Aladdin's Problem (11 page)

How was it that the moments of happiness in Phares's garden increased? I almost said, "expanded" — but that is not the apt word; bliss knows no measurable time.

I should have been surprised that the garden had trees and flowers, but not animals. Phares said: "We can integrate them, but we do not bother." Now whom did he mean by that "we"? Himself and his ilk or even himself and me?

If the garden had no animals — then why blossoms in their marvelous splendor, such as one senses behind the rose and the hibiscus shortly after awakening? The garden lacked bees and butterflies, for which their labella and calyxes are formed, and even the pollinating wind. Perhaps it was the fragrance that united them, or else they faced one another like magnetic mirrors. I could sense their strength even in the darkness, indeed more sharply then.

"Phares said" — but did he actually speak? I saw him move his lips, I could understand him from far away, in thunderstorms and naturally also in dreams, with my
inner ear. So I do not know whether I heard him or whether he spoke. I mused about it for a long time and my guess is that he knows the primal text, of which all human as well as animal languages are merely translations or effusions. As are the rustling of forests and the murmuring of wellsprings; the souls of plants are still closest to the divine world. They convince as metaphors.

Phares probably aims at bridging, if not overcoming, dualism and reaching back through the dichotomies including the divisions into plants and animals or into sexes; but first, the foundations of good and evil had to be shaken. Then the barrier between men and gods could also collapse.

I could already feel that our encounter satisfied my nihilism. I could tell by symptoms too — especially a new affection that both surprised and delighted Bertha and me. It was as if we had never known one another before.

I noticed in general that the people I dealt with as well as strangers I encountered in the street had more to say to me than a bit earlier. And even Terrestra appeared to me, indeed in a new light, as a worthwhile task.

84

My being animated by a new spirit is something I perceive in the fact that I have jumped ahead, for I am still with my problem — say, with the decisions demanded of us by the power that streams toward us. Aladdin could limit himself to comfort; with Budur he had nothing more than a happy marriage. That is how simple minds behave: they remain untouched by stronger temptation. Even concern about society, say, "the welfare of the fatherland," on which they could focus their power, is alien to them. I thought about that, albeit only for an instant, but my nihilism leads to other considerations.

A description that designates itself as a problem can offer no solution. Deeds and images still attack one another. "I am in action," Jellicoe radioed to the Admiralty when it demanded reports from him during the naval battle.

Today, solutions are really white lies, for they do not belong within the framework of our times: perfection is not their task. The approach can only be gradual. Aladdin's problem was power with its delights and dangers; yet it seemed to me that Phares had nothing in common with the genie of the lamp. It makes a difference whether demons or messengers knock at the door.

85

The initial contact was fairly banal; it resulted from one of the letters that arrived at Terrestra. The precipitous development of the firm required more and more advertising for open positions. It is an old experience that mid-level positions are easy to fill. But top-level
positions are a different story. The China market had soon reached first place. It began with inquiries and orders from the peripheral areas: Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, scattered communities in South East Asia, New York's Chinatown. Plus the Chinese restaurants, the silk and porcelain boutiques in all the big cities around the world. Their proprietors along with their staffs wanted to do something for themselves and their ancestors. A coffin was once again considered a nice present.

Then, with the return to capitalism and the loosening of borders, the flood of mail came from the Middle Kingdom itself. It was overwhelming. We needed a senior executive who both had special experience and was a genius at planning.

In such cases, it is hard to choose. Some people waste their time and energy on secondary stipulations, others wreak havoc with outlandish ideas. The category to which each belonged was usually apparent in the applications, which were read by various people in the company, including graphologists; I received the digests.

Thus, Phares's application likewise reached my desk after being routed through numerous offices. Good knowledge of languages, many years in the Far East, excellent penmanship. Several passages were painted in ideograms. This was not unusual, for some of the applicants were Chinese. We had special readers for them.

