Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999 Read online

  Ada, a professional musician, is invited to an arts festival in Havana. Max and Onno accompany her (the year is 1967, the Cuban cause is popular among the European Left – Mulisch himself published a starry-eyed report on Cuba in 1968). Because of a bureaucratic slip-up the Cubans take them to be delegates to a concurrent congress of world revolutionary parties. They go along with the charade until the speech-making bores them, then withdraw to the pleasures of sun and surf. Max enjoys the anarchic feel of Cuban life; when he catches a glimpse of Fidel, the cup of his happiness runs over. ‘It must be possible to found a just society on earth . . . If Fidel succeeds, if only a little, I’m quite prepared in a manner of speaking to grant him a reflection of something like the divine.’ (p. 179)

  In this paradisal setting Max and Ada succumb to a moment of passion and make love among the waves. Ada falls pregnant; but since she makes sure she sleeps with her husband the same night, she is never sure of the paternity of her child. ‘Was she pregnant by the friendship between the two of them?’ she wonders. (p. 218)

  As the gods (or fate) have dictated the sexual union of Max and Ada, so they crudely see to it that Ada never learns the answer to her question. Back in Holland, as the trio drive through a storm, their car is hit by a falling tree. Ada suffers irreparable brain damage. Her baby son Quinten is delivered by Caesarean section; Ada herself is kept alive for years in a hospital but never recovers consciousness.

  Without a mother, and with a nominal father temperamentally unequipped to look after him, the baby passes into the joint care of Ada’s mother Sophia and Max. Soon Sophia is creeping into Max’s bed and overpowering his senses with the sweetness of her love-making. Yet in the light of day she seems to bear no memory of their nocturnal congress – indeed, will not have it alluded to. Though she reminds him of the Sphinx, her sexual hold over him is so powerful that he abandons his libertine ways and settles into staid if secret paternity. Thus do the gods constitute this strange family: child, grandmother, secret father masquerading as foster father. (Mulisch does not allow us to forget that Moses and Jesus came from equally strange family set-ups: in his fiction – most directly in Two Women [1975; English translation 1980], about the attempts of a woman to give her lesbian lover a child – he has repeatedly explored alternatives to the nuclear family.)

  Quinten Quist, agent of the heavenly powers, is a strangely beautiful child with eyes a shade of blue never seen before in a human being. His first word is ‘obelisk’. Though his early years are unexceptional, he is haunted by memories of sights he has not seen and experiences he has not had, memories imprinted on him before birth. His duty, programmed into him, is to find their earthly originals. Among these is a certain lofty, temple-like interior, for which his private name is ‘the Citadel’. The words ‘the centre of the world’ also trouble his dreams. (pp. 399, 448, 436)

  A casual observation by young Quinten allows Max to take the first step on his own path toward illumination, bringing together his obsession with the Holocaust and his vocation as astronomer. If a star is forty light years away, says Quinten, then watchers on that star must be able to see what happened on earth forty years ago in earth time. Furthermore, the star is bouncing the same visual impulses back to earth, however weakly: once the technical problem of picking them up has been solved, we ourselves will be able to see what happened on earth eighty years ago.

  If Quinten is right, thinks Max, the whole of human history is still being propagated in the form of light waves somewhere in the universe. Somewhere his mother is still getting into the cattle truck that will take her to Auschwitz. Nothing is truly past, nothing is ineluctably hidden. Once technology enables us to see the past in all its fullness, the ‘whole truth’ will be revealed and humanity will finally be ‘liberated’. (p. 455) Then he checks himself: will humanity really welcome the whole truth – would he himself, for instance, want Onno to see a replay of his wife’s adultery?

  As a child Max had had the Promethean ambition of laying bare the secrets of the universe, but his scientific research has never been quite of the highest order. At Westerbork he has a second great moment of illumination, one that balances the dark illumination of Auschwitz. Astronomers all over the world have been puzzled by the pulses emanating from a quasar named MQ 3412. It occurs to Max that it is not MQ 3412 itself that is behaving oddly, but something behind it. MQ 3412 is directly in line with, and hiding, ‘the primeval singularity itself,’ the origin of the universe. (p. 525) In a creative outburst rivalling Newton’s or Einstein’s, Max is led to conceive a unified theory of space and time, a theory linking the four fundamental forces of nature and the seventeen natural constants. In essence the theory is Pythagorean: the principle underlying the universe turns out to be musical harmony. But at the moment Max attains this godlike insight he is struck by a meteorite, hurled by the beings whose secrets he is about to unveil, and killed.

