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Agnon Encounters Freud
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Agnon Encounters Freud In the engaging discussions of texts and their interpreters held over the past twenty years, the author has been treated as a nuisance or a pariah. Increasingly, the reader or critic emerges as the producer of meaning. We, the critics, either brazenly usurp the title of author or patronizingly relegate the author to a fiction of our imagination or implication. My argument here should therefore be understood as a reaction to this arrogant posture, to what I would call “the critical fallacy.” In simple terms, I am going to ask: What do we readers do with an author who won’t go away? What do we do with an author who asserts his presence in every line, who virtually challenges his reader to a duel—a friendly duel, to be sure, since no one is killed and no blood is spilled—but a duel from which the reader comes away humbled. That Agnon asserts his presence in every line should be obvious to anyone who has read one page of his Hebrew, written in a style that is flagrantly non-normative, though correct, dazzlingly dense, relentlessly demanding the reader’s full participation. The reader’s encounter with that peculiar style is the background against which all other considerations must take place. Though I shall make few references to style in the following remarks, I assume that you realize that style and what it implies, informs, and underlies everything I say. Readers familiar either with Agnon’s writings after the 1931 Berlin Edition or with the criticism that attended it, are fully aware of the critical dictum that many of these works echo Kafka because, we are told, Agnon was influenced by Kafka—whatever the word influence means. Since I have dealt with that problem elsewhere I won’t address it now. What I would like to present here is the exciting and far reaching notion that Agnon in mid-career, i.e. sometime after 1931, became keenly aware 241 of the broader implications of the Freudian concepts of language in general , and dream language, in particular; he understood both their challenges and opportunities, and struggled to master this language. I will suggest, then, that much of what we have thought was Kafka is really Freud. The implications of the shift in perspective should be immediately obvious. At the very least, it opens new avenues of interpretation and might aid us in understanding what was hidden from us before. Two distinctions should be drawn at the very outset of our argument. Critics have referred vaguely to something Freudian in Agnon since the 1930s, but they have, to my knowledge, neither proved the point, nor specified what they mean by Freudian, nor suggested implications for our reading. Second, we are not primarily conducting an exercise in psychoanalytic interpretation, but rather an historical investigation. First, a grounding in history. What evidence do we have that Agnon ever heard of Freud? For those who need strictly positivistic proof, there are, to my knowledge, at least two significant references in Agnon’s writing to Freud, his “system” (shita) or his “circle” (siya). The first is found in a letter to his wife, Esther, dated February 16, 1925, and demonstrates knowledge of Freud’s theory of the latent meaning of slips of the tongue. The second is so revelatory that it deserves fuller citation. In the first version (Davar: December, 1932) of the well-known story, “Panim aherot” (A different face) the hero, Michael Hartmann, tells his ex-wife, Toni, a frightening dream he had. The narrator then comments: Hartmann was grateful that she did not interpret his dream as would Freud and his circle. His dream was fine just as it was [without interpretation], like snow before it melts. In the first sentence, Freud is connected with the interpretation of dreams; the Hebrew roots (psr) or (prs) and (hlm) appear together. The interpretation of dreams, I submit, is the central aspect of the Freudian enterprise that intrigued Agnon; my studies, in fact, convince me that the specific Freudian work that intrigued Agnon was Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) (1899) and I would suggest that in that book he focused upon Chapters V and VI (though Chapter II is possible ). In the second sentence about Michael Hartmann, where we are told that Hartmann preferred his dreams uninterpreted since they are then “like snow before it melts,” we find an acute awareness of the problematic , disturbing feature of Freudian dream-interpretation. It reveals...