Narrative in Crisis in Forster’s Howards End

Howards End, E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel of Britishness and class conflict, is without a doubt one of the most strangely contemporary old books I have ever read. While it fits politically nice and snugly into the mild meliorist tradition of someone like Turgenev, what makes Howards End so disarming to me is the specificity of its problem set. We might read a novel by Sally Rooney, who regularly expresses her political positions in public, but never really find those same views stated quite so obviously in the text itself. Instead, with her worlds of permissive and diffuse relationships she seems to describe what is, rather than tell us what she wishes for. 

Not so here. Howards End very clearly advocates for empathy with its “only connect” tagline, questions the obligations of those with money by literally having a dinner party where alternatives are acted out, and shows a kind of class striation and conflict that is still uneasily present today in the UK and elsewhere. As a work, its sympathies are not just “liberal” in the sense that most books are because authors generally have to care about at least some people or they wouldn’t bother writing about them – it is liberal in the sense that a reader today who doesn’t agree with that particular sets of views will probably find themselves feeling attacked and yet unable to dismiss the book as being of another time as one might with, say, a feminist novel of the 1860s. That is its strangeness.

None of this makes great literature, however. I came away from Howards End disappointed in it, but I think in my disappointment I have found an interesting thread to expand on in this post. This book’s politics are unmissable, for good or ill, and they are important to Forster, or else he would not have written the book. But just how he presents his theme, the way he arranges and explores it through his characters, is full of choices. Here I find decisions of focus, narrative, and characterisation, that I cannot help but fault. What is more, I suspect Forster would agree. For connected to the novel’s politics is also a kind of conscious crisis of representation – the story itself is in strain – as the narrator practically admits of the difficulty of writing his theme with the toolset of an Edwardian novelist. 

The Plot

Howards End is the story of the Schlegel family, in particular its two eldest children, the daughters Margaret and Helen. They are middle class in that hugely spacious definition of it current somewhere like the UK. Each has what today would be about one million pounds in the bank, according to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator – enough, in the 1900s, to live without working, but not quite enough to feel fully at ease. Though living in England, they are half-German, hence the name. Their father was first a soldier with the Prussians, then a philosopher of sorts, before he moved and settled in England. His name is a slight unsubtlety – a real Schlegel was an idealist philosopher in the early 19th century, and “idealist” is the word we might use to describe Margaret, Helen, and their younger brother Tibby. Without obligation to live in the world, the sisters are free to philosophise upon it at little gatherings of their friends and their brother free to enjoy the abstractions of beautiful music.

There is another world, however – the world of “anger and telegrams”. This is the world of the Wilcox family, with its patriarch Henry, scion Charles, daughter Evie and colony-bound Paul. The Wilcoxes are also middle class, (apologies to my international readers), albeit far wealthier than the Schlegels due to their involvement in business. Having met the Schlegels on a tour of Germany, the two families are later brought together by fate and chance within England itself.

The final family is the Basts, Leonard and Jenny. They are poor, but still in a way middle class too. (The narrator notes: “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.”) Leonard works as a clerk, which allows him some purchase above “the abyss” of true poverty, but as the novel progresses that abyss gets closer and closer. Jenny, meanwhile, is crude and childish. However, an experience in her past connects her to the Wilcoxes, just as Leonard’s accidental acquaintance with the Schlegels, via a misplaced umbrella, brings him into their world. In this way, Forster sets up the Schlegels to act as a balancing point between the two extremes of their class, and sets the stage for a conflict between them, one involving all the usual things we expect of an English novel – marriage, love, and property.

The Brilliance of a Missing Name

Our introduction to Leonard Bast comes in the novel’s fifth chapter, when all the Schlegels, including a relative from Germany, are gathered to listen to a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. This chapter is one of the novel’s best, because it manages to use not just this event as a way of delivering its themes, but also its very form. For a novel about the importance of connecting, Howards End tells us exactly how everyone responds in a different and hence disconnected way to the music: the Schlegel’s aunt taps, Helen visualises a heroic conflict, Margaret hears music, Tibby follows the score on his knee, and their German cousin thinks patriotically of how Beethoven was German. It is not quite a cycling of free minds, as in say, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, but it is still usefully weightless narration.

