Yvan Goll, Claire, surrealism, and Paris.

Isaac Lang is born. Yvan Goll is reborn.

Ode to gift of free copy! I had a poem in this year’s Asheville Poetry Review, which brought some fantastic resonance into my mailbox, particularly Keith Flynn's review essay, "The Remaining Mystery: A Review of Yvan Goll's Selected Poems," which outlines Goll's life in the context of his oeuvre, and includes new translations of Goll’s poems.

Yvan Goll was born Isaac Lang in the borderland of Alsace-Lorraine, a contested space, a borderland of languages and ethnic affinities. After studying law and philosophy in Berlin, Goll became part of the new wave of German expressionism that flourished in Berlin before the War.

In his Expressionist phase, Goll befriended Lasker-Schuler, Hugo Ball and E. Hennings. When the First World War broke out, Goll’s commitments as a socialist pacifist led him to seek refuge in Geneva, Switzerland in 1914, to avoid being conscripted into the German army.

The spirit of the time encouraged self-discovery, which is to say, it demanded a certain self-definition as new identity claims (political, social, artistic) entered the discourse. Goll called himself "Jewish by destiny, French-born by chance, and designated German by a stamped piece of paper." He worked across mediums, writing poetry, plays, and even "an emotional surrealist film", Die Chaplinade (1920) — which I imagine Mihai Sebastian must have seen or heard about prior to the lecture he gave on Charlie Chaplin at the Criterion event in Bucharest.

In his flurry of finding the right name, Goll used two pseudonyms with the first name Tristan; it wasn't a popular name at the time, and so, to me, it suggests a sort of limning of Tzara, a marker that Dada was near.

But— one cannot tell a story about Yvan’s life without centering the woman who laid herself in the heart of it.

Klara Liliane Aischmann Studer Goll, or Claire Goll, as we know her.

Claire Goll (a.k.a. Liliane).

Klara Liliane Aischmann was born on October 29, 1890 and raised in Munich, the second child of a wealthy, assimilated German-Jewish family: her mother, Malvine, came from a family of bankers, and her father Joseph was a trader in hops, acting as the Argentinean Consul.

Claire married publisher Heinrich Studer, and gave birth to a daughter, Dorothea Elisabeth, her only child. But World War I was on the horizon, and Claire decided to emigrate in protest of this war. She wound up in Geneva at the beginning of 1917, among revolutionists and peace activists, studying psychology and contributing to newspapers and pacifist publications.

Chronologies dispute the dates associated with 1917 and 1918 in Claire’s life, and it’s difficult to reconcile them across sources, but many sources claim Claire first met Ivan Goll on February 10, 1917 in Geneva. They maintained an epistolary romance which included, according to some, a promised engagement in 1917, depending on who owns the chronology.

Claire and Studer divorced in late 1917, the same year, she met Yvan Goll, and a year after her emigration. Although the suburbs of Studer’s infidelities were vast, it was Claire’s affair with Kurt Wolff that served as the legal reason for which she lost custody of her daughter, who was sent to Zurich to live with Studer’s parents. (According to sources, Claire and her daughter never developed a close relationship.) But Claire went back home to resolve the divorce, and then met up with Yvan in Geneva in 1918.

At the end 1918, while in a relationship with Goll, Claire had an dalliance with Rainer Maria Rilke. Claire was crossing frontiers, and she heard Rilke was opening his residence and life to left leaning artists. They became lovers for what appears to be a matter of weeks, at a time when Rilke was also nurturing a two-month-fresh epistolary romance with Elya Nevar.

In a note, Rilke told Claire to come and visit him the same day. Claire answered at once. She had come to Munich to make contact with Rilke, she was determined to resist the pressure for marriage from Yvan. In her memoir, she describes stopping at Paul Klee's apartment, next door, to gather up courage to meet the famous poet. She found him to be a fragile man with luminous blue eyes and a mustache. She was impressed by his apartment furnishing.

For Claire, Rilke was the "romantic" aesthete whose anti-war position came only in the face of defeat and revolution. In a sense, Rilke's politics was always aesthetic – and one sees this also inflects his later reverence for Mussolini's speeches and voice.

Unlike the world-of-two Nevar described with Rilke, Claire's memoirs are acutely aware of other presences in the rooms of Rilke's life. Ralph Freeman qualifies:

Claire's imagination constantly focused on others in the background. When she mentioned his reclusiveness, she also suggested that his protected in was literally beleaguered by women.

Rilke’s nickname for Claire was Liliane —this was a time when noms de guerre or secret names held a certain frisson ing artistic circles, as they indicated an underground life, so having a nickname, or a private name, points to the increasing proximity between politics and aesthetics during the interwar period— and the fact that Liliane was Claire’s middle name suggests the presence of childhood in their relationship, or in the way they wanted to perceive one another. Middle names, after all, are intimate, known only to family, and usually it is one’s parents or relatives who use those names, and evoke those names. There’s something innocent about a middle name, something private behind a garden wall with heirloom roses.

In her memoir, Claire extolled Rilke’s omelettes, his aristocratic grace, his tenderness (which she interpreted as a form of self-protection). She described his request that she perform for him the dance of the seven veils from the Arabian Nights, and the experience of being devoured by his eyes.

In one of three passionate letters to Liliane, Rilke posited that a true seduction lasts four days. So she moved in with him. But he did not write during that time. She link this to crashing, or being overwhelmed by social life; Rilke seemed divided between aesthetic and political responses to the war. 

According to Claire’s telling, it was when Rilke started receiving phone calls threatening him for housing a dangerous Bolshevik that Claire made plans to move. She left in December; Yvan had been wooing her in letters throughout. But Rilke was on a list of writers to watch. And Liliane kept trying to connect with her Berlin friends and Rilke until the revolutionary govt there was overturned by Hindenberg.

From Charles Freeman again:

In early February, feeling vulnerable, Claire took off for Switzerland and Ivan Goll. If her memoir is to be trusted, she found herself pregnant with Rilke's child. When she confronted Rilke with this discovery, he had just been buoyed by the news from the Insel-Verlag that despite the heavy political weather his books were moving well....

According to Claire, who remains the only witness of her own pregnancy, Rilke and Goll  engaged in a lengthy exchange of polite letters. Neither man wanted the responsibility of a child, so Claire underwent an abortion. After their extremely courteous epistolary dialogue, the two men agreed to destroy each other's letters. Rilke continued to maintain a friendly if somewhat distant relationship with Claire, who he continued to call Liliane, before and after her marriage to Ivan.

As for Rilke, himself, he despised the call to the front; despised the uniform; despised his job at the Viennese archives which required him to produce a current history of the war, which he likened to "hero grooming," the propaganda of verbal monument-making to assist in the war effort.

Words could be statues for Rilke, and the embellishment of military exploits were not statues he wanted near his name. Freeman maintains Rilke wasn’t politically a “conscientious objector publicly acting from pacifist convictions but rather an artist acting from a strong belief that he was a cultural monument."

In wartime Vienna, Rilke's circle included the recently-wounded Oskar Kokoschkca.

In 1918, Claire published two books: a poetry collection, Mitwelt, and a novella, Die Frauen erwachen.

From Yvan Goll’s Four Poems of the Occult, published by Jacob Quinlan Books.

Yvan and Claire in Paris, before and after exile.

Yvan and Claire moved to Zurich and Ascona before settling in Paris in November 1919.

Despite turbulence and infidelity on both sides—including Claire’s affair with Rainer Maria Rilke, by whom she claimed to have been pregnant—Goll remained the focus of Claire’s life until his death from leukaemia in 1950. Thereafter she devoted herself to maintaining and promoting her husband’s memory with unflagging (but often editorially unreliable) publications and re-issues of his work.

The two married on July 21, 1921, on the same day as the launch of the Eskimo Pie, originally called the "the I-Scream-Bar". In Russia, the Civil War continued, and the Soviet ship Sawa was shelled and sunk by the Soviet submarine Trotsky in the Black Sea while trying to defect to the Whites. The vessel and most of her crew were killed. Four men were rescued and imprisoned. On this same day in Yugoslavia, Serbian politician and Minister of Internal Affairs for Yugoslavia Milorad Drašković was assassinated by a member of the Yugoslavian Communist Party. The killing, coupled with the June 29 attempt on the life of Prince Alexander, prompted the passage of the Law Concerning the Protection of Security and Order in the State" eleven days later.

Yvan loved Paris, loved its surrealist circles, loved the churn of aesthetics rubbing shoulders with history. In 1924, Goll published his own Surrealist Manifesto in opposition to Andre Breton (whom he thought relied too much on Freud and automatic writing).

Goll's work was blacklisted by the German government, and poet Paula Ludwig posed a challenge to the Golls' marriage. Others have written about this.

When France went Nazi in 1939, the Golls fled to New York, where they would remain until Gall got sick with leukemia (the same illness which killed Rilke) near the end of his life and returned to France for treatment. Optimistic by temperament, the rise in global nationalism bothered Goll, and this unrest shaped his poetry, which moved across borders and countries, bearing witness to greed, which he considered the primary force of destruction on the planet.

Buried in Pere Lachaise, near Chopin, Goll’s bones lay within walking distance of Paul Celan’s. In Goll's final years, Celan was frequently at his bedside, donating blood to help him survive leukemia, and trying to help him finish his last manuscript, Dreamweed.

The Goll Tomb at Pere Lachaise. To die in one’s chosen name, as the persona one wrote, rather than the Lang one was born. The 20th century began.

After 20 years in the United States, Goll had "returned to the German language" seeking, again,  a relation with unbidden, ineffable things in the key of dread, in the pulse of surrealism, in what Flynn calls " incendiary images" that might uncover something solid and monumental to leave as testament. In a sense, it was a gift for Claire, a reward for the years of companionship and support that she provided, a poem to bind them together after death.

Flynn doesn't mention the Goll affair in this review at all, an interesting elision. But Flynn does something else wonderful: he references Walter Benjamin's 1929 essay on surrealism, "The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia”, which traces the surrealist's edge-narratives alongside the tensions inside the artistic movement, noting: "the true creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, “a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson”— but a dangerous one; and the lesson offered by religion is stricter.

For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday. The most passionate investigation of telepathic phenomena, for example, will not teach us half as much about reading (which is an eminently telepathic process), as the profane illumination of reading about telepathic phenomena. And the most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic), as the profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance. The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug, ourselves, which we take in solitude.

Italics, here, are mine. I love that statement. It keeps me company in the way ordinary life with humans who don’t want to talk about books cannot.

Benjamin rejects the assumption that drugs are required for surrealism, and drops a small bomb at Lenin's feet by suggesting that Lenin brought drugs and religion closer than anyone. In this distance, Celan and Benjamin stood in aesthetic counterpoint to Goll.

Translated by Donald Wellman, available at Asymptote.

The Goll Affair

I have loved a few men and more than a few have loved me, but it was not until I reached seventy-six that I had my first orgasm.

These words for Claire Goll’s posthumously published memoir, Ich verzeihe keinem (I Forgive No-one), should be appreciated for the ribald honesties they offer. Claire’s writing never strayed from the sexual, and from clarifying the importance of eros in the female life. I appreciate this aspect of her voice.

But the Goll Affair is more complicated — it is complicated not just by the charge of plagiarism that Claire launched against Paul Celan, but also by her memoirs, which she published after his death, alluding to Celan’s attempt to rape her.

It is complicated by Claire’s assertion that Celan killed himself out of fear this information would be released —and that she chose to publish this information after he was dead, and could no longer defend himself.

It is complicated by the extent to which a writer’s depression and trauma become vehicles for posthumous alienation by those who outlive them, and who would like to imagine themselves at the heart of a story which does not belong to them.

This deserves another post….

*

Robert Vilain, “Claire Goll”, Jewish Women’s Archive. + Ralph Freeman, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. + Rennette Watson, “Yvan Goll: Between Expressionism and Surrealism”, The Grandma’s Logbook.

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas: Me and a worm.

Posthumous voice and Machado de Assis

The posthumous voice can be serious, but it can also be light, humorous, critical, as in Machado de Assis' The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, first published in Brazil in 1881. For me, what makes Machado delicious in the present is his tonal irreverence, the techniques he mobilizes to establish it, including metafictional strategies, direct reader address, continuous irony, self-referentiality, intertextual intimacy, and typographical experimentation.

As Larry Rohter commented in the #APSTogether meeting for A Public Space:

“Experimenting with margins, punctuation, and typography is common enough today, but Brazilians in 1880 must have found it disconcerting, even revolutionary. Methinks me spies the influence of “Tristram Shandy” in XXVI, with more to come in LV & CXXXIX.”

Machado’s notion of time and temporality, I think, plays into much of this innovative narrative technique, and what it asks of the reader (see unreliable narratives).

Flora Thomson-DeVeaux’s translation

In the 2020 Penguin publication, Dave Eggers provides an introduction to Machado’s wit. The translator notes by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux are fantastic, elusive, rich, and refer back to his newspaper publications at the time (the form in which this book was first serialized). Machado’s "cronicas" ( news columns where he used pseudonyms to reflect on current events)  are not held separate here. Thomson-DeVeaux’s translation is the only one to include materials from the earlier serialized editions of the novel, as opposed to the other translations, which translate from the basis of later editions.

I love how Thomson-DeVeaux introduces him as "a ghost with memoiristic ambitions”—and how she translates the open field of the page by beginning each of Machado’s chapters on a new page, as did the author. Since the chapters are short (some only a paragraph), the decision to publish the open field enacts the textual pauses and motion—the shifting temporality and cronica-style insights—in a way that feels closer to the flow of the text as well as the memoir form.

Born in 1839, the mixed-race grandson of slaves, Machado does not ignore ancestors or the past. He leavens it, makes it “of the time” somehow, brings into the bourgeois ordinary in a way that structures what many have called his “unreliable narrator.” The existence of enslaved persons is a continuous backdrop in the text. Thomson-DeVeaux's translation pays close attention to how slavery complicates the narrative, for example, by offering context for the scene in which the formerly-enslaved Prudêncio beats his own enslaved persons in the neighborhood of Valongo; Thomson notes Valongo was the site of Rio de Janeiro's slave market, at one time the largest in the Americas, and so the site of the beating continues the brutality “inflicted in the same place over centuries on literally millions of men, women and children.”

She also notes an anti-nationalist spirit that prefers the "local subject" to the imperial one. Her introduction combines the historical memory of slavery with the yellow fever pandemic of 1850 in Rio, which killed many Europeans rather than Africans – and was read as the revenge of Saint Benedict (who was Black)  after white parishioners refused to carry his statue on their shoulders during an 1849 procession through the city.

During the #APSTogether book club meeting, Thomson-DeVeaux spoke a little bit about how love underlies the task of the translator, particularly in William Grossman’s case. While teaching aerospace engineering in Brazil, Grossman fell in love with Machado during his Portuguese language study, and felt compelled to bring him to an American audience back home. He actually self-published his translation of Bras Cubas in Brazil in 1951—and Thomson-DeVeaux noted that there were no existing translations of Machado’s work during his lifetime, apart from a few pirated translations into Spanish.

“A historical note: the Hotel Pharoux, where Bras Cubas spends so much time in his declining years, was a real place. Rio’s first modern hotel, founded in 1816 by a French exile, it closed only in 1959, & during its long zenith was often painted or photographed.” —Larry Rohter

The “status” of death + “the grand idea”

I am interested in the way death, itself, becomes a “status” marker in this status-conscious fictional memoir.

In this first chapter, the narrator describes himself as “a deceased man recently an author, for whom the tomb was another cradle” – and he announces his death as another author might announce his birth—with regalia. We learn of Cubas’ illustrious passing at his country home; we learn his status signifiers, a bachelor of 64 with money to his name, and “eleven friends” at his grave. The narrator renounces tragedy, insisting that he lived a good life - and who are we to doubt it when reading, when realizing the lack of meaning in the status oriented Brazilian culture?

It is clear that Cubas wants to be famous, but there is nothing clear beyond that—and perhaps fame is an empty and meaningless wish which one must pursue in the form of a posthumous memoir. Although the narrator’s official cause of death was pneumonia, he leads us to think what actually killed him was “a grand and useful idea”. And then, in a fascinating fictional move, he tasks the reader with reading his memoir but also serving as a judge. It is the reader who must determine if it was the idea that killed him. This is the new role for a reader.

So what is this grand idea? In “The Plaster,” the narrator describes as the invention of "an anti-hypochondriacal plaster destined to alleviate our melancholy humanity." And then, he does what will become characteristic, namely, he leans over and whispers an aside to the audience:

Now, however, that I am on the other side of life, I can confess it all what drove me most of all was the gratification it would give me to see in newsprint, showcases, pamphlets, on street corners, and finally on medicine boxes, those four words: The Bras Cubas Plaster. Why deny it? I had a weakness for hubbub, banners, pyrotechnics.......... My idea had two faces, like a metal, with one turns toward the public and one toward me. On one side, philanthropy and profit; on the other, a thirst for fame. Let us call it a love of glory.

Cubanos’s love of glory is cultural, socialized—and I’ll return to this—but for now, it’s interesting that Machado keeps letting his narrator indulge in limpid self-critiques which reveal the limits of self-reflexivity.

In "The Fixed Idea," Cubanos warns again the prowess and power of “the fixed idea,” which is what happened to his own idea, or what brought about it’s demise, noting, “My idea, after all it's somersaults, had become a fixed idea.” And then he warns the reader: “God save you, reader, from a fixed idea.” He defines fixed ideas as “what make strong men and madmen; wandering, vague, or shimmering ideas make for Claudius's – in Suetonius’ version, that is.”

