I never had to skip a single day of reading - Elias Canetti's childhood reading plan

Elias Canetti’s childhood memoir The Tongue Set Free follows his education, which means, mostly, his reading.

A few months after I started school, a thing solemn and exciting happened, which determined my entire life after that.  Father brought home a book for me.  He took me alone into a back room, where we children slept, and explained it to me.  It was The Arabian Nights, in an edition for children…  My father spoke very earnestly and encouragingly to me and told me how nice it would be to read.  (39)

Wait, it gets better.

Once I’d finished the book, he’d bring me another…  He kept his promise, there was always a new book there; I never had to skip a single day of reading.  (40)

Canetti is six, and has just learned how to read in school.  Think of the abundance of books so many children have today, books piled on them from birth in the hopes that their brain development will be stimulated to the point of Nobel-prize winning.  Futile, obviously; unnecessary.  Just wait until kiddo is six and give him kiddie versions of Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, Tales from Shakespeare, Dante – although the seventy year-old Canetti is skeptical of that one:  “I wonder how it was possible to adapt Dante for children.”  He has bad dreams, and his mother scolds his father – “’it’s too early for him.’”

Canetti’s mother had a powerful sense of what was too early.  He had long readings and discussions with her of plays, of Schiller and Shakespeare, but when she becomes interested in contemporary writers who work with sexual material, she forbids her son to know anything about them.  He complies, refusing to glance at the contents even when he buys her volumes of Strindberg as gifts.  He suppresses all sexual interest through at least his sixteenth year, when the memoir ends, on his mother’s orders.  It is possible that not everything in the memoir is true, but more interestingly it is possible that everything is exactly as Canetti remembers.

The hilarious culmination of the two themes occurs in Vienna.  The mother falls ill and attracts the romantic attention of a bearded doctor, Herr Professor, who little Canetti entangles with the other claim to his mother’s attention:

I saw books by Schnitzler, and when she happened to tell me not only that he lived in Vienna and was really a physician, but also that Herr Professor knew him and that his wife was Sephardic like us, my despair was complete.  (122-3)

His mother tells him that “’[t]he best thing is to be both a writer and a doctor,’” which infuriates poor Canetti, although he is old enough at this point that he never takes after Herr Professor with an ax, although he does fantasize about the doctor’s death in a balcony collapse, the very balcony where Canetti and his mother used to read Shakespeare.

Strindberg comes later.  I can’t seem to write about this book in order.  Tomorrow, Canetti discovers Swiss literature.

Oh, I can permit myself a remark like that - Schnitzler's Fräulein Else

Fräulein Else (1924) is another Arthur Schnitzler stream-of-consciousness story.  I believe it is the other story, written an amazing twenty-four years after Lieutenant Gustl.  For Schnitzler, the technique was not a fundamental rethinking of fiction, but just a technique useful for telling  specific story.  For whatever reason, it took Schnitzler a long time to find a second story that fit.  Compare the almost plain prose of Casanova’sHomecoming (1918), or the surreal Dream Story (1926) or the intensely interior yet more traditionally told Night Games (1927).

I will interrupt myself.  The end of Schnitzler’s career – he died in 1931 – was impressive.  His cleverest work (La Ronde, Anatol) is from thirty years earlier, but he did his best writing when he was in his sixties.

Fräulein Else is a nineteen year-old Viennese girl on holiday with her aunt and cousin.  Her mother wires to ask that Else ask another guest, Herr Dorsday, for money to cover her father’s gambling debts.  Dorsday agrees, but demands sexual favors in return.  What will the innocent Fräulein Else do?

Perhaps the stream-of-consciousness device is not needed to tell so much as conceal, in Gustl a Maupassant story, in Else a melodrama.

Or it is meant to conceal something else.  I have not read any of Schnitzler’s early work (by early I am covering twenty years!) that had any Jewish subject matter, or Catholic or anything related to any other religion.  Professor Bernhardi (1912) is directly about secularized Judaism in an increasingly anti-Semitic Catholic culture.  Else is Jewish, too, although as far as I can tell this is mentioned in only one place (Rudi is Else’s brother):

No, Herr Dorsday, I’m not taken in by your smartness and your monocle and your title.  You might just as well deal in old clothes as old pictures…  But, Else, Else, what are you thinking of?  Oh, I can permit myself a remark like that.  Nobody notices it in me.  I’m positively blonde, a reddish blonde, and Rudi looks a regular aristocrat.  Certainly one can notice it at once in Mother, at any rate in her speech, but not at all in Father.  (24, ellipses in original)

This is pretty sneaky, obscure enough that I had forgotten until I went back to the passage that it first identifies Dorsday as Jewish – I had forgotten and assumed that he was not.  Else has to justify to herself her own anti-Semitic jab at him by acknowledging her own Judaism, however secularized and suppressed.  The line “Nobody notices it in me” is nicely tricky, since “it” looks like it should refer to “remark,” but in the flow of thought “it” has jumped ahead to “Jewishness,” where “it” remains as Else thinks of her mother.  She disparages her mother in favor of her father at other points in the novella; this passage gives a clue as to why.

In these later stories, Schnitzler is a great recycler – gambling, suicide as a solution to debt, the sexual sacrifice of a woman as a solution to debt, public nudity, and duels recur (well, the duels are an old Schnitzler fixture).  But the stories hardly seem similar, even dazzlingly different, all because of how they are told and who, not what, they are about.

I read an old translation, the 1925 F. H. Lyon version now published by Pushkin Press.

They are the hands of an old man - Schnitzler's Casanova

Arthur Schnitzler was blissfully free of the aesthetic crises that afflicted so many of his peers.  He wore Viennese culture lightly.  Schnitzler’s neuroses were sexual.  No wonder Freud learned so much from Schnitzler, and vice versa.  I know far more than I want to know about the inveterate womanizer’s sex life from reading Peter Gay’s Schnitzler’s Century (2002).  Readers with German and a high threshold for this sort of thing can enjoy thousands of pages of it in Schnitzler’s diaries.  He was a skirt-chasing dog, and a successful one.

What is interesting here is that Schnitzler was keenly aware of the psychology of his own behavior, and of its moral risks, too, of the dangers his lack of self-control posed to any woman who succumbed to him.  I know this because of his fiction, where he is insightful and ironic about people who behave like he does.

Thus Schnitzler’s interest in Casanova, the subject of the 1918 novella Casanova’s Homecoming and 1919 play Casanova in Spa (which I have not read).  The novella describes an adventure that is fictional but might as well be taken from the memoirs.  Casanova is 53, down but not out; the  author is 56.  This is why he is interested:

“Look well, Amalia.  See the wrinkles on my forehead; the loose folds of my neck; the crow’s-feet round my eyes.  And look,” he grinned, “I have lost one of my eye teeth.  Look at these hands, too, Amalia.  My fingers are like claws; there are yellow spots on the fingernails; the blue veins stand out.  They are the hands of an old man, Amalia!”

