Book of the Year: The Man Without Qualities

Still working on the list of books I read this year but number 1 was quite easy to decide. The Man Without Qualities has a forbidding reputation, mainly because of its length and the "difficulty" of ideas it tries to explore and also the fact that it remained unfinished. This book is in every sense a lebenswerk, Musil spent more than twenty years of his life writing it, and when death took him by surprise he still hadn't finished it. Some people are put off by the idea of the absence of closure, specially if the book is such a long one, but reading the novel makes it clear that there could have never have been an ending, at least not in the conventional sense. The book is itself about an impasse, about people and in fact the whole civilization finding itself up against a wall, with no way forward and tries to analyse why and how this came about. This is also the reason why the book has no conventional narrative to speak of - it is not a cross-generational saga about cycle of life, there are no "days-went-by" "winter-followed-summer" kind of linear story-telling. Geometrically if the narrative of a conventional realist novel feels like a straight line then MwQ would be a point, or may be a small circle. There are also no characters in the book you can identify at a surface level, first because there is very little description of their external behaviour, their looks, mannerism, ways of dressing etc and second, because they just belong to a different age. (Unless of course you are the kind of person who likes to gift or receive Complete Works of Nietzsche as a wedding present!) The people in the book belong to a completely different intellectual climate, radically different to our own. Many of these characters are actually based on real-life figures. Ulrich is of course an idealized self-portrait, the character of Arnheim was based the Jewish Foreign Minister of Weimar republic Walter Rathenau who was later assassinated by right-wing thugs, Walter & Clarisse (the Nietzsche couple) are both based on childhood friends of Musil. Diotima herself is modeled after a well-known Viennese society hostess which Musil used to frequent.

Rejection of narrative, well-rounded characters alongwith an absence of major events are only a few aspects of book's difficulty and its innovative style. Much more important is its language itself which is consciously "un-literary." There are no descriptions of nature, the hustle bustle of city life, nothing about weather. In fact it is only in the opening paragraph that we learn about the weather and the way Musil describes it, by taking it to satirical extremes, makes it clear what he thinks about such descriptive language. (I had excerpted it here alongwith an excellent podcast.) Seen from this perspective the length of the book feels even more daunting because it is so unlike the baggy monsters of so much of contemporary fiction, which routinely get called "epic" and "ambitious." So what is inside the book if not a story, events or descriptive language? It is actually written in the style of personal, speculative essay on social, cultural and philosophical questions. The book actually has a chapter which describes in detail what this "essayistic" style of writing really means. It is writing as thinking, writing as solving a problem. Ulrich is after all a professional mathematician. The key according to Musil is tentativeness, scepticism and irony and this is very difficult to achieve in a conventional realist writing, which is based on exact definitions and assertions. The speculative essayistic style also enables Musil to write about individual subjectivity without relinquishing the scientific-analytic position, which is itself the main subject of the book and which also makes it different from other modernist works of its time.

As for the actual philosophical content of the book, I did find it baffling initially since I am not well-read in philosophy, systematically or otherwise. The main philosophical spirit behind the book is Nietzsche but a good understanding of Plato, German philosophy in general and philosophy of science will also help in understanding all the discussions in the book. Ulrich, like Musil himself, is a thinker of Nietzschean bent. He doesn't long for a world of order, a world of false values and false meanings and false "qualities" imposed upon one's self by the outside world. He welcomes the destruction of all these as an opportunity for regeneration, of discovering new meanings and values which are consistent with his scientific worldview. It is true that we can no longer be sure of what is real and what is not but it also means that we now have a sense of "possible" rather than being imprisoned with just a sense of the "real." It means freedom and possibility of rediscovery and knowledge. Although towards the end, the book does get very confusing as Ulrich gets more and more depressed and turns inward alongwith his sister Agathe and frankly it didn't make a lot of sense to me and I was lost somewhere inside it. It was there too that I stopped reading it.

Not many know this but the book is actually very funny. It is essentially a work of satire. Musil's portrait of the Austrian bureaucracy will be familiar to any reader of Kafka. Kafka wasn't making it all up, the whole thing was really as byzantine and ridiculous as he had dreamed in his nightmarish fictions. Even funnier is his portrait of the intellectual class. Paul Arnheim, who is the main villain of the book though a very sympathetic one, wants to achieve "a union of soul and economics." Ulrich himself is a satirical self-portrait of the author. Diotima, like her Platonic namesake and philosopher of Love, is always talking about soul, spirit and the Great Idea even when she is thinking about the act of adultery, which she of course thinks in largely ethical and metaphysical terms. Musil makes her sound like someone out of a Woody Allen movie - think Diane Keaton in Love and Death. It is hilarious and written in a satirical manner but it is actually also a painful and touching portrait of excessive self-consciousness resulting in inaction and confusion. Alongwith Ulrich, Diotima is probably my favourite character in the book. The book actually has a sterling cast of female characters, though some would say that they are all creatures of male fantasies in the sense that they are all highly eroticised and are always discussed in sexual contexts. Funny and erotic, I think I have made a convincing case for the book!

Some personal thoughts about the book before I end the rambling post. The Man Without Qualities tapped into something that has been troubling me for a long time - how to reconcile a deeply ingrained rational and scientific attitude, even to the point of alienating self from the experience of life in the world, with a complete (or at least growing) lack of interest in the external world. Taking refuge in a purely private life is of course the result of not being able to act or take any decisions or make any sense of the confusions that living in the world entails but what is to be done? I have been thinking about the same thing most of the year ever since I read the book, and not surprisingly it is echoed in quite a few other books I read too. The Man Without Qualities didn't offer me any solutions or answers but it did made me realize that the problem is much more serious one. Will the impasse continue in the next year too? I hope not, but probably it will. May be I will reread the book then.

Excerpts from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Two excerpts from Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. First about "a death of one's own" and the second about poetry and experience. The opening paragraph of the book was featured in the post on German Literature Quiz (number 9)


And when I think about the others I have seen or heard of: it is always the same. They all had a death of their own. Those men who carried it in their armour, inside themselves, like a prisoner; those women who grew very old and small, and then on an enormous bed, as if on the stage of a theatre, in front of the whole family and the assembled servants and dogs, discreetly and with the greatest dignity passed away. The children too, even the very small ones, didn't have just any child's death; they gathered themselves and died what they already were and what they would have become.

And what a melancholy beauty this gave to women when they were pregnant and stood there, with their slender hands instinctively resting on their large bellies, in which there were two fruits: a child and a death. Didn't the dense, almost nourishing smile on their emptied faces come from their sometimes feeling that both were growing inside them?

