Category Archives: German Literature

Sunday Notes (Wittgenstein, Kishik, Szentkuthy)

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“Be sure not to be dependent on the external world, then you don’t need to be afraid of what takes place in it . . . It is easier to detach oneself from things than from people. But even that is something one must master.”

In Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks 1914-1916, translated by Marjorie Perloff, we encounter diverse threads that eventually merge in the Tractatus. These notebooks contain early speculations on how Wittgenstein could express his inner life and reveal ideas rooted in an older philosophical tradition. Though encoded, the notebooks oscillate between his work and introspective self-examination.

Wittgenstein’s scope extends beyond critiquing logic and language. His thoughts offer a blueprint for living rightly, a kind of therapy perhaps, echoing David Kishik’s Self Study, where he develops his illuminating concept of autophilosophy. Both thinkers challenge academic philosophy and employ a rich mode of expression, where “philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten,” usually translated as “philosophy could only be written as a form of poetry.” As Perloff notes, the German verb “dichten” encompasses all imaginative writing, including fiction, drama, and lyric poetry. Kishik’s book aligns with a larger project, To Imagine a Form of Life, which I intend to trace through the four earlier books.

I also read Miklós Szentkuthy’s Towards the One & Only Metaphor, my first exposure to his work, hoping to gain insight into his style of thinking and writing before exploring more of his oeuvre. I read this text with great enthusiasm as Szentkuthy keenly observes and describes the world, intertwining language and thought, merging pragmatic and symbolic elements to create a way of perceiving that irresistibly drew me into his world.

This week, I added a few books to my library: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma, a couple of Andrea Zanzotto’s works, and Bataille’s Critical Essays 1944-1948.

Sunday Notes

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Todd Hido, Untitled #2431

Some weeks my reading ends up in unexpected places. I thought that I’d spend this week reading André Gide’s diaries of the period when Paris was under Nazi occupation. But I’ve been reading Byung-Chul Han. A couple of years ago I read The Burnout Society and last year, The Scent of Time (and would recommend both). Han I like because he diagnoses better than any contemporary thinker what it is to live in this age of hypercommunication and hyperactivity.

Add Michel Houellebecq’s fiction to the brew, with his identification of twenty-first century masculine bitterness, and you’ve got a decent set of windows to view the condition of our age. But I like Han better than Houellebecq. The latter’s reactionary nostalgia overshadows his understanding of the world to a great extent. In both cases I like to see the world through their eyes, especially when they don’t confirm my own perceptions. I’ve been reading Han’s snappily-titled Capitalism and the death drive, and The disappearance of rituals, the latter perhaps his strongest work since The Burnout Society.

A couple of additions this week: Steve Hanson’s A Shaken Bible and Complicities: British Poetry 1945-2007, purchase of the latter evidence of a further attempt to indirectly approach J.H. Prynne’s work, before reading an annotated edition of The Oval Window.

Profanation of culture

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Today, the arts are increasingly rendered profane and disenchanted. Magic and enchantment – the true sources of art – disappear from culture, to be replaced by discourse. The enchanting exterior is replaced with the true interior, the magic signifier with the profane signified. The place of compelling, captivating forms is taken by discursive content, Magic gives way to transparency. The imperative of transparency fosters an animosity to form. Art becomes transparent with regard to its meaning. It no longer seduces. The magic veil is cast off. The forms do not themselves talk. The language of forms, of signifiers, is characterised by compression, complexity, equivocation, exaggeration, a high degree of ambiguity that even reaches the level of contradiction. These suggest meaningfulness without immediately being reducible to meaning. All these now disappear, and instead we are confronted with simplified claims and messages that are artificially imposed on the work of art.

—Byung-Chul Han, The disappearance of rituals, translated by Daniel Steuer

Sunday Notes

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In May 1940, with the fall of France less than a month away, André Gide wrote in his journal, “The events are too serious; I have no further attention but for them.” There was, I think from time to time, a prolonged period when the world seemed less eventful, but that is more a reflection of the state of mind of the commentariat and where they choose to direct their attention.

I finished reading Andy Wimbush’s Still: Samuel Beckett’s Quietism. It is an unusually eloquent academic text, convincing in its reading of Beckett’s fiction, particularly of Murphy and How It Is. It serves equally as a study of the origins of Quietism and how Beckett moved in the direction of an ethical, non-solipsistic quietism in both his writing and thought.

Most of my subsequent reading this week was of Beckett’s early stories and poems. Beckett did not appear fully formed as a writer, and while it may be possible to detect faint intimations of the brilliance of his later writing, it is often buried beneath an affected sententiousness.

There is however a pleasure in tracing the early labours of a writer. This is why I so frequently feel compelled to acquire everything written by a favourite author. I have a tendency to see the complete works of a writer as forming a single body of work, and enjoy following chronologically a particular writer’s journey.

No acquisitions this week, but anticipating with pleasure the publication of Peter Handke’s collected essays, and a new translation (by Shelley Frisch) of Kafka’s aphorisms, edited by Reiner Stach. Both are listed for March publication, although the latter’s publisher page indicates later.

Sunday Notes

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This week I wrote into my current notebook something that Samuel Beckett is purported to have said in a 1961 interview with Tom Driver: “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” Beckett, Joyce, Woolf, each exemplified the search for a form that gestures to a reality that exists beyonds the limits of language. Are there contemporary writers that have an interest in questioning and transcending these boundaries?

Where is the fiction with something serious to say, that reveals what cannot be spoken, in a world of omnipresent data and the incessant chattering of ill-informed charlatans? I find assurance in some of the happy melancholy of Jon Fosse, Peter Handke, Gabriel Josipovici, Friederike Mayröcker, and Gerald Murnane, but I cannot help but think that finding new forms to accommodate the mess may no longer be taking place in books.

I’ve been immersed in Beckett, directly and through Andy Wimbush’s Still: Samuel Beckett’s Quietism. At these times I wonder why I stray too far away from my old chestnuts. I could happily spend the time I have available with my tutelary spirits, but for the old rogue of curiosity.

More time than worthwhile was spent reading multiple news sources to comprehend the situation in Ukraine. It serves merely to emphasise the death of investigative reporting and intelligent analysis. I read, with bored compulsion, half of John Calder’s The Garden of Eros, about the goings-on in the post-war Paris literary scene.

In the post this week: Wittgenstein’s Secret Diaries: Semiotic Writing in Cryptography by Dinda L. Gorlée, preparation perhaps for the publication of the first translation into English of Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks: 1914-1916 later in the year.