The Tale of Darkness in Amos Oz's Literary Work
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Abstract
In this article, I present an analysis of Amos Oz's writings, from his early collection of stories, Where the Jackals Howl (1965) to his autofictional novel A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002). Throughout the tumultuous first five decades of Israel's Independence, Oz's oeuvre consistently expressed an implicit tale of darkness. Darkness is the key figure of the national abyss in Oz's literature. As a political category, Oz's interpretation of darkness bears the traces of postcolonial literature, where darkness is a root metaphor; as a poetic principle, darkness holds the unsaid within the literary text. Marking the unsaid, darkness turns to be a recall for depth hermeneutics, as it acknowledges “the hidden” as a core category of meaning in national literatures.
Contributor Notes
LILAH NETHANEL is a senior lecturer at the department of Hebrew literature, Bar-Ilan University. Among her recent publications: The novel Works and Days (Afik, 2022); Hebräische Schreibkultur in Europa: Zalman Schneurs verschollene Briefe (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021); Shneour, from Life and Death: A Literary Study (Mosad Bialik, 2019). E-mail: lil.nethanel@gmail.com