The dean
The dean. From papers left by Spencer C. Spencer. Collected and edited by Dr. Elizabeth Ney, Librarian at the Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin is a novel by Lars Gustafsson . The Swedish edition first appeared under the title Dekanen in 2003, the German translation by Verena Reichel in 2004 by Carl Hanser Verlag under ISBN 3-446-20530-6 . The publisher described the work as a philosophical thriller about evil .
content
Framework story
As in The Death of a Beekeeper , Gustafsson pretends that the writings of the actual narrator were released by a third person after his alleged, but not confirmed, death. Spencer C. Spencer, once a lecturer and later associate dean at the University of Texas , emptied his bank accounts on a "hectic afternoon" that was not reported and retired to a motel in the Chihuahua Desert , where he stayed apparently lives under a false name on the pretext of doing geological research. Here he writes a manuscript about the past years, which he initially kept in the secretary of his room, but which is later found under the spare wheel of his abandoned car - partly illegible due to moisture damage and, as Gustafsson suggests to the fictional editor in June 2002, also incomplete from the start. Spencer himself remains missing. The novel is therefore designed as a fragment and deliberately presents the reader with gaps.
Spencer's report
When Spencer C. Spencer met Dean Paul Chapman, he had been teaching at Austin University for four years . He is a philosopher by nature, but also gives courses in writing and literature. One day he is called to the dean who makes him the offer to work as associate dean - a glamorous position that Spencer, taken by surprise, accepts, although he had never thought of such a reorientation before. Even in the short conversation in Chapman's office it becomes clear that from now on he has two roles to play: on the one hand, the dean's duties have to be done, on the other hand, he becomes a listener and interlocutor for the dean who is available at all times. This becomes clear in the first conversation between the two. Chapman goes into Spencer's Condillac research and creates a counter-image. While Condillac devised the image of a statue that is gradually being equipped with sensory perceptions and acquiring ever more differentiated concepts of itself and the world, Chapman is thinking of a figure that is gradually reduced until it is no longer a mere scent the world around them. Spencer finds this notion melancholy, without realizing that a similar fate awaits him. During the course of the conversation the statement was made that he was actually an atheist , which the dean apparently liked.
After Spencer has changed his field of responsibility, it is important to him to get an idea of the person of his superior. In his spacious and sunny office, the first thing that caught his eye was the wall decorations - strikingly good prints of Piranesi's “prisons”, the Carceri d'Invenzione . The rest of the equipment is also dignified and Professor Chapman himself, as always in an impeccable suit, wears a tie from King's College in Cambridge .
The dean, the son of a soccer coach, has had an eventful life. Faced with the decision to go to the Vietnam War or to spend the rest of his life as a deserter in neutral Sweden, he decided to go to war, made it to the captain's position, and suffered paraplegia when injured by shrapnel . However, this does not prevent him from unexpectedly appearing everywhere in the city and in society. Spencer does not learn much about his personal life, but Chapman clearly knows and has many influential people and admirers. In the university he can always enforce his will and budget wishes and has great authority; Outside of university life, his Thursday visits to a bookstore, where a heterogeneous group of people meet and experiment with toadstools , are particularly noticeable . Some members of this group, like Chapman, appear to be Vietnam veterans and may have other drug experiences. The aim of these attempts is evidently the connection with the " underworld ".
Spencer tries to get information about Chapman from his four secretaries. But only with two, Susan and Gertrude, Spencer enters into closer relationships. Susan is a rather uncomplicated woman who conveys one or the other piece of information to him, while Gertrude, an outwardly cool and reserved beauty, cannot be elicited even in an intimate situation. She seems to have a close relationship with the dean and treats Spencer the day after the night of love as if nothing had happened.
Another woman connected to Chapman is student Mary Elizabeth. At first she appeared in one of Spencer's seminars, albeit irregularly, and then took advice from him during his office hours. Mary Elizabeth wants to rework the Faust material in a story and gets into a debate with Spencer about the main character of this work. After the two have established that Faust actually has a very mediocre, basically “empty” soul, they decide to make him appear in this new version as an initially unsuccessful football coach. The design of the Mephisto seems more difficult to them, especially since the idea arises of replacing it with a female tempter.
