Marguerite Duras’ prolific writing career includes over 40 novels, screenplays, and stories, includingL’Amant, which was made famous in part due to Jean-Jacques Annaud’s explicit film version, The Lover. Yann Andrea Steiner, written towards the end of this career, feels like a coda, of sorts, a look back at a relationship that may have occurred between the author and a younger man. The feel of the book is one of paying up debts, of squaring the books between Duras and this younger man Steiner. Whether these books that need squaring are real or imaginary—or something in between—is not quite clear.

 

There are two parallel narratives to Yann Andrea Steiner, or more precisely, there is the ostensibly “main” narrative—the aforementioned relationship—which is the means by which we get to hear another story, this one of a boy that survived the Holocaust. He is now living with the trauma of seeing his little sister shot in the head, killed right in front of him. This boy is living with other child survivors, with no parents to go to, at a summer camp on the beach directly outside Duras’ apartment. He stares, unseeing, at the ocean, captivating one of the camp counselors who eventually falls in love with him. Twice his age and yet still a child herself, she makes him promise that when he reaches her current age, they will meet again on this shore and consummate their love. The boy agrees; what else could he do?

 

Duras writes the book from a variety of angles. She starts with the small details of Yann Andrea Steiner moving in with her: the foods they ate, the room he slept in, the hours they spent discussing books. The narrative then moves from the apartment to the beach below, where the boy—whose last name also happens to be Steiner—and the other children and counselors spend their days between the rainstorms. Much like Francois Ozon’s Swimming Pool, Duras does not make clear which parts of the narrative are “real,” and which occur as a fiction created between housemate Steiner and herself in conversations. The book itself moves fluidly between passages written directly from Duras to her houseguest, to observations made by the young boy on the beach, to another narrative within the narrative: a story that the counselors are telling the camp children about a young boy who gets carried to an island by a shark and is welcomed by the animals living there, while the shark weeps over his desire to eat the boy.

 

This dual narrative folds in upon itself again and again, with Duras switching between first, second, and third-person narrators and using her approach—favored in her later works—of telling the reader just a bit less than he needs to know to put all the pieces together. The point of view swoops down from Duras’ room to the beach and then into the tent to hear the shark story, and we get a sense that she must be imagining, if only because the physicality of being in two places at once doesn’t work. At the same time, Duras doesn’t give the reader enough threads to tie together in order to make a symbolic connection between the visiting housemate Steiner, the trauma-stricken young(er) Steiner, and the shark. Or the boy.

 

This ambiguity does not frustrate, though. Duras is not interested in making clear to the reader what happens with any of the characters in the story. She instead takes the particulars of each experience and divides them into neat, equal pieces to be admired. This beautiful, short book feels like the product of a lifetime of writing practice. Her writing is sharply honed, evoking just enough of the feel of the place and the emotions each character is experiencing. At times, it could be herself, the boy, or the counselor speaking—“Like all men, every day, even if only for a few instants, you become a killer of women.” Whose rage is she describing? With outstanding writing like this, it doesn’t matter. The rage can belong to all of us, and the beauty—and the relief—comes in the unique, breathtaking prose.

 

 

Stroke by Stroke consists of two volumes of Henri Michaux’s drawing-dominated books. There is some text—explanation, poetic variations on the themes—but it is the striking black-ink drawings that dominate.

In the first volume he describes coming to his bestiary:

Insects, especially insects, were happening to me. Intrigued, I became more and more of a bug. Even though I thought they had completely slipped my mind.

Many of the pictures are of animals and insects, mostly roughly drawn, rarely just a single creature on a page, as Michaux prefers to show transitions and groups.

There’s a sense of scrawl to the drawings, the black ink too thick for precise detail, and yet their very roughness makes them more evocative. Influenced by Chinese ideograms, there’s a sense of double-meaning—as well as that of the personal hand-writing behind the images, a distinctive style connecting creator and content.

Michaux has little interest in precise realism:

What is a resemblance without dissemblance ?
A drawing with no fight in it is a bore.
It is incomplete.