She clasped both his hands as he held them out for her to see, and reverently kissed them one after the other in the shaded walk.  “Tonight, I will kiss you on the lips,” she said, with a mingling of humility and tenderness, which roused his gall.  (171)

I will let Lizzy of Lizzy’s Literary Life address the story itself.  Casanova is still Casanova, even if he now relies more on his reputation than his looks.  “It’s hard to find anyone to admire in these pages” Lizzy says, and I would go a step further.  About two-thirds of the way into the story, several characters (not just Casanova) who seemed self-serving reveal themselves as evil.  The word is not too strong.  Rape, blackmail, and murder are the results.  Schnitzler is cruel in Casanova’s Homecoming, building some sort of understanding between Casanova and me, some sense of how his world works, how he lives in it, before pulling the lever that opens the concealed trap door.

Casanova, of course, does not believe that his acts are evil.  By the end of the story, the events have becomes just another episode for the Memoirs.  Casanova has moved on to his next adventure.  Yet, in the last paragraph, “he was overwhelmed with a weariness amounting to pain, while on his lips was a bitter aftertaste which seemed to rise up from his innermost being.”  The author grants his character the gift of sleep, “heavy and dreamless, taking pity on the aging adventurer.”

I read the version in the German Library Plays and Stories of Schnitzler, tr. Eden and Cedar Paul, revised by Caroline Wellbery.

Schnitzler's medical drama - he would most certainly wind up in jail before supper

If you are rummaging around in that Dedalus anthology of Meyrink, do not miss “The Clockmaker” (1926), which is not one of the Bats but is still quite good.  It replaces poisonous blue flowers and time-leeches with baroque descriptions of clocks.  I was planning to write about it, but I fear I would just be repeating myself, as Meyrink was, aside from all the fine descriptions of clocks (“they seem to be drunk and asleep, for sometimes they snore loudly or rattle their chains”).

Instead, then, onwards and sideways to Arthur Schnitzler.  I have read a few more of his works recently, let’s see.  How about I start with the boring one, which is the 1912 play Professor Bernhardi.

It is deliberately boring; boring is a strategy.  The play at first appears to be about the petty bureaucratic struggles at a private Viennese hospital.  Office politics, personality clashes, budget maneuvering.  Near the end of the first act, Dr. Bernhardi, one of the hospital’s founders, commits either an error or an act of integrity or both.  He refuses to let a priest give extreme unction to a dying woman, the victim of a botched abortion.  The medical reason for barring the priest never made sense to me, but it seems to be taken seriously within the play.

Bernhardi is Jewish.  He is accused of the crime of interfering with the Catholic religion, is tried, and jailed for two months.  Surrounding this bare plot is a lot of office politics, etc.  Act III is set in a conference room!  How dull.  But of course the central conflict, the collision between professional duty and an increasing vehement and angry anti-Semitic politics, is not dull at all.  Bernhardi is made a martyr.

To what, though?  To a cause or to pride?  I will give away the ending:

WINKLER (a friend of Bernhardi’s):  That precisely was your mistake.  If one were always to do the right thing, or rather, if one simply began one morning, without any further thought, to do the right thing and simply continued without interruption to do the right thing all day long, he would most certainly wind up in jail before supper.

BERNHARDI:  And shall I tell you something, Councillor?  In my position you would have done exactly the same thing.

WINKLER:  Possibly.  Then I would have been – I’m sure you’ll forgive me, Professor – just as unreasonable an ass as you were.

It was a pleasure to read a thoughtful Schnitzler story that was about something other than the battle of the sexes, about a meaningful ethical debate in an interesting social setting.  A sort of debate or reconciliation between Bernhardi and the priest in Act IV is even something like an Important Scene, and is probably what I should be writing about.

Look, Professor Bernhardi  is a period piece, but I am a student of the period.  Tomorrow, something more exciting by Schnitzler, with a duel and gambling and rape and other awful stuff.  No conference rooms.

I read the translation in Professor Bernhardi and Other Plays, tr. G. J. Weinberger, Ariadne Press, 1993.

One should feel at ease on these amorous occasions - an early French influence on James Joyce, and also Schnitzler

Another precursor of stream-of-consciousness writing, this time suggested to me by Doug Skinner, distinguished translator of 19th century French more-than-curiosities.  I do not really care who invented the technique, or believe that any one writer did invent it, but I enjoy seeing how creative people think.

The text at hand is Edouard Dujardin’s 1887 novella Les lauriers sont coupés, translated by Stuart Gilbert and published by New Directions in 1938 under the title We’ll to the Woods No More.  A dandyish Paris law student is attempting to keep an actress; she is attempting to fleece him while sleeping with him as little as possible.

The stream-of-consciousness device allows the pursuit of a couple of good psychological ideas.  First, to what extent is the student aware he is being robbed.  Moments of awareness flare up but are suppressed by his libido or ego.  Second, he can work on a conscious scheme at odds with his mostly unconscious desires.  He will supply money but refuse to sleep with the actress, thus a) demonstrating his superiority and indifference, and / or b) causing the actress to give in to him.  Of course, the slightest sign of sexual interest from the actress causes the entire scheme to collapse, since he wants sex far more than the rather abstract pleasure of being above it all.

If the student sounds a bit shallow, so was Lieutenant Gustl.  The interior monologue is an especially good tool for working with unreflective simpletons.  These nitwits certainly could not write their own stories.  They would have trouble sitting still for ten minutes.  No, that is not the problem with Dujardin’s writing.  This is:

Here’s the soup, piping hot; waiter might splash some, better keep an eye on him.  All’s well; let’s begin.  Too hot, this soup; wait, try again.  Not half bad.  I lunched a bit too late, no appetite left.  All the same I must eat some dinner.  Soup finished.  (22)

Dujardin only rarely does anything too interesting with his new toy.  Perhaps he lacks the psychological insight of Schnitzler or Joyce, who both read and praised Dujardin.  He has trouble with any direction of thought besides straight ahead.  I will not say that Dujardin is unrealistic in his depiction of thought – I happily accept that in this story this dim fellow thinks exactly the thoughts presented – but I am reading with the knowledge of what Woolf and Faulkner would have done with the same material.  They would not, in order to fill the reader in on the past history of the love affair, have to resort to a long scene in which the student reads  his old love letters.  They would have the past constantly intrude, flashes of remembered dialogue or emotion, a gesture or a color briefly freeing a fragment of a memory.

Dujardin just kind of motors along.  He sometimes achieves some pleasing Romantic poetic effects, and he can be funny:

…in any case, she will refuse to accept my note.  There, I tear it up; in two pieces; tear across; four pieces; again; that makes eight.  Again; no, imposs.  It won’t do to drop these bits of card on the floor; someone might pick them up; better try chewing them.  Ugh!  Horrible taste.  Drop them then…  (27)

More importantly, most importantly, is this scene, which I will edit for length but not content:

…  better take my precautions while I am alone; must be nearly six hours since that lavatory in the Boulevard Sébastopol; the privy here is on the left of the hall; one should feel at ease on these amorous occasions…  good business, the light’s on; door’s ajar; remember gentlemen are requested to adjust; for this relief ------ and very needful it was…  (132-3, ellipses mine but not those dashes)

So lucky and discerning French readers got to witness this character relieve himself over thirty years before shocked English readers accompanied Leopold Bloom to the toilet in Ulysses.  Now here is an innovation worth pursuing back to its source.

