selfdivider

So I was walking on the 95th Street toward Broadway yesterday, taking my daughter home from school, and guess who I see, kind of staggering down the street Philip Roth. Uh-huh. For some reason, he looked really disoriented & wind-blown. I really wanted to say hello, but he didn’t look like he was doing so good, so just passed him. For a few blocks, I kicked myself for not having said ‘hi.’ And in the meantime, my mind had somehow started referring to him as Zuckerman, and it was really then that it occurred to me: perhaps no one had quite pulled off the fiction/reality entrechat like Philip Roth had over the past few decades. Pretty remarkable.

I was reading Stendhal’s delightful and brilliantly quirky autobiography, The Life of Henry Brulard, and I think he may have had a similar experience of encountering a person who seems like fiction embodied: he met, in one of those Parisian parties which he claims to have despised (yeah, right), an old woman named Mme de Montmaur, a character upon which Mme de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons is based -

I had met with society, and then only at long range, only at Mme de Montmaur’s, the original of Mme de Merteuil in “Les Liaisons dangereuses.” She was by then old, rich and lame. Of that I am sure; as for morality, she objected to them giving me only half a crystallized nut when I went to see her in Le Chevallon, she always made them give me a whole one. “Children take it to heart so,” she used to say.

That was all the morality I had met with… This detail about Mme de Montmaur, the original of Mme de Merteuil, is out of place here perhaps, but I wanted to use the anecdote of the crystallized nut to show what I knew of society.

What a fantastic passage! It’s weird, it’s funny, and most of all - it’s cryptic. What the fuck is Stendhal talking about with this crystallized nut anecdote What kind of “morality” is he talking about here, through this metaphor Pardon the pun, but seriously, this is a hard nut to crack. On the surface level, it does seem like Stendhal’s taking a pretty straightforward shot at the flippant morality of the society, but one has to take into account that he does so by using the crystallized nut as a metaphor. He strangely but pointedly mentions this incident as the “crystallized nut anecdote” at the end of the passage, as if by reiterating the phrase “crystallized nut,” he is pointing toward a hidden code. There’s a definite nudge there, but one has a tough time deciphering to what Stendhal is nudging us toward. He frustrates the easy, straightforward interpretation of the morality of the society.

Some of you may recall that Stendhal’s notion of “crystallization” expounded upon in Love is pivotal to his aesthetic theory. In Chapter 2 of Love, Stendhal describes a couple of lovers throwing a twig into the salt mines of Salzburg -

Two or three months later they pull it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-tit’s claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable… What I have called crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one.

Simply put: it’s seeing your loved one everywhere, in everything. Then through the process, an ordinary person (a twig) becomes perfected in the lover’s eyes (as crystals). But Stendhal extends this metaphor into his theories on art & on literature… the process of making & perfecting art, too, the evocative power of the artist, is a crystallization process, according to Stendhal.

W. G. Sebald was preoccupied with Stendhal’s episode of the salt mine crystallization in Vertigo; apparently, he kept up his strange obsession with it: the crystallization/crystal metaphor becomes crucial in Austerlitz, and elsewhere (see Sebald’s description of Sir Thomas Browne’s crystalline quincunx in The Rings of Saturn; it relates to both Stendhal’s and his own “crystal” project.)

Back to Stendhal standing in front of Mme de Montmaur. He must have felt that he really was standing in front of Mme de Monteuil, as in a few paragraphs before, he admits that he used to believe in those days that he really was at once “a Saint-Preux and a Valmont.” He watches this fiction incarnate commanding people to give him a whole crystallized nut instead of a mere half, and concludes: “That was all the morality I had met with.”

As of now, I can’t unwrap this mystery. How much of his statement is ironic, how much is sincere Is he saying anything about art and its relation to morality, too, especially in consideration of his theory on “crystallization” Almost impossible to gauge. Maybe this joke isn’t meant to have a punchline. And let’s not forget that I may be reading way the fuck too much into this thing, as usual. But to me, this is Stendhal at one of his most inscrutable, delightful turns. I can’t stop thinking about this moment, want to see through to his heart.

