Blueberries

by Ellena Savage

  So why attempt to understand ‘politics’—the mechanics of power and oppression—through the sliding, unsatisfying prism of the ugly truth? Why not, instead, read politics as it is mediated through fiction, poetry, or the artifice of life writing? At a remove, at an interpretive distance?

  Although Red Rosa is mostly grounded in fact, its diversions from historical accuracy (which are meticulously noted at the book’s end) permit it to enter a liminal state. The possibilities that fiction presents allow Red Rosa to be moving, theme-y, sad and, above all, idealistic. It allows one version of reality to be contained by the manageable parameters of literature.

  One of Red Rosa’s sweetest pleasures is its incorporation of some of Luxemburg’s personal writings, also collected in another Verso title, The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, where she delights in being alive, in being a body in the world. From prison, she writes to her lover: ‘The hour before sunset has a magic all its own. The sun was still hot, but one gladly allowed its slanted rays to burn on one’s neck and cheeks like a kiss.’

  Politics is not removed from the way the sun kisses your neck at the hour before sunset. Politics is the pleasure in the body and the imagination, too.

  …

  Other books I read during my love panic: The Notebook, The Proof and The Third Lie are, together, a trilogy by the Hungarian-born, Swiss-émigré author Ágota Kristóf. Some of the saddest novels I have ever read. They take place in and around a Hungarian village during some key events of the twentieth century: World War II consumes the village, which has a transit camp at its periphery; the Communists take over and torture their prisoners; then, a quiet nationalist revolution occurs, a change of power yet again.

  None of these events are named outright. In an interview, Kristóf said that she ‘did not want to name anything’. But one needn’t be told which of the trilogy’s officers are Nazis (the ones with caviar dripping from their lips), which are Russians (the ones gang-raping everything that moves), which civilians are Jews (the ones who appear for a moment and then are gone forever). The first novel in the trilogy is written in the spare language of its two child narrators, the ‘we’ of twins Claus and Lucas. The Notebook is the notebook in which they record ‘everything that happens’ to them during these tumultuous years. The violence of wartime and political precarity is laid bare, but it is in interpersonal politics that we see the grave effects of war; for example, almost every child we encounter is subjected to some form of sexual molestation. In a different interview, Kristóf said that ‘during the war, there are a lot fewer secrets, rape is freed’, and these novels clearly describe this unsettling wartime moral ambiguity. But in the moral landscape of Kristóf’s grim world, trauma is not predictable or clean. In this regard, these novels comprise a rich psychoanalytic tapestry; characters do not always act in line with their interests, and their traumas are not exactly what we might expect them to be. Scenes of rape and other forms of molestation are tangled up with a childhood obsession with sex. And the twins’ moral landscape is itself stark: they feed a soldier who has defected because he ‘absolutely needs’ to eat; they blow gunpowder up in the face of a friend because she has been cruel to a procession of Jews being ‘deported’.

  The Proof and The Third Lie help make sense of The Notebook in metafictional terms. As the narrative develops across the three novels, each storyline the reader is ingratiated into is later pulled from under her feet; every one of them is called into question—fiction within fiction, time outside time? Yet it doesn’t seem that this narrative corruption is for the purpose of delivering a ‘clever’ comment on fiction and reality. Instead it seems to be saying something about the relationship between mortal solitude and writing.

  In The Third Lie, Lucas is asked what he is writing:

  I answer that I try to write true stories but that at a given point the story becomes unbearable because of its very truth, and then I have to change it. I tell her I try to tell my story but all of a sudden I can’t—I don’t have the courage, it hurts too much. And so I embellish everything and describe things not as they happened but the way I wish they had happened.

  In another of Kristóf’s few translated interviews, she states that her novels are more or less autobiographical. When the interviewer asks Kristóf about certain elements of her fiction, she responds with claims like: ‘It is more or less a true story.’ Her insistence on this neat parallel between life and fiction betrays the radical transformation that occurs when information passes between these two domains—but so too does it hint at their interdependence. Lucas says: ‘No book, no matter how sad, can be as sad as a life.’ It is the writing within a life that gives moments of reprieve from solitude.

  These novels were not written to ‘speak truth to power’. What would be the point of speaking truth to power when your days are long and cold and loveless? ‘Laying it bare’ doesn’t go far enough, either. But this trilogy is nonetheless political, in that it shows us that the rootlessness and isolation brought about by the tides of history can be unbearable to live through. The telling of such a tale does not hope to expose ‘the truth’ and then circumvent its injustices; instead it shows us a world where the things that happen in a life, all the terrible things and the joyful things too, can exist in a neatly comprehensible form—a novel—which can be contained on paper pages, and bound, and held in a hand, and passed between people, and consequently, unlike real life, managed.

  On the opening page of another very sad book I read while falling into blissful love, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke, the author says: ‘My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks; I had better get to work before the need to write about her, which I had felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the news of her suicide.’

