The BURIED Book Club discussion

Thanks for this.

Thankee thankee. Some links: Ernst Kaiser ; Die Geschichte Eines Mordes Roman ; translation credits also for von Doderer's The Waterfalls of Slunj {anyone currently championing von Doderer? }::;) ; wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Ka... .

I would guess that his novella or novellas have not been translated either? I wonder whether "Shadow Man" has any relationship to Qxp. Im U Boot Auf Feindfahrt. Tatsachenroman. Could there be other books besides?

Meanwhile, sorry to say, his Wikipedia page looks like it might need to be entirely rewritten! It's obviously a machine translation, or a very bad human translation, apparently from the German Wiki. His name appears as "emperor" dozens of times, the word order is very peculiar for English, the section about Story of a Murder is titled "Publication of the 2nd Romans" (presumably Romans = novel), etc.

[EDIT] I looked at the history, and revised this message, as it appears not to be a plagiarized article, but a translation from the German Wiki article. But anyway, it's a mess.

Nice digging. It looks like copies of the Nimbus works can be ordered as PDFs (for a price) from the Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas (see the Nimbus finding aid). Might be a nice prelude to the VP translation.

Off-topic here, but the Center also holds David Foster Wallace's papers. There are some digitized manuscript pages from The Pale King posted here.

Yeah, I was trying to figure out exactly how much it would cost but it's hard to say without knowing the page counts involved. It looks like there is a flat $10 service charge plus 70 cents per page. But it's probably best to just email them and ask. The finding aid says the collection includes all issues of the magazine, but it doesn't list any tables of contents that I could find.

With some help from Ali, I'm now fully aboard the (slow-moving) Ernst Kaiser train, and a strange, unsettling train it is. I've now read the short story 'The W(indow) C(leaner)', the story/novella 'The City', and the novel excerpt from 'The Murder Story', all of which are annotated above in Ali's very helpful bibliography. It was surprising to discover how many U.S. libraries hold some of the so-called 'little magazines' that Kaiser published in during the 1940s and 50s. I once again find myself genuflecting to the magical process known as interlibrary loan. Below are some initial thoughts on these pieces. I hesitate to draw comparisons to other writers, having read so relatively little of Kaiser's work, but I do note a few names that sprang to mind as I read.

The W(indow) C(leaner): This was my favorite piece and probably the most unique. It describes the character Erk's nocturnal encounters as he struggles along a tenuous line between dream and waking life. It's at turns menacing and absurdly amusing, which for me is an ideal combination and one that I've found few writers capable of successfully executing, especially in short story format. Maybe it was just Erk's hilarious encounter with the talking cat, but some of Leonora Carrington's short fiction came to mind as I read this story. Certainly, of the three pieces, it's the one that showcases Kaiser's surrealist tendencies the most. It's easily my favorite short fiction I've read this year since reading Liliane Giraudon's collection Pallaksch, Pallaksch back in April.

The City: This is the longest piece of the three. As Ali notes above, it can be considered a novella at ~20,000 words. A man named Kahlen arrives by train at a station just outside a great city. As Kahlen moves through the station he experiences a series of mysterious, confounding encounters with various denizens of this strange and ever-changing locale. As he wanders he also begins to suffer memory loss, which rapidly escalates toward a severe existential crisis. I was reminded of some of Anna Kavan's work here, specifically the novel Eagles' Nest and some of her shorter fiction, particularly the novella 'New and Splendid', found in the collection A Bright Green Field. I also thought of both Hans Henny Jahnn's novella 'The Night of Lead' and Maurice Blanchot's novel Aminadab, though I found the former even more opaque, so it's really more of a mood comparison, and the latter employs much more dialogue while working with similar themes of authority and power structures (among others).

The Murder Story: A passage from Kaiser's magnum opus of the same name. See summary above in Ali's bibliography. This brief excerpt follows the character Kalm, a wealthy descendant of a ruling class family, after he leaves the police station where he's confessed to a murder (committed in his dreams) and subsequently been released by the police chief. Kalm walks the city at night, encountering drunken soldiers and experiencing an air raid, while reflecting on his perceived guilt and how to move forward. Considering this is such a tiny fraction of what is a colossal work, it's difficult to say much about it other than I found it intriguing enough to want to read the entire book, should it indeed appear in an English language edition someday.

Based on my reading of these pieces, I think Kaiser deserves much more attention than the little he has gotten from readers of modernist literature. Granted he is likely to be found lurking in the darker shadows with such fellow BBC-championed underdogs as Kavan and Jahnn, but there is also a clear line (as there is with Kavan and Blanchot, and maybe Jahnn, too, though I find his hermetic armor difficult to parse) connecting him to Kafka whom, as Ali notes, he and his wife translated. The influence of works such as The Castle can't be ignored here, particularly in the 'The City'. However, a story like 'The W(indow) C(leaner)' shows that Kaiser's style and themes were diverse. He seems particularly preoccupied with the dream world and its intersection with waking life, his characters are disoriented and struggling with their grip on reality, and yet he also seamlessly injects an occasional deadpan humor into such typically dark subject matter.