The question about nationality was answered with: "Cosmopolitan." Place of residence: "Adler's Hotel." While, or rather before, reading it, I saw that the letter was addressed to me personally. The impression was that of an afterimage: we close our eyes, and the inner text appears. I read it like a painting and discovered unmistakable engrams — for instance, among the positions previously held: "Landscape gardener in Liegnitz, Silesia." Some details could be known only to Bertha and myself, others to myself alone.

I remembered the signs as if I had carved them into a tree trunk years ago. Now they became visible; I did not notice that they were in the Chinese text. But I grew more and more dumbfounded as I read the letter if it was a dream, then it was no ordinary one. It dawned on me that I could not invite the sender to come to my office, for I was the recipient of the invitation — so I immediately dropped what I was doing and walked through the Tiergarten to Adler's Hotel. It was a spring morning, and I was gratuitously cheerful — elated.

Wilflingen, January 6, 1982

AFTERWORD

The Parable
of
Aladdin's Problem

BY MARTIN MEYER

A major influence on the German novelist Ernst Junger was the philosophy of Swedenborg, who presented his cosmic spirituality in
De commercio animae et corpods
(1769): God must envelop all spiritual things in visible garments, for that is the only way a finite human being can perceive the intention of Creation. Hence, matter must also be viewed as the reflection of the spiritual. The soul is the organ that must forge the link between the phenomena and their divine origin — but it can only be the soul of an initiate, whose "internal breathing" carries thoughts. In this manner, the mystical experience ofin-tuition "reconstructs" the primal
images.
What we have here is the neo-Platonic notion ofthe soul.

Junger, haunted by the issue of matter in the
modern
materialistic world, rejected any metaphysical
deprecation
of that concept. And that was the start of the "problem" — a term he even considered worthy of being used in a title:
Aladdin's Problem,
initially published in 1983. At first, this brief four-part novel seems to have little to do with a metaphysical "appreciation" of matter. In his habitual way, the author introduces a first-person narrator who, although not yet forty, has already dealt with
and transcended a number of experiences. Friedrich Baroh begins his story by mentioning a "problem," one that bedevils him, casting gloom on his existence. He is forced to spend more and more time mulling over it, whereby his everyday life becomes secondary to this preoccupation. He therefore recalls his past, filling us in on his background. However, we learn nothing about the nature of his problem.

Baroh has served in the Polish People's Army — originally as a soldier, bullied by a vicious sergeant; then as an officer. In the military, he makes no waves, living as what Junger labels an "anarch," conforming unenthusiastically to the system; he spends quiet hours with a friend, a Polish officer, meditating on historical events and on their causes and premises. One day, Baroh flees to the West, where he attends university, marries, and eventually becomes an executive trainee in his uncle's funeral parlor.

After realizing that people without history have no peace and that even our graves fit in with the "chauffeur style," Baroh attempts to compensate for this lack. He starts deepening his knowledge of funeral customs and — in "a countermove to the motor world" — he founds Terrestra. His firm offers interested clients resting places for all eternity, permanent gravesites. Terrestra buys an extensive and intricate catacomb system in Anatolia; and before long, business is booming. "A primal instinct was rearoused."

But ultimately, success merely increases Baroh's frus
tration, and the fewer the demands placed on him, the more his problem gains the upper hand. In the last part of the novel, he admits, or at least hints at, the location of his pain.

My complaint is not housed in my brain. It is lodged in my body and, beyond that, in society — the cause of my illness. I can do something about it only when I have isolated myself from society. Perhaps I will soon be interned.

Baroh is spared this fate not only by camouflaging his existence as an outsider. In the end, he also finds salvation. He tells about "messengers" knocking on the door. The response to his vague yearning for the absolute are voices and inspirations.

Something wishes to alight — an eagle, a nutcracker, a wren, a jester? Why near me of all people? Perhaps a vulture — I have liver problems now too.

