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PARTISAN REVIEW
held by the leper, experiences a kind of synesthetic hallucination, hears the
terrible clanging sound and feels the waves of the disease radiating out from
the leper's hand. The painting from the school of Breughel, as I have
proposed elsewhere, • is in its formal and thematic deployment a model for
the kind of art embodied in
Shira
itself: in the foreground, the horrific and
compelling figure of the diseased person, intimating an impending cataclysm;
in the background, halfout of focus, the oblivious burghers complacently going
about their daily pursuits. Agnon gives us not only the art work but also an
exemplary audience for it in Herbst. The historian of Byzantium is
mesmerized by the painting in a paradoxically double way: "... he looked
again and again with terrified eyes and eager sou1." The painting at once
scares him and translates him to an unwonted plane of experience because it
both speaks eloquently to a universal truth of human experience and gives
him back a potent image, ofwhich he is scarcely conscious, of his own life.
Seeking relief from the terrible intensity of the Breughelian painting,
Herbst flips through a stack of Rembrandt reproductions and comes to
The
Night Watch,
on which he dwells. Rembrandt would seem to present a kind of
art antithetical to that of the anonymous painter from the school of Breughel.
The narrator tells us that Herbst now experiences a sense of melancholy
accompanied by "inner tranquillity"
(menukhat hanefesh,
literally, "soul's
rest"), a tranquillity usually identified as harmony but which he, the narrator,
prefers to associate with the illumination of knowledge. The opposition, how–
ever, between Rembrandtian and Breughelian art rapidly dissolves, like most
of the key oppositions in the nove1. 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 which 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.
The clinical subject of the
latter painting might ofcourse 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
*
"A Novel of the Post-Tragic World," in my book,
Defenses ofthe Imagination
(Philadelphia,
1977)
