The New Scheherazade.(criticism and interpretation of Lilian Faschinger's first novel)(Excerpt)

The New Scheherazade (Die neue Scheherazade, Paul List Verlag, 1986) is Lilian Faschinger's first novel. As in the original Thousand and One Nights, Faschinger's narrator tells stories to escape death, if not literal death at the hands of a wrathful King Schahriar, then figurative death in the stifling existence of an Austrian wife. The novel, which Faschinger has called "my contribution to postmodernism," features her characteristic humor and treats many of the themes found in her later works: the latent fascism in Austrian society, the uses and misuses of psychoanalysis, and the role of the Catholic Church in the oppression of women, among others. The narrator, whose kinship with and distance from her literary ancestor are symbolized by her different-colored eyes (the legacy of an Austrian father and an Iranian mother), recounts adventures in which she and other fictional characters interact with "real," historical figures (such as the artist Christo, author Gertrude Stein, and actor Clint Eastwood) as well as with characters from movies or literary works, rock musicians, the narrator's own family and friends, and even cartoon characters. A self-interrupting narrative continually calls the narrator's authority into question. Scenes from everyday life suddenly merge with fairy tale motifs (Snow White, Bluebeard) or switch from narrative to drama. As the narrator comments (15), "... there is no significant difference between thought and deed, between imagination and reality." The excerpts included here are from the first few pages of the novel, where the narrator explains her situation and gives us her family history, and two later sections, one describing the first love of the narrator's Aunt Steffi (as she herself would have told it, had she ever done so), and the other imagining the artist Christo confined in an asylum for abnormal criminals. The narrator's musings on love take her to the confessional; the excerpt ends with a line that also occurs in Magdalena the Sinner (Magdalena Sunderin, 1995): "What do you mean by repent?" (JC)

 
   The clock struck eleven. "It's midnight already," said the 
   Count, for he was a terrible liar.--Odon yon Horvath, The 
   Eternal Philistine 

Don't stop talking. Keep your articulatory organs--vocal cords, tongue, lips--in motion, forming sounds. It's a life and death situation. Form sounds with the help of your upper lip, form sounds with the help of your hard palate, form sounds with the help of your larynx, form sounds with the help of your incisors. Silence is not golden, silence is death. Your mother has been silent a long time, for she lost an eyetooth. I'm not a mother, I'm a daughter, I'm not yet silent. Overtones, undertones, inter-tones, nuances. I'm talking/writing for my life, which he wants to take from me, King Schahriar. The stones for the stoning have been piled into a pyramid, the horses for the dragging have been harnessed, the water for the drowning has been drawn, the knives for the quartering have been whetted, the noose for the hanging has been knotted. As long as I keep talking/writing, they listen; as long as I keep talking/writing, he does not talk, does not command the palace guards to kill me with their beautiful scimitars.

So in my case it is not a question of pathological, uncontainable garrulousness, but a compelling necessity, pure self-defense, a ruse contrived by my sister Dunya and me to prevent the eradication of our sex. We dreamed it up in our shared bedroom, lying on our bellies between the white lacquered furniture, the pink batiste curtains, the shirred lampshades, and all the large stuffed animals, our sweethearts, whom we ride on and rub ourselves on until sparks fly. We stood up, lifted our nightgowns up to our breastbones, looked at each other and stroked each other. No, these tender skins are not here to be sliced by scimitars. It must not happen that white-rimmed wounds gape open and all the red juice trickles out like sawdust from dolls. Dunya and I, the two Austro-Persian dolls that Schahriar and his brother play with until they get bored and cut them open.--We also weighed a second possibility for saving ourselves, namely absolute surrender, but promptly rejected this possibility as useless. Employing this method was of no use to the thousands of our sex already slaughtered. They did their best to moan, whimper, and foam ecstatically at the mouth, but Schahriar and Schahseman were not deceived and ordered the maidens' heads to be cut off. When it comes to pleasures of the flesh, no one can pull the wool over their eyes. They can instantly tell the difference between feigned eye-rolling and eye-rolling caused by genuine passion, correctly distinguish the drool of ecstasy from labored salivation, and if fingernails dig into their masculine flesh, they sense at once whether it is occasioned by the heat of sex or by pure malice. And when such a thing comes to their attention (and sooner or later it always does, at moments when the maidens' deceptive energies flag, when they become careless or no longer feel like putting on an act for the brothers), they fly into a rage, roll their huge black eyeballs, foam with wrath and send orders for execution echoing through the palace. Kill this woman! KILL THIS WOMAN! KILL KILL KILL THIS WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN (with an echo effect gradually dying away).

My sister Dunyazade Moser and I, Scheherazade Hedwig Moser, are biracial: Irano-Austrians, Austro-Persians. Our father, Hans Moser, born in Kirchdorf, Carinthia, attended the College of Construction Technology in Villach. After finishing his course of study, he signed a contract with a construction company and went to Shiraz in Persia for several years to build irrigation plants. He decided to do this because his best friend, Rudy Gutschier, had recently emigrated to Australia (to Brisbane? Wagga Wagga?), infecting him with talk of big opportunities and big money. He was going to fence in the land at the foot of Ayers Rock, he said, to start a sheep-breeding business, and he would drive past groups of amazed aborigines, at first in a rattletrap truck, later in a new one, throwing them cans of beer that he would bring by the case in his truck to down while driving. He said in Australia there were no cops to stop drivers and make them take an alcohol test. Then he would marry a beautiful Australian woman of Irish extraction--with skin as white as snow, cheeks as red as blood, hair as black as ebony, and with violet eyes--who would be the very image of Liz Taylor, and they would live happily ever after. In reality, the land at the foot of Ayers Rock was unsuitable for sheep breeding; if anything, it might have been parceled out for lopsided tennis courts. In reality, Rudy Gutschier worked as an underpaid auto mechanic, suffered from a chronic disc ailment, and got married, not to an Irish Liz Taylor, but to an Australian woman of Lower Bavarian ancestry with long teeth and a receding chin ...