Renounce action! On Kundera's The Curtain
Over Easter weekend I read Kundera's The Curtain. It's a thumping good read, and I recommend it for the limited space in one's holiday luggage. I warmed to it from the start with its persuasive argument that historical consciousness is inherent to our aesthetic perception of art; a simple truth it now seems. He uses the example of a modern day composer producing a work Beethoven might have written. It would, he says, be "spontaneously felt to be ridiculous, false, incongruous, even monstrous. Our feeling for continuity is so strong that it enters into the perception of any work of art". Well, it's strong in those of us who are aware that comparing, for instance, Irène Némirovsky'sSuite Française to Tolstoy (as Doris Lessing and Robert Fisk have done) is not the praise those making the comparison think it is. But it seems many see art as a Platonic realm free from the disaster of history. Ironically they tend also to be the ones who insist that novels speak to us of our time, lamenting along the way that there is no Dickens for modern Britain. We need to move on. "[I]n the absence of aesthetic value" Kundera states, "the history of art is just an enormous storehouse whose chronologic sequence carries no meaning. And conversely: it is only within the context of an art's historical evolution that aesthetic value can be seen." Yes, storehouses containing piles of artless trash for "book lovers". A modern day Dickens will have moved on.
Nobody home
My entire life seems to have disappeared in a movement of seeking that is perhaps the experience of writing, the responsibility for which I try to bear, poorly but absolutely.Maurice Blanchot, letter to Elio Vittorini, 1963.
The 'scandal' and the importance of the [Berlin] wall is that, in the concrete oppression that it embodies, it is essentially abstract and that it thus reminds us – we who forget this constantly – that abstraction is not simply a faulty mode of thought or an apparently impoverished form of language but rather our world, the one we live and think in on a daily basis."Berlin", 1964.
Both in Political Writings (1953-1993).
... as if at every moment you are going either to be crushed or swept away, but you also feel as if you are in touch with the secret pulse of the universe. It is an extraordinary sensation ... a compressing into the moment of everything that has ever been and ever will be. It is this that I look for in each sound I imagine ... it is this that is at the heart of every note.
You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months, if not years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude. A man sits alone in a room and writes. Whether the book speaks of loneliness or companionship, it is necessarily a product of solitude. A. sits down in his room to translate another man’s book, and it is as though he were entering that man’s solitude and making it his own. But surely that is impossible. For once a solitude has been breached, once a solitude has been taken on by another, it is no longer solitude, but a kind of companionship. Even though there is only one man in the room, there are two. A. imagines himself as a kind of ghost of that other man, who is both there and not there, and whose book is both the same and not the same as the one he is translating.
On his back in the dark: Winter Journal by Paul Auster
Ahead of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Professor Patrick Major explores the history of the Wall – why it was built, how many lives it claimed, and its significance today…
Balloon is a German thriller that deals with the crossing of the inner German border of the families Strelzyk and Wetzel from the GDR to West Germany with a homemade hot-air balloon.
In the summer of 1979, in Thüringen East Germany, two families put together a crazy plan. They are desperate to leave the DDR for the ‘West’ and plan to flee in a homemade hot air balloon. After sewing and tinkering for weeks, the amateurs make their first attempt. Meters from the West German border, their balloon suffers from the rain and crash lands. Luckily, they manage to avoid being caught by the police. However, the wreckage from their escape attempt is found and that triggers a desperate manhunt. The tension rises as the families determine to try again, and a race against time ensues.
Flight to freedom: film charts balloon escape from East Germany
Germany was cut in two for nearly 40 years by a closed border between the West and the communist East that ran for 1400 kilometres, from the Baltic Sea to Czechoslovakia.
It seems bizarre now. The new Iron Curtain trail, a peaceful cycling path through leafy woods punctuated by crumbling watchtowers, traces the length of that border. Until 1989, those watchtowers housed 50,000 guards along high metal fences fortified with barbed wire, alarms, landmines and spring-loaded guns.
Between 1961 and 1988, 327 East Germans were killed trying to get across, while 75,000 were caught trying and were jailed as traitors. Of course, there were those who succeeded, sometimes in feats of derring-do that were turned into triumphalist real-life adventure stories by the Western press.
...
‘‘I didn’t want to make a movie about the GDR; first of all, it is a movie about freedom and self-determination and that is a timeless thing,’’ he says.
‘‘But it is very important to speak about history. The conversations with teenagers after the screenings makes clear they don’t know so much about it. Today we have a Europe without borders, where people can go where they want. For them, it sounds like science fiction. I think the most important thing is to prevent something similar happening again.’’
