Five Dream, Destiny and Infectious Alterity in Traumnovelle (Dream Story)
Ja, wenn die Prinzen wie im Märchen wären.1
Oh, suppose the princes were like in the fairy tales.
In 1931, the year of his death, Schnitzler published a volume encompassing a range of novellas that he had previously published elsewhere over the first quarter of the twentieth century. The title he chose for the book underlines the central position of two topics in his works: Traum und Schicksal (Dream and Destiny). The first novella of the volume is one of Schnitzler’s most popular texts, Traumnovelle (Dream Story), which was first published as a series in the glamorous fashion magazine Die Dame (The Lady) in 1925/1926.2 While the thematic centrality of dreams is already announced in the title, the novella’s relation to the topic of destiny is much less self-evident. Accordingly, scholarly interest has been drawn to the relation of dreaming and waking in the novella, but the topic of destiny has received considerably less attention.3
I have argued so far that stereotype and destiny occur in Schnitzler’s writings as a coping mechanism to regain a sense of individuality which is threatened by an emerging coercive and de-individualizing force on the part of one’s social role. In Traumnovelle (Dream Story) this is played out through the bourgeois discourse on love. It has already been shown in the discussion of the Dämmerseelen (Dozing Souls) narratives in the previous chapter that destiny plays a central role in the discourse of love, and that love, in turn, is the individualizing currency par excellence. The discourse on love yields, then, probably the most powerful narrative of destiny as individuation: what could be more reassuring of one’s own individuality than to be destined to fall in love with another person and to feel recognized by the other as ‘the one’ in return?4 This is already inherent in Hegel’s figure of mutual recognition as essential pre-requisite for the subject’s development of self-consciousness. The individual has to recognize itself in the other but still accept the independence of the latter. By the same token, recognition by the other is required. According to Hegel, the struggle between the two subjects is inevitable after the movement of mutual recognition has been performed, where the winner will subdue the loser as slave. But the dialectic of the master is a predicament because the movement of recognition becomes asymmetric, making it impossible for him to recognize himself in the other and to gain a proper assurance of himself.5 Santner has analyzed Schnitzler’s novella through the Hegelian master and slave dialectic.6 According to Santner, Fridolin’s conflict as that of Hegel’s master has shown that Fridolin’s problem is that he cannot accept the ‘otherness’ of women and that he has to possess them instead. This is why he is unable to play the game of mutual recognition with an equal partner, which makes it impossible for him to gain any real satisfaction. Santner’s adoption of Hegel’s master and slave dialectic as a framework is useful to bring the novella’s central conflict into sharper focus, and I would like to suggest that it can be developed further. By calling Fridolin ‘something of a neurotic’, Santner seems to assume that the conflict developed in the novella is about an individual pathological case and that being trapped in the master and slave dialectic is a, as it were, personal problem of Fridolin’s.7 If we recall Simone de Beauvoir’s use of the Hegelian model to describe the positions of the patriarchal gender relationship, equating the male position with that of the master and the female position with that of the slave,8 the conflict in Traumnovelle (Dream Story) seems to be more deeply rooted in the bourgeois gender order and corresponds to stereotypical images of femininity and their deconstruction.
When Albertine reveals to Fridolin her capacity for an active eroticism, and thus presents herself not only as the object but also as the subject of desire, she steps out of the stereotypical role of the motherly ‘domestic angel’,9 assigned to her by the bourgeois ideal of femininity, and by Fridolin as representative of the patriarchal gender order. The key moment of challenge to the patriarchal gender model is Albertine’s comment to Fridolin, ‘Ach, wenn ihr wüßtet’ (T12) (‘Oh, if you men knew!’),10 which indicates that the common imago of femininity is insufficient, that the female is more complex than just the knowable complement of male wholeness. Correspondingly, Fridolin’s self-perception and his feeling of security collapse when his wife reveals her capacity for activity beyond his knowledge. Even though both Fridolin and Albertine confess to each other that they felt attracted to another person at least once, Fridolin feels especially betrayed by his wife, which exposes the double standards of patriarchal gender roles.
The figure of mutual recognition in the form of the exchange of gazes is a dominant motif in the novella.11 The first time it appears is right at the beginning, where it initially seems to signify a successful mutual recognition between the spouses: ‘Und da sich nun auch Albertine zu dem Kind herabgebeugt hatte, trafen sich die Hände der Eltern auf der geliebten Stirn, und mit zärtlichem Lächeln, das nun nicht mehr dem Kinde allein galt, begegneten sich ihre Blicke’ (T5) (Albertina [sic] also bent over her, and as her hand met her husband’s on the beloved forehead, they looked at each other with a tender smile not meant for the child).12 Without overemphasizing the Hegelian topos, one could say that here the couple has a ‘mutual other’ in between – their daughter – which allows an equal recognition of each other. In their function as parents it is easy to accept the other as the matching part of oneself – different from the self but belonging to the same entity, both of them necessary. But when it comes to their function as sexual partners, the symmetry turns out to be much less stable. The objective situation of the initial conflict seems to be equal, as Fridolin and Albertine both encountered seductive strangers at the masked ball they attended the previous night and as they both confess to each other that they felt more seriously attracted to other persons before, during a holiday in Denmark. But while for Albertine the mutual confessions initially allow reconciliation, Fridolin does not seem to be able to forgive her:
‘Wir wollen einander solche Dinge künftig immer gleich erzählen’, sagte sie.
Er nickte stumm.
‘Versprich’s mir.’
Er zog sie an sich. ‘Weißt du das nicht?’ fragte er; aber seine Stimme klang immer noch hart.
Sie nahm seine Hände, streichelte sie und sah zu ihm auf mit umflorten Augen, auf deren Grund er ihre Gedanken zu lesen vermochte. (T11)
‘In the future let’s tell each other such things at once,’ she said.
He nodded in silence.
‘Will you promise me?’
He took her into his arms, ‘Don’t you know that?’ he asked. But his voice was still harsh. She took his hands and looked up at him with misty eyes, in the depth of which he could read her thoughts.13
The harshness in his voice signifies Fridolin’s inability to accept Albertine’s secret sexual desire. Yet, at this point he still feels superior to her and thinks that he is able to read her thoughts, which can be understood as mastery over her mind and indeed the denial of her independence. This self-confidence and unforgiving attitude is of course linked to the patriarchal double standard that demands premarital virginity only for the woman. The narrator reflects here Fridolin’s perspective through ‘erlebte Rede’ (experienced speech) stating that he is able to read Albertine’s thoughts. However, the adjective ‘umflort’ may convey a contradiction of this legibility as it hints at a literal veiling of her gaze caused by tears. It is here that Albertine points out the asymmetry in their relationship and refuses Fridolin’s patronizing attempt to comfort her:
‘In jedem Wesen – glaub’ es mir, wenn es auch wohlfeil klingen mag – in jedem Wesen, das ich zu lieben glaubte, habe ich immer nur dich gesucht. Das weiß ich besser, als du es verstehen kannst, Albertine.’
Sie lächelte trüb. ‘Und wenn es auch mir beliebt hätte, zuerst auf die Suche zu gehen?’ Ihr Blick veränderte sich, wurde kühl und undurchdringlich. (T12)
‘You may believe me, even though it sounds trite, that in every woman I thought I loved it was always you I was looking for – I know that better than you can understand it, Albertina.’
A dispirited smile passed over her face. ‘And suppose before meeting you, I, too, had gone on a search for a mate?’ she asked. The look in her eyes changed, becoming cool and impenetrable.14
Fridolin’s comment brings out the paradox inherent in the idea of love as destiny: while it seemingly stresses that Albertine is unique to Fridolin, in the sense that he was looking for his one true love and found it in Albertine, it also reveals that his idea of ‘true love’ was attached to the pre-conceptualized role of ‘wife’ and ‘mother’ that he had to ‘cast’. It suggests that what Fridolin was looking for was rather the realization of an idealized idea of ‘woman’ rather than Albertine as an individual. In this way, the text demonstrates how the experience of love is also determined by performative demands of stereotypical role expectations, which undermine the sense of individuality.15 The need for the uniqueness of one’s own experience of love stands in steep contrast to the factual seriality of enunciations and verbalizations of love, as we have also already seen in the last chapter. Fridolin’s remark already reflects its own clichéd character of this currency when he admits that it might sound cheap (‘wohlfeil’) and in this way hints at the seriality of the enunciation of love.
It is this precise moment, as Albertine’s eyes become impenetrable, that throws Fridolin off his balance. Albertine only now reveals her capability for an independent sexual desire to the full extent and breaks out of her role as Fridolin’s complementary other:
Er ließ ihre Hände aus den seinen gleiten, als hätte er sie auf einer Unwahrheit, auf einem Verrat ertappt; sie aber sagte: ‘Ach, wenn ihr wüßtet’, und wieder schwieg sie.
‘Wenn wir wüßten -? Was willst du damit sagen?’
Mit seltsamer Härte erwiderte sie: ‘Ungefähr, was du dir denkst, mein Lieber.’ (T12)
[H]e allowed her hands to slip from his, as though he had caught her lying or committing a breach of faith. She, however, continued: ‘Oh, if you men knew!’ and again was silent.
‘If we knew –? What do you mean by that?’
In a strangely harsh voice she replied:
‘About what you imagine, my dear.’16
The harshness which was used to describe Fridolin’s irreconcilability now marks Albertine’s reaction to his self-righteousness when he indulges in the resources of patriarchal discourse. This is underlined by the fact that Albertine, by using the plural form, seems to address not only Fridolin individually but men in general.17 In this way, she also reproduces the de-individualizing effect of Fridolin’s comment. Moreover, Albertine mirrors Fridolin’s patronizing appeasement (‘Don’t you know that?’) and turns the tables on him. The emphasis on knowledge – and the lack of it – refers to the underlying struggle for power in the marital conflict. While Fridolin is confident that he knows more about the functioning of gender roles than Albertine would ever be able to understand, she is eager to demonstrate to him his own ignorance. The passage thus describes a failure of mutual recognition, which is underlined when Albertine’s gaze becomes ‘kühl und undurchdringlich’ (cool and impenetrable).
This introduces Fridolin’s crisis-like experience, in which he begins to feel more and more alienated from himself and his previously familiar surroundings. That it is, in fact, this initial conflict that sets his crisis in motion and determines all the experiences and encounters during his ensuing nocturnal wanderings almost becomes clear to himself at one point: ‘Wie heimatlos, wie hinausgestoßen erschien er sich […] seit dem Abendgespräch mit Albertine rückte er immer weiter fort aus dem gewohnten Bezirk seines Daseins in irgendeine andere, ferne, fremde Welt’ (T27–28) (ever since this evening’s conversation with Albertina he was moving farther and farther away from his everyday existence into some strange and distant world).18
The awareness of the failed mutual recognition with Albertine is bound to unsettle Fridolin’s secured sense of self as a representative of the bourgeois masculine norm. Albertine’s confession has blurred the boundaries between the active male self and the passive female other. As a result, the defining lines around his concept of self seem to have become penetrable and everything that represented the old reassuring order before begins to feel unstable. This corresponds to the many other crisis-like experiences of the protagonists discussed in the previous chapters: the protagonist is again confronted with an alienation of his social destiny in the Bourdieusian sense. In this case the arguably most ‘naturalized’ part of social essence comes to be drawn into question: that of gender. Moreover, if the romantic relationship is to be understood as a practice of individuation, in the sense that it provides one with a reassurance of one’s own individuality, then becoming aware of the performative – and thus also serial and repetitive – quality of the experience of love, is highly disturbing for one’s identity: the performative aspects of love are closely linked to those of gender. And when these become palpable, thus when what was experienced as one’s inner essence begins to feel like externally imposed repetition compulsions, one’s secured position within the norm becomes precarious. This is thus one of the moments ‘in denen sich der Mensch selber fremd wird’ (in which man becomes estranged from himself).19 As the bourgeois order is tightly intertwined with patriarchal gender roles, the former also begins to lose its credibility through the disruption of the latter. Fridolin at first turns to the by now well-known coping mechanisms of stereotyping and the invocation of destiny.
