The Low Countries. Jaargang 5

Harry Mulisch's The Discovery of Heaven
An International Success

The publication of Harry Mulisch's novel The Discovery of Heaven (De ontdekking van de hemel) in 1992 (the author's 65th year) brought a virtually unanimous reaction from Dutch literary critics: here was a masterpiece. The novel was awarded the Multatuli Prize by the Municipality of Amsterdam in 1993, and the Mekka Prize by Dutch and Flemish literary critics. The rear flap describes the book as a ‘total novel’: ‘This monumental book, in which all the themes and obsessions from the work of Harry Mulisch are brought together in 65 chapters, is at one and the same time a psychological novel, a philosophical novel, a temporal novel, a Bildungsroman, an adventure novel and an all-embracing mystery play.’

All this may seem a lot to say about one book, and yet the novel most certainly does contain all these facets. The novel's great national and international success is undoubtedly rooted in the mix of narrative genres. An American reviewer in Kirkus Reviews even wrote: ‘Mulisch's bid for a masterpiece works commandingly, on every level. Could be one of the best novels of the last 20 years’. And the Washington Post added the following plaudit: ‘The standard danger lurking in monster-long novels is loss of control. This is not a problem for Mulisch’. The reviewer at the Wall Street Journal even places the novel in the tradition of ‘very great’ literature by writing that Mulisch, like Homer, Dante and Milton, uses the cosmos as his stage and history and the meaning of everything as his theme.

The twelfth print run of the novel was published in the spring of 1997 by Mulisch's Amsterdam publishing house De Bezige Bij, taking the total circulation at that time to 140,000 copies. Following its appearance in the German language area (in 1993, aided by the media publicity generated by the Frankfurt Book Fair), the book's circulation there also rose rapidly to more than 100,000 copies.

Many German literary critics also emphasised the masterly character of this weighty novel. Harry Mulisch was ‘discovered’ as a writer and placed in the literary traditions of the great European storytellers. Or, perhaps more appropriately: it was precisely in Germany that the high philosophical content of the novel was appreciated - and not only because of the allusions to Goethe and Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus. Mulisch raises explicit questions about the relationship between God and man; he examines the relationship between good and evil. But in this book he does it all in literary fashion. Mulisch does not present a philosophical tract here, but a book in which all manner of literary ‘tricks’ are used, so that it becomes above all a gripping book to read. Literary critics in Germany appreciate that. Die Zeit praises Mulisch's virtuosity: ‘Mulisch's powers of combination, exercised in a way which is entertaining, surprising, comical, sombre, crazy, as idiosyncratic as it is light-footed, can no longer be ignored after this novel.’ The Frankfürter Allgemeine Zeitung is equally lyrical about Mulisch's narrative qualities: ‘Mulisch is a brilliant storyteller, an author who knows his craft through and through. His work has an untiring, often refreshing meticulousness of detail, even - indeed especially - in the highest spheres.’ The Süddeutsche Zeitung - rightly - places Mulisch in a somewhat broader Dutch-language per-

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spective and regards itself as fortunate that Germany has two neighbours, namely Harry Mulisch and Cees Nooteboom, ‘who, each in their own way, can tell us something about God and the world and about Europe and Germany and about the labyrinth in our breast’.

The Discovery of Heaven is an exceptional book in modern Dutch-language literature, not only because of its size (over 800 pages), but above all because of the breadth of its themes. No other modern Dutch author has devised such a coherent philosophical system with a claim to universal applicability as Harry Mulisch in his essays, and in particular, in The Composition of the World (De compositie van de wereld, 1980). The Discovery of Heaven can be regarded as the fictional counterpart to this philosophical-scientific magnum opus. The discovery of technology has in fact caused mankind to ‘lose touch with God’, and placed him on an inevitable path to his own end. What Mulisch proved scientifically (or at least claimed to prove) in The Composition of the World, he now ‘proves’ in a Heaven and Earth created by himself, with a God created by himself (although, interestingly, that God

Harry Mulisch (1927-)(Photo by Klaas Koppe).

Siegfried Woldhek, Harry Mulisch and J.H. Donner. 1977. Ink on paper, 15.5 × 24 cm. Letterkundig Museum, The Hague.

remains invisible: the angels carry out the policy of ‘the Boss’).

The novel can be read as an expression of a pessimistic vision: mankind is doomed to extinction. The writing is literally on the wall; after all, the divine assignment is being carried out and the agreement once forged between God and mankind - symbolised in the testimony of Moses' Stone Tablets containing the Word of God, the Ten Commandments - is cancelled and sent back to where it came from: Heaven.

But the novel also has a rational / optimistic vision: mankind has taken over a world in which there is no longer a place for a God, a fundamental metaphysical pattern underlying all things - mankind can now after all do everything of which God has ever been considered capable. The angel / narrator is not satisfied with this prospect, however; he refuses to be pensioned off and demands a new assignment in order to save mankind from his technological side-track and lead him back to the original source of everything: the Word. In the words of the Gospel according to St John: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made.’ This is a rather tautological formulation, something with which Bible texts have no problem. The return of the testimony to Heaven is not the last word on the matter, however: the testimony returns in the world of the story, the world of words, the world of the spirit... As so often in his work, Mulisch refers here to the mythical / magical, the Godly force, which he sees as inherent in ‘writing’.

