Language, Absence, Play: Judaism and Superstructuralism in the Poetics of S. Y. Agnon

S. Y. Agnon is one of the more self-referential writers of modern Hebrew literature: his texts are replete with images of writing, editing, book collecting, and printing. He frequently alludes to his own texts and characters and introduces autobiographical details into his fiction (in addition to fictionalizing his own life). One of Agnon’s major projects was an anthology of Jewish sources on all aspects of language and writing. While Agnon’s ars poetica has been a long-standing subject of critical analysis, the last couple of decades have witnessed an increased focus on the self-conscious “drama of writing” in his fiction (in, e.g., the work of Anne Golomb-Hoffmann). Yaniv Hagbi takes a fresh approach to this topic by treating Agnon as an active theorist of language. He juxtaposes Agnon’s notions concerning writing and creativity with two other major systems of thought on language: on the one hand, Jewish sources on language and creation (many of which were chosen by Agnon himself for inclusion in the anthology Book, Writer, and Story) and, on the other, structuralist and post-structuralist thought, from Saussure, through Jakobson, to Derrida and Lacan. Balancing these three components (Agnon, Judaism, and super-structuralism), Hagbi not only provides original readings of Agnon’s somewhat lesser known works such as “Ad hena” (To this day), but also elucidates some of the central tenets and terms of Jewish and structuralist thought with regards to language. One of his main insights is that for Agnon the Hebrew language predates the world, serves as its building-blocks, and maintains creation daily. Writing fiction in this language is therefore a very serious, dangerous, but also potentially productive undertaking.

Hagbi’s first step is to tease out the basic correspondence or “theoretical homologies” between “superstructuralist” notions (an umbrella term coined by Richard Harlan for both structuralist theory and the variety of approaches that followed structuralism, often undermining it), and traditional Jewish thought. He then uses this “linkage” to interpret Agnon’s work, and this on the basis of an inductive reading of Agnon’s own anthologies. Agnon’s writing thus serves Hagbi as a juncture between the ancient and the modern, between religious ways of thinking that predated his work by centuries and secular ones that gained prominence toward the end of his life and after his death. While claiming that he does not seek to “convert” one mode of thinking to the other, but instead, to uncover the “interesting correspondences” among them, Hagbi nonetheless reads Agnon and, at times, Jewish thought, under the sign of post-structuralist philosophy. He emphasizes the play, or perpetual movement of signifiers, the blurring of boundaries between life and art, language and metalanguage, and “the act of creation as an act of revolt against its creator, its origin, its father—Agnon” (p. 52). Consequently, the golem of Prague legend—a legend of human creation gone awry, as the golem rises up against his creator—represents for Agnon, and Hagbi following him, this revolt of creation and of language more generally, when language gains a material and almost independent aspect. Hagbi pays close attention to the ways in which Agnon blurs the boundaries between different diegetic levels, especially between author and character, theory and practice. Agnon’s use of metafictional devices thus not merely enhances his irony, controlling his position over the work of art but, by contrast, indicates how his self-referential language can transcend its creator and itself (p. 189).

In his first chapter devoted to Agnon’s philosophy of language, Hagbi argues for the rule-governed, productive nature of language in general and the Oral Torah in particular. The central claim here is that Agnon considered his own writing as part of the Oral Torah, as an act of “theological practice” (p. 169). In four subsequent chapters, Hagbi examines Agnon’s works of fiction, focusing on the following linguistic-aesthetic issues: intertextuality, the centrality of absence and destruction for Agnon’s notion of language, the movement or play of signifiers as poetic pattern, and finally, metafictional and autobiographical features of Agnon’s writing. As Hagbi explains, the topics covered in these chapters are closely interlinked, so that sections from one chapter could have appeared in another. The book does not aim, moreover, to survey Agnon’s oeuvre or trace lines of development in his writing; instead, Hagbi returns in every chapter to some of the same texts—primarily the later, and intensely self-referential works “Ad hena,” “Edo and Enam,” and Book, Writer, and Story—in order to substantiate his claims concerning the interplay in Agnon’s writing between the destructive and creative, or ludic, aspects of language.

Hagbi’s productive triangulation of Agnon’s works, Jewish sources on language, and superstructuralist thought focuses on the lines of continuity, correspondence, or homology among these thinkers and texts. The reader could have also benefited, however, from a more in-depth discussion of the main differences and tensions among these systems of thought and writing. Hagbi has positioned Agnon between these religious and secular approaches to language, yet he considers him as a writer who privileges the Hebrew language and Jewish faith. But are “superstructuralism” and Jewish thought as compatible as Hagbi depicts them? Does language merely “replace transcendence” in structuralist thought and can the Written Torah be considered “a theological ‘generative grammar’ creating the Oral Torah”? Hagbi underplays the arbitrariness of the structure of language and its signifiers in structuralist thought—in contrast to the inherent meaningfulness and logic of Jewish law and thought—in order to underscore the shared premise of “a set of rules, a dominant system” that allows for potential future creativity. In this manner, he can fully integrate Agnon into a religious framework without sacrificing his (post-)structuralist reading of Agnon’s texts.

If Hagbi focuses on the text and its ars-poetical qualities, he does so partly at the expense of the context of writing, and this on several levels: the historical context of textual production and circulation, the past and current historical and political events that inform the act of writing, the context of Agnon’s writing in general, and that of particular texts such as “Ad hena” and its intertext, Gustav Meyrink’s 1915 Der Golem. Hagbi does not mention, for example, that Agnon has adapted here a fantastic thriller, a bestseller that received much negative attention from figures such as Gershom Scholem and Arnold Zweig for its inaccurate and populist use of Jewish kabalistic notions. Why would Agnon have his narrator dismiss the same novel that he then continues to draw on implicitly throughout “Ad hena”? And what does Agnon’s complex use of Der Golem tell us about his relationship to the German language and culture specifically and not merely to language in general? Such questions are left unanswered in Hagbi’s otherwise incisive interpretation of the manifold similarities between “Ad hena” and Der Golem.