Научная статья на тему 'Methods of estrangement in Amos Oz’s a Tale of Love and Darkness'

Methods of estrangement in Amos Oz’s a Tale of Love and Darkness Текст научной статьи по специальности «Языкознание и литературоведение»

CC BY
137
30
i Надоели баннеры? Вы всегда можете отключить рекламу.
Ключевые слова
АМОС ОЗ / AMOS OZ / ESTRANGEMENT / "ПОВЕСТЬ О ЛЮБВИ И ТЬМЕ" / A TALE OF LOVE AND DARKNESS / ИЗРАИЛЬ / ISRAEL / ИВРИТ / HEBREW / ПЕРЕВОД / TRANSLATION / ОСТРАНЕНИЕ

Аннотация научной статьи по языкознанию и литературоведению, автор научной работы — Valkova Yulia E.

The present paper characterizes specific stylistic features of a distinguished Israeli author and scholar Amos Oz on the material of non-fiction A Tale of Love and Darkness. The analysis is focused on the method of estrangement in particular, since this stylistic device is of key importance for understanding the ambivalent connection of both the book and the author with European and especially Russian literature in the reflection of modern Hebrew literature. The method of estrangement is also considered as meaningful for equivalent and adequate translating.

i Надоели баннеры? Вы всегда можете отключить рекламу.
iНе можете найти то, что вам нужно? Попробуйте сервис подбора литературы.
i Надоели баннеры? Вы всегда можете отключить рекламу.

Текст научной работы на тему «Methods of estrangement in Amos Oz’s a Tale of Love and Darkness»

Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences 10 (2014 7) 1661-1671

УДК 821.411.16

Methods of Estrangement

in Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness

Yulia E. Valkova*

Siberian Federal University 79 Svobodny, Krasnoyarsk, 660041, Russia

Received 18.07.2014, received in revised form 14.08.2014, accepted 07.09.2014

The present paper characterizes specific stylistic features of a distinguished Israeli author and scholar Amos Oz on the material of non-fiction A Tale of Love and Darkness. The analysis is focused on the method of estrangement in particular, since this stylistic device is of key importance for understanding the ambivalent connection of both the book and the author with European and especially Russian literature in the reflection of modern Hebrew literature. The method of estrangement is also considered as meaningful for equivalent and adequate translating.

Keywords: Amos Oz, estrangement, A Tale of Love and Darkness, Israel, Hebrew, translation. Research area: 10.00.00 - philology.

Introduction

Amos Oz, being one of the most popular Israeli authors and at the same time recognized intellectual and a professor of literature at BenGurion University in Beer-Sheva, is a prominent novelist and his works deserve greater attention than currently in Russia. The research is oriented more on A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002), as this is a partly autobiographical and non-fiction novel, translated into 28 languages so far. One of the topical features of contemporary literature is balancing between two worlds - new and old, West and East, traditional and challenging. When globalization prevails, authors appear to have a temptation to leave far behind cultural roots and attune to cosmopolitan writing, which can be written and read everywhere. Still some rootedness is hard to get away from, especially when the

author attempts to write a biography, though it can turn out to be pseudobiography in the end. When the author starts to revive his childhood memories, he is trying to perceive them as happening again, this literary device is called estrangement. Estrangement concerns not only remembrance of the past, but revival of the things that have gone away, these are (for any Israeli author) - the times of galut (exile), native languages of the places where Jewish diaspora lived, trade and cultural connections of the past times, not to mention some subtle psychological patterns realized in writing novels. Estrangement is a vivid feature in all works of A. Oz and characteristically in A Tale of Love and Darkness. The further study will be concentrated on whether this estrangement is kept in translation and useful methods of translating estrangement or making up for it.

© Siberian Federal University. All rights reserved

* Corresponding author E-mail address: mutlulukcik@rambler.ru

- 1661 -

Theoretical framework

The present study follows mainly works of authors of Israeli origin and those English-speaking researchers who are interested in the modern Hebrew literature and its connection with the traditional one, which was written before the revival of the Hebrew language in the 20th century. These works are based on peering at struggle for identity, on the idea of heterotopy of the narrator, which means a deviation from normal state; abnormal placement. A. Mendelson-Maoz also speaks about dialectical difference between aliyah (migration to Israel with the positive connotation) and immigration. Moreover, scientists note that A. Oz, being a member of the peace movement, while investigating the Jewish-Arab conflict tries to distance himself from both parties and find some reconciliation.

