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Abstract
Etgar Keret (b. 1967) is undoubtedly one of the most popular recent Hebrew writers. However, among critics, there is no unanimity as to the qualities of his oeuvre, both poetic and ideological. In this article, I suggest a new key for understanding Keret's writing and thinking—the concept of a minimal metaphysical origin. The out-of-date and unfashionable thinking of origin reestablishes the human in the allegedly “posthuman” era. The minimalism of the origin refers neither to the measures of Keret's stories nor to his language, but to the main feature of his poetic thinking: constitution of the whole human condition on the infinitely small but inexhaustible originary scene. This scene is further presented as a source of historical alternativeness. I view alternative history as a metaphysical–personalistic counterbalance to both radical determinism and relativism, and as a minimal metaphysical response to the tragic bewilderment in the face of life and history, when a bifurcation point (the significant center of alternativeness) is the minimal metaphysical origin.
Notes
1Bold expressions of this view may be found in publications by Gadi Taub (Ha-mered ha-shafuf 47ff) and Yigal Schwartz. The latter, referring to Ha-kaytana shel Kneller (Kneller's Happy Campers), writes that for Keret's protagonists, “the world is a great masked ball in which people play a new game every moment. In this game, whose central players are the person and the world (and not people interacting with one another), there is neither necessity nor chance. In the confrontation between human figures and the world, there are neither laws nor lawlessness, neither order nor chaos. There are only the moves of the game itself, moves that are more or less pleasant or convincing” (Schwartz 333).
2For a recent survey of opinions for and against Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of carnival, see Kozintsev 176–92.
3I use the concept of “tragic bewilderment” as coined by Matvei (Morduch Nison) Kagan (1889–1937)—a Russian-Jewish neo-Kantian student of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer, and a close friend of Bakhtin, with whom he held long philosophical conversations during and after the Nevel period. The term appears in his last, unfinished article “Motifs of Tragic Bewilderment in Pushkin's Oeuvre” (1936). For further discussion, see Katsman, “Love and Bewilderment.”
4Eric Gans developed the theory of generative anthropology, as part of a broader theory of originary thinking: “The originary hypothesis affirms that humanity and its institutions are most parsimoniously described as originating in a singular event. When the mimetic conflicts generated by the lability of protohuman appetite can no longer be contained by the pecking-order arrangements of protohuman social structure, a new means is needed for preventing the breakdown of the social order. This means is representation, and the first representation is that of the sacred” (Gans, The Scenic Imagination 177–79). In his polemic with René Girard and Jacques Derrida, Gans argues that “Language does not place sous rapture the ‘absolute presence’ of the first sign; on the contrary, its system of differences extends this presence. Metaphysics’ suspicion of writing's secondarity with respect to speech indeed reflects an originary intuition, but this intuition, rather than rejecting différance, seeks on the contrary to retrieve through detemporalization the originary différance that founds the human community. The cure for metaphysics is the retemporalization of its founding myth, not as the rediscovery of originary violence, but as the beginning of the never-ending history of its deferral” (Gans, A New Way of Thinking 184).
5Adam Katz, one of the followers and interlocutors of Eric Gans, writes: “Eric Gans presents the [originating] scene in minimal, parsimonious terms—but it is clear that, if we are to locate all that humanity is capable of on this scene, minimality is a sign of inexhaustibility, not reductionism” (Katz 101).
6Mikhail Epstein creates the philosophy of the possible as a “category of humanistic thought (covering metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and psychology)” that is in no way negativistic, nor postmodern in the narrow meaning of the word. Epstein places his “possibilism” at an equal distance from both the philosophy of realism and the philosophy of nominalism: “The ‘possible’ for me is not a certain reality possessing its physical extension or spatiotemporal continuum [as in realism]. However, the ‘possible’ is not also a provisional fiction symbolically reflecting characteristics of our real world [as in nominalism]. The possible is a special mode of ‘being able’ that takes us beyond the boundaries of this reality, but not necessarily belongs to another reality. Peculiarity of the possible consists in none other but its irreducibility to the real, whether it be the reality of our world or of other ones” (Epstein 27–32).
7Deleuze even had to include the concept of origin in his philosophy of differences, while defining it as a “dark precursor” (Deleuze 145ff). However, this is merely self-deception: The origin cannot be dark; in the typical case, it can only be lit. It is always given a priori but is revealed a posteriori, after analysis, the result of hard and tormented work of culture, the work of reading, interpretation, and creation. This origin is what Hermann Cohen calls Ursprung (“origin” in German)—the transcendental hypothesis that enables experience and cognition (Cohen, “Logik der reinen Erkenntnis” 36ff). Cohen's conception of origin is the elaboration of the tradition of critical idealism of Plato, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Immanuel Kant, particularly of Leibniz's infinitesimal method, in which the infinite is posed as the foundation and principle of the finite and being is led to its origin in thinking by means of the systematic principle of the infinite (see Poma 90–91).
