Get Thee to LA

April 29 might be a good day to be in Los Angeles.  The literary magazine Black Clock is hosting a reading for issue number 15, which is dedicated to “movies never seen and barely imagined.”  Contributors Anthony Miller, Mark Z. Danielewski, Jonathan Lethem, Claire Phillips, Geoff Nicholson and Matthew Specktor are scheduled to join novelist and Black Clock Editor Steve Erickson to read from their work.

Black Clock is published by the California Institute of the Arts’ (CalArts) MFA Writing Program.  Here’s a snippet from their press release:   

Black Clock 15 features Geoff Nicholson’s meeting of two film pioneers in “Buster Keaton: The Warhol Years,” David Thomson’s journey up the Amazon with Warren Beatty, and Anthony Miller’s history of the cinema — from D.W. Griffith’s adaptation of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (presenting Louise Brooks as Lady Brett) to Don Siegel’s ‘60s cult B-movie Bonnie and Clyde with Tuesday Weld and Clint Eastwood, to the 2010 Academy Award-winning portrayal by Chris Farley of silent comedic actor Fatty Arbuckle in Milos Forman’s The Life of the Party.  The issue also stars Jonathan Lethem, Lynne Tillman, Rick Moody, Claire Phillips, Michael Ventura, Emily White, Mark. Z. Danielewski and a cast of tens.

The reading will take place at the wonderfully named Mandrake Bar on Sunday, April 29th at 2:00 PM.  2692 S La Cienega Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90034 (between Venice and Washington Boulevards). Admission is free, but the press release mentions that you must be 21 years old to attend – presumably because of the bar, not the literary content.

You can see a complete contents list for the issue at the website.

By the way, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), a novel about a photographer who moves into a house that seems to have different inner dimensions than outer ones, includes complex typographical gymnastics and a couple of embedded photographs.

Smiley’s Archive

Film still from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, 2011
with Benedict Cumberbatch as Peter Guillam.

After enjoying the recent movie, I reread John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974).  About halfway through, it suddenly dawned on me the extent to which understanding all of the treachery and duplicity of le Carré’s Cold War spy novel hinge around the central concept of the archive.  As George Smiley attempts to discover the identity of the Soviet mole that has been placed in the highest levels of the Circus (Smiley’s apt and marvelous name for England’s primary spy agency), he spends countless nights reading files that his colleagues filch for him from the Circus Archives.

Through the remainder of that same night, the light in the dormer window of Mr. Barraclough’s attic room at the Islay Hotel burned uninterrupted.  Unchanged, unshaven, George Smiley remained bowed at the Major’s card table, reading, comparing, annotating, cross-referencing – all with an intensity that, had he been his own observer, would surely have recalled for him the last days of Control on the fifth floor at Cambridge Circus.  Shaking the pieces, he consulted Guillam’s leave roster and sick-lists going back over the last year, and set these beside the overt travel pattern of Cultural Attaché Aleksey Aleksandrovich Polyakov, his trips to Moscow, his trips out of London, as reported to the Foreign Office by Special Branch and the immigration authorities.  He compared these again with the dates when Merlin apparently supplied his information and, without quite knowing why he was doing it, broke down the Witchcraft reports into those which were demonstrably topical at the time they were received and those which could have been banked a month, two months before, either by Merlin or his controllers, in order to bridge empty periods…he was looking, in other terms, for the “last clever knot”…

Although there is a bit of old-fashioned cloak-and-dagger spycraft in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, one of the tensest chapters in the book, in fact, follows Guillam in an elaborately concocted scheme to steal some files right from under the watchful eyes of Circus Archives staff (only a small part of which is quoted below).

One girl stood on a ladder.  Oscar Allitson, the collator, was filling a laundry basket with wrangler files; Astrid, the maintenance man, was mending a radiator.  The shelves were wooden, deep as bunks, and divided into pigeon-holes by panels of ply.  He knew already that the Testify reference was 4482E which meant alcove 44, where he now stood.  “E” stood for “extinct” and was used for dead operations only.  Guillam counted to the eighth pigeon-hole from the left.  Testify should be the second from the left, but there was no way of making certain because the spines were unmarked.  His reconnaissance complete, he drew the two files he had requested, leaving the green slips in the steel brackets provided for them.

