S.Y. Agnon: Why Literary Fiction Matters

Nothing To Lose:

        Not Actually a Review of To This Day by S.Y. Agnon

In reading S.Y. Agnon’s short final novel To This Day I suddenly understood more clearly why it is that reading literary fiction is such an important complement (if not antidote) to the all but overwhelming glut of blogs, newspapers, magazines, and commercial non-fiction that defines the intellectual marketplace of American culture today. In the voice of his protagonist, a young Palestinian man (that is, a Galician Jew then living in Palestine) caught in Berlin on the eve of World War I, Agnon writes:

This was the job of the press: to distinguish the living from the dead by reporting on the dead to the living. If you were alive you read the newspapers, through which the lifeblood of the times circulated: birth and marriage notices, anniversaries and obituaries, commodities and stock prices, and the like. Moreover, reading a newspaper spared you the trouble of forming your own opinion… In no time you crisscrossed the world and the world was yours for the price of a newspaper.” 

While surely exaggerated, surely tongue-in-cheek, the passage helped to sharpen for me my long-held belief that literary fiction asks of a reader something radically different from the many other more popular forms of print, something essential, more lasting, unique. Unlike with so much non-fiction these days, a novel by Agnon, Bernhard, Klíma, Kafka, Sebald, Toer, Bellow, Valenzuela, Naipaul, El Saadawi, Kawabata, Castellanos, Dostoevsky, Rodoreta, Müller, Conrad, Mulisch, Emecheta, Bolaño or Mahfouz will not permit you to be passive,  to be persuaded, but will confront you with a character or characters, a problem (ethical, moral, intellectual, spiritual, existential), a world (perhaps familiar or strange), then force you to think about it, to examine the evidence before you, to draw your own conclusions. It will ask you—after what is often a mighty struggle—to form your own opinion. 

Again I turn to Kundera who, in speaking of the novel as form, writes: “Creating the imaginary terrain where moral judgment is suspended was a move of enormous significance: only there could novelistic characters develop—that is, individuals conceived not as a function of some preexistent truth, as examples of good or evil, or as representations of objective laws in conflict, but as autonomous beings grounded in their own morality, in their own laws.” If you, the reader, choose to judge them you may, but “the novelist has nothing to do with it.”  That is the difference with literary fiction: the onus is on you, and you alone. You must decide, you must adjudicate or—if too moved, too shaken—you may recuse yourself instead, find a quiet place to think.

Part of what inspired this post, this tangent, was the realization that hardly a week seems to pass anymore when I don't have at least one intelligent adult tell me (usually as apology for not reading this blog) that he hasn’t the time for fiction anymore, that when he does find the time to read (in itself a mystery to me) it is almost always non-fiction: magazines, newspapers, blogs, and the latest from Gladwell, Friedman, Gilbert, Sedaris, and Larson. While I genuinely believe that all types of reading are good, and I mean all, I also believe that it is important to read widely, eccentrically, independently—independent, that is, of such cultural midwives and mediums as Oprah, Ellen, Slate, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.

Commercial non-fiction (even the more political/intellectual variety) is largely about trends (spotting them, mapping them, making readers feel a part of them—even creating them, when the conditions are right). As such it is not only (and for all its distinctive urgency) often highly ephemeral in nature (guaranteeing, as with the latest cut in clothes, that whatever it is or implies about the world it will soon be replaced) but is likely to be driven in its popularity less by some practical or aesthetic measure of “quality” or “value” than by corporate marketing and gain. My contention here is that the world needs more people who are less reliant on the marketplace and more reliant on themselves—on their own wisdom, intelligence, and humanity, readers who genuinely trust themselves to think.

Writers invested in complexity (as opposed to demagoguery and self-promotion) do justice to us all by refusing to package up the world and tie it neatly with a bow. It is why their work sells so poorly and is harder, often disturbing to read. While surely the best non-fiction is complex, forcing us to reckon hard with the matters at hand (and on our own brave and lonely terms), only literary fiction refuses to persuade. It—unlike every other form of prose—has nothing to gain, nothing to sell you, nothing to lose.

*lead photo is of Agnon’s study in his house in Talpiot neighborhood in

         Jerusalem, now a museum called Beit Agnon.