*****

Ah, but poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simple emotions (one has emotions early enough)--they are experiences. For the sake of a simple poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighbourhoods, to unexpected encounters and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else--); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,--and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labour, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very well blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

Rainer Maria Rilke: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is the only novel written by Rilke. Actually calling it a novel will actually be a little confusing. The keyword here is "notebooks" which defines the structural principle behind this prose work. It is not even a diary though it does start off as if it were a set of diary entries - a set of disjointed entries capturing experiences, thoughts and moods of the central character. Malte Laurids Brigge is an aspiring poet from Denmark who is living in Paris. The initial section of the book records his impressions of the city life which he find unrelentingly grim. Indeed some of the passages are the best I have read about the urban misery and the sense of desolation felt by individuals who find themselves adrift in large, indifferent and inhuman cosmopolis. Like all young poets Brigge also worries about the kind of relationship an ideal poet should have with the reality and the world around him. How should one balance the need for solitude and yet be able to immerse oneself in the world in order to gain experience so that it can be transformed into poetry - in other words how to manage the apparent conflict between "absolute inwardness" and being receptive to the outside material world.

This part of the book where Brigge muses about these things is the most interesting and the easiest to read. Unfortunately this covers only a brief section of the book. In much of the later parts of the book Malte Writes about his family history bringing in narratives and stories from Nordic history and mythologies. I was somewhat lost after a while and couldn't really follow what was going on. The book had a lot of extensive notes towards the end but I was too tired to look everything up. Still it is far from being a tedious read. The prose style is always remarkable, full of unexpected comparisons and startling thoughts which will throw even the most indifferent and bored reader off-kilter and make him sit back and take notice. Most of these thoughts are about Death which is a recurring motif and a running theme throughout the book. Brigge has a whole new and complete theory of death. I will post an extract about it later. His conception of death is somewhat pseudo-mystical in the sense the he sees it as an integral part of life itself and not a negation. The emphasis is on the concept of an individual and personal death. The book contains quite a few examples of people struggling to come to terms with their and other people's deaths. Some are full of fear and completely unprepared while others accept death as completely natural and unique. Brigge doesn't approve one over the another. I think the point is that in the end what counts is the "personal" and "unique" death and Brigge thinks that every person should be entitled to it. What he disapproves is the impersonal and mass deaths in the public hospitals and the kind of death poor and destitute people submit to.

In short a very challenging and difficult book and like most challenging and difficult books, very rewarding too. First fifty or so pages are outstanding in whichever way one looks at it, absolutely must read for anybody interested in Rilke's poetry or in anybody's poetry for that matter. Reading the rest and making sense of it will take quite an effort however. I was looking for some nice essays, reviews or reading guides about the book on the internet but couldn't find any. Very disappointing.

German Literature Quiz

I should rather say Germanic literature quiz. Anyway identify the books the following excerpts are from... I have omitted the names of the characters.

1. Farewell [X]-whether you live or stay where you are! Your chances are not good. The wicked dance in which you are caught up will last many a little sinful year yet, and we would not wager much that you will come out whole. To be honest, we are not really bothered about leaving the question open. Adventures in the flesh and spirit, which enhanced and heightened your ordinariness, allowed you to survive in the spirit what you probably will not survive in the flesh. There were moments when, as you "played king," you saw the intimation of a dream of love rising out of death and this carnal body. And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all round-will love someday rise up out of this, too?

2. He was so shaken that he felt compelled to flee the light of the terrace and front garden and hastily sought the obscurity of the rear grounds. Oddly indignant and tender admonitions welled up inside him: "You mustn't smile like that! One mustn't smile like that at anyone, do you hear?" He flung himself on a bench, frantically inhaling the plants' nocturnal fragrance. Then, leaning back, arms dangling, overwhelmed and shuddering repeatedly, he whispered the standard formula of longing-impossible here, absurd, perverse, ridiculous and sacred nonetheless, yes, still venerable even here: "I love you!"

3. Once upon a time there was a poor little boy who had no father or mother. Everything was dead, and there was nobody left in the whole wide world. Everything was dead, and he went away and searched day and night. And because there was nobody left on earth he thought he'd go to heaven. And the moon looked at him so kindly! But when he reached the moon he found it was piece of rotten wood. And then he went to the sun, and when he reached the sun he found it was withered sunflower. And when he came to the stars they were little golden gnats that a shrike had stuck on a blackthorn. And when he wanted to go back to earth, the earth was an upturned pot. And he was all alone. And he sat down and cried, and he's still sitting there still, all alone.

4. We run after them for years, begging for their affection, I thought, and when once we have their affection we no longer want it. We flee from them and they catch up with us and seize hold of us, and we submit to them and all their dictates, I thought, surrendering to them until we either die or break loose. We flee from them and they catch up with us and crush us to death. We run after them and implore them to accept us, and they accept us and do us to death. Or else we avoid them from the beginning and succeed in avoiding them all our lives, I thought. Or we walk into their trap and suffocate. Or we escape from them and start running them down, slandering them and spreading lies about them, I thought, in order to save ourselves, slandering them whereever we can in order to save ourselves, running away from them for dear life and accusing them everywhere of having us on their consciences. Or they escape from us and slander and accuse us, spreading every possible lie about us in order to save themselves, I thought.

5. Because thoughts are something special. Often they are nothing more than accidents that pass away without leaving a trace, and thoughts, too, have their times to live and die. We can have a flash of insight, and then slowly, it fades beneath our touch like a flower. The form remains, but the colours, the scent are missing. We remember them word for word, and the logic of the sentence is completely unimpaired, and yet it drifts ceaselessly around on the surface of our minds and we feel none the richer for it. Until-perhaps years later-all of a sudden another moment comes when we see that in the meantime we have known nothing of it, although logically we knew everything.

6. It is as if a curtain had been drawn from before my eyes, and, instead of prospects of eternal life, the abyss of an ever open grave yawned before me. Can we say of anything that it exists when all passes away, when time, with the speed of a storm, carries all things onward, -- and our transitory existence, hurried long by the torrent, is either swallowed up by the waves or dashed against the rocks? There is not a moment but preys upon you, -- and upon all around you, not a moment in which you do not yourself become a destroyer. The most innocent walk deprives of life thousands of poor insects: one step destroys the fabric of the industrious ant, and converts a little world into chaos. No: it is not the great and rare calamities of the world, the floods which sweep away whole villages, the earthquakes which swallow up our towns, that affect me. My heart is wasted by the thought of that destructive power which lies concealed in every part of universal nature. Nature has formed nothing that does not consume itself, and every object near it: so that, surrounded by earth and air, and all the active powers, I wander on my way with aching heart; and the universe is to me a fearful monster, for ever devouring its own offspring.

7. Hours passed there, hours breathing together with a single heartbeat, hours in which [X] constantly felt he was lost or had wandered farther into foreign lands than any human being before him, so foreign that even the air hadn't a single component of the air in his homeland and where one would inevitably suffocate from the foreignness but where the meaningless enticements were such that one had no alternative but to go on and get even more lost.

