World Literature and Comparative Postcolonialisms

When in 1827 Goethe coined the term weltliteratur, he did this following the “epiphany” of reading a Chinese novel, an epiphany that, as Aamir Mufti has suggested, must not be mistaken for serendipity, but rather grasped in relation to the Orientalist moment in which it occurred. The “lexicographic-philological” revolution Casanova (Reference Casanova2004) writes about, which extended from the late-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, made available in European languages an increasingly large number of texts from the Middle East, India, and Asia, and thus radically transformed the European republic of letters into a global one “incorporating, at least in theory, all cultures of writing across the globe” (Mufti Reference Mufti2013, 74). Although the era of Goethe’s conception of world literature coincides with a particular phase in the expansion of European empires, it is no less important to note that current attempts at defining what is world literature have also had to attend to the emergence of newly independent countries into the global cultural economy (Sommer Reference Sommer1999; Mufti Reference Mufti2010; Damrosch Reference Damrosch2003; Apter Reference Apter2013). For Michael Holquist the clamor of new nations and their impact on definitions of world literature is to be traced back to the end World War I:

Despite Holquist’s evocation of the term postcolonialism, it is evident that his historical typology bypasses the momentous phase of decolonization and independence that are of general interest to postcolonial studies. As I have written elsewhere, there may be some justification for this somewhat narrower deployment of the term, especially in the context of the early 1980s and before the surge of postcolonial studies worldwide from the 1990s onward.Footnote ³ Notwithstanding the narrowness of his usage, the central point Holquist makes regarding the link between the emergence of new nations and the challenge to established modes of studying world literature is essentially correct. The increasing popularity of award-winning writers from the formerly colonized world on curriculum design and popular reading habits starts much earlier but gains tremendous acceleration in the long 1980s when writers from the erstwhile cultural margins begin to regularly be awarded Nobel and other prestigious literary prizes (Ponzanesi Reference Ponzanezi2014, 49–70; Quayson Reference Quayson2015, 1–3). The strong emergence of literary prize winners from the formerly colonized world, and in the case of Toni Morrison (1993), from African America, signals the maturation of a process from the peripheries that had been in steady gestation since the major threshold of decolonization in the 1960s.

As Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih have noted, however, the conventional tendency in postcolonial and transnational studies is to read vertically rather than laterally, and to “study the center and the margin” while passing over “the relationships among different margins” (Reference Lionnet and Shih2005, 2). This is a slightly different problem from the one noted by Holquist in his discussion of world literature, where the centers and margins were largely still those defined inside of Europe. With the proliferation of authors from beyond Europe, and sometimes from oppressed minorities inside of it, the questions that Marc Caplan poses in establishing his comparative framework seems more pertinent:

The questions are a preamble to Caplan’s discussion of Yiddish and African modernisms in their deterritorialized discourses, their relations to hegemonic literary traditions, and the internal contradictions of their variant aesthetic forms. Because the two main foci for his discussion of Yiddish literature are the writings of Reb Nakham of Breslov (1772–1810) and Sholem Yankev Abramovitsch (Mendele Moykher-Sforim, 1836–1917), in addition to a wide range of references to other Yiddish writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the application of the term postcolonialism to the Yiddish corpus entails some justification. Rather than undertake this justification by itself, Caplan links Yiddish and African postcolonialisms to his discussion of peripheral modernisms, making his comparative framework even more useful for any later comparison between the two traditions. I take several cues from Caplan for my own thinking on comparative postcolonialisms, and in what follows I shall attempt a loose elaboration of Caplan’s core insights on the structural and literary historical vectors relevant to understanding the two traditions.

At the heart of my own invocation of comparative postcolonialisms to account for Sholem Aleichem and Chinua Achebe is that their subcultures in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe and mid-twentieth century Africa were forced by historical circumstances to negotiate respective burdens of loss and dispossession. In both the Jewish/Yiddish and African/Igbo cases, the historical dispossession of territory, language, and modes of cultural articulation generates a sense of loss that instigates the need for writing in the first place. That such a loss for Yiddish culture has been traced by several scholars to the inception of the language several centuries prior to the nineteenth century does not obviate the fact that at the birth of its belletrist tradition the loss had specific historical correlatives in Jews’ confinement to shtetls, the constraints of various state laws on their circulation and freedom to adopt particular professions, and the community’s strident scapegoating in public discourse as the cause of economic and social woes. The violent pogroms and consequent Jewish migrations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were direct offshoots of this long historical process of attrition. As for the African/Igbo case, even though it is conventional to speak of empire and colonialism in generic and often ahistorical terms, it is important to note that the plunder of (West) Africa began as early as the arrival of the first Europeans in 1492. That the transatlantic slave trade of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries was to decimate African populations and prepare the way for formal colonialism from the mid-nineteenth century onward has been much commented upon and is not to be discounted in our understanding of the sense of loss that comes to be translated into literary writing (see Caplan Reference Caplan2011, 2; 14–16; also Rodney Reference Rodney1972; Curtin, Reference Curtin1977).

