Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

It is of course possible to summarize the contents in three sentences: Vigoleis and Beatrice travel to Mallorca to offer emergency aid to Beatrice’s dying brother. Because of their generosity, they experience turbulent financial straits that eventually threaten their very existence. And the long arm of Nazism and the nascent Spanish Civil War finally force them to flee to Switzerland.

But such a precis comes nowhere near grasping the essence of the Island . The book’s vitality derives from the thousand stories it contains, such as the following: Vigoleis, the man of letters who is now financially ruined, keeps himself above water by giving German language lessons. He takes on a young American as a private student, and explains the lack of furniture in his and Beatrice’s apartment as the pedagogical method of the future, one that is his own personal invention and one that is destined to enter the annals of pedagogy. He calls it the “Single-Chair Method.” After several weeks, the naive pupil learns the truth and makes a sudden departure. People later speculate that just one word from the impoverished writer would have sufficed for the wealthy American to fill Vigoleis’ apartment with handsome furniture.

This story says more about Thelen’s magnum opus than any plot summary, because with this tale, Thelen touches on two basic themes of human nature: comedy and tragedy. He approaches the tragic involvements of his characters, especially those of his hero Vigoleis, with the stylistic means of comedy, and he succeeds at this only because he observes events from a distance.

In addition to the chronological gap between real experiences and their depiction in writing, Thelen makes use of another technique in order to create distance: he invents a character who is said to have had the same experiences as himself. And he gives this character a name that is identical with his own second name: Vigoleis.

Thelen consciously fashions a complex narrative construct. He reports to us what he experienced on Mallorca. That is, he offers us a portion of his autobiography, completely in keeping with the stipulation he devised in his “Notice to the Reader”: “All the people in this book are alive or were at one time… the author included.” But because he does not wish to hold rigidly to historic accuracy, he places a veil over what is true and what he has invented. The material is autobiographical, but in depicting it he exercises poetic license. Thelen is interested first and foremost in the stories that he can gather from what actually happened. In a 1967 to Günther Padelwitz, he explains his methodology this way, taking as an example an episode in a later work, when the first official act announced by the director of a Catholic hospital made it mandatory for each nun to submit to a thorough cleansing. “Not one of them climbed into the bathtub. Instead, Dr. Vasco was dismissed and brought to trial. He was sentenced to a year in jail for moral turpitude, lascivious advances to nuns, etc. — I devote a chapter to this case, and I ‘apply’ in the narration my own take on the events. Thus my ‘applied recollections.’”

In this fashion Thelen himself explains the subtitle of his Island : “From the Applied Recollections of Vigoleis.” He gives us the story of his own life, embellishing the real events and, with Vigoleis, inventing his own double. He toys with the genres “autobiography” and “novel,” continually highlighting their ambivalent relationship. “Life begins to get interesting only when it touches poetry,” we learn in the Island . And in another passage: “Why shouldn’t the world that matters to us be a fictional one?”

Scholars of German literature believe that a novel must be fictional, and an autobiography authentic, but Thelen violated the borderlines. With his “applied recollections” he created a new variant of autobiographic narrative. Thelen confronts the problematic distinctions that accompany all memoirs, which Goethe exemplified in the title of the presentation of his own life ( Poetry and Truth ), by manipulating these distinctions and heightening them into a poetological program.

Our comparison of Thelen with the great figures of literary history, as well as our stress on his baroque narrative style, give rise to another question that occasionally gets asked: What is there about the Island that makes it worth reading even today? It is easy to provide a first superficial answer: Any person who travels to Mallorca can use the book as a potential source of information about certain places on the island, especially in Palma, the Mallorcan capital. In addition, the work provides valuable glimpses of a time when today’s explosion of tourism was still in its infancy.

Yet such a description does no more justice to The Island of Second Sight than our attempt to summarize the book’s contents. Why should today’s readers reach for Cervantes’ Don Quixote , Melville’s Moby-Dick , or Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum ? These works offer their readers perennial themes of human experience, in eternally new variants and at the highest linguistic level. And this is exactly what happens in Thelen’s work. His topics are:

Freedom and Dependency

Freedom is our hero Vigoleis’ main concern. One of the final sentences in the book is this: “Our destination: freedom.” Vigoleis was unwilling to submit either to the authority of the Hotel Majorica or to that of the Nazis. His freedom was more valuable to him than his own life.

Success and Failure

Vigoleis constantly brags about his own incompetence. His origins aren’t worth writing memoirs about; he has no talent for handling money; he is incapable of acting in his own interest; and he doesn’t shy away from presenting a discussion about whether or not he is a genuine writer. In a brief but very impressive passage, he reports his totally futile attempt at giving a speech at his parents’ silver wedding anniversary. For Vigoleis, whose ambition is to become a storyteller, this episode remains in his memory as a bitter defeat.

Love and Hatred

While telling us about Pilar and Zwingli as a couple, Thelen shows us how love can turn into hatred. But there is also Beatrice and Vigoleis, whose love affair, while much less spectacular, is much more firmly rooted. Thelen is also keen to present different kinds of love, like the love that can exist between siblings (Beatrice and Zwingli), and between parents and children (Pilar and Julietta).

Idealism and Materialism

This important theme, which Cervantes exhibited in such grandiose fashion in his Don Quixote , is present throughout Thelen’s Island . Again and again he matches up his idealistic hero Vigoleis against materialistic antagonists who, for the most part, get the better of him: Adele Gerstenberg, Silberstern, the beggar Porfirio, and — to a certain extent — Zwingli. In the process, Thelen shows us how closely linked idealism is to humanism.

What is truly unique, however — and what launched the book’s Lower Rhenish author into the highest ranks of world literature — is the linguistic mastery that Thelen displays throughout the work’s many pages.

Thelen set off an unprecedented display of linguistic fireworks with the aid of a vocabulary that must have been the hugest in all of German literature. The critic Eckart Henscheid, writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1994, referred to him as a “full-to-bursting narrator.”

Thelen the storyteller stepped forth as a force of nature, taking the fullest advantage of the cornucopia that is the German language, and of his own ability to master this language. The years he spent in foreign climes — and his familiarity with six different languages — were of great benefit for him. In response to a questionnaire in the 1960s, he explained that he had never once felt “banished” into a foreign language. “On the contrary,” he continued, “it was when I was on foreign soil, constantly surrounded by the sounds of a foreign tongue, that I began to take full possession of my own language.” He also developed an early interest in archaic and technical language, and he collected dictionaries. The largest compendium of German vocabulary by far, the German Dictionary of the Brothers Grimm, became his constant companion.