Andreas

by Hugo von Hofmannsthal

  Maria Mariquita

  wishes to live be an old woman is afraid of growing old

  often imagines herself dead (here she coincides with Sacramozo’s conquest of time) dreads death

  loves old people dislikes seeing old people

  is afraid of children draws children to her

  MARIA’S emotion over an old woman whose skin nobody seeks to touch.

  Mariquita is greedy and an artist in cookery. Maria enjoys good food too, but suppresses this tendency and knows nothing about cookery. Mariquita’s concupiscence of experience, boundless curiosity to set her foot everywhere, to enter every possible situation, to visit every place of ill repute. Everything that Andreas points out (the beauty of flowing water, etc.) she absorbs in intenser form. She hears all the talk of the town, knows where everything is going on, where this or anything is to be seen (the vegetable market towards morning, the fish market, fantastic episodes in cellars, stage-coach drives on the mainland, episode of the tight-rope-walkers).

  Mariquita an utterly baffling person, lets herself be kissed, nothing more, hints that she is a respectable woman, but has a lover, of course.—He takes her to casinos, to other places of amusement; sometimes she stiffens convulsively, then suddenly looks at him with the face of Maria.—With the Countess, it seems to him a prodigy, not seriously to be thought of that she might give herself; with Mariquita, an absurdity that she does not. In both he goes too far, both are funnels through which he falls into an abyss. He longs to speak to the Knight about it; instead, he encounters the Duke, who is having a biting-match with the dogs.

  Mariquita to Andreas: “I am infatuated with you because you were the first man I saw after I was free. I know that you are nothing very special after all, but I still see you with rapture in my eyes—it’s all chance, after all.”—“On that day I had really got out for the first time I had already contrived to write letters.”—the power to enter into adventures because she is absolutely free.

  Mariquita receives visitors in a strange lodging which she alleges to belong to her mistress, and has had lent to her on fraudulent pretexts: she pretends to be a dame de compagnie or something of the kind. The conflict in Andreas’s mind about marrying her, since he is aware of all her failings, however charming. Her random chatter at times—her dreaminess. “Shall I possess you entirely?” asks Andreas.—“Entirely, and another into the bargain.”

  How Mariquita makes friends: presents herself as a governess, collecting for religious purposes. Perpetual outings, she has always discovered something. On their excursions, she takes Andreas into all kinds of society, where he has to suffer mockery and scorn, where he is bewildered, imposed on and put to shame: “You would like to become an official?”—Mariquita likes to hear the story of Uncle Leopold.—Among others she takes Andreas to see a lunatic, pretending to be his niece or housekeeper; he comes in, talks to himself without seeing those present.—Once she hits on the idea of enticing him into a strange house for Andreas, then sending him home with the “other” in her confusion and shame. The other does not say a word, seems mortally ashamed and frightened, so that Andreas leaves her.

  Her most beautiful moments: her power of perceiving elements of purity even amid apparent ugliness, at the fish market, at the vegetable market, buying provisions for a meal.—He wants to travel to the widow’s house with Mariquita; after protracted difficulties the plan falls through. She will never revisit any place they visited together the time before. Thus each time she unravels the web.—Andreas: “If only I knew something about your solitude. What are you like then?”

  Mariquita likes to question Andreas about the Knight, it is almost as if she sometimes wavered between the two. “What would he say or do then? Ah, is he like that? Do you admire him very much? Would he like me?”

  Mariquita sees the Knight speaking to Maria with loving urgency. She (what resists in her) prevents Maria from really loving the Knight.

  Mariquita declares that she knows everything about the Countess, back into the first year of her life: she recounts part of her biography—never her own. Andreas asks, “And what about you when you were a child?”

  Mariquita, having once fainted from fright, turns into Maria—during the adventure in the storm, on the quay, in a strange house to which he has carried her. On that day she was tired, had not had enough sleep: a beautiful sunset, then a thunderstorm.