 My idea was fixed, as fixed as..... nothing comes to mind that is quite so fixed in this world: perhaps the moon, perhaps the pyramids of Egypt, perhaps the late German Diet.

The narrator’s dream includes this plaster which he intends to serve as a solution to melancholy and misery—and he is very clear about wanting acknowledgement and glory in return for his invention. I found myself imagining Bras Cubanos Instagram feed too frequently, or considering how the desire to create a perfect product complicates what ,,,,

Do not laugh at the joint triumph of pharmacy and Puritanism. Who does not know that at the foot of every large, public, prominent flag, there are often a number of other, more modestly proportioned flags, which are hoisted and flutter in the shadow of their larger counterpart, and which quite often survive it?

Machado toys with death in order to tell the story he wants to tell. Death reveals the extent to which literary lineage or inheritance continues in novel form - to have the conversation he wanted, Bras Cubas had to die (or Machado had to kill him), thus setting up a narrative voice that speaks from beyond the grave where all voices are equal. Supposedly. Maybe.

Symbolic objects: The plaster, desire, hippos, clocks, and the worm

Machado makes us of many symbolic, recurring objects, and I will note a few that stood out, starting with the entrepreneurial dream of a special plaster.

In "The Plaster," the narrator describes the sublime idea that hopped into his head while walking, the invention of "an anti-hypochondriacal plaster destined to alleviate our melancholy humanity."

"Now, however, that I am on the other side of life, I can confess it all what drove me most of all was the gratification it would give me to see in newsprint, showcases, pamphlets, on street corners, and finally on medicine boxes, those four words: The Bras Cubas Plaster. Why deny it? I had a weakness for hubbub, banners, pyrotechnics.......... My idea had two faces, like a metal, with one turns toward the public and one toward me. On one side, philanthropy and profit; on the other, a thirst for fame. Let us call it a love of glory."

It feels prescient for theory to be commodified as a sort of entrepreneurship-vessel for the chattering classes, an economic opportunity for leisured libidinals. One can’t help but notice a resemblance between Bras’ Cubas’ aspirations and the contemporary economic muscle of self-help industry experts. We have it all, from Emily Oster’s “evidence-based, statistical parenting” (and other emergent parenting scientists) to the lean-in feminisms of Sheryl Sandberg and Jia Tolentino and straight to the plaster face masks of the Insta-influencer scientists—to be so rich in plaster solutions and yet disoriented, miserable, and clueless. This is the American dream as it plays out in the bourgeoisie classes.

All this content isn’t intellectual, but it’s awfully theoretical. Which brings me back to Cubas, whose relationship to desire and love is closer to theory than practice. Certainly, the desire for desire is there in descriptions of Virgilia. But I’m also fascinated by references to death, religion, salvation—or, as he says in “Trust”, something ”with the religious zeal of a desire seeking to rise from its deathbed.”

The chapter "In Which A Lady Betrays Herself" gives us the lover as a "ruins,” which connotes the statue or the monument after it has fallen into disrepair or misuse:

She was then 54 years old, and she was a ruin, and imposing ruin. Just imagine, reader, that we had loved each other, she and I, many years before, and that one day, having taken ill, I see her appear at my bedroom door.

As the narrator lies in bed, clearly ill, he reflects on the nostalgia of seeing his former lover in her advanced years:

Believe me, remembrance is the lesser evil; let none place their faith in present happiness; there is a picture drop of Cain’s drool in it. Once time has worn on and the rapture has ceased, then, perhaps only then, may one truly take pleasure in what has passed; when given a choice between two illusions, the better is that which may be enjoyed without pain.

For Cubas, pain is the thing to be avoided. Life is the journey towards an afterlife of importance, towards fame and glory. Life is pointed towards death. This is why time, clocks, and pocket watches carry significance.

The chapter, "The Pendulum Clock," lays the sleeplessness after a kiss next to the tick-tock of the clock which makes us aware of time's passing. But I'm interested in how the narrator foreshadows here, or builds significance into the pocket watch:

Some inventions are transformed or fade away;  institutions themselves come to grief; but the clock is definitive and everlasting. The last man on earth, as he bids farewell to the cold, sapped sun, will have a watch in his pocket so as to know the exact hour of his death.

Chapter CXXXIX is an ellipsis. Time is not the thing with feathers so much as the endless dots. Notice how ellipses lack causality—they don’t indicate the consequences of an act but the fact that an act may happen. Anything could step into the blank and be gilded by theory’s hindsight.

There’s something fantastic about hindsight and how Machado uses it to undermine respectability and status—something surreal in the aspirational posthumous voice. And the reader is prepared for with “The Delirium,” the long hallucinated description of riding atop the back of a swift hippopotamus, the juxtaposition of absurdity with respect, an opening into that fantastic. Cubas says no one else has narrated their own delusion before. Then he becomes a Chinese barber:

Shortly thereafter, I felt myself transformed into St Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, a volume bound in Moroccan leather, with silver clasps and illustrations; this idea impressed upon my body the most incomplete immobility; and I still remember that my hands were the clasps of the book, I had crossed them over my stomach, and someone uncrossed them (Virgilia, undoubtedly)  because the position made me look like a corpse.

The hippo tells Cubas that they are going to the origin of the ages. The hippopotamus reports that they have passed Eden and as they go, the narrator reflects on what he sees, including the particular silence: "the Silence of that place was like that of the tomb: one might have said that the life and things had fallen stunned in the presence of man." And then the figure of a woman appears, and that figure holds in itself boundlessness, or what the narrator describes as “the vastness of the wilds.” Cubas says nothing at first and then finally asks who she is and what she is named.

She tells him to call her Nature or Pandora:" I am your mother and your enemy."

She tells him not to be frightened because her energy does not kill but rather affirms itself through life: "You are alive: I desire no other torment." 

And here, somehow, as the narrator digs his nails into his palm to make sure that he is really alive, the idea of a worm returns as the woman continues:

“Yes, worm, you are alive. You must not fear losing the tattered rags that are your pride; for a few hours yet you shall still taste the bread of pain and the wine of misery. You are alive: now, even in your madness, you are alive; and should your mind retrieve an instant of sense, you will stay that you wish to live."

There's a sense in which the entire reason for wanting to live is undermined by the monologue of the strange woman. But it’s the worm that haunts my notebooks.

Machado dedicates his coffin-composed memoirs to "the worm that first gnawed at the cold flesh of my cadaver" – and he does so fondly ( though the translators introduction says he dedicated it to worms, plural, and this sounds different to me). In a brief chat note, Thomson-DeVeaux said that the worm doesn't come up in the book but her personal opinion is that he dedicated it to that worm as "a sort of reward for having gotten there first."

Later on, in the chapter "Sad, But Short," Cubas witnesses the death of his own tender, kind mother. The next chapter, "Short, But Happy," gives us the response to it, particularly, he has to decide who he is and what he will do in life, the idea of inheritance weighs heavier on him now.

He says that what he learned in university were formulas, skeletons, some Virgil and Horace, things that he could use in conversation but nothing substantial.

" The reader may be taken aback by the frankness with which I exposed and emphasized my own mediocrity; you should recall that frankness is the primary virtue of a late man. In life, the gaze of public opinion, the clash of interests, the struggle between rival greed's obliged as to hide our old rags, to disguise splits and stitches, to not extend to the world that which we reveal to our conscience; and the best of this obligation is when, by dint of diluting others, one dilutes himself, because in this case he is spared humiliation, which is a painful sensation, and hypocrisies, which is a ghastly vice. But in death, what a difference! What an unburdening! What freedom! How we can shake off our cloaks, toss our spangles into the gutter, unbutton ourselves, unpaint ourselves, unadorn ourselves, confess plainly what we were and what we failed to be! because, after all, there are no more neighbors, nor friends, nor enemies, nor acquaintances, nor strangers;  there is no audience. The gaze of opinion, that piercing judicial gaze, loses all its power as soon as we set foot in the territory of death; this is not to say that it doesn't reach this far, examining and judging us; but it is we who have no compunctions about the examination or the judgment. My good living sirs and madams, there is nothing so in commensurable as the disdain of the deceased."

In a sense, this “freedom” of death is the freedom from sacrilege. one cannot blaspheme a god from inside the grave.  

addenda

In 2020, two new translations of Posthumous Memoirs have appeared almost simultaneously, one translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson (Liveright), who translated Machado's Complete Stories, and the other by by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux (Penguin). In "A Playful Masterpiece That Expanded the Novel’s Possibilities," Parul Seghal compares them and draws attention to the differences. Here’s Borba comparing conscience to why a pretty woman is vain and likes to look in the mirror often: "Conscience...contemplates itself frequently when it finds itself beautiful. Remorse is nothing but the grimace of a conscience that sees itself to be hideous." 

Pasternak and Ghirlandaio: The irradiated smile.

1.

When Boris Pasternak published his memoir of poetic influence, Safe Conduct, the critics in Soviet Russia got excited. His affinity with Rainer Maria Rilke's immaterialism and transcendence were taken as implicit critiques of Marxist materialism (as interpreted by the RCP).

Pasternak was accused of subjective idealism, a form of counter-revolutionary activity. The book was published in censored form in 1931, and later removed from libraries, and reprints were forbidden.

The manuscript, itself, ends with a letter to Rilke that he never mailed or sent. Written after Rilke’s death, the letter speaks to Rilke in the present (as Marina Tsvetaeva did in her New Year’s elegy to Rilke), and it is unique in its repudiation of temporality. A confessional epistolary form reserved for the dead.

2.

I am interested in how Pasternak speaks of women in relation to light — and how this relation to light leads him to aesthetic statements which elide ethics.

3.

“I have just finished writing Safe Conduct, dedicated to your memory,” Pasternak begins his appended letter to Rilke’s posthumous spirit. And then he explains his silence:

I feared that, content with corresponding with you, I would never reach you in person. And I had to see you. Until that time came I would not write to you. When I put myself in your place, (imagining your wonder at my silence), I comforted myself with the knowledge Tsvetaeva was writing to you, and while I could not be a substitute for Tsvetaeva, she could be a substitute for me. 

At that time I had a family. Sinfully I embarked on a venture for which I had none of the requirements;  I drew  another life into it with me and she and I conceived a third life.

Pasternak then goes on to describe two women: artist Evgeniya Lurye, whom Pasternak married in 1922, and the mother of his son, Evgenii; and Zinaida Neuhaus, the wife of the Russian pianist Heinrich Neuhaus, with whom Pasternak had fallen in love.

In the letter, Pasternak offers both women to Rilke, beginning with Evgeniya (whom he called Zhenya), his wife at the time of publication:

A smile gave roundness to the young artist's chin and poured its light upon her eyes and cheeks. When she smiled she would narrow her eyes as against the sun, but not with an intense gaze, rather with a hazy narrowing like that of people who are frail or nearsighted. As the light of her smile rose to the beautiful broad brow causing the whole image to waver between round and oval, one was reminded of the Italian Renaissance. Irradiated by the smile, she was very much like the portrait of a woman by blank. At such moments one could not tear one size from her face. Since her beauty depended upon such illumination she could be attractive only when she was happy.

4.

Curious to know which portrait Pasternak evoked in his description, so I browsed a gallery of paintings by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1448-1494), a Florentine artist who worked mainly in fresco (though several of his famous works were executed in tempera).

Pasternak focuses on the luminosity of his paintings, so it’s interesting that Ghirlandaio was among the first to abandon the use of gilding in his pictures, choosing to represent objects made of gold with paint rather than gold leafing.

5.

So Zhenya needs light to be beautiful, on Pasternak’s view. And then he compares this “only pretty when happy” wife to Zinaida Neuhaus:

Some may say that all faces are like this. Not so. I know others. I know a face that is as striking and moving in grief as in joy and becomes only more lovely in circumstances that would make another's beauty fade.

Whether this woman is mounting the heights or plunging into the depths, her frightening fascination remains the same; she has much less need of anything earthly than the earth has need of her, for she is femininity itself, a rough-hewn, indestructible monolith of pride extracted whole from the quarry of creativity. Since a woman's character and disposition are revealed most truly in her appearance, the second woman, whose life, honor, and passions, and inner essence are perceived independently of lighting, has less reason to fear life's vicissitudes than the first one.

In 1934, Boris and Zinaida divorced their spouses to marry each other. Neuhas was crushed.

6.

It’s not clear to me that Zinaida had “less reason to fear life’s vicissitudes than Zhenya, since Pasternak would win the Nobel Prize for a book that he wrote about a love affair with another woman — and Zinaida was expected to play mother, wife, hostess, and proud matriarch through the entire show.

Boris reading congratulatory telegrams about the Nobel Prize, with his wife Zinaida (looking very wary on the right) and Nina Tabidze, 1958.

7.

Returning now to Pasternak’s letters to the living, particularly one he wrote to his first wife, Zhenya —the irradiated smile— on July 29th, 1926 while she was in Germany for a month with their son. Here, Pasternak was trying to explain what breaking off his correspondence with Tsvetaeva meant to him, but I think we also see, in an interesting sense, the way he had chosen Zhenya’s suffering in advance. The way he painted it without gilding the golden objects.

I'm not trying to test your feelings by jealousy. I am at present absolutely alone. Marina asked me not to write to her anymore after I told her about you and what I feel for you. This upsets you, too. It is indeed absurd. It seems I told her I love you above all else on Earth. I don't know how it came about. But don't attach any significance to it, good or bad. People join our names together before we ourselves know where we are. People love us with the same sort of love before we become aware that we breathe the same air. That cannot be helped, cannot be changed.

I cannot see you separately from the forces constituting my fate. And I don't have two lives and two fates.  I cannot sacrifice these forces and I cannot, for your sake, change my fate........ But it would be inhuman even to think of allowing you, unarmed by a great idea or a great feeling, which is to say not one of the forces constituting my fate, to enter this circle, these lists. Through no fault of mine you are doomed to a perpetual suffering. I do not want you, a person of great courage and strong will, to fight an unequal battle. You do not deserve defeat.

Boris in his coffin, with his widow Zinaida and son Leonid, 1960. (Source)

8.

Pasternak’s poem, “Fresh Paint” as translated by C. M. Bowra and Miss Deutsch.

I should have seen the sign: “Fresh paint,”
But useless to advise
The careless soul, and memory’s stained
With cheeks, calves, hands, lips, eyes.

More than all failure, all success,
I loved you, for your skill
In whitening the yellowed world
As white cosmetics will.

Listen, my dark, my friend: by God,
All will grow white somehow,
Whiter than madness or lamp shades
Or bandage on a brow.

"At Least I Wasn't Earthbound": Barbara Comyns and The Vet's Daughter

According to the 1981 Virago edition, Barbara Comyns “dreamt the idea” for The Vet’s Daughter while honeymooning “in a Welsh cottage lent to her and her new husband by the Soviet agent Kim Philby in 1945.”

Narrated by a girl named Alice Rowlands, a young Londoner who has the misfortune of being born to a cruel, domineering father and a kind, effaced mother who is dying, the novel hinges on a peculiar ability (which some critics have called “the occult” but which seems to me a little off, given Comyns’ own descriptions and references in the text).

Alice’s father is a veterinarian, so the house is filled with animals, which might seem lovely if not for the reason some humans seem to value possessing animals. In this house —“all overshadowed by my father and cleaning the cats’ cages and the smell of cabbage, escaping gas, and my father’s scent” — one gets the sense that Alice’s mother is classed among the animals by the vet. The third chapter begins:

Autumn came and Mother was still dying in her room. It was peaceful in there because Father was frightened of her illness and never visited her.

Like several historically-powerful megalomaniacs, the father loves animals and hates humans. Or maybe the father loves animals because he has absolute power over them when they come to clinic for treatment, so he loathes humans for having needs and feelings and emotions which he cannot control or fix or end.

One night, Alice’s mother dies while Alice is sleeping, and the daughter wakes up to a world in which her father possibly “put Mother to sleep” with his vet-meds like the animal he took her to be. The suspicion that the father killed the mother renders sleep, itself, unstable — a dangerous, vulnerable state in which one can be destroyed or erased. Although Comyns doesn’t have the narrator express this directly, the way she allows is to emerge is a testament to her narrative skill. The author tells a story that haunt abstract states as well as objects.

The original cover of the novel.

“Awake and floating….”

Three weeks after the funeral, the vet returns with a young, “bawdy” gal-pal (Rosa Fisher) who moves into her mother’s room. Comyns sets Rosa up as a type — a certain femme whose currency is male attention, and who over-invests in cruelty, stupidity, anything that placates insecure men. When Rosa’s head waiter colleague, Cuthbert, says Alice is attractive, Rosa expresses sudden interest in the vet’s daughter. Eventually, she convinces her to go out for tea at a nice restaurant, where Cuthbert pays a surprise visit. The three go for a walk — Alice is terrified — and eventually it ends with Cuthbert raping her as Rosa looks on.

Girl power is exhausting, and sisterhood, here, has the synthetic feel of a frat party. After Rosa sets Alice up to be sexually assaulted by Cuthbert, Alice goes home and tries to deal with the feeling that no water will ever render her “clean again.” But that night, after the rape, something strange happens: Alice discovers herself “awake and floating” through the room, holding a glass globe and trying not to break it. She falls asleep peacefully after floating, and then, in the morning, she sees the blankets on the floor and the glass mantle broken and the chalky powder on her hands, all evidence that the floating hadn’t been a dream.

