Death in Quotation Marks

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

Abstract

In Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” the deceased is described as having “screamed incessantly, not for minutes but for hours. For the last three days he screamed incessantly.” In Tolstoy’s magnum opus “War and Peace,” prince Andrei’s death following his injury during the 1812 war is portrayed as a moment of blissful spiritual awakening. In both texts, death features as a meaningful event bearing thematic significance. Although Tolstoy’s attempts to focus in both texts on the process of dying, its duration is relatively short. But what happens when death ceases to be an event and becomes a mode of being? Gnessin’s writing, I argue, explores death and dying, giving it a unique stylistic expression. My talk will focus on Gnessin’s last novella “Etsel” (“By”) written shortly before its author’s premature death in 1913. As critics have already noted, the text is suffused with death. My reading, however, will look at Gnessin’s stylistics as an experimental attempt to describe an epistemology of death and of dying.
While death belongs to the realm of the unknowable, Gnessin gives narrative form to a process I wish to call disintegration, whereby plot, characters, landscape and perception become increasingly disrupted. Instead of cohesive structures, the text foregrounds a plethora of fragments of sights, sounds and movements, thereby pulverizing the represented world. The radical disintegration foregrounded in “Etsel” is read as Gnessin’s attempt to give expression to dying as a lived experience.

Author

• Michael Gluzman, Tel Aviv University and Yad-Yitzhak Ben-Zvi