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Real Life

A pair of novels from Pier Paolo Pasolini, recently reissued by New York Review Books, display the aesthetic and intellectual range of the Italian writer and filmmaker. The first, his debut, Boys Alive, published in 1955, is a fizzing chemical reaction, its postwar hustler vignettes suffused with speed, lust and disaster. The second, his final work in prose, Theorem (1968), is a chilly, enigmatic parable about a visitor who seduces each member of a bourgeois family and thereby transforms or destroys them. (It began as a poem and was later made into a film of the same name.) Between these two approaches we find tradition distilled and then discarded, moving from gritty Italian neo-realism toward the abstraction of the then-ascendant nouveau roman. Pasolini built upon his literary inheritance before utterly razing it such that neither nostalgia nor mythology could gain a footing. Reading the novels back-to-back is like a cold plunge after a scalding bath.

Pasolini was an urban aesthete, conflicted Catholic Marxist, peasant mythologizer and inveterate lech. He was born in Bologna, in 1922, to a Fascist army officer and a schoolteacher. His father’s military postings and sometime imprisonment for gambling debts compelled the family to move frequently. He attended the University of Bologna, writing a thesis on the nineteenth-century poet Giovanni Pascoli. It was there he began to speak openly about his homosexuality. (He was said to have fallen in love with one of the war-ravaged pupils he and his mother taught free of charge.) A series of disasters precipitated his fateful move to Rome. His brother, a partisan, was murdered by rivals in 1945. His father came home from the war in a state of alcoholic paranoia. Then, in 1949, Pasolini was caught with a group of underage boys performing an undisclosed sexual act. The local anti-Communist authorities put him on trial; narrowly avoiding indecency charges, he was nonetheless expelled from the Communist Party and fired from his teaching position. In January, 1950, he and his mother abandoned his father and set out for Rome.

The city was a sea change, a whirl of pleasure, squalor and art. Pasolini’s fall from respectability compelled a reckoning: ‘Like it or not, I was tarred with the brush of Rimbaud . . . or even Oscar Wilde.’ He sought the desperate freedom of disrepute and found it in Rome’s poverty-stricken underclass, particularly in the beautiful, violent young men who furnished him with the material for his early poems and fictions. He stayed afloat via odd jobs: teaching, literary journalism, bit parts in movies. He would later work as a screenwriter for Soldati and Fellini, and go on to direct a variety of disruptive, legacy-defining works including Accatone (1961), Mamma Roma (1962) and Medea (1969). He was murdered, in Ostia, in 1975, likely by a right-wing criminal organization.

Boys Alive remains his best-known novel. It is plotless, headlong, horny, vascular and often unbearably sad. It follows Riccetto and his friends – all the boys have diminutives or nicknames: Trouble, Cheese, Woodpecker and so on – over the course of five years as they pillage, cruise, fight, strut, gamble and narrowly avoid incarceration. Pasolini is unerring in his dramatic instincts. He seeks heat, battle, humiliation, thrilling reversals of fortune. The boys are either skint or flush with ill-gotten spoils. Money is forever being lost and found, then spent recklessly on indulgences. Financial windfalls – from lifting scrap metal, robbing friends and enemies, or sex work – are splurged on fashionable shoes or enormous bar tabs. Riccetto believes ‘cash is the source of all pleasure and all happiness in this filthy world’. It is above all a means of style, to be used solely in service of what the boys call ‘real life’.

What is this ‘real life’ they speak of? Everything pleasurable, everything wanton, everything unpredictable, incongruous and free. It is competition, fashion, swimming, sex, food, drink and indolence. ‘God, I like having fun!’ Cacciota says. The words constitute the group’s personal code, a philosophy with which they reimagine the meagreness of their circumstances. To experience boredom is to have failed ‘real life’. It is to be found wanting, to lose one’s nerve, or else to work a day job, to achieve a shabby respectability. To be short of cash is to lack the shrewdness necessary for living. It is a kind of total defeat. If the alternative to ennui is death, the boys will unfailingly choose the latter. (Many boys die in the novel: illnesses; drownings; car crashes; suicides.)

Weather and youth are the novel’s twin forces of aggression. There is no season but summer and one practically squints while reading, assaulted by page after page of heat and glinting metal. Asphalt yards ‘crackle with flame’, the Colosseum stands ‘burning like a furnace’; ‘rank heat’ rises from a river; bodies sweat under ‘the full blaze of the sun’. It’s nearly impossible to imagine Pasolini’s Rome in winter, so complete is his delirious, fiery dream. The sun is his engine. Its presence suffuses the novel, forever offering up a plausible, heat-addled motive for petty crime or a disorienting backdrop for flashy exhibitionism. It drives the boys, sweating, heedless, into their next misadventure.

The novel’s episodic structure – built loosely around criminal activity, family life, the procurement of prostitutes, group swims at the river, and plenty of shooting the shit – eludes a totalizing narrative. Scenes never outstay their welcome. A climax approaches, your heart lurches or breaks, and then you’re whisked to the next calamity a month or a year hence. It is in these pungent transitions that Pasolini betrays his obsession with cinema, in the way he weds his lyricism to setting, his prose like a camera eye, ever ready for the close up or tracking shot. Translator Tim Parks renders a lean, athletic prose that oscillates between beauty and brutality. Its wattage can’t be overstated. All is kinetic possibility, open-ended, chaotic, alive. No resolution, no hope, only action, action, action.

*

In 1968, Pasolini shot his film, Theorem, in Lombardy. Before it hit screens, he’d published a novel of the same name. Despite some equivocation by contemporary critics, he was quick to dispel any suggestion that the novel was mere film treatment. As translator Stuart Hood notes in his introduction, Pasolini said it was ‘as if the book had been painted with one hand while with the other he was working on a fresco – the film.’ The pleasures and challenges of each work are interrelated, a kind of correspondence. To set one against the other is to ignore this complementary formalism, the way each foregrounds the spiritual corruption and erotic ennui of the bourgeoise.

Theorem is a beguiling work of calculated estrangement. Pasolini forecloses any attempt to locate the narrative, geographically or historically. ‘As the reader will already have noticed,’ we are told, ‘this, rather than being a story, is what in the sciences is called “a report”: so it is full of information; therefore, technically, its shape rather being that of “a message”, is that of “a code”.’ Events unfold by way of meticulous description, a kind of poetic data that pins the novel’s subjects like insects beneath glass. What results is an allegory disguised as a memorandum.

The novel immediately establishes an aura of boredom, drift and atrophy. The family of a well-to-do Milanese businessman endures aimless walks, chaste kisses, drowsy reading, and the ringing of midday bells. This soporific mood is shattered when a beautiful, enigmatic young man invites himself to stay at their suburban mansion. Each member of the family – Paolo, the father; Lucia, the mother; Pietro, the son; Odetta, the daughter; Emilia, the maid – is gradually overcome by the youth. He beds them all, one by one, tenderly, as if the family ‘awoke in him merely a kind of loving compassion, precisely of delicate maternal caring’. His magnetism is effortless, his flesh somehow consoling. He remains an inscrutable presence throughout, a figure of almost biblical ambivalence.

His eventual withdrawal destroys the family: ‘The guest . . . seems to have divided them from each other, leaving each one alone with the pain of loss and a no less painful sense of waiting.’ Each fruitlessly seeks some purpose or diversion to staunch the wound of his abandonment: Emilia leaves her post to float surreally above her village; Odetta becomes catatonic and is admitted to a clinic; Lucia cruises for boys half her age; Pietro becomes an artist, pissing on his work in disgust; Paolo strips at a train station and walks the platforms as if in a dream. Between these descriptive chapters there are lengthy prose poems, ostensibly narrated by a member of the family. Their weighty musings (with titles like ‘Identification of Incest with Reality’ and ‘Loss of Existence’) offer bursts of transgressive interiority. These modal shifts continue through to the novel’s conclusion, ending with a reporter’s staccato questioning of the workers outside Paolo’s factory, a strangely detached examination deploying the ‘kind of language used in daily cultural commerce’. (‘Would the transformation of man into a petty-bourgeois be total?’) This alloy of myth, portent, social commentary and dream was as far as Pasolini could take the novel. From this point on, he would focus solely on filmmaking.

What proof the novel takes aim at – what theorem is being explored – tantalizes in its nearness. It remains an ambiguity swirling beneath the frozen crust of the novel’s surface, luring the reader into a strange, almost empirical participation in the presented facts. Everything trembles with restrained volatility as the family is awoken to itself, its hungers, its failings, the abysses of desire that suddenly open amidst so much ease and comfort. Pasolini is at his best here, a poet of ruinous Eros, of the calamities we welcome and fear, each of us ‘a famished animal writhing in silence’.

Read on: Jessica Boyall, ‘Militant Visions’, NLR–Sidecar.

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Landscapes of Contestation

‘In the autumn of last year, there were four cases of homicide committed in four cities using the same handgun. This spring, a 19-year-old man was arrested. He became known as “the handgun serial killer”.’ So begins Adachi Masao’s A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969), an experimental documentary that retraces the steps of Norio Nagayama, arrested in Tokyo on 7 April, 1969. Linguistic narration is otherwise scarce in the film, restricted to a handful of isolated statements supplying biographical details in a matter-of-fact voiceover. In place of conventional plot and character, the film offers a cascade of landscape images shown without commentary, accompanied by a careening free jazz soundtrack. Crisscrossing Japan, Adachi uses long takes to capture the locations of Nagayama’s life, from his childhood in Tōhoku’s Aomori Prefecture, a move to Tokyo as part of a mass-hiring initiative at age 15, and finally a disaffected drift across the country that culminated in murder. Trains, highways, ships, streets: whether desolate or crowded with people, these images are haunted by the troubled young man who perhaps once passed through them. What relation exists between Nagayama’s deeds and these impersonal spaces? Why tell his story in this way?

Adachi Masao / Iwabuchi Susumu / Nonomura Masayuki / Yamazaki Yutaka / Sasaki Mamoru / Matsuda Masao, ‘A.K.A. Serial Killer’, 1969, 4K Single-channel projection (original 35mm), Collection of Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

A.K.A. Serial Killer is the central work in ‘After the Landscape Theory’, on view from 11 August to 5 November at Tokyo’s Photographic Art Museum. Curated by Tasaka Hiroko in collaboration with film scholar Hirasawa Go, this fascinating presentation of moving images, photographs and documents situates Adachi’s film as a key node within a diffuse, multi-faceted engagement with landscape in lens-based Japanese art from 1968 to the present. At the entrance of the exhibition is a copy of The Extinction of Landscape (1971), an essay collection by Matsuda Masao, a film critic who collaborated on the production of A.K.A. Serial Killer and was a central figure in the articulation of fûkeiron, or ‘landscape theory’. Resolutely rejecting the idea of landscape as a pictorial form devoted to the contemplation of natural beauty and severing any connection it might have to nationalist sentiment, this discourse posited that the power of the state and of capital can be rendered visible in commonplace images of the built environment. It recognized that power is everywhere: not only in spectacular moments of violence, as when police clash with protesters, but in everyday life. Forces of domination are present in transportation infrastructures and norms of bodily comportment, in the ways cities are constructed and local specificities effaced. So often this is overlooked, naturalized. But when caught on film, the petrified surfaces of the world can be defamiliarized and opened to scrutiny.

Matsuda Masao, ‘Fukei no Shimetsu’, Tabata Shoten, 1971, Private Collection

Matsuda’s thinking took shape during a period of tremendous economic growth and social tumult, in the twilight of the so-called ‘season of politics’ of the late 1960s. It was a time when anti-authoritarian sentiment ran high in Japan – whether in university struggles, protests against the renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo), or the conflicts surrounding the construction of the Narita International Airport at Sanrizuka. It was also when, as Hirasawa puts it in the exhibition catalogue, ‘the entire Japanese archipelago was being transformed into one gigantic metropolis’, with intense development and new transport links eroding the distinction between city and countryside. The turn to landscape in A.K.A. Serial Killer was, then, a way of placing Nagayama’s killing spree within the larger frame of these social transformations rather than seeking individual, psychological explanations for the working-class teenager’s crimes. As Matsuda wrote of the film, ‘We became very conscious of that very landscape as hostile “authority” itself. It is very likely that Nagayama shot bullets to tear apart the landscape. State power recklessly cuts through the landscape to clear the way, for instance, for the Tomei Freeway. As we enjoy a pleasant drive on that highway, at that very moment the landscape possesses us, and “authority” entraps us.’ Looking at the built environment entailed turning one’s back on media spectacle to mount a critique of capitalist modernity through the typically spectacular and eminently modern art of the cinema. It meant producing a counter-image, a counter-cartography.

Following the initial display of Matsuda’s book, ‘After the Landscape Theory’ pivots to the present. This reverse-chronological organization has the felicitous effect of loosening the hold of historical material over the interpretation of the contemporary works. The notion of being ‘after’ the landscape theory has two possible implications: the simple fact of coming later, or a more direct relation, be it of homage, imitation or critique, as in the convention of titling a work as ‘after’ the style of a master. The curatorial decision of presenting more recent works first encourages the former approach, avoiding notions of origin and derivation, and circumventing claims to influence that may be tenuous. The presence of Sasaoka Keiko’s photographic series PARK CITY (2001–) in the exhibition’s first room is striking in this regard, as these images of Hiroshima challenge the conceptions of visibility and legibility upon which landscape theory as deployed in A.K.A. Serial Killer depends. The series title, which refers to the Peace Memorial Park, places Sasaoka’s images unmistakably in the shadow of nuclear aggression. Eight photographs of exterior spaces made between 2001 and 2009 are so dark that the distant bodies within them are scarcely discernible. Blackness floods these frames, with the white socks of uniformed schoolgirls in one picture dotting the obscurity like beacons. Elsewhere, Sasaoka shoots plain streetcorners and the interiors of the Peace Memorial Museum. Across these different approaches, she confronts the limits of what can be seen of history’s wreckage, as if to echo the famous line from Alain Resnais’s 1959 film: ‘Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima’. Where A.K.A. Serial Killer considered how one might produce knowledge of a traumatic event, Sasaoka’s landscapes evoke muteness and unknowing. They hint at the possibility that images of the built environment might conceal as much as or more than they reveal. Theories, after all, are not facts; they are liable to fall short of their explanatory aims, and landscape theory is no exception.

