The Book of Intimate Grammar through the prism of cinema

Released in France in June 2012, Nir Bergman’s latest film¹ takes on a masterpiece of world literature: David Grossman’s Le livre de la grammaire intérieure (The Book of Intimate Grammar). First published in 1991, this atypical Bildungsroman — visibly marked by an attempt to approach the Israeli present obliquely, by means of a prose at once introspective and multidirectional — had constituted, from its very appearance, an important turning point in the author’s career. In a sense, with this text Grossman decided to stop treating his writing for young readers and his writing for adults as distinct enterprises; he set about creating a gallery of characters henceforth destined to echo one another. Lost in their paper scenery, they would end up endlessly declining the theme of the “quest” — the topos par excellence of a writing that pits against the iconic force of images the evocative power of the word.

Looked at closely, the complexity of the book lies not so much in the story it tells as in the register it employs. Seeking to integrate into a solid narrative trajectory the movements of a consciousness confronted with doubt, the enunciating instance tends to efface itself behind the actors to whom it lends its voice. Thus each adopted point of view offers the reader an oriented perspective on events, obliging him to perform a labour of deciphering that resembles, page after page, the one young Aharon Kleinfeld imposes upon himself. The solitary second child of a family of Polish-Jewish refugees, this anxious schoolboy, grappling with a reality that escapes him, spends all his days observing the daily life of the people around him — within the domestic space, as in the streets of the Beit-haKerem neighbourhood in Jerusalem, where he lives and where everyone seems to know one another. Comparable to the eye of a camera, his gaze embraces the surrounding space in search of a sign capable at last of solving the mystery: why does one wake up one day unable to behave otherwise than as one behaves? Why do others resemble one another so much and know so well how to manage when it comes to filling a void that frightens?

Of course, the questions Aharon asks himself throughout the narrative resound in his mind without ever finding an answer. Tirelessly reformulated, they fix within an ever better-articulated syntax the foreboding that any solution whatsoever would entail a loss. Whatever its nature, it must simply be avoided, an irreversible change must be prevented by every possible means, one must find, if not in language then at least in its workings, some Houdini-like sleight of hand capable of deflecting the natural course of things and of astonishing the audience, as during an end-of-year stage act. Any occasion is good for achieving this, including an afternoon spent reviewing English lessons with a friend already too politicized to glimpse in the “present progressive” anything other than a mere idiom borrowed from foreigners. Aharon, for his part, grasps the poetry of this strange verbal turn; he then dreams of a gesture that would remain suspended, on condition of concentrating and repeating with delight: “I am ju—mping […], imagining a long, long, interminable jump to which, from the very start, one would give oneself over with absolute concentration and abandon, in total solitude; ju—mping, as if one were enclosing oneself in a hermetically sealed glass bubble and those outside were mistaken: hey! he is only jumping; but inside, in the bubble, things are happening, many things, a second lasts an hour and you are the only one who knows the secrets that reveal themselves only to those who apprehend time […] with the help of a magnifying glass.”²

Unlike Oskar Matzerath in Le Tambour (The Tin Drum, 1959), if Aharon dreams of being able to take shelter in a kind of eternal present to the point of stopping growing, this is not necessarily the result of a conscious choice, or one perceived as such. Indeed, whereas the disquieting hero of Günter Grass — whom we may without any doubt count among Grossman’s innumerable literary models — voluntarily interrupts the natural process of his own growth in order to keep apart from the surrounding hypocrisy and mediocrity, little Kleinfeld seems gradually to discover himself, in spite of himself, refractory to any physical transformation. When his classmates begin to boast of the appearance of a timid “blackish thread, long and thin, [that] extends from [their] paws onto [their] cheeks,” of “a dark patch under [the] armpits,”³ or else of a deep, irrepressible timbre, one cannot help noting that in him, on the contrary, “nothing moves”: his skin remains “smooth and warm as down,” his voice — though exceptional “for mimicking animals or people,” for “imitating to perfection [the] politicians”⁴ — that of a boy of eleven and a half.

