Defense of the missionary position

Defense of the Missionary Position is a novel by the Austrian writer Wolf Haas , which was published in 2012. After Das Wetter 15 years ago (2006) it is his second outside of the crime genre. What both have in common is that they tell a love story with unusual formal means.

content

The main plot of the novel tells two short episodes from the life of the protagonist Benjamin Lee Baumgartner, who comes from Simbach in Lower Bavaria , which are far apart in time and space, but whose constellation is very similar: He always falls in love violently when he is the victim of an impending pandemic becomes. In 1988 in London, he fell ill with BSE when, although a vegetarian, he was eating a burger to get closer to the saleswoman who studies foreign languages ​​like him. Something similar happened to him in Beijing in 2006 when he went out with a Dutch colleague, a translator, again began eating meat and was infected with the bird flu virus. - The last third of the novel continues this line with two further, shortened narrated episodes and puts more focus on other things: on the one hand, Benjamin's prehistory, on the other hand, his friend, the first-person narrator and author (first linguistics student, later writer and referred to as "son of Mr. Haas"), as well as the genesis of the novel itself.

Narrative technique and language

The weather 15 years ago , Haas' “first 'real' novel”, came up with a highly unusual, consistently double-broken narrative perspective : A novel that doesn't exist as such takes shape when its author isabout itin an interview is questioned. Defense of the missionary position , on the other hand, begins in one of the conventional perspectives - authorial - and later changes over to others: the second episode is broken up by insertions of the first-person narrator and author, in the third the protagonist himself has his say in first-person form, and the first-person narrator / author takes over the four short final chapters.

The ensemble of the four main characters (Benjamin, the burger seller, the Dutch woman and the first-person narrator / author) is made up in such a way that playing with language, which always takes up a lot of space in Haas' novels, appears plausible: languages ​​are their subject or . your job. In addition, both women have learned Benjamin's mother tongue so that they speak German with him, not without small weaknesses in the accent (which Benjamin has a weakness for) and realistically not without mistakes. From this, and from the special emotional state, paired with intelligence and quick-wittedness, dialogues emerge full of wit and surprising twists, with numerous references, repetitions and echoes, "with puns, language traps and linguistic philosophizing". This entertains the reader - and challenges him at the same time, because not everything is explained. The statement made by the burger vendor, for example, "I couldn't speak nonsense because I didn't know the word nonsense ," which seems illogical and remains as unchallenged as it remains uncommented, reveals itself as a playful reply to what she learned about Benjamin: he believes that he owes his existence to a "false", because refuted theory by Benjamin Lee Whorf , according to which the language of man determines his thinking and which he demonstrated using the example of the language of the Hopi Indians, from whom Benjamin's father is said to have descended the statement of his hippie mother.

The third episode (Benjamin goes in search of his father in 2009, falls in love with the young saleswoman who turns out to be his daughter at a burger stand in Santa Fe , and falls ill with swine fever ) is particularly noticeable in comparison to the first two linguistically illuminating. Where Benjamin speaks in the first person, he does it in a “similarly jittery, chatty sound like the proven narrator in the Brenner novels”, whereas, depicted in an authoritative way, he has far more language skills and wit. What is striking, especially at the beginning, is the frequent contrast between what Benjamin “almost said” (ie just thinks) and what he actually says. This has a funny effect, above all, because the punctuation does not distinguish between what is said and what is said and always only the suffix provides clarification, so that at the beginning the reader never knows which variant he is dealing with - and then when he means that Having grasped typical differences (what was thought long and highly artificial, what was said short and banal), of course, this expectation is also broken and one of the following is called: "He couldn't believe that he had really said that."

The title also starts with a conversation about language. From the observation that “reading across” or “reading diagonally” there are terms for special types of reading, but none for normal reading, Benjamin derives a general rule and says that there is no word for “normal fuck” either. “Missionary position,” replies the Dutch woman. This leads Benjamin to renewed criticism of the language: The particularity of this word once aroused the illusion in him that what was designated must also be something special. And when the Dutch woman takes this factual side , Benjamin announces: "If I ever write a book about you, I will call it defense of the missionary position ."