Mary Elizabeth not only works at the university, but also works in the aforementioned bookstore. One afternoon the dean sends dispensers to the bookstore to get a book that Chapman says he should read. It is the work of a lost local great, the writer Anthony Travis Winnicott. Chapman sent Spencer to the store to get the book "The Mushroom Goddess and Her Sons", which apparently has to do with the shamanism practiced in his circles . But the title “The cards disintegrate in the moisture” is also mentioned in the sales pitch. This title reappears in the dean's mouth when he talks about his assignments in Vietnam and the maps that are crumbling in the local climate, showing new “landscapes” due to the formation of mold and thus causing disorientation. Another Winnicott title, “Go quietly! Don't talk to the flies! ”His title seems not only to refer to the dean's phobia of flies, which he may have brought with him from Vietnam, but also, like Piranesis Carceri , deals with captivity through illusion. Mary Elizabeth points out to Spencer another work by Winnicott, in which it is about a secret agent who is supposed to sneak into the environment of an Islamic dictator, whose right-hand man is to become and ultimately murder him. He receives the order for this in a library. There are certain parallels to Spencer's interview at Chapman and to his further work. It is suggested that the books could not have been written by the missing Winnicott, but by Chapman himself.
Mary Elizabeth has the peculiarity of disappearing over and over again over long periods of time. One time Spencer loses sight of her for three years and accidentally finds her at a bus stop when she seems to be going through a crisis. He takes her home and she becomes his lover. But soon afterwards he loses it to his cousin Derek Spencer, who has made a million dollar fortune in the IT industry. The apparently omniscient dean speaks to Spencer one day about the situation:
- But, he added quite surprisingly. Speaking of de Sade , I wanted to ask you if you still share your girlfriend with this cousin.
- I was perplexed to say the least. It was a mystery to me how he could know so much about my private circumstances or even have any idea about it. Or, if you will, disproportions. Who could have gossiped?
- - I think so, I replied.
- At the same moment, of course, I became aware of my stupidity. Why should I be obliged to answer such a question? Why didn't I just answer very politely that I hadn't the faintest idea what the dean was talking about. But he continued, lecturing as calmly as he had started:
- - We mustn't forget one thing. We live in a totally amoral time.
In the course of the conversation, Chapman makes it clear, not for the first time, that he considers the world to be bad and evil for a given. In this world, crimes would either not be punished at all or only in a ridiculous proportion to the gravity of the crime. As an example, he cites Hitler , among others , whose suicide is negligible compared to the calamity that this man has brought about the world. Basically, a different world than the existing one is necessary. Spencer, still confused by Chapman's knowledge of his private life, can barely follow Chapman's speculative line of thought. But he did not fail to hear the appeal at the end of the conversation: If jealousy really tormented him and he cared about the girl, he should “go ahead” with his cousin
On a joint fishing trip, the dean makes Spencer an offer to help him with the matter, on condition that Spencer do him a similar favor himself and that the matter will never be discussed again. At this point the dean is worried by a visitor who has unexpectedly turned up at the university. He calls himself Douglas Melvin Smith and claims to have known Chapman from his time in Vietnam. He wants to interview him for a book project about dealing with the truth in the Vietnam War. Chapman, however, does not value this contact.
He once told Spencer how his wound came about: The squadron had landed in an allegedly safe clearing, but in the jungle the men discovered the massacred population of an entire village. So someone must have gotten ahead of the battalion. In addition, the plan to land in the clearing had apparently been betrayed: While trying to get an overview of the situation, Chapman was shot at and his spinal cord injured. He vowed to punish the traitor if he ever got hold of him. He accidentally discovered him while he was still in a hospital in Vietnam and "eliminated" him together with a friend. Apparently Smith knows about this and could endanger Chapman. Spencer's sketchy notes cannot be used to tell what happened in detail after the conversation on the river, but he presumably did his superior a favor and got rid of Smith - at least the stranger on the river who used to catch carp in contrast to Chapman's favorite spot , is identical to Smith at all. Spencer “tackled the problem” with a rifle with a telescopic sight.
