Etgar Keret’s “Fluid Reality”
Image: Etgar Keret in 2016. Image by Stephan Röhl. CC BY-SA 2.0
Etgar Keret has said that his punchy style is inspired by his own asthma. Struggling to get out even a short sentence inspired a certain urgency that in turn became a word economy with powerful effect. I’m sure there was a lot more than just asthma that inspired his style — Keret began writing in response to a lost sense of personal identity during his mandatory military service — but it’s particularly poignant to consider the conversion of forced brevity into strength. It’s interesting that he chooses to use less words, rather than more, in the service of his most foundational themes: nuance and complexity. But, in a way, it makes sense. He states in an interview: “I loved the time when they would invite writers to interpret reality because it was so complex,” encapsulating his own perception of his purpose as a writer in his distinctively concise manner. There is something sharply incisive about this attitude. Equally incisive is his style. His sentences are short and informal, but in no way lacking. With each one he seems to be saying that the world is too complete in its complexity to be appreciated as it should be.
Keret simplifies just enough for us to begin to be confused, and no more. Here, art is working directly to engage and enrich life with a directness that is almost noble. He begins his anthology The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God with a short story of the same name and sets the tone. The subject matter is doubly simple and intellectual, his personal critique of utilitarianism: a bus driver who will not stop for anybody even a second late because the fifteen minutes he could be saving them are less than the thirty seconds wasted when multiplied across all of his passengers. It is both philosophical and accessible, performing the signpost function of informing the reader that these stories are thinking stories, made to be engaged with, mulled over, chewed a bit. Keret contrasts the efficiency of the bus driver’s logic with the heartbreak of a man’s need to get to a date with a beautiful girl, providing a familiar criticism of utilitarianism – its impracticality in matters of life and love – before flipping it again as the man is stood up. The reader is left without a conclusion but the point is made clearly: our assumptions and systems need questioning, especially in the face of reality. Keret uses this premise to force the reader to stare into the essence of the stories to come, and then abuses this focus by setting up similar philosophical-seeming premises without equally accessible ‘meaning’.
If you’re still in this headspace four short stories later then he’s got you. Keret’s Uterus is obscure and complex, using the impossible image of a ‘beautiful uterus’ to combine symbolic meanings without coherent release. The story is silly, confusing, and satisfyingly circular without ever really getting to a point. Keret’s ‘beautiful uterus’ is loaded with biological and cultural significance, without actual reference towards a distinct meaning. If you’re still trying to explore the philosophical underpinnings and their representations, as is implied you should be by The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God, you’ll be left befuddled. A uterus so beautiful it was displayed in a museum, rescued by eco terrorist-pirates and released into the wild amongst the dolphins? Good luck fitting that into your predetermined worldview, or any box you have on hand. As Keret says in an interview: “Ambiguity is a global taboo… We live in very very strange times where people want to control everything.” By encouraging you to analyse his work through a structured framework, Keret has set the pins up just to knock them down. He performs this narrative catch and release at both the macro and the micro level. In Goodman he begins by talking about the murder of an innocent minister and his wife. He has the narrator and his girlfriend receive the news and continues ‘Later, in bed, we were really getting into it when suddenly she started crying. I stopped right away, ‘cause I thought I was hurting her, but she said I should go on, and that her crying was a good sign actually.’ At first it seems as if she’s crying in response to the murder, but immediately this is shown not to be the case. Inclusion of details that are seemingly irrelevant raises the very question of relevance. The world is richer, but less linear. What do we consider essential? Does this presume some kind of underlying, necessary essence? It’s only after the fact that we can reassemble the pieces and align them into a neat little narrative in line with what we already know to be the case. Hindsight tells a story, but present facts are just that: facts. We trim the fa(c)t, choosing what we like in order to make sense of what is presented to us. Keret’s stories deny us this neatness. His worlds are, like the world that we deny, messy.
It’s no surprise that an Israeli author feels the need to express that “reality is very fluid”. Keret’s own life, as seen in his nuclear family, seems unable to decide on what world it lives in. His brother is an anti-state Anarchist peace activist and his sister is a settler in the West Bank. An interesting feature of having an entire country draft to the military after high school is that it breaks the school-university-job track that most people in the Western world are bound to unconsciously. Once the illusion of structure is gone it doesn’t come back, and the rigid frameworks of modern life feel like awkward suggestions. Many Israelis don’t start studying till their late twenties, but when, or moreso if they do, it’s because they want to, not because they ‘should’ (although, interestingly, Israel has one of the highest rates of college-aged citizens in the world).
Breaking the Pig, the story of Pesachson the porcelain pig, sets perspectives at ends. The next, Cocked and Locked, is a totally distinct yet similar inversion of place and perspective. Each story builds up and strips down interpretations of events as they progress, playing with the paradox of passed opportunity and reformed beliefs. Keret weaves complex nets of meaning that attach in a circular fashion to deny simple interpretation. Most end with a miniature reflection, considering or reconsidering the narrative. It’s the power of hindsight that allows us to contextualise our experiences, but this context is frequently what muddles us up. Some of Keret’s pieces take on a magical-realist tone, but many don’t. In both the realist and the magical we end with the same sense of perspective sliding uncertainty, unified in the conclusion that it’s not that simple. What’s funny is how we lack this sentiment day-to-day, in a world infinitely more complex than any vignette. Keret manages to shake our certainty by encouraging deep consideration of a carefully curated set of instances. In this way, his work mirrors a Zen Kōan — What is the sound of one hand clapping? Would it have been better if they’d not found Rabin the kitten?
When I started this piece I had the anti-government pro-democracy protests in mind (as did Keret in his interview), but at the time of writing Israel is at war. The subject matter is now somehow more relevant than before. Keret talks about cutting through rhetoric to understand the nature of the Judicial reform that he resents. Now there is far more rhetoric, and annals of history, to cut into. I’ve heard almost no informed opinions on the current conflict, but, nonetheless, many many opinions indeed. The biggest mistake that I’ve noticed repeatedly is one of selective perspective. A focus on the children’s ward in a Gazan hospital will embitter you to the nature of the situation entirely, and probably leave you cynical and hurting. Zoom out only a couple of kilometres and you’ll reach the homes of Israelis slaughtered without warning. A little further and you’ll encompass the West Bank, and 75 years of occupation. If you step even further back and look at the region you’ll see Israel against the backdrop of it’s neighbours, a shining light of democracy and semi-secularism in a war torn region rife with extremism at worst and state mandated religion at best. Abstract yourself in one direction and you can read oppressor oppressed dynamics into the Israel-Palestine relationship. Go back not much further and we see relationships inverted. You can consider thousands of years of Jewish history, of pogroms and genocide — in the Middle East and Europe — and yet still maintain a sense of light and hope. Layers of perspective, bitter like an onion, flip flop sympathy from side to side.
Etgar means challenge in Hebrew. His mum gave him his name after he was born three months early and wasn’t expected to live at all. It is a name of defiance, and seems to sum up a legacy that he inherited from her before passing it onto his readers. Discussing his latest work, he explains that his mum “rebelled against any attempt to sum her up.” It seems as though Keret too is rebelling against definition, not for himself, but for all of us. This doesn’t, however, result in a kind of abstract postmodern neo-nihilism. Instead, what links all of Keret’s stories is a human connection that persists across his best efforts to veil it: the recognition that it is perspective that both gives and takes meaning, but originates from within us. His work, then, reads as a celebration of complexity and stands isolated as a bastion against the binary worldview that has spread across academia, media, and modern mass consciousness.
If you haven’t had a chance, I strongly recommend you get a copy of The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God.