A conversation in the first episode follows a similar course, from language criticism to factual criticism. Benjamin and the burger vendor discover that they both know and love a largely unknown song ( Misery man by Kevin Coyne ), but differ on the translation of the line “I may one day be eternally happy”. She thinks “one day” means “one day”, so point to the future. He counters that it is "nonsense to postpone everything until one day" and insists on his version of the verse: "I can be happy for all eternity in a single day." It is only too clear what he is defending here : his expectation of meeting her, and thus his view of happiness and love in general.

interpretation

Coincidence

“The basic idea was,” Haas said in an interview, “that it would be fun to tell a love story based on these epidemics that break out every few years, in short: BSE leads to brain dissolution, and falling in love also leads to brain dissolution. “ Within the novel, he initially addresses the question of the coincidence of certain events from a linguistic point of view. As a student, his first-person narrator / author is writing a thesis on the change from temporal to causal conjunctions . Using the conjunction “because” as an example, he ponders how its meaning has shifted from an initially only temporal context to a causal one in the course of language development, and playfully tests the question of the extent to which this is significant. The question becomes significant and real for Benjamin after his return from China, when his wife files for divorce (she is not, as the first-person narrator / author - and with him the reader - believes for a long time, identical to the Burger seller; Benjamin had met her in Scotland before and married on the spur of the moment). She and the divorce attorney judge the coincidence of Benjamin's "escapades" with the epidemics as a coincidental coincidence (and therefore as an excuse on his part), while he suspects a causality after the second incident at the latest. And when something similar happened to him a third time, he sharpened his view: he exchanged cause and effect, no longer sees himself as a victim of epidemics, but as the trigger. (An echo of the question asked earlier whether human madness is the result of mad cow disease or its cause.) The first-person narrator even has to promise to notify the health authorities immediately if he ever finds "symptoms of being in love" again . When he heard of an epidemic ( Ehec ) that broke out in northern Germany in 2011 and that Benjamin met a woman again and followed her to this region (to a sprout farm in Bienenbüttel ), he kept his promise with the result that the trigger of the epidemic is localized and Benjamin returns - the ironic exaggeration of a story whose coincidences are so “outrageously” constructed that it is not difficult to distinguish between the real and the fictional.

Paradox and Antinomy

The protagonist of the novel is a highly paradoxical figure. Paradoxically, what happens to him in the course of the plot is first of all: he falls victim to an animal disease three times, although he is a vegetarian, and ironically, the fourth time he is infected, it happens because he is a vegetarian. The premises of his existence are also paradoxical: he does not know his father, but believes he is an Indian because his mother told him so and she was in America at the time in question; in truth he was French, which his mother does not reveal to him but to the first-person narrator; Of course, that doesn't change the fact that Benjamin paradoxically outwardly resembles the (cliché image of) the supposed father so much that he is told again and again that he looks like the Indian in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - the novel's " running gag " . (Another paradox, or antinomy, is that the cuckoo doesn't build a nest at all.)

A multiple antinomy is the command of the logician Alfred Tarski that a sentence should not speak about itself. The formulation Benjamin used, that Tarski saved the world from “brain disintegration” by forbidding “feeding” sentences with sentences, builds a bridge to the action, explicitly to the statement that it is crazy to feed cows with sheep . Another reference emerges in the second episode when the Dutch woman reads a novel in which the protagonist intends to overcome Tarski's prohibition by deciding not to become a philosopher but a poet: “Only in poetry can language refer to itself relate. ”That is liberation from an antinomy, legitimation of a procedure used in the present novel and metafiction at the same time.

Metafiction

In Haas' Das Wetter 15 Years Ago, you don't read the novel itself, but an interview about it. So you read a fiction about a fiction. The fact that you are dealing with a metafiction is therefore constantly in view. This is different in defense of the missionary position . Here the fiction is broken only selectively, but quite often and with different means.