In the meantime Derek has disappeared without a trace, which is not noticeable for a long time, as Derek always traveled from one meeting or branch to another, only arrived everywhere at the last moment and was actually never really located. Mary Elizabeth seems to have returned to Spencer without comment.
These two alleged murders may have been preceded by a third some time earlier. When Chapman saw himself disregarded by a new administrator and his budget requests were not taken into account, he sent him a letter through Spencer, the contents of which are unknown. Two days later the addressee hanged himself and the position was advertised again.
Why Spencer finally withdrew to the desert and lived there incognito, one does not find out in detail. He reflects:
- And all to please the dean. But then I couldn't take it anymore. That the dean knew everything. That he was sitting in his wheelchair rubbing his hands and that he was happy to know everything. Not just about me, but about everyone, about the administrative director, about the rector, about the other deans, about his secretaries - about everyone. Everyone, I say! Somebody like that just can't exist! Everyone must understand that.
After seeming to admit another murder here, Spencer immediately deconstructs this understanding of the text.
- I found the solution [...] It's actually very simple:
- No Spencer Spencer killed another human. No way.
- And certainly not the dean.
- And neither will.
- For a very simple reason.
- That I just came up with. I alone.
- I am not Spencer Spencer.
- There never was a person like Spencer Spencer. Such a person simply cannot exist. And consequently it doesn't exist either.
Motifs
Power and nothing
Spencer's “solution” at the end of his report, which leaves the reader quite perplexed, seems to allude to a problem that the dean repeatedly takes up in the course of the novel, the question of what can and cannot exist and what is our perception and research withdraws.
In Chapman's case, the foundations for this consideration seem to have been laid by the conversations he had with his uncle Ingram as a young man between the ages of sixteen and eighteen. Ingram was interned in a mental institution, but was considered physically harmless and was allowed to go for a walk with his nephew. He introduced him to the history of the number zero , which was introduced into mathematics in the form of the Arabic "Sifr" and revolutionized it. Ingram taught the young Paul Chapman that the zero represents something that on the one hand does not exist but on the other hand is indispensable - whereupon he quoted the statement of Fredegesius von Tours :
- Videtur mihi nihil aliquid esse. - It seems to me that nothing is anything.
From this point of view, Ingram made his nephew familiar with the ideas of the various epochs of the vacuum in order to ultimately lead him downright into the aporia:
- Yes, said Ingram, who by now apparently didn't care whether I could follow his reasoning or not, one must seriously question whether the world was actually constructed to be understood by humans [...] The demonic, that Something that is frightening about true natural science is that it vaguely conveys the idea of a world with which we have nothing to do with, which our understanding cannot understand, above all of a world which is absolutely not set up for our best be.
- In this sense, added my brilliant cousin, / of course physics, and especially electrophysics, should be considered a demonic science.
Ingram appears at a somewhat later stage in Chapman's life. It appears to him while he is lying in a hospital tent in Vietnam, intoxicated with morphine . The scene is reminiscent of the appearance of the devil in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus . Here as there, the apparition sometimes sits with crossed legs and speaks with a trained, cultivated and extremely versatile voice and draws the person's attention to the fact that it only exists because this person “makes” it in his own brain. The uncle's phantom, who, in contrast to the chair on which he is sitting, does not cast a shadow on the tent wall, initially talks to the nephew about the essence of time without this being perceptible to the environment . Time, he teaches him, does not exist at all and creation is actually just a terrible disorder - which the creator intentionally created in order to cover up his tracks from the researchers. With space, with the entire world, it is basically no different:
- Imagine if this material world that you are so proud of was just a misunderstanding.