I still await one additional ILL request, a piece of Kaiser's (presumed) literary criticism published in 1946 with the intriguing title 'The Development From Surrealism'. I will report back again once I've digested that one.

I love the part of the story when his wife walks in, right after he is exulting in his power over everything, and she yells at him to get out of bed because the window-cleaner is here. I think I burst out laughing the first time I read that.

Yes, the way he maintains the dream-logic in such an authentic way, yet also allows it to be accessible and interesting enough to the reader. It's quite extraordinary. He's managed to successfully combine all of my favorite qualities in fiction into one relatively short piece of work. I particularly like the aspect you mention of the transformation of the mundane into the horrific. It reminds me of Gerhard Roth's The Will to Sickness. (Roth is another writer who needs some promotion. I plan to update his BBC thread after I finish the book of his that I'm reading now).

And I agree the translation is stunning. I may never have guessed that it was even a translation if I didn't know ahead of time. BTW, do you know if any of Wilkins' poetry is available in English?

Thanks! On first glance it would appear that she and Kaiser shared some similar thematic ground.

I also noticed that B. S. Johnson was the poetry editor for Transatlantic Review.

I recently read the Kaiser essay 'The Development from Surrealism' (1946) published in Circle magazine. Circle, launched by George Leite in 1944 and based in San Francisco, was an anarchist-leaning publication supported by Henry Miller. According to James Gifford, in his book Personal Modernisms: Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes, Circle 'endorsed an anarchic Surrealism akin to English Surrealism.'

In his essay, Kaiser eloquently presents his defense of surrealism and, more generally, his impassioned vision for what role art should play in such uncertain times. He captures what one would imagine was not an uncommon feeling among at least certain circles of artists and literary folks in the immediate wake of WWII. Kaiser has some very specific thoughts on surrealism and it is clear he differs from prominent original surrealists on what it means as an artistic approach and what it can strive to accomplish. One of the more memorable quotes in the essay can in fact be read as a jab at André Breton, when Kaiser writes: 'No movement in art should be something like a club that one joins and whose rules one is going to obey.' A few more passages below provide the gist of the essay:

'We must be prepared to recognise that the human faculties have ceased to show any sign of development, except in the direction of brutal power. We have watched all political programmes finish up as expeditions leading nowhere. And if we are really artists, then we must know that the disillusionment of Western man has become a fact: that there is hardly any real belief left, except the belief in holding on to what we have, if indeed there is anything left to hold on to.'

'In such an era of frustration and collapse, when so many connexions have broken down, and not only under aerial bombardment, there is no hope in trying to have an art that is rational and based on solid facts. Solid facts are a luxury that even natural science cannot afford any longer. We are in a world that has lost internal balance, where there is no intellectual or spiritual focus, and hence no possibility for the artist to apply such terms as good or evil, inevitably there develops a tendency towards nihilism and mere cynicism. And without real values to give it vitality, form becomes hollow and purposeless and soon deteriorates. That was shown clearly enough after the last efforts of expressionism by such movements as dadaism, surrealism, 'abstract' art, and so forth.'

He goes on to discuss surrealism in parallel with psychoanalysis and, in particular, the concept of free association, but urges that art needs to go beyond free association to the analysis of what arises during such a process.

'Merely to produce without inhibitions, and to evoke dream-like experiences, is by no means sufficient, either for the artist or for the spectator. One cannot stop at being satisfied with the thrills of mere queerness, and expecting the same from one's public. The artist has to go further than that. His task consists mainly of a tireless analysis of these symptoms of his own, leading further on to the shaping of new symptoms and further on again to the need for new analysis. And there is no stopping until the dream obtains a shape; until the artist knows that his striving toward clarification has resulted in what we call form.'

Finally, here are the last few lines of the essay, which neatly sum up his thesis:

'Anybody who, looking at the world in which we are alive today, still demands that art ought to contain the beautiful and good and fight the evil and ugly, may please himself. He can only be a hypocrit [sic] and a liar, with some strong personal reasons for a false attitude; unless he is merely a hopeless ignoramus of no importance. The artist, on the other hand, has a rather different task: he has to discover or re-discover those values that appear to be practically lost. And he has, on top of this, to create his own theoretical equipment, similar to the equipment of the psychoanalyst, in order to achieve his object. We don't reject what has taken the place of the good and the beautiful, even if it appears to be cruel and ugly, perverted and senseless; because we don't expect, from an era governed by precisely these qualities, anything better and more noble. We expect nothing at all from this era, except its gradual loss of vigor, which may give us the chance of passing through it. But we do not take it, either, as something that can be fought with the means of better qualities, because there are no better ones ready for us.

There is a great transmutation that must be accomplished in the soul, if man is to be capable of overcoming the dark age through which we are going. It is the artist's task to be the pioneer and to go roads that nobody has gone before. It is not the artist's fault if landscape and road are not as pleasant and comfortable as he himself might wish.'

Thanks for the update, Ali. It seems odd to make what sounds like a relatively minor abridgment relative to overall word count. How to decide what to cut and why bother cutting at all? From an economic standpoint, I wouldn't think it would make enough difference to the publisher.