The Golem

I love Meyrink. *The Golem* is certainly his best work, but I loved the short stories, and also these other novels-- *The White Dominican*, *Walpurgis Night*, and , *The Green Face*, roughly in that order, all available from Dedalus. I disagree, for once, with Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote a review of Meyrink's *Angel of the West Window*. (It can be found in the nice fat volume of Borges' collected non-fiction.) I agree with Borges' objection to Angel of the West Window--that it becomes doctrinaire in its strict espousal of specific occult traditions. I'm not interested in the occult, I'm interested in development, transformation. In the Golem we get that. In the other novels perhaps the impact is lessened by his becoming increasingly doctrinaire. I disagree with Borges in that I can't dismiss the other works. They're all worthwhile, great fun, really. Perhaps things have gotten so much worse since Borges was writing. Also, interesting to note that my favorite tastes of Meyrink came from the little excerpts in various Dedalus anthologies. The descriptions and metaphors are so fanciful, wonderful. The lamplighter in the White Dominican. In one of the short stories (The Opal and other Stories, published by Dedalus), Meyrink creates a proto Hitler. Meyrink later boasted that he got it right decades before Hitler rose to power. If you like Meyrink, check out Marcel Schwob, another writer that Borges recommends.

I don't know if I've ever enjoyed reading a book this much (different translation) -- certainly not for years. An incredible plot -- thrilling yes, but deeply textured, revealed exquisitely, every page not only extending the plot, but rippling back through everything that came before. The Prague ghetto at the turn of the century is palpable, but clearly a Prague that existed as much in Meyrink's imagination (or soul?) as in the real world. The characters are complex, or better, nuanced, and rendered with a subtlety that I think may be lost forever. I'm picking up Meyrink's influences on other Eastern European fiction writers -- Gombrowitz in particular, but also Bruno Schulz, just to name a couple. I'm sure some people will not respond to this book as deeply as I have, but if you do, you will experience ecstasy.

The legend of the "Golem" had its origin in Jewish folklore and mysticism, and its reading ranges from a methaphysical interpretation to a child's tale. From the first perspective the Golem is seen as a mystical attempt to experience "imitato dei," God's power of creation and the transcendental nature of the ritual; on a more legendary perspective the Golem is seen as a man-like creature who was created by rabbi Loew from Prague, to protect the ghetto community from persecution and injustice. In Meyrink's novel, the Golem is used as a symbolic device, in an exploration of the problem of identity.Considered a masterpiece of fantasy and expressionism, Meyrink's "The Golem" is an oneiric novel with a strong religious gothic tone, a mirror of Meyrink's intellectual pursuit and involvement in occultist movements. The main character and narrator, Athanasius Pernath drifts in a state of hypnagogia, his memory blocked from the past, desperately in search of his own identity -- "Who am I?" In his quest, the Golem will take Athanasius into an inner journey, in a shift from consciousness to unconsciousness. Meyrink also introduces the mystic and cabbalist concept of the "secret of intercalation" (Ibbur), a combination of God's determinative and guiding hand and of man's freedom of choice and responsibility.It is a novel with a phantasmagorial plot and visionary settings, where characters are drifted by a reality outside their understanding. Some readers might find the journey altogether weird, abstract and surrealist. However, the magic of Meyrink resides exactly in an artistic vision which embodies infinite interpretations. His own words best illustrates his own perspective of life: "when men arise from their beds, they think they have shaken off sleep and they know not that they have fallen victim to their senses and are in the grip of a much deeper sleep than the one they have just left."

Taking the legend of the Golem, the artificial man who was created by the use of the Kaballah magic power, a legend from the times of rabbi Low, contemporary of the emperor of Germany Rudolph II, Meyrink goes beyong this legend to envelope the reader in a complex atmosphere, the atmosphere of the Jewish quarter of Prague, sinister, sombre, gloomy, just like Kafka's novels. The novel, like all Meyrink's novels, is expressionist to the bottom, the characters are distorted, weird, sinister, or else with a sense of unreality about them, although some of them, like Charoussek the student, Hillel and his daughter Miriam, deeply moving.As every novel by Meyrink, "The Golem" is very complex and has difficult concealed meanings, full of symbols which are related to the unconscious. It isn't by chance that Meyrink's novels found the enthusiasm of Jung. The novel, thus, can be seen as a wandering through the mind of the main character, Athanasius Pernath, a particular "saison en enfer" descending to the labyrinth of Pernath's unconscious.However, the novel can also be interpreted from an esoterical point of view, the ancient Eastern doctrine of the Upanishads, the reincarnation, the nature of soul, life and suffering.It also presents the theme of the "double", a recurrent theme in Literature like, for instance, in Edgar A. Poe's "William Wilson".What is crucial is that none of Gustav Meyrink's novels can be interpreted literally, because their meanings are hidden, more concerning myth than plain reality. I don't think that "The Golem" should be seen just as a horror or a mystery novel, because it is profoundly esoterical, mystic and onirical. Its meanings are only to be found in the kind of meanings that dreams provide.

I spent last several days comparing Mitchell's and Pemberton's translation to the German original for a project I'm working on and I strongly recommend Mitchell's version. Pemberton's is quite inaccurate and contains many errors which dull the impact of Meyrink's prose. There is not enough space here for a detailed comparison but as an example just try to figure out the layout of Pernath's and Savioli's apartments (that iron door!) based on Pemberton's translation: "if one unlatched the iron door to the basement - quite easy from above - it was possible, through my room, to reach the staircase..." In fact the door is quite easy to unlatch not from above but from the other side (that is, inside Savioli's studio) and then it is possible to reach the staircase by walking a corridor along (or past) Pernath's room, not through it.