Not this week, though, since tomorrow I will move a ways up the French literary digestive tract.

Dostoevsky's stream-of-something-or-other - oh God, that’s not it at all

Now look, I am a day behind, and all because of dithering, because of wanting to follow twelve threads at once when all I can really handle is three, which is not bad, really, I should be happy with three.  I was also distracted by the amazing and long story, told by Eric Naiman in the new TLS, of the time Dickens and Dostoevsky met.  They never did meet – Dickens biographers, it turns out, are suckers – but the saga of rogue academic hoaxer A. D. Harvey is something to see.

The thread I want to follow here is “precursors of stream of consciousness writing.”  Arthur Schnitzler identified Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1876 story “A Gentle Creature” as one of the sparks of his own “Lieutenant Gustl.”  The story is from late in Dostoevsky’s life, and therefore awkward, bizarre, ethically dubious, and easily worth reading.

Dostoevsky includes a preface defending or explaining the form of the story.  A man’s wife has killed herself and he is “talking to himself, telling the whole story, trying to explain it to himself.”  The reader should imagine a stenographer taking it all down in shorthand “(after which I should have edited it),” which is absurd (“fantastic”).  Dostoevsky points to Victor Hugo’s The Last Days of a Condemned Man (1829), in which “a man sentenced to death is able (and has the time) to keep a diary not only on his last day, but also during his last hour and, literally, his last minute,” as an ancestor of “A Gentle Creature.”

This is a bit of the beginning of the story, which really is indistinguishable from later stream-of-consciousness writing:

She is now in the sitting-room, on a table.  Two card tables put together side by side.  They will bring the coffin tomorrow.  A white coffin.  White gros-de-Naples.  However that’s not what…  I keep on walking and walking.  Trying to explain the whole thing to myself.  (ellipses in original)

The narrative gels and is told more conventionally as the widower, a pawnbroker and disgraced officer, recounts his history with his wife – how they met, how he essentially bullied her into marriage (although he thought of it as a kindness), how their marriage progressed and disintegrated.

And – and, in addition, I suddenly saw a smile on her face, a mistrustful, silent, evil smile.  Well, it was with that smile that I brought her into my house.  It was true, of course, that she had nowhere else to go…  (end of Ch. III, ellipses in original)

The end of that chapter is directly echoed – no, quoted, why not say quoted – at the end of Part I of Lolita.  The wife here is sixteen.  I am just making a note of this for future reference.

For my immediate purpose, what is interesting is the little hiccup (“And – and”) and similar interruptions of the ordinary narrative, where the story with all of its usual trappings like dialogue and transitions between scenes collapses:

But what’s the matter with me?  If I go on like this I shall never be able to gather everything to a point.  Quick, quick – oh God, that’s not it at all.  (end of Ch. I)

What is interesting here, though, is that I am clearly not eavesdropping on the character’s thoughts, but on his own incoherent response to his thoughts.  As in a Shakespearean monologue, the pawnbroker, in telling his story, overhears himself and thus, by the end, either learns the truth about his wife and marriage (about himself, really) or is forced to reveal the truth he always knew – I am not sure which – so Dostoevsky’s sputtering method appropriately directs my attention to the story’s meaning.  I can imagine Arthur Schnitzler wondering if it would be possible to pull off a conceptually purer story that represented the thoughts behind the speech, that abolished the fantastic stenographer and instead granted the reader telepathy.  It turned out he could.

I read the David Magarshack translation found in Great Short Works of Dostoevsky.

The marionettes grow uneasy - clever Schnitzler plays

Schnitzler is a clever writer, interested in cleverness.  He has a conceptual streak in his creativity.  I am still plenty ignorant, but I have read enough Schnitzler to piece together a timeline, and I can even make out a Clever Period, much of it documented in Paracelsus & Other One-Act Plays (tr. G. J. Weinberger, Ariadne Press, 1995), but also covering “Lieutenant Gustl” and of course La Ronde (written in 1897), which is the best example.

La Ronde is about sex but the structure could be used for almost anything.  The ten interlocking, circular scenes each have a pair of characters who are sexual partners, with one character moving on to the next scene and partner, but the structure could be used for doctors and patients, or salesmen and customers, or any situation where people are likely to be found in pairs.  The number of scenes could be reduced or increased as inspiration or resources require, and even the sexual story can easily be updated and rearranged.  Presumably some recent playwright has, for example, made some of the encounters homosexual.

La Ronde as written is good, but the genuine cleverness of the flexible gimmick is more noticeable, and perhaps even more important.

The series of one-act plays Schnitzler wrote between 1898 and 1910 are mostly what would now be called “high concept.”  The Green Cockatoo (1899) is set in a French dive where slumming nobility come to eavesdrop on criminals and lowlifes, except that the criminals are actors and it is all just a performance, and the nobles know it is a performance, so this is really a play-within-a-play with the fictional audience sitting onstage.  The play takes place on July 14, 1789, so we know that something “real” will intrude on the show.

A couple of plays are stylized commedia dell’arte mime plays.  A trio are not puppet plays, as I had guessed from their titles, but rather riffs on puppet plays.  In The Puppeteer (1903) a man who thinks that he is the puppeteer discovers that he is the puppet.  The Gallant Cassian (1904) reprises the idea but as farce and nonsense, with a lot of instantaneous changes in luck and love, a pointless duel, and a woman who hurls herself from a window but is saved when the title character leaps after her and catches her in the air.  Why not, they are all just puppets.  This is the end (Martin lost the duel):

MARTIN plays the flute  It is bitter to die alone when one was still loved, well-to-do, and full of the most splendid hopes a quarter hour before.  Truly, it is a bad joke, and I’m actually not at all in the mood to play the flute.  Lets it fall and dies.

Most amazing is The Great Puppet Show (1906) which features an onstage carnival and another play-within-etc., an entire puppet theater and its audience, who constantly comment on the action.  I assume that the marionettes are meant to be played by humans, with paint on their faces and strings tied to their arms.  Or maybe not.  In the comic high point, a member of the “real” audience, perhaps sitting right next to me

Stands up and yells out loud  This is a fraud!  The people on stage all look over, the marionettes grow uneasy, and some of them look out from the sides of the marionette theater.

THE GENTLEMAN IN THE AUDIENCE  A fraud!  I won’t fall for that!...  that’s not worthy of a serious theater!...

DIRECTOR  on the apron My dear sir!

AUTHOR  also near the front, wringing his hands

THE GENTLEMAN  going further forward  I won’t let myself be cheated out of the ending!...  To the orchestra section  it’s obvious that the author couldn’t think of an ending… (ellipses in original, except for that last set)

The “real” audience member is invited to join the onstage audience, but he retreats in confusion.

I am not saying these Schnitzler plays are as complex as the best Pirandello, but anyone interested in clever meta-theater would enjoy these plays and should give Schnitzler some credit.

"Lieutenant Gustl" - Arthur Schnitzler innovates

Arthur Schnitzler’s longish story “Lieutenant Gustl” (1900) is commonly considered the first pure piece of stream-of-consciousness fiction, meaning that all of the usual information of the story, the plot, characters, setting, and so on, with one crucial exception, is provided somewhere in the supposed thoughts of the title character.

