In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

256 CODES
I rocked you to sleep in my cold bosom.
I, abandoned too,
found myself in this brothel.
You wanted to console me
with your hoarse voice
and your painful notes,
increasing my obsession.
(Reichardt, 210)
Not without considerable difficulty, the philosopher Theodor Lessing
tries to make spiders and flies into symbols representing a similar contrast.
While he praises spiders as passionate lovers, he accuses flies of a
"promiscuity" that yields blindly to the opportunities of random encounters:
"Whereas spiders fight for their females and try to lure them
with their beauty, flies live in blind promiscuity, incessantly changing
their partners in broad daylight" (Lessing, 253). Those who are absorbed
and defeated by the rhythms of the everyday world often appear as
masses of numbed, deindividualized bodies-like the proletarians in
Fritz Lang's film Metropolis: "Men, men, men. And they all had the same
faces. And they all seemed a thousand years old. They walked with
hanging fists, they walked with hanging heads. No-they moved their
feet forward, but they did not walk" (Lang, 21-22). If extreme states of
depression sometimes turn into outbursts of revolt, such sudden attacks
usually have no lasting effect. They are mere expressions of despair.
In Roberto Arlt's novel EI juguete rabioso (The Furious Toy), Don
Gaetano and Dona Marfa, Jewish bookdealers in whose store Silvio
Astier (the protagonist) earns a miserable living, are an allegory of Impotence
and the impotent reaction against it. Dona Marfa regularly
humiliates her husband with outbursts of uncontrollable temper in front
of customers and employees. Soon, however, Silvio Astier learns that
these attacks stem from the frustration caused by Don Gaetano's Impotence:
"'But what's the point of these arguments?' 'I don't know ... they
don't have kids ... he's not a man'" (56). Over and over, it is thus Dona
Marfa (and not Don Gaetano) who ends up doubly embarrassed-embarrassed
by her husband's Impotence and by her own behavior. She
compensates for this with gestures of special generosity toward her
employees: "Wrapping her arms in the folds of the kerchief, she recovered
her usual proud bearing. On her pale cheeks, two white tears