S. Y. Agnon's most informed readers think of him as an epic writer, as the novelist par excellence in his tradition. His fiction spans five to six generations of Jewish life in East-Central Europe and Palestine, from the Hasidic revival at the end of the 18th century through the Zionist revival at the end of the 19th, and beyond that into the present worlds of European and Israeli Jewry. Yet, these readers maintain, Agnon's fiction—for all its farflung diversity of scene and action, and all its startling range of tone and texture—is as coherent as the Faulknerian epic of Southern life, and as rigorously ordered as the many-tiered novels of Balzac and Proust. And, they insist, the overall movement of spirit in Agnon's fictive world drives toward dilemmas that transcend the parochial issues of that world; his work, indeed, is said to project a vision of the human condition which is universally valid for our times.

These are large claims, and, within limits, they would seem to be borne out by the scope of Agnon's interests. At the same time, however, they are at odds with the unique qualities of his achievement, and against the grain of his essential gift. Agnon's powers are not primarily the powers of a novelist; he has no gusto, no thirst for experience, no substantial gift of empathy. He has never been concerned with the plastic creation of character, and he has, on the whole, shunned the task of fleshing out human responses within the finely meshed web of social relationships. His gift is essentially a lyric one, and his lyricism is coupled with a nearly misanthropic thrust of satiric imagination. The grand felicities of his prose, like those of Mann and Proust, of Kafka and Joyce, become a vehicle for reflective incantation upon the life of the soul, reflection that appropriates the actualities of the outer world in order to evoke the sense of an elusive subjectivity.

Agnon's characteristic qualities are to be seen in two long stories which have recently become available in translation.¹ Written at intervals of more than twenty years (“Betrothed” in the mid-20's, “Edo and Enam” in the late 40's), they are linked by strong thematic and narrative affinities. Both “Betrothed” and “Edo and Enam” reflect an obsession with the past, the one personal, the other communal, and both treat that obsession with a clinical detachment which heightens the sense of yearning at their center. Both inhabit a night-world dominated by moonstruck women. Both deal with the experience of scholars completely engrossed in esoteric disciplines: the one a gifted marine biologist, the other a brilliant ethnologist who has unearthed the missing-link language and discovered a series of ancient hymns of uncanny beauty. In both, the action hinges on a rejection of Eros by the men in question, and both are ultimately concerned with the folly of commitment to rational disciplines in the face of deep irrational desires which hark back to an archaic experience in the history of the individual or the history of the race.

Susan, the heroine of “Betrothed,” appears in Jaffa to remind Jacob Rechnitz of the vows of eternal fidelity they had taken in their childhood. Terribly passive, Jacob cannot act on his vow; he drifts in an ambience of dead factuality. At the end, when six maidens of his acquaintance race along a strip of pounding surf for a crown of seaweed from his collection—we never know whether this is actually happening or whether he is dreaming it all—Susan appears from nowhere, in her nightdress, and wins the race, the crown, and, presumably, Jacob's hand. At the climax of the tale, Jacob, like one entranced, sees Susan as his mother, kneeling at his side and fixing his tie; she is identified for him with the moon, the sea, the tides—with the great, agitated mother of all being, all desire. To all this he has been able to relate in his practical life as a biologist only by an act of intellectual distancing that cuts him off from the feminine lure of life itself, grown deathly through its identification with the maternal presence.

There is in “Betrothed” a peculiar mingling of real and dreamlike states, of Jacob's drab everyday existence in sleepy Jaffa before World War I and the fairy-tale romance of his inner life. Susan is a real girl from Vienna, but she is also a figment of Jacob's inner being. There is terror in her charmed night apparition, but there is wonder also and the exhilaration of release. As the seventh maiden in Jacob's constellation, she is the Sabbath Queen and she is—or rather becomes—“Shoshanat Yaakov,” the Rose of Jacob in the Purim hymn, suggesting the gaiety of the Purim feast. In the final fulfillment, she bursts the spirit's sleep; death becomes life, the principle of terror the principle of love and reconciliation. At the end, without psychologization, we have a sense of the resolution of some significant spiritual process, obscure but luminous, and touched with awe.

