rituals

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Rituale ( Dutch Rituelen ) is the third novel by Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom . It was published in 1980 and helped its author to make his international breakthrough as a storyteller. The existentialist narrative tells of the main characters' attempts to give form totheir life, which they perceive as meaningless, by strictly adhering to various rituals . Ultimately, however, these rituals bring about death. The novel received the Bordewijkprijs in 1981 and the Mobil Pegasus Prize in 1982, which funded an English translation. Translations into other languages ​​followed, and in 1984 the imVerlag Volk und Welt and in 1985 in Suhrkamp Verlag also a German version by Hans Herrfurth. In 1989, Herbert Curiel used the novel as a template for his film Rituelen .

A raku tea bowl used for tea ceremonies . Bowl and ceremony play a central role in the novel.

emergence

After his debut Philip and the Others , which was an instant hit when it first appeared in the Netherlands in 1955, and his second novel, The Knight Has Died , which drew more mixed reactions in 1963, Nooteboom did not publish a new novel for seventeen years. Nooteboom explained this to writer Jan Brokken as follows: “I knew that I could easily write another book like 'Philip and the Others', but an inner voice warned me that that wasn't the point and that consequently I have to earn my bread in a different way.”

During this time, Nooteboom traveled extensively, in addition to various European destinations, including Africa, Asia, Japan and Bolivia. He earned his living as a journalist and travel writer, and he also published poetry. After that time, however, he said he had little trouble writing down rituals : “I wrote the book as if I remembered it; I had prepared it extremely thoroughly, having made hundreds of notes and read a great deal over the years.”

The book finally appeared when its author was 48 years old. According to Rüdiger Safranski , Nooteboom considers it his opus magnum , which was originally planned to be considerably larger. Among other things, the novella Ein Lied von Schein und Sein appeared in 1981 , which was originally created as part of the novel.

contents

The relatively short novel (about 200 pages) tells the story of three suicides from the point of view of the protagonist Inni Wintrop in the third person : The first of the three parts, which are not arranged chronologically, describes how the thirty-year-old Inni survived a suicide attempt in 1963 after his wife Zita left him. The second part describes how Inni met Arnold Taads in 1953, a friend of his aunt Thérèse, who replaced his father, who died young, for a few years. In 1960, however, Taads died in an accident in the Alps, the circumstances of which point to suicide. Finally, in Amsterdam in 1973, Inni met Arnold's son Philip Taads, who never knew his father. Fascinated by Zen Buddhism, Philip saved his entire life for a valuable Raku tea bowl. When he finally possesses her, he smashes her and drowns himself in a canal .

Interlude, 1963

The first section, about 20 pages long, begins by stating that Inni Wintrop, stock and painting dealer and author of horoscopes , committed suicide. A flashback to his eight-year relationship with his wife Zita follows. Although the couple has a strong sex life, Inni has ever-changing affairs that Zita doesn't want to know about. It was only when Inni insisted on having their child aborted that she increasingly distanced herself from him and finally left him for an Italian photographer. Drunk, Inni hangs herself in her own toilet, but wakes up the next morning with the broken rope around her neck.

Arnold Taads, 1953

An etching by Baccio Baldini , similar to the one Inni acquired.

The second, almost 80-page section reports from a perspective set in 1978, looking back to 1953 and how Inni is introduced by his aunt Thérèse to her former lover Arnold Taads. On the way to Doorn , Taad's place of residence, Thérèse Inni talks about his family: The reader learns that Inni came from an extramarital relationship of his father, which was ostracized by the family and which he ended for a third wife. His father died in a bomb attack in 1944, and Inni has little contact with his mother and her new husband.

Taads leads a secluded life and follows his daily routine strictly by the clock. During a walk, he explains to Inni why he no longer believes in the Christian God and explains aspects of atheistic existentialism , in particular Sartre's philosophy . Inni also no longer believes in God after witnessing as an altar boy how an old priest collapsed dead during the consecration , but he keeps this story to himself.