At this point, Mr. Peebles, a fellow who has an unrequited crush on Alice, finds a way for her to leave the horrible house of animals, girlfriends, and fathers — “nothing can be worse than home” — by sending her to care for his depressed mother out near the ocean. The vet says disgusting, inhumane things to Alice in parting; her mother’s "happy” ghost appears and smiles on the train ride away from London; she meets Mrs. Peebles and falls in love with the enchanted, large house.

On the first night away, in the beautiful house with the large fireplace on an island, Alice lays in her little room:

The bed was most comfortable, and I was just drifting off to sleep when a strange thing happened: I seemed to be floating. I tried to touch the mattress with my hands, but it wasn't there. I was floating above it and the bed clothes were slipping from me...... I did not try to feel it with my hands, because I kept them — I can't think why — neatly folded on my chest. I suddenly realized I was feeling sick. I thought, 'This is bed sickness, not seasickness.'

And then Alice remembers “a similar thing had happened” to after Cuthbert assaulted her. More things happen: Alice learns to ice-skate, discovers the sea, falls in love with a young, privileged townie named Nicholas, learns more about Mrs. Peebles (there was a fire and a suicide attempt, and this explains Mr. Peebles’ concern for his mother).

“At least I wasn’t earthbound….”

Chapter 16 is outrageous and important. While pining for Nicholas, Alice discovers it happens again:

And then in the night it happened again and I was floating, definitely floating. The moonlight was streaming whiteley through the window,  and I could see the curtains gently flapping in the night wind. I left my bed, and except for a sheet, the clothes lay scattered on the floor. I gently floated about the room. Sometimes I went very close to the ceiling, but I wouldn't touch it in case it made me fall to the ground. If I came here to an object - a wall, or the tall wardrobe, for instance – some sixth sense seems to steer me away, rather as I've heard it does with bats, and the feeling that this was so gave me confidence. 

There is no danger because Alice notices the window is closed, so she can't just float out into the sky. Instead, she bobs about inside the house, where floating is safe, bounded, circumscribed by the house itself.

Finally, she wears herself out floating, and settles back into bed where she sleeps soundly. ,The next morning, she asked Mrs. Peebles if she has ever heard of anyone floating around in their rooms, and Mrs. Peebles brightens up, recalling:

"Yes, levitation I expect you mean. It used to be quite common, I believe, at one time, but I can't remember when. There was a monk I seem to remember hearing about called some name like Joseph of Cupertino, or is that the name of the place in Italy? This man used to behave most strangely, and was not allowed to sing in the choir because he used to rise up and remain suspended in the air and caused quite a sensation and upset the service. This went on for many years, and the poor monk had to remain in his room, where a private chapel was arranged for him. I heard he fasted and practice mortification, but to no avail. Poor man! it was quite an embarrassment for him! My mother used to tell of a man called Home, who was taken up by some society gentleman. He floated in and out of the windows of some big house in London - Ashley House, I think it was. One doesn't hear about that kind of thing now."

It is Mrs. Peebles who first names the floating event for Alice--who provides a word that carries this strangeness.  Levitation. When asked if she, herself, ever floated, Mrs. Peebles replies that she would never do a thing like that because: "I'm not peculiar." 

And so Alice learns that floating is something “peculiar”, like being left-handed, and therefore something that one must keep to themselves and practice quietly alone in a room rather than “boasting” about in public.

Later on the same day, while sitting among the yew trees in the graveyard, Alice spies Nicholas on a horse with a lovely wealthy girl cantering beside him.... and she wanders out to get a better glimpse, settling on a felled beech tree in a clearing.

As Alice lays down on this beech tree's toppled trunk— calling it her bed — sadness claims her "in waves." She weeps a little, and self-soothes with the idea that maybe the girl is a family friend and Nicholas will introduce them, and she says of this idea:

I almost believed this would happen, but not quite. Then I comforted myself with the knowledge that at least I wasn't earthbound like most people. I lay there on the field tree completely relaxed, and try to will myself to float. I lay there and nothing happened, but I felt drowsy and limp and light. Then I rose in the air, only a few feet. All the noises of the world ceased, and there was a great silence as if from shock at all the laws of Nature being broken. I became afraid, so afraid I became all rigid. Then suddenly I was down on the grass, rather shaken but quite unhurt. I felt a small thrill of triumph. I could float when I wanted to;  it wasn't a dream or illness. I really could levitate myself. Walking home in the fading afternoon, I felt a new pride.

And here the chapter ends. Italics mine.

“Much to the alarm of his brethren at the table…”

On May 7, 2021, I am reading an essay titled by “Giuseppe” by Eliot Weinberger when I realize Barbara Comyns must have been here (Weinberger says Giuseppe Desa, Comyns says Joseph of Cupertino, but they are two names for the same man).

Also known as “The Flying Friar”, Giuseppe Desa was born to a poor carpenter’s family in a small Italian village in 1603. By age 8, Giuseppe was known to ecstatic visions that left him gaping and staring into space. The story of his life is fascinating—and worth a read—because this wayward soul couldn’t find a home or please anyone or do anything of value until it was discovered that he was peculiar, which is to say, he had inexplicable spiritual gifts or magic powers.

Then Giuseppe Desa became known as the man whose reverence for God was so intense that he lost his toehold on earth. Giuseppe levitated constantly:

On hearing the names of Jesus or Mary, the singing of hymns during the feast of St. Francis, or while praying at Mass, he would go into a dazed state and soar into the air, remaining there until a superior commanded him under obedience to revive. In the refectory, during a meal, Joseph would suddenly rise from the ground with a dish of food in his hands, much to the alarm of the brethren at table. When he was out in the country begging, suddenly he would fly into a tree. Once when some workmen were laboring to plant a huge stone cross in its socket, Joseph rose above them, took up the cross and placed it in the socket for them.

He died in 1663, was canonized in 1781, after which a large marble altar was erected in the Church of St. Francis in Osimoso that St. Joseph’s body might be placed beneath it, where it remains to this day.

“I don’t want to be peculiar….”

Catherine of Siena saw Jesus in the sky when she was seven. A few years later, she ran away from home and sat in a cave where she prayed to God and began levitating.

Hyacinth Cormier of France (1832-1916) levitated while in prayer.

Levitating is part of the ordinary extra-ordinary in hagiographies, and one wonders if Comyns came across such book on the shelves of Kim Philby’s Welsh cottage. That, at least, is my working theory for some of background magic in this book.

Although Comyns is known for her wacky-lovely character names, Cuthbert stood out to me. It’s an usual name—a Celtic name, a (surprise surprise) name common to Celtic hagiographies, likely present in the book of saints Comyns found on Philby’s shelf. The sainted Cuthbert performed some miracles, though its unclear whether he levitated, and he may have envied the levity of a young girl after standing all night in a freezing river as penance, two otters warming and drying his feet (per Eliot Weinberger’s legend).

The contrast between the seriousness of levitation and the frivolous lightness of levity is Comyns’ chord in this novel, and it gets very loud and fractious towards the end. Tragedy forces Alice to return to London, where her father —who hasn’t changed — is drunk and furious and abusive. He hits her and attempts to attack her more, but she floats above him to escape. Like Joseph of Cupertino, she is awake.

The next morning, her father wants to speak to Alice:

“Alice,” he continued, “you behaved very strangely yesterday…er…it was most peculiar.” Peculiar! that word again! “You seemed to leave the ground in the most extraordinary manner and …er…actually appeared to float in the air. I’d be very interested to see you do this again.”

I said, “Oh no, Father, I really don’t want to. People don’t like it, you know. They think it’s peculiar. Oh, please, I don’t want to be peculiar!”

After more haranguing by her father, Alice levitates around the room and descends, feeling depleted, drained, and worried. Remember how Alice learned from Mrs. Peebles that boasting about one’s peculiar parts wasn’t wise?

The word boasting deserves a certain mention here, as the vet’s interest in Alice is directly tied to her peculiar ability to levitate, which is impressive and possibly financially-viable as a public spectacle. He invites his friends over to watch, and they love it; they can’t get enough; someone bring in the parish to witness the mystery-pageant; someone hire a mystery-agent to market this:

Although my levitation had had such a strange effect on these men, they couldn't see enough of it. They kept pestering father for another demonstration, then another, although I heard father say he didn't want me to be worn out already. It was true I was becoming worn out.

Alice calls it my levitation, asserting ownership of it, and the tension arises from what others to wish to make of this peculiarity. When her father plans a public demonstration at Clapham Common that Alice begins to despair:

Rise up before people on the Common and in music-halls and circuses! Please God, don't let that happen to me. Father, don't make me do this thing. I don't want to be peculiar and different. I want to be an ordinary person. I'll marry Harry Peebles and go away and you needn't see me anymore - but don't make me do this terrible thing.

Notice how Comyns switches from Please God to Please Father, mixing up the two a bit, allowing the spectacles of sainthood to share a pew-breath with the spectacles of circus life and capitalism. Earlier, when I said “occult” wasn’t quite the right word for the bang-up sacred-profane stew that Comyns is serving in this novel, this is what I meant. The patriarch is the head of the house, the king of the church, the master of ceremonies, the deliverer of death, and the daughter — at best— may get to play steeple to his te deum.

Like most decent female characters in this book, Alice Rowlands dies in what could be considered a tragic accident or else the plan of a powerful man-god playing with chess pieces to better his game. I love how it ends in the tawdriest inquest. I love how an inquest may be the carnival-modern version of a hagiography. I love how the tragic language of recent young moms murdered by spouses in the latest Birmingham news story always creates a portrait which verges on sainthood, as if the only worthwhile grief is that shed for a saint or a martyr. I love how Alice’s dread turns out to be correct. I love how Comyns does nothing to make this ending cozy or instructive. There’s nothing to learn, really. One can’t levitate one’s way out of the mess, the vet, the system, the obit.

Speaking of making one’s peculiar parts public, the writer’s role (or unique privilege) is to reveal their peculiars on the page. We all hope that the inquest is distant and the audience enjoys the show we make of our minds for their entertainment and pleasure.

Posthumous voices: Eric Chevillard's "The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster"

Posthumous voices present

I am using my posthumous voice to explain the consequences of hypocrisy to my children. One daughter quotes Ariana Grande, the other nibbles on the heel of ballet shoe we uncovered in the car trunk. Once upon a pre-pandemic time, the grrrls danced and wore tutus. I learned how to use a curling iron so they would not feel less love than their friends when it came time for recitals. I loathe recitals the way I loathe beauty, which is to say one stays conflicted, worried, disturbed.

The posthumous voice is tempted to shove these memories into the ceiling fan and invent a religion for the end of the world. Or what goes on after one stops living in it.

Dear X Jr., what is memorable is the memorial. It is impossible to imagine life should continue its microaggressions and caricatures and dumb ponies without you.

Literature, itself, often takes the shape of a posthumous dialogue for bibliophiles. Herve Guibert says as much (more on how he says this soon), and perhaps the posthumous voice, like a last will and testament, becomes the voice one tries on, the temporality one borrows to experiment, to stand before the mirror of ones own existence and flip what remains of the “I”s. Or the “I” addressing the living from beyond the grave in a tone that is serious, absurd, worldly, having nothing to lose, having already lost it.

When the dead speak, who are we to dispute them? What facts can we hold against the ghost's eyebrows? Or their argument? The posthumous voice raises the dead; it rattles the catacombs, etc. But why.

"Faith moves those same mountains that give birth to mice, and we're supposed to be filled with wonder!"

I attended the virtual launch for The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster, a novel described by the press as follows:

The literary world owes a great debt of gratitude to the executors who, charged with burning the remaining papers of their authorial charges, refuse, instead publishing them for the fanatic and meddlesome among us. Collected here are the remaining unpublished works—diaries and drafts, aphorisms and ephemera—of the late Thomas Pilaster, compiled by Marc-Antoine Marson, a longtime friend and fellow writer with whom Pilaster maintained a healthy rivalry. With rough edges and glints of genius present in equal measure, scholars and lay-readers alike will treasure these curious texts—So Many Seahorses, The Vander Sons Company, and Three Attempts at the Reintroduction of the Man-Eating Tiger Into Our Countryside, to name a few—for generations to come. [1]

In this novel, a living author uses a posthumous voice while alive to ironize the safety from slander; Marson's entire narrative pretext (a series of introductory remarks, prefaces, foot-notes, etc.) reshape the commentary as an ongoing envy-driven slander. In the critic-peer’s urge to preserve Thomas Pilaster's true legacy lies the urge to define it.

(See page 39 please, on your own, without my assistance, like the mature mammal you tell your living relatives you have become)

Sublunary Editions publisher, Josh Rothes led a discussion with translator Chris Clarke, about this book by Éric Chevillard, a French novelist of the age which occurs when a man born in June 1964 is alive in the present.

Chevillard is known for his innovative novels, his playing with "codes of narration." He also keeps a blog which feels like its own book titled "L'autofictif": each entry is numbered and dated. On April 6th, the entry was "4635". I have taken it upon myself to translate today’s entry, “4634”, for my own pleasure, and also to share with others the flavor of this ongoing text:

Without a doubt, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s oeuvre enjoys tremendous popular success, although it doesn’t receive the consideration it deserves from academic critics or organized literati who fawned over Kafka and Proust. And what a pity—since her ambition is equal to theirs, and her text is woven from an attention to mysticism that draws her near sacred texts: “There comes a moment when a woman must choose between his face and his body. Grace be to the fat, she saved her figure (….), although things became enormous below.” Notice the formulation of images which carry fruitful plenitude and abundance at a richer density and probable vibrance than those of our current days. The dream is capable of realizing its possibility as a flying carpet.

It strikes me that a world without animals would be a more hospitable one. To be finally rid of these crabs and macaques, these parodic insults of our most subtle and experimental ways of being. Do we really need the beaver, the horseshoe crab, the peccary? Without the claims animals lay on our surroundings, our air would be purged of their discordant cries, their bitter little breaths, their grotesque braying events which rips open the silken fabric of our dreams. No more sick droppings tumbling from the sky on our fine hats, no more poisons in fangs, the end of all fangs, really. [2] And all that space just for us, for the commercial exchange of our sensitive, fragile souls—and the display and exhibition of our monumental works!

Still, no adverse effects from the vaccine. I have rarely even felt so happy.

From this entry, one learns that Chevillard received his COVID-19 vaccine and he feels rare about it. Also that he lives in a Western European country where pigeons shitting on one’s head or hat is not taken for the auspicious, life-affirming, luck-bomb that Eastern Europeans know it to be. Also that countless species bray—and this ability is not limited to the donkey.

Beyond that, one sees a similar vein that the author probes in The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster, namely the role of the critic as an interior landscape of narrative voice. [3]

The question of paratexts in the footnotes and preface kept coming up in the conversation between the translator and the publisher. A sort of hopscotch game developed wherein each space conceded included a number which then attached itself to a rock.

Both characters passed the rock back and forth with utmost civility. When Rothes admitted the preface and footnotes are critical to the narrative for him, Clarke urged caution. In an email, Chevillard told Clarke that what he likes best about the book is that the quality for the reader remains undefined: the reader doesn't know whether to laugh or be serious, and this uncertainty mimes that of the author's two sides, one which pairs satisfaction and vanity, the other which reveals dissatisfaction and shame. [4] So when Clarke asked Chevillard to write a blurb for his translation of Pilaster, Chevillard refused on the grounds of not wanting to intervene in the reader's view of the writers which, together, form a "self-portrait." 

How does self-loathing and critique play into writing as a process? What does Marson's condescending treatment of Pilaster's text signify outside the particularity of the book? Maybe there is no meaning outside its particularity, and that is true of any self-portrait, however gaslit. 

Clarke selected a few of "the seahorses themselves" to read aloud. his voice rich, comfortable, parsing evolution and water with slight wonder and matter of fact. Under it, the idea that things "complete each other" kept bubbling to the surface, a sort of foam, over time, a froth. This dichotomy in Chevillard's process and concept relies on the assumption of completion by difference, as this novel would be incomplete with the doppelganger to narrate it. The conflict is between the two sides of the writer--two parts so estranged that they can barely stand each other--and what he wants from the page is also what he wants from the reader. 

The influence of Roman Gomez de la Cerra's Aphorisms is legible. Pilaster never manages to hit the appropriate syllabic form for a haiku except once--and he rhymes them. Clarke described the translation of this book as a practice of "translating images rather than words", particularly with the haikus. But Roman Gomez de la Cerra is dead.

END-NOTES

[1] At the online book launch on April 6, 2021, translator Chris Clarke said this translation was his master's project in translation studies at NYU. He defended it successfully, then tried to sell it, and discovered that publishers (who focus on reading brief samples) could not appreciate what Chevillard was doing in this book. The "yards-long sentences" of Marcon, for example, reveal him attempting to overwrite Pilaster in his introductions. Clarke went back and kept revisising--completing 5 or 6 other translations in the process--and finally discovered Sublunary through twitter, when Josh tweeted about looking for a Chevillard translations. One senses that both Rothes and Clarke are looking for complicated ways to describe what might otherwise be considered a trite, navel-gazing book of midcentury modernism with baroque contingencies and nods towards an emasculating ocean.

[2] Chevillard on the rise of botanical memoirs: “…while it’s not my intent to be an activist for the animal cause, I am preoccupied by the fate of these creatures, and I do rebel against man’s abuse of his power over a world he shares with other organisms no less entitled to live there.”

