Space and Time in Israeli Representations of the 1982 Israel-Lebanon War - TINNITUS, WALTZ WITH BASHIR and THE SALT LINE

• In Event: Spaces, Places, and Memory in Israeli Fiction

Abstract

From the beginning, the 1982 Israel-Lebanon War was viewed as a 'war of choice': a political tool, not a defensive war. Three weeks into the war, the soldiers and their parents' voices of protest began to be heard, which grew louder after a series of events in September 1982. As a result of social and political changes caused by this war, such as questioning the boundaries between the home front and the war front and protest movements, Hebrew literature and culture's ideological disciplining mechanisms also changed. It was relatively not long after the war that books and films on the war began to be published, both by those who personally participated in the war and by those who remained at home and watched in pain and anxiety.
The works that will be examined in the lecture are much later: Emmanuel Pinto’s TINNITUS (2007), Ari Folman’s WALTZ WITH BASHIR (2008), and Youval Shimoni’s THE SALT LINE (2014), which was published after more than ten years work and after it was preceded by the book A ROOM (1999) which refers to the war implicitly. These three artists were regular soldiers or reservists during the war, and their works express the fact that today it is taken for granted that traumatic memories have their own rhythm––those who have experienced trauma cannot be rushed to tell their stories and certainly cannot be expected to present the story clearly. There has been much written about trauma writing, its delayed time, and its perforated nature. The innovation I intend to show in this lecture is the exploration of space: the heroes of the works to be discussed embark on a journey not only in time but also in space. Pinto and Shimoni's protagonists chose to leave Israel, to escape the geographical space where the war took place. They traveled to Paris or India's deserts, landscapes far away and very different from Lebanon's, but discovered that the physical distance that opened up did not dull the mental distance from those spaces. While Folman doesn't leave Israel, he travels throughout the country and to other countries to meet friends who have left and thus to recover the blurred memories. In the lecture, I would like to bring back into the metaphorical discourse of trauma mental spaces, the geographical, real spaces where the trauma took place. In addition, I will examine how the time between the dates of the events represented and the date of publication affected the design of the events, and I will highlight the possibilities these works open up for writing about the war in Hebrew literature.

Author

• Vered Shimshi, Ben-Gurion Univesity and Tel Aviv University