This, however, is not what makes the chapter good. What does that is the presentation of Leonard. Margaret, socially minded as ever, has been speaking to “some young man”. Later, after the next few pieces of music this man interrupts the Schlegels to say that Helen (who had just run off, overwhelmed by the music), has taken his umbrella. His awkwardness is obvious – he had “for some time been preparing a sentence.” Margaret helpfully gives him their address, but he suspects instead some hidden deceit. “To trust people is a luxury only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it,” begins the narrator. We learn how “the young man” had been the victim of confidence tricksters in the past, and how it has made him wary. The Schlegels, learning instead from their father, view every deceit as “rent.” “Rent to the ideal” of a society where we trust one another, that is.

The young man comes home with them to collect his umbrella, but does not stay for tea. He is forgotten, except as a memory of another world, of how “beneath these superstructures of wealth and art there wanders an ill-fed boy, who has recovered his umbrella indeed, but who has left no address behind him, and no name.” This ending makes explicit what has given the chapter its force: not once is Leonard named. He is both forcibly a character in the sense that he physically occupies space, yet forcibly denied that most basic right of character – an identity instead of a mere description. It seems to me that this is the most interesting moment of the whole novel, because in the denial (which only lasts a chapter) we see reflected an attitude relevant to the work as a whole. This strange clerk, this young man, does not seem to matter. He does not matter to the people talking to him, even if politically he might be on their side, and Forster chooses to let this come across in the text. That the text both draws our attention to this, then reveals his name in the next chapter, serves a simple purpose – it shames us into realising how easy it is to think nothing of another human life.

A story told with the wrong tools

With the comment earlier about the text’s refusal to depict “the poor” there’s the clearest indication from the narrator there’s some kind of representational crisis afoot alongside all the other crises of the early 20th century, such as changing demographics (“our race is degenerating”, the progressive Margaret remarks) and the threat of war. The problem is that even if the narrator is uncomfortable with his telling, he cannot quite see the solutions that will come to change the face of literature only a few years later. Structurally, Howards End is as conservative as its politics are liberal. Even if we have advanced beyond the days of Turgenev or Austen, when the story must end with a harmonious marriage, Howards End still ends with its shadow – domestic happiness and stability at last achieved. So much, so acceptable – happy endings do happen.

What I find much harder to accept is the role of chance in Howards End, which substitutes for the representation of tragedy by other means. That Leonard Bast might make the acquaintance of the Schlegels at a concert is possible. That his wife might have become a fallen woman thanks to Henry Wilcox while he was visiting a business concern of his in Cyprus some ten years previously is too much. Chance becomes unfair when the reader feels they are not being taken seriously. Howards End reminded me a little of Hardy, who seemed in The Mayor of Casterbridge to enjoy the action of hurting his characters more than he cared for the point he was trying to make. I don’t believe Forster did have any great love of scandal, which makes his choices even more absurd to me.

What is so bad about Jenny’s history with Henry is that it is utterly pointless within the story. The reveal takes place some two-thirds of the way through the book at the wedding of Henry Wilcox’s daughter Evie, a time of conspicuous consumption and general opulence. Into this place arrives Helen, bringing the Bast couple, who are destitute following Leonard’s loss of his job. Leonard and Henry have already met, briefly, at the Schlegel’s. Following Henry’s offhand suggestion at that time that Leonard look for another job the richer man has caused, inadvertently, the latter’s stumble towards his abyss. To accuse Henry of responsibility for another man’s fall the text need do precisely nothing, for the matter is clear already.

Adding guilt for a crime committed in the past, about which there is no prior evidence or indication in the text, merely cheapens all this. (If anything, Henry is depicted as made uncomfortable by the idea of sex, which makes the incident harder, not easier, to believe.) If we want to comment, as I believe Forster does, upon the unfairness of economic outcomes, then the contrast of starving Basts and feasting Wilcoxes is entirely sufficient. Further, if it is moral intrigue that we want, then Margaret (engaged to Henry), forced into the morally unpleasant position of attacking her sister for her “theatrical nonsense” in bringing the two uninvited guests to the party, provides drama enough. This is psychology, rather than scandal, and all the more interesting.  

In other words, Forster lacks subtlety here. Or rather, he’s capable of it, but allows unsubtle moments such as this into the plot at key moments. Through events like the running-over of a dog in the Wilcoxes’ motorcar and their response to it, (“the insurance company will see to that”), their attitudes and carelessness are skewered well enough.

