Christa Wolf: "No Place On Earth"
Kein Ort. Nirgends is Wolf's novella about an imagined meeting between Kleist and Günderrode. I turn out to have a copy of the English translation in my library; after some resistance to the mere idea I decided to sample it.
Wolf is certainly an artful stylist, although the full effect doesn't always come across in translation.
Hmm.
Okay, I seem to be unable to write a balanced review: I couldn't keep reading it. I kept putting it down and remarking on its failures to Paul, picking it up again, getting more frustrated and discussing those failures more intricately; I'll leave it up to anyone else to tell me if it gets better.
Example:
He can easily imagine, down to every individual turn of phrase, what tattle the members of Frankfurt society are telling behind his back. To stall his fiancée, and then to jilt her. Why does it matter to him what they say? Why this horror at standing up to their judgment? Why, when putting this distance between himself and them has failed to bring any relief, does he still feel the temptation: it is better to die than face that.
Ah: because their reproach confirms his own self-reproaches. Immorality! They do not know the meaning of the word. But he knows. To fail to pay life the debt it demands, and the living what they are compelled to demand; to feel truly alive only when one is writing . . . These ghastly six months in Wedekind's home. In some secret sense they had been for him an indescribable holiday: his condition forbade him even so much as to think about writing. In the nearness to death this compulsion to write falls away. One lives simply in order to live. Now, how could that idea be expressed?
One really ought to think about something else.
This is an irritatingly psychologically-minded critical essay with delusions of being fiction. There are footnotes. Who is Wedekind? What was Der Prinz von Homburg? To which of Kleist's letters does this passage make reference? But you don't care, because no one talks, thinks or lives like this, not in 1979, not in 1804, no writer ever, no place on earth. What competent novelist doesn't know that? Writers don't have writerly thoughts: they shit, they go to the grocery store, they wake up late and groggy and off their game. Sehnsucht is notoriously unstable as a state of mind.
I thought Wolf's Kassandra had its moments, but I couldn't get into it in the end: it seemed to be trying so hard, so disingenuously, to determine the reader's reaction to the thoughts and ideas and words of every character— in fiction this is, I think, fatal. Fiction is what you write when you don't have an agenda. You can write perfectly good, perfectly beautiful, persuasive essays, without requiring your readers to buy into the contingency and opacity of imaginary people with imaginary thoughts to get your point. The only decent piece of author-biographical fiction I can think of is Büchner's Lenz, which is a masterpiece, written out of obvious and unfathomable sympathy with its subject. Do any of you know any others?
Comments
Have you ever read any of Cixous's forays into fiction? Cixous wrote this fictional novel (that was really literary criticism) about Clarice Lispector that resulted in one my most difficult reading experiences. As fiction it didn't really hold together, but I did appreciate that she was trying to use different modes of writing, ones that were decidedly non-academic, to push her thinking on Lispector into different directions. But still, it was, many times, painful to read. That being said, I do think that Lispector's The Passion of G.H. and The Hour of the Star are great fictional accounts of the writing process. And the latter compelled me write, in college, a short story that read, I must admit, more like Cixous.
“Each time I agree with myself, I write an essay. When I disagree with myself, I know that I’m pregnant with a short story or a novel. Then I enter the lives of my different characters, giving them all their say fairly.”
This has its own problems (hello, damnable "novel of ideas" where each character gets his (occasionally her) own op-ed section!), but I agree on the negative case. Then again, didn't Musil have an agenda? I watch Battle of Algiers, as polemical a piece of art as any, and I don't care because it's so viscerally compelling. It's propaganda, and I don't agree with it, and it's still brilliant. Wolf may not just be good at it.