European Literature Archives - Page 5 of 7

The Lush Language of Bruno Schulz

Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew, wrote a few stories in the 1930s and then was killed by the Gestapo after Germany took over Poland. It is upon these few stories which his legacy rests. They are stories of a little village on the Austro-Hungarian borderlands, of a strange father and a stranger world, and are at times comedic, at times serious, at times deathly sad. What makes them special – for after all there are quite a few central-European writers bemoaning life in the provinces at that time – is the way that Schulz writes. His language is infused with a kind of imaginative intensity, and every image, sound, or thought, is described without a cliché in sight, so that they hang in the mind long after we have finished reading.

In his obsession with language and his life’s tragic trajectory, Schulz is not unlike Isaac Babel. In his treatment of strangeness and absurdity, he has something of Kafka about him (he translated The Trial into Polish). And in his interest in the imagination and spaces, forbidden and mysterious, he often reminded me of Borges. But as a writer, for better or worse, he is clearly unique, entirely himself.

Stories

The world that Schulz describes is seen through a child’s eyes and endowed with the full imaginative potential that each child brings to the world. The stories he tells are not plot-driven. Instead, they are closer to paintings – they make us drink our fill of a particular impression or mood. When things happen, it’s almost always an afterthought. Take the story “Birds”. The narrator’s father decides to house a hundred exotic birds in one room of their home after becoming interested in ornithology. When he needs still more entertainment, he decides to cross breed them, creating new and more bizarre specimens. In his obsession, the father begins to become bird-like himself. But one day the cleaner comes and throws the birds out. This is the essence of the story.

It lasts four or five pages. What sustains it is its language, more than the plot. A phrase like this – “The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year’s loaves of bread” – is enough to make us stop, pause, wonder. The story also contains its fair share of ideas, but unlike say in the case of Musil, the language in Schulz seems more important than what it might be trying to say. There is a condor who urinates in the same chamber pot as the narrator’s father, an image that brings to mind a certain Austrian psychoanalyst. Then there is the matter of the father’s own ornithological transformation – a demonstration of how our obsessions take hold of us. The story ends, however, after the birds have been driven out, with the father coming downstairs – “A moment later, my father came downstairs – a broken man, an exiled king who had lost his throne and his kingdom”. The image is too ridiculous to be wholly serious, and this light-heartedness means that Schulz never gets too bogged-down in the cleverness of ideas.

Character

Character also goes some way to sustaining a cold, hard, plotless universe. In “August” we meet some of the narrator’s relatives. Here’s an example:

“Emil, the eldest of the cousins, with a fair moustache in a face from which life seemed to have washed away all expression, was walking up and down the room, his hands in the pockets of his voluminous trousers.”

I love this description because of the trousers. It almost seems that they are more characterful than Emil himself. When Schulz applies his wondrous language to people, he can make truly memorable descriptions. Emil’s storytelling is described thus: “he told curious stories, which at some point would suddenly stop, disintegrate, and blow away.”

Of an aging man, Uncle Charles, Schulz excellently conveys a kind of paranoia through his description of Charles’ environment: “The rooms, empty and neglected, did not approve of him, the furniture and the walls watched him in silent criticism.”

But the figure who is most striking is easily the narrator’s father. Unlike Kafka’s father, the father of Schulz’s story is a person more to be pitied than feared: “We heard him talk to God, as if begging for something or fighting against someone who made insistent claims and issued orders”. He is at one point compared to an Old Testament prophet, but in the act of throwing a chamber pot from a window, so that the comparison is just as embarrassing to us as it is to the narrator. At one point the father turns into a crab, at another he appears to be in the process of transforming into a cockroach. In a tragic reinterpretation of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” the narrator, a child, begs his mother to tell him what has become of his father. She merely says that he is now a travelling salesman, and home rarely. But the truth is that like Gregor, he has become monstrous, a thing to be shunned. And this is not something that the narrator should discover.

Imagination and Books

I wrote that Schulz shares with Borges a preoccupation with books and with magical spaces. In the longest story “Spring”, the narrator becomes engrossed in a stamp collection that comes to represent for him the key to understanding the world. In “The Book”, what appears to be an old catalogue is transfigured by the narrator’s nostalgia into being the source of all earthly joy. He looks everywhere for it, only to discover that the housemaid is using its pages for lighting fires. A paragraph like this, of which there are many similar examples, seems to make Schulz into a precursor to the great Argentine:

“An event may be small and insignificant in its origin, and yet, when drawn close to one’s eye, it may open in its centre an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of its being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently”.

