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“Nor Mind Nor Body of Me Can Be Touched”: The Politics of Passivity in Moyshe Kulbak’s Montog and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 December 2015

Marc Caplan
Marc Caplan*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Abstract

This article will compare two novels: Moyshe Kulbak’s Montog (“Monday”) and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. Each novel ends with the death of its protagonist, figured as both a senseless act and the apotheosis of its hero’s self-reflexive, ironic rejection of community, faith, and purpose. Drawing on theories of Hannah Arendt, this comparison proposes to read the two narratives and their preoccupation with incarceration, institutionalization, revolutionary activity, religion, and the family as profound yet oblique parables on the nature of privation, resistance, and commitment in the multiple senses. Indeed, by arguing on behalf of a “politics of failure,” this comparison proposes a methodology for reading Beckett and Kulbak postcolonially that in turn invites further consideration of the postcolonial status of expatriate Irish and early-Soviet Jewish cultures, respectively. This essay creates for the two narratives a community of elective affinity that neither author would have envisioned for himself, and thus demonstrates that their respective critiques of ideological progress—via their shared strategies of parody, linguistic marginality, and exile—fulfill an explicitly political function.

Keywords

Samuel BeckettincarcerationmodernismnovelpostcolonialityRussian revolutionYiddish
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 3 , Issue 1: Jewish Studies and Postcolonialism , January 2016 , pp. 97 - 115
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 Roth, Henry, Mercy of a Rude Stream: A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park (New York: Picador, 1995), 220–221Google Scholar.

2 Soyinka, Wole, The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (1972; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 40Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., 225.

4 Ibid., 82–83.

5 Beckett, Samuel, Murphy (New York: Grove, 2011), 97Google Scholar.

6 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 38–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 In the contemporary American context, a right to privacy has been the central point of contestation in current debates over both reproductive freedom and marriage equality. In 1965, for example, US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas famously asserted in a case declaring state bans on contraception unconstitutional (Griswold v. Connecticut) that “We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights.” As the historian Jill Lepore points out, however, the right to privacy has developed only with respect to bourgeois property rights contemporaneous with the Constitution’s Bill of Rights—and in previous Court decisions, particularly with respect to women’s suffrage, the notion of privacy had been invoked as often to limit freedoms as to grant them. See Lepore, Jill, “To Have and to Hold: Reproduction, Marriage, and the Constitution,” The New Yorker (May 25, 2015): 34–39Google Scholar.

8 In his reading of Murphy as a postcolonial novel, Patrick Bixby makes a similar point, from an opposite perspective, arguing that Murphy’s inability to reconcile himself with the demands of the nation-state determines the dysfunctionality of his interpersonal relationships: “Franco Moretti . . . suggests that the Bildungsroman as an expression of transcendental homelessness manifests a desire to accommodate the private with the public in a symbolic form that narrates the formation of an integrated subjectivity in modern European society. Beckett’s narrative, expressing a much more literal homelessness, portrays the failure of its protagonist to reconcile with the demands of the nation-state and its various social institutions, and yet this failure presents itself as the precondition for postcolonial subjectivity.” See Bixby, Patrick, Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 89Google Scholar.

9 Arendt, 42.

10 For a detailed discussion of Murphy’s itineraries through London, see Bixby, 90–105.

11 Kulbak, Moyshe, Montog (Warsaw: Kultur-lige, 1929), 34Google Scholar. English translation in Neugroschel, Joachim, The Shtetl: A Creative Anthology of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe (1979; Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1995), 537Google Scholar. For the sake of convenience, subsequent references to the Yiddish original of Kulbak’s novel will be incorporated in footnotes as “Y”; all references to Neugroschel’s English translation will be referred to in footnotes as “E.”

12 Kulbak Y, 36.

13 Kulbak Y, 92; Kulbak E, 537.

14 Beckett, 107.

15 Arendt, 38.

16 Arendt, 73.

17 Beckett, 2.

18 Beckett, 28.

19 Kulbak Y 41–42; Kulbak E 507.

20 Beckett, 175. On Murphy’s correct surmise of the derivation of “gas” from “chaos,” see Cohn, Ruby, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 82Google Scholar.

21 Beckett, 70.

22 Beckett, 71.

23 Rabaté, Jean-Michel, “Murphydurke, or Towards a Phenomenology of Immaturity (Reading Murphy with Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke),” Beckett and Phenomenology, eds. Ulrika Maude and Matthew Feldman (New York: Continuum, 2009), 124Google Scholar.

24 Beckett, 226.

25 In the King James version: “Then one said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee. But he answered and said unto him that told him, Who is my mother? and who are my brethren? And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.”

