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Chapter 7 Inscription and Madness in Only Yesterday Comparative Bildung In the wake of Freud's explorations of the decisive impact of the Oedipus complex in the formation of personality, it is not surprising that narrative theorists have turned to the "symbolic triad of the family" [Macksey 1983, 1008] as a fruitful starting point for studying the novel as genre.1 The importance ofthe "paternal metaphor" or the "name of the Father" to the formation of the subject has given rise to a current emphasis in literary criticism on the search for the father as motivator in narrative.2 For our purposes, we might note that the Bildungsroman as a literary form derives much of its narrative energies from the struggles of sons with a paternal principle: the struggle to find the father, the struggle ofthe hero to give birth to himself, or to be his own father. Bringing structuralism together with linguistics, Jacques Lacan constructs the Oedipal narrative in culture as the formation of the subject through an access to language that imposes the Law of the Father: "The primordial Law is therefore that which in regulating marriage ties superimposes the kingdom of culture on that of a nature abandoned to the law of mating.... This law, then, is revealed clearly enough as identical with an order of language" [1977, 66]. "Family" must be understood, then, not only in terms of its specific members, but also as "a set of symbolic relations which always transcend the actual persons defined by them. 'Mother' and 'father' signify cultural positions" [Silverman 1983, 182]. The novel as a genre exploits this intersection of the individual with the cultural: the specifics of plot and character carry broader resonances and tell a story that belongs ultimately to the larger domain of culture. (This patrocentric schema, however, should not lead us to overlook issues of differentiation, fusion, departure and return, that are bound up in 125 126 Between Exile and Return preoedipal relations; narrative reflects the gendered dichotomies through which subjectivity takes shape.) In this context, I propose reading Tmol shilshom (Only Yesterday ) as a Bildungsroman and major modernist text, with particular attention to the ironies generated by the failure of the subject to "develop," that is to go through the sort ofBildung we might expect. From this perspective, I suggest setting Only Yesterday alongside James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. (Later portions of the discussion will use some comparisons to Franz Kafka's works.) First, some points of comparison that have bearing on the discussions of Agnon's novel to follow. In Portrait of the Artist, I am struck by the importance of motherland and homeland, both Ireland and Church. The novel plays out an Oedipal drama, focusing on Stephen's efforts to differentiate himself from the maternal, as well as on his search for a father. Despite the opening child's-eye glimpse of the father's hairy monocled godlike face, the novel sets up the father as the site ofan inaugural lack from which the narrative takes shape. We follow Stephen as he moves among priests, sinners, nationalists , and ultimately, of course, back to Stephen himself, priest ofthe imagination, as he declares himselfto be his own begetter. But while the novel traces the journey ofthe hero through Christian and pagan structures, it also sets Stephen up for an Icarian fall, which his name suggests. Doubts about Stephen's development and self-proclaimed formation are also raised by his autoeroticism and his relation to the female. In particular, the motif of the kiss poses a threat of absorption into the maternal, from which Stephen recoils defensively . We see this in his response to his schoolmates' teasing question "Do you kiss your mother?" (a reference to St. Aloysius Gonzaga, Joyce's patron saint, who was too pure to do so [Anderson, 490)), as well as in his ultimate resistance to his mother's demand that he make his Easter devotion. Along the way, Stephen sums up the danger when he refers to Ireland as "an old sow that eats her farrow." In The Magic Mountain, I would draw attention to the novel's wonderfully seductive portrayal of illness-"life on the horizontal"as narrative manifestation ofMann's growing preoccupation with the death instinct in European culture. In terms of its function and link to the death drive, tuberculosis plays a role in The Magic Mountain that can be compared to the role of...

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