Download then suddenly in an ecstatic swan

Prof. Dr. Marita Mathijsen
Chair of Modern Dutch Literature
University of Amsterdam
[email protected]
THE LIFE AND WORK OF HARRY MULISCH, 1927-2010
[text of a lecture delivered at the Museum of Modern Chinese Literature; August 31, 2012]
On Saturday 6 November 2010, for the first time in the history of Dutch television a
writer’s funeral was broadcast directly and completely. The author in question was
Harry Mulisch, who had passed away a week before at the age of 83.
It was a most impressive ceremony. The coffin with his earthly remains was
first carried from his home in Amsterdam to the city theater just around the corner.
The mayor and members of the royal family were present; not only friends and family
but also politicians, literary critics, and professors of literary history addressed a large
audience. After the ceremonies in the theater his body was carried by boat through the
Amsterdam canals to the cemetery. It was a rainy day and yet, all along the miles-long
route people watched, applauded, and threw flowers to the coffin. Just before the boat
arrived at the cemetery, a large rainbow suddenly appeared in the sky. Everyone could
be watched thinking the same thought: even after his death this author still has the
elements in his power.
Harry Mulisch was an author who kindled people’s imagination, a living myth, a
unique personality, who contributed a great deal to the change that has taken place in
the position of literary authors in the Netherlands. Before, but also during the first
years after the Second World War, literary authors were marginal figures in society at
large. By the 1960s they began to turn into media figures, whose opinions were
counted to be as important as those of politicians. They became public property, and
their books contributed to the social changes that were taking place.
In the Netherlands Harry Mulisch is without any doubt the most important writer
since the Second World War. From an international point of view he is among the
most acknowledged and, indeed, acclaimed authors of the Netherlands. He was our
selected candidate for the Nobel prize for literature. Together with Anne Frank he is
among our most frequently translated authors. The Assault was translated into over 40
languages, Two Women in over 20, just as The Discovery of Heaven. The print runs
were not small. The Assault fetched many reprints, and over a million copies have
been sold in all. In The Wall Street Journal Harry Mulisch’ crowning masterpiece,
The Discovery of Heaven, was compared with Homer’s Odyssey and with Dante’s
Divina Commedia.
In Germany in particular, Mulisch has been recognized as a great writer.
Almost all his work has been translated into German, he gave many speeches there,
and he received numerous prizes. At the occasion of his passing away, all large
German newspapers and periodicals wrote comments on his work, and a memorial
meeting was held in Berlin. China Reading Weekly, too, published an article at the
occasion of his passing away.
What is it, then, that makes Harry Mulisch the most important Dutch literary author
since the Second World War, and an author of well-deserved world repute?
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I shall sketch an answer to this question, with special attention given to the
extraordinarily vast and ambitious themes that mark his entire oeuvre. It is the
outcome of his unbridled dedication to what he used to call ‘the writery’, a newly
formed, somewhat ironic expression, by which he meant the core activity to which he
made his entire life subservient. What gives his work global significance far beyond
the small country to which he belonged, is his search to grasp, and to turn into large,
captivating metaphors and hybrid images certain crucial aspects of the vast
transformations of our modern world. He manages to make his readers reflect on life’s
riddles all the while enjoying one spell-binding story after another. Mulisch did not
aim for an intimate kind of authorship, he was not delving in his own feelings. His
deepest aim in writing was for himself and for his readers to attain insights into a
deeply traumatized society.
What do I mean when I say that Mulisch wrote about a deeply traumatized society?
Mulisch thought that European society of the 20th century was determined by the
Second World War. Between 1940 and 1945 the Netherlands, like most European
countries and Northern Africa, were occupied by Germany. The occupation itself was
not what made for the trauma of the Second World War. Occupations have been of all
times and of all places. What made the so-called Third Reich so unique is the extreme
racism, especially antisemitism of its uncontested ruler, Adolf Hitler. In wanting to
get rid once and for all of the Jews, all Jews, he sought to exterminate an entire group
of the population. Now the trauma of European society is that millions of people
proved ready to go along with Hitler’s delusions, and that he managed to get scientists
so far as to exploit their own creative powers for enabling him to carry them out in
lethal practice. Scientists and engineers made themselves available for deeds which
according to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights are
unambiguously to be qualified as crimes against humanity.
