On Magnus Mills
[posted by Greg]
We haven’t written much about the English author Magnus Mills, even though he is among the leading contemporary novelists whose writing could be considered irreal. We hope to change this situation soon, perhaps using as an inspiration the several days we spent in London on our way to Prague this year and the chance it gave us to buy two books by Mills that are not available in the United States, the novel, The Maintenance of Headway, (published in the UK in 2009) and a short story collection, Screwtop Thompson (2010).
Despite our interest in Mills, The Maintenance of Headway isn’t likely to figure in our discussion of his irrealism. Though it is a fine novel, and certainly an excellent read for someone who has just travelled extensively around London by bus, it is probably the least irreal of his works. This is not to suggest, however, that Mills has embraced the mainstream of literary realism. The work has all the spareness of description, distanced narration, and exclusivity of focus that we would expect from him. But unlike the Restraint of Beasts, Three to See the King, or A Scheme for Full Employment (which we might well call a “social irrealist” novel), there is nothing in this novel that couldn’t happen in our currently existing reality. The ending — which articulates the difficulties that the characters at the bus company have in reconciling the theory and practice of maintaining headway — points us toward a very particular, albeit universal, meaning.
Vaclav Havel’s Film, Odchazeni (Leaving)
(posted by Greg)
The film version of Vaclav Havel’s play Odchazeni (Leaving) – directed by Havel himself – premiered here in Prague a few weeks ago. I hadn’t had a chance to see the play, which Havel wrote in 2005 and which has been the only play he’s written since turning to politics in the wake of 1989. I was quite interested in seeing the film, in part because Havel’s political career, to the surprise of those who knew his earlier work, has taken such an “establishment” turn. He has not only fully backed the policies of the world’s sole superpower but, in addition, the politics of some of its most conservative, and powerful, political groupings (such as the neoconservatives). Thus, he fully backed the United States invasion of Iraq, the stationing of American soldiers and radars on the soil of the Czech Republic as a part of a Star Wars anti-missile system (and opposed the holding of a referendum on the issue), and has refused to condemn the American policies and practices in the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. How then, would this film, which was about the chancellor of an unnamed country leaving office, as Havel had just done, play out, given Havel’s continuing accommodation to the kind of establishment forces that he treated so ironically in his earlier plays? Curiously, in the play, no accommodation is made to these forces at all. It is in fact quite savage in its treatment of all the compromises and deceptions that one must make to keep one’s position in the world of establishment politics. Havel does this quite brilliantly, and the fact that he utilized the best traditions of Absurdist Theater and the Theater of the Grotesque to accomplish this goal was quite gratifying for an irrealist such as me.
But the film does raise the question as to whether Havel, who continues to this day to play the same political game (now in the role of the revered ex-President statesman, very similar to what the protagonist in Odchazeni, Chancellor Vilém Rieger, was aiming for) that he so savagely condemns in the film, might not be a terribly conflicted person.
Aminadab OR Must Irrealism be Existentialist?
[posted by Greg]
To have a chance at long last to read Maurice Blanchot’s novel Aminadab was something of an event for us. Long ago, when we were putting together The Cafe Irreal, we came across a review of Aminadab by John-Paul Sartre titled, “Aminadab or the Fantastic Considered as a Language.” The influence of Sartre’s review, also a polemic on Kafka’s work, is easy to spot in our publication: a citation from it serves as a preamble on our homepage and, indeed, the setting that Sartre uses in that citation helps explain why we are the “Cafe” Irreal even though we serve no food or drinks. At the time we were getting The Cafe Irreal into gear, however, Aminadab was not available in English translation; the part of Sartre’s review/essay that addressed Blanchot’s novel, therefore, was all we knew about the novel. In 2002, however, an English translation appeared and in 2010 we finally learned of it and read the book. Though this review has been a long time in coming, it will remain a preliminary one as the book will require another reading.
