selfdivider

In the current Spring ‘08 issue of The Paris Review, Kaz Ishiguro is interviewed. My favorite Ishiguro novel, by the way, is The Unconsoled, but it might pale in comparison to the radio play he submitted to BBC right after he graduated from college (it was politely rejected). The play was called “Potatoes and Lovers,” and Ishiguro says that in the manuscript, he spelled potatoes as “potatos.” Ishiguro seems strangely proud of it, and mentions that he wouldn’t mind other people seeing it now -

It was about two young people who work in a fish-and-chips cafe. They are both severely cross-eyed, and they fall in love with each other, but they never acknowledge the fact that they’re cross-eyed. It’s the unspoken thing between them. At the end of the story, they decide not to marry, after the narrator has a strange dream where he sees a family coming toward him on the seaside pier. The parents are cross-eyed, the children are cross-eyed, the dog is cross-eyed, and he says, All right, we’re not going to marry.

After I wrote about my initial dismissive impression of J. M Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, several readers contacted me via email and took me to task about not giving the book a proper shot, letting me know that Coetzee wouldn’t be such a simpleton to let the essayistic parts of the book stand in as his voice. Most of them posited that the voice of Senor C in “Strong Opinions” part of the book cannot be the voice of Coetzee himself, as some of the ideas are - as I’d noticed in my previous post - so transparently unimaginative.

I have given Diary of a Bad Year a more thorough read, and the readers were right: I had totally dropped the ball on how the book was operating. But an important distinction has to be made right away - the esssayistic “Strong Opinions” is a reflection of Coetzee himself, even if at times, he presents his ideas as a cursory parody of his real ideas. Many things support my claim. The rant about pedophilia and Catherine MacKinnon in “Strong Opinions” is a reprisal of Coetzee’s actual essay on pornography and MacKinnon, “The Harms of Pornography,” which was collected in Giving Offense. The themes of cruelty of torture in political regimes and the nature of the State and the helpless, Hobbesian condition of mankind expressed by Senor C in Diary of a Bad Year are Coetzee’s favorite preoccupations (Life and Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians, etc.) It would be as hasty to dismiss “Strong Opinions” as a purely fictional concoction, just as proclaiming the section as a straightforward view of the author would be. The question is: what game is Coetzee playing here, and to what ends

“I have an image of Bach as a man,” confides Coetzee in an interview almost two months after 9/11, “in which he is sitting next to me at the keyboard and he says: let’s try it this way.” The answer was prompted by the interviewer’s question regarding a moment remembered in Coetzee’s essay “What Is a Classic” in which the author, as a boy, listens to a passage from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier escaping from a neighbor’s window, transfixed. The interviewer, Peter Sacks, asks Coetzee if Bach has been a formative stylistic influence on him, and Coetzee, despite his usual reticence in interviews, muses at length about Bach. In his mind’s image, according to Coetzee, Bach is the antithesis of Beethoven, who is the very picture of the Romantic genius. Unlike Beethoven, Bach genially sits down next to him at the keyboard, Coetzee says, and shows him the possibilities before mysteriously disappearing without his cognizance.

Coetzee not only elaborates on his admiration for the master in Diary of a Bad Year (he calls Bach his “spiritual father”), but mimics the polyphonal structure of Bach’s music, appropriating the composer’s contrapuntal musical lines in a literary manner. If it’s difficult to simply categorize Diary as a novel, it should not be as difficult regarding the book as a literary fugue of sorts, in which different voices, themes, and ideas become interwoven according to the author’s order and inventio.

If judged conditionally as mimetic fiction, Diary is a spectacular failure. Of course this may be an irrelevant issue, as Coetzee presents the fictive story - of Senor C’s relationship with a young woman named Anya, whom he hires as his secretary after being smitten with her derriére - couched within a presentation of a book of essays called “Strong Opinions,” the very book that Anya is typing and commenting upon. Diary is deliberately fashioned as a metafictional parlour trick: on the top half of the book’s page, the readers get the actual text of “Strong Opinions” (and later, Senor C’s more private, “softer” thoughts), and on the bottom half of the page, we receive Senor C’s and Anya’s internal thoughts running parallel to the essays, with Alan’s voice joining the chorus in the latter half of the book. Surely, Coetzee’s attempt is to puncture the mimetic semblance and the illusion of traditional fiction by closely modeling Senor C after himself. Yet the unavoidable fact is that there is a traditional story lurking beneath the smoke. Crudely put: an old man is infatuated with a young girl, her boyfriend plots to rob the old man of his estate via a computer scheme, and the young girl departs from both the old man and the boyfriend in denouement. The story is replete with the usual peaks and valleys of - God forbid! - conventional plot.

