Language, Body, Dystopia: The Passion of the Real in Orly-Castel Bloom's Dolly City

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The Comparatist, Volume 38, October 2014, pp. 250-265 (Article)

P bl h d b Th n v r t f N rth r l n PrDOI: 10.1353/com.2014.0004

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Ari Ofengenden

Language, Body, DystopiaThe Passion for the Real in Orly Castel- Bloom’s Dolly City

Orly Castel- Bloom’s well- known novel Dolly City, first published in 1993, is a story of an abusive mother named Dolly. Told in first person and set in a future dystopian Israel, the novel concentrates on Dolly’s violent anxiety regarding the health of her adopted son. She worries that he might be suffering from various medical condi-tions ranging from cancer to missing an internal organ. Her response is repeatedly to “open him up” and needlessly operate on him.1 A typical passage describes her actions thus:

I succumbed to the chronic doubt from which I suffer. I wanted to check and see with my own eyes that everything was really in order, and then to check up on my checkup, and then to make sure that there hadn’t been any slipups in the re- examinations, and so on and so forth.

I gave the child anesthetic, I put him to sleep, and I did it. I slipped my hands into white gloves and began slicing into his thorax. His internal organs were revealed to my searching gaze, his heart, his lungs. Once I’d opened him up, I poked around in there too. Then I opened up his stomach, I held an organ roll call, I demanded to know if they were all present and correct. (31)2

Such passages repeat themselves incessantly, marking the basic emotional tone of the novel. Dolly is more than just an excessively anxious and abusive mother. She is prone not only to fits of violent anxiety regarding her son, but often suffers from murderous rage and a flat affect coupled with extreme promiscuity. It is to Dolly as a character and as a narrator that most readers responded when reading the novel, often couching basic emotional reactions in intellectual or ideological terms. The initial reception of the book was varied; some saw it as expressing the linguistic and even moral deterioration of Israeli literature, while others prized the book as a breakthrough in Hebrew fiction.3 Two leading Hebrew literary critiques by Dan Miron and Gershon Shaked claimed Castel- Bloom as the most original of a new generation of writers, urban and non- ideological; her writing resists and scorns social norms and public taste (see Miron; and Shaked 76). Following the strongly evaluative response that the book stirred up in reviews, the academic critical re-ception which followed has chosen to interpret it through the conceptual lenses

Language, Body, Dystopia 251

of Post- modernism and Post- Zionism. Post- Modernist interpretations concen-trate on the free play of language (signifier) used in the novel, on the lack of co-herent reality, the mixture of high and low linguistic styles, and on the lack of depth or real affect.4 Post- Zionist interpretations have either characterized the novel as disengaging from the national meta- narrative or as an explicit critique of Zionist claims.5 Some interpretations saw the novel as a parody, a grotesque exaggeration of Jewish/Zionist mothering, an impossible endeavor composed of anxious shel-tering, and preparing the child to be a soldier (Shiffman; Mendelson- Maoz).

While there is some truth to these interpretations, they evade and assimilate this emotionally difficult text into a familiar grand narrative and try to assuage the reader with the comforting schemes of Modernism, Zionism and their respective “posts.” The novel’s main impact on readers, I argue, did not follow directly from its role in reconfiguring national narrative but from the shock and attraction of the narrator Dolly, a figure who combines a unique style and a grotesque violence. The main claim of this article will be that far from hovering in an unengaged postmodern way above reality in the realms of linguistic play and psychosis, Castel- Bloom’s novel shows what recent theory calls the “passion for the Real.”

The concept of the Real was first articulated by Lacan and then elaborated by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. While there are differences in their emphases, an ideal type (Weber 90)6 of the concept of the Real can be readily sketched. The Real is that part of reality which resists being represented and put into coherent words; it is what cannot be referred to, designated or signified. In Lacanian terminology it is that which is beyond the symbolic and the imaginary. Robert Buch succinctly summed up this concept:

It is inaccessible, an absence or a void that defies representation, yet it is also characterized as excessive and violent. Where it appears, it is said to erupt or to break though, shattering representation and reality. Its impact is as intolerable as it is undeniable. Its “eruptions” cannot be ignored. The characterizations of the Real vacillate between a dimension that is somehow presupposed but utterly unknowable, clearly echoing in this respect Kant’s noumenal Ding an sich, and a violent outburst, a traumatic encounter, a recalcitrant remainder that proves to be unassimilable by the psychic system. The Real is at times associated with the primal organic matter of which we catch a glimpse wherever bodies are torn apart; it figures as the material, corporeal foundation of the subject from which we shrink in horror as from our own finitude wherever we are reminded of it. (9)

The suggestive concept of the Real will serve here as a basis for analyzing Dolly City. Of the various ways in which this notion can be applied to the novel I will limit myself to four essential aspects: 1) Shattering representation by moving from lan-guage toward bodily drive; 2) Cutting up of the body, aggressiveness and cancer;

252 The COmpArATisT 38 : 2014

3) The traumatic encounter with mothering; and 4) Future dystopia as an account of the Israeli present.

