H. N. Bialik and the Quest for Ethical Identity

Abstract

It is a common assumption that art in general and poetry in particular deepen and strengthen the collective identity of the community that they address. This presumably is one of the services?often the main one?they render the community. Poetry does this, we believe, by reactivizing the community's linguistic resources; by infusing its cultural traditions with the vitality of actual experience; by projecting the community's fears and hopes in vivid images and living symbols; by re-inventing its myths or collective ethical narratives. If this holds true for poetry in general, it is so much more so for poetry which addresses itself to a community whose sense of collective identity has been diminished or badly damaged. Communities which, due to ethnic, religious, social, cultural, or gender-determined factors have been politically and culturally marginalized, often exhibit fractured identities. Here, as Deleuze and Guattari argued in their Kafka? Towards a Minor Literature and David Lloyd in his Nationalism and Minor Literature, writers face a choice: embracing and deepening the group's sense of cultural and linguistic marginality, thus achieving both ex pressive intensity and a politico-cultural independence vis ? vis the major, colonizing, culture, or internalizing the norms of the major culture, but realizing them by activating the group's cultural resources, thus de veloping through them autonomous ethical identity for the subject.1 The choice, actually, is between a rejection of the major culture's concept of universal humanity (because, presumably, it universalizes only that culture's identity for the purposes of cultural domination) or an accep tance of that concept with the intention of making it one's own through a synthesis between it and some of the group's traditional norms. The