Juan
What should we make of Juan?
If he just a slightly autistic poseur with a few tricks up his sleeve, or a genuinely interesting person, and a genius?
What should we make of Juan?
If he just a slightly autistic poseur with a few tricks up his sleeve, or a genuinely interesting person, and a genius?
Or everything at the same time? A genuinely interesting genius that's also a slightly autistic poseur?
There was a triangle between Juan, Clarissa and Hermann. They were a trio of compadres, the Three Musketeers, or so they thought. In the end, it's all about the women. It's always about the women, Clarissa in this case. Why Clarissa chooses Hermann over Juan, I interpret, is coming from her notion that he is "false", a "fake". He lacks true emotional depth. When you battle with people, especially those that you love, sooner or later you will encounter the bottom of their souls. You fight and battle, and you find that there's something "there" that fights back. There's resistance.
Between Hermann and Clarissa, both needed someone on the other side that didn't buy their bs, someone that saw through them, for what they really are. When she fought Juan, she fell through a bottomless hole, because there wasn't anything "there". At the bottom of his soul, there was a void. And she saw that, and didn't like what she saw. Between Hermann and Clarissa, there's more "there" than they can bare. Both knew instinctively that there would be enough between them to last a lifetime, and in their positions in life, late twenties to early thirties, they couldn't handle all that at that time.
Juan is his own worst enemy, he couldn't find closure within himself. He was a genius, at the same time that he didn't have anything to give. Like a disturbed child, building castles in the sand, day in and day out, just to see them washed over by the tide. He couldn't find anywhere to focus and direct his talent, he wasn't complete.
A talented and gifted but flawed genius, a sad, tragic and pathetic poseur. A lovely personality, but false. In that, he reminds me of Count Myshkin in Dostoyevskys The Idiot. True or false? A genius or an idiot? Self sacrificing or with a gentlemans intent? There just isn't any right or wrong answers in this question, in the end, we have to take Juan for what he is, for better and for worse.
In my view, we see Juan's talent when he plays the marimba (spelling?) but the rest is just slightly autistic showing off with languages and card tricks/juggling etc.
"Juan is his own worst enemy, he couldn't find closure within himself. "
I agree with that. My battery is running down, but I will read this some more later...
The word "autistic" is being thrown around much too lightly, in my opinion.
It's not a dirty word, I know, but I don't think there was anything "autistic" about Juan.
Nor do I think he was a poseur. Not at all.
Juan was not false. He may have seemed "false" to some people, precisely because of his lack of pretense which made him look so "foreign" in every way. It is a common phenomenon.
He was trying to make sense out of the world, as most people do - only his particular predicament was made even more difficult than in most talented people because he had SO MUCH talent, in so many areas.
And even though this may seem like a superficial, trite aspect to consider, one should take into account that he was transplanted into a culture far different from the one he grew up in, at a time when Germany - or most other European countries, for that matter - were much less "multicultural" than today.
Anyway, I think he was a magical figure - much like the ethereal, totally incongruous feminine figure in Rembrandt's "Night Watch" (which is neither, but I digress ;)).
But the magic of his presence derived directly from the fact that he was very real, not a made-up figure.
The problem is boundaries, or lack thereof.
To be really creative, you need boundaries, limitations, a ceiling above your head. If you have unlimited creative talents and no boundaries, you simply have too many options. You can't create, because you can't decide. There's too many things to take into account. Gifted people that work without boundaries seldom create anything substantial. To be really creative, you have to meet your boundaries, clash with them, "go through the roof".
An example is the story of Picasso. He woke up in the morning and made a painting, every morning of every day. Those that he didn't like, he destructed. Those that he liked, he kept. Through that, he created a body of work of really high quality. But imagine waking up every morning and say: "What kind of masterpiece will I do today?" With endless possibilites comes endless frustration.
To me, a lot of Juans habit of never fulfilling anything comes from that notion that anything was possible for him. But if "anything" is possible, you have to nail it down to actually make "something", something real, something specific. He couldn't really find closure until Clarissa met him at that circus in the end. There, he seemed happy. And I don't know if that was enough for him, but it worked.
Really gifted people have another problem, and that is the paradox that whatever they do seem so effortless and easy. With that talent comes such an overcapacity in so many fields. Compared to the world that surrounds them, everybody else becomes boring, slow, lazy and untalented. The problem is, that particular gifted person may feel for themselves that what they do is not worth anything, because it comes so easy for them. They are so gifted they don't really have to make an effort, by their own standards. And how illogical that may seem, it can lead to personal insecurities.