The mOvemenT Of lAnguAge TOwArd drive: The figurATive, liTerAl, BOdy And drive

The linking and infusion of language with desire or drive has been one of the most fruitful strategies of interpretation.7 According to these approaches some forms of literary sentences are infused with the desire/drive of the narrator or poetic speaker. Sentences in Dolly City often begin with a conventional, even worn out, literary device only to undermine this conventionality with something bodily or sexual toward the end of the sentence. Their basic scheme is to move from the symbolic to the Real, from the artificial or “literary” to the bodily and brutal. As Dolly’s relations to her son are typified by cutting up, so Dolly the narrator cuts to the Real often in midsentence. Contrary to accounts which view Castel- Bloom’s language as unlit-erary (“thin” is the Hebrew expression), Dolly City often uses a very literary style. This literary style, however, is constantly subverted, and made fun of by transitions to the Real. One of the conventions of literary discourse, often a distinguishing mark of romantic literariness, is the opening of scenes with a depiction of nature or the weather. Dolly, the narrator, uses this convention but subverts it at the same time: “A thunderstorm began, and heavy clouds, weighing a ton and a half each, col-lided and inundated Dolly City with blessed rain, flooding roads, filling wells, and shutting mouths” (20), or “Winds blew, evil winds, winds that pissed on the citizens, piss disguised as rain” (55). These sentences start with the literary conventionality of depicting the romantic sublime, but they end brutally, cutting short the poetic and insisting on an aggressive sexuality of specific erogenous zones. The rain and wind are conceived as wholly related to the bodily orifices; the rain is either piss or it shuts up mouths. Rather than sublimely affecting the soul, nature roughly af-fects the body; the romantic is reduced to the bodily Real. In the following sentence the metaphor itself has a similar effect: “It was night, the last night of October. The moon and the stars were sprinkled over the sky like salt on wounds. Desperate men fucked tree trunks” (Castel- Bloom 69). What is interesting in this description is that the metaphor of twinkling stars compared to the bodily “salt on wounds,” still seems too poetical; since the stars which symbolize yearning and the unreach-able can be romantically linked to suffering inflicted by wounds. In order to under-mine any romantic involvement in human suffering and yearning, Castel- Bloom undercuts the first image with the vulgar absurdity of “Desperate men fucked tree trunks.” The following sentences have a similar effect: “Rain in Dolly City isn’t just bullshit, it comes down as thick as spaghetti, but for five years it hasn’t rained a drop. Friendly missiles were fired from the outskirts of the city to tear the virgin


clouds wide open and get things moving, but the missiles entered the clouds and got stuck inside them like horses’ dicks.” Here the literary convention exists in the background of the reader’s mind, and the sentence directly undermines it. In this sentence the poetic depiction of nature is immediately undercut, and what we get is a sort of libidinal release of aggression and sexuality through a virtuosic play of literary language.8 In some sense Dolly’s language is structured like a joke offering both tension and release on another plane of reference, and like a joke the sentence moves to the low bathic aspects of reality (see Holland; and Graeme). These bathic, bodily and physical aspects of reality always have an added, surplus, unintelligible and sinister quality to them, which evokes the effects of the Real. The menacing, brutal quality of the language serves to bring us to the border of the realm of the symbolic, the edge of our conventional ways of conceiving and speaking of reality, and thus representing for us Dolly’s semblance of the Real. Thus the deflation of the high literary style, of the sublime, doubles at the same time as an artistic rendition of madness, the expression of Dolly’s schizophrenic language.