Based on this first reading, I would agree with translator Jeff Fort’s opening words to his introduction, in which he states that “this is a strange book.” Not specifically, however, for the reason that he gives (though it is no doubt true), i.e., that “strangeness is the very element in which [Blanchot's narrative] works move and unfold,” nor because of Blanchot’s tendency to “dispense with all recognizable narrative conventions.” Nor, for that matter, as an irrealist, did I find the Kafkan setting and structure of Aminadab strange. What I found strange and challenging about this novel, and ultimately unsuccessful, was Blanchot’s appropriation of Kafkan conventions and structures without an existential agent to inhabit them. Thus, the work starts out quite enticingly with Thomas, the protagonist, arriving in an unidentified village, making his way through a sparsely described but intriguing street and, upon seeing a woman seemingly signal to him from an upper window of a boarding house, deciding to enter the building and look for her. The rest of the novel is about that search, and all the difficulties that he has reaching her. This, of course, has obvious parallels with the plot outlines of Kafka’s The Castle. Indeed, in comparing the two novels Sartre writes that Kafka had perfected the technique in that work, in that “the hero himself is fantastic. We know nothing about this surveyor whose adventures and views we share. We know nothing except his incomprehensible obstinacy in remaining in a forbidden village. To attain this end, he sacrifices everything; he treats himself as a means. But we never know the value this end had for him and whether it was worth so much effort. M. Blanchot has adopted the same method; his Thomas is no less mysterious than the servants in the building. We do not know where he comes from, nor why he persists in reaching the woman who has signaled to him.” (p. 65)
Having now read Aminadab for myself, I have to question whether this parallel holds. There was, that is to say, an imperative to K.’s claim that he was a land surveyor; first of all, he might actually have been the “Land Surveyor whom the Count is expecting” that he claims to be in the novel’s opening pages and, secondly, even if not, even if his claim, which sets him on that uncertain trajectory toward the Castle, isn’t true, it is a claim that he makes under obvious duress, under threat of being forced to “quit the Count’s territory at once,” that is, being forced out of the inn and into the snowy night with nowhere to sleep. This is far different from the apparent motivation of Thomas, who sees the woman make “a quick sign with her hand, like an invitation; then she quickly closed the window…Thomas was quite perplexed. Could he consider this gesture truly as a call to him? It was rather a sign of friendship than an invitation. It was also a sort of dismissal. He hesitated. Looking again in the direction of the shop, he realized that the man who was sweeping had gone back inside as well. This reminded him of his first plan. But then he thought that he would always have time to carry it out later, and he decided to cross the street and enter the house.”
Thus, it is a matter of curiosity and momentary whim, perhaps additionally encouraged by a vague sense that he knows the woman, that inspires his journey; indeed the journey itself is often a series of discourses as he tries to clarify the laws of the house and his status in relation to them, discourses which are complemented by the “endless commentaries” of the various characters in the novel, with their “unreliable and conflicting clarifications,” as Fort puts it. With these, he adds, the novel “enters into its most singular and proper mode,” (xiv), one which would seem to suggest Blanchot’s later works, which “gradually dispense with all recognizable narrative conventions and constantly verge toward the rarefied disappearance of the voice that proffers them.” (vii)
All of this leaves Aminadab with a floating quality, an endeavor undertaken out of a vague curiosity and compulsion and which continues on more or less on the same basis, which then turns into an extended discourse which offers us, as Sartre complains, “a continual translation, a full commentary on its symbols.” (Sartre, p. 70) One example of this that is particularly striking occurs in the novel’s final pages, when the woman says to Thomas that “this night has its particularities. It brings with it neither dreams nor the premonitions that, at times, take the place of dreams. Rather it is itself a vast dream that is not within reach of the person it envelopes. When it has surrounded your bed, we will draw the curtains that enclose the alcove, and the splendor of the objects that will then be revealed will be enough to console the most unhappy of men. At that moment, I too will become truly beautiful…” (p.196)
In The Castle, on the other hand, K. is clearly a person with a desire to move up in the world – e.g., he is always trying to make contacts (above all with figures of power, such as Klamm) and trying to show, and impress, the others that he is indeed a player. The discourses are concrete ones, about officialdom, what the officials do and how one gets an in with them. His actions represent real aspirations, even if it isn’t clear what it is he’s really aspiring to, how the strange world of the village will receive those aspirations, or whether the aspirations might not themselves be entirely futile from the start.
