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Chapter 4 Autochthon of the Book s. Y. Agnon and Edmond Jabes: The Writer in the Writing Autochthon: sprung from the land itself. Autochthon ofthe Book: a product of the text. Edmond Jabes and S. Y. Agnon, "autochthons of the Book" in Jacques Derrida's phrase, take their identity as writers from the rootedness of the Jews, displaced people, in the Book. Derrida [1978] uses the phrase in an essay on Jabes to suggest a likeness of writer and Jew in the condition of exile. Each is the product of a writing; it is the "ground" from which each springs, but that "ground" itselfresists stable definition. I adapt Derrida's phrase to study the production of an autobiographical myth in Agnon's writing . My interest is in the fashioning of the persona that is "Agnon," a story told in the writing. I begin with a brief comparison of Agnon and Jabes in order to examine the varieties of "autochthony," or relations of the writer to writing, that can be found in each. This preface introduces the more extended examination of Ag'non's autobiographical myth that follows. In his writing, Jabes refers to a Jewishness acquired through the experience of exile in 1956, although clearly it was there for him in the distinguished history of his family in the Cairo Jewish community . While his writing practices a kind ofrecovery ofrelationship to a Jewish hermeneutic, the contradictions inherent in that relationship become for him enmeshed with those of the act of writing itself. By contrast, Agnon's formative immersion in Jewish texts shapes the writer's sensibility to produce a particular kind of exploitation of Jewish sources, an ongoing process in which the Agnon text both makes a place for itself in a tradition of sacred writing and commentary and at the same time enacts its own exclusion from that tradition . Tradition is a continuity of texts in the lives of the people, sustained by the activities ofstudy and interpretation. The Hebrew word 57 58 Between Exile and Return masoret, commonly translated as "tradition," means literally transmission ; it carries a specific reference to the handing on oftraditional materials from generation to generation. (In a similar etymology, "tradition" derives from the Latin tradere, "to deliver.") In postexilic Judaism, the structure of the Temple, the Biblical center of faith, is internalized in the consciousness ofthe people in the practice ofritual and prayer through which the nation sustains its definition of itself. (Geoffrey Hartman refers to the "memory-temple" that the rabbis preserved through ritual and ceremony [1985, 205].) JaMs uses the theme of the destruction and rebuilding of the Temple as a source of metaphor and as a context for exploring the dynamics of writing .1 The Temple occupies a more central place in Agnon's writing. More obviously identified with the central structure of Judaism, it both houses and expels the figure ofthe writer whose writing does not necessarily fall within its compass.2 Paradoxically, modernist fictions challenge their own generic classification in order to bring about a renewal ofform. The relationship to genre is complicated in Agnon by his ambivalent relationship to European culture: renewal cannot be simply thought ofin terms of the novel, but must be understood as much in terms ofrelation to the sacred texts that constitute a model from which secular fiction is excluded. Agnon's fictions encompass a critique ofthe very forms they use, suggesting an effort at renewal from within, although the outcome of the process is never certain. To take one example, the narrator /protagonist of the quasi-autobiographical novel Orea/:t natah lalun (A Guest for the Night) looks at the ruined buildings of his eastern European hometown and observes, "Even now they make books they call novels, just as they still call our town a town" [Agnon 1968a, 46-47; 1968,4:45]; his statement implies a degradation ofthe novel form that is bound up with the situation of European Jewry between the two world wars.3 JaMs and Agnon share this explicit mistrust of fictional forms that assert their own sufficiency. Thus, in Jabes' Yael we read: "The day that I write a novel, I will have left the book, I will have lost it" [1967,51; 1983,36].4 JaMs opposes "novel" and ''book'' in a polemical polarization that makes of "novel" a convention-bound entity, while opening ''book'' up to the process of writing. This mistrust of genre produces an extreme disintegration of form in the writing of Jabes. By...

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