Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past by Amir Eshel (review)

Already embedded in the title of Amir Eshel’s compelling book is the paradox that drives the study as a whole. Futurity, as Eshel defines it, mobilizes the past. It does so not to reach an unattainable resolution or redemption but rather as a vehicle for a potentially better future. Neither futurism nor utopia, futurity refers to a reconceptualization of history that prompts us to act in the present in order to establish the conditions for our future.

In his introduction, Eshel draws from a wide but well-reasoned spectrum of theoretical concepts, offering a thorough analytical foundation for the close readings that follow in subsequent chapters. The most notable ones are Richard Rorty’s Neopragmatism and Hannah Arendt’s ideas about human agency and poetic language generally and her concept of natality—“the fundamental human capacity to ‘insert’ oneself into the world”—specifically (p. 18). These concepts help to illustrate the centrality of human agency and responsibility within futurity. Michael Oakeshott’s “practical past” and Michael Rothberg’s multidirectional memory, among others, also play a role in the complex and fruitful theoretical framework Eshel constructs for engaging with history through literature.

Futurity as a mode of analysis and reading “shocks” readers out of fossilized interpretive formulas and into a new way of expressing and thinking about history, enabling us to reflect on our own agency (p. 72). As such, futurity is pragmatic in prompting us to act; it is dynamic in its resistance to a static engagement with the past; it is hopeful and even optimistic in its faith in humanity and in the power of literature to effect change—not in service of grand ideologies but rather in order to overcome the catastrophes enacted in their name and thereby to imagine a more humane future. In effect, Eshel asks us to consider both history and memory beyond the standard binaries to which they are subjected (the capacity/inability to face a difficult past; memory/forgetting), suggesting instead that they are significant because of their potential for instigating human action.

The bulk of Futurity is devoted to attentive textual analyses that illustrate the importance of futurity as a methodology of reading and criticism. Part 1 investigates German literature’s attempt to come to terms with the German role in the Holocaust. It traces the changing German literary conceptualization of history from a retrospective one that treated the Nazi past as a burden to a prospective one that understands it as a force. “The literary imagination in Germany and elsewhere,” writes Eshel, “does something more significant than display the tension between remembrance and forgetting: it creates new ways of apprehending the world and thereby presents the possibility for new paths into the future” (p. 32). Eshel proposes that works invoking the German past are useful not only in that they allow a reflection on trauma, but also because they actually present new possibilities for engaging with the past and prompt a consideration of the possible future.

Part 2 examines the representation by Hebrew literature of Palestinian flight and expulsion, focusing on canonical texts by S. Yizhar, A. B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, and Amos Oz, and also engaging with more recent works by Yitzhak Laor, Daniella Carmi, Eshkol Nevo, Alon Hilu, and Michal Govrin. One of the most important ideas to emerge from this analysis is the notion that the integration of the traumatic memories of Israeli Jews and of Palestinians—memories conventionally understood to be mutually exclusive—potentially can produce a new beginning, a future based on sharing literary and geographic territory (p. 147). The juxtaposition of German and Hebrew literature and the traumatic events portrayed therein is both jarring and appropriate: jarring because it suggests certain similarities in the questions the book raises regarding historical responsibility and guilt, and appropriate because of the ironic repositioning of the Jewish element in the calculus of power.

The third and final part, “Futurity and Action,” engages with an additional...