By this phase in his career Howells has succeeded in bringing to full con-sciousness the two of contemporary American life and the way a frame of perception learned through one of these culturally organized experiences can be used to master the other. This process is exposed most fully in Howells's description of Basil March's mental process as he rides the new New York mass transit system toward Lindau's home on the Lower East Side:
He went over to Third Avenue and took the elevated down to Chatham Square. He found the variety of people on the car as unfailingly entertaining as ever. He rather preferred the East Side to the West Side lines, because they offered more nationalities, conditions, and characters for his inspection. They drew not only from the uptown American region, but from all the vast hive of populations swarming between them and the East River. He had found that, according to the hour, American husbands going to and from business, and American wives going to and from shopping, prevailed on the Sixth Avenue road, and that the most picturesque admixture to these familiar aspects of human nature were the brilliant eyes and complexions of the American Hebrews, who otherwise contributed to the effect of well-clad comfort and citizen self-satisfaction of the crowd. Now and then he had found himself in a car mostly filled with Neapolitans from the constructions far up the line, where he had read that they are worked and housed like beasts; and listening to the jargon of their unintelligible dialect, he had occasion for pensive question within himself as to what notion these poor animals formed of a free republic from their experience of life under its conditions; and whether they found them practically very different from those of the immemorial brigandage and enforced complicity with rapine under which they had been born. But, after all, this was an infrequent effect, however massive, of travel on the West Side, whereas the East Side offered him continual entertainment in like sort. The sort was never quite so squalid. For short distances the lowest poverty, the hardest pressed labor must walk; but March never entered a car without encountering some interesting shape of shabby adversity, which was almost always adversity of foreign birth. New York is still popularly supposed to be in control of the Irish, but March noticed in these East Side travels of his what must strike every observer returning to the city after a prolonged absence: the numerical subordination of the dominant race. If they do not outvote them, the people of Germanic, of Slavonic, of Pelasgic, of Mongolian stock outnumber the prepotent Celts; and March seldom found his speculation centered upon one of these. The small eyes, the high cheeks, the broad noses, the puff lips, the bare, cue-filleted skulls, of Russians, Poles, Czechs, Chinese; the furtive glitter of Italians; the blond dullness of Germans; the cold quiet of Scandinavians--fire under ice--were aspects that he identified and that gave him abundant suggestion for the personal histories he constructed, and for the public-spirited reveries in which he dealt with the future of our heterogeneous commonwealth. It must be owned that he did not take much trouble about this: what these poor people were thinking, hoping, fearing, enjoying, suffering; just where and how they lived; who and what they individually were. These were the matter of his waking dreams as he stared hard at them, while the train raced further into the gay ugliness--the shapeless, graceless, reckless picturesqueness of the Bowery. (HNF, 158-59)
The New York of this passage is one that Howells was one of the first to register, the polyglot or radically multicultural New York produced by the new immigration of the late 1880s, and Howells's street Italians have changed accordingly from solitary strolling musicians or fruit vendors to a mass of manual laborers (Neapolitan construction workers) partly differentiated from, yet partly also amalgamated with, a yet larger mass of sheer foreignness. Basil March's way of confronting this world embodies a new way of deploying a long-acquired cultural equipment. He sees this scene through a habit of perception rooted in the practice of tourism: he conceives what surrounds him as scenery or visual tableau, makes the world a "sight" he can stand outside of and subject to his connoisseurial appreciative powers. Jews, thus, become a kind of pigment producing an unusual and interesting "effect" for March, and immigrant poverty a tasty visual treat--an "interesting shape of shabby adversity." (Note how the rough-and-ready visual identifiers of different ethnicities--high cheeks, furtive glitters--take on the pleasurable strangeness of ethnic cuisines for the eye.) But March does not just aestheticize the scene in a static way. Rather--and I take this to be Howells's really brilliant achievement in the passage--March in effect constructs the scene as a visual display he can mentally adjust the resolution of, a screen on which--while being sure that he will have no real relation to the strangers he sees--he can now humanize them a little, now return them to an anonymous mass; now enter a little into their real, individual experiences, now blur them out again. Southern Italians...construction workers; workers whose labor is building the very apparatus I am travelling on.... These people are indecently housed, the newspapers report!...What could their life be like, how could America look through their eyes? it occurs to March to wonder, but the thought just as quickly fades from his mind. Then it comes up again: Small eyes? Must be a Russian. High cheeks? Must be a Pole.... What could the inner lives be like of the people with these visual exteriors? March asks this question, but does not wait for an answer.
The habit of mind Basil March plays over his doorstep acquaintances--now the much more anonymous and disindividuated mob of mass transit--receives an unprecedentedly harsh censure in A Hazard of New Fortunes. "It must be owned that he did not take much trouble about this: what these poor people were thinking, hoping, fearing, enjoying, suffering; just where and how they lived; who and what they individually were," the suddenly stern narrator says in judgment of March's reveries. When the Marches visit Castle Garden (predecessor of Ellis Island) to watch new immigrants being processed, this bite enters Howells's voice again: "It warmed their hearts, so easily moved to any cheap sympathy" (HNF, 263). Yet if the book treats this mental process as reprehensibly self-serving, self-congratulatory, and self-centered, it simultaneously registers it not as a moral deficiency but as a social reality: something urban contemporaries will know, a historically new way of having experience. This, I take it, is where the matter of Italy eventuates in Howells's work--not in a literary realism of Italian immigrant experience ("who and what they individually were" finally occupies Howells as little as it occupies March); and not only in the satire of upper-class cosmopolitan aestheticism as a way to master the foreign in our midst; but in the study of this realizing yet derealizing, outward-reaching yet mentally self-enclosing way of having relations with strangers in transit in anonymous public spaces--a modern mode of community that arises, Howells suggests, when the touristic-aesthetic mindset and foreign immigration come into sufficiently close cultural conjunction.
Henry James could be presented as an even more advanced critic of a class-based contemporary "practice" of Italy. Gilbert Osmund, the suave expatriate of The Portrait of a Lady, is James's version of the cultural type Howells red in Corey, and Berenson in himself: the professional amateur, the one who has brushed aside chances for worldly success to become a connoisseur of aesthetic effects. (Osmund says of Italy, "There were advantages in living in the country which contained the greatest sum of beauty. Certain impressions you could get only there. Others, favorable to life, you never got, and you got some that were very bad. But from time to time you got one of a quality that made up for everything.") 15 James's point is that Osmund's pose of disinterested connois-seurship is his tool for projecting a social superiority that he cares for after all, and this baring of a status-seeking dimension to Italophile aestheticism makes for powerful satire. But it would be wrong to infer that James himself is simply detached from the res of Italy in circulation in his world. A larger survey would suggest that he is deeply invested in the culturally constructed Italys of his time in their most orthodox forms--and that, like Howells, James moves toward the greater complications of his later, more evidently "modern" outlooks not by transcending such cultural frames but by working his way forward through them in a changing social terrain.
In what became virtually a mandatory first step in the American literary Künstlerlaufbahn of the Gilded Age, the equivalent of a later generation's stay in Paris, James too made a long sojourn in Italy in his twenties, in 1869-70 and 1872-73. The difference of this eventual expatriate and echt cosmopolitan's experience from Howells's can be said to be that he responded to Italy more ardently. More accurately, we could say that he induced in himself a more ardent realization of the idea of "Italy" then being normalized in American high culture. James unlike Howells came to Italy en touriste, saw the Italy laid out by the touristic-aesthetic itinerary (he had his Ruskin in one hand and his Murray in the other), and had the reactions and "experiences" prescribed by this map. Arriving in Rome in 1869, James registers the responses of the Tourist Ecstatic or what might be called the High Achiever in the touristic mode: "At last--for the first time--I live!...I went reeling and moaning thro' the streets in a fever of enjoyment." 16 There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of this hyperbolic account, but even James is occasionally aware, amidst his gaping and moaning, that he is having an intensely personal version of an experience that has been culturally framed. In an 1870 letter to Charles Eliot Norton, his early patron and the chief American exponent of the high-cultural conception of Europe and the aesthetic, James makes clear that the Italy he is learning about derives its shape and value from a Norton-affiliated American conception: "I find myself tending more and more to become interested in the things for which you have said so much--art and the history of art and multifarious Italian matters" (L, 262). That James--like the young Howells--also used his Italian initiations to improve his American cultural position goes without saying. In the letter to this editor and cultural arbiter he admires "Our friend Tintoret" (L, 260): our shared love of Italian painters, he tells Norton, creates a bond between you and me.
I have argued elsewhere that in his highly elaborate construction of his authorial career, James laid the foundations for the artistic identity he erected by taking in, and taking yet more seriously, a number of the creedal notions of con-temporary high culture: the idea of value-graded aesthetic hierarchy, the idea of the Master, the idea of the classic, and so on. 17 Here it could be added that James made Italy, taken at its official estimate as Home of Art or terrestrial Seat of the Beautiful, into another career-supporting article of personal faith. Already in his 1872 review of Howells's Italian Journeys James has enlisted in the church mili-tant of the contemporary religion of Italy:
We go to Italy to gaze upon certain of the highest achievements of human power,--achievements, moreover, which from their visible and tangible nature, are particularly well adapted to represent to the imagination the maximum of man's creative force. So wide is the interval between the great Italian monuments and the works of the colder genius of neighboring nations, that we find ourselves willing to look upon the former as the ideal and perfection of human effort, and to invest the country of their birth with a sort of half-sacred character. 18
The Italy of late nineteenth-century American high culture receives what may be its single most eloquent definition in this passage, where it is made to embody the height of human creativity or what might be called the cultural sublime.
When James put his Italian travel essays together into the volume Italian Hours in 1909 he wrote a late, self-revisionary update to an 1873 piece he had done on Siena that gives an idea of the continuing authority of this conception of Italy in his career. Writing in implicit criticism of an "earlier poor judgment" now discerned to have "fallen short," James notably fails to criticize the most obvious omissions of the earlier piece. Operating within the coordinates of the touristic-aesthetic conception, James had written of Siena as if Italy were its classical past, a "sweetly-stale grain from the wondrous mill of history," not a still living society with a history still forming in the present. He had also written as if Siena were a set of sights to "look well" at, not a social world of living people. (James's main human contact in 1873--what better proof of the touristic nature of his involvement?--is a waiter he chats up.) But these are not the deficiencies he identifies in 1909. Instead the inadequacies he measures are ones marked as lacks within the touristic-aesthetic conception itself: he did not on his first visit attend the Palio, and he did not then take the "extra credit" side trip to "the pictured convent of Monte Oliveto" (the place where Berenson had converted to Catholicism) to see "those extraordinarily strong and brave frescoes of Luca Signorelli and Sodoma"--works that again exemplify the secular mystery of High Art: "the great sheltered sun-flares and colour-patches of scenic composition and design where a couple of hands centuries ago turned to dust had so wrought the defiant miracle of life and beauty that the effect is of a garden blooming among ruins." 19
The touristic-aesthetic frame does not appear without self-criticism in James's uvre; but it is important to discriminate the form this self-criticism takes. The 1877 essay "Italy Revisited" is perhaps James's most brilliant exercise in distancing himself from the preconceptions I have been describing. Noting the disjunction between Italy's unaesthetic "modern crudity" (to touristic eyes) and the richly aesthetic "relics of the great period," James here chooses against "thinking of Italy as historical and artistic," preferring "to think of her, for a while, as modern, an idea supposed (as a general thing correctly) to be fatally at variance with the Byronic, the Ruskinian, the artistic, poetic, aesthetic manner of considering this fascinating peninsula." 20 James's labor here is to recognize the different, actual, contemporary life effaced by touristic expectation, in order both to gain some sense of its human reality and to expose the touristic-aesthetic schema as a fiction of perception, a "manner of considering." In a characteristic bit of self-mortification, he thus recalls encountering in the countryside near Genoa a handsome young Italian who sings as he walks. By habit, he reads this sight aesthetically, apprehending the youth like "a cavalier in an opera" and musing that "such a re had been exactly what was wanted to set off the landscape." But entering into conversation with him, James learns that this picturesque re is in fact a "brooding young radical and communist,...an unhappy, underfed, unemployed young man, who took a hard, grim view of everything, and was operatic only quite in spite of himself." So known, the re becomes a harsh rebuke to the outlook that had negated his human reality:
This made it very absurd for me to have looked at him simply as a graceful ornament to the prospect, an harmonious little re in the middle distance.  would have been all his philosophy. Yet, but for the accident of my having a little talk with him, I should have made him do service, in memory, as an example of sensuous optimism! ("IR," 52-53)
"Our observation in any foreign land is extremely superficial, and our remarks are happily not addressed to the inhabitants themselves, who would be sure to exclaim upon the impudence of the fancy-picture" ("IR," 51). This is the sweeping condemnation James builds the case for in "Italy Revisited"; but we should beware of concluding that James has therefore escaped from the touristic-aesthetic point of view. After all, the unhappy young man is known only fleetingly in this scene, certainly not in the deep, sustained, interactive form we could label "intimacy." In any case his rhetorical function in the essay is not to become interesting in his own right but to permit a self-exposure of the aestheticizing approach: so far from leading truly outside the touristic-aesthetic mindset, he appears only with respect to that mindset, which continues to organize the possibilities for perception even when that perception takes the form of self-critique. (The similarity of this passage to Howells's critique of Basil March's obliviousness to real others suggests that this form of self-criticism is not neces-sarily a break from but perhaps a regular by-product of the touristic-aesthetic frame, a self-consciousness this habit of vision regularly generates.) The chief confirmation that this framework of perception has been complicated but not eluded in such a passage lies in the rest of the essay, which, after bouts of self-censure and feints toward potential interest in Italian industrialism, proceeds to readopt the touristic-aesthetic approach: "the river-front of Florence" is thus, seen as a "delightful composition" ("IR," 58); the (unknown) inhabitants of villas "disposed upon the neighbouring hills" are seen as "res in an ancient, noble landscape" ("IR," 60); and James resumes a charmed wandering "from one corner of Florence to another, paying one's respects again to remembered masterpieces" ("IR," 69). 21
Except for a few glancing references, for instance the mention of "the children of the disappointed" in Central Park in The Bostonians, 22 James's writing largely fails to register the immigrants who came to America during the years of his expatriation. When he does confront this presence, notably in his report on his 1904-1905 exile's return, The American Scene, it is striking how much his response is organized through the foreigner-as-intruder image also taken in from American gentry culture: an image he heightens and hyperbolizes just as he did the same culture's ideal of high art. Ross Posnock, the critic who has written most discerningly on this subject, has argued that James shows surprising curiosity about the immigrants he finds in his old home, and an equally surprising willingness to question the native-born's right to "own" the world they now share with others. 23 Posnock may be right about where James's musings eventuate (especially his musings on Jews); but it would seem worth adding that if James puts a certain distance between himself and gentry-class prejudices, this distance is effected after a strong initial investment in something very similar to those prejudices, and carries its weight as a swerve from an initially adopted line of thought. When this real-life Basil March takes to the streets, he sees around him "the ubiquitous alien," "the inconceivable alien," "gross aliens," "gross little aliens," "millions of little transformed strangers" caught in "the first grossness of their alienism." 24 His baroque or even byzantine flights of ration link this alien, with an almost zany extremity of imaginative enforcement, to highly familiar terms of prejudicial slur. The immigrant thus appears in The American Scene as physically indecent, a human equivalent of the greasy spoon: "[in seeing New York] do we not feel ourselves feeding, half the time, from the ladle, as greasy as he chooses to leave it for us, that he holds out?" (AS, 118); as the product of vomit-in-reverse: "it is a drama that goes on, without a pause, day by day and year by year, this visible act of ingurgitation on the part of our body politic and social" (AS, 84); as linguistic monstrosity or destroyer of intelligibility: "it is as if the syllables were too numerous to make a legible word. The illegible word, accordingly, the great inscrutable answer to questions, hangs in the vast American sky, to his imagination, as something fantastic and abracadabrant, belonging to no known language" (AS, 121-22); as uncanny dispossessor: "a ghost in [my] supposedly safe old house" (AS, 85).
