Quilted

"and I remembered how you once thought the quilt was Paris,
the quartiers demarcated by pattern and colour." (Carson, Ciaran: For All We Know. Winston-Salem (NC): Wake Forest University Press, 2008. S.35)

In Ciaran Carsons 'For All We Know' wird Information verzettelt hingeworfen. Jede Aussage steht zugleich für sich und im unendlich erweiterbaren Diskurs mit weiteren, neuen, die eben erst erzählte Geschichte in ganz anderes Licht rückenden Hinweisen. Nicht zufällig ist darin der "quilt" eines der am hartnäckigsten wiederkehrenden Bilder. Stellt man sich darunter einen crazy quilt, also eine patchwork-Decke, vor, so evoziert der Begriff das Bild einer langen Familientradition. Jede Generation fügt dem Gewebe der Decke neue Flicken hinzu, womit die unterschiedlichsten Generationen und damit die unterschiedlichsten Wert- und Weltvorstellungen, Ideale und Ideen, in einem Diskurs über Zeit und Ort hinweg zusammengehalten werden.
Selbstverständlich provoziert das patchwork aber gleichzeitig das dem obigen scheinbar entgegengesetzte Bild der Uneinigkeit, des Chaos, der Unordnung: jeder Flicken antwortet schliesslich von einer neuen, anderen Position: aus einer anderen Welt heraus auf die vorhergehenden. Aber die Beharrlichkeit, mit welcher der Text auf dem quilt – und damit auf dem scheinbaren Widerspruch – insistiert, löst diesen scheinbaren Dualismus auf. Kontinuität (Tradition, Wiederholung, Einigkeit) und Diskontinuität (Diskurs, Kritik, Differenz) sind in der Idee der Flickendecke vereint – wie die Summe der unterschiedlichsten Viertel einer Grossstadt sich zur Vorstellung: Paris! zusammenfügen. Und dann muss ich wohl, weil ich schon bei Paris bin, das Offensichtliche erwähnen und dadurch entmystifizieren: dass nämlich die Liebe das Nähgarn dieses Flickwerks ist.
Nicht zuletzt handelt es sich bei unserem Objekt um ein wohliges, wärmendes, schützendes Stück Stoff, wobei all diese seine Eigenschaften von den unterschiedlichen, widersprüchlichen Flicken abhängen: ohne das Stickgarn sind die Flicken nichts wert. Es gilt also, sich dem Diskurs der Meinungen auszusetzen und vor allem gilt es, zu scheitern: daran zu scheitern, seine Erkenntnis zu missionieren – und es dennoch weiter zu versuchen. Dies ist nicht etwa eine Kontradiktion: Ohne beide Elemente ist ein quilt kein quilt. Wie das auf manche Menschen übertragbar ist, das zu erklären führte hier wohl zu weit vom Text weg. Dass aber die wärmende, diskursgeladene patchwork-Decke einen Menschen wärmen kann, ist jedem einsichtig und als solches auf jeden Fall in die Tradition zu stellen, aus welcher das folgende, abschliessende Zitat stammt, bei welchem mir jedenfalls wird, als wärmten mich die Gedanken von Generationen: "La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un coeur d'homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux." (Camus, Albert: Le mythe de Sisyphe. Paris: Gallimard, 1942. S. 168).

Who is Nina

Ciaran Carson lets the reader plunge into remembrances of Gabriel who has lost his love Nina in a car crash. Carson creates strong images with his poems, but leaves the reader grasping a leitmotif that seems to appear but eludes again. Nina remains a figure that is mysterious and covered. The reader sometimes even gets the impression that Gabriel is asking himself in his remembrances who he loved: Peace p. 105


So carefully did you measure your words it seemed to me
you rarely said what first came to mind. You reserved judgement.

Or: Pas de Deux page 26

It took us some time to establish our identity
For you'd learned where you came from to choose your words
carefully.
And often you'd seal my lips with a kiss as silently (...)