P.S. - There are many film incarnations of Les Liaisons dangereuses, but you may not have seen the Korean adaptation of it, called 스캔들 (Untold Scandal), set in the Chosun Dynasty. Perhaps it’s my favorite film version of the Laclos’ tale, and Jeon Do-yeon, who won this year’s best actress at Cannes for her devastating performance in 밀양 (Secret Sunshine), is great in this movie, as are the rest of the cast.

(Image: one of many incomprehensible hand-drawn maps/diagrams from Stendhal’s The Life of Henry Brulard; for a vaguely and tangentially related post, go to Terry’s entry on Sebald’s useless map, which is actually more of a critique on the limitations of cultural-studies approach to reading Sebald…)

First of all, welcome Ashraya, to the blogging community. She’s a precocious pre-med student who happens to be quite a writer, as well as a singer for the band, The Kitchen Cabinet. Second of all, if you haven’t already, grab a copy of Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks’ new album, Real Emotional Trash and go to track 6, “Baltimore.” Go ahead, dude: crank it up. It will quickly be apparent that younger bands haven’t forgotten how to jam. Psychedelic, wall-of-sound guitar, kick-ass drumming by Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney throughout the album… what can I say My favorite rock album in some time.

I noticed that this blog has actually gained readers while I was away. Interesting. I suspect that it was because my Murakami interview translations got picked up somehow in different channels. I had like two thousand visits one day. (Maybe I should purchase that weird book, Murakami’s Whiskey Pilgrimage in Europe, from the Korean bookstore & translate some passages…) But just maybe, the readers find my silence way more interesting. I wouldn’t doubt that possibility at all.

Taoists always knew the value of being silent, both in words & deeds. “One does less and less until one does nothing at all,” says Lao Tzu, “and when one does nothing at all there is nothing that is undone.” The gist of it all being that words & purposive action lead to the kind of instrumental reason which entrenches one in the ways of the world, away from wu wei.

I briefly mentioned Chuang Tzu by way of Eliot Weinberger in my previous post. He’s a more interesting philosopher to me than Lao Tzu, because while adhering to the same Taoist cautionary stance against “words,” Chuang Tzu’s functional valuation of “words” is more nuanced than Lao Tzu’s. There’s an interesting parable of an Artisan named Ch’ui in Section 19 of Chuang Tzu called “Mastering Life.” “Artisan Ch’ui could draw as true as a compass or a T-square,” Chuang Tzu tells us, “because his fingers changed along with things and he didn’t let his mind get away” -

You forget your feet when your shoes are comfortable. You forget your waist when the belt is comfortable. Understanding forgets right and wrong when the mind is comfortable. You begin what is comfortable and never experience what is uncomfortable when you know the comfort of forgetting what is comfortable.

Artisan Ch’ui had no need for mediating tools because he didn’t let his mind get away, just as how one forgets his body when the mediating apparel is comfortable. Then Chuang Tzu concludes with a culminating illustration of this principle -

The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you’ve gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him

Any word that exists outside of meaning is a useless vessel, can only deter The Way. Even the words that successfully serve their mediatory function must be forgotten once the meaning is understood. Uncannily enough, these words of Chuang Tzu find their echo centuries later, in a different continent, in the words of Ludwig Wittgenstein which inform his readers of the limited, mediatory purpose of his words and propositions in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus -

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

Throw away the fish traps, throw away the ladder. Chuang Tzu’s instruction “once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words” slides comfortably into Wittgenstein’s famous last words of Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

