Two quotations from I'm Not Stiller

Whose original title was merely Stiller, raising the question of why it was changed for translation.  (Perhaps the Dalkey Archive wanted to punch it up.)

All I can really say is that I had a premonition.  It is not shame that prevents me from laying my cards on the table, but sheer inability. I never felt ashamed of my action. I threw away a life that had never been a life. Even if the way I did so was ridiculous. I was left with the memory of an immense freedom: everything depended on me. I could decide whether I wanted to live again, but this time so that a real death took place. Everything depended upon me alone, as I have already said. I have never been closer to the essence of grace. And I realized that, certain of grace, I had decided in favour of life, by the fact that I began to feel a terrible pain. I had the distinct sensation that I was new being born for the first time, and with a certainty that need not fear even ridicule. I  felt ready to be nobody but the person as whom I had just been born and to seek no other life than this, which I could not cast from me. That was about two years ago and I was already thirty-eight.

So Stiller, p 328, near the end of the section, by far the majority, which consists of his notebooks in prison.  The public prosecutor's postscript, waxing philosophical on a topic he's already discussed with Stiller when the latter was still in prison on pp 275–8 (p 351):

The self knowledge that gradually or abruptly alienates a person from his previous life is merely the first step, indispensable but by no means sufficient in itself. How many people we know who come to a halt after this first step, who are satisfied with the melancholy that comes of mere self-knowledge and who make this melancholy look like maturity! Stiller, I believe, had already passed beyond this stage when he first disappeared. He was in the process of taking the second and much more difficult step, of emerging from resigned regret that one is not what one would so much have liked to be and of becoming what one is. Nothing is harder than to accept oneself. Actually only the naive succeed in doing it, and I have so far met few people in my world who could be described as naive in this positive sense. In my view Stiller, when we met him in custody, had already achieved this painful self-acceptance to a pronounced degree. Why did he nonetheless defend himself in such a childish way against his whole environment, against his former companions? … In spite of all his self-acceptance, in spite of all his will to self-acceptance, there was one thing our friend had failed to achieve, he had not been able to forego recognition by those around him. He felt himself a different man—quite rightly, he was a different man from that Stiller whom people immediately recognized him as—and he wanted to convince everyone of this: that was the childish thing.

I assume that it would not be too far wrong to read into these two stages of which the prosecutor speaks a reference to Kierkegaard, with whom we know him to be at least glancingly familiar (thus about as familiar as I am).  (Since I know Fear and Trembling better than any other Kierkegaardian text, my thoughts first incline to the knights of infinite resignation and faith: but who knows.  I understand he had a thing or two to say in other places about stages on life's way.)  Presumably the prosecutor's final diagnosis is yet more evidence, of whatever sort it might be, for the proposition that amour propre everywhere, man, and it's no good.

Comments

[germanidealist]

And what exactly was your excuse for not reading this in German?

[ben wolfson]

My excuse is compound in nature, encompassing several sub-excuses:

I don't own it in German; I do own it in English; judging by my progress with Die Blendung and Berühmte Gemälde aus Entenhausener Privatbesitz, it would have taken me several years.