Paracelsus is a significant statement of Schnitzler's relationship to psycho-analysis in that it recognizes the value of the insights it gives—and at the same time relativizes that value in terms of a reticent and yet passionate moral intention. The same is true of the work which in my view constitutes Schnitzler's deepest illumination of the problem—Traumnovelle.

Central to Traumnovelle is the dialectical relationship between the actuality of Fridolin's and Albertine's marriage and the possibility of other experiences and adventures within their being.¹ The story begins and ends with the reality of their married life together. Yet this reality is threatened by the experiences of two nights. What first begins the process of undermining is the masked ball they have recently attended. Not that anything happened at the time; but the following evening at home is spent reminiscing about the ball. Gradually the possible adventures become larger and more significant in recollection, and husband and wife begin to discuss the hidden possibilities of their personalities. Fridolin is then called away to a patient who has had a heart attack. The patient's daughter, Marianne, declares her love for Fridolin. Their brief kiss is interrupted by the arrival of her fiancé. Fridolin leaves, still feeling curiously resentful of the revelations Albertine made in their conversation that evening. After a brief encounter with a prostitute he calls at a coffee-house. Here he meets an erstwhile fellow medical student, Nachtigall, who now earns a living by playing the piano in various cellars and private houses. Nachtigall reveals that he has an appointment that evening to play at a large villa where he has been three times before. Each time he has played blindfold—but each time he has managed to squint through the bandage covering his eyes—sufficient to see that he is playing for a wild orgy at which the women are naked but for their masks. Fridolin hastily hires a monk's habit from a theatrical costumier and with Nachtigall's help gains entrance into the villa. The woman are dressed as nuns, the men as courtiers and cavaliers, but at a given signal the women appear naked and the orgy commences. Fridolin's presence is discovered and one of the women offers to sacrifice herself for him. Fridolin is forcibly ejected. When he finally returns home he awakens Albertine from a dream which at his request she tells him. Her dream is similar in experiential content to the actual adventure in which Fridolin has participated. It is a dream of passionate consummation with Fridolin, of her then lying naked in a meadow where she is seduced by a young Dane, whom she saw briefly many years ago on holiday—of Fridolin being flogged and crucified. The contents of her fantasy are comparable to Fridolin's adventure—violent sexuality, nakedness, sadism.

The following day Fridolin tries to trace the scenes and people of the night before—but with little success. Nachtigall has left town, the prostitute has been taken to hospital. He manages to find the villa where the orgy took place, but is warned against making further inquiries. The morning paper reports the mysterious death of a woman, and Fridolin goes to the ‘Allgemeines Krankenhaus’ to view the body. He finds it impossible to be sure if this lifeless body is identical with the sensuous and beautiful woman of the previous night's orgy. Fridolin returns home to Albertine, only to find a mask on his pillow, the mask he wore at the villa and which he has presumably dropped somewhere in their flat. He makes a full confession to Albertine of the night's adventures.

No summary can render fully the mounting intensity of Fridolin's night of adventures. Once he embarks in quest of such experiences, the familiar world around him changes, revealing at every turn possibilities of newer and stranger erotic experiences: ‘seit dem Abendgespräch mit Albertine rückte er immer weiter fort aus dem gewohnten Bezirk seines Daseins in irgendeine andere, ferne, fremde Welt’ (E, ii. 451). At regular intervals, however, as he moves deeper into this strange world he thinks back with affection to the stable world of his everyday realities, to which he knows he will return in a few hours: ‘und wie an etwas Erlösendes dachte er daran, daß er in wenigen Stunden schon, wenn alles gut ging, wie jeden Morgen zwischen den Betten seiner Kranken herumgehen würde—ein hilfsbereiter Arzt’ (462). And yet Fridolin is to find that this world of adventure cannot be so easily shaken off. He is particularly distressed when he hears Albertine's dream, when he learns that she, too, is capable of entering a world that is equally foreign to her everyday existence as wife and mother. As he sets out on the following day to confront again the experiences of the previous night, he feels that the orderly social reality to which he belongs is some kind of monstrous sham: ‘Und erst auf der Stiege kam ihm wieder zu Bewußtsein, daß all diese Ordnung, all dies Gleichmaß, all diese Sicherheit seines Daseins nur Schein und Lüge zu bedeuten hatten’ (488). Cynically he weighs up the possibility of leading a kind of double life, of being both the respected and respectable family doctor, and a seducer and cynical libertine: ‘eine Art von Doppelleben führen, zugleich der tüchtige, verläßliche, zukunftsreiche Arzt, der brave Gatte und Familienvater sein—und zugleich ein Wüstling, ein Verführer, ein Zyniker, der mit den Menschen, mit Männern und Frauen spielte, wie ihm just die Laune ankam—das erschien ihm in diesem Augenblick als etwas ganz Köstliches’ (489). Fridolin realizes that, when he enters the world of erotic adventures, he abandons his identity as it had been established hitherto. He will join the anonymity of the masked ball, the whirling dance of man and woman liberated from their individual identity—and from the social and moral responsibility that goes with that identity in the practical world. Anonymity is literally and symbolically the hallmark of adventure in Schnitzler's work. Adventure so often appears as a kind of masked ball—or as a furtive meeting in an enclosed cab. It is interesting how many of Schnitzler's stories concerned with illicit relationships introduce the two main characters as simply ‘er’ and ‘sie’, as man and woman at the most basic experiential level. As the narrator writes in Die Braut physical consummation needs not two individuals—but two sexes: ‘der kurze und bewußtlose Augenblick, in welchem die Natur ihren Zweck durchzusetzen weiß, braucht nur den Mann und das Weib, und wenn wir auch sein Vorher und Nachher so erfindungsreich von den tausend Lichtern unserer Individualität umtanzen lassen—sie löschen doch alle aus, wenn uns die dumpfe Nacht der Erfüllung umfängt’ (E, i. 89).

