The Tale of the King s Daughter Exile, the Soul, and the Question of Literature

Transcription

1 Galili Shahar The Tale of the King s Daughter Exile, the Soul, and the Question of Literature 1 The tale is well known: the story of the king s daughter who left home and lives captured in exile, in solitude and sorrow, and prays to be saved and to return to her homeland. The tale has various sources and variations in the Jewish tradition. It can be found in the Midrash literature, in Kabbalistic texts, and in the Chassidic corpus; 1 it has been adapted and retold and has obtained different interpretations, a few of which have become part of the tale itself and have served as a poetic solution that carries a messianic message. The tale of the king s daughter is a story of a feminine body, thrown out and banished, and who prays for redemption. In this tale, however, literature itself is reflected the possibility of telling a story as the expression of exile. The story of the king s daughter is thus the story itself the revealing of what literature is the fate of language in the permanent state of not being at home. This essay discusses three literary versions that deal with the figure of the king s daughter and that offer different perspectives on the question of literature and exile. Although we present here three literary examples, we know that literature itself is never an example. Rather, literature has a life of its own; it embodies a power of resistance, the resistance against becoming an example. Literature refuses to be at home and to find an end. It denies solutions, conclusions, and generalizations, and thus resists becoming an example (an exampling body). Literature is essentially unheimlich (not at home, uncanny), not because of its frightening subjects, figures of anxiety and bodies of denial, but rather because of the way it is delivered. Literature delivers itself in readings and translations, and it relocates itself between the languages. Literature depends on movement, travels and paths of escape. Being in exile thus implies the literary condition itself the necessity/freedom, the compulsion/choice of writing. Nevertheless, the versions of the tale of the king s daughter who lives in exile and prays to be saved and to return home, mark the condition of literature. The 1 The figure of the king s daughter (or the king s son) being banished or lost in exile is found in different versions, for example in the Zohar, in the books Kana and Pliah, and in the legends of the Baal Shem Tov and Rabbi Nachman of Breslav. Bibliographic details will be rendered in the following.

2 110 Galili Shahar tale hints at the condition of the text that asks to be found, to be saved, and to return home, and yet at the same time this text, which we call literature, depends on its resistance the denial, the wish not to be found, not to be saved, and not to return. Literature embodies this movement, the denial of return. It refuses to become a faithful wife, to live within, at home. The tension between home and not being at home, belonging and exile, is the difference that makes the essence of literature. We recall the Hebrew verse the king s daughter is all glorious within. Tradition often interprets this verse as revealing the female vocation of interiority. The king s daughter (i.e., the daughter of Israel) is expected to embody the logic of living within the interior economics of being. The tale of the king s daughter, however, demands a different, ambiguous, complicated reading of the female condition expressed in the state of exile. In this reading the king s daughter does not merely embody the ideal of being at home, but rather presents a critical view about living/writing within. We thus argue that the tale of the king s daughter embodies the dialectic of being, written as a gap (Unheimlichkeit) the gender difference (the female) which also reflects the essence of literature, and delivers its secret its inability to be delivered. 2 Let us turn to the tale and its versions. In one if its adaptations, the story of the king s daughter is quoted by Walter Benjamin when he writes about Franz Kafka s novel Das Schloß in his essay Franz Kafka. Zur zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todes (1934). Benjamin reminds us about the village at the castlemountain, at which K., der Landvermesser, arrives. Benjamin recalls a note by Max Brod who identified the village with a certain colony in Zürau that Kafka once visited. Benjamin, however, has another village in mind. He writes: Es ist das [Dorf] einer talmudischen Legende, die der Rabbi als Antwort auf die Frage erzählt, warum der Jude am Freitagabend ein Festmahl rüstet. Sie berichtet von einer Prinzessin, die in Verbannung, von ihren Landsleuten fern, und in einem Dorf, dessen Sprache sie nicht verstehe, schmachte. Zu dieser Prinzessin kommt eines Tages ein Brief, ihr Verlobter habe sie nicht vergessen, habe sich aufgemacht und sei unterwegs zu ihr. Der Verlobte, sagt der Rabbi, ist der Messias, die Prinzessin die Seele, das Dorf aber, in das sie verbannt ist, der Körper. Und weil sie dem Dorf, das ihre Sprache nicht kennt, anders von ihrer Freude nichts mitteilen kann, rüstet sie ihm ein Mahl. Mit diesem Dorf des Talmud sind wir mitten in Kafkas Welt. Denn so wie K. im Dorf am Schloßberg lebt der heutige Mensch in seinem Körper; er entgleitet ihm, ist ihm feindlich. Es kann geschehen, daß der Mensch ei-

