A Review of Shmuel Yosef Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist (review)

A REVIEW· OF SHMUEL YOSEF AGNON: A REVOLUTIONARY TRADITIONALIST . By Gershon Shaked. Jeffrey M. Green, trans. Modem Jewish Masters Series 3. Pp. xii + 293. New York: New York University, 1989. Cloth. Alan L. Mintz University ofMaryland It is rather astonishing to realize that almost twenty-five years have passed since the publication of Arnold Band's Nostalgia and Nightmare: A Study in the Fiction of S. Y. Agnon. That volume was an extraordinarily ambitious achievement. Band sought-in six hundred densely printed pages-to layout the historical development of Agnon's corpus, summarize the plots of the stories, review the criticism, undertake his own original readings of the text, present a fonnidable and ingeniously organized apparatus which catalogues all of Agnon's writing (through their various pennutations and versions) and all of the criticism, and to do all this in the manner that would reward the attention of both neophyte English readers and initiated Hebrew readers. Some have argued that the book crippled itself by trying to do too much, but in the end the sheer utility of the book and its abundant good sense have answered its critics. Nostalgia and Nightmare has made itself essential to anyone undertaking to write about Agnon. Gershon Shaked's new work, Shmuel Yosef Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist, is a third the size of Band's volume and carries only a modest critical apparatus. It is meant to be an introduction to Agnon, as befits its place in a series of brief overviews of "Modem Jewish Masters," and it is intended specifically for the English reader. Yet at the same time, Shaked's book is very ambitious in its own way. By virtue of its introductory mission, it endeavors to set the tenns for the critical discussion of Agnon and to map the terrain of the major problems in his work. The kind of "mapping" Shaked engages in is not the preliminary surveying of unknown territory but the work of a master cartographer who knows every hill and valley and then chooses how to represent in simplified relief the general contours of the landscape. In the past quarter century, moreover, there is simply more territory to map. The black-jacketed posthumous works of Agnon threaten to take up as much space on the shelf as the white • A refereed review essay. Hebrew Studies 32 (1991) 62 Review Essays covers published in his lifetime. There is a new body of Agnon criticism, as well, much of it written by younger scholars. Then there are the new (though not necessarily better) ways of reading which have been made available by recent developments in literary theory. Shaked's book is, then, an important event in Jewish literary studies. Its contribution is made at two levels. On an objective level, the book offers a comprehensive guide to the major facets of Agnon's oeuvre: biography, influences, reception, the poetics of the prose, the development of style and plot, and a taxonomy of the genres and forms, in addition to a critical description of the six major novels. In his comprehensive references to the significant criticism written about Agnon's work, Shaked is careful only to locate and describe the contributions of other scholars; he assiduously avoids polemical judgments. At the same time, on a subjective level, Shaked's English introduction to Agnon can be usefully taken as an introduction -a kind of digest and precis-to the Hebrew Shaked on Agnon. Shaked's own contribution to Agnon studies over three decades, which are gathered in his books Omanut HasJppur She] Agnon and PanJm Aberot Biytsirato She] ShaJ Agnon, stands as its own formidable scholarly edifice. Having an implicit summary of this important body of work available in English is in itself extremely useful. The principal illustrations in the present volume, a dozen or so texts analyzed in depth, are also taken from the Hebrew works. This too is helpful because it reveals the nature of Shaked's own revisionary convictions about the shape of the Agnon canon, that is to say, which works are, in his view, the most artistically accomplished and which features of Agnon's craft the most significant. On the basic but elusive question of...