Out of the silence

Nonfiction says this is how it is. Fiction says this is how it seems. So there is strain when a writer attempts a hybrid: a novel that does not simply base itself on history but shapes characters and circumstances to its particulars.

At times, “98 Reasons for Being” shows some of the strain. Clare Dudman is a writer ignited by ideas, and history furnishes them. Her characters often arrive and depart according to her plans and history’s timetables. Yet they possess a rough, tousled energy that refuses to brook more than limited management.

They keep asserting their individualities. Placed, they do not keep their place. There’s a disjunction between entrances and exits that is a little awkward but expressive.

The setting is an institution for the mentally ill in 19th century Frankfurt. But Dudman’s subject, with all its documented detail, is used as a magnifier. Issues of gender, power and race (in this case the position of Jews) and the uncertain no man’s land between what a society defines as sane and insane are rigidly set out. By the end we wonder about our own rigidities.

The novel has a compelling back-and-forth rhythm -- a dance, almost, of coming together and moving apart -- between its two principal characters. One is the man who was the director of the Frankfurt asylum in the 1850s, Heinrich Hoffmann. Both historically and as a character, he is an idealistic figure -- trained in such crude physical means of dealing with the demented as water treatments, restraints and leeches, yet a seeker after something better.

His challenge comes, and here the fictional element expands, with the arrival of Hannah Meyer. Living in the Frankfurt ghetto and pregnant by a young German gentile, she was abandoned so that he could marry a rich widow. Hannah gave solitary birth in the woods and buried the dead baby. Refusing to believe she’d been deserted, she made a raving scene at her lover’s wedding and fell into impenetrable silence.

Hoffmann refuses the easy diagnosis of insanity, insisting that the problem is an acute melancholia. When the conventional remedies fail, he decides to try a talking cure, an experimental rarity more than half a century before Freud. Yet Hannah remains mute, and it is almost by chance that the doctor, feeling a growing emotional attachment to the young woman, begins to tell her of his own sorrows: a cruel wife, a troubled son, his struggle with the chilly orthodoxies of the time.

Up to then we hear Hannah’s silent thoughts as a poetic monologue of evasion and transformation of everything that was happening to her. It is as if, to bear reality, she needed to put it into code. Using a splendidly affecting device, Dudman pairs these italicized passages, one by one, with what is in fact happening.

Now, as Hoffmann reveals himself, Hannah’s thoughts converge with the life around her and she begins to speak, hesitantly and then with growing confidence. Dudman has reversed the Freudian premise: It is not the patient talking to the therapist but the opposite that heals. Whether medically sound or unsound, as fiction, it is strange and stirring.

These scenes alternate with a wider, troubling portrait of asylum life, painted in deliberately rough, Bruegel-like images that succeed in suggesting the material distance of provincial Germany of a century and a half ago. There are the attendants, some brutish, others painfully groping toward their better natures. There are the patients: a saintly anorexic, a sweet-spirited transvestite.

Toward the end of the novel, the shifting relationship between Hannah and Hoffmann develops a further transformation: that of gender power. With her abusive lover, Hannah had been all subservient adoration. Hoffmann is her healer, yet the very means of healing -- her impulse to hear his pain and console it -- threatens him with a different subservience.

For a while Hannah all but offers herself to him; by the time he shows signs of accepting, she has developed the sanity to pull away. Here, as in several other places, the story turns schematic; Dudman, having created a mysterious and vital character, shows signs of tugging it into a state of raised consciousness. Yet if her novel has its didactic side, it is redeemed not only by the emotions it creates but also, oddly, by its oddities.

Chief of these is the fact that the real Hoffmann, aside from his healing career, was also the creator of a children’s classic. Balefully illustrated, and translated as “Slovenly (or Shock-Headed) Peter,” the story punishes disobedient juniors by incineration, amputation, starvation and the like.

Dudman scatters its verses throughout. There are connections of sorts with the story, but the purpose is disconnection: a sardonically grotesque dismounting from the intentions, pretensions, illusions and delusions of all instruction, even that wielded by her two endearing characters -- even perhaps her own. *