The Circus Archives, neatly, if secretively, cataloged and shelved, are a far cry from the uncontrollable archives that lie at the heart of Kafka’s The Castle (J.J. Long refers to the “shambolic amateurishness of Kafka’s filing cupboard”). Probably more than any other writer, it is Kafka who is responsible for the threatening image of the archive that looms over the twentieth century.  W.G. Sebald, of course, continued to explore Kafka’s vision of the role of archives in his four books of prose fiction, but especially in Austerlitz.  As Long says in W.G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity, the archive “lies at the very heart of Sebald’s narrative project.  His work is profoundly concerned with the material and infrastructural basis of knowledge systems…”  Reading le Carré’s description of the Circus Archives made me immediately think of the room described by Jacques Austerlitz and reproduced in a photograph near the end of Austerlitz.  “”I came across a large-format photograph showing the room with open shelves up to the ceiling where the files on the prisoners in the little fortress of Terezín, as it is called, are kept today.”  These files held data on the inmates of the German concentration camp also known as Theresienstadt, where Austerlitz’s birth mother had been sent.

To Smiley, the Circus Archives represented “a very dull monument…to a long and cruel war.”  As he embarks upon his research through the vast Archives he notes that “the files contained only the thinnest record of it; his memory contained far more.”  Nevertheless, it transpires that the very thoroughness of the Circus Archives makes it possible for his research to succeed in helping unmask the Soviet mole.

“Operation Witchcraft,” read the title on the first volume Lacon had brought to him that first night.  “Policy regarding distribution of Special Product.”  The rest of the cover was obliterated by warning labels and handling instructions, including one that quaintly advised the accidental finder to “return the file UNREAD” to the Chief Registrar at the Cabinet Office.  “Operation Witchcraft,” read the second.  “Supplementary estimates to the Treasury, special accommodation in London, special financing arrangements, bounty, etc.”  “Source Merlin,” read the third, bound to the first with pink ribbon.  “Customer Evaluations, cost effectiveness, wider exploitation; see also Secret Annexe.”  But the secret annexe was not attached, and when Smiley asked for it there was a coldness.

“The Minister keeps it in his personal safe,” Lacon snapped.

J.J. Long suggests that “the self-understanding of modernity itself is based not on a pervasive sense of epistemological chaos [referring to the slovenly archive of Kafka's The Castle], but on an unbroken faith in the rationality of the archive.”  What le Carré and, to some extent, Sebald both show, is that the obsessively maintained archives of modern bureaucratic states creates a kind of rationality that can also be leveraged against those that created and maintained them.  The Circus Archives held the clues that led to the identity of the Soviet mole, just as Nazi-created archives permitted Jacques Austerlitz to learn more about the fate of his mother.  As le Carré’s wry description of file names implies, any agency that ruthlessly archives its customer evaluations and special financing arrangements is just asking for it.

The Cold War of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a desultory and hollow competition amongst faded empires in which men and nations pursue the false memory of nostalgia with tragic results.

Face à Sebald

I recently picked up a copy of a new French anthology, Face à Sebald, published last November by Inculte in Paris.  It looks like a great collection of essays, reflections and poems.  The title (Facing Sebald) implies a more informal undertaking and, indeed, the anthology includes writing by a mix of novelists, poets, essayists, and academics of various specialties.  Not every piece is new, notably the French translation of Susan Sontag’s “A Mind in Mourning” from 2000.  Even though some of the titles are in English in the Contents, the book is entirely in French.

“Beautifully organised displays of despair”: Cate Blanchett in the Botho Strauss play “Big and Small”

As luck would have it, I was in Paris last week for the European premiere of the Sydney Theatre Company’s new production of Big and Small by Botho Strauss, starring Cate Blanchett.  This version used a newly-commissioned English translation from by the British playwright Martin Crimp.  Big and Small (the allusion is first and foremost to Alice in Wonderland) is an episodic play of a dozen scenes in which we follow Lotte Kotte (Blanchett) on a road trip, struggling to make sense of her life after separating from her husband.

Gross und Klein (as it’s called in German) was first staged in 1978 and its themes are redolent of that era: alienation, the inability to communicate, and utter disdain for bourgeois life.  Scenes are full of conversations overheard and half-heard and communications devices – telephones, intercoms, and a tiny portable television set – which serve only to limit Lotte’s ability to communicate.  Lotte suffers from moments of inarticulation that Blanchett pulls off with stunning eloquence as she suddenly erupts into stammering, wordless speech or spasmodic, liberating dance steps.

Strauss was the subject of an essay in A Radical Stage: Theatre in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, edited by W.G. Sebald: “Myth and Mythology in the Drama of Bothy Strauss” by Irmela Schneider.  Although she doesn’t discuss Gross und Klein, Schneider’s commentary on several other plays by Strauss contain references that seem equally applicable to this play, including Wim Wenders’ 1984 film Paris, Texas and the writing of Peter Handke, especially The Left-Handed Woman.  “What characterises” Strauss’ plays, she writes, is “the insistence that while the search may be something meaningful in itself, it can no longer produce any meaning.”

