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CHAPTER 1 Ahad Ha-Am and the Essay: The Vicissitudes of Reason ALAN MINTZ When the history of the Hebrew essay is eventually written, we shall likely come to a better understanding of Ahad Ha-Am's achievement . As a literary innovator, he combined the imaginative freedom of the Russian-Hebrew feuilleton with the polemical earnestness of the programmatic article-a mode developed by Moses Leib Lilienblum and Peretz Smolenskin-and under the influence of such Western masters as Montaigne and Emerson, fashioned what became the norm for the classic Hebrew essay in the high style. As a norm that perhaps Ahad Ha-Am alone was able to realize, this classic form exerted a harsh authority over subsequent Hebrew writing-the shadow of Milton in English poetry comes to mind-such that those who imitated him were doomed to be derivative and those who sought to avoid that fate had to evade the austerities of the high essay form. Add to these inhibiting factors the ascendancy, closer to our own times, of more "scientific" modes of writing about literature, philosophy, and society, and it is clear why essays of the sort Ahad Ha-Am wrote, have by and large dropped from sight. My purpose is neither to proceed with a history of the Hebrew essay nor even to offer a full accounting of Ahad Ha-Am's transactions with that form. I limit my discussion to the essays written in the early 1890s, which were included in the first edition (1895) of Al parashat derakhim (At the Crossroads); and among these I exclude the overtly political essays. What we are left with is about a dozen essays, the best known and most frequently anthologized and, I believe, the most influential. They include "Heshbon ha-nefesh" 3 ALAN MINTZ (Reckoning of the soul); "Le-toledot ha-hiyyuv ve-ha-shelilah" (On the history of affirmation and negation); "Mukdam u-me'uhar bahayyim " (Early and late in life); "Avar ve-atid" (Past and future); "Shetei reshuyot" (Two domains); "Hikkui ve-hitbolelut" (Imitation and assimilation); "'Kohen ve-navi" (Priest and prophet) and others. These pieces, I shall argue, evince a remarkable kinship in the structures of consciousness and argument that lie beneath the surface of their changing themes and subjects. As a way of understanding what Ahad Ha-Am was about in these essays and the powerful norm they subsequently established, I will attempt a description of these structures. Before doing so, I am obliged to define some terms. This is not easy. We all know an essay when we see one; yet if we were required to supply a definition of the form, we would likely appear either evasive or simpleminded. Like the poem, the essay is protean and virtually unregulated. Without undertaking the larger task of definition then, I wish to isolate two general properties of the essay that bear on the particular case of Ahad Ha-Am. These two properties I call totality and authority. By totality I mean a quality that signifies the opposite of a fragment. In an essay a writer "takes on" a subject that is large and consequential; he assumes the responsibility for a conclusive statement on the subject, so that when the reader finishes the essay, he feels that the last word on the subject has been spoken, that what needs to be said has indeed been said. The dynamics of the reading process involve this expectation on the reader's part, regarding the successful production of totality. The essay is a gamble, literally an essai (an attempt) in which the stakes rise in proportion to the ambitiousnl~ss of the subject and in which the chief drama lies in whether the player, having broached great issues, will or will not succeed in bringing them to closure. The second relevant property of the essay is authority or personal voice. Voice and authority come into play because in the essay conventional ways of validating statements -logical proofs, documentation, quotations from authorities, historical precedents, statistics-are, by and large, suspended. The essayist is allowed to go about building his argument by laying out his assumptions as truths; our willingness to assent to the argument depends, in the absence of conventional means of validation, on the authority of the writer and the ability of his voice to win our trust. Authority is linked to voice because the essay, unlike narrative, disallows the manipulation of personae; the essay depends on the absolute identificaltion of the voice of the discourse...

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