The German psychiatrist Carl Schneider characterized the essential attribute of schizophrenic language as derailment (Entgleisen) in 1930 (see Sims), a meta-phor which likens thought disorder to a train starting off only to be diverted and sidetracked from reaching its destination.9 Derailment offers a fitting description to the disconcerting effect which language has on the speaker. In Dolly City derail-ment often moves to bodily reality entailing a comparison between the first and the second part of the sentence. Thus, at the same time as the sentence mimics derailment and madness, it dazzles us with comparing unlike things, for example: “About a week after I became an unwilling mother, at midnight, I was all ready to go to sleep, but sleep eluded me like a toddler hiding from his parents between the concrete pillars of a parking lot in Ashdod” (17–18). The metaphor not only revels in comparing very different aspects of reality but the very excessive particularity of this metaphor evokes the absurd. In Hebrew the verb for eluded is “Chamak,” while the formation sleep eluded is a conventional metaphor. What Dolly does reinvigo-rates this worn- out phrase by over- concretizing it. Some metaphors in Dolly City express a derailment which seems to lead not to an alternate destination but self referentially to the beginning, for example: “The trains in Dolly City run like panty-hose—if you don’t stop them, they’ll reach your crotch” (77). This metaphor entails an inversion, a conventional Hebrew metaphor which likens longs tears in panty-hose to “trains.” Essentially this is a self- referential likeness, a tautology: the trains in Dolly City run like pantyhose which are often compared to trains. Essentially the sentence says ‘trains are trains’ via pantyhose. However, this psychotic closed cir-cuitry breaks out in the phrase “if you don’t stop them, they’ll reach your crotch.” Thus, the trains threaten phallic penetration; language is invested with affect, with the bodily Real. These metaphors also lead to unexpected and absurd actions, for


example: “Someone wrote on the wall, Madness is a ripe orange, and therefore it should be wrapped up and sent to Europe in crates stamped with the word Jaffa” (122). This sentence likens the abstract concept of madness to the concrete symbol of wholesome Israeli produce. The sentence simultaneously refers to madness but also reveals the thought process of madness, the way in which madness relates to figurative language. There is a movement from the figurative, taking madness to be an orange, to absurd practical consequences. Dolly reveals the passion of lan-guage toward the bodily, toward drive but also toward the literal, toward action in the world. In this Dolly mimics psychotic syndromes which are said to take figura-tive language literally. In an autobiography of a nineteenth- century schizophrenic named Perceval, re- issued by Gregory Bateson, we read:

Thus you will hear one lunatic declare that he is made of iron, and that nothing can break him; another, that he is a china vessel, and that he runs in danger of being destroyed every minute. The meaning of the spirit is that this man is strong and iron, the other frail as an earthen vessel; but the lunatic takes the lit-eral sense, and his imagination not being under his own control, he in a manner feels it. In like manner, when I was desired to suffocate myself on my pillow, and that all the world were suffocation for me, etc. etc., I conceive, now, that spirit referred to the suffocation of my feelings—that I was to suffocate my grief, my indignation, or what not on the pillow of my conscience. (Lecercle 233)

Like Dolly, Perceval takes his metaphors literally. Instead of leaving “being suffo-cated” on a metaphorical level of emotionality, he suffocates himself on a pillow. This sort of practice entails a unique alignment between modernism and psychosis since both tend to subvert the romantic and the figurative by the literal, embodied and action oriented. Bloom’s comparison of madness to an orange is then made both literal and political when this orange is sent as a sort of emblem of Israeli pro-duce abroad. Literalization of metaphor often functions in Dolly City as a passage à l’acte10, where an impulse which is essentially linguistic, seeks fulfillment in reality. The passage from figurative language to the literal in Dolly City seduces the reader into partially empathizing with Dolly in the paradoxical enjoyment of disgust and pain as we move from the figurative to the literal, from metaphorical thought to the act. In these ways Dolly moves from the socially conventional, from the sym-bolic and inherited to the concrete, bodily Real of objects and action in the world.

CuTTing up Of The BOdy, Aggressiveness And CAnCer

If it is language that veers to the concrete, action in Dolly City tends toward the in-side. Dolly’s main act in her passion for the Real is penetration, usually achieved by the cutting open of pets, of her own fingers, but mainly of her son. The cut entails


an unnatural, rude, violent and life- threatening exposure of an inside to an outside; life depends on the ability of the body to maintain a boundary. Neurological theo-rist Antonio Damasio states, “Life is carried out inside a boundary that defines a body. Life and life urges exist inside a boundary, the selectively permeable wall that separates the internal environment from the external environment” (137).

For Damasio the representation of the body in the brain is the precursor of the self. Thus every significant disruption of the boundary of the body entails a disrup-tion and a reconfiguration of the self. The body cut open is the symbol of both the Real of the body and the body’s exposure to the Real. We are simultaneously “re-minded” of our embodied fragility and of a Real outside threatening the body. As Alain Badiou claims, “the wound is what testifies to the body’s exposure to the Real” (116). Independent of the mother/child relationship, cutting up the body generates fear and disgust, these feelings that direct us to a keen sense of bodily subjectivity, to the Real of the body. However, our sense of bodily self which is perturbed by witnessing the cutting up of the child in the text is only one of our responses. An-other is ambivalence stemming from our passion for the Real. On the one hand, the reader shares Dolly’s passion to go beyond his/her entrapment within the symbolic and confront the very mortal bodily bases of life; however, this awareness itself cre-ates revulsion, disgust, and a movement of drawing away.11

