On a Tale of the Christ

 On a Tale of The Christ

You don’t know anything about Patrick Roth.  Most likely, you’ve never heard of this German writer.  To my knowledge, only one of his books has been translated into English.  However, in his native country, Roth is important enough to be taught in literature classes in German Gymnasium.  Suhrkamp Verlag, a leading publisher in Germany, produces volumes of significant works of literature suitable for use in High School or Junior College courses – this is the BasisBibliothek series.  (The volumes come with numbered paragraphs for ready citation, a brief biography and bibliography of the author, notes as to unusual words and phrases as well as more detailed notes appended at the end of book as passages requiring explication; the books also sample critical reactions to the work and attempt a modest appraisal of the text’s significance.  These small format volumes are similar to the books Norton publishes in this country for College readers.)  Roth’s Riverside, the writer’s first novel, exists in a BasisBibliothek edition and, apparently, is widely read in German schools.  Suhrkamp originally published the book as a first edition in 1991, a slender volume under a handsome cover showing Caravaggio’s portrait of John the Baptist.  The teaching version of the book is cheap and nicely annotated and this was the edition that I read.  

Patrick Roth is a curious figure – he was an expatriate and lived in Southern California between 1978 and 2012 when he returned to Germany.  (He is now apparently a lecturer in literature at Heidelberg.)  During his 34 years in the United States, he wrote about a dozen books, all of them in his native language.  A cinephile, Roth studied film in Paris and, then, was granted a stipend to study at UCLA.  He enrolled in the film studies program at that school and, in fact, directed a short film in 1980 based on a story by Charles Bukowski, “The Killers”.  Roth seems to have worked as a correspondent for various German periodicals covering the Hollywood scene.  Although his stipend was for a one year period, he remained in the LA area, specifically Sherman Oaks, for 34 years.  You Tube videos and other information suggest that he probably spent two or three months a year back in Germany during that period.

Arts are state-supported in Germany.  German writers are subsidized to produce radio plays: so-called Hoerspiele.  Generally, these radio-plays are presented by small casts or feature monologues.  Roth supported his residency in Los Angeles by reporting on the American film industry – he interviewed film-makers and directors and free-lanced articles to the German press.  In his spare time, Roth wrote several radio plays produced in his native country.  Riverside, written in the context of Hoerspiele, has many features in common with a radio play.  The book is relatively short – about 100 pages – composed, almost entirely, in dialogue.  There are a few laconic descriptions outside of the speeches comprising the book, but these passages read like stage-description.  My guess is that the book began as a radio-play but became simply too long and complex for that form.  Nonetheless, Riverside shows many of the features of Hoerspiele – it has only three characters and, when description is required, the text uses extended poetic monologues, sometimes three or four pages long.  The form is classically Aristotelian, maintaining unities of place and time – events take place in real time at a single location, a desert cave in the wilderness, a place described by Roth in an interview about the book as being modeled on Zabriskie Point in California’s Death Valley.  (Zabriskie Point is significant to Roth as the location where Antonioni’s film of that name was shot.)

Riverside belongs to a genre once popular, but without critical honor – these are books that purport to supplement the Gospels.  One might think that four synoptic gospels would be more than adequate, but, from time to time, writers have presumed to write fictions deploying biblical characters in cameo appearances, more or less, to impart prestige to otherwise rather ordinary historical romances.  In English, the most noteworthy example of this kind of novel is Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur, A Tale of the Christ , a best-seller in 1880 and a favorite source-text for the film industry.  (The first adaptation of the novel was in 1912, followed by big budget extravaganzas in 1926 and 1960.)  The Polish writer, Henyrik Sienkiewicz wrote a similar historical novel exploiting New Testament characters in 1895, Quo Vadis.  This book was adapted to the screen in version starring Debra Kerr in 1950 – Jesus is represented in the Hollywood movie by a radiant beam of white light.  Quo Vadis was first covertly adapted to the stage in a play written in 1895, The Sign of the Cross – a work with a plot suspiciously similar to the Polish novel.  (It’s unclear whether The Sign of the Cross is based on Quo Vadis or merely very similar in plot – a commercially fortuitous accident, in other words.)  Cecil B. DeMille bought the rights to The Sign of the Cross and produced a suitably tawdry spectacle based on the story in 1932 – Claudette Colbert bathes in ass milk and naked women are mauled by crocodiles in the Colosseum.  (The pre-Code film was so entertainingly offensive that it inspired the formation of the Catholic League of Decency.)  The Swedish writer, Par Lagerkvist, also specialized in this genre – his most famous novel, Barabbas was adapted into a movie on the epic scale in 1953 by Alf Sjoberg and, then, in 1960 in a version starring properly bankable American stars shot at Cinecitta Studios near Rome and directed by Richard Fleischer.  I cite these books and film-adaptations because they are obviously precedents to Riverside and because Roth clearly is aware of this tradition and writes within its context.  

Riverside concerns two brothers Andreas and Tabeas dispatched by the vestigial Christian community to collect stories about Jesus Christ.  Christ has been recently crucified and the two young men’s project is to interview people who came in contact with the savior.  To this end, they seek the cave of a leprous hermit, Diastasimos.  The leper’s cave is a hollow high above a desert wadi and, when the two young men reach the hermitage, it is raining violently in the wasteland.  The novel, devised in four chapters, reports the dialogue between the three protagonists while sheltering in the cave during the deluge.  (Roth likes rainfall – a deluge of Biblical proportions occurs in his short-story cycle Starlite Terrace published in 2003.  In interviews, he claims that the rainstorm is based on scenes in Kurosawa’s first film, Sanjuro Sugato released in 1943.  This is a showy, if dishonest allusion to a rare film.  In fact, the rainstorm that forces the characters together in Riverside is an echo of the torrential rain that falls in Rashomon and that continues while the divergent stories about the rape of the woodcutter’s wife and his murder are told.  Roth shows an anxiety of influence in not citing Rashomon as his model – Rashomon, of course, has a structure similar to the Gospels in that it relies upon four synoptic versions of the same events.)

