PART TWO—
STYLISTIC PROTOTYPES
Chapter 4—
Beyond Language Pangs:
The Possibility of Modernist Hebrew Poetry
The challenge of writing modernist poetry in Hebrew during the first half of this century ought to have been unbearably difficult. A language that could claim almost no native writers and few native readers, that held to purist and archaist stylistic norms, that still carried the unwieldy burdens of traditional rhetoric and poetic diction (melitsah and shibbuts[1] )—how could such a language become the vehicle of a modernist poetic experiment? Moreover, how could Hebrew, in the brief span from the beginnings of its linguistic and literary revival (the 1880s) to the crest of its first wave of poetic modernism (roughly, the 1920s),[2] have achieved enough stylistic flexibility to accommodate modernist needs for expressive authenticity? But Hebrew poetry managed to do just that and even escaped paying the price that a stylistic struggle of such magnitude could exact.[3]
Rather than create a stylistic crisis, Hebrew poetry's unique affiliation with international modernist movements propelled it toward breathtaking imagistic and poetic achievements. In fact, the ideology and poetics of modernism actually facilitated the achievement of certain internal stylistic goals which were crucial for the poetic redevelopment of the Hebrew language. A beneficial rapport existed between the aesthetic demands of the external modernist affiliation and the particular needs of the newly revived Hebraic tradition. Thus, for example, the moderna poets of the pre-Statehood Generation often employed neologisms both as a vehicle of modernist (futuristinspired) poetics and as part of the push toward lexical innovation
that was necessary for the revival of the Hebrew language. Although each of the three modernist waves in Hebrew poetry developed this rapport within different areas of expression, modernism and Hebraism (namely, the dynamics of the Hebraic literary and linguistic system) nevertheless offered all Hebrew poets a truly serendipitous conflation of purposes. It is important to stress at the outset, however, that Hebrew modernism did not simply adapt foreign influences for indigenous needs. The dynamic hierarchies of diverse stylistic and ideological prototypes within modernism were particularly adaptable to the internal needs of each of the national literatures that participated in it.[4] What remains extraordinary about the Hebrew versions of poetic modernism is the consistency with which the international modernist affiliations could be made to cohere with the peculiar historical demands of the Hebrew literary and linguistic renewal.
As opposed to mere co-option of extranational trends, modernist Hebrew poetry overcame its “language pangs” by evolving a complex rhetorical mechanism in which stylistic strategies and devices received dual but logically independent justifications: one from the external modernist literary system, and the other from the internal Hebraic system. The Russian formalist notion of motivation of the device (motivruvka priëma )[5] and its modifications in Benjamin Harshav's [Hrushovski's] theory of the text[6] best describe this systemic congruity between the external and internal literary dynamics. But first the problem itself needs to be presented in more precise terms.
A historicized, politicized revision of Israeli neoformalist polysystem theory[7] generates one component of my account of Hebrew poetic modernism. It may not be accidental that the Israeli polysystem model itself arose, in part, as a response to the historical conditions peculiar to Hebrew literature and language. Let me try out these particular critical tools in describing the linguistic problems that modernist Hebrew poetry inherited from Bialik and other predecessors. Indeed, Chaim Nachman Bialik very early on was keenly aware of these problems and ingeniously articulated them with unparalleled force in his essay “Chevley lashon” (“Language Pangs”). Using Bialik's analysis as a point of departure, I shall restate the linguistic condition in neoformalist terms and then go on to present the clusters of prototypical stylistic features associated with each of the three modernist Hebrew trends as historically unique responses to these conditions.
Since these stylistic developments were most crucial during the earlier stages of Hebrew modernism, I shall devote the bulk of this
chapter to representatives of the first two modernist trends in (my account of) Hebrew poetry: the anti-nusach (antiformulaic) poets, whose retrospective paragon turned out to be David Fogel; and the moderna of the pre-Statehood Generation, whose activist, dominant paragon was undoubtedly Avraham Shlonsky.[8] Yehuda Amichai and the other members of the third modernist wave of Statehood Generation poets write at a time when already many of the linguistic problems are at a stage of final resolution. Still, I shall discuss some of their salient stylistic features since they have continued to benefit from the literary/linguistic rapport between international and domestic modernism.
Bialik, Automatization, Language System
What exactly were the linguistic and stylistic problems that modernist Hebrew poetry inherited from its premodernist forebears, the poets of Bialik's generation? As I indicated above, Bialik himself, with his unique sensitivity toward language, brilliantly diagnosed the central problems facing Hebrew as a language of modern literature. “The mere existence of linguistic assets alone, as plentiful as they may be, still will not suffice,” Bialik asserts in “Chevley lashon”:[9]
Rather [these linguistic assets] need a turning and overturning, [they require] the perpetual, cyclical motion of life. In this movement the most faithful guardian angel of language is created—routine use. The wealthiest of languages, if its assets are not commonly traded, handled and touched … every hour and every moment in both writing and speech, suffers a marred and miserable existence, gradually deteriorating and falling behind. Great is the power of living speech. No absurdity of grammar or logic exists which the stomach of the living language cannot digest… but on the other hand, a language that is not alive, its powers of digestion weakened, … begins to show the dry bones of its philological skeleton.
To obliterate completely the barrier between our soul and our tongue, to put an end to all the “language pangs” all at once—all this will become possible only through a total rejuvenation of the language and a renaissance of speech and writing. There is no other way: either a complete revival or … a life of shame that would be worse than death. (Bialik, 1965:197-98; translated by Chana Kronfeld and Eric Zakim)
Confronting the stylistic crisis of Hebrew literature head-on with this model of a healthy linguistic economy and anatomy, Bialik's essay prefigures, as early as 1905(!),[10] two radically modern conceptions of literary and linguistic evolution: first, the Russian formalist notion of the automatization and deautomatization of discourse;[11] and, second, the Israeli neoformalist notion of linguistic/literary polysystems.[12] In the first of a series of studies devoted to the special conditions of the Hebrew language system, Itamar Even-Zohar himself stresses that Bialik already reveals a deep understanding “of the problems, deficiencies, and especially the defects of the language … which lacks a complete polysystem.” Even-Zohar then acknowledges his own theory's indebtedness to Bialik, despite what he terms Bialik's “imprecise terminology” (Even-Zohar, 1970:292). Bialik's incisive, albeit “imprecise,” metaphorical description thus provides a particularly instructive beginning to an account of the stylistic crisis which modernist Hebrew poetry inherited from its predecessors.
In his discussion of the importance that clichés have in the linguistic “economy,” Bialik shrewdly uses precisely such a life-giving cliché: the metaphor of lexical coinage (matbe'a lashon literally, “a coin of the tongue”). By reviving the dormant metaphorical import of matbe'a lashon and turning it into the “currency” of a speech community's negotiations and transactions (matbe'a over la-socher “currency,” “negotiables”; literally “a coin handed to the merchant”), Bialik demonstrates the power of shigra (routine use) before our very eyes. He activates, in his own discourse, that “faithful guardian angel” of the Hebrew language which the discourses of his contemporaries lack so badly. In allowing its linguistic assets to be recycled and “automatized,” a language actually ensures its stylistic vitality. Through “the perpetual motion,” the turning and overturning of literary and everyday use, a language system establishes its strong norms (what Bialik refers to elsewhere as nusach ) against which all creative deviations and deautomatizations are measured.
Even-Zohar describes automatization as a “process and/or state whereby signs are (wholly or partly) dereferentialized” (1986:66).[13] Signs, be they literary, linguistic, or cultural, tend to become “‘automatic stock’ for given situations, that is motorized and not controlled by free selection decisions. A large portion of communication … is indispensably automatic…. [Automatization] can be conceived of not just as an elementary feature of signs, but as a necessary condition for their efficient functioning” (1986:66–67). The linguistic economy
implied by Even-Zohar's metaphor is stock market oriented, whereas Bialik's invokes the handling and touching of merchandise in the market place. But both have a strong sense of the necessity of automatization for vital linguistic function.
Bialik clearly understood the need for an all-encompassing conception of language as a system. In establishing his metaphorical anatomy of language in the second half of the passage from “Language Pangs,” Bialik again revives and reifies a lexicalized figure of speech, the anatomical sense of lashon (tongue/language). By metonymic extension from “tongue” to “body,” Bialik constructs an elaborate anatomy of the life and death of a language. In terms that would easily fit both a modernist poetics and a contemporary linguistics,[14] he stresses that a vital language system can digest and absorb any logical absurdity and ungrammaticality. “Bad” grammar and illogic present no danger to the life of the language system. On the contrary, a language becomes contaminated by allowing the normative rules, “the dry bones of its philological skeleton,” to show through. Bialik goes on to prescribe a total revival of Hebrew both in writing and in speech as the only available cure, not only for the obvious nationalist ideological reasons but because—as the anatomical metaphor suggests—Hebrew must become a vital, dynamic, and interactive system which demands and receives the full development of all its strata. Only then can it function properly within the linguistic and literary domains. This antipurist, antiphilological view ultimately calls into question the conservative stance that later modernist generations attributed to the National Poet, Preserver of the Nusach.
Bialik's organistic account of language is clearly reminiscent of later formalist and neoformalist theories, in particular the views adopted by Jurij Tynjanov and Roman Jakobson ([1928, 1971] 1978), the founders of the systems approach to literature and language.[15] Like them he stresses the interdependence of all linguistic strata, both canonical and noncanonical, and their holistic function within the linguistic/literary body. In discussing the importance of stratification to the life of the language system, Even-Zohar also uses organistic/systemic metaphors that differ from Bialik's only in their heavily mechanistic overtones:[16]
Similarly to a natural system, which needs, for instance, heat regulation, so do cultural systems need a regulating balance in order not to collapse or disappear. This regulating balance is manifested in the stratificational oppositions. The canonized systems … would very
likely stagnate after a certain time if not rivaled by a non-canonized system, which threatens to replace it…. This guarantees the evolution of the system, which is the only way by which it can be preserved. (Even-Zohar, 1979:295-96)
An equally important correlation exists between Bialik's views in “Language Pangs” and the neoformalist dynamic conception of language. Even-Zohar and the Israeli theorists have developed a “theory of dynamic system” similar to Bialik's as an alternative to the structuralist “theory of static system … usually associated with the teachings of Saussure” (Even-Zohar, 1979:289). Inspired by Harshav's [Hrushovski's] integrational semantics, Even-Zohar repeatedly emphasizes open-endedness and heterogeneity:
A semiotic system is necessarily a heterogeneous, open structure. It is, therefore, very rarely a uni -system but is, necessarily, a poly -system—a multiple system, a system of various systems which intersect with each other and partly overlap, using concurrently different options, yet functioning as one structured whole, whose members are interdependent…. Against a background such as [this], the term polysystem is more than just a terminological convention. Its purpose is to make explicit the conception of the system as dynamic and heterogeneous. (Even-Zohar, 1979:290).
Even-Zohar's polysystem hypothesis and Bialik's metaphor of linguistic anatomy converge at their objection to philological purism and normativism. Bialik's open embrace of any “absurdity of grammar or logic” produced by living discourse is echoed in Even-Zohar's privileging of noncanonical, nonstandard language and literature within the evolution of the polysystem: “Thus, standard language cannot be accounted for without the non -standard varieties; … the polysystem hypothesis involves a rejection of value judgments as criteria for an a priori selection of the objects of study” (1979:292). Finally, Bialik's complex image of Hebrew's sick linguistic body with its stagnant social economy is repeated in Even-Zohar's diagnosis of modern Hebrew as a defective polysystem or pseudopolysystem, “lacking primarily the system of colloquial speech along with its specific subsystems (standard vernacular, slang, class registers, geographical dialects, etc.)” (Even-Zohar, 1971:339).
The striking correlations between Bialik and the neoformalists may now allow us to reformulate the stylistic crisis which Bialik describes
through metaphor: in the absence of strong and clear-cut norms for ordinary language use, no coherent frame of reference can exist for a literary/linguistic system. The language of literature, lacking the “faithful guardian angel” of routine use, is then forced to supply not just the deautomatization but also the prerequisite automatization of its own discourse. Thus, in order to achieve stylistic stratification the system must artificially fill in the gaps within its various stylistic registers by inventing equivalents or compensations for nonexisting slang, dialects, technical language. However, these artificial or invented modes of compensation (such as Shlonsky's well-known use of Aramaic as an equivalent for slang) do not, as a rule, become adopted by the entire speech community. Rather than perfecting the defective polysystem, the artificial registers can lead to the creation of a “pseudo-polysystem” (Even-Zohar, 1971:339).
Extricating the language of Hebrew literature from its defective or false polysystem has been, and in some ways continues to be, a long and painful process full of “language pangs.” This process became uniquely productive for the modernist poets because of the coinciding emergence of the three major trends of modernism in Hebrew poetry with the general revival of the language. This conjuncture of linguistic and literary forces during the modernist era gave the “digestive powers” of Hebrew poetry enough strength to prevent stylistic starvation and emaciation.
Within Bialik's dissection of Hebrew's language pangs lies a great part of the cure: the recognition of the vital importance of change to the survival and rejuvenation of the (poly)system: “[Only] a system undergoing permanent, steady and well-controlled change is a stable one. It is only such stable polysystems which manage to survive, while others simply perish. Therefore, crises or ‘catastrophes’ within a polysystem (i.e., occurrences which call for radical change, either by internal conversion or by external interference), which can be controlled by the system are signs of a vital, rather than a degenerate system” (Even-Zohar, 1979:303-4).
