The Wonder-Worker by Dan Jacobson

First published: 1973

Type of work: Psychological symbolism

Time of work: c. 1950-1970

Locale: London and Switzerland

Principal Characters:

• Timothy Fogel, the protagonist and “wonder-worker,” a mentally deranged young man
• Gerhard Fogel, his father, a Jewish refugee from Germany and a painter
• Maureen Fogel, his mother, a half-mad clerk in a tobacco shop
• Mr. Truter, the rent collector, Maureen’s lover and possibly Timothy’s biological father
• Susie Sendin, the object of Timothy’s desire and his victim
• Laurence Sendin, her brother and Timothy’s friend, a thief
• Mabel, Susie’s friend
• Elsie Brody, Gerhard’s second wife
• The Narrator, a young man whose life and behavior parallel Timothy’s
• The narrator’s Father, the successful counterpart of Gerhard
• Dr. Wuchs, the narrator’s doctor

The Novel

The Wonder-Worker begins with the relatively straightforward account of Timothy Fogel’s conception on the Isle of Wight and his subsequent (and unexpected, since his mother did not know that she was pregnant) birth on the floor of Robinson’s tobacco store in London. After Timothy’s birth and the fire that occurs simultaneously (Gerhard Fogel, his father, left the kettle on the stove in the apartment), Dan Jacobson’s readers know that the Fogels are among life’s losers, especially when Gerhard considers the possibility of Mr. Truter’s being Timothy’s biological father. The plot, however, does not proceed until Jacobson’s unnamed narrator introduces himself, describes his creations, the Fogels, as “caricatures, cartoons, cheap satiric spooks” who “parody” real people, and reveals that he “may be in a bad way, in need of a rest” in the institution where he is confined. Throughout the remainder of the novel, Jacobson shifts back and forth from the narrator’s life to Timothy’s life until the creator and his creation apparently fuse.

Timothy’s life is irrevocably shaped by his playground encounter with Susie Sendin when he is four years old. His effort to impress her on the swings, his failure, and her scornful response characterize his relationship with her throughout the novel: her existence is “entwined with his.” When she taunts him about his mother and Truter, Timothy retreats from the real world and discovers that he can transform himself into a brick. While there are limits to his ability to do transmutations—he cannot become Maureen as she dies—the transmutations do provide him with a “release from pain and desire, from time.” In school, Timothy befriends Laurence Sendin, Susie’s brother, and begins to visit the Sendin home, where he steals Susie’s empty spectacle case. When Laurence shows him some of the jewels he has stolen, Timothy keeps one of the rings and puts it in Susie’s case, which becomes the repository for other stones he acquires.

After leaving school, Timothy goes to work at his father’s secondhand store, which becomes a convenient place for him to “fence” the stolen goods Laurence brings him. When he informs Susie of his plans for his own jewelry store and discusses “crystalline evolution, projected life, and solid state sublimation” with her, she concludes that he is mad and tells him that she will never belong to him. Yet she continues to taunt him, even pairing him with Mabel, one of her unattractive friends, in order to spy on them; Timothy, in turn, spies on Susie and her lover, a married man who impregnates her. Thwarted in the real world, Timothy turns, like his “creator,” to making up scenarios about his life with Susie, but those word “games” result in his murder of Susie. Another indication of Timothy’s increasing violence is his attack on Elsie Brody, his stepmother, who has been, to the paranoid Timothy, prying into his life. After his unsuccessful attack on Elsie (accomplished ostensibly by a transmutation in which he becomes her necklace and then strangles her), Timothy lures Susie to his apartment and kills her, possessing her in death as he could not in life. After her death he, like his “creator,” writes more scenarios; then, after deciding that he “no longer cares about Susie,” he feels the need of a “holiday” and “treatment,” which he can get in Switzerland, where the narrator is, predictably, also being treated.

While the plot involving Timothy spans some twenty years, Jacobson devotes much less time to events in the narrator’s life. When the novel begins, the narrator is already in the Swiss mental institution where his wealthy father has sent him. For some reason—it is perhaps impossible to determine the real reason—the narrator begins to write what he calls his “memoirs,” surely an indication that his characters are “parodies” and that his “fiction” is autobiographical. The writing may be therapeutic, but Dr. Wuch’s treatments and injections produce only paranoia and projection as the narrator speculates about Wuch’s motives and possible Nazi past. Although the narrator is enthusiastic about his “graphomania,” his visiting father does not share his enthusiasm. At times the writing seems fraught with danger, and at one point he wonders if the “scribbling adventure” is “at an end.” As Timothy deteriorates, the narrator vanishes from the novel, only to reappear with the realization that “my time here is definitely running out” and that he has “to finish my task.” That task is to describe Susie’s murder, which is followed by the narrator’s account of a mysterious visit by his father, a girl, and two men, possibly police. The narrator’s “novel” is “evidence,” possibly indicating a tie between Susie’s murder and a “real” murder, but his father describes the writing as unintelligible scrawls and lines. Jacobson’s readers are left with more questions than answers.