8. It is the fulfilment of man’s primordial dreams to be able to fly, travel with the fish, drill our way beneath the bodies of towering mountains, send messages with godlike speed, see the invisible and hear the distant speak, hear the voices of the dead, be miraculously cured while asleep, see with our own eyes how we will look twenty years after our death, learn in flickering nights thousands of things above and below this earth no one ever knew before; if light, warmth, power, pleasure, comforts, are man’s primordial dreams, then present-day research is not only science but sorcery, spells woven from the highest powers of heart and brain, forcing God to open one fold after another of his cloak; a religion whose dogma is permeated and sustained by the hard, courageous, flexible, razor-cold logic of mathematics.

9. So, then people do come here in order to live; I would sooner have thought one died here. I have been out. I saw: hospitals. I saw a man who swayed and sank to the ground. People gathered round him, so I was spared the rest. I saw a pregnant woman. She was pushing herself cumbrously along a high, warm wall, groping for it now and again as if to convince herself it was still there. Yes, it was still there.

10. Several times during the day I felt a desire to assure myself of a reality I feared had vanished forever by looking out of that hospital window, which, for some strange reason, was draped with black netting, and as dusk fell the wish became so strong that, contriving to slip over the edge of the bed to the floor, half on my belly and half sideways, and then to reach the wall on all fours, I dragged myself, despite the pain, up to the window sill. In the tortured posture of a creature that has raised itself erect for the first time I stood leaning against the glass. I could not help thinking of the scene in which poor Gregor Samsa, his little legs trembling, climbs the armchair and looks out of his room, no longer remembering (so Kafka's narrative goes) the sense of liberation that gazing out of the window had formerly given him. And just as Gregor's dimmed eyes failed to recognize the quiet street where he and his family had lived for years, taking CharlottenstraBe for a grey wasteland, so I too found the familiar city, extending from the hospital courtyards to the far horizon, an utterly alien place. I could not believe that anything might still be alive in that maze of buildings down there; rather, it was as if I were looking down from a cliff upon a sea of stone or a field of rubble, from which the tenebrous masses of multi-storey carparks rose up like immense boulders. At that twilit hour there were no passers-by to be seen in the immediate vicinity, but for a nurse crossing the cheerless gardens outside the hospital entrance on the way to her night shift. An ambulance with its light flashing was negotiating a number of turns on its way from the city centre to Casualty. I could not hear its siren; at that height I was cocooned in an almost complete and, as it were, artificial silence. All I could hear was the wind sweeping in from the country and buffeting the window; and in between, when the sound subsided, there was the never entirely ceasing murmur in my own ears.

Frank Wedekind: Spring Awakening

I just finished reading Jonathan Franzen's translation of Spring Awakening, the nineteenth century German play by Frank Wedekind. It is quite good actually, exactly the kind of dark and mysterious tale of sexual awakening that I love. I would love to see it on stage if I get a chance sometime. Incidentally in much of his introduction (low on information and high on polemic, alas!) Franzen rails against a recent Broadway musical adaptation of the play.

"One example of the ongoing danger and vitality of Spring Awakening was the insipid rock-musical version of it that opened on Broadway in 2006, a hundred years after the play's world premiere, and was instantly overpraised. The script that Wedekind had finished in 1891 was far too frank sexually to be producible on any late-Victorian stage... And yet even the cruelest bowdlerizations of a century ago [i.e., the early censored versions] were milder than the maiming a dangerous play now undergoes in becoming a contemporary hit. [....]The result is funny in the same way that bad sitcoms are 'funny' - viewers emit nervous laughter at every mention of sex and then, hearing themselves laugh, conclude that what they're watching must be hilarious."

Even though I haven't seen the Broadway version I can understand what must have happened. It is not hard to fit the play into a standard teenage sexual confusion and frustration genre that the Hollywood loves so much, without realizing that Wedekind's view of human sexuality if far from the standard sexual-liberationist view of "if we only we could get laid as often as we want, everything would be alright." Wedekind saw sexuality as a chaotic and destructive force which is only made worse by our unwillingness to acknowledge and confront it. The play contains some really fierce and merciless caricatures of authority figures, the parents, the representatives of the church and the teachers who all collude in the collective denial of the presence of sexuality in the lives of children leading to some really tragic consequences. (There is some really strong stuff in it - suicide, physical and sexual abuse, rape, botched abortion leading to death etc.)

On the surface the central idea of the play may seem to be anachronistic. Indeed nobody can say that in this age sexuality is something hidden and its presence is not acknowledged enough. Sexualisation of children and the way pornography has become mainstream, it all seems so harmless and normal to us now. But one has to only look closer to realize that this sexuality is a normalized and homogenized version manufactured and foisted on us from outside by the commercial culture. It has no basis in the authentic inner experience. A real authentic sexuality will still be too subversive to handle.

Complete text of the play in an older translation is available here. Complete Review has more information and links. May be Franzen had this review in NYT in his mind when he called the musical version "instantly overpraised."

The same accusations can't be levelled against the movie versions of other plays by Wedekind - the silent German classic Pandora's Box by G.W. Pabst and the French film Innocence which came a couple of years back, both of which are masterpieces. In fact I saw Pandora's Box only recently. I will try to write in more detail about it later. Probably I should look for his Lulu plays on which the film is actually based.

Joseph Roth's Rebellion & Michael Haneke's TV Films

I saw Michael Haneke's film adaptation of Joseph Roth's Rebellion yesterday. I thought I will write something about the book too but then came across this review by James Wood in the Guardian. It is quite good, so I will just link it here. (He has written a longer essay on Roth too which is collected in his book The Irresponsible Self, titled "The Empire of Joseph Roth." I found it too technical but it is also quite good.)

This novella is not as great as his masterpiece The Radetzky March but if you have read that book you will probably want to check this one too. His melancholia and the dark and extremely pessimistic view of human history and human affairs in general is really something you can't shake off easily. For him things like God, Death, Fate, Destiny are all synonymous (he uses capital letters for all). Everything is already hurtling fast on the path towards doom and destruction, even the inanimate things. In common with a lot of Central European literature of that period, there is also an apocalyptic sensibility at work in his books which sees the end of the habsburgh monarchy as the end of the world itself. It was actually the case, specially for the Central European Jews who were left homeless after the rise of ethnic nationalism in the wake of the collapse of the empire, leading to catastrophic consequences just a decade later.

Wood is all praise for his craft and the skill with which he uses language but personally I find it a little overwrought though I can understand why someone can feel excited after encountering a sentence like, "Night attached itself to day, and then melted in the grayly victorious morning," to describe the passage of time. What I love in his books is not the craft, which is quite conventional, specially so if you compare it with his illustrious compatriots and contemporaries (Kafka, Musil et.al.), but rather his worldview and his dark, apocalyptic sensibility that I talked of earlier.