No cheating, then – no narrator, no background, nothing that would not be part of the thoughts of this character at this moment.  So an extra degree of cleverness is required to turn the mental chaos into a coherent story with all of the usual features.

The exception is the first thing I see, the title, which at least suggests the possibility that the lines that begin the story belong to a fellow named Gustl with the title of lieutenant:

How much longer is this thing going to last?  Let’s see what time it is… perhaps I shouldn’t look at my watch at a serious concert like this.  But no one will see me.  If anyone does, I’ll know he’s paying just as little attention as I am.  In that case I certainly won’t be embarrassed…  (251, ellipses all in the original)

A time, a place, a little bit of insight into the shallow ego of the character.  I might question  the coherence of the sentences – “perhaps I shouldn’t”? – and wonder about those ellipses but it is easy enough to go along with the conceit, to accept that the text does not reproduce but at least resembles thought.

Gustl looks at his program, looks for pretty girls, and lets slip that “day after tomorrow I might be dead as a corpse” (252).  He does not have a great talent for metaphor, this guy.  Since it is a Schnitzler story about an army officer, a duel is as a matter of course part of the story.  How Schnitzler hated dueling.

But then I, like the character, am surprised.  Gustl is a jerk in the coat-check line and is quietly reprimanded, insulted, by a baker who is clearly used to dealing with hothead officers.  A duel with a lowly baker is out of the question, so there is only one way to erase the stain on Gustl’s honor.

Most of the remaining two-thirds of the story consists of Gustl wandering around central Vienna planning his suicide, his thoughts flitting to his mother, his career, women he has known or not (“A window is being opened up there. – Pretty creature. – Well I would at least put on a shawl or something when I go to an open window,” 271).  I was constantly reminded of Mrs. Dalloway, since Schnitzler anticipates so many of Woolf’s technical flourishes.

I doubt that Woolf or Joyce or Dorothy Richardson had any idea what Schnitzler had done.  I doubt Schnitzler had any idea.  Woolf et. al . were looking for solutions to a more general artistic problem of the representation of consciousness.  Schnitzler was looking for a novelty hit (and also a way to follow the thinking, such as it is, of this particular nitwit).  The great clue is the nimble twist ending.  Under the innovative wrapping, “Lieutenant Gustl” is a first-rate Maupassant story.

Schnitzler would write a longer and more complex stream-of-consciousness novella, Fraulein Else, but that was not until 1924.  It is curious to see what would later, in English, be thought of as an important breakthrough in literary technique treated by Schnitzler as one more demonstration of his cleverness.  “One more” meaning: more clever Schnitzler tomorrow.

Quotations from the version in the German Library Plays and Stories of Arthur Schnitzler, tr. Richard L. Simon and Caroline Wellbery, Continuum, 1982.

Only a man can be that inconsiderate. - Arthur Schnitzler's 1893 eternal sitcom

The earliest Arthur Schnitzler work I have found in English is the 1893 play Anatol, a comic, poignant, insightful, etc. investigation in seven scenes of the human sub-species of which Schnitzler himself was a member, Homo sapiens canis sexualis, commonly known as the skirt-chasin’ dog.  I got all the detail I needed on that subject, in fact more, from Peter Gay’s history of the Victorian bourgeoisie, Schnitzler’s Century (2002), which is not even about Schnitzler.  A big biography of him would be a trial.  Schnitzler recorded everything.

The cast of the play: Anatol (the dog), his pal Max, and seven women, one for each scene.  In not one but two scenes, Anatol is about to get married, but the woman in the scene is never the prospective bride.  Anatol pursues women, juggles multiple girlfriends, has flings and long-term affairs, and beds an old girlfriend the night before his wedding (without telling her that he is about to marry).

Given that Anatol has a resemblance to his creator, I might think that the play excuses Anatol’s behavior, but in fact in each scene Anatol is portrayed as hypocritical and cruel.  Schnitzler was a perceptive self-analyst, for all of the good it did him.  Quoting Peter Gay, “As usual, this insight had no effect on his conduct” (p. 75), which could have been Schnitzler’s motto.  But a positive result is that the play is pretty good.

Anatol is throwing a farewell supper for one of his girlfriends, at which he is planning to dump her.  Viennese period note:  they are at the Sacher Hotel which is still in operation, so you could do the same as Anatol!  He has been giving a farewell supper every night for a week, it turns out.  Maybe his friend Max will help him:

MAX:  As for convincing her?  I could never do such a thing.  You’re a far too likable man.

ANATOL:  But my dear Max!  You could, up to a certain point?  Couldn’t you?  I mean, you could tell her that I’m no great loss.

MAX:  I suppose I could.

ANATOL:  And that she’ll find hundreds of other men who are – handsomer – richer –

MAX:  More intelligent –

ANATOL:  No, no, please.  Don’t exaggerate.  (Sc. V)

Max always gets the best lines.  Once Annie arrives, she begins guzzling the champagne and oysters:

ANNIE:  I’m just wild about oysters!  It’s the only food one can eat every day.

MAX:  Can?!  Should!  Must!

ANNIE:  I know!  I told you so!

It turns out she is dumping Anatol.  He becomes hysterical, demanding, and finally cruel, revealing that he has been cheating on her, his secret turned into a weapon.

ANNIE:  (At the door.)  I would never have told you.  Never.  Only a man can be that inconsiderate.

The women do not necessarily win every battle, but they do well in the war.  Some might object that love affairs are not battles.  They are once the woman has been dragged down to Anatol’s level.

It is likely that you have seen this sitcom before, perhaps many times.  Why read or watch a 120 year old version of what you can see in some form on Girls or How I Met Your Mother or some better example I have never seen?  That is a good question.  Some works of art are eternal; some are constantly updated and replaced.

Update: I forgot to include the source. Four Major Plays (1999), tr. Carl R. Mueller.

Ah, what do we know about time and space? - Schnitzler loots Tolstoy

Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Dying reminded me of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych in its insightful depiction of the thoughts over time of a dying man, and Schnitzler impressed me by giving equal attention to the thoughts and fears of his wife or girlfriend or - I’ll just say wife for today’s purpose.

In his recent Anna Karenina hatchet job, obooki singles out the well-known passage in which Anna is in a carriage, turning over recent events but being distracted by shop signs.  Here is a sliver of Anna’s thoughts:

Office and warehouse … Dental surgeon … Yes, I will tell Dolly everything. She doesn’t like Vronsky. [I’ll skip a bit]  I won’t give in to him. I won’t allow him to teach me … Filippov, pastry cook – I’ve heard he sends his pastry to Petersburg. The Moscow water is so good.  (Pt. VII, Ch. XXVIII)

And so on.  The ellipses are in the original, an orthographic feature, although different translators treat them differently.  They signify Tolstoy’s pauses, not obooki’s omissions.  This is an early example of stream of consciousness used for a specific purpose, (I am quoting obooki) “to show a disordered human mind – a mind pushed to emotional extremes – rather than the everyday state we find ourselves in.”

