Albert Cohen: Dissonant Voices (review)

Despite the popularity of Cohen's work among readers and the critical acclaim it has garnered, Cohen has received relatively little attention from the academy on both sides of the Atlantic. In this first scholarly book to be published in English on Cohen, Abecassis explores Cohen's fictional and autobiographical works from the vantage point of 'dissonance', in other words, the ambivalent representations of Jewish identity manifest in Cohen's texts. Arguing that Cohen continuously reworks the 'catastrophe of being a Jew' by combining 'the affirmation of Judaism in the abstract and its negation in the concrete' (p. 209), Abecassis rightly highlights scholars' tendency to categorize Cohen unproblematically either as a Jewish writer or a member of the French canon and thus to ignore the troubled and at times anti-Semitic ambivalence that makes Cohen's writing so unique. In the first chapter, Abecassis grounds his study of Cohen's attraction/repulsion towards Jews in the 'double bar mitzvah' represented by Gamaliel's speech in Solal and by the young Cohen's traumatic experience with an anti-Semitic street-hawker on his tenth birthday (Ô vous, frères humains). The former reflects Jewish estrangement from the world, noble as long as it remains abstract; the latter this estrangement as experienced by a boy enamoured of the French republican ideal who realizes the 'catastrophe of being Jewish'. In Chapter 2, Abecassis explores various biblical subtexts for Solal's story (Sarai, Joseph, Esther) and relates these to Marranism, which he sees as 'an existential condition . . . integral to the logic of exilic Judaism' (p. 37). The religious, mythical and autobiographical resonances brought out in these chapters shed new light on Cohen's use of myth and intertext. Abecassis takes here an 'either/or' perspective whereby Jewish subtexts are seen to exclude the presence of Western myths (Don Juan, Tristan and Isolde) already noted by scholars, or whereby Cohen must operate on a mode of either full inclusion in or full exclusion from the French canon. I believe rather that Cohen's specificity lies precisely in his provocative combination of Western and Jewish myths, and in his masterful integration of the French canon into his work.

Chapters 3-5 offer insightful readings of key episodes such as the Jewish underground in Solal's Saint-Germain château and the Berlin underground in Belle dú Seigneur. Particularly welcome is Chapter 4's analysis of Le Livre de ma mère, which acknowledges the painful ambivalence at the heart of this book of 'fine sentiments'. (Again, Abecassis's either/or analysis — the book must be either morbid or fine — would benefit from the admission of a more complex both/and perspective.) Chapter 6 argues convincingly for reading Belle du Seigneur's Ariane and Solal as 'a single identity montage' (p. 177). The epilogue presents Ézéchiel as exemplary of Abecassis's hypothesis of Cohenian dissonance, and explains persuasively the uneasy reaction this dissonance has provoked in the academy, in particular in France. It is in these later chapters, when Abecassis turns his considerable talents as a reader to a wholehearted engagement with Cohen's texts, that this study is at its best: original, passionate and often brilliantly perceptive. While I regret the sometimes uncritically psychoanalytical aspects of the analysis, Dissonant Voices represents a solid, well-researched first monograph in American Cohen studies.