The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Night Games and Other Stories and Novellas by Arthur SchnitzlerKeith Cohen
Arthur Schnitzler. Night Games and Other Stories and Novellas. Trans. Margret Schaefer. Foreword John Simon. Ivan R. Dee, 2002. 272 pp. $28.50.
This collection of nine stories and novellas by Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) provides an excellent introduction to an underappreciated writer of penetrating psychological depth. Schnitzler, whose stories largely take place in fin de siècle Vienna, astounds us with his insights about the mind of the heel: opportunistic army lieutenants, unfaithful husbands and wives, and suspicious siblings populate these stories, whose pace alternates smoothly, thanks to Margret Schaefer’s deft translation, between swiftly narrated emergencies and dimly luminous introspections. While Flaubert is credited with having innovated the “indirect interior monologue” that Joyce, Woolf, and James practiced with renown, I know of few examples to rival Schnitzler’s intricate mapping of the coming-and-going of consciousness, the love-hate of desire, and the yes-no of a morally repugnant act. The adulterous woman, for example, of “The Dead Are Silent” ponders whether to wait beside the body of her lover, presumed dead after a carriage accident: “Why isn’t she dead like him? He’s to be envied; everything’s over for him.” The darkness of Kafka comes to mind as Schnitzler plumbs the motives of Willi Kasda, the presumptuous gambler, whose current indiscretions reach an unexpected climax when he realizes that his wealthy uncle has married one of Willi’s spurned lovers (“Night Games”). Narrative aimlessness charts an increasingly alarming anomie: “Dream Story” (on which Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut is based) mixes real and imagined sex with imagined and real death, as Schnitzler performs upon the bourgeois marriage a microsurgery that culminates literally in the morgue as Fridolin examines the corpse of the woman he believes sacrificed herself to save him from the vengeful guards of some ritualistic orgy. This danse macabre plays against a bass of nagging sexuality (e.g., the bereaved girl smitten with the attending physician) to give Schnitzler’s voice a distinct ring at the turn of the twentieth century. [Keith Cohen]