Initially, he seeks to re-stabilize his position within the norm by typecasting the ‘other’, in this case Albertine and women in general: ‘Eine ist wie die andere, dachte er mit Bitterkeit, und Albertine ist wie sie alle – sie ist die Schlimmste von allen’ (T72) (They are all alike, he thought bitterly, and Albertina is like the rest of them – if not the worst).20 That is, she is not only a serial figure, who can stand for all, but excessive in her exemplary badness. Elisabeth Bronfen describes three predominant types of literary representations of femininity, which will become useful for my reading of Traumnovelle (Dream Story): ‘firstly, the diabolic outcast, the destructive fatal demon woman, secondly, the domestic “angel of the house”, the saintly, self-sacrificing vessel, and thirdly a particular version of Mary Magdalene, as the penitent and redeemed sexually vain and dangerous woman, the fallen woman’.21 Fridolin’s image of Albertine is highly influenced by this stereotypical imagery of femininity: while she fulfilled the role of the ‘domestic “angel of the house”’ before, she now appears like the ‘destructive fatal demon woman’. This becomes even more evident later in the novella when Albertine tells him about her dream. Fridolin does not distinguish here between dreamed and real experience, and judges Albertine for her oneiric actions as if she really had committed them: ‘Da saß sie ihm gegenüber, die ihn heute nacht ruhig hatte ans Kreuz schlagen lassen, mit engelhaftem Blick, hausfraulich-mütterlich’ (T76) (There she sat opposite him, the woman who had calmly allowed him to be crucified the preceding night. She was sitting there with an angelic look, like a good housewife and mother).22
As we will see, in all his encounters with the different women during this nocturnal odyssey, he seems to seek the self-assuring recognition he was used to getting from Albertine, but was suddenly deprived of through her refusal to remain within the boundaries of the complementary ‘other’ assigned to her by the patriarchal gender order. At the same time, the feeling of sudden alienation from his social role also sets in motion a fascination with ‘otherness’ and the temptation to cross the boundaries from the realm of the bourgeois norm into that of the ‘other’. This is again linked with the invocation of destiny.
Fridolin decides only a few hours after his conflict with Albertine that from now on ‘[d]as Schicksal soll entscheiden’ (T36) (Let fate decide the question)23 and later he feels the temptation, ‘sich mit dem Schicksal zu messen’ (T57) (to match oneself against Fate).24 However, ‘Schicksal’ connotes different things in the two passages. While at both times the invocation of destiny is linked to Fridolin’s desire to transgress the normative boundaries of his social role, ‘Schicksal’ seems to indicate in the first case a possible loophole to escape the restrictive structures of the dominant order, thus an alternative to his social destiny in the Bourdieusian sense. In the second case, ‘Schicksal’ is less likely to refer to metaphysical destiny and thus to his individually laid-out path of life, but here actually means his social destiny, i.e. the rules of conduct imposed by his social role. The first quotation is taken from the conversation with his former fellow student Nachtigall, who will take him to the secret masked ball. Fridolin’s invocation of destiny marks an eagerness to leave behind the restrictive structures of his bourgeois existence which have lost their reassuring effect. The moment can thus indeed count as an escape ‘aus dem Alltäglich-Festgelegten’ (from the pre-assigned quotidian),25 and as the desire for an individually assigned path, set off from the pre-determined normalized tracks of his social role. While this might feel to Fridolin like an opportunity for a ‘Durchbruch zum Eigenen’ (breakthrough to a realm of one’s own),26 it is striking that this ‘Eigene’ (realm of one’s own) is again linked to the idea of giving oneself over to a higher power: the rules of conduct imposed by the social destiny are replaced not by a claim of individual responsibility, but by the idea of a metaphysical determination of events. In the second example, however, ‘Schicksal’ (destiny) does not seem to have the same implications of individuation, but rather the opposite: it is actually his bourgeois existence that Fridolin wants to challenge here. The full sentence reads: ‘Sollte man immer nur aus Pflicht, aus Opfermut aufs Spiel setzen, niemals aus Laune, aus Leidenschaft oder einfach, um sich mit dem Schicksal zu messen?!’ (T57) (Is one always to stake one’s life just from a sense of duty or self-sacrifice, and never just because of a whim or a passion, or simply to match oneself against Fate?).27 What becomes clear here is the desire to transgress the normative restrictions of his bourgeois social role as physician, husband, and father. ‘Schicksal’ here refers, then, not to the idealized notion of an individual path of life, but to his social destiny.
The stereotype of the doctor seems to be particularly closely linked to the moral expectation that doctors have to be fully identified with their work, that it is in fact not only ‘Beruf’, but also ‘Berufung’,28 which implies, strictly speaking, a willingness to give one’s life for it. This willingness is obviously in the case of Fridolin rarely tested, but the expectation is implied in the formulation ‘aus Pflichtgefühl […] aufs Spiel setzen’, taking risks out of a sense of duty, and is further underlined by the fact that immediately after this thought Fridolin remembers for the second time in the novella ‘dass er möglicherweise schon den Keim einer Todeskrankheit im Leibe trug’ (T57) (that even now the germ of a fatal disease might be in his body),29 which refers to his fear that he might have got infected by the contagious cough of a child suffering from diphtheria. To take on risks not out of professional duty, but just for the sake of passion or out of whim, can thus be understood as an attempt at escaping the responsibilities and duties of his social role. To challenge destiny in this context is, then, very closely linked to the transgression of normative boundaries. At the same time, Fridolin’s fear of infection is also a fear of this urge for transgression. By wondering whether he might be delirious (see T57), Fridolin pathologizes his own desire to escape the restrictions of his social role. As a consequence, only moments later, the very same role he just wished to overcome seems like the return to a safe haven to him: ‘Und mit einem seltsamen Herzklopfen ward er sich freudig bewußt, daß er in wenigen Stunden schon im weißen Leinenkittel zwischen den Betten seiner Kranken herumgehen würde’ (T58) (And with a strange, happy beating of his heart, he realized that in a few hours he would be walking around between the beds of his patients in his white hospital coat).30 This obviously indicates Fridolin’s ambivalent needs for freedom and security, for feeling ‘special’ and ‘normal’ at the same time.31
Fridolin’s fear of infection mentioned above, which turns out to be a subtle but recurring theme in the novella, can be interpreted in yet another way: infection as the ‘invasion’ of ‘otherness’ into the healthy ‘body’ of the norm.32 As the conflict with Albertine has unsettled Fridolin’s secured sense of his position as representative of the bourgeois male norm, it does not only have a deeply frightening effect, but also instills in him the desire to escape the normative boundaries he no longer feels protected by. If crossing over the boundary from the realm of the norm into that of the ‘other’ means losing one’s secured and privileged position within the social order, then infection with ‘otherness’ is equal to a threat of ‘social death’. Accordingly, all of Fridolin’s encounters after the conflict with Albertine are marked by the ambivalence of Eros and Thanatos: the promise of transgression they seem to have in store is highly seductive and frightening at the same time.33
The returning motif of Denmark as site of the uncontrolled Eros may be seen as an initial source of infection.34 The Shakespearean ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ comes to mind and could refer to a smouldering wound in the patriarchal gender order, which becomes uncovered in the conflict with Albertine.35 The sudden thawing of the snow, which introduces Fridolin’s nocturnal odyssey, could also be understood as referring to the first signs of infection: a raised temperature. Immediately after Albertine’s revelations, Fridolin is called to the deathbed of one of his patients, the ‘Hofrat’ (Privy Councillor). As a magistrate, the Hofrat is a representative of the social order. His doorbell has an ‘altväterische [sic] Klingelton’ (T14) (old-fashioned [literally: old-fatherly, M.K.] bell),36 which appears like a ‘simulation’ of the patriarchal. His death marks once more the disruption of the patriarchal order: the father is dead, the paternal law seems to be losing its power. However, Fridolin’s sudden irrational idea that the Hofrat might only be seemingly dead and so able to hear the conversation between his daughter Marianne and Fridolin gives the corpse vampiric features. This also corresponds to Marianne’s appearance: years of taking care of her father have drained her and he seems to have ‘sucked’ all life from her. In this way, she appears like the distorted ideal of the complementary female, the ‘domestic angel of the house’, who fades away in order to provide a man with a sense of wholeness. The text refers repeatedly to the ‘süßlich faden Geruch’ (T15) (indefinite [rather: stale, M.K.], sweetish scent)37 of Marianne, which has highly morbid connotations. ‘Death’ seems to be inscribed all over her with the ‘großen, aber trüben Augen’ (T15) (large, but sad [rather: dull, murky, M.K.] eyes),38 the dry hair and the wrinkled, yellowish neck. Fridolin also assumes that she is feverish and quickly diagnoses her with a ‘Spitzenkatarrh’ (T17) (catarrhous pulmonary infection, M.K.), which was considered as the onset of tuberculosis in Schnitzler’s day.39 This diagnosis reinforces the vampire motif, as the disease was one of the scientific explanations for vampire folklore in pre-modern times.40 Marianne thus seems to be infected by a parasitic depletion, as if now that her father has drained all life from her, she needs a new source of life for herself. In fact, at one point Fridolin fantasizes about being that source, when he assumes: ‘Marianne sähe sicher besser aus, wenn sie seine Geliebte wäre. Ihr Haar wäre weniger trocken, ihre Lippen röter und voller’ (T16) (Marianne would certainly look better, he thought to himself, if she were his mistress. Her hair would be less dry, her lips would be fuller and redder).41 However, her body as a potential dangerous source of contagions makes him feel rather repulsed than excited (see T19). When she professes her love to him he quickly distances himself from her by thinking of her as a hysteric. With this second medical diagnosis, as with the first one, Fridolin reassures himself in his position as a man of science who is immune to the infectious onslaught of vampiric ‘otherness’ represented by Marianne. However, this is immediately undermined by his rather unscientific and irrational, Gothic idea that the Hofrat might only be seemingly dead.42
Sebald’s description of hysteria as ‘die panische Reaktion des Mannes auf eine seinen Blick erwidernde Frau’ (a man’s reaction of panic, when a woman returns his gaze) points up the connection between Fridolin’s reaction to Marianne and his conflict with Albertine.43 This is underlined by Fridolin’s immediate association: ‘Flüchtig erinnerte er sich eines Romans, den er vor Jahren gelesen hatte und in dem es geschah, daß ein ganz junger Mensch, ein Knabe fast, am Totenbett der Mutter von ihrer Freundin verführt, eigentlich vergewaltigt wurde. Im selben Augenblick, er wußte nicht warum, mußte er seiner Gattin denken’ (T19) (He had a fleeting recollection of reading a novel years ago in which a young man, still almost a boy, had been seduced, in fact, practically raped, by a friend of his mother at the latter’s deathbed. At the same time he had to think of his wife, without knowing why).44
