Contrast, Continuity and Contradiction: Opening Signals in A. B. Yehoshua's "a Poet's Continuing Silence"

Openings in fiction have received increasing attention lately from critics concerned both with narrative theory and the explication of specific texts. In his story, "A Poet's Continuing Silence," A. B. Yehoshua provides a series of opening signals that command special interest, since the text focuses directly on beginnings and attempted new beginnings in the lives of the protagonists. The various beginning strategies here highlight the psychological impasse of one character in contrast with the growth of another. These strategies also help put into relief some basic features of Yehoshua's development as a writer, and they indicate the relation of his work to trends in the recent fiction of other Israeli authors. A. B. Yehoshua's story, "A Poet's Continuing Silence" (n:::i7iil ilp,nw "1"11ll.ll:l 71l.1 n:::iwmi), opens on a note of contradiction, a deliberate insistence on repetition and return that precludes a sense of real beginning: . . . . :i iw7 .,n, x :nil.I ll.ll:lx (He was late again last night, ... ) 1 Dramatizing its own meaning of return through its conspicuous double appearance in this first brief phrase, the root :SU!z_ alerts us immediately to two kinds of return in the text. In the first instance it means simply 'again' and indicates the repetitiousness of habit or routine that is to become so central a focus of this work. In the second instance, as the following pages confirm, su!z_ signifies not just coming back but coming I. "Continuing Silence" forms part of the collection Mui hayy;i'arot ( 1962). Page numbers for citations in this essay refer to Barze I (1972); this first citation comes from page I 05. The English translations are by Miriam Arad, in Yehoshua ( J 970a); here, page 9.