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Thomas Bernhard and Vienna

The Tower 玄武

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Thomas Bernhard and the City of Dreams

Thomas Bernhard and Wittgenstein Notes

Thomas Bernhard came into my life as I was walking across the grounds of a mental hospital in August. Located on top of a wooded hill (Ah, the Vienna Woods!), the Kirche am Steinhof is part of what is a sprawling psychiatric hospital--one of the largest in Europe. Completed in 1907, it is also the location of what is considered one of the most important Art Nouveau churches in the world. And it was here that a dear friend of mine went on a first date with a man with whom she fell madly in love many years ago. I thought it was an awfully unusual spot for a first date. But my friend assured me: it had been perfect--and more, that they were still going strong even now, decades later. I had never been on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital before. The guard inquired if we wanted to see the church: Kirche? We nodded, and he pointed up the hill. There were maybe a dozen old buildings, each set within its own grove of trees, dotting the extensive grounds. The church was visible through the shade trees lining the gravel path up the hill. It's golden dome--recently renovated-- was gleaming in the brilliant sunlight, and I could easily understand why the locals called it: limoniberg (the lemon hill). A cheerful place --but then later I found out it also had a terrible history. This happened during the Nazi years, when Steinhof Hospital became the staging point for the death camps. A heartbreaking history of hospital beds emptied of children and adults deemed "untreatable" because of their ethnicity or for any so-called anti-social tendencies; this was where the now disgraced Dr. Hans Asperger did some of his dirty work. I had no idea about this dark history as I walked along the tree-lined path that sunny August day. All I was thinking was what a perfect setting for a novel the place would make. And sure enough, I would later learn, it had been just that; for this picturesque and strange place was the backdrop for my favorite novel by Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. Wittgenstein's Nephew (1982), is set over several months in 1967, when the hospital was comprised of two units: the pulmonary disease clinic and the sprawling psychiatric institution. 

Wittgenstein's Nephew bowled me over completely--and it led to several other novels by Bernhard: Old Masters, Old Masters Graphic Novel, Wittgenstein's Nephew, Yes, Correction, and Goethe Dies. It also led to Gita Honngeger incredible biography: Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian. This then led to a fantastic biography of the Wittgensteins by Evelyn Waugh's grandson, called the House of Wittgenstein; as well as Kandel's Age of Insight and Carl Schorske's classic, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna.

For me, the best part about this narrative journey was being able to be reacquainted to the life and work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I had briefly studied Wittgenstein as part of my undergraduate degree in philosophy but I confess I had mainly forgotten him. So, the narrative totem pole ended with several books on Wittgenstein's philosophy, as well as philosophical connections to Heidegger. I am still finishing this tower up and need to catch up on my reviews! I also have a long post on Bernhard and Vienna. 

 

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Thomas Bernhard and the City of Dreams

12_otto_wagner_3[First appeared at 3 Quarks Daily in April 2020]

Arriving in Vienna, we immediately set out for District 14, in the western suburbs of the city. Exhausted after the long journey from Los Angeles, all we wanted to do was get something to eat and crash out in our room. Unfortunately, Viennese architect Otto Wagner's legendary church was only opened to the public for four hours a week --on Sundays from noon to 4pm. And today was Sunday, so it was now or never!

Completed in 1907, the Kirche am Steinhof is considered to be one of the the most beautiful Art Nouveau churches in the world. Located on top of a wooded hill (Ah, the Vienna Woods!), the church is part of a sprawling psychiatric hospital—once one of the largest in Europe. It is also the place where a dear friend of mine had gone on her first date with the man she fell madly in love with decades ago.

It was an odd spot for a first date. But my friend assured me: It had been perfect--and they were still going strong!

Still, I had never been on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital before. The guard stationed at the front gate inquired if we wanted to see the church: Kirche? We nodded, and he pointed up the hill. There were maybe a dozen old buildings, each set within its own grove of trees, dotting the extensive grounds. The church loomed large above the wooded landscape. Its golden dome--recently renovated-- was gleaming in the brilliant sunlight. I could easily understand why the locals called it: limoniberg (the lemon hill).

The hospital grounds were a cheerful place.

It was only later that I learned its terrible history. Edith Shefferd in her book, Asperger’s Children, tells the story about how the hospital became one of the staging points for the death camps. A heartbreaking history of hospital beds emptied of children and adults deemed "untreatable" because of their ethnicity or for any so-called anti-social tendencies; this was where the now disgraced Dr. Hans Asperger did some of his dirty work. I had no idea about any of this dark history as I walked along the tree-lined path that sunny August day. All I was thinking was what a perfect setting for a novel the place would make. And sure enough, it had been just that: this picturesque and strange place was the backdrop for my now favorite novel by Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard.

