Victor Halfwit: A Winter's Tale, by Thomas Bernhard

As a child I didn't read books. At least, I have no memory of doing so. My teacher in primary school once read to us James & the Giant Peach, and I enjoyed that, so why didn't I rush straight to Roald Dahl's other books? I don't know. Still, it can't be true that I didn't read because, a few years ago browsing in a small shop dedicated to children's books, I found a display of Ladybird Books' Well Loved Tales, reprints of editions I recognised as part of my childhood.

The moment I saw the cover of The Gingerbread Boy, involuntary memory washed over me. My fascination with the image of the gingerbread boy himself is particularly distinct. I can see now that he is running away but then, as a child, it wasn't so clear. I could see only a two-dimensional figure, though of course "two-dimensional" meant nothing to me. His odd way of running must have made me wonder what he was doing exactly; it didn't look like running. And why is he smiling? I'm sure I didn't know, and this is why I found it mysterious and captivating. But the distance between the content of my innocence then and my knowledge now is almost impossible to close outside of that momentary wash.

Other features in the series have a similar if slightly dimmer aura: the size of the elves against the shoes in The Elves and the Shoemaker, the presence of the pea beneath the layers of blankets in The Princess and the Pea, the contemplative demeanor of the ape in The Beauty and the Beast and the disdainful remove of the black goat in The Three Billy-Goats Gruff (which looks like it influenced the cover of U2's October). I should be clear: these are not Proustian reveries in which remote times and places merge into one, but something less grand, a fleeting sensation, a shadow of memory. I have no memory of the stories, only the images and the fascination they summoned then returns to me in placeless, wordless memory.

I am now fascinated by this fascination: what is its cause? If the gingerbread boy's oddness stands out, the others are not so clear. With adult knowing one may apply Freudian analysis to the blankets, aligning perhaps with Kafka's disgust at his parents' unmade bed, but I think the explanation is much simpler: they each manifest the part of the story that writing cannot contain. That is, the fascination created by storytelling itself, the inexplicable enchantment of the imagined world. Perhaps this is why graphic novels are so popular now, and my own puzzlement at this popularity – and an inability to share in it – is due precisely to my lack of childhood reading. This is no doubt true, but I think there's a deeper reason.

In 1837, Soren Kierkegaard wrote there were two ways of telling stories to children with "a multitude of false paths in between".

The first is the way unconsciously adopted by the nanny, and whoever can be included in that category. Here a whole fantasy world dawns for the child and the nannies are themselves deeply convinced the stories are true […] which, however fantastic the content, can’t help bestowing a beneficial calm on the child. Only when the child gets a hint of the fact that the person doesn’t believe her own stories are there ill-effects – not from the content but because of the narrator’s insincerity – from the lack of confidence and suspicion that gradually develops in the child. The second way is possible only for someone who with full transparency reproduces the life of childhood, knows what it demands, what is good for it, and from his higher standpoint offers the children a spiritual sustenance that is good for them. [Trans. Alastair Hannay, the ellipsis is in the original]

I suspect with graphic novels the problem for me is that the graphical content cannot bestow a beneficial calm, and this is because, put as simply as possible, the novels that drew me into reading (and thereby bestowed calm) were adult novels aware of what they cannot contain, an awareness necessary to form and content (Proust's would be the earliest example) which nevertheless sought that lack against nature. And the addition of graphics to a text is a shortcut, an unwitting act of insincerity. Perhaps I was too far from childhood fascination to maintain ready access to it, while those readers with an uninterrupted passage from the freedom of childhood books to reading for social integration and acceptance feel drawn to the beneficial calm afforded by the gesture of sincerity implicit in graphic novels, even if that means they are told, inevitably, by someone who knows the stories are not true.

Kierkegaard contrasts the two paths of storytelling to the false paths which "crop up by coming beyond the nanny position but not staying the whole course and stopping half-way". But how can modern writers stay the whole course if full transparency means knowingness inimical to fascination? It can't be a coincidence that the most popular children's books of recent years – JK Rowling's and Philip Pullman's – are enjoyed by many of the same readers, albeit "ironically". Postmodernists need sincerity too.

Thomas Bernhard's story for children, Victor Halfwit: A Winter's Tale, first published in Austria in 1966 with the subtitle "a winter's tale not just for kids", and now translated by Martin Chalmers and published by Seagull Books in an extraordinarily extravagant illustrated book, may be an example of Kierkegaard's false path. Had it been closer to a graphic novel, it may have found one of the other two.

The story itself is typical Bernhard: dark and charming, brutal and funny, moving and disturbing, all at the same time. That is, not each of these in turn but all at the same time. A doctor in Traich is walking to Föding through the "high forest" late one night – "this is what you have to picture" he says, the time of night is important – on his way see a patient with "an ailment of the head", when he stumbles upon a man lying in the snow, unable to move. From his prone position he introduces himself as Victor Halfwit, a man with two wooden legs: "the locomotive tore them from my body!". Victor is delighted as, had the doctor not arrived just then, he would surely have died of the cold and, "as you know, the most horrible death occurs when one freezes to death." You can expect children to love this. The rest of the very short story is taken up with Victor's explanation of how he came to be trapped in the high forest and what the doctor does to help him.

