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Alfred Döblin’s The Murder of a Buttercup and Other Stories – a Review

Alfred Döblin’s The Murder of a Buttercup is a collection of short stories written by the German writer during his early career, from 1904-11, and published in English in the book Bright Magic. I read them largely because they all fall within the time period of the German paper I’m taking next year – is there any other reason to read anything? – and because unlike, say, Robert Musil’s stories of this period, the stories collected in The Murder of a Buttercup are rather more straightforward and approachable. They are, that is, stories as well as experiments, however full they are of modernist flourishes. Döblin himself is one of the better-known German modernists, albeit one whose lifetime’s work has been reduced down to a single book – Berlin Alexanderplatz – just as Ivan Goncharov in Russia or William Makepeace Thackery in Britain have been reduced to Oblomov and Vanity Fair for the casual reader.

A photo of Alfred Döblin, the author of The Murder of a Buttercup — Alfred Döblin, a German writer whose work has more or less been reduced down to his novel *Berlin Alexanderplatz*, was born in 1878 and worked as a doctor before becoming a full-time writer. *The Murder of a Buttercup* was his first collection of stories.

Whether or not that seems fair in Döblin’s case I hope to venture an early answer to at the end of this review. Before then I’ll go over a few of the stories themselves, alongside their general themes. For, whether good or not, they are certainly interesting for their modernist impulses. All translations are by Damion Searls.

The Rejection of the World – “The Sailboat Ride”

The first story in The Murder of a Buttercup is the plainly titled “The Sailboat Ride” and it is itself one of the most straightforward tales here. It details a relationship between a Brazilian man, Copetta, and a woman he meets at the beach at Ostend in Belgium. Copetta is, at forty-eight, already conscious of his age. In Paris, before the story begins, he’s spent weeks in hospital, expecting to die only to ultimately recover. Far away from home, he hopes to sample European culture. But his attention is taken by a woman he meets. After seeing her three times in one day he begins to question the assumptions underlying his life. He sends her a note before destroying both his wedding ring and his pictures of his children.

When they meet, they go for a ride into the sea on a sailboat. They are wild and restless in their passion, but in time Copetta’s mood worsens. She tries to comfort him, but without success. At last a wave comes that bears him away. She is found by the authorities, drifting on the sea – Copetta’s suicide was premeditated, and he had already sent them a telegram to warn them. But the story does not end here. Now we follow the woman as she heads to Paris and tries to stave off her grief through sexual liberation. “She denied herself to no one”. But this does not bring her the deep pleasure she is after. A year later she sends a message to Ostend: “To Mr Copetta Ostend Hotel Estrada expect me tomorrow noon. Wire reply requested.”

She returns. Her mother has died in the interim, but the news has no effect on the woman. She is filled with bliss – her madness is complete. She pretends that Copetta is alive and writes him a message, then one morning she steals a rowboat and heads into the sea. There she meets “Copetta” again. From out of the waves “a dark shape” appears. He joins her on the boat, but his body is crusted with shells and ruined. He tries to ward her off with an ambiguous wave of his arm, but she does not retreat. As they are united in intoxication and pleasure, they turn young once more, and in that moment they are both at last swept under the waves.

Meanings and Themes in “The Sailboat Ride”

“The Sailboat Ride” is a good introduction to many of the general themes of The Murder of a Buttercup. First among these is a turning away from the world. In the Modernist period many artists rejected the stodgy social conditions of the environment in which they worked. Emotions and characters that otherwise would not grace the printed page now rose to prominence and without condemnation on the part of their creators. In “The Sailboat Ride” we have Copetta’s infidelity and also the open female sexuality of the woman. Döblin’s narration in The Murder of a Buttercup is at timeshighly sensual, and this story is filled with hip-on-hip contact, mussels, and other overt and covert sexually charged emotions and symbols.

A painting of Nietzsche by Edvard Munch. — Friedrich Nietzsche, destroyer of past values and builder of new ones, is a big influence on modernism in general, and Döblin in particular. It was he who first challenged the foundations of our culture and society, revealing how flimsy these foundations really were. Painting by Munch.

