Under a Fence: A Revue
[One of America's most highly respected literary critics and social historians, Howe was a longtime editor of the leftist magazine Dissent and a regular contributor to the New Republic. Greenberg was a Russian-born American poet, essayist, translator, and critic who dedicated himself to bringing Yiddish literature to English readers. In the following introduction to "Under a Fence," the critics provide an outline of the story.]
When "Under a Fence" first appeared in the Soviet Yiddish periodical, Di royte velt, in 1929, its editor, perhaps anticipating that it would evoke a storm of attack from the more orthodox party-line critics, wrote: "It is a ring of allegorical and symbolic tales, mutually intertwined, expressed in a rich, rhythmic language … It is a kind of confession, a renunciation of the idealistic view of the world …" Except for the last phrase, obviously mistaken though intended, no doubt, as a protective device, the editor's description was a helpful one. For it leads us into the labyrinth of the story, into the actual experience of it rather than a misconceived attempt to reduce it to an intellectual jigsaw puzzle. The important thing, we believe, is not to look for detailed one-to-one equivalents of meaning for the rendered events, but to yield oneself to its phantasmagoria and thereby gain a general sense of its implications. So we offer here not a worked-out interpretation, but a few notes that may be helpful.
The story begins with a confession by a middle-aged scholar. Obviously a man of some achievement and stature, he tells his daughter about his debasing involvement with Lili, a circus rider, and his seeming drunkenness after being rudely thrown out of the circus. As the daughter attends her sick father, he confesses to having been unworthy of his calling, and this ends the initial episode, or narrative frame, of the story.
Then comes the substance of the confession, staged (hence the subtitle) as a "revue." What follows apparently has to do, in various grotesque forms and through the imagery of dream symbolism, with an experience of guilt—the scholar's guilt before his pupils (his literary disciples?), the trial where he is punished by burning, etcetera.
The scholar, writes the Yiddish critic Khone Shmeruk [in The Field of Yiddish, 1965], "sees himself as an accused man, completely losing his bond with his 'real' self. He is now an ex-hermit in circus leotards. He is tried by the senior judge, his former teacher Medardus, of the school of hermits, along with his own pupils … During the trial, the hermit tells about his transformation."
A phantasmagorical figure, the "dustman," appears. This figure tells the scholar-hermit that all of his creatures—father, mother, child—are made of "straw." They are, that is, useless, obsolete, ready for destruction.
The dustman, writes Shmeruk, "is the actual cause" of the scholar's guilt. "It is he who brought him to the circus and led him to Lili…He is capable of subjecting the hermit's values to public ridicule … At the same time, however, he is highly intimate with the hermit and solicitous about him… This is undoubtedly a personification of that part of the hermit's self which embodies a number of satanic, Mephistophelian attributes."
The name of Lili "is similar in sound to and hence associated with Lilith—the traditional female demon who makes men stray from the path of righteousness." As for Medardus, the scholar-hermit's teacher or master, Shmeruk traces a complicated genealogy from a story by the German writer, E.T.A. Hoffmann, where the figure represents a literary tradition of seriousness and autonomy—the very tradition the circus denies.
"The scholar, the last hermit, represents an intelligent man, an artist or perhaps even a writer.… External pressures and internal doubts pursue him ceaselessly. His daughter—his one creation up to now, his very own—is betrayed and harmed because of his attraction for Lili—an opposite creative principle, whose place is in the circus, and whose essence is tricks. External pressures are expressed by the loneliness of the hermit, which inclines him and readies him to accept his own doubts, symbolized by the dustman. He begins to believe in the strawness of his former path."
This story is a complicated but extremely powerful and moving revelation—a kind of symbolist outcry—of the agonies experienced by a gifted writer who has been forced, in part, to submit to the demands of a repressive external authority. Obliquely, it tells us a great deal about the feelings of Soviet Yiddish writers as the inquisitors grew more demanding. And in a way, the party-line critics were "right" in denouncing the story.
"Even so," concludes Shmeruk, "the issue is not too simple for Der Nister. One cannot ignore the opposition between the lonely tower of a last solitary hermit, filled with doubts, and the security of a seasoned circus actor in a packed hall. There remains the gnawing questions: Is this, then, the way? Is it, after all, only for select individuals? There is no definite answer to this question. Insecurity coupled with hopelessness and with the necessity to submit, out of'hunger and joblessness,' to the transformation, increase the depth and horror of the tragedy of the man undergoing the test.
"Despite all of the doubts, Der Nister's judgment is, nevertheless, unequivocal. The feeling of guilt is stronger than the doubts, and the threefold punishment appears justified."
Der Nister closes the story's frame on a poignant note: the scholar-hermit, "drunkard and ashamed," is wept over by his daughter while he had "nothing to comfort her with and couldn't lift my head up to her."
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.