Vision and Surface in Yeshayahu Koren’s WorkVision Work

Abstract

This article deals with the poetics of vision and its affinity to questions of Israeli nativeness in the novella “Yolik” (Two Palms and a Word, 2013) by Yeshayahu Koren. The gaze of the eponymous protagonist, a child growing up in an Israeli settlement in the 1940s, exposes the history of the land, as well as of the domestic space, through the representation of traces, detritus and absences marking its material surface. The conception of vision generated in the text is based on participation and experience as conditions for vision, as well as for representation. Drawing on phenomenological approaches and the critique of “symptomatic” readings of literature, as well as conducting a comparison with S. Yizhar’s representations of Israeli space, this article shows that despite the immediate ideological context, Koren’s novella draws readers’ attention to what there is to be seen on the material surface of the land, as well as to the literary narrative’s surface, rather than referring to symbolic, “deep” structures. By doing so, Koren´s work challenges the structuralist distinction between a narrative’s deep structure and its surface, and that between the visible and the invisible, both of which are present on the surface of the material world, as well as of the narrative.