"We are lost."

"Which is to say: The war is lost, and that means more than a lost campaign, it means that we are in fact lost - lost, our cause and soul, our faith and our history. Germany is done for, or will be done for. An unutterable collapse - economic, political, moral, and spiritual - in short, an all-embracing collapse looms ahead. Not that I would have wished for what threatens us, for it is despair, it is madness." (186)

Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, and essayist. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 and married a Jewish woman who later converted to his Lutheran faith. When Hitler assumed power in 1933 the family emigrated to Switzerland and then to the United States in 1939. Mann became a naturalized American citizen and taught at Princeton. During World War II he produced a series of anti-Nazi radio broadcasts entitled "Deutsche Hörer!" ("German Listeners!") which were recorded in the US and then sent to Great Britain, where they were transmitted by the BBC. Mann would never again live in Germany, although after the war he often traveled there. He died in Zurich.

Doktor Faustus (Doctor Faustus, translated by John E. Woods) was begun in 1943 and published 1947. As the title suggests, it is a reworking of the German legend of Faust, an ambitious scholar who makes a deal with the devil. In negotiations with the devil's representative Mephistopheles, Faust agrees to trade his soul for a twenty-four year period of unlimited knowledge. Although some adaptations have Faust saved through the grace of God, in the original story he is corrupted beyond redemption and ultimately dragged to Hell before horrified onlookers. The tragic tale of ambition, temptation, power, and damnation is widely accepted as an allegory for the surrender of moral integrity in exchange for worldly prestige.

Mann's version is framed as the biography of the late composer Adrian Leverkühn, as written by his friend, an elderly schoolteacher named Serenus Zeitblom, while World War II rages outside and Germany's final catastrophe looms closer. Zeitblom had known Leverkühn since their boyhood days and remained by his side until Leverkühn's mental collapse in 1930 and death a decade later. Given Leverkühn's solitary nature, the bulk of the story is concerned with his artistic and intellectual evolution, from the comforting traditions of nineteenth century humanism, to the dizzying freedom of modernism, and finally to a nihilism seeking to redeem itself in new truths. The lectures of musicologist Wendell Kretzschmar, heard by Leverkühn and Zeitblom as adolescents, initially establish the history of Western music - and by extension, Western culture - as possessing of a frame of reference in God and the church. The destiny of art, however, was a gradual "emancipation from the cult . . . which on the one hand proved quite beneficial, on the other gloomily onerous" (91). Art for art's sake is, socially speaking, potentially dangerously unrestrained.

Leverkühn initially studies theology but eventually abandons it for a career in music. Lacking the cultural anchors enjoyed by previous generations, his early compositions are self-aware parodies that mock Romantic conventions. An overwrought tale of epic love and chivalry, for example, can no longer be composed with sincerity as audiences have seen such tales all too often and now recognize them as pure stylization. Art has lost its legitimacy as representative of life and taken refuge in irony. As Zeitblom explains:

It is indeed work, artistic labor for the purpose of illusion - and now the question arises whether, given the current state of our consciousness, our comprehension, and our sense of truth, the game is still permissible, still intellectually possible, can still be taken seriously; whether the work as such, as a self-sufficient and harmonically self-contained structure, still stands in a legitimate relation to our problematical social condition, with its total insecurity and lack of harmony; whether all illusion, even the most beautiful, and especially the most beautiful, has not become a lie today. (192)

Leverkühn subsequently longs for a strong personality to establish a new order out of fragmented modernism.

"You need only recall," he said, "how I defended the childish tyranny of [Beissel's] master and servant against your accusation of silly rationalism. What instinctively pleased me about it was itself something instinctive and naively consistent with the spirit of music; the will, which it suggested in its own comical way, to establish something like a strict style. We may well need someone like him, though on a less childish level, today, just as badly as his flock needed him back then - we could use a master of system, a schoolmaster of objectivity and organization, with enough genius to combine the elements of restoration, indeed of the archaic, with revolution. . . ."

He had to laugh. (202)

Shortly afterwards Leverkühn has an encounter with a demonic figure, if we are to believe a document he left behind that Zeitblom provides in its entirety. It purports to be Leverkühn's transcription of a dialogue between himself and a Mephistopheles type, who is either real or an imaginary personification of Leverkühn's thoughts on art and morality.

He (without annoyance): "So far, so good. Surely you are in fundamental agreement with me that it can be termed neither sentimental nor malicious if one acknowledges the facts of one's world and time. Certain things are no longer possible. The illusion of emotions as a compositional work of art, music's self-indulgent illusion, has itself become impossible and cannot be maintained - the which has long since consisted of inserting preexisting, formulaic, and dispirited elements as if they were the inviolable necessity of this single occurrence. Or put it the other way round: The special occurrence assumes an air as if it were identical with the preexisting, familiar formula. for four hundred years all great music found contentment in pretending such unity was achieved without a breach, took pleasure in conventional universal legitimation, which it endeavors to confuse with its own concerns. My friend, it will work no more. Criticism of ornament, of convention, of abstract generality - they are all one and the same. What falls prey to criticism is the outward show of the bourgeois work of art, an illusion in which music takes part, though it produces no external image. . . The claim to presume the general as harmonically contained within the particular is a self-contradiction. It is all up with conventions once considered prerequisite and compulsory, the guarantors of the game's freedom" (256-257)

Mephistopheles offers him twenty-four years of musical greatness in exchange for Leverkühn's renouncement of love. It is revealed that the prostitute Esmeralda with whom Leverkühn had had a one-night stand had given him syphilis. Its slowly progressing madness promises to grant Leverkühn untold-of heights of creative inspiration even as it ruins him physically as well as mentally. Settling on a farm outside Munich, Leverkühn takes up with a small group of intellectuals, most of whom (with the exception of Zeitblom) eventually meet tragic and untimely deaths. The affluent but empty lifestyle of Ines Rodde, for instance, who meets her end through morphine and jealousy, illustrates the spiritual vacuity of the German bourgeoisie. Thus the original circle is slowly supplanted by such figures as Georg Vogler and Dr. Holzschuher who long for a new age of disciplined harshness and ironclad ideology to arise from the softness and decadence they perceive as the fruits of unrestrained freedom.

Between periods of blinding migraines and illness, Leverkühn composes several daring and avant-garde works such as the opera Apocalypse, which he begins in 1919 shortly after Germany's defeat in the Great War. He speaks to Zeitblom of the need to unite art and the people:

". . . But what we call the refining of the complicated into the simple is ultimately the same thing as regaining vitality and the power of feeling. Whoever might be able to achieve the - how would you put it? . . . the breakthrough, you'd say, whoever might achieve the breakthrough out of intellectual coldness into a risk-filled world of new feeling, that person would be called art's redeemer. Redemption, . . . a Romantic word; and a word that harmonists love, shoptalk for the bliss of harmonic music's resolved cadences. Funny, isn't it, how for a long time music saw itself as a means of redemption, and all the while, like all art, it needed redemption, that is, needed to be redeemed from a solemn isolation that was the fruit of culture's emancipation, of the elation of culture to ersatz religion - needed to be redeemed, from being left along with a cultured elite, known as the 'audience,' which will soon no longer exist, which already no longer exists, so that art will soon be all alone, alone to fade away and die, unless, that is, it should find a way to the volk, or to put it un-Romantically, to human beings?" (338-339)

A central tenet of Doctor Faustus, Mann would later say, is the mistake of intellectuals such as himself and his avatar Selenius Zeitblom to regard art and society as separate spheres, even after the First World War aptly demonstrated the ability of war to unite nations and lay aside old rules in favor of patriotic redemption.

