Biblical Intertextuality, Nissim Ezekiel and the Jungian “Enterprise”.

In this paper, I argue that Nissim Ezekiel’s “Enterprise”, first published in The Unfinished Man (1960), strongly alludes to the Book of Job from the Old Testament of the Bible. Through intertextual and interdisciplinary readings, one can discern how the shadow that falls upon the characters of Ezekiel’s poem during the pilgrimage possesses the characteristics of Yahweh’s shadow that falls upon Job, and becomes directly responsible for his decrepitude. The shadow grows in both texts because the Supreme Unconscious (God) is indifferent to(wards) the human condition, and to the consequences of an apocalyptic aftermath, as illustrated in C.G. Jung’s Answer to Job. Their spiritual and moral states are restored upon two conditions – the protagonist’s internalization of both human struggle and divine wrath makes him resilient towards both, creating the theoretical premise for the resolution of their antinomy, followed by the evocation of the sublime that resists annihilation as well as the catastrophe of extreme suffering. It leads to the substitution of the poem’s theoretical framework from “the good of God” to the “agon of the Go(o)d”, as I argue towards the conclusion of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]