Votes Mr. Robinson for a better world
The Roman Selects Mr. Robinson for a Better World is a work of Donald Antrim and was released in 1993 under the title "Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World" in New York .
content
Elementary school teacher Pete Robinson lives in a small community on the coast in the southern United States . After the murder of the previous mayor, Robinson plans to replace him. He bases his election campaign on the opening of a private elementary school in his house, for which he canvassed teachers and schoolchildren among his friends. The peculiarity of this community becomes clear in the fact that at the beginning of the novel, the former mayor is quartered on the street by cars under the guidance of Robinson, the citizens protect their homes with armed pitfalls and moats and on the last pages a schoolgirl on the opening day Private school dies on an improvised rack in the basement of Robinson's house. The community is doing well economically, nothing is reported about racial differences or differences in wealth. The almost exclusively white citizens have transformed a recently closed elementary school into a well-used factory for tourist items from the coral reef off the coast. But although the protagonists again and again profess the goal of respect for human life and a fear-free, “better world”, they sink into a swamp of mutual distrust, the most modern weapons and a civil war in the community's public park.
Narrative
The narrated time of this explosion of violence is only a few weeks at the end of summer. The first-person narrator Pete Robinson reports in retrospect from his attic room, in which, after the murder of the schoolgirl, he continues to prepare for class and his election campaign with a padlock on the door. The presentical framework draws the reader into the events that are just happening.
A texture of ethical degeneration, the war of all against all and the undermining of one's own existence permeate the novel. The parishioners keep coming back to the necessity of an ethical renewal suggested in the title, but the protagonists fail because of their inactivity or because they promote the opposite. Instead of the mentioned values education z. B. the lending library is closed and their books are used in the park as projectiles for mine clearance. The esoteric empathy and mystical transformation into one's own primordial animal succeed, but empathy with other people fails: the helpfulness and friendliness of the community members turn into excessive violence in the next moment. And this community lies on a coral bank in the ocean that is being removed piece by piece for souvenirs and turned into money. Just as at first only the drains of the neighbors clog and then the water penetrates the houses, so the small town on the sinking coral reef could soon get water up to its necks before the houses disappear in the floods.
Between their atavistic phases and mystical-religious moments, the characters always succeed in a confused foresight: The previous mayor z. B. amazed at a meeting with the assertion: "We are all murderers here" and yet a little later shoots several deadly Stinger rockets into the Botanical Garden to "make a mark" as a martyr . Which then excited by Robinson lynching carries with him though to self-doubt, but at the end of the novel he lets in a similar fashion but still a child kill - the rituals of violence seem inescapable. Robinson's analytical interest is in the current penetration of bourgeois discourse with the barbarism of the Holy Inquisition, but he becomes the mastermind of this relapse into barbarism.
Regardless of the symbolism and texture of the events, Antrim concentrates the absurdity of this world in individual places as if under a magnifying glass: As Robinson z. For example, when describing a game in which the “skill and cunning of the individual” is important, the listener asks doubtfully: “So a team game?”. Robinson self-deceptively evaluates the watercolor of a fully rigged British warship, surrounded by bark canoes full of warriors, as a “peaceful sight.” And Robinson's wife Meredith decorates the deadly bamboo skewers for the pit in front of her own house with carved laughing dolphins - “looks pretty” comments they are contextually blind. By gutting the social orientation knowledge, the catastrophe of this community becomes almost invisible for its members, ethics has already lost its fight against language in the head.
interpretation
In 1999 the novel was first published under the German title "The Bombardment of the Botanical Garden". This highlighting of a narrative thread from the composition of the whole was a linguistically not compelling reinvention of the publisher, which shifted the intention of the author to a clowning or at best to a satire . According to Jeffrey Eugenides , who wrote the foreword to the new edition of the novel, this pessimistic utopia is “about half-mad men of middle age” whose story would be told with running gags, comedy and humor . Antrim's network of social and ethical contradictions, on the other hand, lacks any hope of improving conditions in the satire: "Hope is nowhere in sight", it says several times and also at the end of the novel. Only the title translated from the American supports the understanding of the novel as a hopeless grotesque and gloomy prognosis .
Pete Robinson, the protagonist and self-conscious hero, reminds us of Daniel Defoe's century work “ Robinson Crusoe ”, this island study of the creation of the bourgeois world in the 17th century. Antrim's grotesque, on the other hand, is about the collapse of bourgeois society in the 20th century, which its members suspected rather than understood, but which cannot be stopped.
When looking at the school massacres and public shootings in the USA, which have become more frequent since the turn of the millennium , Antrim tells this novel with disturbingly accurate premonitions. Like the painter Hieronymus Bosch the atrocities of his time in anthropomorphic monsters, so Antrim shapes the moral mutilations of his contemporaries into his poetic pictures.
literature
- Antrim, Donald, Vote Mr. Robinson for a better world. Novel, with an introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides. Translated from the English by Gottfried Röckelein, Reinbek: Rowohlt 2015, 221 pages, ISBN 978-3-499-27078-9