Juan doesn't care that his elaborate pattern of stones in the Fuschbau garden will be teared down tomorrow and destroyed with the rest of the house. He can make another pattern in another garden the day after. It doesn't cost him anything, and he will do it with the same love and passion anyway. To me, that is so sad and tragic, because it's like building castles in the sand that will be swept away by the tide almost as you're looking at it. The talent that Juan possess is wasted, because of his inability to nail it down and make something substantial out of it.
I couldn't agree more. You described it very well.
(And I thank you for the time and thought you put into this.)
The only thing is, boundaries - structure - can only come from a defined view of the world (defined by others or by oneself, for the end purpose it makes little difference).
And I think the very nature of Juan's openness, to which you referred and which is the core of his "genius" (because his are more than a scatter of discrete "talents", it's an all encompassing facility that comes from that openness) dictates not only a malleability from which his talents come, but also an intuitive resistance to any "rule" that would curtail it and mould it.
Ironically (or not), this comes from a sort of humility (certainly not from "foggy" thinking or anything like that): from being aware of one's own existential un-knowing, of the potential treachery of one's certitudes.
It's that unrelenting openness again.
Anyway, I only wanted to point out that, in my opinion, there is nothing false or poseurish about Juan. That's all.
And yes, of course his condition - the condition of all such "Juans" - is tragic.
Unless, of course, there is a transcendent constructive purpose to that, which may or may not become apparent at some as yet undefined point in time-space.
(Sorry to be obscure, it's not meant to be obfuscating blabber. ;))
I do wish his subsequent fate had been disclosed in the final "fragments".
I know it was supposed to be about women only, and I find that its only shortcoming. There were some pretty interesting male characters, too!
But then, it probably makes sense that he would remain elusive forever.
And I wonder who Reitz had in mind when writing his character.
P.S. I wish I could reciprocate with a similarly well articulated reply, but I fear it's not going to happen, not tonight, so I may edit this in the future.
"Sorry to be obscure, it's not meant to be obfuscating blabber."
Don't worry, you're doing fine. It's only complicated because the Heimat series is such an immense body of work, so complex and full of nuances it becomes hard to discuss it, because there's so many different viewpoints one can take. One view is not more right or wrong than any other, it's just different opinions...
"...but also an intuitive resistance to any "rule" that would curtail it and mould it."
If you break the rules, people will take notice. I read a book on classical music last night, there was a passage on Mozart that said, Mozart wasn't only a genius, he was talented as well. Being both a genius and having the gift for it is very unusual, most people will have to work very hard for their accomplishments.
Take Hermann for example, he was a gifted musician before coming to Munich, but he needed to learn and evolve as a musician before he could accomplish anything. There's a learning curve, even gifted people need to go to school. Juan was so talented he really didn't need anything of that, but he had nothing to show, because he couldn't put anything on paper. Juan broke the rules, and that made him slightly aloof, or above, etheric, or autistic, if you prefer that. He was like a UFO because he was so alien.
"I only wanted to point out that, in my opinion, there is nothing false or poseurish about Juan."
Okey, there we differ. I think there's something false about him. He reminds me of Dr Manhattan from the "Watchmen" comics. An supreme being, being able to duplicate himself. His girlfriend found they were having sex, or so she thought, while at the same time he was in another room conducting experiments:
http://pfangirl.blogspot.com/2009/03/girlz-n-games-40-freaky-threesome .html
In the same way, Juan is not really ever "there". If Hermann was to write a solo concert for Clarissa, he would really put his heart and mind to it. Give her all that he got. And it would really be more of foreplay than concert. If Juan was to do the same, it would sound equally wonderful, but Clarissa could not ever be sure his heart and mind was into it. It would be like he was elsewhere already. Or so I imagine...
"I know it was supposed to be about women only, and I find that its only shortcoming. There were some pretty interesting male characters, too!"
Now, this I don't get. The Heimat series is not more about women than men. Surely, that must be a misundestanding? The series show equal opportunity for women and men, think of the fates of Reinhard and Stefan and Volker. Perhaps because of that passage of time, the mens fate seems more catastrophical? It was the desendence of white male superiority, think womens lib and black panthers...
That's an entire candy store of thought you served there, Chester Copperpot.
I'll be rereading it - and replying - later on. It deserves way more attention than I have available right now.
(I know, that makes this post utterly superfluous... but hey, that's the sort of posting I am best at. :-))
P.S. Just to clarify the last part - I was referring to the "Fragmente" (2006), not to this series. And of course, the "Fragmente" were almost exclusively about the women.
I have mixed feelings about the portrayal of women in this. Hermann uses and abuses many of them for his own ends, and the Clarissa story is also irritating in some regards.
I preferred the original Heimat... there is a vein of cruelty running through the second one, and it's not all conscious either.
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It's not "sci-fi", it's SF!