Of course, within the story both man and women are punished for their desires – Copetta’s inability to deal with socially-conditioned guilt no doubt leads to his suicide, while the woman faces condemnation for forgetting her mother and dancing with so many men. But what matters is that that at the story’s conclusion they turn their backs on society and find bliss. The sea, intoxication (a motif that directly speaks to Nietzsche’s Dionysian world in The Birth of Tragedy), allows them to come together at last, at the cost of their demise. And it’s hard to read the final moments as anything other than triumphant.

“Astralia”: Another Retreat from the World

A rejection of the world can come in many forms, and though death and suicide are common in The Murder of a Buttercup there are other retreats here. In Astralia we find a scholar, Adolf Götting, whose escape comes in the form of mysticism. As the fin-de-siècle mood in Europe worsened towards the outbreak of the First World War, and with organised religion dying, many turned to cults and mysticism to try to find a suitable faith.

The scholar of Astralia has his own mystic group, convinced that the Redeemer will soon return. They meet and drink, and drink a lot. When Götting leaves the tavern one evening he has no boots, nor hat nor coat. He thinks he is transformed into some kind of prophet, and the mockery he receives on the street only confirms his delusions. When he returns home, he treats his wife badly for not being part of his group, but when she continues to fuss about his dress and state of dishevelment he eventually breaks down: “Oh, don’t laugh…. Please, please don’t laugh. Oh, I beg you, I’m begging, beg-ging….”. The retreat fails, Götting is left a fool. Society has been too strong for him to escape.

“The Murder of a Buttercup” – Religion and Rationality

There is a tension in The Murder of a Buttercup not only between society and the self, but also between an extreme rationality and irrationality. Both Nietzsche (e.g. Beyond Good and Evil) and Max Weber (in his lecture “Science as Vocation”) warn against adopting a hyper rationalist viewpoint of the sort that was at the time coming into vogue. While on the surface science offers a lot of explanations, Nietzsche saw a wholehearted belief in science as just a continuation of the Christian world view, and as such one ultimately tending towards nihilism and a devaluation of all things. Meanwhile, Weber added that although science answers a lot of questions, nonetheless its answers are very often based on presuppositions (even today), meaning that most “facts” are nonetheless ultimately contingent. Once we start questioning what underpins them we can devalue the world that way too.

What matters, then, is to leave a little bit of irrationality in yourself instead of veering between hyper-rationalism and irrationalism. There are many characters in The Murder of a Buttercup who seem unable to do this. The most memorable on is Michael Fischer, the hero of “The Murder of a Buttercup” itself. This is an extraordinarily strange tale. On a walk in the mountains Fischer, the head of a firm in the city, attacks and dismembers a buttercup that had managed to slow him down. Fischer is a rational man, if cruel. But the murder of a buttercup is all that is necessary to lead him down the road to madness. A few moments after killing the flower he sees himself, committing the act again. A dislocation has taken place between the old Fischer and the new.

As he continues walking, guilt for the “murder” begins to eat away at him, including a fear of social repercussions – “What if someone saw him, one of his business colleagues or a lady?”. Fischer tries to control himself the same way he controls his firm. In his mind he even seems to refer to himself as a “firm”. But he is unable to win out, and images of death and decay, of the “plant corpse”, continue to eat at him. Alongside another emotion – pleasure. A kind of sexual enjoyment was to be had in murdering the plant, a “gentle lasciviousness”.

Once Fischer gets over his guilt he feels “liberated”. But back in the city this guilt returns. He finds himself crediting the buttercup money to try to buy back his peace, he makes offerings to it. He is unable to win out – he ends up crying at all the beauty in the world, beauty that his guilt is ruining. He only moves on when he takes a new buttercup home from the mountains. He lavishes attention on this one out of spite for the old one. “Never had his life passed so cheerfully” we are told. Eventually, he disappears into the forest, “laughing and snorting loudly”. His madness is complete.

