Dancing, Standing Still: Back to the Hidden Source

Abstract

Dancing, Standing Still (1993), is one of the more daring products of Israeli Postmodern fiction. It is a spoken monologue, a performance, uttered by a young woman whose life had been shattered. Her world contains three men, between whom she alternately moves – her husband, her beloved and her former lover. She has a daughter that was taken from her, and it is unclear whether she is looking for her of accepting her loss. She has parents who do not remember her name, and for her part, she is filled with feelings of estrangement towards them. There is an abundance of episodic characters, appearing in her life only to disappear again from whence they came. The book is composed of image upon image, segment upon segment, a nightmarish collage whose parts are not truly linked. Its diverse pieces are written in different codes: some of them more or less life-like, most of them surrealist and grotesque. Beyond the breathtaking grotesque carnival of nightmarish situations, are two noticeable underlying traumatic issues, One of them is the destruction of the private home as a consequense of the collapse of the heroine’s marriage. The other one is the desperate yearning to the daughter she had lost. A re-reading of Dancing, Standing Still reveals the fact, that at this almost forgotten inaugural novel’s dense core lies the root to many different phenomena that have developed and spread out in Shalev’s later books: characters, underlying themes, storylines, emotional materials, spoken sentences, grotesque patterns and figurative systems. One daresay the dense mental materials that had erupted lava-like from the author’s psyche, settling as concrete images on the pages of Dancing, Standing Still, constituted a primal reservoir, from which she has been drawing threads to this day.