Roth wrote this book early in his career and it is very interesting to see how his ideas about the empire changed from an attitude disrespectful and critical of empire to a pure sentimental elegy. The hero of the novel is a "believer," he believes in the essential justness of the state (and the world) which he sees as an agent of a merciful and just God on earth, even after losing a leg in the war. It is only after a series of personal misfortunes that he realizes his folly and comes to the side of "the heathens," the rebels, the criminals, even the Bolsheviks! In the end though this idea of political revolution itself is given a completely different spin because of his "leftist melancholy" (as Walter Benjamin called it in a different context for a different writer whose I don't remember now.) This idea of moral rebellion against God and connecting to the the authority of an unjust state is already there in Dostoevsky. He even named his chapter in The Brothers Karamazov "Rebellion." It is quite possible that Roth had read Dostoevsky. The final monologue spoken by the hero, hallucinating that he is in the court while actually he is in his final death-throes, feels quite similar to Ivan Karamazov's speech in Dostoevsky's, the same accusation of injustice, the same expression of revulsion towards all authority figures including God, the same "I believe in Your existence but I revile You." Also the way he writes about the byzantine and comically (and tragically) inefficient Habsburg bureaucracy, intent on crushing weak and innocent human beings, does indeed put him in the same league as Kafka and Musil both, who wrote about the same on a much larger scale. (The cover picture above is very suitably Kafkaesque.)

******

Michael Haneke's adaptation of the novella as expected invites all kinds of superlatives - both as a cinematic work on its own and also as an enlightening companion piece to the book. (In fact it received a big applause from a packed audience at the moma.) This is one of those cases where the book and the film adaptation complement each, enhancing appreciation of both. I had read about the Viennese Waltzes that the hero plays on his portable Organ machine in the book but only in the film I really heard how it actually sounded. Haneke of course uses the same theme in other scenes as well, again giving a unity which is not as perceptible in the book. The cast as is usual with Haneke is uniformly brilliant, there is not even a single false note anywhere. He also bookends the story with newsreel footage of the war and the Vienna of the twenties providing a historical context which you otherwise have to bring with yourself when reading the book. The screen palette itself is a kind of faded brown giving it a feel of found footage. Also like in his adaptation of The Castle he uses overhead narration to mimic the omniscient voice in the book. It may seem like an easy way but it is actually designed very carefully, to create just the right ironic and contrapuntal effect between the action onscreen and the narration. I recently saw Fassbinder's Effi Briest, an adaptation of the nineteenth century German novel of the same name by Theodor Fontane, which used the same technique of extensive narration. In this case even many of the dialogues were "acted out" by the narrator. In the beginning the film feels static but as you get into its rhythm it is extremely effective.

The other TV film of Haneke I saw yesterday was not as good. Fraulein with the subtitle "A German Melodrama" looked at best a sub-Fassbinder work. The same subject is treated much more forcefully and effectively in Fassbinder's well known The Marriage of Maria Braun. It also takes a critical look at the speedy revival and regeneration of post-war Germany and shows that moral and spiritual compromise, willful amnesia are just the side-effects of the essential will to live and pursuit of happiness. This film has some complicated cross cuttings between the scenes making it very non-linear so stylistically it can't be compared to Fassbinder but I don't think this way of telling story added anything worthwhile apart from making it very difficult to follow, specially in the beginning. These two tv films also clarified the mystery specially for those who were astonished by his shocking debut The Seventh Continent. He had been honing his craft since quite long before venturing full time into feature film making. He also has an extensive experience directing Austrian theatre which probably explains his facility with the actors. I want to see his Three Paths to the Lake too which is based on a short story by Ingeborg Bachmann. It is sometime in the coming weeks. I had linked to the moma schedule before. Another link (the same exhibition I think) with brief details about his films here.

Life: An Infectious Disease of Matter

Two wonderful excerpts from The Magic Mountain. They are both from the chapter called "Research." These are actually Hans Castorp's thoughts as reads some biology books. It is a fantastic analysis and interpretation of what a scientific-materialist view of life really means. I specially love the second one... (may not be advisable if you are having a depressing weekend)

What was life, really? It was warmth, the warmth produced by instability attempting to preserve form, a fever of matter that accompanies the ceaseless dissolution and renewal of protein molecules, themselves transient in their complex and intricate construction. It was the existence of what, in actuality, has no inherent ability to exist, but only balances with sweet, painful precariousness on one point of existence in the midst of this feverish, interwoven process of decay and repair. It was not matter, it was not spirit. It was something in between the two, a phenomenon borne by matter, like the rainbow above a waterfall, like a flame. But although it was not material, it was sensual to the point of lust and revulsion, it was matter shamelessly sensitive to stimuli within and without - existence in its lewd form. It was a secret, sensate stirring in the chaste chill of space. It was furtive, lascivious, sordid - nourishment sucked in and excreted, an exhalation of carbon dioxide and other foul impurities of a mysterious origin and nature. Out of overcompensation for its own instability, yet governed by its own inherent laws of formation, a bloated concoction of water, protein, salt, and fats - what we call flesh - ran riot, unfolded, and took shape, achieving form, ideality, beauty, and yet all the while was the quintessence of sensuality and desire. This form and this beauty were not derived from the spirit, as in works of poetry and music, nor derived from some neutral material both consumed by spirit and innocently embodying it, as it is the case with the form and beauty of the visual arts. Rather, they were derived from and perfected by substances awakened to lust via means unknown, by decomposing and composing organic matter itself, by reeking flesh.

[...]

So much for pathology, the study of disease, with an emphasis on bodily pain, which at the same time was an emphasis on the body, an emphasis on its pleasures - disease was life's lascivious form. And for its part, what was life? Was it perhaps only an infectious disease of matter - just as the so-called spontaneous generation of matter was perhaps only an illness, a cancerous stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward lust and death, was doubtless taken when, as the result of a tickle by some unknown incursion spirit increased in density for the first time, creating a pathologically rank growth of tissue that formed, half in pleasure, half in defense, as the prelude to matter, the transition from the immaterial to the material. This was creation's true Fall, its Original Sin. The second spontaneous generation, the birth of the organic form from the inorganic, was only the sad progression of corporeality into consciousness, just as disease in an organism was the intoxicating enhancement and crude accentuation of its own corporeality. Life was only the next step along the reckless path of spirit turned disreputable, matter blushing in reflex, both sensitive and receptive to whatever had awakened it.

