Georg Büchner: Lenz

Literary representations of madness and melancholia are not that uncommon but not many can rival Georg Buchner's short story Lenz in the truthfulness of its depiction and insights into a mind coming apart. (Buchner's play Woyzeck is another masterpiece of the genre, and Werner Herzog's movie adaptation is excellent too.) Lenz is based on the real life events from the life of the eponymous German writer (wiki page here) who was Goethe's contemporary. Lenz, after an attack of paranoid schizophrenia and following an advice from a friend, visited an evangelical minister and philanthropist by the name of Oberlin in the hope of getting some relief. The story describes Lenz's visions, torments and thoughts once he arrives in that mountainous region and ends with his departure for the town of Strasbourgh. Lenz later died in a state of complete madness.

What is most remarkable is that though the account is written in third person, it is so completely allied with Lenz's skewed perspective that it creates an uncanny feeling of inhabiting Lenz's mind and yet maintaining a detached understanding of the subject. For example this passage, it will seem as if it is being described by a detached narrator who is just trying to create a background "effect" before the arrival of the hero, but soon it turns out that it is supposed to show the mental state of Lenz and everything is filtered through Lenz's fractured consciousness. It is breathtaking long sentence...

Only once or twice, when the storm forced the clouds down into the valleys and the mist rose from below, and voices echoed from the rocks, sometimes like distant thunder, sometimes in a mighty rush like wild songs in celebration of the earth; or when the clouds reared up like wildly whinnying horses and the sun's rays shone through, drawing their glittering sword across the snowy slopes, so that a blinding light sliced downwards from peak to valley; or when the stormwind blew the clouds down and away, tearing into them a pale blue lake of sky, until the wind abated and a humming sound like a lullaby or the ringing of the bells floated upwards from the gorges far below and from the tops of the fir trees, and a gentle red crept across the deep blue , and tiny clouds drifted past on silver wings, and all the peaks shone and glistened sharp and clear far across the landscape; at such moments he felt a tugging in his breast and he stood panting, his body leaned forward, eyes and mouth torn open; he felt as though he would have to suck up the storm and receive it within him. He would stretch himself flat on the ground, communing with nature with a joyfulness that caused pain. Or he would stand still and lay his head on the moss, half closing his eyes, and then everything seemed to recede, the earth contracted under him, it grew as small as a wandering star and plunged into a rushing stream that sparkled by beneath him, But these were only moments, and then he would get up clear-headed, stable and calm, as though a shadow-play had passed before him. He had forgotten it all.

Also interesting is that how Buchner presents nature as a destabilising and oppressive force, something diametrically opposite to the romantics, or even the nature descriptions in Goethe's Young Werther.

The story also touches on an interesting philosophical debate surrounding an aesthetic issue. Lenz is vehemently critical of idealists and thinks that only simple mimetic representational role of art is valuable:

He said: God has created the world the way it should be, and we cannot cobble together anything better, we should just try to copy it as best we can. I demand in all things - life, the possibility of existence, and then all is well. There is then no point in asking whether something is beautiful or ugly; the feeling that something has been created possesses life stands above these qualities and is the only criterion in the matters of art. Besides, this is quite a rarity; you can find it in Shakespeare, and we encounter it totally in folk-songs and sometimes in Goethe. All the rest can be thrown in the fire.

It is interesting because the story itself is far from a representation of the objective world. Indeed, one of the sources of Lenz's madness is that he is not able to extricate his own consciousness from that of the outside world and that he thinks the whole world is just a figment of his imagination and extension of his own mind.

I had read Woyzeck before but I am yet to read his other plays. He didn't write much, in fact it comes as a shock to learn that he died at a ridiculously young age of 23 from Typhus. It is even more surprising because he doesn't come across as just another intuitive genius, or at least not just that, but someone who had spent a lot of time reading and thinking about other people's ideas and forming his own opinions before expressing it in his writing. I will post about some of his other works later.

Filmgoing Notes

If you are a movie-lover and live in and around New York City there are busy weekends ahead for you. First the wonderful BAM cinemathek is holding a retrospective of films by Japanese director Shohei Imamura who died last year. Shamefully I haven't seen any of his films yet. I will definitely try to be there as and when it is possible.

Also, fans of Abbas Kiarostami should head over to the Museum of Modern Art which is organizing a complete exhibition of his works (first ever in the US), including his early didactic short films and recent video installations. I have already seen his major films, A Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, Close-up and Ten (the first and the last are my favourites, the two "car-movies") but will see if I can make it to some other movies that I have not seen.

Satantango

Susan Sontag said she wanted to see it every year for the rest of her life. For me I think two times will be enough. I was at the BAM cinemathek yesterday and saw it for the second time (first time on big screen). There were two intervals of fifteen minutes each but still a major sitzfleisch test, but I passed it successfully, from three in the afternoon to almost eleven in the night, sitting and staring at the screen in the dark! Surprisingly the theatre was completely packed and I don't think anybody walked out before the end, except perhaps for one cat-lover. Tarr has said somewhere that there was vet on the set and the cat wasn't harmed during the filming of the scene. The cat now lives with him.