From Victor Halfwit illustrated by Sunandini Banerjee

 
I've noted before how interrupted routines, particularly interrupted walking routines, recur in Bernhard's fiction: the early novel Gargoyles and the later novel The Cheap-Eaters are not included there but suit comparison with Victor Halfwit, the first featuring a doctor on his rounds meeting grotesque characters, the second a scientist missing one leg changing restaurants on a whim. So what difference does having illustrations make to the Bernhardian experience? One particularly effective feature is emphasis of the comedy. The doctor notices that Victor is even more delighted when he learns of his rescuer's profession. He is happier than if he had been a plumber, an electrician, a baker or a farmer. In a normal book, this information would take up two lines of text, three at most, which one would scan without pause. Here it covers ten pages! Two pages count for the doctor's comments, then there are two for each profession mentioned. On first reading, each page provokes smile upon smile as the unnecessary excess increases. Each page-turning pause is a perfectly-timed caesura. Yet while the collages representing each profession in the abstract are impressive and fun, they seem more decorative than illustrative. (You can see more at Sunandini Banerjee's Facebook page.) Had each been related directly to the story and the interaction of characters, I wonder how much more captivating they would be. A regular graphic novel reader, one for whom illustration itself is a narrative, would be a better judge. Perhaps they would be enchanted by the illustrations just as I was by the Ladybird books. However, I longed for the straightforward representation offered by the latter. In the former, nowhere is the doctor or Victor Halfwit depicted. Sometimes there was little compulsion to look at anything but the words before turning the page. Perhaps, however, if they had been depicted, each caesura would have been missed as one studied the relation of one character to the other before reading the text.

Late on, there is a two-page spread featuring eight wooden grotesques in a distinctly medieval Germanic style, one of whom I decided looks like Victor Halfwit. This emphasised to me what the rest refuses and which I missed. Perhaps though, as the doctor says: "this is what you have to picture".

“I am no longer capable of writing about”: The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956

Soon Beckett’s stipulation that only letters with a bearing on his work can be published will be repeated as often as Kafka’s request to Max Brod. The difference is that we may regret Beckett’s executors were not so disloyal. What ever the riches the letters contain, we will always wonder about those bearing on the life. However, the latest volume stresses the unavoidable and indeed necessary nature of such wonder.

The cover of volume two announces letters from 1941 to 1956, yet the first letter is dated 17th January, 1945. The missing years were those of war, most of which Beckett spent living and working in a farming community deep in the “free zone” having escaped occupied Paris on the brink of arrest. From there he sent postcards to his family in Ireland, which they didn’t receive and, on January 12th 1941, he sent a “pre-printed lettercard” to James Joyce. A facsimile is shown in the introduction. Joyce died the next day.






If we cannot have direct access to what Beckett experienced in that time, it remains indirectly sensible. The anxious verve of the brilliant young writer is replaced by a quieter man, still gravely lyrical yet less prone to hyperbole, much more forgiving of third parties (unless it’s Alexander Trocchi) and more focused on writing, just writing. What makes the editors’ task particularly daunting (that is, in persuading the executors to publish) is Beckett’s reluctance to discuss the detail of his work. When he does mention what he has written, he is excessively dismissive. So, rather than offer a review of the letters, I want to focus on this apparent oddity.

It is odd because Beckett was exceptionally learned and eloquent – the letters to Georges Duthuit, the major highlight of this collection, are proof enough of both – and before the war published critical essays, including the monograph on Proust. There is strong evidence of diverse learning in his fiction too: Molloy likes anthropology because of “its inexhaustible faculty of negation”. This is no divine innocent at work. One expects at least one letter to raise local decisions made during his famous “siege in a room” while writing Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. Yet the nearest he gets is to comment on the possibility of an overall title: “this work is a complete whole only in so far as one takes for granted the impossibility of going on”. So much, at least, for Beckett’s alleged pessimism. What he tells the German translator Hans Naumann suggests it was nothing new: when he knew James Joyce they “seldom talked literature, he didn't like doing it, neither did I.”

He has to be more open about the plays: while Waiting for Godot is in production, the director Roger Blin learns “the spirit of the play ... is that nothing is more grotesque than the tragic”. Otherwise he avoids all requests for insight and interviews and makes only one public statement about his relation to the play: “All that I have been able to understand I have shown.” Silence, then, Beckett claims, is not due to having anything to hide, but ignorance. “You may put me in the dismal category of those who, if they had to act in full awareness of what they were doing, would never act.” Is this disingenuous? The answer, which can be neither yes nor no, may reveal the uncommon nature of Beckett’s non-method.

Once he is famous Beckett receives letters from enquirers curious about the origins of his work. Hans Naumann again: “Has the work of Kafka ever played a part in your spiritual life?”. He apologises for his response: “I am not trying to seem resistant to influences. I merely note that I have always been a poor reader, incurably inattentive, on the look-out for an elsewhere. And I think I can say, in no spirit of paradox, that the reading experiences which have affected me most are those that were best at sending me to that elsewhere.” Reading Kafka, he says, “I felt at home – too much so”. He didn’t finish The Castle because it did not offer this elsewhere: “I remember feeling disturbed by the imperturbable aspect of his approach. I am wary of disasters that let themselves be recorded like a statement of accounts.”

As this suggests, the letters bear on the work most powerfully when Beckett is looking away. And indeed he is most expressive as only Beckett can be when talking about an entirely different art form. The painting of Bram van Velde is, he tells Duthuit, “the afterbirth of the unfeasible”. His art “is new because it is the first to repudiate relation in all its forms. It is not the relation with this or that order of opposite that it refuses,” he says, “but the state of being in relation as such, the state of being in front of.” In this we can recognise the remove in which Beckett’s narration operates and in which the reader experiences it.

I think continually of those last paintings, miracles of frenzied impotence, streaming with beauties and splendours, like a shipwreck of phosphorescences, decidedly one is a literary all one’s life, with great wide ways among which everything rushes away and comes back again, and the crushed calm of the true deep. [Trans. George Craig]

Beckett admits what we suspect: “bear in mind that I who hardly ever talk about myself talk about little else.” He goes as far as to call Bram van Velde his soul-mate:

The further I sink down, the more I feel right beside him, feel how much, in spite of the differences, our ventures came together, in the unthought and the heartrending.

The reason for Beckett’s critical silence after the war is perhaps best expressed when he ends a letter about van Velde: “I am no longer capable of writing about.” Such thought, such writing, is mere relation. The contradiction inherent in making such statements cannot go unnoticed: “To write is impossible but yet impossible enough”. There is also a need to speak. To Thomas MacGreevy he writes of his “feeling of helplessness ... and of speechlessness, and of restlessness also I think, before works of art”.

