The Other Side

The Other Side: Written by the great graphic artist Alfred Kubin, this is one nutty book. If you’ve seen any of his deranged, grotesque illustrations, you won’t be surprised by this deranged, grotesque “novel.” We put novel in quotation marks because Kubin’s writing lacks certain technical skills, chief among them comprehensibility. Stuff happens in this book just because stuff happens. If you are willing to go along for the ride, you’ll be treated to one of the great literary freak shows.

The Other Side tells the story of the narrator’s and his wife’s journey to the Dream Realm, which was founded by the mysterious Patera, former classmate of the narrator and now a nearly supernatural figure. The Dream Realm is a 1200 square mile patch of Asia shut off from the rest of the world by a massive wall, and meant to be refuge for those unhappy with modern civilization. The residents of the Dream Realm are said to “exist in moods alone.” But the narrator and his wife soon find it to be a gloomy landscape of shabby buildings inhabited by a population of neurotics, misfits and human oddities. The bizarre atmosphere and queer occurrences  take their toll, producing an accumulating anxiety and sense of dread, and the narrator’s wife dies a vague death of nervous exhaustion, which provokes in the narrator a morbid libido, as just a few hours after his wife’s funeral he seduces a married woman. The narrator finds a temporary peace with the blue-eyed tribe, a group of indigenous hermits who practice a zen-like way of life. With these people the narrator discovers the joys of quiet contemplation, and discovers, to his shock, his inner being: “I found that my self was composed of countless selves, each one lurking behind the other, each one seeming bigger and more taciturn than the one in front. The last ones disappeared in the shadows, beyond my comprehension. Each of these selves had ideas of its own.” 

But the quiet life is broken with the uninvited arrival of an ugly American into the Dream Realm, who wants to dethrone Patera and remake the place in his own image, but his plans only cause a fissure in the Realm’s delicate balance, and soon chaos erupts: a sleeping sickness ensues, animals run wild and copulate in a frenzy, buildings and objects begin to decay rapidly, ants inherit the earth, the citizens descend to base carnality, engaging in mass orgy, with no limit, including incest and pedophilia. After the American’s failed revolution, mass murders begin and bizarre ecological disasters occur until the even more lunatick grand finale, were a vengeful Patera becomes a titan, spraying his boiling urine all over the earth, and then engages in a last battle with a now similarly titanic American, which ends in both of them expanding and contracting like demented universes collapsing upon themselves, leaving Patera to survive in death, while the American survives in life.

Huh? What did it all mean? Who knows? It makes Revelation seem straightforward. Fittingly, this mad masterpiece ends with the following: “True hell lies in the fact that this discordant clash continues within us. Even love has its focus ‘between faeces and urine.’ The sublime can fall prey to the ridiculous, to derision, to iron.” Amen, brother.