A week later, Inni and Arnold Taads visit the Villa Thérèses in Goirle . This meeting changes the life of Innis, who has no school qualifications and has previously earned a meager living with an unskilled office job, in three ways: Firstly, Taads convinces Thérèse to make available to her nephew the part of her fortune that her family had innis father had withheld. On the other hand, Inni experiences an erotic adventure with the housemaid Petra this weekend. Since she is engaged, it remains an episode, but for Inni it marks the beginning of a constant search for sexual encounters with ever new women, which becomes the purpose of his life. Eventually, a long-lasting friendship develops with Taads, who at dinner is involved in a bitter argument with a senior Catholic priest who is present.

A few years later, Thérèse's husband died in a car accident. In 1960, shortly after having to shoot his sick dog, Arnold Taads freezes to death during his annual stay in a secluded alpine hut under exactly the circumstances he once described to Inni. The aunt herself eventually dies as a result of excessive alcohol abuse , which Inni assesses as a gradual suicide.

Philip Taads, 1973

The final part of the novel begins with Inni burying a pigeon that had just flown into a car along with a girl he accidentally meets on the street . He then accompanies the woman, who is twenty years his junior, home and sleeps with her. Now he keeps his appointment with Bernard Roozenboom, an art dealer friend, whom he asks to appraise two recently acquired paintings: the first is an etching by Baccio Baldini showing the Libyan Sibyl . For the second, a Japanese engraving , the dealer Inni refers to his colleague Riezenkamp, ​​who is an expert in Far Eastern art. He tells Inni that the engraving is a portrait of a geisha and was created to advertise her services.

An Asian-looking man is standing in front of Riezenkamp's shop window, staring in fascination at a black tea bowl. He enters the shop and lectures Inni about the Raku pottery dynasty while the dealer attends to a Japanese customer who ends up buying the bowl. Inni's new acquaintance introduces himself as Philip Taads, the son of Arnold Taads and an Indonesian woman who abandoned Arnold shortly after birth because he rejected his son. Philip would also have wanted to buy the bowl, but does not have enough money for it. Inni follows Philip home, where he lives in similar seclusion to his father. He makes Inni realize that his greatest desire is to "redeem" himself from the world and from himself and gives him a story by Kawabata Yasunari to read. Five years pass while Inni becomes friends with Philip.

In 1978, Riezenkamp finally bought a new Raku pot, this time a red one. Philip has now saved enough money to buy them. He then invites Inni and Riezenkamp to a traditional Japanese tea ceremony . Three weeks later, Philip writes to his landlady asking her to call Inni. When Riezenkamp and he enter the apartment, they only find countless shards of the shattered tea bowl. A few days later, they identify Philip's body, which had been discovered in a canal, and attend the cremation of the dead man with the dealer Roozenboom . From now on, Inni regularly dreams of the two Taads, but is happy to be among the living herself.

interpretation

fathers and sons

A recurring theme in the novel is the lack of a father figure: Philip Taads never met his father and lives knowing that he has been rejected by him. This is repeatedly presented as the cause of his suicide: "Arnold Taads never spoke of a son and, according to Inni, thereby condemned this son to a strange form of non-existence, which ultimately led to the final form of non-existence, to death." ( Rituals , p. 31.)

The father of the protagonist Inni Wintrop died young and Inni does not have a close relationship with his stepfather. In this respect, the novel character Inni shows many traits of the author that suggest that Nooteboom is processing his own experiences that he found formative: Among other things, Inni is the same age as Nooteboom, lost his father at the same age under the same circumstances, was also sent to monastic schools under the influence of a Catholic stepfather, which he had to leave early, so that both earned their living with undemanding office work until 1953. After all, both the author and the character in the novel remain childless.