What is she hiding? What the reader gets to know about her is that she speaks French, English and German. She was in Paris, Berlin and Dresden. Her mother is French, (one?) of her aunts was in the résistance during World War II and her uncle used to collect watches. She was an interrogator probably as Stasi agent: The Shadow p. 30

The lie is memorized, the truth is remembered, he said.
I learned that early on in their school before I became

interrogator. That was after I learned to listen
in. They played many tapes of many stories, some true, some

false. I was asked to identify which was which, and where
the conversations might have taken place, whatever time.

(...)
You've told me that story more than once, more than once telling
me something I never heard before until then, telling

it so well I could almost believe I was there myself,
for all that I was at the time so many miles away.

Carson amazingly creates these intimate images of the two lovers, which dissolve in distance that reoccurs like a theme in a fugue. The cleft between them almost seems palpable.

Nina shows fragments of her that do not quite form a whole. In between the lines she seems to yell that he has no clue who she is. In the chapter "Filling the Blank" p. 104 it is described what and who she could be:

I'm the lady behind the counter of the Mont Blanc shop
who says what a nice hand when you try out one of her pens.

I'm the lady you write to when she's far away from home
though by the time the letter gets there she might have moved on.

I'm the lady in charge of the airport lingerie store
who asks you if there is anything she can help you with.

I'm the lady in question whose dimensions you reveal
to the lady in charge of the airport lingerie store.

I'm the lady you bump into unwittingly before
you know her name age or what she does for a living.

(...)

These are a lot of options to choose of - and a lot of "blank" space for projection. Carson succeeds to "paint" a picture of a lover who has lost someone beloved. The reoccurring remembrances that chase each other, always the same, varied ones, which try to find key moments that alleviate the fact of accepting loss. A very moving work!

Matters of Form: Christoph Ransmayr's "Notiz am Rand"

Having just prepared and taught a school lesson on Der fliegende Berg (to a bunch of incredibly noisy and utterly disinterested kids), a short note in which the author remarks upon his choice of an unusual form caught my interest. It strongly reminds me of Milton's "The Verse" (Paradise Lost, 2) in which he justifies the use of blank verse, though there are probably many examples of similar notes. Since I have read the novel roughly two years ago and my memory needs refreshing, I see the following thoughts as an essay – with strong overtones of the etymological roots – that will hopefully help us think about the use of verse in Der fliegende Berg. First off, here is said note quoted in full:

Notiz am Rand

Seit die meisten Dichter sich von der gebundenen Rede
verabschiedet haben und nun anstelle von Versen freie
Rhythmen und dazu einen in Strophen gegliederten
Flattersatz verwenden, ist da und dort das Mißverständnis
laut geworden, bei jedem flatterndem, also aus ungleich
langen Zeilen bestehenden Text handle es sich um ein
Gedicht. Das ist ein Irrtum. Der Flattersatz – oder besser:
der fliegende Satz – ist frei und gehört nicht allein den
Dichtern.

CR (Der fliegende Berg, no pagination [p. 6])

Quite obviously there are some terminological issues that ought to be clarified. Ransmayr seems to use the word 'Dichter' in its narrower sense, so one would have to translate it as 'poet' ("someone who writes poetry") as opposed to the much more general 'writer.' Interestingly, as becomes apparent in the final sentence, he does not think of himself as a poet, but as a writer reclaiming a certain form that is considered to be typical of poetry. The phrase "gebunden[e] Rede" refers to traditional verses defined by metre and, in some cases, rhyme. So far, this is not problematic, but the following description of what is commonly called 'free verse' is, as I will attempt to show.

Ransmayr names three defining characteristics: free rhythms, stanzas and "Flattersatz," which is used instead of verses. The first two agree with common notions of free verse; with the third, however, he introduces a typographical concept which should be familiar to anyone using text-editing software. (Ironically, or maybe intentionally, the note is printed in Flattersatz, wherefore I have preserved the original line breaks in the quotation.) The problem is that, in Flattersatz, the line breaks are arbitrary; they are solely based on how much space there is for one line and whether there is still enough room for any given word. If not, it will appear as the first word of the next line.