Old masters

Wittgenstein's Nephew (1982) is set over the course of several months in 1967, at a time when the hospital was comprised of two units: the pulmonary disease clinic and the psychiatric institution. The hero of the novel--named after the novelist himself-- is very ill with a lung disease --as was Bernhard his entire life. Believing himself to be dying, he spends his days morbidly dwelling on his past. One day, learning that his good friend Paul Wittgenstein --nephew of the famous philosopher-- has been admitted to the psychiatric wing, he decides to sneak over the fence that separates the two facilities. As he plans this subterfuge, he reminiscences about his friend's troubled life and about the significance of their friendship.

The novel is typical Bernhard. Like my other favorite Bernhard, Old Masters (1985), and indeed like all of his novels, there are no paragraph breaks and no chapters. Sentences come relentlessly-- one after the other without end. One die-hard Bernhard fan on Goodreads, counting the opening sentences of the story "Goethe Dies" declared:

What joy. The first sentence has 140 words, the second 190, and the third 280.

German poet Michael Hofmann once famously remarked that, "Bernhard's novels have no moving parts." That is to say, there are no voices for different characters, and there is no plot development; just a surreal scene that unfolds in front of the reader, through the eyes of a man engaged in a long soliloquy.

In Old Masters, there is the man. There is the painting (Tintoretto's Man with Beard). And there are two friends. Every other day, the man comes to the museum to sit in front the same picture. Of course, he looks at the picture. But he also holds court. This is where he met his wife. We don't find this out until the very end, though. She has just died, and he is bereft. So, he continues to sit there. And holding court for his two friends, he rips apart all manner of things held dear to the Austrian people--from Heidegger to Mahler; from the Roman Catholic Church to the city of Salzburg, absolutely nothing is sacred! (And who could hate Salzburg?) Indeed, he even concludes--sitting there in what is one of the finest collections of art in the world-- that there is no picture in the gallery truly worthy of our devotion. And more, there is no work of great music good enough either. (He is a music critic for the newspaper).

Nichts. Nichts. Nichts. 

To catch a glimpse of just how devilishly clever Bernhard can be, you could take a look at Nicolas Mahler's graphic novel version of Old Masters (2018). The translation by James Reidel (who also translated one of my favorite Bernhard stories, "Goethe Dies") is very spirited, and the drawings by Nicolas Mahler bring to life what is just so entertaining about Bernhard's writing. But I must warn you, as much as I love the graphic novel, if you only read this version you will miss the strange and unique effect that a Bernhard novel can have.

His writing is maddening, difficult and some people think totally addictive. Wading in, the reader might feel washed out to sea. Submerged in prose without paragraphs or chapters, the repetitive, musical quality of his writing, with the single authorial voice (characters are simply not differentiated by voice in his books) is hypnotic. Someone once said that reading his novels is such an ordeal that the endings can only ever come crashing down on the reader. Speaking for myself, after reading a hundred uninterrupted pages (more like a hundred-page-long paragraph) in Old Masters--after all that ranting and raving is said and done-- the denouement left me in tears. His work is profoundly moving.

 

During his lifetime, Bernhard was much derided by his fellow Austrians for "dirtying his own nest." This was due to his endless tirades about Austria. He simply loathed anything that stank of the old Habsburg Empire (long gone for more than fifty years). He was furious that Austria’s complicity with the Third Reich was whitewashed. He had witnessed it first-hand, after all. He had been a child during WWII- and was keenly aware of what he felt to be a conspiracy of silence (Totschweigentaktik) and was tireless in urging fellow citizens to confront their historical culpability.

But Austria is known for being hard on her native geniuses. Maybe in a way similar to Mozart or Mahler, wily Bernhard saw it all coming! And anticipating the Austrian people embracing him only after his death, he decided to have the last laugh by stipulating in his will that upon his death, none of his works could be published or performed within Austria's borders until the copyright period ended. And sure enough just as Bernhard suspected, after he had died Austrians came to realize that an artistic giant had been in their midst. Imagine their horror to discover that his work would be inaccessible to the next generation. It would take over fifty years before this legal obstacle was cleared.

Critics have compared his writing style to that of Kafka or Beckett, but really, to read a Bernhard novel is a singular experience. His long uninterrupted and very repetitive monologues remind me of psychotherapy; as if the "talking" alone is able to uncover the underlying trauma so that the truth can be laid bare. His novel Yes is particularly interesting on this point since the hero reflects about how ugly he must appear unburdening himself in that way to his friend Moritz. And then he practically flees in horror when the character known as the Persian Woman confesses all to him. Anyone who has been in psychotherapy might suspect that there is something crass about the way we regurgitate all our troubles to an analyst and that it can take on the form of a spewing rant. But in the end, a kind of truth can be uncovered--or so the story goes! Bernhard’s relentless focus on the inner world of his characters is not surprising given that Vienna is the birthplace of Freud's revolutionary "talking therapy." (note 2)

Bernhard ++

“We are the stuff of Viennese dreams, we moderns,” says historian Robert Weldon Whalen in his book, Sacred Spring: God and the Birth of Modernism in Fin de Siecle Vienna.