This is all fine and dandy, but the ultimate irony is that Chuang Tzu depends on words and texts to theoretically deliver a conduit to The Way, the principles of which all but negate the primacy of words. Wittgenstein, likewise, would spend a solid chunk of his life digging himself out of the hole that was Tractatus, with words and more words. When Chuang Tzu asks, “Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him” it is as if he is stoically acknowledging the impossibility of such a prospect. The question is a rhetorical möbius strip: it promises the enlightenment of the wu wei, but simultaneously puts at distant bay the practical attainability of The Way. The fact that both Chuang Tzu and Wittgenstein rely on the written word seems to testify to this - unmediated meaning exists in truth, but may be irretrievable in practice. Just as it is impossible to undo language, in this completely mediated and rationalized world, all one can do is sift through the mediations to get closer.

(Last image: by Rivane Neuenschwander)

One of my wife’s first cousins died about 2 weeks ago. She was only 25 (or was she younger). She’d had this infection in her ear, and somehow it had spread into the brain stem. The hospital gave her some morphine, I believe, but then - for some inexplicable reason - she gave a desperate gasp, according to accounts, and slipped into a coma. She was on ventilators for about two days before they pulled the plug. She was a recent mother, is leaving behind a baby girl, just a few months old. Her husband, who had just now returned from Iraq, is only a kid, too. They were planning to move out to Texas before all this happened, finally a family again. From what I understand, no one knows how to best take care of the baby girl, which really wrings my heart.

In Eliot Weinberger’s An Elemental Thing, the author remembers a conversation he has with his dying friend, when his friend relates to him a passage from Chuang Tzu in which the philosopher uses an old skull as a pillow and falls asleep -

In a dream, the skull appears and tells Chuang Tzu that among the dead there are no rulers or subjects, no work to be done, and spring and autumn are endless. Chuang Tzu asks: ‘If I got the Arbiter of Fate to give you a body again, make you some bones and flesh, return you to your parents and family and your old home and friends, you would want that, wouldn’t you” The skull replies: “Why would I throw away more happiness than that of a king on a throne and take on the troubles of a human being again”

“It is comforting,” my friend said, “but I don’t believe it.”

It really is hard to believe. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, it is said that the children lead the dead by hand to an acacia tree. Regrettably, I forget what happens after that. But in that moment which probably feels both brief and expansive at once: hard to believe that the innumerable souls of the dead do not look back and feel the nostalgia for the life of flesh and blood. Yearn for the ones they must leave behind.

But, still. Rest in peace.

No baby yet. So today, I would like to talk about the Devil. If The Book of Job is any indication, it would seem all too likely that if Satan or the Anti-Christ were to walk the earth today among us, he or she would be a suave PR/marketing guru of devastating and ruthless acumen, leaving the throngs of his followers craving and craving. That is not the only reason why I think Steve Jobs of Apple Computers is the devil; when asked if Apple would design a e-Reader like the Amazon Kindle, Jobs replied -

It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore… The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.

Sweet. What a dick. Before we scoff at his reductive comment, though, I’m sure most of us would admit that we had such a thought cross our minds. I live in NYC right now and such a comment seems just patently false to me. But I used to work in an independent book store in Los Angeles as a Buyer, and analyzing weekly/monthly sales, I’d often think about the same thing - that people were reading less and less. (Although I hate to be elitist, I’m not talking about books like Eat Right For Your Blood Type.) Even in NYC, I’ve talked to a few editors at publishing houses who lamented about the same thing, especially about the decline in readership & sales of literary fiction. Depressing, for sure, but at the same time, I don’t think there’s any cause for alarm. Literature will stick around.

On a more cheerful note, here’s a memo that the National League of Baseball sent to its players in late 1890’s. In an attempt to redress the use of profanity by the players on the field, the memo makes a conscientious but colorful effort to define exactly what sort of language that the League is concerned about -

That such a brutal language as “You cock-sucking son of a bitch!” “You prick-eating bastard!” “You cunt-lapping dog!” “Kiss my ass you son of a bitch!” “A dog must have fucked your mother when she made you!” “I fucked your mother, your sister, your wife!” “I’ll make you suck my ass!” “You cock-sucker!” and many other revolting terms are used by a limited number of players, and are promiscuously used upon the ball field is vouched for by the almost unanimous assertion of those invited to speak… whether it be the language quoted above, or some other indecent and infamous invention of depravity, the League is pledged to remove it from the ball field…

Thankfully, History has sided with the profane.