It was Hebrew poetry's good fortune that at a time when the language was caught in the midst of its change-demanding crisis, it had available to it those modernist prototypes which placed a special emphasis on revolutionary change and provided a plethora of aesthetic and ideological motivations for the innovations that were necessary to the life of the language. Change and motivation go hand in hand. The Russian formalists’ conception of motivation of the
device formed a central tenet in their theory of literary change. The history of the novel, for example, was construed by Victor Shklovsky as “the succession of different motivations for the device of fusing short stories into larger wholes” (Steiner, 1984:58).
Clearly, however, the formalist notion of motivation cannot be adapted to the needs of a historical poetics of Hebrew modernism without some major modifications. After all, in its most well-known formulation, motivation is a rather dogmatic and reductionist concept: Shklovsky (1923:50) restricts his definition to the “extra-literary (reality-like) [bytovoe ] explanation of plot construction.”[17] Even when extended beyond the limits of prose fiction, this interpretation of motivation remains rather problematic, for it denotes “a justification of artistic convention in terms of life,” terms which are always perceived as ancillary to the all-important device. Thus, Jakobson “interpreted the ‘urbanism’ of the futurist poets, their cult of machine civilization, as an ideological justification [motivation] of the revolution in poetic vocabulary, a Futurist's expedient for introducing new, and unorthodox word-combinations” (Erlich, 1965:195). Similarly, Boris Eichenbaum proclaimed that “Tolstoj's passion for minute psychological analysis … was fundamentally a matter of his … challenge to the clichés of romantic literature” (quoted in Erlich, 1965:196). These views, many scholars have suggested, reveal the formalists' strong modernist bias against the representational, ideational, or ethical functions of verbal art. Rather than provide a scientific model of the literary object, as some formalists purported to do, these views promoted a specific prototype of literature consistent with that presented by Russian radical modernism.
Other versions of a theory of motivation, though never fully developed, were less tendentious. By 1935 Jakobson “was ready to postulate for the ‘motivation’ the same autonomy which Russian Formalists claimed for the device” (Erlich, 1965:207). This change was perhaps influenced by Boris Tomashevsky's 1925 expansion of the concept to include “realistic” motivation as well as “compositional” and “artistic” ([1925] 1965: 78–87). In the reader-oriented text theory of Harshav [Hrushovski] and the Tel Aviv School, thematics, ideology, and characterization, for example, are the (realistic) motivation for the compositional device only if the reader happens to be “activating” the compositional dimension of the work. If, however, the reader is actualizing thematic or characterizational patterns, then the (aesthetic) motivations consist of compositional aspects.
While these newer developments in motivation theory have extricated the concept from a completely formalist bias, in practice they have been concerned only with part of the concept's extension. For a variety of reasons, existing contemporary discussions of motivation have dealt mainly with questions of segmentation—namely, the justification for the introduction of segments into the text sequence. There is, however, no reason to go on restricting the application of the concept in this manner. In this chapter I employ “motivation” in a much broader sense. Within this broader interpretation, I describe the workings of a dual motivation in modernist Hebrew poetry as a set of solutions to its stylistic “language pangs.” In the process, some insight may also be gained concerning the applicability of modern Israeli literary theory to the modernist poetry that serves as its prototype. However, it could be argued that the polysystem theory, as it stands, will do to explain all the stylistic achievements of modernist Hebrew poetry and to render redundant the complicated dual-motivation hypothesis. I will begin by examining two such possible explanations, which are based on the concepts of system and automatization/deautomatization as traditionally construed.
The first explanation relies on the peculiar historical development of the Hebrew poetic system. Modern Hebrew poetry assimilated many extant components of its diachronic polysystem, which were kept alive by the strength of the traditional norm from the Bible to the Middle Ages. This strong norm served as a basis for the same automatization of discourse that, according to the neoformalists (as well as Bialik), is a necessary precondition for stylistic rejuvenation. This powerful conventionality engenders the required rebellion against itself, which in turn brings about a deautomatization of the poetic/ linguistic code. Thus, because Hebrew poetry had a history of a strong norm, or nusach, it could also contain a strong modernist reaction against that nusach.
Although this account answers part of the question, it does not encompass all the conditions particular to the history of Hebrew. After all, from the time of the Italian Renaissance, a strong stylistic norm in Hebrew poetry actually ceased to develop, and it survived only in a dormant condition until its resurrection in Bialik's generation. (See Harshav 1993:81–132.) This inconsistent tradition might explain why modernist Hebrew poets, rather than rebel directly against the origins of their style, have always defined themselves vis-á-vis the tradition by discovering within it ever-changing complex
stylistic features. These “strong beginnings” of the Hebrew canon[18] allowed each modernist generation to find in them a prototype fitting its own needs. Paradoxically, then, the influential but relatively shortlived traditional norm enabled the modernist Hebrew poets to turn their defective polysystem into a source of strength. But without help from the open-ended and heterogeneous models of their modernist affiliations it is doubtful whether the strong beginnings would have sufficed to support a major literary revival.
The difference between the polysystems of Hebrew poetry and prose could provide a second possible answer. Clearly, poetry and prose create different expectations for linguistic “fullness” and stylistic authenticity. Traditionally, poetry places fewer mimetic demands on style than prose fiction. For Hebrew poetry, polysystemic gaps in the stylistic registers of colloquial idiom and slang were simply not that critical. In contrast, Hebrew prose fiction from Uri Nissan Gnessin to Amos Oz has been caught between archaic stylistic norms inherited from the diachronic polysystem and its own aesthetic needs for a modern, expressive idiom. While the modernist poet could draw from any of the registers and historical layers of the language which fit his or her needs, the writer of fiction often had to accept a lofty and unnatural linguistic norm or struggle to compensate for the huge stylistic gap between the descriptive passages and the dialogue.[19]
This explanation has the advantage of addressing specific stylistic problems within the genres and may even help explain peculiarities of genre selection, such as the clear preference for the novella and the short story over the novel in modernist Hebrew fiction. The novel could not develop into the dominant narrative genre without the existence of a standard middle register. This register, which linguists call ivrit beynonit (standard Hebrew), is only now maturing into a comprehensive written style. This development has enabled the novel to rise to a position of dominance in contemporary postmodernist Hebrew fiction.
However, this explanation does not account for the problem of poetic diction. Hebrew poetry traditionally showed a strong resistance to any incorporation of “low” or “subcanonical” stylistic materials. While this tendency is probably typical of poetry in general, it was always especially characteristic of verse in the “holy tongue,” where norms of ornate and lofty style have been particularly strong. Thus, it might have been expected that Hebrew poetry should have had difficulty parting with its archaist and purist tendencies, and that
these tendencies in turn would have clashed with the antitraditionalism and experimentation of the modernist poetics. But this conflict did not arise, at least not in any destructive way.
Although incomplete, these two accounts introduce an important issue which the poems I discuss will soon make abundantly clear: paradoxically, there exists a strong conservative element in the experimental stylistics of modernist Hebrew poetry. In the most radical innovations and reversals of past conventions there is also a return to the radices of traditional strong beginnings. We need, however, the model of a dual motivation in order to comprehend more fully the subtle modernist interplay of change and tradition, language crisis and systemic stability.
Stylistic developments in modernist Hebrew poetry are always products of a dual dynamic: the delicate balance of intrasystemic currents with intersystemic (European and American) trends.[20] The stylistic features that allowed modernist Hebrew poetry to overcome its language pangs are, therefore, a special case of this general interaction of inter- and intrasystemic relations (see Even-Zohar, 1978:77–80; 1979:300–303).
The easiest way to illustrate these dual dynamics would be to focus on the Nathan Zach/Nathan Alterman/T. S. Eliot triad, where Alterman represents the internal paragon against whom Zach rebels by importing and raising the salience of those aspects of Eliotesque modernism that fit his needs and marginalizing those that do not. In the process Zach would also establish for himself a role within the Israeli neoimagist trend of Statehood Generation poetry which is self-consciously analogous to that of Eliot within Anglo-American imagism—namely, the role of an activist, dominant paragon. But this famous example could also be quite misleading. The three waves of Hebrew poetic modernism reveal, as a whole, a much more complex and subtle system of congruities or conjunctures between external and internal motivations than this paradigm of a rapport between two activist, dominant paragons might suggest.
It is often from the more ambivalent or peripheral affiliations with modernism that the unique innovations within the Hebrew literary system have emerged. Shimon Sandbank (1976) has shown in a number of detailed and sensitive discussions that Fogel's expressionism is not exactly expressionist. By the same token, I would argue that Shlonsky's futurism is not exactly futurist, and that Amichai's imagism is not precisely imagistic.
To emphasize the decentering tendencies of modernist Hebrew poetry I chose examples from the poetry of Fogel, Shlonsky, and Amichai precisely because these poets' centrality and membership gradiences (Lakoff, 1987:12–13) within Western modernism are much lower or at least more ambivalent than those of their respective contemporaries: Avraham Ben-Yitzhak with impressionism, Alterman with symbolism, and Zach with (neo)imagism. In selecting these particular poets, I also mean to suggest that the encounter between Hebrew and European modernism did not take the form of a passive rendezvous in which both sides maintained an independent existence until, by Hebrew poetry's good fortune, a harmonious match was made. Rather, this encounter occurred as a prolonged process in which general modernist tenets were reworked and adapted to the unique needs of Hebrew poetry. The result was a highly modified series of marginal prototypes of modernism.
Three Love Poems: Fogel, Shlonsky, Amichai
The genre of love poetry exhibits a strong traditional norm both in Hebrew (based especially on the models of the Song of Songs and medieval poetry in Spain) and in European literatures. This genre is appropriate to our discussion precisely because its conventional assets have been so “commonly traded, handled and used.” Given the interdependence of automatization and deautomatization in the linguistic/literary system, it is to be expected that the impulse toward innovation and norm reversal would be vividly present in Hebrew modernist love poems. However, the poets would need to reconcile this impulse with the objective limitations of the Hebrew language system available to them. In this sense, modernist Hebrew love poems ought to offer a rather dramatic example of both the Hebrew stylistic crisis and its resolutions.
Fogel's “At The End of Day”
Viewed against the background of European literary developments, Fogel's antiformulaic (anti-nusach ) generation themat-
ically and stylistically occupies the space between premodernism and modernism proper. In many ways Fogel's poetics prefigures the features most typical of the later two modernist trends, yet it does not repudiate altogether traditional modes of expression and representation. Had he been more familiar to his contemporary readers, this would have made Fogel a perfect transitional paragon. Yet even two (poetic) generations later, for readers who are beginning to see in him retrospectively an important proleptic paragon, his transitional status is still preserved within the dynamics of literary reception and categorization. His low salience within Hebrew modernisms still causes Fogel to be described alternatively as a neoromantic, an impressionist, and an expressionist. (Compare Grodzensky, 1975:116-19; Ha-Ephrati, 1976:167-75; and Sandbank, 1976:70–82)
However, this low-key, highly individualistic poetics, with its carefully veiled subversions of realistic norms of representation and with its undercurrents of erotic radicalism, is common to a particularly large group of poets of or close to Fogel's generation—for example, Ya'akov Shteynberg, Ben-Yitzhak (Sonne), Yehuda Karni, and even more so their contemporary women poets (who are rarely included in mappings of Hebrew modernism): Esther Raab, Rachel, Elisheva, the early Yocheved Bat-Miriam, the early Leah Goldberg, and others. But the combination of their “minor-key” poetics (shira minorit ) with a socially determined marginality coincided with a consistent avoidance of forming any literary circle or of associating with any Hebrew modernist group. While Fogel's personal canonization was probably assured only in the early 1990s, the conjuncture of poetic and social processes in the present Israeli literary system still prevents a collective label for the first modernist trend from being accepted. By selecting this example of Fogel, therefore, I reveal my own special bias: the attempt to recover his role not only as the proleptic paragon of a belated imagism but also as the avant-garde of a camouflaged or repressed early modernism.
In the early 1990s this old debate reignited the entire Hebrew press in vehement controversy over whether Fogel and his generation indeed remained forgotten until their (re)discovery by the poets and critics of the third modernist wave, the Statehood Generation. This critical struggle proves quite instructive for a theory of canon formation. Clearly, two forces are competing within the literary/cultural polysystem, each espousing a periodization of modernist trends that fits its own model.[21] The underlying problem that this debate raises is
the acceptability of anti-nusach minimalist, yet radical, poetics within the official canon of Hebrew poetry.
This minimalism must be regarded, in part, as a reaction against the stylistics of overstatement, which Fogel associated both with the older Bialik generation and with the younger moderna of the pre-Statehood Generation. In what amounts to a radical reinterpretation of Hebrew poetic history, Fogel claimed that in spite of Shlonsky's famous feud with Bialik, very little divides the schools each represents. In Fogel's judgment, an overabundance of literary allusiveness characterizes both “the nusach poets … who filled their pockets with the prepackaged treasures of our language, a biblical, midrashic, mishnaic nusach, but who lack any individual style” and the “literary acrobats” among the linguistic innovators of Shlonsky's generation. For Fogel the moderna poets are merely formalist nusach poets in modernist guise: “The trite melitsah,[ 22] that regurgitation of ready-made verses, which every empty, talentless maskil [“enlightenment-Jew”] used to show off with, that melitsah which we have already buried once is now rising again before our very eyes, albeit in a slightly altered shape and a more modernist form, as befits the needs of our times.”[23]
Fogel's harsh words, whose publication was delayed until after Shlonsky's death in 1973, contributes a new perspective to the internal stylistic norm shift in Hebrew poetry. This bitter attack on both the premodernists of the Revival (ha-tchiya ) Generation and the moderna poets was delivered by Fogel in a lecture tour of Poland in 1931, about eight years after the publication of his first book of poetry, Before the Dark Gate (Lifney ha-sha'ar ha-afel ) (1923). Shlonsky's first volume of poetry, Dvay (Distress ), was published in 1924, one year after Fogel's, so a chronologically determined generation gap between these two rival modernist paragons cannot really exist. Thus, the famous rebellion of Shlonsky's modernist group against Bialik's premodernist nusach must now be seen alongside the almost contemporary struggle between two contradictory prototypes of modernism: the maximalist, extroverted style of the moderna poets in Palestine; and, the minimalist, introverted style of the European antiformulaic (anti-nusach ) poets.
