A small family farm, home of the woman who tells the story, is flung down like a gauntlet in the face of insensate industrialisation; the plant surrounds it. The plants kill her lover; it has crippled the man whom she later marries. During the course of her life, its noxious fumes lay waste to the valley in which she lives.
Yet there is an infernal grandeur about the manganese plant and the devastation it wreaks. Only nature itself could be more destructive. Can’t one bolt of lightning kill a whole flock of sheep? There is no such grandeur about the slow erosion of the farming communities as they are encroached upon by the banality which is our century’s particular gift to civilisation. In ‘Boris is Buying Horses’, a woman seduces a farmer in order to gain possession of his house, which she and her husband proceed to run as a souvenir shop. This is a glimpse of a future in which the Alps have become a giant theme park.
Once in Europa is about history at work in daily life. This is the second volume of Berger’s projected trilogy about twentieth-century peasant life, which has the general title Into Their Labours. It is Berger’s genius – and I don’t use the word lightly – to reveal to us how the process of history affects people we come to know as friends, so that we suffer with them, grieve for them, hope for them, realise that we, too, are part of the same process.
The final story in the book, ‘Play Something For Me’, takes a young farmer on a day trip to Venice, where he makes love to a shop assistant during a festa de l’unita, which is a good urban substitute for a village festival. She urges him to leave his cows and come and work in the oil refineries at Mestri. Perhaps he will. Like the eponymous accordion player of the first story, he is a music maker. ‘The accordion was made for life on this earth, the left hand marking the bass and the heart-beats, the arms and shoulders labouring to make breath, and the right hand fingering for hopes!’ These are not pessimistic stories, although often they will make you cry.
(1989)
• 7 •
The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm
Unlike the Grimms’ collection of fairytales, without which no home is complete, their collection of German legends has never been translated into English before. What is the difference between a fairytale and a legend? The Grimms themselves scrupulously differentiate in their own Foreword to the first German edition of 1816. A fairytale, they say, can ‘find its home anywhere’, it belongs to the timeless, international zone of poetry; but the legend – ah! the legend, securely attached to a specific place, often a specific date, is the folk spirit recreating its own history. Is distilled essence of folk spirit. Is, in short, essentially, gloriously and unpollutedly German. ‘Nothing is as edifying or as likely to bring more joy than the products of the Fatherland.’ H’m.
Ironically, Donald Ward’s scholarly notes on individual legends suggest that many of the German legends aren’t so very German, after all – wild hunts, mermen, headless horsemen, dwarfs and giants distribute themselves throughout Europe and, indeed, the world with a grand disregard for frontiers.
Volume One is composed of odd, fragmentary bits and pieces of pseudo-history and folk belief taken, mostly, directly from the mouths of the German folk themselves. It is a feast of snacks. The very inconsequentiality is enchanting. ‘There is a bridge outside of Haxthusen-Hofe near Paderborn. Beneath it lives a poor soul who sneezes from time to time.’ Who? Why? You can almost see the Grimms’ informant shrug. Who knows? Just take my word for it.
Early nineteenth-century Germany was rife with such spooks; many of them seem to have fallen out of a household tale, folk motifs in search of a narrative. What of the ghostly girl, carrying a bunch of keys, often seen washing herself in a certain spring? And another girl, with long, golden hair, who frequents the mountainside on which she was burned to death – what can they be up to?
The answer, usually, is nothing. Neither numinous nor ominous, they possess only the existential validity of being there, part of the imaginative furniture of the place, ubiquitous and homely as the village idiot.
Sometimes the legends are uncanny just because they are so enigmatic:
Once a man was riding through a forest late in the evening when he saw two children sitting next to each other. He admonished them to go home and not to tarry any longer. But the two began laughing loudly. The man rode on and after a while he encountered the same two children, who began laughing again.
The pointlessness of it is the whole point; it is a free-form apparition, awaiting a random injection of significance, or the formal shaping of the storyteller’s craft.
