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Rabbi Nachman of Braslav, Jorge Luis Borges

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Rabbi Nachman of Braslav, Jorge Luis Borges Writing the Margin: Rabbi Nachman of Braslav, Jorge Luis Borges and the Question of Jewish Writing Yitzhak Lewis Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 © 2016 Yitzhak Lewis All rights reserved ABSTRACT Writing the Margin: Rabbi Nachman of Braslav, Jorge Luis Borges and the Question of Jewish Writing Yitzhak Lewis The present project draws a comparison between the literature and thought of Hasidic Rabbi Nachman of Braslav (1772–1810) and Argentine writer and public intellectual Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986). It is organized around two components of their writing—a discursive self- positioning at “the edge” of tradition and a “cabbalistic” stylization of their narratives. The dissertation contextualizes these components within late eighteenth century Enlightenment ideology and emancipation policies, and mid-twentieth century political ideologies of Nazism and Fascism, respectively. The dissertation is bookended by a close comparative reading of their stories. It finds that each in his moment is greatly implicated in questions of resituating Jews and Judaism within broader society, and argues that the effort to aesthetically represent the changing social location of Jews is linked to their understanding of their respective literary projects more broadly. Finally, the study illuminates their shared conceptualization of modern Judaism as a literary model. The dissertation’s broader intervention in the filed of early modern and modern literature relates to the dynamic of rupture and continuity that is so central to categorizations of modern writing. It demonstrates that the fault lines of the rupture from tradition, vis-à-vis which modern literature has been constructed, was already present—poetically and discursively—in the “tradition” from which it purportedly departs. By combining the study of diverse geographies, histories, languages, cultures and genres, the present study articulates a comparative frame that challenges conventional categorizations of modern writing. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Section One: Cabbalistic Stories 14 Chapter 1: Tales the World Tells 28 Missing the Ending 32 A Permanent Beginning 43 Poetics of Intransitivity 50 Chapter 2: A Game of Inheritance 64 Metaphysical Tropes 72 A Vindication of the Author 80 Writing Within the Gap 91 Section One: Conclusion 104 Section Two: The Trouble with Tradition 106 Chapter 3: Locating “the Judaic” in Borges 114 Tradition: The Historical Sense 115 What is a Margin? 136 The Intellectual 151 Chapter 4: Locating Rabbi Nachman 156 The Organization of the Jews 162 Was Rabbi Nachman a JeWish Intellectual? 171 The Topography of the Question 182 Antiphilosophy 196 Section Two: Conclusion 205 i Section Three: A Narratology of the Margin 209 Chapter 5: Historia Universal 214 Temporal Thresholds 224 The Appearance of a Secret 237 At the Secret’s Threshold 245 AfterWord 255 In Conclusion: The Question of Jewish Writing 258 Bibliography 261 ii Acknowledgements Sitting before the committee for my dissertation defense, I had the wonderful realization that all the members on the committee had been my teachers and advisors from my very first year in graduate school at Columbia. I am fortunate to call them my mentors. It is my privilege to thank Dan Miron, Gil Anidjar, Graciela Montaldo, Edna Aizenberg and Sudipta Kaviraj for their persistent support and generous advice—for accompanying this project from its very inception, through its most tenuous moments to its conclusion. I have learned much from all the Wonderful students it has been my pleasure to Work With over the past years in New York. I thank them for discussions, questions, ideas and intellectual curiosity that (whether they know it or not) helped me Work through many of the questions in this project. Over the course of researching this dissertation, I spent extended periods of time in Jerusalem and Buenos Aires. To the staff of the Gershom Scholem Archive at the National Library of Israel, my gratitude and friendship. To the staff of the researcher’s reference desk at the Biblioteca Nacional Argentina, the faculty of the Seminario Rabbinico Latinoamericano, the staff of the Fundación Internacional Jorge Luis Borges, the archivists of the Biblioteca Prebisch, and the friends I made through the IWO literary meetings, my deepest thanks. iii There have been many colleagues and friends Whose thoughtful comments and generous energy in reading and discussing drafts of this work have been invaluable in my Work. I am grateful or their comradery and engagement. My friends and colleagues at the Columbia University Jewish and Israel Studies Graduate Student Association, my fellow students at the Cardozo LaW School Graduate Student FelloWship in JeWish LaW and Contemporary Civilization, and colleagues and teachers at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. To the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies