The catholicity of place
a supplement to my review of Heimito von Doderer's novel, The Demons
In their Easter issue Dappled Things published a review I wrote of Heimito von Doderer’s novel The Demons, reissued last January by Wiseblood Books. The header image is from an outlying area of Vienna that figures prominently in the novel. I meant to post a supplement to my review when it came out. I always like to quote as much as possible from something I’m reviewing, but The Demons is such a massive project, especially as it’s been reissued with ancillary material, that I didn’t get a chance to within the space constraints of the journal. It was necessary first to lay out the intellectual stakes of the novel, as I see them. So in what follows here you have a series of excerpts from von Doderer’s great work, along with some thoughts of mine about each passage. You might profit from reading the published review, but you can read this on its own. At the end, a few words on what’s coming next in the newsletter.
Supplement to review of The Demons
Heimito von Doderer was one of the great writers of place of the last century or more. Specifically as a novel of the city, The Demons belongs in the company of Ulysses, Petersburg, Bleak House (or some other of Dickens’ novels), Berlin Alexanderplatz, Shira, Open City, NW, and more fantastical works like Invisible Cities, Tainaron, and N K Jemisin’s Great Cities books. But the work of which The Demons most reminds me is Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, published almost at the same time as The Demons. Durrell was a master stylist at least in terms of descriptive prose, and like Doderer he knew that the city is never without hinterlands and other places with which it may be connected. The whole according to which the novelist of place (or the universal novelist, to use Doderer’s term) must register life ought to be a dynamic balancing of center and peripheries. No city exists in a vacuum, and part of the role a novel of the city plays is to reveal the bonds that connect the city to the ecological and cultural region or cosmos-in-miniature of which the city is the hearth. The characters of such novels, Durrell believed, express the place where their story occurs. Place was the secret ingredient of the great novels: characters “exist in nature, as a function of place,” he thought, and the place itself was a kind of character.
This idea of the novel seems to me very close to Doderer’s own, even if he does not use place as his primary idea, preferring that of universality. I would argue that place is a universal category. If that seems too grand an assertion, then at least it’s clear that place is an essential structural element of the novel, and one that many of the masters have not treated as a secondary concern but have used as an important means of constructing the feeling of universality. I tend to think of place as a primary idea rather than as merely one element because it usually affects several elements. For example, places govern the structure of The Demons. The neighborhoods of the city constitute a distinct cast of characters who interact with the human characters, and the city as a whole is a compound character that interacts with other characters which are certain places in the hinterlands: the Burgenland on the Hungarian border, a cause of political tension in the plot; the Vienna Woods; a castle that will provide one of the main characters with the literary equivalent of a dungeon crawl; estates deeper in the Austrian countryside and mountains; London, home to several characters at various points; Paris, where the villain retreats; Munich, where a character recuperates from an injury. The novel may in this way be mapped, its cosmos made manageable.
But I think the real proof of any novel built upon a profound affinity for the spirit of place is in description. It is an archaic element of fiction. The earliest novels in the Western tradition, the romances of later antiquity, developed the art of description in the form of ekphrasis. The novel or romance is also coeval with and influenced by travel literature and has drawn on that genre to refine and expand its descriptive techniques. To conclude this review, I’ve selected five passages which showcase some—by no means all—of Doderer’s descriptive range and acumen. After each I offer brief comments. These passages and many others like them constitute the heart of Doderer’s artistry. The first concerns a building called the Blue Unicorn.
With afternoon’s lengthening, the Blue Unicorn had also sunk deeper into the city and into the old ground hereabouts, as though the underlying morass of centuries of urban life were sinking slightly beneath the walls, and the walls sinking with it. Out of the soil, out of the cellars, out of ancient front halls, the genius loci emerged as evening descended and stepped out on the street, as if to take part in an untimely witching hour, for it found people still in front of their doors and old ladies at the windows and the street full of conversation.
The genius loci is the “spirit of place,” an ancient concept. The term occurs with some regularity in The Demons. Note that there are two personifications in this paragraph, the spirit of place and the evening. In such a passage the entire cosmos seems alive and personal, from diurnal rhythms to the human built environment. I find no trace of irony or cynicism, no sly wink to the reader signaling that we all know there is no such thing as a genius loci or a personal evening. There is rather a kind of solemnity, tempered by playfulness—it is enjoyable to conceive of the world, even the urban world, in such animistic terms.
