YITZHAK OREN’S FANTASTIC SCIENCE: TWO STORIES

Abstract

Until recently, Israeli literary scholars have dismissed fantasy as insignificant for ideological and political reasons. Yet there has been a long tradition of fantasy in Jewish literature. Now, thanks to the Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov’s precise conceptualisation of fantasy as a distinct literary genre, we are able to define works of the Fantastic with greater clarity. The Hebrew writer who most immediately comes to mind with respect to fantasy is S. Y. Agnon, whose works are replete with ghosts, magic, strange creatures and events. In this article I examine two stories by one of his younger contemporaries, the Israeli author Yitzhak Oren from the point of view of Todorov’s generic classification. I ask whether defining Oren’s stories according to Todorov’s generic system helps us to read them. I believe that applying Todorov’s categorisation to Oren’s fiction certainly determines the way we read it and that this has implications with regard to other Hebrew authors, Agnon in particular, and to the work of some younger Israeli experimental writers. There is a strange belief that modern Hebrew literature avoids fantasy, or at least that it has done so until recently. Perhaps the genre of fantasy was not recognised because it did not suit the criteria of the arbiters of the Hebrew literary canon as it was being formed at the turn of the 20th century, perhaps because of the perceived nature of fantasy at that time. The fantastic genre is still often characterized as escapist, nonserious, and ‘minor,’ exiled to the ‘edges of literary culture.’ Moreover, these canonisers saw Hebrew literature from the start as committed to the development of the national consciousness, to an extent a guide for social thinking, about which it had to be explicit not obscure. Realism was, therefore, the reigning genre. Israeli literary scholars have, until recently, similarly dismissed fantasy as insignificant for ideological and political reasons. In its early years Israeli literature was recruited into the enterprise of nation building and the writers were obliged to address concerns of Israeli individual and social identity. Literary characters were rarely distinct from their national and social origins, unlike characters in fantastic fiction. In any case the * Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University of Oxford; Editor of Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. Email glenda.abramson@stx.ox.ac.uk 1 Carter Wheelock, ‘Fantastic Symbolism in the Spanish American Short Story’, Hispanic Review 48:4 (Autumn, 1980), 416. 2 Ásdís Egilsdóttir, ‘The Fantastic Reality: Hagiography, Miracles and Fantasy’, http://www.dur.ac.uk/medieval.www/sagaconf/asdis.htm Glenda Abramson, ‘Yitzhak Oren’s Fantastic Science: Two Stories’, Melilah 2010/5 92 writers of the third and fourth aliyot had largely, although not exclusively, been influenced by Soviet socialist realism. Barukh Kurzwell, the leading Israeli scholar of Hebrew literature, himself of Central European origin and broadly versed in European literatures, frequently berated the young Hebrew literature when it strayed into European aesthetic territory. According to Ortsiyon Bartana, who has written the only comprehensive study of Israeli literary fantasy, the creation of a specific ideal of ‘normalisation’ in fiction meaning the apprehension of fiction as reflecting a normal society strongly influenced the marginalisation of fantasy after the establishment of the state. Similarly, those authors who, for whatever reason, did not fit into the collective framework, or those who failed to comment about the ‘enterprise’, including writers of fantasy, were marginalised. In fact, there has been a long tradition of fantasy in Jewish literature, which is not surprising considering the prominence of mysticism in all branches of Jewish culture. Rabbi Loew’s Golem was a fantastic creation long before Dr Frankenstein’s and it has been proposed that even Herzl’s futuristic Altneuland is a work of utopian fantasy. Moreover, there is an historical awareness in Hebrew literature of the miraculous, primarily realised in the allusiveness of modern texts to the biblical text. Modern fantasy in any case has its roots in myth, mysticism, folklore, fairytale and romance. We are now able to qualify works of the fantastic, thanks to the Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov’s precise conceptualisation of fantasy as a distinct literary genre. According to Todorov, the Fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural or supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character as well as the reader; third, the reader must reject allegorical as well as ‘poetic’ interpretations. In short, the Fantastic is characterized by a simple narrative stratagem: putting supernatural events into a realistic narrative as if they were true. Todorov distinguishes the Fantastic from other modes or sub-genres, one being the ‘fantastic3 Ortsiyon Bartana, Hafantasia basifrut dor hamedina [Fantasy in the literature of the generation of the state] (Tel Aviv: Papryrus/Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1989), 40. 