As such, it may be tempting to attack Diary on the surface level of mimetic fiction. For example, the way Anya’s thoughts are presented is not so much differentiated from how Senor C’s thoughts are relayed; the syntax and the rhythm of Anya’s internal monologue are frequently indistinguishable from Senor C’s. Given Anya’s background and the repulsion she feels toward formal elitism, it is impossible to imagine her formulate her thoughts this way -

On the contrary, I don’t have the faintest idea what Alan means. Why this obsession of his with the old man and his money… something in the whole picture offends him, as though the old man were a Spanish galleon going down on the high seas with a hold full of gold from the Indies, that would be lost for ever if he, Alan, didn’t dive in and save it.

The whiff of formal construction in the sentences, the casual metaphor comparing Senor C to a Spanish galleon going down with a “hold” full of gold - these elements belong to Senor C’s rhetorical repertoire, not Anya’s. It is all the more incredible that Anya, in confronting Senor C, accuses him with all certitude, of hiring her based on the lovely shape of her derriére, as if she is privy to his personal thoughts. But just as it becomes tempting to dismiss such infelicities as a writer’s failure, it would dawn on any close reader of Coetzee’s work that there are simply far too many of these inconsistencies for them to be indeliberate errors.

Another thing: for the first time in Coetzee’s fictional career, the quotation marks have disappeared. Even in Coetzee’s more recent attempts to blur the demarcation between fiction and real life (i.e. Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man), the verbal reportage had alwyas been marked by quotation marks. In Diary, there are no “he said, she said” quotation marks, but an uninterrupted flow of three different voices. Or, the possibility arises, is it just a single voice of the author split into three

It becomes evident that not only Senor C, but all three “characters” in the book - C, Anya, and Alan - might be versions of Coetzee, fictionally incarnated, and it is in such a way that Diary is, simultaneously, a work of fiction and an “aleatoric” confession, as Senor C might phrase it. What one reads first as a mistake - a glaring coincidence - may have been according to Coetzee’s design all along. For example, in Senor C’s essay on intelligent design, he writes -

Why is it that the intellectual apparatus that has evolved for human beings seems to be incapable of comprehending in any degree of detail its own complexity Why do we human beings typically experience awe - a recoil of the mind, as if before an abyss - when we try to comprehend, grasp, certain things, such as the origin of space and time, the being of nothingness…

The language and content of the passage, especially the pointed phrase “a recoil of the mind, as if before an abyss,” specifically allude to Kant’s aesthetic theory of the sublime in Critique of Judgement. A few pages later, in a startling moment of “coincidence,” Alan - when explaining to Anya about pornography, of all things - says that everything is a perception. “That is what Kant proved,” says Alan, “That was the Kantian revolution. We simply don’t have the access to the noumenal.” Senor C’s Kantian notions about the incomprehensible Sublime find their perfect counterpoint in Alan’s observations on the “Kantian revolution,” the inaccessibility of the noumenal. Such coincidental moments become so numerous with the accretion of the book that they cease to be coincidental in earnest. The only feasible explanation is that the three voices are riffing on each other by design, adroitly in concert, each voice aware of how the other voice is playing out, just as a contrapuntal melody in Bach’s fugue will pick up the motif from the original theme and transpose it, develop it further. They are all different manifestations of the thoughts by the same person: the author.

As mentioned at the head of the essay, many themes and preoccupations of Coetzee are revisited in Diary, as if in a grand fugue. It is as though Coetzee is attempting to weave the different elements of his work into his life: the art of life become the Art of Fugue, as Bach might have put it. Coetzee, as his Senor C alter ego, writes that it is to Bach alone that he wishes to speak, not Cervantes, not Schubert.

Why Bach Senor C opines that “Bach shows how in almost any musical germ, no matter how simple, there lie endless possibilities for development.” In this era in which fiction is supposed to have exhausted itself of all possibilities, here is a writer telling us that it isn’t so, reminding us of the limitless amplitude of fiction, using Bach’s music as analogue. In a very important way, Diary of a Bad Year has succeeded where his previous attempts at metafiction have failed: the author has allowed his fictional characters to channel the multivalent, different strands of his thought, whereas in Elizabeth Costello, for example, such a translation never rose above its technical construct. That said, the paradox of Diary of a Bad Year is that despite its formal innovation, it is still profoundly a traditional work of fiction, albeit in a way that Proust’s fiction is, by now, traditional. Life and fiction seem as one, two lines running parallel to each other at times, intersecting at other moments, all pointing - as Bach’s fugues do - toward endless possibilities.

