It Must Be Broken
Unlike what seems like most literary writers, in The Netanyahus Joshua Cohen takes Harold Bloom’s influence theory seriously
I came across this review of The Netanyahus, by a writer named Nathan Goldman in the magazine Jewish Currents, and it reminded me of some afterthoughts that I didn’t develop in last week’s essay. He considers the novel a failure, which is notable, because it was largely positively received. Here’s his main criticism and then his conclusion —
... too beholden to fixed archetypes to respond imaginatively to the experience of contemporary Jewish life. Rather than bringing forth a new brightness from a broken tradition, his attempt to render the 20th-century Jewish American novel newly relevant through an ironic repurposing of exhausted tropes only carries us back into that lineage’s most familiar features. The result is a novel that understands itself as live and potent, but is really anemic, even undead.
...
If Cohen has so far given us only variously interesting failures, it may be because he finds himself continually compelled to try to build a new Temple, rather than dwell in the ruins.
I found this eloquent and the concluding statement is intriguing, but I think it misreads the novel. In my view, it is an “ironic repurposing of exhausted tropes”, but it does not understand itself as “live and potent”. If Goldman had taken his observation one step further he might have come to like the book better. The book knows its characters are “anemic and undead” — that’s actually its central argument. Maybe it doesn’t make a difference to Goldman — he seems to be saying, simply, “no more ironic repurposing of tropes!” — but for me that was the center of the book’s power.
This is the paradoxical truth about it — it is a loving tribute to a past that expresses its love most deeply by destroying that past, by emptying it of all its life. It seeks to find everything in the tradition it can break. It wants to bury it far beneath the ground, and to shock its readers into the recognition that things really have changed, that this world of the past has departed. It wants to embarrass any subsequent attempt at writing with authentic nostalgia for these things. It is pronouncing them dead and empty. It wants to frighten its readers with the idea that they themselves might one day be empty too, if they aren’t already. I’m not familiar with Cohen’s other books, but I find The Netanyahus triumphant because it knows it is a vision of decline.
It has learned the Bloomian lesson of understanding its own belatedness in the tradition it inhabits. It joins itself to that tradition by announcing the tradition’s end. It wrests its inheritance from the Temple of Jewish American writing by ruining it, which, paradoxically, fortifies the Temple further. But it also ensures no other writer after this will attempt to come near.
Even though this all might sound esoteric, it’s a method of reading very much out of the Harold Bloom playbook. And this is fascinating because The Netanyahus might be the first book in which a literary writer has pushed themselves to take Bloom’s influence theory seriously, as actual advice for writing. Critics tend to find it an intriguing curiosity or just pretentious, but the writers themselves seem always to want to push it away. They meet it with dismissal, or denial, or puzzlement, or outright sneering, but not, as far as I’ve seen, with much sincere attention.
Learn the tradition, learn to see it clearly, learn how it attempts to repeat the past through you. Then find out what can be broken and set about breaking it. This is what The Netanyahus does. The vessels of the tradition must be broken in order for new creation to be possible.
And “nothing is got for nothing”, Bloom liked to say. It might sound strange to say it, but the achievement of the book must have come at some personal cost for Cohen, who has performed, in my reading, a kind of dramatic self-wounding. It is like he is punishing himself for his own love of the past. We can’t see these things from an everyday view, but some “internal difference / Where the meanings are”, as Emily Dickinson put it, has oppressed itself into Cohen and so into us. I will keep working to learn from it.
For more on The Netanyahus, check out my original review and my poem in response to the book.