Strictly speaking, however, the postcolonialism that we might adduce for Jewish/Yiddish culture is not the same as that to be traced for the African/Igbo one. For what we normally describe as colonialism may be explored along two axes: extraverted and intraverted. Put formulaically, extraverted colonialism is that which involves the conquest of external territories (such as the British in India, the French in Africa, the Spanish in South America, the Americans in the Philippines). Thus for example the variety of territorial settings and types of British colonialism (by charter, conquest, or the protectorate) did not prevent the adoption of generalized policies of colonial control following the establishment of the reconstituted Colonial Office in 1854. Personnel and policies were often transferred from one region of empire to another, thus generating a comparative template for the governance of colonial territories. Extraverted colonialism is the default mode of understanding colonialism and forms the main platform from which most analyses of the postcolonial condition are undertaken in postcolonial studies. The colonialism of extraversion is what the African/Igbo culture of Achebe’s novels fall under. Intraverted colonialism for its part does not so much require territorial conquest as the deployment of devices for the management and control of populations, especially when such populations are considered heterogeneous and require placing under the “empty” signifier of the nation-state in the process of nation building. The devices for the management and control of heterogeneous populations are therefore regularly applied inside the nation-state itself. The examples of intraverted colonialism are many and varied, and have had several historical articulations. British policies in Ireland stretching from at least Cromwell until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 exemplify a long-term history of intraverted colonialism. Australia and Canada’s policies toward their Aboriginal populations, China’s response to the Muslim Ugyhurs, Russia during the incorporation of various republics that came to form the Pale of Settlement in the nineteenth century (eastern and central Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Byelorussia, and Ukraine) and also under Stalin, and Israel’s continuing policies regarding the Palestinian question all illustrate versions of intraverted colonialism.Footnote ⁴

Extraverted and intraverted colonialism must be understood not as separate but as dialectically related to each other. It has long been noted that Ireland provided Britain’s primary laboratory for testing out policies that were subsequently exported to the rest of the empire (Howe Reference Howe2000; Kenny Reference Kenny2004). More significantly, extraversion may sometimes be deployed as a means of managing internal problems (that is to say, as a concomitant outcome of intraversion). Thus Bismarck’s imperial adventures have been interpreted as a crucial aspect of forging the German nation-state (Wehler Reference Wehler1997). The point to be taken about the dialectical relationship between extraverted and intraverted colonialisms for our own discussion, however, is that in whichever guise colonial policies are applied the minority populations that bear their brunt have to contend with the sense of loss that we noted earlier. This is not a loss brought on exclusively by the loss of territory, but the overall fracturing and abbreviation of autonomy that is produced by domination. Hence if the Jewish and Yiddish cultures of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe were overdetermined by the intraverted forms of colonialism that were deployed in Russia in the period, then the loss that they experienced find an analogue in the conditions under which Achebe’s Igbo culture suffered under British colonial rule in Nigeria in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Caplan also raises the critical question of language as a central aspect for comparing Yiddish and African literature. As he shows via his discussion of Deleuze and Guattari, deterritorialization for Yiddish letters meant the embrace of the inherent hybridity of its language as a defining feature of literariness. More importantly, it is a language that is to be accessed primarily through its written form, which despite having a depleted number of speakers at the present time retains a fundamental orality. For a Yiddish scholar, the preponderance of its written over its spoken forms replicates the dislocation experienced within the language itself: “there is no Budapest, Bucharest, or even Bamako to which Yiddish scholars can travel to connect with “their” language and culture. . . . Unlike ancient (“dead”) languages, such as Latin or Sumerian, Yiddish not only retains an animated, oral character, but in spite of its written legacy remains, except for the precincts of contemporary scholarship, primarily a spoken language, even if it is a language increasingly misheard, misused, or misunderstood” (Caplan Reference Caplan2011, 6).Footnote ⁵ For postcolonial African literature, the condition of deterritorialization involves first and foremost the attempt to “domesticate” European languages (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese) within an Africanist literary discourse. In the case of Anglophone African writing, this meant infusing the language with the polysemy of oral forms. As has been noted by all readers of Achebe’s writing, the infusion in his novels of a deep sense of the Igbo lifeworld prevents anyone from mistaking them for say Japanese, or Scandinavian, or English culture, for that matter.Footnote ⁶ In Yiddish and African culture, “subjectivity is paradoxically predicated on multiplicity and proliferation—of languages, temporalities, and modes of identification” (Caplan Reference Caplan2011, 16). This observation is especially pertinent to Tevye the Diaryman and Arrow of God, as we will see next.

Consciousness as Agon: Tevye’s Interlocutors

Tevye’s penchant for quoting from various religious texts is perhaps one of the most noticeable features of his stories. Michael Stern has pointed out that the quotations are not erudite, but come “almost entirely from the Torah, the psalms, the five scrolls (those parts of the Hebrew Bible read on Sabbath and holidays in synagogue); from the Ethics of the Fathers, the prayer book, and High Holy Day liturgy; and from Talmudic phrases familiar because they had achieved the status of proverbial expressions” (Stern Reference Stern1986, 95). Even if the sources are themselves not erudite, the discursive effects that Tevye seeks to achieve are ones of erudition and wisdom. This is evident in his repeated habit of first quoting a sentence or phrase in Aramaic or Hebrew, then going on to provide a gloss or translation in Yiddish. As Stern and other commentators have shown, Tevye’s gloss and translations are either typically wrong or do not relate in any way to the contexts in which the quotations from sacred text are being deployed. The scriptures are sources of sentiment and general folk wisdom rather than of theology, and they provide citational authority for Tevye’s discourse with others. Furthermore, Tevye is an unreliable narrator and is somewhat defensive and prone to the infelicitous exhibitionism of the self-taught (Miron Reference Miron2010, 365–78). But beyond all these observations, perhaps the significance of his repeated recourse to such maxims and wise saws from religious texts is the polysemous orality that they invoke in his continuing dialogue with himself and with others. Additionally, his orality also implies an imagined community of values, which, as we shall see later, is marked as much by the availability of a reservoir of sacred texts as by the absence of the social relations that might be taken to undergird such an imagined community in the primary instance.

Tevye’s orality has a number of mutually reinforcing dimensions, with the persistent references to sacred texts acting as glue and lubricant to the entire agonistic infrastructure upon which his consciousness is grounded. The OED entry for agon traces one of its etymologies to Latin: “[in] classical Latin agōn [meant] struggle, public exhibition of games, contest, in post-classical Latin also spiritual struggle, martyrdom (late 2nd cent. in Tertullian), death struggle (11th cent.; 12th cent. in a British source),” with its Greek variant ἀγών referring to “an assembly or gathering for the public games, contest for a prize at the games, any contest or struggle, battle, action at law, mental struggle, anxiety. . . .” The essential elements of the agon, whether in the Latin or Greek variant, are doubt, contest, and debate, all features that show themselves repeatedly as shaping the agonistic infrastructure of Tevye’s consciousness.

