by Tim Parks
The girl’s family is recognisably that of the earlier novel. There is an absent mother who exercises legal guardianship from South America. Vindictively, she restricts her daughter’s contact with the divorced father to a minimum. But at least he has a name now: Johannes. Sick, close to death, Johannes is granted the right to take his daughter on a two-week cruise. The process of getting to know him will also be a farewell. In so far as SS Proleterka is a beautiful as well as a most disturbing novel, it is so because, precisely through the medium of its determined restraint, it reads as a passionate love letter, not to the Slav sailors, but to Johannes.
Johannes is not an easy person to know. Deprived early of the family business and fortune, all spent to nurse his twin brother through an incurable illness, he is a man who has lost the core of his life and, with it, all social potency. His ‘expression is always the same, sad and distant’.6 Johannes is a member of a Swiss corporation, or guild, a kind of ancient Rotary Club, dating back to 1336. For years the only meeting permitted with his daughter was at a traditional guild procession. As always in Jaeggy, intimacy is suffocated in a straitjacket of tradition, as if in a vendetta protracted against us by our ancestors.
We paraded together through the streets of a city on a lake. He with his tricorne on his head. I in the Tracht, the traditional costume with the black bonnet trimmed in white lace. The black patent leather shoes with the grosgrain buckles. The silk apron over the red of the costume, a red beneath which a dark bluish-purple lurked. And the bodice in damasked silk. In a square, atop a pyre of wood, they were burning an effigy. The Böögg. Men on horseback gallop in a circle around the fire. Drums roll. Standards are raised. They were bidding the winter farewell. To me it seemed like bidding farewell to something I had never had. I was drawn to the flames. It was a long time ago.7
It is the guild that has arranged the cruise on the Proleterka for its members, a collection of ageing, well-to-do Swiss. ‘Stubborn and self righteous’,8 geriatric and vain, entirely comfortable with their customs and language, the guild members epitomise the forces that are constantly denying the young girl contact with real life, supposedly ‘for her [own] good. A venomous expression … You ought to watch your back when listening to diktats of this kind. When you are a hostage to good. A prisoner of good.’9
Johannes, however, is endearing because he is not quite like the other members of the guild. Since he married an Italian, lost his wealth and then his wife, he has been tolerated rather than fully accepted. Above all, although this cruise was to be his one opportunity for getting to know his daughter, and despite specific instructions from his ex-wife to keep her in check, he doesn’t prevent the girl from spending much of the time, and particularly the nights, with the sailors.
‘Well, doesn’t her father see? Doesn’t Johannes see his daughter’s behaviour? It is unverschämt, shameless. We are in the dining room. Johannes’s best friend looks with commiseration at the corner table. The neglected table. Johannes is absent and indifferent. He tries to tell me something, I should not leave the table. Immediately his voice dies away. Without conviction. Do what you like, say his clear and wounded eyes. The room sways. The waiters bring the hors d’oeuvres. They too no longer want anything to do with the passengers of the guild. Politely, I get up, excuse myself. The dining room is a prison.’10
Yet the kind of experience the girl has outside the prison of guild protection is hardly more positive: ‘Nikola shoves me violently into the cabin. They must not see us. The captain can know, but he must not see us. He locks the door. He is violent on the bunk too …’11 Submitting to her first sexual experience, the girl’s mind is seized by memories of a school friend who advocated such brutal encounters, so that the crucial moment is somehow stolen from her. ‘I was behaving a little as if she were present. She was taking notes.’12
Ostensibly on the cruise to get to know her beloved if vacant father, the girl is distracted by the crewmen, the call to life, distracted within that distraction by another’s imagined reportage of events, then unceremoniously passed on to another man for sex when the first has had enough. This infallible mechanism of malign substitutions is beautifully captured when, on a visit to the Acropolis, another member of the guild insists that the girl must make every effort to be with her father and remember him. To aid that process he offers to take a photograph:
I walk among the ruins and try to remember. But it is the previous night [with the second mate] that appears. Johannes’s friend laughs. His eyes are astute slits. The vegetation is in bloom, splendor blazing in the fields on its way to withering. To brushwood. At Athens, in the Acropolis, Johannes’s friend comes up with his camera. ‘Du wirst diese Reise mit deinem Vater nicht Vergessen.’ I was remembering the Acropolis photographed by him.13
Later, in the book’s cruellest twist, long after the end of the cruise and her father’s death, the narrator will receive a letter from a man who claims that he, and not Johannes, is her natural father. At the age of ninety, with unforgivable complacency, he reveals this secret, he claims, out of Wahrheitsleibe, love of the truth, when the only truth the book is establishing is the perverse process by which the life we desire is obscured and denied to us. Language itself is complicit: ‘Two words accompany me like a refrain: “living” and “experience”. People imagine words in order to narrate the world and to substitute it.’14 In one passage the book brings together the moment of learning to write with the birth of conscious memory. It is the beginning of a process of falsification, of stylish calligraphy. Hence the immense, even tortuous caution of Jaeggy’s prose.
