The People of the Book and the Camera: Photography in the Hebrew Novel

By Ofra Amihay

Amihay offers a pioneering study of the unique nexus between literature and photography in the works of Hebrew authors. Exploring the use of photography—both as a textual element and through the inclusion of actual images— Amihay shows how the presence of visual elements in a textual work of fiction has a powerful subversive function. Contemporary Hebrew authors have turned to photography as a tool to disrupt narratives and give voice to marginalized sectors in Israel, including women, immigrants, Mizrahi Israelis, LGBTQ+ individuals, second-generation Holocaust survivors, and traumatized army veterans.

Amihay discusses standard novels alongside graphic novels, challenging the dominance of the written word in literature. In addition to providing a poetic analysis of imagetext pages, Amihay addresses the social and political issues authors are responding to, including gender roles, Zionism, the ethnic divide in Israel, and its Palestinian minority. In exploring these avant-garde novels and their authors, Amihay elevates their significance and calls for a more expansive definition of canonical Hebrew literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Jun 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9780815655329

Book preview

Select Titles in Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art

Diary of a Lonely Girl, or The Battle against Free Love

Miriam Karpilove; Jessica Kirzane, trans.

From a Distant Relation

Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky; James Adam Redfield, ed. and trans.

Petty Business

Yirmi Pinkus; Evan Fallenberg and Yardenne Greenspan, trans.

Jewish Identity in American Art: A Golden Age since the 1970s

Matthew Baigell

The Odyssey of an Apple Thief

Moishe Rozenbaumas; Isabelle Rozenbaumas, ed.; Jonathan Layton, trans.

Paul Celan: The Romanian Dimension

Petre Solomon; Emanuela Tegla, trans.

Red Shoes for Rachel: Three Novellas

Boris Sandler; Barnett Zumoff, trans.

The Rivals and Other Stories

Jonah Rosenfeld; Rachel Mines, trans.

For a full list of titles in this series, visit https://press.syr.edu/supressbook-series/judaic-traditions-in-literature-music-and-art/.

Copyright © 2022 by Syracuse University Press

Syracuse, New York 13244-5290

All Rights Reserved

First Edition 2022

222324252627654321

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit https://press.syr.edu.

ISBN: 978-0-8156-3745-5 (hardcover)

978-0-8156-3731-8 (paperback)

978-0-8156-5532-9 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Amihay, Ofra, author.

Title: The people of the book and the camera : photography in the Hebrew novel / Ofra Amihay.

Description: First edition. | Syracuse, New York : Syracuse University Press, 2022. | Series: Judaic traditions in literature, music, and art | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: ’The People of the Book and the Camera’ is a study of avant-garde novels which include photographs in their pages, this book suggests that the combination of visual and verbal narration in Israeli novels allows minor voices to emerge, representing new perspectives in Israeli culture—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021045439 (print) | LCCN 2021045440 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815637455 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780815637318 (paperback) | ISBN 9780815655329 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Literature and photography. | Hebrew literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. | Israeli literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Graphic novels—Israel—History. | LCGFT: Literary criticism.

Classification: LCC PJ5012.P48 A45 2021 (print) | LCC PJ5012.P48 (ebook) | DDC 892.43/70995694—dc23/eng/20220111

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021045439

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021045440

Manufactured in the United States of America

To Aryeh

גַּ֤ם כִּֽי־אֵלֵ֨ךְ בְּגֵ֪יא צַלְמָ֡וֶת לֹא־אִ֮ירָ֤א רָ֗ע כִּי־אַתָּ֥ה עִמָּדִ֑י

Contents

Note on Hebrew in this Book

Introduction

1.Family Snapshots and Hybrid Identities: Photography and Postcolonial Discourse in Ronit Matalon’s The One Facing Us

2.Negatives and Counternarratives: Photography and Feminist Discourse in Yoel Hoffmann’s How Do You Do, Dolores