After questioning his nephew's understanding of reality, Uncle Ingram himself alludes to his Mephistophelian role:
- Why do you think i am here? Why this personal interest in a captain who did not die? Do you think I'm out to get something? Your immortal soul maybe? How do you know she's immortal? /
- And if it were her now, what do you think I would start with? You don't always have to be out on business?
- You may never have wondered why Mephisto was interested in such an obviously shallow and insignificant soul as Faust's? Is such a morose little libertine really useful for anything? And where should Mephisto put it? In a bottle? As sea lights, perhaps, to light up the cabin at night when looking for the spoon and the bottle with the cough medicine?
The conversation then takes a different turn when the uncle asks the nephew to give an account of his participation in the war. He proves that he chose this “bad” alternative quite voluntarily and that at certain moments he also enjoyed evil.
Ingram is said to have given his nephew more information in those morphine conversations, but Chapman refuses to ever repeat these things. In any case, it made him question the understanding of reality. Decades later, in a conversation with Spencer, Chapman brings up the question of the existence and nature of the devil, which was already the subject of this hallucination . He protests against the reversal of the ontological proof of God of Anselm of Canterbury : If a being that does not exist is less perfect than one that exists, and if the devil is to be regarded as the most imperfect being, one can infer from this that he does not exist can. Angrily, the dean asks how one can actually fall for the devil as imperfect:
- If there was a really evil power in the world, was there any reason to believe that it was imperfect? Wasn't most of the evidence that she was, if not perfect, at least on the way to perfection?
The nature
The dean's image of nature also corresponds to the idea of the existence and success of evil in the world. Using numerous examples, he repeatedly explains that evolution also has its negative sides:
- I persistently point out to nature enthusiasts that gamma rays , gravitational collapse and the Ebola virus are just as much an expression of the greatness of nature as sunsets and edelweiss, and I regard Switzerland's habitability as a triumph of man over nature. A nature that is essentially evil.
In retrospect, Spencer sees the fact that the dean compares his own inner nature with what is actually "bad" and uninhabitable Switzerland and begins to talk about it extensively as one of the first indications of the disturbing events that have developed over time.
To make nature habitable, first and foremost the ability to learn to deal with the dangers of water is essential. This motif appears early on. Spencer notes that the Dean and his friends have a close relationship with Colorado and like to talk of the old days when he was untamed and capable of doing great harm, and he is concerned with what was hidden at the bottom of the later reservoirs is. The dean later pointed out to him that not only in Genesis but in numerous religions the victory of a deity - such as Marduk - over the water represents the beginning of a world order. The victorious god later usually retires to his residence on a mountain and does not let much more be heard from him. Spencer transfers this image to his powerful cousin Derek, who has built a castle-like property high above the meanders of the Colorado and rules his empire from a study at the top of the tower. Later, after Derek disappears from the world, Spencer takes over this building for a while and experiences what he calls a shamanistic journey. Apparently it is a drug experiment with toadstools, which he carried out after the Dr. Chapman conducts recommended literature along with Mary Elizabeth. Similar to Chapman in the morphine intoxication, he now experiences the dissolution of the concept of time, but analyzes this as a disruption of the temporal lobe , which is a known effect of eating mushrooms.
But Spencer's actual image of nature does not correspond to the landscape made habitable and the tamed water, but the immense desert into which he withdrew to write his report. If he reports he is here
- in the great void, the great salty dryness, the great stupid nothing
and this is how the world looks to a large extent, he combines the dean's idea of the “bad” world with his fascination with nothing . At the end of his report, he transfers the external image of the desert to his inner life - and suddenly seems to find a way out:
- On a steep, arid slope out of nowhere, which I seemed to be climbing hour after hour, a dry river valley […] I suddenly found a hole in the bottom of my soul, like in an old well. And in this fountain ... [...] sleep was like darkness. […] I drank […] the sleep […] rolled over me like a tidal wave, like a flood / […] I didn't care who I was and who I could have been.
- Yes. I slept.
