Kracht (Re: Allegedly, Sorta P)

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

One more thing about the Mishima/Kracht connection. As I already 
mentioned when I first wrote here about "Die Toten" (The Dead), the 
novel's three-part-structure is built after the jo-ha-kyu concept from 
traditional Japanese Noh theater. "JO means beginning, HA means 
breaking, KYU means rapid or urgent" (Wikipedia). While this structural 
arrangement may sound unspectacular in our late modern times, which are 
called "postmodern" by some, it can nevertheless be read as another 
reference to Mishima. Not that Mishima ("Five Modern Noh Plays") was the 
first Japanese author who tried to modernize that dance drama art with 
its origins in the 14th century - during World War Two there even 
emerged a Noh play whose action takes place in a submarine - , but he 
was the one who took it to the level of high literature. To give you an 
impression of the atmosphere (from "The Damask Drum"):

"Iwakichi: 'The sky is full of stars. You cannot see the moon. The moon 
has become dirty & fallen to  earth. When I jumped out of the window, I 
jumped after the moon. One could say that the moon & me committed 
suicide together.'

Hanako (looking down on the street): 'Can you see the dead moon 
anywhere? Not me. Only the night taxis are driving through the streets, 
just like always. & there walks a cop. Now he stops. But I don't think 
that he discovered a cadavar. The cop will meet nobody except for the 
colleague coming from the other direction. This is as if he'd be walking 
towards a mirror.'

Iwakichi: 'Do you believe that ghosts do only meet ghosts & the moon 
does only meet the moon?'

Hanako: 'Yes, around midnight that's true for all things.' (She lights a 
cigarette.)

Iwakichi: 'I'm not a ghost anymore. I was a ghost as long as I lived. 
Now only my dreams are left ...'"

Translated after Y.M.: Sechs moderne No-Spiele [this German edition adds 
an earlier play]. Reinbek bei Hamburg 1962: Rowohlt Paperback, pp. 53-54.

The Western understanding of Japanese tradition in general & Noh theater 
in particular will always be a problematic thing. Even if one really 
knew the tongue (which Kracht, if I'm informed correctly, does not: he's 
seriously learning Sanskrit, though), there would still be so many 
things on the non-verbal level which one simply isn't socialized into:

"'If for example a mountain landscape is to appear [in Noh theater - 
KFL], then the actor will slowly lift the open hand & hold it at the 
level of the eyebrows quietly above the eye. Shall I show it to you?'

'Therefore I ask you.'

(The Japanese lifts & holds the hand in the manner described.)

'This is indeed a gesture an European could hardly get himself into.'

Heidegger: Unterwegs zur Sprache [On the Way To Language], p. 107 (the 
translation is mine)

Once I talked with Kracht about Pynchon. That was in October 2013 after 
the 'sneak preview' of the movie "Finsterworld", directed by Kracht's 
wife Frauke Finsterwalder. Since Kracht co-wrote the screenplay with her 
(currently Finsterwalder is - & Kracht again co-writes the script - 
working on a movie about Empress Elisabeth of Austria), he was there 
too, & after movie plus discussion we got into conversation while he was 
signing my first editions of his novels. Our dialogue on Pynchon wasn't 
general fan talk, it was about a particular scene from "Finsterworld". 
To go into this in detail would take us too far afield.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l6vqPUM_FE


