Where the Stress Falls (12 page)
Read Where the Stress Falls Online
Authors: Susan Sontag
[1982]
ROBERT WALSER IS
one of the important German-language writers of the twentieth century—a major writer, both for his four novels that have survived (my favorite is the third, written in 1908,
Jakob von Gunten
) and for his short prose, where the musicality and free fall of his writing are less impeded by plot. Anyone seeking to bring Walser to a public that has yet to discover him has at hand a whole arsenal of glorious comparisons. A Paul Klee in prose—as delicate, as sly, as haunted. A cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett: a good-humored, sweet Beckett. And, as literature’s present inevitably remakes its past, so we cannot help but see Walser as the missing link between Kleist and Kafka, who admired him greatly. (At the time, it was more likely to be Kafka who was seen through the prism of Walser. Robert Musil, another admirer among Walser’s contemporaries, after first reading Kafka pronounced him “a peculiar case of the Walser type.”) I get a similar rush of pleasure from Walser’s single-voiced short prose as I do from Leopardi’s dialogues and playlets, that great writer’s triumphant short prose form. And the variety of mental weather in Walser’s stories and sketches, their elegance and their unpredictable lengths remind me of the free, first-person forms that abound in classical Japanese literature: pillow book, poetic diary, “essays in idleness.” But any true lover of Walser will want to disregard the net of comparisons that one can throw over his work.
one of the important German-language writers of the twentieth century—a major writer, both for his four novels that have survived (my favorite is the third, written in 1908,
Jakob von Gunten
) and for his short prose, where the musicality and free fall of his writing are less impeded by plot. Anyone seeking to bring Walser to a public that has yet to discover him has at hand a whole arsenal of glorious comparisons. A Paul Klee in prose—as delicate, as sly, as haunted. A cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett: a good-humored, sweet Beckett. And, as literature’s present inevitably remakes its past, so we cannot help but see Walser as the missing link between Kleist and Kafka, who admired him greatly. (At the time, it was more likely to be Kafka who was seen through the prism of Walser. Robert Musil, another admirer among Walser’s contemporaries, after first reading Kafka pronounced him “a peculiar case of the Walser type.”) I get a similar rush of pleasure from Walser’s single-voiced short prose as I do from Leopardi’s dialogues and playlets, that great writer’s triumphant short prose form. And the variety of mental weather in Walser’s stories and sketches, their elegance and their unpredictable lengths remind me of the free, first-person forms that abound in classical Japanese literature: pillow book, poetic diary, “essays in idleness.” But any true lover of Walser will want to disregard the net of comparisons that one can throw over his work.
In long as in short prose Walser is a miniaturist, promulgating the claims of the anti-heroic, the limited, the humble, the small—as if in response to his acute feeling for the interminable. Walser’s life illustrates the restlessness of one kind of depressive temperament; he had the depressive’s fascination with stasis, and with the way time distends, is consumed, and spent much of his life obsessively turning time into space: his walks. His work plays with the depressive’s appalled vision of endlessness: it is all voice—musing, conversing, rambling, running on. The important is redeemed as a species of the unimportant, wisdom as a kind of shy, valiant loquacity.
The moral core of Walser’s art is the refusal of power, of domination. I’m ordinary—that is, nobody—declares the characteristic Walser persona. In “Flower Days” (1911), Walser evokes the race of “odd people, who lack character,” who don’t want to do anything. The recurrent “I” of Walser’s prose is the opposite of the egotist’s: it is that of someone “drowning in obedience.” One knows about the repugnance Walser felt for success—the prodigious spread of failure that was his life. In “Kienast” (1917), Walser describes “a man who wanted nothing to do with anything.” This non-doer was, of course, a proud, stupendously productive writer who secreted work, much of it written in his astonishing micro-script, without pause. What Walser says about inaction, renunciation of effort, effortlessness, is a program, an antiromantic one, of the artist’s activity. In “A Little Ramble” (1914), he observes: “We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.”
