Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marc Caplan is the Zelda and Myer Tandetnik Professor of Yiddish Literature, Language, and Culture in the Department of German and Romance Languages of the Johns Hopkins University.

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How Strange the Change

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments................................................................................................xiIntroduction: Apples and Oranges: On Comparing Yiddish and African Literatures.................................11. Defining Peripheral Modernism...............................................................................252. One Tale, Two Tellers.......................................................................................52Conclusion.....................................................................................................713. Haskole and Negritude Compared..............................................................................834. Education and Initiation in the Narratives of Haskole and Negritude.........................................120Conclusion.....................................................................................................1565. Mendele's Mare and Soyinka's Interpreters...................................................................1676. Mendele's Benjamin the Third and Kourouma's Suns of Independence............................................210Conlusion......................................................................................................242The Future of the "Minor" in Minority Literatures..............................................................245Notes..........................................................................................................259Bibliography...................................................................................................325Index..........................................................................................................337

Chapter One

The terms "tradition" and "modernity," to say nothing of "transition," are complicated and procrustean enough to elude succinct definition. One can nonetheless summarize the aspects of life transformed through modernization in terms identified by Michel de Certeau: "The generalization of writing has in fact brought about the replacement of custom by abstract law, the substitution of the State for traditional authorities, and the disintegration of the group to the advantage of the individual." Certeau's synecdochal model for modernity as the transition from orality to literacy can be characterized as "supersessionist." Where previously a culture functioned exclusively through the oral transmission of information, values, and collective narratives, the introduction of writing, whether gradually through technological development or suddenly through the imposition of a new social order, fundamentally transforms the formerly traditional culture. This model seems to be apt for understanding the dramatic transition that took place in the purely oral Yoruba culture when it was subjugated in the nineteenth century by the modern, literate British Empire.

With respect to Eastern European Jewish culture, however, writing was always a factor in cultural life, though Yiddish was primarily reserved for oral purposes (with Loshn-koydesh being used primarily in written contexts). In the context of Eastern Europe, it is helpful to modify an apparently rigid dialectic between the oral and the written with reference to an observation by the medievalist Brian Stock: "Understanding how a textually oriented society came into being presupposes a basic chronology of medieval literacy. If we take as our point of departure the admittedly arbitrary date of A.D. 1000, we see both oral and written traditions operating simultaneously in European culture, sometimes working together, but more often in separate zones, such as oral custom and written law." Stock's starting point coincides with Max Weinreich's ultimately no less arbitrary date of 1000 C.E. for the birth of Yiddish, and underscores therefore both the mediating function of Yiddish between "oral custom and written law," as well as the essential proximity of Reb Nakhman's writing, eight hundred years later, to medieval cultural norms.

In terms of the transition from tradition to modernity, however, it is important to stress that for both Eastern European Jews and Independence-era Africans—in contrast with, for example, Western Europe during the Industrial Era, or China in the postimperial era—tradition and modernity do not separate into discrete, generational demarcations, but rather continue to coexist, interact, and compete with one another for several generations. In fact, in imperial contexts such as colonial Africa and nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, tradition is often a site of political contestation, and is itself a means of resistance against a modernity imposed from above. The reconfiguration of "tradition" from a position of authority within a culture to an oppositional force in the face of an imperial hegemony will be a recurring concern of this comparison.

The use of tradition as an oppositional force takes on added significance when one considers that ethnic-Yoruba writers such as Tutuola are preeminent among Africans in using folk traditions to illustrate the transition from tradition to modernity. In a characteristic strategy for peripheral literature, the Anglophone writing of Yoruba authors has typically used the motifs of folklore to apprehend modernity, rather than using the language of modernity—as in the case of, for example, Chinua Achebe's use of narrative realism in Things Fall Apart, or Camara Laye's use of quasi-anthropological discourse in L'enfant noir—to interpret an ostensibly closed-off past. The decision, therefore, to begin this examination of postcolonial African literature with Tutuola not only accords the author appropriate historical status as a pioneer, but also identifies him as a representative of the enduring and adaptive folk tradition itself. The Anglophone literary tradition that he calls into being derives from oral narrative not only themes or examples of "local color," but a formal model for the evolving relationship between tradition and modernity, orality and literacy.

For both Yiddish and African literature, one of the ways that oral, folkloric culture exerts a structural and thematic influence on written narrative is through the pronounced fantastic, supernatural character of the first books in these respective traditions. It thus comes as no surprise that both the Hasidic worldview from which Reb Nakhman emerged and the traditional Yoruba culture of Tutuola's youth are distinguished by the prominent role each accords to modes of esoteric knowledge that combine features of oral transmission with written semiotics: kabala (in general, the mystical "branch" of the tree of Jewish knowledge) for the Hasidim; divination and transformation rituals among the Yoruba. In Tutuola's example, particularly, despite the power disparity between native and imperial belief systems inherent in the colonial situation, a synthesis between the Yoruba and Christian religious traditions in which he was raised was possible because of the syncretism of Yoruba culture as well as the heterogeneous pluralism of modern life. Both Reb Nakhman and Amos Tutuola, with apparently quite different aims, have therefore fashioned...