[3] Chevillard on psychogeographic metereology: “My response to concerns, challenges, crises, all the various events of life, is a written response. Not exclusively, of course, but it’s rare that I don’t feel a need to confront in writing the things that happen to me, to consider them in that manner. It’s a way of not being hoodwinked by the fate I’ve been given, a way of regaining the upper hand. However, I don’t have much imagination.”

[4] Chevillard on Erik Satie and auctioned time-pieces: “Beckett and Michaux were beholden to nothing. They were never bound by the demands of the system, its necessities or laws, and they never surrendered or conceded a single thing, doubtless because they had no need for fortune or glory and because the only thing that mattered for them was to create, through writing, the conditions of a life that was possible in spite of everything. Beckett and Michaux instilled shame in us like a righteous punishment, like a painful realization of what we have become. Writers these days clearly have no idea the extent to which they’re compromised.”

Can't touch this: The voice of Barbara Comyns.

1.

For every Comyns-lover, there is a coming-to-Comyns story.

Mine is recent. I lost my Barbara-Comyns-virginity last month because Richard Mirabella tweeted about hosting a zoom book club—and I will read anything to crawl into a small digital room with fellow bibliomaniacs and talk about a book they love, in this case, Our Spoons Came From Woolworths.

2.

Barbara Comyns was British. She grew up in large house, among a large family with dwindling economic means and status. Her father died in her teens, and the family house was sold off. While attending art school in London, Comyns married fellow artist John Pemberton. Four years later, in 1934, the two exhibited their work together. Between exhibits and marriage, Comyns birthed two children, Julian and Caroline. The marriage ended in 1935.

At some point in the late 1930’s, Comyns started a relationship with Arthur Price, a “black marketeer,” and she took her two kids to live with Price at various places in London, where Comyns made money by modeling, flipping apartments, breeding poodles, renovating pianos, dealing in furniture and cars, and drawing for ads.  

When World War II began, money grew tighter and the threat of bombing increased. Comyns’ relationship with Price ended, at which point she took the kids to the countryside and “became a cook in a Hertfordshire country house, where she wrote a series of vignettes about her childhood.” This is when Comyns wrote Sisters by a River, which was initially released in serialized form.

More than a decade ago, Emily Gould (who introduces the New York Review Books edition) described Comyns’ first novel, Sisters by a River, as “a barely fictionalized account of her strange childhood” created to entertain and amuse her own kids while living in London and “working as a cook on a country estate to escape the Blitz.” In her introduction to Virago’s 1984 edition, Ursula Holden emphatically asserts: “The events in the book are true.” So we know Comyns’ early work emerged from lived experience: we take it she used her own life as a muse. At least, at the beginning.

3.

Her second novel, Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, was published around the same time as her first, and it continues the mining of personal life as fictional muse. In this, Comyns turns from her childhood to adulthood, carrying the reader through a series of ordinary remarkable things, including childbirth, child loss, marital drudgery, peak misogyny, and pets (from newts to foxes). 

The book begins in the voice of the narrator, Sophia: “I told Helen my story and she went home and cried.”

From here, Sophia narrates her life at twenty-one in 1930’s London, after marrying a fellow painter named Charles. They are very poor. Charles’ family doesn’t support his marriage to an artist, a woman without pedigree, status, money, or extended family. Sophia narrates this rejection with fatalism-tinged humor: things are the way they are because this is how things go and here we are going along with them. Obviously, the novel explores the author’s relationship to John Pemberton, and I derived cream-cakes of pleasure imagining his initial response upon reading it.

While Charles paints and works on his art, Sophia struggles to make money for rent, heating, and food. She supports his art career and puts her own on hold. Again, this is what one does, and therefore one must do it. They go to various places which inspire Charles to paint, and the narrator’s voice wanders between her own experience and that which is appropriate, as determined by Charles reaction’s. Here they are at the fair:

Fair music always had excited me and given me a kind of lump in my throat, but Charles did not get this feeling, so he said I was being even more stupid than usual, and if I felt like that I had better go home.

Sophia poses nude for artists and sculptors and eventually gives birth to a baby—which horrifies Charles—and then struggles to feed and nurture the baby alongside her pet newt while also wondering what she is doing, and suspecting that her husband is cheating.

The childbirth scene is disorienting; Sophia has no context or background knowledge for what is happening. The hospital seems like a stadium of continuous humiliations where women go to be delivered of their autonomy and humanity. Sophia describes the healthy birth as follows:

I suddenly felt so interested in what was happening. The baby was really coming now and there it was between my legs. I could feel it moving and there was a great tugging in my tummy where it was still attached to me.

........ I couldn't help crying when I heard it was a boy, because I knew there wasn't much chance of Charles liking it, now it was a boy. He particularly disliked little boys. I longed to see the baby, but they said I couldn't yet. It had stopped crying and I was worried in case it was dead. So I cried about that, too.

The humor comes from the narrator’s deadpan delivery of absurdities, often voiced by men or figures of power and authority. Comyns lets them make fools of themselves—she doesn’t try to explain or excuse or label their hypocrisies. Instead, she lays on the table near spoons, napkins, and gloves. Again, a scene from the hospital:

Charles said he had borrowed some money to send telegrams to his relations saying we had a boy of six oz. I told him it was 6 pounds not ounces, but he said a few pounds either way wouldn't make any difference. But Charles' telegrams caused a huge sensation, and his family was most disappointed when in due course they discovered we had quite a normal baby.

Eventually, after Sandro’s birth, Sophia slips into a nonsexual flirtatious friendship with an elderly art critic named Peregrine (and what a fantastic name for this man one imagines repeatedly as a sort of sad loafing penguin, an exhausting succubus)!

When Peregrine isn’t complaining about his estranged wife, he is “a charming companion” and Sophia begins to enjoy his attention. At this point, she gets pregnant again:

I went home and told Charles and he looked quite terrified and said he wouldn't give up his painting for beastly babies and ran out of the house. I felt all frightened, as if I'd done something wicked. I did wish it was the men sometimes that had babies. I would be awfully kind to Charles if he had one, although I would hate to see him looking all fat.

He didn't come back till late in the night, but I was still awake. He said he was sorry he had been so angry with me, but I must promise to get rid of this extra child. So I cried a bit and said I would, as long as I didn't have to do anything too alarming.

Sophia learns Peregrine is going to be away for business, and she expresses relief: “I was pleased he was going to be away now I felt so unhappy, because I knew men hate women when they are unhappy.”

To keep the men in her life happy, Sophia pays for an illegal abortion. She describes the experience and the accompanying emotions without elucidation: simply lays them side by side as facts.

I don't feel much like writing about the actual operation. It was horrible and did not work at all as it should. I couldn't go to hospital, because we would have all gone to prison if I had. Even the doctor did his best to help me recover, although he was scared stiff to come near me when he saw it had all gone wrong, but eventually I became better. But my mind didn't recover at all. I felt all discussed it and that I had been cheated from having my baby. Now it had gone I wanted it more than ever; I felt I had been weak. I should have left Charles and had the baby somewhere. If I'd just become a tramp with Sandro surely someone would have taken us in….

One is struck by how few options Sophia has—to become a “tramp” or to have an abortion—what a strange choice for a mammal to be forced to make. Thank goodness no male-identifying mammals are being forced to make these choices on a daily basis.

Fortunately, Pegerine returns from his business trip and Sophia begins a sexual affair with him. I say “fortunately” because good fortune and bad fortune seem indiscernible in this story where all fortune is there, grinding forward, without time to consider its intent or duration.

4.

Throughout this novel, Comyns uses narrative voice to destabilize knowledge and convention. She does this discreetly, humorously, painfully, continuously pressing Sophia’s voice against the world’s received wisdoms, and making authority and status seem ridiculous.

The problem of pregnancy, and the challenges with avoiding it, are clearly demarcated as a women’s labor, a sub-heading of knowledge inaccessible to the narrator. Notice the juxtaposition of physical pain with supernaturalism and a slight absurdity in this scene where Sophia is trying to tell her husband labor has begun:

Then I saw my mother's ghost sitting in the rocking chair, and it was rocking in quite a normal way, so I did wake Charles and said, "Look there is my mother's ghost! She must have come to tell me it's time to go to the nursing home. I do feel a bit queer." Then Charles saw her, too, but he didn't like her much. He jumped out of bed and put the light on, and she wasn't in the chair anymore, but it still rocked. We got dressed because I was quite sure she wanted me to go to the nursing home, but seeing a ghost had made Charles a bit grumpy.

In this section, Sophia manages to express that no one existed to usher her into motherhood, no living person cared enough to know when she should go to the hospital, and so the ghost of the mother appeared. We don’t question the verity of this ghost because, I think, we sense a true need for it. As readers, we are relieved for the rocking chair, relieved for anything that gets Charles off his navel-gazing ass where Sophia’s existence is concerned. Sometimes it takes a mother’s ghost to make a man listen.

And this is just the beginning of the sad times. For after the abortion, Sophia gets pregnant again. She gives birth to a little girl named Fanny. Then, she leaves Charles—who informs her that she needs to move on—and decides to go live with Peregrine. After discovering that her lover—and the father of her baby girl, Fanny—is, in fact, married to the woman whose money and home-labor sustains him, Sophia finds herself on the streets of London with a baby, homeless. She catches scarlet fever and almost dies. Fanny, the baby, does die. The string of losses sharpens but does not relent. There is more. There is more. You should read it.

5.

Our Spoons Came From Woolworths ends with Sophia sitting in her garden, happily married, financially-stable, beginning to tell her friend, Helen, this story. In this sense, it returns us to the moment before the first line: “I told Helen my story and she went home and cried.”

The circle is complete. It is an uncomfortably happy ending because it ends in marriage, or because marriage to a decent, middle-class man gives Sophia a space from which to begin to write the book. That is one way to look at it.

Another way might be to consider why, despite its use of postmodern destabilizing techniques, juxtapositions, distancing syntax, and absurdity, Comyns’ novel is not meta-fictional. It’s not a story about telling a story—it is a story told very, very well, a story that is conscious of telling a story and committed to it. The way this story is told is unique to Comyns. “She reminds you what a pleasure it is to be told a story,” Richard Mirabella said. “There is very little staging,” Kyle Winkler noted, “very little use of direct dialogue to scaffold scene and plot.” Sophia tells us the story rather than showing it.

Kyle also pointed out the use of strong modifiers throughout the text, so that one finds a feeling or experience framed at a distance, or a certain remove:

We enjoyed the drive so much at first, but gradually we became bored. It was such a long journey and the car was small and old and didn't go very fast and was very bumpy, too.

The such and so and very and very would not survive a modern workshopping, and yet it is integral to deployment of voice. To me, it is this constant self-qualification, this navigating between expectation and convention in language, that renders Sophia endearing and fascinating. Another example:

Peregrine was a good driver, but he sat rather forward and crouched over the wheel and talked a lot about driving as if he wasn't really used to it. This seemed rather waddy to me. Then I felt unkind to criticize him after all his kindness.

“Waddy” keeps this from feeling traumatic. “Rather forward” keeps Peregrine from feeling threatening. These small dislocations and modifications keep us, as readers, from being drawn into the sadness of what the narrator describes.

I found myself smiling during some of the most tragic parts of this novel, and I think Comyns intended this.

6.

In our discussion, we pounced about the zoom room, trying to find words to pin down the narrative voice. Naive? (No, because she knows the world is a wreck.) Stoic? (No, because she expresses dissatisfaction and hurt; she isn’t ashamed of expressing these things to the reader, only to the men she is sleeping with.) Passive? (No, because she actively makes choices to leave men, to start a new, to adopt a Fox, to raise her child…)

We couldn’t settle on a word for this voice. Lucy Scholes describes it as “fortitude of spirit” and “youthful enthusiasm.” Emily Gould evokes its “childlike qualities; she looks at everything in the world as though seeing it for the first time.” Ultimately, for me, I think the best word is “innocent”—not in the Puritan sense, not in sense which posits a relationship between chastity, purity, and virtue—in the sense of acknowledging the world’s impossible unfairness without judgement.

There are no moral lessons to be drawn from Sophia’s story—no redemptive salvations or purifications. The narrator remains the same person in better circumstances. Perhaps this is why the circumstantial feels so powerful and terrifying—everything happens without us. What keeps the traumatic themes from descending into melodrama is the use of voice, the shifting between reportage of trauma alongside a new recipe—the lack of inflection or change in tone when describing personal pain.

Sophia expects to suffer: it is part of how she knows the world, and this expectation renders suffering ordinary, common, mundane. Comyns’ stylization of unremarkable, extraordinary suffering is not redemptive in the sense that the narrator “learns a lesson”—it simply passes, seamlessly, from tragedy to country manor. There are no bootstraps. There is genuinely nothing to learn and no take-away.

Reading her in the present feels quaint like a blood clot is quaint: the threat is part of the landscape of the life. There is little self-pity or psychologizing. There is scant self-reflection on what she could have done better—the plot is driven by the narrator’s random attempts to respond to unpredictable reality. And it is reality which remains unstable in Our Spoons Were From Woolworths—it is the world’s change that serves as an antagonist—a feat all the more extraordinary for the technique the author uses to enchant us.

7.

To speak of Comyns’ style and voice is to enter the destabilized landscape with a narrator whose knowledge we trust for being so unknowing, so innocent, so blameless in many ways. By reporting artifice from the perspective of innocence, or the viewpoint of one who might believe it, the narrator exposes the artifice without raising her voice to didacticism. She makes innocence seem enviable. It is easy to confuse the art of writing from innocence with a formal innocence—an absence of experience in higher education.

“Comyns was 40 years old when she started publishing books,” Nathan Scott McNamara wrote. She had studied art, been a mother, managed a business, but she never studied literature in school, “where culturally inherited notions of how to construct a story might have guided her.” McNamara sees this absence of schooling as influential in Comyn’s voice.

But I’m not so sure more art-school would have changed her writing any more than it would have made her go easier on the bohemian set.I suspect Comyns read a fair bit. As Emily Gould has written, Comyns marked her time in London with libraries:

“[I] read until I was almost drunk on books, but my own writing became imitative and self-conscious. In the end, with great strength of mind, I destroyed all the stories and half-written novels I’d written over the years.”

So I suspect Comyns loved telling stories, and weaving new jingles from the gargoyles passed around bohemian circles. I suspect she wanted to blow dandelion fluff all over the stodgy, peer-reviewed desks, and this blowing, this seemingly-casual disruption of eloquent Bloomsburyesque language, was part of her aesthetic and formal commitment. And while McNamara is right that Comyns didn’t get “interviewed or profiled while she was alive,” I suspect she was well-connected enough to get interviews if she wanted them.

Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she wanted to write and to continue poking tiny newts into the eyes of literati and bohemian art circles.

8.

Which leaves me with how much I want to read Comyns into the novel. She enchants with authenticity, with gross social error, with misunderstanding, with quiet determination to the continue the unlikely story. I want to know what Comyns was like in real life—and the absence of interviews makes this elusive quest more intriguing.

Author Jane Gardam decided to find out for herself, in person. After learning Comyns had lived next door to her, Gardam starts trying to track Comyns down, finding “her movements as hard to track as those of her heroines and in some ways very like them: the adolescent marriages and escapes, the curious jobs, the poverty, the rescues, the bundled-up babies, the messy art school bohemianism, the fecklessness and the bravery. And the innocence.”

And the brilliant, fascinating innocence—yes.

Anyway, Gardam finally phoned Comyns, and was surprised by the invitation to come over that very afternoon and hang out. For Gardam, “the impetuous certainty” resembled Comyn’s early heroines:

“Even in the depths of loneliness and rejection they make lightning and often very unwise decisions. They seem to stem from a perpetual curiosity, an inner observing eye that even death — and there are horrible deaths — can’t conquer.”

“When I met Barbara Comyns for tea that day in her cheerful house in Twickenham the sun was pouring in through all its bright windows,” Gardam continues. There is no stockpile of skulls, no macabre undertone. When Gardam describes the end of her meeting with Comyns—and one can almost hear Sophia’s voice speaking in Comyns, asserting its amused, marveling tone:

As I was leaving, she said, ‘I expect you’ve heard that my husband was a spy? He worked in Whitehall with Kim Philby. Oh, Kim was a delightful man. So funny. Always here playing cards. Neither of us had a notion! When he disappeared — to Moscow, you know — they sacked my husband. They said that either he must have known and therefore was a traitor, or that he hadn’t spotted it and therefore must have been a fool.’

One imagines a scene from a novel, narrated in droll horror, the suspense emerging from the lightness by which horror dances from the narrator’s mouth. One imagines poor Jane Gardam, scouring the flowerpots for Barbara, and accidentally seeing Sophia. One imagines the upside-down novel which could have come from this—even this.

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas: Unreliable narratives (or part 2).

The unreliable narrator

"To the Reader"-- signed by Bras Cubas – says it was written "with the pen of mirth and the ink of melancholy." One of the words that kept circulating in the #APSTogether discussions of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas was “unreliable narrator.”

In fiction, the unreliable narrator conventionally offers a first-person viewpoint whose version of the story cannot be trusted. Since the first-person narrator is our filter—the measure by which we judge the verity of the account—we tend to expect “truth” from this speaker. When we talk about unreliable narrators, we are generally referring to their deceptive account of the truth, and this adds suspense and tension to the story.