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A similar sense of spiritual process dominates “Edo and Enam,” which is also concerned with the resurrection of a lost past—this time from a more highly universalized point of view. Gemulah, the Susan of this tale, is the last repository of the traditions of a warrior tribe that has preserved the heroic ways of ancient Israel in the timeless mountains of central Asia. Gamzu, a one-eyed dealer in rare books and manuscripts, has found her and carried her off as his wife to modern Jerusalem. But it is Ginat she loves, a handsome ethnologist who has recorded from her lips the marvelous hymns of ancient Enam, and the grammar of the lost tongue of Edo.

Removed from her native place, she has taken to her bed, a chronic invalid who torments her husband, rising only to sleepwalk at the full of the moon. Only magical charms that look, says the narrator (referring back to “Betrothed”), “like the seaweed fished from the sea by Rechnitz at Jaffa,” can prevent her nightwalking. But Gamzu lost the charms when he sold the book in which they were placed. The book has been bought by Ginat, whom Gemulah seeks out, in her nocturnal wanderings, to sing him the song of Grofit, which is sung once in a lifetime, and which consumes both the singer and him to whom she sings. Ginat will not listen to her song, but one night as she walks on a roof in her trance, uttering the song, she carries him to his death as he tries to save her from a fall. She and Ginat having passed on, the realm of haunting beauty that she embodies and he has transcribed can now be glimpsed only in the books Ginat has published, in which it “shines, like a light, glimmering.”

Susan, linked to the sea and the tides, suggests a lost world of infinite desire, rooted in the personal past of a single individual. Gemulah, linked to the moon and the stars, suggests a generic past, rooted in the history of the race. The archaic world from which she comes leads back beyond recorded history; it is a sort of golden age in which all things hang together, in which the center cannot but hold—an idyllic world where natural, tribal, and political harmony prevail, and where the religious and the erotic are one. Her name itself is suggestive, meaning “the weaned one,” “the reciprocal one,” or “reward”; a derivative of the same name, Gumlidata, meaning something like “reciprocult,” is used in another Agnon parable, “Forevermore.”

Gamzu, whose name means “this too,” but also suggests an Aramaic term for grafting in fig culture, is the man who tries to patch things up—to make sense, in other words, of the forms of Orthodoxy in which he cannot altogether believe. Thus he attempts to domesticate the recalcitrant girl, dooming himself thereby to suffering, sterility, and bereavement. For Gemulah, the reciprocal one, cannot reciprocate his kind of desire, while Ginat—even though his name suggests a truncated form of the phrase describing the garden of love in the Song of Songs—cannot reciprocate hers. He can, however, with the monstrous detachment of his “scientific” pursuit, penetrate the mysteries of the being she embodies, and yet this exposes him, willy-nilly, to her fatal song.

The very scene of the action in “Edo and Enam” fixes the frame of reference. Agnon in his fiction plays continually with the redemptive, messianic associations of Jerusalem, the Holy City, which is meant to suggest security and integrity as opposed to the Diaspora (Exile), where rootless-ness and insecurity prevail. Yet the city of Jerusalem is also of this world, a modern environment of alienation, disruption, and fragmentation. Even his earliest, most lyric tale (“Agunot”) projects a sense of the tragic contingency of the best of possible arrangements in the best of possible towns. As if to emphasize this sense of contingency, he begins the names of most of the characters in “Edo and Enam”—who are in fact homeless—with the letter “G,” which could stand for the Hebrew words for either redemption or exile, or both (geulah and golah); the story thus succeeds in suggesting that what the seeker of redemption finds is only another form of spiritual and sexual exile. But Agnon, at the last, will not relinquish a vision of redemption. The light of the spirit that shines out of the works of Ginat asserts once again the possibility of realizing in the flesh, and in history, the values of beauty and truth.

“Edo and Enam” is a powerful and complex tale. I happen to have read it in Jerusalem when it first appeared, and for weeks the town lived so vividly in Agnon's evocation of its physical and spiritual existence that I despaired of ever regaining the ability to see it in any other terms than his. This cagily difficult parable, at once so abstract and so faithful to the immediacies of the here and now, seemed to arise from the deepest erotic and imaginative life of Jerusalem (Gemulah especially seemed a terrifying clue to the neurasthenic pallor and resentful hysteria one sensed to be endemic in the Orthodox women of the town); yet with all this, it managed also to enunciate a vision of universal malaise.

