Digital Poetics 3.7 Beyond the Pale, or Crossing Borders with ‘The Books of Jacob’ by So Mayer
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (1920)
There is no spoon
Olga Tokarczuk’s 1000-page opus Księgi Jakubowe was originally published in Polish in 2014, winning the Nike Award and selling 100,000 copies in its first year of publication. Jennifer Croft’s 2021 translation arrives on the heels of Tokarczuk’s 2018 Nobel Prize, receiving a shortlisting for the 2022 International Man Booker Prize; a win would be the second for the Tokarczuk/Croft partnership. The novel’s title conveys less in English than for Polish readers, as the false Messiah Jacob Frank is a major figure in the nation’s history. Living from 1726-91, Frank’s life bridges the partition of Poland; quite literally, as he was imprisoned in Częstochowa, near what became the new eastern border. Placing his long imprisonment at the centre of her long book, Tokarczuk explores Frank as a border-dweller; as a Jew who converted to both Islam and Christianity; as a Messiah who numinously embodies the Divine in the material plane; and as a patriarch whose thirst for power clashes with his body’s queer and trans desires.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given this radical approach, despite – or because of – its success, the book was also met with an overtly hostile reception in some Polish nationalist circles, leading to a sustained online harassment campaign against the author. Ron Charles, in his Washington Post review of the book in translation, mentions that these violent threats related particularly to Tokarczuk’s brilliant examination of the ‘blood libel’ fallacy. The novel exposes this persistent, dangerous myth that claims the use of Christian children’s blood in making matzoh for Passover, as an intentional disinformation campaign knowingly executed by Church fathers, which the novel’s subject, Jacob Frank, queasily uses to leverage his and his followers’ security. Frank’s disturbing weaponisation of the blood libel – which he knows to be false, and knows that Church leaders know to be false, against Orthodox Jewish neighbours who disapprove of his cult – is one of the many contradictory, chaotic and sometimes chilling actions taken by this unscrupulously charismatic leader, who was known in his day as the Messiah.
Frank’s actions are, literally, beyond the Pale. The Poland of the novel straddles what is now the Poland/Ukraine border, part of what was known as the Pale. This was the vast Central European, predominantly rural geographical span in which Ashkenazi Jewish culture took its shape. It was a landscape across which borderlines move, accompanied by and accompanying nationalist and genocidal conflagrations. As Tokarczuk reveals, the Pale was a world within a world, and without a world, insofar as it is without legitimacy of citizenship and status. Frank, by her account, is driven to the politics of assimilation by the precarious status of Polish Jews as much as his spiritual acumen. With his followers, he crosses both historical and current national borders throughout the book, sometimes fleeing persecution, sometimes with ease, sometimes with cunning, and sometimes delayed by plague, bureaucracy and war. Tokarczuk shows that the Wandering Jew is, like the blood libel, a myth constructed by exclusionary states. On the one hand, the Frankists do seek and value freedom of movement; on the other, stable petty bourgeois status is what – for all his metaphysical claims – Frank seeks to gain through conversion to Christianity. Frank’s prior conversion to Islam, his travels among Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews of the Ottoman Empire, whose prior Messiah he adopts as his precursor, are also a call to solidarity and the recognition of a shared history not just of exclusion, but of interfaith cultural conversations. It is a reminder to Ashkenazi Jews today that identifying ourselves with Christian hegemony, not least in its Islamophobia as well as its anti-Semitism, is our undoing. Even as the book offers a dizzying hymn to shared and overlapping mystical and spiritual experiences within the Abrahamic faiths that demolishes Christian claims of supremacy, in doing so, it also offers a reminder that European Jews form a persistent liminal and limit case to the binary ‘conflict of civilisation’ narrative.
Tokarczuk’s polyphonic, mischievous, border-crossing historiography consistently flouts – here, as in Flights – the historically vapid notion of Europe as a Christian entity, beloved of such philosophers Slavoj Žižek. She takes aim at several related and interconnected sacred cows as well, including Enlightenment rationalism, heteronormativity, and the protagonist as both singular and psychologically realist character. Hence Croft’s choice of The Books of Jacob: ‘of’ in the sense of about, concerned with, emerging from, rather than belonging to or authored by. Perhaps ‘possessed by’ in its ambiguities. Like Flights, this longer and apparently more conventional historical novel has an unconventional form that lends it an orchestral polyphony. In fact, Tokarczuk nods wittily to the emergence of opera with a brief cameo from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart during the Frankists’ time between Germany and Vienna. The staging of Don Giovanni suggests both a connection between Frank’s Messianism and the composer’s Freemasonry, and also, echoing Peter Schaeffer’s play Amadeus, the resonant theme of the childish genius equally belayed and betrayed by paranoia, rivals and yes-men. Within her grand scheme, Tokarczuk does not give us Jacob, but – as in Schaeffer’s play – the Great Man’s actions as seen by those who are obsessed by him, whether friends or enemies, written through a combination of letters, diary notes and documents by his closest followers and chroniclers, as well as a correspondence between an encyclopedia-writing priest and an aristocratic woman poet. These designated sections, with their ornate, Baroque titles, reproduce written documentation, but they mingle with an unsourced cool close third that enters the souls, or spiritual apprehension, of many of the characters around Frank, from his Polish aristocratic benefactor to his daughter, Eva. Her voice is the most piercing as it overwhelms the final stages of the novel, placing her embodied revelation, that she was sexually abused by her father, against the many, varied and airy proclamations of revelation issued by Frank (and his hype men) to gain, retain or manipulate his followers.