S.Y. Agnon was born Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes in Buczacz, Eastern Galicia (now Ukraine).  In 1908 he immigrated to Ottoman Palestine where he published his first story, “Agunot” under the pen name “Agnon”—a surname he adopted legally.  After an extended stay in Germany from 1913 to 1924, he returned to Jerusalem, where he remained until his death in 1970.  Winner of numerous Israeli prizes, including the Bialik Prize (1934), and the Israel Prize (1954, 1958), he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966. To This Day is published by the fabulous Toby Press.  Be sure to check out their list:  http://www.tobypress.com/

 Peter Adam Nash 

Argentina: The Dirty War

Departing at Dawn

(Viene clareando) by Gloria Lisé

Posterity forgets or acclaims.

              Walter Benjamin

Even the dedication page of Gloria Lisé’s 2005 novel about Argentina’s “Dirty War” is revealing:

 The story that follows is entirely fiction.

In memory of Isauro Arancibia, his brother,

Antilo Santillán, and Trinidad Iramain, whom I was never

able to meet, because they were killed without ever

being charged or having the right to a defense.

It is a juxtaposition that speaks volumes about Argentina, its politics and history, about the relationship between fact and fiction, and about the challenge to novelists like Lisé to make the world real to us—again and again and again.

The 19^th Century Argentinian author and exile, Domingo F. Sarmiento, best known for his protracted intellectual struggle against tyranny in Argentina, against dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, believed that his greatest enemy was not De Rosas and his kind, but silence and complicity. It was his determination as a writer “to stir emotions, to persuade, to verbalize the collective hatred and instigate a rebellion based not on bullets but on ideas.”* Such it is clear—were I to add “to remember” and “to heal”—was Gloria Lisé’s aim in her smart and affecting novel Departing At Dawn, the story of a politically indifferent medical student named Berta Cristina del Pino who, following the state-sponsored murder of her lover, is drawn headlong into the maelstrom of “La Guerra Sucia” or “The Dirty War”.

In 1976, when this novel begins, the government of President Isabel Peron has just been toppled by the right-wing military junta of Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla, a coup that ushered in “el Proceso” or “the Process of National Reorganization,” a seven-year reign of terror unmatched—even by Argentinian standards—in its brutality and repression.  Declassified documents cite an official estimate of 22,000 people killed or “disappeared” between 1975 and 1978.** Early in the novel Berta herself is forced to flee to the countryside, out of fear for her life, where she renews her acquaintance with her mother’s estranged family—with her frog-like aunt, Avelina, and her uncle, Tristán Nepomuceno, “el negro,” who spends his time collecting old nuts and bolts and serenading his favorite snails.

Departing At Dawn, what Luisa Valenzuela calls “a beautifully simple, poetic story of solidarity and love,” is in essence a story about a young woman’s search for identity and connection in a country traumatized by despotism and violence.  As translator Alice Weldon puts it in her helpful Afterword, “For Argentines Viene clareando creates connections between past and present, between public and private, and the way in which even the most apolitical citizen has been forced to confront the exigencies of political life.”

Gloria Lisé (March 22, 1961- ) is an Argentine writer, lawyer, professor, and an accomplished musician. She was fifteen years old in 1976 when a coup d'état overthrew the government of Isabel Martinez de Perón. She is the author of Con los Pies en el Escenario: Trayectoria del Grupo Arte Dramático y su Director Salo Lisé (2003), a book based on the life of her father, and Viene Clareando (2005), which was chosen by Argentina’s National Commission for the Protection of Public Libraries for distribution to the country’s public libraries. (The Feminist Press, Wikipedia)

Departing at Dawn is published in English by The Feminist Press, New York.  Be sure to check out their remarkable list. http://www.feministpress.org/

*I am grateful to Ilan Stavans for his introduction to Sarmiento’s extraordinary Facundo or, Civilization and Barbarism (Penguin Classics).  Part history, sociology, political commentary, and fiction, it is  a book I highly recommend.