  My lover said to me, possibly to impress me with his sensitivity to gender norms, ‘What a masculine opening.’ And he might be right: this urge to capture a feeling before it slips away into ‘dull speechlessness’ demonstrates the violent ordering, the formal enslavement that is writing, and reminds me that writing is the kind of occupation that thrives in cultures that are built upon accumulation. And yet, it’s a masculine gesture I feel comfortable identifying with. I need to manage the unmanageable, to contain, correct and formalise the world, because I need to survive it.

  A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is an essay-length biographical portrait of the author’s recently suicided mother. It examines her life from beginning to sorrowful end, grappling with the senselessness of her wasted potential. Her life was marked by not-having: not pleasure, not education, not voice, not freedom, not choice. Self-administered abortions. Injuries from one violent man or another. Illness. Pain.

  If Kristóf’s trilogy creates the possibility of a parallel literary universe where the germ of moral courage can infect the imagination, Handke’s view of things is much bleaker. Upon hearing of his mother’s suicide, Handke finds that suddenly ‘my day-to-day world—which, after all, consists only of images repeated ad nauseum over a period of years and decades since they were new—fell apart, and my mind became so empty it ached’. In his misery, all of life becomes simply an endless repetition of banal moments. Acker’s unchangeable forever fixtures. The mechanics of sadness.

  The tragedy of Handke’s mother’s life is not unique. It is the life of untold women and men from nowhere, who have no power, not even over the course of their daily lives. In trying to describe this sadness that is the world, Handke touches on the corollary of his urge to ‘capture’ with writing that which would otherwise slip away: that despite its promise to make the unmanageable manageable, language is not a complete tool for recording the world. He writes, ‘In stories we often read that something or other is “unnameable” or “indescribable”; ordinarily this strikes me as a cheap excuse. This story, however, is really about the nameless, about speechless moments of terror.’ Towards the end of the essay, Handke states that in the act of writing he has failed to allevia
te terror and enormous grief:

  Obviously narration is only an act of memory; on the other hand, it holds nothing in reserve for future use; it merely derives a little pleasure from states of dread by trying to formulate them as aptly as possible; from enjoyment of horror it produces enjoyment of memory.

  Which leads me to ask if this is what writing is. Writing is the collision of thoughts with events, translated into a material form and then back again into the whisper of a feeling. But when the action is happening elsewhere—for example, when your world is puny because you are in love—perhaps the writing is happening elsewhere. The writing is the urgency to translate and contain what is happening, when what is happening demands to be contained.

  Instead of talking about ‘political literature’—because the term is outdated, because it doesn’t adequately describe the literature that makes us feel the most ‘in the world’ and the best prepared to reject the intolerable—why not talk about the literature of sadness. If love tears everything to shreds, sad books, like sadness itself, demonstrate that the unchangeable forever fixtures are the same things that kill us. We wish to be redeemed from this muddy truth, but we won’t be. Did Rosa Luxemburg get to escape her assassination just by knowing it was coming?

  …

  Apart from this temporary love-blessed reprieve, in general I am not a ‘happy’ person. In general, I unreasonably assume I am difficult and unlikeable. I assume that every email contains a threat. I am genuinely surprised when people don’t torture their children or animals. When I am in the habit of writing every day, sometimes it feels that I am writing because writing is trying not to die. Or writing is trying not to become a hopeless alcoholic. This sounds melodramatic, for sure, and I say it only to suggest that sadness is not always a terrible illness. Sadness is, perhaps, the most honest response to living.

  Turning Thirty

  º How did I get to thirty without knowing how to trim the length of a screw?

  + Don’t know if ‘trim’ is the correct word here or even ‘screw’. (Quietly, I’m proud that I know the word for ‘thread’, the ribbed valley circling the screw-like object.)

  º How did I experience an entire twenties without several doomed and haunting love affairs? I mean, all my relationships failed, except for this one I’m in right now, and most of them failed miserably. But their failures were not at all poetical.

  + The older I get, the less doomed I feel. I’m pleased about that. Though this fix is a trick.

  − Every extra day increases the chance of full-scale disaster.

  − Or each new day the chances are just the same as always.

  º How did I get here without first learning to wear pastels?

  º Or be thin?

  + I think, I should have spent the past ten years learning how to tolerate exercise.

  + And then I think, What’s so fucking good about pilates?

  − What did getting on your knees to disappear ever get anyone?

  º Some people believe in nothing. Not no thing, but nothing. Not me.

  º I watched the miniseries Angels in America recently, all of it. In the first episode, I cried my heart out. Beautiful, good, gorgeous men, falling into nothing.

  + Then I got bored of the whole New York-y aspirational upper-class vibe. The final scene, where the four now-friends—Belize the regal nurse, Prior the survivor, Louis the over-thinker and Hannah the ex-Mormon—sit in the shadow of the Angel of the Waters in Central Park, discussing the Gorbachev-y, ‘settlements’-y news of 1990. They all have these chatty, flirty opinions.

