Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Mental Health in a Mental World

I recently read Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, a delightful book on the problems facing almost everybody alive in late capitalist society – which is to say, pretty much anyone reading this.

We have come a long way as a people. Free market capitalism has lifted great numbers out of poverty, given homes to them, placed food on their tables, and led to countless new inventions. It’s hard to argue with that. But something in the past fifty-or-so years has gone very wrong. Today, nations continue getting richer, our phones continue getting faster, our supermarkets continue getting even better stocked… and yet it appears that we have lost something of value that the data can’t or won’t acknowledge. People are getting unhappier – there is a worsening crisis in mental health, the planet’s ecosystems are collapsing before our eyes, innovation is slowing down, income inequality is getting worse, and extremism is on the rise in our politics. It’s hard to argue with that, too.

A photo of Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism
Mark Fisher (1968-2017) was a cultural theorist and a pretty cool guy. Capitalist Realism is probably his most famous work, but he is also important in modern British music criticism. Photo by MACBA and used under CC BY-SA 2.0

Capitalist Realism tries to explain what’s gone so wrong. It’s a compelling, frightening, and valuable book. Here I’d like to cover a few of its very many exciting ideas, and then discuss the value of Fisher’s critique for people who are not on the radical left like he was. For it turns out that the very power of this book lies in the way it answers questions faced by people all over the political spectrum.

What is Capitalist Realism?

As I study Russian, my first port of call is almost always going to be Dostoevsky. His books are full of passionate characters who are constantly espousing theories for new forms of governance, people filled with a great and infectious optimism for the future of the world. Dostoevsky himself was a dreadful reactionary, but his characters weren’t always. In the 1860s Russia was filled with hope – serfdom had been abolished, and the new Tsar seemed like a reformer. People debated the direction reforms should take, but nobody doubted that positive change was coming.

Things are different now. Early on in Capitalist Realism Fisher writes that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”, a quote that comes from either Slavoj Zizek or Fredric Jameson. That is the essence of the problem – we cannot imagine, or even hope to imagine, a way out. Fisher’s own definition for capitalist realism is this: “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it”. Since the collapse of the USSR it has seemed that there’s no other system quite so resilient as capitalism. But accepting this doesn’t exactly bring us happiness.

Fisher charts this loss of imagination using examples from popular culture. He compares the utopian aspirations of rock with the grittiness and self-styled “realism” of modern hip-hop. He contrasts the movie Heat, where criminals don’t form attachments to anything because they are always on the move, with earlier gangster movies where there was an emphasis on loyalty and honour. And what he finds is that the closer we approach to the present day the less hope and non-monetary values there is to be found.

Values in a World of Capital

“Everything has a price”, and indeed it’s true for everything from harvested organs to works of art. But the problem is that’s not necessarily a good thing. To give something a price is to take away everything about it which is priceless. The mysterious quality of historical or artistic artefacts is lost, in what Fisher calls the “desacralization of culture”, the second you say how much it’s worth. It allows you to make comparisons between things that shouldn’t be compared – a work of art and a loaf of bread, for example. But the very moment something has a price that price then blocks out those other values which cannot be so easily named. And over time those values are lost.

If you think of art, or a watch, or a car, as an investment, then you’re already thinking about things in a way that’s conditioned by capitalism. In much the same way, if you think about Christmas as a time for getting cool presents, then the original message of that time has been lost or at the very least partially displaced too. I’m not saying that Christmas ought to be the Christian holiday it once was – rather, it’s a good example of how capitalism can destroy the traditional aspects of tradition and leave only a commercialised shell in its wake. In the UK we now “celebrate” Black Friday – a whole tradition was created for consumerism where there was just a calendar day before.

