Julia Schoch’s novel “The Occurrence”. A review. – Culture

It’s not an inviting title. He looks brittle and neutral. The expression “Das Vorkommnis” is similar in grammar and form to some recent novel titles such as “Das Event” or “occurrence”. The essential that is said with this refers to the drama and its Greek roots. The ancient tragedies deal with fate. Humans strive to give their direction to events, willy-nilly fulfilling the commission of the gods. the “Oedipus” by Sophocles is relevant here and is also valid for us thanks to Freud’s exemplary actualization, one could also say: protection.

Let’s stay with the introduction for a moment. The novel is preceded by a motto. It’s a short dialogue in English, and it’s from an older movie, Flesh and Bone. Kay, the young woman played by Meg Ryan, says to Arlis, played by Dennis Quaid, “What’s that on your pocket?” His answer: “That’s nothing. It’s just a little blood.” What do you have in your bag? Nothing, just a little blood. It’s the last sentences of the film. Arlis drives away in his pickup. Shortly before, he shot his father. Exactly in the house where the father wiped Kay’s family out of greed twenty years earlier. The film tells how Arlis catches up with memory.

The media of this memory are the same as in “The Occurrence”: notes, stories, old photos. They open up a space behind the supposedly simple conditions. Nothing is true anymore, nothing is what it seems. It’s a terrifying space, haunted by the specters of an intangible past. They are the family secret, the trauma at the bottom of the social community, or more trivially: the skeleton in the closet that underlies almost all family narratives.

A family novel from hell. Literally, that’s the norm

“Flesh and Bone” tends towards a horror film, “The Occurrence” initially towards a historically embedded family drama, although it gradually develops into a family horror, always from the perspective of the first-person narration of a young mother, who finally speaks of the “house of darkness” several times. “We don’t know what happens in the house of darkness until we live in it ourselves. In the houses of darkness.”

As dark as it is, it sounds familiar. A family novel from hell is, from a literary and psychoanalytic point of view, the norm. What does Julia Schoch do differently with her book, what is special about “The Occurrence”? She uncovers the core of the drama in the very first sentences, showing what is left over instead of what is missing, what is too much instead of a gap, and the found relative instead of the corpse, known as the “complete stranger”. The reversal of the usual analytical drama into the synthetic: the novel deals with the incalculable effect of this fatal woman.

She appears after a reading by the author who tells all this and speaks the endlessly resonating sentence: “By the way, we have the same father.” The entire novel develops from these five words, in terms of content and narrative structure. The following two paragraphs already mark the momentous difference that will carry the novel with the respective introduction: “In my memory, the fountain pen breaks out with this sentence.” Here the pen derails, draws a “line of shock. As if I had been hit by a bullet while signing”. And the following paragraph begins in return: “In reality…I immediately jumped up and hugged the complete stranger.”

Each family resembles a geometric figure. Some are more circular, others have corners

So memory is opposed to reality. For years, the writer has tried to understand this rift in her imagination. What does the appearance of a half-sister mean for herself, for her sister, for her parents, for her children, for her husband? How does one lie not only infect other lies, but everything else in general, in the family, in the environment, in the city, in the country, an all-pervading lie urbi et orbi so to speak.

Yes, not even the fact of the initial lie can be recorded once the solid ground begins to slip. Through hints, photos and stories, an earlier similar rift soon becomes apparent: the maternal grandfather was stationed in France as a young, good-looking man at the beginning of the Second World War and had met a French woman. Pierre is the name of the son born of the union, whom he never saw. He and his mother Mathilde are the only ones who have names in the novel. The others are named with their family genealogical position, called about the first sister or the second sister. There is a philosophical-mathematical reason for this: “Every family can be assigned to a geometric shape. Some are essentially like a triangle, others more like a circle, a polygon or a star. There are clear shapes like two closely nested points, protective, strangely twisted and those that represent a prison for the members.”

Soon after the confusing reading, the author travels with her mother and two small children to Bowling Green in the USA, known for its international literature courses. She holds seminars on the so-called German-German literary dispute in the years after the turning point here called “revolution”, the positions already encapsulated in two uncommunicable historical-narrative conceits. A reflection of the family’s loss of reality. Most of the novel’s action takes place on campus. The more precisely the concrete events are described there, the more it bears witness to the deep alienation of the narrator. The constant question about the new sister penetrates the joints of all relationships. Nothing is identical to itself anymore. Even the little daughter in the university day care center is suspected of only playing her games; and in the memory of the mother, the baby that traveled with her was born skeptical about the woman giving birth. This is the lowest point of the story: the origin of the world as a suspected psychological case.

The young mother’s gaze, transformed by the new relative, recognizes more and more hidden connections between the symbolic forms of the real world. One of the novel’s most intriguing passages is how the concrete derealization effect of the original encounter with the new sister infiltrates every piece of the narrative puzzle. Paranoia would be a clinical term for this uncontrollable productive force. “South and North. East and West. Such axes, reflections and coincidental circumstances suddenly formed a magical web in my perception. My likes and dislikes, all my previous traces on this planet added to a logical puzzle.”

Open detailed view

The last lines of the novel tie in with its contradictory first. They now refer directly to the Potsdam author Julia Schoch, who several years ago drew a melancholy portrait of her sister in her novel “With the Speed ​​of Summer”, exhausted by the West Pomeranian wasteland, who finally kills herself during a visit to the USA. At the end of “The Occurrence” the author meets an acquaintance from school. This says something about the “speed of summer”, “sad, compassionate. It took me a while to realize that it was related to the death of my sister … But that was only fiction, I cried. I really cried it ?”

So a “former” sister is dead. A novel killed her. The starting point of the new book is a resurfaced sister. It is also these reflections of the beginning and end of the story, of the earlier and the new novel, that act according to law – according to the higher right of the literary gods: fate.

In fact, “The Occurrence” is planned as the first part of a trilogy entitled “Biography of a Woman”. It is not easy to imagine how a novel with such a special narrative dramaturgical charge will be continued. Julia Schoch has moved a good deal away from her topic, recent German-German history, even if one sometimes thinks she is reading a parable of contemporary history in “Event”. But the immense density of correspondence between all levels of the novel creates such a rich 3-D puzzle that one enjoys the reflection of life in it, even if it is a life that is derailing. Julia Schoch has embarked on a new path. We follow with interest.