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ABSTRACT
Throughout his career, Amos Oz explored different kinds of narrations that would enable him to capture both the story of individuals and the voices of the collective. The stories often presented a tension between the first person singular and the first person plural narration. In A Tale of Love and Darkness, Oz finally found a harmonious and comfortable way to speak and write in what I define as his “fluid I-Us” voice. I argue that a key to understanding the new and poetic I of A Tale of Love and Darkness is the 1999 book The Same Sea, which preceded the memoir. This book was the first fictional work by Oz to include his biographical self. In this book, Oz experimented with prose poetry, and with the narrative possibilities that the lyrical “I” can introduce into his work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Laura Marlowe, “Amos Oz: One Pen I Use to Tell Stories, the Other to Tell the Government to Go to Hell,” Irish Times, June 14, 2014. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/amos-oz-one-pen-i-use-to-tell-stories-the-other-to-tell-the-government-to-go-to-hell-1.1830079. Accessed November 12, 2020.
2. Thomas Lansky, “Amos Oz, Conjurer of the Tribe,” New York Times, May 19, 1978, https://www.nytimes.com/1978/05/19/archives/publishing-amos-oz-conjurer-of-the-tribe.html?module=inline. Accessed November 12, 2020.
3. On the exceptional popularity of the book see: Schwartz, “Nikhnasta le-armon mekhushaf,” 188.
4. Amos Oz in conversation with Bill Thompson for “Eye on Books,” 2014.
5. Omer-Sherman, “A Disgrace to the Map of Israel,” 99.
6. Lasky, “Amos Oz.”
7. It is interesting to compare this with an interview Oz gave in 1993 on the Charlie Rose show. Oz then shifted away from seeing himself as the conjurer of the tribe and argues that his fiction is about individuals. When Charlie Rose asked him if he writes about Israel or about specific characters, he said, “Definitely about characters. I am no sociologist. I never attempt to encapsulate the whole country or different sections of the country even though – ” Charlie Rose then interrupted Oz and asked, “You’re not a voice for your homeland?” To this Oz answered, “Well, I do in my essays. Not necessarily for my homeland. On a lucky day I manage to be a voice for myself and for people who share my views.” What remained consistent until the publication of The Same Sea is the exclusion of the biographical “I” from the fictional work. See “Prolific Israeli Author Amos Oz Introduces His Latest Book, Fima,” Charlie Rose interviews Amos Oz, November 23, 1993, https://charlierose.com/videos/28704. Accessed November 12, 2020.
8. Amos Oz, “Israel: A Tale of Love and Darkness,” lecture at Stanford University, published on July 11, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aegK_iDp6xs. Accessed November 12, 2020. It is interesting to compare this statement with an interview from 1991 where Oz said, “I write prose. I aim at truth, not facts, and I am old enough to know the difference between facts and truth.’’ Jay Parini, “The Land of Oz,” April 14, 1991, http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/97/10/26/home/oz-land.html. Accessed November 12, 2020.
9. Kaplan, “Amos Oz’s ‘A Tale of Love and Darkness,’” 120.
10. Ibid.
11. Grumberg, “Of Sons and (M)others,” 377.
12. Shapira, “Ha-siper ha-tsiyoni shel Amos Oz,” 164.
13. Oz, “Israel: A Tale of Love and Darkness,” 33:40.
14. Oz, “Israel: A Tale of Love and Darkness.” Regarding personal stories that become political, see, for example, the first 40 min of the lecture.
15. Avirama Golan, “Haim ha-sipur shelo hu ha-sipur shelanu?” [Is His Story Our Story?], Haaretz, August 28, 2005, https://www.haaretz.co.il/literature/1.1040323. Accessed November 23, 2020.
16. All quotes from the book will appear in text.
17. The “Us” and “we” of Oz, as I demonstrated at the beginning of the paper, was presented by him and seen by others (especially outside of Israel) as representing the story of Israel. But to clarify, I am not claiming that there is one unified Zionist story. Oz’s story reflects what he sees as a collective, as “us.” As Uri Margolis writes, “‘we’ does not designate multiple ‘I’s, but rather an individual ‘we’-sayer, together with one or more co-utterers and/or hearers and/or others, all of whom belong to the reference class of this ‘we’.” Margolin, “Telling our story,” 115.
18. This quotation was used by the publisher in the marketing of the English translation of the book online. See, e.g., https://www.amazon.com/Same-Sea-Amos-Oz/dp/B00A1A7BEM.