I don’t know if some of you are planning on reading Coetzee’s Diary of A Bad Year, which received - for the most part - excellent reviews so far. I haven’t finished the book yet, but I must say, some of the discursive patches of writing on politics are pretty derivative and disengaged from Coetzee’s usually lively fictional imagination. The author’s disquisition on State and Power, especially, reads like a limp distillation of the Frankfurt School ideas. I believe that there’s definitely a place for essayistic, political writing in fiction, if done well. One prime example that I know of is Alexander Kluge’s The Devil’s Blind Spot. Even when dealing with topics such as the 9/11, Iraq and Guantanamo, Kluge’s mischievous and elliptical fictional frame of mind shapes such issues beyond the simplistic, binarious notions formed by the media images, the headlines. The book is structurally a series of quick feuilletons, and in progressing through the short pieces, one simply moves along with the author’s pace of thought in a state of constant surprise; a perfect read. In one particularly disquieting chapter near the end of the book, Kluge uses Kant’s retort - “A well-intended lie is an act of omnipotence” - as a prism through which to contemplate the various political occurrences of such lies in history (The French Revolution, The Stalinist purge during the 1937 Moscow trials, the CIA interrogation of Al-Qaeda operatives, etc.). Then, immediately following the chapter is the author’s whimsical musing on Fourier’s mathematical calculation of the transmigration of souls -

The human soul, says Fourier, must assume 810 different forms before it concludes its planetary circuit and can return to earth. Of these existences in the cosmos 720 years are happy, 45 favorable, and 45 unfavorable or unhappy. After the end of our world the chosen souls will travel to the sun! Only those with complete courses are chosen. Before souls spend 80,000 years on our planet, they must have inhabited all other planets and worlds. The human race will have enjoyed boreal light for 70,000 years.

Kluge then trains his gaze on Benjamin, who contemplated Fourier’s notion of transmigration of souls in The Arcades Project, its hopeless utopia. All too naturally, the reader’s sense of desperation about the atrocities of human history grafts onto Benjamin’s - especially after having read Kluge’s preceding chapter about “lies” in history. And the twin emotions of despair and glee which attend Benjamin’s description of Fourier’s hopeless utopia seem the same attendant feelings which visit the reader, and Kluge’s fiction becomes, effortlessly and simultaneously in the seamless instant of unnameable sadness, also a palimpsest of historical disillusionment -

Fourier also says that… humanity will acquire the capacity to live like fish in the water and to fly like birds in the air, and that, by then, humans will have reached a height of seven feet and have a life span of at least 144 years. Everyone, at that point, will be able to transform himself into an amphibian; the individual will have the power of opening or closing at will the valves connecting the chambers of the heart and so - without the blood having to pass through the lungs - bring it directly to the heart… Nature will evolve in such fashion, he maintains, that a time will come when orange trees blossom in Siberia, and the most dangerous animals will be replaced by their opposites. ANTI-LIONS and ANTI-WHALES… New stars will emerge to take the place of the moon, which, by then, will already have begun to rot.

(Image: by Ji Lee)

I’m re-reading Cortazar’s Hopscotch. As you know, you can read the book in a linear fashion, up until Chapter 56, or alternately, in a “hopscotch” fashion, jumping around according to the dictates of the author given in the Table of Instructions. This time around, I’ve chosen to disregard the Table of Instructions, foraging through the book according to my whim, to see what might happen. I’ll write more about the results later, but I must say, some parts of Hopscotch make better sense to me, now that I’m in NYC and have been on the L train to Brooklyn on numerous occasions (I’d insert a smiley face emoticon here, only if I knew how to) -

… and it occurred to me like a sort of mental belch that this whole A B C of my life was a painful bit of stupidity, because it was based solely on a dialectical pattern, on the choice of what could be called nonconduct rather than conduct, on faddish indecency instead of social decency.

I’m sure most of us are guilty of this “faddish indecency” at certain points of our lives. But in this post, I’m going to deviate from Cortazar’s connotation here to appropriate the phrase, “faddish indecency,” to describe a kind of writing that I don’t have much of a tolerance for. Specifically speaking, it’s the kind of writing pertaining to rendering moments of violence through fiction (for that matter, let’s also include rendering sex in fiction as well). The faddish indecency, in such cases, occurs when such moments are overly aestheticized.