When Italians appear in The American Scene, as they do with some frequency, they are focused through imagery of the sort just described. When James revisits the Boston Common, he thus finds Italian immigrants to be its chief occupants, and so the chief usurpers of "'my' small homogeneous Boston": "the people before me were gross aliens to a man, and they were in serene and triumphant possession" (AS, 231). When he revisits Salem and seeks directions to the great nativist mythological landmark the House of the Seven Gables, uncompre-hending aliens--for a change here called "flagrant foreigners"--turn out to have taken over this world too. "At Salem, when, wandering perhaps astray, I asked my way to the House of the Seven Gables, the young man I had overtaken was true to his nature; he stared at me as a remorseless Italian" (AS, 265). This foreigner, who not only does not know who Hawthorne was but cannot even understand James's question, embodies "the other, the smoky modernism" that has displaced "the small original Hawthornesque world" (AS, 270): he is the Italian as bad modernity, the Italian as air pollution and eroder of old forms. Elsewhere the Italian appears just as the irremediable other. Visiting a "large new rural resi-dence" being thrown up on the Jersey shore, a part of the conspicuous con-sumption of the turn-of-the-century leisure class, James finds the soon-to-be-hidden labor of construction being done by "groups of diggers and ditchers," in short by a manual working class. These workers are "Italians, of superlatively Southern type," and what happens when James and his wealthy host meet them is simply nothing. They are so estranged that they can only stand in "staring silence" as if understanding that contact between them "were out of the question" (AS, 118-19).
As in A Hazard of New Fortunes, James's mental interrogation of the Italian immigrant reaches a kind of climax in a scene set in mass transit. In "the electric cars," James like Basil March finds himself reduced to a minority status, surrounded by an "alienism unmistakable, alienism undisguised and unashamed" that leaves "the observer" to "gasp with the sense of [his] isolation." Before the "face after face" of these foreigners paradoxically so much "at home" (AS, 125), James begins to muse on the process of their assimilation, the process by which immigrants begin to lose the socializations of their culture of origin and to take on the new lives of a new land. James continues:
There are categories of foreigners, truly, meanwhile, of whom we are moved to say that only a mechanism working with scientific force could have performed this feat of making them colourless. The Italians, who, over the whole land, strike us, I am afraid, as, after the Negro and the Chinaman, the human value most easily produced, the Italians meet us, at every turn, only to make us ask what has become of that element of the agreeable address in them which has, from far back, so enhanced for the stranger the interest and pleasure of a visit to their beautiful country. They shed it utterly, I couldn't but observe, on their advent, after a deep inhalation or two of the clear native air; shed it with a conscientious completeness which leaves one looking for any faint trace of it. "Colour," of that pleasant sort, was what they had appeared, among the races of the European family, most to have; so that the effect I speak of, the rapid action of the ambient air, is like that of the tub of hot water that reduces a piece of bright-hued stuff, on immersion, to the proved state of not "washing": the only fault of my image indeed being that if the stuff loses its brightness the water of the tub at least is more or less agreeably dyed with it. That is doubtless not the case for the ambient air operating after the fashion I here note--since we surely fail to observe that the property washed out of the new subject begins to tint with its pink or its azure his fellow-soakers in the terrible tank. (AS, 128-29)
Just as the 1909 hymn to Monte Oliveto marks the climax of his involvement with touristic-aesthetic Italy, this passage can be taken to represent the culmination of James's involvement with the Italy of immigration, and its ingredients need to be specified fairly subtly. Present with an almost obscene lack of embarrassment here are some mental derivatives from the coarsest strains of contemporary prejudice: does the notion of Italians as "the human value most easily produced" mean that they are shamelessly prolific, or "only" that their life isn't worth much whatever their numbers? Present too is the expectation that these people should be more appealing or agreeable, an expectation bred by touristic experience of "a visit to their beautiful country." At the same time, without fully freeing itself from these preconceptions, the passage also dramatizes an authentic movement of curiosity in the direction of the immigrants' lives--but a movement (like Basil March's) that, by its nature, never crosses out of self-involved speculation. Where has the homeland manner of these immigrants gone, James wonders? How exactly has their reacclimatization changed them? The question expresses James's powerful imaginative sympathy with those he sees, a real will to grasp the operative conditions of their lives, but his answer stays shut up in the playful patterns of his mind. Italians are like noncolorfast garments only within the conceit of the hot washtub (witty variation on the melting pot), and the further thought that bleached-out ethnic colors do not "run" onto other fabrics in the "terrible tank" is generated through a further turn of the observer's verbal re, not a further knowing of the men and women before him. We are back where all the most protracted literary interactions with Italy lead in the American Gilded Age--to a spectatorial act of mind that appreciates the visual drama of con-temporaneity in complex ways on the understanding that no interaction with real others is about to take place.
Considered in a longer temporal prospect, Howells's and James's mass-transit scenes point forward to many similar scenes in the writing of the early twentieth century: moments in the metro in Pound, Crane, and T. S. Eliot; encounters with Italian immigrant aliens in Dos Passos's U.S.A. and Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury; and so on. More largely, Howells and James give a review of that inten-sified yet contradictory disposition toward the foreign--the conjunction of cosmopolitanist Europhile attraction with various shades of anti-immigrant repulsion (anti-Semitism is one)--that recurs in American modernist writing. In this context, the Gilded Age forebears do more than supply a frisson of structures of sentiment yet to come. They suggest that this doubleness in its specific early twentieth-century American forms came out of a certain social-historical set-ting--the high-cultural upper-class habitus the American moderns were either born to or educated in. And they suggest that a certain way of looking at the foreign was formed, there, through the interaction of elements made neighbors in that milieu: love of the foreign regarded as aesthetic; dread of the foreign as insurgent native presence; and a habit of pictorializing, derealizing "appreciation" highly useful at home but first practiced in touristic initiations.
Richard H. Brodhead has written widely on American Literature. His most recent books are Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth Century America (Chicago, 1993) and The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt (Duke, 1993). He is Bird White Housman Professor of English at Yale University and Dean of Yale College.
* This essay was commissioned by the Agnelli Foundation for presentation at its conference "America's Italy," held at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C., in September 1992, and is to be published in the conference proceedings. My gratitude to the Foundation for permission to print it here in a slightly altered form.
1. Cited from Berenson's Sketch for a Self-Portrait in Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 104-105. Other quotations in this paragraph, ibid., 80, 94, 90.
2. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (2nd ed. 1963; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1965), 90-92.
3. Cited in Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 375.
4. The following works could be consulted for partial histories of this social formation: Ronald Story, The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800-1870 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1980); E. Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (1964; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 109-42; Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 111-32; and Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976). Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class is the great contemporaneous theorization of this social development.
5. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; reprint, New York: New American Library, 1953), 47.
6. For more thorough consideration of later nineteenth-century high culture and its social sponsorship see Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Paul DiMaggio, "Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston," parts 1 and 2, Media, Culture, and Society 4 : 33-50 and 303-22; and my Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 115-41.
7. Leonard Covello has estimated that 78% of eventual Italian American immigrants came from the southern Italian peasantry. The Social Background of the Italo-American Child (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967), 277.
8. Higham has been the chief developer of this point. See Strangers in the Land, esp. 68, 88.
9. For notable expressions of all of these stereotypes see the treatment of "the Italian" in Jacob A. Riis's How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, ed. Sam Bass Warner (1890; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 21-22, 36-39.
10. Late nineteenth-century upper-class nativism is discussed in Higham, Strangers in the Land, 97-105, 136-44; Baltzell, Protestant Establishment, 104-108; and John C. Sproat, "The Best Men": Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 230-35, 250-57. On the performance of Italian opera in German see Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 220. John Paul Russo's account of George Whitfield Chadwick's opera Il Padrone forms a fascinating further exhibit of high culture's simultaneous attraction to Italy and aversion to it in its lower-class, domestic immigrant forms. See Russo's response to my essay in the Agnelli Foundation volume America's Italy (forthcoming).
11. See my School of Hawthorne (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 84-89 and, for a more general account of this phase of Howells's career, Kenneth S. Lynn, William Dean Howells: An American Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 110-35. Nathalia Wright discusses Howells and Italy in American Novelists in Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965), 168-97.
12. William Dean Howells, Suburban Sketches (1871; reprint, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1881), 35-59. Cited passages, 37, 39, 45, 50, 47; hereafter abbreviated SS.
13. Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885; reprint, New York: New American Library, 1963), 66; hereafter abbreviated RSL.
14. Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889; reprint, New York: New American Library, 1965), 22-23; hereafter abbreviated HNF.
15. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 278.
16. Henry James, Letters, 4 vols., ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974-84), 1: 160; hereafter abbreviated L. The subsequent letters make clear that James's Roman destinations were the standard art-historical touristic sights.
17. See The School of Hawthorne, 104-20.
18. From the review of Howells's Italian Journeys reprinted in Henry James, Literary Criticism: Essays in Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984), 476-77.
19. "Siena Early and Late," in Italian Hours (1909; reprint, New York: Grove Press, 1979), 259, 248, 259, 265, 267-68. My thanks to Bonney MacDonald's Henry James's Italian Hours: Revelatory and Resistant Impressions (Ann Arbor: U. M. I. Research Press, 1990) for drawing my attention to this essay.
20. "Italy Revisited," reprinted in Portraits of Places (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), 44-45; hereafter abbreviated "IR."
21. For a useful comment on this essay and on James's relation to the touristic discourse of Europe see James Buzard, "A Continent of Pictures: Reflections on the 'Europe' of the Nineteenth-Century Tourists," PMLA 108 : 30-44.