Fault Lines: Not So Real

Capitalism works so long as people buy into it, mentally and literally. Boom and bust cycles are all dependent on people investing themselves psychologically into speculation, and without these cycles, capitalism falls apart. Capitalism portrays itself – that is, businesses and politicians supportive of the status quo portray it – as hyperrational, hyper logical, the best option. Fisher writes that the only way to challenge capitalism is to reveal that this portrayal is a fabrication, and bear that knowledge in your own mind and spread it into the minds of others, too. Where are these fault lines in the system? Fisher singles out a few.

The first of these is the environment, and the effect on it of climate change. The fact that our ecosystems are collapsing because of capital’s pursuit of unlimited growth has already provided many people with an impetus to abandon faith in capitalism. Science, which is so valued in capitalism’s self-theorizing, is suddenly ignored and denied when it paints a terrifying view of the future. The consequences of climate change are not yet sufficiently visible, in the West at least, to cause mass clamour for alternatives to untrammelled free market growth, but they will be in due course. Millions of climate refugees, increased storms and extreme weather, and rising sea levels, will all be visible challenges faced by the West and capital in the coming decades.

Next, there is the matter of bureaucracy. Fisher points out that what we have seen, in spite of notions of “innovation” and “efficiency”, is that capitalism now demands reams of paperwork. Much of it, however, seems pointless. Endless targets, self-inspections, call centres – these aren’t efficient at all. Capitalism appears to be deteriorating from its initial agility. Fisher also talks about culture in connection with this. He approvingly refers to Jameson again, who thought that in the later stages of capitalism all culture will be pastiche or revivalism. That is, innovation will end. To me, at least, it does seem that culture is stagnant right now, with postmodernity being a dead-end but nothing else being created as an alternative. Fisher points out that by contrast, in the Soviet Union, cinematic innovation was far greater than it was elsewhere. Consider Tarkovsky and Vertov, among others. However, this is hard to quantify.

The third point is mental health. There are no two ways about it: people in the West are getting sadder and sadder. It’s all well and good to excuse this by saying that rising numbers of sufferers are due to changing methods of diagnosis or increased openness or by blaming social media. All of these things play a part. Fisher doesn’t deny that chemical imbalances can make us depressed. But he notes that capitalism encourages us to seek solutions and causes within ourselves – whether in the brain, or in our family, or in our upbringing – instead of in the system. “Unhealthy” mental health can be seen in the brain, but that doesn’t mean that its first cause was in the brain, or that the solution is necessarily in the brain. I know that when I’m depressed the best antidepressant is company – the complete opposite of capitalism’s relentless atomization of us.

A picture of the cover of Capitalist Realism, showing skyscrapers and a red background for text.
It’s red! There are skyscrapers! It’s enough to make any big-C conservative shudder… (fair use)

When you consider all the things that late-stage capitalism does to humanity, it’s hard not to see a lot of truth in Capitalist Realism’s suggestions. Nature is being destroyed, values that are not economic are devalued, family is broken up due to demands that both parents work to make ends meet, we lack the free time to make friends and spend time with them, and when we see people our views are distorted by increasingly unrealistic portrayals of life seen through social media, and politically we feel powerless too. And the worst thing is, we can’t imagine another system. We feel absolutely trapped and hopeless.

A Conservative View on Capitalist Realism

I have a habit of arranging all of the books that I’m taking with me on holiday in various shapes and piles, and rather unfortunately Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? was lying in pride of place just as my mother entered to see how my packing was going for my latest trip to Russia. She took one uncomfortably long look at the book, said nothing, and promptly left. Unfortunately, it seems like I’ll have to be defending myself against accusations of being a socialist anti-monarchist traitor for the next few months again, just when I thought I’d managed to escape the worst of it…

All this is frustrating, because Capitalist Realism, for all its radicalism and its angry red cover, is not a book that “conservatives” should reject out of hand. Capitalism ought to be seen as a monster by those on the right just as much as it is for those on the left. I’d like to explain why that is the case, and in doing so hopefully redeem myself partially from the disappointment of my family. Though truth be told, the views that follow are not entirely my own.