Am 18.07.20 um 12:29 schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen:
>
> In terms of sales figures? No.
>
> But regarding the artistic quality "Die Toten" (The Dead) is as good 
> as its predecessor. Scroll down for my review from September 2016. 
> (Spoken aside: On some days this place appears to be not a mailing 
> list but a chatroom with massive personnel turnover ...)
>
> Since I hadn't read Mishima back then, let me add the following: There 
> are many references to this outstanding author in "The Dead". The very 
> first chapter gives us a kind of suicide snuff movie, more accurate: a 
> seppuku snuff movie, which of course refers to Mishima's ritual death 
> on 11/25/70, of which footage exist. Then there's the peephole scene 
> where Nägeli secretly watches Ida & Amakasu having sex. This calls to 
> mind a very similar scene in "The Temple of Dawn" (which is the third 
> volume from the tetralogy "The Sea of Fertility"); it also, though to 
> a lesser degree since the situation is not equally comparable, reminds 
> me of a related setting in "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the 
> Sea". & the scene where Amakasu is burning down his school seems, in 
> the given context, to evoke the arson at the end of "The Temple of the 
> Golden Pavilion". (I'm sure that I could name more references, if my 
> Mishima knowledge was better.) Actually the whole book can be seen as 
> a Mishima-esque meditation by an European author. B-but of course you 
> don't have to take this perspective. A Pynchonian angle of view will 
> do fine for the first read. Just give it a try!
>
> Thinking about Kracht in Anglophonia, an unavoidable question arises: 
> Why are his first three novels - which belong together by style & of 
> which Kracht speaks as his "Triptych" - not available in English? 
> Since all three are pretty short (& since anglophone publishing houses 
> tend to print significantly more words on a page), Farrar, Strauss and 
> Giroux could publish them in one volume that would hardly have more 
> than 300 pages. ~ Perhaps like this? C.K.: Triptych (The Early 
> Novels). Faserland - 1979 - I'll Be Here in Sunshine and in Shadow. 
> Translated from the German by Daniel Bowles ~ I mean, these books have 
> been translated into 30 languages. & the quality of Kracht's early 
> novels - "1979" is still my favorite of all - is first-rate. Does 
> anybody know anything about this? (off is okay.)
>
> Later this year a new Kracht novel will be published; no further 
> details are known.
>
> "The long-haired graybeard is taken to and shown around a confusingly 
> large military base on the island of Guadalcanal, which was wrested 
> away from the Japanese. Wide-eyed, he sees everywhere friendly black 
> GIs whose teeth, quite unlike his own ruinously rotten heap of dental 
> wreckage, gleam with a secret, surreal luminosity; everyone appears so 
> extraordinarily clean, their hair parted and clothes pressed; he is 
> given a dark brown, sugary, rather tasty liquid to drink from a glass 
> bottle slightly tapered in the middle; sedulous fighter planes set 
> down on runways at minute intervals and take off again (the pilots 
> smile, waving, from glass cockpits, radiant in the sunlight); with an 
> expression of rapt attention, an officer holds a metal box with small 
> perforations to his ear, from which enigmatic, heavily rhythmic, but 
> still not at all unpleasant-sounding music emanates; the old man's 
> hair and beard are combed; an immaculately white cotton collarless 
> camisole is pulled over his head; he's given a wristwatch; they pat 
> him gaily on the back; this is now the imperium; he is served a type 
> of sausage brushed with garishly bright-colored sauce that lies in a 
> bed of oblong bread as soft as a down pillow, as a result of which 
> Engelhardt, for the first time in long over half a century, ingests a 
> piece of animal flesh; here, a soldier of German extraction (his 
> parents simply forgot their language of origin---it was totally 
> assimilated PARS PRO TOTO into the E PLURIBUS UNUM), one Lieutenant 
> Kinnboot, in shirtsleeves, preparing with patient affability to ask 
> Engelhardt dozens of questions for a newspaper, is mightily impressed 
> when Engelhardt suddenly recalls the English language---which of 
> course has grown somewhat rusty over the decades---and begins to 
> speak, at first haltingly, then with increasing vivacity, of the age 
> before the world war, no, not the one favorably just ended, but the 
> one before that, even."
>
> Imperium. A Fiction Of The South Seas, pp. 177-178
>
>
> Am 11.07.18 um 10:51 schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen:
>>
>> Soon you will have the possibility to read the novel in translation:
>> "The Dead" will be out in the US on July 17th.
>>
>> https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374139674
>> https://us.macmillan.com/excerpt?isbn=9780374139674
>>
>> "Er muß also lernen, seinem - hüstel - schweizerischen Geiste 
>> uneigene Banalitäten von sich zu geben, Formeln herunterzuspulen, 
>> fährt es ihm durch den Kopf." (p. 148)
>>
>> Am 21.09.2016 um 14:35 schrieb Charles Albert:
>>> To anyone whose appetite may have been whetted by this tantalizing 
>>> review...
>>>
>>> The novel was released 12 days ago in the original.......those who, 
>>> on principle, abjure familiarity with the barbaric tongue in which 