The Second World War has confronted European society, not just Germany
but all of Europe, with a human dilemma. We know about the inevitable disasters that
wars bring in their wake. We know that among us there are murderers who, for money
or power or out of jealousy, may take the life of a fellow human being, most often in a
fit of rage. This happens in every society. This is evil we know of, it has a place in the
oldest literary stories and it has been taken up in world literature in wonderfully
captivating ways. In the real, everyday world, systems of law have been developed to
counter it, with an orderly jurisdiction and with prisons. But how can it be that a
society is capable of consistently annihilating entire sections of the population for no
other reason than that these people’s genes do not stem from the same, allegedly
superior root?
In his literary works, Harry Mulisch pursues the Second World War beyond its
conclusion, to the new society that has developed since. The technologies that during
the war were applied in so utterly evil a manner, have kept following the wrong,
inhuman pathway. Technology no longer stands at the service of humankind, it has
acquired ends of its own, which encroach upon the principles of life and of humanity.
Take the development of nuclear energy, which has run wild in Chernobyl and in
Fukushima, thus endangering many people’s health or even their lives. Take the
development of fertilization techniques, which enable sixty years old women to bear
children who are bound to lose their parents at far too young an age. Take the
possibilities for euthanasia, which enable a society to decide of its afflicted and of its
elderly who may live and who may not. What first happened on a large scale in the
Second World War, so Harry Mulisch’s idea ran, has kept existing and has developed
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further without a human brake being anywhere near in sight.
Mulisch’ obsession with the Second World War does not originate in moral concerns
only. It is also the product of personal circumstances. ‘I am the war’, he has often
said, meaning his own, extraordinary family background. Harry Mulisch was born in
1927 as the only child of a Belgian-Jewish mother and a German-Austrian father.
During the occupation his father worked for the Germans. So Harry Mulisch is a child
of a Jewish mother and of a father who collaborated with the German occupying
regime. His mother was arrested during the war, and ran a serious risk of being sent to
the death camps, but due to his contacts with the occupiers his father was able to
prevent this. But her family did perish in the camps. Harry himself, in being a child of
a Jewish mother, had no right to exist, either, but here, too, the father intervened. All
this determined and shaped Mulisch’ entire life as a writer, his entire authorhood.
Harry Mulisch’ life, and his development as a literary author
Altogether, Mulisch published 13 novels, 14 collections of stories, 9 collections of
poems, 7 theater plays, and 32 non-fictional essays or collections of essays. I shall
confine myself to discussing seven particularly characteristic books of his, but I start
with what happened in Mulisch’ life before his first book publications.
He was born in Haarlem — a city ten miles from Amsterdam. Nine years after
his birth his mother left his immediate surroundings – his parents divorced, the mother
went to live in Amsterdam, and Harry stayed with his father.
He did not finish high school: war had broken out, the school did not interest
him any more. He developed himself at home, watched German and Allied bombings,
read philosophers and classic Greek and Roman literature, and studied textbooks of
physics and engineering.
Right after the war Harry’s father was arrested and imprisoned in view of his
conduct during the occupation. So as a youngster of just seventeen years he found
himself more or less alone in the world. He began to write essays and stories. In later
years Mulisch used to say: ‘You do not become a writer, you are one. If you want to
become one, you never will’. He himself just was one at a given moment, so he felt.
He himself took that particular moment to be the publication in a well-known weekly
of his first story in 1947.
Once it had been printed, his pathway was clear to him. From then on he opted
unreservedly for authorhood. But it would take years before recognition came his
way, before his first book publications took place, and before he could live of nothing
but his pen.
In 1951 he won an important literary prize, meant especially for young Dutch
writers, with his novel Archibald Strohalm. Before, he had already sent several
manuscripts to several publishing houses, but none was prepared to print one. The
prize confirmed him in his position as a writer, and that is what made it so incisively
important to him. Suddenly publishers were urgently demanding to print his work,
and after some deliberation he opted for De Bezige Bij (‘The Busy Bee’). Originating
in the Dutch resistance movement against the German occupiers, this publishing
house was turning into the principal one for young, promising authors. As such it
would become the most important publishing house in the Netherlands — a position it
still holds.