At the heart of this agonistic infrastructure is the fact that Tevye repeatedly directs himself to different addressees, whom we may define as occupying variant interlocutory relationships to him. These include God, his long-suffering horse, his wife Golde, Sholem Aleichem, and Tevye himself. The gallery of other characters who appear in the stories—his daughters and their various suitors, marriage brokers, religious figures, and so on—all arguably occupy narrative positions similar to the five I have just enumerated. The exception must be the civic authorities in “Lekh-Lekho,” where the people who come to ask that he vacate his home to avoid a pogrom represent a synecdoche of the destructive forces that had affected Eastern European Jews in the period, but who, until this final story in the collection, had only been signaled through peripheral references to contemporary events. Setting aside God, his horse, and Golde for lack of space, I would like in what follows to expound on the interlocutory functions of Sholem Aleichem and Tevye himself. At one end of the spectrum of interlocutors is the entextualized Sholem Aleichem, frequently invoked at the beginning and end of the stories as a framing device that enables Tevye’s storytelling in the first place.Footnote ⁷ In the opening of “Tevye Strikes it Rich,” Pan Sholem Aleichem is addressed in a way that sets up our expectations of the kind of storyteller Tevye is:

We can discern from this opening address several features that will be repeated throughout the stories: the fondness for quotations from sacred texts or just commonsensical wisdom (“King David said in the Psalms . . . it will do as much good as last winter’s snow”). We see a certain penchant for incremental repetition, which we will later understand to be the sign of Tevye’s extremely digressive garrulousness. And so the fairly simple point about luck or fate being apportioned without due regard to one’s exertions or the lack thereof is stated in several different ways, first with the opening statement itself, then with the illustration of the statement (“neither brains nor brawn”), then with the “analogy” of flogging the dead horse, and then with the reference to the unexpected showering of fortune or its opposite on the hardworking Jew. The final religious quotation takes the entire gist of the statement in a completely different direction because it now enjoins the exercise of hope in what appears to be completely capricious and unpredictable circumstances. That Pan Sholem Aleichem is silent and yet is still elicited as an interlocutor who is actively listening (“don’t ask me how or why”) suggests that Tevye’s discourse is a form of dramatic monologue. And yet, as we come to see, it is a dramatic monologue in which different interlocutors, both real and implied, take their place as the addressees of his stories. But in all instances, Sholem Aleichem is a sympathetic interlocutor. At the beginning of “Hodl,” for another example, Tevye responds to an implied remark of Sholem Aleichem on his physical aging with these comments: “You’ve been wondering, have you, Pan Sholem Aleichem, where I’ve been all this time? Tevye’s changed quite a bit, you say, grown gray suddenly? Ah, if only you knew the troubles, the heartache, that I’ve been through!” (53), implying that his listener has noted how much he has aged and is entirely sympathetic to his troubles. Given that Sholem Aleichem is explicitly referred to within the stories as a writer (“please don’t stick me in any of your books” [21; 82]) his entextualization is also in part an invitation for us to demarcate the encounter between the literary and the real, the represented and reality as the author registers the masterly transcription of a world in transition.Footnote ⁸ (There is an entire volume to be written on this device of boundary-blurring between literary and real worlds that one might compare the Tevye stories to. We only have to think of Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the ending of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Toni Morrison’s Jazz to see that this is a favored narrative device in world literature used to problematize the boundary between the real and the imagined.)

By far the most important interlocutor for Tevye is Tevye himself. Because everything he narrates, including the dialogue he has with others, is reproduced in his own words, Tevye’s accounts provide him with a way of justifying his own judgments and creating a degree of intimacy between himself and his reader, whose surrogate in the text as we have already noted is none other than Sholem Aleichem, the author. And yet Tevye’s Tevye is not the same as Tevye. For he is an alter ego and voice-in-the-head that comes to occupy different locations in relation to the speaking Tevye. Tevye inadvertently gives a hint of this difference in the very first story when trying to establish the temporality and time frame to the story he is about to tell Pan Sholem Aleichem: “What I’m trying to tell you is that it took place exactly a dog’s age ago, nine or ten years to the day, if not a bit more or less. I was the same man then that I am now, only not at all like me, that is, I was Tevye then too, but not the Tevye you’re looking at. How does the saying go? It’s still the same lady, she’s just not so shady” (4). As we read the stories, we find that the difference in himself that he is pointing to is not merely a function of time’s passage, but is an inherent aspect of his interactions with his day-to-day “other self,” the role of which seems to be not only to provide him with a constant companion to turn to, but also as a means to interrupt him with queries and second thoughts. In this Tevye is reminiscent of Krapp in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. All the central operations involved in being a self, including believing, communicating, doubting, and so forth, are for Krapp pitfalls that have to be scrupulously negotiated. To him the self is a very elusive thing. The crisis is pronounced for Krapp because he listens to tapes of his much younger selves, all of which he disagrees with, while also being burdened by the present demands of an aging and ill-functioning body; the many references to eating bananas in the play are signs of his struggles with poor digestion and overall decrepitude. Although Tevye does not suffer the same crisis of alienated selfhood as Krapp does, his consistent recourse to his “other” self, sometimes in doubt and sometimes in affirmation, suggests that the problematic of self is a central part of his own storytelling.Footnote ⁹