The first chapter begins with an enigmatic description: the leper Diastasimos uses a ladder to hang a garment high above the floor of his cave.  It is unclear why he does this – particularly because we don’t know that the character is a leper when this action is described.  Andreas and Tabeas come to the cave where Diastasimos is squatting by his fire.  Roth crams the novel with various literary and philosophical illusions in the pedantic German manner – for instance, the cave of the leper is also Plato’s cave in which the Ideas are only dimly descried as shadows on the wall.  The two Christians have heard that Jesus came to the cave just before his crucifixion and they are gathering testimony as to Christ’s last days – thus, they want to interview the leper.  Diastasimos is an ornery character, nursing a grudge against Jesus because he was not healed during his encounter with Christ.  He disputes the validity of the written word as set against verbal witness.  And he distrusts the Christian narrative because of its unfairness to Judas, someone that he seems to admire.  Instead of telling the lads about his encounter with Christ, he describes how he learned that he was leprous, discovering lesions on his shoulder and torso while sharpening a sickle.  As a good Jew, Diastasimos went to the Temple in Jerusalem where he bought dove for sacrifice, planning to pray that he flesh be made clean again.  With the bad luck that characterizes figures in these sorts of narratives, the leper arrives at the temple just as a riot takes place, unrest that results in the Romans killing many people.  Indeed, a specific Roman centurion whips Diasastimos with a leather scourge threaded with copper shards and exposes his lesions.  In a scene worthy of the cinema, everyone recoils from the unclean protagonist and he staggers away from the massacre, escaping when many others are killed.  

In the second part of the book, the leper narrates his encounter with Jesus.  The Savior is making his way to Jerusalem for Passover.  Night is falling and Jesus with Judas and John climb the steep hillside in the wadi to where they see a fire burning.  It is Diastasimos in his cave.  Roman troops are abroad, searching for Jewish rebels and John is afraid Jesus will be captured.  Jesus is not afraid of the Leper and doesn’t seem to regard him as “unclean” – the others, of course, are afraid of contagion.  Jesus seizes Diastasimos by the shoulder, the first person who has dared to touch the sick man since the first display of his symptoms.  The leper asks Jesus to be healed but nothing happens.  Apparently, the sick man lacks faith.  Jesus explains his failure (or refusal) to heal the leper by telling a parable about each human being being divided into a bright and dark half – Diastasimos represents the darkness.  This imagery is coordinated with the discovery of a fire burning in the wasteland some distance from the leper’s cave.  This bonfire seems to be a Roman sentry post.  Judas hatches the plan to descend from the cave and boldly approach the fire.  Jesus will be burdened with a wooden threshold, a piece of carved timber inexplicably laying around the leper’s grotto.  John and Judas will claim that Jesus is their slave and, by this dissembling, they will evade the Roman sentries.  

This plan is put into motion in the third chapter.  Judas, John and Jesus descend from the cave in the darkness and approach the sentry-fire.  Diastasimos creeps down the hill behind them to witness their encounter with the Romans.  At the fire, we find the Roman centurion who flogged Diastasimos (exposing his leprosy) in the Temple.  The Roman centurion as a sinister advisor who immediately senses that the slave trudging toward the flames heavily burdened with the wooden threshold is, in fact, the Jewish Messiah for whom they have been searching.  After some dialogue next to the blazing watch-fire, it becomes clear that the centurion is convinced that Jesus is lurking in the shadows, pretending to be a mere slave.  Jesus drops the heavy piece of wood and Judas begins to savagely flog him.  As Judas scourges the fallen Christ, the centurion sees that the man writhing on the ground is covered with leprous sores.  Somehow, Jesus has become Diastasimos.  The centurion raises the fallen man and embraces him.  At that moment, all distinctions between characters seem to collapse.  Diastasimos who is both Christ and Leper, both inside the scene and observer, finds that his leprosy has been healed – his skin is clean and smooth.

The epilogue to this story is short.  Diastasimos has been healed by his recounting of this story.  He retreats into the darkness.  Andreas follow him to the back of the cave where there is a trough of water in which Diastasimos is washing a sickle. Andreas recalls how he would bring his father’s garments to him when he was a little boy.  Suddenly, he realizes that Diastasimos is his father.  In the firelight, the young man confirms that the Leper’s skin is unblemished and that he has been healed.

Roth embeds all sorts of allusions to Biblical texts in the story.  His prose uses short fragmentary sentences at inflection points in which high emotion is required – the leper speaks in dithyrambs and the text has some of the ecstatic energy of Nietzshe’s Zarathustra.  Everything is worked out in a stylized and precise manner.  For instance, the opening images in the book invoke the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water; similarly, the last sentences are symmetrical with the beginning – again the four elements occur.  The revelation that Andreas and Tabeas are Diasastimos’ sons seems unmotivated and implausible, but plausibility is not Roth’s strong point and he seems determined to cram as many signs and wonders into the story as possible.  Clearly, Jesus’ bearing of the wooden threshold simulates the burden of the cross and, when Judas savagely scourges Christ (to show that this man couldn’t possibly be the Messiah), his later betrayal of Jesus is prefigured – Judas exists to harm Christ so that the god-man can perform his mission. 