In the very year when Mulisch received this prize, his mother left for the
United States. This is a fact of importance in his oeuvre. After the divorce she now
leaves him a second time. Mulisch, as I told you, does not delve in private sentiments,
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so the dual abandonment does not come up in his work as such. Rather, he very
characteristically turns it into mythology; in most novels of his you find some
modernized variation upon an ancient Greek myth, the myth of Orpheus. Orpheus is
allowed to take his beloved Euridice out of the nether-world of the dead, only, he is
expressly forbidden on their way out to look back. But he does, and thus loses her for
the second time. Indeed, a loss once delayed and then happening for good often takes
place in Mulisch’ oeuvre.
A big change in his life occurs when his father dies in 1957 on his 65th
birthday, and Harry decides to move to Amsterdam. He settles in the city center, in a
house where he keeps living until his final day.
In 1961 a prominent Dutch weekly invites him to attend in Israel the trial of
one of the biggest German war criminals, Adolf Eichmann, the man who very
efficiently and in the most bureaucratic manner possible had organized the mass
murder of the Jews in German annihilation camps. The Israeli secret services had
found Eichmann living in Argentina, and managed to smuggle him out of that
country. This war crimes trial was the first to take place in the new homeland of those
Jews who had managed to survive the German onslaught, and it held the entire world
captivated. The report that Mulisch published in book form threw him off balance —
he could not handle the confrontation with a man who, as the appointed head of a
program to murder millions of his fellow human beings, operated as if he were
nothing but a machine.
In the meantime Western society was changing. After the war a certain
restauration had taken place of the standard rules imposed by representatives of
organized religion and other authorities. These rules now came under attack by young
artists, students, workers, all of whom found support for their aims in socialist or
communist ideas. Mulisch, not politically or socially very active before, takes up the
case of those who engage themselves for changes in society. Like many Western
intellectuals in the 1960s he reads, among many other revolutionary works, Mao Ze
Dong’s ‘Little Red Book’.
The doctrines of communism begin to impress him. In 1967 he is invited to
visit Cuba (an independent island just south-east of the United States) which was then,
as it still is, the only communist-run state in the Americas. In Cuba Mulisch believed
to see how after the Second World War a society could develop positively, in an
environment where schooling, health care, and work were guaranteed for all and
where differences in social status and in property no longer seemed relevant.
Back in the Netherlands Mulisch lent his support to all kinds of unofficial
movements which aimed for cultural and social renewal.
After the roaring sixties, Mulisch returned to the ‘writery’ of novels. He made a great
impression with his short novel of 1975 Two Women, which is among many other
things a modernization of the Orpheus myth. Publication in 1982 of The Assault led to
his international breakthrough, on a scale never before attained by a Dutch literary
author.
1992 was a crucial year for Harry Mulisch because he became the father of a
son (after, in an earlier marriage, two daughters had been born). He also turned 65 that
year. His father had died at precisely that age, on his very birthday, and Harry had a
slightly superstitious fear that the same might happen to him. So he did what he could
to complete the novel that was to become the culmination point of his entire oeuvre,
The Discovery of Heaven, before that possibly fatal day. But his own 65th birthday
came and passed in a most festive manner; the book appeared, and it was
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acknowledged everywhere as a true masterpiece, in the Netherlands first, but upon
translation abroad as well.
In 2001 appeared Siegfried, the book that was to prove to be his final
completed work. In Siegfried the protagonist is a writer, Rudolf Herter, really an alter
ego of Harry Mulisch. Herter dies upon a confrontation with Adolf Hitler’s ghost. The
novel’s final words are: ‘And then, nothing’. This sentence has acquired a predictive
character, as indeed since 2001 Mulisch did not publish any fiction any more. He did
give lectures and lent himself to interviews, he cooperated with the production of
documentaries and movies about his work, and he kept writing, albeit without any
rounded outcomes. By mid-2010 he was told that he had a brain tumor. He died
naturally at home in the presence of his wife, his ex-wife, his daughters, and his son.
Principal works
In discussing seven of Mulisch’ books, I confine myself to those that I find the most
important and that would definitely be worth being translated into Chinese, as indeed
The stone bridal bed and The assault already have been.
