Category: European Literature

L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas – Paul Heyse

During the nineteenth century the great prestige form of prose literature in German-speaking Europe was not the novel, but the novella. The best writers of the time were hard at work crafting powerful, rich, narrative prose at lengths that allowed works to be read in a single sitting, works which were of at times incredible quality. Polished, focused, though they often were, the Novelle-tradition was also incredibly varied, ranging from the ecologically-minded ghost story of Theodor Storm’s Rider on the White Horse to the murder mystery of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Jew Beech Tree, from the moral tales of Gottfried Keller to the modernist-inspiring intensity of Georg Büchner’s story of madness, Lenz.  

With so much writing in a specific form, there soon came attempts to theorise, classify, exclude and include. Goethe called novellas a “sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit” (an unprecedented, extraordinary event that has nevertheless occurred), which, like his own novella (called Novella) confused as much as it clarified things. For Ludwig Tieck, it was all about the Wendepunkt – the turning point. Theodor Storm, in my favourite definition, called novellas “the sister of the drama and the severest form of prose fiction.” None of these is suitable for every novella, but each gives a sense of how at least some of these stories worked. They were mainly short-to-medium length narratives with a high symbolic charge, focusing on an important event in the life of a single individual.  

One other writer whose theory is known to students of the Novelle-tradition is Paul Heyse, one of Germany’s first Nobel Laureates and creator of the “Falkentheorie”. As described by Idara Crespi in the introduction to a new edition of four of Heyse’s novellas translated by Renata Lenz, L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas, this is “a pivot. The point where all the accumulated pressure of the narrative tilts and pours in one direction.” It is also something specific which sets the story apart from all others – a particular thing, or even just a moment that seems utterly unique. In the title story a girl bites the man who tries to seduce her, in another what is special is a work of embroidery.

I had not read Heyse before, so when Crespi’s Espresso publishing house, which aims to focus on furnishing unjustly-forgotten European works with new translations, asked me whether I would like a copy, I agreed without difficulty. This blog’s own focus is similar, after all. The review, however, comes only from me.  

The Stories 

Paul Heyse was born in Berlin in 1830, but he spent most of his long life in Munich, where he passed away in 1914, after winning the Nobel Prize two years earlier. The time when Heyse was not in Munich he largely spent in Italy. Like many German artists, most famously Goethe, Heyse found in the southern country a wellspring of inspiration. The four novellas collected in L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas showcase the extent of that inspiration. The title story is a drama set in a coastal fishing village. The Embroiderer of Treviso is a historical tale from north Italy, while The Wedding on Capri is a kind of comedy of manners where German tourists come up against Italian mores. The last, Nerina, is a dramatization of a key moment from the life of the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. Each is entirely unlike the others, which does mean that the enjoyment of such a collection is bound to be a matter of personal taste.  

For me, my favourites were the first story, L’Arrabbiata, and the last one, Nerina. I liked the The Embroiderer of Treviso as well, while I felt The Wedding on Capri was more like a weak version of the kind of tale Stefan Zweig (or even Henry James) would later perfect. 

L’Arrabbiata  

Laurella, a poor young woman in Sorrento across from the island of Capri, is “L’Arrabbiata” – the angry one. Her father is dead, her mother ill and unable to survive without her daughter’s support. One day Laurella crosses over to Capri, intending to sell some materials to two women there. The boatman is a young man, Antonino. They avoid one another’s eyes. The only other passenger is a priest. After chatting about her mother’s health, the priest chides her for her reputation as one who will not dance or sing with others, and mentions a suitor who was rejected in the past by her. She explains that she has a private reason for her actions and decision “to be subject to no man who would ill-use me and then caress me”. It is the abuse she witnessed her mother receive at the hands of her father which makes her determined to defend herself as her mother could not.  