I wonder if the method of the collectors differed when they were out after real pseudo-history, serious German essence rather than frivolous invented narrative? How much did they themselves want their informants actually to believe in the things the informants were relating? The almost lunatic precision of dating and locating material – ‘in 1398 . . . near Eisenach, in Thuringia . . .’; ‘In 1519, just before the plague killed many people in the city of Hof . . .’ – gives a specious appearance of authenticity to many a tall tale, though, indeed, some of these references come from old books to back up the memories of old people. All the same, these legends occupy a curious grey area between fact and fiction.
There are anecdotes, old-wives tales, tales of saints and miracles, marvellous lies designed to test the gullibility of the listener – most of them designed to be neither believed nor disbelieved, designed to court no more positive response than ‘Well, fancy that!’ It is a loose-jointed, easy-going way of decorating the real world with imaginative detail. As Lévi-Strauss says about such benign and cheering superstitions, they make the world ‘more tasty’. It was a tasty old world that the Grimms found, all right.
Mermen are just the same as we are except for their green teeth. The edges of the petticoats of water-pixies are always sopping wet. The devil, a constant visitor, lends his name to inauspicious tracts of land like the Devil’s Dance Floor, and the Devil’s Pillow, a boulder on which the very mark of his ear may still be seen. Dwarfs borrow pots and pans for their weddings. Fairies borrow human midwives for their lyings-in.
Some narratives start out like true fairytales, only to collapse in grand anti-climax, pricked balloons from which the magic suddenly leaks out. A young man releases a dwarf from a spell but no good fortune accrues; he can’t get rid of the dwarf, an unwelcome lodger, thereafter. A girl sees another dwarf pouring water in front of a house; shortly afterwards, the house is saved from fire. Some time later, the dwarf is out with his watering-can again; and what happens this time? A big fat nothing happens, this time.
Often the very magical matter of the fairytale comes down to earth with a bump in these matter-of-fact renditions of wonderful occurrences. The anti-hero makes his appearance. A poor girl who, like the Fairy Melusine, is a snake from the waist down, must be kissed three times by a chaste youth to regain her natural shape. But the lad from our village dared kiss her only twice! ‘Each time, in great anticipation for the unhoped-for miracle, the maiden made such dreadful gestures that he feared she was going to tear him to pieces. He, therefore, did not dare kiss her for the third time, and instead departed in haste.’ Departed, in fact, to forthwith lose his virtue to an ‘impure woman’ and, with it, all his fairytale eligibility for the task of rescue.
Some of the legends are, in fact, shaggy-dog stories. The boy in Freiburg in 1545, for instance, who was cursed to remain standing up. Eventually his feet wore grooves in the floor. Because he was standing near the stove he got in everybody’s way, so they picked him up and stowed him away in corners. At last they all got bored with him and covered him up with a cloth.
Amongst many other such delights may be found the true stories of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and of Bishop Hatt and the Rats. There is a delicious little giant girl who scoops up plough, horses, ploughmen, and all in her apron and takes them home to play with: ‘Oh, Father, it’s such a marvellous toy!’
Volume Two is a very different kettle of fish, a collection of her
oic legends very few of which come from the living traditions of real people. The Grimms say these stories could be called Legends of Teutonic Tribes and Royal Families and, here, they are as much concerned with myth-making as with folklore. They embrace the historic with disturbing enthusiasm: ‘ . . . it is . . . a noble attribute of people . . . any people . . . when both the dawn and the dusk of their day in history consists of legends.’ The relation between the rise of folklore studies and that of modern nationalism is an interesting one; there are things here that uncomfortably tease the mind.
To quote King Dagobert who, while he lay on his deathbed, said to his dogs: ‘No company is so good, that one cannot take leave of it.’
(1981)
• 8 •
Georges Bataille: Story of the Eye
There’s a photograph – among the surrealist souvenirs – of the poet, Benjamin Peret, insulting a priest. One lesson of Georges Bataille’s erotic novella, Story of the Eye, is that French intellectuals are made of sterner stuff than we are.