In contrast, Beckett’s references to contemporary literature are few and far between: Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye he liked “more than anything for a long time”. For me, however, the great revelation of the letters is Beckett’s occasional engagement with the work of Maurice Blanchot. As early as October 1948, he acknowledges receipt of an unspecified essay sent by Duthuit, presumably for translation. Three years later Duthuit has Beckett translate passages from what is presumed to be Sade’s Reason and “the foreword” to Faux Pas which just happens to contain this passage:

The writer finds himself in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothing to write, of having no means with which to write it, and of being constrained by the utter necessity of always writing it.

 Compare this to the famous passage in Beckett's Three Dialogues with Duthuit:

There is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.

No trace of these translations remains, not even the name of the journal for which they were intended. In April 1951, he also translates The “Sacred” Speech of Hölderlin collected in The Work of Fire and complains of the “very badly translated” extracts from Heidegger. The same applies. That same month Molloy was published and was nominated for the Prix des Critiques, for which Blanchot was a judge. He supported the novel “without reservation” and tried to persuade the jury to award it the prize. Beckett’s partner Suzanne wrote to Jérôme Lindon that “[to] have been defended by a man like Blanchot is the main thing for Beckett, whatever the outcome”. In 1954, when Peter Suhrkamp was preparing a journal dedicated to Beckett and requested French reviews, Beckett told him that those by Maurice Nadeau and Georges Bataille were the best “but the big thing, for me, is the recent piece by Maurice Blanchot”. He means “Where Now? Who Now?” published in the NNRF in October 1953. This is the extent of his comment, understandable given the formality of the letter, yet he doesn’t mention the review to more casual correspondents let alone responds to its analysis. If such reticence is not disingenuous, we may recognise a reason in Blanchot’s words:

What first strikes us is that here someone is not writing for the worthy purpose of producing a good book. Nor does he write in response to the noble urge we like to call inspiration; or to say the significant things he has to say; or because this is his job; or because he hopes by writing to penetrate into the unknown. Is it then so as to get it over with? [...] What is this vacuum which becomes speech in the inwardness of he whom it engulfs? [trans. Sacha Rabinovitch]

The vacuum may then be a stuporous passivity; an elsewhere engulfing.

Art requires that he who practises it should be immolated to art, should become other, not another, not transformed from the human being he was into the artist with artistic duties, satisfactions and interests, but into nobody, the empty animated space where art’s summons is heard.

What must a writer do in order to inhabit this space? If we search these letters in the hope of finding Beckett’s secret, we betray our admiration and need. The question assumes the mastery it must divest to discern an answer. One of the final letters in this volume is to a young writer seeking guidance and consolation from a writer he revered: “Don't lose heart” he tells Robert Pinget, “plug yourself into despair and sing it for us.”

In “Oh All to End”, his obituary tribute to Beckett, Blanchot remembers Molloy's failure to win the Prix des Critiques, and recognises his naïveté in trying to alert members of the literary establishment to its deserve. Beckett's early novels, he says, were after all “foreign to the resources of 'literature'”. Even today one cannot imagine such a novel winning anything but the label unreadable. Blanchot then compares Sartre’s theatrical soliciting and refusal of the Nobel Prize with Beckett’s distance: “he had neither to accept nor refuse a prize that was for no particular work (there is no work in Beckett) but was simply an attempt to keep within the limits of literature that voice or rumble or murmur which is always under threat of silence”. The aside prompts reassuring disquiet: there is no work in Beckett. Blanchot continues by quoting from his own work Awaiting Oblivion “because Beckett was willing to recognize himself in that text”. Does this mean Beckett corresponded with Blanchot? How else did he find out? Perhaps volumes three and four will disabuse us.

The Meridian: Final Version–Drafts–Materials, by Paul Celan

Poetry, ladies and gentlemen: an expression of infinitude, an expression of vain death and of mere Nothing.

These were the first words I read from The Meridian, a speech given by Paul Celan on October 22nd 1960 in the German city of Darmstadt on reception of the Georg-Büchner-Prize, as quoted by Maurice Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster, translated by Ann Smock. The excess of specification is deliberate. On a provincial train twenty years ago I read the words in the dizziness of discovery and recognition. At that time it was fragment of a speech not readily available in full – at least not available to me – found in amongst the dizzying fragments deconstituting Blanchot’s own work. Blanchot understands this enigmatic juxtaposition to mean that “the final nothingness ... occupies the same plane as the expression which comes from the infinite, wherein the infinite gives itself and resounds infinitely.” This would then afford poetry an extraordinary lightness as its social weight evaporates.

The same dizziness occurred with the line of Rene Char’s that Blanchot also quotes: The poem is the realized love of desire still desiring. Years of familiarity may have calmed the dizziness, and the sediment of acquired understanding buried recognition, but each time I read these sentences, the vertigo of those moments returns like a jolt of a train and a green light from the countryside.

Does it have to be these words precisely? In Carcanet’s Collected Prose, until this year as far as I know the only English version of speech available, Rosmarie Waldrop translates the line as: Poetry, ladies and gentleman: what an externalization of nothing but mortality, and in vain. James K. Lyon, in his study of Celan’s dialogue with Heidegger, translates it in passing as: this endless speaking of nothing but mortality and gratuitousness, and in Pierre Joris’ extraordinary new edition entirely dedicated to the speech – not only a new translation of the speech but of its drafts and materials, based on the German critical edition – the line is: Poetry, ladies and gentleman: this infinity-speaking full of mortality and to no purpose!

When I read these new translations, the experience is one of distance. It is certainly not a problem of translation; the fidelity of each is not in question – try putting Die Dichtung, meine Damen und Herren -: diese Unendlichsprechung von lauter Sterblichkeit und Umsonst! into Google Translate. It happens with Char’s line too: both Kevin Hart and Susan Hanson translate Le poème est l'amour réalisé du désir demeuré désir as The poem is the realized love of desire that has remained desire. Nor is it a problem of amended meaning: the lines that moved me do not necessarily assert a demonstrable, objective truth that any fair translation or paraphrase can repeat with ease. So why this distance? Is it anything other than the melancholy romance of nostalgia?  

