Pathological Review: Am I a Redundant Human Being?
A novel by Mela Hartwig
In the English-speaking world, the Austrian author Mela Hartwig is virtually unknown. Despite a friendship with Woolf and accolades from Döblin and Zweig, only one of Hartwig’s works has been translated into English: the novel Am I a Redundant Human Being? [Bin ich ein überflüssiger Mensch?], published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2010. Fifteen years later, Hartwig’s numerous other writings—novellas, short stories, poems—remain out of the English reader’s reach.
It might be more precise, therefore, to say that Hartwig is less unknown than she is unknowable to English audiences. In any case, redundant she is not: though Hartwig wrote Am I a Redundant Human Being? between 1931 and 1932, the novel reads like something straight out of our contemporary age.
Am I a Redundant Human Being? opens with its narrator’s barefaced declaration of her own mediocrity. Appearance, abilities, personality: nothing to write home about, according to Aloisia Schmidt. But apparently something to write a novel about, a wincing, retrospective navel-gaze, holding its sightline even when it barely holds the reader’s sympathy.
Aloisia begins with youth, recalling her middling performance academically and socially, her fascination with classmates confident and charming. But her appreciation of others’ strengths is always but a means to observe her own inadequacy; her romantic inclinations, likewise, betray a desire to be the objects of her interest more than a desire to be with them. Aloisia sneaks off to the theatre each evening, initially to feed her obsession with a local actor, yet eventually decides that she herself dreams of the stage. It comes as no surprise that this aspiration is based in a yearning to act out lives other than her own—that is, the only one to which she is bound, and naturally, the one for which she constantly eschews responsibility.
Aloisia, to be sure, marks a height of avoidance. She is lazy, but decisively so (an astute distinction on Hartwig’s part). The matter is not one of pure incompetence but an evasion of action for fear that it might prove insufficient, or, perhaps, worse: that it might be effective after all—and then what? Hence Aloisia describes herself, paradoxically, as ambitious:
I, on the other hand, completely lacked that equilibrium between our talents and objectives that we call confidence. Instead, a desperate imbalance, an unbearable tension existed between my abilities and my goals—and I call this imbalance, this tension, my ambition. Perhaps it wasn’t what’s commonly recognized as ambition: there was no will to drive it, no energy behind it, only a vague need, as in a dream, for recognition. I don’t know if I’m making myself clear. I didn’t use my ambition to demand more of myself than I was capable of giving—I simply used it to expect more of myself than I was capable of giving.1
This “vague need for recognition” drives Aloisia to prostrate herself before the wills of others, tyrannical as these may be. Really, the more oppressive, the better. Despite her insecurity and constant pursuit of external validation, Aloisia doesn’t wish to be accepted. During a short-lived engagement to the equally unremarkable (if not less redeemable) character Anton, Aloisia realizes that such unconditional acceptance only degrades the other person in her eyes: “What finally began to nag at me was the realization that I—as he saw me—was enough for him […] how could I value a person who persisted in loving what I myself found entirely without merit?”2
Anton’s willingness to love her represents to Aloisia a kind of complacency, in which she, most regrettably of all, is complicit. She would rather “struggle desperately to please” another person (as in her fleeting relations with the intellectual Emil K.) than find that someone is impressed by her potential alone—devoid, as it is, of actualization.3 This gap, which Aloisia observes as not only vast but unclosable (and therefore pointless to attempt to cross) elicits in her a reflexive disgust. Potential marks what she is not more than what she could or will be.
Still, Aloisia gleans from Emil K. that “a person who wants to make something of themselves helps you to make something of yourself.”4 This would seem to suggest some self-determination. Aloisia’s defect, however, is that she relies wholly on such figures for this “help,” borrowing, in a sense, the force and direction of their will as her own. The moment she loses Emil K., therefore, Aloisia is impotent once again. Moreover, this tendency to outsource the actualization of her desires enables haphazard presences to draw Aloisia out on foolish whims, such as when she is swindled by a total stranger to whom she feels a transient and baseless devotion.
Such fantasies of utter submission recurs throughout the novel. They are met with yet another psychological counterforce, however: Aloisia’s self-absorption. Her paranoiac narcissism in fact precludes her from submitting entirely, from giving herself over to any person or cause, and her self-deprecation, as the term alone suggests, is above all an attachment to the self. Aloisia’s reflexivity puts her own person at the fore, and her self-awareness leads only to an excruciating cycle of hyperconscious humiliation and shame.
It seems that Aloisia is finally approaching a more authentic relation when she cultivates a “friendship” with the character Elizabeth, a young actress who functions as a kind of mirror to Aloisia—a mirror, that is, being both a reflection and an inversion, a doubling with difference, which emphasizes, ironically, our incongruities, the errors in the way we see. And Elizabeth herself is a house of mirrors: Hartwig presumably draws on her earlier career as an actress as she describes this elusive, shapeshifting figure, whose underlying identity is difficult to grasp.
