The raft of Medusa (Roman)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The raft of the Medusa is a 2017 novel by the Austrian writer Franzobel . It is about the wreck of the frigate Medusa on July 2, 1816 off the West African coast. The novel was awarded the Bavarian Book Prize in 2017 .

Figures (selection)

The figures form a complex structure. The focus of the narrative is particularly on the ship's passengers. There is the crew of the ship: the hierarchy consists of the captain Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys , who is a nephew of Louis Guillouet , his friend Antoine Richefort, the officers Joseph Reynaud, Espiaux and Lapeyrère. The protagonist among the sailors is Hosea Thomas, who forms a fraternal alliance with the cabin boy Viktor Aisen, whose greatest adversary is the Smutje and his vicious kitchen boy Jerome Clutterbucket.

Among the guests are the future governor of Senegal Julien-Désiré Schmaltz with his wife Reine and their daughter Arétée. In addition, the two ship doctors Jean Baptiste Henri Savigny and Bertoni. The mining engineer Alexandre Corréard is on board on behalf of the colonial society. The large family of a notary from Rochefort is on their way to Senegal to benefit from the colonial business there. The family consists of Charles Picard with his second wife Adelaïde, their three children Laura, Charles and Gustavus, two grown daughters from their first marriage, Charlotte and Caroline, and the orphaned five-year-old nephew Alphonse Fleury.

Other characters are Jean Griffon du Bellay, the missionary Jean-Pierre Maiwetter, the Jew Menachim Kimmelblatt, the Asian Tscha-Tscha, the researcher Adolphe Kummer and a dark-skinned sutler named Marie-Zaïde.

The staffage includes the two pigs Blücher and Madame Pompadour as well as a guillotine, which is called Luise.

content

The novel begins with a fade-ahead and begins in the third chapter with the story of the Medusa in the port of Rochefort-sur-Mer. The departure is under good omens: the weather is fine, preparations for the trip to Mauritania are in progress. The brig Argus, the supply ship Loire, the corvette Echo and the Medusa are solemnly baptized by the bishop.

The captain is a pretentious royalist: he is fearful, nervous and overwhelmed. From the start, he didn't like his own command. The officers are Bonapartists and suspicious of the captain. The reader learns that the captain's adlatus, called Toni, was the real driving force behind taking over command. Toni is presented as a royalist, a jovial fanatic and exposed as a con man. The ship's doctor sorts his medication one last time, followers of the old order sort their medals, the Picard family of notaries maneuver their children onto the ship. The travelers and crew say goodbye to the relatives waiting at the pier and the ship casts off and drifts across the Charente into the Atlantic .

After leaving the port, the atmosphere becomes more concrete in the first dialogues among the passengers. This is how the dissimilar couple, Hosea Thomas and his parrots William Shakespeare and Viktor, get to know each other. The figure of Hosea is compared to that of Arnold Schwarzenegger, while Viktor, the son of a lawyer, tired of the classic educational canon and looking for adventure, is more like the young Rimbaud.

In the chapter The Guts of Medusa , Viktor is confronted with the harsh chicane, the physical violence of the cook, the work and the superstition of the crew. The signs of calamity are closely linked to the behavior of the impostor Richefort. He has a tendency towards inappropriate compliments and demonstrations of power. When Viktor porcelain falls from his work-battered hands, Richefort wants him to be punished. Viktor only escapes the corporal punishment through the intervention of the doctor Savigny. But Savigny's character is also ambivalent. Viktor becomes suspicious of his routine in dissecting corpses.

The arbitrariness of the captain and his bad adviser later hits an innocent Moravian soldier named Prust, whose punishment is to serve as an example for the other soldiers. After forty strokes without ceasing, the doctor can only determine that he has died; even the grotesque attempts at resuscitation are in vain. Another victim of the inhumane conditions is the cabin boy O'Hooley, who is pushed overboard by the galley boy and is not rescued despite detailed discussions on board.

When the Medusa hits the Arguin sandbank, the disaster is prepared. In order to make the ship mobile again, the crew discuss the unloading and reloading of the ship's inventory. The characters interact in uncertainty about their fate and order is shaken. When the decision is then made to build a raft so that the ship can lift itself again without a load, leaving the Medusa behind also becomes concrete. The designated governor Schmaltz expresses what was previously indicated: There are too few lifeboats for all passengers. The raft will be built from parts of the Medusa in a short time. The captain leaves the ship and there is general panic. When the guillotine is finally pushed overboard, Schmaltz is beside himself. His wife, who is committed to etiquette, is angry about the loss of her clothes. The Picard family reacts differently. The parents, who quarreled eternally in the course of the story, move together in the extreme situation.