Researchers largely contrast works of A. Oz to the works of other authors of his age or fortune, such as to S. Yishar (Sh. E. Jelen, R. Omer-Sherman), Mary Antin (N. K. Miller), S.Y. Agnon, H. Bartov, A. Appelfeld, S. Michael, E. Amir (A. Mendelson-Maoz), A.B. Yehoshua, D. Grossman (H. Halkin), Y. Orpaz, M. Tammuz, D. Shahar (Sh. Peled), A. Cohen (K. Grumberg), A. Appelfeld, Y. Kaniuk, H. Gouri (G. Shaked), A. Camus, S. Yishar (G. Piterberg). A. Balaban speaking about panentheism and religious framework in The Trappist Monastery draws parallels between A. Oz, his literary contemporaries and predecessors and philosophers, including F.W. Schelling.

The objective of this paper is to examine the realization of estrangement in A. Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness, so we have three tasks: to define what estrangement is, to observe the researchers' approaches to estrangement in A. Oz's works and to concentrate on the author's application of estrangement on the material of the particular novel.

Let us begin with the definition, which will be reviewed briefly as the wider and all-encompassing examination of the notion extends beyond the scope of the present paper. Estrangement here will be understood as the distancing effect (estrangement derives from estrange, which means: to cause someone to be no longer friendly or close to another person or group; to cause someone to be no longer involved or connected with something; to remove from customary environment or association; to arouse especially mutual enmity or indifference in where there had formerly been love, affection, or friendliness (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). In another dictionary estrangement is the fact of no longer being on friendly terms or part of a social group; the fact of no longer living with one's spouse or partner; separation (Oxford Dictionary). This distancing effect allows for unbiased, objective approach, especially necessary when the philological analysis deals with pseudo-biography, which has both fictional and non-fictional nature.

Estrangement in philological sense is close to the term "defamiliarization", which was introduced in 1917 by V. Shklovsky in his essay "Art as Technique"). To illustrate what he means by defamiliarization, V. Shklovsky uses examples from L. Tolstoy, whom he cites as using the technique throughout his works. The story "Kholstomer" is told as if anew, from the point of a horse. Defamiliarization also includes the use of foreign languages within a work. It is akin to automatization, but avoids over-automatization (for further details cf. C. Emerson). Moving forward a little, we will see that the use of different languages, languages of different cultures and automatization is a commonplace for A Tale of Love and Darkness.

Estrangement from the viewpoint of psychology is state of increased distance from

oneself of others; decrease in contact where close contact once occured (Psychology Dictionary). Again, later we will see the realization of these directions in the analyzed work.

Though there is a number of both ambiguous terms for the phenomenon and different definitions of estrangement, the current purpose is not on the differentiating the terminology, rather on looking at specific examples narrowly.

The next step on our way to examination of estrangement in A Tale of Love and Darkness is to refer to the already existing theoretical works devoted to estrangement either in the whole literary corpus of A. Oz, or letting into the topic of estrangement in A Tale of Love and Darkness in particular. Let us form a comprehensive list of reasons for estrangement before (in the following section) we will look for specific purposes of usage of estrangement.

So scientists attribute A. Oz's estrangement

to

• Leaving relatives, intellectualism, old and bookworm culture, as Sh. E. Jelen aptly articulates, his trajectory from Jerusalem to "Kibbutz" marked his own personal journey away from that which he considered a parochial Europeanism. Still, the heroes as other characters in A. Oz's fiction feel uprooted and alienated in a new, unfamiliar place (Feldman, p. 395). Yet the recently written story, painfully revelatory "Little Boy" (2012), "reveals that even the kibbutz's native-born sometimes endure traumatic estrangement" (R. Omer-Sherman, book review).

• Attempt to create new literature in a new language (modern Hebrew is still new and lacks some words)

• Attraction in the youth to the risky allures of the Gnostic defiance (Y.S. Feldman), which is hard to detach from

- 1663

Rethinking of the past Difficulty of self-identification Failure of the parents' generation to blend in (in particular, A. Mendelson-Maoz mentions it)

Connection with European origins, which hardens involvement into community "His experience in that moment appears to be an acceptance of his universe as distinctly nonindigenous" (ShJ. Jelen, p.512).

