ABSTRACT
Following up on Chapter 9 of Permanent Liminality and Modernity (Routledge, 2017, the first volume of this series), which discussed Broch’s Sleepwalkers, this lead-off chapter will discuss his 1935 novel draft, The Spell. While the book was not finished and published by the author, he several times turned to its completion, leaving the manuscript with various stages of re-editing, and was working on it, having finished in the previous decade The Death of Virgil, regarded as his masterwork, being only prevented from finishing it by his untimely death. Written shortly after Hitler’s rise to power, the book is a masterpiece analysis of the trickster logic, as if literally following the anthropological and mythological characterisations of the trickster as a script, though most of these books were written not only later than 1935, but well after Broch passed away. Thus, far from being a mere response to the particular place and time, it captures how absurdity can become real, and as a consequence how reality can become absurd.