This “other” Tevye is both a discursive alter ego—the one he is constantly talking to inside of his own head—and a composite of emotions and affects that interrupt him with charged thoughts. This is not to say that Tevye is by any means schizophrenic; he is not a split personality struggling with different aspects of himself that manifest as autonomous entities in his mind. And yet the interruptive thoughts are distinguishable from the discursive conversations that he has with his alter ego, which typically involve some mild self-mockery or the self-interrogation of his decision-making processes. Tevye’s inner voice is not contradictory but appears seamlessly related to Tevye’s own account of things. For their part the interruptive thoughts, on the other hand, appear as signals of an unruly and emotionally charged state of mind. For example, at a point in “Tevye Strikes it Rich,” Tevye is debating with himself whether to accede to the two old ladies’ request to give them a ride to Boiberik, when their mention of the words “cup of coffee and butter roll” triggers an arresting image in his mind that he struggles mightily to shake off:

That what we are calling here the intrusion of second thoughts might be explained away as due to his extreme hunger at this precise moment cannot be denied. And yet the point of the intrusion is that the thought of food manifests itself to him as an almost hallucinatory tableau that is so sensorially intense (seemingly palpable to both touch and smell) as to obliterate everything that lies before him in the intra-diegetic present of narration. (The extra-diegetic outer limit is always marked by Sholem Aleichem, whether he is mentioned directly or not).Footnote ¹⁰ Thus memory is an affectively charged and vivid image that creates a specifically charged emotional intrusion in his mind. Not two pages later, Tevye experiences another tableau with reference to the image of the man in the dark forest who picks up a sack onto the back of his wagon that mysteriously turns into a billy goat with a long tongue. Just before remembering this story fragment, Tevye’s “blood began to whistle like a teakettle” (10). The context of the image is the uncanny environment in which he encounters the two old women seeking a ride to Boiberik, which is the much-deferred core of the story he tells Pan Sholem Aleichem. Tevye tells him it is late in the evening and dark in the forest; he is riding home with his horse and wagon, and “The shadows of the trees were as long as the exile of the Jews” (5). His horse decides to take off downhill just when he is starting to say his evening prayer, so he chases desperately after it while haphazardly intoning the words of the prayer. The horse comes suddenly to a stop. Tevye crashes into the horse and wagon, and in the midst of the chaotic entanglement of limbs, wagon wheels, and the horse’s variant kicking parts, the two women seem to suddenly materialize out of nowhere. They look to him like “goblins” (7) and “ghosts, witches, things that go bump in the night” (9). Thus the tableau of coffee and butter rolls, appearing in the midst of this uncanny environment, also acts as a counterpoint to the encounter itself.

We see the same thought-image-affect nexus again in “Tevye Blows a Small Fortune.” After surrendering his life savings to Menachem-Mendl in proposal of a business deal, Tevye enters into a long reverie that ends with him as a grand and mighty personage:

The fact that he has to “snap out of it” suggests that the daydream has completely taken over his mind, not just as a series of disconnected thoughts, but as an image that is firmly coupled to strong feelings. In many respects the link among thoughts, images, and strong emotions finds its apogee in “Hodl.” The story starts off innocently enough with the introduction to his household of the young tailor Pertchik. Hodl falls in love with Pertchik, and without the necessary blessings from her father and much to his chagrin, they pledge their lives to each other. It turns out that the Peppercorn (Tevye’s derisory nickname for the young man) is part of a bunch of revolutionaries, and after the wedding he vanishes without a word. Except that he has been in contact with Hodl, and she later informs her father of her decision to go and join her husband somewhere in Siberia. All Tevye’s attempts at persuasion, suitably leavened with choice quotations from sacred texts and a heavy dosage of ironic comments, turn out to be completely futile. From the beginning of the story Tevye has kept insisting that he is not “a woman,” meaning he is not someone who easily surrenders to emotions. But as it becomes increasingly clear that not only has he lost his daughter to a communist, that she is going to depart from home to forever be with her husband in the nowhere of Siberia, Tevye begins to lose his much-vaunted manliness. He is only “as calm as a boiling kettle inside” (68). By the time his daughter hugs him and bursts into tears in her final good-bye on the night before her departure, Tevye can no longer contain his emotions:

One point of this outpouring is of course the disclosure of his naturally strong paternal feelings toward his daughter. But it also illustrates the fact that she has become the focal point of a strong emotion that is manifest first with reference to an image—“just then I thought of my Hodl when I held her as a baby in my arms”—an image coextensive with the other image tableaus that also bring up strong emotions in Tevye. Oddly enough, such a thought-image-affect nexus is completely absent in “Shprintze.” When Tevye learns of Shprintze’s drowning, he barely shows any emotion, almost as if that dimension of his identity has been somehow foreclosed by the earlier loss of his other daughters. The nexus is also absent from his description of his wife Golde’s death in the opening pages of “Tevye Leaves for the Land of Israel.” Both stories suggest an alteration in the texture of Tevye’s inner life, something that might be best explained by the different circumstances in which the author, Sholem Aleichem, wrote the later stories, or, if we want to retain a coherent account of Tevye, a progressive retreat from the inner emotional well-springs of his identity. When we see him in the final story responding to the authorities who wish to take his home from him, the Tevye we find is mellower and changed, and the entire chapter is a catalogue of family misfortunes concluding with the threat of pogrom. The ironic voice is still present, as is his habit of quotation, but the inner Tevye, who we have come to associate both with dialogue and the interruption of second thoughts, has changed and become attenuated. The texture of Tevye’s inner life must be understood as an aspect of the agonistic interlocutory structure, and it changes to reflect the alterations in the historical circumstances that affect him personally and Jews in general. Indeed, we might say that the alteration of the texture of Tevye’s inner life with respect to the thought-image-affect nexus is a way for Sholem Aleichem to signal the foreclosing of the inner possibilities available to him as he is forced to respond to externally devastating circumstances that are the correlatives of the existence of Jews in historical reality. In this respect, the change and attenuation of Tevye’s inner life is the mark not of the dictates of fictionality, but of the imperatives of a profoundly disturbing history. We shall return to this point in our conclusion.