The dental surgeon is foreshadowing, and the pastry cook's pancakes – but I am not writing about Tolstoy.

Schnitzler’s dying Felix and the faithful Marie have been in the mountains, hoping to improve Felix’s health, and are now returning to Vienna by train.  Felix's mind is understandably disordered:

She looks so pale, or is that just the light? ... Ah, yes, the overhead lighting is on.  But it isn’t entirely dark outside yet …  And now autumn is coming … autumn, such a sad, quiet time …  We’ll be back home in Vienna this evening …  And then I’ll feel as if I’d never been away …  [I gotta skip some of this]  There are a great many passengers in a worse way than me on the train …  It’s good to be alone …  How has this whole day passed?  Was it really today that I was lying on the sofa in Salzburg?  It’s so long ago …  ah, what do we know about time and space? ...  the mystery of the world, perhaps we’ll solve it when we die …  And now a melody sounded in his ear.  He knew it was only the sound of the moving train, yet it was a melody …  A folk-song, a Russian song …  monotonous …  very beautiful …  (67)

He is asleep by the end.  Ellipses again in the original.  Somewhere in the middle I was thinking, gee this sounds, and even looks, a lot like that part of Anna Karenina, and then Schnitzler drops in the Russian folk-song, out of nowhere.  The previous scenes in Salzburg had taken place in the midst of “a great festival of vocal music” (53), but there was nothing Russian until this moment.

“Russian” is like a signature or seal – “yes, dagnabit, I have been reading Tolstoy!”

Why I do not write reviews – just look at these:  Winston’s Dad, Lizzy’s Literary Life, John Self, and Pechorin’s Journal, all enjoying Arthur Schnitzler’s Dying.

Schnitzler's Dying - some idle speculation

Another pleasant Pushkin Press book today, their edition of the 1895 Arthur Schnitzler novella cheerily and accurately title Dying.  A young writer, Felix, learns that he has a year to live and we watch him live out that year, badly and well by turns.  At times the story and Felix’s behavior reminded me a bit of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886), but in a fundamental shift the point of view of Felix alternates with that of Marie, his wife or girlfriend.  Sometimes their views of life and death sync up, sometimes not.  Mostly not.

Now that is an odd detail there, isn’t it, that I do not know if the couple is married.

The novel opens with Marie waiting for Felix in a Viennese park.  They are young, they are a couple – “she said lovingly,” “he took the hand she casually offered him.”  Felix acts like a jerk for a while before admitting the bad news he got from a doctor, so that is how the story moves.  I assumed that the couple was unmarried, especially once Felix demands that Marie leave him to spare her the suffering and similar balderdash.  But Felix and Maria also cohabitate, share a bed, stay in hotels together, and so on.

Perhaps their surnames would provide a clue, but Schnitzler never mentions them .  Maybe a legal matter comes up, like a will.  No.  Perhaps another character, say a family member, will mention something, but neither Felix nor Marie have any family at all.  In fact, Dying only has one other character of consequence, a friend who happens to be a doctor.  So this is a deliberate ambiguity.  Maybe the translator missed something, but the translator is Anthea Bell, so I strongly doubt that.

Dying reinforces my sense that Schnitzler is a powerful but narrow writer.  No family, no religion, no work except some vague writing about which the dying man claims, near the end of the story, to have “thousands of fresh insights” (p. 96).  I cannot remember, actually, a single reference to religion in any of the Schnitzler I have read so far, although I was not looking for them, so who knows.

Schnitzler’s imaginary world is cramped.  Many of the scenes in Dying are not much more than two people in a bedroom or railroad carriage, talking or fighting or thinking.

This is strange, too.  The three earliest Schnitzler stories I have read, aside from Dying, are about:

1.  “The Widower” (1894): a young man’s wife has just died.

2.  “A Farewell” (1896): a young man’s secret mistress has just died, and he cannot grieve properly because of course the husband makes all of the funeral arrangements.

3.  “The Dead Are Silent” (1897): a young adulterous couple have a carriage accident; the man is killed.

You cannot say that Schnitzler does not squeeze the juice out of a conceit when he gets hold of it.  His plays from the same period, like La Ronde and Liebelei, do not fit this pattern.  Still: narrow.

I have done no justice to Dying, so we are stuck with it for another day.

The Austrian Literature Non-Challenge - Mellow fruit unendingly

Happy New Year!  Welcome back to Wuthering Expectations, where the literature of the year, which usually means more like nine months, is Austrian.

The Austrian Non-Challenge was meant to be the sequel to the earlier Scottish and Portuguese Reading Challenges, surely among the greatest reading challenges in book blog history, but the more I explored and thought about what I wanted to accomplish, the less social the whole thing seemed.  It may all be too narrow to support the amusing Challenge rhetoric.

However, as I spend a few days planning ahead, showing my bibliographic work, I do want to invite anyone interested to read along with me.  If anything strikes your fancy, or I fail to mention something I ought to read, let’s read it together.  This has always worked out well in the past.

This is what I am looking for:  the big change, the birth of the New, the invention of the Modern.  The metaphors are bad because the New, birthed by Flaubert and Baudelaire and Manet and others, is already thirty or forty years old by 1890 when Austrian literature begins to crack open.  The transition in Austrian literature, and art, and music is late but fast.  So I hope that I might learn something about how it happened, about the change in the ideas or tastes, the artists or audience.

My guess is that I cannot, that I am fundamentally mistaken in some way and am looking in the wrong place, and it is possible that I will never mention the idea again.  The books should still be good either way.

Two writers with parallel careers will likely make up the core of my Austrian reading.  Arthur Schnitzler has been on Wuthering Expectations recently enough that I will zip past him.  I want to read more of his plays, including some puppet plays that sound promising, and more of his fiction, including his single novel, the 1908 The Road to the Open, which sounds more relevant than good (pretty good and highly relevant), but we will see.  More promising:  the early stream of consciousness showpiece “Lieutenant Gustl” (1901) and some later novellas.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal was a decade younger than Schnitzler but their careers overlap almost perfectly because Hofmannsthal was another of those weird teenage literary prodigies I have been coming across lately, a writer of poems, essays, short stories, and verse plays of remarkable assurance and originality. 

Still in his twenties, Hofmannsthal suffered an aesthetic crisis  that he describes in the 1902 fiction now know as “The Lord Chandos Letter.”  The result in his own life was an almost complete abandonment of poetry and to a lesser degree fiction for theater, leading, eventually, to his series of operatic collaborations with Richard Strauss.  Here is a Hofmannsthal poem from 1898:

Traveller’s Song (Reiselied)
To engulf us water’s eddy,
Down the boulders roll, to crush,
And to bear us off already
Birds on powerful pinions rush.

But a landscape lies below
In its ageless lakes reflecting
Mellow fruit unendingly.

Brim of well and marble brow
Gleaming rise from flowery meadows,
And the gentle breezes blow.  (tr. Michael Hamburger)

Can I get to the mellow fruit before I am crushed by the boulders, that is the question.  The poem is on p. 11 of Poems and Verse Plays, Pantheon, 1961.