It is no doubt a great film but as with Werckmeister Harmonies I felt it is too formalist an approach to the subject, eschewing the social, political and philosophical elements of the story, which makes it something of a comparatively limited interest than the source book. I am of course extrapolating from Krasznahorkai's two other books The Melancholy of Resistance and War and War that I have read so far. I hope it gets translated too. It sure will be funnier and even bleaker than the other two.

"Death of a Reader"

Bhupinder has an apt and a great title for the post. Veteran Journalist and columnist Sham Lal passed away yesterday. The Hindu has more details.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in a condolence message, remembered Mr. Sham Lal as a "great editor, a thoughtful writer and a voice of reason, liberal values and patriotism."

Describing him as a "media icon of my generation," Dr. Singh said: "Generations of his readers looked forward to reading his columns for his wit and wisdom and his erudition. I hope his inspiring example will continue to guide Indian journalism."

I read his collection of previously published columns, book reviews and essays "A Hundred Encounters" with great interest and enthusiasm. It was difficult to believe that such erudite and wide ranging articles were published in a newspaper, that too in The Times of India, which has now virtually become the symbol of the death of mainstream intellectual culture in India.

The most impressive and easily recognisable thing about his writing was the manner in which he distanced himself from his subject and yet remain committed to essenntial values of freedom, justice and truth. That was the reason why they remained of great interest even years after they were first written and published. It was in that book that I first came across names of people like Derrida, Adorno, Hobsbawm and so many others. A review of the book from The Tribune and The Hindu.

Fat Girl

What a brilliant film! I just saw it again for the second time. In a way perfect film for valentine's day! Just over eighty minutes, this film has enough vitriol to dissolve year long supply of sentimental mush about sexuality and gender relations. It succeeds because all the rhetorical flourishes are not empty and shallow misanthropic posturing but is built up organically from the roots of the characters, who are also very identifiable types. In this sense it is very different from Breillat's earlier film Romance, which is a complete failure. It is of course extremely cynical and the last scene, with its perverse interpretations of the act of rape may drive even full time feminists crazy. But then they will be missing the main strand of her argument. Her main targets are the the "soar bar theory" and "corked bottle theory" of female sexuality (not my phrases; Anais, the titular fat girl, in a scene says "she is not a soap bar" to her imaginary lovers who are jealous because of her imaginary promiscuities), and it is these ridiculous ideas about sexuality that forces people to invent sentimental lies about themselves and other people. In the process the sexual act and sexuality becomes alienating, rather than a genuine and authentic self-expressionm as it should be. Very highly recommeded! Jim Hoberman has a nice review of the film. (he discusses the whale movie too, just scroll down) Two interviews from Guardian and Village Voice and a profile from Senses of Cinema.

An Excerpt from Anatomy of Melancholy

(A little harsh in my opinion...!)

What breach of vows and oaths, fury, dotage, madness, might I reckon up? Yet this is more tolerable in youth, and such as are still in their hot blood; but for an old fool to dote, to see an old lecher, what more odious, what can be more absurd? and yet what so common? Who so furious? Amare ea aetate si occiperint, multo insaniunt acrius. Some dote then more than ever they did in their youth. How many decrepit, hoary, harsh, writhen, bursten-bellied, crooked, toothless, bald, blear-eyed, impotent, rotten, old men shall you see flickering still in every place? One gets him a young wife, another a courtesan, and when he can scarce lift his leg over a sill, and hath one foot already in Charon's boat, when he hath the trembling in his joints, the gout in his feet, a perpetual rheum in his head, a continuate cough, his sight fails him, thick of hearing, his breath stinks, all his moisture is dried up and gone, may not spit from him, a very child again, that cannot dress himself, or cut his own meat, yet he will be dreaming of, and honing after wenches, what can be more unseemly? Worse it is in women than in men, when she is aetate declivis, diu vidua, mater olim, parum decore matrimonium sequi videtur, an old widow, a mother so long since (in Pliny's opinion), she doth very unseemly seek to marry, yet whilst she is so old a crone, a beldam, she can neither see, nor hear, go nor stand, a mere carcass, a witch, and scarce feel; she caterwauls, and must have a stallion, a champion, she must and will marry again, and betroth herself to some young man, that hates to look on, but for her goods; abhors the sight of her, to the prejudice of her good name, her own undoing, grief of friends, and ruin of her children.