In his early novel The diamond (1954), destruction and annihilation form the main
theme. It has a highly unconventional protagonist — not a human being at all, but a
stone. Not a stone like the one that spends time on earth in your wonderful classic
Hong Lou Meng (‘Dream of the red chamber’), but the largest diamond on earth. It
destroys everyone who owns it, even after in the course of its centuries-long existence
it has been split into two. The book is best characterized as a picaresque novel, full of
jokes and wit, fierce adventures and miraculous events. The diamond becomes the
center of a religious cult, is placed in the navel of Mi-lo-fo, the laughing Boeddha, is
taken away time and again, breaks into two in the city of Alexandria, and then travels
through the centuries twofold, one half in the East, the other in the West. Both halves
remain the focal points of tumultuous histories until their own existence, too, comes to
an end. As the diamond moves through time, just about the entire history of human
civilization passes in review. The end of the diamond is a feat of annihilation. A
garbage-man who has happened to find the largest part wants to prove that it is really
a diamond. That can be done only by burning it: only in annihilation does it become
clear whether the diamond is real. So the garbage-man throws it in the stove. And now
the diamond perishes in an explosion of light and fire. I quote from the book’s final
lines:
then suddenly in an ecstatic swan-song the diamond absorbed everything that
was heat, everything that was light, so that it seemed to become many meters
large. Now the difference between itself and its rays disappeared, and in an
irrepressible parting act it consumed itself in colors and in a light of which no
further speech is possible. For many seconds the orgiastic reflection of its
burning death hang like a sunset against Krijn’s [the garbage-man’s] dazed
face …
The diamond can be read as a metaphor for writership, as I shall explain shortly when
in the next section I address the principal themes of Mulisch’ oeuvre.
Five years after The diamond, Mulisch’ fame was established for good with his
fascinating The Stone Bridal Bed (1959), recently translated into Chinese by Yao Jin
Qing. The theme of annihilation is here connected with the question of guilt. An
American who during the Second World War served as a pilot for the American Air
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Force is confronted years later with the consequences of the assignment he received at
the time to bomb the German city of Dresden. He is now a dentist, and attends a
conference in Dresden. At the time, he and his comrades carried out their assignment
in one big euforia. He now realizes that the bombings had been senseless, as the
Germans had already lost the war, and above all because citizens had been the main
target of the fire-bombing.
The book’s biggest theme is simultaneity. However paradoxical it may seem,
earlier times are not earlier – they are still there. In The stone bridal bed Mulisch
posits the presence of three times simultaneously. Greek antiquity is present in that
Mulisch lends from it both forms and chants. He builds the book by way of a Greek
tragedy in five parts, and in the chants that conclude the chapters he uses the style of
Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Greek heroism and the Greek cult of war connect
the Greeks with the Germans. The Second World War is manifestly present, in that
the German people are still suffering from the consequences of the Allied bombings.
Then there is post-war time, with the pilot/dentist seducing his female guide and
making love to her as if she were a city to be bombed. By means of this simultaneity
the author hopes to get around the linear flow of time to which human beings are
subject.
Also informative about Harry Mulisch is his provocative collection Fodder for
psychologists of 1961. Here he reflects on his authorhood, and turns his own
personality into a subject of ‘writery’. Few authors have revealed themselves in their
strengths and their weaknesses to such an extent as Mulisch. Long before it became
customary to do so, he reflects on writing as an activity and positions himself as an
author. The principal element is that he turns himself into an issue of discussion. Take
for instance aphorisms like these:
Not the author, but the reader should have imagination.
The reader is not the spectator of a play, but the actor who performs all roles.
What he reads is his own personal creation. The author supplies the text — but
it only becomes an artistic piece of work due to the reader’s talent.
Or take this one, about the coherence of an oeuvre:
An author’s oeuvre is, or ought to be, a totality, one large organism, in which
each part is connected with all others by means of countless threads, nerves,
muscles, skeins, and canals, through which every part remains in touch with
every other and in which mysterious messages, currents, signals, code, keep
being sent to and fro.
Harry Mulisch’ most often translated book is The Assault (1982). It was translated
into Chinese in 1988 by Jaap Sie (Shi Huiye). This novel made an impression worldwide, and the movie made after it won an Oscar. Its success is due in part to its manyleveled structure. It is a book full of suspense, that works its way toward a solution of
all tensions built up from the start. It is also a book that circles around the damning
influence of the past upon the present, combined with the theme of guilt and
innocence. The story starts in the Second World War, when a 12-years’ old boy,
Anton Steenwijk, loses both his parents and his brother. In front of their home the
corpse has been found of a high-placed policeman at the service of the German
occupiers, who has been liquidated by the Dutch resistance movement. The Germans
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in their turn liquidate the house’s occupants, even though the police officer was not
shot dead in front of their house but of that of their neighbors, who however have
dragged off the corpse. Only the little boy is spared. Even so the avenge of the
Germans determines his life, as he keeps wondering who have been guilty: the
Germans who murdered his parents, or the resistance movement that shot the police
officer, or the neighbors who put the man’s corpse in front of his parents’ home. It
takes decades for Anton to experience a veritable catharsis, when he finally learns that
the corpse had been dragged away because Jewish inhabitants were hidden in secret in
the neighbors’ home. He is told this during a large political manifestation against the
American military involvement in Vietnam, hence, during a manifestation directly
relevant to the changing times , when the old and the new world seemed to collide
head-on.