Or in the words of the great Austrian writer Hermann Broch, “The city was a dream, and the emperor a dream within the dream ...”

As we were told repeatedly on guided tours in Vienna, the city's turn of the century citizens knew that the Hapsburg empire was rotten and the end was near. But not being allowed to speak directly of things political—especially of the Hapsburgs— intellectuals, artists, and writers invented new modes of thinking, seeing, and expressing, giving birth to Fin de siècle Vienna. It is hard to come up with another period of time where so many great minds lived and rubbed shoulders so closely in one city. From physicists Ludwig Boltzmann and Erwin Schrödinger to psychologists Hans Asperger and Sigmund Freud; to composers and artists, including Schoenberg, Mahler, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. 

Was this not Bernhard’s greatest talent of all: to stand at a critical distance from all his society held dear and question the values and preoccupations of his day? Bernhard made a career of not just dismantling but of thoroughly undermining Austrian values, trying to uncover a deeper truth. He did this in the form of “fables, polemics, irony and satire,” much as philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would suggest. (note 3 on Wittgenstein).

Thinking of my own country, I wonder where America's Thomas Bernhard is? America's conscience: Dave Eggers is the only name I came up with so far...

During the early days of the Iraq War, I listened to a general speak about how our insularity and inability to understand the rest of the world remains at the core of quagmire after quagmire. He said, we assume the rest of the world wants to be just like us and proceed accordingly again and again at our own peril. The general ended by discussing how maybe after our empire has fallen, future travelers from China or Russia, or Iceland or Peru might come to visit places like Georgia or Los Angeles in much the same way we like to travel to former lands of the Roman Empire. "Kind of like Tuscany" he said. And that wouldn't so bad, would it? After all, the former bastion of the powerful Hapsburgs, Vienna, has been named most livable city in the world for two years running. Despite being but a faded shadow of its former glory, it has transformed itself into something beyond empire. Of course the art collections, gorgeous architecture, dazzling cafes, and quirky inhabitants are part of the package--but so are the Vienna Woods. On one of our tours, our guide pointed out that Vienna is not just livable for people but that the entire animal world is thriving IN THE CITY! Driving or even flying into the city one is amazed to see the lush green woods encircling it like a biosphere. There is an extensive animal preserve with foxes and skunks, wild boar and deer, To breath... And everywhere bees, with hives kept even on the opera house roof.

A decline into grace. Bernhard would have been pleased. 

 

Notes on Vienna Woods and Wittgenstein

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Books

Thomas Bernhard: Old Masters, Old Masters Graphic Novel, Wittgenstein's Nephew, Yes, Correction, Goethe Dies

Gita Honngeger Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian

Kandel: Age of Insight

Carl Schorske: Fin-de-Siecle Vienna

Paul Hofmann: Vienna Woods

Alexander Waugh: The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

Wittgenstein's Vienna
by Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin

Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna
by Edith Sheffer

And:

No less a milquetoast magazine than the Atlantic recently ran an op-ed about America as a failed state. 

 

 

 

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Thomas Bernhard Notes

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Notes

 

1. The Vienna Woods

Vienna has been named most livable city in the world for a few years running. Of course the art collections, gorgeous architecture, and dazzling cafes are part of the package--but so is the Vienna Woods. I cannot think of another city that has a green biosphere encircling it in the way Vienna has. It really is surprising driving into the city--or even flying into it--to see the green woods unfolding around it. And there are bees and animals and a fairly extensive animal preserve with boar and deer...

Those sweet and melancholic woods of firs, pines, birches, ashes, and famously of lindens and horse chestnuts... and the taverns with their "fresh wines that don't travel very well..." The wines from the woods are really something perfect. To walk from Kahlenberg to Leopolndsberg and to drink white Austrian wine under the chestnut trees by moonlight is a magical experience. And the author is right that you can hear the woods in all music --from Beethoven To Mozart. I thought his chapters on Auden, as well as the wonderfully told chapter on the double suicide (or was it?) of the crown prince Rudolf and his girlfriend, were particularly wonderful to read. Mayerling and Grinzing... sigh~~

All countries should set aside a significant percentage (I leave that open to each case) of land to be turned back to wild and kept as a reserve and half of those preserves should be forests (where possible)... Cities should look to Vienna for ideas for creating biospheres. Vienna's is the real thing... but even if we started again and waited... cities could aim for a greenbelt surrounding the city center to help alleviate the impact. To breath... There are foxes and skunks, boars and deer--right there in the city in the preserve.. and everywhere bees (Hives are kept even on the opera house roof). I loved reading the author's reminiscences about his childhood in Austria and also to know that those woods are still there--where they continue to inspire people!