Indeed, it is these conflicts between K.’s aspirations and the world he finds himself in that helps make it possible to classify The Castle as an existentialist work (as well as many other works which we consider to be irreal). Aminadab, by presenting us with an extended work that has a Kafkan structure but whose protagonist and narrative lack such aspiration, raises the question of whether there must be such a close association between irrealism and existentialism. Or, put another way, if we accept that an important element of irrealism is not just the absurd (meaning, in this case, the chasm between what we want and can imagine on the one hand and what our finite world and body allows us on the other) but also the passion of the absurd (the insistent, driven attempt to do the impossible and cross this chasm) then Aminadab might not be an irrealist work. By largely discarding any strong imperative in the protagonist or narrative — any of the passion mentioned above — the novel leaves the reader in the abstracted and disassociated state that more typically results from reading works of narrative experimentation. But, of course, the novel does utilize many Kafkan elements and structures, and so even in my own mind the matter is not settled.
Sources:
Aminadab by Maurice Blanchot ; translated and with an introduction by Jeff Fort Lincoln ; London : University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
Literary Essays by John-Paul Sartre, Philosophical Library, New York, 1958, tr. Annette Michelson.
The Other City by Michal Ajvaz; The Return of Kral Majales; and the Prague of My Imagination
[posted by Alice]
In November of 1993 Greg and I arrived in Prague for the first time. As Louis Armand tells us in his introduction to the anthology The Return of Kral Majales, by that point Prague was home to a lively community of English-speaking writers and had already been proclaimed the “Left Bank of the nineties.” Also in 1993, Michal Ajvaz published The Other City in Czech.
Flash forward from November of 1993 to November of 2010: Although an English translation of Ajvaz’ exceptional novel has been available since 2009, it wasn’t until this month that I actually read it. I also just finished reading Greg’s essay about the Kral Majales anthology, a volume that contains work by many writers who lived in Prague between 1990 and 2010 (including Greg and me). I decided to write a post about these readings and the memories they evoked.
[To be honest, I wasn’t thinking very clearly on my first trip to Prague because of jet lag and fatigue, and we were only in the Czech Republic for six weeks and in Prague for two before we had to leave because of my father’s illness, and it took a lot of energy just to make ourselves understood because we possessed maybe 200 words of Czech between us, and when we were hungry we found our way through crumbling cobblestone streets and down into musty basements of stone buildings to eat pizza with catsup and drink muddy coffee and breathe vast amounts of cigarette smoke, and when we emerged and had walked through streets filled with slushy snow till we were exhausted, we would find our way back in the coal-scented darkness to accommodations that were sometimes stiflingly warm, and I lay in bed and read Kafka’s collected stories and thought them brilliant and wanted to write fiction but wasn’t at all convinced that Prague was the place to do that. In the meantime, Greg found enough that was attractive and intriguing to convince him that he would return.]
In The Other City Ajvaz says, “… the snow lying everywhere is almost already the beginning of the unreal. It too urges us to leave: we are bound to find in it footprints of chimerical beings, footsteps that will lead us to secret lairs in the depths of the city.” (page 13) And of course when we returned to Prague in January of 1995 there was again snow on the ground, and Greg was ready to teach English and to become a translator and to engage in a richly complex writing project. Less engaged, less convinced, I focused on imagination.
[As Greg describes in more detail in his essay, we began to go to movies in out-of-the-way neighborhoods, to go to galleries to see whimsical and sometimes fiercely original art, to look at old buildings with distinct personas (though these buildings still exist, they are now renovated, sandblasted, painted and plastered into pretentious monuments that remind me of Disneyland), and we explored a city with so many hidden corners that it seemed to disassemble and reassemble itself before our eyes to defy being known, and in public places we found a deep chill that the coal-fired heat couldn’t touch (though the apartment in which we stayed was cozy warm), and I learned the complex route from the tram stop to our place (past the brewery, over the tracks, up the hill, up the steep steps, up another hill, around the bend, past the barking dogs, and so on), and I learned to speak a little Czech; to find vegetarian possibilities in a pork-and-dumpling land; and to miss my home as a special and idealized place I rarely appreciated when I was in it.]