Critics disagree in their evaluation of Riverside.  Many thought the book inspiring and brilliant.  Others condemned the whole affair as tendentious and superfluous – this is the school of thought that regards four Gospels as more than enough.  Although I can’t exactly measure the timbre of the prose, some Germans thought that the self-consciously archaic diction was vulgar and pretentious.  Roth is an enthusiastic admirer of Carl Jung and, indeed, has been associated with various Jung societies in southern California and the novel certainly traffics in Jungian archetypes – for instance, the four elements at the outset and ending of the book and the figure of Diasastimos who embodies the dual nature of human beings: half light and half dark, half clean and half diseased.  (The name means something like “one who persists in a dual nature” and this odd Greek name for a Hebrew is mirrored by the English title to the German novel, “Riverside” referring to the hymn refrain “down by the riverside.”)

Roth subtitled Riverside as a Christusnovelle.  He, then, wrote two other books, completing the so-called Christus-trilogy.  In 1993, Roth published Johnny Shines oder Die Wiedererdeckung der Toten (Johnny Shines or the Resurrection of the Dead).  This was followed by Corpus Christi (1995). Johnny Shines is set in the present and involves a preacher’s son who steals a corpse and tries to resurrect the dead body in the wastelands of the Mojave Desert – the frame story takes place in jail where Johnny, imprisoned for his crimes, speaks with a woman who turns out to be his mother and who explains his obsessions on the basis of childhood abuse inflicted on him.  Corpus Christi is a return to historical fiction and involves the story of Thomas Didymas (that is, “doubting” Thomas).  Roth hangs each novel on situations that arise in films that he admires.  The setting of Riverside is clearly drawn from the scenes in Ben Hur involving the “cave of the lepers” – Ben Hur’s mother and sister have become lepers and live in a spectral cavern with other disfigured and miserable victims of the disease.  Roth also claims that a central aspect of Riverside is derived from Kurosawa’s 1945 crime film Men who tread the Tiger’s Tail – this is the encounter with Roman centurion at the bonfire.  Johnny Shines is suspended on narrative scaffolding taken from John Ford’s Western, The Man who shot Liberty Valence. Corpus Christi  is supposedly based on Kurosawa’s film Redbeard, a movie about a virtuous doctor in Meiji era Japan.  (The doctor is suspected of heresy because he dares to adopt Western medical practices in mid-19th century Japan.)  These novels also may be characterized as Midrash – that is, the Jewish exegetical practice of elaborating on Biblical stories to tease out additional significance in the narratives.   

Movies are mythology for Roth.  Movie stars are the equivalents of pagan gods and goddesses.  Roth deploys references to films the way that Greek and Roman writers allude to mythology.  This tendency on Roth’s part derives, I think, from his predilection for Jungian analysis. Similarly, Christian mythology (and I’m not sure that Roth qualifies as a “Believer”) affords us access to Jungian archetypes, particularly those related to redemptive suffering and the resurrection of the dead.  Similarly, films and movie stars are thresholds opening into “depth psychology” – that is, providing the writer with a basis to invoke a Hollywood (or film) mythology that can represent, in shorthand, as it were, various psychic dilemmas.  This tendency to treat scripture as film and film as scripture in the context of myth-making is evident in Roth’s later book, Starlite Terrace – so far as I can determine, the only novel-length writing by the author that has been translated into English.   

Starlite Terrace is a short book assembling four short stories.  The stories are linked by characters, themes, and location – the titular Starlite Terrace, a low-rent apartment building in Sherman Oaks.  The author, who appears, more or less, as himself, narrates the stories in the first person.  However, Roth isn’t a protagonist and his role is that of observer, or, perhaps, chronicler.  The stories are simply written but very dense with incident and allusion.  Roth packs the book with recondite film references and gossip, much of it scandalous, along the lines of Kenneth Anger’s compilation of lurid movie rumor in his book Hollywood Babylon.  Each of the four narratives focuses on a central figure.  These characters are uniformly hapless, leading grotesque or forlorn lives.  Much of the action revolves around a delicatessen named Noah’s.  Roth isn’t subtle – in broad terms, his book is about the great flood, called a Sintflut (“Sin-flood”) in German, punishment inflicted by God on a corrupt humanity.  Throughout the book, it rains incessantly and apocalypse by nuclear war figures prominently in two of the stories.  Although one of the characters is a fundamentalist Christian, Roth’s book chronicles antediluvian lives – that is, people who have been damaged or complicit in the evil and violence that surrounds them.  God destroyed his creation because it was corrupt and its people violent.  In this book, Roth explores humanity before the advent of Christ, people suffering in a world poised on the brink of destruction.  

Rex, the protagonist in “The Man at Noah’s window” is called “the King of Jews”, although he is, in fact, not really Jewish at all.  (After he was taken from his mother, a small-town prostitute, Rex was raised by a Jewish foster-family – we see him, as a boy, choking on the horse-radish in a Passover  ceremony.)  Rex’s life has been damaged by the disappearance of his father.  In Sonnenfinsternisse,(“Dark of the Sun” or “Eclipse”), Moss McCloud is a New York talent agent who has lost his daughter in a vicious custody dispute.  He has moved to Los Angeles and lives in Starlite Terrace in the hope of being reunited with his child, who would now be a middle-aged woman.  Gary is a fundamentalist Christian and, probably, an aging drug dealer; he is featured in “Rider on the Storm”.  Gary is in love with Grace, a much younger woman.  She leaves him to attend a party with some Armenian friends that she has met at Starbucks on the eve of the first Iraq war.  Gary goes to the party with Roth and shoots the place up.  June, the heroine of “The Woman and the Sea of Stars”, is a retired Administrative Assistant who worked for Disney and, then, Fox Studios.  She has no children but longs for a relationship with her niece Jennifer.  Her hobby is collecting wedding dresses at Thrift Stores with the idea that one of them will please Jennifer so much that she will wear it when she gets married.  She keeps her Jewish grandfather’s ashes in her apartment.  June knows all the juicy Hollywood gossip but she’s been badly traumatized by an assignment that she completed right after the end of World War Two – it was her job to watch four hours of raw concentration camp footage and provide notes to the boss as to the content of the film.  