The philosophical layer of meaning is one which can intrigue readers, particularly because of the lightness with which serious themes are treated. With equal irony, however, Mulisch looks back in his novel at his own writing career and presents a chronology, both reviews covering the period 1967-1985. With the emphasis on the man's world in which the adventures take place in the first instance, the novel becomes a monument to and of friendship: the friendship between the astronomer Max Delius and the linguist Onno Quist. Their meeting, arranged as a ‘chance’ event by the angels, stands at the beginning of a series of events which are designed to lead to the creation of the Wunderkind Quinten and thus to the carrying out of the divine assignment. The description of Quinten's development into adulthood contains all the hallmarks of a Bildungsroman: growing up in the almost fairy-tale ambience of a castle (‘a gift from Heaven’), it is - literally - child's play for him to learn those things which he will need later, both psychologically and physically, in order to carry out his allotted task.

For the writer / philosopher Mulisch, these scenes allow him every opportunity to display his knowledge in a wide range of fields, but always in a playful tone, since they are seen through the eyes of a growing boy. Mulisch plays an exceptionally refined game with fiction and reality on these narrative levels. In his essays, autobiographical writings and interviews, Mulisch has

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never made a secret of his life. In his narrative worlds, he places recognisable events from his own life in everchanging perspectives. This applies to this novel, too, in which Mulisch creates his alter ego Max Delius by means of a mirror-biography, placing him opposite Onno Quist, a faithful representation of Mulisch's friend, the Dutch chess grand master Jan Hein Donner (1927-1988).

Mulisch's political involvement with the Cuba of Fidel Castro, a figure so greatly admired by him in the 1960s, is also given a literary ‘treatment’: it is precisely on this island, on a moonlit night in January 1968, during one of those eternal Communist international friendship conferences, that the god-child Quinten is conceived by the two friends Max and Onno. That is Max' betrayal of friendship, or at least that is the way he sees it for the rest of his life, because on that fateful night he has sex with his former girlfriend, who at that moment is Onno's girlfriend. She also sleeps with Onno on that same night.

Another, literary event takes place on Cuba, which is highly typical of Mulisch's way of writing. During the Cuban conference Mulisch places his alter ego, the character Max Delius, eye to eye with a Dutch writer who displays clear traits of the writer Harry Mulisch. Max is drunk and sees the writer double; he asks the question: ‘How is it possible in God's name for someone to dream up a novel?’ ‘I never dream anything up,’ reply the two mouths coolly. ‘I remember. I remember things which have never happened. Just like you when you read my novel.’ And for the reader, too, Mulisch is present here in a double image - as a figure in his own novel being addressed by a character - but he gives a uniform answer to the puzzle of how great ‘literature’ operates. That operation has to do with universality; then, the unique biographical anecdote of the writer proves to be no more than a leader to a story which is recognisable, or at least imaginable, to many readers.

In his first major (autobiographical) essay collection, Fodder for Psychologists (Voer voor psychologen, 1961), Mulisch makes the statement: ‘Literature is not a supply in response to demand; rather, it is supply which creates demand.’ That, at least, is how Mulisch's literature works, as is evidenced once again by the reactions to the novel in America (in the English translation by Paul Vincent): critics respond enthusiastically, praise the gripping narrative character (and this is an area where modern American literature has itself recorded not a few achievements), and even (see the Wall Street Journal) refer to the literary tradition of Homer, Dante and Milton. This last comment perhaps goes a little too far in describing a writer who presents himself - though of course ironically - with the statement: ‘I am world famous in Amsterdam’. Because that, in turn, was saying much too little about a writer whose book was placed in the following company by John Updike writing in the New Yorker: ‘Like Joyce's “Finnegans Wake” it is oneirically entangled with the entirety of European history; like Umberto Eco's “Foucault's Pendulum” it proposes a dark trickle of arcana running beneath the surface of that history, and gives us a thriller dénouement. Perhaps the great book it most resembles - in its genial ironical tone, in its hospitality to extended arguments, and in the metaphysical height of its sympathy with humanity's spiritual and erotic adventures - is Thomas Mann's “Magic Mountain”.’ In early 1997 The Discovery of Heaven was hailed by the New York Public Library as one of the 25 ‘Books to Remember 1996’.

In 1995 Harry Mulisch received the highest literary distinction which the Netherlands and Flanders can bestow: the Netherlands Literature Prize. The jury was unanimous: ‘The apotheosis of Mulisch's writing career so far is formed by the spectacular “The Discovery of Heaven”. This book unites mastery in storytelling with a multi-layered structure. It allows diverse readings which do not contradict each other.’ And that is precisely the paradox about which Mulisch so likes to talk, or rather: about which he writes in this novel. Everything appears to be a contradiction, but everything is in fact interrelated. The establishing of those contrastive bonds, on so many different levels of meaning, must be an activity for the reader. In his Manifests from 1958, Mulisch puts it like this: ‘It is not the writer, but the reader who must display fantasy. The reader is not a spectator in the theatre, but rather the actor who plays all the roles. What he is reading is very much his own creation. The writer supplies text - but it only becomes a work of art with the talent of the reader.’

Such a statement is both a great compliment and a challenge to the creative capacity of the reader. The international esteem in which The Discovery of Heaven is held emanates at the very least from the scope which this majestic novel, thanks to the talent of the writer, offers to the creativity of the reader.

frans de rover

Translated by Julian Ross.

Harry Mulisch, The Discovery of Heaven (Tr. Paul Vincent). New York: Viking, 1996; 736 pp. isbn 0-670-85668-1.