Mixture of different cultures in Israel "Absent memory" of Holocaust and other horrors, postmemory of the third generation. This absent memory brings pressure to young generation, which has not experienced the traumas of the World War II, but feels them as if phantom pains. The narrower meaning of the term concerns more private individualistic matters. M. McNay applies the notion of absent memory to the family secrets that underlie these narratives and reflect on questions raised by such secrets-and by incomplete narrative inheritances-for the children burdened with them (cf. M. McNay).

Trauma at the suicide of author's mother, odd behavior of the mother "Fania's nocturnal migrations from her room to that of her pubescent son are presented, from Amos's perspective, without pity and with an admirable avoidance of retrospective commentary and diagnosis" (Carmy, p. 58). Ch. Schachan and K. Grumberg discuss it in the terms of spectropoetics introduced by Jacques Derrida. K. Grumberg also addresses Freud's term "unheimlich" (uncanny) and the concept of exile as mingling of the homely and the unhomely (cf. K. Grumberg, p. 383).

• Individual expression fighting collective consciousness, objective versus subjective. "<...> a protagonist feels trapped or constrained by a public self that is not of his choosing" (Halkin, p.32). Ch. Schachan cites G. Shaked in regards that A.Oz iz primarily concerned with the collective subconscious (cf. Ch. Schachan, p. 327, 329).

• Distinguishing between the positions of settler and colonialism. G. Piterberg alludes to A Tale of Love and Darkness, as "it so clearly conveys the forcefully demarcated fault-line, so rationalised and orderly, between settler and indigene (G. Piterberg, p.40).

• Evasiveness of parents when asked to tell about their insufferable past (N.K. Miller, p.320)

• Renaming "The choice of the Hebrew name to replace the European one represents both the deliberate turning away from the old, fetishized models of European Enlightenment culture and the journey toward the forging of a new world on new terms<...>" (N.K. Miller, p.322), Sh. Carmy writes about a repudiation of the previous name and resolution to adapt the Hebrew identity.

• Inner migration within the identity (N.K. Miller)

• Vexed position between secular and religious (Sh. Carmy, A. Balaban). A. Oz is pleading for the distancing of the biblical model from modern Israel, because if Israelis try to take after biblical heroes, this will result in "insecure individuals bewildered about their identity and heritage (N. Aschkenasy, p. 134).

• The very geographical location of the setting, replete with biblical reminiscent spirit and archetypical landscapes.

"<...> the desert serves potentially as a transformative space that lays bare the cracks in the individual's commitment to national identity" (cf. R. Omer-Sherman developing the ideas of J. Cohen, p.53).

• Personal experience of the author, including moves across the country and military service. "Having experienced Jerusalem as a divided city and served in a tank unit in the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, A. Oz has an intimate understanding of the movement of Israeli society from a collectivist ethos to a socially critical and finally to an increasingly Americanized and, hence, individualistic culture" (R. Omer-Sherman, p.54).

Even the earliest characters of A. Oz feel alienated from the environment. In the analysis of My Michael (1968) Sh. Peled discusses Hannah, protagonist, "representing a besieged sovereign who declares a state of exception, at once constituting the space surrounding her and perceiving it as a threat. She oscillates between representing the sovereign and being an individual character; interpretations fluctuate accordingly, unable to resolve this ambiguity" (Sh. Peled, p. 269). And later the researcher comments that A. Oz's text "creates a system of exclusions that generates a constant sense of unease, a system of oppositions and distinctions that sustain a covert and threatening conflict, thus repressing the hybridity of the space (Ibid, p. 278). Ch. Schanan brings out the express intention of the protagonist in Longing (1976) of concentrating precisely on recording details of the place and the moment (Ch. Schachan, p. 328). So the narrator's position throughout of the literary corpus of A. Oz is that of the outsider (cf. Sh. Carmy, p.57).

All these above-stated reasons considered we will fix our attention more on the stylistic

purposes of estrangement in the novel and its linking role for the whole work.