If war is felt to be, so to speak, with more or less clarity, a universal ordeal, in which each individual - and each individual nation - must do what he must do and be ready to atone with his blood for the frailties and sins of the epoch, including his own, if war presents itself to the emotions as a sacrificial rite by which the old Adam is laid aside so that a new, higher life may be secured in unity, then quotidian morality is thereby superseded and falls silent before what is extraordinary. (317)

The brief glory, degeneration, and downfall of Leverkühn mirrors that of Germany itself. The national devil was, of course, Hitler, who promised a defeated and directionless society a new beginning and united all aspects of life - including art - under the banner of his seductive gospel of the Thousand-Year Reich. In the seconds leading up to his collapse Leverkühn laments the confused, wandering spirit of the age that turns to the Devil, figuratively speaking, as the only alternative to a life of uncertain freedom.

"Item, my desperate heart did trifle it. Had indeed a good fleet brain and gifts granted me from on high, which I could have used in all honesty and modesty, but felt only too well: It is an age when no work is to be done in pious, sober fashion and by proper means, and art has grown impossible sans the Devil's aid and hellish fire beneath the kettle. . . . Yes, ah yes, beloved fellows, that art is stuck fast and grown too difficult and God's poor man in his distress no longer knows up from down, that is surely the guilt of the age. But should a man make the Devil his guest in order thereby to go beyond and break through, he indicts his soul and hangs the guilt of the age around his own neck, so that he be damned. For it is said: Be sober, be vigilent [sic]! But that is not the business of some, and rather than wisely to attend to what is needful one earth, that it might be there better, and prudently to act that among men such order be stablished that may again prepare lively soil and honest accommodation for the beautiful work, man would prefer to play the truant and break out into hellish drunkenness, thus giving his soul to it and ending upon the shambles." (523-524)

It is easy to see Mann speaking through Zeitblom and exploring his own grief and anger at his homeland's apocalyptic self-destruction. Doctor Faustus is very much a metafictional novel, with Zeitblom/Mann discussing the process and form of the work itself in the context of the current global conflict. A problem I have often had with frame narratives is the first-person narrator's apparent ability to reconstruct entire conversations from memory; here, however, Zeitblom seems to be using the dialogue to discuss various areas of German intellectual thought in the decades leading to the rise of the Nazi party. The characters' highly structured, organized sentences simply do not feel like natural speech, and it is easy to accept them as Zeitblom's subjective reinterpretations of past conversations in light of his present emotional state. This further links the fate of Leverkühn to that of Germany as a whole and establishes Doctor Faustus as, first and foremost, Mann's own literary means of coming to terms with Germany's spiritual and literal ruin.

The original translator was H.T. Lowe-Porter, who used Middle English to correspond to the passages originally written in Early New High German, a task she described as quite difficult. Mann himself acknowledges this through Zeitblom's thoughts on the publication of his completed work: ". . . I have now and then considered ways and means for having these pages reach America, so that for now at least they could be presented to people there in English translation. . . . Granted, the thought that in terms of content my book would surely arouse puzzlement in that cultural sphere is coupled with an anxious concern that its translation into English, at least in certain of its all too radically German passages, would prove an impossibility" (528-529). John Woods's second translation, which came out in 1997, is the one I read and it does not attempt to mirror the archaic German. I don't speak German and nor did I read Lowe-Porter's version; nevertheless I did not feel that anything was lacking and found the highly stylized speech of Mephistopheles and occasionally Leverkühn to be extremely well-done and a joy to read.

Other works by Thomas Mann I have read are the short stories "Death in Venice," "The Blood of the Walsungs," and "Tristan."




Kamelot, "March of Mephisto" (The Black Halo)

Sat and gazed into the eternal process of birth and decay . . .

Next World Novella
By Matthias Politycki
Translated from German by Anthea Bell
138 pages
Peirene Press
February 2011





. . . or whatever it was all fundamentally about, linking one thing with another, that one with yet another, flowing over and into it, mingling and dispersing and in the end leaving only a continuous grey expanse

Matthias Politycki (1955-) is considered one of Germany's most successful contemporary authors. He has published twenty novels and poetry collections that have sold over 200,000 copies and been translated into several languages. Jenseits-novelle (Next World Novella) came out in 2009.

Hinrich Schepp is a renown authority on ancient Chinese. He has been married for the past thirty years to Doro, a fellow Chinese scholar who gave up a promising career to be a wife and mother. With the children gone, they have a content but tranquil marriage, or so Hinrich thinks. He wakes up one day to the sickly sweet scent of decay and finds Doro dead of a stroke at her desk. A series of notes on a forgotten manuscript of Hinrich's reveals that not all was what it seemed.

Hinrich had had surgery several years previous to correct his vision. Since then, a new world had opened up to him of bars and social gatherings. He was never unfaithful to Doro, who remained home as he spent his evenings hanging with students or enjoying a flirtation with Dana, a Polish waitress at La Pfiff. Ironically, however, Hinrich is afflicted with another form of blindness: the inability to recognize Doro's increasing unhappiness as the wife who sacrificed and is rewarded by being left behind. He is also ignorant of the friendship formed between her and Dana in which his pathetic old-man foolishness was a recurring topic. The narrative starts to take an odd circular motion as people and events turn out to be linked in more ways than one. Hinrich's brief, aborted manuscript for a novel called Marek the Drunkard is an almost exact retelling of events at La Pfiff despite having been written before said events took place. Hinrich knows Dana who also knew Doro.

Throughout it all there is the recurring image of the dark lake you must cross after death. It appears to be a subdued place - "there are no colours, no smells, not a breath of wind, not a sound" - and so still as to be unreal. In the early days of their relationship, Doro had shown Hinrich a painting that she believed to be a portrayal of this lake of her nightmares. "Anyone could see, she said, that the painting was intended to be surreal; it skillfully kept its real subject hidden; the island was nothing but a reflection, an illusion that the painter had added as a kind of consolation." Dream, reality, and reflection blend into one another, as symbolized by the mystical body of water whose unreachable far shores promise renewal and whose immovability conceals the struggles of a swimmer. The short length of Next World Novella only reinforces its dreamlike atmosphere.

Although the thoughts and ideas raised by Politycki on life, death, relationships, and interconnectedness are poignant and beautifully unfolded, I still found myself not quite satisfied with the Next World Novella overall. I hate to say that it was because I could not identify with an older male protagonist and his marriage and mid-life crises - Hermann Hesse once described his Steppenwolf as being primarily concerned with the anxieties of middle age and I enjoyed that one immensely. But that seems to have been my issue, which is admittedly a very shallow one. So I'm left in the unusual position of appreciating yet not quite liking a novel yet still able to recommend it. In conclusion, I will say that Next World Novella will doubtlessly appeal to other readers and even if it does not, Mattias Politycki raises many thought-provoking subjects and invites a post-read meditation.

Trailer

---

Review Copy

---

"hospitable and harsh, beautiful and uncanny city"

Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman
By Friedrich Christian Delius
Translated from German by Jamie Bulloch
125 pages
Peirene Press
September 2010



          after every confinement there was space, after every darkness, light, after every emergency, help, but it was uncomfortable and exhausting and involved much sacrifice to obtain light and salvation, redemption and beatitude, that was more or less the meaning of this verse, everything was good, everything was in God's hands, and the more solid people were in this belief, the less they would be troubled by questions and anxieties, the more calmly they could wander down dark streets such as this, . . . (72-73)

Friedrich Christian Delius was born in 1943 in Rome, the eldest of four siblings. He began contributing to his school and local papers in 1961 and published his first book of poetry, Kerholz, in 1965. In 1964 Delius joined the Gruppe 47 association of post-war German writers and read from his novella, Die Birnen von Ribbeck, at its final meeting in 1990. Throughout his award-winning career, Delius has published fourteen novels, five poetry collections, and, most recently, the libretto for the opera Prospero by Luca Lombardi. Since 2002 he has lived mainly in Rome. His mother, the subject of his novel Bildnis der Mutter als junge Frau (Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman), passed away in 1995, thirty-five years after the death of his father, a pastor in the German Evangelical Church.