Among his ambitions is specifically: “To disobey form.” Tension is almost always present in the pictures—the sense of motion he tries to capture, for example.

The first volume is called Grasp —an attempt, among other things: “To grasp the underlying.” From there he moves to Stroke by Stroke, more focussed on action (“Gestures rather than signs”), looking to transform, release, approach, explore —all “stroke by stroke.”

It’s an appealing and attractive volume, if occasionally frustrating (though that frustration of communication is an essential part of what he is trying to convey). The imagery is striking, the text limited but intriguing. Worthwhile.

 

Masquerading as a novel, this latest from Polish experimentalist Tulli (Dreams and Stones, 2004, etc.) is actually a brain-teasing meditation on the conventions of fiction and the strategies of grammar.

In an unspecified, presumably Eastern European city, in an unspecified contemporaneous time, a handful of vaguely menacing, deliberately generic characters—a businessman, a red-haired woman, a “grinning hipster in a studded leather jacket”—behave like gnomic ciphers. Spinning the tale, such as it is, is a completely baffled narrator, straight out of a kind of Kafka-meets-Beckett spoof. A nose gets punched, a love affair probably occurs, cabs depart—as will any reader hoping for any kind of conventional story. Here, plot, character development, emotional catharsis and dialogue are sacrificed to Tulli’s arcane musings about how her narrator can’t rein in the words that threaten to erupt and seize control of the narrative: “All he can do, and that only to a certain degree, is to govern grammatical forms, especially as concerns the verbs, which are constantly striving to escape into open space.” In the 1980s, when poststructuralism was the rage, this sort of metafiction was at least startling. Now, it s merely perplexing. After a while, however, once the thorny commentary about subordinate clauses is hurdled, Tulli’s snapshot vignettes—of trains covered with “bright zigzags of graffiti,” of “a fur that gives off the oppressive smell of mothballs,” of a hobo who “rakes cigarettes out of his hair”—can be read as lapidary, Cubist poetry or a word collage that’s amorphously if resonantly evocative. Evocative of exactly what, however, is the question.

Erudite fans of postmodernist language may find this thrilling, but it’s a decidedly acquired taste.

 

In the Babel of books that surround us these days, probably not many people have noticed two extraordinary books by the Polish writer Magdalena Tulli: Dreams and Stones and Moving Parts, both translated with elegant clarity by Bill Johnston. Like all great works of art, Tulli’s books create something new, something that doesn’t respond to what the reader has been conditioned to expect. To begin with, they don’t tell a story in a straightforward way; rather, they tell the story of creation itself, of what it means to create, and this is particularly true of Moving Parts, a novel reminiscent of Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author or of the French nouveau roman.

Moving Parts mixes reflections on creation with the narrative fabric itself, and this gives it a mythical dimension, though it is hard to summarize. The historical time moves back and forth between German-occupied Poland during World War II, the Cold War, the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and the present. The space also is disconcertingly unidentifiable—the setting is Poland, but the characters’ names are not necessarily Polish: there’s an African-American trumpeter named John Maybe; the tight-rope walker Mozhe and his partner Yvonne Touseulement (who is also John Maybe’s lover); a Captain in the third Reich, Feuchtmeier, and his wife; and a Jewish publisher called Fojchtmajer.

Each time the story approaches some kind of resolution, Tulli makes sure we don’t settle comfortably in it, letting us know that it could branch off in many directions. The numerous possible stories that could develop are compared to the floors of a hotel where an elevator might stop: the names of the characters appear in the computerized list of guests, and the moving parts of the elevator are compared to the mechanisms of grammar governing the story. The focus shifts constantly from a vertical dimension—the stories that develop out of the elevator’s movement—to a horizontal dimension—the stories developing in a train that moves from one station to another.

This multi-dimensional storyline is unified by the presence of the narrator, who becomes a character in his own tale. When Fojchtmajer is forced by the Nazis to leave his house, the narrator moves in—the narrator who, like all characters, has a body, a wallet, and biological needs. The story ends with his grotesque humiliation in front of a big audience: he flips over, loses his glasses, injures his nose, his pants fall down, his butt is kicked, and a crumpled ball of paper hurled from the crowd hits him. Thus Tulli’s carefully constructed world succumbs to the inescapable chaos that precedes and follows all creation.