 

2. Bernhard’s relentless focus on the inner world of his characters is not surprising given that Vienna is the birthplace of Freud's revolutionary "talking therapy."

Nobel Prize-winning neuropsychiatrist Eric R. Kandel, in his book, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present, looks at fin-de-siecle Vienna in light of the tremendous excitement generated at the time by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. In both art and science, says Kandel, intellectuals found themselves less trustful of surface appearances and sought to delve inward to try and uncover a deeper truth. For example, Freud suggested that a patient in excruciating back pain might actually be experiencing psychosomatic pain because of an emotional trauma that the doctor needed to uncover. We certainly see the inward gaze in the paintings of Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, in which unconscious drives can be found lying beneath the surface. Architect Otto Wagner, in addition to his marvelous church, was most famous for his postal saving building in Vienna—a building that defied understanding at the time. In not covering up structural elements and eschewing the decorative, he aimed at a rational functionality that allowed the building to "show its true face." And even his highly decorative church showed a definitive break with tradition; for the decorative elements were rationally conceived to serve the function of easing the emotions of the mentally ill patients of the hospital. 

 

Wittgenstein's house3. Bernhard and Wittgenstein: Even language, our principle tool for understanding the world and each other, was an unstable construction. To my mind, this illumination and vivid illustration (a kind of demonstration) of Wittgenstein’s subversive philosophical project was Bernhard’s tour de force.

Wittgenstein looms large in Bernhard's novels. The philosopher not only appears in the title of one of Bernhard's most famous works, Wittgenstein’s Nephew, but various members of the Wittgenstein family haunt the pages of his books. One of the best books I read last year, called the House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War, was written by British novelist Evelyn Waugh's grandson Alexander Waugh (talk about family sagas!) It is a fascinating look at the tumultuous history of the Wittgenstein family. Much like the Ephrussi Family (of Edward de Waal’s Hare of the Amber Eyes fame) or the Rothschilds, the Wittgensteins were Jewish industrialists, who had more than their fair share of tragedies. According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, their suffering included "suicides, madness and quarrels." And history bears this out; as the family suffered terribly under the Anschluss, after which three out of four Wittgenstein brothers would commit suicide. 

Ludwig was not the only man of talent in the Wittgenstein family. For also dear to Bernhard's heart was Ludwig's brother, Paul-- who was quite famous at the time as a concert pianist. Having lost his right arm fighting in the First World War, he worked furiously to learn how to play with just one hand and later commissioned special pieces by such composers as Strauss, Korngold, and Britten. Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand is the best known of these special compositions. In some ways, however, despite sharing a name with pianist Paul, the character Paul in Bernhard’s novel in Wittgenstein's Nephew served more as a stand-in for the great philosopher. 

Gitta Honegger, in her beautifully written biography, Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian, discusses the various ways that Ludwig Wittgenstein shows up in Bernhard's works. This can be seen most vividly in what some people consider to be Bernhard's masterpiece Correction. In this novel; a brilliant scientist attempts a life --in true Wittgensteinian fashion-- of "showing not telling." The protagonist builds a conical house in the middle of an Austrian forest for his sister-- the person he loves more than anyone in the world. Rather than producing a house that his sister might actually want to live in, he creates something in which all of his mathematical ideas can be expressed. The sister moves into the house and immediately dies. The scientist then commits suicide. The novel begins with the nameless narrator arriving at the conical house in the forest to sift through all of the documents and designs for the project that were left behind. This house, says the narrator, is a "thought dungeon" in which only thoughts permissible by the house can be thought.  

In fact, the real Ludwig Wittgenstein had also built a house for his sister Margaret--and this house was also an expression of Wittgenstein's thoughts and values. And for this reason, Margaret declined to ever live in the house, declaring that, "Even though I admired the house very much, I always knew that I neither wanted to, nor could, live in it myself. It seemed indeed to be much more a dwelling for the gods than for a small mortal like me." According to Waugh's biography of the Wittgenstein Family: Paul Wittgenstein, Ludwig's brother, disliked it, and when Margaret's nephew came to sell it, he reportedly did so on the grounds that she had never liked it either. Honneger suggests that Bernhard consciously sought--not to explain Wittgenstein-- but to act out his philosophies; specifically to try and illuminate in language, the limits of language itself.

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Wittgenstein is well-known for his truth tables, which sought to delineate the way in which statements were true or false only in so much as they correspond to an outer world of fact. But was Wittgenstein a positivist in the way he has been portrayed?

