Lures of shiny, silvery tin shaped like human hands - Meyrink's symbolizing

Jorge Luis Borges once edited a series of little books that have tantalized later readers.  One of them contained three stories by Gustav Meyrink, all from Bats.  St. Orberose discusses the project; he led to Grant Munroe’s piece at The Rumpus, who in turn relied on this Spanish-language site.  Borges picked “J. H. Obereit’s Visit to the Time-Leeches,” “Cardinal Napellus,” and “The Four Moon Brethren.”  When Munroe wrote his piece none of these stories were available in English, but here they are in the 2010 Dedalus Meyrink Reader.

Borges shared Meyrink’s gnosticism and love of esoteric systems, although the former took it all a lot less literally than the latter.  Or such is my understanding, but perhaps I overstate Meyrink’s credulity.  This outstanding paragraph of “Cardinal Napellus” might have some symbolic relevance:

Giovanni Braccesco tried to strike up a conversation by describing our unusual methods of catching the ancient, moss-grown giant catfish that lived in the permanent darkness of the unfathomable depths of the lake.  They never came up to the light and spurned any natural bait; the only things that could get them to bite were the most bizarre forms anglers could think up: lures of shiny, silvery tin shaped like human hands which made swaying movements as they were pulled through the water, or others like bats made of red glass with cunningly concealed hooks on their wings.  (57)

The main character, a lapsed monk, spends his days on the lake, not fishing but plumbing its depths with “an egg-shaped ball of glittering metal on long, fine silk threads” (55).  His friends believe that this is some form of science, but he corrects them:

The intensity brought red blotches to Radspieller’s face and his voice cracked with the emphasis he put on each word: ‘If I could just have one wish’ – he clenched his fists – ‘it would be to let down my plumbline to the centre of the earth, so that I could shout out to the world, ‘See: here, there, see, nothing but earth!’  (64)

So Radspieler is, however strangely, deliberately avoiding a search for secret knowledge, even denying its existence.  A half page later it catches up with him, though.  The characters of H. P. Lovecraft, Meyrink’s literary cousin, are always destroyed by their quest for hidden truths, while this poor sap is punished for not looking.  He would have been happier learning about C’thulu.

If you click on the Spanish-language link above, you will see the cover of the Borges edition of Meyrink, which features a monk emerging from a blue flower.  That is almost accurate, almost in the story.  The “poisonous blue flower” is monkshood.  Any mention of a blue flower in German literature has been permanently poisoned by Novalis.  In “Cardinal Napellus” the Romantic longing for transcendent meaning leads not to bliss or escape or nirvana but to insanity and horror.

While I am making connections – I mean, Novalis and his blue flower, that one is obvious – in Adalbert Stifter’s Indian Summer the dedicated scientific protagonist makes a detailed multi-year study of the topography of a lake bottom (that does not sound right).  I had so many other unnovelistic parts of that novel to deal with that, when discussing Stifter’s novel recently, I did not even mention the scenes where he plumbs the lake and makes maps, leading to discoveries, I guess, about how the seasonal hydrology changes the lake.

So Novalis’s non-rational blue flower is poisonous and Stifter’s rational empiricism is completely useless.  What is left?  I wonder, to what work of German literature do those fishing lures refer?

Art is the most sublime and the most revolting thing simultaneously - Thomas Bernhard's Viennese cultural history

Next week I am on vacation.  The advertising robots have become aggressive lately, so I will turn up the juice on the comment bug zapper while I am gone.  Sorry about that.  Temporary.

Let’s go back to where I started three weeks ago.

Bruckner is just as slovenly a composer as Stifter is a slovenly writer, both of them share that Upper Austrian slovenliness.  Both of them make so-called devout art which in fact is a public danger, Reger said. (36)

Who could that be but Thomas Bernhard, in this case a character in Old Masters (1985).  What did poor Bruckner do to anyone?  But Bernhard is not really attacking Stifter and Bruckner (or not only attacking them):

I certainly do not come from a musical family, he said, on the contrary my people were all unmusical and altogether completely hostile to the arts…  We had many beautiful, expensive paintings hanging on our walls, he said, but they never looked at them once in all those decades, we had many thousands of books on our shelves but they never read a single one of those books in all those decades, we had a Bösendorfer grand piano standing there but for decades no one had played it.  If the lid of the piano had been welded shut they would not have noticed it for decades, he said.  (51)

The age of the characters puts his childhood back in the 1910s or so.  His parents are children of the decorative “roast chicken” era in Vienna.  Those books and paintings might seem to undermine the completeness of his parents hostility, but the character agrees with Broch that it is all for show.  Thus Bruckner and Stifter, creators of that era, are necessary targets in whatever war the character is waging, not that he restricts himself to that period (“basically Beethoven is an utterly repulsive phenomenon, everything about Beethoven is more or less comical, a comical helplessness is what we continually hear when we are listening to Beethoven: the rancour, the titanic, the marching-tune dull-wittedness even in his chamber music,” 61) or to artists (“Vienna is quite superficially famous  for its opera, but in fact it is feared and detested for its scandalous lavatories,” 81; this theme is pursued for several pages).

All of this is more or less declaimed in front of a Tintoretto painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, a painting and room you can see for yourself if it is not closed on the day you visit, grumble grumble.

For this character, and for the comparably vitriolic narrator of Woodcutters (1984), art is the only source of ethical values, the only ground worth fighting on.  I had wondered about the attacks on Viennese institutions like the Burgtheater, but I had been mistakenly guided by the French or American model where the argument for art is so often anti-bourgeois, anti-philistine.  Bernhard’s characters live in a world that has embraced art, is engorged on it.  The Viennese artist’s struggle is from within the center of the culture, not on the fringe.  Bernhard is aligned with Karl Kraus, Robert Musil, and Hermann Broch in his simultaneous attack on and defense of art.

Art is the most sublime and the most revolting thing simultaneously, he said.  But we must make ourselves believe that there is high art and the highest art, he said, otherwise we should despair. (37)

I keep quoting Old Masters, but the stuff in Woodcutters is just as good.

Both Woodcutters and Old Masters turn out to be, hidden behind all of their acid, love stories – love for people, a woman, I mean.  Old Masters is almost sentimental, as sweet as Adalbert Stifter.

All our writers nowadays, without exception, speak and write enthusiastically about Stifter and follow him as if he were the literary god of the present age.  Either these people are stupid and lack all appreciation of art, or else they do not understand anything about literature, or else, which unfortunately I am bound to believe, they never read Stifter, he said.  (37)

Now I have read Stifter.  Judge accordingly.

Hermann Broch's Vienna - decay leads to the museum

If I think of a culture as a person and then overlay a seasonal metaphor, both of which are misleading ideas, the period from 1860 to 1890 begins to look like Vienna’s Indian summer.  Stifter’s novel again provides a strangely prophetic model (“My collections are getting more complete, the building projects are increasingly receiving their finishing touches”).  The Indian summer is followed by winter, and death.