All characters are eccentric and wounded.  Rex believes, probably incorrectly, that his father’s hands were used for insert close-ups in Gary Cooper’s movie High Noon.  (Roth views the movie and notes that there are no hand close-ups in the film.)  But these hands, that Rex believes to be extraordinary and famous, were used to repeatedly beat up his mother.  Moss McCloud is like a secular version of Hannah and Elkanah in the Old Testament – he has a daughter but has given her up, persuading himself that he is making a “sacrifice to God.”  However, McCloud isn’t without sin – in the context of a vicious child custody dispute with his ex-wife, he contemplated hiring a gangster to murder the woman, and, indeed, was saved from that crime only by a sheer violent fortuity: the criminal with whom he was planning to contract for the murder is assassinated just minutes before McCloud can close the deal.  Throughout the book, themes of paternity, disputed lineage, and savage violence are explored – parents are absent or cruel: McCloud’s mother is the most noteworthy figure in this brutal cast of characters – she pitched her little son out of a fourth floor window with the result that McCloud has a soft spot in his head where part of his skull is missing.  The figures in the book earnestly desire to be mothers and fathers but their failings and fate conspires against them.  In general terms, the book recapitulates some of the subject matter of Genesis.  Beyond the repeated allusions to the great Flood and the end of the world by radioactive fire and deadly water, Starlite Terrace recapitulates Old Testament concerns with procreation, succession, and family lineage.

The first two tales in the book, although highly digressive, can be scanned as abstruse but conventional short stories.  In the first story, Roth goes back to Germany for an extended stay and when he returns Rex has died.  Roth has dreamed of a great tornado sweeping down Ventura Avenue, but, also, a secret place of refuge.  Although Rex is figuratively lost in the storm, the story concludes with an account of how Gary Cooper was saved from a flood in his childhood home in Montana.  The story includes a poignant and very moving account of Cooper being chauffeured between businesses that he had previously patronized in Beverly Hills – the star knows that he is dying of cancer and, although he is reticient, he is saying good bye to the tradesmen and merchants with whom he transacted business in suits and shoes and other haberdashery.  Roth correlates this farewell with the scenes in High Noon in which the beleagured sheriff seeks assistance from the townspeople who are too cowardly to assist him against the bad hombres who have come to gun him down.  As in the movie, no one can really help Cooper and he will die, a few months later, from his cancer.  The second story involving Moss McCloud also has a conventional core – the New York theatrical agent’s attempt to hire a hit man to kill his ex-wife.  The story is linked structurally to the first tale – in the second story, Roth dreams of a secret shelter hidden somewhere behind a wall in Noah’s Deli.  This is the place where he will shelter against the tornado (and floods) about which he dreamed in the first story.  (One of Roth’s literary devices is to link his stories by dreams – at the time of writing Starlite Terrace, Roth was the President of the Jungian Association of Southern California.  In the story about Moss McCloud, the hero dreams of pouring blood into the open mouth of a gangster.  In the third story, a character saves another by spilling fiery water into someone else’s mouth, also a dream vision.  These sorts of correlations with connecting imagery are ubiquitous in the book and provide the sense that the stories thematically comprise a whole.)

The last two sections in the book are more lyrical and diffuse.  Much of “Rider on the Storm” involves a lengthy passage of film ecphrasis.  Ara, an Armenian film-maker, tells a group gathered at Starbucks about a movie he saw as a little boy.  In the film, Noah’s fourth son is excluded from the ark.  This man, named Ur, consorts with a witch, imploring her to turn him and his much beloved wife into animals so that they can be saved with the other beasts loaded into Noah’s ark.  The witch turns Ur’s wife into a goat but he isn’t transformed.  The fountains of the heavens are unleashed upon the earth and, although Ur’s wife, in the form of a she-goat, is led onto the ark, Ur is left to fend for himself.  In the raging waters, he desperately seizes the side of the ark.  Roth, then, describes a camera trick – the image shows a cross-section of the ark with Ur clinging to its side and, within the wooden vessel, the she-goat that is his wife crowded close the wall to which her husband has clamped himself outside.  A narrow passage through the wood connects the two.  The account of the movie is dream-like and implausible.  I very much doubt that any movie of this sort exists (or could ever exist) and Ara’s description seems contrived, a device to weld a very slight tale about a man disappointed in a romantic liaison to the more intricate and profound scriptural themes animating the book.  (Nonetheless, the story contains some funny passages, particularly Gary’s assertion that he all would have been well in his life if he had somehow been able to attend a party thrown by the Beatles in the Hollywood Hills – as a member of the rock group, the Turtles, he’s been invited but can’t get there.  This event is described as “the mother of all parties”, I think a reference to Saddam Hussein’s florid rhetoric on the eve of the Iraq war, the time during which the story is set – the American invaders, Hussein said, would “perish in the Mother of all Wars.”) There are a number of interesting things in “Riders on the Storm” – for instance, the grooves in the records cut by the Turtles are metaphorically linked to Laurel Canyon, where the hero lived during the sixties.  For a time, Gary worked as a Statist (the German word means “extra”) on the TV show ER and may have spoken one or two times with George Clooney – this also yields some comic material.  But doom hangs heavy over all of these tales and, in the end, Gary shoots up a party where Grace (an obviously allegorical name) has gone with the Armenian filmmaker, Ara.  As he is apprehended by the police, Roth sees that Gary has become Ur and that the shooting represents him in the process of becoming either a human (who will be drowned in the flood) or an animal saved on the ark – in any event, the deluge is coming.