Needless to add that what such immobility can arouse in the one who undergoes it, or in those who notice it, is all the more striking when one tries to represent it visually. If Nir Bergman took up the challenge, it was, it seems to us, for at least three reasons: first, the fact of taking an interest in the vicissitudes of an individual obliged to live as though in a jar where things and persons would float, prisoners of weightlessness, helps to refine a reflection begun earlier with Broken Wings (2002) — the disenchanted and cruel chronicle of a community that struggles to constitute itself; next, the exploitation of the inside/outside pairing lends itself wonderfully to flirting, by means of the filmic apparatus, with the codes of television series — an exercise to which Bergman has devoted himself from his very beginnings as a screenwriter; finally, the effort to confer a plastic consistency upon paralysis as a theme, motif or, more broadly, as an “aesthetic category” constrains the director to lean either toward the absurd — and this is what the German Volker Schlöndorff had resolved upon in his adaptation of The Tin Drum in 1979 — or toward a realism punctuated by grotesque accents. If it is true that this second solution resembles a none-too-courageous compromise, one must nonetheless admit that if Nir Bergman ends up opting for it, this is because it has the merit of restoring to the original text all the nuances — of tone in particular — that make its beauty.

In this respect, if the hand-to-hand struggle with the novel proves fruitful, it is, on the one hand, because fidelity to the author is never openly claimed⁵ and, on the other, because the actors give themselves over to a highly engaging and, on the whole, remarkable performance. Never mind if Aharon’s mother — played by Orly Silbersatz — may at moments seem a little caricatural; in the very last part of the film, when one draws near a conclusion as allusive as it is moving, she displays a wide dramatic range and inscribes herself in the spectator’s memory as one of the most endearing characters. The same goes for the alluring Edna Blum, whose “house [resembles] a sanctuary” where “the dirt [is nothing but] fine stardust.”⁶ Evelyn Kaplun lends this neighbour, by turns coveted and unattainable, ethereal features and the gestures of a fashion model; she makes of her the typical fantasy of the neighbourhood’s adolescents, but also the “objective correlative” of all that, in Aharon’s eyes, remains bearable despite an intrinsic inanity.

In L’homme visible et l’esprit du cinéma (Visible Man, or the Culture of Film), Béla Balázs asserts that one of the specificities of cinematography is the possibility of following the organic process of an evolution of feelings as it can be made explicit, for minutes on end, upon a screen. He specifies that an evolution of this kind “lyric language cannot [render, since] each word can refer only to [one] of its delimited phase[s] […], which yields a staccato, a succession of […] isolated snapshots.” Indeed, “a word must surely be pronounced in its entirety before the next begins”; whereas, “[i]t is not necessary […] that one expression of the face have […] faded for another to [mingle with it] and absorb it progressively.” In fact, “in the legato of visual continuity, the expression of the present instant still bears the mark of the preceding one, and the next is already sketched within it,” which amounts to asserting that, by means of a multimedia support, “we see not only the various states of mind, but the [underlying] process of succession itself.”⁷ It is this movement that the camera is meant to capture, not only with the aim of deepening the psychological characterization of the characters, but also in order to model the rhythm of the narrative upon each one’s perception of duration. This is all the more convincing in the close-ups that punctuate Bergman’s work and clearly distinguish the function of the secondary roles — we have referred to the mother and the neighbour, rivals promised a similar fate, but we could also have lingered over the less colourful portraits of the father and the sister — from that of the main character, the centre of gravity around which they come to orbit.

Far from being an innocuous detail, the fact that the framing tends to detach Aharon’s figure from the rest indeed exerts a double function: not only does it amplify the exceptional character of the figure, but it also gives the impression of observing up close the geography of a world in miniature, ignorant — supposing they exist — of its operating principles. Yes, because as when facing a painting, when one draws too close, the image opposes a resistance and obliges us to surmise, beyond its texture, the possibility of a “referent that is less and less referential”⁸; in other words, the image reveals itself recalcitrant and demands a meaning that can be negotiated only “at the moment when [every signifier] refuses [so to speak] to let itself be folded back onto [it].”⁹ This is precisely what the apparent absence of focus leads us to think on several occasions over the course of the film, and it is what is realized most particularly in the illness sequence, situated shortly before the conclusion and marked by an oneirism that is, to say the least, unexpected.