Wow. Did I really use the word “Geist” in my last post I’m such an asshole. I swear it won’t happen again.

But speaking of Geist (he he), I’m thinking about the Chinese idealist philosopher Wang Yangming (1472-1529), sitting in front of a bamboo tree for a week with his friend. He was an innatist Confucian philosopher who believed that because of the human capacity for memory, one can comprehend every essence of multivalent physical objects in the universe, by examining and understanding - through anamnesis - each essence of every thing, one by one, gradually. (Or - so to speak - rung by rung, up the Plato’s ladder).

Anyways, Wang and his friend sat in front of a bamboo tree. They didn’t eat or sleep, trying to explore the complete essence of the tree (Pass the pipe, Wang!). The friend passed out after three days, the wuss that he is, and Wang fell ill after one week. But he concluded that in the end, he continued to exist in his state, just as the tree had all along, on its own accord, existed in the universe.

According to Wang’s formulation, it is not the world that molds the mind, but the mind which gives rise to the world, through reason. First of all: the word “mind” is problematic here, as the word should mean “heart” or “consciousness” as well; just as it is with the German word Geist, the Chinese word escapes a straightforward English translation. It is common in the western world to use the word “mind” with Wang’s philosophy, but in the eastern world, the translation of the word tends toward “heart” rather than “mind”; to me, it makes more sense to use “heart,” albeit in a loose sense. Especially since the word “mind” comes with a heavy Cartesian baggage in the western philosophy. Just know that we’re talking about heart-mind-consciousness. So in rephrasing, Wang said that since “heart” is reason itself, there is nothing in the universe outside one’s “heart,” no reason outside “heart.”

One day, as Wang and his pupils were walking alongside a cliff, one of his pupils pointed toward a flower tree growing in the dark crevice of the cliff. He asked Wang: “If indeed there exists nothing outside one’s heart, then how related is that solitary flower in the cliff to my heart, seeing as it lives and falls quietly, unbeknownst to me” Wang replied: “Before you noticed that flower, both your heart and that flower were silent, but in the moment you noticed the flower, the flower’s color became clear, and is that not letting you know that it lies not outside your heart?”

Wang’s response is almost a paraphrase of George Berkeley’s dictum, Esse is Percipi. Or what about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle? But screw all those comparisons: Wang’s response to his pupil precisely mirrors the fox’s lesson to the Little Prince in St. Exupéry’s book, doesn’t it? The fox teaches the Little Prince to “tame” him, and through that taming, the fox says he shall hear every day, in the Prince’s approach, “the sound of a step that will be different from all others.” After he learns to “tame” the fox, and gets to “know” the fox, the Little Prince realizes that the roses on earth cannot compare to the rose he loves back in Asteroid B-162. When the Prince goes back to bid farewell to the fox, the fox tells him that he has a very simple secret to tell him -

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Happy new year, everyone.

(Top Image: by David Chelsea)

