The Green Face (35 page)

It would appear that there was a certain dichotomy in Meyrink, that can, perhaps, be reconciled: on the one hand there was
the satirist, the scoffer, the sceptic, the liberal writer with a
preference for the eccentric and the bizarre, for whom little was
sacred, and under whose scrutiny not even the occult was
spared; on the other the believer in occult wisdom, the seeker
after hidden knowledge, the propagator of occult doctrines. But
how to make sense of these different selves? His occult essays
are as polemical and ambiguous as his fictions, with elements
of playfulness and strategic opposition ever present. At times
Meyrink gives the distinct impression that he was better at
formulating what to dislike than what he believed in. He especially raged against astrology which he considered a baleful
poison, and while he believed in ghosts, he considered spiritualism a poor cousin of genuine insight, and expended much
energy trying to debunk mediums. He believed in parapsychological phenomena, but considered them extremely rare, and the whole field fraught with swindlers and charlatans; perhaps there
were four true yogi in all of India, he once declared. In the
descriptions of spiritual voyages of his novels, his heroes are
beset at every turn by pitfalls, traps, false paths of which they
must constantly be wary. While debunking charlatans he continued to believe in the existence of a deep and true occult
knowledge.

What emerges from the plethora of contradictory evidence
that exists by and about him is the image of a man who longed
to believe in a realm of higher spiritual reality that opposed the
petty materialism of the everyday world. But a man who at the
same time was too much of a sceptic, perhaps not a thorough
sceptic, but certainly a methodical one, whose strong bent for
the grotesque and the playful led him to probe even that in which
he wanted to believe. So he tried one system after another, one
teacher of wisdom after another, always willing to invest a good
deal of enthusiasm, but again and again he came away disappointed, finding only fraud, showmanship and false pretences.
And on he went with his search.

This sceptical attitude, combined with his ability to laugh at
himself and a penchant for polemics and satire, proved an
advantage in his fiction, where ambiguity is a virtue, giving the
impression of manifold meanings, leaving the reader room for
his own interpretations, and providing the dialectical interplay
and tension on which intellectual drama thrives. Nor is the
satiric component incompatible with Meyrink’s mystic goals,
they are rather supplementary. An essential element of
Meyrink’s novel is dualism; a conflict between a material world
of appearances, and a higher, spiritual world of true causes. The
world of appearances is one of alienation, spiritual decline and
despair, an eccentric world of the criminal demi-monde: a kind
of gigantic curiosity shop enlarged to city-size and populated by
the rejects of mankind. This world has to be rejected, and like
Athanius Pemath in The Golem, the engineer Hauberrisser, the
nominal hero of The Green Face has to be educated for and
initiated into a higher world, helped along by various colourful
figures who offer him assistance (like Swammerdam or
Sephardi). But the rejection of the material world is not total, rather he has to become a citizen of both worlds, truly alive in
this world and the other. This goal is to be achieved not after
death, but in this world; only citizens of both worlds may survive the fall of this one and help create the real one.

Who is to say of this labyrinthine structure where fictional
reality ends and dream and vision begins? What is sanity and
what madness? The hero has to experience both, he is forced to
split and to double his ego and meet himself. By creating an
all-pervading atmosphere of kafkaesque mystery and uncertainty, Meyrink succeeds in suggesting inexhaustible depths
and heights of meaning.