How then does Fogel avoid what he regards as the stylistic pitfalls of his predecessors and near contemporaries, while working within the limitations of the defective polysystem of Hebrew? “Binetot ha-yom” (“At the End of Day”), the love poem I have chosen to discuss, shows Fogel resisting almost completely the temptations of linguistic innovation on the one hand and allusive melitsah on the
other. Instead, he offers a functional deployment of the limited resources at his disposal, turning their very limitation into an organizing stylistic feature. Not surprisingly, perhaps, these resources are quite traditional. It is their functional, nonornamental use that constitutes a stylistic innovation.
[At the End of Day]
At the end of day—
my secret love will look[24]
to the blue agonies of your[25] eyes,
my mute love.
But when the soft night
comes to me
how my two small,
pale breasts will yearn,
unto you, my beloved.
And suddenly then I will leap from my bed
and with my hands I will clench them to my chest.
Anxious I will whisper
to the stillness of the night:
I loved him, I loved him.
And my womb will shudder quietly
in its longing for the child.
—Fogel ([1966] 1975:96; published in 1923;
translated by Chana Kronfeld and Eric Zakim)
The most salient examples of Fogel's strict functionalism are the poem's selective use of biblical syntax and biblical allusion. Syntactically, the poem maintains a subtle oscillation in its use of verb forms between the biblical aspectual system and the modern tense system. This oscillation, the product of interrupted diachronic processes of language change, could easily have resulted in serious obstacles to literary style. In Fogel's hands, however, it becomes a means for making the poetic Hebrew phrase at once more precise and more pliable. Moreover, the indeterminacy of tense and aspect proves to be an excellent vehicle for achieving that purposeful hesitation between premodernism and modernism, the low and ambivalent membership gradience which Fogel maintains through a delicately balanced fluctuation between impressionism and expressionism, stasis and action, observable reality and subjective space.
A brief outline of the overall stylistic functions of syntactic patterns in the poem can provide a context for Fogel's dual motivation of tense and aspect. The beginning of the poem, and the beginnings of all stanzas, establish an expectation that the text will develop a sustained, conventionally structured plot. The different phases of the action occur at defined times—Bi-netot ha-yom …/Ulam be-vo …/Ha-la'yil ha-rakh (“At the end of day … But with the coming …/Of the soft night”)—between two specified agents (the female speaker and the male addressee), leading up to a climax, or turning point—U-feta az 'itar (“And suddenly then I (will) leap(ed)”), and winding down in an anticlimax—cheresh (“quietly”). However, several syntactic choices undermine these “action-filled” expectations, imbuing the poem with a static, “nounlike,” and atemporal quality. The most obvious examples are the use of adverbial gerundives—Bi-netot ha-yom (“At the end of the day”), be-vo … /Ha-la'yil (“with the coming … /Of the night”)[26] —rather than inflected verb forms, and the predominance of noun phrases, adjectives, and stative verbs and adverbials in the
poem. Of the inflected verbs, only one, ahavtiv (“I (have) loved him”) is not morphologically marked for the future but is written as a morphological past. This is also the only transitive verb in the entire poem. Yet, this one perfective, transitive verb, while semantically expressing the focal emotion of the poem—love—is clearly not an action verb at all.
The rest of the inflected verbs—tabit (“(will) look(ed)”), ya'argu (“(will) yearn(ed)”), 'itar (“I (will) leap(ed)”), a'amtsem (“I (will) clench(ed)”), elchash (“I (will) whisper(ed)”), yir'ad (“(will) shudder(ed)”)—can be read in two different ways. They are either aspectual, describing habitual, imperfective action which the speaker experiences (in a future converted to the present or the past), or they are marked for tense, projecting a desired, unattained, and perhaps unattainable future event. An aspectual reading is more appropriate for the first half of the poem, partly because the gerundive (be + infinitive) could easily mean “whenever”; the second half of the poem, coming after the adverbial l-feta (“suddenly”), lends itself more readily to a tense-marked reading denoting a specific—albeit fantastic—future action. The fact that both the temporal and atemporal verbs use an identical morphological future blurs the distinction between projected and actual event. This indeterminacy is supported by other stylistic manifestations of the speaker's agitated state of mind. She expresses her yearnings for her lover in the second person—elecha, dodi (“unto you [masculine], my beloved”)—only to realize through an implied autoerotic experience that both the lover and the child she wants to have by him remain absent. In lieu of the lover, she then addresses the night, which in the course of the poem turns from a metonymic substitute for the man—be-vo elay/Ha-la'yil ha-rakh (literally, “with the coming to me/Of the soft night”)—into the speaker's only real companion and the addressee of her whispered words—elchash/Li-dmi ha-la'yil (“I (will) whisper(ed)/To the stillness of the night”). The lover can now only be invoked in the third person—Ahavtiv (“I (have) loved him”)—the finiteness of the perfective verb suggesting, perhaps, that the love story is indeed a matter of the past.[27]
Fogel makes effective use of the very inconsistencies and incompleteness within the Hebrew syntax of his time, a Hebrew that was still by and large not a fully revived, spoken language. This limitation of the Hebrew polysystem allows Fogel to capture the subtle fluctuations and purposeful hesitations which always stand at the perceptual center of the work of this transitional paragon, a hesitation
between impressionist, atmospheric shades of a discrete moment in space and time, and the expressionist, internalized reality of the speaker's state of mind. In the process, the use of biblical syntax in a modernist Hebrew poem receives a dual, mutually reinforcing motivation. Intersystemically, as we have seen, the duality serves modernist expressive needs by emphasizing both the phases of an action rather than its real time and the convertibility of one “tense” into another: future into past, past into future and present. Intrasystemically, the functional revitalization of the aspectual system provides a much needed compensation for gaps in the tense system of modern Hebrew. For example, the absence of a present progressive with its vividness and immediacy of depiction is compensated for by the use of conversive verb forms that highlight the duration of an action. In this manner, a modernist desire to privilege the act of perception by focusing attention away from the objective time coincides with an internal Hebraic need to fill lacunae in the language system. Fogel's uncanny sensitivity to both linguistic and modernist needs has, perhaps, more than anything else made the stylistic achievements of his poetry so unique.
But Fogel's use of biblical syntax is innovative also in what it does not do. Unlike premodernist poets before him, he does not employ biblical syntax for the purposes of lending his text authority or complying with traditional demands for poetic decorum. Nor does he use nonbiblical syntactic patterns merely to challenge that authority and decorum. Fogel's treatment of language and style demonstrates a poetic in which both the archaic and the modern layers can be approached simply as linguistic and cultural assets. A poet is free to pick and choose from these assets, regardless of their authoritativeness, simply in order to achieve specific expressive effects. The tension between temporality and atemporality is one such example. It gives syntactic concreteness to the transitional pose so typical of Fogel's lyrical “I,” between the “receptive stance of the impressionist mode and the introspective stance accompanied by ‘active contemplation’ which characterizes the expressionist mode” (Sandbank, 1976:51–52).
Fogel's use of biblical allusion not only exhibits the same functionalist approach as his syntax but also reveals his sensitivity to the diachronic evolution of the Hebrew tense and aspect system. The connection between the poem's patterns of biblical allusion and its oscillation between biblical aspect and tense lies in the linguistic nature of the biblical text that the poem evokes, the Song of Songs
(specifically, 3:1–5 and 5:2–8). Talmy Givón has shown in his study of biblical syntax that the Song of Songs marks the “endpoint of the change,” within biblical Hebrew itself, in the tense-aspect system and is therefore “the most progressive dialect-level evident in the Old Testament” (Givón 1977:188).[28] As a result of this change, all instances of the imperfect in the Song of Songs semantically and pragmatically have come to designate “IRREALIS or HABITUAL ” aspects of an action (p. 248, note 21). “The PERFECT [compare ahavtiv in line 14 of our poem] has become the main past narrative tense, covering both continuity and anterior functions; the PARTICIPLE has become the sentential/nonpunctual/continuous/habitual aspect” (p. 233). These are precisely the “nounlike” and fantastic implications of verb construction in Fogel's poem, implications which are motivated intersystemically by adopting salient modernist subversions of romantic and naturalist conventions of representing reality and human relationships.
The syntactic function of the allusion is independent of any specific intertextual relations that may obtain between Fogel's poem and passages from the Song of Songs. In fact, the poem's language never specifically evokes those passages. Only the dramatic situation of “At the End of Day” identifies for the reader a particular allusive pattern to Song of Songs 3:1–5 and 5:2–8. The only direct and unambiguous textual marker in the language of the poem that points to the Song of Songs is the word dodi (“my beloved,” homonymous with “my uncle”).[29] Saliently located at the end of a stanza in the very center of the poem, this word alone lays bare the entire allusive device. But even dodi does not refer the reader specifically to the two evoked passages from the Bible; the word presents itself instead as a general biblical love epithet. There are, after all, numerous examples of its use throughout the Song of Songs, as well as in normative Hebrew love poetry of all ages. The “world” created within the poem, rather than its language, establishes the network of intertextual links between Fogel's love poem and particular biblical models. Within the poem's dramatic situation, the female speaker, alone in bed at night, in an agitated state of mind, narrates an actual or make-believe nocturnal erotic encounter with her lover. The hesitation between reality and the imagination, wakefulness and dream, that accompanies the dramatic situation is realistically motivated by the woman's agitation. But it is reinforced aesthetically both by the poem's modernist expressive goals and by the evoked biblical texts, which provide traditional normative support for these modernist goals. Once the two
biblical texts are evoked, however indirectly, they become necessary to our understanding of the motivation of the allusive structure in Fogel's poem.
The two biblical passages, both dramatic monologues of a female speaker, present essentially the same narrative material in two different versions. The first evoked text, Song of Songs 3:1–5, describes the Shulamite's wakeful nighttime fantasy ('al mishkavi ba-leylot bikashti et she-ahava nafshi “By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth”), whereas the second, 5:2–8, relegates the events to her dream (ani yeshena ve-libi er “I sleep, but my heart waketh”).[30] Furthermore, the first version (3:1–5) clearly empowers the female speaker/protagonist and presents her as the initiator of the action: she misses her lover and decides to go looking for him; when she cannot find him she enlists the help of the watchmen; finally and quite literally she gets hold of her beloved and brings him home to her mother's bedroom. The second version (5:2–8), while erotically more explicit, depicts the woman in a more reactive and disempowered light. Although she responds to the lover's requests with coy resistance, it is he who leaves her. She cannot find him anywhere and falls victim to the abuse of the watchmen who catch her wandering about. Wounded and love sick, she can only go on waiting—and dreaming.
Like these two passages, Fogel's “At the End of Day,” which is the third in a series of eleven “maiden poems” (shirey ha-na'ara ),[31] is narrated from the female lover's point of view. The poems in this series, like the passages from the Song of Songs, alternate between a passive and an active rendering of the female role in the lovers' encounter.[32] Indeed, all eleven “maiden poems” need to be examined as one conjoined poetic unit in order for the full force of the allusive pattern to emerge. Through such a sustained allusion, Fogel's modernist goals receive a surprising reinforcement from the most traditional of sources, the biblical canon. The modernist goals most amenable to a stylistic analysis involve the subversion of two traditional norms of representation, the first concerning reality and the imagination, and the second pertaining to love and erotica.[33]
Both the passive and the active versions of the Shulamite's poem in the Song of Songs maintain a subtle hesitation between reality and fantasy not unlike that which Fogel strives to capture in his depiction of the young woman's agitated state. Specifically, both the modern poem and the two biblical “songs” it alludes to are characterized by a fundamental uncertainty of perception: does the text present the
story of a nocturnal love encounter or is it all a projection of the speaker's unfulfilled yearnings for just such an encounter? Similarly, in all three texts an autoerotic experience—“by night on my bed” (Song of Songs 3:1)—or erotic dream—“I sleep, but my heart waketh” (Song of Songs 5:2)—may constitute the “event” which the poems obliquely describe. In Fogel's poem, what is presented syntactically as the narrative climax (in stanzas three and four) may in fact be a highly suggestive linguistic correlative to the speaker's own sexual climax: U-feta az itar mi-yetsu'i / U-veyaday a'amtsem [et shaday] el chazi…. / Gam rachmi yir'ad (“And suddenly then I (will) leap(ed) from my bed / And with my hands I (will) clench(ed) [my breasts] to my chest / breast…. / And my womb (will) shudder(ed)”). A very similar reading could be provided for the metaphorical depiction of the Shulamite “opening to” her lover, her fingers dripping with sweet smelling myrrh “upon the handles of the lock” (Song of Songs 5:5–6).[34] It is, therefore, the bold eroticism and radical metaphoricity of the paradigmatic text of traditional Hebrew love poetry which reinforces Fogel's modernist exploration of a female erotic perspective.