 

One of the most gifted of contemporary European writers, Magdalena Tulli creates an intricate and, ultimately, inhospitable fictional world in her unsettling and fine novel Moving Parts. Tulli has been hailed as the “new Bruno Schulz,” but her literary heritage extends back to Franz Kafka, and her prose evokes the illusive and deceptive “reality” encountered in Nikolai Gogol’s later prose. Her nearest “relatives” among current authors include Cuban-born Italian writer Italo Calvino and American novelist Don de Lillo, the latter sharing Tulli’s strong sense of unease and impending disaster. Readers of English are fortunate to read her work in the masterful translation of Bill Johnston, who also rendered Tulli’s Dreams and Stones, as well as Gustaw Herling’s masterpiece The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories, into English.

Tulli’s most distinctive contribution to modern letters may well be her hapless narrator, who loses all control over “his” text in the course of Moving Parts. Gogol’s narrator maintains ironic dominance over text and reader, while Schulz features a first-person narrator whose perceptions shape the readers’ reactions. But Tulli’s narrator can only observe helplessly as his world flies apart, a casualty of fictional centrifugal force with a “center that does not hold.” That her narrator is male, not female like the author herself, injects yet another disquieting note. The uncertain fictional world she creates in Moving Parts brings to mind the world of Eastern and Central Europe, or societies undergoing far-reaching changes. Tulli leaves the reader in a void, completely unlike the solid ground we encounter in the realist novel of the nineteenth century. Characters appear fleetingly and uncertainly, their fates unclear. They float in a nebulous space beyond the narrator’s control, perhaps even out of the reach of the author herself.

To underscore the insecurity of her fictional universe, Tulli typically depicts characters on the run. We encounter them in hotels—away from home—underscoring their vulnerability. When they are at home, their relationships unravel as the readers, uncomfortable witnesses to familial collapse, observe helplessly. Not even the narrator, the traditional locus of authority in fictional works, retains any sense of constancy or security.

Tulli combines homelessness with a universe gone awry in her images of displaced furniture that echo uprooted characters: “sofas, armchairs, and tables of that other world, deprived of solid ground, fall chaotically . . . into oblivion” (15). (Falling furniture foreshadows to a falling woman our “heroine”, who plunges into the void and dies “instantly” [103].) “The tale,” the narrator adds, “is like a hotel; characters appear and disappear” (15). A few pages later (23), furniture is piled up in a soggy heap out in the corner of the garden, where it will wait, forgotten, until clement weather. Tulli reminds us of the spatial and temporal fragility that lurks behind superficial solidity, and furniture, an everyday component of our lives vividly underscores this vulnerability. Our universe, she stresses, is built on sand, whirling through the blackness of the void.

How better to increase our sense of fear and helplessness than with a senseless crime? As in Dostoevsky’s later works, violence emphasizes the tenuousness of life. However, while in Dostoevsky murder is linked with larger religious issues, no such central theme emerges in Tulli. Thus we read that workmen are shot dead with an automatic pistol, a weapon divorced from a human perpetrator. The narrator—whose discomfort and powerlessness increase exponentially throughout—is “forced” to tell us about this pointless, bloody crime. He doesn’t act of his own free will, but the reader never finds out who has compelled him to recount this exceptionally unpleasant episode. Nor do we know why he recounts any of the incidents that he attempts to describe. His efforts are made increasingly difficult by his unruly and independent characters. But the characters themselves do not gain in strength, and the centrifugal forces that the author set in motion from the beginning pull characters and events out into empty space. At the end, the story has “slipped out of [the narrator’s] hands” (121).