** Political Injustice: Authoritarianism and the Rule of Law in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, Anthony W. Pereira, p. 134, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

Peter Adam Nash

Poland, 1945

Jerzy Andrzejewski, Ashes and Diamonds (1948)

As a historian, there are particular moments in European history that I especially want to understand; among them, preeminent even, is the passage of Eastern Europe from Nazi Occupation to Soviet-dominated governments.  What events precipitated the defeat of nationalist aspirations in Poland (for example) during the critical years between the end of the war and the establishment of the Polish United Workers' Party under Boleslaw Bierut? The facts aren't difficult to come by; what is wanted is the feeling of these years, impressions of the primary participants in the nation's reluctant embrace of Stalinism, a sense of the human cost to a nation already dismantled by the Nazi Occupation, Hans Franks' systematic terror, and the extermination of Polish Jews.  As usual, one must turn to works of literary art to gain insights, however limited, into the tragedy of post-war Poland. 

Often the 'whys' of history are neglected in the standard textbooks. We might say, for example, that given the horrors of Nazism, the Soviet Union was a natural ally for Polish nationalists who survived the camps (non-Jewish Poles were sent to Arbeitslager or German slave labor camps like Gross-Rosen, which figures prominently in Ashes and Diamonds) and were liberated by the Red Army.  But one suspects that this explanation is too simple; the truth, it would appear from Andrzejewski's brilliant and compelling novel, is that men and women were drawn into the sphere of Soviet influence, seduced by promises of brotherhood and Polish solidarity, for all sorts of reasons--out of patriotism, despair, personal ambition, greed, and idealism.  Andrzejewski's remarkably well-drawn characters embrace or reject communism only in part because of their experiences in the war; a great strength of this novel is that it depicts the power of an individual's will even at the most "world historical" of moments.



Barracks at Gross-Rosen



At the beginning of Ashes and Diamonds, the war has just ended--or has it? One of Andrzejewski's narrative talents is the blurring of time.  The novel transpires over some undefined period of days or weeks, and the events of the war, once so visceral to its survivors, are now receding from the memories of some characters (by choice) and defining the actions of others, especially those who hope to create a communist nation--a brotherhood of equals--in Poland. In other words, history isn't experienced in the same way by every person, and this is not only true, but a brilliant novelistic observation that enriches and deepens Andrzejewski's great book.

The deftness with which Andrzejewski sketches his characters is remarkable.  During a briefing that will lead to the murder of a member of the Communist Party by a Polish nationalist, the Colonel, who has ordered the assassination, calms a young man's qualms by saying:

"We're living and fighting under very difficult and complex circumstances. But the war years, which were the testing years for everyone, have taught us that things have to be regarded in their elementary, basic set up. There's no time for subtle discrimination. If there had to be any discrimination, it must be simple and clear. Good is good, and evil evil. You agree?"

But of course nothing is ever so clear.  For the socialist Podgorski, the world isn't divided into Manichean absolutes but gray with ethical questions and humane concerns; for the ambitious Mayor Swiecki the tragedy of Poland has served only to feed his ego--a mediocre man in peacetime, Swiecki remakes himself into the perfect Party toady, a yes-man for the cynical and brutal.  For Kossecki, at one time a prisoner at Gross-Rosen, the aftermath of the war is fraught with fear and self-loathing for what he allowed himself to become in the camp.  Opportunists like Drewnowski and Pieniazek (yes the names will give you fits!) have no allegiance to party or nation, while others, like the richly- drawn Communist Szczuka, have complex feelings about the meaning of commitment in the face of Poland's apocalypse (six million Poles, including over 90% of Polish Jews, perished in the war, out of a pre-war population of 35 million). 

