Out of this world

[Dave Monroe]

Out of this world

Daniel Kehlmann, author of a bestselling German novel about the Weimar
naturalist von Humboldt, reflects on the art of historical fiction and
what it taught him about his national identity

Saturday April 21, 2007
The Guardian

I had almost finished writing my novel Measuring the World when I
first set foot in the observatory at Göttingen. This was where one of
my main characters, the mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich
Gauss, had lived and worked, and I was surprised how apprehensive it
made me feel, suddenly to be up close and personal with him. In my
book, the man who had inhabited these rooms, while unquestionably a
genius, had also been a habitué of brothels, a neglectful husband and
father, and a monster given over to foul tempers. If he were still
alive today, no fancy aesthetic theory I could conjure up would spare
me either his wrath or a lawsuit for defamation of character.

The Göttingen observatory is an imposing temple to the sciences, built
in the neoclassical style in the early 19th century. And yet the dome
on top of the building is purely decorative and cannot be opened;
instead, astronomers trained their telescopes on the sky from narrow
openings next to the main entrance, rather like arrow slits in the
walls of a castle. Inside, a staircase leads up to the former
director's living quarters. The original of the famous portrait of
Gauss wearing his black velvet cap hangs on the wall here, and - as so
often seems to be the case with famous pictures - is remarkably small.
Next to it stands the legendary telegraph apparatus that he invented
in order to be able to communicate with his colleagues working in the
town centre.

The storyteller's stock-in-trade is the creation of realities. The
philosopher Schopenhauer wrote that existence could be summed up as a
long dream punctuated by shorter ones; in the same way, for a
storyteller, the long story is interrupted by shorter ones, and the
thing that really bothers him is not the basic similarity between all
these stories, but rather the danger that they might begin to merge
into one another - in other words, any blurring of boundaries, as, for
example, when he is unexpectedly confronted with a very real machine
invented by a person whom he has already come to think of at certain
moments as a figment of his own imagination.

This telegraph apparatus crops up in a scene towards the end of my
novel. Professor Gauss, by this stage old and frail, is standing at
the window of his study transmitting messages. He is half conversing
with his colleague Weber and half with himself, but at the same time
is in contact with the world of dead souls, a realm that has grown
alarmingly over the course of his life. However, as the briefest
glance at the machine in the observatory told me, it would have been
impossible to hold conversations using this piece of equipment. The
oscillations of the receiving needle were so faint that you had to
stare down a magnifying tube to detect any movement against a scale.
This in turn meant that the person transmitting the message had to
send a messenger to the recipient beforehand to let them know when he
planned to begin the transmission - a truly Pythonesque arrangement.
As I stood there in Gauss's room, between the teleprinter, the window
and the portrait, I made up my mind to stick to my original version.

Perhaps this is why so many people who expect to be served up hard and
fast facts in books mistrust historical novels. You read the book and
yet you can never shake off the suspicion that what you're reading
isn't actually true. To some extent, I learned this lesson while I was
still at university, in an introductory seminar by one Professor S. He
advised us not to read historical fiction, because it was unreliable
and trivial. His thesis was that we were living in the here and now,
and anyone who immersed themselves in the past was simply wallowing in
escapism. The professor had bulging eyes, bad skin, and a drink
problem. He cut a sad figure, had no great love of reading, and didn't
seem particularly to live in the here and now himself.

But I was still intimidated by the professor's pronouncement when,
years later, I first tried my hand at writing a novel whose action
took place in a period before the very recent past. I might never have
even dared to do so had I not been inspired by several great examples
of the art: Thomas Mann's Lotte in Weimar, John Fowles's The French
Lieutenant's Woman, EL Doctorow's Ragtime, John Barth's The Sot-Weed
Factor and Thomas Pynchon's epic about the Enlightenment, science and
obsession, Mason & Dixon. All these novels indulge in the great game
of narrating the past afresh and of diverging from the official
version of the past offered by historians into the realm of invented
reality.

A prime example of this kind of invention of reality is Stanley
Kubrick's film based on Thackeray's novel Barry Lyndon, which
reconstructs a lost world in intricate detail. It does so by focusing
not on what has survived from that period, but on its most ephemeral
moments, and by choosing to highlight not the things that we still
have in common with that era, but precisely that which separates us
from it. The impression of authenticity derives from the very fact
that Kubrick tries to depict not real life in the 18th century, but
rather its reflection in art. So, when he portrays scenes from daily
life, they look like copperplate engravings come alive, while his
landscape images are based on Watteau paintings and his interior shots
- filmed by candlelight using special lenses from Nasa - exhibit the
same play of shadows and the exaggerated chiaroscuro that are found in
indoor scenes by great genre painters. Here, then, nothing is
spontaneous and certainly nothing is realistic; even the novel by
Thackeray is itself already a historical novel about an age the writer
had not experienced at first hand. Every scene of Barry Lyndon makes
the point that all art is essentially abstraction and stylisation, and
that there is no better way of getting to the truth of that period
than by consistently dispensing with any attempt to portray it
directly.