Sleep and death
With this sentence Spencer's report ends. The comparison of sleep with the tidal wave seems to conjure up the early, chaotic states of the world before order was established by a god, and the renunciation of individuality and special fate in sleep seems to bring back a primitive, original state, like the statue of Condillac, quoted at the beginning, before gaining knowledge and may have had the will to know. Sleep, known to be a brother of death, is not only discussed at the end of the book. In Chapman's morphine hallucination, Ingram describes himself as “the boy Morpheus ”, and Chapman himself explains in retrospect that he was not only unconscious in the time after his injury, but actually dead. During the experiments in the bookstore and in the book Geh leise! Do not talk to the flies , the descent into the underworld, the realm of shadows, is in the foreground - although Chapman actually holds it with Nietzsche , who rejects a further life in the afterlife because it could only be an eternal repetition. Nevertheless, the experiments seem to fascinate him. Spencer, on the other hand, mentions in his report that near his motel in the desert there is an opening in the ground in an old car junkyard, a descent into the underworld, and numerous people have already been there and returned.
Literary and biographical references
This motif of the journey to the hereafter is already related in a similar form in Gustafsson's work Windy , which appeared a few years before the dean and is expressly quoted here. There the technical details of the modern Texan Nekyia are described by the hairdresser Windy quite incidentally in conversation with a customer; one recognizes in it the journeys of the heroes of the Odyssey and the Aeneid . But not only this possibility of a journey into the hereafter, also the bookstore, the works of Winnicott and the figure of the dean are already present in Gustafsson's book.
Gustafsson himself taught for many years at the University of Texas at Austin and, in The Dean, quotes many more in addition to the philosophers and other writers already mentioned; the Ingram episodes in particular are rich in literary references.
The Faust motif plays an unmistakable role again and again, as the whole novel basically shows the wanting to know and the not being able to know both of the characters and the readers.
In a note on a flyleaf of the novel, which certainly also features of the campus novel and whose fictional author carries such a mirror-image name as Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, the author against possible attempts to secures Dean about a roman à clef to read. Although he had seen five deans in two decades at the university, the most original being Bob King , who had appointed him professor quite arbitrarily, none of these persons could be seen as the archetype of the dean's figure.
Reviews
The novel often met with approval from critics because of its eloquent and humorous passages, but also with incomprehension or rejection because of the fragmentary plot. Martin Krumbholz certified that the novel was wonderful to read because the rapid play with ambiguity kept the recipient in suspense. Also Ulrich Greiner , of the novel in the time -reviewed on 11 November 2004, found reading while rewarding and entertaining, but objected to the confusion, exaggerating the Gustafsson with his readers. Simply as a literary masterpiece called andreas dorschel the Dean. Kurt Flasch turned his attention to the time in which the book was being written and placed it, though somewhat asymmetrically, between Vietnam and Iraq . In addition to the reflections on emotional war trauma, he was particularly interested in the humorously treated devil motif. Andreas Breitenstein thought the publisher's idea of marketing the book as a thriller was wrong. He saw in Der Dekan more of a theses , the strength of which is not the plot, but the essayistic insertions.
Individual evidence
- ↑ blurb
- ↑ The Dean, p. 8
- ↑ The Dean, p. 156
- ↑ The Dean, p. 159
- ↑ The Dean, p. 172
- ↑ The Dean, p. 187
- ↑ The Dean, p. 187
- ↑ The Dean, p. 188
- ↑ The Dean, p. 66 f.
- ↑ The Dean, p. 114
- ↑ The Dean, p. 115 f.
- ↑ The Dean, p. 96
- ↑ The Dean, p. 97
- ↑ The Dean, p. 59 f.
- ↑ The Dean, p. 71
- ↑ The Dean, pp. 188 f.
- ↑ The Dean, p. 89
- ↑ Frankfurter Rundschau, December 8, 2004
- ^ 'Im Zeitstrudel', Süddeutsche Zeitung No. 235, 9./10. October 2004, p. 18
- ↑ FAZ, August 28, 2004, online at Der Teufel ist Los - Lars Gustafsson's novel about jealousy and lust for power
- ↑ NZZ, August 24, 2004