As attractive as the values of the period can seem to me, I have to ask the same questions I asked about Stifter.  Are we sure that the connection between aesthetics and ethics is so strong?  Is collecting as meaningful an activity as Stifter argues?  Are there risks in an aesthetic focused so strongly on the past?  And fundamentally, are the answers to questions like these the same for individuals and for society?

Aestheticism easily becomes decadent, empty, sterile.  Collecting is almost necessarily neurotic and, like art appreciation more generally, can become, or always is, a device for signaling social status – how good a catch is the guest at my artistic dinner, how visible is my box at the theater.

So were the aestheticized Viennese more like Green Henry, reading and re-reading their second-hand collected Goethe until it is torn from their hands, or more like Törless’s family, who store Goethe “in the bookcase with the green glass panes” that “was never opened except to display its contents to a visitor”?

Hermann Broch, in his critical study Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time (1974)*, argues for the latter, vociferously:  “Was this really nothing but the roast chicken era, a period of pure hedonism and sheer decoration of life?” (59).  Vienna and its “gelatin democracy” (78) was the purest example of the European “value vacuum.”  It “was really far less a city of art than a city of decoration par excellence” where “[p]oetry was an affair of gold-edged books on the parlor table” (60).

Broch, born in 1886, is describing the generation of his parents.  I have written admiringly about the artistic institutions they created, the art museum and the opera.  Exactly the problem, says Broch:

In fulfillment of its duty to tradition, Vienna confused culture with “museumness” [Museumshaftigkeit] and became a museum to itself (unfortunately not in its architecture, where it was guilty of the most outrageous devastations).  Because Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert had miraculously converged on this spot, had been treated badly and nevertheless composed, Vienna set itself up as a musical institution…  The “museumish” was reserved for Vienna, indeed as a sign of its ruin, the sign of Austrian ruin.  For in despondency decay leads to vegetating, but in wealth it leads to the museum.  (61)

The tone of this passage should look familiar to readers of later Austrian literature.  I feel bad about omitting any of it.  Unfortunately, or maybe not, the entire book is not made of this kind of rhetoric.

Broch’s indictment, written from the far side of the horrors of World War II, is ethical.  The Viennese did not achieve the kind of ethical and aesthetic balance Stifter described, but rather used false aesthetic values to “mask” an ethical crisis.  The inevitable aesthetic result was not art but kitsch, and “as the metropolis of kitsch, Vienna also became the metropolis of the value vacuum of the epoch” (81).  And kitsch leads to, well, to Nazis (“the dance of apocalyptic ruin,” 175).  Art can also be the source of ethics, though; true art, of course, not kitsch.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal and other artists, Broch and his generation. are thus engaged in a kind of struggle to fill the ethical vacuum created by their parents.  They mostly lose.

Broch has an outstanding definition of kitsch, by the way - “music in which cowbells ring is kitsch” (16, from “Artistic Style as the Style of the Epoch,” 1919).

*  Written 1947-50 and published in pieces.

The Viennese middle class chooses art and fun - not as an ornament of life or as a badge of status, but as the air they breathed

The little Austrian aesthetic Golden Age that was magically called into being by Adalbert Stifter’s Indian Summer is described in some detail by Carl E. Schorske in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980), particularly in Chapter VI “The Transformation of the Garden” (originally published in 1967), where Schorske actually begins with fifteen pages on Stifter’s novel.  The actual causes of Golden Age are political, social, and economic, the usual stuff – the 1848 revolution and counter-revolution, the perpetual rise of the middle class, changes in the nature and influence of the Austrian imperial court.

But it must have been strange, or satisfying, for a Viennese burgher, circa 1875 or 1885, to re-read Stifter’s idealistic account of moral and aesthetic development.  My son will be Heinrich, he could think to himself.  The parallels between Stifter’s character and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, an aesthetic Tiger Woods, trained from childhood to be a great artist, are especially striking.  As Schorske describes the time:

Beginning roughly in the 1860’s, two generations of well-to-do children were reared in the museums, theaters, and concert halls of the new Ringstrasse.  They acquired aesthetic culture not, as their fathers did, as an ornament of life or as a badge of status, but as the air they breathed. (298)

The Vienna State Opera (opening 1869), the Burgtheater (an 18th century institution, but in a new building in 1888), and the Kunsthistorisches Museum (1891) are still central to Viennese culture.

I have been going back and forth about the uniqueness of the period compared to earlier Golden Ages, or to contemporary cities all Europe and America that were also building museums and opera houses.  Heian Japan, for example, or Medici Florence, or the Ferrara of the Estes, depicted in Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528) – these were all court-centered, aristocratic.  So perhaps what Schorske calls “the aristocratization of the middle classes” (296) is a real difference, with what were once court institutions like the Burgtheater not exactly democratizing but at least opening up to the bourgeois or burgher or managerial class, which really was expanding at a new pace.

That expansion was happening everywhere, though, and only in Vienna did aestheticism swallow the middle class.   As Schorske describes it:  “Aestheticism, which elsewhere in Europe took the form of a protest against bourgeois civilization, became in Austria an expression of that civilization, an affirmation of an attitude toward life in which neither ethical nor social ideals played a predominant part” (299).  In France, Flaubert and Baudelaire and their descendants set themselves against the smug, philistine bourgeois.  In England, aestheticism was intimately tangled with social reform.  I am thinking of Ruskin and Morris and the pre-Raphaelites, all of whom were direct influences on Viennese art nouveau, but with all of the politics stripped out.

The anti-bourgeois protests come later in Austria, and take on a different character. It was a challenge to make an oppositional case for advanced art against an opponent who devoutly believed in advanced art.  Flaubert and Baudelaire would have found this frustrating.

I wonder how the spread of Arthur Schopenhauer’s ideas contributed to the Viennese ethos.  Ignored for decades, Schopenhauer began to attract followers in the 1850s and his writings rapidly diffused across Europe.  The important concept here is that he argued that aesthetic appreciation, however brief, was one of the few ways people can mitigate their ordinary state of suffering and misery.  Schopenhauer argued that the more effective, more lasting path is one of asceticism and renunciation.  But that is difficult and no fun, while dancing to Johann Strauss is easy and fun.

Good choice, Viennese middle class!

But tomorrow, I begin the case against.

We are living in happiness and with a sense of constancy as if in an Indian Summer - Stifter, cultural prophet

I packed my crates, put all my tools and notes that had to do with my work into their cases and trunks, dismissed almost all my people, put the addresses on the crates, arranged for them to be shipped, and then went to the Lauter Valley.  (302)

Not exactly the most sparkling Stifter sentence, and Indian Summer contains numerous variants of it.  The narrator and Stifter insist that I understand the process of Heinrich’s growth, his Bildung.  Here he is winding up his summer research in the mountains.  Heinrich obviously spends a great deal of money on his research, just as his father and patron spend a great deal of money on their collections and restoration projects.  Heinrich himself, in his twenties, commissions a number of works of art – a marble fountain, inlaid zithers, jewelry.

