The Carnevalis of Eusebius Asch by Peter Gimpel
The Carnevalis of Eusebius Asch,
Edited, Annotated, and with an Introduction by Peter Gimpel.
Beethoven and Schoenberg, Schumann and
Hesse, Lévi-Strauss and Vico, each has a role in this seagoing carnival
of Platonic lust and manic scholarship—a role as Protean and unpredictable
as that of "Zeebee" himself, as he struggles to recreate the world in his own
fuzzy image—a world in which the erudition of Faust, the wisdom of the
Rabbis, the music of the spheres, and the angelic charms of a forbidden coed,
all succumb to his miscalculated advances. Meanwhile, the real world
has done another backflip—only this time it appears to have landed on its
head! Still, Père Castel's celestial keyboard can play more than one
tune . . . What would you do? You have twelve days to find out. Ship
sails at noon. Bon Voyage!
Trade paper. 272 pages. ISBN
0-9631478-1-1. Price (US): $14.95.
REVIEWS
THE CARNEVALIS OF EUSEBIUS ASCH
"GIMPEL’S NOVEL:
MYSTICAL, WILDLY FANTASTIC, KNEE-SLAPPING HUMOROUS, DEEPLY
RELIGIOUS"
By Chris Leppek, Assistant Editor,
Intermountain Jewish News.
(March 26, 1999)
Fully aware that the potential readership
for this wonderfully-titled novel is far from mainstream, California
Chasid-poet Peter Gimpel lets his eclectic creative powers flow in all sorts of
strange and fascinating currents and eddies, most of which wind up right on
their intended literary target.
The Eusebius Asch of the title is
Gimpel’s fictional alter-ego, supposedly a bright 1960's American youth
(now utterly untraceable, Gimpel writes) who feverishly pens this manuscript
during a trans-Atlantic voyage aboard a rusting freighter.
The manuscript follows a path through the
ship’s library and the papers of an Italian literature professor before it
finally winds up in Gimpel’s hands.
Although the novel’s framing device has
its own metaphorical import, it mainly serves as a loose frame upon which
Gimpel hangs all sorts of literary musings and reflections, ranging from the
mystical to the wildly fantastic to knee-slapping humorous to the profoundly
religious.
He juggles these musings deftly, for the
most part, confidently and competently guiding his reader through Jewish
mysticism, Torah, thoughtful comparisons and contradictions between Judaism and
Christianity, history, philosophy, sundry sciences, art and much more.
There are a number of belabored passages
that deal with music which will leave all but the most accomplished
musicologist confused and perhaps frustrated. Although Gimpel’s theme has
much to do with music and sound, and although he sometimes succeeds in
conveying the soul-transforming power of music, he should have pared the more
technical passages with a broad knife.
For all that, the author manages to redeem
himself time and again, winning back his readers with a literary grace and
aplomb capable of reaching amazing heights.
When Eusebius writes of the woman with whom
he has fallen in love, the passages are as dignified, moving and simply
beautiful as any you will find anywhere.
Such genuine talent, coupled with a
kaleidoscopic story that is much better experienced than described, make The
Carnevalis of Eusebius Asch an unusual, educational and ultimately wonderful
book.
********
The Carnevalis of Eusebius
Asch.
Edited, Annotated, & with an Introduction.
By
Frederick R. Marcus, Graduate Fellow, Emory University;
New Vico
Studies 17 (1999), pp. 131-34.
(By courtesy of Philosophy
Documentation Center)
In Jerusalem, the story is told of Bezalel
the Milkman, a studious Tevya of a generation ago, whose hidden learning so
surprised the distinguished Rabbi Mordecai Gimpel Barg and rabbinical court
presider ("Rav") Rabbi Selig Reuven Bengis that the latter exclaimed, "I fear
that this community has made a mistake in appointing me to this position. If
this is what milkmen here are like, can one imagine how great one must be to
serve here as Rav!"1 Peter Gimpel has produced a novel which explores the
domain of the hidden from many facets—among them music, philosophy,
literature, scripture, psychology, and mysticism—during the course of
which he offers an imaginative and perspicuous treatment of Vico's
philosophical character and enigmatic relationship to the Jews.
Gimpel structures his work through a series
of narrative frames that devolve upon the discovery and publication of a
manuscript, "The Carnevalis," penned feverishly during a transatlantic crossing
from New York to Naples by a young man who styles himself "Eusebius Asch."