The priest is to stay the night on Capri to tend to a sufferer there, leaving Antonino to take Laurella back on her own later that day. During the journey they sit “like the bitterest enemies”, before eventually an argument breaks out. The boatman declares “that here you are in my power, and must do what I will” and seizes her, only to find his hand bitten and bloodied. “Must I do what you will?” Laurella asks, then leaps into the open sea. But when Antonino recovers himself and tells her she is too far from land to survive she climbs back in and rows with him back to the shore in silence. Later that night, however, she comes to him with healing herbs and apologises, even breaks into tears. Love, at least of a sort, is admitted, and with that the story draws to a close. 

L’Arrabbiata was one of the first novellas Heyse wrote and remains his most famous. That bite is strange and unforgettable. But that does not quite answer what makes it interesting. One way to look at that, as it often is with novellas, is through the idea of determinism. Fate, in other words. 

L’Arrabbiata as Tale of Fate 

All but the most inventive fiction is determinist by its very form, as the words are fixed upon the page long before we open up the book. But with novellas this feeling is particularly stark. They are simply not long enough even to give the illusion of an alternative, of branching paths. Instead, we often have a sense of characters hurtling towards their doom. So it is, in a way, in L’Arrabbiata. Laurella knows what fate wants for her – a marriage – and fears the violence, the “look in his eyes” that men have when they alternate between abuse and tender words. Her rejection, before the novella begins, of another suitor, seems to indicate her victory in the struggle with her fate. In becoming “the angry one”, she has let herself be defined in a way that makes her safe at a cost of partial isolation from her community.  

But she is not safe. Antonino loves her and does not resist his own feelings. At first, he tries to use the weight of society’s judgement to force her into his arms – “one day you’ll grow lonely, and then, wild as you are, you’ll take the first man who comes”. When that does not work, he turns to force. Laurella’s bite seems at first glance like her successfully resisting him, but I read it much more negatively. She gains a moment, but soon enough she has to return to the boat. Like trains in 19th century fiction, the boat of L’Arrabbiata is ultimately a symbol of the limited choices people, but especially women, had in life. Laurella can drown, or she can get back in. She chooses life over principles. But also, I think, because those principles have already been damaged beyond repair.  

In reacting with force herself, by drawing blood, Laurella essentially discovers to herself that she is no better than the men. (Though, perhaps she had no choice.) This is reflected too by the tears (another liquid) that pour down her cheeks when she meets Antonino later in the evening. Her surrender to him is, on the one hand, an acknowledgement of her own repressed romantic feelings. On the other, it’s a surrender to the idea that she is, like the men, at base capable of cruelty and violence. That, in a way, they deserve one another. L’Arrabbiata is a love story with a happy ending, but it’s also a kind of tragedy, as Laurella’s idea of herself is crushed by the reality of her feelings and actions. The end result is that the forces of patriarchal society, emphasised by the priest – who gets the final word – are victorious.  

Freedom was mere illusion, the woman who tried to be an individual was crushed. But as often happens with novellas, it made for a good story.   

Nerina  

My second favourite of the novellas collected in L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas was Nerina. This is a tale of a moment from the life of the marvellous pessimist Giacomo Leopardi, an Italian poet of the early 19th century beloved by Schopenhauer. As with L’Arrabbiata, indeed with all the stories here, it’s a love story. Leopardi, returned to his family home in Recanati, meets his neighbours’ daughter, Nerina, much older now than when last he saw her, and like Laurella, an independent spirit. She has even read Leopardi’s poems, even though they have been censured by the Church. Her youthful spirit makes an impression on Leopardi, whose gloom is the overriding characterisation Heyse gives us of him besides his well-known ill-health. At the same time, Leopardi is shocked by the effect he has had on her – “forget the premature and mournful wisdom you have learned from my poems!” 

That night, they exchange, from window to window, his latest poem for a bouquet of carnations and some of her hair. But like a miserable figure in a work of Dostoevsky’s, Leopardi is confused and unnerved by his own feelings and resolves to avoid her thereafter. It does not work. Her father wants to enlist Leopardi to convince Nerina to marry a suitor she does not wish to, turning him into the agent of the forces of society he has little respect for. Nevertheless, he agrees, telling her off for “hav[ing] nothing to do with the happiness [the suitor] has chosen for you”. She listens, responds by reciting his own poetry to him with its “bitter joys”, and the two of them end in an embrace. Yet still he goes, encouraging her to ignore his poetry and its messages: 

“Promise me – when I am gone – that you will try to find your way into life as thousands do. I am not asking you to do violence to your heart. But you are young, Nerina, and life transforms us in wondrous ways.” Leopardi leaves and, perhaps predictably, a few months later learns of her death. She did not, it seems, find her way into life after all. 