But to enlarge or illustrate this power and effects of love, is to set a candle in the sun. It rageth with all sorts and conditions of men, yet is most evident among such as are young and lusty, in the flower of their years, nobly descended, high fed, such as live idly, and at ease; and for that cause (which our divines call burning lust) this ferinus insanus amor, this mad and beastly passion, as I have said, is named by our physicians heroical love, and a more honourable title put upon it, Amor nobilis, as [4747]Savanarola styles it, because noble men and women make a common practice of it, and are so ordinarily affected with it. Avicenna, lib. 3. Fen, 1. tract. 4. cap. 23. calleth this passion Ilishi, and defines it to be a disease or melancholy vexation, or anguish of mind, in which a man continually meditates of the beauty, gesture, manners of his mistress, and troubles himself about it: desiring, (as Savanarola adds) with all intentions and eagerness of mind, to compass or enjoy her, as commonly hunters trouble themselves about their sports, the covetous about their gold and goods, so is he tormented still about his mistress. Arnoldus Villanovanus, in his book of heroical love, defines it, a continual cogitation of that which he desires, with a confidence or hope of compassing it; which definition his commentator cavils at. For continual cogitation is not the genus but a symptom of love; we continually think of that which we hate and abhor, as well as that which we love; and many things we covet and desire, without all hope of attaining. Carolus a Lorme, in his Questions, makes a doubt, An amor sit morbus, whether this heroical love be a disease: Julius Pollux Onomast. lib. 6. cap. 44. determines it. They that are in love are likewise [4751]sick; lascivus, salax, lasciviens, et qui in venerem furit, vere est aegrotus, Arnoldus will have it improperly so called, and a malady rather of the body than mind. Tully, in his Tusculans, defines it a furious disease of the mind. Plato, madness itself. Ficinus, his Commentator, cap. 12. a species of madness, for many have run mad for women, Esdr. iv. 26. But Rhasis a melancholy passion: and most physicians make it a species or kind of melancholy (as will appear by the symptoms), and treat of it apart; whom I mean to imitate, and to discuss it in all his kinds, to examine his several causes, to show his symptoms, indications, prognostics, effect, that so it may be with more facility cured.

David Lynch in Cahiers du Cinema

Cahiers du Cinema, the world's most famous film journal, is now available in electronic format (I mean with simulation of print copy and everything and translated into English!) There are lots of goodies for David Lynch fans. If you are one of the heathens the essays and reviews might piss you off. They are a slightly over the top in their praise for his work. There is also an exhibition of David Lynch's paintings and graphic work currently on in Paris. There are images from that too.

Also lots of Lynch related links on this blog.

Also Girish has excerpted an article about the history of the Journal on his blog. There is a nice discussion in the comments section too.

Also I am planning to re-watch Inland Empire when it gets released into the neighbourhood theatre. (I just saw the posters, I don't know the dates.) This time I will try to take down some mental notes. Of course, if you are in New York you can trek down to the IFC Center where it is still going strong after three months since its release.

Update:Greencine Daily points to another magazine which has Lynch on its cover.

Tired

Some good news for film lovers living in (and around) New York. Three Bela Tarr films, all masterpieces (I've seen all three), including the seven hour long monster Satantango, are getting screened at the BAM Cinemathek in Brooklyn. I have already got the tickets for Saturday show of Satantango. Whew! It is things like these which somehow keep me excited otherwise I feel like dropping dead just out of tedium vitae.

Also more than two years after its world premiere in the Berlin Film Festival, Tsai Ming-Liang's tale of alienation, loneliness, porn and water melon, The Wayward Cloud is getting its first American theatrical run at the super specialised Anthology Film Archives (scroll down). I don't think I will be able to cram both in this coming weekend but will try. Needless to say, if you are around you shouldn't miss either. I have some doubts about Wayward Cloud, specially after I read about it. Taking potshots at porn from a sociological angle seems, well, a little too easy for me. I will anyway watch it and try to post about it too.

In other news, the Musil reading project is going fine. I just finished chapter 99, which is around 500 pages. Only 1200 more pages remain. I think I will read the first volume (200 more pages) and leave the rest for a little later. In the meanwhile I have to learn a few basic things about metaphysics in German philosophy, Nietzsche, specially his ethics, philosophy of science and also philosophy of consciousness ("self", "intentionality", "mind-body problem" etc.) Then read at least a few chapters of the first volume again. This is one book meant mostly for people who have a few degrees in philosophy. But it is philosophy done with a great style and that's what has kept me going even though I am mostly vague about all the aforementioned topics.

Also the more I read Austrians, the more I am getting impressed. They are sharp, bilious, intelligent, misanthropic, unsentimental and they don't suffer fools or nonsense gladly. They are all one uncompromising bunch, interested only in extremes, in every sense of the word, whether it is how they say or what they say, no half-measures for them. Next on the line are Peter Handke (one of whose books is called "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams"), Elias Canetti (about whose novel Auto-da-fe, Salman Rushdie says, "In Auto-da-Fé no one is spared. Professor and furniture salesman, doctor, housekeeper, and thief all get it in the neck. The remorseless quality of the comedy builds one of the most terrifying literary worlds of the century") and also Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, who I recently came across and whose novel Lord Chandos Letter looks enormously interesting. Also I have to read the rest of the oeuvre of Thomas Bernhard and Ingeborg Bachmann. And also I have to look for a copy of "Wittgenstein for Idiots" or some similar book. I am excited even though always feeling very tired and sleepy even at work, or actually, specially at work. I am just a little worried about my mental health right now. I fear I will turn into one of those people inside these books. We'll see. I will keep this blog updated.