The delicately ironical allusion to myth does not cloak the issue for long. Baroh, now living in an expectant mood, receives a letter of application from a man named Phares. He knows — although he cannot really know it — that this person will initiate him into the mysteries of a world that conceals meaning behind the phenomena. For Phares, we are told, is conversant with the "primal text, of which all human as well as animal languages are merely translations or effusions."

Now we understand what this "problem" is all about: the narrator is tormented by the both personal and social dilemma of having to live in a nihilistic culture that, in the wealth of available knowledge, has lost all connection to "meaning": "Aladdin's problem was power with its delights and dangers." And also: "Aladdin too was an erotic nihilist...."

What does that mean? The Aladdin metaphor, often encoded, often merely whispered in a subordinate clause, keeps recurring throughout Ernst Junger's late works. On December II, 1966, in Lisbon, the author, thinking about secular and spiritual treasures, notes:

As for other treasures, like that of the Nibelungs, only legend knows about them. They rest in the depths: hauling them to the surface can spell disaster, as described in Germanic myths or Oriental fairy tales. What they mean is the world's hoard, from which we live, albeit only on the interest, only on an effulgence that comes from an unattainable distance. Even the sun is merely a symbol, a visible reflection; it belongs to the temporal world. On the other hand, every treasure that is gathered on earth remains a simile, a symbol. It cannot suffice; hence, our ravenous, our insatiable hunger.

The story that best reflects this conflict, if not explicitly, then allegorically, is
Aladdin's Problem.
What has Baroh learned? That after 1888, Germany's Year of the Three Emperors, History flows into the Post-History of "Titanism." ("Titanism" is the adaptation of ancient myth to modern reality. The Titans, issuing from the union of Gaea and Uranus, are representatives of the primal cosmic powers.) What else has Baroh learned? That this Titanism subjugates all material and spiritual resources in order to rule over the "temporal world" as a demiurge. That the "primal text" thereby turns more and more into silent hieroglyphics. "Aladdin" is Junger's "worker" — the "titanic" agent, who mines and controls the energies of the earth, deluding himself into believing that eventually he will achieve perfection by containing and contenting all needs. This is intimated but not "explained" in the first edition of the novel. The second version, published here by Eridanos, then adds a passage right before the next-to-last paragraph of Chapter seventy-eight. The reliance on allegorical power did not suffice; now this truth is pinpointed:

Aladdin's lamp was made of pewter or copper, perhaps merely clay. Galland's text reports nothing about this matter — all we learn is that the lamp hung from a grotto ceiling. It was not lit, but rubbed, to make the demon appear. He could put up palaces or wipe out cities overnight, whatever the master of the lamp commanded. The lamp guaranteed dominion as far as the frontiers of the traveled world — from China to Mauritania. Aladdin preferred the life of a minor despot. Our lamp is made of uranium. It establishes the same problem: power streaming toward us titanically.

What must happen not only to keep matter from being utilized for the destruction of humanity and its planet, but also to have it go through a process of "spiritualizing," of harmonizing? The author supplies no answer to this question anymore that he did in
Eumeswil,
a novel he published six years before
Aladdin's Problem.
However, at the end of the latter story, he brings in Phares, whose task it is to encourage Baroh to cope with his skepticism. This mysterious personage already appeared in Junger's earlier fiction
Heliopolis —
as commander of the space ship that carries Lucius de Geer toward the infinite edges of the universe. Phares is a bringer of light. His name comes from the French word
phares,
meaning "beacons, lighthouses." "Les Phares," a poem in Charles Baudelaire's
The Flowers of Evil,
celebrates eight artists whose works, like beacons, illuminated the darkness of the world. In
Aladdin's Problem,
Phares once again stands for an unknown power beyond the shocks and tremors ofthe world oflife. He is an emissary who is familiar with the primal text; a mentor with Gnostic instruction. For the Gnostics of Late Antiquity, knowledge appears when the "call" is heard: this "call," as Irenaeus explains, draws both salvation and liberation from the fetters ofthe world. It is precisely this "call" that Friedrich Baroh ultimately follows.