  II

  Max Delius’s Pythagoreanism belongs to a neoplatonic cosmology that Harry Mulisch himself has been propagandising, under the name ‘octavity’, since the 1970s. (He claims that he laid the foundations of his system during a spurt of creative energy as a teenager in the late 1940s.) Octavity embraces an alternative, post-scientific physics based on an anti-Aristotelian, post-logical logic in which contradiction is not excluded: just as a musical note and its octave both are and are not the same sound, so, in post-logic, an entity is both non-identical to itself and (as a boundary condition) identical to itself.

  For Mulisch octavity is not a mere metaphor, an as if for some other, more truly scientific account of the universe. Instead, it is by its nature a philosophy of metaphor, of homologies or correspondences that may seem to be accidental (like the homology between Westerbork and Auschwitz) but that in fact echo or rhyme significantly with each other – as do coincidences in fiction, including the coincidences in The Discovery of Heaven. Octavity is the most basic of all principles, underlying not only the structure of the heavens but the broad sweep of human history. Thus, for instance, the Renaissance was marked by a rediscovery of Pythagorean principles of number and harmony in art and architecture, while in the anti-Renaissance constituted by the grand tyrannies of the twentieth century – principally Nazism – we witness the submergence of these humanistic principles and a return to pre-Pythagorean, Pharaonic gigantism and the cult of death.

  In the person of Max Delius, Mulisch is thus able to bring together an intensely felt personal preoccupation with the historical trauma of European fascism with an idiosyncratic, even arcane, vision of the cosmological order. As Max’s son, the banished and brainwashed angel, will later remark, ‘I have the feeling that the world is very complicated, but that there’s something behind it that is very simple and at the same time incomprehensible.’ (p. 601) In this respect The Discovery of Heaven marks an advance on The Assault (1982; English translation 1985), Mulisch’s best-known novel to date. The Assault is also about forgetting, about the use of oblivion by individuals and societies to protect themselves from the pain of memory. By comparison, The Discovery of Heaven explores forgetting in a broader, more metaphysical sweep. (In what amounts to a private joke on Mulisch’s part, the central figure of The Assault reappears in a walk-on role in The Discovery of Heaven.)

  Meanwhile Onno has abandoned scholarship for politics. He spends some years as a junior Cabinet Minister (the chapters devoted to the internal squabbles of Dutch politics of the 1970s are largely wasted on the foreign reader), and seems to be a rising star until a malicious rival discloses his participation in the Havana conference and puts an end to his career.

  In disgust he quits the country. For several years he lives incognito in Rome, speaking only to a pet raven named Edgar (after Edgar Allan Poe). The raven would seem to be a spy planted by the celestial watchers; Quinten too is dogged by flies, wasps, ants, as well as by tempters and temptresses. Onno’s monologues to the raven, mainly diatribes on world history, make for less than gripping reading, and confirm one’s suspicion tha
t with the death of Max the novel has lost its moral raison d’être and its backbone.

  In Rome Onno is miraculously tracked down by Quinten, now aged seventeen, obeying the inner voice that controls him. Slowly the place of Onno in the cosmic plot begins to become clear. He is needed as a palaeographer and antiquarian, to decode the various inscriptions (in Latin, in Hebrew) that will guide Quinten to the Citadel of his dreams and bring to fruition his mission on earth, which turns out to be the theft of the tablets of Moses from where they have been secreted in the crypt of the Lateran Chapel, and the return of the tablets to Jerusalem. For this purpose Quinten has conveniently been provided with a crash course in pre-modern lock technology; the long sequence in which philologist and cracksman unite in a race against time to pick the locks of the Lateran comes straight out of Hollywood and will feed back seamlessly into the film of the book if and when that is made.