Proustian Wisdom

Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit to the country it described, I should have felt that I was making an enormous advance towards the ultimate conquest of truth. For even if we have the sensation of being always enveloped in, surrounded by our own soul, still it does not seem a fixed and immovable prison; rather do we seem to be borne away with it, and perpetually struggling to pass beyond it, to break out into the world, with a perpetual discouragement as we hear endlessly, all around us, that unvarying sound which is no echo from without, but the resonance of a vibration from within. We try to discover in things, endeared to us on that account, the spiritual glamour which we ourselves have cast upon them; we are disillusioned, and learn that they are in themselves barren and devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilise all our spiritual forces in a glittering array so as to influence and subjugate other human beings who, as we very well know, are situated outside ourselves, where we can never reach them.

--from Swann's Way, Scott Moncrieff Translation

Vive L'Amour

This is a scene from Tsai Ming-Liang's Vive L'Amour... a crying scene like no other...



A memorable description from Dennis Lim in Village Voice.

In a scene saturated with the perversely lucid regret of a bleary morning-after, she walks through a desolate park at daybreak, seats herself at a bench, and starts to cry—an implacable tidal wave with a life of its own, going beyond surrender, beyond absurdity, beyond catharsis, right into the realm of fables. The fade to black arrives just as you've convinced yourself she could go on weeping forever.

Laszlo Krasznahorkai: War and War

Laszlo Krasznahorkai's first novel to be translated into English, The Melancholy of Resistance, won the "Dispatches from Zembla book of the year" award last month (Details here. And yes, its German translation also won the book of the year award in Germany, just in case!). War and War his second and only other novel to be translated was published only last year, more than a decade after it was first published in Hungarian. It is engrossing but very difficult to read and even more difficult to conclude what it all means in the end. Melancholy of Resistance wasn't easy to read either, but since I had seen the movie Werckmeister Harmonies which is adapted from the novel, I was aware of the basic plot and events described in the novel and I could marvel at his style and apocalyptic and satiric tone without distraction. The basic story was easier to decipher too. The dead whale of the circus was obviously the dead Leviathan, which connects it through the pessimistic political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, to death of authority, to death of God and to anarchy, chaos and destruction. Also the shadowy figure who is known as "Prince" is perhaps "the prince of darkness," which again points to destruction and chaos. The metaphor of the history of western music and the theories of temperament are pretty obvious too. There is no harmony, no order to be found in nature. All is chaos, entropy and doom.

War and War resists such reading. At least for me, I couldn't make much of what was happening. The plot is simple and spare, if a little bizarre and odd. A Hungarian archivist Gyorgy Korin has come across a mysterious manuscript who he thinks is a work of exceptional beauty and importance. In fact such is its importance that he must travel all the way to new york, "the centre of the living world", and consign it to the eternity by typing it on the internet and once this last mission of his life is over, he must commit suicide. He is obviously "insane" and like many of the similar characters in the novels of Thomas Bernhard, he is also very eloquent. (One of the characters calls him a "word nut"). Most of the novel is Korin's narration of the mysterious manuscript in his own breathless style as he types it on his computer. In the process he also meets a few unsavoury characters. He finally manages to type the entire thing and comes back to Switzerland where he takes his own life. This incident is not narrated in the book. Instead we see the image of a plaque informing that "this is the place where Gyorgy Korin, the hero of the novel War and War by Laszlo Krasznahorkai shot himself in the head." And also, "Search as he might, he could not find what he had called the Way Out." There is even a blackened page, just like in Tristram Shandy, as a mark of mourning. The novel ends with an epilogue titled "Isaiah has come," in which Korin rants against humanity and about meaninglessness of history and threatens suicide. Perhaps something that happened earlier. Also you can check what finally happened to his manuscript by clicking on http://www.warandwar.com/.

The main source of bafflement for me was the content of the manuscript. It tells the story of the adventures and journeys of four men through various historical time and places, rome, crete, cologne, and in various centuries. I couldn't figure the head or tail of what it all meant. My guess is that it is all meant to signify the meaninglessness of human history, the antithesis of the idea of historical progress or the Hegelian idea that history is a rational process. In the beginning Korin even says that he finds the idea the history and truth have anything to do with each other extremely ridiculous. It is also evident in the title of the manuscript (the same as the novel). It is all war and war, one war after the another, a sequence of destructive events. If it is indeed what he wants us to conclude, it is clearer and more effectively done in the melancholy of resistance.