Whatever example Stifter is presenting is based, even in these trivial details, on great wealth.  Money and time are devoted to art and science.  One generation had to create the foundation and can now enjoy it – this is the host, the Baron speaking:

“Thus, we are living in happiness and with a sense of constancy as if in an Indian Summer without the preceding summer.  My collections are getting more complete, the building projects are increasingly receiving their finishing touches, I have drawn people to me, I have learned more here than I have in my whole life, my hobbies are taking their course, and I am also a bit useful for something.”  (445)

The next generation, carefully cultivated, carefully developed to experience growth without hardship, what does it do?  Simply maintain the achievement of their parents?  Or do they continue to expand their knowledge and tasks into realms Stifter does not want to specify?  Heinrich never does really find a vocation.  Or is preservation his vocation?

Stifter is writing in an Idealist tradition, but in the carefully cultivated garden of Indian Summer he often sounds like he has taken the next step into Utopian fantasy.  At the very least, it sounds like a rarefied retreat from the cares of the world available to an enlightened few, although I should not use that word since the Enlightenment is clearly seen as an enemy of art, although given that modern science, of which Stifter approves, is so clearly the product of the Enlightenment – well, I do not understand the host’s or Stifter’s argument here.  He always sounds more like a Deist than a Catholic, and wears clothes that – no, I will figure this out the next time I read the novel.  The host is clear that he believes he is protecting what is valuable from the current violent and “[c]oarse times” which “had lost the concept of beauty” (357) but that “a new era will dawn, the like of which the world has never seen” (301).

The strange thing is that Stifter was only off on the timing.  The new era dawned in Vienna circa 1860, with the demolition of the medieval city walls and the construction of the new Ringstrasse.  It lasted until about 1890.  The citizens rapidly developed a culture that emphasized Bildung above all else, that devoted itself to science and art, with bourgeois parents who deliberately raised their children to be not just doctors and scientists but  poets and painters and book bloggers.

Stifter was not a Utopian.  He was a prophet. Much of what has attracted and perplexed me about Austrian art and literature comes directly out of this period, and thus, strangely, out of Stifter’s novel.

I want to spend next week figuring out what happened and what it means.  To me, this sounds wonderful.  The Indian Summer, though brief, is my favorite part of the year.  Herman Broch grew up in it, and has a different opinion.  Boy does he ever.  That’ll be a highlight of next week.

From that hour I did not leave the couch, and I read for forty days on end - Goethe, Stifter, Goethe, Keller, Goethe

I have not written about the literary tradition of Indian Summer.  It is a Bildungsroman, a novel of personal growth, of which Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796) is not the first but for a long time the most read, the most important.  Certainly the center of the German tradition.  So that is the tradition.

R. J. Hollingdale, in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Essays and Aphorisms, argues that “the overwhelming presence of Goethe” crushed nineteenth century German-language literature and channeled the “most original” thought into philosophy, a field “Goethe had not harvested” (9-10).  Hollingdale is not wrong.

The existence of Indian Summer and other German literature would seem to refute Hollingdale, if it were not for passages like this, where a mother is giving her son, who is maybe twelve, a gift:

“You’ve been asking me for them for a long time, which I’ve had to refuse since you weren’t yet ready.  They are the Works of Goethe.  They belong to you.  A great deal in them is for a more mature age, indeed, the most mature.  You can’t choose which books you’ll now take in hand or which ones you’ll save for later days.  Your Foster Father will add that to the many kindnesses he has shown you; he’ll choose for you, and you’ll obey him in this, just as you have in everything up to now.”  (144)

The mother has given her son her personal set, full of her notes and underlinings.  Her son protests, but she insists, and anyway “Since I will probably still want to read the works of this remarkable man sometime during the remainder of my life I am going to buy a new set of books.”

With Goethe you do not simply read a book, but rather a fifty volume set, tied up in string.  Or that is what Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry does:

As if I had all these threads [of association] together in the clumsy knot of the string, I fell upon it and hastily began to untie it, and when at last it came loose, the golden fruits of his eighty years of life fell apart gloriously, spread over the couch and tumbled over the edge on to the floor so that I had my hands full, trying to hold the riches together.  From that hour I did not leave the couch, and I read for forty days on end, during which time the winter returned, and the Spring came back, but the white snow, whose shining I saw but heeded not, passed me by like a dream. (Green Henry, tr. A. M. Holt, III.1, p. 312).

Now that is a serious reader.  Green Henry (1854-5/1879-80) is yet another jumbo-sized Bildungsroman, although with an entirely different flavor than Stifter’s novel.  Where Stifter’s Heinrich has two father figures, poor Green Henry has no father at all; where Heinrich moves smoothly from one stage of growth to the next, Henry stumbles from mistake to mistake, eventually, in an inversion of Stifter, rejecting an artistic vocation and entering the Swiss civil bureaucracy.

Henry does not even get to keep his set of Goethe.  His mother takes it away because of its dangerously addictive properties.  Goethe was the Angry Birds of the nineteenth century.  But readers of Stifter know that Goethe needs to be read under proper adult supervision.

Both Indian Summer and Green Henry are drenched in Goethe.  There are constant allusions and references to Goethe, or at least Goethe’s work is so all-encompassing and inescapable that the later novels appear to be constantly referring to Goethe. Keller, Stifter and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (and its 1821 sequel, Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering) share a common ethos.  They are all novels of idealism, Kantian ideas worked out through fiction.  Stifter is in a way the most radical of the three, with the most abstract characters inhabiting the most “realistic” landscapes.

Eh, I should do some sort of massive re-reading of Goethe.  I do not know how to convey what a titan he was.  And in the context of Stifter’s and Keller’s novels, he had only been dead for twenty years!

I wonder who first discovered the existential significance of bureaucracy - Kundera on Stifter

A little fragment of Indian Summer has acquired its own life.  These are fragments of Milan Kundera in his fragmentary essay The Curtain (2005), in a section title “Bureaucracy According to Stifter”:

I wonder who first discovered the existential significance of bureaucracy.  Probably Adalbert Stifter…  he is the key writer of the Central Europe of the nineteenth century, the pure flower of that era and its idyllic, virtuous mentality that we call Biedermeier!  (130-1)

After a brief summary of Indian Summer Kundera looks at a single long paragraph (six pages in the English edition, pp. 397-403) near the end of Indian Summer, what turns out to be the beginning of the host’s recounting of his early life and his purpose in creating the Rose House.  “[A]s far as I know it is the first (and a masterly) phenomenological description of bureaucracy” writes Kundera (131).

The host is a Baron, ennobled because of his service to the state during and after the Napoleonic Wars (which are of course not named).  His function is vague, but he was clearly superb at it, earning wealth, a title, and the friendship of the Emperor.  Yet he describes himself as a bad civil servant, a sufferer from a proto-Marxist white collar alienation from his labor, for whom “[d]oing something just because it was prescribed to satisfy some rule or complete some organizational plan was irritating, even painful” (398).  The Baron describes his character, his “urge to create tangible things,” and his childhood love of “plants blossoming” and “watch[ing] the shore ice forming” (400-1).

I would call this the creative urge.  It is more or less present in many people.  (400)

Yet the Baron does not attack the state bureaucracy.  He refuses to suggest reforms: “I wouldn’t presume to even offer one” (399).  His eventual resignation from state service to create the Rose House is entirely personal and temperamental – “My inclinations required forms, they revolved around forms” (401).  And just as the Baron will help Heinrich avoid the destructive passions of youth, he will also keep the young man from mistaking his vocation.

