Transgression and Self-Punishment in Isaac Bashevis Singer's Searches (review)

102 SHOFAR Summer 1997 Vol. 15, No.4 they used the Orient as an imaginative space to explore and come to terms with .their own position as Jews in German and Austrian society: Jennifer E. Michaels Department ofGerman Grinnell College Transgression and Self-Punishment in Isaac Bashevis Singer's Searches, by Frances Vargas Gibbons. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. 157 pp. $41.95. Vargas Gibbons's book is a vigorous defense of Singer as a champion of the imagination, a magician ofnarrative who, in his adherence to the pleasure principle and in his attempts at self-creation through literature, resists the expectations and conventions of society. The title might cause contemporaryliterary scholars to expect a reading ofthe Yiddish author which uses paradigmsdrawn from currently fashionable French theorists such as Foucault, Deleuze, and Bataille. Actually, the theoretical model used throughout the book is a straightforward Freudian one; applied with single-minded thoroughness. Biographically grounded speculation as to Singer's conflicted relationships with his parents, his talented siblings, and his religious heritage is used by Vargas Gibbons as a key to understanding both Singer's fiction and life. "Transgression " refers to Singer's use of fiction to establish an identity independent of the strictures of his religious background and the burdens of his complicated familial relationships. The punishment denotes .the ambivalence inherent in such a project, the way Singer's characters seek to repent for their extreme attempts at independence, and the way such penance is occasionally exacted from the prose itself, at some aesthetic cost. Overall, the critical stance is once ofunabashed appreciation: Singer's novels, we are told, "will promote and enhance.the enlightened and aesthetic communication between groups and between ages which is essential for the happy survival of humanity" (p. 129). The critic clearly identifies with her subject, and remarks early upon the similarity she senses between the milieu of the young Singer and her own country of origin, Venezuela, in which reality is, she says, also built largely "out of words" (p. 2). Most worthwhile in Vargas Gibbons's critical project is the way in which Singer's novels are illuminated by his literature for children. Since she views the entire corpus and life of Singer as an organic whole, as a single narrative about the attempts of an individual to achieve freedom from biological, social, and theological limitations, Vargas Gibbons is able, iil her psychoanalyzing of this whole, to link Singer's children's stories quite convincingly to the adult literature as an indication of the forms Book Reviews 103 Singer's desire for a pre~social, ideal, and childlike existence might take, imaginatively speaking. The heroes in children's tales such as "The Milk of a Lioness" are able to resolve the Oedipal and societal conflicts of their author in ways that increase our understanding of the psychological stakes involved in novels, such as The Slave, in which similar resolutions arestymied. Such insight is nomean gain. Vargas Gibbons's readings are also a pronounced departure from the critical consensus which tempers admiration for Singer's novels with distaste for their frequent misogyny and infantilism. In Si,nger, Vargas Gibbons sees a romantic quester after autonomy, and understands the attitudes towards women in his fiction as a necessary; ifoccasionally deplorable, component ofSinger's psychic project. Singer mustrecreate himselfnot only independently'ofa religious milieu that would prohibitboth his fiction and his skepticism, but also independently ofthe social and familial demands which ask the artist to deny his creative sovereignty and take on the responsibilities of lover, husband, father. Women are therefore representative of ·forces which deny the imagination, and Vargas Gibbons's readings ofEnemies and Shosha emerge antithetical to more measured feminist readings ofthe works. It would be hard to fmd a cntic more sympathetic to Herman Broder. The book's chief limitation consists in its sometimes awkward language and exposition, perhaps the traces of a dissertation's timidity. (Transgression and Self-Punishment emerged from Vargas Gibbons's doctoral thesis.) Generalizations are at times argued with an almost mathematical fastidiousness, and commonsensical notions supported with unnecessary and bizarrely chosen quotations. At one point the author cites an article on the critical reception of sci-fi films by...