The Marquise of O- and Other Stories by Heinrich von Kleist

The introduction to this volume mentions, with regard to Kleist's Penthesilea, the Bacchae of Euripides. The anti-rationalism of that particular drama is a thread which runs through these stories of tragedy, violence, injustice and despair. Living in that rational age of Goethe (who spurned his one-time protege) and Schiller, and hot on the heels of the Enlightenment, Kleist (1777-1811) began his young adulthood with a plan for success. Whatever that plan may have been, it fell to pieces rather quickly, and Kleist lived the remainder of his short life in a state of restlessness and disillusionment. (A clue may be found in Kleist's reading of Kant, whose epistemological theory pulled the rug out from under Kleist's tender notions of the perfectability of man, an experience which seems to mirror that of the 20th century Russian author Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.) This dissatisfaction with human nature and political and ecclesiastical authoritarianism are well reflected in these remarkable stories, which range from a ghost story ("The Beggarwoman of Locarno"), to tragic tales of love ("The Earthquake in Chile" and "The Betrothal in Santo Domingo"), to a chilling tale of kindness repaid with betrayal ("The Foundling"), a precursor of Kafka (the title story), and an excellent novella of a man driven to madness and violence by a corrupt and unresponsive bureaucracy. ("Michael Kohlhaas").

In addition to this venerable Penguin edition, Archipelago Books has recently published Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist, a collection of “short stories, novellas, and literary fragments". The aforementioned Penthesilea is included in the out-of-print Five German Tragedies, also published by Penguin, and in the collection of Kleist's plays in Continuum's excellent German Library series.

Fechner's Little Book of Life After Death

Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887) was a 19th century experimental psychologist and philosopher credited with several discoveries in perceptual psychology, such as the Weber-Fechner Law and the visual illusion called Fechner Color, in which colors may be perceived in a moving pattern of black and white. As per William James’ introduction to his Little Book of Life After Death (the present volume brings together this work and some supplementary materials from Fechner’s other writings), God for Fechner was “the totalized consciousness of the whole universe, of which the Earth’s consciousness forms an element, just as in turn my human consciousness and yours form elements of the whole earth’s consciousness.” One may see in Fechner a bit of the pantheist, or a forerunner of Bucke’s cosmic consciousness and Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious.

Fechner saw our life as an intermediate stage between fetal development and the third, postmortem, stage. Each stage is an outgrowth and fulfillment of the previous stage, as (in the timeworn analogy) the butterfly is the realization of the chrysalis. All is well and good, so far, for those willing to accept Fechner’s conception of meaningful existence, but then the good doctor makes a further leap and proposes that each human soul on this earth is an arena of influence for other souls existing in the afterlife, and that these souls, both good and evil, exert themselves through the individual‘s soul in such degree as the soul has affinity with these spirits. Sometimes one follows the better nature and guidance of these spooks, sometimes not.* Now, where Fecher has come up with this scenario, he doesn’t say. There is no appeal to precedent, although an illustration in the text gives one to believe that it is somewhat based on Fecher’s work with color and color blending. There is also a nod to the Great Man conception of history: “No man’s life is without consequences that remain always and eternally.” Fecher supports the sweet idea that when we think of the deceased, then live not only in memory, but are in fact brought to us spiritually, which naturally leads to a discussion of ghosts and why it’s not such a good thing to think of the dead too often.

All in all, Fechner’s hypothesis seems an odd and inadequate explanation for the workings of human consciousness, and given this, one’s sense of dubiousness (not to mention tedium) increases as one proceeds further into this book.

*One is also tempted to see the influence of Swedenborg in this conception.

Note: The edition under review is the Pantheon Books edition of 1943, with introduction by Willam James and preface by John Erskine. The link below is to a different edition.

Accumulated Wisdom

Born in Kiev to Catholic Poles, Krzhizhanovsky was the youngest of five children, the only son, highly musical. As an adolescent, he secretly read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, a deeply unsettling experience: "Before it had all seemed so simple: things cast shadows. But now it turned out that shadows cast things, or perhaps things didn't exist at all." Kant, as he put it, had erased the fine line between 'I' and 'not I.'"

