The meal could be said to have had its uses. There’s something to be said for allowing a fiancée to learn, early in the relationship, the sort of occasion one goes out of one’s way to avoid.
The friend, Eloise, had started life as a Presbyterian. She had converted in England; she had undergone ritual immersion at Henley, where it had been necessary to dodge rowers warming up for the regatta. She had in fact broken up with the boyfriend for whose sake, or rather, for whose mother’s sake, the conversion had been embarked upon, but Simon had said it would be rude to the rabbi to drop out. Permission to work in the UK, which would have accompanied marriage to Simon, was now out of reach, so she had returned without enthusiasm to New York. She had attended services on Yom Kippur because it seemed obscurely rude to the rabbi not to bother. It had seemed obscurely rude to the rabbi to skimp. Hence Kol Nidrei. (All this, naturally, part of what passed for conversation at dinner.)
The girl’s Hebrew was not at all good. (Her personal best for the Amidah was a shamemaking 25 minutes.) With the result, unsurprisingly, that she had whiled away the forcefasted hours reading the English pages facing the impenetrable Hebrew of her shabby Machzor.
720 pages into Birnbaum the child had come upon Isaiah 57:14–58:14. (Quotation from which cannot help but seem long to the sort of person for whom an hour is a reasonable length for a service. What is to be done? Pah!)
There is no peace for the wicked, says my God.
Cry out, spare not, raise your voice like a trumpet;
Tell my people their guilt, tell Jacob’s house their sins,
Daily indeed they seek me, desiring to know my ways;
As an upright nation that has not forsaken the laws of its God,
They keep asking me about righteous ordinances;
[footnote from Birnbaum: ולס ולס, the prophetic portion recited as the haftarah, refers to the fasts. The people have complained that their fasts have produced no change in their material welfare. The prophet replies that their fasting was a hollow pretence. [!!!] Instead of giving their workmen a holiday, they worked them all the harder. If they would but feed the hungry and nurture the destitute, God would lift them out of their miserable conditions. [!!!!!!!!]]
They seemingly delight to draw near to God.
‘Why seest thou not,’ they ask, ‘when we fast?’
‘Why heedest thou not when we afflict ourselves?’
Behold, on your fast day you find business,
And you drive on all who toil for you.
Your fasting is amidst contention and strife,
While you are striking with a godless fist;
You do not fast today to make your voice heard on high.
Can such be my chosen fast, the day of man’s self-denial? [!!!!!]
To bow down his head like a bulrush, to sit in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call fasting, a day acceptable to the Lord?
Behold, this is the fast that I esteem precious:
Loosen the chains of wickedness, undo the bonds of oppression,
Let the crushed go free, break all yokes of tyranny!
Share your food with the hungry, take the poor to your home, [!!!!!!!]
Clothe the naked when you see them, never turn from your fellow,
Then shall your light dawn, your healing shall come soon;
Your triumph shall go before you, the Lord’s glory backing you.
[footnote from Birnbaum: …פתח חרצבו that is, God favors the fast that includes ת the self-denial shown in the exercise of justice and kindness; for example, setting the people free and distributing food and clothing. [!!!!!]]
The synagogue was very full, for it was a day of competitive fasting. The girl thought: But perhaps at this very moment there are Jews manning soup kitchens, having taken this passage of Isaiah to heart… So they would naturally not be in synagogue. Perhaps the sort of person who goes to synagogue fasting is not the sort of person who would take Isaiah to heart. So perhaps it was not odd that EVERYONE did not stand up and walk out and give a homeless person a place to stay. But was it not odd that not one person did so? (This too, naturally, part of what passed for conversation at dinner.)
Ah, said K, but you’re taking it out of context. The interpretation of the text is determined by the oral tradition. You can’t cherrypick. If you’re going to reject the oral tradition, it’s not clear what you’re doing there in the first place. Why are you willing to accord special status to this text on the basis of its presence on an occasion whose importance is determined by tradition?
It would have been possible for Eloise to say something about Agamben at this point, but she felt awkward, now, meeting K.
K was an Abstract Situationist. His sentences had their cold beauty.
He stated in interviews that art should concern itself with the operation of the machine.
The operation of the social machinery, he would add for clarity, though he disliked the phrase.
K was very grand, so grand that he could refer to himself as K in his work without a murmur of editorial dissent. Eloise was very young and not at all grand. She had known K’s work for years and had imagined that it was open to anyone to follow his example, or rather that it was open not only to K but to anyone to follow the example of the usual suspects. If K had this licence only in virtue of his position he would, as an avowed Situationist, have embedded a statement to this effect in the work — so she had thought, being a mere Naïve Situationist at the time.
She had been wrong about this as about so many other things.
Eloise had written a book and been made to have discussions in which the phrase ‘flesh out’ was used of characters. She was just out of college. She had been reading Robbe-Grillet. She had recently seen Dogville. In a moment of weakness she had attached to four characters the sort of name that is affixed to a little primate at birth. Each was also provided with hair, eye, and skin colour, a wardrobe, some sort of plausible history. A favourite TV show. What with all these plausible names and histories, the characters went plausibly about their business like impostors in a witness protection programme. It was, of course, awkward to be known to K as the person whose name appeared on the cover of the thing.
(She was, as it happened, safe enough: the word ‘contemporary’ was enough to put K off a work of fiction.)
K, meanwhile, talked on.
K drew attention to the difference between a cliché and a formula. (He preferred the fixed formulae of the Homeric poems to the polished phrases of Vergil.) K had once read an essay by Harold Bloom in which the great man found fault with J. K. Rowling for using the phrase ‘he stretched his legs’ whenever a character went for a walk. K had immediately lost all respect for Harold Bloom, who appeared not only to be unfamiliar with Milman Parry’s The Making of Homeric Verse but also to be wholly innocent of the Iliad, Odyssey, Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle and Argonautica except, perhaps, in some sort of translation. Taken to its logical conclusion, the argument would compel one to prefer the Argonautica to the Iliad. Madness! (K had tried to do a search in the Perseus project for ton d’apameibomenos prosephe (that old Homeric wordhorse), was balked by an uncooperative search engine, left Bloom with a shrug unenlightened.) The problem with J.K.R. was not that she was repetitive, nor even that she was not repetitive enough, but rather that she was insufficiently formulaic. Judging by the 3 pages K had been able to bring himself to read before remembering that we are creatures of a day.