22. The Bostonians (1885; reprint, New York: Modern Library, 1957), 348.
23. Ross Posnock, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. 6-18, 147-48, 277-84.
24. Henry James, The American Scene (1905; reprint, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 87, 85, 231, 120; hereafter abbreviated AS.
In this essay, I shall explore the functions of natural language as a "secondary medium" in visual art, as it appears in the polyphonic work of Marc Chagall. Language is here part of the private "fictional world" that Chagall constructed in his paintings in counterpoint to the languages of the avant-garde. It conveys some of the images and perceptions of a local culture and carries the "thick knowledge" of a periphery that Chagall brought to the centers of modernist art. I shall focus primarily on the role of Yiddish language and literature, which have the deepest roots in his conscious world. 1
Innovations in modern art and science claimed general validity and were accepted in the general canon, yet the context of their discovery was narrowly local and depended on a specific combination of national, linguistic, social, and personal forces and circumstances. The opposition between "Western European" and other cultures, as emphasized in recent criticism, may divert our attention from the fact that European culture itself has been time and again formed by an awareness of the differences among national cultures and their reciprocal oppositions, interactions, and influences.
The most prominent outsiders nestled within the European world were the Jews in their traditional, religious society. In the heart of Europe--in recent centuries, primarily Eastern and Central Europe--they maintained a religion that stood in opposition to the dominant Christianity and a culture based on the teaching and interpretation of an ever growing library of texts. Though influenced by the folklore and beliefs of their neighbors, and often multilingual (using Slavic, German, and other languages), they maintained tightly knit communities with their own social and educational network and an internal multilingualism in three languages of their own: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish. In Eastern Europe, and especially in the "Pale of Settlement" of the Russian Empire, where until 1917 over five million Jews were kept in a huge geographical ghetto (comprising most of Poland, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Lithuania), the Jewish masses were concentrated in small towns (called shtetls). Two-thirds of the population of a typical shtetl was Jewish (67% in Chagall's family town of Lyozno), and shtetl life was dominated physically by a towering Church and politically by a Russian administration. It was a more or less self-contained island amid a sea of Christian villages. In the larger towns, Jews constituted half the population (52.4% in Chagall's Vitebsk), and in several big cities, about one third. It was a polka-dotted map, a powerless Jewish empire within an empire, unified by a voluntary cultural network--from the spread of authoritative books and Hasidic sects to modern ideological parties, educational systems, literature, and newspapers.
It was in this context that the Modern Jewish Revolution erupted at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century: a veritable explosion of modernity within one or two generations, entailing both a massive transformation of millions of Jews, and their influx into the centers of European and American culture. 2 Jews eagerly joined the "general" modern culture in manners both extrinsic and intrinsic; while many took up the languages and entered the cultural institutions of the extant European nations, others created a European-type secular culture of their own in Hebrew and Yiddish, accepting European genres and modes of discourse and infusing them with elements transformed from the Jewish tradition. Unlike writers, however, who had to choose either an intrinsic or an extrinsic language (either I. B. Singer or Franz Kafka), painters could simultaneously participate in both.
Chagall (1887-1985) was a typical child of this Modern Jewish Revolution. He was the first of many siblings, born to religious, Yiddish-speaking parents of limited education in Vitebsk, the capital of a province or gubernia (in today's Byelorussia), in the Russian Pale of Settlement. He moved rapidly from Vitebsk to St. Petersburg, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and again France, the U.S.A., and France; he lived through three Russian revolutions, two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the rebirth of Israel; he embraced modern secular Yiddish literature, the Russian language, the achievements of the Russian and French avant-gardes, as well as the tradition of earlier Christian painting. The impact of his unusual art in France and Germany was evident from the beginning: Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, and Kurt Schwitters wrote poems about him before World War I, when Chagall was still in his twenties; in 1914 Herwardt Walden organized a one-man Chagall show in Berlin that strongly influenced the German Expressionists; and in later years there were major Chagall exhibits in New York, Paris, and London. Werner Haftman, a historian of twentieth-century art, has written, "We think of Chagall as the painter-poet of the twentieth century. He shares this distinction only with Paul Klee." 3
Chagall was influenced by most of the contemporary art trends of his time. In his paintings we can find quasi-geometric articulations of forms derived from Analytic Cubism; Orphism's predilection for circles in space; a fauve-inspired exuberance for colors that overflow the boundaries of objects; the precise chromatic shapes of Suprematism; the dynamic movement and strong diagonal gestures of Futurism; pre-Expressionist deformations of human faces and res; a dreamlike arrangement of objects in represented space, anticipating surrealism; and even minute and multiple decorative ornaments typical of the Russian Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) movement from the beginning of the century. In many of his paintings, several seemingly disparate components fuse into a functional unity, often in an asymmetrical, uneasy, but ultimately justified balance, perhaps most typically in his brilliant Introduction to the Yiddish Theater in Moscow . 4 Each painting is masterfully constructed with a dynamic interplay of several centers of gravity: in some areas of the canvas, geometrical forms are independent and conspicuous, while in others representational res are dominant, creating a thematic and situational polyphony; in between, unrelated animals and vignettes inhabit some secondary space. The tensions between those heterogeneous forces endowed his work with its peculiar power. Often Chagall suggests depth, perspective, and theme, yet disrupts the continuities of space, time, and perspective. Individual res are presented in disproportion and deformation, removed from realistic continuity, functionality, or causality, and left floating in a two-and-a-half-dimensional space. Thus the connection between his res and objects has been perceived as enigmatic, surreal, or poetic.
Chagall rarely painted from nature. The typical Chagallian representational vocabulary is made up of modular units repeated time and again in various trans-formations and combinations overlapping or interrupting each other. Such units were derived from heterogeneous sources: the traditional Eastern European Jewish world with its parareligious folklore, Russian provincial life, emblems of Paris, his beloved wife Bella, his array of animals, and so on. What unifies all those elements is not coherent, logical, or representational continuity, but Chagall's own constructed biography, a world that a viewer must know to understand his paintings. Indeed, Chagall himself supplied such a text, Mein Leben, known in English as My Life.
Chagall, in other words, created his own fictional world, derived from the multicultural domains encountered in the course of his life, yet combined and unified by the accidents of his biography. Fictional worlds are typical of literary works, 5 and Chagall has often been accused of being a "literary" painter. Yet in literature, a discrete fictional world with separate characters may be created in each novel, while all his life Chagall seems to have evoked one and the same fictional world, dwelling in his "naive" or "poetic" imagination. The represented domains themselves appear in grotesque or ironic distortions, enabling a retrospective look homeward that is nostalgic, yet not, until late in his career, sentimental. Over time, the repeated representations transform them into a private language of art, acting in counterpoint with formal devices drawn from the prevalent languages of modernism. This was well understood by Chagall's friend in Paris, the poet Cendrars. In his poem about Chagall, he wrote:
Suddenly he paints
He takes a church and paints with a church
He takes a cow and paints with a cow
With a sardine
With heads, hands, knives
He paints with a bull's pizzle
He paints with all the foul passions of a little Jewish city
With all the heightened sexuality of provincial Russia. 6
Chagall rarely added new elements to his basic vocabulary, yet when his own fictional world was exhausted (partly by repetition, and partly by its disappearance into the past), he resorted to the fictional worlds of literature, illustrating Gogol, Abraham Lyesin, La Fontaine, or the Bible. In his own fictional world, however, res become more and more stenographic, emblematic, and sentimental; exuberant colors take over, the tension between the painterly and the representational forces disappears, and he loses his edge. Chagall becomes predominantly a colorist.
In sum, Chagall responded to modernism in painting by employing cubist, surrealist, Suprematist, and fauvist principles and techniques, but restrained their dominance with the counterweight of his fictional, symbolically representational world. Thus, on the one hand, realism was subverted and deformed, while, on the other hand, formalism was harnessed to poetic and social representation. A similar tension between those two forces has given life and eclectic--or polyphonic--originality to Latin American modern painting and fiction. Indeed, this complex and rich style may be seen as eclectic in a negative sense only from the point of view of an ideal of purity, or one might say, the poverty of purity. Chagall may not have invented his individual stylistic features, but he did invent the treatment of human res, the gravity and social (dis)continuity, the multicentered composition, and the language of his modular fictional world.
Understanding the semiotics of Chagall's art enables us to see the importance of his cultural background not just for the biography of the painter as a person, but for the understanding of his paintings. If a substantial part of his language of art is drawn from a fictional world, the components of this world are essential to reading his art. Chagall never intended to be an exclusively "Jewish" artist, but an artist in the European and modernist sense of the word. The lost world of Eastern European Jewish folk life was part of the material from which he molded his paintings; it reflected the earliest layers of his consciousness and provided the concrete and unique substance of his fictional world and surreal moods. From this base, he reached out to modern Yiddish literature, themes from contemporary Jewish history, and the "universal" Bible. Just as Faulkner's or Joyce's origins do not make them provincial, exclusively southern or Irish writers respectively, but provide the rich specificity in which their universal art is embedded, the social locus of their fictional worlds, so does Chagall's Jewish background. Though Chagall's use of cultural connotations that are rooted in Jewish literature and folklore has often been discussed in recent criticism, treatment of it has been marred by misunderstandings and ignorance, for even fine scholars do not know to what extent that world and its language have disappeared into history.
As is well known, the effect of a painting is dependent not just on the immediate impression produced by its own painterly language, but also on natural language, narrative knowledge, and the semiotics of culture. Some of these elements are indicated in the painting itself, while others are part of its wider context. A painting is created in a cultural, and yet at the same time private, chamber of resonance: and when that chamber of resonance is no longer common to our whole culture, we have to reconstruct the particular chamber of each artist in order to "read" his work.
The role of natural language in the reading of painting can take on several different forms:
Language describing the ideology or poetics of art. The dependence of paintings on their declarative poetics became crucial in the various trends of modernism; we have to read the manifestos and theoretical writings of the painters and their peers, or the theories constructed from these texts, to be guided in our mode of "reading" the actual art objects.
Language describing the nature of the represented world. In Chagall, our understanding is guided by the knowledge of his own constructed biography and those domains of Eastern European life he evokes.
Language as a secondary medium or a subtext attached to specific paintings or their details. Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even makes little sense without the specific texts he jotted down for this work. 7 It is clearly a two-tiered work of art, where the primary medium is painting and the secondary is a specific written text, including its variants, crossed-out versions, and accompanying drawings. Though these are less moving, and operate only behind the scenes, they guide the signification of the visual units and inform the entire work of art. In Chagall, subtexts of this kind are provided by idioms, proverbs, dead metaphors, and literary images of Yiddish language and literature. His private fictional world draws on collective stereotypes, and Yiddish culture represents that collective consciousness.
Language incorporated in the paintings themselves. In many modern paintings, pieces of words and texts appear, often deformed or extracted from their normal context and everyday purposes. These fulfill many functions: they represent the textual nature of modern culture in general, the plethora of words surrounding us; they signal the crossing of the boundaries of visual art and language art, painting and textuality; they represent two-dimensional surfaces, along with wallpaper, thus motivating the foregrounding of the two-dimensional canvas; and they serve well in collages, representing the daily, journalistic, practical, or political world, as tram tickets do in Kurt Schwitters's work. They may also serve specific thematic functions in each concrete case, either referring to another object on the canvas, providing a title for the painting as a whole, teasing its topics with contradictory meanings, or alluding to another text and its denotations.
Chagall was an early practitioner of language use in paintings, and a variegated and prolific one. Since his late teens, Chagall tried to assimilate the Russian language and culture, and later the French. Yet he lived in a Yiddish-speaking world at least until the age of twenty, and then again in Moscow in 1920-22, and in New York in 1941-48. He also communicated and corresponded in Yiddish with Yiddish writers throughout his life, and wrote poems, essays, and speeches in Yiddish. From an early age, he absorbed its imagery in his conscious and subconscious mind, absorbing with it the foundations of his fictional world. He read the classics of Yiddish literature, and in Yiddish he read the Bible. These cultural sources combined in his work with his subsequently acquired Russian and French languages and painterly models, yet his linguistic base was in popular Jewish culture.
Many seemingly unreal scenes and gestures in Chagall's paintings can be explained by the use of Yiddish idioms and proverbs, 8 as well as by archetypes developed in modern Yiddish literature. In his memoirs, written in 1922-23 and first published in Yiddish in 1925, Chagall writes that his mother told him "just now" (she died in 1916) about her father, who had disappeared years before on holiday. They searched for him everywhere, and "it turned out that in the nice weather he climbed on the roof, sat on the chimney [sic!], and ate tsimes [Jewish sweet carrot stew]." Chagall adds: "Not a bad picture." Chagall domesticated the fantastic situations of his paintings in events that presumably happened in his own life. Some critics have taken him seriously and thereby made him into a realist, defusing the surrealist effects of his work. Yet Chagall himself knew perfectly well that his grandfather in the story had enacted "not a bad picture"--the picture is primary--and added: "And perhaps I dreamt it all" (i.e., the event, the tsimes, and mother's story too). 9 Chagall made a drawing of his grandfather's story that was published in the album Mein Leben by Paul Cassirer in Berlin [Begin Page 58] ( 1). In a later lithograph, moreover, he embedded this drawing in a frame being painted by young Chagall in a clown's uniform, with his head half inside the white drawing, half outside, in the blue frame ( 2). 10 Most important, Chagall had already placed a man on the edge of a roof (prototype of the "fiddler on the roof") many years earlier, in The Dead Man ( 3). For Chagall, his grandfather's story demonstrates the strain of positive craziness and creative freedom that ran in the family. All three works, moreover, present a realization of the Yiddish idiom meshugener, arop fun dakh! (you're crazy, get off the roof!)--a phrase that is said to someone who is not on a roof at all but who "climbed high" only metaphorically, someone who is not clinically insane but pursues an unrealistic, unattainable, or absurd idea.