The Characters

Because Jacobson’s narrator is a young psychotic, his descriptions of the characters in his own life are necessarily unreliable; his story, the novel-within-the-novel, is also shaped by his psychosis, which accounts for both the blend of reality and science fiction and the parallelism between the two plots and the two sets of characters. In effect, the narrator tells what is happening to him and what has happened to him. Not surprisingly, the characters in his novel bear striking resemblances to the characters in his life.

The first indication of a possible tie between the narrator and Timothy occurs just after Timothy has transformed himself into a brick. The transmutation provides the first indication of Timothy’s own psychological problems, and while his creator denies responsibility, he sympathetically describes his creation as a “poor little devil.” As the story progresses, the narrator mentions a “chemical analogy” involving “the tendency of the remainder” of “molecules in a cooling liquid” to join those in “the solid.” While the narrator does not identify the other half of the analogy, it is tempting to assume that the resulting “sharp, cooperative phase transition” represents the joining of the two stories and the two identities. The narrator’s admitted “delusions” closely parallel Timothy’s own transmutational delusions, and both receive unsympathetic disbelief from their fathers when they attempt to win their acceptance of transmutations, in Timothy’s case, and of writing, in the narrator’s case. (The narrator’s “disappointed hunger for praise from my father” could as easily apply to Timothy.)

As the narrator becomes obsessed (he states that his subject is “obsession”) with Timothy’s story, which is also possibly his own, he is not content to write about Timothy; he even enters Timothy’s story as a character and has to assure his creation that he will not harm him. The identification is complete when Timothy travels to Switzerland for treatment, for in the last chapter the reader is initially uncertain about whether Timothy or the narrator or, more probably, the fusion of the two is at the Swiss institution. The narrator’s last words are paradoxically enigmatic and revealing: “As long as I have my pen in my hand, I am almost as contented with my lot as Timothy is with his.”

The parallels between Timothy and the narrator extend into their families and their relationships. The narrator’s father and Gerhard are both German Jews who deal in stones; in fact, the narrator’s father seems to be only a more successful Gerhard. Both fathers remarry, and Elsie’s prying into Timothy’s life may account for the narrator’s otherwise inexplicable hostility to his own stepmother, just as the narrator’s feelings for his stepmother may explain Timothy’s attempt to murder Elsie. In fact, the narrator even comments on these parallels (elsewhere he terms them “parodies”):

that his beloved gallery should be transformed into Gerhard’s squalid second-hand shop; that my spirited Anglo-Irish mother should be degraded into proletarian Maureen; that the property king and patron of the arts with whom she bolted shortly before her death should figure in my ‘memoirs’ as rent-collecting, handy Mr. Truter.

If Timothy’s attack on Elsie is a projection of the narrator’s feelings for his stepmother, then Timothy’s murder of Susie is also to be explained by the narrator’s feelings about another woman, perhaps Marnie, an inmate who disappears from the narrator’s story, or the “wife” whom the narrator mentions only once in the story.

Critical Context

Dan Jacobson was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and spent the first twenty-five years of his life, with the exception of trips to Israel and London, in South Africa, which provided the setting and themes for his first short stories and novels. In 1954, he returned to England, which has become his home, although he has continued to visit South Africa. In following this course of action his career has resembled those of fellow African English novelists such as Olive Schreiner and Doris Lessing. His move to England has affected his writing, since after his first five novels, which were set in South Africa and concerned the racist policies there, he has turned to England for setting and themes.

In his earlier novels, Jacobson had been, for the most part, in the realistic school of fiction, but with the publication of The Rape of Tamar (1970) he has changed his style, making the narrator’s relationship to his theme the focus of his novel. This reflexive quality, the concern with the narrator’s voice and with the craft of fiction is even more apparent in The Wonder-Worker. In The Confessions of Josef Baisz (1977), Jacobson’s focus is also on the relation between the first-person narrator’s psychology and the story he tells. Jacobson’s shift in style and theme has resulted in fiction that makes new demands on his readers, who find that, in a very real sense, they must participate themselves in the “making” of each of his novels.

Bibliography

Jacobson, Dan. “Away of Seeing,” in Momentum: On Recent South African Writing, 1984.

Prescott, P. S. Review in Newsweek. LXXXIII (April 1,1974), p. 75.

Roberts, Sheila. Dan Jacobson, 1984.

Sissman, L. E. Review in The New Yorker. L (June 24, 1974), p. 101.

Sokolov, R. A. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXX (April 21, 1974), p. 4.

Wade, Michael. “Apollo, Dionysus and Other Performers in Dan Jacobson’s South African Circus,” in World Literature in English. XIIl (April, 1974), pp. 39-82.