Sigismund by Lars Gustafsson

First published:Sigismund: Aus den Erinnerungen eines polnischen Barockfursten, 1976 (English translation, 1985)

Type of work: Magical realism

Time of work: 1973

Locale: West Berlin; Vastmanland, Sweden; Cracow, Poland; and East Berlin

Principal Characters:

• Lars, the narrator, a Swedish writer
• Laura G., an artist and a friend of the narrator
• Uncle Stig, the narrator’s Swedish uncle
• Aunt Clara, the narrator’s Swedish aunt
• Sigismund III, King of Poland from 1587 to 1632

The Novel

Sigismund: From the Memories of a Baroque Polish Prince explores the inner reality of man’s existence through a series of loosely connected meditations, fantasies, and memories. The novel, written in the first person and often addressed directly to the reader, depicts the struggle of the narrator, a Swedish writer, to create an authentic identity despite the alienating forces of modern society. Alternately, he identifies with Sigismund III, King of Poland from 1587 to 1632 and with an alter ego, the painter Laura G., who journeys to Hell. He also plays a small role in an intergalactic war that ultimately resurrects Sigismund, and he re-creates scenes from his childhood in Sweden. Juxtaposed to his imaginative life are brief scenes that underscore the emptiness of his roles as intellectual and family man.

The main section of the novel, “Memories from Purgatory,” begins with a strange anecdote that breaks down the distinction between reality and fiction. The story, told years in the past by a former professor, is “so unbelievable, so absurd, and so alien” that it jars the original audience as well as the reader. The narrator validates this world, however, by relating the story in the present tense and by identifying with its main character, “Prince W.’s flunky serf.” He views the so-called ordinary world as the real absurdity and lives emotionally in his daydreams and fantasies. Meanwhile, his “stand-in” participates in this absurdity; he writes newspaper articles, discusses politics with his wife and friends, and tries to communicate with his children.

The public persona of the narrator conforms to the conditioning of a culture that rewards superficial cleverness and punishes any violation of the rules. Friends and students respect his ideas; colleagues envy his many accomplishments. As he goes through the motions, however, he secretly despises his petty bourgeois life. He is alienated from his work and emotionally detached from his wife and two children, who are unnamed. The only person who evokes any real feeling is his friend Zwatt, but he sublimates his desire for her into intellectual conversation and only obliquely hints at his feelings in a letter to her. On the surface, he is normal; his ideas are politically correct; his behavior is socially acceptable.

What he considers his real life—his philosophical speculations and fantasies—is richer and much less predictable. He regularly escapes to pastoral scenes from his childhood in Vastmanland or loses himself in fantastical adventures. A comic strip, pasted on an outhouse wall, suddenly comes alive. Just as Flash Gordon breaks through the glass bubble that has imprisoned him for thirty years, so the narrator and the reader enter another level of reality. Perceiving further challenging of accepted notions of time and the material world, Sigismund begins to stir in his sarcophagus.

Perhaps the narrator is particularly obsessed with Sigismund because he too was a Swede fated to live in another country. Just as Sigismund unsuccessfully tried to unify Sweden and Poland, the narrator tries to integrate his memories of humus-filled lakes and solitary canals with the squalor of thirty-story tenements and the ugliness of the Berlin Wall. Trying to make sense of his life, he re-creates the stories of two people who played a significant part in his early development. Both his Uncle Stig and his Aunt Clara symbolize the possibility of asserting one’s individuality in opposition to conventional expectations.

His Uncle Stig initially appears to have been a failure. A socialist, he is repeatedly cheated out of the profits from his inventions, because he refuses to deal with the capitalist system. He is finally defeated, not by the capitalists, but by his own loss of faith. His most spectacular invention is an aerodynamic bicycle, dedicated to the cause of socialism and world peace and designed to compete with an automobile. After he recovers from his seventy-mile-an-hour crash, he lives the rest of his long life a silent, ordinary man. Yet his attempt to create more satisfying alternatives to the status quo generates a metaphorical wind of freedom that sustains the narrator in his own moments of crisis.

The story of Aunt Clara has an opposite ending but suggests the same possibilities for freedom. Jilted by a socially prominent politician, she leaves home with a blind, slobbering beggar who is revealed to be a surreal incarnation of Homer. Clara dies of exposure after a few months of wandering through the rain, but the narrator believes that she dies “completely happy.” The common denominator in both stories is the escape from self-imposed limitations and from the narrow restrictions of society.

The lessons from the past are interwoven with the narrator’s vision of possibilities. A conversation with Laura G. about selling one’s soul to the devil triggers an extended fantasy that divides the novel into two plots. The fictional Laura G. meets with the friendship delegation from Hell, negotiates with them on the price of her soul, and takes a sight-seeing trip to assess the living conditions of her eternal destination. Like the narrator, she is less interested in superficial enticements—enduring fame and huge sums of money—than in the possibility of understanding herself and the world. Her final demand, to be another person for a day, corresponds to the narrator’s need to escape the prison of the isolated ego.

As these fantastic events are unfolding, the narrator frequently interrupts with comments on his fictional strategies in the novel, his opinion of his readers, and his interpretations of good and evil, heaven and hell, God and the devil, freedom and reality, and sanity and madness.

