Lost in the Many Realms of Mind and History

Now that the 20th century is about over, we see that it didn’t begin, psychologically, until 1914. Works of art ranging from the movie “Titanic” to Richard Powers’ debut novel, “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance,” to some of Thomas Pynchon’s early stories have exploited our retrospective fascination with the last moment of innocence before World War I. Now it’s Timothy Findley’s turn.

Findley, a Canadian whose previous works include “The Piano Man’s Daughter” and “The Butterfly Plague,” begins this novel on April 17, 1912, two days after the sinking of the Titanic. Unlike the 1,500 people who died with the ship, Findley’s title character, an English art historian known only as Pilgrim, tries to die--and fails.

Five hours after his valet, Forster, cuts him down from the garden tree where he hanged himself, Pilgrim mysteriously revives. He is taken to the famed Burgholzli Clinic in Zurich, Switzerland, where he arouses the interest of psychiatric pioneer Carl Jung.

Jung’s thinking has begun to diverge from that of his mentor, Sigmund Freud, and his superiors at the clinic. Confronted with a Russian ballerina who claims to be a refugee from the moon--or with Pilgrim, who insists he has lived for centuries and cannot die--the psychiatrists try to force the patient to confront reality. Jung prefers to play along with the delusions. The key to each patient’s condition, he believes, is the shape of his or her private world.

Lady Sybil Quartermaine, a friend of Pilgrim’s, gives Jung his journals. Pilgrim says he “awakened” in each life at 18, oblivious of his childhood but vividly aware of previous lives. He claims to have been Elisabetta Giocondo, raped by Leonardo da Vinci and, years later (her smile reflecting what she bitterly remembered and he had forgotten), the model for the “Mona Lisa.”

Pilgrim also says he witnessed the Trojan War, suffered lead poisoning from working on the stained-glass windows of Chartres Cathedral, and was a disabled Spanish shepherd boy who knew St. Teresa of Avila but couldn’t be cured by her.

A theme emerges from all these lives: He has been the whetstone on which some of the most glittering achievements of Western culture have been honed. But the stone is worn out, not enhanced, by such sharpening. Hence Pilgrim’s mortal weariness. And he senses a new catastrophe coming, against which art and religion will be powerless. Maybe, if the faithful Forster can spring him from the clinic, he can destroy the cultural monuments he helped create and let humanity start over.

Jung withholds judgment. He doesn’t quite believe Pilgrim’s story, but it fits with his emerging theory of the “collective unconscious,” in which each person’s psyche recapitulates the evolution of the species. The whetstone, once again, is doing its work.

Findley writes beautifully of this time and place, which are also the time and place of Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain”--the deep comforts of the upper classes, the humane therapies available to the privileged few, the suppressed but growing fear Jung documented in his journals, in visions of chaos and blood sweeping Europe.

Jung, childlike and serious, compassionate and tyrannical, a family man whose love affairs are disrupting his marriage, is “Pilgrim’s” most fully realized character. Jung’s colleagues, Forster, Lady Quartermaine and others are sharply drawn, as are the scenes from Pilgrim’s alleged past. Only Pilgrim remains cloudy, an intellectual construct rather than a person (or persons). There are advantages to leaving the truth of his story open to conjecture, but there’s also a price to be paid, and in the end Findley has to pay it.