Serious intention

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Serious intention is a novel by Gabriele Wohmann , which was published in 1970 by Luchterhand in Neuwied. In the following year, the author received the literature prize of the city of Bremen for her novel . In 1974 Halina Leonowicz translated the text into Polish : Poważna decyzja .

Gabriele Wohmann (1992)

title

The first-person narrator's stay in the clinic in her “ cancerous bed” in private ward 6, room 606, is recorded - sometimes down to the minute. It is in such houses that people are born and died. Birth and death associate optimism and pessimism. The narrator, a successful writer, survived the life-threatening surgical operation - in the novel the reason for her pithy final sentence: "I die, alive, on and on." The great injustice: While the writer, mother of a 15-year-old son named Rock, who is difficult to bring up , thanks to medical art can live on and on, a little girl dies of an infection in the neighboring building. The narrator provides one of her innumerable constructions of thought for this pessimism: What if the convalescent writer left her safe balcony and - just like that - went into close proximity to the dying little one? Answer: That would be certain suicide. The first-person narrator articulates this as a potential suicide: “Close to the dying child ... these are serious intentions.” Fortunately, it remains a non-binding mind game.

content

Time and place: The narrator, who belongs neither to the Catholic nor to the Protestant denomination, is housed in the above-mentioned clinic for a few days - which are in the period after June 26, 1968.

There is a lot of talk. Little happens. The narrator is divorced, but cannot get rid of her ex, an early retired theologian. After the ex-husband left running the Bethesda Protestant Deaconess House , which houses Debile , he and his family were assigned an emergency apartment. The narrator's lover is would-be writer Rubin. "The monstrous, lovable, difficult one-off" with the gold dots in the brown eyes lives in a "bumpy marriage" with the north German Martha. Both have a 15-year-old daughter who is also difficult to bring up: Ruth. The girl was deflowered in time. After that, the back of her knees began to look prettier over time.

The professor personally will operate on the narrator and although he will talk to the patient about the "growths that have grown" in her body, he will only know about their benignity after the histological findings and will not be able to give any prior evidence. Sister Christel makes "our enemas ". The narrator signs her consent to the operation. Sister Charla is happy about the patient's "fat-free stomach". The professor “doesn't have to go through a lot”.

The professor decides to make a horizontal incision - so that the scar becomes beautiful. After the apparently successful operation, the patient is allowed to drink a little tea - she claims. The freshly operated one torments the thirst. Finally, her sister Christel gives her a "stand up injection for the circulation ".

Days after the operation, the family gathers at the bedside. Missing skirt. The narrator speculates: "He is afraid of his mother."

shape

The little that has been mentioned above can perhaps be considered certain.

More or less brisk sayings can be found in the book enough: "... we are too old little children ..." But the central sentence of the work is: "I die every day ..." That is no pessimism at all, because lines later comes the appeal: "... let's eat and drink, because tomorrow we are dead." To cut a long story short - the book is about "living dying".

The text should not be taken too seriously. The narrator puts time fuses under the idylls and exhausts the virtual possibilities of the words - whatever that is. There is talk of "delusions", that is, of the amentia .

“The rushed, gurgling tone of the tumultuous association” is not for everyone. Anyone who bites through the present text, unimpressed by the "foaming cascades of memory and reflection", can discover meaning and sometimes register sensuality poured into language .

In view of the problematic surgery, the thought of dying runs through the whole novel. The narrator says: “Life is there to die” and is clear about it: “I know that I cannot say I DIE, because my disappearance begins before I notice the whole event.” The matter is like this: “ Nobody can help us anymore. We die longingly hungry for life. "

The description of everyday hospital life is loosened up by rambling, always interrupted excursions into the past. There are to mention: The stay in Rome of the writer narrator as a scholarship holder in the Villa Massimo as well as an abundance of escapades with Rubin. He calls himself "a true idiot" and wants to write the basic epistle novel Truth . But Rubin does not make any noticeable progress with his “prose circus number” in which it is “universal and cosmic”. The narrator has a preference over her ruby. When writing, it gets by without a “ dictionary of synonyms ”.

An outstanding, almost meaningless formal element is the incessant repetition - for example of a sentence - word for word. If the negation that sometimes follows is counted, one can soon speak of repetition towards infinity . The patient has a lot of time to think in bed during convalescence . With the writing down of the thought results and especially the approaches in staccato, no savings are made. The book lives from memories of the time before the operation.

Miscellaneous

The narrator thinks about all sorts of things: What is the upper age limit for lesbian love?

sensuality

Adultery : When the husband, who has spent the night away from home for days, comes home, the established, i.e. suspicious housewife first looks at the fly. Its nature reveals a lot.

The narrator is one of the lucky women Rubin has not yet left. She apologizes: her head doesn't know what the abdomen is doing. She wears - accommodating as she is now - a skirt that can be unbuttoned at the front. The narrator disrespectfully satirizes Goethe's Blessed Sehnsucht : “Sexual sleep. Divine cohabitation, higher sexual intercourse ... “It's about the narrator's sex with Rubin. She doesn't go along with anything. For example, she doesn't want to use the hotel elevator. Usually that approach begins with rubbing your legs against each other under the table. It is not Rubin who is responsible for this activity, but the narrator.

Why does Rubin call himself an idiot? Perhaps because he thinks that the "peak of love" can be climbed. How then? Very simple: Cohabiting with your own daughter .

