On the Novel as an Unnecessary Form

 On the Novel as an Unnecessary Form

1.

There is something unnatural about the literary form that we call the “novel.”  Throughout most of history, people got along without the form perfectly well.  This leads me to the conclusion that if novels suddenly ceased to exist, we wouldn’t really notice their absence.  Lyric poetry, by contrast, seems integral to human consciousness.  Narrative and epic poems also pre-date the novel by thousands of years and, although less organic, seem somehow rooted in the way that people experience reality.  The world as re-counted or mirrored in words is an exercise in memory and poetry, even in very long forms, seems mnemonic, a device to channel and regulate what we choose to recall.  It goes without saying that theater is rooted in liturgy and religious observance and, similarly, integral to our consciousness.  Short stories derive from anecdotes; even, longer form tales of this sort such as novellas are intrinsic to the way the people interact – we tell each other stories.  But the novel, conceived as a long prose depiction of people and society, is somehow gratuitous, a profoundly unnecessary form.  Contrary to other forms of literary expression, the novel is dependent on publishing – that is, type technology.  No one can remember a prose novel and, so, the form is rooted in mechanical reproduction and, also, requires something that has never been universal – that is, literacy.  In order to experience a novel, people have to be able to read the book.  Before the 20th century, novels were serialized in print publications, later bound into volumes (often multi-volume texts) and read aloud to friends and family.  The form is therefore highly dependent on social and economic factors: the economy must support periodicals and publishers; people must be able to read; and there must be bourgeois society that provides sufficient leisure for reading.  These prerequisites have not existed for most of human history and will, probably, cease to exist once more in the next one-hundred years.  

Because the novel as a genre is alien to human experience, these books are very hard to successfully write.  And there seems to be little agreement, in fact, as to what constitutes an esthetically valid novel.  Just as the form is contrived and contrary to human nature, many of these books seem to be constructed according to curiously arbitrary principles, whimsical in structure or theme, and strangely capricious.  There are very few novels that are wholly or, even, partly successful – this applies to the greatest of writers no less than the hacks who write most of the books that we encounter.  (Genre novels are, often, much more successful in terms of form than works of so-called literary merit – a mystery writer has a certain form to which he or she must be obedient.  This is true of romance novels and westerns, when such books were written, and many narratives that are, in effect, autobiographical or political accounts of grievance, a sort of novel that comprises a recognized, if ill-defined, genre today.)

The world’s first novel, as it is sometimes called, Cervantes Don Quixote isn’t a novel at all – it’s merely a loosely collated group of anecdotes.  The book’s through line or central narrative, the story of the Knight of La Mancha, comprises about a third of the novel – the rest is loosely appended romance that has nothing to do with the book’s main themes.  Daniel Defoe’s most successful books are, basically, journalism with some of the names changed – that is, essential non-fiction reportage.  Gogol, the Mozart of prose, was unable to complete his only novel Dead Souls and the book just peters out.  Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, despite many brilliant and moving chapters, similarly just collapses in its last hundred pages – the author is exhausted and doesn’t know how to unify the book and, so, he just gives up.  Melville’s Moby Dick, although very great, is packed with tedious stuff – I don’t mean the whaling industry passages that are fascinating, but the laborious imitations of Lawrence Sterne invoking Tristam Shandy, another wonderful piece of prose that just stalls out without reaching anything like a conclusion or denouement.  Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow contains spectacular prose, but, it’s obvious, that he ran out of energy about two-hundred pages before the print stops – I don’t know why critics haven’t observed that the last part of Gravity’s Rainbow is the author’s outline for the book’s end and not the actual ending of the novel (which would have required another thousand pages.)  Musil couldn’t complete The Man without Qualities; Kafka’s two novels are similar unfinished.  Dickens big novels are stuffed with interesting characters but don’t cohere – consider Bleak House, a book that starts with some amazing material, and, then, spirals into demented trivia and vapid sentimentality (the plot turns on “spontaneous human combustion”).  George Eliot’s Middlemarch, although fantastically penetrating, doesn’t succeed in the end – it also just concludes when the author becomes tired of the book and its characters.  In recent times, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is an unreadable harangue – not a narrative but a protracted scream of pain.  Lincoln in the Bardo is a fifteen page short story inflated to three-hundred pages, although those pages are mostly empty – I like this book a lot and think it is a master-work, but I can’t exactly assimilate the text, largely comprised of quotations, to the concept of the novel.

The problem with the novel seems to be that there are too many ways for a long book to go awry.  This is not to say that there aren’t perfected examples of the form, but they are few and far between.  Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is estimable, but, for most of its length, the book is just a series of well-tuned and witty philosophical dialogues – the operative plot of the book could be written on the three-by-five card.  (Mann’s later Dr. Faustus is, I think, close to perfect – but, probably, too specialized in its interests in syphilis and atonal music to appeal to most people.)   Mann couldn’t complete his last novel The Confessions of Felix Krull, another promising book that has no ending or, like Gogol’s Dead Souls, not even a fully realized second half.  Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire seem to me to be wholly successful.  Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, one of the greatest works in American literature, is not a novel, but a novella – it doesn’t aspire to the larger ambitions and characteristics of the form and, therefore, can be as polished and lapidary as a gem.  Stendhal’s novels seem successful to me.  Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is probably the greatest and most fully achieved novel of the 19th century and several of Flaubert’s books, most particularly A Sentimental Education, establish paradigms for the form.  And, in my view, the novel’s history ends with a perfected masterpiece, Joyce’s Ulysses, a book that no one can surpass in terms of its breadth of vision and its stylistic energy.  

You might disagree with my assessment of the books listed above.  Your assent to my evaluations is beside the point.  The gist of my argument is that successful novels, because of their ambition and the intrinsically formless prose from which they are fashioned, are almost impossible to achieve.  Most novels fail on various levels.  Almost none of them are persuasive in terms of form – indeed, most literary novels start on a note of flamboyant excellence that gradually degrades as the author discovers that he or she has lost control of the material and is simply floundering in an excess that can not be made to cohere.  In general, we think of art as life designed to cohere in some kind of pattern and with the dull parts, perhaps, referenced, but, more or less, elided.  Simply holding a mirror to life will not satisfy us in the long run – what is required is that a book with all of its episodes and characters be made to cohere in an intelligible pattern that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  Almost all famous novels have a successful beginning, but, then, decay into an interminable middle with either no end or an end that not at all persuasive.