The Meridian itself may offer an answer in that it addresses specific people on a specific date and in a specific place. What follows then is an attempt to summarise the speech in all recognition of the violence of such an attempt.

The counterword

Celan begins the speech by using words and metaphors from three plays by the author after whom the prize is named to situate art as the subject of a conversation taking place within works of art. For Celan it is an eternal problem that in Danton’s Death, the French Revolutionaries Camille and Danton are able to string together word upon word just as he can in this speech: “It is easy to talk about art”. Such is the complacency into which culture can fall, to be welcomed by art-peddlers – those who Celan compares to carnival barkers. “But whenever there is talk about art,” he goes on, “there is also always someone present who ... doesn’t really listen”. In Danton’s Death it is Lucile, who, upon seeing her husband led to scaffold, cries “Long live the king!” thus guaranteeing her own execution. For Celan, her cry “is the counterword, it is the word that cuts the ‘string’ [...]. It is an act of freedom. It is a step.”

This, ladies and gentlemen, has no name fixed once and for all, but I believe that this is ... poetry.

He is quick to distinguish the precise, political meaning of the words from their authenticity in face of what Lyon calls “the empty rhetoric and poetizing of the revolutionaries”. The point is: “Homage is being paid to the majesty of the absurd as witness for the presence of the human.”

Against mere wordplay

The speech seeks such witnessing. Celan admits one can read the words “Long live the king!” in various accents, accents one may place over or under a letter: the acute of today, the grave of history, and the circumflex of literary history. The latter places an obstacle to Celan destination in the speech so, to follow Lucile, he says: “I give it–I have no other choice–the acute.”

To explain further he turns to another work of Büchner’s. In Lenz, the title character, in the midst of a breakdown, relates a vision of two country girls which sometimes prompts him to wish to have Medusa’s power to turn the vision to stone so that others might experience it. The obstacle is how Celan may be seen to be orientating himself within the folds of a movement between Idealism to Naturalism that is present in Lenz’s own words. But this is no literary-historical debate. He wonders instead if with this example Büchner may be calling art into question, the art of automata, “wooden puppets”, a “stepping beyond what is human” into “an uncanny realm turned toward the human” and where art seems to be at home. The art-peddlers would be the first to call us to see the tableaux of country girls. He accepts the idea of Büchner’s intention may be far-fetched. Still, Celan asks where, against the route of automata, can poetry instead move toward this realm without losing its humanity?

His suspicion is that it can move with Lenz himself, the person who “on 20th January walked into the mountains” and who was sometimes annoyed that “he could not walk on his head”. On this date and in this state of mind, the authentic human being steps into literature. For someone who walks on his head, Celan reminds us, the sky is an abyss. The narrative itself is Lenz’s “Long live the king”. Reading Lenz today we notice an extraordinary modernity for a novella from 1835, thus perhaps obscuring its radical expression. However, this is an example of what moves poetic art away from elegant wordplay or social realism in favour of finding the words for an authentic human moment. The poem might then be "one person’s language-become-shape …[in its] presentness and presence”. We may compare this moment with Blanchot’s “writing of the disaster”, in which the disaster is a rare and hopeful act of communication.

And it should be noted what Celan need not: January 20th was decisive for him and so many others in that it is also the date of the Wannsee Conference.

Towards an encounter

Despite this connection with Lucile's cry, Büchner’s Lenz has, Celan says, gone a step further: “His ‘Long live the king’ is no longer a word, it is a terrifying falling silent, it takes away his–and our–breath and words”. I presume this is because the story is one of mental breakdown and the narrative describes Lenz’s walk into such a land without authorial knowingness or narrative redemption. Celan thinks this may be where the Medusa’s head shrinks and the automatons break down if only for a “single short moment”. And it is here Celan introduces his famous neologism, later used for a title of a collection, to describe such a moment: Atemwende, a breathturn. Such moments still demand a certain turning away from the self toward a certain darkness. “The poem wants to head toward some other, it needs this other, it needs an opposite”. In Under the Dome, his memoir of his friendship with Celan, Jean Daive observed how this need affected the man and his poetry: “The impenetrable–inhuman–distance between him and the Other. A distance where the remains of the world may accumulate”.

In an implicit response to the impatient reaction to his own poetry, Celan says turning away is a submission for the sake of such an encounter. “Attention”, he says, quoting Benjamin’s essay on Kafka, “is the natural prayer of the soul”. Impatience speaks only for itself.

For an example of such attention, read Peter Szondi’s remarkable essay Eden on Celan’s transfiguring of personal experience in an untitled poem about his brief visit to Berlin in 1967.

The route of the impossible

What Celan has argued for then is simply the inclusion of the human in poetry; that is poetry in which the poet speaks within the puppet show of art “under the angle of inclination of his Being, the angle of inclination of his creatureliness”: “The attention the poem tries to pay to everything it encounters … is a concentration that remains mindful of all our dates.” Jean Daive again: “Paul always kept his watch on his wrist. He told me: the day I take off my watch I’ll have decided to die.”

This emphasis on “radical individuation” leads to the end of the speech and a memorably declarative line: “Enlarge art? No. To the contrary: go with art into your innermost narrows. And set yourself free.” Public art lives on, yet inside it the breathturn is its poetry “due to the attention given to thing and being” in which “we also [come] close to something open and free. And finally, close to utopia. Poetry, ladies and gentlemen: this infinity-speaking full of mortality and to no purpose!”.

