A cricket, a sigh.
And so I will not speak of authors or books that inspired me, but of an almost physical sensation that may not be a source of inspiration in the traditional sense, yet I feel it is a distinct root of my need to write. I find it difficult to reduce this sensation to a verbal definition. Bruno Schulz talks of suffocation within “the fortressed walls of tedium that close in on us”; perhaps it is that suffocation. Perhaps it is a type of claustrophobia that arises within the words of others. To understand it, I wrote a whole book, The Book of Intimate Grammar, which is the story of a young man who cannot accept the burden of all the conventions and routines that surround him, or the verbal clichés, or even the restrictive, unequivocal, physical dictates of his own body.
The book takes place in 1960s Jerusalem. Aron Kleinfeld lives in what is essentially a society of refugees, filled with people who have recently escaped a catastrophe and are trying with their last remaining strength to create a new life, a new language. With sometimes grotesque fervor, they grasp onto objects, food, anything with tangible volume. They create a solid, corporeal, unequivocal world, and it is naturally a world that is extremely belligerent and arbitrary, recklessly invading the privacy of its individuals.
To me, it is a book about the birth of an artist from within those “fortressed walls of tedium.” Aron, who is twelve when the story begins, a bright and imaginative child with abundant happiness, feels this invasion increasingly stifling him. It is all around him, shoving rude fingers into his mind and body. Even the physiological process of maturation that he faces seems to be a part of it. (Incidentally, the Hebrew words for “muscle”—shrir—and “arbitrariness”—shrirut—come from the same root.)
Alienation and, ultimately, hostility emerge between Aron and his own flesh and body — between himself and the part of his being that has an external, objective, yet extremely internal existence. Aron sees his friends begin to mature and change, as if collectively obeying an invisible order, and he is incapable of joining them. There is something in the unity of the process, in its inevitability, that deters him because he finds it lacking in freedom, almost humiliating.
Aron’s case is of course an extreme one, but I imagine we all remember the feelings of our adolescence, when we entered a tunnel that would stretch out for a number of years without knowing what fate had in store for us, how we would emerge at the other end, woven into which body, woven into which soul. As the years go by, we come to know the thing that Aron feared most, unknowingly of course, and which probably made him refuse to accept this constitution of the flesh: the knowledge of how easy it is for the mind to surrender to the corporeal dimension and gradually become a mechanism much like that of the body — with clogged arteries, cramped muscles, rigid joints, and automatic reflexes.
Faced with the bureaucracy of the body imposed on him, Aron feels that the primary means through which he can express his freedom, his uniqueness, and even his sexuality is language. And since language is also a kind of body, with a dual existence, both inside and out, Aron is tormented every time there is a grating contact between that “inside” and that “outside”: when people around him use language like old saws, when they belittle something that in Aron’s soul has a different, purer, more loyal existence. From that particular moment he realizes instinctively that he can no longer use words as others do — indiscriminately, indifferently, inarticulately.
It is also relevant to note that the story occurs shortly before the Six-Day War, when everyone Aron meets talks in the same blunt, military style, born of fear and arrogance. They all prophesize in the same tone, and this depresses Aron to no end, both because of the crudeness that characterizes the uniform, slogan-ridden discourse and because of his sense that they all belong to a secret, hermetic system of symbols from which he himself is removed, and that he will never have the requisite crudeness or obtuseness to become a part of it.
Deep within himself, beneath his heart, Aron establishes a hospital for sick words, where he employs complex rituals to heal and purify the words he gathers from the day-to-day. Only when the purification process is complete does he feel entitled to use the words. They have passed through his body and soul. They are his. Of course this process condemns Aron to utter solitude, trapped in his inner world, in his own private language, creating his beloved and his best friend inside himself, unable to maintain normal relationships with them in what is termed “reality.” The book ends when Aron shuts himself up inside an old refrigerator and hopes that with the help of the childlike, artistic spark he used to have, he will be able to pull off his most difficult Houdini trick and break out of the refrigerator into the world. But will he in fact be able to?
I have my own answer to this question, but before I reach it I would like to shift from the private, personal language to the more general kind, which served as a sort of “inspiration in reverse” for three of my books: the novel The Smile of the Lamb and two works of nonfiction, The Yellow Wind and Sleeping on a Wire. Each of these books, in its own way, tries to describe contemporary political reality in a language that is not the public, general, nationalized idiom.
To our great misfortune, we in Israel have been living for almost a century in a state of violent conflict, which has an enormous influence on all realms of life, including, of course, on language. When a country or a society finds itself — no matter for what reasons — in a prolonged state of incongruity between its founding values and its political circumstances, a rift can emerge between the society and its identity, between the society and its “inner voice.” The more complex and contradictory the situation becomes and the more the society has to compromise in order to contain all its disparities, the more it creates a different system for itself, an ad hoc system of norms, of “emergency values,” keeping double books of its identity.
I am not saying anything new here. Those who live in such a reality, as we do in Israel, will find it easy to understand how fears consolidate ideals around themselves, how needs become values, and how a subjective world-view and a self-image that is wholly unsuited to reality can materialize. A special kind of language then begins to emerge, one that is usually a manipulation on the part of those who wish to prolong the distorted situation. It is a language of words intended not to describe reality but to obfuscate it, to allay it. It depicts a reality that does not exist, an imaginary state constructed by wishful thinking, while large and complex elements of the actual reality remain wordless, in the hope that they will somehow fade away and vanish. In such conditions one of our most dubious talents arises: the talent for passivity, for self-erasure, for reducing the inner surface of our soul lest it get hurt. In other words, the talent for being a victim.
Let us go back eleven years, to the spring of 1987.
For two decades, as a result of the Six-Day War, Israel has controlled more than two million Palestinians. By all opinions this is a grave state of affairs, yet it turns out that most Israelis, as well as most Palestinians, have taught themselves how to live in these warped circumstances and that many of them believe the situation will never change. As time goes by, there is an increasing perception of a “status quo,” along with more and more arguments that justify and even sanctify this very status quo. The press provides scarcely any news of what is going on in the Territories, only brief reports of violent incidents phrased in fixed formulas that are little more than slogans and do not catch one’s eye for very long.