The co-plot with Heinrich’s father ends with the father’s retirement from business, what Heinrich described as his “sacrifice,” in order to build his own Rose House-inspired estate.  The young couple will move between all of the idyllic, art-packed homes of the relatives who suffered in order, it turns out, to allow Heinrich and his bride to reach their highest ethical and aesthetic potential.  They will presumably do the same for their descendants, down through the ages.  The narrator’s final words: “[E]verything…  has now gained significantly in clarity, solidity, and importance” (479).

As happens so often with this novel, I was left not with a sense of calm but rather greater unease.

“His [the Baron’s] break with bureaucracy is one of the memorable breaks of mankind from the modern world,” Kundera concludes (133).  Indian Summer was published in the same year as Charles’ Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal.  The modern world has arrived! Just in time to break with it.

He took care of his son and didn’t even try to prove to him how beautiful these things were - Stifter's utopia

With all of my attention on Indian Summer’s Rose House and its Idealist host, I have neglected the narrator Heinrich’s winter quarters, with his family, with his father.  Heinrich spends the spring, summer, and fall in the mountains or at Rose House, making discoveries about nature and art, his Bildung moving along at a steady pace.  Every time he returns home to Vienna, he makes further discoveries in his own home.

For example:

My father had paintings by Titian, Guido Reni, Paul Veronese, Annibale Caracci, Dominichino, Salvator Rosa, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorraine, Albrecht Durer, both Holbeins, Lucas Cranach, Van Dyck, Rembrandt [all right, that’s enough].  We went from one to the other, admiring each one, placing many of them on the easel, discussing each.  My heart was filled with joy.  (260)

A Titian, you don’t say.  Remember that the path for Heinrich has been: science leads to the direct study of nature which leads to drawing which leads to painting, and at the same time there is the study of marble, all of which culminates into the sudden discovery of the beauty of a Classical Greek sculpture, which in turn leads to an appreciation for the host’s collection of Old Master paintings.  Back home, when he enters his father’s art gallery, he “is utterly astonished,” understandably.  I mentioned the Titian?  Previously, Heinrich, had been undeveloped, unprepared to even see his father’s paintings:

A strangely profound sensation came into my soul.  That was my great and indescribable love for my father.  He owned these precious things, his heart was devoted to them; his son had simply passed them without giving them any notice at all; yet Father hadn’t withheld even a fraction of his affection from his son; he sacrificed himself, he had been sacrificing himself for most of his life, he took care of his son and didn’t even try to prove to him how beautiful these things were.  (258)

This is a strange passage, a strange response.  That “sacrifice” is the father’s long hours working as a merchant, obviously a successful one (“Forced into business of the most boring type or perhaps having entered it of his own volition since he conducted it with such order, integrity, tenacity, and devotion,” 263).

Even if I think of Indian Summer as an exemplary novel, like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, not necessarily a guide to my own behavior but an ideal example, I begin at this point to wonder exactly what Adalbert Stifter expects his reader to do.  Neither my own family nor my fortuitously discovered mentor have collections of Old Master paintings or Greek carvings (the father also has a drawer of Classical carved stones), and Heinrich has both.  No wonder his Bildung is so smooth.  But what about my Bildung?  I am in trouble, I am afraid.

Stifter creates a utopia in Indian Summer.  Next I will try to figure out exactly what kind.

In general, cactus blooms are the most beautiful in the world if you except a few parasitic plants - Stifter in the greenhouse

Inorganic nature, provided it does not consist of water, produces a very melancholy, indeed oppressive impression upon us when it appears without anything organic…  [W]e derive a high degree of immediate pleasure from the sight of vegetation, but this is naturally the greater the more abundant, manifold and extensive – that is to say left to itself – the vegetation is.  The immediate reason for this lies in the fact that in vegetation the law of gravity seems to have been overcome…  (Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, Penguin Classics, p. 161)

And conversely rocks make us sad because they have succumbed to gravity.

Indian Summer is a novel that finds great pleasure in both plants and rocks.  I wonder if Adalbert Stifter had read that passage of Schopenhauer’s.  It was published in 1851; Stifter’s novel in 1857, although I assume they were both responding to scientific currents of the day.  Still, this is funny:

“Form is inextricably bound up with material.  Stone is serious, it strives upward and can’t be bent into the softest, finest, most supple figures.  I’m referring to building stones and not marble.”  (359)

Stifter's speaker, the “host,” is referring to Gothic architecture, actually.  Stone escapes gravity when assembled into a Gothic spire.

Early in the novel the narrator, Heinrich, encounters a giant greenhouse cactus, a Cereus peruvianus, that is being neglected.  He suggests it be moved to the Rose House greenhouse, which it is (the host buys it – no conflict, not in this book), and twenty pages later “the Cereus, which had to twist and wind itself along the ceiling of the greenhouse at the Inghof, now could grow straight again.  I wouldn’t have imagined that this plant was so big or that it would grow so beautifully.”  (185)

The cactus theme recedes – or I have forgotten its appearance – for a time, but it returns with one of my favorite lines in the novel: “In general, cactus blooms are the most beautiful in the world if you except a few parasitic plants and a very few other individual blossoms” (349).  Yes, Heinrich, of course.  The cactus is healing, and has changed color, from “yellowish” to “a dark blue-green which now covered the entire plant like vapor.”  Perhaps it will bloom.

Of course it does, but not until the very end of the novel, at Heinrich’s wedding.  The gardener has “’retarded it by cold’” so that it would bloom as a wedding present – “’It can unfold in just the next five minutes’” (472).

The blossom had already opened by the time we got there.  A large splendid exotic blossom.  Everyone was unanimous in its praise.

“So many people have the Peruvianus,” Simon said, “since it isn’t rare at all, but even though they can get its stem to grow tall and mighty, very few can get it to flower.  Few people in Europe have ever seen this white blossom.  Now it is unfolding, tomorrow it will be gone with the break of day.  Its very presence is a treasure.”  (472)

There are a few more symbolic utterances to go before moving to the next page when – this is very exciting – the zither theme finally resolves!

Schopenhauer wants the vegetation to be abundant and left to itself.  Stifter argues for a single flower cultivated by an expert hand.  Similarly, the sheer cliff and bare rock are aesthetically and emotionally exciting for Heinrich (“the winter is also very beautiful”), but the Gothic church or marble statue is even more powerful.  In Indian Summer, life fulfills itself in the workshop and the garden.

I have omitted the workshop side of the argument.  It is mostly about restoring antique furniture.  You might guess that another wedding present is a particularly meaningful piece of restored furniture.  Yes.

Sir, the winter is also very beautiful. - enjoying the view atop Indian Summer

Stifter carefully places his characters in a landscape.  Sometimes – often – he invents them, like the boulder-strewn hills in his novella “Limestone.”  I actually looked that one up in a book about Stifter several years ago, because I wanted to see photos.  But Stifter had made it all up.