Statement of the problem

In A Tale of Love and Darkness A. Oz chronicles his childhood in Jerusalem at the end of the British Mandate for Palestine and the early years of the State of Israel, and his teenage years on kibbutz Hulda, where he escaped from highbrow environment in search of highly true Zionist ideals. Being a stranger in a completely new place, being a stranger to the values proclaimed there, he starts writing as if turning over a fresh leaf. Nonetheless, he could not quit his acquaintance with well-known figures in Israeli society, among them Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Shaul Tchernichovsky and David Ben-Gurion. One of his teachers was the Israeli poet Zelda. Joseph Klausner, one more considerable writer, was his great-uncle. Told in a non-linear fashion, A. Oz's story is interwoven with tales of his family's Eastern European roots. The family's name was originally Klausner. By changing the name to a Hebrew one, A. Oz rebelled against that European background while affirming loyalty to the land of his birth. In the book, A. Oz's father recalls how the walls in Europe were covered in graffiti saying "Jews, go to Palestine", but when he reached Palestine, the walls were scrawled with the words "Jews, get out of Palestine." This alienage, sense of not belonging to any of the worlds fully, running away from Jewish unconsciousness and V. Jabotinsky's revisionism led to affluent estrangement in the works, among which A Tale of Love and Darkness stands aside with its recalling of the bygone childhood, revisiting which any writer perceives is as anew, so events are told as estranged, it is ineluctable.

It needs to note that not only scholars, but also publicists assert this estrangement as interwoven in this memoir, about combination of anticipated intimacy and actual estrangement: ".. .the Hebrew

nation returning to its homeland, a man in his sixties connecting the segments of his life before and after his mother's suicide fifty years earlier, and the writer tangling with the many languages that shaped him and the Hebrew that he shaped in turn" (cf. M. Pomerantz and other).

Methods

For the present study philological analysis was used with attuning to identifying vivid examples of estrangement and establishing the purpose of each case. To ease the presentation of analysis the English translation of the novel will be cited in the following paragraph. To mine a literary text for any single case of estrangement is extravagant, so only few examples will be enlisted in this work, though estrangement permeates the whole novel.

This paper quotes from the English translation: A Tale of Love and Darkness, trans. Nicholas de Lange (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2004). Subsequent references will be given in parenthesis in the text, using the abbreviation LD. We will apply here the method of partial selection of the most significant examples, as the limitations of the paper size do not allow for scrutiny.

For determining single cases of estrangement we will be guided by the dictionary definitions and approaches of A. Oz's works' researchers, which were analyzed in the previous section.

The textual analysis of examples of estrangement and detecting estrangement in the context (not to mix it with another literary devices) will be carried out on the base of the linguistic organization of the text, mainly in its stylistics aspect. Stylistics serves to make formation or interpretation of estrangement explicit and retrievable. Apart from stylistics, we will see, but not range them the means of other levels of language, which are graphical, lexical and syntactic. All these means are designed to

realize the whole idea of estrangement, which passes through the whole book. To prove the assumption that estrangement is a kind of a binding agent for this work, let us turn to discussion of different examples to see whether there is firm connection between and the number of examples of estrangement is big enough to extrapolate the idea of estrangement to the entire A Tale of Love and Darkness.

Discussion

To begin with, estrangement is essential for self-referential works, otherwise they may appear as apologetic. It is worth mentioning that A Tale of Love and Darkness is not an autobiography per se, so use of estrangement acquires here a fictional character as well. More of the examples derived here are of fictional character, not of documentary one. Such is the first example, which narrates about switching on the light in the cold flat:

I stared at it (switch) and watched the coil begin to glow. It lit up gradually: at first you couldn't see anything, you just heard a series of crackling sounds, as when you walk on grains of sugar, and after that a pale purplish gleam appeared at either end of the element and a hint of pink began to spread toward the center, like a faint blush on a shy cheek, which turned into a deep blush, which soon ran riot in a shameless display of naked yellow and lecherous lime green, until the glow reached the middle of the coil and glowed unstoppably, a red-hot fire like a savage sun in a shiny metal dish of the reflector that you couldn't look at without squinting, and the element was now incandescent, dazzling, unable to contain itself, any moment now it would melt and pour down on my Mediterranean Sea like an erupting volcano raising cascades of molten lava to destroy my flotilla of destroyers and submarines (LD, p.30).

