The Reading Experience

Optical Illusion

In a recent review of "two novels about Alzheimer's disease," LaVonne Neff comments that in one of them the author "convincingly sees through [the protagonist's] eyes, even though she tells his story in the third person." Here is a paragraph she quotes in illustration:

He looks around his car and tries to remember what make it is; he cannot. He opens the window to feel what month it is. It isn't a month. There aren't months. There are just happenings, a lack of signposts … . He pulls up at the side of the road, lifts his glasses, and rubs his eyes. He has been doing this journey to and from work every day for thirty-five years. He pores over the map.

There is actually very little here that could accurately be described as being conveyed "through the eyes" of this character. Sentence one reports on an action from the outside and then offers a brief report of what's "going on inside" the character's mind. Sentence two does likewise, although in this case we are given the puzzling report that  he wants to "feel what month it is," presumably a measure of his Alzheimer's-induced confusion. The next three sentences puport to be the character's thoughts, but as in most fiction using the free indirect method ("psychological realism") they're really just the narrator's coherent formulation of what might be happening, in a fleeting, incomplete sort of way as, in this case, the character looks out the car window. Certainly nothing like these articulated statements are really being fully-formed by the character himself.

The following sentence is again straight reporting: "He pulls up at the side of the road, lifts his glasses, and rubs his eyes." Indeed, this could just as easily be the perspective of someone peering in at the character through the car windows as of the character himself as he prepares to consult the map. The next sentence provides us with a piece of information that could be hovering in the back of his mind but again hardly seems to be the sort of thing the character would be thinking explicitly. It is the sort of thing the narrator would be offering as a way to fill out the scene, however. It's a summary statement, not a reflection of actual thought processes. The final sentence in this quoted passage returns to reporting what the character does.

In no way can I read this passage as an attempt to make us "see" through the character's "eyes." (Or if it is such an attempt, it certainly fails.) This would require a loosening of linguistic and rhetorical logic (as opposed to the loss of "logic" being experienced by the character) that we just don't find here. It would require the suspension of our own expectations of what "seeing" entails. I have not read either of the novels Neff is reviewing, and I could certainly imagine using cognitive anomalies such as Alzheimer's and dementia in such a way that something genuinely innovative in the application of point of view could be achieved, but from the passages quoted in the review and from the reviewer's account of the novels as a whole, it doesn't appear as if they are anything other than conventional, third-person central-consciousness narratives that happen to take cognitive impairment as a subject.

It is Neff's review itself that is most telling in its own confusion about the effects of point of view. It reflects a more general lack of attentiveness in many general-interest fiction reviews whereby the work at hand is mischaracterized as "getting inside" the minds of its characters when at best what it provides is some combination of omniscient reporting and mild inflections of those characters' perspective through by now shopworn narrative notations and manipulations of sentence length and structure ("It isn't a month. There aren't months."). It mistakes these facile and perfunctory devices for genuine exploration in point of view. And it thus reinforces the notion that what distinguishes fiction from visual forms of storytelling is primarily its ablity to delve into consciousness and reveal what it's like to "see through the character's eyes." What distinguishes fiction from other narrative forms is its existence in language, in writing, and the writing quoted by LaVonne Neff is just the same old boilerplate.

"The Style is on the Inside"

Susan Sontag's essay "On Style" (Against Interpretation)  contains many passages to warm an aging aesthete's heart. First, a selection:

Indeed, practically all metaphors for style amount to placing matter on the inside, style on the outside. It would be more to the point to reverse the metaphor. The matter, the subject, is on the outside; the style is on the inside. As Cocteau writes: "Decorative style has never existed. Style is the soul, and unfortunately with us the soul assumes the form of the body." Even if one were to define style as the manner of our appearing, this by no means necessarily entails an oppostion between a style that one assumes and one's "true" being. In fact, such a disjunction is extremely rare. In almost every case, our manner of appearing is our manner of being. The mask is the face. . . .