3 The Tale of the King s Daughter 111 nes Morgens erwacht, und er ist in ein Ungeziefer verwandelt. Die Fremde seine Fremde ist seiner Herr geworden. 2 The secret of the village to which the king s daughter is banished, and its language that she does not understand, is that of literature.»mit diesem Dorf des Talmud sind wir mitten in Kafkas Welt«, Benjamin writes, the village lies at the center, at the heart of Kafka s world. The village is the place of Kafka s literature, and the air of this village dominates his work. Even though Benjamin ascribes the tale to the Talmud, it is not of a Talmudic nature, but rather belongs to the Chassidic corpus. The origin of the story is concealed. 3 And yet the story is told: Benjamin writes about a Rabbi who himself tells the legend of the village to which the king s daughter is banished and exiled, waiting for her beloved to save her. However, when the message arrives, the letter from her fiancé, she herself cannot tell she is unable to speak of it: Und weil sie dem Dorf, das ihre Sprache nicht kennt, anders von ihrer Freude nichts mitteilen kann, rüstet sie ihm ein Mahl. To recapitulate: Benjamin tells about a Rabbi who tells about the king s daughter who herself cannot tell. She cannot share her joy in language. She thus prepares a feast in order to express her delight. The state of exile, the banishment of the king s daughter, her living in solitude the not being at home expresses itself in silence, in the inability to tell. Not being at home implies here not being in language. And yet the story is told: what is delivered [transmitted/conveyed] is the inability to deliver. We are told here about the inability to tell. This is the whole story. Literature tells the untold. And the untold, what the king s daughter cannot express, we claim, should be understood as the condition of exile. The king s daughter cannot speak and cannot tell, which is how exile is expressed in silence. The silence of exile, however, is of a messianic nature. For this is the message enfolded in the letter: Zu dieser Prinzessin kommt eines Tages ein Brief, ihr Verlobter habe sie nicht vergessen, habe sich aufgemacht und sei unterwegs zu ihr. Der Verlobte, sagt der Rabbi, ist der Messias. The message that cannot be told by the king s daughter, the silent expression of exile, the secret of literature, the unspoken, is messianic. The Messiah, she reads, is on his way to save her, to redeem the soul. What the princess cannot 2 Walter Benjamin: Franz Kafka. Zur zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todestages. In: Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. II.2. Frankfurt am Main 1991, The tale seems to have its origin in one of the legends ascribed to the Chassidic leader, the Baal Shem Tov (See: The Book of Baal Shem Tov,»Bereshit«[Nr 66]. Jerusalem 1948, 71. Compare also with Sefer Toldot Yaakob Yossef, Parashat Ki Tawo, 72). Benjamin became familiar with this tale through his discussions with Soma Morgenstern. I wish to thank David Assaf for his assistance in tracking the Chassidic sources of Benjamin s tale.

