Although Heimito von Doderer (1896-1966) is generally acknowledged to be one of the the great modern Austrian novelists, his stories, novels and theoretical writings have not yet passed into the canon of modern works which receive extensive critical exposure. While the critical literature on Kafka, Musil and Broch grows by leaps and bounds, only scanty and unsystematic information is available in the sparse trickle of publications on Doderer. In fact, large portions of his work are illuminated only by casual remarks in reviews and Festreden. To be sure, research on Doderer is just beginning, for the majority of his journals and letters, as well as an authoritative biography still await publication. Although Doderer was not a master of the essayistic novel, in the manner of Broch and Musil, and although he never attained the universality of Joyce or the perfection of Mann, he nevertheless contributed a large, complex and fascinating body of work that does admit some comparison with the the work of the luminaries of the modern novel. Especially his gargantuan masterpiece, Die Dämonen (1956), must be considered in connection with equally ambitious attempts by Mann, Musil, Broch and Joyce, to document modern man's consciousness (in the sense of Bewusstsein).
The following thesis centers on Heimito von Doderer's magnum opus, Die Dämonen. It is an attempt to interpret that exceedingly complex and enigmatic work as a masked autobiography of the author. In this thesis we shall try to show that three characters in Die Dämonen, Rene von Stangeler, Kajetan von Schlaggenberg and Georg von Geyrenhoff are masks for the author, Doderer.
By emphasizing the autobiographical nature of the work, we shall go counter to a strong current in the secondary literature which celebrates in Doderer a re-emergence of the realistic prose of the nineteenth century. Despite the essentially realistic prose style, Die Dämonen cannot, or rather, should not be read like a volume of Balzac's Comedie Humaine or Zola's Roman Experimental. The crucial difference between Die Dämonen and a realistic novel of nineteenth-century vintage is that the former tries to illuminate the author's private reality while the latter is concerned primarily with the objectification of social reality. It will be our task to demonstrate that Doderer is actually narrating his life, cleverly worked around a historical setting.
The three principal characters, Stangeler, Schlaggenberg and Geyrenhoff, represent two facets of Doderer's biography: first, the three ages in life, youth, middle age, and mature old age; and secondly, the three character types--scholar, writer, and observer. With these three characters, Doderer is able to narrate his own life. Each of the three represents a period of the author's life and particular psychological traits as he observed them in himself. Stangeler represets the humanist and scholar, as well as the young Doderer, anxious to carve a place for himself in the world. Schlaggenberg represents the grotesque, alienated and demonic writer-journalist who is beset by personal and professional problems. Geyrenhoff represents the objective moralist, who tries to withdraw from active participation in life so that he may understand it objectively. In the interaction of these cipher-like characters, Doderer illustrates the various periods in his life and the elements of his personality.
Yet, we must keep in mind that each character is not representative of one occupational type, scholar, journalist or retired bureaucrat, or one psychological type, trusting industry, grotesque alienation or harmonious integration. In fact, the characters are not symbolic in the conventional sense that they each exhibit a consistently dominant and hence symbolic trait. Rather, each character exhibits development. In the novel, the development of the characters takes place concurrently: the young Stangeler, the scurrilous Schlaggenberg and the mature Geyrenhoff affect each other's development within a fictional time frame from summer 1926 to summer 1927. In Doderer's life, the periods were obviously consecutive; from Stangeler came Schlaggenberg came Geyrenhoff. In the memory of the author Doderer, however, the past phases of his life become present and find expression in the novel through the triumvirate. Similarly, the psychological states of the three characters are always present in the author. Thus, Stangeler, Schlaggenberg and Geyrenhoff linger in the consciouness (Bewusstsein) of the author to form a composite montage with an autobigraphical correlative in Doderer. Consequently, one cannot say that Doderer is one of the three; Doderer is Stangeler and Schlaggenberg and Geyrenhoff, for the true picture of Doderer emerges only in the composite.
The task we set ourselves in this thesis is the location of Doderer's persona in the characters of Die Dämonen. The consistency with which Doderer plays tricks on his readers makes that a problem which can be solved only with some elaborate detective work. To borrow a simile from the world of sleuths: like Lieutenant Kojak, the latter-day Sherlock Holmes, we shall take a hunch, formulate a plan, pursue and capture the quarry. The hunch is a certain suspicion that this reader felt as early as the first reading of Die Dämonen, that there is a connection between Stangeler, Schlaggenberg and Geyrenhoff that goes beyond their function as characters in a realistic novel. In the course of the first reading it also slowly became clear that one of the standard interpretative procedures with novels, that of evaluating characters in a novel in terms of verisimilitude to recognizable social reality, would have to be discarded with Die Dämonen in favor of recognizing each character as one aspect of the actual author, Doderer.
We cannot emphasize enough that in this interpretation of Die Dämonen we shall concentrate on the element of personal confession in the novel. Whatever Doderer's ideas on the function of the novel as an essentially mimetic form might have been, in practice his work focuses less on the exterior social reality than on the private reality of Doderer as he is writing.
Frank Trommler points to precisely this problem of the private versus the social or the subjective versus the objective, when he compares the methods of Doderer and Thomas Mann:
Während Thomas Mann die Legitimation des Dargestellten in die Hände des Erzählenden gibt, der über den Fiktionscharakter der Romanrealität keinen Zweifel lässt und den Roman damit als Kunstform bewahrt, entzieht Doderer das Faktum jeder Diskussion: wesentlich ist die adäquate Sprachfindung. Der Roman wird zur Chronik. Der Dichter gibt Geschichtsschreibung, und Geschichtsschreibung ist Sprachfindung. [Note: Roman und Wirklichkeit. Eine Ortsbestimmung am Beispiel von Musil, Broch, Roth, Doderer und Gütersloh (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1966), pp. 142-143.]