Most critics would agree that a work of art does not "contain" a certain amount of content (or function--as in the case or architecture) embellished by "style." But few address themselves to the positive consequences of what they seem to have agreed to. What is "content"? Or, more precisely, what is left of the notion of content when we have transcended the antithesis of style (or form) and content? Part of the answer lies in the fact that for a work of art to have "content" is, in itself, a rather special stylistic convention. The great task which remains to critical theory is to examine in detail the formal function of subject-matter. . . .

To treat works of art [as statements] is not wholly irrelevant. But it is, obviously, putting art to use--for such purposes as inquiring into the history of ideas, diagnosing contemporary culture, or creating social solidarity. Such a treatment has little to do with what actually happens when a person possessing some training and aesthetic sensibility looks at a work of art appropriately. A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world. . . .

Inevitably, critics who regard works of art as statements will be wary of "style," even as they pay lip service to "imagination." All that imagination really means for them, anyway, is the supersensitive rendering of "reality." It is this "reality" snared by the work of art that they continue to focus on, rather than on the extent to which a work of art engages the mind in certain transformations. . . .

In the end, however, attitudes toward style cannot be reformed merely by appealing to the "appropriate" (as opposed to utilitarian) way of looking at works of art. The ambivalence toward style is not rooted in simple error--it would then be quite easy to uproot--but in a passion, the passion of an entire culture. This passion is to protect and defend values traditionally conceived of as lying "outside" art, namely truth and morality. but which remain in perpetual danger of being compromised by art. Behind the ambivalence toward style is, ultimately, the historic Western confusion about the relation between art and morality, the aesthetic and the ethical.

For the problem of art versus morality is a pseudo problem. The distinction itself is a trap; its continued plausibility rests on not putting the ethical into question, but only the aesthetic. To argue on these grounds at all, seeking to defend the autonomy of art. . .is already to grant something that should not be granted--namely, that there exist two independent sorts of response, the aesthetic and the ethical, which vie for our loyalty when we experience a work of art. As if during the experience one really had to choose between responsible and humane conduct, on the one hand, and the pleasurable stimulation of consciousness, on the other!

Much of Sontag's essay is concerned to break down the opposition between "style" and "content," but unlike others who sometimes complain about the persistence of this opposition but do so mostly in order to banish "style" from critical discussion altogether--it's just the writer's way of communicating his/her content--Sontag maintains it is content that should recede, becoming simply the word for a "special stylistic convention." Style is the real substance of art, content its outer decoration, the enticement to the reader's attention that allows the "experience" of art that style enables.

Sontag was unfortunately denied her wish that critical theory might move "to examine in detail the formal function of subject-matter." Academic criticism has gone in precisely the opposite direction, dismissing form altogether in order to focus on the "subject-matter" that satisfies the critic's pre-established theoretical disposition, while there's very little "critical theory" at all in general-interest publications of the sort that once published writers like Susan Sontag. Essentially, the debate over the fraught relationship between "style" and "content" is about where Sontag left it.

Unfortunately, she left it presumably resolved to her own satisfaction, but not in a way that satisfies any current attempt to advance the argument that "style is on the inside." Since the notion that subject-matter is mostly a formal function seems if anything more outlandish even than it must have in 1965, a case needs to be made for it that extends beyond Sontag's somewhat idiosyncratic account and that avoids what I consider her more serious missteps.

The most serious problem with "On Style," in my opinion, is that Sontag can't finally unburden her argument of the criticisms of aestheticism made by the moralists she otherwise castigates. It seems to me her observation that it is quite easy to keep separate "responsible and humane conduct" from "the pleasurable stimulation of consciousness" without the latter contaminating the former would entirely suffice as a rebuttal of these criticisms, but she spends a great deal of her essay--the heart of it, really--defending the notion that art should not be judged by the standard of "humane conduct, " since art and the experience of art are phenomena of "consciousness," not actions requiring moral scrutiny. In fact, immediately after making the observation she begins to back off, assuring skeptics that "Of course, we never have a purely aesthetic response to works of art--neither to a play or a novel, with its depicting of human beings choosing and acting, nor, though it is less obvious, to a painting by Jackson Pollack or a Greek vase."