The journey into adventure undertaken by Fridolin is, as in Die Toten schweigen and so many of Schnitzler's works, an allegorical journey into death. The coach which takes Nachtigall to the villa and which subsequently brings Fridolin back to Vienna is a ‘Trauerkutsche’. And Fridolin's climactic experience of sexual adventure—the masked orgy in the villa—is shot through with, and indeed heightened by, a sense of imminent danger and destruction. The violence smouldering beneath the surface becomes actuality as the woman offers herself to the men as a sacrifice in place of Fridolin.

As so often in Schnitzler, death functions as an intensifying factor in the sexual adventure. One should note, however, that it is the notional presence of death, the image of death that heightens physical desire. The actuality of death destroys the magic of heightened sensuality. The day after the orgy, the ravishing naked figure of the woman is a corpse in which the decomposition of the flesh has begun. Fridolin's confrontation with the dead body is a scene that comes from the world of the Baroque. The pleasure garden has changed into the desert. The skeleton is now seen forcing its way through the once alluring flesh.

War es ihr Leib?—der wunderbare, blühende, gestern noch so qualvoll ersehnte? Er sah einen gelblichen, faltigen Hals, er sah zwei kleine und doch etwas schlaff gewordene Mädchenbrüste, zwischen denen, als wäre das Werk der Verwesung schon vorgebildet, das Brustbein mit grausamer Deutlichkeit sich unter der bleichen Haut abzeichnete, er sah die Rundung des mattbraunen Unterleibs, er sah, wie von einem dunklen, nun geheimnis- und sinnlos gewordenen Schatten aus wohlgeformte Schenkel sich gleichgültig öffneten, sah die leise auswärts gedrehten Kniewölbungen, die scharfen Kanten der Schienbeine und die schlanken Füße mit den einwärts gekrümmten Zehen.

(500)

It is from the powerful confrontation with the emptiness, with the ‘Wahn’ of physical passion that Fridolin returns to his wife, to the everyday world of order and responsibility.

The interpretative problem involved in Traumnovelle centres upon the relationship between the two worlds evoked in the story. One should first stress that the links between the two worlds are suggested throughout in a series of subtle hints. In one sense Fridolin does leave the world of social reality for one of unbridled sexual adventure, but one should not forget that this latter world is potentially present behind Fridolin's everyday world. He does not have to journey to strange, exotic places in order to find entry into the world of anonymous sexual adventure. It is there all the time, just as the possibilities of sexual adventure are always present in his being. Often we are made to feel the link between the real world and the intense, frenetic world of irresponsibility and adventure. The most obvious example is the password that gives Fridolin admission to the villa—‘Denmark’. This links with Albertine's confession to Fridolin that she was so powerfully attracted to the young Dane whom she had seen on holiday that she would have been prepared to sacrifice everything and go with him. There are other touches where the link with reality is maintained. Albertine's dream begins with her being claimed by Fridolin, who appears as a prince: ‘Mit einem Male standest du davor, Galeerensklaven hatten dich hergerudert’ (476). This detail has presumably been taken into Albertine's dream from the fairy-tale her daughter has been reading the night before: ‘Vierundzwanzig braune Sklaven ruderten die prächtige Galeere, die den Prinzen Amgiad zu dem Palast des Kalifen bringen sollte’ (434). Another subtle link is made when Fridolin the day after the experience at the villa, is doing his hospital rounds: ‘Das junge Mädchen mit dem verdächtigen Spitzenkatarrh dort im letzten Bett lächelte ihm zu. Es war dieselbe, die neulich bei Gelegenheit einer Untersuchung ihre Brüste so zutraulich an seine Wange gepreßt hatte’ (485). This recalls the moment during Marianne's outburst at the house of the Hofrat when Fridolin reflects: ‘Wie erregt sie spricht, … und ihre Augen glänzen! Fieber? Wohl möglich. Sie ist magerer geworden in der letzten Zeit. Spitzenkatarrh vermutlich’ (443). The link is made in Fridolin's diagnosis: the possible adventure is embedded in the very reality of Fridolin's profession, his contact as a young doctor with women in whom the proximity of sickness or death excites physical desire.