In contrast, poets using free verse place their line breaks deliberately, as they see fit. This is exemplified by how enjambments are sometimes used to great effect (see Andrew's post on Autobiography of Red). When one applies these two notions to Der fliegende Berg, it suffices to take but a look at any page of this novel to realize that it is written in free verse and not simply printed as Flattersatz. As it seems unlikely that Ransmayr uses one or both of these terms mistakenly, the idea of a form that is distinctly new and particularly suited to his endeavour is conveyed. This is emphasized by how he calls it "der fliegende Satz," analogous to the title of the novel. (Additonally, he probably tries not to scare potential readers away by calling it verse.)

This leaves us wondering about the salient formal characteristics of Ransmayr's fliegendem Satz. From what I remember, most line breaks are placed according to natural syntactic phrases; there are hardly any striking and strong enjambments. Similarly, there seems to be, however mild, a tendency to correlate sentences and stanzas. Regarding metre, there are usually around one to three unstressed syllables between two stressed ones, which leads to a rhythm that is very natural for the German language. Ransmayr, on the one hand, does not exploit the potential of verse to the fullest and, on the other hand, frees himself from the limitations of a regular metre; his verse is tame in that it does not bend language, at least as far as rhythm and line breaks are concerned. As it stands, only a careful (re-)reading will shed more light on the purpose and properties of Ransmayr's fliegendem Satz.

Works Cited

• Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. by Gordon Teskey. (A Norton Critical Edition.) New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005.
• Ransmayr, Christoph. Der fliegende Berg. Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 2006.
  

"It happened over an apple," Whatever It Might Be

In the second part of For All We Know, the poem titled 'Proposal' (66*) starts with the following sentence: "It happened over an apple." Though it is obvious that an apple is involved, what the "It" refers to remains unclear. On a sunny day in August graced with the occasional shower, Gabriel and Nina find themselves "in a market" and before "a barrel of apples." Nina then takes one of them:

Try it and see, Miss, said the vendor. You nodded, and bit
into the crisp flesh. You felt its juice explode in your mouth

as I did when you passed it to me for the second bite.

This little scene might recall how Eve first tastes the forbidden fruit, which has often been identified as an apple, and then passes it on to Adam so he might partake of it as well (Gen 3:6). Hence it comes as no surprise that, in the 'Proposal' of the first part (17), there is an explicit reference to the story of the fall of man as recounted in Genesis: "the Tree of Knowledge looming within reach." (There, however, the apple in question is capitalized and of a more electronic nature.) The Tree of Life, Eden's other prominent tree (Gen 2:9), is mentioned too (47).

After tasting the fruit of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve discover that they are naked (Gen 3:7).
We have to keep this in mind as we turn back to the poem that caused this excursus, because, as I will show, it seems rather apt that the apples on sale should be called "Discovery" (66). Gabriel and Nina "bought a pound of them, some wine and cheese, / and repaired to the country where we picnicked by a stream" (66).

Though the location where the picnic takes place is not described, the stream alone brings to mind a classical topos, the locus amoenus. In this ideal, paradisal setting, "[Nina] offered [Gabriel] a Discovery" (66). The distinction between the apples bearing that name and an actual discovery is only apparent in writing. This means that if one reads the passage aloud it becomes ambiguous. Besides alluding to Adam and Eve's discovery of their own nakedness, this word also recalls the clichéd metaphor of the male lover as a conqueror and the woman as the terra incognita he discovers and explores.

Yet there is even more that justifies a reading of 'Proposal' that brings out its sexual subtext. Gabriel describes eating the second apple as follows:

This time I could taste
your mouth from it through the juice. We took bite for bite from it

until we finished it as one.

In the first sentence, the apple reminds Gabriel of the taste of Nina's lips and therefore taking a bite from it metonymically comes to stand for kissing her. The phrase "as one" at the end of the second sentence alludes to the lover's becoming one flesh (Gen 2:24). Thus, the ensuing exchange of kisses culminates in the consummation of their love.

Finally, the last line sheds light on the "It" with which the poem began, though it can be read in various ways (66): "Then we asked things of each other we'd never asked before." The most literal, if also simplistic, reading could be paraphrased as: 'We asked questions we had not dared to put to each other earlier.' As it is hardly possible to define the sequence of events between their first meeting and the fatal car accident, this might be their first rendezvous, which results in a second reading. What they ask of each other could then be taken to refer to physically expressing their love.

