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Affectionate, Anxious, and Perplexed:Studies in American Jewish Literature Dean Franco My impression of the future of Jewish American literature study is necessarily filtered through the hazy thoughts and murky plans for my own future research and writing, though as I write this I see that it correlates somewhat with other scholars' good work currently circulating or forthcoming. I begin with the urge to put all the words in this journal's title in quotation marks, to suggest that each is a starting point for research and writing and not a simple premise. Or perhaps each term should get a question mark: "Jewish?" "American?" "Literature?" I am guided to this suspension by Homi Bhabha, who suggests we begin "by questioning that progressive metaphor of modern social cohesion—the many as one—shared by organic theories of the holism of culture and community, and by theorists who treat gender, class or race as social totalities that are expressive of unitary collective experiences" (142). Instead, Bhabha would have us attend to how " minority discourse acknowledges the status of national cultures—and the people—as a contentious, performative space of the perplexity of the living in the midst of the pedagogical representations of the fullness of life" (157; emphasis added). The "pedagogical . . . fullness of life," or ameliorative pluralism is visualized in the wonderful prologue of Henry Roth's novel Call It Sleep, which aggregates a group of recent immigrants from Europe under the Whitmanesque gaze of a ferry boat captain. Looking out across his decks, the captain observes a "colorful . . . matrix of the vivid costumes of other lands, the speckled green and yellow aprons, the flowered kerchief, embroidered [End Page 11] homespun, the silver-braided sheepskin vest, the gaudy scarfs, yellow boots, fur caps, caftans, dull gabardines" (9). The prologue goes on, capturing Poles, Italians, Englishmen, Germans, and Jews with a perfect précis of sentimental behavior specific to each. It is a bravura view of pluralist America, but the novel proceeds to document the contentious and indeed perplexing fact of living amid and against pedagogical and hegemonic norms of Americanness. For this reason, Albert Schearl, endlessly anxious about fitting in, violently discards his son David's old-world-style hat, fearing it designates the family as un-American. Straightaway, however, Call It Sleep shifts from a visual register of cultural accumulation to an audible register of différance, yielding not a series of easily classified types, arranged by the gaze of a master-seer, but a noisy crowd, with ethnic groups speaking to and across one another, with no primary mediator to organize it all. The novel ends with a collision of public and private spheres, the overlap of Jews and non-Jews, and the prominence of Christian symbolism to force the difficult question: What, if anything, remains "Jewish" about Roth's David by the end? If the opening is a vision of naive pluralism fit for critique and displacement, what does the ending suggest? Perhaps the novel recalibrates the crowd as a site of democracy, shifting away from the simple counting of the population ("You've got your Poles here, your Irish there, your Jews over here . . .") to a count of the uncounted, as Jacques Rancière would put it, that portion of the population which becomes audible as it begins to speak to itself, and recognizable as it demands new forms of hearing from a wider polis; or in the case of literature, new ways of reading which reconfigure the "distribution of the sensible" (Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics). In Rancière's account of politics, the political is whatever disrupts and resignifies the calcified terms of political and social identification, and between Rancière and Bhabha, we may find Roth participating in a disruptive and democratic critique of the norms of Americanness. Still, I wonder how to sustain the "Jewish" in this journal's title, yet encourage criticism that overcomes the stability of "Jewish" on the way to such analyses. Perhaps that is precisely where "Studies" comes in—a word the OED tells me means both "affection" and " partisan sympathy" for a topic, and "a state of mental perplexity and anxious thought." Echoing Bhabha, perplexity is not only the...
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