8On the possible worlds in Keret, see Mendelson-Maoz 39–64. On the general theory of possible worlds in literature, see Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory, and more recently, Doležel, Possible Worlds of Fiction and History.
9On the world as a task, see Cohen, “Kants Theorie der Erfahrung” 666.
10Evidence for that is the growth of metaphysics, in the terms of Girard and Gans, from one conflict around one victim, or, in the terms of Cohen, from one Fundament, Ursprung, Erzeugungsgrösse (Cohen, “Kants Theorie der Erfahrung” 545–47).
11The story “Rabin's Dead” in Anihu was not included in the English translation that was published under the title The Nimrod Flip Out.
12For application of Gans's concept of victimary, mastery, or heroic rhetoric to aesthetic-poetic analysis, see Ian Dennis's works on Byron (and others). See also Emma Peacocke's comment on how Byron “subverted the rhetoric of victimhood and suffering” and Andrew Bartlett's study on Frankenstein.
13Juri Lotman systematically applied the conception of explosion (along with chaos, borderline, multiple possibilities) in cultural semiotic studies.
14This is a circle of justification based on Cohen's conception of Ursprung: Origin(ation) of history is the purpose of history. The point of the proper entrance into this circle is the point of bifurcation and choice between alternative historical possibilities.
15Matvei Kagan writes: “Any plot is a myth. A plot in essence is nothing but a myth. […] A myth is always nothing but a manifestation of meaning and of a sequence of events and phenomena, whose purpose is predicted in the internal character of the events themselves. […] After all, the purity of accident and of fact in history is not perfect! But perfection does exist. It bursts into history, as it were, and is presented to it. A myth is just this prior perfection of the concrete. This is the principle and the fact of the constant creative source that constitutes the vision of the revelation of the future in the present, and the past's inclusion within the constantly revealed present, which lives the future, already lives the future. […] In this, the purity of an episode is embodied. An episode's pure being is the myth, the plot of art. […] There is no causal-legal factor. Here what operate are visible individual purposefulness, individual closure, and perfection. […] The sequence is not fantasized nor does it have a prior existence; rather, it is inspired as the vision of the purpose of being in the character [through the content], which has already closed from the inside in the formal individualism of the fact of the work of art” (Kagan, “Dva ustremleniia iskusstva” 460–61).
16On the genre of alternative history and its allegedly postmodern roots, see Hellekson 2–8, 28–30; Hardesty 73–79; Rosenfeld 2–11.
17This is the confidence about which Karl Jaspers writes in Lecture 2 of his Philosophical Faith and Revelation: not as certainty and closeness, but as conviction, belief, and commitment. This concept unites the claims of the philosophical, scientific, and critical reason, on the one hand, and of the originary transcendent human knowledge and communication, which Jaspers calls “faith,” on the other hand.
18Adam Z. Newton, building upon Emmanuel Lévinas's metaphysical ethics, has formulated the theory of narrative ethics, which describes the narrative-ethical practices and forms of behavior of characters, storytellers, readers, and most importantly, their interaction.
19The infiniteness and “unfulfilled-ness” of the human desire for the Other is the basis of Lévinas's metaphysics, which is, in a sense, originary and minimal: One (R/)revelation of (O/)one (O/)other originates sign, language, understanding, interpretation, ethics, and culture as a whole (Lévinas 129–50).
20On the concept of talush in Hebrew literature, see Govrin, Tlishut ve-hitkhadshut; Holtzman, Ha-sippur ha-Ivri; and Bartana, Tlushim ve-khalutzim.
21Alexandra Nocke writes: “Although Etgar Keret does not specifically relate to ethnic issues, he should serve as an example for a new generation of writers, who deal with the realities on the ground. His writing is distinctively local, since it links specific local (Israeli) experiences, such as the tense security situation or the military service, to universal concepts and questions” (Nocke 160).
22Rubik Rosenthal emphasizes that Keret's language is not “thin,” where “thin” is understood as “clean,” and defines Keret's language as “literary colloquial.”
23For Matvei Kagan, canonization of culture is “the care,” “the loving work,” which is the only form of individual-creative human existence, as opposed to the “organic-technical,” “civilizing-legal,” “abstract and scientific-theoretical” forms; so understood, canonization of culture realizes “the anticipation of the wholeness of humanity and of unified meaning of being as the historical universe” (Kagan, “Evreistvo v krizise kultury” 180). For further discussion of this concept, see Katsis, “Evrejstvo v krizise kultury,” and Katsman, “Love and Bewilderment.”