We think blasphemy is silly. They are exhilarated by it. Bataille’s hero and heroine end up doing a lot more to a priest than just insulting him. The fine European tradition of anti-clericalism is central to the preoccupations of this grand old surrealist fellow-traveller and sexual philosophe. It underpins Bataille’s theory of active sexuality as the assertion of human freedom against the laws of church and state. There can be few texts that illustrate so precisely the cultural differences between the Roman Catholic and the Protestant sensibility.
Bataille puts pornography squarely in the service of blasphemy. Transgression, outrage, sacrilege, liberation of the senses through erotic frenzy, and the symbolic murder of God. This is a scenario alien to the secular heritage of Protestant humanism. It confirms the free-thinker’s darkest fears about the nauseating madness inherent in Judaeo-Christianity itself. One can understand why Susan Sontag – whose worthy but dull essay, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, is appended – refrains from commenting on the climax of Story of the Eye, where a priest is enticed into lapping up his own urine from a sacramental chalice. Sontag is concerned to define what kind of literature pornography might be; she doesn’t notice that Story of the Eye is didactically lewd.
After the hapless cleric has drained the cup to its dregs of marinated Host, the polymorphously perverse heroine, Simone, orgiastically strangles him, gouges out his eye and pops it into her vagina, which she has already used as a repository for eggs, both raw and cooked, and the testicles of a bull. Roland Barthes, in his essay in the buxom appendix to the brief tale, points out the complex circularity of the dominant imagery of eye, egg, testicle. No content man, he; his whimsical formalism is too disingenuous by half. Story of the Eye was first published in France in 1928; two years later, French fascists smashed up the cinema in which Buñuel and Dali’s L’Age d’Or was celebrating erotic blasphemy. Bataille was dicing with death and Story of the Eye is about fucking as existential affirmation against death, who is also God. (Unless Bataille’s own blind, paralysed father – syphilis, naturally – is God; he materialises horribly in an afterword.)
Now Simone, her lover, and an onanistic English milord set sail to America. They won’t be able to raise Susan Sontag’s eyebrows, whatever they get up to there; but since they crew their boat with black sailors, no doubt these guerrillas of the libido will think up a few stunts that will get up everybody else’s noses.
That English milord, the non-participatory entrepreneur of obscene spectacles, is an unkind cut. The French have always thought we are sexually weirder than we have ever thought them, which is saying something. This has to do with the relativity of the notion of the sense of sin; and to do, too, with the way the metaphysics of Story of the Eye evaporate in the translation (by Joachim Neurgroschel), just as the crystalline rhetoric of Bataille’s incomparable prose muddies in English. Nevertheless, this marvellous, scatological fairytale about the omnipotence of desire, as Barthes says, ‘between the banal and the absurd’ still enlightens.
(1979)
• 9 •
William Burroughs: The Western Lands
Since William S. Burroughs relocated from New York City to Lawrence, Kansas, the town blasted by IBMs in the antinuke TV spectacular, ‘The Day After’, he has evidently perfected a final loathing for the instruments of mass death and – ‘no job too dirty for a fucking scientist’ – their perpetrators.
Pointless to head for the hills, these days: ‘What hills? Geiger counters click to countdown. Decaying lead spells out the last syllable of recorded time. Orgone balked at the post. Christ bled. Time ran out. Radiation has won at a half-life.’
The densely impacted mass of cultural references here – Macbeth, the Western, Reich, Dr Faustus, pulp science fiction – isn’t an isolated example of The Western Lands’ intense awareness of literature and of itself as literature, suggesting that perhaps one of the things going on, here, is an elegaic farewell to all that. The peremptory demand on which the novel ends, ‘Hurry up, please. It’s time’, is a straight quote from ‘The Wasteland’, reminiscent also of Cyril Connolly’s remark about closing time in the gardens of the West.