Crabwalk: Günter Grass

Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the German literary critic (my post about his autobiography here), says that Gunter Grass's novel Crabwalk moved him to tears. That was a big enough recommendation for me. Because, first of all he is a Polish jew and a Holocaust survivor and the the subject matter of the book was the German victims of the war, a subject often exploited by the neo-nationalists in Germany. Also, Reich-Ranicki himself is no fan of Grass. A few years earlier he appeared on the cover of a German magazine tearing (literally) Too Far Afield, an earlier novel by Grass, in which he denounced German reunification by comparing it to Anschluss, Hitler's annexation of Austria. (Ranicki in the autobiography clarifies that the picture was actually a collage and that he was not happy about it.) Given all this I was actually quite disappointed with the book, which is not saying that it is not interesting or is bad. I was just expecting it to be something else.

The book is a part history lesson and a part meditation on how memory, both personal and collective, shapes politics. It sounds like a theoretical and a remote question but for the Germans, who can't take their national identity for granted, it is also an important personal question. The plot revolves around the sinking of a German ship named Wilhelm Gustloff by a Russian submarine towards the end of the second world war. More than ten thousand German civilians -- mostly women and children fleeing the advancing Red army died, which also makes it the worst maritime disaster ever. In the book we get to know about the origin of the ship, the biography of the eponymous figure who was the head of the Swiss Nazi party, a Jew named David Frankfurter who murdered him in Davos much before the war and the Russian naval commander Marinescu who was in charge of the submarine whose torpedo sank the ship. It is no straight-forward history lesson though. The structure of the book is very intricate and it is framed very interestingly. The narrator of the book, a middle aged journalist, was actually born on the rescue boat. He is reluctantly telling the story after being egged on by his mother and "the old man", who is none other than Grass himself. In his search for materials for his story he also comes an internet website and chatroom run by a neo-nationalist German, who it turns is none other than his estranged son. Much of the book is about the arguments in the chatroom that the narrator follows and then reports with his comments.

The part of the book dealing with the sinking of the ship and the histories of the all the figures involved didn't leave much of an impression on me. What I found most impressive was how alert Grass is to the political implications of German history which acknowledges German victims. A few years ago W. G. Sebald's essay collection On the Natural History of Destruction attracted a lot of guarded and sometimes hostile criticism because some critics felt that he was putting the German victims and the victims of Germans, and by implication German war crimes and the War Crimes of the Allies (the firebombing of Dresden), in the same category. Of course there is a technical similarity but talking about both of them can only lead to moral and political confusion. There can be no equivalence there, and any attempt to do so can only appear dishonest. Nobody can doubt Sebald's intentions, which were nothing but his solidarity with the victims of history, the dead and the forgotten ("to whom the greatest injustice was done" as he says) that he shows in all his books. But not every writer can aspire to be of the stature of W. G. Sebald.

Grass is deeply aware of all these political and moral issues inherent in the German history. He clearly sees the dangers of both forgetting and remembering. If you forget you are doing an injustice to the dead, and remembrance on the other hand can potentially revitalize the monsters of nationalism and extremism as he shows in the book through the participants in the chatroom. It was in this context that I found this review by Ruth Franklin somewhat strange:

Considering that Grass has already written so profoundly about the effects of the war, why did he pay any heed to this simplifying and demagogic call to decontextualize German suffering? It is obvious from his earlier work that he once knew how distorting such a reevaluation is: the Danzig trilogy owes its great power not least to his determination to provide a full, even epic picture of the war years. And coming from Grass, Crabwalk's pandering to the politics and the intellectual fashions of the season is worse than disappointing. For not only does it result in a novel stocked with wooden characters and ludicrous dialogue, it also is evidence of Grass's failure to take the lead in exposing the wrongheadedness of the current debate. He, of all people, should have pointed out that the question of whether German suffering should be given priority in the understanding of World War II is fundamentally misguided. For it is a question he had already answered.

I think he is doing no such thing in the book. He is more alive to political realities and its nuances than she claims. If only, most of the criticism I have come across of him is about how he always goes too much overboard on the other side -- too much moral browbeating and self-mortification about German guilt and responsibility. Still the review is a good overview of the politics behind the topic. Also this review by John Updike in the New Yorker. Mostly plot overview but interesting.

Wolfgang Koeppen: The Hothouse

Journalist and author Timothy Garton Ash enthused about Germany in a recent essay on the Oscar winning film The Lives of Others saying that, "No nation has been more brilliant, more persistent, and more innovative in the investigation, communication, and representation—the re-presentation, and re-re-presentation—of its own past evils." I was reminded of these words while reading The Hothouse by German novelist Wolfgang Koeppen. It is a little difficult to summarise but there is no mistaking the accusation underlying the disjointed and disconnected montage of images, thoughts and sense impressions which form the bulk of the book i.e. Germany after the war was in a hurry to "move on." Blinded by the "economic miracle" of the post war boom and the contingencies of a nascent cold war realpolitik, the Germans had enveloped themselves in a collective act of willful amnesia.

At the start of the novel Keetenheuve, the middle aged politician and a member of the Bundestag (the German parliament) has just arrived in Bonn to attend a party meeting. His wife has died recently and he seems to be deeply depressed and grieving, even though his relationship with his wife were not so good. He sees the meeting as a final chance to do something for the country and for himself; a way of finally doing something about the "mild futility of his existence." He doesn't succeed in doing anything about it though. Over the course of the next two days the novel charts the process of his mental collapse and psychological dissolution. He feels alienated among the politicians who are more interested in their respective career than real politics. Nobody is interested in mourning the past, everybody is in a hurry to move on and start afresh. He is further oppressed by the willful blindness of everybody to the continuation of the Nazi legacy. He feels the presence of a "Nazi idiom" in the design of the new buildings representing the so-called new Germany. The wheels of the train remind him of Wagner. There are many other similar references to Nazism throughout the novel. It is clear that he is transposing his inner life on to his surroundings and that the basic problem is that of psychology, rather than politics. What he wants is some kind of collective mourning for the past. This inability to mourn, as Freud suggested too in his essay "Mourning and Melancholia," can result in serious psychological consequences. An indeed the novel ends in as gloomy manner as it can be imagined.

This need for "collective mourning" was a theme that W.G. Sebald also returned to again and again in his novels. In his essay "On the Natural History of Destruction" he explicitly criticised the post-war Trummerliteratur literary movement ("literature of the ruins") for its failure to tackle, or indeed in perpetuating the collective amnesia about the recent past. In the essay he was talking specifically about the German victims of allied firebombings of German cities but in his fiction too, he always returns to this theme again and again, and most often victims of Germans. Michael Hofmann in his introduction says that this (and his other two novels on the same subject) were not received favourably by the mainstream literary establishment which was in the favour of "new start" and "clean slate" school of writing. Koeppen lived long but wrote very little mainly as a result of this. Though later he was eulogised by Gunter Grass and Marcel Reich-Ranicki as one of the greatest of post-war German writers. (In fact in Ranicki's autobiography the chapter on Koeppen stands out conspicuously because he rarely has anything nice to say about any of his contemporary authors.)

