SOURCE: Weigel, Marga I. “‘I Have No Language for My Reality’: The Ineffable as Tension in the ‘Tale’ of Bluebeard.” World Literature Today 60, no. 4 (autumn 1986): 589-92.

[In the following essay, Weigel explores the role of communication and speech in Bluebeard.]

Following acquittal on charges of murdering a prostitute, Felix Theodor Schaad, M.D., begins to search for the reasons why his life has been a failure. The public cross-examination in the courtroom is followed by Schaad's private cross-examination, an attempt to determine his guilt which ultimately drives him to confess the murder and shortly thereafter to attempt suicide. In the last analysis he is indeed convinced that he is guilty, although he has consistently maintained, both to the court and afterward to himself, that he did not commit the murder.¹

It may be of interest and perhaps not unimportant for Frisch's literary development that a variant of this “tale” appeared in the novel Gantenbein (1964), almost twenty years earlier. A “personality, a cultured man”² is brought before the court and accused of the murder of his former lover Camilla, a prostitute. Far more than the sum of the evidence against him, it is his behavior which makes him suspect: “He can't find the words in which to express complete innocence” (262). He stutters, “and when he speaks, which happens less and less often, he is helpless.” He obstinately maintains his innocence, but no one believes him any longer. The formerly brilliant speaker in Parliament has lost his language;³ before the court he is totally lacking in the power to persuade: “For weeks he has been saying that he didn't do it, he didn't do it, but as though he didn't consider it impossible that he could have done it” (262). On the basis of his obvious uncertainty and of his letters to the victim—“testimonies to a passion about which there was something murderous” (262)—public opinion has long since labeled him a “tart murderer” (263). Gantenbein, called as a witness, observes: “I know the jealousy that no amount of culture can withstand” (261). He has no difficulty at all in imagining himself in the position of the accused. Schaad also knows whereof Gantenbein speaks.

Although the sketch in Gantenbein already contains the nucleus of the Bluebeard “tale,”⁴ the latter is decidedly different in its narrative technique. Frisch, now attempting a concrete portrayal of the suffering individual's speechlessness, succeeds by means of “sham dialogues,” which often prove on closer inspection to be nothing more than the skeletons of inner monologues. There are no longer any conversations in the present. No longer does the narrator comment with the astonishing eloquence of a Stiller or a Gantenbein; instead, he often combines a short introductory phrase with nothing more than sentence fragments. Indeed, toward the end, statements appear without any commentary at all. Epic quality disappears almost entirely, and the “tale” approaches the style of the drama. Joachim Kaiser speaks of a supremely designed narrative dramaturgy.⁵ As far as the title Bluebeard: A Tale is concerned, the best judgment is Walter Faber's: “None of it is true”;⁶ it is neither a tale in the usual sense, nor is it about a fairy-tale Bluebeard who kills his seven wives.

To be sure, the link with the tale of Charles Perrault is made in the text (B, 93); however, the motif of the tyrannical man is inverted. Unlike Bluebeard, Schaad is not characterized by authoritarian power, but rather by powerlessness caused by a weak sense of self.

In Bluebeard the reader's “greed for stories” (G, 47)—as Frisch titled a brief prose piece from 1960—is no longer satisfied, as it was earlier in the novels. Certainly the narrator Schaad feels the need to trace his guilt, but even in his cross-examination of himself he no longer finds the words for it. Not only does he do without “the illusion inherent in the epic preterite” (GW, 4:264); he also neglects to give the reader important information. There are two possible reasons for this. The first is that the narrator Schaad suffers from amnesia and therefore cannot recall the day of the murder. Although his feelings tell him that he cannot have committed the deed, he lacks the alibi necessary to convince himself and the world unequivocally of his innocence (B, 8-10, 71). The second reason is that behind the narrator is another authority, the author, who often sends the reader off on a false trail and leaves him in uncertainty. The reader's task of ascertaining the facts is not made easier by sketchy flashbacks (21, 54, 106) and questions which no one answers (83, 86, 96), by Schaad's delusion that his wives are “helpless” (57, 123, 128), and by the repression of important facts (55, 100, 118), as well as dreams rich in significance (73, 126), and hallucinations (28, 131). Isolated sentences taken from diary entries (87), from notes (82), and from letters never mailed (59), monologues briefly commented upon (4, 5, 7), and earlier statements (119, 129)—these are all pieces of a puzzle which we must laboriously fit together to yield a biography of Schaad. Because explanatory information is withheld from us, we are forced to read between the lines and fill in the lacunae in the text.⁷ These lacunae are often marked only by ellipses (132, 134). The reader is called upon to continue Frisch's intellectual game. In this respect, the “laconic”⁸ narrator Schaad contrasts sharply with Frisch's earlier protagonists. Those men, who delighted in their ability to tell tales and maintained sovereign command of their narrative, paraphrased their situation in imaginative attempts at stories for the purpose of making available to the reader their reality, that which moved them. Schaad, however, for want of language, imagination, and vitality, is unable to flee into stories. He makes good on what Stiller merely promised: “We possess language in order to become mute.”⁹