One of these is already used in a modified version in Wetter 15 years ago : There you can also find out what the author has rejected, and here now what he would add or change in general at certain points. This is done in inserts that also stand out typographically . The first reads: “[BUILD IN A LONDON ATMOSPHERE HERE. PEOPLE. CARS. HOUSES. 1988. THE LOOK FROM THE BRIDGE.] “This keeps the reader aware that the novel is something“ made ”. The supposed look into the poet's workshop can, however, also be a deception, because the intentions expressed by the first-person narrator / author do not necessarily have to match those of the real author. Wolf Haas, for example, comments on the quoted inset as follows: "If I write 'insert London atmosphere later' instead of describing London brilliantly on ten pages, then the reader has London in his head as well [...]" This also makes it clear that the first-person narrator / author referred to as “Mr. Haas' son” is just as much a fictional character as the author of Das Wetter 15 years ago , where he is even explicitly named Wolf Haas. Metafictional things are not only based on the first-person narrator / author. There is a fictional character, the Dutch woman, who reads a novel (a fictional one), which is followed by a conversation with all sorts of points of reference to the actual novel. Another fictional character, Benjamin, announces first to the burger seller and then to the Dutch woman that he will write a novel about her, whereby what he promises in terms of content will also be realized in the actual novel, albeit not by himself. A third fictional character, the most unusual, encounters the first-person narrator / author as a reader of his as yet unpublished novel, who not only seems to know what has already been written, but even what he has just experienced and thought, so cannot have even put on paper. Finally, a fourth character in the novel, Benjamin's wife, actually finds the unfinished manuscript and reads it. The reader now follows this process with her, that is, he literally reads the beginning of the novel he already knows - with the difference, of course, that for him the text gradually narrows down to the point of illegibility and up to the moment when she hits the first-person narrator / author with the manuscript and does not believe his subsequent declaration that the story is fiction (which it is not within fiction either).

The packaging in which the narrator / author kept the manuscript has a paisley pattern . The burger seller's dress also has a paisley pattern, and Benjamin meets his future wife in the Paisley Museum in the Scottish town of the same name . - The basic form of the paisley pattern is reminiscent of a leaf or a large comma (both with reference to a book or text), and the tapered, curved end of the "leaf" leads back to itself - a reference to the metafiction used here Procedure of self-regressive fiction.

expenditure

• Wolf Haas: Defense of the missionary position . Hoffmann and Campe Verlag, Hamburg, 2012

Web links

• Interview with Wolf Haas about the novel in the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" [5]
• Review in the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung" [6]
• Review in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" [7]

literature

• Assmann, David-Christopher: Back and forth. Process of concrete poetry and metaization in Wolf Haas "Defense of the Missionary Position", in: Journal for German Philology, Vol. 134, 2015, H. 2, pp. 273-298.
• Buck, Nikolas: "There is something ecstatic about thinking about such things". Wolf Haas' poetological novel Defense of the Missionary Position , in: K. Eichhorn (Ed.): Neuer Ernst in der Literatur? Writing practices in contemporary German-language novels. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2014, pp. 65–74.
• Jaumann, Michael: “But that's exactly the theme of the story!” Dialogue and metafiction in Wolf Haas' Das Wetter 15 years ago, in: J. Alexander Bareis, Frank Thomas Grub (ed.): Metafiction. Analyzes of contemporary German literature . Kadmos, Berlin 2010, pp. 203-225.

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b c} Reinhard Stiehl: The linguist laughs - Wolf Haas' novel "Defense of the Missionary Position" , March 19, 2013; accessed on March 14, 2014 [1]
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Franz Haas: The gradual production of a novel. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, October 18, 2012; accessed on March 14, 2014 [2]
3. ↑ Wolf Haas: Defense of the missionary position . Hoffmann and Campe Verlag, Hamburg, 2012, p. 43
4. ↑ Wolf Haas: Defense of the missionary position . Hoffmann and Campe Verlag, Hamburg, 2012, p. 22
5. ↑ Wolf Haas: Defense of the missionary position . Hoffmann and Campe Verlag, Hamburg, 2012, p. 138
6. ↑ Wolf Haas: Defense of the missionary position . Hoffmann and Campe Verlag, Hamburg, 2012, p. 58
7. ↑ ^{a b} From the unruly reader. Interview with Wolf Haas. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, September 20, 2012; accessed on March 17, 2014 [3]
8. ↑ Wolf Haas: Defense of the missionary position . Hoffmann and Campe Verlag, Hamburg, 2012, p. 139
9. ↑ Wolf Haas: Defense of the missionary position . Hoffmann and Campe Verlag, Hamburg, 2012, p. 26
10. ↑ Sandra Kegel: The Blick from the Bridge. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 31, 2012; accessed on March 17, 2014 [4]