Shira

by Agnon, S. Y.

  Let us try to pull these strands together and consider the kind of conclusion to which Agnon wanted them to lead. Shira, hardbitten, mannish, unseductive, coldly imperious, neither young nor pretty, seems an unlikely candidate either for the focus of an erotic obsession or for the symbolic representation of Poetry. It seems to me, however, that all these unappetizing traits are precisely what makes her the perfect conduit to carry Herbst from the realm of scholarship to the realm of poetry. Agnon’s figure for Poetry is no classical maiden in decorous déshabillé. Art as he conceives it is a violation of all the conventional expectations of bourgeois rationality. In Freudian terms, the roots of art are in the pre-moral realm of polymorphous perversity. It is hard to reconcile anything in the character of Shira with ordinary notions of the good and the beautiful, and once Herbst has learned something about her bizarre sexual history, the initial ambiguity of identity between female and male that he perceives in her is compounded by others in his fantasies: Shira is both the rapist and the raped, the wielder of terrible weapons and the dismembered female victim, the nurturer of mothers and infants and the asocial disrupter of families, nurse and source of contagion. Sexually, she clearly appeals to Herbst because she is everything that his fadedblonde, maternal, sweetly solicitous wife is not, and in the thematic logic of the novel, it is necessary that he be detached from the complacencies of the haven of domesticity in order to be inducted into the soul-trying realm of poetry. The novel stresses the indissoluble bond between poetry and eros, because in Agnon’s view what art does is give the revelatory coherence of form to erotic energies (the affinity with both Nietzsche and Freud is not accidental), and, conversely, the many-faced spirit of eros, both god and monster, is the very motorforce of art. It is instructive that Agnon’s major fiction before Shira repeatedly focuses on some form of gravely impaired male sexuality (A Simple Story, Only Yesterday, novellas like The Hill of Sand and Betrothed); only in this novel is there emotionally affecting consummation – “Flesh such as yours will not soon be forgotten” – however elusive the object of desire subsequently proves to be.

  But the most crucial crossing of opposites associated with Shira is the wedding of health and sickness, love and death. At the beginning, the freckle-like protuberances on Shira’s cheeks seem to be merely a token of her mannish unattractiveness; eventually, we realize that they were an early sign of her leprosy, and so the death’s head on her wall becomes an emblem of the fate to which she is consigned, in which Herbst will finally join her. It is reasonable to assume that Agnon, who made a careful study of Freud in the 1930s and probably read him episodically earlier during his sojourn in Germany, followed Freud in positing eros and thanatos as the two universal driving forces of the psyche. A couple of the passages we have glanced at establish an eerie equivalence between the two. If Böcklin, Herbst reasons, was obliged to use only the power of his imagination for the female figures he painted, the same must be true for his painting of the skull. And if Herbst in his dream, constrained like Böcklin by his wife’s jealousy, is denied access to female models, he is invited to substitute bony death for woman’s flesh as the subject of his art. In the end, no model is required for either, because love and death are so deeply seated in every one of us, constituting the matrix of all our human imaginings.

  A small point in Agnon’s Hebrew makes the force of his ramified use of painting particularly clear. The standard Hebrew verb “to paint,” tzayer, is also the verb Agnon uses for “to imagine.” A chief reason for Herbst’s failure to write his tragedy is that he is too fastidious to imagine, or literally “paint to himself,” the concrete suffering of the leper who figures centrally in its plot. “Herbst was afraid to immerse himself in that sickness and explore it, to picture various aspects of leprosy, such as how lepers relate to each other or how they function in conjugal terms” (ii:17). The true artist is the person, like Rembrandt of The Anatomy Lesson, like the anonymous painter of the school of Bruegel, and like Böcklin, who looks on death and disease clear-eyed and unflinching, just as we see the face of Böcklin in his self-portrait serenely scrutinizing his canvas.