Walser often writes, from the point of view of a casualty, of the romantic visionary imagination. “Kleist in Thun” (1913), both self-portrait and authoritative tour of the mental landscape of suicide-destined romantic genius, depicts the precipice on the edge of which Walser lived. The last paragraph, with its excruciating modulations, seals an account of mental ruin as grand as anything I know in literature. But most of his stories and sketches bring consciousness back from the brink. He is just having his “gentle and courteous bit of fun,” Walser can assure us, in “Nervous” (1916), speaking in the first person. “Grouches, grouches, one must have them, and one must have the courage to live with them. That’s the nicest way to live. Nobody should
be afraid of his little bit of weirdness.” The longest of the stories, “The Walk” (1917), identifies walking with a lyrical mobility and detachment of temperament, with the “raptures of freedom”; darkness arrives only at the end. Walser’s art assumes depression and terror, in order (mostly) to accept it—ironize over it, lighten it. These are gleeful as well as somber soliloquies about the relation to gravity, in both senses, physical and characterological: anti-gravity writing, in praise of movement and sloughing off, weightlessness; portraits of consciousness walking about in the world, enjoying its “morsel of life,” radiant with despair.
be afraid of his little bit of weirdness.” The longest of the stories, “The Walk” (1917), identifies walking with a lyrical mobility and detachment of temperament, with the “raptures of freedom”; darkness arrives only at the end. Walser’s art assumes depression and terror, in order (mostly) to accept it—ironize over it, lighten it. These are gleeful as well as somber soliloquies about the relation to gravity, in both senses, physical and characterological: anti-gravity writing, in praise of movement and sloughing off, weightlessness; portraits of consciousness walking about in the world, enjoying its “morsel of life,” radiant with despair.
In Walser’s fictions one is (as in so much of modern art) always inside a head, but this universe—and this despair—is anything but solipsistic. It is charged with compassion: awareness of the creatureliness of life, of the fellowship of sadness. “What kind of people am I thinking of?” Walser’s voice asks in “A Sort of Speech” (1925). “Of me, of you, of all our theatrical little dominations, of the freedoms that are none, of the un-freedoms that are not taken seriously, of these destroyers who never pass up a chance for a joke, of the people who are desolate?” That question mark at the end of the answer is a typical Walser courtesy. Walser’s virtues are those of the most mature, most civilized art. He is a truly wonderful, heartbreaking writer.
[1982]
THE DEATH OF
Danilo Kiš on October 15, 1989, at the age of fifty-four, wrenchingly cut short one of the most important journeys in literature made by any writer during the second half of the twentieth century. Born on the rim of the Yugoslav cauldron (in Subotica, near the frontier with Hungary) a few years before World War II to a Hungarian Jewish father (Kiš is a Hungarian name) who perished in Auschwitz and a Serb Orthodox mother from rural Montenegro, raised mostly in Hungary and in Montenegro, a graduate in literature of the university in Belgrade, where he made his debut as a writer, eventually a part-time expatriate, doing some teaching in France, and finally a full-time one, in Paris, where he lived his last ten years, Kiš had a life span that matched, from start to finish, what might have been thought the worst the century had to offer his part of Europe: Nazi conquest and the genocide of the Jews, followed by Soviet takeover.
Danilo Kiš on October 15, 1989, at the age of fifty-four, wrenchingly cut short one of the most important journeys in literature made by any writer during the second half of the twentieth century. Born on the rim of the Yugoslav cauldron (in Subotica, near the frontier with Hungary) a few years before World War II to a Hungarian Jewish father (Kiš is a Hungarian name) who perished in Auschwitz and a Serb Orthodox mother from rural Montenegro, raised mostly in Hungary and in Montenegro, a graduate in literature of the university in Belgrade, where he made his debut as a writer, eventually a part-time expatriate, doing some teaching in France, and finally a full-time one, in Paris, where he lived his last ten years, Kiš had a life span that matched, from start to finish, what might have been thought the worst the century had to offer his part of Europe: Nazi conquest and the genocide of the Jews, followed by Soviet takeover.
