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Albert Cohen: Dissonant Voices

2006; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 101; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/20466842

2222-4319

David L. Parris, Jack I. Abecassis,

Musicology and Musical Analysis

As one of the most renowned and yet critically unread authors of the French, Jewish, and Sephardic canons, Albert Cohen (-) presents a rare paradox in academia.The prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade collection, the most visible sign of canonicity in the French print world, has recognized him by publishing an excellent two-volume compendium of his fiction and essays, and quality paperback editions of his works are sold in every well-stocked bookstore in France. 1 Cohen is read by the French-speaking public, and those who read him rarely remain indifferent to his baroque verve, his passion, and his unique style.Yet despite two illuminating biographies in French and a growing body of criticism by a handful of academics associated with the Atelier Albert Cohen and its series Cahiers Albert Cohen, wider scholarly interest remains negligible.This is especially the case in the English-speaking world, where only one of Cohen's works, Book of My Mother, is currently in print, and there is not a single critical monograph devoted exclusively to Cohen.This is particularly surprising given that Jewish studies and Holocaust studies have become serious components of twentieth-century French curricula in the United States.Why would an author whom Elaine Marks rightly characterizes as "one of the major French writers of the twentieth century who is Jewish by birth and whose narrators are never not conscious of their own Jewishness and the Jewishness, or relation to Jewishness, of most of the important characters in their fictional world" be all but absent from our curricula? 2This is the "Cohen paradox," which from the start has motivated me to think about this author.Cohen is known, read, appreciated, but deemed too  Prologue: The Cohen ParadoxHere, in this room, he has the right to do what he wants, to speak Hebrew, to recite Ronsard to himself, to shout that he is a monster with two heads, a monster with two hearts, that he is everything of the Jewish nation, everything of the French nation.Here, all alone, he can wear the sublime silk of the synagogue over his shoulders and even, if he feels like it, apply the red, white, and blue sticker to his forehead.Here, hidden away and lonely, he will not see the distrustful looks of those he loves and who do not love him.Albert Cohen, Belle du Seigneur disturbing for critical inquiry.Why, in fact, is there such a plethora of commentary on Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a great writer to be sure, but such a dearth of commentary about his contemporary Albert Cohen?The two disturb, but Cohen is-consciously or subconsciously-deemed more disturbing.Why?This is the question that I seek to answer in this book through a series of sustained readings of Cohen's fiction and essays.These readings are an attempt at an uncompromising analysis of his dissonant and nightmarish version of the state of being a Jew, which Cohen himself labels a "catastrophe."I take this core sentiment, which is both ironic and literal, as the main theme of Cohen's work. 3 To enter Cohen's world is to face the multiple facets of recounting this catastrophe, which in Cohen is like a wound that does not heal, notwithstanding the occasional extravagantly colored bandages adorning it.Kafka recounts a variant of this catastrophe, yet his systematic usage of allegories and of parables, his sober style, and his focalization of the narrative from a single point of view allow the reader a hermeneutic space for multiple identifications and transferences. 4Does one need to think of the specifically Jewish metaphysical and historical predicament to understand The Trial or In the Penal Colony?Perhaps, but the abstract allegory permits many possible identifications, and oppressed and alienated readers of all creeds and nationalities can thus read themselves into these allegories.The figurative writ large opens that space.Cohen is stylistically precisely the opposite: the hell of being Jewish in early twentieth-century Europe is taken on directly, despite the astounding pains that his readers have taken to avoid seeing the obvious.His comic and baroque novels abound in multiple points of view, complex (and often half-hidden) plots, digressions, streams of consciousness, exuberant styles, constant flaunting of the French prose style, and even transgression of French syntax.Lost in the forest of Cohen's writing, the reader may find it easy enough to forget what is at stake.Although readers may think that they are reading a satire on romantic delusion (as embodied, for example, in Anna Karenina), their unconscious knows the truth that they are reading a burlesque epic on the catastrophe of being Jewish in republican France.Critics thus politely and even deferentially shy away from the task