Schulz here is exploring the way that objects can be transformed by attention, and how they might disclose hidden meanings. Borges’s world too, is filled with magical objects – daggers, alephs, and the like. But what differentiates Schulz from Borges is that Schulz has more heart. The near destruction of the book for starting fires is a disaster, rather than a development in a story of ideas. The narrator’s emotions are felt by us, even though we retain a certain ironic distance (after all, we know that with age the narrator will realise that a catalogue is just a catalogue, and really not worth getting so excited about).

Magic Spaces

Beyond books, Schulz uses the imagination to transform his provincial town’s world into something far greater. One of my favourite stories is “Cinnamon Shops”, which sees the narrator go on a walk late at evening:

“It is exceedingly thoughtless to send a young boy out on an urgent and important errand into a night like that, because in its semi-obscurity the streets multiply, becoming confused and interchanged. There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are doubles, makebelieve streets. One’s imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night.”

With Schulz we never know when the real world ends and when the magical one begins. The narrator visits his school, but finds it transformed now that it is dark. He enters spaces he has never been before. He feels a certain anxiety, which Schulz conveys perfectly through his language:

“The profound stillness of these empty rooms was filled with the secret glances exchanged by mirrors and the panic of friezes running high along the walls and disappearing into the stucco of the white ceilings.”

Awe and wonderment are what makes these descriptions so compelling. Schulz has a particular talent for describing the sky, which always succeeds in making it ominous, or joyous, or frightening, as he desires.

Conclusion

His was a small oeuvre, but there’s no denying Schulz’s talent, which is why there are few valid reasons for avoiding him. Nevertheless, he is a writer who is better sampled in sips than gulps. My girlfriend, who bought me the collection, asked me to read the tales aloud to her. This was the right approach. Slowed down by my voice, the language could reach me with its full melodious complexity. I could not rush to find some plot – I could only enjoy what I had in front of me.

Schulz is a master of words. Even if his ideas are not as gripping as some other writers, or his plots as exciting, still he draws us in. Language, at least in his hands, is far more important than ideas or plots are in those of other writers, because Schulz uses language to transform the world. He reveals possibilities for vivid description which are obscured by the layers of cliché we normally read in books, and in doing so frees us from looking on the world as something finished, already described. Thanks to him we can see it as something magical once again.

Magic Sentences – Flaubert’s Three Tales

The thing with Flaubert is that he knows how to write a sentence. And not one of those magnificent but coldly complex sentences, of the sort that Henry James or William Gass carved out on a regular basis – a sentence that you admire like you admire a marble sculpture – from a distance, aesthetically. No, what Flaubert wrote were real, living, breathing sentences. I can’t read a sentence by Flaubert without wishing his ghost could find its way into my wrist and guide it to write something similar. Flaubert, this superhuman master of realism, is one of the only authors whose style I feel obliged to imitate. Because although he does nothing fancy, unlike almost everyone else in the world each and every sentence he wrote somehow comes out original and fresh.

He somehow could not think in clichés. He was repulsed by them. The only thing we as readers and writers can do to avoid falling completely under his linguistic spell is to try to remind ourselves that his work was the result of an extreme effort – these novels and stories were the real sculptures. Whereas the likes of Zola and Balzac were pumping out novels faster than your average 19^th century bourgeois French intellectual could read them, Flaubert barely managed a handful over the course of his life.

Whether or not you like the content is in a way besides the point. Personally, I didn’t like the plot of Madame Bovary that much. But the Three Tales, which I read last week, are rather fun. They are all very different. They range from the beautiful “A Simple Heart” to the weird “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator” to the also weird but now in addition confusing “Herodias”. What was surprising for me, knowing Flaubert only from Madame Bovary, was seeing Flaubert’s range. Here’s a medieval tale, here a piece of historical fiction. It’s surprising because I tend to associate realism with writing about one’s own time and world, but Flaubert shows that neither need be a limitation.

Anyway, on to the stories, which I read in Roger Whitehouse’s translation!

A Simple Heart

“A Simple Heart” is the most standard of the stories collected in Three Tales. It is essentially the telling of the life story of a single woman, Félicité, who is a servant. Though she has the appearance of “a woman made out of wood, driven as if by clockwork”, that does not mean the tale is boring. There is an element of daring in this story, because Félicité is from low down in society, and in “A Simple Heart” there is neither ogling nor idealisation of the poor going on – Félicité simply is a human being, in spite of her simplicity. As a young lady she was disappointed in love, was divided from her siblings as a result of the need to earn a living, and eventually ended up in the service of a Madame Aubain, who is not particularly pleasant as a master, though she could, one supposes, be a bit worse.