In 1943 Delius's mother was twenty-one, alone, and eight months pregnant in Rome, waiting in a kind of limbo for the return of her husband from North Africa. The product of an austere Lutheran upbringing, she is innocent and naïve and prefers to trust that everything is in God's hands. She worries about her freethinking roommate Ilse, who converses with the Italian servants and has the habit of broaching subjects that make the young mother uncomfortable. It is now January and she has been in Rome for nine weeks. Tonight she is headed to a performance at the local German Protestant church. Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman is constructed as a single sentence that follows her thoughts on love, war, faith, and the Eternal City from the time she leaves her apartment to her musical experience at the concert.

Delius's single, rambling sentence is rich with psychological depth and the ancient, opulent grandeur of Rome. The visual sensuality of a "steeply towering, chocolate-box villa, busy with hemispheres, columns, mouldings, recesses and statues" is set against the distant influence of a father "who would consider the stone-sculptured naked boys indecent" (88). Between her father and her husband, the young mother seems incapable of forming an opinion of her own. It is this blind acceptance of patriarchal authority that holds her back from appreciating the new and unfamiliar and, by extension, from confronting disturbing questions. But she can in no way be called a bad person. She recognizes her privileged position in a time of great suffering and realizes that is is "un-Christian to shed tears for one's own misfortune and to forget the far greater misfortunes of others, the joys of life were limitless, each day she could delight in her child, and today she might look forward to the church concert, . . ." (40). What becomes increasingly clear instead is that she is instead a flawed person, just like anyone else. Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman is a portrait of cognitive dissonance and the inability to overcome personal barriers.

Which bring us to the proverbial elephant in the room. In his mock essay "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," Borges argues that the interpretation of a text is as much influenced by the reader's own background as it is by what the author actually wrote. Although Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman is a contemporary novel (2007), its perspective as that of an ordinary German woman during World War II gives it a sort of double layering. The young mother knows absolutely nothing about the Holocaust and focuses exclusively on the war itself. She does recall her father and husband's concerns about how Hitler and his racial theories heretically elevate man to divine status and has her own doubts about the alleged inferiority of the Jews. But she sets her potential dissent aside and opts to wait for her husband's opinion on the matter. Although the novel's voice is entirely her own, the reader perceives, like Borges's narrator, a deeper meaning in this young woman's willful obliviousness. From our vantage point in the future, she is, as one German review puts it, an "unthinking perpetrator." The fact that Delius portrays her so realistically and so sympathetically gives her innocent thoughts and feelings a distinctly surreal edge.

Although Delius's narrative style - The Sentence - takes some getting used to, it is perfect for his blend of stream-of-consciousness and physical movement. His mother's impressions of the "hospitable and harsh, beautiful and uncanny city" mirror her own awareness of the tumult engulfing the world. In these dangerous times, she leans on her hopes for the future, just as she clings to "her little islands of reassurance, such as crosses on obelisks or the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo, along the side façade of which she now walked towards the Pincio steps, the only one of the over-elaborate, profoundly grandiose churches in which she did not feel alienated, . . ." (31). Her literal and emotional journey culminates in a musical climax grants her relief but preserves her naivety. It is questionable whether there is any real character growth but I think that's what Delius intended. Overall, The Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman is a beautiful and honest character study and comes highly recommended.

---

A special thanks to Meike Ziervogel for this review copy.

---

Klausen: Review and Giveaway

Klausen
By Andreas Maier
Translated by Kenneth J. Northcott
168 pages
Open Letter Press
August 15, 2010





Incidentally, all your dialectic is metaphysics. All the conclusions of this sort of dialectic lead to purely imaginary products. What Nietzsche calls analysis I call mere fancy and a multiplicity of combinations. You take one thing, then another, combine the two, and then say whatever comes to your mind about the combination. That's what has always annoyed me about Nietzsche. Everything, free combination, but with a claim, with a claim, I ask you!

Andreas Maier was born in Bad Nauheim, near Frankfort, in 1967. His debut novel, Wäldchestag, was awarded the Aspekte Literary Prize and the Jürgen Ponto Foundation's Literary Support Prize. In 2000 Maier also came in first place at the Ingeborg Bachmann Literary Competition in Klagenfurt, Austria. Klausen is his second book.

Klausen is a German-speaking comune (municipality) located near the Austrian border in Italy's Bolzano-Bozen province. One day, in the midst of a raging controversy over noise pollution, a bomb went off on the autobahn, or in a shack near the autobahn, or someone was shooting in Klausen's direction from a bridge - actually, we're not sure what happened exactly, only that a catastrophic event took place that has the whole town talking and pointing fingers. Anxieties over immigration and ongoing ethnic tensions fuel the rumor mill until fact blends with fiction and no one can separate the two. But there is one notion on which all of Klausen is in complete agreement: that the guilty party is likely Josef Gasser, a mysterious figure who spent years away in Berlin and whose sister is a famous actress with a politically dubious fiancé. But beyond that, it's impossible to keep anything straight.

Maier's unusual style - the narrative repetition, the single nonstop paragraph, and embedded, indirect dialogue - has earned him comparisons to Thomas Bernhard and José Saragamo. As such, Klausen has a risky format akin to that of Gabriel Josipovici's Moo Pak. But what allowed Josipovici to pull it off was his constant introduction of new topics and many unpredictable turns. Despite presenting a veritable smorgasbord of ideas, the pull created by Moo Pak's relentless, unbroken execution did much to unify the book as a whole and maintain the reader's interest. Unfortunately, Maier's attempt at a similar project falls short. The people of Klausen are groping for answers in a fog where each story seems as credible as the next. To convey this confusion, Maier sets Klausen up as a recitation of conflicting theories, unreliable memories, and real action in which all three are given equal weight. But unfortunately, that's all it is: a dry recitation that just goes on and on for 168 pages. Andreas Maier also completely lacks Gabriel Josipovici's rich, conversational prose and the result is a book that's impossible to get into.

And so, I quit on page 66, which makes Klausen my first ever review copy to go unfinished. Apologies to Open Letter Press. Of course, as anyone familiar with this blog knows, I usually enjoy their offerings and firmly believe that we will have much better luck next time.

I don't usually do this but I feel really guilty about ditching a review copy. If you are a book blogger who might be interested in Klausen, and you are located in either Canada or the US, please email me at elfay123(at)gmail(dot)com and I'll be happy to send it to you, along with the press materials. Hopefully you'll find Klausen more engaging than I did. First come first serve! (This is a finished book, not an ARC.) Book claimed; giveaway now closed.

---

Review Copy

---

What?

Ergo
By Jakov Lind
Translated by Ralph Manheim
Open Letter Press
150 pages
January 15, 2010





For you my dear Würz comma I will empty every bucket period. You have understood what it's all about period. Now we are going to talk about politics this is the last period. For our aim is the renewal of a literary gift as boundless as it is aimless as uneven as your mental capacities of adroit helplessness of the momentary inconveniences of broad sections unmistakable resistance regardless if the desires for homogeneity of views the task of individuals in their mode of thought. . .
I'm not dumb. Seriously. I like books that make you think.