While Fridolin has no idea why he thinks of his wife immediately after recalling the fictional scene of the boy raped at his mother’s deathbed, in the context of the conflict he had with her, it becomes understandable. The dead mother and her violent friend are both sides of Fridolin’s stereotypical image of femininity, nurturing both the domestic angel and the voracious, diabolical outcast. They mirror Fridolin’s disturbing experience of Albertine’s revelations: the maternal woman that had provided a sense of wholeness and integrity has ‘died’ and the dangerous demonic woman figure has appeared instead. This corresponds again to the depiction of femininity in Dracula where the virtuous Lucy after her death is transformed into a lecherous vampire with an active desire.45 With the act of violation the woman in the novel takes possession of the phallus as emblem of the paternal order. That Fridolin has to think of Albertine right after recalling this fictional scene suggests that this threat is already implicit to him when she confesses that she is capable of an active sexual desire. Fridolin’s fear of infection is, then, tightly linked to a fear of the inversion or depletion of binary oppositions like male/female, dead/undead, self/‘other’.46
On this note, it is not surprising that Fridolin feels relieved when he exits this place of decay: ‘Er selbst erschien sich wie entronnen; nicht so sehr einem Erlebnis als vielmehr einem schwermütigen Zauber, der keine Macht über ihn gewinnen sollte’ (T20) (He felt as if he had escaped something, not so much from an adventure, but rather from a melancholy spell the power of which he was trying to break).47 Fridolin seems here to convince himself that he was able to avoid becoming infected at the ‘contaminated’ house of the Hofrat. However, ironically, the idea of fighting off the powers of a ‘melancholic spell’ seems to indicate the opposite: Fridolin, the doctor and man of science, has become ‘infected’ with irrational, mysticist thinking. The sensation of false security is also reflected directly afterwards, again with regard to the ‘unnaturally’ warm weather and to sexual activity, which also connotes the theme of potential infection in the guise of impregnation: ‘Auf beschattenden Bänken saß da und dort ein Paar eng aneinandergeschmiegt, als wäre wirklich schon der Frühling da und die trügerisch-warme Luft nicht schwanger von Gefahren’ (T21) ([H]e noticed, here and there on the benches standing in the shadow, that couples were sitting, clasped together, just as if spring had actually arrived and no danger were lurking in the deceptive, warm air [literally: as if the deceptive, warm air were not pregnant with danger, M.K.]).48 Fridolin’s feeling of having escaped is thus undermined by the narrative structure. While the text conveys Fridolin’s perspective through internal focalization, the reader is presented with textual effects like the one just described that yield an additional level of meaning, exceeding Fridolin’s conscious and intentional thoughts and actions. This might refer back to the ‘speaking body’ of the alleged hysteric Marianne, whose lips are ‘wie von vielen ungesagten Worten schmal’ (T15) (thin and firmly pressed together [rather: as if thinned out from too many words not said, M.K.]).49 If hysteria can be understood as the ‘genaue Äquivalent ihrer sonstigen Stimmlosigkeit’ (exact equivalent of her general lack of voice),50 then the bodily symptoms can be seen as speech acts that tell of what cannot be said: the hysterical body language can also be called ‘rhetoric of the unconscious’.51
If the text, while on the face of it representing Fridolin’s perspective, yields an additional level of meaning that undermines his intentional and conscious thoughts, it functions in a similar way to the body of a hysteric. The text offers the reader ‘symptoms’ that can be read and interpreted as performative effects that exceed Fridolin’s perspective.52 Moreover, while Fridolin at this point tries to reassure himself that he has escaped the ‘schwermütige Zauber’ (melancholy spell) in the Hofrat’s house, the following passages suggest the opposite. Fridolin seems to lose more and more control over his own actions: he repeatedly does things unintentionally (‘unwillkürlich’) and his speech acts and ‘performances’ miss their goal more often than they are successful. He becomes ‘self-conscious’ in his own modes of conduct, so that what appeared ‘natural’ to him before suddenly feels theatrical. In other words, one could say that his habitus as bourgeois male subject begins to feel like ‘role’ rather than an expression of natural essence.
If the habitus is produced and expressed through movements, gestures, facial expressions, manners, ways of walking, and ways of looking at the world,53 it depends heavily on successful performances of ‘social essence’. If those performances go awry, the re-production of one’s habitus and thus the reconfirmation of one’s position in the dominant order becomes questionable. And if the ‘natural essence’ of this position is in turn called into question, the performances attached to it may begin to feel theatrical. Already in the scene with Marianne Fridolin catches himself doing things involuntarily. While he thus performs things without the conscious decision to do so, the fact that he realizes that these things happen ‘unwillkürlich’ also indicates a form of self-consciousness. And in fact, not only does he realize that his behaviour seems to be somewhat ‘automated’, he almost seems to recognize them as the realization of cultural narratives: when he holds Marianne to comfort her he ‘beinahe unwillkürlich’ (T19) (almost against his will)54 kisses her on the forehead, ‘was ihm selbst ein wenig lächerlich vorkam’ (T19) (an act that seemed somehow rather ridiculous).55 This is only the beginning of a process in which Fridolin experiences his own actions repeatedly as ridiculous, which can be understood as an alienation from his own habitus. At the same time, his fear of infection accompanies him on this wandering where he nevertheless seems to above all seek a satisfying recognition scene, which would reassure him of his position within the norm and put an end to his feeling of increasing fragmentation.
The encounter with a group of fraternity students, in which Fridolin does not respond to the provocation of one of them and thus avoids a duel, is another failed movement of mutual recognition. While he recognizes the challenge as ‘eine alberne Studentenrempelei’ (T24) (silly encounter with a student)56 he is nevertheless unable to shake off the feeling of his own inadequacy with regard to the still powerful ideal of military masculinity. Even though duels in the bourgeois milieu are marked in Schnitzler’s work as ‘theatralische Farce’ (theatrical farce), to use Sebald’s expression, the passage nevertheless displays ‘die dem bürgerlichen Mann prinzipiell mangelnde Satisfaktionsfähigkeit’ (the fact that the bourgeois man is not eligible to ask for satisfaction).57 Sebald’s choice of words is important in our context, as it points up the theatrical effect of when performances required by obsolete norms are still carried out without the necessary identification. However, if the old ideal has not been replaced by a new one, which is eminently the case with the ideal of bourgeois masculinity, the feeling of theatricality does not prevent feelings of inadequacy and shortcoming. Moreover, Fridolin’s fear does not only refer to the threat of castration, as had been pointed out repeatedly, (‘oder ein Auge heraus?’ (T23) (Or lose an eye?)), but is also once more concerned with infection (‘Oder gar Blutvergiftung?’ (T23) (Or even blood-poisoning?).58 The dreaded sepsis might result from a ‘Hieb in den Arm’ (T23) (cut in my arm),59 thus an injury from the outer protective layer of the skin, which prevents the invasion of pathogenic germs. These fears can obviously be seen as completely rational considerations of the objective risks attached to a duel, but in the context of Fridolin’s general fear of infection, they seem to be linked to his mental state of an emerging identity crisis in which he already feels that the protective boundaries around his sense of self have become permeable. As Judith Halberstam writes, ‘Skin houses the body and it is figured in Gothic as the ultimate boundary, the material that divides the inside from the outside’.60 One could say that Fridolin’s skin has become permeable through a Gothic infection, or an infection with ‘otherness’.
It is not surprising that at this point Fridolin is craving an encounter that could provide recognition and reassurance about his position within the norm of the bourgeois order. When he hears the interpellation ‘Willst nicht mitkommen, Doktor?’ (T24) (Won’t you come with me, doctor?),61 he turns around automatically (again: ‘unwillkürlich’ (T25) (involuntarily)).62 Webber has pointed out that by assuming that the young sex worker must know – and thus recognize – him, Fridolin is ‘enacting a version of Althusser’s classic scene of subjectification by the calling power of ideology’.63 Indeed, Fridolin seems to be desperate to accept this interpellation and in this way to be reassured of his position within the bourgeois order. For that, it is also important to be recognized individually, which explains his almost hopeful question: ‘Woher kennst du mich?’ (T25) (How do you know who I am?).64 However, the illusion is exposed immediately afterwards: ‘Ich kenn’ Ihnen nicht, […] aber in dem Bezirk sind ja alle Doktors’ (T25) (Why, I don’t know you […], but here in this part of town they’re all doctors, aren’t they?).65 Fridolin’s longing for self-consciousness (in the Hegelian sense of the word) is so strong that he ignores the arbitrariness of her recognition and tries to fulfil the mutual movement by asking for her name. Yet here again she does not make any attempt to conceal their stereotypical exchangeability in this encounter: ‘No, wie wir i denn heißen? Mizzi natürlich’ (T25) (Well, what do you think? Mizzi, of course).66
Despite this refusal to engage in a more personal discourse with him, Fridolin feels tempted by her, but also thinks immediately of the possibility of infection: ‘Könnte gleichfalls mit dem Tod enden’ (T24) (She might also lead to a fatal end).67 According to Bronfen’s typology of femininity mentioned earlier, we can recognize in Mizzi the type of the ‘fallen woman’, who is positioned between the two other types.68 On the one hand, Mizzi, like Marianne, also bears the threat of infection and her appearance re-invokes the vampire theme: ‘Es war ein zierliches, noch ganz junges Geschöpf, sehr blaß mit rotgeschminkten Lippen’ (T25) (She was still a young and pretty little thing, very pale with red-painted lips).69 On the other hand, her vitalistic youth stands in contrast to Marianne’s lifelessness, which becomes clearer when Fridolin follows her home. Her room is ‘behaglich’ (pleasant) and ‘nett gehalten’ (neatly kept), ‘und jedenfalls roch es da viel angenehmer als in Mariannens Behausung’ (T25) (At any rate, it smelled fresher than Marianne’s home).70 He then realizes that her lips are naturally red and not made up with lipstick, which stands in opposition to Marianne’s pale ones. The proliferation of terms that all connote the realm of the motherly ‘domestic angel’ is striking: he sits down and enjoys the lulling movement of a rocking chair (which Santner convincingly associates with a cradle),71 and in her embrace he senses ‘viel tröstende Zärtlichkeit’ (T26) (comforting tenderness).72 Nevertheless, the fear of contracting a contagious disease holds him back from sleeping with her. This is even stressed when Fridolin finds out the next day that Mizzi has been hospitalized and that he had thus in fact come very close to being infected.
In this way, the transgression of the bourgeois order through illicit sexual intercourse becomes linked to the objectively existing danger of catching a sexually transmitted disease.73 This reinforces the link between crossing the normative boundaries into the realm of the ‘other’ and infection. Becoming infected in this case also means a point of no return, which is why even only a single act of transgression holds the risk of losing one’s position within the norm permanently. This is particularly the case with the etiopathology of syphilis, which ‘aus dem eleganten Kavalier einen lallenden Paralytiker macht’ (turns the elegant cavalier into a slurring paralytic):74 the disease not only makes the transgression visible through symptoms, but threatens the loss of both physical and mental health, and with it the ‘ultimate’ form of ‘otherness’.75 While Fridolin does not commit an act of transgression by sleeping with Mizzi (which is ultimately not due to his prudence, but to her decision not to expose him to this risk), he nevertheless transgresses normative boundaries here by carrying out courtship rituals that are usually not part of the interaction with a sex worker: ‘Er zog sie an sich, er warb um sie, wie um ein Mädchen, wie um eine geliebte Frau’ (T27) (He put his arms around her and wooed her like a sweetheart, like a beloved woman).76 And upon parting, again ‘unwillkürlich’ (T27) (involuntarily),77 he kisses her hand, thus performatively assigning her a position equal to his own. This may already indicate that he has become more and more detached from his own position within the norm.