The last story, June’s tale, “The Woman in the Sea of Stars” is very beautiful and, I think, represents an improvement on the lyrical style and exceedingly loose narrative form that Roth experiments with in the preceding narrative.  June, a tough old Hollywood dame, yearns for a visit from her niece, Jennifer.  Roth has been sick and has to be nursed back to health by his buddies at Noah’s Deli who lovingly nurse him back to health.  The author is feverish but, at the point that his fever breaks, he has a vision of the cosmos including an astronomical feature called the Horsehead Nebula.  In this dream-vision, he focuses on the eye of the cosmic horse in intra-galactic space, but he is careful to note that the vast celestial form is comprised of dust or interstellar ash.  Characteristically, Roth is careful to show that the dream isn’t febrile – it comes after the fever has broken.  For Roth, dreams are windows into a true reality and, therefore, the author is described as lucid when he has this vision.

Roth goes to June’s apartment to visit her niece who has, at long last, come to see her aunt.  On TV, an old John Wayne movie is broadcast, The Conqueror, in which the star, rather ridiculously, played Genghis Khan.  June relates a well-known Hollywood rumor: the movie was shot on radioactive sands near St. George, Utah with the result that many people in the cast and crew later developed cancer and died.  (June attributes John Wayne’s cancer to this toxic film location.)  In fact, June says that studio scenes requiring simulated outdoor locations were made with truckloads of the poisoned red dirt hauled to Los Angeles from Utah.  This part of June’s story rhymes with an earlier section in Moss McCloud’s Sonnenfinsterniss (“Eclipse”) in which Moss meets his future wife in a restaurant in a New York hotel where everyone has gathered for the end of the world during the Cuban missile crisis – it is as a result of this encounter that Moss’ lost daughter, Amy is conceived.  These allusions support the apocalyptic scaffolding on which the story-cycle is framed.  

June, then, goes on to sketch the story of her life.  Her grandfather was a resolute and courageous German Jew.  She has his ashes in an urn on her mantle.  A structure of type and anti-type relates Hollywood stars to their fans.  June’s life in some ways mirrors the life of her type, Marilyn Monroe.  She has a foster father and an unhappy, childless marriage.  She works as a secretary for Disney and, then, at Harry Cohn’s Fox Studios.  She’s traumatized by the assignment that she record in words the ghastly content of four hours of concentration camp footage.  (In the footage, she sees people being burned alive, an image that relates back to the scenes of fire and water in the movie described to Gary in “Rider on the Storm”).  In the end of the story, she enters the water – in this case, the swimming pool at Starlite Terrace.  She has poured her grandfather’s ashes into the pool that is lit from bulbs below its surface.  It’s now night and everyone is drunk.  June dives into the water, piercing the ashes that have formed into a shadowy human shape on the surface of the water.  Here is how Roth describes June’s dive:

Wie unter den Saum eines sich bauschenden Brautkleids tauchte sie, aufwarts in Innere der treibenden Figure sich zu stellen, ins Zentrum der lichtdurchglanzten tanzende Wolke.

She dived as if under the edge of a billowing bridal dress, upwards to set herself within the moving figure, at the center of a dancing cloud through which the light sparkled.  

The ashes of the dead Jewish grandfather has become an ashen bridal gown (June has collected these for Jennifer.)  Motifs involving ash and radioactivity, humans burnt to cinders in the concentration camp, and the dust of interstellar space that forms the Horsehead nebula are all combined here.  Roth sees the fiery eye of the celestial horse in the center of the ash drifting on the turquoise water of the swimming pool.  At last, the destructive water of the flood has become the baptismal water of the new Covenant.  June emerges from the pool as if “new born.”   

This rapturous concatenation of symbolic leit motifs will seem either ecstatically beautiful or absurdly contrived according to the sentiments of the reader.  The story is really a complex, and compactly dense lyric poem in prose – not so much a narrative as a constellation of interconnected images relating to death, the apocalypse, and rebirth.  I’m attuned to this sort of thing and willing to overlook some of Roth’s more outlandish contrivances and, so, found the text very moving and ingenious.  In its density of imagery and breadth of reference (concentration camps. Bugsy Siegel and Marilyln Monroe, radioactive sands and an intergalactic nebula), the prose approximates a poem by Celan – dust, eye, genocide, water.  

Gottesquartett is Roth’s most recent book, written in 2019 and equipped with an epilogue in which the writer discusses the Covid pandemic in suitably Biblical terms.  In the fifteen years intervening between Starlite Terrace and Gottesquartett, Roth’s thinking and literary concerns have evolved in a way that many readers will find disquieting.  Starlite Terrace was a suite of stories enlivened and energized by allusions to the Bible and Jungian analysis.  Gottesquartett is Bible commentary configured as Jungian depth-psychology.  There are several anecdotes narrated in Gottesquartett but they serve as examples of psychological processes.  Storytelling is now subsumed within precepts derived from Jung.  Bible stories related in Gottesquartett don’t stand on their own, but rather are referenced as systems of Jungian archetypes.  Roth has shifted his focus from the narrative to the didactic.  The stories in Starlite Terrace were studded with allusions to Jung and the Bible.  Now, Jung and the Bible are central to the text and the tales, themselves, are only incidental, that is, allusions or anecdotes illustrating psychological or philosophical arguments that Roth poses.  Starlite Terrace comprised of stories with a faint suggestion of Jungian interpretation as a nimbus surrounding the tales.  Quartett is all Jungian interpretation with the stories reduced to short exemplary anecdotes.  There is a disheartening seriousness to Roth’s Gottesquartett and some features of the book seem embedded in a kind of eccentric cult.  Nonetheless, Roth remains fascinating and, despite my reservations, I found the book both intriguing and compelling.  It’s an unusual text, not exactly essay, nor really a personal memoir, but rather a series of propositions derived from Jung and illustrated by odd personal anecdotes.  The secret source of the book’s quasi-poetric (dithyrambic) prose in Nietzsche’s Also spach Zarathustra and passages in the text lapse explicitly into a kind of ecstatic, if didactic, poetry.

