Under This Blazing Light (3 page)

You would no doubt be pleased if I said something like this to you: in great times of revival and reconstruction great works of literature too emerge. Don’t get me wrong: I am neither a villain nor a masochist. I am not going to tell you that I am waiting for dusk to descend on the Zionist dream so that great literature can flourish here in the flickering half-light. I simply want to say that the best works of literature are written in times of ending and destruction. It would be nice if literature chirruped like the birds in a Tu Bishvat song: ‘The sun is shining brightly, / The almonds are in bloom; / The birds on every rooftop / Resound in festive tune.’ Literature, at its best, is written by birds of a different feather.

Here in Israel at the present time (which means, in this context, not particularly the end of 1972, or the happy years following the Six Day War, but our own age), the times are not propitious for the creation of great literature. It is entirely possible that a poem or novel will come along to shatter my generalisation. I am not talking about an exact science. I could challenge my own generalisation with weighty counter-examples from the length and breadth of world literature. But the light in Israel at the moment is the light of midday, of midsummer, a bright blue light. Someone looking at Israel from the side, obliquely, might see it like one of those old flickering black-and-white films, where everything is speeded up, with little people rushing around among little cars, making little leaps, half-hysterical, half-grotesque. What can a storyteller do in this light, with this overwhelming rush of energy?

‘As
a
servant desireth the shadow’

This is the place for that old plea that is always heard from ideologues, reformers and idealists: hey, you there, poets, writers, come out of your holes and sing songs of praise for these great events. Momentous achievements are unfolding here, national restoration, building up the land, ingathering of exiles, social reform, wars and mighty deeds, and what are you doing? Sleeping! Scratching at old wounds! Writhing in dark dungeons! Come on out of there, wake up, sing up, plough up the fallow land, your mission is to observe, describe, represent, defend, infuse, plant, educate, exalt, and praise, etc. (There is a fixed litany of verbs that ideologues and politicians always drop into writers’ letterboxes.)

And what is the outcome? Virtually nothing. The writers go on scratching, retreating into their various dungeons, ‘as a servant desireth the shadow’. How irritating. Even in the excitement of the Zionist enterprise not a single epic or drama has been composed to represent or celebrate it. Nothing but groans and grumbles. There is virtually nothing in Hebrew literature about the conquest of the desert or the ingathering of exiles or the security system. Bialik came to the Land of Israel, looked around, everybody pestered him for a new poem, and he wrote nothing, or at most tossed his admirers odd tidbits like ‘Whom should we thank? / Whom should we praise? / Labour and Toil!’ Alterman, who tried hard from time to time to touch the Zionist enterprise and sing its praises, got his fingers well and truly burnt.

So what is the matter with writers? What is the sickness that makes them happy with loss and failure and unhappy when all is going well? Do they obey some fashion directive from Paris that makes them write only of gloom? Or has the whole of Hebrew literature been secretly bought by the enemy’s propaganda machine, which pays it to undermine the national morale? We have heard explanations like these, and worse. But it may be worthwhile to offer a simpler explanation. Something like this:

If you write a story or a poem or a play about a successful undertaking, a dream that has come true, a struggle that has culminated in a resounding victory, it can never be as fine as the achievement itself. No poem about an act of heroism will ever be as splendid as the act of heroism itself. A poem about the ingathering of exiles or idealism or the delights of love cannot compete with life itself. A story about a railway bridge that has been well designed and well made and does its job well is nothing but a heap of redundant words beside the bridge itself.

By contrast - and here there is a mystery - it is possible to write a poem about loneliness, terrible, gloomy, ugly, ignoble loneliness, with eczema, gut-rot, and sticky self-abuse, and the poem can be touching and clean and even beautiful. Or to put characters on the stage so loathsome and tormented that nine out of ten of us would recoil from them in horror and disgust, yet on the stage they will also make us feel tender and compassionate and disgusted with ourselves and our own disgust.