The fields and Alps and glaciers of Indian Summer are not so unusual, so I am not sure what it would mean to say that Stifter had invented them, although in some sense he obviously did.  Instead, Stifter has a character, a painter, do the invention.  His immense painting features “naked cliffs towering up not as an ordered formation but as if by chance like massive boulders placed here and there indiscriminately on the earth, like strangers who, like the Norsemen, settled on islands that didn’t belong to them…  it was torn and jumbled, devoid of trees and bushes, it had dry grass lining white glaring furrows, and piles of quartz stones.”  (387)

And most importantly, it is all imaginary:

“He has set a task for himself of portraying a subject he has never seen,” my host said, “he only sees it through the power of his imagination.”

Those Norsemen were a surprise.  Indian Summer is generally sparse with the metaphors.  I do not really understand the purpose of this painting, but I certainly recognize it as Stifter’s work.

The narrator, Heinrich, begins the novel on a path to be a scientist, with geology and botany as his main interests.  I guess I am just writing about geology now.  Heinrich is pondering his collection of marble specimens:

Will a great deal, will everything completely change again?...  If through the influence of wind and water, the mountains are constantly broken off, if the rubble falls down, if they are further split and the river ultimately brings them to the lower areas in the form of sand, how much can that continue?...  Thus, will one day the mountains have disappeared completely?...

Such questions put me in a serious, solemn mood; it seemed as if a more profound existence had come into my very nature.  (192)

This is the sort of thing W. G. Sebald pulled out of Stifter.

In some sense the climax of the narrator’s story, before the host’s revelations and the romantic plot necessarily bring the book to a close, is a winter hike to an Alpine glacier that he had first visited around page 277.  The hike, in the company of a local mountaineer, is described in detail.  The glacier, the mountains, and the view shift into abstraction – e.g., the glacier’s “sides peered out from the general white in iridescent blue or green” (381) or “[e]verything stood out immovably, silently, solemnly in a gentle blue, a golden shimmer or a distant dull silver” (382).  A few pages earlier, lower down the mountain, Heinrich’s companion

standing beside me, commented, “Sir, the winter is also very beautiful.”

“Yes, Kaspar,” I replied, “it is beautiful, it is very beautiful.”  (379)

Some sort of perfect balance of science and art, of knowledge and beauty, has been achieved, a duality has been resolved, within one branch of the larger symbolic world of the novel, the rock side of the Plants and Rocks idea.  Roses and marble.  The garden and the glacier.  The ephemeral but continually renewed; the permanent yet continually changing.

Next, then, some flowers.

Then I thought of my marble – how remarkable marble is! - the marble theme in Stifter's Indian Summer

After all of my (accurate) complaints about the limits of the art of Indian Summer, I want to enjoy a couple of examples of Stifter at his best.  I mean his best just as a prose writer, a novelist, not where he fits in a strange tradition or what larger ideas he is trying to convey.  I will get to all of that later.  Don’t try to stop me.

I’m going to return to the Greek statue I mentioned yesterday.  Here is the narrator, Heinrich’s, first glimpse of it, by candlelight; remember that he is visiting the ideal Rose House for the first time.

We were in the beautiful marble corridor; a staircase of the same marble led up from it…  In the middle of the stairway where there was a landing like an enlarged area or stairwell, I could see a figure made of white marble standing on a pedestal.  By a few lightning flashes that just then illuminated the room the head and shoulders of the figure glowed ruddier than it would have with just our candles…  (50)

Heinrich sees the sculpture again the next day as while on his tour of the house.

He led me to the stairway where the white statue was…  serene white daylight shone down upon it, illuminating the head and shoulders in a gentle splendor.  Not only the steps but also the side walls of the stairwell were made of marble.  (53)

A powerful distraction is through the next door, a room made entirely of marble, “a veritable collection of marble, ”with no furnishings but just doors and windows, open so that “the hall was also filled with the fragrance of roses” (54).

At this point in his Bildung, he is incapable of seeing the statue well.  Notice that he does not identify the subject of the sculpture, even though even by the faintest light he instantly identifies its material.  The scientific sensibility of the young geologist is well developed, but not his aesthetic sense.  When he returns home, Heinrich tells his family about the wonders of the Rose House:

I was able to describe the marble exactly and the antique furniture almost…  I was able to say less about the carvings, not much about the books either, least of all, actually practically nothing, about the statues and paintings. (108)

I mentioned yesterday that Heinrich’s mid-novel encounter with the statue during yet another lightning storm is used as a sort of test of his artistic education.  After 160 pages of Bildung, he finally truly sees the sculpture (“it seemed quite different to me,” 214).  He finally describes it in detail, its subject (a young woman), form, and effect on him (“I gazed enraptured at the figure, watching the reddish flashes and the grayish white color alternating several times,” 215).

The sexual overtones of Heinrich suddenly noticing a beautiful woman are reinforced by an earlier scene featuring a different marble statue of a woman, this one at the mansion of the young woman with whom he will later fall in love and marry.  That other, lesser, sculpture somehow prepares his understanding of the better one.

I wonder how many other carefully placed incidental mentions of the statue I missed because I, like Heinrich, did not realize until the middle of the book that it was meaningful.  In fact, an entire marble theme runs through the novel.  “Then I thought of my marble – how remarkable marble is!” Heinrich says as he surveys his geological specimen collection (191).  The love affair is conducted in the shadow of one of the statues, the wedding dinner takes place in that amazing marble room, etc., etc.  I am not going to trace it all out, not this time.  It is Advanced Novel Writing, and a sight to behold.

You will know it all the more certainly than if someone else had said something about it - Indian Summer, a plot summary

Adalbert Stifter’s Indian Summer has very little story but a great deal of carefully described incident.  The novel is a Bildungsroman, so the story is the development and education, ethically and aesthetically, of a young man.  That is plenty vague.  So here is more of the story.

Heinrich, the young man and narrator, finished with his tutors, embarks on a scientific career, with an emphasis on geology and botany.  He takes trips to the Alps to further his education, collect specimens, and draw.

I realize now that I have no idea when or where I learned the narrator’s name.  It is almost never used, a recurring theme in a novel where the Danube and the Alps are frequently named; Vienna (always “the city”) and Austria, never.

One summer he comes across the Rose House and the story really begins:

The first floor was covered with roses reaching up to the windows of the second…  The plants were so well arranged and cared for that there were no blank spaces any where to be seen; the wall of the house was completely covered as far as the roses extended.  (31)

A thunderstorm is approaching.  Heinrich asks for shelter from a bareheaded, white-haired, oddly dressed man, the owner of the house, “my host” as he will be known for most of the novel.  The host insists that the storm will not break, but that Heinrich is welcome.  They tour the grounds, and later the house.  The house tour is room by room.  Everything on the estate is perfectly arranged, the crops, the flowers, the birds (attracted by bird seed and artificial habitats), and also the paintings, furniture, marble floors (requiring felt slippers), the household schedules, habits, everything.

This first visit lasts three days and occupies 16% of the book.  It is thorough.  A storm that does not break is a perfect symbol for Adalbert Stifter.  The perfection, the lack of drama, is itself a source of tension.  What is the cost of perfection?

