Reviewed in Haaretz, October 12, 2007.
Dorit Abusch's book "Crazy Heart" reminded me of a scrap of a poem that she wrote in the early 1970s. It consists of only two lines, a single rhyme: "They said of Ni/ That she had no inner me." The deeper I delved into the book (depth is a key word with a unique status in this book), I could not help thinking that this rhyme contains all the elements of the book, or vice versa: that the book is a rich and fascinating development of a central motif in Dorit Abusch's poetic. The underlying subject of the book is an opening and a shattering of the linguistic conventions regarding an artistic-literary representation of the psyche: an inner world, an inner life and an inner truth, inner spiritual richness, self awareness et al. Which means that the story could perhaps be seen as a bildungsroman about its heroine, Noa, whose life wanders from one country to another and from one career to another, from academe to selling medicines. But I think that the opposite is true: This formula of a female bildungsroman falls apart during the course of the book and is revealed as an artificial genre construct.
The adventures of the heroine bear more similarity to those of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, although they have an erotic nuance that is much more specific. Alice is a "Victorian story," similar to and different from any bildungsroman. Although Alice undergoes various and peculiar adventures, no education takes place. What does take place?
This is how Gilles Deleuze describes what happens to Alice (in the book "Essays Critical and Clinical" – translation by Daniel W. Smith and Michael Greco). "In Lewis Carroll, everything begins with a horrible combat, the combat of depths: things explode or make us explode, boxes are too small for their contents, foods are toxic and poisonous, entrails are stretched, monsters grab at us... Bodies intermingle with one another, everything is mixed up in a kind of cannibalism... Even words are eaten. ... Everything in depth is horrible, everything is nonsense... 'Alice in Wonderland' was originally supposed to be called 'Alice's Adventures Underground.' Why was the name changed? Because Alice progressively conquers surfaces.
She rises or returns to the surface. She creates surfaces. Movements of penetration and burying give way to light lateral movements of sliding; the animals of the depths become figures on cards without thickness... We no longer penetrate in depth, but through the looking-glass, turning everything the other way round, like those who write with their left hand… Mathematics is good because it brings new surfaces into existence, and brings serenity into a world whose involvement in the depth, in the chaos, is liable to be horrifying… But the world of depths still rumbles under the surface, and threatens to break through it. Even unfolded and laid out flat, the monsters still haunt us."
Such is the world created in "Crazy Heart." That is the strangely superficial quality of the heroine Noa (she even gets a name only towards the end of the book). In other words, instead of "looking inward" the heroine looks and observes the world and tries to capture its texture, a world that is understood as a surface or is translated into one. Noa is an expert at discerning flatnesses. It is no wonder that she specializes in Egyptology and hieroglyphics, where pictures and graphic signs convey meaning. Not to mention the mummies, the horrible entities, to use Deleuze's words, who are horrible just because their existence involves flattening them, removing the "inner world" from them, endowing them with eternal life by removing all the body organs.
Noa demonstrates an interest in those areas where the three-dimensional is flattened into the two-dimensional. And of course all this happens first and foremost in the visual arts. Noa is fascinated by the visual arts and the various ways in which the three-dimensional fullness of the world turns into flat graphics or a pictorial surface. She drags in photography, the technological development that embodies the imprisoning, swallowing up and flattening of the world, through the chapter in art history which she discusses at length; 17th-century Dutch painting and that of Johannes Vermeer in particular; and also through Sandy, the art scholar whom Noa meets, who is addicted to the investigation of Vermeer's artistic technique and the technological practice involved in it. Sandy's obsession causes her to suffer from anorexia, and what is anorexia if not the flattening of the body by removing the insides, similar to the process of embalming. The complementary opposite of Sandy is Clara the nun, another friend of the heroine's, who doesn't stop eating and yet looks as though nothing has entered her body (except for the Holy Spirit).
The three women reflect and complement one other, and are similar to Vermeer's women, who as noted by art historian Svetlana Alpers, have no ties to family and children. Vermeer's women are preoccupied with looking out the window, playing an instrument and reading (these painted figures can be said to be engaged in the introspection involved with their "inner world"). The encounter between Noa and Sandy gives rise to an extensive explanation of Vermeer's work methods, and primarily the important method that is crucial to the structure of Abusch's story – the camera obscura, the modern version of Plato's cave, which is at the same time the first stage of photography. If we recall the boxes that Deleuze described as filling the universe of Wonderland and the Looking Glass, the camera obscura is the box in which Noa is located, and in a certain sense the entire book is constructed as a "camera" (room) that traps impressions on its walls. The encyclopedic approach, the knowledgeable wealth of details that characterizes the way in which Noa experiences and confronts the world, is the verbal equivalent of the collections of impressions trapped by the walls of the camera obscura.