and the Institute for Israel and JeWish Studies at Columbia, my deepest gratitude for all their mental and material support, for obliging my ambitions and supporting my motivations. iv To my family for their endurance and support, whose firm demands for balance keep me both sane and focused, my thanks and love. v Introduction It has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous. The critics often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works—the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say—attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres. 1 Rabbi Nachman of Braslav and Jorge Luis Borges have been received as entirely exceptional writers, within the literary and cultural contexts from which they emerged respectively. As part of constructing this reception, they are also largely treated as exceptions to the definitions of literature operative within the respective contexts of their reading. That is, they occupy a dual relation to conceptions of what it means to be a “modern writer,” to write “modern literature.” They are the exception, and they prove the rule. A central theme through which I bring them together in this study is the question of modern writing. The first step in introducing the juxtaposition of these two figures will be the constellation of exceptions and exclusions that marks the critical reception of both. To follow their lead on the question of modern writing, I draw attention to the ways they signal this category in their own writing, and themselves as marginal to it—“writing the margin,” as I have put this question in the title. Thus, the second step in introducing their juxtaposition is to note their own participation in this “exceptional” reception. Indeed, their 1 Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings (New York: New Directions Pub. Corp., 1964), 28. 1 respective self-presentation as exceptions does much to perpetuate critical attitudes that take them up as exceptions to the categories of literature and writing within which they operate. In addition to discursively presenting themselves as such, their writing certainly challenges literary conventions to the point of subverting the very categories of literature, within which these conventions prevail. This subversion, in turn, is subsumed under a critical reception that constructs them as exceptions. The exception participates in articulating the rule that defines it as an exception. The present study highlights two key moments in this dynamic of reception and exception as it pertains to R. Nachman and Borges, one poetic and one discursive. In both, the concordance between these writers’ self-presentation and their appreciation by subsequent readers is the starting point for a discussion of this dynamic, and its role in the construction of the rule of “modern writing.” In both moments I have selected, the dynamic is not merely structural. R. Nachman and Borges not only share poetic and discursive elements with their respective reception, but they share these elements with each other as well. The first two sections of the study deal with these two key moments. Individual chapters within them offer separate discussions of R. Nachman and Borges. Thus discrete chapters on their particular writing and reception come together to articulate a broader problematic of “modern writing.” The first point of juxtaposition is poetic, and addresses a shared category in their distinct articulations as exceptions, that of writing “cabbalistic stories.” The second point of juxtaposition is discursive, and reads central texts of their presentation 2 (and self-presentation) as exceptions, in which they are located “at the edge.” Through these two points, I highlight their exception in terms of its discursive construction and poetic stylization. Lastly, in the final section, I comparatively read the narrative production of such an exception, as such an exception, in a story by each. A primary finding of this study, one that emerges throughout the juxtaposition of these two writers, relates to the central role of “the Judaic,” as a reference point for their thought about writing and literature in their respective contexts. The Judaic comes to light in terms of a shared discourse, poetics and narratology that R. Nachman and Borges articulate through their persistent reference to it. In addition, and in keeping with the dynamic of reception-exception outlined above, the Judaic is also an important prism in the reception of their work. Recognizing, analyzing and questioning their persistent reference to the Judaic are central frames for the reception of both. The pervasive role of the Judaic— poetically and discursively, in the process of their writing, its reception and its subsequent exception—points to a broader question I have already signaled in the title. In the juxtaposition of these writers, persistently reverberating within the question of “modern writing” is the question of “Jewish writing.” At first I had considered him to be as singular as the phoenix of rhetorical praise2 The exception of R.
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