ROBERT ALTER
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character
in
the book).
In each of the three novels Agnon published from 1935 to 1945, he
had found ways to go strikingly beyond his previous work in the fashioning
of new fictional forms and in the range of themes he was able to sound.
It
was clearly his intention to go beyond himself once again in
Shira,
and he
apparently set to work on the new novel not long after the appearance of
just Yesterday.
Between 1949 and 1952, he published chapters of
Shira
in a
literary yearbook issued by the newspaper Ha'aretz, material corresponding
to most of Book One and Book Two of the novel as we have it. The ex–
citement roused in Hebrew literary circles was then frustrated as Agnon
confined the continuation of
Shira
to the privacy of his drawer, pursuing
other projects in print. In 1966, after he received the Nobel Prize, he al–
lowed two more chapters to appear, and, with failing physical powers, he
was working on
Shira
in his last years, still hoping to forge it into what it
would in any case, even incomplete, prove to be-his great last testament as a
writer.
Shira
is at once Agnon's fullest invocation of the nineteenth-century
European novel and a deliberate modernist demonstration of the collapse of
the thematic concerns and formal strategies of the nineteenth-century novel.
Adultery as an attempted escape from the flatness and the stifling routine of
bourgeois society is, of course, one of the two or three great recurrent
themes of the traditional novel. One could not have chosen a more thor–
oughly bourgeois realm in the Palestine of the 1930s than the milieu of the
Hebrew University with its predominantly German-Jewish professorate,
where propriety, conformism, industriousness, self-importance, and social
status were the governing values. Agnon, who lived on the margins of the
Hebrew University, some of his best friends being members of its faculty,
knew this world well and rendered it in his last novel with a shrewd satiric
eye.
Shira,
however, turns out to be something quite different from a latter–
day Hebrew reprise of
Madame Bovary
and
Anna Karenina
in an academic
setting. Herbst, unlike Flaubert's Emma, does not "discover in adultery
all
the
platitudes of married life" but, on the contrary, finds that a fleeting carnal
encounter with an unlikely object of desire opens up vertiginous new per–
spectives, makes bourgeois hearth and home unlivable for him, impels him in
ways he is hardly conscious of to do something radically other with his life.
The background of political violence is one of the keys to the difference
between
Shira
and the tradition of the European novel that it recalls. The
bourgeois academic world from which Manfred Herbst derives is not a fixed
datum of social reality, as would be the case in a nineteenth-century novel,
but is seen instead as a fragile choreography of complacent social rituals on
the brink of a historical abyss. The novel is set in the late thirties, in the midst
