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"Melancholia Balneum diaboli est." Melancholy is the devil’s bath. This aphorism, scrawled in block letters on postcards, is sent by the nameless heroine of Marion Poschmann’s Hundenovella [Canine Novella] to all her former friends. Anonymous and unstamped. "Whoever wants to know, ought to pay for it.” This dark bit of wisdom is the first person narrator’s final message to her surroundings. By this point, she has all but sunken into a black vortex, heading towards its realm of shadows.
Following the rules of the genre, Poschmann’s novel tracks the slow, progressive trajectory of a person suffering from melancholy. Recently unemployed, the young woman has lost her mother to cancer. She is alone. With her gaze focused inward, she loses herself in her pessimism towards life. She spends her days wandering aimlessly through the city, observing how the boundaries of the world she once knew begin to blur. It’s as if she had fallen out of this world and entered a dismal parallel one. On her daily walks, she takes over the city outskirts from the garbage dump to the sewage farm. She experiences nature there as lush and sprawling in contrast to the gray concrete civilization. In her descriptions, Poschmann creates unconventional nature poetry. The green elemental force shoots out from the gray concrete columns, sprawls across rusted steel structures, and envelops the man-made surroundings. The connection she draws between time and nature is also unique: "Slowly, very slowly the plants screwed out of the hardened soil, they grew in spirals, twisted imperceptibly upwards, to the sides, filled up space, buds gaped open, leaves unfolded, pollen scattered, but nobody saw, it was too slow, invisible to the naked eye, maybe they could see the outcome, a contraction, an extension." Reality dissolves in the narrator’s gaze, and the everyday turns alien. Observing her surroundings, but most of all herself, the heroine rarely connects with others. Most often she slips from contemplating the dismal outskirts of the city to the black landscape of her soul. And the protagonist realizes gasping: "The landscape has taken possession of me."
But there is no such thing as a novella without an extraordinary event. And this occurs when a scruffy diabolical creature enters the heroine’s life and takes it over. Amidst a dark, desolate landscape this black being clings to her leg. A stray dog that comes out of nowhere. Thus, Poschmann draws a clear reference to Albrecht Dürer's engraving "Melencolia I". In Dürer’s image, a winged angel stares darkly into the distance, an emaciated dog lies asleep at his feet, tools are scattered about. A bat flying in the dark sky carries a banderole with the title of the image embossed on it. Poschmann takes Dürer into the literary present: "I held my head on my clenched fist and stared at the overgrown field." Just at this moment the unexpected event occurs, "a black animal sprinted out of the bushes and curled itself up at my feet." A hammer, nails and plane are lying in the grass as a bat darts past her head.
The narrator establishes an ambivalent relationship to the stray dog. She feeds him, brings him to the pet salon, and even sews a little jacket for the shaven dog. Nevertheless, she thinks of him more as a sinister invader than a welcome pal. She admires his mysterious elegance, finds him "in some unusual, frightening way, beautiful." With his imposing movements that are "somehow terrifying," he takes over her apartment, becoming her own inescapable hell dog.
Apart from a few episodes of bizarre situation comedy, at the pet salon, or at the veterinarian’s, the life of the protagonist is characterized by gloom and loneliness. Her isolation, however, does not make the youngish narrator sad or suffering, but rather misanthropic: "It was a strange anger that drove me onward. A hot rage seethed in me and spread outward to the entire surroundings."
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that at some point the four-legged friend, who seemingly even robs her of breathing space, becomes unbearable to her. She abandons him to a deserted forest and then flees to absolute solitude. But there is no escaping the demonic creature. The black messenger of death returns and the moment they reunite at the threshold to her apartment, he drops dead - the border between her dream image and the world. She steps over the cadaver into the night. To where Orion's dogs reign and chase across the starry night. At the end of this philosophical labyrinth are the words: Canis maior, the dog with the gleaming bright face (...) the brightest star in the sky in its jaws."
Christine Fehenberger
December 2008
[Translated by Zaia Alexander]
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