Tag: David Short

And we’ve come full circle: Tractatus by Róbert Gál

1.103
Not every pearl of wisdom is necessarily true. Not every catharsis necessarily amounts to understanding.

The Latin title, Tractatus, is ominous, immediately conjuring images of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famously difficult text, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and indeed a quick glance inside reveals a sequence of numbered statements and passages with an epigram from the great Austrian philosopher himself: Philosophy ought really to be written only as poetry. Yet anyone who has struggled through the logical propositions and equations at the core of Wittgenstein’s critically important, if cool and austere, treatise, will be relieved to know that it is a later, less certain, more playful expression of the philosopher’s thinking that seems to be inspiring much of what unfolds in the latest work from Slovak-born writer and editor, Róbert Gál. But he is also forging his own idiosyncratic path.

Gál has, over the years, produced a collection of writings that have ranged from the fictional to the philosophical, highlighting a gift for aphorisms, a fondness for tautologies, neologisms and rhetorical questions, and a tendency to riff off ideas with the improvisational energy of a jazz stylist. Now, in what may be his shortest work (or a close tie with Naked Thoughts), he is, with a nod to Wittgenstein, engaged in surprisingly dense axiomatic exercise that endeavours to examine what we can know about our experience of truth and reality, and what that implies for our ethical and metaphysical existence in the twenty-first century. That is, of course, not to suggest that his is a rigidly structured systemic exposition—it is a much more fluid, free-flowing and varied engagement with ideas, beginning with a most unconventional approach to a first principle:

1.1
I don’t remember the day I died, but it was obviously before I’d had time to be born. And nothing had mattered more to me than that very business of getting myself born. Ideally getting myself born into the me that had been born already, discretely, corpuscle by corpuscle. Born into the ready and waiting, hence painlessly. Not being born, though born already. But what into? Shall we imagine it? Might it not play havoc with the seeming need to have one’s own outer shell, for all that it just keeps on cracking?

Ah, yes, a rather different game is afoot, and yet not so much as one might expect. Anecdotes, asides and aphorisms are woven into the exercise that follows, an investigation that begins with the self as an entity, the interface through which we interpret the experiences that shape our understanding of the world. By the second section, the discussion starts to open up to the question of what we can intuit about that which cannot be directly observed or proven, and the we are invited to slow down and work our way through the reasoning at hand. Logic, truths, reality, these are the problems that begin to surface, as they will again and again throughout. But buffered by aphorisms, reflections and anecdotes this is neither a dry nor an unduly taxing read. By contrast, this is a living philosophy. Gál is working with large concepts with his signature inventive wit and creative energy. He makes you think:

3.4
Sorrow is one of the joys. Its basis is a process of projecting. If this projecting collapses beneath the pressure of reality, joy is put to an end. However, the pressure of reality also means that our projecting is petrified—and that is the precondition for any further projecting to be possible. Reality becomes the back-up to its own power to bring pressure to bear on us. It is no less prone to being continually deformed as it is subject to being continually formed. The mind by which it is formed becomes a reflection of the mind that it itself is giving form to, and we’ve come full circle.

As we work our way through Tractatus, we are continually challenged to engage with our own assumptions about truth, thought, memory, emotion and much more. Existence becomes understood as a dance with the experience of reality, or that which we imagine reality to be:

7.11
If the truth is meant to be a possibility, then by some means it has to be imposed upon reality.

13.11
Anything is never anything. Anything is a sonorous option between nothing and something that carries weight.

16.3
Intelligence, unlike memory, selects from time only those truths, instants and items of knowledge that it finds worthwhile. Which is why memory is the more truthful.

22.12
Can interior actions have exterior manifestations if interior and exterior are but abstract notions invented by us? Or, conversely, are interior actions—and their exterior manifestations—the reason why these notions have been abstracted by us?

