'Reality has only one purpose in art: the artist must become familiar with it so as to know how to avoid it'
Originally
published in 1900, A Gothic Soul is
a mysterious and alluring piece of fin de siècle decadence in the vein of JK Huysmans and Gustav Meyrinck. Presented by the Prague-based Twisted Spoon Press,
with a new translation by Kirsten Lodge,
the novel touches on themes of modernity, aesthetics and alienation, as well as
contemporary psychiatric debates.
In his
preface, a stream of Wildean epigrams regarding art and reality, Karasek
declares that A Gothic Soul is 'not a novel in the usual sense of the word’;
instead, it is ‘a diary of emotions and
moods, of the undulating play of the spiritual world, an account of stories of
the soul'. The narrative, such as it is, focuses on the inner life of a
young man, 'the last scion of a venerable
chivalric family'. Fearing that he may be suffering from a ‘hereditary degeneration’ which has
afflicted his ancestors, the youth retreats from the world, attempting to exist
in undisturbed solitude. Karasek details the morbid fantasies which concern the
young man, who feels alienated by modernity.
Like
the ‘decrepit old man’ of Poe’s The
Man of the Crowd, the youth is an uncanny, idiosyncratic presence on
the streets of early Twentieth century Prague; his eyes, in particular, ‘disturbed anyone who looked into them’. After
spending a year living alone in Bavaria, he has returned to his homeland 'resolved to live by nothing but his dreams'.
As with des Esseintes in Huysmans' novel A Rebours, he yearns to live an idealised and solitary existence,
but crucially, he has never really been at home in society. So how can he
renounce a life he has never fully lived?
His
thoughts are primarily concerned with the difference between experience and
understanding. The question of religious experience is particularly fraught.
Watching worshippers in church, he witnesses the ecstasy of direct religious
experience, 'mad kisses on holy wood... eyes
burst into a blaze of frenzied pleasure', yet when he tries to experience
this himself, he is repelled by man's attempts to bridge the gap between the
mystical and the mundane, the 'arid
desert' of theology. He is suffering from a form of false consciousness – the
social conditioning which taught him to analyse and understand the phenomena
which surround him has left him feeling alienated. He can learn, but he cannot
feel: 'His entire attempt at life now
seemed to him an effort to improvise on a violin whose strings had lost their
sound and gone forever mute.'
Searching
for a purer way of experiencing the world, he looks back to the Middle Ages. He
is entranced by world of mythology, which is contrasted with the
perceived drudgery of modern life: 'Czechness itself lost its contours in his thoughts, and the more
everything became legendary, the more glorious that unfulfilled mission
appeared to him'. He is all too aware, however, that
his fantasies are illusory: ‘The Middle
Ages were dead'.
The
young man’s struggles are also those of the aesthetic movement. He privileges
form over function, and yearns to live his life intensely, but seemingly lacks
the capacity for such elevated thought. In an echo of Flaubert’s observation that an artist should ‘be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may
be violent and original in your work,’ Karasek’s preface stresses that the
artist must be familiar with reality, in order to avoid it in his writing. By
contrast, his protagonist has been isolated and withdrawn from a young age,
leaving him incapable of the sort of transcendence that aestheticism demands.
Lacking experience, he is little more than a ghost who haunts himself.
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