Sasaoka Keiko, from the series ‛PARK CITY’, 2001-2009, Collection of the artist

Endo Maiko’s X (2022) and Takashi Toshiko’s 12-part Itami series (2005–10) are both serial moving-image works that approach landscape in a distinctly personal register. Made during the pandemic as an online project for the 14th Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions, X was initially updated with new footage each day, producing an unfolding chronicle of the artist’s life. Itami similarly embeds the production of images in quotidian experience, such that the landscape is aligned with habit and intimacy, while the changing seasons provide a means of marking time. Such emphatically subjective approaches contrast sharply with not only Adachi’s film but also with the rule-based form of Imai Norio’s 8mm work Abenosuji (1977). An artist previously associated with the Gutai group, Imai filmed a series of traffic lights as they changed from red to green in a neighbourhood of Osaka. By allowing the presence of red lights to dictate where and when to make an image, he mitigates intentionality. This constraint intensifies the presence of contingency within the work, since all else that might appear in the frame besides the artist’s privileged motif is left to chance. Notably, traffic lights are responsible for regulating the movement of the masses at specified intervals; they tell Imai when to stop and film, just as they tell everyone when to stop and go. The concern with how social control manifests itself in urban space that so deeply marks A.K.A. Serial Killer resurfaces here in altered guise, as part of the relinquishing of authorial agency that is a hallmark of some strains of conceptual art.

Imai Norio, ‘Abenosuji’, 1977, Single-channel projection (original 8 mm), 22 min, Collection of Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

A pristine 4K projection of A.K.A. Serial Killer leads to the exhibition’s final room, which presents an array of documents, photographs and film clips from when landscape theory first took hold – including Nagayama’s handwritten journal and a copy of the book, Tears of Ignorance, that he published from prison in 1971. Rather than shore up Adachi’s film as an origin point, this room emphasizes that the discourse on landscape lacks a single authoritative formulation; it was a dispersed and contradictory debate occurring across diverse films and publications. On display are a trailer and stills from Oshima Nagisa’s The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970), in which an activist filmmaker who is being chased by the police jumps to his death. The ‘will’ he leaves on film depicts the cityscapes of Tokyo; his friends wander the metropolis in search of those same locations, as if in search of their elusive meaning. Since A.K.A. Serial Killer was not released until 1975, it was Oshima’s film – originally titled ‘Tokyo Landscape War’ – that was initially taken to be exemplary of landscape theory; meanwhile, Matsuda first used the term in relation to the pink filmmaking of Wakamatsu Koji, also present here in the form of excerpts and stills. In 1971, Adachi and Wakamatsu went to Beirut to make Red Army/P.F.L.P.: Declaration of World War, which marries the strategies of A.K.A. Serial Killer with the agitprop newsreel, depicting Palestinian fedayeen and members of the Japanese Red Army amidst landscape images. Three years later, Adachi would leave Japan to join the struggle in Palestine, abandoning filmmaking for nearly three decades.

Standing in this final room, it is possible to glimpse Sasaoka’s PARK CITY photographs back at the start: an architectural loop linking past to present. Why revisit all this material today? For a start because, as the exhibition demonstrates, the bond between landscape and power endures as a concern in artistic practice. In the catalogue, Hirasawa notes that, ‘Since the turn of the 21st century, a re-evaluation of landscape theory has taken place internationally, and it is likely not perceived as a specifically Japanese discourse.’ If it ever was: a programme of film screenings accompanying the exhibition gestures to the longstanding interest in landscape on the international left through the inclusion of works made between 1969 and 1981 by the Dziga Vertov Group, Jean-Luc Godard/Anne-Marie Miéville and Danièle Huillet/Jean-Marie Straub. Yet Hirasawa is correct in emphasizing contemporaneity. Today, landscape films comprise a vital current on the global circuit of festivals and biennials and, as a corollary, historical works of this kind have been the subject of renewed interest. Sometimes the connection to this past work is explicit: for instance, French-American artist Éric Baudelaire has produced a trilogy of films made with and ‘after’ Adachi, culminating in Also Known as Jihadi (2017). Meanwhile, the looser notion of coming after encompasses an avalanche of work. Whether in relation to concerns with climate, ecology and extractionism, out of a desire to move away from anthropocentrism, or as part of an effort to unearth traces of marginalized histories, landscape films have proliferated. As critic Leo Goldsmith has proposed, they ‘persist at a significant moment…in which the planet’s physical spaces are subject to increased quantification and abstraction on the one hand, and transformations to its geography accelerated by capitalism-driven human activity on the other’.

The present context is different to that which fuelled the debates in 1960s Japan, but there are affinities. Although, as works by Endo and Takashi show, landscape films can be tethered to first-person expression, their contemporary manifestations generally seek to transcend human perspectives and temporalities. The durational work of James Benning or Nikolaus Geyrhalter, for instance, is best understood as a response to crisis – to a ruined world in which ‘nature’ is a chimera. These are films for a time when anthropogenic changes to the environment are violent and ubiquitous, when rampant individualism must be refused, and when structural diagnoses are needed. Whether or not landscape theory produces the knowledge it promises remains an open question. What is certain is that it endures as a resource for filmmakers who seek to contest their present and, in turn, as a provocation for spectators for whom cinema is not only aesthetic but political and epistemological.

Read on: Jeremy Adelman, ‘The End of Landscape?’ NLR 126.

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Humans and Trees

In 1992, Hayao Miyazaki visited Hachiman Elementary School to speak to a group of students. This was seven years after Miyazaki had co-founded Studio Ghibli with his peers Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki, four years after the release of My Neighbour Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service, and the same year he would release Porco Rosso. He was a god. The children, all aged eleven or twelve, would have waited patiently for the magic man to appear – perhaps by cat-bus, or insectoid aeroplane, or flying broom. But in he walked with orthopaedic shoes, eyebrows overgrown and hair greying, and reeking, as some naughty adults do, of cigarettes. He briefly introduced himself and then began to talk of death.

In the Jōmon period – the Japanese Neolithic era, around 14,000 BC – people only lived to thirty, he told the class, intimating that he, their hero, would already be dead. In those days, he continued, people died before they became grandparents, and most would have children when they were just fifteen years old! He pointed at one of the students. This was before modern medicine, and so most of these babies would die, and these young mothers would need to have lots and lots of children just to ensure some survived. And even if you make it through all those painful childbirths – no doctors, remember – you don’t get to enjoy life for long, because when you turn thirty your children will be fifteen and it’s time for them to have babies and you to die.

‘Why am I telling you these things?’ he asked the children, presumably all in tears. ‘Well, in winter trees dry up and shed their leaves, but in spring they send forth new buds and shoots. And people are the same, for they have babies, the babies grow up, and then they have their own children. Of course, babies look like their parents, so even as people die they in a sense reappear. Both humans and trees, therefore, seem the same to me.’

Miyazaki’s latest film, The Boy and the Heron, released without fanfare in Japan and currently touring the international festival circuit, is all about life, death, and rebirth. Like any good children’s film, it begins with the protagonist’s mother burning to death in hospital. Mahito Maki, a boy about the same age as those students at Hachiman Elementary, is awoken one night by a civil defence siren, and from his bedroom window sees the fire. He dresses in a hurry – Miyazaki carefully animating the awkwardness of buttoning one’s trousers in a panic, of attempting to speed down a staircase without falling – and then races toward the hospital, now alight with impasto pencil-scratchings in yellow, pink and red. As he runs, people enter the frame as already-charred corpses; they blur and flicker like flames. This horrific vision will recur throughout the film as a nightmare, as will fire – something violent, warm, divine, curative, illuminating, obliterating. (This year’s Oppenheimer, told from the other side of the war, opens with the myth of Prometheus.) In Miyazaki’s films, there is no good and evil, only the products of an oblivious natural world.

Mahito flees Tokyo for the countryside with his father, Shoichi, and his ‘new mother’, Natsuko, whose first interaction with Mahito includes placing his hand on her pregnant belly. He becomes quiet, avoidant, often looking to escape; he gets into a fight at school; he self-harms. All the while a grey heron seems to be mocking him – just circling and swooping at first, later crashing through his bedroom window and shitting all over the floor. ‘Your presence is requested’, the heron says through human teeth. Mahito isn’t sure what this means. He decides to kill the annoying bird by crafting a bow and arrow from bamboo, and in succumbing to malice he inevitably ends up in the underworld.

Here there is a milky-eyed wizard who builds the world each day from white marble tomb-stones, carved down to simple shapes, pyramids and columns and spheres, like toy blocks for children. There is an emerging empire of fat carnivorous parakeets who seek to overthrow him. There are little bulbous sperm-ghosts who represent unborn spirits (and will sell well as toys) and there are the vicious pelicans who gobble them up. There is a meteor that shines with the black rainbow of a polished pāua shell from which all the magic of this world is derived. And there is a Charon-like fisherwoman named Kiriko, who rescues Mahito, and who seems to be an age-inverted reincarnation – or parallel-carnation – of one of the goblin-like grannies who watch over him in the ‘real’ world. It’s all very strange.

But I am most taken by the island on which Mahito first arrives. It seems inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead, and also Dante, featuring a golden gate with an ominous inscription, and Virgil and Ovid, and perhaps most importantly Paul Valéry, whose poem, ‘The Cemetery by the Sea’ where ‘Time glitters’ and ‘Dreams are knowledge’, inspired Miyazaki’s previous film, The Wind Rises (2013):

This peaceful roof of milling doves
Shimmers between the pines, between the tombs;
Judicious noon composes there, with fire,
The sea, the ever-recommencing sea . . .

Miyazaki adapts the poem more literally than before: those ‘milling doves’ are old ships on the horizon, circling the island in a silent, spectral orbit much like the aeroplane graveyard of Porco Rosso. The sun bounces on the ocean’s surface to resemble ‘fire’, a commingling of antithetical elements, which forms a ‘peaceful roof’ for the bodies below. Kiriko warns Mahito to tread softly, lest he wake the dead. (‘Their gift for life flowed out into the flowers! . . . Now larvae spin where tears once formed’ – isn’t this a philosophy of death so like the one Miyazaki recounted to his preteen audience?) The island is an unnerving place and thankfully we don’t stay long. The pair undo their trespassing by walking backwards through the gate. Mahito is told not to look back, like Orpheus, until they reach the shore. The wind is rising, Kiriko warns, and they must set sail at once.

Valéry’s poem ends: ‘The wind is rising . . . We must try to live!’ The recurrence of this phrase – in the title of The Wind Rises, but also within the film, again as a warning to the protagonist – is worth lingering on for the fact that The Boy and the Heron originally took the title of the 1937 novel by Genzaburō Yoshino, How Do You Live? The two films form an answer and a question. Mahito discovers the book by accident one day, a gift from his mother, with a dedication to her ‘grown-up’ boy. We see him abandon reading it to chase the heron. It’s a well-known text in Japanese culture, often read by children, which asks people to act selflessly, lessons of wisdom passed on by an uncle to his fifteen-year-old nephew, Koperu. Miyazaki, now eighty-two, had announced his retirement after completing The Wind Rises in 2013. He first did so in 1997, and has continued this tradition every few years. But after that last film, people believed him. It struck an elegiac tone. Many of its narrative elements were autobiographical, as they are again here: Miyazaki’s father was involved in the manufacturing of aeroplane parts for the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, which the protagonist of The Wind Rises, Jiro, helped design; in The Boy and the Heron, Mahito’s father is seen hoarding aeroplane parts in the countryside to preserve his factory. Miyazaki and his father did flee the war in Tokyo for the countryside (though we can’t be sure that a talking bird changed his life). His mother did get sick, suffering for a long time from spinal tuberculosis – a similar disease to the one suffered by Jiro’s wife – but she didn’t die in his childhood, and instead shocked the family by living well into old age. Mahito is often seen whittling, which is a skill Miyazaki passed on to his son Goro, having learned it from his own father. Jiro is an engineer who dedicates his life to a creative industry which nevertheless harms the world, something Miyazaki feels is true of animation; in The Boy and the Heron, this self-insert is bifurcated between the young Mahito and the old Wizard – the one who has to keep building new worlds else everything will end.

The remedial nature of the wizard’s building blocks gestures to an old-world modality. He draws his power from the meteor, which we learn fell to earth during the Meiji Restoration, an era that marked the end of Japanese feudalism and the beginning of rapid industrialisation. It was a time when samurai were retired and spirits disappeared, when the syncretic, pluralistic approach to spirituality, a mix of Shintoism and Buddhism then called shinbutsu-shūgō, was replaced by the worship of an emperor. Castles were destroyed, deep woods were plundered and railways grew like striped serpents across the countryside, fuelled by coal, whose production rose 3450%. For Miyazaki, as for Timothy Morton, this marked the end of the world. ‘It was April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine, an act that commenced the depositing of carbon in Earth’s crust – namely, the inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale’, Morton writes in Hyperobjects. The mid-war setting of The Boy and the Heron is no accident, of course. ‘Since for something to happen it often needs to happen twice, the world also ended in 1945, in Trinity, New Mexico, where the Manhattan Project tested the Gadget, the first of the atom bombs.’

Miyazaki is neither Karl Marx nor Ted Kaczynski. He has toyed with socialism and Maoism and now seems to have come around to an ecoterrorism led by nature itself. ‘I’d like to see Manhattan underwater’, he once told a writer for the New Yorker. ‘I’d like to see when the human population plummets and there are no more high-rises, because nobody’s buying them. I’m excited about that. Money and desire – all that is going to collapse, and wild green grasses are going to take over.’ Some of this thinking stems from reading Clive Ponting’s A Green History of the World, which traces the various histories of civilizational collapse brought about by climate catastrophes. (When I saw the empire of parakeets, I thought of Ponting: an invasive species that has repopulated the underworld, risen to power, reached its apex, and in doing so, doomed itself.) It likely influenced Miyazaki’s understanding of societal decadence, his curmudgeonly view that things will inevitably collapse and that this can only mean good things. He even disavows environmentalism for this reason, claiming that his own ecological pursuits – using profits from toy sales to fund rewilding projects, for example – are foremost in the service of a personal nostalgia: ‘When I participated, I felt more pleased by seeing a real crayfish than by some grandiose feeling that I was preserving nature. We were able to become simply happy rather than thinking we were providing aid to protect this or that. We could see that the river was getting closer to what we remembered as children.’

