An interview with A.B. Yehoshua, with a discussion of his books Mr. Mani and Open Heart
Originally published in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine,
June 5th, 1997
Talking About His Generation
Israeli Writer A.B. Yehoshua on the
Waning Art of the Democratic Novel
The name A.B. Yehoshua may not ring too many bells here in the States, but on
the international scene he ranks alongside Gabriel García Márquez, Günter
Grass, and Salman Rushdie as one of the great contemporary novelists. He is to
Israel what García Márquez is to Columbia, Grass is to Germany, and Rushdie is
to India—a kind of literary spokesman and symbol for the entire country.
This
might seem incomprehensible to an American reading public obsessed with keeping
art and politics separate, because even though we have Toni Morrison, who comes
close, we generally don’t have much interest in writers who are engaged in the
national culture the way Yehoshua and company are. So when Yehoshua came to
Minneapolis a few weeks ago, he meant to shake things up a bit, giving two
electrifying lectures and talking serious politics in an interview arranged
by the University of Minnesota’s chair of Hebrew Studies, Yehudit Shendar.
A
Francophile from birth, Yehoshua speaks English with a curious French accent,
and his wild hair and ecstatic bearing give him a Nutty Professor type of aura.
Lying beneath his disordered manner, however, is a mind as focused and
organized as any in literature. He speaks frankly about the Palestinian
question (he advocates full peace at any cost), and he stresses the importance
of moral and political involvement on the part of writers. But the moral duty
of the Israeli novelist, Yehoshua says, has a specific dimension that may seem
foreign to other writers:
“The
artist in Israel, and in Zionism in general,” Yehoshua says, “was very much
involved in what you will call the national activity, the national spirit. They
were involved not only because there was a great problem that is happening to a
people, generally writers are very much involved as social critics, as prophets
or whatever they are doing as patriots. But in the Jewish Zionist movement it
was especially important because the renaissance of the Jewish people of the
Zionist movement, of the national Zionist movement, was done also through the
renaissance of Hebrew. So they were not only participating in the big event as
partners, but also it was very important because they were very active in the
recreating of the Jewish language. Because in order to do a national movement,
it was a necessity to bring back, to revive the Jewish language.”
But
Yehoshua is finding himself to be one of the last of the Israeli writers
engaged in this larger arena. It seems that Yehoshua and fellow novelist Amos
Oz, who are both part of a leftist section of the Israeli Labor Party called
the “Sane Left,” form the last of the old guard. Only novelist David Grossman,
who is even farther left (and whose book See Under: Love is one of the best
novels of the last ten years in any language) is as engaged.
“My
feeling is that we are the last one,” Yehoshua says, “my generation—and perhaps
David Grossman, who is younger, and perhaps he is the last one—who are very
much involved in public affairs, that are still writing from time to time in
articles, that are shouting, that are giving interviews and things like that.
The younger generation doesn’t want to do it anymore. The younger writers are
writing their Postmodern literature—they are doing it with great joy, with all
the jokes, like your [American] writers. There is a fine writer, a young
writer, who is doing a very smart kind of short story pieces, and he was asked
by a television station to have a dialogue with one of the former writers, with
the more older writer. So he chose me as a partner, and when he was calling me
and saying to me, ‘I’m going to come to your house with the crew of
television,’ there was some kind of terrorist attack, and I was saying to him,
‘Prepare yourself. We will have to talk about—we will be asked by the
television about this and that,’ and he said, ‘Why? We have to talk about
politics? No, no. I am not coming here. I don’t want it at all.’”
Writers
want to write personal literature, which is important, but Yehoshua says that
there has to be a balance between the inner and outer worlds in literature:
“A
writer has his duty first of all to do a fine literature that will touch the
individual,” Yehoshua says, “that will speak on the behalf of the individual.
And so it’s very difficult how to find your way in between your duty as a
writer to speak about the big issues—and especially about moral issues—and to
do all your private literature with all the subtleties of psychological
description, of human situations.”