A sign of the times every time that I speak
Tokarczuk comes neither to cancel, nor to redeem, Jacob Frank – more to unpick the West’s protagonitis, its cultural obsession with charismatic leadership, by using her form to demonstrate and deconstruct charisma’s metamorphic and theatrical qualities. Frank is undoubtedly a ‘very naughty boy’, to borrow perhaps the most infamous description of the Christian Messiah in contemporary culture: his profoundly immoral use of the blood libel against his neighbours and family members makes it clear that there is nothing funny about this. Tokarczuk is equally interested in tweaking nationalist and evangelical sensibilities as the Pythons were, but her satire is less schoolboy, as disinvested in maintaining an innocence around leadership and its damaging force as she is in protecting status quo sensibilities.
In particular, she sets out – as in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych, 2009, translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) – to raze toxic masculinity to the ground. Tokarczuk’s Frank is a groomer, a vain and entitled man with a trumped-up sense of self, a charlatan who uses his undoubtedly compelling presence to lure, control, extort and abuse. Yet there is also another side to Frank: amid his replications of dominance behaviour as seen among the Polish aristocracy and Church leadership, there is a genuine yearning for something more, something other, a yearning he brings out and answers among his followers. He finds a version of it in the Bogomil community he visits with the confidence man Mowlida. Bogomils practiced a spiritual lifestyle related to that of the Catharism, considered a dangerous heresy for its radical egalitarianism of class, gender and sexuality. Frank appropriates Bogomil ideas of non-monogamy and non-heteronormativity, but enforces them through the hierarchy of his position as Messiah. Frank has sex with men as well as women – handily, he has two penises, a myth that Tokarczuk first inflates, then deflates by revealing that the upper penis is in fact a painful hernia.
It is not so much that Tokarczuk creates a glowing positive representation of a queer Messiah, as that the book itself queers an Enlightenment figure, inquiring into both what his sexuality means, and why it has been hidden. In fact, Anglophone reviews have ignored Frank’s sexuality and the queerness (both formal and thematic) of The Books of Jacob entirely. That’s all the more surprising given that Croft’s translation – a sign of the times, as Nas quotes Prince – was published in the UK in November 2021, immediately between Lil Nas X’s Montero (17 September 2021) and Lana Wachowski’s Matrix Resurrections (22 December 2021), before appearing in the US in February 2022. In literary terms, its UK publication followed another extremely queer Messianic historiographical metafiction, Lauren Groff’s vibrant Matrix, which pieces scraps and fragments of the possible identities and published writings of the mysterious Marie de France. Groff’s shimmering story feels like a mirror image of Tokarczuk’s in its consideration of how Marie’s explosive desire for women could actually have reconfigured and radicalised her relation to Church and state hierarchies, and the life of her community.
Like Groff’s Matrix – and indeed, the Matrix quadrilogy – The Books of Jacob has to wrestle not only with what Walter Benjamin calls the Angel of History, but with dominant narrative power of ‘the voice of God’: willing an act of omniscient, omnipotent narration in an era of scepticism. All three texts are rich with the visionary, with the treasure trove of intensity offered by the messianic and radically materialist, and particularly by the utopian potential of embodiment and sexuality, still present within Tokarczuk’s critical take. Who wouldn’t want to make art with such potential and pleasure? But it also raised the vexed question: do we believe in these Messiahs? And if we don’t, do we therefore also not believe in God? And if we don’t, do we believe (in) the narrator, and, moreover, the form of the novel, and even of language (whether verbal, visual, or digital code) itself?
Theses could be written on the relations and resonances between the Matrix quadrilogy and The Books of Jacob: the truth is that they draw from the same deep wellsprings of European Enlightenment thought and its shadow sides, with the question of how radical political ideas emerge from and relate to spiritual practices often classified as irrational. In both texts, this is thematised through gender; or rather, through an address to/through gender as a metaphysical manifestation located both in, and beyond, the physical. Frank’s insistence on free love is not his only mis-entanglement with radical openness: he is also convinced that both the Holy Spirit and the Messiah are, or should be, women, identifying the former with the Shekhinah, the Rabbinical term for the divine presence, often characterised as a bride. At different times there is a suggestion that Frank wishes, wants and wills himself to become this woman, and/or that he is – in a deeply misguided and horrifying way – trying to make Eva into this Messiah, but only insofar as she is a part of himself. Frank never frees himself from concepts of ownership, hierarchy and importance: a reminder that queer sex and genderfluidity are not in themselves inherently radical, unless they are part of a thorough-going politics of breaking down all borders; but that they may point the way for us, as readers.