Tomorrow:  more fine Austrian writers, and perhaps even some duds.

I know what youth is. And I can't shoot them all - another Schnitzpard play

Schnitzpard’s other play, Das weite Land / Undiscovered Country (1911 / 1979), is longer and more ambitious than the earlier and later Dalliance, and is less punchy, but features a more complex – an aggravatingly complex – lead character.  Like Dalliance, the play climaxes with an offstage pistol duel over adultery.  What a strange society.

This time the male lead, Friedrich, is older, with a grown son, but still a lady-killer.  His wife is long-suffering; his friends suffer in a different way: car accidents, suicide, mountaineering  fatalities.  For an act or so I wondered if I was reading a play about a dashing serial killer, but no, he is just the lucky one of the bunch.  As is typical with Schnitzler if not Stoppard, death is a constant presence.

FRIEDRICH:  Oh yes – how is Stanzides?

MAUER:  I’m just going to see him, as a matter of fact.  He’s very impatient, considering he ought to be grateful he didn’t break his neck.

FRIEDRICH:  Not to mention mine.  I was thrown thirty feet up the road.  But it’s certainly true that the insurance companies will soon be turning down anyone who is acquainted with me.  (I, 69-70)

And this is just after the funeral for the suicide.

Friedrich is a perfect hypocrite – he always has a reason, a good one, for whatever he does, no matter how it contradicts something else he does.  He is sincere when that is useful, cynical when he needs to be.  As I said, aggravating.  I suppose the ultimate success of the play depends on whether the production and Schnitzpard are convincing in giving Friedrich a core that makes him more than a specimen.  If he earns these words near the end:

FRIEDRICH:  Hush!  I know what youth is.  It’s not an hour since I saw it.  It glows, it laughs, it has an insolence in its eye.  I know what youth is.  And I can’t shoot them all…  (V, 147, italics not mine)

Dalliance ends with a sort of sincere and surprised despair, while Friedrich’s despair is more of a long-cultivated philosophy of life.

In the introduction to the volume that contains Dalliance and Undiscovered Country, Tom Stoppard describes the technical side of the adaptation in some detail.  Knowing no German, he began with a trot, and went through it word by word with an expert in German.  This is “the high water-mark of literal accuracy” after which the playwright and director begin to rampage through the script, filling it with their own ideas and improvements and jokes – I more or less assume that every actual joke is Stoppard’s – until the word “translation” becomes an embarrassment and “adaptation” is quietly substituted.  “[A] surprising number of critics turned out to be Schnitzler purists,” Stoppard says (ix-x).  Not me, though.  I wish there was more jolly Schnitzpard for me to read.

Schnitzler and Stoppard collaborate - our love is eternal, of course, but there is a limit.

Special surprise bonus Schnitzler for the next two days!  I didn’t mean to read it, but I did.

Specifically, I read two Tom Stoppard adaptations of Arthur Schnitzler plays, Dalliance, a version of Liebelei (1895, English version performed in 1986) and Undiscovered Country, an adaptation of Das weite Land (1911, performed 1979).  Edith Grossman, telling reviewers how to do their jobs in Why Translation Matters,  demands that authors and translators be treated as creative co-equals.  In this case, I think she is correct, and will write accordingly.

I will call the composite author Schnitzpard.

Schnitzpard’s play begins with Chekhov’s gun:

FRITZ is discovered practising marksmanship with a duelling pistol…  It is clear from the way FRITZ inspects the target that he is not much of a shot.  There does not appear to be a hole in the target at all. (I., 5)

So the only question is who, by the end of Act III, is gonna get plugged.  Things are not looking good for Fritz, but who knows, his fate may end up being ironic somehow.

Fritz is just a student, but he is having an affair with a married woman, and at the same time having a fling with a seamstress who works at a theater.  The seamstress makes the mistake of falling in love.  Fritz and the seamstress each have friends who understand things better:

MIZI:  Well, next time we go out anywhere together you must wear your uniform.

THEODORE:  I only put it on for funerals [foreshadowing!].  But I’ll be wearing it for August – I’ve got manoeuvres.

MIZI:  Heavens, it won’t wait till August.

THEODORE:  No, that’s true – our love is eternal, of course, but there is a limit.  (I., 11-12)

Theodore's lines should be read in a Wildean spirit.

The very short third and final act is set backstage at the seamstress’s theater, with a rehearsal taking place on stage, meaning of course the actual backstage of whatever theater we might be in – typical Schnitzpardian theatrical playfulness – but with a point.  The contrast between the singing and botched cues in the background and the audience’s knowledge, my knowledge, that Chekhov’s gun has gone off in a duel with who knows what result while the women, knowing nothing about the duel, fret about entirely pointless problems, creates some outstanding tension.  There are lots of nice bits to quote, but they would resolve the tension a bit too abruptly.

Dalliance is a conventional play in many ways – love affairs and goofing around take up most of the action.  It is hardly as innovative as La Ronde (written 1897) or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1968) but is written with a lot of zing.  I would love to see it.

Page numbers refer to the 1986 Faber and Faber edition of Schnitzpard’s plays.

Schnitzler's Dream Story - Even the reality of a whole lifetime isn't the whole truth

The best for last, or at least the most distinct for last.  I have been emphasizing the repetition in Schnitzler’s short stories, repetitions of theme and pattern and structure.  In his novella Dream Story (1926) Schnitzler at least varies the structure quite a lot, and though the Sex and Death theme is stronger than ever, the use of dreams and dream imagery is a new, rich addition.

A Viennese doctor experiences a long, strange, dream-like, sexually charged night, a kind of surreal sexual picaresque, featuring a kindly prostitute, weird figures in costumes, a decadent secret orgy which may or may not involve rape and murder, that sort of thing.  His wife is at the same time having a complex, sexually charged, violent dream; at the end the husband is crucified.  All of this is told to the husband in suspicious detail.  He then, the structure of the plot now resembling that of a thriller, tries to reconstruct or undue or put right the events of his own wild night, all the while haunted by his wife’s dream – perhaps that is the problem he is actually trying to solve.

This structure is odd, isn’t it?  Husband’s adventures, wife’s seemingly unrelated dream, reversal of husband’s adventures.

In the end, the husband relates his adventures, pre- and post-dream, to his wife.  Once they have both expelled their anxieties or neuroses or unconscious desires they are reconciled and can live in peace.

“Are you sure we have [come away unharmed]?” he asked.

“Just as sure as I suspect that the reality of one night, even the reality of a whole lifetime, isn’t the whole truth.”

“And no dream,” he said with a soft sigh, “is entirely a dream.”  (272)

The novella ends with the laughter of their child, which is close to the scene that begins the story, where the parents are reading a dream-like story to their daughter.

Schnitzler is competing with the Surrealists and E. T. A. Hoffmann and other dream-peddlers.  Since literary dreams allow anything, they had better be particularly good.  Schnitzler dreams like a champion.  The doctor’s episodes, for example, move pleasingly from weird to weirder:

… and all at once a blinding light poured down to the end of the hallway where a small table set with plates, glasses, and bottles was suddenly visible.  Two men dressed as inquisitors in red robes arose from the chairs to the left and to the right of the table, while at the same moment a graceful little creature disappeared…  a graceful, very young girl, still almost a child, wearing a Pierrette costume with white silk stockings…  (227, this time all ellipses are mine)

And this is from the episode before the really strange one.