  If the artist’s credo put forth by Shira is in one respect distinctly modernist, embracing the idea of art as an unflinching “technique of trouble,” in R. B. Blackmur’s phrase, it also has an oddly medieval feeling. Herbst is a historian of Byzantium versed in the ascetic practices of the early Christians, and the novel draws explicit parallels between the monastic renunciation of worldly life and the withdrawal to the leper hospital that Herbst will choose as his final fulfillment. In some of his earlier fiction, Agnon had set up a simple alternative between art and eros, depicting protagonists who renounce the gratification of desire in the name of the pursuit of art. Here, on the other hand, desire joins hands with art in the magic circle of imminent death, removed from the shallow egotism and the complacent self-deceptions of everyday social existence. This is chiefly what I had in mind earlier when I proposed that in Shira Agnon seeks to move through realism to allegory. And this, I suspect, was precisely the problem that bedeviled him for nearly two decades after the initial élan that produced Books One and Two. How was he to take Herbst, a figure with a certain academic pedigree, a family history, individual work habits and domestic tics, and translate him into the symbolic sphere where poetry, desire, and death were one; and what face could Shira, hitherto also a novelistic character with an individual sensibility and a personal history, show in that ultimate locus of thematic convergences, withdrawn from the worldly realm? There is a structural analogy, though I am not proposing any influence, between the ending of Shira and the ending of Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma. Stendhal, too, sought to transport a hero entrammeled in the petty machinations of worldly life to a privileged sphere of lofty withdrawal from the world, and though his novel never actually breaks off like Agnon’s, most critics have felt that the conclusion of this masterpiece of European fiction is huddled, leaping too suddenly from all the complications of the court of Parma to the contemplativeness of the monastery at the very end. Herbst’s planned route to the monastic leprosarium is persuasively traced by Adiel Amzeh, the protagonist of the remarkable story “Forevermore,” which Agnon originally wrote to include in Shira and then decided to publish separately. In the fuller dimensions of the novel, he was unable to find a solid fictional bridge on which Manfred Herbst could cross over from his home and wife and children and academic tasks to that ghastly consecrated realm where a disease-ridden woman whose name means poetry could offer him more than the world ever could. The result was a plot in which after a certain point the central character can only turn and turn again in the circuits of his one obsession, circling back on the apartment where Shira is no longer to be found, revolving in his mind the idea of the tragedy he would write and the memory of the flesh that cannot be forgotten, which are but obverse sides of the same lost coin.

  There are certain works of literature that are finally stymied by the bold effort of the writer to pursue a personal vision beyond the limits of precedent and genre. Stendhal’s Charterhouse is a memorable case in point; another, still closer to Shira in its actual incompletion, is Kafka’s The Castle. Confronted with this order of originality, most readers, I think, will be content with the splendid torso, however much they may regret the absence of the fully sculpted figure. In Shira the hero’s final way to the place of poetry and truth, where death hones desire, is indicated rather than fictionally imagined. But Herbst’s descent into an underworld of eros and art, enacted against the background of Jerusalem life in the gathering shadows of a historical cataclysm of inconceivable proportions, is so brilliantly rendered that Shira, even without an ending, deserves a place among the major modern novels.

  Robert Alter is Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written extensively on modern Hebrew literature and on the Bible as well as on the European and American novel.

  * “A Novel of the Post-Tragic World,” in m
y book Defenses of the Imagination: Jewish Writers and Modern Historical Crisis (Philadelphia, 1977).

  Agnon’s Shira: A Translator’s Afterthoughts Zeva Shapiro

  S. Y. Agnon’s romantic novel, Shira, is an ode to Jerusalem, understated in its tone, complex in its structure, overwhelming in its lyric sweep. When the initial chapters appeared, intermittently in the literary journals of the early 1940s and ‘50s, readers reveled in the fun of identifying the prominent public figures who served as models for many of Agnon’s thinly disguised characters. In the 1970s when the novel was published, posthumously, critics were challenged by the task of decoding the message and dealing with the ambiguous conclusion of the Nobel laureate’s final work.