Gimpel plays the role of recipient and fictional editor who appears to impart a
critical distance on Asch's "confessional conflagration" while engaging the
reader surreptitiously in the book's dramatic and thematic flow. That flow,
complex and musical, springs from a series of seemingly unconnected allusive
motifs suggested quietly in the editorial introduction and builds, with a
controlled hand, through the multiple cascades of Asch's self-revelation to a
painfully ecstatic denouement. Both the editor and main character display a
facile and erudite imagination as they set forth a story of moral education
which draws generously from Hermann Hesse and Vico, Robert Schumann and
Beethoven, Levi-Strauss and the Talmud, Teilhard de Chardin and the history of
ocean liners. Gimpel's Bildungsroman presents a memory theater which evokes the
reader's own education by invoking a continual effort to grasp its deeper lines
through invention, inference and deduction. Those lines, which stretch from the
book's dramatic content to its cryptic title and, perhaps, to the name of its
publishing house, reward the reader's labor with insights too varied to be
treated in a short review. To give a relevant taste of the book's philosophic
content, this review will focus upon one aspect of Gimpel's treatment of Vico
and the Jews.
The character Eusebius, in the midst of a
conversation with his close friend, Jonah Mandelbroit, discovers that Jewish
tradition accounts for the natural origins of religion in a manner strikingly
close to Vico's (90ff.). Eusebius, perplexed by Vico's professed Catholicism in
light of the Scienza Nuova, questions Vico's sincerity in placing Jewish
revelation singularly outside the bounds of his principles and method. After
giving a brief, fictionally distorted report on Vico's writing to his friend,
Eusebius proposes that consistency would require Vico, like Lucretius, to
abandon religion for materialist thought. Jonah responds with a disquisition
that begins by bolstering (unknown to himself) Vico's claim that the Hebrews
commune with Gd's "infinite mind." By tradition, Abraham arrived by his
own reasoning at the conclusion that the world has a Creator who is one,
immaterial, and holy, a conclusion then confirmed by revelation. "Abraham
belonged to Vico's Age of Man, not to the Age of Gods or Heroes. He already
reflected with a ‘pure mind'" (99). Jonah continues by pointing out other
humanly contradictory factors that traditionally distinguish the Jews, such as
their practicing a great deal of the Torah (Law) before the Sinai revelation
and accepting the Torah without "preliminary inspection of its inner workings."
Eusebius, far from satisfied, is provoked in a new direction: "Well, if there
was no contradiction for the Jews, did there have to be a contradiction for
Vico?" (120). To this query he offers his own gibing but astonishing reply.
Playing the buffoon, Eusebius suggests that
Vico is a hidden Jew. Due to a ban on Jews in Naples, Vico keeps his identity
and origin secret. His aquiline nose, his father's profession as a bookseller,
and his name, perhaps alluding in a traditionally Jewish manner to his
forebear's provenance ("the Marquisate of Vico") buttress this sportive
suggestion. More importantly, Vico's separation of sacred history and the Five
Books of Moses from his new science points to a deeper reasoning.
Removed from its fictional context, Gimpel's
proposal merits consideration.2 What would support a conjecture of Vico as a
hidden Jew, perhaps of Converso (pejoratively called Marrano) descent? The
seventeenth-century Italy of Vico's birth was home to many Jews who had fled
the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. Often these families had converted to
Catholicism while retaining practices, memory, or at least a deep respect for
the tradition from which they had been coerced. For survival, generations
practiced masking to avoid detection exemplified, perhaps, by Vico's pains to
court the clergy's good opinion while writing a philosophy sufficiently
ambivalent about Christianity to generate controversy to this day. A Converso
born of Sephardic descent might comfortably value philosophy over Christianity
while placing Judaism, even recast, above both. He might consider Christianity,
unlike Judaism, a ricorso phenomenon, while incorporating enough ambiguity in
his linkage of the former with the latter to avoid the suspicion of Church
authorities. His piety would be unfeigned but hidden from the casual reader,
without being esoteric. The political experience of his forebears might lead
him to concentrate upon the civil aspect of gentile religion, and his family's
religious origin might accentuate the general lack of emphasis upon the person
of Jesus in his account of Christianity. Perhaps the internal conflict
experienced by a man of integrity practicing necessary duplicity would engender
a melancholic attitude and would lead him to a different regard upon the
gentile culture into which his family had been subsumed, in contrast to the now
somewhat idealized religion of his family's past. By carrying Gimpel's
suggestion through, one might arrive at a Vico situated existentially between
pagan philosophy, Christianity, and the Hebrews, unable to assume fully any of
these identitites, but qualified to offer a unique philosophic perspective
which triangulates between the three. It may never be provable, but if Gimpel's
playful conjecture were true, one might imagine Vico pleased that the
suggestion arises from a poet, albeit of the human age. Like Bezalel the
Milkman, Vico may make more sense when seen differently than he appears.
Notes
- Nun ben Avraham, Sipurim Yerushalmiyim, cited in Nosson
Sherman, et al., Shavuos: Its Observance, Laws and Significance (Brooklyn, NY:
Mesorah publications, Ltd. 1995), 137-38.
- For background to the following discussion, see Frederick
R. Marcus, "Vico and the Hebrews," New Vico Studies 13 (1995), 14-32.
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