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PARTISAN REVIEW
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 ofthe 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 Bocklin's painting: every artist, in every age, as an
ineluctable given ofhis 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 Bocklin's attitude as a self-portraitist, the grim fiddler just
behind
him.
Herbst takes due notice of the Bocklin painting in Shira's apartment,
and he is several times bothered by an oddly literal question about it. "This
skull that B6cklin painted, did he paint it from a model or through the power
of his imagination? Why do I ask? Herbst wondered about himself'
(1:29).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
B6cklin 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 Bocklin worked from a
model or from his imagination, but this time he decides firmly on the latter
alternative when he recalls that B6cklin "used to complain that he wasn't able
to paint a woman from a live model because his Italian wife's relentless
jealously prevented him from bringing any woman into his studio." There is
an instructive overlap, then, between painting
eros
and painting
thanatos
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