Modern Anxieties in The Murder of a Buttercup

Döblin’s Berlin grew extremely rapidly in the final years of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The city and business underpin Fischer’s power and confidence. But the foundations are flimsy. There is a moment in the story where he thinks “Nobody would make a fool out of him, nobody”. Though he tries to live rationally, he gains more enjoyment from an imaginary war with a buttercup than from his entire business career. His final retreat into the forest, like Copetta and the woman’s in “The Sailboat Ride”, is a firm rejection of society and social constraints. And like theirs, it is marked by a feeling that illicit, sexual pleasures and desires and more valuable than socially constrained ones, even as those same desires have fatal consequences. Fischer’s story is also similar to “Astralia” by means of its preoccupation with religious concerns.

In “Astralia” there was an attempt to replace organised religion with a kind of mystical cult; in “The Murder of a Buttercup”, however, it is the absence of religion that is the focus. Without a god to turn to, the question of how to expiate his guilt torments Fischer incessantly and seems to be a great contributor to his eventual madness. Looking at the story through Nietzsche seems like a good approach. Guilt, of course, is a Christian emotion in Nietzsche’s view. It makes us uncomfortable acting in a way that benefits ourselves by encouraging us to think about others and external, heavenly, judgement. It is thus the hallmark of a slave-morality. Fischer lives in a godless world, but he is still hamstrung by a Christian moral system, leaving him in the double bind of feeling a bad emotion but being unable to deal with it.

He doesn’t know he is free, and that ignorance comes to destroy him.

Conclusions

There are a few other interesting stories here, including “The Wrong Door”, with its amusing play on our ideas of fate, and the coldly rational and brutally misogynistic “Memoirs of a Jaded Man”. But space and attention are at a premium and I had better wrap things up. I liked a lot of the ideas and concerns that Döblin voices in The Murder of a Buttercup. In some sense his stories, with their mix of the supernatural and irrational alongside the rational and concrete, reminded me of Borges’ work. But Borges manages in three or four pages what Döblin needs several more to do, and I’m not sure the latter’s work is better for the extra space.

A painting of Döblin in a jagged, modernist style. — Modern anxieties alone are not enough for good fiction, at least in my book. The stories in *The Murder of a Buttercup* are intellectually interesting, but not always gripping. Portrait of Döblin by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

It doesn’t help that his stories are rarely gripping, and there were a few times when I was left confused about what was actually happening. These aren’t instances of modernist flourishes – when Döblin’s language gets weird, it can be fantastic and beautiful – instead, these are times when he could probably simply have done with an editor. In the end, I’m left with mixed feelings. These tales are the work not of a talented author, but of someone who has everything they need to become one given time and the right circumstances. As with Isaac Babel’s Red Army Cavalry, and Platonov’s Soul and Other Stories, I can’t help but feel that the intellectual side of Döblin’s stories overpower their weaker and less gripping plots. And unfortunately, while it makes him easy to write essays about, it doesn’t really make him enjoyable to read.

But I hope his mature work, when I get around to it, will change my mind.

Have you read any Döblin? Does he get better? Leave a comment and let me know.

Zorba the Greek and the Ambiguities of Affirmation

Introduction: Kazantzakis and his novel’s Reputation

Zorba the Greek was the novel of Nikos Kazantzakis that I least wanted to read. I had come across its author in a round about way as I rambled through Wikipedia page after Wikipedia page, probably procrastinating something, until at last I stumbled upon a reference to his novel Christ Recrucified. With a title like that there was no leaving that link blue, and I soon discovered to my horror that one of my dearest ideas for a novella of my own had already found expression in the work of a Greek man, Nikos Kazantzakis. It soon became obvious that my idea-making was not in vain, and that actually our stories were only superficially similar. This led me to the man himself who – this much I could tell already – was an author whose thematic concerns were similar to my own. Something of a literary friendship, or at the very least an alliance, could be salvaged from the wreckage.