A couple of years ago, in the summer ‘06 issue of Zoetrope’s All-Story, there was a good short story written by David Means, called “Nebraska.” From the beginning, I was engrossed by it. The prose was beautifully immaculate, each word impeccably considered. The story wasn’t one of those enervated pieces about the tortured inner lives of people, either; it had a real, strong plot, concerning a heist that a set of characters were to pull off.

The characters in “Nebraska” are faddishly indecent, in the original Cortazarian sense, deliberately living in defiance of social decency, but with a cool sense of style. Before the planned heist, one of the protagonists bleaches her hair and feels like Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, and her cohorts strive for a certain élan as well, going for the Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway vibe, circa Bonnie & Clyde. I have no problem with this; it’s entirely natural for these characters to fashion their identities, referring back to their cultural icons. But I have a problem with how the actual heist is rendered, the violent crux of its action. Means’ prose goes into a cinematic slow-mo -

… all frozen there for a moment in the fear and agony until there is the flash of muzzle fire and then - in what seems to be a modulated time/space, not slow motion but rather something else, a kind of compact glimmering shimmer of movement - the fat man falls to the side, collapsing under the weight of his torso as his knees give, falling to the ground and then bowing down, prayerfully, his dark oil-slicked hair glinting in the light and his scalp bright red with sweat until another bullet hits and the top of his skull flowers with bone and spray; then the other man falls too, his lean slim body folding over sidelong and leathery; his own bones balsawood frail and delicate so that he appears to come down to the earth with a sliding motion, like a leaf blown by the wind, crumpling over himself.

I understand that this may be Means’ prose homage to the hail-of-bullets ending of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde. Even still: is it me, or is this too pretty or too precious Would such a moment of terrible violence really boil down to a “compact glimmering shimmer of movement” Would the falling man’s bones really occur to anyone to be “balsawood frail” as he crumples in death Perhaps it’s only a matter of subjective opinion, but I found the action of the violence too thickly smeared with aestheticized glaze, too prettified and stylized to be convincing as any real moment. So I found this passage to be an instance of “faddish indecency.”

I don’t know why such writing bothers me more than any other kind, but I figure I’d need an analyst to figure it out rather than a literary critic. But on an aesthetic level, I feel that the closer you get to depicting the limits of death, the more difficult it gets in rendering the truth in that given moment. Rather than dressing it up with beautiful shrouds, I feel that the writer should strip death of decorousness. It doesn’t mean that every writer should write about violence and death in a stark, Cormac McCarthy-esque cant. In his essay “That To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die,” Montaigne writes that it is the dreadful trappings and faces with which people surround scenes of death that are more frightening than death itself -

Children fear even their friends when they see them masked, and so do we ours. We must strip the mask from things as well as from persons; when it is off, we shall find beneath only that same death which a valet or a mere chambermaid passed through not long ago…

Montaigne’s stoical prescription on dealing with death seems as good an advice on writing about death as any: to strip the masks from things to discover in the moment of death - by the process of attrition - any and all truth available, lurking beneath the masks.

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)

Only God knows how much I love Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Perhaps the finest example of the 1st person, lyrical-address novel that I know. A bildungsroman in which the bildung is only a slight re-orientation of thinking and viewing of the world. Filled with lines like: “A deformed live oak emerges from the whiteness, stands up in the air, like a tree in a Chinese print.” I remember reading a fine appreciation of the novel by Sven Birkerts a while back, but I forget where… I think in The Believer. But what American male did not go through this kind of spiritual crisis, as tormented over by Binx Bolling on his 30th birthday

Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies - my only talent - smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall - on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.

Went to the Sebald panel that the Mercantile Library hosted to kick off the publication of The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald (Seven Stories), edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. First of all, the library is beautiful, and I can’t believe I didn’t even know about its existence prior to last night. It caters almost exclusively to fiction, its shelves stuffed with great fiction and literary journals. Check out their events and book groups if you’re in NYC. One hundred bucks per year will get you membership and access to the space, well worth the price, I think.

The panelists were Lynne Sharon Schwartz, whose introduction to The Emergence of Memory is graciously simple and is an approachable primer for many readers who might be getting to know Sebald’s life and work. (For the review of the book, check out Terry’s take here.) Joe Cuomo, whose interview with Sebald is published in the book, was also there; he runs one of the best reading series in New York - Queens College Evening Readings moderated by Leonard Lopate of WNYC. Two Columbia professors rounded out the panel: Ross Posnock, Professor of English Lit, and Mark Anderson, Professor in the German Department. Professor Posnock just delivered a lecture on Sebald and Wittgenstein at Yale, and Professor Anderson is currently working on Sebald’s biography (which he hopes to finish next year), and had also participated in the Sebald Symposium I moderated for The Blue Notebooks last year, with Barbara Epler, Sebald’s editor at New Directions, and Professor Andreas Huyssen.