When I started writing my novel about Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt
and their endeavour to quantify and survey the world, about
Enlightenment figures and sea monsters, and about the grandeur and
comedy of German culture, I soon realised that I'd have to make things
up. Telling a story means imparting an overarching logical structure
to events that possessed no such thing in reality. The writer does
this not to give the world a semblance of order, but rather to lend
its portrayal the clarity that is vital if one aspires to depict
disorder. Precisely if you're planning to write about the cosmos being
chaotic and resistant to measurement, then you need to take form
seriously. You have to tweak things and arrange the way the light and
shadows fall. In particular, the portrayal of my second main
character, the eccentric Baron Humboldt, that cross between Don
Quixote and Hindenburg, called for exaggeration, paring down and
distillation.

I'd first got interested in Humboldt some years before, while on a
trip to Mexico. My initial impulse was to get to know the country
better through his writings, but over time I found myself enthralled
by his oddity - an oddity of a uniquely German kind, imbued with
idealism and yet deeply clumsy, and at the same time benevolent but
also, when he deemed it necessary, shockingly brutal. Along the
Orinoco, Humboldt had the bodies of Indians exhumed from their graves
and carried around with him for weeks on end, all the while failing to
grasp why the indigenous people were so outraged at what he had done.
In Havana, he set crocodiles on chained-up dogs as a way of studying
their hunting behaviour, and during his Atlantic crossing insisted on
taking his own sextant readings alongside the ship's Spanish captain;
within a day, he was correcting the captain's navigation. You only
have to look at this scene through the eyes of the long-serving
Spanish mariner, who suddenly has to deal with a smart-aleck Prussian
mine inspector on his bridge, to find yourself firmly in the realms of
a burlesque novel.

As a German writer, I can only marvel at Latin American novels; unlike
their authors, I can't just invent a beautiful woman who flies away
while hanging up washing, or creatures that are half-man, half-snake.
But what I can do is send out into the world a Prussian who is a past
master at shutting out all these phenomena even as he is witnessing
them, and who remains blind to all the wonders and strangeness around
him. Humboldt is the one person in whom the two lines of Weimar
classicism and the South American novel converge. He is also the
character who enabled me, in the course of writing, to reflect on what
it means to be German. Humboldt was a Weimar classicist, a friend of
Goethe, a representative of the most humane world-view that the world
has ever seen, but at the same time he was immensely hidebound, ill at
ease, humourless and - just like Gauss - lacking in any understanding
of art.

Humboldt's account of his attempt to climb Mount Chimborazo in 1802 is
a prosaic recounting of facts couched in the omniscient tone typical
of reports of expeditions in the 18th century. However, anyone reading
the writings of contemporary alpinists gets a very clear picture of
what actually happens to a mountain climber. Even people who are in
excellent physical shape vomit continuously and experience
hallucinations. If they try to speak at high altitude, they slur their
words like drunks, they cannot think straight, and their mucous
membranes and even their eyes start to bleed. Things would not have
been any different for Humboldt. The sovereign and detached tone of
his description of the climb is not necessarily any less fictional,
then, than the scene of utter confusion and lurching aimlessness that
I turned it into. In one way or another, artistic satire always comes
from the confrontation between a narrative tone and the reality that
it was designed to mask. In my version, Humboldt and his sidekick
endure the whole gamut of madness, sickness, dizziness, fear and
disorientation - that is, all those things whose denial defines the
very essence of the Weimar classicist. It takes so much effort and
studied poise, such a denial of unpleasant realities, to be one; this
is the source both of its greatness and, when things go wrong, of its
sheer ridiculousness.

Picturing the reality that lies behind the facts and then altering the
facts accordingly to corroborate your picture - this would be a
cardinal sin in journalism, whereas in literature it is indispensable.
The historical figure is, so to speak, a magnet surrounded by a force
field within which the writer has free rein to invent. If you get too
close to the original person, then you end up writing a biography, but
if you get too far away and can no longer feel the pull of the
magnetic field, then you've renounced the artistic right to use that
person's name.

Would all this have pleased my main characters? Certainly not. After
all, both were sticklers for exactitude and sworn enemies of the
narrator's art. Explaining why this attitude is so soul-destroying for
a person cannot be the task of the historian, nor should one expect it
of the sciences. Only literature, in all its unscrupulous freedom, can
do this.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2061351,00.html