Reading Dual Progression:: A View from The Hilltop

At a time when reading practices—close, distant, reductive, surface, suspicious, symptomatic—have been a subject of intense scholarly conversation, Dan Shen's concept of "covert progression" offers a resonant narratological brief for deep diving. In this response to Professor Shen's essay, I will explore one Israeli novel, Assaf Gavron's The Hilltop (ha-Giv'ah) through the lens of covert progression and, conversely, explore covert progression through The Hilltop's lens. I cannot, of course, do justice in 2,000 words to either the essay or the novel, but I hope that in conjoining them, I can demonstrate the benefits of reading (through) dual progression and offer a couple of friendly amendments to Professor Shen's postulates. Most centrally, I hope (1) to suggest the value of thinking in terms of dual progression rather than relying on an overt–covert opposition; (2) to shift attention from authors to readers; and, in so doing, (3) to argue for both the accessibility and the relativity of what gets deemed covert.

Gavron's novel tracks the origin and probable fate of an illegal West Bank outpost that broke away from a larger "legal" one by turning an open field into a circle of trailer homes called Ma'aleh Hermesh C.¹ The novel's chief character is arguably the outpost itself, with variable focalization illuminating the histories, desires, sorrows, struggles, and interactions of the settlers: several families, some lone individuals, a couple of soldiers, and especially two brothers, Gabi and Roni, whose backstories carry most of the analeptic load. More tangentially, the novel traces wary relations between the settlers and the Palestinian residents of nearby Kharmish, relations that take brief center stage when Roni tries to enter an olive-oil export business with the local producer Musa. In the book's farcical and chaotic concluding scene, costumed Purim revelers from the outpost descend upon Palestinian villagers who take them for rioters—which they eventually become—and the government-ordered bulldozing is interrupted by a rare and sudden snowstorm. An epilogue deploying the future tense predicts that because "no one will have the time to deal with a small, insignificant outpost" [leaf ekhad lo yihyeh zman laasok b'maakhaz katan v'lo khashuv] the illegal settlement will prevail (445, 427).

That is the plot in a nutshell, but what of the more complex notion of the novel's progression? While The Hilltop has been acclaimed for its humanizing portrayal of settlers, it is also usually read as a biting critique of the settlement enterprise itself. Reza Aslan calls the novel "wry and satirical," Ruth Margalit "coruscating," Adam Kirsch "a cutting satire." Amos Oz names it "a poke to the eye," and Nathan Englander declares Gavron to be one of today's "truly committed, political Israeli novelists."² The Hilltop's narrator certainly affirms that the rogue settlement has no right to exist: "in any normal country, the outpost would have been dismantled and they would have been thrown in jail" [bekhol medina metukenet hayu mefarkim et ha-yishuv vezorkim otam lakele] (266, 256). A compelling essay by Yaakov Herskovitz takes the critique a step further, arguing that in linking the settlement project with the kibbutz movement of the previous century, The Hilltop deconstructs not only the settlers' mentality but Zionist ideology tout court.

But not all readings position The Hilltop as political critique. Ian Sansom is not alone in concluding that the novel ultimately "mak[es] light of the politics and the plight of the Palestinians," and we might note that only one Palestinian character is listed in the novel's cast of thirty characters. In a 2019 essay focused on narratives of the Occupation, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan and I argue that The Hilltop's critique of settlements is formally mitigated by a blend of frequent flashback and multiple focalization, both of which create sympathetic investments in the lives of the settlers and especially of Gabi and Roni Kuper, the orphaned kibbutzniks whose histories are told without sentimentality but with extensive detail.

Reading The Hilltop through the rubric of dual progression enables me to...