Among Andrzejewski's many narrative talents is the subtlety with which he moves his story forward.  Much of the action of the book takes place in the Monopole, the central hotel and restaurant in the town of Ostrowiec, an establishment previously owned, we are offhandedly informed, "by Lewkowicz...one of the wealthiest men in Ostrowiec, [who] died with the rest of his family at Treblinka." Slomka, the new manager of the Hotel Monopole, has been the beneficiary of Nazi racial policies, but no further mention of this fact is made. In 1945 there is emerging a new order, a world that is a blank slate for the ambitions, idealism, and cruelty of every man and woman. When the new world (of communism or of Polish nationalism? That remains to be seen, at least in the novel) has been created, will it be "only ashes and confusion" or "a star-like diamond./The dawning of eternal victory?"  [from the epigram by Cyrpian Norwid].  We know the answer of course--Poland's story since the war has been far more a tale of ashes than of diamonds.  And Andrzejewski as well seems to have been fully aware of the historical situation of his country:

"The fact is I don't know what this new Poland is, just yet."
"How can I put it in a few words? It's difficult, that's probably the best way to describe the tangle of conflicts and contrasts which we're faced with at every step and which we certainly shan't resolve tomorrow or the day after. ...the war is over, but the fight here is only beginning." 

Ashes and Diamonds was the third film in Andrzej Wajda's great trilogy which included A Generation (1954) and the unforgettable Kanal (1956) [Ashes and Diamonds appeared in 1958].  I saw the entire trilogy over one long, rather depressing weekend while in college.  Andrzejewski wrote the screenplay for Ashes and Diamond; the films are available through Janus and provide an emotional immersion in both wartime and post-war Polish history.

Ashes and Diamonds, the novel, is brought to us by the wonderful folks at Northwestern University Press whose series of European Classics includes novels by Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Vladimir Voinovich, and the incomparable Heinrich Boll, who has written the introduction of Andrzejewski's novel. 

http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/Home/AllTitles/tabid/86/Default.aspx


George Ovitt (4/16/13)

Haitian Alphabet: One Soul’s Rising

Tired of zombie stories, movies, television series, and video games? If so, try Haitian Jean-Euphèle Milcé’s searing short novel Alphabet of the Night. It may be the antidote you need. Set in the smoke-blackened capital city of Port-au-Prince during the dying days of the Duvalier dictatorship, in the very land where the zombie (zonbi in Haitian Creole) was born, this story—for all its zombies and voodoo, for all its bloodshed and violence—offers little titillation for those weaned on Hollywood, Max Brooks, and AMC. What it offers instead is a portrait of a gravely wounded man and nation haunted by corpses, the missing, and the walking, still-talking dead. 

After the daylight murder of his lover, Lucien, Jewish shopkeeper Jeremy Assaël decides to leave his cursed and lawless homeland for good, but not before discovering the fate of his childhood friend and one-time lover, a mulatto named Fresnel, who has mysteriously disappeared. By the time the novel opens, the Duvalier family has ruled the country for nearly thirty years through a strategy of corruption and terror: an estimated 30,00o Haitians have been murdered by ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier’s security forces alone, thousands ‘disappeared’, and tens of thousands more exploited, terrorized, and finally forced to flee the country with nothing—quite literally—but the clothes on their backs.

Jeremy Assaël’s quest to learn the fate of his missing friend and lover takes him on a journey through the hell of contemporary Haiti in the course of which he encounters a broad sampling of the Devil’s disciples—government henchmen, foreign aid workers, Catholic priests and Brothers, Protestant missionaries, Rotarians, and even a German Consul General.  Commencing his journey on All Souls’ Day, an important Catholic holiday of alms-giving and prayers for the dead trapped in purgatory (Dante, by contrast, begins his journey through Hell on the day before Good Friday), the narrator has first to make his way through the raucous celebrations, celebrations which, while ostensibly Catholic, are in practice something much much more. Indeed in Haiti, All Souls’ Day has a special resonance for the descendants of African slaves, mixed with voodoo, as it is, and informed by the deep-seeded fear that one’s deceased loved ones have becomes zombies, dead people who cannot get across to lan guinée (literally Guinea, or West Africa), the leafy-green paradise of their ancestors. Only through the intervention of a voodoo priest and the execution of an elaborate series of rituals can the dead be so freed.

Near the end of the novel, the narrator himself meets a hougan, a voodoo priest, who helps him to complete his quest. For, like his black compatriots, Jeremy Assaël yearns to discover—if only in a secular sense—if his lover, Fresnel, has become a zonbi or crossed safely to lan guinée.