Industrialisation is a childhood’s end, and in Miyazaki we so often see this Promethean moment rendered through a Freudian hermeneutics. (His new film features a primal scene between the father and ‘new mother’, observed by firelight; when Mahito reunites with his biological mother, she’s made much younger; his great transgression in the underworld, which leads to its destruction, is one of ‘taboo’; and so on…) Is Miyazaki a sleeper agent of the Freudo-Marxists, or is this just the nature of children’s films? His producer, Toshio Suzuki, would answer more simply that he’s a ‘mama’s boy’. For the Soviet cartoons that inspired Miyazaki, The Snow Queen chief among them, the child was a symbol that existed outside of capitalism, a pure potentiality or budding revolutionary. In Spirited Away (2001), the young girl Chihiro is the only one in her family capable of seeing spirits, while her parents obsess over consumption and turn into pigs – basically red cinema with a sprinkling of Shintoism.

Miyazaki believes that Mahito’s mid-teen moment is one much like the Meiji Restoration, a maturation that prefigures entry into the labour force and the total deadening of the creative mind (or the spiritual mind, the natural mind – all the same). This is marked most explicitly in Japan by university entrance exams – introduced, of course, during the Meiji period – a time often referred to as shiken jigoku, or ‘exam hell’. (Climb out of the underworld, young people!) This is also the time, Miyazaki claims, when they fall in love with anime. ‘To escape from this depressing situation, they often find themselves wishing they could live in a world of their own – a world they can say is truly theirs, a world unknown even to their parents. To young people, anime is something they can incorporate into this private world . . . The word nostalgia comes to mind.’

Nostalgic for what? A time before adulthood, before industry, pollution, exams, emperors? In Marxism and Form, Fredric Jameson spends a long time teasing out a theory of Marxist literary criticism before arriving at his bravura example-analysis of Hemingway. He calls it ‘a mistake’ to think that Hemingway’s books deal ‘essentially with such things as courage, love and death; in reality, their deepest subject is simply the writing of a certain type of sentence, the practice of a determinate style’. Hemingway, Jameson argues, is attempting to reconstruct some lost lived experience through his prose, where writing is as much a ‘skill’ as bullfighting or fishing. This spiritual pursuit, the nostalgic desire for an old world where the ‘true’ and ‘good’ were possible, is borne out in form, and each sentence points to its creator as an artisan, athlete, hero. Miyazaki’s animation functions similarly. At stake in his work is the anima of all things, the essential lifeforce of a world soon to ‘end in flames’ (so his latest film tells us), which perhaps explains his obsessions with animism, Shintoism and mechanisms of flight – all are a kind of quickening.

Porco Rosso, for example, the story of a porcine fighter-pilot and the closest thing Miyazaki has made to a Hemingway novel, again has little to do with its ostensible themes of ‘courage, love and death’. Few children understand what fascism is or what it means to fight against it, fewer comprehend the geopolitical complexities of aeronautical warfare in the Adriatic, and fewer still catch the reference to Jean-Baptiste Clément’s communard anthem Les Temps des Cerises. But what so enthrals Miyazaki’s audience – as with readers of Hemingway – is the animation itself, which we might liken here to the magic of flight. Consider the propellor, a symbol we find emblazoned on Mahito’s bedsheets: through strict adherence to the scientific properties of aerodynamics (Miyazaki’s insistence on instilling ‘fictional worlds’ with ‘a certain realism’) the propellor spins, blurs and disappears – and in doing so catapults us into the sky. Miyazaki’s unique talent for animating animation has a similarly uplifting effect.

In the 2013 documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, filmed during the making of The Wind Rises, you can see Miyazaki at work. His process is quite simple: he closes his eyes, envisions the scene, then puts hand to paper. Nobody knows what the film will look like until then. Key animation, script and storyboard all arrive at once, direct from Miyazaki’s mind. Here is that old-world modality yet again – the wizard and his building blocks. In his refusal to capitulate to modern technology and his insistence on personally drawing tens of thousands of frames for each film, Miyazaki is equally nostalgic for what Jameson calls ‘nonalienated work’ – but his nostalgia goes further. If previous films lamented the post-industrial use-value of human creativity – be that the ecologically destructive colony of ‘Irontown’ in Princess Mononoke (1997) or the Mitsubishi warplanes of The Wind Rises – then The Boy and the Heron takes a more apocalyptic view. Yes, after the great flood, grasses will inherit the earth, or parakeets, or whatever warriors nature thinks to send, but despite this, humanity will be lost, and human creativity with it. Elephants can paint, just not very well – like most animals they have no eye for colour. So what’s a man to do? In The Boy and the Heron, the wizard is seeking an heir. Will Mahito rise to the challenge? For Miyazaki, the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

Read on: Fredric Jameson, ‘Gherman’s Anti-Aesthetic’,  NLR 97.

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That Which Haunts

Poetry, the American poet Louise Glück once told an audience, a member of whom had, preposterously, asked her to define it, ‘is that which haunts’. The response itself haunts, not least for being strikingly satisfactory. It ‘seems true and deep’, to borrow a phrase of Glück’s, from her essay ‘Death and Absence’. It begins in indeterminacy (‘that which’) and then tapers to a verb (‘haunts’) that is both distinctive and a little mysterious, achieving the air of the irrefutable while ‘loosing a flurry of questions’ (another of Glück’s phrases, this one from her essay ‘Ersatz Thought’). At once distilled and capacious, laconic and expansive, Glück’s definition of poetry shares many of the qualities of her poems.

Glück, who died aged 80 on 13 October, also talked about making poems ‘memorable’. She wrote thirteen collections in all, the first in 1968, the last in 2021, plus two slender books of essays, and a final short ‘fiction’ in prose published last year. She also taught poetry, from her late twenties onward, an experience she found she loved. Teaching was ‘the prescription for lassitude’; interludes of silence, some lasting years, were a feature of Glück’s writing life. Reflecting on working on her students’ poems in her essay ‘Education of a Poet’, she writes: ‘It mattered to get the poem right, to get it memorable, toward which end nothing was held back’. The repetition of ‘get’, producing that subtly odd, almost impatient phrase, ‘get it memorable’, enacts the kind of dogged focus it describes. (Occasionally lines would arrive like gifts, but making poems to house them was generally hard labour: Glück said her last book of poems, Winter Recipes from the Collective, ‘came in the most tortured little drips – I thought of it as rusty water coming out of the tap’.)

The ‘right’ poem, the complete or perfected poem, is the ‘memorable’ one; its raison d’être, to ‘haunt’. Neither claim, similar but not identical, is necessarily obvious. Many poems lend themselves to learning by heart – this is one function, or effect, of rhythm and rhyme – but why would being memorable be the sine qua non? And do we want to be haunted? That which is memorable – one is tempted to say, ‘merely’ memorable – stays with you; that which haunts won’t leave you alone. That which haunts affects, consumes, disquiets, returns unbidden, perhaps unwelcome. And insofar as haunting is often recursive – that which haunts comes back – it isn’t exactly memorable: in fact, we may be haunted by what we would prefer to forget, or are in danger of forgetting (or fear we are: Hamlet’s father’s ghost commands him to ‘Remember me’).

Haunting, then, is not a steady, nor altogether pleasant, voluntary form of persistence. ‘The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last’, Glück once wrote. Her poems are sharp in several senses. They are not only distinguished by clarity, precision and keen intelligence, often delivering a penetrating, sometimes harrowing insight with aphoristic authority (most famously: ‘We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.’ – ‘Nostos’). Her poetry is also unsparing, and can be mordant, cutting or frank to the point of callousness. The poems in perhaps her frankest, and most relentlessly morbid collection, Ararat (1990), a kind of family self-portrait written in the aftermath of her father’s death, are studded with barbs, lines of unexpected hostility:

My sister’s like a sun, like a yellow dahlia.
Daggers of gold hair around the face.

‘Yellow Dahlia’

My son’s very graceful; he has perfect balance.
He’s not competitive, like my sister’s daughter.

‘Cousins’

Or almost violent candour:

My mother’s an expert in one thing:
sending people she loves into the other world.

‘Lullaby’

In the same way as she’d prepare for the others
my mother prepared for the child that died.

‘A Precedent’

‘My son’ and ‘my father’ are the only male figures in a collection otherwise dominated by women, including a sister, a ‘girl child’ in Glück’s painful phrase (‘Mount Ararat’), who died before Glück was born. (‘Her death was not my experience, but her absence was’, she reflects in ‘Death and Absence’. It ‘produced in me a profound obligation toward my mother, and a frantic desire to remedy her every distress’ – ‘a haunted child’s compulsive compensation’.)

Ostensibly about death and grief, Ararat is shot through with envy, jealousy, fearfulness, resentment. Poems ‘will not survive on content but through voice. By voice I mean the style of thought’, Glück once wrote, and the ‘style of thought’ – the dominant logic – of the collection is comparison. The speaker often begins by contrasting, likening, ranking, summing up, categorizing. Yet there is usually something awry with these attempts at summary; they seem beside the point, the significance misplaced, a kind of category mistake:

When I saw my father for the last time, we both did the same thing.

‘Terminal Resemblance’

This is a bizarrely roundabout way to begin: that the speaker and her father do the ‘same thing’ is a rather abstract, shallow fact about their final parting (not least because the ‘same thing’ turns out to be waving, hardly an unusual gesture during farewells). By the last stanzas, the opening observation, although outwardly unimpeachable, seems an evasion, a way of not speaking directly of the pain of the memory, much as the speaker’s ‘wave’ is an effort to hide or expel her emotion:

When the taxi came, my parents watched from the front door,
arm in arm, my mother blowing kisses as she always does,
because it frightens her when a hand isn’t being used.
But for a change, my father didn’t just stand there.
This time, he waved.

That’s what I did, at the door to the taxi.
Like him, waved to disguise my hand’s trembling.

Several of the poems in Ararat progress from static abstraction to a painful particular, from some seemingly unflinching summary to a muted emotional climax. Many lead with conclusions: ‘My sister and I reached / the same conclusion: / the best way / to love us was to not / spend time with us.’ (‘Animals’). The second poem in the sequence, ‘A Fantasy’, begins:

I’ll tell you something: every day
people are dying. And that’s just the beginning.

Glück liked poems that dramatize a ‘question, a problem’ in which the ‘poet was not wed to any one outcome’. (In ‘Death and Absence’, she recalls cutting lines that ‘summarized what the poem had to suggest’.) In the light of such preferences, the second sentence in ‘A Fantasy’ sounds almost like a self-referential joke. Glück seems to have set herself the perverse challenge of beginning the poems in Ararat in the most inert way possible, with beginnings that sound like endings, dead-ends (fitting for lyrics that are, after all, about going on after death).

Yet ‘A Fantasy’ doesn’t begin with the pronouncement itself – ‘every day / people are dying’ – but that strangely unprovoked promise of disclosure: ‘I’ll tell you something’ is an odder phrase than its colloquial aspect suggests. The ‘something’ can sound either confiding or a little menacing, either arbitrary (you’ll tell us ‘something’, but will you tell us what we asked, will anything do?) or aggressively pointed. Does the speaker have something to say or is she talking for fear of silence the way her mother compulsively blows kisses? And who would need to be told, who could fail to know, that every day people are dying? Several of the book’s opening lines have this unstable, inscrutable tone: forthright and somehow exposed, knowing and a little childlike, as though the speaker doesn’t quite understand the import of what they’re saying.

‘A Fantasy’ goes on to describe a funeral, but superficially and from a distance, mostly without the specificity that would suggest true intimacy with death:

Then they’re in the cemetery, some of them
for the first time. They’re frightened of crying,
sometimes of not crying. Someone leans over,
tells them what to do next, which might mean
saying a few words, sometimes
throwing dirt in the open grave.

And after that, everyone goes back to the house,
which is suddenly full of visitors.
The widow sits on the couch, very stately,
so people line up to approach her,
sometimes take her hand, sometimes embrace her.
She finds something to say to everybody,

Along with the accumulation of ‘some’ words (‘something’, ‘sometimes’, ‘someone’), the subtle lapses in logic (do people approach the widow because she is sitting ‘very stately’ as that ‘so’ suggests?) are little giveaways, indications that the speaker doesn’t fully comprehend the ‘something’ she set out to tell. It’s as though there is a child hiding within the world-weary manner, with its neat rhymes, or rather it’s the knowing posture that is part of what sounds like a child, a child’s botched precocity. The third and final stanza moves inward – ‘In her heart, she wants them to go away’ – and then ends on a note of unexpected ambivalence. The widow wants to be ‘back in the sickroom’: ‘it’s her only hope, / the wish to move backward. And just a little, / not as far as the marriage, the first kiss.’ She doesn’t want to revive her husband so much as relive his dying; to ‘move backward’ – not quite the same as ‘going back in time’, as though she wants to approach the past but doesn’t want to arrive.

Several of the poems in Ararat ‘move backward’, less advancing toward resolution than unravelling or backtracking from the certainties with which they begin:

Nothing’s sadder than my sister’s grave
unless it’s the grave of my cousin, next to her.
To this day, I can’t bring myself to watch
my aunt and my mother,
though the more I try to escape
seeing their suffering…

‘Mount Ararat’

Despite its sing-song matter-of-factness, the casual briskness of those two symmetrical apostrophes in the first line – among the formal signatures of the sequence – anticipates the speaker’s impulse to hasten past ‘suffering’. She can’t even bring herself to complete the sentence, to name what she can’t watch her aunt and mother do. Yet the second line of the couplet, which ends on that slightly hurried, forced rhyme with ‘sadder’ (‘next to her’), undermines or at least alters the first. The voice of a child is faintly audible, in the ‘unless’, which suggests the speaker searching for the right answer, as though there could be one. There’s the hint of a punchline, too, in the way the second line pulls the rug out from underneath the first by taking its proposition literally – as if it were a genuine invitation to comparison (and isn’t it her sister’s death that’s sadder than her grave?)

