After eight novels—Battle Cry, The Angry Hills, Exodus, Mila 18, Armageddon, Topaz, QB VII, and Trinity—Leon Uris continues to prompt conflicting assessments. Literary critics disparagingly dismiss his work as something less than "serious."… On the other hand, Uris has nurtured in the last thirty years a loyal American readership which renders almost every Uris novel a runaway bestseller. In short, Uris remains a reader's writer and a critic's nightmare.

The easy and conventional explanation for this discrepancy would be to acknowledge the sorry state of the audience and point to critics as having higher levels of taste. Admittedly, when judged by traditional literary canons, Uris is a poor writer. But that Uris's critics are at odds with his readers does not necessarily mean the latter have lower standards; it is equally plausible to assert they merely embrace different standards…. [While] surface appearances suggest that Uris's is a simple message packaged in a simple style, it unfolds, ironically, through complexity, necessitating a cognitive and affective sophistication by creating a reading experience wherein elements must be processed into a coherent reality. (p. 192)

Uris's work may best be understood if seen as representing a form which fuses fictional and external worlds, producing in effect a relationship between writer and reader—which we call semi-aesthetic detachment—wherein the demands of the former and the expectations of the latter deviate significantly from the "contract" underscoring traditional literature. The form may not be unique to Uris, but neither Uris nor the form has received much rhetorical attention…. [Literature such as Uris's] addresses an immediate, specific, external world concern and envisions its audience as capable of effecting change through an outwardly directed reader response. (pp. 192-93)

The plight of Jews is one major injustice Uris attempts to resolve…. Addressing what he calls "the great American public," Uris wrote four novels about the Jewish experience which portray past injustices and attempt to deter future ones: Exodus, a story about Israel's inceptional period and her fight for independence; Mila 18, a recreation of the Warsaw ghetto uprising; Armageddon, a chronicle of post World War II Germany and the Berlin Airlift; and QB VII, an account of sexual sterilization experiments performed on Jews at Auschwitz.

The dominant theme of these works is that the Jew must live in sovereignty. Throughout, Uris contends that Jewish survival rests on the establishment and maintenance of a sovereign state—the ultimate solution/deterrent to injustice against Jews…. In a sense, Uris reflects the Jewish hope from the time they were scattered 2,000 years ago: Israel must be reborn. (p. 194)

Once Jewish autonomy became a reality with the birth of Israel, the problem shifted to maintaining that sovereignty, a sovereignty seemingly forever in jeopardy. Uris, in fact, continually reminds the reader of the immediacy of the problem, noting that his novels recreate not past history, but "living" history, documenting persistent threats to Jewish homeland. QB VII character, author Abe Cady, echoes the philosophy matter-of-factly: "You learn to live with it [the Middle East uncertainty]. When I was writing The Holocaust, Shawcross [Cady's publisher] would get into a dither every time a new crisis came up, and he'd badger me for the manuscript. I told him, don't worry, whenever I finish the book, the Jews will still be in trouble."

Uris contends that the problem must be confronted by the West and, in particular, America because America's own moral and physical survival is linked to Israel's sovereignty…. America, Uris argues, is bound not only ideologically but emotionally and pragmatically to support Israel. Armageddon's General Hanson underscores the obligation when he observes, "It is going to take time for our countrymen to realize that Americans can never go home again." As leading advocators of democracy, Americans share, according to Uris, in the responsibility for Israel's future. Foreign aid, especially in the form of weaponry, must be provided to guarantee Israel's military might. Concludes Uris, "Just keep the arms coming to Israel."

Uris's view of the novel as a situational and transitory tool by which to resolve specific injustices dramatically influences his rhetorical posture, consequently altering the implicit agreement between novelist and reader. (pp. 194-95)

Uris's works … differ from traditional literature both because of what they do and what they ask of the reader.

Uris precludes placing the reader wholly in another world because it would disserve his purpose. Less interested in the reader's intrapersonal growth per se than in the sovereignty of Israel, Uris aims at producing an external/public as opposed to internal/private reader response. Although, granted, self-reflection often precedes public action, Uris is primarily concerned with prescribing the latter and hence seeks to facilitate less an isolated, personal experience than a specific, external response similar for all readers. Virtually free of implication, subtlety, and ambiguity, Uris's writings require little in the way of "working" at meaning. Uris orchestrates linguistically "complete" speech acts with which readers may agree or disagree, but which permit only minimal variance of interpretation of the inherent characterizations. One is conscious not only of a narrator—as in traditional literature—but of Uris's authorship, his ever-dominating presence.