I wonder to what extent some of the details in the wife’s dream or the husbands narrative can be pinned directly to those in The Interpretation of Dreams or some other work of Freud or, by this point, one of his students.  If I ever to Freud, I will read him with Dream Story in the back of my mind.

I rarely do this, but what the heck – of the limited Schnitzler I have read, if you are going to read one, read Dream Story and La Ronde, so read two.  I assume as I read more Schnitzler two will grow to three or four.  Well-read commenters can suggest likely candidates.

Thanks to Caroline and Lizzy for the German Literature Month business!   I’ll have a little more next week.

Night Games - Schnitzler stretches out

I read two novellas collected along with the shorter stories, Dream Story (1926) and Night Games (1927).  Please note that these works are from thirty years later than the other stories I have been writing about, and are similarly far from the composition of La Ronde.  Schnitzler’s career was impressive.

In Night Games  an Austrian officer in a single night gambles himself into massive debt.  Nothing is so artificial in fiction as the tension created by gambling, and Schnitzler is not above giving me a shot of the cheap stuff, but the wins and losses do have meaning.  Winning big means sex, because the officer will finally be able to marry; losing big means death, since the officer’s code makes it likely that he will choose suicide over dishonor.

In other words, the officer embraces or succumbs to the “death drive” as described in Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920.

Schnitzler’s protagonists can be generic.  They are often a bit more like representative specimens than individuals.  In La Ronde, the characters are not even given names but are just Soldier or Actress, and in most of the stories this would work just as well.  The greater length of the novella allows Schnitzler to include some idiosyncratic secondary characters in Night Games.  Since they are not part of the psychological study, they are allowed to be a little bit strange.

He looked around the circle as though he sought approval.  Everyone was silent.  Herr Elrief looked away, very aristocratically, and lit a cigarette; Wimmer bit his lips; Greising whistled nervously, almost soundlessly; and the theatre manager remarked somewhat rudely, as though it were trivial, “The lieutenant has really had bad luck today!”  (VII, 32)

The short stories did not have much room for these sorts of individualizing touches, characters who will now be packed away, never to return in the fifty remaining pages.

I have been describing the plots of Schnitzler’s stories, however compactly, more than I usually do because so much of the meaning of the stories comes directly from the plot.  A typical person, the generic representative of a particular social status (bourgeois wife, poor officer), stumbles into an atypical situation.  The steps  the character then takes begin to generate meaning, begin to individualize the character and move him from the generic to the specific.  The climax of the story is simultaneous with the complete creation of the character, the moment of greatest individuality.

So now, back in Night Games, the game has ended and the officer needs to scrounge up a lot of money, or else.  As a result he encounters the best character in the story, his aunt Leopoldine, who he happens to have known previously to her marriage to his uncle.  Sex has again intersected with death:

He saw the little gold ring with the semi-precious stone on the ring finger of her right hand, which was lying on top of the red bedspread, and the slender, silver bracelet that encircled the wrist of the left hand that she had stretched out toward him in waving him farewell from the bed as he was leaving.  She had pleased him so much that when he left he was firmly determined to see her again.  It happened, however, that just at this time another woman had prior claims on him, a woman who, since she was being kept by a banker, didn’t cost him a kreuzer – a consideration given the circumstances.  (XI, 59)

Schnitzler cleverly begins to tell Leopoldine’s story not alongside but somehow behind the rest of the officer’s story.  Because of their entanglement, because of her story, he makes a decision that is not itself a surprise; however the reason for his decision is a shock.   It’s very impressive, but aside from the variety of characters and greater intricacy of the plot, this is exactly how Schnitzler was writing stories thirty years earlier.

Schnitzler's substitute for the talking cure - He felt as if nothing bad could happen to him now

It’s all so Freudian, isn’t it, the basis of all these Schnitzler stories?  Schnitzler’s characters reveal or discover  themselves as the result of a crisis, but not through any action they take themselves.   The characters attempt to defend themselves, but the truth resides in the unconscious and is made apparent by a breach in the defenses.

Schnitzler is anticipating the Freudian “talking cure,” in which the therapist guides the patient to create his own breach without having to suffer through the actual crisis.  The errant wife can resolve to confess her affair to her husband (or not) without having the lover die in a carriage accident.  This is the idea, right?  Let no one assume I know too much about Freud or Freudianism.*

 Schnitzler was an avid reader of his neighbor Freud, but it turns out Freud was also an enthusiastic reader of Schnitzler.  Although a late novella like “Dream Story” (1926) is obviously, even blatantly indebted to The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), several of the stories in Night Games, including the ones I have written about so far, precede any significant contact with Freud’s ideas, making me wonder just how much Schnitzler there might be in Freud.  They were both studying the same set of clinical subjects, the bourgeois Viennese.

The one story in the Night Games collection not about Sex and Death, “Blind Geronimo and His Brother” (1900), shows how guilt is actually Schnitzler’s central concern.  Carlo blinded his brother when they were children, accidentally of course, but he has devoted his life to leading his blind brother around Austria and Italy, living off Geronimo’s earnings as a street musician.  A meaningless chance encounter causes a sort of crisis of faith – has Carlo’s lifetime of sacrifice been meaningless?  Rather than atone for his guilt, has he only committed more sins? And Schnitzler then woks through some plotty stuff to get us to this point, which is the end of the story – I am always quoting from the ending:

For he saw Geronimo smile in the mild, blissful way that he had not seen him do since childhood.  And Carlo also smiled.  He felt as if nothing bad could happen to him now – neither before the judge, nor anywhere else in the world – for he had his brother again…  No, he had him for the first time…  (124)

All of those ellipses are Schnitzler’s, not mine.  Please note that the Sex and Death story I wrote about yesterday, “The Dead Are Silent” (1897) literally ends with “a great calm comes over her,  as though everything will be all right again…” – in other words, with an almost identical ending.

The mention of the judge reminds me that Carlo and Geronimo end their story at a material low point, but at a psychological peak.  The intervention of a trained therapist earlier in the story would have been helpful.

*  Although I am old enough to have been assigned Freud in college, in a class called, and also about – youngsters will find this hard to believe, but it is true – “Western Civilization.”  Freud was assigned to every student getting a BA!   And read by about one in ten, I would guess.

As though everything will be all right again - Schnitzler's breakthroughs

The one hour of voluptuous joy he had experienced with Clara now seemed to him to be surrounded by spine-chilling horror.  (172)

Now that is what I am talking about.  That is the Arthur Schnitzler I have been reading, although this particular story, the 1904 “Baron von Leisenbohg's Destiny,” is admittedly the silliest of the stories in the Night Games collection.  It involves a deadly curse.  A deadly sex curse.  Any effect of a sex curse is of course merely psychological, of course, of course.

