It is not the aim of this chapter to discuss the Jewish question. Nor is it my aim to raise the issue of discrimination or prejudice on the basis of race or social position. Rather, it seems that something like a thought of the “frontier within,” which is currently my main theme, receives sustained expression in the work of many Jewish writers.
In writing this, I have in mind, for example, someone like Franz Kafka. Of course it is a bit of a stretch to interpret Kafka’s work solely from the perspective of its Jewish characteristics. There is an argument one sees recently that focuses on the notion of the “father” in Kafka—that is, its Jewish characteristics—and while it may appear that this reading shows high regard for Kafka, it actually reduces the contemporary universality of his work to its particular Jewish qualities. There is something ineffaceably sectarian about this. Here we find an impractical attitude that is tantamount to seeing Marcel Proust, Charlie Chaplin, and Henri Bergson simply in terms of their Jewish traits.
Yet it would be similarly impractical to deny Kafka’s status as a Jew. Kafka clearly wrote in his diary that he was conscious of himself as a Jew and that he tried to come to terms with this consciousness. The question is whether there exists some link or absolutely no link between his status as Jewish and the contemporary meaning of his work, and for this we must put aside literary tastes and our own particular agendas and reexamine without bias the subtle implications contained in the label “Jewish writer.”
The easiest solution to this question would be to find a happy medium between these two choices. This would produce the following: “Despite being largely bound by his particular Jewish qualities, Kafka was finally able to achieve a contemporary universal form of expression thanks to his talent, which transcended these limitations.” Now I don’t completely reject this interpretation. Depending on the context, it is an undeniable fact that a rainy day means that we’re having bad weather.
However, when this apparently irrefutable compromise is applied to and compared with other writers of a strong ethnic hue (non-Jewish writers), one immediately recognizes a very different resonance. Compare: “Kafka wrote with the heart of a Jew, and yet he rose above that to appeal to the soul of all humanity” and “Tolstoy wrote with the heart of a Russian, and yet he rose above that to appeal to the soul of all humanity.”
Here I am not intentionally using a Russian as the counterpart of the Jew. There would be no real difference if I were to refer to a Frenchman, German, Arab, or Japanese. Rather, I simply happen to choose Tolstoy as a representative non-Jewish writer based on such things as his ethnic character, ideas, and global reputation, and I don’t think there can be any complaints about this choice.
What then is the nature of the subtle division between the above two twinlike statements? To further summarize these statements, we ultimately arrive at the standard formula “universality through the particular” (this is the cherished mantra of literary critics), and perhaps Kafka and Tolstoy are qualitatively different with regard to the content expressed by this word “particular.”
Even we Japanese are to a large extent capable of understanding the Russian particularity of Tolstoy. Of course perfect understanding is impossible but, even allowing for this impossibility, a tentative guess is possible. This understanding is perhaps mediated by a common—that is, mutually translatable—sentiment regarding “land.” The symbol of the “good man” that Tolstoy ultimately arrived at was none other than the “good peasant” who understood the workings of the motherland. Despite differences in manners and customs, broad commonalities existed in agricultural techniques throughout many countries, and naturally there were strong similarities in peasant consciousness. The notion of Russian particularity was not truly separate from the particularity of other nations or peoples but was rather a mere variation that contained universally peasant characteristics. Insofar as faith in the land continued to flourish in one form or another, it was quite natural that pursuit of such particularity led directly to universality. All modern states have embraced a memory of the land as holy as part of the historical background of their formation.
However, the situation is slightly different in the case of Kafka—or rather, beyond Kafka, with regard to Jewish particularity in general. The word “Jew” calls to mind for us only a very abstract concept, one that is perceived strictly through writing, virtually unaccompanied by any concrete image. For Japanese people especially, who do not share the history of anti-Semitism and cannot easily distinguish Jews from other Caucasians based on physical appearance, it is impossible to escape the indirect and false scope of this concept, since it is derived strictly from the words and actions of non-Jewish Europeans.
Judah from the Old Testament; Shylock from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice; Dr. Einstein, who always appears in one section or another in the Lives of Great Men; and, the most familiar example, Jews as the unfortunate victims of racial prejudice and genocide, as symbolized by Auschwitz.
Indeed, the Jews’ status as sacrificial lamb is certainly one aspect of their particularity. No matter how much this particularity is driven home, however, it does not seem to be easily universalized, unlike the manner in which peasantry in general is extracted from the Russian peasants. Since this is in any case mere secondary knowledge, however, let us again hear the views on Jewish particularity directly from the victimizers themselves.
“We must everywhere develop the peasant spirit.”1
“The urban masses are empty. Where all is extinguished, nothing can be aroused.”2
“Since the Civil War, in which the southern states were conquered, against all historical logic and sound sense, the Americans have been in a condition of political and popular decay. In that way, it was not the southern states but the American people themselves who were conquered.”3
This apparent moralist, who seems to speak in the voice of a Narodnik preacher, is none other than Adolf Hitler, the architect of the Holocaust. These are Hitler’s own words, as randomly excerpted from Hermann Rauschning’s book Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on his Real Aims.
Even for Hitler, in other words, the image of the new German aristocracy that would occupy the highest ranks of Nazi power was at most that of peasant landowners. Now let me state here that I have absolutely no intention of engaging in such sophistry as to claim, for example, that Tolstoy and Hitler are thus similar. Just as the power of the peasantry has not always operated negatively upon history, so too has it not always operated positively. Japanese farming villages represent the base of conservative political parties, but in China they were the center of revolution. Che Guevara was aided by the peasants in Cuba, whereas in Bolivia he was ruthlessly betrayed by them. Just as it is false to view the peasants as Hitler’s allies merely because of his sense of affinity with them, so too must one avoid regarding them as the kindred spirits of Tolstoy and Whitman.
In any case, it stands to reason that Hitler, who perceived in the good German peasantry the existence of the German Volk with its own pure lineage, would recognize something of the city in the hated Jews. In fact, Hitler’s image of Jews was that they were diverse, as cities are diverse, and extraordinarily complex, as cities are complex. To put it in the extreme, it was almost as if Hitler regarded everything outside the peasantry as Jewish.
Let me cite once again from Rauschning’s book: “The two are as widely separated as man and beast. Not that I would call the Jew a beast. He is much further from the beasts than we Aryans. He is a creature outside nature and alien to nature.”4
This is clear evidence of a pathological hatred for the unnatural or artificial. While attacking Christianity for corrupting the farming villages, Hitler also criticized the atheists in the cities as symptomatic of deracinated Jewish thought. He argued that those members of the working class who were poisoned by cities should not be given the opportunity to receive primary education and be kept illiterate. Hitler also seemed to harbor an immense hatred for those who engaged in various forms of abstract intellectual work, such as the intelligentsia, technicians, and specialists.