This brings us to the final, and perhaps most intriguing, aspect of Fogel's subtly radical use of biblical allusion: the repudiation, through metaphor and metonymy, of conventional distinctions between familial and romantic constructions of love and intimacy, a repudiation of tradition which seeks and finds for itself a model within that selfsame tradition. Throughout Fogel's poetry there is a striking sustained similarity between those poems that describe parent/child attachments and those whose theme is love between man and woman. Aharon Komem (1982:24, 29ff) was the first to point out an intriguing conflation of motifs, images, and tones in all the different kinds of love in Fogel's poetry. Especially striking are the analogies between the poems which feature the daughter and the erotic love poems to a young adolescent girl. “These two realms [the daughter poems and the erotic poems], which reveal a kind of radical reevaluation (sidud ma'arachot ) of Fogel's attitudes toward the world and of our attitudes toward his poetry, … maintain a special interrelation between the poetic materials, the overall position, as well as much beyond that” (Komem 1982:24).[35]
The stylistic mechanism through which this “radical reevaluation” is effected involves a subtle reworking of biblical material. At the center of “At the End of Day” stands the lone allusive marker dodi. It appears at first to be simply a biblical epithet, but almost
imperceptibly Fogel uses it to activate the entire metaphorical system embedded in the Song of Songs, EROTIC LOVE AS KINSHIP: the woman is a sister-bride (achoti kala ); the male lover is (homonymously and figuratively) an uncle (dod ); and alternatively the man is like a brother unto the woman, a brother “that sucked the breasts of (my) mother” (Song of Songs 8:1).[36] In other narrative metaphors in the Song of Songs, the desired consummation of the love relationship is depicted figuratively as the “uncle” coming home to “mother” (3:4; 8:2); elsewhere the Shulamite arouses her lover under the apple tree, in the same location where his mother gave birth to him (8:5). While these metaphors' literal kinship meaning has been largely forgotten through the automatization of routine use over the centuries, the larger context of Fogel's poetry revives and reifies them. Seen as an instance of the EROTIC-LOVE-AS-KINSHIP metaphor, the ending of “At the End of Day” acquires a radical reading: the female speaker describes an autoerotic orgasm through the maternal image of the womb trembling with yearning for a child: Gam rachmi yir'ad cheresh / Bega'agu'av 'el ha-yeled (“And [literally, “also”] my womb will shudder quietly / in its longing for the child”).
Fogel's use of allusive systems such as this, which at first appears quite marginal, prefigures strategies that have become the hallmark of later Hebrew modernists' prototypical style: the subversion of traditional attitudes through the literalization and resuscitation of traditional figurative concepts. This tense cooperation between tradition and innovation, so characteristic of modern Hebrew poetry, emerges as an integral part of the dual-motivation thesis. Through the effective use of radical components within the Hebrew literary canon, Fogel, and other modernists after him, managed to overcome stylistic difficulties and achieve many of their modernist goals.
Fogel's invocation, via classical allusion, of the entire history of a genre and a device becomes quite typical of later modernists as well, and especially of Shlonsky and Amichai. “At the End of Day” draws not only on the biblical origins of the conventions of love poetry but also on the diachronic developments leading up to neoromantic interpretations of these conventions in the poetry of Bialik's Revival (ha-tchiya ) Generation. In fact, an argument can be made for seeing “At the End of Day” as a critical response, from an individualistic, early modernist perspective, to Bialik's “At Dusk” (“Im dimdumey ha-chama”). In his reevaluation of traditional poetics, Fogel not only positions himself subversively within the classical canon but also
challenges genre conventions that became established during the previous generation of the nascent national literature.
Shlonsky's “You Are Hereby”
Hebrew literary historiography commonly describes the intrasystemic struggle between modernism and premodernism in Hebrew poetry as an intertextual wrestling match between two dominant modernist and premodernist paragons: Shlonsky and Bialik. Avraham Ha-Gorni-Green in a study aptly titled Shlonsky ba'avotot Bialik (Shlonsky in the Bonds of Bialik) (1985) calls this view into question. Other scholars have also observed that the stylistic relationship of Shlonsky's moderna to its intrasystemic predecessors, the poetry of the ha-tchiya generation, is marked by a powerful ambivalence. (Compare Tzur, 1985, and Shavit, 1981, 1988.) The resistance to the strong pull which the traditional literary norm had on the pre-Statehood Poets needed to be motivated by an equally powerful intersystemic modernist affiliation. Russian futurism offered a cluster of salient prototypes such as revolutionary ideology and an attack on the literary institutions of the past. These prototypes provided Shlonsky with the required antitraditional “destructive” motivation; at the same time, the urgent needs of Hebrew as a defective polysystem in a state of crisis offered a compelling mission and a “constructive” motivation for many of the same futurist, antiromantic poetic practices. For the purposes of my argument, this conjuncture of intersystemic and intrasystemic motivations becomes particularly exemplary in Shlonsky's use of allusion and neologisms.
You Are Hereby
She is naked—steaming from mist and dung,
Demanding and puffing in her heat—
A field—and from the nostrils: dew and vapor—
A bride—in a veil. An aroused woman.
How wild-looking is her hair, and how long-grown.
Her dirt-clods are ready for the grass.
And he hands her a slice of the moon
This evening as a wedding ring.
You are hereby sanctified unto me by grass,
By a whisper of thoughts and thistles.
You are hereby manured unto me by fertilizer,
With the dung of flocks and herds.
You produced for me the sheaf of wheat and the thorn-bush,
You renewed for me brambles and stalks.
They will come, your plowers will husband you
And they will establish in you a seed for crops.
You were hot for me, and so I came to the holy-place.
I felt compassion for your wholeness and your plenty.
You are hereby overflowing unto me with abundance,
A field at the season of lovers. Hallelujah!
—Shlonsky (1947:8; translated by Eric Zakim)
In “Harey at,” the intertextual links to traditional sources are much more explicit than in Fogel's poem. In fact, they are flaunted in the poem's very title. And, in the end, they leave their mark on the diction and syntax of every line. The most salient feature of the allusive pattern in the poem is the marker harey at (“you are hereby”), which constitutes the title and reappears at the beginnings of three lines highlighted in the center and at the end of the poem. This marker evokes the traditional speech act performed by the bridegroom during the Jewish marriage ceremony, harey at mekudeshet li … ke-dat moshe ve-israel (literally: “you're hereby sanctified unto me … by the religion of Moses and Israel”). However, the juxtaposition of the title and the first line indicates, semantically as well as prosodically, that the traditional allusion is pointedly used for antitraditional purposes:[37]
HAREY At (you are hereby)
ERYA Hi (she is nude/genitalia)
Harey and erya bring together, in a rearrangement of almost identical sounds, the boldly contrasting realms of the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the physical, contrasts which are highly prototypical of Shlonsky's poetics of allusion. The poem contains a bold allusive juxtaposition not just between the title and the first line but also within the first line itself. This contrast recurs in all other stanzas of the poem: between the naked agricultural body of a (personified) fertilized field, “steaming (perfumed) with mist and dung” (mekuteret ed va-zevel ), and the norms of traditional Hebrew love poetry represented by the covert allusion to the beloved in the Song of Songs (3:6), rising out of the desert, “perfumed with myrrh and frankincense” (mekuteret mor u-levona ). In addition, within the diachronic context of Hebrew love poetry, Shlonsky's reinterpretation of harey at, especially given his metaphorical rendering of the beloved as a field (identified explicitly in line 3), clashes with the forceful norm of the earlier hatchiya generation poetry.
It is impossible to conceive of Shlonsky's “Harey at” without in some way involving Shaul Tchernichovski's pantheistic epithalamium, “Harey at mekusemet li” (“You Are Hereby Bewitched unto Me”) (1929; in Tschernichovski 1950:492). Shlonsky, then, is struggling to extricate himself from both the religious norm (ke-dat moshe ve-israel, “according to the law/religion of Moses and Israel”) and its
humanist/pantheist critique by Tchernichovski (ke-dat oto parpar … be-sod kol shirat ha-adam, “according to the law/religion of that butterfly … with the secret of all human poetry”). The poem combines the ideological motivation provided by the anticlericalism of socialist Zionism, a salient aspect of which is the rejection of traditional Jewish attitudes toward sacred rituals such as the marriage ceremony, with its concomitant modernist rejection of traditional and romantic notions of beauty and propriety. In this way the poem celebrates an iconoclastic secularization of traditional Mosaic values at the same time that it rejects a neoromantic religion of nature.[38] The alternative that Shlonsky offers is itself ideologically motivated: it reifies the religious and sexual metaphors which are an integral part of the left-wing Zionist idealization of agricultural labor. As in the beginning of the poem, the ideological conversion of the sacred first into the natural realm and ultimately into the realm of labor is aesthetically motivated through the spectacular prosodic conversions of a focalizing sound pattern and untraditional rhyme scheme which are placed in the center of the poem (lines 9 and 11):
mEku DESHE t (sanctified)—Mosaic religion
BE DESHE (with grass)—Tchernichovski's pantheism
BE DESHE n (with fertilizer)—socialist “religion of labor”
These prosodic patterns are, of course, typical of the modernist functional activation of rhyme and rhythm as opposed to a convention-dictated employment of a metrical scheme. The focalizing sound pattern and the asymmetrical rhyme are the means for establishing semantic relations among mekudeshet, be-deshe, and be-deshen.[39] By elevating deshen (“agricultural fertilizer”) to an alternative for both traditional Judaism and pantheism, the poem bestows religious significance on the new pioneer values of labor and return to the land. This radical valuation actually has quite a specific parallel in the revolutionary and iconoclastic poetics of Russian futurism: from V. Khlebnikov's image of the modernist poet shooting arrows at the gods to his glorification of the garbage and maidenry of the “steaming fields” (1976:55, 99). The coincidence of futurist ideology and the values of the “labor religion” (dat ha-avoda )[40] in Shlonsky's poetry is far from accidental since the same Russian revolutionary socialism fed the roots of both.
Shlonsky's well-known tendency toward neologism also reveals a complex system of congruities between internal and external needs.
Statements made by Shlonsky in a series of manifestoes of the moderna supply the explicit poetics for his neologistic bent. They present the futurist view of language from a decidedly Hebraic perspective, fraught with ironic allusions to traditional Jewish texts and traditional Jewish practices. Although these pronouncements were made about twenty-five years before the publication of “Harey at,” they nevertheless directly prefigure the poem's umbrella metaphor of an antitraditional woman. This woman, however, started out as the “word,” and only later became the “field.” “The word (under the rule of the melitsah of the language) just as a woman (under the patriarchal rule of society) is not free: she is dependent on her husband for her livelihood; … we have rebelled: ‘free love! civil marriage!’ Our melitsah —a kosher humble daughter of Israel—has accepted the tradition: matches are made in heaven. ‘By the law of Moses and Israel’” (1923:189-90; in Harshav [Hrushovski], 1973:154-55). Instead of this religious linguistic bondage, Shlonsky advocates “civil ceremony, free love between words without arranged marriages of ancestral-proud style, without a dowry of associations, and mainly: without a religious chupa (too much family purity in our language!!). Each coupling of words—a promiscuous surrender, a one-night stand” (1923: 190; in Harshav [Hrushovski], 1973:154).
The same new value system of free love and antitraditionalism which characterized early labor ideology in Palestine generates the materials of the umbrella metaphor for a rebellious, modernist style. In the poem “Harey at,” both anticonventional and “permissive” conceptions of love similarly serve as the source of materials for a metaphor, except that here the tenor is the pioneer/laborer's relationship to his land. The pioneer sexually possesses (bo'el ), plows, and plants in the nakedness of the feminized field who demands her satisfaction from him, “puffing in her heat” (line 2).
As in Fogel, and as we shall see later on, in Amichai as well, the same “free love between words,” which rebels against the norms of love poetry, simultaneously and perhaps paradoxically also preserves the traditional model. The poem “Harey at,” in fact, resurrects the agricultural/natural component within the imagery of the Song of Songs itself and modifies it to fit modernist ideological needs. Whereas in the biblical poem the worlds of agriculture and sheepherding serve as vehicles for the tenor of the lovers' relationships, here the terms of the metaphor are reversed: free, unruly love serves as a vehicle for the tenor of a new commitment to the field and the land. However different, the
context of the evoked biblical text is mobilized in support of even the most antitraditional of Shlonsky's modernist stances.
The neologisms themselves are new words coined from existing roots or portmanteaux, blends of two separate roots. Many of them are presented in morphological patterns with the stress on the penultimate syllable—a typical compensation device in moderna poetics for the paucity of such Russian sounding, “soft” (mil'eyl ) forms in Hebrew: péra —a portmanteau of pere (“wild”) and paru'a (“disheveled”); gélel —“dung”—rather than the common milra equivalent, the plural form glalím; rachámti —a portmanteau of rechem (“womb”) and rachamim (“pity,” “compassion”); megudéshet —a portmanteau of gdusha (“heaping full”) and mekudeshet (“sanctified” or “sacred”). These neologisms and others like them appear on the surface to be lexical innovations. As such they are consistent with those modernist prototypes which view the language of poetry as a productive process of signification rather than with the opposite modernist prototype which denies the very possibility of signification. However, on close examination, it turns out that all the neologisms in the poem are actually resuscitated forms which are found at least once in traditional sources.[41] For example, a form such as novavt in line 13, which at first strikes the modern Hebrew speaker as odd if not incomprehensible, appears in the Bible, within a context strikingly similar to that of the poem: ve-tirosh yenovev betulot (“[Corn shall make the young men cheerful]/And new wine the maids”) (Zechariah 9:17). Similarly, the uninflected noun yichuma in line 4 (note that it isn't the feminine possessive of yichum! ) appears in the liturgical poetry of Ha-Kalir[42] in the sense of “woman,” investing Shlonsky's text with the stock identification of femininity with unbridled eroticism (from yichum, “sexual arousal,” “heat”).