Perhaps I should now see this line as slightly and cheerfully sarcastic. The purpose, after all, he suggests, is a kind of homecoming. Yet included in the new edition is a draft of a letter to the president of the prize committee with another version of the same line: Celan asks:

Aren’t words, especially in the poem, aren’t they–aren’t they becoming and–decaying–names? Aren’t poems exactly this: the infinite-saying of mortality and nothingness that remains mindful of its finitude? (Please excuse the emphasis: it belongs to that dust that sets free and receives us and our voiceful-voiceless souls.)

So not sarcasm but awareness of the double movement recognised by Blanchot.

Celan ends the speech by expressing a wish to avoid misreading Büchner – something that I will have to express here with regard to The Meridian as I have no doubt warped the speech in trying to summarise it – and by emphasising the impossibility of talking about the breathturn. However, he adds:

I find something that consoles me a little for having in your presence taken this impossible route, this route of the impossible. I find something–like language–immaterial, yet terrestrial, something circular that returns to itself across both poles while–cheerfully–even crossing the tropics: I find ... a meridian.

Celan’s reluctance to assert, almost to the point where hesitation, qualification and doubt undo the occasion of a prize rewarding mastery, reminds me of Blanchot’s observation about Celan’s poems: that however hard, strident and shrill his language, it “never comes to produce a language of violence, does not strike the other, is not animated by any aggressive or destructive intention: as if the destruction of self has already taken place so that the other is preserved, or so that a sign borne by obscurity is maintained” (translated by Charlotte Mandell).

Pierre Joris’ edition of The Meridian, translated over seven years, reveals to us how much learning, reflection and patience went into maintaining such a permeable presence. It is a staggering document in that regard alone. In the drafts we can read innumerable versions of familiar passages from the final speech, and many more that did not find their way there. Of the latter, in writing of the encounter with the poem:

It is ... the second at the core and in the casing of your desperation.–
It stands with you against infamy. It stands against Goebbels and Goll.– 

The first name needs no explanation but second is Claire Goll, the woman who persecuted Celan with falsified evidence of plagiarism spelled out in a German literary magazine. It was enough to trigger the mental breakdown that led eventually to his suicide. We need not consider its deletion from the final version as ironic or contradictory because The Meridian is not a call for the confessional but for the pursuance of the single short moment of dizziness of discovery and recognition. What is exceptional about The Meridian is that it continues this work of poetry, Celan's poetry, rather than being merely an adjunct to it.


UPDATE: I've since been reminded that John Felstiner's Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan from 2000 has a translation of The Meridian. The specific line as discussed above is: “Poetry, ladies and gentlemen–: this speaking endlessly of mere mortality and uselessness!” and that Jerry Glenn produced the first translation in the early 1970s. I presume in this rare edition.


See also my review of The Celan-Bachmann Correspondence.

The Lost Art of Walking by Geoff Nicholson

The prospect of a planned, solitary walk can often become off-putting. At first the distance seems daunting, the landscape predictable and the destination uninspiring, so, sitting down, one thinks: what's the point? Better to stay indoors and do something productive, like, say, read a book. But then reading too seems like too much intellectual effort and one has to get out.

For a while I let Geoff Nicholson's The Lost Art of Walking wait because it looked like a solemn work of study; 264 pages on a mundane subject. Moreover, Lost and Art threaten a New Agey cris de coeur from beneath the rails and road of modernity – all very justified, yet depressingly futile. And then there's the subtitle: what does The History, Science, Philosophy, Literature, Theory and Practice of Pedestrianism suggest to you? But then one starts and the doubts fall away. Happy, necessary amnesia is the gift of both walking and reading, and this book is a pleasure to read.



It helps that Geoff Nicholson is almost the perfect walking companion: never boring, cheerfully opinionated but not self-obsessed, and full of engaging examples and personal anecdotes. I say 'almost' because Nicholson is not really a companion; he is the walk, its distance, its landscape and its destination, which is a little odd, so the comparison is not entirely appropriate. The full title is not entirely appropriate either because it suggests an academic procession across the subject rather than what it is: a ramble – an often moving ramble – through various landscapes. The cover design is a better guide to its contents. A review would normally summarise, share some favourite stories and dissent from one or two opinions, but this would miss the nature of the subject. One doesn't criticise cloying mud on a riverside path for not being asphalt, so I won't criticise the careless errors early on – Eliot's poem isn't "The Wasteland", "Oliver Sachs" is not the famous neurologist, it's Sacks; and "Stuart Home" is not the founder of the London Psychogeographic Society, it's Stewart – or gripe about how those with otherwise fine literary judgement inexplicably value JG Ballard's fiction (Ballard's house features in the book), or wish Nicholson had mentioned other novels in which walking is key to its style and content (Bernhard's Walking, Handke's Repetition and, in the London chapter, Josipovici's Moo Pak – the list, after all, may be endless). I want only to point the reader toward the path and recommend one just walks, listens and enjoys the words flying and dissolving in the fresh air.

What I will note is an interesting tension in the book, which may also relate to its apparent lack of interest in literary experiment. Nicholson is unfussy about where he walks and is interested in all ideas about it – he covers Guy Debord's inaugural definition of psychogeography, and then gives Iain Sinclair prolonged respectful attention, yet he is dismissive of the "jejeune philosophising" of the "walking in nature brigade", invariably American New Age mystics writing in Oprah-friendly clichés about "the wonder of creation", how nature "is full of surprises, always changing" and how "the soul is renewed and called to open and grow". "You want to be called upon to open and grow?" Nicholson asks, "Go take a walk through the Isle of Dogs on a Saturday afternoon when Millwall are playing, lady." He decides he lacks the "spiritual gene" because he does not limit his walking to floating through the local wildlife sanctuary. But his earlier impatience with Debord's attempt to unify and communalise what he agrees is unique and ambient experience confirms a love of surprise, a need for change, and a willingness to open himself to both. The New Agers he dynamites in a barrel are, like him, not a brigade but individuals striving to put into words what necessarily escapes them. And what the lady says holds for all landscapes.

