Andreas (14 page)

On death: “To have to leave the theatre before the curtain has even risen.”

Dissolution, striven for, means peace as to one’s own being, great or small, limited or the powerful, accepted or rejected, about one’s own lifetime and the epochs of time and the symbolic vision of things, and about the poor and needy.

The Knight great in his total defeat—a being struggling for his fate: In Andreas’s union with the transformed Maria, he finds all in one, faith, love, fulfilment.

Andreas, beside the bed on which Sacramozo’s body lies, must feel that, in a supreme sense, he may have been right.

Andreas: Outcome of tour to Venice: he feels with
horror that he can never return to the narrow life of Vienna, he has grown out of it. But the state he has achieved brings him more distress than joy, it seems to him a state in which nothing is conditioned, nothing made difficult, and by that very fact nothing exists. Everything merely reminds him of things, they are not really there. Everything tastes stale, there is nothing to seek, but because of that nothing can be found.—Question: whether these fragments in the kaleidoscope could discover a new arrangement. Envious recollection of his grandfather’s journey down the Danube, his first places, success by health and courage, piety and loyalty, and, with it all, a certain robust selfishness and cunning.

Andreas’s return.—He was what he might be, yet never, hardly ever, was.—He sees the sky, small clouds over a forest, sees the beauty, is moved—but without that self-confidence on which the whole world must rest as on an emerald;—with Romana, he says to himself, it might be mine.

Andreas
was found, unfinished, among
Hofmannsthal’s
papers after his death. It consisted of a finished chapter and a collection of notes in the form of brief dialogues, aphorisms and quotations. The main
fragment
first appeared in the magazine
Corona
in 1930. Two years later,
Andreas
was published in book form with an afterword by Jacob Wassermann—only to be suppressed by Nazi censure. Thus,
Andreas
was not available in the German speaking world until
Herbert
Steiner’s postwar edition.

Let us briefly retrace what is known of the genesis of the posthumous novel. While in Venice in the summer of 1907, Hofmannsthal wrote the first draft of
The Venetian Travel-Diary of Herr von N (1779)
, followed by a series of notes under the headings “Ven. Diary”, “Ven. Adventure” and “Ven. Experience”. Hofmannsthal had just read Morton Prince’s
The Dissociation of Personality: A study in Abnormal Psychology
(New York 1906), which relates the case of an American female student who suffers from a split personality. From this unusual case he derived the double figure of Maria and Mariquita, also known as the “wunderbare Feundin”.
At the time Hofmannsthal briefly considered writing the novel in the form of letters. The main fragment—roughly a quarter of the projected length of
Andreas
—was written between February 1912 and August 1913. (The title
Andreas or the United
was chosen later that year.) In 1918, Hofmannsthal described
Andreas
in a letter to his friend Hermann Bahr as a “novel, on a limited scale on the youth and life crisis of a young Austrian travelling to Venice and Tuscany”. He thought that three to four years would be needed to complete it. However, Andreas was put aside in favour of
Nachspiel 1808
, the story of Austria’s uprising against Napoleon.

The finished fragment of
Andreas
, written in 1912-13, tells the story of the young knight’s voyage from Rococo Vienna to Venice. But
Andreas
is much more than a mere historical novel, a period piece. As a voyage of spiritual discovery it reaches beyond the specific experience of a vanished age; the hero, at first characterless and passive, encounters conflicting emotions that will ultimately lead to regeneration and love. These emotions are rooted in experience; as such they have the value of symbols without ever becoming intellectual abstractions.

The initial episode takes Andreas to Carinthia, where he falls under the spell of the enchanted landscape. Magically enveloped in the landscape’s
immortality, Andreas is enfolded in a wonderful vision of beauty; and he wishes he could espouse this timeless world untainted by corrupting forces. It is no coincidence that the encounter with Romana takes place in this region of loving simplicity and purity, for Andreas senses—if only fleetingly—that Romana comes from a region of the soul which is hidden but pure. Andreas understands that the path to love is akin to the feeling of sanctitude.

Following an encounter with the evil Gotthilff (God-help), he escapes to Venice. The adventures of Andreas in Venice form the centre of events in which the hero is split, on the one hand towards the sensual, on the other towards the ideal. These conflicting attitudes of the soul are brought to light in his meeting with the woman alternatively described as Maria or Mariquita, which are only “the two faces of the same person”. Maria embodies the highest expression of the individual soul; she personifies love in its purest form, but fears contact with life itself. She lacks the ability to become flesh and blood: to lose herself in the sensual moment. Mariquita, on the other hand, belongs entirely to the world and succeeds in revealing the unique and external in sensual appearances. Hofmannsthal noted in the
Book of Friends
, a collection of aphorisms dating from 1922: “Every new acquaintance takes
us apart and brings us back together. It is of utmost importance that we experience regeneration”. Torn between the extremes of duration and change, loyalty and betrayal, the physical and spiritual in life, Andreas realizes that he must allow himself to be transformed by both; for in this apparently simple contrast is enclosed the double possibility of the soul’s attitude to life: emotions, neither anchored at one extreme or another, but mysteriously drawn to each other.

Ultimately, Andreas is brought back to himself by Sacramozo, the Knight of Malta. Sacramozo, the spiritual teacher, awakens a higher awareness of life in Andreas. But Sacramozo belongs to a world which does not open itself—he embodies a form of denial akin to destruction and isolation. To find a link to humankind, Andreas realizes that he must accept the impure, the fragmented in life. Only then will he succeed in uniting the two faces of life which he has glimpsed through his encounter with the mysterious double figure. He knows that he belongs to Romana; thus, in the last, unfinished chapter, Andreas leaves Venice behind and returns to the Finazzer farm.

The novel as it lies, unfinished, before us, ends with a stream of notes, allusions to various situations, brief dialogues, epigrams and occasional aphorisms. These intuitions, dissolved in movement, are loosely woven
into a fragmented fabric. Beyond its fragmentary form,
Andreas
is concerned with much that our world has lost touch with: timeless and ultimate experiences, moments of poetic ecstasy in which the wholeness of existence is perceived. The miraculous familiarity of things is revived; heightened sensations strive towards a kind of identification with nature and all things; language is wonderfully attuned to nature and human experience. Images of landscapes, towns and villages through which the young knight has wandered, sights which have delighted his eyes, everything is visually retained. Here perhaps lies part of the enigma of
Andreas
. Hofmannsthal started the novel around visual elements reminiscent of Stifter’s tales—but gradually shifted towards incorporating fragments rooted in personal experience. And perhaps that is why Hofmannsthal’s novel was doomed. As he felt an increasing distaste for the spirit of the modern age intertwined with a sense of the tragedy awaiting his beloved Austria—he may have found himself reluctant to give shape to Andreas’s spiritual journey.

OLIVIER BERGGRUEN

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