Hooray. Now that the semester is finally over, I can drink in the morning hours. As true as that may be, I won’t (at least for today). Instead, I’d like to recommend a book: Soseki Natsume’s Spring Miscellany and London Essays, which is Soseki’s recollection of his stay in London, where he studied with W. J. Craig, a noted Shakespeare scholar who was the editor of the Arden Shakespeare. Soseki Natsume is best known in this country by his novel I Am a Cat of which narrator is - drum roll, please - a cat (see my post here). He had stayed in England between 1900 and 1902, and was not very happy during the course of his stay. The short pieces which are collected in Spring Miscellany were originally serialized in 1909 in the Asahi Newspaper. They are called shohin (little items), the Japanese counterpart of the European feuilletons. Particularly delightful is Soseki’s meditation on Thomas Carlyle written after his visit to the Carlyle Museum on Cheyne Row, Carlyle’s home in London. “It was here,” Soseki writes, “that Carlyle lived in austerity, like Cromwell, like the Emperor Frederick, in this house resembling a factory chimney, without even receiving the annual income offered him by Disraeli for the publication of his writings in which both Cromwell and the Emperor Frederick were celebrated.” Soseki wanders through Carlyle’s house, lightly pensive, comparing Carlyle to Schopenhauer, digressing as he walks. Not many writers can balance irony and sincerity as deftly as Soseki can, and his light-footed poise is evident even in these slight shohin pieces. (If you are in NYC, you can pick up a remainder copy of Spring Miscellany for two bucks at the Labyrinth Bookstore on 112th & Broadway.)

Tucked near the end of the book is Soseki’s letter to his wife, Kyo, on March 8, 1901. In the letter, Soseki is unnerved because he has been expecting a letter from her, especially as he knows that his wife must have delivered their baby. He asks Kyo if the baby is a boy or a girl (Tsune, his daughter, was born on January 26, 1901.) “SS Rio de Janeiro,” writes Soseki, “which set sail from Yokohama on February 2nd, has been wrecked off San Francisco, and I am very worried as to whether there was mail for me on that very boat.”

Inexplicably, when I read this letter about the wreck of SS Rio de Janeiro, I became intrigued. Probably for no other profound reason (which is often the case with me) than a coincidental tangent: in my previous post, I’d quoted a stanza from Brodsky’s “Rio Samba.” Apparently, on February 22, 1901, SS Rio couldn’t navigate through the dense coastal fog of San Francisco, and as the steamer neared the Golden Gate Bridge, she hit the jagged rocks near Fort Point and sank. It seems that even though the visibility was zero, the captain disregarded others’ warnings and decided to approach the harbor. 129 people died, and about 80 survived. The ship was filled with immigrants. “Chinamen,” said an eyewitness in the NY Times article, “were even more panic-stricken than the white women… [rushing] about the deck howling frantically.”

The same article mentions a certain Third Officer Holland, who, along with a man named J. K. Carpenter, was in a rescue boat. But the hull of the SS Rio crashed into the boat, splitting it in two. The report states that J. K. Carpenter had swum away and eventually rescued, but “the fate of Holland is not known, but he is supposed to have perished.” It seems that indeed Holland had been supposed as one of the deceased, until he surfaced, two days later, unharmed. Nobody knows how he had come to be numbered among the dead; he was pulled down by the suction, but took hold of a life preserver and swam to the surface, where he was rescued by an Italian fisherman. (I keep thinking about Dashiell Hammett’s Flitcraft in The Maltese Falcon.)

About nine months after the wreck, a diver named Sorenson found the sunken ship about a half mile from Fort Point. On board, it was reported, were $65,000 in general cargo and $400,000 in raw silk (I am going to resist making a Sebald parallel here, with the silk in RoS and Austerlitz - maybe another post.) Sorenson, according to the article, was entitled to 70% of everything recovered from the wreck. I wonder how much of that booty he actually ended up keeping, how much of that was recovered. There was even speculation that vast quantities of gold and silver were on board - $3 million worth - the rumors of which were never substantiated. Anyway, in 1990, the wreck of SS Rio was declared a possession of the State of California and became listed in the National Register as nationally significant.