With all their stress on lexical innovation, the Russian futurists themselves also viewed neologisms as a process of “delving into the root.”[43] Mayakovsky's description of Khlebnikov's poetic practice might easily apply to Shlonsky: “He created an entire ‘periodic table of the word.’ Taking the word in its undeveloped unfamiliar forms, comparing these with the developed word, he demonstrates the necessity and the inevitability of the emergence of new words…. Khlebnikov is simply reversing the process of word formation” (in Brown, 1976:15).
Clearly, Shlonsky is less radical in his practice of lexical innovation and experimentation than Khlebnikov and the other futurists, in part because he must limit his selections to those neologistic devices which
best serve the intrasystemic goals of revitalizing the Hebrew language. Paradoxically, this very tension between innovation and tradition points to the major congruity between the needs of European modernism and the demands of the internal system within Shlonsky's poetry. According to Shlonsky's own account, neologisms are viewed by the Russian futurist poets as a way out of the impasse for a literature which is trapped between “the domestic grayness of the realists” and the “symbolists' flight to the heavenly clouds” (cited by Yaffe, 1966:159). Shlonsky continues: “Now a change has taken place in the concepts, perceptions, and interests of the generation, and of necessity this requires a change in the verbal stock. Therefore we must renovate the language, produce new words, coin expressions which have never occurred before” (cited by Yaffe, 1966:159–160).
This acute need to renovate the language becomes for Shlonsky not just a matter of modernist disappointment in realism and symbolism. It is necessary in order to help Hebrew extricate itself from the status of a defective polysystem, to fill in the gaps in the lexicon and the stylistic registers, and to work toward the establishment of a highly differentiated, stratified system which all types of discourse can then draw on. These goals, unmentioned in Shlonsky's modernist manifesto, nevertheless form an integral part of his generation's implicit poetics. Ironically, the rebellious, modernist desire to shatter the archives of petrified traditional language serves a constructive collective goal of reviving and preserving the old-new Hebrew tongue.
Amichai's “Jacob and the Angel”
While many of the intrasystemic linguistic factors in the modernist process of dual motivation have become less critical in the poetry of the Statehood Generation, its major poets, and perhaps especially Yehuda Amichai, have continued to maintain a complex modernist/Hebraist rapport. Actually, in this generation the correlation between dual motivations and the tension of innovation and conservation becomes most poignant.
The Hebrew which Amichai and his contemporaries feel free to employ in their poetry is more stratified than the language of any of their predecessors, especially as regards stylistic registers. Colloquial Hebrew and slang, as well as the innovative discourse of army, Kibbutz, and children's Hebrew, are being allowed for the first time into poetry in any sustained manner. At the same time, these poets of the
1950s and 1960s continue to conduct an elaborate intertextual dialogue with the cultural and linguistic norms of biblical Hebrew. Their affiliations with Euro-American (neo)modernism is yet again both mediated and enabled by a radical rewriting of traditional Hebrew texts. Yehuda Amichai's famous iconoclastic love poem Jacob and the Angel will serve to illustrate this third phase in the complex history of Hebrew-modernist stylistic rapports.
Jacob and the Angel
Just before dawn she sighed and held him
that way, and defeated him.
And he held her that way, and defeated her,
and both of them knew that a hold
brings death.
They agreed to do without names.
But in the first light
he saw her body,
which remained white in the places
the swimsuit had covered, yesterday.
Then someone called her suddenly from above,
twice.
The way you call a little girl from playing
in the yard.
And he knew her name, and let her go.
—Amichai (1962, 1977 ed.:260;
translated by Bloch and Mitchell in Amichai, 1986:40)
In this poem three internal frames of reference function simultaneously (Harshav [Hrushovski], 1982a), each introducing its own register and set of intertextual relations. The first constitutes the literal frame of an erotic encounter between a man and a woman. This event motivates the introduction of the stylistic conventions of love poetry. Here belong, for example, the connotative uses of yada (“know”) in the biblical sexual sense (lines 4 and 15), as well as the exploitation of the erotic sense of “death” in European poetry, as a periphrasis for orgasm, in line 5. The second frame of reference, of children at play, constitutes a metonymy for the first literal frame (a girl for the woman, a boy for the man). This frame motivates a somewhat restrained connotative use of children's Hebrew, where, for example, le-natse'ach (“getting the upper hand in a scuffle”) means to force the other “to the mat,” to make him or her give up or “cry uncle.” Thus the sexual athletics of the couple's erotic encounter is read, within this frame, as a naive, if militant, struggle. The metonymic relation of this frame to that of the lovers is laid bare at the end of the poem when the woman-cum-child is called “suddenly from above (from upstairs)” (milema'la ) as when a child is called in from play.
The third frame of reference is supplied by the title (and almost only by the title). It maps onto the sexual and child-play frames the outlines of the biblical story of Jacob's struggle with the angel. This action, of course, motivates the introduction of all the local biblical and religious allusions in the poem, such as the play on ha-shem (“name” and “God”). Notably, however, there is no trace of biblical diction or syntax in the poem, even though word connotations do activate optional biblical senses of terms.
Quite typically of Amichai's poetry, these three frames of reference are linked through linguistic rather than traditional poetic means. The
masculine attribute “angel,” which in this poem is made to apply to a woman, is anchored in colloquial metaphor, where mal'ach could apply to a woman (in the sense of “a wonderful person”) or a child (“a beautiful, peaceful, and pure creature”). Amichai introduces into the poem the weighty associations of the biblical story of Jacob's struggle with the angel, with all its national and transcendental implications, in order to describe a one-time erotic encounter (the literal frame).[44] He domesticates and thoroughly demystifies these materials through the second, metonymic frame of child's play. And thus he also effects the sanctification and elevation of both the erotic and the childlike domains.
This practice can easily be characterized in terms of certain modernist prototypes, such as the drive to deflate and secularize the eternal and spiritual, and, conversely, to remystify and valorize the transient and the physical. However, within the specific intrasystemic conditions of Hebrew poetry at the end of the 1950s, the poem enlists an additional stylistic motivation for its three-tiered structure: to grant legitimacy to the literary use of relatively new registers of modern Hebrew such as slang, colloquial idiom, and children's language. This internal motivation is subtly strengthened by Amichai's (still quite minimal) use of military Hebrew. For example, the occurrence of the rare form tefes (from t.f.s., “to grab,” “hold on to”) in line 4, can refer to the catch that holds the clip of cartridges. Similarly, at the end of the poem we find a nonliterary allusion, to the lyrics of a popular song of the Sinai campaign era, “Hu lo yada et shma” (“He Did Not Know Her Name”).[45] This noncanonical allusion deflates and restrains the metaphysical pathos of the search for meaning in a name which is no longer God (ha-shem ) but is instead an interpersonal code for transitory love.
Finally, as in both the Fogel and the Shlonsky poems, the modernist nontraditional biblical allusion in “Jacob and the Angel” serves to highlight an obscure but implicitly dominant aspect of the biblical text itself. Amichai's love encounter guides us to look anew at the biblical story of Jacob and the angel. We find in Genesis, through the prism of this poem, an intriguing erotic moment in the encounter between God and man, an encounter which, as we know, left Jacob/Israel injured in a very sensitive spot.
In tracing the ways in which modernist Hebrew poetry overcame its language pangs I have attempted to outline a systematic rapport
between internal and external literary and linguistic needs, and their social and ideological context. Filling in the gaps in the defective polysystem of Hebrew was made easier by—rather than achieved in spite of—the pursuit of general modernist goals. However, in the actual poetic texture this rapport turned out to be part of a complex rhetorical strategy for achieving yet another delicate balance, a balance between two well-known principles in Hebrew literary history—innovation and tradition. That modernism was intimately associated not only with radical change but also with the conservation of tradition was perhaps true of the international movement as a whole. In the context of the revival of Hebrew as a language of modern poetry, this potential modernist feature gains special salience. Radicalism in the Hebraic literary and linguistic framework has, after all, always been associated with a return—of one sort or another—to the never fully lost radices of the traditional canon.
Chapter 5—
Theories of Allusion and Imagist Intertextuality:
When Iconoclasts Evoke the Bible
Mi amar le-mi u-matay (“who said unto whom and when”) is the standard opening of a Bible quiz in an Israeli school, and the standard “lead-in” of many Israeli jokes. It is also a familiar reminder that traditional attitudes toward biblical quotation and allusion are still very much alive. Just as schoolchildren commit entire biblical passages to memory, so do university students (of literature as well as the Bible) learn to identify the mekorot, the biblical sources quoted or alluded to by writers of all periods. While Talmudic, liturgical, and rabbinic allusions are becoming harder and harder for the general reading public to identify, biblical references still form a vital part of the Israeli's “system of associated commonplaces,” in Max Black's (1962:40) terms.[1]
Still, these cultural practices do not explain why Israel has emerged as a center for the theoretical study of allusion as a general literary device, nor do they account for the specific innovative views of allusion which these theories take. In this chapter I look into some of the internal dynamics of the third trend of modernist Hebrew poetry (the Statehood Generation) as it correlates with some relevant imported prototypes and paragons of Anglo-American imagism and I examine how together they helped shape contemporary Israeli theories of allusion. As in the case of the “language pangs” of earlier generations, theories of literature remain closely linked to modernist literary practices. Specifically, I find a strong link between the interactional view of allusion that has gained prominence in Israel (especially in the work of the Tel Aviv School of poetics and semiotics)[2] and the icon-
oclastic use of biblical and liturgical allusion in modernist Hebrew poetry of the Statehood Generation (dor ha-mdina ). I further find that this poetry's special use of biblical allusion is in turn correlated not only with “indigenous” literary, linguistic, and ideological developments but also with Anglo-American modernism (especially as spearheaded by T. S. Eliot's famous views of tradition and the individual talent).[3] After describing the basic relevant theoretical concepts against the background of the poetic practice and its modernist prototypes, I test my initial claims by examining in some detail two exemplary poems of the Statehood Generation which employ one and the same biblical allusion: Yehuda Amichai's “Be-khol chumrat harachamim” (“To the Full Extent of Mercy”) and Nathan Zach's “Kemo chol” (“As Sand”).
A correspondence between the theory and practice of intertextuality is not without precedence in Hebrew literary history. The pervasiveness of allusions to the Bible and other traditional sources in all phases of Hebrew poetry from the Middle Ages on has at times been paralleled by rhetorical manuals on the values of allusion and by a variety of traditions of allusive exegesis from midrash to source criticism. I shall briefly mention one such precedent, the medieval use of allusion in the Hebrew poetry in Spain, because it alerts us to the complex and potentially problematic nature of the diachronic and synchronic correspondences between the explicit and implicit poetics of allusion, and because it presents the strongest phase in the formation of the norm for poetic allusion within the Hebrew literary system.[4]
Even a poetry bound by a prescriptive or normative poetics of a convention-oriented literary school,[5] such as medieval Hebrew poetry in Spain, allows for tensions between the stated rhetorical requirements (Benjamin Harshav's [Hrushovski's] “explicit poetics”) and the principles embedded in the individual works (“implicit poetics”). Dan Pagis has in a series of brilliant studies made this point emphatically (primarily, Pagis, 1970,1976,1991). The implicit poetics of allusion in this poetry ranges very widely from the neutral use of biblical language which does not echo any specific biblical text to the remizah or shibbuts system, in which the biblical text is a necessary component of any semantic construal and structural cohesion of the poem (Pagis, 1970:70–77).[6] The explicit poetics of the period, however, with its emphasis on linguistic embellishment and the separation of form and content, resulted in the emergence of the decorative and semantically neutral shibbuts as the paradigm for medieval Hebrew poetry; so much so that
in generations to come shibbuts sometimes becomes synonymous with a mosaic structure (Mussivstil )[7] and sometimes with the melitsah.[8]
All evidence points to the fact, as Pagis suggests, that the medieval reader had a good sense of the implicit contemporary poetics as well as of the prescribed paradigms. The reader could “recognize the [biblical] verses but would also know when it was right to ignore the biblical context” (1970:71) and when appropriate to invoke it. Only modern readers lose their way and fail to distinguish the explicit poetics of the period from the implicit one and end in imposing anachronistic paradigms on the medieval text. If these habits of mis-reading sound disturbingly like some source criticism of modern literature, it is only because they are.[9] At one extreme, in Pagis's diagnosis, is the critic
who sometimes claims to have fulfilled his exegetical task by supplying marginal notes [to identify] each and every [biblical] verse. At the other extreme is the exegete who is close to a homilist [parshan she-hu karov le-darshan ]. He believes that almost every biblical fixed expression has to drag in with it into the world of the poem connotations of an entire [biblical] verse or even of an entire chapter. Suffice it for the medieval poet to say about his patron, “If he pays no heed to my offering,” and this type of exegete already suspects [the poet] of seeing himself as Cain, his brother's killer.[10] (1970:70; translation mine)
Even if medieval poetry points to the inherent difficulties of correlating critical and poetic principles of allusion, the example is an instructive one. It underscores the need to reconstruct the kinds of allusion that serve as prototypes for the poets, readers, and critics of the period and trend, and to account for the ways in which these prototypes raise the salience of some aspects of the allusive practice while suppressing others. A critical history of allusion needs to offer a descriptive and analytic account of what is perceived as central and what is perceived as peripheral in a given period or trend. It must therefore be wary of reduplicating the prescriptive requirements of the explicit poetics of that period or trend, while acknowledging its own historicity and tendentiousness. This caution becomes especially crucial as we approach late modernist treatments of biblical allusion because here the prescriptive element is often suppressed in the explicit poetics and in the critical theory, which now claim to be descriptive of all “true” poetry.
