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Ut Pictura Poesis: text, image, identity and ideology in Nathan Shaham's series

Nathan Shaham's novel, Series, is one of the most significant contemporary Israeli texts to explore the representation of cultural identity in general and of Jewish and Israeli identities in particular. The present article, which forms part of a larger analysis of poetic devices used in Hebrew literary texts to scrutinize issues of identity, discusses how Shaham employs text and image as devices to represent this investigation. Israeli writers are increasingly re-examining the national identity shaped for them by the founding Zionists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing in particular on their desire to construct a secular and revolutionary 'New Jew' in the context of a fresh (or refreshed) attachment to the ancestral homeland, and of a reversal and rejection of the diaspora. It is recognized that they created an inseparable link between ideology and identity of the kind condemned by Theodor Adorno, a Marxist of the Frankfurt School, on the grounds that these tend to equate distinct phenomena, suppress contradiction and 'homogenize' the world. Adorno saw the primal form of 'ideology' as 'identity' and recognized how it threatens to process social conflict out of existence in a 'totalitarian' way. Art alone speaks up for the differential and non-identical, promoting the claims of the sensuous particular against the tyranny of a seamless totality. Terry Eagleton has argued against this condemnation on the grounds that the ideological conditions of western societies are mixed and self-contradictory rather than totalitarian, but both his and Adorno's views confirm the closeness of the link between identity and ideology, a conjunction evident especially in Zionism. The debate over the desirability or otherwise of ideology is one of the central themes of Shaham's novel, Series. In this the author recounts the work of a television crew who, in 1991, at the height of the intifada? were engaged in planning a 10-programme documentary series for Israeli television. The omniscient narrator adopts the viewpoint of a different major character in each chapter. The principal protagonist, Adam Bauman, now aged 40, had been a famous film-maker in Poland, but had not made a film since he moved to the United States and later to Israel where he now lives. He chose as his cameraman Peter Kelner, an American aged nearly 50 and, as a researcher, Na'ama Sternberg, an Israeli-born woman in her 20s. All three are of Ashkenazi extraction, implicitly excluding the Oriental Jews who form roughly half of the population from this vision of contemporary Israeli society. Peter, inspired perhaps by American values, wants to depict ten exceptional characters (16); Adam, coloured by his Polish background, prefers 'unimportant' (17) or 'grey' ones. The narrator explains that 'he has a hidden ambition to succeed where others had failed. Any director can make an attractive film about big people. But only