Ways into Poetry 

As with L’Arrabbiata, we can read Nerina through the lens of fatalism, but here it is less interesting. The novella is trapped not by its form, but by the facticity of at least one of its central figures. (Nerina’s identity and reality remain debated by scholars). The story here can only end one way. Nerina will become a poem; Leopardi will continue being a poet.  

Instead, what I liked about Nerina was the how it worked in Leopardi’s poetry. Many 19th century novellas took artists as their subjects, from Grillparzer’s The Poor Musician to Mörike’s Mozart on the Way to Prague, but Nerina, taking as it does a poet as the artist, is able to achieve a better integration of creation into itself. The story begins shortly after Leopardi has finished writing his most famous poem, “L’infinito”, in 1819, and finishes with him considering the lines to Nerina he placed within his later poem, “Le Ricordanze” (Memories), written in 1829 while at home again. But Nerina takes Leopardi’s ideas and tries to integrate them into her own barred, limited life at home. She poeticises her life.  

When she meets the poet there’s a shock, because he had not appreciated the impact his own words might have had. That in a way, living, she has become more of a poet than he is. Leopardi is not the hero of this work, as the title should have warned me. He tries to turn her away from the kind of poetically-charged life he allows himself, and acts as an instrument of a society he himself has no belief in. She, meanwhile, dies for beauty. Leopardi’s despairing response, the text argues, is creation. He may have failed to be true to her while alive, but at least he can be true to her in his verse. The outcome is bittersweet, but true enough to my understanding of Leopardi’s pessimism. In his failure before Nerina, we can see an example of the way that his own actions might have fed into his disappointment with life, a disappointment that runs through all his work.  

Conclusion 

The other stories are all novellas serious enough to handle a blog post’s worth of analysis, especially the The Embroiderer of Treviso, which combines the historical writing of C.F. Meyer and the bloodiness of Kleist, but space is limited and so is our time. I have been glad to get a little acquainted with Heyse even if, at this point, I am still not quite sure how far I like him or even really know who he is. A collection like L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas shows his range, but there seems no solid commonality under all these works, nothing distinctly “Heysian”, in the in the way that I think there is for Storm, Stifter, Kleist, or E.T.A. Hoffmann. This, maybe, makes the collection a good first introduction to the kind of things that were possible for the magicians who wrote novellas, even if, the title story perhaps excepted, I would not say these are the best novellas I have yet read.  

Nevertheless, I can easily recommend this book to those who are interested in the craft of writing. I think novellas in particular are incredible teaching devices for writers. More expansive than short stories, they guide us on shape, on prose, on narration, in ways that novels can do but often fail to do, with so much else going on. The inventiveness of the form has not yet been exhausted, as contemporary fiction, in German and not, has shown on this blog. (See Grass, Walser) Reading something like this collection a good introduction to just some of the possibilities on offer, and I hope that the translator, Renata Lenz, is able to translate more novellas from the original. The tradition really is wonderful and thoroughly underappreciated outside of Germany.  

Thanks to Chiara and Espresso for the copy. More details on their website, or in the usual places where books are sold online.

The book was provided without an obligation to review or link onwards attached. While I wouldn’t mind continuing to read similar new old texts from time to time as it is in line with what I write about anyway, if regular readers of the blog would much prefer this to be my only foray into Bookfluencing, feel free to reach out privately via the contact form / email.