These scattered passages are offered simply to give a taste of the kind of musings that comprise this short volume. Some may seem self-evident, others may trigger a little dissonance. And that’s okay. As the work progresses, the axiomatic elements carry an increasing value. From an open and playful beginning, over less than sixty pages and twenty-seven brief sections of between one and twenty-four sub-sections, the material in Tractatus builds upon itself to create a loosely spiraling structure of statements, questions and extrapolations leading to, a final and important conclusion.

As with all of Gál’s previous publications, this book is small, almost pocket-sized, the kind of thoughtful companion you can easily tuck into a bag. I also want to suggest this is his most accessibly serious philosophical work to date—challenging but not heavy, wise but not dogmatic—and as ever, deceptively playful.

Tractatus by Róbert Gál is translated from the Slovak by David Short and published by Schism Press.

At the threshold: City of Torment (and Prague, I See a City…) by Daniela Hodrová

Founded, according to legend, with the prophetic proclamation of the mythical Princess Libuše, Prague rose from a hilltop settlement to become the political and economic hub of Central Europe. Forged in stone, blood and bone over a thousand years it is a place dense with history, a city that cannot escape itself, often depicted as a labyrinthine maze of magic, madness and despair. City of Torment, a loose trilogy by Czech author and theorist Daniela Hodrová, falls into the literary tradition of writers like Karel Hynek Mácha, Gustav Meyrink and Franz Kafka in its portrayal of the city as a distorted space within which the individual can become lost or disoriented. Her Prague is a layered, cyclical place in which spatial and temporal dimensions shift, trapping its living and the ghostly inhabitants in a grand circle game, one that plays out again and again in a number of distinctive settings or “stages” throughout the city centre. As such, the narrative that runs through the course of the three novels that comprise City of Torment—In Both Kinds, Puppets and Theta—is fragmented, kaleidoscopic and cumulative, peopled by characters that defy boundaries between life and death, human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate.

There is no succinct way to provide an outline of City of Torment as a cohesive work of fiction; it is akin to an organic, evolving entity that gradually takes on a life that even seems to confound its own author by the time we reach the third part. It was not conceived as a trilogy. Hodrová began the first novel, In Both Kinds, in December 1977 and finished it the following year, but, like the two novels that would follow, it could not be published until after the fall of the Communist government. This work, narrated by an omniscient third person narrator that occasionally takes on the direct voice of a character or an object, is centred around an apartment block across from the famed Olšany Cemetery, and those who reside in or pass through in the building and the graveyard. It opens near the end of the Second World War, as young Alice Davidovich throws herself from the window of the building’s fifth floor flat to avoid being taken away to the gas chambers, thus making a direct transit from the building to the cemetery. Alice, who will spend much of her after-life repeating a fruitless rush to meet her beloved Pavel, is the central female protagonist in this first book, and provides a critical yet curious continuity linking the women at the heart of each of the following texts.

A wide cast of eccentric characters populate the pages of In Both Kinds. The living, the dead (recently and long dead), and the few who have found themselves charmed (or cursed) with the ability to negotiate a space in between the two states, exist alongside one another. Souls trapped inside inanimate objects, or transformed into birds interact on both sides (with both kinds) and, naturally, many characters will make the passage from the world of the living to the community of the dead over the course of the novel. Their personalities and the events or activities marking their lived existences follow them to their graves. Clothing and objects—a sweater, a coat, a mother of pearl button, a Persian lamb muff—become talismans, symbols (but of what?). And woven into all of this are historical personages and events that appear or are referenced, exaggerated or confined by the mythology that has grown around them over time. It is a strange and wonderful ensemble piece, but hanging over it all is a disquieting sense of directionlessness.