The novel’s finale is another moment involving the Basts where Forster seems to prefer silly action to serious subtlety. After Margaret’s rejection of the Basts at the wedding, in a moment of rage and confusion, Helen sleeps with Leonard while his wife is in bed next door. This is reasonably plausible if we assume more alcohol than was previously mentioned was involved. Helen becomes pregnant from the encounter and with still more confused emotions leaves England for the continent. After some time and concerned by her sister’s lack of contact, Margaret devises a plan with Henry to catch Helen at Howards End, where the family books are now being stored. Helen arrives, Margaret and she meet, and they decide to spend one night together before Helen departs again. Meanwhile, Leonard, who has been living for the past few months by cadging money off family members, decides he must see Margaret to confess. Hot-tempered Charles also heads to Howards End, to get Margaret away and back to her husband.

When Charles sees Leonard, the cause of his sister-in-law’s shameful pregnancy, his response is to whack him over the head with the Schlegel’s sword. (The blunt side.) Leonard falls over and is crushed by a bookcase he bumps on the way down. He does not get up. The aspiring upper middle class murders the descending lower middle class – one cannot get more direct than that! But one certainly should be less direct. Leonard doesn’t need to die at all. A life of despair, as Leonard watches his family gradually give him less and less money until he becomes truly desperate, would be far worse. It would also serve the book’s key message, “only connect”, far better, by showing how he was slowly disconnecting from everything. Instead, at the novel’s end, it’s an attempt to connect that he dies, which certainly makes Charles look bad, but is far less impactful as a political message of the sort the novel seems to want to make.

In other words, it’s not just that the drama is silly, it’s that it is cheaper, less interesting, than the alternative. Margaret’s divided loyalty between her husband and her sister is much more morally meaty than having her be divided over her husband’s unbelievable indiscretion from before they ever met. Charles’ failure in life is much better depicted in the scraps of his home life that we see – his too many children, his too small prosperity, and his anxiousness over his own class position – than through having him become a murderer. And finally, Leonard’s abjection is far more interesting than his poor heart. In other words, I am trying to say something like – more Chekhov is needed. As he well knew, drowning, slipping into the wrong life and having no idea how to escape it, is far more horrible – and relevant to our own existences – than scandal.

Conclusion

Howards End is an accomplished novel. The pieces fit together, the characters exist reasonably well, the theme reaches the reader without too much difficulty. The rich remain so, the poor suffer, and those in the middle muddle along, maybe with a bit of mental torment but no real difficulties. Its strength is its articulateness – its discussions feel forceful in the way that only discussions felt as part of a tradition can do – and in many of its subtleties and images, such as the “rent” to the ideal of trust. Yet overall, I think it is ruined by structural decisions that devalue the effort Forster clearly put into his more subtle comments. If it had been published not in 1910, but say, 1924, as was A Passage to India, or even later, perhaps Forster would have had more opportunities to tell his story more effectively. He might have read Woolf’s “The Russian Point of View”, for example, and realised all the options he had missed.

As it stands, this is a strange work. It’s so modern in its sympathies, so outdated in its approach, that the overall effect is of a contemporary novel by a new writer who hasn’t yet mastered their craft.

For more ambivalent comments on Forster, I’ve written on Maurice here

Jacob’s Room and the Limits of Biography

1922 was a good time to be a person who read books written in English. Ulysses and The Waste Land both appeared that year, though you might have had trouble getting your hands on the former because it was banned in various places for obscenity. However, if you wanted cutting edge fiction but couldn’t get your hands on Joyce’s work, then luckily there was another great writer ready and waiting. Virginia Woolf is a wonderful writer, and every time I have returned to her I am grateful for it. My wanderings within the pages of the first of her “experimental” novels, 1922’s Jacob’s Room, was no different. This is a novel about a man where his role as plot actor is very much secondary, his voice muffled. It’s a Bildungsroman with very little Bildung. Most of all, though, it’s a frolic, a joyous exploration of what literature and language can do.

But also, however, what they cannot. Jacob’s Room concerns the short life of a young man in Edwardian England, Jacob Flanders, yet from the title alone there’s already a hint of a problem – for the title refers to his lodgings, and not to the man himself. This problem is what makes the work so fascinating – I interpret Jacob’s Room as a work that’s both determined to shake off old ideas of characterisation and literary creation, while at the same time trying to defend itself against the kind of total narrative collapse that rejecting old forms entirely might lead to or imply. It’s this strange mix of past and future, a kind of conservative modernism, that makes the work so fascinating. Compared to Ulysses, it’s really a kind of anxious battleground about what the future of literature might look like – and what it should not.

