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The Angel of the West Window is a fictional summation of Meyrink’s preoccupation with the occult, but not in any simple, direct way. The reader should not look to it for a message, for, say, Meyrink’s final distillation of the wisdom of the mystics. Many of the theories and ideas he would have come across in his researches are there, it is true. But none is presented as the sole key to knowledge. They all contribute to his portrayal of the search which is all we can know of the ultimate goal. Through the fictional world he has created, Meyrink is trying to convey to the reader the sense of a reality where, as one commentator puts it, “everything is different from outward appearances, but only the outward appearances are accessible” (Marianne Wünsch). It is a comment that is also frequently made about the world of Meyrink’s contemporary, Franz Kafka.
The two main characters of The Angel of the West Window, the historical figure from the age of Queen Elizabeth, John Dee, and his fictional modern descendant, the narrator, both pursue a tightrope course between normally distinct categories which merge and separate in varying constellations. Male and female, for example, are on one level distinct: the symbol of the male blood line of the Dees is the suitably phallic spear of Hywel Dda, whilst at the end Jane “takes the woman’s road of sacrifice”; and in the transcendental sphere where the novel ends there are separate male and female realms. On another level, however, they intermingle: the narrator’s mystical marriage with “Elisabeth” is a union with the female element dormant within himself which produces the self-enclosed whole which has echoes of both incest and hermaphroditism; “the Queen is within me, I am within the Queen: child, husband and father from the very beginning. ... Woman no more! Man no more!” This ambiguity – in which opposites can be distinct and at the same time merge, can be external to the hero and at the same time are situated within him – appears in the theme of sex which is an undercurrent running through much of the novel. The woman who is the eternal temptress of man appears in different guises with different names which are all variants of the same basic form: Isaïs, Sissy, Assja. Jane/Johanna appears to be a counter-figure embodying self-sacrificing love. But it is the erotic that attracts Kelley to Johanna, and when the narrator calls on Jane his cry is intercepted by Assja because, Lipotin tells him, ‘Jane’ represents his “vital erotic energy”. The distinctions are further blurred by the fact that ‘love’ and ‘hate’ are also closely related; the succubus, Assja, feeds on the hatred that the narrator thinks will protect him from her. He succumbs to the succubus and yet is saved. In another reversal of expectation, what looks like the road to destruction turns out to be a detour that leads to his goal.
The conclusion is not explicable in neatly rational terms, in terms of good v. evil and the ultimate triumph of the former confirming a one-dimensional moral universe. Rather, Meyrink’s universe is multi-layered and different ‘worlds’ exist alongside, interlinked with, each other. The hero’s triumph is not that he overcomes evil, but that he recognises himself and fulfils his destiny within his own allotted sphere. Instead of being “erased from the Book of Life”, which was the threat posed by Isaïs, the entelechy that is both the narrator and John Dee becomes a link in the great chain of being.
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If Meyrink’s own life was full of fantastic episodes, then this was even more the case with the person he chose as the central figure of his last novel: the life of John Dee was so remarkable that Meyrink had to invent little. John Dee was one of the outstanding scholars of the Elizabethan age, especially in the field of mathematics and related disciplines. Meyrink even makes him less of a prodigy than he was: born in 1527, he went up to Cambridge in 1542 and in 1550 was lecturing to the assembled scholars of the Sorbonne on geometry and was offered a permanent post there. At that time the occult and the natural sciences were not as rigidly separated as today. Dee was an astrologer and hermeticist and gradually became more and more involved in alchemy and crystallomancy. He fell under the influence of an obviously very plausible rogue called Kelley, travelled the continent looking for noble and regal patrons – they included Count Lasky, the Emperor Rudolf, the King of Poland and Count Rosenberg – and finally returned to England where he died in poverty in 1608.
Beside his scientific works, Dee published a self-justificatory pamphlet which included a biography; he also kept minutes of the séances (which he called “actions”) in which he called up various spirits. Meyrink has used a wealth of this material, from the main events of Dee’s life down to minute details. Thus the historical Dee was imprisoned by Bishop Bonner (on suspicion of using magic to assassinate Queen Mary – in the novel Dee is imprisoned under King Edward); in prison he shared a cell with a certain “Barthlett Grene” whom Meyrink builds up into an important character. The first protestant martyr under Mary was John Rogers – is that where Meyrink took the name for the narrator’s cousin?. Dee briefly mentions a “Moschovite” he encountered – whom Meyrink turns into the figure of Mascee. The biography also briefly mentions someone called Gardner who “declared to me a certayn great philosophicall secret of a spirituall creature”; in the séance minutes one