A picture of Nikos Kazantzakis
from the Μουσείο N. Καζαντζάκη / Kazantzakis Museum.
Used under CC 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en — Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957)

Nikos Kazantzakis had an extremely rich life. Born in 1883 in Heraklion on the island Crete while it was still part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1907 he began his travelling. By the end of his life he had visited France, Germany, Italy, The Soviet Union, Spain, the Near and Far East, and much of north Africa, working in various jobs including being a journalist and translator. He met Mussolini, admired Lenin, despised Stalin and at one time or another seemed to have had every view in every shade that was popular in his turbulent times, before dying in 1957. But most importantly of his views, he had a profound interest in trying to find something he could believe in, which is evident from the title and beyond of every single thing he wrote.

Zorba the Greek has a reputation for being “one of the great life-affirming novels of our time” – so says the blurb of my edition. This naturally put me off the book before I’d even bought it, as being made happy is very low on my list of priorities when it comes to deciding what to read next. However, it was the only work by Kazantzakis that was in either of the big bookstores in Cambridge, so I didn’t have much choice. And as it turned out, the thing that struck me as the book drew to a close and that continues to bother me now is just how much more ambiguous its contents seem than the blurb’s cheeriness would indicate. This is no mere exercise in standing naked on the top of hills.

The Plot

What happens is simple. The whole book is really a series of largely unconnected events which happen to the narrator, an intellectual who is trying to become more experienced in the workings of the world itself, and the titular Zorba. While waiting for a boat to Crete to start a mining operation there the unnamed narrator meets an old man, Zorba, who offers his services to him, having been a miner himself. The narrator accepts, and the two of them begin their adventures. They meet the locals of a small village including Madame Hortense, an old French lady, the widow, an alluring woman, and uncle Anagnosti, the village elder. The two of the men, alongside workers from the village, build their mine, and in the evenings Zorba relates stories of his life, and his now-famous worldview. But eventually there are money problems which even Zorba’s hairbrained schemes are unable to solve, and finally the two are forced to leave the village and each other. On the material side of things, that’s all there is – a collection of escapades and affairs. But there is another level of plot – the mental. Here, the book describes the narrator’s internal conflicts over the organisation of his own life and his beliefs. A tentative Buddhist at first, he soon finds his book-learning challenged by Zorba’s own way of life.

Zorba and his Way of Life

And what is Zorba’s way of life? Life-affirmation is a good starting point. At a few points he describes himself as being filled with “demons”. He lives according to his whims, eternally on the move and doing different jobs and meeting new and different people. Food, and music, and women, are what he lives for. Or rather, he doesn’t live for anything at all – early on he shouts “Can’t a man do anything without a why?”. It is the day-to-day pleasures of life that attract him, with questions of meaning of the sort that trouble the narrator and plenty of other people in our own world not even coming into his head. He has his views on religion, but they are inevitably blasphemous, simple, and conducive to letting him avoid worrying about them. Several times he announces that God and the devil are one and the same. At others he claims that he lives as though he expects to die in the very next minute. He resembles Nietzsche at his cheeriest, but with added innocence, and also Walt Whitman, whose words “I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing” could just as readily have come from this Greek’s mouth.

Picture of Cretan Beach
Marc Ryckaert (MJJR) [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)] — The island of Crete where the action takes place. The sea is a prominent image

Zorba’s worldview is also intimately connected to the language and style of the book. Kazantzakis was one of the first major Greek authors to use Demotic Greek – the language of the common people – instead of Katharevousa – a conservative and prestigious literary form of Greek which was designed to bridge Ancient Greek and its Demotic variant. The language of the book is, as a result, as simple as Zorba himself, even in translation. Sentences are short and images are generally natural or associated with manual labour – that is, they are human rather than bookish. The lush descriptions of the sea and rural life on Crete also help encourage the reader to reflect on their interaction with the natural world, mediated as it so often is nowadays through windows and electronic screens. Zorba himself also often speaks in stories that have something of the parable about them, such as when he retells the history of Zeus’s infidelities as a continuous list of incidences of pity sex.