But I don't even know where to begin with this one. Ergo, first published in 1966, is my second Jakov Lind book after Landscape in Concrete, which I reviewed for Open Letter Press last year. It wasn't the greatest book I ever read but I liked it well enough. Had a very Catch-22 feel to it. But Ergo. . .

To put it simply: this guy Wacholder is obsessed with this other guy Würz who hasn't left his house in seventeen years. He has obvious symptoms of what we would recognize today as severe OCD (he's obsessed with germs, cleanliness, and order). Convinced that Würz is a menace to society, Wacholder has been trying to "smoke him out" through a series of annoying, threatening, or otherwise obnoxious letters, some 74 in total over the years. Wacholder, meanwhile, lives in a pile of paper in the dilapidated Custom House No. 8 with his son Aslan and a bedridden philosopher named Leo. He then gets a bunch of government workers together for dinner and an orgy, following which he will hold a rally to collectively declare Würz's non-being, pursuant to Leo's placental theory of existence.

Now, um, I guess there is some obvious comedic source material here. But my reaction from practically page one is that this novel is not dissimilar to one of Wacholder's own letters:

Dear Würz, although dominant inclinations might have permitted another step forward and the pertinent instrumental suggestion and advance of effective knowledge, it cannot be denied that not always before we take such a step, I, in this connection, ask someone who is above all doubt to develop his theory superficially but thoroughly and unintelligibly, especially to the scientist, that what has actually happened and is universally known simply cannot, that the contemplation and opportunity for experiments have assumed enormous proportions in connection with statistical truth, where concepts are not, that in many cases blood-pressure readings and stool samples often no longer or even conversely produce deleterious effects if the greatest danger is eliminated and really worthwhile ailments are cured by the incomprehension of the psychiatrist. . .

I am not sure if this Ergo is meant to be quite this ironic or not, mostly because I'm not even sure if Wacholder's letters are really supposed to be nonsense or not. Part of what Lind is trying to get at is that people are insane and that civilization is insane. (I don't know what the other part is.) So is this book supposed to be completely confusing? Is this, like, some kind of reflection of Lind's argument as to the innate incongruity of various aspects of German-Austrian small-town life in the 1960s?

Plus, there are some pretty crude moments in the narrative that give the whole thing a really icky feel that I just could not shake off the entire time I was reading it.

So. . . I hate to be really lame but is there anyone who can explain this to me?

---

Review Copy

---

I've Been Published!

The Front Table, the online magazine of Seminary Co-op Bookstores (a small chain in Chicago), has published my review for Gert Jonke's The System of Vienna. You can read it here.

I have been slaving over this review for two weeks. Serves me right for choosing such a mind-bending book for my very first published review. But I did it, and I am very pleased with the results.

Between these folks and Trapdoor Books, I've been getting lots of love lately! Awesome.

24-Hour Read-a-Thon: 9:00 p.m. (Updated #5)

I just finished Thomas Mann's "Tristan." After the incest of "The Blood of the Walsungs" it was quite the welcome relief. My reading was interrupted by a quick run to the grocery store. I was out of coffee.

Despite their differences, however, both "Tristan and "The Blood of the Walsungs" had echoes of "Death in Venice" (although the latter was written decades later). "Walsungs" had the twisted sexuality, but "Tristan," though quite chaste, centered on a relationship with philosophical overtones similar to those of the one-sided relationship between Aschenbach and Tadzio. To Herr Spinelli, "Herr Klöterjahn's wife" (whose name is not revealed until the end) represents a Platonic ideal of art and beauty. She is a Gothic vision of deathly loveliness too fragile for the debasement of ordinary life. She is Ophelia floating down the creek surrounded by flowers. The "love" between her and Spinelli is consummated through the music of the piano, which she plays with unearthly grace.

If it all sounds contrived and artificial, that's because it is. Spinelli hates Herr Klöterjahn because he is a businessman, "a peasant with gourmand tastes," and he hates the Klöterjahn infant son for being lusty and healthy like his father. To Spinelli, the death of Herr Klöterjahn's wife is a tragedy, yes, but a highly stylized one. He imagines her family as ancient nobility, doomed to decay into ethereal art before softly passing away.

In other words, Spinelli, like Aschenbach, is one nutty writer.

The parody of "Tristan" was far more evident to me than the supposed parody of "The Blood of the Walsungs." Some things only exist in fiction. Unfortunately, Spinelli just doesn't understand that.

24-Hour Read-a-Thon: 6:30 p.m. (Update #4)

After the pedophilia in "Death in Venice," I really wasn't too surprised by the incest in "The Blood of the Walsungs." Oh that Thomas Mann. . .

"The Blood of the Walsungs" centers on a pair of twins from a wealthy German family named Sieglinde and Siegmund. The twins are incapable of appreciating anything other than their own outward perfection. They claim to appreciate artistic effort but fail to be impressed by the finished product. Their days are filled with laziness and self-indulgence. The outside world holds no interest for them, however, as it often fails to meet their standards of order and cleanliness. This is exemplified by the image of the twins gliding through a busy, bustling city, on their way to the opera, shut away in a silk-lined carriage.

This self-imposed isolation has darker implications: there is an underlying theme of persecution, one which I initially saw as imaginary - like, "they only hate us because we're so much better than them." But no, apparently the twins and their family are supposed to be Jewish. I didn't figure that out until I looked "The Blood of the Walsungs" up on the Internet several minutes ago. Now I'm just confused. Thomas Mann was not an anti-Semite. His wife was Jewish and he vehemently opposed the Third Reich. So . . . WTF???

Actually, it seems that "The Blood of the Walsungs" was meant to be a parody. My online research was pretty brief, but apparently Jews and incest (and not to mention money) were often linked in the early 20th-century German imagination. The strained interaction between Sieglinde's fiance and her overly-refined (to a ridiculous extent) family represents failed assimilation, while the relationship between Sieglinde and her brother represents some statement on endogamy. So . . . I guess the outside world hates them because they're Jewish and links them to incest, and so they isolate themselves from the world, become suspicious of it and hostile to it, and subsequently turn to . . . incest. Okayyyy. . .

Oh that Thomas Mannn. . .

(I'll be reading "Tristan" next.)

Garden of the Gods

. . . [A]lthough the commonplace aids of modern travel such as railways, steamers, telegraph, automobiles, airplanes, etc., were renounced, we penetrated into heroic and the magical. It was shortly after the World War, and the beliefs of the conquered nations were in an extraordinary state of unreality. There was a readiness to believe in things beyond reality even though only a few barriers were actually overcome and few advances made into the realm of a future psychiatry.

This post contains spoilers.

Hermann Hesse's The Journey to the East (first published in 1932 as Die Morgenlandfahrt) is a short, meandering tale that is equal parts mystic and mundane. Narrator H.H. is lonely, unhappy man who used to be a choirmaster but who has since sold his beloved violin and abandoned music. He claims to have once been a member of "the League," a religious/philosophical sect whose members have included such luminaries as Mozart, Plato, Don Quixote, and Paul Klee. Some time ago, shortly following the Great War, H.H. and a small group of League members undertook a journey through time and space, attempting to reach "the East" in hopes of attaining spiritual enlightenment. Instead, the whole lofty enterprise collapsed into mindless squabbling following the mysterious departure of the much-loved servant Leo. A disillusioned H.H. left the Journey and the League shortly thereafter, and now struggles to recall the events that transpired during his time in the League and set them to paper.