Schwartz kicked off the event with a general introduction. What I found almost refreshing was that Schwartz was not afraid of categorizing Sebald’s work as fiction, despite the category-bending nature of his prose works. She said Sebald’s work was fiction because, well, “he makes things up and shapes and structures his prose works like fiction.” I’d definitely agree with Schwartz on a common-sensical level, much more so than with Vivian Gornick’s preposterously ill-considered response in The Situation and the Story, in which she denies Sebald’s work is fiction at all. Still, it must be said that this kind of dissension which exists makes Sebald’s work even more attractive for so many of us readers, I guess. You can’t pigeon-hole the guy at all.

Joe Cuomo spoke about Sebald in startlingly intimate and personal terms. It seems that he’d formed a close bond with Sebald and his widow since his interview, and Sebald’s death had deeply affected him. He spoke about how Sebald saw the process of writing as a “con trick,” a string of lies by which one arrives at a kind of a truth, and that Sebald had a Flaubertian fear of the false, that somehow he might make a moral and aesthetic compromise through the process of writing which would somehow dilute “truth.” Cuomo talked about the hurricane in 1987 which Sebald writes about in The Rings of Saturn that destroyed both Sebald’s and Michael Hamburger’s homes (there’s a significant section in RoS, if you recall, which takes place in Hamburger’s house.) Cuomo made a brilliant link, the kind which Sebald himself would have made: he noticed that Michael Hamburger’s poem “The Massacre” was essentially about the same experience which Sebald chronicled in RoS; he even read from the letter that he’d written to Hamburger about his discovery. All in all, Cuomo’s account was refreshingly personal and emotionally direct (although, it must be said, it made me somehow uncomfortable… but this probably only means that I’m emotionally stunted and emotional forthrightness freaks me out.)

Anderson followed Cuomo’s deeply personal account of Sebald with his experience in trying to write Sebald’s biography. He mentioned that when a biographer writes a work of biography, (s)he usually looks for certain conforming patterns in the subject’s life, but in the case of Sebald, he found that such a practice seemed at odds with what one naturally values in Sebald, which is that Sebald’s life and work gains intensity by the fact that he worked from the marginal realms, that he was a loner in the periphery. Anderson said that fame did not suit Sebald, and intimated that the pressure of fame - i.e. book tours, big agent and book contract - essentially led to Sebald’s heart attack which killed him. Anderson spoke with insight about the generation of ‘68 Germans, of which Sebald was a member, about how they were not responsible for the war but were indelibly marked by its repercussions. He talked about how the ‘68-ers were disconnected from their families by a conspiracy of silence, and had found out about the war only through papers and media, i.e. 1963 Eichmann trials, which led to an angry moment of realization, and a kind of “phantom guilt” and post-memory. Sebald, accordingly, left Germany and never went back despite the fact that he never felt at home in England. Anderson specified Sebald’s anti-German stance as a rejection of high, northern German culture, and mentioned that Sebald had refashioned his German identity by aligning and identifying himself with the regional Germany, that he’d felt that he was more Austrian or Swiss, even. (This makes a great deal of sense, as Sebald’s literary forebears were writers like Gottfried Keller, Adalbert Stifter, and Thomas Bernhard.) Anderson also talked about Sebald’s hometown of Wertach in Allgäu, a small town with a view of the Alps in which Sebald had spent the first eight years of his life. Sebald had mentioned that the town existed in a pristine pocket outside of the modernizing process, and had always talked about his life with his grandfather with fondness. Anderson remarked that Sebald’s work, in a way, is about the loss of his life in Wertach; that all of his work is one long lament about the loss of pristine pocket of Wertach, which is in turn a lament about the onslaught of destruction caused by the urban, industrial world.

