Books in Brief: Nonfiction; Rilke on Rodin

2004-08-01

In 1902, an obscure young poet named Rainer Maria Rilke arrived on the Paris doorstep of Auguste Rodin, armed with an assignment to write a monograph on the French sculptor. At the time, Rilke, fastidious and recently married, was equipped with only halting French; Rodin, unable to read Rilke’s lyrical German, was an imperious 62, his creative drive matched only by his skill at seducing the women who posed nude for him. Combining Daniel Slager’s elegant translation from the German of Rilke’s writings on Rodin with Michael Eastman’s photographs of Rodin’s sculptures, AUGUSTE RODIN (Archipelago, $30) offers a fresh look at an unlikely mentorship. Adopting the rapturous tone of a new disciple, Rilke finds in Rodin’s sculpture much of his own ideal of the solitary genius—“sheltered behind the efforts that sustained him” and “filled with the animating burden of his vast knowledge.” But he may be closer to the mark, as the evocative photographs suggest, in portraying Rodin as a keen student of the flesh. In such works as “The Caryatid” and “The Kiss,” Rilke observes, “faces were extinguished and bodies came into their own,” an achievement that transformed the movement of limbs into “strange documents of the momentary.

 

A poet carves a sculptor in words

2004-11-30

 

They were surely one of the oddest couples in 20th-century art: Auguste Rodin, the French sculptor, sixtyish and wildly famous, and Rainer Maria Rilke, the 26-year-old German poet, at the beginning of his career, who showed up on the sculptor’s doorstep on a September afternoon just over a century ago to begin a monograph on the great man.

The monograph pleased the master, and led to an offer of lodging and employment for Rilke as the sculptor’s secretary. The poet even took his Rodin show on the road, as a lecture delivered in Dresden and Prague. But then came a falling out; less than four years later, the younger man found himself “dismissed like a thieving servant.”

However badly it ended, the time together did yield for Rilke two remarkable pieces of writing – the monograph and the lecture.

This volume comprises those two pieces, plus an introduction, in prose as rich as a fine pâté, by William Gass, author of “Reading Rilke” and other books. Rilke illumines Rodin’s creative process; he also sheds light on his own ideals of the artistic genius. Gass adds context and helps us read between the lines.

Up close and personal, Rilke had the opportunity to observe Rodin’s immense artistic dedication – but also his tendency to get more than professionally involved with the women who modeled nude for him. Rilke’s observations are wonderfully astute. Speaking of his drawings, he wrote, “Rodin assumed that if a model’s most inconspicuous and unassuming movements were captured quickly, they would provide an unfamiliar intensity of expression, because we are not accustomed to observing them with keen, active attentiveness.”

Or consider this: “Rodin developed his memory into a resource that is at once reliable and always ready. During the sitting his eye sees far more than he can record at the time. He forgets none of it, and often the real work begins, drawn from the rich store of his memory, only after the model has left.”

It was an encounter, though, almost destined to end painfully. Rilke brought to Rodin’s atelier the breathless, idealistic adoration of a disciple, as well as his rather fussy, proto-vegan eating habits.

When he first arrived in Paris, Rilke barely had a means of communicating with the master. Rodin could not have been expected to speak German, and Rilke’s mastery of French was still a work in progress. And so the poet had to “run after Rodin’s rapid French as though for a departing bus,” as Gass puts it.

Rilke’s first weeks in Paris were a difficult time, spent on the very margins of society when he wasn’t at the studio or Rodin’s country place at Meudon. But it was the sort of painful solitude out of which good work can come. Rodin exposed Rilke to an artistic work ethic. “You have to work, nothing but work.” For the poet used to waiting for inspiration, this was a new – and very useful – concept.

“Writers work with words, sculptors with actions,” was a Renaissance motto. For readers interested in either field of endeavor, this volume is a treat.

 

Reading is an intimate act. When we hold a book, we take possession of the words–with our hands and our eyes as well as with our mind. And when the book is an art book, we take possession not only of words but also of images. Of course, the images in art books are secondhand, because the startling immediacy of the painting or the sculpture has been diluted by the photographer’s lens and the printer’s ink. But we know this before we pick up an art book (we are not quite the victims of mechanical reproduction that Walter Benjamin feared we would become). And reproductions have their advantages, for we can strike up an easygoing acquaintance with them, which can in turn give us a yearning for the deeper, less readily contained experiences that we have with works of art in galleries and museums.