Remembering last Berlin Wall victim Chris Gueffroy
Thirty years ago, border guards gunned down Chris Gueffroy as he attempted to flee across the Berlin Wall into West Germany. The 20-year-old was the last person to be shot trying to escape the East German dictatorship.
An East German refugee had applied for compensation after being traumatized during a hair-raising escape. He was trapped on a barbed wire fence when border guards found him.
A man who fled East Germany in 1988 will be eligible to receive compensation for trauma he experienced as a result of the escape, Germany's highest civil court ruled on Monday
It is in reading Thomas Bernhard that Thomas Bernhard becomes Thomas Bernhard, though the poetry isn't very Thomas Bernhard. . .
"Tense, unnerved, and close to madness before writing–and when I read what I've written it looks so calm. "
| Hinter den Bäumen ist eine andere Welt, der Fluß bringt mir die Klagen, der Fluß bringt mir die Träume, der Fluß schweigt, wenn ich am Abend in den Wäldern vom Norden träume... | Behind the trees is another world, the river brings me laments, the river brings me dreams, the river grows silent when, in the evening forests, I dream of the (west) ... |
(from The Infinite Conversation translated by Susan Hanson)
Both together: Migrations by Gabriel Josipovici
The main reason I still write this blog is to maintain a contact with the need or condition that drove me to read and write in the first place; a need often misdirected in pursuit of what the industry is talking about. Long silences here report stout resistance to the temptations of disinterested reception. But what is this need? Only chance can reveal it, as a fall might graze a knee. So one night at 10pm I happened to be looking for the availability of another book when I noticed a bookseller had priced Gabriel Josipovici's 1977 novel Migrations at £90. My copy is in better condition, I thought, and picked it off the shelf for an inspection.
Beneath the epigram in Hebrew I had written a translation: Arise and go, for this is not your rest(Micah 2:10). Fortunately, it was in pencil and I scrubbed out the words. But why? I have no intention of selling and the copy stands for sentimental memories of my first reading as a student in January 1992: the anonymous protagonist pacing his bedroom, vomiting into a basin, drinking directly from the tap, walking about town under a burning sun, looking into shop windows at bundles of shoes tied together, slumped beneath a lamppost or over a café table with a nearby stranger offering him a cup of tea: Ere, the man says. Av some of mine.
The scenes never stop to clarify a traditional back story, nor even to insert narrative conjunctions, so that the café scene in one paragraph moves straight into another in which the man is pacing to and fro in his bedroom. A scene from adulthood moves then without pause to a scene from childhood, yet not as in stream of consciousness but something less secure, less comforting, not contained within a mind but as if the meaning of each lived moment is sought in repetition and in order to resist the constant migration of mind and self. The apparent distress of the protagonist in this quest is described with a mixture of clinical distance and romantic metaphor and simile.
The elemental in literature is often misconstrued from outré subject matter or writing described asraw and unmediated, yet in Migrations the elemental appears as the subjection of form and content to the logic of its title: constant becoming in constant undoing; constant undoing in constant becoming; the logic of birth and death. So the man is unnamed not in order to protect identity but to loosen the binds of identity, to allow time to colonise the means by which the identified resists time and self erasure. The man senses constant movement in everything around him – when he orders a beer it tastes of urine: "of everything that has been ejected".
The paradox here is that the attempt to inhabit migration in a narrative automatically includes the quest for unity and permanence; a novel is a monument to unity and permanence. Literature takes possession of the elemental, becomes a still point in the hub of its vicious circle and thereby becomes a means to express, analyse and perhaps to lead out of terror and comfort without denying either. The man explains to someone what is like in this space:
Migrations was Josipovici's fourth novel, with Hotel Andromeda last year being his eighteenth, but very little else compares with its extreme expression of the major themes of his work. At 230 pages it is also by far his longest novel, and yet it is perhaps closest to Everything Passes of 2006, which at 60 pages is by far his shortest. A few years after it was published, Josipovici wrote a short afterword to a collection of his reviews in which he describes the reception of this and two later novels:
Beneath the epigram in Hebrew I had written a translation: Arise and go, for this is not your rest(Micah 2:10). Fortunately, it was in pencil and I scrubbed out the words. But why? I have no intention of selling and the copy stands for sentimental memories of my first reading as a student in January 1992: the anonymous protagonist pacing his bedroom, vomiting into a basin, drinking directly from the tap, walking about town under a burning sun, looking into shop windows at bundles of shoes tied together, slumped beneath a lamppost or over a café table with a nearby stranger offering him a cup of tea: Ere, the man says. Av some of mine.
