Voices of the People:
Chorus, Confession
and Confidence in
A
Woman in Jerusalem
A.B. Yehoshua, 2004
A nameless Human
Resources Manager –– let us call him HR –– undertakes a journey that not only becomes personally
transformative, but international in scope and universal in significance. A PR
exercise for a Jerusalem bakery becomes a Mission for the nation of Israel, a
diplomatic intervention in the international community, and finally a beacon of
hope for humanity. On his journey, HR is accompanied by voices: the voice of
his boss to be sure, insisting on the urgency, the rightness, of the Mission,
but also the voices of family, colleagues, bureaucrats, and the voices of the
random people HR encounters because of their connection to Yulia Ragaev.
It is the legacy of Yulia Ragaev for which HR has assumed
responsibility. But responsibility in what sense? In an adventure that starts
with a bureaucratic snafu creating petty annoyances for HR, the manager assumes
responsibility, first for Yulia’s person, then for the disposition of her
remains, and ultimately for the existential meaning of her life. As HR’s
destiny and that of Yulia begin to converge, his progress is regularly marked
by encounters with the voices of representatives of the collective – voices
very like those from the chorus in an ancient Greek drama – warning,
sympathizing, cajoling, commenting on the action and sometimes even driving the
action.
The chorus in antiquity gave expression to a variety of
collective voices, many of which articulated the point of view of marginal
members of society. Thus while some plays had choruses representing robust
members of Greek society – men of military age, for example – many plays
featured choruses composed of old men, women, or slaves. Since the chorus was
expected to express a limited point of view, not necessarily that of the
playwright, the marginal status of the groups represented in some choruses
provided an opportunity for the articulation of alternative, even
countercultural perspectives. The identity of the chorus was a key element of
any Greek play because discovery of the main actors’ situation and character
often took place in dialogues with the chorus. For tragedies, the chorus might
consist of any of the groups mentioned above. In comedies by Aristophanes,
there are choruses of frogs and birds. Whatever the identity of the chorus, it
remained consistent from beginning to end of any particular play. By contrast,
the chorus in A Woman in Jerusalem is
a metamorphic chorus that changes its identity every time HR crosses its path.
What is a
traditional Greek chorus doing in a contemporary Israeli novel?
you might ask. The primary structural function of the chorus
is to mark the transitions in HR’s journey.
An Israeli Everyman
All too soon HR’s
mission becomes complicated,
its rationale at the
same time more grandiose
and more dubious.
HR is a kind of
Everyman, and we are given sketchy information on his appearance.
If the narrative of A
Woman in Jerusalem at first appears deceptively simple, that is because the
novel is rather abstract. Too grounded particulars, too embedded in a detailed
setting to be an allegory, A Woman in
Jerusalem is not quite a realistic novel either. Launched on a quirky, not
to say quixotic, pilgrimage, HR discovers, as, along the way, he crosses
various boundaries – bureaucratic obstacles, state frontiers, and the
boundaries between private and public, life and death – a growing intimacy with
the woman in his charge. While his particular reaction to what he encounters at
every juncture of his journey may at times be masked, the meaning of each
transition from the collective point of view is articulated for the reader by
the chorus: a chorus that guards each crossing like a sentry.
What is HR’s Mission?
What is HR’s Mission? Though it can be simply stated, as if
it were a plausible undertaking, HR’s Mission accrues a surreal, even
outlandish quality as he progresses towards his goal, inciting scandal and
excitement in several communities, and paradoxically gaining in overarching
significance at the same time. For HR has been deputed to provide for the
burial of a dismissed company employee killed in a terrorist attack.
The plan for HR’s Mission begins modestly. The rationale for
the Mission is plausible at the outset. The original intentions of the company
owner, HR’s boss, perhaps slightly muddled by self-deception, are nevertheless
benignant. Yet all too soon, with the intervention of a journalist and the
consequent awakening of a near-archetypal Israeli guilt complex, the Mission
becomes complicated, its rationale at the same time more grandiose and more
dubious. The emphasis in the company owner’s mind goes from a simple rationale
of doing justice in a matter of labor relations, to making atonement on an
international scale for accidental misfortune, for terrorism, for evil itself.
As HR’s practical difficulties in carrying out his Mission increase, the
rationale for the Mission evolves from plausible to dubiously grandiose to
bordering on lunacy.
If we learn anything
from reading this book, it’s that the Israelis –always under siege – only look
crazy from the outside. Actually they are sane people in a crazy world, doing
their best to manage the craziness.
These Israelis
are, in some sense, crazy. But how crazy? The novel of A.B.Yehoshua is
haunted by its literary predecessor, Dostoyevsky, who exposed the craziness of
the Russian psyche (not distinct from the human soul, to be sure) in the form
of confession and scandal in the Russian novel. Conversations in Dostoevsky’s
novels frequently spill over into confessions, a messy but dramatic way his
characters have of exposing the repressed – secrets and scandals – that must be
integrated into conscious, even public awareness in order for Russian soul and
society to be made whole again. There is some Dostoevskian craziness in
Yehoshua’s A Woman in Jerusalem, but
it is craziness of a different order. In Yehoshua’s novel, too, confession
serves the purpose of integrating the fiercely repressed truth, and with confession
comes a modicum of scandal. But while the confessions of Dostoevsky’s
characters take place in what is essentially a tragic universe, the universe in
which the characters of A Woman in
Jerusalem behave, misbehave, and learn is comic in nature.