Ultimately, for Hitler, Jews were the drab petty officials lurking in government offices, priggish didacticians, liberals, usurers, physicians, speculators, inventors, Romantic composers, financial cliques, lawyers, leaders of the labor movement, natural scientists, university professors, garret writers, and Marxists. In other words, Jews were like an urban demon that could freely transform itself into anything other than German peasants.
Yet the projection of urban characteristics onto Jews is in no way an exclusive idea that originated with Hitler. According to Sartre’s Portrait of the Anti-Semite, the situation is virtually identical for French anti-Semites: “Intelligence, for the anti-semite, is a Jewish attribute. … The true Frenchman, with his roots deep down in his own country, in his own small locality, sustained by a tradition of twenty centuries, benefiting from an ancestral wisdom and guided by tried and tested customs, does not need to be intelligent.” 5 And again: “Why should I … be able to understand [Racine]? It is because Racine belongs to me. Racine and my own language and my own soil.”6
Are Jews urban or are cities Jewish? It seems that Jews and cities are so deeply intertwined that I cannot help but ask this question. My theme of the “frontier within” is related to precisely this point.
If it were merely a question of Jews as victims, then perhaps blacks in the United States would be the far more suitable object of this kind of particularity. Actually, there are a number of works from black writers that are worthy of international attention, works in which one clearly sees the principle of movement from particularity to universality. Moreover, prejudice against blacks is far more virulent and nihilistic than anti-Semitism. The Nazis believed that Jews had to be killed, whereas American farmers never even saw the need to kill blacks.
In this sense, the novel Mandingo that I read recently is terrifying and quite ominous. If I hadn’t known that certain descriptions were of living beings, I might have suspected the characters to be discussing a brand-new sports car. Even when I understood from the mention of limbs and teeth that the characters were referring to living beings, everything convinced me that the topic was something like a well-bred, expensive hunting dog. They were raised cleanly, rationally, and lovingly. In return, they loved and feared their masters to a degree no less than that of loyal dogs. Of course they were not dogs. Rather, the context of such discussions was farms that specialized in the raising of black slaves. If a pureblooded female slave of high quality was obtained, she would be taken to another farm to mate with a man of the same tribe. Women who were especially fertile would be forced by certain measures to repeatedly give birth. Although seldom whipped, slaves received this punishment in such a way that no marks would remain. Veterinarians were immediately called if slaves were even slightly ill. Thus slaves were well cared for and protected until they reached an age where they could be sold at a high price.
Such a cold, inhuman form of interdependence is far more ruthless and cruel than any hatred or genocide. I finished the book with a sense of horror only to find upon glancing through the afterward that the author, Kyle Onstott, was not a professional writer but rather a dog handler who had also written The Art of Breeding Better Dogs. I burst out laughing in spite of myself and then immediately felt all the worse. The realization that extreme prejudice and discrimination do not always produce hostility but can indeed take such a form of trust forced me to reexamine the meaning of human relations. I felt stung by a dangerous cynicism. Even if the novel were a purely fictional account that Onstott had written based on his experience raising dogs and which he then applied to blacks, the setting was quite realistic and convincing. In any case, ours is an era in which human relations have grown so complacent that no one feels strange when the peace movement, which is based on humanism, issues statements that sound like slogans from the Humane Society. It might be that a new form of racial prejudice, in which one loves while discriminating just as one loves while being discriminated against, has actually achieved an international universality. This prejudice appears in the form of lovable dogs, and haunts everything within us.
In fact, Joseph K., the protagonist of Kafka’s The Trial, also died like a dog. Yet there is an enormous difference between dying like a dog and dying as a dog. This might explain why even Hitler could not treat his sworn enemy the Jews in the same manner that blacks in the American South were treated. Far from suggesting any standard for judging the relative superiority or inferiority of Jews and blacks, this point merely reveals the difference in their sociohistorical positions. In reality, blacks recently have overcome all traces of their former status as lovable elite dogs in both the United States and the world in general. They are like an immense stock of black dynamite with a smoldering fuse that runs headlong from discrimination based on contact with whites to a form of equality based on severing such contact.
Classical discrimination survives with a forced smile between friendly nations within each military bloc.
Let us now return to the question of explaining Jewish particularity. Beyond the dimension of mere prejudice or discrimination, there seems to be an essence of particularity itself that is hidden in the way in which Jews have been labeled as distinct from peasants, as incapable of understanding Racine, and as alienated from the land—labeled, in other words, as strictly of the city.
The urban character of the Jews is both a malicious wanted poster fabricated by nativist demagogues and a fact supported by historical proof. No matter how tolerant the king or feudal lord, Jews in their role as the eternal foreigner were strictly forbidden to set foot in the sacred farming areas. They were granted the right to live only in cities (ghettos) and were allowed to maintain symbiotic relations with Christians because of their practice of moneylending—an act considered impure by Christians but which had already become an indispensable part of the state economy. As economies eventually developed, the proportion of the monetary economy gradually increased vis-à-vis that of the object economy, and the role of the Jews within the state economy necessarily expanded as well. Instead of owning land, the Jews gained power in such areas of the credit economy as commerce, trade, medicine, and law, thereby resulting in the consolidation of their urban character, whether they wanted this or not.
For the Jews, however, cities were not a safe refuge. They were squalid areas that were originally seen by feudal lords as mere marketplaces located in the remote frontiers of their domain. Upon realizing that these cities had become the goose that lays the golden egg, however, the feudal lords could no longer silently stand by. Pressure on the Jews was gradually increased: restrictions led to discrimination, which in turn led to rejection. This was perhaps the basis for the emergence of anti-Semitism as well as of the Jews’ countermeasure against it, for therein began the consolidation of Jewish religious and spiritual unity.
The proud Zionists would of course strongly protest this point. For them, the self-awakening of the Jewish people did not take place so passively; rather, it must be grounded on the two-thousand-year tradition that began with the Jews’ expulsion from Jerusalem. If the Jews had wandered for two thousand years, the Zionists argue, then they had also been persecuted for that long, and yet they had survived catastrophe to finally arrive at the founding of the state of Israel. For the Zionists, it is precisely the weight of this fact that furnishes the best proof that Jews are the “chosen people.” Now I have no desire to refute this claim. My focus here is less on the Israelis as object than on the false image of the Jews that haunts the interiority of non-Jews.