The topic of the missing father also appears in broken form in other passages: Inni's marriage ultimately fails because he rejects his own child. Lyda, one of Inni's lovers, has a framed picture of her dead father hanging over the bed. The rejection of Inni's guardianship by his relatives and the death of Father Romualdus also belong in this context; after all, Arnold Taads also lost a father figure with his belief in God. In all cases, the lack of a father's role model results in a lack of ideological orientation, which is expressed in the characters' search for meaning. Maarten van Buuren interprets this theme as an oedipal pattern of behavior in which the death of the father creates feelings of guilt that "lead to self-loathing and self-annihilation".

Search for meaning and ritual

All of the main characters in the novel feel that their lives are meaningless and try to give it form through their own rituals. Arnold and Philip Taads are compared to monks in their life plans: Arnold Taads lives in isolation with his dog Athos - Athos is also the name of a monastic republic in Greece - and divides his time exactly according to a fixed daily routine. His son Philip, on the other hand, is reminiscent of a Zen monk with his Far Eastern facial features and his shaved head . His room, which Inni refers to as a “ cloister ” ( Rituals , p. 143), is entirely white and almost empty. Time doesn't matter to Philip. He only leaves home three days a week to earn a living with light office work and spends the rest of the time in meditation in order to "lose" the world and himself (p. 151).

In contrast to the ascetic life of the Taads, Inni is inclined to sensual pleasures, but the act of love he constantly repeats becomes a ritual, not only in his countless one-night stands , but also in the context of his marriage, which he and his wife Zita into “perfect pleasure machines” (p. 13). This is also where Inni has his ritual, which “at times still gave him the feeling that he existed” (p. 17) and which he opposes to the chaos of his life. Rein Zondergeld points out that this ritual is also not suitable for "getting life and time really under control", but at least leads back to life. Rüdiger Safranski assumes that after his unsuccessful suicide, Inni gave up trying to “make sense of the meaningless” and was therefore able to observe the rituals of his fellow human beings impartially and from a critical distance.

Christian symbols and rites

communion chalice with paten . In the second part of the novel in particular, the Eucharist is a central motif.

The novel is permeated with allusions to Christian symbols and rites. In particular, the Eucharist in the context of the Catholic Holy Mass is closely linked to important events in the course of the story. The motto of the second part, which consists of the words of the Eucharistic Prayer that recall the Last Supper, already refers to this.

First of all, the Eucharist becomes a symbol of how changing sexual contacts in Inni's life replace faith in God as a meaningful element: He loses faith at the moment when Father Romualdus collapses dead while lifting the chalice - here the transubstantiation becomes reality in a very concrete sense , as the Father's blood mixes with the wine. The fact that women take the place of religion for Inni is already indicated by the name of the beloved who stands at the beginning of this development. Her name is Petra and the narrator states: "On this rock, this gentle, arched rock [...] he had built his church . " says: "You are Peter, and on this rock ( lt. 'petra') I will build my church". The description of their lovemaking uses phrases reminiscent of emptying a goblet: Inni "felt that he was being drunk" (p. 84) and that he was "emptying" (p. 102). When they both attend mass the next morning, Petra secretly shows him the host on her tongue in the same way she had previously shown him his semen and Inni is firmly convinced that his own host would “turn into semen” in his bowels . In nothing else.” (p. 105)

Finally, in the third part, numerous Christ-like qualities are ascribed to Philip Taads: His acquaintanceship is preceded by a “announcement” (p. 111) by three doves, and the Sibyl of the etching can also be interpreted as a prophetess of what is to come. Philip feels his imminent death as willed by his father, just as Christ understands it as God's will , and Inni immediately reinterprets the Buddhist teachings Philip talks about in terms of Catholic theology. When Riezenkamp sells the bowl to Philip, he feels "like Judas" (p. 177) and the tea ceremony that Philip hosts shortly before his death is explicitly compared to the Last Supper (p. 183).

These parallels express the representative position of Philip, similar to how Christ died in theology for the sins of mankind. Because even in Inni there are self-destructive tendencies: He "saw life like a club that looked a bit strange, which one had only joined by chance and from whose list of members one could be removed without giving a reason." (p. 11 ) Through his encounter with Philip, however, he manages to bring these thoughts out and to deal with them constructively, so that at the end of the novel he is happy to be alive. There is evidence that the story of his characters may have played a similar role for the author Nooteboom. In an interview he said of the novel: "Instead of committing suicide, I let someone else do it on paper. That was a much better solution.”

