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