ROBERT ALTER
627
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
under~ake
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 strolling with
Shira, and it wouldn't have been seemly, as Henrietta had conspired with the
wife of a certain teacher from Beit Hakerem not to allow their husbands to
bring any strange women into their studios, and
if
they wanted to paint-they
could paint a death's-head." One notes that B6cklin's allegorical pair
Dichtung
und
Malerei,
Poetry and Painting, follow in quick sequence in the dream.
Agnon gives one further twist to the Bocklin painting by turning it at
one point into a kind of reverse 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" (11 :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 art-work. Its origins, or
at least the origins of the part of the Bocklin 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 art work 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 con–
clusion to which Agnon wanted them to lead. Shira, hard-bitten, 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 unappetiz–
ing 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
deshabille.
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 premoral 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
