Shira

by Agnon, S. Y.

  Shira is at once Agnon’s fullest invocation of the nineteenthcentury European novel and a deliberate modernist demonstration of the collapse of the thematic concerns and formal strategies of the nineteenth-century novel. Adultery as an attempted escape from the flatness and the stifling routine of bourgeois society is, of course, one of the two or three great recurrent themes of the traditional novel. One could not have chosen a more thoroughly bourgeois realm in the Palestine of the 1930s than the milieu of the Hebrew University with its predominantly German-Jewish professorate, where propriety, conformism, industriousness, self-importance, and social status were the governing values. Agnon, who lived on the margins of the Hebrew University, some of his best friends being members of its faculty, knew this world well and rendered it in his last novel with a shrewd satiric eye. Shira, however, turns out to be something quite different from a latter-day Hebrew reprise of Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina in an academic setting. Herbst, unlike Flaubert’s Emma, does not “discover in adultery all the platitudes of married life” but, on the contrary, finds that a fleeting carnal encounter with an unlikely object of desire opens up vertiginous new perspectives, makes bourgeois hearth and home unlivable for him, impels him in ways he is hardly conscious of to do something radically other with his life.

  The background of political violence is one of the keys to the difference between Shira and the tradition of the European novel that it recalls. The bourgeois academic world from which Manfred Herbst derives is not a fixed datum of social reality, as would be the case in a nineteenth-century novel, but is seen instead as a fragile choreography of complacent social rituals on the brink of a historical abyss. The novel is set in the late thirties, in the midst of the murderous Arab attacks on the Jewish population of Palestine that began in 1936. The ideological tension between Jewish militants, like the underground group to which Herbst’s daughter Tamara belongs, and the pacifists of the Brit Shalom organization at the Hebrew University, is frequently invoked. On the European horizon that has the most urgent thematic relevance to all that transpires in the Jerusalem setting of the novel, Herbst’s German homeland is preparing the machinery for genocide. In a world moving rapidly from episodic terror to systematic mass murder on the most unprecedented scale, mere private experience – the staple of the classic novel – dwindles to insignificance. Adultery can no longer be even the illusory personal adventure it was in nineteenth-century fiction, and the very premise of the linear plot of the novel of adultery is called into question: Herbst’s involvement with Shira cannot go anywhere as a developing chain of fictional events; instead, he circles around and around the idea of Shira, or, what amounts to the same thing, around what Shira’s disturbing presence has released within him.

  Let me state this in terms of the quest for knowledge that is a central issue in the novel. Herbst and his fellow cultivators of the grove of academe, equipped with their index cards and bibliographies and learned journals, sedulously pursue the most esoteric and distant objects of knowledge – the burial customs of ancient Byzantium, the alphabets of long-lost languages. The purported sphere of these objects of knowledge is history, but do these historical investigations, beyond their utility in advancing the careers of the investigators, tell us anything essential about the historical forces that are about to move the German nation to gun down, gas, and incinerate millions of men, women, and children? The European perpetrators of these horrors are, after all, at least in part products of the same academic culture as Herbst and his colleagues. The most troubling question a Jewish writer after 1945 could raise is variously intimated here, particularly in Herbst’s nightmares and hallucinations: Could there be a subterranean connection between forces at work, however repressed, within the civilized Jew and the planners and executors of mass murder who are, after all, men like you and me? At the beginning of the novel, Herbst is unable to write that big second book which will earn him his professorship because he has a writer’s block. As the effects of his exposure to Shira sink in, he is unable to write it because it has become pointless, such knowledge as could be realized through it felt to be irrelevant. Instead, Herbst hits on the desperate idea of writing a tragedy, for his experience with the radical ambiguity of eros in his involvement with Shira/Poetry leads him to sense that art, unlike historical inquiry, has the capacity to produce probing, painful self-knowledge, and is able to envisage history not as a sequence of documented events but as a terrible interplay of energies of love and death, health and ghastly sickness. Herbst, with his habits of academic timidity, his hesitant and unfocused character, may not ever be capable of creating such exacting art, but he is ineluctably drawn to the idea of it.