The passage from Fridolin's social existence as doctor, husband, and father into a world of indiscriminate adventures is not a difficult one. The possibility accompanies Fridolin every day of his life. And yet, if he chooses to follow the path of the adventurer, then he must abandon all the basic certainties of marriage and his profession. Albertine is characterized throughout the story by a kind of leitmotif, by a detail of physical description: ‘die Arme unter dem Nacken verschränkt’ (448), ‘ruhig lag sie da, die Arme im Nacken verschlungen’ (503). Albertine is associated with this pose and all it suggests—peace, calm, contentment. Significantly, when Fridolin returns home from the villa, he finds her sleeping in this pose—and yet her thoughts are anything but peaceful: ‘Albertine lag ruhig, die Arme im Nacken verschlungen, ihre Lippen waren halb geöffnet, schmerzliche Schatten zogen rings um sie; es war ein Antlitz, das Fridolin nicht kannte’ (474). Fridolin awakens her and Albertine tells of her dream, a dream which reveals that she is potentially just as capable of adventures and betrayals as Fridolin himself. Fridolin feels this dream as a kind of infidelity. The following day he concludes that he cannot possibly tell her of his experiences at the villa:

Aber er wußte keinen, den er in die Abenteuer der vergangenen Nacht gerne eingeweiht hätte. Seit Jahren war er mit keinem Menschen wirklich vertraut als mit seiner Frau, und mit der konnte er sich in diesem Fall doch kaum beraten, in diesem nicht und in keinem andern. Denn man mochte es nehmen, wie man wollte: heute nacht hatte sie ihn ans Kreuz schlagen lassen.

(493)

One wonders if Fridolin's reaction here is not perhaps right. Is not the real social world, for all its values of order and responsibility, simply a thin, precarious façade which must crumble as soon as the individual faces the truth about his own being?

In order to answer the whole question as to how we are to evaluate the depiction of social existence, of marriage and family within the story, one has to examine the two crucial scenes in which Schnitzler shows Fridolin and Albertine together. These scenes occur at the beginning and at the end of Traumnovelle, and constitute its axis. As the story opens, the child is put to bed, and we see Fridolin and Albertine together ‘unter dem rötlichen Schein der Hängelampe’ (434). The ‘Hängelampe’ recurs as a leitmotif throughout Schnitzler's work, suggesting the security of home and family. They eagerly discuss the events of the previous night's masked ball, and they remember how their greatest pleasure lay not in the exciting anonymity of the occasion, but in being together: ‘im Grunde froh, einem enttäuschend banalen Maskenspiel entronnen zu sein’ (435). They had pretended that they had only just met, they had played ‘eine Komödie der Galanterie, des Widerstandes, der Verführung und des Gewährens’ (435), and then returned home ‘zu einem schon lange Zeit nicht mehr so heiß erlebten Liebesglück’ (435). And yet, this happiness is gradually forgotten as they recall the possibility of adventures which they missed. At the time this possibility did not attract them, but now it seems to acquire new life and importance: ‘und jene unbeträchtlichen Erlebnisse waren mit einemmal vom trügerischen Scheine versäumter Möglichkeiten zauberhaft und schmerzlich umflossen’ (435). It is important to note the unequivocal nature of the narrator's judgement in this sentence. The possible adventures begin to disturb Fridolin and Albertine, and the narrator makes it unmistakably clear to us as readers that Fridolin and Albertine are deluded. The adventures were nothing, and their attractiveness in retrospect is nothing but deception. And yet Fridolin and Albertine pursue the subject and begin to doubt their certainty about each other, to question whether their present reality is in any sense a necessary expression of their being. They recall moments when they could have been different from what they are—when they could have been unfaithful to themselves and each other. Again, the narrator unequivocally judges their behaviour and condemns their curiosity: ‘bang, selbstquälerisch, in unlauterer Neugier versuchten sie eines aus dem andern Geständnisse hervorzulocken’ (436). The decision they reach may in the abstract be a sensible one. They agree to confront such experiences openly—to tell each other of those moments and thereby exorcize them. But in practice, the atmosphere is now thoroughly poisoned between them as they desperately search their memories for an experience ‘dessen aufrichtige Beichte sie vielleicht von einer Spannung und einem Mißtrauen befreien könnte, das allmählich unerträglich zu werden anfing’ (436). They exchange memories, but the narrator reminds us all the time how dangerous their behaviour is. The confessions do not dissipate the tension; they exacerbate it. Their tone of voice is stressed: ‘mit verschleierter, etwas feindseliger Stimme’, ‘aber seine Stimme klang immer noch hart’, ‘mit seltsamer Härte’ (437), ‘so ärgerlichen Tons’ (440). The ill feeling between them mounts perceptibly. At one point Albertine confesses to a passionate moment of desire for Fridolin before they were married, when, if he had asked her, she would have eloped with him, slept with him—done anything he wanted. Fridolin misunderstands completely and asks her whether she would have reacted in the same way if another young man had happened to come along. Albertine replies: ‘“Und wärst nicht du es gewesen, der vor dem Fenster stand,”—sie lächelte zu ihm auf—, “dann wäre wohl auch der Sommerabend nicht so schön gewesen”’ (440). And yet, Fridolin will not be convinced. He degrades Albertine's description of a moment of passionate longing for him to a kind of impersonal sexual excitement. The attempt to face possible adventures in their own being drives Fridolin to debase the love between him and Albertine, to devalue the actuality of their relationship as man and wife.