Or so I felt as I went through a raft of recent books dealing with the visual arts. A part of what is most satisfying in this season’s fare is the appearance of some volumes of relatively modest dimensions, which manage nevertheless to suggest the wildest reaches of artistic experience. Some of the most interesting new art books actually contain relatively few reproductions. And some of the best picture books suggest a break with the coffee-table behemoths; they are books you can hold easily, as you would a novel.

[excerpted]

Poets and the visual arts—it is a vast subject; and all through the twentieth century artists and writers collaborated almost constantly, sometimes with such intensity that it seemed as if they were passing back and forth a single flask labeled “Inspiration.” Few poets have written more eloquently about the visual arts than Rilke, and one of the most beautiful books of the year is his Auguste Rodin(Archipelago Books, $30), translated by Daniel Slager, with photographs by Michael Eastman, which bring us close to the charged surfaces of Rodin’s bronzes, and catch their storm-tossed intensity. Rodin was at times a disturbingly bombastic artist–while his Gates of Hell may be the work of a genius, it is also pure kitsch–but in the years just after 1900, when Rilke got to know him, the avant-garde was still inclined to embrace Rodin as a rough-hewn visionary, a man in whose studio, as Rilke wrote, “everything was becoming, but nothing was in a hurry.” For Rilke, both Rodin and Cézanne suggested, through the very physicality of their labors, a route beyond fin-de-siècle preciosity. Rilke discovered in Rodin a man who was utterly committed to the materiality of the artistic vocation. Rodin taught Rilke to make his feelings concrete.

 

Brilliant and subtle but richly colored new photographs of Rodin’s sculptures by Michael Eastman make this new translation of Rilke’s classic meditation on Auguste Rodin a feast fro the eye and the mind. National Book Critics Circle Award winner William Gass examines the text and the setting to provide insight and context. Fine writing, beautiful images, and exciting ideas make this edition of Rilke’s Auguste Rodin a real treat.

From the Slavic and East European Journal
Review by Kirsten Lodge

 

Dreams and Stones, by the Polish writer Magdalena Tulli, is a postmodernist masterpiece of lyrical prose that defies generic definition and is rife with paradox and metaphor. Lacking characters and a clear narrative, it is non-linear and frequently non-rational. The world of Dreams and Stones is one in which nothing can be fully known, the past has left half-forgotten and distorted yet transformative traces on everything, and every word contains its opposite.  Striving towards utopia inevitably flags and becomes weariness, sickness, and ultimately corruption and debauchery, as the enthusiasm of constructing a new order is transformed into sorrow. Continued disillusionment leads to cruelty and violence, which hasten the city’s demise. The disintegrating metropolis collapses, in the end, into an apocalyptic nightmare of miry swamps, torrid heat, ice, and floods.
Every city, for Tulli, is composed of dreams and stones. Dreams include thought, memory, and language, which are boundless, intangible, and invaluable. However, they are also impermanent. Thoughts and memories are like sunken coins in the cold black “groundwaters of oblivion” (87), which slowly wear them down, heedless of the principles of reason. The city of dreams is a city of death, but it alone has human value. The language of memory also dissolves as time passes, and Tulli gives this linguistic fragmentation imaginative physical form. The W and A—presumably of WARSAW—for instance, are broken letters of shattered words that have been dispersed far and wide in both time and space. They can be seen in the form of the roofs and steeples of the city destroyed by war; the spikes of rickety fences in the city of today; and the Arch of Triumph and Eiffel Tower in Paris. Just as language leaves its detritus on the cityscape, the city of yesterday is inseparable from the city of today. The many fractured layers of the city’s history overlap on its geography.
Countless memories were lost when the “city of furnishings” became the “city of excavations,” i.e., when “a vast bomb crater” (63) appeared in the city’s heart and fires raged through it, destroying dreams, lives, and things. Yet many memories nonetheless survived into the ensuing period of optimistic reconstruction, when time seemed to be accelerated. People demonstrated faith, strength, and bravery as they dedicated themselves to labor to attain their beautiful dream of the future. Though faded and distorted, memories of this era and the subsequent failure of its ideal live on in the contemporary city of corruption, drugs, and American banks.
Whereas dreams, like nature, are ephemeral, yet living and unique, the stones of cities are permanent and tangible, but not alive. Though they possess neither language nor memory, they blindly and mutely observe the life of the city, as do the stone statues built in the early years of communism with their “protruding eyes without pupils” (26-27). Only the stones, which are outside time and language, will continue to exist, “a steadfast endurance free of any name” (110). Dreams and memories may disappear, but the city’s stones, for the most part, will remain. And even if they should fall or crumble to dust, they are always free of coercion and emotion, unlike the inhabitants of cities, who succumb to oppression and suffering.
Tulli’s vision of the world and the growth/construction of the ideal city are founded on two central metaphors: the city as a tree and the city as a machine. At first she criticizes the (Communist) builders for envisioning the city as a machine in which every part is replaceable. She then appropriates that metaphor, however, and describes the building of the utopian city as the construction of an intricate complex of machinery. The futuristic city’s mechanisms are so complicated that multiple breakdowns are inevitable, replacement parts cannot be found, no one is able to repair the damage, and eventually the city-machine begins to fall apart. It is the desire for utopia itself—the constant effort to dispel disorder from the world—that paradoxically creates more chaos, or what Tulli terms the influx of the “countercity.” Even the artificial stars n the sky go black, and sooty dust descends upon the dark metropolis. Not only the city, but the entire universe is nothing but junk.
For Tulli, however, those who compare the city to a tree are not only enemies, but also brothers of those who see it as a machine, for the manmade and the organic are always interconnected. As the world dies, each individual is alienated within a distinct city showering her not only with crumbling plaster, but also with dead leaves. The nature motif returns here, near the end of the book, echoing the first paragraph, which describes the tree of the world. Here too the natural and the inorganic mingle: when the tree of the world loses its leaves, they turn brown like “pieces of paper turned to ash or rusted-though tin cans” (7). The metaphors of “tree” and “machine” are inseparable; they are the obverse and reverse of a single coin, like good and evil, life and death, Tulli asserts.
Dreams and Stones is a difficult book, but it merits and rewards close readings and re-readings. Anyone interested in contemporary central European literature, or in post-Communism or postmodernism in general, will be deeply impressed by this brilliant elegiac work. But is it too complex for undergraduates? I taught it and found that about half my students didn’t like it because it was too difficult, while the remainder enjoyed it very much (though there was a lot that they didn’t understand). Some contextual background, close reading, analysis, and discussion helped them to appreciate the text, and at the end of the semester two students said it was their favorite reading of the course. I would, therefore, recommend it for undergraduates as well as advanced students, provided that the need for essential historical background and substantial guidance in interpretation is recognized.

