Significant Moments An historical novel written in quotations Gary Freedman The purpose and character of the use of quotations of copyrighted material in Significant Moments is for educational purposes. 17 U.S. Code § 107(1). The book illustrates the use of a particular literary device known as “Melitzah,” and has been so recognized. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melitzah All copyrights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended. Significant Moments Those with an intimate acquaintance of Hebrew texts will recognize immediately that this one is written entirely in melitzah, a mosaic of fragments and phrases from the Hebrew Bible as well as from rabbinic literature or the liturgy, fitted together to form a new statement of what the author intends to express at the moment. Melitzah, in effect, recalls Walter Benjamin's desire to someday write a work composed entirely of quotations. At any rate, it was a literary device employed widely in medieval Hebrew poetry and prose, then through . Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. the movement known as Haskalah, Hebrew for “enlightenment,” . Herbert Kupferberg, The Mendelssohns: Three Generations of Genius. and even among nineteenth-century writers both modern and traditional. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. What is so special about this particular . Adam Baer, The Music Language. literary device? Ken Ham, Where are you, metaphor? In melitzah the sentences compounded out of quotations mean what they say; but below and beyond the surface they reverberate with associations to the original texts, and this is what makes them psychologically so interesting and valuable. In the transposition of a quotation from the original (in this case canonical) text to a new one, the meaning of the original context may be retained, altered, or subverted. In any case the original context trails along as an invisible interlinear presence, and the readers, like the writer, must be aware of these associations if they are to savor the new text to the full. A partial analogy may be found in Eliot's use of quotations in The Waste Land. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. If he is successful in . Donald P. Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis. his use of melitzah, . Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. the Author . Bill Moyers, Genesis: A Living Conversation. will arouse in the reader a particular set of images and associations which will add a certain texture and tone to what is being described—the chordal accompaniment, so to speak, to the melodic line. Donald P. Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis. ________________________________________________ I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself. Simply myself. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions. If I have written much of it in the third person, well, that is because such an obsessive account of . Richard Selzer, Raising the Dead. my intrusion into this valley of suffering . Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years. forces one, like Dorian Gray, to confront his own "devilish, furtive, ingrown" self-portrait. The pronoun he gives a blessed bit of distance between myself and a too fresh ordeal in which the use of I would be rather like picking off a scab only to find that the wound had not completely healed. Richard Selzer, Raising the Dead. In the career of the most unliterary of writers, in the sense that literary ambition had never entered the world of his imagination, the coming into existence of the first book is quite an inexplicable event. In my own case I cannot trace it back to any mental or psychological cause which one could point out and hold to. The greatest of my gifts being a consummate capacity for doing nothing, I cannot even point to boredom as a rational stimulus for taking up a pen. Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record. What kind of person am I? What is so special about me? Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century quoting Wagner, Letter to King Ludwig II of Bavaria. I am an assimilated Jew, content to be assimilated, relieved to be religiously unobservant. I don't know any Hebrew, or have forgotten the little I once learned. Wayne Koestenbaum, Listening to Schwarzkopf: The Reich and the Soprano. Speaking personally, I find that the American experience of being an assimilated grandchild of Orthodox immigrants has tended to make me an ill- informed, nonbelieving, non-observant Orthodox Jew, haunted by nostalgia for the peculiar music of the shul, for the Judaism I do not practice. And this adds still another puzzling iridescence to my Jewishness and to the tantalizing opportunities of my writer's divided self. Daniel J. Boorstin, Cleopatra's Nose: Essays on the Unexpected. since these pages, if they survive me, may be the last testament of my brief and insignificant passage through the world, let me scrawl out the main facts. Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance. "I come from an unbroken line of infidel Jews. My father was a Voltairian. My mother was pious, but one day my father took me out for a walk . Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable quoting Sigmund Freud. a walk in a little neighboring wood . Voltaire, Candide. I can remember it perfectly, and explained to me that there was no way we could know that there is a God; that it didn't do any good to trouble one's head about such; but to live and do one's duty among one's fellow men" Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable quoting Sigmund Freud. I know my own heart and understand my fellow man. But I am made unlike any one I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different. Whether Nature did well or ill in breaking the mould in which she formed me, is a question which can only be resolved after reading my book. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions. ______________________________________________ We writers live in the limbo between expression and communication. And we do not need theology or metaphysics to remind us that as writers we cannot avoid the effort, or the temptation, to serve two masters—ourselves, what is within us, and our reader, our conjectural clients outside. Daniel J. Boorstin, Cleopatra's Nose: Essays on the Unexpected. I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to whom it fits. Henry David Thoreau, Walden. By an ironic twist in the history of western literature, in this very age of unprecedented temptations to literary populism, an age of the sovereign and increasingly demanding public, there developed a fertile new sense of Personal Conscience. The private consciousness took on a new life and became a wondrous new literary resource. In modern transformation, conscience, an ancient laboratory of theological hairsplitting and a modern arena of ephemeral public taste, became inward, experimental, and biographical. Daniel J. Boorstin, Cleopatra’s Nose: Essays on the Unexpected. But more. But infinitely more.— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner. As prophet and pundit . Daniel J. Boorstin, The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination. as devilish, dangerous, a rebel, and yet also a martyr and sacrifice . Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka: Representative Man. the writer has become . Ramakant Rath, Has Literature a Future? . the bad conscience of our whole era, . Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Monday, December 13, 1869). and in so doing indeed . Henry James, Confidence. he has come perilously close to defining the modern . Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka: Representative Man. antihero who rejects received tenets of behaviour and stays true to his individuality . Youssef Rakha, Review of A Sun Which Leaves No Shadows. in an always alien society. Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka: Representative Man. To think of the writer as conscience of the world is only to recognize that the writer, . Daniel J. Boorstin, Cleopatra's Nose: Essays on the Unexpected. as we shall see, . Edward R. Tannenbaum, 1900: The Generation Before the Great War. is inevitably a divided self, condemned at the same time to express and to communicate, to speak for the writer and speak to others. Daniel J. Boorstin, Cleopatra's Nose: Essays on the Unexpected. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him. Henry David Thoreau, Walden. Western literature offers us countless different ways in which authors have dealt with this divided self.