Zionism, Religiosity and Irony in S. Yizhar's Literary Representation of Reality

Abstract

The desire to represent the Land of Israel is the literary equivalent of the Zionistpolitical desire. This article combines two themes surrounding the acceptance of S. Yizhar's work: his being the first significant Sabra author of prose and his uniquepoetics of representing reality. A close reading of Stories of the Plain (1964) uncoversa quasi-religious poetics of facing that-which-cannot-be-represented; striving forrepresentation while being aware of its impossibility. This poetics is explained asa solution to a challenge posed by the realization of Zionism. The realization of Zionism, both politically and literarily, makes the Zionist desire redundant. Yizhar'swork is positioned at the point where Jewish life in Palestine becomes an accessibleobject for literature rather than an aspiration. His poetics keeps the desire aliveby making the signified infinite, like god, thereby turning literature into a ritual ofworshiping the absent signified. Yizhar's religious poetics are shown in two phases:a tragic-pathetic attitude - a serious heroic quest for reality as signified, and anironic-comic one. The tragic attitude is literature's suicide as it annihilates thedistance between the signifier and the signified. This suicide is prevented when anironic distance is opened between the two, a distance that prevents the religiousattitude from being fetishistic idolatry