The Whole Loaf: Agnon's Tales of the Ancestral World
About a third of Agnon's work directly reflects the culture of the shtetl before its final decline. Entirely devoted to a limited range of experience in the century preceding Agnon's birth, such work takes the form of folk tales in the idiom of the faithful who enjoyed the "whole loaf" of experience within the ancestral tradition. The civilization of the shtetl had defined itself for centuries almost entirely in terms of that tradition. Agnon attempts to render the quality of experience within it.
If one seeks a spiritual center of gravity within the Agnonic shtetl one finds it in the pervasive feeling that, ultimately, mortality holds no terrors for its folk. The denizens of Agnon's traditionalistic tales live in a world where pain and loss are pervasive. There are pogroms and persecutions; there is poverty; there is the final fact of death. But pain and loss can be placed in a larger conception of moral order in the cosmos, of an implicit logic in events. One craves the good things of the life of this world, but one is perpetually aware of their transience. The real life—the true, the intelligible world—is elsewhere. Though one does not negate the immediate conditions of one's existence—the tradition, after all, is essentially not otherworldly—one knows its limits and strives within the established order of faith to transcend it.
The culture of the shtetl had its upheavals. The life of East European Jewry between 1770 and 1880 was stormy, even in relatively peaceful Galicia. But Agnon is not occupied with its upheavals. His tales of the ancestral world are meticulous in historical detail, touching again and again upon the tensions and disruptions of the times. The emphasis, however, is not on the conflict in and for itself, but on its effect on the individual caught up in it. What really interests Agnon is the way individuals accommodate themselves to the stresses of life within village culture.
Those who celebrate Agnon as an epic writer do so because of the lucidity with which he conjures the actualities of the lost village past. And, indeed, his technique is highly objective. He writes folk tales full of people, things, events, evoking a world where the daily round of actions and responses unfolds at a leisurely pace. The emphasis, however, is not on the objective order, but rather on the strain of feeling that informs the lives of its people. The prevailing tone of the tales—even the broadly comic ones—is lyric in the extreme. Agnon tunes in on a delicate, tremulous strain of feeling that, he implies, suffused the culture at large and came to fruition in individuals. And the consciousness of these individuals is ordered by the governing patterns of consciousness in their civilization.
What characterizes the denizens of Agnon's shtetl is a radical limitation of individual consciousness and a peculiar passivity in confronting the conditions of their lives.
There is conflict, but it is always defined in conventional terms. There is struggle, but the struggle is rarely ultimate. Agnon's village folk never strike out boldly against the things that undo them, and they rarely reflect on themselves or the immediate causes of their anguish. When they do reflect on their circumstances, everything is referred back to the governing order of things—to God, to galut (exile, Diaspora), to schemes of sin and punishment that imply divine governance. The world is seen wholly in terms of the system of ideas and images that order their lives. Both nature and history are grasped in such terms.
The effect, aesthetically, is that of certain folk drawings, where stars modulate into Sabbath candles, and the world of nature arranges itself around a sukkah (tabernacle) or the Ark of the Covenant. The inner life is treated in a similar fashion. The life of the feelings is mediated through sets of prototypical patterns and analogues. To long for one's lost love is to be an agunah, that is, a grass widow, who is bereaved in this life; to sit among the ruins of one's shop is to be like the city that sat desolate.
The people of Agnon's tales of shtetl life have little individuality in our sense of the word. They are discrete beings, possessed of particular qualities and sharply distinguished from each other. They lack self-consciousness, however, and rarely turn in upon themselves. They never hurl themselves against the existing order of things, and they therefore have little inwardness in the way people in modern fiction ordinarily do. What they do have is an intensified experience of a clearly delimited range of feeling, which Agnon echoes and amplifies to the fullest. They are given to a deeply felt sense of ineffable longing, ineffable loss, ineffable pleasure in longing and loss—which Agnon devotes his formidable gifts to evoking. The most striking thing about his shorter tales is the lapidary elegance with which they dramatize the experience of relatively passive individuals, reaching beyond the flesh and the world. Even the comic tales, with their emphasis on incongruity and happy endings, are infused with a muted melancholy quaver and a constant sense of the something beyond.
