In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

UNCERTAINTY VS. REALITY 345
fession and of her domestic concerns are stifling the passionate moments
of their marriage: "Fridolin's profession summoned him to his patients
at an early hour, while Albertine would not stay in bed longer because
of her duties as a housewife and mother. So the ensuing hours passed,
soberly and predetermined, in daily routine and work" (Schnitzler, 5).
In this situation of disillusionment, Albertine gets entangled in fantasies
about what her amorous past could have ideally been, whereas Fridolin
enters a highly eroticized world that Schnitzler constructs as ambiguous-it
may be either a daydream or a licentious Reality. At the end,
when Fridolin is about to make a confession about this erotic life, which
has turned into a nightmare for him, he finds Albertine full of understanding.
From her own personal experience, she is familiar with the
character of his dreams, and she can thus persuade him to stop worrying
about how real they are. She can sense that there is no single, ultimate
truth that would invalidate all the particular-sometimes passionate and
sometimes boring-worlds and forms of their shared experience: "I'm
sure that the reality of one night, let alone that of a whole lifetime, is not
the whole truth" (Schnitzler, 135). With this philosophical insight, Albertine
and Fridolin once again learn to appreciate the modest joys of
everydayness: "So they lay silently, dozing a little, dreamlessly, close to
each other-until there was a knock on the door, as there was every
morning at seven. And-with the usual noises from the street, a victorious
ray of light through the curtains, and the clear laughter of a child
through the door-a new day began" (136). Schnitzler, however, is much
too fond of Sigmund Freud's ideas to insinuate, as Louis Aragon does in
his novel Le paysan de Paris, that all higher spheres of human existence
and transcendence, and all mythology, ultimately emerge from everydayness:
"New myths are born under each of our footsteps. Where man
has lived, where he lives, legend begins" (Aragon, 14). [see Immanence
vs. Transcendence] Schnitzler and Aragon display two different tonalities
in their ways of coming to terms with a new experience of Reality.
Coming to terms with, or even opting for, this experience of Reality
means acknowledging the same feeling of Uncertainty that pushes other
people to the opposite reaction-namely, to refuse to embrace Reality
with intellectual Sobriety. [see Sobriety vs. Exuberance] Far from excluding
Uncertainty, Reality always presupposes and contains it. If there is
any possibility of problematizing the contrast between Uncertainty and
Reality, it comes from individual voices that, while they acknowledge the