>>> the story is written will have to wait several months for The 
>>> Deciphering.
>>>
>>> So, Kai, from all of us.....
>>>
>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01ja-hEqvIs
>>>
>>>
>>> love,
>>> cfa
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Sep 20, 2016 at 9:20 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen 
>>> <lorentzen at hotmail.de <mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>     I've read Christian Kracht's new novel /Die Toten/ (The Dead)
>>>     twice now and can recommend it strongly. It's set in the film
>>>     industry during the transition from Weimar culture to the Third
>>>     Reich, and tells the story of a Swiss director, Emil Nägeli, and
>>>     a Japanese government official, Masahiko Amakasu, who try to
>>>     create a collaboration between German and Japanese cinema. This
>>>     is labeled the "celluloid axis" and it's directed against US
>>>     imperialism. While being as harsh on the thanatoid aspects of
>>>     these traditional cultures, especially German antisemitism, as
>>>     the young Thomas Pynchon, Kracht articulates nevertheless a
>>>     yearning for their idiosyncratic truths, which were still valid
>>>     in the 1930s, before anglophone globalization started to strike
>>>     everything with similarity. (Already in his debut novel
>>>     /Faserland /from 1995, Kracht writes: " (...) Germany could be
>>>     like this, if there wouldn't have been the war and if the Jews
>>>     wouldn't have been gasified. Then Germany would be like the word
>>>     Neckarauen" - p. 85; "Neckar" refers to the river, and "Auen" is
>>>     the plural form of Aue, eng. (wet) meadow). In terms of art, it's
>>>     the silent film in black & white which stands for uncorrupted
>>>     art, as opposed to globalized commercialization.
>>>
>>>     Early cinema, in all its artistic and also technical
>>>     sophistication (echoes of AtD's photography!), is - the parallel
>>>     of camera and machine gun gets pointed out more than once -
>>>     pictured as an artistic model for a different modernity. The
>>>     novel's action is set in Berlin, Switzerland, Camp Q/Canada,
>>>     Japan and LA. It's three-part-structure follows that of the
>>>     Japanese Noh theater (jo-ha-kiu). Among the real world characters
>>>     popping up are Ernst Hanfstaengl (whose heraldic Harvard
>>>     "Ve-ri-tas" slogan is one of the novel's running gags), Alfred
>>>     Hugenberg, Fritz Lang, Lotte Eisner, Siegfried Kracauer, Heinz
>>>     Rühmann and  - a mirror figure for both male main characters -
>>>     Charles Chaplin, who first nearly gets murdered for political
>>>     reasons and then commits an actual murder for more personal
>>>     reasons himself. The book is as funny  - several Pynchonesque
>>>     slapstick scenes - as it is uncanny: In the end, the female main
>>>     character named Ida von Üxküll (actress, fiancee of Nägeli, lover
>>>     of Amakasu) - does she stand for Germania? - finds a violent
>>>     death in Hollywood ... And the beautiful language of /Die Toten/
>>>     can, like that of its predecessor /Imperium/, be described as
>>>     kinda Thomas-Mann-2.0.-German, which - with its often long and
>>>     winding sentences - stands in contrast to the reductionist style
>>>     à la Bret Easton Ellis which was so characteristic for Kracht's
>>>     first three novels.(Corresponding to this, there's a change from
>>>     first person narrator to authorial narrator.) Apart from Mann and
>>>     Pynchon, there are also stylistic influences from Kleist, Nabokov
>>>     and others. In single passages the sound might scratch the
>>>     all-too-artifical, and there are minor violations of grammar too,
>>>     but in its evocative power Kracht's language is unequaled in
>>>     contemporary German literature. His prose is superior to other
>>>     people's poetry. To give you an example of this, let me translate
>>>     a paragraph that reminds me strongly of /Gravity's Rainbow/:
>>>
>>>     "The seed thus was planted, like a sleeping rocket, and nothing
>>>     should be able to smother its future growth, its star flight,
>>>     neither Masahiko's superficial contempt for the Western world,
>>>     nor - obviously aiming at expansion and the humiliation of other
>>>     peoples - the soul of Germany, which the young man could sense
>>>     with such an accuracy as if he himself had plugged into it with
>>>     his own soul via etheric conductors." (p. 70)
>>>
>>>     It's also, Kracht's father passed away five years ago, a novel on
>>>     the relation of father and son.
>>>
>>>     And there is, perhaps connected to this, a spiritual dimension to
>>>     the text and its title, and here the famous Joyce story seems to
>>>     be relevant too. A key passage from the novel (p. 167) is
>>>     reprinted on the dust jacket's inner front side:
>>>
>>>     "The dead are infinitely lonesome creatures, there is no
>>>     solidarity among them, they are born alone, die, and also get
>>>     reborn alone."
>>>
>>>     Now my family is busy with this copy of /Die Toten/, --- but
>>>     right after that I'll start my third read!
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
> Am 17.07.20 um 03:51 schrieb Charles Albert:
>> While the Germans are here...
>>
>> Did the follow up to Kracht's Imperium live up to the hype?
>>
>> love,
>>
>> cfa
>>
>>
>
> -- 
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> .