With this quest for a set of prototypes in mind, I must trade in the advantages of historical hindsight for the uncertainties of the still
unfolding story of biblical allusion in late modernist Israeli poetry, explicit poetics, and theory.[11]
A shift from the tradition of shibbuts to the practice of remizah has been perceived as the essential change in the critical and poetic treatment of allusion. Whereas in the Middle Ages shibbuts and remizah are distinguished by the object of representation (the language of the biblical text in shibbuts, the “world” or thematic elements of the biblical text in remizah ), modern treatments focus on the difference in function between the two modes. Shibbuts, and the critical tradition of source identification, is seen as a device for establishing the poet's erudition (beki'ut ) and for lending his or her poetic expression authority and beauty. That many shibbutsim in fact go beyond this goal is clear. But it is also important to note that common modern conceptions choose to disregard the potential complexity of the shibbuts in order to render the alternative notion, remizah, not just functionally distinct from shibbuts but also implicitly superior to it. It is not surprising, therefore, that when theories of allusion began to be developed in Israel in the late 1960s, they were theories of remizah (still to be defined) and not of shibbuts. These theories provide structural and linguistic (rather than thematic and philological) accounts of allusion as a dynamic, interactional literary device which of necessity involves a reinterpretation both of the source text and of the target text. This is the case even though the modern poetic practice still accommodates uses of allusion which are shibbutsim according to the new interpretation—namely, ones which clearly do not require an intertextual alteration of one text by another.
How did the original binary distinction between shibbuts and remizah acquire its new sense as well as its normative import? I can only suggest one transitional link. When one looks at Hebrew literary criticism of the forties and fifties, as well as at the explicit poetic pronouncements of some of the antimodernists among the writers of the period, an interesting duality emerges. While the focus is clearly on biblical remizah and not shibbuts, what seems to be meant is remizah in the premodern sense, a reference “which depends on the situation described in the Bible” and not on the exact biblical wording (Pagis, 1970:75). Shimon Halkin's classic work, Modern Hebrew Literature (1950), for example, deals thematically (in Chapter 10) with biblical allusions as religious motifs in modern Hebrew poetry, and Ya'akov Fichman's influential Dmuyot kdumim (Figures of Antiquity ) (1948)
opens with the essay entitled “Ha-mikra ke-nose' le-shira” (“The Bible as a Topic for Literature”). The need for a vindication of the Bible as a source for allusions in a secular, often antireligious society continues to be felt even today in the critical literature.[12] It was especially strong in pre- and early statehood days, and it was thematic rather than structural in focus, as required by the antimodernist prototype dominant within the critical establishment of the time.
The shift from “motif criticism” to structural and textual analysis and from philology to linguistics in the 1960s was preceded by the emergence on the scene of the poets of the Statehood Generation, whom I have described as the third trend of Hebrew poetic modernism. These developments, as will become clear later on, were intricately related and mutually enriching. One result of these changes was the reinterpretation of remizah, the already privileged pole of the dichotomy, to accommodate the new contemporary paradigm of radical allusion.
The most impressive progress in the Israeli theories of allusion was made in the 1970s, most notably in the work of Ziva Ben-Porat.[13] The critical foundations for these new views were laid, however, many years before, in the unusual lexical-psychological analyses of allusion by the prolific and original scholar Dov Sadan.[14] Ben-Porat, in a joint article with Harshav [Hrushovski], the founder of the Tel Aviv School of poetics and semiotics, where the major work on allusion has been done, acknowledges her school's debt to Sadan:
Sadan emphasized the subconscious associations in the language of poetic creation, the wealth of possible connotations which words in poetry carry from the history of the language, their allusions to other languages and to classical texts, as well as the conventionality of idioms, expressions and topoi. With an unformulated theory of poetic language, akin to I. A. Richards's on the one hand and Curtius's on the other hand, and with a technique and knowledge reminiscent of some of Leo Spitzer's studies … Sadan used his enormous knowledge of Hebrew writing of all periods to produce a series of observations about the language of poetry, free from any ideological preconceptions. This endeavor influenced some of the younger interpreters of poetry. It matched well the techniques which the younger critics in the 1950s and 1960s learned from Anglo-American New Criticism (Ben-Porat and Harshav [Hrushovski], 1974:5–6; emphasis added).
Remarkably like the manifestoes of the Statehood Generation poets, Ben-Porat's and Harshav's [Hrushovski's] seemingly objective account of Sadan's work is in fact an act of self-description. Despite the
vast differences in methodology and technique, Sadan can serve as the proverbial grandfather of the new theorists because his work offers both an alternative paradigm and an appropriate context.[15] Note, for example, that in the italicized sentences above, the study of allusions to classical texts is associated with the investigation of other aspects of the language of poetry, such as connotation, collocation (fixed expressions), and figurative language. It is not presented as an investigation of sources and influences in their traditional conception. This indeed proves to be both the needed legitimation for the rebellion against source criticism and the context in which the new theories of allusion had their first rather localized developments.
Gideon Toury and Avishai Margalith (1973), accordingly, discuss remizah and shibbuts within a rigorous analysis and taxonomy of deviant uses of collocation in modern Hebrew language and literature.[16] The identification of the sources in their work is merely a precondition for the description of significant systematic deviations from those sources. A few years earlier, Itamar Even-Zohar (1969/70) developed a different aspect of the same association between allusion and the creative use of collocation within his account of Hebrew as a language which, given its special history, has a “defective polysystem.”[17] Even-Zohar describes the allusive activation of ancient literary collocations as one of the ways in which Hebrew literature compensates for what its language lacks. It is important to note here that his emphasis is not only on the ways in which literature compensates for its linguistic deficiencies but also on the ability of the literature to turn this deficiency into an advantageous aesthetic function. Thanks to the allusive use of ancient collocation, the poet can both “replace polysystemic variation and contrast and … give rise to the multiplicity of meaning often resulting from the conscious manipulation of the polysystem” (p. 444, English summary). Thus, allusion begins to be conceived of as a special use of language (like collocation), with specific semantic and pragmatic functions (like ambiguity and multiple meaning).
Note also that the collocational approach to allusion assimilates the medieval sense of shibbuts into the modern notion of remizah: it focuses on linguistic rather than thematic or situational similarities between the modern and the ancient text. From this point on, Israeli theories no longer distinguish thematic from linguistic allusion, as befits a poetics which has replaced the form-content distinction with a distinction between materials and patterns. (Compare Harshav [Hrushovski], 1976:2–6.)
A truly integrationist[18] view of allusion appears in the most important treatment of the topic outside Ben-Porat's: Meir Sternberg's (1982) theories of quotation and repetition (see also Sternberg, 1976, 1977). Combining linguistic and mimetic perspectives, Sternberg presents allusion as a special form of reported discourse. (Since his treatment of allusion is subsumed under the more general topic of quotation and since he uses mainly prose fiction for his model, I shall confine my discussion to brief remarks on his article “Proteus in Quotation-Land: Mimesis and the Forms of Reported Discourse,” 1982.) Allusion, Sternberg acknowledges, is a form of covert quotation, like parody, imitation, pastiche, and free indirect style.[19] But what interests him is not a structuralist taxonomy of types of quotation in which allusion, for example, will be defined by the features which distinguish it from its counterpart in a binary opposition. (In that respect his theory goes against Gerard Genette's (1982) taxonomy of “transtextuality.”) Instead, Sternberg seeks to contextualize allusion within the general complex phenomenon of reported discourse, stressing what he calls “the Proteus Principle”: “the many-to-many correspondences between linguistic form and representational function” (p. 112). Emphasizing “the interplay of unity and variety in quotation” rather than the distinctive features of each type of quotation (p. 112), Sternberg allows us to see the allusive process as one of the cases in which “two discourse events enter into representational (‘mimetic’) relations.” These relations differ from ordinary representation (of the world through language) “only in the represented object, … [which is] the world of discourse as opposed to the world of things” (p. 107). “In this general sense,” Sternberg continues, “all reported discourse—from the direct through the free or the plain indirect to the most summary or allusive quotation—is a mimesis of discourse” (p. 107).
This emphasis on intertextuality evokes poststructuralist French and American theories. Yet there are several significant differences between these notions and the Israeli conception of intertextuality. Since Julia Kristeva (1969) first articulated the belief that intertextuality is the underlying condition of all textuality, poststructuralist and especially deconstructionist critics have actually suppressed the issue of allusion as a literary device and privileged the general condition of intertextuality: “Every text is absorption and transformation of a multiplicity of other texts” (see English excerpts and discussion in Ducrot and Todorov, 1979:339). But these approaches confront a logical and
methodological difficulty when they move from the level of theory to that of interpretation. As Jonathan Culler has shrewdly observed (1981:103-7), if every text takes shape as a mosaic of citations, and it is only through these intertextual codes that literature can function, what sense is there in the isolated study of specific allusions to specific texts? The study of intertextuality, by the poststructuralist account, ought not to be “the investigation of sources and influences as traditionally conceived” (p. 103). This is an idea that the new Israeli theorists of allusion, who have rebelled against traditional Hebraic source criticism, would certainly embrace.
But the concept of intertextuality, as Culler goes on to argue, proves difficult to work with. While such critics as Kristeva declare that intertextuality is all-encompassing and that it includes “anonymous discursive practices, codes whose origins are lost, that make possible the signifying practices of later texts” (Culler, 1981:103), they proceed in practice to identify and interpret specific allusions in specific texts and to claim that one allusion is more contextually relevant than another. This practice leads to a troubling inconsistency within the critical system: “The attempt to demonstrate the importance of intertextuality leads one to focus on the other discourses identifiable in and behind a discourse and to try to specify them … [but] a situation in which one can track down sources with such precision cannot serve as the paradigm for a description of intertextuality, if intertextuality is the general discursive space that makes a text intelligible” (p. 106).
Do the new Israeli theories of allusion face a similar dilemma? Isn't this inconsistency a necessary consequence of the concept of intertextuality? A full answer to this question would involve an examination of the concept of intertextuality and cognate concepts in the general theories of the text developed by the Tel Aviv School. I shall only outline the issue in broad strokes. In an article titled “An Outline of a Theory of the Literary Text,” Even-Zohar (1972) introduces intertextual relations as “indispensable for any explicatory model of intratextual relations” (quoted from the English summary, p. iii). Yet, this is different from claiming, with Barthes, that intertext is the “impossibility of living outside the infinite text—whether this text be Proust or the daily newspaper or the television screen” (1975:36). The Israeli theorist does not feel compelled to make an ontological commitment to intertextuality as the defining feature of human existence simply because it is one of the defining features of human texts. This difference becomes dramatically clear when it comes closest to disappear-
ing—in the general statement of Harshav's [Hrushovski's] integrationist semantics (Harshav [Hrushovski], 1982:158, emphasis added):
Language is not an independent vehicle for conveying meaning. It is rather used to (re-)orient the understander in a “network of information” (“World,” which includes all previous texts as well )….
[A] speaker of language uses language as well as the “World” to convey his intentions…. This is true even for such highly abstract texts as philosophy, which cannot be understood without previous philosophical texts or such notions as “time,” “space,” etc. And it is certainly true for newspapers, which cannot be understood without newspapers (or newscasts) of previous days.
… Semantic theory must overcome the “First-Sentence fallacy”—the analysis of a sentence as if it stood alone. There are no first sentences in language.
How does Barthes's intertextual newspaper differ from Harshav's [Hrushovski's]? For Harshav [Hrushovski] and the Tel Aviv critics, to begin with, the relativism of linguistic meaning, as it is expressed in the intertextuality of discourses in general, is not a source for critical or ontological anxiety. Quite the contrary. The inherent dependence of an understander's meaning on imperfect, convention-shaped conceptions is readily accepted, even welcomed, because the products of these dependencies are patterns such as allusion, metaphor, and ambiguity. Therefore, Harshav [Hrushovski] goes on to say, “theory must not shy away from the diffuse, ambivalent, multidirectional, imprecise, potential-filled nature of language—which is its great strength in interacting with a multifarious and changing “World.” One should not confuse method with ontology, the neatness of a theoretical apparatus with a schematic neatness in language” (pp. 158-59).
It is therefore clear that an understander's interpretation of a text always already depends on previous interpretations of other texts and that the world these texts refer to is, for a given understander, always only a “World”—namely, a network of information and not an objective referential reality. And yet, given these general conditions of textual understanding, some “semantic stuff” may be organized in patterns which refer to the “World,” while others may be restructured over “discrete bodies of text” (Harshav [Hrushovski], 1982:159) in patterns that connect one specific text to another. The difficulty pointed out by Culler, then, does not exist for Harshav [Hrushovski] and the Tel Aviv School, not only because for them intertextuality does not mark an ontological crisis but also because they do not
expect meaning to reside in the words or sentences of a text. Meanings are instead observed as “open-ended networks of constructs, forming bridges between given pieces of language and the world (or language) outside of it” (p. 157). The fuzziness of the borders of such units of meaning does not mean that there is no border, no distinction between what is inside and what is outside the unit. All it means is that the distinction, in order to be valid, has to take into account the fluidity and interpenetration of semantic categories. The model of modernism I present in this study is also to be understood within this general conceptual scheme.
Whereas poststructuralist theories of intertextuality in Western Europe and the United States have moved toward greater generalization and comprehensiveness, Israeli theories have clearly evinced a growing specificity. While attempting to supply a general model for the actualization of an allusive pattern by an understander, the most developed Israeli theory of allusion to date offers a systematic account of allusion as a well-defined literary device rather than of intertextuality as a general textual condition. It is also characteristic that Ben-Porat's accounts of allusion are presented not only in theoretical studies (1973,1976) but also in applied analyses and interpretations (1973, 1978a). Another project by Ben-Porat is a large-scale empirical study of Israeli readers' actualizations of literary allusions and of the distribution of allusions in Israeli high school matriculation-examination reading lists (1978b, 1979).