Body and Soul – David Szalay’s Flesh 

Flesh, the Booker-prize-winning novel by the British-Hungarian author David Szalay, is many things. So is its central figure, the Hungarian István, whose rags-to-riches-and-back tale covers more ground than many of us can expect to experience in our own lives, from soldiery in Iraq to bouncing at nightclubs in London and finally hobnobbing with politicians over billion-pound property developments. The mere accumulation of believably rendered scenes, however, is not what makes this interesting as fiction. Instead, it is Flesh’s rendering itself that is exciting. Through a bare, pared-down style, which is especially visible in its shockingly direct dialogue, the novel is a brilliant example of saying without stating and showing without quite telling.

 The work’s title sets out its thematic scope right from the get-go. István is a man who appears to be someone wholly devoid of interiority or reflection – all body, no mind. He spends much of the book in a kind of passive role – things happen to him. Those things, often as not, involve sex. Whether that’s his sexual initiation at the hands of an older woman or the affair with his boss’s wife that sets off his rise to the upper reaches of British polite society, interlocking bodies are almost always involved. Despite his taciturnity and passivity, István succeeds in life. At least to a point. This result raises questions about whether such things as interiority and reflection are really necessary and has allowed some commentators on the novel to turn it into a kind of guide to practical stoicism.  

Such a view is wrongheaded. If the novel shows that a man can reach the top of the world without interiority or reflection, that fact reflects poorly upon that world. So much is possible, certainly, except what truly matters – mainly, in this case, love. The view also downplays those little, quietly articulated, developments within the novel, that show István changing even as the world does not. The growth of his imagination and empathy, for example, and his attempts to move from passivity into a certain kind of activity. That none of this is ultimately rewarded says nothing against him. Instead, after so much time spent meditating on flesh, we are left wondering how the world and people might change if we wanted to value mind also.  

Plot  

István comes from relative anonymity in small-town Hungary and ends up, briefly, at the top of British polite society. During his rise, two things stand out: the role of chance, and that of his own relative passivity. An older woman begins his introduction to sex as a teenager, less with his consent, than with his compliance. When the affair is discovered, István and the woman’s husband fight, with the young man accidentally killing the older in a brawl. After his release from a young offender’s institute, István loafs. An attempt at intimacy with his uncle’s stepdaughter leads to him being rebuffed, but it plants the idea of joining the army in him. After a tour in Iraq and therapy for PTSD, he becomes a bouncer in the UK, where one night he comes across a man being attacked by a mugger. István doesn’t rescue him so much as make it impossible for the mugging to continue by crying out. Nevertheless, it’s enough.  

The man saved, to István’s good fortune, runs a bodyguard service. After training, István receives as his clients a very wealthy Scandinavian couple, the Nymans, who divide their time between London and the countryside. The much-younger wife, Helen, begins an affair with István, which comes into the open after her husband’s death from cancer. For a few years, they enjoy their life openly. But her son from her marriage, Thomas, is destined to inherit everything from his father upon reaching the age of twenty-five. Thus István’s stint at the top becomes time-limited. The novel sketches out the shape of its arc early enough, even if the exact shape, the clicking together of the pieces of the decline, retains its capacity to surprise.  

Chance and Passivity 

The role of chance is so important within the novel because of István’s essential passivity, or at best reactivity. The older woman begins their affair by unexpectedly asking if she can kiss him. As for the heroism that fends off the mugger late at night, it’s described like this:  

“Help,” a voice says.  

The voice sounds strangely normal, like someone just neutrally saying the word. 

Maybe it’s for that reason that he does nothing for a second or two. 

Then he starts to move towards it, past the weakly lit display windows of the bookshop. 

“Hey!” he shouts. 

Which seems to be enough. 

At key moments like these, István’s actions have been prompted by external stimuli, and always with delays, as if he is a simple, slow, organism. His PTSD centres upon his failure to rescue a friend from a burning military vehicle in time – for too long, he simply watched the flames in shock, he thinks. Even his language is reactive: “Sure, thanks.” “Okay.” I remember making a mental note when I first saw a sentence of dialogue from István which required a second line in the book – it was so unexpected.  

Yet in spite of this essential reactivity, István’s ascent is meteoric. As a bouncer, then later as a bodyguard, he is in roles where his passivity and silence become virtues. Even with the women who fall for him, such as Helen Nyman, it seems that his reticence is taken by them as a sign that he can be trusted for a clandestine affair. Later, once he moves into British polite society, his lack of personality means that he can easily “fit in.” His interests, such as they eventually are, appear to be expensive cars and watches. He does not rock the boat. He barely makes it bob, stepping in.  