Wittgenstein himself distanced himself from all positivist interpretations of his work, vehemently rejecting Bertrand Russell's introduction to Tractatus--claiming Russell had misunderstood the entire project. Indeed, his penultimate aphorism 6.54 states: 

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

Philosophers Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin back in the 1970s in their book Wittgenstein's Vienna, suggested that Wittgenstein, building on Kierkegaard, believed that there is a higher truth than "facts" --which, in the end, do not speak to an objective real world at all, but only the world as we perceive it. This higher world is one of subjective truth. This would be the realm of art and religion, and of particular note, of ethics. We arrive at this subjective truth, says Janik and Toumin, only indirectly through "fables, polemics, irony, and satire" And this is the only method to "see the world rightly." Wittgenstein stated that absolutely central to this project-- indeed, without which no truth could be illuminated—is a dismantling of all one’s preconceived notions. This is the kicking away of the ladder.

Was this not Bernhard’s greatest talent as well: to stand at a critical distance from all his society held dear and question the values and preoccupations of his day? Bernhard made a career of not just dismantling but of thoroughly undermining Austrian values, trying to uncover a deeper truth. He did this in the form of “fables, polemics, irony and satire.” The culmination of the fin-de-siecle project of progress and renewal through questioning, he delved under the surface of those things Austrian held dear. Even language, our principle tool for understanding the world and each other, was an unstable construction. To my mind, this illumination and vivid illustration (a kind of demonstration) of Wittgenstein’s subversive philosophical project was Bernhard’s tour de force.

Notes on Bavarians Bernhard, Kiefer and Sebald.

Books

Thomas Bernhard: Old Masters, Old Masters Graphic Novel, Wittgenstein's Nephew, Yes, Correction, Goethe Dies

Gita Honngeger Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian

Kandel: Age of Insight

Carl Schorske: Fin-de-Siecle Vienna

Paul Hofmann: Vienna Woods

Alexander Waugh: The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

Wittgenstein's Vienna
by Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin

Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna
by Edith Sheffer

 

 

 

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New Section on this Blog: The Bavarians

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Dürer’s Rhinoceros: Notes

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Books:

Sotheby's The rhinoceros from Dürer to Stubbs, 1515-1799 Hardcover – 1986
by T. H Clarke

The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium: An Essay in Natural History, By Juan Pimentel

"The Rhinoceros" in An Elemental Thing, by Eliot Weinberger

Umberto Eco, Theory of Semiotics (I read about it here though)

A Gandhari Version of the Rhinoceros Sutra
British Library Kharo~!hI Fragment 5B
Richard Salomon
with a contribution by Andrew Glass (PDF)

Chapter Five "The Ill-Fated Rhinoceros" in The Pope's Elephant, by Silvio Bedini 

The Medici Giraffe and Other Tales of Exotic Animals, by Marina Belozerskaya

Dali's Diary of a Genius

Animals Strike Curious Poses Hardcover 
by Elena Passarello

 

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Haven't read it yet, but there is a novel: The Pope's Elephant, by Lawrence Norfolk

 

Online Articles:

Thought Co: Japanese Conception of Red: Is Red the Color of Love?

And Dali's Fascination with the Rhinoceros

 

Inscription:

In the year 1513 [Sic] upon the 1 day of May there was brought to our King at Lisbon such a living Beast from the East-Indies that is called a Rhinoceronte. Therefore, on account of the wonderfulness I thought myself obliged to send you the Representation of it. It hath the Colour of a Toad and is close covered in Scales in size like an Elephant…. The elephant is terribly afraid of the Rhinoceronte…, for he gores him always, where-ever he meets an elephant; for he is well-armed, and is very alert and nimble. This beast is called Rhinocero in Greek and Latin, but in Indian, Gonda. It was fortuitous that Dürer made his woodcut because the Ganda would not survive the trip to Rome. “Unhappy Ganda,” as the creature would be called, perished in a shipwreck after stopping at an island off Marseilles, where the French King Francis and his queen paid a state visit to see the creature. The court had staged a mock battle with the Portuguese ship firing oranges at them in place of cannonballs. Caught in a sudden storm, the ship went down off the Ligurian coast of Italy.

English translation the work of Dr James Parsons (1705-70) published in the Philosophical Translations of 1743

 

 

 

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Sebald and Kiefer: Memory and Ruins

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Ruins, for me, are the beginning. With the debris, you can construct new ideas. They are symbols of beginning. --Anselm Kiefer

His work is overwhelming. I was relieved the day I learned we had several of his pictures at the Broad in LA. To stand in front of an Anselm Kiefer is to be drawn into a vortex. I would hazard he is the greatest living artist in the world. As with Kiefer, ruins dominates Sebald's novels. It is hard as a person not born in the ruins of war to follow this obsession --but both artists are fascinated and obsessed. 