Whether the League actually exists or not is left up for debate. The Journey to the East is describes as both a literal, geographic journey and a metaphysical exploration of the collective human experience of art, literature, music, science, philosophy, and the intellect. H.H. tells us that

this expedition to the East was not only mine and now; this procession of believers and disciples had always and incessantly been moving towards the East, towards the Home of Light. Throughout the centuries it had been on the way, towards light and wonder, and each member, each group, indeed our whole host and great pilgrimage, was only a wave in the eternal stream of human beings, of the eternal strivings of the human spirit towards the East, towards Home.

Though the prose is simple and straightforward, H.H.'s brief descriptions of his time on the Journey, particularly the Bremgarten episode, are reminiscent of the hallucinatory fantasy sequences that characterize the climactic party and the Magic Theatre in Steppenwolf (1927). In Steppenwolf, Henry Haller's proto-psychedelic experiences come at the culmination of his evolution from bourgeoisie conformity to liberation and self-realization. H.H., in Journey to the East, similarly recalls that the "first principle of our great period" was to "never rely on and let myself be disconcerted by reason" and to "always know that faith is stronger than so-called reality." Taken together with Steppenwolf, Hesse seems to equate intellectual and psychological growth with looking "beyond the veil," so to speak - of breaking through the physical world to some higher plane.

In Journey to the East, however, the Bremgarten episode occurs not only at the beginning of the story but as H.H.'s memory of a past event. H.H.'s abandonment of the League is depicted not so much as literal resignation from an organization but as the loss of some inner faculty related to imagination and creativity. He recalls a conversation had with one of his leaders regarding a comrade who had deserted the Journey. Many great people have undergone a similar experience, the leader tells him; once upon a time, when they were young, "the light shone for them; they saw the light and followed the star; but then came reason and the mockery of the world; then came faint-heartedness and apparent failure; then came weariness and disillusionment. . ." Don't concern yourself with that young man, the leader concludes, he will repent what he has lost, search for us, and never find us. The main conflict Hesse brings to our attention appears to be the disconnect between art and the intellect on the one hand, and the conventional, immediate, and here-and-now on the other.

Still, an open, seeking mind comes with a price. H.H. is disenchanted and adrift, certainly, yet he also seems diminished and "not all there." In fact, I didn't even think he had much of a personality beyond his feelings of loss and desire to write about the League. We get no description of his past before the League, or where he currently lives or what he has done since he left the League. H.H. is a cipher: who is he other than a wayward disciple of some vaguely-described secret society?

Back at the Bremgarten, H.H. had asked Leo why the artists present seemed only "half-alive" while their creations were so vivid. (The Greek poet Longus, for example, spends the entire party writing in a book while dragons and colorful snakes fly from his letters and whirl about the room.) It is, Leo responds, because the artist, like the mother for her child, gives all their strength and passion to their offspring, and watches the offspring grow, from an idea existing only in the mind to a physical creation that awes the world. "He who wishes to live long must serve, but he who wishes to rule does not live long." Leo, far more than H.H., is an animated, fully-realized character who reveals both innocent joy and humble wisdom. Leo has been the focal point of H.H.'s obsession with the long-lost League: it was his disappearance that precipitated H.H.'s decline and it is he who H.H. now seeks to contact. They are like Haller and Hermine, like Emil and Demian: two separate beings who are compliment one another and are united in their opposing qualities.

Years later, in the novel's present day, H.H. finds the League again and discovers that, far from a simple servant, Leo is the League's President! And while H.H. flails about desperately seeking purpose, Leo has achieved true greatness and piece of mind. Only in the very last pages does H.H. - Hermann Hesse's surrogate? - arrive at the true meaning of his downfall: as he decreases, so does Leo increase. Such is the way of creation. H.H. suddenly feels inexpressibly weary and wishes to find somewhere to sleep.

Death in Venice

From Hermann Hesse and now to Thomas Mann, I think I am in love with pre-WWII German writers.

Mann's novella Death in Venice starts out very dry, going on and on about the ascetic life of a famed Munich novelist named Gustav von Aschenbach. His hero is the steadfast artist who toils to the brink of exhaustion for his craft and conceals his inner struggle behind a cool, composed facade. Literature is great not because of the beauty of its prose but because of how its readers relate to it. Its author must speak for the men of his times and express, through his works, a natural affinity with his contemporaries. Aschenbach's books appeal to the bureaucrats and businessmen who labor incessantly at their jobs and yet must maintain a respectable bourgeois appearance at all times. The figure of Saint Sebastian is, in Aschenbach's mind, the most beautiful image of all: it depicts a man who gladly suffers for his beliefs and who perseveres through the most painful torture.

Saint Sebastian is also considered by many to be an LGBT icon.

Upon traveling to Venice, however, Aschenbach is seized by the erotic desire for an aristocratic Polish boy named Tadzio who is staying with his family at the same hotel. Aschenbach never actually speaks to Tadzio or interacts with him in any way. He watches his muse from the distance, seeing him as the personification of the Platonic ideal of a transcendent, universal beauty of which all things on Earth are but faint copies. The heavens open, a light shines down, and the ancient gods enchant, beguile, and torment him. Having dedicated his art to the constrained and the conservative, having disdained the bohemian fascination with the outcast and debased, having been lauded by schoolteachers and heads of state, Aschenbach finds everything he has believed in thrown into a gloriously delirious flux.

Passion is like crime: it does not thrive on the established order and the common round; it welcomes every blow dealth the bourgeois structure, every weakening of the social fabric, because therein it feels a sure hope of its own advantage.

Aschenbach ends up going a little bit crazy. All public honor laid at the artist's feet, he concludes, is but a farcical homage to appearances. It is absurdity at its finest. Echoing Plato's views on the poets, as laid out in The Republic (he sought to ban them), Aschenbach admits that art (be it visual or literary) is dangerous, as the idolization of form is the very spirit of Dionysus himself. Art destroys all restraints, and the mad piper - the celebration of the material, of the flesh, of the here-and-now - leads art's devotees to the Pit itself. And yet, objective knowledge only makes it worse by encouraging tolerance and forgiveness in its drive to understand all things. Artists must dedicate themselves to beauty and beauty only. But that is a risky endeavor.

At one point, Aschenbach is awakened from a dream/nightmare in which he is drawn into a violent bacchanalian orgy despite his initial fear. It is an extreme metaphor, but the awakening of homosexual longing in a respectable citizen of the early twentieth century is a pretty frightening, anti-social experience. Of course, Aschenbach's obsession is also pedophiliac - Tadzio is a fourteen-year-old boy after all. Today we strive to be accepting of the LGBT community. If Tadzio was another man, a modern reader would likely feel sympathy where a reader of Mann's time would feel disgust. But I think the NAMBLA angle allows us to still experience aversion, which is probably what Mann intended (although in his time this would have been accomplished with homosexuality alone). Hyperbole about the perils of art aside, Aschenbach's desires really are dangerous. No one in their right mind can blame Tadzio's family for eventually becoming uneasy whenever their son is around that creepy old guy who's always watching and stalking him. Heck, they should've freaked out more.

To the ancient Greeks, however, the love between a boy and an older male teacher was the sexual paragon. In his previous struggles to reconcile art and social convention, Aschenbach may be demonstrating the impossibility of applying Classical values to the twentieth century. I think his death on the very last page is similar to Edna's suicide at the end of Kate Chopin's The Awakening (written in roughly the same time period). The protagonist has achieved a new inner awareness and subsequently rejected social norms. But what has replaced them is transgressive, subversive, or, in Aschenbach's case, threatening. Okay, so now what?

