Putting a stop to this was her most sacred duty, and to that end, she philosophized away that particular day and its lamentable events, until finally they seemed like a mere trifle. But trifles of this kind still damaged the fortress, creating the impression it was nothing more than the inevitable result of an upbringing that had failed out there in that Sodom and Gomorrah world, where the wound of life holds court and Babylon founders. And this was a terrible affront to the fortress’s edifying work, its mission of scrupulously cultivating sainthood, which it carried out in the most exemplary manner.
In other words: the old woman would not stand for a challenge to her merit with respect to Berta, for whom she felt great responsibility, as if she herself had borne her. No, she would not be defied by the wound of life, which had crept its way so shamelessly into Ward 66.
On January 14, 1963, the Wise Little Mother stood witness to Berta’s final deliverance, a responsibility the old woman accepted with great solemnity.
On January 14, 1963, Berta washed the man, the word, and all her lostness out of her life. This is according to the words of the old woman who watched her do it.
Berta stood at the sink and washed herself slowly and deliberately. Then a-man-a-word-and-then-you’re-lost Berta swam down the drain with the sweat from yesterday’s nightmare and into the fortress’s sewers.
“This is your awakening, Berta dear, a blessing from our fortress. Here is where you sweat out life, that awful dream. Isn’t that true, Berta dear? That life is no more than an awful dream?”
Berta giggled.
“Yes. Indeed. Guilt cries out from this dream. Indeed. The dream never leaves you in peace, it forces visitations on us, it never frees us from guilt. Everywhere we turn it confronts us with Sodom and Gomorrah. Say it now, Berta dear: the visitation has passed, the terrible dream is washed away, the colossus of life has been toppled. There is no more Sodom and Gomorrah, no more guilt, and no more dream.
“It is true, Berta dear. Yes. Indeed. The fortress has heeded your wishes. It is speaking to you now. It speaks to you before God and the saints. They hold the keys to your redemption. Yes. Indeed. Hear us now, Berta Schrei. You have been chosen for eternal peace. I bless you: Ego te absolvo.”
Berta giggled.
“Dear Berta, you owe this to the fortress. The fortress alone listens to you. It alone loves you. It understands you. It feels what you feel. It speaks for you before God and the saints.”
Berta giggled.
AFTERWORD
On Marianne Fritz
Of all the crooked arrows in the critic’s quiver, the one labeled “genius” seems to fly most erratically. Rather than a substantive gesture of praise, in its normal application it tends to serve as an aggrandizement of the critic himself, who thereby claims the capacity to appreciate this ethereal property. Yet beyond able craftsmen of the Richard Ford stamp or crowd-pleasers whose affability calls their integrity into question, there is a class of artists whose work is so strange and extraordinary that it eschews all gradations of the good and the mediocre: genius and madness are the only descriptors adequate to its scale.
Such is the case of the Austrian novelist Marianne Fritz (1948–2007), whose work is little known outside a small but fervent circle of admirers. Praise, though scant, is neither tepid nor inconsiderable: from 1978, when she received the inaugural Robert Walser Prize for the unpublished manuscript of The Weight of Things, her first novel, to her winning the highly prestigious Franz Kafka Prize in 2001, her writing was repeatedly honored with awards and stipends. Regarding Naturgemäß1, Fritz’s unfinished magnum opus, Elfriede Jelinek commented, “It is a singular work, before which one can do nothing but stand, like a devout Muslim before the Kaaba.” W. G. Sebald also dedicated to her a section of the late poem “In Alfermée.” Here the image of Fritz working through her exhaustion, “one hand on the keys of her machine,” recalls the passage in The Rings of Saturn on the melancholy of scholars and weavers, “harnessed to the machines we have invented.”
A contrasting view was held by Thomas Bernhard, who addressed his esteemed publisher, Siegfried Unseld, with characteristic charm in 1986:
Before my departure I have had another glance at your recent publishing catastrophe: the 3,000 pages you have had printed and allowed to appear are the greatest embarrassment I have been acquainted with to this day. To print and bind over 3,000 pages of mindless proletarian trash with all the bombast of a centenary event belongs, quite frankly, in the record books: as a world record of stupidity. I am not speaking so much of the begetter of this idiocy, but of the fact that the publisher has handicapped himself by releasing this fatuous vulgarity.