By describing the narrator from the outside, Tulli effectively takes over his role and transforms him into yet another character. Midway through the novel, he has lost the privileged position we traditionally associate with a narrator. He is a most unwilling narrator, one who is “determined to do his job at the lowest possible cost” and who “sighs and sets to” (43). He gets his feet wet when attempting to keep pace with the novel (85). Unlike Herling’s narrator, always in control, Tulli’s is helpless and reluctant. We see him “calmly open[ing] and clos[ing] a double door and put[ting] a bunch of keys on a round side table” (41). As Chekhov’s readers recall from his play The Three Sisters, possession of keys denotes control, but Tulli’s narrator surrenders control when he deposits them on the furniture. Like peripatetic characters in the hotel and displaced furniture that hovers in space or gets shoved into a corner, forfeited keys underscore transience, loss of control.

Tulli elegantly distills the unease of a universe that has spun out of balance. She enlists details from everyday life, details that resonate with her readers’ own unpleasant experiences. We see a married woman (encountered earlier, in a relationship with her lover) sitting uncomfortably in a dentist chair. Dental problems compound personal problems, and we never know whether anesthetic was administered. But we know “it’s going to hurt” (49) if she wasn’t medicated. Tulli forces us to imagine an unpleasant scenario, including the whirring drill. She expands fictional anxiety to include her readers, in effect forcing us into this unsettling world.

Finally, the void prevails, and we are deposited in a silent world, the aural equivalent of visual emptiness. In her masterful novel, Tulli strikingly and subtly captures the essence of a world in transition between tradition and modernity. This elusiveness, an apt symbol of contemporary uncertainty, may also be an echo of Poland’s complex history.

 

The second of Tulli’s works published by Archipelago, Moving Parts is an invigorating puzzle of grammar and narrative that takes the reader on a fantastic journey through the last hundred years of European history without ever leaving the confines of a hotel. This curious building contains an impossible number of floors, trapdoors, and tunnels that seem to be the architecture of the story itself as well as the whole world. We follow here a nameless narrator who “would prefer not to tell about anything at all,” and who is not the book’s narrator but has been paid to narrate a certain plot, a banal tale involving a love triangle and an argument in a garden. This narrator gets bored, sidetracked, and ultimately lost as he struggles to maintain his hold on a story in which characters mutate or complain about their story line, other narrators of other stories get in the way, and a trapdoor in the hotel’s basement leads to a tunnel, which leads to an apartment building during World War II, which leads to an elevator, which leads to something pretty close to hell on earth. Because he is not a reader or character, our narrator can move behind the scenes of the hotel—which stand in for the constructed realities of narrative and history—with a set of keys that open doors to other places and times; but he is finally as powerless as anyone to understand or affect the nightmare of the world he confronts. In its surprising movements through history, space, and language, Moving Parts is an incisive social commentary that suggests how crucial it is we pay attention to dominant structures of narrative in literature and life.

 

Archipelago Books continues to issue handsome paperback editions of works that are emphatically not for everyone but that will be of great interest to readers seeking the unusual and the obscure. The Novices of Sais is by Friedrich von Hardenberg, who wrote under the name Novalis and died of consumption at age 29 in 1801. Some aspects of his life foreshadow the life of Edgar Allen Poe, notable his love ofr a 13-year-old (he was 23 when he fell for her) and her death at 15. Like John Keats, Novalis had a Romantic temperament plus a practical streak (he studied medicine to try to save his beloved’s life). The Novices of Sais combines emotional Romanticism with a love of nature and an attempt to show how Man and Nature interrelate. Ralph Manheim’s translation from the original German flows well: “Now the country became richer and more varied, the air mild and blue, the path more level, green copses lured him with comforting shade, but he did not understand their language, they seemed indeed not to speak, and yet they filled his heart with green color and cool stillness.” But the meanderings and proto-Surrealist philosophizing of Novalis may be of less interest to the curiosity-driven modern reader than this edition’s 60 illustrations by Paul Klee. They are a world unto themselves, reflecting Novalis’ inner one into a highly detailed and fascination exterior.

 

With his moony-eyed, flushed face gazing out from his portrait, the late-eighteenth-century poet Novalis looks like the patron saint of German Romantic literature. Friedrich von Hardenberg took his pen name from his twelfth-century Saxon ancestors, known in Latin as de Novali, or “clearers of new land,” which finely evokes the otherworldly aura for which he came to be revered. Yet the “ardent and holy Novalis,” as Emerson called him, had his feet firmly planted on the ground. The poet made his living as a salt-mine inspector, conducting geological surveys and mineralogical studies an experience that had a significant influence on his literary work that scholars are only beginning to register.