For me, part of what is called the "psychogeographical" element of his writing, is the way Sebald walks the landscape and approaches the place from multiple points of view--and also over the long view-- flourishing into decay and new growth from the ruins? Like in Kiefer's Ages of the World, there is something apocalyptic about the writing... like standing back and being able to watch empires rise and falls and feeling the earth as it is trampled upon in the process. 

But I think it is out of this that both artist's main obsession--that of memory--emerges. 

How do we remember? Why are certain memories held dear--like "Next year in Jerusalem and the wondrous Western Wall-- hence, Sebald's obsession with  Alec Garrard. 

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Rings of Saturn: Part 2

 

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This is the story of a journey. A walk around East Anglia, to be specific. It is a gloomy landscape for a gloomy pilgrimage, at the end of which the author suffers a nervous collapse. But in any case, this is a book about melancholia. 

800px-Albrecht_Dürer_-_Melencolia_I_-_Google_Art_Project_(_AGDdr3EHmNGyA)From Biblioklept:

Renaissance medical texts identified Saturn with the bodily humor melancholy–black bile–indicated by sluggishness and moroseness, paradoxically paired with an eagerness for action (hence the modern word saturnine)). The melancholy of Rings pervades the whole text and even infiltrates each sentence. Like Dürer’s engraving, Sebald’s text is complexly and richly detailed, overflowing with allusion and symbolic registry that defies simple or easy interpretation. Just as Dürer situates the winged figure of genius at the (slightly off-) center of his image, contemplative yet dreamy, we find Sebald’s narrator to be a flighty genius made forlorn by the world he sees. And yet, just as Dürer’s figure is ultimately ambiguous (is he despondent or merely in the throes of absent fancy? Is he shirking his duty or contemplating a new grand work?) so too does Sebald’s narrator resist any simple interpretation. The narrative bulk of Rings consists of the narrator’s perspectives on history and memory, art and economics, literature and suffering. Like the myriad strange objects that surround the figure of genius in Dürer’s engraving, the connections between the subjects of the narrator’s lessons seem tenuous at first (indeed, several interpretations of Dürer’s piece have argued that it is simply a failed allegorical vision).

It is also a book about natural destructions--how civilizations rise and fall; a book about human cruelty; and a book about ruins. Some could argue that it is also a book about how art can save us. 

It is in this aspect that Sebald, I think, shares so much with Anselm Kiefer. Kiefer, like Thomas Bernhard, has written eloquently of growing up amidst the ruins of war. Bernhard has written of his childhood in Salzburg in a really unforgettable way--of looking down on the ruins of the imperial stables from the Mönchsberg. These children grew up as small children playing in the ruins left by war. And Kiefer, in his art, creates works created from layers of dust (see this fantastic article by Tim Adams):

His studios tend to re-create his childhood on a vast scale. The raw materials of his art are bundles of wire, rolls of lead, uprooted trees, emulsion, shellac, ash, concrete, the fabric of children’s clothes, earth, bricks, seeds (these stand for hope and keep him going). In his sculpture and his painting he mingles the organic with the inorganic, in the way Bomber Harris and his squadrons managed so comprehensively in raids on the Rhineland.

Likewise, Sebald is drawn to austere place; cold landscapes and places that have seen a downtown, places in ruin--from castle and former country estates to seeing the hideous brutality of the Belgium Congo as he walks the city streets in Brussels. 

And this on memory

The moral backbone of art is about that whole question of memory,” Sebald once observed in another context. “To my mind, it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.” The task that Kiefer set himself when he started out painting in the forest 40 years ago was to ask if it was possible to create a German art that was all about memory, and that was as much about destruction as creation. He is still working on the answer.

Moody Map of the Digressions

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Rings of Saturn : Part 1

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Thalia Bookclub has a wonderful show devoted to the Rings of Saturn. Guests were Dinaw Mengestu, Rick Moody, Hari Kunzru, and Denis O'Hare. Rick Moody was especially fantastic and now I would like to read one of his books. One of the others remarked that to read Sebald is to try to "understand the world by assembling fragments together, like piecing together pieces in the puzzle."

But isn't that more like what it's like to live life? Moody wondered. Our lives really don't feel like those things we read about in an American novel "with a clear narrative arc and "through line." Meaning is gained through examining multiple threads, varying starts and stops and traveling over old ground--in rings." 

I agree with this. And perhaps it is why I love digressive writing. Japanese traditional essays, and Japanese literature in general values digressions and derailments--as long as they are interesting. And Sebald is endlessly interesting. Addictive like Bernhard--but I think he is better. The greatest in my lifetime?

