                           19980914.02

To: review@netcom.com
From: Bill Edwards 
Subject: your novel

     Dr Meyer--just a quick note to say that I am making good
progress through your novel and am totally absorbed in it.  It's
proving to be a challenge for my German (this note will evince my
level of understand, I daresay).  I am finding the characters
sympathetic, and the ideas are fascinating.  Here are my initial
reactions (bear in mind that I am only part way through):

     * Dorothea (which coincidentally is my wife's name) seems at
one point to be involved in a particularly virulent form of
separatist feminism.  My experience of feminism is not nearly
that (to coin a word) misandrist, but I can understand that
certain women may well experience men as cruel, oppressive, and
exploitive.  Dorothea's relationship with her first husband is, I
admit, ambiguous.

     I personally would call myself a feminist.  I think I would
also call (dare I say this) Doehring a feminist, or, in any case,
someone who has a deep love and respect for the women in his
life.

     * I gather at the beginning of the novel that Doehring is
suffering disillusionment from his idealization of belles-lettres
as a sort of Holy Scripture for society, or channel for truth and
beauty.  I suppose that I would say that all literature
(*including* the Bible) is incarnated, and has a human, limiting
component that masks its divine elements.

     Please set me straight if I in any way have misunderstood
you on either of these points.  It is rare that one can
correspond with an author about his or her work.

     On a more mundane(?) level, I am downloading the HTML for
your novel chapters into my Newton Messagepad and reading them
there.  That is working very well, except that the Newton Web
browser that I am using does not correctly render umlauts or
sz's, so I have started editing some of the chapters (I devised a
crude Emacs-Lisp macro to do this) to replace those with ae, oe,
etc.  I note that you do use that orthography in most of the
chapters.

     It was great to meet you last month, and I look forward to
further conversation on topics of Linux, German, theology, and
anything else that might occur to you.  I am also very much
looking forward to continuing to read Die Andere.

     Cordially, Bill Edwards


     Dear Bill Edwards,

     Thank you for your note, and especially for your willingness
to spend your time reading my novel.  I was, if you forgive the
vernacular, thrilled by your note. Die Andere has been sitting
out there on the Internet for years, and you are the first reader
who has expressed an interest in the book.  That means a great
deal to me.

     As I wrote the introductory chapter I became aware that it
was a parody of the Studierzimmer scene of Faust, - Habe nun ach,
Philosophie, Juristerei und leider auch Theologie studiert, mit
heiszem Bemuehn ..., with Doehring akin to the despairing Faust;
but Jonathan Mengs a student very unlike Goethe's Wagner, and no
Mephistopheles, since at the time I wrote the chapter, I did not
believe in the existence of evil. That was before Kenneth Starr,
who has, so far as I am concerned, given demonology a new lease
on life.

     I take the theories of interpretation that Mengs espouses
very seriously, perhaps too much so. I contrast Mengs' discovery
of the sanctity of literature and Doehring's disillusionment with
its profanity.

     The question in what respects Doehring was or was not
feminist is elaborated by Doehring himself in the conversation in
flight, pages 16-18 of Chapter 3. There is between private
experience and public expression an absolute qualitative
difference, over which we Germans have always stumbled, in that
we do not know how to translate inward convictions into outward
action. Doehring whose feelings are so powerful and whose
experience (Erleben) is so profound, cannot accommodate himself
to their social expression, as for example in a marriage
ceremony, - while Dorothea needs a public forum to provide a
stage for ideas and feelings that are rooted in dystrophic - or
atrophic experiences.

     My favorite chapters at which you may not have arrived, are
those that describe the hike up the Ammonusac Ravine Trail to the
Lakes of the Clouds Hut (Wolkenseehuette) (?Wolken- kuckucksheim)
where Doehring converses with Heinrich, the mad theologian who is
obsessed with the Imitatio Christi.  (Chapters 20 to 22) Here
occurs the peripateia of the novel.  It is Doehring's affinity
with Heinrich that alienates Dorothea.  She cannot tolerate his
sympathy for the demonic....

     I apologize for my sloppiness of the inconsistent
orthography.  I started out with what I assumed was the standard
representation the Umlaute; subsequently I decided to spell them
out, and also to spell "sz" with the two consonants, as does
Grimm's Woerterbuch.

     I have been working on pieces of essays about epistemology,
theology and jurisprudence, all very fragmentary and
inconclusive; as well as a novel that doesn't yet know where it
is heading.

     I shall be glad to correspond with you by e-mail, or to
discuss over the phone whatever seems to you worth discussing.
And I thank you again for your interest.

Sincerely,
Ernst Meyer

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