ROBERT ALTER
623
energies of love and death, health and ghastly sickness. Herbst, with his
habits of academic timidity, his hesitant and unfocused character, may not
ever be capable of creating such exacting art, but he is ineluctably drawn to
the idea of it.
The underlying concern with the nature of art in
Shira
is reflected in its
wealth of references-elsewhere in Agnon's fiction, scrupulously avoided-to
European writers: Goethe, Nietzsche, Balzac, Rilke, Gottfried Keller, Stefan
George, not to speak of the Greek tragedians and their German scholarly
expositors whom Herbst reviews in his quixotic attempt to write a tragedy
(ostensibly, a historical drama set in the Byzantine period but unconsciously a
reflection of his own agonizing erotic dilemma with Shira). From one point of
view, this is a novel about the impossibility of tragedy in the modern age, and
especially after the advent of Hitler-that is to say, the impossibility of a lit–
erary form that assigns meaning to suffering, or represents an experience of
transcendence through suffering. In consonance with this concern with
tragedy, a good deal of weight is given to Nietzsche's notion in
The Birth of
Tragedy
of the roots of the genre in an experience of violent primal forces
contained by artistic form-Herbst, preeminently a "Socratic" man in Niet–
zsche's negative characterization of German academic culture, at one point
runs across a first edition of
The Birth of Tragedy
in an antiquarian bookshop.
Another manifestation ofAgnon's preoccupation here with the way art
illuminates reality is the attention devoted to painting, again, a thoroughly
uncharacteristic emphasis in his fiction. Three painters figure significantly in
the novel: Rembrandt and B6cklin, who recur as motifs in connection with
Shira, and the anonymous artist from the school of Breughel responsible for
the stupendous canvas of the leper and the townscape (III: 16) that consti–
tutes Herbst's great moment of terrifying and alluring revelation. A look at
how the three painters interact in the novel may suggest something of what
Agnon was trying to say about art, and perhaps also why he found his way
to a conclusion of the novel ultimately blocked.
If art, or poetry, is a route to knowledge radically different from the
academic enterprise that has been Herbst's world, Agnon sees as its defining
characteristic a capacity to fuse antinomies, to break down the logically
marked categories-Herbst's boxes full of carefully inscribed research notes–
presupposed by scholarly investigation. The Breughelian painting Herbst
discovers at the antiquarian's is a multiple transgression of the borderlines of
reason, and that, he realizes, is the power of its truthful vision. The leper's
eye-sockets are mostly eaten away by the disease, yet they are alive and
seek life-a paradox that reenacts the underlying achievement of the painter,
"who succeeded in breathing the spirit of life into the inanimate." The medium
of the painting is of course silent, but Herbst, contemplating the warning bell