Since we never have a "pure" response to anything, I can't see that this proviso is necessary. If it isn't obvious to readers that a depiction of "human beings choosing and acting" is not the same thing as human beings choosing and acting and that it would be irrational "for us to to make a moral response to something in a work of art in the same sense that we do to an act in real life," then any further attempt to heighten those readers' aesthetic awareness isn't going to accomplish much in the first place. Although Sontag argues that "we can, in good conscience cherish works of art which, considered in terms of 'content,' are morally objectionable" (her brief defense of Leni Riefenstahl's documentaries is the best-known illustration of this possibility), finally she can't let "morality" go as an issue relevant to the creation and experience of art. "Art is connected with morality," she asserts. "The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness."

Much is elided in that formulation "intelligent gratification." Is "unintelligent" gratification immoral, or just lack of artistry? Is lack of artistry itself a moral issue, or simply a critical/evaluative judgment? Does only the greatest art perform the "moral service" Sontag associates with the "intelligent gratification of consciousness"? I don't object to the formulation itself--John Dewey would probably have found it usefully synonymous with his own notion of "art as experience"--but to insist that it must have a moral dimension seems to undo almost completely Sontag's case--which she admits she has made "uneasily"--for the autonomy of art:

But if we understand morality in the singular, as a generic decision on the part of consciousness, then it appears that our response to art is "moral" insofar as it is, precisely, the enlivening of our sensibility and consciousness. For it is sensibility that nourishes our capacity for moral choice, and prompts our readiness to act, assuming that we do choose, which is a prerequisite for calling an act moral, and are not just blindly and unreflectingly obeying. Art performs this "moral" task because the qualities which are intrinsic to the aesthetic experience (disinteredness, contemplativeness, attentiveness, the awakening of the feelings) and to the aesthetic object (grace, intelligence, expressiveness, energy, sensuousness) are also fundamental constituents of a moral response to life.

Again, there isn't much here with which I would fundamentally disgree, but Sontag comes close to suggesting that art needs this moral justification, that "contemplativeness" and "attentiveness" are not in themselves sufficiently desirable qualities. They are "moral" insofar as they are good things to exercise, but I can't see that an explicit justification of them--and thus of aesthetic experience itself--on moral grounds is otherwise relevant. Either art needs no moral justification to strengthen its appeal or it is an impetus to moral action after all. Sontag wants to believe the first, but really seems to believe the second.

To be continued

A Tradition of Anti-Traditional Writing

Jonathan Mayhew questions whether there is such a perceptible difference between the "modern" and the "postmodern," both in fiction and poetry, as we are sometimes led to believe. As Jonathan observes, "the term [postmodernism] took on a different meaning after Lyotard and Jameson. Basically, the word was hijacked as a term for 'poststructuralism' or for 'late capitalism,' respectively."

It is certainly true that "postmodern" was transformed from a term descriptive of an identifiable set of writers and specific literary practices to one that increasingly took on heavy historical and philosophical baggage. Critics such as Leslie Fiedler and Ihab Hassan initially used the word to track developments in 20th century literary history, and it became an umbrella term to gather together "experimental" writers such as Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Robert Coover, etc. Theorists such as Lyotard and Jameson did indeed appropriate "postmodernism" to their own extra-literary agendas, although theirs did not become the widespread use of the term until well into the 1980s. Prior to that time, "postmodern" was mostly an adjective attached to "fiction," a formulation that could encompass both of the nonrealist strategies invoked by Robert Scholes as "fabulation" and "metafiction."

Jonathan suggests that poets from this period were really "continuers of a tradition" extending back to Williams and Pound, that these "new" poets' work still essentially belonged to the "modernist period." I think the same is true of what was postmodern fiction. "Post-" modern meant not just after modernism but more specifically a return to the spirit of modernism understood as the attempt to expand the possibilities of form and style in fiction, an endeavor that to some extent had been interrupted by a resurgence of realism and naturalism from the 1930s to the 1960s. Insofar as writers such as Barth accepted "postmodern" as a meaningful label for their work, they almost always themselves situated the work as a continuation of modernist experimentation and epistemological skepticism. This may have led in some cases to formal experiment that called into question the stability of all narrative conventions, that stylistically exceeded the limits of "fine writing" and comedically deflated fiction's pretensions to transparently representing "reality," but however much these practices might have seemed to challenge the less audacious experiments of the modernists, they were ultimately as much tributes to the inspiration provided by the modernists as attempts to displace modernist fiction.

