Explosion. Novel of ethnology

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Explosion. Roman der Ethnologie is a novel by Hubert Fichte published posthumously in 1993 . It is the seventh part of the novel cycle The History of Sensitivity . The novel deals with the three trips to Brazil that the author made in 1968/69, 1971/72 and 1981/82 with his partner Leonore Mau . The main characters, the writer Jäcki and the photographer Irma, are closely related to the two. A central motif is the exploration of the Afro-Brazilian syncretistic religions, especially the Candomblé . Fichte completed the novel in 1985/86, in the last year of his life, in view of his serious illness under great time pressure. He used extensive material such as interviews, his own diary entries and essays. The text is characterized by fast line breaks, for long stretches each sentence has its own paragraph, and unconventional punctuation, especially the lack of commas. The novel has 854 pages.

content

The dolls and the parched ones

During their first trip to Brazil in 1968/69, Jäcki and Irma made their first contacts in Rio de Janeiro , various favelas and a church service in a Macumba were visited, Jäcki conducted several interviews, Irma created a series of photos about lotus flowers .

La Double Méprise

During their second trip to Brazil in 1971/72, Jäcki and Irma met the French ethnologist Pierre Verger , who gave them important contacts to colored priestesses from various temples. The focus of the trip this time is in Salvador (Bahia) . Jacki is particularly impressed by one of the few male priests, Pedro de Batefolha, who cultivates numerous plants required for cults in his gardens. Jäcki tries to research which plants the priestesses of Candomblé use for their potions, which are administered during the rites. For this purpose he creates an extensive herbarium . He found out that the priestesses sometimes name the plants differently, sometimes use the same name for different plants and often give contradicting information. The use of plants in Candomblé does not seem to follow the precision that Jäcki is used to from Western science.

Irma wants to photograph a so-called “blood bath” for German magazines, an inauguration rite of some temples in which animals are slaughtered and novices are poured their blood over them. At first several priestesses deny the strangers access to this rite, but after a great deal of effort a temple is found in Recife where the relevant recordings can be made.

Inserted is the extensive Chapter 20 about the two’s stay in Chile , where President Salvador Allende is working to transform the country into a socialist state.

The double misunderstanding in the title of this part relates to the relationship between Pierre Vergers and the native representatives of the Candomblé.

The river and the coast

Chapters 1 - 4: At the beginning of their third trip to Brazil in 1981/82, Jäcki and Irma register the changes in Rio since their last trip. Some priestesses now use the rites and recipes recorded by ethnologists as models for their cult. The Casa das Minas in São Luís is considered to be the finest Candomblé temple in Brazil . Part of the ethnological research deals with the tradition that this temple was established by Agotime, mother of the king of Dahomey , who sold his successor into slavery. To investigate this legend, Jäcki and Irma travel to the north of Brazil this time.

In the unusually long Chapter 5 (71 pages) the visit of the two to Manaus , Rio Branco , Porto Velho and Belém , the capitals of the northern states is discussed. There Jäcki asked other priests about rites and plants.

Chapters 6 - 47: In São Luís Jäcki visits the temple Casa das Minas and wins the trust of the local priestesses Dine, Roxinha and Celeste. The Brazilian ethnologist Sergio offers him to research the Casa together. In the Casa das Minas, a large part of the knowledge about rites and plants has already been lost because some former priestesses died unexpectedly, some had passed on their knowledge insufficiently, and some later had not taken care of it adequately. The priestess Deni would therefore like to travel to Africa to explore the lost knowledge there. In preparation for this, Jäcki gives her French lessons. On his departure, Jacki obtained permission to look into the holy of holies of the temple in order to ask for a successful trip, although this holy of holies is actually forbidden to him.

Chapter 48 (123 pages) contains two large-scale interviews with the French researcher and Candomblé priestess Gisèle Cossard and the colored priestess Wilma, who was initiated by her. The interviews were conducted in Rio de Janeiro. Sections of around 10 pages each from the two interviews alternate.

Chapters 49 - 51 contain Jäcki and Irma's journey home via Lisbon to Hamburg.

shape

The novel dispenses with a uniform narrative style. In addition to elaborated scenes, there are many interviews that are more or less skillfully woven into the plot of the novel. Some parts, like the short first chapter, which associatively strings together impressions of the Copacabana , achieve a lyrical density. The sometimes little elaborated state of some passages is partly due to the enormous time pressure under which the fatally ill Fichte last worked, but partly also to his poetics, which were skeptical of an omniscient narrator and a conventional design of the material. It is claimed several times that a motif (of course, of course) cannot appear in Jäcki's novel. For example, when Jacki thinks of a woman of color, “everyone would say she looks like a monkey” (p. 538), or when various travel illnesses and complaints of Jacki (and thus probably also Fichte) are mentioned. With which these and other aspects become the content of the novel. The text is characterized by fast line breaks, for long stretches each sentence has its own paragraph, and unconventional punctuation, especially the lack of commas.

reception

The novel is widely viewed as a central part of the novel cycle The Story of Sensitivity .

expenditure

literature

  • Peter Braun: A journey through the work of Hubert Fichte , Frankfurt a. M. 2005
  • Ulrich Carp: Rio Bahia Amazon. Research on Hubert Fichte's novel of ethnology with a lexical compilation for the study of the religions of Brazil. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2002.
  • Miriam Seifert-Waibel: “A picture made up of a thousand contradicting threads”. The role of the collage in Hubert Fichte's "Explosion" and "The House of Mina in São Luiz de Maranhão". Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2005.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Braun: A journey through the work of Hubert Fichte, Frankfurt a. M. 2005, page 180 ff