This is surely one of the reasons for the extraordinary quality of Thelen’s book — for its grand humor and its abundance of ideas. The twenty-year gap allowed him to view his characters and their doings in a wholly different manner than if he had written things down directly, as they happened. How might Thelen’s Mallorca book have looked if he had written it while still on the island, or directly thereafter? Perhaps we would have in our hands a completely standard travelogue of the type produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thelen, we may surmise, would have described the island, its places, its people, and its culture — but not much more.
When Moby-Dick was first published, Herman Melville’s contemporaries were disappointed. They regarded as superfluous — indeed as annoying — the abundance of metaphysical reflections and technical digressions, especially those that concerned the hunting of whales. What they wanted, instead, was Melville the travel writer, not the philosopher and whaling expert.
Thelen, too, was criticized for his digressive form of narration. Some contemporary reviewers of the Island would have preferred a book with fewer ancillary passages, a work that clung more firmly to the narrative thread and moved faster. It is fortunate for literary history that this was not the course Thelen pursued and that, instead, he found his own inimitable style and remained true to it. In the Island he himself calls this his “cactus style”: “it [forms] branches and offshoots at random, like a cactus with its urge to sprout buds just where you would never expect them.”
This “cactus style” places Thelen on a par with the three other first-rank practitioners of digressive narrative: Laurence Sterne, Jean Paul, and Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel. These writers, too, were blamed by contemporary critics for their numerous digressions. But what the critics overlooked was the fact that the digressions were neither padding nor extraneous material, but elements of methodical narrative technique.
Thelen, too, does not race from A to B. He doesn’t race at all; he ambles. At times he crawls. He enters secondary pathways and often takes three steps backward — sometimes into his own childhood. Often, when the reader wishes to know how the main story will continue, Thelen inserts a retarding passage. One wishes to call out to him, “That’s enough! Take us back to your plot! Tell us what happened next with Vigoleis and Beatrice!” But no, Thelen prefers to go off on a tangent. And if you choose to follow him there, you will be rewarded. In the end, after over 700 pages, you are pleased that nothing and no one has forced the author to abandon his “cactus style.”
But just what is The Island of Second Sight, if it is so much more than a Mallorca novel in the form of a travelogue? It is a microcosm of life itself. It is a receptacle containing characters and events, a reservoir of learning, a linguistic treasury, and above all it is what Friedrich Schlegel demanded of any work of art, a “continuum of unending reflection.” It is so full of dazzling figures and happenings that even after repeated readings we have the opinion that we haven’t read all of the stories. That is why the book is inexhaustible, and why it is quite impossible to describe its contents.
It is of course possible to summarize the contents in three sentences: Vigoleis and Beatrice travel to Mallorca to offer emergency aid to Beatrice’s dying brother. Because of their generosity, they experience turbulent financial straits that eventually threaten their very existence. And the long arm of Nazism and the nascent Spanish Civil War finally force them to flee to Switzerland.
But such a precis comes nowhere near grasping the essence of the Island. The book’s vitality derives from the thousand stories it contains, such as the following: Vigoleis, the man of letters who is now financially ruined, keeps himself above water by giving German language lessons. He takes on a young American as a private student, and explains the lack of furniture in his and Beatrice’s apartment as the pedagogical method of the future, one that is his own personal invention and one that is destined to enter the annals of pedagogy. He calls it the “Single-Chair Method.” After several weeks, the naive pupil learns the truth and makes a sudden departure. People later speculate that just one word from the impoverished writer would have sufficed for the wealthy American to fill Vigoleis’ apartment with handsome furniture.
This story says more about Thelen’s magnum opus than any plot summary, because with this tale, Thelen touches on two basic themes of human nature: comedy and tragedy. He approaches the tragic involvements of his characters, especially those of his hero Vigoleis, with the stylistic means of comedy, and he succeeds at this only because he observes events from a distance.
In addition to the chronological gap between real experiences and their depiction in writing, Thelen makes use of another technique in order to create distance: he invents a character who is said to have had the same experiences as himself. And he gives this character a name that is identical with his own second name: Vigoleis.
Thelen consciously fashions a complex narrative construct. He reports to us what he experienced on Mallorca. That is, he offers us a portion of his autobiography, completely in keeping with the stipulation he devised in his “Notice to the Reader”: “All the people in this book are alive or were at one time… the author included.” But because he does not wish to hold rigidly to historic accuracy, he places a veil over what is true and what he has invented. The material is autobiographical, but in depicting it he exercises poetic license. Thelen is interested first and foremost in the stories that he can gather from what actually happened. In a 1967 to Günther Padelwitz, he explains his methodology this way, taking as an example an episode in a later work, when the first official act announced by the director of a Catholic hospital made it mandatory for each nun to submit to a thorough cleansing. “Not one of them climbed into the bathtub. Instead, Dr. Vasco was dismissed and brought to trial. He was sentenced to a year in jail for moral turpitude, lascivious advances to nuns, etc. — I devote a chapter to this case, and I ‘apply’ in the narration my own take on the events. Thus my ‘applied recollections.’”
In this fashion Thelen himself explains the subtitle of his Island: “From the Applied Recollections of Vigoleis.” He gives us the story of his own life, embellishing the real events and, with Vigoleis, inventing his own double. He toys with the genres “autobiography” and “novel,” continually highlighting their ambivalent relationship. “Life begins to get interesting only when it touches poetry,” we learn in the Island. And in another passage: “Why shouldn’t the world that matters to us be a fictional one?”
Scholars of German literature believe that a novel must be fictional, and an autobiography authentic, but Thelen violated the borderlines. With his “applied recollections” he created a new variant of autobiographic narrative. Thelen confronts the problematic distinctions that accompany all memoirs, which Goethe exemplified in the title of the presentation of his own life (Poetry and Truth), by manipulating these distinctions and heightening them into a poetological program.
Our comparison of Thelen with the great figures of literary history, as well as our stress on his baroque narrative style, give rise to another question that occasionally gets asked: What is there about the Island that makes it worth reading even today? It is easy to provide a first superficial answer: Any person who travels to Mallorca can use the book as a potential source of information about certain places on the island, especially in Palma, the Mallorcan capital. In addition, the work provides valuable glimpses of a time when today’s explosion of tourism was still in its infancy.