Nineteen eighty-nine, the year Kiš died of cancer, was, of course, the annus mirabilis in which Soviet-style totalitarian rule ended in Central Europe. By mid-October, the collapse of what had seemed immutable was clearly under way; three weeks later, the Berlin Wall was torn down. It is comforting to think that he died knowing only the good news. Happily—it is the only thing about his premature death which gives some consolation—he didn’t live to see the collapse of the multi-confessional, multi-ethnic state of which he was a citizen (his
“mixed” origin made Kiš very much a Yugoslav), and the return, on European soil, in his own country, of concentration camps and genocide. An ardent foe of nationalist vanities, he would have loathed Serb ethnic fascism even more than he loathed the neo-Bolshevik official culture of the Second Yugoslavia it has replaced. It is hard to imagine that, if he were still alive, he could have borne the destruction of Bosnia.
“mixed” origin made Kiš very much a Yugoslav), and the return, on European soil, in his own country, of concentration camps and genocide. An ardent foe of nationalist vanities, he would have loathed Serb ethnic fascism even more than he loathed the neo-Bolshevik official culture of the Second Yugoslavia it has replaced. It is hard to imagine that, if he were still alive, he could have borne the destruction of Bosnia.
The amount of history, or horror, a writer is obliged to endure does not make him or her a great writer. But geography is destiny. For Kiš there was no retreating from an exalted sense of the writer’s place and of the writer’s responsibility that, literally, came with the territory. Kiš was from a small country where writers are for better and for worse important, with the most gifted becoming moral, and sometimes even political, legislators. Perhaps more often for worse: it was eminent Belgrade writers who provided the ideological underpinning of the Serbian genocidal project known as ethnic cleansing. The complicity of most Serb writers and artists not in exile in the current triumph of Greater Serbian imperialism suggests that the anti-nationalist voices, of which Kiš was the bravest and most eloquent, have always been in the minority. Much as by temperament and exquisitely cosmopolitan literary culture he would have preferred a less embattled course, in which literature was kept separate from politics, Kiš was always under attack and therefore, necessarily, on the attack. The first fight was against provincialism. This was the provincialism not so much of a small literature (for the former Yugoslavia produced at least two world-class prose writers, Ivo Andri
and Miroslav Krleža) as of a state-supported, state-rewarded literature. It could be fought simply by his being the utterly independent, artistically ambitious writer he was, almost from the beginning. But worse attacks were to come.
and Miroslav Krleža) as of a state-supported, state-rewarded literature. It could be fought simply by his being the utterly independent, artistically ambitious writer he was, almost from the beginning. But worse attacks were to come.One of those writers who are first of all readers, who prefer dawdling and grazing and blissing out in the Great Library and surrender to their vocation only when the urge to write becomes unbearable, Kiš was not what would be called prolific. In his lifetime he published nine books, seven of them in the fourteen years between 1962, when he was twenty-seven, and 1976, when he was forty-one. First came a pair of short novels,
The Attic
and
Psalm 44
(published in 1962; not yet
translated into English). The second book,
Garden, Ashes
(1965), was a novel. The third,
Early Sorrows
(1968), was a book of stories. The fourth,
Hourglass
(1972), was a novel. The fifth and sixth were two collections of essays,
Po-etika
(1972) and
Po-etika II
(1974). The seventh,
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
(1976), was a collection of thematically linked stories that his publishers chose to call a novel. He wrote it while an instructor in Serbo-Croatian at the University of Bordeaux, as he’d written
Garden, Ashes
when he taught at Strasbourg.
The Attic
and
Psalm 44
(published in 1962; not yet
translated into English). The second book,
Garden, Ashes
(1965), was a novel. The third,
Early Sorrows
(1968), was a book of stories. The fourth,
Hourglass
(1972), was a novel. The fifth and sixth were two collections of essays,
Po-etika
(1972) and
Po-etika II
(1974). The seventh,
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
(1976), was a collection of thematically linked stories that his publishers chose to call a novel. He wrote it while an instructor in Serbo-Croatian at the University of Bordeaux, as he’d written
Garden, Ashes
when he taught at Strasbourg.
By this time, Kiš was spending more and more time abroad, though he did not consider himself to be in exile, any more than he would have said he was a “dissident writer”: it was too clear to him that writing worthy of the name of literature had to be unofficial. With this seventh book, a suite of fictional case histories of the Stalinist Terror, Kiš’s work finally attracted the international attention it deserved.