*

Escaping suffering – sometimes in the guise of confronting it – is among the major subjects of Ararat. Unlike her ‘brave’ friend ‘able to face unpleasantness’, the speaker is ‘quick to shut my eyes’ (‘Celestial Music’); she shows ‘contempt for emotion’ (‘Paradise’); she is a ‘living expert in silence’ (‘Children Coming Home From School’). The speaker in the sequence is in this sense an unreliable narrator (one poem is titled ‘The Untrustworthy Speaker’), and the drama of the poems arises from the way the language of neutrality, detachment or composure fails to convince. In ‘Cousins’, an amusingly nasty poem, the speaker compares her son to her ‘sister’s daughter’ who is ‘competitive’ (that she won’t say ‘niece’ is an early hint of the speaker’s hostility). But what the poem reveals far more vividly, because implicitly, is the speaker’s own competitiveness, formally disavowed by the even keel of the lines, which can’t quite disguise the tone of jealous vitriol:

Day and night, she’s always practising.
Today, it’s hitting softballs into the copper beech,
retrieving them, hitting them again.
After a while, no one even watches her.
If she were any stronger, the tree would be bald.

The measured pace of each line’s opening clause half-obscures the sound of bitter complaint, capped by that wonderful dry line ‘the tree would be bald’. The flat adjective exudes the venom behind the exaggeration. Next the speaker turns to boasting about her son, with a cloying internal rhyme followed by an almost preening dash: ‘I’ve watched him race: he’s natural, effortless—’. But her son always ‘stops’ – he ‘was born rejecting / the solitude of the victor’. Then follows the deliciously spiteful, socially unacceptable conclusion:

My sister’s daughter doesn’t have that problem.
She may as well be first; she’s already alone.

Reflecting on past efforts to write about her family in ‘Death and Absence’, Glück writes that ‘These poems, these many attempts, were frank but without mystery. The problem was tone… I kept taking appropriate attitudes, when what was wanted had to be, in some way unique’. As with the widow in ‘A Fantasy’, who only wants to go back in time as far as her late husband’s ‘sickroom’, the ending of ‘Cousins’ – feeling viciously competitive toward a child, and seeming to wish them ill – couldn’t be mistaken for an ‘appropriate attitude’. What makes Ararat’s remorselessly frank poems mysterious and unique is this disconcerting tension between sense and sound, between sentence and line, between implied emotion and composed appearance, which scrambles the voice of the speaker.

The speaker’s father is the absent centre of Ararat – ‘there was only one hero. / Now the hero’s dead…there’s no plot without a hero.’ (‘A Novel’). While alive, he appears remote, inexpressive, so much so that he seems to be waiting for death:

What he wanted
was to lie on the couch
with the Times
over his face,
so that death, when it came,
wouldn’t seem a significant change.

‘New World’

He is avoidant, perhaps depressed:

Late December: my father and I
are going to New York, to the circus.
He holds me
on his shoulders in the bitter wind:
scraps of white paper
blow over the railroad ties.

My father liked
to stand like this, to hold me
so he couldn’t see me.
I remember
staring straight ahead
into the world my father saw;
I was learning
to absorb its emptiness,
the heavy snow
not falling, whirling around us.

‘Snow’

The sharp line, the one that punctures the line before – ‘to hold me / so he couldn’t see me’ – brings out the latent desolation in the image of discarded scraps of paper blowing over the railroad ties, two parallel lines that face in the same direction like the child and her father, but never touch, remain permanently separate. ‘So you couldn’t see me’ makes us reconsider the whole first stanza – its scarcely established sense of intimacy and anticipation (‘to New York, to the circus’) – as well as the first mention of holding: ‘He holds me / on his shoulders in the bitter wind’. That line break now seems to foreshadow the winding blow of the later line break – as though the holding is retracted by the fact she is on his shoulders (does being on someone’s shoulders count as being held, or is the child holding the parent – holding on?) And is being on her father’s shoulders the pleasure we assumed it to be or was she too exposed up there to the ‘bitter wind’?

Yet the final verb in the final line – ‘the heavy snow / not falling, whirling around us’ – like the snow itself, ‘looses a flurry of questions’. Glück uses the word ‘whirl’ twice in her essay ‘Ersatz Thought’ to describe the effect of the implicit or the incomplete in poetry: ‘the unspoken, becomes a focus; ideally, a whirling concentration of questions’; ‘the unsaid’ becomes ‘the centre around which the said whirls’. She also talks about the way the sentence ‘initiates and organizes fields of associations which (in the manner of the void) may continue to circulate indefinitely’. In ‘Snow’, even as it could suggest a kind of frightening chaos, ‘whirling’ also revives the air of magic and excitement that opened the poem, and the possibility of wresting poetry from desolation.

Whirling concentrations, flurries of questions, indefinite circulation: this is the sort of poetic permanence – alive, ongoing – Glück prefers to the more commonplace notion of poems as ‘words inscribed in rock or caught in amber’. What is left out of such ‘images of preservation and fixity’, she explains in ‘Death and Absence’,

is the idea of contact, and contact, of the most intimate sort, is what poetry can accomplish. Poems do not endure as objects but as presences. When you read anything worth remembering, you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit. I read poems to hear that voice. And I write to speak to those I have heard.

Though they contain their fair share of haunting lines, Glück’s poems are for the most part not, strictly speaking, memorable. They remain ‘strange, and will never become familiar’, as the American painter Philip Guston once said of the work of ‘marvellous artists’. But a poem that endures, this passage suggests, is not ‘memorable’ in the sense of being easy to remember; it is rather ‘worth remembering’. What is worth remembering? That which we are liable to forget, that which we need to continually discover – unsayable feelings and intolerable facts, the ‘unpleasantness’ we are perennially unable to ‘face’.

And that which disappears. ‘It seemed to Marigold that you remembered things because they changed. You didn’t need to remember what was right in front of you’, Glück writes in her final work, Marigold and Rose, a kind of adult-children’s book about the inner lives of infant twins. Marigold is writing a book even though she can’t talk, let alone read, and is given to astonishingly adult – existential, morbid – thoughts: ‘I will be grown up, she thought, and then I will be dead’; ‘the twins knew somehow they were getting older whether they wanted to or not. They would someday walk instead of crawl. They would have teeth…Everything will disappear, Marigold thought.’ Far from being a time of innocence, pre-verbal infancy in Marigold and Rose is a time of concentrated, radical losses of innocence. If ‘we look at the world once, in childhood’, it is then, Glück’s inexplicably convincing swansong suggests, that we absorb the unacceptable fundamentals – nothing lasts, including us and those we love – in elemental form. ‘Everything will disappear. Still, she thought. I know more words now…And both these things would continue happening: everything will disappear but I will know many words.’

What survives is voice, and what distinguishes a ‘specific, identifiable voice’, Glück insisted, is ‘volatility, which gives such voices their paradoxical durability’. It is this volatility which makes a voice seem to speak ‘not from the past but in the present’, which ensures a poem endures not as an ‘object’ but as a ‘presence’. One advantage presences have over objects is that they are not only there; you can be in them. If you read Glück’s poems, you can not only hear her durably volatile voice, you can feel you are in her presence.

Read on: Anahid Nersessian, ‘Notes on Tone’, NLR 142.

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Speak, Geology

The world of the German author Esther Kinsky is the world after Babel. The Biblical story goes like this: once, the people of the world had a single language. They found an empty plain and, having worked out how to bake clay into bricks, decided to build a tower in order to reach the heavens – ‘otherwise’, they feared, ‘we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth’. When God comes to punish them, this is exactly what happens. The tower goes unbuilt, the universal language vanishes. Kinsky, who began her literary career as a translator of Polish, English and Russian, invokes Babel in her book-length essay Fremdsprechen (2013), a manifesto of sorts that sets out her conception of what it means to exist between languages. It begins with an extended riff on the thwarting of the tower of Babel as humanity’s third collective punishment (after the expulsion from Eden and the Flood), one that condemned it to ‘difficulties of comprehension’, to language as a site of otherness.

Yet for Kinksy, the chasm between languages is not a bleak place, but rather a field of resonances, a ‘transit space’, a creative sound-zone. Everyone must face the complex reality of life after Babel; everyone, too, is capable of excavating their personal relationship to language, formed through the accumulation of layers of association and memory, which can be unearthed and probed as Kinsky herself does in a series of autobiographical fragments that conclude the book. Kinsky employs such geological terminology throughout Fremdsprechen: language is likened to clay, loam, bricks.

Language and discontinuity, geological excavation and reconstruction: these are themes that run through the triptych of novels that has made Kinksy’s name in the anglosphere. River (2017), Grove (2018) and now Rombo (2022) – the first translated by Iain Galbraith, the latter two by Caroline Schmidt – have tended to be received as nature writing. Yet Kinsky has rejected this rubric, and for good reason. Not only is her vision of the natural world far less pristine than that found in many of that genre’s naiver examples, but nature in her work is ultimately more of a charged setting than Kinsky’s main subject – a device, or metaphorical resource. Her interest is not in geology itself, but in the geological workings of memory, while her central preoccupation is language – the ‘shapeable material’ of post-Babel Earth.

Kinsksy’s three Geländeromane (‘terrain-novels’) are formally experimental meditations on disturbance – at once geological, personal and linguistic. All are set in the aftermath of loss, and show their narrators trying to come to terms with change. In River, an unnamed narrator – about to leave town for good – wanders the ‘partly mutilated’ mudscapes of east London’s lower Lea Valley, recording what she sees with both photographs and words, journeying into the ‘lower reaches’ of memory:

Hidden in the middle of the large Hackney Marshes Playing Fields, as in the depths of the instant pictures I had taken with my bulky camera, were memories I was only gradually learning to read: the steady drone of an invisible plane above the white cloud cover, chirring pylons lisping messages from the air, the wispy rustling of pale winter grass in the wind, and between it all a stillness that masked the proximity of the city.

Grove, written in the wake of the death of Kinsky’s husband, the translator Martin Chalmers, sees a recently widowed woman move to a small Italian town southeast of Rome; her fragmented, memory-suffused relections on the land and her place in it produce a teetering superimposition of images. Kinsky’s investigation into what she calls ‘disturbed terrain’ finds perhaps its most literal expression in Rombo, about the series of earthquakes that rocked Friuli in northern Italy in 1976, killing around a thousand people, with countless more displaced.

The cataclysm is reconstructed through the fragmentary accounts of several fictional eyewitnesses; this collective narrative is interspersed with a narrator’s intricate descriptions of Friuli’s ecology and landscape, its local flora and fauna:

Up the Rio Nero, the terrain is always wild. The path is forever being shifted by fresh rock falls and descending scree – a terrain of interference in the tenor of events. The scent of resin sits above the sunny barren land, where dwarf pines brace themselves between chunks of rock – the trees so small one might be quicker to attribute to the stones their scent. Beside the pine saplings junipers take root, small bell flowers, heather on blown-in soil.

There are also detailed accounts of Friulian culture and folk customs, including a traditional song dedicated to the mermaid Riba Faronika – sung while undulating one’s hands in front of one’s chest – and the bile maškire performance, which takes pride of place in the region’s carnivals:

The men and women who masquerade in white all wear the same costume: a long white skirt adorned with colourful cording, a white shirt and a colourful belt. On their heads, a prodigious bonnet, bedecked with colourful paper flowers. Some bonnets dangle colourful ribbons that hide one’s face; all roaming strangers by no account recognizable, white as the limestone mountains and not-white as the flowers from the interglacial period that managed to salvage themselves, whiling in the cracks of the limestone peak that towered over the glacier.

As in the story of Babel, the disorienting fallout from the earthquake is social, cultural, linguistic. ‘An earthquake rattles everything and turns it upside down, even the thoughts in your head’, one local observes. ‘My life is this place’, says another. ‘Here I know everything. Every stick and every stone. The animals and the people.’ But then suddenly she doesn’t. Amid the rubble, it is not only the roads and pathways that are thrown into confusion; folktales and social bonds stop making sense too. ‘Work, the neighbourhood, the animals, music – all that was now divided into the before and after’, one resident says. Many families leave the region, never to return. The village cemetery has fallen into disarray. Displaced former locals who have decamped to nearby coastal towns look out towards the sea – the legendary home of the mermaid Riba Faronika: ‘But they said nothing about it, not even to one another, and they didn’t sing either, not even quietly, because it was too late for that – and even had they hummed, out of homesickness or simply from memory, never would they have moved their hands up and down before their breast, imitating a wave or a snake: not here, beneath this endless sky and in the presence of the horizon.’

While River had a looping, forking structure and Grove imitated its photographic leitmotif by layering – or superimposing – different exposures of its subject matter, Rombo’s snatches of memory and information overlap, diverge and rub against each other like tectonic plates. River and Grove were each narrated by a single coherent persona, whereas Rombo’s fractured chorus of voices dramatizes the ruptures created by the trauma of the earthquake. Together, the eyewitness accounts produce a kind of shifting mosaic – one might call it ‘rubble narration’ – which tries to convey the catastrophe, and the community it destroyed, while stranded irredeemably in the aftermath.

As an act of critical reconstruction, one might compare Kinksy’s approach to kitsugi pottery, or to the chunks of ruin and graffiti preserved in Berlin’s rebuilt Reichstag. The cracks are the highlight; the conspicuousness of the commemorative effort is the point. Kinsky’s descriptive exertion – although occasionally wearing in its attention to esoteric detail – is similarly paramount. It is a method for refusing oblivion. In each novel, dislocations of self and setting initiate a process of reorientation. ‘Memory’, one Friulian local says, ‘is something that is being forever woven.’ After the first earthquake, the residents find themselves arguing about what happened:

One argued over the form of the cliffs, the course of the brooks, the trees that avalanches rolled over. About the whereabouts of objects, the order of things in the house, the fate of animals. Each of these arguments was an attempt at orientation, at carving a path through the rubble of masonry, mortar, split beams and shattered dishes, to understand the world anew. To begin living in a place anew. With one’s memories.