Still, it’s not the scientist who has enchanted generations of readers but rather the doomed visionary who died young after spending his entire life in the shadow of mortality. Born in 1772 in Saxony, Novalis barely survived an attack of dysentery at the age of 9. In 1794, after completing a law degree, he fell desperately in love with the 12-year-old Sophie von Kühn, to whom he was engaged in secret. But Sophie soon fell ill and died just after her 15th birthday. The following, grief-stricken year, Novalis enrolled at the Mining Academy in Freiburg and began writing poetry while pursuing his studies of mathematics, physics and chemistry. His first major work the Blütenstaub [Pollen] fragments appeared in 1798 in the premiere issue of the journal Athenäum. Edited by August and Friedrich Schlegel, the journal was the central forum for the early German Romantics who congregated in the city of Jena, notably the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, the writer and critic Ludwig Tieck and the philosopher Friedrich Schelling.

The Romantics, feeling that the French Revolution had left mostly desiccated cultural forms in its wake, sought to forge a new mode of existence out of the ruins. Their movement ran counter to the cult of reason and scientific objectivity arising from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Advocates of a higher unity, they did not so much reject rational illumination as insist that the nocturnal, subterranean and interior realms of existence not be forgotten. Significantly, the Athenäum’s history paralleled Novalis’s career, its final issue containing his last work before his death at the age of 28 in 1801. In the span of three years, he virtually patented the sensibility of early German Romanticism. His writings most notably the haunting poetic work Hymnen an die Nacht [Hymns to the Night], which memorialized his lost child-bride, and the never-completed novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen[Henry of Ofterdingen] helped launch the movement and have since become practically synonymous with it. The yearning for the remote and unattainable, the fascination with ancient myths and mysticism, the heralding of spiritual rebirth, the celebration of the fragment as a form of expression it’s all there in Novalis. But his unfinished novel Die Lehrlinge zu Sais which has just been reissued by Archipelago Books as The Novices of Sais is more than a specimen for an anatomy of a literary movement. Its variations on the theme of the human search for knowledge of nature exhibit a dazzling array of poetic motifs and philosophical expositions.

The basic scenario of The Novices of Sais harks back to an ancient, mystical age of masters, disciples and initiation rituals. The novel takes the form of a conversation among a group of “novices,” spiritual apprentices who gather at the feet of their mentor, the “teacher,” to receive instruction in the secrets of nature. For the Romantics, nature was a forest of symbols containing all mysteries and all truths. In this, they expressed the spirit of their times, except that they assigned the task of deciphering nature to the poet rather than to the scientist. The Novices is a kaleidoscope of interpretations, visions and allegories of nature, all conveyed by the disciples in a series of philosophical dialogues. In the mesh of their “crisscrossing voices,” paradoxes abound. One disciple observes that nature is as foreign as an indecipherable script “written…in crystals and stone formations,” yet as familiar as a “household utensil.” Another calls it a “sacred home” from which human beings have strayed, while yet another sees it as a “hideous prison” confining them to their mortal fate. The teacher, for his part, finds in nature a delightful play of resemblances: “Sometimes men were stars, sometimes the stones were beasts, the clouds plants.” A more menacing view is expressed by a disciple for whom nature is an “awful, devouring power,” a force of annihilation wreaking the “desolation of former glories,” a perilous abyss that swallows up life and human civilization.

Like Plato in the Symposium, Novalis uses conversation rather than disquisition to convey ideas. In fact, the affinity with the Symposium runs deeper: Both books view Eros as essential to the attainment of truth, and both have a female character as their vehicle of revelation. In theSymposium, the priestess Diotima explains how the desire for knowledge is initially sparked by erotic attraction. This must have appealed to Novalis, who famously likened his passion for philosophy to his love of Sophie, playing on the Greek philosophia. In The Novices of Sais, the connection between erotic mystery and the quest for truth is epitomized in the motif of the veil appearing in the myth, told by one of the disciples, of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis. Her tantalizing veil entices mortals to uncover the naked secrets it conceals: “He who does not seek to lift it, is no true novice of Sais.”