Tortured by guilt feelings, Schaad attempts to discover what really happened, but he is unable to do so because he does not know himself and because he represses a great deal. For instance, he can no longer remember just where he was at the time his sixth wife was murdered. The reader, like the reader of a detective story, is anxious to know who the murderer is; however, he does not find out until the last page. Until then there is evidence both for and against Schaad. (Schaad is acquitted by the court despite the lack of an alibi.) In what follows, I shall attempt to fill in some of the lacunae in the text and to analyze Schaad's “pattern of experience” (GW, 4:262), which he repeats ad absurdum, in order to uncover the reality which oppresses him and which is for him ineffable.

The information presented about the internal specialist Felix Theodor Schaad, M.D., is sketchy. His sixth wife, who after their divorce becomes a prostitute, is found suffocated with a sanitary napkin and strangled with Schaad's necktie, her feet bound, and five lilies on her breast. From Schaad's cross-examination of himself, we learn that together with school chums he once bound the feet of a boy and left him exposed to the elements (B, 20-21), that it was he who had the five lilies sent (129), that he had visited his divorced wife on the day of the murder (6, 126-29), and that afterward he had gone out and got very drunk (79-81). In spite of the evidence (which, however, was only partly available to the court), the prosecuting attorney finds no clear proof of Schaad's guilt. Surprisingly, almost no one supports the doctor, although he was well known for his charitable work (11, 66, 81); indeed, virtually no one testifies in his favor. His divorced wives and his present wife (number seven) show no desire to come to his aid in court: they are strikingly indifferent, even in answering the questions put to them. For instance, Gisel replies to the serious question “Was tat er?” (“What did he do?”) with a pun in German: “Er tat mir leid!” (“Made me feel sorry for him”; 85). Dialogues do not become a means of communication, for everyone is too preoccupied with himself or herself to be receptive to the other person. Each of Schaad's marriages is shorter and more chaotic than the one before, until his last wife, whom he married only a few weeks prior to the murder (90), calls him “Bluebeard,” because he once said he already had six wives in the cellar (91).¹⁰

After his acquittal, Schaad is tortured in the prison cell of his conscience by his memories. Attempts at flight involving travel, billiards, alcohol, and even a brothel (74) offer only temporary help. Ostracized by his patients, he sells his practice and, in a process of self-accusation, falls prey to hallucinations. Finally, convinced that he was indeed the murderer, he goes to the police. After that he tries repeatedly to commit suicide (101, 131). The fact that the real killer has already been found and has confessed cannot penetrate to Schaad in his nervous breakdown, even though a policeman informs him of it (133). The real murderer is Nikos Grammaticos, a Greek student who lived with Schaad's sixth wife Rosalinde and who is only mentioned briefly earlier in the story (14). Here, as so often before, Frisch makes use of significant names. It is said of the student that he doesn't know German and that in Rosalinde's company he was always drinking water, out of frustration at not being able to express himself. Ironically, he comes from the land in which our Western culture originated, a culture in which the dialogue was raised to an art form. His name translates into “victor” (Nikos) and, in the usage of late antiquity, into “teacher of grammatical forms and of rhetoric” (Grammaticos).¹¹ Thus he ought to be a master of language; instead, like Schaad, he has no language. Rosalinde has once again chosen a man who did not know how to express himself. She contents herself with purely physical contact, and even in that she admits she finds no fulfillment (100). Her relationship to both men, as well as to her customers, is evidence of the total bankruptcy of human relations. The fact that she calls herself a therapist (1200) is an irony which only underscores her lack of comprehension of her own situation.