In Dolly City we get to follow and empathize with the heroine as she goes about operating and killing, sharing her passion for the Real. Yet making us sympathize with an ostensibly bad, or even evil, person, calls for the exercise of considerable rhetorical power. Wayne C. Booth and other Chicago School critics have stressed that the main strategy of making a reader identify with a bad person is assuming this person’s point of view.12 As we have seen, this strategy stands at the rhetorical center of Dolly City’s first person narrative. However, the psychoanalytical account gives a more precise function to rhetoric in the novel. It not only wins us over by assuming the protagonist’s point of view, but it wins over our conscious moral ob-jections to violence and allows us the enjoyment of unconscious aggressive drives (Freud 139–50). Dolly City is susceptible to interpretation using both approaches. It is however the perspective of Lacan and Badiou which enables us to go beyond the rhetoric of point of view and venting of aggression, to see the novel as an attempt to escape the stifling confines of the symbolic.

Not just the life of the body but its uncontrolled growth, cancer, is the Real in Dolly City. Dolly’s main obsession is to look for signs of cancer in her son’s body, but toward the end of the novel, Dolly’s obsession with cancer is decoupled, released free from both her son and human bodies in general. In a kind of special penetrating vision Dolly can see cancer on non- living objects as well: “And then it hit me: I saw cancerous growths on the blonde women’s faces, on the barrels of tar, on the wheels of the buses, on the telephone poles, on the trees, on the wheels of cars, on the


newspapers—wherever I looked, malignant, terminal, spreading tumors danced before my eyes” (62). Cancer represents both death and out- of- control growth, or more precisely death in out- of- control life. The image of death in out- of- control life is a central image of the novel. Dolly distrusts life and growth itself. With her operations and her abuse she tries to stifle her son’s growth. As a potent metaphor for the irrational (which continues to exist under a more repressed rational layer of thinking), cancer has often been linked to parts of the body which are considered embarrassing; cervix, rectum, bladder, prostate, testicles, breast, colon (Sontag 17). Cancer as abnormal growth is often seen as a parasite, as a sort of demonic preg-nancy (14). Dolly’s vision or gaze and not only her knife allows her to see what others cannot. In her ability to see metastasis everywhere Dolly takes the medical gaze to its extreme, of a dehumanizing separation of the disease and the body from the patient’s identity and person (Foucault). The medical gaze is said to penetrate the surface of things to their underlying causes in the body. The novel thematizes malignant growth as occurring at the depth and the surface at the same time. In this sense the medical gaze is more like Dolly’s knife than her vision. Dolly’s actual gaze sees the Real of cancer not deep inside things but on their surface.13 The sur-face of things is given to an uncanny abnormal growth that resists treatment and control. Growth itself is often subsumed under the metaphor of extension and dif-ferentiation. This extension and differentiation have lost all control in Dolly City, and it is to feelings of the uncontrollability of life that we turn to now.

The TrAumATiC enCOunTer wiTh mOThering

In a short newspaper piece, Castel- Bloom recounts the autobiographical events which form the kernel narrative of Dolly City (see “Why I wrote Dolly City”). She was twenty five when she had her first baby, and the young couple had to move to a relative’s apartment in Bat Yam. She had no money and no car and no phone in that apartment. On the second day there her baby threw up some porridge which she was eating but also inhaled some of it and as a result could not breathe. Being at a total loss of what to do she went outside holding the baby with one hand and waving for cars with the other. A car took her to the hospital where the baby was successfully resuscitated. However, this life and death situation left an indelible mark on her. In more than one sense the book rests on the experience of the Real of mothering, the responsibility and the power over life and death. From the nov-elist’s perspective there is an acting out of fantasy in writing the novel, similar to the fort- da phenomena which Freud talks about in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In the same way that Freud’s grandson gains control over his mother’s absence and appearance by using toys that he makes appear and disappear, similarly the life of


the child which at one time evaded the control of the mother ( fort) in the literary fantasy is exercised fort and da. Life is made to almost disappear under the knife and made to reappear again. Indeed in the following segment Dolly’s words alone bring the child to life:

For over an hour the group of doctors tried to resuscitate the child, but it didn’t work. I saw that they were on the wrong track. A woman doctor gave him an electric shock. His little body leapt into the air. This was the crucial moment. I couldn’t trust anybody.

“Move aside,” I cried and pushed my way though, “I’m the mother, and I’m telling you to get out of the way!”

The group of doctors rustled like the wind in a field of thorns, their gowns fluttering on their rigid bodies.

“Get up!” I commanded the child. “Did you hear me? Get up, or I’ll take you home!”

