The Asylum of Dr. Caligari
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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE ASYLUM OF DR. CALIGARI
“No one does history-meets-the-fantastic like Morrow. The Asylum of Dr. Caligari is a great example—Impressionism versus expressionism, psychology in the asylum of ‘dreams,’ the weaponization of art, big laughs and big ideas, a wild imagination, and smooth, subtle writing.”
—Jeffrey Ford, author of A Natural History of Hell
“I was reminded time and again of some horror greats, including Dracula and Frankenstein.”
—The Booklover’s Boudoir
“The Asylum of Dr. Caligari is a fast, funny book . . . Brilliantly walking the line, its zippy energy camouflages a surprisingly powerful resonance. It’s yet another seriocomic triumph from one of the genre’s best satirists.”
—Christopher East
“One of the joys of The Asylum of Dr. Caligari is its portrayal of the intellectual ferment of the first two decades of the twentieth century. Discussions of the value of the new science of psychology, of non-expressionistic art forms, of philosophers such as Nietzsche, and of the evolution of warfare are strewn throughout the story.”
—Amazing Stories
PRAISE FOR JAMES MORROW
“Morrow is the only author who comes close to Vonnegut’s caliber.”
—The Stranger
“The most provocative satiric voice in science fiction.”
—Washington Post
“I am so besotted with James Morrow’s talent that I cannot find a word big enough to deify it.”
—Harlan Ellison, bestselling author of Shatterday
“Christianity’s Salman Rushdie, only funnier and more sacrilegious.”
—Denver Post
“Widely regarded as the foremost satirist associated with the SF and Fantasy field.”
—SF Site
ON THE MADONNA AND THE STARSHIP
[STAR] “Jonathan Swift meets Buck Rogers in this hilarious send-up of the golden ages of television and pulp sci-fi.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Galaxy Quest, eat your heart out.”
—Bookish
“A work of wit and substance.”
—New York Review of Science Fiction
ON SHAMBLING TOWARDS HIROSHIMA
“Sharp-edged, delightfully batty . . . skillfully mingling real and imaginary characters with genuinely hilarious moments.”
—Kirkus
“Witty, playful . . . reminiscent of Watchmen.”
—Strange Horizons
“James Morrow’s bizarrely funny new book Shambling Towards Hiroshima turns the usual Godzilla paradigm on its head.”
—io9
ON THE PHILOSOPHER’S APPRENTICE
“[A] tumultuous take on humanity, philosophy and ethics that is as hilarious as it is outlandish.”
—Kirkus
“Wickedly hilarious—and they can break our hearts and scare us silly.”
—Denver Post
ON THE LAST WITCHFINDER
“This impeccably researched, highly ambitious novel— nine years in the writing—is a triumph of historical fiction.”
—Booklist
“Grim and gorgeous, earthy and erudite.”
—Seattle Times
ON GALÁPAGOS REGAINED
“Galápagos Regained reads like a riotous conflation of Candide and Around the World in 80 Days . . . a delectable historical epic.”
—Paolo Bacigalupi, author of The Windup Girl
“Jim Morrow’s madcap brilliance and exuberant erudition are on the move again, and Galápagos Regained is a triumph.”
—Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex
SELECTED TITLES BY JAMES MORROW
Novels
The Wine of Violence (1981)
The Continent of Lies (1984)
This Is the Way the World Ends (1985)
Only Begotten Daughter (1990)
The Last Witchfinder (2006)
The Philosopher’s Apprentice (2008)
Galápagos Regained (2014)
Novellas
City of Truth (1990)
Shambling Towards Hiroshima (2009)
The Madonna and the Starship (2015)
The Godhead Trilogy
Towing Jehovah (1994)
Blameless in Abaddon (1996)
The Eternal Footman (1999)
Short Story Collections
Bible Stories for Adults (1996)
The Cat’s Pajamas (2004)
Reality by Other Means (2015)
As Editor
Nebula Awards 26, 27, and 28 (1992, 1993, 1994)
The SFWA European Hall of Fame (2008, with Kathryn Morrow)
The Asylum of Dr. Caligari
Copyright © 2017 by James Morrow
This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the author and the publisher.
Cover illustration and design by Elizabeth Story
Interior design by Josh Beatman
Tachyon Publications LLC
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San Francisco, CA 94107
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Series Editor: Jacob Weisman
Editor: Jill Roberts
ISBN: 978-1-61696-265-4;
EPUB: 978-1-61696-266-1
PDF: 987-1-61696-268-5
First Edition: 2017
To the memory of
DOROTHY VANBINSBERGEN
artist, booklover, cherished cousin
Acknowledgments
While in embryo this novella was nourished by comments and interpolations from numerous friends and colleagues. My gratitude goes to Eva Maczuga Letwin for the German, to Carolyn Meredith for the Latin, to John Develin for his knowledge of painting, and to the rest of you—Joe Adamson, Justin Fielding, Daryl Gregory, Christopher Morrow, Glenn Morrow, Jill Roberts, Kevin Slick, Dave Stone, Jacob Weisman—for your invaluable suggestions and improvements. I want especially to thank my beloved wife and indefatigable in-house editor, Kathryn Morrow.