And there was something more in the tale. Though it stood by itself, it had behind it the massed force of Agnon's preoccupations with a set of issues and feelings central to his culture. Knowing Agnon's work, one perceived in “Edo and Enam” the distillation of lifelong attitudes and tensions. The anonymous narrator, as well as Gamzu and Ginat, all seemed projections of various aspects of Agnon himself. For Agnon's own quest, as a man and as a writer, has involved just such a pursuit of the wholeness of past experience, and just such a definition of a viable attitude to the quest as that which engages his narrator. With both of the Two Tales in mind, one is tempted to say that Agnon, like Rechnitz, has been subject to the tidal pull of the submerged past, personal and historical; like Ginat, he has sought to detach himself in order to record it; like Gamzu, he has at times sought to domesticate it; like the narrator, he has struggled with his experience, an experience which reflects and clarifies the experience of his times. The specific gravity of the tales can only be weighted against the background of that life and those times—a time in which men of Agnon's generation were striving to create a new world on the ruins of an old, and in which the past that was rapidly slipping into oblivion refused to surrender its hold over the spirit. Agnon's work records a sense of impotence in the face of time and change; it involves an effort also to record the quality of the obsolescent world toward which he yearns, and the dilemma of being subject to such yearning; finally, in parables like “Edo and Enam” and “Forevermore,” Agnon's work represents an attempt to formulate an attitude toward the entire experience.

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Agnon is of Ben Gurion's generation; he is also roughly contemporary with the great European writers—Lawrence, Kafka, Eliot—who came to the fore after World War I. He was born in Galicia in 1888, seven years after the inception of Zionist activism, five years before the publication of Bialik's nostalgic Zionist poem, “To a Bird,” and less than a decade before the first Zionist Congress. His world was the “secure” world of Franz Josef's empire; his background, for all its Hebraic, Orthodox, and incipient Zionist bias, seems to have been permeated by that diffuse sense of longing which characterized the Central European middle class at the turn of the century, that hysteria of yearning which we know from Freud's case histories as well as from the Schnitzleresque, Molnaresque literature that shaded off within less than a generation into the anxious nightmares of Kafka and Musil. Quite early, Agnon seems to have made a Zionist commitment—one would gather on sentimental rather than on political grounds. He wrote, first in Yiddish, then in Hebrew, and was mildly active in the Zionist life of his town. During the second aliyah—the wave of immigration to Palestine that began in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution—he made his way to Palestine, an anomaly and yet not altogether an anomaly among the brusque back-to-the-landers of the socialist camp and the fugitive burghers of the householderly settlement.

Agnon found his place. He became the secretary of the journal published by the labor group in which Ben Gurion was also active, and his literary ambitions were fostered by Berl Katznelson, one of the saints of the Zionist labor movement. Even so, from the outset he stood apart. While his peers were busy excoriating the lassitude and corruption they saw in East European Jewry, Agnon was busy evoking the felicities and bereavements of the “community of the faithful,” wherever it might be. Whereas Y. H. Brenner, the most distinguished of his peers, indulged in Dostoievskian orgies of self-laceration, harping on the social, moral, and metaphysical frailties of the Jews, Agnon sought to render the “whole loaf” of experience in the aspiring soul, creating delicate tales of love and fate within the framework of the traditional pieties (as these pieties continued to live in the rose-light of his imagination), or to portray his purely subjective experience on the margin of life in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. Unlike Brenner, who purged every shred of lyric loveliness from his prose, Agnon indulged himself in luxurious orchestrations of language and image, mating richly associative material from traditional sources with highly personal lyric themes. His dominant theme was aginut, or bereavement—the word from which the title of his first major story, “Agunot” (1909), was derived and from which he took the name that he has been known by ever since. His characters tended to be innocents of one sort or another, full of mute yearning and subject to the vicissitudes of a fate that stemmed from internal weakness or external accident; the pathos of his tales arose from the characters' will-less submission to failure and frustration.

