The Subaltern Within Speech

Leonard Michaels wrote this long, moving essay about his relationship with Yiddish, which was his only language from birth to the age of five. I don't know enough about Wittgenstein to fully comprehend some of his points, but I had ideas of my own.

Yiddish is probably at work in my written English. This moment, writing in English, I wonder about the Yiddish undercurrent. If I listen, I can almost hear it: “This moment”—a stress followed by two neutral syllables—introduces a thought which hangs like a herring in the weary droop of “writing in English,” and then comes the announcement, “I wonder about the Yiddish undercurrent.” The sentence ends in a shrug. Maybe I hear the Yiddish undercurrent, maybe I don’t. The sentence could have been written by anyone who knows English, but it probably would not have been written by a well-bred Gentile. It has too much drama, and might even be disturbing, like music in a restaurant or an elevator. The sentence obliges you to abide in its staggered flow, as if what I mean were inextricable from my feelings and required a lyrical note. There is a kind of enforced intimacy with the reader. A Jewish kind, I suppose. In Sean O’Casey’s lovelier prose you hear an Irish kind.

This is the kind of unverifiable stuff that makes literary analysis so damn fun. When Hebrew literature was first coming on the scene in the ~1860s, its main practitioners' first tongue was the mother tongue, Yiddish: they read Yiddish novels and poetry, they listened to their bubbes tell stories in Yiddish, they heard the rabbis give a drash in Yiddish (so the womenfolk could understand). This was only the historical pattern. Jews spoke, as primary languages, Aramaic, Arabic, Italian and Spanish, and these influenced their Hebrew writing (which was mostly poetry). I took a structural approach to this in my paper on the American Hebraist Gabriel Preil; that is, how language as a total system functions (Yael Feldman, who follows Bakhtin, does it really well, because there are some dense-ass linguistic concepts).

In her work on Preil, Feldman also hints at an approach she explores in her other work: the linguistic undercurrent, which can be exposed with psychoanalysis (she likes Jung). This also shows why multiple approaches to literature will always be a good thing, and why Kristeva is so brilliant when she combines them. Straight or "pure" post- and structuralism will never account for every factor. When poststructural psychoanalysis, via Kristeva, attempts to explore the points at which one language system breaks through into another-- e.g. not just unique turns of phrase and the like, but a thought pattern (semiotic layer) inherent in a language-- can we understand the uniqueness of an individual's writing. The individual writer or work is a result of the complex interactions of these larger systems, with the addition, obviously, of the unique input of their being.

Modern Hebrew, then, carries this undercurrent of Yiddish.