 

Kirsten Lodge, Columbia University

 

Excerpts from “Dreams and Cities” by Daniela Hurezanu, The Chattahoochee Review, Spring/Summer 2008, pp. 160-166.

 

Magdalena Tulli’s book Dreams and Stones, published in 2004 by Archipelago Books in Bill Johnston’s translation, has been hailed as one of the most extraordinary books written after the fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe. It’s writing has been compared to that of her compatriot Bruno Schulz, and to that of Kafka, who himself had been a source of inspiration for Schulz. These kinds of comparisons are common when we encounter a new voice and feel the need to define it in some way, and since the only way we can pin it down is by encapsulating it into something we are familiar with, we always summon these familiar voices as a measure for the unknown. We think that because Tulli and Schulz share the same language and geographical space (Poland), one must have inspired the other; we think that because Kafka and Schulz were both Jews from Central Europe, they must have similar voices and world views. And we are not entirely wrong.

 

But for whoever takes the time to read these authors with an attention that goes beyond our comfortable assumptions, it becomes clear that they are also very different from each other. Kafka and Schulz were indeed almost contemporaries and the Jewish ethos streaming underneath their stories is recognizable as the same, but their style couldn’t be more different. While Kafka’s fight against idolatry, that is, the “lie” which any work of art is in its essence, is materialized in an austere style, Schulz’s style could be described as almost baroque. When we read Schulz, the influence of the surrealist writers who were his contemporaries is as undeniable as the presence of certain Kafkaesque themes: the authority of the father and the desire to overthrow it, the human metamorphosis into an insect, which in Schulz is taken to an extreme, for it is the father who is transformed into an insect. Shulz is a combination of surrealist aesthetics, Kafkaesque inner conflicts stripped of their religious anguish and Kafkaesque absurdness turned into grotesque humor. As for Kafka himself, one cannot recognize any influence in his writing; if there is any, it is not an influence; rather, it is distilled Judaism.