I am fascinated by how sincerity can be modulated in narration, especially where unreliable narrators influence our reading. In #APSTogether discussion, the unreliable narrator was assumed—and readers gave their thoughts on how Machado used the narrator, or what he intended to do by using an unreliable narrator.

Translator Flora Thomson-DeVeaux focused on the unreliable narrator as a man watching himself watch a woman, and she noted that something in that part of the translation “went haywire,” as the narrator is showing us his projections on to the woman rather than showing us the woman. On her view, everyone in the novel represents Bras Cubas in some sense, and the narrator is somehow aware of that.

“Sincerity” in context: Slavery and the Dungeon

The narrator knows what he is doing, I think, in digging his own grave. Or, it seems as if Machado helps Bras dig the grave of his meaningless existence with relish, adding to it the philosophical notions of social Darwinism that helped sustain economic hierarchies, including the based on slavery.

When Rohter brought up the word sincerity, I wondered whether (or how) that could be gauged, given the narrator’s commitment to representing the systems of slavery, status, and politics in Rio. Certainly the narrator stays true to his role as a dandy-like caricature of the nobility-aspiring class (Not "dandy," says Thomson-DeVeaux, but "pintolagrete", or man about town, as Grossman translated it.)

In “A Note on on the Calabouço,” Thomson-DeVeux offers insight into her meticulous translation, but also the systemic silences which characterized Machado’s time. She explains the translation of a single word—calabouco—to “Dungeon.” She decided to capitalize the word in order to disrupt the silence around its history—to bring this word forward as a designator of a particular time, place, and social practice.

The word comes up in Cubas’ description of his slave-smuggling brother-in-law, Contrim as a “paragon” of virtue:

People accused him of avarice, and I believe they were right; but avarice is nothing more than the exaggeration of a virtue, and virtues should be like budgets: better a surplus than a deficit. As he had a very dry manner, he had enemies, and they went so far as to accuse him of savagery. The only thing they alleged on this score was that he often sent slaves to the calabouço, from where they came down streaming with blood; but, apart from the fact that he only sent runaways and incorrigibles, it so happens that, having dealt for so long in the smuggling of slaves, he had become somewhat used to the slightly harsher treatment required by that sort of business, and one cannot honestly attribute to a man’s original nature that which is the pure effect of social relations.

Here, the narrator suggests the charge of “savagery” held against Contrim stems from the fact that he sent slaves to the calabouço, but the narrator insists that he only did this with “runaways and incorrigibles;” and Contrim’s experience as a long-time slave owner offered him insight into which slaves most deserved this unfortunate treatment. The systemic evil of slavery—the way Cubas narrates it—creates a mood of factual resignation where virtue, itself, becomes a description of success within the system where one is expected to support the dominant class rather than operating according to personal ethical considerations.

Thomson-DeVeux reveals that slaveowners delegated corporal punishment to the state after the royal decree of November 16, 1693 forbid owners from shackling or imprisoning slaves. A royal decree also established the ”workhouse” or dungeon where slaves could be “humanely” punished by men with whips would be compensated for their efforts. Until then, in 17th century Brazilian prisons, both enslaved persons and citizens were confined in the same prisons for violations of the penal code. The Dungeon was different—it was created expressly for the purpose of punishing “runaway slaves”—it’s role was to somehow civilize the brutality of violence by hiding it behind the walls of a state institution. Contrim could remain a paragon of virtue, or what Thomson-DeVeux calls “a man who outsources bloodletting, keeping his own hands clean and sparing his neighbors’ ears.”

Alongside this, the “whipping system” existed as a state-created tool which served the economic and security needs of a dominant class (and its hierarchy) by using violence to control labor. Only in 1832 did Brazil begin to require that slaveowners specify the alleged “infarction” committed by the enslaved person subject to punishment.

The relationship between the Dungeon and the prison system which replaced it carries into the present, where Thomson-DeVeux says that over one-third of Brazil’s prison population consists of pre-trial detainees. Those who are stigmatized by criminality, or the allegation of criminality, are described as bandido in the media, and the same brush is used to tarnish reputations of those who argue for pre-trial and prison reform in Brazil.

How race “maps”: Brazil and US

In the discussion, Rohter said contemporary American discussion of marginalized persons has helped to make Machado relevant as “a writer of color and a Latino.” He also said it was interesting to compare how race is mapped in Brazil with how it is mapped, or translated, in the US. Thomson-DeVeux noted that this novel experienced a resurgence in the early 1950’s when translator William Grossman published an essay in the NAACP’s paper, The Crisis, which identified Machado de Assis as a “great negro writer.” To this, Rohter added that race classifications in the US and Brazil are very different (though they seem to be moving closer to the US map in Brazil). Grossman's depiction of Machado as a "negro writer" might have been strange to the author, himself, who identified as a "mulatto." A Brazilian translator present for the discussion confirmed that "mulatto" was the more common word to Brazilians, also "moreno" meaning "dark-skinned."

“But the white slave owning mobster that the author has created is not colorblind," added Thomson-DeVeux. Slavery was gratuitous, a sort of background noise that existed as part of the landscape in Brazil at the time. The scene with the whip and the freed slave who buys his own slaves and competes for power by whipping them, is one of the most tragic in the book. For me, it’s tragedy lies in the absolute power of the system to replicate hierarchies that aren't questioned or refuted. For a formerly-enslaved person to whip their own slave does not leave us with an ethics or an out—it leaves us only with the System.

Machado’s appropriate cynicism meets Bras’ sincerity

Rohter thinks the end is “devastating in its cynicism (“I came out even with life,” he avers, because of “the final negative in this chapter of negatives.” No spoiler alert here: let’s just say that his final sentence is devastating in its cynicism”). Since the novel ends without giving any meaning to the narrator's life, Rohter wonders if  this is because the author went straight to writing his best novella, The Psychiatrist, immediately after this.

But Thomson-DeVeaux maintains that the ending is true to the form – the ending will be abrupt when you ride the bumpy hippo.

I would argue that the ending is actually the opposite of cynical. A narrator involved in competing for status in the Brazilian system of enslaved labor should have a meaningless life—there should be no beautiful meaning or continuance after having been compromised to the point of nihilism, after wallowing in a friend’s eugenicist Humanitist survival-of-the-fittest “philosophy”….. Machado does not promise us meaning in this memoir-novel. In fact, he delivers on his promise of showing us how the rich and fabulous die with only the perfume of blood on their hands.

When we speak of unreliable narrators, we assume the narrator is lying or hiding—but I think Machado’s narrator is devastating precisely because he hides none of the moral nihilism at the heart of Brazilian 18th century society. He writes straight into its vanity and puts on its airs. He doesn’t repent or ever see through his own mistakes. He never questions the system in which he wants to succeed.

If honesty is essential to sincerity, then Bras Cubas is both honest and sincere. He is a social striver torn between the duty of leaving an inheritance (through children) and the magic thing/philosophy he hopes to become famous for (thus gaining the status that eludes him). It is because we want Machado to repudiate these things that we hold his narrator, Bras Cubas, to be unreliable.

There are also questions how Victorian or European notions of “sincerity” map onto narrative form. For  example, is Fernando Pessoa an unreliable or insincere narrator? Is he, when writing that mix of poetry and philosophy, being sincere? The standards of the European bildungsroman or confessional doesn’t always map onto the expectations of innovative fiction—and perhaps we narrow the reading (or narrow what we can experience from it) by relying on those constructs.

Because the class system and the focus on status is central to Machado’s novel—and because Machado allows it to exist as “part of life,” as a sort of naturalism—I was intrigued by Brandon Taylor recent his sub stack comments on Zola:

What if the active tension at the heart of most Millennial Novels is between Naturalism and Existentialism, between Zola and Camus. What if the Millennial Novel seeks to answer the question of whether or not a person’s experience is actually unique and individual or whether it is truly just an emanation from the various systems we are subjected to. I think some novels tend to fall on the side of the purely naturalistic—that is, race, gender, sexuality, class, and on are bounding phenomena that determine how people will treat you and what you can expect. And some are more existential. That is, a life is unique, that one’s choices are not predetermined.

Perhaps, in a more extensive sense, the question of sincerity and narrative voice also emerges here.

I wish I had more time to think about it—though I will probably share a brief summary with some themes and points of interest next week. In the meantime, you can cross-reference some of the ways in which Machado uses these words in Thomson-DeVeaux’s translation with this index.

The Brás Cubas index.

I have a habit of adding indexes to my notebooks while reading.

Because I enjoyed this book so much, I decided to type this strange index assembled from personal saliencies in the 2020 version of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, written by Machado de Assis, translated by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux, and published by Penguin.

In my dream, I asked the powerful Penguin perhaps to find a way to format the chapter titles without eliminating so many page numbers (for those of us who take notes by page)—but the Penguin did not respond. In my forthcoming dream, I will ask the hippo to ride me past Eden where I might try to ask the Penguin again. Or, initially.

Per indexing impulse, a precursor. Machado’s innovative use of typography on pages 75, 123-4, 233, 241, 260.

The narrator celebrates a few objects in tonal gestures which resemble the ode, so I added an index for Machado’s narration in ode modes. Several objects prefaced with an “O” enter this small index, but you should read the odes themselves. They are delightful.

Index of odes

paddle: 40-41
tight boots: 91
legs: 145
nose: 112-113
Formality: 244-245
muleteer: 62-62

Some words are used ironically—and I indexed those. Some words are defined in a topsy-turvy way—and I indexed them as well. Other things which made it to this index: unique phrases, philosophies, precepts, intertextual references, abstract states like silence (but only on the pages where one abstraction seemed to resignify another), a few minor characters, estranged metaphors, larger symbols, dances, translator notes, neat words (including Flora Thomson-DeVeaux’s marvelous “smallsword”). I’ve italicized the words that are direct quotations or interesting phrases which recur, almost thematically, in this novel. There’s not really a key, And nothing is exhaustive,

Index of text

Achilles: 20, 247, 301
administrative solution: 165
Africa: 6, 10, 230
alienist: 282-6
American riddle: 64
ambition: 60, 175, 246, 261
Anacreontic panpipe: 226
antiphons: 290
Athenian maniac: 284, 294
avarice: 70, 239
bachelor: 5, 6, 17, 169, 234, 238
Bakbarah the Toothless: 54-5, 306
bibliomaniac: 154-155
blood: 30, 32, 80, 88, 202, 221, 236, 239
Bocage: 36-37, 303
Borba, Quincas: 41, 130-134, 136, 187-8, 214-6, 228-231, 234, 242, 256, 258, 261-5, 270-273, 276-7, 282-3, 285-7
Bras’ father: 10, 73-74, 104-105, 106, 107, 110
cadaver: 58, 59, 67, 83, 84, 106, 152, 196
caliph: 270, 287, 291
capitalist: 289
catafalque: 106
Catumbi: 5, 295
cerebral ventriloquism: 248, 249
childhood: 28, 29-42, 66, 135, 167-169
Claudius: 12, 318
concubine: 160
conscience: 117, 181, 209, 277, 279, 288
clock (see also pocket watch): 98, 122, 134, 135, 141, 188, 207 *
cockfights: 236
colloquy: 186
cynic: 89
cypress tree: 153
Damasceno: 189-190, 191, 197, 235-236, 242-245, 246, 316-7
dandy: 50, 125, 186 *
Dante: 126-7, 311-312
declaration: 274-275
delirium: 18-25, 28, 60, 213, 230
dialogue as form: 123-124, 224
divine pillow: 136
dogfight: 263-264, 266
donkey: 62-64, 277
duodecimos: 65, 307
drug: 177
Dungeon: 239, 320
eclogue: 58, 307
eleven: 5 (friends), 56
ellipsis: 91
embryo: 185-186, 192, 193, 211
envy: 229, 242, 254, 278
epitaph: 241, 242, 280
Erasmus: 277
fate: 126-127
fatal error: 272
fatigue of the idle: 287
fixed idea: 12-13, 14, 55
flag: 13
Flamengo Beach: 201
folly: 26, 277
formality: 31, 243, 244-245
gimlet: 116
gossip: 17, 182, 200
hairpin: 206, 207
Hamlet: 6, 172
Hebe’s cup: 16, 300
hero: 29
hippopotamus: 19-25
Hotel Pharoux: 145, 170, 224
hubbub: 8, 34
Humanitism: 187-188, 214-216, 242-243, 228-231, 234, 261-262, 270-271, 287, 290
hypochondria: 8-9, 70, 79, 170, 291, 297
I stared at the tip of my nose: 110, 111 *
illusion: 16, 23, 230, 284, 290
improvisatore: 38
inheritance: 148-149, 220-221
injustice: 32
inventor of butterflies: 84-84
Job: 24, 301
lamentations: 229
law of the equivalence of windows: 117, 209
Lobo Neves: 103, 110, 119, 114-5, 128-9, 139, 163-4, 166, 175-6, 179-180, 194-5, 199-201, 207, 217, 220-1, 246, 278
Lord Byron: 64
love of glory: 8, 9, 79, 128-129, 198, 232
letters: 212-213, 226-227
Macrobians: 14, 299
manure: 34
masculine indiscretion: 252
maxims: 233
mediocrity: 40, 60, 68, 221
metaphysical: 101, 102, 221
monotony of misfortune: 288
monumental: 188
moral geology: 179-180
mother: 21, 22, 30, 32, 66-67, 80, 208, 289, 303
mysterious parcel: 117, 118, 311
nabob: 282
nanny goats: 270
Napoleon: 35, 36, 40, 50, 261, 303 (see also Ani DiFranco’s “Napoleon”)
Nature: 12, 21, 22, 23, 281
no remorse: 192, 247 *
nostalgia: 16, 168, 226
oblivion: 254
ode: 57
oil lamp: 172
opportune moment: 125, 207
Pascal: 77, 266, 318
perpetual: 179
philosophy of old papers: 226-227
Plaster: 8-9, 11, 13, 14, 52, 79, 232, 291, 296-7, 300, 319
polka: 224, 253
pride: 21, 60, 199
privation: 276, (memory of) 276-277
prologue: 3
Prudencio: 70, 71-2, 107, 148-149
public esteem: 146, 238-9
public opinion: 3, 69, 79, 198, 220-221, 223, 267 (neighbor’s attention)
publicity: 239
Puritanism: 13
rank: 60
Realists: 42
reciprocal deceit: 180
red-haired virgin: 175-6, 316
restitution: 117, 188
rhubarb: 231
Romantics: 42
romanticism: 60, 64
Rossio Grande: 43, 45
Sancho Panza: 45
Saturn (planet): 254
selfishness: 22
servant: 43
Shakespeare: 70
shakos: 256-258
shuttlecock: 215
silence: 20, 47, 59, 81, 101, 238, 245, 260 (see use of typography), 261
sincere: 48, 76, 80, 168, 264, 281 (sincerity)
slave/s: 31, 33, 38, 47, 51, 66, 82, 94, 98, 107, 148-149, 230, 239, 317
sleep: 57
smallsword: 35, 36, 40
snakes: 144
spectacle: 22, 23, 24, 58, 57, 67, 93, 236, 242, 254, 264, 265
Stendhal: 3, 249-250, 294
storks: 6, 15
sub-Greeks: 216
sublime: 22, 57, 117, 230, 253, 270, 276, 287
superstitions: 14, 172-174, 175-176, 201, 217, 316
Suetonius: 12, 226, 318
the grand idea: 7
the little house: 142, 146-147, 151-152, 156, 196
the living condensation of all time: 23
the pure reality: 213, 224
the mystery: 178, 186
theory of human editions: 16, 77, 93-96
thirteen: (see also superstitions) 172-174, 175-176, 201, 217
Tijuca: 70-73, 87, 88, 89, 263, 307
tomb: 5, 20, 244
tragedy: 6, 202, 210, 213
trapeze: 8, 52
Valongo: 148-149, 313
Venice: 64
vertigo: 68, 211 (vertiginous)
Virgil: 68, 75, 171, 308
virumque: 75, 308
Voltaire: 261, 190, 231
voluptuousness of woe: 70-71
waltz: 114-115, 117, 125, 126
wart: 176
weeping willow: 257
widower: 226
women’s indiscretion: 250
worm: 1, 21, 77
yellow fever epidemic: 242-243, 300
youth: 28, 33, 71

*

Machado’s original novel can now be read for free online in Portuguese thanks to Gutenberg.

Borba comparing conscience to why a pretty woman is vain and likes to look in the mirror often: "Conscience..... contemplates itself frequently when it finds itself beautiful. Remorse is nothing but the grimace of a conscience that sees itself to be hideous." 

But remember: “The book’s greatest flaw is you, reader….”

Benjamin & Seghers in transit.

1. Transit papers

We don't talk about papers enough. This is because most Americans genuinely lack personal, lived experience with the absolutely mind-boggling labor, money, risk, and time involved in the procurement of visas and transit papers for stateless persons or refugees. As part of my ongoing commitment to consume every book ever published by NYRB, I read Anna Seghers’ novel, Transit, with great interest in its treatment of refugees and stateless persons.

The translation by Margot Bettauer Dembo—her final work of translation—is intimate, disturbing, and powerful. One feels alienation like a close houseguest, or a lost language, the lip of an inaccessible elsewhere.

Peter Conrad’s introduction ties Segher's novel to her lived experience as a Communist trying to escape Hitler's armies. She was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933; upon release, she fled to Paris, then to Marseilles, one of the few ports available to exit visas. (Seghers was Jewish, which certainly factored into the threat that Nazism posed to her life.) Conrad compares Seghers’ refugees to Kafka's Joseph K, seeking to get his credentials as a land surveyor recognized by the rulers of the castle.