  MARIA’S STORY: abandoned after passionate love, marries a man she does not love, who only possesses her once: he falls very ill: she nurses him in a wayside inn—then the faithless lover comes to her window.—Maria’s fundamental idea: the infinite—how it is possible to take one man for another.

  Her psychic malady dates from the day on which, nursing her unloved husband after the death of her child, she is unexpectedly confronted with the lover, the faithless one. “Life has rent me asunder, God in Heaven alone can put me together again.”

  What happened: gradually she brings herself to answer some of the lover’s letters, agrees to meet him once. Here, she does not think beyond the delight of the meeting, but into that delight she plunges entirely: it is an utterly different thing for her from seeing him pass by often: for her the meeting is like the plastic compared with the visual—there is something added. In comparison, her husband loses relief more and more. Just before the meeting, she pauses, turns round and goes home. She feels as though her husband were sitting at her embroidery frame, waiting for her, as though his eyes were on her. As she is going home, she feels her lover behind her back, but does not turn round, has the strength to reach the threshold. She goes upstairs, opens the door; her husband is actually sitting at the embroidery frame, his eyes upon her, but he is dead.

  In her marriage, temporary loss of sense of value. Sitting alone at her mirror, the Countess once sees how she changes after everything in her mind has taken on a different aspect. The torture in her face struggles with triumph—then Mariquita stands up and steals downstairs.

  Once, when Maria is talking to Andreas and the Knight (about Spanish titles and successions, purposely, tediously, because she does not want to excite herself), she forgets herself: the other face appears, her tone changes completely, her eyes swim, a burning look meets Andreas—then it is over, she turns deathly pale, has difficulty in picking up the thread. During this glowing moment, Andreas says to himself, “I am possessed, my imagination has called up the other”—he turns red with shame and tears come into his eyes.—Andreas cannot bring himself to assent to the identity of the hands, he insists on finding a difference.

  In Maria, subliminal horror of everything happening in the street, increasing reluctance to drive out, which the Knight tries to overcome. Purification, the heart reduced to ashes, glorifies self-mortification, interest in Platonism, tendency to Molinism.

  The sermon she has heard in the afternoon about the work of the worms in the human corpse, and at the same time how we are forgotten even by our nearest: how there is no salvation here save with God.

  Confessor: Spaniard. Mariquita has a curious relationship to him; she writes to him too, she threatens to lead Maria into another way of life. She resists his look.—Strong desires felt by Mariquita are felt as impulses by Maria.

  Mariquita on Maria: she refused to be a real woman—would not forget Christ.

  Andreas—Maria: it comes to taking a room: his dread of possessing her—unconscious even to himself.—Maria feels a voice warning her, repeats tonelessly what she imagines the voice said to her: “Do not do it, do not do it.”

  Her confessions when she is ill (apparently delirious, but she is not delirious)—how Mariquita has cut her feet from her body and hidden them. As she tells this, Andreas rushes from the room. He now receives incessant letters from both. Finally, the lady enters a convent.

  THE KNIGHT of Malta.—He moves in a time which is not quite the present, and in a place which is not completely here.—For him, Venice is the fusion of the classical world and the Orient, impossibility, in Venice, of relapsi
ng into the trivial, the unmeaning. Morosin Peloponnesiaco his great-grandfather. Possesses some antiques, among them an early torso.

  Several beings in him: when he is gardening, out on the Brenta, in shirt-sleeves, he anticipates the bourgeois of 1840: for Andreas the premonition of how his own grandchildren will live.

  Relatedness. Alone with the child, the child looks up: “Out of the substance, which I may not seek—for I am that substance—all the heavens and hells of all religions are constructed—to cast them away would be gross darkness.—The child’s look: binds me, the words in my mouth, to these walls, to their protection, to what is simply there.”—Impavidum ferient ruinae—an interpretation, a consideration of inner powers, a mustering of resources: only the cataclysm reveals supreme ecstasy.