  The underlying concern with the nature of art in Shira is reflected in its wealth of references – scrupulously avoided elsewhere in Agnon’s fiction – to European writers: Goethe, Nietzsche, Balzac, Rilke, Gottfried Keller, Stefan George, not to speak of the Greek tragedians and their German scholarly expositors whom Herbst reviews in his quixotic attempt to write a tragedy (ostensibly, a historical drama set in the Byzantine period but unconsciously a reflection of his own agonizing erotic dilemma with Shira). From one point of view, this is a novel about the impossibility of tragedy in the modern age, and especially after the advent of Hitler – that is to say, the impossibility of a literary form that assigns meaning to suffering, or represents an experience of transcendence through suffering. In consonance with this concern with tragedy, a good deal of weight is given to Nietzsche’s notion in The Birth of Tragedy of the roots of the genre in an experience of violent primal forces contained by artistic form – Herbst, preeminently a “Socratic” man in Nietzsche’s negative characterization of German academic culture, at one point runs across a first edition of The Birth of Tragedy in an antiquarian bookshop.

  Another manifestation of Agnon’s preoccupation here with the way art illuminates reality is the attention devoted to painting, again, a thoroughly uncharacteristic emphasis in his fiction. Three painters figure significantly in the novel: Rembrandt and Böcklin, who recur as motifs in connection with Shira, and the anonymous artist from the school of Bruegel responsible for the stupendous canvas of the leper and the townscape (iii:15) that constitutes Herbst’s great moment of terrifying and alluring revelation. A look at how the three painters interact in the novel may suggest something of what Agnon was trying to say about art, and perhaps also why he found his way to a conclusion of the novel ultimately blocked.

  If art, or poetry, is a route to knowledge radically different from the academic enterprise that has been Herbst’s world, Agnon sees as its defining characteristic a capacity to fuse antinomies, to break down the logically marked categories – Herbst’s boxes full of carefully inscribed research notes – presupposed by scholarly investigation. The Bruegelian painting Herbst discovers at the antiquarian’s is a multiple transgression of the borderlines of reason, and that, he realizes, is the power of its truthful vision. The leper’s eye-sockets are mostly eaten away by the disease [see Fig. 1], yet they are alive and seek life – a paradox that reenacts the underlying achievement of the painter, “who imbued the inanimate with the breath of life.” The medium of the painting is of course silent, but Herbst, contemplating the warning bell held by the leper, experiences a kind of synesthetic hallucination, hears the terrible clanging sound, and feels the waves of the disease radiating out from the leper’s hand. The painting from the school of Bruegel, as I have proposed elsewhere,* is in its formal and thematic deployment a model for the kind of art embodied in Shira itself: in the foreground, the horrific and compelling figure of the diseased person [Fig.2], intimating an impending cataclysm; in the background, half out of focus, the oblivious burghers complacently going about their daily pursuits [Fig. 3]. Agnon gives us not only the artwork but also an exemplary audience for it in Herbst. The historian of Byzantium is mesmerized by the painting in a paradoxically double way: “he looked at it, again and again with panic in his eyes and desire in his heart.” The painting at o
nce scares him and translates him to an unwonted plane of experience, because it both speaks eloquently to a universal truth of human experience and gives him back a potent image, of which he is scarcely conscious, of his own life.

  The painting depicted in Book II Chapter 15 “from the school of Bruegel” does not seem to be an actual painting, but Agnon may have been drawing on elements from a number of works by Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569), see figs. 1-3.

  Fig. 1: Bruegel the Elder, “The Parable of the Blind Leading the Blind” (1568) – Museo di Capodimonte, Naples. (“Herbst picked up the picture and stood it up so he could see it better. The eyes were awesome and sad. Their sockets had, for the most part, been consumed by leprosy, yet they were alive and wished to live.”)