In 1941, Seghers (and her family) procured permits to board a ship for Mexico—and she began to write this book immediately upon arrival. Like Marie, the novel's quasi-heroine, Seghers lived the in-between state of warring borders and expired papers. The novel offers few emotional characterizations to distinguish the characters, many of whom are refugees waiting for papers in Marseilles. In a sense, all details exist only to be demolished by the violence of the occupation, and by the quiet intersecting complicities of French citizens. 

The male narrator of Transit doesn't even inhabit a name. He is among the nondescript nameless, seeking a future in the words of others, the moment by moment navigations. He has no distinguishing beliefs, looks, or ideologies. He begins with describing his time spent in work camps performing "labor service" by unloading British munitions ships, where he felt himself "in the shadow of death." 

Ultimately, he escapes the Vichy regime by passing himself off as Weidel, a dead Jewish author whose suitcase he discovers in a hotel room. Along with Weidel’s papers, the suitcase also contains Weidel’s final manuscript. By some twist of fate, the narrator happens to have fallen in love with the Weidel’s girlfriend, who does not yet know that he is dead—and who is trying to find him so that her transit papers can be finished.

For the narrator to steal a dead’s man identity is hardly a crime in a time when survival depends on anonymity. And the whole novel is retrospective: a confession recounted by the narrator to an American border official for whom such stories are thrilling, museum-like, and incomprehensible. 

2. The Struma and Mihail Sebastian

The first lines of Transit:

"They're saying that the Montreal went down before Dakar and Martinique. That she ran into a mine."

Immediately, I thought of Mihail Sebastian's diary, where he expresses anxiety and concern over what would later be called the Struma disaster. The Struma was a small ship commissioned to carry nearly 800 Jewish refugees from Axis-allied Romania to Palestine. Sebastian attempts to navigate between conflicting media reports: whether the ship carrying Romanian Jewish refugees arrived safely, or whether it had been sunk.

Over one hundred pages of Sebastian’s diary reference the absolutely abysmal media reporting and propaganda, and the paralyzing effect this had on Jewish persons in determining whether to flee or “wait for it to pass.” The Struma disaster would later be referenced by Romanian Jews as why some chose to flee by foot or stay put, rather than try a boat.

Here’s the Wikipedia version of what happened:

Struma's diesel engine failed several times between her departure from Constanţa on the Black Sea on 12 December 1941 and her arrival in Istanbul on 15 December. She had to be towed by a tug boat to leave Constanţa and to enter Istanbul. On 23 February 1942, with her engine still inoperable and her refugee passengers aboard, Turkish authorities towed Struma from Istanbul through the Bosphorus out to the coast of Şile in North Istanbul. Within hours, in the morning of 24 February, the Soviet submarine Shch-213 torpedoed her, killing an estimated 781 refugees plus 10 crew, making it the Black Sea's largest exclusively civilian naval disaster of World War II. Until recently the number of victims had been estimated at 768, but the current figure is the result of a recent study of six different passenger lists. Only one person aboard, 19-year-old David Stoliar, survived (he died in 2014).

3. Walter Benjamin and Weidel

Weidel's manuscript suitcase, for me, maps upon the missing suitcase of Walter Benjamin—and with it, the possibility that someone used it to publish his text.

I thought about this as I traced relations between Seghers and Benjamin during their Paris days. Both wrote within a climate of rising fascism. Where Benjamin's reproduction of news headlines and local ephemera offered the landmarks of rising fascism, Seghers' narrator speaks from a blurred, distracted distance, evoking a world where moral boundaries have become as fuzzed and non-commital as those of nation-states. 

In 1937 and 1937, Benjamin was seeing more of Seghers (born Netty Reiling, 1900), who was already known as a novelist (her first book was published in 1928) and activist. And he probably knew Seghers through her husband, László Radványi, a Jewish Hungarian writer and poet who had been involved in the revolution which created the Hungarian Soviet Republic—and who was forced to flee when the HSR was disbanded in 1919. Radványi fled to Vienna, where he acquired the pseudonym "Johann Lorenz Schmidt" (from the 18th-century Protestant dissident theologian). In 1923, he got his doctorate in philosophy from Heidelberg University, where his these on Chialism was directed by Karl Jaspers.

In Heidelberg, Radványi/Schmidt met poet Anna Seghers. They married in 1925 and had two children, Pierre and Ruth (pictured in portrait at the top).

Benjamin and Radványi had both been interned at La Varret. This is where they met, in a French internment camp. After Radványi was released from labor camps, he, Seghers, and their two children went to Marseilles, where they became part of the crowds trying to flee Vichy France. She fled via Mexico City to New York City, and returned to the German Democratic Republic in 1947, where she became a prominent figure. 

Benjamin, on the other hand, joined a handful of others fleeing on foot towards the Spanish coast. After being refused transit at the Spanish border, Benjamin took his own life that night in a border hotel. His suitcase is still missing.

4. The Gide aside

In 1936, Andre Gide accepted an invitation to tour the Soviet Union, and his dreams of liberation crumbled like the plaster from Potemkin villages. In Return From the the USSR, Gide recanted his support for the Soviet project as it stood, which he believed to be antithetical to flourishing, human thriving, and queer comrades in general.

Gide was writing as a socialist, as someone committed to liberation—and so he framed his book by criticizing the particulars in the name of a hopeful, more liberated (and socialist) future:

I do not hide from myself the apparent advantage that hostile parties—those for whom "their love of order is indistinguishable from their partiality to tyrants"[1]—will try to derive from my book. And this would have prevented me from publishing it, from writing it, even, were not my conviction still firm and unshaken that, on the one hand, the Soviet Union will end by triumphing over the serious errors that I point out, on the other, and this is more important, that the particular errors of one country cannot suffice to compromise a cause which is international and universal. Falsehood, even that which consists in silence, may appear opportune, as may perseverance in falsehood, but it leaves far too dangerous weapons in the hands of the enemy, and truth, however painful, only wounds in order to cure.

In hindsight, it was a sort of bourgeois naivety that led Gide to believe his speech commemorating the death of Maxim Gorky could have been well-received by those present in Moscow’s Red Square, but we must take it on faith that Gide was idealist enough to celebrate how literature, the province of the leisured and wealthy, now belonged to the worker, or the silent masses:

I could not weary of contemplating the numbers of women, of children, of workers of all kinds for whom Maxim Gorki had been a spokesman and a friend. I reflected with sorrow that these people, in any other country than the U.S.S.R., belonged to those to whom entry of the hall would have been forbidden; to those who, precisely, when they come to the gardens of culture are confronted with a terrible "No admittance. Private property." And tears came to my eyes at the thought that what seemed to them already so natural seemed to me, the Westerner, still so extraordinary.

Gide goes on to contradict himself, claiming that great writers have always been revolutionaries (but also bourgeois, leisured, etc), and that the new problem for writers is being revolutionary while losing their status as rebels:

And it seemed to me that there existed here, in the Soviet Union, a most surprising novelty—up till now, in all the countries of the world, a great writer has always been, more or less, a revolutionary, a fighter. In a way that was more or less conscious and more or less veiled, he thought, he wrote, in opposition to something. He refused to approve. He brought into the minds and into the hearts of people the germs of insubordination, of revolt. Respectable people, public powers, the authorities, tradition, had they been far-seeing enough, would not have hesitated to recognize in him the enemy.

Today, in the U.S.S.R., for the first time, the question is put in a very different manner; while remaining a revolutionary, the writer is no longer a rebel. On the contrary, he responds to the wishes of the greatest number, of the whole people, and what is most remarkable, to those of the rulers. So that there appears to be a sort of fading away of the problem, or rather a transposition so new that at first it disconcerts thought. And it will not be one of the least glories of the U.S.S.R. and of those prodigious days which still continue to shake our old world, to have called up into fresh heavens new stars and unimagined problems.

If one hasn’t read Gide’s pamphlet, it’s a humorous historical dive inflected by Gide’s unique voice. The book caused a huge commotion among the European Left; many tongues clucked, others wagged, some stayed glued to the roofs of their mouths. I wouldn’t be surprised if CIA cash was used to help publish it.

5. Backtracking to 1937 intellectual climate

In continental Europe, political tensions over Madrid's fall to Franco's Nationalists made lip service support for the Republican cause in Spain verboten. It was a tense time. The Popular Front offered the single viable alternative to Nazi occupation.

Thus it comes as a surprise to find Walter Benjamin, in letters to friends, refusing to condemn Gide for throwing shade on the Soviet Union before actually reading the book. In 1937, Walter Benjamin was struggling to get eyeglasses, as his eyesight had worsened to the point where he was afraid to leave home. He was reading—and loving—Carl Juster Jachmann's On Language, which he called "meteoric" for its insight into the collision of language and politics. Jachmann's these that "the regression of poetry is the progress of culture" blamed Germany's failure to move towards a politics of liberation on its obsession with literature. Benjamin wrote an essay on Jachmann which he shared with Theodor Adorno in Paris in the spring of that year.

Also in the spring of 1937, Benjamin attends Anna Segher's speech honoring the work of Georg Büchner. Benjamin appreciates her speech, though he doesn’t say much about her poetry.

In the same month, Benjamin promises himself that he will pen a critique of Jungianism, whose "fascist armor" he swore to "expose." He sees Jung as offering a "clinical nihilism" which may have appealed to Celine, but which heralded a danger to free thought and expression. 

In May 1937, Siegfried Kracauer published Orpheus in Paris: Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time. The book used biography as a lens into the socio-cultural history of Second Empire Paris, aiming to be a "physiognomy" of a cultural era. Both Adorno and Benjamin bonded over their hatred of it, but it was Adorno who sustained a long-standing vendetta which resurfaced in his Minima Moralia, published in the 1950's. One must credit Adorno, perhaps, with a capacity for steadfast, unrelenting intellectual-grudge commitments.

By the summer of 1937, Benjamin expresses dismay in the Popular Front, writing "leftist majority pursues a politics with which the rightists would provoke revolts." The Stalinist show trials continue in Soviet Russia, which Benjamin finds worrisome.

“There is a view onto gloom through whatever window we look,” he wrote to Fritz Lieb, continuing:

“The destructive effect of events in Russia will inevitably continue to spread. And the bad thing about this is not the facile indignation of the staunch fighters for ‘freedom of thought’: what appears to me to be much sadder and much more inevitable at the same time is the silence of thinking individuals who, precisely as thinking individuals, would have difficulty in taking themselves for informed individuals. This is the case with me, and probably also with you.”

Back in Bucharest, Mihail Sebastian is watching the Iron Guard emerge as an ideological competitor. In December 1937, religious scholar Mircea Eliade is not yet teaching in a tenured position at the University of Chicago. He’s just another young intellectual who has fallen for the Legionary, fascist movement. Eliade will celebrate a few weeks later as Jews are forbidden to work in the journalism profession. He will celebrate as the fascists moved to erase Jewish voices from the national press. The silence of Jewish erasure will lack translators. 

Sebastian’s 1938 journal begins with fake news, or its predecessor. The word propaganda hovers over the new uniforms, their ideologies, their apologists. In Bucharest, Sebastian will listen to his charismatic professor, Nae Ionescu, build a case for a mystical “National Greatness” that relies on exclusion of what is foreign. Ethics, for Nae,  isn't a question of whether one should kill the enemy, The Foreigner, the Jew - but rather, whether one does this with relish rather than light regret.

To do the deed with one's mind is different from doing the deed with one's heart.

Sebastian will listen, add this to his notebooks, wondering at which point the illness of ideology will release his friends. And how much harm will be accomplished in the interim?

At a cafe, he and Bellu Zilber will discuss alternatives, or carve out the shadows of rising anti-Semitism in their own flesh. The maps are a question of survival—of what one must be, or become – in order to live. “The People” has become an altar demanding sacrifice; the political is sacralized in national greatness.

Should another People be constructed to oppose it? How many Peoples need to exist? Can Peoples co-exist? At the table, Sebastian sees humans, divided by hyphens, believing the bridge can carry them. Zilber suspects that only communist internationalism can save Jews from death in German camps. Sebastian believes multinationalism and fluidity offer eternal protection. Others believe the hope is in Zionism. Many are trying to get visas, exit permits, passports which enable them to leave the land where they were born, the land of their fathers and mothers.

Decades later, Bellu Zilber will sit in prison during the communist show trials, revisiting his commitments in light of changing allegiances. Now, The People have become The Party; internationalism is Trotskyism, an official crime against the Peoples’ Republics. Nationalist communism emerges to fill the vacuum of Stalinist and Soviet empire.  But who can measure the distance between national interest and anti-Semitism in the dictators mouth? Sebastian will not live long enough to witness his friends’ silence in prison. If he had, one could hardly imagine his response.

* Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, pp. 555-556, 567. Sebastian, 113.

A Review-Museum of Danse Macabre in Shifting Pandemic Time

New Darkness, Old Dances

My twelve-year-old daughter has discovered a tremendous fear of the dark--not just fear of going to sleep in it, but waking up, discovering it is still dark, and coming into my room, half-awake, asking when the darkness will end. 

"Soon," I lie.

Soon is the litany of pandemic, a time we banish by promising things will return to normal on a given time and date. For parents, the struggle becomes identifying this time and date, passing this date as comfort to our children. But perhaps this time of fantastic helplessness requires a different articulation, a commitment to intertextual conversations as a form of company, an infectious friendship. In all the self-help I find to soothe my daughter, it is the danse macabre that is missing. 

As an allegorical form, the danse macabre emerged in the Late Middle Ages in visual representations, sermons, and stories where the dead (or a representative of the dead) summons humans from all stations, ages, and status to dance to the grave. Serving as a memento mori, a reminder of life's fragility and material vanity, the danse macabre even earned a mural in a Parisian cemetery.

The seam between a daughter's fear and an old dance which approaches dread appear in an essay by Emil Cioran. "Paleontology" begins in the accident of an afternoon when Cioran wanders into a natural history museum only to find himself altered by the encounter with skeletons, astonished by the bones beneath the vulnerable costume of flesh that hides each human's death. Cioran takes horror as a path towards liberation, admiring the Middle-Aged gaze that "cherished the livid and the fetid," the gruesome. To marvel over "dreadful decrepitude" is to acknowledge our limitations in this time of irregularities and conspiracies, a time when the promise of Progress feels increasingly feeble, or unaffordable, to the underprivileged. The skeleton invites us to contemplate the cadaver, the end. 

Isn't melancholy and slight morbidity a normal response to the death and anxiety in which we are living?

What is aberrant about acknowledging the grief woven into current events, the see-saw of rue and regret over masks?

What is flimsier, really, than the Americanist cult of positivity which seeks to downplay the present by articulating new commercial adventures and self-enhancements which foreground "living one's life" as a national past-time. 

"Blessed was that age when solitaries could plumb their depths without seeming obsessed, deranged," Cioran continues, since "their imbalance was not yet assigned a negative coefficient." Blessed be the terrified speechless for their insistence on acknowledging the night.

Blessed be the worried and miserable who look at the numbers and understand how a confetti-covered capitalist death cult is the opposite of not fearing death. And isn't there a certain astonishment that animates dread--the disbelief that any of us could ever end?

Small Presses as My Pandemic Abode

There is no more life as usual; what exists is new to all of us, inflected by the fears we may avoid or confront. In pandemic time, the books which inhabit dread have kept me from despair by daring to speak the unspeakable. They have given a way into conversations with my daughter; a way to make skeletons dance.

As pandemic has changed what I want from the page, it is small presses that fill the gaps in what self-help culture can offer a world disoriented by pain, loss, and fear. Because the dance macabre does not occupy a large market presence in a country that hides death, in a country that hates its own ghost-histories so much that it plans their obsolescence with demands for positivity and closure,  it is small presses who provide what is necessary to navigate a time we cannot escape, rewind, or awake from.

Life circles back upon itself like a Mobius strip of anxiety; books with an expansive notion of time, and a willingness to address the macabre, have been the best company.  All these books excavate interior silences and dread to formulate a language of looking; all are written from a hunger for roots that somehow mingles with reckoning. All are haunted and haunting and intentional in this relationship with the dead.

Brandon Shimoda, The Grave on the Wall , City Lights Books, 2017

Brandon Shimoda's memoir is framed by the discovery of a continuous, nonlinear time after his grandfather’s death. In seeking to inhabit a time that includes the ancestors. Shimoda undertakes a pilgrimage which illuminates the heart of the pilgrim, the desire to be reunited in a meeting with someone greater, someone definitive: 

In the seventh or eighth century, a poet sat between beneath the pines and, facing the sea, wrote an ode to the pines, to what he felt to be their perfection. The ode enfolded a lamentation on what the poet felt, by comparison, to be his perilously misshapen life. The pines held the sound of the waves and the poet's silent labor. The poem is one of the many thousands of poems in Man'yoshu (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves) and is inscribed on the face of a large stone that sleeps beneath the pines. The day I arrived, it was raining. The poem and its characters were leaking.

To meet the ancient poet on his terrain, Shimoda wanders through this ancestral space in Japan, shifting across places and photographs and monuments, in order to recover something about his grandfather's history - and this merely opens the door to a larger space of who is missing....