The World Attained 

By all of this I read Flesh as having a clear moral implication. If so much of our world is achievable without much thinking or conscious action, what does that say about the value of our world?  

István gets to his position without friends of any sort, without any extended dialogue. He is addicted to cigarettes, then later adds alcoholism, while Helen’s son Thomas eventually has develops a heroin addiction. The only changes for István between rags and riches is the quantity and brand of what he’s smoking. At one point, after Iraq, in one of the novel’s most memorable moments, we learn about the development of his habit: 

When he went to Iraq he smoked ten to twenty cigarettes a day. 

Now it’s forty. 

There is something gleeful about the narration here, a kind of revelling in self-destruction. It’s shocking to me because normally in our stories we expect our characters to be moderately rational, to want what’s best for them, to grow in positive directions. Instead, here, Szalay has István only get worse. And we could not expect for things to be otherwise, or hope for that, because István lacks the kind of interiority that might make such a thing possible. Yet in spite of that he still “grows” socially and financially, time and again. 

The sex of the novel ranges from exploitative to hateful, and only rarely does it seem loving or a meeting of two minds and bodies in mutual recognition and respect. But that it happens over and over, especially within the contexts of infidelity, also becomes an argument of sorts. The world, as it comes to István at least, is full of unhappy people, trapped in unhappy situations. He can give them sex, but it is hard to say if he can achieve anything more. The material success of the Nymans has clearly not saved them, in any serious way, from the unhappiness that seems to afflict most of the characters of Flesh. The novel’s willingness to indicate a change in material conditions, especially through brand names for cars, watches, and cigarettes, is contrasted with this lack of any kind of change to the people consuming them – still sad, whether they know it or not.  

We can also think about the dialogue again in connection with this world-critical angle. Taking a page at random, here’s a snatch of dialogue between Helen Nyman and her sister-in-law Mathilde, while Helen’s husband is in the hospital for cancer treatment: 

“And how are you?” Mathilde asks her. “Are you okay?” 

“Yes I’m okay.” 

“You need to look after yourself.” 

“I know.” 

“You mustn’t let yourself go.” 

“I know,” Helen says. 

This dialogue is above all really strange. It is the right words, perhaps even the real words, but on the page it’s startling, as is all of the dialogue of Flesh. There is a distinct unliterariness to it – instead of flowing, the end of each line is like a cliff edge we must carefully lower ourselves down on to reach the beginning of the next. That awkwardness is the point, of course. Here are two people not really communicating to one another. They are, like the many-jobbed István, playing roles. They are also, deliberately, consciously, not connecting. The clipped speech makes it seem that they are all acutely, painfully conscious of the possibility of being hurt and choosing to give the slightest possible opening. Even if István’s own speech lacks this sense of self-protection, it certainly contains its sibling – the self-retention. “Okay” is one of the hardest replies to find an answer for, after all.  

This dialogue relates the other topics, the sex and the material aspects of the world, by being another reminder of this world’s shallowness. Certainly these people could say more. They have, as the novel eventually reveals, more inside them. But the world as it comes to them, by and large, does not bring these things out. A bad world makes for bad dialogue, just as it makes for bad sex. Everyone here is trapped, without even the words to escape their cages.  

The World Missing

f Flesh were merely a parabola of a man’s life, without growth or change, with merely an implied judgement on the world, it would probably still be reasonably good. However, what elevates the novel is the way that it also offers an answer, or at least a hint, of what is missing, and what it looks like. These missing things are threefold – love, imagination, and goodness.  

Love is the first. Flesh is a book that is all about sex, but love is quite clearly absent, most of the time. This is further emphasised by the way that the majority of István’s sexual encounters, indeed his sexual relationships, are infidelities by the second person against their husbands. But from the beginning, with his relationship with the older woman, István is at least aware of love and its importance. He tells her he loves her and she tells him he does not know what that means. He protests that he does, but there is no evidence that this is the case. This show of emotion disturbs the woman and precipitates the end of their affair shortly thereafter. 