Out With The Old

Somewhere or other I remember reading that literary modernism began with a growing scepticism of the idea of character. Perhaps the best way to explain how this works is by reference to a work by one of my favourite German writers of the 19th century, Theodore Fontane, No Way Back. In that novel, our main character, Count Holk, has an affair while away from his wife. His letters home, naturally, reveal none of this. But we, readers, know the truth. And eventually his wife finds out too. Fontane uses letters as a way of exploring the communication difficulties two people can have, all the while Holk’s character remains known to us and his wife’s remains knowable too – that Holk ultimately does not understand her, leading to the novel’s tragedy, is a fault of his character, not a statement about character in general.

Letters and other writings dot the pages of Jacob’s Room as well, and as with No Way Back they are places for concealment more than communication. Jacob writes home, revealing nothing of his loves or his thoughts. His mother is delighted, “he seems to be having… a very gay time.” But what separates the treatment of writing in both works is that in Jacob’s Room there comes no revelation of the truth, no contradiction to the apparent world of the letter. The final scene sees his mother and Bonamy, the man who loved him, standing in Jacob’s empty room with “all his letters strewn about for anyone to read.” The dispersal of the letters indicates a similar dispersal of character. Who is Jacob? One person to his mother, another to Bonamy. Putting all the letters together, or the two people talking, would only be to court chaos. It’s not that character is changeable; rather, that there may be nothing solid about it all.

Other letters and writings are similarly undermined. Those of well-bred Clara are “those of a child”, and even when she writes in her diary, there’s nothing more there than air – she writes “how the weather was fine, the children demons, and Jacob Flanders unworldly.” There’s a sense that even when characters in Jacob’s Room try to express themselves, they cannot. We readers only have what we can see of them, hear of them, and that is rarely enough. “It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, not yet entirely what is done.” This phrase is repeated, word for word, twice in Jacob’s Room. What pessimism, really, lies in it – “hints,” “not exactly,” “not yet entirely”. If character is so diffuse that this is how we trap it, then clearly what we can trap will be far from the real thing.

Elsewhere that pessimism is more clear, as we can see from this description of men on a bus: “Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all–save “a man with a red moustache,” “a young man in grey smoking a pipe.”” Traditionally, by focusing on individuals, we might get a past. This does not work here. Jacob’s father has a grave that may not be his, while the scenes of Jacob’s childhood are mere flashes of impressions with as much attention on the other characters and their thoughts as on Jacob himself.

Finally, we might hope that impersonal forces would provide a key to character. Instetten, in Fontane’s Effi Briest, decries this “society-thing” that forces him to kill a man he does not hate because of an idea of honour he is powerless to reject. What are the forces in Jacob’s Room?“The incessant commerce of banks, laboratories, chancelleries, and houses of business”, “the men in clubs and Cabinets”. Woolf explicitly names this “unseizable force” that drives men to their deaths. But whether the forces of her novel match those of, for example, Fontane’s, is another matter.

On the one hand, Jacob is shaped into seeming conventionality by a usual society – the artistically-inclined former graduates of Cambridge and Oxford. He stands for the Greeks (despite knowing the language poorly) and for Shakespeare, neither a particularly radical opinion. He has other views, such as his ideas of women, that are still more clearly conditioned by society. However, though ultimately his society does kill him – for the Great War is coming – it seems fair to say that Woolf suggests we cannot just turn to impersonal forces to describe character either. Since Jacob is hard to fix down to begin with, he is too uncertain to be moulded by external forces.

All this is to say that the novel looks to the sources of character from fiction of previous centuries – what is revealed in letters, or the forces of an impersonal society, and says these are not adequate. Even dialogue itself is typically disconnected, disjointed words floating on the page, with Jacob rarely speaking. The old ways do not work, but how does Woolf innovate and experiment to build an alternative idea of character – and what are the limits?

In With The New

If I try to think of how this novel works, what makes it modern in its depiction of character, the answer is simple – the fragmentary flashes of prose that make up the bulk of the text. Jacob’s Room is told in snatches, sometimes only a single short paragraph long. It is true that every biography is broken into events and key moments, for lives are long. But in Jacob’s Room the moments chosen are less obviously important, even when contextualised. We might read symbolic importance into them, such as by analysing the significance of the sheep’s skull he finds on the beach as a child or the image of the moth, but it’s not necessarily the case that any of the characters joins us in such narrativizing work.

