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YUDKIN / REALITY IN THE FICTION OF YAAKOV SHABTAI
133
ultimate duty or absurd termination. Similarly, we might also
ask such questions o f the novel. A steep and apparently inev
itable decline could be reversed in terms o f the surrealistic end
ing. Certainly, the final section marks an idyllic transformation:
“All was conducted in perfect tranquillity,”2 following up a per
fectly realistic description o f the hero Meir’s return to Israel,
after a foreign tour, during which he had fallen ill. Nothing,
as in Ecclesiastes itself, has previously prepared us for this sort
o f consummation. The world surrounding Meir had been d e
scribed as a world falling apart. His mother had died after a
period o f growing disenchantment and despair, and he himself
had got sick after an unconvincing attempt to shake himself
out o f an increasing lethargy and alienation. The foreign tour
was a hoped-for rebirth, but it culminated in personal disaster,
following his usual cycle o f indecision and lack o f fulfillment
in all projects, great and small.
So, is the end o f the matter climax, resignation or reversal?
Referral to the biblical source, with the assertion that “ . . . un
intentionally or otherwise, the voice o f Ecclesiastes resounds
throughout,”3 has the paradoxical effect o f redirecting the ques
tion in two ways. What concerns us here is the reality reflected
in Shabtai’s work, the effect created as well as the means sum
moned to achieve that effect. What we will see again is a binary
opposition between two poles, pulling the protagonists, who are
also narrative voices either in the direction o f irritation, disen
chantment and despair, or towards an idyllic vision. This latter
can be encapsulated either by an idealization o f the past, the
past o f the locus, Tel-Aviv, the past o f the protagonist’s own
youth, o f the representation o f that youth through the presence
o f an older but dying generation (the grandmother), or by some
sort o f idealized future, such as that portrayed in the final sec
tion o f
S o f da va r ,
with its perfect mystical union in ideal sex,
in the vision o f total freedom and access, when all the wonderful
dead are reunited with the live narrator. (Or is it the reverse
— that the narrator is united with the dead through his own
death?) He is, in any case, reborn.
2.
Sof davar.
(Tel-Aviv, Siman Keriah/HaKibbutz Hameukhad, 1984), p. 208.
All references are to the pagination o f the Hebrew publications.
3. Zach, ibid.