At the same time, Fridolin keeps insisting on his position as representative of the norm through acts of (gender) performance, but these acts appear to go wrong repeatedly, to produce a kind of surplus meaning, which undermines their intentional quality. He more than once also fails to persuade others (including the reader) that his ‘posture’ as bourgeois post-Enlightenment male subject is not in fact ‘imposturous’. In a way, we could speak here of ‘infected’ performances, in the sense that Fridolin’s habitus as enlightened bourgeois male subject appears to be more and more subject to pathological infiltration.78 As we shall see, this process seems to begin with the encounter with Nachtigall.
Up to this point, Fridolin has not completely left ‘den gewohnten Bezirk seines Daseins’ (T28) (his everyday existence).79 For that it takes a revenant of Marco Polo from Die Weissagung (The Prophecy): the piano player Nachtigall, who tells him of the masked ball and finally purveys him with the password (Denmark) to enter the tempting event.80 Both Marco Polo and Nachtigall thus lead the respective protagonist temporarily outside of the structures of the dominant order to which they are subjected. As performance artists, the two mediating figures are also both representatives of a non-bourgeois ‘half-world’ and function as ‘doormen’ before the protagonist’s entrance into dream-like states of consciousness.81 Certainly not coincidentally, they are both Eastern-European Jews, thus culturally marked as ‘other’. Marco Polo is introduced as ‘Sohn eines Branntweinjuden aus dem benachbarten polnischen Städtchen’ (W604) (son of a Jewish gin-shop owner in a Polish little town close by), which is the closest bigger town to the ‘öde polnische Nest’ (small boring Polish town) where von Umprecht and his regiment are based. When Marco Polo was younger he went at first to Lemberg and then to Vienna, where he learned his skills in magnetism before travelling around the world with his art. Nachtigall, in turn ‘Sohn eines jüdischen Branntweinschenkers in einem polnischen Nest’ (T30) (son of a Jewish gin-shop owner in a small Polish town),82 came to Vienna in order to study medicine and piano, but lacking the ambition and discipline to finish either degree, he became a freelance piano player and started travelling around. The similarities and cross-references between the two figures are thus striking, considering the repetition not only of properties but also of identical formulations. Both of them are contrasting figures to the protagonists who, as privileged representatives of the norm, feel increasingly unfree and restricted within the normative boundaries of their bourgeois role. Although the protagonists feel socially superior to them, the itinerant performers seem to promise a specific kind of insight and passage into a world lying outside of the structures of the dominant order, which holds once again a certain fascination and suggests a potential idealization of the position of the ‘other’. Accordingly, both protagonists demand entry to this world: von Umprecht’s request ‘Prophezeien Sie mir’ (fore-tell me my future, W606) is mirrored in Fridolin’s ‘Nimm mich mit, Nachtigall’ (T35) (Take me along, Nachtigall).83
And just as Marco Polo at one point appears as von Umprecht’s challenger (‘Der Herr Leutnant haben Angst’ (You are afraid, Lieutenant, W606)), Nachtigall challenges Fridolin’s courage by asking ‘Hast du Courage?’ (T34) (Have you got plenty of nerve?),84 which can be understood to some extent as another form of interpellation, calling Fridolin’s masculinity into question. Fridolin shows an offended knee-jerk reaction, in which he automatically performs that form of masculine conduct that he had dismissed as ‘albern’ (silly) and immature before: ‘“Sonderbare Frage”, sagte Fridolin im Ton eines beleidigten Couleurstudenten’ (T34) (‘That’s a strange question’, said Fridolin in the tone of an offended fraternity student).85 The reader is here obviously immediately reminded of Fridolin’s experience with the fraternity students and recognizes the imposturous quality of this speech act. Bearing in mind that Nachtigall is a former fellow student of Fridolin, one could also think of this as a regression to their student days and the codes of conduct that were common then. Nachtigall’s Jewishness brings back the question of ‘Satisfaktionsfähigkeit’, which the fraternities in Austria denied to all Jews as early as 1896.86 Confronted with Nachtigall’s possibly challenging remark about Fridolin’s courage, Fridolin automatically invokes the military code of honour as an attempt to demonstrate that he is fulfilling the requirements of the masculine norm – and thus, of course, is courageous. By performing his ‘Satisfaktionsfähigkeit’ he seems not only to demonstrate his potency, but also to put Nachtigall, who, as a Jew, is excluded from this code, in his place. However, this might be an artificial and empty performance, and not merely because Fridolin avoided the duel with the fraternity brothers before. The aggression of the fraternity brothers towards Fridolin has also been interpreted as an attack of anti-Semitism, thus identifying Fridolin as a Jew.87 In this way, Fridolin, as ‘acculturated’ Western Jew, would emphasize his belonging to the norm by stressing the ‘otherness’ of Nachtigall as an Eastern Jew.88
This may once more subtly allude to the corresponding passage in Die Weissagung (The Prophecy), when Marco Polo is confronted with the anti-Semitic attitude of the members of the regiment. Both von Umprecht and Fridolin seem to want to secure their position within the norm by marking their difference to the (Eastern) Jewish ‘other’. However, Nachtigall immediately makes it clear that the institutionalized code of honour is not the kind of courage he was asking for anyway: ‘Ich meine nicht soo [sic]’ (T34) (I don’t mean that).89 Without specifying further what it is he means, he seems nevertheless to indicate that the rites and performances of masculinity Fridolin is used to are useless in the world he is about to be introduced to. This, as we will see later, is precisely the case when Fridolin tries to apply the normal rules of offence and satisfaction to the secret society at the masked ball. Thus, similar to Marco Polo, Nachtigall is a figure who leads Fridolin into a realm in which the rules and conventions of the dominant order do not apply any more. In this, he seems to be a ‘doorman’ of the realm of the metaphysical, individually laid out ‘destiny’. When Nachtigall is reluctant to take Fridolin with him to the masked ball, Fridolin ‘appoints’ the power of decision to the force of ‘destiny’: ‘Das Schicksal soll entscheiden’ (T36) (Let fate decide the question).90
Fridolin’s transition state between social and metaphysical ‘destiny’ (and between norm and ‘other’) in the passage with Nachtigall is already prefigured in a pronounced focus on voice and speech acts. The voice, as Mladen Dolar writes, ‘holds bodies and language together’ and seems thus particularly interesting when analyzing ‘infected performances’ of ‘speaking bodies’.91 The voice, as the ‘instrument, the vehicle, the medium’ of meaning, is nevertheless potentially excessive and disruptive: as soon as we become aware of the voice, its quality, timbre, accent etc., we are distracted from the meaning it conveys.92 If it is true that the voice is ‘the material element recalcitrant to meaning’, and that the voice is precisely that part of the speech act ‘which cannot be said’,93 then disruptions of meaning through the voice might be part of the ‘rhetoric of the unconscious’ mentioned earlier.94 When Nachtigall tells Fridolin about the details of the secret ball, Fridolin exclaims: ‘Nachtigall, Nachtigall, was singst du da für ein Lied!’ (T34) (Nachtigall, what do you mean [rather: what kind of song are you singing, M.K.]?).95 As singing is a cultural practice in which the voice tends to overpower the meaning of words, thus ceasing to be just a medium for meaning, but becoming the goal itself, Fridolin expresses here the fact that what Nachtigall tells him escapes signification and thus intelligibility. This already indicates that we are about to enter a realm outside of the structures of the dominant order. A further marker of deviance from the norm is Nachtigall’s ‘polnisch weicher Akzent mit mäßigem jüdischem Beiklang’ (T29) (soft Polish accent and a slightly Jewish twang),96 which is
something which brings the voice into the vicinity of singing and a heavy accent suddenly makes us aware of the material support of the voice which we tend immediately to discard. […] After all it is a norm which differs from the ruling norm – this is what makes it an accent, and this is what makes it obtrusive, what makes it sing – and it can be described in the same way as the ruling norm.97
Nachtigall’s accent seems to indicate that he does not fully respond to the demands of the ruling norm, that he is not fully subjected to the dominant order.98 Although Fridolin at first tries to conceal the fact that his excitement has been sparked, a disruption of his voice gives him away: after being assured by Nachtigall of the exquisite selection of women present at events of the secret society, he has to clear his voice: ‘Fridolin räusperte sich leicht. “Und wie hoch ist das Entrée?”, fragte er beiläufig’ (T35) (Fridolin hemmed and hawed a little. ‘And what’s the price of admission?’ he asked casually).99 When Nachtigall turns out to be reluctant to take Fridolin with him, Fridolin tries to persuade him: ‘Vor einer Minute hattest du noch die Absicht … mir zu “vergennen”. Es wird schon möglich sein’ (T35) (But a minute ago you yourself spoke … of being willing to … I think you can manage alright).100 This imitation of Nachtigall’s accent is of an ambivalent nature. While it is reminiscent of the condescending way the colonel imitates Marco Polo in Die Weissagung (The Prophecy), it can also be seen as an awkward attempt at ingratiation: after all, it is a conscious deviation from the linguistic norm, which might indicate that Fridolin is willing to transgress normative boundaries. Much in the way that Robert in Flucht in die Finsternis (Flight into Darkness) plays with symptoms of mental illness before losing all control he might have had over it, Fridolin theatrically plays with crossing the line between norm and ‘other’ (which began already during the encounter with Mizzi, as we have seen), but also increasingly loses control over these performances. It seems as if Fridolin’s decision ‘Das Schicksal soll entscheiden’ (T36) (Let fate decide the question)101 becomes realized in this way.
In order to commission appropriate clothing to enter the tempting masked ball, Fridolin goes to the costume dealer Gibiser where he also meets the daughter of the latter: dressed as a Pierrette, she gets caught in the middle of an erotic adventure with two men, costumed as vehmic judges. Her innocent youth is disturbed by her apparent promiscuity, as she seems to be available for erotic encounters with any man she meets (as Fridolin too feels immediately seduced by her).102 With her promising costume, which represents a pantomime form of servant, the Pierrette offers her services to anyone who wants to be her master. Following my elaborations on the Pierrot figure in Leisenbohg, one could say that this costume refers to the ambivalence of femininity in the patriarchal order, functioning at once as a projection screen, and a death omen, but also as a kind of ‘gender masquerade’, bringing to attention the performativity of gender roles. Here again, the arbitrariness seems to undermine the fulfilment of Fridolin’s longing for mastery and self-knowledge. Nevertheless, the idea of possession that the Pierrette promises appears so appealing to Fridolin that he imagines kidnapping her: ‘Am liebsten wäre er dageblieben oder hätte die Kleine gleich mitgenommen, wohin immer – und was immer darauf gefolgt wäre’ (T38) (He would have liked to stay, or, better still, to take the girl with him, no matter where – and whatever the consequences).103 When Gibiser calls her ‘eine Wahnsinnige’ (T38) (deranged),104 Fridolin tries to reassume his authority as a physician in order to protect the Pierrette from punishment. However, he fails miserably in front of Gibiser: Fridolin uses his (possibly even authentic) protective impulse to cover his own erotic interest in the girl, and the purveyor of masks Gibiser immediately sees through him.