Love does come back onto the page until István’s relationship with Helen, half way through the book. This time it is she who confesses her love to him. He does not know how to react, and she even forbids him a response. But she brings the idea of love back into the book, so that when István has a chance to show his affection, and what she means to him, following an accident, he does it. Even if that showing is still just a restrained, pained, retreat into alcoholism, it is a sign of real emotion, however poorly managed. If the novel begins with a statement without emotion, here there is emotion without its statement. 

Imagination is important in the novel as something missing from the main world of the work. In contrast to the materiality of things – the brands, and so on, which suggest a kind of objectifying vision on the part of the characters – imagination, in the form of empathy, provides a counterpoint: a vision of a better way of thinking about other people. After István’s time in Iraq, carrying the weight of his friend’s death in combat, he keeps it to himself except when encouraged to share by therapy. He believes others could not understand. He himself cannot understand art, that legendary transferal medium for emotions, as his trip with Helen to a museum shows. And when the affair between her and him is discovered by Thomas, his response to her suggestion that he might tell his father is simply to say “I can’t imagine it.” At first glance István wholly lacks imagination, the ability to place himself in others’ shoes.  

Again, however, the matter is only a question of seeming. In the background there is therapy, and hopefully independent personal growth. By the time István has a son of his own and has to confront the realities of the boy’s growing sexual maturity, he is able to reflect, looking back into himself at that age, to compare and contrast. It has taken a book, but this is still small progress. We can also see this progress formally. Not merely in the shockingly long paragraph (average length for any other book) of reflection after István discovers a well-thumbed porn mag, but more concretely in the way that the book begins by sticking closely to István, but then expands its reach to give glimpses into the lives of other characters too, such as Helen and Thomas. I would say this is a controversial decision on Szalay’s part in terms of focus, but insofar as it fits into a framework of the novel showing a growing awareness of other people, it makes sense. 

Finally, the last thing obviously missing from the main world of the work is goodness, or positive action. Towards the book’s end, István is faced with that strangest of things to a man whose rise has been given mainly by chance – a choice. It is quite a plain one, between the full and permanent attainment of the earthly riches he has enjoyed for much of the book at the cost of a bad action, or rather continued inaction, versus a moral and “active” action which puts that attainment at risk. In this situation, István makes the latter decision. In terms of these two worlds, it means that he loses this great moneyed world and gains a smaller world, one of reflection and self-worth. He chooses, we might say, soul over mere flesh at last. 

Conclusion  

What is Flesh, in the end? A lot of things. I read it as showing our world as it is – atomised (István has no friends), materially obsessed, helpless – and showing another world, shining through the mist. Ultimately it is no mere dismissal of life. Its title might seem to set off a negative view of the body, but “Flesh” is not body. Rather, it is something less. It is only in combination with mind, and reflection, and thought, that flesh can be elevated into harmony, can become truly “body”.  

What is interesting here is the tentativeness of the work’s conclusions on this front, which has allowed some critics to see it as specifically about masculinity. (Thomas calls István an example of “primitive masculinity”, which supports this). István’s progress, his discoveries, are limited: from nearly no self-consciousness or emotional expression to just a little. If we come to the book to learn, to grow ourselves, we probably could not – we are probably already far more emotionally mature than our hero. But all growth is valuable, is a story, and for the relative rarity of this kind of story, Flesh becomes all the more worth reading.

How to Read an Aphorism

The aphorism, that snippet of wit and wisdom, is not a prose form I imagine many of us encounter regularly these days. It is primarily French in origin, with its most celebrated practitioner being the moralist François de La Rochefoucauld. I myself first encountered it through Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ill-health meant he could only focus long enough to put down a paragraph or two before needing to cool his brains, and who was happy to take any influence provided it wasn’t German. Both of these men are long dead; just as dead can the aphoristic form itself strike us as being.