The passages of such length are characteristic of the whole oeuvre, which appears as a luminal, extraneous, heterogenous world, as though captured in a particular moment and frozen with all its peculiar characteristics. Hybridity and sensuality of the ordinary object in the fantastic reflection of a young narrator serve the purpose to immerse the reader in the state where common objects are precursors of rueful events. The imagination looks into the membrane of everyday routine, in which future events are "signalled, erupt, are set aside, returned to; for its style, a breathtaking conjunction of the large and small" (cf. S. Gee).

Despite the length of any single description, A. Oz's text is constructed from a collection of episodes, rather than appears as a consistent narrative. He states it as such:

I am trying to reconstruct, or rather to guess, to conjure up, almost to create out of nothing: like those palaeontologists in the natural history museum who can reconstruct a whole dinosaur on the basis of two or three bones (LD, p. 281).

Here again we see estrangement, which is presented as reconstruction which is due to an effort to distance the author from the narrator, and them both from the events described. The text breaks fabula by integrating different material such as testimonies, documents, postcards, literary criticism, memoirs from the standpoint of members of the family, all of which deviate from one clear voice, to create a chorus. The proclaimed scientific objectivity of the author assists creating a pluralistic approach.

The next example also deals with reconstruction and is critical for understanding the use of estrangement in the text, encompasses pages 62-63 (description of Aunt and Uncle):

I can see them standing there; at the end of the world' on the edge of the wilderness, both very tender, like a pair of teddy bears, arm in arm'

with the evening breeze of Jerusalem blowing above their heads, the rustle of pine trees, and a bitter smell of geraniums floating on the clear dry air <...> On his lips floats a distracted, slightly bewildered smile' like a man who knocks on the door of a house where he is a regular visitor and where he is used to being very warmly received, but when the door opens a stranger suddenly looks out at him and recoils in surprise, as though asking, Who are you sir and why exactly are you here?

The defamiliarization here is aligned with estrangement in psychological rethinking of the destination. The purpose of estrangement is to reconsider the life path through remembrance of the relatives and ascribing to them the author's own immediate thoughts, though the characters "like teddy bears" in the empty city are shown alienated and they are given their own voices to speak. The definition at http:// www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/estrangement deduces estrangement to "the feeling that you don't belong, especially when you're surrounded by other people. Estrangement happens when something - or someone - makes you feel like a stranger. It can describe a couple that's split up or the alienation of a former friend. The meaning hasn't changed much from its Latin root, extraneare, "treat as a stranger". Here the couple is alienated and the narrator as well. The characters of A. Oz "often flee homogeneous and complacent insularity" (R. Omer-Scherman, p. 54).

Such is the character of Grandma, who lacks this insularity and intervenes into the narrator's consciousness. The passage about hot bath at Grandma's house shows how the narrator's speech intermingles with the Grandma's humming and becomes her voice. This soliloquizing stretches for two pages without any pause. The direct speech starts after "then Grandma told you to close your eyes as tight", and then the

narrators stops thinking and the reader listens to Grandma's voice only until the bath is over (LD, pp. 73-75). This strategy is implemented to grant the character, other than the narrator, right to outspeak their life positions.

The author abundantly lets his characters speak from their own, such is the memories of Aunt Sonia (LD, pp. 150-158) about some relatives. It is remarkable that the story finishes with the description of the estranged narrator:

And you were such a serious little boy, a boy who couldn't set the sunshine, too serious <.> I thought then that you would surely be much more of a Klausner than a Mussman. Today I am not so sure...

Here and there the narrator appears as precocious child, lost in between two families. The purpose of estrangement is to see the family story in a different light.

The disconnectedness of the narrator is partly inherited from parents who preferred a solitary life, in disunion, lack of unity with religion:

<...> my mother found no sense or interest in Jerusalem <...> The synagogues and rabbinic academies, churches, convents and mosques all seemed much of a muchness to her, dreary and smelling of religious men who did not wash often enough.

The foreignness in the life, separation from religion, politics, conversations with people other than small talks is the lineament of emotional dissociation or alienation. Estrangement arises out from a defensive operation aimed at coping with stress. The narrator may be telling of estrangement in an effort to be aware of it and prevent self-alienation in future.

