132
PARTISAN REVIEW
memorably demonstrated in
Mimesis,
presents an externalized narrative
in which very little is given to us of inner thoughts and feelings.
It
is left
to the interpreters and storytellers that follow to fill in what is left to the
imagination. And this is precisely what Yehoshua does in a manner that
combines novelistic imagination and Talmudic
pilpul.
Interiority
(Yehoshua's addition to the story) enables him to transform the idea of
nomadic judgment from an external wandering to a psychological expe–
rience of guilt and emotional volatility. Cain's life in the city is psycho–
logically unstable. The effect, or at least the ambition, of the
interpretation is then to solve the puzzles of the story in order to justify
God's ways.
Even more challenging to the moral intelligence is Euripides's
Alces–
tis.
How can we justify Admetus's willingness to allow his wife Alcestis
to die in his place? Indeed, how is it possible for the reader or spectator
not to be revolted by his behavior? In his tortuously subtle analysis of
the play (difficult to reproduce in a brief review), Yehoshua traces the
complex emotions Admetus and Alcestis experience. By focusing on
Admetus's inner struggles, his feelings of guilt, his self-justification, his
admiration for his wife, his wife's nobility, her demand that he not
marry again, and so on, Yehoshua means to humanize Admetus's accep–
tance of his wife's sacrifice to the point where the reader overcomes
whatever revulsion we might feel about his behavior. (For example,
doesn't the nobility of Alcestis and her willingness to sacrifice her life for
him reflect his own nobility and virtue?) At the end the wife is restored
to Admetus, who declares his good fortune. "Thus, the announcement
at the close of the play-'I am fortunate'-does not in the end revolt us.
I must, though, be accurate and reserved here: it does not revolt
me
in
the end ." Yehoshua is careful to grant every reader his or her moral free–
dom in responding to a text. In this reading of the play Yehoshua comes
across as something of an antinomian, a moral weight lifter, who can
justify the sinner through a kind of interpretive casuistry.
Yehoshua is not so much a moral critic of literature as he is a literary
critic of its moral element. For instance, in his discussion of Camus's
short story "The Guest" he relentlessly deconstructs every moral inter–
pretation of the protagonist's behavior. The scene of the story is Algiers,
where the schoolteacher Daru finds himself in the awkward position of
having been given custody of an Arab prisoner. He decides to release
him and, as Yehoshua convincingly shows, none of the ethical motives
that might explain his action are evident in the story. Daru's decision is
"absurd, existential, irrational, grave and uncompromising." For
Yehoshua the question is how Camus manages to overcome "the