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
also attracted a seven-month-long campaign of negative attention back home in Belgrade. The campaign, which reeked of anti-Semitism, centered on an accusation—that the book was a web of plagiarisms from an arcane bibliography—to which Kiš had no choice but to respond. The result was his eighth book,
The Anatomy Lesson
(1978). Defending
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
against these scurrilous charges, Kiš mounted a full-scale exposition of his literary genealogy (that is, his literary tastes), a post- or protomodernist poetics of the novel, and a portrait of what a writer’s honor could be. During the next ten years, he published only one more book,
The Encyclopedia of the Dead
(1984), a collection of unlinked stories.
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
also attracted a seven-month-long campaign of negative attention back home in Belgrade. The campaign, which reeked of anti-Semitism, centered on an accusation—that the book was a web of plagiarisms from an arcane bibliography—to which Kiš had no choice but to respond. The result was his eighth book,
The Anatomy Lesson
(1978). Defending
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
against these scurrilous charges, Kiš mounted a full-scale exposition of his literary genealogy (that is, his literary tastes), a post- or protomodernist poetics of the novel, and a portrait of what a writer’s honor could be. During the next ten years, he published only one more book,
The Encyclopedia of the Dead
(1984), a collection of unlinked stories.
The Western European, and eventually North American, acclaim for
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich—
typically confining it within the literature of dissidence from “the other Europe”—had brought about translations of the earlier books into the major foreign languages, and Kiš started to be invited to first-rank literary conferences, to win prizes, and to seem a plausible Nobel candidate. Becoming an internationally famous writer meant becoming a much interviewed writer. Asked to pronounce on literary matters and, invariably, to comment on the infamies back home, he did so with grave, always incisive combativeness—he gave splendidly substantive interviews. He was also asked to contribute short pieces to newspapers and magazines—treating no literary
solicitation as ever less than an occasion for intensity. Recalling that Kiš published only one book of fiction in the last decade of his life, one can’t but regret that he gave as many interviews, wrote as many essays and prefaces, as he did. A poet in prose as well as a prince of indignation, Kiš surely was not best employed in these discursive forms. No great writer of fiction is. And unlike Italo Calvino and Thomas Bernhard, who were also lost to literature in the late 1980s, Kiš had probably not yet done the best of what he was capable in fiction. But the novels and stories he did write still assure him a place alongside these two somewhat older, far more prolific contemporaries—which is to say that Kiš is one of the handful of incontestably major writers of the second half of the century.
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich—
typically confining it within the literature of dissidence from “the other Europe”—had brought about translations of the earlier books into the major foreign languages, and Kiš started to be invited to first-rank literary conferences, to win prizes, and to seem a plausible Nobel candidate. Becoming an internationally famous writer meant becoming a much interviewed writer. Asked to pronounce on literary matters and, invariably, to comment on the infamies back home, he did so with grave, always incisive combativeness—he gave splendidly substantive interviews. He was also asked to contribute short pieces to newspapers and magazines—treating no literary
solicitation as ever less than an occasion for intensity. Recalling that Kiš published only one book of fiction in the last decade of his life, one can’t but regret that he gave as many interviews, wrote as many essays and prefaces, as he did. A poet in prose as well as a prince of indignation, Kiš surely was not best employed in these discursive forms. No great writer of fiction is. And unlike Italo Calvino and Thomas Bernhard, who were also lost to literature in the late 1980s, Kiš had probably not yet done the best of what he was capable in fiction. But the novels and stories he did write still assure him a place alongside these two somewhat older, far more prolific contemporaries—which is to say that Kiš is one of the handful of incontestably major writers of the second half of the century.