-From the introduction to Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky's Memories of the Future (New York Review Books, 2009)

The Other Side by Alfred Kubin

The Other Side, Alfred Kubin's only extended literary work, is a strange and fantastic dystopian nightmare, and a book which would make my list of 100 favorite books, if I were prone to making such lists.

The Central Asian "Dream Kingdom" established by the enigmatic Claus Patera is ruled by manipulation of the subconscious and furnished with the tarnished and threadbare cast-offs of Europe. It is to the capitol of the Dream Kingdom, the city of Perle - a place perpetually oppressed by grey skies - that the narrator is inexplicably summoned. The eccentric inhabitants of Perle live as if under a spell, subject to bizarre hallucinations and ruled by the secluded Patera. To the degree that Patera may be an emanation of Patera’s mind, it is subject to his increasing madness as events in the physical realm reflect the explosive violence of his mental disintegration.

Alfred Kubin was primarily a visual artist. The Penguin Modern Classics edition* includes drawings by Kubin and an autobiographical appendix. Born in 1877 in northern Bohemia, Kubin’s was a morbid personality, given to torturing small creatures in childhood and obsessing over death. He later fell under the thrall of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, which he considered the only reasonable response to life. He “found keen pleasure in dwelling in imagination on catastrophe and the upsurge of primeval forces”, a perspective that informs the cataclysmic climax of his novel. In his collected illustrations, Kubin’s dark and fantastic imaginings are a natural (or unnatural, as the case may be) progression from Redon’s cyclopic, grinning spiders and the sexual fetishism intimated in Rops. Click on David X's blog over there on the right for more about Kubin and his art.

*There is also an edition published by Dedalus (link below), which appears to be out of print.

The Origin of the Brunists by Robert Coover

Written in 1966, way before he became a proponent of non-linear “hypertext” literature, Robert Coover’s The Origin of the Brunists is an excellent narrative fiction detailing the rise of a religious cult in the aftermath of a coal mine disaster. There is a certain mastery of narrative in this first novel, realistically told, as Coover explores the motivations of several disparate characters over 500-plus pages.

The quiet lynchpin of the novel is one Giovanni Bruno, an Italian-American miner, rather dim and shiftless, and (like his near namesake) a bit of an apostate from the local Catholic church. The early chapters effectively portray the crude humor and dangerousness of the miners world. When one Oxford “Ferd” Clemens saves his young new partner from a sexually humiliating hazing deep in the mines, they slip into a side room to share a smoke, unaware of the deadly accumulation of noxious gases awaiting only the spark of a match to send the mine and 98 of its workers to the appropriately titled “kingdom come”.

By some random miracle, Bruno has sequestered himself in a tight spot, avoiding the death by asphyxiation that kills several co-workers. Overcome by carbon monoxide poisoning, he lingers in a coma for weeks before awakening to utter a very few cryptic words. By the time he awakens, there is an intimation of religious revival in the air, occasioned by a short enigmatic note left by another miner, the Reverend Ely Collins, to his wife. Rumors have also been circulated about a mystical white bird seen in the mine just before the disaster.

It is at this point that several characters, including former local golden boy, sexual conquistador, and newspaper owner “Tiger” Miller and Mrs. Eleanor Norton, a mystagogue with an unhealthy interest in teenage boys who receives signals from a transdimensional character named Domiron, descend upon Bruno and the widow Collins. With Norton as the catalyst, that most American of institutions - the apocalyptic cult - begins to form around Bruno and the “martyred” Reverend Collins. Against the backdrop of economic depression in the town of West Condon, and increasing suspicion of the cult by the Nazarene preacher Abner Baxter and local big wheel Ted Cavanaugh, the elements of the drama come together like cogs in a wheel, moving inexorably towards a explosive climax on The Hill of Redemption, formerly a makeout point near the mine known by the cognocenti as Cunt Hill.

Coover constructs the novel intricately and with fine and humane characterizations, although once can see the continued fascination with the male organ that first appeared in his first collection of stories, Pricksongs and Descants, and which has apparently continued in his later works. The experimentalism for which Coover is known, while present in this novel in a series of gnomic (and ignorable) italicized sections, do not interfere with the narrative. Humor and the pathos of shattered dreams and human gullibility imbue this novel with a distinctly timeless realism.