Moody made a fantastic map of the digressions--and how these are in fact circular rings of meaning.

It is interesting to try and view the miscellanea as a Cabinet of Curiosity. As a way to understand the world  by assembling fragments together like piecing together pieces in the puzzle.

This from Biblioklept:

At the end of The Rings of Saturn, Sebald’s narrator returns to Thomas Browne’s skull again–only this time resurrected, a living brain. He discusses at length Browne’s Musaem Clausum, an imaginary library that Browne invented containing texts, artifacts, and relics of every manner of wonder. Sebald’s narrator goes on for pages listing the contents of Musaem Clausum with fervor and passion–the reader realizes that the book, and the narrator, could go on and on, detailing these wonders and their connected histories under more intense scrutiny. Rings replicates both Browne’s Musaem Clausum and Dürer’s engraving, offering readers a tour through myriad marvels–and if the walk is melancholy and strange, it is also profound and beautiful, and very, very rewarding. 

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Sebald's Vertigo (Pisanello)

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It’s hard to believe it took me 50 years to find my way to WG Sebald.

Much like reading Thomas Bernhard, reading WG Sebald is to concentrate on solving a puzzle. (And indeed, Sebald himself has acknowledged this influence). 

Sebald's books are not for kicking back and waiting to be entertained. 

Instead, you need to stay awake/ be alert, ready to doubt everything and try to draw the threads together. What is this guy trying to say? You have to keep your eye on the ball.

I was listening to a fabulous conversation about Rings of Saturn, in which the guests remarked that to read Sebald is to try to "understand the world by assembling fragments together, like piecing together pieces in the puzzle."

And another guest remarked that, isn't that more like what it's like to live life? Our lives really don't feel like those things we read about in an American novel "with a clear narrative arc and "through line." Meaning is gained through examining multiple threads, varying starts and stops and traveling over old ground--in rings." This is my memory of what I heard on the program --but it is also really how I feel about writing, reading and living life. 

Sebald once said in an interview that he writes palimpsests. 

The story goes over and over the same ground.

DBAHP6BXoAAeRmuOver the Saint Bernard Pass--again and again-- to W. First, following in the footsteps of Stendhal, then twice journeys he made as himself (kind of?)...Is this fiction/memoir/travel/history--what is it? 

Smaller journeys are made again and again: from Vienna to Venice and from Venice to Padua... he himself --as himself-- does this several times, Kafka too. Casanova as well. By creating these multi-layered palimpsests, going over the same ground multiple times from multiple angles, metaphysical meaning might be read in the meanderings?

Also like Bernhard-- but more like Proust-- Sebald really looks at the Old Masters. 

(For me, Sebald is a little Bernhard plus Proust... but I maybe like Sebald best of all?)

Pisanello. I have never seen his work in person. How is that possible?

I adore Pisanello. And reading this novel (is it even really a novel?) --with its illuminating meditations about the paintings, I fell totally in love.

The painter is sometimes compared to two of my favorites: Piero and Durer...

This painting, in the National gallery in London, The Virgin with the Saints, is just extraordinary. Look at that hat!

Here is Sebald:

The following afternoon, back in London, my first port of call was the National Gallery. The painting by Pisanello that I wanted to see was not in its usual place, but owing to renovation work had been hung in a poorly lit room in the basement into which few of the visitors who wandered the gallery every day found their way. It is a small painting, measuring about 30 by 50 centimetres, lamentably imprisoned in a far too heavy Victorian frame. The upper half of the picture is almost completely filled by a golden disc, radiant against the blue of the sky and serving as a background for the Virgin and her Redeemer Child. Lower down runs a line of dark green treetops from one side to the other. On the left stands the patron saint of herds, herdsmen and lepers, St Anthony. He is wearing a dark red cowled habit and a capacious earthen-brown cloak. In his hand he holds a bell. Beside him lies a tame boar, close against the ground in kindly submission. The hermit with a stern expression surveys the shining knight who stands before him, and who, for his part, is all of this world, almost heart-rendingly so. The dragon, a ringed and winged creature, has already breathed its last. The ornate armour, wrought of white metal, draws the evening light unto it. Not the slightest shadow of guilt shows on the youthful face of St George. His neck and throat are bared to us, unprotected. The most remarkable feature, however, is the very finely worked broad-brimmed straw hat adorned with a large feather which the knight wears on his head. I wish I could know how Pisanello conceived the idea of furnishing St George with such inappropriate and positively extravagant headgear. San Giorgio con cappello di paglia – most odd indeed, as the two trusty horses gazing across the knight’s shoulder may well be thinking too.