Many readers, I think, may be appalled by Gottesquartett.  I enjoyed the book, but am afraid to unreservedly recommend it to others.  Certainly, the structure of the book is beautifully designed and deeply resonant.  The protagonist, Patrick Roth, a figure that is, for all intents and purposes coincident with the author, has returned to Los Angeles from Germany after an absence of seven or eight years.  The occasion for Roth’s travel, apparently in the Fall of 2019, is the recent death of a woman called Dianne, the author’s Jungian psychotherapist.  Roth has been asked to speak at her obsequies and feels her loss deeply.  Indeed, he characterizes Dianne as the figure most decisive in his life – after meeting her, he says, there was no longer anything purely “accidental” about his existence: she taught him to live, as it were, intentionally.  Furthermore, Roth and Dianne have promised one another that the person who dies first will manifest to the survivor in some kind of sign.  In this way, there will be proof that the soul survives death.

Roth intends to spend four days in Los Angeles – this is the quartet that is referenced in the book’s title.  There is another quartet: the four voices interacting in the book: these are Roth, Ava, Vera, and Wyatt.  All of these people are involved with the Jungian Association to some degree and were admirers of Dianne.  The quartet is gathered in Santa Monica in a house that overlooks the sea within sight of the high rise condominium where Dianne once lived with Ed Erdinger, also now deceased, a prominent Jungian psychoanalyst and author.  The mountains are on fire and many homes are endangered in the Hollywood hills and Santa Monica range.  Ironically, the services for Dianne have to be canceled – wild fire threatens the place where the gathering was supposed to occur.

In effect, Roth and his three California hosts are trapped in the house overlooking the ocean.  At night, they can see fire flaring behind the mountains.  Roth has brought with him some short stories or essays and he proposes that, each night, the company gather on the terrace and read aloud what he has written.  (He also delivers his eulogy for Dianne in this way.)  The book is divided into four nights.  On each night, one of the quartet reads a text by Roth.  The members of the group, then, discuss the text and offer interpretations of the writing.  Roth, who seems insufferable in this book, dominates the conversation with his sage remarks about his own prose.  He’s a very bad and annoying house-guest, monopolizing discussions and arrogantly insisting that people read aloud what he has written.  He assumes center-stage and will not relinquish that role to anyone else.

Nonetheless, the notion of a group of people isolated in a house and passing the time during a crisis by telling one another stories is a time-honored narrative device, a way to impart profundity to what might otherwise seem mere anecdotes.  Boccaccio’s Decameron has this structure  – seven women and three men confined to a country manor during the plague in Florence amuse themselves by telling 100 stories.  Margaret of Navarre’s Heptameron is similar; in this case, a bridge has collapsed and a company of travelers stranded at an inn pass the ten days required to restore the span by telling one another stories – in this case, seventy-two tales.  The form that Roth uses for his book also resembles Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the more sinister 120 Days of Sodom by de Sade, also a text that involves characters isolated in a country house, passing the time between orgies by telling one another erotic stories.  Gottesquartett is peculiar because the stories aren’t particularly well-developed or interesting and seem, more or less, excuses for Roth to demonstrate his exegetical prowess – the interpretations that Roth imposes on the material are more important than the stories or dream related. 

A key element to Roth’s practice is the concept of Einstellung.  The word is used dozens of times in the book and represents a central concept.  Einstellung is one of those German words that has dozens of meanings depending upon context.  Literally, the word refers to “setting something within”, that is, within a situation or context or mental framework.  The word can be translated as “installation” or “attitude”.  Roth expresses the idea that Einstellung is fundamental to true understanding – in order to grasp something adequately, we must somehow “install” it within our psyche; truth is participatory – we have to imagine our way into a situation or text.  Einstellung defines Roth’s approach to scripture.  We must participate in the scriptural text by imagining ourselves within the situation described by the writing.  This concept is aligned with the Jewish exegetical practice of Midrash.  In Midrash, the person interpreting a text imagines additional details of the situation, adopts a perspective within or interior to the circumstances described in the writing, and may improvise elements of the narrative that aren’t explicitly revealed by the text itself.  Another form of Einstellung developed in the book is the notion of energizing a text by reading it aloud.  Actually pronouncing the words of the writing are a way of installing the text in our imagination – this is why Roth insists that the writings that he has brought to California be read aloud.  At one point, in the book, Roth describes a religious exercise prescribed by a German church – members of the congregation are directed to write in long-hand chapters of the Bible.  By this spiritual exercise, the writer inhabits the text and assimilates its meanings to himself.   In Jungian terms, the concept of Einstellung which denotes bringing within oneself meanings that might otherwise be perceived purely rationally and as abstractions is the opposite of the notion of “projection” – also a crucial concept in the book’s psycho-dynamics.  “Projection” means perceiving one’s inner reality in others or things.  It’s a form of transference or, as Roth also demonstrates, a kind of psychic translation in which meanings are “carried over” (uebersetzt) into a context outside of their original setting.       

