Disasters waiting to happen
At the beginning of the last century, a young Jewish law student in Prague, scribbling a letter in German to his schoolmate Oskar Pollack, offered this fearful advice on literature: "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. . . . A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us." Franz Kafka, who would go on to become an inconspicuous clerk in an insurance firm and, I would venture, the voice that centuries hence will continue to speak for our age, even as a student understood the task of literature: "If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading for?" Readers of the following works are advised to wear a helmet.
In his chilling tale of modern justice, The Trial,Kafka develops an image of the inexplicably culpable citizen caught in the state's inexorable legal machinery. But it is "In the Penal Colony," included in The Complete Stories, that displays the greatest prescience about the twentieth century. The author, whose whole family, within twenty-five years of the publication of this story, would be exterminated in Nazi concentration camps, allows the assistant to the Commandant of a penal colony to elucidate a new theory of justice: "My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted." The formalities of prosecution and defense are abandoned in favor of immediate execution. (The gallows, too, yield to a technological marvel that, like the gas chambers of Auschwitz, is emblematic of this new jurisprudence.) Thus are we introduced to the spirit of our times.
Another master of German, also a native of Prague, provokes in us the same uneasiness through exquisite lines of verse. In his profound meditation on the human condition, the Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke proposes that "beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are just able, for the moment, to endure." And what is the lesson of such awe-inspiring beauty? In another poem, he explains in a single sentence. Though a sonnet is little enough room to develop an argument of these dimensions, the poet waits until the last half of the last line of "Archaic Torso of Apollo," found in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, to challenge his reader with the intimate and troubling declaration: "You must change your life."
Though Rilke assures us that beauty "disdains to annihilate us," neither will it save us. Only fairy tales, after all, end with the formula "And they lived happily ever after." Everything else, we call literature. A Neapolitan proverb, for example, takes a rather literary view of love: "A year of flames, a century of ashes." The embittered Italian spouse who first uttered those disconsolate words would have understood the final, crushing sentence of a love story by a provincial Russian physician and, as it happened, the greatest short story writer of his age. In the conclusion of Anton Chekhov's "The Lady with the Pet Dog," in The Portable Chekhov, two lovers, having yielded to their love and reunited, now face the future: "And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and glorious life would begin; but it was clear to both of them that the end was still far off, and that what was to be most complicated and difficult for them was only just beginning."
"Complicated and difficult," Chekhov writes, but perhaps not impossible. Some years ago, buffeted on a long night flight through a winter storm, I huddled in the meager light of the reading lamp above my head and paged through a copy of Time. In an article on W.H. Auden's recent death, the magazine offered the first stanza of "Lullaby" from the British poet's Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957. As the plane plunged through the tumultuous sky towards a frozen city where someone I loved was waiting, I distracted myself by memorizing the long sentence that composed that stanza:
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Taken by the easy grace of its form and, especially, of the delicacy of its rhyme, I looked away from the page and found myself staring into the reflection of my own face in the window stippled with ice as my lips mumbled Auden's sentence over and over again, while all around me the other passengers slept or, roused by the storm, clung to one another.
Yet no matter how desperately we cling to one another, our grip must eventually loosen. The heartbroken narrator of Jorge Luis Borges' "The Aleph," from The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969, laments the death of his beloved Beatriz. The tale seems to coalesce around the eponymous Aleph, a "small iridescent sphere" in which one may glimpse, in a single instant, the whole of the universe in all its infinitesimal detail. Consider the daunting task of the writer who dares to undertake such a description; Borges allows himself only a single sentence to convey the cosmos. But that is not the sentence that makes us tremble. Meditating upon the lesson of the Aleph, his narrator admits the tragic and inexorable truth: "Our minds are porous and forgetfulness seeps in; I myself am distorting and losing, under the wearing away of the years, the face of Beatriz."
Young Kafka, in what was to prove to be the last letter to his boyhood friend, does not merely insist upon his own belief that books should disquiet us but also vehemently objects to Pollack's contention that books should make us happy. "Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster. . . ." Be forewarned that Kafka, Rilke, Chekhov, Auden, and Borges are disasters waiting to happen to you.
Het Open Gordijn (The Torturer's Apprentice) van uitgeverij Ailantus is nu verkrijgbaar.