There is an underlying and uncanny threat that determines the whole passage in Gibiser’s house. The fact that Gibiser calls his daughter insane moves her into the realm of the absolute ‘other’. As insanity represents the split subject par excellence, the Pierrette’s promise to function as the complementary ‘other’ is undermined by the threat of dissociation. As a result, Fridolin seems to bear the signs of infection after he tries to find himself in the eyes of the girl: his own feeling of disintegration is exacerbated, as he becomes frightened by his own reflection in the mirror – a classic uncanny Doppelgänger experience. As Freud writes in Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny), the motif of the Doppelgänger, which in the phase of primary narcissism acts as a reassurance ‘gegen den Untergang des Ichs’ (against the decline of the ego), later develops ‘zum unheimlichen Vorboten des Todes’ (to the uncanny forbearer of death).105
Although the striking moment of Grauen (horror) discussed in the previous chapters does not occur explicitly in Traumnovelle (Dream Story), there are several passages with the same distinct Gothic colouring, as has already been pointed out with regard to the recurring vampire motif. The accumulation of Gothic elements finds its climax in the description of the secret society at the masked ball.106 Fridolin does not feel a Grauen (horror), but repeatedly a similar sensation of Schauer (shudder, T21, 42), which could be read as an ‘infection’ on the level of the text, as if it were ‘infected’ by elements of Schauerromantik (Dark Romanticism) or the Gothic. This Schauer (shudder) accordingly accompanies an experience in which the conventional interpretative patterns of the protagonist start to crumble and the differences between real and oneiric experiences begin to fade.107 The death symbolism is here built up to the extreme: the secret society travels in funeral coaches, complete with silent coachmen, which again strikingly allude to the coach that brings Jonathan Harker to Count Dracula, and finally, the hall is decorated with black silk.108 Accordingly, Fridolin’s thoughts circle around his death before he enters the event, even if he does not know the reason: ‘Weiter meinen Weg, und wär’s mein Tod. Er lachte selbst zu dem großen Wort, aber sehr heiter war ihm nicht zumut’ (T42) (I must go through with this, even if it means death. And he laughed at himself, using such a big word but without feeling very cheerful about it).109 As has been said in the first section, this rhetorically heightened fear of death can also be seen as fear of infection with ‘otherness’ in the sense of a ‘social death’ that would be the consequence of a permanent crossing of the normative boundaries of the bourgeois order. That he enters an alternative space to his bourgeois existence is made explicit when Fridolin puts on his costume, ‘geradeso wie er jeden Morgen auf der Spitalabteilung in die Ärmel seines Leinenkittels zu schlüpfen pflegte’ (T42) (just as he slipped into the sleeves of his white linen coat every morning in his ward at the hospital).110
At the masked ball, the woman, who will later sacrifice herself for him, at first bears all the signs of a threatening femme fatale, with her vampiric features (‘Er sah den blutroten Bund durch die schwarzen Spitzen schimmern’ (T44) (He saw the blood-red mouth glimmering through the black lace).111 However, when she warns Fridolin about the danger he is in, the motif of the encounter of gazes appears again: ‘dunkle Augen sanken in die seinen’ (T44) (Dark eyes were fixed to him [literally: sunk into his own, M.K.]).112 This formulation underlines the reassuring moment of this encounter. Her eyes ‘sink into his’ and thus seem to overcome the gap between them and complement Fridolin’s fractured self again. In the middle of this lasciviously morbid event where the appearance of a diabolical woman seems most likely, Fridolin thus finally meets the perfect ‘angel of the house’ he has been looking for all night. She eminently fits Bronfen’s definition of the first type – even though there might not be anything ‘domestic’ about her appearance, she evidently is ‘a saintly, self-sacrificing […] vessel’113 with almost motherly features. The encounter immediately has a transformative effect on him: ‘“Ich bleibe”, sagte er in einem heroischen Ton, den er nicht an sich kannte’ (T44) (‘I shall stay,’ he said in a heroic voice which he hardly recognized as his own).114 As long as the motherly protective woman is around him, Fridolin is able to be rid of his feelings of inadequacy: ‘Er war berauscht […] von sich selbst, von seiner Kühnheit, von der Wandlung, die er in sich spürte’ (T48) (He was intoxicated with himself, with his boldness, the change he felt in himself).115 That this change, however, is not permanent but linked to the reassuring recognition through the masked woman becomes immediately clear when she leaves him: ‘Fridolin fand sich allein, und diese plötzliche Verlassenheit überfiel ihn wie Frost’ (T49) (A sudden feeling of solitude made Fridolin shiver as if with cold).116
His inadequacy is then made explicit, when he is asked for the second password and does not know the answer. This refers back to the conflict with Albertine, in which she revealed to him that he could have seduced her even before their marriage had he said the right ‘word’. In this way, the lack of the second password also refers to his inadequacy with regard to the potent codes of masculinity. That he is an impostor and indeed not accepted as an equal by the other male participants in the ball becomes clear when they demand atonement from him. Fridolin tries to establish a mutual recognition by relying on the rules of offence and satisfaction: ‘Wenn einer der Herren sich durch mein Erscheinen gekränkt fühlen sollte, so erkläre ich mich bereit, ihm in üblicher Weise Genugtuung zu geben. Doch meine Maske werde ich nur in dem Fall ablegen, daß Sie alle das gleiche tun, meine Herren’ (T50) (If my appearance has offended any of the gentlemen present, I am ready to give satisfaction in the usual manner, but I shall take off my mask only if all of you do the same).117 However, the members of the secret society are not interested in the ‘übliche Weise’ (usual manner) of the master–slave game, as it is evident that he is not one of them. The fact that a woman is then able to replace him – ‘ihn auszulösen’ (T51) (to redeem him)118 – may underline that Fridolin is already in the position of the ‘other’ for them. Fridolin’s performance as representative of the male norm has thus failed here.119
It is then that Fridolin tries to return to his bourgeois position and give assurance that he has in fact stopped playing a role. Significantly, he stresses his authenticity by invoking destiny: ‘Ich spiele keinerlei Komödie, auch nicht hier, und wenn ich es bisher notgedrungen getan habe, so gebe ich es jetzt auf. Ich fühle, daß ich in ein Schicksal geraten bin, das mit dieser Mummerei nichts mehr zu tun hat, ich will Ihnen meinen Namen nennen, ich will meine Larve abnehmen und nehme alle Folgen auf mich’ (T52) (I won’t play a part [literally: comedy, M.K.], here or elsewhere, and if I have been forced to do so up to now, I shall give it up. I feel that a fate has overtaken me which has nothing to do with this foolery. I will tell you my name, take off my mask and be responsible for the consequences).120
Fridolin counter-poses the fate or destiny that has overtaken him with his social destiny, by offering to give his opponents his proper name, the signifier of his institutionalized identity and social destiny. This could be seen as a performative speech act that for the first time can count as an attempt at taking over individual responsibility. However, although Fridolin asserts that he is no longer playing a part, he cannot help but recite melodramatic lines: ‘“Nein”, erwiderte [Fridolin] in erhöhtem Ton. “Das Leben hat keinen Wert mehr für mich, wenn ich ohne dich von hier fortgehen soll”’ (T52) (‘No,’ replied [Fridolin], elevating his voice. ‘Life means nothing to me if I must leave here without you’).121 The heightened tone of his voice underlines the theatricality of this utterance and contradicts his claim to authenticity. Fridolin seems to have no control over his performance and the invocation of his own individuality (name, face) qua destiny is not of interest for the secret society – he gets removed from the event and thrown back into the bourgeois world he came from.
However, this world is still not what it used to be: it seems to be ‘infected’ by an unfamiliar strangeness. When he arrives home he finds Albertine caught up in her dream as if in an uncanny masquerade, with an ‘Antlitz, das Fridolin nicht kannte’ (it was a face that Fridolin did not know), laughing ‘in einer völlig fremden, fast unheimlichen Weise’ (T58) (in a strange, almost uncanny manner).122 The content of her dream takes her demonization to the extreme: in fact, it can be seen as a symmetrical inversion of the patriarchal gender order when she imagines Fridolin sacrificing himself for her. It is hardly surprising that the leader of her dream world is a queen. Moreover, in contrast to Fridolin’s dreamlike experiences, Albertine’s dream is an ‘ungebrochener Wunschtraum, der die Befreiung aus patriarchalischen Zwängen von Anfang bis Ende konsequent durchführt’ (an unequivocal dream of wish fulfilment, which consequently realizes the liberation from the shackles of patriarchy).123 Of course, this leads at first to a further intensification of Fridolin’s identity crisis.124
During the following day, Fridolin repeatedly tries to regain control over what has happened by consciously assuming an authoritative male habitus. He returns to all the significant stations of the previous night in order to make sense of them and to re-establish the disrupted order. This may allude to the pattern of classical crime novels, in which the elements that disrupt the norms of the dominant order are step by step unravelled by an authoritative male protagonist – usually a detective of some sort. However, the course of events demonstrates that Fridolin is far from being the cool investigator of the case he aims and pretends to be. This becomes particularly evident in the way in which he compulsively strives for authoritative habitus: ‘es war ihm angenehm, daß er seine Arztenstasche in der Hand trug, als er aus dem Haustor trat; so würde man ihn wohl nicht für einen Bewohner dieses Hotels halten, sondern für eine Amtsperson’ (T69) (He was glad that he had his doctor’s bag with him when he stepped out of the door, for anyone seeing him would not think that he was staying at the hotel, but would take him for some official person).125 The doctor’s bag is supposed to signify the status of the objective and distanced observer, and his hope that he will be perceived as an official person, thus a representative of the state, underlines the fact that Fridolin tries very hard to re-invoke the structures of the dominant order which have been drawn into question since the events of the previous night. Also when he returns to Gibiser’s house to return the costume and to talk to him about the mental health of his daughter, Fridolin tries to incorporate an official habitus: ‘“Ich bin ferner hier”, sagte Fridolin im Ton eines Untersuchungsrichters, “um ein Wort wegen Ihres Fräulein Tochters mit Ihnen zu reden.”’ (T69) (‘I would also like,’ said Fridolin in the tone of a police magistrate, ‘to have a word with you about your daughter’).126 However, with Gibiser, Fridolin remains as unsuccessful in his imposture as he was the night before. When he suggests that the girl should be examined by a doctor because of her alleged mental illness: ‘Gibiser, einen unnatürlich langen Federstiel in der Hand hin und her drehend, maß Fridolin mit unverschämtem Blick. “Und Herr Doktor wären vielleicht selbst so gütig, die Behandlung zu übernehmen?” “Ich bitte mir keine Worte in den Mund zu legen”, erwiderte Fridolin scharf, aber etwas heiser, “die ich nicht ausgesprochen habe”’ (T70) (‘And I suppose the doctor himself would like to take charge of the treatment?’ ‘Please don’t misunderstand me,’ replied Fridolin in a sharp [but slightly hoarse, M.K.] voice).127 Again, it is Fridolin’s hoarse voice that gives him away and undermines the meaning of his utterance: Gibiser, whose superiority is made obvious in this passage, has hit the mark.128
All of Fridolin’s attempts to shed a light onto the events of the night before fail miserably and he seems unable to resume his position as representative of the bourgeois male norm. His feelings of alienation and self-loss reach a climax here: ‘Er fühlte sich ungeschickt, hilflos, alles zerfloß ihm unter den Händen; alles wurde unwirklich, sogar sein Heim, seine Frau, sein Kind, sein Beruf, ja, er selbst’ (T80) (He felt awkward and helpless. Everything he put his hands to turned out a failure. Everything seemed unreal: his home, his wife, his child, his profession, and even he himself).129 Interestingly, this crisis-like state of mind briefly opens up a moment of reflection in which he questions his normal interpretative patterns and practices of stereotypical labelling: ‘Wie man doch immer wieder, durch Worte verführt, Straßen, Schicksale, Menschen in träger Gewohnheit benennt und beurteilt’ (T81) (Isn’t it strange how we are misled by words, how we give names to streets, events and people, and form judgements about them, just because we are too lazy to change our habits?).130 As a result he feels so alienated from his bourgeois existence that he half-heartedly considers leaving it all behind him: ‘Ganz flüchtig, nicht etwas wie ein Vorsatz, kam ihm der Einfall, zu irgendeinem Bahnhof zu fahren, abzureisen, gleichgültig wohin, zu verschwinden für alle Leute, die ihn gekannt, irgendwo in der Fremde wieder aufzutauchen und ein neues Leben zu beginnen als ein anderer, neuer Mensch’ (T80) (Then the idea occured to him – not deliberately but as a flash across his mind – to dive to some station, take a train, no matter where, and to disappear, leaving everyone behind. He could then turn up again, somewhere abroad, and start a new life, as a different personality).131
This passage is reminiscent of Robert in Flucht in die Finsternis (Flight into Darkness) who in fact follows through with this plan and as a result irreversibly crosses the boundary into the realm of the ‘other’. Fridolin too displays, then, the first paranoid symptoms already familiar from Robert: ‘In einer entfernten Ecke nahm ein Herr Platz; in dunklem Überzieher, auch sonst ganz unauffällig gekleidet. Fridolin erinnerte sich, die Physiognomie im Laufe des Tages schon irgendwo gesehen zu haben. Das konnte natürlich auch Zufall sein’ (T84) (A man had just taken a seat in a distant corner. He wore a dark overcoat and inconspicuous clothes, and Fridolin thought he had seen his face before, during the day. It might, of course, be just a fancy).132 The fact that Fridolin does not get overwhelmed by this ‘infection of otherness’ and at the end of the novella is able to return home to Albertine and his bourgeois existence, is due to the ‘purifying’ encounter with a dead woman.
