Summary
Israeli literary critic whose early, influential analysis of Anton Shammas’ Arabesques (1987) — as a work of Minor literature that deterritorializes and then reterritorializes Hebrew — Bernard builds on and revises in Chapter 6 of Rhetorics of Belonging.
Details
- Hever (1987) is cited for Oz’s remark that Arabesques was a ‘triumph’ for Hebrew (qtd. in Hever, 1987, 48, quoted PDF p.146) and for the claim that the novel seeks to reterritorialize Hebrew ‘as the language of the Israeli’ (Hever, 1987, 70, quoted PDF p.148) through its syncretizing arabesque structure.
- In Hever’s reading, Shammas ‘is suspicious of the validity of the Israeli national allegory, both for the Israeli Jew, with his uncertain identity as master, and for himself as a half-slave whose role and identity are no less uncertain’, and the novel concedes the nation state ‘only as articulated through the arabesque: not as an absolute and rigid notion’ but as evolving and dialectical (Hever, 1987, 69–70, 72, quoted PDF p.148-149). Bernard departs from Hever in holding that, on Jameson’s discontinuous sense of allegory, the arabesque is itself a form of allegory rather than an anti-allegorical device (PDF p.149).
- Hever (2002, 185) reads Bar-On’s phrase ‘my Jew’ as registering both ‘genuine empathy with a fellow-minority’ and ‘the racist stance of a superior majority’ (quoted PDF p.152); Bernard counters that Bar-On’s racism is self-conscious to the point of satire rather than unconscious (PDF p.152).
- Hever (2002, 191–92) argues Shammas needs ‘both oral and written narrative’, the oral tradition’s arabesque rhythms serving as a touchstone against Israeli public discourse’s nondialectical attitude to time (quoted PDF p.159); Bernard notes against this that ‘The Tale’ itself cites a vast written Arabic archive (PDF p.159).
Related pages
Rhetorics of Belonging, Anton Shammas, Minor literature, National allegory