Agnon's early tales are remarkably consistent in their evocation of these qualities. Though they vary in theme, in nuance of background, and—subtly—in technique, they share the peculiar beauty and harmony he casts on shtetl types in describing their response to the pain of existence. The tales this chapter discusses represent, in a way, variations on a unifying theme: the theme of loss, in a field of experience where loss can be undergone in a larger context, where harmonization of discord is possible, as well as an extraordinary aesthetization of pain. Such aesthetization of experience, but also of the spirit of the shtetl as Agnon sees it, is perhaps the most striking quality of these tales. It is also their most drastic limit.
"Agunot" (1908), Agnon's first major tale, sets the tone for the later tales; it is a kind of prelude to his life's work. Attuned to the moods of the shtetl as he apprehended them, though not specifically concerned with its milieu, it established the thematic and sentimental patterns that have dominated his work.
"Agunot" is a tale of thwarted love. Its heroine, Dinah, is a girl of fairy-tale loveliness, reared tenderly by a father who wishes to marry her to a renowned scholar. She falls in love, however, with an artist who has been commissioned to build an ark for the Torah scrolls in the house of study over which her husband is to preside. Ben Uri, the artist, is too deeply absorbed in his task to take notice of her, and she marries Ezekiel, a prodigious scholar her father has imported for her from abroad. Ezekiel in turn loves Freidele, a simple shtetl girl, the daughter of his father's housekeeper, who returns his love. After the marriage, Dinah dreams of Ben Uri, Ezekiel of Freidele.
The marriage does not work. Ahiezer, Dinah's father, who had gone to Jerusalem "to rebuild and refound her, from her ruins," acknowledges that his intentions have not prospered. He takes Dinah to the Rabbi, who had known of Dinah's predilections, and the Rabbi undoes the marriage knot. Ahiezer leaves Jerusalem, and Dinah goes with him. One night, the Rabbi dreams a disquieting dream, and after dreaming it once again, takes up a pilgrim's staff and wallet and goes out into exile with a view to "repairing" the bereaved souls, like Ben Uri's and Dinah's, that wander in droves through limbo.
The tale is suffused with thwarted yearning. Its basic motifs are sounded at the very outset:
It is said: A thread of grace is spun and drawn from the deeds of Israel, and the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself, in His glory, sits and weaves a prayer shawl all grace and all mercy for the Congregation of Israel to enfold herself in. Radiant in the light of her beauty she glows, even in these the lands of her exile, as she did in her youth, in her Father's house, in the temple of her Sovereign and the city of sovereignty, Jerusalem. When He, of Ineffable Name, sees her, that she has been neither sullied nor stained even here, in the lands of her oppressors, He—as it were—leans toward her and says, "Behold, thou art fair, my love, behold thou art fair." And this is the secret of the power and the glory and the exaltation and the tenderness in love which fill the heart of every man in Israel.
But there are times—alas!—when some temptation creeps up and snaps a thread in the loom. Then the prayer shawl is damaged. Evil spirits hover about it,. . . and tear it to shreds. At once a sense of shame assails all Israel, and they know they are naked. Their days of rest are wrested from them, their feasts are fasts, and their lot is dust instead of luster. At that hour the Congregation of Israel strays abroad in her anguish, crying, "Strike me, scourge me, strip away my veils from me!" Her beloved has slipped away, and she, seeking Him, cries, "If ye find my beloved, what shall ye say unto Him? That I am afflicted with love." And this affliction leads to direst melancholy which persists—Mercy shield us!—until from the heavens above He breathes down upon us strength of spirit to repent, and to muster deeds that are a pride to their doer, and again to draw forth the thread of grace before the Lord.
By setting the star-crossed lovers in a field of rich traditional associations, Agnon achieves a fine lyric resonance. It is no mere accident that sends bereaved souls into the world seeking their mates, but rather a near-cosmic fatality. Ben Uri and Dinah, Ezekiel and Freidele, and also Ahiezer and Jerusalem itself, figure within a prototypical pattern of loss, associated as they are with both the Shulamite of the Song of Songs and the Congregation of Israel in its distress. The Rabbi who takes up his pilgrim's staff to wander in the world is the prototype of the saint who wanders in the darkness of life, seeking to right its incomprehensible wrongs. Jerusalem is not merely a city, but the city, land of the pious heart's desire, whence men wander in gloom, coerced by the mysterious workings of chance of of fate—of the sin that, in the formulation of the tale's opening, "catches a thread in the loom." The rest of the world is outer darkness, Diaspora, exile—banishment, ultimately, from both terrestrial delight and the joy of existence in the light of the divine presence.