2.

Consider with me Heimito von Doderer’s The Waterfalls of Slunj, the last novel of an Austrian novelist who was once famous and widely celebrated as the most important figure writing fiction in German after the death of Thomas Mann.  Doderer’s Waterfalls was published in 1963, three years before the novelist’s death. 

Heimito von Doderer writes in the shadow of the more ambitious and brilliant Robert Musil, an Austrian acolyte of Marcel Proust who, like his idol, couldn’t exactly complete his magnum opus.  There’s debate as to whether Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is fully realized; Proust was tinkering with the huge book up to his death.  There’s no debate about Musil’s Man without Qualities – he died before it was finished leaving over a thousand pages of prose that seems polished and final, but with hundreds of pages of fragmentary notes and sketches aimed toward a conclusion to the book that Musil never accomplished.  Doderer’s books are all finished, with the exception of something called Roman Number 7 (apparently a second volume to an earlier novel called Der Grenzwald – The Border Forest).  Like Musil, von Doderer wrote at enormous length – his most famous novel The Demons is over 750  pages long, generally published in two volumes; his second most acclaimed novel, Der Strudlhofstiege (The Strudelhof Steps, referring to a landmark in Vienna) is something like 900 pages in length. By contrast, Waterfalls is a mere bagatelle – it runs 393 pages in its German paperback edition. 

Waterfalls is a historical novel.  The book concerns the interactions of about a dozen characters between the years 1880 and 1910.  Primarily set in Vienna, the book takes excursions into the Styrian Alps and wanders as far afield as Istanbul and Beirut.  The titular waterfalls are located in Slunj, a village in Croatia.  Doderer seems to have improvised the novel and it is flagrantly formless.  I have no idea why he wrote the book or what, if anything, he intends by the narrative that is, by turns, tedious, very funny, and smugly faux-romantic.  The book has a sort of climax, but it is so highly contrived as to be ridiculous – an appendix to a novel that shows no signs of ending until Doderer finally tires of one of his main characters, a feckless figure that he has mercilessly mocked throughout the book, and kills him off.  Since a death always gives an impression finality, the assassination of one of his main characters, although wholly arbitrary, provides an illusion of form to the novel as does the scene-setting at the thunderous falls at Slunj.  (The man who dies in the waterfall was presumably conceived there during his parent’s honeymoon visit to this renowned tourist attraction – and, so, book has a kind of mechanical structure: it begins and ends at the cataract.)

It’s not worth describing the book’s plot – the story is too diffuse and ramifies in so many directions in such a seemingly capricious manner that the book’s narrative is hard to characterize.  Furthermore, it’s impossible to define any protagonist in the novel.  People come and go.  Doderer is still adding characters and giving them long introductions, complete with backstory, twenty pages before the end of the book.  Readers are likely to experience irritation when Doderer pauses to insert yet another character in the book at a point in the novel so late that it is apparent that this figure will have little or no significance in what we have left to read.  A strong sense of aimless futility haunts this book and, in the end, the reader is likely to throw up his or her hands and ask “What’s the point?”  This is unfortunate because Doderer himself is an amusing presence in the book – he appears on just about every page as “ye olde storyteller”, disgorging ironic or witty (if often snide) comments about his characters or the situations in which they find themselves.  Doderer is anything but absent from his book – he’s not like the divine all-knowing narrator that Joyce hypothesizes “paring his fingernails” abstractly, withholding all intervention in human affairs, and indifferent to the sufferings of his creatures.  To the contrary, Doderer epitomizes chatty omniscience – he knows everything about everything and the reader needn’t fear that he will keep this knowledge to himself.  Rather, he interlards his seemingly random plot with lengthy asides, bestows snotty nicknames on his characters – one is the Lulusch (“big lummox”), another is called Runzel (“the wrinkle”), another he simply dubs Dickerl (“fatty”) – and, generally, shows overt contempt for everyone in his book.  Doderer indulges in meta-fictional ploys – he reminds readers of what he told them before by citing the page number.  (This is pretty unhelpful because he generally adverts back to a comment that was so astounding that the reader readily recalls it; Doderer would be more helpful if he would remind his readers from time to time about minor characters who keep surfacing later in the book, names with which the reader is familiar although can’t recall accurately who the hell this personage is supposed to be.)  Doderer’s constant interference with his characters and their fictional fates would be amusing if the writer weren’t so smug and despicable.  Doderer was a pervert and, for a time, a Nazi enthusiast and there’s nothing about his biography that is inspiring – in fact, the more you know about the man, the more the reader is likely to regard him as a pathological case.  Some writers are inevitably smug – John Updike is an example in English as is Saul Bellow although to a much lesser extent.  A tone of smug detachment can be effective when it’s not irritating.  But with Doderer, as well as Updike, the author’s blandly smug attitude toward his characters, simply annoys the reader.  Furthermore, Doderer was such a wormy personality that it’s hard to imagine that he had anything to be smug about.  He’s obviously highly intelligent and his prose is fantastically complex with a formidable and brilliantly inpenetrable surface, but the man is a poseur – one has the sense that the huge fictional apparatus of The Waterfalls of Slunj is devised to deliver certain sexually perverse frisson, exciting to the author but of minimal interest to most modern readers.  (Of course, I am commenting on one of von Doderer’s ostensibly minor novels and have no idea whether his huge and much more famous books suffer from the same defects as Waterfalls – it is hard to imagine that they are much different, however, and excerpts that I have read from The Demons and The Strudelhof Stairs seem similar.  Doderer’s failings are baked-into his books – at least, this is how it seems to me, particularly since the writer makes himself the center of attention in these narratives.)