An aphorism is a sentence or two, maybe at most a few paragraphs, on whatever takes the author’s fancy. They are philosophical, in that they are driven by ideas, but never system-building. If you wanted to build, you would write an essay, not scatter fragments like seeds. To write an aphorism, you must typically believe against something. In Theodor Adorno (in Minima Moralia) or Nietzsche’s cases, this “against” is a dislike for significant portions of the world they lived in. In the case of the French-language Romanian thinker Emil Cioran, it’s a dislike of nearly all the world he lived in, indeed of life itself. The typical impression of an aphorism is of witnessing someone engaged in a futile conflict with a great edifice, an elegant swordsman stabbing at the cold stone of castle walls.

Prejudice is often necessary to the aphorism, and it is precisely this which makes the form seem challenging to imagine writing today. An infamous one by Nietzsche, “You go to women – do not forget the whip”, provides an example. On the one hand, it conveys succinctly the importance of power dynamics for Nietzsche to his reader, but on the other it is reliant upon a (male) reader who is happy to take sexist ideas without question. The more prejudices we attempt today to dissolve – on race, gender, nation – the more we lose that centre of common understanding which an aphorism can work with. Nietzsche may dislike much of the modern world, but he needs it there to make his points. The best aphorisms are short, but brevity is enabled by us being able to recognise the world, the idea, for ourselves.

Prejudice and the absence of a system are not the only things that are needful to the aphorist. The most important is an overwhelming sense of one’s own importance and, of course, correctness. We shouldn’t underestimate how rare this actually is. Writers, especially of fiction, are uniquely predisposed to consider themselves great geniuses – but they are also typically wracked with self-doubts. In the case of fiction a creator typically believes in the merits of each work as a whole, rather than every aspect of it. Philosophers and other thinkers may likewise be utterly convinced that their key ideas are right, yet ready to deny themselves the megalomania that sees their every thought as being worthy of a crown of laurels.

For the aphorist, it is not so. Your ideas in your aphorisms range widely, and you must believe each one to be totally correct and worth sharing. In other words, you must be willing to assert to yourself and the world that you are a polymath, a rare genius. Such arrogance is another reason why few aphoristic books are being written and published today – the people truly arrogant enough to produce such a book are too busy in politics or leading large companies. This is why, to a certain extent, for the modern aphorism, we should look to social media, because it is here that we hear the select thoughts of those who believe the entire universe needs to hear them, compressed into the shortform.

We need arrogance because to doubt, for an aphorist, is fatal. Since an aphorism rarely has time to give examples, let alone argue, it works by the beauty of its prose and the power of its emotions to persuade us to its view. (“Logic and sermons never convince, / The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul” wrote Walt Whitman, whose poems are often filled with aphoristic little moments.) Since this is the case, to show doubt is to undermine everything you write – if you doubt, the reader will have cause to also. Regardless of the arrogance noted above, the aphorists I have read seem to be human, and no freer ultimately from self-questioning than the rest of us. Not showing it, then, is the thing.

This tension between feeling and revealing becomes part of the excitement of reading aphorisms. I think one of the best ways into reading someone like Cioran or Nietzsche is to think of their works as collectively constituting a work of fiction, complete with a highly opinionated narrative voice trying to get our attention and our trust. One of our goals becomes, as it is when we read fiction, the analysis of this narrative voice, the pinning down of its consistencies and inconsistencies, and identifying those moments when it seems to be hiding something from us that may yet prove essential. In many cases we can read a book of aphorisms looking for the gaps between the mask and the man – and it is normally a man – and not feel our time has been entirely wasted.

All of the above is a kind of defence of the aphorism and its writer. But this does not, really, get us any closer to reading or enjoying reading the things. Here I can only speak for myself, those things I noticed that helped me in a recent attempt at this.