First, I should just qualify what I mean by “conservative”. It does not mean the Republican Party in the US and nor does it mean The Conservative and Unionist Party in the UK, at least as these parties currently are. Rather, to my mind, it means a set of values and attitudes. It means a preference for slow change over rapid change, for local communities over global connections, for modesty in matters of sex and relationships when in the public view, for tradition and (sometimes) religion in public affairs and in culture, for a sense of honour and duty, for conservation of history and nature and the good aspects of the past, for the tight-knit family, and for respect. Conservatism in this sense is an intellectual tradition with such notable supporters as Edmund Burke.

A Painting of Edmund Burke,
Edmund Burke, a founding figure of modern British Conservatism and a believer in those old-fashioned things we call values. It is only recently that conservatism seems to have lost its way and become more about attacking its opposition than promoting its own values and positive vision of the world.

Many of these values are easy to get behind, and some are easy to disagree with. But I think that all of these values when present in another human being are deserving of respect, in the same way that many “liberal” values are also worthy of admiration. The problem is that these values are strangely absent from modern conservative parties. Yes, they pay lip service to them at election time, but “conservatism” for them seems much more an economic policy of low taxation and regulation, rather than a social one. And the problem with all this is that, for the reasons Fisher describes in Capitalist Realism, the values imposed by economic conservatism are incompatible with the values of social conservatism as I’ve defined it.

Capitalism doesn’t encourage loyalty because it demands businesses and individuals make money over cultivating dedication and honour and duty. It doesn’t encourage respect for nature or history or art or tradition because all that gets in the way of making profits. It doesn’t encourage our participation in local communities because it is focused on our atomization and individual consumption. It doesn’t even, really, encourage conservative politics, because the capitalist system demands anything be blamed instead of the system itself, and so parties on the right end up adopting elements closer to fascism in order to remain electable, such as demonizing unproductive groups as the source of people’s discontent.

Taken this way, people throughout the political spectrum ought to find good reasons to be disappointed with the state of the world right now, and both would benefit from reading Capitalist Realism. People all over the political spectrum have a lot of positive values to offer the world, but the problem is that capitalism, instead of encouraging those values so that together left and right can build a brighter future, instead turns left and right against each other, forcing them into increasingly unsavoury political positions with little chance of compromise or peaceful resolution. “The system works, don’t change it”, is a traditional conservative rallying cry. But Capitalist Realism provides us with enough evidence to show that’s not the case. And though they would not approve of rapid change, I’d hope conservatives wouldn’t be against slow, steady, and sensible change towards a world that actually values their values.

Conclusion

I really can’t recommend this book enough. It’s only eighty pages, and it’s pretty cheap too. Fisher is an excellent diagnostician of our present woes, and he even puts forward some decent suggestions as to how to move forward going into the future. Capitalist Realism isn’t perfect – it has a few problems typical of this kind of book. For example, his suggestions about how to fight back against capitalism were a little undeveloped, and his comments on the 1985 miners’ strike in the UK are somewhat contradictory in light of what he writes about climate change. But that’s doesn’t matter too much. The book gets the job done. To understand the nature of our predicament is already the first step out of it. And whether you’re on the left or on the right, you should have reason to be disappointed with the current state of our overcapitalised world.

Mark Fisher died in 2017, a victim of the system he had spent his life analysing. I may not have agreed with everything he wrote in Capitalist Realism, but it’s hard not to think of him as, in his own way, a heroic figure…

So go off and try imagining something other than capitalism for yourself! If you do manage to think up a solution to our problems, why not leave a comment with your answer?

For a recent film that showcases a few ideas featured in Capitalist Realism, have a look at my analysis of Joker. For more theory complaining about the state of the world, check out my piece on Adorno and our relationship with the past.

