Sacrificing Commentary: Reading the End of Literature

by Sandor Goodhart

In Sacrificing Commentary Sandor Goodhart proposes a new view of literary reading, arguing that the writing we have designated as "literary" is in fact a form of commentary or critical reading. In the case of our most important cultural documents -- Shakespeare, for instance, or Sophocles -- this commentary remains our most powerful inquiry into questions of reading, aesthetics, violence, and ethical responsibility .To support his argument, Goodhart offers a close analysis of Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus, Shakespeare's Richard II, four passages from the Hebrew Torah (the story of Joseph and his brothers, the ten commandments, the story of Jonah, and the story of Job), and a talk given shortly after the war by Yiddish poet and playwright Halpern Leivick. Goodhart concludes that criticism as we know it within a formal academic humanities setting, far from expounding the critical reading a given work makes available to us, more often acts out or repeats the very structures or conflicts which are its subject matter. As a result, the most powerful forms of commentary upon our myth-making capacities may be found less in these critical texts than in the literary texts they model and whose perspectives they would usurp. "Exploring themes introduced in his well-known essay on Oedipus, Goodhart concludes that literature is best understood as an interpretation of criticism. The demystifications provided by critics are often recreations of the myths that literary texts attempt to expose. Others have suggested as much, but have not pursued the issue, as he and Renè Girard do, to the foundations of Western thought. His dialogic relation to Girard illuminates both the Judaic and Christian traditions." -- Wallace Martin, University of Toledo

408 pages, Hardcover

First published June 30, 1996

Reviews

[Chungsoo Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goodhart is an accomplished literary critic who writes like a novelist when he argues his points. His arguments unfold gradually like a plot in a novel. Goodhart follows and implements to a certain extent René Girard’s thesis that literature and to a large extent our culture (including Christianity) show the central role of the sacrificial violence and the way out of it by demystifying it in terms of rituals and sanctifications-- demystification in the sense of annulment or sublation (100-102, 103-04, 106, 138, 199-201). Goodhart follows Girard only to an extent and stops. He stops where Girard goes on to argue that the violence perpetuates despite the demystification within the literature and the culture. How is Girard’s latter part of the thesis overcome? Following Levinas, Goodhart finds the way out of the perpetual cycle of violence by finding ethical practices in Judaism, more specifically in the Torah. Thus, literary criticism or commentary must stop, so as to stop the violence perpetuated within literature and our culture (despite demystification).

Hence, Goodhart situates himself at "the end of literature" and hopes to usher it in by exercising what he would call a "prophetic" reading from within the text, a kind of reading that will actualize in life and culture what one reads in a performative sense. Commentary or criticism, too, must be sacrificed or given up--so as to stop the perpetuation of violence --for moving into ethical practice embedded in the two thousand years of Jewish practice of reading the text of the Torah, the ethical practice or subjectivity that Emmanuel Levinas proposes: to be responsible for the other humans. Goodhart, thus, proposes displacing criticism with ethics, text with ethical life. Hence, the book title: Sacrificing Commentary: Reading the End of Literature.

If, as Goodhart shows along with Girard, the story of Oedipus Rex and Richard II stage the ambiguity if not the absurdity of the logic of the sacrificial violence that perpetuates within those stories themselves despite staging the demystification thereof, Goodhart demonstrates (by also staging) that the Hebrew Bible (the story of Joseph, the Ten Commandments, the story of Jonah, and the Book of Job), in contrast, tells us to stop and give up the way of the perpetual violence committed in the name of sacrifice and its demystification. A midrashic story told by Gershom Scholem, as in turn retold by Goodhart, in this regard is instructive:

… a Talmudic scholar is sitting in his study reading Talmud and he suddenly sees himself sitting in his study reading Talmud. He comes, in other words, to see his own double, to recognize himself in the other, to recognize the other as himself. Moreover, he understands that other as his own past or his own future, the road he is already traveling. And having had this vision, he comes finally, at the critical moment, to distance himself from it. He fictionalizes it. He tells a story about it, a midrash (120-21).