The project that inspired these extremes of reverence and ridicule began with The Weight of Things, which was followed two years later by The Child of Violence and the Stars of the Romani. Whereas The Weight of Things covered the years 1945–1963, in her second novel Fritz would approach the period she saw as the key to understanding the disaster of Western civilization: the years surrounding the First World War. The action of the book centers around Kaspar Zweifel, a sensitive young man who dreams of moving away to America. In 1914 he loses his beloved and is sent away to fight for the Austro-Hungarian army in the suicidal battles on the Isonzo front in present-day Slovenia. When he returns to the village of Gnom, he takes over his father’s farm, makes a conventional marriage, and begins to complain of the “mongrelization” of the Austrian countryside. One night, drunk, he rapes a gypsy woman, and she and her community flee the area in fear of further violence. The woman returns in June of 1923 to leave Zweifel’s child in the village parish house.
The novel went nearly unnoticed. While its rancorous subject matter and its convoluted structure were unsuited to a broader readership, its failure to engage with the more self-consciously avant-garde aims of the famous Grazer Gruppe writers left it adrift with respect to Vienna’s literary establishment. Yet it proved a turning point for Fritz, for its stylistic departures and the broadening of the author’s vehemence and scope.
Only five years later, she would publish the provocatively titled Whose Language You Don’t Understand, the 3,392 page prodigy that was the object of Bernhard’s derision. It was natural that critical discussion surrounding a book of such proportions would not be confined to its literary import. Fritz’s neologisms, intentional misspellings, and readiness to violate the rules of grammar in favor of the construction of her own eccentric poetic idiom left the text unfit to be fed through the computer her publisher used to weed out errors, and her proofreader gave up after a thousand pages, saying it was impossible to distinguish mistakes from the distortions characteristic of the author’s style. Critics began to talk of classifying books by their weight, and spoke openly of the point at which they had abandoned their reading.
Whose Language You Don’t Understand is the chronicle of the Nulls, a poor family residing in Nullweg, number 0, in the village of Nirgendwo2, in June and August of 1914. Thomas K. Falk, in World Literature Today, points out that the date is significant not only for its proximity to the Great War, but also as a marker for a period in which the traditional agrarian economy gave way to industrialization, when those who had previously worked the land became a despised and neglected appendage to the modern capitalist state. It is in this book that Fritz’s partiality toward the insulted and injured becomes explicit: the patriarch, Josef Null, is killed in a worker’s demonstration, as is his third son, Josef II; one of his brothers, the Dostoyevskian August, is a farmhand and an anarchist and murders the landowning parents of his girlfriend Wilhelmine; another becomes a deserter and is chased down by the military and shot. Their mother is confined to the fortress first mentioned in The Weight of Things, and their home is destroyed, lest it serve as a remembrance of the possibility of resistance.
Eleven years later, Naturgemäß began to appear: five volumes in 1996, another five in 1998, just shy of 7,000 pages reproduced directly from Marianne Fritz’s typescript. Set largely in Przemyśl, an �
�eternal death-territory” in southeastern Poland, it examines the lives of many of the characters in her previous books over the war years of 1914–15. Her publisher found setting the book’s first part impossible; the printed version consists of a bound facsimile of the typescript. At first, Fritz limited herself to employing a variety of fonts, spacings, margins, and unusual typographical markers, but when she learned how the book was to be released, she began to incorporate drawings, maps, coded marks meant to establish links between various characters and situations, and copies of the innumerable notecards—her second memory, in the words of her partner Otto Dünser—that she used to keep track of the hundreds of characters and place names and thousands of events that made up her novel. (One critic complained the reader was forced to turn the book back and forth like a steering wheel.) In her refusal of unilinear narrative, Fritz had largely dispensed with the traditional paragraph; text was often inverted or written at an angle, or a central letter would form the axis for three words that would be based on it, their letters curved to fit inside a drawing that appears to represent an oblique phase of the waning moon.
The comparison with Joyce is both obvious and inapposite, and has been made by critics within and beyond the German-speaking world. Against the clear dissimilarities in tone, subject matter, and working method stands the male genius as the archetype against which the female author is to be compared. If she passes muster, she may be crowned a “female Joyce”; if she falls short, her work is disqualified as an extravagance. A further injustice to a female writer of such staggering ambition is the lack of a feminine analogue to the stereotype of the “mad genius”: women’s madness cannot invoke the dignity of the late Nietzsche or Thomas Chatterton, but is classed with the aberrations of hysterics and cat ladies.