This sensation becomes more pronounced in the second novel, Puppets (Living Pictures), composed between 1981 and 1983. Composed of one hundred and twenty-six “living pictures” or vignettes, this novel focuses closely on Sophie Souslik, a seamstress at the Realm of Puppets, and her parents and grandparents. Prague with its warren of streets and public squares forms a wider backdrop against which the action—much of it imagined, remembered and echoed—is staged. And staged is the appropriate word, Prague has become a city of marionettes. But something darker lurks here. Specific spaces and objects, like the courtyard with its rug beating rack or Sophie’s father’s office with its heavy black furniture and spinning chair, hold special powers and seem to become portals to painful personal and historical pasts, hidden or forgotten. There is a significant and welcome crossover of characters from In Both Kinds as well as new characters that sometimes act as alternate versions of previous actors. For example, Sophie is sometimes mistaken, at least briefly, for Alice Davidovich, and she also has a boyfriend named Pavel. Identities are frequently confused, experiences are repeated merging the familiar with the strange, and characters increasingly begin to change—humans metamorphize into insects and birds, while statues and household objects fall in love with people and long for release from their solid states. Still, an atmosphere of detachment colours the text.

With the third and final novel, Theta, composed between December 1987 and January 1990, the project that will become City of Torment begins to take form (the books will ultimately be published individually before being gathered together into a single volume). It opens with a variation on the first lines of Dante’s Inferno. Prague is now clearly depicted as its own special version of hell, a city of torment. The title, Theta, has a double meaning—it’s association with death, Thanatos, and its use, θ, as a proofreader’s symbol for “delete”—and as soon becomes apparent, “this novel” now exists an entity within itself. Here, the solitary, curious female protagonist, Alice and Sophie’s heir/doppelgänger, is Eliška Beránková (Lamb). But, not only is she less satisfied to stay within the confines of the text, Daniela Hodrová continually allows the boundary between herself and her creation to blur, even disappear. In a full metafictional turn, the author enters her own novel, and, at one point, Eliška steps out and tries to become a living being. Fiction and fact clash. Some new characters that initially appear to be entirely the product of the text grow more transparent. Others openly straddle the line between fact and fiction. For example, Hodorva introduces her real life husband, trying and failing to keep to the fictional name she assigns him. She grants Eliška imitations of her own life, consciously negotiating her two identities as the manuscript on her desk grows. Through her alter ego, Hodrová, the author, merges with the central figure who is descending into the city of torment in search of her own past.

If this all sounds like an overload—and these are densely packed works—Hodrová writes with a style that constantly refers back on itself, without being repetitive, so the reader does not lose track of who is who. Her narrative second guesses itself constantly (questioning meaning in parentheses) implying that nothing is certain, nothing is written in stone. There is, however, much more going on beneath the surface—historical, literary and place references that would likely be less of a mystery to those familiar with Prague—but for a visitor stumbling into her City of Torment with less background, the Appendix that closes out the work might not quite suffice. So I turned to Hodrová’s Prague, I See A City…, written after the completion of the trilogy, first as an alternative guidebook, but then released as a kind prologue/companion piece to her major work. A short, engaging, magical exploration of her hometown, this book is a perfect follow-up read, not only because it will fill in some of the biographic, geographic and historical details behind the novel, but because, written in 1990, in the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution it looks forward, however cynically, to new possibility, with hope of shedding the weight that had oppressed the previous decades.

As noted earlier, the first two novels of City of Torment are characterized by a certain flattened affect and sense of detachment. Composed during the restrictive Normalization period under the Communist government of the 1970s and 1980s, Hodrová was writing without knowing if, or when, it might be possible to release her fiction. It must have felt akin to writing into a void in a world where the dead seemed more alive than the living. The final novel was composed at the end of this period, a time of turmoil, and, when the government fell she stopped writing it, not knowing how a dynamic text informed by a city (or a city formed by a text) might now be altered. In Prague, I See a City… she says of this time:

A revolution of words, an almost fairground battle of words really did take place last year, though its tumult now reaches us only dimly. The city is once more slipping back into its sleep, its unconsciousness, its oblivion.