Posnock read from the first few pages of the essay he delivered at Yale on Sebald and Wittgenstein. Posnock talked about Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblance,” which is not based on notions of essence or identity, but on a complicated network of similarities “spinning in thread, fiber on fiber.” Wittgenstein formulated his propositions in Philosophical Investigations as such, and had conceived his work - in the Preface to PI - as a “thought criss-cross”: an album of remarks which would result in “a sketch of landscape.” It’s easy to see that Sebald’s aesthetic sensibilities and process closely resembled Wittgenstein’s, the densely webbed intertextuality, etc. Also, Posnock noted that on page 3 of Austerlitz is the photograph of Wittgenstein’s eyes, and how one of the models for Jacques Austerlitz must have been Wittgenstein (i.e. picture of Austerlitz’s rucksack -> Wittgenstein’s famous rucksack): just as Wittgenstein was working from the principles of “family resemblance,” Austerlitz spends his life on investigating the “family likeness” between various monuments in Europe. It goes without saying that Wittgenstein/Austerlitz is also an analogue of Sebald, as the narrator himself travels everywhere, commenting on similarities, convergences, and eerie, overlapping coincidences, the process of which is, after all, an aesthetic implementation of Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblance.” Posnock also discussed Sebald’s use of Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson” in terms of Wittgenstein’s dictum of “Don’t think, but look,” from which - according to Posnock - Sebald’s aesthetic stance of “looking” as a counter-stance to a rational, intellectual subjection (and the stance against moral self-anesthesia via looking away/not looking directly) is derived. (As an example, think of Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction, in which he quotes Döblin remarking that Germans walked around the destroyed cities “as if nothing had happened,” and how the Swedish journalist Stig Dagerman recalled that the travelers on a train did not look out the window and that he was recognized immediately as a foreigner, simply by the fact that he looked out the window.)

During the Q&A session, citing Ruth Franklin’s New Republic essay which is reprinted in The Emergence of Memory, Schwartz mentioned that one of the latent dangers in Sebald’s work is that through the sheer beauty of his prose, he had somehow aestheticized the historical atrocities, undercutting the true horror of it all. Cuomo disagreed, mentioning the suicides in The Emigrants as amply real examples of such a horror that were not aestheticized. But Anderson retorted that still, Sebald doesn’t really write about the nature of “evil” directly, only choosing to write about the victims, that the presence of “evil” in Sebald’s work is abstract and shadowy at best. The discussion had to end somewhat abruptly because there had to be time allotted for a brief audio clip to be played, of Sebald talking about why he liked dust so much. Then there was wine to be drunk at the back, always a welcome ending to any event (at least for me.)

I talked to Joe Cuomo for a bit and inquired to see if there was a way to purchase a videotape of his conversation with Sebald, because it was broadcast on TV. But to my horror, I learned that the old TV station had turned into a semi-porn station, and that in the process of transition, the new producers had thrown away the Sebald tape from the archives!!! I think I almost barfed; what a loss, considering how there isn’t much video documentation of Sebald conducted in English. I also talked with Mark Anderson, and learned something fascinating; Anderson had met Sebald personally at a reading, and had asked him about the character of Paul Bereyter in The Emigrants, the schoolteacher who kills himself. Anderson suspected Wittgenstein as one of the models (among many) for Bereyter (Wittgenstein also was a schoolteacher) and Sebald had confirmed that was the case. Anderson told me that in his forthcoming biography, there is going to be a whole chapter on Paul Bereyter’s real life, as well as the connection to Wittgenstein, and that he’s planning on publishing a version of the chapter soon somewhere. Stay tuned.

(First image: by Thomas Allen)

Somehow, going from one wiki article to another, I became curious about a film called The Greene Murder Case (1929), starring William Powell and Jean Arthur. The movie was based on a whodunit written by S. S. Van Dine, in which a detective named Philo Vance tries to figure out a series of murders which takes place in the Greene mansion in the Upper East Side, which he calls “the holocaust that consumed the Greene family.” I guess the Philo Vance novels were popular back in the day, as Van Dine wrote twenty or so novels based on the character. Anyways, it seems that the film version of The Greene Murder Case is not available on DVD or VHS, and I’m out of luck (although other Philo Vance films, like The Benson Murder Case and The Kennel Murder Case are available on DVD.)

The novel is available here on Australia’s Project Gutenberg site, and you’ll see that the prose is leaden, the dialog wooden, and the plot plodding. But the point of my interest lies in the final pages of the detective novel, wherein Philo Vance deduces that the murderer used Hans Gross’s Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter to plan the murders of various members of the Greene family. Hans Gross is commonly regarded as the first to apply scientific methods in forensics to criminal investigation - he invented, for example, dactyloscopy, the science of interpreting finger prints. Basically, the last chunk of The Greene Murder Case is Philo Vance reading out loud from Gross’s various case studies from the Handbuch, complete with page numbers (!), to explain the motives and actions of the culprit. Yes, it’s pretty laughable.

