The book is an easy, quick read and of course, very enjoyable. Himmelfarb is a great writer and doesn't put in any academic/scholarly/deconstructionist analysis sort of hooey. I don't think it is at all necessary to have read any Eliot in order to understand and appreciate the book. I think she does an excellent job of summing up the main points and memorable segments of Daniel Deronda, which is the main book being discussed here.
I had a big pile of sticky-markers to mark sections that had new and /or exciting points, as I usually do when I read. But I actually didn't mark anything until about halfway through. This is because, as I mentioned, there is a lot of recap. Not only of Eliot's novels, but of her journey in reading various philosophers - which means, a lot of recap of your standard 19th and 18th century Western philosophy.
I think Himmelfarb does a nice job tracing Eliot's intellectual path to come to learn about Judaism, but in the end doesn't really answer the question why. Oh well. It's an interesting path nonetheless.
I started really perking up when Himmelfarb points out that even though Mordechai is the predominant Jewish figure, the book is named after Daniel. Why? "Judaism, for her, although unique in its faith, its people, and its history, was of a whole with the culture and history of mankind...this is why Deronda the disciple, not Mordecai the prophet, is the eponymous hero...Deronda embodies the wholeness of Judaism, retaining the virtues of the English gentleman while discovering and abiding by his true faith as a Jew..."
Well, I've been up to my ears in readings on Moses Mendelssohn and Leopold Zunz in my prep for final exams this week, so this certainly rings a bell, somewhere, on something.
The epilogue is really the best and most interesting part of the book. For example, Himmelfarb wonders how else a book about Jews would have been written by a typical person informed by Victorian attitudes toward Jews. Himmelfarb thinks it is more probable that a hero would have been someone like Klesmer - a "rational" Jew who is cosmopolitan and progressive. But for Eliot, "Her Jewish question was not the relation of Jews to the Gentile world, but the relation of Jews to themselves, to their own people, the beliefs and traditions that were their history and their legacy. This Jewish question was predicated upon a robust Judaism...not a defensive, beleaguered Judaism but an affirmative, even an assertive one."
Well, I certainly like that idea of Judaism too, and I think Deronda embodies that. But then I feel that she starts to exaggerate the point, when she brings in Nathan Sharansky. In comparing ideas from Nathan Sharansky's tract Defending Identity with various letters from Eliot, Himmelfarb finds that both seem to have the idea of "Judaism as a communal faith finding its expression in a national identity." Both the character Deronda and Sharansky came to discover their Jewish identity rather late, and both were excited to find that belonging to a common world or nationality "gives strength not only to community but to the individual as well."
This reminded me of how Himmelfarb took a turn in an essay on the Reform Act of 1867, in a collection called Victorian Minds. The essay is mainly about Disraeli, of course. By the end of the essay Himmelfarb is vehemently asserting that Disraeli and his move to pass the Reform Act was far from an anomaly but in fact was -and is- the very essence of political conservatism. And that in fact conservatives have always been about being flexible and not too ideologically-bound compared to liberals, in any context, and so on and so forth. I got the sense that Ms. Himmelfarb might have been relying too much on contemporary political views in defending past political heroes.
That isn't to say that I didn't fully enjoy both that essay and this book and those particular areas of concern. I actually agree with them, pretty much. But I think that under hard scrutiny, there might be a few too many holes.
Deronda was the first book by Eliot that I read. I was absolutely amazed to find a Victorian novel that was periodically dotted with quotes from Zunz and the Talmud. I was also delighted by the beautiful language and amazingly pin-point descriptions of Eliot (you think to yourself, yes, that's just the way it is sometimes, isn't it?). When I came to the famous pub scene with Mordecai and his buddies, I was blown away. Why is this not standard reading amongst liberal Jewish leaders?
*Okay, here is the sort-of connection between all this and the Navy. Disraeli, who may have in some way been an influence on Eliot's choice of protagonist (same three-syllable D name, Jewish, dark complexioned) appointed Sir Joseph Porter to be First Lord of the Admiralty in his government. Porter was mocked because he apparently had absolutely no experience with ships or the Navy whatsoever (he started out as a newsboy). Porter was probably the inspiration for the Admiral in Gilbert and Sullivan's comic HMS Pinafore. While Queen Victoria's reaction to the operetta was supposedly "We are not amused," Disraeli was in fact highly amused and started calling Sir Porter "Pinafore."
And Himmelfarb notes that "this insistent moral theme, 'that idea of duty,' pervaded all of Eliot's novels...Indeed, it became her trademark." It's true, Deronda gets a bit annoying in this way. The same way that Ralph Rackstraw, from that same operetta, is comically annoying in his insistence on duty. You see where I'm going with this? I'm not entirely sure either.
But I do know that I grew up in a family odd enough that, at an early age, the children knew many of the lyrics to HMS Pinafore. Then I joined the Navy. Then I read a lot of books about Disraeli and by George Eliot. That's really all it is.
No comments:
Post a Comment