Structural Reduction in the Early Work of Assaf Gavron

In this chapter, I argue that Roberto Schwarz’s writing can produce a wholly new reading of contemporary Israeli literature. I use Schwarz’s insistence on the primacy of the literary (when thinking about literary works) to read Assaf Gavron’sGavron, Assaf 2013 novel The Hilltop, to problematize the too-quick of a reading of it in terms of familiar political oppositions, thereby missing the novel’sNovel, the original thinking. I argue reading the novel via Schwarz’s conception of structural reduction—in which the critic must invent a social theory that will account for the work’s dominant formal property—allows this newness to emerge. I argue that The Hilltop is to be understood as combining two antagonistic strands of Israeli fiction: on the one hand, the more playful “post-national” metropolitan works of the 1990s (as in the writing of Orly Castel-Bloom); and the more earnest political-literary writing of the 1980s–2000s (as in the writing of David GrossmanGrossman, David or Nir Baram). I argue that the novel’s structural reduction is strongly related to a sense of misplacedness; and the collision of these two contradictory strands in the novels is the strongest example for this misplacedness. I end the essay by suggesting that, the real subsumption under capitalismCapitalism of Israeli settlementsIsraeli settlement on PalestinianPalestinian lands, is the social form to which this structural reduction is correlated. As such, the novelNovel, the allows us to understand the theft of PalestinianPalestinian land by Israel, as part of a larger contradiction: the development of capitalismCapitalism.