Finally, a great Hebrew work - in quantity and quality - that is original and innovative by any standard, not just that of our local provincial literature, but also on the map of world literature. For a long time (decades?) we have waited for a work that would deeply digest the spiritual crisis created by technology in the world of the spirit, and present a relevant literary conception that grapples with it
Yehuda Vizan recently delivered a lament disguised as criticism on the state of Hebrew literature, but failed to extract from himself and raise from the valley of weeping and lamentation any new insight regarding the deep sources of the crisis - and therefore also regarding its possible literary solutions. Vizan, of course, is not the only one lamenting the state of the book - and not just the Hebrew one - in our time, which is defeated on a broad front by its rival-enemy (in which you are also reading this paragraph, aren't you?) - namely the computer (and its miniaturized son - the smartphone). Vizan, of course - like the late Navot - is fighting a rearguard battle, which is as heroic and tragic as it is pathetic and even comical (and like any lost war - completely unnecessary). Literature living the spirit of our time should not aspire to the past - but to the future. For there has never been a period like ours that sees itself through the lens of the future, and whose true religion is technology.
Only a literary form and idea that confronts the enemy with its own tools and on its own field, while deeply internalizing the spiritual change that the computer has created in our world, is the one that will break through to the next literary formula - of the next century (that is, excuse me, the current one). Therefore, it is not the state of the Hebrew book that should keep us awake at night - but the state of the Hebrew computer. And here we are no longer encountering the killing field of the valley of weeping, but the "empty battlefield" of the 21st century. World literature as a whole is perplexed by the computer's influence on the human spirit, and particularly by the crisis of shortening spiritual attention span, in reading, writing, and even thinking.
In Hebrew literature of the last decade, there have been several interesting attempts by a new generation of young writers, who published their debut works in prose, to deal with the crisis, which in the world of prose is expressed - even more so than in the world of poetry - in a deep fault line created between the short individual piece (such as the post, whether on Facebook or on a blog) and the long prose form. First (full disclosure: the author writes on this site) came "The Book of Darkness" by A. Shachor, a very internet-like work in its language and its premature haste. Unfortunately, this work failed in its enormous, though sometimes refreshing, excess, in its sweeping preference for the crumb of prose and consciousness created by the short piece at the expense of the overall work. Indeed, this reader was left with only a vague concept of it, even after reading it a second time, and not with pleasure. Then came "On Foot for Another Place" by A. Morris and "The Book of Men" by Shabtai (in the nano version), both of which dealt in a very interesting way, though far from satisfactory, with the same problem.
With Morris, who is a wonderful writer of Facebook crumbs (i.e., posts), it is evident that the book was created from a collection of pieces the author wrote (and even published) over the years, but in reverse order, onto which a plot was pasted as a kind of alibi (sometimes an excuse and constraint and sometimes - in its good moments - as a fruitful literary game between the autobiographical and the fictional). The great interest that could have been created from the reverse movement, towards the origin and beginning, is marred by the immaturity of the first pieces in their writing (which will be the last in their reading), which conclude the book. But on the other hand, it is clear that original thought was invested here in this innovative structure of walking backwards towards the beginning of the personal history of writing. Only the problematic editorial execution, and the thin and too transparent - and in my opinion even unnecessary - framing story about the author's dead double (behind whom he peeks-hides), mar the literary composition (not a little due to the easy pitfall of self-justifying ars-poetic explanations).
And here the problem of editing, which is the central problem at the heart of the post-prose form, is exposed in all its glory - even and especially when the individual pieces are genius and virtuosic, and it stems to no small extent from the current dysfunction of the institution of the literary editor. Precisely in the center of Morris's book, when moving away from the problematic opening and ending, an impressive and very rich fan of mixing between pseudo-biographical letters, almost perfect pieces, and depth created from the play of gaps between the pieces and the many different layers between reality and fiction on which the text plays, unfolds.