Women: the Dark Side of Affirmation

And this is where the problems for the modern reader start. A casual look at the top reviews on Goodreads paints a conflicted picture of the book, and pretty much all of the complaints centre on the work’s treatment of its female characters, or at least Zorba’s view of them. For Zorba, like Nietzsche, believed that women were not capable of the life-affirmation and strength that a man is. To the Greek they are stupid, pitiable, wild beasts just waiting for a man to show a sexual interest in them – pity, rather than hate, seems the main emotion here. At one point he declares that all you need to do to get into bed with a woman is to grab her by the breast. Zorba, in relating his travels, mentions several past wives, several other chance encounters each lasting a few months, several abandoned or deceased children. For him this is all positive. The way he describes the women, it sounds like they had a good time too. But within the story proper the Frenchwoman, Madame Hortense, falls in love with him and expects him to marry her after he and she spend time together, forcing the narrator to make all sorts of excuses when Zorba goes off to another village for two weeks and writes about his relationship with a new girl over there. When he gets back, Zorba is frustrated by his need to play along and marry the girl. Eventually they do marry, but only as Hortense is dying of an illness, saving himself the problem of being tied down. In his interaction with women a dark and deceitful side of Zorba’s character is made clear.

Unchallenged Misogyny?

Zorba’s life affirmation is obviously good for his own life and confidence. And in the world of the book his views on women bring him plenty of adventures in bedchambers. But to me it is frustrating, because it denigrates women and hardly seems fair that he should, like a vampire, gain his strength from the mistreatment of others. Kazantzakis doesn’t openly criticise this side of Zorba, but I would at least like to argue that the book itself is not wholly supportive of the message of misogyny, at least if you exercise a little empathy. There are two female characters who are important here – the mysterious widow, and Madame Hortense. Hortense is the one first introduced. She is a Frenchwoman who has ended up on Crete after a life of adventure, visiting many of the cities of the Orient, conducting illicit affairs with many varieties of Ottoman officialdom. On Crete itself she met and bedded members of the great powers of Europe, who had convened to discuss the Cretan revolt against Ottoman rule, but now her looks are gone, and she lives alone, dreaming of a legitimate sexual encounter through marriage.

Hortense has done what Zorba has done – worked and travelled the world. But her work and travel have become intricately linked to her sexual attractiveness, and once she has aged, she has become worthless in the eyes of society. Zorba, meanwhile, is sixty-five by his own reckoning, and still virile and hard-working. The similarities between Zorba and Hortense may seem superficial, but they are enough to show the frustrating situation for women who wanted to live like Zorba in those days. She is pitiable, because she has decided to believe that her self-worth comes only from her beauty, and now finds herself rejected by society. It seems to me that the book is critical of the way in which women cannot live like Zorba, even as it allows him to preach and ramble unimpeded.

The critical attitude goes to even greater heights in the character of the widow. Unnamed, she becomes her status as a once-married woman. Widows have traditionally been seen as sexually pernicious precisely because they no longer possess the sexual naivety of the unmarried ingenue, and are also no longer restrained in their desires by the figure of their husbands – and it is this view of widowhood that informs her portrayal here. Lusted after by the whole village, she eventually sleeps with the narrator in a moment when his own self-control lapses. But shortly afterwards she is attacked in broad daylight because of her refusal to be with another Greek and decapitated in what is surely the book’s most horrible moment. The narrator is horrified at this barbarity. As with Hortense but even more explicitly, rural Cretan society is revealed to be monstrous towards women. And it is unlikely that a reader of any time would see this without demanding some kind of change.

