Between Jerusalem and Albion. - Review - book review

New Stories for Old: Biblical Patterns in the Novel. By HAROLD FISCH. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.

The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake. By HAROLD FISCH. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.

A generation ago, before Israeli English departments committed themselves to becoming, in Zionist lingo, like the nations by emulating the critical fashions (currently studies in gender, class, and race) of American and European universities, they were distinguished by a group of remarkable scholar-critics who were also committed Zionists. Among them were the late Dorothea Krook at Tel-Aviv, Murray Roston at Bar-Ilan, and H. M. Daleski at Hebrew University. But none has had a longer or more fully-achieved and distinguished career than Harold Fisch, a transplanted Englishman (product of Sheffield and Oxford Universities) and for many years Head of the English Department at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan. For over half a century Fisch has been publishing books and articles (in Hebrew and English) covering the whole range of English and American literature (with special emphasis on the Renaissance), Jewish subjects ancient and modem, and the relations (literary, political, spiritual) between Jerusalem and Albi on.

Fisch's first article, "The Evolution of the Jew in Early English Literature," appeared in 1946. Shortly thereafter he published scholarly essays in English studies on Bishop Hall, on Francis Bacon and Thomas Sprat, and, simultaneously, on Zionism, Hebrew literature, and Jewish history and religion. The permanent center of his scholarly interests became clear in books of 1959 and 1964: The Dual Image: A Study of the Figure of the Jew in English Literature and Jerusalem and Albion: The Hebraic Factor in Seventeenth Century Literature. Over the decades he has returned to this subject again and again, but always enriched it by adding new information and insights, and (this above all) by integrating-but with intelligent selectivity-new modes of criticism and scholarship.

The two new books which are the subject of this review complement most particularly his wonderfully rich book of 1989 entitled Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation (Indiana University Press). In that book, he attended to the biblical text itself, especially the patterns (in the sense both of informing ideas and literary structures) which give to the Bible narratives their unique character. In New Stories for Old and The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake, Fisch is concerned with the reappearance-as re-telling or echoing-of those patterns in prose fiction from the eighteenth century onwards and in three of the greatest English poets.

New Stories for Old has three sections, arranged in chronological order. The first deals with biblical realism in three English novels: Robinson Crusoe, Joseph Andrews, and Silas Marner; the second studies the reworking of the Job story in Kafka, Joseph Roth, and Bernard Malamud (The Fixer); the last evaluates modern visions and revisions of the akedahin Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, A. B. Yehoshua, and S. Y. Aguon. In all the examples discussed, so Fisch argues, the biblical presence is shown in three ways: "first, as authorizing the moral code by which the characters are perceived and judged; second, as undergirding the plot structure; and third, as the model for a particular kind of narrative realism" (8). Fisch argues that reinterpretation or reinvention of the Bible stores became a central feature of the novel from the time it first emerged as a genre.

Fisch's analytic technique is atits most impressive in his discussion of George Eliot's Silos Marner (1860). This shortest of Eliot's novels (which, however, to a couple of generations of American high school students assigned to study it laboriously day after day, seemed as long as Don Quixote) affords Fisch the opportunity to demonstrate that the "obligating power" of the bible source doesn't depend on the author's personal commitment, i.e., acceptance of the divine origin of those texts. Eliot, when she came to write Silas Marner, was an agnostic, yet it is "the most biblically-charged and biblically-haunted novel of its century" (60).

Fisch gives us new eyes with which to read this novel by showing how obsessively Eliot returns to her bible sources for plot and characterization. The story of Lot's rescue from the cities of the plain (Genesis 19) underlies the coming of the infant Eppie to Silas on New Year's Eve. Eliot's tale, like that of Lot, is one of retribution, redemption, and rescue. In chapter 19 of the novel--and Fisch is the first of Eliot's critics to recognize this--the story of Ruth and Naomi is recalled when Eppie makes her choice between Silas and Godfrey Cass, embracing the adoptive father who has loved and reared her in preference to her natural father. But more remarkable is Fisch's revelation of how the Judah-Tamar story (Genesis 38) lurks behind the history of Godfrey and his brother Dunstan. When Dunstan's body is found together with Silas' lost gold, the skeleton is identified by three items of accouterment--his watch, seals, and hunting-whip--just as Judah is unmasked (as the man she has lain with) by Tamar in the b ible story. Most striking of all is the author's revelation of the common element in the three stories--of Lot, Judah, and Ruth: they are all part of a single family history, all stories of redemption, all centered on a woman who takes charge of the situation. The biblical dimension of Eliot's artistry has never been so artfully defined.