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All of the interlocutory infrastructure that we have so far noted is a product of the essentially polysemous orality that infuses the stories. This places Tevye between individuality and imagined community. The community is necessarily imagined because its discursive invocations imply an old and hoary cultural tradition rather than specifically sociological referents within the story. Because there are no social signifiers of community within the stories, the discursive invocations remain only at the level of (implicit) wish and desire. That is why Tevye retreats to the citational authority of sacred traditions.

As Ruth Wisse (Reference Wisse Ruth2000) and others have noted, the specific geography of the Tevye stories suggests a certain isolation. Tevye lives in a village and not a shtetl. His village is not far from Yehupetz; whereas Boiberik is a thirty-minute train ride from Yehupetz. He mentions several times that it is to Yehupetz he goes regularly to sell his dairy products. Given that only the wealthy Jews of Yehupetz would have been able to afford his wares, Tevye is partially part of that class fraction. If still essentially a laboring peasant, he prides himself on being an entrepreneur who has goods and wares that are of interest to wealthier Jews. And yet he is regularly reminded, and reminds himself, that he is not part of their ilk and can only gawk at their wealth from the outside. The absence of community must, however, not be attributed exclusively to his geographical distance from the Jewish community of Yehupetz. Given the collective intent of the Gentiles in “Lekh-Lekho” to oust him from his property as part of the general purging of Jews, we can surmise that Tevye is not the only Jew in his village. In my view, the absence of community is really to be discerned in the fact that (a) Tevye is rarely shown sharing a communal meal with others outside of his immediate family and (b) none of the ritual institutional gatherings common to Jewish life are given explicit representation within the stories. In a word, there is a decided absence of communal conviviality. The space of sociality and of social encounters is typically either the outdoors, the streets of Yehupetz (as in when he runs into Menachem-Mendl in “Tevye Blows a Small Fortune”), in the forest (in “Tevye Stirkes it Rich,” “Today’s Children,” “Hodl,” “Chava,” and “Shprintze”), or in individual households. The Jewish spaces of institutional and ritual sociality, such as synagogues or marriage ceremonies in which serendipitous and not-so-accidental encounters might have been displayed, are entirely absent from the stories. Given that a majority of the stories are about marriage, it is odd that there is no depiction of marriage ceremonies in any of them. Each of his daughter’s marriages is either conducted surreptitiously or does not provide the grounds for elaborate celebrations and the in-gathering of friends and family. Tsaytl marries a non-Jew; Hodl, as we have noted, marries a tailor and goes to live in self-imposed exile in Siberia; and Shprintze commits suicide by drowning in the river on account of a broken heart. Although the other daughters’ marriages are reported in passing, it is only Beilke’s marriage ceremony that is specifically referred to, but even then only to comment on her elegance and her father’s pride in her: “Well, if you think that by now you’re an expert on Tevye’s daughters, you should have seen Beilke at the wedding—a princess! I stood there feasting my eyes on her and wondering, can this really be my Beilke? Who taught her to stand like that, to walk like that, to carry herself like that, to wear a dress like that, as if wedding gowns had been invented just for her?” (103). There is no reference to any other details of the ceremony itself, who officiated, what the other celebrants wore, what was said there, and by whom. And even though mention is made of a feast, no details are provided of it either, except to say that by 6.30 p.m. the newlyweds waved good-bye and went by “night express to Nitaly, or Italy, or however the Devil that place is called that everyone goes to these days” (op cit).Footnote ¹¹ The lack of reference to details of the marriage feast and who may have been at it coincide with the general lack of communal conviviality within the stories. This is not to say there is no eating and drinking in them at all; quite the opposite. Rather, all the eating and drinking are done either on an individual basis (Tevye invited to eat when he delivers the women safely to Boiberik in the first story), on a dyadic basis (eating and drinking with Layzer Wolf, the widowed butcher with an interest in marrying Tsaytl, in the second story), or, as is most often the case, alone with his family. The one instance where Tevye and his family have guests to dinner is in the story “Shprintze,” where the invitation to Ahronchik and his friends to come for dinner Shavuos provides the occasion for the ill-fated attraction between him and Shprintze.

The essential lack of communal conviviality in Tevye the Dairyman suggests that Tevye is not part of a Jewish social community. The distant Jewish world of Yehupetz and Boiberik that he frequently refers to in the course of his deliveries is exactly that: a distant world. It is distant from him both spatially and in class terms, and his relationship to that world is mainly entrepreneurial or as a means by which to improve his own lot in life. The Jews of Yehupetz and Boiberik appear in the stories more as a source of envy and bafflement due to their extravagant lifestyles than as a source of communal ratification. And even though Tevye does reference various Jewish prayers and holidays, such as Hannukah, Rosh Hashanah, and Shavuos in his elaborate stories, these references act as placeholders for a universe of communal sentiments that is nevertheless not represented within the stories through explicit resources of participation and identification. Even in the story about going to Israel, in which the aforementioned Beilke marries Pudhotzur and goes to live with him in his mansion in Yehupetz, the story is not about the homeland at all but about the arduous process by which his daughter’s wealthy husband attempts to get Tevye to give up his dairy business so as not to constitute a nuisance and embarrassment to him. He is first offered to be shipped off to America, and it is only on his flat and immediate refusal of this preposterous offer that the attractions of going to Israel are put on the table. The point is clearly to move him to a faraway part of the world so his wealthy son-in-law can consort with others of his own business class without concern for the rough peasant character of his wife’s father. Thus in the story class interest makes even Israel (then still part of Ottoman Palestine) a place of peasant exile rather than of a homeland for the affirmation of community.