But Agnon was not long for this mode. By the time of World War I, the tenuous, exquisite tales gave way to a firmer, more objective endeavor. During the war, Agnon made his way to Berlin, and there he became involved in the effort, led by Buber and others, to record the fugitive traditions of Hasidism before they passed altogether out of existence. Through this effort, Agnon developed a new sense of intellectual and spiritual fellowship. He also settled at that point into a way of life he has followed to this day. He was taken up by the Schocken publishing enterprise—first in Germany, then in Israel—drawing a regular stipend for publication rights to his work, and withdrawing into the steady contemplation and expression of the kinds of experience that were closest to his heart. From that time forward, Agnon has had the means to sustain the apartness that had characterized him from the outset. He has lived largely in Palestine, and his life has been devoted exclusively to writing. Though he has obviously followed events in the country rather closely, he has remained aloof from public life, adopting a fixed posture of irony toward politics, which he treats as part of the gray round of meaningless movement that is for him the modern age; and his sense of the absurdity of politics is expressed in a series of mordant satires gathered in The Book of the State.

But if he has withdrawn from the world of action, he has not withdrawn from the world of fact. His Berlin period produced a series of tales rooted in the actuality of the waning East European shtetl, a series that culminated in a long piece of prose fiction, The Bridal Canopy, which was immediately hailed as the epic representation of life in Eastern Europe in the pre-modern period. The Bridal Canopy is a frame story, on the model of Don Quixote, with strong affinities to Mendele's Benjamin the Third and Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman. A long folk-tale about the adventures of its hero, Reb Yudel, The Bridal Canopy projects both the spirit and the historical detail of a period in which even miracles remained conceivable. Yet it cannot merely be said to be an exercise in nostalgia; conjuring a lost world, it never allows us to lose sight of the necessary and inevitable decline of that world.

The Bridal Canopy represents Agnon's emergence from the twilight of the early tales. I find it tedious, labored, and even, at times, coy. What is interesting about it, however, is the way it seems to have confronted Agnon with the crucial problem of history, of the relation between the past and the present which forms the central concern of the late parables. Even as he was summoning up a vision of the old world of the “fathers,” he seems to have begun to come to grips with his own problematical relation to it. Agnon's later novels deal with the impact of that world's decline upon people like himself who bear the body of its death. His own historical situation becomes the focus of his work—a situation in which the individual remains sentimentally bound to a decaying social and cultural order which magnetizes his sensibility and prevents him from creating a viable life in a changing universe. As Susan is to Rechnitz, and Gemulah to Gamzu, so the shtetl and the entire tribal past is to the Agnon hero, caught between two worlds and belonging to neither. Though he has left Reb Yudel behind, the ancestral past continues to serve Agnon as a ground of consciousness and even of judgment, as a source of stability and a premise of alienation from modernity.

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In organizing his fiction in this way, Agnon began to crystallize a set of issues that had been implicit in Zionism from the outset. The history of Zionism is marked by a deep ambivalence toward the centers of Jewish life in the Diaspora and toward the concept of the Diaspora itself. On the one hand the Diaspora represented a negative value: exile, persecution, backwardness. Zionism, in this perspective, figured as the resurrection of a lost reality. Thus, the Diaspora, the Diaspora Jew, and the Diaspora way of life became hateful. Yet for the individual, the Diaspora was home; one's primal sympathies were invested there. “Man,” the poet Saul Tchernichowsky was to write, “is no more than the soil of a little land.” If, for the individual Zionist, the Diaspora was hateful because it afforded little contact with the soil, if it was thought to cut one off from the experience of nature and life and normalcy itself, one's human nature was nonetheless richly implicated in it.