The reading I prefer, in accordance to the interpretation outlined above, would be that one of them proposed to the other in the heat of passion. Interestingly, the 1^st person plural pronoun veils who it was and turns the proposal into something put forward by both of them equally. In a way, the idea that "[t]he lie is memorized, the truth is remembered" (19), that memories blur and change over time, is taken very far by not attributing the proposal to one particular person. On the whole, this reading explains why the trip described in the poem was more significant than many others and accounts for its title.

* All page numbers refer to Ciaran Carson, For All We Know, as published by Wake Forest University Press.

Ciaran Carson's For All We Know: A love story memorised as a ticking fugue

It’s because we were brought up to lead double lives, I said. Yes, you said, because of the language thing it was one thing

with my father, another with my mother. Father tongue and mother tongue, all the more so when they separated irrevocably (66).

The bilingual Irish-English, Ciaran Carson is obsessed with music. The author of a classic work on Irish music, composed this verse novel in a sonnet-fugue of two parts –symbolising the separation of the couple, Gabriel and Nina – with repeating the titles of the individual poems in a chronological order in each part. Readers feel as if they could hear the “boisterous music” in a Bierkeller in Germany or the ticking of the Omega watches which Nina collects.

Not only is Carson obsessed with music, but also with languages. He uses English, French and German to express thoughts and feelings in For all we know. “Not that my German is anything to speak of”, admits Gabriel in the second The Shadow, hence, I was not surprised to read “Spiesewagen” in the first double sonnet To (45). A little irritated at first, I was tempted to ponder whether this is more than a typo or spelling mistake, but I just could not make sense of it, if it was.

What is striking, apart from Carson’s obsession with music and languages, is the recurrence of themes such as the ticking of time. Recurrent themes are typical of a fugue and we seem to hear the Omega watches ticking as in the following passage.

I think men and women run different times, you’d say.

I’m wondering if I wore a man’s watch would I speed up, perhaps we might become synchronized. But you drive too fast,

I’d say, and you often look at your watch as you do so, as if you could never get fast enough wherever

you’re going.

This obsession of time reminds me of Quentin Compson’s obsession with time and his inherited, cracked watch in The Sound and the Fury. The Shadows that occur as another topos are also reminiscent of that successful, modernist novel. Whether this is a coincidence or purpose is questionable. Both novels also share motives and symbols such as shadows, perfumes, and the questions whether langauge and narrative can truely represent reality. What the verse and prose novel also have in common is that there were both written in an uncertain period of time shortly before a financial crisis.

It is a very good idea to start the seminar with that verse novel as it includes feelings and sociological observations of the everyday life, all of us can comprehend and empathise with.

The quilt is a repeated motif which often covers and protects the lovers’ bodies and consists of many parts, like a human self consists of memories. Towards the end of the verse novel, the oyster, known as a aphrodisiac, is introduced and leads to the only explicitly sexual-connoted scene I found in this remembered love story (apart from the eating of an apple in turns, maybe).

The last sonnet Zugzwang then repeats the “babble of language”, “the bells”, the fugue’s “melodic fragments” and “different times” and Gabriel assures that his memories of the lost lover will “recede into the future”. Critics often criticised the bland ending of the verse novel, but I find it the icing of the cake of this fairy-tale like, memorised love story.

Those of you who have not read it yet, enjoy!

PS: The page number refers to The Gallery Press's edition.

Der vorborgene Mensch: Vom Schnee

Descartes ist der in der Fabel des Cartesianismus verborgene Mensch. (Der cartesische Taucher, 110)

Man geht auf die Suche nach einer Person, die inzwischen nur aus Papier besteht. Dazu kommen zwei Probleme: diese Person hat mehr Wert auf seinen Gedanken als auf seiner Körperlichkeit gelegt, und diese Person hat seinen Namen nicht nur einer philosophischen Richtung gegeben, sondern auch einer Weltanschauung, die die Geschichte der Welt verändert hat.