3.Travelogues and Spiritual Quests: Place Photos in Michal Govrin’s Snapshots and Ruth Almog’s A Stranger in Paradise

4.Posttrauma, Postmemory, and Poster Images: Iconic Photos and Drawn Snapshots in Ari Folman’s and David Polonsky’s Graphic Novel Waltz with Bashir

5.Pink Story with a Blue and White Background: Screenshots, Drawn Photos, and LGBTQ Identity in Ilana Zeffren’s Pink Story

Conclusion: Hebrew Literature and Photography, Past and Future

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Note on Hebrew in this Book

In order to facilitate discussion, I avoided inclusion of Hebrew quotes in my text and did not include transliterations of Hebrew titles in Romanized form. The exceptions are primary works I discuss, the Hebrew titles (in Romanized form) of which I include at first mention and then proceed to refer to them by their translated title or an abbreviated form of it.

I chose not to follow a transliteration system that will reflect Hebrew as it is written. Instead, I use an intuitive style that should enable a general readership to read Hebrew terms with a fair degree of certainty while allowing readers of Hebrew to identify the words at hand. Most notably, I do not distinguish between the guttural het and the soft kaf but represent them both as kh, thus reflecting the common pronunciation of most Hebrew speakers today, myself included (however regrettable the process of the weakening of the gutturals may be). Non-Hebrew speakers should think of this as the ch in lechayim. For the same reason, the shva is represented as a vowel only when it is commonly pronounced as such but not if it is elided, even when it is a shva na (for example, dvarim). I also do not double consonants to represent the dagesh (for example, sipur). In cases where the word has a common spelling in English that departs from my style, I retain its standard form (for example, Mizrahi or sukkah).

In the notes and the bibliography, Hebrew titles are indicated as such (that is, in Hebrew) but are cited by an English title alone, either as provided by the publisher or of my own translation. This will provide readers who do not know Hebrew an idea of the contents of the title. A list of all publications in the original Hebrew is provided at the end of the bibliography for the benefit of those who wish to consult them further.

Finally, all quotes from Hebrew texts are my own translations and page numbers at the end of translated quotes indicate the pages in the original Hebrew publication. When available, published English editions are mentioned at the opening of each discussion.

Introduction

Photography and literature have been in dialogue since the invention of photography. Early photographers were intrigued by the notion of photography as a unique writing tool, or the pencil of nature as William Henry Fox Talbot titled his 1846 collection of early photographs, generally considered the first photographic book.¹ Authors were equally intrigued by photography’s potential as a literary motif, and Hebrew authors were no exception in this respect.² This is especially remarkable in light of the specific circumstances of the development of modern Hebrew literature, in tandem with the revival of the Hebrew language and in the wake of the photographic age. Nevertheless, while studies of relations between photography and literature are abundant, this trajectory has been understudied among scholars of Hebrew literature.³ Inspired by the few exceptions, like Gabriel Zoran’s article on the entry of the theme of photography into Hebrew novels, this book offers a study of the unique meeting point between Hebrew literature and photography.⁴ It focuses on the works of Hebrew novelists who reproduce actual photographs in their texts and employ them as crucial narratological tools.

Following W. J. T. Mitchell, I refer to this aesthetic and poetic choice as the imagetext mode, which I argue is a potentially subversive mode of creativity, especially when it involves a conjunction of photographs and novels. Drawing on major theoretical approaches to photography’s complex relation with reality and memory, every chapter in this book offers a careful reading of the works at hand and is comprised of both textual and visual analyses that explore the distinctive poetic and political function of photography in each. I show that by innovatively engaging with photos of particular genres, these authors achieve literary accomplishments that are outstanding both within Hebrew literature and on the global literary stage.