Modern Hebrew literature, bound up with the Zionist cause, has been racked by this ambivalence. The very language of the new literature implied a negation of the mother tongue; to cultivate Hebrew meant, on the whole, to reject Yiddish, to forge a new instrument designed to create a new set or responses, a new frame for the brave old-new world in Zion. The very language, as literary instrument, implied a struggle to overthrow the old, “black Orthodox,” reactionary order of shtetl life. Even when—at the time of the “Hebrew Renaissance” in the last third of the 19th century—the espousal of the language came to symbolize an identification with the ongoing life of the folk, and an effort to preserve such elements of the old communality as could be saved, the effort was in a sense contaminated by its origins. Historically, modern Hebrew literature stemmed from an attempt by members of the emergent Jewish middle class in Germany (and later, Austria and Galicia) to identify themselves with the forces of change—of “progress”—which threatened utterly to undermine the bases of the old order of life in the Jewish community. For the old order had been embedded in the quasi-feudal structure of East European society; its religious and communal systems were rooted in that structure, and were directly menaced by the modes of rationalist thought and action implicit in the social and economic changes that lay behind the European Enlightenment itself.

Agnon not only refused to join in with the habitual denigration of the old order, but also came to perceive with growing clarity the conflict between the traditional modes of experience and the rationalist, progressivist attitudes that pervaded the Zionist ideology. He came, moreover, to have a sense of the irrationality at work in the heart of the “progressive” processes of modernism, and tried to relate the larger patterns of that irrationality to the kind of irrationality at work in the individual Jew. He perceived in the soul of the individual Jew, in his struggle to be free of the limitations of the past, a tropism toward the very past he was trying to escape—a tropism that doomed him to fragmentation, and yet linked him to some transcendent realm that gave meaning to life and the world. The history of Agnon's own development is a history of increasing self-consciousness with regard to the personal and historical conflicts that are implicit in the changing communal experience.

His novels after The Bridal Canopy reflect the growth of this self-consciousness. A Simple Tale deals with a passive young man born into a bourgeois family in Galicia at the turn of the century, and with the crisis he undergoes as he proves unable and unwilling to assume the roles foisted upon him there. As Rechnitz yearns for Susan, Herschel of A Simple Tale dreams of Blumah Nacht, his childhood sweetheart, but cannot assert himself enough to take her; he goes mad when his bovine country wife, inflicted on him by his parents, bears him a son. For him the madhouse is a place of peace, a refuge from the nightmare “reality” of his life. The failure of Herschel's personal will is a perfect microcosm of the failure of will in his entire environment. He feels that his father is “more” than he is, and is dimly aware that his father's fathers were “more” than his father: the entire community seems to have lost touch with the sources of its vitality, to have become a stagnant backwater of vanity, passivity, evasion, and greed.

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A second novel directly confronts the final deterioration of that milieu. Wayfarer for a Night—written in a narrative mode reminiscent of the expressionist fiction of the 20's—is about a man who has settled in Palestine and returns full of nostalgia some time after World War I to his home town in Galicia, only to find it in a state of utter disruption. In Yesteryear, the third novel after The Bridal Canopy, Agnon travels backward in time, exploring the inner dislocation of an individual who seeks to solve the problem of exile by emigrating to Palestine during the second aliyah and trying to recreate a tradition of heroism by joining in the effort to resuscitate the folk in its own land. Yitzhak Kummer (who is the grandson of Reb Yudel of The Bridal Canopy) takes the Zionist dream seriously; he imbibes the ideals of the Zionist pamphlets which he reads in his father's store, and rebels against the stagnation and corruption that surround him and that had engulfed Herschel, the hero of A Simple Tale, before him. By emigrating to Palestine, Kummer believes that he will be able to rehabilitate himself, but it turns out that, for all his activity, Yitzhak is essentially as passive as Herschel, and just as subject to regressive longings.

There is one important difference, however. The failure of Yitzhak's will is accompanied by a corrosive awareness of his ancestry, and specifically of his grandfather Reb Yudel, the Hasid who had emigrated to Palestine under very different circumstances, in a very different frame of mind. Reb Yudel had “gone up” to the Holy Land after the Good Lord had, by a miracle, provided his daughters with a dowry, and absolved him of the struggle for survival in an utterly resistant environment. Yitzhak thinks of himself as walking in his grandfather's footsteps, but is haunted by the sense that Providence no longer watches over him, that his life can no longer be what Reb Yudel's was. In this frame of mind, he lives out his gruesome fate, slowly, almost without conflict, reverting to the occupations, the habits, and the rituals of his forefathers. Having come to be a pioneer among pioneers, he ends up a member of the parasitic, old-guard community of Meah Shearim in Jerusalem, betrothed to the neurasthenic daughter of a rabid Hungarian religious fanatic, and dying of the rabies communicated to him one sweltering afternoon by a dog that lurches at him from under the gabardine of his ranting father-in-law.