Uris's readers must weave between external personageship and ideal auditorship—asked to empathize with fictional characters in a primarily fictional setting, but not to the extent of becoming so aesthetically detached that external personage is obscured from its articulation to storyline. Uris suggests that fictional and external worlds are interrelated to the point that his fictional discourse cannot function independent of the external world—which is different from saying … that a fictional world experience may subsequently be externally generalized, as often occurs with traditional literature. Uris's rhetoric mandates semi-aesthetic detachment: readers are required to slip into the role of ideal auditor to appreciate affectively Uris's story while continually slipping out of the role, back to external personage, to integrate fictional and external worlds. Without his readers seeing the interdependence of both worlds, Uris's purpose cannot be achieved. He hints at this when he observes that success usually comes only when words are coupled with violence, Israel's fight for sovereignty being a prime example:

If you want attention, you only can do it through words sometimes. Of course, an article can stop the world cold, a book can stop the world cold. But in order to really achieve your goal, you've got to have violence. I could have written the most beautiful story about the Jews after World War II, but if there were no Israeli army or no Israel that novel wouldn't be worth a nickel, would it?

A novel can expose injustice, Uris believes, but correction requires external action. Ideally, he would have readers emphathize with Israel's quest for sovereignty, simultaneously remembering that in their external personages they possess the power, in the form of financial assistance, to help secure and maintain that sovereignty. Accepting a contract stipulating semi-aesthetic detachment, readers collaborate with Uris by calling into play the resources of their external world. (pp. 196-97)

Because his argument for Jewish sovereignty depends on the integrating of fictional and external worlds, Uris utilizes three devices which may be labeled, in order of ascending complexity, transporters, exemplars, and stereotypes.

The transporter is an external world reference which functions to remind readers of their external personages. It "transports" by momentarily moving one from Uris's fictional world back to one's immediate external world, thus guarding against total aesthetic detachment. The transporter stands apart from, although it has correspondence to, Uris's fictional world. Uris's use of bold historical narrative serves as an example. Accentuated by one sentence paragraphs, structural parallelism, and frequent exclamation, the passage [describing the horrors at Auschwitz] recalls the external world at perhaps its most shocking hour…. (pp. 197-98)

Uris's frequent use of Biblical references is another effective transporting device…. Moreover, when Uris quotes the Bible as predicting Israel's inevitable rebirth, and when those predictions appear to concur with specific events reported by Uris, the right of Israel's sovereignty must seem obvious, as, for instance, in Exodus where readers are told of how Arab troops have blockaded the old city of Jerusalem and how reinforcements and supplies cannot reach the besieged city because the main highway from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem cannot be traveled. However, David Ben Ami, a student of the Bible, suspects that a hidden road exists because the Bible says so…. The highway indeed is found, supplies replenished, and the siege of Jerusalem broken within days. Israel's sovereignty is temporarily secured.

More complex, the exemplar provides a model of ideal, external world behavior, and normally takes the form of an extended scene or episode featuring fictional and external worlds sharing a symbiotic relationship.

Uris's fictive depiction of Americans typifies his use of exemplars. Usually portrayed as heroes, American characters aid Israel in times of crisis and play a major role in the achieving and maintaining of her sovereignty. In Exodus, for example, American reporter Mark Parker is asked to help outwit the British. Having devised a plan whereby three hundred volunteer refugee children threaten to commit suicide unless allowed to sail unmolested on the "Exodus" to Israel (then Palestine and under British protection), Jews seek Parker's help in writing and releasing the story to the press. When Parker's story reaches the public, it creates the world sympathy needed to guarantee the safe entry of the "Exodus" into Israel. Although others could have exposed the story, Parker is presented as the only source the public would believe. In a similar scenario, Mila 18's Christopher de Monti is an American journalist allowed to remain in Warsaw after Poland's surrender to Germany because he works for a neutral Swiss news agency. Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto ask de Monti to tell of the extermination centers at Treblinka and Madjanek. A reluctant de Monti explains that his efforts to expose the atrocities against Spaniards years before passed unnoticed. Still, the ghetto Jews adamantly press de Monti, believing that only he can alter their situation. They realize that as a journalist de Monti is credible to the masses and that his professionalism will dictate that he write the truth. His conscience finally overwhelming him, de Monti acquiesces and breaks the story to the publics in America and England.