26 Kulbak Y, 54; Kulbak E, 514–15.

27 For more on the significance of Jesus to modern Jewish cultures, see Hoffman, Matthew, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar and Stahl, Neta, Other and Brother: Jesus in the 20th Century Jewish Literary Landscape (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Kulbak Y, 61; Kulbak E, 518.

29 As easily as one might make an imperfect analogy between Gnesye and Mary Magdalene, she also evokes aspects of the Polish false messiah Jacob Frank’s daughter Ewa, who held a court dedicated to her father’s credo after his death at Offenbach am Main, Germany. Frank (c. 1726–1791), whose heresy combined elements of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam along with the cultivated blasphemy of Shabetai Tsevi (1626–1676), as well as a great deal of personal aggrandizement and financial opportunism, was the subject of a drama, Yankev Frank, that Kulbak wrote while living in Berlin in the early 1920s. For more on the Frankist movement, see Maciejko, Pawel, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

30 Kulbak Y, 21–22; Kulbak E, 494–95.

31 Beckett, 67.

32 Kulbak Y, 62; Kulbak E, 519.

33 This choice of metaphor does double duty in signifying Mordecai-Marcus’s (and implicitly Kulbak’s) heretical impulses, first by associating the “Monday Jews” with the most unkosher species in the animal kingdom; second by resonating with yet another New Testament reference, of Jesus’ expulsion of the demons into a herd of swine in Matthew 8:28–32.

34 Kulbak Y, 61; Kulbak E, 518–19.

35 Kulbak Y, 95; Kulbak E, 539.

36 Mordecai-Marcus’s death scene also resonates with Moses’s farewell to the Children of Israel in the Book of Deuteronomy, though the echoes of the Passion are more explicit given both the apocalyptic mood of Kulbak’s novel and the identification, however paradoxical, of Mordecai-Marcus with Jesus. As previously noted, in Murphy the protagonist must play both Judas and Jesus in his private Passion play because all the dramas in the novel are inevitably subsumed within his own consciousness.

37 Kulbak Y, 100; Kulbak E, 540–41.

38 Kulbak Y, 116; Kulbak E, 550.

39 Beckett, 112.

40 Richard McGuire offers an additional, eloquent observation on how Murphy’s night-shift employment at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat asylum further connects Beckett’s protagonist with a familiar postcolonial trajectory: “Murphy’s work experience . . . belongs to that range of Irish London Underground construction and maintenance tunnelers, Caribbean London Underground railway staff, Irish and Caribbean factory workers, and Irish and Caribbean nurses in the National Health Service in Britain, in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Murphy’s ultimately chosen way of working in London is in the manner of many migrants on the margins of daylight, nine-to-five society: he is largely unknown to many of those who, in the sunlit hours, frequent the city and claim it as their domain.” See McGuire, Richard, “Migrant Drifters: Samuel Beckett’s Murphy and Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners in a Postcolonial Comparative Context,” Comparative Critical Studies 11.2–3 (2014): 247CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Professor Tyrus Miller has my heartfelt thanks for providing me with this reference.

41 Perhaps the most graphic account of this discontent can be found in (the British-born!) Shane MacGowan’s song “The Old Main Drag”; see (hear!), The Pogues, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash (1985; Audio CD: Rhino Records, 2006).

42 As James Knowlson writes, in terms echoed by other biographers, “Although he was in London for most of 1934, the focus of much of Beckett’s interest and attention remained, naturally enough, in Ireland. . . . He hated London and was infuriated by the patronizing English habit of addressing him in pubs or shops as ‘Pat’ or ‘Paddy’.” See James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 2004), 178–79. Lois Gordon further elaborates that “during the years Beckett lived in London, not only were there many ‘down-and-out-Irishmen,’ but everyone was down and out: it was the middle of the Depression. . . . During his stay in London, nearly three million people were unemployed and London had become a city of poor housing, ill health, and a widely demoralized population.” See Gordon, Lois G., The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906–1946 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 93Google Scholar, emphasis in original.

43 Perhaps most vividly evoked in the narrator’s description of Murphy’s erstwhile lover, “For an Irish girl Miss Counihan was quite exceptionally anthropoid.” See Beckett, 118.

44 For a compelling summary of the political factors that would have motivated Murphy’s rejection of an Irish national identity, when repressive notions of conformity and unity were most forcefully articulated and legislated in the Irish Free State, see Bixby, 86–87.

45 The definitive study of this phenomenon in Jewish literature is Chone Shmeruk, Hashem hamashma’uti Mordkhe-Markus: gilgulo hasifruti shel ideal hevrati (“The Significant Name Mordkhe-Markus: the Literary Transformations of a Social Ideal”), Tarbitz 29.1 (1959): 76–98.