What I cannot understand, however, is the strange fact that agrarianist ideas are still constantly reproduced even within the advanced capitalist nations, which are now heavily industrialized and where all the major areas of politics, economics, and culture are concentrated in the cities. Even within cities, one still encounters undiminished suspicion and prejudice toward urban elements.
According to statistics, in 1961 one-third of all Jews in the world lived concentrated in fifteen cities across Europe and the United States with populations of over one million people. This trend likely remains unchanged today. Although control over finance and trade has already been appropriated by the authentic native bourgeoisie, the Jews’ historically urban character—whose formation and development parallels that of the city itself—remains unchanged.
Must “authentic citizens” appeal to antiurban or native elements in order to preserve their “authentic culture”? Must we for the sake of our culture stand barefoot on mother earth and purify the filth from cities?
I don’t know if this applies to the time of the Crusades, but the state has long achieved full occupation of the city. There is now absolutely no opposition between state and city. On the contrary, cities are the heart and soul of the state, they have been assigned an indispensable and pivotal role within it. Intolerance toward cities on the part of those who adhere to an ideology of the authentic is now completely groundless. Even if one recognizes certain urban tendencies in Jews, to regard everything urban as Jewish is a sign of a persecution complex. But even if everything urban were Jewish, the fact that cities no longer stand in opposition to the state means that prejudice against the city (including its Jewish elements) itself has now become a ghost of the past.
“In fact, civilizations are the descendants of cities. … Rulers from the Hellenic period clearly appealed to the foundation of cities in order to promote the fusion between Greeks and Orientals. The height of the Roman Empire corresponds to the founding of many cities in the Empire. In contrast, Latin culture disappeared upon the withdrawal of the aristocracy to their ‘farming estates’ during the final years of the Empire.”7
Yet the events at Auschwitz happened only yesterday. No matter how industrialized or how firmly reconciled city and state appear to be, the reality of the modern state may be such that the volcano that is hatred for the city is only temporarily inactive and secretly waiting for an opportunity to explode. Of course we must not discount certain conditions particular to the rise of Nazism, as for example the serious damage sustained by Germany during World War I and the country’s relative backwardness at the time. Because of Germany’s particular circumstances then, an abstract form of prejudice against the city overwhelmed the city’s actual functioning. If the gas chambers were nothing more than the convulsions of a premature infant visited by a past nightmare about faith in the land, and if it were possible to believe that such a nightmare was the last one of this century—then I too might regard Auschwitz as an unfortunate exception and hold out some hope for the future of cities located within national borders.
In the wake of the liberalization of Czechoslovakia, the Kafka scholar and Jew Eduard Goldstücker was elected chairman of the Czech Writers’ Union. When I first heard this news, I felt cheerful and optimistic. Several years prior, in fact, I had the opportunity to meet Goldstücker and speak with him privately at the Writers’ Union in Prague. This was not a chance meeting; rather, I had specifically requested an appointment, and he kindly obliged. His manner of speaking was unusually sullen, however. Just as Kafka was lonely, so too did Goldstücker appear to be filled with misery, as if complaining of his own loneliness. Something about him seemed to suggest the fate of Kafka and indeed of all Jews in Eastern Europe. For that reason alone, I felt my heart soar at the thought that Goldstücker’s election as chairman represented both proof of Kafka rehabilitation and a true reconciliation with the Jews, that socialism had perhaps entered a new era marked by liberation from an ideology of the authentic.… But that too has ended. I have no way of knowing whether this is true or not, but I heard somewhere that Goldstücker had been removed from his post and subsequently went underground.
Sartre has written that socialist revolution is a necessary and sufficient condition for the eradication of anti-Semitism. In principle, he is no doubt correct. The Soviet Constitution clearly states that all racial discrimination is forbidden, and that both favoritism toward and discrimination against people of a specific race are punishable by law. Bernard J. Choseed of the University of Michigan has also written a paper, entitled “Jews in Soviet Literature,” in which he points to the appearance of many leading Jewish writers and analyzes the changes over time in the depiction of Jewish characters in various literary works. Here Choseed clearly shows that a gradual shift has taken place from the ethnic particularity of “‘little’ Jews” to universality as an awakened member of the Communist Party.8
Yet the gradual emergence of the “socialist hero” is in no way limited to Jewish citizens. It is part of the powerful demand in socialist realism with regard to all literary characters. Choseed’s point here is acceptable, however, for this trend is very different from depicting Jews as spies. What is problematic about the paper is that it treats only works written before 1945. In truth, my concern is with the fate of Jewish characters after World War II, in the wake of the purges begun the following year known as the Zhdanov Doctrine. As can be seen in the notion of mighty Russia, there exists in the Soviet Union a raging tide of patriotism and xenophobia, which is far removed from socialism. It seems that many Jews have come under suspicion and at times been sent off to the camps simply for having relatives abroad. I wonder what sort of treatment Jewish characters have received during the long night before the publication of Ehrenburg’s The Thaw.
However, it seems necessary to first consider the situation of Jewish writers. Precisely because writers are made of flesh and blood, they seem to feel the impact of the storm earlier. Beginning with the attack against Shostakovich in 1936 for his western tendencies, there emerged critiques of “formalism” that were soon accompanied by bloody purges and even assumed aspects of a punitive heresy trial.
One finds random shots against “cosmopolitanism,” “rootless wanderers,” “modernism,” “petit bourgeois interests,” “western corruption,” “bourgeois objectivism,” “liberalism,” “decadence,” and “nihilism.” It occurs to me that such invectives against “formalism” are identical to those used by Hitler, and this makes me uneasy. But one mustn’t be rash here. To regard Stalin and Hitler as equivalent based solely on this evidence would be no different from those neofascists in the United States who casually refer to “Nazism as a Jewish conspiracy.” Rather, we must factually examine what Stalin and Hitler each tried to attack and protect.
In the case of Hitler, it is clear that from the beginning he targeted the Jews and protected the “authentic German peasants.”
As for Stalin, let us compress these invectives into one standard image through the process of elimination. What appears, for example, is the concept of the “ethnic-nation.” This refers to the definition of socialist realism as “socialist in content and national in form.” This formulation strikes me as a bit odd, but it is the phrase used by Stalin himself. We can only assume that this is what he truly believed.
However, what would “national in form” mean in the context of prose fiction? I don’t know about folk dances or the local arts, but surely the spirit of prose first emerged from the desire to go beyond the dimension of national form and seek something freer. Fixity in form only restricts possibilities for prose. But perhaps we needn’t be so sensitive on this point. First of all, Stalin did not use this term “national” in the same, much more limited way as Hitler did. Indeed, socialist revolution also implied liberation from national form. In Russia, moreover, such set form can only be traced back to Pushkin, who has received official government recognition.