When Fridolin finally reads a note in the paper about a beautiful Baroness D. who has been found poisoned in her hotel room, he immediately identifies her with his martyr of the previous night. In fact, the text does not give any unequivocal information as to whether the dead baroness is really the woman from the ball. Yet when Fridolin goes to see the corpse in the morgue it becomes clear that it is actually irrelevant whether or not he ascertains the dead woman’s identity:
Denn ob die Frau, die nun da drin in der Totenkammer lag, dieselbe war, die er vor vierundzwanzig Stunden zu den wilden Klängen von Nachtigalls Klavierspiel nackt in den Armen gehalten, oder ob diese Frau irgendeine andere, eine Unbekannte […] war, […] was da hinter ihm lag in der gewölbten Halle, […] ihm konnte es nichts anderes mehr bedeuten als, zu unwiderruflicher Verwesung bestimmt, den bleichen Leichnam der vergangenen Nacht. (T94f.)
It did not matter to him whether the woman – now lying on the hospital morgue – was the same one he had held naked in his arms twenty-four hours before, to the wild tunes of Nachtigall’s playing. It was immaterial whether this corpse was some other unknown woman, a perfect stranger he had never seen before. […] [H]e knew that the body lying in the arched room […] could only be to him the pale corpse of the preceding night.133
The dead woman, then, becomes the personification of the entirety of the previous night’s temptations of transgression. Her dead body is tantamount to the dead body of the night. Thus, with her death, the danger of transgressing irreversibly into the realm of the ‘other’ seems to be contained. The individual person behind the mask is thus not of interest to Fridolin. He realizes instead that all the time it had been Albertine’s face that he had imagined behind his saviour’s mask. In this way, the woman’s sacrifice takes on the quality of a displaced wish fulfilment for Fridolin: as Albertine’s revelation has ‘unmasked’ the threatening side of femininity represented by the second type, the diabolical demon woman, Fridolin’s logical reaction is to wish that this disturbing side of the feminine should be covered up again. That Fridolin has always imagined Albertine as the woman behind the mask demonstrates that he wants her to fulfil the part of the reassuring ‘other’ again: the woman’s dramatic sacrifice appears like a radicalized version of the sacrificial role of the ‘domestic angel’ that is assigned to Albertine as mother and wife.134
In this way it is not surprising that, of all things, the sight of the woman’s dead body re-establishes his security again and manages to suppress the disturbing images of the previous night. The flirtation with the corpse finally gives Fridolin the impression of a successful recognition scene:
Unwillkürlich, ja wie von einer unsichtbaren Macht gezwungen und geführt, berührte Fridolin mit beiden Händen die Stirne, die Wangen, die Schultern, die Arme der toten Frau; dann schlang er seine Finger wie zum Liebesspiel in die der Toten, und so starr sie waren, es schien ihm, als versuchten sie sich zu regen, die seinen zu ergreifen; ja ihm war, als irrte unter den halbgeschlossenen Lidern ein ferner, farbloser Blick nach dem seinem; und wie magisch angezogen beugte er sich herab. (T92)
Fridolin touched the forehead, the cheeks, the shoulders of the dead woman, doing so as if compelled and directed by an invisible power. He twined his fingers about those of the corpse, and rigid as they were, they seemed to him to make an effort to move, to seize his hand. Indeed he almost felt that a vague and distant look from underneath her eyelids was searching his face. He bent over her, as if magically attracted.135
At first, Fridolin loses any control he might still have had over his own actions: again ‘unwillkürlich’, and this time even explicitly as if guided by an invisible power, which invokes both the topic of destiny and the vampire theme, he seems to lose himself in this recognition scene with the dead woman. Santner’s claim that this experience has a cathartic impact on Fridolin is a convincing one.136 But rather than freeing him from his former narcissism, the dead woman seems to ‘purify’ him from his ‘infection of otherness’. The colourless gaze might refer to an empty canvas, which is underlined by the description of her face: ‘es war ein völlig nichtiges, leeres, es war ein totes Antlitz’ (T91) (It was a face without expression or character. It was dead).137
In his 1846 essay ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, Edgar Allan Poe famously claimed that ‘the death […] of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world’.138 Whether meant in a satirical way or not, Poe’s comment suggests that the representation of female death yields a certain kind of aesthetic pleasure; that it resonates with audiences and readers in a specific kind of way which Poe calls ‘most poetical’. Arguing that death and femininity are often conflated in cultural representations, in the sense that death is repeatedly inscribed in representations of women (for example as death-stricken femme fragile or as death-threatening femme fatale), Bronfen sees death to be culturally gendered as female and comes to the conclusion that ‘“dead woman” is a pleonasm used to confirm the social structure of gender and efface the reality of death’.139 The aesthetic pleasure deriving from female death implied by Poe is, then, for Bronfen fuelled by the ‘desire for the death of the other’,140 and brings about a moment of ‘satisfaction, since the survivor is not himself dead’.141 Without claiming that Bronfen’s argument can be blindly and generally applied to each aesthetic example of female death, I want to suggest that it proves helpful for the interpretation of the function of the female corpse in Traumnovelle (Dream Story). Fridolin’s fear of infection, of irreversibly transgressing the boundary into the realm of the ‘other’ is tantamount, as already argued, to a fear of ‘social death’. This fear is then experienced as mortal threat, which we have seen in the passages at Gibiser’s house and in particular at the masked ball. Seeing the body of the woman reassures him of his own survival and gives him a chance to be, as it were, reborn.
After this mutual recognition scene with the dead woman, he receives an interpellation from the voice of his colleague, the ambitious and thorough man of science Doctor Adler, which wakes Fridolin ‘jählings’ (T93) (instantly) from his reverie.142 Now Fridolin is ready to leave the events of the last two days behind him: in Doctor Adler’s halls of science, he cleanses away all possibly remaining sources of infection and feeling of guilt: ‘Fridolin trat ans Waschbecken. “Du erlaubst”, sagte er und reinigte seine Hände sorgfältig mit Lysol und Seife’ (T93) (Fridolin stepped up to the wash basin. ‘With your permission’, he said and carefully washed his hands with lysol and soap).143 The thorough Doctor Adler then offers Fridolin one more option, ‘zur Beruhigung deines Gewissens’ (to quiet your conscience), by letting him look through his microscope: ‘“Findest du dich zurecht?”, fragte er, während Fridolin ins Mikroskop schaute. “Es ist nämlich eine ziemlich neue Färbungsmethode.”’ (T93) (‘Can you make it out,’ he asked, as Fridolin looked into the microscope. ‘It’s a fairly new staining method’).144 This new method almost certainly refers to Robert Koch’s colouring technique, which allowed bacteria to be made visible under the microscope.145 The possibility to visualize pathogenic agents is obviously a promising step in order to understand and avoid infection. Adler’s reassuring touch of reason (‘Doktor Adler legte die Hand beruhigend auf Fridolins Arm’ (T94) (Doctor Adler placed his hand on Fridolin’s arm reassuringly)146 seems to confirm Fridolin’s purification. This gesture in fact mirrors Nachtigall’s before: ‘Und seine Hand auf Fridolins Arm legend’ (T32) (Placing his hand on Fridolin’s arm).147 In this way, Nachtigall and Adler could be understood as the two extreme poles of ‘norm’ and ‘other’ between which Fridolin himself oscillates, with their contrasting ‘bird names’ also supporting this reading.148
After this experience, Fridolin can return home to Albertine who is magically restored as the motherly domestic ‘angel of the house’. Even if a final uncanny moment is provided as Fridolin’s lost mask is found by Albertine and laid on his pillow beside her, the threat nevertheless appears to be banished. Fridolin’s reaction is that of the regretful child: he bursts into tears, feels comforted by her soft hand stroking his hair and confesses everything to her. Accordingly, it is Albertine who provides the final reassurance: ‘“Was sollen wir tun, Albertine?” Sie lächelte, und nach kurzem Zögern erwiderte sie: “Dem Schicksal dankbar sein, glaube ich, daß wir aus allen Abenteuern heil heraus gekommen sind – aus den wirklichen und aus den geträumten.”’ (‘What shall we do now, Albertina?’ She smiled, and after a minute, she replied: ‘I think we ought to be grateful that we have come unharmed out of all our adventures, whether they were real or only a dream’).149 With this expression of gratitude that both their ‘adventures’ remained without consequences, which is, with regard to the dead woman in the morgue, at least questionable, Albertine becomes here the speaker of an order she – as a woman – used to be a victim of. ‘Destiny’ seems here to be congruent with their social destiny, because it has led both of them back into the realm of the bourgeois norm. By this token, the bourgeois ideal of romantic love as destiny seems to be re-enforced in the end, which underlines its ‘complicity’ with the bourgeois order. The cliché used by Fridolin in the beginning – that in all other women he had encountered he had been looking only for Albertine – has in some sense come true.
The death of the unknown woman is, then, a sacrifice that re-established the old order in a double sense: she has died not only for Fridolin, but also for Albertine, who was the actual object of Fridolin’s fantasy of sacrifice. The resurrection of the old order seems certain as soon as the new day begins with a ‘sieghaften Lichtstrahl durch den Vorhangsspalt und einem hellen Kinderlachen’ (T97) (victorious ray of light through the opening of the curtain, and a clear laughter of a child).150 Whether this victory is absolutely desirable seems arguable in view of the dead woman who, in the novella’s concluding pages, represents nothing but a void – no further mention of her is made. In this sense her task has been fulfilled exemplarily: she has faded completely in order to sustain the bourgeois patriarchal system. Accordingly both Albertine and Fridolin appear able to return to their mutually reassuring and individualizing roles within the norm. The mask on the pillow – as emblem of stereotype and performance – remains as the only reminder of the constructedness and potential instability of these roles. The ending seems to imply something between the possibility of the total reestablishment of the old unstable and ignorant security, and a small chance of a new, at once knowing and unknowing acceptance of ‘otherness’ and insecurity. This is indicated by Albertine’s comment on feeling insecure about the future, which seems to suspend the model of destiny: ‘Niemals in die Zukunft fragen’ (T97) (Never inquire into the future).151
1 From one of Schnitzler’s early drafts (CUL A144,1) for Traumnovelle (Dream Story).
2 I have analyzed Schnitzler’s authorial self-fashioning through this publication in a women’s magazine elsewhere. See Kolkenbrock, Marie (2017), ‘Der “graziöse” Autor und Die Dame: Arthur Schnitzlers implizite Autorschaft im Fortsetzungsroman Traumnovelle,’ Poetologien des Posturalen: Inszenierungen von Autorschaft in der Zwischenkriegszeit, ed. by Clemens Peck and Norbert Christian Wolf, Paderborn: Fink, 49–65.