  + I rolled my eyes. It was all so average. But I watched it till the credits played out.

  − I rolled my eyes because frivolity mixed with the fruits of abundance (decadence) is the easiest thing to eye-roll at. But the truth is that its opposite is even worse.

  − I rolled my eyes because so many of my desires were structured around the aesthetics of this New York-y aspirational upper-class thing, which suddenly disappointed me. My gutlessness, my naivety.

  º My apartment is now ninety-five per cent finished. Ninety-five per cent is the percentage of finished that, once reached, might never be surpassed. I painted the bathroom’s tiled floor black, but we needed to use the bathroom, so I didn’t get any further. It still needs one more coat. Will I get on my knees this weekend and actually paint it? I hope so. I really do.

  + Half-finished home renovations recall a mode of living I was for most of my life comfortable with, but which in recent years I’ve been trying to abolish. Things like half-painted walls which remain half-painted forever I used to not notice and now they tip me over the edge.

  º When I was little, sitting in the back of the car, I’d frown at houses I deemed ‘ugly’, as though they were committing an act of hostility against me. I’d smile, however, at the posh houses.

  º My family’s house then wasn’t a ‘nice’ house, but we had an overgrown front yard, which was charming. And we had guinea pigs, a dog, a cat and chickens, and for one minute, a pony, which other children envied.

  + We next lived in a small town in the country, where the appearance of houses was important.

  + A classmate described my house as a shanty house, which was both politically incorrect and untrue, but which wounded my pride.

  − Wounded the foundations of my house-pride.

  + The town’s menacing Better Homes and Gardens atmosphere unsettled my parents, who hadn’t come from there, and we left. By this time, Sydney, where we had come from, was a rich person’s city. So the industrial scrub of Melbourne’s north it was.

  + I was very excited to meet my new ‘Melbourne’ friends, who would be highly cerebral tween punks.

  − The only punks I found were highly cerebral stoners, which is to say they loved impersonating Cartman.

  º In my first week in Melbourne I put a pair of eight-hole cherry Docs on lay-by.

  º In my first month, I became a baby recruit to a socialist party. I went to revolution-planning meetings every Saturday. I couldn’t honestly see myself storming parliament in ugly fatigues, but in principle the socialists were okay. Besides, I had no friends other than the friend I cajoled into coming to meetings with me, so it was, at least, something to do. I read Karl Marx (slowly) and sold radical newspapers in my school uniform at Flinders Street Station (boldly). But if I’m honest I was always a dilettante about these things.

  + One night I went to some sort of afterparty the socialists were throwing at one of their houses. The place was an open-plan, newly renovated apartment on Swanston Street. The guy who lived there was seventeen or eighteen.

  − Don’t trust a socialist who’s never held down a degrading job.

  º My mother thought I had been tricked by some alluring older man into joining this cult, but that’s only because she’d never met a socialist male from the early noughts. Their facial hair was atrocious.

  º The socialists all smoked cigarettes, but none of them ever ate McDonald’s. There was, I suppose, an unspoken distinction between these filthy habits. I worked at, and often ate, McDonald’s, but didn’t mention it.

  º Which is not to say I learned nothing.

  + I learned that all the sexist slurs I used on the regular were in fact sexist slurs, part of a larger project of degrading women. This transformed me.

  + I learned that there are people who believe a revolution can be bloodless.

  + I learned the words for my political outrage, about the legacy of people saying no.

  + I learned that men with unkempt beards and a theoretical understanding of the patriarchy don’t ask you questions if you’re a young girl.

  − Years later, I learned they don’t start asking you questions when you’re grown, either.

  + Anyway, I couldn’t afford the dues.

  º I keep getting these flashbacks.

  + Like what people say happens in their seventies, eighties.

  + Thirty’s not so old. But it’s not young, either.

  + It
’s all just so sharp and clear now.

  º A few months ago, I bought an apartment. Well, I split the cost with my boyfriend, who is actually now my husband. So I’m turning thirty as a married homeowner, which is definitely not how I thought things would go.

  + Our apartment is in a place where we won’t be able to find work, so we’ve agreed to periodically come back to Melbourne and save like demons in order to live in our place.

  + That will mean living skint in both cities, which is fine by me.

  + Living skint is not so easy in Melbourne, though, not these days. People there spend a lot of time convincing you they are very poor, and then they wash their dishes with Aesop hand gel.

  − It’s probably not called ‘hand gel’. Hand-cleaning fluid. Palm wash. Finger clean. Savon pour les extrémités. Soap?

  º Other things happen. In the world and inside the home and body. When a person turns thirty.

  + Today was the forty-fourth anniversary of the Athens Polytechnic uprising that is credited with bringing down the military junta in Greece. The rain this morning stifled the early-morning protests, but later in the arvo we went down to the main rally. It was moving and fearsome. There must have been at least twenty thousand people.

  − A few hundred young revolutionaries in the front line linked arms, and each of them held a red flag attached to a broomstick in one fist and a motorcycle helmet in the other.