Performance Anxieties: Carnival Spaces and Assemblages in Der Nister's "Under a Fence"

MARC CAPLAN Performance Anxieties: Carnival Spaces and Assemblages in Der Nister's "Under a Fence" IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT TO CONCEIVE of a compliment that would have been more deeply appreciated by the author Der Nister ("the Hidden One," Pinkhes Kahanovitsh, 1884-1950) than to say that his stories resist conventional modes of interpretation. They are impenetrable and private narratives written by an elitist for an elite audience; they are at odds completely with the popular conception of what Yiddish fiction should express, and how it should convey meaning. As David Roskies has written, "Unlike previous Yiddish writers who tried to pass themselves off as preachers, pietists, or folk philosophers, Der Nister donned the cloak of Jewish mystic, high priest, or prophet, the better to explore the universal reaches of creation, revelation, and redemption. He delighted, moreover, in mixing poetry and prose, cosmology and folklore, and made religious syncretism into the gospel of a new idealistic religion."1 The complexity of these stories' heterogeneous symbol-systems further intensifies when the reader considers the author's artistic development as a whole. Examining the progression from a serious and mystical saga such as "A Bove-mayse, or a Tale of Kings" (1920) to the grotesque and nihilistic burlesque "Under a Fence: A Revue" (1929), the reader confronts an unstable literary landscape, an aesthetic hell-bent on dismantling itself. It is, of course, possible to offer interpretations of individual stories and their arrangement of symbols through psychological, political, or religious vocabularies. Such readings are unsatisfying, however, because the isolation of one mode of discourse or metaphor imposes an arbitrary PROOFTEXTS 18 (1998): 1-18 ß 1998 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 2 MARC CAPLAN hierarchy ofmeaning on a narrative style that achieves its effects precisely through the interplay, accretion, and overdetermination of symbols. As Delphine Bechtel has argued, with specific reference to the author's later stories, "No longer does Der Nister organize his stories around a central ideational referent, neither God, nor truth, nor any set of traditional values. The vertical structure of meaning so essential to symbolism has been replaced by horizontality, . . . idealistic values [have been replaced] by the domination of innate drives, symbolized by chaos and the underworld ."2 In fact, this resistance to a "central ideational referent" is characteristic of Der Nister's symbolist work in its entirety, as the diversity of his religious, cultural, and literary allusions makes clear. Stated more generally, allegorical readings of literature can be persuasive only when both author and audience share an understanding of what symbols mean and where they derive their value and authority from; allegory is a proper interpretive strategy for authors invested in a coherent and organic belief system—for Saint Augustine, Dante, Flannery O'Connor— but sheds little light on the work of more ambivalent and idiosyncratic writers such as Der Nister. How, then, can a story such as "Under a Fence"—a surrealist satire loosely inspired by Heinrich Mann's Professor Unrat, also the inspiration for the classic German film The Blue Angel (Roskies, 225)— best be read? How can the critical reader employ the motto that James Weldon Johnson attributed to a preacher of the gospel: "I intend to explain the unexplainable—find out the undefinable—ponder over the imponderable—and unscrew the inscrutable"?3 The key to Der Nister's work is found not in the one-to-one correspondence of symbols to references, but in the momentum generated by the narrative process itself. The best means of understanding its literary strategies is to examine , simultaneously, the distance this late story has traveled from the author's earlier aesthetic, as well as the social function its devices and modes of discourse have served for other writers; opening Der Nister's work up to such a historical, generic investigation demystifies his insular and hermetic imagery by contextualizing the story within the larger body of his fiction, and by returning his work as a whole to an artistic community, a tradition. This tradition can be identified through a consideration of the author's discourse. Just as the story "From My Estates" (1928) employs a rhetoric of cannibalism—the story describes a protagonist who buys a book by Der...