The end of the world

Another theme that runs throughout the novel is the announcement of the end of the world. It can be related to reference to the story of Jesus Christ, since according to Jewish belief the advent of the Messiah marks the beginning of the end times . Already at the beginning of the novel it says explicitly: "But hardly anyone seemed to know that nature, the mother of all things, would soon no longer cooperate and that the end of the rotten times was very near, and this time for good." ( Rituals , p. 14) Numerous allusions confirm this prophecy, including Innis visions, a curse that a witch pronounced over Amsterdam in 1480 and the Sibyl, who was not only considered a prophetess in ancient Greece, but also announced the day of judgment according to medieval belief (Compare the text of the Dies irae , "...test David cum Sibylla.").

The images of the end of the world are linked to Greek and Christian ideas of the underworld and hell : Doorn, where Arnold Taad lived, is described as the entrance to the underworld (p. 38) and Taad’s dog, which apparently “was connected to subterranean labyrinths […] “ (p. 69), can be interpreted in this context as a representative of the Greek hellhound Kerberos . In this regard, Rudi van der Paardt goes into detail about remarkable parallels to the Aeneid . The middle room in the Roozenbooms art shop, on the other hand, is compared to Catholic purgatory , and to get to Roozenboom's office one has to descend a flight of stairs, but in a nod to Orpheus ("I dwell in the underworld, but I seek no one.", p . 121) there is also a reference to Greek mythology here.

literary references

As is typical for Nooteboom, Rituale is also characterized by a dense network of literary references and allusions. The novel and each of its parts are preceded by mottos by Stendhal , Theodor Fontane , Kakuzō Okakura , Émil Cioran and from the Canon of the Holy Mass, and it ends with a quotation, again taken from the Book of Tea by Okakura. In addition, numerous works and authors are mentioned throughout the narrative, among which Sartre and Kawabata Yasunari are among the most important, as they have a significant influence on the characters Arnold and Philip Taads. Finally, the narrative itself uses motifs drawn from the Bible , Bach's St. Matthew Passion , and Greek mythology , among others .

Position in Nooteboom's complete works

Nooteboom's debut novel Philip and the Others was written in 1954 out of the experiences of a trip to Europe, which the then twenty-year-old author had hitchhiked to a large extent. His readers appreciated the romantic and dreamy aspects of him, which contrasted with the sober, realistic style of Dutch literature of the time. However, the commercial success and literary recognition that had initially pleasantly surprised Nooteboom soon became a burden for the author. It was not until 1963 that he wrote a second novel, Der Ritter ist died , and described it as a "farewell to literature": "I thought everything has been said now, nothing more is possible."

In the 17 years that passed before the appearance of Rituale , Nooteboom's attitude towards life and writing changed: the longing and melancholy that still prevailed in Philip and the others is greatly reduced in the works from Rituale and gives way to a more distanced, philosophically reflected and ironic style. While his debut novel still openly professes the magic of poetry and blurs the boundaries between imagination and reality, the author later consciously plays with the relationship between poetry and reality - in particular he makes it the subject of the novella A Song of Appearance and Being , which at times should become part of rituals .

Nevertheless, Rüdiger Safranski also sees a continuity in Nooteboom's work: He compares the concept of the poetic "festival", which plays a central role in Philip and the others , with the concept of "ritual" used later: In both cases it is about " out of life islands of significance ... lift out and fasten". The difference is that as a reader of the first novel, one is drawn into the fortress, while one observes it from the outside in a distanced manner in rituals .

effect

The first part of the novel, titled Intermezzo , was published in Zero magazine in 1977 , Arnold Taad 's second part was printed in Avenu in 1980 . This positioned Nooteboom outside of the Dutch literary scene, because neither of the two magazines is a classic literary organ. The book was published in its final form in the same year. Shortly after its publication, Rituale received two literary prizes that enabled it to be distributed worldwide: the Bordewijk Prize in 1981 was followed a year later by the Pegasus Prize, which financed an English translation. This was obtained from Adrienne Dixon and published by Louisiana University Press in 1983. Although the book was not a great financial success in the USA , the reviews were positive and drew reviewers' attention to Nooteboom: the author's next books were also published in America and were discussed in all the major newspapers.