In these examples, Uris enables the notion of Jewish sovereignty to assume special, affective meaning by fictionalizing heroes whom the reader can admire and respect…. This weave of storytelling and historical chronicle allows Uris to forge a work of heightened excitement and intrigue having generalizable, external world immediacy and significance. Afforded the novel's license and control, Uris manufactures an American of romantic proportions who possesses—through Uris's inventional skills—qualities of strength, charm, and commitment, and whose "good fight" seems that much more justified because of Uris's fictive manipulations. Against this backdrop, Uris interjects both a skeletal history of the external realities to which his story corresponds and reminders of Israel's contemporary exigencies. When all of this is played out, the Americans portrayed emerge as models exemplifying how Uris's American readership should act.

Also provided are more specific models of how Jews should think and behave. Through the character of Alexander Brandel [in Mila 18] Uris exemplifies the ideal Jew as actively committed to freedom and capable, or at least accepting, of physical force as a defensive weapon. (p. 199)

Brandel's character reflects a lesson in Jewish intellectual history and a statement of contemporary public policy. Brandel's initial philosophy of nonviolence typified Jewish thought prior to and early on in the war, and most readers can be expected to recognize Brandel's minimal resistance as culturally characteristic of the period. Similarly, Brandel's rejection of outright pacifism has its historical counterpart in the growing militancy Jews experienced as the war progressed and afterwards…. As Uris argues, history demonstrates that without physical power the Jew cannot hope to survive. The Jew must become a fighter.

Similar to the exemplar but somewhat more structurally complex, Uris's use of stereotypes also represents a wedding of fictional and external worlds. The stereotype promotes semi-aesthetic detachment in that it is predicated on readers suspending themselves between both worlds. They are forced, on one hand, to recall the external world, given that any stereotype survives apart from its fictional life and simply mirrors and/or embellishes external world preconceptions…. On the other hand, to accept Uris's stereotypes readers must distance themselves from external world sensibilities.

In presenting the Jew as a fighter, for instance, Uris refutes one stereotype by substituting another. "The lowest writers on my totem pole," he notes, "are those Jewish novelists who berate the Jewish people"; writers depicting "caricatures of the Jewish people … the wily businessman, the brilliant doctor … the tortured son … the coward"; authors "who spend their time damning their fathers, hating their mothers, wringing their hands and wondering why they were born." These portraits, Uris believes, are erroneous: "We Jews are not what we have been portrayed to be."

To evidence his claim that Jews "have been fighters," Uris cites the work of the Warsaw ghetto fighters, Jews running sea blockades to reach Israel, and Israel's battle with surrounding Arab countries. Uris's characters are typically "people who do not apologize either for being born Jews or (for) the right to live in human dignity."… Implicit in Uris's characterization of Jews is the idea they are worth battling for—worth saving—because they are willing to fight and accordingly risk their lives. The stereotype assures and motivates the Jew, and more significant, perhaps, provides the non-Jew with additional incentive to aid Israel.

The Jew is cast not just as a fighter, but one possessing strange mystical powers—a superhuman, capable of tasks seemingly impossible. In Exodus, Uris describes the Jews' chances for victory in their War for Independence as negligible: they are surrounded by enemies, can claim few allies, and possess virtually no military resources; yet they succeed. Uris explains the victory of the small, ill-armed Israeli fighting unit by suggesting an omnipotent presence at work…. (pp. 200-01)

Portraying the Jew as having mystical powers functions to eradicate negative Jewish stereotypes and imbue the quest for sovereignty with religious, metaphysical overtones. On one level, a mystical Jew represents a power of sorts which can be neither controlled nor predicted. Spiritually possessed and obviously devoid of cowardice, the Jew mandates respect, if not reverence…. On another level, the mystical powers of the Jew in connection with Jewish homeland suggest that irrespective of how readers may feel towards Jews, Jewish sovereignty must be taken seriously because it appears "willed" by God. Continually, Uris describes a watchful, omnipresent God, always siding with the Jews. (p. 201)