Old cities have frequently grown together out of various parts; such is the case with Paris and Vienna. The genius loci of these disparate portions of the city which have been unified and connected by modern institutions, lingers with incredible persistence in their air, and probably can never be entirely dispelled. It is as though such a quarter of the city were constantly contemplating its old days, remembering its origins, its original nature.
The archaic spirit of place again. Here we feel the weight of history, the way time defines personality. For the city—rather, each of its neighborhoods—is again anthropomorphized. Memories layer like sediment. This passage occurs in relation to a main character who takes to walking in neighborhoods distant from the one where he lives; in other words, he becomes a flâneur, the wanderer about cities typical of modern literature. The flâneur (or flâneuse) is a scout for the reader: he or she brings the pleasures of sensitive reconnaissance and voyeurism. Part of the pleasure of the passage also comes from the narrator’s intervention. Traditionally the storyteller’s presence is welcome in the story, not a hindrance but a conduit for immersion. Geyrenhoff here is providing information and speculation. The place, in addition to having its own personality (or genius), is a means for the narrator to express his.
Here one feels the great plains press in from Hungary. The sensation is strong at all seasons of the year but especially in the summer, when there seems to be a greater stillness over these prairies than anywhere else in the world. It is not an empty stillness, not rigid and static, such as we often find around and inside large buildings. Rather, this stillness is divided and accentuated and appears to hum audibly. It lures. It lures one out to the horizon and deeper into the puszta. In this region you are never entirely where you happen to be standing; you feel always drawn elsewhere; the feeling begins in the fibers of the heart, but the body wants to follow and remains frustrated by the small steps that the legs can take. It is country where only the mounted man can be entirely with himself and at the same time entirely with the world, even when his horse stands still. Galloping remains as a possibility: if he wishes he can thunder off toward the horizon.
The plain is described as if it is a city with neighborhoods: it is “divided and accentuated and appears to hum audibly.” It is the internal divisions, the distinct neighborhoods, which give the city its allure, its sense of being larger than itself or bigger on the inside than on the outside. Compare this way of describing the hinterlands near the Hungarian border with the description, quoted above, of Renata and Sylvia (scouts fond of camping and hiking) experiencing a certain neighborhood as if rural countryside. Center and periphery reflect and signal each other. But what I find so striking about this paragraph is the evocation of geographical Sehnsucht as C S Lewis used the term: longing for mysterious far horizons, their beckoning distraction. Just as center and periphery commune each other, so the hinterland is mysteriously bound to yet further places. Geyrenhoff feels this in the middle of the city as well. Sehnsucht is ingredient to the fantasy genre. In The Demons it is the objective correlative (perhaps that should be the geographical correlative) of what Geyrenhoff calls the “hereafter in the here,” a sense characters can have—sometimes faultily—of transcendence, of beguiling potentiality.
The silence of deciduous woods is lighter, less formidable than that of the deep fir forests in the mountains, whose gravity silences the pipes of Pan and from whose surmounting craggy cliffs rises the hunting cry of the buzzard. Here, the suns’ rays fell in clusters upon ground flecked with the shadow of leaves, and amid the smells of bushes and smaller plants the tang of wild garlic could already be detected; whole patches of these woods are covered by its grasslike leaves.
Here, as in (2) above where the topic was the genius loci of old cities, part of the pleasure comes from a narrator able and inclined to share a bit of wisdom or insight—in this case, regarding a difference between deciduous and conifer forest—however minor that insight may seem. Impressive in the technique is the movement in just two sentences, from the auditory through the visual to the olfactory senses. Similarly, the auditory sense was present in the previous excerpt in the summer hum of the plain and in the thundering of the (imagined) horses’ hooves. Doderer tends to involve as many senses as he can, and is particularly notable for his attention to scent, which is so often neglected.
He set out approximately eastward. His eyes, accustomed to the darkness, caught the glowing rents in the black velvet of the night, the slow emergence of details. The tree trunks separated. Now powerful pipings slashed the dark woods, made them resound, revealing their spaciousness, making plain that all was not an unbroken black, plane surface. At a bend in the path a greenish hint of sky appeared, and while Leonard was looking at it, the first bold and artistic cadenzas began from the depth of the woods and were almost immediately taken up close by. The concentrated, inexorable process made Leonard stand still for a long time, breathing deeply. It almost lifted him up.[…]
Now the birds halted their song, leaving space for a mightier, soundless paean.