N. Shabtai's book is certainly more uniform, in its stories which are its chapters, and in its slightly (and sometimes - forcedly) rhyming language. The problem of connecting the pieces stems from the anger and hatred that spoil the line, which turns into a line of defendants (men, of course, after whom the book is named). The monotonous and undeveloped emotional stance of the author, out of the blindness of self-justification and accusation towards all the men in her life, ultimately creates an impression of repetitiveness. In fact, the one-sided book accumulates in the reader's eyes, clearly against the author's intention, into an indictment against herself - and against the choices she made in her personal life.
In this case too, the virtuosic, daring, and interesting pieces in themselves fail to create a book, that is, to create a composition that has interest and development. Each piece is good and mostly excellent in itself, but all the pieces are essentially the same piece (because there is a thesis to prove by induction). And so again (and again) it seems that the novel - that very tired and very moldy genre, which buries the book along with it - remains the only competitor in the field capable of building depth, with its well-known and excessively tried methods, but effective.
Another and final example of this problem is the book of fragment-prose "Love" by M. Eitan that was recently published, in which the one-sided political agenda also undermines the literary act, and all the author's impressive talent, in favor of writing engaged and politically correct literature, which is all flattery to the spirit of the time (which, of course, hurried to embrace it). In this brilliant work there is even a manipulative and exploitative element, not only towards the phenomenon of real, non-fictional prostitution, but also towards the reader, in the extreme and sensational choices for achieving the "effect", in service of the holy American ideology (see Dworkin and others, there there).
Hence the book's need to formulate precisely a comprehensive and aggressive thesis that imposes itself on reality and readers - for example in the language of "they", or in the blurring tactic of "all possibilities are correct" - at the expense and on the back of a very individual and private (and interesting!) story. And hence also the escape to the fragmenting post-traumatic consciousness as an easy (too easy) psychological alibi for the fragments' inability to commit and accumulate into a specific narrative (as opposed to a pamphlet) that has longevity, coherence and God forbid - maybe even a solution. The fashionable victimhood imperative of our days, which tries to forcibly recruit all the poetic talent and rhetorical manipulation of the two writers, and even rapes (sorry!) the plot to it (that is: turns it from a plot into a static by nature and eternally recurring state of affairs, which is a parable), severely damages the literary potential that was latent in these two books. And the missed opportunity is evident in the face of the quality of writing and language proficiency.
These books, and many others that were not mentioned, join a trend and perhaps even a wave that can be given several signs, and which tries to combine the form of the internet blog or feed with the high form in literature - the novel:
- First, many of the pieces in these books, when standing on their own - are indeed virtuosic, and sometimes shine like perfect natural or masterfully polished diamonds, and often surpass almost any single piece you would take (or - and here's the point - cut) from one of the novels of the generation of novelists in Hebrew literature. It is evident that writing in fragments is the authentic and natural form in which this new generation of writers expresses itself - the face of the generation is like the face of the internet. Here lies exactly the secret of the great poetic power of all the aforementioned writers, most of whom even excel at using it in their natural field (for example on Facebook). It is not lack of talent that fails the books of the fragment generation, who know well how to "give us a piece". However, on the other side of that same fragment-coin, all these fragment novels also contain very weak pieces, which it is unclear how the editor's hand did not throw out of the browser window. The unevenness in level is glaring, but of course stems from the same deep problem of the whole being less than the sum of its parts.
- Second, what characterizes the genre of fragment prose - and distinguishes it quite noticeably from other much older forms of narrative writing in pieces - is that the pieces in it really stand on their own. Each of them, exactly like a post, can be read alone and be taken out of the book (blog?) and become a completely independent piece, as a short story or musing. And the trouble is that often the pieces are actually better in this independent form (alas). The suspicion creeps in that the pieces were indeed written this way, and their collection into a book was created artificially, in a synthetic gluing, that would allow them to be published, and thus enter the hall of literature, which still (?) does not publish Facebook walls. That is, the spiritual form is digital and internet-based, and the material form is - woe to the trouble - from an analog and older technology (unbelievably - made of wood!). And the seams are coarse and the joining creaks and the posts peek out from behind the tears. We can see you.