I suppose Kyo’s letter to her husband was in fact among the mail which sank with SS Rio. If so, it’s most likely that the letter has since been long dissolved in the water, forever irretrievable. But maybe - who knows - the letter is preserved still, kept inside some black chest impermeable to water and time, sealed and locked away for all eternity. Who the hell can ever know of such things By the way, in the same letter to Kyo expressing his anxiety about his mail vanishing with the wreck of SS Rio, Soseki writes with pure delight and amazement of his experience attending a Christmas pantomime staged in a theatre on Drury Lane. He tells his wife of the wondrous stage effects, especially during a scene in which fifty girls dance in a submarine palace, their hair and costumes lit up, sparkling with thousand little red bulbs. “Just think!” Soseki writes to his beloved wife -

You have only just been looking at a palace beneath the ocean, and already it is covered over by the wonderful flower garden which succeeds it, and after this it is the sun shining on the sea, while finally we find blue-tinged mountains appearing and then turning into a snow-clad landscape.

(Bottom Image by Anthony Goicolea)

On Books (Passing of Time):

“What would you think, fair reader, of a problem such as this - to write a book which should be sense for your own generation, nonsense for the next, should revive into sense for the next after that, but again became nonsense for the fourth; and so on by alternate successions, sinking into night or blazing into day, like the Sicilian river Arethusa, and the English river Mole - or like the undulating motions of a flattened stone which children cause to skim the breast of a river, now diving below the water, now grazing its surface, sinking heavily into darkness, rising buoyantly into light, through a long vista of alternations”

- Thomas De Quincey, from Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

…

On Flying (Getting Lost):

“Come to Rio, oh come to Rio.
Grow a mustache and change your bio.
Here the rich get richer, the poor get poorer,
here each old man is a Sturmbahnführer.”

- Joseph Brodsky, the 1st stanza from “Rio Samba”

(Bottom images by: Shaun Tan from The Arrival & Chris Ware from Jimmy Corrigan)

So I wanted to follow up on yesterday’s post on Adorno, Schubert and Sebald, especially about the operetta (Das Dreimäderlhaus) that Adorno alludes to in comparing the wanderer in the Winterreise with the fictional doppelgänger of Schubert Like any self-respecting scholar would have done, I googled “Adorno” and “Dreimäderlhaus.” It turns out that Alex Ross had briefly mentioned Adorno’s hatred for the operetta in his profile of Adorno he’d written for The New Yorker back in 2003. From the article, I learned something even creepier: Hitler had also condemned Das Dreimäderlhaus in a speech he gave in 1929, basically for the same reason as Adorno, that Schubert’s sacred melodies were defiled.

Ross’s article is a good one, especially in its clear-eyed assessment of Adorno’s influence on German music. There’s a bit about Stockhausen. A mention about Eminem and a composition by Helmut Oehring called “Do You Want A Blowjob” But all that aside, what makes the article special for me is a sequence of three sentences (after which all of Alex’s writing must be seen as an inevitable denouement) which has the epigrammatic zing of, let’s say, a mordant Fénéon dispatch -

Tragically, Adorno was himself a victim of the shock tactics of pop culture. In April, 1969, a group of female activists interrupted his lecture, “An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking,” by flashing their breasts in his face and taunting him with flowers. He died a few months later, on August 6, 1969.

(Speaking of Fénéon, I just learned through The Dizzies that Luc Sante has a new blog. Go check it out.)

Adorno writes about Schubert’s song cycles this way -

They link up with poems in which again and again the image of death present themselves to the man who wanders among them as diminutively as Schubert in the Dreimäderlhaus. A stream, a mill and a dark desolate wintry landscape stretching away in the twilight of mock suns, timeless, as in a dream - these are hallmarks of the setting of Schubert’s songs, with dried flowers for their monumental ornament… The eccentric structure of this landscape, where each point is equidistant from the center, is revealed to the wanderer who traverses it without making any headway, every development is its own perfect antithesis, the first step is as close to death as the last.