The Hothouse is often very difficult to follow. It is written in the style of an unbroken stream of consciousness and the disjointed, fragmented prose style takes some time getting into. There were also many references to German politics and culture which escaped me at many places. And as my summary above would have indicated, it is also very, very gloomy. In fact it is downright claustrophobic and oppressive. Reading these German books I was also thinking about how much unhappiness these Germans have brought into this world, both for themselves and for others. But that's a subject for another post. A couple of reviews from the new york times and TLS. There is also a nice introduction by Michael Hofmann who also translated it.

Suicide in Vienna

from Wittgenstein's Vienna by Janik and Toulmin, an account of a few Viennese celebrities who committed suicide during the early years of twentienth century:

"If the Habsburg Empire's national, racial, social, diplomatic and sexual problems were as grave as we have suggested, the Empire's suicide rate should have been correspondingly high. The list of prominent Austrians who were to die by their own hands is, in fact, both long and distinguished. It includes Ludwig Boltzmann, the father of statistical thermodynamics; Otto Mahler, the brother of the composer, who was not lacking in musical talent himself; Georg Trakl, a lyric poet whose talents have been rarely surpassed in the German language; Otto Weininger, whose book Sex and Character had made him a cause celebre, only a few months before his suicide in the house where Beethoven died; Eduard van der Null, who was unable to bear the criticism that was leveled upon the Imperial Opera House he designed; Alfred Redl, whose story has already been told; and no less than three of the Ludwig Wittgenstein's own elder brothers. Perhaps the most bizarre case is that of General Baron Franz von Uchatius, the designer of the 8-cm. and 9-cm. cannon. His crowning achievement was to have been the gigantic 28-cm. field piece; but, when the weapon was tested, the barrel split, and a few days later Uchatius was found dead in his arsenal, having cut his own throat. Even the Imperial-and-Royal house was not spared. In 1889, at his lodge in Mayerling, Crown Prince Rudolf took his life and that of the woman he loved, Baroness Maria Vetsera, in circumstances that were more lurid than romantic. These were few of the men for whom Vienna, the City of Dreams, had become a city of nightmares past further bearing."

Arthur Schnitzler, the Viennese writer, brilliantly captures the suicidal mindsets of the common people in his stories like Fraulein Else and Lieutenant Gustl (both small masterpieces.) (In fact, one of his daughters committed suicide too in situations similar to what he wrote years earlier in the novella Fraulein Else.)

Apparently things haven't improved at all even after so many years. At least that's what one gathers from reading recent Austrian literature. Most famous of them is of course Thomas Bernhard. Almost all of his characters invariably make a visit to the famous Steinof Asylum and who perhaps don't commit suicide only because they have found someone who will listen to their rants and report it to the readers! I am also reminded of Michael Haneke's truly frightening and unnerving (and very unfunny unlike Thomas Bernhard) debut The Seventh Continent. The way Haneke charts a Viennese family's slow path to self-destruction makes it one of the most difficult-to-watch films ever.

A self-critical tendency in writers is very common. In fact in a way, that is the primary job of the writer -- to remain dissatisfied with himself and the society he or she is part of. But even by that standard Austrian writers are in an entirely different league. The viciousness and fierceness of loathing and contempt for their country and countrymen that these writers muster make them somewhat unique among all national literatures. They even have a special term for it -- they call it "anti-heimat literature." Thomas Bernhard (or at least his characters) doesn't just hate his countrymen, he even hates the Austrian landscapes. For him even the Austrian air is poisonous! The Austrian tourism department must be happy that these writers are not so famous. If one has nothing but the accounts by Musil, Kraus, Bernhard, Bachmann, Jelinek and others one will be totally convinced that if there is a hell on earth it is Austria!

The Author of Himself: Marcel Reich-Ranicki

An autobiography of a book reviewer sounds inconceivable but this is no ordinary autobiography. The back cover claims that more than half a million hardback copies of this book were sold in Germany and that it was "no. 1 bestseller for 53 consecutive weeks." Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the polish-jewish literary critic, is obviously a very popular figure in Germany. He is also loathed vigorously, mostly by resentful authors. He has the reputation (unjustified he says) of being a "literary executioner." One of his collection of book reviews is called "Nothing but Drubbings." His enemy list contains who's who of modern German literature. He once appeared on the cover (it was actually a montage) of the Speigel magazine literally tearing apart a Gunter Grass novel. Elsewhere the Austrian writer Peter Handke portrayed him as a "barking and slobbering 'leader of the pack' in whom 'there was something damned' and whose 'killer lust' had been further enhanced by the ghetto." Another writer Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, called for a machine gun to mow him down, and the poet Christa Reinig wrote fantasies about his death from cancer. There was also a book by Martin Walser called Death of a Critic, a satirical narrative about an author murdering a reviewer. It was highly controversial because of accusations of anti-semitism. He is also accused of being power-hungry, dogmatic, conservative and prone to exaggerations and simplifications in his reviews (he hosts a very popular TV show.) He relates all these charges and stories and tries to answer them with a remarkable good humour. It really makes for a very entertaining reading. And I am not even familiar with all the authors he talks about in the book. I have barely heard of names like Max Frisch, Wolfgang Koeppen, Walter Jens and many others.

MRR was born in Poland to Jewish parents. The family emigrated to Berlin in the late twenties where he grew up and had his early education. The first section of the book where he describes his introduction to the "land of culture" are the best. He seems to remember every single book he read, every single play he attended and not just names, his detailed impressions of every single performance. He even remembers his school assignments (his essay on Georg Buchner ran to three pages)! It is a riveting account. Soon however dark clouds gather. He is first denied a place in the university because he was Jew and soon is deported back to Poland.

Soon after Germany invades Poland and all the Jews of Warsaw are sent to the ghetto. His account of the life in the Warsaw ghetto where he found work in the Jewish council as a german translator is equally riveting. There is also a moving portrait of Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Jewish coucil in the Ghetto in whose office he worked. (There is also a very moving account of Czerniakow's life in the documentary Shoah where Raul Hilberg comments on his diaries.) In the ghetto he also meets the woman who was to remain by his side for the rest of his life. They soon marry in haste because he had a job and as a result he gets the "life number" which meant that he wouldn't be the first to be sent to Treblinka. Soon the deportations start and his parents are sent to the gas chambers. The last words Tosia, his wife, hears from his mother were, "Look after Marcel." He himself alongwith his wife manages to escape after the ghetto uprising and finds himself sheltered by a working class family on the outskirts of Warsaw. The head of the family named Bolek is given to drunken ravings. In one of his Vodka induced ravings he says, ""Adolf Hitler, the most powerful man in Europe, has decreed: these two people here shall die. And I, a small typesetter from Warsaw, have decided: they shall live." They work for him in the basement which is actually a hole in the ground and MRR keeps him entertained by telling stories from literary classics of Shakespeare, Goethe and Kleist. Bolek remains indifferent to the plight of Hamlet or Werther but is moved by the stories of King Lear and Prince of Homburg. After almost two years the Red Army finally arrives on the Polish border and they are finally liberated. Sounds like the stuff for a novel? Well, Gunter Grass fictionalized this story in his novel Diary of a Snail (I haven't read it).