This is a new realism, the result of an eye connected to optical devices that make it possible to capture and formulate a new, different and daring pictorial world. And this is the world that is constructed in "Crazy Heart," – a world of appearances, of a wandering eye that looks for the surface of things and conveys them with a precise obsession for details: That is true of the description of the trip to Venice, which is almost a type of tour guide, as though all of Venice were trapped inside the camera obscura of the heroine, who has no inner world because her inner world is the camera obscura.
There is one exception: her sister Nami, the only one who has a family; to a great extent she is the Mommy, the heroine's substitute mother who supports her from "behind." It is her presence that allows for the existence of the box, she is the pinhole, the hidden presence. As we recall, Abusch's early poetic heroine is "Ni." Nami, that is N(am)i, is the opening of Ni's inner being, and the introduction of the "m" into it. The "m" of mortality? Of meaningfulness? At a later stage in the reading of the story we discover that Nami is the nickname given to her by her sister, the heroine Noa. Her original name is Naomi; in other words, Noa took away the "ayin" (a Hebrew letter used in the spelling of Naomi, as well as the Hebrew word for "eye"). Because Nami does not see, but Nami lives. Of course Noa has an "ayin," as do Ami, Idan and even Ido. Here we can mention Noa's linking of Ido and Idan.
Only the "foreign" heroes in the story, such as Sandy, Clara or Fabritius have been saved from this "ayin," since it is a letter unique to Hebrew. Noa's story is the story of an ayin-eye, and perhaps, because the eye is part of the head, one could go so far as to say that Noa is a heroine of the head, like Etna that arose from part of Zeus' head, or like Moll Flanders who was born from the forehead of Daniel Defoe.
The central linguistic strategem in Noa's story is that of ekphrasis, the verbal description of various works of art (the most famous ancient ekphrasis is the description of Achilles' shield in the Iliad) and this strategem is adopted repeatedly in the book, because it can be used to convert an object or a picture into words. It's no wonder that "Ni" also opens into "A-ni" ("I"), whose "inner world" is rendered with a question mark and quotation marks, and "ni" is the syllable inside the Hebrew word "pnimi"(inner), which has been confiscated and uprooted in this story. And contrary, "Ni" combines with "ayin" to form "ayin-ni" and by extension "ha-ani ha-ayin-ni", the poor I (poor because it lacks an inner I, being only Ni). This also works in English, "I" and "eye" – the rhyme basic to understanding the world of "Crazy Heart".
The third visual moment from art history that interests Noa alongside Egyptian art and Vermeer's painting is the painting of second-century Fayum portraits. It is easy to understand where this interest comes from: Fayum is realistic three-dimensional painting that appears on the surface of mummies; it appears suddenly, "ex nihilo," in art history, only to be repressed and forgotten once again.
These three chapters in art history are essential to Noa's world. She moves from the outside to the inside, always remaining on the surface.
The transition takes place when the heroine undergoes a major crisis toward the end of the story: the death of her twin sister. The disappearance of N(am)i and the commitment to her orphaned children, who become "the pressure of the depths" a la Deleuze, open a depth, a pit, and Noa's body begins to "speak" through a series of symptoms. The hysteric, the woman with the inner world of the unknown, the woman whose body speaks, is the one threatening the heroine's head and eye. Like Alice, who at the end of her adventures in Wonderland is threatened by the loss of her head ("off with her head"), Noa also begins to lose her head. And like Alice, she is also offered relief and rescue when there is an opportunity for speech by the body into which, finally, a dark room (camera obscura) is introduced and grows. Shall we call it the subconscious? If the plot can be described with a term from art history – horror vacui, the fear of empty space – we could perhaps say that the heroine has learned to fear, has learned the meaning of fear, has encountered empty space.
Translated from Hebrew by Miriam Schlusselberg.
Michal Na'aman is one of the most prominent Israeli painter of her generation and Professor of Art in "Ha-midrasha", one of the two main art colleges in Israel.