A seasonal pattern is established for Heinrich:  winter with his family, spring and summer in the mountains, autumn at the Rose House.  The pattern is subtly varied – Heinrich sees the roses bloom, or misses them entirely.  Heinrich’s scientific and artistic knowledge expands. He moves from drawing to painting.  He studies architecture, and glaciers.

The centerpiece of the novel is an encounter with an ancient Greek sculpture (first glimpsed back on page 50) during a thunderstorm (now the storm comes, just when Heinrich needs it):

“Why didn’t you tell me before,” I continued, “that the statue on your marble stairway is so beautiful?”

“Who told you that now?” he asked.

“I could see it myself,” I replied.

“Then you will know it all the more certainly and believe it all the more firmly,” he answered, “than if someone else had said something about it.”  (216)

Hints of two more novelistic stories have appeared by now.  At some point a woman Heinrich’s age is introduced, perhaps a relation or friend of the host.  A romantic story, perhaps?  Yes.  And then there is the mystery of the host’s identity, seemingly defused early, but the culmination of the romance subplot leads the host to tell his own story in detail, filling another 10% of the book.

A quick recap:  Introduction 6%; Host’s Estate Tour 16%; Develop Develop Develop (Love!) 62%; Host’s Story 10%; Conclusion 6%.  I detect symmetry.

The big climax, the secret of the host, is that the perfection of his estate and life are the consequence of a failed love affair of his youth, the one eruption of passion and anguish in the novel.  He is somehow attempting to make restitution for his lost happiness, and the narrator and his bride become the embodiment of the host’s efforts.  The breach is healed, order is restored.

Is this a good story?  I do not know.  But Stifter packs it with meaning, and also with zithers, mountains, engravings, nests, cacti, furniture, and flowers.  So much furniture, so many flowers.

The most boring and mendacious author in the whole of German literature - beginning Adalbert Stifter's Indian Summer

For very long stretches of his prose Stifter is an unbearable chatterbox, he has an incompetent and, which is most despicable, a slovenly style and he is moreover, in actual fact, the most boring and mendacious author in the whole of German literature.  (Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters, 1985, tr. Ewald Osers, p. 35)

So there is one view, admittedly that of a fictional character, of Adalbert Stifter.  It contains some truth. His first novel, Indian Summer (Der Nachsommer, 1857), is dull, mannered, distant, completely devoid of humor, virtually devoid of story, and free of characters who might be described as naturalistic.

For example, dull:

“Once I took the trouble of measuring the area of this hill as far as it is planted in grain so I could make a prediction about the average amount that would be harvested in one year.  I based my calculations on our previous harvests as well as those of our neighbors.  I couldn’t believe the figures; I wouldn’t have even dreamed that they were so large.  If you are interested, I’ll show you this study which is kept in our house.” (45)

The novel could be even more dull, I suppose – Stifter could spend several pages describing that study of grain yield; thankfully, it is never mentioned again, although the characters do spend a great deal of time looking at drawings of buildings and furniture.

Humorless:

We finally learned from each other, spending many joyous and loving hours with the zither.  (208)

Sorry, that is actually an example of humor, assuming you find the word “zither” as inherently humorous as I do.  The narrator spends a fair amount of time playing the zither and commissioning beautiful hand-crafted zithers.  This is the voice, by the way, of the main character and narrator of the novel.  Hundreds of pages, much like that.

Mannered:

“Thank you, Mother,” her son replied, “you are so kind, Mother dear; I already know what it is and shall do exactly as Foster Father decides.”

“That will be good,” she answered.  (142)

Everyone talks in this way.  They have to, because a defining feature of the novel is that there is no drama or even conflict of any sort.  Everyone says the words they ought to say and takes the actions they ought to take.  In a pattern typical with Stifter, for example in his novellas Limestone (1848) and Brigitta (1844), the events in the present of the story are a sort of ideal resolution of a conflict from the past, a conflict the existence of which is only revealed at the end of the story.

Imagine how this works when the text of the novel is eight times longer than the novellas.  The tension is almost unbearable.  When will something happen?  Something has to happen, doesn’t it?  Or was Stifter writing some kind of expectation-crushing 19th century avant garde anti-novel?

He was not, but it took me a long time to understand what he was doing.  As my understanding grew, so did my enthusiasm for this quiet, odd novel.  Indian Summer turns out to be a – what is a good metaphor – a foundation stone of Austrian literature.  Austrian culture, perhaps.  That grump in the Bernhard novel also calls Stifter “an author I myself had always so enormously revered that it became more like artistic addiction,” at least before he finally read him “accurately and radically.” (34)

That sets a good example for me.  I am going to write about Stifter and Indian Summer until I run out of things to say.

All quotations are from the 1985 Wendell Frye translation, which I still, after 470 dense pages, can hardly believe exists.

Austria, what a naïve place you are!

That cheerful thought is courtesy of Peter Altenberg, the archetypal Viennese coffeehouse Bohemian, who spent his life wandering from café to café and writing Baudelaire-inspired prose poems or articles of short fiction or whatever they are.  As collected in the 2005 Archipelago book Telegrams of the Soul, his importance seems more historical than literary, but that is a thought I hope to sketch out some other time.  For the title line in context, see p. 120.

A greater writer, a greater figure, is the Diogenes of Vienna, Karl Kraus, who moved from journalism to founding his own paper Die Fackel (“The Torch”) in 1899 to writing every word of its contents for twenty-five years:

I no longer have collaborators.  I used to be envious of them.  They repel those readers whom I want to lose myself.

Kraus is highly quotable.  This one is from In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader (Carcanet, 1984, p. 5).  It is amusing to joke that this or that old timey writer, Montaigne or Dr. Johnson or what have you, would now be a blogger.  Not a joke with Kraus.

Along with his articles, jokes, vitriol, parodies, shivs, and bile, Kraus also sometimes presented one-man performances of Shakespeare plays which must have been a sight.  Somewhere along the way he wrote an enormous play-like object titled The Last Days of Mankind, published 1918-19, of which a fraction has been translated.  Perhaps if we all read it someone will translate the whole thing!  I will do my part.

What other Austrian books might I try to read?

I am in the middle – no, closer to the front – of a long, tedious, magnificent Adalbert Stifter novel, Der Nachsommer (“Indian Summer”, 1856).  I have written plenty about Stifter before and recommend him strongly to patient readers, but anyone who introduces himself to Stifter with this novel is insane, no offense.   His subsequent novel, Witiko (1867), is reputed to be even more boring, which if true is an achievement.

Another mid-century writer who should have no existence in English is the comedic playwright Johann Nestroy, but one of his Viennese dialect comedies was adapted by Thornton Wilder and eventually turned into the 1964 musical Hello, Dolly!  That exclamation point is in the title of the show, but I also lay claim to it – what, really?  More appealing to me is that the same play was adapted by Tom Stoppard as On the Razzle (1981).

The young Salzburg poet Georg Trakl I read in November.  I should revisit him.  The other major poet of the period is Rainer Maria Rilke whom I should also revisit (after fifteen years).

