Where the Stress Falls

by Susan Sontag

  In Walser’s fictions one is (as in so much of modern art) always inside a head, but this universe—and this despair—is anything but solipsistic. It is charged with compassion: awareness of the creatureliness of life, of the fellowship of sadness. “What kind of people am I thinking of?” Walser’s voice asks in “A Sort of Speech” (1925). “Of me, of you, of all our theatrical little dominations, of the freedoms that are none, of the un-freedoms that are not taken seriously, of these destroyers who never pass up a chance for a joke, of the people who are desolate?” That question mark at the end of the answer is a typical Walser courtesy. Walser’s virtues are those of the most mature, most civilized art. He is a truly wonderful, heartbreaking writer.

  [1982]

  Danilo Kiš

  THE DEATH OF Danilo Kiš on October 15, 1989, at the age of fifty-four, wrenchingly cut short one of the most important journeys in literature made by any writer during the second half of the twentieth century. Born on the rim of the Yugoslav cauldron (in Subotica, near the frontier with Hungary) a few years before World War II to a Hungarian Jewish father (Kiš is a Hungarian name) who perished in Auschwitz and a Serb Orthodox mother from rural Montenegro, raised mostly in Hungary and in Montenegro, a graduate in literature of the university in Belgrade, where he made his debut as a writer, eventually a part-time expatriate, doing some teaching in France, and finally a full-time one, in Paris, where he lived his last ten years, Kiš had a life span that matched, from start to finish, what might have been thought the worst the century had to offer his part of Europe: Nazi conquest and the genocide of the Jews, followed by Soviet takeover.

  Nineteen eighty-nine, the year Kiš died of cancer, was, of course, the annus mirabilis in which Soviet-style totalitarian rule ended in Central Europe. By mid-October, the collapse of what had seemed immutable was clearly under way; three weeks later, the Berlin Wall was torn down. It is comforting to think that he died knowing only the good news. Happily—it is the only thing about his premature death which gives some consolation—he didn’t live to see the collapse of the multi-confessional, multi-ethnic state of which he was a citizen (his “mixed” origin made Kiš very much a Yugoslav), and the return, on European soil, in his own country, of concentration camps and genocide. An ardent foe of nationalist vanities, he would have loathed Serb ethnic fascism even more than he loathed the neo-Bolshevik official culture of the Second Yugoslavia it has replaced. It is hard to imagine that, if he were still alive, he could have borne the destruction of Bosnia.

  The amount of history, or horror, a writer is obliged to endure does not make him or her a great writer. But geography is destiny. For Kiš there was no retreating from an exalted sense of the writer’s place and of the writer’s responsibility that, literally, came with the territory. Kiš was from a small country where writers are for better and for worse important, with the most gifted becoming moral, and sometimes even political, legislators. Perhaps more often for worse: it was eminent Belgrade writers who provided the ideological underpinning of the Serbian genocidal project known as ethnic cleansing. The complicity of most Serb writers and artists not in exile in the current triumph of Greater Serbian imperialism suggests that the anti-nationalist voices, of which Kiš was the bravest and most eloquent, have always been in the minority. Much as by temperament and exquisitely cosmopolitan literary culture he would have preferred a less embattled course, in which literature was kept separate from politics, Kiš was always under attack and therefore, necessarily, on the attack. The first fight was against provincialism. This was the provincialism not so much of a small literature (for the former Yugoslavia produced at least two world-class prose writers, Ivo Andri and Miroslav Krleža) as of a state-supported, state-rewarded literature. It could be fought simply by his being the utterly independent, artistically ambitious writer he was, almost from the beginning. But worse attacks were to come.