How one defines renewal and growth then becomes the important question, a question both begged and resisted by writing. As Nietzsche and Marc Augé have argued, forgetting is as necessary to a healthy life as memory. Walking would then be forgetting and writing memory. Nicholson's fine company thereby has to betray the title's promise of unity in order to do justice to his subject, which he does. Any quibbling can take a hike.

To set the lost afire: The Roving Shadows by Pascal Quignard

In his essay On Reading, Proust says great writers prefer old writing, the works of the ancients, and finds two reasons: first, that they are “more easily diverted by different ideas” and second, that they recognise “the beauty which the mind that created them was able to put into them.” Both standard observations of course. But, as is Proust’s habit, he doesn’t stop there: “They receive another beauty, more affecting still, from the fact of that their substance, I mean the language in which they were written, is like a mirror of life.”

He compares the experience to walking through a 15th Century hospice that has been preserved in tact into the 20th: “its well, its wash-house, the painted panels of its wooden ceiling, the tall gabled roof, pierced by dormer windows surmounted by frail finials of beaten lead”. Walking here is like reading a tragedy by Racine or Saint-Simon’s memoirs because they “contain all the lovely suppressed forms of a language that preserve the memory of usages or ways of feeling which no longer exist, persistent traces of the past unlike anything in the present and whose colours time alone, as it passed over them, has been able further to enhance.”


In this sense Pascal Quignard’s The Roving Shadows is the project of a great writer. In the first few chapters there is an extract from a letter written in Latin by Descartes, a passage from Chin P'ing Mei, a novel of the Ming Dynasty, and the story of Syagrius, the last king of the Romans, as told by Gregory of Tours. But this is not a waterfall to disrupt Proust’s deeper current: each chapter is a discrete approach to suppressed forms and persistent traces, the shadows of the title. “I seek only thoughts that tremble” he writes, “a flush interior to the soul”. This does not always require many pages, as short stories and poetry attest. The Roving Shadows seeks its own form – Quignard insists the book, published in 2002 as Les Ombres errantes, is not a novel or an essay but “a sequence of beginnings of novels, stories, landscapes, autobiographical fragments” – and yet yields similar rewards.

It is still a very Proustian quest, as Ombres suggests: to experience the presence of Time Past (he capitalises the phrase throughout) not as the past but as “a ceaselessly active actuality”. Our access is frustrated by the blinding light of modernity. In chapter 15, he describes Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s 1933 work In Praise of Shadows which laments, of all things, the loss of old Japanese toilets; places once hidden in near darkness now illuminated with “dazzling, puritanical, imperialist ... neon light”. He goes on to present a list of what has passed from Japanese life: peeling paint on wood, tarnished metal objects and “freer or dulled or vacillating thought that arises in the human head when it buries itself in shadow”. Suddenly a culture that seems to run ahead of modernity like sanderlings happily taking advantage of a foaming wave, diminishes and becomes more pathological as one recognises the millennia of tradition from which it has been wrenched. This is a Proustian moment of universal consciousness.

The structure of The Roving Shadows – 55 chapters in 223 pages, with the chapters themselves divided into fragments of story, aphorism, anecdote, reference and citation – plunges the reader into open water in which one can never fully breathe nor fully drown in the comforts of narrative: “Fish that still rise to the surface”, he writes. “A gulp to stave off death. That gulp: reading.” The hyperbole is a necessary misstep of the form, as David Shields’ Reality Hunger confirmed in 2010, and the two books share the goal of overcoming their book misfortune: “Books that can be said to be touched by the reflection of the sun, of which they know nothing, are even more silent than purely literary ones.”

Except Quignard’s predates Shields by eight years and is far more aware of the contradictions of writing towards such a goal: “One can't offer a visible counterweight to the domination of light”. It is thereby more literary. What this means, and as this aphorism asserts, is that The Roving Shadows is in constant battle with its own accomplishment. After all, by writing in commonly intelligible French to a contemporary audience about ways of feeling which no longer exist, translated and contextualised in notes at the end of the book, he has also endangered them; risking exposure of the pale beast to imperial neon light. Chris Turner’s translation, which has to accept the impossibility of containing the double meaning of ombre – both shadow and shade – is thus a double threat.

Alerting us to the danger, chapter 39 tells the story of the imprisonment of the Abbé de Saint-Cyran, a 17th Century Jansenist who spoke “of the vanity of books that are merely books. Of gods that are mere phantoms. Of ideas that are merely desires.” Emerging from months in darkness he wrote: “after the greed for wealth, honours and worldly pleasures has been destroyed, there arise in the soul – out of those ruins – other honours, other wealth, other pleasures that are not of this visible world, but of the invisible world.” Quignard comments: "It is dreadful to think that, after destroying within us the visible world, with all its trapping, as much as it can be destroyed on this earth, another invisible one is immediately born, a world more difficult to destroy than the first." Dreadful perhaps, and of course Quignard is contributing to our sensitivity to the invisible, yet it is why Proust loved ancient works and why reading was so important in his life:

Often, in St Luke's Gospel, when I come upon the ‘colons’ which punctuate it before each of the almost canticle-like passage with which it is strewn, I have heard the silence of the worshipper who has just stopped from reading out loud so as to intone the verses following, like a psalm reminding him of the older psalms in the Bible. This silence still filled the pause in the sentence which, having been split into two so as to enclose it, had preserved its shape; and more than once, as I was reading, it brought to me the scent of a rose which the breeze entering by the open window had spread through the upper room which the Gathering was being held and which had not evaporated in almost two thousand years.

As with Time itself, reading gives access to what habit and the violence of modernity obscures; no phantoms or mere desires here. Even if he shares Proust’s vision, he does not entirely share his optimism: “To set the lost afire with loss – this, properly speaking, is what it is to read.” Yet to accept on face value the statements and assertions peppering The Roving Shadows is to fall back into the positivism its form and content resist. The contradiction is always present; a fish rising briefly to the surface reaffirming the depths.