There Is Another
Eva is not, as it were, Jacob’s Trinity. That doubling/echoing role can be seen in the character who appears in the prologue (Jacob does not), and who spends much of the book unconscious/insensate (hovering in unlife), contained and trapped, much like the Trinity outside the Matrix in Resurrection. Yente is a very old woman under a spell that keeps her from completely dying. ‘Once swallowed’, the book begins, ‘the piece of paper lodges in her oesophagus near her heart’. Tokarczuk invokes the famous Ashkenazi legend of the Golem, and applies it authorially to both character (who is resurrected by the author’s words), and the reader, who similarly swallows them. In doing so, both character and reader exist on the borderline between reality and fiction, history and present, inert and agential. Dwight Garner, in his New York Times piece, cannily describes Yente as ‘fourth-person narrator’ with reference to brief moments when a narrator who can only be Yente speaks with the confidence of the orders of angels, for example, describing God as an oyster. This quantum achievement in narration pays off particularly in the book’s very final section, titled with her name. Here, Yente’s two centuries’ long afterlife as an oral story offers a strange safety to her family’s descendants when the Nazis invade; they hide in her cave until 1944, and then ‘emigrate to Canada, where they tell their story, so improbable that few believe them’. In some ways, this epilogue, and Tokarczuk’s details on this cavern in her Note on Sources, are not just the endpoint but, I intuit, the seed of the book, whose pages are numbered in reverse. It is not an alternate Polish-Jewish history that imagines a life-saving solidarity during and after WWII, but instead offers a tiny sliver and shiver of the miraculous and utopian framed by the horror of its necessity. Yente (again, thinking of Trinity in flight in the epilogue of Resurrections) is Benjamin’s Angel of History blown backwards.
Yente is thus ‘another’: throughout the novel, she is an alternate to Jacob. She did not seek the power she has been granted, never holds it over anyone, inspires oral tales handed down through generations, and provides genuine succour, all without the status and recognition, however contingent on assimilation, that the times offered Jacob Frank. It’s neither solution nor resolution, but another manifestation of an energy that Tokarczuk draws on in her early collection Primeval and Other Times (Prawiek i inne czasy, 1996) translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. It is rarely mentioned by reviewers, possibly due to being published by micropress Twisted Spoon in 2010, yet Primeval is perhaps the book of Tokarczuk’s thus far translated into English that is closest to The Books of Jacob, its narrative shaped by a Kabbalistic board game played by angels that disrupts received accounts of twentieth-century Polish history. Primeval is perhaps the strangest formally and narratively of Tokarczuk’s works, but also shares with The Books of Jacob the sense of being written from an angel-eye view.
Yente, like Primeval, both escapes and draws the gaze. Her name is an almost-generic one for an elderly Jewish woman; a yenta, in slang, is a gossip, a busybody getting in everyone’s business, as in Fiddler on the Roof (Norman Jewison, 1971). For many film fans, however, it will be more familiar as Yentl (1983), Barbra Streisand’s heroic feminist adaptation of an Isaac Bashevis Singer story about a transmasculine rebel from the Pale. To make such a person a mensch, a doer of good deeds who stands parallel to – and even over – a supposed Messiah is to shift narrative focus from very naughty boys to those they ignore or abuse. It is to sit in the half-dark with the ageing Eva and her assistant Anusia as they soak their legs rather than pay bills; they sit for so long that ‘the nib of the pen has dried out’. In all the flurry of written words of power, it is those characters, Tokarczuk shows, who stop writing who tell the story. Those who are swallowed hold the most, for they can cross borders and become part of us. As Tokarczuk does so brilliantly by rewriting Jews back into Polish history, it is those swallowed characters who can change, fundamentally, how we understand that ‘us’ to be constituted. The Books of Jacob, in the end, let Eva and the reader possess Jacob and all he stands for; reinterpret him; swallow him down like an oyster.
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So Mayer is the author, most recently, of A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (Peninsula, 2020), and co-editor of Unreal Sex (with Adam Zmith, Cipher, 2021), Mothers of Invention: Film, Media and Caregiving Labor (with Corinn Columpar, Wayne State UP, 2022), and Space Crone (with Sarah Shin, Silver, forthcoming). They are a bookseller at Burley Fisher Books, a curator with queer feminist film collective Club des Femmes, and Translation Advisory Committee co-chair (with Preti Taneja) at English PEN. They have recent work in Extra Teeth, LUMIN, Lucy Writers Platform, Shuddhashar, On Relationships (3 of Cups, 2020) and Altered States (Ignota, 2021). @Such_Mayer
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