 

And what about Magdalena Tulli? As flattering as the comparison with these masters might be, I am not sure that it is entirely accurate. Like most comparisons, it too is based on something true: Tulli’s Dreams and Stones, a fictional prose poem or a poetic fiction, is reminiscent of Kafka’s parables in that the story seems to be telling much more than its surface lets appear; and it is reminiscent of Schulz in its unbound imagination and metaphoric associations. But its theme is remote from the concerns that the two Jewish writers had at the time when the lived and wrote. It is a theme that in today’s academic circles is described as nature versus culture or narrative versus technology, and which has been clothed in a jargon entirely absent from Tulli’s book – for, like any true creation, Dreams and Stones creates its own language as it re-creates the world. And because we often perceive things only in the shell we are accustomed to, we may fail to see what this book is about. Tulli’s countrymen say it is about a city, namely Warsaw, and they are probably right. But for those of us who do not know Warsaw, the book is no less vivid: the city it describes is not only Warsaw, but any city, a mythical city whose history replicates the history of civilization and the intricate relation between nature and artifact residing at the core of all societies. Knowing that Tulli has translate Calvino into Polish also reminds us that Calvino is the author of Invisible Cities, a collection of fable-like tales, whose narrator takes us through the labyrinth of the numerous cities he has passed through, all with names of women, all elusive and desirable as the women whose names they bear.

 

Dreams and Stones begins with the description of “the tree of the world,” which brings to mind the mythical image of the tree of life or of axis mundi. The tree, however, is not only he tree of life; it appears that it may also be the tree of death. The tree, which grows like all trees above the ground, has a “countertree,” which grows “into the depths of the earth,” dark and full of vermin. A rushed reading might conclude from here that we are dealing with the classical opposition between life and death, but Tulli’s story is much more complex than this. The opposition is between the visible and the invisible, between being and nonbeing, between that which is and that which could be, between the conscious and the unconscious, between the real and the imaginary. Moreover, each fruit of the tree contains in itself the possibility of the countertree. Which also means that the two sets of oppositions are rather sides of the same whole.

 

[…]

 

From the image of the tree and its countertree, Tulli’s book slowly takes us to the universe of the city. Each fruit from the tree encloses a city. Each city and every single thing in it are “the embodiment of a singular possibility from the register of the possible.” For every thing that is, another thing has been “taken away.” In order for something to exist as a unique form, another possibility has been tossed away. Existence is  built on the loss of its counterpart––imaginary existence. For example a river triggers in the imagination of the city’s inhabitants the desire to create another river, whose characteristics are opposite those of the first river. And so, the city “contains within itself all possibilities at once, and the entire plan of the world.”

 

[…]

 

By the end of the story, the inhabitants realize that cleaning and repairing the city is not sufficient. Repairing only what can be touched does not take care of the invisible countercity, which influences the whole. The invisible is made of the flow of nouns, adjectives, verbs, and rules that link all ideas into a story. It may be, suggests Tulli, that the city and the world, i.e., the visible, exist only to make it possible for the inhabitants to dream their dreams.

The complete review’s Review

2000-07-29

 

Dreams and Stones is a fantastical fiction, its subject a nameless city. It is mainly descriptive: there is no sequence of incidents of the sort that usually carry a novel forward. Other than the city itself there are no characters — just anonymous masses of inhabitants and workmen and the like, with no individuals standing out.

Dreams and Stones reads almost like a lyrical essay, but it drifts beyond that. It is fantastical, a work of the imagination that sees in the city much beyond the everyday and real: it’s an interpretation that goes far beyond familiar urban realities.

The book is rich in fertile imagery, the city never static but rather in a state of constant, swelling metamorphosis. Growth and change are both organic and industrial, something Tulli conveys particularly well.

Many of her images and descriptions are striking, as is her ability to keep the reader from fixing on any single one. The world — this world, especially — is in constant flux, and the scenes can not be captured with photographic precision, blurring just at the moment when the scene seems to come into focus. Fans of naturalism will not be pleased, but it’s an effective representation of urban (and historical) memory:

Objects and buildings circulate randomly and mingle with one another. Memory must constantly untangle them since permanent order is not possible there. The city can neither be described nor drawn; the reality of the city blocks is resistant to orthogonal projection.

The city is to some extent situated in contemporary European topography, connexions to Paris and St. Petersburg and elsewhere reflecting back and helping in defining it. Presumably, in fact, the city is Warsaw, but Tulli’s cityscape is near-universal: particulars may differ, but what interests her about the living entities that cities are can be expressed more generally. Specifically, the constantly changing city — different from every perspective and every person’s place within (and without) it — mirrors life and memory itself. It’s one way of looking at the common conundrum:

In this city of changes, ruled by memory, there had to be room for everything that memory has retained, yet every day its contents are reduced to shreds a little more.