Despite all the obscurities and difficulties it holds one's attention because of its style, its chapter length sentences -- every chapter in the novel is one single sentence -- and the breathless stlye of narration. This is one of the passages where Krasznahorkai is more explicit in his themes:

What had happened to him--Korin shook his head as if he still could not believe it--was, at the beginning, almost inconceivable, nigh unbearable, because even at first glance, following an initial survey of the complex nature of what was involved, one straight look told him that from now on he'd have to abandon his "sick hierarchical view of the world," explode "the illusion of an orderly pyramid of facts" and liberate himself from the extraordinarily powerful and secure belief in what was now revealed as merely a kind of childish mirage, which is to say the indivisible unity and contiguity of phenomena, and beyond that, the unity's secure permanence and stability;and, within this permanence and stability, the overall coherence of its mechanism, that strictly governed interdependence of functioning parts which gave the whole system its sense of direction, development, pace and progress, in other words whatever suggested that the thing it embodied was attractive and self-sufficient, or, to put it another way, he now had to say No, an immediate and once-and-for-all No, to an entire mode of life; [.... On to two more pages]

Some links and reviews I could find (I haven't read them all): Waggish, Ready Steady Book, Hungarian Literature Quarterly

Top 10

This looks like a very interesting book. More than a hundred writers pick up their top 10 books. Complete Review has more details.

Well, I still haven't read so many great books but so far my top 10 looks like this...

1. In Search of Lost Time: Marcel Proust*
   
2. Don Quixote: Miguel de Cervantes
3. The Castle: Franz Kafka
4. Dead Souls: Nikolai Gogol
5. Notes from Underground: Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Speak, Memory: Vladimir Nabokov
7. Gulliver's Travels: Jonathan Swift
8. The Red and the Black: Stendhal
9. Tristram Shandy: Laurence Sterne
10. Eugene Onegin: Alexander Pushkin

*I have read only the first three volumes but I am still sure of its place on top 10.

It is a very eurocentric list (though personally, like the great Russians on my list, I don't consider Russia to be a part of Europe). Also no women writers...

And based on the 400 pages that I have read so far Man Without Qualities might be somewhere on the list too. Somewhere around 4.

"Novel of Ideas"

nice interview of Milan Kundera...

LO: You have provoked many discussions about Central Europe, All of your fiction takes place in Czechoslovakia and even in your theoretical work, The Art of the Novel, Central Europe is very important. Would you mind clarifying just what this notion of Central Europe represents for you, just what its real perimeters are?

MK: Let's simplify the problem, an enormous one, and limit ourselves to the novel. There are four great novelists: Kafka, Broch, Musil, Gombrowicz. I call them the "pleiad" of Central Europe's great novelists. Since Proust, I can't see anyone of greater importance in the history of the novel. Without knowing them, not much of the modern novel can be understood. Briefly, these authors are modernists, which is to say that they are impassioned by a search for new forms. At the same time, however, they are completely devoid of any avant-garde ideology (faith in progress, in revolution, and so on), whence another vision of the history of art and of the novel: They never speak of the necessity of a radical break; they don't consider the formal possibilities of the novel to be exhausted; they only want to radically enlarge them.

From this as well there derives another rapport with the novel's past. There is no disdain in these writers for "tradition," but another choice of tradition: they are all fascinated by the novel preceding the nineteenth century. I call this era the first "half-time" of the history of the novel. This era and its aesthetic were almost forgotten, obscured, during the nineteenth century. The "betrayal" of this first half-time deprived the novel of its play essence (so striking in Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot) and diminished the role of what I call "novelistic meditation." Novelistic meditation--let's avoid any misunderstanding here: I'm not thinking of the so-called "philosophical novel" that really means a subordination of the novel to philosophy, the novelistic illustration of ideas. This is Sartre. And even more so Camus. La Peste. This moralizing novel is almost the model of what I don't like. The intent of a Musil or a Broch is entirely different: it is not to serve philosophy but, on the contrary, to get hold of a domain that, until then, philosophy had kept for itself There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize. This said, these novelists (particularly Broch and Musil) made of the novel a supreme poetic and intellectual synthesis and accorded it a preeminent place in the cultural totality.

These authors are relatively little known in America, which I have always considered an intellectual scandal. But really it is a matter of an aesthetic misunderstanding that is quite comprehensible when one considers the particular tradition of the American novel. In the first place, America didn't live through the first half-time of the history of the novel. In the second, at the same time that the great Central Europeans were writing their masterpieces, America herself had her own great "pleiad," one which would influence the entire world and which was that of Hemingway, Faulkner and Dos Passos. But its aesthetic was entirely opposed to that of a Musil! For example: a meditative intervention of the author into the narrative thread of his novel appears in this aesthetic as a displaced intellectualism, as something foreign to the very essence of the novel. A personal recollection: The New Yorker published the first three parts of The Unbearable Lightness of Being--but they eliminated the passages on Nietzsche's eternal return! Yet, in my eyes, what I say about Nietzsche's eternal return has nothing to do with a philosophic discourse; it is a continuity of paradoxes that are no less novelistic (that is to say, they answer no less to the essence of what the novel is) than a description of the action or a dialogue.