All memory is fragmentary. When I try to think back to yesterday, an ordinary day, there’s scant solidity to it. I recall a few images, the food I cooked for dinner, but little more. Woolf enjoys noting vibrant colours, and drifting between her characters’ consciousnesses, as if they are already looking back from some moment a little ahead. This gives the text a kind of blurred feeling. Even its characters seem themselves a little like names on whirling sticks, because none is quite embodied, pinned down and described like a beetle in the previous century would be. Really, like certain paintings, while we may appreciate the texture of Woolf’s prose up close, it’s only when we retreat a little that we see the overall effect – the mood, the shifting shapes settling into scenes.

Such fragmentation puts action into the background and overall reflects that pessimism about getting to the heart of character which I mentioned earlier. Solidity, perhaps, comes from the novel’s interest in architecture and buildings, which, suggested by its very title provides the clearest example of this. Yet Jacob’s own room, when we first encounter it at Cambridge, gives no clue to his personality. “Jacob’s room had a round table and two low chairs.” For the first mention of the title, its lack of force is its force. He has books and the detritus recognisable to anyone who has gone to Oxbridge – “a photograph of his mother; cards from societies with little raised crescents, coats of arms, and initials.” A piece of writing in his own hand is titled “Does History consist of the Biographies of Great Men?” – a normal assignment then, as if to highlight that Jacob is really only an average Edwardian, nothing special. 

We often think of Woolf as a writer of the inner world, someone who lived in the marginal thoughts of men and women. Jacob’s Room certainly shows her moving between her characters, but of them, Jacob is probably the one inhabited least. When we hear a voice, like his room it almost seems to tell us we were fools for expecting anything more of him – “I’m twenty-two. It’s nearly the end of October. Life is thoroughly pleasant, although unfortunately there are a great number of fools about. One must apply oneself to something or other–God knows what. Everything is really very jolly–except getting up in the morning and wearing a tail coat.” Here is the gentle delusion of superiority of the untested, but does this show Jacob to be any different to a hundred thousand other young men? Certainly not.

At the beginning I mentioned a kind of anxiety to the prose. Woolf read avidly among her modernist contemporaries such as Katherine Mansfield and knew through Eliot what Joyce was up to with Ulysses, so she had a keen awareness of the options for advancing prose which were being worked upon by others. One thing I found curious was that in her revisions of the novel Woolf primarily worked to reduce instances of interiority. It was as if, while retreating from the scenes and structures of 19th century fiction – the genealogies and letters, the carefully orchestrated scenes and overheard gossip – she did not want to commit wholly to something from the 20th century, that totally absorbing, egotistical monologic stream of consciousness of the sort we read from Molly Bloom at the end of Ulysses. Something that is both extraordinary, yet at the same time a kind of dead end, for it denies the soul of every other living being.

All this is to say that it’s as if Woolf were experimenting here with trying to find a third way of characterisation, neither the pure continuous interiority of the stream of consciousness, nor the lifeless puppetry of the realist novel. A characterisation through fragments, through assembling snatched moments of life, and of consciousness, into a kind of whole. Except, if that is the goal, it is a failure. I have no idea who Jacob is, and I am not sure that any truth on that score really lurks within the novel. We may have escaped the madness of stream of consciousness and run out onto the street, but now cars are hurtling past us, and all is disorientation.

Yet if the goal is not to create a character, but to paint a world, to load readers with the impressions and thoughts of a society, then by contrast Jacob’s Room is a great success. We learn as much about Jacob in five pages as we do in fifty – giving us more is only like putting another thin sheet of coloured glass upon a heap, and indeed the effect of colouring is diminished as more and more is added. The first sheet is when things are most striking. So it is that in a single one of Woolf’s fragments she has more than enough opportunity to create her effects.

The one that sticks in my mind comes from early on, a tiny story of four pages, in which Jacob’s mother receives a letter from his tutor proposing marriage, considers it, and decides to remain independent. In this section Woolf’s total technical mastery is evident. Mrs Flanders receives the letter and, expecting nothing but remarks related to her son’s work, reads it while continuing her own business. Thus do we see her, divided: ““Yes, enough for fish-cakes tomorrow certainly – Perhaps Captain Barfoot—” she had come to the word “love.”” A few sentences on she rages at her children, not truly out of anger towards them, but because she is angry at the letter and cannot control it. This is all wonderful, delicate writing. Her emotions, a world of them, are covered in a few pages. Completeness stretches even to time – we get a little epilogue, in which some years later Mr Floyd sees Jacob by chance in London, but thinks he “had grown such a fine young man that Mr Floyd did not like to stop him in the street.”