Myth and the Creation of Character in Conrad’s Nostromo

I’ve just finished Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, a magnificent and great novel if ever there was one. It chronicles several years in the history of the invented Republic of Costaguana in South America, focusing on the seaboard town known as Sulaco as it grows rich and influential thanks to a huge silver mine located there. This mine is the central image of the story, consuming the hearts and minds of every character by offering power and wealth in equal measure and giving the novel many elements taken from traditional myths. What Nostromo does so well is use this mine to become at turns a political novel, a philosophical one, and – most importantly – an adventure one. Using formal inventiveness Conrad is able to create a fictional world every bit as alluring as the silver at its heart.

A photo of Joseph Conrad, author of Nostromo
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), whose Heart of Darkness has been the bane of many schoolchildren, including me. I’m glad I gave him a second chance, because he has fast become one of my favourites.

Here, though, I’d like to gush simply about the formal tricks and turns Conrad uses to introduce and give life to his imagined republic, and to the characters who inhabit it, especially the mysterious and fascinating Nostromo himself. The novel is good enough that I could go on for days, and so I think it’s wise I limit myself to these two connected ideas.

An Introduction to Sulaco: The First Chapter of Nostromo

The first chapter of Nostromo is not, dare I say, particularly punchy. It begins in the matter of fact manner more typical of a history book than of a novel. But therein lies its purpose. It is designed to bring us into the Republic of Costaguana and Sulaco as if they had existed for many years. And this requires a great deal of skill. When we think of a country, we rarely stop there in our minds. We think of the capital, we think of the location, we think of its history and its people. Conrad, in creating a new world, has to do all this in a way that doesn’t come across as being boring; but he also cannot skimp on the descriptions, because then the world will hardly feel real and lived-in then. That is the central challenge for the first chapter and its four or five pages.

“In the time of Spanish rule” – the novel’s opening words – already establish Nostromo as part of history, and a familiar one. We laypeople may not know the specifics of Spanish rule, but we know its approximate time and its approximate extent. It doesn’t seem too unreasonable to add another country to those we know Spain once ruled.

Once the country has been fixed in history it needs to be fixed geographically through a description of the main features around Sulaco itself. But naming a mere rock, such like the peninsula of Azuera, is once again not enough. Conrad must invest objects with history too, and show their relationship to the people. And thus, the barren peninsula, we are told, is associated by the poor of the town with “an obscure instinct of consolation the ideas of evil and wealth” and therefore they “will tell you that it is deadly because of its hidden treasures”. Now we have not merely a rock, but a people revealed through their attitude towards it.

Conrad goes on, very briefly, to tell the story of this peninsula – which is never visited during the events of Nostromo. That is, how two foreigners went out with the goal of finding the treasure apparently lurking there but disappeared without a trace. Again, we have the people’s view of things – “the two gringos, spectral and alive, are believed to be dwelling to this day amongst the rocks, under the fatal spell of their success”. Magic and mystery live within the language of this part of the novel, and these stories-within-the-story of Nostromo add to the fairy-tale like quality of the novel. Ideas and events seem doomed to repeat. Perhaps, indeed, they are fated to.

A photo of Panama, showing trees and a peninsula
A view of Panama, whose scenery is similar to that of the Republic of Costaguana in Nostromo. Picture from Erandly [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

The rest of the first chapter continues to add to this mythic representation of Sulaco and its history. A rogue cloud is described as “burst[ing] suddenly into flame and crash[ing] like a sinister pirate-ship of the air” – an ominous description if ever there was one. Meanwhile, using phrases like “as the saying is”, Conrad is able to create even the idiomatic language itself of the local populace. There is no weak point, it seems to me, in all of this – the world feels real and lived-in. The attitude of the locals is built up piecemeal through each new geographical location and its associations, so that by the end of the chapter, without a single man or woman being named, the reader has the sense of a them as pious folk, superstitious and hostile towards foreigners and their wealth. We already know their speech; we even know their myths.

And as Nostromo progresses we return to these places in thought or in action, and even the figures of speech find themselves being used. The novel itself is the vindication of its first chapter, proving the reality of all that Conrad initially describes. The two parts buttress and justify each other.