  One of those writers who are first of all readers, who prefer dawdling and grazing and blissing out in the Great Library and surrender to their vocation only when the urge to write becomes unbearable, Kiš was not what would be called prolific. In his lifetime he published nine books, seven of them in the fourteen years between 1962, when he was twenty-seven, and 1976, when he was forty-one. First came a pair of short novels, The Attic and Psalm 44 (published in 1962; not yet translated into English). The second book, Garden, Ashes (1965), was a novel. The third, Early Sorrows (1968), was a book of stories. The fourth, Hourglass (1972), was a novel. The fifth and sixth were two collections of essays, Po-etika (1972) and Po-etika II (1974). The seventh, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1976), was a collection of thematically linked stories that his publishers chose to call a novel. He wrote it while an instructor in Serbo-Croatian at the University of Bordeaux, as he’d written Garden, Ashes when he taught at Strasbourg.

  By this time, Kiš was spending more and more time abroad, though he did not consider himself to be in exile, any more than he would have said he was a “dissident writer”: it was too clear to him that writing worthy of the name of literature had to be unofficial. With this seventh book, a suite of fictional case histories of the Stalinist Terror, Kiš’s work finally attracted the international attention it deserved. A Tomb for Boris Davidovich also attracted a seven-month-long campaign of negative attention back home in Belgrade. The campaign, which reeked of anti-Semitism, centered on an accusation—that the book was a web of plagiarisms from an arcane bibliography—to which Kiš had no choice but to respond. The result was his eighth book, The Anatomy Lesson (1978). Defending A Tomb for Boris Davidovich against these scurrilous charges, Kiš mounted a full-scale exposition of his literary genealogy (that is, his literary tastes), a post- or protomodernist poetics of the novel, and a portrait of what a writer’s honor could be. During the next ten years, he published only one more book, The Encyclopedia of the Dead (1984), a collection of unlinked stories.

  The Western European, and eventually North American, acclaim for A Tomb for Boris Davidovich—typically confining it within the literature of dissidence from “the other Europe”—had brought about translations of the earlier books into the major foreign languages, and Kiš started to be invited to first-rank literary conferences, to win prizes, and to seem a plausible Nobel candidate. Becoming an internationally famous writer meant becoming a much interviewed writer. Asked to pronounce on literary matters and, invariably, to comment on the infamies back home, he did so with grave, always incisive combativeness—he gave splendidly substantive interviews. He was also asked to contribute short pieces to newspapers and magazines—treating no literary solicitation as ever less than an occasion for intensity. Recalling that Kiš published only one book of fiction in the last decade of his life, one can’t but regret that he gave as many interviews, wrote as many essays and prefaces, as he did. A poet in prose as well as a prince of indignation, Kiš surely was not best employed in these discursive forms. No great writer of fiction is. And unlike Italo Calvino and Thomas Bernhard, who were also lost to literature in the late 1980s, Kiš had probably not yet done the best of what he was capable in fiction. But the novels and stories he did write still assure him a place alongside these two somewhat older, far more prolific contemporaries—which is to say that Kiš is one of the handful of incontestably major writers of the second half of the century.

  Kiš had a complicated literary genealogy, which he was undoubtedly simplifying when he declared himself, as he often did, a child of Borges and of Bruno Schulz. But to marry the cosmopolitan Argentine to the immured small-town Polish Jew sounds the right note. Most obviously, he was claiming foreign relatives over his descendance from his native Serbo-Croatian literary family. Specifically, by yoking together the serenely, speculatively erudite Borges and the inward-looking, hyperdescriptive Schulz, he was pointing to the principal double strand in his own work. Odd mixtures were very much to Kiš’s taste. His “mixed” literary methods—most fully realized in Hourglass (historical fiction) and A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (fictional history)—
gave him exactly the right freedoms to advance the cause of both truth and art. Finally: one can, in literature, choose one’s own parents. But nobody obliges a writer to declare his or her parentage. Kiš, however, had to proclaim his. Like every writer who is a great reader, he was an inveterate enthusiast about the work of others. His talent for admiration also made him an extremely collegial writer, which he expressed best in his numerous translations of contemporary writers he undertook from French, Hungarian, Russian, and English into Serbo-Croatian. In expatriation he was still really back home, in his head and in all his work—despite his lived estrangement from the literary world of his native country. He had never forsaken them, though they had betrayed him.