The title of the tale clinches the sense of universal bereavement. The agunah was the grass widow of the Jewish Law, which had no statute of limitations in family matters, so that a woman whose husband had disappeared could not remarry till he had been proved dead—or sent her a divorce. As it happens, every soul in this tale is in a state of aginut—including the mourning figure of the Holy Spirit (shekhinah) who appears to the old Rabbi in his dream, cooing mournfully like a dove. Everyone in the tale is an agunah, fatally bound to an inaccessible love object and unable to break out of the "web." And though there clearly is a cause, no one need struggle to know it. Whether the cause is an accident of human history or of an inevitability of the transcendent Law does not matter. It merely is. And the sadness of it is unspeakably lovely, its loveliness unspeakably sad.
"The Crooked Made Straight" (1912), Agnon's next major tale, is less penumbral than "Agunot." Its action is more directly recounted; its characters are sharper and more vivid. It is a moral tale that projects an analogous mood far more obliquely. Its moral is stated at the outset: "The sage hath said, 'Wealth is less substantial than vanity,' . . . to make it known how frail and insubstantial money is, since it has no intrinsic value. . . . By its very nature . . . [it] evanesces . . . [and] for the least of reasons . . . it is lost." The story itself recounts
a series of events involving a certain man, Menashe Haim by name, . . . who fell from prosperity . . . and was driven . . . into transgression. How he was oppressed . . . but did not oppress others, and [therefore] came into his own in his death and enjoyed a name and a memorial among the living, as is set forth at length . . . within the tale. It is of him and the likes of him that it is written, "And then they shall atone for their sins"; to which our rabbis added . . . , "They shall atone for their sins through suffering."
The tale tells of the progressive impoverishment of a decent but childless shopkeeping couple to the point where the husband must take to the road as a certified beggar. We watch the husband's deterioration from a householder's dignity to rank mendicancy. Menashe Haim sinks so low that, at the very moment he has enough alms in hand to justify his heading homeward, he sells his credentials to a professional beggar and then eats and drinks himself insensate. When he awakes, he finds that all his money has been stolen and takes to the road again, now as a common pariah.
Time passes. Finally, the other beggar drinks himself to death, and Menashe Haim, whose documents he carries, comes to be thought of as dead. By the time Menashe Haim has worked his way home again, Kraindel Charney, his long-suffering wife—who has languished patiently, first as an agunah and then as a widow—has finally remarried and is celebrating the birth of a son. Stunned, Menashe Haim takes to the road again. Finally, after much wandering, he stumbles into the cemetery where his wife has erected a monument to "him"—that is, to the beggar who has been mistaken for him. Menashe Haim, exhausted, dies there, and is buried by a kindly gravedigger alongside the monument that bears his name. In the end, he benefits from the prayers and offerings his still loving wife tenders in his name.
The imaginative emphasis of the tale is on the grotesquerie of Menashe Haim's life and death and the final, graveyard peace he achieves. At the center of the story is the selling of the begging certificate at a nightmarish fair, with its monstrous distractions and its deafening din. A beggar in shrouds sings mournfully of how he returned from the other world to find his door shut against him. A woman sitting on a pile of rags keens her misery as an agunah.
The fair seems to externalize something in Menashe Haim himself. What Menashe Haim sees at the fair anticipates what will happen to him in life. It suggests, moreover, that the "real" world is a nightmare of vanity, mortality, disincarnation. When Menashe Haim gorges and gluttonizes at the inn, we recoil from the sour taste in his mouth and his sodden flesh. The death of Menashe Haim's double is still more revolting.