An Invaluable Fellow – The Creation of Nostromo the Man

The best of Conrad’s characters embody the fragility of our understanding that came with modernism and the modern sensibility – people like Lord Jim and Kurtz, characters seen through Marlow’s eyes in glimpses, as though they are walking deep in fog. Nostromo creates its titular character in a way that takes its cue from Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim while moving beyond them. Nostromo himself, oddly enough, scarcely appears in the novel’s first two hundred pages, but we feel his presence throughout. While other characters, such as the stoic Charles Gould, owner of Sulaco’s San Tomé mine, are all focused on the creation of wealth, Nostromo himself stands out by his focus, instead, on his reputation. And in light of this, the lack of his appearance until the middle of the novel makes perfect sense – his reputation precedes him. We come to “know” him before we meet him.

But at the same time, we feel a sense of uncertainty in our knowledge of Nostromo. We come to know the facts – he is an Italian, raised in Genoa, who now is the captain of the longshoremen in Sulaco’s harbour – long before we meet the man, but we are keenly aware that they are inadequate for getting a true measure of him. When we do see Nostromo he appears in the epic mode, rather than as a normal character – his language is curt and full of an almost inhuman confidence. When he talks with one character who is mourning the fact that his son never lived past childhood Nostromo simply says “If he had been like me he would have been a man.”

His figure is also highly symbolic. For example, there is the silver-grey mare that he rides, which connects him with the mine while also making him preternaturally fast. He appears like a vengeful spirit without clear goals of his own – he lacks any kind of internality, at least in the novel’s first hundred pages or so, where his confidence and pride overcome any hint of reflexivity. At the closing moments of Part First he is present at a night-time celebration among the locals which even has more than a hint of the Dionysian about it, with “the barbarous and imposing noise of the big drum” that draws him in. There, he is confronted by a lover who demands a gift, and Nostromo, carelessly powerful, cuts off the silver buttons of his very own coat to give to her. His self-mastery is frightening and alluring.

A picture of the Panama Canal being built. Exploitation of resources doesn't come without exploitation of the people too. Conrad nudges us at times to ask if it is worth it.
The Panama Canal under construction. During Nostromo we see the Republic of Costaguana become highly developed due to its silver mine and European and American investment. But Conrad is keen to show that all of this change is not without its cost. He nudges us to consider the human consequences of all this “progress”.

The use of names is another area where Nostromo casts an epic shadow. By giving him countless names and epithets Conrad shows the multifaceted nature of his character. Even the very name “Nostromo” is not his own, but the name by which the English residents of Sulaco call him. We don’t even hear his actual name, Giovanni Fidenza, until near the book’s end. As a result, we receive the impression, yet again, that we are only scratching the surface of who he is. A great many people trust him as “a perfectly incorruptible fellow”, but others know him as “the generous, the terrible, the inconstant Capataz de Cargadores”. Who is he really?

This situation is further muddied when certain epithets, such as “incorruptible” are used not without a hint of irony – but only at times, so that we never know how much the irony reflects truth, or distracts from it. Early on in the book we are told of a character that “so far, she too was under the spell” of Nostromo’s reputation. Is the “so far” a warning, or a red herring? Does “spell” refer to something that is backed up by the rest of the story, or is it the mark of an evil man and sorcerer? I certainly shan’t reveal the truth here – I just want to indicate the range of methods by which Conrad fashions the character of Nostromo while leaving him nonetheless a mystery for us to piece together.

We see Nostromo as gestures, and we hear him more through reported speech than through his own mouth. Conrad gives us masses of information but never enough of the man to make sense of them. To my mind at least, it is a fascinating way of showing how modernism disrupted our notions of certainty and character. Conrad can’t tell us who Nostromo is, but his characters all get the chance to have a go. Yet each explanation seems to contradict the next one, leaving us even more confused than when we started out. And yet we know that under all of these explanations there must be a man. The challenge in reading Nostromo partially becomes trying to locate this man and understand who he is and what it is that drives him.