  Sacramozo’s two dreams at the desk in the magistrate’s court at Bruneck: (i) He is living alone at the castle—a cock crows, then a second time; a bell rings. He stands up, barefoot: through the soles of his feet he feels everything, right down into the mountain. The miller’s daughter at the gate; lights the fire, waters the cattle in the great hall—purely symbolic ceremonies. Then, in the arbour, he marries her to his son. From the mountain wall opposite there issue silver ancestors, so beautiful that he cries in his dream, “I am dreaming.”—(ii) Everything has two meanings: he is governor, but nobody must know it. In the entrance hall, a fire, maids, the prisoner chained to the wall. Denial. The prisoner: “Do you know me, then?” Every time in between, he flies through the landscape: brooks, graveyards—hither, thither. Already weary of his fight, he believes that he must discover who the other is—it is like a mislaid key.—The cock crows. He knows that it is for the third time, and knows that he has betrayed his Saviour.—The real governor comes up to him: “I have the strangest news for you: the Count of Welsberg has returned from the Turkish war”—he was believed to have been captured and beheaded by the Janissaries.

  His hypochondria (indescribable dependence on the quality of the air): his pride with regard to these things, reticence.—Antipathy to raucous shouts, barking of dogs.

  A man must become devout in the struggle for perfection. His explanation of what has taught him to despise the sensuously perfect—although he is sensitive to it (the sensuous perfection expressed in Veronese in the relation of a perfect white to a bare throat, the same in Correggio)—the dilapidated condition of Venice has taught him the vanity of all things.

  Perfectomania: to plan sumptuous festivals ends in the belief that no festival is perfect but the funeral of a Carthusian monk.

  His key, that he can see through the motives of others, their nature: just as, for a devout man, everything is over when he realizes that the other is godless, incapable of seeking God; so, for him, everything is over when he feels no disinterested and steady striving upwards: he clings to what he calls the human, he is quick to divine the merely partial.—“What is the use of a confused striving, an isolated good quality? I will have nothing to do with the sieve of the Danaides, the rock of Sisyphus.”

  Sacramozo’s interpretation of the Gospel saying: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you” (here, in created beings, he seeks the Kingdom of God). “The ergon,” says the Fama, “is the sanctification of the inner man, alchemy is the parergon.” Solve et coagula. The universal binding agent—gluten; his universal solvent—alkahest; in love, both are present. In love, always sublimate, etherealize, sacrifice life, the moment, to the higher, purer thing which is to be distilled from them—seek to fix this higher, purer thing.

  The Knight: a motto: Le plus grand plaisir de tous les plaisirs est de sortir de soi-même, in Amours d’Eumène et de Flora (in von Waldberg, Geschichte des Romans). The evil mood that precedes his crises: he is then actually unpleasant, or rather insufferable, even discourteous. The look of contempt for everybody, even for Andreas. His crushing mockery of Andreas: he literally annihilates him (and himself too). The consuming irony and tormenting restlessness that drive him. In this condition, one of his crises coincides with a momentous crisis in Maria: Mariquita suddenly speaks to him, mocks him. He runs away, passes through a crisis of deepest self-abasement, from which he rises to supreme purity and joyful victory. Before this, he hurries to various places (to Nina too) where he suffers rebuffs and humiliations.—“How,” he wonders, “can the worthy substance arise from the worthless, the eagle from the chameleon, the jewel from dirt?”

  Knight: the complete collapse of the man of forty. He can no longer expect further illumination, redeeming revelations, and cannot imagine that those older than he should have resources that are withheld from him: he can approach nobody with entreaty, in confiding discipleship: what is capable of redemption is his work (the young man there before him)—He himself is his own last resort: he no longer looks on life with curiosity, very many relationships are no longer possible. He has realized all this, his morbidity intensifies it: he cannot really reconcile himself to his actual age. With the Countess he is like a schoolboy: that is a task beyond his powers: everything he does to her is a pretence. Appalling doubts at this point: every time they arise, he has the decency to put a stop to them and go on doing.—That is the most heroic of all human conditions (see Frederick the Great).

