The materialization of these elements is a process mostly unnoticed by the writer, occurring as naturally as a tree bearing fruit. When it exists, the writer can give Gisella — almost without thinking about it — the extra pedal, and then her foot can reach the machine and she can make it move, and the pedal can move the large wheel on the side, and the wheel can spin, and the wheels of the story can spin too, and the whole fragile and slightly groundless world, born from a marriage of imagination and reality and words, can begin to move fully and confidently.
When I write a character, I want to know and feel and experience as many characteristics and psychic arrays as possible, including things that are difficult even to name. For example, the character’s muscle tone, both physical and emotionaclass="underline" the measure of vitality and alertness and tautness of his or her physical and emotional being. The speed of her thought, the rhythm of his speech, the duration of pauses between her words when she speaks. The roughness of his skin, the touch of her hair. His favorite position, in sex and in sleep.
Not all of these things will end up in the book, of course. I believe it is best for only the tip of the iceberg, only one-tenth of everything the writer knows about his characters, to appear in the book. But the writer must know and feel the other nine-tenths too, even if they remain underwater. Because without them, what surfaces above the water will not have the validity of truth. When these complementary elements exist in the writer’s consciousness, they radiate themselves to the visible aspects and serve as a sounding board and a stable foundation for the character, and it is they that give the character its full existence.
I can attest that when I reach that knowledge of the Other from within him — and this does not always occur, not with every character; I wish I could reach it with every character, but regrettably that does not happen— when I reach that place in the story, I experience one of the greatest pleasures of writing: the ability to allow my characters to be themselves — inside me. The writer then becomes the space within which his characters can fulfill their characteristics and desires, their urges and acts of foolishness, madness, and kindness, which the writer himself is incapable of — because he is a specific, finite person, and because these characteristics, these desires and acts, threaten him or somehow contradict him, even invalidate him.
What marvelous happiness, what sweet reward there is in these moments, when in the very act of writing a character, the writer is also written by him or her. Some unknown option of his personality, an option that was mute, latent, suppressed, is suddenly articulated to him, redeemed by a particular character, brought to light.
From experience I know how wonderful it is when a character I have written surprises me this way, or even betrays me, by acting in contrast to my consciousness and personality and fears, acting beyond my horizons. The feeling at those times is one of extraordinary physical and emotional pleasure. In the simplest way, I can say that it is as though someone grabs me by the back of my neck with immense vigor and lifts me up, forcing me to take off outside my own skin.
On a closely related issue, I would like to say a few words about the meaning of literary writing — as I see it, as I believe in it — for people who have been living for over a century in an area that can be described, without exaggeration, as a disaster zone.
First, a clarification: I am not planning to talk “politics,” but rather to address the intimate, internal processes that occur among those who live in a disaster zone, and the role of literature and writing in a climate as lethal as the one we live in.
To live in a disaster zone means to be clenched, both physically and emotionally. The muscles of the body and the soul are alert and tensed, ready for fight or flight. Anyone who lives in this condition knows that not only the body clenches but also the soul, preparing itself for the next explosion or news bulletin. “He who laughs has not yet heard the terrible tidings,” wrote Bertolt Brecht — another experienced citizen of disaster zones — in his poem “To Posterity.” Indeed, when one lives in a disaster zone, one is constantly on guard, and one’s entire being anticipates imminent pain, imminent humiliation.
It is difficult to determine the moment at which the cruel reversal occurs. When is the question of whether the pain and humiliation will in fact occur no longer significant because, either way, you are already deep inside them, even if they themselves remain only possibilities? For you have already created them inside you. You are already maintaining a routine that is saturated with humiliation because of the constant fear of humiliation. You no longer realize to what extent your life is largely conducted within the fear of fear, and how much the anxiety is slowly distorting your nature — as an individual and as a society — and how it is robbing you of your happiness, of your purpose in life.
In this intolerable climate, I and many other writers try to write.
In the first two years of the last intifada, for example, I went into my study every morning and wrote a story about a man and a woman who spend an entire night in a car, on an intense and turbulent journey. There were moments when it seemed utterly mad to shut myself up with these people in the car while the world around me turned upside down. On the other hand, writing has always been the best way for me to stay sane, and to find a grasping point in the world, which, as I grow older, seems more and more illusory and absurd, not truly graspable.
When the book I was writing—Her Body Knows—was eventually published, I was frequently asked, “Why didn’t you write about the intifada?” “How could it be that the man and the woman are not a Palestinian who falls in love with an Israeli?” And also, “Is the man’s broken leg a metaphor for the fracture occurring in the Zionist idea?” And of course, “Is the car really an allegory for the stifling Occupation?”
My reply was, No, these are a man and a woman who insist on turning inward, to each other — because they must. They even turn their backs on the “situation” outside, perhaps because they instinctively feel that this “situation” may cause them to miss out on the most important things in their lives. They feel that because of the “situation” and its terrors, they barely have the time or energy left over to inquire into the greater questions of human existence, and their own private little existence, which happens to have been tossed into the disaster zone of the Middle East.
When we live in a perpetual battle for our very existence, we often begin, out of despair and anxiety, and perhaps mainly out of exhaustion, to believe deep in our hearts that the war — in all its forms and guises — is the main thing in life, and often the only thing. We are so submerged in our warped perception that we barely grasp the true price we are paying for living alongside our own lives, for not daring even to dream about the whole spectrum of possibilities that a full, normal, peaceful life can offer a human being.
Again, I hope you understand that I am not talking “politics” in the narrow and restricted meaning of the term, in its insulting meaning, I would say. I will not discuss occupied territories or settlements or unilateral or bilateral withdrawals today. But I will talk of the principles of this disastrous condition, and of the roots it is striking in us, and the blows it is delivering us. Moreover, I will address the role of literature in this state, the healing and mending that literary writing and a literary way of thinking, observing, and regarding can bring to these distortions.