Claude Levi-Strauss

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/europe/04levistrauss.html?hpw

Way back in 1979, entering my freshman year as an Anthropology undergrad at the University of Texas, I picked up a copy of Levi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked. This was the initial volume of a four volume work on structures of human thought. I took it back to the dorm, cracked it open...and was immediately mystified.

Levi-Strauss on myth was completely alien to the facile narrative-based comparative mythologies of Joseph "Masks of God" Campbell and Mircea Eliade. It took a perusal of The Savage Mind and two volumes of material on Structural Anthropology to start to get a handle on him. It didn't help that my first class on Levi-Straussian thought was taught by a disciple of his, Ira Buchler. Buchler came into class on the first day, stood thoughtfully for a few minutes, and then, in a barely audible monotone, started to relate a story of a turtle his daughter had found in the middle of the road. This led into a monologue so opaque that it wasn't until two classes later that one brave soul stood up and, speaking for the rest of us, made it known to Buchler that we had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Fortunately, things got better after that.

Over time, I drifted away from Levi-Strauss, and I understand that his theories have not aged particularly well, at least in American academia, where structuralism seems to have joined the field of sociobiology on the intellectual dustheap. But maybe this is a harsh, ill-informed, judgement on my part.

Still, once one gets into his mindset, he is a fascinating and intricate author and thinker. Despite the difficulties of his works, I can state unequivocably that his memoir of fieldwork*, Tristes Tropiques, is one of the classics of 20th century writing, no matter how you slice it. I still get goose bumps reading the final elegaic pages:

Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe. When the spectrum or rainbow of human cultures has finally sunk into the void created by our frenzy; as long as we continue to exist and there is a world, that tenuous arch linking us to the inaccessible will still remain, to show us the opposite course to that leading to enslavement; many may be unable to follow it, but its contemplation affords him the only privilege of which he can make himself worthy; that of arresting the process, of controlling the impulse which forces him to block up the cracks in the wall of necessity one by one and to complete his work at the same time as he shuts himself up within his prison; this is a privilege coveted by every society, whatever its beliefs, its political system or its level of civilization; a privilege to which it attaches its leisure, its pleasure, its peace of mind and its freedom; the possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists - Oh! fond farewell to savages and explorations! - in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society: in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.

*Levi-Strauss, back in the 1930's, contributed to the "Tropical Forest Tribes" volume of the excellent Handbook of South American Indians, by far the most expensive book I had hitherto bought when I special-ordered it in the early 80's.

Thank You

A quick "thank you" to old and new friends who follow this blog. I don't pay much attention to the social aspects of blogging, so I was quite surprised to have a look this morning and notice that I have a few "followers". I look forward to mining your very intelligent blogs for good books, films, images, and other pleasant diversions. I'm quite impressed with the amount of work you all put into your blogs! I hope to return the favor in the near future by linking to these blogs so that others may find and enjoy them.

On the negative side, knowing that someone is reading will goad me to put my sloth aside and work harder to come up with more thoughtful reviews and opinions!

Cheers, and happy reading!

-Maki

P.S. In case you don't know, I also have a sister site on blogger called "Tijuana Bible", dedicated to random images, unusual short films and strange old cartoons. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that this site exists until a few minutes ago. I suppose I had better think about updating it.

Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories by Algernon Blackwood

The weird stories of Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) are supernatural in the truest sense. They testify to an awareness that the natural world is greater and more powerful than the puny destiny of man. Blackwood the nature-mystic holds the certitude that there are deeper forces at work in the universe, of which man is ignorant and before which he is helpless. These forces are not malignant per se, but are rather of such immensity of power and so mysterious in their purpose that before them man is but an insignificant microbe. The horror in Blackwood is the realization that modern man is insignificant to the degree that nature hardly deigns to perceive him, or perceives him only as a slight impediment in the fabric of the cosmos. Blackwood writes of a terrifying nature spirit or elemental (“The Wendigo”) that haunts the great northern forests of North America, of the Danube willows which threaten to engulf two stranded campers on a island crumbling in flood (“The Willows“), and of the innate animalistic instincts of the atavistic soul (“Ancient Sorceries”, which loosely inspired the film “Cat People”). Anyone with an interest in tales of the strange and uncanny ought to be acquainted with the stories of Algernon Blackwood.