An idiom is a fixed cluster of words, some or all of which have lost their independent meanings, while the whole means something more and often very different from the sum of its components. 11 Like a dead metaphor, an idiom incorporates a frozen rative situation or its derivative (e.g., only a crazy man would sit on a sharp-edged roof; hence, if you think or say such-and-such, you must be crazy; get off the roof!). When we use an idiom, we may even visualize or contemplate its ral aspects or imagery, though they have no ontological status in the real world; but when we think of its general meaning, we do so with reference to a given situation. In contrast, a realization of an idiom in literature or painting inverts this relationship: what was a mere expression in language becomes a real object or event in the presented world (a man actually sits on a roof). The image now denotes, while the idiomatic meaning (he's crazy) has become merely a potential connotation. rative language is replaced by immediate objects. But when placed in the presented "reality," such objects or events are often out of place, creating an unrealistic, grotesque, or poetic fictional world, as in Kafka's famous metaphor of a person becoming an insect. Literature and art of this sort are not metaphorical; they transfer metaphoricity from the level of style to the fictional world itself, and by so doing, make it "irrational," "surrealistic," "fantastic."
To return to the crazy man on the roof: in Yiddish the word for crazy, meshugener, is often used as a positive epithet, a warm appellation with affectionate connotations of idiosyncracy, unpredictability, and creativity. This polysemy (which includes a tension between craziness and creativity) is based on the biblical meshuga ish ha-ruah (crazy is the man of spirit, i.e., the inspired person, the prophet; "The prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is mad." [Hos. 9:7]) and on the proximity of shigazy (craziness) and g(cr (genius), in Yiddish (Hebrew-derived). Genius is even phonetically embedded in craziness (in every shigniu lies a gies), supporting the popular belief that genes of craziness and of genius run in the same family. And other idiomatic expressions further complicate the painting's allusions: If somebody tells you a lie or an absurd and unbelievable story, you may retort in Yiddish, a ku iz gefloygn ibern dakh (a cow flew over the roof, meaning, "Sure!" "Get real!"); or in full: a ku iz gefloygn ibern dakh un geleygt an ey (a cow flew over the roof and laid an egg). 12 All three works, in other words, include a gesture that subverts the realist continuity and social functionality of a world that is, nonetheless, very "real" in the painter's memory.
The famous painting Over Vitebsk ( 4) features a Jew hovering above the buildings and churches of the city. He is the embodiment of the fantastic luft-mentshen (people of the air), created in Yiddish literature by Mendele Moykher Sforim and Sholem-Aleichem: they are people who have no income from productive work and live "on air" as well as "in the air," with no ground under their feet, unlike a healthy nation rooted in its own soil. This expression became a key image of self-criticism of the Jewish diaspora existence in most Jewish ideologies, from Zionist to Socialist, as well as by Western Jews in Berlin or New York vis-à-vis their Eastern brethren. Kafka described them as a special race of miraculously surviving "soaring dogs" (in his story "Investigations of a Dog"). It is no accident that Chagall's hovering Jew carries the attributes of a traditional, religious, old Jew, with his beard, hat, and typical black garb; there was no iconography to represent the Jewishness of Chagall's young, secular generation. The image itself is a realization of an idiom: er geyt iber di hayzer (literally: he walks over the houses) which simply means in Yiddish, he is a beggar. 13 It is often used as a euphemism, to describe somebody's profession or state of affairs. Iber (literally: over) here means to walk from house to house, from door to door (as in the English expression, "to go over some papers"); but literally, the word means over something, higher than or above; whence the image of a man walking above Vitebsk. In Chagall's painting, the worn-out spatial metaphor of "over" was returned to its original literary sense and visual image.
Yet this is only the beginning of an interpretation; other literary and cultural images are grafted onto the idiom. The so-called "Grandfather of Yiddish literature" Mendele Moykher Sforim (Mendele the Book Seller, pseudonym of Sh. Abramovitsh, 1837-1917; abbreviated Méndele), wrote one of the seminal books of modern Jewish self-understanding, The Short Travels of Benjamin III. A Jewish Don Quixote, Benjamin the Third, guided by fantastic books and numerous Hebrew quotations, departs with his companion, Senderl the Woman, from their backward shtetl to find a way to Eretz-Israel. A grotesque clash between imagination and reality ensues: they mistake a swamp for a great sea; they cannot even communicate with their Slavic neighbors; eventually they are caught and conscripted into the Russian army, only to be released as good-for-nothings. The world is topsy-turvy, reality doesn't match the quoted texts, and the Zionist dream is a flop. In his mock introduction, the narrator tells us that every person has his guardian angel:
The angels hit even all kinds of beggars, pushing them: grow, beggars, paupers, poverty-stricken, born, arrived, open, concealed, sprout like grass, like nettles! Go, Jewish children, go--over the houses!... 14
On the road, when Benjamin realizes that they fled their hometown without taking any food, the practical Senderl the Woman retorts,
What do you mean, Benjamin, to eat? Do you intend to carry a kitchen with us? What for? Are there no inns, no houses on the road?...And if there are houses, we can, at the same time, go over the houses. For what are all other Jews doing? Today some go to others' houses, and tomorrow, those will go to yet others' houses. It's a Jewish thing, just a grace.... 15
The symbol of this voyage is the ubiquitous the s (sack), and the similar pekl or pékale (nomad's pack). It is not just a beggar's sack he carries on his back, but a mishmash of various and sundry food, peddler's merchandise, books to guide him on the road, and whatnot. It is a symbol of the "unproductive" existence of the Jews, their beggars' predicament, their essentially parasitic and "unreal" peddler life, combined with the image of the "Wandering Jew" going into exile.  Yet whereas Mendele foregrounded degrading poverty and lack of productive work, Chagall stressed the connotations of Exile and Jewish destiny that were also potentially a part of the whole image. 16
The "Eternal Jew" or "Wandering Jew," a traditional image of Christian, often anti-Semitic literature, was adopted by modern Yiddish literature as a symbol of self-understanding (see Dovid Pinsky's play "The Wandering Jew," performed in Hebrew by HaBima in Moscow). He is a mythical re, larger than life, condemned to exile, yet eternal. Bella Chagall used to sing the popular song "A Goles Marsh" (A March of Exile) by the American Yiddish poet Morris Rosenfeld (1861-1923), which begins thus:
With the wanderer's staff in hand,
With no home and with no land,
No friend or savior on the way,
No tomorrow, no today,
Chased, not suffered in our plight,
Ne'er a day where spent a night,
Always pain will knock, knock, knock,
Always walk, walk, walk,
Always stride, stride, stride,
While your strength can still abide. 17
Chagall's painting has the legendary image, but without the pity. Indeed, this was a key image throughout Chagall's life and work. On 28 July 1948, before leaving New York for France, he writes in a private letter to his friend, the Yiddish novelist Y. Opatoshu,
How are you dear Opatoshu. Ever closer to our voyage to the abysses-perhaps of Europe. I feel like going as you feel like dancing. You are toiling now and I am toiling on the peklakh 18 together with the little, thin, young Virginia, who must also taste a bit of what it means to be a Jew with the sack on his back. [Chagall's common-law wife Virginia Haggard was a Christian. Emphasis added.] 19
This was neither exile from America nor a tragic trip to Europe, where major exhibitions and fame awaited him, but simply a stereotype, a central symbol of Chagall's self-perception as a homeless Jew.
Here realization of an idiom is a direct bridge that links the painting with a whole cultural conceptual world. Without that cultural cluster--in our case, the movement above the houses, the religious garb, the stick and sack--the defiance of gravity may have a different meaning altogether. The painting Over the Town ( 5), ostensibly similar to Over Vitebsk, does not include the element of walking, indispensable for the idiom, or any other attributes of the Eternal Jew; instead it features two lovers flying weightlessly above Vitebsk. In the mural entitled Music, the towering re of a Jewish fiddler looms above the little houses and church--evoking not the Eternal Jew but the soaring power of music that is not bound to mundane reality. In some of Chagall's soaring characters, the idiom loses its relevance; in others, we observe realizations of various expressions, not exclusively Yiddish, that lift people or objects above the force of gravity. 20 Chagall, as soon as he discovered the principle, turned it into an unmotivated device that signals the irrationality of his fictional world, using it almost anywhere. Furthermore, it is a device for making familiar objects strange, as well as an imprint of Chagall's authority over the painting. Thus the fantastic, absurd, or poetic world in the painting, even though it may be derived from Yiddish idioms and literature, is perceived both as a departure from reality and as its most authentic expression. Chagall himself, for example, said that Lenin stood Russia on its head like res in a Chagall painting (and depicted him standing on his head in the painting Revolution).
A major influence on Chagall's perception of the Jewish world was Sholem-Aleichem, ostensibly a good-natured humorist, who exposed the irrationalities and absurdities of Jewish life and--through it--life in general. For Sholem-Aleichem, irrationality lies both in the dangerous unworldliness of Jewish existence and in the endearing quality of the true folk person, who sees the abyss yet does not want to see it, glossing over it with a smile. Chagall adopted this stance in his depiction of reality in his early paintings.
Yiddish literature also influenced Chagall thematically. Mendele's seyfer Habeheymes (The Book of livestock) can be quoted at length in this connection; cows, horses, goats, and especially the touching story of a calf, are all echoed in Chagall's world. Mendele's introduction says,
As I got to know my animals better, as I saw that they were like humans, flesh and blood, like people with all their senses, with feelings, and as I seriously observed their situation, their miserable life, how they are in Exile, suffering from the small humans in the world--the feeling of pity drew me toward them...and their language, as strange as it seems, is often more intelligible than the over-clever, artificial, bookish language that was intentionally invented to screw your brain and remove the slightest thing from any logic. [Emphasis in original.] 21
Chagall had little connection with animals in real life, yet he constructed them as parts of his culturally stereotypical but private fictional world, elements of a universe he had imbibed from his childhood reading. Animals for him could represent the warmth and endearing quality of a living being, symbolize the inarticulate impact of nonverbal communication, or epitomize the ideal of human living in close contact with nature, an ideal that many Jewish contemporaries saw as specifically Christian because of the patent contrast between the shtetl and surrounding Christian villages, and consequently an ideal that came to play a major role in the Modern Jewish Revolution, with its emphasis on a return to the land, to nature.
Another theme that Chagall derives from Mendele is connected with childhood. "The children of Kesalon (Fooltown) are old Jews in every respect: in their clothes, the sadness, the worry, the fear, the caution registered on their faces, except that they are little, have no beard, and do not procreate....[They are] Children without a childhood." 22 This image appears in The Holy Family , which places a Christian theme within a Jewish family setting. The child is depicted with a beard, because he, too, has been born "an old Jew." Though not as gloomy as Mendele's, Chagall's vision reflected a melancholy existential perception.
We also find many traces of Sholem-Aleichem's children's stories in Chagall's worldview. "The Enchanted Tailor" is a story about a poor tailor who has bought a milk goat in a distant town, but who is surprised to discover, while staying overnight in an inn, that his milk goat is repeatedly conjured away from him and exchanged for a billygoat. The tailor and his goat appear in Rain ( 6) and other paintings; and the goat is ubiquitous in Chagall's work, especially since it is proverbially the most elementary bread-earner in Jewish poverty. No less ubiquitous is the image of the violin, which also is derived from Sholem-Aleichem's short story, "The Violin." In this work, the child recounts, "The desire to play the violin grew together with me." The violin, we know, was the most widespread prestigious instrument of music in traditional Jewish society:
A violin, you understand, is an instrument older than all instruments. The first violinist in the world was Tuval-Kain, or Methuselah, I don't remember precisely....The second violinist was King David. And there was a third one, Paganini was his name, also a Jew; all the best violinists in the world were Jews. 23
Chagall himself dreamt in his childhood about becoming a violinist (before he transformed that dream into the "non-Jewish" art of painting). The animal and the violin--both nonverbal communicators--merged in his imagination, and there is a close empathy between the painter and all these characters.