There's no doubt that "postmodernism" is now overloaded with the connotations of cultural change brought to it by the likes of Lyotard and Jameson, so much so that its utility in measuring the continuity of 20th/21st century fiction--or its disruptions--probably has been lost. There still persists a tradition of anti-traditional writing, but to identify new works that exemplify this traditon as "postmodern" no longer offers much illumination. It only reinforces the stereotyping that passes for critical thinking among critics unsympathetic to experimental writing and links that writing to bloated theoretical speculations with which it has almost nothing in common.

Language Barrier

I was persuaded to read Thomas Glavinic's Night Work by Steve Mitchelmore's thoughtful review of the novel. I do believe that Steve's defense of its strategy of non-revelation is more convincing than the complaints made by some reviewers that the novel fails because it does not adequately account for the circumstances motivating the story, but ultimately I wasn't quite as taken with Night Work as was Steve or some other of its reviewers. I'm not sorry I expended the time to read the book, although it has turned out to be one of those books that, for me at least, has been more stimulating to think about in retrospect than it was while reading it.

To some degree I expected to not like the book much at all, however much I generally trust Steve Mitchelmore's judgment. If it's not exactly a "post-apocalytic" novel, it sounds when first described to be close enough to that sub-genre, and I can't say I've ever been one of its fans. (And I don't mean just its SF version in particular; the post-apocalyptic novels written by Denis Johnson and Paul Auster and Cormac McCarty haven't done much for me, either.) These novels always seem to be striving so hard to "say something"--about technological development, about human nature, about what the future might bring if we don't watch out!--that I am unable to take much pleasure in them as works of fiction on a purely aesthetic level. It's not that the "vision" of human life after the ultimate catastrophe is itself unpleasantly dark; it's that the formal resources of fiction have been so thoroughly subsumed to rhetorical ends that I feel I'm being lectured.

Night Work mostly avoids this problem, although questions about what has happened and why must inevitably persist about a narrative that posits a world emptied of all human and animal life save for the story's protagonist, Jonas. But not only does the novel resolutely refuse to disclose the source of the protagonist's dilemma, it becomes clear rather early on that the source of this dilemma is really beside the point. This is a novel set in an apparently calamitous future that is not going to resolve itself into a meditation on that calamity or a satire of human folly but is instead going to explore through the actions and state of mind of its solitary main character what it would be like to be the last vestige of conscious life in existence.

The narrative does playfully leave the suggestion that the "night work" performed by Jonas's sleeping self might be the cause of his predicament, perhaps a kind of half-awake dissociative state. Jonas begins videotaping himself asleep, and he does witness what must be episodes of sleepwalking (which also start to become evident in other ways as well, as when Jonas apparently locks himself into the trunk of his car while asleep). The moment when Jonas watches his sleepwalking self peer into the camera at his awakened self (or vice versa?) is almost vertiginous in its self-referentiality. But even if sleepwalking provides some sort of "explanation" of Jonas's experiences--and it would be a pretty lame one, if we were to take it literally--it doesn't finally matter to our own experience of Jonas's story. Whether it is "really" happening or not fades in importance, as does whether it occurs in the aftermath of a plague, or an alien invasion, or through any other "logical" explanation, to the comprehensive accounting of Jonas's response to the new realities of his situation, literally dreamed up or not.