Yitzhak is an Isaac meaninglessly sacrificed to his ancestral commitments. He has been conditioned to a set of roles and patterns that have passed out of existence, and so, like most of Agnon's heroes, he finds himself filled with inchoate aspirations for objects of desire concealed from his waking consciousness. These objects ultimately point beyond this world, but they are mediated through a firm sociological pattern in which he no longer can find a place. His destiny, much like that of Rechnitz, Gamzu, and Herschel, works itself out in terms of an erotic pattern. The dog who bites him at the end is of his own creation; it is Yitzhak who has dribbled paint on the dog's back and named him “Balak,” and it is this name which has driven the dog mad. The long episode of the mad dog is an allegory of Israel's destiny among the nations, but the dog itself is a symbol of Yitzhak's own sexuality, and of the specifically sexual quality of his relation to his ancestry.

In Yesteryear, Agnon clinched his formulation of the central dilemma of his imaginative universe. Wayfarer for a Night, anticipating the Holocaust, had confronted with finality the shattering of the old frame of reference. One cannot return home because the old society no longer exists; all that remains to the narrator of the novel, as to the narrator of “Edo and Enam,” is the key to a ruined sanctuary, and the possibility of vivifying the past in the creative imagination.

The present, then, is unbearable, and the past will not die: this is the dilemma in which the typical Agnon hero is caught. He tends to be disoriented, hung between the madness and meaninglessness of the world as it is, and his deep bondage to a past which neutralizes the present even as it alienates him from it.

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Most of Agnon's short fiction since the late 30's has been concerned with representing either the radically equivocal states of being that arise when one is unwillingly possessed by the past, or when one willfully pursues its essence. These stories fall roughly into three groups. There is the usually brief, nightmarish tale, rather Kafkaesque in technique, that renders the experience of an individual whose life is disrupted by the onrush of incomprehensible events obscurely related to his wishes and fears. Then there is the expressionist tale, directly related to the sort of writing done by Hermann Broch in the last volume of The Sleepwalkers, but with affinities to the art of Wedekind and Musil and even of the early Brecht. These render an utterly fragmented, demented outer world, which often reflects a disrupted inner world, but which has independent validity as an image of chaos and upheaval. And finally there is the self-conscious parable of quest, like “Edo and Enam,” in which characters consciously and unconsciously seek out ways of resuscitating the old, sanctified modes of existence, trying to order their experience and find goodness, beauty, and truth in a wayward, desperate present.

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One notes the persistence, in all three types of story, of certain radical and recurrent motifs, involving what we might call an Agnon-figure, a writer or scholar (like Ginat, Gamzu, and Rechnitz) who is deliberately out to contact, record, or preserve a lost or elusive reality. All these characters share an alienation from ordinary experience; all of them pursue their interest in relative or complete isolation, often with a Magian intensity. Some, like Rechnitz, are driven by obscure cravings which stem from an aberrant or displaced sexuality and which make them simultaneously demonic in their work and passive within the circumstances of everyday life. Curiously, however, these specialized characters are not essentially different from the more commonplace figures who move through Agnon's stories and novels. The Agnon protagonist is always a little man who tends toward a bewildered incomprehension of the things that happen to him. He is—one might say—an archetype of bewilderment.

This figure represents the peculiar strength as well as the peculiar limitation of Agnon's achievement. He has been compared to Kafka's heroes, just as the tales about him have been compared in style and form to Kafka's work. If one seeks analogies in modern literature, however, one would do better to look to Faulkner, whose characters remain caught up in the traditions of the old South and continue to live within its mythos without being able to evolve viable relationships in the world which has supplanted it. The difference is that Faulkner's people respond to this situation with glorified self-dramatizations in postures of defeat, while Agnon's people respond with Chaplinesque incomprehension and a reflective shrug of the shoulders in which wit and imbecility coincide.

