“My literature artwork is based on classical shapes… Pornografia is based on the good old Polish countryside story, Cosmos is a kind of detective novel, my theater is a parody of Shakespeare and my last play is a kind of operetta. I use classical shapes because they are perfect and the reader has become accustomed to them, but do remember – it’s important – that the shape, in my case, is but a parody upon shape. I use it but put myself outside of it, I’m looking for a connection between readable literary types and new, fresh world experiences.” 

This idea of basing a novel upon shape is one important lesson that I have learnt from Pornografia. The other great aspect is the alter-ego of the author who narrows the distance between the writer and the character – a character who tries to direct the events in the book and in turn makes the book more interesting.

The following article will be on another borrower of sorts – Israel Rabon.

Venerable elder! Let us learn of you.

Read us a lesson, a plain lesson how

Experience has worn of made you anew

That on this humble kitchen wall hang now,

O dew that condensed of the breath of the Word

On the mirror of the syllable of the word

                From, ‘The man seeking experience enquires his way of a drop of water’

What can be said about Hughes that has not already been said? He was born in 1930 in a small village in Yorkshire, perhaps the last place that would fit a poet, a gloomy village of a bruised population. When he received The White Goddess of Robert Graves, who called to return to the worship of the ancient muse, with dread and love his interest in mysticism grew and during his army service, (an experience that shaped many writers and artists), he was given a chance to dig deep into Shakespeare. I said earlier that he and Amichai possessed very different qualities. Admiring nature and giving life a metaphysical dimension belong in part to the Hebrew poetry of the first three decades of the 20^th century but also from digging in something that might seem old. By taking on animal personas, by taking on the masks of the shaman and the trickster, Hughes connected in a new way to ancient ideas and brought new meanings to the old nature poetry, making it green poetry. My private definition for this week is not just about writing about the elderly, but a portrait of the artist as an old man. The selection of poems that I’m holding in my hand doesn’t have many poems with ars-poetic dimension but I would love to refer to two poems that sort of fit this week’s category. In ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’ we read the lines:

 “Moon!” you cry suddenly, “Moon! Moon!”

The moon had stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work

That points at him amazed.

This ability to twist reality to look it over is a wonderful thing when it’s being used properly, and we can see something like this in his poem ‘Theology’.

The other poem I would like to refer you to is ‘Cadenza’, who talks about a violinist who causes an explosion at an orchestra. In it we can read the lines:

And I am the cargo

Of a coffin attended by swallows

And I am the water

Bearing the coffin that will not be silent

And his descriptions of that self are becoming more and more special and I believe that this is his way of connecting with some persona far greater and enchanted than he.

“Beauty and truth. To be constituted of such elements is to have purpose enough. No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.”

                                                                                                                  – Henry James 1884

There are many essays and books with this title, and normally they are meant to teach you how to write or take yourself seriously. Ayn Rand, who authored a book called The Art of Fiction, talks about the need to know the language well, about using the words clearly, about theme, about plot, but what about the basic question – what is that makes poems and prose different from day to day life and stories?

Many Israeli books are freely based upon reality. Whenever editing other writers’ fiction, I try to dig deeper or to understand why this or that line was written in this sort of manner and not another. I usually come to the conclusion that it must have happened in real life. But literature isn’t real life, it condenses, it enlarges, normally I say that it takes three real people in order to create a fictional character. That is to say that the writer has to take the qualities of at least three different individuals to form one single character. It’s sort of like a 1:100′000 map, it’s only a representation of real life and if we would construct a city identical to the map, we would fail miserably. There is one literal historic epic that tries to do just that – À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust that is known to the English reader as In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past. He attempt to write down decades of his own life. This work of art ended only with the author’s death and one can say that this is also a failure to grasp and describe real life.

One can ask, ‘What is the importance of real life?’ and ‘Isn’t literature more important?’ Shakespeare wrote in the 18th Sonnet to his lover that “So long as man can breathe or I can see. So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” and in a way this shows us how literature can be almost like a time machine. Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg, a Hebrew essayist and thinker made a mockery out of Jewish researchers who tried to determine whether Moses was a real person or not. In one of his essays he claims that the importance of Moses as a literal character who affected so many people along the ages is far more important from the question if he is a truly historical figure, so this brings me to the question, ‘What is important in the art of fiction?’

I believe that in order to create something meaningful one must strike a nerve, a fundamental truth in his writings and that is something we are going to talk about next week.