The behavior of HR’s colleagues, Israeli bureaucrats, and
other members of society at times verges on lunacy, but the Israelis are not,
for all the extremity of their existential plight, Dostoevskian-crazy. In the
course of the novel, we see HR summoning just enough mindfulness in the tough
situations in which he is placed, and even using gentle humor to get the better
of his boss’s atonement mania.
If in fact if we learn anything from reading this book, it
is that the Israelis, always keeping vigil, always under siege, only look crazy
from the outside. Actually they are sane people in a crazy world, doing their
best to stay alert and manage the craziness. This is very far from being the
author’s message in A Woman in Jerusalem,
but can be inferred from the evolution of HR’s character, based on some of
the situations he faces at home and abroad as he tries to repatriate Yulia’s
remains.
A Man on a
Mission. This would be a simple enough story, if not for the many voices
dramatizing divergent meanings, social contexts, points of view. Chorus and
confession
are the vehicles Yehoshua uses to initiate the reader into
the strange world of
A Woman in Jerusalem, at
once a story of the political realities of Israel’s situation, and a literary
parable of humanitarian relevance.
The Chorus in A Woman in Jerusalem
Chorus and Confession
are the vehicles Yehoshua uses to introduce the strange world of A Woman in Jerusalem.
There are fifteen instances of choral speaking in A Woman in Jerusalem. The chorus in this
contemporary novel, like the chorus in the ancient Greek drama, is an entity of
crucial importance, communicating popular reactions to events, communal
understanding, and sometimes transcendent meaning. In Yehoshua’s novel, the
chorus is deployed as a formal device, marking transitions in the manager’s
journey. The choral presence in the novel is symmetrical. There are three
sections to the novel: Part I. The Manager, Part II, The Mission, and Part III,
The Journey, and the chorus appears five times in each section. How do we know?
We know because signaling the dramatization of
each choral voice, the author uses italics to designate the choral
moment. The roles that the chorus plays in A
Woman in Jerusalem are as follows:
Part I, The Manager
1. The
People of Jerusalem
2. The
Night Shift Workers
3. The
Cafeteria Workers
4. Security
Workers at Mount Scopus Hospital
5. The
Six Sisters: Yulia’s Orthodox Neighbors
Part II, The Mission
6. Employees
at Conference of Social Workers
7. Bartenders
8. The
Six Sisters
9. Citizens
of Yulia’s Country at the Airport
10. Citizens
of Yulia’s Country
Part III, The Journey
11. Aggrieved
People of Yulia’s Country
12. The
Night Watch at Military Installation in Yulia’s Country
13. The
Dream-Bearers
14. Vendors
at the Market
15. Villagers
of Yulia’s Birthplace
In Part I of the book, the chorus first manifests as the
voice of the Jewish citizens of Jerusalem. The chorus recalls how they had
hoped, that year, that Jerusalem’s winter of bountiful rain, which is just
beginning to fall at the start of HR’s story, “might cool the suicidal zeal of
our enemies.” (p. 9) Unlike a theatrical chorus, which has a physical presence
on stage, and exists contemporaneously with the actors, the first chorus of A Woman in Jerusalem is disembodied and
has a different time-sense –– not only from HR – but from the omniscient
narrator, whose all-knowingness is limited to the story as it unfolds in the
present.
The omniscient narrator, who has been telling the story of
HR’s new assignment, is interrupted by this collective voice that at first appears
to be ruminating on the weather. In addition to marking HR’s transition from
quotidian manager to Man on a Company Mission (he has just received the
assignment from the factory owner and been told: “You are the only one who can
do it.” p. 9), this first manifestation of the choral voice immediately
establishes a wider perspective. This is a world of changeable weather, of
chaos and terrorism amidst the routine autumn days HR spends at the office.
Next in Part I, the chorus manifests as the voices of a
bunch of gossipy night shift workers, marking the moment when, arriving on the
bakery floor with his secretary, HR officially begins his investigation. Not
long after, a chorus of tired but curious cafeteria workers notes the body
language of the night shift supervisor as he makes full confession of his
misdeeds to HR. Here the chorus acts a witness to the scandal of the
supervisor’s relationship with Yulia: “we were shocked to see the older man
bury his face in his hands as if hiding something painful or shameful.” (p. 44)
As HR takes his investigation to the brink of the death realm, voices from the
staff hut at Mount Scopus Hospital announce HR’s visit to the morgue. Finally,
a chorus of six sisters, neighbors at the apartment where Yulia lived, announce
HR’s visit to Yulia’s room, marking the beginning of a more intimate
relationship between Yulia and HR.