In the brief coda, “Sigismund Walks Again,” the narrator appears to be overwhelmed by the darker side of this dichotomy. His wife and children have gone back to Sweden. Isolated in his apartment, he faces chaos and disintegration. At the point of despair, however, he once again affirms the power of the imagination to transform the sordid details of commonplace reality, and the novel ends in a double victory. Laura G. has been granted her request. Now a young man, she experiences the supreme horror and pleasure of being a completely different person. The narrator is rescued by the resurrected King Sigismund. Just before this climactic moment, the narrator repeats the idea that recurs throughout the novel and is the key to both the action and the theme: “We begin again. We never give up.”

The Characters

The similarities between the author and the narrator are deliberately emphasized in this fictionalized autobiography. Like the author, the narrator was reared in Sweden, attended the University of Uppsala, was a visiting professor in Germany, and is a writer named Lars. The novel is dedicated to Zwatt, one of the minor characters, and the narrator frequently comments on the progress or difficulties he encounters in writing Sigismund. Yet because Lars Gustafsson, and his protagonist, reject facile distinctions between reality and fiction, a complete identification of author and narrator is meaningless. In the same way that everyone fictionalizes his life, Gustafsson gives us a fragmented and fictionalized version of his. He is concerned with his inner, spiritual life, precisely what cannot be documented with factual accuracy.

His need to discover a meaning for his own life as well as human history leads to an unresolvable dialectic between freedom and security, belief and skepticism. He divorces himself from the mundane details of his outer life, because he sees no way to change the destructive forces of civilization. (Indeed, he seems to have little effect on his own children.) At the same time, his mind fixates on the most grotesque reminders of the sickness in Western culture. At breakfast, he engages in a carefully structured debate with his wife over an abstract political idea while mentally focusing on the image of a man who has burned himself alive. He curses the cleverness through which he has secured his position in society, yet his respectability suppresses his two greatest fears—“the fear of going crazy and the fear of being without money.” Like Flash Gordon or Sigismund, he longs to break free. Only in his imagination, however, is he able to transcend the traps that he has created for himself.

Before he can achieve emotional freedom, he must come to terms with what he sees as the essential duality of the universe. His attempt to find an acceptable answer leads to an existential crisis. Close to madness, he contemplates giving up writing, implying that language is only another illusion. In the process of accepting his worst fear, he paradoxically affirms the power of the imagination. In an insane world where people are mass-bombed, he decides “it is probably not so odd that you get a desire to flee into a really elegant, deliciously balanced insanity.” By surrendering to his imagination, even if it might appear to be madness, he realizes that humankind creates its own heaven or hell. Although he can find nothing to believe in beyond human existence and in spite of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, he affirms the power of human faith and love.

The other characters in the novel are primarily important as a reflection of the narrator or as a means of conveying his ideas. His interaction with his wife and children merely show his alienation from domestic life. Other characters, such as the Bulgarian poet-in-exile and his friend B., who is cheated by a theater agent, serve as examples of his social milieu or as a vehicle for him to work out his ideas. Other characters, such as his friend Zwatt, allow the narrator to reveal his emotional reactions. None of them is a fully realized character.

The most extended and fully developed of these figures is the artist Laura G., whose successful bargain with the devil parallels the narrator’s quest. She is the mirror image of the narrator. She believes that it is possible to achieve perfection in her art, whereas the narrator is beset with both artistic and personal self-doubt. She actively pursues the answers to her metaphysical questions; the narrator frequently tortures himself with introspection and passively waits for Sigismund to save him. Her story adopts an independent life, and a large portion of the novel is devoted to her journey. The narrator, however, makes it clear that she is, like Sigismund, a projection of his own fantasies and desires.

Critical Context

Sigismund is the fourth in a series of five loosely connected novels. Although each of the novels in the series is complete in itself, they share a common theme: the importance of the individual and the necessity for self-definition. As Gustafsson noted in an interview conducted by one of his English translators: “More and more people are realizing that the meaning or sense of their lives is the one they have to give to themselves.” All of his characters are engaged in this struggle, which provides the only possibility for freedom.

En biodlares dod (1978; The Death of a Beekeeper, 1981), the only other work in Gustafsson’s series that has been translated into English, asserts the significance of the individual, even over a hypothetical god. The protagonist declares, “if there is a god, then it is the task of the human being to be his negation.” Like Sigismund, the novel expresses an optimistic belief in the human power to persevere and repeats the refrain that runs through all the novels: “We begin again. We never give up.”

Most of Gustafsson’s work has not been translated into English. Yet he is well-known in Sweden and Germany as a poet, dramatist, and literary critic, as well as a novelist. Sigismund is an excellent example, in both structure and theme, of the postmodern novel. Rooted in the tradition of Laurence Sterne and Miguel de Cervantes, as the epigraph from Don Quixote of the Mancha (1605, 1615) makes clear, the novel self-consciously plays with the conventional rules of fiction. The work of other, contemporary, writers, such as Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, John Barth, and John Fowles, provides a useful context for Gustafsson’s achievements. He asks the timeless questions that place his novel with the best of this genre in world literature.

Bibliography

Best Sellers. Review. XLV (May, 1985), p. 48.

Kirkus Reviews. Review. LII (November 15, 1984), p. 1061.

Library Journal. Review. CX (February 1, 1985), p. 112.

Publishers Weekly. Review. CCXXVI (December 14, 1984), p. 38.

Voltz, Ruprecht, ed. Gustafsson lesen, 1986.