📕 That which is near to us: on The Books of Jacob

The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk

Long historical novel about cult figure is actually about the Internet.

Finished: 5 March 2023 Rating: ★★★☆☆

Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob is a lengthy chronicle of the life of Jacob Frank, a religious leader of Polish Jewish origin who claimed to be the reincarnation of Sabbatai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Jewish Messiah, and convinced his followers that, in order to achieve enlightenment, they must convert to Christianity. Although it is historical fiction, Abigail Fisher for the Sydney Review of Books makes a compelling argument that The Books of Jacob is really a novel about the Internet. And, as someone who spends an offensive amount of time online, I don’t think think it quite succeeds in that respect.

This book gives form to Tokarczuk’s neologism, “ognosia” —  coined in an essay also translated by Jennifer Croft — which seeks to capture the idea that we increasingly view the world and ourselves in an ever-complexifying manner. The world is seen “not as a hierarchically ordered monolith, but as multiplicity and diversity, as a loose, organic network structure”. Accordingly, Tokarczuk seeks “eccentricity” as a way of looking outside of and beyond the centre (“ex-centric”). Linked in part to chaos theory, which posits that there are patterns within the seemingly random nature of complex systems, her argument is essentially that we have lost our holistic sense in our compartmentalisation of knowledge into components that no longer interact, like labourers in a factory focusing on only one aspect of the product, unable to comprehend the whole. And so, in her writing, Tokarczuk tries to steer the reader’s “attention and sensitivity towards the whole”.

Oftentimes, we need to look away from the purported centre to comprehend the whole. But we don’t do that by amassing every bit of detail that we can — this just explodes the mind. We do it by diving deep into a particular corner of detail that allows us to understand the pattern that emerges, and with that pattern (which will evolve) we can then make greater sense of the whole. One feels this in the cacophony of voices that surround Jacob Frank, the Polish cult figure who is the titular figure of this tome. And, too often, I felt like I was drowning — swept along by the trappings of an idea that obscured the heart of what could’ve been a powerful story. Fiction can and should wrestle with who we are today. But there’s an aspect of being perennially online that resists so much of what makes stories and narratives compelling, for the artistic expression of chaos must, in a novel, still submit to some kind of order. It is the author who needs to lay down the red thread through the labyrinth, and I don’t think Tokarczuk succeeds on this front.

The Internet allows us to relate to one another in a way that is “precise and at the same time total”, connecting many seemingly unconnected things all at once. Tokarczuk writes viscerally in the essay of “the great, fluid, flickering universe that is the world” and refers to her own use of “fragmentary forms” in her work to “[suggest] the existence of constellations that extend beyond a simple sum of composite parts and create their own meaning”. I understand this to mean that Tokarczuk would like us all to take a step back and try to comprehend reality in its totality. The problem is that to do so requires, as a necessary step, that we become aware of the inexhaustible torrent of details in the universe which our minds necessarily tune out. We require a guiding principle to switch to what is salient to us and to avoid being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information. The lesson is not that there is a lot of stuff out there that we are ignoring — it’s that there is a subset of information that we should shift our attention to while continue to ignore other, less salient details. While Tokarczuk admonishes the local, intense focus on a particular component, I don’t think it too dire a situation. Rather, the crisis is that we are increasingly insensitive to the ‘right’ kinds of pattern or order. Such fundamental and organising patterns of reality make themselves felt through every level of resolution — to look away from the centre is to localise in a way that allows us to see the patterns that we cannot actually grasp if we are overwhelmed by the whole. Thus, it doesn’t follow that the answer is to open ourselves to all the detail encompassed within the whole.

Fisher posits Yente, the grandmother who exists liminally between this world and the next and exists outside time and space, as the “fourth-person” perspective that is meant to reflect this “extremely online” perspective — someone who floats above all the characters and observes the connections between individuals and events. Is that not merely the function of the authorial voice? Can that not be achieved through a third-person omniscient perspective without having to turn a character into functioning as a ghost? Did we have to reinvent God? While I am sympathetic to the appeal to a more holistic sense of knowledge and understanding, I cannot help but think of the Aristotelian understanding of matter in a teleological sense — as almost being alive and having purpose. This is an example of a thread that draws everything together. It’s not that many things seem to be connected, but that all things are connected in particular, ordered ways.

There’s a review in The Guardian that discusses what Tokarczuk calls “contuition”, which apparently means the ability to see divine unity in disparate things, and bestows the task upon the reader of “[deducing] a higher order out of the patchwork of scenes and fragments”. My preliminary question to that is: does it exist? I can assume some kind of order to be found, even if conjured by the belief alone, if I am myself sifting through reams of primary material — if I am the one sitting at the computer surfing the net and stitching together the tapestry (and Tokarczuk does indeed include this image of herself in the final pages of the book). But if an author presents a novel to me, a work on which some kind of curatorial order would have been imposed, I’d appreciate a hint. If the divine unity is the idea itself that some kind of order exists, then it’s an insight that’s told to us, not shown — as the narrator explains, Yente can “see all those bridges, hinges, gears and bolts, and all the minor instruments that link distinct, singular and unique events”. So these things are all linked. So what?

Monica Zaleska writes beautifully of how Tokarczuk’s fragments “act as points on a larger map that … reveal the cosmic framework that encompasses and accounts for everything within it, revealing the world to be a ‘living, single entity’ that requires our care and attention”, and it is Yente’s narration that shows us “how to live with tenderness”. I like this reading, but (or because) I am sympathetic to the view that Sam Anderson expresses in his essay “The Last Two Northern White Rhinos on Earth” that “[l]ove has a range. We are built to love, and we can summon that love to do nearly impossible things — and yet that love has an outer range of maybe 30 yards. It’s like a wonderful lamp. It fills the inside of our houses. … But it cannot leap, with any of the necessary intensity, across city limits or state lines or oceans. … We love, really love, what is near us. What we have touched. What loves us back.” In other words, we love for and care by the whole by each taking care of what is close to us. A city is made alive and beautiful by each resident caring deeply for their own piece. It is possible to argue that it is an awareness of the whole that makes our love and care something that contributes to that whole without selfishly taking away from it. But it is also possible to argue that love, if it is true, will always give more than it takes.

In that sense, it is unsurprising that I found the strength of the book to be each instance of its deep exploration of detail. Tokarczuk, through Jennifer Croft, is a vivid and colourful writer, and some of her characters are wonderfully drawn. I wish we could have spent more time with them. The universal is found in the specific. We would do well to pay attention to the growing communities on the web that are seeking to push back against centralisation by building the “cosy web”: local corners of familiarity that people tend like gardens in their homes. By zooming in on what is close to me, do I forget the whole? Perhaps I forgo that expanded vision, that omniscient sense of perspective. But, like the ancient gods racing in to close the distance between them and humanity, I learn the deepest, most far-reaching lessons — care, intimate connection, true sacrifice, love. It is all alive.