The chorus of six Orthodox sisters, which appears twice in
the novel, is one of Yehoshua’s most dynamic realizations of the choral
convention. The sisters scream at HR, almost in hysterics. Up past their
bedtime, they are bursting so with curiosity that they naturally transgress –
disobeying their parents’ orders by opening the door to a stranger. The
transgression of the labile chorus mirrors HR’s transgressive behavior in
visiting Yulia’s room. The six sisters constitute a single witness, naively
accepting HR’s cover story [that Yulia has been injured and is in hospital, and
HR has come by to pick up some of her things] and by virtue of their credulity,
casting doubt on the rationale for HR’s visit to Yulia’s room.
Why didn’t Yehoshua
just narrate HR’s encounter with the six sisters in the third person? Why
dramatize the sisters as manifesting through a choral voice?
Considering the dynamic, interactive nature of this
particular chorus raises the question of why Yehoshua didn’t just narrate the
scene of the encounter between HR and the girls, telling it in the third person
voice of the omniscient author. This of course leads to the larger question: why
have these choruses at all? In the case of the six sisters chorus, formally
setting this moment in the story apart, and presenting the sisters as one of
several manifestations of the voice of the collective (or in the case of the
dream-bearers, of the collective unconscious) gives them far more weight and
authority than would a realistic depiction of six screaming little girls in
their nightgowns. To answer the larger question about the use of the chorus in
the book as a whole, when most of the scenes involving the chorus could as
easily have been enacted as part of the third-person narrative, requires
looking at all fifteen instances of the chorus.
It’s possible though to make a few preliminary observations
concerning the utility of the chorus in this modern novel. Formally, the
regular, symmetrical appearance of the chorus allows for variety in the
narrative, comparable to the now frequent use by contemporary novelists of
multiple points of view. Philosophically, the presence of the chorus as an alternative
source of knowledge to that of the omniscient author (the omniscient author as
a construction: not to be confused with A.B. Yehoshua) delimits the realm of
“omniscience” and indicates multiple sources of partial truth, as opposed to
the one true story. In fact in A Woman in
Jerusalem, the omniscient author is quite authoritative (there is no
reason, for example, to think ‘him’ an unreliable narrator), so there is
inherent tension between the presumption of omniscience, or authorial
authority, and the alternative schema involving uncertainty, even skepticism,
arising from the presence of several claimants to at least a partial truth.
Social Workers and Bartenders, Sisters
and Countrywomen
The momentum of Part II of the novel, The Mission, is geared
to a scenic pattern. Among the most vivid scenes are the scene in which HR
shows the owner Yulia’s room (and the ‘hyperactive’ owner investigates by
ogling, sniffing, and rifling through Yulia’s possessions); HR’s visit with his
daughter (in which HR opens up and communicates his confidence in her); and the
scene at the airport, in which HR stands up for Yulia’s fourteen year-old son,
who wants his grandmother to be present at the burial. Punctuating these
heightened moments are the choral voices announcing the stations of HR’s
journey in his mission to fulfill his company’s commitment to honor Yulia.
During HR’s transition from the intimacy of Yulia’s room to
the bureaucracy of Immigration, it is the chorus of social workers who notice
his strong identification with his charge: “He spelled her name and recited her
visa number as if it were his own ID.” (pp. 105-6) Initially repelled by the association of his
name with hers, HR is now mistaken for a relative. Next, the chorus of
bartenders, marking HR’s transition from Immigration to a talk with the office
manager, confirms that he’s a regular.
HR thinks:“This is
turning into a collective mania.”
Reacting to the desire of his office manager and her husband
to pack things for Yulia’s journey, HR thinks: “This is turning into a
collective mania.” (p. 129) Though we appear to be moving into the territory of
a hyperactive, Dostoevskian lunacy, it is worth noting how Yehoshua’s HR uses
humor to assign these antics to the rubric of benign folly: “The old man has
flipped out and is taking everyone with him,” HR muses; then observes, his
perception described in the words of the author: “Even the ever-brighter sun,
dipping westward, as it tinted the Knesset building with a coppery wash, seemed
to be celebrating his mission.” (p. 129)
Here Yehoshua parts
company with Dostoevsky, for Dostoevsky is always about crazy people in crazy
world, whereas Yehoshua is about sane people
in a crazy world.
Indeed, shortly after HR and the office manager banter about
atonement and lunacy, the owner proposes delivering the coffin along with a
gift box: a kind of cornucopia consisting of baked goods, paper supplies, and
bags of assorted crumbs from the factory. (p. 135) Here too, HR banters with
his colleague, joking with the owner about the absurdity of a gift box: “There
could no longer be any doubt. Atonement was turning into lunacy. ‘A
well-intentioned lunacy though,’ the owner said.” The author’s light irony
moves the action away from manic drama to the depiction of people perhaps
driven by obscure impulses, but ultimately equipped to manage the situation.
Here Yehoshua parts company with Dostoevsky. For Dostoevsky is always about
crazy people (and a few sane) in a crazy world, whereas Yehoshua is about sane
people (and a few hyperactives) in a crazy world.
When HR returns to Yulia’s dwelling and encounters the still
very excitable six sisters, the chorus provides additional information about
Yulia’s unusual impact on others. When the family was told that Yulia was
actually dead, “Every one of us six sisters saw our father turn pale and start
to tremble. . . he must have been in love with that foreign woman.” (p. 130)
Such an intimate choral role is appropriate to Jerusalem; once the cortège of
HR, Yulia’s coffin and the reporter reach the airport of their destination, the
chorus turns public, expressing a baffled view of Israel’s travails. When the
coffin arrives at this new point of transition, it’s: “Uh-oh! Another coffin. .