In 1972, well before he started writing outside of the academia, W. G. Sebald wrote a great essay called “The Death Motif in Kafka’s The Castle.” In the essay, Sebald mentions the particular Adorno quote cited above to link Schubert’s winter wanderer to Kafka’s K, to emphasize the point that the image of journey or an aleatory hike is the symbol of death in both Schubert and Kafka’s works. It should also seem obvious that Sebald’s own prose works operate on this principle as well. Writing about K’s yearning for death as a desire for salvation, Sebald writes that in death, K can avoid the terrifying alternative - to be a “stranger and pilgrim” on earth, unable to die like Kafka’s Hunter Gracchus, or the “Wandering Jew.”

Kafka’s presence is pervasive in Sebald’s Vertigo. Not only is one of the four sections from the book dedicated to Kafka (”Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva”), Kafka appears throughout the novel as an apparition, or in the forms of doppelgängers (think of the twin boys Sebald meets on the bus, who look just like Kafka). Kafka’s story of Hunter Gracchus plays a prominent role in Sebald’s narrative as well; Sebald carefully retells the story of Hunter Gracchus, especially focusing on the two men carrying the bier upon which Gracchus lies. This image of Kafka’s Gracchus finds its double image, when Sebald, in Pizzeria Verona, sees two men carrying a bier and upon it, a dead body. More tellingly, in the section “Il ritorno in patria,” perhaps the most autobiographical piece in all of Sebald’s writing, the Sebald-narrator remembers his childhood years in W (Wertach) and Engelwirt. He remembers a beautiful girl named Romana, a twenty three year-old woman whom Sebald seems to have idolized as a child. The Sebald-narrator remembers spying on Romana having sex with “Schlag the hunter” in a woodshed. Schlag is a huntsman who regularly disappears in the Black Forest for weeks before surfacing in the town again. Later, the Sebald-narrator says that whenever he saw the ice stores open up for summer in his town, he’d imagine that he and Romana would be locked in the ice store by accident, and holding each other tight, they would freeze to death (a variation on Stendhal’s “crystallization” metaphor, which appears in the first section of Vertigo: “Beyle, or Love Is a Madness Most Discreet.”) Anyway, Schlag the hunter is later found on the other side of the border, in Austria, having died from falling off from a cliff into the ravines. The Gracchus image is vivified again and Schlag becomes Gracchus’ doppelgänger, as Sebald writes that above the sledge which bore Schlag’s body was a wine-colored horse blanket (above Gracchus’ bier is a floral-patterned cover.) Shortly after seeing Schlag’s dead body, the Sebald-narrator falls gravely ill, the first of many instances of vertigo which would recur throughout the rest of his life, as we learn from Sebald’s subsequent books.

The question is: why was Sebald so obsessed and unnerved by these doppelgänger moments which serve as structural buttresses of his prose works Too many answers, too little time, I suppose. But at least for now, we can turn back to the Adorno quote on Schubert at the head of this post, the one that Sebald used to compare Kafka to Schubert. If you read closely, Adorno compares Schubert’s diminutive wanderer from Winterreise, who sees the image of death everywhere in his journey, to the “Schubert in the Dreimäderlhaus.” This is a mysterious and beguiling comparison: the Dreimäderlhaus was not Schubert’s own composition, but a cheesy and sentimental operetta which adapted Schubert’s music to fictionally imagine Schubert’s romantic life. Adorno loathed the Dreimäderlhaus, yet still used the operetta to compare the Winterreise wanderer to the fictional doppelgänger of Schubert.

This irony would not have been lost on Sebald when he used the specific quote for his essay on Kafka. As much as he maintained that fiction, in essence, is merely a string of lies, Sebald was also riveted and disturbed by the level and content of truth that fiction brought forth. (It is no coincidence that the word “Schwindel,” the German term for “vertigo” and the word Sebald uses as his novel’s title, also means “fraud” or “deceit.”) Any doppelgänger effect is also, strictly speaking, only an illusion. Yet such illusions, for Sebald and those who read him, open up other insights, different roads meandering into difficult, uncanny truths.