In his own Introductory Remarks to this volume, Sebald offered a fairly cool response to Strauss’ work:

Strauss may not have remained sufficiently resistant to the temptations of beautifully organised displays of despair, which can be as insincere as they are ostentatious.  On the other hand it is true to say that Strauss does attempt to reflect the process which gave rise to the discontinuity in his dramatic inventions.  His plays mark a phase of societal evolution where the dynamics of social intercourse have become almost entirely opaque and where conflict – the stuff of drama – can only be represented, figuratively, in terms of battles fought and lost many times before.

A play like Big and Small is a very gutsy undertaking for someone like Blanchett, but it’s clear why Lotte is so appealing as a character (Blanchett calls her “a female Candide”).  Lotte is on stage nearly every minute of the more than two hour-long play and her mercurial emotions provide an extraordinary canvas on which to work.  Lotte is a physically and emotionally demanding role as she teeters precariously between optimism and despair within the space of a single sentence.

Big and Small is in Paris until April 8, then moves to the Barbican in London from April 13-29, followed by stops in Austria and Germany.

Literature as a Record of Resistance

Between travel and other commitments, I’m very slow at making my way through the December 2011 issue of the Journal of European Studies, edited by Dr. Richard Sheppard and devoted to W.G. Sebald.  My first post included the full Table of Contents and focused largely on a short travelogue intended for German visitors to East Anglia that Sebald wrote for a German publication in 1974.   Even though I am only about halfway through the Journal, it’s clear that this is an important anthology of essays that delve into some of the core issues surrounding Sebald’s work and legacy.  Needless to say, these are densely argued essays that can only be butchered by my minor remarks.  I won’t even pretend to offer a full synopsis of any of the essays, I’ll try to just give the flavor of several of the papers that I’ve read so far.

Ben Hutchinson’s The Shadow of Resistance: W.G. Sebald and the Frankfurt School examines Sebald’s sizable debt to the Frankfurt School, especially in relation to his books on Carl Sternheim and Alfred Döblin and on Sebald’s four works of prose fiction.  Hutchinson argues that a primary tenet that Sebald took from the Frankfurt School was their insistence on “literature’s relationship to a contingent historical context.”  “Sebald consistently insisted that aesthetic problems were also ethical ones.”  Hutchinson points out that Sebald’s praise for Thomas Bernhard (quoted from his 2001 radio interview with Michael Silverblatt) corresponds to the aesthetic values Sebald derived from the Frankfurt School. Bernhard’s fiction, Sebald said “wasn’t compromised in any sense…He only tells you in his books what he has heard from others.  So he invented, as it were, a kind of periscopic form of narrative.”

In his essay W.G. Sebald as Critic of Austrian Literature, Ritchie Robertson proposes that Sebald related so well to Austrian literature because it is a “literature of displacement.  Its writers and its literary figures are alienated from their childhood, their places of origin, and their native cultures.”  He relates this, in part, to Sebald’s sympathy for schizophrenics and the literature that they have produced – most notably Ernst Herbeck, who he visits and describes in the opening pages of the “All’estero” section of Vertigo.

Lynn L. Wolff’s essay The ‘Solitary Mallard’: On Sebald and Translation, reminds us the extent to which Sebald’s fictions themselves are “translations.”  Wolff points out, for example, how, in Austerlitz, the conversations between the narrator and Austerlitz were “originally” in English and French, and that Austerlitz often related prior conversations that presumably took place in Czech.  But Sebald has “translated”, as it were, all of these conversations into German.  Wolff discusses at length the many challenges that face Sebald’s translators and she notes some of the issues relating to the placement of images in various editions.

In The Calamitous Perspective of Modernity: Sebald’s Negative Ontology, Rob Burns and Wilfried van der Will argue that “for Sebald, the world is rotten to the core.”  They believe that he saw no hope for mankind, that our history is a history of destruction, and that modernity’s promise of progress was hollow.  So why did Sebald write? They argue that “Sebald was able to sustain his practice of writing partly because of his increasingly embattled belief that he was called to fashion literature as a record of resistance.”

Sebald’s negative ontology produced in him neither a state of complete apathy nor, by any manner of means, one of abject nihilism.  On the contrary, his dominant mood of melancholic irony inspired a mode of writing where his inconsolability over history, nature, and, ultimately, the whole of Being provided constant motivation for further creativity, both fictional and essayistic….Sebald remarked that melancholia, “the contemplation of our continuing misfortune, has nothing in common with the craving for death,” being “a form of resistance…”

[I'll be traveling until early April.]