In the New Testament, Jesus says that if people keep silent, the stones themselves will speak. Kinsky’s fiction is full of articulate, evocative stones: bits of brickwork in River; the Ravenna mosaics in Grove; Rombo’s twisted geological layers. But can stones be made to speak of absence, of loss? In Rombo, the loss in question is not just that of 1976. The novel, after all, is not titled Sisma – Italian for earthquake; Rombo is rather the local term for the subterranean growling that comes before seismic activity. ‘The earthquake is everywhere’, our narrator observes. ‘In the mountains’, says one local, ‘something is always shifting’. The narrator offers various theories about the kinds of tectonic activity that cause such disasters; they also note that Friuli is home to some of the deepest cavities on Earth:

What constitutes a cavity? Is it the absence of stone, soil, light – or the presence of walls enclosing it? The darkness within or the light without? When does can’t remember become forgotten, after all? In the early days of geology there was a science of abyssology. A theory of shafts, chasms, voids where forgotten things lie trapped, like tonsil stones. Things lost.

For Kinsky, nature ultimately provides no escape from loss, no solace or release from human tragedy (it is sometimes, as with the earthquake, the cause of it). What it may offer, however, is the possibility of coming to terms with this absence-filled world. Kinsky’s nature is never quite cruel, but it is utterly indifferent to humans’ emotional claims. As she once remarked in an interview: a landscape ‘touches our heart, but doesn’t itself have a heart’. Yet her strikingly unsentimental novels seem to suggest that to attend to the natural world, in all its icy, violent otherness, is to begin to find ourselves a place in it.

Read on: Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Rural Sensualist’, Sidecar.

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Troubled Voices

Best-known in the English-speaking world for her 1992 debut The Governesses, a frenzied modern-day conte of female appetite translated in 2018, the French writer Anne Serre says she has little time for the vogue of fictionalised autobiography. ‘It’s not enough to write in your own voice, come to the page with what you have to say, and call it a novel’, she has argued. ‘The whole point of a novel should be that we don’t know who is speaking’. In a mannered, highly controlled style – her surname resembles the verb serrer, to ‘tighten, wrench or clamp’ – Serre has spent her career troubling the boundaries between author and narrator, fact and fiction, realism and fantasy.

In A Leopard Skin-Hat, published in France in 2008 and now the fourth of Serre’s fifteen works to appear in English, the question of who speaks is muddled by the presence of a character called ‘the Narrator’. Such metafictional ploys can be found throughout her oeuvre: a 2004 novel is titled Le Narrateur, as is a novella included in her 2021 collection A Fool and Other Moral Tales. In this case, ‘the Narrator’ is a middle-aged male writer, struggling to make sense of the abbreviated life of his childhood friend, Fanny, who dies by suicide after suffering from schizophrenia. An extended rumination on her life and death, the novel resembles a ballad, comprising a wistful effort to index everything remembered about a loved one and lamenting its failure to provide a cohesive portrait.

Raised in a ‘very decent’ and conventional bourgeois Catholic family, with literature-professor parents who ‘bathed’ their children in fiction from an early age, Serre insists that she began writing in order to charm her secondary school philosophy teacher (Anglophone critics have made much of her professed conviction that literature is invariably written to ‘seduce’ someone). She lost her mother when she was ten and her sister in 2007 from ‘probable suicide’ related to struggles with mental illness. Her sister was 43, the same age as Fanny when she dies; A Leopard-Skin Hat is arguably Serre’s most autobiographically inflected work to date. In an unusual disclosure of her intentions, Serre has said that she conceived the work as a tribute to a life which resisted interpretation.

Serre’s books unfold from striking, enigmatic images which ‘foist’ themselves upon her in dreams, or during walks in the countryside. This latest work is ignited from the ‘elegant leopard-skin hat’ that Fanny ‘pilfers’ during one of her more ‘light-hearted’ phases. As her illness worsens, the hat functions as a cruel measure of her decline. The novel opens with the Narrator’s fond, generic recollection of his friend in her youth: ‘Oh, how pretty she was, Fanny, back in the days of her childhood.’ The reader may suspect a Proustian set-up – a hapless, Marcel-like character mooning over his Albertine – but this is quickly disrupted. The portrait soon grows more complicated: ‘One summer, a child from next door asked her if he could use her piano and Fanny refused, saying quite simply, “No”. There was nothing gracious about it, no attempt to soften the blow. It was No. The child was taken aback and hurt, and went off looking distinctly sad.’

The Narrator’s fixation with Fanny is more intellectual than erotic; the bond they develop is not romantic but a ‘gruelling’ friendship. In contrast to the trademark eroticism of Serre’s other works, A Leopard-Skin Hat is a para-philosophical reflection on intimacy and the opacity of other people. Visiting Fanny’s bedroom after her body is taken away, the Narrator is confounded by its neatness, so at odds with Fanny’s public dishevelment: ‘he discovered, with a lump in his throat, all her papers carefully arranged and annotated and filed away like those of a fantastically tidy person, the official documents of her life meticulously ordered. You never know who your loved ones are or what they are capable of.’

The portrait represents something of a departure for Serre, whose characters have tended to resemble what she describes as ‘ghosts, masks, dolls, theatre figures and vignettes’ rather than full-dimensional people. Along with her next novel, The Beginners, published in France in 2011 and translated in 2021, A Leopard-Skin Hat was an experiment in applying her favoured modes – sly, oneiric, sometimes farcical – to a more realistic world. Serre did not judge either book successful, deeming them unsatisfying ‘one-offs’ that reaffirmed her antic taste for whimsy and surrealism, not the travails of everyday intimacy. Yet the works are among her most affecting. The Beginners, the story of an art critic, Anna, who, though in a contended long-term relationship, becomes infatuated with a researcher spending the summer in her countryside town, may be prosaic, but it is also tender and often riveting. Like A Leopard-Skin Hat, the novel chimes with elements of Serre’s own tragically inclined biography (Anna is also motherless, and has lost a sister to suicide). Its portrayal of how Anna ‘catches’ love for Thomas, like an illness, fatally contaminating her well-established partnership, vividly showcases the unsparing side of romantic life. For all the novel’s abstract talk of love and existential pondering, few others have registered the fraught experience of being in love with more than one person so well, nor articulated the dilemma as precisely.

It is a shame therefore that some of the sharpness of Serre’s prose is lost in translation. Her long-term translator Mark Hutchinson has rendered the crisp plainness of A Leopard-Skin Hat in an idiomatic English that is at times a little cloying and cumbersome. In a passage in which the Narrator questions whether Fanny ‘really wants to live’, for the expression ‘sortir de sa cachette’ (‘to come out of hiding’), Hutchinson has ‘to come out of her hidey-hole’. His rendering of Serre’s plain description of Fanny’s relationship to alcohol is similarly obtrusive. For ‘Lorsqu’elle a été ivre’, instead of ‘When she was drunk’, we have the old-fashioned ‘When she was in her cups’.

For a writer fond of ‘cruel irony’ (a term she has used to praise the work of Elfriede Jelinek), we should not exclude the possibility that Serre is sometimes poking fun at her Narrator. On occasion, a winking authorial voice intrudes: ‘Fanny’s actual life probably bears no resemblance to what the Narrator writes’. These metafictional flourishes would be more agreeable, and the sudden instalment of ironic distance more effective, if the reader were invited to care about the Narrator as a stand-alone creation. Yet he is pompous, inordinately occupied by his own genius, tediously adamant that the demands of long-term friendship are akin to those of writing books. Perhaps this estrangement is a further defence against the conflation of literature and reality, against approaching any settled sense – anathema to the novel, in Serre’s view – of who is speaking. But by leaning into the more parodic aspects of the Narrator, A Leopard-Skin Hat risks satirizing his struggle to say something fair and true about a loved one in distress, and rendering the central question ‘Who is speaking?’ a pantomime.

More than a meta-fictional hall of mirrors, however, A Leopard-Skin Hat is perhaps most potently about the limits of literature when confronted with something as obliterative as schizophrenia. Fanny’s life is portrayed as one of perpetual self-estrangement and fear. Calling herself ‘Felix’ as a child, she become a ‘social outcast’, unable to hold down a job. Her body is consistently ‘alien’ to her, an ‘enemy about to pounce’; she ‘scared of herself’ – ‘scared of hurting someone else.’ ‘The more she read’, we learn, ‘the more she seemed to fall apart’. As Serre has reflected elsewhere: ‘anything that’s unnameable is terrifying; and for a writer, perhaps even more so. Naming things is comforting. If you can’t name something (Is he a vagabond? A murderer? My loved one? Death? A ghost?), the world will disintegrate, and if the world disintegrates, you will too.’ The Narrator, for all his erudition, cannot ultimately find a way to define his relationship with Fanny: ‘Perhaps in the end it was more about love than friendship? What other name is there for this urgent, violent marriage of minds? Why did he accompany her?’

Serre, as we’d expect, leaves the question open. Definitively scotching this ‘one-off’ experiment in realism, she gives Fanny a celestial, surrealist send-off. ‘Over the rail she stepped, she who was such a powerful swimmer, and dropped into the sea’, from where she ascends to the heavens. ‘Truly, it’s a joy to have become a clock once more with a well-oiled, precision mechanism,’ she enthuses during her climb. From such heights, she can look down on the story of her life with, if not quite freedom, something like poise. She is still ascending in Serre’s final sentences. The Narrator is nowhere to be seen.

‘What distinguishes a novelist’, Serre has argued, ‘is having access to the imagination and knowing how to blend that in with their own experience. When the two currents merge (which is what being a novelist is all about), it reveals something, it tells you something about existence that is far more richly variegated, far more penetrating and arresting and impossible to pin down, than the story of a life’. In her latest novel published in France, Notre si chère vieille dame auteur (2022), she dispenses with her Narrator character and places the figure of a famous woman writer centre stage. The book unfolds around the latter’s death bed, thronged by journalists and critics who grill her about her latest text. ‘We are troubled by something,’ one reporter complains. ‘You are an old woman (our dear little old woman), but there is also an old woman in the story.’ They pause. ‘Is it not you?’ The question hovers unresolved. Serre’s preferred literary mode is enchantment. She does not break the spell. 

Read on: Emma Fajgenbaum, ‘An Aphorist of the Cinema’, NLR 104.

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Under Western Eyes

Milan Kundera, the Czech writer who died earlier this summer aged 94, represented a number of things, but they were all variations – to borrow one of his own favourite words – on the theme of freedom. To the Western readership which embraced his work perhaps as eagerly as that of any non-Anglophone writer during the final quarter of the twentieth century (Marquez was the obvious competitor) he seemed to offer a distinctive, unorthodox and unassailably authoritative approach to novelistic form, literary history and the sanctity of private life. But no less important to Kundera’s project and legacy were the liberties he took, the freedoms he granted himself – from responsibility and rigour, from his obligations to coherence and even reality.

He was born on April Fools’ Day 1929 in a small Moravian city, Brno, where his father, a pianist, served as the head of the state conservatory named after his mentor Leoš Janáček. Kundera initially studied music before turning to poetry, short stories and plays while lecturing in world literature at the FAMU film school in Prague. Though he had been temporarily expelled in 1950 from the Party, his early collection, Man, A Wide Garden (1954), was a classic of Czech communist verse and Kundera was, in the words of his contemporary Ivan Klíma, ‘an indulged and rewarded child’ of the regime. That changed in 1967, when he published a novel critical of political orthodoxies, The Joke, and delivered a speech at the annual writers’ congress celebrating the vitality of Czech culture and denouncing censorship, a contribution to the reformist movement that culminated in Alexander Dubček’s Prague Spring. After the country’s invasion by Warsaw Pact forces in August 1968, Kundera was fired from his teaching post, and his books – along with those of 400 colleagues – were removed from libraries and banned from shops.

His emergence as a figure of international prominence was extraordinarily swift. Until the late 1960s, Kundera’s only work to attract attention outside Czechoslovakia was a play, The Owner of the Keys (1962). Following publication of The Joke however, he received a visit from a delegation of Latin American writers (Marquez, Cortazar and Fuentes); introducing the French edition, Louis Aragon called it one of the great novels of the century; a film adaptation was shown in London and New York. In 1973, his second novel, Life Is Elsewhere, which had been smuggled out of Czechoslovakia by Claude Gallimard, was awarded the Prix Médicis, an award for under-appreciated writers, and Edgar Faure, the President of the French parliament, helped Kundera and his wife, Věra Hrabánková, to obtain a travel visa. They moved first to Rennes, then Paris, where he was made a professor at the L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales. (He compared his move to a rebirth, something he had previously hoped for from Communism.) Briefly stateless after the revocation of his Czech citizenship, in 1981, he was granted a passport by Mitterrand.

By this point, he was arguably the country’s most famous émigré writer. A one-volume edition of Kundera’s story cycle Laughable Loves had appeared in Philip Roth’s Penguin series ‘Writers from the Other Europe’, and his stirring sequence of related narratives The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980), the first book he wrote in exile, was serialized in the New Yorker. When it appeared in hardback, the New York Times ran both an interview with Roth and a review by John Updike under the shared headline ‘The Most Original Book of the Season’. Kundera was felt to be bringing news from behind the Iron Curtain, offering descriptions of Soviet oppression and hypocrisy – the most memorable being a passage about the Communist poet Paul Éluard participating in an anniversary dance while his friend Záviš Kalandra was being hanged. But in a development that Kundera welcomed, his intervention was taken as primarily formal, political to the degree that it challenged the primacy of politics – no ‘dissident’ intervention along the lines of Czesław Milosz’s The Captive Mind (1953) or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward (1968). Kundera chose to write about the society he had left for the virtues it embodied, however residual or under siege. History in his telling was ‘an alien force’ which man ‘cannot control’, yet the novel was ‘born of man’s freedom’. His kind of ‘thinking novel’ – almost always divided into seven parts – was an assembly of narrated episodes, ‘reflective passages’, macro-structural dichotomies, adaptation of musical techniques (leitmotif, counterpoint, fugue, variation), anecdote, allegory, dream, fairytale and farce. There was consensus over the sort of unencumbered authorial figure he cut. John Bayley described him as ‘a man let loose among all the literary fashions of the West, grabbing this and that, intoxicated by the display patterns of freedom’, while Terry Eagleton, as different a critic as you could imagine (though unlikely successor to Bayley’s Oxford chair), remarked that he ‘treats the novel as a place where you can write anything you like’.