The German language version is by Hans Herrfurth and was first published in 1984 by Verlag Volk und Welt . Suhrkamp Verlag took over the rights to it and published the novel in West Germany in 1985. Here, too, there was no commercial success at first, despite good reviews, but Suhrkamp undeterred also published Nooteboom's following books. The author finally came to the attention of a broader public in 1991 with the novella The Following Story , which stayed on the bestseller lists for months after an enthusiastic review by Marcel Reich-Ranicki as part of the “Literary Quartet” . In the course of this discovery of the author by the German public, Rituals also became popular and was one of the Spiegel annual bestsellers for two years in a row.

Based on the novel, Herbert Curiel directed the 1989 film Rituelen starring Derek de Lint . The Dutch production was represented at the Toronto International Film Festival in the same year , but did not achieve any international significance beyond that. A reading of excerpts from the novel was also included in the film Hotel Nooteboom - A picture journey into the land of words , with which Heinz Peter Schwerfel portrayed Nooteboom in 2003 on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

literature

expenditure

  • Cees Nooteboom: Rituals . Translated from the Dutch by Hans Herrfurth. Suhrkamp (= suhrkamp paperbacks. Volume 2446), 6th edition 2004. ISBN 3-518-38946-7
  • The page references for quotations from the text refer to the Btb paperback edition from 2001, ISBN 3-442-72767-7

secondary literature

web links

itemizations

  1. ↑ Quoted from: Daan Cartens: Cees Nooteboom, Der Augenmensch , Suhrkamp, ​​1995, pages 12/13. In Rotraut Keller's translation of the article, 'Philip en de other' is still rendered as 'Das Paradies ist nebenan', the title of the original German translation of the book. The new translation from 2003 is called 'Philip and the others'.
  2. ↑ Quoted from: Daan Cartens: Cees Nooteboom, Der Augenmensch , Suhrkamp, ​​1995, page 14.
  3. ↑ Rüdiger Safranski: The world of Cees Nooteboom. In: Daan Cartens (ed.): Cees Nooteboom, The Eye Man , Suhrkamp, ​​1995, page 29.
  4. ↑ Maarten van Buuren: "And cried bitterly" (see above) page 92
  5. ↑ Rein A. Zondergeld: Rituals. (see above)
  6. ↑ Rüdiger Safranski: The world of Cees Nooteboom. In: Daan Cartens (ed.): Cees Nooteboom, Der Augenmensch , Suhrkamp, ​​1995, page 31.
  7. ↑ Quoted from a Swedish article and interview by Kristjan Saag ( Memento of 3 July 2007 at the Internet Archive ), 1998
  8. ↑ Rudi van der Paardt: No father on the back (see above) pages 103/104
  9. ↑ a b Quoted from: Rüdiger Safranski, afterword to Philip and the others , Suhrkamp, ​​2004, page 166
  10. ↑ Ralf Grüttemeier: After the Second World War. In: Ralf Grüttemeier and Maria-Theresia Leuker (eds.): Dutch literary history. J.B. Metzler, 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02061-1 , page 288
  11. ↑ Carel ter Haar: Suddenly you know that they exist. Cees Nooteboom and Dutch literature in Germany. In: Cees Nooteboom, the eye man. , Daan Cartens (ed.), Suhrkamp, ​​1995, pages 279–282.
  12. ↑ Klaus Ziermann: Bestseller experiences in West and East: A comparison of the Spiegel and Neues Deutschland bestseller lists