The Roving Shadows is the first of a sequence of books called Le Dernier Royaume, The Last Kingdom. So far, five books have been published in France and this is the first to be translated into English. Seagull Books has been admirably adventurous in its translation policy and we can only hope it continues with Quignard among others. This review hardly touches the range and richness of The Roving Shadows: the book rewards and defeats re-reading. We have more than enough to be going on with.

Mehr Nichts: Alice by Judith Hermann

In his essay for the TLS, Tim Parks wonders what kind of literature will reach the international public after “what is now an industrialized translation process”. He points out that, while authors from English-speaking nations can include meticulous detail on every aspect of everyday life, to reach a global audience a writer from, say, Serbia, the Czech Republic or Holland “must come up with something impressive and unusual in terms of content and style. Five hundred pages of Franzen-like details about popular mores in Belgrade or Warsaw would not attract a large advance.” He cites the struggles of editors in various European countries to sell foreign rights for their authors. Worse, for readers less concerned with popular mores (such as the size of advances) than discovering novels exploring content and style, what Parks calls “direct, unmediated contact between a writer and reader” may not survive such translation because “the final product will be flattened and standardized”.


A case study may be Alice, a translation by Margot Bettauer Dembo of Judith Hermann’s 2009 German novel. It is published by The Clerkenwell Press, a new imprint of Profile Books, publishers of such mainstream favourites as Alan Bennett and Susan Hill. Hermann’s work is very popular in Germany, so cannot be accused of pandering to the foreign image of Germany. Her 1998 volume of short stories Sommerhaus, später sold a quarter of a million hardback copies in Germany and, according to The Independent, its translation revealed “a master storyteller”. When Alice was published in Germany, Katy Derbyshire reported that “the press are (sic) going absolutely wild” and Irish novelist Hugo Hamilton says “Alice has the breadth of an epic novel”. Might local appreciation indicate a writer of her time and place, and thereby allay Parks’ disquiet?

The answer is no, probably, but this has very little to do with the translation. Alice is an effortlessly readable sequence of five linked stories each named after a man who is dying or dead: Misha, Conrad, Richard, Malte and Raymond. The novel itself is named after the woman to whom they are related either by love or blood. In the first three chapters, Alice visits the men on their death beds. They are almost entirely silent and their deaths occur off screen, implied in the description of a hospital room being cleared or guessed interpretations from words in a foreign language. Instead, the narrative consists of descriptions of Alice’s thoughts, actions and polite interaction with the dying men’s relatives and carers. There is almost no backstory or passages of nostalgic reminiscence. A certain chill pervades:

That morning Alice sat at Misha’s bedside until noon. First on one side of the bed, then on the other. The room was utilitarian, fitted cupboards, a sink, the door to the toilet, a bare area of painted linoleum where a second bed had stood in which another patient had been lying. Some days ago the nurses had pushed him elsewhere, without giving any reasons. To some other place.

The abrupt division of the final sentence, which we must assume is a feature of the German original, mimics the pauses in speech; an aural semi-colon adding a peculiar stress to the banality of the information it contains. It stands for Alice's experience in general.

Sitting on the left-hand side of the bed, she’d be next to the IV drip stand for the morphine, but leaning back against the wall unit, she could look out of the window and see the hills when she could no longer bear to look at Misha. To look at his face. Misha slept with his eyes open. The entire time. Like a plant, he had turned to the light, towards the grey but bright day.

The technique is soon dropped, yet the motifs hinted at here continue and begin to dominate the content: light on walls, distance – physical and psychological – water for drinking and swimming in, and insects. Alice describes how, in her final days with Misha, a spider built a web between their two beer bottles which they had to destroy in order to share a drink. Later, questions about a dead relative are described as threads of spider webs broken as soon as one seeks an answer. Back in the present, Alice moves close to the hospital and notes that she can see his room from her window: "Misha's there. And we're here". In the second story, she lies in Conrad’s empty bed and watches a spot of light on the wall, realising Conrad would have seen it too. In the next story, there is more light on another bedroom wall and then later, as Alice travels to Richard’s Berlin home, she thinks: "In a room in that apartment in this house on this street, a man I know is dying. Everyone else is doing something else." So, rather than Franzen-like details about popular mores in Germany, we have stories drained of the usual personal histories and emotional struggles and instead the distance felt between one living on and another on the brink of a grave. The reader lives with Alice on the surface of the narrated moment like the pond skater, unsure if it is over a millennia-old ocean floor or a transient puddle.

The incommensurability of death then is the dominant theme and determines the style and content. Alice avails herself of the modern world, phoning for taxis, visiting cafés and state-of-the-art hospitals, yet these are the limits of reference. There is only one reference to literature, an unnamed SF novel being read by her husband. It is as if the loss of religious context has also emptied art and literature of consolation; the fate of art has followed the fate of theology. It has disappeared, more or less. However, while characters have bland, pan-European names and live in bland, pan-European cities, as if to emphasise the universality of the incommensurable, there’s only so much that can be drained from the particulars of place and time before it disappears into silence. As well as evoking obscure pathos, such motifs and metaphors inevitably invoke a tradition.

For example, in an otherwise insignificant moment, an unidentified, “multi-legged” insect drowns in Alice’s latte macchiato. The readerly impulse here is to recognise a possible allusion to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, and thereby to appreciate the implications of this absurd event. We may ask: is German literature drowning in consumer culture? Instead, or in addition, we ought to admit the tension this moment generates, when literature tries to exhaust literature by means of literature. Rather than having been flattened and standardised by translation, Alice is flattened and standardised in its quest for an impossible loss of meaning. The plaintive death of the insect is a small manifestation. In his review of Hermann’s first book of stories, Zulfikar Abbany says the word “Nichtssagend”, meaning empty or meaningless, “describes a host of young German literary lights who, aside from a smattering of cute observations, have nothing to say”. The leading light of Nichtssagend, he says, is Judith Hermann. The problem for them and their admirers is that the cute observations say more than they may wish.