Broadly speaking, Waterfalls follows the fortunes of a large group of characters, more or less, involved with a manufacturing firm called Clayton & Powers.  This enterprise makes machines of some kind that have agricultural applications – probably tractors.  (I’m sure Doderer explains what the company makes somewhere but it didn’t register with me, probably because I didn’t fully understand the German technical vocabulary.)  The firm is owned by Robert Clayton, a vigorous Englishman with an imperialist bent.  The book begins with the 27-year old Clayton meeting a young woman whom he will marry and, then, establish in an opulent villa in Vienna.  Clayton’s business is international and there is a vigorous market for whatever his company makes in the somewhat under-developed eastern part of the Austria-Hungarian empire.  Clayton & Powers evolves to be headquartered in Vienna, where most of the book’s events take place.  On his honeymoon, Robert Clayton and wife, Harriet, tour beautiful Croatia where they are impressed by the waterfalls at Slunj.  These are a series of cascades divided by pinnacles of rock on which there are perched mills, apparently for sawing wood and grinding grain.  The mills form a sort of crenelation along the crest of the roaring precipice and they are linked by wooden catwalks. The book’s only palpable structure is that it begins and ends at the titular waterfalls.

Robert Clayton’s liaison with his markets in the Balkans is a fellow named Chwostic, an engineer but also jack-of-all-trades.  After a dozen pages establishing the mercantile situation and locating the villa where the Clayton’s live in Vienna, the narrative shifts to Chwostic or Pepi as he is sometimes called.  Pepi/Chwostic is poor and an immigrant to Vienna from the eastern provinces.  He has a friend named Milohnic, a Serb, who ends up in the hotel business.  Most significantly, Chwostic’s poverty has forced him to live within Vienna’s red-light district and he shares his flat with two hard-working whores, Finy and Feverl, ruined farm girls from Hungary.  The first hundred pages in the book involve Chwostic’s adventures, most of which concern exchanging his brothel-apartment for a better apartment previously occupied by a dentist and his wife in a more upscale neighborhood.  The dentist’s wife is involved in a longstanding affair with the tax lawyer, Eptinger, counsel on retainer to Clayton & Powers.  The dentist’s wife has a child with Eptinger, a little girl called Monica.  One day, after Chwostic has moved into his new digs, the toddler, Monica, falls into the Danube canal and is saved by Finy and Feverl who are picnicking nearby and both of whom, as a result of their rural upbringing, are vigorous swimmers.  As a reward for their valor, the two whores end up employed as milkmaids on a huge estate in Hungary owned by a fat man named, appropriately enough, Globus.  In this book, everyone is related to everyone else and many plot developments involve someone having an accommodating uncle in some other part of the Empire.  Doderer, in an aside, tells us that he no longer has any narrative need for Finy and Feverl, in some ways the most attractive characters in the novel, and so he is going to literally “boot” them out of the story.  Doderer admits liking the two whores and so says the will “boot” them out of the plot without using heavy shoes (or boots) but, gently, with soft felt slippers on his feet.  As we will see, boots and shoes will play an important part in the book as it progresses.

A number of years pass – in fact, more than 30 years.  Chwostik is still living in the dentist’s old apartment.  Donald Clayton, a strangely feckless and inert young man, has joined his father’s firm.  Doderer describes various parties and business gatherings, dutifully giving us addresses and itemizing menus.  Donald woos Monica, now grown up and working as a technical writer for a science publishing house.  Monica is educated as an engineer and seems to be the prototype for the modern woman.  Robert Clayton’s wife has died and Chwostik, who is now wrinkled but vigorous, remains single.  A cadre of young men, students in the Gymnasium, are introduced.  These boys are over-achievers and participants in something called the Metternich Club or M. C.   Strangely, the club is devoted to the study of the greatness of the diplomat Metternich, but, in fact, the M.C. is really just a sort of highfalutin’ study group.  The M.C. is led Zdenko Chlamtasch, also of Hungarian origin and a brilliant student.  Doderer describes the curiously ineffectual Donald Clayton as a man of the future – the ultimate bystander or “Mann ohne Eigenschaften” (“man without qualities”); he doesn’t act but is acted upon.  

Monica Bachler, the lady engineer, develops an interest in Donald Clayton.  Clayton is too listless to really pursue her and ignores her blandishments – at one point, she takes off her clothes and lounges around in bed, but Donald seems impervious to her charms.  Having failed to seduce Donald, Monica falls into bed with the gallant and accommodating Chwostik – it’s a one-night stand but remains a precious memory to the old fellow (whom Doderer calls “the Wrinkle”.)  A few dozen pages later, Monica becomes the girlfriend of Robert Clayton, who must now be about 60.  This aspect of the novel is reminiscent of Goethe’s themes in his big, last book Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre.  The most famous feature of that novel is a short story, really a sixty-page novella, called “The Man of Fifty”, detailing an erotic competition between a middle-aged man and his son for a teenage girl.  Doderer sets up a similar rivalry between Robert Clayton, father, and Donald Clayton, son, but the book is too hyper-refined to make much of this somewhat tasteless plot.  Although Donald’s repressed love for Monica is central to some aspects of the novel, there’s no Sturm und Drang – Donald isn’t capable of an emotional response of this kind.

An intricate series of somewhat farfetched erotic complications occupy the book’s core.  A physician named Harbach has been “kept” by an Italian countess when he was a young man.  She pays for his medical education.  Harbach later marries and has several daughters.  His wife is handsome and big – Doderer really likes big, plump women – her girls have long-legs and look a bit like horses.  (We will return to this theme a little later.)  Harbach is a complete cipher, an enigma, although he hangs around the margins for much of the book.  The Harbach girls are courted, ineffectively, by the callow and scholarly members of the Metternich Club.  Zdenko, meanwhile, has been lured into a sexual encounter with Henriette Frehlinger, a fat middle-aged woman with no morals to speak of.  Birds of a feather gather together and Frau Frehlinger is best friends with the equally amoral Monica Bachler.  Zdenko seems to be a surrogate for the author and the narrative involving the affair, or really single statutory rape, involving the middle-aged housewife is the subject of much morose rumination in the book.  Although I think Zdenko represents the young and polymorphously perverse Doderer, the author actually gives himself a cameo in the book – he’s mentioned as part of a crew of reprobates at the Gymnasium that despise members of the M. C. and are, in turn, disdained by them.