I sure wouldn't want Aschenbach on the loose.

***

I actually found this little story to be an indirect commentary on one of the traditional views of women in Western culture - as idealized and exalted, but ultimately dehumanized, beauty. Women, like Tadzio, have often been mere symbols worshiped from afar but never interacted with as fully realized individuals. (Aschenbach makes it quite clear that to actually get to know Tadzio would spoil the illusion of perfection, since, of course, a Platonic ideal cannot actually exist in humanity's material world - it is supposed to be beyond it.) She is the subject of poems, prose, and painting, but never the creator. She is the passive recipient of inspired praise and burning passion but never the active agent exploring and expressing her own desires. True, the ancient Greeks, whose philosophy and mythology Mann heavily draws upon, often saw beauty as a prime virtue and an end in and of itself. But in reality, the pedestal is a cold, lonely place.

I Am Omega (A Review of Night Work)

After ten minutes, the figure stood up and walked around. It was covered from head to foot in white paint, or possibly dressed in a white leotard. Its hair was invisible, creating an impression of baldness. Everything was white: eyebrows, lips, ears, hands. It walked around the room in a seemingly aimless fashion, as if lost in thought or waiting for something.

Without a sound.

Thomas Glavinic's Night Work (translated from German by John Brownjohn) is hardly the first novel of its kind. The "Last Man" (or variations of it) has long been a prominent theme in contemporary popular fiction. There's Richard Matheson's I Am Legend and its movie adaptions, telling the story of Robert Neville and his solitary stand against marauding mutant-zombie-vampires. There's also Dean Koontz's Phantoms, about two sisters finding everyone in their isolated hometown either dead or missing, as well as Craig Harrison's The Quiet Earth and Danny Boyle's film 28 Days Later, both of which open with their protagonists waking up and finding the England abandoned and in ruins. We also have David R. Palmer's Emergence and Robert O'Brien's Z for Zachariah, both about teenaged girls who initially believe themselves to be utterly alone, as well as George R. Stewart's Earth Abides, about a biologist returning from his remote study location to find the world devoid of people, and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, which centers on Snowman, the last normal human left, surrounded by the simple-minded "Children of Crake." Like most modern works of the overall post-apocalyptic genre, "Last Man" stories often focus on the fall-out of some spectacular catastrophe. Sometimes it is supernatural in origin (I Am Legend, Phantoms), but, as in most post-apocalyptic fiction, many of these books and movies seem to be "what if?" scenarios of WMD's, social philosophy, or bio-/genetic engineering gone wrong.

Night Work is different. One fine summer day in Vienna, Jonas woke up and found all humans, animals, and insects gone, replaced by dead silence and stillness under the cloudless blue sky. Now if you're the type of reader who looks forward to a big revelation at the end, this is not the book for you. I will tell you up front that we never find out what happened to everyone, as the exact cause of the mass disappearance is irrelevant to the story Glavinic wants to tell. Night Work is acutely psychological, focusing on Jonas's memories and his relationships to the now-vanished people. It is also paranoid and even vaguely grotesque, recalling that famous image of the last man on Earth, sitting alone in his room and suddenly hearing a knock at the door. There is another version of that, which imagines the last man on Earth, sitting alone in his room, with a lock on his door. Against what? The loneliness closing in on all sides? Or. . . ?

When there are no fellow humans to contend with, what are other potential sources of conflict? Who or what could be your enemy?

In essence: the point of Night Work is not so much what does happen but what could happen, especially once the line between the internal and the external has been blurred, and it turns out that conflict with yourself can be as intense as clashing with other individuals, especially in a world gone horribly wrong. The juxtaposition of a massive, sudden trauma (everyone on the planet is mysteriously gone) and the subsequent lack of any human interaction whatsoever eventually leads Jonas to turn on himself. His personality splits between "Jonas" and "the Sleeper" - the nickname he gives his own sleeping image on the camera he set up after noticing unsettling changes in the apartment, despite the locked doors and windows. All Jonas remembers of the nights are haunting, surreal dreams, but the Sleeper is clearly challenging him, thwarting his plans and engaging in bizarre and increasingly menacing behavior.

Jonas couldn't interpret the look in those eyes. He saw no hint of kindness or friendliness. Nothing that might have inspired confidence or conveyed intimacy. But he also saw no anger or hatred. The expression was one of cool, calm condescension and a sort of emptiness that clearly related to himself. It became so intense that he noticed he was displaying signs of mounting hysteria.

Jonas's waking hours are dominated by mounting paranoia driven by both his nightmarish situation and his own fevered imagination. He thinks he hears sounds or notices movement out of the corner his eye. At one point, walking down a street, he envisions a woman waiting for him behind a nearby van, wearing a nun-like wimple and having no face. Then he develops his own version of ManBearPig.

Glavinic's book is ultimately a study on the power of fantasy. Jonas often meditates on a world - revealed by his many video cameras - that exists even when there are no humans around to see it. (If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound?) He recreates his family and friends out of his memories of childhood, travel, dating, and ordinary moments. ("These fragments I have shored against my ruin. . .") Do humans make the world or does the world make humans? Jonas watches film after film of empty scenery, and yet his own subconscious concocts threats and hazards - physical and imagined - that do not exist.

Night Work is by far one of the creepiest books I have ever read. It has a couple of irritating plot holes in that the water and electricity continue to function perfectly; plus, a world without insects is ecologically impossible. But none of that detracts from the overall story, which is gripping and fast-paced, despite its complete lack of action. "No zombies," gripes one Amazon reviewer. "No marauding gangs of outlaws looking for fuel for their cars. Just a boring guy in Austria." Granted, it's not the post-apocalyptic book for everyone, especially not readers more interested in Matheson-style monster-whacking. (In fact, in a sad display of literary injustice, Night Work is currently averaging only 3 stars on Amazon.) But I found Glavinic's subtle, understated atmosphere far, far scarier than any shambling corpse or pessimistic war/environmental cautionary tale. Night Work is both an awesome book and an original take on the post-apocalyptic genre.

On Night Train to Lisbon

Was it possible that the best way to make sure of yourself was to know and understand someone else? One whose life had been completely different and had had a completely different logic than your own? How did curiosity for another life go together with the awareness that your own time was running out?



Pascal Mercier's Night Train to Lisbon (translated from German by Barbara Harshav) was a smash European bestseller in 2004. Widely regarded by critics as one of the first great works of literature of the twenty-first century, Night Train to Lisbon is certainly the type of book you would expect a philosophy professor to write: dense and self-consciously intellectual. But Mercier is also a talented novelist; and what could have easily been a ponderous tome of abstract contemplation is instead the wonderfully rich story of one individual's life becoming enmeshed with another's, and how it is that knowing another is the best way to know oneself.

The main character is a brilliant but dull philologist named Raimund Gregorious. A mild-mannered man in his late fifties, Gregorious is governed by habit and experiences the world primarily through the prism of his scholarly interests in ancient languages and Classical literature. A marriage to a former student lasted barely five years, as his wife soon found him insufferable. All this nevertheless changes one morning in the rain, when Gregorious approaches a young Portuguese woman seemingly ready to leap off a bridge. In that singular instance, he is transformed. Later that day, he abruptly ditches class, seized by a sudden, overpowering interest in Portugal. A random find at a second-hand bookstore solidifies this new fascination into something tangible. As the multilingual bookseller translates A Goldsmith of Words, a self-published work by one Amadeu de Prado, Gregorious, despite knowing no Portuguese, is drawn to the obscure little volume in a way he cannot quite articulate. Leaving his four-decade career behind mid-semester, Gregorious embarks on a long train ride to Lisbon, where he hopes to learn more about the mysterious doctor who had defied a dictator.

