Authors and Women as Antiheroes in Aharon Megged's Later Works

In his latest novel, Persephone Zokheret, ¹ Aharon Megged returns to his much traveled road of the authorial spoof, or the placing of the writer at the center of a parodic novel in which an author, artist, or intellectual is a principal antiheroic character. An antihero, generally speaking, is an unconventional or unexpected central protagonist who displays prominent weaknesses or flaws. Regarding Megged's works, the term antihero can be defined in one of two ways: First of all, he is "the small man," such as the author Jonas in Ha-Hai 'al ha-Met (1965), ² who lives in the shadow of a great heroic figure. Jonas is dwarfed, haunted, and ultimately consumed by his obsession with a legendary Zionist hero, Davidov. Another example of the subsidiary literary personality is Evyatar Levitin, a selflessly loyal, but envious and resentful literary editor for an acclaimed author, Yosef Richter, in Mahberot Evyatar (1973). ³ And yet another "small man" is the sabra historian, Arbel, in Foigelman (1987), ⁴ who sets out to salvage Yiddish culture, as it were, by having the work of the Yiddish poet, Shmuel Foigelman, translated into Hebrew.

Most recently, in Persephone Zokheret, the daughter, Avivit, is a rather ordinary schoolteacher who lives in the shadow of her distinguished mother, the poet Gavriella Gat. Mother Gavriella unwittingly torments and exasperates her daughter in an oblique evocation of the mother-daughter dynamic of the Greek myth of the Earth Mother Goddess, Demeter, and her daughter, Persephone, the goddess of the springtime. ⁵ Mother Gavriella, in turn, experiences what she perceives as ungenerous, unfair, demanding, and "tyrannical" recriminations from her daughter. ⁶ Additional markers of the daughter Avivit as a literary antihero of the "small man" type are her longings to be a creative writer like her mother, to be loved and accepted by her mother, and also her identification with diminutive heroes in literature, such as those of Y. L. Peretz and Flaubert's "A Simple Soul." ⁷

The latter short story is the subject of one important chapter in Victor Brombert's acclaimed study In Praise of Antiheroes. ⁸ Brombert's work has served as an inspiration and a direction finder for me in this paper, as indeed have Megged's own intermittent provocative definitions of the antihero, most particularly in his excellent article of 1966, "Six Characters in Search of a Way Out." ⁹ I should hasten to point out that I will not be dealing here directly with the "schlemiel" ¹⁰ subcategory of the antihero, for all the importance of this at least partially comic, or Chaplinesque, type in the early Megged of Hedvah va-Ani (1953) and Miqreh ha-Kesil (1959); then subsequently, with less humor, in 'Asa'el (1978) ¹¹; and finally, in Ga'agu'im le-Olga (1994). ¹² In the latter novel, the highly eccentric and unremarkable protagonist, Albert Giron, is indeed a would-be writer, and at the same time, by his own definition (because he is a faceless, computer-using, clerk) he is a "shum-ish," a nonperson, ¹³ a border-line schlemiel. Except for some general remarks in our "Afterword and Overview," we will leave this subcategory for another paper; as background, however, the "schlemiel" should be kept in mind.

Secondly, in addition to the "small man," the diminutive and undistinguished literary bystander, a second important paradigm of the antihero for the student of Megged is the great hero himself or herself, who is revealed to have feet of clay. Most frequently in Megged's literary universe, an author serves as this great figure, the one who turns out to be a negative hero, and who challenges our assumptions of perfection. By virtue of this very imperfection in greatness, however, these protagonists express the tragedy of the human condition; imperfection renders the negative hero believable, and, at least occasionally, deserving of our sympathy. Megged has asserted on many occasions that even the most gifted literary...