The Imagetext Mode

The term imagetext was coined by Mitchell in order to substitute the binary theory of the relation between images and words with a dialectical picture.⁵ My perception of imagetext as a subversive artistic mode is further inspired by Jacques Rancière’s perception of the egalitarian intertwining of images and signs on pictorial or typographic surfaces as a political act, overturning an entire well-ordered distribution of sensory experience.⁶ As an artistic mode, imagetext defies the hegemonic status of any form of expression—words within literature or images in visual art. The very presence of a second form of expression offers a symbolic subversion of the established order of the visual/verbal divide.⁷

Undoubtedly, as both Mitchell and Rancière emphasize, the amalgamation of text and image throughout history has been a fundamental impulse . . . not confined to any particular genre or period.⁸ Indeed, from ancient illuminated manuscripts to modern picturebooks and advertisements, the urge to combine words and images has been a fairly consistent one, not always producing subversive content necessarily. Yet following Rancière’s idea regarding this mode’s interruptive political potential, I posit that the imagetext mode lends itself as a powerful tool in the hands of artists, and especially authors, looking to expose and interrupt various hegemonic narratives in their work. While this could be true even when words and images join arms in expressing analogous ideas, the following chapters demonstrate that a conflicting relation further accentuates the subversion inherent in that precise fusion.

My analysis of such complex image/text convergences follows what Mitchell dubs image X text. In this further development of his imagetext theory, Mitchell expresses a multilayered interaction between images and words by treating the X as a Joycean verbo-voco-visual pun that condenses these many meanings and inscriptions.⁹ I argue that within literary works of fiction and graphic memoirs, photography as a visual form can symbolically underscore the subversive power at the heart of the imagetext mode.

The novels discussed in the first three chapters are among the most groundbreaking examples of this writing mode, which flourished at the turn of the twenty-first century. Indeed, earlier ventures existed, with Georges Rodenbach’s 1892 Bruges-la-Morte (Bruges the Dead) and André Breton’s 1928 Nadja reckoned among the most celebrated examples of the earliest novels to present an intricate combination of narrative and photographs.¹⁰ While remaining unique examples for decades to come, these nevertheless marked the genesis of what would become in the twenty-first century an influx of egalitarian employment of photographs within western novels. To borrow the title of one such work by French author Annie Ernaux, Rodenbach and Breton’s unique novels signaled the very commencement of the novelistic imagetext use of the photo (L’usage de la photo).¹¹ Today Ernaux represents a constantly growing group of novelists, including Javier Marías, Monika Maron, Jonathan Safran Foer, Patrick Modiano, Aleksandar Hemon, and Umberto Eco, to name a few, who chose to split the focalizing authority in their novels between text and photographs.¹² But the name that shines most clearly as the stalwart author of this modus operandi is that of German author W. G. Sebald.

The extent of scholarly attention Sebald’s work attracted and continues to attract is unparalleled and some of it serves as inspiration to my own project. Silke Horstkotte’s definition of Sebald’s reader as a reader who is also a spectator and the association she offers between this and Sebald’s choice to insert photographs into the body of the text, are at the basis of my approach to this study.¹³ Equally fundamental to my project are discussions of Sebald’s dual approach to photography as simultaneously validating and undermining the text. For example, J. J. Long describes Sebald as keen to stress the authentication function of photographs while using them to create uncertainty in the reader as to the authenticity of the text.¹⁴ Timothy Adams further argues that Sebald is the founding father of the postmodern novelistic engagement with photography as the reverse of representation.¹⁵

Sebald published only four novels before his tragic death in 2001, but these novels constructed the first significant body of work of photographic imagetext novels that influenced and opened the way for the many others to come.¹⁶ That some of the Hebrew authors discussed in my book were concurrently publishing imagetext novels in the same period as Sebald, at a time when so few did, renders their work important in shaping this literary mode worldwide in addition to introducing it into Hebrew literature.