During the closing act of the Cold War, in a literary culture characterized by self-conscious cosmopolitanism and PEN galas, Kundera was the object of rhapsody, his work discussed – or name dropped – by a dizzying range of figures at or near their own height of prominence, from E.L. Doctorow to Tzvetan Todorov, Italo Calvino to Elizabeth Hardwick, David Lodge to Madonna. Raymond Carver, leading short story writer of the day, used the key passage from The Unbearable Lightness of Being – about the ‘lightness’ imposed on human beings by having only one life – as the epigraph for his final collection Elephant (1988). Kundera provoked not just passionate advocacy but acts of devotion. Ian McEwan, a committed anti-Communist and notably reluctant literary journalist, reviewed both The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Kundera’s next novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), in addition to interviewing him for Granta; Edmund White, newly celebrated as the author of A Boy’s Own Story (1982), translated from French his lecture on the tragedy befalling ‘Central Europe’; Susan Sontag turned theatre director to stage his play Jacques and his Master, at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater, in 1985.

Kundera’s aims and sensibility came into sharper focus with the appearance of his literary essays, collected in a series of books starting with The Art of the Novel in 1986. Reviewing Philip Kaufman’s film of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), Pauline Kael explained that Kundera set himself up as a ‘rational spokesman for playfulness’, mischievously adding (in parenthesis) that he ‘also sees it as a tradition’. That tradition originated in the early days of the novel – Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, de Laclos – and rallied again with Kafka, Musil and Broch. The tendencies of the nineteenth century, the novel’s putative peak, were at once too Romantic or subjectivist, too in thrall to plot at the expense of a confiding narrator. According to another conception of the thinking novel – Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism – Dostoevsky would belong in this company, as a practitioner of Menippean satire. But for Kundera, Dostoevsky was the bête noire, an example of a writer for whom feeling was elevated to the rank of truth – a lyrical attitude that the true novelist existed to expose.

In The Joke, he had offered something close to a paean to mid-life disappointment, the realization that one’s dreams were a lie. Life is Elsewhere (1973), about a poet and police informer who dies aged twenty, more directly revealed the enemy as youth and putatively youthful concepts – solipsism, revolutionary fervour, the poetic impulse. ‘A person becomes mature when he leaves his “lyrical age” behind’. At the end of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, in a passage Kundera described as an ‘oneiric image of an infantocratic future’, Taomina moves to an island exclusively populated by children and is killed. In the same book, Kundera outlined two kinds of laughter, that of the devil, who exhibits lofty disdain for the idea of order, and that of angels, who laugh to restore or underscore a sense of divine harmonies. His concept of a ‘broadly developed and mature personality’ was one that recognised ‘illusions concerning progress’.

There’s an obvious precedent for an aesthetically inclined, would-be apolitical, anti-Soviet, Dostoevsky-bashing novelist with a wife named Vera, who dispensed churlish mots, set great store by a specialized category of bad taste, published in a second language, railed against sentiment and seriousness, and found fame in exile: Vladimir Nabokov. But Kundera exhibited a deeper kinship with another exile from the East, Joseph Conrad, whose work was underpinned by a similar conviction about the futility of human agency. (Conrad went so far as refusing to sign petitions, even one protesting the imminent execution of his old friend Roger Casement.) Defining irony in a glossary of words collected in The Art of the Novel, Kundera quotes a would-be revolutionary from Conrad’s Under Western Eyes – a riposte to Dostoevsky – to the effect that an ironic stance negates ‘all saving instincts . . . all faith . . . all devotion . . . all action’. The formulation finds an inverted echo in Kundera’s claim, in a well-known passage from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, that ‘kitsch’, a term he associated with self-serving fantasies but applied to virtually anything he did not like, banishes ‘every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end up by doubting life itself)’ and ‘all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously)’.

The title of The Joke refers to a lampoon of Party optimism sent on a postcard by Ludvik, one of the narrators, to an earnest girlfriend, who reports him. But it also refers to the joke played on him by fate when decades later he tries to exact revenge. His ‘mission’ involves seducing the wife of the apparatchik who ruined his life only to discover that the man is a willing cuckold, glad to be shot of her. In the memorable final section of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tomas, a promiscuous former surgeon, and Tereza, the woman who has ended his regime of ‘erotic friendships’, are living deep in the Czech countryside, an internal exile resulting from a half-hearted but nonetheless ill-fated anti-Communist gesture on Tomas’s part. (The setting recalls Patusan, where ‘Lord’ Jim moves to leave behind what Marlow calls his ‘earthly failings’ and ‘reputation’.) In the final moments, Tereza apologises to Tomas. She had forced him to move back to Prague from Geneva on account of her homesickness. He is quick to reject the apology. When she says that surgery had been his mission, he insists that missions are ‘stupid’. He calls it ‘a terrific relief’ to recognize you’re ‘free, free of missions’ – a position no less applicable, it seems, to working as a surgeon than to taking a fruitless and costly stand against a repressive government.  

The central difference between Kundera and Conrad is how they conceive of the next step. Their attitude to radical programmes – to programmes of any kind – was similarly pitying and dismissive, but whereas Conrad deployed irony as something like a filter, a tool and marker of his detachment from terrestrial affairs, an aid in his search for transcendent meaning, Kundera was on constant guard against being gulled. To Conrad, a higher salvation was possible – if ‘saving instincts’ were to be rejected, it was in favour of a ‘saving truth’. Kundera receded into a pseudo-rationalist defeatism. 

Václav Havel, who had debated Kundera in the late 1960s on the question of whether Czechoslovakia was consigned to its fate, noted with admirable empathy that ‘total scepticism of Kundera’s kind’ was a ‘natural outcome of losing one’s enthusiastic illusions’. Kundera acknowledged that his own ‘lyric age’ had coincided with ‘the worst period of the Stalinist era’, yet this awareness failed to put a brake on his convictions. In his essay ‘Paris or Prague’, which appeared in English in Granta in 1984, he identified himself as an optimist of scepticism, a believer in scepticism’s force and power to prevail. He continued that what he shared with Central European novelists was ‘sorrow about the Western twilight. Not a sentimental sorrow. An ironic one.’ But it’s hard to construe what this distinction amounts to in the sphere of practice, how it differs from the fruitless despair that Sartre, discussing The Joke in his 1971 essay ‘The Socialism that Came in from the Cold’, was adamant that Kundera had stopped short of exhibiting.

Kundera’s positive vision was entirely retrospective. As he wrote of Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: ‘Only looking back could bring her consolation’. He defined a European as ‘one who is nostalgic for Europe’, and called ‘Czechoslovakia’, which originated in 1918, ‘too young’ a term to use. He was especially drawn to the idea of Central Europe, of which Bohemia formed a part, having been destroyed by Communism, an Eastern import – ‘raped by Asia’, in Havel’s paraphrase. He invoked a lost haven of pluralism and variety, a unity that ignored conventional topographic borders and markers, and was prone to saying things like ‘Do you know that in the seventeenth century Lithuania was a powerful European nation?’ It was exactly the sort of misty thinking that he professed to deride. Perry Anderson compared the notion that Kundera’s homeland was closer to ‘Western than Eastern patterns of historical experience’ to ‘the kind of redescription to be found in estate agents’ brochures’. Even Timothy Garton Ash, a fellow promoter of a Central European mirage, recognized that Kundera’s treatment of Russia was ‘absurd’.

The sternest rebuke came from Joseph Brodsky, writing in 1985, in response to an essay in which Kundera cleanly equated Communism, Dostoevky’s novels, and Eastern irrationality. Brodsky was no supporter of the Soviet Union – he moved to America after enduring a decade of persecution – but he lamented Kundera’s ‘lopsided’ historical vision. And though he said that he could readily understand why Kundera should wish to be more European than the Europeans, he argued that Kundera displayed a stubborn aversion to remembering the intellectual origins of Nazism and Marxism, and the emotional radicalism that was supposed to underpin them. ‘The idea of the noble savage, of an inherently good human nature hampered by bad institutions, of the ideal state, of social justice and so forth – none of these originated or blossomed on the banks of the Volga’, he wrote. On seeing a Russian tank in the street, there was ‘every reason to think of Diderot’ – the writer Kundera had turned to when asked to adapt The Idiot for the stage. (‘I do not feel qualified to debate those who blame Voltaire for the gulag’, Kundera said a few months later, when receiving the Jerusalem Prize.) Dostoevsky’s novels in fact portrayed the Russian denouements to scenarios that developed in the West. The Possessed, for example, provided a reminder that Communism had encountered greater resistance in Russia than it later would in Kundera’s beloved and super-sensible Central Europe.

Brodsky, though focused on a local debate, had identified Kundera’s characteristic capacity for swatting aside any obstacle to what he wanted to say or do. He was not alone. Milan Jungmann claimed that in Kundera’s interviews his ‘true likeness is completely obliterated’. Like Tomas’s lover Sabina in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he began to insert ‘mystifications’ into his biography, describing himself in the period before the invasion as a ‘relatively unknown Czech intellectual’. The scholar J.P. Stern accused him of perpetuating ‘the myths on which he and I were brought up’. Todorov noted that Kundera’s belief that barbarity reigns was hardly compatible with the wide recognition of his work; Will Self that his reductive certitude was ‘poorly governed’ by its avowed belief in a pluralist mindset. Kundera’s fiction was by no means immune. Updike felt that elements of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting were ‘rooted in the sky, in whims beyond accounting’, and later summarized its effect as ‘etherealized’. Klíma, notionally ventriloquizing the position of the Czech intelligentsia – though with notable gusto – said that ‘the hardness of life has a much more complicated shape’ than we find in Kundera’s novels, which instead resembled ‘the sort of picture you would see from a very capable foreign journalist who’d spent a few days in our country’.

Yet this cluster of vices – a vice-in-variations – is largely absent from The Unbearable Lightness of Being. A star-crossed love story, it is, along with The Joke, his most solidly constructed book, far less capricious and conversational than its predecessor The Book of Laughter and Forgetting or successor Immortality (1988) or the four novellas he wrote in French, Slowness (1995), Identity (1998), Ignorance (2000) and The Festival of Insignificance (2014). It also offers the widest range of competing visions, and more than anything he wrote resists – though it did of course attract – the go-to Kundera adjective, ‘brilliant’. Janet Malcolm noted that the novel seemed to lead a ‘charmed life . . . Every door Kundera tries opens for him’. The claim is reminiscent of Updike calling The Great Gatsby ‘superbly fortunate’ and of James Wood’s reflection that certain novels – he named Dead Souls, Midnight’s Children, and Herzog – achieve something like ‘the inventor’s secret machine, elixir, or formula’.

In a sense, The Joke, with its devilish central conceit, more properly belongs in this company. But The Unbearable Lightness of Being offers portraits of characters who achieve dynamic life while illustrating the narrator’s stated theme – whether or not to live with ties, and the impossibility, within a single life, of evaluating the chosen course. The most palpable source of luck is that the seductive quiddity of narrative works not only to rein in Kundera’s discursive tics but also outwit his habitual certainties. The ‘lightness’ of a life without commitment is revealed as freighted with risk, as fraught with danger, as an existence weighed down by connection or conviction. The emphasis on the difficulty of having just one life, of not having the benefit of ‘eternal recurrence,’ forces a recognition in Kundera of the precarious truth-status of any position: engagement or apathy, feeling or detachment, Geneva or Prague. But, however at odds this was with how he talked about the world, it vindicates his idea of the novel – as a vehicle for uncertainty, a route to ‘suprapersonal wisdom’, much as Franz, an academic and devoted dissident with whom Tomas shares a lover, says that New York achieves a richness that far exceeds the conscious intentions of ‘human design’. Kundera frequently cut corners – Todorov used the word ‘oversimplification’, Klíma ‘simplified’ – but he also managed to write at least one book that tells the reader, as he said a novel should, that ‘things are not as simple as they seem’.

In 2002, Harold Bloom, in a nominal introduction to a collection of essays exploring Kundera’s work, cast doubt over the writer’s ‘lasting eminence’. He called The Unbearable Lightness of Being ‘formulaic, over-determined, and in places unbearably light’, and asserted – on what basis he does not specify – that ‘young people no longer go off to the Czech capital with his novels in their backpacks’. Kundera may have ceased to be a cult or sensation, the near-to-hand reference-point that he had been for the Gen X heroes of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (1995) and Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming (1995).

Such gloating talk of Kundera’s eclipse is exaggerated. If he was no longer in backpacks, he was still on library desks and bedside tables. And his example has endured. Geoff Dyer, noting that readers had started to take their ‘amazement’ with Kundera for granted, argued that, far from being a mere ‘influence’ like, say, Martin Amis – stylistic, or tonal, or temperamental – he had developed a novelistic software that fellow practitioners could download. Writers who have directly cited his influence include Adam Thirlwell, Jonathan Safran Foer, Benjamin Markovits, Leïla Slimani, Taiye Selasi. Though The Unbearable Lightness of Being has claims to being a separate, extra-authorial phenomenon – it is at once his best-known and least typical book – the vision of the thinking novel as exemplified in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Immortality anticipated the essayism and autofiction now rather narrowly credited to W.G. Sebald. 