  The novel unfolds on several levels through characters whose actions are ordinary, though weighted with an awareness of motives and alternatives. The actions and thought processes of the central figures – Manfred Herbst, a professor of Byzantine history who is on the brink of middle age; his wife Henrietta, who is more interested in her family, household, social conscience, then in meeting her husband’s needs; Shira, the arrogant nurse with whom Herbst has an affair and, to his dismay, becomes passionately entangled – have an insistently comic dimension that moves Agnon’s painstakingly detailed accounts of an action or thought process beyond the obsessive to the realm of the absurd.

  In Shira Agnon writes, at last, about his own time and place: Palestine in the period of the British Mandate, with the Holocaust casting its shadow on the mechanics of life, personal modes, political options. Agnon’s prose is relatively free of nostalgia and pietism, providing wry descriptions of academia, the religious community, political responses ranging from the innocent to the militant, describing a context that one recognizes all too well to this day. Though the narrative line of the novel is rather loose, Agnon’s distinctive prose embodies a very special realm where thought and feeling meet, a powerful and fascinating integral logic that engages the reader and evokes endlessly new meanings from what might otherwise be considered the trivia of everyday life and consciousness.

  When I began to discover intimations of Agnon in the events of my own daily life, I realized that he had entered my world just as I had entered his. I began to flow with the text, and Shira (the women at the romantic center of this novel, whose name means poetry/song in Hebrew) was transformed from a fiercely pragmatic figure to a sensual evocation of King Solomon’s beloved. Herbst’s often frantic rambles through modern Jerusalem were enriched by the resonance of familiar verses: “Upon my couch at night I sought the one I love – I must rise and roam the town, in the streets and squares I must seek the one I love.” There are more pointed references to the Song of Songs (Shir HaShirim in Hebrew) throughout the novel – so that for me King Solomon’s passion inhabits its core. In a crucial scene, toward the end of the novel, Herbst regards a painting of a leper “with panic in his eyes and desire in his heart,” a phrase that echoes Herbst’s tortured relation to Shira and will, undoubtedly resonate even for the common reader who will not make the leap to the verse in Chronicles I, wherein David informs the people that the Lord has chosen Solomon to build the Temple, rejecting David because of the bloody consequences of his affair with Bathsheba.

  Books I and II of Shira both end with dreams. In a dramatic segment that has the intensity of a gripping nightmare (included as “Final Chapter” at the end of the English-language edition), Herbst finds Shira in a leper colony and decides to stay with her there. Emuna Yaron, Agnon’s daughter and dedicated editor, whose notes are a primary source in our attempt to reconstruct Agnon’s design for this book, provides the following information: “This chapter, which belongs after Book III, was meant to be the conclusion of the book, but Agnon removed it and began writing Book IV.” In fact, this segment, with its bizarre dream-like syntax, seems to fit between Chapters 18 and 19, near the end of Book III, where it is consistent with the lurid surreal mode of the ongoing text. Chapter 19 begins with a reference to a dream, somewhat distinct from the visions that plagued Herbst in the preceding chapter. And Agnon himself almost seems to be addressing problems of chronology arising from this placement (the baby, to whom Shira refers in these pages is not actually born until the final chapter of Book III, some 25 pages later), when he remarks: “I will relay something that becomes relevant later on. Why advance the sequence now? Because what follows cannot be interrupted.”

  Chapters 14 and 15 of Book III, which deal with Herbst’s pursuit of the book collections and his encounter with the painting of the leper, were also, at some point, taken out of the book. But Emuna Yaron reports that when she asked her father for guidance about them she was instructed to put them back in. She mentions that the text, from Chapter 16 on, was found in binders marked “Shira III” and “Shira IV”, a fact that adds to the speculation about Agnon’s motives in removing material from the body of Shira and reinforces the impression that the manuscript remained in a somewhat fluid state. While this information does little to clarify Agnon’s ultimate scheme, it does suggest ambivalence about the place of leprosy in the novel.