The experience of reading a book of aphorisms is strange because it neither asks us to keep a thread of argument in mind, as does a typical non-fiction work, nor asks us to remember characters and stories as does a work of fiction. Yet memory is vital to the aphorism. “There are some words that hit like hammers. But others / You swallow like hooks and swim on and yet do not know it.” We ought to replace Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “words” with “aphorisms” to get an idea of the role of memory in reading aphorisms. We must read to remember. The startling thing, for me, when I read Cioran, or even Nietzsche (a writer I much prefer), is how so many of the aphorisms do nothing for me. I read them and shrug to myself. But if we remember them, they will return to us, and if they are good aphorisms they will return to us at precisely that moment when they can best reveal their value and hidden truth to us. To someone in the habit of letting the words one reads leave their head as soon as they move onto the next sentence there’s almost no point reading the aphorisms at all.

To say that we have to read to remember hints at the importance we need to place in ourselves as readers. Just as the aphorist cannot show doubt, the reader of aphorisms must believe she will one day be receptive to them. The faith, the confidence, must be on both sides. To give up a book of aphorisms as we may give up a novel damns us as much as it damns the aphorist, for in doing this we say, in effect, that we believe we will never have the right frame of mind, that we are incapable of the receptivity needed for appreciating what is in front of us. That we are fixed, and dull, and heavy of spirit.

Such were my thoughts, anyway, as I wondered whether to write about Emil Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born. I finished it last week, and had thought it would get no blog post. There was too little underlining, too few thoughts of my own to work with. That strange aphoristic rhythm – where we read page after page before suddenly gasping at something of beauty, or wit, or profundity – was not doing anything for me. Cioran, who has found a posthumous popularity among the anti-natalist community, (“Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one’s reach”), is relentlessly negative in a way that I try to avoid adopting for myself.

Only occasionally would I reach for my pencil. “No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive” – certainly a silly view, but one well expressed. At one point he describes mankind as “fidget[ing] as if he were on the threshold of an astonishing career.” These things we can respect for their imagery, even as we chuckle from beyond the margin. (Just as Adorno wrote that there can be “no right life in the wrong”, there can be no good aphorism in wrong prose.)

Other moments required more consideration at my end. “There is no ‘ecstasy’ which either memory or imagination can resuscitate!” seems frightening in its implications about the value of our moments, and for that reason worth carrying about, seeking in life the evidence that may one day disprove it. “The jealousy of the gods survives their disappearance” is another good example of something that works for me. Even if there are no gods, nor ever were, such a phrase by its mystery makes me wonder about their value in trying to explain something about the world I live in. Just flicking through the book now, I have come across another thing to note, as if to prove my point about needing to find the right time, the right inner receptivity, for what at another moment may be so many dead words. (What a relief to find something I wrote at the beginning of this post makes sense, at least for my own case…) The aphorism in question: “Every friendship is an inconspicuous drama, a series of subtle wounds.” Here, it’s less a question of whether I agree, but whether this provokes something. Perhaps that’s another good way of looking at an aphorism – each successful one seems to carry in itself the seed of any number of novels.

Perhaps the hardest thing about aphorisms is writing about them. They ought to speak for themselves. At school I might be given one and told to go away and write 1,500 words, the length of a short blog post on this website. But to write, as I normally do, a few paragraphs on each of the above, would make me look like an idiot. (This result may occur by accident at other times, but is not the intention of the blog.) I trust readers to know how to unpack the obvious meanings of a saying. And as for the deeper meanings, the ones that come out of the wound an aphorism leaves in us – these are too personal for me to share, and I imagine are just the same for you too.

They are strange things, aphorisms. These sentences of prejudice, arrogance, at times barely-concealed anxiousness, sometimes resonating, sometimes aggravating, sometimes doing nothing at all. I wrote the first part of this post in an attempt to make myself believe the time I spent with Cioran (not the first, because I read A Short History of Decay a few years ago) was not wasted, and with the magic that is granted me as your blogger, I somehow succeeded. Reflection added meanings, brought a certain sense to stacks of nonsense. Cioran himself writes of his form: “An Aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.” This is a deliberate silliness, one we shouldn’t take too seriously. A mask, a play, an act.

We don’t read such things to become warm. As Kafka wrote of good books, they must “be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” Aphorisms are for when we are cold. They are the prick of pain that tells us we’re alive, and we must keep a store of them inside us, just in case the ice is ever at risk of getting too thick.