San Salvador (short story)
San Salvador is a short story by the Swiss writer Peter Bichsel . It was first printed in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in 1963 and was part of the short story collection a year later. Ms. Blum actually wants to get to know the milkman , which was Bichsel's first great success. The short story is about a husband's fantasies of escaping while he waits for his wife to return home. The title literally means (Spanish) 'holy savior' and at the same time alludes to San Salvador , the capital of the Central American state of El Salvador .
content
The short story takes place in the evening in the apartment of a married couple, Paul and Hildegard. The man (Paul) is sitting at home and trying out the newly bought fountain pen. After a few writing samples, he wrote a farewell letter to his wife, who was outside at the rehearsals of the church choir. The letter he puts on the table says:
"It's too cold for
me here, I'm going to South America
Paul"
Paul passes the time and waits for his wife to return. When Hildegard returns home, she asks her husband “Are the children sleeping?” The short story ends suddenly at this point. The reader does not find out whether Hildegard reads the folded note, the farewell letter from her husband, who sits next to the note the whole time, and what then happens between the spouses.
shape
At about 350 words, San Salvador is a very brief short story of the type also known as the shortest story . In a personal narrative situation, it describes the behavior and thoughts of the protagonist while waiting for his wife. By narrated monologue readers, according to Klaus Zobel receives "immediate insight into the secretive expectations and disappointments of the main character."
The language is kept very simple, the vocabulary that of everyday language . All linguistic decorations are left out, the linguistic and formal reduction leads to a density and rhythm that is reminiscent of lyric poetry . Different sentences are repeated, sometimes modified. For example, when they are repeated, they are in the indicative instead of the subjunctive . Bichsel called himself a "poet who disguises his poems, hiding behind prose ."
The form of the short story, its conciseness, in which many processes are not expressed and only hinted at, encourages the reader to think along. He has to assemble the story himself from the details and the gaps. For Rolf Jucker, on the one hand, this sharpens the reader's sense of possibility, but on the other hand also harbors the risk of overinterpretation.
interpretation
The majority of the interpretations gave San Salvador a negative interpretation. Then Bichsel describes people whose lives are stagnating, who only planned to break out of their everyday lives, but missed the opportunity to carry it out. For Klaus Zobel, the man in San Salvador suffers from a marriage in which mutual trust and togetherness have been lost, from the "coldness of being alone". He is unhappy trapped in his bourgeois existence, whose constant sequence and the predictable gestures of his partner make him weary. He only hoped to break out of this uniformity by changing location. The city of San Salvador, which gives the story its title without ever being mentioned in the text, becomes for him the “Savior”. But in the end the man did not implement his escape plans and remained in resignation - hence the multiple, leitmotiv mention of the sentence "Then he sat there". His wife's final question about the children proves that the couple's interests no longer apply to one another.
Rolf Jucker countered this interpretation with a positive interpretation. In it he rated the man's boredom positively and referred to Bichsel, who himself loved boredom and pointed out that the “Längi Zyt” (long time) in Swiss German stands for “ longing ”. For Jucker, the text repeatedly led back to Hildegard from a distance, from which he concluded that Paul suffered less from wanderlust than from longing for the absent partner. The predictable gestures of the woman showed the intimacy of the couple, the question of the returning woman about the children the family bond. Jucker interpreted the failure to act out the escape fantasies as an insight that fleeing does not solve any problems. He referred again to Bichsel, who, despite all the criticism he had of Switzerland, had never left his home country.
Jucker concluded by stating that the shortage of Bichsel's prose highlighted the possibilities of the story, both variants are conceivable, the reader should not just play through a stuck reading. In his own words, Bichsel is not concerned "with the truth, but with the possibilities of truth."
Origin and reception history
San Salvador is the fifteenth story of the 21 short story collection. Ms. Blum actually wants to get to know the milkman . Bichsel, who was still unknown at the time, sent their manuscript to the publisher Otto F. Walter in the summer of 1962 , who was immediately taken with the stories. In 1964, the short story collection appeared as Volume 2 of the Walter Drucke series edited by Walter together with Helmut Heißenbüttel .
Marcel Reich-Ranicki wrote an enthusiastic review at the time . In it he judged: “Finally someone who does not strive for originality, who does not hunt for effects and does not want to surprise us with stylistic capers, who does not forcibly try to boast with language. […] But one can praise this prose for what seems to me to be a more important quality that is only encountered in exceptional cases in today's German literature: the grace of naturalness. "
The success of the short story collection Actually, Mrs. Blum wants to get to know the milkman was unexpectedly great. The first edition of 1220 copies was sold out after just four days. By 1984 Walter Verlag had sold 64,000 copies, which does not include the licensed editions of Suhrkamp Verlag .
The short story San Salvador has also found its way into the curricula of German-speaking schools. The text is here to be short, distinctive and linguistically simple, making it easy to understand in one lesson.
expenditure
- Peter Bichsel: San Salvador. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , No. 5113 of December 8, 1963 (first printing).
- Peter Bichsel: San Salvador. In: Peter Bichsel: Ms. Blum actually wants to get to know the milkman. 21 stories . Edited by Otto F. Walter. Walter Verlag , Olten / Freiburg i. Br. 1964, pp. 34-35.
- Peter Bichsel: Ms. Blum actually wants to get to know the milkman. 21 stories . Suhrkamp Frankfurt am Main 1993, pp. 50-52.
- Peter Bichsel: San Salvador. In: Classic German short stories (= Reclams Universal Library , Volume 18251). Published by Werner Bellmann . Reclam, Stuttgart 2003, pp. 271-273.
Secondary literature
- Rolf Jucker: Peter Bichsel: San Salvador. In: Werner Bellmann (Ed.): Interpretations. Classic German short stories (= Reclams Universal-Bibliothek , Volume 17525). Reclam, Stuttgart 2004, pp. 267-273.
- Klaus Zobel: Peter Bichsel: San Salvador. In: Klaus Zobel: Textanalysen. An introduction to the interpretation of modern short prose. Paderborn 1985, pp. 193-198.
Individual evidence
- ^ Klaus Zobel: Peter Bichsel: San Salvador , p. 196.
- ^ Jucker: Peter Bichsel: San Salvador , pp. 268–269.
- ^ Jucker: Peter Bichsel: San Salvador , p. 269.
- ^ So Klaus Zobel: Peter Bichsel: San Salvador , p. 196.
- ↑ After Jucker: Peter Bichsel: San Salvador , pp. 269–272.
- ↑ Jucker: Peter Bichsel: San Salvador , pp. 270-272.
- Jump up ↑ Jucker: Peter Bichsel: San Salvador , p. 272.
- ^ Jucker: Peter Bichsel: San Salvador , p. 267.
- ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki: From the missed life . In: Die Zeit from October 16, 1964. Quoted from: Chalit Durongphan: Poetics and practice of storytelling by Peter Bichsel . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005. ISBN 978-3-8260-3091-8 , p. 16.
- ^ Jucker: Peter Bichsel: San Salvador , p. 268.
- ↑ Berit Balzer: Some thoughts on Peter Bichsel's story "Das Messer" . In: Peter Bichsel. A meeting with the writer about his work . Published by Ofelía Marti Peña, Universidad de Salamanca, 1994. ISBN 84-7481-763-3 , p. 52.