- Third, another very distinct sign that can be given in fragment writing - whose close connection to it is not logically necessary but is only technologically linked to it - is its diagnosis as being in the autobiographical s-p-e-c-t-r-u-m (as opposed to classical autobiographicality). As a product of the world of internet blogging and Facebook personality and dating site profile, melted into the fiction of the prose world, the writing of these creators will never be completely biographical or completely fictional, but will constantly move in the wide space between the fictional and the autobiographical, playing with them incessantly. This is another notable quality of their writing, which infuses it with not a little psychological depth - and even voyeuristic interest. Unlike the generation of novelists who often hide behind a heavy screen of dense prose, there is here a constant game of veils, but never without the veil (an extreme marker here is , who seems to almost choke on his black veil).
- Finally, all these prominent writers fail notably precisely in their attempt to convert the fragmentary form of writing - which is of course a spiritual form and not just a technical one, like any writing style - into long and meaningful prose. And even the solutions that some of them try to recruit are still far from convincing. The root of the failure is editorial - in composition. The challenge here is not insignificant (and did not exist at all in such sharpness in the era of the novel), for Facebook is the material and spiritual opposite of the long novel, and the book is the spiritual enemy of the computer. And how will the two go together, if they were not destined? Isn't the fragment the opposite of the whole, in both senses?
Here a methodological note will not be superfluous, for all these writers (except, perhaps, the first) are sophisticated and refined book people, and very aware of the act of narration, and particularly aware of the weakness and shortcoming of the fragment genre, and therefore planted in advance in the text countless excuses and justifications for its disintegration and repetitiveness. The book's inability to become a "great" coherent and sophisticated long work? Not at all! Its unwillingness, its lack of intention, its desire to challenge the reader and not flatter him (oh, the audacity), to describe a disintegrating consciousness/narrative/world/cat (ars-poetic, postmodernist, psychologistic, meta-cognitive-narrative excuses...) etc. After all, you are like that critic from the brilliant piece (wink) (wink wink, search Google!) by Hanoch Levin - "Aunt Feige (Another Word on Criticism)". But exactly here the aunt is actually buried.
Because contrary to both the Viznian and anti-Viznian positions, criticism is not a court of law. Therefore, it is not at all concerned with motives, establishing guilt and proving criminal responsibility (and on the other hand with justifications and cries of "he is innocent"), with sins (and their punishments), with defendants (and their defenders) or with philosophical and religious questions of free will (what caused what: the chicken or the egg, the will or the ability, to turn many fragments into a whole that is one). And certainly it is not concerned with the authors themselves, and delving into the root of their motives in their literary choices, as if they were characters. Criticism that has substance (unlike newspaper criticism) deals with broad phenomena, that is, with genre, that is, with literature - and not with writers.
Every random author stands presumed innocent, but when the fragment genre systematically fails, due to an inherent fundamental limitation, to accumulate into a great work (in all senses, in breath length and breadth of aspiration which is also its depth, and yes, in text size does matter) - here stands the role of criticism to point out the phenomenon and its meaning (the failure of the spirit in the face of technology). In a Wittgensteinian paraphrase: we must remove all motive from the literary explanation - and put description in its place. And the situation here is unequivocal: there is an acute poetic problem, which may throw the efforts of an entire talented literary generation into the garbage bin of literary history (in which Vizan actually enjoys rummaging and wallowing, while retrieving treasures, which sometimes actually resemble my troubles, for the past is not a seal of quality, and the worship of antiques is a fetish suitable for furniture - not for literature).
This problem of the fragment-and-the-whole is of course not just a problem of the last Hebrew generation - and also exists in world literature. In fact, the reaction of the series of thick-volume novels flooding world literature today is another attempt to deal with a similar spiritual problem (it is not the confrontation with the computer that underlies it, but with the never-ending television series on Netflix. Another novel is another season, and if the fans want - another sequel will come out for the next season too, with the same beloved characters, or alternatively some good spin-off, with which one can put the brain to sleep, or at least quiet the noises of the world before sleep, and see Glasner's conception of the novel).
