You must also consider, Milena, the kind of person who comes to you, the 38-year journey lying behind me (and since I’m a Jew an even much longer one), and if at an apparently accidental turning of the road I see you, whom I’ve never expected to see and least of all so late, then, Milena, I cannot shout, not does anything shout within me, nor do I say a thousand foolish things, they are not in me (I’m omitting the other foolishness of which I have more than enough), and the fact that I’m kneeling I discover perhaps only through seeing your feet quite close before my eyes, and by caressing them.
Author: ryan chang
An Extract From Thomas Bernhard’s Correction on Death and Taxidermy
… [But] one day I too shall no longer find a way out, everyone is destined, one day at some moment which is the crucial moment, to find no further way out, that’s how a man is made. … As I ‘d heard something that was different from what I’d been hearing till then, I’d gotten up and gone to post myself at the window, to look outside. The darkness was kept at bay by the workshop lights, Hoeller was busy stuffing a huge bird, I couldn’t see what kind of bird. It was a huge black bird which Hoeller held on his knees, cramming polyurethane into it with a stick. It was eleven o’clock, and inasmuch as Hoeller always got up at four in the morning, all his life, even as a child, he’d always gotten up at four in the morning, because his father also had always been up by four in the morning, everybody in the Aurach valley got up between four and five o’clock in the morning, and so because Hoeller is always up at four in the morning, keeping such late hours, such very long late hours as these in these circumstances, will undermine his health, I thought. From my window up in the garret I kept watching Hoeller down there in his workshop stuffing that huge black bird, how he kept cramming it with more and more stuffing, I thought I’ll watch him from this excellent vantage point until he’s finished stuffing that bird, and so I stood there motionless for a good half hour until I saw that Hoeller had finished stuffing the bird. Suddenly Hoeller had thown the stuffed bird down to the floor, he’d jumped up and run off into the back room where I couldn’t see him anymore, but I waited, looking into the workshop, until I could see Hoeller again, he came back and sat down on his chair again and went back to stuffing the bird, now I noticed a huge heap of polyurethane on the floor beside Hoeller’s chair and I thought this huge heap of polyurethane is now going to be crammed into thi bird which I’d supposed had already been crammed full long since. By stuffing this bird he is making the night bearable for himself, I thought (122-3).
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Watch Gerald Murnane Type In His Writing Room
I call this my literary archive, there are ten drawers, and each of them contains all of the material that went into the making of one or other of my books. But at the back you will find untidy hand written pages, at the front you will find a file copy of the finished book and even all the reviews and comments. … This is part of what I call my chronological archive, um, we just have happened to have opened one of nineteen drawers that we could have opened. And then, I have been a great writer of letters to people, and people write letters to me. In there must be… I couldn’t count them; there must be many thousands of letters in those cabinets. The equivalent for me of emails is the little box of envelopes up there.
Please Unplease Me: A Review of Laura Frost’s The Problem With Pleasure
First, I want to get a bad joke out of the way: it seems cruelly apt to review a scholarly text titled The Problem With Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents (Columbia UP 2013), especially one, while passionate and provocative, that may preclude pleasure for the casual reader. To be expected from a scholarly text, hence the bad joke, but Frost’s study of the vicissitudes of modernist unpleasure performs its argument quite well — The arrays of Unpleasure found in this book do delight and prod the reader in its investigations of everything from stalwart modernist topoi to perfume and farts. Frost’s mission, in her own words, is to “present the interwar debate about pleasure and the rise of unpleasure … as a new way of defining literary modernism more capaciously” (14). Frost wants to collapse the schism between the two divergent interwar poles of “high” and “low” culture and their shared mission to re-stabilize the shocked and distended interwar subject. Frost’s contribution to her field isn’t quite revolutionary, but the methods in which she ties the affect of text and media on the body is pressing and important, and carries weight outside the academy. For it is not simply that the “high” modernists wanted its world to repudiate fast & easy entertainment to engage with the post-World War One space. Rather, they wanted their readers to engage with pleasure in a different key — unpleasure. Seeing the beginnings of literary modernism with the more inclusive Unpleasure rather than Eliotian disdain or Poundian militancy allows us to see how literary modernists not only critiqued vernacular entertainment, but how Jean Rhys, James Joyce and Aldous Huxley were themselves subject to mass cultural motifs in their own texts. “High” and “low” culture were not as mutually exclusive as previously thought, Frost asserts, and the interwar period set the stage for our current moment of pleasure, cultural division, and technological innovation considerably more than we think.
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Portrait of Franz Kafka — Carl Köhler
KCRW Bookworm’s Michael Silverblatt with William Gass (1998)
Riffing Over Gerald Murnane’s Inland
Zadie Smith’s essay, “Man vs. Corpse,” in the New York Review of Books asks us to
Imagine being a corpse. Not the experience of being a corpse—clearly being a corpse is the end of all experience. I mean: imagine this drawing represents an absolute certainty about you, namely, that you will one day be a corpse. Perhaps this is very easy. You are a brutal rationalist, harboring no illusions about the nature of existence. I am, a friend once explained, a “sentimental humanist.” Not only does my imagination quail at the prospect of imagining myself a corpse, even my eyes cannot be faithful to the corpse for long, drawn back instead to the monumental vigor.