The scenes never stop to clarify a traditional back story, nor even to insert narrative conjunctions, so that the café scene in one paragraph moves straight into another in which the man is pacing to and fro in his bedroom. A scene from adulthood moves then without pause to a scene from childhood, yet not as in stream of consciousness but something less secure, less comforting, not contained within a mind but as if the meaning of each lived moment is sought in repetition and in order to resist the constant migration of mind and self. The apparent distress of the protagonist in this quest is described with a mixture of clinical distance and romantic metaphor and simile.
The bulb hangs down in the middle of the room. It is lit, making the curtainless window appear like a black mirror in which only the blub itself is reflected. But the light is poor and seems to have difficulty reaching the walls of the big room. Even the washbasin and the bed are in shadow.The rhythms of repetitions and returns build an uncommon presence, as if the words have been typed directly onto the page, indenting the paper with the urgency and confusion of a writer trying to catch up with the world and himself. So, soon after 10pm, I had started reading Migrations and before midnight I had read 50 pages. And this is why I read: the gifts of chance rediscovery, of being returned to real needs, which is also why I remember Thomas Bernhard, aged 19 and on the edge of death, reading Dostoevsky's The Demons: "Never in my whole life had I read such an engrossing and elemental work ... it had shown me a path that I could follow and told me that I was on the right one, the one that led out".
Silence flows away from him in dark rivers.
Falling backwards, in a wide arc, he stretches out his hand to grip the lamppost and encounters only air. The black sky presses on his face like a blanket.
Everything flows away from him. It flows outwards and away in dark rivers.
The elemental in literature is often misconstrued from outré subject matter or writing described asraw and unmediated, yet in Migrations the elemental appears as the subjection of form and content to the logic of its title: constant becoming in constant undoing; constant undoing in constant becoming; the logic of birth and death. So the man is unnamed not in order to protect identity but to loosen the binds of identity, to allow time to colonise the means by which the identified resists time and self erasure. The man senses constant movement in everything around him – when he orders a beer it tastes of urine: "of everything that has been ejected".
The paradox here is that the attempt to inhabit migration in a narrative automatically includes the quest for unity and permanence; a novel is a monument to unity and permanence. Literature takes possession of the elemental, becomes a still point in the hub of its vicious circle and thereby becomes a means to express, analyse and perhaps to lead out of terror and comfort without denying either. The man explains to someone what is like in this space:
–First of all, he says, there is this stifling. This effort to draw breath. As if time had become a blanket someone was stuffing into your mouth and the more you opened your mouth the more blanket was stuffed in and the less chance there was to breathe.To be alive is to sense the winding sheets of burial as they take hold and then as they unwind to leave not fresh air to breathe but a pile of dust. Lazarus, he says, embodies despair and desperation, and he, the man without name, embodies the madness of the paradox thrashing beneath the surface of the paper:
–Go on, she says.
–I–he says. I don't–
She watches him. She smiles. – Go on, she says.
He looks down at his hands.
–Well? she says.
–Lazarus, he says.
–Lazarus?
What man wants, he says, is to speak in the way as he eats. He wants to cry out, to talk, and then for his words to fill himself and the person he is addressing as substantially as a great big chunk of animal meat. That's what we all want. Not the one, not the other. Both together.
Migrations was Josipovici's fourth novel, with Hotel Andromeda last year being his eighteenth, but very little else compares with its extreme expression of the major themes of his work. At 230 pages it is also by far his longest novel, and yet it is perhaps closest to Everything Passes of 2006, which at 60 pages is by far his shortest. A few years after it was published, Josipovici wrote a short afterword to a collection of his reviews in which he describes the reception of this and two later novels:
It is a shock to any artist who has only thought of getting things 'right', of pinning down that elusive feeling which is the source and end of all creative activity, to wake up one morning and find himself labelled 'experimental'. Yet this is what happened to me.The Times and the Daily Telegraph, he says, used the term to patronise or damn with faint praise what didn't fit into the familiar round of English novels. Worse, the London Review of Booksreferred to him as "prominent among those who are anxious to free the novel from any hampering subservience to the outer world" and having "a lingering but still severe case of the Robbe-Grillet syndrome", the first part of which makes no sense with Migrations, steeped as it is in the physical reality of London's streets, unless one assumes the novel should be a branch of reportage. The furore after the publication in 2010 of What Ever Happened to Modernism? and lack of reviews, let alone major awards, for a novel as great as Infinity in 2012 suggests things have not improved. But if, like me, you wish to maintain a contact with the condition that drives you to read in the first place, there is a way to arise and go from such travesties. Watch out for your knee.
“Balloon” (Germany) International Film Showcase
