Aladdin's Problem

AFTERWORD. THE PARABLE ALADDIN'S PROBLEM OF BY MARTIN MEYER

A major influence on the German novelist Ernst Junger was the philosophy of Swedenborg, who presented his cosmic spirituality in De commercio animae et corpods (1769): God must envelop all spiritual things in visible garments, for that is the only way a finite human being can perceive the intention of Creation. Hence, matter must also be viewed as the reflection of the spiritual. The soul is the organ that must forge the link between the phenomena and their divine origin — but it can only be the soul of an initiate, whose "internal breathing" carries thoughts. In this manner, the mystical experience ofin-tuition "reconstructs" the primal images. What we have here is the neo-Platonic notion ofthe soul.

Junger, haunted by the issue of matter in the modern materialistic world, rejected any metaphysical deprecation of that concept. And that was the start of the "problem" — a term he even considered worthy of being used in a title: Aladdin's Problem, initially published in 1983. At first, this brief four-part novel seems to have little to do with a metaphysical "appreciation" of matter. In his habitual way, the author introduces a first-person narrator who, although not yet forty, has already dealt with and transcended a number of experiences. Friedrich Baroh begins his story by mentioning a "problem," one that bedevils him, casting gloom on his existence. He is forced to spend more and more time mulling over it, whereby his everyday life becomes secondary to this preoccupation. He therefore recalls his past, filling us in on his background. However, we learn nothing about the nature of his problem.

Baroh has served in the Polish People's Army — originally as a soldier, bullied by a vicious sergeant; then as an officer. In the military, he makes no waves, living as what Junger labels an "anarch," conforming unenthusiastically to the system; he spends quiet hours with a friend, a Polish officer, meditating on historical events and on their causes and premises. One day, Baroh flees to the West, where he attends university, marries, and eventually becomes an executive trainee in his uncle's funeral parlor.

After realizing that people without history have no peace and that even our graves fit in with the "chauffeur style," Baroh attempts to compensate for this lack. He starts deepening his knowledge of funeral customs and — in "a countermove to the motor world" — he founds Terrestra. His firm offers interested clients resting places for all eternity, permanent gravesites. Terrestra buys an extensive and intricate catacomb system in Anatolia; and before long, business is booming. "A primal instinct was rearoused."

But ultimately, success merely increases Baroh's frustration, and the fewer the demands placed on him, the more his problem gains the upper hand. In the last part of the novel, he admits, or at least hints at, the location of his pain.

My complaint is not housed in my brain. It is lodged in my body and, beyond that, in society — the cause of my illness. I can do something about it only when I have isolated myself from society. Perhaps I will soon be interned.

Baroh is spared this fate not only by camouflaging his existence as an outsider. In the end, he also finds salvation. He tells about "messengers" knocking on the door. The response to his vague yearning for the absolute are voices and inspirations.

Something wishes to alight — an eagle, a nutcracker, a wren, a jester? Why near me of all people? Perhaps a vulture — I have liver problems now too.

The delicately ironical allusion to myth does not cloak the issue for long. Baroh, now living in an expectant mood, receives a letter of application from a man named Phares. He knows — although he cannot really know it — that this person will initiate him into the mysteries of a world that conceals meaning behind the phenomena. For Phares, we are told, is conversant with the "primal text, of which all human as well as animal languages are merely translations or effusions."

Now we understand what this "problem" is all about: the narrator is tormented by the both personal and social dilemma of having to live in a nihilistic culture that, in the wealth of available knowledge, has lost all connection to "meaning": "Aladdin's problem was power with its delights and dangers." And also: "Aladdin too was an erotic nihilist…."

What does that mean? The Aladdin metaphor, often encoded, often merely whispered in a subordinate clause, keeps recurring throughout Ernst Junger's late works. On December II, 1966, in Lisbon, the author, thinking about secular and spiritual treasures, notes:

As for other treasures, like that of the Nibelungs, only legend knows about them. They rest in the depths: hauling them to the surface can spell disaster, as described in Germanic myths or Oriental fairy tales. What they mean is the world's hoard, from which we live, albeit only on the interest, only on an effulgence that comes from an unattainable distance. Even the sun is merely a symbol, a visible reflection; it belongs to the temporal world. On the other hand, every treasure that is gathered on earth remains a simile, a symbol. It cannot suffice; hence, our ravenous, our insatiable hunger.