  Fig. 2: Bruegel the Elder, “The Lepers” (aka “The Cripples”) (1568) – The Louvre, Paris

  Fig. 3: Bruegel the Elder, Detail of “The Fight of Carnival and Lent” (1559) – Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

  Fig. 4: Rembrandt, “The Night Watch” (1642) – Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

  Fig. 5: Rembrandt, “The Anatomy Lesson” (1632) – Mauritshuis, The Hague

  Fig. 6: Arnold Böcklin, “The Isle of the Dead” (1883) – Nationalgalerie, Berlin

  Fig. 7: Arnold Böcklin, “The Plague” (1898) – Kunstmuseum, Basel

  Fig. 8: Arnold Böcklin, “Self-Portrait with Death as a Fiddler” (1872) – Nationalgalerie, Berlin

  Seeking relief from the terrible intensity of the Bruegelian painting, Herbst flips through a stack of Rembrandt reproductions and comes to The Night Watch [Fig. 4], on which he dwells. Rembrandt would seem to present a kind of art antithetical to that of the anonymous painter from the school of Bruegel. The narrator tells us that Herbst now experiences a sense of melancholy accompanied by “inner tranquility” (menuhat hanefesh, literally, “soul’s rest”), a tranquility usually identified as harmony but which he, the narrator, prefers to associate with the illumination of knowledge. The opposition, however, between Rembrandtian and Bruegelian art rapidly dissolves, like most of the key oppositions in the novel. To begin with, The Night Watch immediately makes Herbst think of Shira, who had been looking for a reproduction of the painting, and she is doubly associated with disease – the wasting disease that by this point we suspect she has contracted, and her hapless lover’s disease of the spirit manifested in his obsessive relationship with her. But a few minutes later in narrated time, Herbst suddenly realizes that his memory has played a trick on him, or, in the psychoanalytic terms never far from Agnon’s way of conceiving things from the thirties onward, he has temporarily repressed something. It was not The Night Watch, with its beautifully composed sense of confident procession, that Shira wanted, but another Rembrandt painting, The Anatomy Lesson [Fig. 5]. The clinical subject of the latter painting might of course have a certain professional appeal to Shira as a nurse, but what is more important is that its central subject is not living men marching but a cadaver, and thus it is linked with the representation of the living-dead leper in the anonymous canvas.

  Death as a subject, in turn, connects Rembrandt with Böcklin, the artist responsible for the painting of the death’s-head that Shira keeps in her apartment. Arnold Böcklin, a Swiss painter much in fashion in Central Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century (Stefan George wrote a poem about him), provides one of the teasing keys to Shira. Böcklin had a pronounced preference for mythological and allegorical topics, often rendered with a sharp realism of detail, and in pursuing this interest he repeatedly devoted emphatic attention to those figures of classical mythology associated with a riot of sensuality – Pan, satyrs, centaurs, Triton disporting himself with a Nereid. He also produced two versions of an allegorical painting that is particularly pertinent to the central thematic complex of Shira: entitled Poetry and Painting, it shows two female figures on either side of a fountain (presumably, the Pierian Spring), Poetry on the left, naked to the waist, leaning on the fountain’s edge; Painting on the right, enveloped in drapery, dipping one hand into the water while with the other she holds a palette. Interestingly, Böcklin never did a painting of a skull, if one can trust the testimony of the comprehensive illustrated catalogue of his paintings published in Berne in 1977. He was, however, much preoccupied with death, which he characteristically represented in a histrionic mode that has a strong affinity with Symbolist painting. One scene he painted a few times was The Isle of the Dead [Fig. 6], in which the island looms as a spooky vertical mass against a dark background, with a small boat approaching it in the foreground, rowed by a presumably male figure, his back to us, while a female figure in white stands erect in the boat. One of his last paintings, The Plague (1898) [Fig. 7], exhibits a more brutally direct relevance to Shira: a hideous female figure, with large wings and grotesque tail, yet more woman than monster, swoops down over the streets of a town.

  The reproduction that hangs on Shira’s wall is probably of Self-Portrait with Death as Fiddler (1872) [Fig. 8]. It is possible that Agnon simply forgot the self-portrait and concentrated on the skull when he introduced the painting into his novel, but given his frequently calculating coyness as a writer, it seems more likely that he deliberately suppressed the entire foreground of the canvas. In the foreground, Böcklin, wearing an elegant dark smock, stands with palette in one hand and brush in the other, his trim beard delicately modeled by a source of light from the upper left, his lively lucid eyes intent on the canvas he is painting. Behind him, in the upper right quadrant of the painting, virtually leaning on the painter’s back, death as a leering skull with bony hand – rendered in the same precise detail as the figure of the artist – scratches away on his fiddle. That missing artist absorbed in his work who stands in front of the figure of death is, in one respect, what Shira is all about.