A greater challenge to Kundera’s legacy than the inevitable loss of modishness may be the charge most extensively levelled by Joan Smith in the ‘Czech mates’ chapter of her book Misogynies (1989). Even Jonathan Coe, having defended him against Smith’s claims, ended his 2015 essay ‘How Important Is Milan Kundera Today?’ with a reference to ‘the problematic sexual politics which send ripples of disquiet through even his finest books’. But this seems not to be the dominant position today. Gina Frangello, writing in the LARB in 2020, acknowledged Kundera’s misogyny only in the course of celebrating his work as a ‘definitive craft book’ on the uses of authorial omniscience. As recently as May – 37 years after the Madonna name-check – the English-Albanian pop star Dua Lipa praised The Unbearable Lightness of Being for its portrayal of sexual relationships.

It is easy to imagine Kundera’s novel enjoying an essentially charmed afterlife as well, proving sufficiently resilient or multivalent to withstand polemical blows, becoming a beneficiary as well a victim of the loss of its original context in Cold War jockeying and Anglo-American fetishism of Slavic sexual freedoms. John Banville expressed his astonishment, on returning to the book in the new millennium, at how little ‘a work so firmly rooted in its time’ had seemed to age. But then distance is often a boon to the longer-term reputation of writers apparently defined by a series of spot-lit moments, offering readers a reprieve from churlish sermonizing, misplaced stridency, or the spectacle of artistic decline, and bringing a sense of proportion and perspective, even a kind of serenity, a freedom from the fray, that provides more fertile ground for appreciation. As Tomas reflects, following a break-up with Tereza, ‘Now what was tiring had disappeared and only the beauty remained’.

Read on: Jiří Hájek, ‘Condition of the Novel (Czechoslovakia)’, NLR I/29.

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Non-Events

Narrative painting in the European tradition tended to depict drama and action: scenes from biblical tales, classical mythology and historical events such as military confrontations and nuptial pagaentries. By contrast, the Chinese tradition of narrative painting was less overtly dramatic and more detached – ‘interstitial’ rather than ‘architectonic’, to borrow terms Andrew Plaks applied to classical Chinese fiction and historiography. Chinese literary narratives put equal, if not more, emphasis on ‘non-events’, or the interstitial spaces between events – purposeless gatherings and inconsequential conversations. Even battle scenes in Chinese historical fiction are often slowed down and their tension diffused using devices such as interspersed verse, discursive digression and frequent recapitulation, producing a ritualised ‘hiatus’ rather than a climactic action. Analagous effects can be seen in traditional Chinese narrative painting, always closely connected to history and literature, and where the ‘interstitial’ quality is if anything more pronounced since paintings convey narrative spatially rather than temporally.

The equivalent of ‘narrative painting’ in Chinese is xu shi hua (picture that tells a story) or gu shi hua (picture of an ancient event).The two concepts are intertwined. Sometimes a contemporary incident was indirectly depicted through the evocation of the past – especially common when the painting served a political purpose. Narrative painting flourished during the political turbulence of the Jin dynasty (1115–1234), when North China was conquered by the Jurchens, ethnically the same group as the Manchu who would seize the whole of China in the seventeenth century, later adding what are today Tibet and Xinjiang to their conquests. The Jurchens defeated the Northern Song, pushing the Han rulers south of the Huai River, re-established as the Southern Song (1127–1279). In the south, the court painter Li Tang produced Duke Wen of Jin Recovering His State, using this ancient story of dynastic revival – from the seventh century BC – to express Emperor Gaozong’s ambition to reclaim the lost land. In the north, Yang Bangji, a Chinese literatus serving at the court of Sinicized Jurchen ruler Hailing (1149–61), depicted the Song’s humiliating tribute mission in A Diplomatic Mission to the Jin, in an effort to legitimize the Jurchens’ rule over North China.

Among the political paintings of the time, the theme of Mingfei chusai (Consort Ming Departing for the Frontier) stands out on account of its female protagonist. Consort Ming refers to Wang Zhaojun (54 BC–19BC), a lady-in-waiting. According to Han Shu (History of the Former Han), she was sent by Emperor Yuan to marry the ruler of the neighbouring Xiongnu empire – an early example of heqin, a diplomatic marriage alliance to ensure peace between China and surrounding states. This historical episode was fictionalised in a collection of short stories, Xijing zaji (Miscellaneous Records of the Western Capital) some three centuries later. There, a corrupt court painter, whom Zhaojun is too proud to bribe, produces a deliberately flawed portrait of the royal consort – so flawed the emperor decides to send her away. Just as she leaves, the emperor appreciates her beauty for the first time, regrets his decision to exile her and has all his painters executed. The legend stirred the imaginations of Chinese literati and street performers alike. Generations of poets commemorated Zhaojun in their verses and made pilgrimages to her hometown. Demoted mandarins compared their own loyalty to Zhaojun’s patriotism, blaming their exiles on deceitful opponents like the villainous painter.

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Gong Suran (12th–13th century), Mingfei chusai tu (Consort Ming Departing for the Frontier), preserved at Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts, Japan.

The handscroll Consort Ming Departing for the Frontier is one of the earliest visual representations of the legend. The scroll, which many attribute to the Jin dynasty, is currently preserved in the Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts in Japan. It measures 30.2 cm vertically and 160.2 cm horizontally when fully spread out. It shows Zhaojun being escorted into exile. The sand hills in the background are indicated with light-tone washes. Wind is suggested by the fluttering banner, waving ribbons and the sleeves half-covering the faces. The composition comprises four sections, arranged horizontally in a linear fashion. Those who came to look at the painting at the time would have unfolded the scroll from right to left. What they would see first would be the two Xiongnu men on horseback leading the procession, one carrying a flag, with a foal trotting alongside. Next would appear the lady-in-waiting herself and her maid, both riding a horse led by a servant. Wearing a fur hat with earmuffs and dressed like a warrior, Zhaojun grips the reins and looks ahead. The maid turns around as if trying to catch a last glimpse of her disappearing hometown. She carries a pipa, the four-stringed Chinese lute which, according to legend, Zhaojun played well. Following them is a group of seven men, among them a Han envoy holding a fan to shield his face from the wind. The last section depicts a Xiongnu man on horseback holding a falcon, and a hound loping along slightly ahead of the horse and its rider. The scene was painted with ink on paper, in delicate brushstrokes reminiscent of the baimiao style of the Northern Song master Li Gonglin (1049–1106). The narrative is minimal: instead of the drama of the send-off or arrival, the scene presented is, in essence, a ‘non-event’, its figures simply on their way. Yet the circumstantial details of this ‘interstitial’ space trigger the imagination, carrying a train of associations: their daily meals would come from hunting using the falcon, the sorrowful melody emitted out of the pipa would make wild geese linger, the foal trotting ahead of Zhaojun’s horse suggests the motherhood that would inevitably follow her marriage in a foreign land.  

Gong Suran, Mingfei chusai tu (detail), preserved at Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts, Japan.

Little is known about the identity of the painter, who signed the scroll ‘Zhenyang / Gong Suran hua’ (‘painted by Gong Suran of Zhenyang’. They were once assumed to be a Taoist woman artist because the signature was misread as ‘Zhenyang Gong / Suran’, ‘gong’ meaning temple. The current consensus is that Gong is the surname of the artist, and that Zhenyang was today’s Zhengding county in Hebei province, which fell under the Jurchen rule at the time. The stamp above the painter’s name reads ‘seal of zhao fu shi’, referring to a temporary post in charge of military affairs during wartime. Some speculate that the seal belonged to Wu Xian (?–1234), who was assigned the post in Zhenyang in 1217 and organized military resistance against Mongols, who frequently attacked the Jin state. In 1214, after Genghis Khan besieged Jin’s capital Zhongdu (the southwestern part of present-day Beijing), the Jurchens sent a diplomatic delegation to the Mongols, offering ‘gold and silks, five hundred boys and girls, three thousand horses’, as well as the Jurchen Princess Qiguo, daughter of Emperor Wanyan Yongji, to be married to Genghis Khan. It is possible that Gong’s painting of the legend of Zhaojun was commissioned to record the contemporary heqin event. The hypothesis is consistent with the scroll’s pictorial details: the black flag with a white sun in the middle is the symbol of the Jurchens; the clothes of the Xiongnu riders resemble those worn by the Jurchens and the Mongols; the hair style of two of the envoys was typical among the Mongols. One of the three colophons appended to the painting appears to confirm the theory. The poem ridicules heqin as desperate politics and sympathizes with the painter who, their intention delicately concealed, had succeeded in making the viewer feel sorrow about both the ancient story and contemporary matters.

Was Gong Suran a woman? If so, the painting would be a very rare representation of a woman protagonist by a woman painter concerning a political theme. It would certainly challenge the conventional conception of woman painters in dynastic times as courtesans who depicted willows on fans to reject clients’ advances, or as gentry who picked up their skills from brothers or fathers only to produce paintings as gifts in social exchanges. Museum labels tend to refer to Gong as a woman, but this is an assumption likely based on the name’s feminine intonation. There is no historical evidence available to confirm the painter’s gender or anything else about them. Perhaps the question should instead be: what was the general experience of women under Jurchen rule, especially if we see the image of Zhaojun as not only a historical icon but also a mirror of contemporary lives? Literary sources, such as Jinshi (History of Jin), praise women for their military skills – for leading troops and defending cities. Jin society appeared to be less hierarchical: one Song envoy visiting the Jin state was astonished by the sight of Emperor Aguda’s wife sitting next to him receiving guests and a second wife rolling up her sleeves to serve food. Acculturation went both ways. Elite Jurchen women started to wear silk and read Chinese classics; Han women, meanwhile, had more access to public venues under Jurchen rule than their counterparts in the Southern Song where foot-binding and Confucian ethics would confine them to interior spaces. In a large Jin mural (1167) at Yanshan temple in Shanxi province, women can be seen walking freely on the streets, mingling with men, shopping at the market, playing pipa in an open-air pavilion. This forms a stark contrast to the depiction of women in the Northern Song masterpiece Qingming shanghe tu (Along the River during the Qingming Festival), completed sixty years earlier: of the eight hundred figures featured in the scroll, only a dozen or so are women, many half hidden behind windows or peering from sedan chairs.

Zhang Yu (12th–13th century), Wenji guihan tu (Lady Wenji Returning to Han, detail), preserved at Jilin Museum, China.

The composition of the Gong scroll is almost identical to that of another Jin painting, now stored at the Jilin Museum. It was signed by a court painter named Zhang Yu serving at the Commission of Palace Services. The crucial difference in the Zhang scroll is the omission of the maid figure carrying the pipa. Later generations titled the painting Wenji guihan tu (Lady Wenji Returning to Han). Cai Wenji (177–239), of the Eastern Han dynasty, was abducted by Xiongnu invaders but eventually returned home after twelve years’ captivity. During the Song–Jin period, Wenji’s tale was frequently depicted in paintings, many in sequential scenes based on a verse epic called Hujia shiba pai (Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute), composed by the Tang poet Liu Shang (727–805). Like Zhaojun, Wenji also had a contemporary reincarnation. When the Jurchens captured the last two emperors of the Northern Song, they also took captive Empress Dowager Wei, who had to spend sixteen years in Manchuria until her son, by then Emperor Gaozong of the Southern Song, signed a peace treaty with the Jurchens in exchange for her release. Questions remain as to whether the Gong scroll copied the Zhang scroll or whether both were based on an earlier painting. Whichever is the case, there is an undeniable relation between them: a poem on the Gong scroll juxtaposes Zhaojun’s pipa with Wenji’s flute; Emperor Qianlong’s inscription on the Zhang scroll contrasts Wenji’s rehabilitation with Zhaojun’s permanent expulsion. In this alternative tradition of visualizing human experience, the drama of departure or return is out of frame. Instead, a hiatus: an interstitial space that seems directionless and endless.

Read on: J. X. Zhang, ‘The Roar of the Elephant’, NLR 131.

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Loose End

The writer Victor Heringer (1988–2018) did not consider himself properly Brazilian. Spending formative years in Chile and Argentina – after which he had to relearn Portuguese – he once explained that any affection for his country sprang from a kind of ‘uncomfortable amazement’. His claim to be apátrida, stateless, reflected a fundamental repudiation of tribalisms and ideologies of all kinds. Today there can be no vanguards, no faiths, or as he proclaimed in Pessoa magazine: ‘Down with Progress! Long live Walter Benjamin!’ His true homeland was irony, something he half-joked was unknown to his compatriots. In a 2014 article – all his contributions to Pessoa are collected in Vida desinteressante (2021) – he defined this not as the pointed drawl that indicates the opposite of the ostensible utterance, but as Scott Fitzgerald defined intelligence, ‘the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function’. Its ruling instance was the compenetration of life and death: ‘Infinity is inscribed into our perishable flesh’.

Simultaneity is the theme of Misantropical, Heringer’s incantatory video made with the musician Dimitri BR for the 2012 São Paulo Biennale, and begets other reverberations in his video work, poetry, journalism and fiction, setting up frictions between melancholy and playfulness in inconsistent ways especially suited (he often said) to the restless attention-style of digital culture. Of course, the new and the old were for him entwined; he was at the same time updating his great hero Machado de Assis. And while he milked the irony of a Brazilian being the greatest ironist of all time, it’s surely because Machado, a mulatto as well as disabled and epileptic, was equally an outsider in his own culture. My failure to find anything online about how Heringer fits into the national literary scene could be simply because he doesn’t.

His debut novel, Gloria (2012), contrasted two phenomena, online life with its witty self-fakery and the growth of Pentecostalism, through two incurably depressed brothers; it was high on metafiction, using anachronistic language registers and pseudo-footnotes. The Love of Singular Men (2016), published this year in a remarkable translation by James Young, is more earnest, despite its slowly emerging snares, and therefore perhaps more daring. It is about first love and aloneness (‘singularity’). Partly set in the mid-seventies on the edge of Rio, in a poor district where the one big house belongs to the narrator Camilo’s family, it is dressed in his shifting subjectivity. We first meet him as a disabled, introverted thirteen-year-old with wildly dysfunctional parents who don’t allow him out except to school, on the day his father inexplicably brings home a ‘coffee-with-watered-down-milk colour’ boy named Cosme to live with them. Camilo instantly hates him, ‘who knows why. Hate has neither reason nor purpose.’