4 112 Galili Shahar tell, her state of being in exile, also carries the message of redemption. In other words: the tale of the king s daughter that expresses the inability to tell, the unspoken word in which the condition of being in exile is enfolded, conveys, in silence, a messianic message. The secret of literature (what is not told) is the promise of redemption. Der Verlobte, sagt der Rabbi, ist der Messias, die Prinzessin die Seele, das Dorf aber in das sie verbannt ist, der Körper. The village, the place to which the king s daughter is banished, is the body. The body turns unfamiliar, uncanny. The soul does not feel at home here. The body the physical condition of being, the material, earthly element (the element of evil) is foreign. The body is the non-essential element in which the essence of being (the soul, the spirit) is captured. Yet, this is how the soul (the king s daughter) expresses her joy with a celebration of a profane nature (a feast). The experience of the body as something unfamiliar (strangeness, nonbelongingness) is the reflection of Kafka s literature, the reflection of the body becoming unheimlich: Denn so wie K. im Dorf am Schloßberg lebt der heutige Mensch in seinem Körper; er entgleitet ihm, ist ihm feindlich. Es kann geschehen, daß der Mensch eines Morgens erwacht, und er ist in ein Ungeziefer verwandelt. What Kafka s literature conveys, its secret, is the unspoken experience of the body, the body that turns unheimlich. This is Gregor Samsa ein Ungeziefer, an insect; Gregor Samsa a human, a creature, a wound; Gregor Samsa a body, a Jew, a stranger; Gregor Samsa an embodiment of distortions of the modern age, a subject of an unhappy drama, unmarried, and unwanted in the realm of the family; Gregor Samsa a young merchant who suffers the deformations of the technical era and feels the empty and homogeneous time of the alarm clock that sits on the chest in his room, and the irregularities of the train travels which he makes each morning; Gregor Samsa a body of pathological desire (masochism), a body that cannot deliver itself into language, a silent body, unspoken, banished to his room, exiled and doomed. Gregor Samsa keeps the secret of literature. In quoting the tale of the king s daughter Benjamin thus creates the texture of a literary expression, which we call the telling of a secret. It is the delivery of that which cannot be delivered, the unspoken experience of exile, the silent message of not being at home. But this experience, the unspoken, carries with it the messianic element of return. The paradox of literature is also the paradox of the messianic tradition. The messiah delivers himself in the promise of the final arrival, which itself is based on postponements, delays and absence. The messiah is here and now and yet not of the present (un-re-presentable). He will come today and yet he is always, forever, on his way. 4 4 The messianic paradox of arrival and delay is hinted in Talmud Bavli,»Masechet Chelek«, 98, 1.

5 The Tale of the King s Daughter 113 Benjamin who delivers his readers a story on exile and the meaning of literature, delivers here also the condition of his own banishment, his fate as a German-Jewish writer. In his essays on Kafka, written in the 1930s, one can notice the air of this village, the air of exile. 3 The tale of the king s daughter which Benjamin ascribes to the Talmud, should, we argue, be read rather in the context of the Chassidic tradition. It reminds us of the legend from the Book of Baal Shem-Tov 5 that gives the reason for the joy of Shabbat: the king s son has been captured and there is no way of rescuing him. Years have passed since he once received a letter from his father, the king, telling him not to despair for he would be brought back to his homeland either through war or peace. The king s son felt great joy, but could not reveal the secret. So he went with the men of his town to the guesthouse where they feasted and drank wine in celebration of receiving his father s letter. In this version the one who is found in Galut and waits to be saved is not the king s daughter, but rather his son. This difference is not of marginal significance, for it is the gender difference itself that is represented in the variance between the two versions. Both versions, however, are based on the idea of keeping the secret. The king s son, like the daughter, cannot tell the reason for his joy he cannot reveal the secret of the letter (the secret of literature). The version that is given in Benjamin s essay should be read also in correspondence with the Tale of the Loss of the King s Daughter by Rabbi Nachman of Breslav (1815). 6 This story was first told and written in Yiddish, translated later into Hebrew by Nachman s disciple Rabbi Nathan, and published with twelve other stories in the well-known anthology Sippurey Masioth. Nachman s version of the tale of the king s daughter (which is the first tale in the cycle) recalls the attempts of the king s viceroy to find the king s daughter who disappeared from her home on a certain night after the king lost his temper with her and said:»may the no-good-one take you away«. 7 After a long journey from place to place over deserts and through fields and forests, he arrives at a very beautiful, well-built, and well-run castle, where he recognizes the king s daughter, now a queen in a foreign kingdom. The viceroy asks her:»how can I get you out of here?«8 And she answers:»you cannot take me 5 The Book of Baal Shem Tov,»Bereshit«(Nr 66), Jerusalem 1948, 71. 6»The Tale of the Loss of the King s Daughter«, Sippurey Masioth, Jerusalem, On the tale, its structure, motifs, sources and its reception by Hebrew critics see Yoav Elstein: In the Footsteps of a Lost Princess. Jerusalem The Tale, Ibid., 23.