In those November days, something fundamental happened to the life of this city, to my life. I finished writing Theta at the very moment the battle broke out, for at that moment the city ceased, at least briefly, to be a city of torment.

Far from a conventional travel guide, Prague, I See a City… serves as an immediate refocusing of Prague after the fall of Communist Czechoslovakia and as an introduction to Hodrová’s world-view. As she wanders her city, as if in a dream, the boundaries between the real and the imagined blur. The city she sees is perhaps on the cusp of a new beginning, but the weight of the past, historical and literary will not pass lightly. She reflects on her own childhood, comments on the novels of her trilogy, and visits museums, St Vitus Cathedral, Prague Castle and other sites, evoking the lives of long dead kings and more recent political environments along the way. Published before the recent complete translation of the trilogy, this book could easily be read first, and for its own merits alone, but it is just as effective (if not more so) read as an extended (and exceptionally entertaining) epilogue that offers a fuller understanding of both Hodrová’s literary vision and her idiosyncratic relationship with Prague.

In Both Kinds is a revised translation by Véronique Firkusny and Elena Sokol (an earlier English translation by Tatiana Firkusny and Véronique Firkusny was published in 2015 as Kingdom of Souls). Puppets is translated by Elena Sokol and Véronique Firkusny, and Theta is translated by Elena Sokol. Prague, I See a City… is translated by David Short.

Daniela Hodrová’s City of Torment, Prague, I See a City… and Kingdom of Souls are all published by Jantar Publishing.

 

 

 

Given to thinking: Naked Thoughts by Róbert Gál

The impossible, until it proves possible, will always appear for a time to be wrong or inappropriate . The inappropriate, until it proves wrong, will always appear for a time to be possible. (XXII)

The aphorism is a literary form with a long history, reaching back to Classical philosophy. Over the centuries, the form—a sharp, memorable image speaking to some broader facticity—has appeared in literature, folklore, and scientific and political discourse. It is not enough to be witty and concise, an aphorism must also contain a truth, insight, or a piece of wisdom. It is much easier to describe than to create. But, for many, the aphorism, with a risk of appearing too clever or cliché, has no place in serious writing. What, then, is serious writing? Aphorisms, when well-crafted, hold a lasting appeal and, I would argue, that in a day when truths are suspect, the form is perhaps even more essential as an accessible opening for melancholy reflection.

And so, to my friend Róbert Gál. The Slovak writer has been proclaimed a modern master of the aphorism, a rather heavy mantle that he has worn with modesty for more than a decade. The form finds its way into all of his work, often providing more than a little poetic heavy lifting along the way. Now, with the release of Naked Thoughts from Black Sun Lit, Gál’s unadorned—yes, naked—gift for the form is on full display, presented against some of his idiosyncratic poetic prose.

Divided into five short sections, or three sets of numbered aphorisms set apart by two stylistically distinct interludes, Naked Thoughts begins, not unlike Gál’s recently released fictional work Agnomia, with the question of beginnings and endings. He appears to be setting a grounding principle—Life is a book of record, the first page of which is a stigma—and offering unsettling images of pathways, progress and temporal relativity. Toward the end of the long first entry he says: “To travel in time is pure recreation; to travel through space is an instinct born of a neurotic imbalance.” Where one finds oneself in the process of tracing the thoughts to follow, if in fact one finds oneself anywhere at all, is not prescribed.

While some of his ponderings in the “naked thoughts” segments are slightly longer, slipping into expected philosophical terrain, the brief—frequently sarcastic, wise, even beautiful—entries are, as one might expect, the ones that tend to stand out. These are aphorisms, after all:

He who seeks solutions has knots on his mind. (X)

The best school of life is a life misspent. (XXXIII)

To give life meaning means to make something of it deliberately—and thereby go against it. (XXXVIII)

Unspeaking silence supplies an act with its substance. (XLV)

or

Love is like scales at rest. It weighs nothing, but it carries weight. (LVIII)

The second and fourth sections, in contrast to the numbered aphorisms, are more poetic in form—in the first instance fragmentary, the latter primarily as a set of very short prose pieces—and yet, similar themes and ideas continue to percolate in these breaks. The first of these interludes, titled “in the bosom of indifferent virtues” which features an epigraph from Antonin Artaud, is perhaps the more curiously intriguing. It consists of three sets of fragments, some complete aphorisms, others incomplete thoughts, that have a subtle theatrical resonance. One begins:

She takes her dreams as the one thing that’s sure. And even though this certainty is not of negation, she does occasionally shake her head in doubt.