The separation of cultural ethos from community in the Tevye stories may be traced to a single cause, namely the evident class differentiations that are the direct effect of the dominance of capitalist relations in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. In all instances that Tevye references, he consistently imagines the wealthy Jews of Yehupetz and Boiberik as having gained their wealth either through speculation or large-scale investment. They do not labor, as he does, but their languid lifestyles are something he desires as a relief from his arduous and back-breaking life. What we might then describe as capitalist actantial roles—the speculator, the businessman, the peasant—are well laid out within the stories. They demarcate a world of back-breaking work and poverty on the one hand, and of almost magical wealth acquisition on the other. The avatar of the world of speculation in the stories is of course the comical Menachem-Mendl, but representatives of that world are also amply illustrated from a more serious perspective by Podhotzur, Ahondichik and his mother, and the almost legendary Brodsky, whose untold properties and lifestyle Tevye is constantly imagining, as well as the nameless wealthy Jews of Yehupetz and Boiberik.

Given that in “Shprintze” we have already seen the impossibility of a marriage between the classes, in “Tevye Leaves for Israel” the point is only reiterated, but in such a way as to suggest the conscription of both symbolic and economic capital in keeping the peasant classes at bay. That is the significance of Podhotzur’s offer for Tevye to go to Israel. It is as if Sholem Aleichem wants to show the impossibility of social community in a Jewish world in which social relations have been progressively commoditized by capitalism. The recourse to Jewish sacred texts, the references to Jewish holidays and prayers, and indeed even to the land of Israel, become in Tevye the Dairyman a mode of lonely privatization. In essence, this means that in a world in historical flux in which capitalist accumulation reduces all social relationships into the idiom of economic exchange and class hierarchies Jewish cultural symbols and resources can only remain meaningful within the domain of a privatized discourse, riddled though it might be with lapses, citational misconstruals, and complete fabrications. That Tevye is very much a Jew and enacts his Jewishness with every resource available to him we are not allowed to doubt. But the context of his enactment is also the desire for an imagined community, which in the stories is marked more by its social absence than the density of its institutional representation.

Ezeulu and the Affliction of Second Thoughts

Two central differences are to be noted immediately on moving from Tevye the Dairyman to Arrow of God. First is the fact that the former, a collection of short stories, is told entirely from the first-person narrative viewpoint of Tevye himself. Despite the multiple interlocutors he addresses himself to, everything that is relayed to the entextualized Sholem Aleichem and thus to the reader is in the words of Tevye himself so that his own impressions provide the principles around which everything else is organized. In Achebe’s novel, the third-person nonparticipant narrator establishes different degrees of proximity and distance from the characters, the most important of whom is Ezeulu. It is important to note, however, that Ezeulu is not the only center of value in the novel, or indeed the only focalizer of narrative events. The focalizing function is distributed among different characters, including Edogo, Obika, and Uduche (all three Ezeulu’s sons), Captain Winterbota (Winterbottom) and Mr. Clarke, the colonial officials at Okperi (the headquarters of the district colonial administration). At the same time, we are not left in any doubt that Ezeulu’s consciousness has priority over those of the other focalizers, partly because he is given by far the largest segment of the text, and, perhaps more importantly, that he interacts with a wider range of characters and thus thinks about more people than any of the others we have just mentioned.

The most significant difference between Tevye and Arrow, however, is the different status of community in the two novels. As has already been noted, Tevye has recourse to the full discursive resources of Jewish sacred culture. Although this lends him citational authority, he is nevertheless bereft of Jewish communal relationships. Without the representation of Jewish institutional sites for articulation of such relationships, Tevye thus must be understood as standing outside the Jewish community. The direct opposite is the case in Arrow. Here we are presented with the dense specificities of both culture and community: repeated ritual motifs (the moon and the sacred yam), communal gatherings (the meeting of the clan elders and the Festival of the Pumpkin Leaves), and in-gathering routines of both domesticity and extended family relationships—fetching water from the river, cooking, the reception of guests in the household, the communal resolution of disagreements between spouses, marriage rituals—and so on. Furthermore, the main crisis in the novel turns on Ezeulu’s refusal to accede to a specifically communal demand for eating the last of the old yams, something that is ritually enjoined before the community is allowed to harvest the new yams. Thus, in Arrow community provides the main horizon of identifications, and in ways that are not easily escapable or indeed negotiable. And yet, because of Ezeulu’s attunement to the shifting realities of history, rather than of an unproblematic affirmation of core communal values, his enveloping community becomes progressively for him the source of intense irritation and anger. What is more, the clan that we are presented with in Arrow is dramatically different from the one we encountered in Things Fall Apart. In place of Umuofia’s unanimism, we find Umuaro’s heterogeneity of viewpoints, and to the former’s convergence around foundational questions we find the latter’s profound disagreement about every foundational myth that might be taken to unify them. The split between Ezeulu and his tribesmen is thus no ordinary split, and manifests itself inside his mind as the intrusion of second thoughts, which much like in Tevye’s, is a combination of image, thought, and intense affect.

We get an inkling of this combination very early in the novel, when Ezeulu is contemplating his power and its limitations:

