Linguistic Drama and the Voice of the Child in Bialik's Aftergrowth

Abstract

LINGUISTIC DRAMA AND THE VOICE OF THE CHILD IN BIALIK'S AFTERGROWTH Naomi Sokoloff University of Washington I Bialik's late essay, '~'~:l "0';" "?'l [Revealment and Concealment in Language]" (1915), has been read as a kind of ars poetica and a key to the writer's poetic oeuvre.1 A concern with words as camouflage or disguise, voiced in "1'11Z)?:l ''10';'' "?'l" figures importantly in much of Bialik's lyric production. Many of his works echo, reinforce, or modify the essay's central contention that conventional language is but the husk of meaning. External and shallow, such language is easily disassociated from the matters of spiritual significance to which its words may refer. In this scheme of things poetry serves to break open the bonds of conventional language and so rediscover meaning by uncovering perceptions previously masked or blocked by stale formulations. This prospect is seen by Bialik as at once beckoning and frightening, for it allows truths both beautiful and terrifying to emerge to consciousness even as it provides new access to deeper recesses of the individual's being. The ideas articulated in '~'IIZ)?:l ''10';'' ',?r" affirm a modernist understanding of the fundamentally non-mimetic nature of language and the consequent distrust of language that this understanding has engendered. Given Bialik's concern with the irreparable rift between world and word, the impact of modernism on this poet's thinking should not be underestimated .2 While often heralded as twentieth-century inventions, however, these concerns also hark back to the Romanticism with which Bialik's name is so firmly linked. The impenetrable subjectivity of ideas is a fundamental 1The essay appears in P'''''':! lCl"ll c"n ':1nj .,;:, (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1953), pp. 191-193. An English translation by lacob Sloan appears in Alter 1975:127-137. Luz (1984) examines at length the notion of "10';:" ""'l as a generating force in Bialik's poetry. 2 Bialik's grasp of these matters was strengthened by his familiarity with Russian symbolism and exposure to non-literary writing. He followed the work, for instance, of Potebniah, a linguist in the philosophical psychological vein whose disciples included Victor Shklovsky of the Russian Formalists. For discussion, see Luz (1984:157-158). Modernism was not the prime source of Bialik's creativity, but the modernist distinction between signifiers and signifieds, sound and sense, found a responsive chord within the Hebrew poet. Bar Yosef calls for greater recognition of the impact modernism had on Bialik and other Hebrew writers of his generation (1990:38-46; 1987:301-305). Hebrew Studies 32 (1991) 20 Sokoloff: Linguistic Drama postulate of Romantic aesthetics (Aarsleff 1982:27). "The sad incompetence of human speech" to which Wordsworth referred in his "Prelude" is a concept close to Bialik's heart) This is a concept, too, that reverberates throughout Bialik's A/tergrowth (n'!le), a piece of prose fiction written in installments between 1908 and 1923. In this narrative, strained relations between language and individual experience receive sustained thematic treatment. Indeed, the topic attains a new intensity and crystallized focus as it coincides with Bialik's central interest in childhood. Linguistic drama fmds a natural stage in this story of semiotic initiation as the plot follows a small Eastern European boy's first encounters with language, his discovery of reading, and his exposure to sacred texts at the beder. The gap between the sayable and the unsayable generates the narrated events of A/tergrowth. It also fundamentally affects the narration itself. The various artistic approaches taken by the author in this account of boyhood all center on a mature narrator who reminisces about the past but can never recover it satisfactorily in words. In this way the text underscores one of the most problematic aspects of retrospective self-narration. The present verbal act can never recapture the non-verbal reality of past experience . Aftergrowth accentuates this problem for it begins with a child character defined as an infant in the etymological sense of the word, meaning "one without language." Dealing with a pre-linguistic phase of life, this text delineates the radical difficulty of inhabiting the perspective of the child, that is, of describing in words the...