One inevitably thinks of the night work named in the title as being the work of fiction as well. What Jonas confronts is something he desperately hopes is fiction--a forced encounter with "reality" on a transformed, elemental level--but that increasingly forces itself on him as reality, however uncanny it has become. If it is possible to emerge from the structured dream of fiction with an expanded sense of reality, Jonas is unable to emerge from his dream at all, and he learns that the reality it has become is ultimately unbearable. But this is where my appreciation of Night Work begins to break down. I'm not really sure how much Glavinic himself appreciates the literary/aesthetic implications of his novel, and this reservation is reinforced by both the novel's narrative method and its prose style.

Night Work is presented to us through a more or less conventional third-person narration. It begins on the morning Jonas enters into his anomalous state and ends with his apparent death. Although we are restricted to Jonas's own actions and perceptions, we are not immersed fully into his "deep" consciousness as in much "psychological realism," and while this is to some degree a deliverance from this now stale approach, it creates another problem in a narrative so reduced to activity and event. The narration is mostly concerned to relate what Jonas does:

In the station concourse he trotted from ticket office to ticket office, shop to shop, smashing the windows with his wrench. He didn't disconnect the security alarms this time. Having broken the window of the bureau de change, he waited to see if its alarm would go off, or if he would have to continue his orgy of destruction. Perhaps some-still surviving guardian of the law would think a heist was in progress and intervene.

To the ear-splitting accompaniment of the security alarms he rode the escalator up to the platforms. Taking his time, he began by exploring platforms 1 to 11 in the east section, where he'd seldom been before. Then he boarded the second escalator.

He also smashed the windows of the shops in the south section. They weren't equipped with burglar alarms, which surprised him. He raided one for a bag of crisps and a can of lemonade, plus a packet of paper handkerchiefs for his runny nose. From the newsagent's he grabbed a stack of newspapers two days old.

The level of detail provided here (and throughout the novel) is so generic I almost feel I am reading a screenplay, or at least a novel heavily influenced by cinema. This wouldn't necessarily be an inherent flaw--Robert Coover's A Night at the Movies and The Adventures of Lucky Pierre are both ingenious appropriations of film for literary effect--but the straighforwardly episodic structure of Night Work is not particularly enlivened by its prose, which, as in the passage quoted, remains rather pedestrian. If Night Work becomes particularly laborious in its middle sections, its uninspired language seems to me the immediate cause.

Or at least so it seems, as I am judging Glavinic's style as rendered in its English translation. Perhaps the banality of "trotted from office to office" and the cliches of "orgy of destruction" and "guardian of the law" are fair equivalents of Glavinic's German phrases, or perhaps they are as close as the translator could get to Glavinic's more felicitous words. Since my German is near non-existent, I really have no way of telling, so while I am inclined to think that the bland prose style is authentic enough Glavinic, I was sufficiently engaged with his story and his intrepid commitment to its ultimate indeterminacy that I'd like to think this translation is not appropriately faithful to the German text.

A Quiet Autonomy of Language

Most discussion of the work of Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld eventually focuses on Appelfeld's status as a "Holocaust writer," even if it is acknowledged that in his novels the deportation of European Jews to the death camps and to their murder there is not directly depicted, nor are the horrors experienced there by those who managed to escape or survive their attempted murder explicitly recalled, rarely even mentioned. The silence about the massacre itself is taken to be a strategic silence, whereby the Holocaust looms even larger for its absence in Appelfeld's narratives.

I don't necessarily disagree that Appelfeld's consistent elision of the Holocaust has the effect of drawing the reader's attention to that elision, but perhaps it would be just as true to Appelfeld's intentions and achievement to regard his subject not as the Holocaust, nor even as the conditions, attitudes, or assumptions that preceded and, to a lesser extent, succeeded the event itself, but more plainly as the lives lived by diasporan European Jews prior to the cultural cataclysm represented by the Holocaust, as well as the subsequent response to the extinction of that way of life by those who remained. Applefeld's fiction seems to me much more concerned with the specific experiences of specific characters in a specific time and place than in subsuming those experiences into some overarching abstraction, even one as potent as the Holocaust has become.

