The curious one
The Curious One is a story by Hans Erich Nossack from 1955.
action
The narrative begins with the narrator's reflections on how long it took him to convince himself that he was still alive, and then merges into his memories of the time he drowned an ordinary life as a fish Water led - the life that everyone but himself and his beloved friend, whom he had lost in a terrible misfortune, had thought the only possible one. In particular, this life consisted of the cheerful enjoyment of the females, which recently, to the horror of the elderly, had developed from an annual ritual to an every night amusement, which the protagonist once enjoyed in his attempts to distract himself from his search for meaning involved.
However, the pleasures were overshadowed by the certainty that the sea was getting smaller and smaller, by the "fear of narrowness" and of omnipresent death, which led some to flee into the transcendent idea that the dead are no less alive than the living. Such attempts at interpretation did not convince the doubting protagonist, however, and so he eventually became an outcast loner who only shared his loneliness with a similarly feeling but more tender friend who was increasingly filled with the desire to discover the origin of life in the depths of the sea to detect.
He got to know him during the “nocturnal jumping”, during which some daredevil fish investigated the question of whether the shrinkage of the sea was connected with a strange light that could sometimes be seen from outside the water. These leaps into nowhere were a relief for him and also a training for what he was to do later - as well as the extravagant and long journeys through the sea that he took to escape his ordinary life and the love games through which he went tried to numb his sadness.
But his friend did not allow himself to be distracted and dissuaded from his request to seek out the depths of the sea, and out of loyalty to him the protagonist accompanied him on the way despite all his doubts and his attempts to delay the departure. After a seemingly endless journey, they finally faced a "limit of endurance" that they were able to overcome, only to be overwhelmed with disgust at what they found: a primitive, naked, ugly creature whose only undignified purpose in life was it to get fatter and that eventually devoured the beloved friend. Inconsolable about the loss, the protagonist did not return to his homeland after he was able to save himself, and looked for complete solitude and seclusion.
Tired of his suffering, he finally let himself be carried into nothing by a wave during the mating season of his people. He reached land, and with the help of his flippers he moved slowly but steadily forward, exhausted and pensive again and again in pools of water. He saw the sea behind him, the place where he had lived, and his own dragging track in the sand, through which he realized that he was still alive and that he was actually moving further and further away from the water. His wounds and pain became a certainty that he was not dead. “Where does this curiosity come from, which keeps pushing me up out of the pools?” He finally asks himself, “And what is it aimed at?”
Text analysis and interpretation
The narrative is formally an internal monologue by the first-person narrator with an open beginning and an open end. Suddenly and without prior introduction of the autodiegetic narrator or the situation in which he finds himself, the reader is put right in the middle of the action: "Oh, how long it took me to find unmistakable proof that I was still alive!" the narrator, without the reader being able to suspect why he had doubted it, and that not a person, but a fish is the main character of the story.
Similar to other works from Nossack's pen, the following scenes are strung together in an associative manner and without particular regard for proportion or narrative gradation. In his works, Nossack wanted to use a language that worked in images and completely dispensed with abstractions . In the curious to the use of pictorial and abstracting language but are remarkably voltage relative to: Symbolic are the fish of the sea, the moon, the rock for the Althergekommene, abstractions such as the "Nameless", the "perverse" and especially the “Nothing” for the unknown and new.
The Nothing in turn is "less the abolition of all being, rather than a name for a range of not creation." It is the place where the wrong thing can become the right one. The expedition of the fish into this unknown space references corresponding passages in Nekyia and Dorothea and especially in the spiral narrative Das Mal . It is not important whether this departure succeeds or not, but rather that the attempt is dared: Because just like the fish, even if it dies, will show the following through its skeleton and alleviate their loneliness, the curious can completely in principle, the goal is sufficient to "move the time a few meters further out."
However, it is not about the return to the natural origin, even if this is just as unknown as “nothing”; this option is just as excluded in the narrative as it is again later in the novel After the Last Revolt , in which the first-person narrator has the opportunity to return to nature "to lead the life of a raging animal, just concerned about my preservation" and so on to avoid death resolutely rejects itself. It is precisely this existence, which is geared to mere self-preservation and preservation of species, that the curious also wants to overcome; but the exploration of his own origin only leads him back to an even more primitive, more appalling stage of existence. It is precisely this experience that ultimately convinces the narrator to choose the exact opposite path, not into the depths, but into the "dry", into the unknown space outside the sea.
The solitude in the border situation , the search for the own I and the death are the big issues Nossack, and they are also in The Curious taken up again. The curiosity is not only critical to title this story, but it is the key to the overall work of the author. The universal claim of poetry even led Hans Bänziger to interpret it as a “new myth ”.
expenditure
- Hans Erich Nossack: The curious one. Albert Langen / Georg Müller, Munich, 1955.
- also published in Hans Erich Nossack: Encounter in the anteroom. Stories. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt (Main), 1963.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Cristof Schmid: Monological Art. Investigations into the work of Hans Erich Nossack . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, 1968, p. 92 f.
- ↑ Andrew Williams: Hans Erich Nossack and the "mystical". In: Günter Dammann (Ed.): Hans Erich Nossack. Life - work - context. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg, 2000, p. 97.
- ↑ Ingeborg M. Goessl: The action-less room with Hans Erich Nossack . In : months booklet 66, 1974, p. 35.
- ↑ Cristof Schmid: Monologische Kunst , p. 98.
- ↑ Ingeborg M. Goessl: The actionless space with Hans Erich Nossack , p. 35.
- ↑ Hans Erich Nossack: Spirale. Novel of a sleepless night. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt (Main), 1956, p. 372.
- ↑ Hans Erich Nossack: After the last uprising . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1961, p. 173.
- ^ David Andrew Roper: The Theme of Aloneness in the Work of Hans Erich Nossack . 1976, p. 360.
- ↑ Cristof Schmid: Monologische Kunst , p. 67.
- ^ David Andrew Roper: The Theme of Aloneness in the Work of Hans Erich Nossack , p. 296.
- ↑ Hans Bänziger: "The Curious". About Hans Erich Nossack's contribution to the creation of myths. In: Wirkendes Wort 20 (1970), pp. 183-189, here p. 188. A critical discussion of this interpretation can be found in Andrew Williams, Hans Erich Nossack and the Mythical. Factory examinations with special consideration of formal-mythical categories. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg, 2004, p. 42.