Unfortunately, however, it was precisely this notion that came to be singled out for criticism. This was completely unexpected. Who could have imagined that Pushkin would be the one to set off this explosion?
“When at last the big guns opened fire, the target in the foreground proved to be Professor Nusinov.… It was to Nusinov that the term ‘passportless wanderer in humanity’ was first applied in the postwar period. His study was declared to have derogated from Russian national individuality by constantly comparing Pushkin’s creations with abstract, cosmopolitan stereotypes. … Pushkin’s works on Western themes, moreover, held interest not for what they had in common with Shakespeare, Goethe, and Byron, but because of what was distinctive in them.”9
There would be no place for Jewish writers if the claims of Slavic superiority and uniqueness were traced back to the time before the Soviet revolution. Jews played no part in the historical formation of the Slavic people and so could not possibly understand the notion of national form. Jews were formalists simply because they were Jews. In this way, many Jewish writers would come to be criticized, silenced, and purged—Boris Pilnyak, Ilya Ehrenburg, Isaak Babel, Yuri Olesha, Osip Mandelstam, Bruno Jasieński—as well as those who were not writers—Vsevolod Meyerhold, Sergei Eisenstein, etc.
The bleakness of a long, frozen season continued until finally Stalin died, anti-Stalin critiques began, and Ehrenburg spoke of signs of a “thaw.” This bleakness was testimony to the fatal cultural effects caused by suppression of the Jews. Everyone was hurt: both victim and victimizer suffered deep wounds.
In the Soviet Union, where ethnic or national discrimination is expressly forbidden by the constitution, how was such Nazi-like insanity possible?
The average American would proudly reply, “It’s because of totalitarianism. There is something wrong with anyone who would take seriously a totalitarian constitution.”
But it seems that the situation is not so different even in the United States. American history is brief, there is a sample box of races, and the black problem is like an active volcano: under these conditions, anti-Semitism might not appear, but similar symptoms seem to exist latently that chronically develop. In their book Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator, Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman skillfully sketch out a profile of the Americanized fascist: “Nazi propaganda tried to conceal the essentially negative and reactive nature of the ‘Aryan’ by developing the notions of the biological race and the hemmed-in nation. But these notions, obviously irrelevant to American life, are of little help to the American agitator when he attempts to portray his adherent.”10
Agitation can thus begin in the following way: “When will the plain, ordinary, sincere, sheeplike people of America awaken to the fact that their common affairs are being arranged and run for them by aliens, Communists, crackpots, refugees, renegades, Socialists, termites, and traitors?”11
If the interlocutor here is a plain American, then the agitator who is addressing him must himself be an equally plain American. This plain American might appear to be quite bland, but actually “the invention of the Aryan race and the agitator’s glorification of the Simple American are symptomatic of similar efforts to strengthen social coercion.”12 This represents the standardized, abridged version of the original Nazi appeal, which contains a universal applicability that “could be used in other countries as Simple Germans, or Simple French, or Simple Britishers etc.”13
Agitators explain themselves as follows: “I do not understand political science, as an authority from an academic viewpoint. I am not familiar with the artistic masterpieces of Europe, but I do say this tonight: I know the hearts of the American people. [For I am] one of [those] plain old time, stump grubbing, liberty loving, apple cider men and women. [I am thus] an American-born citizen whose parents were American born and whose parents’ parents were American born.”14
As to the aim of this agitation: “Sooner or later the American people are going to be looking for a few flocks of scapegoats. And it’s not going to be the Irish, the Spaniards, the Egyptians, or the Hottentots who’ll be called to the accounting.”15
“Indeed, the very idea that any other group could be a scapegoat is almost comical. The agitator knows very well that he need not be more explicit.”16
Agitators have composed the following list of targets to be attacked: “the Judeo-Marxists, Anglophiles, International bankers, radio commentators, Hollywood, Anti-Defamation League, Anti-Nazi League, Friends of Democracy, Rhodes scholars, PM, Daily Worker, Chicago Sun, The New Masses, The Nation and The New Republic.”17
So different people have different customs, it seems, and “plain Americans” are extremely friendly and a bit humorous. However, it is clear that they also toss out Jews from their own self-definition as “authentic citizens” as well as from the melting pot of mixed races. This type of prejudice is no different from Hitler’s gang. Let us thus pose the question once more: what is a Jew from the standpoint of these anti-Semites?
Zhdanov would certainly raise his voice from beyond the grave to protest this term. He would say, “I was not an anti-Semite, nor did I ever engage in so-called ‘discrimination.’ In the name of my country, rather, I simply eliminated those oppositional elements that stood in the way of party unity. For those who make no distinction between communists and fascists, however, it is perhaps futile for me to now offer a defense of my actions.”
But I am fully aware that communists and fascists are different. Perhaps everything was as Zhdanov described. Having recognized this distinction between communists and fascists, however, I would like to repeat that, regardless of their difference in motives, there is one undeniable point of convergence: in both cases, it was the Jews who were driven away and chosen as sacrificial lamb. What then did it mean to be a Jew?
There can be only one answer to this question. Jews are those who could not attach themselves to the land. And those who were not bound to the land were Jews. In other words, Jews were those for whom it was inherently impossible to become “authentic citizens.” Of course it was possible for Jews to become “citizens,” but it was absolutely impossible for them to be “authentic citizens.” Only this thin film of authenticity separated the Jew from the non-Jew, but at certain moments this relationship became one of decisive opposition. It seems, moreover, that this relation is formed irrespective of any particular social system. Thus the real nature of authenticity appears to be a condition of the state as represented by the space of territory.
Authentic citizens thus appear in the form of peasants, while pseudocitizens are driven off to the cities. In reality, it is the city that is the backbone of the state; on the scale of authenticity, however, the city is merely a frontier within. The figure of the Jew, therefore, is unrelated to the Jew in any racial sense but is rather something that comes to be endlessly reproduced as the destiny of the state that contains the city enclosed within its national boundaries. Even in Japan, where there are no Jews, this Jewish question is quite real. In this regard, the Meiji Restoration can be interpreted as the seizing of the cities by provincial feudal lords. When we think of the Jewish question in this manner, we perhaps come close to identifying the space in which Kafka’s particularity comes to be universalized. It seems that this issue needs to be reconsidered in the context of Japan, where there are no Jews, from the perspective of the conflict between the city and anticity.