Allow me now to mention a sentence, or rather two. We have been learning about the guests who turn up at Madame Aubain’s house. We have just read about the Marquis de Grémanville, who is somewhat profligate and prone to alcohol and overall not entirely welcome. The paragraph ends, and the next begins, as follows:

“I think you have had enough for today, Monsieur de Grémanville! Do come and see us again soon!” And she would close the door behind him.
But she was always delighted to welcome Monsieur Bourais, a retired solicitor.

What a transition! I had to stop reading and fetch my pencil. It is the most prosaic thing in the world, and yet, so perfect. The closing of the door and the closing of the paragraph, the way that we feel the sudden delight of Félicité seeing Monsieur Bourais thanks to the suddenness of his sentence, as if we ourselves were opening the door! I know, it is a minor thing. But like learning the parts of a mechanical watch, being able to look out for these details and savour them is what makes the Three Tales, and Flaubert in general, so wonderful.

Félicité works tirelessly. Her cares, for the children of Madame Aubain, for her own nephew when she meets him, all result in dejection and failure. But Félicité, who has a simple faith, just keeps going with life: “She doted on her mistress with dog-like fidelity and the reverence that might be accorded to a saint”. In some sense Flaubert’s tale reminds me a little of Gogol’s “The Overcoat”. Both stories take someone whom society was inclined to think relatively worthless – a servant and a petty scribe – and show that they have a certain dignity about them, in spite of their low origins. Félicité is treated awfully by those around her, but she does not lose her faith. And as a result, the reader comes out at the end of the story with a sense of the strength and the value of every individual. A better moral couldn’t be found.

The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator

I didn’t like the other two of the Three Tales as much as I did “A Simple Heart”. I am a bore, I know. “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator” tells the story of how a certain Julian became a saint. As a theme, this is rather off-putting to the modern reader. I mean, who reads about saints these days? The most we might expect is a boring-old morality tale. And of course, that is part of the story. But there is more to it.

Julian is born in a castle, and to his mother and father respectively it is prophesied that he will become a saint and an emperor. As a young man he is a hunter, and here was something I had not expected – Flaubert’s violence. This tale is pretty unpleasant to read for even the most steak-loving of readers. Julian kills everything. For pages and pages we read about how he slaughters – and I mean slaughters – this or that creature. “They circled round him, trembling with fear and looking up at him with gentle pleading eyes”. And he kills them anyway. Lakes of blood, and all that – it’s all here! Eventually though, the animals fight back and Julian is told a curse is upon him. He will kill his father and mother. Uh-oh.

To save his family Julian runs off, becomes a mercenary, and gets a palace of his own – as you did, back then, in the days of knights and shining armour. Here’s another sentence: “The whole palace was so quiet that you could hear the rustle of a scarf or the echo of a sigh”. What suggestion!

Anyway, Julian does kill his parents, in the kind of ridiculous comedy-of-errors manner that is only possible in Greek tragedies and the Middle Ages, and commits to a life of voluntary wandering. Julian’s suffering as he wanders is just as intensely described as the suffering he inflicted on the animals, which meant it was effective even as it was difficult to read. But it is the end of the story that is the hardest part of all to read. A leper comes to Julian asking for help and Julian does everything he can to help the man, even hugging him tightly while they are both naked so as to give the man his warmth. I know we don’t have lepers these days, but Flaubert’s descriptions made me shrink back in disgust all the same.

Yet this, I think, is what makes the story so powerful – it really makes us feel what it must have been like to be a saint. We feel after reading like we have an idea of what is asked for. This is in stark contrast to, say, Tolstoy’s “Father Sergius” where it’s impossible to escape the feeling that Tolstoy and his main character just need to get a better therapist and maybe go outside more. Julian’s faith feels lived in a way that Sergius’s always felt on the edge of parody.

Herodias

Finally, the last of the Three Tales is “Herodias”, Flaubert’s retelling of the story of Salome and John the Baptist. I basically only know that story from the Klimt painting. And I have just googled it and discovered that the painting has nothing to do with this story to begin with, which means I know even less about the story than I thought. I didn’t like the story. I found it hard to follow. There are far too many characters and I do feel that readers without a sense of the background (more than just the tl;dr “John the Baptist gets decapitated” summary) are going to be just as confused as I am. Perhaps if I read it again slowly, after reading the Bible version, things would be clearer.