The apotheosis of Mulisch’ oeuvre is The discovery of heaven (1992) — a book
marked by more layers than ever, which nonetheless reads quite fluently. The story is
an homage to friendship. It is also a story about the relations between fathers and
sons, between mother and daughter; it is a story of human beings as playthings of
higher powers; a vision of the tragedy of the twentieth century with its two world
wars; a concretization of what it means to be an author; a search for true morality; the
story of how technology has taken over. All this is being drenched in references to
modern world literature and art, to the bible, to the classics, to his own work, and also
to 20th century politics. The biggest paradox in this book is that one of the
protagonists is not a living person but a dead one, who cannot act and who
nonetheless is central to the story. The main story is of friendship and love, and of a
very special child that is given a very special mission.
This child has not one but two fathers. Two men meet, become intense friends,
and at a given moment share the same woman. She gets pregnant, not knowing by
whom of the two. During her pregnancy she has a traffic accident and she gets into a
very deep coma. She is kept alive so as to be able to bear the child she has been
expecting. This child grows up in extraordinary circumstances. During a trip to Rome
he finds out where Moses’ Stone Tablets must be resting. These Stone Tablets are
symbols for the basic rules of human conduct, allegedly dictated thousands of years
ago to the Jewish profet Moses by Jahweh, the God of the Jews who later becomes the
God of Christianity, too. Together with one of his fathers the son steals the Stone
Tablets and brings them back to Israel, upon which feat he dissolves into nothingness.
The enveloping story is told by two angels, spirit-like intermediaries between God
and humanity. God has concluded that human beings have lost their right to the Stone
Tablets he once gave them, because the run-away development of technology has
invalidated their message. Mulisch, not himself a believer, employs here telling, very
well-known symbols from Jewish/Christian culture to make it clear that the world is
losing its most important human values.
I cannot now explain in how captivating a manner all this and much, much more
has been put together. The story has been widely acknowledged as a powerful
analysis in fiction of how the Western world has degenerated. The book received rave
reviews, and has been translated into many languages, albeit not yet into Chinese.
In Mulisch’ last book, Siegfried (2001), all earlier obsessions make their appearance
all over again. Once again unnatural parenthood, how far fiction can go and what the
meaning of writerhood is, also guilt and annihilation, come to the fore. Mulisch’
exploration of authorhood leads to full hybris in Siegfried. The writer who is the
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protagonist of the book hopes that fiction will help him understand Hitler. The big
question is: if Hitler had had a son, would he have been ready to sacrifice him to his
own system if this son had some Jewish blood? In Siegfried Mulisch causes Hitler
(who in historical reality was infertile) to get a son who is killed on Hitler’s own
orders once Hitler discovers that, indeed, the child’s mother is of partly Jewish
descent. The author, Mulisch’ alter ego, discovers this, but the discovery means at the
same time his own death.
Mulisch has also published a very special little book which throws a fascinating light
upon his poetics: Foundations for the mythology of authorhood (1987). In ten theses
he presents his thoughts about authorhood, and here again it becomes clear how much
he seeks to connect with the big myths in world literature.
Here, in brief, is how his reasoning goes. If you look at the starred sky, you watch
the deep past. If you talk with someone a meter removed from you, there is a fraction
of a microsecond between what you see yourself and what the other sees. The words
that you speak and that another hears, are by then already past. Every person finds
himself lonely in his own present. As long as he does not touch anything, he is
surrounded by the past. The fully shared ‘now’ exists only in sexuality. That is the
biologically creative moment.
But there is also commonality in the written word. Time and space coincide. With
a collection of poetry, or with a novel, time has been vanquished. By means of his
poetic art Orpheus was able to enter the world of the dead. The living Orpheus gained
admission to the netherworld through poetry, to get back his beloved. That is why
Orpheus is the author’s patron saint.