. Could someone please tell us what’s happening over there in the Holy Land?”
(p. 138) Finally as the cortège departs the airport, a chorus of Yulia’s
countrywomen decry the presence of the coffin: “Who died? Where? Where is the
body being taken?” Here, in this generic Eastern European city with its skyline
of spires and domes, the chorus provides an expression of common, recurrent
concerns about things the people don’t understand.
Night Watch and Dream-Bearers: “I am a
human resources manager”
Part III, The Journey,
begins with a chorus of aggrieved people from the provincial capitol of Yulia’s
country. “Tell us, you hard people” they begin, addressing the Israelis, “after
desecrating the Holy Land what right do you have to trample on our feelings?”
Entangled in their grievances is the chorus’s indignation about the fact that
Yulia’s coffin has been left in a courtyard. The chorus – hostile, complaining,
resentful – projects its feelings onto the conflict in the Middle East. The
people don’t understand why this conflict has spilled over into its (presumably
Eastern European) country.
The presence of the unattended coffin, left in a courtyard,
is an insult to “our children”. HR has had to stay at the airport to meet
Yulia’s son. Clearly there is no set protocol for handling this situation: the
death of a compatriot in the sacred city of Jerusalem. Earlier HR expressed
indignation to the Immigration official who informed him that the government
would not send an escort along with the coffin: “Since when can you put a
coffin on an airplane as though it were a suitcase?” (p. 123) In addition to
indignation over the unattended coffin, the chorus feels threatened by the
military trappings of the emissary’s cortège. Yulia’s fellow citizens berate
the emissary (HR) for having come back “in an armored car from some ancient
war”. Above all the chorus is concerned about the uncertainty surrounding the
incident. Where has the coffin come from? Where is it going?
Again, the realism of
this scene raises the question why Yehoshua chooses to dramatize these
sentiments, perhaps typical of foreign countries in the region, through the
collective voice of a chorus rather than by rendering the scene
realistically as part of the third person narrative. One simple answer is that
these ordinary people would likely not have the opportunity to enter into a
dialogue with officialdom. As in the case of the chorus of the six sisters, the
author’s use of the formal convention of the chorus lends resonance and
authority to the feelings of these citizens of an anonymous country.
By dramatizing the
night watch as a collective voice, the author reiterates the theme of the vigil
that is so descriptive of HR, his company, and indeed Israel.
As HR’s journey continues across snow covered Siberian
terrain, he is persuaded to take a detour by his drivers, who want to see a
military installation that has been turned into a national museum and tourist
site. Marking the transition to the museum is a chorus of the night watch at
the military installation. One of the first voices from the chorus that we hear
remarks: “I’ve been serving this country
for over fifty years” (p. 189). This is the voice of experience, commenting on
the changes that have taken place since the end of the Cold War. Members of the
night watch allude to the fact that there is an atomic shelter beneath them.
Does the fact that a military installation has been turned into a museum
indicate that the threat of nuclear destruction is over? The government of
Yulia’s country seems confident about the future, believing perhaps that the peace
that followed the dismantling of the Soviet Union is here to stay.
Nevertheless, they feel that the approach of an armored car carrying a coffin
is a bad omen.
By dramatizing the night watch as a collective voice, the
author reiterates the theme of the vigil that is so prominently descriptive of
HR, his company, and the Israeli bureaucrats in Part I of the novel. Thus at
the insistence of the bakery owner, HR’s investigation of Yulia’s case takes
him into the wee hours of the night. By representing the vigil of the night
watch of this nameless Eastern European country, the author universalizes the
theme.
The third chorus that
HR encounters is the chorus of dream-bearers. This is the most surreal and
symbolic form the chorus takes in Yehoshua’s novel. Who are the
dream-bearers? They are some sort of mystical entity that knows exactly who HR
is and knows of his present plight. They are in one sense healers, in another
sense prognosticators. Thus the dream-bearers mark the transition from the
airport to the first stopping point in the journey by armored car; the
intervention of the dream-bearers brings respite to HR, and ultimately enables
the journey to go forward. For having taken a detour to visit the
military-base-cum-tourist site, with its new educational program: The War That
Never Was, HR is now lies on a thin mattress in the barracks of the military
base/museum.
Fortunately the dream-bearers – perhaps messengers from
another world, perhaps voices from the collective unconscious – know everything
they must know about HR to give him the dreams he needs. These will be a dreams
for an ex-army officer, a divorced father of a teenage girl, a personnel
manager charged with a unique mission: the repatriation of Yulia’s remains to
her native country.
Reminded by his
surroundings of his military service, HR first dreams of the atomic shelter
under the museum, then of nuclear disaster, a Jewish holiday, an empty
classroom, and of Yulia. As HR’s soul begins to mirror Yulia’s, his dreams take
on a mystical quality. Incorporated into his dreams are both the forces of
destruction and the life force; HR dreams of the military base, the mystery of
Yulia’s mesmerizing beauty, and the vitality she conveyed to those whose lives
she touched. Indeed, HR has fallen in love with Yulia.
