two fragmentary fictions
How did Kalb endure
the inconclusive events in his brain? The word-fragments
that were caught incessantly by his ear,
his absorption of idiosyncratic time, bits
of incidents, snippets of events? What made
him suffer through this uninterrupted
series of fragments? What made him
experience these agonizing circumstances as
normal?
—Gerhard Roth, The Will to Sickness
Gerhard Roth Die Wille zur Krankheit (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1973). Translated by
from the German by Tristram Wolff as The Will to Sickness (Providence, Rhode
Island:
Burning Deck, 2006).
Eva Sjödin Det inre av Kina (Stockholm: Norstedts
Förlag, 2002). Translated from the Swedish
by Jennifer Hayashida as Inner China (Brooklyn: Litmus Press,
2005)
Made up of 99
paragraphs and a short section of 34 “notes,” The Will to Sickness tells the story—if you can describe this as a
“story”—of a man named Kalb who wanders about an unnamed city encountering
various visual and visceral sensations that, in their ability to set off a
series of reactions in his brain, are ultimately painful, and lead to his
recognition that he is undergoing the “symptoms” of some strange sickness. The
astute reader recognizes the “symptoms” quite easily as those of a man of the
edge of despair, a man whose connection with others is limited primarily to
unsatisfactory meetings with prostitutes, waitresses, barkeeps and others he
accidentally encounters on the streets, in restaurants and offices.
The financially and emotionally
impoverished Kalb spends most of his time alone in his room or simply
wandering, like the hero of Hamsun’s Hunger,
following various individuals and, occasionally, even attempting some vague
sort of communication with them—all to no avail. Kalb’s most daring
interchanges include an occasion in a restaurant where he approaches a man at
another table, asking for his glass; when the puzzled man nonetheless reaches
for it, Kalb “boxes he ears” and is dragged to the door by the waiter. In another restaurant a middle-aged woman
nods to him, and as Kalb sits down at her table she puts her hand upon his knee.
Later, while drinking cognac on a sofa, the two suddenly undress each other and
engage in sex.
By this time in Roth’s surrealist-like
tale, however, we recognize that what seems to be happening may in fact be a
hallucination, for as the narrator has told us, “Kalb hallucinates reality.” By
the end of this short fiction, what we formerly thought might be a mimetic
description has slipped into utter fantasy:
Through the telescope of his
isolation he examined the image of the street.
Today’s dream came in green and
red. The elderly lady hauled a jug of milk
along the sidewalk, overtook and
tread upon her own shadow, which ac-
companied her anew immediately thereafter,
on the other side of her body.
THE MOST TEDIOUS DETAILS ARE THE
MOST LIKE DREAMS.
Two flies buzzed about angrily. He
engaged them in psychic congress….
Combined with
Roth’s medical-like examination of Kalb’s surroundings and the author’s
inclusion in the text of various scientific terms, The Will to Sickness presents, in fact, a dream-like reality that
may suggest a complex subtext, but also self-mockingly recognizes itself to be
the delusions of a fláneur, an
aimless intellectual trifler.
Accordingly, any great significance we
seek in these 99 paragraphs, given its completely fragmentary structure, is of
our own making. But that is exactly why this fiction is so compelling. For we
cannot help ourselves: it is almost impossible not to attempt to connect the
pieces with which one is presented and discern a significance in their whole.
Of course, that is exactly what we do in every day of our living experiences;
we make meaning often where there is none. Is that a sickness? Yes, the
symptoms are clear; as with Kalb “the physiognomy of objects [touch] us” just
as the safe societally-condoned distances at which we remove ourselves from
others equally draws us toward them, for it is only through our connection with
the world and one another than we can comprehend who, what and where we
are. Man not only desires meaning, he
demands it, must have it in order to survive. It is a grand sickness, and
living life is to accept that one is willingly infected with the disease.
Swedish author
Eva Sjödin’s Inner China may at first
appear to be a short narrative poem. The publishers, however, describe it as a
“tale,” and I am inclined, despite the work’s obvious poetic aspirations, to
agree with them. Like Austrian-born Roth’s The
Will to Sickness, Sjödin’s work is a fragmentary fiction. The two works are
similar in other ways as well. As in Roth’s work, Inner China is a story of sickness, different kinds of sickness.
The central narrator is a young girl whose sister Edith is obviously retarded.
The mother, evidently, is a alcoholic (or suffering some other drug or drugs)
who spends most of her life in bed, coming only to life when she can bed a
passing lover. Forced to be the caretaker of her sister, the young narrator
creates a world outside of the home—in the forest, fields, deer and other
habitats around their troubled house—a world apart from the emptiness within
her supposed domicile. Creating a fantastical world of lost children amid
dangers of kidnap and death, the young girl “plays” the game of Tehseng and
Laiseng, two imaginary Chinese children subject to various rules and
regulations of her creative imagination.
Like Kalb, these two explore a world of
visual and physical sensuality as among the rocks and fir trees they eat dirt,
dog biscuits, worms and other debris. Although the two are never sexually
accosted, they are approached by a man and sense sexual danger everywhere in
the rural world they inhabit. Neighboring children mock Edith, and in one
instance, as they attend a village festival, an old woman appears to attempt to
lure Edith away, but just in time her protector-sister steers her in another
direction, warning her never to trust anyone in the town.
Ultimately, welfare workers, recognizing
that the often sick child is not being properly cared for, take her from the
home. Almost at the same moment, the young girl’s dog grows ill, and she if
forced to carry it to the village veterinarian, who recognizing it is beyond
saving, mercifully kills it. The girl takes the body home, forcing her
unwilling mother out of bed to watch her bury it.
The fiction ends with the young girl
caring for her own now child-like mother almost as she has previously had to
care for Edith, forcing a bit of porridge into her Mother’s mouth while the
older woman whimpers: “I-do-not-want-to-I-do-not-want-to.” She too has become
another being who the young girl must take into her the unknown terrain of
“inner china.”
I should qualify my statements above,
however, by saying that this summary represents my reading. Others will take these same poetically fragmentary
paragraphs and weave the tale together in another pattern, willing these
evocative germs of meaning into another kind of “sickness unto death.”
Los
Angeles, January 21, 2008
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