The Dreaming Narrator in S. Y. Agnon

Abstract

The reader of Agnon is likely to receive as his first impression a sense of the extraordinary waywardness of the story-line. In a long novel such as Hakhnasat Kala (The Bridal Canopy), 19321 the pattern is almost classically picaresque. The hero's journey in search of a bridegroom and a dowry for his daughter takes him through the Jewish villages of Galicia at the beginning of the nineteenth century. His chance encounters with mendicants, burghers, students of the law, functionaries of all kinds, the poor and the rich, provide the opportunity for an endless series of reminiscences, legends, moral tales, and even beast-fables. Linking them is the naively pious personality of the wanderer himself, Reb Yudel, as well as the overall atmosphere of hasiddic spirituality which involves all the characters in its warmth. Reb Yudel's return to his wife and family at the end of his journey (like that of Leopold Bloom at the end of Ulysses) brings the stream of incidents and chance associations to an end, but by no means binds them together in a unified plot structure.2 A more complex and enfolded narrative technique is provided by the shorter novel 'Ido Ve'enam (Edo and Enam), 1950.3 Instead of a simple string of episodes associated in the picaresque manner, we have here a concentric system of narratives or hints of narratives to which the central node of relation is more than casually linked. There are no fewer than twelve such secondary narrations deployed in a brief work of twenty-five thousand words, and the narrator has a way of picking them up again and again as the story proceeds rather in the manner of a