CLASSICS REVISITED
Agnon's angst
RAVI VYAS
Angst: Variously translated as anxiety, anguish, dread. First used by Soren Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anxiety (1844) where he describes the terrifying reality of the state of splitness, indecisiveness and responsibility in front of choice.
Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought
SHMUEL YOSEF AGNON (1888-1970), the only Hebrew novelist to win the Nobel Prize for literature (1966) had once joked that if a book is not worthy of being read twice we may as well not read it once. Agnon won the prize for an oeuvre, which, in its use of stories, parables, fables, proverbs and other folkloristic material and its pervasive if unexplained angst, is closely akin to that of Kafka. "I write things simply as they are"; as simple as the stories in the Old Testament which may explain why the main body of his works were about stories with only two full length novels, The Bridal Canopy (1937) and In Times Past or Yesterday and the Day Before (1945).
Social allegories
Agnon chose as his subject the declining Jewish life of the Hasidim (Jewish mystical sect founded in Poland in 1750) and later, when he migrated from Poland to Palestine in 1908, the life of the East European diaspora. But these stories were allegories on the decline and futility of (Jewish) religious rituals and on the universal themes of man spiritually lost when wrenched from his natural environment — one dead, the other powerless to be born. Put another way, nostalgia and nightmare. Angst prevails throughout, somewhat like a social version of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which arose because of the fallibility of the observer himself.
Agnon was, first and last, a storyteller with a double-edged irony mocking both the religious Jews and the frailties in human nature. Agnon's works have been published in eight volumes but we will speak of three of them from the two most popular anthologies: Twenty-One Stories and Two Tales.
"In the Prime of Her Life" (from Twenty-One Stories) is the story of a young woman married to an older man who had once been in love with her mother. The story is a take-off on another, Effi Briest by Theodore Fontane, written some 27 years earlier, in which a young woman of Prussia, the daughter of a respected and well-to-do family, had been married off by her parents to a noble, Baron Innstetten, an older man and an army officer. The match was a desirable one for both families but the partners were ill-suited for each other. The strict values of the Prussian upper class — duty, honour, obedience and discipline, strict routine and emotional restraint — makes Effi agree to the proposal. She had no expectations of love because she had accepted and internalised the values of her social milieu to such an extent that in her view "surely he is the right man. Every one is the right man. Of course on condition he is of the nobility and has standing and good looks." The marriage turns out to be a disaster.
When victory is defeat
In contrast, Tirtza, the protagonist of "In the Prime of Her Life" very much wants to marry Akavia Mazal, has things her own way because, according to her, Akavia is the right man for her. Unlike Effi, Tirtza does not accept the world around her. For her, love takes precedence over all else, because she loves Akavia Mazal or at least the reflection of his image in her mother's unfulfilled love for him. She is even willing to feign illness to get the man she wants, even if he is not fervent about this match, or of any other, because he is not a fervent kind of man. May be, Tirtza's aim is merely to correct an injustice that occurred in her parents' generation. At the end of the story we realise that erotic injustice is irreparable. Meanwhile, in the background there is a dog that runs around from place to place. It is not a mad dog; it is rather friendly and named Meu'at which (the translator tells us) means twisted, distorted, deformed.
So is the story. Tirtza wins her love by falling ill but her victory is her defeat. The marriage becomes cold and remote, either because over the years the romantic idealism has worn off or because the middle-aged gentleman (who was no romantic in the first place) was simply bored with the dailiness of life. To Tirtza, the husband starts looking like her father — towards the end of the story she even mixes them up.
Why did the two marriages fail? Is it because every character seemingly embodies someone else? "How many natures lie in human nature?" as Pascal asked. If there are many instances of mistaken or misleading identities, large and small, trivial and symbolic, comic and tragic, is it because we all have multiple identities for differing circumstances in life?
There are two stories in Two Tales: "Betrothed" is a tale of rest; "Edo and Enam" of restlessness — two facets of life.
Rest and restlessness
The "rest' in "Betrothed" is in the times, in the language of the telling and in the protagonist. The times, the port city of Jaffa at the turn of the century: "The days before the First World War... .days many times longer than ours, and a man was able to do much more, with hours left over in which to take stock of the world." The tempo is slow and leisurely. The protagonist is Jacob Rechnitz. From whatever busy-ness is in the place, Jaffa with its "trade and labour... shipping and forwarding", the very first paragraph sets him off as a person who takes "no part in any of these". Though he is described as "not particularly passive", he is passivity itself. It takes a lot to get him going when "life was very unexacting; very little happened... days slipped by quietly; people were undemanding". Till a woman comes who awakens Jacob from his "waking sleep". But Jacob has found his calling not because he has consciously tried; it just came along on its own and roused him from his slumbers.
"Edo and Enam", that means movement / restlessness, is an elaboration of one of Pascal's Pensees: "All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot sit quietly in their own room." The Greifenbachs have left home to travel; Ginath is seldom home; Gamzu has covered most of the globe in his journeys; Gemulah has been transplanted. Out of this restlessness comes ruin. Agnon quotes the Ecclesiastes (his stories are full of Biblical references): "Going to the south, turning to the north, turning turning goes the wind, and again to its circuits the wind returns." What Agnon is saying is an elaboration of Plato's axiom: "For motion to be at rest and rest in motion, for either of them... .will compel the other to change to its opposite."
Two Tales, S.Y. Agnon, Penguin Modern Classics, this translation published in 1966, 7sh.
Twenty-One Stories, S.Y. Agnon, Schockken Books, 1970, price not stated.
The Story Begins: Essays on Literature, Amos Oz, Vintage Books, 2000.
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