  Who could imagine him infinitely weeping, infinitely wooing?—he lacks that touch of the actor which is essential to the priest, the prophet, without which they cannot exist. How every faculty requires for its existence its own opposite latent in it: the unspeakable delight, for the modest, to think that they might overcome their modesty, for the proud, the cold, to imagine themselves glowing.—Thus, in every impulse to take, the profound impulse not to take (the secret in Grillparzer’s relationship to Kathi)—duality incorporated in Maria and Mariquita. Sometimes Sacramozo bewilders Andreas with disclosures of this kind, for instance, once after an evening together (supper, casino) when Sacramozo greeted a large number of people.

  Sacramozo’s way of telling a story.—Instead of “I was once in Japan with pilgrims,” he says, “Go to Japan! You will walk three, five days with a band of pilgrims … the question is whether you will see the sun rise in purity …”

  Knight: “Note that each of us only becomes aware in the other of what conforms to himself; we create statues round about us in our own dimensions. Problem: in what does union with a human being consist? in understanding, in possession, in first approaching that human being? …” (hint of Indian speculation).

  Knight to Andreas: “Does a young man really know what he demands, what he wants?”—“all these connections, and whether they lead to anything—that requires guidance from above.”—The Knight possesses the conception of power, which Andreas has yet to acquire.

  Knight and Andreas compared: Andreas: Faith in authority ramifying to the uttermost periphery of existence, so that he feels that everything he experiences is analogous to, but not identical with, something real, his actions too. The real doers are elsewhere; his inhibitions, his naïveté in face of life, are his own. Knight: doubts not himself but his fate. In suffering, in enjoyment, he had the whole, two-sided, in one, but everything remained partial to him (while Andreas feels that everything remained partial to him, not “the grasp to get it”). Knight knows: my command is a command, my smile has a general power to win—but, en somme, what is the good of it?—Knight has not Andreas’s wavering, his doubts, his fitfulness—he is sure of results, but it can often happen that he finds himself in a vacuum with them: “Eh bien! what now?” says his double. “Aha!—well, well, what now!”

  Andreas’s dawning realization that there is for the Knight, who can speak to everybody, before whom all barriers fall, one barrier all the same. This thought has something of it which moves him almost to tears.

  The affair with the letter. Chapter V.—Zorzi: “The Knight has left a letter behind.” Andreas: “Let me take it back to him”—almost as if his tongue had said it of himself: the fulfilment of his wish means infinitely much to him. Runs after him. Knight puts
it in his pocket, unforgettable hasty gait. Knight returns a few minutes later. “You are mistaken. The letter did not belong to me.” Andreas: “And certainly not to me.” Chapter VI, a few days later. Knight catches him up. “I must ask you to tell me what could have persuaded you to give me that letter. There are coincidences that leave one no peace. The inside and the outside of the folded letter were in a different hand; I think it belonged to me.” He blushes as he speaks; Andreas vows to use the words “beautiful” and “ugly” with caution.

  Knight hails a gondola in order to read the letter, begins while the gondolier is getting the gondola ready—forgets to get in. The gondolier does not like to draw his attention. He stands up quickly and pushes the letter into his pocket. Gets in, tries to get over the letter. Mistakes several houses for his own, then feels his own then feels utterly restless at home, wants to burn the letter.—Foreboding of death through the letter.

  He believes that one or the other of his two servants has done away with the letter—for what possible reason? the elder to protect him? the younger to injure the elder? At last he finds the letter, reads it over; he finds it among travel notes, where his hand has put it in a kind of somnambulism, at a particular place, next to a particularly significant note on Japan. Deeply and singularly shaken by this slight experience.—His degree of sympathy, and hence his comprehension of his two servants. He cannot possibly disturb the elder, who has relatives visiting him: it occurs to him that that is why he went up the front staircase. He reflects on this himself; his servants in Japan, where he had fourteen of them, men and women, come into his mind. He notices in passing that he is forming within himself a whole chain of thought, always turning on this servant—his old servant: he and the servant always at cross-purposes: the young servant, who is always quarrelling with the elder. The Knight locks up the letter, and at once takes it out again.