The big grandfather clock is also a conspicuous re in Chagall's world, recalling Sholem-Aleichem's story "The Clock," which begins thus: "The clock rang thirteen..." and continues somewhat later, "I swear, it's a crime that a clock is not a living thing, a mute tongue, speechless: he would have had to tell and tell!..." In the story, the clock dominates the life of the town: the father tries to prevent it from ringing thirteen, and hangs more and more weights on it, until the clock collapses with an unbelievable noise, and everyone mourns it as a dead person. The boy internalizes the experience:
The whole night afterward, clocks crowded my head.  I thought the clock was alive, but, instead of the pendulum, a long tongue, the tongue of a human being, swings back and forth, and the clock does not ring but sighs, and each sigh takes away a piece of my health....And on the face, where I am used to see a twelve I suddenly see thirteen, truly thirteen--believe me! 24
The dominating clock appears, with its enigmatic, blurred face, swinging diagonally, along with a flying fish and a fiddle (alliterative in Yiddish: fish, fidl, fligl [wing]) and a pair of lovers on a riverbank, in Chagall's Time is a River Without Banks ( 7). Of course, there are two banks to the river, we see indications of a town on both, and we are reminded of Chagall's early encounters with Bella on the bank of the Dvina river, as described in Bella's memoirs. 25
In this painting, too, Jewish proverbs may be at work again. There is a Hebrew expression, widely used in Yiddish: yam ha-talmud, "the sea of the Talmud," or better, "the sea of learning," which indicates an inexhaustible, endless body of knowledge. You can swim in it--a related idiom, describing a learned person and astute scholar, is "he swims in the sea of learning"--but you cannot reach or see the other shore. Several additional proverbs are related to it: the rhymed couplet: der yam on a breg, di toyre on an ek (the sea has no shore, learning no end); di toyre hot nit keyn breg (literally: learning has no shore). 26 Indeed, breg (shore, riverbank) and ek (end) rhyme in Yiddish and are interchangeable; the dictionaries translate the word breg (shore) also as ek (end). Thus, "a river with no shore" actually means "with no end," and, in our context, "timeless." Yet Chagall revives the primary meaning of breg and thus paints two shores. Hence, the paradox of the pictorial and verbal aspects of the picture: the river has no shore, yet in order to be a river in a painting, it must have two shores. The young love scene is placed in the shadow of this paradox; the tune is played by Chagall-fish, the artist-fiddler; and the rest is in the hands of color.
Chagall was not an ideologue; and though at some points in his life he was close to programmatic Jewish art circles, he never joined them. Through the years, he maintained contacts with both Jewish cultural circles and French intellectuals. Even in his most "chauvinistic" statement, "Leaves from my Notebook," published in Moscow in a Yiddish journal in 1922, he states, "Beginning with the Renaissance, national arts began to decline. Boundaries are blurred. Artists come--individuals, citizens of this or that state, born here or there (blessed be my Vitebsk)--and one would need a good registration or even a passport specialist (for the Jewish desk) to be able to 'nationalize' all the artists." 27 He is proud of what the "little nation" of Jews has achieved: it gave the world Christ and Christianity, Marx and Socialism, and it will "show the world some art." But he refers to Art in general, measured by international standards, rather than "Jewish art." Indeed, there was no identity crisis here since in the minds of young intellectuals on both sides of the Modern Jewish Revolution, general culture and Jewish culture coexisted in one consciousness.
Because Christianity was central to the European cultural tradition, it attracted many Jews in the modern period: Edmund Husserl, Gustav Mahler, Alfred Doeblin, Roman Jakobson, and many others converted to Christianity. Chagall was not one of them, since he was deeply connected with a Jewish folk sensibility; but culturally, the Christian world was a tangible reality in his work and life. His friends in the interwar period, Raissa and Jacques Maritain, actively propagated conversion of the Jews. Raissa, herself a Russian Jew who converted to Catholicism, also wrote a book about Chagall. 28 Hence the many fusions and confusions of Jewish, Russian, and Christian elements in Chagall's paintings; they interact, coalesce, and represent each other, just as other modular individuals --man and animal, or man and woman--do. He presents the sacrifice of Isaac in the form of a Michelangelo Pietà, or he potrays the Holy Family with a bearded, "old," little Jewish child; he paints himself as a Christ child along with his parents in the famous Golgotha. Some Jewish critics were puzzled, even outraged by the use of Christian motifs in the works of a Jewish artist like Scholem Asch or Chagall. But Christian art was the mainstream of the European art tradition and was part of Chagall's intellectual world: as Buddha and Zen Buddhism may appear in the writings of a Christian writer, so did Martin Buber discuss Buddhism along with Hasidism in his writings; and such, too, was the openness of modern Jewish literature in Hebrew and Yiddish. 29
A special case is the re of Jesus Christ. His image was part of the modern gallery of Jewish literature. Dr. Yosef Klausner, a native of Russia, editor of the flagship of Hebrew literature in Europe, Ha-Shiloah, and the first professor of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (between 1925 and 1949), devoted many years to the study of Jesus of Nazareth and his time. Similarly, Uri-Tsvi Grinberg, the Expressionist poet who wrote in Yiddish and Hebrew and who edited the avant-garde Yiddish journal Albatros, used the re of Jesus prominently in his work. There can be no doubt that Chagall knew Albatros, for it was a major organ of the Khalyastre (Happy Gang), a group of Yiddish Expressionist poets, who also published the journals Khalyastre and Literarishe revi 30 in Paris, with many illustrations by Chagall.
Grinberg had been a frontline soldier during World War I, had deserted, and lived in hiding. After experiencing a pogrom in his hometown of Lemberg (Lvov), he became an ardent Zionist who firmly believed (already in 1924, in Berlin) that the earth was burning under the feet of the Jews in Europe, and that one day they would be gassed. In 1924 he left for Palestine, where he became a prominent Hebrew poet and extreme nationalist. In 1922 he wrote a Yiddish "concrete" poem in the form of a cross, which was entitled "Uri-Tsvi Before the Cross / INRI" (INRI printed in large Latin letters; 8). 31 Chagall painted a similar image, The White Crucifixion ( 9), with the same letters I.N.R.I. above the cross, and below, he added an Aramaic version of the text in Hebrew letters, "Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews." In "Uri-Tsvi Before the Cross" and in the long poem "In the Kingdom of the Cross," Grinberg addresses Jesus as "our brother," symbol of Jewish suffering, hanging on crosses all over Europe for two thousand years. I will quote a few lines pertinent to Chagall:
At the churches
Hangs my brother
Crucified
Frozen
From his covered member
Girls get pregnant....
Why am I one of the suffering caravan, not hanging next to you on a village pillar at a crossroad, sun drying me, night weighing on me?...
Brother Jesus. You had two thousand years of calm on the cross.  Torn talises [Jewish prayer shawls]. Pierced parchments. Blood-stained white sheets... Ancient Jewpain. Golgotha, brother, you don't see. Golgotha is here: all around. Pilate lives. And in Rome they sing psalms in the churches...
The Jews! The Jews!
When poisoned gas enters the temples
And icons suddenly scream in Yiddish...
On the wound-ridden body a torn talis--the body
Feels good in a Jewish talis--Oh, good in a talis:
The wind cannot blow sand on the dripping wounds....
Oh-Ho, I am king in a wound-and-blood talis! [Emphasis added.] 32
Such was the Jewish context of Chagall's The White Crucifixion, which included Jesus wearing a talis, as well as the context of similar images in later paintings responding to the Holocaust. Of course, unlike Grinberg, Chagall did not paint it with an Expressionist scream. Just as Chagall borrowed images from Yiddish literature, so did his painting evoke responses from inside Jewish culture. Here is a comment about the painting entitled Flayed Ox ( 10):
Look closely at the red, flayed calf, hanging as a crucifix over the whole city. As the true crucified, the father of all the crucified in the world, since the evil of a living creature wielded its power over a living creature. See how the red of its blood screams, see the brutal cut in its body split in two, see the purity of its face licking from the bowl-- Does another crucified like this exist among all the crucifieds? Weren't we all stunned, trembling in our childhood, when we saw the neighbor butcher slaughter our beloved calf? Isn't Fayerberg's "The Calf" 33 authentically Jewish for all time? And is there a more authentic feeling of pity for the lot of the powerless? And a stronger scream of rage at the brutality of the heartless? And isn't Chagall here like Fayerberg?...
Look closely and see the zenith of human Evil, emanating from an idyll that is clear purity and beatitude. 34
This was written in Yiddish after the Holocaust by the President of Israel Zalman Shazar, a Hebrew scholar and former Israeli Minister of Culture, who was born in Byelorussia two years after Chagall. Given their shared cultural background, the calf may be more appropriate than the ox in the painting's title.
Naturally, Chagall had ideological hesitations about crossing religious boundaries in his paintings. As a young man of twenty, before leaving for St. Petersburg to study art, he went with his mother to Lubavitsh to see the head of the Chabad Hasidic sect and ask for his advice; characteristically for that time, the Rebbe told him he must judge for himself. And half a century later, Chagall wrote to the first Israeli President Chaim Weitzmann, invoking the traditional authority of the Rebbe, and asked for advice from "the highest Jewish authority" about whether to accept a commission for a Christian church. According to Chagall, who felt apologetic toward his Jewish friends, Weitzman, too, answered that Chagall must decide for himself. And he did.
In Chagall's art, writing plays a conspicuous role. To be sure, words or parts of words were used by Picasso and his followers in France and in Russia (for example, Kazimir Malevich). Chagall, however, often uses long texts, and the textual engagement of his paintings are usually complex. This was plainly a function of Chagall's origins and interests in Jewish culture, which had been a profoundly textual culture. The Jews had no cathedrals filled with art objects (even though synagogue art--limited as it is--was extolled in Chagall's generation). Their "otherness" was fully embodied in their "other" letters, their writing in the "opposite" direction, and their "other" and essentially private library. In Chagall's works, texts fulfill a global function, representing the culture of his fictional world.
The quoted words also fill numerous specific functions, often simultaneously. They serve as synechdoches, a part of objects in the represented world (for example, inscriptions in a cemetery); they issue multimedia signals, suggesting nonvisual aspects of the represented frame of reference (referring, for example, to the song "Bridegroom's Voice, Bride's Voice" with the image of the Dancer in the theater mural Dance); they offer titles for some of the other material in the painting; they present allusions that bring in additional frames of reference that are otherwise indiscernible in the painting proper (biblical quotes and references to biblical events); they serve as a metalanguage that shows the artist's interference in his presented world (such as the tiny names of his family members inserted in longhand in Introduction to the Yiddish Theater; and they fulfill a design function within the composition of the painting.
Chagall often writes a text and subsequently erases part of it, leaving the full content as his own private knowledge--a mystifying gesture that appears on other levels of his paintings as well. Further, he deforms words and texts, just as he does other represented objects, perhaps because he originally had in mind two different audiences but increasingly lost the audience that could read the Hebrew and Yiddish inscriptions. In spite of his acculturation and his shift to speaking Russian or French, most of the texts in his paintings are in Hebrew letters, whether the language be Hebrew or Yiddish. Russian rarely appears as an independent text, but as an object within a represented reality: a sign on a store, a newspaper headline (War!), or a quotation from a revolutionary slogan in the early Soviet years (such as Lenin's slogan War on the Palaces!). 35 Although most of Chagall's long texts are biblical quotations or quotations of Hebrew inscriptions, they are always set within the world of Yiddish; there is no independent Hebrew text or sentence composed by him in his uvre. 36
One example of Hebrew text appears in The Cemetery Gate ( 11), apparently a realistic painting from nature made in his "Vitebsk period." The colors, however, are not realistic at all. The upper part is treated in a cubist manner, while the lower half, almost photographic, offers an unrealistic textual collage. On each of the two pillars of the gate is a long indecipherable text, such as may be found on a tombstone, precisely written out and then obscured, as if worn away with time; at the heads of both pillars, in large letters, are Hebrew dates, equivalent to 1812-1890. These cannot indicate the opening and closing dates of a real cemetery (certainly not of an ancient cemetery, as Vitebsk had), but must refer to a person's life. Chagall has apparently transferred them from an individual gravestone. Most likely, Chagall, when in Vitebsk, discovered the gravestone of his paternal grandfather, whom he admired for his learning, and was happy to place his date of death, 1890, on a Star of David set upon the peak of his imaginary gate. We know that the grandfather from Lyozno, who had a house in Vitebsk, had died when Chagall was a child, whereupon the family sold his house "in the sands" and moved to a neighborhood in Vitebsk proper. If the dates indeed refer to this grandfather, Marc was three years old when David Chagall died.