of evaluating Cohen-they may "love" his writing, but they exclude him from their professional conversation, and silence continues to surround his unpalatable description of the Jewish condition in Europe and the searing ambivalence contained in the Jewish response to this condition.For ideological and esthetic reasons, most of his republican/romantic readers persist in seeing primarily aThe Cohen Paradox  hatred, and hopelessness; it is the story of searing ambivalence about the mother and unrelenting hostility toward the father.It is the story of that nightmarish equivocality where Jews are despised in the flesh but embraced in the abstract, where God is recognized and affirmed by a nonbeliever, where the flesh is condemned for its bestiality and forgetfulness of death yet celebrated in the most sensual way, where the state of Israel is fought for, but the French language remains the true ground of being; it is the universe where a rabbinical Don Juan seduces the feminine projection of himself, a Gentile woman, who also represents the absolute hostile other of his Jewish identity.And, finally, this historical, familial, and psychological nightmare ends in a double suicide-suicide being the theme that haunts Cohen's successive narratives from  to .In other words, Cohen tells the story of the Jewish catastrophe in a specifically twentieth-century French context, from libel to appeasement to genocide (Dreyfus, Munich, Vichy), not simply in terms of historical narrative, but in terms of successive masochistic fantasies of a kind that no other novelist, in my opinion, has ever penned.The power of such a vision is obvious, and its capacity to disturb, to unhinge, and therefore to be resisted and repressed, is vastly underestimated.Paradoxically, it is precisely this scriptural fauna of plots and styles, this exuberant strangeness of Cohen's prose, that allows the reader, even the very sympathetic reader, to become so "lost" as to be unable to see what is clearly on the page: the Jewish catastrophe, the desire to struggle, the longing for death.Cohen is complicit in this obfuscation of the obvious, inasmuch as he himself couples categorical statements with sleight-of-hand concealments, not simply in the texts themselves but especially in his public commentary on them.But the careful reader is in the end pinned down to a reading of a specific catastrophe, and its representation is so disturbing and so dissonant that it constitutes, in my opinion, the root cause of the institutional resistance to the transmission of Cohen's work.Abraham Albert Cohen was born in  on the Greek island of Corfu (Kérkira), which had been a place of refuge for Spanish and Portuguese Jews since the sixteenth century.Cohen's family was prominent in the community, his grandfather being its religious and civic leader.Cohen's native language was a Judeo-Venetian dialect, a language that he continued speaking with his parents throughout his life and that underlies his strangely oriental French.After centuries of relative calm, as the euphemism goes, the late nineteenth century was not kinder to the Sephardim in Corfu than it was to their Ashkenazi 44.111.38]Project MUSE (2024-07-18 17:58 GMT) brethren in eastern Europe.Blood libels preceded the threat of violent pogroms, which then precipitated communal disintegration and emigration.(Later, during World War II, the entire remaining Jewish population of Corfu was decimated by the Nazis, one of the few Sephardic communities to perish en masse during the Holocaust.)In , the Co[h]en family immigrated to Marseille, 7 where his parents toiled away in a modest shop selling eggs, while the five-year-old Albert attended a Catholic convent kindergarten, then a state elementary school, and finally the lycée Thierry (with his lifelong friend Marcel Pagnol).The Dreyfus Affair was in its waning phase, but the anti-Semitic virulence in the streets did not spare the young Albert Cohen, who was traumatized for life by the experience of being publicly harassed by a street hawker.During World War I, he studied law and literature in Geneva, rubbing elbows with that city's restless community of foreign students, who ranged from Bolsheviks to Socialists to Zionists.In , he married Elisabeth Brocher, the daughter of a Calvinist pastor, and became a Swiss citizen.He seized on the occasion to alter his last name: Coen became Cohen, making the name even more Hebrew, just as the immigrant became a citizen.In , he published a collection of lyrical poems entitled Paroles juives ( Jewish Words) to reveal to his wife the verve, vitality, and sensuality of biblical Israel, as opposed to both Calvinism and exilic Judaism, and, more important, perhaps, to affirm his own Jewish identity vis-à-vis (and despite) his Gentile wife.Their only child, Myriam Judith, was born in .The next year, a relative promised Cohen a paid internship as an apprentice lawyer in Egypt.He traveled there alone, leaving his wife and one-year-old daughter in Switzerland.But Cohen was never actually paid for his internship, and the entire