For this reason, I also have trouble reading Appelfeld's novels as allegories, as many other reviewers and critics seem to do, although in their relative brevity and episodic structure they undeniably do seem closer to fabulation than to slice-of-life realism. The two most recent of his novels to be translated into English, All Whom I Have Loved and Laish, might especially seem to invite allegorical interprepation, but while I would not begrudge readers their attempt to find in these novels the kind of accessible "meaning" usually associated with allegory, assuming that the allegorical content is an adequate measure of what Appelfeld's fiction has to offer seems to me at best mistaken and at worst just a way of assigning it to some manageable category that excuses inattentive reading.

Appelfeld is often enough compared to Kafka, but this comparison in turn generally assumes that Kafka's fiction is allegorical in a more or less overt way. But of course Kafka created narratives that appear to incorporate an allegorical level of meaning only to complicate and ultimately to deny that meaning. Kafka's world purports to be comprehensible, its ultimate sense to be discovered just around the next narrative turn, but it is finally a world of no-sense, or, more accurately, only of the aesthetic sense made through its own impeccable construction. Kafka is at pains to give his inscrutable world as much substance and texture as is necessary to make it. . .real. The point of reading Kafka's fiction is not, it seems to me, to arrive at a conclusion that the world we live in is absurd, or frightening, or grotesque, but that the world Kafka has created is self-sustaining and entirely logical.

If Kafka is a touchstone in understanding the work of Aharon Applefeld, then something like this focus on texture, on the imaginatively concrete, must be true of Appelfeld's fiction as well. Like Kafka, Appelfeld in all of his novels is concerned above all to sustain the integrity of his invoked world, to make the reader's experience of that world as palpable as the more customary world assumed in most novels. Indeed, if part of Appelfeld's ambition as a fiction writer is to recapture the lost world of prewar European Jewry, then insuring that the particulars remain in the foreground of the reader's attention seems all the more necessary, even if those particulars must unavoidably be filtered through fallible and subjective retrospection.

All Whom I Have Loved is a characteristic foray into recollected experience, transformed into a narrative of confusion, loss, and the imminent dissolution of all ties to life as it had been known. The story is narrated by Paul Rosenfeld, another of the fictional stand-ins for the young Aharon Appelfeld that we find in numerous Appelfeld novels, and the experiences he relates again seem variations on the essential core of experience Appelfeld brought with him when he managed to emigrate to Israel a year after the war ended. Paul is separated first from his father, a struggling artist, in an acrimonious divorce from Paul's mother, with whom Paul lives afterwards until he comes to feel neglected by her in her efforts to assimilate into the local community--she ultimately marries a schoolteacher colleague, a gentile--and then goes to live with the penurious father. While still living with his mother, Paul is cared for by Halina, a local peasant girl whom Paul eventually witnesses being murdered by her abusive boyfriend. After going with his father (including on a trip to Bucharest, where the father briefly experiences renewed hope in his artistic career, only to have it come to nothing), Paul learns his mother has become sick with typhus, from which she shortly dies. The narrative concludes with the shooting of Paul's father during an attempted robbery of a Jewish store and with Paul facing an anarchic future.

The bare bones of this story--a young Jewish boy growing up in Eastern Europe with some degree of turmoil and/or premature tragedy afflicting his family while the even greater trauma of persecution is beginning to build--recurs in several of Appelfeld's novels. This makes his body of work as a whole more broadly representative, as a new reader can start with any one of the novels and immediately become acquainted with Appelfeld's peristent themes and methods. Since the quality of the novels is remarkably consistent as well--at least in those that have gotten to us English speakers in translation--such a reader can be fairly well assured he/she is getting an illustrative sample of Applefeld's accomplishments as a writer of fiction. It also makes the "allegorical" element of Appelfeld's fiction a less relevant and less helpful orientation to his work for the already committed reader. The symbolic implications of the setting and events related are already apparent enough, and what keeps one reading Appelfeld is less the payoff in "meaning" than an interest in how he will again reshape a particular set of experiences into an engrossing fiction that draws us deeper into the specificity of its recreated world.

