Zweig

Stefan Zweig

I was quite wrong about where I thought Beware of Pity was head­ing. At the halfway point, I noticed lit­tle if any sex­ual ten­sion between the lieu­tenant and Edith, the crip­pled young woman he befriended. That changes quickly after the mid-​​way point. Her sud­den expres­sion of love for Toni alters the course of the novel, and the life of many of the main char­ac­ters. It’s a key to sub­se­quent events, every bit as impor­tant as pity.

Zweig does an excel­lent job con­vey­ing some­thing we often for­get. That peo­ple are never who they seem to be at first glance. Often, they aren’t the same peo­ple we think they are after sev­eral glances. Toni’s com­mand­ing offi­cer, Colonel Bubencic, for instance, proves him­self wor­thy of respect and appre­ci­a­tion very late in the novel, even though he is seen as a “mar­tinet” early on, and dis­liked intensely by most of the reg­i­ment. The doc­tor who treats Edith also takes more com­plex form as the novel pro­gresses. We the read­ers can see more of his moti­va­tions after we dis­cover his wife is blind, and that he, too, mar­ried out of a sense of duty, per­haps pity, per­haps honor. Toni never really sees how this alters the doctor’s view of what is right for Toni to do in his own sit­u­a­tion. We can see it. Toni seems not to. He doesn’t put two and two together. He treats the doctor’s pleas as if they have some objec­tive, black and white basis.

Pity, in and of itself, is not the prob­lem. Not in the novel or in life. In the novel, pity becomes the dri­ving force behind the tragedy pri­mar­ily because Toni is inca­pable of liv­ing with­out obses­sively wor­ry­ing about what oth­ers think. His fel­low offi­cers, Kekesfalva (Edith’s father), Doctor Condor, Llona (Edith’s cousin) and so on. He lives his life accord­ing to his per­cep­tion of codes, con­ven­tional wis­dom, and the opin­ion of those in his own soci­ety. Rarely devi­at­ing. And then when he does, he wor­ries him­self into a state of panic, of want­ing to com­mit sui­cide. Even after the main events of his nar­ra­tive, when he per­forms heroic deeds in the Great War, he is act­ing largely out of a sense of duty to a mem­ory of a bro­ken promise, a lie, and what oth­ers might still think of him. He enters the war, per­haps with great relief, because it is yet another time when he can fol­low orders, live by some­one else’s code, and avoid deci­sions that involve the reser­voir of the self and his own willpower.

Still, the char­ac­ter of the nar­ra­tor is com­plex. He sees and knows his own weak­nesses, and that col­ors his vision of his sur­round­ings. This pre­vents him from being a mere car­toon, a pup­pet, and keeps us inter­ested in his life. But the reader sees and knows more, which is one of the great aspects of the novel. We can step back and have pity on Toni, the doc­tor, Kekesfalva, Edith and a host of oth­ers, and sense that Toni him­self is try­ing to elicit pity as well. His feel­ings regard­ing Edith are mir­rored by his own attempt to seek abso­lu­tion as he tells his story, while he tells us he isn’t doing that, can’t do that, that he just has to live with his shame. He tells his story to Zweig (osten­si­bly), out of a sense of shame that he is now, in 1937, con­sid­ered a hero, and he wants some­one to know that’s bunk. But is the telling yet another form of decep­tion, of self-​​deception?

Edith manip­u­lates her fam­ily and Toni, gets them to order her world the way she wishes, uses her crip­pled state to gain power over oth­ers and over­come her ini­tial pow­er­less­ness over her phys­i­cal world. Perhaps the nar­ra­tive is Toni’s attempt to do the same, to order his world, even though it fell apart once, almost to the point of the lights going out forever.

If the reader is hon­est, he or she will find echoes in their own attempts at manip­u­la­tion, masks and self-​​deception. As George Harrison once said, isn’t it a pity?

 

 

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