Egyptian episode was a miserable experience for him, except for a chance encounter that dates the beginning of his vocation as a novelist.Walking down the street in Cairo, he saw displayed in a bookstore window Marcel Proust's À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the  winner of the Prix Goncourt (the French equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize).He entered the store, picked up the book, began reading, and was transfixed for hours (a store clerk offered the penniless intern a chair to sit on).Later, in , Cohen would teach a summer course on Proust at the University of Geneva.Cohen's career as a professional Jewish and Zionist activist commenced in Paris in , when Chaim Weizmann, head of the World Zionist Congress, conferred on him the responsibility of establishing, directing, and editing a major cultural review to promote Zionist ideas in the francophone world.Thus was born La Revue juive (published by the Nouvelle Revue française),The Cohen Paradox  whose editorial board included many Jewish notables, among them Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein.The review was successful in its initial year, but soon disintegrated because of Cohen's difficulty in collaborating with other Zionist representatives in Paris and Geneva.This personal discord seems to have been a permanent feature of Cohen's intermittent work for Jewish and Zionist organizations from  until the end of World War II. 8In , Cohen obtained a post in the diplomatic section of the International Labor Organization, and he thereafter was concurrently a writer, diplomat, and activist.This triple career ended only in , when he retired from his official functions and devoted himself exclusively to writing.Cohen's first novel, Solal (), is remarkable for its Dionysian energy, its breathtaking style, and its emblematic plot.It tells the story of a charismatic Joseph-like figure named Solal, who, born on the Greek island of Cephalonia (also one of the Ionian Islands, like Corfu), ascends to political power in France by means of bravery, cunning, and seduction, but whose career (and life, in the first edition) are destroyed when his Sephardic family encroaches on his secular Parisian life, thereby ending his forgetfulness of his origin and destiny. 9All of Cohen's subsequent works of fiction focus on the adventures of the great European diplomat Solal and his Gentile women, and on Solal's clownish Sephardic kin, whom he calls the Valorous (also the title of a later work, Les Valeureux).The function of the Valorous is both to serve as Solal's ethnic and historical id, and, most important in the plots, to remind Solal that he must be true to his full name (Solal des Solal or, alternatively, Solal Solal), that his life and his name form a tautology from which he cannot escape.Whenever the two worlds collide, disaster occurs.Solal was a major literary achievement, garnering wide critical acclaim and meriting immediate translation into English and German.The success won Cohen a long-term contract and stipend from Gallimard, the most important French publishing house both then and now.His next work, the one-act play Ézéchiel (Ezekiel), was staged at the Odéon theater in  and won the first prize in the Comoedia competition.Two years later, the Comédie-Française gave ten performances.Ézéchiel tells the story of a Greek Sephardic banker (Solal's father), a grotesque combination of Shylock and Molière's Harpagon incarnating each and every anti-Semitic stereotype, while at the same time claiming to represent the eternal spirit of the Jews.The play sparked heated controversy, especially among Jews (even Cohen's closest friends criticized the play for its alleged display of anti-Semitic self-hatred), and when Gallimard published the final version in , the reprobation of the Jewish community continued unabated.In , Cohen published Mangeclous (Naileater), a burlesque novel focusing on the adventures of Solal and the Valorous.Cohen's original authorial intent was different.Since , he had intended to publish a single novel, entitled Belle du Seigneur, or alternatively (and very significantly) "La Geste des Juifs" (The epic of the Jews), that would defy all genre conventions by juxtaposing in one narrative most of the established modes of expression, whether of Rabelais, Proust, or Joyce. 10By , Cohen already had a complete draft of Belle du Seigneur, but he was not entirely satisfied with it.Gallimard insisted on publishing something, however, and to satisfy his contractual obligations, Mangeclous was thus extracted from the sprawling manuscript.The novel's blatantly disjointed form, along with the unfortunate timing of its publication, on the eve of World War II, explains its lukewarm critical reception.With the war imminent and a clear sense of urgency, Cohen returned to his diplomatic career as spokesman for a number of Jewish and Zionist organizations.He launched a feverish campaign in - for the creation of a substantial Jewish Foreign Legion that would be trained by the French Army and fight at its side.