Amadeu de Prado had died of an aneurysm in 1975. In addition to A Goldsmith of Words, left behind is a collection of various individuals, ranging from family members to teachers to former freedom fighters, each with their own memories of the passionate, charismatic Prado, who once shocked his entire graduating class and several priests with a blasphemous speech called "Reverence and Loathing for the Word of God." Adrift in a strange land and unwilling to return to his monotonous life in Bern, Gregorious's journey will take him back through time, to the days of the Salazar regime (1932-1974), when dissent could land you in the Tarrafal concentration camp in Cape Verde. Prado came into the resistance late in his life, driven by a desire for redemption after doing his duty as a physician and saving the life of a notorious member of the secret police. Prior to that, Prado, for all his personal magnetism and need to emphasize with others, was an intense, deeply thoughtful man who believed that of "the thousands experiences we have, we find language for one at most and even this one merely by chance. . . Buried under all the mute experiences are those unseen ones that give our life its form, its color, its melody." As a philologist, ancient texts in dead languages have always been Gregorious's one real love. But words are inherently human; they are a human invention.

Gregorious couldn't resist and wrote: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men.

Silveira picked up his Bible and read these opening sentences of the Gospel of Saint John:

"So the word is the light of men," he said. "And things exist properly only when they are grasped in words."

Amadeu de Prado was called a "godless priest" while he was alive. (And correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe his first name means "beloved of God" or "God's love" or something of that nature.) He sought to get at the hidden nature of things and people and find words for the wordless. To truly know oneself, one must be able to articulate and give voice to hidden aspects of the soul, for the image we have of ourselves may be only a painted cover. The book must be opened.

On Steppenwolf

"You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is the prison where you lie. And if you were to enter the theater as you are, you would see everything through the eyes of Harry and the old spectacles of Steppenwolf. You are therefore requested to lay these spectacles aside and to be so kind as to leave your highly esteemed personality here in the cloakroom where you will find it again when you wish."

Hermann Hesse's novel Steppenwolf (published in Germany in 1927 and translated to English in 1929) feels like the older, more mature sequel to Demian, which Hesse had written in 1917 over a two-week period. Demian followed its title character from boyhood to his service on the front in the Great War as a young man. Steppenwolf, by contrast, concerns a cultured, moderately well-to-do former professor in his late forties who, worn down by what he perceives to be an irreparable split in his psyche, has resolved to kill himself. He is stopped only by the attentions of a young woman whose earthy, carefree personality both contradicts and compliments his own, and who eventually leads him down the rabbit hole and into Heaven and Hell.

Harry Haller has long felt divided between a civilized human side and an eccentric, primeval, socially rebellious inclination he identifies as the soul of a displaced wolf come down from the steppes and into the tidy town of bourgeois respectability (hence the German title Steppenwolf). Like Emil Sinclair in Demian, he recognizes the "world of light" (Sinclair's term for it) as a place of orderliness, convention, and comfort where he nevertheless does not belong, but to which he is inexorably drawn. The wolfish side of Harry's nature, however, daily torments him with its yearnings for something more, for some transcendent ideal to strive for beyond the clockwork humdrum of daily life. While aimlessly wandering one night, he sees lights flickering on a crumbling wall near an old church, telling of some sort of Magic Theater that is "for madmen only." He spots a vendor nearby also advertising the theater, but instead of a ticket, receives a little booklet that turns out to be a Treatise on the Steppenwolf which identifies Harry by name and proceeds to describe his inner turmoil with unnerving accuracy. It then goes on to argue that Harry's sense of his soul as a dichotomous entity, its two sides forever at war, is both inaccurate and simplistic. No, the booklet argues, human beings are large, containing multitudes of souls and multitudes of personalities.

In fact, those who are wholly One with themselves, who are seamlessly unified in thought, action, instinct, awareness, and so forth - these are the mad ones, not the stifled artists and creators derided in Hesse's day as "schizomaniac." (Hesse's view, not mine.) Hitler and his single-minded zealots had not yet risen to power in the mid-twenties, but ominous signs are already evident. (Black-and-white thinking is, of course, very much a part of being an extremist or fanatic.) One of Harry's acquaintances, for all his intellectual powers, falls easy prey to the jingoist rantings of a nationalist newspaper. In their attempts to order themselves and their world, the German bourgeois are ironically heralding their world's destruction. "He thinks nothing of the preparations for the next war that are going on all around him," Harry observes of his friend. "He hates Jews and Communists. He is a good, unthinking, happy child, who takes himself too seriously; and, in fact, he is much to be envied." Harry's wolf aspect prevents him from assimilating into this comfortably numb mindset - a morally and ethically superior position from an historical perspective (Harry has actually written articles denouncing this proto-Nazi movement), but still, it is one which currently causes him pain. He is a part of nothing. He is isolated and stagnant and adrift.

Several days later, Harry, now committed to suicide despite his fear of death, meets Hermine, who draws him out of his cerebral comfort zone and into a realm of decadence and sensation, where sex, drugs, and jazz flow freely and dissolute young people rush gaily to their own tragic ends. (Think of the musical Cabaret, or Mel Gordon's Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, which inspired Marilyn Manson's album The Golden Age of Grotesque.) Harry soon feels that he too is speeding toward some unknown, decisive fate. At Hermine's urging, he attends a lavish masked ball where, after losing himself to music and celebration, he and Hermine are invited by Pablo, a South American saxophonist, to his Magic Theater in the basement. The result is a kaleidoscope of visions, scenarios, philosophies, and famous dead people. (Many critics in the '60s saw it as drug-induced psychedelia.) Steppenwolf ends rather abruptly, but the story's climax is well-drawn, and I have to admit I actually did not see it coming despite all the foreshadowing.

Steppenwolf, though grounded in the cultural context of interwar Germany, is also the product of Hesse's own fascination with Eastern mysticism. That's a topic I know absolutely nothing about, so I can't really comment there, but having read Demian, I feel that Steppenwolf definitely builds upon Hesse's earlier ideas of the self as a synthesis of opposing forces. In Demian this is expressed, in part, as the gradual discovery of Abraxas, a Greek god often identified (most notably in Carl Jung's "The Seven Sermons to the Dead") as a union of opposites such as male/female, guilt/innocence, and so on. Steppenwolf, goes further, however, actually disparaging the idea of the human soul as dual-natured and positing that it is instead so many-sided as to be beyond conscious comprehension. Says Treatise on the Steppenwolf:

For there is not a single human being, not even the primitive Negro, not even the idiot, who is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum of two or three principal elements; and to explain a man as complex as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands.

Harry's acquaintance with Hermine demonstrates that conciliation between the "man" and the "wolf" (as he perceives within himself) is certainly possible (for example, Pablo's ruminations on the art and instinct of jazz), but it takes his trip to the Magic Theater to truly encounter the brilliantly-colored and clashing reality of the individual psyche and all its myriad manifestations.