To repeat: the Jewish question cannot be settled simply on the basis of racial prejudice, for the roots of this disease extend deeply within contemporary society. For example, there is the fact that, without exception, anti-Semites in all nations throughout virtually all periods maintained an image of the peasants as “true citizens” while viewing city dwellers as the source of all evil. This fact alone should serve as sufficient proof that Jews cannot be a mere other (i.e., racial alien).
The socialist countries, in particular, have supposedly completely rejected and expunged racial prejudice and ethnic discrimination. While these countries of course don’t make explicit use of anti-Semitic rhetoric, one does find the hothouse idea that peasants represent true citizenship while city dwellers are marked as corrupted by the West. Given this fact, it cannot be a coincidence that so many of the so-called antirevolutionaries who suffer persecution have been Jewish citizens.
For example, Jewish representatives from Czechoslovakia who attended meetings in Moscow to discuss the Soviet invasion were stigmatized as Zionists and boycotted. And in Poland, there were signs of a campaign identifying the leaders of the student movement as Jewish, and this was used to suppress liberalization and rationalize the dispatch of troops to Czechoslovakia. Perhaps the student leaders were Jewish. If they were French or Swedish, however, it is doubtful whether they would have been denounced for their ideas and singled out by their ethnicity.
In any case, the basis for anti-Semitism is not to be found in Jewish existence itself; rather, it is symptomatic of a kind of autointoxication, for it lies hidden within the demand for legitimacy that is the notion of “authentic citizenry.” Jewish existence did not produce anti-Semitism. On the contrary, the heretical notion of the Jew appears to have been introduced as an artificial illumination of consciousness in order to highlight more clearly the contours of the notion of legitimacy. It is not that Jews existed, but rather that they were made to exist. Now there can be no question that responsibility for this inversion of cause and effect lies not in the heretical essence of heresy but rather solely in the legitimizing essence of legitimacy.
Yet why was the Jew—and only the Jew—specifically chosen as the object of heresy? If this were due merely to religious reasons, then nothing requires that discrimination against Jews be greater than that against Muslims or Buddhists. Indeed, it would have made more sense for atheists, who outnumber Jews, to be beaten. But perhaps the problem is due to Jewish statelessness. If this were the case, however, then Gypsies would be the more orthodox choice. And if there were not enough Gypsies to play the role of enemy, then citizens of other ethnic or national origins could be lumped together and victimized. A shortage of enemies is highly unlikely, particularly when one considers, for example, the case of Beckett (who is Irish) or Ionesco (Romanian), both of whom write in French and have French citizenship. For that matter, there could even be state laws banning all translated fiction. Throughout Europe, and even within royal families, members of other ethnic or national groups have often played important roles and mixed in.
Yet the heretic must always be the Jew; it can be no one but the Jew. Jews are not merely members of a different religion or ethnic group; rather, they are the chosen (or cursed) figure of heresy itself. How are we to understand this Jewish quality of incompatibility?
Certain proud Jews, and particularly Israeli Jews (this phrase might sound odd, but the notion of “authentic” Israeli already exists in this country despite the fact that it was founded merely twenty years ago. It seems that these “authentic” Jews tend to treat as somewhat “inauthentic” not only overseas (?) Jews but also those Jews who were only recently naturalized as Israeli citizens), explain this situation as follows: “Subsequently, the Jews, already dispersed before the final exile, left the centers of civilization—Alexandria, Babylon, and Rome—for the ‘backward’ countries of Europe. They were learned and clever; they felt themselves superior and set their defiance against all eventual rejection.… From the Renaissance in western Europe, and much later in eastern Europe, the Jews refused to disappear and sink into semibarbarous societies to which they felt themselves superior.”18
There are those who explain Jewish ethnic superiority on the basis of the lofty ethics, metaphysical depth, and powerful speculative tendency of Judaism. If they continue with this claim, however, they would be forced to admit that at least half the responsibility for anti-Semitism lies with the Jews themselves. Ultimately, it would not be surprising if this argument were seen as indicative of an inferiority complex borne by an inferior ethnic group vis-à-vis their superiors. In this way, the argument for Jewish superiority reveals itself to be the simple reverse of anti-Semitic thought. It is by and large a form of escapism to pull oneself down to the same level as those who practice discrimination. First of all, the very notion that a two-thousand-year tradition has any validity today is pure fantasy and comes closer to the world of myth than it does to history. I for one find it difficult to accept such logic.
I side with Sartre’s view that “the Jew is formed through the mirror of the concept of the Jew as other. This self-evident truth serves as the departure point.” For such people as Barnir, however, Sartre’s “antinational” definition appears deeply unsatisfying: “Yet how does one explain that Jews from one hundred and twenty countries in the world, spurred on by anti-Semitism, have promised themselves that they would meet in Israel and have done so for two thousand years?”19 Yet if the Jews were truly an ethnic group beholden to a two-thousand-year-old promise, then that is proof far less of their superiority than of their deplorable stagnation and conservative nature. In the course of two thousand years, many ethnic groups built nations, died out, and disappeared. Even ancient Greece, whose cultural force remains vibrant today, has been reduced to stone ruins. Why was it that only the Jews passively stood by for two thousand years while maintaining their dream of founding a nation? Or rather: how were they able to do this?
It would simply be an excuse to reply that no opportunities existed to found a nation. National borders were far more elastic and vague in the distant past than they are at present. For a long time, Europe itself was merely a region surrounded by a vast “frontier.” It is hardly the case that states were built strictly on legendary soil. Indeed, the United States created a new state without legends or traditions less than two hundred years ago, when there were neither memories nor attachments to the New World. For Jews now to go back two thousand years—during which time everything has changed, from the shapes of mountains to the position of coastlines—and speak of a mythical Palestine is, in fact, tantamount to confessing that they lack subjectivity or possess parasitical features.
Let us consider a much more familiar example. As based on the various, mixed views regarding the century that has now passed since the Meiji era, we know today that the collapse of feudalism was not entirely a spontaneous event. In other words, the present is not framed by tradition; rather, tradition is shaped by the present. If we consider what, from the diverse and complex vector of the present, will be recognized as tradition one hundred years from now, we know that the present itself has no say in this matter and that it is the exclusive concern of that future world. The past with any real binding force can at most be found three generations prior. The length of this force is perhaps proportionate to the stagnancy of the present environment.
No matter how stagnant the environment, however, it is a slight exaggeration to speak of memory going back two thousand years. If a generation equals thirty years, then that is nearly seventy generations into the past. Assuming that with each generation people lose half of what they inherit from a parent, then Jews today possess only one of the roughly three hundred ninety trillion parts of the blood of their ancestors from seventy generations back. If the equivalent of a mere drop in the ocean is sufficient to bind Jews so tightly to the spell of history, then we can only conclude that their psychic structure reveals symptoms of an excessive rigidity similar to that of coelacanths and salamanders.