The final meeting between husband and wife takes place the following evening. Fridolin has spent the day unsuccessfully attempting to recapture the experiences of the previous night. He returns home to his wife, and as he looks at her sleeping, ‘ein Gefühl von Zärtlichkeit, ja von Geborgenheit, wie er es nicht erwartet, durchdrang sein Herz’ (502). He has decided to tell her everything:

doch so, als wäre alles, was er erlebt, ein Traum gewesen—und dann, erst wenn sie die ganze Nichtigkeit seiner Abenteuer gefühlt und erkannt hatte, wollte er ihr gestehen, daß sie Wirklichkeit gewesen waren. Wirklichkeit? fragte er sich—, und gewahrte in diesem Augenblick, ganz nahe dem Antlitz Albertines auf dem benachbarten, auf seinem Polster etwas Dunkles, Abgegrenztes, wie die umschatteten Linien eines menschlichen Gesichts.

(502)

This is the most richly symbolical, and yet at the same time the most human and touching moment in the story. Fridolin realizes that Albertine has put the mask there as a kind of joke—‘in der zugleich eine milde Warnung und die Bereitwilligkeit des Verzeihens ausgedrückt schien’ (503). At the symbolical level, however, the incident focuses the confrontation between the two worlds. The mask, symbol of the anonymity of sexual adventure, is placed on Fridolin's pillow next to his wife. Fridolin is forced to see the mask in the immediate and actual context of his marriage to Albertine. Its position on the pillow next to her symbolizes the degradation of love that Fridolin committed the previous night. He had reduced a very precise memory of her love for him to a kind of erotic euphoria, to a craving for sexual adventure—with anyone. Fridolin is forced to confront himself, to confront that part of his being that has pursued adventure, to confront the horror of Albertine sleeping next to that symbol of and passport to indiscriminate adventure. He perceives it as a degradation of himself—and a degradation of their relationship. To her, the mask must suggest ‘sein, des Gatten, ihr nun rätselhaft gewordenes Antlitz’ (503). The juxtaposition of mask and face symbolizes the confrontation of ‘Sein’ and ‘Schein’. It is one of Schitzler's supreme moments—and it is a moment which in its symbolic, almost theatrical ‘Anschaulichkeit’ reveals his immense debt to the Austrian Baroque tradition.