Conclusion

The depths given to Nostromo are great, but there are many other characters in the novel who are fascinating in their own way, from taciturn Englishman Charles Gould, the owner of the mine, to the indignant General Montero whose decision to start a revolution forms the key conflict of the book. It isn’t just the characters of Nostromo that make the novel great, but also its exciting plot, filled with tricks and turns including even buried treasure. Conrad lures us in with the promise of adventure, and then reveals something far more complex lying under the novel’s surface – a modern myth, yes, but also a highly political novel, and a brutally sad story of our common exploitation of the South American nations, long after formal colonialism had ended. It’s a really cool book, and thoroughly recommended. Even though I only managed to finish it the third time through…

An interesting comparison to Nostromo would probably be Salvatore Satta’s novel, The Day of Judgement, which I talk about here. Both novels explore the changes in sleepy rural society around the beginning of the twentieth century, and how far we should consider our notion of “progress” to be a positive thing.

Did you enjoy Nostromo as much as I did? Did Conrad’s style derange you rather than dazzle? Why not leave a comment below

Theodor Storm’s Aquis Submersus and the German Novella

Theodor Storm’s Aquis Submersus is a novella that shows the potentially dangerous consequences of going against society in the pursuit of love. But first and foremost, it is a story, and that’s what makes it fun to read. I’d like to make the case for that “fun” factor today, while still providing a summary of the plot and an analysis of what makes the story interesting from an “I’m going to have to write an essay on this for uni” perspective.

Theodor Storm and the Novella

The German word “Novelle” can be easily translated as “novella”, but you lose a lot of cultural associations that way. Theodor Storm, whose work is as cool as his name, was a master at the art of writing novellas and also one of the genre’s great theorists. He explained the power of the novella by connecting it to tragic drama when he said “the novella is the sister of drama”. Unlike a novel, which is typically (experimental works discounted) burdened by a large cast of characters and multiple subplots, the novella in 19th century Germany is lean and focused on a single plotline and a few characters, much like a traditional tragic drama. And unlike a short story, the novella has enough time to develop its characters and plots from fleeting impressions and moments into something with a complex plot that can grab and hold our attention.

A photo of Theodor Storm
Theodor Storm

Storm himself was born in 1817 and lived out most of his life in what is now northern Germany but during his lifetime changed from Danish to German hands. He wrote novellas and some beautiful poems, almost all of them taking his coastal homeland for their setting. This already puts him in stark contrast to the earlier German Romantics, who seemed to forget that Germany had sea as well as mountains and forests. His most famous works are Immensee and The Rider on the White Horse (Der Schimmelreiter), though Aquis Submersus is not far behind.

Storm’s tales are symbolic and often feature magic, which shows the influence of fairy tales. In their heavy symbolism Storm’s tales also conform to Paul Heyse’s Falcon Theory (Falkentheorie), which states that novellas ought to have a symbolic leitmotif that repeats throughout the work like a spine. We’ll see how this works out in Aquis Submersus.

Telling a Story – Framing the Narrative in Aquis Submersus

The thing that I like about Aquis Submersus, and Storm’s work in general, is that it has an unmistakable and yet undefinable quality of being a story to it. What does that word mean? Walter Benjamin did his best to explain what a story was in contrast to a novel. But for me, Storm’s stories feel like the sort of tales that are told by the fireside in some cold and dreary cottage. They are designed to bring mystery and wonder into a merciless world. They remind me of my own childhood, growing up in the far north of Scotland. The Rider on the White Horse even begins with that very idea – the narrator, a young boy, is told one layer of that story’s frame narrative by his grandmother, while he is playing around with an old newspaper in front of the fireplace in their cottage.