The text on the top triangle is from Ezekiel's vision in the Valley of Dry Bones, and here it may speak as much of the resurrection of his grandfather as it does of the resurrection of the Jews, according to a Zionist interpretation. The absent context is: "Then He [God] said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: 37 we are cut off for our parts" (Ez. 37:11). The text on the gate reads, from midverse (Ez. 37:12): "Behold, I will open your grave[s] [and cause] you [to come up] out of your graves, my people / And bring you onto the land [of Israel] [here verse 13 is missing and some text is obfuscated] [and shall put] my spirit in you, and ye shall live." 38 However, the first two clauses are placed in the reverse direction, as in Russian: the first half on the left side, then switching to the right. There is only one change in the biblical text and it is significant: on the horizontal plank, instead of = admat Israel (the soil of Israel), he wrote eretz (the Land), as the Zionists affectionately referred to Palestine. 39 Furthermore, he misspelled eretz, as if it were Yiddish (, beginning with an ayin instead of an alef), indicating a contemporary response. Finally, one may see in the soaring blue sky the Zionist colors.
The Jew in Bright Red ( 12), depicts a weary, ancient Jew with a fiery red beard, clad in black, who sits with his back to a red house. Half-rising, his re suggests that he is about to leave the cluster of shtetl houses immediately behind him, while still looming beyond the house we see a massive yellow halo, like a globe or a sinking sun, covered with a biblical text. The text opens with lekh-lekha: "Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee" (Gen. 12:1). In the original, this chapter promises a "Zionist" vision of going to the Holy Land and becoming a great nation. In folk semiotics, however, and in the Yiddish language, the expression lekh-lekho (get thee out) symbolizes the expulsion of the Jews. This section of the Bible is called parshes lekh-lekho (the chapter or episode of banishment); and it acquired a metaphorical meaning: "Now it is time for the Chapter of Banishment" means not the weekly reading, but its contemporary implementations. Indeed, "Lekh-Lekho" is the title of the last chapter of Sholem-Aleichem's Tevye the Milkman, referring to the expulsion of the Jews from all Russian villages in 1892. But in this painting, no doubt, it refers to the expulsion of a million and a half Jews who had to leave their homes within twenty-four hours, as ordered by the Russian army in the areas near the German front in 1914. Related to the painting, there is a drawing in gouache, india ink, and pencil on paper, titled Remembrance ( 13). Though the Gug-genheim Museum catalogue marks the date as "ca.1918," the drawing has an inscription in Chagall's handwriting: "Erinnerung 1914" (on top of an earlier pencil mark "Chagall 914"). No doubt the inscription was made when Chagall was in Berlin in 1923 (for German is rare in Chagall's texts), and the date 1914 refers to the expulsions (and perhaps the date of his original plan for this painting). This is amply confirmed by the painting's subject, which shows a banished Jew who takes his mother's home with him, on his back.
A related drawing is the so-called Walking Village ( 14) which depicts a whimsical superimposition of a series of houses on a body with human legs, reclining backwards. In fact, this was an illustration in a collaborative work, a book-length poetic cycle entitled Troyer (Grief) by the young Yiddish poet Dovid Hofshteyn (published in Kiev in 1922), with "cover and illustrations by M. [Begin Page 76] Chagall." It is an avant-garde poem, written in response to the pogroms in Ukraine in 1919, that explores the paradox and absurdity of the twin birth of Jewish tragedy and world renewal, with a hyperbolic tone, modernist imagery, avant-garde graphics, and futuristic rhythms. The last poem of the cycle reflects the poet's visit to the recently devastated towns. Destruction and emptiness are covered with the lucid air of autumn, and the poet concludes, "What do I need the lucidity, the clarity / that leaks into the cracks of ruins?" 40 In Chagall's Walking Village, a tiny re pops out of a window with an accusing finger and hurls Hofshteyn's memorable iambic pentameter line into the empty world: vos darf ikh zi di loyterkayt di klore (What do I need the lucidity, the clear, transparent lucidity?), while the reader and the text supply the next line and the full context. In the original drawing itself, we see something like male genitals between the two big legs (this was subsequently erased in the Soviet printing), evidently a popular conception of the psychoanalytical version of the irrationality of this world. The drawing piles on a series of empty, blank houses (ironically, like Suprematist white squares and triangles), with only one sign of life: smoke in the last house. Human legs create a portmanteau image: the body of houses may be seen as a human body leaning unnaturally backwards, smoking a pipe. It may also be the reverse: a town walking.
The received title of this drawing, Walking Village, is rather misleading. In translating the term shtetl people often confused two very different administrative concepts, "village" and "town": in Russia, villages were settlements of Christian peasants who worked the land, places where Jews did not live; while Jewish towns generally had little to do with farming. Since shtetl (small town) is a diminutive of shtot (city) in Yiddish, it would be natural (though misleading) for Chagall, a newcomer in France in 1910, to derive "village" from "ville." But in the context of the poem it is safe to assume that the title is The Town is Walking, which is a Yiddish idiom (di shtot geyt) meaning "the whole town goes"; all the Jews are leaving their hometown, fleeing from pogroms into exile. Indeed, the book opens with a carter and his wagon leaving home (or carrying it away?), depicted on top of a child's head, where we read the inscription, in a child's longhand: "To all those slaughtered before their time" ( 15). 41
Accounting for all the language elements in Chagall's paintings would require an annotated edition that deciphers all the texts and allusions and explains their different cultural levels. Apart from the referential gestures exemplified above, Chagall was a sophisticated user of the language material itself. He treated language as he treated other representational elements in his fictional world and other formal elements on his canvas: deformation and polyphony of voices were his guiding principles, allusion and whimsical twists his constant devices.
Chagall used Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian texts, but often confounded their respective spellings and direction of writing in a multicultural manner. As we know, Hebrew is basically spelled with consonants, while Yiddish evolved a European-type spelling system, including all vowels. Hebrew words within Yiddish, however, use the Hebrew consonantal spelling, to separate the Holy Tongue from the mundane language. After the Communist Revolution, the Hebrew (or "clerical") spelling of Yiddish words was abolished and all words acquired vowel letters. Thus in Mein Leben the inscription on his mother's tombstone reads = ShGL (capitals represent the actual letters; Sh is one letter in Hebrew) while in the same book his father's tombstone reads = ShAGAL, with all vowels filled in. 42 His mother died in 1916 and his father after the Revolution, in 1921. The artist adopted the Soviet spelling and used it throughout his life for his own name and in private correspondence. But in his paintings he played with the differences and their cultural connotations. On several occasions, he signed his paintings in consonants only: = MShH SGL (pronounced: Moyshe Segal), invoking the Jewish art pedigree of an eighteenth-century synagogue painter Chaim Segal. In the painting Rain ( 6), a Russian word is even spelled in consonants: = LVK (for lavka, "store" in Russian), perhaps to indicate Jewish ownership. On the other hand, in the midst of a holy text in The Jew in Green , we find a Yiddish insert, der slutsker magid (the preacher from Slutzk). "Preacher" is a Hebrew term for a religous profession, normally spelled = mgid; by inserting the vowel a, Chagall indicates that the preaching was done in Yiddish.
The interactions between Hebrew and Cyrillic letters often hinged on the direction: Hebrew and Yiddish read right to left, while Russian goes from left to right. Sometimes he changed the direction of a Hebrew text, as we saw in The Cemetery Gate. In one case he even changed the order of the two tablets of the Ten Commandments, indicating his double-directed culture. He signed a painting MARC = MARC [LAGASh] (here, the Yiddish letters are represented in square brackets, as they read in their normal Yiddish order, but when read in reverse they sound ShAGAL). On the stage design of a train, in Sholem-Aleichem's "Agents," he wrote = FAR REYKHER[ers] LK III (for smokers [lk III]); when read in the reverse direction, it says: III cl[ass], mixing Yiddish with Russian.
An interesting case appears in the mural Introduction to the Yiddish Theater, which depicts Efros, the literary director of the theater, bringing Chagall to the stage director Granovski. In a preliminary study for this painting ( 16), the Yiddish inscription above the res, reads = IKSVVONARG LAGASh EFROS. Efros, a Hebrew name traditionally spelled = APRT receives an outrageous Soviet spelling, EFROS. The other two names are inverted; if read in the Russian direction, they read "Shagal Granovski." 43 This is similar to the reversible rhymes (perevertini) in Russian Futurism, but it also expresses the multicultural symbiosis of Chagall's generation. In the actual painting, moreover ( 17), Chagall deletes a letter in both his and Efros's names and inserts miniature drawings of a literary critic and a painter instead, thus achieving a double-media denotation. Further, in writing in the director's name, he changes = S into = T, and repeats the first syllable twice: IKTIKTVNARG. When read in reverse, we get GRANV (only half of the Yiddish VV is left; the rest is redundant), but when read from left to right we get IKT IKT, the Russian acronym of Granovski's theater as spelled in Yiddish: "Ievreyskyj Kamernyj Teatr" (Jewish Chamber Theater). This is a double characterization that combines the name of the director and his theater, also underlining the fact that the director of the Yiddish theater spoke not Yiddish, but Russian.
Similar close attention to cultural details can be seen in the use of typefaces in Chagall's paintings. In the Ashkenazi religious tradition, which he knew from his childhood, Hebrew letters appeared in several socially determined categories of typefaces: The so-called square letters (mostly based on straight lines or round backbones but with the thickness elaborated in curvaceous forms and ornaments) were obligatory in handwritten Torah Scrolls and in printings of the Bible, having an aura of "holy text." In the Bible, the letters were accompanied by markers of vocalization and syntactic-musical reading accents, in the form of tiny dots, dashes, and other markers below, above, and inside letters. Moderate square letters were used as normal typefaces in printed Hebrew and Yiddish, usually printed without the vocalization markers. Typically, in engravings on a tombstone, the curvaceous embellishments could be moderate, as imitated by Chagall in The Cemetery Gate or as later developed by him in casual floating biblical names in his stained-glass windows. Rashi letters were used for commentaries printed on the margins of a Bible or Talmud: a commentary must never be confused with the holy text itself. Vayber-taytsh, (women's typeface)--a special script between printed and cursive--was used for books for women on religious topics in Yiddish. All Hebrew words within the Yiddish, however, are printed in Hebrew square letters, and placed in parentheses in midsentence, between the feminine words, not to mix the feminine and masculine. Written letters were used for writing in longhand: for personal correspondence, manuscripts, and the like (with "childish" and "adult" varieties).
Chagall used square letters to indicate textual quotations from religious texts, and moderate square letters for other "serious" purposes. He--and the whole secular movement--would rarely use the second-class Rashi or the women's scripts. He often used "written" letters for the painter's personal message (e.g., the list of his siblings and parents in Introduction to the Yiddish Theater) or to indicate a character's personal statement ("I am an acrobat," "I am frolicking," written on the belts of the clowns standing on their heads).
Yet he also used the following types: Modern printed letters, which were developed in Yiddish and Hebrew secular literature; Geometrical letters, which reduce all letter shapes to straight strokes or semicircles, as developed in the modern movement. Such letters were used in Constructivist designs of book covers and in secular Yiddish schools and institutions--for headlines, front pages, invitations, posters, etc., and were often given fancy geometrical forms and three-dimensional bodies.
One example is the cover of the Soviet Yiddish literary journal = ShTROM ( 18) ("stream" or "torrent," connoting both the torrential stream of the Revolution and the slogan of "going with the stream," accepting it). The title is drawn on a diagonal bias, a favorite device of Chagall. The first letter Sh is fully geometrical, but inverts the traditional manner: in "square" letters, the base is thick and the three diagonal strokes are thin; while here the base is just a line, whereas the right side is thick. The body of the side stroke and the heads of the two others are of a precise, quadrangular form, rather than the traditional curving sides and heads. The geometrical bodies are used as a background for "construction" themes. The second letter, T, has a geometricized imitation of the traditional rounded upper part. The third and fourth letters (R, O) are modern, simplified, and stylized imitations of square letters, whimsically Chagallized. The fifth letter, closing M (used only at the end of a word) is again geometrically "square" in its sides and in its overall closure--yet the parallel lines move slightly apart, making dynamic the whole. The rectangle head has a symbolic dollop on top. Thus Chagall uses his "demonstrative eclecticism" repeatedly to evoke juxtapositions and surprises inside each letter and between the letters. The allusions to the distinct typefaces and their cultural connotations are not lost on the reader.
Furthermore, the sides of the letters can be used as backgrounds for Chagallian little res and shaded spaces. In the rectangular base of two of the geometrical "printed" letters, "written" letters announce in Soviet spelling, "monthly journal." 44 The written letters, however, have an unusual thickness that is rendered sometimes as a white and sometimes as a dark surface. These provide an intimate, casual feeling to the Constructivist ShTROM, like a personal letter to the reader; yet the Constructivist part itself has been softened and humanized in the middle (which El Lissitzky, taking Constructivism seriously, would never have done) through the portrait of the head of a high school boy, one of Chagall's emblems indicating general (Russian) education.
