Rhyming Life and Death Read Free Page B

the wall to the rightof the dais. Katznelson looks crafty but kindly, as though he has just pulled off a coup by devious means known only to himself. For now he is a king. A lord, even. And so, belatedly, the Author smiles that faint smile the audience has been waiting for since the cultural commissar’s opening speech.
    At that moment the Author has a feeling that somebody, somewhere in the furthest recesses of the hall, has sniggered offensively. He scans the hall: nothing. There’s no one who looks as though he has just laughed. His ears must have deceived him. So he rests his elbows on the table and his chin on his fists, and affects a modest, faraway look while the literary critic, his freckled bald pate sparkling under the ceiling lights, stands and stridently draws comparisons and parallels between the Author’s latest book and works by various contemporaries and writers of previous generations, tracing influences, identifying sources of inspiration, revealing hidden textures, indicating various levels and planes, pointing up unexpected connections, plunging to the lowest depths of the story, digging and burrowing in the ocean floor, then rising breathlessly to the surface to display to the world the treasures he has managed to bring up with him, thendiving once more and rising to the surface again to disclose concealed messages, to reveal the ploys and devices the Author has used, such as the strategy of the double negative, the snares and delusions he has concealed in the lower layers of his plot, and then on to the problem of credibility and reliability, which raises the fundamental question of narrative authority, and, in turn, the dimension of social irony and the elusive boundary between this and self-irony, which brings us to questions about the limits of legitimacy, the classification of conventions, the intertextual context, from where it is but a short step to the formalist aspects, the pseudo-archaic aspects, and the contemporary political aspects. Are these various latent aspects legitimate? Are they even coherent? Are they synchronic or diachronic? Disharmonic or polyphonic? Eventually the critic weighs anchor and sails away boldly onto the open seas of wide-ranging meanings, but not before impressing his listeners with a nimble detour around the fundamental question, what is the actual meaning of the term ‘meaning’ in relation to artistic creation in general and literary creation in particular, and of course in relation to the work we are considering this evening?
    In vain.
    By this time the Author is totally immersed in his usual tricks. Resting the palms of his hands on his temples (a gesture learned from his father, a minor diplomat), he stops listening and starts looking around the hall, to steal an embittered expression here, a lascivious one there, or a miserable one, to catch a pair of legs just as they uncross and are about to cross themselves again, to seize a mop of unruly white hair, or a passionately expectant face, to spot a rivulet of perspiration running down deep into the crack between a pair of breasts. Over there, in the distance, next to the emergency exit, he can make out a pale, narrow, intelligent-looking face, like that of a student who has dropped out of a yeshiva and become, let us say, an enemy of the established social order. And here, in the third row, a suntanned girl with nice breasts, in a sleeveless green top, is absent-mindedly stroking her shoulder with her long fingers.
    It is as though he were picking their pockets while the audience is immersed in the byways of his writing with the literary expert as their guide.
    *
    In the front, over there, a broad-faced, heavily built woman is sitting with her vein-lined legs wide apart, she has long ago abandoned any attempt at dieting, beauty is a delusion after all, she has given up caring about her appearance and determined to ascend to higher spheres. She does not take her eyes off the speaker, the literary