6 114 Galili Shahar away unless you find a place and live there a full year; the whole year you should only pray and hope to take me out, and on the last day you should fast and not sleep the entire day.«9 And so he did. However, on the last day of that year, on his way back to the castle to free the king s daughter, the viceroy saw a tree laden with very appealing apples. He picked one, ate it, lay down and slept for a very long time. And the king s daughter was not rescued. The story, however, continues and the viceroy again fails in an attempt to save the queen from her castle. He now goes back to the deserts in which he searched many years for her, looking for a mountain of gold and a castle of pearls. There [he] shall find her. 10 And indeed, eager and dedicated to saving her, he finally arrives at the gate of the beautiful city. He bribes the guards to let him enter the city and he rents lodgings, for he would need to stay there some time. It would require much wisdom to free her, yet how he freed her, he did not tell, but in the end he freed her. 11 It is not the viceroy who tells how the king s daughter was freed, but rather Rabbi Nachman himself who left the tale unresolved, a secret. The story of saving the king s daughter is not told to its end. The tale of how the king s daughter was freed is not told, but left silent. It was Rabbi Nathan, the translator of the tale, who in the second introduction to the book of Nachman s tales (1845), discusses the secret of the king s daughter and its allegorical meaning in Kabbalistic literature. According to him, the king s daughter is the figuration of the exile of shechina and the people of Israel. The loss of the king s daughter, he argues, following the theory of Isaac Luria, is an expression of the destiny of holiness itself being in exile after the Breaking of the Vessels. The exile is thus understood as a literary embodiment of the cosmic myth of the break, the crisis of holiness in the process of creation, and the fall of shechina into the abyss, the depths of evil. It is man who is now called to save it and to bring correction to the world by prayer, commandments and good deeds. This is what the tale of the king s daughter is expected to impart, according to Rabbi Nathan thoughts of repentance. However, it is not the theological solution of the tale delivered by Rabbi Nathan, but rather its secret, the untold, that is of real interest for us. For, we recall, the Tale of the Loss of the King s Daughter is not told by Rabbi Nachman to its end. We are not told how she was taken away and saved by the viceroy. This is left silent and concealed, a secret. The tale thus delivers also its inability, its refusal to be delivered. A secret must be kept. And the secret, we argue, is that of literature. Literature itself depends on the keeping of a secret. The revealing of the untold implies the resolution of the story, the end of literature. Like the king s daughter herself, literature is essentially in exile. The longing to return, the desire to be at home, to find a solution, to be resolved, to be saved this is what literature expresses, but this 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., Ibid., 33.

7 The Tale of the King s Daughter 115 expression, the expression of exile, should not be realized, for its realization entails the cost of literature itself, its sacrifice. To repeat: The nature of literature lies in the secret of not being at home. The tale of the exile of the king s daughter expresses what literature is. Saving the princess, resolving the tale, is indeed the messianic end. But the tale of the king s daughter refuses to attain this end, to be concluded, done. The story, we argue, embodies also a power of resistance and retains its right to remain unfinished, endless. The king s daughter cannot easily be returned home. She refuses to return, unless her savior overcomes impossible tasks. One should possibly attempt here a different way of reading which acknowledges the trickeries of the king s daughter. The poor viceroy is doomed to fail. The lover, the savior, will follow her; he will be subjected to new trials and new interpretations of her secrets. But in vain. The king s daughter cannot be taken away. Her resistance, her secret, reflects the condition of her story. Stories can be told only in the being of exile. Redemption that brings history to its end makes literature redundant. The king s daughter seems to be aware of this. She perhaps shares the fate of Scheherazade, the Persian queen, the storyteller of the Thousand and One Nights whose being depends on her being able to keep the story open and unfinished. The readers of the tale of the loss of the king s daughter, like the viceroy himself, stand before the gate. They are called upon to undertake difficult tasks, to make impossible attempts at solving riddles and secrets. Readers, like the viceroy, are doomed to failure (misreading, misinterpretation), and yet they remain faithful and cannot escape their own nature. The reader, like the savior, will continue to travel and to read. 4 This journey, our reading, brings us to Shmuel Yosef Agnon, and to a short remark on the appearance of the king s daughter that embodies exile and literature in his novel A Guest for the Night (1939). 12 Agnon s protagonist, the storyteller, returns to his home town to tell the stories of its people stories of the decline of tradition, absence, and the loss and displacement of Jewish life. These are stories of wounded, painful bodies, cripples and beggars; stories of study and prayer that interweave exile, misfortune, and messianic hopes. The tale of the king s daughter is mentioned when the protagonist speaks of Rachel, the daughter of the innkeeper in his home town, a young girl who denies the parable and the lessons of the storyteller. Rachel rejects the story of the king s daughter (ha-mashal) and the meaning (ha-nimshal) the storyteller attributes to it when he speaks about the keeping of torah as the devotion of 12 S. Y. Agnon: A Guest for the Night. Trans. Misha Louvish. New York 1968.

