The Catholicity of Place: A Review of Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons
The Demons by Heimito von Doderer
Wiseblood, 2024; 1,630 pp.; $40 (two volumes)
Right from the very start,” Heimito von Doderer says of novelists, “they innately grasp the knowability of creation out of everything it presents in swirling, eddying flow, embrace it, and are convinced that whatever objects present themselves as concretions are nothing less than their own selves and for that matter are even more—that they are nothing less than our very own selves. We could call novelists individuals in whom there dwells to an especially striking degree a distant reflection of analogia entis as a personal characteristic, in a somewhat stretched and figurative meaning of that concept: as a fixed connection between inner and outer. One almost wants to say that they are something like born Thomists.”
Doderer explained his craft and calling to a group of French literary scholars in Paris in 1958, two years after publication of The Demons. Doderer was part of a group of modern literary authors inspired by the paragon of medieval philosophy and theology that included James Joyce, Czeslaw Miłosz, G.K. Chesterton, Paul Claudel, Dorothy Sayers, and Flannery O’Connor (who only three years before had labeled herself a “hillbilly Thomist”). Reading the Angelic Doctor brought Doderer out of Nazism and into the Catholic Church.
At stake in Doderer’s embrace of Thomas’s support of the way of affirmation (as opposed to the more paradoxical or “mystical” way of negation inspirational to other Catholic authors like Jon Fosse) was nothing less than escape from the ghettoes of ideology into the interconnected complexity of the real, wide world: openness to life in the fullest sense. For Doderer, the very reality of Creation or the given world was imperiled. In the same lecture he declared that “the function of the novel today is the reconquest of the outer world, broad expanses of which have shriveled to a second reality.”
“Second reality” is a key phrase in The Demons. Doderer does not by “second reality” mean anything like Tolkien’s fantasy, or fiction itself, which always points back to and places us within the primary world, convincing us of its realness through the potency of its words and wonderfulness of its things. Rather, for Doderer, a second or secondary reality is what he calls ideology.
To avoid uncritically inserting such second realities into fiction or conceiving fiction from within the deluded confines of a second reality, Doderer advocated a kind of self-transcendence or detachment. As Doderer says in his Paris lecture, “the making of fiction places authors, if only for the length of an initiating moment, outside the here and now of their own circumstances.” Only in such an aesthetic interval can the novel be fashioned. “But what then are writers, these people to whom nothing is sacred because everything is? They’re nothing, nothing at all, and it’s pointless to look for anything behind them. They’re men and women of uncertain age whom one may bump into from time to time in the stairwell.”
It would be a mistake to conclude from such a hyperbolic figure that the novelist does not draw on the world he actually knows in the detached yet immediate, concrete way Doderer insists upon. Real knowledge—as opposed to vague opinion—is on the line. What is to be avoided is anything that is reductive, too tidy, driven by preconceived notions rather than that from which ideas are meant to come: the world in all its profusion and seeming chaos. In his introduction to The Demons, contemporary German novelist Martin Mosebach claims that “Doderer was never at any point in his life as a writer concerned with telling stories, neither in the conventional nor in some ingeniously intricate sense.” If this is so, it still does not follow that Doderer tells no stories.
In fact, the story of The Demons is obvious, archaic, and simple to rehearse. The narrator is Georg von Geyrenhoff, a civil servant who has retired early to work on a “chronicle” of the Viennese society in which he moves or knows at one remove. He despairs of this literary effort and gives it up, though he continues to keep notes, from which he assembles the manuscript we read from a retrospective of almost thirty years, i.e. the mid-1950s when the novel was in fact published. The events of the story take place in 1926 and 1927, culminating with the burning of the Palace of Justice on July 15, 1927. The cast of characters is enormous, ranging from low criminals to high (a murderer, prostitutes, a swindling financier), and including artists, workers, intellectuals, and aristocrats. A large inheritance hangs in the balance. Tied to this inheritance are the romantic fates of several characters, which are all resolved by the novel’s conclusion. The narrator himself likewise marries by the end: The Demons is textbook comedy. There is a virtuosic set-piece that functions as a key to the novel and its title in which a fictitious medieval manuscript is discovered and rendered in pseudo-archaic language. There is no single stand-in for the author. As is usual in such novels, he is distributed across several characters including the narrator and not reducible even to their composite.