Within breaks in happiness.

Tacit contiguity.

He writes the terrible out of his system, she the beautiful out of hers.

The pros and cons of one con.

A failure is a first draft. And a first draft needs no motives.

This is a small book, a slender, pocket-sized volume, but it is not insubstantial. A thoughtfulness, an attentive sense of thinking out loud welcomes the reader into the meditative experience. Rhetorical inquiries, lexical truisms, wry musings, pointed barbs, and sly juxtapositions play out across the pages. Originally published in Slovak in 2014, translated by David Short, and featuring with the spare designs of Viktor Kopasz, this is the type of book that welcomes rereading, opening up fresh insights with each visit. Sometimes serious, sometimes light, Róbert Gál has the right feel and touch for this type of writing. His experience and comfort with the form is fully evident here in these “naked thoughts.” And, what is the harm in encouraging a little thinking? After all:

The only fear of one who is given to thinking is that he will see the light. (III)

Lost in the endlessly circular experience of Agnomia by Róbert Gál

Stories that begin at the end don’t need beginnings that would convict them of making a point, that is, of committing a falsehood. A falsehood that loses its falsehood, being turned inside out by the truth, as if that were possible at first sight. But in any subculture there are other rules and privileges accorded to others that permit them to fire off viruses at everyone else, as if all that was at issue were the odd truth. As indeed is the case.

After what seems an impossible delay, and an unthinkable series of detours, Agnomia by Slovakian writer Róbert Gál is finally available in English, only a decade after its original release. I originally encountered Róbert’s writing in 2015 with what was, at the time, his first published work of fiction in English, On Wing (Dalkey Archive). After that I slipped back  to what was, at the time, his only other available translated book, 2003’s more explicitly philosophical Signs & Symptoms (Twisted Spoon Press). I have to confess that these two volumes served as important inspirational triggers for my own writing, and Róbert has become part of my far-flung circle of literary friends. He is, however, stubbornly reticent to talk about his own work, so I have no advantage in crafting my response to this text which fits, chronologically speaking, subsequent to Signs & Symptoms and On Wing, holding thematic ties to both, but standing uniquely as an attempt to offer a solid, singular prose piece, albeit one that disrupts the lines between fiction, memoir, and philosophy.

Unfolding in a single, unbroken paragraph, Agnomia runs to just under 80 pages. The narrator is, as one would expect, a Slovak writer named Róbert Gál. But where the enigmatic author and his fictional alter ego converge and diverge is unclear; it’s not even clear that they know:

For the author wants to tell his tale, but doesn’t know where to begin, and he doesn’t even know if there is a tale to be told at all. He tries to get inside it, as if any entrance on his part would automatically coordinate with the context in which the tale is being played out. Coordinate with what is being played out, whatever that might be, on a parasitical basis, though it’s erroneously taken to be symbiotic.

This metafictional segue that arises in the early pages of the book is not sustained, the narrative “I” soon takes centre stage, such as it is, but he is an impatient, introspective, and alternately obsessive and ambivalent participant/observer/chronicler, inclined to lapse into philosophical musings. If the story does, in fact, have a beginning and end, it seems to be in New York City, with plenty of Prague in between. But this tale is circular rather than linear. Our author appears to be piecing together his account as he goes, fueled by memories and dreams, however ambiguous and unformed. The result is an meandering prose poem, regularly folding back on itself as if to take stock of its own ability to write itself into being, a post-punk Bernhard monologue set to an erratic thrash jazz soundtrack, playing out inside the mind of a mildly neurotic writer.