A careful reading of All Whom I Have Loved would dwell on a moment such as this:

The next day I stood by the door and said good-bye to Mother. I did not cry. I felt the anguish of parting later, in the bedroom amidst the rumpled bed and scattered clothes. It was a sunny day, and the yard behind the house was filled with light. We went out, and Halina immediately began to show me her wonders: she walked on her hands and then made noises like the cawing of crows; she imitated sheep and cows, frogs, and cuckoos. And for a moment she seemed to be not a person but an amazing animal that knew how to do everything that animals can do: to climb trees nimbly, to crawl, to leap over fences, and to fly. Halina lost no time in trying to teach me her skills, but I was far from agile and scarcely capable of producing a single whistle.

Then we rolled in the grass. Halina was slender and very nimble. I tried hard to catch her, but she ran fast and could hop like a rabbit. I stared at her and knew: I would never be able to do the same.

Not only is this passage notable for its aptly chosen detail--"in the bedroom amidst the rumpled bed and scattered clothes"--and not only does it provide us with an episode of brightness and joy as a balance to the descending gloom that we readers of Paul's narrative can always sense (and the joy is in this case itself leavened by Paul's underlying sadness at the separation from his mother), but to the extent it invites us to incorporate the scene into the abstract allegorical narrative paralleling the actual narrative of his experiences that Paul relates we should be wary of effacing the latter while agreeing to the former. Paul's "I would never be able to do the same" might point us to the incipient terror of the Holocaust, or more generally Paul's long-term inability to indulge in simple pleasures, but it might also, almost certainly does, refer to his literal inability to "run fast" and "hop like a rabbit," at this specific time and place as well as in the projected future. That Paul is "far from agile" is a simple matter of fact, however much we might want to see it as a symptom of some larger metaphysical condition.

If anything, Laish even more obviously seems to court an allegorical interpretation, as it is structured explicitly as a journey, the figurative status of which is further reinforced by the cast of characters and the purpose of their journey: At some unspecified point late in the nineteenth century, an untidy group of Jews is making its way in a caravan across Eastern Europe, its stated mission to reach a point of embarkation to Jerusalem. The group consists of traders, ex-convicts, religious seekers, and various other vulnerable people who have joined up with the caravan over the years. The story of their journey is related by a teenage boy, for whom of course the journey acts as an initiation into the ways of the world but who really acts more as a dispassionate observer of the motley assortment of pilgrims and their interactions with the gentiles they encounter. The caravan more or less falls apart by the time it reaches the port of Galacz, but a few of them do remain, their ultimate fate uncertain as they prepare to board ship and the narrator notes that "It appeared to me that all those who had fled were standing at some distance and staring at us."

It would be easy enough to take this story as "the story" of Modern Jewry prior to the founding of Israel, upon the precipice of which the survivors of the caravan symbolically stand. And to some degree it is that story. But it is hard to believe that Appelfeld wrote the novel merely, or even primarily, to advance such a story through what is finally one of the hoariest of devices, the journey narrative. The variety of characters presented and experiences related presses upon the reader's attention more than the goal of the journey itself, and the effect seems more picaresque than emblematic. If Laish does recall Kafka in leaving the caravan and its origins somewhat enigmatic, it also never resolves the enigma into something more readily accessbile to interpretation.

Like All Whom I Have Loved, Laish is composed in short, compact chapters, each relating a brief episode or mini-narrative in Appelfeld's characteristically reticent prose. (At least this is the persistent impression I get from the translations I have read; to examine Appelfeld's prose style more thoroughly would require a facility with Hebrew I don't myself possess.) Even more than in All Whom I Have Loved, in Laish this manner of writing calls attention less to the narrative as a whole, its forward momentum, and more to the self-sufficiency, both in language and in structure, of these discreet parts. Appelfeld is another of those writers who, for me at least, blurs the line between poetry and fiction, in this case by working against the pull of allegory and preserving space for a quiet autonomy of language. To read Laish simply for the meaning conveyed by its plot is to willfully overlook its more impressive effort to find the words that might begin to render experiences that at some point become essentially inexpressible. This is the greater triumph of all of Appelfeld's work.