Doderer complicates the already complex narrative by adding various ancillary characters who don’t really contribute much to the action – except, of course, there is no action, everything slides by in a paralyzed Proustian fog of parties and recondite business transactions.  Robert Clayton’s deceased wife has relatives in Canada – one of them, Augustus Cunius appears as a would-be member of the M.C.  He’s fat and simply called Dickerl or “Fatty” by Doderer.  There’s a mountain climbing expedition involving Chwostik, Robert, and Monica that is picturesque but leads nowhere.  Zdenko, who spends lots of time playing tennis at the Clayton villa, suspects that Robert Clayton is having an affair with Monica (or, at least, there is an attraction) and he lets this slip to Donald whereupon the younger Clayton stumbles, apparently with dismay.  This turns out to be a crucial moment in the narrative.

Robert Clayton has a sexual rendezvous with Monica at a mountain resort.  Meanwhile, Chwostik and Donald are dispatched on a mission to the East, planning a trip by steamer as far as Beirut and, even, Constantinople – this is recompense for a fateful trip into the middle east thirty years earlier in which the Levantine merchants swindled Robert, someone who is vigorous but not too smart.  Relentlessly, von Doderer adds more and more characters.  Chwostic and Donald are accompanied by Dr. Harbach.  During their travels, their liaison in the Balkan countries is a fellow named Laszlo Putnik.  Putnik is related to the managers of a firm called Putnik and Gollwitzer, perhaps, a business that markets the products manufactured by Clayton.  (Confusingly, however, Putnik is not employed by the Putnik and Gollwitzer but works for a competitor.)  Laszlo Putnik is married, but not married, to the beautiful Margot who is, in turn, the sister of a woman married to business contact in Beirut.  Margot is a very strange character – she hates men and suffers from an erotic disfigurement.  She has a scarlet birthmark, the width of a towel, stretched across her haunches and, apparently, when this is seen by men, they are filled with horror and repelled by her.  (It seems that for this reason Laszlo Putnik has not consummated his marriage with her.)  Margot is carrying on a clandestine love affair with a burly museum security guard – this guy, named Illek, works at a Budapest museum of Roman antiquities that has a locked room full of erotic statuary.  (It’s in this room and Illek’s little office that the couple have their sexual encounters.)  The Clayton entourage includes a conniving fellow named Tibor Gergliffi who stirs up further erotic trouble.  Gergliffi has no real part in any of the narrative, but is an important vehicle for Doderer’s sexual obsessions.  (We will consider this below.) 

It’s pretty clear that the mission to Beirut and Constantinople, as well as the extended trip through the Balkans at the height of the sweltering summer, is a scheme contrived by Robert Clayton to get Donald out of the way so that he can finalize his relationship with Monica – ultimately, he sends Donald a letter announcing his betrothal with Monica.  (She also encloses a note telling poor Donald that she “values their friendship” and hopes it will continue.)  Donald, finally, decides that he must act and, so, he sets up a would-be sexual encounter with the terrifying Margot Putnik.  Margot is thrilled to add another victim’s scalp to her trophies.  She gets Donald into her boudoir and strips down to display her scarlet birthmark, expecting him to be stunned.  Donald is horrified and stands in the dim, humid room gaping at her when suddenly Laszlo Putnik, her husband, appears.  Although Laszlo is digusted by Margot, he feels aggrieved, seizes a fowling piece from over the mantle, and aims it at Donald.  Acting decisively for once in his life, Donald pushes the shot gun aside as it discharges.  Laszlo who intended no actual harm, is horrified; he thought he had unloaded the shotgun after its last use hunting ducks.  He and Donald shake hands and bribe the housekeeper to keep silent about the contretemps, although everyone later whispers about the scandal.  Laszlo uses the event as a basis to divorce Margot who lives happily (or unhappily) ever after with her boyfriend, the security guard in the museum crammed with pornographic knick-knacks.

Running parallel to this account of the adventures of Donald Clayton and his associates is the story of Zdenko.  He has been sent to his Aunt’s estate, apparently in Croatia, basically so that the old lady will have a partner for her card games.  But Zdenko’s aunt, Ada Vukovic, is a chronic alcoholic and, at the estate, she spends all her time “indisposed” due to the booze.  Zdenko goes out riding one day to see the celebrated falls at Slunj – they are only twenty minutes away by horseback.  Zdenko has been brooding over his one-night stand with the depraved Henriette Frehlinger and feels that his youth is now over – he has renounced the childish activities of the Metternich Club.  At the falls, he sees a tall, long-limbed man approaching on the gangway.  Suddenly, a railing on the catwalk gives way and the man falls over the edge.  Of course, the unfortunate man is Donald Clayton who has nothing but miserable luck in this novel.  Donald lands on a protruding rock and doesn’t even get washed over the edge, but, nonetheless, dies “of fright” someone claims – it’s summer and too hot for an autopsy so the cause of death is never really determined.  Chwostic comes to help retrieve the corpse and, then, goes into town to send a telegram to Donald’s father who is disporting himself with Monica Bachler back in Vienna.  At the post office, he runs into an old buddy from his days on brothel-street, a man named Muensterer, now a postal official in Croatia and stationed at Slunj.  (It is characteristic of Doderer that he continues to complicate the story even on its last page.)  Muensterer is the son of Frau Wewerka, a loathsome procurer, who served as a concierge or janitor at the apartment in Vienna that Chwostik shared with the streetwalkers Finy and Feverl (who have, notwithstanding Doderer’s peremptory dismissal appeared once more at an idyllic outdoor banquet on the Globus estate, a place where Clayton & Powers hope to sell tractor equipment.)  And, so, the book ends.

This summary omits about a dozen other characters, some of whom are fairly prominent.  Doderer mercilessly adds new characters right up to the end of the book; the flyleaf of my copy of the novel is covered with lists of characters and the page numbers on which they were introduced.  Illek, Margot’s lover at the Roman pornography museum, is described about 25 pages before the end of the book and, even, given an elaborate backstory – he’s an orphan and former military man whose happiest moment was seeing “enemy” cavalry (fictionally) destroyed during maneuvers.  (Doderer goes so far as to provide us with a description of man’s handwriting.)  A groom on the Vanice estate of Zdenko’s drunk aunt, a teenager named Ivo, is introduced about four pages before Donald goes over the brink of the falls and within ten pages of the book’s last sentence.  Doderer tells us the groom’s nickname (with a digression on how nicknames are formed in Hungarian), some facts about his background, and that he keeps a cardboard box full of money that he has saved, including tips from Zdenko, in a hidden place in the barn that is, nonetheless, well-known to all the other servants, some of whom examine this loot from time to time and keep count of Ivo’s assets.  In fairness to Doderer, there is a sense in which the scheme of the narrative is incomplete – some sources suggest that the Waterfalls is really only the first volume of a bigger book, identified (as I mentioned above) as Roman (that is, “novel”) No. 7.  The second volume of the book, called Der Grenzwald (The Border Forest) exists only in fragments, although these were edited and published in 1967.  

