the walls come tumbling down
by Douglas Messerli
Heimito von Doderer Divertimenti and Variations, translated
from the German by Vincent Kling (Denver: Counterpath Press, 2008)
It would be fruitless to reduce von Doderer's great writings to this
simple pattern, but it is nonetheless helpful in understanding the motivations
of a great many of his characters, not only in the novels The Demons, Every Man A
Murderer, and The Strudhof Steps,
but in Divertimenti and Variations,
translated and published in English for the first time.
The very first "Divertimento" seems to come almost directly
out of The Demons, as a mob of
workers rebel in Vienna, sweeping up along with them a purposeless young
Technical Institute student, Adrian and a young woman, Rufina Seifert, who
works as a cashier in a store which has been among those trashed by the angry
crowd. Finding themselves deposited at the edges of the skirmish and bloodied
by the flying glass, they escape together, resulting in a relationship that
seems more a dependency upon one another than a true passionate affair.
If Adrian has been ignorant of all about him, including the possibility
of such violence, Rufina sees herself as the cause of it, as if she herself had
willed the crowd into being. Yet strangely they are drawn together and begin an
affair that suddenly ends as Adrian realizes how unsophisticated and desperate
Rufina has been. Accidently meeting some of his old friends, he stays away from
their room, as Rufina breaks down, ridiculously admitting to crimes of "human
degradation" and being the cause of "everything that's happened to
all those people," before rushing madly into the streets.
Adrian desperately strives to find her, and discovers her in the
hospital, where the professor explains to him that she is
"incurable," and will be sent to an asylum. For some patients, he
explains, "the world simply won't fit into any conventional framework;
they no longer possess the ability to put most things to functional use as
'ready-made' objects—predominantly abstract concepts with all their
concatenations—which is one of the signs that they're confronting the
abyss."
Confronted with these statements, Adrian is forced to leave her in the
hospital and he reenters the outside world, where a violent rain and
thunderstorm erupts. While Rufina has been lost, Adrian has been saved, come
back to himself, so to speak. The story ends at a concert, with "the sky,
high and deep in its midnight blue...standing above the many covered tables out
on the terrace, above the colorful lights and the flowers." That night,
Sofia Mitrofanov falls "all-out in love with Adrian, head over heels."
In short, Adrian has been returned to everyday human life.
In "Divertimento No. 5," a young Viennese gentleman, Georg,
awakens to find all sorts of trials and tribulations facing him. He has
promised friends, the Tangls, that he will take Frau Tangls's pearls to be
reset, but has somehow lost them along the way. Meanwhile, he has promised
their previously divorced daughter Fanny that he will intercede with her
parents about a another, equally undesirable young man she now wants to marry.
Georg is tortured by the look and smells of his apartment, and his desperate to
move to the suburbs; he may be able to make an exchange with a Doctor Polt, but
is skeptical about the meeting. Besides that, his toe is swollen and, although
he should see a doctor, he has to get to work!
Jumbling these complaints together and intertwining them, he seems to
face a vast array of disasters, which von Doderer comically has him list:
1. Toe (ought to go see the
doctors!);
2. Pearls;
3. Hot-water heater (under this
point he meant everything about his apartment);
4. Marriage negotiations;
5. Building falling apart.
Running between his job and the
classified-ad office, he waits to escape the notice of Fanny, passing by, then
juts out into the street where he is hit by a bus.
After being hospitalized for a few days and finding himself able to
escape into a blissful world of peace, Georg is determined to spend one more
day at home in the protection of his bed.
Ensconced, at tale's end, in the peaceful green pathways of the suburbs,
Georg has returned to normality.
In the best story of this collection, "Divertimento No. 7: The
Trumpets of Jericho," we follow the dissipation of a seemingly well-adjusted
Viennese doctor, who, after witnessing what appears to have been an attack by a
obnoxious-looking neighbor, Rambausek, upon an eight- or nine-year old girl, is
temporarily stocked by the perpetuator, who is afraid the doctor may turn him
in to the police. The neighbor is willing to pay the doctor to keep quiet (he
has already paid the girl's parents), but the doctor devises a seemingly
ridiculous alternative, that Rambausek go to a certain street near the Café
Greilinger and make "three deep knee bends with [his] arms held straight
out in front of [him]."
The strange punishment accomplished, the doctor slowly begins to fall
himself into more and more deviant behavior, drinking heavily and allowing his
apartment to be the scene of rowdy, all-night male parties. An accidental
encounter with the young girl and with Rambausek and his wife, seems to further
trigger his decay, as he seeks out sex with the mother, Frau Jurak, of the girl
Rambausek has raped. The only humanity left him seems to be his fondness for
his next door neighbor, Frau Ida.
On one particular such evening a young man attending a party and another
doctor friend suggest that they play a trick on the friendly elderly neighbor,
involving what they describe as "the trumpets of Jericho." Hiring
several trumpeters to lock themselves in playing the triumphal march from
Verdi's Aida, the partygoers enter
the hall and pound on the door of the "little mousie" next door while
shooting off pistols. Entering Frau Ida's apartment, they discover it empty,
but riot police soon arrive and the merry-makers are taken away.
Realizing his spin into dereliction, the doctor offers to care for an
artist-friend's studio in the suburbs for a lengthy period of time, at first
refusing to even return to his old neighborhood. But one evening, walking with
Frau Jurak near the river, they discover that her child has nearly drowned,
coming upon the scene as Rambausek, having pulled her to safety, is attempting
to resuscitate her. The girl regains consciousness and the doctor's hatred for
Rambausek abates. The story ends with him on an express train headed west. Like
the figures in the other stories I've described, through this violent accident,
has been able to awaken himself from a false world, has been able to experience
the Menschwerdung necessary to return
him to humanity. The false walls of his irreality have come tumbling down.
Using musical phrasing and patterns, von Doderer has in each of these
beautifully crafted stories presented the dilemmas of individuals and the
societies in which they live, revealing the need for us all to awaken to new
visions of life.
Los Angeles, February 8, 2009
Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (March
2009).