During that general pause the sky broke open like the husk of a fruit, giving birth to the glowing god. And already he was there, above the dark ridges of the mountains, his strength concentrated as it never is in the later hours of the day, which he illumines in a more disperse fashion. Now, however, an eye appeared, an eye like an arrowhead, aiming straight to the heart.
Out in the garden suburb the whitish dust is already settling upon the streets, and a single window in a farmyard suddenly leaps into flame, gathering all the white-hot glow into its pane and flashing it far across the plain over cornfields and crop lands as far as the first curving hills and the higher, veiled mountains.
The city sinks into summer as into a dissolving bath of acid. The nights arch their backs high; masses of stone looking up into the brightness of the moon seek the keystone of the arch, growing, climbing, escaping that close confinement that was their nature all the gray winter. A wild uprush of life, emanations and fragrances of vegetation, has broken out everywhere among the stone buildings, thrusts and sways in the gardens around colored lights and music, runs down the broad streets with the interlocked shadows of trees under whose dense foliage a moonlit night can be transformed into blackness enclosed within a glittering armor. Most nights are bright and thin; they do not surround people densely enough for sound sleep; the people become like the houses, whose windows are all thrown open, and so streets and gardens are full of nocturnal animation.
But I slept soundly.
Even with open windows.
The morning’s brightness flowed into the room very early.
At a glance, one notices the alternation of rhythm achieved by the use of a few short sentences and paragraphs. Although The Demons is a massive novel, it is for the most part free of monstrously huge sentences and paragraphs that create intimidating blocks of prose. It is as necessary in prose as in verse to vary rhythm (though there are many ways of doing this).
On a deeper level we begin to notice movement of various kinds. There is the transition from darkness to light. This transition is not fixed in place. The passage is comprised of three places: the rugged woodland west of Vienna; the suburb where the narrator and many of the characters have been living; the city as a whole. In moving between these, the narrator is exercising his omniscience. There is another kind of movement in the modulation into present tense when describing the city as a whole. You could call this the historical present, but I would simply call it iterative. We are presented with general information: the sense is that this is how it was in the summer of 1927, and that this how it always is in Vienna in the summer. Alternating location and modulating tense is a formidable exercise of authority. Narratorial authority is one of the chief pleasures of fiction since the narrator is the distinguishing characteristic of mode. The reader wishes to be in the hands of a capable and knowledgeable storyteller who is not bashful with his wisdom.—Incidentally, the current trend of using the present tense as the default in fiction robs the art of the sort of finesse on display here, where the flow of narration can be relieved by a temporary elevation into the present tense.
Perhaps the most impressive movement in the passage is between points of view. Frequently Doderer uses description to transition between points of view and scenes rather than the clumsier but much easier insertion of a break in the prose. When the “I” arrives after the general description of the summer city, it is with a feeling of formality: specifically the musical form ABA. The passage begins with subjective consciousness—that of Leonard—moves through a somewhat more objective descriptive phase (though we note the personification of the sun, an animistic move familiar from [1] above) and returns to the subjective—this time the narrator’s consciousness, still of a piece with the naturalistic description.
Any writer of prose fiction who were to produce a page and a half of material like this would feel a great sense of accomplishment indeed, and any reader who were to encounter such prose should feel justly compensated for the sacred commitment of time and attentiveness.
Next time I want to leave behind the world of realist fiction to write about E R Eddison, the English fantasist who knew Tolkien and Lewis and that crowd, or was known to them, and whose work represents a splendid possibility for romance as a modern mode—and one that is perhaps truer to its pre-Christian sources. Eddison was very philosophical, and he was a unique stylist. I want to understand how his philosophy and his style work together (or at cross purposes). I also want to put him alongside Lawrence as a religious thinker, and perhaps a few others if space allows. For Eddison (like many others from the Troubadours on down) challenges Christianity in its most vulnerable quarter: that of Eros. How shall Eros be made sacred? What may be the fruits of a sacred Eros, in literature or in life? Tolkien famously linked fantasy, or what he called “subcreation,” to the Gospel and therefore to Joy. In fact, Eddison is not far off from this, as we’ll see, but the reigning divinity for him is Aphrodite, whose most important epithet, he thought, was: laughing.
I'm personally convinced the Genius loci is a 'real' event/process/ presence/ unfolding. Perhaps more real than the digital effluent we now surround ourselves with. Sounds like a fascinating book. I enjoyed your interpretations. Thanks.