"I had to burrow through it, burrow through it": Anthropocene, Literature and Aesthetics of Garbage
This article presumes that garbage is an important material for understanding the era we live in, and that it is important to think about it precisely from an aesthetic perspective. In this era, which manufactures so much garbage that you can no longer push it aside and repress it, garbage has even infiltrated literature and art. I argue that in the era of garbage, an era of incessant manufacturing, the aesthetic taste that only recently seemed to us as a given without a source, is gradually unraveling. That unraveling gives rise to the questions: What is beautiful? What is destroyed? What is dirty and repulsive? What, actually, is garbage?
The starting point of the article is that turning to garbage allows a twofold escape: from the modern discourse of cleanliness and aesthetics, but also from a fantastic environmental discourse of a green and virginal nature. “The dirty Jew” is described as someone in contrast with aesthetic concepts and alienated from nature and life, and therefore the literary image of the Jew allows examining the encounter between the cleanliness discourse and nature. In the article I look at texts from different periods of Hebrew literature that placed garbage at their center: a story from the medieval compilation “The King’s Son and the Ascetic,” alongside texts from contemporary Israeli literature: two stories by Rachel Halfi and the book “The Eye of the Cat” by Haviva Pedaya. Out of the broad perspective on the place of garbage in Hebrew literature I offer a theory of writing garbage and point to the increase in the discussion of garbage in Hebrew literature since the 1980s.
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