“I don’t wanner,” he said.“There you are,” I said to the startled doctors. “Some children will do any-

thing for attention.”“Strange,” Said the woman doctor. “There was no pulse. I’m willing to bet a

thousand dollars that there was no pulse.” (67)

Dolly’s words both echo miracles from the bible and reveal an obsessive belief in the power of performative language itself, its power over reality, the omnipotence of words. Dolly’s magic words bring Son back to life, signaling an undecidability, an ambiguity regarding the reality which Dolly narrates, while at the same time asking the reader to grasp the Real of a mother’s anxiety beyond these words. Dolly’s words and deeds signal the fantasy of absolute sovereignty over her son:

I only wanted to protect him from harm. I wanted him to live to be a hundred and twenty, and what’s wrong with that? I wanted to be in command on all fronts, and what’s wrong with that? Why this hypocrisy? In some societies a man can be forced to chop off his sister’s clitoris with his teeth—and I’m not entitled to demand sovereignty over the defense of my son? (52)

In this parody of ethnographic accounts of oriental tyranny the “savage” other is used as a justification for unlimited sovereignty at “home.” Dolly is intent on being an absolute sovereign, on having in Foucault’s words the power to “make live and let die,” to exercise total bio- power over her child. This totalizing power attempts to intervene at the very core of existence, while at the same time revealing the anx-ious Real of mothering. Dolly City is essentially a critique of society’s expectations of mothers. That is, the belief that woman are naturally mothers, that they are sup-


posed to harbor only positive feelings of nurturing love and care toward their chil-dren, while selflessly putting all of their own desires and aspirations on hold. It is also a powerful critique of a society which puts most if not all the existential burden of life on maternal care. By uncovering and exaggerating maternal aggression to this extent, the novel exposes the Real of normal mothering as an unbearable pres-sure and responsibility which entails a total repression of resentment and aggres-sion toward babies and children.

Son is taken away from Dolly and grows up in an institute for abused children as a fully alert, vibrant young man. At one of their short reunions he suggests starting psychoanalysis quite casually. She of course disapproves:

“You know,” I cried eventually, “psychoanalysis, what do you need psycho-analysis for? Ignore your past. Just don’t take any notice of it. All those child-hood complexes, those pacifiers and daddy’s underpants, what good can they do you now?”

“Forget it, Mom. I’m going for it.” (118)

A couple of pages later, however, Son decides that he does not want to go to psycho-analysis and instead begins dialysis:

“I’ve begun dialysis.”“Dialysis?” I got the word out with difficulty. “Weren’t we talking about

psychoanalysis? Don’t you want to have psychoanalysis any more? Are you con-tent with dialysis?”

“I’m content with dialysis,” he said and gave me a mischievous wink. “I’ve de-cided to look ahead, and to forget all the bullshit.”

“What do you mean?”“You know what I mean. I meant that you might be said to be the only mother

in the worlds who knows her son inside out.” (123)

These are key statements in the novel and one of its main paradoxes. The book evades a fidelity to violence and trauma of the past. Son with an admirable plas-ticity moves on. He begins dialysis, a mechanical purification of the blood, a pro-cess which gets rid of toxins without claiming any importance for them as funda-mentally creating the personality. Son’s development and maturation argues against “depth” and the heaviness of history and trauma; it makes a strong claim for the surface, for the flowing present, for the ability and plasticity of life to re- create and heal itself. This is to be read as an appreciation and a parody of the cult of Israeli youth at the same time. Son knows that his mother knows him more than any other mother, but he decides to look ahead. But what is ahead? Son’s very normalcy and vibrancy leads him to volunteer for the brutal navy. This comes as a shock to Dolly since she is afraid for his fate there. What ensues is a life- threatening circle,


in which Son’s life moves from being threatened by his mother to a rehabilitating pause in a benign institution, to a life- threatening situation by serving the state.

As Shiffman claims, “Israeli Jewish mothers . . . tend to combine two contradic-tory aspects: Mother as the familiar, well known Jewish Mother, nurturing, caring, self- effacing and adoring and the Israeli Jewish Mother harnessed to the national effort” (139). However specific, “abnormal” Israeli conditions only better reveal the structure of mothering in general.14 It is by examining the extreme that we can better reveal the hidden fault lines of the normal, or put differently, only the ex-treme can break our habitual ways of thought and reveal something new to us. In the second part of the book Dolly moves from being an all- powerful mother abso-lutely in control of her son’s life to being a concerned mother of a young adult with the distance and relative lack of control that this entails. Under its violent fantastic gloss the book is about the Real of mothering, the vicissitudes of care and worry.