Theoretical Background and Chapter Outlines

Above all the many reasons that made it an exciting invention, photography has been celebrated mainly for two promises it held: a democratic access to representation and an undeniable relation to the real. Susan Sontag offered one of the most astute formulations of the democratic facet in her pioneering work, On Photography. She argues that the revolutionary effect of the portable camera merely carried out the promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.¹⁷ The novel was equally celebrated as a democratic genre, of course, causing the intersection of the two to be particularly eminent.¹⁸

Before discussing the theories that informed Sontag’s formulation of this specific aspect of photography, it is noteworthy that Sontag’s thoughts on photography were developed while shooting a film in post–Yom Kippur War–Israel. At the outset of this book, which deals with the intersection of Israeli culture and photography, the influence of the making of Sontag’s 1973 documentary film Promised Lands on her theory of photography is of utmost significance. As Ohad Landesman argues, the horrific images Sontag captured in Israel now seem closely tied to her developing understanding of photography. While On Photography was written during the time of the making of the film and published a mere four years after, its influence on Sontag’s work is evident in her future work on photography as well. "Promised Lands, writes Landesman, is a film that should also be reevaluated in light of Sontag’s late writings, especially Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), written thirty years after her visit to Israel."¹⁹ The importance of Sontag’s visit to Israel supplements the relevance of both of Sontag’s books to my study with a sense of reintroducing these theoretical works to their proverbial place of birth.

Sontag’s description of photography’s promise to democratize all experiences echoes Walter Benjamin’s earlier analysis of Dominique François Arago’s speech at the unveiling event of photography, after France nationalized Louis Daguerre’s invention in 1839. In this analysis, Benjamin, one of the earliest champions of photography theory, identifies the beauty of that speech in how it pointed out photography’s application to all aspects of human activity.²⁰ Ariella Azoulay further developed this idea by drawing a link between how France presented the world with The Declaration of Rights of Man in 1789 to the way it bequeathed photography to all humanity fifty years later. A reading of the rhetorical gestures of the first proponents of photography, Azoulay writes, demonstrates that they conceived of themselves as emissaries entrusted with the mission of bringing photography to all of humanity, as a gift of universal value.²¹

Roland Barthes was the one to articulate photography’s connection to the real most emphatically as the essential feature of the medium. In photography, Barthes famously wrote,

I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past. And since this constraint exists only for photography, we must consider it, by reduction, as the very essence, the noeme of photography. . . . The name of photography’s noeme will therefore be: That-has-been (Ça a été).²²

Indeed, the ability of photography to deliver on these two promises has been challenged repeatedly, almost since its inception. Yet in the same way that complex operation and, later, pricy materials did not nullify the wide access the camera offered to representation, even the most advanced manipulation techniques did not deprive photography of its symbolic connection to the real. Following these theorists, I argue here that it is precisely these defining tropes that lend photographs a subversive potential in literature by questioning the boundaries between reality and fiction while challenging the limits of expression. More specifically, the very presence of photographs in novels using written words to portray a fictional narrative, and in graphic novels using words and drawings to depict a biographical one, interrupt an order of representation. Yet what this book further establishes is that such a disruption is most complete when authors also allow the words to challenge the photographic images in turn.

They do so first and foremost by relying not only on photography’s inborn democratic sentiment and connection to the real but also on the limitations and possibilities of photographic representation as formulated by these very same thinkers.

While highlighting the democratic nature of photographs, it was Sontag who also pointed to their limitation as independent representations. Photographs, she suggests, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.²³ Since the camera’s rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses, Sontag maintains that the assumption that one knows something about the world by accepting it as recorded in a photograph is actually the opposite of understanding. Understanding, Sontag argues, "starts from not accepting the world as it looks.²⁴ On the one hand, Sontag’s call to resist the temptation of accepting photographs at face value evokes the dependency of photographs on some kind of narration. At the same time, it is a call to delve beyond the surface of the photograph in order to discover its hidden layers through interpretation or deduction, speculation, and fantasy."

