The Treason of the Poets: Piyyut’s Revival and Lyric Poetry’s Decline in Shimon Adaf’s 26th-Century Novel KFOR

• In Event: Speculative Fiction of Twenty-First-Century Israel

Abstract

In a recent interview, while explaining his reluctance to publish new poetry volumes, writer Shimon Adaf declared:

“The form of lyric poetry presents me with a problem. […] Poetry has returned almost completely to its primordial and ancient state in which it is nothing but unmitigated outbursts of emotion, experience, and self-expression. I also think that the “I” of contemporary poetry is too firm. In prose you can find a larger expanse of experimentality that can interrogate the “I” more critically.”

In this paper, I explore Adaf’s views on form and selfhood through his 2010 novel Kfor. This novel is set (mostly) in the far-off future of 26th-century Earth that has long since been ruined by global warming. In this world, the true reason for climate change is the proliferation of bad modern Hebrew poetry. Therefore, in the futuristic theodicy of the city-state Tel-Aviv, only licensed paytanim are allowed to create poetry — until one day a wild poet, who is a doppelgänger of the novel’s narrator, Doron Aflalo, who himself is a doppelgänger of Shimon Adaf, appears on the streets of the city, reciting poems to only then be murdered.

Throughout the novel, Adaf weaves together post-apocalyptic science-fiction, murder mystery, a star-crossed love story, as well as Aflalo’s fictionalized memoir. This paper traces Adaf’s generic SHATNEZ, examining it within the context of lyric theory and the Mizrahi Piyyut revival movement. As I show, Adaf’s genre-skipping and mirror-plays draw out an unstable and surprising notion of his selfhood, one in which, to quote Adorno on lyric poetry “no false universality, that is, nothing profoundly particular, continues to fetter what is other than itself.” At the same time, the Piyyut of the novel brings in the politics of social capital and Mizrahi identity in Israel, contrasting lyric universality with the particularism underlining Piyyut genre conventions and Mizrahi politics. This talk lays out how Adaf builds the tension between prose, lyric poetry, and piyyut, and how it instructs us to think of new ways of writing experimentally in Hebrew.

Author

• Oren Yirmiya, University of California, Berkeley