As shown by my plot summary, necessarily incomplete and simplified, the book presents an ungainly sprawl.  Furthermore, it resists interpretation.  Since most of the action takes place in 1910, the reader initially suspects that the book will be about the decadence and decay of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, something like Roth’s Radetzky March or Musil’s monstrous Man without Qualities.  (In Musil’s novel, the characters are connected by committees planning festivities for a jubilee celebration of K.u.K (“Koeniglich und Kaiserlich”) empire of Austria-Hungary coinciding with the old emperor’s fiftieth year in power.  The irony of the book is that the regime that everyone is planning to celebrate will be destroyed in the fires of World War One before the celebration can be mounted).  The image of the mills perched on the precipice of the torrent suggests a world poised on the brink of destruction.  But this is not Doderer’s intent and he makes nothing of the oncoming calamity.  This is puzzling because Doderer has the tendency to index locations to present-day Vienna – his sets, as it were, have both an imperial history under the old regime and a modern post-World War Two identity (at one point, he tells us that a street address has changed, at least, three times since his pen-portrait circa 1910).  I assume the waterfalls somehow signify the eccentric relationship between industry (and economy) and sexual passion – mills make power from the water roaring over cliffs only a few feet from their machinery.  This symbolism seems unavoidable, but I’m not sure that it is intended by Doderer, who, after the continental manner, seems a libertine and takes sexual license for granted – people are very nonchalant in this book about love affairs.  Indicative of Doderer’s refusal to make sense of the events that he has so laboriously contrived is Donald’s death.  At first, we suspect that Zdenko’s visit to the falls may be motivated by a desire to kill himself – he’s been mooning about the Vanice estate for several weeks, baking in the heat.  (Apparently, the Balkans are very, very warm during high summer.)  As he gallops toward the brink of the falls, we wonder whether he will not simply dash into the water and drown in the cataract.  But, Zdenko stops on the edge of the river, hikes around among the mills, and, in fact, draws new courage and will from the spectacle of the torrent plunging past the waterwheels and millwork.  So, does Donald seek his death at the waterfalls?  We have seen him upset by the letters received from his father and Monica about their upcoming nuptials.  But Doderer insists that Donald dies because of a carpentry defect – the joints in the balustrade overlooking the waterfall have become rotten from the spray and are warped.  It’s typical of Doderer to stop his narrative to provide a forensic account of this technical failure in the railing.  Zdenko correlates Donald’s flailing plunge over the edge to his “stumble” in the park at the villa in Vienna when Zdenko’s words inadvertently revealed the love affair between Monica and Robert Clayton – thus, Zdenko thinks that Donald’s death is somehow related to the Englishman’s disappointing and abortive relationship with Monica whom he seems to have loved after his own passionless and immobile manner.  But Doderer will not condone this hypothesis suggesting that it is an artifact of Zdenko’s own erotic torment relating to his one sexual encounter with the fat Frau Frehlinger.  Doderer insists, and recall that he is proudly omniscient, that Donald’s death is a pure accident. And this would be characteristic of the novel: people seem to act without knowing their own motives (although they later agonize to unscramble them) and everything occurs as a result of Fortuna – that is, by sheer coincidence and accident.  

It is an open question whether a novel can be designed to demonstrate over the course of 400 pages that there are no plots, that character does not determine action, and that everything occurs by accident.  This question is, perhaps, frivolous.  In the words of the old Lutheran who was asked whether he believed in infant baptism: “Of course, I’ve seen it done.” 

3.

One book leads to another.  

Before the covid-virus put an end to our book club, we were reading Gogol.  While waiting for copies of Dead Souls to arrive, I xeroxed a famous short story by the Italian writer, Tommaso Landolfi, “Gogol’s Wife”.  This was the last text that my group was supposed to read together – I wish it had been something less rebarbative.  Landolfi translated Gogol into Russian and his short story is an odd anecdote, alleging that Gogol (who was, in fact, unmarried and, probably, homosexual) had kept company with an inflatable sex doll that he later murdered. The story was acclaimed by many critics, including Harold Bloom, but the merits of the tale, a grotesque and unpleasant work, are not eminently clear.  Landolfi wrote about thirty short stories and sketches that have been translated into English and, so, when the Great Books club ceased to meet out of fear that we would infect one another (literature is a kind of infection; Burroughs says that words are a virus from outer space), I undertook to read everything that I could find written by Landolfi.  This was not a quixotic or particularly ambitious undertaking – Landolfi’s ouevre in English consists of three short books containing anecdotes and sketches as well as a couple of mid-sized novellas and a short novel called An Autumn Story.

This latter book appears in English in a translation published by an enterprise called Eridanos Press.  I ordered a used copy of the book and read it with pleasure.  (The story involves a gothic encounter between an Italian guerilla fighter and an elderly aristocrat living in a remote and ruinous manor.  The book is similar, in some ways, to Edgar Alan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and involves madness, hidden crypts, and a deranged young woman.)  Landolfi’s short novel is handsomely printed in a paperback format with a stiff cover with lapels (or a “turn in” cover as it is called in the industry),  that can be used as page markers.  The print is clear, embossed on slightly papyrus-colored leaves and, on the cover of the book, there is a suitably melancholy image by Edvard Munch, I think, showing an unhappy couple.   Within the book, there is a table of other writings published by Eridanos Press, including Pierre Klossowski’s very strange and eerie novella The Baphomet.  (The “Baphomet” is the name for the fiendish demon allegedly conjured by the Knights Templar – it’s described as a disembodied, bearded head.)  I have a copy of The Baphomet somewhere, a book that I’ve skimmed, but not carefully read – Klossowski was a prominent Sadist (here meant as a follower of the Marquis de Sade) and wrote several books of mystical pornography; he’s the brother of the artist Balthus and an authority on the imagery and symbolism of alchemical allegorical prints.  On the evidence of these two books in the Eridanos catalog, it appeared to me that this publishing house specialized in European arcana written by relatively unheralded but accomplished (if eccentric) authors.  This is the sort of the stuff that I enjoy and, so, I endeavored to learn more about the publishing house.  