As the emphasis on the process of actualization suggests, Ben-Porat's theory of allusion, as well as the studies in descriptive and historical poetics which derive from the theory, hinges on the conceptual framework of the integrational semantics developed by Harshav [Hrushovski] (1982a, 1982b, 1979). The most abstract and most generalized formulation of Ben-Porat's account, in an article entitled “The Poetics of Literary Allusion” (1976), employs not only Harshav's [Hrushovski's] concept of the actualization, or “realization,” of an allusion by a reader but also the principle of maximal patterning of elements from both texts (Harshav [Hrushovski], 1976). Additional components of Ben-Porat's theory echo, as the self-referential acknowledgment to Sadan predicted, both New Critical ideas—especially Richards's (1936) interaction theory of metaphor—and recent developments in linguistics and semiotics.
Against this background, the major operative concepts of Ben-Porat's theory of allusion can now be introduced. A functionalist,
understander-oriented theory, it defines literary allusion as “a device for simultaneous activation of two texts.” This activation “is achieved through the manipulation of a special signal: a sign (simple or complex) in a given text characterized by an additional larger ‘referent.’ This referent is always an independent text. The simultaneous activation of the two texts thus connected results in the formation of intertextual patterns whose nature cannot be predetermined. According to this definition the literary allusion differs from allusion in general (i.e., ‘a hint to a known fact’) with regard to the nature of both the sign and the referent, as well as the end product and the process of actualization” (1976:108). The constitutive features of all literary allusions which help distinguish them from mere hints are the independent existence of both texts, called the alluding text and the evoked text, “the presence of a directional marker or in short [a] marker in the alluding text, the presence of elements in both texts which can be linked together in unfixed, unpredictable intertextual patterns, and the process of actualization which reflects in its stages the efforts to reconstruct the fuller text” (Ben-Porat, 1973, abstract).
The actualization of a literary allusion by a reader is a four-step process. First, the recognition of a marker in a given sign; second, the identification of the evoked text; third, the modification of the initial local interpretation of the signal (the sign and the marker); and, finally, the activation of the evoked text as a whole in an attempt to form maximum intertextual patterning. Ben-Porat also offers a basic typology of literary allusions based on the initial distance or proximity of the mutually activated texts. Initially unrelated alluding and evoked texts result in metaphoric allusions, whereas initially related texts yield metonymic allusions.
Ben-Porat's theoretical account of literary allusion has already made an important contribution to the interpretation of complex and divergent modern allusive texts. She herself has employed the conceptual framework outlined above to provide insightful analyses of intertextual patterning in, among others, Zach's “Dantes, lo” (“Dantes, No”),[20] in a group of Hebrew poems which evoke the Odyssey (1979:37–41), and in Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1976:118ff). Miri Baruch, in her book on Zach, Ha-romantikan ha-mar (The Bitter Romantic ) (1979), devotes a chapter to the properties of allusion in Zach's poetry, combining an early version of Ben-Porat's theory with a compositional model which is relevant to the analysis of allusion offered by Menakhem Perry (1972).
It is no accident that it is relatively easy to apply Ben-Porat's system to a descriptive and historical poetics of allusion in Israeli poetry[21] and in particular to the poetry of Zach. Nor is it accidental that Ben-Porat has chosen an Eliot poem as her non-Hebrew example of an alluding text and the Odyssey as her classical example of an evoked text. Her theory, like its less extensive precursors, is motivated by an indigenous implicit paradigm of radical allusive practice and an imported, prototypical, explicit poetics of radical modernist credos.
The emergence of the new Israeli theories of allusion is a response to two factors: the shift in the intrinsic (Hebraic) paradigm of allusion in the poetry of the Statehood Generation and the shift in the dominant extrinsic modernist model from a Russian and French one (the symbolist and futurist tendencies of Nathan Alterman's and Avraham Shlonsky's moderna ) to the Anglo-American prototypes of imagism and vorticism. More specifically, I find a three-way correlation, which may in fact be a causal relationship, among the following complex descriptions: (1) the theoretical account of allusion as a dynamic, unpredictable, and simultaneous interaction of two texts, which mutually modify or criticize each other; (2) the practice of radical allusion in the neoimagist poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, prototypically represented by iconoclastic intertextual patternings of secular, mundane alluding texts with biblical or other religious evoked texts; and (3) Anglo-American modernist views of intertextuality and literary history, especially those clustered around Eliot's prototypical text, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (in Eliot, [1920] 1960), where literary tradition is described as a dynamic, fluid hierarchy which maintains a simultaneous, mutually modifying relation with the new contributions of the modern individual poet.
In order to observe the correspondences among the three domains, I present in Table 1 a schematic breakdown of five features which are prototypical of the special uses of allusion in late-modernist Hebrew poetry and their characterization within each domain. Note that on several occasions the poetry duplicates the theoretical characterization. While this is only one segment of a rather complex and fluid process, it nevertheless indicates a general tendency.
The examples cited in the domain of Statehood Generation poetry, as well as the generalizations about the poetic use of allusion, could of course be replaced by many others. I have deliberately limited my examples to the early work of two very different but equally
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(Table continued on next page)
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dominant poets of this generation, Amichai and Zach, and have chosen only allusive processes that involve biblical or other religious evoked texts. In examining the new norm for allusive practices, the discussion of Amichai and Zach poems that follows should help explain why iconoclastic references to biblical texts have become so prototypical of this trend's radical modernist allusions and why these examples are foregrounded in the center of the canon.
The Israeli critics themselves have acknowledged the correlations among dominant theory, normative poetic practice, and imported modernist model. As far as I know, however, this acknowledgment was never specifically applied to allusion, nor was it ever much more than a general programmatic statement. Thus, for example, Ben-Porat and Harshav [Hrushovski], in their account of the background for the emergence of their school's theoretical orientation to literature, state: “A parallel shift [to the one that was occurring in criticism] took place in Hebrew poetry. There was a revulsion from what was felt to be “rhetorical” and empty versification, towards a “precise” poetic language and a poetry of the individual, modeled after T. S. Eliot and English modernism” (1974:7).
These statements do not reveal the extraliterary, sociological factors, which in the close intellectual community of Israel always loom large and which as a rule are quite important in the dynamics of canon formation within literary circles and movements. One such factor is simply that the founder of the Tel Aviv School of Poetics, Harshav
[Hrushovski] (under one of his numerous pen names, H. Benjamin), was also cofounder (with Zach and Amichai) of the Likrat circle, the core of what later became known as the Statehood Generation of Hebrew poets. Another “anecdotal” noncoincidence is the fact that Zach, who also formulated the explicit poetics of the group and published, among other things, a fifteen-point manifesto of the poetry of the 1950s and 1960s (Zach, 1966a), is also a scholar of modernist English poetry, especially of imagism, and the works of Pound and Eliot (see, for example, Zach [1976] 1981). Thus, in the manifesto, in addition to many intrinsically motivated processes (for example, reaction against what was conceived of as the over-poetic, excessively figurative, and rhetorical moderna poetry of the pre-Statehood Generation), the fifteen points are—quite self-consciously—styled in the manner of Pound's imagist manifestoes and Eliot's programmatic articles.[22]
Interestingly, both Zach's explicit poetics and subsequent theoretical developments adopt Eliot's view of tradition and intertextuality but transform Eliot's clearly normative statements into the descriptive language of fact. Because of its lasting impact both on the explicit poetics of the Israeli neoimagist poets and on the theories of allusion that appeared a decade later, it is worthwhile quoting Eliot's famous mixture of description and evaluation in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:
[T]he historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write … with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and … the whole literature of his own country [have] a simultaneous existence and compose a simultaneous order….
No poet…has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets….
[W]hat happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. ([1920] 1960:49–50)
One influential idea that Eliot expresses here and elsewhere and that I have not included in the schematic presentation of the salient features above is the assertion that difficulty is a necessary and not an altogether unwelcome consequence of the simultaneous view of tradition which supports the allusive new poetry. “I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the metiér of
poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry)” (p. 52). Eliot along with Pound and other modernists—as well as latter-day critical followers such as George Steiner (1972:18–47)—legitimize the use of such “difficult” erudition in modernist poetry and so does Zach, their Israeli interpreter. Zach (1966a, point 15) claims the “right to compose individualistic poetry in a difficult, hermetic style, so long as you are dealing with a true work of art.” Zach's example is Avot Yeshurun, but as Baruch (1979: 69) points out, Zach might have been talking about his own poetry and his own use of allusion. This is where Amichai's and Zach's use of allusion differ radically and where a central feature of the Anglo-American imported model is a source of internal contradiction between two dominant paragons within the Hebrew literary system.
Before we take a closer look at the differences that emerge from the three-way correlation between theory, poetic paradigm, and modernist model, I would like to note an interesting similarity between Israeli theory and praxis of allusion and the Russian approach to intertextuality.[23] As Elaine Rusinko (1979) points out, Russian theories of allusion have also been developed in order to deal with a body of poetry which shares explicit and implicit poetic prototypes with Anglo-American imagism. The acmeist poetry of Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam presented interpretive needs, in their use of allusion, which, according to Rusinko, led to the development in the Moscow-Tartu circle of subtext theories that sound surprisingly like some of the Tel Aviv theories. This is perhaps not only a result of the similarity in the modernist poetics and the acknowledged influence of Eliot on both literatures and theories. A more direct route from the Moscow-Tartu circle to the Tel Aviv School is charted by the emigration to Israel of two of the major Russian allusion scholars, Omri Ronen and Dmitri Segal, whose work is described extensively in Rusinko's article (for example, Ronen, 1977; Segal, 1975). Finally, the theories may be linked by the common formalist heritage. But that is a topic for a different study.
The theory of allusion needs to be taken one little step further to bring it to a fuller agreement with the poetic practice. In a footnote to her theoretical article, “The Poetics of Literary Allusion,” Ben-Porat stops short of allowing the allusive interaction to be fully bilateral:
It is very probable that the creation of intertextual patterns affects and enriches the evoked text…as well. Even if the evoked text preceded the alluding text by several hundred years, a simultaneous activation
is possible for the reader of both. Consequently, familiarity with the later text…can change or modify the interpretation of the evoked text…. In [the figure describing the components of the allusive process], however, we can only trace the effect of the intertextual patterning on the interpretation of the alluding text, since this is the text being read and reconstructed at the moment. In the actual reading process the reader may shift his attention to the effect of the intertextual patterning on the evoked text. But by doing that he has for a moment changed the roles: [the evoked text] becomes for him [the alluding text]. The problems involved in the legitimacy of manipulating such an ahistorical (and intentionally impossible) allusion in interpretation need not concern us here. (1976:114, note 9)
But it does need concern us here. The prototypical poetic paradigm of allusion for the Statehood Generation, and especially for Amichai and Zach, places, as we shall see, special significance on the mutual reinterpretation of the two texts activated in the allusive process. The question of anachronism does not arise, nor does the need to reverse the roles of the alluding and evoked texts, because this reinterpretation occurs beyond the initial phase of identifying marker, alluding and evoked texts, at a stage when there is no reason to suppose that simultaneity does not also entail, as Eliot suggested, a mutual alteration and restructuring of the textual materials.
We can now approach the first poem under discussion, Amichai's “Bekhol chumrat ha-rachamim,” an untranslatable title which I render as “To the Full Extent of Mercy.”
To the Full Extent of Mercy
Count them.
You can count them. They
aren't like sand on the seashore. They
aren't like the numerous stars. They're like lonely people.
On the corner and in the street.
Count them. See them
seeing the sky through ruined houses.
Leave through the stones and return. Where
will you return? But count them, for they
do their time in dreams
and they walk around outside, and their unbandaged hopes
are open, and they will die of them.
Count them.
Too soon they learned to read the terrible writing
on the wall. To read and write on
other walls. And the banquet in stillness goes on.
Count them. Be present, for they've
already used up all the blood and some is still missing,
as in a dangerous operation, when one is worn out
and beat like ten thousand. For who's judge and what's judgment
unless it's in the full sense of night
and to the full extent of mercy.
—Amichai ([1962] 1977 ed.:253; translation mine)
In a typical move, the speaker of Amichai's poem issues a series of instructions to an unidentified addressee, who may be either the reader or a rhetorical objectification of the poetic persona. But despite the syntax of speech, the diction of the opening line is just enough too formal—for a poet who makes a point of using “only a small part of the words in the dictionary” (from “El male' rachamim” [“God Full of Mercy”] in Amichai, [1962] 1977 ed.:69–70) for the address to be taken literally. Mene (“enumerate,” “count”) is much more formal than the colloquial sfor (“count”), as is the use of the imperative rather than the future for commands. And, indeed, we soon discover that mene is part of a marker which triggers intertextual patterning not with one evoked text but with the recurring biblical narrative typescene of the divine promise to make the children of Israel as countless (lo' yimanu ) as the sand on the seashore and like the numerous stars in the sky (lines 3–4). The familiarity and generality of this complex marker (complex because it triggers the activation of more than one discrete evoked text) makes the speaker's series of commands and assertions readily interpretable. The interpretability does not seem to suffer from the fact that the alluding text explicitly negates the message and the tone of the evoked narrative pattern and its most famous manifestation—God's promise to Abraham and his descendants (Genesis 15:5, 22:17). Furthermore, the negation of the biblical injunction against counting people itself constitutes another marker, evoking the story of David's temptation by Satan to count his people and the terrible devastation that befell the country as a collective punishment for his sin (1 Chronicles 21). The two evoked texts, the promise and the punishment, are in direct conflict, but they are both activated through the same sign, mene.