In a refreshingly anti-psychological novel, this is the condition of most emotions, offered as facts that observably succeed each other, typically in the form of physical sensation rather than as inner processes. Love is as arbitrary as hate: ‘After I walloped him with my staff, my hate no longer took Cosme’s name or shape. And so, with a single blow, I began to love him.’ Over the course of fragmentary encounters, love and lust become somehow requited. But what consciousness is remembering all this, yet never trying to make retrospective sense of it? Chapter five introduces a different time frame, that of fifty-something Camilo, still on crutches, in the present day. ‘After more than thirty years away, I came back to Queím. I want to die right where I was born. Everyone likes a little symmetry.’

A double narrative now unfolds. One, Camilo reliving his days as the overwhelmed naïf discovering the streets with Cosme, learning how to masturbate with the boys, the surprise first kiss, the terror of abandonment, Cosme’s homophobic murder. Two, Camilo today as the grumpy misanthrope, railing against the sameness of people or Rio’s cheap upgrades, lamenting the fading of memories that are nevertheless brutally vivid in the telling. Cosme’s death spelled the end of Camilo’s freedom as a teen. As a solitary adult, a period of dealing antiques provided some meagre human connection: ‘our bonds are cardboard boxes full of junk’.

When this sad man lures into his home an untethered boy rather like Cosme, the two strands begin to chime in unacknowledged, disturbing ways. Believing (on flimsy grounds) that Renato is Cosme’s killer’s grandson, yet developing a fondness for him, Camilo is batted between feelings that must be gleaned between the lines – quasi-affection, anger, arousal – given his petrification ever since the murder of his love. This pudeur is one of the most moving figurations of authorial compassion in the novel.

The narrator’s passivity demands active work from the reader. On top of the irregular alternation and overlap of the two timeframes, key information is not released chronologically. We know from the start that Cosme will be killed, steeping each moment of the pair’s two-week idyll in dread as we read. We learn much later of Camilo’s mother’s theory about Cosme’s origins, communicated in a posthumous letter. Cosme was possibly the child of a victim of his father under the dictatorship – suddenly revealed to his son as a torturer – but ‘I never tried to get to the bottom of it . . . It might have been an invention of her bitterness’. What if Renato’s identity is likewise an invention of Camilo’s bitterness? The hum of uncertainty and its implications are amplified by the novel’s literary and sonar patchwork: sharp sensual detail, foggy ambiguity, realism both social and magical, contradictory opinions, different orders of fantasy. The very concept of ‘first’ love is simultaneously upheld and subverted, as Camilo never loved a second time. The several pages dense with the names of real people’s first loves, which Heringer solicited from the internet, both embrace and exclude Camilo: ‘Like André loved Luca, like Tayana loved Nanda, I love my Cosme, my first and only.’

When it comes to fantasy, one scene stands out. The pair go to meet their usual gang of young toughs in the derelict slave house, and stage a kiss. The others freeze, while Camilo steels himself for extravagant violence; instead, a stylized brawl unfolds in slow motion and peters out. ‘Afterwards, for something to say, Knots commented that I was white and Cosme was brown, I was rich and he was poor . . . and then laughed . . . And that was that.’ Such easy acceptance of gayness from street kids in 1976 is surely wishful writing. It sends me to something that Heringer’s brother, in a recorded memorial, said about him: Victor often used the word ternura, tenderness; he did love the world, but really it was ‘more of an aspiration . . . He had an extraordinary capacity for both love and hate’.

In the slave house scene, then, love is wilfully made to prevail, as it also does – more pathetically – in the present, at the novel’s end. After a slapstick revenge fantasy, in which Camilo’s attempts to murder Renato are repeatedly thwarted by his disability, the tension lifts and the chapter numbers start going backwards. We move into the third person. Camilo has become a normal, fussy parent-figure to Renato; but he’s right back in the insecurity that tormented him with Cosme.

As if to adulterate a still too-pure form, various graphic elements appear. Here are Camilo’s childhood drawings, there, stills from a documentary Renato is watching, elsewhere the reproduction of a school attendance sheet. A kind of emoji, a circlet of commas, appears whenever the sun (which paleface Camilo hates) is mentioned, and is used to illustrate other violent evocations, such as scattered brains. The sign is complexly suggestive; the other visual extras – lacking, say, Sebald’s allusive distance in which meaning floats in the disjunction of text and image – provide little more than pleasing illustration. The book remains this side of putting language itself into question.

Was it all conscientiously planned? Heringer once said that he loved the serendipity of creation, like exploring a mountain and discovering new places to twist your ankle. His commitment to heterodoxy, singularity and incongruity made him an artist of the loose end. He killed himself aged twenty nine, when he was beginning to make his name. Perhaps the ‘who knows why’ that whispers through all his work applies also to this.

Read on: Roberto Schwarz, ‘Competing Readings’, NLR 48.

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Structures of Feeling

The front cover of Lucy R. Lippard’s I See/You Mean, republished in 2021 by New Documents after decades out of print, is a pale shade of violet. On its lower left side, a map of what appear to be sea currents, signalled by a series of arrows; its upper right side may depict land, with rivers marked as lines. The first edition, published by the feminist press Chrysalis in 1979, carried a version of this same design, but in a deep blue. How might we interpret the change? Towards the end of Lippard’s book, we read that blue ‘is complete calm, depth of feelings, the medium of empathy’, while violet might express ‘emotional insecurity’ or a desire for approval. An additional change has been made to the back cover, which now features a black and white photograph of the author. Looking down at something out of frame, Lippard could be standing at a desk or table, perhaps reading something or examining images, writing or annotating (the question of whether she was an ‘artist’ rather than a ‘writer’ was raised around the time of the book’s writing). Barely visible in the background are the ordered panes of a glass door, a hint of a structure that permeates I See/You Mean: the grid.

I See/You Mean is an entropic novel, one constantly on the verge of disintegrating into fragments. Lippard is principally known as an art critic and curator, and her book derives from the North American art world of the late 1960s, a period in which Lippard was working as a researcher for art books to support her writing career, was a mother to a young son, and participated in activist groups like Art Workers’ Coalition and Women Artists in Revolution. The writing of the novel coincided with some of her most renowned artistic projects, and their concerns are legible within it. One was Six Years (1973), whose lengthy subtitle gives an account of Lippard’s ambitions for the work:

Six Years: The dematerialisation of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones), edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard.

Another was a series of conceptual art exhibitions she organised between 1969 and 1974, often referred to as the ‘numbers’ shows because each was titled after the population of the city in which they were staged (the last of these, featuring only women artists, c. 7500, was held in Valencia, California). The third was the set of ‘feminist essays on women’s art’ collected in From the Center (1976). I See/You Mean, then, dates from a time when Lippard’s minimalist and conceptualist allegiances were being overwritten by feminism.

Lippard’s novel is on its surface an oblique portrait of New York’s avant-garde scene. One chapter, ‘Log V/Everybody’, for example, describes a party through a range of devices: unattributed snatches of speech, lists of conversation topics (‘Ad Reinhardt, money, day care, science fiction, Angela Davis’), movements (‘D to G to C and M and R’), data about guests (‘69 of the people at the party who live in New York City live below 14th Street; 18 live on the Upper East Side’) and their interactions (‘26% talked to people they had never met before; 17% of these because they felt physically attracted’). The quasi-systematic, quasi-rational cataloguing of information lies somewhere between Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist accounts of kinship systems and Dan Graham’s language piece March 31, 1966, with its list of measurements from the artist to the nearest subway station, to the paper in his typewriter, the ‘.00000098 miles’ between his cornea and retinal wall.

Most of I See/You Mean centres on four characters called A, B, D and E. Its most typical device is the description of imaginary photographs. Julia Bryan-Wilson has speculated that, used to writing about images as a critic, Lippard felt the need to invent some to hang her fiction on. Their effect is to conjure something of the solidity of the index, as well as distance. In photographs, unlike the movements of consciousness that have predominated in the modern novel, we see characters frozen and from outside. The additional representational form sets us at a remove from the characters, particularly as photographs are by their nature always in the past tense. The ekphrastic passages are interspersed with dated diary entries, lengthy quotations from other books, fragments of characters’ internal monologues, star sign information, I Ching readings (which might make us think of Lee Lozano’s 1969 I Ching Piece). Applied to the characters’ relationships, their jealousies, their pleasures, their arguments about feminism, writing and sex, these devices are ways of ‘managing experience’, to use Eve Meltzer’s phrase for the repressions and returns of affect in conceptual art.

I See/You Mean embodies a decentred, intimate positivism: the accumulation of documentation never amounts to a totality. If anything, it starts to break down. Diagrams such as the one carried on the book’s cover reduce their objects to a state of conceptual order, but in doing so reveal the way the objects they depict – the deep complexity of oceans, tides and shores for example – exceed their dimensions. The ocean is the book’s central metaphor for this dialectic between form and feeling. At one point, there is a description of a series of photographs demonstrating the effects of different wind-speeds on the sea surface; this is followed by a dated fragment saying ‘I need the sea to be the book’s armature; no – its medium’. Elsewhere, an account of sea currents might just as well denote the movements of emotion:

‘…there are deep flows, generally as slow drifts of immense masses of water, and these are of equal significance with the superficial currents in the whole system of mixing and interchanging of water masses … Ocean currents are caused by conditions existing in the water as well as by outside forces. Of the internal causes, most prominent are those due to differences in pressure; unequal pressure results when one part of the ocean is heated to a higher temperature than another … There may be internal waves at several different levels, and each series of waves may have some effect on those above and below’.

At another moment, two women discuss the orgasmic potential of the sea:

What turns you on?

Sexually?

Yes.

Well, if I think about the ocean – the idea or image of the ocean, something cool and clear and wet and all-enveloping. Sounds of waves breaking, the rhythms all the same but different, crossing each other, and endless. It rocks me out of my head and thoughts and inhibitions, I suppose.

I can see that. Oh yes. The sensual curve of a wave, like a body, the build-up. I’d never thought of it as directly erotic.

Anything moving or changing or heaving or curving. But slow.

The desire for the sea stems from the way it carries along, swallows up, obliterates the subject. The book begins and ends on the beach – the edge of the ocean, where human figures can still stand before being encompassed by its depths.

I See/You Mean’s dedication reads ‘For Susana, who always understands the sensuous grid’. In Rosalind Krauss’s account, the grid is the exemplary form in modernist art, symptomatic of visual art’s desire to emancipate itself from literature, narrative and discourse, and to declare its autonomy from nature, mimesis and the real world. What happens when the grid is brought back into literature – as in the book’s various devices of description, measurement and commentary – and applied to events and states of mind? In I See/You Mean, the absolutism of the grid is compromised. Its grids are all partial and incomplete – tentative frameworks drawn in coloured pencil, to test a logic of feeling. The novel is sensitive to the grid’s edges, the places where its claims to reason and totality are problematised. This is a social fact as much as a philosophical one. At the party, we are informed that the only two black people see each other across the room and ‘exchange ironic glances’. While the book’s initial grid of characters (two men, two women) might suggest a heterosexual logic, as it progresses A sleeps with B (a woman) and E (a man, who is gay), as well as D, her partner (and has an affair with Oliver, one of the two black guests at the party). To say the grid is sensuous, moreover, is not only to say that this abstract structure is brought into contact with bodies and all the psychological confusion they bring with them. It is to say – as Meltzer has – that grids are already sensuous. The clarity of grids is enticing. There is a beauty in their aesthetic. We can become deeply attached to them.

‘Feelings are facts’, says Yvonne Rainer. This is another statement of emotional positivism. Rainer’s films from the early 1970s share a great deal with I See/You Mean: the New York art scene, minimalism as it encounters the effects of the women’s movement, the cool presentation of emotionally charged material, taxonomic methods applied to the interpersonal. The final sequence of her Lives of Performers (1972) restages photographs from a book documenting G. W. Pabst’s film Pandora’s Box (1929): representations of representations of a representation. About three-quarters of the way through, ‘No Expectations’ by the Rolling Stones starts to play, catching the spectator off guard. Pop music’s contrasting quality of allowing the listener to access and feel their emotions renders the moment, for me at least, almost unbearably moving. (‘Moving’ is a key word in the Rainer dictionary: ‘No to moving and being moved’ is the most over-quoted phrase in her writing.) Yet Rainer lets the Rolling Stones do this work for her. Everything on screen remains carefully controlled. I See/You Mean concludes differently. The structuring devices appear less and less frequently, while the distanced account of the various characters yields to a focus on A, speaking in the first person. Her narration resembles Lippard’s own life (she is in Spain, finishing a book, alone with her young child). This is close to – maybe is – ‘autobiography’. It is tempting to think that one of the determinants of this difference is feminism, a label that Rainer was still wary of embracing at the time, unlike Lippard, who said that writing the book made her into a feminist.

I see – the visual; you mean – language, literature. (Spoken aloud, ‘see’ and ‘you’ sound like ‘C’ and ‘U’, more letters.) We could interpret the book’s title in light of the feminist theories of the gaze elaborated shortly after, which posit women as the screen onto which the fantasies and fears of the male looker are projected, subjecting women to their meanings. Optics is one type of grid; language is another. Still, ‘I’ and ‘You’ are ambiguous here – could ‘I’ be the writer of the book? To ‘mean’, also, is not only to have meaning for another, against one’s will; it can also be to intend, which implies agency. And meaning is not only the bloodless work of signification, but the carrying of resonance, emotional weight. Seeing and meaning may sometimes be opposed, but they can also be connected (‘I see what you mean’). If Lippard’s title remains enigmatic, this may be because it is happy to slide between the analytical clarity of the grid and the mess of experience that eludes its grasp.

Read on: Caitlín Doherty, ‘Between Ego and Libido: On the Work of Carolee Schneemann’ , NLR 138.