Reference
Bleistein and Shylock
| Bleistein and Shylock in "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" Venice by the late 16th century had become what New York is in literature today: a symbolic city of decaying and corrupt power. Today Eliot might put it in line with the rest of his falling towers, taking the place of the Unreal City. But in his time Eliot put Chicago there, expecting that city to be first, and besides that knowing the city much better. Making a line in the poem Venice-Vienna-Chicago has a number of obvious reasons; each of these cities was in its time a, or even the, major trading city and partly as a consequence, partly as a condition, these cities consisted of many different ethnologies. In Eliot’s continuous line of past-present-future lies a warning to Chicago; Venice fell apart from racial dispute, Vienna fell or was falling apart for this same reason during the period of Eliot’s conception of this poem, and Chicago threatened to fall apart in the near future. That is not to say that racial disputes were the only reasons for these cities’ failings; but in his compact poem, Eliot managed to make several points by symbolic representation, and this is but one of them. The particular symbol he chose for representing race is the same which Joyce had chosen in Ulysses. Presumably for that reason the first line of the poem, Burbank crossed a little bridge, is a reference to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist; where it reads that Stephen symbolically decides to leave the clergy because he believes he will be able to learn more from dwelling among sin. The second line, descending at a small hotel, is then presumably a reference to Freud’s interpretation of dreams, where the phrase figures prominently in connection to a dream where the subject also dwell among sin – in this particular case prostitution. Henry Adams, referred to in the phrase Time’s Ruins, wrote out the idea of going to Europe to dwell among sin and to learn from that in his Education. In one of Henry James’ essays on Venice, after dwelling romantically on the city’s picturesque atmosphere, momentarily awakens from the dream to harsh reality. Where does this happen? In the tourist industry, owned by the Jews. He finds it ugly, but true, as the truth is often ugly just as beauty is often a lie. It was Joyce’s conception in Portrait of the Artist, developed in Ulysses, to describe something ugly such that it became beautiful. Leopold Bloom was his ultimate exercise – an apparently ugly, ironical anti-hero taking the place of the heroic Ulysses in a 48 hour Odyssey. Combine the two images, and you have Bleistein in Eliot’s poem. The complexity of Eliot’s poem derives from its seemingly endless references to literary sources and the intricacy and compactness with which they have been employed. We’ll look at one important reference in detail, ‘on the Rialto once’.
On the Rialto once immediately calls up Shylock; by this sixth stanza Eliot’s method of evoking Venice by employing literary and symbolic references to that city and works related to that city should have become clear to an educated reader. There is no single play nearly as well known as The Merchant of Venice in which the phrase occurs quite nearly so often (eleven times), and then when we further note that Shylock is probably the most famous of (solely) literary Jews there can be little doubt that this text is being referred to. On a slightly closer inspection we can even identify a particular speech from Shakespeare’s play:
Several of these accusations return in Eliot’s poem – the patient shrug is a representation of the Jew’s posture which has become a point of mockery even in Eliot’s own time, as several cartoon representations of Jews in that time attest to. Eliot has taken this over in his description of the saggy bending of the knees and elbows, and the palms turned out, combining it with the image of Christ on the cross, representations of which will nine out of ten times fit the description. One particular term of abuse in here is the ‘cut-throat dog’ which returns in the play a few times; continuously the Jew is being compared to animals, and among these the dog (and the wolf) figure most prominently. This has a reason, certainly in Shakespeare’s play. We remember that Antonio is despondent at the beginning of the play, having a sense of evil foreboding. With one of the most suspect lines Shakespeare ever uses – ‘let me play the fool’ (after Antonio had said that the world’s a stage on which each must play his part and himself a sad one) – Gratiano, a friend to Antonio, comments upon the foolishness of those who try to be what they are not; try to evoke wisdom by saying nothing or to show on the outside what is not on the inside:
As usual, the fool has all the wisdom and his words are the only truly oracular ones in the play. "I am Sir Oracle, / And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark" refers to the proverbial expression that those at whom the dog barks are in disgrace. When Shylock barks at Antonio, the close reader will know what time it is. Admittedly, it’s a very small detail to catch. But it’s not the only one – following directly on the speech above, read the following:
This last line is a reference to Matthew v.22, which reads as follows: "But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire." It is in Matthew 22.31-45 that a lawyer tests Jesus’ knowledge of the scriptures by asking him what the most important commandment in the Bible is: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second [is] like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Several of the warnings implicit in Gratiano’s speech hold true for Antonio, who abuses Shylock for no reason, wherefore he is in danger of judgment. This Antonio receives, and by Shylock’s bond, who as he says himself, assumes the vengeance of the part of misinterpreted Christian law – if each character in the play plays a part, Gratiano the fool, Antonio a sad one, then Shylock plays justice. Antonio learns his lesson from him during the course of the play in the terms that a merchant can understand:
It is the truth that Blake’s "The Clod and the Pebble" so eloquently expresses, and it is probably no coincidence that Burbank takes the place of innocence and Bleistein that of experience, at least at the beginning of the poem – Burbank is "tra-la-la-la-lair", Bleistein "nil nisi divinum stabile est; caetera fumus". But, like Antonio, Burbank (through playing the parts of several literary Antonios throughout the poem) comes to learn his lesson, expressed in the final stanza of the poem. The bottom line is that Eliot has recognised the Jew as a symbol for the danger of not loving your neighbour, on both a moral and an economical scale. The trade and profit of the city, whether it be London, Venice, Vienna, or Chicago, consisteth of all Nations and the justice of any state is much ‘impeached’ (how true this word sounds today) by denying this justice and by not loving thy neighbour like yourself. This idea, together with that other great point expressed by Gratiano and echoed in the casket episode and in nearly all of Shakespeare’s works that involve prejudice in one form or another, which is that appearances are deceptive, including that of Venice and her personification in the poem, Princess Volupine, returns in several other places in the poem and in the other texts referred to by the poem. But this single instance is a crucial turning-point in the poem deserving of much more comment than ‘oh look – how racist of Eliot’. The words are Bleistein’s, barking like Shylock at a person in disgrace, but more with the silent style of the man in black in Browning’s poem. The price for not heeding this call was WWI, the malice of the post-WWI treaties, and the world-wide recession following. Perhaps he also foresaw that the mistake would be made again, in part through his professional confrontation with the Versailles treaty which carries all of the faults of revenge (in Shakespeare’s play also represented by Shylock, but he for the moment assumes the role of the Christian avenger, as he himself is ever pursued for something that happened in generations before him) and none of the love (so typical of Shakespeare, and in The Merchant represented by Portia). As Eliot would say himself much later:
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