3 An exception is the article by Schrimpf already discussed in the Introduction of this book. See Schrimpf, Hans Joachim (1963), ‘Arthur Schnitzlers Traumnovelle,’ Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 82: 172–192.
4 Sebald also points up the function of love as the secularized metaphysics of bourgeois societies. See Sebald, W. G. (1985), Die Beschreibung des Unglücks: Zur Österreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis Handke, Salzburg: Residenz, 38.
5 See Hegel, G. F. W. (1988), Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. by H.-F. Wessels and H. Clairmont, Hamburg: Meiner, 128–136.
6 See Santner, Eric (1986), ‘Of Masters, Slaves, and Other Seducers: Arthur Schnitzler’s “Traumnovelle”,’ Modern Austrian Literature 19 (3/4): 33–45, 39.
7 Santner, ‘Of Masters, Slaves, and Other Seducers,’ 33.
8 Beauvoir, Simone de (1968/2009), The Second Sex, London: Jonathan Cape, 72.
9 I am borrowing the term from one of Elisabeth Bronfen’s (1992) types of femininity, to which I will return later on, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 208.
10 Schnitzler, Arthur (1928), Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, London: Constable, 19. All translations for Traumnovelle (Dream Story) are taken from this English edition, which does not list the name of the translator. All other translations from the German are my own.
11 The centrality of the gaze in Traumnovelle (Dream Story) and Schnitzler’s work in general has been pointed out by several scholars. See Freytag, Julia (2007), Verhüllte Schaulust: Die Maske in Schnitzlers Traumnovelle und in Kubricks Eyes Wide Shut, Bielefeld: transcript; Aspetsberger Friedbert (1966), ‘“Drei Akte in einem”: Zum Formtyp in Schnitzlers Drama,’ Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 85: 285–308; Saxer, Sibylle (2010), Die Sprache der Blicke verstehen: Arthur Schnitzlers Poetik des Augen-Blicks als Poetik der Scham, Freiburg i. Br./Berlin/Vienna: Rombach.
12 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 7.
13 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 17–18.
14 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 19.
15 See also Sebald, who suggests that Schnitzler’s works express a ‘Skepsis gegenüber den habituellen Veranstaltungen der Liebe’ (scepticism with regard to the habitus-related events of love). See Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, 40.
16 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 19.
17 See Scheible, Hartmut (1977), Arthur Schnitzler und die Aufklärung, Munich: W. Fink, 76.
18 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 59.
19 Schrimpf, ‘Arthur Schnitzlers Traumnovelle,’ 175.
20 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 145.
21 Bronfen, Elisabeth (1992), Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 218.
22 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 151–152.
23 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 74.
24 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 111.
25 Schrimpf, ‘Arthur Schnitzlers Traumnovelle,’ 175.
26 Schrimpf, ‘Arthur Schnitzlers Traumnovelle,’ 175.
27 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 111.
28 See also my analysis of Flucht in die Finsternis (Flight into Darkness) in Chapter Two. Also Otto – at least in the perspective of his brother Robert – seems to fulfil this expectation of the stereotype.
29 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 111.
30 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 112.
31 Webber additionally underlines the ambivalence yielded by the formulation ‘zwischen den Betten’ (between the beds), which not only indicates his half-dreaming state but also the oscillating quality of his sense of adventure between the promises of Eros and the dangers of sickness and death. See Webber, Andrew (2011), ‘Threshold Conditions: Benjamin, Schnitzler, and the Sleeping Disorders of Modernism,’ Die Halbschlafbilder in der Literatur, den Künsten und den Wissenschaften, ed. by Roger Paulin and Helmut Pfotenhauer, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 275–290, 283.
32 See my discussion of the theme of infection in the section on Andreas Thameyer in Chapter Three. I have analyzed this aspect in both texts, Traumnovelle (Dream Story) and Andreas Thameyers letzter Brief (Andreas Thameyer’s Last Letter) in more detail in my article ‘Gothic Infections’.
33 See Lukas, Wolfgang (1996), Das Selbst und das Fremde: Epochale Lebenskrisen und ihre Lösung im Werk Arthur Schnitzlers, Munich: Fink, 108; Webber, ‘Threshold Conditions,’ 275–290, 283.
34 Both Albertine and Fridolin had seductive encounters during a holiday in Denmark, which they confess to each other during their initial conflict. Dänemark (Denmark) then returns as password for the masked ball that Fridolin illegitimately attends and Albertine’s Danish seductive stranger makes another appearance in her dream. In this way, Denmark is linked to a stereotypical idea of illicit desires. For an extensive reading of the orientalization of Denmark and its role as Austria’s ‘other’ in the novella see Allen, Julie K. (2009), ‘Dreaming of Denmark: Orientalism and Otherness in Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle,’ Modern Austrian Literature 42 (2): 41–59.
35 See Lange-Kirchheim, Astrid (2003), ‘Déjà-vue einer Jahrhunderwende. Psychoanalyse als Traumatheorie. Zu Arthur Schnitzlers Traumnovelle,’ Geschlechterforschung und Literaturwissenschaft, ed. by P. Wiesinger, Bern [et. al.]: Lang, 269–274, 273.
36 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 27.
37 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 28.
38 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 28.
39 The anonymous translator of the 1928 English edition pragmatically translated the term directly as ‘tuberculosis’. See Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 32. In his 1887 book Die diätetische Blutentmischung als Grundursache der Krankheiten (The dietetic dysaemia as basic reason for diseases) the physician Heinrich Lahmann writes: ‘Der bis dahin nur katarrhalische Lungenspitzenkatarrh geht damit in den tuberkulösen über (wobei man allerdings nicht glauben darf, dass der Übergang durch Untersuchungen genau zu bestimmen wäre, […] was praktisch auch völlig gleichgültig ist, da ohne rationelles Eingreifen der Spitzenkatarrh zur Tuberkulose führt)’ (the catarrhous pulmonary infection will eventually turn tuberculous (although one should not believe that this moment of transition could be precisely determined in the medical exam, which is completely irrelevant from a practical point of view, because without any rational intervention, the catarrhous infection will definitely lead to tuberculosis). See Lahmann, Heinrich (1987), Die diätetische Blutentmischung (Dysämie) als Grundursache der Krankheiten: Ein Beitrag zur Lehre von der Krankheitsanlage und Krankheitsverhütung, St. Goar: Reichl, 96.
40 See Sledzik, Paul and Nicholas Bellantoni (1994), ‘Bioarcheological and Biocultural Evidence for the New England Vampire Folk Belief,’ American Journal of Physical Anthropology 94 (2): 269–274.
41 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 30.
42 See Aurnhammer, Achim (2013), Arthur Schnitzlers intertextuelles Erzählen, Berlin, Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 241. Aurnhammer calls the novella a ‘Musterbeispiel’ (paradigmatic example) for modernist fantastic fiction, because of the way it blends realistically possible and realistically impossible elements: while the beginning of the novella seems to be firmly rooted in realism, typical fantastic elements (masks, ruins, old houses, enigmatic messages etc.) enter the represented world incrementally so that the realistic setting becomes successively undermined. See Aurnhammer, Arthur Schnitzlers intertextuelles Erzählen, 240.
43 Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, 43.
44 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 36. Aurnhammer suggests that the literary text indirectly quoted in this passage refers to the fairy tale Amgiad und Assad (Amgiad and Assad) mentioned as the bedtime story of Fridolin’s daughter at the beginning of the novella: here two mothers respectively desire the son of the other. However, Aurnhammer stresses that the actual source text is Der ‘Wilde Mann’ und das ‘Feuerzeug’ (The ‘Wild Man’ and the ‘Lighter’) by Otfried Mylius (pseudonym for Karl Müller). See Aurnhammer, Arthur Schnitzlers intertextuelles Erzählen, 248.
45 See Kittler, Friedrich A. (1993), Draculas Vermächtnis: Technische Schriften, Leipzig: Reclam, 38.
46 Elisabeth Strowick describes this effect of the inversion of binary oppositions through infection in Klabund’s Die Krankheit (1915). See Strowick, Elisabeth (2009), Sprechende Körper, Poetik der Ansteckung: Performativa in Literatur und Rhetorik, Munich: Fink, 244.
47 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 43.
48 A few lines before this sentence the text reads, ‘in der Luft wehte ein Hauch des kommenden Frühlings’ (T14) (there was a touch [literally: breath, M.K.] of spring in the air). See Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 29. Allerdissen and Imboden have pointed out that this ‘Hauch’ (breath) refers back to the ‘Hauch von Abenteuer, Freiheit und Gefahr’ (T7) (spirit [literally: breath, M.K.] of adventure, freedom and danger), which which Albertine und Fridolin felt during their seductive encounters. See Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 11. Allerdissen and Imboden also link this ‘Hauch’ (breath) to the ‘unfaßbare Wind des Schicksals’ (T7) (incomprehensible wind of fate) that Fridolin assumed behind his nocturnal adventures. See Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 11. See Allerdissen, Rolf (1985), Arthur Schnitzler: Impressionistisches Rollenspiel und skeptischer Moralismus in seinen Erzählungen, Bonn: Bouvier, 118; Imboden, Michael (1971), Die surreale Komponente im erzählenden Werk Arthur Schnitzlers, Bern: H. Lang, 48. This confirms my claim that destiny is used by Schnitzler’s characters as coping mechanism when they feel the desire of transgression. Moreover, the emphasis on the semantic field of wind and breath could be read as referring again to infectious diseases transferred through miasmatic winds and the coughs of those already infected.
49 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 29. Recall Bertolt’s ‘schmal gewordene[n] Lippen’ (WiF657) (tightly compressed lips) in Der Weg ins Freie (Road into the Open). See Schnitzler, Arthur (1913b), Road into the Open, translated by Horace Samuel, London: Howard Latimer, 28.
50 Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, 44.
51 See Strowick, Sprechende Körper, Poetik der Ansteckung, 85. See also Strowick’s literature review about the discursive intersection of psychoanalysis and rhetoric. See Strowick, Sprechende Körper, Poetik der Ansteckung, 86, fn. 109.
52 See Strowick’s discussion of performance/performativity of literary texts. See Strowick, Sprechende Körper, Poetik der Ansteckung, 145–193.
53 See Moi, Toril (1991), ‘Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture,’ New Literary History 22: 1017–1049, 1031.
54 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 36.
55 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 36.
56 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 49.
57 Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, 49.
58 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 48.
59 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 48.
60 Halberstam, Judith (1995), Skin Shows: Gothic Horrors and the Technology of Monsters, Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 7.
61 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 50.
62 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 50.
63 Webber, ‘Threshold Conditions,’ 285.
64 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 50.
65 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 50.
66 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 51.
67 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 50.
68 Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 219.
69 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 50.
70 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 52. See also my reading of Das neue Lied in Chapter Four with regard to the cliché arm, aber sauber (poor but clean) as a sign of ethical impeccability. The Ladenbauers’ flat is also ‘nett gehalten’ (nicely kept, NL621).