What happens to Son? At the end of the novel Dolly reads a newspaper article on Son in the geriatric ward, where Son has put her at the comparatively young age of forty- five. Son has hijacked a Pan- T airplane, and having been caught by the police he escaped; the police in turn have shot him in the back and are searching for him with helicopters in the Gobi desert. The novel ends with the words: “I was wor-ried about the boy, but I wasn’t hysterical. I knew that after everything I’d done to him a bullet or knife in the back were nothing he couldn’t handle” (157). The novel thus concludes with the proud satisfaction of a mother, for both bequeathing her violent transgressive way of life, and preparing him for life. The novel thus exhibits the Real of mothering as mixture of normalcy in lunacy. The abnormal personality of Dolly and the extreme circumstances of Dolly City are conducive to fleshing out this basic structure.

fuTure dysTOpiA As unAssimilATed ACCOunT Of The isrAeli presenT

Dolly City presents a dystopian future which comes with no sense of progress, nor-mality, rationality or meaning. Given that the historical meaning of the present is very much set by the horizon of a meaningful near- future, an abnormal future effects the intelligibility of the present. It is through the portrayal of a senseless, absurd future that Dolly City brings us in contact with the Real of the present which is normally subsumed and hidden under normalizing and moralizing tendencies. It as though Dolly City offers us a glimpse of a chaotic netherworld which is essen-tially the Real of our world. This world is expressed mainly through the weather, the social structure, transportation and war.

Seasons in themselves are a basic temporal ordering principle creating order in human affairs. All cultures arrange human temporality according to the seasons,


giving meaning and order to the longest experiential unit of life, the year. The lack of ordered seasons in Dolly City signals the breakdown of the temporal symbolic and the exposure to the Real of temporal disorder:

It was August, snow was falling softly. It covered all the roads and pavements, and people were walking about wearing Russian fur hats. I stopped a cab and asked the driver to take me to Ben Gurion Airport. At Ben Gurion it was summer, the sun beat down on the cosmopolitan heads with calm tyranny. (29)

It is not just that this world is topsy- turvy with snow falling in August, but there is a spatial inconsistency at work, a “patch work” weather/reality. Dolly’s apartment be-comes extremely hot or cold at arbitrary points in time, and Son starts playing with his own frozen spit. This breakdown of the way we structure our symbolic space/time entails a relentless exposure to an incomprehensibly hostile nature.

The structures of society and human affairs are not disordered like nature but are totally arbitrary; one cannot truly internalize and make sense of them. Social structure is arbitrary in Dolly City; the criteria with which political groups are divided is nonsensical. At the same time Castel- Bloom parodies the extremely partisan one- sided political perspective that one can come across in contempo-rary Israel. We learn that there are two big parties: Bureaucracy and Procedure. The soldiers of the Bureaucracy party are called the Trashers. They are “Revolting, dirty, unhygienic types, who spend all their time pickpocketing, coughing, wiping their noses on their sleeves, and relieving themselves in their pants” (77). The Al-righters follow the Procedure party: “They are all right—absolutely, gorgeously all right. Every one of the Alrighters has swum across the Kinnereth dozens of times. They all adore hiking in Jerusalem, most of them go jogging round the Old City walls every evening” (77). Castel- Bloom is poking fun here not only at Dolly’s ideo-logically extreme perspective but also at the Alrighters themselves who are seem-ingly oblivious to the realities of their surrounding and who hold idealized views of themselves and of Dolly City. Then there are the Apostrophers, “whose slogan is as dumb as their faces. They sing to a Reggae beat, ‘The state is me. Please decapitate me’” (77). Castel- Bloom is poking fun perhaps at the radical left which identifies strongly with the state, but at the same time wants to “decapitate” itself. This consti-tutes a lack but at the same time an excess of meaning that renders habitual ways of generating meaning inoperative. The statement “The state is me. Please decapi-tate me” can be interpreted as a typical “Bloomian” sentence as we saw above, since it starts with the political sublime and ends in brutality. The sentence also super-imposes the saying attributed to Louis XIV, L’État, c’est moi, and the decapitations of the French Revolution, that is, the ultimate sovereignty and violent doing away of sovereignty at the same time. However, the fact that the sentence entails self- negation and suicide clearly points elsewhere, perhaps to the self- negation needed


to form the socialist and Zionist new man. Thus, the meanings of the sentence shift without settling on any meaningful interpretation.