The Penguin Classics edition of Blackwood contains four fewer stories than the Dover publication misleadingly named The Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood, but does contain a useful introduction by S.T. Joshi, who has also compiled editions of the works of Lovecraft, Machen, and Lord Dunsany.

Accumulated Wisdom

History as Existential Despair, or, What Fools These Mortals Be

She that once appeared the mistress of the world, we have seen what has become of her, shattered by everything that she has suffered from immense and manifold misfortures - the desolation of her inhabitants and the menace of her enemies. Ruins on ruins...where is the Senate? Where the people? All the pomp of secular dignities has been destroyed...and we, the few that we are who remain, every day we are menaced by scourges and innumberable trial...No more Senate, no more people, but for that which still survives, sorrows and groanings, multiplied every day. Rome is deserted and in flames, and as for her buildings we see them fall down of their own accord.

Gregory the Great (540-604)

The entire human race, both present and future, is condemned to death. All the cities that have ever held dominion or have been the splendid jewels of empires belonging to other - some day men will ask where they were. And they will be swept away by various kinds of destruction: some will be ruined by wars, otheres will be destroyed by idleness and a peace that ends in sloth, or by luxury, the bane of those of great wealth. All these fertile plains will be blotted out of sight by a sudden overflowing of the sea, or the subsiding of the land will sweep them away suddenly into the abyss.

Seneca
Moral Epistles lxxi. 15


The future belongs to future men. No Sibyl uveils to our view the roads which mankind will travel after us. As it advances in the mass, we will recede into the background. Today we look back upon the past's social and political culture forms as upon obsolete stages of spiritual development. In exactly the same way, subsequent generations will glance backwards upon the constitution which society, state and church have achieved in our present. We know only this: that the synthetic spirit of man forms the world's panorama more splendidly and more uniformly with every day, and that every miracle of its inventive power opens an inconceivable series of miracles yet to come.

Ferdinand Gregorovius (1821-1891)
Historian of the City of Rome and Incurable Optimist

Chateau d'Argol by Julien Gracq

Chateau d'Argol (1938) is a curiously moody work and, in the precise phrasing of the inestimable magus benwaugh, “baroquely oblique”. One seems constantly on the verge of revelation, only to have the spectres dissolve into the mist of incomprehension. The novel has the ephemeral quality of a dream, and shares with de Chirico’s Hebdomeros (see previous review) the dubious reputation as a “surrealist” work. The narrative is gothic and atmospheric, centering on a decaying castle in Brittany recently purchased by Albert, “the last scion of a rich and noble family.” Ordinary reality holds no attraction for Albert, who shares the name of a the medieval philosopher and reputed alchemist Albertus Magnus, who was reputed to be in the possession of a brazen head. His doppelganger and secret sharer is Herminien, with whom he has pored over ancient manuscripts and shared elevated discussions. In my copy of the book, I have penciled real or imagined references to alchemical phrases, as the text is itself a kind of chemical retort where various elements are conjoined and refined, with volatile consequences.

(A crib note: we find the following under “Hermes” in the flawed but invaluable Wikipedia: “An interpreter who bridges the boundaries with strangers is a hermeneus. Hermes gives us our word “hermeneutics” for the art of interpreting hidden meaning.”)

Albert receives word of a visit from Herminien, who will be bringing a mysterious friend named Heide. Trancelike, he ponders the significance of this visitor, he know that the name is rumored to be associated with “violent revolutionary outbreaks”, and thus is a potential disruptor of the intellectual camaraderie he shares with Herminien. Wandering, he reaches an ancient cemetery, and absentmindedly scratches the name of the stranger on the decayed face of a gravestone, a dark portent.

