Summary
Critic whose Zionism (1994) supplies the framing for Chapter 4 of Rhetorics of Belonging: Israeli Hebrew writing resolves the historical order to a narrative order superseded by the telos of the ‘living utopia’, the Zionist’s Israel (Rhetorics of Belonging, PDF p.97).
Details
- Gover’s epigraph: “The Israeli writer must always position the present as a whole in the consuming context of a total history, and reconstitute the individuals of the present as agents but never as principals or sources of principle […] The Israeli Hebrew author resolves the putative historical order to a narrative order in which moral priorities are stated in reference to a cumulative series of oppressions and resistances superseded by the telos of the living utopia, the Zionist’s Israel.” (1994, quoted PDF p.97).
- Dissident Zionist writing, in Gover’s analysis as Bernard presents it, “both challenges Zionist moral and political themes and, despite itself, ends up by reiterating the episteme upon which those themes are based” (1994, 3, quoted PDF p.102).
- Gover on Israeli narratives’ plausibility: “the constant return to allegory [is] part of the way in which [Israeli] narratives achieve their plausibility and therefore a sense of community among readers” (1994, 9, quoted PDF p.103); the “subtexts” of Israeli Hebrew fiction “operate as supertexts, metatexts”, there before what is read, so a novel’s meaning is always located outside itself (1994, 9, PDF p.111-112).
- In Gover’s account, quoted in Chapter 1, what would elsewhere be ‘high’ and elite literature “is in Israel popular and public” (1994, 2, quoted PDF p.10).
- Against Oz’s Srulik, Gover counters that the synthesis of morality and politics “is progressive only if the inclusive referent is a universal humanity rather than a segment of a population. It is regressive and reactionary if the posit of a living utopia is particularized and sectarian” (1994, 7, quoted PDF p.122).