Whereas Demian was pretty much a straightforward exploration of psychology and individuality, with obvious Jung and Nietzsche influences, Steppenwolf is more subtle and more radical. Its frank depictions of drug use and deviant sexuality were doubtlessly shocking in its own day (regardless of what Voluptous Panic says about the moral state of Weimar Germany - I'm pretty sure that wasn't everyone), but reading it in the twenty-first century, I was more struck by the juxtaposition of Asian philosophy (mostly Buddhist, and probably some Hindu) and the fantastic and hallucinatory. No wonder this book resonated so well in the sixties - were it not for the language (obviously an older style) and my knowledge of Hesse's biography, I would have assumed that that was when Steppenwolf had been written. For instance, the ecstatic "high" of the masked ball:

It was all a fairy tale. Everything had a new dimension, a deeper meaning. There was one girl of great beauty but looking tragic and unhappy. Herman [Hermine dressed as a boy] danced with her and drew her out. . . and she told me afterwards that she had made a conquest of her not as a man but as a woman, with the spell of Lesbos. For my part, the whole evening reverberated everywhere with the sound of dancing, and the whole intoxicated crowd of masks, became by degrees a wild dream of paradise. Flower upon flower wooed me with its scent. I toyed with fruit after fruit. Serpents looked at me from green and leafy shadows with mesmeric eyes. Lotus blossoms luxuriated over black bogs. Enchanted birds sang allurement from the trees. Yet all was progress to one longed-for goal, the summons of a new yearning for one and one only.

What makes Hesse succeed, in my opinion, is precisely this ability to combine art and intellect, as well as vivid pictures and beautiful prose with erudite pondering on complex topics. Demian was, as I stated in my post on it, a novel of ideas in which the characters, though well-drawn, function primarily as vehicles for Hesse to espouse his thoughts on Jung and Nietzsche. That (characters as Hesse's mouthpieces) is present in Steppenwolf as well, but it is also counter-balanced by striking, flowing prose and a suspenseful, forward-moving plot (what is the Magic Theater and why is it "for madmen only"? what will happen at the ball? who will die?). I wouldn't say it's Hesse's masterwork (I haven't read Siddhartha, Journey to the East, or The Glass Bead Game yet, and I believe they are more acclaimed), but it is a worthy novel of a Nobel laureate. I enjoyed reading it and found it wonderfully provocative.

(And there is a LOT more to it, but to discuss every theme and idea Hesse expounded upon would take ten pages.)

On Demian

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas.







Though ostensibly a personal bildungsroman, Demian, written by Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) in 1917, is about the uniqueness and individual potential found within every human being. There's an image meme that's been floating around the Intertubes for awhile which informs us that "You're unique - Just like everyone else." It's a great (if old) take on those kitschy motivational posters, but it also expresses (albeit sarcastically) Demian's primary theme: that the mass of humanity, despite leading lives of quiet desperation is capable of new and greater heights, if only each singular member were to make the difficult journey to Selfhood that protagonist Emil Sinclair achieves. Loosely based on Hesse's own youth, Demian is told as a fictionalized autobiography or memoir, a genre innately celebratory of the individual life.

Demian follows Sinclair from the time he is ten, when he meets the character Demian, to his service on the front as a German doughboy in World War I. The motif of duality is apparent from the outset: Sinclair's home and family are an artificial sanctuary of "light" that contrasts with an outside world where bad things happen and working class toughs like Franz Komer threaten and extort money. There is contradiction at the core of this perception, however; one that threatens its very foundations. Light cannot exist if there is not darkness for it to illuminate or ward off. Light and dark may seem like polar absolutes, but is this really a legitimate metaphor for human society? Ask yourself, Demian says to Sinclair, ask yourself who decides what is "safe" and "conventional." The God of the Old and New Testaments is certainly an impressive figure in the strictly literary sense, Demian goes on -

"He is all that is good, noble, fatherly, beautiful, elevated, sentimental - true! But the world consists of something else besides. And what is left over is ascribed ot the devil, this entire slice of world, this entire half is suppressed and shut up. In exactly the same way they praise God as the father of all life but simply refuse to say a word about our sexual life on which it's all based, describing it whenever possible as sinful, the work of the devil. I have no objection to worshiping this God Jehovah, far from it. But I mean we ought to consider everything sacred, not merely this artificially separated half!"

The union of two opposing forces - such as God and Satan, male and female, guilt and innocence - is eventually established as Abraxas, who is simultaneously a god, a radical concept of unification, and a psychological merger of id and ego. It is a strikingly pagan creed that seems to take the form of self-worship, especially as Sinclair learns to use his very will to influence the behavior of others. There is also a troubling degree of narcissism involved which Hesse, through Sinclair, never addresses, and not to mention an alarming amount of self-overconfidence. As Germany began to lose the Great War still raging in 1917, Hesse, carrying out pacifist campaigns in Switzerland, has his characters Demian and Pistorius urge complete personal liberation and prophetize the collapse of the stagnant and rotting social order that had led to the current catacalysm. But despite some surface similarities, this is not quite the same type of ideology sixties counterculturalists would later proclaim.

Both Hesse and Sinclair were fond of Nietzsche, who developed the idea of the Übermensch, a new "race" of transcendent, exalted, but very much flesh-and-blood individuals whose living, breathing, tangible humanity stands in diametric opposition to the neo-Platonic Christian ideal of an otherworldly "City of God" (think of St. Augustine). When Nietzsche declared that "God is dead," what he meant was that God and Christianity are no longer the sole sources of value in human life. Any subsequent nihilism can be avoided, however, through the Übermenschs' efforts to create new values rooted in a love of life and the here-and-now. In Demian it is explicitly stated that they - Sinclair, Demian, Frau Eva and others who have allegedly achieved an inner strength and awareness rare among men - will be the messiahs who will rise from the ashes of barb wire and trenches. Says Demian:

"What will come is beyond imagining. The soul of Europe is a beast that has lain fettered for an infinitely long time. . . Then our day will come, then we will be needed. Not as leaders and lawgivers - we won't be there to see the new laws - but rather as those who are willing, as men who are ready to go forth and stand prepared wherever fate may lead them. . . The few of us who will be ready at that time and who will go forth - will be us. That is why we are marked - as Cain was [Demian is fond of Cain] - to arouse fear and hatred and drive men out of a confined idyl and into more dangerous reaches. All men who have had an effect on the course of human history, all of them without exception, were capable and effective only because they were ready to accept the inevitable. It is true of Moses and Buddha, of Napoleon and Bismarck."

Much as I enjoyed Demian, I could not help but hear alarm bells as I read this German book, published in 1919, proclaiming the superiority of a new race of men. (It is unknown if Hitler ever actually read Nietzsche, but many Nazis were fond of him.) On the other hand, the disillusionment with old, empty catchphrases like fatherland and honor and sacrifice and bravery were universal among Western culture following the horrors of the Great War.

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

Hermann Hesse may have been a pacifist who steadfastly opposed the Third Reich, but still, when one considers the social malaise felt by the victors of World War I, one must also wonder what the losers experienced. Elsewhere, Fitzgerald and Hemingway wrote of Americans partying and living empty, amoral lives (The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises), believing in nothing and seeking nothing. Germany, utterly crushed, did not have that luxury of aimless drinking and turned instead to a bold, charismatic individual who introduced what appeared to be fresh, hopeful ideas.

Things went steadily downhill from there.

Obviously, it is easy to note these developments in hindsight nearly a century later. Really all Hesse did was capture the current mood of his countrymen through a little story of one man's journey toward Self, away from staid conventionality and the mass numbness of the herd (ironically enough). Hesse spoke many truths about the individual's struggle to be free and Demian really is a beautiful novel. Still, in the context of history, it is also a disturbing one.


Gagh, this post didn't come out as I wanted - switches too abruptly to Nietzsche, probably makes more sense if you've actually read the book. Oh well. It's a blog post, not a paper for school or professional review.

That was T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men," by the way.