Musil Links

I am trying to catch up with The Man Without Qualities. It is not really a difficult book to read, it doesn't have the long and complex sentences of Proust but the ideas are very complex. On more than a few occasions I had to skip a few passages carrying with me only a vague understanding of what Musil is really saying. If one is familiar with the philosophical background, specially the critics of the enlightenment tradition and scientific worldview and also various sociological theories of "Modernity" one will have an easy time with the text.

Anyway, I had copied a long introductory essay on Musil's life and MwQ a few days ago on the blog and posted it with an earlier date because it is very long. It was fist published in the new republic. (It is not entirely legal and if you feel the same, you should get a subscription to the magazine! And now those guys have said sorry for cheer-leading the Iraq war too!)

Also there are a bunch of essays on this website dedicated to Musil, including a couple by J M Coetzee. (He is his usual pedantic self. He is berating the editors, both English and German, for calling the volumes under review "diaries" rather than "notebooks" which is what he claims they actually are!)

The best essay however is the one by literary critic George Steiner. It is also a great defence of "novel of ideas" and the idea of a novelist as an original thinker, something that is rarer in the anglo-american tradition of the novel. (There are some spelling and punctuation typos but still worth reading.) He compares Musil with Proust about whom he says:

By contrast, if the notion of literature should disappear, Proust's place in intellectual life would remain eminent. He is, after Aristotle and Kant, one of the seminal thinkers on aesthetics, on the theoretical and pragmatic relations between form and meaning. His analyses of the psychosomatic texture of human emotions, of the phenomenology of experience, are of compelling philosophical interest. Even in his lifetime, it became a cliché to set "Proust on time" beside Einstein and the new Physics. "A la Recherche du Temp Perdu" is interwoven with motif of epistemology, philosophy of art (including music), and ethical debate which nevertheless have their own independent status. Only Musil provides a counterpart.

Also via Waggish, this is an informative article about Walther Rathenau, who was the foreign minister of Germany and also an extremely successful business tycoon and one of the leading intellectuals of his time. One of the main characters in the book, Paul Arnheim, is modeled after him. He is a rather quixotic figure who is trying to bring about "a union of soul and economics" and is also trying to "bring philosophy to the corridors of power". He even likes to use "Bergsonian philosophy" in determining the correct coal pricing. He doesn't hesitate to give pompous philosophical justifications for the profiteering activities of his fellow businessmen. He is their philosophical face and also a representative and a caricature of a "modern" and "rational" man.

It is also a little strange reading his satirical exegesis of the old world order just when it was breaking apart. (The main action of the novel is set in 1913, one year before the great war.) When ridiculing the idea of "global European spirit," that the Austro-Hungarian empire stood for, for example he just comes across as extremely cynical. Cynicism is in a way justified given the fact that the so-called European spirit was soon subsumed into petty and barbaric nationalisms but he could have at least shown some sympathy with the original idea. Similarly knowing the eventual fate of Rathenau (he was murdered by right-wing anti-semitic fanatics), it is jarring to read how he makes fun of his character. As Waggish says:

Musil’s engagement with Arnheim/Rathenau is total, but by 1934, it could not have seemed relevant. He was attacking an Enlightenment-derived ideology in one of the better statesmen of the century while National Socialism had taken over the world around him. Excavation of a flawed “frame” was hardly noticeable while the house was on fire.

May be this was the reason why he couldn't finish the book. It is also very interesting to compare his attitude to that of Joseph Roth who wrote on the same subject but whose books and stories, such as The Radetzky March or The Bust of the Emperor, are filled with painful longing and melancholia about the demise of the old order. As one of the characters in MwQ (the count I think) says, "there is no voluntary turning back when it comes to history of human affairs." There is no turning back, even when it is all doom and destruction ahead! I can't complain about Musil being pessimistic, just that I find his distrust and skepticism about the empire hard to swallow.

Some Friendly Advice from The Anatomy of Melancholy...

...on why one should practice moderation when it comes to matters of venereal nature :)

