Helmut Krausser's Satan
By Helmut Krausser
Dedalus Ltd., UK, 153 pp.
To read The Great Bagarozy
is to wish that more of Helmut Krausser were available in English. This first translated novel shows
Krausser to be a narrative stylist of deceptively light touch and rhythm. The prose moves in a quick and
breathless way, giving us all that is essential in the meeting of his
protagonists: Cora Dulz, the middle-aged psychiatrist, and Stanislaus Nagy, the
impossible patient who slowly reveals himself to be under the delusion--or is
it a delusion?--that he is the Devil.
Cora Dulz, who falls in love with her delusional patient, who hopes to
cure him and be cured by him, but who until the end resists believing his
claims might possibly be true.
At the very first session in Cora's consultation room, Nagy tells of
his reasons for seeking treatment: he has had hallucinations or visions of
Maria Callas. He explains that on
occasion the great opera singer appears to him as a revenant of sorts, singing. It happened to him first at a garden
party, then in a city park. Cora
rather indifferently takes notes as her patient describes these visions. But this is only the beginning. In fact Nagy's visions of Maria are not
really the essence of his problem: he has not, he admits, only known Maria in
these visions, but was there at her side through her whole career. Cora wonders how such a thing could
have been possible, given that the man before her appears to be in his
thirties, whereas Maria Callas died in 1977. Nagy explains it is possible because he is not
human. He is the Devil. And we learn over the following sessions
that he, the Devil, actually fell in love with Maria Callas: he needed her,
punished her; he put the burden of his decrepit satanic being on her. And now that she's gone he is left with
nothing but his own suffering: he, the Devil. This is the real reason he has come to Cora Dulz for
treatment. It is not merely a
matter of hallucinations.
Krausser's novel finds much of its power in its balancing of the two
worlds: that of the Devil and that of Cora Dulz, the Devil's shrink. Nagy is such a talented case of
delusion that his explanations of his predicament never miss a beat: he is
always a step ahead of Cora, who keeps trying to trip him up or find some
weakness in his story. She is too
much in love with him--with all the aggressivity that often implies--to step
back and question how it is that her patient's story seems to have no chinks. Cora feels humiliated by such a sharp
patient, one who is clearly delusional, but who nonetheless is far beyond her
in the arts of dialectic. She can
never catch him out in some inconsistency that would prove he is delusional.
Along with the tug of war
between Cora and Nagy, Krausser offers us a somewhat comic but ultimately
compelling portrait of the decline of Satan. We learn from Nagy/Satan that God himself has tired of the
world, and that ever since His departure the game of evil is no more fun. It turns out that God also involved
himself somewhat with Maria Callas, and that between them there was a certain
competition over her. But since
then it seems God has withdrawn, and the Devil is now left on an empty playing
field. When Nagy first speaks of
God and their sparring over Maria, Cora wants more information. The exchange is typical in its
minimalism. Nagy is explaining how
during one wartime incident in Greece the young Maria was supposed to be arrested
by a patrol of Italian soldiers. Having harbored the enemy, she could have been
sentenced to death. The soldiers
enter her flat:
". . . And what
happens? Maria sits down at the
piano and sings arias from Tosca. The Italians lower their rifles, sit
down in a semicircle round the piano and listen with rapt attention. Forget they're supposed to be searching
the flat! Unbelievable? I thought so too when I heard it. I sensed there was something going
on. I wasn't the only one who had
noticed Maria. She wasn't just my
toy any more. He was joining
in."
"Who do you mean by 'he'?"
"Well. . . Him. You know."
"God?"
Nagy gave an exasperated nod and a sideways look up at the ceiling. Cora put on her enthusiastic act.
"You know God personally?"
"We tend to avoid each other."
"What does he look like?"
Nagy
made a gesture to say he found the subject disagreeable.
"We haven't seen each other for a while now. The last time he looked pretty
old. He'd had enough of the world. May I proceed?"
"Please do."
If indeed Nagy is
delusional one of the great charms of his delusion is just this blandness: he
refers to cosmic history and its players as if they were tiresome and shrunken,
not even worth talking about. We
learn that at one point he was more glorious and truly satanic: back when he
still had wings. Cora acquires the
story of his growth and decline slowly, in bits and pieces, as a byproduct of
her attempts to trip him up. She
asks him how old he was at the time he became interested in Maria. He replies: "No older than I am
now."
[Cora:] "That's no answer."
"Oh yes it is. And a
profound one at that."
"I don't think so.
Would you like to talk about your childhood?"
"I never was a child.
In the beginning I was a thought.
Later on came images. The
images became flesh. At some point
or other the process of personification was. . . was overdone, probably. Nowadays there is hardly anything to
distinguish me from the idiot you think I am."
"But I don't think you're an idiot."
Ultimately Cora's love for Nagy fails because of her lack of
faith. She is smitten by him,
willing to risk everything for him, but even so she cannot give up her clinical
perspective. Faced with such
charisma as the Devil possesses, she can only maintain her self-respect by
upholding the sham of being his doctor.
Nagy is not really the
Devil. Nagy/Satan at least admits
that he began literally to worship Maria.
But Cora can never come near to such admission. This expert in the tricks pulled by the
ego to protect itself is unable to unmask her own self-deceptions. This doctor cannot heal herself, and
Nagy/Satan becomes disgusted by such evident cowardliness.
With Nagy, Krausser creates a character worthy of Dostoyevsky. The unique strength of this novel is
that he does so with a lightness and speed that normally doesn't come with such
existential heaviness. One waits
for more of Krausser's work to be translated, as one wonders if the style that
is so compelling in The Great Bagarozy is unique to this work or is Krausser's style in general.
The Great Bagarozy is
translated from the German by Mike Mitchell. I encourage him to bring out another of Krausser's novels.
Eric Mader-Lin
Check Krausser's *The Great Bagarozy* at Amazon.com
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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