Fig. 8: Arnold Böcklin, “Self-Portrait with Death as a Fiddler” (1872) – Nationalgalerie, Berlin
Seeking relief from the terrible intensity of the Bruegelian painting, Herbst flips through a stack of Rembrandt reproductions and comes to
The Night Watch
[Fig. 4], on which he dwells. Rembrandt would seem to present a kind of art antithetical to that of the anonymous painter from the school of Bruegel. The narrator tells us that Herbst now experiences a sense of melancholy accompanied by “inner tranquility” (
menuhat hanefesh
, literally, “soul’s rest”), a tranquility usually identified as harmony but which he, the narrator, prefers to associate with the illumination of knowledge. The opposition, however, between Rembrandtian and Bruegelian art rapidly dissolves, like most of the key oppositions in the novel. To begin with,
The Night Watch
immediately makes Herbst think of Shira, who had been looking for a reproduction of the painting, and she is doubly associated with disease – the wasting disease that by this point we suspect she has contracted, and her hapless lover’s disease of the spirit manifested in his obsessive relationship with her. But a few minutes later in narrated time, Herbst suddenly realizes that his memory has played a trick on him, or, in the psychoanalytic terms never far from Agnon’s way of conceiving things from the thirties onward, he has temporarily repressed something. It was not
The Night Watch
, with its beautifully composed sense of confident procession, that Shira wanted, but another Rembrandt painting,
The Anatomy Lesson
[Fig. 5]. The clinical subject of the latter painting might of course have a certain professional appeal to Shira as a nurse, but what is more important is that its central subject is not living men marching but a cadaver, and thus it is linked with the representation of the living-dead leper in the anonymous canvas.
Death as a subject, in turn, connects Rembrandt with Böcklin, the artist responsible for the painting of the death’s-head that Shira keeps in her apartment. Arnold Böcklin, a Swiss painter much in fashion in Central Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century (Stefan George wrote a poem about him), provides one of the teasing keys to
Shira
. Böcklin had a pronounced preference for mythological and allegorical topics, often rendered with a sharp realism of detail, and in pursuing this interest he repeatedly devoted emphatic attention to those figures of classical mythology associated with a riot of sensuality – Pan, satyrs, centaurs, Triton disporting himself with a Nereid. He also produced two versions of an allegorical painting that is particularly pertinent to the central thematic complex of
Shira
: entitled
Poetry and Painting
, it shows two female figures on either side of a fountain (presumably, the Pierian Spring), Poetry on the left, naked to the waist, leaning on the fountain’s edge; Painting on the right, enveloped in drapery, dipping one hand into the water while with the other she holds a palette. Interestingly, Böcklin never did a painting of a skull, if one can trust the testimony of the comprehensive illustrated catalogue of his paintings published in Berne in 1977. He was, however, much preoccupied with death, which he characteristically represented in a histrionic mode that has a strong affinity with Symbolist painting. One scene he painted a few times was
The Isle of the Dead
[Fig. 6], in which the island looms as a spooky vertical mass against a dark background, with a small boat approaching it in the foreground, rowed by a presumably male figure, his back to us, while a female figure in white stands erect in the boat. One of his last paintings,
The Plague
(1898) [Fig. 7], exhibits a more brutally direct relevance to
Shira
: a hideous female figure, with large wings and grotesque tail, yet more woman than monster, swoops down over the streets of a town.
The reproduction that hangs on Shira’s wall is probably of
Self-Portrait with Death as Fiddler
(1872) [Fig. 8]. It is possible that Agnon simply forgot the self-portrait and concentrated on the skull when he introduced the painting into his novel, but given his frequently calculating coyness as a writer, it seems more likely that he deliberately suppressed the entire foreground of the canvas. In the foreground, Böcklin, wearing an elegant dark smock, stands with palette in one hand and brush in the other, his trim beard delicately modeled by a source of light from the upper left, his lively lucid eyes intent on the canvas he is painting. Behind him, in the upper right quadrant of the painting, virtually leaning on the painter’s back, death as a leering skull with bony hand – rendered in the same precise detail as the figure of the artist – scratches away on his fiddle. That missing artist absorbed in his work who stands in front of the figure of death is, in one respect, what
Shira
is all about.