Gottesquartett is described as Erzaehlungen eines Ausgewanderten – that is, as “stories by one who has wandered away”.  The subtitle suggests that the book will be comprised of something like short stories.  But this is deceptive.  Most of the book consists of interpretations of anecdotes or dreams. The reader moves through the text waiting for stories, but they are not forthcoming.  Much of the writing is fascinating, but, at times, the subordination of narrative to exegesis may be frustrating to many readers. Some tales have promising titles – for instance, there’s one called “Michelle Pfeiffer in Love”, but the stories are slight to the point of vanishing.  (In the anecdote about Michelle Pfeiffer, Wyatt, who is somehow also connected with the movie industry, attends the Golden Globes.  After the awards are presented, the participants decamp to the Trader Vic’s for drinks.  There, Wyatt sees Michelle Pfeiffer beaming radiantly at him.  He’s wearing a rented tuxedo and doesn’t really belong with the glitterati in the bar and he can’t figure out why the beautiful woman seems to be beckoning to him.  At last, he figures out that she is watching herself on a TV monitor placed behind where Wyatt is sitting -- her luminous smile signifies her pleasure at seeing herself on-screen accepting an award.  The movie star is in love but it is amour propre – she loves her own image.  This story occurs in the context of a lengthy explanation of the concept of psychic projection.)  The closest thing to a conventional story occurs near the end of the book in the context of densely philosophical discussion as to love and memory.  This discussion arises from consideration of two texts: a bible verse from the book of Luke and the concluding paragraph of Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey.  The citation from Luke involves Jesus recalling how 18 persons died when the tower at Siloam collapsed – there was no evidence that these people were guilty in any way, yet they perished by an “act of God”.  Jesus uses this fearsome example to demand that his listeners “convert” or they too will perish.  This strange non sequiter (the people crushed under the tower didn’t deserve this fate, whilst presumably those who won’t convert might have earned destruction) is a trigger to Thornton Wilder’s novel about a group of travelers who are killed when a bridge collapses.  Therefore, the text at Luke 13:4 engenders Wilder’s novel – Roth’s book is full of this sort of intertextuality.  Further, the threat of destruction explicit in the passage from the Gospel and Wilder’s meditation on fate and causality mirrors the situation in the book, the apocalyptic threat of the wild fires burning in the hills above Hollywood.  Finally, Wilder’s bridge of San Luis Rey is present in the location of the story – the four have gathered at Marina del Rey in Santa Monica.  In Roth’s imagination, the Christian apocalypse is another form of Goetterdaemmerung (“the twilight of the Gods”) and, further, associated with the final massacre in The Wild Bunch.  (The “god-quartet” also refers to William Holden, Ernest Bornine, Warren Oates, and Ben Johnson walking through the dusty Mexican village to rescue Angel, a comrade held by the vicious General Mapache; Pike Bishop’s terse command “Let’s go!” from Peckinpah’s movie is an epigraph to the book.)

Roth’s complicated interpretative machinery imposes frames upon frames.  The four friends at the condominium overlooking Marina del Rey recall reading Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey out loud many years before and, then, discussing the question of whether there can be love without memory.  Wilder’s book seems to suggest that love abides even when people can’t recall what they love or, even, have had all of their memories, and thus, their own identity, obliterated.  This seems questionable to the practical Vera – her name means “truth.”  (She has appeared as an actress for many years in a “soap opera” and, therefore, presumably knows a thing or two above love.)  Vera challenges the idea that love can persist in the face of oblivion.  These conversations occurred decades earlier, before the group became involved in Jungian analysis (and before anyone knew Dianna) and were reflected in a short story that Roth composed.   

Wyatt reads the story.  It also has an elaborate frame: the four friends have just finished reading Wilder’s novel – it has taken six hours to read the text out loud.  It is near midnight and the characters seems to be a little drunk. They debate the meaning of Wilder’s assertions about memory and love and the novelist’s claim that “the bridge is love”.  Within this frame, Roth as a character in the story tells a story about a girlfriend, Sharon, that he met at UCLA in January 1976.  Roth has just come back from Germany and has dreamed about a bridge comprised of crouching cats.  Sharon invites Roth to meet her mother and stepfather.  The stepfather, whose name is Saul, lives on a sort of houseboat –it’s a yacht in fact – moored in Marina del Rey.  The stepfather has been hesitant to meet Roth – he’s described as an “older Jewish gentleman” – and we suspect that his reticence relates to the concentration camps.  Roth, with Sharon and her mother, cross over a little walkway onto the yacht  –it’s a kind of bridge that brings to mind the oneiric “crouching cats”.  On the yacht, it’s dark with light reflecting off the water into the cabin.  Roth immediately associates the lyrical lighting in the cabin with Stanley Cortez’s photography– the lighting effect is created by floating pieces of a broken mirror in a bowl of water and, then, shining a beam on them.  (The broken mirror and the projected beam seem to have archetypal significance).  It’s an awkward meeting and Roth tries to make small-talk by recounting how he traveled to Vevey on Lake Geneva in the hope of meeting Charlie Chaplin.  There have been break-ins and robberies on the boats moored in the marina and everyone knows that Saul has been playing with a revolver, a gun that he keeps on board for protection.  Roth brings his story within a story within a story to its climax but doesn’t get to complete the narrative.  We never find out if he met Chaplin or not.  Saul has a kind of seizure, an affliction of memory that affects him physically.  He recalls that when he was a pilot during the Second World War, he flew over German cities strafing civilians.  Guilt now torments him.  He mutters that he made 22 strafing runs, shooting down men, women, and children.  This disrupts the small gathering.  As Roth rises to leave, he hears a click behind him and suspects, for a moment, that Saul has snapped off the safety on the pistol and is about to shoot him.  But this is not the case and the narrative ends with Roth embracing Saul, a gesture of forgiveness between the two men.  (Odd and a little self-serving that a Jew would need to forgive a German.) The significance of the 22 strafing runs is that the Hebrew alphabet contains 22 letters.  Earlier in the book, Roth has ventured into cabalistic speculation, ruminating on the 23rd letter in the alphabet – the final character, which doesn’t exist, but is imagined to destroy the world (or perfect it) created by the first 22 letters.  (In an earlier story, Roth hears two accounts about the Torah – a rabbi saves one book from the Nazis; another rabbi is burned alive by Nero in Torah scroll: the white ash signifies the spaces between letters.  The narrator of these tales, a Jewish eye-doctor recalls how he met Max Brod in Prague – Brod imitated Charlie Chaplin to the amusement of the people gathered in the tavern.  Kafka is present but the narrator doesn’t notice him.  Later, returning to the narrator’s home in Hollywood after hearing these tales at a dinner party, the old man shows Roth a Pleiade edition of Kafka in which there are 21 letters in the title Kafka - Ouevres Completes I.  If the hyphen is counted as a character, the count of letters is 22, the equivalent of the Hebrew alphabet from which the world was created.  Roth interprets his memory of this event as being inserted in his mind by the dead Dianne and, therefore, a message to him from beyond.)  