Aquis Submersus also uses a frame narrative. The unnamed outer layer narrator begins by describing his childhood visits to the house of the village priest, where he and the pastor’s son play outside in the grass by a pond. But they also sometimes investigate the church itself, which is an old building that the narrator says “excited my fantasies”. Inside that building there is a painting of a young, drowned boy, and underneath it there are the letters “C. P. A. S.”. Like any good 19th century lad, the narrator knows Latin and quickly determines that A. S. is “aquis submersus” – died from drowning. But he and his friend struggle to work out C. P. – giving the readers their first mystery. The narrator suggests it means “culpa patris” – “through the father’s guilt” – but the priest himself doesn’t know and can’t confirm the narrator’s suspicions.

Years go by, and the narrator finds himself attracted by an old house in his town. When he goes in he discovers another painting by the same artist, once more showing the drowned boy. When he asks about the painting the house’s inhabitants say it belonged to a member of the family from long ago, and offer to show him the belongings of the painter. These turn out to be, in the words of the owner, “just some old scribblings; there’s nothing of value in them”. But our narrator is overjoyed, and in his eagerness to learn what secrets lie within these books he doesn’t even leave the house but reads them right in that very room. And it is here that the main story begins.

The significance of the frame narrative device is here that it heightens the feeling that what we are reading is just a story. It mimics the format by which we ourselves here stories in the real world – organically and often through chance occurrences, so that we build ourselves a narrative out of the separate pieces. Just like the narrator we learn about a mystery, and then only gradually do we see it resolved. The fact that we have a resolution, the fact that the narrator stumbles upon the books – these are unrealistic, perhaps, but we accept them as we accept the corner-cutting and rearranging that takes place every time an old story is recounted. We know that not everything we hear is to be believed, but we want to hear anyway, and decide for ourselves what is real and what may well be fiction.

The Plot – “Just some old scribblings”

The story of Aquis Submersus concerns an orphan, Johannes, who finds financial support from a family of German nobles. The son of the family, the appropriately named Wulf, resents Johannes because he is receiving what Wulf considers his inheritance. It gets even worse when Johannes falls in love with Wulf’s sister, Katherina – a love that, in the middle of the 17th century when the novella takes place, cannot be legitimised through marriage due to the differences between their classes.

Time passes and Johannes leaves to become a well-known painter in Holland. When he returns, five years after his last meeting with the family, he finds that “the good times have passed”. As he approaches the family’s castle he is attacked by Wulf’s new bulldogs, and he also learns that the father has died, leaving the hostility of Wulf towards him without check. But there is another tragedy approaching – Katherina is preparing to be given away in marriage, likely to a neighbour, Kurt, who is noted for his brutality. As if to rub salt into the wound, Wulf demands Johannes paint his sister’s picture before she goes, so that her memory will always be in the house.

Johannes paints Katherina in a room filled with old paintings of her relatives, including one woman who reminds him of Katherina’s mother while also terrifying him. It turns out that the picture is of an ancient relative who cursed her own daughter, leading to the daughter’s death in a pond nearby. The reason was that the daughter didn’t want to marry the person chosen for her – and Katherina admits that she feels the curse is on her too. But there is a way out, and Katherina gives Johannes a letter to pass on to an aunt who might be able to spirit her away. Unfortunately, though, it seems that Kurt has put spies out, because when Johannes returns, the task complete, Wulf and Kurt together set the dogs on him, and Johannes is only able to escape by sneaking into Katherina’s window and spending the night with her.

The next day he must move on, expecting never to see her again. But a few years later he finds himself tasked with painting a priest in a local village, and he heads out there. The priest’s son is a small boy, also called Johannes, and at first his mother is unknown. But a series of events lead to Johannes the painter learning the identity of the mother, and thus begins the novella’s tragic conclusion.