‘The healthy’, as Emil Cioran remarked, ‘always disappoint’.15 Jaeggy, who does not disappoint, creates a mind, a vision, that is nothing if not unwell. Deprived of intimacy, or indeed of all that we would normally consider as making up a life – partner, work, friends – her narrator is disturbingly intimate with the inanimate world; she experiences rooms, objects, landscapes, as alive, malignant and predatory. She possesses the various certificates and documents of her father’s dead parents as if this might keep a possible vendetta at bay. She imprisons her dead mother’s piano in a small room, where no one can see or play it, as though visiting on the instrument a revenge for her own suffocated childhood. Nothing is ever properly past, nothing ever effectively exorcised. Some critics have imagined that behind all this lies a never-declared Freudian trauma. Such a reading is banal. The ‘sickness’ is absolutely structural to this mind’s experience of the world and of language. And if Jaeggy is convincing, it is because, aside from the psychology of her narrator and the fine intrigue of her story, even the ‘healthiest’ reader will recognise, in some part of himself, that there are moments when experience, or its absence, assumes this form.
As for any writer with a highly individual, determinedly controlled style, Jaeggy’s main enemy is mannerism, the complacent repeating of oneself. And in the struggle against mannerism her main ally is plot. Again and again, in SS Proleterka, she finds the twist that will confirm and communicate her vision without simply repeating her ideas. At Johannes’s funeral, not long after the cruise, the proprietors of the hotel where he has been living, people who, beneath a veneer of politeness, despised and exploited him, send ‘a sumptuous wreath of flowers’.16 Johannes’s daughter, who has been passive throughout the funeral arrangements, suddenly reacts:
No, I said. Send it back. I did not want the wreath. Miss Gerda flushed. I could not, I could not send a wreath back. Johannes’s daughter can not send a wreath of flowers back, she says. According to Miss Gerda, Johannes ought to decide whether to accept the wreath or not. And Johannes has left no instructions about accepting flowers or not. Reluctantly, Miss Gerda takes a last look at the pompous wreath with the purple ribbon and the showy gilt lettering. She lets the staff take it away.17
In stark contrast to this gaudy wreath, the daughter, prevented by Miss Gerda, executor of her father’s will, from kissing Johannes’s corpse, has placed a nail in his pocket, ‘a little piece
of iron’18 to accompany him in the fire of cremation. Though Jaeggy would never be so explicit, it is not hard to imagine the extravagant wreath with its gilt lettering as an image of the prose she has rejected, the nail burning in the corpse’s pocket (she does not place it in his hands as there ‘it would have been too visible’)19 as emblematic of something she aspires too. If Jaeggy’s novels are always short, it is because the combination of the spare, often paratactic sentence with an extraordinary density of thought, plot and emotion would become unbearable if extended.