Death is, I think, a specter of many faces in this somber, troubling novel. It has, to begin with, certain specific historical resonances for the period of the late 1930s in which the action is set. In the two decades since 1914, death had given ample evidence of having been instated as the regnant
Zeitgeist
of the century. Herbst recalls wading up to his knees in blood as a soldier in the great senseless slaughter that was the First World War. The novel begins with mention of a young man murdered by Arabs, and in these days of organized terrorist assaults and random violence against the Jews of Palestine that began in 1936, there is a repeated drumbeat of killings in the background of the main action. On the European horizon, German Jews are desperately trying to escape, many of them sensing that Germany is about to turn into a vast death-trap. But beyond Agnon’s ultimately political concern with the historical moment as a time of endemic murder, he is also gripped by the timeless allegory of Böcklin’s painting: every artist, in every age, as an ineluctable given of his mortal condition, works with death fiddling at his back, and cannot create any art meaningfully anchored in the human condition unless he makes the potency of death part of it, at once breathing life into the inanimate and incorporating death in his living creation. Agnon was nearing sixty when he began work on the novel and an octogenarian when he made his last concerted effort to finish it, and it is easy enough to imagine that he saw himself in Böcklin’s attitude as selfportraitist, the grim fiddler just behind him.
Herbst takes due notice of the Böcklin painting in Shira’s apartment, and he is several times bothered by an oddly literal question about it: “Did Böcklin paint from a model or from his imagination? Why do I ask? Herbst wondered about himself (I:29). Why, indeed, should so sophisticated an intellectual trouble himself about whether the painter used a model or not? The question, it should be observed, makes somewhat better sense if one keeps in mind not just the skull but both figures in
Self-Portrait with Death as Fiddler
, for then, since Böcklin demonstrably used himself as the model for the painter, one might begin to speculate about the “source” for the macabre fiddler standing behind the painter, the very hybrid nature of the composition putting to the test any simple mimetic conception of art. A couple of paragraphs later in the same chapter, a clue, or at least a dangling possibility of connection, is provided for Herbst’s question. Again he asks himself whether Böcklin worked from a model or from his imagination, but this time he decides firmly on the latter alternative when he recalls that Böcklin “complained that he never had the chance to draw a woman from life because his wife, who was Italian, was jealous and wouldn’t allow him to have a model in his studio.” There is an instructive overlap, then, between painting eros and painting thanatos from the imagination rather than from a model. The particular link is important enough for Herbst to pick it up again explicitly in a dream somewhat later in the novel (ii:7). In the dream he accompanies his daughter Tamara to Greece, where she means to undertake a study of verse meters (the word
shira
is used here for poetry). The father is glad to have gone with his daughter on the trip for “otherwise she would have seen him walking with Shira, which was not advisable, because Henrietta was in collusion with the wife of a teacher from Beit Hakerem. They agreed to prohibit their husbands from bringing other women to their studios, declaring, ‘If they want to draw – let them draw skulls.’“ One notes that Böcklin’s allegorical pair,
Dichtung und Malerei
, Poetry and Painting, follow in quick sequence in the dream.
Agnon gives one further twist to the Böcklin painting by turning it at one point into a kind of reversed portrait of Dorian Gray: as Shira visibly deteriorates, the painting deteriorates with her and so its artificial deathliness becomes progressively more lifelike: “The picture became so darkened that it would frighten you, as though a real skull were staring at you” (ii:2). Agnon never entirely renounced the macabre interests of his early neo-Gothicism, and though here the ghastly correspondence between painter and owner is given a perfectly plausible explanation – as Shira neglects herself, she neglects her possessions and no longer bothers to dust the painting – troubling thoughts are stirred about the status in reality of the artwork. Its origins, or at least the origins of the part of the Böcklin painting mentioned in the novel, are not in the representation of a model but in the artist’s imagination, and yet the unforeseen intercourse between painting and experience produces a spectral affinity between the two, imbuing the artwork with an air of reality the artist himself had not given it.
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.