My copy of An Autumn Story bore an imprint indicating that Eridanos Publishing was located at Hygiene, Colorado.  A little research on the internet showed me that this was an unincorporated post office location somewhere in the high mountains to the west of Boulder.  Eridanos references a river known from Greek mythology.  Hesiod in his Theogony places the river near the Tin and Amber Islands somewhere in Tethys and Oceanus, the torrents that encircle the known world.  Eridanos is associated with dense forests, amber thought to be the embalmed tears of wood dyads, and other semi-precious gems.  Virgil, despairing of locating the actual river, put it in Hades, as one of the streams that bathe that dark and mournful realm.  In the Fifth century after Christ, Nonnus in his Dionysiaca, imagines the celestial serpent Typhon dipping his coils in the Eridanos – Nonnus probably is referring to the constellation as reflected in the gloomy waters of the river.  

Many books published by Eridanos are rare, paperbacks selling for about 150 dollars.  Almost the entire catalog seems to be out of print.  As far as I can determine, Eridanos was an off-shoot of a major New York-based publisher, but seems to have been involved in legal squabbles.  I interpret the company’s business location at Hygiene, Colorado as an effort, perhaps, to defraud creditors – how do you serve process on a company that is nothing more than a post-office box in rural Colorado?

Hygiene is a peculiar place as well.  The village, now non-existent, was founded by the Church of the Brethren, a German Anabaptist sect.  The Brethren established a colony in Boulder County and built a handsome fieldstone church there, adjacent to a tuberculosis sanitarium that they erected on that “magic mountain.”  Because of the TB sanitarium, the community was given the odd, but optimistic name, Hygiene.  The sanitarium, built in the 1880s, is now long gone but its sad cemetery still exists as does the doughty fieldstone chapel, now designated a historic place.  There’s a railroad siding supposedly, a general store in which the post office is located, and, perhaps, six residents as of last census.  

Among books by Pirandello, Alexander Lernet-Holenia, and others, I noticed that Eridanos had published a volume by someone called Heimito von Doderer.  Doderer’s book had the strange title The Waterfalls at Slunj.  “Slunj”?  What does that mean?  I had never heard of von Doderer, notwithstanding some acquaintance with German literature.  When I looked up the book on Amazon, I found that it was apparently rare and that the Eridanos publication, issued in the mid-1990's in a handsome edition, was very expensive –something like $200 for a paperback.  Of course, a book that you can’t obtain always exerts a siren spell.  

I mentioned the novel to a very well-read friend apropos my interest in the Eridanos Press. To my complete surprise, he told me that he owned a copy of the book and that it was in his basement.  Apparently, my friend had purchased a library copy when the book was deaccessioned – probably twenty years ago, had stacked the book among hundreds of others in his storage, and hadn’t read it.  It seems that he paid something like fifty cents for the hardback book bound in library plastic when our local Carnegie library sold the the volume at a fundraising event. (The library edition was published in the United States by Harcourt, Brace & World in a first American imprint dated 1966 – I wonder if Harcourt, Brace & World is the firm that calved to produce Eridanos.)  I ordered a copy of the book in German, something that was easy to accomplish, but had to wait several weeks for the paperback to be shipped over Tethys and Oceanus to me.  In the meantime, my friend read much of the book and provided me with a report by email.  He said that the book was written in an interesting style, contained some remarkable passages, but was too complex and disorganized to be intelligible – he gave up on reading the volume at about page 200.  But my friend, knowing of my interest in the book, brought me his copy so that I could try the novel.  Later, I received the German paperback edition and ceased reading the English version except as a backup to the German, written in a very rococo and intricate style that I understood only imperfectly.

There is another association that I record here: one of my earliest memories is of a dark wood rotunda, filled with people, singing and lights, and my mother beside me with another female relative on what seems, now, to be a pew, also carved from burnished cherry-colored wood.  I believe this memory reflects a visit to Ocean Grove Great Auditorium.  Ocean Grove was revival camp founded in the late 19th century and located beyond some sinister-looking salt-water canals to the south of the Asbury Park boardwalk.  (For several years, until I was about six, my family lived in Wannamassa, a suburb about five miles from the Jersey Shore and adjacent to Asbury Park).  The Ocean Grove Great Auditorium, one of the most remarkable all-wood structures of the Victorian era, was built by the United Church of Brethren during their heyday – a tent city for revivals stood around the great auditorium.  The Brethren, of course, are the religious sect that founded Hygiene, Colorado, the place were the Eridanos Press was said to have its headquarters.  

4.

I’ve accused Heimito von Doderer of being smug and a pervert.  Now, I need to prove those accusations to which I will add another – Hiemito von Doderer’s rococo prose style is fundamentally inhuman.

First, Doderer is insufferably smug: in an aside, the author notes that he has “spread” his net and, more or less, accidently caught Finy and Feverl in his narrative web.  Viewing the two former prostitutes as specimens, Doderer says that before “liberating” them (that is, dismissing them again from the plot), we should have a “bit of a look at them.”  And, so, Doderer tells us that they have actually become more handsome and “prettier” now thirty years after their exploits as street walkers in Vienna.  They look “less vulgar” but still constitute “a tandem”.  (Here Doderer is reverting to earlier imagery in which he described the women as “little Trojan horses” – this is part of the author’s obsession with the equine that I view as a conspicuous part of his perversity.  For instance, when he says the women are “a tandem” he is referring to the way that they would be harnessed to a carriage or wagon.)  And, so, he writes:

They still constituted a tandem.  That is to say, each had remained identical not so much with herself as with the other, which is by no means always the case with doubles, as the lamentable example of Clayton Brothers had recently demonstrated in the most emphatic manner.  The critics will say, quite rightly, that the author has not succeeded in “characterizing each of these figures and distinguishing them from one another.”  It is not that the author has not succeeded: he has not even tried!  What on earth should he “characterize” about these two drabs!  Look, I haven’t been able to tell them apart from the very beginning.  I never knew what either looked like, only what they looked like together.