  Onno has begun to find ‘something inhuman’ in Quinten, ‘a touch of interstellar coldness’. (p. 593) But both are by now in the grip of greater forces. With the sapphire tablets in a suitcase they fly off to Jerusalem, where they catch a glimpse of a mysterious woman with Quinten’s blue eyes and a number tattooed on her arm: Eva Weiss, Max’s mother and (the cuckolded Onno now realises) Quinten’s grandmother, who has either survived Auschwitz or come back from the grave.

  Everything is coming to a head: walking like a zombie, guided by Edgar the raven, Quinten carries the tablets to the Temple Mount – the centre of the world – where, in a climax mingling Judaic, Christian and Muslim motifs, the tablets crumble to nothing, signalling the end of God’s covenant with mankind; whereupon Quinten is borne back into the heavens.

  III

  Along with W.F. Hermans (1921–95), Gerhard Reve (b.1923), the Fleming Hugo Claus (b.1929), and Cees Nooteboom (b.1933), Harry Mulisch (b.1927) makes up the first rank of Dutch novelists of his generation. All except Hermans have had a fair quota of their work translated into English; none has hitherto made quite the impact on the English-speaking public as in France, Scandinavia, and (particularly) Germany.

  With The Assault and Last Call (1985; translation 1989), Mulisch has to an extent overcome this fate (it helped that The Assault was turned into a successful film). The Discovery of Heaven will certainly add to his reputation. Mulisch has always known how to tell a story and here he interweaves three life-stories – Max’s, Onno’s, and Quinten’s – with admirable dexterity. In creating Max his stroke of inspiration has been to situate the malaise of the Dutch intellectual of his own generation, belonging to a peaceful, prosperous, unified Europe, yet haunted by the nightmare past of the Occupation, within a larger question: has humanity truly moved beyond good and evil, and, if so, how did it happen?

  In the case of Quinten, Mulisch gives a moving portrayal of the inner life of a baffled other-worldly being struggling to find the reason for his existence (the precocious younger Quinten has his cloying moments, however); while the eerie liaison between Max and Quinten’s grandmother is entirely convincing. If the action is rather slow-paced, this is compensated for by the intellectual adventurousness of the whole. Though at times Mulisch seems merely to be showing off, the play of ideas is generally lively.

  It is probably best not to let the foundational conceit of The Discovery of Heaven – that God is about to give up – bear too much weight, just as we need not take too seriously the idea that since the time of Constantine the popes have been in possession of the tablets of Moses. Mulisch’s myth of the abandoning of humankind to the prince of darkness implies an apocalyptic reading of the trajectory of the twentieth century, a reading that is hardly borne out by the picture of contemporary life he gives in his book. Aside from miserable weather, vandalised callboxes, nouveau-riche philistines, and boring politics, Mulisch’s Holland does not seem too bad a place, certainly not bad enough to deserve the diatribes it gets from the heavenly beings or to justify Mulisch’s lament (sounded elsewhere) that it is simply part of ‘an increasingly fascistic-technological world’.5 Indeed, if anyone comes out badly from the story, it is the gods. Even if humanity has fallen into the trap that Satan, employing Aristotle and Bacon, has prepared, who would want to be saved by beings as petulant, despotic, and amoral as Mulisch’s heavenly crew?

  IV

  The translation of The Discovery of Heaven by Paul Vincent is good without being exemplary. More often than is excusable, Vincent quails before the problems posed by the plethora of fussy little modifiers characteristic of Dutch. Complex verb constructions are simplified at the cost of nuance. There are a fair number of outright errors (instead of ‘the dilemma of theodicy’, for instance, Vincent writes of a ‘Theodicean dilemma’, as though there had been a person named Theodicea). (p. 281) Further errors have crept in that ought to have been picked up by an editor – for instance, sixty million Jews are said to have perished in the Nazi camps. (p. 558) Vincent also goes in for locutions that make Mulisch’s Holland sound like England: ‘Stop that nonsense, mate!’ (p. 89) He might have taken a lesson from Adrienne Dixon, translator of The Stone Bridal Bed and Last Call, who creates for Mulisch a discreetly neutral variety of English, neither British nor American.