Both the language and behavior of the people of Dolly City shift aimlessly and often brutally. Movement and human activity in Dolly City are as meaningless and directionless as the politics:

Dolly City, a city without a base, without a past, without an infrastructure. The most demented city in the world. All the people in Dolly City are usually on the run. Since they’re always running there’s always someone chasing them, and since there’s someone chasing them, they catch them and execute them and throw them into the river. (76–77)

Traffic, movement and paranoia are impossibly superimposed, with a reverse logic, where results come before actions, where outcomes determine causes. The basic psychological mechanism is projection: people act/feel and then project causes on the outside, which then somehow becomes this projection. The original motive for “running” remains nevertheless inexplicable and stands outside the ability of the text to make it intelligible. The text thus attempts to render a chaotic behavior which cannot be made meaningful. The aimlessness of movements and the direc-tionless of Israeli politics are similar:

I looked out the window, but how long can you go on looking out of the window at rushing trains? Especially when they’re rushing to where these trains were rushing. All the trains in Dolly City rushed to Dachau and back again. Not that Dachau, just some old plank with the name Dachau written on it, a kind of memorial. (49)

Castel- Bloom comments here not only on the lack of direction, but on the fictional element to which all this rushing to and fro is directed. Dachau is not the real Dachau, signaling that all this hectic activity is somehow directed at a shabby simu-lation of the real thing. Activity and movement are politicized, and at the same time this political telos is rendered nonsensical. As a critique of contemporary state re-sponses to the Holocaust, the statement signals the illusionary and at the same time threadbare character of this simulation. It expresses a general lack of purpose, ac-tivity or action with the politico- religious aspect of memorialization. Just as move-ment and transportation are linked to a senseless political telos, so sexuality, the traffic of bodies, is similarly directionless and lacking in meaning.

I looked out at the ceaseless movement of this city, at the frenzy of the traffic, at the fury of the buses forced to wait for all the lost, senile old ladies to get on, at the conductors who spent their breaks fucking the drivers on the moldy back-seats. (55)


The description elaborates the well known analogy between traffic and sexuality, their commonalities in movement and in contact. Sex and traffic have all lost their meaning and direction. Like traffic, sex is mechanical and senseless. Sexuality is a violent, sudden and arbitrary meeting of bodies in Dolly City; it does not come about through closeness nor does it create intimacy. Finally, war is the ultimate ab-surdity of the real of senseless death and injury. Near the end of the novel the sky becomes covered with French Air Force Planes:

The descendents of the Gauls, the comrades and successors of Saint- Exupery, had arrived with their most up- to- date weapons to wipe out the inhabitants of Dolly City, and thousands of animals were parachuted down, dogs and jackals and foxes infected mainly with rabies, but also with typhus and other serious diseases. The animals spread through the city like swarms of locusts, and people began to vomit and fall twitching to the ground. (151)

Castel- Bloom parodies both the means and the ends of war. The motivation for the attack, we learn, is “to wipe out the entire population of Israel, filling the whole of the coastal plain with gleaming white lavatories of the finest export quality” (151). These motivations parody economic incentives for war; replacing the population with white lavatories with no people to use them. War is absurd and shatters our usual sense- making on many levels. It joins the lowest to the highest, the lavato-ries are the “finest export quality” and defecation descends specifically from the heavens: “. . . the French began dropping shitbombs on us, there was so much shit flying around that it was hard to understand where they were getting it all from” (152). War is symbolized by the lowest in the body but also as the disfigured body. The body, the source of our stable sense of identity, becomes a set of autonomous partial objects. As a result of an atom bomb, “People came in without heads, but with eyes. Some of them came in without legs, but walking, with shoes full of mud. And the funniest of all were the ones without waists, whose upper and lower halves were connected by association” (152). Just as war arbitrarily reconfigures the human body, so are its happenings an arbitrary joining of events. When Dolly relentlessly tries to ascertain if her son is in fact alive she is finally told that he was sunk by the Belgians who have mistaken his ship for French. Son by chance went out to sea on a raft to look for mine- bearing fish and survived, but war itself is presented as some-thing defying meaning and signification.

In Dolly City Castel- Bloom’s chaotic derangements pleasurably but also pain-fully disrupt the conceptual schemas which habitually support the intelligibility of our experience. The eruption of drives into language, the derailment of the sen-tence, the literalization and acting out of metaphor, the cutting up of the body and the arbitrary nature of social arrangements all destabilize our prevailing ways of world- making. The novel disrupts readers’ usual attachments to the body, to the


figure of motherhood, to city, nation, temporal order, and to spatial coherence. The destabilization and displacement of hegemonic ways of both constructing and re-lating to the world open up a gap in which readers can intuit a Real which exists beyond these habitual ways of world- making. What is normally unavailable infil-trates the structure of the symbolic order and creates a semblance of the Real of both mothering and the urban existence of the readers. With violence, absurdity and non- sense Orly Castel- Bloom fights the prevalent hegemonic ways of sense making. Castel- Bloom’s literary discourse critiques the interpretative practice used in world- making. Her poetics of fragmentation and the grotesque launch an attack against the “normal” ways we conceive of the interrelated aspects of mothering and social/political reality.15 Mothering which is paranoid, implosive, and violent complements the arbitrary violence and movement of Dolly City. Castel- Bloom’s novel is much more than a postmodern play of language, an exercise in the far-fetched and unrealistic; its excess only serves to better represent a reality which re-sists representation.