The story that best reflects this conflict, if not explicitly, then allegorically, is Aladdin's Problem. What has Baroh learned? That after 1888, Germany's Year of the Three Emperors, History flows into the Post-History of "Titanism." ("Titanism" is the adaptation of ancient myth to modern reality. The Titans, issuing from the union of Gaea and Uranus, are representatives of the primal cosmic powers.) What else has Baroh learned? That this Titanism subjugates all material and spiritual resources in order to rule over the "temporal world" as a demiurge. That the "primal text" thereby turns more and more into silent hieroglyphics. "Aladdin" is Junger's "worker" — the "titanic" agent, who mines and controls the energies of the earth, deluding himself into believing that eventually he will achieve perfection by containing and contenting all needs. This is intimated but not "explained" in the first edition of the novel. The second version, published here by Eridanos, then adds a passage right before the next-to-last paragraph of Chapter seventy-eight. The reliance on allegorical power did not suffice; now this truth is pinpointed:

Aladdin's lamp was made of pewter or copper, perhaps merely clay. Galland's text reports nothing about this matter — all we learn is that the lamp hung from a grotto ceiling. It was not lit, but rubbed, to make the demon appear. He could put up palaces or wipe out cities overnight, whatever the master of the lamp commanded. The lamp guaranteed dominion as far as the frontiers of the traveled world — from China to Mauritania. Aladdin preferred the life of a minor despot. Our lamp is made of uranium. It establishes the same problem: power streaming toward us titanically.

What must happen not only to keep matter from being utilized for the destruction of humanity and its planet, but also to have it go through a process of "spiritualizing," of harmonizing? The author supplies no answer to this question anymore that he did in Eumeswil, a novel he published six years before Aladdin's Problem. However, at the end of the latter story, he brings in Phares, whose task it is to encourage Baroh to cope with his skepticism. This mysterious personage already appeared in Junger's earlier fiction Heliopolis — as commander of the space ship that carries Lucius de Geer toward the infinite edges of the universe. Phares is a bringer of light. His name comes from the French word phares, meaning "beacons, lighthouses." "Les Phares," a poem in Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil, celebrates eight artists whose works, like beacons, illuminated the darkness of the world. In Aladdin's Problem, Phares once again stands for an unknown power beyond the shocks and tremors ofthe world oflife. He is an emissary who is familiar with the primal text; a mentor with Gnostic instruction. For the Gnostics of Late Antiquity, knowledge appears when the "call" is heard: this "call," as Irenaeus explains, draws both salvation and liberation from the fetters ofthe world. It is precisely this "call" that Friedrich Baroh ultimately follows.

Nevertheless, he is left with the feeling that all earthly things suffer from the imperfectness of Creation. The final station on this road is death. Death claims not only the individual existence but also the historical eras:

After all, historical, especially archaeological interests are closely woven with graves; basically, the world is a grave…

Such are Baroh's musings when he is about to do commerce with the human need for permanence. "A resting place ad perpetuitatem": the formula pops up again. As a narrative, Aladdin's Problem elaborates on the insight that even "eternal" rest is disrupted by the incessant hustle and bustle, the endless upheavals in the Age of Titanism. Actually, Junger has been explaining this theme since his early journals. Thus, in September 1943, he talks about a book he has perused, Maurice Pullet's Thebes, Palais et Necropoles (Thebes, Palaces and Necropolis):

While reading, I again realized how thoroughly, albeit on a lower level, our museum-like existence corresponds to the cult of the dead among the Egyptians. Our mummy of culture parallels their mummy of the human image, and our anxiety about history matches their anxiety about metaphysics: we are driven by the fear that our magical expression could go under in the river of time. Our resting in the bosom of the pyramids and in the solitude of caverns amid artworks, writings, implements, icons of God, jewelry, and rich funereal goods is aimed at eternity, albeit in a more subtle fashion.

His awareness of being involved in a gigantic historical catastrophe led Junger's reflections toward an "anxi

ety about history." Exactly forty years later, he was as agitated as ever about the "chassis" of civilization. However, by the time he penned

Aladdin's Problem

at the age of eighty-five, this angst had gained a sharper metaphysical, and ultimately also a personal profile. The author's own mortality was casting its shadow, as he implies in 1984, in

Author and Authorship:

Time is the great, indeed the only source of tragedy. The vanquishing of time is the great task, one that only leads to symbols. Time overpowers, it cannot be overcome.