But how can one truly deal, in a new literary style, with a fragmented and fragmentary and internet-based spiritual world, which will indeed accumulate into a whole greater than the sum of its parts - and into a new universe greater than its components? Are we forever doomed to jump between posts on Facebook, without any narrative and organizing idea that weave from the web a plot or rich and sophisticated fabric? After the breaking of the tablets - can there be second tablets? Is a great work possible in the age of tiny creations? Can one really create a picture from stamps, or maybe even from pixels?
This is the root of the great importance of the work before us, which provides for the first time a new, original and contemporary to the bone style, which offers a deep solution to the depth problem of the relationship between technology and literature, which have reached a crisis - and there is no strength for birth. It is not merely the unique talent of the writer that enables the exemplary nature of the work, but rather his extraordinary audacity - in creating a completely new genre, which answers the question of the generation. What is most amusing and instructive (and illuminates the whole matter in a precious light), is that no new writing was required for this work. All that was needed is real, strong editing, in a complete, plot-driven and unified composition, that is, simply "doing the job" of weaving the fragments anew - into a suit, while maintaining the unique fragmentary logic and its unique advantages.
The truly wonderful thing is that precisely the least talented - the least sophisticated in his phrasing, less rich in his language and apparently even less literarily educated - among all the aforementioned writers is the one whose work first crossed the threshold of plot and ideational accumulation towards the status of a great work, and this is because it is not an improvement in the quality of the individual fragment that is required - but an improvement in the quality of the whole. The pixels have been rearranged, the veil has been removed, and here what was vague, scribbled and fragmented, stands before us as a magnificent picture, which we could not discern at all before (and not because of our shortsightedness, but because of the writer's disregard for composition).
And even the new overall narrative form of the work is not a new form at all, for it tries to give a very contemporary answer to an ancient question (that is, one arising from the achievements of the ancient world) that troubles literature in our age: how can one write tragedy in the modern era? What will replace, for example, the gods of fate, in our so secular world? Well - technology. The trilogy we will discuss deals with the story of a man whose computer destroyed his life, and all his connections with the world and with human beings - but he actually finds redemption in this, and even formulates a perverse ideology for it.
The "trilogy" is divided into three acts (too short for a book), and it is actually one thick novel telling the autobiographical story of the hero in a simple chronological order, but with enormous complexity (like any great work it can be read again and again, and it will certainly support generations of researchers, who will be able to dig into it endlessly). The first part is the most mischievous and light among the parts, and it is guided by the idea of escape from reality and rampant fantasy. In contrast, the second part is gloomy and mysterious, and is dominated by the logic of the espionage and betrayal plot, which reveals a handbreadth and conceals two, and plays with the reader with foreshadowing hints. Finally, it ascends with him to a kind of mystical-fantastic peak, whose failure and disintegration is the root of the sin - after which punishment is not late in coming.
In fact, the trilogy hides its great secret from us until the end of the second part, where the tragedy is revealed (which was hidden and hinted at all along from the beginning) - and after which all the first two parts are read anew. The third part is probably the pinnacle of this work - and in it the hero deals with the tragedy of his life - and also with our great tragedy, which are melted together into a whole - and almost perfect whole. Not to mention the accumulating cathartic effectiveness (is it allowed to tell that the critic, usually stone-hearted in ordinary novels, cried at the end of the reading?).
Never before has a work been written that deals with the Holocaust with such fantastic courage. Never before has prose been written that deals with the tectonic technological change with such a seething ideological fervor. And as the last of the recommenders, the critic finds it difficult to remember when else in reading Hebrew prose he burst out laughing aloud so many times, because unlike the tragedy that is gradually built from the whole - the fragments themselves are often astonishingly comical (and the contrast is indeed amazing). This is just one example of the unique possibilities of fragment prose, whose meaning always exists in the fertile gap between the micro and the macro. For it is precisely in the fragment genre that a tremendous poetic potential for the future of Hebrew literature is hidden, in building a world of tension and mystery that exists precisely in the gaps between the fragments, exactly like the Kafkaesque or biblical world whose tremendous power and meaning lie in the gaps within them and in the unsaid (and indeed made terrible-majestic use of fragments and fragmentation). This potential is realized here for the first time, and even if not in a complete form - to the regret of this reader - it certainly outlines a poetic direction for the future.