Notice the Möbius strip at work here, which Goodhart employs at crucial juncture of each of his analyses of the aforementioned texts (118, 156, 196, etc.). The inside of the midrashic story told here leads to the outside like the Möbius strip. As the story goes, the Talmud one is reading shows the reader’s own past and future, the road he has taken and where it is leading. All this is in turn taken up to be told as yet another story, like the commentaries that surround the Torah where the boundary between Torah and the commentaries thereof is blurred. This blurring becomes effective for the entire Tanakh, the Jewish Bible. In fact, the whole Bible is an extension of the Torah (124). Thus the Books of the Prophets, the wisdom books, the Talmud, etc. are but an extension of the Torah. In fact, the rabbis believe that the whole universe is an extension of the Torah because, as they like to say, the Torah existed before the creation (198) or that it serves as the “blueprint” of the world (131, 198). There is thus no distinction between the inside and the outside of the text: “We have never been outside of the text” (118). Just as the literature demythologizes the sacrificial violence so as to perpetuate violence (Girard’s thesis), the Biblical texts, on the other hand, pull us out of the world of violence by the force of the Torah, which is a teaching that says in essence: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Ex. 20:2, italics added). It is in this First Commandment (a teaching rather than an imperative) that contains all the rest of the Ten Commandments; and it is furthermore in the unpronounceable name of God that contains all of the Ten Commandments, as the Kabbalists are fond of saying (137). Because the essence of the Jewish Law is for Goodhart summed up in anti-idolatrism, which is to say, in a call of God “to live otherwise than by the being of the sacrificial structures of the worlds in which [Judaism] appeared” (202). Thus Goodhart writes at the outset of his book with a clear reference to Levinas:

In Judaism, at the altar, before the ark of the covenant, in the place where older cultures would identify a sacrificial victim, one discovers a text—a teaching, a torah—which speaks anti-sacrificially of that victimage from one end to the other. In place of sacrificing a victim, one intones or recites or reads this text, which is taken itself as the trace of an encounter with the infinitely Other and as such the foundation of ethical response (xiii-xiv).

For Goodhart Levinas provides the ultimate point of reference, because Levinas enables him to overcome Girard’s pessimism or nihilism: that in demystifying the sacrificial violence the western culture ends up perpetuating the violence. Judaism enable to stop the cycle of violence and to give up its logic by the Law that commands in essence: Stop, repent, and become responsible for what you are not and what you have not created. The impetus to stop and to give up comes from the Biblical texts that ultimately boil down to the saying of the First Commandment: “I am the LORD your God” and thus abandon the ways of idolatries of the world.

The strongest argument (that appears at the center of the book) comes from Goodhart’s brilliant analysis of the Book of Job. It is crucial to understand, as Goodhard successfully shows, that the Book of Job is not about the “problem of evil” and that Job is not much different from his three visiting friends who attempt to explain the origin of evil through a system of causality or of free will. (Levinas’s interpretation of Job is followed here wholeheartedly; cf., Of God Who Comes to Mind, 133; Nine Talmudic Readings by Emmanuel Levinas, 48, 49; Otherwise Than Being, or, Beyond Essence, 122.) Job complains about his banishment from his community like a victim (in the mode that Girard describes (Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World))—from the community where he was respected and where he “dwelt as a king in the army, as one that comforteth the mourners” (Job 29:21-25, 30:1, 8-10, 29; as quoted in Goodhart’s 183-84). In the end, however, Job turns from his way of thinking and repents. In the face of God (in response to “God’s prophetic presentation” (205, italics added)), he overcomes his “problem” and acknowledges: “But now mine eye seeth Thee; Wherefore I abhor my words, and repent, Seeing I am dust and ashes” (Job 42:6; as quoted in Goodhart’s 205). His so called “problem of evil” becomes small in comparison to the magnitude of God, the Creator: “Creation is larger than justice, God says to him” (201). It is not that Job felt sorry for his complaints, which is otherwise legitimate. His repentance (teshuvah)—another key term for Goodhard as it is in Judaism—involves stopping (shavat from which we have 'Sabbath') and giving up the way his three friends were thinking; in fact, the way of Satan (the term ‘satan’ means “accuser”) who, unlike Job, does not stop accusing God (cf., 164-65, 207). “Repentance,” says Goodhart, “is the regenerative force par excellence in Judaism and therefore appropriate to the one day [Yom Kippur, the day of repentance or atonement] ordained since creation, … for purification, for the separation of light from darkness…” (165; cf., 143—hence, the Book of Jonah is read in the ritual of Yom Kippur). Goodhart writes:

After posing these questions what is required of Job is that he give up insisting upon the sanctity of his own position, that he humble himself before the condition of his own possibility, indeed the condition of the possibility of the universe itself, and return to the way of God (209).

