Qualibus in tenebris vitae quantisque PericlesDegitur Hoccer Aevi, Quodcumque is!In the midst of what dangers, what darkness, what happens to us is given little life!(Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, II, 15)
Fate Jakob Elias Poritzky seems related to his work fell into obscurity until his death in 1935. Some years after his birth in 1876 in Lomza, in occupied Poland and Russia where pogroms and famine are rampant, his family emigrated and settled in Baden, near Karlsruhe. Editions of The Last Drop , whose catalog contains decidedly treasures, revived in 2008 a work never previously translated into French here My Hell, published in Germany in 1906. This unclassifiable book stands a powerful voice, desperate and rebellious, yet the irony of which is not absent: a vicious cycle and painful, but sometimes burlesque. The author, when this text appears, has only thirty years. He recounts a descent into hell, in a move both spiral and cyclic: in fact, each chapter describes a new circle of hell in which plunges the narrator, each more narrow and more tightly than the previous however, the last, "Revolt", the call directed angry a hypothetical God, meets the second evokes the narrator's childhood in an environment very similar to that known Poritzky.
No need to know to be dead in hell. The narrator moves in a narrow world, one room "small and low," he only comes out to meet the waste of the human species. In every man crossed he guesses a similar fate to his, miserable and sordid. Each conceals from his dismal "little secret " : thoughts guilty to a cabaret singer, the refusal to give birth to a child that would perpetuate their condition, the desire to kill him ... But, endowed with the ability to discern the incisor baseness of its congeners, n not escape their through, giving way to random encounters, even if they lead to a miserable brothel where he is the plaything of lewd attentions of two ugly prostitutes. In this erratic wanderings, he trains a player like him:
The misery of existence, this is what I preach. If life disgusts you, if you're nauseated, having reached the zenith of misery, if your soul is so oppressed she is about to burst, if you want to make you blow your brains to take refuge in a vacuum where you do not feel it, then read my book. It will console you by increasing your torments. You know ...I Poritzky, written in 1900 (quote placed emphasis).
outset, the author makes the reader his brother in misery, assuming they both belong to the same humanity misguided and unfortunate. This "You know ..." takes us on to its sequel, membership application, almost pleading, in conjunction solitudes can regain a sense of brotherhood. The trip looks tough. One of the characteristics of writing Poritzky is there: speaking directly to the reader himself, God, he moves to the center of a creation which reveals the chasm leading into the depths of hell. The report establishes that God is strange: indeed, he suggested at the beginning and the end of his work, while denying him against entering or speaking directly to him, in a process almost Schopenhauer. It is believed that passage of Parerga and Paralipomena : "If there was a God, I would not be what God, the misery of the world breaks my heart." Moreover, "The gates of hell "could well be those of heaven according to his father. The second chapter, in fact, recalls a childhood that was anything but a green paradise. The narrator's father, like Poritzky (which was Chasan - cantor in the synagogue), prevents read, whereas the books away from religion.
- No, dirt, you're not thinking. You do not like to pray, read your crap you prefer German. But wait a bit to see! In the Hereafter, you will not stop to make you tan leather ass for all that.- But Father, it is necessary that I read.- No, you do not read. Throw all those books repugnant. Plug this garbage in a fire! Therefore requests! That's what you've got smart thing to do. Then God will love you. If you despise it as he despises the vulgar mangy dogs.
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| Gustave Dore Bible . Solomon |
However, the narrator chooses to remain faithful to his love of books, which diverts from this God awful. It can not recognize itself in its family. The image of the mother, loving but submissive, is not enough to keep him in the inner circle where he had his first hell. As Poritzky family fled Poland to escape the danger, the double of the author chose to travel, joining without knowing the fate of his people condemned to wander. The only ray of light in the distance: the discovery of the love of his sister - a feeling that can not speak in secret from the father. This revelation can only make that even more unfortunate, since this is starting tear.
Thus begins a journey that leads the protagonist of hope in disillusionment. His travels are replicas of those has made Poritzky: Frankfurt to Paris, then Berlin, hell hell. He experiences of poverty and hunger, as the character of Knut Hamsun. In Paris, surrounded by students as wretched as himself, he is reduced to begging, to get involved in those endless lines of beggars at the soup kitchen. Sometimes it happens meals.
Take empty bowl, a spoon and pretend to eat to be satisfied: that fails this feat can not be both poor and willing to Paris to study.
Sometimes he sniffs a pitcher of water, thinking to breathe the smell of alcohol he dreams. This experience is not a passage. Each stage gives rise to another, even more painful. The plight raises abjection. The mother figure, poor old woman, blind but loving, which connects the world still turns into representation shameful, since it accepted the seed of the man hated the father, in an embrace disgusting. Thus, no further reference does not bind well. It is becoming increasingly difficult to escape from this hell that seems to be closing in on him ... social deprivation enlisted infamy. Rather than seeking solidarity, comfort in a loving relationship or love, the narrator takes pleasure in belittling the prostitute with whom he maintains a relationship, Claire, the aptly named, in love with him. If the punishment is because it refers to its own downfall:
Because I am unable to love from the depths of my soul, because, yet, as I would dearly love someone. Any human being. Because she is not worthy that I hold in my arms because I'm hungry because I hurt, because men do not deserve nothing but contempt ... and a thousand other reasons too, which s 'agglutinate and, suddenly, my mood darkens.
Since it is not capable of being happy, he chose to make another unfortunate, gradually isolating themselves from the rest of humanity which leads him into one of the last circles: Berlin, "the cruel city," where the pangs of hunger still present, ; the abject begging intensified by a sense of loneliness such inexorable death. The narrator imagines corpse
I lay in my coffin, my brooding nullity. I heard the wind howl outside: I am compressing the heart and discouraged me.
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| Gustave Dore engraving The Divine Comedy |
But death offers no escape from this misery, it did is not even nothing, promises no ataraxia. There is no solution. So much to engage in mud that has invaded the world. Hunger tormented him still, haunting, and making him a being subject to all the turpitude. He suggests a good possibility of finding something to eat, he denied in a final burst of dignity
At the soup kitchen, a place of despair and hunger eternal home of anarchists, abject financial arrangement of a successful case, I was advised sympathetically to get into pederasty, say ... passive. And if it did not join a team cunnilingi active as they were in high demand.
This descent into hell, paradoxically, is the origin of a work born of hunger. Thus emerges a faint hope - may be denied, the work falling quickly into oblivion. In a final revolt, he quote what God has refused to acknowledge: the final chapter of the book is a sort of antithesis to the incipit of Confessions of Rousseau - impossible to know if there Poritzky thought, but the reader can not help it. Thus, the miseries of earthly life is not compensated by the prospect of paradise, the man finally being a puppet manipulated by a God who does not exist. The terrible vision of humanity contained in the pages of this book is a dead end: yet the vivacity of the language used to create time for pleasure, the author does not forbidding, referring to all aspects of ignominy in a deluge of recriminations but with a desperate energy. If the author never mentions anti-Semitism, however, more than prégnant at that time, his work foreshadowed yet, tragically, the disaster to come, which will die in his wife and daughter, and that only his untimely death will escape. Note the remarkable translation of Dina and Nathalie Regnier Sikiric Eberhardt (as always) which preserves the vigor and strength of a very contemporary writing.
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| I Poritzky and his family |
- Jakob Elias Poritzky, My Underworld, The Last Gout, 2008. Translation of Dina and Nathalie Regnier Sikiric Eberhardt
- I advise you to listen to the audio fine chronicle by Nikola Delescluse on Marshlands (issue of September 25, 2009).
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