If I stick to the kind of cutoff date I used in previous reading projects, say something around 1919, I will then stop before I get to Rilke’s best-known works, the Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies (both 1923).  I thus also cordon off most Robert Musil, all Joseph Roth, most Stefan Zweig, most Ernst Weiss, etc. etc.  Unwise, perhaps, but it is a guideline, not a rule.

An important exception: Young Törless (1906) is Robert Musil’s first novel, a story of boarding school sadism with a humanist turn.  It also features a long monologue about the meaning of imaginary numbers.  I have read it twice and will likely read it again.  A fine readalong book, but c’mon, The Last Days of Mankind, right?

Perhaps it is clearer why what once seemed like a project of wide scope has come to seem a bit narrow.  Valuable reading but less fun for more casual participants.

Tomorrow:  some supplementary or alternative paths that may well be more fruitful than anything I have mentioned so far.

And so it will be with all the works of art that now exist; an eternal veil of forgetfulness will lie over them

You might ask if I have any larger point when I gather up the Best Books of Year 18XX, besides the jolly fun of literary history.  I do, several points, some of them contradictory.

In part I am parodying the mass of year-end Best of lists, which I enjoy and read with avidity, but also with the strong sense that almost none of the championed books – good books, worthwhile books – will outlive their authors.  In a few years they will be gone.  Or a few decades.  A century whittles the pile – the worldwide pile! – down to a few dozen books; another century wipes out most of those.  So my listing is a memento mori.  Art is long, life is short, but art is also short.

The context is antique furniture restoration, but otherwise this passage from Adalbert Stifter’s Der Nachsommer (or Indian Summer, 1857) says what I want to say:

However, all means, even the most complete, would not prevent the ultimate perishing of a work of art; this is due to the constant activity and necessity for change within men as well as the transitory nature of material.  Everything that now exists, no matter how great and good it is, lasts for a time, fulfills a purpose, and then passes on.  And so it will be with all the works of art that now exist; an eternal veil of forgetfulness will lie over them, just as there is now over those things that came before. (I.4, 68, tr. Wendell Frye)

Identifying the books they thought of as important in 1812 and comparing to the 1812 books we think are important is a way to understand the “constant activity… within men.”  It does not help predict the future except to demonstrate that the future is unpredictable, which we all knew.

The compilers of real Best of 2012 lists based on the reading of genuine 2012 books are helping books last for a time and fulfill their purpose, perhaps more than I do, even if that time is short and that purpose limited.  Some books are intensely good right now.  Who cares if they are worthless tomorrow?  That plate of fried oysters becomes less valuable the longer it exists, so dig in, eat up.  Most books get cold quickly, too, but that does not mean they were not worth reading when they were hot.

That Stifter novel, by the way, in case anyone was wondering, is amazingly dull, easily living up to its reputation.  I just read a passage about the proper building of birdhouses, and it seems that we are about to move to bird seed.  A representative sentence:

I also noted that I had studied botany somewhat, not with regard to gardening, but for my own edification and enjoyment, and the cactus had not been the least to which I had devoted my attention.  (I.5, 80)

I should save this for my week (at least) of posts on this masterpiece, but I cannot restrain my enthusiasm.  That sentence was entirely sincere, as is this one.

This tongue tells us almost with intelligible words how good and how happy and how peaceful everything is - I found another Adalbert Stifter story

How exciting.  I came across an Adalbert Stifter story that I had not known was available in English.  It's "Granite" also known as "The Pitch-Burner" (1849/ 1852).  A translation by Jeffrey L. Sammons can be found in The German Library, Volume 37, German Novellas of Realism I (1989).

I can hear your clucks of dismay.  "You had not read German Novellas of Realism I?  Were you born in a hayloft?  Just look at that title - German Novellas of Realism I!"  I know, I know.

The story itself is perfectly typical Stifter, perhaps ur-Stifter.  A Stifter-like boy tells us about the day he got in trouble for smearing pitch all over the house, and how his kindly grandfather helped him out.  Sweet, sentimental Stifter.  One way the grandfather helps tiny Adelbert is by telling him an old story about their region, a story about the plague, and children who lose their parents and wander through the woods, eating nuts and committing saintly acts.  Weird, weird Stifter.

The grandfather links the old story, horrific as it is, to specific features in the landscape.  He in fact begins by having the grandson name each feature:

"That is the lake forest, where there are dark and deep lake waters."

And still to the right of the Lake Forest?"

"That is the Boulder Stone and the Chair Forest."

"And farther right?"

"That is Tusset Forest."  (p. 15)

I don't mean to suggest this is any special prose - a lot of Stifter's writing is pretty ordinary - but to highlight a Stifterian method, here performed more systematically than I have ever seen.  The exact details of the landscape, real or imagined, must be precisely identified.  Then humans are set within the landscape.  The grandfather tells his grandson about the hay-gleaners in the forest meadows, and the fungi collectors, and the pitch-burners:  "You see, these columns of smoke all come from men who do their jobs in the forest" (15).  If Stifter is a nature writer, he's an odd one.  It's the connections between people and nature that he writes about again and again.

I don't expect to make any converts to Stifter, so I will leave "Granite" behind here.  I was converted to him by W. G. Sebald, who really taught me to read Stifter.  Sebald directed me to Stifter's landscapes, and his quiet uncanniness.  Stifter's sweetness and placidity then seem less like flaws or outdated modes than veils of his real aesthetic purpose.

I wish someone would translate some more Adalbert Stifter stories for me.  "Granite" was as good, or at least as Stifterian, as any I have found.

The title quotation (p. 18) is torn from its context, a bit.  That tongue is of a bell, not a storyteller.

Nothing, for here nothing was being heralded - Adalbert Stifter's Rock Crystal

OK, here's a real Christmas story.

Two children are trapped on a mountainside during a blizzard on Christmas Eve. They are saved by a miracle, or by chance, or perhaps the series of coincidences that allow them to survive are themselves the miracle.

This is Adalbert Stifter's sweet, mysterious Rock Crystal (1853). It's a real Stifter story - the landscape of two imaginary but perfectly credible mountain valleys and the pass between them is described in possibly tedious detail. Much of the story is really about the landscape, and the childrens' direct experience with it as they wander off the path and somehow make their way up the mountain. The story is a genuine example of the sublime - unmediated nature is beautiful and thrilling but also threatening, deadly. A truly Burkean sample, where the human bells are the Beautiful and Nature's silence is the Sublime:

"At this very moment all the bells were ringing, the bells in Millsdorf, the bells in Gschaid, and on the farther side of the mountain there was still another little church whose three clear-chiming bells were ringing out. In remote places beyond the valley there were innumerable churches with bells all ringing at this very hour; from village to village, the waves of sound were floating, and in one village you could at times hear through the leafless branches the chiming of the bells in another. Away up by the ice, however, not a sound reached the children; nothing, for here nothing was being heralded. Along the winding paths of the mountainslopes lantern lights were moving; and on many a farmstead the great bell was rousing the farm-hands,- unseen here, and unheard. Only the stars twinkled and shone steadily down."

Many of Stifter's stories seem to occur in a great hush. This passage is strangely both silent and noisy, with the web of sound connecting the villages below the children. Those final bells, the ones rousing the farm-hands, are, like the lantern-lights, part of the miracle, the search parties already on the childrens' path.