Marianne Fritz may represent a limit-case of the blurring of life into literature. The small apartment she shared with her partner in Vienna’s 7th District, now preserved for visitors, is lined floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves, map cases, and card files; there are no accommodations for guests or relaxation, virtually no concessions to the demands of ordinary existence. When her writing went well, she would not leave her work room for weeks at a time; it was only when she had elected to take a “philosophical pause for thought” that she would discover what season it was. In fact her labor transcended the possibilities of a lone author, and she engaged her partner to toil in the archives, bringing home to her mimeographs of war correspondence, newspaper reports, ministerial records, and battle plans. “Going out was my job,” Dünser recollects. “At first she would research with me in the War Archives in the Stiftgasse. We were to look through 30,000 photos. Then she said to me: Otto, you do this.”
It is possible that a fictional topos as dense and expansive as Fritz’s is inconceivable outside of such isolating circumstances; that like a phantom limb, such imagined worlds may arise only after conventional reality has been hewn away. To say this is not to reduce Fritz’s work to aleatory hallucinations or to question her artistic integrity. On the contrary, just as Rimbaud argued for the systematic derangement of the senses, Fritz’s subjection of herself to the conditions necessary to reconceive the situation of war in all its staggering complexity must be considered a conscious, programmatic gesture.
In Naturgemäβ III, her work begins to revolve around Der Giftpilz, Ernst Heimer’s notorious anti-Semitic children’s book published by Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher. Reversing the text’s original schema, it is Nazism rather than Judaism that becomes the poison mushroom growing in Austria’s soil. For the writer and critic Klaus Kastberger, this episode leads to the essential question for an understanding of Fritz’s oeuvre: in what does the subjective experience of such a disaster as National Socialism consist? Paradoxically, the first person or free indirect approach is inadequate, for inner experience obscures the historical and social conditions by which it is determined. To Fritz, fidelity was to be found instead in the minute recreation of a society down to its very fundaments, and to this end, nothing was irrelevant. The purpose of imagination became less the fashioning of persons and events from whole cloth than the rectification of those gaps in official documentation through which the lives of so many at society’s bottom ranks had filtered:
what moves me are the “blank spaces,” the “not established,” the “crossed out,” the “unmentioned,” the “irrelevant,” the “superfluous,” the “redundant,” the fact that so much “information” is actually lived through […]3
Fritz’s writing has been described as a counter-history or a writing against history, but it is a counter-historiography as well, a supersession of the Great Man Theory (and the notion of free will underlying it) through a vision of historical events overwhelming their radically passive subjects. It is not, for all that, lacking in moral force. Fritz, who was from a humble background and only came to pursue literature after completing vocational studies to prepare her for secretarial work, shows an all-consuming contempt for the structures of class oppression. Indeed, her entire oeuvre works toward a vindication of the lives of the poor, men and especially women, who were expelled from the dignified arenas of Austrian society in the first half of the twentieth century and crushed like roaches under the millstone of history. Freedom is not absent amid the duress of time past, but remains in the artwork as an imaginative horizon: the space of the dreaming mind that cannot but turn away from its own degradation, and the compulsion to defiance that imbues it like a calling.
—Adrian Nathan West
1 Naturally, or, more precisely, in accordance with nature.
2 That is, the Null family, residing in Number 0, Null Street, in the town of Nowhere.
3 From a letter from Marianne Fritz to her editor included in the volume Was soll man da machen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marianne Fritz (1948–2007) was an Austrian novelist. She lived most of her adult life in a small apartment in Vienna’s 7th District, devoted entirely to her writing and dependent on small subsidies and occasional prize money. Her first book, The Weight of Things, marked the beginning of an ambitious cycle of novels with the overarching title of Festung, or “The Fortress,” comprising Das Kind der Gewalt und die Sterne der Romani, Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst, and the gargantuan Naturgemäß, the third volume of which she was preparing at the time of her death.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Adrian Nathan West is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation as well as the translator of numerous works of contemporary European literature. He lives between Spain and the United States with the cinema critic Beatriz Leal Riesco.
DOROTHY, A PUBLISHING PROJECT
1. Renee Gladman Event Factory
2. Barbara Comyns Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead
3. Renee Gladman The Ravickians
4. Manuela Draeger In the Time of the Blue Ball
5. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi Fra Keeler
6. Suzanne Scanlon Promising Young Women
7. Renee Gladman Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge
8. Amina Cain Creature
9. Joanna Ruocco Dan
10. Nell Zink The Wallcreeper
11. Marianne Fritz The Weight of Things
12. Joanna Walsh Vertigo
DOROTHYPROJECT.COM
Table of Contents
Half Title Page
Copyright
Title Page
A Note on the Translation
The Weight of Things
Afterword
About the Author / About the Translator
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The Weight of Things Page 9
