“Towards a ‘Drier,’ Objective World”

The Statehood Generation, Imagism, and Literary History Between Nationalism and Capitalismand Capitalism

Abstract

This paper offers a new interpretation of the poetic stage of the Statehood Generation. As the dominant historiographic narrative has it, the Statehood Generation is a dramatic moment of rebellion and liberation, embodied in the ideals—usually seen as overlapping and complementary—of concreteness and individualism. Yet this paper reveals tensions between them, as the ideal of individualism emphasizes subjective emotion, while the ideal of concreteness emphasizes the impersonal image.
To figure out this contradiction we need, I argue, to “exit” the dominant historiographic narrative, which focuses almost exclusively on the nation, and add capitalism, its relations with nationalism and its social ramifications. Following the model offered by Kfir Cohen Lustig I argue that the Statehood Generation is a transitional stage in the ongoing process of autonomization, between the heteroenomic society of monopolistic capitalism, in which capitalism is subordinated to the building of the nation/state, to the autonomous society of the neo-liberal stage, when capitalism spreads and prevails over the state. I argue that Zach’s critical articles embody this transitional stage as they posit autonomous poetics as the poetic ideal, whilehis poetry of these years remains, as yet, incapable of realizing this ideal. In the 1970s, with the beginning of the neo-liberal stage, the process of autonomization increases, allowing for the realization of this poetic ideal: indeed, this is when Imagist poetry (and other “autonomous” poetics) emerges in Hebrew poetry.
This understanding allows us also to better understand the relations between the Statehood Generation and Anglo-American modernism—not as a relation of “belated influence,” as the dominant narrative has it, but rather as an analogy between two similar poetics, emerging in similar historical-social structures, which occur in their different cultures at different points in time, following similar stages of historical-economic-social development