Unless Burroughs is practising some complicated double irony (and I wouldn’t put it past him), the West of Connolly’s usage has nothing to do with the Old West of Burrough’s obsession, site of his last novel, The Place of Dead Roads, which was second in the trilogy of which Cities of the Red Night was first and this the last. The ‘Western Lands’ of Burroughs’ title are, mythologically speaking, where the dead live. That is, the place beyond death.
Essentially we are talking about immortality, the immortality promised by the poet to Mr W. H., which is no longer compatible with the weapons that cause ‘Total Death. Soul Death’. ‘Well, that’s what art is all about, isn’t it? All creative thought, actually. A bid for immortality.’ Who is talking about immortality? William Seward Hall, for one, old man and blocked writer, who decides to ‘write his way out of death’ just as old novelists, like Scott, wrote themselves out of debt.
But, both in and out of this transparent disguise, Burroughs is talking about immortality, too. The Western Lands is structured according to an internal logic derived from an idiosyncratic reading of Egyptian myth; immortality, in its most concrete form, greatly concerned Egyptians.
In spite of a series of discontinuous story lines featuring a variety of heroes, the book often resembles a nineteenth-century commonplace book. The most urgent personal reflections are juxtaposed with jokes, satires, quotations, essays in fake anthropology, parody, pastiche, and passages of Burroughs’ unique infective delirium – piss, shit, offal, disembowellings. This is slapstick reinterpreted by Sade.
Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn between a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can’t be ironic all the time.
The method is eclectic and discrete and it is important, and essential, because Burroughs is doing something peculiar with the reader’s time. He’s stopping it. Or, rather, stop-starting it. Taking it out of the reader’s hands, anyway, which is where we tend to assume it ought to be.
He’ll give you a paragraph, a page, even three or four pages at a time, of narrative like a railway down which the reader, as if having boarded a train, travels from somewhere to somewhere else according to an already existing timetable. Then – the track vanishes. The train vanishes. And you find you don’t have any clothes on, either. While all that’s left of the engine driver is a .disappearing grin.
This constant derailment of the reader happens again and again, shattering the sense of cause and effect, whilst all the time one is reassured in the most affectingly disingenuous manner: ‘How can any danger come from an old man cuddling his cats?’
You cannot hurry Burroughs, or skim, or read him for the story. He likes to take his time and to disrupt your time in such a way that you cannot be carried
along by this narrative. Each time it tips you out, you have to stand and think about it; you yourself are being rendered as discontinuous as the text.
In fact, Burroughs’ project is to make time stand still for a while, one which is more frequently that of religion than of literature and there are ways in which Burroughs’ work indeed resembles that of another William, the Blake of the self-crafted mythology of the Prophetic Books, although it must be said that Burroughs is much funnier.
He is also the only living American writer of whom one can say with confidence he will be read with the same shock of terror and pleasure in a hundred years’ time, or read at all, in fact, should there be anybody left to read.
(1988)
• 10 •
William Burroughs: Ah Pook is Here
Ah Pook is Here is an apocalypse. Ah Pook is the Mayan death deity. John Stanley Hart, a young American student of immorality, searches the jungle for the lost Mayan codices that contain Ah Pook’s secrets of fear and death. But, when he finds them, he reads them ‘as one who reads Moby Dick to find out about whaling and to hell with Ahab’. For Hart is addicted to a personal immortality predicated on the mortality of others, ‘gooks, niggers, human dogs, stinking humans’.
The arcane secrets of fear and death are utilised to make a world safe for John Stanley Hart to live (forever) in. ‘Is this terrible knowledge now computerised and vested in the hands of far-sighted Americans in the State Department and the CIA?’ Burroughs is often so outrageously upfront about his moral indignation it is possible, I think wrongly, to dismiss it as a cheap effect.
But a fugue of deathless mutant boys precipitate a bizarrely ecstatic finale that looks like it’s been choreographed by Hieronymous Bosch. ‘A boy whipped with a transparent fish sprouts wings . . . Flying fox boy soars above a burning tree.’ Wild boys lyrically ejaculate robins and blue birds. Nobody, it turns out, can Hire Death as a company cop. Or not for long.