And something, it turns out, is being heralded, even in the void. Something happens immediately afterward, in the stillness of the ice, that I will leave to the reader. Rock Crystal is definitely a Christian Christmas story.

I read the original 1945 edition of the translation NYRB has republished, so I didn't benefit from the wisdom of W. H. Auden's introduction, although I get to see a dozen primitive, useless illustrations that I pray NYRB omitted.

Have a good holiday. Wuthering Expectations will be on vacation for a while.

In which I fail to comprehend the religious ideas in Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice

So I have a problem understanding the religious ethics of 17th century Japanese fiction and 8th century Chinese poetry. I am ignorant of traditions, and I don’t know how to read all sorts of signals that would have guided contemporary readers. I’ll bet that some aspects of 8th century Chinese poetry looked pretty foreign to the 17th century Japanese reader, but I’m too distant from it all to guess which ones.

Adalbert Stifter’s novella Limestone stars a strange, saintly priest. Re-reading the story recently, I realized that part of the strangeness of the character was that he did not seem quite Catholic. There were oddities of dress and habit that made me think he belonged in a Bergman film. What a delight to later read that when the story was first published, the priest was actually a Lutheran minister. Stifter changed some of the details about the character, but not all of them. Perhaps it was an oversight, perhaps he valued the strange effect.

With Chinese or Japanese literature, I don’t recognize those signals. If Ihara Saikaku dressed his 17th century monk like an 8th century Chinese hermit, how would I know?

But I have the same problem, actually, with European and American literature. It’s worse in a way, more insidious, because it’s easier to assume that then is basically like now. In classical Japanese literature (or medieval European or Classical Greek) the foreignness, the strangeness, is hard to ignore. I can’t be as glib about what I don’t understand. When I read, I fill in the background with what I know, and in the 19th century, I am less likely to see when the background and foreground clash.

Even in European literature, religious content presents the greatest challenge to me. I want to denature religion too much. I don’t want to punish Clarissa Harlowe for the sin of disobeying her parents, or Jane Eyre for the sin of idolatry. And I don't have to. These books have plenty of strengths – they’re complex masterpieces, packed with meaning. But I know that I am missing a piece if I look away from ethical aspects with which I am uncomfortable.

Jane Austen puts a mortal sin right there in the title of Pride and Prejudice. Today, pride is as often thought of as a virtue as a sin, and it’s hardly appealing to think of Elizabeth Bennet as a sinner. She’s so wonderful. But maybe the clergyman’s daughter put some of this into her novel. It's worked into the ethics of the novel, I can see that much.

This would be a good place to link to The Little Professor, who makes her living with this sort of thing, and to My Life in Book’s headfirst dive into the religion of Jane Eyre.

Everything's great - a George Sand idyll

Everywhere I look, in everything I read, things are going great. Or they go great for a while, but then something bad happens. Or they're going great now, except that things are a little weird, because something bad happened a long time ago. For some reason, I have been reading a lot of idylls.*

Herman Melville, Adalbert Stifter, Theodor Storm, Longfellow in Evangeline, Eliot in Adam Bede - they all build their stories around some sort of idealized rural setting, always with some sort of threat (even in Arcadia, am I, says Death) hidden somewhere. In Evangeline and Adam Bede, a tragedy disturbs the idyll, while in Stifter and Storm the sorrows lie in the past.

George Sand's The Devil's Pool (1846)** is an especially idyllic idyll. A young farmer, a widower, is going to visit a nearby village to meet an eligible widow. By chance, he is accompanied by a poor, pretty shepherdess; his adorable seven year-old son comes along as well. They all get lost in the woods. The sheperdess is really pretty. And good with children. And she secretly gathers chestnuts while they walk, and has an exta bottle of wine, all of which turns out to be kind of handy when lost in the woods. That widow does not have a prayer.

Sand begins the short novel by invoking a Holbein print, from The Dance of Death. See left. That's Death striking the horses. She describes the image only to reject it:

"So it was that I had before my eyes a picture the reverse of Holbein, although the scene was similar. Instead of a wretched old man, a young and active one; instead of a team of weary and emaciated horses, four yoke of robust and fiery oxen; instead of death, a beautiful child; instead of despair and destruction, energy and the possibility of happiness." (Ch. I)

That young man's story is the one Sand chooses to write. "I might write his story, though that story were as simple, as straightforward, and unadorned as the furrow he was tracing." Curious that she feels she has to justify it like this. I don't understand French Romanticism.

More, the best part of The Devil's Pool, tomorrow.

* Well, not anymore, now that I'm reading Cousin Bette, a vulgar and chaotic anti-idyll.

** La Mare au Diable. I've also seen it translated as The Haunted Pool, and as The Devil's Pond.

Another Stifter-colored stone - this is a very dark story

Tourmaline, or the Doorkeeper (1853) is hardly a favorite of mine, but it has a Modernist feel to it that is especially interesting, so I'll end my week of Stifter here.

There is a couple with a daughter living in an apartment in Vienna. The man seems to be a gentleman of leisure with numerous hobbies. His room has as a grand piano, and two violins, and two flutes, and "a special work corner where he could cut up cardboard and make boxes, containers, lampshades, and other articles." Yes, that sounds like fun.

Also, the "walls of the apartment were completely pasted over with portraits of famous men." The man has special couches and ladders made to allow optimal viewing of the portraits at all different heights. A famous actor, friend of this fellow, likes to come over and see the portraits; together, they look up information about the famous men in books.

The actor begins, and ends, an affair with the wife. Later, the wife disappears. The husband searches for her, then he and his daughter disappear as well, abandoning the apartment. The narrator, a Stifter-like figure, tells us about all of the details of the landlord putting ads in the paper, and the city auctioning off the furniture.

That is that, until, years later, "Stifter" meets a woman who happens to have met the father and daughter, and who assisted the daughter, who was mentally handicapped, after the father's death. And, again, that is that. What happened to the wife? Why did the man disappear? Why does any of this matter?

If there are answers to these questions, I missed them. Except for the last one, which Stifter addresses before the story even begins:

"It [this story] is like a sad letter that tells us what extremity man may come when he dims the light of his reason, when he no longer understands life, when he abandons that inner law which is his steadfast guide along the right path, when he surrenders so utterly to the intensity of his joys and sorrows, loses his foothold, and is lost in regions of experience which for the rest of us are almost wholly shrouded in mystery."

The story, the behavior of the characters, remains shrouded in mystery. Stifter gives us pieces, and even views from different angles, but the center is missing, deliberately. The opening words: "Tourmaline is a dark stone, and this is a very dark story"; the last: "the new generation has no knowledge of what stood there before them and of what took place there."

Stifter will return to Wuthering Expectations in December, I predict, when I take a look at Rock Crystal. I know, he sounds like just the guy for a jolly Christmas story. And someday, I will read the long, slow Indian Summer, perhaps when I am convalescing.

I would be remiss in not directing the reader's attention to this German-language Adalbert Stifter website. Note especially the map of Stifter sites on Der Adalbert-Stifter-Weg. Call your travel agent now.