Spirit of Boz

If we intend to compare and confront the Book of Boz to monuments of literature, three masterworks can be invoked right away. (Many others could probably be examined, from Goethe to Nietzsche or Kafka, through Nerval and even Proust…, but choices have to be made).

Here are these three elected works, in my opinion, seemingly responding to the complexity of the Book of Boz :

The Divine Comedy (1314-1320) by Dante (1265-1321), Don Quixote (1605-1615) by Cervantes (1547-1616) and finally, more recenty and maybe less known too, Albert Cohen’s (1895-1981) fiction work, which builds up in its whole, like Julien Friedler’s, an one and only always rewritten book, indeed even a cycle, formed by Solal (1930), Mangeclous (1938), Belle du Seigneur (1968) and Les Valeureux (1969). (For the record, Les Valeureux was a part of Belle du Seigneur; the publisher Gallimard arbitrarily choosed to separate them, duplicating the author’s dilemna, quartered between the goy world and his dear tribe’s one, in the intend of reducing the already substantial amount of pages of Belle du Seigneur).

The first evidence, the first connection between these four books is that we follow the story of a hero, a man reaching “the middle of his life”, battling against madness (distraction, a moral, intellectual or religious crisis,…) and love. Excessive idealization (which can also lead to its contrary) of the beloved woman (Dante and Beatrice; Don Quixote and Dulcinea; Solal and Adrienne, Aude, Ariane; Adam and Marguerite). They also share a mutual experience and interrogative approach of the world. An inner as geographical travel. A religious course. They also deal with trial, settlings of scores, with yourself or with others. Dante is a dispenser of justice, he welts with flames and damns as Julien Friedler reveals acting crooks on the eve of the 3rd millenium. Jose Bové, Jacques Chirac or José Saramago, among others, are present and vilified in the Book of Boz. These are works written in the individual history as well than our common History. From Dante’s Inferno to the world described in the Book of Boz, there is an obvious kinship. Hell is omnipresent in the Boz and its evocations of religion wars, French Revolution, Shoah, and even the World Trade Center kamikazes and the following al Qaïda attacks. The Boz is a world crowded with all kinds of corpses and horrors. We find in Don Quixote the prisonner’s account (a mise en abyme just as the L’ombre du Rabbin tales inserted in the Boz) reminding of Cervantes’ participation to the famous Lepante battle and his prisonner condition; we must also recall this episode, a kind of bad daydreaming, in Belle du Seigneur, where Solal, having his back to the wall because of History, joins up with the midget Rachel in her cave in Berlin, to share the persecuted Jews’ lot.

In her introduction to the Dante’s Inferno bilingual edition, Jacqueline Risset wrote :

    “Precisely, what always made Inferno so fascinating, even in times when the rest of the work had become almost beyond understanding, it’s the radicalism of an imaginary world, which prooved itself able to transform a series of separate and repetitive representations (…) in a mysterious architecture, extremely varied and deeply unitary at once, and fully original comparing to previous stories and visions.”

These words I underlined in bold sound to have been written about the Book of Boz, which wager to be fully original “comparing to previous stories and visions”, almost 700 years after Dante. The plastic dimensions of the Book of Boz build up, as far as I know, a unique creation in literature to date.

Another Divine Comedy “review”, by the French writer Frederic Ozanam (1813-1853), great expert in Dante’s work, seemed to fit, in my opinion, surprinsingly smoothtly to the Book of Boz :

    “ In a way, Divine Comedy is the compound result of every Middle Age conceptions, each one of which resulting in turn from a long work carried on through christian, arab, alexandrian, latin and greek schools and started on Orient sanctuaries. It would matter to follow this long genealogy. It would matter to know how many centuries and generations, how many unknown wakings, how many thoughts wearily gained, then left behind, resumed, transformed, were needed to make such a book possible : its price, and ,accordingly, its worth.”

This excerpt reminds me of the huge encyclopedic knowledge, held and revised in the Book of Boz, a kind of poetic visionary synthesis of the current world (cf L’Europe en péril ou le monde du fantasme - Europe in peril or the world of fantasy), encompassing the former experiences.

There is also an analogy between Boz’s scribe and Dante, “the divine substance scribe”, whose book will be the sign and the result of his mission. From time to time, Dante stops his wonderful travel to think about the book, still to be written, asking himself if he will have the force to sustain the final heartbreaking vision, and suddenly understanding the only way to reach the unbearable experience is to go further into it and to write it. There is also talk of the Book of Boz inside the Book of Boz itself, of its writing, its possible forgery and even its proofreading. As in Don Quixote, where we hear about the book telling Don Quixote and Sancho Panza’s famous adventures through Spain and about the forgery of the Second Book published in 1614.

Solal’s world (Solal from the Solals, rabbi Gamaliel’s son, whose uncle Saltiel asks himself if he is the Messiah) is deeply dichotomic. On one side, he grows in Goy society (Genevan gentry, upward mobility within the League of Nations) and lusts for the western woman while, on the other side, the Valourous troop, Solals’ younger branch (composed of his uncle Saltiel, Mangeclous, Michael, Mathatias and Salomon), springs up to remind him of his belonging to the Chosen People.

In the Book of Boz, our three stooges (Jack Balance, Ego and Scribe) would be equivalent to the Valourous for Solal, to Sancho Panza for Don Quixote or eventually Virgile for Dante.

They are there to guide the hero, to remind him of his condition, his conscience, a kind of Jiminy Cricket.

The Book of Boz tells Adam Smith’s tragic story, fighting his demons like Dante in Inferno or Solal trapped by the deadly love.

There is also the humorous tone, brought by Sancho Panza, the Valourous or many Boz characters, slightly lightening tragedy. Their colorful side is underlined and emphasizes hero’s loneliness (Solal : a “solar” and “sole” name at once). A self-victim hero, victim of his own desires, attempting to invent or restore a lost self-protective world, wherein he would feel out of danger, but which leads him to his fate though. Adam Smith, human too human, who tries to survive in a shattered world by creating his own self-sustaining universe to keep the control of an escaping life back.

Don Quixote : knighthood’s world ; Solal : in camera love.

Adam Smith : origin world.

By Sandrine Rochez, co-founder of "La Moire" 

This entry was posted on Friday, September 1st, 2006 at 12:31 pm and is filed under News, Testimony. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.