At this point of Goodhart’s argument, Levinas becomes decisive. Quoting from Levinas’s 1955 essay “Loving the Torah More Than God,” Goodhard argues that the issue of suffering is not a question of justice (the metaphysical question) but of being a Jew. It is at this point Goodhart cites Levinas: “The suffering of the just for a justice that is without triumph is lived concretely as Judaism” (Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, 144, in Goodhart’s translation as quoted in his book 180, 181, 194). To be a Jew in turn means to be responsible for God’s creation: “Thus to live in accord with God’s Law in this account [says Goodhart], to live according to the law of anti-idolatry, is to participate in God’s creative act, to create the world as God did via Torah” (198). The so called “problem of evil” is overcome by redeeming act of repentance, negatively; and by becoming responsible for the evil one did not commit, positively: in short, to be “responsible [as Levinas puts it] for what was neither one’s self nor one’s work” (“Transcendence and Evil” in Of God Who Comes to Mind, 133) or, again to quote Levinas, to “substitut[e] oneself for others,” which is the quality that defines Job’s 'uprightness' (temimut) (Nine Talmudic Readings by Emmanuel Levinas, 49; as quoted in Goodhart’s 168, 211).

Goodhart thus concludes:

We are interested in reading today… because the condition of our contemporary being is the Holocaust, and post-Holocaustal reading is a form of ethical practice, one that shares certain similarities with the ethical practice exercised for more than two thousand years as the reading of the Hebrew Torah, and one that has as its end or goal witness: the ownership of one’s responsibility for the other individual (276).

I ask: Is prophetic reading that leads to ethical practice possible in any great texts outside the Hebrew Bible—be it the New Testament or any other texts of the world’s great religions? (Goodhart leaves a room for “Eastern religions” (203).) More specifically, is ethical practice possible in the Christian liturgy which imitates, if not seek to revive, the Jewish sacrifice or the ritual of atonement? (Goodhart was surprised, in our recent conversation, by how similar the Catholic liturgy was to the Jewish liturgy, except of course for the Eucharist.) If we are at the end of literature and if commentary must be sacrificed, what next? If practicing ethical life (i.e., being responsible for the other humans) is integrally associated with Judaism, and if we are thus to live like the Jews ("the people of the book"); how is the Jewish life to continue at the end of literature and commentary? Must we abandon literature and take up the study of Torah? Shall we continue the Talmudic tradition of commenting on the Torah and thus living the Torah? Once again, the following Jewish wisdom that refuses to separate the study of the Torah with living is instructive:

These are things that are limitless,
of which a person enjoys the fruit of the world,
while the principal remains in the world to come.
They are: honoring one's father and mother,
engaging in deeds of compassion,
arriving early for study, morning and evening,
dealing graciously with guests, visiting the sick,
providing for the wedding couple,
accompanying the dead for burial,
being devoted in prayer,
and making peace among people.
But the study of Torah encompasses them all.

(Mishkan T'Filah: A Reformed Siddur, (New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2007), 88).

Lastly, is not Logos, who "was with God and was God" in the beginning (John 1:1), in fact the Law incarnate? (Logos, perhaps, should be translated as 'the Law' in John's Gospel.) Goodhart sees that both Jews and Christians can arrive at an agreement in the following summation of the Law that was offered by Jesus himself: “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and all your soul” (Deut. 6:5; cf., Goodhart’s 138; Matt. 22:37; Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27). Christians and Jews can also join in agreement in the verse that precedes it, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone” (Deut. 6:4), which is a repeat of the First Commandment itself (Ex. 20:2). “But," Goodhart objects, "the displacement of the Word of God that is Torah with another is a stumbling block” (138, his italics). Incarnation is the problem.

But did not Levinas use the exactly the same word to designate the ethical self as “substitution”? Levinas, it would appear, then is more Christian than he or Goodhart would acknowledge. This is to say, both Jesus and Paul, I propose, were the proto-Levinasians.

Notwithstanding and despite the undeniable atrocities the Cross represented for the Jews and Muslims in history and politics in the past and present, both Judaism and Christianity at bottom is one religion, nonetheless. The difference seems to lie in which way one nudges the core: toward the old or the new (where the term the ‘new’ does not necessarily mean ‘better’ or ‘improved,’ beyond and despite the rhetoric of the ‘new wine’ and the ‘old wineskins’ in the synoptic Gospels (Matt 9:17, Mark 2:22, Luke 5:37)).

[Andrew Marr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant essays on Greek drama & the Hebrew Bible applying René Girard's mimetic theory. For my thoughts on mimetic theory see my blog "Imaginary Visions of True Peace: at http://bit.ly/Tqbeqw