Altogether, there is a sense of the hideousness of the flesh—and of its deathliness. The flesh is equated with selfhood, with a kind of death of the spirit. At the end, Menashe Haim is in a sense reborn in the spirit, having purged himself through suffering and remorse. Thus, the tale bears out its "argument." We perceive the mutability of a happiness rooted in the world and the flesh. Menashe Haim is happy only when, insensate with suffering, he finds repose among the tombstones and comes to rest underground. Like "Agunot," "The Crooked Made Straight" suggests that the common condition of mankind is indeed a condition of disenfleshment without disenchantment, of pariahdom without final degradation, of aginut without desperation—only of incessant, muted desire.
Nor is the disenfleshment unpleasant. Menashe Haim, all passion spent, seems happier underground than anywhere else. But even underground and passionless, he has not stopped yearning. He still wants the tenderness of Kraindel Charney's love. From our point of view as readers of the tale, he gets them. Kraindel Charney lays offerings on his grave.
"The Legend of the Scribe" (1919), has a more positive emphasis, though it too moves toward dissolution and death. "The Crooked Made Straight" is a moral fable with Gothic touches, "The Legend of the Scribe" an idyl of love within the Law, with a moment of hallucination at the end. It suggests how fantasy and feeling can indeed be embodied in a marriage of tender beauty and essential innocence, even as they can be released in a moment of peculiar delight that neutralizes the horror of death. The opening sets the tone for what follows:
These are the events of Raphael the scribe. Raphael the scribe was a wholly pious man, who used to prepare Torah scrolls and phylacteries and mezuzot in perfect sanctity. It was the way of householders who were afflicted with childlessness, God help us, and whose wives had been taken from them, to come to Raphael and say to him, "You know, good Raphael, what we are and what we will be. I had hoped to see my sons and the sons of my sons come to you and ask you to indite for them their phylacteries in their time. But now, alas, I am desolate and forlorn. My wife, whom I had hoped to await through the days and the years in the heavens above—my wife has suddenly passed on before me, and left me to nothing but tears. Perhaps you could bring yourself, good Raphael, to prepare a Torah scroll for me, in accordance, with my means, such as they are, as the hand of the Lord is kindly upon you. . . ." And Raphael the scribe would sit himself down and prepare him a scroll, that he might leave behind him some memory, some monument in Israel.
The action of the tale is radically simple. We learn how Raphael lived and worked, of the quality of his relationship to his wife, of their childlessness, and of the irony of his preparing Torah scrolls for the childless. And we learn of Miriam's tender yearning, how she prayed that the Lord might bless her womb, even as she tenderly ministered to the children of others. Then we see how their life is disrupted by Miriam's sudden death and learn how Raphael decides to prepare a Torah scroll in her memory. We watch Raphael immerse himself in the ritual of scroll-writing. And we watch him, when he has completed his labor of love, as he dances with the scroll, which he has decked out in a cover made of Miriam's wedding dress, and is carried back to that Simhat Torah (Festival of Rejoicing in the Law) long ago, when he was a boy and first joined the men in the dance. He recalls how Miriam, hardly more than a child, came to kiss his Torah scroll and, having burned his jacket with her candle, was engaged to him. He sings as he dances, signing the song and dancing the dance he had danced then, confounding the now and the then in the song. Though Miriam is dead and her wedding dress adorns the Torah scroll he has written in memory of her, he reaches into the closet to find the dress. Having looked and having found only a bag of earth from the Holy Land—the very earth he had placed in Miriam's grave—he dies, and is found with the wedding dress over his face.
The tale is remarkable in its capturing of the tenderness that informs Raphael and Miriam's life together, and in its modulating into the quiet ecstasy of Raphael's final dance. We have the sense that for Raphael, within the containing forms of the tradition, the life of love and the life of the Law are continuous, not dichotomous; for once, Eros and civilization do not collide. The one feeds the other, and is fed by it. To be a scribe, monastically dedicated to the transcription of the Law, and to be a man and a husband are not disjunctive; the kissing, the touching, the singing, the dancing—and also the fasting, the praying, the self-containment—that signify one aspect of life inform the other as well. Agnon captures the process whereby such congruence is made possible in his account of the Sabbath encounter between man and wife.