This rhetorical address to the reader is unusual in the book, but not uncharacteristic.  The form of Doderer’s expostulations owes not a little to the prose of another famous Viennese writer, Sigmund Freud.  One of Freud’s typical persuasive strategies is to identify an objection to his argument likely to be felt by a careful reader; Freud, then, states the objection, usually more forcefully that the reader might, and, then, proceeds to refute that criticism or show that it is insignificant to the general thrust of his argument.  (“Clayton Brothers,” in the excerpt above, refers to the fact that father Robert Clayton looks so similar to his son, Donald, and, indeed, appears so youthful, that the two men are referred to as “brothers” – the nickname “Clayton Brothers” is also redolent of the book’s mercantile aspect: the phrase sounds like the name of business firm.)

I have cited this text, however, to demonstrate Doderer’s Olympian indifference to his characters, a nonchalance about their miseries and joys, that he expresses with a sort of rhetorical smirk.  The text above is quoted in the 1966 translation by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser – a translation into a particularly irritating “tally-ho” sort of affected British upper-crust idiom.  Although Doderer is intolerably smug, his Austrian-German is not as gratuitously nasty as represented by Wilkins and Kaiser.  For instance, Doderer doesn’t call his two former streetwalkers “drabs”, a particularly opprobrious British term for worn-out prostitutes.  The word that Doderer uses is much more neutral: Menschen – that is, just “people”. 

Integral to Doderer’s depiction of Finy and Feverl is his insistence on their “horsiness”.  This equine motif runs as a persistent current through the entire book.  References to horses occur hundreds of times in the novel and, surely, represent some kind of obsession that Doderer displays, more or less, inadvertently – the reader has the sense the author can’t help himself.  

On the first page of the novel, Robert Clayton meets his wife while riding his horse through the country side.  She is also astraddle a horse that is moving with a hopsenden Gallop (rendered as “canter” in the translation.)  Finy and Feverl are “cute little Trojan horses.”  Paul Harbach’s daughters have long legs (like horses) and walk with a “cantering stride.”  Similarly, both Robert and Donald Clayton are characterized by their long horse-like legs.  When Monica Bachler, during her sexual liaison with Robert Clayton, watches the older man as he sleeps, she (or Doderer) notes that he has a sleek “dry head” – a term from horse-trading that means that an animal has no excrescences, tumors, or sores on its head.  “Fatty” (Augustus Cunius) dislikes his riding lessons.  However, when a runaway horse is confronted in the Prater Park in Vienna, he subdues the beast and mounts it, riding the horse back to where it can be surrendered to authorities.  Margot Putnik’s birthmark disfiguring her hips and genital area is described in German as a Brandmal – that is, a brand of the kind that would be used to mark a horse.  Tibor Gergleffi’s business machinations in the implement trade are described as “horse-trader tricks”.  Ada Vukovic, Zdenko’s alcoholic aunt, is said to have a very nice “ass” for riding horseback and, in fact, to the dismay of the local Croatians, she doesn’t ride side-saddle but straddles her steed.  (A big ass is said to be a prerequisite for good horsemanship.  Doderer liked big, heavy-set women.  Two days before his marriage, he placed a personal ad in a Viennese periodical expressing interest in an erotic tryst with an “Israelite lady (Viennese) and about 45 years old of an unusually strong, corpulent, voluptuous, and generally powerful and broad stature” – certainly, someone who might be a fine horsewoman.  Doderer’s working title for the book was “Fat Women”, a name that he fortunately discarded.)  

The most remarkable example of Doderer’s unseemly interest in the equine arises in connection with Illek.  This minor character is the security guard at the museum in Bucharest with the secret gallery full of pornographic figurines.  As he exits an empty tavern (called a Csardas in Hungarian), the former imperial soldier sees something lying in the dust on the street.  Illek, who is carrying on a clandestine affair with the sexually disfigured Margot, first thinks that the object discarded in the roadway is a Hufeisen (a “horse-shoe”).  But, on closer inspection, the thing turns out to be a Stiefelabsatz (that is, a broken-off boot heel).  Illek fantasizes that he is this melancholy object: either a horse shoe or the heel of a boot and, in fact, sheds bitter tears over recognizing himself prostrate in the dust and helpless.  It’s not the fault of women, Illek acknowledges, but rather his own miserable destiny to lay in the street’s filth, broken and discarded.  Whether this bizarre Kafkesque interlude is intended to be funny is unclear to me.  What is evident, however, is that the figure of the horse-shoe/boot-heel fuses two of Doderer’s sexual obsessions – human beings are fantasized as ponies ridden by women with big asses and, presumably, flogged by them; these masochistic impulses are materialized in the desire to be under a woman’s heel, that is, to literally become the heel on her boot.  The artifact of the discarded boot-heel lying in dust trampled by marching columns of soldiers and tourists is melancholy because it is detached from the source of its erotic fascination – if the heel were the shoe of a powerful striding horse or reunited with the woman’s boot from which it has broken, the poor little homunculus would be happy, perhaps, even blissful.  (Illek’s masochistic perception of himself is parallel to Doderer’s depiction of his authorial stance, similarly and bizarrely masochistic as noted below.)

The reader might regard these surmises as fantastic.  But, in fact, this reading can be easily supported by evidence in the novel.  Tibor Gergleffi, the Hungarian attache to a firm selling agricultural implements, is a boot fetishist.  The character is introduced late in the book and seems superfluous – he’s not present at the climax at the falls and doesn’t really interact with any of the other characters except in a mercantile, trading context.  Gergleffi is inserted into the book so that Doderer can enjoy describing the desires of a man sexually obsessed with boots.  In fact, Gergleffi likes a certain kind of boot, “little boots” (an inclination that allows Doderer to invoke Caligula or “little boots”, the Latin nickname for the infamous Roman emperor.)  These”little boots”should be worn by girls in peasant garb.  In fact, Gergleffi sets up a liaison with a bar-maid, Marika, in which he sends to their place of assignation not only a cute, revealing peasant costume, but, also, a pair of specially made boots.  Doderer advises us that Gergleffi, himself, would not wear boot during the encounter but would be “between her boots.”  Later, when the business associates retire to Globus’ country estate (where Finy and Feverl have their hermitage), Gergleffi is quick to devise sexual encounters with the local women, whom, of course, he requires to wear their work boots to bed.  This passage in the novel culminates (I don’t want to say “climaxes”) with a description of the men’s boots worn in this vicinity of Hungary, a plethora of shoe-ware that disappoints Gergleffi who is a sexual specialist in lady’s feet.  (Doderer was bisexual and his orientation to the boots on display worn by the local lads is ambiguous.)  

