Para ver os gnomos - close reading no romance 'O beijo de Esaú' por Meir Shalev

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to suggest a detailed analysis of the novel Esav (Esau) by the Israeli author Meir Shalev. The novel was published in 1991, and is essentially, a type of saga, which conveys the story of four generations of Jewish family starting from the first days of Zionist settlements in the land of Israel. Meir Shalev, who started writing in the late eighties, belongs to the postmodernist generation, and his writing shows influences of the tendencies of his time. Even so, we can still detect in his work, clear modernist trends, which are being manifested in a search for meaning and in portraying the complexity of life. The methodology of the detailed analysis of the novel relies on several theoretical sources: the first is 'close reading’, a term coined by Richards, one of the leaders of the new criticism school. The procedure of close reading focuses on the words on the page, in an attempt to discover and describe all the effects of their linguistic relations. Another methodological source is the famous essay of Roland Barthes and his assertion that the author is dead; the death of the author allows the birth of the reader, who can assume new authorities towards the text in front of him. Bakhtin’s ‘Dialogism’ provides another important theoretical basis. According to this theory, any verbal utterance provokes intertextual relations with many other utterances. Since the novel ‘Esav’ is rich with allusions and quotations from the Bible and Western literature, intertextuality is also an important interpretative tool. The analysis of the novel begins with an attempt to uncover the principles that organize its structure, which might appear to be a kind of collage or a quilt, made of different items that are attached together, without any distinct guideline. The novel presents a concept that historical events are actually repeating cycles. An attempt to understand the nature of time is another theme embedded in it. The novel also deals with human relationships and man’s attitude to earth and nature, elements that receive a mythological design in the novel. These themes are also connected to the question of Zionist ideology and its impact on the social stratification of the early generations of pioneering settlement. More themes derive from the analysis of the role of the biblical infrastructure of the novel, especially the stories about the relationship and the fate of the twins Jacob and Esau.