But that is impossible. While the excavated remains of the past certainly appear in the form of facts, cultural tradition consists in a community’s structural patterns; it is another name for the everyday present. Tradition is precisely the patterns selected by the present, and thus the notion of a land promised two thousand years ago should rightly be seen as the crystallization of a fantasy created by the internal structure of Jews today. Such fantasy reveals, in other words, how much the Jews have suffered from their hunger for history.
In many cases, legitimacy as a citizen is measured by one’s participation in the history of state formation. The Jews, however, have been rejected from subjectively participating in anything historical that takes the form of the present progressive. They might somehow endure present misfortune if they could at least learn the identity of those rejecting them. It is undoubtedly the case that the Jews chose a notion of “ultralegitimacy” in the form of a distant promised land as a countermeasure against the notion of “legitimacy” that so threatened them. This makes sense. It is not that the Jews existed because of this promised land; rather, their self-awareness as heretics opened the path to it.
Sartre also fully opposes the idea articulated by proud “authentic Jews” that they are the chosen people: “But we have shown that the Jews have between them neither a community of interests nor a community of belief. They have no common homeland, and no history. The only tie which binds them together is the hostile contempt in which they are held by the communities surrounding them.”20
Nonetheless, my greatest concern is that this appeal to a notion of “ultralegitimacy” to counter a notion of “legitimacy” means that the Jews have in fact abandoned their contemporary significance—not in the passive sense of challenging the inequality of state evil though restoring rights to the Jewish people, as depicted by the Zionists, but rather more fundamentally in terms of their role as catalyst in hastening the reform of the very structure of contemporary society.
Insofar as the notion of “ultralegitimacy” represents a belief in legitimacy, it is essentially no different from that of “legitimacy.” At most, it is the mirror image of this latter: the same yet reversed. Even if one notion centers its belief on the concrete state while the other merely focuses on the state as an abstract idea, the shared belief in legitimacy naturally means that they will reject each other, just as the like poles of magnets are mutually repellent. There might be some hope if these proponents of legitimacy were separated by a buffer zone in the form of a national border, but unfortunately those who believe in this abstract idea of legitimacy are indifferent to the presence of such a border.
Such confrontation in the same arena not only offers an increasingly favorable excuse for anti-Semites but it also makes their incitement more effective and provides opportunities for it to filter among the people. As goes without saying, it is impossible for the general public to arrive at anti-Semitic ideas spontaneously. It is absolutely impossible for fascism to appear without the presence of agitators and their ambitious appeals to the crowd. As I have repeated several times now, Jews themselves are of course not the direct cause of anti-Semitism. Yet anti-Semitism receives its best weapon when Jews come to be infected by the feverish “myth of legitimacy” and, supported by a sense of themselves as the chosen people, begin boasting that the Jewish community remains indomitable even in the face of diaspora. “Authentic citizens” versus “pseudocitizens,” “citizens” versus “unpatriotic individuals,” “patriots” versus “traitors,” “decent, law-abiding citizens” versus “lawbreakers”: this language will gradually escalate and cover anti-Semitism in a kind of wrapping paper of sensuous images. In and of itself, anti-Semitism contains too many leaps of logic and is difficult to grasp, but the claims of Jewish legitimacy provide a rare chance for anti-Semites to convert their ideology into popular language and make it more comprehensible. This explains why the agitators’ slogans are in general nothing more than clichéd popular versions of anti-Semitism.
(My sense is that, if we give the devil his due, perhaps even Hitler might be somewhat excused. Strictly in terms of the belief in legitimacy, the relation between Nazis and Zionists is not wholly unlike that of twin brothers. Of course many Zionists abhor violence. Yet is it the case that Hitler must be judged solely for his role in ordering the events at Auschwitz? Were it not for Auschwitz, would the anti-Semitism that still smolders throughout the world today be permitted, even if only tacitly, under the name of freedom of activities to political parties? Just as war [the extremity of violence] is described as one form of politics, it seems to me that there is no great difference whether it involves group slaughter. When one considers the sadistic violence in Algeria on the part of the same French soldiers who had earlier taken part in the Nazi resistance movement, for example, or the enormous consumption of gunpowder in Asia (again) under the pretext of protecting national interests on the part of the sons of those same American soldiers who had once exchanged oaths on Elbe Day, one must conclude that only a slight difference separates politics and violence. Insofar as the state prizes its citizens’ “legitimacy” and considers its heresy trials justified from the standpoint of national sovereignty, one cannot help but suspect that it will always regard Jews as an internal enemy and seek to provide refuge for a potential Hitler, secretly waiting for a chance for him to emerge and take wing. Ultimately, the relation between Zionists and anti-Semites cannot be considered in the same terms as that between brothers in the saying “Brothers may reveal themselves to be strangers.”)
Having said this, however, I have no intention to criticize these proud Jews, the authentic Jewish people. I fully realize that I am unqualified to make such criticism, as my knowledge of the history of Jewish suffering is limited to books. I have taken up this question merely as the subject of my essay, but for Jews this topic represents real anguish, from which they can never escape. Joining the ranks of these “adherents of legitimacy” through belief in a promised land was no doubt an attempt to deal with this pain.
Yet my focus here is not on actual Jews themselves. As I mentioned previously, my sense is that the strange heresy trial that is anti-Semitism is deeply related to contradictions that lie concealed at the base of contemporary society (or in the structure of the era). In other words, I wish to examine not the Jews themselves but rather the nature of “the Jew” as well as the anxiety and resistance brought about by this figure in the heart of non-Jews.
Hence I don’t reject Israel, which was finally able to revive the “myth of legitimacy,” or those Jews outside of Israel who nevertheless consider the country as their spiritual homeland. Instead I simply would like to avoid these issues while focusing on the discussion at hand. This is not simply because the question of Israel, and particularly the Arab-Israeli conflict, is beyond my grasp; rather, the founding of the state of Israel finally transformed Jews into “authentic citizens,” and thus they are completely unrelated to what I am trying to think here under the heading of the Jew. From the standpoint of non-Jews, Israelis are simply foreigners. Even the vulgar pamphlets distributed by anti-Semites have no effect whatsoever on Israelis. In fact, American right-wing politicians are far more likely to support rather than oppose Israel. Even the Soviet Union, despite its pro-Arab stance, recognizes the state of Israel and maintains an embassy there. For Israeli Jews, the notion of Jewish poison no longer exists.