When the passengers are distributed among the lifeboats, the plan is to pull the raft with the remaining 150 people behind. But due to misfortune, mishap or intent, the line loosens, so that the first three boats come free. Only the governor's boat is now still connected to the raft and the governor orders the lines to be cut. Here a conflict develops between the governor and the conflicting captain. Ultimately, fear of charity wins out. While the now self-sufficient governor's boat is found by an escort ship of the Medusa, the raft is floating in the open sea and supplies are used up. 13 days after the raft was abandoned, 15 survivors can be rescued. In Saint-Louis , other raft passengers die of exhaustion. The novel ends with the certainty that none of the participants will survive the events without harm.

criticism

The novel received numerous reviews in a short period of time, for example by Alexander Košenina for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . Košenina describes Franzobel's novel as a provocative painting designed “with an irrepressible love of tales”. For the reader this means an entertaining reading, because he himself is in an inescapable “artificial distress”: “It is not just the incessant barrage of shocking, ghastly, monstrous scenes that is responsible, but the constant change of point of view between the narrator's voice, experiential or direct Figurative speeches, dream sequences, oracular spirits of revenge or streams of consciousness and supra-individual aperçus. "

Tilman Krause appreciates Franzobel's ability: “The chutzpah of someone born later to acquire a topos of the European experience of disaster with such a great impartial narrative. Or the creative force with which all the stops are pulled out here, atrocities drastically, but also in a grimly comical way, frankly in all physical details, but then again fully rationally comprehensible. "At the same time, Franzobel does not succumb to the" showmanship of something bent into the literary Splattermovies ".

Carsten Otte locates the novel in the author's oeuvre: “In Franzobel's novel, the ship disaster is told as a wild orgy of stupidity and the inhuman. Apparently the cloudy subject has found the right author. Franzobel, whose real name is Franz Stefan Griebl, is a hard-working, versatile and contentious author. He writes crude satires on his home country, publishes wild trash thrillers, provokes with plays, parodies erotic literature, but despite all the weird and aggressive humor, and above all, sees himself as a humanist, and the narrative voice in this 600-page novel by no means hides this attitude . “Maximilian Huschke comments on Franzobel's harsh and extremely explicit linguistic style.

Mareike Ilseman describes the novel as a confrontational “masterpiece” and in her review points out its proximity to filmic means, which the author uses narrative: “The narrative eye glides like a camera over the damp ship's planks, following a popular figure, the ship's boy Victor, into the bowels of the "Medusa". "

expenditure

  • The raft of the Medusa, Roman. Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna 2017, ISBN 978-3-552-05816-3 .
  • Translation into French: À ce point de folie. D'après l'histoire du naufrage de La Méduse . Traduit de l'allemand (Autriche) par Olivier Mannoni , Flammarion, Paris 2018, ISBN 978-2081429406 .

See also

The historical model has already been processed in literature and in other art forms, often under the same title:

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bavarian Book Prize 2017: The winners at a glance / Franzobel and Andreas Reckwitz win the race. Retrieved December 22, 2018 .
  2. ^ Franzobel: The raft of the Medusa . 5th edition. Zolnay, Vienna, p. 50-52 .
  3. ↑ Ibid. P. 45.
  4. ↑ Ibid. P. 46.
  5. ↑ Ibid. P. 63.
  6. ↑ Ibid. Pp. 63-34
  7. ↑ "So watch out for your straw noses: Medusa was a gorgon, they are Greek giants ... a beautiful girl of well-formed stature, just like our ship. She was just as adorable as our daughter of the governor." Ibid. P. 112.
  8. ↑ Ibid. 123.
  9. ↑ "Hopefully Savigny never got the idea to carry out an experiment with him too. Whenever he talked about corpses, his eyes got a strange gleam and he looked strangely excited." Ibid. P. 252.
  10. ↑ Ibid. Pp. 138-150.
  11. ↑ Ibid. Pp. 183-188.
  12. ↑ Ibid. P. 255.
  13. ↑ "We have to make lists for the disembarkation, but secretly, whispered Schmaltz. If it turns out that some have no place in one of the lifeboats, they will mutiny." P. 289.
  14. ↑ Ibid. P. 338.
  15. ↑ "The beautiful guillotine! Oh, Luise! You beautiful! The governor fell into a lament that could have been taken for the first sign of the beginning madness of old age." P. 340.
  16. ↑ "I had dresses made for representation purposes that would put the tsar's daughters to shame. And with your comical catastrophe you will not deprive an official representative of France of the dignity." P. 337.
  17. ↑ "- What are you so aggressive about? - Me? You act like Xanthippe, but you probably don't even know who it is. - And whether I know that, Aristotle's wife! Picard couldn't suppress a smile. After this exchange of marital sentiments, they looked sobered. " Ibid. P. 352.
  18. ↑ p. 368.
  19. ↑ Ibid. Pp. 496-497.
  20. ↑ a b Alexander Kosenina: Franzobel's "Raft of Medusa": A unique experiment . In: FAZ.NET . September 12, 2017, ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed December 22, 2018]).
  21. ↑ a b Tilman Krause: How much do you accept to save your skin? In: world. Accessed December 22, 2018 (German).
  22. ↑ Carsten Otte: Delicious human meat. In: Tagesspiegel. February 7, 2017, accessed December 22, 2018 .
  23. ↑ Maximilian Huschke: Civilization and Catastrophe - On dealing with history in Franzobel's “The Raft of Medusa”: literaturkritik.de. In: Literaturkritik.de. June 7, 2017, accessed on December 22, 2018 (German).
  24. ^ Mareike Ilsemann: Franzobel: "The raft of Medusa" - The normality of horror. In: Deutschlandfunk. March 1, 2017, accessed on December 22, 2018 (German).