"like a Man in Exile from the Palace of His Father": Dramas of Writing in the Fiction

To enter Agnon's fictive universe, one must acknowledge the very central place occupied by Torah as the fabric of the world that both contains Creation and binds God to Israel. Torah, as pre-existing text, authorizes subsequent interpretations in the assumption that they are already contained within it. Using the texts of rabbinic tradition, Agnon maps out this territory in Seper, soper vesippur ("Book, Writer and Story"). But, we might ask, what place is there for the modern writer within this view of a world structured by the word of God? What structures do the writer's words generate and what space do they occupy in relation to Torah? Hebrew literature has had to work out its relationship to the sacred texts of Jewish tradition, and the conflict between sacred and secular has proved in many ways to be an energizing source for the modern writer. Torah constitutes something of a mythic center in Agnon's fictive universe, a text of presence where word and thing join. Within this emblematic geography, two sorts of movement can be discerned: movement away from or toward the source. More interesting than any simple