Aloisia is not blind to the fact that she scarcely knows the true Elizabeth. She’s cognizant, too, of their inverted resemblance, wondering:
Was she really my gifted sister—yes, gifted, but also my sister: insatiable where I was only dissatisfied? Was that the reason I wanted to be like her, despite her volatility? Was that the reason I loved her to distraction? I don’t know. Perhaps I hoped I could catch her fire, her obsession… perhaps I hoped her talent for enjoying life would rub off on me.5
Thus Aloisia’s love is but another iteration of her envy, benign as it may be. Her final object of infatuation, Egon, is in fact first adored by Elizabeth (and proves most debasing of all, culminating in aborted suicide attempt). Despite claiming otherwise, Aloisia is surely as insatiable as her friend; the difference is perhaps that Elizabeth appears to have a suitable channel for her intensity. In discussing Elizabeth’s craft, the two girls come to conclusions which pertain likely more to their own lives than to the life of the actor. Aloisia recalls:
I began to think about what it really meant to be an actress, began to suspect that you accepted a role because it represented the person you burned to be—a person you were willing to pour your heart’s blood into as you struggled to rouse them to their new, borrowed life. […] [Elizabeth] went even farther, describing a stage role as an enemy you must either conquer or be conquered by. For the sake of becoming one with the role, you either had to bend it to your will until it became your doppelgänger, or melt into it entirely, taking on its features, its feelings, its desires. One thing was certain, however: you could never bargain with it. You either had to be completely absorbed by it or assert your own identity until it became your slave.6
While Elizabeth supposedly masters her characters, Aloisia tends toward being conquered, bent nearly to a breaking point. But even here, Aloisia struggles with the rule: she bargains, still yearning for some measure of ownership. This conflict extends beyond the scope of her relationships, permeating her professional life and her time spent in solitude. She takes no satisfaction in her work as a secretary, for example, yet comes to dread unemployment just as much, as
enforced idleness is no idleness at all. An inactivity that has no goal, no sense of responsibility hanging over it, accompanied only by a nagging fear of starvation—this is worse than a job.
Aloisia tires of putative liberty as readily as she tires of obligation; while partially a function of her character, this also belongs to the novel’s social commentary (largely implicit, for anything more overt would be out of keeping with its narrator’s beleaguered egocentrism). Her helplessness betrays the traces of a broader historic moment—her paltry job prospects, for example, are exacerbated by the wartime economy, which magnifies her fraught dependency on men and on her parents. Other episodes in the novel enact a similar gesture, intertwining Aloisia’s psychology with the times: at one point, caught up in a patriotic, pre-fascist mob, she experiences an oceanic feeling much like the ephemeral, deferential ecstasies that characterizes her personal life. As in the latter, however, she emerges with a subtle nausea, a sense not of connection but, rather, of her own absence of individuality.
The reader does not witness much, if any, development in Aloisia over the course of the novel. This is perhaps the natural result of a narrative recounted retroactively, replete with that painful knowledge that comes with hindsight. In the same breath, however, one has the sense that this self-awareness was always present, not merely in reflection, that even in the moment Aloisia was all too conscious of her faulty way of being, predicting and thereby producing each new misstep. Am I a Redundant Human Being? goes to show that awareness is no substitute for action, that desire alone does not lead to completion but only to further desire.
Aloisia admits to her own stasis in the closing pages of the novel, stating, “I still haven’t managed to break my habit of demanding more from life than I can receive.”7 She posits “renunciation” as the only way out of this disparity: “to resign myself to myself, for I truly believe it is my fate to have no fate at all.”8 But renunciation is not the same as resignation. The former implies something much more radical, a nearly ascetic disavowal of self which stands in dramatic opposition to Aloisia’s consistent, neurotic involution. Though she self-identifies as a “zero” just prior, this reads only as self-deprecation, betraying precisely her desire to amount to something.9 Nor is resignation entirely convincing, so committed is Aloisia to her frenzied dissatisfaction. Her overqualified claim to truly believe in her oxymoronic absence of face sows doubt by its very insistence. One who has no fate need not say a word.
Hartwig’s title is a question; it is almost a plea. Before the book is opened and up to the final moment, its inquirer looks for assurance, from anyone at all, including the anonymous reader. Whether Aloisia seeks confirmation or refutation of her redundancy, however, remains equivocal: this is a person who wants to be told she is worthless as much as she wants to be told she is worthy. But the former would indulge her and the latter she wouldn’t believe. It is as though Aloisia delivers the most human account and still destroys all possible humanism, dehumanizes her listener by hearing nothing of whatever response they could give. The reader—recipient of the eponymous question—is drawn in as listener only to be silenced, denied, made as redundant as the speaker herself. So her query must go unanswered.
Am I a Redundant Human Being? is wonderfully modern, a surprise to come across and yet no surprise at all to read, so familiar is Aloisia’s character to our own milieu. The psyche hasn’t changed so much in a century.
Hopefully more of Hartwig’s work will meet the hand of the translator soon. Until then, there have one copy of Am I a Redundant Human Being? available for sale in the Pathological Research store (message to inquire).
Have a blessed day:
PR
48.
65.
66.
66.
82.
90.
150.
Ibid.
Ibid.