Since we haven’t much time to engage in discussion here, I’ll throw up a couple of quick questions for now and return to make some additional comments.
“Hep! Hep! Hep!” refers several times to separateness: “a sense of separateness unique in its intensity” (175), “a separate people” (177), “the separateness which was made their badge of ignominy” (179), “steadfast in their separateness” (192). What entirely is Eliot getting at? How does that relate to difference, race, or nationality/nationalism?
I wonder about the differences in the histories of Deronda and Klesmer and the position of each by the end of the novel. Are the differences in their outcomes coherent? How is that informed by “Hep! Hep! Hep!”?
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The culture surrounding Judaism is a high context culture--I think that is the term. The culture can guide so much in life. As Eliot points out--that with the persecution made for a uniquely separate culture. That is my take on it.
ReplyDeleteAs for the different outcomes of Deronda and Klesmer--"Herr Klesmer has cosmopolitan ideas" says his future wife. "Cosmopolitan" is used in the novel twice-- I don't think that was Eliot's main concern, but Klesmer, instead of Deronda, is the true cosmopolitan it seems. Maybe this is because he is more confident in his Jewish heritage?
I guess it struck me that Eliot does not have a single agenda for the Jewish characters the novel. There is a place for the Zionist as well as the Cosmopolitan. And I find the variation in her characters fascinating. Klesmer’s Jewishness seems to weigh on his life decisions differently from, say, Deronda or Mirah. And the characters seems to have a different understanding of Judaism or their identities as Jews.
ReplyDeleteWhat do we make of Mordecai’s description of his relationship with Deronda in terms of marriage: “the marriage of our souls” and “the willing marriage that melts sou into soul” (751)? What is the connection to writing versus thought? Writing is mentioned earlier in the chapter in reference to family/heritage, when Deronda his grandfather’s preserved manuscripts and family records, which he brings up in the context of “fellowship” and “communion” (748). And there is Mordecai’s comment, “For I have judged what I have written, and I desire the body that I gave my thought to pass away as this fleshly body will pass; but let the thought be born again from our fuller soul which shall be called yours” (751).
ReplyDeleteAs Donald and Emily pointed out, I’d had an impression that Klesmer is positively rendered “cosmopolitan” figure, too, so Eliot’s profound doubt about cosmopolitanism in “Hep!” was interesting for me. One of Eliot’s central logics for promoting Zionism is that it helps the Jews from falling into “universal alienism (euphemistically called cosmopolitanism)” (185). She says, “if they drop that separateness which is made their reproach, they may be in danger of lapsing into a cosmopolitan indifference equivalent to cynicism” (182). Can we think that Eliot’s apparently paternalistic argument for Zionism is in fact derived from her anxiety over cosmopolitanism as severed from a sense of organic community (albeit illusionary), and the Jew functioned as an embodiment of such nascent mode of modernity in her era?
ReplyDeleteLiterary critics tend to focus more on the text and less on auhorial intent. What are the implications that we are reading Eliot's essay on "the subject of the Jews" while we are discussing her novel Daniel Deronda (168)?
ReplyDeleteJuliette, you’ve asked an interesting question. To add to it, how would we answer that question if we understand “Hep!” itself to be a fictive work, a monograph comprising the arguments of her character Theophrastus Such?
ReplyDeleteJuliette: Are you suggesting that this enterprise is, sort of, misguided or unproductive? If so: maybe you're right. But the issue is complex than the way I've just framed it, in part because of what Donald points out about Theophrastus. Also, though, we might consider the political unconscious of both texts and draw conclusions about Eliot in that way. I think the example Madoka (via Emily) points to regarding 'cosmipolitanism' might be an example of what I'm talking about. I suppose what I'm getting at is rather obvious: authorial intent informs the text, sure, but it's not the last word. At least, not to me.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading "Hep!" the distinction that Anderson makes between Deronda and Mordecai faded away even more. After beginning the piece chastising English society for trying to efface the differences of the Jews, she then argues that it is dangerous for Jewish people to choose to assimilate or mitigate their own differences, primarily because it is something they cannot escape. The essentializing,organic language Eliot uses in arguing for the Jew's natural desire for their own nation sounds closer to Mordecai than any other figure. She leaves the Jew on the outside unless they have their own nation--she leaves no possibility for them to fully embrace the nationality of a Briton because that is at best a stall game, or adapting to a current situation that will resolve itself in the establishment of a "true" nation. Her move on the last page to apply the strengthening and enriching nature of individual idiosyncrasy to the nation seems to work within the same paradox of separate but universal. The idiosyncrasy of this nation is their commonality. According to her closing line, it is an idiosyncrasy that only "superstition" believes one can escape--a rather odd construction to me, since her "influences which have made us human" seem often to be innate, inchoate, inexplicable and surviving many more recent experiences and memories that would affect "human well-being."
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