This is a work of fiction and, more to the point, of fantasy. The presentation of mental illness found herein is not intended to correspond to reality, being keyed instead to Expressionist art, Weimar cinema, and my own philosophical preoccupations.
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
—Karl Marx
From its birth during the Age of Reason until its disappearance following the Treaty of Versailles, the tiny principality of Weizenstaat lay along the swampy seam between the German Empire and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg like an embolism lodged in an artery. Ruled by a succession of harmless hereditary monarchs whose congenital mediocrity enabled their respective parliaments to run the county without royal interference, Weizenstaat was for many generations a prosperous and idyllic land. Then came the Great War, and when it was over this polyglot nation had simply ceased to exist, annexed by Luxembourg without the consent of the principality’s citizens, who were accorded the same measure of control over their fate that a cow enjoys in an abattoir.
Prior to its dissolution, Weizenstaat was known primarily for three institutions: bedrock political neutrality, a banking system sympathetic to the requirements of monopoly capitalism, and a sanitarium called Träumenchen Asylum. So successful were the treatments pioneered at this maison de santé—most famously the eponymous Caligari system—the people of Wei
zenstaat took to joking that their country’s principal import was irrationality and its principal export rehabilitated lunatics.
My personal journey to Träumenchen began many miles from Weizenstaat, at the 69th Regiment Armory in midtown Manhattan. On the 17th of February, 1913, the Armory opened its doors to a month-long exhibition of modern European paintings and sculptures (complemented by some indigenous pieces), the most audacious such show ever to disturb the digestion of an American critic. Having recently graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, aflame with the naïve notion that avant-garde images were destined to cure the complacency of the bourgeoisie, I could no more have passed up this landmark event than the moon could waltz free of its orbit.
Because my story is inextricably linked to the Great War, its genesis in a military reservist training facility seems poetic to me. The Armory Show changed my life. It changed many lives. Words can never convey the exhilaration of my encounter with Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, that fragmented Cubist figure in whom the sensual and the mechanistic existed in such riveting equipoise. My pen will never rise adequately to the occasion of Henri Rousseau’s Jaguar Attacking a Horse, the violent event playing out in a jungle at once savage and serene. No earthly language is equal to Bourdelle’s gilded bronze masterpiece, Herakles the Archer, the demigod taking aim at the Stymphalian birds while balanced on a rock from which he has seemingly sculpted himself.
So what does a bookish farm boy from central Pennsylvania do upon realizing his eyes are in love with Pablo Picasso’s Woman with Mustard Pot? He learns to speak rudimentary French, borrows two hundred dollars from his doting Aunt Lucy, assembles a portfolio of his best charcoal sketches, watercolors, and unframed oils (most of them tableaux of urban life rendered in his impression of Impressionism), and finds a job peeling potatoes aboard a freighter bound for Le Havre.
My crossing occurred without mishap. I proceeded directly to Paris by train, hoping to locate Señor Picasso and perhaps find employment as his apprentice. Although my Pennsylvania Academy diploma read “Francis J. Wyndham,” I’d decided to represent myself as “Zoltan Ziska, descended from a line of North American gypsies famous for their spare but powerful folk art.”
Things did not go as planned. Enraged by my presumption, Picasso escorted me to the second-floor landing outside his Montparnasse studio, threw my portfolio down the escalier, and, taking me by the shoulders, pushed me in the same direction. I tumbled to the bottom, humiliated but unharmed. Rube Descending a Staircase. As the coup de grâce he hurled a jar of azure-tinted turpentine toward my recumbent form (he was evidently still in his Blue Period). The glass struck the wall and, shattering, stained my white shirt with pale blotches. For several weeks I declined to wash the shirt, regarding it as a Picasso by other means, but in time I decided that the afternoon’s true artistic event had been the spectacle of my ejection from the mad Spaniard’s life.
Chastened though I was by this experience, I didn’t stop trying to insinuate myself into the Paris circle. Despite my dogged persistence (which occasionally shaded into boorish impertinence), none of the other artists I tracked down assaulted me. This felt like progress. Marcel Duchamp spent a full minute perusing my portfolio, then furrowed his brow and said, “I suggest you learn a vocation, Monsieur Ziska, since you’ll never live by selling your paintings. Brick-laying is an honest trade, and artistic in its own way.”
Georges Braque was more considerate of my feelings. “I think that at present you paint like an American in Paris. Come and see me after you start painting like a Frenchman in Babylon.”
Henri Rousseau was the kindest of all. “Whenever I am visited by a young artist whose work does not speak to me, I try to recall the lesson we all know from Hans Christian Andersen. Who am I to tell an ugly duckling he will never become a swan? Keep on painting, Monsieur. Something may come of it.”
Of course such encouragement did nothing to alleviate my impecunious circumstances. Man does not live by bread alone, but it’s a good idea to start with the bread. After three months of subsisting on restaurant scraps and street market discards washed down with public water, I was ready to enroll in bricklayer’s school.