In other words, if one believes that the notion of a Jewish threat was simply propagated by neofascist agitators, then the founding of the state of Israel should have marked an end to anti-Semitism and foreclosed any and all excuses to agitate. Even if the Jews engineered some plot, the whereabouts of their base would already be known. In which case, it would be possible under international law to file an official protest against them, just as the Canadian government did against De Gaulle. Even if overseas Jews, like other foreign citizens, suffered discrimination or hardship as members of an ethnic minority, the matter could be easily settled.
In theory that would be possible, but in reality the allergy to Jews has not been eliminated. Even with the antidote of Israel, the poison that is the Jew still remains exceedingly potent.
This is not surprising. For this poison is not introduced externally by Jewish intruders; rather, it is something intrinsic that oozes from within the “myth of legitimacy” that is the notion of authentic citizenry itself. Ultimately, the allergy to Jews is nothing other than a kind of autointoxication. The poison of heresy will forever be reproduced insofar as the state seeks its authority in the “myth of legitimacy.” Jews just happen to be this poison.
Hence even in Israel today, the formation of anti-Semitism is entirely possible. Of course the term “anti-Semitism” would not be used, but there is no need to attach undue importance to names. What is necessary is the effective image of “heresy” to reinforce and confirm the citizens’ sense of “legitimacy.” Countless variations exist that correspond to the term “anti-Semitism,” from the elaborate, theoretical-sounding “cosmopolitanism” (used in opposition to the “internationalism” so cherished by Stalinists) to such simple terms as hikokumin, or “unpatriotic individuals,” that were indiscriminately used in wartime Japan. Even the very blunt expression “pseudo-Jew” would be fine if one could guarantee its effectiveness.
Regardless of whether the poison of “heresy” is found among Jews themselves or in areas where there are no Jews at all, it seems to be an unavoidable chronic disease insofar as the state functions as the state.
The Jews themselves are certainly not the poison of “heresy.” From the perspective of the products of autointoxication that is the “myth of legitimacy,” even the term Jew is essentially no different from such other stigmatic expressions for heretics as “unpatriotic individual,” “traitor,” “proforeign,” “cosmopolitan,” and “rootless wanderer.”
Yet this is not to say that these terms are all identical. The expression Jew seems to contain a unique nuance that cannot be replaced by these other words. Perhaps the difference is that the latter sound somewhat bland and less forceful, whereas Jew is much more sharply delineated and historically resonant.
This point can be understood when one considers, for example, the term “Jewish culture.” “Proforeign culture” or “culture of unpatriotic individuals” may work as critical expressions, but they don’t necessarily have any concrete meaning. Yet the term “Jewish culture” actually exists. Not only does it exist but it also occupies a distinguished position throughout contemporary culture as that culture that most sharply reflects the historical era.
If I were to list in no particular order only the most famous of Jewish intellectuals (focusing on writers), I would include the following: Irwin Shaw, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Bernard Malamud, J. D. Salinger, Arthur Miller, Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, Witold Gombrowicz, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, Franz Werfel, Sigmund Freud, Georg Simmel, Karl Löwith, Ilya Ehrenburg, Bruno Jasieński, and Boris Pasternak. And as for those who were not writers: Vsevolod Meyerhold, Sergei Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin, Karl Marx, David Riesman, and Albert Einstein, etc. What springs to mind here is the enormous range and magnitude of contemporary culture as incredibly represented by only one ethnic group (presumably).
When I think about it, most of these men are important artists who have strongly compelled my attention. But they have not simply impressed me personally; objectively speaking, it is remarkable that these men are pioneering artists who have powerfully influenced the present era.
If for example Franz Kafka never existed, contemporary literature (and particularly the standards of literary value) would be quite different. And no one can deny that Brecht and Meyerhold have shaped the course of contemporary theater. It would be virtually impossible to speak of the history of cinema without reference to Chaplin. Freud is already one of the major channels flowing beneath contemporary art. Even closer to home, contemporary English theater would be quite bleak without Pinter and Wesker.
Yet some people might question whether these artists can all be lumped together and treated as Jewish. In particular, we Japanese are ignorant of specific Jewish characteristics—this is only natural given the lack of opportunities for contact with Jews—and most of us understand, for example, Arthur Miller’s very popular play Death of a Salesman less for its strong Jewish undertones than as an instance of American tragedy in its depiction of the general split between dreams and reality.
But actually I don’t have any problem with that. The point is that Japanese people have no trouble sympathizing with Miller’s work in terms of their own concerns, and there is absolutely no need for them to determine whether he is Jewish or not. However, Americans view the reality of that miserable salesman as something that is typically Jewish. But I wonder if these Americans would not hesitate when asked whether Miller should be referred to as an American writer or Jewish writer. This is a poor example, but in comparing Miller and Brecht the question arises of whether to focus on their difference (American writer vs. German writer) or commonality (both as Jewish). Of course the standard of their works’ value is determined by the context in which it is placed, and this question cannot be resolved simply by choosing either their difference or commonality. I think it is best to strike a balance between these two views.
My point here is that even for westerners, who have a highly developed understanding of Jews, the works are singular but nevertheless carry an ability to appeal as based on universal themes and are widely accepted, as they are with Japanese as well. This does not seem to be a reluctant kind of reception, as if to say that even Jewish writers won’t necessarily be rejected if they have talent. I know certain influential American editors who are quite insistent on this point. They claim that Jewish writers are the most vigorous and promising (in terms of both literary merit and book sales) in America today, and that they, together with South American and black writers, dominate contemporary American literature. This comment was slightly worrying to me, and I later sought confirmation with other foreign writers and editors only to discover that few disagreed with it. Some stated that the static quality of German literature was due precisely to the decrease in Jews, while others suspected that this problem went beyond Jews and signified more generally the contemporaneity of émigré writers. In any case, the advance of the Jew seems to be decisive, at least in terms of the field of art.
Yet it is hardly surprising that oppositional views have emerged, claiming that the lack of any firm ground on which to stand for these wandering Jews has resulted in their talent for producing merely clever, superficial art, one that finds easy acceptance by the average masses. In other words, they believe that the advance of Jewish writers can be attributed to the deceit rather than truth of their work.
In fact, however, Jews have written increasingly like Jews. They have increasingly set forth their own Jewish sensibility in no less a manner than blacks have written like blacks. Thus we might say that Jews have attained universality not despite but rather precisely because of their own Jewish particularity.
