Masculinity, Madness, and Religion: The Patriarchal Legacy of the Bible in Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s Pong

Summary

Thus far, Sibylle Lewitscharoff has (unlike most female authors) invariably invented male protagonists for her prose works. This is not the only reason why Lewitscharoff (b. 1954), the daughter of an orthodox Bulgarian immigrant, is hard to compare with her con- temporaries. She grew up amongst quarreling Protestant sects in Stutt- gart, and her interest in the force of closed belief systems led her first to the famous Institute of Comparative Religious Studies at Berlin's Freie Universität, later to Argentina. There she studied the works of Latin America's Catholic conquerors, whose lives were spent in “Bemühungen, auch das kleinste und ihnen fremdeste Detail, das sie in der neuen Welt entdeckten, in ihrem eigenen Religionssystem unterzubringen, zu klas- sifizieren, es auf diese Weise zu beherrschen.”

Lewitscharoff's impressive knowledge of religious traditions is shared by only few of her literary contemporaries (Martin Mosebach and Arnold Stadler, for example), and informs all of her work. Her first literary publication was 36 Gerechte (1994; the title alludes to the Hasidic legend of the thirty-six righteous men who unknowingly justify mankind in the eyes of God), her most recent novel Consummatus (2006; the title cites the last words of Christ, “consummatus est”); both clearly use biblical motifs. Her texts not only flaunt their author's religious erudition, but also, in implicit and explicit allusions, her profound familiarity with European writing traditions. Lewitscharoff's idiosyncratic and very recognizable style has often been compared to Jean Paul because of the humor, imagery, and witty coinages that play on the literal meaning of metaphorical expressions. Echoes of Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, and others who have portrayed the kinds of characters she calls “Erlöserclowns” are never far away. Pong was her debut novel, and won her the 1998 Ingeborg Bachmann prize in Klagenfurt.

Pong is “ein Verrückter” who shows clear signs of paranoid schizo- phrenia. Unlike the psychiatric patients described (for example) by Rainald Goetz in Irre (1983) or Heinar Kipphardt in März (1976), however, Pong is unlikely to be mistaken by the reader for a real person; an actual man of flesh and blood. Lewitscharoff's creation refers to so many famous literary and historical madmen that the resulting character is utterly (and deliberately) artificial. Pong is less a human being than, to use Reinhard Baumgart's word, a “Verrücktheitsprogramm” of an experimental nature. I will try to elucidate how Lewitscharoff, in writing about an eccentric madman who is obsessed with the Bible, produces something like a cultural pathology of masculinity.