As it stands, I appreciated bits of it but not the whole thing. Moments like this description of a dancer will remain in my memory –

“Her feet moved rhythmically one in front of the other to the sounds of a flute and a pair of hand cymbals. She extended her arms in a circle, as if she were calling to someone who was fleeing her approach. She ran after him, light as a butterfly, like Psyche in search of her lover, a soul adrift, as if she were about to take flight.”

So too will the speech given by John the Baptist himself, which has a certain Biblical force about it. And finally there is this image, as the ruler of who has had John the Baptist imprisoned looks out over the desert, which has the same power as Shelley’s Ozymandias:

“His spirits sank as he looked out over the desert; in its fold and convolutions he seemed to see the shapes of ruined amphitheatres and palaces.”

But overall, I must say the story left me more confused than awed.

Conclusion

At under a hundred pages in my edition, the Three Tales are short enough to read over the course of three hours – in my case I read one each day. And I am certainly glad I read them, even “Herodias”. I really can’t express fully how giddy with excitement Flaubert’s prose makes me, even though it is distorted by translation. And in his use of historical topics, and not just the world around him, he has reminded me of the full range of literary possibilities associated with realism. Finally, these stories do have a certain thread of continuity to them. All of the Three Tales are concerned with faith, and the differing ways it manifests itself. And in the way that the faiths here are in the most part unusual – the prophet’s faith of John the Baptist, the saint’s faith of Julian – these stories are interesting and powerful to read, and not just beautiful. Though they are, certainly, that too.

The Joys of Youth: Boris Vian – Mood Indigo / Froth on the Daydream

Oh, how wonderful it is to be young and happy, rich and idle. Such is, in some sense, the first impression I got from the French writer Boris Vian’s novel, Mood Indigo (after one of its film adaptations), originally translated as Froth on the Daydream. The work is absurd, and at first glance meaningless – people hop on clouds, the sunlight makes pleasant sounds. For the first third of the book I had thoughts of dropping it and getting on with something serious. Who actually likes to read about happy people? Certainly not me. And especially when that happiness is located in a world of absurdity, where nothing seems to matter or have a connection to our own world… in short, the book started to annoy me.

But Vian is playing a game in Mood Indigo. His characters are indeed happy, their world is indeed absurd. But this is just the setup. Because soon enough, a rot appears under the joyous façade, and all that was wonderfully absurd now becomes terrifyingly absurd, and the initial messages the book trumpeted now struggle to sustain themselves once things have started going wrong. And they go very wrong in this book. In the end, Mood Indigo moves on from its silly initial impression to become a brilliant reflection on mental health and more.

Our Colourful Cast of Characters

The silliness of Mood Indigo is in evidence from the very first words – “Colin finished his bath”. It is a meaningless phrase; its lack of drama subverts our expectations for what an opening line normally looks like. Our hero, Colin, is joined by Nicholas the butler and cook, Chip his friend, and Alyssum and Chloe to make up our main characters in Mood Indigo. They have silly names and lead silly lives. Colin has a lot of money and does nothing all day except enjoy himself. His world is yellow – the colour of positivity, of energy. Sunbeams flood his house with joyous sounds (as part of the way everything is connected in Mood Indigo, even normally soundless things all make noises).

The overall impression, come to think of it, is similar to a children’s television show. Colin not only eats strange things, such as an eel found in his sink, but he also has a huge store of Rube Goldberg machines, including a drinks mixer that doubles as a piano. Everything is possible in this world, and everything is positive. Colin’s great anxiety is over finding himself a girlfriend – both he and Chip are in their early twenties. Other than that, we might say that “life is but a dream”.

A Rube Goldberg machine. Colin has lots of devices that make his life exciting and pleasurable.

Things Go Wrong

Until it isn’t. At a party Colin meets a young lady, Chloe, and falls in love with her. His courtship of her is, as with everything else, an extreme affair – the world reforms itself to suit his new mood of infatuation. He finds that a “street led straight to Chloe”, and when they are together they can literally step onto clouds to enjoy themselves. In a moment of kindness Colin gives Chip part of his fortune – Chip doesn’t have money of his own – so that Chip can, in his turn, marry Alyssum, another friend of theirs. In the meantime, Colin and Chloe celebrate their marriage. It’s a wonderful, expensive, lavish affair – Vian enjoys describing everyone’s clothes in Mood Indigo – marred only by the sudden death of a music conductor when he falls from his perch in the church. But we don’t pay such things any mind. Death doesn’t bother us.