Midori's death, or departure to another place, opened up a pantheon of ancestors. He had to have gone somewhere. The pantheon of ancestors was the most likely place, because it was intuitional. I felt it. Therefore assumed it. The ancestors formed a place in which no single individual could be truly differentiated from the collectivity of the dead. And yet, the first ancestor who introduced herself to me as an ancestor, was my great-grandmother. Her name is Kawaki Okamoto.

Her name is. Kawaki is. Notice how the presence of the great-grandmother is implied by the narrator's subtle shift into present tense. One almost doesn't realize what has happened (though it becomes clearer as chronology, itself, grows murkier).

Shimoda differentiates between the burial grave, where the body is buried, and the "ritual grave...where the living go to visit the dead." Attaching the picture-bride photo of Kawaki to his bedroom mirror, he creates a space in which he must see her everytime he sees himself, thus changing the nature of time which excludes her, the Americanized time which keeps them separate: 

She would not recognize my face, coming in and out of focus, attending, so I think, to her memory, which is synonymous with trying to keep it alive..... A grave is anywhere we leave an unrepeatable part of ourselves. A part that has broken away. 

In this hunger to remember the dead hides a hunger to be known by the dead, to be connected to the knowledge of one's ancestors. The role of the photograph as a ritual grave evokes Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, which Shimoda quotes later: "suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it." 

Claire Meuschke, Upend, Noemi Press, 2020.

Like Shimoda, Claire Meuschke makes a special place for the photograph or the image in a Barthean sense; she includes the material text of court documents, and juxtaposes official, state-sanctioned language against family ghosts. Where Shimoda occupies the space of lyric memoir, Meuschke reconfigures the poetry collection as a dialogue between discourses and language. 

In the Notes, Meuschke acknowledges an incomplete list of info and quotes that serve “after-the-fact, as points of reference and suggested further readings and viewings” rather than inspiration or source for the text itself. Like Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony (where the theory of translation challenges epistemology in its insistence on a deformation zone), Meuschke's Notes serve to destabilize or somehow re-vision the text, opening it to a sort of time which is ongoing, continuous, multiplicitous.  Meuschke leans into indigenous concepts of time and place to inhabit the temporal disorientation of texts in a book—to discover her great-grandfather (Hong Ah Wing) as a fevered hallucination in a library book. 

Inspired by Layli Long Soldier’s “investigative poetics,” (especially in “to ward”) Meuschke also says she borrowed from CAConrad’s (soma)tic poetry rituals and “recombining writing exercises” initially coined by Farid Matuk to write white settler violence; oriented towards discovering “after-images.” Language and drive of this book informed by immigration trial of her grandfather, Hong On—and includes actual transcripts of questions from “Statement of Applicant”. The next poem, “—oOo—“ ends with: "I don’t have any words for the past question." 

“Figurative As Literal” takes the metaphor and destabilizes it:

a figure is real
a number is literate
products like people
come with a number and a name

I would hope that reading this in reverse would
image like a mirror
like history as a way to remember doesn’t image.

Across several poems, the poet uses “like” as a pivot, a sort of root in the ground that stays continuous as the panorama is absorbed. It’s not uprooted. From “To Word”, a long prose poem, ending: "I use the em dash when I can’t bare for the sentence to end. / Here they punctuate the symbol into existence."

Bruno Scultz, Undula, Sublunary Editions, 2020. Translated by Frank Garrett.

"As for myself, I can no longer remember the street where my childhood home was," writes Bruno Scultz in his first published story, "Undula," recently translated by Frank Garrett. Scultz was born in 1892 in Drohobych, Galicia, a place which does not fit any of our current maps, a town which has been translated and retranslated by occupations, has moved from Poland to Ukraine, a space which served as home to a large oil extraction industry that made it possible for Scultz to publish this story in a journal, Dawn: The Journal of Petroleum Officials in Boryslav. 

In this story, Undula is the object of the narrator's desire, a fascinating, impure, and complicated muse which keeps his company in his dark imaginings--in the "monotonous, pointless dialogues" with unspecified pain. According to Garrett's extensive translation notes, "undula" means "little wave or wavelet," which also sees the "Dunajew" as a nod towards the Danube, which means "something like born of dew." There is no map which can hold the precise place where Bruno Sculz was shot and killed by a Gestapo officer while returning to the Drohobych ghetto carrying a loaf of bread. The unfathomable exists with the fathom, the measurement of how far arms can reach.

Maria Negroni. Dark Museum. Translated by Michelle Gil-Montero, Action Books, 2015.

Macabre is punctuated by anxiety, the silence which shrouds a pandemic body, and there is a certain flowing syntax, an extension of corpuscent, winding sentences, which works against fear while handling corpses. For no one dances the macabre as diligently as Maria Negroni:

Against all Utopias, against the wounds of failure, against the last strongholds of dissent and protest, against all the answers in politics (whether visionary, dogmatic, silencing, repressive, or even just), poetry sketches for us yet again that giant nocturnal bird stalking the most elusive, irrevocable terror. 

In rejecting purist utopias, Negroni takes us into the gothic Castle, where there are no strongholds. The lyric is born and spent there, as in unstable places where the only sure way is the detour. For her, melancholy and poems speak together "like a fatal illness, they corrupt language in order to amplify what is eternal in what is ephemeral, what is illusory in what is true." The writer aims for an aesthetics which rejects essences or essentialisms in favor of "monographs that encrypt mysteries, a bit of treachery, a useless voluptuosity, a cabinet of marvels where a child might become lost...."

And there is a childness in this desire for decadence, petulance, the pout without magnitude, the playing alone with one's disappointment by the world created by adults: there is a formal excess in the intensity of this disappointment.

Negroni is looking for a special word, "the word....in which natural sound is decanted to the pure sound of feeling." She is correct that the sound must be excessive, messy - but she is wrong, or setting up another perfectism, to use the word pure. For it is purity and hygiene which serve as epistemological foundation for the cult of anti-melancholy, the cult of mature stoicism and fake smiles. Again in the idea of a "stellar cradle, protected from corruption and the passage of time by cold and pulchritude..."

Negroni celebrates the fascination of the alien, the "intergalactic evil," the alien is a "pre-verbal mother," one which animates silence: "Silence that utters atrocious, fascinating things." And between all the tales of monsters, the virus we dread inside us, the anxiety becoming "a space made up only of surrogates," and architecture of intimate terrors, the drawing-in of the dark museum.

Pierre Senges, Falstaff: Apotheosis. Translated by Jacob Siefrig. Sublunary Editions, 2020.

Pierre Senges, Studies of Silhouettes. Translated by Jacob Siefrig. Sublunary Editions, 2020.

How can we orient ourselves in pandemic time, when all the usual maps are marked by social distance and an invisible six-foot diameter around each body? Like Morya Davey, cemeteries have been safe, empty spaces, sites of pilgrimage with the kids at a time when playgrounds are complicated by the presence of others. Seeking to find new ways to do creative work after a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, Davey documents her efforts in "Index Cards," which makes a map of remembered necropolises, and creates an impetus forward as a map into three cemeteries. 

Pierre Senges makes a similar use of maps in Geometry In The Dust, a series of map-elegies which acknowledge the decrepitude of the modern metropolis. As JM Schreiber notes, Senges' exploration of maps and cities and spaces emerge from the tension of the artefact itself--and Senges addresses the danse macabre directly, calling it by name, comparing the city, itself, to "a danse macabre every day of the week... a scraping of nail on bone, as well as a gnashing of teeth." The geometry in the dust carries us into the circle, or what Senges calls "the city’s circular nature," referring to how cities were once "contained within wooden circles, like certain soft-rind cheeses; although they tried hard to emancipate themselves and go over the walls, they still retain a bit of this roundness." 

In Falstaff: Apotheosis, we witness an apotheosis of Shakespeare's minor character, Falstaff, in the hands of a literary canon-rattler. Jacob Siefrig's translations are accompanied by excellent notes on Senges' oeuvre. Studies of Silhouettes is a model for pandemic modes, an intertexual addendum which takes lines from Kafka and writes an alternate version in the most intimate voice, nudging, prodding, inquiring, asking if that's really what Kafka meant. And then writing into it. 

There are also moments in which the fragment is extended into a diagnosis or clarification of Kafka's text: 

This would appear to be a complaint, the beginning of the life of a bureaucrat from the 60th Bureau written in this vein, the lamentation contained in a precisely reconstituted setting.....  no one would ever believe, from reading these first lines, that in fact a great adventure novel has just begun, the great Epic Novel, with horses and stirrups, sand dunes, mountains, arms of giants and sales of windmills, the tilting of the sinking ship...

In the silhouettes, one feels the presence of an alienated child-gaze, a human on the brink of discovering that the world does not match the linearity of history but instead unfolds in circles and spirals, where the narrator, the "I" who intended to be the hero...kicking off a 600-page-tale with that story of a faceless stranger tugging at my sleeve" finds his voice undone by disorientation and displacement. Senges focuses on the mystique of the story that begins with Someone, as "someone is the most appropriate name under such conditions, it at once designates the totality of the protagonist, all of them someone to one other, all from their earliest childhood shorn of the greater part of their identity." 

[Since a review on this book is forthcoming in a journal, I will stop here and let the review doing the speaking.]

Christina Tudor-Sideri, Under the Sign of the Labyrinth. Sublunary Editions, 2020.

Christina Tudor-Sideri's fragmented memoir approaches the darkness of embodied trauma and melancholia by harnessing the power of ghost horses, village rituals, and enchanted forests. "I take the shape of a doorbell for a memory of earth trembling," she writes, noting that what happened in the world of her native Romania occurred inside her body. This lack of boundaries is emphatically anti-Western and a relief. I find myself in dialogue with the ghosts who survived the Bucharest earthquake as passed from the mouths of my parents, the legends of homeland which animate a quaking space. For Tudor-Sideri, magic is a sort of "experimental metaphysics"; her writing explores the non-linearity memory's residence in the mind and body, how memory lays its hands on what it touches, giving rise to a relationship that makes its own claims.  

Her thoughts are structured by anamnesis, itself. And her body: "the site of voices brought together after death".. There is this "ille tempore" of leaving her mother tongue, its ties to the village, and writing "interrupted manuscripts" in broken dialogue with the voices inside her.  Tudor-Sideri takes writing trauma as a way of devouring one's self- becoming one's "own sin-eater" surviving on hunger for wounds. The "mad forest" is the space outside the village community, a descent into the animal of one's own mind. She mentions the custom of dressing a tree's wounds as a forbidden practice. She introduces a space, the preventorium, which borrows from the healing powers of the forest - something we lack in pandemic present. 

For Tudor-Sideri, village culture develops the soul differently. Causality is complicated by a temporality in which the dead nestle close to the living. Where the idea of destiny invokes a sense of inevitability, we are given an agency that shapeshifts, moving from inanimate objects to trees to liminal dates. Voice is altered by this scattered time and the supranatural village narrator. The village and its surrounding forests emerge as characters.

When the narrator wants to recall a car accident, she locates it on St John's Day, aiming towards auspiciousness. We read about the mussel hunt undertaken in the shadow of the fathers, the relationship between lunar protection spells and the blood moon, the "violence of being taken out of time," the significance of a burning house in a village. 

Tudor-Sideri describes the "plaque of the dead" on each house to locate it in time, to lay claim to lineage, which she finds in history and the practice of burning one's home, or dominthanasia.  Only those who remember can rest in paradise. "I have always traveled with one hand on my shoulder," she writes. 

And I think of my mother, of how much I miss Romania, of how little of me exists in the limbo between lands and languages—and the absolute absence of mom’s life. The darkness and dread is there, I tell my daughter. Let us find some way to dance it.

[To note: György Ligeti’s “Mysteries of the Macabre”]

Prompts inspired by Lewis Hyde's primer for forgetting

Lately, I have been obsessed with memory, absence, keepsakes, monuments, transgressive translation theories—and David Naimon’s remarkable podcast, Between the Covers. Enter Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past (Picador, 2019), a book structured as an episodic notebook, a collage form that juxtaposes “not just free association but free forgetting.”

Towards the end, Hyde explains that random leaping across time and nation-states, political mythologies and spiritual myths, is an intentional strategy that declines “to declare a train of thought.” He refuses to interpret the gaps, as “interpretation too readily declared dims the lights of things” while “holding off allows the elements to glow.”

And it is true that these elements glow, glow—grow to near glowering. Hyde is fine with this. He intends that the spaces between entries “foreground what happens with any book we read”—what happens with the act of reading, itself, wherein we absorb certain images while abandoning others. [Aside to Ionesco’s rhinoceros: I am tempted to argue for interesting extensions to current critique/ literary theory in americanist academic spaces but that would be a different thing, an alternate direction, a strip mall with lonelier parking lots and standardized, ticket-incurring gaps.]

What Hyde wants is for the book’s form to resemble the neurological experience of remembering, forgetting, self-mythologizing, and collating tiny scraps of monuments into selfhood, its scatterings:

The episodic form acknowledges the collaged afterlife of anything we read—or of any life, for that matter, for we we too are discontinuous creatures, scattered in time, the meaning of our existence something we can only imagine.

This book inspired me to write, to remember, to forget, to hold world history against the world and its historians, to wrestle the self-loathing of oppositional identities as I have experienced (and embodied) them in both the South and the Romanian emigre community. In the spirit of this love, complicity, horror, hope, and fascination, I leave you with a few notebooking avenues directly inspired by Hyde’s collage.

1.

Forgetting is the shears with which you cut away what you cannot use, doing it under the supreme discretion of memory….When we say that we consign something to oblivion, we suggest simultaneously that it is to be forgotten and yet also remembered.

- Soren Kierkegaard

For Lewis, there is a paradoxical nature to consigning a memory for forgetting. If the etymology of consigning comes from a Latin word meaning “to mark with a seal,” what does it mean to consign to forgetting? And my mind meandered into consignment stores, where one encounters the difference between consigning and giving away. Or what we keep so close that we cannot give away, choosing instead to re-sell it through a third party, imagining a value to the memory, something others might pay to keep.

Maybe this requires sketching, a notebook, a pen, your head formulating words to loosely describe shelf or a table or a rack in the Consignment Boutique of Forgetting—the objects on this shelf, the memories attached to them, marked for sale. Maybe this is the beginning of a short fiction about disputed value, and the voices in dispute, the varied valorizations of individual memories and experience. Maybe it’s a list poem. Maybe it’s an essay. Maybe it’s a notebook entry that kills time by underestimating it.

2.

Things we remember for their artifice. Lewis recollects two incidents from childhood: being seven, choosing the bun he thinks Mrs. Brown wants him to select (i.e. the moral bun) in a bakeshop and, later, being ten in a kitchen agreeing with his mom that she should get a haircut because he thinks that’s what she wants him to say. He wonders:

But why do I remember these events? Because in them I am performing someone else’s script. When I perform myself, that’s forgettable, and rightly so, the actions of the unself-conscious self leaving no necessary marks on memory.

O the injurious heart, how it collects and recollects the ways in which one’s behavior aimed to please or conform with social scripts. Recollect five such events from any point in your life. Write them down as lists, including details. Then pick one to poem with an eye to the strangest estrangement.

3.

In describing Slobodan Milosevic’s celebrations of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, Lewis explores the way this date, June 28th, was weaponized for ethnic war and genocide. To ignite a sense of grievance, Milosevic’s speech declaimed shattered national dignity and humiliation, the violation of motherland, the idea of treason, the counterpoint of courage and heroism in dying for an abstract cause. It was an evocation of lost causes. In Hyde’s words: “Thus does a lost cause’s causes apparent humiliation get turned on its head and become proof of the highest ideals.”

Psychiatrist Vamik Volkan coined the term “chosen trauma” to describe “an identity-forming ancestral calamity whose memory mixes actual history with passionate feeling and fantasized grieving and hope.” He spoke from the ground of his own loss:

“..the idea that [the Serbs] could change their minds and choose a kingdom on earth was not articulated until the awakening of nationalism in Europe in the nineteenth century.”

For the notebook: pick an identity group in which you are a participant or communicant (i.e. Catholic Church, Southerner, Russian, Ukranian, Uighur, academic, etc.) and take notes on the potential events or loci of chosen trauma, the words used as descriptors, the lexicon of humiliation, the allusion to eschatological fulfillment or what might bring change). Alternately, write a brief sketch of a Civil War reenactment from the point of view of a Confederate-identifying participant. Research news articles and features reports for particular lexicons, note any references to transcendent experience and/or descriptions of rootedness, of feeling part of something bigger. Consider writing a fictional interview with this participant.

4.

In 1882, Ernest Renan published his paper, “What Is A Nation?”. It warned against confusing nationality and ethnicity—since this confusion could lead to irresolvable military conflict. On Renan’s view, “ethnographic politics” was destabilized by the metaphysical nature of its claims, and how those claims evolved over time, how those claims depended on the exclusion of others in the name of ethnic purity. Renan believed it was better to forget ethnic claims and rigid ethnic identities which could no exist in multilingual spaces: “…the essence of a nation is that all its individuals have many things in common, and also that everyone has forgotten many things.”

Hyde argues that “all group identity, all abstract knowing, has such origins", and even “families know themselves by their recollection and elision..” For your notebook, sketch what recollections constitute your family identity. Start nuclear and then move to include extended family. Climb as high in the family tree as you wish. Or, just circle the trunk. Then sketch the elisions, the things no one discusses, the forgetting which prevents conflict—who is asked to sacrifice most to maintain these elisions? Who is the beneficiary? Play with the words collision, collusion, and elision.