19. Interview with Amos Oz, “One Book: The Same Sea,” February 19, 2019, https://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-5465926,00.html. https://castbox.fm/episode/ספר-אחד-עמוס-עוז-על-אותו-הים-id1449284-id130322961?country=us. Accessed November 14, 2020.
20. Ibid.
21. Vendler, Soul Says, 1–8.
22. From “Che cos'è la poesia,” 223–37.
23. “The lyric poet normally pretends to be talking to himself or to someone else: a spirit of nature, a Muse, a personal friend, a lover, a god, a personified abstraction. [..] The poet, so to speak, turns his back on his listeners.” Culler, “Reading Lyric,” 99.
24. Interview with Amos Oz, “One Book: The Same Sea.”
25. See Shemtov, “Metrical Hybridization.”
26. For Oz, characters were extremely important and so was narration. When talking about his writing process, Oz said that he often starts a new book by thinking about a character. He walks “pregnant” with this character for a while, imagining how he or she functions and feels in different daily situations. See interview with Amos Oz, “One Book: The Same Sea.”
27. Elizabeth Farnsworth, PBS interview with Amos Oz, “Coping with Conflict: Israeli Author Amos Oz,” January 23, 2002, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/coping-with-conflict-israeli-author-amos-oz. Accessed November 23, 2020.
28. In one of the prose poems in The Same Sea a character by the name of Dita suggests to him: Why don’t you try and see it my way for a moment: I’m twenty-six and you’ll soon be sixty, a middle-aged orphan who goes knocking on women’s doors and guess what he’s come to beg for. The fact that before my parents were even born your mother called you Amek isn’t a life sentence. It’s high time you gave her the push. Just the way she chucked you. Let her wander round her forests at night without you. Let her find herself some other sucker. It’s true that it’s not easy to ditch your own mother, so why don’t you stick her in some other scene, not in a forest, let’s say in a lake: cast her as the Loch Ness monster, which as everyone knows may be down there or may not exist, but one thing is certain, whatever you see or think you see on the surface isn’t the monster, it’s just a hoax or an illusion (134).
29. Yitzhak Laor, “It’s Wild. It’s New. It Turns Men On,” London Review of Books 23, no. 18 (September 20, 2001), https://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n18/contents. Accessed November 23, 2020.
30. Laura Miller, “The Last Word: We the Characters,” New York Times, April 18, 2004. www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/books/the-last-word-we-the-characters.html. Accessed November 23, 2020.
31. Richardson, “Representing Social Minds,”212.
32. Tara Shea Nesbit, “We Can Do a Lot: The Rise of First-Person Plural Narration,” Guardian, May 14, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/may/14/first-personal-plural-narration-novels-stories. Accessed November 23, 2020. On this topic see also: Maxey, “The Rise of the ‘We’ Narrator in Modern American Fiction.”
33. Sifriat Ha-Kore Ha-Ivri, “Reayon im Yael Ne’eman, hayeenu ha-atid, yalduta be-Kibbutz Yehiam,,“November 1, 2016, https://www.hebrewreader.com/ראיון-עם-יעל-נאמן-היינו-העתיד/. Accessed November 23, 2020.
34. Oz, Elsewhere, Perhaps, 6.
35. Parini, “Land of Oz.”
36. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Books of the Time,” New York Times, November 14, 1973, http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/97/10/26/home/oz-elsewhere.html. Accessed November 23, 2020.
37. Oz, “Nomad and Vipers,” 22.
38. Nesbit, “We Can Do a Lot.”
39. I am grateful to Hannah Naveh, who gave a talk on “Father” in my class. I am sure that my own reading was implicitly influenced by her insightful talk.
40. Ben Lawrence, “Between Friends by Amos Oz: review,” Telegraph, April 29, 2013, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10021555/Between-Friends-by-Amos-Oz-review.html. Accessed November 23, 2020.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Vered Karti Shemtov
Vered Karti Shemtov is the Chernov Lokey Senior Lecturer in the department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, and the Editor-in-Chief of Dibur Literary Journal. Shemtov is the author of Changing Rhythms: Towards a Theory of Prosody in Cultural Context. Some of her more recent publications in English are “Utopia, Dystopia, Limbotopia” with Elana Gomel, and “Poetry and Dwelling: From Martin Heidegger to the Songbook of the Tent Revolution in Israel.”