The Narrator and the Other Revolt

Actually though, the narrator is who I first thought of when I began to challenge the simple affirmations of the book’s blurb. He is, unlike Zorba, a young man and an educated and successful one at that: early on he mentions carrying around a copy of Dante, and he also corresponds with two friends, both of whom are living in accordance with a more educated worldview – the first man has gone to the Caucasus to try to rescue the ethnic Greek population that then lived there, while the second is in charge of a colonial venture in part of British Africa. The narrator, however, has abandoned his book learning temporarily to try out a capitalist mining venture on Crete. He knows little about mining and Zorba is entirely in charge of that operation for him. What he himself does is think, and think, and think. He is attracted by Buddhism, which in its portrayal here means a rejection of all desires and a cultivation of the spiritual life – all of this is the complete opposite of Zorba, and the two world views regularly clash. The narrator is trying to write a manuscript on Buddhism, and as he moves ever closer to Zorba’s views he begins to see the completion of the work as a sort of exorcism of that side of himself. At times he says he is happy, most often in the contemplation of nature, but at others he falls into a deep melancholy. He seems happier to philosophise than to live himself: “I was happy and said to myself: this is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them.” It is typical that the very next paragraph begins like this: “The days were passing by. I tried to put a brave face on it, I shouted and played the fool, but in my heart of hearts I knew I was sad.”

Villanueva [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)] — A santuri – one such instrument is Zorba’s pride and joy. In Nietzschean terms Zorba is very much a Dionysian character – primal, musical, and unbridled – in contrast to the narrator’s education, literariness and self-restraint.

In much the same way, he claims that Zorba has changed him, and yet nothing changes. An intellectual, he entertains the new ideas, but puts into practice nothing. The one moment when desire gets the better of him and he submits to the widow’s attentions, her death only reinforces his reluctance to do anything. He listens to Zorba, and talks in his turn, but that is all. His great decision to actually try to run a mine leads to failure, while in Georgia and Africa his two friends pursue lives of action with much more success. The adventurer in the Caucasus is driven by a profound nationalism and love of his people, while the one in Africa is driven by a hatred for society and a desire to live apart from it. But both of them have put their beliefs into practice, while the narrator does nothing of the sort. Zorba, after their separation, tries to persuade him to come and see a marvellous green stone he has found – a useless object but the perfect example of the pure excitement and love for the natural world he has – in vain. The narrator doesn’t go, and later receives information of Zorba’s death.

Conclusion: the Ambiguities of Affirmation

The narrator decides to write down all that Zorba said or did, a sort of hagiographical record, once he hears of his friend’s demise – the book itself. The final note of the novel is the news from the family that he died with that Zorba has left the narrator his santuri, the stringed instrument that Zorba derives much of his musical power and essence from. It is absolutely a positive and uplifting ending – I wrote a smiley face next to the paragraph in my copy. But at the same time, I’m not sure what to make of it. The narrator hasn’t changed, really. All he has achieved is the recording of another, happier, stronger man. Both Zorba and the friend in the Caucasus have died, leaving the mopey Buddhist alone with beliefs he cannot even rely on anymore. What does all that say about us? Most of the people reading Kazantzakis nowadays, at least outside of Greece, are likely to be closer to the narrator than to Zorba – educated and ineffectual like me. No doubt what Zorba says is motivational and exciting, but how much affirmation are we supposed to get out of a book that suggests that if we can’t find ourselves a real Zorba, there’s little chance we’ll be able to grow one within us?

In any case, the book is fun, easy to read, and in its own blasphemous way profound. Zorba is an inspirational character and his travels and world views certainly motivate me to do more, even as I am left uncomfortable by his misogyny. But like the narrator, in practice I probably won’t do anything different. Though I absolutely intend to read more Kazantzakis in the future, for anybody who might come to this in search for a simple and unqualified message of affirmation for all life, women included, I might have to point them towards dear old Whitman instead.

For some gloom to go with your affirmation and to make it easier to appreciate how lucky we all really are, I have a piece on Varlam Shalamov’s time in the Gulag system here. For more Kazantzakis, I have a piece on Report to Greco here.

Picture of Kazantzakis by Μουσείο N. Καζαντζάκη / Kazantzakis Museum. Used under CC 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Picture of Crete by Marc Ryckaert (MJJR) [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)],

Picture of santuri by Villanueva [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]