In Hermann’s case, North American minimalist realism is the clearest influence; Alice’s husband is called Raymond. Perhaps this indicates the loss of tradition in German fiction concurrent with multinational cultural homogeny; the odd translation decision suggests as much: American English such as “liquor bottles” and “fat bugs” appear alongside “centre”. Yet no matter how much the stories appeal to an international audience, the contradictions within Nichtssagend are distinctly European. It was Kafka, after all, who said the true artist is someone who has nothing to say. In October 1921, Kafka wrote about the essence of Moses’ wandering in the wilderness and death before he can enter the promised land.

It is incredible that he should see the land only when on the verge of death. This dying vision of it can only be intended to illustrate how incomplete a moment is human life, incomplete because a life like this could last forever and still be nothing but a moment.

Alice’s reticence about the past and preoccupation with the distance between herself and the dying men is a fascination with this moment.

The fourth story is unique among the five in that Malte, Alice’s uncle, is already long dead and Alice never knew him. He killed himself decades ago and she seeks out Frederick, Malte’s lover, to learn more about his death. He gives Alice the letters he received from Malte, which, however, she does not read before the chapter ends: "It didn't matter what was in them - it wouldn't change anything. But it would add something - one more ring around an unknowable permanent centre." The reader is both disappointed and relieved. The centre is his death and, while an addition may be welcome, it is merely a surplus of strength. This is confirmed in a nice, metafictional moment when Frederick, who has no contact with Malte's family since his death, asks after Malte’s mother, who happens to share the protagonist’s name: "Alice has been dead a long time, Alice said."

On reaching the final page of Alice, the reader appreciates why it has to end without epiphany, unless that epiphany is its own absence, an appreciation that neither diminishes nor improves upon re-reading. Alice is dead. It is a prime example of what the defunct blog Life Unfurnished calls the Emperor’s New Clothes of contemporary literature: "writing in a manner to give the appearance alone of literature", and wishes someone would cry: "But they aren't writing anything at all!" (To which we may respond: if only!)

Reading Alice we can only wonder if this is a failing of living writers or a necessary characteristic of literature itself to which they are admirably faithful. Perhaps the failing is that writers do not strive more determinedly for Mehr Nicht (rather than Mehr Licht). What does it mean to acknowledge the limits of writing? After his own wandering in the wilderness, Kafka concluded, “Moses fails to enter Canaan not because his life is too short but because it is a human life."

Joyce Division

Adam Mars-Jones' review of a new biography of James Joyce begins by claiming that Joyce has "lost a little ground" to Proust in terms of popularity. This would be a pleasant surprise to me if true. "People like to read about the rich" he says, adding another dubious claim. Do people read such writers for such reasons? Before this can be answered, Mars-Jones returns to fact: "No one in [Joyce's] books ... is worth more than a thousand pounds all told". But then we're back with an odd construal:

Even Gabriel Josipovici, a stubbornly brilliant critic, seemed to short-change Joyce in his recent polemic What Ever Happened to Modernism? He was more attracted to writers with a high rating of aesthetic anguish, to Kafka's writhings and incompletions, to Beckett's long campaign against his own charm and eloquence, which is a rather romantic way of responding to an anti-romantic movement. In his books, Joyce shed the 19th-century cleanly and decisively, and had a great gift for generating rich new material from arbitrary scraps of patterning. The interval between his realising that a certain way of writing the world was bankrupt and finding a new one seems to have been enviably short, however long it took him to get the words exactly as he wanted them.

I emphasise Mars-Jones' assertion because it is in direct opposition to Josipovici's reasons for short-changing Joyce. (The "high rating of aesthetic anguish" is closer to these, as will become clear.) Of course, the assertion is axiomatic in the history of Modernism. Almost every review of What Ever Happened to Modernism? presents Joyce as its prime representative and Ulysses as the definitive Modernist novel without noticing that Joyce is mentioned in the book only in passing and Ulysses not once. This reading impairment encapsulates the unfortunate confusion in the reception of What Ever Happened to Modernism?, even in reviews sympathetic to the project of the book; the project has not been appreciated fully for its revisionism.

To redress this, here are the final paragraphs of a Sunday Times review of Hugh Kenner's Joyce's Voices from 1978. (It also shows that Josipovici's iconoclasm has not changed in the last 33 years.) "This is criticism of the very highest order" he says. "Nevertheless, a doubt remains":

Not about Kenner, but about Joyce. No objective style, Kenner rightly insists, can be said to exist; no truth can be discovered by aligning so many words to so many things; every attempt to simulate such a Truth will, as in the case of Hemingway, itself quickly become a 'style'. 'The True Sentence, in Joyce's opinion, had best settle for being true to the voice that utters it.' Yet what Kenner fails to see is that in the end Joyce does, against his own deepest insights, cling to one unquestioned Truth, that of the completed work. If there is no True Sentence, then why is there is a True Work? This, it seems to me, is a major weakness of Joyce, his refusal to recognise the vulnerability of the Muse, his insistence, against the evidence, that to make a book is itself a valuable activity.

Compared with Proust and Beckett, Kafka and Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Joyce presents a strangely rigid attitude; he refuses ever to let go, to trust the work to take him where it will. Every 'letting go' has to be carefully fitted into its place in the overall design, even though there is no longer, by his own admission, any authority for the pattern the design itself assumes.

It is perhaps a weakness of Joyce and not just a fact about him that he is such a godsend to the academic community. For there is ultimately something cosy and safe about Ulysses: underlying it is the belief that the mere accumulation of detail and complexity is an unquestioned good. Far from being 'the decisive English-language book of the [twentieth] century,' as Kenner suggests, it is perhaps the last great book of the nineteenth.

"as well as weakened by his fear of approaching death"

Hands up who can identify this new book, the first graphic novel on my bookshelves.

Answer: it's Victor Halfwit – the link goes to my review.