It is therefore important to note that the centrifugal force is the default, the basis upon which culture and language attempt to impose order. Syntactic sentences are the outcome of the struggle between these forces, rather than being something in themselves. Bakhtin forces us to think about grammar not as a given, but as something that is necessarily achieved in a struggle against what is necessarily formless: this is what he dubs heteroglossia.Hess explicitly addresses the problem of the boundary in the cycle No Actual Woman in Israel, entitling the first page "Place me within my permitted boundary." She explains her poetic engagement with boundaries as an attempt to find congruence between experience and words, stemming from her commitment to attentiveness and precision. This is exemplified in "Attentivating Beauty" ("Koshevet Yofi," the passive form renders attentiveness as the default of literature): "If I die pardon me when I have done evil / and to my melody of nuance be attentive / and listen to my East gurgling within my eyes / for I have reached the boundary of omitted profoundness-." 4 The speaker requests complete attentiveness to her "gurgling East"-a gentle movement, similar to the gurgling of the waves. Resisting the more aesthetic phrase, "for I have reached the boundary of profoundness," she adds the modifier "omitted" (genuza), followed by a dash in order to denote the earnest attention required.These elements are already apparent in her first book, Veyareakh Notef Shiga'on (1984)( And Moon Drips Madness), many of the poems lack conclusive endings. One poem, for example, ends with these lines: "When October arrives come what may-/ I shall not count rings on my years, / I shall circle whilst the birth of snow on Hermon mountains, / in an aerial cable-car inhaling satisfaction / whilst gliding, the view of my childhood / a transparent plastic wrap, a cellophane." 5 The modifiers come in the form of kitchen utensils: "nylon" (Hebrew for plastic wrap) with the adjective "transparent," and another modifier, "cellophane," and all that after the overwhelming description of the aerial movement. The speaker, striving to render the image accurately, ends the poem with an anticlimax, and uses the same device at the end of the next poem: "What do flower people do? / How do they parachute upon the day and upon our heart? / Blind to meaning of colors of light / and inside a not variegated, slightly murky womb." 6 This last rather wordy description of the womb contrasts with the poetics of the parachuting flower-people. In this collection of poems, the poet explicitly refers to the image of the centrifuge, which is compatible with the powerfully figurative and sometimes idiosyncratic language Hess normally uses: 7 "And the cloud / In centrifuge / Without rest / And above it a dream and below it a dream/ And the erosion of flight vibrations-vibrations." 8 "Centrifuge" is a feminine noun in Hebrew, further underlining the conflation with the speaker. Like a modern prophet the speaker is asked to "see:" "And Ang...
In this study I confront the work of Thomas Mann with the Jewish question in order to examine the relationship between literary (human) agency and the inferior margins that enable it: those creatures who do not share the language of (the European and civilized) man. Through a reading of several of Mann’s narratives that concern the relationship between human beings and animals as well as texts by Jewish authors, Kafka in German and Agnon in Hebrew, I seek to shed light on the concept of ‘animality,’ a term that implies continuity between the human and the animal, thereby laying bare man’s political precariousness and fragility and aligning the human with the creature by exposing the body. Based on my reading of Mann’s figuration of the dog in the early story “Tobias Mindernickel” (1898), the novella Herr und Hund (1917), and his Jewish mythical depiction of the biblical Joseph as a dog in Joseph und seine Brüder (1933–1943), I argue that Mann’s humanism is limited in that it guards against the mimetic alignment of man with other creatures by portraying the (often muted) creaturely object of the literary depiction as an inferior – albeit frequently admirable – being. By contrasting Mann’s treatment of this question with Jewish literature’s complete immersion in the animal, I suggest how descriptive speech identifies orientalism as a form of descriptive knowledge, thus clarifying as well the process whereby the modern European nation-state was consolidated by its invisible margins. The article thus suggests that literary description is a means to differentiate and gain agency by adhering to language’s elevated and hierarchical terms.
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