In the section relating to Kafka in Vertigo, Sebald notes that according to his diary, Kafka had gone to a cinema one day in 1913, and muses if Kafka hadn’t watched Student of Prague, a Faustian tale in which a hero named Balduin sells his soul to a stranger named Scapinelli to woo a girl. “[Kafka],” Sebald writes, “would have recognized a kind of doppelgänger [in Balduin]… just as Balduin recognizes his other self” -

In one of the very first scenes, Balduin, the finest swordsman in all Prague, confronts his own image in the mirror, and presently, to his horror, that unreal figure steps out of the frame, and henceforth follows him as the ghostly shadow of his own restlessness.

The ghostly shadow of fiction, in other words, always accompanies us in real life through our winterreise, as our own, unshakable doppelgänger.

(The first image - “Winterreise” by Caspar David Friedrich)

I was going to write about Schubert’s D. 960 Sonata, but due to a shitload of work I need to address, I’ll have to push that off until later. Instead I’ll tell you a funny story. My daughter has been talking coherently and it’s freaky and wonderful at the same time. When she says these new phrases which I’m sure she hasn’t picked up from us or elsewhere, I think to myself that maybe Chomsky’s right about the innate, almost-perfect faculty of language. (Pinkerites, turn away from this post.) Anyway, until last week, my daughter would refuse to address me and my wife by our usual monikers of “daddy” and “mommy.” She’d say “daddy-bear” and “mommy-bear,” and in fact, she’d throw a tantrum if we addressed her with any other name than “baby-bear.” So I remarked to my wife that it’s like that weird story in which a family of bears takes over a human household or something. She looked at me incredulously and said, “you don’t know the story, do you” Embarrassed and angry, I admitted that I didn’t know, and she told me that the story I was referring to is probably “Goldilocks and Three Bears,” in which a girl named Goldilocks happens upon a forest house and briefly enjoys the beds and porridge of three bears, until the bears come home and threaten to eat her or something. Weird.

Because I came to the U.S. after my childhood, I missed out on a lot of standard, western literature for children. For example, I learned some Mother Goose rhymes only recently, reading to my daughter. As a child, I read some Andersen and Grimm Bros. tales, to be sure, but I read mostly Korean tales, myths, and biographies. When I came to the States, I remember learning English by reading about a dog named Ribsy (Beverly Cleary, I think) and this mouse on a motorbike with a ping-pong helmet. Then, influenced by my sixth grade English teacher, I started to read Wallace Stevens’ poems with a great deal of obsessiveness. His poems, for the first time, made me aware of the capacity and beauty of the English language.

At the Sebald event last week, I ran into a woman named Anna, who is a German translator. I’d forgotten where I’d met her, and she reminded me that we’d met through her friend, Barbara Epler, Sebald’s American editor at New Directions, after The Blue Notebooks Sebald Symposium last year. I see her, without fail, at every Sebald event I go to in the city. Anyway, we were talking about German literature and she asked me why I was so particularly interested in German writers. I thought about why, and in the process, it became clear to me: the passion stemmed from my childhood in Korea. For some reason, my cousins who were high school students - whom I idolized as a kid - read a lot of Goethe and Schiller, plus other German Romantics. So the book which I pined to read and understand, which I’d thought contained nothing less than the meaning of life, was not a Shakespeare or a Tolstoy, but The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Another example. My uncle on my mom’s side was a high school teacher in the rural Chunra Province, but he looked more like a farmer than a teacher, with his leathery, copper brown skin and white undershirts. I remember he raised a lot of free-roaming chickens in his front yard. But in his private study, which was only a dark, tiny room with a low sit-down table, he had shelves of books with names that seemed almost mythical to me. Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, et al. (even though the book that immediately grabbed my attention on his shelf was Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian.) I would leaf through the pages and read the words, but the words would not make sense in my head, made me dizzy. I understood that my uncle had a flourishing, secret inner life. I also understood that his books were written in a beautiful code that I might one day hope to unlock myself.

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