Placing Identities

Legendary Landscapes and Foundation Tales in Haim Beer’s The Pure Element of Time

Abstract

The Pure Element of Time is an autobiographical novel, which is comprised of an especially complex network of chronotopoi. The inherently dual relationship, characteristic of any autobiography, between the “epic situation” and the narrated events, implies the very basic underlying problematics of its time/space components (i.e. of the “here” vs. “then”). In turn, the autobiographical novel is expected to provide a plot that would link the temporal and spatial elements, in effect explaining the identity of the narrating persona. Within that, it is a figure, a metaphor of kind, which explains the transformation of that persona from some initial state to its final status (here: as a writer, informed by an aesthetic and ideological view). Following that, I suggest viewing the genre of the foundation legend – specifically those narratives about the narrator’s forefathers of the Yishuv ha-Yashan – as the novel’s figure; viewed as a mise en abyme. These foundation legends can be read as a metaphor of the foundation story of the narrator. As a synecdoche of the novel as a whole, they encapsulate the time/space tension that is expressed in its entirety. The foundation legends, in the typical manner of the novel as whole, are constantly and explicitly reflected upon. The historiographical assumptions that underlie their plot are presented, on the one hand, in all their poetic glory; and, on the other hand, are cast in critical doubt. The historiography that is embedded in the foundation legends thus serves as an arena in which questions of authenticity, continuation and a linear trajectory leading up to a contemporary coherent identity are debated. These questions are fundamentally linked to the Zionist foundation legend – and historiography – in which the association of the subject to its place, i.e., the land of Israel, plays a key role.