A very different cover was made two years later in Paris for the Yiddish Expressionist literary journal = KhALYASTRE (Happy Gang; 19). To indicate "the Jews (Yiddish literature) conquer Paris," his atheist friends are made to wear emblems of religious garb. The Eiffel Tower and the rectangular leaning houses of his Paris paintings are here, as are the lines and clusters of tiny dots. The "beautiful" (with his thick, "feminine" lips) Peretz Markish hangs down the top of the Eiffel Tower, holding the title Khalyastre (which turns into a building), and the climbing Oyzer Varshavski on the right proudly holds a banner: Paris. A boy, Chagall himself, holds out the number of the issue, 2. The text is in simplified, square letters, mocked and disrupted: the A wants to walk away, the second A turns its foot backwards and has dots instead of its central diagonal backbone; and in Paris the first is a written letter, with the others printed, yet rounded and moving in a written direction. By juxtaposing typefaces, subverting and mixing them, Chagall turns them into malleable graphic bodies; he uses their social functionality, ironizes it, and foregrounds its problematic nature.
Throughout his career, Chagall has evoked interest in major centers of art by means of his exotic pictorial world and surreal compositions. Yet the extent to which his work owes its density of meaning to his local culture has not been fully explored. Oversights and mistaken readings of Jewish texts and subtexts are routine in recent criticism of Chagall, even in the work of excellent scholars who have contributed greatly to our understanding of his uvre. A recent book on Chagall in Russia, for example, reproduces an illustration to a Yiddish children's tale in verse by Der Nister, and subtitles it "The Sleeping Man and the Cockerel"; yet inside the drawing itself there is a Yiddish inscription in large, childish letters: "Little Grandma died"--a reference to the poem, which plainly should have been read. 45 In another book the black hole on (the open-mouthed) grandma's face is interpreted as a beard, producing the title Man in Bed and Rooster. 46
An eminent Chagall specialist claims that in Chagall's milieu they "used Hebrew mainly to talk to rabbis, preachers, and wandering men of God," while in fact no one, including the rabbis and preachers, spoke Hebrew at the time. The same scholar identifies the painting Feast Day as taking place on Purim instead of the serious Sukoth, as the fruit (ethrog and lulav) in the man's hand and his solemn posture indicate; it would be like confusing Halloween with Christmas. 47 Yet another important Chagall scholar discusses two versions of The Pinch of Snuff based on a reading that assumes one has an inscription "Life" and the other "Death"; but actually the inscriptions (on the curtain of a Torah Scroll) read = HI (abbreviation of God's name), not = XI (alive) and = ST (Torah Scroll) not = MT (dead). 48 Even specialists on Jewish art make similar mistakes. Hebrew and Yiddish cultures parted company at the turn of the century, and living in Jerusalem does not guarantee a deep knowledge of the Yiddish world. As the Hebrew saying goes, "This is a discipline and it requires study."
Ziva Amishai-Maisels, who has written several detailed Chagall studies, has developed what amounts to a conspiracy theory, in which Chagall appears as a great manipulator who inscribed his personal grudges (against Malevich, Lissitzky, Granovski, the Christians, the Jews) as crossword puzzles in his paintings. In her "In-Jokes" paper she claims that Chagall "purposely [sic!] used Yiddish idioms and other Jewish sources in his early works in a manner which made them incomprehensible to the Christian world." And in the second version of her interpretation of "Chagall's Murals for the State Jewish Chamber Theater," 49 she accuses Chagall of duplicity. On the one hand, "by visually translating Yiddish idioms," "which would be understood neither by Russian nor French Christians...he could even assail with impunity the Christian religious paintings which influenced him." On the other hand, "he showed his discomfort with Judaism by utilizing modern formal elements which he felt Jews would be less likely to understand." But Chagall hardly needed to show discomfort with Judaism: his Jewish milieu and viewers were secular atheists who also admired the formal innovations of modern art. Nor is the use of Yiddish idioms an intentionally anti-Christian act. No evidence in Chagall's writings or private correspondence supports such a view.
Such claims are based on an essentialist ideology of racial "identity," which runs counter to the cosmopolitan, ambivalent, and polyphonic consciousness of secular Jews in the twentieth century. Maisels's references to Chagall's "identity-pendulum" and "the constant oscillations in Chagall's [national] self-image" 50 are based on the assumption of univalent ethnic identities (either Jewish or French), and yet even her periodization of Chagall's identity cannot be sustained. When, in her view, Chagall allegedly "returned to full assimilation within the French world in 1923-35," 51 he, at the same time, made some forty illustrations to three volumes of Lyesin's Yiddish poetry, 52 illustrated the Bible from a Yiddish translation, corresponded with Yiddish writers, published Yiddish poetry, and appealed to the YIVO (yidisher visnshaftlekher institut [Yiddish Scientific Institute]) in Vilna in 1929 to erect an international museum of Jewish art. At the same time, he complained that Jews did not appreciate or commission art, and himself did little work directly treating Jewish topics. In theoretical terms, moreover, the artist's private pronouncements are not necessarily identical with the complexity of his art; Freud, Kafka, or Einstein were more concerned with their Jewishness in private correspondence than in their creative work.
Was Chagall a "Jewish artist"? Or was he a Russian, French, or modern artist? Is Salman Rushdie an Indian, Iranian, Muslim, or British artist? Is Gauguin a Tahitian painter? Imposing a contemporary need for exclusive racial identity on Chagall only brings him back to the ghetto he strove to escape, and inadvertently excludes him from the more universal canon of major modern artists. Today, we know much more about the role of culture in art, and can understand that most creative work is done at an intersection of several cultural strains. All Third World cultures exhibit this daily. But identifying blood with form does not help. The importance of cultural density and its interaction with formal problems requires our knowledge of all cultural sources. An essentialist definition of an artist is unnecessarily reductive and largely counterproductive; only a perspectival cluster of several constructs will do justice to a body of art as complex and multivalent as that of Chagall.
The tensions between local culture and the new languages or arts were fruitful for many artists of the period. Thus a recent major exhibition of Joan Mirce to a body of art as complex and multivalent as that of Chagall.
e of all cultural sources. An essentional Catalan." 53 Jewish language and literature represent the earliest, linguistic layers of Chagall's consciousness and are an essential part of his private fictional world. It is no accident that the oral subtexts are primarily in the "oral" language, Yiddish, and the written texts are in the "Holy Tongue," Hebrew. Russian and French literary subtexts were added in his illustrations when emanating from specific books, such as the exquisite Russian provincial world of Gogol's Dead Souls. And all those were perceived through painterly conceptions of the European avant-garde and interacted with their stylistic tendencies: at first, Russian Neo-Primitivism, the Russian reception of the Fauves, and the "World of Art" decorative style, then cubism and Suprematism. In its sources, Chagall's art represents cultural and stylistic eclecticism. Yet eclecticism was a salient hallmark of many modernist artists. Since the invention of cubism by Braque and Picasso, most artists felt impelled to negotiate new combinations between cubist and other elements. Indeed, the history of culture is a history of eclectic combinations and recombinations. There is no reason to privilege a "pure" style over an "eclectic" style, or, as we may call it, a polyphonic style; nor should Malevich (though historically important and easily definable) be ranked above the richer and more imaginative Chagall.
Benjamin Harshav (Hrushovski) is Professor of Comparative Literature, the J. and H. Blaustein Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature, and Professor of Slavic Literatures at Yale University. He was formerly director of the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University, and editor of HaSifrut (Literature) and Poetics Today. His recent publications in English include Language in the Time of Revolution (California, 1993) and Marc Chagall and the Jewish Theater (Guggenheim Museum, 1992).
* All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own.
1. This paper is a continuation of my study "Chagall: Postmodernism and Fictional Worlds in Painting" in Marc Chagall and the Jewish Theater (New York: Guggenheim Musem, 1992), 15-63, 133-203; and of its expanded Hebrew version, "Marc Chagall: Painting, Theater, World," Alpayim: A Multidisciplinary Publication for Contemporary Thought and Literature 8 : 9-97.
2. See my Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
3. Werner Haftman, Marc Chagall (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1973), 7.
4. I discussed this issue in detail in my essays mentioned in note 1. See especially the analysis of I and the Village and Introduction to the Yiddish Theater.
5. See Tomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Harvard University Press 1986) and my "Fic-tionality and Fields of Reference," Poetics Today 5 : 227-51.
6. Blaise Cendrars, "Portrait" (October 1913), in Selected Writings of Blaise Cendrars, ed. Walter Albert (New York: New Directions, 1966).
7. See The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even: A Typographical Version by Richard Hamilton (New York: Jaap Rietman Inc., 1960).
8. This issue was known in Chagall reception from the beginning, especially in Yiddish criticism; see Chone Shmeruk, "Marc Chagall and the Moscow Yiddish Chamber Theater" (in Yiddish), Di Goldene keyt 137 . Chagall himself wrote in his Yiddish autobiography, "I turn around and see my painting where people are 'outside of themselves.'" Ziva Amishai-Maisels ("Chagall's Jewish In-Jokes," Journal of Jewish Art 5 [1978]: 76-93) raised the issue in a systematic manner; there are, however, many mistakes and omissions in her reading of the Yiddish and unacceptable allegorizations. It is also not clear why the central images of a culture should be called "in-jokes."
9. Marc Chagall, My Life (New York: Orion Press, 1960), 13. Another version appears in Marc Chagall, "eygens: autobiographie" (From my own world: Autobiography), tsukunft 30 : 160.
10. This image appears in Julien Cain, The Lithographs of Chagall, vol. 1 (Monte Carlo: André Sauret, 1960), 27.
11. An excellent study of the theory of idioms, including many Yiddish examples, is Uriel Weinreich's "Problems in the Analysis of Idioms," in her On Semantics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 208-64.
12. A classical collection of Yiddish proverbs offers an additional, semi-rhymed variant: a ku iz ibern dakh gefloygn / hot dem shvantz tsebrokhn (a cow flew over the roof / and broke her prick) (Ignaz Bernstein, yudishe shprikhverter un redensarten [Warsaw 1908], 233).
Many cows sit on roofs in Chagall's paintings.
13. John Hollander tells me that Meyer Schapiro lectured on this idiom in Over Vitebsk. Amishai-Maisels, discussing this painting ("Chagall's Jewish In-Jokes," 89), obviously doesn't know the idiom and the literary cluster attached to it, but quotes another expression, geyt ibern dorf (literally: walks over the village) which she translates as "to pass through a town"--but this is not an idiom but a sentence; and Vitebsk, the capital of a gubernia, was hardly a village (there is a world of difference between a Christian village and a Jewish town!).
14. Mendele Moykher Sforim, kitzer masoes binyomin ha-shlishi (Vilna: Widow and Brothers Romm, 1878), 4.
15. Ibid., 27.
16. The expressions "Going into exile" (geyn in goles) and "conducting exile" (praven goles) are also used for a man who leaves his town and family to repent for his sins, or goes to places of study, or leaves to seek his fortune, sleeping in prayer houses on the road, with no place to rest. For a powerful example, see I. B. Singer's novel Yoshe Kalb.
17. The original reads:
Mit dem vandershtab in hant,
On a heym un on a land;
On a goyel, on a fraynd,
On a morgn, on a haynt,
Nit geduldet nor geyogt,
Vu genekhtikt nit getogt,
Imer vey, vey, vey,
Imer gey, gey, gey,
Imer shpan, shpan, shpan,
Kol zman koyakh iz faran.
Morris Rosenfeld, "A Goles Marsh," in Shriftn, vol. 1 (New York: A. M. Evalenko, 1908), 100.
18. "Packages," the symbol of a Jewish wanderer.
19. Chagall's letters to Opatoshu, in the YIVO Jewish Research Institute archives, New York.
20. The "elevated mood," "ecstasy," or "trance" of love lift the lovers off the ground; a fast moving carriage is said to be "flying by" (farbaygefloygn); er flit in di himlen (he is soaring in the heavens) means elation or fantasy and delusion; zayn kop flit in himl (his head is flying in the sky) implies unsubstantiated fantasy.
21. Mendele Moykher Sforim, seyfer ha-beheymes (The Book of livestock) in Ale Shriften, vol. 2, bk. 1 (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1910), 75.
22. Mendele Moykher Sefarim, "be-seter ra'am," in kol kitvey mendele mokher sefarim (Collected writings of Mendele Moykher Sefarim) (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1950), 379.
23. Sholem-Aleichem, "The Violin," in Stories for Jewish Children, vol. 1 (New York: Sholem Aleichem Folksfand, 1918), 42.
24. Ibid, 63, 75.
25. Bella Chagall, brenendike likht (Burning candles) (New York: Book League of the Jewish Fraternal Order, 1945), passim. It was suggested that the idea came from Ovid; but Ovid has only "time is a river," an idea from Greek philosophy, without the decisive clause that creates the paradox: "a river with no banks."
