moes crashed Principal’s “medimorial” (meditation memorial) held at the Tetplex, four of them legally named Vishnu, and one even named Vishnu Fernandes. Cullen de Groeve and Owmar O’Quinn read a selection from the Tibetan Book of the Dead: “Void cannot injure void, the qualityless cannot injure the qualityless.”
Kori Dienerowitz did not attend due to a prior commitment in Bermuda, a premature retirement with prosecutorial immunity.
A Pew Research poll, of around this date, queried a responsible sampling of Americans as to whether their government’s online surveillance initiatives were justified (62%)? or unjustified (28%)? with only 10% undecided.
Into December, another whitish body washed up in a drainage culvert at the Verna Industrial Estate, Goa, and the boy who found it, shockingly recognizing his find, posted the pics and vids online, which were reasonably convincing, according to the convinced: Principal, already decaying. Anyway, something happened next like the boy’s father without contacting anyone, perhaps without even being privy to his son’s exploits, tried selling the body. But he was caught. Or the guy who’d bought it from him and contacted Sari Apt Le Vay was caught, the body taken into custody or whatever, but lost before tests, according to the tabloids. Subsequent corpses turned up in Cairo, Lisbon, Kifl Haris outside Nablus (Palestinian Territories). The great wheel turned and memed. Live in the flesh spottings in Brazil were a thing. Principal was a wayfarer in a Finnish disco. The wheel was turning me 40. A child was born in Kanazawa, Ishikawa, whose soul was recognized as his.
Principal is the other Joshua Cohen, founder and high satrap of Tetration, the ultimate startup turned tech titan of the Internet, computers, smartphones, and government surveillance. He has hired our Joshua Cohen, familiarly Josh, to ghostwrite his autobiography. Josh, with somewhat justified bitterness but with an inaccurate sense of prophecy, likes to refer to himself as “a failed novelist.”
* * *
—
If you are to do critical justice to Joshua Cohen, you have to begin with the necessity of difficulty. He is a difficult writer and is likely to become even more difficult. These days readers shun difficulty, because they are so desperately distracted. The Age of the Screen jeopardizes the art of the novel. Joshua Cohen is an immensely ambitious novelist. His innermost desire is to transcend his precursors, Jewish and Gentile. Book of Numbers is difficult enough and has to call upon invention to palliate readers having an arduous experience.
When I reread Book of Numbers I remember my personal acquaintance with the late William Gaddis and the uncanny experience of first reading The Recognitions in 1955. Since Joshua Cohen has read everything, and in the original languages, doubtless he knows The Recognitions. I reread The Recognitions last year and was again a reader who fought against immersion but gradually yielded to it. It is linked to the Clementine Recognitions, a work dubiously ascribed to the third century of the Common Era. Ostensibly set against the Gnostics, the Clementine Recognitions curiously exalt the marvelous figure of Simon Magus of Samaria, a first-century C.E. grand charlatan and miracle worker who asserted an identity with the divine, and who matched himself with a whore of Tyre. Simon declared her the reincarnation of Helen of Troy, and the fallen element in God’s thought. Since the Clementine Recognitions are Christian, Simon Magus is declared the founder of all Gnosticism. In a levitation contest with Saint Peter, Simon plunges to his death.
Joshua Cohen is no Gnostic but something close to a normative Jew. Implicitly he trusts in the Covenant between Yahweh and the Jewish people. He has no illusions, because he knows the full burden of Jewish history. Yet there is a wistful quality whenever he turns to the Sages, whether ancient, Hasidic, or modern. I myself am aware that when I do so, I am studying the nostalgias and little more. Yahweh broke the Covenant, and who am I to gather the shards? A novelist, poet, or dramatist might do it, but not a secular exegete. Both Joshua Cohen and Harold Bloom are addicted to quoting Rabbi Tarfon: “You are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” Joshua Cohen is trying to complete the work. Long ago I desisted from it.
The vessels of Judaic trust and of Jewish identity have broken. Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), to whom I listened attentively during many hours we spent together in the last year and eight months of his life, would have denied that sentence. And yet Scholem, who masked as a historical scholar of Kabbalah, truly was a navi, a throwback to Amos and Micah. Joshua Cohen has no such exalted ambition, yet he also wants to see the broken vessels mended.
One of Joshua Cohen’s dazzling ambitions is to conduct an agon with phantoms. He is haunted by all the losses in Jewish tradition—of language, trust, benignity. His lamentation extends also to the transcendence of Emerson and of Walt Whitman, which is lost to us. Tikkun, the mending of the broken vessels, is his deepest desire. His exorbitant hope is that his books will be the mending. I must not neglect his recent novel, Moving Kings (2017), since that attempts tikkun. For Joshua Cohen, that is to achieve a perilous balance between mending the Oral Law or being overwhelmed by it. I take the liberty of quoting from a letter he kindly sent me:
The first section of Moving Kings is my homage to Roth/Malamud/Bellow—David King is a creature of their times, not of mine. The second section is my homage to the Israeli novel—written with the impulse to create a new language in a new land, but constantly recalled to the Tanach, and alternately reveling in and wary of that tension. The third section is my attempt to unite
the two, but perversely to do it partially in the voice of a black Muslim who mistrusts both.
This, I think, is the best summation of my attitude toward the “unity” of healing: A broken tradition can never be made whole again in and of itself, but rather its pieces can only be combined with the pieces of another broken tradition, into a new and never-before-imagined whole, bound together by someone suspicious of and even ashamed by the very activity but unable—historically unable—to do anything else.
This binding I take to be perpetual, and perpetualizing—as I write in Moving Kings, “The thing about following a star is where do you stop? Hard to tell where it’s telling you to lay down your burden. Because a star can always seem to be above everything, it can always seem a block beyond. All you can do is follow until you’ve fooled yourself.”
I cannot hope to achieve that urgency but it moves me almost beyond measure. Yet so ingenious is Cohen’s account of Tetration that it can be read as mock-heroic frolic. In one way, Book of Numbers is a missile launched against the Internet, yet in another, it boldly attempts to appropriate that vacant ocean. Unlike Philip Roth and his many precursors, for whom doubling hooked identities, Joshua Cohen seeks his other self in the abyss of the Internet. It may be that Cohen’s true forerunner is Herman Melville, who sought out the ambiguities in scriveners’ offices and on whalers. A patience willing to accept a bad time can prevail until the good time comes again, if ever it can. That may be why Joshua Cohen can so perilously absorb what bedevils me:
Basically, Kor had called a VC meeting, had not invited us but had invited Moe. This was the first we had been informed about any of this. Apparently, Moe had been under the impression that the purpose of the meeting was to examine his plans for the DCent, which, for him, was culminant. Anyone else would have resented the lack of notice, but he was primed. He had been primed since birth. His first birth. This was why he had endured the quibbly servers and Tetplex delays, this was what he had been mounting and sealing and soldering and suffering for through every karmic deferral, countless reincarnations counted as like retroincarnations until the bodies released their egos. All existence had been just a mobilization for this, the mindful manifestation of his sadhana, his purpose, this slideshow presentation.
Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279) Page 56