“Corpsed” letters may be characterized by a certain kind of desperation that contradicts itself in the act of speech (or writing); by writing, narrators acknowledge the necessity of communication and the inscrutable feeling that s/he has failed in that act of communication. That failure signals the desperation, and so on. How to figure/perform a “corpsed” perspective, outside of reality? Gerald Murnane’s Inland makes a kind of utopia out of death, but not a death as the absence of life. Death as the space wherein all people are irrevocably connected. Death and loss as, perhaps, the only thing that can be shared between us without the mediation of language, with fiction paradoxically as the sole vehicle.
A Riff-Report on Elisabeth Sheffield’s Fort Da: A Report
First steps in my Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and the exponentially more crushing and debilitating fear it would produce each step I took outside of my apartment, required morning chats with my brain. As in: “Brain, when I go out there today, you’re going to make me think x when I see y. I know you’re going to do that, and I expect it”–and here’s the worst part of it–“so bring it on.” I still do it. And it helps. And the silliness of that last phrase hasn’t left. Maybe because of pride, or because it does offer some small affirmation that OCD is distinct from me or, instinctively, “I” feel all therapy is fundamentally justification and posturing. But a necessary justification and posturing nonetheless. This might also apply to literature, criticism, philosophy, art, etc. Bernhard: “When one thinks of death, everything is ridiculous.” Kraszhnahorkai, in an interview with The White Review, says, “there is no medicine.” Just because there is no medicine does not mean that we can not strive for medicine, even if that medicine is “there is no medicine.”
Alternatively, I might try something that the narrator/character/subject/patient/object Rosemarie Romeo Ramee from Elisabeth Sheffield’s novel/report/study/apologia Fort Da: a report (FC2) employs. “Disguised” as a report on her “affair” with a pre-adolescent/pubescent Cypriot boy named Aslan, Ramee confesses and searches for understanding and empathy by externalizing her self, “RR,” in a supposed strict description of the events to a Ms. Wall, who we learn was RR’s AP English 12 instructor. We begin at the end of RR’s story, writing from some where that’s part-prison, part-clinic, with legal prosecution waiting for her. RR’s “account” of the ways in which she sexually, emotionally and physically consumed Aslan is dissociating the “I” away from her own constructions of Self. (For more on this, I recommend Michael W. Clune’s fantastic essay on Beckett and Bernhard at NonSite). My therapist suggested a similar approach. In not so many words, he said “write out your trauma as if it were a play, like stage directions.” But in the attempt to objectify and externalize an ostensible past iteration of my self, at least to Ramee, presupposes failure.
For we know at this stage in evolution, the amygdala has a greater influence on the cortex than the cortex has on the amygdala–allowing emotional arousal dominate and control thinking. A person doesn’t want to be unreasonable, but feeling is a variable that cannot be discounted. // Another is the nature of memory. The inherent inexactitude of the internal record of external events–this must be acknowledged. Yes it must be acknowledged that the neuronal record of reality is selective, if not capricious, a spotty chronicle at best. … Also, it must be conceded that an illness such as cerebral malaria can diminish the reliability of the record even further, smearing the ink, so to speak, deleting entire pages. … Therefore, this account will probably fail as an etiology–the sequence of cause and effect being incomplete. Nevertheless, it will be as rigorous as possible. And she will try not to cry. (19-20).
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Riff #2 on Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters
I’ve been trying to think of a way to talk about Bernhard’s (or, really, the translator Ewald Osers’) style and affect relative to, say, American prose traditions. I turned to some scholarship on old Bernie, and most of the articles focused on how musical forms (the fugue, sonata, etc.) frame Bernhard’s sentences (and, in some cases, the entire narrative, like The Loser). These were very welcome insights. But before I touch on that, I read a quote by the ever-excellent Deb Olin Unferth this morning that helps start a conversation about Bernhard’s style relative to American prose traditions. Here it is:
Prose can be what keeps you wanting to read. Strong prose contains conflict, even at the level of the sentence. If a sentence is pushing against itself, or if each sentence is contradicting what just came before it and you’re wondering how you can hold all these contradictory statements in your mind at once, that’s interesting to me. What you’re getting then is a complex psychology or philosophy as a result of the very sentences that you’re reading. That’s a Lishian way of looking at prose. I subscribe to it. I admire work and I strive to in my own work have that kind of pressure on the individual sentence, so that each sentence is in conflict with what’s around it in some way.
I think you could pick things out of this quote and posture Bernhard into them. Contradiction–surely. Self-imposed pressure–definitely. I would also say these qualities aren’t specific to Lish, though. So-called Lishians often default into a kind of prosody that depends on physical characteristics of sound to help move meaning within a sentence. In other words, sound thematizes presence and produces the emotional effect; and sound thematization is the affect of Lishian prose. So, for example, a sentence that evokes a sharpness and harshness would have a lot of alliterative K-sounds, or something. Diane Williams’ sentences are very proud of this prose. Look at this, from “One of The Great Drawbacks” in Vicky Swanky is a Beauty:
If left to themselves, they fight like fiends or yell out the great news and one of these girls is entirely out of danger.