On their honeymoon Chloe begins to get sick, and it is here where Mood Indigo becomes really interesting. At first it’s a sickly, overly happy story about young love – but now darkness begins to creep in. Chloe has a disease of the lungs. There is a waterlily in her right lung, and the only way to save Chloe is to surround her by other flowers in the hope that they will scare the waterlily away. It is not a cheap affair, and Colin spends more and more of his money in trying to save Chloe from her illness. But nothing seems to have any effect, and soon Colin finds himself running low on funds and forced to find work for himself. Meanwhile, Chip and Alyssum’s relationship is also under strain – Chip hasn’t used Colin’s money on the wedding, as planned, but on his obsession with the writer, Jean Pulse Heartre, instead.

Objects and Objectification

Chloe’s illness, and Chip’s increasing obsession – he spends his money on everything possibly connected to Heartre, from books to old clothes the writer might once have worn – both mark the novel’s decline from its cheery beginning into gloom. Both of these events are also important because the decline in Mood Indigo can be partly explained as stemming from its treatment of people and objects. What I mean, is that in some way the novel is an argument against objectification, overt and covert. We can think about this through the example of Chloe’s illness. Chloe’s personality is pretty non-existent in Mood Indigo. She is simple, concerned only with objects – at one point she says she wants to buy: “things and things and things”. Every time she is described its by reference to her beauty – at first this annoyed me, but now I see it was deliberate.

“Chloe’s such a pretty girl,” one character says of her. “I can’t imagine her being ill.”

Chloe is treated like an object by everyone around her, and in a way it kills her. Colin loves her, but the treatment she gets is all through objects – in the end, she is left fading away on a bed, surrounded by plant pots. It is a strange image, but a striking one – she is literally being destroyed by beauty. Chip’s case is similar. In his obsession with objects connected with Heartre, he neglects the human he is supposed to love – Alyssum. All of the girls in Mood Indigo, by the way, have names connected with flowers (Chloe is from the Greek word for fertility). And like flowers, the girls are left to blossom and then die, without the water of true affection. They are never treated like people, like individuals with personalities.

Money and Emptiness

Connected with objects is the way money is used in Mood Indigo. At first it seems to be a source of liberation for Colin, letting him do whatever he wants. He goes ice skating and kills people (by accident) without facing any consequences. He goes to parties and meets pretty girls. The characters of Mood Indigo seem to enjoy the fullness of youth. Chip, when he gets Colin’s money, is able to pursue his passion for Heartre without any limits. Chloe is able to buy all the things she wants. But as Mood Indigo continues the emptiness of their lives becomes harder to avoid.

Chloe’s things are worthless once her illness takes hold, and Chip’s passion soon morphs into an addiction, excluding everything else in his life which once he had valued. Finally, as soon as Colin’s money starts running out, his entire house and world begin shrinking, growing dark and unhealthy in reflection of his inner state. By spending, by not paying attention to the consequences of their actions – most noticeably they random deaths of the early parts of Mood Indigo – the characters avoid trying to grow, to develop themselves or find a real and lasting happiness.

Boris Vian, the French author of Mood Indigo, was a multitalented person, producing not just novels but also songs and poetry. He was an important figure in the French jazz scene, connecting American artists with their French counterparts, and knew how to play himself. Source: Photomaton Archives Cohérie Boris Vian” (propriétaire du cliché), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Conclusion

It is a wonderful thing to be young, to be rich and live irresponsibly. At least it seems so, while it’s happening. The horrors of the world, its terrifying absurdity, barely affect us or our happiness. Mood Indigo perfectly captures that mood of joy. But the novel goes further, in showing us that under our pleasure there lurks someone else’s pain, that the happiness we think we have is often bought at the price of someone else’s. Ultimately, happiness comes in part from choosing not to see the world. During Chloe and Colin’s honeymoon, at the last stage of Mood Indigo’s “happy part”, Chloe finds herself unable to look through the window of their car onto the world outside – the sight is too distressing. Fortunately, there is an easy solution. You can just put a filter on the window, see only what you want to see, and everything will be okay.

Ultimately, Mood Indigo is about the dangers of easy solutions, of turning the world into your playground, of treating others as objects and shirking responsibility. You will have a great time, at least at first. But soon enough something will happen that you could not have predicted – like an illness – and you will find how little you are prepared for the world hiding behind your dreams. I wasn’t expecting to like Vian’s novel, but I did. It’s intelligent, fun, and has much more to say than I have written about here. I’m grateful to my girlfriend for recommending it.

The title of Mood Indigo comes from a piece by the legendary (and repeatedly namedropped in Mood Indigo) jazz artist, Duke Ellington. Here’s a version on Youtube.