Ecstasy in Alterman’s Early WorkEcstasy Work

Abstract

This article examines the place of ecstasy in Alterman’s early prose and in the poems of “Stars Outside” (“Kochavim Bachutz”), with reference to Alterman’s unique take on Symbolist poetics. The ecstasy in his poems is characterized by tension between attraction to an intense life (anti-bourgeois and non-institutional) and willingness to self-destruction or to losing oneself within being.
I argue that attraction to death and attraction to life are intertwined and jointly illustrate the complexity of the ecstatic experience and the simultaneous presence of irreconcilable opposites. The discussion focuses on the place of violence and its images in Alterman’s poetry, on the role of metonymy in the representation of the ecstatic experience, on the tendency of these poems to establish musical patterns only to challenge them (simultaneously representing the ecstatic experience of challenging boundaries). Alterman’s attitude to the difficulties of poetic expression of this type of experience is also discussed. The final part of the article focuses on the tension between ecstatic symbolist poetry and political poetry, and on the awareness of the danger inherent in the ecstatic experience, i.e.,its political use by totalitarian regimes. The response suggested by Alterman is a politicization of the aesthetic, offering a humanistic critical point of view instead of the ecstatic one. Alterman felt this contrast on the eve of the Second World War and the collection “Kochavim Bachutz” shows evidence of his future course, veering away from ecstatic poetics.