Fridolin breaks down and weeps, and with his tears comes the full confession to Albertine. He asks the timid question as to what they should do. Albertine's answer is simple—to be thankful that they have emerged unscathed from all their adventures, both real and imaginary. She has no reassuring explanation to give—she cannot say which is ultimately real, the ‘reality’ of a night of adventure or the factual ‘reality’ of a whole life. To which Fridolin adds: ‘Und kein Traum ist völlig Traum’ (503). There is no solution—only a gratefully accepted working arrangement which is of necessity tentative and reticent in the certainties it offers. For all its reticence, however, it gives passionate assent to the waking, conscious self and the actual relationship which it can forge. As Albertine says: ‘Nun sind wir wohl erwacht … für lange’ (503). They lie side by side, and in contrast to the tension of one night ago, they are now ‘einander traumlos nah’ (504). And so they lie until the real social world, to which they have given their allegiance, makes it usual claims on their time, their energies, and their love: ‘bis es wie jeden Morgen um sieben Uhr an die Zimmertür klopfte, und, mit den gewohnten Geräuschen von der Straße her, einem sieghaften Lichtstrahl durch den Vorhangspalt und einem hellen Kinderlachen von nebenan der neue Tag begann’ (504).

Traumnovelle contains perhaps the most revealing exploration of Schnitzler's relationship to psycho-analysis, and in it he asserts that position which we see him adopt so often in the aphorisms—that of a pragmatic moralist. It is because of this latter perspective that Schnitzler writes a story which is much more than a case-history. We know that the mature Schnitzler expressed an aversion for those of his early stories where he was concerned with ‘cases’ rather than people. He condemns Sterben as follows: ‘es stammt aus der Zeit, wo mich der “Fall” mehr interessiert hat als die Menschen, und ich denke das Meiste aus dieser Epoche muß wie luftlos wirken’.² One knows what Schnitzler means. Sterben is a harrowing story in which Felix and Marie are observed with a kind of relentless, clinical objectivity. All their attempts to answer the awful fact that Felix has only one year to live, all their emotional assertions of undying love, their stoic confrontations of the inevitable, their decision to live for the moment and to forget the pitiless flow of time, everything by which they strive to maintain dignity, joy, love, in the face of inevitable destruction, is eroded and undermined by the process of physical disintegration at work in Felix's body. At one point Felix says: ‘Es gehen eigentlich lauter zum Tode Verurteilte auf der Erde herum’ (E, i. 112), and in this sense the story acquires an anguished existential meaning. The dialectic of the physical facts of man's being on the one hand and his spiritual and emotional need to discover meaning and purpose in life on the other, the dialectic of determinism and free will, runs right through the story and is evoked with masterly power by Schnitzler. And yet the existential statement is made from an extreme situation, from a carefully selected experimental situation where it is known that one of the partners in a relationship is to die in a year's time. Under these circumstances hardly any protestation of moral and human dignity has any chance of standing up to the relentless process of decay that slowly devours Felix. In this sense, then, the story is more a case history than anything else; the characters involved are under such intolerable physical strain that they can hardly do anything but act as the incurable disease bids them. This particular experiment proves its point. All man's pretensions to free will and conscious decision come to naught if his physical circumstances are utterly against him.

In his art every artist is selective: he chooses certain aspects from the raw material of human experience. To choose to see the defeat of human aspirations is one choice; to choose to see their vindication is another. In his life Schnitzler made both choices. It seems to me that when he inclined to the latter choice—as in Traumnovelle—he produced his finest achievements. Traumnovelle is fine, not because its subject matter is intrinsically ‘better’ than that of Sterben, but because Traumnovelle is intellectually and stylistically a richer work than Sterben, in that it encompasses intellectually both negation and affirmation, stylistically both observation and compassion. The affirmation is not facile; it is tentative because of the weight of threat and negation that precedes it. And in Traumnovelle, as so often in Schnitzler, there is an extraordinary fusion of the modern with the traditional. Traumnovelle draws on the literary tradition of the Baroque and also on the insights of Freudian psycho-analysis. Heinz Politzer in a magnificent study of Schnitzler summarizes those recurring themes in his work that link him with Freud, but concludes: ‘all diese Elemente der Schnitzlerschen Welt sind nichts anderes als psychologischanalytische Variationsfiguren, ausgeführt über einem in seiner Tiefe barocken Orgelpunkt.’³ This fusion accounts for the range of stylistic expression, for the breadth of human vision in Traumnovelle. In his finest works Schnitzler analyses human experience in terms that both encompass and go beyond the scientific determinism of Freud.

Notes

1. Cf. the following studies of Traumnovelle: R. Lantin, Traum und Wirklichkeit in der Prosadichtung Arthur Schnitzlers (Phil. Diss., Köln, 1958); Hans-Joachim Schrimpf, ‘Arthur Schnitzlers Traumnovelle’, ZfdP, lxxxii (1963), 172 ff.; William H. Rey, op. cit., especially pp. 116f.

2. Cf. p. 123 n. 1.

3. Heinz Politzer, Das Schweigen der Sirenen (Metzler, Stuttgart, 1968), p. 138.