The credibility of Uris's stereotype of the Jew as a Herculean fighter grows out of Israel's fight for independence in 1948 and subsequent Israel-Arab skirmishes—in particular, The Six Day War of 1967. Uris's stereotypical characterization of the Jew reflects, with some distortion, what readers already know. Yet to empathize with Uris's stereotype, the reader must subordinate external world rationality and play the role of the all-believing ideal auditor, suppressing the knowledge that not all Jews are or were fighters and not all, if any, possess mystical powers. And too, the reader consciously must overlook Uris's major contradiction: If Jews have mystical powers and can perform extraordinary feats because God is on their side, why do they so desperately need American military and financial aid?

While a positive stereotype of the Jew serves to foster and enlist the Gentile's aid in securing Israel's sovereignty, so does Uris's negative stereotype of the Nazi. In a part factual, part fantastic, part conjectural explanation of Nazi atrocities, Uris describes the German as a pagan who rejects belief in one God…. (p. 202)

Granted, Uris's stereotype of the Nazi has some grounding in the chronicles of Nazi Germany, but it is extended by Uris to a point which denies external world plausibility. To think of Germans as barely domesticated, pagan animals requires considerable latitude in imagination; obviously, only by distancing external world personage can one accede to this portrayal. Exaggeration and dubious inference aside however, Uris, by linking anti-semitism to the Jews' religious beliefs, rhetorically places the Christian in the same league, because the one-God concept, the Bible, and the Ten Commandments are also foundations of Christian philosophy. Jew and Christian are wedded in common cause by virtue of having their religious tenets held in contempt by the Nazis.

Stereotypes—whether they be of Jews, Nazis, or otherwise—may encourage semi-aesthetic detachment by also keeping readers focused on the relationship of storyline to external world, allowing neither to be overshadowed by the kind of complex characterization which might elicit an internal/private reader response. Uris as such presents "social types rather than individual portraits," whose "main function is to carry along the plot that history has already written." Too, the stereotype per se can aid Uris's purpose by conditioning readers to think in simplistic terms. Fostering belief in a "grayless" world of clear-cut heroes and villains whose lines of demarcation never blur, Uris's stereotypes imply that nothing needs to be complex or uncertain. Not unreasonably, Uris's readers may begin to see the world similarly, and correspondingly dispose themselves to embrace Uris's facile contention that American aid to Israel can insure the latter's sovereignty and resolve all the intricacies of Israel-Arab conflict.

Although literary critics sharply attack Uris's reliance on stereotypes, those stereotypes, nevertheless, serve to support his case for Jewish sovereignty as well as render his audience cognitively receptive to the argument. Together with the transporter, which reminds readers of the external world, and the exemplar, which fuses external and fictional worlds, the stereotype helps implement Uris's purpose by suspending readers between both worlds and encouraging semi-aesthetic detachment.

If Uris's novels are seen as mutating the traditional contract between novelist and reader, the disparity in reader/critic evaluations may be given another explanation. Literary critics, it appears, perceive the combining of fictional and external worlds as producing a shoddy novel, at best deserving of another label: living history; quasi-history; documentary; "part novel, part journalism, and part history"; even nonfiction. However, the reader finds in Uris an entertaining yet credible message with direct and immediate, external world bearing. (pp. 202-03)

From another perspective, Uris's novels seem symptomatic of a growing condition where audiences care less about the rhetor's methods than with being presented and/or entertained with facile information. One finds today some "journalism" bearing considerable literary license while some "novels" seem little more than veneered external realities. Uris as well, albeit unconsciously, may influence how readers regard and process fictional and external worlds by tacitly promoting fuzzier boundaries between the two. Once such standards are relaxed, potential exists for the blending of ideal auditorship and external personage into a single persona which cares not to distinguish among varying realities. (p. 204)

Sharon D. Downey and Richard A. Kallan, "'Semi'-Aesthetic Detachment: The Fusing of Fictional and External Worlds in the Situational Literature of Leon Uris," in Communication Monographs, Vol. 49, No. 3, September, 1982, pp. 192-204.