Schaad desperately seeks communication with each of his wives (85), yet again and again he allies himself with women who are basically not interested in him. This is easily seen in the testimony of his former wives (85). Asked about Schaad's diary, for example, Corinne or Andrea (he is no longer sure which one) proclaims her lack of interest: “Frankly, I didn't find what Felix scribbled in his notebooks very interesting” (87). The seventh marriage, intended as an open arrangement, founders on the total indifference of his partner (109-15). In an attempt to gain control of each catastrophe, Schaad not only curbs what he says (which he often subsequently entrusts to his diary [65, 86], to letters never sent [59-60, 73], or to notes [68, 82]), but with Rosalinde he even tries to curb his feelings of jealousy, by watching videos of her carrying out her profession of prostitute (58), in order to convince himself that she is not really emotionally involved in the sexual intercourse with her customers. Schaad even insists that he overcame his jealousy in this way; but why then does he attempt—most probably in Rosalinde's presence—to shoot himself with a pistol or to poison himself with pills (54, 101-2)?

Frisch's protagonists have never succeeded, by any means, in getting their “pathological jealousy” (60) under control. Jealousy as the product of inner uncertainty destroys communication and falsifies language. Gantenbein was not the only one to report on this: in his first Sketchbook Frisch speaks of jealousy as “the fear of comparisons,” as a “feeling of inferiority.”¹² The fear that the beloved woman “must still be capable of finding completely different satisfactions” (SB, 264) also preys on Schaad. He tries to suppress his jealousy, but again and again it comes to the surface in thoughts of murder and suicide. No human interlocutor would be able to stand what he entrusts to his diary: “She is a jellyfish, a jellyfish, even when for once she is not lying, and one cannot strangle a jellyfish” (B, 65). He could strangle this woman, he says drunkenly to a friend. As the court psychologist puts it, his “pent-up emotionality” (73) is evident in the diary entries after Rosalinde admits to having had intimate relations with a whole series of men (59-60).

Since the personality of his partner makes an honest conversation aimed at solving the problem impossible, Schaad once again, on the very day of the murder, apparently feels the need to kill Rosalinde—only to discover, ironically, that another man has already done the deed for him, a man who also lacks a language for his reality. There is considerable evidence for murderous intent on Schaad's part: at the time of Rosalinde's death he had drunk himself into a state in which he was no longer responsible for his actions; while visiting her on the morning of the murder, he had read a love letter written by her; and after departing, he had had five lilies sent to her, lilies which she normally received from her lover, in all probability the Greek student. Furthermore, we may assume that the lilies, the love letter to a third party, and Rosalinde's travel plans all combined to drive the doubly speechless Greek to murder.

A year after the murder, Schaad is sitting wordlessly in a tavern. Pursued by hallucinations as though by the Erinyes, he tries to call his dead wife (28), possibly to warn her of her murderer. In ever-increasing isolation—patients and friends, as well as his seventh wife, have long since deserted him—he works himself more and more into the role of the murderer. He is now convinced that he is the person others consider him to be—an attitude identical to the reaction of Andri in Andorra, who is forced into an identity by others and is thereby destroyed. With its headlines “Bluebeard in Court” (71), the press not only has contributed to the destruction of his reputation, but has also been instrumental in convincing him of his own guilt.

In addition to diary entries, dreams bring us closer to the true state of things. For instance, a dream in which Schaad sees himself as a fish on dry land is revealing: the fish is a predator, larger than a pike, and it wants to devour a snake. Out of its element, it realizes too late that it is choking on the reptile (126). It is obvious that the snake is the prostitute Rosalinde, embodying the sexuality which destroys Schaad. In another dream a roadside cross marking a traffic accident is transformed into the cross on a grave: the “accident” which Schaad suffered with Rosalinde leads to self-destruction. The desire to fall totally silent is manifested in the dreams and the suicide attempts.

