Art and the Artist in the Contemporary Israeli Novel by Lowin Joseph;

Author:Lowin, Joseph;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Role of the Cinema

The title of the novel, suggesting a Jewish hero ready to pounce, does not come from romantic poetry or classical sculpture, however. It comes from one of several Hollywood movies from which the adolescents in the story draw their heroic inspiration. When Proffy, the young central character of the novel, is confronted with a question of disloyalty by his comrades, he responds with reference to one of the movies they have seen. “I pointed out that even in Panther in the Basement Tyrone Power was given a free hand . . . to disappear in the fog and assume and discard identities at his sole discretion” (48). Other movies cited by the narrator provide heroic models as well. “I think it was Lightning Bolt with Olivia de Havilland and Humphrey Bogart,” says Proffy, who goes on to provide a plot summary of a scene in the movie. “Humphrey Bogart was captured by the enemy. Wounded, unshaven, with his clothes torn, and a thin trickle of blood trailing from the corner of his mouth, he confronted his interrogators with a faint smile that was polite yet mocking. His cool manner expressed a subtle contempt that his captors did not and could not grasp” (40).

What the actors Tyrone Power and Humphrey Bogart have in common here, aside from their Hollywood-generated heroic deportment, is the fact that the actors themselves are fictions, fictions created by Amos Oz. An Editor’s Note to the English translation of the novel tells us: “The films mentioned in the text are fictional. Their plots and casts were invented by the author to conjure up the popular Hollywood films which were showing in Jerusalem in the late 1940s, and which he himself watched there as a child in the local cinema.”[4]

It turns out, then, that Panther in the Basement, the novel, is a fictional re-writing of Panther in the Basement, the film, whose very existence is itself a fiction. What we are to make of this we shall see presently. A first clue becomes perceptible when we ask, what, exactly, we are supposed to take away from the panther-in-the-basement metaphor. From the text it is clear that, for the young boy, a panther in the basement is a hidden hero, living inside a decidedly un-heroic outer shell. With an adolescent’s bravado (or perhaps like the braggart soldier of classical comedy) he is prepared to emerge from the basement into the light, pounce on the enemy, and save the day. In addition, one might want to consider Panther in the Basement a rewriting of the many Jewish legends of unexpected heroism, from the young shepherd-boy David to the Golem of Prague, and beyond.

Like all Midrash, as James Kugel describes the genre, the tale being told here begins with a problematic biblical verse that needs to be elucidated. In this novel, the verse is: “The adversary and the enemy will not enter into the gates of the city.” What is problematic about this verse is that it does not exist as such in the Bible.

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