What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Woolf comes up against the limits of biography within this approach. She can create characters through her experimentation, certainly. But with her reluctance to travel too deep and stay too long inside their heads, as she does in her later novels, that characterisation can only go so far. That is why Jacob remains a blur, while those other characters, whose internal worlds are clearer to us, are themselves are much clearer – Mrs Dalloway or Mrs Ramsay, for example. Overall, Jacob’s Room is a book of wonderful prose, challenging forms, and experiments which remain relevant to writing even today. I did not love it as I do To the Lighthouse, but that is no matter. Woolf was such a prolific writer – of letters and diaries as well as her novels – that as readers we get a view of nearly-unmatched privilege compared to other writers. We see not just the brilliance of her experiments when they succeed, but also the many false-starts and sites of practice she needed to prepare for them. That, for anyone interested in the craft of fiction, will never not be exciting.

Interrogation as a Way of Life – Max Frisch’s Bluebeard

Like a suicide, a crime well investigated makes even a lazy reader pay attention, looking for clues that might explain what happened. In the Swiss writer Max Frisch’s tale Bluebeard (Blaubart), our attention is rewarded with a short but rich exploration of the consequences of one man’s experience of being under investigation for murder. Though he finds himself “acquitted for lack of proof”, the accusation of murdering his ex-wife leaves Dr Felix Schaad stuck in a kind of self-interrogative mode of thinking long after he walks free. In this way, Frisch’s tale becomes both a kind of parable about identity under threat, a challenge to all investigative legal systems, and finally a story about the relationship between truth and conviction in a world of unreliable and confused memories and witnessing.

The Crime

Dr Felix Schaad, a doctor and respected member of Zurich’s upper-middle class, is informed that his ex-wife Rosalinde was found strangled with a menstrual pad stuffed in her mouth and a tie used to finish her off. Rosalinde, now an escort, had seemingly remained on good terms with Schaad and the two had met on the morning of the crime at her house – he had been seen by two witnesses. Most importantly the tie, we learn immediately, is his. Schaad has no alibi because his excuses – walking, or being in his office – cannot be corroborated. For the courts, the question is simple – why did he do it? For the reader, inhabiting something approximating Schaad’s mind, there’s a different question – did he do it?

Interrogation as a way of life

The first thing we notice with Bluebeard is the narration. This is a short, dense book, but also a divided one. On the one hand we have Schaad, brief flashes from his own mind as he tries to play billiards or go for a walk, and on the other we have the world of his intrusive thoughts, coming in the form of memories of his time at court. This dialogue is delivered using dashes rather than quotation marks, which gives it a formal quality, as if we are reading a transcript or report. Neither section lasts more than a page or at most two before we shift into the other. At one point Schaad plays billiards. The clicking of the balls can keep his attention focused, but when he stops to use some billiard chalk on the cue, these memories burst in. Their very shortness on the page makes them feel sudden and, as it were, diegetic.

More important than the division of the text into interrogation and narration is the relative weighting of the two. Schaad is utterly dominated by the remembered, then later imagined, world of the court. “Acquittal from lack of evidence – how can anyone live with this? I am fifty-four.” This is the entirety of his introduction to us. Then we return to the dialogue. As a portrait of a man, we get very little of who Schaad is through these sections. Rather, we get a sense of how he lives – entirely in the shadow of the remembered trial. He cannot take his own life or leave Zurich, for either of these would be considered a tacit acknowledgement of his own guilt for the murder. Even as the months pass, and Schaad sells his medical practice, the trial remains in his own mind. He has left the interrogation, but it hasn’t left him.

At some point we notice that we are moving on from memories into something stranger. Schaad’s dead parents are questioned as witnesses, even Rosalinde herself is brought forth. Though he is now free, the fantastical prosecutor continues to challenge Schaad’s every action. In a way, this makes me think a little of that famous philosophical injunction to know oneself. In Schaad’s case the self-questioning becomes so dominant that it totally destroys his ability to live. He wants to be free of it, but nothing seems to help – alcohol, walking, travel. At the end of the book he is finally so broken by the questioning that he actually does the one thing that he imagines means it should stop – he goes to a police station and admits the guilt that feels is his own but, as it turns out, never was.

