Amos Oz: Black Box

Love's debris & the irreversible of written speech

In his article on Black Box (in a superb English translation by Nicholas de Lange), published in New Statesman on the 1st of July 1988, Sean French expresses his surprise for the epistulary form of this novel; he also locates the inevitable problem of doubtful verisimilarity presented to a novelist by the application of this writing technique. In any case, the epistulary novel, especially when consisting of a letter exchange among individuals of different characters, mentality and origins, could always constitute a temptation to the writing skill of an author, as the heterogeneousness it entails makes it a first class exercise of style.

"Black Box" is the indestructible tape where the last moments before a plane crash have been recorded. Critic Clive Sinclair considers the black box artifice "brilliant", as it places the reader in a judgemental role, leaving him or her to discern "why such and such an aircraft crashed". Through 46 letters, 56 telegrams, 3 police reports and 39 notes on little cards, letting aside the enclosed notes, fragments of articles, even a photocopy of a divorce issue, a whole miniature society files off that could either be the Israeli one or any other. Diffident intellectuals, unfaithful wives, double-dealing lawyers, angry adolescents, quiet housewives, skillful investigators, have their exemplary representatives in this excruciating journey which has no real ending. Every character experiences his or her own "season in Hell", having to make the account of - and finally account for - their past lives and face the direct or indirect consequences of their actions but also of their very existence. In a crisis of despair, beautiful and miserable Ilana confesses that she "brings disaster to whatever she touches" while the half-wit, illiterate savage Boaz, a genuine Voltairian figure, "cultivates his garden" abandoning all vain and sterile philosophical argumentation.

But the most interesting and complete portrait is that of the unpredictable Professor Gideon, permanently armed with murderous coldness, under which hides "a vampire stuffed with rags, a solitary rogue, a watch without glass". And as his counterweight there is a tempestuous Ilana, full of lyricism and sensitivity, whose often incomprehensible attitude masks a decicive power of character. It is not by chance that she ends up being the only factor of possible ending to the drama, a "social mimicry of the genetic model" as Sinclair remarks.

The other two dominant characters, Michel and Manfred, present a common tragicomical aspect: the former is an odd mixture of exaggerated typolatry, servile cunning and tormented honesty; the latter is a tragic caricature coming right out of Commedia dell'Arte, the funny exaggeration of a well-meaning, misunderstood Iago. Besides them, there is "good, clever, normal Rachel", whom George Steiner defines as "a chorus-voice of exasperate normality", sole representative of the so-called common sense but nevertheless equally unhappy.

Characteristic of the novel is the general tolerance Amos Oz manifests towards all of his characters, whose souls are laid exhaustively bare, to such a point that the reader often has the impression of spying on them through a Hitchcockian Rear Window. The family, and at the same time social, drama gradually unfolding in Black Box indelibly prints in our memory the portraits of its leading actors, as well as a bittersweet taste of unfulfilled happiness.

Concluding here, I would like to cite a phrase Stefan Zweig wrote about Leo Tolstoy and which has its place in the presentation of Black Box: "History", the great critic notes, "is a purposeless chaos of accidental events. [...] We never make the slightest effort to get away from this depressing nihilism. [...] There is always the inexorable description, the objective, cynical description of this darkness".