It follows that when literature deals with the collapse either of an individual or of the relationship between two people, a father and son, a man and a woman, an individual and the party, or whatever, it has a chance of working a minor miracle. A transformation. To purge suffering, to make sense of senseless pain, to make collapse more beautiful than it is outside art, in ‘life’. To be a kind of appeal court where monstrous characters and abominable events can demand a second hearing and get off almost scot-free. Think about it: how many murderers, how many madmen, walk free among the pages of what we call literary classics? And we put these murderers and madmen into our schools, to improve our children. Oedipus and Medea, Don Quixote, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Raskolnikov and all four Brothers Karamazov, Prince Mishkin and Kafka’s heroes, they are all either murderers or madmen, or both.

If Shakespeare had written plays about, let us say, the expansion of the navy and improvements in transport and advances in agriculture in Elizabethan England, who would watch them today? After all, a new highway will always be more beautiful, more necessary, more self-evident than a poem about a new highway. But cruelty, suffering, madness, death - these are not self-evident. They call for some sort of justification or illumination or compassion ...

This is all rather schematic. It needs to be hedged around with innumerable reservations. But this is not a seminar, and I have chosen to sketch broad and rather simplistic lines. I ought to be demolishing generalisations, and here I am condensing all my wisdom into generalisations. That is not good.

Witchcraft and sorcery

So what do storytellers do? The ones I like operate more or less like tribal witchdoctors.

Here is a little story for you. Nine thousand six hundred and six years ago, in a musty cave or on a river bank, some shaggy, prognathous men and women are sitting round a fire at night. In the darkness all around lurk monsters, beasts of prey, the ghosts of the dead. Between their terror, the shrieks of birds, the rustling and whispers, these people are suffering mortal agony. And then along comes the storyteller, who is perhaps also the tribal witchdoctor. His stories may be just as frightening as the spirits of the night, perhaps even more so, but in the stories the fear is trapped in words, the ghosts are pent up in a cage of structure, and the monsters are trained to follow the route the storyteller has chosen for them: beginning, middle, and end, tension and release, cunning, mockery, in a word - order. Wild desires and instincts, the very forces of nature, are trapped in the storyteller’s snare, in a web of language and purpose. They can be made to seem ridiculous, those forces and instincts and monsters, or compelled to repeat themselves, like a dancing bear, or forced to obey the logic of the story. In this way the storyteller comforts the members of his tribe and helps them to withstand the eternal siege. Animals, lightning, fire, water, lust, disease and death are made to dance to the beat of the story.

The eternal siege is still there, as you know. Ghosts and goblins, despair, desire, disaster, hatred and dread, old age and death still hold sway. Stories still have the power to comfort, and wordsmiths can still work as witchdoctors. As long as they do not try to be too clever, as long as they do not write academic novels about university life, for a university audience, that will be dissected in the university and die on the shelves of the university library without ever reaching out to the other members of the tribe. The world is filling up with novels about a writer who is an academic having trouble writing his next book so he goes and sees an analyst and tells him how hard he is finding it to write his new book, and after his analysis he sits down and writes a new book about a writer who can’t write so he goes to see an analyst, etc., etc. All full of clever allusions, full of‘locks’ so that the critics can come along with their keys and say ‘Aha, got it’.

I am talking about the need to tell stories ‘shamelessly’. To tell about the primary things in a primary way. To tell as if this were the first or the only book in the world. To start ‘Once upon a time ..and at once to bring to light all the terrors and demons in the depths of one’s psyche - which may echo those in the tribal psyche - to use words to bring everything to the surface, to the light: ‘and in the light all impurities are blasted away’. All this apart from questions of genre and technique, which are not my present subject. Any true storyteller, whether he lives in the fourth century
BC
or the sixth century
CE
or our own twentieth century, be he a modernist or a realist or a symbolist or any other kind of-ist, if he is a storyteller he is also the witchdoctor of his tribe, who conjures the fears and phantoms and terrors and filth, everything that is ‘not mentioned in polite society’, and so brings some relief either to the whole tribe or to some of its members, even if the tribe is ungrateful, even if it howls with pain and fury, even if it shouts ‘What will the neighbouring tribes say about us’, and so on.

