ROBERT ALTER
629
ent colors, or how lepers behave toward each other and what their sexual
practices are" (II: 17). The true artist is the person, like Rembrandt of
The
Anatomy Lesson,
like the anonymous painter of the school of Breughel, and
like B6cklin, who looks on death and disease clear-eyed and unflinching, just
as we see the face of Bocklin in his self-portrait serenely scrutinizing his can–
vas.
If
the artist's credo put forth by
Shira
is in one respect distinctly mod–
ernist, embracing the idea of
art
as an unflinching "technique of trouble," in
R.
P. Blackmur's phrase, it also has an oddly medieval feeling. Herbst is an his–
torian of Byzantium versed in the ascetic practices of the early Christians,
and the novel draws explicit parallels between the monastic renunciation of
worldly life and the withdrawal to the leper hospital that Herbst will choose
as his final fulfillment. In some of his earlier fiction, Agnon had set up a simple
alternative between art and
eros,
depicting protagonists who renounce the
gratification of desire in the name of the pursuit of art. Here, on the other
hand, desire joins hands with art in the magic circle of imminent death, re–
moved from the shallow egotism and the complacent self-deceptions of ev–
eryday social existence. This is chiefly what I had in mind earlier when I
proposed that in
Shira
Agnon seeks to move through realism to allegory.
And this, I suspect, was precisely the problem that bedeviled him for nearly
two decades after the initial elan that produced Books One and Two. How
was he to take Herbst, a figure with a certain academic pedigree, a family
history, individual work habits and domestic tics, and translate him into the
symbolic sphere where poetry, desire, and death were one; and what face
could Shira, hitherto also a novelistic character with an individual sensibility
and a personal history, show in that ultimate locus of thematic convergences,
withdrawn from the worldly realm?
There is a structural analogy, though I am not proposing any influence,
between the ending of
Shira
and the ending of Stendhal's
Charterhouse of
Parma.
Stendhal, too, sought to transport a hero entrammeled in the petty
machinations of worldly life to a privileged sphere of lofty withdrawal from
the world, and though his novel never actually breaks off like Agnon's, most
critics have felt that the conclusion of this masterpiece of European fiction is
huddled, leaping too suddenly from all the complications of the court of Parma
to the contemplativeness of the monastery at the very end. Herbst's planned
route to the monastic leprosarium is persuasively traced by Adiel Arnzeh, the
protagonist ofthe remarkable story, "Forevermore," which Agnon originally
wrote to include in
Shira
and then decided to publish separately. In the fuller
dimensions of the novel, he was unable to find a solid fictional bridge on which
Manfred Herbst could cross over from his home and wife and children and
academic tasks to that ghastly consecrated realm where a disease-ridden