Indeed, as Agnon moves further and further away from the dead shtetl culture, as he contemplates the futility of the Zionist effort either to reincarnate the shtetl or to resurrect the religious Commonwealth of ancient Israel, as he evolves his sense of the ugliness, the fragmentation, and the systematic irrelevance to human desire of the given, modern world, his protagonists slouch ever more deeply, groan ever more pathetically, fall ever more habitually into the cliché' of self-denigration. The voice in which he speaks is the voice of the shlemiehl: the crinkle of self-pity and the quaver of self-doubt define its range.

There are anomalies here. The idiom of Agnon's novels is pietistic, the logic seems rigorous, and the erudition—rabbinic—is vast; yet, in fact, the logic is shuffle-gaited and the erudition is irrelevant to the ongoing concerns of life. Agnon tries desperately to think things out, but his very idiom reflects a failure of thought. The marvelously nuanced prose, examined closely as to rhetoric and syntax, is revealed as dramatizing an inability to find cause or to measure time and space significantly. Its very flow and cadence take on the quality of a universal krechtz, or groan. In view of Agnon's own “Zionist” choice to write in Hebrew, and in view of his massive contribution to the development of modern Hebrew as a literary instrument, it is supremely ironic that his language should come to seem a transmogrified, quintessentialized rendering in Hebrew of something native to Yiddish at its most reflexive. His prose is a language never heard on land or sea, impeccably Hebraic and yet molded in the cadence of another mode, another language, another form of consciousness. Indeed, the nearly inexhaustible pleasures which Agnon's prose style affords the attentive reader are themselves a symptom of the underlying difficulty. So much is invested by Agnon in the language that, instead of serving as a pane of clear glass through which we might envision a world, it often seems to be one of those finely-wrought products of vitreous art in which figures are etched into the glass itself. His language, in short, points always back to itself, rather than outward into an objectified fictional universe.

Thus, though one marvels at Agnon's achievement, one comes away from a reading of his work with a sense of disquiet. The range is too narrow, and the historical scope fails to compensate for the limited span of experience encompassed in his tales. Agnon lacks gusto, and so do his characters. Their inherent passivity—their incapacity to engage in passionate struggle—oppresses the reader and, as a total vision, fails to convince. The common comparison to Kafka suggests one source of the weakness. Within the psychic smog of Kafka's world there is a tensed, even compulsive will to be, to achieve, to escape. Kafka's obsession with his father, with authority in general, is unpleasant in its clinical baldness, but out of it there seems to grow a tenacity of will, and a counter-fixity of guilt. Such tension is largely absent in Agnon. In psychological terms, his characters are obsessed not with the father, but with the mother, and the result is a propensity to undergo life in a labile, feminine mode.

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More damaging, ultimately, is the underlying irresolution in Agnon's attitude toward his material. The late parables bespeak the hopelessness of embodying in consciousness the high aims and ravening dreams of the Rechnitzes, Ginats, and Gamzus. Yet they may also be said to constitute a kind of elegiac celebration of that fond, foolish effort—the only effort worth making in this shattered world. It is surely no accident that Agnon's first novel had Don Quixote in its background; The Bridal Canopy and all the work that follows is riddled with a Cervantesque ambivalence toward the figure of the hero—saint and fool, martyr and fall guy, be he Reb Yudel or Ginat-Gamzu-Agnon. It is the sort of ambivalence that mocks the objects of its desire, and it accounts in part for the quality of unpleasantness in Agnon's work. The price of the remarkable lyricism—of the pathetic comedy of his own and his people's journey through the anterooms of modernity into the center of its hell—is a faint nastiness, an uneasy afterstench of self-indulgence which precludes wisdom, passion, and even the larger energy of a truly hellish ordeal.

And yet, for all that, one is irresistibly drawn to Agnon's vision, and to the intricacies and bafflements which his own irresolution begets. For it is out of the effort to reconcile his conflicting attitudes of irony and celebration that the rich fabric of his work, a work is woven, finally, which seeks to embody in itself the elusive wholeness that is the object of man's desire. That wholeness may in fact be beyond us, but from Agnon's work—as from Ginat's published Enamite hymns—there shines, for those who can glimpse it, the light of the higher yearning.

¹ Two Tales, Translated by Walter Lever, Schocken Books, 236 pp., $4.95.