While Miriam stands in the ritual bath, Raphael tarries in the house of prayer. When she comes home from the bath, she puts on garments as lovely as those of a bride on the day of her nuptials and stands in front of the mirror. At that moment it seems to her that the days of her girlhood have returned; she sees the inn that had stood at the crossroads, where lords and ladies used to come and cattle merchants used to lodge—where she had lived with her mother and her father and with Raphael, the lord of her youth, and she remembers for a moment the veil her mother had made for her marriage. For a moment, she thinks of adorning herself for her husband. But then she sees, glancing at her out of the mirror, the sampler she had made as a girl, which now hangs on the wall opposite—the pair of lions standing within it, their mouths open [to utter the glories of the Lord]. She recoils from her thought. "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof!"
So that when Raphael returns from his devotions and beholds his wife in her loveliness,. . . he draws near to whisper endearments in her ear. But when he reaches her, he sees the Lord's name reflected in the glass . . . and reads with reverence, "I shall hold Him always before me." Then he shuts his eyes and turns from her, to honor the Lord in his holiness. They part in silence. He sits in one corner of the room, reading the Zohar and its commentaries, and she sits in another, saying her prayers, until sleep comes to dim their eyes. They rise and take the copper bucket with the copper fish engraved on its bottom, and they wash their hands for their evening prayers.
There is nothing puritanical in Miriam's failure to adorn herself as a bride. She is intrinsically a bride. Consciousness of her place in God's world makes her one. Her memory of girlhood becomes part of her consciousness of a larger pattern to which she belongs. To see the sampler on the wall, with its evocation of the greater context of her existence, is to realize her essential form. Raphael and Miriam go to bed, like other couples. But their doing so seems an aspect of a larger reality of which they are a part.
What Agnon suggests is a kind of ladder of love, on which the movement from one plane of love to another is achieved without negation of the "lower" planes. It is this that makes possible the peculiar equanimity with which Raphael experiences the final hallucination, which is potentially so dissonant and yet so filled with a sense of the tenuousness of life.
In fact, the underlying life of the tale seems to stem from a paradox. What Raphael and Miriam are—and love—intimates a pattern of transcendence and is contained in a way of life that is the earthly vehicle for that pattern. But the delicate balance of feeling, its perfect poise, arises within life, and consists of the shifting, time-bound mortal realities: the human feelings which, however they are caught up in the governing pattern of transcendence, are subject to mortality and can themselves be disintegrated, under the pressure of experience, into the time-bound realities which have constituted them.
But even such disintegration need not finally disrupt. At the end of his life, Raphael is still dancing the dance of the Law with which his meaningful life as man and husband began. And, though we may perceive it differently, Raphael's experience remains integral. His dance of death is his dance of life. As he dances, his consciousness, which carries him back to the past, before the beginning of his love, is moving backward and forward at once, to what has become a timeless past and to what will be a timeless future, in death. But in both directions he moves toward the unifying goal of his life. And that goal is both in life and beyond life.
"The Outcast," published in the same year as "The Legend of the Scribe," renders a similar theme more elaborately. It is concerned, not with the quiet felicity of a traditional marriage, but with the torment and upheaval in the life of a boy torn between two traditions. Set at the time of the first appearance of Hasidism in eastern Galicia, it is more concrete in social and historical detail than any of the tales discussed so far. It is also more directly concerned with open conflict. Yet its chief emphasis is on the inner turmoil of the boy in question—and in the resolution of that turmoil in a death of exquisite longing.
"The Outcast" tells how Uriel, a Hasidic rabbi, comes to a village one snowy Friday and is banished from the town by Avigdor, its rigidly sectarian parnas (burgomaster). The rabbi, as he leaves, curses his antagonist, saying that an outcast will arise from his seed. At just that time Reb (Mr.) Avigdor's daughter dies, leaving a brood of children. Gershom, the eldest, is a gifted Talmudic scholar and the apple of his grandfather's eye. And indeed, when Gershom comes home for the first Passover after his mother's death, he is overwhelmed by melancholy and goes by chance into a little Hasidic prayer house, where he finds both pleasure and release in the Hasidic service. He immediately rejects the experience, however, and reverts to his grandfather's Way, splitting hairs in his Talmudic studies, afflicting his body with ascetic exercises, and "encasing himself in sadness like a worm." His soul suffers, however, and craving the union he senses can come only through the medium of Hasidic exaltation, he sets out to find Reb Uriel.