Wyatt’s reading of Roth’s story about Saul, embedded in textual frames relating to a recent book that the  author has written about Paul, the apostle, formerly known Saul, is, then, discussed by the quartet.  Roth observes that the story has taken on a new significance.  Roth thought that the story was primarily about Saul and this was how the story was interpreted when he wrote it (and, apparently, read it aloud to his friends) twenty years earlier.  He now construes the story as about whether there can be love without Wissen – that is, love without “knowing” or “understanding”.  Roth now thinks that love is before all categories, even taking priority over space and time.  

It’s late at night. Ava can now return to her home.  The threat of the fire has passed, at least, with respect to her dwelling.  Roth must fly back to Germany in the morning.  He borrows Wyatt’s car and drives through his old haunts.  Dianne, after moving from the Marina del Rey condominium, lived in Bel Air.  Roth drives to Bel Air and, despite police erecting barricades at the entrance to the community, enters through the gate. (We are reminded that the 22 characters in the Hebrew alphabet represents a gate or, in German, a Tor, a word that is homophonic to Torah.)  He drives along a golf course and recounts an anecdote about how Alfred Hitchcock in a characteristically devious and, even, cruel way, gave his wife, Alma, a house in Bel Air for a birthday present.  Smoke blackens the air.  Roth gets out of his car, but can’t find the place where Dianne lived – he’s suffocating.  A series of apocalyptic visions follow and, then, Roth wakes up on a airplane descending from the sky to land in Germany.  The book concludes with an epilogue about the Covid-19 virus and a prayer by Roth – he has re-translated the 23rd Psalm from Hebrew – that those who have become ill will be healed.  The various revelations and apocalypses recounted in the book are now manifested in the diabolical virus afflicting the world.

I liked Gottesquartett.  It’s a book in which every event and idea is connected to every other aspect of the writing.  However, the book doesn’t have much connection to the quotidian reality in which we live – it’s highly abstract and mystical and suffers from an overload, a vast surfeit, of significance.  There’s so much meaning in the book that it has no room for mere characters or events.  Furthermore, the book has something of the aspect of a holy text in a cult.  Roth’s version of Christianity is very remote from what most people might consider orthodox – his God is Jung and Jung’s prophet is Jesus.  At one point, Roth says that the sharp sword of “individuation” – the central doctrine in Jungian analysis - is akin to the sharp sword that Jesus says that he will wield to sever father from son, and brother from brother, in furtherance of God’s dictate.  Jesus isn’t an end in himself or the center of an epistemology.  Rather, the Savior appears as a tool of Jungian analysis, a device by which a person enters into becoming what he really is – that is, the mechanism of individuation.  Roth’s Jesus (and Jung) doesn’t have any social conscience or political imperative.  At the heart of things is a personal salvation that arises from exegetical work on texts and relationships and dreams that are harbingers of our own fundamental nature.  Roth conflates worship with psychoanalytical interpretation.  Furthermore, in several passages in the book, he seems to renounce what is most characteristic of his own discourse – that is, his obsessive reliance on images from films as a key to understanding himself and others.  Roth asserts that Hollywood is a Babylon and, even, cites Kenneth Anger’s book to that effect as well as Griffith’s depiction of the fall of that great city in his 1916 film Intolerance.  Babylon is the pedestal upon which the Great Whore has been elevated.  And Roth interprets his fetishistic relationship with films and their imagery as a kind of idolatry.  In my estimation, this evolution in Roth’s aesthetic is not wholly for the good and it’s my surmise that he is tending toward a kind of extreme mysticism that, perhaps, will defy further articulation – words and things are sliding into the darkness of the ineffable and the unnameable, the cultic “mud” that Freud thought obscured Jung’s thinking.  

Gottesquartett is published by Herder Verlag, a Freiburg publishing house, that specializes in Catholic theology.  (Herder published all of the works of the Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner).  The book is handsomely produced with a beautiful cover showing Tobias and the great fish.  But you have a slight sense that there is something half-crazy about the whole enterprise.  Roth's unorthodox syncretic imagination seems to be ossifying into some kind of fundamentalism.