This call echoes an earlier perception of photography Benjamin offered in his pioneering essay Kleine Geschichte der Photographie (A Small History of Photography), where he describes photography as an inherently triggering medium. In every photograph, Benjamin posits, something remains that does not testify merely to the art of the photographer . . . the viewer feels an irresistible compulsion to seek the tiny spark of accident, the here and now. He defines these details as the optical unconscious (Optisch-Unbewußten) of the photograph that is unconstrained by the intentions of photographers. This is a result of the camera’s capacity to capture a specific moment pregnant with layers of information that elicit the interpretation of viewers.²⁵

This idea was further developed by Barthes in his discussion of two aspects necessary for the analysis of any photograph: studium and punctum, or the cultural and historical context of a photograph as opposed to specific coincidental details that engage the viewer on a more personal level. "A photograph’s punctum, writes Barthes, is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)."²⁶ In that sense, photography’s undeniable association with the real does not subscribe it to a single version of reality, given the ability of the camera to capture everything in front of it and the independent reaction of viewers to these coincidental details.

Following Benjamin, Sontag, and Barthes, Giorgio Agamben suggests that this unique faculty of the camera also charges photographs with the power to turn any specific person, moment, or gesture into every person, moment, or gesture. The true fascination of photography, Agamben argues, is its aptitude to represent the world as it appears on the last day.²⁷ As an emblematic example, he uses one of the first photographs ever taken, Daguerre’s 1838 Boulevard du Temple, also considered the first photograph to ever capture an image of a person.²⁸ Regarding this photograph, where the only person seen on a Parisian street is a man who stopped for a shoe-shine (consequently standing still long enough for Daguerre’s camera to capture him), Agamben writes:

I could never have invented a more adequate image of the Last Judgment. The crowd of humans—indeed, all of humanity—is present but it cannot be seen, because the judgment concerns a single person. . . . In the supreme instant, man, each man, is given over forever to his smallest, most everyday gesture. And yet, thanks to the photographic lens, that gesture is now charged with the weight of an entire life.²⁹

In other words, the End of Days according to Agamben is the everyday uniquely frozen and captured by the camera. Benjamin’s claim regarding the optical unconsciousness reverberates in Agamben’s marvel that he could not have invented such an image himself: the camera captures an idea that is discovered only through the still photograph. This process of freezing and fixating takes the moment out of the specific and the banal and grants it a metonymic quality. The shoe-shining gesture becomes an entire life and the man having his shoes shined in the street becomes every man. This occurs not allegorically but synecdochally, not because he symbolizes humanity but because his halted gesture becomes an annunciation of all human gestures. This is especially important when discussing the meeting points between photography and the novel, since it is a genre that aspires to accomplish the same goal precisely. As Rancière puts it, a figure in a novel is no longer the illustrative ornament of discourse or the allegory of a hidden truth, but a body announcing another body.³⁰

These theoretical perceptions of photography’s dual essence as simultaneously limited and polygonal, dependent on external narration yet intrinsically rich with layers of meaning, specific and metonymic, is in the background of every work examined in this book, whether directly or tacitly.

The most explicit engagement with this duality is found in Ronit Matalon’s novel, zeh im hapanim eleynu (The One Facing Us), a tour de force of literary engagement with photography both as a recurring presence and as a central theme.³¹ I address this novel in the first chapter and show that in her poetic negotiation of family snapshots Matalon prompts what Mieke Bal calls a counterreading.³² This reading, which resists the surface of family photographs by uncovering their optical unconscious through specific puncta, creates a powerful confrontation between the novel as a genre and photography as a medium.

As captured most famously in Anna Karenina’s opening lines, the dedication of novels to the quotidian and to social critique often meant an uncompromising exposure of the fragility of the family unit.³³ Conversely, Sontag suggests, photography sought to restate symbolically the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life.³⁴ Marianne Hirsch further notes that even when photography became widely available, and the content of the family portrait shifted from posed aristocratic studio photographs to everyday home snapshots, the convention of familial representation was not radically refocused.³⁵

By juxtaposing these two genres through the imagetext mode, Matalon’s text goes beyond what Hirsch defines as the conventional and opaque surfaces of family photos, exposing the complicated stories of familial relation . . . that have, for the most part, remained outside the family album.³⁶ I show that Matalon further achieves this in her choice of posed photographs alongside photos that are often deemed unsuccessful or damaged due to shadows or technical defects, relying on Svetlana Boym’s discussion of photography’s potential as broken-tech.³⁷