A Hasid finds him fainting in the snow and brings him home. He recovers but languishes, until a mysterious stranger initiates him into the vision of ecstatic union with the deity that informs the Hasidic cult.
And since Gershom's heart was opened and came to glimpse the divine mystery within simple things, the stranger began to lead him from rung to rung on the ladder of wisdom. . . . At that moment the husk of that soul fell away, and all of Szibucz fell away from it. And such longings began to spring up in his heart as had never been known to the people of Szibucz, and they revealed themselves in his eyes, which labored in the Law and then sought to rise higher and higher, beyond. But his fingers were blind, and they groped in the world of truth as a blind man gropes in the darkness.
As a result, "melancholy suffused him, and the anguish of the world veiled his pleasant face." Suffering, he moves further and further from the ordinary plane of rabbinic learning and human contact, "pouring out his soul, as a child into its mother's bosom," climbing and soaring into the "intelligible world" and striving to sit "in the shadow of the Holy One, blessed be He" and to "suckle from holy thought." But when the inspiration leaves him,
Gershom sits on the ground and puts his head between his knees like one who had been forced to alight from the chariot at the moment that the Holy Spirit went forth to greet its Father in Heaven. "My God, my God," Gershom cries, "you created Paradise and placed a sword at its gate. May it be your will that my bones burn in hell, if only a sixtieth part of them reach you in the end.". . . And a voice murmurs like a dove, "Alas, for the sons who were exiled from their Father's table." Exiled from Father's table, and when will they return? Has their time not yet come? The lowly world thou hast created—what remains for us within it?
His final sense of release comes only when his master reveals the mysteries of the Song of Songs.
He had not yet finished when Gershom began to cry with all his might, "I will fly and wander far, and sing the Song of Songs. To the house of the Lord we will go, we will go; we will tell the house of Jacob how my soul has thirsted, has yearned for the Lord." So he cried and cried, like a bird that has scented the fluttering of its wings, and flies, and murmurs as it flies.
The scene then shifts:
The eastern sky reddens, and the dome of the sky nearest the earth grows dark. The daughters of Israel light their candles and stand in the gateway of their houses, murmuring to each other, "A good and a blessed Sabbath." As they wait, their chaste daughters come, with their hair dressed, in their lovely garments, and stand with them, facing the synagogues and the houses of study in order to be able to respond with "Amen, may His hallowed name be blessed." The householders, with their sons, walk to the houses of study and chant the Song of Songs, and the good Lord sinks the wheel of the sun in the west in order to receive his beloved, the Sabbath Queen, in chaste darkness.
At that moment Gershom entered the house of study and leaped onto the altar and lay his head between his hands for a moment. Then he lifted his head and began to read the Song of Songs with terrible ardor and awesome strength until he reached the verse, "Draw me after Thee, and we will run." And when he reached the verse, "Draw me after Thee, and we will run," his soul departed from his body, in its purity. His lips were still murmuring, "The King, he brought me into his chambers," when his soul expired with the words.
Formally, "The Outcast" is concerned with the working out of a curse in the context of a conflict between Hasidim (ecstatic pietists) and Mitnagdim (legalistic literalists) at the time (the 1770's) Hasidism reached Galicia. The issues are crystallized in the representation of Avigdor, the rich, worldly, repressive pillar of the old dispensation with its emphasis on Law, and Uriel, with his melting, ecstatic cult of love.
Gershom's tragedy stems from the conflict in him between the way of the world, which is Avigdor's, and the way of transcendence, which is Uriel's. The story's main emphasis is on Gershom's anguish and the horror—mixed with ecstasy—of his doom. It is terrible that he should have to suffer; it is terrible that he must die, reaching into the world beyond for tenderness and love. It is also marvelous: a total transcendence, in feeling, of the limits of life in the vale of tears. In taking the mystic way, which he does not altogether choose, Gershom reaches out to his dead, beloved mother, as well as to God. The imagery of suckling at the breasts of thought, and of pouring out his soul "like a child into its mother's bosom," straddles the conventional metaphoric language of mystic communion and the concrete psychological realities of the boy's life. The tale evokes essentially the same ambiguity that informs Raphael's relation to the Torah scroll and the same reconcretization of metaphor that is achieved in "Agunot." So integral is Gershom's melting out of life at the end that it induces neither pity nor terror in the ordinary sense. Gershom wants it so badly and needs it so much, that the pity lies only in the fact that it took so long for it to happen, the terror in the fact that it is not really pitiable at all. And yet it is all very sad.