Heide is a white-skinned beauty, ephemeral but captivating, an element of discord and potential estrangement between Albert and Herminien. As in a gnostic parable, she is an attractor, a tempting and physical being who plucks the companions from their spiritual and intellectual pleroma. Albert is captivated by her, and thus begins an uneasy cycle, played out in the isolated landscape, of degeneration, renewal, violence and death, culminating in “the icy flash of a dagger gliding between…shoulder blades like a handful of snow”.

Gracq’s writing is maddeningly voluptuous and oblique, with the concentrated potency of an alchemical process. The Pushkin Press edition is translated from the French by Louise Varese.

Accumulated Wisdom

"Since we are compelled always to relate things to ourselves, let us remember that there would be fewer martyred children if there were fewer tortured animals, fewer sealed trains carrying the victims of whatever dictatorship to their deaths if we had not become accustomed to cattle cars in which animals die without food or water en route to the slaughterhouse, fewer human game felled with guns if the taste for and habit of killing were not the prerogative of hunters."

Marguerite Yourcenar
"Who Knows Whether the Spirit of Animals Goes Downward"

Insatiability by Stanislaw Witkiewicz

“A study of decay: mad, dissonant music; erotic perversion; widespread use of narcotics; dispossessed thinking; false conversions to Catholicism, and complex psychopathic personalities.”

-Czeslaw Milosz on Insatiability

It’s bad form to introduce a review with another review, but Milosz’s concise summary can scarcely be improved upon. As a work of modernity and madness, Insatiability prefigures Gravity’s Rainbow by half a century, and there is a certain resemblance between the two - the hypersexed antihero facing a crisis of self in the face of an overwhelming force, the young man in a historical moment headed for a schizoid breakdown, the biting social satire and grim humor and, not least, the secret transformation of civilization.

Insatiability takes place in a hypothetical late 20th century Poland . A quasi-Bolshevist Europe, and specifically a hedonistic Polish upper class, receives disturbing reports of an Asian tidal wave, an overwhelming Chinese army rolling in from the East, engulfing greater Russia and setting its sights on the puny European peninsula, bearing with it a new religion that utilizes a narcotic as a means of social control. Once again, Poland is the bulwark, the great plain through which the invaders must roll to get at the creamy center. But let’s begin at the beginning….

When choosing my destiny, I choose insanity
-Tadeusz Micinski, quoted by Witkiewicz

Genezip (Zipcio) Kapen is marked from birth as a prodigal son, a Valentino-faced scion of the upper middle class drawn towards melancholy and the salon society of the nobility. By means of his repulsive and perverted older friend, the avant-garde composer Putricides Hardonne, he gains entry into the salon of the aging Princess di Ticonderoga, a “blue-eyed vulture” (one of the kinder descriptions) who adopts Zipcio as a sexual initiate, an indefatigable boy-toy. The first half of this long book is mostly taken up with this relationship and the yin-yang of attraction and repulsion he feels for this spoiled and decadent siren. In addition to Hardonne (who early on debauches the boy in the woods) and the Princess (who debauches him everywhere else) there is a bizarre cast of characters dizzying Genezip’s mind with philosophies and perspectives which set the stage for his breakdown in the latter half of the novel. Insatiability is a sardonic and misanthropic novel with nary an attractive character, a cesspool of ideas in the form of Witkiewicz’s extended rants and ramblings. Actual dialogue is minimal, and usually in the form of extended philosophical discussions, intellectual ramblings which bear little on the perverse passions which form the undercurrent of the interpersonal relations. Most of the pages are either Zipcio’s interior monologue or pages upon pages of sarcastic third person observations on the grotesqueness and psychological vileness of the characters.