While Thomas Mann's narrator always maintains sovereign control over the fictional reality, Doderer prefers to use the form of the chronicle, an essentially historical form that records individual perspectives with no attempt at a universal overview. The comparison of a work such as Mann's Doktor Faustus and Doderer's Die Dämonen leads to some interesting recognitions about the use of montage techniques in the modern novel. Thomas Mann borrows widely from the history of music, from the biography of Nietzsche, as well as from his general readings for his incomparable portrait of the German spirit during tumultuous times. Doderer, on the other hand, borrows extensively from his own past for a portrait of the course of his life.
Doderer's method of writing in Die Dämonen can be adequately described through the concept of "montage," as the concept is generally used to describe prose:
MONATAGE (franz.), Begriff aus der Filmkunst: die schon im Drehbuch vorgesehene künstlerische Aneinanderfügung einzelner Bildfolgen und Szenen in räumlich und zeitlich verschiedenen Situationen, die nicht sachlich-handlungsmässig oder gedanklich verbunden sind, durch die Assoziationsfügung einzelner konkreter Gegenstände; als Darstellungstechnik auf Roman, Lyrik und Drama übertragen für die verfremdende Zusammenfügung verschiedener Wirklichkeitsebenen oder Wort-, Gedanken- und Satzfragmente unterschiedlicher Herkunft nach rein formalen Grundsätzen zur Erzielung von überraschungseffekten; im weiteren Sinne auch jede Anwendung filmischer Techniken wie Rückblenden, überblenden, Einblenden und szenische Gleichzeitigkeit sowie Darstellung von Taumgeschichten usw. auf die Literatur, bei BENN, DOS PASSOS... [Note: Gero von Wilpert, Sachwörterbuch der Literatur (Stuttgart: A. Kröner, 1955).]
The essential structural element of Die Dämonen that is described by the concept of "montage" is the piecing together of short narrative sections. A close study of the outline in Appendix One is a necessary prerequisite for a full appreciation of this technique.
As Trommler correctly points out, Doderer was concerned with Sprachfindung, the attempt to clothe events in language. In the sense that this endeavor was not without problems for Doderer, he betrays his Austrian heritage, skepticism about language. In contrast to Thomas Mann, who was never at a loss for the right expression, Doderer was able to overcome his distrust of language only after the Second World War, late in his life.
Our strategy for interpreting Die Dämonen shall rival the novel in complexity. After a thorough discussion of some of the perspectives available on Die Dämonen in the secondary literature in Chapter One, we shall discuss the problem of subjective and objective narrative as the problem is treated in Wolfgang Kayser's "Die Entstehung und Krise des modernen Romans." [Note: Wolfgang Kayser, "Die Entstehung und Krise des modernen Romans," Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift, XXVIII (1954), 5-36.] Kayser's essay will lead us to a consideration of three analyses of modern prose which concentrate on autobiographical aspects and which will serve as paradigmatic strategies for our consideration of Die Dämonen.
To build a case for an autobiographical structure in Die Dämonen, we will review the facts of Doderer's life to find early versions of the figures used in Die Dämonen. Using the paradigmatic analyses as models, we shall look for sources that explain the identity of the correlative figures, build a hypothetical model that would approximate the intention of the author, and finally, discuss the documentation of his consciousness (Darstellung des Bewusstseins) that Doderer achieves in Die Dämonen by means of his elaborate autobiographical montage.
These rather abstract and theoretical speculations about autobiography and the work of Heimito von Doderer will be followed in Chapter Three by four descriptive essays that should illuminate the actual text of the novel. The essays will cover the four parts of the novel, the overture and the three main parts. With constant reference to the plot outline in Appendix One, we hope to identify the parts of the montage which we encounter in each section of the novel. By synchronizing the discussion of the genesis of each part with a discussion of the main characters throughout the book, we hope to dispel the notion that Die Dämonen is a novel written in the manner of realism or naturalism and make a firm case for its autobiographical nature.
The second chapter could be considered the central part of the thesis. In this chapter the hypothesis about the autobiographical nature of Die Dämonen is formulated. The discussion of the secondary literature in Chapter One, the interpretation in Chapter Three as well as the outline of the plot in Appendix One are designed to serve this hypothesis. Like any hypothesis about an object of external reality, especially an object as complicated as Die Dämonen, this hypothesis restricts the view of the work as it focuses closely on one aspect. Thus, it must be understood that any polemics against other interpretations, as well as the arrangement of the outline and the emphasis in the interpretation have only a limited validity; they are valid only in reference to the hypothesis presented in Chapter Two.
In stating a hypothesis, the thesis claims allegiance to a neutral definition of the scientific method in four steps: observation, hypothesis, demonstration and conclusion. Observation consists of the encounter with the text, the author and the critical literature. The hypothesis arises from this observation and determines the demonstration, which is not unlike observation. Specific conclusions are thus formed from observation, guided by a specific hypothesis. To complete the hermeneutic, as every scientist of nature or of literature must do, the conclusions are stated in the introduction and assumed in the demonstration. Demonstration in any discipline, be it geometry, the natural sciences or humanism proves nothing absolutely, rather, only in terms of assumptions. This thesis should be regaded as an experiment, an attempt to argue a hypothesis.