  6 Cees Nooteboom, Novelist and Traveller

  I

  TOWARD THE END of Cees Nooteboom’s novel In the Dutch Mountains, his novelist-narrator – by this point all but indistinguishable from Nooteboom himself – gets into a debate about truth and fiction with the shades of Plato, Milan Kundera and Hans Christian Andersen. Why, asks the Nooteboom figure, do I have this irrepressible desire to fictionalise, to tell lies? ‘From unhappiness,’ answers Andersen. ‘But you are not unhappy enough. That’s why you can’t bring it off.’1

  This is the most penetrating stab of self-insight in a novel which – like the rest of Nooteboom’s fiction – is as much about its own processes and raisons-d’être as it is about the fictitious activities of its personages. For, despite contortions of self-reflexiveness that in another writer (Samuel Beckett, for instance) might give rise to agonies of the spirit, Nooteboom and his narrator-avatars strike one as too much at home in the world genuinely to suffer. This – as the ghost of Andersen suggests – is Nooteboom’s peculiar misfortune as writer: he is too intelligent, too sophisticated, too urbane, to be able to commit himself to the grand illusioneering of realism, yet too little anguished by this fate – this expulsion from the world of the heartfelt imagination – to work it up into a tragedy of its own.

  At one of its reflexive levels, Nooteboom’s fiction has therefore had to be about a search for a level of feeling that can be carried over undiminished into literary creativity. In the novel The Following Story (1991; English translation 1993), in the love of a bumbling classics teacher for one of his students, he has been able to tap into feeling that is both passionate and creative. In the novella A Song of Truth and Semblance (1981; English translation 1984), where the writer-hero and his nineteenth-century characters inhabit the same rooms and even the same emotional space, life, Eros and fiction seem to be on the brink of interpenetrating. Then Nooteboom falters, terminating what had promised to be the most eerily Jamesian of his tales with a trick ending. And in In the Dutch Mountains itself, Andersen’s diagnosis turns out to be correct: for all the wit, for all the insight into the self and its fictions, for all the elegance of style, there is finally not enough feeling to drive the story.

  II

  In the Dutch Mountains began its life as a film text under the title ‘The Snow Queen’ (the film was never made). Based on Andersen’s story of the same name, it plays quite openly on its debt to Andersen.

  ‘The Snow Queen’ is one of Andersen’s most remarkable tales, a plea for the precious uniqueness of childhood, an appeal against the premature induction of the child into rationality. Little Kai is stolen by the Snow Queen and kept captive in her castle in the far, cold North. His faithful playmate Gerda goes in quest of him. After many adventures and tribulations she arrives, borne on the back of a reindeer, at th
e Snow Queen’s great hall of ice. Here she finds Kai, blue with cold, playing an endless, solitary game, trying to fit shards of ice together like pieces of a broken mirror. Her warm tears melt the ice around Kai’s heart and he is freed from the Queen’s spell.

  In Nooteboom’s version, Andersen’s children become Kai and Lucia, a perfectly handsome, perfectly happy young couple who make a living as illusionists in the theatre. Their act consists of Kai blindfolding Lucia and holding up an object before her, which she then ‘sees’. Their serene perfection (they are of one mind; they are continually compared with the reunited halves of the self which – in the fable of Plato’s Symposium – has been split in two) arouses the envy of a mysterious femme fatale, who has Kai kidnapped and whisked off to her castle. There she keeps him in thrall, obliterating his memories of Lucia, subjecting him to her lust. For his Snow Queen mistress Kai feels both fear and unwilling desire: her eyes are like ‘tunnels of glass and ice that led to a world where it was so cold that, if you penetrated too far . . . you would freeze to death’. (p. 99)

  But Lucia has not forgotten him. Guided by a fairy-godmother figure who playfully metamorphoses into a reindeer, she tracks him down; with the aid of the police, the wicked Queen is killed and Kai rescued.

  This is pretty much the whole of Nooteboom’s core story. Kai and Lucia are no more individualised than the hero and heroine of any fairy tale. Lucia has ‘blue eyes like a summer sky . . . lips . . . red as cherries . . . teeth white as milk’: as her creator candidly admits, she is constructed according to ‘the conventions of European literary culture’. (p. 11) Their adventures take place against a vaguely realised Ruritanian background; for the rescue of Kai the clichés of the escapist thriller are unabashedly called upon.