The Drama of Narration: Y. H. Brenner'sIn Winter

Abstract

In her book,Transparent Minds, Dorrit Cohn reminds us that one of the special powers of fiction lies in its ability to reveal the normally hidden inner life of people other than ourselves. Writers of fiction can, if it fits their purposes, place before our scrutiny the most intimate and private thoughts, feelings, motives, fears, and passions of their imagined characters, and can do so with a variety of techniques which, especially in twentieth-century fiction, take account of the complex, overdetermined, and largely unconscious processes of the human psyche. In modern Hebrew literature, no novelist has exploited this aspect of fiction with more passion and technical inventiveness than Y. H. Brenner. From the very outset of his career, Brenner's ability to make transparent the minds of his characters drew special attention and praise. Responding to his first collection of short stories, M. Y. Berdyczewski, for example, marveled that Brenner's characters had only to speak and they “stand before us naked, revealing all that is within.” And even Bialik, who was troubled by Brenner's fiction on other grounds, had to admit his impatience with literary theories when, as he put it, he was able to “see a living soul.”