Portrait of the Artist as an Aging Scholar: A. B. Yehoshua's The Liberating Bride

In The Liberated Bride, A. B. Yehoshua thematizes the quest for truth and explores its implications in the life and work of the artist. This aspect of the novel may well be the closest Yehoshua has ever come to articulating his own artistic credo. It is explored through the conflict between the novel's protagonist, Yohanan Rivlin, an aging political scientist, and his wife, Hagit. The apparent cause of the conflict between Rivlin and Hagit is their disagreement about the appropriate reaction to their son's emotionally arrested situation in the aftermath of his unexplained divorce from his wife, Galya. But underlying this specific difference of opinion is a more profound clash of contradictory convictions. Rivlin believes that knowing the cause of the failure of that marriage is the key to liberating his son from its stultifying effects. He becomes obsessed with discovering the truth that the son, Ofer, is hiding. He is willing to transgress against honesty and loyalty, as well as against the prerogatives of personal boundaries, in order to pursue what he believes to be a necessary truth. Hagit, on the other hand, argues that personal boundaries must be respected and she, like Ofer, repeatedly admonishes Rivlin for his willingness to violate these boundaries. But Rivlin persists in this transgressive pursuit despite being aware that this may cost him the trust of his wife and the love of his son.

In addition to plumbing the psychological underpinnings of Rivlin's choice, The Liberated Bride makes the exploration of the moral viability of this choice one of its central thematic concerns. Rivlin's insistence on truth draws on sources deeper than the intellectual honesty required of a scholar. It is portrayed as being akin to the all-consuming passion that inhabits many literary artists and drives them to defy the constraints of convention and to often sacrifice personal relations. Ultimately, Rivlin is able to bring about the transformation that will liberate his son. He accomplishes this by acting on the conviction that there are circumstances where the conventions of circumspect personal relations obstruct the apprehension of hidden truths that generate the more intractable problems of the individual, as well as the communal, psyche. Like the novelist who has created him, Rivlin believes that such problems cannot be resolved until these hidden causes are disclosed, and that in order to uncover these causes one must find the courage to violate norms and transgress boundaries that are barring access to them. As orchestrated by Yehoshua, the outcome of Rivlin's pursuit constitutes a vindication of this conviction.