Tulli’s wild vision sometimes goes too far, as when she describes dark stars in the sky, invisible because:

They were smashed to pieces by the helicopters of the municipal transit system which were roaming aimlessly beneath the vault of the sky without fuel, which they could not refill since there was nowhere to land: The landing pads on the rooftops had never been built and now they were overgrown with dense jungles of antennas.

But elsewhere she impresses greatly. There are many simple yet effective images: “With time the buildings took on the same shade of gray as the cloudy sky and in this manner disappeared.” And there are also more elaborate but similarly effective descriptions:

At dusk the city of dreams and the city extending in space become one and join in a murky whole crowned by the black silhouettes of office buildings against a reddish sky, giant edifices constructed not long ago yet already affected by corrosion and darkness. Nowhere is there any boundary marker, inscription or informational sign that would indicate the relative positions of dreams and waking life. Some take the ringing of alarm clocks in the morning as a signal indicating the crossing of the border. But alarm clocks which themselves belong to dreams cannot wake people from them.

Readers should be aware of what they are getting themselves into: Dreams and Stones is an almost plot-less novel of description. Romance, action, dramatic arc are absent. But for those who don’t mind that, it’s certainly worthwhile: Tulli does what she does very well, her meditation on memory and the cityscape an often fascinating, wildly-imagined, and well-conveyed one.

 

Summer, seriously

2004-06-20

 

One of these mornings I’m going to rise up readin’

George Gershwin, “Summertime” (sort of)

Go ahead consult the best-seller lists. You might even stumble across something worthwhile, though the odds aren’t promising.

So once again we’re offering an alternative summertime-reading roundup. Our position: Mindless reading, or escape lit, is best consumed (if at all) when neurons are drained from a day’s work; long stretches of long days off are ideal for serious reading pleasure. Although this guide is by no means comprehensive, it’ll blaze a path through bookstores’ stand-alone, stand-up cardboard displays featuring James Patterson and those Da Vinci-whatever-it-is books.

As for fiction … some of my suggestions are going to be edgy, even over-the-edge for some people in some cases. And why not? You know where to find the Da Vinci stuff, right?

Dreams and Stones, by Magdalena Tulli, is a short (110 pages), odd and oddly hypnotic narrative about the rise of a mysterious, unnamed city. The—what? novel? not exactly—was translated from Polish by Bill Johnston and has been beautifully packaged by Archipelago, a small new independent press dedicated to offering high-quality foreign literature to the American public.

 

Dreams and Stones, Polish writer Magdalena Tulli’s first novel to be published in the United States, dexterously braids cords of memory, imagination, and elegiac intensity, as she give us the story of the founding and development of a major city and, by extension of all cities: a brilliant tale of “these interpenetrating spaces” that become “ever more confused, entangled, diffuse.” Tulli manages with apparent ease to parse the shifting urban amalgam she posits into complementary component parts that are rendered with great exactitude: “The city of yesterday and the city of today can seem like a pair of identical looking pictures from a puzzle in which on closer inspection one may find a flag missing from a rooftop, an additional flowerpot on a windowsill or one more sparrow upon a ledge.”

 

Like all cities, Tulli’ has a many coexisting, mutually coloring layers as mica. Zones of joy and sorrow overlap, rise out of each other. There are beautiful dreams evoked and, of course (not least, one supposes, because of the ravages of the 20th century) horrible ones. The generative and destructive nature of time is accordingly speculated upon: “Is it that which turns the cogs of clocks or that which the clocks crush in their cogs?” Part of great power of the writing, well-served by Bill Johnston’s gorgeous translation from the Polish, derives from Tulli’s unusually limber, absolutely authoritative prose line. It never for a moment falters as her city of dreams and stones and steel, grows and contracts, turns inward, outward, rushes on.

 

 

Compiled and translated by Peter Wortsman, this collection of short stories, novellas and literary fragments by German writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) is impressive not only for its content but for its relevance centuries later. In “The Earthquake in Chile,” Jeronimo Rugera is jailed for impregnating his student, Donna Josephe, and is contemplating suicide on the day of her arranged beheading when an earthquake thunders through the city and frees him. Rugera, wandering through the rubble-torn streets, is astonished to find that both his love and their baby have miraculously been spared, but the bloodthirsty nature of the surviving townspeople has not abated. Based on a true event, “The Marquise of O” centers on an Italian widow courted by Count F., who asks for her hand in marriage. Meanwhile, she notices her body transforming and when the surprise pregnancy is confirmed, her family banishes her in disgrace, and she seizes upon the plan of advertising in the newspaper for the father to step forward and prove her innocence. A dark, charming collection of twisted fairy tales for grownups.