With the transition from instruction to description in lines 3–4, it is no longer God's injunction that is being negated but his figurative language. The two stock similes of the evoked texts of the promise are exposed when they are taken literally: the fact that these people are few enough to be counted proves that “like sand” is not a correct
(literal) similarity statement. The speaker's unadorned use of syntactic repetition (“they aren't like x, they aren't like y, they are like z ”) emphasizes his obsession with literal fact and his rejection of simile and hyperbole. This rejection is especially emphatic since the final, affirmed “like” statement is not properly a simile at all, nor even a literal similarity statement. They are lonely (or few, single; boded can mean both) people. The final line of the first stanza sparsely but insistently establishes the replacement of the figurative by the literal, hyperbolic promise by minimalist reality.
In this first activation of allusive material, Amichai's poem already reveals a prototypically modernist intertextual process: the deflation of the traditional and sacred source (namely, the values associated with the evoked text) and, simultaneously, a heightening of the valuation of the mundane and disillusioned “World” that is the reference of the alluding text. Like the rejection of the nationalist-religious idea of being chosen through doing battle with God (in “Jacob and the Angel”), biblical promises of plenitude are renounced here in favor of the world of lonely, separate people who are victimized by their own dependence on impossible dreams and empty promises. Their hopes are like open wounds that will eventually kill them (line 12). It is these people, Amichai says, who are entitled—after all the waiting and hoping—to the full severity of mercy. This oxymoronic inclusio starts and ends the poem with a linguistic rather than a literary allusion based on the deviant use of the collocation be-khol chumrat ha-din (idiomatically, “to the full extent of the law”). The oxymoronic semantic potential of chumra (“severity,” “rigor”) and rachamim (“compassion,” “pity,” “mercy”) is reversed, first prosodically by revealing that the two share the same consonantal root in a different order (ch.m.r.—r.ch.m.) and second, thematically by redefining true mercy and compassion as the refusal to give false hope, hence as “rigor” or “severity.” This, then, is the full reversal of the biblical promise, which according to Amichai is full of (dangerous, misleading) hope but empty of mercy. (See his “El male' rachamim” [“God Full of Mercy”] in Amichai, [1962] 1977 ed.:69–70.)
The ease with which the Hebrew reader can mutually activate the multiple alluding and evoked texts in this short segment of the poem is part of the poem's antimodernist ideological and thematic import. Like the very identification of the marker, this import is laid bare in the text in an antielitist identification with the lonely rather than the chosen people, and, on a thematized level, by using antielitist allu-
sions, namely markers that every native speaker of the language can identify and activate. With this accessibility as the primary goal, and the critique of the Eliot-Pound prototype of elitist allusion perhaps an implicit target as well, the poem can now allow the allusion hunters among its readers the treat of more subtle and intricate intertextualities. But not before the entire poem has been supplied with an allusively naive surface.
Still, then, on this first level of the readily accessible allusive pattern, the second half of the poem appears to put in the foreground one central marker, which is so well known it has become a cliché. The reference to the “writing on the wall” is not meant to be dug up by scholars. It is right there in the explicit language of the third stanza, as are the reversals of the meaning of the evoked text and its associated commonplaces. Belshazzar and his lords could not read the writing on the wall which foretold their doom (mene mene tekel u-farsin, “God has numbered the days of your kingdom, has weighed in the balances and decided to cut off [root p-r-s] your kingdom from you and give it to Persia [again, root p-r-s],” Daniel 5). Hence, people who fail to see the warning signs of disaster are, according to the cliché, those who cannot read the writing on the wall. In the alluding text, however, the marker reverses the marked by asserting what the Bible negates (just as “count them” reversed a biblical negation). Knowing the destructive divine intentions, being able to read the writing on the wall, is not much help. Aware of their own disastrous fate and that of others, they can only continue this mock-feast-turned-Last-Supper in stillness (line 16). The Hebrew bi-dmamah implies absence of sound and of motion, total inertia, at the same time that it echoes phonetically the blood (dam ) of the extended metaphor of wounds, surgery, and blood donors developed in the second and fourth stanzas.
I turn now to the context of the reconstructed poem, where the more subtle allusive interactions are to be found. The repeating first line functions as a rather latent “allusive junction” (to adapt Harshav's [Hrushovski's] concept)—namely, a complex marker which can be linked to more than one evoked text or block of texts. As such it can trigger an intertextual activation and mutual modification not only of the alluding and evoked texts but within and among the evoked texts themselves. The conflation and interpenetration of the promise of the Pentateuch with the epitome of prophetic threat or curse in Daniel results in our increased perception of the promise as jeopardy and affliction. It also serves to place the reference of the
alluding text not on an exclusively Jewish level but within a more universal and existential framework; the destruction of Belshazzar's kingdom, a metaphor for the human apocalypse in general, causes us to read even the usually Judaic promise in more universal terms.
We have come full circle from a simple, explicit challenge to the validity of the biblical promise to the actualization of the promise as curse and punishment, a writing on the wall, a warning which will not prevent the disaster. The careful reader of this unorthodox version of the biblical promise will discover that the conflation of promise and punishment, blessing and curse, is already present in the Bible. The marker thus causes an interaction even between the missing parts of the evoked text. This unpredictable element of the allusive interaction can be discerned in the exact language of Amichai's initial marker for the biblical promise. In these exact words the promise occurs only once in the Bible, in the context of another highly symbolic narrative which our system of associated commonplaces has turned into a stock metaphor for persecution and for the Holocaust as well. I am referring of course to the binding of Isaac. The first time in which God combines the similes of sand on the seashore and stars in the sky, and the only time in which the verse appears verbatim as in the poem is in Genesis 22:17, a few narrative minutes after the disaster of the binding of Isaac (the akedah ) almost happened.
The discovery of this association of promise and curse within the Bible itself is much more evident a theme in Zach's poem “As Sand.”
As Sand
When God in the Bible wants to promise
He points to stars. Abraham strolls
from his tent at night
and sees lovers. As sand on the sea shore,
the Lord says. And man believes,
even though he understands that to say
as sand is merely a way
of speaking.
And from that time on,
sand and stars have been intertwined in
man's net of images. But perhaps
we shouldn't speak here of man.
He wasn't mentioned there and then—
and yet it is said explicitly as sand,
from which we might infer
the capacity for enduring. On the other hand,
it's possible to believe
that everything is then set free
and there are no more—explicitly
no more—boundaries.
As sand on the sea shore. But then, water
is never mentioned. God does, however,
speak of seed. Which only goes to show
the ways of heaven
and possibly, those of nature
—Zach (1965; translated by Everwine
and Yasni-Starkman, 1982:17)
The differences in the poetics of allusion between these two contemporary Israeli poets is all the more evident because both the central evoked text and the general attitude toward it seem to be similar in both poems. Whereas for Amichai the allusion to the biblical prom-
ise is a means toward the expression of a message about contemporary life and human expectations, which is not intrinsically linked to the biblical stories, Zach turns the biblical text, or more precisely the language of the evoked text, into his theme. Ben-Porat, who discusses other poems by Zach in her studies of allusion (for example, 1978b), refers to this intrinsic linking of the theme or fictional world of Zach's alluding texts and that of his evoked texts as “metonymic allusion.” In this type of allusion, she argues, the marker functions as a device to point to preexisting contiguities between the alluding and evoked texts. She distinguishes this type of allusion from what she calls “metaphoric allusion,” where, as in Amichai's poem, the two texts are not initially linked at all, but the sequence of the poem ultimately points to ways of turning the evoked text into a metaphor for the world depicted in the alluding text. It is not certain that this part of Ben-Porat's argument in fact works, and not only because the Jakobsonian dichotomy of metonymy and metaphor is probably too rigid to be useful here. The typical structure of allusion employed by Zach, in contradistinction to Amichai, involves not only an initial linkage with the materials of the evoked texts but a thematization of allusion as a linguistic and literary device, one which Zach both uses and mentions, to invoke a common logical distinction, but one for which he ultimately has little respect.
What in Amichai's poem is an occasional and implied reference to the figurative language used in the biblical promise becomes in Zach's poem the central tool for emptying the evoked text of any promise of meaning. When God in the Bible wants to perform the speech act of promising, an act—John Searle (1969:57–71) reminds us—which has a whole list of constitutive rules and sincerity conditions, he does what couldn't ever constitute a sincere promise: he points to stars (the Hebrew mar'eh 'al deliberately uses child language to emphasize the unattainability of promising someone “the moon and the stars”). But Abraham, naive, literal-minded, and trusting as always, already sees in his fertile imagination the first enactment of the promise, as lovers religiously fulfilling the command peru urvu (“be fruitful and multiply”). This is Zach's initial retelling of the biblical scene, the reinterpreted marker which now begins to undergo a series of revolutions and reversals in the text sequence in a sophisticated but ostensibly nonsensical parody of the rabbinic exegesis of biblical allusions (note the use of Talmudic connectives throughout the second half of the poem). The strategy seems to be the exact reverse of the one employed
by Amichai; whereas the markers in the first half of the poem were to a large extent readily identifiable, the second half is most deliberately obscure and mostly so in places where it uses terms like “explicitly” or “absolutely.” The surface structure is one of a nonsense string; ideas and pseudomarkers are concatenated by mere phonetic association; rhyme (both internal and traditional end rhyme) does not point to a meaning relation between its constituents; the rhyme appears to be the only connection: chol, khol, li-sbol, ha-kol. In none of the famous evoked texts of the promises are these terms associated. The same is true for the pseudononsensical concatenation of mayim-zera-shamayimteva (water-seed-heaven-nature, the internal rhyme in the Hebrew being deliberately “bad”).
Yet once Zach has achieved his primary meta-allusive goals, namely the illusion that biblical promise, language, metaphor, and even speech act have all been emptied of their meaning, and once, furthermore, the reader is told that the system of commonplaces associated with the evoked text—namely, the tradition of rabbinic exegesis—also consists of empty logical connectives which point to no inherently valid argument (second stanza), Zach has in fact allowed a significant amount of meaning to escape through the cracks in his persona's cynical mask. We understand, for example, that not only is the expressibility of language being challenged but so is the very existence of God. In line 7, man (but also Adam) realizes that to say “as sand” is only a manner of speaking. But the term used for “manner of speaking,” ki-vyakhol, is also one of the euphemistic names for God (“the So to Speak”). This allusive junction causes the metaphors of the promise to interact with the euphemism for God, with the result that the literal meaning of ki-vyakhol (“as if” or “not really”) is being sarcastically revived and applied to God's existence.
Let me illustrate Zach's use of a “difficult” or nonsensical allusive facade as a cover for a meaningful intertextuality with one last example. In the parody of Talmudic exegesis presented in the second stanza, an apparent nonsequitur is offered as a mockery of rabbinic attempts to justify, after the fact, the discrepancy between the plenitude of biblical promise and the misery of historical Jewish existence. Since the words chol (“sand”) and li-sbol (“to endure,” “suffer”) rhyme, and since the text of the promise explicitly mentions chol, then li-sbol must be pseudologically implied. Zach is clearly poking fun here at the tradition of far-fetched midrashic interpretation, evident especially in the repeated use of be-ferush and bi-mforash, which idi-
omatically mean “explicitly” or “clearly” but literally mean “(located) in the interpretation”—namely, not in the text. Yet, when one meticulously traces all the uses of the metaphors of the promise in the Bible—as in a traditional allusion hunt for the mekorot —it appears that Zach's pseudononsensical claim is quite literally true. We have already seen the conflation of promise and suffering in the story of the binding of Isaac, the text in which the heavenly and earthly metaphors of plenitude occur for the first time. More surprising, however, in all the historical books of the Bible the metaphors of the promise have had their context of application reversed quite consistently. They have been appropriated for exclusively dangerous, militant descriptions and most often occur in the portrayal of the enemy. When Joshua fights the Canaanites (Joshua 11:4), it is they who are like the sand on the seashore; when Gideon fights the Midianites, their camels and their army are like sand on the seashore (Judges 7:12); the only time in 2 Samuel in which the metaphor is applied to a Judean (17:12), it is still ironically the enemy: Absalom's army is described by the adviser of this would-be usurper of David's reign as sand on the seashore.
In this manner Zach manages here as in other poems to bring across his favorite radically modernist message about the meaninglessness of language and the futility of the divine and creative word; and at the same time he continues subterraneously the very same tradition of ingenuous biblical exegesis whose allusion hunt and farfetched methods of interpretation he so sarcastically parodies.
This duality in the rhetorical strategies of Zach, and its mirror image in Amichai, brings us, once again, to a fundamentally conservative moment in this iconoclastic allusive poetry of antitradition. Both Zach and Amichai, as well as the other poets who stand at the canonical center of the Statehood Generation, can be described as coming out of the tradition:[24] they are the harshest critics of the delusions of transcendent hope which tradition gives (Amichai) or of the illusion of meaning which its sacred language maintains (Zach). The one wishes to exalt the mundane and the secular, while deflating the traditional and sacred; the other wishes merely to thematize the tautological nature of all language and all thought. In this sense both place themselves outside of the indigenous tradition and in the mainstream of international modernism. But as reinterpreters and retellers of biblical, Talmudic, and liturgical allusions, in fact even as vociferous critics of the biblical God, they cannot help but identify
themselves as evolving out of the same tradition which they so consistently fight. In this sense, Amichai and Zach and the other ambivalent Hebrew modernists are in the end familiar figures. They are the last in a long line of God's critics whom, like Job and Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev, the tradition has managed to pull into the mainstream.