Gnessin’s Loose Attachments: Affective Inconvenience and Hebrew Modernity

• In Event: Inconvenient Gnessin: Languages of Subjectivity and Death (Hebrew)

Abstract

A feeling of lingering inconvenience often accompanies the reading of Uri Nissan Gnessin’s fiction: not only on the level of form, where his sophisticated yet opaque style has long been regarded as the epitome of Hebrew high modernism, but also on that of content, as an affective lived experience that saturates the world of his protagonists and minor characters. Taking such sensations as its point of departure, this paper forms part of an ongoing project that explores the ways in which different strands of contemporary affect theory can allow for new readings in Hebrew literary traditions. It proposes to mobilize the philosophical notion of the “inconvenience of other people,” as developed by the late Lauren Berlant, in order to conceptualize alternative modes of intersubjective relationality—and ultimately of being in the world—in and through Gnessin’s oeuvre.
Between the dramatic Sartrean proclamation “Hell is other people” and the sweeping psychoanalytic perception of other people as doubles and projections of the self, the conception of others as mere “inconveniences” attunes our critical attention to the fabric of ordinary life—what Berlant describes as “the affective sense of the familiar friction of being in relation.” Echoing and historicizing this theoretical insight, I argue that Gnessin’s fiction—which has been traditionally read mainly through existentialist and psychological frameworks—is revealed at its most innovative when considered as written in the genre of “affective realism.” My paper shows how Gnessin’s celebrated four novellas (“Sideways,” “Meanwhile,” “The Time Before,” “Beside”) are imbued with a new type of modernist, non-dramatic sensitivity to “experiences of everyday aversion, adjustment, minor resistance, and exhaustion… the force that makes one shift a little while processing the world” (Berlant). By briefly demonstrating how this sensitivity also plays out in the works of Gnessin’s contemporaries Shofman and Brenner, my paper ultimately proposes a new account of the rise of Hebrew modernity out of the spirit of affective inconvenience.

Author

• Eyal Bassan, University of Haifa