Rich Text Document (draft of October 2008)
A Treatise on Mannequins
Continued
THE FOLLOWING evening, Father picked up with renewed volubility his dark and complicated topic. The lineation of his wrinkles folded and unfolded with subtle cunning. In each spiral, a projectile of irony was concealed. But at times inspiration spread the vertebrae of his wrinkles, which grew with a kind of enormous, swirling menace, withdrawing in silent scrolls far into the winter night. ‘Waxwork figures, my ladies,’ he began. ‘Calvary’s parodies of mannequins — but beware of making light of them, even in this form. Matter does not know how to take a joke. It is eternally full of tragic solemnity. Who will be so bold as to consider that they may trifle with matter, shape it for the sake of a joke, and that the joke will not take root there, will not be immediately engraved like fate, like predestination? Have you any idea of the pain, the stifled suffering, the unliberated, shackled to matter suffering of that rag doll which has no idea how it became what it is, or why, being a parody, it must endure in that form, as if etched in stone? Can you appreciate the impact of an expression, an appearance, a semblance — the tyrannous licence with which it assails a defenceless piece of wood and lords over it like a possessing, tyrannical and ruling soul? Bestow an expression of anger on some head of straw and canvas and you abandon it once and for all to that anger, that convulsion and that tension — locked into that blind animosity from which there is no end p.40 escape. The crowd laughs at that parody. Weep, my ladies, over your own fate when you see the destitution of imprisoned matter, oppressed matter that does not know what it is or what it is for, or what that gesture is leading to, with which it has been now and forever endowed.
‘The crowd laughs. Do you grasp the terrible sadism, the intoxicating demiurgic cruelty of that laughter? For after all, my ladies, we should bemoan our own fate at the sight of that destitute matter, violated matter upon which a terrible injustice has been perpetrated. From this, my ladies, springs the terrible sadness of all the clownish golems, all the rag dolls tragically agonising over their comical grimaces.
‘Here is the anarchist Luccheni, murderer of Empress Elizabeth*; here is Draga, the demonic and ill-starred Queen of Serbia**; and here is a gifted youth — the hope and pride of his line — ruined by the lamentable practice of onanism. O irony of those names, those semblances!
‘Is there really anything at all of Queen Draga, even the merest shadow of her being, in that rag doll, her double? We are reassured by that semblance, that appearance and that name, and we feel no need to ask what that unhappy creation is, in and of itself. And yet it must be someone, my ladies, someone anonymous, someone menacing, someone lamentable — someone who has never in her deafened life even heard of Queen Draga...
‘Have you heard at nights the terrible howl of those wax dolls locked inside their fairground booths, the doleful chorus of those end p.41 hulks of wood and porcelain, beating their fists against the walls of their prisons?’
In my father’s face, animated by the menace of the matters he had summoned up from the darkness, a whirlpool of wrinkles arose, a crater growing deep within, at the bottom of which a menacing, prophetic eye blazed. His beard bristled strangely; wisps and tufts of hair, shooting out from his warts, moles and nostrils, stood up on end. Thus he stood, rigid and with fiery eyes, trembling with inner perturbation, like an automaton that had jammed and ground to a halt.
Adela rose from her chair and required us to close our eyes to what was about to happen. Then she stepped up to Father and, with her hands on her hips, adopting an air of emphatic resoluteness, demanded very forcibly...
— — — — — — — — — — —
— — — — — — — — — — —
The girls sat rigid, with downcast eyes, in extraordinary numbness...
end p.42
> -A Treatise on Mannequins, Conclusion- >
Notes
* ... the anarchist Luccheni, murderer of Empress Elizabeth: Empress Elizabeth, the wife of Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary (who features prominently in Schulz’s story ‘A Spring’), was murdered by the Italian anarchist Luccheni in 1898.
[RETURN]
** Draga, the demonic and ill-starred Queen of Serbia: the Serbian monarchs Alexander I Obrenovich and his queen, Draga, were assassinated in 1903.
[RETURN]