The Utopian Dystopia: Igal Mossinsohn’s, THE WAY OF A MAN, and the allegoric icon of the Kibbutz in the 1950s

• In Event: History and Politics in Modern Hebrew Fiction

Abstract

The foundation of the State of Israel was a moment of crisis for the kibbutz. The establishment of formal state apparatuses, Israel’s pro-Western orientation, and the 1948 war and the refugees it created, all obligated the kibbutz to cope with deep changes and difficult conflicts. From its inception, the State marginalized the kibbutz, and forced it to adjust to new international and regional conditions. The kibbutz, I argue, understood itself in theo-political terms: it saw its daily life, its everyday existence, as fulfilling the Zionist-Socialist meta-historical narrative of repair and salvation. This self-perception was radically undermined by the State in which it now found itself. This crisis, however, is seemingly absent in the kibbutz literature of the time, which represented the kibbutz as a static icon: conventional, predictable, sacred, and compulsively repeating itself. Kibbutz literature replicated the themes and patterns of representation of the pre-State era. This was though, I argue, precisely the acting-out of the kibbutz’s cultural-trauma: an expression of its inability to absorb the rift, and its lack of conceptual language to respond to it.

In my paper, I will elaborate this claim while focusing on and contextualizing a paradigmatic example of such kibbutz iconization: Igal Mossinsohn’s 1953 kibbutz-novel THE WAY OF A MAN. The reception of the novel, because of its critical representation of kibbutz-life, was one of extreme anger and condemnation. However, I will show that, in fact, the novel elicits the kibbutz-utopia, by drawing-out its absence, re-approving the traditional perception of the kibbutz, and preserving its core-image and its political-theology. Detached from time, the kibbutz is presented as a symbol of a-historic, metaphysical essence. Reading the novel inside history, I will re-conceptualize the kibbutz as an allegoric figure, an object of fetishism of the pre-traumatic past. The allegoric icon of the kibbutz – not Mossinsohn’s dystopian image – bore, I maintain, the actual danger for the kibbutz, since its own ejection from history neutralized its political potential.

author

• Lior Libman, University College London