The metamorphic
dream-image in which HR is both a man and an infant at the breast is a
precursor of the archetype of the Roman Charity (Caritas Romana) that forms the
core of Yehoshua’s most recent novel.
Dreaming the last dream sent by the dream-bearers in a state
akin to lucid dreaming, HR wonders of Yulia’s death: “Is the bomber on his way
to the market? Has the bomb already gone off?” (p. 198) At the same time, HR
dreams of making love to Yulia .In the dream, HR is both a grown man making
love to Yulia and an infant at the breast. The dream echoes certain aspects of
the Caritas Romana or Roman Charity,
a Roman theme with archetypal roots reaching even further back in antiquity.
From an Etruscan medallion depicting a bearded Herakles nursing at Hera’s
breast to the scene in John Steinbeck’s The
Grapes of Wrath in which Rose of Sharon breast-feeds a starving stranger,
the image of the Caritas Romana
figures forth the full circle of life, illustrating the importance of nurture
at the beginning of life and at life’s end.
Indeed, the Caritas Romana is a central theme of
A.B. Yehoshua’s most recent novel, The
Retrospective, here associated with the motif in a 17th century
painting depicting a prisoner in chains being offered the breast by a young
woman. In the recent novel a film director makes reparation to his scriptwriter
for a long-ago betrayal by filming a scene based on the Caritas Romana – a scene that was cancelled when the original film
for which it was conceived was made. The metamorphic dream-image in which HR,
in A Woman in Jerusalem, is both man
and infant at the breast, is more a
precursor of the Caritas Romana than
a full-fledged realization of that archetype, which includes specific
narrative elements common to the 17thcentury paintings
that illustrate the theme.
Choruses four and five of Part III are choruses of women.
The fourth chorus, marking the transition from health to sickness and back
again, consists of a group of vendors – presumably gypsies – whose stalls attracted
HR during his first stopover on the journey. Having just consumed what he takes
to be Tatar stew, HR is pursued by the vendors, who try to tell him to puke it
up, but are prevented by the language barrier. Too late! HR is about to be
wracked by food poisoning and unable to travel for the next two days. More than
anything else, this chorus emphasizes local color and the picaresque nature of
HR’s journey: one adventure follows fast upon the heels of another.
Chorus five consists of an anxious group of women from
Yulia’s natal village. Aware that the coffin is about to arrive, and that
Yulia’s mother still has not returned from her trip to the local monastery, the
women, over-wrought and distraught, are in a quandary about what to do with the
coffin if it arrives before Yulia’s mother does. This is a typical, even
traditional ‘woe-is-me’ chorus. Like the conventional chorus of ancient Greek
tragedy, this collective voice expresses almost an emotional paralysis when it
comes to making a decision. Should the villagers go ahead with the burial?
Should they put the coffin in the cottage of Yulia’s mother (they would have to
break into the house) or in the church (where the odor of decomposition would
disturb their prayers)? And who should speak at the funeral? Yulia left the
village long ago –- no one remembers her as a young woman. In fact the chorus
of villagers, purportedly expressing their inability to act, serves the deeper
purpose of chronicling Yulia’s life from the time she left the village.
The villagers may no longer know Yulia, but they are well
apprised of her trajectory: they know of the husband and the beautiful baby, of
Yulia’s training to be an engineer, of her life in the provincial capitol as
well as in Jerusalem. Moreover, the chorus knows Yulia’s story well enough to
express its disapproval of her treatment by foreigners: “What were we to tell
the delegation that was bringing us an engineer who had died as a cleaning
woman in someone else’s war?” (p. 229)
Significantly, the fifth chorus of Part III marks HR’s
transition from a state of malaise and uncertainty to a condition in which he
completely embraces his role as a human resources manager – precisely because
he has made that role over in his own image. HR is a leader, nothing less, and
he immediately fills the authority vacuum by answering all of the villagers’
concerns and allaying their anxieties. From a bureaucrat who couldn’t even
remember interviewing a beautiful woman to the champion and protector of that
woman’s legacy, HR has undergone a complete transformation. It is with this
renewed understanding of his role that he reassures the peasants: “I am not a
courier who comes and goes. I am a human resources manager whose duty it is to
remain with you until the last clod of earth has fallen on this woman’s grave.
Only then will I return to my city, which exists for me as a bitter reality
alone.” (p. 228) What a stirring speech! Of course, this being a novel by
Yehoshua, HR’s speech is about to be ironically undercut when Yulia’s mother
arrives and makes her feelings about the burial known. Nevertheless, HR’s
commitment and leadership shine forth as aspects of his personal
transformation.
Confession and Confidence in A Woman in Jerusalem
The ghost of
Dostoevsky haunts A.B.Yehoshua’s A Woman in
Jerusalem. In Part I of the novel, a Dostoevsky-style confession
burbles from the lips of the night supervisor, and even the factory owner
displays a Dostoevskian mania in his obsession with atonement. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that Yehoshua
is interested in secular confession as a mode of discovery revealing character.