One more example shows estrangement of the narrator as a child from the world of grownups:

I had a specific role in these conversations at the café. First of all I had to give polite, intelligent answers, just like a grown-up, <.>Secondly my

task was not to get in the way. I had to be nonexistent, invisible (LD, p. 400).

The invisibility of the spectator is useful for creating the verifiable objective narration of the outsider, which is a purposely chosen position of a writer:

To this day I pickpocket in this way. Especially from strangers. Especially in busy public places. <. >Peeping and making up stories. <...> Nowadays I no longer stop in terror at the bedroom door: I float invisibly in.<...> I live in fear of being caught in the act and asked to explain myself.<.> Half a minute, and they're caught in my invisible paparazzi camera (LD, p. 403).

That is the trait of any single writer as to collect the stories from the observed objects, pretending that you are an independent, unaffected, all knowing creator with omnipotence to reconstruct the destiny from the appearance of the passer-byes.

That is frequently applicable method - to show the main character's life from the position of his/her relatives, the child's revelations from the position of adults. One more extract in this string is the narrator's father voice, when the narrator looks at the photo of his young father who utters:

Don't worry, pals, everything's going to be alright, we shall overcome <.> (LD, p.99).

Such mode of language is uncharacteristic of the narrator, so estrangement here is for hearing the voices of the past and "optimistic chums".

These examples presented the point of people, but the author recurrently falls back upon personification of not live objects. Such is the description of the "amiable" and "most obedient" woolen dog (LD, pp. 105-106), which "had followed Klausners faithfully". Estrangement here is in effect for magic realism in real world setting.

The use of direct speeches as if they are stenographed and not invented or remembered

by the author provides a means for everyone to sound as real with drawbacks and inaccuracy of oral speech. The author starts, for instance:

He had had his own unique brand of Hebrew, Grandpa Alexander, and he refused to be corrected (LD, pp. 113-114).

Thus, the new scene with the new voice and new accent is easily introduced in the text. The mode of estrangement here is marked by italics; all the words which Grandpa pronounces incorrectly or in other than Hebrew languages are italicised, which is graphic (more seldom than the lexical or conceptual) way of showing estrangement.

From the individual cases of estrangement let us turn to the key topic, which is in the very heading. The conceptual and adversarial opposition of love and darkness is also estranged. The next example of this method is about hovering over darkness because of the saddening memory of the past (absent memory inherited from the previous generations or own recollections of the past woes). For instance, Aunt Sonia recalls the mother's rage, "which may have been the spark my mother's life-force vainly trying to free itself from the darkness that was already beginning to enfold it". Being a child, the mother knows despite the curtained windows about the tragedies happening around but chooses a way not to notice them. The markers of estrangement we find in this passage:

But all these things happened on the other side of the double glazing, outside the pleasant, illuminated circle of the Tarbuth school. None of them could break in and seriously harm the pleasantness of my mother's childhood, which was apparently tinged with a hint of melancholy that did not mar but merely coloured and sweetened it (LD, p.207).

Juxtaposition of love, vive de joie and darkness is also marked by book reviewers (cf. C. Messud in her review of Scenes from Village Life). Later in the passage the author tells about

the mother's anguishes that led her to suicide. The death is personified by the mother in the refraction of the narrator's story as a lover, charlatan, piper, youthful prince, crafty hunter, etc. Thus, the mother is estranged from the reality and "associated muses with death". The pathological helplessness had its outcomes in exclusion of the mother from the world of material doers.

Most examples of estrangement in the text are vivid, when the narrator describes selfhood, employs self-analysis, such as:

What does my memory begins with? The very very first memory is a shoe. (LD, p. 209). Then the narrator develops his associations about his feelings and switches on to the way how his parents looked at this picture of smelling, i.e. the story continues in third person, the narrator is no longer I, but he: "the infant was also frightened and alarmed by the abundance of their attention, that he was too small to contain" (LD, p.210).

The memory like this also includes re-experiencing an engendering unusual perceptions. While describing how the mother helped him to put the shoes on, the narrator makes a comparison: "as if she was a midwife helping the foetus of my tiny foot to travel down the virginal birth canal of my fragrant new shoe". The narrator confesses that to date every moment he strains the tight shoe he feels the same sensual pleasure, though it happens only in reliving memories. Memoir as reinvention: it can't be anything else, though questions about verity are tempting. (cf. Pomerantz).