You have heard how this tyrant Love rageth with brute beasts and spirits; now let us consider what passions it causeth amongst men. Improbe amor quid non mortalia pectora cogis? How it tickles the hearts of mortal men, Horresco referens,—I am almost afraid to relate, amazed, and ashamed, it hath wrought such stupendous and prodigious effects, such foul offences. Love indeed (I may not deny) first united provinces, built cities, and by a perpetual generation makes and preserves mankind, propagates the church; but if it rage it is no more love, but burning lust, a disease, frenzy, madness, hell. Est orcus ille, vis est immedicabilis, est rabies insana; 'tis no virtuous habit this, but a vehement perturbation of the mind, a monster of nature, wit, and art, as Alexis in Athenaeus sets it out, viriliter audax, muliebriter timidium, furore praeceps, labore infractum, mel felleum, blanda percussio, &c. It subverts kingdoms, overthrows cities, towns, families, mars, corrupts, and makes a massacre of men; thunder and lightning, wars, fires, plagues, have not done that mischief to mankind, as this burning lust, this brutish passion. Let Sodom and Gomorrah, Troy, (which Dares Phrygius, and Dictis Cretensis will make good) and I know not how many cities bear record,—et fuit ante Helenam, &c., all succeeding ages will subscribe: Joanna of Naples in Italy, Fredegunde and Brunhalt in France, all histories are full of these basilisks. Besides those daily monomachies, murders, effusion of blood, rapes, riot, and immoderate expense, to satisfy their lusts, beggary, shame, loss, torture, punishment, disgrace, loathsome diseases that proceed from thence, worse than calentures and pestilent fevers, those often gouts, pox, arthritis, palsies, cramps, sciatica, convulsions, aches, combustions, &c., which torment the body, that feral melancholy which crucifies the soul in this life, and everlastingly torments in the world to come.

Notwithstanding they know these and many such miseries, threats, tortures, will surely come upon them, rewards, exhortations, e contra; yet either out of their own weakness, a depraved nature, or love's tyranny, which so furiously rageth, they suffer themselves to be led like an ox to the slaughter: (Facilis descensus Averni) they go down headlong to their own perdition, they will commit folly with beasts, men leaving the natural use of women, as Paul saith, burned in lust one towards another, and man with man wrought filthiness."

David Lynch in London

David Lynch is now on London tour with his Inland Empire. The Guardian has a transcript of the interview conducted at the NFT. Has this interesting information in particular.. he asks his polish visitors, "if they could get me nude women at night to photograph." (the film has some scenes of nude polish prostitutes singing pop songs!)

Q10: What is it about Poland that made you decide to film Inland Empire there, and with Polish actors as well?

DL: A car arrived and five or six guys get out and come into my house. And they're from Lodz, Poland, and they say they're from the Camerimage film festival. They're the greatest bunch, these guys who run the festival, the hardest workers. They've been putting on this festival for 14 or 15 years now, on their own against all odds and it gets bigger and bigger every year. Really beautiful. They invited me over there and I asked them if I went there, because I heard there were factories, so I asked if they could get me into factories so that I could photograph, and if they could get me nude women at night to photograph.

Also some video excerpts from the interview.

More posts on Lynch coming up. Last Sunday I saw Lynch's Dune adaptation, a disaster but a very interesting disaster. Will write about it later. I have also caught hold of his new book "Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity". I am not really into all this but still it is David Lynch...

I also wanted to link to this great post on house next door. It is a fantastic discussion on cinema and new technologies, specially digital video. They discuss David Lynch in detail too.

The Rings of Saturn Art Exhibition

The Guardian Review has details about an art exhibition inspired by W G Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, which is a (highly idiosyncratic) account of his travels through the coastal regions of East Anglia:

Before he stopped in Middleton, Sebald's fictional self went to Dunwich, one of the most important towns in medieval England, with possibly as many as 18 churches, before it was lost to sea. It was also a place of pilgrimage, in the Victorian age, for melancholy poets such as Swinburne, who described it as "a land that is lonelier than ruin". In Guy Moreton's photographs of the ruins of St Andrew's, Walberswick, captured with a 10inx8in camera, we get a sense of that dissolution. Lonely, yes, but the images are so dense, rich and sensual we nearly forget that they are recording the continual process of decay.

Moreton reminds us that faith erected these places, places that were once inhabited, active, hopeful. They are symbols of eternal life crumbling into dust and ash. By portraying them in quiet dignity, he gives us an assurance of their still-sacred value. The photos are accompanied by Alec Finlay's watercolours, reinforcing that spiritual symbolism. Finlay has transformed bell-methods, usually represented by number sequences, into rows of concentric primary-coloured circles.

More on the exhibition here.

from The Nightmare Before Christmas

from one of my all time favourite animation films...

The Oogie-Boogie song. If you are sentimental about Santa Claus please don't click!


More scenes and songs:

Lock, Shock and Barrel are planning to Kidnap "Mr. Sandy Claws". Same warning is applicable here too.

And two of my other favourites. Jack's Lament and Sally's Song

"Down with Love"

I love this picture! From the latest "grouchy valentine" issue of washington post book world titled "down with love." The first book review (or at least the book being reviewed) seems more like a case of sour grapes ("Love good, Sex bad!").

It seems strange to have to state the obvious all over again: Both males and females should work hard to gain another's affection and trust. And one's sexuality is not a commodity that, given away too readily and too often, will exhaust or devalue itself. Tell girls that it is such a commodity (as they were told for a number of decades), and they will rebel. The author is conflating what the girls refuse to conflate: love and sexuality. Sometimes they coexist, sometimes not. Loving, faithful marriages in which the sex life has cooled are as much a testament to that fact as a lustful tryst that leads nowhere.

Another one about women having mediocre sex lives and what should be done about it...