“Seven days had passed since Independence Day and [the others] still had not returned from camp, where are they, [Aharon] thrusts two tiny objects into his wounded nose: a minuscule particle of dough inside which, by way of leaven, he has slipped his Trojan horse, a scrap of paper on which he has inscribed the Name of God, after the manner of the Golem of the Maharal of Prague.”¹⁰

Still nothing, no trace of the friends of before, now engaged in a struggle that is not one, united in order to give themselves the impression that they too are building a country, whose political situation seems to waver with every gunshot. If the wishes do not come true, the ruse is nonetheless not without consequence: the organic tissue of the paper degrades on contact with the blood, to the point of provoking bouts of fever and a vaguely hallucinatory state. “Get up, I beg you, give a sign of life, tell me that everything will work out in the end,”¹¹ Aharon repeats to himself in desperation. “His hand had trembled when he had rolled the sheet [and] introduced [it] as far as possible […], beyond the frontier of sneezes”¹²; in his imagination, “the missive was to advance slowly, borne by a courier, or a vapour of a courier, or a child courier, white, immaculate […], holding the letter at arm’s length, [making] its way along the sinuous nasal walls, the spiralling crannies, farther, still farther”¹³… In fact, “the nebulous courier [did indeed] cross the white plain, the tangle of frontal bones, push[ed] higher, amid the scaffoldings of bone and thread”¹⁴, but, contrary to expectation, the undertaking sees no completion. The obstacles to be overcome are innumerable and if Grossman describes them by means of a breathtaking interior monologue, Nir Bergman for his part recreates them on screen in a shot–reverse shot that sees Aharon and his double interact.

The latter, played also by the talented Roee Elsberg, is filmed with a handheld camera and by means of rather artisanal tracking shots. Like an adventurer, he traverses a desert whose cracked surface evokes the rough surface of the brain; a bluish sea where the memories that seem to have left no trace sink heavily; an adipose labyrinth where sounds propagate, phlegmatic and muffled. His silhouette, of which we generally perceive only details, becomes a splash — a touch of colour on a canvas that never ceases to move, as though any freeze-frame were bound to represent a definitive resolution. His journey, of which we grasp only snatches, becomes scribble more than drawing — a profusion of strokes that have lost their original orientation and embrace one another until they merge. If in the book the little boy “advances cautiously over the rugged terrain, stepping over the grey-yellow, lunar craters […], [if he] crawls, […] crosses defiles, crevasses […], [and if] brambles scratch his face and crumble away at once”¹⁵, in cinema the slowness of the actions related and the ellipses operated upon the original text oblige the spectator to rely entirely on the voice-over. The latter tries to take up, stitch together, make explicit so far as possible, so that a meaning may emerge, if not from the journey unveiled to us, at least from the rhetoric the editing employs to render an account of it.

Indeed, it is from sensible elements that the director sets up a weave which — Vincent Amiel would say — “has neither the obviousness of mimeticism […] nor that of the aleatory.”¹⁶ Foiling any cause-and-effect relation that has not been posited by the delirium-stricken child, Nir Bergman has recourse to exclusively analogical juxtapositions, sometimes interspersed with brief states of wakefulness. The impression that immediately ensues is that of being able at last to discover what hides behind closed eyes, there where, when one squeezes one’s eyelids very tightly, fireworks even more beautiful than those of a national commemoration may appear. That said, the spectator’s feeling in the face of such phantasmagoria ends up resembling that of the protagonist when he becomes aware that all this is but illusion, straying, error. Mamtchu perhaps knew it, she who, shortly before the crisis, in the novel as in the film, “[had] begun to rummage feverishly in the pocket of her dressing gown [in search of] a little piece of thread”¹⁷; this amulet — invisible in cinema — should have helped Aharon find his way again, protect himself from false appearances and, who knows, from himself. “Should have,” to be sure, because life is not a fairy tale, not even when one seeks to transfigure it from top to bottom by means of varied semantic strategies, proper to literature as much as to moving images.