Wie findet man eine Person, die nur aus Papier besteht? Mit Papier:

Gefangen sitzt Ihr, Euer Doppelgänger, in den Strophen
Von einem, der Euch schlecht aus Euren Büchern kennt. (32)

Man spricht ihn an und hofft auf Antwort, man stellt sich vor, wie er mit anderen gesprochen hat, wie er sich selbst in seiner Fabel verbarg. Dabei vergisst man nie, dass es hier um die Person geht, um den Menschen, um seine Körperlichkeit, wenn man ihn so etwas sagen hört:

"Entweder suchst du hier die Wahrheit, hier im Innern.
Oder du folgst dem Augenschein—und wer du bist,
Bleibt unbestimmt wie das Ensemblespiel der Sinne.
Und damit Schluß. Heiz den Kamin. Mich friert." Er ißt. (18)

Man lässt ihn sprechen, philosophieren, und man lässt die Körperlichkeit das Philosophieren unterbrechen—in einer Weise, die gerade diese Philosophie ironisiert? Dieser Descartes setzt auf eine "innere Wahrheit" gegen "den Augenschein" und die Sinne, und deshalb auch gegen den Körper überhaupt. "Und damit Schluß": er beendet sein Philosophieren und wendet sich seinen Körper zu: ihm ist kalt, er hat Hunger.

Es kann nicht darum gehen, die Philosophie von Descartes mit seiner Körperlichkeit zu widersprechen—das wäre langweilig (und es gäbe kaum den Impuls, dieses Buch zu schreiben). Es muss eher darum gehen, die Welt der Körperlichkeit, der Kälte, des Hungers, des "Drecks" (der immer wieder am Anfang des Buchs thematisiert wird) gleichzeitig mitzudenken, und nicht außen vor stehen zu lassen.

"Being / A Self in a Song": Autobiography of Red

At one point in Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, Geryon, the main character, is in "the only authentic / tango bar left in Buenos Aires," and he begins to remember a high-school dance at which he stood "against the wall / for three and a half hours in a casual pose":

Meanwhile music pounded
across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being
a self in a song. (XXXI, 101)

If there is any doubt about whether Carson's verse novel gains anything from being in verse rather than prose, the second line break here clears it up with the exemplary enjambment of "the desperate drama of being / a self in a song."

Read without the phrase after the break, the line picks up on the references to Heidegger that have appeared in the last twenty pages or so; music (even the banal pop of a high-school dance) lays the basis for a moment of insight into the "drama of being." With this reading hanging in the air, the next line continues by specifying a particular kind of being: "being / a self in a song."

But I should be careful about making too much out of this, because Autobiography of Red also makes fun of reading too much into things, especially in altered states (which is what the wallflower at the high-school dance is in, even if he has not smoked or drunk anything):

... He had never been so stoned in his life. I am too naked,
he thought. This thought seemed profound.
And I want to be in love with someone. This too fell on him deeply. It is all wrong.
Wrongness came like a lone finger
chopping through the room and he ducked. What was that? said one of the others
turning towards him centuries later. (XL, 136)

Be careful of finding anything too profound here, Carson seems to be warning—but even that interpretive move might be overdoing it!

In fact, one of my difficulties with Carson's book (one that I have rarely had with any other literature, whether poetry, prose, or drama) is that it simply makes my jaw drop. When I began rereading the book in preparation for the verse-novels course, I intended to read with a pencil, but I ended up just reading it straight through, without marking anything that I had not marked before (a few phrases here and there, such as "Facts are bigger in the dark"). That made three times that I had read it, and I had to read it a fourth time and force myself to highlight things in order to be able to begin to interpret it.

And frankly, even now I find it hard to interpret a book that just leaves me speechless, as in the final lines of the book (well, the final lines before the concluding "interview" with Stesichoros, author of an ancient epic about Geryon whose few remaining fragments were the starting point for Carson's work). Although my mind was less confused than it would have been if I had been as stoned as Geryon was in the lines above, and less frustrated than if I had been the wallflower at a high-school dance, each time I have read this book I have been in an altered state by the time I read these lines:

We are amazing beings,
Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire.
And now time is rushing towards them
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,
night at their back. (XLVII, 146)