Place, Space, and Michal Govrin's Snapshots

Abstract

Place, space, chronotope have again become focus of interest after having been relegated to the status of background or setting in the heyday of classical narra tology1. In the framework of this resurgence, my paper is an attempt to draw atten tion to configuration that, to the best of my knowledge, has yet been discussed. Transposing the ambiguity, though the literal meaning, of the title of Irigaray's pathbreaking feminist book (This Sex Which Is Not One), I call this configuration a place which is one.2 My concern is with place that is both not one? i.e. unique but multiple, and not one, i.e. fully place, in sense that will emerge from the analysis. Place itself is provisional shorthand for an unorthodox combina tion of the three opening notions. My hypothesis is that a place which is one is basic structure (dare I say deep structure?) that can have different manifestations in different peri ods/genres/texts. I have been led to this hypothesis by my engagement with the re cent novel Snapshots by Israeli author Michal Govrin (2002; English translation 2007), narrative text that implicitly theorizes the relation between place and space. Snapshots both integrates and problematizes Jewish religious traditions, secular ideals of the early twentieth century settlers in Israel, present-day political views concerning issues of territory, and contemporary West European (mainly French) thinking about location.3 I shall first show how the work of Michel de Certeau sheds light on Govrin's conceptualizations of place. This will be followed by close analysis of ways in which the novel goes beyond de Certeau and other theorists by its concrete representations of the dual meaning of a place which is