In this regard, it must probably be underscored that if Bergman might have been strongly tempted to offer Grossman’s characters an existence “less solitary, less torn, happy perhaps”¹⁸, this is not what he decides to do when he prepares to shoot a “dramatic comedy.” In choosing to retain from this oxymoron the full range of narrative potentials, his stance becomes rather that of the translator, concerned to say — by an arrangement whose scope is, among other things, argumentative — “almost the same thing.” For “what poses a problem is not so much the idea of the same thing, nor that of the same thing, but indeed the idea of this almost.”¹⁹ To fix “the elasticity, the extension of the almost, this depends on criteria that must be [established] beforehand.”²⁰ At bottom, “saying almost the same thing is a procedure that takes place […] under the sign of negotiation.”²¹ Hence the discrepancy inherent in any type of transposition seeking to rework a raw material with the help of tools and variations — in the most musical sense of the term — inevitably heterogeneous. These “work upon the work” in order to ensure its autonomy and coherence, despite all manipulation; on screen, they serve the intentions of a technical team and engage in a somewhat paradoxical enterprise: to efface all artifice by a new artifice.

Here, then, is what Bergman’s latest feature film achieves: to bring back to life the places, actions and characters of Grossman’s novel by attributing to them significations that only an uninhibited reading could possibly have whispered to the most attentive ears; to incarnate — in its etymological acceptation, that is, to “give flesh to” — feelings at once subjective and shared, issuing from a plausible, though at moments implausible, microcosm; to exhibit stories so as to exhibit History no longer, especially when it seems able to lend itself all too easily to metaphorical instrumentalizations. On this point, if the critics scarcely appreciated the reconstitution of 1960s Israel²², it seems to us, on the contrary, very successful since it manages to evoke a time now bygone, without falling into the trap of nostalgia and with an economy of means that does it full justice. This reconstitution is minimalist not only on account of its incontestably metonymic bent — a single detail suffices to evoke the “whole” — but also because its use of archives is limited to the opening sequences, the only ones in black and white and whose image quality differs from that of the rest of the film. By way of introduction, these fragments of a national narrative relegated to the background say at the same time the debt and the distance with respect to a literary tradition that has made the epic a genre, in spite of everything, “in the singular.”

Notes

Bibliography

Primary sources

Grossman D. (2011), Le livre de la grammaire intérieure, Paris, Seuil. Bergman N. (2010), La grammaire intérieure (Ha-Dikduk ha-pnimi), Israel, 1h44.

Secondary sources

Amiel V. (2002), Esthétique du montage, Paris, Nathan-Université. Balázs B. (2010), L’homme visible et l’esprit du cinéma, Paris, Circé. De Gaetano R. (February–March 2003), “Profondità e superficie,” in [duel], no. 102, p. 63. Eco U. (2010), Dire presque la même chose. Expériences de traduction, Paris, LGF-Livre de Poche. Kristof A. (2004), L’analphabète, Carouge-Geneva, Zoé. Savinel Ch. (2001), “De la résistance comme un visage,” in Murielle Gagnebin and Christine Savinel (eds.), L’image récalcitrante, Paris, Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, pp. 13–28.

Internet references

Mandelbaum J. (12 June 2012), “‘La Grammaire intérieure’: un classique de la littérature israélienne victime d’une adaptation malencontreuse,” Le Monde, accessed 15 January 2013, URL: http://www.lemonde.fr/cinema/article/2012/06/12/la-grammaire-interieure-un-classique-de-la-litterature-israelienne-victime-d-une-adaptation-malencontreuse_1716597_3476.html

Smith B. (12 June 2012), “Maladie d’enfance,” Critikat, accessed 15 January 2013, URL: http://www.critikat.com/La-Grammaire-interieure.html?var_recherche=grammaire%20int%C3%A9rieure