A tremendous and perhaps unfair advantage of the work is its being astronomically distant from the routine and conformist world of Hebrew literature, and therefore it is light years away from many of the ills that have afflicted it, and failed fragment writers no less virtuosic and talented than the author. Thus, for example, the crisis in relations between the sexes and the male crisis of the early 21st century receive here a comprehensive, non-ideological, non-whiny, and also non-apologetic treatment, and without a tiny bit of political correctness (it seems the author has not heard of the concept). The hero may be a victim - but he is a victim of himself, of his fantasy world. He is the one who sacrifices his life to Moloch and the true culprit in his situation, caused by the depth mistake - spiritual and real - fatal fatal that there is no return from, for this is a tragedy. But how great is the space between his tragedy and the sensational and telenovela-like tragedies that flood our literature and our screens, and how original and contemporary and hewn from the heart of the current reality it is (but any mention of it would be a spoiler), and on the other hand woven into the ideational heart of this fragment-novel (yes! finally).
And like all works of the fragment generation, the play here between the biographical and the fictional is rich, layered and challenges the reader immeasurably more than in the novel generation, precisely because of the lack of commitment that the fragment form allows - and hence its openness to both harsh reality chunks and wild fantasy. But this is not fantasy of the common type in fantasy novels, where we are transferred from reality to another fixed layer (only fantastic), which itself operates according to its own realistic laws. The writing here is constantly playing hide and seek with the reader between layers of layers wonderfully varied across the widest - and non-dichotomous - spectrum between fantasy and reality. The hero's relationship with his wife, for example, is described in a piercing and exceptional realism of real relationships in marriage, as they are in the real world, which do not respond to some artificial and novelistic plot development. They are not complex for the sake of "complexity", not sensitive for the sake of "sensitivity" and not balanced for the sake of "balance", and certainly not correct for the sake of "correctness", but rather evoke a sharp sense of authenticity. This is life.
The great disadvantage of the work is its language - and its externalized ars-poetica. The writer often tends to slip into colloquial language à la Castel-Bloom, in a way that sometimes makes it difficult to understand the sentence, and does not add to the serious intention required for reading such a work. There are quite a few sentences that needed further polishing and skilled linguistic editing (which, by the way, is almost completely lacking here - and almost as an ideology, to the point where you sometimes wonder if it's not a systematic intentional matter, or part of the general wildness of the text). Also the endless sound games - don't really add (you are not a poet) and some of the linguistic cleverness is unnecessary, to say the least (ha!). In addition, hiding here in the shadow of the Almighty are also some kabbalistic scribbled passages as long as the exile of the Divine Presence, which the reader simply yearns for their end like the Infinite Light (or, in short: you've eaten our heads, have mercy, our Rabbi). A wise-hearted reader is advised to skip them, as it is written: "And his skipping over me is love". And above (or below) all this, the ars-poetic ideology present here in every corner ultimately creates an apologetic impression, contrary to the writer's intention. Okay, we get it. You are presenting us with a new version. And perhaps the difficulty in creating the version - and in the literary breakthrough - is what gives its mark here.
But in the end and in summary - these are trifles in relation to the scope of the achievement, and a great and groundbreaking work is not necessarily (and usually not) a perfect work, and the achievement here is indeed certain. A complete literary universe has been created here, in which one can drown or live for years, just like in the great works of world literature. Its ideational, psychological and narrative richness is almost infinite. This work could not have been written in any other language or cultural world, other than our culture, and will never be able to be translated into it. But in essence it is completely different from any book published so far, even in world literature, and there is almost no limit to its originality and innovation, to its creativity and mischievousness, and to its tremendous inner freedom, which liberates the soul and expands consciousness. You have not read anything like this before. "The Book of Darkness - Trilogy" (Google it) is most likely the first great work of Hebrew prose in the 21st century.