The balance of the feeling evoked in "The Outcast" is characteristic of all the tales I have discussed here—and of many of Agnon's other tales of shtetl life. They exploit the imagery of faith and transcendence, of union and communion as a way of conveying a sense of experience that at once laments mortality and celebrates the pain that it brings. One might say that "The Outcast" renders a characteristic moment and a characteristic mode of experience in the shtetl culture. But the emphasis is not on the substance of that culture or on the ancestral values that inform it. Rather, it is on the emotional values that arise within it, without reference to the validity of the problems or attitudes that give rise to them.
The most striking thing about the stories is the apparent objectivity of their form. One might say that Agnon does a triple take in rendering actions set in the ancestral world. First, he enters, though in a limited way, into the experience of particular characters who act and react within it. Second, he renders their actions and reactions much as they would have rendered them. And third, he casts the tale itself in a literary mode that would be congenial to the participants in its action. Reading such a tale, we apprehend the people, scenes, and events that fill the tale, but also participate in the attitudes and perspectives of those who act in them. Thus it is not only an action that we see imitated, but—implicitly—an entire mode of consciousness and a total vision of experience.
Agnon never attempts a discursive presentation of the grounds for and qualities of this vision. In fact, he never talks about the vision as such. Quite the contrary. The tales—again—are composed in the manner of folk tales. They employ a narrative voice that assumes we are tuned in upon its assumptions and can therefore focus directly on the things that concern it. The vision that animates the entire world of the tales is, in a manner of speaking, completely dissolved in their narrative mode.
Yet the depersonalization that the form of these tales involves should not conceal the extent to which Agnon uses them to project his most personal, his most intimate predilections. And these predilections are both complex and devious. The "modern" tales, written since the early thirties, suggest that Agnon turns to the ancestral world for the "wholeness" of experience it engendered. In tales both traditional and modern, moreover, Agnon suggests that the ancestral world is possessed of a power and a vitality which stun the imagination. One story—"The Fathers and the Sons"—presents us with a series of fathers, each older than the one preceding him, and each more fresh, more vigorous, and more vital. The suggestion is that the narrator of that tale experiences a sense of impotence and insignificance in the face of the patriarchal world and the "fact" that the world is felt to deteriorate in power and glory with the passing of the generations. One presumes that Agnon resurrects the ancestral world to present us with images of that power and that glory.
Yet the power in question is a very peculiar one. It is, to be sure, the power to affirm life, but it is also the power to reconcile oneself utterly to life's negativity. The people and scenes depicted in these tales are always seen as diminutive—quaint, folksy, lovable. His people are, almost uniformly, little people with a quiet dignity. They are pious and prudent, deeply involved with the things that constitute their lives and remarkably gifted at letting go of them without crying havoc. Again and again we see them, in one of two perspectives. We see them experiencing pain and loss, not only stoically, but also with a kind of yearning pleasure. Or we see them comically abstracted from consciousness of the exigencies of ordinary life. In either case, there is beauty or amusement in their lives, but certainly not power or vitality in the ordinary meaning of the terms.
As a result, one has the sense that Agnon is performing a peculiar operation on the past which haunts him so persistently. If its grandeur lives in his imagination, that grandeur is cut down to size in the adulatory diminutives of his stories. It is as though he must shrink it to livable scale, not by directly challenging its existence or values, but by bringing it under aesthetic control. I often wonder whether Agnon's most pious evocations are not in fact voodoo exorcisms of a past that will not die.
If Agnon is indeed resurrecting the past in order at once to celebrate it and to diminish (if not to denigrate) it, if he is in this way indeed circumventing a very real confrontation with decisive elements in his own experience, then a further quality of the tales takes on a striking significance. The tales of the traditional world rarely involve confrontation of the tensions to which their characters are subject or an exploration of the inner gounds of their conflicts. Just as "The Legend of the Scribe" renders the way fantasy and feeling are integrated within a prescribed pattern of relationships, so it renders the disintegration of that life—and feeling—pattern within rather formalized conventions of feeling and belief. It is surely no accident that Raphael, like Gershom, breathes out his soul in song. In these tales, song is the vehicle for the unquiet, the longing, the fear that the characters experience: it is Ben Uri's song that haunts Dinah, for example. But song is also the medium of reconciliation and a final harmonization of discord, both for the characters in the stories and for their readers. That reconciliation comes in death. To expire is to breathe out the dying breath, and that breath is song, which both expresses the individual's craving for union and carries him toward the union he has craved.