But my primary interest was piqued by the fact that Franz Kafka studied with Hans Gross extensively when he was studying law at Prague University; it seems that Kafka really went out of his way to attend a lot of Gross’s lectures, and it’s likely that K’s legalistic and judicial sensibilities were in many ways influenced by the formative years he spent as Gross’s student. Even more interesting is the fact that Hans Gross’s son was Otto Gross, the anarchist psychoanalyst (he was one of Freud’s most prized students) and notorious drug user. He was also Kafka’s friend. Hans Gross had demanded that his son Otto be forcibly confined in a mental asylum, and it’s believed by some scholars that the beginning of Kafka’s The Trial was inspired by the episode. Weird, weird, weird…
I don’t know why this interests me so much, this tangential relationship between this cheap detective novel and Kafka. I spent much of yesterday thinking about it, even going as far as planning to visit the mansion in which they shot the film. I doubt anything further would come of this, and like most of my other strange fixations, this one will disappear, too, but I’m curious if any of you out there has watched the actual film. According to a few accounts, including the old NY Times review, the film was pretty middling. I’d still like to see the film version of The Greene Murder Case, though, even if just to see Jean Arthur in it. I like Jean Arthur a lot. In the film, she plays Ada Greene, the family’s adopted daughter from Germany. Another creepy coincidence: Jean Arthur’s real name was Gladys Georgianna Greene.

I’m reading a slim novel called The Seventh Well by Fred Wander, a holocaust survivor (due out this December from W. W. Norton). It was originally published in East Germany in 1970, and is only now translated into English - very elegantly - by Michael Hofmann. Wander seems to have been somewhat of a street urchin, having grown up on the streets after dropping out of high school. He left behind his mother and sister in Vienna and fled to France, on foot, where he was eventually put on a train to Auschwitz. Between 1939 and 1945, he was transported to and from twenty different concentration camps. (Fred Wander died recently, in 2006, in Vienna.)

It doesn’t seem appropriate to call The Seventh Well a ‘novel.’ Wander’s book is comprised of episodic pieces dedicated to remembering different inmates whom he knew, along with short, poetic essayistic prose pieces. Wander’s prose is spare and lucidly beautiful. Really, the only other works I thought of in comparison were Primo Levi’s Periodic Table and, strangely enough, The Coast of Chicago by Stu Dybek (because of the short prose poem-y interstices.)

Michael Hofmann, in his Afterword to the novel, writes about a French term which he finds strangely beautiful - “univers concentrationnaire” (coincidentally enough, in my post about late style, there’s a quote by Sebald in which he calls our world, even now, “le monde concentrationnaire.”) I think Hofmann might be right when he hypothesizes that Primo Levi might have been the person who coined the term. And like Levi, Hofmann evokes the bleak closed system of “the world of camps” in purely unsentimental terms. The inmates finally get to sleep in their bunkers made of boards after escaping another day, after having eaten their fill of rotting beet soup. They try to sleep -

When the three of us were pressed together under one blanket, a blanket stiff with filth, dried blood, and pus, Petrov and I and Tadeusz between us, we could hear a rushing murmur in our ears: a mechanism, a perpetuum mobile, that ran on nothing but life itself and was trying to prevent its own dissolution.

Yet the true beauty of The Seventh Well comes from Wander’s refusal to be trapped in le monde concentrationnaire; the novel, in a crucial way, charts the writer’s growth as an artist, even inside the camp world of solipsism and death. What punctures the insular walls of the camp are the vibrant debates and arguments that various inmates engage in. On Block 16 of Buchenwald, Wander remembers inmates feverishly arguing about the relations between Volkonsky, Rostov, and Trubetskoy in War and Peace, or about Cousin Pons or Colonel Chabert of Balzac. Rack their brains trying to remember a whole scene from Hamlet without any omission. An inmate named Antonio belts out “Addio amore” from Puccini’s Turandot in the middle of the night. Many inmates wake up, startled: listening, spellbound. “It was like poison,” Wander writes, “like a drug, it drove the blood into our hearts and choked us. A glimpse of paradise. The Jews on the mountain, in the valley below the promised land of Canaan.” In the morning after, as usual, death claims more inmates, including Antonio -

Death was all alone among a great number of men. Some lay there stiffly, eyes open, anonymous and despised, like deserters: deserters from a remarkable existence. Then I found Antonio, but he was no longer living. A little man, with dark skin and dark eyes, that even as they faded wore a wistful expression of regret, the last flinching of someone who had seen much that was beautiful. A Mediterranean type, with sores on his legs and a grotesquely swollen head on a neck like the stem of a flower.