5.

Mythological memory applies the logic of myth to the unstable narratives of the personal or public. It offers an easy way of divining meaning from inexplicable human tangles. I think of Orpheus, how he calls the poet—to do a Brodsky or Rilke and change Orpheus’ myth in a way that encapsulates personal fears of rejection or loss. Or Oscar Wilde’s Salome as the spurned lover, seeking the kiss of John the Baptist, the conquest.

“It’s an American ending, a Lone Star ending with the kind of individualist forgetting that cannot possibly scale. We get private romance but no model of how to study the nation to forget the nation.”

Thus does Hyde frame “Forget the Alamo!”, the final line of John Sayles’ movie Lone Star, as spoken by the Chicanx history teacher, Pilar (in contrast to “Remember the Alamo!" that bit of memorabilia on the postcards and t-shirts of American boyhoods). A diptych perhaps, a two-sided image of remembering and forgetting on the same page.

6.

“Man does not die in a ditch like a dog—but at home in history,” wrote Boris Pasternak. Hyde elucidates “state-transition amnesia,” the struggle of the newly-bereaved. It could be the loss of a pet or the loss of a homeland. How does the end of Yugoslavia define what it means to be born as a Yugoslavian? What stories fill the narrative gap?

I keep thinking of how accommodating one’s self to loss requires forgetting, burying the past, forgetting my mother’s voice so that other humans can feel less haunted—and how this amounts to a betrayal.

Forgetting is the only form of forgiveness; it’s the only vengeance and the only punishment too. Because if my counterparts see that I’m still thinking about them, in some ways I become their servant, and if I forget them I don’t. I think that forgiveness and venegeance are two words for the same substance, which is oblivion.

- Jorge Luis Borges in the last interview before his death, when asked if he had forgiven the Peronists

Write a list poem or outline a curriculum for an ars oblivionis, or what Hyde calls “an art for loosening the hand of collective thought.” I say list but I also mean an incantation, a curse, an injunction, a recipe, an instructional, a collect, a liturgy…..

Although Hyde doesn’t touch on this, I kept thinking of haunted houses as both signifiers and narrative modes in pop culture and mythology. The entertainment of haunting, it’s consumption as a form of estrangement during Halloween. Some of us want to be haunted by what has been lost. Some of us settle for hauntedness generated as play, as distance rather than proximity.

7.

What gaps feel like open wounds? What faces exist in the gaps? What books from childhood carried a sense of something left undone that might be mistaken for nostalgia? How does duty taste when you are alone in a room saturated by its enormous disquietude?

In this same key, there is Eugenia Ginzburg writing from inside Soviet prison, notes the fears and worries and internalized trauma of family culture; no family culture leaves its children unmarked. What did yours do that makes it hard to trust the world to believe it's kindness to accept its kisses? How did school culture support or subvert family culture? Think about the tribalism of school, the scars, the risk of speaking out against friends who are bullying others. The sadism of unthinking, regurgitative nostalgia, a portrait of a politician or history teacher.

8.

Repetition as a formal mechanism for re-membering. A mode for piecing back together, gathering as verb form of togethering, or calling as summons for memory—calling my mama’s name again and again in the hopes of retrieving her scent, the brisk kindling of her laughter lighting the hallway, the illuminated manuscript of her voice, her mouth, her flesh.

9.

On the syntax of amnesia—the unreliable narrator repeating the memory back—and how vulnerable we are to being brainwashed. To being fooled. To having a memory of delight transformed by the retrospective gaze of others.

Thinking about how this plays out in national myths or even college sports fanning—to forget or step back from these myths is seen as treason. To question these myths is to be “a bad sport” at best. To stare at the worship of football coaches critically is to see Tommy Tuberville rising to power in Alabama, riding the coattails and power of that inviolable mythos.

How does this syntax play out in commercial events and valorizations? Our lives are buyable. We shop for churches. The market will provide newer and better forms. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to more suspense; to melodrama. I think there is so much to write in this ephemera, and I feel like Walter Benjamin’s Arcade Projects attempted to give form to the juxtapositions of public ennui and distraction during times of social crisis. One could arcade this pandemic, this neo-fascist moment, this pressure to continue “working” and normalize a daily mass-death from a virus so that later experts can say “it was inevitable.” (To note how many experts say things are inevitable is to note, perhaps, that experts have conflicts of interest between saving lives and sustaining capitalist systems.)

10.

Psychologist Pierre Janet’s study of dissociative amnesia led him to propose that we think of memory not as a fixed record of the past but as a fluid event, an ongoingness: “Memory …. is an action; essentially, it is the action of telling a story.” One of Janet’s patient could not incorporate the shock of her mother’s death into the rest of her personal life-story. She could not make it part of a living narrative. For Janet, this patient could not really “be said to have a memory…it is only for convenience that we speak of it as a traumatic memory,” since the act of re-membering was absent.

Tomas Transtromer’s poem, “About History” (translated by Alice Fulton):

Every problem cries in its own language.
Go like a bloodhound to where the truth has trampled.

And, from my notebook: "Poetry is the language the dead use to help us forget they are dead," said Valzhnya Mort (whose surname means death in multiple Latin languages.)

[Addendum]

And so I end with the words of others, the ways in which they read Hyde’s collage, the virtual community of readers and thinkers in the world who encounter a book with the urge to speak of it to paper…

Hyde’s “associative collage” of fragmentary stories, meditations and recollections turns on this paradoxical relation between memory and forgetting. Perhaps the most intriguing and original argument of the book is that forgetting is an essential condition for imaginative as well as political freedom. Imaginative freedom has been Hyde’s abiding theme since the publication of his now classic 1983 study The Gift, which made the case for the infinite generosity of a “gift economy” of art against the pinched rivalries of a market economy. [Josh Cohen’s review]

Hyde describes A Primer for Forgetting as “a thought experiment seeking out places where forgetting is more useful than memory,” so the deployment of this hijacked historical memory might seem curious, as it militates against Hyde’s thesis. But Hyde is always an honest broker of ideas. An open-hearted interdisciplinarian who traces arguments across anthropology, history, poetry, and other fields… [Sebastian Stockman’s review]

On "Every Atom" by Erin Coughlin Hollowell

1. The loss of memory in poetic subjects

There are many ways to lose a mother. Alzheimer’s is a particularly difficult journey of loss, a grief that begins before the death of the body—a loss that demands reconciliatory gestures from the poet, as James Meetze’s Phantom Hour has demonstrated.

Erin Coughlin Hollowell’s Every Atom begins in relation to those ghosts, or to the empty, unremembered spaces. Dan Branch notes that Hollowell’s mom’s mental capacities were declining as Hollowell wrote this book. And she did not write it from a distance—instead, Hollowell gave up a writer’s residency in Washington State to assist her father in caring for her mother. The book is dedicated: “In memory of my parents, Leonard James Coughlin and Mary Louise Coughlin".”

Although the poems place the mother in landscape, or navigate her absence by landscape metaphors, the tone often wanders into the ethereal, which is to say that ethereality might be a coping mechanism in poetry: how language of presence is displaced by language of absence.

Most interesting to me was the role played by metaphor, imperatives, and conditionals across the breath of this collection.

From the outset, we know the narrator is trying to relate to ghosts, or finding a space for them in ordinary life. See “The last scud of day”:

I brush away the hours
like the smear skids of eraser
left over from a project that went
from unwell to undone. Words
scrawled over the ghosts of others
and then rubbed away again.

We suspect the work of finding meaning requires a relation to hieroglyphs, to reading the signs in surrounding objects, as in "Night of the few, large stars," which ends with the poet trying to make sense of constellations:

Three stars:
a king, a shadow queen,
a child who is lost on purpose.

It is images and metaphors—rather than people, loved ones, stories—that provide mooring in these poems. And Hollowell’s images are powerful; they are hinges for the poem, spaces at the threshold of something opening or closing. I held my breath midway through "The palpable in its place and the impalpable in its place" when I came across this image:

The window blank with light.

And because I find complicity more compelling than innocence, I valued the way the poet unpacks (or carries) guilt in these poems. It is a complicated guilt—a human one. "Waits by the hole in the frozen surface" begins with waiting for a memory, evoking the absence of both memory by implying a sort of loose complicity in the narrator's inability to remember. O reader, you must remember this book is about a mother losing her memory and dying—but we are also standing on a frozen lake, somehow, waiting for something to explain the hole in the ice:

I remember kneeling before my brother's coffin
but of my mother's grief there is a hole, as if

I've taken scissors and neatly cut her from the day.

Hollowell returns to this metaphor, to this hole in the ice of the lake often, as in "Life whenever moving":

Imagine your mother
was a turtle. Her great
three-chambered heart

beating between two
hardnesses. Her legacy
a sandy hole or a shade

on a riverbank. And you,
left in a leather purse
of an egg.

This poem moves through imperatives to imagine--to imagine the mother as turtle, oyster, cicada, to fill in the whole with an image---and then to relate to it, to find meaning about the daughter in relation to that image. And I keep thinking how the imperative can, in poetry, serve as a vehicle for incantation, a spell the poet wants in order to inhabit the raiment of liminal space.

3. The poetry of titles

So many questions lately in the poetry community about titling poems—and how titles work best in a collection— Hollowell’s titling is haunting; the titles can be read on their own, as a poetic mode. Titling does the work of conveying tone in this book. Notice how she does this rare thing, namely, enjambing the titles, allowing them to stretch across the page and then break, as in:

“For the fourth-month moon showers have, 
and the mica on the side of the rock has”

which begins with a powerful image, and it’s relation to imperative:

shine, glisten like that sleek lick
of damp left behind by a snail. 

These titles are conversant with the poems, rather than nominative—they do not name what will happen so much as present the conditions under something could occur. They describe a mode rather than a theme.

4. Hollowell’s conditional mode

Also: this sense in which the metaphors, themselves, are imperatives for the poet.

And how close these metaphor-imperatives come to the conditional form, or how the conditional, itself, is implied in them—though also evoked directly, as in “Perpetual payment,” which begins:

If you could unlock the box
within the box within the fist
of meat that beats to its mechanized
meter, you would find my father.

The poem progresses through six quatrains to end in a reversal, a resistance to both the father’s explanations and, in a sense, the stories themselves:

My father’s stories built the house
we set on fire and fled from. My father’s

stories built a plucky woman on a train
that none of us have ever met. Somewhere
the bear is still bleeding. Somewhere
that mother is still riding the train.

Maybe stories are not helpful. Certainly metaphors and conditionals seem like more significant terrain for this particular grief, this attempt to live with a loss. Rather than construct a new mythology to assuage grief, Hollowell remains restless, eyeing the hole In the ice, the moon, every atom—eying them loosely, tenuously, as possibilities rather than explanations.

I love this. I could say more—o I could burn the day with details—instead I rest in this interesting approach to what is not quite elegy, or what edges lament without settling for the narrative that allows lament to grow its iconographies. What if mom was an oyster? Who would her daughter be, then?

Why I love James Meetze's "Phantom Hour"

Phantom Hour. By James Meetze. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 2016. 83 pp. $18.00.

James Meetze's Phantom Hour embraces metaphysical uncertainty. In this collection which Meetze inscribes "for my father and for his memory", we encounter a poetics of amnesia and absent memory. The geography is immediate, located within the human body, its failings, and the mind which negotiates time through memory. Poetry becomes a vehicle to bear absence, to speak silence. 

For the son who aims to paint a portrait of his father, dementia offers a heavy brush painting over the curves, erasing beloved details and particularities, obliterating perspective and light, leaving vague shapes and abstracted loss. "Memory is the architect of forgetfulness", but also the agent of preservation, the palette in which we hold one another captive, the curator of what is to come. The language reveals memory's antipodal nature, a back and forth, erase and rewind, interrupted by the way in which objects render the absence of memory palpable.  

To convey this dizzying motion, Meetze makes use of form, alternating between lineated stanzas and lyric into heavy prose blocks. 

This drifts between his father and memory of the person his father was when he had the ability to say it. The poems are his "profession":

to record the trail of our flesh: this. 

When he offers "lyric as lineage", Meetze addresses his father as a son who writes in order to remember-- "to know the narrative of our blood." The flesh is a staging ground for embodied history, and the narrative of blood is filled with the stories of others: 

I address myself in reference to what I remember.

This address includes multiple audiences--  the father he knew, the face behind the phantom, and the fear of ghosts dwelling in our own blood. While the science of genetic mapping can offer us new certainties about the origins of Alzheimer's, it provides no exorcism, no cure for genetic haunting. The phantom in the gene code-- this "genetic disposition"-- the science of what we cannot prevent. These are questions which others must answer for us. In our name. 

Family history hides inside a surname-- "a noose", by Meetze's metaphor-- which renders us subjects, a place in our common past from which the serialized self  is "hung", simultaneously extinguished and eulogized.  Meetze seems to suggest that mythologies provide a way to incorporate the change and transform surprising events into safe, holy, untouchable spaces. 

Want and story and loss inhabit me
speaking words aloud to make them real things.

The phantom hour is marked by the absence of the human and yet the memory which intervenes re-builds this absence into a physical fact, solid as "gray matter". Meetze's muse expands to include the mind itself, our place in that mind, the rituals of entry and exit. And the risk inherent in writing for phantoms. 

Unlike automatic writing which transcribes the words of the absent, we are faced with the terror of possible forgery. Fear of forgetting, of wronging, of perverting, is present. Love tempts us to idealize our parents as parts of a usable past. This temptation lies in the hollows of Meetze's half-shades:

Look, ghost, you too are legend, madman
a stanza in our longer story.

The ethics of remembering hinges on this blurred boundary between remembering and rendering. When a body is rebuilt or re-membered, it is an approximation of an original, at best. We see this ethics at work in the construction of memorials and public monuments in which a certain valiant aspect of the memory is rendered solid and immovable. 

The ghosts this poem is written for
are the ghosts of the poem.

Neuroscientific studies show memory to be a process of constant revision. Each time a particular memory is accessed, the mind rewrites and revises. The violation of lived reality is inescapable in the act of honoring the past. In Meetze's use, honor is not merely verbal but "perpetual condition". He juxtaposes the rigidity of his father's honor--its diligent manners, its formal gestures-- against the fluidity of memory itself.

Everything is not what we assume
and this is the problem; the body in this world
moves between challenges and finds its way
to that other world in which the ghosts say.

The saying and the said. the careful use of syntax to reverse expectation, as in the line: "The specters of our past are with us to say." Our loved ones cannot stay, Meetze acknowledges, while asserting a greater privilege, the possibility of "saying". 

"Sacred to the memory" it says.
If only, like this, the mind
were a stone
and the story its engraver.

This distinction between saying and speaking is a fascinating ontological question which deserves further poetic treatment. 

 The liturgical aspects of poetic longing emerge in Meetze's interspersed incantations of holy words ("Here is the body, and here the blood."), and the pulse of fear released by careful caesura and lineation. 

My prayer is narrative; it too is a form of song.
Those hold together everything we remember.

We abandon the chronological linearity of historical time to for the multiplicitous memories and associations of neurological time. How to deal with an end to our linear, earthly lives?

These questions are not meant to be answered.
I think existence hinges on our unknowing.

The poet's challenge is to acknowledge the awe in these questions rather than depict their tidy resolution. The tools of the human spirit, the poet's screws and hammers, have not kept pace with scientific discovery. We are left with the same broken techne:

When I asked, a caesura
where an answer should be.
This house could be.
You or I were not yet there, were,
in some small way, lacunae,
imagined in absentia.

Meetze's assertion--"I am nonlinear"-- dangles between response and proposition. This interstitial, in-betweening spirit is the poet's voice. Giving up the things we have memorized and known in exchange for the things we cannot believe-- the phantoms, the nonlinear time, the material insistence of placed objects-- we permit the memories to speak for themselves. Meetze acknowledges: "These memories comprise my council." But the council does not absolve us. We are left with the responsibility of reconciling our family histories in the larger context of current life. 

Meetze flirts with Jean-Luc Godard's suggestion that art has no obligations to memory and no duty to render reality truthfully, since truth is an outcome inherent to the process of well-made art. Despite this implied freedom, the placed poet, the poet charged with family history, struggles with the intimacies of memory, or how it becomes a process of negotiation within families, a narrative woven and rewoven by different voices, a "we" that unthreads into separate strands:

No one wants
to be a river
more than we.

"Remember lest you be haunted" is the twentieth century's warning, the vestige of totalitarian regimes, gulags, and nationalisms. But Meetze remembers in order to be haunted, as if the haunted is one emboldened by courage to hunt forbidden images. The poet becomes the haunted hunter of memory. We trust him for being loyal to the memory rather than the world which makes use of it. 

As the cycle winds down, Meetze returns to absence. Rather, he returns to the absentia of poetry: 

The phantom is in the hour of the book, it is the book, and the work the words do in the absence of their author. 

Though Meetze doubts his role as son, progenitor, and patriarch, he establishes his bearings in a poetic vice. His father did not trust the poet to tell a true story. Yet, when Alzheimer's arrives, it is the poet who is best equipped to bear this journey towards loss. 

In the moving finale, Meetze gives his father permission expand the boundaries of what we see.  A simple envoi for an unfathomable journey: 

I hope it is sound.

Poised between wine and the blood, the invisible act is transubstantiation. This transubstantive space that lingers between the shadows of synapses is Meetze's lodestar. It is courageous, metaphysically transgressive-- utterly shameless in its sublimity.