To ask a translator to reproduce the prose that has gone through the purging fire of Jaeggy’s rejection of all public rhetoric and easy sentiment is to risk contamination. As any translator knows, language constantly invites us towards the commonplace, the standard, the conventional flourish. Overall Alastair McEwen is admirable in avoiding this. He has the courage to keep Jaeggy’s unsettling tense switches, he appreciates that one of the book’s pleasures lies in the reader’s effort to imagine the mind that could make such strange leaps. A little bent, perhaps, a little less sharp, as is inevitable, Jaeggy’s nail is nevertheless driven home.
fn1 The original title is simply Proleterka. It thus presents itself to the Italian reader as one of those foreign and incomprehensible impositions. To add the reassuring SS to explain the word for the American reader indicates a sad loss of nerve on the part of the publishers.
Tales Told by a Computer
* * *
[Hypertext]
AMONG THE MANY things the computer is supposed to change in our lives, one of the most profound, if the change were really to occur, is our experience of narrative. For the way we tell ourselves stories – our sense of the opening, development and closure of a plot – still largely determines the way we think of ourselves and of our progress, or otherwise, between cradle and grave.
We are not talking here about the e-book, the portable screen on which, page by page, traditional narrative can be read. That, in the end, offers only a more economic, if less attractive, way of giving us what we already have. Perhaps the only reasons to welcome the e-book are the possibility it offers to save on school texts, to travel light with a number of volumes in electronic form, and above all, for those like myself whose eyesight is not what it was, the possibility of choosing a larger type size than any printed book will offer.
No, the development that seeks to revolutionise the nature of storytelling is the so-called hypertext narrative, a product that, whether stored on CD or downloaded from the internet, can be experienced only through the computer, since access to the many choices and variations it offers can only be achieved through the use of keyboard and mouse. It cannot properly exist on the printed page. All over the world, websites and university courses promulgate and promote the phenomenon. Novelists of the stature of John Barth and Robert Coover have written enthusiastic essays and given lectures on how to become hypertext narrators. In an ‘Endtroduction’ to Katherine Hayles’s new book Writing Machines the editor remarks: ‘It’s no wonder that one of the chief fetishes our society has produced is the book. But bibliomaniacal impulses are mutating in this world of multi-, trans- and re-mediation, and we need to establish new categories for describing the emotional and physical relationships readers have with what (and how) they read.’1 fn1
The hypertext narrative comes in so many forms that it is difficult to consider its potential with reference to just a few examples. All the same, two fundamental innovations immediately present themselves: the hypertext is free to mix the written word, whether narrative, poetry or essay, with sound, static images or even cinematic effects, and to deliver the text at whatever speed and in whatever form the author chooses. This is such a dramatic extension of the bookish tradition of illustration and illumination that in many cases the written part of the hypertext may lose much of its sense if separated from the dynamic within which it is presented.
However, by far the most revolutionary development of the hypertext has to do with the succession in which sections of written text are read. Hypertext dispenses with the linearity that invites us to proceed from page one of a book through to the end, front cover to back. Pages are not numbered and one cannot ‘turn’ them. Instead we are invited to use the computer mouse to click on any of a number of links (‘hot’ words or images in text on the computer screen or on the margin of it) to proceed to a (not the) following screen.