As the book progresses toward its end, Doderer seems incapable of avoiding sexually suggestive (and perverse) situations.  This aspect of the book, perhaps, is embodied by the business transactions that the author rather laboriously details –we are given details as to tax consequences of acquisitions and rebates offered in Hungary for payment in cash.  As far as I can determine, Clayton and company are selling tractors – that is, traction devices.  The traction applied by these machines has two equivalents in the novel – the influence of sexual inclinations that drive people together and the traction exerted by the falls.  At the end of the book, all events take place under the magnetic influence of the falls – the roar of the cataracts sounds as a basso profundo that can be heard miles away from the actual precipice over which the river pours.  The falls, as it were, exercise traction, pulling the characters to them.  However, the prevalence of perverse sexual imagery accumulating toward the end of the novel casts a lurid shadow over all of its proceedings.  For instance, we expect Zdenko to be seduced by his alcoholic aunt with the big horse-delighting ass.  Furthermore, when Zdenko goes riding with the groom Ivo, the context implies that some kind of sexual encounter will occur between the two of them, an interaction, undoubtedly, involving whips, leather, and boots.  (Neither happens – but, I have the sense that The Waterfalls of Slunj as a part of the larger Roman No. 7 may be setting up these encounters for the book’s continuation in Der Grenzwald, the next installment of the narrative.)  As it stands, Doderer’s coy references to sexual perversion seem to me to be subtly harassing to the reader.  Doderer is drawing us into a web of sexual perversion for his own purposes since many of these aspects of the book seem extraneous (or unnecessary) to its other themes – Gergleffi, as I have noted, exists in the book only to dramatize certain sexual themes that don’t necessarily cohere with other aspects of the novel.

On the hundredth anniversary of Heimito von Doderer’s birth, the German magazine of record, Der Spiegel published an article about the author focusing primarily on his flirtation with the Nazi party during the Anschluss and his sexual perversion.  Doderer maintained a secret diary and this was made public on his centenary.  From the diary, it’s clear that the writer’s sex life was polymorphous, perverse, and intricate.  In his early youth, Doderer was initiated into sado-masochistic sex by one of his tutors.  He also seems to have had liaisons with several older women.  During World War One, Doderer was captured and ended up hewing wood in Siberia at a prison camp.  Somehow, his old instructor and first sexual partner ended-up in the camp with him and the two of them continued their SM relationship in captivity.  Doderer later married.  However, he maintained in his home a “pillar of martyrdom” to which he would fetter his wife for erotic floggings.  (Ever a Viennese gentleman, Doderer owned an elegant collection of whips fashioned from silk and satin so that no one would be injured in these flagellant activities.)  The degree to which Doderer was a practicing boot fetishist is unclear to me.  

Illek’s fantasy about becoming a discarded boot-heel qua horse-shoe is mirrored by a peculiar self-reflexive passage in the middle of the book.  Doderer is brooding about Donald’s failure as a character in the novel.  The author repeats, as he has earlier told us, that he wants to get rid of the big lummox.  A hundred pages earlier Doderer kicked out of his book a repulsive concierge, Frau Wewerka, and the author says that he really should do the same thing to Donald.  Donald is a disappointment to his creators, both Doderer, who invented him, and the indefatigable Robert Clayton, his biological father in the novel.  Donald is inept and impotent. Doderer despises him for his inability to consummate sexually his stalled relationship with the attractive Monica Bachler.  By contrast, Robert Clayton is one of the sons of that “honored and beloved by all” island whose inhabitants have not only conquered the Matterhorn but India and most of Africa as well – in other words, the aggressive industry of the British empire is epitomized by Robert Clayton but has fallen into decadence in his feckless son.  Robert, half unconsciously, contrives to get Donald out of the way by sending him to inspect the firm’s operations in England so that he can seduce Monica, his son’s girlfriend.  Here is how Doderer describes the scene:

Robert told Donald one evening, after dinner, in the hall (to go to the factory in England).  Augustus was also present.  Kindly imagine ourselves seated, microscopically small, with snail’s eyes on the end of long sticks, on the chimney piece (there has been no fire in the hearth for some time.)  We observe nothing at all, so far as Donald is concerned.

Doderer describes himself as tiny creature with eyes mounted on tall stems, crouching in the cold soot of the hearth as he observes the scene.  This is certainly a bizarre description of the author as narrator as strange as Illek’s fantasy that he is a lost boot-heel prostrate in the street’s dust.  In fact, I don’t know any other writer who would describe his involvement with his characters in such an inhuman and degrading way.  Here is the German:

Wir sitzen (ganz klein gedacht) mit Stiel-Augen auf dem Kamin, in welchem nun schon lang kein Feuer mehr brannte.

As is customary, the actual German is less ostentatious than Eithne and Kaiser’s translation into pseudo-Victorian prose.  (This is how Thomas Mann is also customarily translated).  The German says:

We sit (think: very small) with stilt-eyes in the hearth in which, for a long time, no fire has burned.

The German doesn’t have a microscope.  Doderer represents himself as, notionally, “very small” but he’s not microscopic.  He has eyes mounted on stalks, like a snail or crustacean.  (The German focuses on the periscope shape of the eyes and not on the species of the creature.  Of course, the hearth, symbolizing erotic love, at Robert’s mansion has long been extinguished, but the flames are about to be re-ignited.  

What other author would picture himself as a tiny creature with eyes on stilts peering out of the ash of a fireplace?  Doderer shows himself to be, in effect, wholly alien and inhuman.

For hundreds of pages, Doderer broods about how he can move Donald to action.  Of course, his brooding takes the form of the author’s characteristic sexual obsessions.  Doderer contemplates giving the “boot” to Donald.  He should kick him in the ass with his boots.  

This leads me to this surmise: Donald didn’t accidentally fall from the gangway into the waterfall at Slunj.  He was pushed, or more accurately, hurled over the foaming precipice by a boot applied squarely to his behind.