Let me try a story that is less unlikely.  “The Dead Are Silent” (1897) begins with a young man awaiting his married mistress in a hired carriage.  The lovers direct the cabbie to the Vienna suburbs, where there is no risk of meeting anyone they know.  An accident occurs, and the point of view deftly switches from the man to the woman, a necessary change because he seems to have been killed, while she is uninjured.

The next five or six pages are mostly just the woman’s interior monologue.  She confronts her lover’s death (“Well, why don’t I believe it? – it’s a certainty… this is death!  A horror seized her whole body,” 92, ellipses in original).  Her thoughts, as one might guess, are confused, but she soon decides to flee the scene (“She can’t be of use to anyone here anymore, and she’s only courting tragedy,” 93).  She spends a four page paragraph walking home, all the while justifying her behavior:

Franz himself would have said she was right to do what she did.  She has to get home, after all.  She has a son, she has a husband, she would be lost if they had found her there with her dead lover.  There’s the bridge; the street seems brighter…  (94)

That passage is typical – thought interrupted by something exterior like a landmark or a racing ambulance on the way to you-know-where.

So far, so explicable.  Schnitzler is moving the character down a clear path.  A reader may support or deplore her behavior but everyone will understand it.  Schnitzler is still working on the surface of the character.  It is only in the last couple of pages, once she is home, safe, that the more complex psychological story can begin.  This is the end:

And she knows that in the next moment she’ll tell this man, whom she has deceived for many years, the whole truth.

And as she slowly goes through the door with her boy, her husband’s eyes on her, a great calm comes over her, as though everything will be all right again…  (100, ellipses again Schnitzler’s).

So Schnitzler spends sixteen pages steadily moving a single action to a resolution and two pages shattering it.  His interest is in that last leap or fall; it is what makes him a great writer.

The story I mentioned yesterday, “The Widower,” has an identical structure.  Most of these stories have the same structure.  The widower discovers his dead wife’s affair with his best friend, and in a several page internal monologue works though his grief and moves to forgive them both.  Yet in the last line he is frothing with rage at his friend for an unexpected reason.  As with the wife in “The Dead Are Silent,” Schnitzler writes a story that breaks his character.  He adds stress, the surface cracks, and I am granted a glimpse of the truth.

Arthur Schnitzler's short fiction - “You bastard!” he screams, and throws the pages in his face.

For last year’s German Literature Month, I tried out Arthur Schnitzler’s best known play, Der Reigen / La Ronde, which was about sex and its discontents.  This year I tried some of his short fiction, which is not just about sex but rather sex and death, over and over again.  Eight out of nine stories in Night Games (Ivan R. Dee, 2002, tr. Margret Schaefer): sex, death, death, sex.

My one criticism as such of Schnitzler is that, based on what I have read so far, he is kinda narrow.  The same translator and publisher have produced two more volumes of Schnitzler’s novellas that I am eager to read, to see if I am right, or wrong, or who cares.  Schnitzler is deep rather than broad.  Well, he is not always that deep, either, but here is what I am getting at, every story in this book has at least one moment where I could say, ah, yes, that’s it, that is just what that character in that situation would do, although not being an insightful psychologist like Schnitzler I would have guessed something else entirely, likely some cliché.

For instance, in “The Widower” (1894) Schnitzler gives me a husband who has just lost his young wife (“He still doesn’t understand it; it all happened so fast”).  Left alone, finally, in his house he begins rummaging “mechanically” in his wife’s desk.  Why, there is a locked drawer.  Why, it contains – oh no, speaking of clichés!  It contains love letters between his wife and, who else, his best friend (death, sex).  After a few hours of angry, painful reflection, the friend arrives – “The door opens and his friend is there.”

Now I will skip to the last sentence:

“You bastard!” he screams, and throws the pages in his face.

That sentence is, I suppose, predictable given the setup I have described, but Schnitzler arrives at it from a surprising direction.  The reason for it, the psychology, is surprising yet true, insightful.

In this sense many of Schnitzler’s stories are built like many stories published today, where ordinary people, facing some moment of stress, react in an unpredictable way, and the quality of the story is in part determined by the arbitrariness of that single climatic moment – does the final action feel random, or right?

Schnitzler reminds me of Chekhov or Joyce or Giovanni Verga in that he has crossed the line that divides us and them.  Schnitzler is still us, still now.  Kipling, Stevenson, and Maupassant, innovators, masters of their own kind of short story, are them and then.  Take the metaphor for what it is worth, please.

A couple more days of Schnitzler’s fiction, Schnitzler’s Vienna.

German Literature Month is up and running, by the way, so this is part of that.

In short – it only confuses one. - Arthur Schnitzler seizes the day

And I thought Spring Awakening was sex-crazed!  Arthur Schnitzler’s Der Reigen (in the Carl Mueller version I read, La Ronde) is about nothing but.  Pairs of characters approach sex via dialogue and groping, engage (concealed by three small dots), and gather up their things.  One member of the pair advances to the next round, men and women alternating

In scene I, for example,  The Prostitute and The Soldier dally under a Viennese bridge, and then in scene II The Soldier seduces The Parlor Maid, who subsequently topples upon The Young Gentleman, who is up to no good with The Young Wife, and on like this to scene X, when The Count is surprised to find himself with The Prostitute of scene I.

What a director does with the actual sex, hidden by Schnitzler, I do not know.  Kill the lights for three seconds, perhaps.  These days, probably not.

The scenes, and lines, expand as the play proceeds.  The Prostitute is efficient with her Soldier:

PROSTITUTE:  Shh!  Police.  Imagine.  The middle of Vienna.
SOLDIER:  Over here.  Come on.
PROSTITUTE:  Watch it.  You want to fall in the water!
SOLDIER:  (Takes hold of her.)  You little –
PROSTITUTE:  Hold tight.
SOLDIER:  Don’t worry.
[Now, the modest dots]
PROSTITUTE:  We should’ve used the bench.
SOLDIER:  Who cares.  Get up.

And then just a few more lines finish this indecorous scene.  Later seducers have to work harder, and philosophize more:

COUNT:  But there’s no such thing as happiness.  The things people talk about most don’t really exist.  Love, for example.  It’s the same with happiness.
ACTRESS:  You’re right.
COUNT:  Pleasure.  Intoxication.  Fine.  No complaints.  You can depend on them.  If I take pleasure in something, fine, at least I know I take pleasure in it.  Or if I feel intoxicated.  Wonderful.  That’s something you can depend on, too.  And when it’s over – well, then, it’s over.
ACTRESS: (Grandly.)  Over!
COUNT:  But as soon as you fail to live for the moment, and begin thinking about the future or the past – well then, the pleasure’s as good as dead.  The future is – sad – the past uncertain.  In short – it only confuses one.
ACTRESS: (nods, her eyes large with wonder.)  I think you may have hit on something there.

That (Grandly) direction is pretty good.  I would not want to argue strongly for the author’s view.  Everyone gets his say, or hers, and everyone is undercut.  The most common refrain is to seize the day, but the context is always pathetic, or ridiculous.  The day, however, is always seized, in some crude sense, which may well be better than the alternative.  The ennobled lemurs are doing what they can.

Austrian literature, concentrated in turn of the century Vienna, was the leading alternative to the Portuguese Literary Challenge.  Maybe next time.