Secular confession – with its literary antecedents from Rousseau to the Russian
novel, has been used in romance and in realist narratives to validate
characters’ sincerity and authenticity, or to exhibit their psychopathology.
However, it is more of a surprise to learn that in his most recent novel, The Retrospective, Yehoshua, in the
persona of autobiographical character Yair Moses, is also drawn to the Roman
Catholic rite of confession.
In The Retrospective, Israeli
film director Moses accepts an invitation to a retrospective of his early work
in the Spanish pilgrimage city Santiago de Compostela, only to find upon
arriving that the event is in effect being underwritten by the Catholic Church.
Moses’ host, the director of the local film archive, is also a priest. Indeed,
Moses first sees Juan de Viola emerging from a confessional booth. Guided,
along with his actress companion, on a tour of the cathedral by animation
teacher Pilar, Moses notes at the front of the building, “one last
confessional, isolated and closed, apparently in use. Pilar asks the two to
wait silently until the curtain is opened, and after a huge, red-faced man
emerges, wiping away tears, she …pulls from the dark a short priest in a big
robe.” (p. 24)
The secular
confession…depends upon finding an appropriate confessor.
The conversation preceding the emergence of Juan de Viola,
which begins as lighthearted banter with the tour guide about the willingness
of Moses and actress Ruth to undergo confession or not – both are Israelis –
reveals, nevertheless, Moses’ keen interest in what is going on in the confessional
booths lining the walls of the cathedral. Telling Pilar that he won’t rule out
making confession some day, Moses insists that he would first have to put his
house in order, “Separating personal from professional sins, for which I would
need a priest who is also an expert in film.” (p. 22) (He is about to meet
one.) Moses has just one other condition: “But is it possible to take
confession from someone who is neither a Christian nor a believer in God?”
Moses’ secular ideal of confession, modeled after the church’s sacrament,
requires above all that the soul of the sinner be prepared, in effect
sanctified, and that the sinner speak to a confessor who is suitably agnostic.
The secular confession, then, is not just a matter of
unloading intimacies and secrets; it depends upon finding an appropriate
confessor. Minutes later, when asked to expand on his CV, Moses finds himself
spilling the story of his life to the Mayor of Santiago de Compostela, whose
listening demeanor is calm and patient, “like a therapist.” (p. 28) Atypically,
Yehoshua satirizes his protagonist’s readiness to tell all: “Moses decides to
expand a good deal, and looking over the great square of pilgrimage on this
dazzling morning, he unspools his life story, the full director’s cut, outtakes
and all.” (p. 26) Is it the Mayor’s demeanor that unlocks Moses’ disclosures?
In fact, facing successive audiences at Q & A sessions following the
screening of his early films, Moses turns out to be on a roll, and divulges a
great deal about himself both as a professional and private person. Now we are
back on Dostoevskian terrain, an environment where, once confessional mode is
initiated, the impulse to unburden the self drives communication, and
accelerates by its own momentum.
Confession in A Retrospective,
with its procedural rule: prior to confessing, put your house in order and
find the right confessor, is a more orderly, predictable narrative engine than
confession in A Woman in Jerusalem, where
the idiosyncrasies of confession create uncertainty. Accordingly, in Chapter
Five, “Confession,” in A Retrospective, Moses
seeks out the son of a nonagenarian actress, maverick monk Manuel, as his
confessor; and in Chapter Six, “Putting the Old House in Order,” Moses visits
his parents’ home and the apartment he lived in with his ex-wife to put these
houses in order in actuality and metaphysically – in his mind. Moses’
confession to Manuel specifically relates to his “professional sins,” and by
making this confession, he is, if not absolved, better able to proceed with a
plan for making reparation. By contrast, confession in A Woman in Jerusalem is best described as an opportunistic event
partaking of a symbiotic relationship: intended to clear the air, it raises questions
as it answers them, exacerbating trust.
The key confession in
A Woman in Jerusalem, the
supervisor’s confession in Part I of
the novel, becomes a double confession. By looking closely at the way the first
confession plays outs, we discover the reason for the second. For in true
Dostoevskian fashion, the ‘sinner,’ far
from guilelessly spilling his story, is sizing up HR, his confessor, the whole time
he is speaking. The model for self-conscious confession could be Jean-Jacques
Rousseau himself, author of ground-breaking autobiography Les Confessions, or one of several fictional characters in
Dostoevsky’s novels and stories. Take, for example, the character Stavrogin,
whose confession in Dostoevsky’s The
Possessed forms a pivotal moment in the novel. Craving judgment, Stavrogin
orients his confession towards his intended audience. Stavrogin wants “everyone
to look at” him and know him for a criminal, but because he despises everyone –
as seen in his manipulative coarsening of the language of his written
confession – he cannot accept their judgment. Stavrogin’s intended confession
will bring about no catharsis.
The night shift supervisor first tells his story to the
resources manager. In a preamble to his confession, the supervisor, become
enamored of Yulia, explains to HR that although nothing had happened between
them, he had to ask the cleaning woman to leave because he ‘thought about her
all the time.’ (p. 48) The supervisor has accurately intuited the naïve quality
of HR’s empathy; in fact HR is primed to feel identified with the supervisor:
“It was as if this woman ten years older than himself, whom he still couldn’t
remember, was threatening to become a temptation for him, too.” (p. 47) Like
any good storyteller, the supervisor forestalls against interruption by asking
the indulgence of the kitchen workers until his story is complete.
