Metaphysics and Metanarrative in the Stories of David Shahar

The metaphysical concerns of David Shahar's short stories lead repeatedly to a pronounced metanarrative focus in this fiction. Metanarrative awareness develops on three complementary levels of Shahar's work: a) as explicit textual commentary by the narrator (e.g. Si'ur rison, and others); b) as complexities of narrative organization that struggle against the inescapably discrete and discursive nature of language; c) as dramatization of a concern with narration. Texts such as s~pamo sel ha'apip_ior and Louidor. Louidor introduce multiple narrators, suggesting that no one version of a story ever exhausts the preliterary or extraliterary experience to which it refers, for language never presents an iconic reproduction of the world external to words. Shahar acknowledges and grapples with the divergent views of language that emerged out of Symbolism and, from there, revolutionized much of subsequent twentieth century literature. The complexity and strength of Shahar's writing derives in considerable measure from his struggle with these issues and his refusal to opt for either a despair over language, a free play of signifiers dissociated from referentiality, or restrictively self-involved fiction about fiction. David Shahar's stories return time and again, with persistent fascination and bemused wonder, to the stubbornly elusive relations of the sacred and the mundane. Shahar focuses recurrently on man's ever unfulfilled longing in the here and now for a more meaningful beyond, and as his narrators reflect on the irreconcilable differences between the spiritual and material realms, his tales chart uneasy attempts at encounter between the two, depicting brief glimpses through the concealments and