It is clear that with this innovation each reader’s experience, at least in so far as the trajectory of plot or the accumulation of the work’s reflections is concerned, will be different. He or she is obliged to construct a personal route through the text, and this largely at random and often without knowing how many pages there are, or whether there is still more to read or not. ‘The traditional narrative time-line’, wrote Coover, who makes it clear that he has a personal investment in ‘fictions that challenge linearity’, ‘vanishes into a geographical landscape or exitless maze, with beginnings, middles and ends being no longer part of the immediate display.’2
Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, or a Modern Monster is an example of a fairly early hypertext (1995) which, in every respect but linearity, remains fairly close to the print-bound novel; it has only a very few illustrations and no sound or cinematic effects. An opening image, comparable to a book cover, shows an old-fashioned, Da Vinci-style drawing of the human body, a woman’s, above the title ‘Patchwork Girl, by Mary Shelley and herself’. The reader is invited to click on various body parts or various areas of an anatomically represented brain. In each case he will see different sections of text varying from a brief sentence to a full, traditional page, many of which offer further links. What eventually emerges is a sequel, or addition, to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Taking her cue from the unhappy student’s dilemma over whether or not he should make a mate for his monster, Jackson stitches together pieces of Shelley’s work with convincing pages of pastiche to tell, for example, the stories of those whose corpses yield the body parts for the gruesome experiment and the story of the monstrous girl herself, her fugitive anonymous life as an outcast and freak and her erotic adventures. All of this in a decidedly nineteenth-century prose:
My left leg belonged to Jane, a nanny who harbored under her durable grey dresses and sensible undergarments a remembrance of a less sensible time: a tattoo of a ship and the legend, Come Back To Me. Nanny knew some stories that astonished her charges, and though the ship on her thigh blurred and grew faint and blue with distance, until it seemed that the currents must have long ago finished their work, undoing its planks one by one with unfailing patience, she always took the children to the wharf when word came that a ship was docking, and many a sailor greeted her by name.
My leg is always twitching, jumping, joggling. It wants to go places. It has had enough of waiting.3
At every point the text insists on an analogy between the patchwork nature of the girl’s body and the fragmented and non-linear hypertext, between her difficulty in establishing an identity from the many lives that have formed her and ours as we click back and forth looking for a thread to follow, often finding ourselves frustratingly confronted by a screen we have already read, unsure how to proceed or when to stop. In this regard, and like almost all hypertexts, Patchwork Girl seems obsessively conscious of its experimental medium, which it is eager to present in a positive light as a heightened form of realism, a metaphor for modern consciousness and, in this case, something peculiarly feminine, if not feminist. Digressions on the usually female task of quilting, for example, run alongside sections such as this:
Arranging these patched words in an electronic space I feel half blind, as if the entire text is within reach, but because of some myopic condition I am only familiar with from dreams, I can see only that part most immediately before me and have no sense of how that part relates to the rest. When I open a book, I know where I am, which is restful. My reading is spatial and even volumetric. I tell myself, I am a third of the way down a rectangular solid, I am a qu
arter of the way down the page, I am here on the page. But where am I now? I am in here and a present moment that has no history and no expectations for the future.4
More romantically the narrator announces:
I hop from stone to stone and an electronic river washes out my scent in the intervals. I am a discontinuous trace, a dotted line.5
Or again:
The past I collect like snapshots in accordion-pleated plastic sleeves. Perhaps I’d like it better riding a strong steady flow, guaranteeing that if I boarded a Mississippi steamboat at x I would certainly pass through y before disembarking at z.6
At this point one has to say that, as Twain has amply shown, if you do embark on the Mississippi at, for example, St Louis, you will inevitably pass through Cairo before reaching Memphis. Only if you fall asleep, as Huck and Tom do, do you risk missing the place where you want to stop. Not for nothing did Jackson speak of ‘some myopic condition I am only familiar with from dreams’. The hypertext, perhaps, has a vocation above all for the dreamlike. The linear progression of time, the unyielding contour of the familiar landscape, these, whatever enthusiasms one may have for the post-modern world, are still our standard experience in the hours of wakefulness.
Turning back for a moment to the traditional book, it’s worth recalling that nothing obliges us to read it from front to back. When we pick up anthologies, or essay collections, we frequently ignore the order in which the pieces are presented. Many like to read the last pages of a novel first.
The linearity of the book, of the page, or even the sentence, is thus only a convention, not inherent in the form, but something we choose to submit to, or not, every time we decide to read. In the 1960s and 1970s there were various experiments with loose-leaf novels whose chapters could be read in any order. They were soon abandoned. In his novel Watt, at the point of his main character’s maximum derangement, Samuel Beckett begins to invert the order of the words in the sentence (‘Day of most, night of part’), then the letters in the words (‘“Geb nodrap,” he said, “geb nodrap”’). No sooner has he reminded us that such things are possible, that nothing obliges him to write from left to right, top to bottom, than he returns to standard prose. Why?