A credulous listener,
HR has been set up to be a validating confessor. The supervisor begins his
tale, again asserting that it was “purely an emotional matter” and proceeding
to exculpate himself in oddly self-serving ways. Describing his avowedly
blameless conduct in what would appear to be conscientious detail, the
supervisor elaborates on the nature of his infatuation: Yulia’s mere proximity
had “seemed to promise something he had always known about but never dreamed of
for himself.” (p. 48) Like many a literary confession preceding this one, the
supervisor’s garrulous tell-all is driven by what critic George Steiner
calls “hysterical candor.” (Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, p. 164)
This confessional offering of too much information ––
including a disquisition on the effect of Yulia’s eyes (Tatar or Mongol?) and
smile – takes a strange turn when the supervisor sets about describing how his
workers, out of respect for his feelings, and hoping the fulfillment of his
love for Yulia would ‘soften his rough edges,’ began to collude in, and give
permission to, his feelings. After more such verbiage, and without reference to
any feeing of sorrow at Yulia’s death, the supervisor, appealing to HR as
fellow man, fellow romantic, and fellow countryman, concludes with this dubious
peroration: “Aware of how he, a man on the verge of retirement, was being
encouraged to live out an impossible dream, one that was given greater
legitimacy only by the desperate times the country was going through, he’d
decided to dismiss the woman…” (p. 56)
Just hours later, ignorant of the fact that his boss has
already heard the night shift supervisor’s confession first hand, HR will recap
the confession in a state of emotional identification with the supervisor: “He
told it like a detective story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end…When at
last he reached the heart of the matter, he defended the supervisor as though
pleading for his own self.” (p. 95)
Right after the supervisor told his story of love
relinquished, there was a sequel in the cafeteria parking lot. Following HR out
to his car, the supervisor appealed to him as to his only judge, and begged him
to guard his story from the secretary, who earlier had tried, ferret-like, to
dig it out of him. HR had reassured the supervisor that “Your story stays with
me.” (p. 57)
HR’s boss, infected by
the garrulous night supervisor, now launches into his own confession.
HR then arrives at his boss’s house only to discover, after
relating his findings to his superior, that the supervisor has already called
the boss and repeated his confession over the phone. The factory owner tells
HR: “He couldn’t get over his talk with you. He felt the need to confess to me,
too.” (p. 193) There ensues a dialogue about which of the two confessors, HR or
his boss, made the better judge. HR’s boss claims that HR was “too fair.”
Insisting that he is “the last one to be taken in by [the supervisor’s]
sentimentality,” HR’s boss, now infected by the supervisor’s garrulousness,
launches into his own confession. HR’s boss offers a story full of
contradictions concerning his decision to put the supervisor on the night shift
to quash the “scandals” he caused “even after he was married” – saying of the
night shift: “It’s quieter there and the workers have no time for escapades.”
(pp. 94-95) Thus does one confession beget another.
The supervisor’s confession plays an important role in the
novel, showing HR at the start of his assignment as a man eager to please his
boss, credulous, and more identified with the supervisor who dismissed the
cleaning woman than with the employee who has become his responsibility. HR has
been chosen to investigate the matter – HR, a man so officious, so depressed by
his divorce that, although he once interviewed Yulia – a woman by all accounts
possessing extraordinary beauty – he cannot remember ever having met her.
Confession, promulgating the language of self-deception, paradoxically creates
an atmosphere of mistrust. Expected to clear the air, these intensely dramatic
scenes of secular confession fail to bring about catharsis or resolution.
The supervisor’s confession is also pivotal in motivating
the action of the novel, and in clarifying the company’s responsibility towards
Yulia. In his confession, the owner
reveals the supervisor to have been a habitual offender who preyed on female
employees; the supervisor’s confession, staged in the cafeteria for HR’s
benefit, turns out to have been a partial truth at best.
In place of a
confession, Part II, The Mission, features
a confidence – HR’s unusually frank and intimate talk with his daughter. Allotted a precious three quarters of an hour
by his ex-wife in which to say good-bye to the teenage girl, HR makes a full
disclosure of the story behind his mission. These moments of confidence are, in
effect, an anti-confession. Rather than a confessor who elicits secrets, HR’s
daughter is a catalyst of the storytelling that bonds the two. Rather than
revealing some shocking truth in a process akin to a tragic agon, HR honestly
and forthrightly reveals life as it is to a teenage girl who is ready to learn
about life, death, and the strange ways of love: “…she asked about the cleaning
woman. He was frank – he described the article that was due to appear the next
day and the supervisor’s strange falling in love. Eyes wide with fear, she
smiled in spite of herself at his account of his night in the morgue and his
refusal to look at the dead woman, even though her beauty was considered
special by all who saw her picture.” (p. 127)
A confidence is a
dialogue, an exchange of two voices, a give and take.
Confession, born, on the one hand, of the need to be judged,
and on the other, of the attempt to elicit truth under duress, yields ambiguous
results in A Woman in Jerusalem.