Jean-Euphèle Milcé, born in 1969 in Haiti, readily identifies himself as an ex-islander. Having qualified in Applied Linguistics at the State University of Haiti, he trained in information and library management. Jean-Euphele Milce taught Creole Literature and was in charge of the main National Library of Haiti. In 2000 he settled in Neyruz, Switzerland with his wife and children. Alphabet of the Night is published by Pushkin Press. http://www.pushkinpress.com/

Related recommendations:

The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, C.L.R. James

Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti, Amy Wilentz

Travesty in Haiti: A True Account of Christian Missions, Orphanages, Fraud, Food Aid and Drug Trafficking, Timothy T. Schwartz, Ph.D.

All Souls’ Rising, Madison Smartt Bell

Peter Adam Nash

Spain: The Windmills of Sergio Prim

The Scale of Maps

 “A Knight Errant going mad for a good reason— there is neither pleasure nor merit in that. The thing is to become insane without a cause and have my lady think: If I do all this when dry, what would I not do when wet?” 

                                                              Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

 “We shall do our best to avoid the fatal error of looking for so-called ‘real life’ in novels,” declares Vladimir Nabokov in the first of his six-part lecture series on Don Quixote.  “Let us not try and reconcile the fiction of facts with the facts of fiction. Don Quixote is a fairy tale, so is Bleak House, so is Dead Souls. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenin are supreme fairy tales. But without these fairy tales the world would not be real. A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.” This admonition is fitting not only as a description of the dazzling surreality of Belén Gopegui’s lyrical novel The Scale of Maps (La escala de los mapas), a story as fairy a tale as “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” and “Snow White,” but—perhaps more aptly—its main character, Sergio Prim, a humble, ‘prematurely old’ geographer/ philosopher with ‘a cracked mental map,’ is nothing if not a modern (more modern) Don Quixote adrift amidst the windmills of 20^th century Madrid. And, as in Don Quixote, the Spain depicted in The Scale of Maps  bears little resemblance to the familiar, geographical Spain we know, which is certainly a part of the novel’s charm. So unwonted, so unfamiliar is the story’s landscape, that one feels one has stumbled into some byzantine tale by Nabokov or Borges, say, Ada, or Ardor or “The Garden of Forking Paths.”

Quickened by hallucinations, pricked and bewildered by his own Dulcinea, a flighty fellow geographer name Brezo Varela, Sergio Prim struggles daily through the fog of his brilliant, anxious, sometimes paranoid madness to map his way to a place, a ‘hollow,’ a gap between time and space, in which love—his late-term love of Brezo—is forever safe from harm. Just as Don Quixote waxes poetic over Dulcinea’s beauty, praising her lips as coral, her teeth as pearls, her neck as alabaster, so too does Sergio Prim exult in the manifold wonders of his baffling, beautiful Brezo—his ‘little automatic umbrella,’ his ‘sea-swell,’ his ‘love without a perch.’  

Alternating deftly between first-, second-, and third-person perspective, the novel that unfolds between these covers is a marvel for its unpredictability and strangeness, for the daring versatility of Gopegui’s prose. Even at its most elusive, most confounding, its imagery and language work a kind of magic on the senses, the mind, propelling one swiftly through this adroit and bewitching tale.

Belén Gopegui,  Belén Ruiz de Gopegui, was born in the city of Madrid in 1963 as the daughter of the aerospace scientist, Luis Ruiz de Gopegui. Belén chose to study in Madrid at the Autonomous University of Madrid where she studied for her degree in Law, but before she even finished her studies, she had already decided that what she truly wanted to be was a writer. Once she finished her degree, she began her career by collaborating in the literary sections of a number of publications, including 'El Sol', for which she carried out interviews. She continued working in this manner up until the publication of her first novel, La escala de los mapas, in 1993. This novel was published by Anagrama and was met with great success, winning the Tigre Juan and the Ibero-American Santiago del Nuevo Extremo Prizes. An ardent communist, she has written numerous articles about Cuba.

She has been praised for the maturity of her prose and literary approach, her very original narrative structures, the brilliance of her metaphors, through which she shows a more than superficial understanding of the world, her scientific vocabulary, and her intimate and poetic character.*

The Scale of Maps, translated by Mark Schafer, is published by City Lights Books www.citylights.com

*www.classicspanishbooks.com 

Peter Adam Nash