8 116 Galili Shahar Israel and its fortune: Rachel, the innkeeper s young daughter, has also forgotten that she is a daughter of kings, and when I reminded her of this, she laughed at me. 13 The storyteller regrets the forgetting of Israel s destiny. What is forgotten in exile is the election Israel being crowned by torah. Indeed, Rachel, the young woman, embodies the forgetfulness of tradition, the denial of torah, the rejection of rabbinical authority, and the revolt against the old generation and its messengers, among them the storyteller himself. So I had my say, she made a wry face and said, why should I take on myself the burden of past generations? Let past generations look after themselves and my generation look after itself. Just as the generations before me lived in their own way, so my generation lives in its own way. And as for what you say, that every daughter of Israel should think of herself as a daughter of kings, there is nothing more foolish than that. Today, when the crowns of kings are lying in museums and no one takes pride in them, you come and say: Every daughter of Israel should think of herself as a daughter of kings. 14 Rachel denies the figure of the king s daughter and its religious implications. She refuses to fall into that pattern (identity) of a female the pattern of interiority, of being at home and living within (we recall the verse the king s daughter is all glorious within ). Rather, she rejects this tradition as a foolish story. Rachel, the protagonist tells us, is a modern girl and does not tend to pay attention to legends of kings sons and kings daughters. She prefers stories about girls of her own kind. At first reading, Rachel seems to embody the break with tradition, denial of the religious order and its figures, and rejection of rabbinical sovereignty. She even repudiates the story itself the tale of the king s daughter. The narration of exile in which the Messiah himself is expected to appear as a savior is denied. However, this first reading, which is based on the differences (or oppositions) of tradition and modernity, religion and secularism, literature and legends, the male and the female (fathers and daughters) is also an affirmative one. It fits a certain path of interpretation that looks on tradition from a historical perspective reviewed as a process of decline. According to this reading, tradition is found in a crisis, which itself was one of the conditions the prologue of modernity. In this view, the modern is essentially secular non-religious, and rises from the ruins of tradition. We the readers who follow Agnon s story, should, however, be aware of the complicated, dialectical grammar of tradition and its trickeries. Tradition that implies the transformation of theological knowledge is also based on secret ways of transmission. For the story of loss and absence, of denial and forgetfulness, of exile and the inability to be at home, is not merely a modern phenomenon, a secular event, but rather the radical experience of tradition itself which is delivered in the tale of the king s daughter. Rachel, in her unwillingness to listen, her refusal to be identified 13 Ibid., Ibid.,

9 The Tale of the King s Daughter 117 with the realm of interiority and thus to find her communal place in the world, takes upon herself the fate of the king s daughter. Rachel embodies the most constructive tensions the story of exile. Her story is rather the embodiment of an inner crisis, one that made the messianic idea possible. Rachel s modernity, her new, secular appearance, her power of resistance, should not mislead us. More than any other figure, Rachel is the one who keeps also the longing, the expectation, the hope of redemption, the messianic desire itself. Agnon s protagonist recognizes this as well: So who could this be whom she prepared to bow her head? Often she will twitch her shoulders, as if a hand had touched them, and half close her eyes. Not like her father, who wants to preserve what he has already seen, but like one who half closes his eyes to see what is still to happen. What is this girl waiting for? 15 Rachel, who half closes her eyes to see what is still to happen and who looks to the future, through darkness and misery, exile and solitude, is the one who is still waiting. Her being is that of longing. Rachel s longing, we read later, her love, is dedicated to Yeruham, a young man, an inhabitant of the town, who returned from Eretz-Israel disenchanted with the Zionist vision. It is not the messianic idea that is embodied in Yeruham s situation, but rather its disillusion. He offers a critical view of the Jewish establishment in Palestine and challenges the storyteller s faithful attitude towards the Yishuv. Rachel is mentioned again at the end of the novel when she gives birth and names her son after the storyteller, who, in turn, endows the newborn with the key of the local synagogue. With this gesture (the delivery of the key) he leaves his home town and returns to Palestine. More should be argued on the dialectic of tradition and its expression in Agnon s novel; more should be said on the tensions of exile and the Zionist vision, and on prayer and the meaning of literature in his work. More should be argued on the poetical fate of the king s daughter and the possibility of telling her story in modern Hebrew fiction. But this is left unfinished, without an end. 15 Ibid., 31.