Yehoshua’s
history as a writer is a testament to how artists can integrate the needs of
the individual with then needs of society. Starting out at age twenty-one—after
his military service—Yehoshua worked as a short story writer, feeling out how
to create a prose style, and then moved on much later to larger forms—and
issues.
“I
was starting writing abstract short stories in the mood of Kafka and some of
the abstract writing of Agnon. And then, little by little, I was descending
from the abstract writing to reality, and I was very much influenced in a
certain time of my literary career by Faulkner. In my mind Faulkner is the best
writer of the century in any language. … He was important in the way in which
he was doing the multi-voices novel. This for me was important in the ’70s,
when I felt that Israel was cracking, dismantling to many voices, and the way
to recreate a novel that will express rightly the mood of Israel—the model was
given to me by Faulkner.”
Yehoshua
has been called “a kind of Israeli Faulkner” by critic Harold Bloom, and
Yehoshua explained part of his fascination with Faulkner in his lecture “Modern
Democracy and the Novel.” Arguing that all the greatest works of literature
from this century were written in its first fifty years, he says that he would
take the works of “Thomas Mann, Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Kafka,
Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, the less famous Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bruno
Schulz, Musil, Doblin, Agnon and Céline” over any of the great works written in
the last fifty years.
It’s
not just the mysticism of time that makes these writers seem better than
contemporary ones, Yehoshua says, but that the current political scene isn’t
conducive to great writing. He points to modern democracy—democracy as
practiced in countries like the United States, that is—as one of the key
factors in literature’s decline. Many of the great novels of the past—from
Cervantes’ Don Quixote to Faulkner’s As I lay Dying—strove toward
a democratic aesthetic, Yehoshua says, but with today’s capitalism-disguised-as-democracy,
writers somehow think there’s no more work to be done.
Don
Quixote was radical because it placed more emphasis on the voices of the
poor than of the aristocracy, and writers as late as William Faulkner were
still expanding this vocabulary. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying took the
democratic mode in literature to its highest point, Yehoshua says, with each
chapter narrated by a different character—none of which having any supremacy
over any other. With this barrage of voices eliminating any kind of ersatz
objectivity on the part of the narrator, Faulkner was able to create a world as
seen by its inhabitants, not just by its creator.
It’s
this kind of democratic agitation that Yehoshua sees as missing from modern
novels. But he, at least, is still interested in progress. Taking his cue from
Faulkner, Yehoshua uses the multi-voice technique in ways even more radical
than his Mississippi master’s. His 1976 novel The Lover was his first
foray into this style, but his 1989 novel Mr. Mani rivals even the
astonishing See Under: Love as the great novel of modern Israel.
Mr.
Mani tells the story of the Mani family through five long conversations held over the course of 150 years. In each conversation the reader hears only
the voice of one of the speakers, which makes the whole thing both wildly
disjointed and almost infinitely suggestive. Each speaker is somehow connected
with the Mani family, so the reader gets to see its progress through
Israeli/Palestinian history not only from the outside, but through several
unrelated and openly biased eyes. Each speaker has his or her own story, and
watching all the threads—of the Mani family and the speakers—come together is
one of the most thrilling experiences of modern literature.
Yehoshua’s
last book, Open Heart, is a bit of a retreat from this style, however.
Following one narrator, Doctor Benjamin Rubin, on his impossible love affair
with his boss’ wife, the book finds Yehoshua writing a more personal kind of
fiction for a change. Although it’s amazingly rich, with uncanny
characterization and an almost unfathomable spiritual depth, it’s just not as
compelling as his other work. Part of this has to do with the translation.
Yehoshua’s old translator, the brilliant Hillel Halkin, just recently retired,
and Open Heart is clumsily translated into English by the South African
Dalya Bilu.
But
Yehoshua is returning to the larger arena with his next novel, A Journey to
the End of the Millennium, which he just released in Hebrew. Exploring the
relationship between the Sephardic Jews and the Ashkenazi Jews at the end of
the first millennium, the book looks to be a vast parable extending its reach
into modern Israeli questions—in short another Yehoshua masterpiece. But we’ll
have to wait and see. In the meantime, check out Mr. Mani.
—David Wiley