Summing up, the author showed the narrator and other characters in the state of some disavowal of reflection and alienation followed by anxiety and insecurity. Are there any ways to overcome this alienation? One way to overcome it as speculated by the author is through adaptation, assimilation, conformity, imitation, mimicry:

I therefore adopted a representative expression, and expressed the view that <...>

Somehow, out of embarrassment or arrogance, I was talking to her not in my own Hebrew but in that of Father and his visitors: formal, polished. Like a donkey dressed up in a ballgown and high-heeled shoes: convinced for some reason that this was the only proper way to speak to Arabs and girls. (I had hardly ever had an occasion to talk to a girl or an Arab, but I imagined that in both cases a special delicacy is required: you had to talk on tiptoe, as it were) (LD, p. 313).

Here the theatricalism and assuming different masks help the author to pit Jews against Arabs, and oppose political relationships and children chitchatting. The contrasts are denuded especially from the standpoint of children as in the cited paragraph.

iНе можете найти то, что вам нужно? Попробуйте сервис подбора литературы.

The derived examples, which have been analyzed by partial selection, show indeed estrangement of characters, as if they are not living people but a set of persons dissected by the author. The characters at times feel strange to this world, which adds some tragedy to the story and predicts further calamities to the kin.

Conclusion

Thispaperobservedsomeartisticpeculiarities of A. Oz's works, and of A Tale of Love and Darkness in particular. The aesthetic method of estrangement was studied in relation to this novel. A. Oz uses estrangement for many purposes which we can now establish. These purposes include: showing ambiguity of the child's worldview, showing the life from different viewpoints and especially the narrator's life from the standpoint of people around him; showing the world as re-experienced and re-invented. The narrower tasks done by the author to mark estrangement include, but not limited to: a) phonetic peculiarities of different characters; graphic marking (italics) of foreign or incorrectly pronounced words; b) use of specific words, accents, modes of speech; c) use of direct and reported speech; long passages

without pauses; d) inner monologues; ideas of strangeness and alienation; use of different stylistic devices, such as prose, poetry, memoirs, simple notes and quotes. By doing so the author applies correspondingly the methods of graphic, lexical, syntactic and conceptual realization of estrangement. Estrangement in its essence is characterized by feeling uncomfortable and

disconnected from other people, the world around, the absence of firm religious and moral values. The author of auto-biography appears as the author and the narrator, the whole story takes a form of onlooker's observations, which is interesting for self-analysis. The further step is to see how this estrangement can be translated from Hebrew and kept as estrangement.

References

1. Aschkenasy, N. (2001). Deconstructing the Metanarrative: Amos Oz's Evolving Discourse with the Bible. Symposium (Fall 2001), pp. 123-140.

2. Balaban, A. (2002). Secularity and Religiosity in Contemporary Hebrew Literature. Middle Eastern Literatures, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2002, pp. 63-85. doi: 10.1080/14751790220103783

3. Carmy, Sh. (2005). Oz's Israel. First Things, No. 8 (August/September 2005), pp. 54-59.

4. Emerson, C. (2005). Shklovsky's ostranenie, Bakhtin's vnenakhodimost' (How Distance Serves an Aesthetics of Arousal Differently from an Aesthetics Based on Pain). Poetics Today, 26:4, Winter 2005, pp. 637-664. Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton.

5. Estrange. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Available at: http://www.merriam-webster. com/dictionary/estrange

6. Estrangement. Oxford Online Dictionary. Available at: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/ definition/english/estrangement

7. Estrangement. Psychology Online Dictionary. Available at: http://psychologydictionary.org/ estrangement/

8. Feldman, Y.S. (2007). On the Cusp of Christianity: Virgin Sacrifice in Pseudo-Philo and Amos Oz. The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 97, No. 3 (Summer 2007), pp. 379-415.

9. Gee, S. Book of a lifetime: A Tale of Love and Darkness, By Amos Oz. Book Review. The Independent. 9 August 2013, available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/ reviews/book-of-a-lifetime-a-tale-of-love-and-darkness-by-amos-oz-8755005.html

10. Gertz, N., Chazan, M. (ed.) (2005). Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness (Special Issue, Summaries). Israel. Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel. History, Society, Culture, 7, 13p.