Confidences, by contrast, bring about an opening up to others, and an
experience of true intimacy. Confessions are fundamentally monologues; though
they may contain internal dialogues,
they are the product of one dominant, egocentric voice, in conversation with
itself. Confidences are dialogues, the exchange of two voices, a give and take:
“They talked on and on. Groping his way, he sought to assure her that he would
never give up on her and that she should never despair of him. The reborn sun
outside the window was sharpening its palette of colors as the day grew
brighter. His daughter’s simple and honest questions and his candid replies had
forged a new closeness between them.” (p. 127)
The City that Belongs to A Woman in Jerusalem
What is the
existential meaning of Yulia’s life?
I stated in my introductory remarks that HR ultimately
assumes responsibility for the existential meaning of Yulia’s life. What is the
word ‘existential’ doing here? What does it add to the already sufficient
phrase: ‘the meaning of life’? In one sense, ‘existential’ refers to the
existence of Israel, and by extension of Jerusalem, of which Yulia – her life
since coming to Jerusalem, her death in a terrorist bombing – becomes a part.
Although in terms of its archetypal significance as homeland and promised land,
Israel is almost a timeless “City on a Hill,” the political uncertainties
surrounding Israel’s existence, the nation’s existential situation in the 21st
century, pulls against the claim of timelessness. Israel’s existential position
is described by Israeli author David Grossman in his novel To the End of the Land:
A few days later he asked her to show him the
countries that were “against us.” She opened the atlas again and pointed to
each country, each one after the other. “Wait, but where are we?” A glimmer of
hope shone in his eyes: Maybe they weren’t on that page. She pointed with her
pinky finger at Israel. A strange whimper escaped his lips, and he suddenly
clung to her as hard as he could, fought and plowed his way into her with his
whole body, as though trying to be swallowed up in it again…And then Ofer demanded
numbers. When he heard there were four and a half million people in Israel, he
was impressed, even reassured... “He was always a terribly logical child,” {his mother says:}”He
wouldn’t stop until Ilan found out for him exactly the number of citizens of
each Muslim country in the world…What do you do with a child like that?” (p.
374)
Jerusalem, symbolic center of three world religions, has a
worldwide spiritual significance. The Hebrews of antiquity, subject to forced
migration, were exhorted above all to remember Jerusalem: “If I forget thee, O
Jerusalem, / Let my right hand forget her
cunning. . . Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, /
If I prefer not Jerusalem above my my chief joy.” (Psalm 137)
Yulia is A Woman in Jerusalem, not ‘A Woman in
Israel’. Jerusalem was the home she chose, the city she decided to
immigrate to and stay in, despite the fact that she would work there, not as a
trained engineer, but as a cleaning woman. Yulia chose Jerusalem twice: once at
the time of her initial immigration, and once again when her Jewish boyfriend
left, and Yulia decided to remain. Yulia is not Jewish. Moreover, a great deal
is made of her foreignness, of the beauty and exoticism of her slanted eyes.
Citizen of an unnamed Eastern European country, Yulia is supposed by all who
knew her, or viewed her picture, to have Tatar blood. A marginal person in
Israeli society, it was considered highly unusual, even magnanimous, that her
former employer would acknowledge her humanity by taking the trouble of repatriating
her remains to the country of her birth. Where, indeed, does Yulia – does the
memory of Yulia – belong?
HR’s journey is structured like the parable that underlies
Maurice Maeterlink’s 1908 play, The
Bluebird: following a long, arduous quest, the desideratum, in this case
the bluebird of happiness, is discovered close to home. In the case of HR, the
personal transformation that occurs during the long journey to Yulia’s native
village gives him the confidence to make a unilateral decision to carry out the
unexpected wishes of Yulia’s mother: “she threw herself heartrendingly at his
feet, pleading that her daughter be returned to the city that had taken her
life. That way, she, too, the victim’s mother, would have a right to it.” (p.
230)
What is the existential meaning of Yulia’s life? Yulia’s
mother, a devout Christian who has just spent a week praying at a monastery
when Yulia’s coffin turns up at the village, seems to understand this best of
all when she insists that the coffin be returned to Jerusalem, since Jerusalem
is now Yulia’s city. “An engineer like that doesn’t come to Jerusalem just for
work,” HR thinks, “She comes because she feels the shabby city is hers, too.”
(p. 233) On paper a marginal person, somehow this woman with the startling eyes
brought love and beauty into the lives of those who knew her, and this was so
even after her death. She is the only person in the novel with a name: in this
way the author reverses the usual anonymity that would be conferred upon such a
person by hierarchy and bureaucracy, by death. The meaning of her life is
existential, confirming the meaning of Jerusalem as a city of the world, and
conferring meaning on the lives of the people of Jerusalem whose existence she
magically touches.
Steiner, George. Tolstoy
or Dostoevsky, E.P. Dutton & Company, 1971, 354 pages.
Yehoshua, A.B. The Retrospective, Halban, 2013, 379 pages.
Translated by Stuart
Schoffman
Yehoshua, A. B. A Woman
in Jerusalem, Harcourt, Inc., 2004, 237 pages.
Translated
by Hillel Halkin
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