Kiš had a complicated literary genealogy, which he was undoubtedly simplifying when he declared himself, as he often did, a child of Borges and of Bruno Schulz. But to marry the cosmopolitan Argentine to the immured small-town Polish Jew sounds the right note. Most obviously, he was claiming foreign relatives over his descendance from his native Serbo-Croatian literary family. Specifically, by yoking together the serenely, speculatively erudite Borges and the inward-looking, hyperdescriptive Schulz, he was pointing to the principal double strand in his own work. Odd mixtures were very much to Kiš’s taste. His “mixed” literary methods—most fully realized in
Hourglass
(historical fiction) and
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
(fictional history)—gave him exactly the right freedoms to advance the cause of both truth and art. Finally: one can, in literature, choose one’s own parents. But nobody obliges a writer to declare his or her parentage. Kiš, however, had to proclaim his. Like every writer who is a great reader, he was an inveterate enthusiast about the work of others. His talent for admiration also made him an extremely collegial writer, which he expressed best in his numerous translations of contemporary writers he undertook from French, Hungarian, Russian, and English into Serbo-Croatian. In expatriation he was still really back home, in his head and in all his work—despite his lived estrangement from the literary world of his native country. He had never forsaken them, though they had betrayed him.
Hourglass
(historical fiction) and
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
(fictional history)—gave him exactly the right freedoms to advance the cause of both truth and art. Finally: one can, in literature, choose one’s own parents. But nobody obliges a writer to declare his or her parentage. Kiš, however, had to proclaim his. Like every writer who is a great reader, he was an inveterate enthusiast about the work of others. His talent for admiration also made him an extremely collegial writer, which he expressed best in his numerous translations of contemporary writers he undertook from French, Hungarian, Russian, and English into Serbo-Croatian. In expatriation he was still really back home, in his head and in all his work—despite his lived estrangement from the literary world of his native country. He had never forsaken them, though they had betrayed him.
When Kiš died in Paris in 1989, the Belgrade press went into
national mourning. The renegade star of Yugoslav literature had been extinguished. Safely dead, he could be eulogized by the mediocrities who had always envied him and had engineered his literary excommunication, and who would then proceed—as Yugoslavia fell apart—to become official writers of the new post-communist, national chauvinist order. Kiš is, of course, admired by everyone who genuinely cares about literature, in Belgrade as elsewhere. The place in the former Yugoslavia where he was and is perhaps most ardently admired is Sarajevo. Literary people there did not exactly ply me with questions about American literature when I went to Sarajevo for the first time in April 1993, but they were extremely impressed that I’d had the privilege of being a friend of Danilo Kiš. In besieged Sarajevo people think a lot about Kiš. His fervent screed against nationalism, incorporated into
The Anatomy Lesson
, is one of the two prophetic texts—the other is a story by Andri
, “A Letter from 1920”—that one hears most often cited. As secular, multi-ethnic Bosnia—Yugoslavia’s Yugoslavia—is crushed under the new imperative of one ethnicity/one state, Kiš is more present than ever. He deserves to be a hero in Sarajevo, whose struggle to survive embodies the honor of Europe.
national mourning. The renegade star of Yugoslav literature had been extinguished. Safely dead, he could be eulogized by the mediocrities who had always envied him and had engineered his literary excommunication, and who would then proceed—as Yugoslavia fell apart—to become official writers of the new post-communist, national chauvinist order. Kiš is, of course, admired by everyone who genuinely cares about literature, in Belgrade as elsewhere. The place in the former Yugoslavia where he was and is perhaps most ardently admired is Sarajevo. Literary people there did not exactly ply me with questions about American literature when I went to Sarajevo for the first time in April 1993, but they were extremely impressed that I’d had the privilege of being a friend of Danilo Kiš. In besieged Sarajevo people think a lot about Kiš. His fervent screed against nationalism, incorporated into
The Anatomy Lesson
, is one of the two prophetic texts—the other is a story by Andri
, “A Letter from 1920”—that one hears most often cited. As secular, multi-ethnic Bosnia—Yugoslavia’s Yugoslavia—is crushed under the new imperative of one ethnicity/one state, Kiš is more present than ever. He deserves to be a hero in Sarajevo, whose struggle to survive embodies the honor of Europe.Unfortunately, the honor of Europe has been lost at Sarajevo. Kiš and like-minded writers who spoke up against nationalism and fomented-from-the-top ethnic hatreds could not save Europe’s honor, Europe’s better idea. But it is not true that, to paraphrase Auden, a great writer does not make anything happen. At the end of the century, which is the end of many things, literature, too, is besieged. The work of Danilo Kiš preserves the honor of literature.
[1994]
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