  When Kiš died in Paris in 1989, the Belgrade press went into national mourning. The renegade star of Yugoslav literature had been extinguished. Safely dead, he could be eulogized by the mediocrities who had always envied him and had engineered his literary excommunication, and who would then proceed—as Yugoslavia fell apart—to become official writers of the new post-communist, national chauvinist order. Kiš is, of course, admired by everyone who genuinely cares about literature, in Belgrade as elsewhere. The place in the former Yugoslavia where he was and is perhaps most ardently admired is Sarajevo. Literary people there did not exactly ply me with questions about American literature when I went to Sarajevo for the first time in April 1993, but they were extremely impressed that I’d had the privilege of being a friend of Danilo Kiš. In besieged Sarajevo people think a lot about Kiš. His fervent screed against nationalism, incorporated into The Anatomy Lesson, is one of the two prophetic texts—the other is a story by Andri, “A Letter from 1920”—that one hears most often cited. As secular, multi-ethnic Bosnia—Yugoslavia’s Yugoslavia—is crushed under the new imperative of one ethnicity/one state, Kiš is more present than ever. He deserves to be a hero in Sarajevo, whose struggle to survive embodies the honor of Europe.

  Unfortunately, the honor of Europe has been lost at Sarajevo. Kiš and like-minded writers who spoke up against nationalism and fomented-from-the-top ethnic hatreds could not save Europe’s honor, Europe’s better idea. But it is not true that, to paraphrase Auden, a great writer does not make anything happen. At the end of the century, which is the end of many things, literature, too, is besieged. The work of Danilo Kiš preserves the honor of literature.

  [1994]

  Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke

  START WITH the title. Which means … nothing. There is no character in the novel called Ferdydurke. And this is only a foretaste of insolence to come.

  Published in late 1937, when its author was thirty-three, Ferdydurke is the great Polish writer’s second book. The title of his first, Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity (1933), would have served beautifully for the novel. Perhaps this is why Gombrowicz opted for jabberwocky.

  That first book, whose title was pounced on by the Warsaw reviewers as if Gombrowicz had made a shaming confession inadvertently, was a collection of stories (he’d been publishing them in magazines since 1926); over the next two years more stories appeared, including a pair (“The Child Runs Deep in Filidor” and “The Child Runs Deep in Filibert”) that he would use, with chapter-long mock prefaces, as interludes in Ferdydurke, as well as a first play, Princess Ivona; then, in early 1935, he embarked on a novel. Had the title of his volume of fanciful stories seemed—his word—“ill-chosen”? Now he would really provoke. He would write an epic in defense of immaturity. As he declared toward the end of his life: “Immaturity—what a compromising, disagreeable word!—became my war cry.”

  “Immaturity” (not “youth”) is the word Gombrowicz insists on, insists on because it represents something unattractive, something, to use another of his key words, inferior. The longing his novel describes, and endorses, is not, Faust-like, to relive the glory days of youth. What happens to the thirty-year-old who, waking up one morning roiled in the conviction of the futility of his life and all his projects, is abducted by a teacher and returned to the world of callow schoolboys is a humiliation, a fall.

  From the start, Gombrowicz was to write, he had chosen to adopt a “fantastic, eccentric, and bizarre tone” bordering on “mania, folly, absurdity.” To irritate, Gombrowicz might have said, is to conquer. I think, therefore I contradict. A young aspirant to glory in 1930s literary Warsaw, Gombrowicz had already become legendary in the writers’ cafés for his madcap grimaces and poses. On the page, he sought an equally vehement relation to the reader. Grandiose and goofy, this is a work of unrelenting address.

  Still, it seems likely that Gombrowicz did not know where he was going when he began the novel. “I can well remember,” Gombrowicz declared in 1968, a year before he died (did he remember? or was he massaging his legend?),

  that, when I started Ferdydurke, I wanted to write no more than a biting satire that would put me in a superior position over my enemies. But my words were soon whirled away in a violent dance, they took the bit between their teeth and galloped towards a grotesque lunacy with such speed that I had to rewrite the first part of the book in order to give it the same grotesque intensity.

