9th Annual Conference of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA), Long Beach, CA (Nov. 2007)
Panel description
For at least 2000 years, the figure of Moses has been invested with extraordinary power and complexity. At the turn of the twentieth century, Moses emerged as a figure of modernity, hovering between history and memory, between cultural purity and hybridity, and between linguistic expression and its limits. In the works of Sigmund Freud, Zora Neale Hurston, Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Franz Kafka, Ahad Ha’Am and others, the biblical story of Moses is re-imagined in order to explore some of the most pressing questions at the heart of Modernism: How do “new” traditions of expression maintain memories of their origins? What are the distinctions between speechlessness and inexpressibility, and new forms of speech and expression? What are the relationships between the categories of race, culture and religion? Can a culture (or cultural product) be “authentic” if it rejects purity and instead embraces hybridity? Is it possible to recognize a shared hybridity and brokenness, or is this universal multiplicity a modernist myth constructed to counter-act the fictions of purity and wholeness? Finally, in keeping with the MSA 9 theme of “geographies,” how does the “passage” out of Egypt get refigured as a process of liberation, artistic expression and political enunciation?
In fin-de-siècle Prague, Ahad Ha’am and Hugo Bergmann questioned the historical personage of Moses while privileging his position as a spiritual leader. In “Franz Kafka and the Mosaic Moment,” Joel Morris places Kafka in the context of these discourses, focusing on Moses as exemplary of the “imperfect moment” of human life. In considering Moses’ “human life,” Kafka suggests that even if one lived forever, considerations of eternity can yield only an instant.
In “Moses, Music, and Modernism: The Birth and Death of the Book,” Gregory Erickson discusses Arnold Schoenberg’s opera, Moses und Aron, in which Moses emerges as a disruptive force within Modernism and as a bridge between Modernist and Post-Modernist conceptions of “writing.” The opera dramatizes the limits and absence of the Word, reverses the Christian process of Word made flesh, and ultimately questions the possibility of any book—returning us to a point before meanings and Laws were written on stone tablets.
In “Jewish, Egyptian and/or African: Freud’s Moses and its Curious Consequences,” Eliza Slavet explores how Moses has been embraced as a leader who could guide his people out of involuntary hybridity and toward a promised land of purified self-made identity. Whereas many Enlightenment authors emphasize Moses’ Egyptianness in order to overcome age-old distinctions, Freud suggests that violent and hybrid origins are compulsively repressed in the founding of a new society.
In “Psychoanalytic Mumbo Jumbo: Ishmael Reed's Moses,” John Duvall explores Reed's appropriation in Mumbo Jumbo of Freud's Moses and Monotheism and Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain. Reed could not accept the race-changing possibilities represented by Hurston's Moses who models manhood for the racial other. He also could not acknowledge Freud’s Jewishness, for to do so would complicate his Afrocentric narrative and his portrayal of the white conspiracy repressing the African origins of Western civilization.