Times Literary Supplement called this book "an unforgettable work of Holocaust literature" which to me sounds like an over-praise. It is very well written but is also a very straight-forward narrative. He touches on the painful paradox of the coexistence of German barbarism and the sublime German culture but never really comes to term with it. He says his fatherland is nether Poland nor Germany, it is German Literature. He never really goes into the complex questions that historians of Germany have been grappling with. How far German culture is to be blamed for what happened? Was it just a work of a few criminal barbarians or was it a more organic result of German cultural history? He never really goes into these things. Which is a pity, because he is at such a vantage position to answer these questions.

There is a brief section in the middle about his life in post-war communist Poland where he worked as a spy, yes a Spy in the London Polish consulate, but is soon disillusioned by the restrictions imposed on him by the communist party and manages to escape to west Germany. His rise there from a lowly book reviewer to the literary editor of FAZ, the most powerful literary position in Germany, is meteoric. The long third section is virtually a parade of who's who of post-war German intellectual history. Gunter Grass, Adorno, Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg Bachmann, Brecht, and so many others, they are all there. He relates anecdotes, shares his opinions and reflects on the relationships he had with all the writers, almost all of which eventually soured in the end. This section is an extremely fascinating guide to the history modern german literature, told from a very unique point of view.

Overall I was slightly disappointed with it because he mostly skirted things I was personally more interested it. One of these as I mentioned above is the issue of how far should one hold German culture to be culpable for anti-semitism and Nazism. Other issues like German-Jewish relations in post-war Germany or the questions of German guilt are also, if not completely absent, are almost always treated as an aside. He does mention these things but only in bits and pieces, here and there. He never tackles these head-on. In the last chapter he writes about the historikerstreit ("historian's dispute") but then just stops at expressing his disappointment at the whole affair and saying that he was particularly pained because of the involvement of Joachim Fest, an editor at FAZ and a personal friend for many years. He evidently disapproves of these right wing historians who played a major role in the dispute but doesn't discuss what kind of relationship should jews have with Germany, or what whould the new German nationalism look like or what Holocaust means for contemporary Germany.

Still I think these are minor quibbles. In short it is a marvellous account of a truly remarkable life. Must read for anyone interested in modern German history and literature. Some reviews I could find: The Observer and two reviews from TLS here and here.

Two Bleak Poems

Two morbid and bleak poems by Austrian poet Georg Trakl. These are two of his last poems that he wrote while stationed at a town called "Grodek" in Galicia (currently in Ukraine) during the first world war. Not long after he committed suicide. First of both translations are taken from this PDF book which contains his poems and a brief introduction. The second ones are from an introductory book I am reading. (The online dictionary says "Klage" means "complaint", I don't know why it is translated as "mourning.")

There is also this comment in the book that I found interesting:

"In Anglo-american poetry, as opposed to German, the issue is no longer the sublime style versus the anti-sublime; the reign of the sublime, which has never had the hold on English that it has on German, was effectively destroyed through the efforts of Eliot and Pound early in this century. For poets such as Bly, Wright, Creely, and James Dickey, the central issue is directness of vision as opposed to discursive reasoning in poetry; and in his critical pronouncements Bly has constantly invoked Trakl has the great modern visionary poet."



Mourning

The dark eagles, sleep and death,
Rustle all night around my head:
The golden statue of man
Is swallowed by the icy comber
Of eternity. On the frightening reef
The purple remains go to pieces,
And the dark voice mourns
Over the sea.
Sister in my wild despair
Look, a precarious skiff is sinking
Under the stars,
The face of night whose voice is fading.

Klage

Sleep and death, the somber eagles
Resound all night around this head:
The icy waves of eternity
Would swallow
Man's golden image. The purple body
Is dashed to pieces on horrible reefs
And the dark voice laments
Over the sea.
Sister of stormy melancholy
See, a fearful boat is sinking
Under stars,
Under the silent face of the night.

Grodek

At evening the woods of autumn are full of the sound
Of the weapons of death, golden fields
And blue lakes, over which the darkening sun
Rolls down; night gathers in
Dying recruits, the animal cries
Of their burst mouths.
Yet a red cloud, in which a furious god,
The spilled blood itself, has its home, silently
Gathers, a moonlike coolness in the willow bottoms;
All the roads spread out into the black mold.
Under the gold branches of the night and stars
The sister’s shadow falters through the diminishing
grove,
To greet the ghosts of the heroes, bleeding heads;
And from the reeds the sound of the dark flutes of
autumn rises.
O prouder grief! you bronze altars,
The hot flame of the spirit is fed today by a more
monstrous pain,
The unborn grandchildren.

Grodek

In the evening the autumnal woods resound
With deadly arms, the golden plains
And blue lakes, over which the sun
Darkly revolves; the night embraces
Dying warriors, the wild lamenting
Of their broken mouths.
Yet quietly in the low pasture they gather
Red clouds, in which the wrathful God lives,
The spilt blood, moonlike coolness;
All streets run into black decay.
Under golden branches of night and stars
The sister's shadow hovers through the silent grove
To greet the spirits of the heroes, the bleeding heads;
And softly in the reeds the dark flutes of autumn resound.
Oh prouder mourning! You brazen altars,
Today the hot flame of the spirit is fed by an immense pain,
The unborn grandchildren.

More on Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften

The Man Without Qualities is surely one of greatest titles for a novel ever. The original German, Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften, sounds even better, with its harsh music so typical of the German language. I like this title because it manages to capture all the grave ideas discussed in the book even when it itself is so simple and direct. I had earlier posted an excerpt which throws some light on the title of the novel. Basically Musil is alluding to the scientific (i.e. modern) ways of looking at things and defining them. It is alright to define, say water, in terms of its physical and chemical qualities -- its smell, colour or its behaviour in a chemical reaction. You can chart all the qualities of water on a paper and you will get water in the end. But what if one follows the same process with a human being? We will then ultimate end with a man without qualities or even worse, qualities without a man. In a way Musil is repeating what Nietzsche had already said, about the "death of god" and also the idea of soul and personal identity but reading Musil is in a way more harrowing and also exhilarating (not that I have read Nietzsche) because one gets to know what it really means to live in a world without absolutes and with the knowledge of the hollowness one feels inside oneself.