Significantly, and in contrast to Tevye, Ezeulu’s internal addressee seems to be predominantly a skeptical interlocutor. This is because his inner voice is the internal inflection of the doubt that is inherent to the agonistic structure of the clan in general. The voice in his head is thus the residue of a disunified community. The word stung in the passage we just saw is also not insignificant because on two other occasions later on in the novel Ezeulu responds to being challenged in his thoughts as though he had been stung by a black ant. And sometimes a thought is so intense in his mind that he has to “put it aside to cool” (189). This somatization of thought is crucial to understanding the collocation in Ezeulu’s consciousness of thought and an unruly affective economy, and in another register, with representationality. At all times Ezeulu sees himself as either the supreme expression of tradition or as possibly the representative of his clan’s ultimate will. But because the clan community in Arrow is governed by an inherently agonistic and non-unanimist structure, nothing is subject to immediate consensus. The debatelike structure in the novel proliferates everywhere: among the Christian community, between Captain Wintabota and both his superiors and inferiors in the colonial administration, between Ezeulu and his sons, among Ezeulu’s wives and their children, and between Ezeulu and the secular leaders of the clan. The structure of skeptical interlocution we find in Ezeulu’s mind must thus be read as the psychological correlative of a larger agonistic structure that transects the entire representational apparatus of the novel, whichever way we might choose to look at it. What fundamentally distinguishes Ezeulu from any of the other characters in the novel is that he has a much better sense of how world-historical processes have come to impact upon his clan. When he sends his youngest son, Uduche, to the Christian mission school, he tells the boy that he wants him to go and be his eyes among the Christians, so that if there is something they are carrying he can bring home his share (45–46). Everyone in the clan and within his own family condemn him for this move. In the end his downfall comes not because of his anticipation of world-historical processes, but because he does this while simultaneously misinterpreting both his own status as representative of the clan and the degree to which the ritual truths of which he is guardian would become conscripted by Christianity. Christianity extols a new salvation that finds potent resonance in the crisis that Ezeulu himself instigates for the clan by refusing to eat the last of the new yams. The historical processes he has anticipated finally leave him bereft and completely separated from his people. The novel ends with Ezeulu mad and inhabiting alone a mental space that mirrors his own deluded grandeur.

In the Tevye stories, it is clear that his recourse to quotations from Jewish sacred texts is also a mark of an attitude to Jewish historicity. To be a Jew is always to have access to such sacred resources as a primary mode of identification even if, as we saw, many of the quotations are either completely made up or are glossed in ways that bear no relevance to the situations they are meant to illustrate. And yet the fumbling recourse to core Jewish texts must not divert from the fact that they form a reservoir that Tevye believes himself capable of accessing at all times. Contrastively, in Arrow of God there is inescapable ambiguity with respect to such a reservoir of beliefs and ritual norms. This is depicted not only in the quarrels and disagreements that various characters have regarding all manner of beliefs, but in the very ambiguation of the relationship epistemology and history, transcribed in the novel as the historical contrast between foundational narratives on the one hand, and rumors, gossip, and anecdotes on the other. The rumors, gossip, and anecdotes that swirl around the novel give us insights into the surreptitious perceptions that people have of Ezeulu, that his wives have of each other, and that the folk in the tribe have of the white man, and vice versa. The novel suggests that rumors, gossip, and anecdotes are first and foremost disciplinary instruments, in the sense that the characters use these to devise a moral cartography of others’ behavior, and, more consequentially, that such details are prefaces to various courses of action. Intersecting with rumors, gossip, and anecdotes, however, are a number of foundational narratives. And though these narratives are also ultimately disciplinary, they are analytically distinct from the earlier group in that they appear to require specific forms of assent with regard to their truth-value. Their truth-value is tied to notions of heroic action. Ironically, whereas the elusive veracity of rumors, gossip, and anecdotes does not seem to generate any difficulty in procuring assent toward the opinions they express or the actions that derive from them, the foundational narratives in the novel suffer from a debilitating skepticism.

The most crucial of these foundational narratives is without a doubt the one that is the subject of the elders’ meeting early in the novel. The male elders of Umuaro meet to debate whether to go to war with the people of Okperi, who have mischievously in their eyes come to lay claim to a piece of land bordering the two communities that had hitherto not been the object of any disagreement. At this meeting Ezeulu recounts the story that his father had told him as a child about how the six tribes came together to collectively create the god Ulu, with the weakest tribe among them nominated by the others to be the custodian of this new synthetic deity. As descendant of priests of Ulu, he cautions that his god is not one to fight an unjust war because as his father told it to him the land had always belonged to Okperi. To this piece of measured rhetoric is counterpoised the words of Nwaka, a lord of the land who has taken the highest title, Eru, “which was called after the lord of wealth himself” (15). Nwaka opens his speech with a proverb, which, unlike anything we have come to expect from our acquaintance with Things Fall Apart, is designed not to affirm unanimity but to inscribe radical difference: “Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own. Knowledge of the land is like that. Ezeulu has told us what his father told him about the olden days. We know that a father does not speak falsely to his son. But we also know that the lore of the land is beyond the knowledge of many fathers” (16). This extraordinary opening is only the preamble to a story that is in every detail opposed to the one that Ezeulu has just recounted. In Nwaka’s account the people of Okperi could not possibly have owned the land in question because historically they were driven away first from Umuofia, then from Abame, and subsequently from Aninta. It is only after many upheavals that they came to settle near Umuaro. By insisting that Okperi had been driven from not one but several locations, Nwaka raises a dramatic distinction between nomadic and sedentary peoples. In his account as nomadic peoples the Okperi are nothing but wandering “strangers” and thus cannot have any claim to a land settled by a sedentary people such as their own clan. The only reason they now make a bold claim to the disputed land, Nwaka adds, is because the white man has established his headquarters at Okperi. This last point is also a historical interpolation introducing the presence of colonialism that is not reflected in Ezeulu’s foundational narrative. Because each account is a “goatskin bag” and therefore incapable of objective verification, the only means of ascertaining their truth content is through the horizon of ideology.

The binary distinctions that undergird the differences between the two men—priest versus self-made man, tradition versus individual talent—serves to underscore the fact that the two of them are actually proffering mutually exclusive accounts of their collective past. The radical ambiguity regarding the communal past, here located in two contrasting narratives about the foundation of the tribe, gains further ramification at different levels of the text. That gossip, rumor, and anecdote possess readier assent as of actionable value as opposed to the foundational narratives of the tribe hints at the fact that the transition produced by the colonial encounter has succeeded also in reconfiguring epistemological categories. In the terms set out by Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature, we see how Achebe is giving free play to both dominant and residual cultural categories. He does this in such a way as to simultaneously suggest a discursive inversion (the dominant foundational tales appear dubious while rumors and gossip retain believability) and an affirmation of the order of things (it is the foundational tales that are the subject of deliberative exchange for the lords of the clan, while gossip and rumor retain their salience largely at the level of the domestic sphere). The simultaneity of inversion and affirmation then encapsulates the ambiguity of transition located at the intersection of both content and form.