So this is Mulisch’message: to write is to descend into a world of the dead where
space and time do not exist and, therefore, neither death – even though one must go
there in order to vanquish it. A clear-cut argument within Mulisch’ world of fiction,
yet not (unfortunately) outside it.
Mulisch’ principal themes
Now that we have made our acquaintance with an important portion of Mulisch’
oeuvre, I pass on to the principal themes that keep it together. Mulisch is capable of
connecting things which no one has ever connected before but which in retrospect
look so obvious as to make the reader feel that the connection has always been there.
This is the secret of Mulisch’ attraction as a writer. He is surely interested in personal
relations and in the psychology of realistic characters, yet at bottom he is out for
bigger catch, for the larger whole. As with other great writers, a fine, well-built story
is for him extremely important to arrest and enthrall the reader. But underneath the
captivating story are the layers which make it truly interesting, and which must be
delved up the way an archeologist must dig under the topsoil to arrive at the layers
that hold his true interest. Taken together, these layers form what has made great
literature so attractive over the ages. It deals with our shared, human problems, which
remain the same always, such as brotherly conflicts, power struggles, thwarted love,
jealousy, revenge, hatred. At the same time great literature gives occasion, time and
again, to give it new interpretations which draw it into your own time. So, great
literature is as constant as it is variable. Each time gives its own interpretation to a
work of art, and great works of art have it in them to lend themselves to ever ongoing
reinterpretation.
In Mulisch’ work this power of ever refreshed interpretation is present, too.
His stories captivate their readers in view of the general human themes addressed
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therein, and they offer the possibility of being reinterpreted in forever freshly creative
ways.
The first theme to mention is annihilation. There is the annihilation that has to do with
creativity. Whoever makes a work of art arrives inevitably at the point that it is
completed. The growth process is annihilated, giving way to petrifaction. The
annihilation of creation also has a positive effect, in that it stops the flow of time and
in so doing vanquishes time.
The second form of annihilation of which Mulisch writes is, obviously, human
annihilation, for which the Second World War stands as his enduring exemplar. Here
the crucial books are The Stone Bridal Bed and The Discovery of Heaven. Mulisch
regards the increasing power of technology as a continuation of the Second World
War.
But Mulisch does not resign in the face of annihilation. He agrees with the
15th century philosopher Nicolaus Cusanus that even in opposites we may always
encounter commonalities which connect them. We have already seen how Mulisch
does this in creative petrifaction, where rest (death) carries perpetuation (life eternal)
in its wake.
For human destruction he seeks an insight that enables him to make it
comprehensible. Only art can capture the essence of the desire for annihilation, so he
demonstrates in his final novel, Siegfried.
Connected with annihilation is the theme of the paradox. If one style figure is
predominant in Mulisch’ universe, it is the paradox. It resides in titles like The stone
bridal bed. But it is more than a style figure, it is a way of viewing the world. The
view is founded in the well-known paradox of the man from the Greek isle of Crete.
‘All Cretans lie’, the Cretan says. But if it is true what the Cretan says, then, being a
Cretan, he must be lying, too. But then all Cretans do not lie, so his lie falls away as
well. Cusanus’ coincidence of opposites likewise displays a paradox: what is opposite
has a point of union nonetheless. In no book has Mulisch worked out the paradox
farther than in The Diamond. The largest gem-stone on earth, which should really
bring nothing but happiness, beauty, and riches, is an announcer of death. It bears
beauty and annihilation at the same time, and this contradiction is only apparent, as in
essence the two hang together.
Also connected with the paradox is the theme of guilt and innocence in relation with
the individual and with history. An individual takes part in a collective, he stands in
society and thus takes part of history, whether he has opted for it or not. Can an
individual in a given historical process be innocent when he was only connected to it
sideways, or has been dragged into it by sheer chance? Am I guilty of time? is the big
question here. The Assault has been woven around this particular theme entirely. Was
the resistance movement guilty of the death of Anton’s parents and brother, or were
the Germans, or was it the neighbor who dragged the corpse away? Individual interest
had to give way for the higher purpose. Chance is present in this theme in the manner
of fate in ancient Greek drama.
