—thus: literature as escape even in this sense—)

SCHWAB

Biographical note:

He can barely recall his boyhood years (and his childhood, not at all). He dreamed his way through them. He gets self-conscious when asked about them, pussyfoots around the facts as if they embarrass him. The truth is, he has trouble reconstructing them. They lie befogged in the diffuse light of the daydreams woven through them. The “way it could have been” always superseded what was actually happening.

So he’s almost incapable of telling the story of his life as it played out in the eyes of his family. They try to remind him of this or that event and he accepts it as a possibility. He can only conjure up something approximating it if it’s interlaced with a simultaneous dream motif whose emotional color allows him to recall that epoch. The tone, the nuances in the span between major and minor allow inferences about the character of actual occurrences. For instance, the anxiety at moving from a spacious, sunny, and comfortable house to a meager, narrow apartment after his father’s death; or the grueling, eye-straining hours of study so that he could escape that cramped place as soon as possible. His dream adventures rob those days of their reality. Replayed against the pale screen of life’s trivial happenings, his dreams are incomparably more intense and he is unable to discern their motifs and elements in the actual occurrences. Reality took place (a curious way to express it, but it captures the working-out of reality) without giving the experience of the past a sturdy framework, some sort of bone structure. And so in retrospect he himself is composed of feelings without a skeleton, a sort of mollusk. It’s up to him now to give what he dreamed then a framework and thus plausibility. He has countless possible biographies within himself. (Compare that to Aristides, whose memories are a series of concrete events only retrospectively illuminated by emotion.)

The loss of reality in the realm of the factual also determines Schwab’s relationship to the persons allotted him as family. To manufacture them he has to slot them into social categories. His mother: typically déclassé, a lady who had “seen better days,” suppressed indignation in every bone of her angular body, the “daughter of a good family” fated to become a domestic slave (in contrast to Aristides’s Aunt Selma, who was just as “worn out by housework” but without reproach and without dreams either, according to the testimony of Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha). Her love for her son was strict and ambitious; she was not about to let him think that lack of means led to social decline. Poor but proud. Emphasis on intellectual, culturally elevated pursuits. Idolized father: a frock-coated professor of the Wilhelmine era, incurably behind the times, his horizon blocked by the spines of his books. Highly respectable in his role as the noble philologist. Too sure of his own knowledge to become didactic. His son perceives it painfully as open contempt (in contrast to Aristides’s Uncle Helmuth: the flat-footed engineer who sometimes indulges in an excessively good mood, tells jokes, feels an affinity with the poltergeists that serve to lubricate the sticky spiritualism of séances. Not to mention his taproom politicizing).