George Washington University

nOTes

1 In clinical terms, Dolly suffers from Münchausen syndrome by proxy, where one ex-aggerates, fabricates, and/or induces physical or mental health problems in others and usually expresses itself in child abuse (see Sterling).

2 Dolly City was first published in Hebrew by Zemora Bitan in 1992. All citations are from Orly Castel- Bloom. Dolly City [Doli siti], trans; Dalya Bilu. London: Dalkey Ar-chive Press, 2010.

3 For an overview of Orly Castel- Bloom’s reception and early work, see: Ginor; Schwartz. 4 For Postmodernist Accounts of Dolly City, see Shiffman; Bartana; and Weisman. 5 For a review of Post- Zionist accounts, see Hasak- Lowy. For an earlier approach, see

Ginor 351. 6 I am using Max Weber’s account of “Idealtypus.” 7 This strategy of interpretation was best elaborated by Julia Kristeva in Revolution in

Poetic Language. It is also used extensively in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men. 8 In “Creative Writing and Day- Dreaming,” Freud claims that the artistry of the writer is

to use aesthetic means to attain socially libidinal gratification which is normal circum-stances is socially unacceptable. See Freud, “Creative Writers and Day- Dreaming.”

9 The use of the journey metaphor or transportation in general in giving shape to ab-stract phenomena, like mental illness, is analyzed in George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

10 I am using the term to delineate the uninhibited movement from violent fantasy and thought to criminal often violent action. See De Mijolla- Mellor.

11 Susan Sontag quotes Plato as ascribing the core human ambivalence not to sexuality but to violence (Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others 96): “On his way up from the Piraeus outside the north wall, he noticed the bodies of some criminals lying on the


ground, with the executioner standing by them. He wanted to go and look at them, but at the same time he was disgusted and tried to turn away. He struggled for some time and covered his eyes, but at last the desire was too much for him. Opening his eyes wide, he ran up to the bodies and cried, “There you are, curse you, feast yourselves on this lovely sight” (The Republic 440). Besides projecting to the eye (not even to the gaze) the internal urge to see the violent and grotesque, this marks the classic ambiva-lence regarding seeing violence done to others.

12 Representing the events of a story from a bad person’s point of view has been classical narration strategy from Macbeth to Crime and Punishment, still modernity has used it to an even greater extent (see Booth).

13 The text is thus characteristic of the modernist obsession with the surface and expres-sivity of things not with their romantically “deep” underlying causes.

14 In this I am using the logic of psychoanalysis which claims to better see the structure of the psyche in neurotics than in well- adjusted individuals.

15 These are of course highly related since mothering has such a central role to play in the reproduction of the social world.

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the 90’s” [Hebrew]. Mosnayim 7/8, (1992).Ben- Yosef, Ginor. “Ha- Distopyah Ha- Tsiyonit al Pi Orli Kastel- Blum.” In Ben Sifrut le-

Hevrah- Iyunim Ba- Tarbuth a- Ivrit Ha- Hadashah. Eds. Judith Bar- el, Yigal Schwartz, and Tamar S. Hess. Tel Aviv: Keter, 2000.

———. “Involuntary Myths: Mania, Mother, and Zion in Orly Castel- Bloom’s ‘Ummi fi shrul.’” Prooftexts 25, 3 (2005): 235–57.

Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Buch, Robert. The Pathos of the Real: On the Aesthetics of Violence in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

Castel- Bloom, Orly. Dolly City [Doli siti]. Trans. Dalya Bilu. London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2010.

(Why I wrote Dolly City) “למה כתבתי את דולי סיטי” New Library. 27 September 2012. http://www.newlibrary.co.il/htmls/article.aspx?c0=13580&bsp=13175.

Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt, 1999.

De Mijolla- Mellor, Sophie. “Passage to the Act.” Enotes. 27 September 2012. http://www .enotes.com/act- passage- reference/act- passage.

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Orly Castel- Bloom.” Jewish Social Studies 14, 2 (2008): 86–112.Holland, Norman N. Laughing, a Psychology of Humor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1982.Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1980.Lecercle, Jean- Jacques. The Violence of Language. New York: Routledge, 1990.Mendelson- Maoz, Adia. “On Human Parts: Orly Castel- Bloom and the Israeli Extreme.”

In Novels of the Contemporary Extreme. Eds. Durand, Alain- Philippe and Naomi Mandel. London: Continuum, 2006. 163–73.

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Language, Body, Dystopia: The Passion of the Real in Orly-Castel Bloom's Dolly City

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