26. Bernstein, yudishe shprikhverter un redensarten, 130, 290.
27. See the English translation in the Guggenheim catalogue, Marc Chagall and the Jewish Theater, 173-74.
28. Raissa Maritain, Marc Chagall (New York: Edition de la Maison française, 1943).
29. See, for example, the themes and sources of Buddhism, Christianity, psychoanalysis, the Russian Revolution, American politics, and so on, in American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
30. Edited by Peretz Markish and Oyzer Varshavski respectively; they translated Chagall's autobiography from Russian into Yiddish in 1924-25, when all of them lived in Paris.
31. Uri-Tsvi Grinberg, "Uri-Tsvi Before the Cross / INRI," Albatros: Journal for the New Expression of Poets and Artist 2 (November 1922): 3.
32. Uri-Tsvi Grinberg, "In the Kingdom of the Cross," in Collected Yiddish Works, Vol. II: 1922-1958 (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1979), 394, 431, 433, 459, 460.
33. Story written by M. Z. Fayerberg in Hebrew in 1897 and published in 1899.
34. Zalman Shazar, Di Goldene keyt 60 : 33.
35. See the half-effaced slogan in Peace to Huts--War on Palaces in Marc Chagall: The Russian Years, 1906-1922, ed. Christoph Vitali (Frankfurt: Schirn Kurnsthalle, 1991), image 134.
36. For the illustrations to the Bible that Chagall made in 1930-31, he used the brilliant Yiddish translation of the Bible by the American Yiddish poet Yehoash (sent to him by his friend Y. Opatoshu from New York) and the images of the patriarchs are perceived in Eastern European Jewish terms. Chagall had no Hebrew beyond Bar-Mitzva, and in his Yiddish correspondence throughout the years, he makes elementary mistakes in the Hebrew words.
37. The Zionist hymn "Ha-Tikva" begins with a verse protesting these words: "Our hope is not yet lost."
38. Authorized King James Version.
39. Chagall's Zionist leanings were covered up during the Revolutionary times, and revived during the thirties and forties. In the murals for the Soviet Yiddish theater he paints "Carmel" wine from Eretz-Israel, a Zionist gesture. It is plausible that The Cemetery Gate refers to the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, promising a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The painting was postdated "1917" and certainly does not refer to the October Revolution.
40. David Hofshteyn, Troyer (Kiev: kultur-lige, 1922). The couplet was translated in Franz Meyer's Chagall biography as "What do I need her for, / the sincerity, the purity?" which does not convey the real meaning of this text. Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall: Life and Work (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1963), 742
41. And not, as the usual translation goes: "To those who departed before their time."
42. The images are reprinted in My Life, facing pages 10 and 146. ShGL is a variant of SGL (Segal), a Hebrew acronym, hence spelled with consonants only.
43. From the Biblical vocalization it is clear that he pronounced his own name "Lagash," while "Granovski" he read left to right.
44. Literally, "Monthly Notebooks": khoydesh (month) is a Hebrew word spelled HDSh, now Sovietized; heftn, "issues," like the French cahiers.
45. Alexandr Kamensky, Chagall: The Russian Years 1907-1922 (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 245. In addition, the image is printed in reverse and the text appears in mirror script.
46. Marc Chagall, ed. Vitali, image 99.
47. Werner Haftman, Marc Chagall (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1973), 20.
48. Susan Compton, Chagall (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1985), 177.
49. Ziva Amishai-Maisels, "Chagall's Murals for the State Jewish Chamber Theater," in Chagall: Dreams and Drama, ed. Ruth Apter-Gabriel (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1993), 21-39.
50. Ziva Amishai-Maisels, "Chagall's Jewish In-Jokes," 76-77.
51. Ziva Amishai-Maisels, "Chagall's Murals for the Jewish Theater" in Marc Chagall, ed. Vitali, 107-27. This is an earlier version of the essay that appears in Chagall, ed. Apter-Gabriel.
52. Abraham Walt (Abraham Lyesin), lider un poemen (1888-1938) (Poems and long poems [1888-1938]), 3 vols. (New York: Forverts Association, 1938).
53. Carolyn Lanchner, Joan Miro (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1993), 19.
Joy is the proof by nines.
--Oswald de Andrade, "Cannibal Manifesto"
December 24, midnight--Christmas dinner. The European tradition was imitated in everything: the music, the large illuminated pine tree adorning the back of the drawing room and even in certain delicacies: chestnuts, dates, apricots. This lack of authenticity irks the purists of customs, who demand a tropical expression of the Christmas celebrations. I don't know whether they're right and if a substitution is really possible. I'm inclined to believe that all this might even be more powerful, here, than in its countries of origin.
--Osman Lins, The Queen of the Prisons of Greece 1
Antropofagia (cannibalism), an iconoclastic movement within Brazilian literary modernism, drew upon the theme of cannibalism as a central motif for its theoretical and artistic program in the insouciant Revista de Antropofagia (Cannibal Magazine) (1928-29); its principal res, the writer-intellectual Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954) and the painter Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973), have long been recognized as powerful artists of major significance and international status. Brazilian cannibalism created one of the most innovative theories to be derived from the modernist fascination with the primitive, 2 and was characterized by its mocking appropriation, inversion, and local application of European models, among them the rhetoric of manifestos and the primitivist discoveries of the European avant-gardes, both transposed to the spaces and races of Brazil's vast interior. Antropofagia exploits its avant-garde posture to address the question of Latin American cultural autonomy in dialogue with the primitivism then attracting attention in Europe. Vitally engaged with the question of Latin American cultural autonomy, Antropofagia was a bold, provocative, if also ambiguous, attempt to respond to the conflicting imperatives of cultural nationalism and pluralist cosmopolitanism in a post-colonial context. Yet ever since the movement was first formed in the late 1920s, and continuing to the present, their work has been repeatedly taxed with charges of impurity and inauthenticity, with being essentially a derivative imitation of the European avant-gardes and lacking genuine roots in the soil of Brazilian culture. Moreover, since the revival of interest in "cannibalism" in the 1960s, antropofagia has been accused of failing to offer a cultural program with serious social or political consequences for Brazil, a charge that indirectly reinforces the earlier complaints about cosmopolitan uprootedness. While these claims usefully acknowledge certain limitations inherent in antropofagia from the beginning, they also slight the genuine ambivalence of the movement's responses to European culture and neglect the complexity of the Brazilian socio-cultural setting in which that response was formulated. The choice that faced the cannibalists was not so much between imported art and indigenous practice, or between cultural colonialism and native resistance, but between one version of nationalism, itself already saturated with European notions of the telluric and soon to prove all too amenable to the spurious nationalism of the Vargas regime, and another more nuanced sense of cultural autonomy that explored the cross-relationship of primitive Brazil with modernist Europe. 3 Antropofagia owed little to ideas of recovering a lost authenticity and instead adopted a more self-reflective and theoretical concept of national identity as constructed difference. Largely forgotten, or even studiously neglected by official cultural authorities in Brazil, this notion of identity may prove to be a strategy of enduring value. Moreover, it may also help us reconsider the increasingly reductive dichotomy between European derivatives and indigenous authenticity. In the fractured world of post colonialism, the choice is not between purity and its opposite, but between competing kinds of impurity whose values are inseparable from settings and circumstances.
To be sure, the origins of antropofagia are inseparable from contemporary European fascination with the primitive. One of the crucial lessons the Brazilians learn from the Parisian movements is how to value the ethnic diversity and racial heterogeneity that would allow Brazil to claim a primitivism of its own. The modernists from São Paulo assert the primacy and superiority of man and nature in the New World, in a reversal of nineteenth-century ideas about race and climate. Their position is strengthened from their Parisian vantage point, where Amaral's studio is a center of euphoria and exoticism in the world of primitive art in the 1920s. 4 Surveying Brazil from their urban and erudite perspective, they come to equate indigenism, folklore, and ethnicity with an authentic national cultural definition. Although not indigenous or folkloric themselves, the artists find it natural to incorporate indigenous and folkloric themes into their works and to claim them as their own, as equally valid representations of Brazilian reality. In Paris, the Brazilian artists appropriate the expressive qualities of European primitivism and art nègre, and especially the themes of excess and appetite that they recognize as apt for Brazil. They use the forms provided by the plastic arts, the manifesto, Freudian theory, and primitivist ethnology aesthetically to model these themes into their own "primary materials." Through a calculated reformulation of these common forms and themes, the Brazilians place themselves in a position both to rewrite their national history and to cast themselves as the rejuvenated descendants of the "sad races"--a term popularized by poet Olavo Bilac that reflects the late nineteenth-century social Darwinist and racialist theories of inferiority that had been applied to Brazil's non-European and multiracial population. Tarsila do Amaral and Oswald de Andrade embody the modernists' counterconception of racial diversity as strength in the re of the cannibal who sits at the origin of natural philosophies, perfectly in harmony with them. 5
Antropofagia will be described here in terms of avant-garde aesthetics as an avenue to postcolonial intellectual autonomy. 6 The cannibal artists reject an intermediary identity that would cross Europe with Brazil, and instead rebel against Europe, while at the same time, paradoxically, drawing on their European experiences and education to define Brazil as pure difference. In the cannibal, the Brazilian group finds an aggressive symbol capable of subverting the primitivism then in vogue in Europe, in order to rewrite colonial history and invert the relationship between center and periphery. They exploit primitivism conceptually by constructing a wild cultural and philosophical theory, in which primitivism reconstructs national identity. Antropofagia replaces the predominant colonial models with primal, indigenous, Amazonian scenarios.
The central document of the cannibalist movement is Andrade's "Manifesto Antropofago" (Cannibal Manifesto), 7 which begins by declaring that the birth of logic was never permitted among the cannibals. The manifesto follows a disorienting method of inversion, incorporation, and metamorphosis, by which any entity can become its other by subjection to the cannibalistic metaphor of ingestion, symbiosis, and change: "Cannibalism.... The world's single law. Disguised expression of all individualisms, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties." The dynamic is one of transformation, in which the concepts of race and ethnicity are ultimately brought to bear on questions of identity, legitimacy, and authenticity. By allying themselves with cannibalism in a gesture of playful exuberance, Brazilian avant-garde artists reinvent primitive society from a New World perspective. They explore cannibalism as a metaphor, broadened to include other ritual practices, in a theory of national autonomy and development opposed to Europe. First, they reverse colonial Brazilian historiography: "Down with all the importers of canned consciousness. The palpable existence of life. And the pre-logical mentality for Mr. Lévy-Bruhl to study." 8 They question the ethics of discovery: "Down with the antagonistic sublimations. Brought here in caravels. Down with the truth of missionary peoples." Second, substituting periphery for center, they propose indigenous society as a mythical locus for renewing Western social philosophy, ethnography, and art: "We already had Surrealist language. The Golden Age. Magic and Life." The cannibal occupies a remote site to which the West is perennially and unconsciously returning in search of social and economic utopias. Thus, antropofagia's rediscovery of the primitive New World is also placed in counterpoint with colonial texts of discovery. Working with an avant-garde vocabulary, they devised a clever point-counterpoint that was influenced by the logic of anti-art manifestos.
Two artworks, separated by four centuries, introduce and orient the interpretation of antropofagia in the 1920s, with respect to both its effort to recast national cultural history and its attempt to establish a complex, reflexive relationship with Europe and the European avant-garde. The first work consists of fifty-six woodcuts printed in the original 1557 edition of the travels of Hans Staden, a German adventurer who was captured during his first trip to Brazil by the cannibalistic Tupinambá tribe. The woodcuts illustrate Staden's experiences during his eight years with the tribe, which he called wild, naked, fierce, and cannibalistic. Several woodcuts depict an orgiastic banquet in the central ground of the village, where tribal maidens are greedily devouring roasted body parts ( 1). 9 The primitive style of the woodcuts enhances the impression of barbarity given by the cannibal scenes. While some victims are being dismembered and devoured, others are shown awaiting their fate, creating an account that could be called "black" anthropology. In Brazil, these scenes were reprinted and popularized in a deeply ironic vein in the first "dentition" of the Revista de Antro-pofagia, used to illustrate the first printing of Andrade's manifesto.
The second work is a painting by Tarsila do Amaral, dated 11 January 1928 and titled Abaporu; see cover illustration). 10 It depicts in brilliant colors a featureless savage with crossed legs, a large foot, and a small head sitting in a stylized tropical landscape of cacti and sun. With their static forms and dynamic undercurrents of color, Amaral's paintings suggest a neoclassical modernity of simple yet excessive elements that is visibly linked to her apprenticeship with Fernand Léger. The indigenous res are depicted as pure form and volume without movement, as massive sculptures of bodies that are all color and shape, and possess a neoclassical balance. Excess is conveyed aesthetically through giant forms that defy the canvas's capacity to contain them, and is expressed culturally in the symbol of a prolific nature, a lemon slice of sun. Prepared for her husband Oswald de Andrade's birthday, Amaral's canvas becomes the most significant piece in her antropofagia phase and, predating the manifesto, founds the icon-ography of Brazil's avant-garde primitivism, anticipating the ideological tenets of Andrade's literary manifesto. 11