Musil also takes over from Nietzsche and goes beyond. He interpolates his ideas into the domains of interpersonal relationships, sexual desires, social and political institutions and finds the same hollowness everywhere. Through the character of Arnheim Musil paints a hilarious caricature of Capitalism and financial institutions, which in a way is not far from reality. Without a moral core, or a conscience at the centre of things, they are more or less systems of loot, injustice and exploitation. Of course there are legal systems in place which ensure that these things do not happen or at least they are in limits but the entire legal system itself is based on shaky foundations. Our ideas about human intentionality and personal responsibilty require radical redefinitions in the light of the idea of "man without qualities". There are passages in the novel about a sex-murderer named Moosbrugger which analyses in detail what do law and justice mean in this post-Nietzschean world, in which the Kantian absolutes (that the Hero's father believes in) have been shown to be illusions and lies. It is not that people aren't aware of these things but they often invent pompous abstractions and delude themselves. In a way he also shows why such an essential concept and a word like "soul" has become so meaningless in our contemporary culture, with our own shares of Arnheim and other charlatans and hypocrites and spiritual peddlers like him.

Another aspect of the novel which struck me, and I have mentioned it before too, is the total absence of the feeling of nostalgia over the passing of the old order. Ulrich, the novel's hero, for example finds the idea of god "embarrassing", an idea I am sure the narrator feels sympathetic towards too. Another noteworthy thing is the scorn Musil heaps on the austro-hungarian empire, or at least its symbols -- military, bureaucracy and aristocracy. I was even more shocked because I had read Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March a few months back and my idea of the the austro-hungarian empire was still based on that book. Now after having read the first volume of MwQ, Roth's book feels like a bloodbath of sentimentality (I still love that book very much though.) Musil knows that old stability and order was based on lies and falsehoods and there is no choice but to give way to its collapse and move forward. Anything incompatible with science, that longing for childish faith just won't do anymore. It is also noteworthy that unlike his fellow modernists, most notably Eliot perhaps who reached the same conclusions after similar cultural diagnosis, he is not ready to succumb to the easy temptations of preservations of culture and order through Fascism. He is even more critical of such easy solutions. In fact reading this book one is awed at the prophetic insight he had into where Europe was heading towards. He knew everything, saw everything and he also understood everything. He is bitterly (sometimes in a good humoured way too) critical of any idea that smacks of nationalism, militarism, conservatism, cultural chauvinism and fascism.

There are many more things to say about the book, most notably its extreme form and structure and also the way Musil portrays the female consciousness from the inside. I think it must be one of the most extreme cases, it is way beyond what even Tolstoy, Flaubert or even Henry James could do with their female characters. (I might be wrong here, I am interested in what more learned readers, feminists and literary critics think about it. I have read that in second volume the character of Agathe is even more complete and detailed.) I am now on my way into the second volume. More posts on the book will continue.

Previous posts on the book here and here.

Georg Büchner: Lenz

Literary representations of madness and melancholia are not that uncommon but not many can rival Georg Buchner's short story Lenz in the truthfulness of its depiction and insights into a mind coming apart. (Buchner's play Woyzeck is another masterpiece of the genre, and Werner Herzog's movie adaptation is excellent too.) Lenz is based on the real life events from the life of the eponymous German writer (wiki page here) who was Goethe's contemporary. Lenz, after an attack of paranoid schizophrenia and following an advice from a friend, visited an evangelical minister and philanthropist by the name of Oberlin in the hope of getting some relief. The story describes Lenz's visions, torments and thoughts once he arrives in that mountainous region and ends with his departure for the town of Strasbourgh. Lenz later died in a state of complete madness.

What is most remarkable is that though the account is written in third person, it is so completely allied with Lenz's skewed perspective that it creates an uncanny feeling of inhabiting Lenz's mind and yet maintaining a detached understanding of the subject. For example this passage, it will seem as if it is being described by a detached narrator who is just trying to create a background "effect" before the arrival of the hero, but soon it turns out that it is supposed to show the mental state of Lenz and everything is filtered through Lenz's fractured consciousness. It is breathtaking long sentence...

Only once or twice, when the storm forced the clouds down into the valleys and the mist rose from below, and voices echoed from the rocks, sometimes like distant thunder, sometimes in a mighty rush like wild songs in celebration of the earth; or when the clouds reared up like wildly whinnying horses and the sun's rays shone through, drawing their glittering sword across the snowy slopes, so that a blinding light sliced downwards from peak to valley; or when the stormwind blew the clouds down and away, tearing into them a pale blue lake of sky, until the wind abated and a humming sound like a lullaby or the ringing of the bells floated upwards from the gorges far below and from the tops of the fir trees, and a gentle red crept across the deep blue , and tiny clouds drifted past on silver wings, and all the peaks shone and glistened sharp and clear far across the landscape; at such moments he felt a tugging in his breast and he stood panting, his body leaned forward, eyes and mouth torn open; he felt as though he would have to suck up the storm and receive it within him. He would stretch himself flat on the ground, communing with nature with a joyfulness that caused pain. Or he would stand still and lay his head on the moss, half closing his eyes, and then everything seemed to recede, the earth contracted under him, it grew as small as a wandering star and plunged into a rushing stream that sparkled by beneath him, But these were only moments, and then he would get up clear-headed, stable and calm, as though a shadow-play had passed before him. He had forgotten it all.

Also interesting is that how Buchner presents nature as a destabilising and oppressive force, something diametrically opposite to the romantics, or even the nature descriptions in Goethe's Young Werther.

The story also touches on an interesting philosophical debate surrounding an aesthetic issue. Lenz is vehemently critical of idealists and thinks that only simple mimetic representational role of art is valuable:

He said: God has created the world the way it should be, and we cannot cobble together anything better, we should just try to copy it as best we can. I demand in all things - life, the possibility of existence, and then all is well. There is then no point in asking whether something is beautiful or ugly; the feeling that something has been created possesses life stands above these qualities and is the only criterion in the matters of art. Besides, this is quite a rarity; you can find it in Shakespeare, and we encounter it totally in folk-songs and sometimes in Goethe. All the rest can be thrown in the fire.

It is interesting because the story itself is far from a representation of the objective world. Indeed, one of the sources of Lenz's madness is that he is not able to extricate his own consciousness from that of the outside world and that he thinks the whole world is just a figment of his imagination and extension of his own mind.

I had read Woyzeck before but I am yet to read his other plays. He didn't write much, in fact it comes as a shock to learn that he died at a ridiculously young age of 23 from Typhus. It is even more surprising because he doesn't come across as just another intuitive genius, or at least not just that, but someone who had spent a lot of time reading and thinking about other people's ideas and forming his own opinions before expressing it in his writing. I will post about some of his other works later.