The narrator writes about the former Rubin lovers, whose paper images Martha keeps like family photos, i.e. - more precisely - about Rubin's “apostasy ... in illegitimate vaginas ”: “Rubin's hugs are always successful”. However, she puts it into perspective: "The scientific claim that the clitoris can be easily reached ... again does not make sense to us."

Silence is not a reason for divorce, but talking is.

Life support
  • "Bad dreams go back ... to eating mistakes in the evening."
  • Despite the numerous graves of cancer deaths, the earth looks sapphire from a distance .
  • "Not a penny for suicide."
philosophy

The subject of “dying” provokes deeper and more urgent banal insolubility in the narrator, who fantasizes over hundreds of closely described pages: “... about death, despite an infinite number of witnesses, there are no experience reports." I like to live so much, I think I should die. "

reception

  • According to Blöcker, it could be possible that Gabriele Wohmann writes about herself in parts. For example, those sprinkles speak for the Villa Massimo . In its "overabundance of the spread material" the text appears more as a protocol than as a work of art.
  • Häntzschel states that the narrator - a successful writer in her late thirties - is unable to organize her life between two men. Gabriele Wohmann maintains romanglobal using the stream of consciousness technology appropriate to the topic and introduces “her own crisis” in an oppressively precise manner. Years later, however, the author moved away from her book.
  • The novel by the author - after all, increased to eleven of the seventeen titles that became known in 1994 - is dismissed by the editor in Barner's literary history with one sentence: "It is not Gabriele Wohmann's often monotonous novels such as Serious Intentions [meaning Serious Intentions ] ( 1970), Beautiful enclosure (1975) or early fall in Badenweiler (1978) who put their narrative ability to prove (although these novels her real writing selle imperious ambition is true), but stories such as hunt that attest their Erzählvirtuosität. "

literature

First edition

  • Serious intention. Novel. Luchterhand, Neuwied 1970, 487 pages

Used edition

  • Serious intention. Novel. Piper (Piper series, vol. 1698), Munich 1992, 281 pages, ISBN 3-492-11698-1

Secondary literature

  • Günter Blöcker : A touch of frustration . Pp. 69–72 in: Gabriele Wohmann. Materials book. Introduction by Karl Krolow . Bibliography by Reiner Wohmann. Edited by Thomas Scheuffelen. Luchterhand, Darmstadt and Neuwied 1977, 150 pages, ISBN 3-472-61184-7
  • Rolf Michaelis : Living dying . P. 72–77 in: Gabriele Wohmann. Materials book. Introduction by Karl Krolow. Bibliography by Reiner Wohmann. Edited by Thomas Scheuffelen. Luchterhand, Darmstadt and Neuwied 1977, 150 pages, ISBN 3-472-61184-7
  • Günter Häntzschel, Jürgen Michael Benz, Rüdiger Bolz, Dagmar Ulbricht: Gabriele Wohmann . Verlag CH Beck, Verlag edition text + kritik, Munich 1982, authors' books vol. 30, 166 pages, ISBN 3-406-08691-8
  • Wilfried Barner (ed.): History of German literature. Volume 12: History of German Literature from 1945 to the Present . Beck , Munich 1994, 1116 pages, ISBN 3-406-38660-1

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Halina Leonowicz : Translator into Polish
  2. ↑ Edition used, p. 208, 6th Zvu
  3. ↑ Michaelis, p. 76, 5. Zvo
  4. ↑ Edition used, p. 281, 3rd Zvu
  5. ↑ Edition used, p. 279, 20. Zvo
  6. ↑ Michaelis, p. 76, 9. Zvo
  7. ↑ Edition used, p. 6, 7. Zvo and p. 15, 10. Zvu
  8. ↑ Edition used, p. 227, 7th Zvu
  9. ↑ Edition used, p. 249, 23. Zvo
  10. ↑ Edition used, p. 211, 19. Zvo
  11. ↑ Edition used, p. 180, 17. Zvo
  12. ↑ Edition used, p. 180, 23. Zvo
  13. ↑ Michaelis, p. 72, 13. Zvu
  14. ↑ Edition used, p. 248, 10. Zvo
  15. ↑ Edition used, p. 248, 19. Zvo
  16. ↑ Edition used, p. 241, 4th Zvo
  17. ↑ Michaelis, p. 73, 11. Zvu
  18. ↑ Michaelis, p. 73, 12. Zvu
  19. ↑ Edition used, p. 50, 12. Zvo
  20. ↑ Edition used, p. 49, 13. Zvo
  21. ↑ Edition used, p. 56, 10. Zvo
  22. ↑ Edition used, p. 216, 15. Zvo
  23. ↑ Edition used, p. 215, 18. Zvo
  24. ↑ Edition used, p. 223, 10th Zvu
  25. ↑ Edition used, p. 227, 10. Zvo
  26. ↑ Edition used, p. 227, 15. Zvo
  27. ↑ Edition used, p. 227, 15. Zvo
  28. ↑ Edition used, p. 241, 11. Zvu
  29. ↑ Edition used, p. 211, 14. Zvo
  30. ↑ Edition used, p. 220 above
  31. ↑ Edition used, p. 241, 21. Zvo
  32. ↑ Edition used, p. 219, 12. Zvo
  33. ↑ Edition used, p. 222, 10. Zvo
  34. ↑ Häntzschel, p. 37, 3rd Zvo to p. 39 middle
  35. ↑ Häntzschel, p. 39, 9. Zvo
  36. ↑ Barner, p. 610, 5th Zvu