Drama’s Sister – Tragedy in Aquis Submersus

The mother is none other than Katherina. Kurt has married someone else, leaving Wulf to dispose of his sister by leaving her with the priest – a good and kind man. Since Katherina was pregnant – with Johannes’ own child – the man’s decision to marry her saved her from ignominy and shame. But when Johannes sees her again, all thoughts of the public and their potential reactions go out of the window. She is outside with her child when Johannes catches her, and though she says she wants to keep the young boy – he’s only about four – in sight, Johannes refuses to let her go. He has waited too long. There is a moment of bliss between the two old lovers, and then it is shattered with a cry. The child has drowned, and the priest, now returned from work and knowing the full story, doesn’t let Johannes see the result.

These moments towards the end of the book demonstrate the way that Aquis Submersus is very much a tragic work extracted from the same vein as tragic theatre. A crescendo of happiness – what we might consider to be well-earned by the travails of both characters – is destroyed in a way that seems at first completely unfair. But when we ask ourselves why such suffering has taken place, explanations do appear. With each of the great tragic figures in literature, there are reasons for their fates.

But what makes Aquis Submersus exciting from an interpretive perspective – not just in essays, but when you listen to the story by the fireside – is that there is no one dominant explanation. Does Johannes’ child die because of his father’s impatience and selfishness? Or does he die because Johannes is going against society and God by trying to be with someone from a different social class? As one of the servants in the castle says early on in the story, “we ought to stay wherever the Lord God has chosen to set us down”. Is it a kind of hubris for him to want to be with Katherina? And why does Katherina have to suffer, when she tried to escape Johannes and watch over the boy? And why must the boy himself die? Unanswered questions like these form the tragic component of Aquis Submersus, where fate itself is inscrutable.

The Leitmotifs and Symbols of Aquis Submersus

Aquis Submersus is a highly symbolic work in addition to being a tragic one. Throughout the story objects and images repeat in the same way that a leitmotif repeats in certain types of music. Two prominent symbols are the castle and its grounds, and paintings. The castle and grounds are first introduced in the outer section of the frame narrative. There, they are completely in disrepair and the hedgerows are empty and “ghostly”. What we see in the inner narrative is the decline to this point play out. At first, while the father of the family is alive, things are well, but by the time he and the older servants are dead Wulf becomes isolated there. It is only by using the lush vegetation of the castle walls that Johannes is able to spend the night with Katerina. But with her banishment the place grows barren and infertile.

A picture of a German castle
A German castle, perhaps like the one of Aquis Submersus

Our first introduction to the central story of Aquis Submersus comes through a painting. The inscription is the source of the mystery – clearly there was a reason to commemorate the death of a child, but what? The idea that paintings are a source of memory continues when Johannes is tasked with painting Katherina prior to her departure from her family’s home. But the memories located in paintings, it soon becomes clear, aren’t always positive. The initial painting serves as a warning about the dangers of all-consuming love, while the portrait of the distant ancestor works to bring knowledge and memory of past misdeeds down through the generations as a curse. Johannes’ own career as a painter is marked by a desire to become famous because then the class barriers between him and Katerina will be no more. But in painting his dead son, Johannes finally performs an act of redemption.

There are other symbols too, such as birds and the water of the very title. But these two above should give an idea of how Storm weaves symbolism into the narrative and uses it to reinforce central themes. The castle comes right from traditional medieval works and their ideas of chastity, while paintings and their recorded images have always had occasional negative undertones, as if it is not an image but a soul that is trapped within them. Some things, of course, it is better not to remember. A painting keeps us from moving on.

Conclusion

I read Aquis Submersus both because I knew it was on my reading list for next year and because I’ve read and enjoyed Storm’s stories before. I was glad that this one didn’t disappoint. As with all of these German novellas, the formal aspects of Aquis Submersus are pretty interesting, letting you talk about various novella-theories and also how the story fits into Benjamin’s conception of storytelling too. But more importantly, the tale is fun because of the story itself, which is suspenseful and exciting. And at only eighty-or-so pages, it’s hard not to recommend it.

For more Storm, I have a summary of Immensee here. I’ve also translated some of Storm’s poetry, which you can read here.

Picture of a castle comes from KlausFoehl and is used under [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]