And what should an Israeli witchdoctor be doing, here and now, in this strong blue light that is the opposite of twilight?

Gunther Grass sits in Germany conjuring his tribal ghosts. Oskar, the malicious dwarfin The Tin Drum, shatters glass with a high-pitched shriek and plays on a tin drum, bringing out into the light the spirits of madness and the horrifying, grotesque, schmaltzy-sentimental, sadistic nightmares of his tribe. Gabriel Garcia Marquez sits and conjures. Our own Bashevis Singer sits in New York conjuring spirits. I do not know what surrounds them when they write, or what they can see from their windows. Maybe it is harder to conjure spirits if you live in a modem housing development in Israel. It is harder still because of this pedantic light, that does not favour magic. This is a world without shade, without cellars or attics, without a real sense of time-sequence. And the language itself is half solid rock and half shifting sands.

I do not know any Russian, but I imagine that if you say ‘peasant’ (muzhik?) in Russian there is no need to add any adjective: the figure plods straight into your imagination. Say ‘peasant’ in Hebrew: who is it? Is it a veteran kibbutznik, with a bookcase where Kafka’s Trial rubs shoulders with a handbook of pesticides? Or an elderly Yemenite from Ta’anakh? Or a suntanned youth with glasses and dreamy gestures, in a paramilitary settlement in the desert? Or a settler in the Occupied Territories? What is a ‘peasant’ in Hebrew? And who is a ‘worker’? And what does an ‘intellectual’ look like? (Not in a story by Brenner, but here and now?) And I could go on in the same vein. What is, here and now, a village? What is a settlement? And who is, for instance, ‘upper class’? And, incidentally, who is a Jew?

Trees and manure

In this blazing blue light it is of course possible to try to huddle in the shade. It is possible to turn your back on the time and the place, to ignore the tribal problems and write what they call ‘universally’ about the human condition, or the meaning of love, or life in general. But, in point of fact, how is it possible? Surely the time and place will always burst in, however hard you try to hide from them and write about desert islands or Nebuchadnezzar in Tahiti. S. Yizhar once talked about oak trees that cannot grow where there is only a thin layer of topsoil over bedrock. In a rocky wilderness, he said, only shallow-rooted plants can grow. But maybe they will rot down into humus that will permit the growth of shrubs that will rot in their turn so that one day mighty oaks can grow.

This is the State of Israel: a refugee camp thrown together in a hurry. A place of wet paint. Remnants of foreign ways from Marrakesh, Warsaw and Bucharest and godforsaken shtetls drying in the sun among the sand in the backyards of wretched new housing developments. There are ancient remains, but only rarely, in Metulla, Ekron or Gedera, will you find a family home that has been standing for three or four generations. Who in the whole of this frantic country lives in the house he was bom in? Who lives in the house one of his grandparents was bom in? Who has inherited a house from his grandfather or his great-grandfather? Who lives within walls covered with nooks and family memories, surrounded by furniture used by his ancestors (not nouveau riche antiques from the flea market but your own family heirlooms)? Who was brought up on the same lullabies that were sung to his grandparents and great-grandparents? Even our lullabies smell of fresh paint: they were composed yesterday out of more or less Polish or Russian melodies embellished with a few biblical or Arab trills. Everything is new, everything is disposable, cardboard, nylon, plastic, everything, folk-stories, lullabies, customs, speech, terms of endearment and curses, the place, the view. I could prove, on the basis of a ‘statistical sample’, that virtually all the writers we enjoy reading grew up with a grandmother. Which of us has a real grandma? I don’t mean some weird, Yiddish-speaking old woman but a real grandmother with memories, who can be a ‘conductor’ between you and your origins.

And so, in this blight, it is very hard. It is hard to trace the criss-crossed complex of genetic encounters generation after generation that gives each of us his makeup. The uncles and aunts were murdered in Europe or emigrated to America. The grandparents spoke another language. Everything that constitutes the depth of family and tribe - the jokes, stories, customs, lullabies, gestures, whims, beliefs, superstitions, the resemblance to a remote ancestor or distant cousin - has all been destroyed like an unpicked embroidery.