71 Santner (1986), ‘Of Masters, Slaves, and Other Seducers,’ 33–45.
72 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 53.
73 For a further interpretation of the function of syphilis as Shibboleth that negotiates the moral implications of promiscuity, see Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, 52–55.
74 Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, 54.
75 The case of the young cavalry officer Höhnburg in Flucht in die Finsternis (Flight into Darkness) bears the signs of such a transgression.
76 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 54.
77 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 55.
78 Strowick develops the notion of the ‘poetics of infection’. She argues that literature itself can be seen as infectious performative speech act and that the literary representation of infectious diseases provides a showcase for body politics and bodily performances and in this way enables an analysis of performativity as an act of the speaking body. See Strowick, Sprechende Körper, Poetik der Ansteckung.
79 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 59.
80 Without elaborating on it any further, the similarity between the two characters has been also pointed out by Peter Loewenberg. See Loewenberg, Peter (2006), ‘Freud, Schnitzler, and Eyes Wide Shut,’ Depth of Field: Stanley Kubrick, Film, and the Uses of History, ed. by James Diedrick and Glenn Perusek, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 267.
81 For an extensive reading of the repeated negotiations of ‘threshold conditions’ in the novella, see Webber, ‘Threshold Conditions’.
82 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 63.
83 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 72. That the seductive ‘otherness,’ which appears to the protagonists as a less restricted alternative to the bourgeois existence, is rooted above all in precarity, is hinted at in the case of Nachtigall: he has a wife and four children who live in Lemberg, where Marco Polo also spent some time before going to Vienna – ‘und [Nachtigall] lachte hell, als wäre es ausnehmend lustig vier Kinder zu haben, alle in Lemberg und alle von ein und derselben Frau’ (T32) (He had a wife and four children living in Lemberg, and he laughed heartily, as though it were unusually jolly to have four children, and all of them living in Lemberg, and all of them by one and the same woman). See Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 67. Nachtigall’s laughter expresses his awareness that he deviates here from the stereotype of the lightheaded non-committal artist who is not bound by any responsibilities. When he talks about his different not very prestigious sources of income, his need to make ends meet becomes clear: ‘“Aber wenn man für vier Kinder zu sorgen hat und eine Frau in Lemberg” – und er lachte wieder, nicht mehr ganz so lustig wie vorher’ (T32–33) (‘But if you have to provide for four children and a wife in Lemberg’– he laughed again, though not quite as gaily as before). See Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 68.
84 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 70.
85 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 70.
86 Pulzer, Peter (1997), ‘Die Wiederkehr des alten Hasses,’ Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte der Neuzeit 1871–1918, ed. by Michael A. Meyer, Munich: Beck, 193–248, 208.
87 See Loewenberg, ‘Freud, Schnitzler, and Eyes Wide Shut, 268.f. In her keynote talk at the Annual Conference of the Modern Austrian Literature and Culture Association 2011, which took place at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, PA, Dagmar Lorenz also gave evidence for Fridolin’s Jewish identity. This seems to be contradicted when Fridolin remembers his student days and recounts: ‘Drei Säbelmensuren hatte er ausgefochten, und auch zu einem Pistolenduell war er einmal bereit gewesen, und nicht auf seine Veranlassung war die Sache damals gütlich beigelegt worden’ (T23) (He had fought three sabre duels, and had even been ready to fight a duel with pistols, and it wasn’t at his request that the matter had been called off). See Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 48 [emphasis in the original]. This suggests that either his student days were before Jews were excluded from the ‘Satisfaktionsfähigkeit’ or that he might not be Jewish after all. In a first draft of the text, Schnitzler (CUL A144,1) had Fridolin kill someone in a duel at the masked ball. In a later draft closer to the final version, however, Fridolin’s doubts about his own lack of courage in the passage with the students are elaborated further, when he wonders, ‘eine gewisse Anlage zur Feigheit steckte doch wohl in ihm’ (CUL A144,3). This ‘Anlage’ suggests a biological predisposition and evokes the stereotype of the Jew’s ‘natural’ lack of masculinity. One could read this then as a self-demeaning internalization of the stereotype. All in all, it seems important to keep open the question whether Fridolin is Jewish or not, which once more blurs the lines of demarcation between norm and ‘other’.
88 It was indeed a common phenomenon among Western Jews to distance themselves from Eastern Jews. See Gilman, Sander L. (1995), Freud, Race, and Gender, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
89 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 70.
90 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 74.
91 Dolar, Mladen (2006) A Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 60.
92 Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 15.
93 Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 15.
94 See Strohwick, Sprechende Körper, Poetik der Ansteckung, 85.
95 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 71.
96 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 62.
97 Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 20.
98 The seductive element of Fridolin’s encounter with Nachtigall is also underlined through the remark about his accent, which mirrors Albertine’s seductive encounter with the stranger at the ball, ‘dessen fremdländischer, anscheinend polnischer Akzent sie anfangs bestrickt […] hatte’ (T6) (whose blasé manner and apparently Polish accents had at first charmed her). See Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 9.
99 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 72.
100 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 72. The English translation does not convey Fridolin’s imitation of Nachtigall’s accent, but it is clear in the German original.
101 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 74.
102 With the Pierrette Fridolin repeats his seductive encounter in Denmark where he felt tempted by an equally young, but apparently more innocent (i.e. probably sexually inexperienced) girl. For an extensive description of the stereotype of the seductive ‘Kindfrau,’ see Pohle, who writes: ‘Die Furcht vor der aktiven, begehrenden Frau (der femme fatale) ist in der Begegnung mit der Kindfrau allein schon durch die Alters- und Erfahrungshierarchie abgewendet. Mythologisch in das Bild der Nymphe oder Meerjungfrau verpackt, fungiert die infantilisierte Weiblichkeit als Leinwand für Projektionen männlicher Phantasie’ (The encounter with the child woman averts man’s fear of the active female desire through the man’s advantage in terms of age and experience. Through mythologized images of the nymph or mermaid, infantilized femininity becomes the projection screen for male fantasies). See Pohle, Bettina (1998), Kunstwerk Frau: Inszenierungen von Weiblichkeit in der Moderne, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer.
103 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 78.
104 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 78.
105 Freud, Sigmund (1947b), ‘Das Unheimliche,’ in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 12: Werke aus den Jahren 1917–1920, ed. by Anna Freud, Edward Bibrig, Willi Hoffer, Ernst Kris, and Otto Isakower, London: Imago, 227–268, 247. For a discussion of the death symbolisms in the passage, especially the dominant motif of the ‘Totentanz’ (dance of death), see Malsch, Katja (2007), Literatur und Selbstopfer: Historisch-systematische Studien zu Gryphius, Lessing, Gotthelf, Storm, Kaiser und Schnitzler, Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 138, and also Scheible, Arthur Schnitzler und die Aufklärung, 84.
106 See also Hertha Krotkoff, who describes the novella’s parodic play with elements of the Schauerroman (shudder novel). See Krotkoff, Helga (1973), ‘Zur geheimen Gesellschaft in Arthur Schnitzlers Traumnovelle,’ German Quarterly 46: 202–209, 202f.
107 Recalling in Flucht in die Finsternis (Flight into Darkness), Robert’s ‘süßer Schauer, der sich aber allmählich in ein leises Grauen verwandelte’ (FiF84) (almost delicious sensation. Then he shuddered. Finally a fear [rather: slight horror, M.K.] rose up in him). See Schnitzler, Arthur (1931), Flight into Darkness, translated by William A. Drake, New York: Simon & Schuster, 111. This moment of slight horror makes Robert more and more removed from his social relations. One could assume that also the Schauer (shudder) Fridolin feels might be prefiguring the feeling of complete crisis later, but may at this point still be of an ambivalent, thus also exhilarating quality.
108 Webber argues that this passage is a quotation from Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s film adaptation of Stoker’s novel, Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, 1922), in which case the term Grauen (horror) is perhaps present by implication after all. See Webber, ‘Threshold Conditions,’ 287. Moreover, one is reminded of Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (1912), more precisely of Aschenbach’s journey over the Grand Canal, where he feels a ‘flüchtigen Schauder’ (fleeting shudder) as the gondola reminds him of a coffin. Aschenbach’s passage also combines fantasies of illicit sexuality and death. See Mann, Thomas (2013), Der Tod in Venedig, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 41.
109 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 86.
110 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 85.
111 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 89.
112 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 89.
113 Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 218.
114 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 89.
115 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 95.
116 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 96.
117 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 99.
118 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 100.
119 Fridolin’s assumption that the secret society may consist of noblemen supports the interpretation that the novella is concerned with a crisis of bourgeois identity that is linked to the fear of masculine inferiority. See Webber, ‘Threshold Conditions,’ 284, fn. 22; Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, 58.
120 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 102.
121 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 102.
122 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 117–118.
123 Perlmann, Michaela L. (1987a), Der Traum in der literarischen Moderne: Untersuchungen zum Werk Arthur Schnitzlers, Munich: Fink, 193.
124 The way Albertine imagines Fridolin as a prince in her dream also expresses her dissatisfaction with his inability to fulfil the requirements of the ideal of masculinity, which is represented in her fascination with the Dane, who was a military officer. The bourgeois woman’s erotic fantasies are thus focused on an image of masculinity stemming from ideals of the military and nobility. As already seen in Chapter Four, in the section on Die Fremde (The Stranger), these are ideals are of a somewhat anachronistic quality: ‘Der erotische Idealtypus der bürgerlichen Frau ist ein vom Geschichtsverlauf relegiertes Wesen’ (The erotic ideal of the bourgeois woman is a creature which has been relegated by the course of history). See Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, 48.
125 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 139.
126 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 140.
127 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 141.
128 One could say that Gibiser, as a sort of puppet master and ‘ventriloquist,’ infects the vocal performance of his ‘puppet’ Fridolin.
129 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 159.
130 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 161.
131 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 160.
132 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 165–166.
133 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 183.
134 ‘Im weiteren Sinn geht es aber bei der geheimen Gesellschaft um die symbolische Darstellung jenes alltäglichen Masochismus, der das Verhalten von Albertine, Marianne und den anderen Frauenfiguren in der Novelle prägt’ (In broader terms, the secret society symbolizes the everyday masochism that determines the behaviour of Albertine, Marianne and the other female characters in the novella). See Perlmann, Michaela L. (1987a), Der Traum in der literarischen Moderne, Munich: Fink, 187.
135 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 180.
136 Santner, ‘Of Masters, Slaves, and Other Seducers,’ 45.
137 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 178.
138 Poe, Edgar Allen (1965), ‘The Philosophy of Composition,’ Literary Criticism of Edgar Allen Poe, ed. by Robert L. Hough, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 20–32, 26.
139 Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 208.
140 Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 63.
141 Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 65.
142 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 180.
143 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 180.
144 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 181.
145 See Sarasin, Phillip (2007), ‘Die Visualisierung des Feindes: Über metaphorische Technologien der frühen Bakteriologie,’ Bakteriologie und Moderne: Studien zur Biopolitik des Unsichtbaren 1870–1920, ed. by Philipp Sarasin, Silvia Berger, Marianne Hänseler and Myriam Spörri, 427–461, 430–434.
146 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 182.
147 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 66.
148 In Schnitzler’s first draft (CUL A144,1) of the text, the piano player is called ‘Amsel’ (blackbird). It seems that with the change to ‘Nachtigall’ (nightingale) the opposition between him and Adler (eagle) is emphasized.
149 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 190.
150 Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 191.
151 Schnitzler Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, 190.