This may be something we cannot achieve by any other means. We tend to think that when we merge completely with another person, in moments of love and sexual contact, we know that person in an incomparable way. In biblical Hebrew the sexual act is even connoted with the verb “to know”: “And the man knew Eve his wife,” says Genesis. But at the highest moments of love, if we are not completely focused, on ourselves or on a pointed projection of our heart’s desires onto our partner, we are usually directed mainly toward what is good, beautiful, attractive, and sweet in him. Not to all his complexities, all his different tones and shades — in short, not to everything that makes him “an Other” in the deepest and fullest sense of the word. But when we write about the Other, about any Other, we aspire to reach the knowledge that encompasses the unloved parts in him as well, the parts that deter and threaten. The places where his soul is shattered and his consciousness crumbles. The bubbling cauldron of extremism and sexuality and animalism that I mentioned previously. The fount of magma, before it has hardened, and long before it has turned into words.
Even if, almost inevitably, we “project” our soul onto the Other we are writing about, and even if we often “use” the Other to tell stories about ourselves and to understand ourselves, still the wish that I am speaking of, in its purest essence, aspires precisely in the opposite direction: to boldly cast off the shackles of my “I” and reach the core of the Other, as an Other, and to then experience the Other as one who exists to himself and for himself, as a whole world with its own validity and internal logic. It is then that we are able to catch a glimpse of — and even linger in — the place that is usually so difficult and rare to know in another. The place where we are exposed to the Other’s “core,” where dreams and nightmares, hallucinations, terrors, and yearnings are created — all the things that make us human.
What is interesting to discover is that at those rare moments when I manage to make this wish come true and reach that “core” of the Other, it is then that I — the writer — do not have a sense of losing myself, or of being assimilated into this particular Other about whom I have written, but rather I have a more lucid perception of “the otherness of the Other,” of the differentiation of this Other from myself. There is a sharp and mature sense of something I might call “the principle of Otherness.”
I further believe that when we read a book that was written this way, in which the author reached that sought-after place and was able to know the Other from within him but still remain himself, we readers experience a unique sensation of spiritual elevation, of sharing a rare opportunity to touch a precious human secret, a deep existential experience. This sensation is accompanied by another, no less precious and moving, which is a true intimacy with the person about whom the story is told. It is a sense of deep, empathetic understanding of the character and his motives, even if we utterly disagree with them. At these times we catch sight of a similarity — sometimes surprising, sometimes enraging and threatening — between this character and ourselves. And thus, even if the character arouses resistance, aversion, or disgust, these reactions no longer create in us a total alienation to the character; they do not separate us from him. They prevent us from sharply, unequivocally, perhaps uncompassionately condemning the character. On the contrary: we often feel that only by some miraculous twist of fate have we been spared from becoming that detestable character ourselves, and that the possibility of being that character still exists and murmurs within us, in our genetic reservoir.
We must not only embody the soul of the Other when we write of him but also be under his skin, inside his body, experiencing his limitations and flaws, his beauty and ugliness. In this context, I would like to recall a little story.
A few years ago, my book See Under: Love was published. Some weeks later, I was taking an evening bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, listening to the news hour on the radio along with the other passengers. In the “cultural segment” of the program (culture, as we know, should always be confined to a segment, so that it does not swell and seep into the more important news), a stage actor read an excerpt from my novel. The passage described Gisella, Momik’s mother, sitting at her sewing machine, a well-known Singer model, her foot moving up and down on some sort of pedal that Uncle Shimmik had installed for her at the bottom of the machine.
At that moment, the bus driver, who apparently could no longer tolerate the story’s gloom and doom, turned the radio dial and switched us all to a more upbeat channel playing Israeli music. I imagine most of the passengers breathed a sigh of relief, but I was left distraught, because of the private insult — mine and my book’s — but also because I could not understand which pedal the excerpt was referring to, and why on earth Uncle Shimmik had installed an extra pedal. The Singer I remembered had its own perfectly comfortable metal treadle, and I am not in the habit of throwing accessories or instruments into my stories for no reason. I could not comprehend what had made me add this device when I wrote the book.
I was on edge for the rest of the journey. When I finally got home, I quickly opened the book and found the excerpt. Indeed, shortly after the point at which the bus driver had cut the segment off, I found out that Gisella’s foot simply did not reach the original Singer treadle. In another part of the book, I learned something that had somehow escaped my memory: Gisella was an extremely short woman.
I remember being filled with happiness, because I had suddenly discovered something simple and profound about writing. If I had a broken blind at home, for example, or a door handle that needed fixing, it would undoubtedly take weeks before I found the time to repair it. My wife would have to remind me every few days, I would leave myself notes in all sorts of places (and promptly forget about them), and finally, when I no longer had any choice and the family members’ protests were jeopardizing my already rather tenuous standing as head of the household, I would give in and fix it. But when I write a story and a short and stocky woman named Gisella walks around in this story, then, when I write her, I become Gisella. Even if she is a marginal character, even if she only passes through for a few pages, I must, I want, I long to be Gisella. And when I write Gisella, I walk like Gisella and eat like Gisella and toss and turn in my sleep like Gisella. I run after buses heavily, like her, and I measure every walking distance by the steps of her short, thick, bandaged feet. And when I sit my Gisella down at a sewing machine, the extra pedal practically comes into being on its own, because without it she could not reach the Singer treadle. I know full well that if I had not added that extra pedal, most of my readers would not have noticed its absence when they read the description of Gisella using the machine. Moreover, I myself, were I to read the excerpt after some time had passed, would not think anything was missing.
Yet something would have been missing. A small space, the size of one foot pedal, would have been exposed in the story. And poor Gisella’s foot would be hanging forever above the Singer treadle, never able to spin the wheel. It is entirely possible that similar tiny spaces would have emerged in other parts of the book too, and in their quiet, hidden way they would have joined forces to create a bothersome void in the reader’s mind, and a dim suspicion of some negligence on the part of the author, and even of a breach of trust. But if the writer allows himself to be Gisella, in body and soul, if he accepts the rare and wonderful invitation to be such a Gisella, then the extra pedal will naturally occur, as will thousands of other sensations and nuances and accessories that the writer gives the characters.