The Mundane Issues of Magical Bears: Magical Realism and Immigration
The world of Yoko Tawada’s Etüden im Schnee is an odd one. Seals and polar bears deal with Soviet censorship, humans and bears meet in each other’s dreams to share life stories, and bear labor unions become bear stock holding companies all in a setting that otherwise reads as one-to-one with our world. This oddness, the magic in the mundane, is what makes Tawada’s Roman a timeless story. While the physical settings of the novel places it firmly in living memory, the themes found within transcend time, place, and culture by telling a universally human story of family, alienation, and immigration.
At the core of Etüden is a generational narrative which follows a line of polar bears as they navigate feelings of estrangement from the world around them and try to find their place in it. While the story does feature Knut, the famous polar bear from Berlin, as its final narrator, this real world connection has little to do with the narrative. There is little that is Knut-like beyond that they share a name and an origin; he is essentially his own “person”, as are all of the polar bears. Because of this, the polar bears make for a perfect representation of “the other”, where in every situation the bears are treated as the outsider: able to be exploited without consequence.
Each of the narrators, from the unnamed grandmother, to Toska, to Knut, are all exploited for their talents and labor. Not just in the sense that one is exploited for working for less than what they are worth, but also that, because they are bears, they do not even receive help from most humans. The grandmother, after fleeing to West Berlin from the Soviet Union, is only relevant to the West Berliner because she has written negatively about the Soviet Union when all she would like to do is further explore her own past. Toska, a brilliant dancer with a fantastic pedigree, is relegated to working as a controversial performer in a circus. Even the little Knut is always on display because he’s a cute orphan, treated more as a thing than as a living being.
This exploitation results in the generational separation that drives the story as each bear must not only navigate a foreign world, but one in which they do not have strong familial connections. Using bears in this way makes the struggles of immigrants more palatable to the non-immigrant reader. The author, Yoko Tawada, is herself part German and part Japanese, meaning that the experiences of these bears is likely drawn from very personal experiences. The Ur-Grandmother that Knut dreams of, for instance, easily represents feelings of a third generation immigrant separated from his own heritage and feeling shame from that. In this sense, the story is both timeless and terribly contemporary. The bears could be in first century Rome, 15th century Ming China, or the 19th century United States and the story would be the same, but due to how present immigration and movement is in our globalized world, it strikes a strong chord in the here and now. Neither English-language nor German-language reviewers seem to have caught this thread, however.
In her article in The New York Times, Ramona Ausubel analyzes the narrative as if the bears are actually just that: bears. While she does recognize themes of generational connection and soul searching, her review seems limited to just what is in the text and not the metatextual narrative. She ends her review with “Look at us searching for love, for meaning, for our own true forms”, a theme that does ‘bear’ truth, I don’t feel it captures the pervasive feelings of alienation and otherness throughout the lives of the bears.
Reviewer Annie Rutherford, writing for Goethe Institut Glasgow, understands the alienation angle better than her American counterpart but still lacks the metatextual analysis. Her phrase (translated) “the bears’ unusual perspective alienates everyday life”, I think captures that perfectly. But when the bears aren’t bears it makes readings like this feel a good deal more flat. A literal bear, while comedic and more easily palatable, turns the book into just another story about magical creatures in a mundane world.
The literal interpretation of any work, as has become so common as of late, is one that tends to hug only the surface of the work. This is doubly true in this Roman, as the layers of subtext and metatext permeate the work. Understanding any work, in a sense, also requires an understanding of the author and their experiences.
Etüden im Schnee, as any work, is reflective of the author and their experiences. In this, we as the audience see experiences of immigration, alienation from virtually every angle, and subsequent isolation. But we also see a journey of pushing forward and gaining a better understanding of one’s own self in spite of all the roadblocks. While a strange and often dense novel, Tawada’s work tells a story that is both surprisingly timeless and solidly contemporary.
