Literary Criticism as Anything But Literary Criticism - Imagining Each Other: Blacks and Jews in Contemporary American Literature - Facing Black and Jew: Literature as Public Space in Twentieth-Century America - Book Review

Judaism, Fall, 2002 by Robert Philipson

No methodology can avoid blind spots, and, in spite of its limitations, Goffman's book is the best literary gloss on the Official Liberal Version that is likely to appear for some time. It should not be the last word, but it will rank as one of the better ones.

If my praise is qualified for Imagining Each Other it will sound like a hosanna of glory compared to what I have to say about Adam Zachary Newton's Facing Black and Jew. That is because I am not part of the audience for whom this book is intended. With my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin and its de rigueur requirement of theoretical literacy--post-structuralism, post-colonialism, feminism, and other -isms--I do not have the background or intelligence to absorb Newton's argument. But there is another possibility--that Newton is a bad writer and a worse teacher. I will do my feeble best to present the project of Facing Black and Jew in the way that Newton conceived it, but his style, if it can be called that, is extremely alienating.

Unlike Goffman, Newton does not confine himself to works of African-American and Jewish-American literature that seek to represent the other. He juxtaposes novels by African-American and Jewish-American writers in order to bring out parallels that throw new light on Black and Jewish relatedness. This is done in conscious opposition to the reductionist discourse that has coalesced in the media and in sociopolitical commentary around Black and Jewish relations, a discourse for which Newton coins the ridiculous neologism, "blackjewishrelations."

Borrowing from the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Newton calls this juxtaposition "facing," and you can tell from his strenuous use of epigraphs with the word "face" in them and his punning use of Preface and Post face that Newton feels he is adding something monumental to critical vocabulary. This helpful quote from the back cover describes Newton's project. "Newton combines Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy and Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory in shaping an innovative kind of ethical-political criticism." In his Preface, Newton succeeds somewhat in glossing Levinas, but his invocation of Benjamin's notion of allegory is impossible to understand for those who haven't read the German writer's Origin of German Tragic Drama and "Theses on the Philosophy of History." (21) And here is how Newton brings the two concepts together.

   Allegory, in Benjamin's sense, and
   ethics, in Levinas's, have this in common:
   they both intervene in an inadvertently
   enchanted world. One could
   say, therefore, that Black-Jewish relations
   describe a world where allegory
   and face both miscue, where the one
   stands in lack of what medieval writers
   called the clarifying integumentum--the
   allegoresis--between persons,
   while the other cannot positively show
   forth. (xiv)

Got that? No? Put on your dunce cap and join me in the back of the class.

If the teaching is abstruse, the writing is nothing short of painful. Newton displays all the tics of High Theory: epigraphitis (in one case, three epigraphs to one subheading); relentless, "in-jokey" wordplay; endless chapter titles; and ugly, unnecessary neologisms. On page 8 alone, one finds "surplusive" (a Derridean derivation?), "instantiation" (for "instance"), and "transgeographic peoplehood" (for "diasporic population").