We returned to Prague each year after that and stayed as long as we could. We encountered many of the spaces Armand describes as meeting places for expats: Beef Stew readings at Radost, Alchemy, The Globe Bookstore. But the strangeness of the city was what seeped into my bones and the Czech imagination influenced me more than the English speakers around me ever really did. It was while we were in Prague in 1997 that we first came up with the idea of publishing an online journal that would feature a hard-to-define type of writing, which we call irrealism. We sometimes refer to it as Kafkan (we used to call it Kafkaesque as John Gardner does, but we learned that people associate the term Kafkaesque with faceless bureaucracy and dehumanizing police states, and though such things can be found in irreal literature, it’s not inevitable), and we spent many hours trying to see Kafka’s city as he once did.
We were also very influenced by Czech literature, which is filled with whimsy and absurdism and fantasy, and that brings me to the fact that The Other City by Michal Ajvaz is a very irreal novel. The main reason I say this is that the meanings contained in the work point in many, often irreconcilable directions (in Shimon Sandbank’s parlance, they are “so many pointers to an unknown meaning”). The Other City begins like an allegory: the velvet-bound book with its secret alphabet opens the way to a world of the imagination that includes lectures at 2:00 a.m. and underground churches. But the references also point to notions of death, the unconscious mind, the mysteries of life and sexuality, and the search for meaning and patterns that might result in art. This novel is a feast for the imagination, alternating as it does between a moderately straightforward (though always irreal) narrative style and stream-of-consciousness, surreal, automatic-writing sorts of monologues, the first of which is delivered by a black fish. And yet there is a way in which the green marble streetcars and combination skyscraper-cruise ship on the Vltava found in this novel call to mind the real city, the Prague I knew back in the 1990s, a place of such intense complex imagination that anything seemed possible.
[In the summer of 2009 when I was last in Prague, there was no snow in which to find the footprints of chimerical beings, of course, but we lived near Petrin Hill, which features prominently in The Other City, and it’s still a microcosm of those hidden corners and magic moments we once seemed to find everywhere, and I walked up that hill almost every day because I wanted to see the birds and trees, but I also was reminded that Prague is still full of the unexpected – on Petrin there’s a gallery of imaginative art and an underground exhibit, and a number of small and unusual buildings (a wooden church, a pink chapel, and at the top a replica of the Eiffel Tower -- and when I walked up Petrin I felt secure in the company of the remarkable number of statues to be found there (though I also enjoyed the Japanese and Italian tourists, the students, the staid ladies with their little dogs), and the night we went up to the astronomical observatory at the top of the hill and then rode slowly back down in the funicular railway gazing at the lights of the city below us that looked so lovely and yet promised something more than an ordinary city should, I renewed my connection with the other city, and I think it would be a very good idea to read Ajvaz’ book again next time I’m in Prague.]
Our Article in the Journal of the Kafka Society of America
posted by Greg and Alice
Dr. Marie Luise Caputo-Mayr, the editor of the Journal of the Kafka Society of America, has just written to tell us that the new issue of the Journal, containing our article “After Kafka: Kafka criticism and scholarship as a resource in an attempt to promulgate a new literary genre,” has just come out. In the article we discuss using critical work on Franz Kafka by various writers and scholars (including Shimon Sandbank, Amaryll Beatrice Chanady, Eric Rabkin, Clayton Koelb, and Jean-Paul Sartre) as a basis for, and justification of, our attempts to establish irrealism as a distinct literary genre.
Obviously we are very pleased and honored to have our article appear in this distinguished and interesting publication, more information about which can be found on the website of the Kafka Society of America.