  Death is, I think, a specter of many faces in this somber, troubling novel. It has, to begin with, certain specific historical resonances for the period of the late 1930s in which the action is set. In the two decades since 1914, death had given ample evidence of having been instated as the regnant Zeitgeist of the century. Herbst recalls wading up to his knees in blood as a soldier in the great senseless slaughter that was the First World War. The novel begins with mention of a young man murdered by Arabs, and in these days of organized terrorist assaults and random violence against the Jews of Palestine that began in 1936, there is a repeated drumbeat of killings in the background of the main action. On the European horizon, German Jews are desperately trying to escape, many of them sensing that Germany is about to turn into a vast death-trap. But beyond Agnon’s ultimately political concern with the historical moment as a time of endemic murder, he is also gripped by the timeless allegory of Böcklin’s painting: every artist, in every age, as an ineluctable given of his mortal condition, works with death fiddling at his back, and cannot create any art meaningfully anchored in the human condition unless he makes the potency of death part of it, at once breathing life into the inanimate and incorporating death in his living creation. Agnon was nearing sixty when he began work on the novel and an octogenarian when he made his last concerted effort to finish it, and it is easy enough to imagine that he saw himself in Böcklin’s attitude as selfportraitist, the grim fiddler just behind him.

  Herbst takes due notice of the Böcklin painting in Shira’s apartment, and he is several times bothered by an oddly literal question about it: “Did Böcklin paint from a model or from his imagination? Why do I ask? Herbst wondered about himself (I:29). Why, indeed, should so sophisticated an intellectual trouble himself about whether the painter used a model or not? The question, it should be observed, makes somewhat better sense if one keeps in mind not just the skull but both figures in Self-Portrait with Death as Fiddler, for then, since Böcklin demonstrably used himself as the model for the painter, one might begin to speculate about the “source” for the macabre fiddler standing behind the painter, the very hybrid nature of the composition putting to the test any simple mimetic
conception of art. A couple of paragraphs later in the same chapter, a clue, or at least a dangling possibility of connection, is provided for Herbst’s question. Again he asks himself whether Böcklin worked from a model or from his imagination, but this time he decides firmly on the latter alternative when he recalls that Böcklin “complained that he never had the chance to draw a woman from life because his wife, who was Italian, was jealous and wouldn’t allow him to have a model in his studio.” There is an instructive overlap, then, between painting eros and painting thanatos from the imagination rather than from a model. The particular link is important enough for Herbst to pick it up again explicitly in a dream somewhat later in the novel (ii:7). In the dream he accompanies his daughter Tamara to Greece, where she means to undertake a study of verse meters (the word shira is used here for poetry). The father is glad to have gone with his daughter on the trip for “otherwise she would have seen him walking with Shira, which was not advisable, because Henrietta was in collusion with the wife of a teacher from Beit Hakerem. They agreed to prohibit their husbands from bringing other women to their studios, declaring, ‘If they want to draw – let them draw skulls.’“ One notes that Böcklin’s allegorical pair, Dichtung und Malerei, Poetry and Painting, follow in quick sequence in the dream.

  Agnon gives one further twist to the Böcklin painting by turning it at one point into a kind of reversed portrait of Dorian Gray: as Shira visibly deteriorates, the painting deteriorates with her and so its artificial deathliness becomes progressively more lifelike: “The picture became so darkened that it would frighten you, as though a real skull were staring at you” (ii:2). Agnon never entirely renounced the macabre interests of his early neo-Gothicism, and though here the ghastly correspondence between painter and owner is given a perfectly plausible explanation – as Shira neglects herself, she neglects her possessions and no longer bothers to dust the painting – troubling thoughts are stirred about the status in reality of the artwork. Its origins, or at least the origins of the part of the Böcklin painting mentioned in the novel, are not in the representation of a model but in the artist’s imagination, and yet the unforeseen intercourse between painting and experience produces a spectral affinity between the two, imbuing the artwork with an air of reality the artist himself had not given it.