Notice the alliteration and assonance in the first part of sentence on the F-sounds, the short E’s, and long I’s. From a “craft perspective,” I guess, there’s a sense that making the sounds of the words symbiotic take precedence before plot and character. Composition first depends on making the sounds interesting, and lead the other components into the story. It’s a very different set of restrictions on the writer to depend on the physical properties of language than what Bernhard is doing.
But, I think, Bernhard is one of the most musical writers I’ve ever read. There’s a quote by him somewhere that details his focus on style, and he calls it a “theoretical music.” Where Lishians want the reader to “hear” the prose in the head, Bernhard wants her to feel the consciousness of the ostensible narrator as if she were listening to music; namely, the composition of Old Masters, or Frost, or The Loser. Bernhard’s favorite technique to achieve this effect is repetition with slight variation which, if I remember correctly, is the most infantile way to describe the classical sonata.
Incidentally, he was speaking English, which I found agreeable, but then suddenly also German, very broken German, that broken German which all Englishmen speak when they believe they know German, which, however, is never the case, Reger said, the Englishman probably wanted to speak German rather than English in order to improve his German, and after all why not, when abroad one prefers to speak the foreign language unless one is a blockhead, and so in his broken German he said that he had in fact come to Austria and to Vienna solely for the White-Bearded Man, he was not interested in the museum as a whole, not in the least, he was not one for museums, he hated museums and had always only visited them reluctantly, he had only come to the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum in order to study the White-Bearded Man because back home he had just such a White-Breaded Man hanging over his bed in his bedroom in Wales, in actual fact the same White-Bearded Man, the Englishman said, Reger said.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a sentence by a “Lishian” that was ever this long. Where the musicality of a Lishian sentence is in the very materiality of language, Bernhard performs his music in the construction of the melody (sentence) by arranging the phrases (clauses) in this sort of point-counterpoint call and response. English calls to German, and vice versa, and we get a sense of the character within the rant; all the phrases that repeat “German” respond to Reger finding the English “agreeable” perform his total ambivalence for the Englishman. It makes me think that “Lishian” sentences still aim for a kind of story in the traditional sense, and Bernhard’s aim to stage a mind at work, a mind paralyzed (This was touched on in the Frost post). Less a story than a confession, testimony, absurd anecdote.
“Bach,” An Anecdote by Heinrich von Kleist
Bach, when his wife died, had to arrange for the funeral. The poor man, however, was in the habit of leaving all practical matters to his wife, with the result that when when an old servant appeared, asking him for money to buy mourning crepe, Bach, weeping quietly, his head resting on the table, said, “Ask my wife.”
–Heinrich von Kleist
Riff on Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters
Out of the four or five Bernhard works I’ve read, Old Masters is so far the least enjoyable, at least in terms of “heart.” Concrete and The Loser were both concerned with acceptance of one’s limits, his/her incapacity to be great in the face of their insistence on trying to get there. Here, it is mainly the folly of aesthetic representation, and how achievement and authority in an “old master” is false and arbitrary and patronizing. It seems like it is the most obvious excuse for Bernhard to rage against the art world, and of art making in general. On a formal level, though, it might be the clearest example of what Bernhard repeatedly performs: it is a “staged fiction,” insofar that techniques of theater are implemented through the mode of the “novel.” Bernhard, as always, beautifully writes paradox, ambivalence, and futility in this seamless meshing of form and content. This is the structural dipole–its largest–that is mirrored within the text on levels of theme, syntax, and joke.
Slavoj Žižek on John Carpenter’s They Live and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises
Watch the Cream of Slovene analyze some film in this excerpt from The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. (Via.)
Thomas Bernhard’s Reger on the Purpose of Art
Art is the most sublime and the most revolting thing simultaneously, he said. But we must make ourselves believe that there is high art and the highest art, he said, otherwise we should despair. Even though we know that all art ends in gaucherie and in ludicrousness and in the refuse of history, like everything else, we must, with downright self-assurance, believe in high and in the highest art, he said. We realize what it is, a bungled, failed art, but we need not always hold this realization before us, because in that case we should inevitably perish, he said.
Drei Männliche Figuren in einem Raum — Erhard Schön
~ca. 1538. (via Monoskop).
Thomas Bernhard’s Atzbacher on State-Sanctioned Corpses
Irrsigler has that irritating stare which museum attendants employ in order to intimidate the visitors who, as is well known, are endowed with all kinds of bad behaviour; his manner of abruptly and utterly soundlessly appearing round the corner of whatever room in order to inspect it is indeed repulsive to anyone who does not know him; in his grey uniform, badly cut and yet intended for eternity, held together by large black buttons and hanging on his meagre body as if from a coat rack, and with his peaked cap tailored from the same grey cloth, he is more reminiscent of a warder in one of our penal institutions than of a state-employed guardian of works of art. Ever since I have known him Irrsigler has always been as pale as he now is, even though he is not sick, and Reger has for decades described him as a state corpse on duty at the Kunsthistorisches Museum for over thirty-six years.
–Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters, trans. Ewald Osers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Biblioklept 