The effect is peculiar. Agnon's finest noncomic work in the traditionalist mode has a kind of luminous loveliness and musicality, reminiscent of the medieval tale at its best. In it there is a fine orchestration of feelings that spring from pain and loss, but never a direct representation of the rawness and anguish they involve. Everything is harmonized within the dominant pattern of submission, and every discord is resolved within that pattern. The songs characters sing are one medium for expressing the feeling that there is a resolution. Another is the elaborate pattern of tropes from the repertory of traditional image and legend. But the final effect is somehow one of evasion. It is as though Agnon turns to the ancestral past partly because he finds within it a set of attitudes that permit a deeply desiderated transcendence of the harshness of inner conflict and a deeply felt need to circumvent the horror of death itself.
And that evasiveness leaves one uneasy. The stories have a quiet beauty. In sheer virtuosity there is little to match them in modern Hebrew letters. And they do, one feels, draw on something that was really present in the shtetl culture. Indeed, they do so with an authority and a compassion (despite the diminutives) that are moving. But the extraordinary aestheticizing of experience is suspect, as is the deep passivity they reflect. They are still more troubling when read in the light of Agnon's later work. There Agnon invokes dissonance. He renders characters who, like those in the earlier tales, yearn "beyond"—often back to the world of the earlier tales, that is, to the ancestral scene. And he projects, sometimes on a grand scale, the horror that informs such yearning in the modern world. Yet in the modern stories as well, however clearly the psychological and historical grounds of the dissonance are projected, one feels he is stepping away from the heart of the darkness—and illuminating it with an inadequate, aestheticizing light.
I am suggesting, in effect, that there is a much stronger affinity between Agnon's early, pathetic tales of shtetl life and his later, "modernist" work than at first meets the eye. There are stylistic affinities, of course, and there is the ever felt hand of the master craftsman at work. And there are the constant echoes of the classic Judaic idiom of faith. But beyond these formal and external elements there are the pervasive passivity, the recurrent "yearning beyond," and the constant craving for a wholeness unattainable in the present life.
One might see these qualities as the expression of a deep theological and existential intuition, of the awareness of man's deeply experienced sense of his vulnerability and violability, and of the only partial existence which is—at best—his in the flesh. One might hold that the melting sweetness and even ecstasy of the tales of the ancestral world evoke the way that the sense world is overcome by a tradition of faith, in which the felt presence of the deity creates the possibility of dealing with it satisfactorily. One might insist that the sense of loss and fragmentation of being that fills the modernist tales is the consequence of the characters' having been cut off both from the ancestral world and the deity who could be reached through the forms of life he prescribed.
But it seems to me that Agnon is writing about (or working with) something else: a deeply felt personal, one might even say infantile, sense of a wholeness that has nothing to do with the deity or his ways (unless one wishes simply to consider the religious feeling a direct projective of infantile needs). There is no question that he projects the sense of completeness with delicacy, mastery, and grace. But the struggle, the horror even, that ordinarily accompanies this craving for wholeness is never really there. There is no subversive resistance within the self to the felicities to which his characters consistently aspire.
Hence one comes away from the tales with a sense that something is lacking. It is impossible not to wonder whether the loveliness and musicality so worshipfully evoked are not, in the end, an evasion and a self-indulgence of Agnon's own wish to transcend the final terrors of mortality itself. Agnon, one notes, depicts pain, but never the pain of wayward inner resistance to striving toward objects of valid desire. And we rarely glimpse the larger, more dangerous impulses, which his people are generally and beneficently spared. When we do perceive them, as in Agnon's lyric evocation of a dreadful necrophiliac love, we perceive them in the glow of an aestheticizing so complete that it robs them of their life. Yet their luminous simplicity continues to beguile us.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.