(Great post here about Sebald on Pisanello)

[Posts about German art and literature under "Bavarians" category at right]

 

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He Lit a Fire with Icicles

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He Lit a Fire with Icicles
BY KAY RYAN
For W.G. Sebald, 1944-2001

This was the work
of St. Sebolt, one
of his miracles:
he lit a fire with
icicles. He struck
them like a steel
to flint, did St.
Sebolt. It
makes sense
only at a certain
body heat. How
cold he had
to get to learn
that ice would
burn. How cold
he had to stay.
When he could
feel his feet
he had to
back away.
Kay Ryan, “He Lit a Fire with Icicles” from The Niagara River. Copyright © 2005 by Kay Ryan. Reprinted with the permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved. Caution: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

 

Painting: Saint Sinibald by Sebastiano del Piombo in Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice

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Rings of Saturn: Digression to Nuremberg

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Nuremberg. One of the digressions of the book takes place in Amsterdam, when the narrator talks about his namesake and the tomb of Saint Sebaldus in Nuremberg. It is one of my favorite digressions in the entire book, as his descriptions of the monumental tomb-- standing atop a line of bronze snails-- are wondrous.

Miracle of the Icicles

Saint Sebaldus is credited with having performed several miracles during his lifetime. One of his more famous miracles involved the transformation of icicles into fuel for a warm fire. The story, as recounted in Butler’s Lives of the Saints, goes like this: “[O]ne snowy night [Saint Sebald] took shelter in a peasant’s cottage, but found it was almost as cold within as without, for the fire was low and small. Sebald suggested that more fuel might be put on, but the man answered that he was too poor to keep up a decent fire, so Sebald turned to the housewife and asked her to bring in a bundle of long icicles hanging from the eaves; this she did, Sebald threw them on the fire, and they blazed up merrily.”[13] The miracle of the icicles is depicted in relief on the base of Saint Sebaldus’s shrine at the church of Saint Sebaldus in Nuremberg. The bronze shrine (below), which was made between 1508 and 1519, is one of the best-known works of Peter Vischer the Elder.

Terry at Vertigo has such a wonderful post --He lit fire with icicles-- about the shrine and a contemporary poem inspired by the chapter by Kay Ryan. I can't top what he did--so will just copy it here, with kudos to him!

In her 2005 book of poems The Niagara River, Kay Ryan included He Lit a Fire with Icicles, dedicated to W.G. Sebald.  It’s a beautiful, brief poem about Sebald’s namesake, who he calls St. Sebolt.  In chapter four of The Rings of Saturn, Sebald mentions a visit to Nuremberg, where the grave of “my patron saint” is located.  Sebald recounts some of the stories about St. Sebolt, allegedly the son of royalty who fled his wife on their wedding night in order to overcome his sense of unworthiness and fulfill a higher calling.  Eventually, he became capable of miracles.

At Regensburg he crossed the Danube on his cloak, and there made a broken glass whole again;  and, in the house of a wheelwright too mean to spare the kindling, lit a fire with icicles.  This story of the burning of the frozen substance of life has, of late, meant much to me, and I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one’s own wretched heart is still aglow.

The three pages that Sebald dedicated to St. Sebolt are curiously self-revealing.  The narrator The Rings of Saturn, who, after all, is in the hospital for “ailments of the spirit and the body” when the book begins, is clearly wondering about his own fate and he seems to identify his melancholy with this “inner coldness and desolation.”  Is this the price that has to be paid to follow a true path and create something worthwhile?  The passage continues and Sebald next describes at length the large and elaborate sarcophagus created between 1507 and 1519 for St. Sebolt’s remains.  At the base of the tomb are animals and fabulous creatures along with the “four cardinal virtues of Justice, Prudence, Temperance, and Fortitude.  Higher up are mythical figures (Nimrod, Hercules, Samson, Apollo), “apostles with their emblems and the instruments of their martyrdom,” representations of miracles (including the burning icicles), and the celestial city.  It seems to me that the narrator gazes upon the sarcophagus and relics of his namesake with a potent blend of wistfulness and hope for his own reward and redemption.

And in the heart of this reliquary cast in a single piece, surrounded by eighty angels, in a shrine of sheer silver, lie the bones of the exemplary dead man, the harbinger of a time when the tears will be wiped from our eyes and their will be no more grief, or pain, or weeping and wailing.

Only Sebald (and now Kay Ryan in her poem) seems to refer to this saint, an 8th century hermit, missionary, and now patron saint of Nuremberg, otherwise commonly known as St. Sebald or St. Sebaldus, by the name of St. Sebolt.  Sebald doesn’t mention it in The Rings of Saturn, but most of the city of Nuremberg was destroyed by Allied bombing between 1943 and 1945, the topic he will cover in On the Natural History of Destruction.

Kay Ryan's poem here. 

 

 

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