Schaad seems familiar to us, for we have already gotten to know his predecessor Anatol Stiller, who also maintained that he had killed his wife and who in fact did so in his dreams (S, 126). The latent aggressiveness of both protagonists is suppressed in the waking state and thus leads to feelings of guilt and to silence. Each makes the “terrifying discovery” that he has no language for his reality (S, 68). Stiller explains that his reality lies not in the role he plays, but rather in the kind of role which he unconsciously assigns to himself (S, 290).

Frisch has dealt intensively with the role-playing of the individual. Gantenbein maintains, “Every ego that expresses itself in words is a role. … Sooner or later everyone invents for himself a story which he regards as his life” (G, 46-47). What each one has, therefore, are simply “patterns of experience” (Erlebnismuster), which are then used to draw up the story of one's life (GW, 4:262-63). Schaad plays out his pattern of experience in sevenfold variation; in each marriage he makes the same mistakes. Like Kürmann in Biography: A Game, he cannot free himself from the solidified structures of his behavior, from his feelings, “which repeat themselves like a rosary” (GW, 4:262), as Frisch once put it. In Bluebeard Frisch proves once again that not only do his figures learn nothing from their experiences; they do not even comprehend them. Schaad has the same need as Stiller: “I cannot be alone, strictly speaking, and there has hardly been an hour in my life when I was able to be alone” (S, 294). Both men have to feel themselves confirmed by a woman, and both make her into a test of themselves (S, 128). Of all Schaad's wives, Rosalinde was the most difficult, and it is precisely she and only she of whom he says repeatedly that he loved her (B, 17, 100). Like Stiller (S, 390), he could just as well have said that he hated her. Once he does admit while drunk, “I did not know her” (B, 55), yet it is true of the partners in the marriages of Schaad and Stiller that they fit together in a particularly unfortunate way, that they “needed each other because of their fear” (S, 73). None of the women, not even Rosalinde or Julika, is genuinely interested in her partner, and the difficulties in the marriages manifest themselves in impotence and frigidity (S, 70, 84; B, 82, 100). Both women find greater fulfillment in forms of prostitution: Stiller says of Julika that she had prostituted herself as a ballerina before her audience (S, 112-14), whereas Rosalinde prefers the life of a prostitute to a genuine “encounter” (S, 303).

Although Schaad has long since realized that there can be no future for Rosalinde and himself, he returns to her as a Platonic friend (B, 5) and tries to suppress his emotional dependency on her. In a very similar situation Stiller was still able to see through this pattern of experience: “Why did I come back? … I couldn't forget her. That's all. As one can't forget a defeat” (S, 390-91). Somewhat earlier he explains this defeat with the words, “We can see our defeats, but we do not understand them as signals, as the outcome of a misdirected endeavor, of endeavor directed away from our self” (S, 282). Both pay for this perverse striving by falling silent.

Thus far my analysis has shown that Frisch, in selecting Schaad for his new story, chose a figure astonishingly similar to Stiller. New, however, is the narrative technique, which in its linguistic parsimony mirrors the inner condition of the protagonist. Schaad lacks the language which, by allowing him to articulate his problems, could have provided clarity for him in his search for guilt and identity. With the medium of language it would have been possible for him to put aside misunderstandings and defend himself against a hostile press, which with its Bluebeard caricature made life impossible for him both as a doctor and as a private person. Frisch explained the function of language early on, in a 1946 entry in his first Sketchbook.

Like the sculptor plying his chisel, language works by bringing the area of blankness in the things that can be said as close as possible to the central mystery, the living element. There is always the danger that in doing so one might destroy the mystery, just as there is the danger that one might leave off too soon, might leave it as an unshaped block, might not locate the mystery, grasp it, and free it from all the things that could still be said; in other words, that one might not get through to its final surface.