After Zipcio’s awakenings in the first half of the novel, part two (titled “Insanity”) follows him into young adulthood. The “Yellow Peril” has become all too real, and society braces for the impact. Genezip has been through school and is now a military officer. He becomes attached to the staff of the Quartermaster General Sloboluchowicz (the “Great Slob’), the dominant figure of the second half and a self-styled, self-assured Nietzschean superman whom Zipcio comes to idolize. Through his sister Lilian (for whom he, of course, has incestuous longing) and her connection with the theatre, Zipcio makes the acquaintance of the delectable Persy, who brings him to her rooms only to torture him with extended sexual teases, which give her a sadistic satisfaction. Zipcio is unaware that Persy is also the Great Slob’s mistress, who, in the intervals of strenuous lovemaking sessions, rebuilds his lust by recounting her teasings of Zipcio. Finally, at one point, it appears that Zipcio can control himself no longer and is on the verge of rape when Persy leaves the room. From another door enters another man, an adjunct of Sloboluchowicz, who has been spying on the two under orders of the General. Perhaps as a result of his own arousal from viewing the proceedings, he approaches Zipcio with clearly unwholesome intent. Zipcio picks up a hammer and buries it in the man’s temple. He leaves, disoriented but remorseless, and by lucky turn of fate guerilla warfare between rival factions begins that very night. Zenezip is wounded and wakes up in an infirmary.

He finds himself in the care of the gentle and virginal Eliza. Following the murder, Zipcio has experienced a breakdown of sorts, a disassociation from reality. He sees in Eliza a boundless calm and none of the guile that has characterized the women with whom he has heretofore associated. Eliza explains that she is a convert to a new religion, a religion that takes the form of mysterious pills dispensed by an Indian named Djevani, who is a sort of advance man, an infiltrator spreading the neo-Buddhist gospel of Murti-Bingism through Davamesque B2, a pill that takes away the anxieties and concerns of philosophy, the obsessions and insatiabilities of the artist and the intellectual, by revealing the “Grand Truth“. Zipcio partakes of the drug and experiences a mind-bending alteration of reality, which leaves him in a schizoid state, by turns docile and psychotically manic.

Zipcio keeps his hands off Eliza, mostly worshiping her virginity and wondering at her inner peace, but also bearing silent witness to a certain contempt of her. Finally, on their wedding night, they consummates their relationship, an act which turns Eliza sexually ravenous - in a word, insatiable. In the heat of sex giving way to his revulsion of her, Zipcio grips his hands around Eliza’s throat and strangles her in a last erotic convulsion. He rises the next morning, puts on his uniform, informs the desk that Madame will be staying an extra day, and calmly leaves to join his unit. He travels with Persy and the Great Slob to Polish Byelorussia, where a minor Armageddon is to be staged in the face of the advancing Chinese (the acknowledgement of this second murder is taken calmly by the Great Slob, as he is certain that Zipcio will perish at the front anyway along with the rest of the army, obviating the need for punishment). But it turns out that the Great Slob himself has partaken of Davamesque B2 as well. He knows that resistance to the Chinese is futile, and that his army will be slaughtered. At this point, under the influence, this great leader who has planned martyrdom and a blaze of glory for himself makes the astonishing decision to surrender. Despite angry rebellion by other units in the Polish army, the deed is done, and the group is taken to the camp of the Chinese general, where a group of Chinese are being lazily beheaded for minor infractions in the preparation for a battle that never takes place. Sloboluchowicz has assured himself that a man of his experience, stature and charisma will be invaluable to the Chinese, but he allows no show of emotion when he is calmly informed that they really have no use for him, and he is taken out to be summarily decapitated. In the aftermath, Zipcio, after a brief emotionless fling with Persy, takes up his new position in the new order, a “consummate lunatic, a mild catatonic” and is forcibly married off to a noble Chinese beauty. The new devotees of Murti-Bing, freed of unproductive intellectual inquiry and decadent Western ennui, take their assigned places in the new order.

A summary of the main narrative of Insatiability hardly does the book justice. The neologisms, the obscenities, the mad jargon, poisonous satire, and tooth-grinding contempt of Wikiewicz for the banal shine forth crazily from every dark page. Insatiablity flows forth like a manuscript smuggled out of an asylum, a bizarre, unique document of the early 20th century avant-garde, and a work of breathtaking genius, decades ahead of its time. In a strange coda for one who had created such a novel, Stanislaw Witkiewicz committed suicide at the Russian border upon learning of the Soviet invasion of Poland. Later investigation, it is said, revealed that his coffin held the body of an unknown woman.