Nofel Mihutz Lazman
(Falling Out of Time), by David Grossman
Hakibbutz Hameuchad/Kinneret Zmora-Bitan
(Hebrew), 187 pages, NIS 88
In Sigmund Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” he convincingly portrays the process that begins with the unconscious denial of the death of a loved one, and ends with acceptance and a re-adjustment to life, slow and painful though it may be. What can the mourning writer do, however, if he does not want merely to re-adjust, but rather to express, to capture in words, the terrible disaster that has befallen him? The process of reworking mourning that Freud and his followers describe at length does not apply here, because the act of writing in effect preserves the disaster in a living, empowered and concrete form.
David Grossman lost his son Uri in the Second Lebanon War. His new book, “Falling Out of Time,” is a sort of precise, detailed literary investigation into the mourning of parents, an echoing cry of bereavement, whose power lies, paradoxically, in an abundant use of restraint and distancing.
This distancing is a result of a decision not to offer readers a psychologically realistic story, but to adhere to the mythological model of entering the underworld in order to connect with the dead. The opening pages of the novel follow a husband who leaves his wife and his daily routine (signified by a kitchen and dinner), and sets out for “there,” the land of the dead. The couple lost their son five years earlier, but the sorrows of bereavement have not lessened over time; the father travels this path because he can no longer bear the loss of his child.
Another distancing device lies in an attempt to express bereavement as a universal experience rather than a particularly Israeli one. Grossman employs two different means to this end. First, within the total isolation to which he is “sentenced,” the father discovers that he is not alone, that his mourning connects him to other bereaved parents. This revelation provides the book’s structure and its array of characters: The father is joined on his way by other bereaved figures. Both the father and those accompanying him talk about their dead children, their desire to see them once more, and the mourning that does not lose power after one year or a score. Common elements unite their speech, revealing immediately that all these characters, despite their separate identifying features, are an extension of the father, and indeed, toward the end of the book, their voices merge into one another.
Second, the setting of the book is not at all Israeli, but an imagined duchy whose leader asks one of his subjects to report on its citizens. This person writes the history of the city, but since he himself lost his daughter 13 years earlier, he follows only bereaved parents. Among them are the duke himself, as well as a mute mender of nets, an elderly teacher who draws math problems on the walls of homes, a shoe repairman and a midwife. It is easy to see that these characters are extensions of the bereaved father who appears at the beginning of the novel. The fact that they come from completely different social classes, and that there are a variety of causes for their respective mourning (ranging from accidental death to illness, drowning and war) and a range of time since the disasters struck − all this grants the father an impersonal and timeless dimension. Grossman purposefully blurs the Israeli nature of the story, as when the bereaved father turns to his son and says that a man from a “distant” land once “told me that in his tongue/ someone who dies in war/ is said to have ‘fallen’./ And thus you have fallen/ out of time.” Such language, which provides the title of the book, represents Israel as a faraway land whose tongue is foreign to the protagonists.
Half-writer, half-desk
There is an additional character among the citizens of the duchy, a bereaved man called the Centaur. He does not join the procession following the bereaved father, but sits in a room and writes. Unlike the mythological centaur, half-man, half-horse, the bereaved man portrays himself as half-writer, half-desk. The Centaur, who lost his son 15 years earlier, still surrounds himself with the son’s belongings; his main desire is to understand, to grasp the death. This desire to capture the fact of death in words is in effect the inner story of this book. The Centaur explains to the writer of the duchy’s history that “I am unable to understand anything until I write it ... so now please write large, in huge letters: I must recreate him in the form of a story! Do you get it?” In the end, he manages to write this story, and while doing so he comes to understand that the fictional story he is producing is not meant to allow him to see his son again or return the dead to life, but to enable him to live a life in which there is also room for a dead son: “For myself/ for my own soul I fight/ against destruction, dwindling, fading.” The book ends with the Centaur’s words about the possibility that indeed he has found words “for this.”
Just as the bereaved father who opens the book provides a double for the writer, it is implied that the Centaur too, who is writing a book about his own disaster, is also the writer’s double. The book, it becomes clear, is in its entirety an attempt to express “this” − the nightmare, the ongoing, unending presence of grief − in words: the exile imposed on bereaved parents, the complete collapse of the reality that preceded the death and the inability to return to routine and earlier relationships. At the same time there is tension between the desire to preserve the image of the dead children and the certain knowledge that living memory means living, burning pain. The doubling of the bereaved father who is also a writer is conveyed here very powerfully.
The book’s subtitle is “a story in voices” (one can predict with some certainty that the story will be adapted for the stage). These voices, of the father who leaves home and the rest of the characters who accompany him, are shaped into poetic monologues in which the characters speak about the different faces of bereavement. Poetry − short, rhythmic lines, internal rhyme, the language of oxymoron that includes the basic building blocks of lyric verse (heat-cold, light-darkness, silence-screaming, absence-presence, birth-death) grants the book its tremendous force. The reason for turning to poetry may be found in remarks by the duke’s servant, presented throughout the book as “the writer of city history.” He tells the story of the characters and their actions in long-winded prose; but when he describes his own mourning, he switches to short, poetic lines and explains why he is suddenly spouting poetry. “Also with me/ yes, my lady. also/ with me: poetry/ is the language of my grief.”
Poetry serves here to establish distance, and at the same time it grants great force to the characters’ pain. In other words, Grossman has found a marvelous balance between restraint and letting out a cry. The fact that we are confronted with an apparently foreign, fictional city and characters rising from the Centaur’s feverish imagination allows the writer to put painful words and cries of pain into his characters’ mouths without even a smidgen of sentimentality. Poetic language grants tremendous force to the dialogue of the bereaved parents that opens the book, a dialogue in which they break a silence that continued for five years, only in order to reconstruct that terrible evening when they were informed of the death of their son (Israeli readers will not help but see before their eyes the terribly familiar scene of army officers sent to notify parents of the death of a child): “Here we stood,/ you and I,/ shoulder to shoulder./ They stood on the threshold,/ and we faced/ them and their/ compassion./ Unhurried,/ quietly/ they stood/ blowing/the breath of death/ at us.” In the original Hebrew, the author uses not only rhythm and rhyme, but also broken lines in which “we” confront “them,” as well as turning the expression “breath of life” into “breath of death.” This reversal, which depicts the continuing presence of death in the life of bereaved parents, is the crux of the book. One must take off one’s hat before Grossman: The lines cited above are spine-tingling poetry, poetry at its best.
Poetry grants a similar force to the monologues and dialogues that follow as well. The attempts by the various characters to remember their young children in the small, daily gestures of eating, bathing and going to sleep, are heart-breaking. They attempt to find some space between oblivion and memory, between the land of the living and the land of the dead, a space that would allow them, finally, to breathe deeply. They long for the dead and are constantly in dialogue with them − the book conveys all these very powerfully.
“Falling out of Time” also conducts a dialogue with the Bible and myths and with many writers, some Hebrew (among them, Natan Alterman, Amos Oz and Hanoch Levin), but also others (e. e. cummings and Rainer Maria Rilke are mentioned by name, while John Donne is not named but present in his famous line that “No man is an island”). David Grossman has succeeded here in restraining his tendency for linguistic acrobatics, a tendency that caused more than a little damage to his previous novel, “To the End of the Land,” and has created a disturbing, heartbreaking vision of mourning.
Prof. Avraham Balaban is a poet, writer and literary scholar. His most recent books is “Nine Mothers and a Mother: Representations of Motherhood in Modern Hebrew Fiction,” published in Hebrew by Hakibbutz Hameuchad.