At the same time, The One Facing Us reflects another term coined by Bal when Matalon integrates photographs as migratory aesthetics in her construction of a postcolonial narrative that challenges major binaries in Israeli discourse.³⁸ Matalon exercises writing as an act of immigration and frames photographs as both an alternative language and as portable roots or what I call photographic roots. I borrow this term from Margaret Olin’s analysis of the collective function of James Van Der Zee’s Harlem funeral portraits, but my interpretation of it in the context of Matalon’s novel is also inspired by Hélène Cixous’s discussion of photographs as personal strange roots.³⁹ I argue that by charging the photographs with the double function of an alternative language and portable roots, Matalon challenges the here/there and self/Other Zionist binary discourse and substitutes it with the alternative of a hybrid identity. Matalon specifically addresses the marginalization of Mizrahi identity and Arabic language in Israeli culture by allowing Arabic (and other languages) to interrupt the Hebrew, in the same way that the photographs challenge the words. At the same time she also uses the text to expose hidden layers in the photographs, thus unveiling their inherent negative, albeit without using this terminology.

The second chapter is dedicated to Yoel Hoffmann, who brings the photographic negative to the fore in his novel mah shlomekh dolores (How Do You Do, Dolores).⁴⁰ I suggest he does so precisely through a direct terminological reference to the negative and by operating photographs as negatives of the text. In a manner characteristic of Hoffmann, the narrative is immanently charged with inversions, leading me to suggest that he presents the photographic negative as an organizing principle of the novel and, hence, as a way to read the novel as a key to his entire oeuvre.

Theoretically, my analysis relies first and foremost on Régis Durand’s delineation of the negative as a unique form of representation which offers a vision . . . in reversed values ("vision . . . en valeurs inversées), simultaneously capturing an object and its inversion. Thus, Durand suggests, it contributes to the creation of a true photographic fantastic (le fantastique photographique), and an absolutely original photographic material, which has no equivalent in any other field."⁴¹ This description of the photographic negative is highly useful in capturing not just the function of photographs in Dolores but the unique grammar of Hoffmann’s work as a whole, which indeed presents an absolutely original body of literary work.

My employment of this photographic mechanism in a literary analysis of a novel follows two previous similar projects: Bal’s visual reading of Proust and Laurence Petit’s examination of Penelope Lively’s novel The Photograph.⁴² Bal incisively evokes photography, and specifically the snapshot, or the rapidly taken image, as the best metaphor for Proust’s writing and the most revealing . . . mechanism by which to understand Proust’s poetics.⁴³ Petit employs Durand’s perception of the negative as vision in inverted terms in reading Lively’s narrative as an inverted photo development or a textual reconstruction of a negative.⁴⁴

My reading of Hoffmann through the negative mechanism also hinges on earlier metaphoric and literary uses of this photographic term, especially by literary scholar Maurice Blanchot. In 1955 Blanchot introduced the photographic negative into literary analysis in his book The Space of Literature (L’espace littéraire), where he applies the term to works by Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke.⁴⁵ The image has two possibilities, Blanchot writes, there are two versions of the imaginary. And this duplicity comes from the initial double meaning which the power of the negative brings with it.⁴⁶ Eduardo Cadava further clarifies that Blanchot specifically focuses on the double existence of an image as a being and a being-towards-death.⁴⁷ Thus, according to Blanchot, the innate uncertainty and duality is a power that the photographic negative can carry into literature. A more recent project correlating with my engagement with the negative as a literary mechanism is Susan E. Cook’s analysis of Victorian literature and its relation to the mechanism of the negative. In her analysis of works by authors such as Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde, Cook emphasizes the centrality of early photographic forms to Victorian literary culture and especially the negative, a process the central features of which are multiplication and distortion.⁴⁸

With this