Imaginary Jews and True Confessions: Ethnicity, Lyricism, and John Berryman's <em>Dream Songs</em>

Abstract

Author(s): Gross, Andrew S. | Abstract: Berryman was fascinated with figure of the Jew. The phrase is title of his first short story, it recurs in The Dream Songs, and it was to have been topic of final chapter of his autobiographical novel Recovery. Critics have not treated Berryman's imaginary Jew kindly. Early critics saw prosopopoeia as uncongenial to confessional project. More recent critics see figure as a misappropriation of Jewish identity. Berryman, however, did not want to pass himself off as Jewish; he invented figure to expose anti-Semitism of Eliot and Pound. His strategy of impersonating stereotypical figure of the Jew was also in keeping with contemporary theories of prejudice and identity, which followed Sartre and psychoanalysis in understanding Jewishness as a product of morbid projection. My essay traces critical reception—and rejection—of Berryman in order to expose what I see as identitarian bias of American studies since 1970s, most recently evident in debates over the Americanization of Holocaust. Berryman's transpersonal poetry, I argue, is also transnational, both in its personification of Nazi victims and in its comparison of domestic racism and Vietnam War to genocide. Berryman's concern is not identity but violence implicit in designating other as Other. This violence not only plays a role in prejudice but also in progressive theories of ethnic lyricism that see individual as an expression of her culture or nation and poem as a personification of individual.