24Kagan's concept of “canonization of culture” can be viewed as growing from Hermann Cohen's characterization of Judaism as possessing an intention “to transfigure all human deeds in the light of the eternal” (Cohen, Religion of Reason 368). Following Cohen, Kagan sees the cultural model of the traditional Jewish community, a holy congregation at the center of which is the practice of talmud Torah, of Gemara, as a prototype of the canonization of the work of culture (see also Katsman, “Matvei Kagan”).
25See Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation.
26My intention here is to move beyond the nature of fiction as discussed so fervently by “referentialists,” “segregationalists,” and “fictionalists” in the 1980s. To this day, three works remain the firmest structural-hermeneutical fundament for the theory of alternative history as a fictional genre: Paul Ricoeur's “threefold mimesis” theory, as presented in Time and Narrative (52–90), Wolfgang Iser's literary anthropology set forth in The Fictive and the Imaginary (2–21), and Thomas Pavel's “fictional world” theory as stated in Fictional Worlds (136–50).
27In defining myth, I follow Aleksei Losev, who defined it as a miraculous personalistic history that is conveyed in words, when miracle is a realization of the transcendental purpose of the personality in the empirical history (Losev 185–86). This definition is essentially different from the more common perception of myth as contrasting with reality. For application of the conventional perception in Keret's works, see Harris 76.
28Although Roland Barthes was the most influential figure who examined the interconnection between myth and rhetoric (while he had merely antimythical and antirhetorical intentions), the roots of the positive juxtaposition of the two concepts in the modern context may be found in Kenneth Burke's writings. Bryan Crable shows that the formative element in Burke's famous book A Rhetoric of Motives is the irrevocable distance between speaker and listener. Although this element is not entirely clear, it is only on its basis that Burke can speak about the rhetorical act as an “eternal plea” that is never fulfilled (Crable 213–39). Kevin McClure applies Burke's concept of “identification” to narratology and establishes the concept of “narrative identification” as stemming from Burke's own approach and as describing the rhetorical processes at the core of the narrative (McClure 189–211). Finally, we can speak of rhetoric in the terms of personalistic, ethical myth creation (mythopoesis) and narrative conflict between myths.
29 Alternativeness, or “counterfactual thinking,” can be viewed as a special type of modal logic, philosophy, and pragmatics, as developed in works by David Lewis, Alan R. White, and Robert Stalnaker. A special case of modal thinking is Algirdas Greimas's modal semantics-semiotics.
30Orzion Bartana assumes that a type of fantasy literature called “metaphysical story” can be viewed as a case of alternative history/reality (30–40).
31The counterfactual method was introduced by Max Weber for the purpose of “singular causal analysis” of historical events: To assess whether one event really caused the other, we should modify or remove the first one and ask whether under the new conditions the second event would be still expected (Weber 164–88). However, this method is rather controversial among historians. For a defense of this method, see Bunzl 845–58. For the opposite opinion, see Tucker 227–39. See also Demandt, History That Never Happened.
32Adina Abadi speaks about the nonsense elements in the Keret stories (Abadi 55–72); however, not nonsense but paradox is a certain kind of modal thinking that reflects tragic bewilderment (and in this sense, it is close to the Greeks’ and Derrida's concept of aporia).
33The problematization of sincerity in literature has a long history; in the 1960s and 1970s, it reached its peak in the classical works of Henry Peyre and Lionel Trilling. Menahem Brinker discusses Brenner's “rhetoric of sincerity” as a game, and a mode of thinking and expressing ideas in ‘Ad ha-simta ha-tverianit (To the Tiberian Alley, Brinker 13–24). The most recent collection of papers on the subject affirms the conception of sincerity as a merely theatrical performance (Alphen, Bal, and Smith 3). However, both rhetoric and sincerity can be viewed as genuine modes of originating myth (in Losev's sense) and personality, thus merging with each other in the rhetoric of sincerity as a metaphoric realization of the truth and subjectivity (see Katsman, ‘Nevu’a ktana’).
34See Jaspers, Philosophical Faith, Lecture 3. One should remember, though, that Jaspers's philosophy of the origin (as well as this of Hermann Cohen) is by no means the monistic one, but essentially historic and communicative (see Wildermuth).
35Kagan writes: “History is the giving of creation, the gift of creation (Gabe der Schöpfung). […] Only creation makes history possible.” See Kagan, “O poniatii istorii” 289.
36Katsman, “Ishiyut, etika ve-ideologiya.”