Alchemy makes its presence felt in Mulisch’ work in a variety of guises. Writing itself
is an alchemical process: an accelerated manner of making gold. In writing, the author
finds the philosophers’ stone which helps him liberate the divine principle from
matter. This sounds more religious than it is with Mulisch. His point is that the
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alchemist aims for something that the author also wants to attain: an insight into
processes that he initiates but that develop in ways independent of him, as he
demonstrates in The Diamond, a metaphor for ‘the writery’.
A theme that has become ever more important in his later work is the moral norms of
creating life. The counternatural creation of life is punished with death. One novel
that I have not mentioned yet, The Procedure, is largely devoted to this theme. It
opens with the artificial construction of what should become a human being, passing
on from there to the drama of a child born dead. The bearing of a dead child out of a
living woman is the counterworld of the bearing of a live child out of a dead woman
that takes place in The Discovery of Heaven. In both books the unnatural process is
concluded with the annihilation of the child. These attempts at creating life are
connected to the alchemical process. It is not for nothing that the protagonist of The
Procedure is a scientist who does research at the very borderline between dead matter
and simple organisms.
A theme connected with classic mythology is the effort to vanquish time. One means
to attain this is the synchronization of various times. When the fifteenth and the
twentieth century are simultaneously present, there is no past and no present, only
omnipresent time.
Mulisch connects this theme with two ancient myths. One is the Orpheus
myth, where Orpheus can vanquish death but may not look back, in other words, art
can vanquish death but it must not look to the past. How to understand this in the case
of an author like Mulisch, so given to look at the past, at early philosophers, at hoary
myths, at long-ago wars? To grasp this we need the paradox. The past can be
synchronized, be made present, by art – this is the power of Oedipus, the mythical
king who was unknowingly led by fate to kill his father and marry his mother.
Oedipus is already in himself a paradox, in that he is at the same time son and spouse,
simultaneously brother and father. In being all this he has vanquished time, for by
turning the generations upside down you annihilate time. This theme recurs in
Mulisch’ work in various guises, but a true victory over time does not take place —
each book of his in which an Orpheus- or an Oedipus-like figure makes his
appearance ends with the death of all concerned, even though in death they often gain
a sublime experience.
All these themes come together in the ‘writery’. However powerful the plot line in
Mulisch’ books may be, almost always a layer is also present about writing itself. His
writery is by no means noncommittal. To write is to fixate. To write literature is the
same as to perpetuate and to vanquish the temporal.
Great literature, Mulisch says, adds something to reality. It describes things which
have never existed. Consequently, a writer must always write in the most conscious
manner possible. Mulisch does not bear with one letter he cannot personally vouch for.
All the same, Mulisch rejects literature that is being written for the sake of the
message. He has an aversion to so-called tendentious literature, which uses literature to
denounce some social wrong. ‘A writer is not an errand-boy’, he once said in an
interview.
It may seem contradictory that an author who displayed his engagement with
movements like socialism and communism says that he does not want to write literature
with a message. You might expect that by means of literature he would want to effect
changes. Mulisch has often enough made public statements against the established order,
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he has endorsed the ideas of various movements for protection of the unprotected. Are
we to believe that he would have no message, all the while he certainly wished to effect
certain changes?
What he really meant to say is that he refused to press literature into a straightjacket. He did not wish to sit down at his desk and, the idea fully worked out, write a
novel with some pre-set intention. His desire was not by means of literature to contribute
to a better society, but rather to intensify his individual readers’ reflection upon society.
He liked to compare himself with an alchemist who puts certain ingredients together, to
find out what happens with them. Does something new emerge? Do things begin to
move, or does everything remain the same? Does the bottle with ingredients explode, and
has it all been for naught? Or does the brew begin to bubble and does the magician cry
eureka, ‘I have found it’, because out of already existing stuff something wholly new has
been composed? The writer cannot know beforehand, and that is what Mulisch means
with his absence of a message. He has hopes for a message, but he does not know it
before the act.
Writing involves an almost messianic assignment. The literary author is
capable of creating life and of annihilating it. He may try with his pen to catch in a net
of fiction the big Evil that Hitler was. He may, as in an alchemical proces, seek with
his writing to rescue the essence from matter. He may with his pen set time still. He
can conquer heaven. Mulisch regards the writer as a Redeemer, capable of enriching
us with insights that go further than the scientist or the philosopher can provide.
Ultimately literature is the instrument for revealing the highest possible knowledge.