Work and idleness in Hanokh Bartov’s prose

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper addresses representations of idleness in the fiction of Hanokh Bartov while describing the historical privatization process that Israel went through as its idea of freedom radically changed. Following recent Marxist critiques of modern Hebrew literature, it shows that in Bartov’s prose, idleness functions as the image of unattainable freedom – an image that changes as Israel moves on from the statist decades of the 1950s to the neoliberal era beginning around the 1980s. Accordingly, the article demonstrates how the image of idleness reveals contradictions inhabiting each era’s ideological structure. It does so by engaging “idleness” not as ahistorical and abject nonwork, but as an ahistorical, ideological concept that both derives from social relations and reflects them. Starting with Sesh knafayim le-ehad [Each Had Six Wings] (1954), this article will show how the Israeli prose of each period of time dealt with the disappearance of a utopic imagination of freedom in favor of the project of a heteronomous political making of capitalist forms of production. Here, Idleness functions as the image of the inevitable future of capitalism without a national project. Moving onto the almost unexplored “Tikuney Itzhak” [Isaac’s Corrections] (1980), the article will explore the culmination of this process and the total privatization and moralization of the once-political Zionist subject.