(SB, 25)

For his part, Schaad decides not to use language any longer as a means of communication, a way of attaining renewed vitality in his state of inertia. During the entire first-person narrative (which begins only after his acquittal), he does not conduct a single conversation, except at the police station. Language is employed only to cross-examine himself or imagined witnesses, including dead ones, in the attempt to ascertain his own guilt. Bluebeard may well be a “work comprised of dialogues” (Dialogwerk), as was Triptych (1978) before it;¹³ however, there are no longer any conversations in either work, or in Man in the Holocene (1979), which appeared shortly after Triptych. Thus language is used neither as an anchor, in order to begin anew after defeat and draw closer to the “mystery,” nor, as Frisch had hoped, as a means with which “to rebel, to change one's way of thinking, to revise, and not to stagnate prematurely.”¹⁴ Like the protagonists of the late works after Montauk (1975) in particular, Schaad chooses to fall silent or, as Frisch expresses it, chooses “that which is lethal” (das Tödliche). Instead of joining battle, instead of using the weapon of language to defend his position and his reality, Schaad flees into amnesia and, once this is cured, into the labyrinth of his hallucinations, so that we must finally wonder whether he will ever find his way back into a life in which he can feel at home.

Notes

1. A shorter version of this article was presented in German at the Learned Societies Conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on 3 June 1986. The title quotation (in the original, “Ich habe keine Sprache für meine Wirklichkeit”) comes from Anatol Stiller, who is viewed in this essay as a predecessor of Felix Schaad, the protagonist of Bluebeard. The quote is from Max Frisch, Stiller, in his Gesammelte Werke in zeitlicher Folge, Hans Mayer with Walter Schmitz, ed., Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1976, vol. 3, p. 436. The translation here is my own. All subsequent references to the collected works will appear parenthetically in the text and use the abbreviation GW.

2. Max Frisch, Gantenbein, Michael Bullock, tr., San Diego, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982, p. 261. Subsequent references use the abbreviation G.

3. Cf. S. P. Hoefert, “Zur Sprachauffassung Max Frischs,” Muttersprache, 1963, pp. 257-59.

4. Max Frisch, Bluebeard: A Tale, Geoffrey Skelton, tr., San Diego, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. Originally published as Blaubart: Eine Erzählung, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1982. Subsequent references are to the U.S. edition and use the abbreviation B.

5. Joachim Kaiser, “Vom Schuldgefühl des Mannes,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 76 (1 April 1982), p. 1.

6. Max Frisch, Homo Faber, Michael Bullock, tr., New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957, p. 210.

7. Marcel Reich-Ranicki also feels that it is the duty of the reader to search for the connections: “Obviously Frisch also hopes that the reader will add to this draft; he expects the reader's cooperation, indeed he depends on the reader's help.” From “Max Frischs ungedeckter Scheck: Seine Erzählung Blaubart,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 79 (3 April 1982), n.p. The translation is my own.

8. Reinhard Baumgart states in his review that Frisch has written “a very laconic, taciturn book.” See “Über Max Frischs Blaubart: Kahlschlag,” Der Spiegel, 10 (19 April 1982), p. 264.

9. Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller, Michael Bullock, tr., New York, Vintage, 1958, p. 291. Subsequent references use the abbreviation S.

10. The code name “Bluebeard” has a double function in the tale: on the one hand it stands for the failed-marriage pattern of experience, on the other for the feeling of guilt when Schaad asks himself to what extent he is guilty of Rosalinde's murder. Cf. the Bluebeard motif in Ingeborg Bachmann, “Ein Schritt nach Gomorrha,” in her Werke, Munich, Piper, 1982, vol. 2, pp. 187-213.

11. “In classical times the ghramatikós was anyone who knew the letters. … In late antiquity, ‘grammar’ was understood only as the doctrine of sounds and forms, since these disciplines became the primary task of the ghramatikós. “Grammatik” entry, Lexikon der alten Welt, Zürich, Artemis, 1965; my translation.

12. Max Frisch, Sketchbook 1946-1949, Geoffrey Skelton, tr., New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977, pp. 268, 270. Subsequent references use the abbreviation SB.

13. Peter Rüedi, “Die lange Ewigkeit des Gewesenen: Max Frisch schrieb ein Stück vom Tod, das nicht gespielt wird,” Deutsche Zeitung, 17 (21 April 1978), p. 15.

14. Ibid.