  Again, from Emuna Yaron’s notes: “While my father was writing Shira, he was also writing the story ‘Ad Olam’ (Forevermore). After Shira was published, Rafi Weiser, of the Agnon Archive, discovered on a particular page of the manuscript just how ‘Ad Olam’ connects with Shira, i.e. somewhere along the line ‘Ad Olam’ was pulled out of Shira and became a story on its own. In ‘Ad Olam’ the scholar Adiel Amza enters the leper colony and doesn’t ever leave it. This may be the reason, or one of the reasons, why my father no longer used this subject in his book Shira.”

  Herbst’s own decision within the text of Shira, to abandon the tragedy he was writing about Basileus, the devoted leprous servant, may echo the decision not to include the ‘Ad Olam’ episode in Shira, to withdraw the subject of leprosy form a central position in the novel; and use it as the core of a freestanding story instead. (Could the tale of Ludmilla the nurse, which Agnon promises to tell at the end of Chapter 7 of Book iv, but which never materializes be related to the tale that became ‘Ad Olam’?) Critics who, nonetheless, consider the reunion of Herbst with Shira in the leper colony as the correct conclusion of the novel point the narrative, the characters, and ultimately, the entire thrust of Shira in the direction of pathology and death.

  I, myself, choose to take Agnon at his word: “I will show you Manfred Herbst. I won’t show you Shira, whose tracks have not been uncovered, whose whereabouts remain unknown.” In this connection, it is interesting to refer to the last paragraph of Agnon’s novel A Simple Story, which suggests a distinction between “ending” and “closure” that could be applied to Shira too: “The tale of Hirsh and the tale of Mina are over. But Bluma’s tale is not over. What happened to Bluma Nacht is a book in itself. As for Getzel Stein, whom we mentioned rather casually, as well as all the others in our simple story, how much ink will we spill, how many pens will we break to write their tale. God in heaven knows when.” (Translation mine.)

  In both A Simple Story and Shira, the narrator, fate’s trusted accomplice, implies that there is unfinished business to be transacted, more knots to be tied or untied. In the case of Shira, where the ending has more finality but is less fully resolved than A Simple Story, the reader who allows himself to drift into the rich and perplexing world of Manfred Herbst will be drawn into the process of finding closure within the book’s abrupt and fragmentary conclusion.

  Throughout the final chapters of Shira, Herbst seems on the verge of confession, and there are repeated intimations that Henrietta suspects he is having an affair, either through her own canniness or because Herbst is so transparent. Herbst’s confession to Henrietta (in “Another Version,” which follows “Final Chapter” at the end of the English-language edition), and her characteristically laconic response as she refuses to either blame or absolve him, leave her with the upper hand, depriving him of dramatic confrontation that might feed his thwarted sense of self. (Three babies – Sarah,
Dan, Gabi – have been born in the course of Shira. Henrietta’s condescension when Herbst makes his confession all but transforms him into another rather pathetic baby.) There are many indications that Agnon would have, eventually, amplified Book IV, leaving its substance essentially unchanged, that he would have incorporated key elements of “Another Version” to support, rather than alter, the final segment. The recurring verse – “flesh such as yours will not soon be forgotten” (a slight but not insignificant departure from the poet Sh. Shalom’s “cannot be forgotten”) may also serve to underline this ending rather than the one Agnon wrote earlier and discarded, in which Herbst and Shira are reunited in the leper colony.

  Critics have added a great deal to our appreciation of Agnon’s mind, of the complex network of intellect, culture, and sensibility that is embodied in the text of Shira; ordinary readers, on the other hand, have responded to the novel’s immediate emotional and psychological power, contemplating its “ideas” as secondary gain. It is ironic that Agnon, whose art defies and deplores pedantic analysis, who parodied the academic establishment so effectively in Shira and elsewhere, has been appropriated by admirers who engage in elaborate attempts to decode and analyze rather than risk immersing themselves in the pleasures of this elusive and unpredictable text. Highlighting the “message” of Shira at the expense of its novelistic art, reducing the character of Shira herself to metaphor in an attempt to extract philosophical magnitude and impose conformity on this unconventional, yet thoroughly accessible, novel deprives it of a far more essential dimension.