  But the problem was less (I suspect) that the first chapters needed a further infusion of lunatic energies than that Gombrowicz did not anticipate the freight of argument—about the nature of eros, about culture (particularly Polish culture), about ideals—his tale would carry.

  Ferdydurke starts with a dream-like abduction to an absurd world in which the big become small and the small monstrously big: those great buttocks in the sky. In contrast to the landscape Lewis Carroll conjured up for a prepubescent girl, Gombrowicz’s wonderland of shape-shiftings and resizings seethes with lust:

  Everything was expanding in blackness. Inflating and widening, yet at the same time shrinking and straining, evading something, and some kind of winnowing, general and particular, a coagulating tension and a tensing coagulation, a dangling by a fine thread, as well as transformation into something, transmutation, and furthermore—a falling into some cumulative, towering system, and as if on a narrow little plank raised six stories up, together with the excitement of all organs. And tickling.

  In Alice’s story, a child falls into an asexual underworld governed by a new, fantastic but implacable logic. In Ferdydurke, the grownup who is turned into a schoolboy discovers new, puerile freedoms for giving offense and owning up to disreputable desire.

  Starts with an abduction; ends with an abduction. The first (by Professor Pimko) returns the protagonist to the scene of true, that is, unmanageable, feeling and desire. The second abduction shows the protagonist making a provisional flight back into so-called maturity:

  If someone were to spot me in the hallway, in the darkness, how would I explain this escapade? How do we find ourselves on these tortuous and abnormal roads? Normality is a tightrope-walker above the abyss of abnormality. How much potential madness is contained in the everyday order of things—you never know when and how the course of events will lead you to kidnap a farmhand and take to the fields. It’s Zosia that I should be kidnapping. If anyone, it should be Zosia, kidnapping Zosia from a country manor would be the normal and correct thing to do, if anyone it was Zosia, and not this stupid, idiotic farmhand …

  Ferdydurke is one of the most bracing, direct books ever written about sexual desire—this without a single scene of sexual union. To be sure, the cards are stacked from the start in favor of eros. Who would not concur in the silencing of this social babble by the clamor of rumps, thighs, calves? The head commands, or wishes to. The buttocks reign.

  Later, Gombrowicz referred to his novel as a pamphlet. He also called it a parody of a philosophical tale in the manner of Voltaire. Gombrowicz is one of the super-arguers of the twentieth century—“To contradict, even on little matters,” he declared, “is the supreme necessity of art today”—and Ferdydurke is a dazzling novel of ideas. These ideas give the novel both weight and wings.

  Gombrowicz capers and thunders, hectors and mocks, but he is also entirely serious
about his project of transvaluation, his critique of high “ideals.” Ferdydurke is one of the few novels I know that could be called Nietzschean; certainly it is the only comic novel that could be so described. (The affecting fantasia of Hesse’s Steppenwolf seems, in comparison, riddled with sentimentality.) Nietzsche deplored the ascendancy of slave values sponsored by Christianity, and called for the overthrowing of corrupt ideals and for new forms of masterfulness. Gombrowicz, affirming the “human” need for imperfection, incompleteness, youth, proclaims himself a specialist in inferiority. Swinish adolescence may seem a drastic antidote to smug maturity, but this is exactly what Gombrowicz has in mind. “Degradation became my ideal forever. I worshipped the slave.” It is still a Nietzschean project of unmasking, of exposing, with a merry satyr-dance of dualisms: mature versus immature, wholes versus parts, clothed versus naked, heterosexuality versus homosexuality, complete versus incomplete.

  Gombrowicz gaily deploys many of the devices of high literary modernism, lately relabeled “post-modern,” which tweak the traditional decorums of novel writing: notably, that of a garrulous, intrusive narrator awash in his own contradictory emotional states. Burlesque slides into pathos. When not preening, he is abject; when not clowning, he is vulnerable and self-pitying.