Maybe you're tired. Or you just don't feel like it. Perhaps it's your lover's fault; he doesn't know what you like. Or there's no time, the kids take all your attention, your job drains the life out of you. Or the dishes need to be done, the laundry has to be folded, and your body is not what it used to be. Or maybe you've never understood what all the fuss is about. It's easy to find reasons not to have sex.

Just in case the psychology claptrap is boring, here's an old column by Michael Dirda, Book World's editor, on the history and representation of love in French Literature... Also in the latest issue Dirda reviews a book about the friendship of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Such a shame, Wordsworth's philosophy and romanticism looks so out of place in our world. almost a cliche...

I am reading about Love too (and I am not grumpy or grouchy at all!). The Man Without Qualities isn't a very romantic book (Musil basically says that there is a big gaping hole where we thought we had a "soul"). Though it has some great passages about love, written in a very peculiar and ironic style, like this one:

Neither Diotima not Arhnheim had ever loved. [...]This shrewd man, although imbued with experience of life, was still untouched and in danger of being parmanently alone when he met Diotima, whom destiny had destined for him. The mysterious forces within them converged. It could be compared only with the movement of the trade winds, the Gulf Stream, the volcanic tremors of the earth's crust; forces vastly superior to those of man, akin to the stars, were set in motion from one to the other, overriding such barriers as hours and days, measureless currents. At such moments the actual words spoken are supremely unimportant. Rising from the vertical creases of his trousers, Arnheim's body seemed to stand there in the godlike solitude of a towering mountain. United with him through the valley between them, Diotima rose on its other side, luminous with solitude, in her fashionable dress of the period with its puffed sleeves on the upper arms, the artful pleats over the bosom widening over the stomach, the skirt narrowing again below the knees to cling to her calves. The glass-bead curtains at the doors cast moving reflections like ponds, the javelins and arrows on the walls trembled with their feathered and deadly passions, and the yellow volumes of Calman-Levy on the tables were as silent as lemon groves. We will reverently pass over the first words spoken.

from The Man Without Qualities

My literary tour of Austria continues. After Bernhard, Jelinek, Bachmann, Roth, Schnitzler, Freud, now it's the turn of what is generally considered the greatest work of Austrian (or Central European) literature-- The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. I have read around 200 pages so far and it has been more entertaining and much easier to read than what I had expected it to be. It is surprisingly very funny and the tone is predominantly satirical, in a good humoured sort of way, even when he goes all ballistic on the desolations and the shallowness of the modern world. I read somewhere that it gets serious, bleak and slow towards the end but so far it is a rollicking read. I will try to write down a summary of whatever I have read sometime (to keep track of my own reading more than anything else). For now here is a very enlightening extract which explains the title of the novel and the central character of the book and also elucidates the central idea of the novel -- that in the modern world man has lost his "essence", "soul" or "qualities" as scientifically minded Musil would prefer to call it. It is conversation between a couple, Walter and Clarisse, who are boyhood friends of Ulrich, the titular man without qualities.

Walter said vehemently: "Today it's all decadence! A bottomless pit of intelligence! He is intelligent, I grant you that, but he knows nothing about the power of the soul in full possession of itself. What Goethe calls personality, what Goethe calls mobile order-- those are the things he doesn't have a clue about!"[...]

"There are millions of them nowadays," Walter declared. "It's the human type produced by our time!"[...] "Just look at him! what would you take him for? Does he look like a doctor, a buisenessman, a painter or a diplomat?"

"He's none of those," Clarisse said dryly.

"Well, does he look like a mathematician?"

"I don't know -- how should I know what a mathematician is supposed to look like?"

"You've hit the nail on the head! A mathematician looks like nothing at all--that is, he is likely to look intelligent in such a general way that there isn't a single specific thing to pin him down! Except for the Roman Catholic Clergy, no one these days looks the way he should, because we use our heads even more impersonally than our hands. But mathematics is the absolute limit: it already knows as little about itself as future generations, feeding on energy pills instead of bread and meat, will be likely to know about meadows and young calves and chickens!"

[...]

"His appearance gives no clue to what his profession might be, and yet he doesn't look like a man without a profession either. Consider what he's like: He always knows what to do. He knows how to gaze into a woman's eyes. He can put his mind to any question at any time. He can box. He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tenacious, dashing, curcumspect--why quibble, suppose we grant him all these qualities--yet he has none of them! They've made him what he is, they've set the course for him, and yet they don't belong to him. When he is angry, something in him laughs. When he is sad, he is up to something. When something moves him, he turns against it. He'll always see a good side to every bad action. What he thinks of anything will always depend on some possible context--nothing is, to him, what it is; everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a superwhole that, however, he knows nothing about. So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling only an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only how it is--some extraneous seasoning that somehow goes along with it, that's what interests him. I don't know whether I am making myself clear--?"

[...] By the time he finished he had recognized that Ulrich stood for nothing but this state of dissolution that all present-day phenomena have.