And that mindscape is a busy place. Old friends and passing acquaintances, former girlfriends, fellow artists, even the author’s parents pop in and out, arising in fractured conversations, their off-hand gestures observed, their habits briefly dissected, their otherness serving as springboards for the narrator’s digressions. The men are analyzed and compared, while women are allowed a certain magical leeway, like L., a former lover whose diaphanous nudes he’d “used in another book of aphorisms” (see Signs & Symptoms). But between them all, the narrator, seems to be navigating ghosts, remembering encounters, propelled by his own recurrent personal and philosophical obsessions. Nothing is fixed fast in time, lines of thought spin off in all directions, always circular in motion with a relentlessly engaging force.

Driving the narrative are several persistent themes: an underlying bitterness about the futility of being involved in the creative process, especially as a purveyor of words, and more explicitly as the citizen of a small, insignificant country like Slovakia (where “a poet is dead before he’s even born”) ; a fascination with the curious dynamics of romantic and sexual involvement; and a penchant to wander down metaphysical and epistemological wormholes, get tangled up in tautologies, and play with words:

I’m gazing at a tree-shrub hastily planted in a demolished square. I want to tie the moon in with it so that the image I’m creating looks fully formed. It’s a full moon. Is it fulfilled? My room is inhuman. It isn’t accessed by a door, but by clockwork, with a key poking from outside in. A bit like a deep intake of breath whose exhalation and exhaustion are identical. Music has an instant effect. That’s something it shares with a drug or a telling aphorism. Circular self-relocation, each time a total gyration round one of a pair of aching legs. Oneness with pain like a fly with a wing torn off. The whirling of a whirligig beetle. Extirpation of redundancy by stretching it on the rack of a thing that at that instant is no longer a problem.

The flow of accounts, anecdotes, aphorisms, and anxieties continues unabated from end to end of this slender, philosophical fiction, inviting and rewarding rereading—as is typical of all of Gál’s other writing. The abiding presence of his holy trinity of influences is increasingly evident with each re-encounter: Thomas Bernhard, Georges Bataille, and the wildly prolific and ambitious avant-garde composer John Zorn. Readers familiar with the author’s aphorisms and other published work will recognize strong cross currents running throughout Agnomia, but the tone here is lighter, the logical challenges more accessible, and more of Gál’s spirit and humour comes through. The “truth” of fiction? Who knows?

The “stories” or memories that form the loose, fractured framework of this book support what is, in fact, its beating heart—the endlessly unanswerable questions about the nature of thought, truth, and the possibility of adequately representing reality. The balance of narrative—fiction or memoir, it matters not at all—against the narrator’s musings and meditations is pitch perfect. An account of an evening out with a woman, for example, leads to further considerations:

“We’re going now,” I say. I might have helped her break free from certain stereotypes, but she didn’t need my help. She might have helped me break free from certain stereotypes, but I didn’t need her help. Repetition is reminiscing ahead. Ineffectual dreams don’t exist, so the unconscious is more effectual than consciousness. And since my pain doesn’t follow from the findings of philosophy, the question is: In what respect can clarification of the cause of my pain be aided by the findings of philosophy? In being accountable for anything’s enduring, since for what else can one be held accountable? This raises more questions: To what extent can the consciousness’s accountability for something enduring be its consistent monitoring of it, and to what extent is the monitoring of what endures even conceivable and admissible? Is every story a manipulation? And so forth.

At the end of the story we have more questions than answers and that’s the point. After all, what truths lie in the thoughts we think we have?  And is it possible to express them, or is all creative process dependent on our own inherent ignorance?

Agnomia by Róbert Gál is translated from the Slovak by David Short, and published by Dalkey Archive.