Yet it would be a problem if Jewish particularity were too quickly swallowed up within such universality. What is at issue here is utterly different from the notion of particularist superiority (i.e., the myth of legitimacy) found, for example, in the claim that what is most Japanese can also be understood by foreigners. As I have already mentioned, what enabled Tolstoy to appeal to the soul of all mankind while writing from the heart of a Russian was the presence of the shared motif of the peasant, as found in all “orthodoxies.” This might appear to be similar to the universality attained by Kafka through writing from the heart of a Jew, but in fact it is completely different.
The Jew is not the Israeli. While it is possible for the Israeli to write of the history and glory of two thousand years of suffering, joining the ranks of those who believe in legitimacy, what remains for the Jewish writer who is refused all participation in history is to write of today, the eternal present. Yet how was Jewish literature able to attain such universality?
Perhaps the poison of “heresy” is cherished precisely because it is poison. Indeed, an interest in toxicants seems to be a general trend of the present. As industrial society becomes more complex, it creates an impression of chaos while also developing organizational technologies, thereby inciting anxiety in people who feel as if trapped in a maze from which there is no escape. This anxiety causes people to work hard in the hope of good fortune, but it also fosters a cynical contempt for hard work. It is hardly surprising that this sense of disjuncture creates a desire for toxicants, from morphine, heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD, and Hyminal to such bleak and prosaic poisons as paint thinner.
As a phenomenon, there clearly seems to be an interest in toxicants. Certain Jewish writers (e.g., Norman Mailer) intentionally provoke readers by advertising their effects. However, a substantial difference exists between such toxicants and the poison of “heresy.” The heaven glimpsed through LSD and paint thinner is a world of madness that exists in relation to sanity, but the world glimpsed through the poison of “heresy” represents the hell of awakening. Regardless of whether or not it is flagrantly labeled as toxic, Jew means “heresy” and “heresy” means poison. Besides, who would indulge in such a substance that offers only a bleak awakening with no promise of intoxication?
What then is the universality found in the work of Jewish writers? Perhaps this secret lies hidden within the very notion of “legitimacy” itself. The notion of “heresy” was originally created for the self-validation of “legitimacy”; it is a sacrificial lamb devoted to an oath of allegiance to “legitimacy.” Thus we can more or less guess the identity of this universality by uncovering the “heresy” that lies concealed within “legitimacy” itself. Since it is the state that tests whether something is “legitimate” or “heretical,” one must first inquire into the meaning of “legitimacy” as seen from the state’s perspective.
It is actually quite strange that “legitimacy” for the state—regardless of political system—is depicted in terms of middle-scale farmers. Why is it that, even in the advanced industrial countries whose sole economic basis is heavy industry, the image of authentic citizen still remains that of the good farmer? In this era where the earth’s surface is divided everywhere by national borders, competition between states creates compromise in the form of international agreements, and the temporary cease-fire known as peace barely passes as justice, it is understandable why states demand unity and loyalty from their citizens. But it is utterly unnatural that such unity and loyalty be identified with the peasantry. Putting aside the question of those semicolonial, underdeveloped nations that are forced by other countries to provide raw materials, industrialization has become necessary for all states. In the advanced industrial nations, in particular, industrialization is accelerating at a geometric pace, and an actual program exists that involves a population influx into cities, the explosive growth of cities, and indeed the urbanization of the nation as a whole. Knowing that ultimately this situation results in the branding of cities as “heretical,” what does the state have to gain by granting peasants the license of “legitimacy”?
I won’t touch on this point in detail since it is not my intent here to provide a theory of the city. However, cities can be characterized by their compressed spatial density. This urban concentration leads to a relative increase in migration efficiency and a diversification in human relations at the same time that it results in growing anonymity. Compared to the fixity of rural life, the lives of those who live in cities assume, to a surprising degree, many of the features of migrant ethnic groups.
It is clear that the state does not approve of this mobility of urban life. For the descendant of the fixed state, which after its long struggle with the frontier has finally succeeded in stabilizing agriculture, it must be horrible to realize that it must now use the cities defined by migration efficiency as its own standard.
Apart from true city folk, who have no particular attachment to fixity, the vast numbers of newcomers to the city who have not yet fully broken with fixed habits also enjoy the city’s convenience while at the same time experiencing the anxiety of the temporary resident. In its hatred for the city, the state takes advantage of this anxiety and assiduously fertilizes the unrealistic notion of legitimacy that is “faith in the land.” Of course the state does not actually encourage a return to agrarian society. Rather, it continues to maintain the functions of the city while nevertheless encouraging people to construct an illusory community of “legitimacy.”
Just as the state once fought against the “heresy” of the frontier and vigorously protected its national boundaries, so too must it now begin the struggle to safeguard the notion of legitimacy against the “heresy” of the frontier within (i.e., migrant society). Heretics might be identified as “unpatriotic individuals,” “proforeign,” “destroyers of order,” “foreign agents,” “reds,” “the Zengakuren student association,” etc. If the state is lucky enough to have Jewish citizens—“those congenital city folk”—play this role, then they will of course quickly become known as “dangerous kikes who ignore national interests.”
Illusions are only illusions, however. In the context of this increasing urbanization, any futile repetition of the notion of “faith in the land” can only broaden the sense of emptiness and lack even among those avowed citizens of legitimacy. The fact that Jewish and émigré writers have now begun to exhibit an irrefutably global influence also signals the beginning of the end to the state’s pretext of “belief in legitimacy.” Just as the foreign invasion of migrant ethnic groups once destroyed the spatial identity of the agrarian state, introducing a sense of contemporaneity beyond national borders and providing a new opportunity to leap beyond the stagnation that accompanies fixity, so too might troops intent on destroying national borders now appear from the internal frontier of cities. The state ideology that recognized “legitimacy” in the particularity of farming villages might then be replaced by frontier troops who recognize “legitimacy” in the contemporaneity of cities.
I believe that the first sign of this battle in the field of literature appeared quite early, at the beginning of this century. With Tolstoy’s death in 1910, literature based on faith in the land began to decline and was replaced by Kafka, Proust, and Joyce waving the flag of “heresy.” But even I am not so naïve as to think that this shift signaled the death of the state. At most, literature can only hasten the onset of the state’s autointoxication, but this is better than standing by and doing nothing. Is it not the duty of writers who are conscious of contemporaneity to, at the very least, reject all “beliefs in legitimacy” and attempt an internal defection to the frontier within?
The “festival” celebrating the land is over, but the new plaza is still dark. Che Guevara, who went beyond national borders, is dead, and the Vietnamese who lost their national borders are being burned by the war. But it is too early to despair. The plazas of the city might be dark, but the national borders are darker still. Those who cross borders are in need of something more than light.