In its capacity to incite unquenchable desire, the veil rivals the Blue Flower, an image from Heinrich von Ofterdingen, widely hailed as the quintessential novel of Sehnsucht (romantic longing). But it also has an enigmatic quality much like the rippling, suggestive texture of Novalis’s prose. His language seduces in the same way that the numerous cloaks and guises of nature captivate the knowledge seekers of the novel. The Novices of Sais beguilingly embodies the process of “romanticizing” the world as he defines it in a posthumously published fragment: a transfiguration of the commonplace, giving “the ordinary a mysterious countenance, the known the dignity of the unknown.”

 

When The Novices of Sais was translated into French in 1925, the surrealists avidly embraced it and claimed Novalis as a guiding light. The English translation by Ralph Manheim was first published in 1949. It included an introduction, as it does now in this elegant reprint, by the English poet Stephen Spender, who compares Novalis to Keats, and presented sixty stunning drawings by the Swiss-born German artist Paul Klee (1879 — 1940), images created not as illustrations but rather as visual improvisations on Novalis’s tale. There are, therefore, two poets at work in the body of this mysterious and transporting book, one using language, the other line. And what an intriguing, epoch-spanning duet they form.

Novalis envisions a gathering of novices, or spiritual seekers, in the ancient Egyptian city of Sais. They have gathered around their teacher, who has meditated so intently on life “he ceased to see anything by itself.” The novices, some ebullient, some morose, share their thoughts and revelations, tell stories, and listen to the tales of travelers on their own quests for meaning. As one voice takes up where another leaves off, an esoteric, occasionally wry, sometimes exalted, otherwise down-to-earth, wistful, and shrewdly open-ended discourse takes shape. The eloquent speakers dissect everything from the role of poets and scientists in society to the nature of true love, and ask whether it is nobler to live a life of solitary reflection or one of joyful human connection.

There is much to parse and contemplate here, and so tightly grained and subtle are Novalis’s arguments, so pointed his portraits of the novices, so crystalline the details he limns, that his enchanted prose poem yields new insights with each reading. Novalis’s lustrous style and penetrating vision call to mind the books of W. G. Sebald, another writer whose work is at once mythic, philosophical, and acutely attuned to the living world. Like Novalis, Klee was born into a time of bloody upheavals, war, and radical change, and he, too, became a perceptive and passionate student of nature. His imagination was also stoked by both the magic of fables and the reason of philosophical inquiries. Klee looked to the subconscious for inspiration and sought to retain the spontaneity of a child when making art. The son of a music teacher and a musician himself, Klee brought the fluency of music to his fantastic drawings in their grace of composition, the rhythm of their patterns, and their subtle resemblance to musical scores.

Just as Novalis creates a streaming narrative, Klee’s drawings look as though he never lifted pen from paper. They are as faceted as crystals, as meshed as leaves, as finely patterned as a shell. Klee’s complex, lovely, whimsical, and enigmatic drawings evince a profound affinity for Novalis and add dimension to the intricate text, while Novalis’s fable provides a provocative context for Klee’s images.

 

Diary of Andrés Fava

2005-06-05

This previously unpublished portion of an early work by Cortázar is actually a fragment of a fragment. Ostensibly the daily jottings of Andrés Fava, a peripheral character in the novel Final Exam, the text offers a whirlwind voyage through Cortázar’s mind. Written in 1950 and set in an eerie, fog-bound Buenos Aires, it anticipates the mental games and mortal quests of the great Argentine writer’s masterpiece, Hopscotch, and more experimental works like Cronopios and Famas and Around the Day in Eighty Worlds. Overflowing with existential riffs and noirish turns, the narrative also features notes on jazz and appearances by phantasmagoric creatures of the imagination. “This notebook is a cage full of monsters,” Cortázar writes, “and outside is Buenos Aires.”