North American Release of Kral Majales Anthology
The North American release of The Return of Kral Majales anthology, which includes several translations that first appeared in The Cafe Irreal (as well as excerpts from my and Greg’s work), will be launched this Thursday, September 23, at the Czech Cultural Center in New York City. Since we are currently in Arizona neither of us can be there, but for anyone interested it will be held at the Czech Center in the Bohemian National Hall at 321 East 73rd Street (between 1st & 2nd Ave.) starting at 6 p.m.
Revolt of the Means Against the Ends
[posted by Greg]
In the citation that appears on the homepage of The Cafe Irreal, Jean-Paul Sartre describes how, in a particular cafe of a fantastic nature, the “means” (e.g., cups of coffee) rebel against the “ends” (i.e. the purpose for being in the cafe), making the world topsy-turvy for the cafe’s patrons. In fact, the setting of his description and the irreality that follows from it inspired us to name our publication The Cafe Irreal. I have been thinking of this citation as I’ve watched a strike (and the reaction to it) unfold in Tucson, the city to which I’ve returned after my recent trip to Prague. Specifically, the bus drivers and mechanics here have gone on strike over the city’s reluctance to guarantee a certain level of job security, and the reaction of some members of the public to the strike is, true to form (I have noticed this during other strikes), similar to the way the patrons in Sartre’s cafe would have reacted. That is to say, they are astonished and appalled that this “instrument” (e.g., the workers) who normally fill their assigned role of being a means to end (in this case getting from point A to point B), have suddenly refused to fulfill this function, causing some people’s world to go topsy-turvy. (Many other people who ride the buses are sympathetic to the drivers, and their main concern is how to get around now that their primary means of transportation has been disrupted.)
Of course, the scenario I’m describing here in Tucson, unlike Sartre’s fictional cafe, isn’t irreal: it may be a rebellion by what some people would regard as the “means to an end,” but in this case the means are human agents seeking a comprehensible end (job security), and thus lacks the irreality of the rebellion Sartre describes. In this very specific way the strike here plays out rather more in the way that the worker’s rebellion played out in Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, though with vastly less melodrama and action. That film – which is currently featured in an exhibition at the University of Arizona Museum of Art that no doubt also inspired me to write on this theme — rather famously portrays the instrumentality of workers in the bourgeois scheme of things, as can be seen in this clip. Still, by the end of the film the factory owner has to acknowledge the human agency of the workers. In the same way, the people I’m describing here, once they recover from their initial astonishment, have to acknowledge the human agency of the strikers; unfortunately, this often takes the form of angry comments on, for example, the alleged greed of the strikers, or the belief that the strikers have their heads in the sand, or that they are communists because they’re members of a trade union or thugs because they’re Teamsters, etc.
Nonetheless, in that first reaction — that first astonishment at the rebellion of the means against the ends — there is, I believe, an irreal resonance.
A Tribute to Jose Saramago
The recent death of Jose Saramago should not pass without mention on a blog dedicated to irreal literature. Saramago was a remarkably imaginative writer, not only writing a series of interesting and compelling non-realist novels (such as Cave, Blindness, and Seeing), but also the rather irreal All the names. First published in 1997, this work impressed me above all with how it pointed the reader in so many directions without ever quite allowing us to get to where we thought we might be going. That this indeterminate quality would impress me relates to my feeling that the old dramatic formula of climax, catharsis, and resolution is often a bane of literature, a staple of the dramatic tradition whose incorporation into the realist tradition has contributed to making that genre so very unrealistic, or at least contrived. Above all, All the names illustrates my point because it offers us several false resolutions, or transitory resolutions, which would be all that the great catharses of high drama could offer us if we picked up the action the day after the climax had been reached (yes, Macbeth and wife have been done away with, and their personal drama brought to an end, but already their successors will be scheming with their own plays for power and who can know what kind of leader Malcolm will turn out to be).
