The natural order of things

The natural order of things is a novel by António Lobo Antunes . The Portuguese edition was published in 1992 under the title A Ordem Natural das Coisas by Publicações Don Quixote, Lisbon. The German translation by Maralde Meyer-Minneman was published in 1996 by Hanser Verlag in Munich .

Classification in the oeuvre

The tenth novel by the Portuguese is, like some previous ones, a deconstructive family novel that moves like a dance of the damned in the milieu of curious characters and networks of relationships. As with instructions to the crocodiles , the novel ends with the death of the majority of the protagonists . Ten narrators have their say in five books, each in monologues with chapters . Two storytellers change per book, the individual members of the Oliveira family and those who want to belong, such as the former civil servant, who is in love with the youngest daughter and hunts down communists, Russians and Stalin, and Portas, a former secret service agent.

These chapters, which strictly follow a narrator, can also be found in Rounds of the Damned . It was only in his later novels that Antunes began to leave these novel buildings and to line up monologues with even more voices without interrupting chapters, for example in The Handbook of the Inquisitors . In the novel The birds come back from 1982, birds appear as central flight and flight motifs, as well as in The Natural Order of Things , where albatrosses, pigeons, swallows, owls and a raven fly into the plot. The monologue structure is the same in all novels, although there is only one narrator in the first books, like the doctor from Angola in The Kiss of Judas .

construction

The novel consists of five books, each with two alternating narrators. Three books are set in the period after 1975 and two books around 1950:

• First book: Sweet scents, sweet dead - Valadas / Portas (after 1975, seven chapters)
• Second book: The Argonauts - Iolanda's father / Dona Orquídeas (after 1975, four chapters)
• Third book: The trip to China - Jorges / Fernando (around 1950, seven chapters)
• Fourth book: Life with you - Iolanda / Alfredo (after 1975, four chapters)
• Fifth Book: The Hallucinatory Representation of Desires - Maria Antonia / Julietta (around 1950, seven chapters)

content

In the first book, an unspecified man of 49 years monologues about his love for a high school student named Iolanda Oliveira, with whom he shares a room, which he is not allowed to touch, and whom he observes in his sleep throughout the night. For this luxury he pays the butcher, the electricity bill and the rent of the Oliveira family. It is only in the third book that it becomes clear that the man is a scion of the Valadas, an upper-class family in a Lisbon suburb. He is the illegitimate child of a stranger and the mentally deranged Julietta, who has to live in the attic of the villa and is the eyesore of the Valadas because she was conceived by cheating on her mother with a redhead.

In regular chapter changes, Ernesto da Conceiçâo Portas has the floor as the second narrator. He was an employee of the PIDE , the secret police under the Salazar - dictatorship . Now he lives in a shabby shed to sublet and consumes himself with self-pity as the loser of the Carnation Revolution . In order to secure his livelihood, he offers hypnosis distance courses for self-study, he sends the mulatto Lucília on the line and takes out a writer who otherwise does not appear, who wants to know who is sleeping with Iolanda Oliveira. He meets the writer in bars and pubs for dinner and is supposed to spy on the first narrator of the book. But he has new insane excuses chapter by chapter, which is why he is not yet able to provide any substantive information. At one point he has to flee the room because the pigeons invade his room.

In the second book, The Argonauts , Iolanda's father, who flew underground , has a say . Before returning to Portugal, he had mined coal and gold in Johannesburg and had commanded black workers. Instead of not crying tears for this backbreaking job, all he has on his mind is to dive down again and fly to work with the pickaxe. In the process, he hits a sewer pipe in the Lisbon sewer system, after which an entire quarter sinks into the manure. Dona Orquídeas is his sister who has kidney stones . Her doctor is so fascinated by it that he wants to exhibit her as a marble woman at the fair. She asks the doctor for help to cure her brother's quirks and also reports that her brother's wife died of diabetes , which he refuses to admit - he is of the mistaken opinion that she counts frigates in a madhouse.

In the third book there is a leap in time and the framework story takes place during the Salazar dictatorship around 1950 and tells the story of the Valadas family. The trip to China is a Portuguese twist on a suicide by drowning in the sea, this is the title of the third book. Now it is the monologized views of Fernando and his brother Jorges, a high-ranking military man. He is arrested and tortured under the Salazar dictatorship. He has delusional inspirations during the torture and, when released, feels pursued by mannequins and then commits suicide .

