My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

188 FROM AN ONGOING INTERVIEW WITH TOM BECKETT
a Chaplinesque sojourner in the wilderness of signs, and
in the sublime wackiness of her typographic inversions.
TB: In "The Lives of the Toll Takers" (in Dark City) you have written:
The hidden language ofthe}ews: self-reproach, laden with ambivalence,
not this or this either, seeing five sides to every issue,
the old pilpul song and dance, obfuscation clowning as ingratiation,
whose only motivation is never offend, criticize only
with a discountable barb: Genocide is made of words like these,
Pound laughing (with Nietzsche's gay laughter) all the way to
the canon's bank spewing forth about the concrete value of
gold, the "plain sense of the word", a people rooted in the land
they sow, and cashing in on such verbal usury (language held
hostage: year one thousand nine hundred eighty seven).
I was moved by that passage. It is rich with associative possibilities-personal,
literary, political-and yet, within the darkly zany,
satirical collage-logic of the poem, it sticks out (like a hitchhiker's
forward pointing, backward walking thumb) as singular commentary.
I still want to explore with you issues relating to irony and
alienation. Maybe if you could speak to the issues raised by the
quoted passage in relation to the larger architectures of the poem it
appears in we could move ahead another step. Or maybe I should
just ask you: For whom do the Toll Takers toil?
CB:
I suppose the passage of a year, the time
it has taken me to begin to respond
to your question, is not an answer
but a further elaboration, or belaboring.
I'm wondering what gives ground
for the sort of statement you cite, as if
the zaniness of the surround makes a space
for truthfulness divested of the patina of
truth, what Alan Davies, in one of his essays,
calls "lies that have hardened".
The passage you ask about refers to Sander Gilman's
Jewish Self-Hatred, which it diagnoses as a
state in which a person internalizes the racist
stereotype that their true language is not the one
they speak but an imaginary "hidden language
of the Jews". Gilman's study centers on the