Conclusion: Mind and Contextures

What is the relationship of the mental agon to history, and in what ways might we read the mental infrastructure of the two characters as the correlatives of social contradictions beyond their texts? The question requires us not to interpret Tevye and Ezeulu in sociological terms, but to come to an understanding of how their “minds” emblematize historical processes. In various accounts of literary history, the literary text has been interpreted as a form of social chronicle, thus being made to yield direct insights into discrete sociological forms beyond the literary. This has by no means remained uncontested because it is also patently the case that literary form transcends its context, or, repeatedly refuses straightforward contextualization. In another kind of literary sociology, the literary text is perceived as part of the expressive ensemble of a class fraction. This implies that the individual literary articulation harbors traces of its collective provenance. This generates efforts to identify the particular syntax of such socio-cultural forms, whether they are ultimately relatable to classes or other methodologically definable collectivities. The point to note, however, is the degree to which the social context adduced for a literary representation is always itself a strategic selection out of a process of flux. The social and its cognate, society, are therefore analytically bounded fields in the eyes of the literary critic. Thus any concrete social situation described in the literary text is to be grasped primarily as a problem or enigma whose purpose is not (solely) the disclosure of an authentic social life but rather, as we have seen with our two characters, the embedded thematic of change, process, and contradiction. The form in which these are to be discerned is through a focus on the variety of relations established between the various elements in the text and between these and the several discursive contexts that might be adduced for the text. In this regard, what I have attempted to do here is to provide a “contexture” for the worlds of Tevye and Ezeulu through a focus on the agonistic infrastructure of their minds. In other words, what we want to arrive at is not just the contexts of their literary production or indeed of the real worlds to which their referential chains point toward, but the texture(s) of the worlds beyond their texts. To be sure, the act of contextualizing is necessarily a strategic act of selection and depends upon the orientation, critical background, and even idoscyncracies of the reader. To say that we can read out contexture from the agonistic infrastructure of Tevye and Ezeulu’s minds is to make a choice about what precisely variegated character of social worlds we point to. And yet the move from the one to the other requires the privileging of a cluster of elements and a choice of both passions and blindnesses, so to speak.

In Tevye’s case, the key to understanding the relationship of his mind to contexture of the social is the progressive diminuendo of his fervor, or, to put it more starkly, the movement from optimism to pessimism. We see in the stories that the optimism of “Tevye Strikes it Rich” steadily recedes until we come to the resigned and hardened pessimism of “Lekh-Lekho,” as if to register formally in the mind of the character rather than just sociologically with reference to real-world events the nature of the terrible historical transition that afflicted Jews in the period in which the stories were written. Pessimism does not, however, yield incontrovertibly to disaster, for there is a replenishment of will that is captured in the regular references to sacred texts. Going back to our brief mention of one of Beckett’s creations, this is what establishes an inalienable difference between Tevye and Krapp; Krapp has no abiding faith, whereas Tevye has a surfeit of it, to the point of being a plain irritation to all who interact with him. Contrastively, for Ezeulu there appears a “crack” in his mind early on that is shown by the end to have been the crack of madness. This must ultimately be attributed to the split in his psyche between tradition and modernity. Ezeulu’s attraction to the extant forms of modernity revealed within his culture is shown in his implicit attraction to the Christian school to which he sends his son, and in his admiration for the assistant district commissioner’s ability to write in a book with his left hand. At the same time Ezeulu remains resolutely traditional, refusing the secular temptations of political authority in the same scene where he is invited by the assistant district commissioner to become a colonial government gazetted warrant chief (Arrow, 173–75). Although it is true that Ezeulu’s descent into madness is directly connected in the novel to the sudden death of his son Obika, and his perception that this is a chastising message from his deity Ulu, throughout the text the signs of his self-division are not reducible exclusively to his perception of the internal dynamics of the clan. Ezeulu’s crisis is thus to be read as the crisis of being a “conscript to modernity” that David Scott (Reference Scott2005) so adroitly writes about. Like Tevye, and perhaps even Okonkwo, he is resolutely traditional, but unlike either of them he also contemplates how to use his immense authority to take his clansmen beyond the confines of tradition, or at least even without making any commitments to it, to anticipate what fruits modernity might bring. Ezeulu’s final madness is the sign of an unbearable alienation whose roots lie deep within the historical confluence of tradition and modernity refracted inside of his own mind. If, as we have seen, the agonistic infrastructures of the two characters can be read alongside each other, it is also to show that the historical specificities of their respective conditions render them also different.

I conclude, then, with speculative pedagogical questions: What might it be to introduce Tevye to an African schoolroom? To teach him not as an extraordinary expression of Yiddish storytelling, but as divulging the very forms of orality and history that have long been associated with African letters and that many people agree is now under threat from globalization, urbanization, and modern technology. More importantly, is it possible to use a text like Tevye in an African classroom to incite interest in a culture so distant to the African in both space and time, and yet so similar in its particular expression of transition and flux? Might Tevye in an African classroom succeed in igniting the imagination about what it is to be Othered without the almost routine and thus infertile reference to Europe? And how about a Yiddish Ezeulu? What would happen if Ezeulu’s crisis were translated onto the Yiddish stage? What might he teach the Yiddish stage about the forms of their own historical dislocations? And what might we imagine Ezeulu and Tevye, both old and burdened, saying to each other if they were to meet on the hypothetical fields of world history? Such an encounter may have to remain only speculative, but the exercise might bring enlightenment where the distinctions of literary traditions, of communities of interpretation, and of diverse research agendas have only served to fracture world literature into enclaves of value-interest and only sporadic dialogue across cultures.