Thus, in All the names, we have every right (by our conventions) to expect a real resolution to Senhor José’s obsessive search for the woman, and answers to the various questions it raises, such as: what was motivating him in regards to her? Why did the she kill herself? If Senhor José had somehow inspired the Registrar with his search, don’t we have every right to expect more of his great reform of the system than merely rearranging the cards into a different order? Shouldn’t Senhor José, in the end, either be rewarded or punished for his extraordinary actions, instead of being allowed, by both Registrar and novelist, to just return to his business as usual?
Indeed, we are even frustrated when we try to plaace the novel in a specific tradition, as its protagonist and setting — a lonely clerk (Senhor José) working in a vast bureaucracy — suggest Kafka, and yet the nature of the bureaucracy itself, the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, which holds the record cards for all residents of the unnamed city stretching back endlessly into the past, is more reminiscent of Borges. Even the issue of the reality or irreality of the work remains up in the air, for the physics of the work, for all of its Kafkian suggestions, only enters the realm of the irreal in the remarkable graveyard scene.
And yet it all works quite well, for these are not loose ends left hanging by a writer not able to control his material, but the deliberately induced ambiguity of a writer in remarkable control of his material, and who has led us to a that highly refined sense of non-resolution that is one of the reasons why we can say, whether we want or not, that irrealism can allow us a glimpse of the real that eludes the most specific forms of realism.
Some News from Prague
[posted by Greg]
Last week I had the good fortune to attend and read at one of the two book launch parties for the monumental anthology The Return Of Kral Majales: Prague’s International Literary Renaissance 1990-2010 (ed., Louis Armand, Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2010), whose 960 pages detail and present the literary and artistic activities of the English-language community in Prague — perhaps the most coherent, successful, and self-aware English-language expatriate community of the last fifty years. Both Alice and I have pieces in the anthology, and there are several translations originally published in The Cafe Irreal that are also included. In fact, the whole thing got me thinking about Prague, its influence on us, and our irreal project, and so that is something I will be writing on soon, and at length.
And, speaking of Prague and at least one of its influences on The Cafe Irreal, Franz Kafka, I finally made it to the Divadlo Komedie’s presentation of a stage version (in Czech) of The Trial. This play, which has been running since 2007 and won awards that year for best staging and best actor, made me think of something John Updike wrote some years ago when he first saw the film version of his novel Rabbit Run. He recalled how impressed he was with the quality of the film but he said that, even as he was watching it, he wondered why the filmmakers didn’t just drop the pretense of making a film from his book and make their own original film; it was obvious to him that having to fit the film into the strictures of his book had hurt the film, while at the same time the film completely failed to capture any particular aspect of his novel.
In the same way I was left wondering why the producers and director of Proces didn’t just write their own play about a guilt-ridden and socially estranged guy having to deal with an arbitrary process of judgment. If they had, I wouldn’t have entered the theater with expectations based on having read Kafka’s work and so wouldn’t have been so disappointed by what they had made of his novel; I might have even praised the play for having had a rather Kafkan theme. But of course they didn’t write their own play, they chose to essentially rewrite Kafka and then go out and print up a bunch of flyers that boasted about it being “The Trial by Franz Kafka.” And so I wasn’t expecting, as such devices were very much eschewed in Kafka’s work, the play’s use of the classic song “Stand by Me” to emphasize the loneliness of the characters (talk about giving us something we can comfortably anchor ourselves to!), the emotional outbursts of the tormented, and ultimately suicidal, Joseph K. (also called, in the play, “Mr. K”), or a periodic personal, first person narrative delivered by him (so much for the narrative distancing of the original).
And this brings up another point: if you add a lot of your own material, dialogue, and so on, as they did here, can you really put forth the play as being “by” Franz Kafka (even beyond the fact that Kafka wrote a novel, and not a play, called The Trial)?
A little while ago I wrote in a post that when we watch these various remakes of original material, we need to set aside our expectations of the original and just focus on the new version, rather as if it had sprung up out of nowhere. But quite frankly I’m getting tired of having to do this; perhaps the people doing these remakes should save us this trouble by eliminating the middle man. They’d have more artistic license and give us something new. And this, I would argue, is especially true for remakes of works that have strong irreal elements, as those elements are easily washed out once more standard dramatic devices are introduced.