4 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard and Robert Scholes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975). 5 See Todorov, The Fantastic, 33. Glenda Abramson, ‘Yitzhak Oren’s Fantastic Science: Two Stories’, Melilah 2010/5 93 uncanny’ and another, the ‘fantastic-marvellous...the class of narratives that are presented as fantastic and that end with [the reader’s] acceptance of the supernatural.’ Modern fantasy has moved beyond 19th-century romantic models of the supernatural. In Hebrew literature it acquires ideological accretions that may, in intentionality, rather than modality, cause it to exceed Todorov’s qualification. Bartana’s definition of fantasy in Israeli literature is more inclusive than Todorov’s scheme. For Bartana, fantasy is ‘every story that describes a seemingly real world, that creates alternative relationships with the real world well known to the reader.’ This broad definition includes myth, allegory, fable, metaphysics and the absurd. ‘Every description of the supernatural that appears in a story is sufficient for the story to be defined as fantastic... therefore I shall use the term ‘fantastic’ here as a catch-all for the entire system of non-realistic stories.’ In one respect Bartana’s definition is crucial in its application to the relationship between Hebrew literature and Israeli culture. He refers to the ‘secular myth’ of Zionism: This myth came to herald the renewal of the biblical kingdom, the actuality of redemption, independence after two thousand years of exile and above all, to give a response to the destruction, Holocaust. This was a secular myth, distinct from the symbols known as Jewish tradition. He includes the ‘metaphysical’ story in his definition of the Fantastic, as the modern realisation of a myth. The subversive implication that Zionism is somehow linked with fantasy has real political connotations in Israel, rather than relating only to a theoretical or aesthetic argument. However, this idea has not been developed in Hebrew writing that can be deemed to belong to the genre of fantasy. On the other hand, it may be that in modern Hebrew literature, fantasy is a means of avoiding direct confrontation with difficult topics; it has been used by canonic authors to convey controversial ideas in palatable form. For example, fantasy has been used 6 Todorov, The Fantastic, 32. 7 Bartana, Hafantasia basifrut dor hamedina, 32. 8 Bartana, Hafantasia basifrut dor hamedina, 32. 9 Bartana, Hafantasia basifrut dor hamedina, 19. Glenda Abramson, ‘Yitzhak Oren’s Fantastic Science: Two Stories’, Melilah 2010/5 94 more extensively from the 1980s as a new way of expressing the Holocaust experience, by ‘crossing certain limits’ that had hitherto been largely avoided in Israeli literature. This renewed encounter required a departure from the prevailing cultural norms which regarded as taboo the representation of the concentration camps by those who had not experienced them. The fantastic is a narrative strategy to counter the taboo by holding the real at arm’s length while contributing to the Holocaust discourse. The Hebrew writer who most immediately comes to mind with respect to fantasy is Agnon, whose works are replete with ghosts, magic, strange creatures and events. However, Bartana scarcely mentions him, probably because Agnon’s stories often present a moral message whose importance surpasses its means of transmission. For example, what is Agnon’s ‘Im kenissat hayom’ (At the Outset of the Day)? An example of fantasy, an example of the surreal, a philosophical conundrum or a combination of all three which technically, according to Todorov, preclude each other? Todorov’s demarcations of fantasy help us in distinguishing it from surrealism, a genre to which Agnon’s stories are more likely, at first glance, to belong. Yet despite their obvious similarities, primarily their departure from realism, fantasy and surrealism differ in intent. In Agnon’s story a man who has been away from home returns after suffering the privations of a war. His former acquaintances are dead or have moved away. In his arms he carries his small daughter whose clothes have been burnt off her back during the conflict. On the eve of Yom Kippur, he stands outside and gazes at, but does not enter, the synagogue in which he had once written Torah scrolls. A straightforward realistic narrative, it seems, but it does provoke a degree of hesitation. Strange characters appear on the scene; the protagonist’s beloved late teacher’s house is now inhabited by ghosts, the child clothes herself with her long hair and utters gnomic words of wisdom. The story could comply with Todorov’s definition of the U