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In 1945, the writer S.Y. Agnon published what would become his magnum opus—the Palestinian Hebrew novel, Tmol shilshom (Only Yesterday). The novel follows the travels of Second Aliyah immigrant Yitshak Kumer. Unable to find work as a laborer, Kumer moves to Jerusalem where he becomes a house painter and eventually dies after being bitten by a rabid dog. It is precisely this rabid dog, Balak, whose presence in the novel has received the most attention and whose biblical moniker has catalyzed multiple intertextual interventions.
In the following paper, I approach this canine figure from a different perspective, one informed by the growing field of the Medical Humanities. To do so, I proceed along three lines. First, I examine the medico-cultural history of rabies in Palestine, providing a statistical summary of the number of rabies cases in and around Jerusalem from the 1910s to 1950s. Second, I investigate the long tradition of identifying rabies and melancholia as co-related infections, both stemming from a perceived surfeit of black bile in the spleen. Finally, I engage rabies and its melancholic affect not only as plot devices but as literary styles. The choice of rabies, I argue, demonstrates Agnon’s effort to pathologize the literary process and to thematize rabies and melancholia as generative aesthetics. In short, rabies and melancholia emerge in this paper as artistic practices that bring Agnon’s work into conversation with larger concerns of physiological aesthetics. Agnon’s “mad dog,” I contend, is not just an intertextual touchstone but the marker of a novel defined by a rabid-melancholic literary mode.