The picture on the cover of my book portrays a gentleman in black, stiff collar awash in a sea of impressionistic daubs, and the stark blackness so contradictory like a stiff veil. His lips are pursed and his right hand dangles a cigarette like an afterthought. The portrait is like an afterthought. A semblance of an afterthought, relegating the subject further into the background: he looks a part of the hazy yellows and greens behind him, but for his black attire.
Broch’s Pasenow looks, on the cover, very much like the protaganist of the story in all the essential ways; his identity is an ‘atavistic residue’ of the dictates of tradition and cherished beliefs, horridly similar to the strangeness of his own shell. His uniform is his self, his own constructed self, his best self envisioned. Broch writes in a rising and falling cadence, his sentences run long, and his paragraphs run longer, after Kafka’s style, but his analysis is more apparent. At various points in the story you hear words like “uniform”, “represents”, “priest” in the same breath when describing Pasenow’s obvious torment: he knows his place in the world, and ultimately, validates his beliefs by making choices that are representative of his best self, as a soldier, as a son, as a citizen.
He can only be a gentleman of a century before, and that’s the interesting conundrum Broch’s drawn for me. Bertrand is light to Pasenow’s dark; both Elizabeth and Pasenow remark on his cynicism. Accurately enough, Bertrand’s attitude is that of a person who recognizes the sentimentality of form seen both in Elizabeth and Pasenow, and despises it. Bertrand recognizes something I’ve been trying to figure out about the South Koreans, after watching their passionate demonstrations on TV and the like. It’s a sentimentality of form, a lyricization of ideas. It then becomes easier, more palatable, to romanticise it. It’s as if ‘lyricization’ makes an idea all the more eternal, because you can’t lyricize something as epic as nationalism, for example, or loyalty, without committing naturalistic fallacies. Loyalty, for example, becomes bound up as right duty, as piety to God, as filial piety to our Fatherland or Motherland, as good in the most basic of ways — and therefore in the most religious of ways.
And then that idea becomes absolutely Platonic, and as exteriorized as Pasenow’s self in his own uniform.
All this is even more telling when Broch describes the uniform of the priest, and the uniform of the new priesthood, the army - but that’s not quite it. The militaristic fervour, more like. I’m still thinking through this part; uniforms are symbolic in so many ways aren’t they?
There is a beautiful scene in Broch’s ‘The Romantic’ when Pasenow speaks to Elizabeth. He speaks to her and he sees the mountains beyond, and Broch describes Pasenow making the same descriptive cues about the mountains and hills as he does to Elizabeth in his thoughts. He’s already ‘exteriorized’ her, has made her one with the nature of the hills, has made her kind take on an air of the infinite; and the more he does this, the more he finds himself falling in love with her. It’s written in such a way that Broch seems to want you to understand that Pasenow can’t distinguish between idealizing this image of Elizabeth and how he feels. His feelings seem to erupt in idealizing.
I think Bertrand says the most incisive thing in the whole book. When she runs to him seeking advice on her impending betrothal to Pasenow, he kisses her and says “I have such a longing for you”, and then again, “I have such a longing for you,” and then at last “I have such an unspeakable longing for you”. And he then turns his declaration of love into sweet revenge, the only revenge he can inflict on Pasenow: the memory of his declarations in Elizabeth’s heart. He has such longing for her, and he wants less that he wants her, but more than she will always know that he longs for her.
The book ends the only way it can, with Pasenow and Elizabeth; and the thing about it is, the preceeding pages predict the end, and it is written in the most meaningful of ways. It ends in a prototypical, anaesthesized way. The brilliance of the end lies in Broch’s description of all the physical cues, so much so that I had an iconographed image imprinted in my mind long after I had finished reading the book. Now, whenever I think of Pasenow, I think of his portrait on the front cover, and that sterilized image of the couple at the end.