11. Grumberg, K. (2010) Of Sons and (M)others: The Spectropoetics of Exile in Autobiographical Writing by Amos Oz and Albert Cohen. Prooftexts, 30 (Fall 2010), pp. 373-401.

12. Halkin, H. (2004). Politics and the Israeli Novel. Commentary (April 2004), pp. 29-36.

13. Jelen, Sh. E. (2010). Israeli Children in a European Theater: Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness and S. Yizhar's Preliminaries. The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 100, No. 3 (Summer 2010), pp. 504-518.

14. McNay, M. (2009). Absent Memory, Family Secrets, Narrative Inheritance. Qualitative Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 7 (July 2009), pp. 1178-1188. doi: 10.1177/1077800409334236

15. Mendelson-Maoz, A. (2010). Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness within the Framework of Immigration Narratives in Modern Hebrew Literature. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1 (March 2010), pp. 71-87. doi: 10.1080/14725880903263101

- 1670 -

16. Messud, C. Amos Oz's Tales of Love and Darkness. Sunday Book Review. The New York Times. 3 November 2011, available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/books/review/scenes-from-village-life-by-amos-oztranslated-by-nicholas-de-lange-book-review.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

17. Miller, N. K. (2007). I Killed My Grandmother: Mary Antin, Amos Oz, and the Autobiography of a Name. Biography 30.3. Interdisciplinary Quartely (Summer 2007), pp. 319-333.

18. Omer-Sherman, R. (2005). Zionism and the Disenchanted: the Plight of the Citizen-Soldier in Amos Oz's A Perfect Peace. Middle Eastern Literatures, Vol. 8, No. 1, January 2005, pp. 53-73. doi: 10.1080/1366616042000309184

19. Omer-Sherman, R. Journeying Back to the Land of Amos Oz. Book Review. The Jewish Daily Forward. Published September 26, 2013, issue of October 04, 2013.available at: http://forward. com/articles/184502/journeying-back-to-the-land-of-amos-oz/?p=all#ixzz36wY8XtXx

20. Oz, A. A Tale of Love and Darkness, trans. Nicholas de Lange. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2004, p.

21. Peled, Sh. (2011). "Mastery Regained" - Israeli Jewish Sovereignty and Space in the Israeli Novel 197-1973. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (July 2011), pp. 263-284. doi: 10.1080/14725886.2011.580987

22. Piterberg, G. (2011). Literature of Settler Societies: Albert Camus, S. Yizhar and Amos Oz. Settler Colonial Studies, 1:2, pp. 1-52. doi: 10.1080/2201473X.2011.10648811

23. Shklovskij, V. Art as Technique. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 1998.

24. Pomerantz, M. The Land of Amos Oz. Book Review. The Arts Fuse. 20 December 2004. available at: http://artsfuse.org/150/fuse-book-reviewthe-land-of-amos-oz/

25. Schachan, Ch. (1998). Novellas under the Blazing Light: Transformations in the Novella Writing of Amos Oz. Orbis Litterarum 53, No. 5, 1998, pp. 318-335.

Способы создания остранения в "повести о любви и тьме" Амоса Оза

Ю.Е. Валькова

Сибирский федеральный университет Россия, 660041, Красноярск, пр. Свободный, 79

В статье описываются отдельные средства языковой выразительности в произведении автобиографического характера "Повесть о любви и тьме" известного израильского писателя и ученого Амоса Оза. Отдельное внимание уделено приему остранения как средству языковой выразительности, наиболее значимому в отражении неоднозначных связей произведения и автора с европейской и русской литературной традицией в частности. Остранение является частотным приемом для произведений, создаваемых на современном иврите, в особенности если они носят автобиографический или псевдоавтобиографический характер. Прием остранения рассмотрен также с точки зрения адекватной и эквивалентной передачи при переводе.

Ключевые слова: Амос Оз, остранение, "Повесть о любви и тьме", Израиль, иврит, перевод. Научная специальность: 10.00.00 - филология.

- 1671 -

i Надоели баннеры? Вы всегда можете отключить рекламу.