For all that, is Doderer in this great novel really “nothing”? And if the ideas of the novel are to be held in such low esteem—for ideas there must be, even if we understand them as emerging from the material rather than directing it a priori—then what are we to grasp as the unifying structure and the motivating principle? Mosebach’s introduction, based on a study of the journals Doderer kept in the last decade of his life, points toward an answer:
“Through their origins, their political convictions, their aesthetic judgments, their tastes, and their principles, ‘anti-writers’ are rigidly defined personalities hermetically sealed inside the armor of their own opinions, which are ever seeking to fix themselves in the same unchangeable form using their template or schematic of reality. The ‘anti-writer’ already knows what he will see before he has begun to observe; He has taken sides, possibly including through his language, a language marked by his determination to make some point or other.... The ‘writer,’ on the other hand, tries, and tries anew everyday, to lay aside said armor... To draw on expressions from Thomistic philosophy, held by Doderer in such high esteem, the writer attempts to separate his own characteristics from the core of his being and to comprehend them as accidents that can be discarded.”
The genuine writer—as opposed to the anti-writer—in this account relies on another important term for Doderer, apperception. “‘Apperception,’” Mosebach writes, “is the readiness to receive the signals and impressions of the material world and the images rising from the memory.” So in addition to the empirical powers of the writer, we still have memory, which means we still have the subject, even after transcending or bracketing our “accidents” which threaten to make of us anti-writers. We must return to the rhetorical question with which Doderer closed his 1958 lecture: What then is a writer? He is not nothing after all, it seems. What remains to transubstantiate after the accidents are shorn?
The “crisis of the novel,” Doderer believed, was “a crisis of reality as a whole, and the concept that has grown problematic as a result, that has grown shopworn and suffered a decline—that has lost delineation, in short—is that of universality.” Responsible novelists, according to Doderer, are “the only people who will defend complexity and the whole of life to the utmost against any and all definitive solutions, who will sit right in the midst of life while at the same time placed under the frightful suspicion of sitting off to the side through their claim that everything one sees precisely and completely is beautiful.”
We begin to draw near the heart of the matter and the mysterious essence of the novelist. What is this universality? Doderer doesn’t say. But I would suggest that from The Demons we may surmise that the idea of universality draws upon three closely related ideas:
Cosmos. The word means both beautiful and ordered. That which has cosmic properties may be mapped, but it will be a beautiful and enticing map, one suggesting the richness and detail of that which is mapped, a map imbued with spirit (“Here be dragons…”). The map is not to be confused with a scheme or with stage props that cannot beckon and tempt the reader to questing over the horizon.
Wholeness. We have seen that Doderer was wary of “second realities.” The “demons” of the novel are those characters who are divided against themselves, absorbed into and deluded by second realities (ranging from sexual fetishes to political factions) and so split from primary reality. But that which is universal does not suffer such stark internal divisions. It has parts, but they are composed into a whole, so that in any part one has a sense of the whole and when regarding the whole one perceives harmonious composition.
Aesthetic distance. There is necessarily a kind of transcendental subjectivity involved in the perception of the universal. To see the whole according to the whole, i.e. attain to a catholic perspective (catholic means according to the whole), the perceiving subject must have access to some purchase that transcends the whole. And to comprehend the part as a part, likewise the subject cannot be totally immersed in the part.
In regard to the final point we may quote Herr Altschul, a bank director, who says to our narrator that “it almost seems that all capacity for judgment is based solely on taking the proper distance from a subject... Only at the proper distance will the necessary detailed knowledge be found; in fact it would be subject to a kind of law of gravitation, would fall into place given the successful establishment of correct distance. There is one of the mysteries of what is called universality.”
One comes away from The Demons with the impression that a city may be experienced as an epic of neighborhoods, and as the story of the communion between city and hinterlands. Certainly, this is how Geyrenhoff experiences Vienna, and in addition to treating his experience directly, he reveals it by means of his editorial privilege as narrator. Such is the value of aesthetic distance for novelistic technique: only the narrator, mediator between story and audience and thus master of the aesthetic interval, may give us the most vivid example of what it is like to perceive a beautiful order (cosmos) according to the whole. An epic is historical; experience is personal. Other characters are handicapped in their place-sense because they are deluded by second realities or simply oblivious. But some characters, including the narrator (who is so capable of distance that he frequently steps back and refers to himself in the third person) do catch glimpses of the order, and for them the sense of time may be woven into the sense of place in such a way that they would lack the former without the latter.
The sense of place, then, is what is left when all the “accidents” of the novelist have been stripped away and we inquire as to the essence of this kind of craftsman—and the essence of what he produces, its origin and guiding principle. You cannot tell the story of the whole universe. And you cannot rid yourself of place, cannot bracket the concept and imagine a person who is not somewhere. We cannot jettison place by moving, for we move through places, and if we are still then we are still somewhere. But a story of place—a tangible cosmos—is possible, and it is just such a story which makes place and provides the “delineation” of universality Doderer requires.
