EXILED


        The exile from Jerusalem was anti-Edenic, the horizontal version of the original Fall from heaven (preceding the earthly one in Eden) but backward in space/time, toward the original (obscurely intuited), negative pole of sacred/natural life, which we reach fully only in death.
                By the waters of Babylon
                I lay down and wept.
                If I forget thee, Zion…
        That was spiritual death—and musical promise.
        The mysterious problem of evil versus the exquisite beauty of faith unfathomably arising there is memorably expressed in these lines—the fountainhead of our finest Western cultural expressions.
        Abraham, Joseph, David, Jesus, and the archetypal theme of Edenic Jerusalem lost and yearned-for, especially in the male mind, are (or were) remembered in this tradition, yes, but, as in the medieval dream of the maiden in the city to be rescued by knightly quest—or Perceval’s left-behind, dying mother—the Mother and Jerusalem coalesce sacredly/naturally: she is Jerusalem, as in Goethe, Proust, Joyce, Camus, or “Holy Mother Russia” and the cult of the Virgin.  
        In her, birth occurs, rebirth at the cost of infinite pain.  The old mystery of life/death, and love/death, suicidal love-pangs, goes on.  Whence “ambivalence,” as in Mallarmé’s “the Mother who thinks and conceives us…free to renounce us” (“Catholicism”) or the death of flowers in “Les Fleurs,” the “beauty …death” of Hérodiade.  But the deep doubt ends in faith like his:  the “yes” in “Quand l’ombre” and “Toast funèbre” and the glimpsed north-star at the end of his masterwork, Un Coup de Dés, echoed by the “yes” of Molly Bloom at the close of James Joyce’s Ulysses (which began with the unsurpassable “love of the mother”).
        A major aspect of the stubborn paradox of theodicy—the problem of evil—is that the Jews who gave us our faith (ethical monotheism) are both admired and hated for it, again today, a revenant, crucial test of faith.  That is the true nature of anti-Semitism.
        It even, unsurprisingly au fond, got fleetingly into Mallarmé and Joyce and everybody else: Mallarmé, in his superb lecture on Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, was momentarily contaminated by the latter’s traditional Jew-hatred, mocking a Jewish man who tried to fight the dangerous anti-Semitic tsunami in late nineteenth-century France (and the world) by offering to pay Villiers for journalistic help in the struggle (like Zola’s).  Like Villiers, Mallarmé thought of Judas Iscariot and the thirty gold coins.
        But Mallarmé’s “dream of perfect beauty” was the Jewish princess, Hérodiade (biblical Salomé) influenced by Heinrich Heine’s Atta Troll; his spiritual “knight” was Jewish Saint John the Baptist, pointing to Jewish Jesus.  He admired the Solomonic sage depicted by Odilon Redon.  The “Eden” he said (to a friend) “we can’t do without” is Hebraic.    
        This contradiction is constant.  Dante’s Divine Comedy worships the Jewish Virgin Mary (and, nearby, Beatrice), as Goethe’s Faust does; but Dante’s neo-Aristotelian “choplogic” put Abraham and Moses in hell (limbo), along with babies born before Christ, and even the Virgin gets jostled in the wooden process and is clumsily excluded from the gentile, country-club inner circle of heaven!  Saint Bernard himself (who outranks Mary in Dante) was appalled at this.
        How is it, one wonders, that Rachel, the dying mother wept-for in loving memory by tender, forgiving Joseph in Egypt—Goethe, Mann, even the Arabs honored him exceedingly—becomes the “Rachel tearing at grapes with murderous paws” in T. S. Eliot?
        Mediterranean Albert Camus, after the Holocaust, remembered her as “weeping in the night for her dead children, refusing to be consoled,” thinking of the genocide of the Dutch Jews in Amsterdam (including Anne Frank) of his wonderful The Fall.  He worshipped his own mother and, unlike Sartre, the traditional beauty murdered in secular modernity.  
        The ambivalence is widest in Catholic, occasionally anti-Semitic, Baudelaire; in “As mistress I have no illustrious lioness,” he movingly describes his fervent love for a wretched Jewish woman, forced into prostitution by cold and hunger, prematurely blemished by harsh life.  His petite vieilles encountered in Paris—“ruins, my family!” is his cri de cœur—are exquisitely Judeo-Christian, bittersweet, and make us weep as gentle, merciful Jesus’ “Neither do I condemn thee,” said to the adulteress, can do to some still.
        T. S. Eliot too had “another side,” obviously: he courted cosmically-breezy Groucho Marx.  A comparably touchy issue is raised by Jerusalem versus Athens, as in Matthew Arnold et al.  
Mallarmé, in a letter to a friend, contrasts pagan Venus with the Mona Lisa, “bitten” by faith.  In his “The Afternoon of a Faun,” Greek Venus is the supreme object of desire, along with the nymphs, but the faun is complexly French, “bitten” by sacred conscience, inhibited.  Mallarmé’s ideal woman is closer to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, the Virgin and Saint Anne, Botticelli’s ethereal/earthy figures (Botticelli was finally anti-humanist).  The wistful portrait of his future wife, or Ettie Yapp, is not pagan anymore than Yvonne de Galais in Le Grand Meaulnes, the lady with a dog in Chekhov’s elegiac story (and the sensitive film of it).
        Europeans like Chateaubriand came to America seeking, secretly, spirally, lost Jerusalem.  In Attala he admired the native women but through his Judeo-Christian eyes: the theme of mother-milk (as in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, “the milk of paradise,” Mallarmé’s key theme) is obviously Edenic, not pagan.  He returned, toward the East.
        Mallarmé loved nature above all, according to his cherished daughter.  But it was French nature, not the Grand Canyon—“bitten” into sublimely refined sensuality, like the adorable Virgin or of the Cathedral statues, with the tenderness of the “Childhood of the Virgin” illustrated medieval manuscripts (or the Psalteries).  Even the male King was so graced:  in the stained-glass windows of the Sainte Chapelle, Saint Louis had himself portrayed as prolonging a line of Hebrew kings.  Charlemagne, even a King of Cards, had that inner chane (Jewish for sense of beauty).
        The 13th-century sculptured row of Kings flanking an entrance to Chartres had an inner gravitas unprecedented in pagan culture according to Kenneth Clark; or in the reptilian dapper of suave snake revenant in neo-pagan fascist modernity.
        That chane magnetized Shakespeare too: his dark mistress was, probably, a Venetian Jewess, reflected in lovely, tender, merciful Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, offsetting Shylock (who was also subtly redeemed in a touching monologue and Laurence Olivier’s sympathetic shriek of pain).  The old, soul-tearing puzzler…
        Walter Scott’s mysterious, healing Rebecca; Dickens’ “our mutual friend” (offsetting Fagin); George Eliot’s Mordecai, Mirah, and Daniel in Daniel Deronda: Joyce’s Bloom and Shem; Mann’s Joseph (after Goethe’s lost epic), Proust’s Swann (and Jewish mother, sorrowing for his sin, in a portrait described in Contre Sainte-Beuve).
        Julia Kristeva wondered, in an article on Mallarmé and Nietzsche, whether all that was over.  Will our exile go on?  “That is the question…”