(Image from Gerhard Richter’s “Atlas”)

It seems really cold this morning in NYC and my back is killing me because I slept on the couch for the week. Whenever I have a lot of work to do, I can’t put it upon myself to go into the bedroom and sleep like a decent human being. Anyways, my wife just brought me a cup of coffee and Glenn Gould is on the stereo, the French Suites. I think of how so many artists - from Mozart to Klimt and dozens in between - end up being skewered by Thomas Bernhard, but Glenn Gould is immortalized. “We exist,” Gould says in The Loser according to its narrator, “we don’t have any other choice.” Bernhard’s life and work in a nutshell, in other words.

Which makes me think of Edward Said on Glenn Gould. Although Edward Said’s interpretation of Glenn Gould’s pianism is too dependent on Adorno’s description of Bach’s polyphony (perhaps the weakest chapter in On Late Style), his ultimate assessment of Gould’s genius seems spot on to me -

The tension in Gould’s virtuosity remains unresolved: that is, by virtue of their eccentricity his performances make no attempt to ingratiate themselves with his listeners or reduce the distance between their lonely ecstatic brilliance and the confusions of the everyday world.

Gould’s disinterest in resolving the tension between aesthetic pleasure and worldly confusions finds its literary counterpoint in Cavafy. Said quotes from “The God Abandons Antony,” in which Cavafy orders Antony, before his attendant death, to hold still in absolute silence so that he can hear the exquisite music of Alexandria in its exact notes, for the final time -

go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion,
but not with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen - your final pleasure - to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

Said claims that this refusal to resolve the tension between disenchantment and pleasure is the prerogative of late style in art: “[Late style] has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them.” This seems entirely right to me, too. For example: Beethoven’s Opus 110 Sonata. Its Arioso dolente is perhaps the most despairing passage of music among his late sonatas (Beethoven’s accompanying injunction is Ermattet, klagend - Exhausted, lamenting). Yet it leads, eventually and inexplicably, by the way of fugue, into a finale which is transcendentally ecstatic, life-affirming. The twin flames of disenchantment and pleasure. I think one of Jean Genet’s metaphors in Prisoner of Love illustrates this concept of late style, albeit inadvertently, better than anything I can say about it -

If you put two matches together and light them, they twine so close you can’t separate their single ember. Two immortalities in one. And so with the bard and the power that he sings, as long as no one goes and touches what’s left of the confused but splendid conflagration.

One more application of late style: W. G. Sebald. It bothers me to the n-th degree when different scholars and critics peg his work as unremittingly pessimistic, without hope, even going so far as to proclaim that the trajectory of his work seemed to foretell his untimely death. Is it me or does their reading seem reductive and problematic to you, too They miss the tiny moments of gleam which Sebald pits against the portents of destruction - the rendering of the pleasure and the disenchantment. Without this notice, it seems to me, one is reading only 1/2 of Sebald. The narrator’s notice of a flitting butterfly and the myriad of quartz fragments glimmering in the Alps, before his dreaming of the Great Fire of London in Vertigo. The bodies of herrings which glow in phosphorence after their death (The Rings of Saturn). The impenetrable beauty of salt crystals that the narrator of The Emigrants notices in the salt-frames of Kissengen, after he comes out of the neglected Jewish cemetery that’s almost crumbling into the ground. What to make of these numerous, tiny moments of “beatific” pleasure and beauty, pitted against the scenes of destruction

The answer comes from Sebald himself, in an interview with Michael Silverblatt of KCRW’s Bookworm (you can listen to the podcast here, or read an excerpt from the interview in the forthcoming The Emergence of Memory). Silverblatt astutely notices that there is something in Sebald’s prose which brings “the sensibility of tininess, miniaturization, to the enormity of the post-concentration camp world.” Sebald agrees with Silverblatt’s assessment, and his reply in characterizing his project is not so distant from Said’s characterization of what late style is, how it renders both pleasure and disenchantment, without the artist’s attempt to resolve their contradiction -

I think Walter Benjamin at one point says that there is no point in exaggerating that which is already horrific. And from that, by extrapolation, one could conclude that perhaps in order to get the full measure of the horrific, one needs to remind the reader of beatific moments of life, because if you existed solely with your imagination in le monde concentrationnaire, then you would somehow not be able to sense it. And so it requires that contrast.

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