In Bluebeard interrogation becomes a way of life, just as the court drama changes Schaad’s life. His friends are called in to bear witness against him, his name covers newspaper headlines, and he loses his livelihood as people no longer want to be treated by him. On a simple level we can read this as a fair complaint about how being accused of murder works. Yet on another, it’s about identity and how hard it can be to maintain. All of Schaad’s secrets are placed in public view and this leaves him unable to allow himself any privacy again in case he should once more be subjected to judicial scrutiny. No independent life remains for him. He becomes fearful, trapped within the biting thoughts of his own mind. 

Truth, Guilt, and Certainty

If the effect upon someone’s identity of being dragged through the courts is one key thematic aspect of Bluebeard, another is its treatment of the matter of truth. We might want to say that the judicial system aims at truth, but really this is a desperately idealistic suggestion. Much fairer is to say that it aims at a relative certainty – a “good enough” reading of the facts that can convince the court of one thing or another. Nothing higher, no matter the evidence marshalled, is in the end determined. If truth was something so simple to establish, the philosophers would be out of a job.

Just as a narrator wants to present his or her version of events, not the truth, so too does the prosecution in a legal environment. But this is a bias, an interpretative lens, that barges in and pushes truth out of the way, whenever it is inconvenient. Schaad, for at least some of the people in the court room, has murdered his ex-wife, and all that remains is to find the smoking gun. As Bluebeard comes from a time before omnipresent CCTV or DNA testing, instead the goal of the investigation is to find a psychological justification for Schaad’s actions. If the goal were interpreting physical evidence like fibres or fingerprints, perhaps Schaad’s mind might have emerged relatively unscathed. Instead, the evidence is mental, personal, psychological.

Schaad’s many ex-wives are interviewed to find proof that not only was the man subject to fits of jealousy, he also took out this rage on others. (They deny it, stating that his violence was only ever directed towards himself). Schaad’s drunken comments to a friend that he could strangle Rosalinde appear as clear evidence of his intention. But if he did not kill her nor did ever truly intend to they mean nothing except that he should watch his language better. The same can go for the notes that Schaad made or his diaries, which are likewise trawled through. Eventually, even his dreams are interpreted. (At this point we have moved beyond memory of the trial into imagined persecution, I hope). None of these pieces of evidence confirms that Schaad did it, but they aim at building enough certainty that they might ultimately displace any question of the truth.

Yet all these pieces of evidence are inherently unreliable. Just as the court tries to find its truth, or rather certainty, we see how flaky it is – which is why Schaad ultimately gets acquitted. Schaad himself cannot remember what his tie is doing in Rosalinde’s home, or account for his every movement. A witness who claimed to have seen him that morning later admits that it was actually his wife who saw him, because he himself was in the cellar. Another witness is just a child. “As witness you have to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. You know that false witness is punishable by time in prison, and in serious cases by as many as five years there.” This phrase is repeated over and over as witnesses are introduced. But it’s hard not to read it ironically, when there’s so little truth reported, and so little accurate witnessing.  

Conclusions

The power, though, of institutions like courts is that they can determine, at least to a certain extent, what is true. They get inside the head, as they do to Schaad. They turn chance remarks into dark intentions, and leave him unable to live his life. I found myself thinking as I read of another person faced with the overwhelming power of truth-determining institutions, Nellie Bly. The American journalist visited the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on today’s Roosevelt Island after posing as insane, but dropped the act once she was already in there. Yet “the more sanely I talked and acted, the crazier I was thought to be”. Just as with Schaad, all action and speech becomes refracted through the idea that a person is guilty – of murder or in this case mere madness. To protest that one is innocent, as Schaad does, is proof that one is guilty. An innocent person, of course, has nothing to hide.

Bluebeard is short but intense. In a way, it feels like Kafka’s The Trial, in that both works are both real and both parables of justice. Both works end with their central characters admitting to a guilt that is not really there, though Frisch’s tale, being situated in something closer to the real world, is kinder, and leaves Schaad alive. To me the interest in the work lies not in the crime itself, but in the light the work throws upon those human fallibilities of memory and motive, and especially in that very real-feeling form of madness as Schaad turns his own interrogation into a way of life.

Bluebeard was the last work of fiction that Frisch published in his lifetime. Reading it, you can see how it might have felt like an end for him. What it says about the possibilities of narrative and truth-finding are just too negative, the impacts upon a life from this fact are just too stark. Still, it makes for a work worth pondering.