On a congenial July morning in 1914, I entered the atelier of André Derain, who had agreed to give me “ten minutes of my valuable time and a glass of second-rate Bordeaux.” Derain was among the artists whom the critic Louis Vauxcelles had disparagingly branded les Fauves, the wild beasts (the most famous was Matisse), and while Derain’s contribution to the Armory Show had struck me as paradoxically domesticated, a combination still life and landscape titled La Fenêtre sur le parc, I was mesmerized by the work-in-progress on his easel, an impiously Cubist interpretation of the Last Supper. Even more enthralling was his assessment of my work. In smoothly flowing English he called it “unassumingly intense” as well as “a portal to new possibilities in Impressionism.” I nearly swooned, partially from hunger but mostly from the praise.
“Monsieur Ziska, I have a proposal for you,” Derain continued, “a scheme that promises to free me from an awkward situation and improve your personal finances. I shall begin by requesting your real name.”
“Zoltan Ziska.”
“Bullshit. Isn’t that what Americans say? Merde de taureau.”
“Francis Wyndham.”
The Fauve took a drag on his cigarette. “Mr. Wynd-ham, did you read in Le Soir about the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary? A Slavic radical, one Gavrilo Princip, shot him during a state visit to Sarajevo.”
Although I had no interest in politics, I affected a somber countenance and said, “Oh, yes, an international crisis to be sure.”
“Princip was a nasty little crackpot, and nobody much liked Ferdinand either, but the rulers of Austria-Hungary believe in punishing terrorist acts severely. Last Tuesday, with Germany’s blessing, they declared war on Serbia and bombed Belgrade. Serbia’s staunch ally, Russia, is mobilizing even as we speak, and Russia’s staunch ally, France, is doing the same. Yesterday my conscription board told me I must put on a uniform, which means I cannot honor the commitment I made last month to Alessandro Caligari, the Italian alienist. Dr. Caligari runs the Continent’s most celebrated mental institution, Träumenchen Asylum in Weizenstaat. He designed the building himself. I had contracted to become a teacher there, giving painting lessons to lunatics.”
“Art therapy?”
“Exactly. The latest thing, very avant-garde.”
“I’m flattered that you think me the right man for the job.”
“To be honest, Mr. Wyndham, were I to leave Dr. Caligari’s employ without providing a replacement, I fear he would exact some highly unpleasant retribution. Reading between the lines of his letters, I sense that he handles disappointment badly and nurtures grudges eternally. When in Herr Direktor’s presence, pass up no opportunity to call Sigmund Freud a charlatan.”
“Next you’ll be telling me he throws people down stairs.”
“He’s not a Picasso, if that’s what you mean. Patronize his eccentricities, laugh at his jokes, and all will be well. The position pays two hundred francs a week, and you’ll receive free meals plus your own apartments in the asylum. I’ll send you off with a letter of recommendation and the hundred-Deutschmark retainer I received from Caligari’s private secretary. If you depart from the Gare d’Orsay early tomorrow morning, you’ll stay ahead of the troop trains. Get off in Lyon and change there for Kleinbrück, the sort of municipality that in Weizenstaat passes for a city. Your indifferent French will serve you adequately, though the citizens normally speak German. Once you’re inside the asylum, you’ll be pleased to discover that English is the lingua franca.”
“I’m impossibly grateful to you.”
“There’s something else you should know about Herr Direktor. He fancies himself an artist. He mailed me photographs of his paintings.”
“And your verdict?”
“The ma
n is not without talent. Despite his Italian heritage, his heart belongs to German Expressionism. His images are quite grotesque, shocking—horrific actually.”
“Might we infer Caligari is applying art therapy to his own troubled psyche?”
“He may be troubled, but no more so than the gentility presently contriving to visit an apocalypse upon Europe. Je vous souhaite bon chance, Monsieur. God go with you—and with myself as well. I don’t relish getting shot at by the Kaiser’s soldiers, but it will be amusing to show the world that a Fauve can also be a patriot.”
Forty-eight hours later, on Friday the 31st of July, I detrained in Kleinbrück, luggage in hand. As dusk dropped its chiaroscuro veil on the station platform, I hunched protectively over my portfolio case and made certain my wallet still held the vital hundred Deutschmarks. According to the last letter M. Derain had received from Caligari’s secretary, the new painting master was to spend the night in the town, then arrive at the asylum in time for a three o’clock interview with Herr Direktor.
I faced the Moselle River, its spirited flow spanned by a wide wooden footbridge leading directly to a neoclassical marble building that my guidebook (a gift from Derain) identified as the Kleinbrück Kunstmuseum. A zigzag passageway, closed on all sides, with portholes instead of windows, connected the museum to a ponderous concrete edifice that was surely Träumenchen Asylum. Thrusting upward in a series of immense but ever-shrinking layers, the topmost surmounted by a bell tower supporting a gigantic clock (the whole arrangement oddly canted to the south), the sanitarium suggested nothing so much as a cake confected for some Brobdingnagian wedding feast. I’d been expecting a more graceful and therapeutically soothing structure, but who was I to criticize the great Caligari’s vision of the ideal mental institution?