46 As Shmuel Feiner writes of one nineteenth-century maskil, “According to [Shalom] Hacohen, the correct meaning of Aufklärung in the Jewish context was the cultivation of Hebrew language and literature, especially Hebrew poetry.” See Feiner, Shmuel, “Toward a Historical Definition of the Haskalah,” New Perspectives on the Haskalah, eds. Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001), 194Google Scholar.

47 Beckett, 122.

48 Kulbak Y, 16–17; Kulbak E, 492.

49 The formulation “revolutionary shtetl” recurs habitually throughout the novel, and unlike Beckett’s specific location of Murphy in London, this is the only spatial marker for the story’s action. A shtetl in Yiddish discourse refers not just literally to a small town but specifically to a habitat for traditional Jewish culture, replete with a Jewish communal infrastructure, houses of worship and study, and facilities for the maintenance of Jewish observance such as a ritual bath, a Jewish cemetery, and a kosher slaughterhouse. In nineteenth-century Yiddish and Hebrew literature, it was conventional to render the shtetl in prototypical terms rather than to place narratives in specific, historically identifiable locations; this practice emphasized the idea of the shtetl as an archetypal Jewish space, and although this convention had faded among many of Kulbak’s contemporaries in favor of greater narrative verisimilitude, his adherence to this practice underscores the temporal contradiction between Jewish tradition and revolutionary modernity at the heart of the narrative. For more on the uses of the shtetl as archetype, see Miron, Dan, “The Literary Image of the Shtetl,” The Image of the Shtetl and Other Essays of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 1–48Google Scholar.

50 Without wishing to go so far afield in tracing these allusions that the comparison of Montog with Murphy gets lost in the process, one can nonetheless observe that at one point in Kulbak’s novel the two beggar women, Stesye and Gnesye, dream of themselves being transformed into soldiers (Kulbak Y, 28; Kulbak E, 499), an image that blurs boundaries of both gender and selfhood, and conflates these two figures with the androgynous accidental soldiers at the center of Mendele Moykher-Sforim’s 1878 novel The Travels of Benjamin III (Masoes Benyomin hashlishi in Yiddish and Hebrew); when Mordecai-Marcus says, “Behold, there exists a great prayer that is prayed not with the lips, and that no one hears, and that prayer is the holiest” (Kulbak Y, 64; Kulbak E, 520), Kulbak takes his cue from Y. L. Peretz’s 1894 short story “Kabalists” (Mekubolim in Yiddish and Hebrew), that story’s mystical aspirations now purged of their crypto-aesthetic symbolism in favor of the nihilist-expressionist fatalism of a prayer offered not to God but to nothingness. It is moreover worth mentioning, in this context, that Kulbak’s devotion to a theology of negation—as my friends Yitzhak Melamed and Ada Rapoport-Albert have suggested to me—derives as much from a negative theology discernible in kabalistic, and specifically Hasidic, theology as Peretz’s story does.

51 Kulbak Y, 22; Kulbak E, 495.

52 Kulbak Y, 26-27; Kulbak E, 498.

53 Kulbak Y, 71-72; Kulbak E, 525.

54 As my teacher Avrom Novershtern has written, “Parataxis, the coordinated clause, is the distinguishing characteristic of Kulbak’s style, which is explicitly concerned with coupling very heterogeneous materials.” See Avrom Novershtern, Moyshe Kulbak’s Meshiekh ben-Efrayim: A yidish-modernistish verk in zayn literarishn gerem (“Moyshe Kulbak’s Meshiekh ben-Efrayim: A Yiddish-Modernist Work in its Literary Context”), Di Goldene keyt 126 (1989): 199. The translation from the Yiddish is my own.

55 Beckett, 38.

56 Jean-Michel Rabaté has pointed this out to me in response to the earliest draft of this article. By way of response, one can suggest that Beckett never reiterated the specific, and specified, politics of Murphy in the postwar era, and of course Kulbak never had the chance to revisit his political fatalism following his own execution! These historical facts notwithstanding, I wish to suggest here a more tentative and theoretical response to this objection, through which these two novels might be read not just as cautionary examples, but also as anticipatory parables for a politics more comprehensible today than during the epoch(s) in which they were written. Such a reimagining of their respective political potential mandates a recognition that postcolonial authors articulate a crisis in modernity that has come to characterize metropolitan nations as much as colonized or neocolonized ones and that this crisis is the norm in which all global citizens currently reside.

57 See Quayson, Ato, “Autism, Narrative, and Emotions: On Samuel Beckett’s Murphy,” University of Toronto Quarterly 79.2 (Spring 2010): 852–853CrossRefGoogle Scholar.