There is another time jump and the perspective of the schoolgirl Iolanda, a half-orphan, changes with that of her school friend Alfredo. They look full of suspicion at the “idiot who pays rent”. The last book The Hallucinatory Representations of Desire is the view of Maria Antonia, a neighbor of the Valadas who has a brain tumor and is a woman of silence (“I speak little because most words seem vain to me”). In her remarks the riddle about the title of the novel is resolved (“and with me the people of this book will die, which will be called a novel ... which, according to the natural order of things, somebody for me in some year once will write ... ").

The final monologue is then given by Julietta, who, from her hiding place in the attic, overhears the house being presented room by room by a cousin in order to sell it to a new family, whereupon she seeks death in the sea herself in absolute darkness.

Stylistic devices

Above all, the streams of consciousness of the monologues, which are woven from subjective perceptions, dreams and memories, must be mentioned. Regarding sentence structure, it should be mentioned that Antunes works with the stylistic device of repetition . On the one hand, the sentence syntax varies, in that sentences begin the same, but then continue differently. On the other hand, there are simple whole repeated main clauses that introduce new paragraphs. The advertising message “Everyone flies as he can” braces several sections together as a phrase that appears several times.

The phrase: “And the policeman ...” is the beginning of a sentence, which over an entire chapter brings structure to the sprawling linguistic images, consisting of thought loops, memories, explanations or observations. With the monologues, António Lobo Antunes redeems what Arno Schmidt called “conformal mapping of brain processes through a special arrangement of prose elements”.

interpretation

This natural order of things is anything but what is commonly believed to be orderly. They are strung together grotesques in which ordinary relationships and circumstances are thwarted and turned upside down. Taking advantage of the financial dependency of a family, an almost fifty-year-old lives in a room with a schoolgirl and can indulge in his old-man fantasies. A writer, usually himself a victim of secret police surveillance and the reprisals of PIDE, Stasi or CIA , instructs a former officer of the secret police to obtain various information at regular conspiratorial meetings. However, this secret service agent is anything but militant and secretive, but rather chatty, whimsical and full of fixed ideas, offers correspondence courses in hypnosis and wants to let his students fly.

Instead of being happy to have escaped working underground in South Africa, in the second book Iolanda's father only has his pickaxe in his sights and wants to fly underground again with it. These poor creatures belong in a cabinet of curiosities that could be displayed at a fairground without Antunes betraying them. All of them have the rich Antunes vocabulary in their monologues, live in the thicket of their memories and take stock - like Iolanda's aunt Dona Orquídeas, who, as her doctor suggests, should be exhibited as a marble woman because she is slowly solidifying through her kidney stones. She lives with the trauma of her defloration in a summer cinema, but at the same time allows her niece to share the room with a much older man.

In the Valadas family, too, things go against the natural order. Jorge is not driven to suicide, as is to be assumed, by the torture and the henchmen of the regime, but out of fear of mannequins.

The central bird motif appears as a raven in the first chapter of the first book and continues in the doves in the second chapter, as messengers of peace and a symbol for the communists who drive the old secret service agent out of the room. Several storks, terns and owls also follow.

The second leitmotif is the fox that the Valadas keep in a cage and that ends up starving there. Both are allegories of freedom and imprisonment and the perverted existence - in the words of Julietta Valada: "an absurd existence that was as screamingly absurd as mine".

The third is the flight motif: Both Iolanda's father is an aviator who flies underground in the tunnels of memory, and Portas, who offers flight lessons through hypnosis.

characters

• Iolanda: 18-year-old student with severe diabetes
• Alfredo: Iolanda's school friend
• Jorge: Julietta's half-brother, is driven to suicide as a major
• Anita: Sister Jorges
• writer
• Portas: the spy
• Teresina: Sister Jorges
• Julietta: mother of the first narrator in the first book
• Valadas: Illegitimate son of Juliettas, with platonic love for a high school student named Iolanda
• Dona Orquídeas: mother of Iolanda, lives with the trauma of her defloration
• Alvaro Valadas: a high officer and head of the Valadas family
• Fernando: Brother of Jorge, breaking the code by marrying a maid
• Maria Antonia: neighbor of the Valadas family

literature

• António Lobo Antunes: The natural order of things. Translated from the Portuguese by Maralde Meyer-Minnemann. Carl Hanser Verlag , Munich and Vienna 1996.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ [cit. Schmidt Arno: "Calculations I." In: The essay work on German literature in 4 volumes. All night programs and essays. Volume 4 Zurich 1988, p. 347]