Ilse AichingerReseñas

Meine Sprache und ich, wir reden nicht miteinander, wir haben uns nichts zu sagen.

This was Aichinger's second collection of "stories" (Erzählungen), but you shouldn't expect actual narratives. They are surreal, dream-like flights of fancy, in which words, most of them very concrete, often domestic or agricultural in range, seem to be chosen with a calculated randomness so that sentences make short-range sense but fight against every attempt our minds make to impose some kind of long-range order or message or symbolism onto them. There are giants, like the milkmaid of St Louis, and dwarves, like the infantry who accompany Diogenes on his journey; there is a gigantic fan in the title story; there are hares who decide after living for many generations in the sandy bay of Port Sing to mount an expedition to the (unexplained and inexplicable) Sacred Mountain, and so on. Random travel seems to be a recurrent theme: a farmer in search of weather proverbs sails from Brittany to Western Scotland, goes thence by rocket to Utah, and ends up by the sacred river in Mecca. But there are theories, the narrator points out, that Mecca is not on a sacred river. Tell that to the crocodiles.

In the late story "Meine Sprache und ich", the narrator's language becomes a character in her own right, the two of them are travelling over various frontiers together, and it is the language, not the narrator, who appears suspect to the border guards. Aichinger seems to have had a deep-rooted and growing distrust for language herself, and she constantly feels the need to challenge assumptions about words and their meanings and associations. The stories are wonderfully disorienting and disturbing, but it doesn't do to read too many at once, or you end up like a visitor to a giant gallery of abstract art...½

Schlechte Wörter is a collection of short pieces (essays, stories, prose-poems - take your pick) from the first half of the 70s. As originally published in 1976 it also included the radio-play Gare Maritime, but in the 2015 collected works edition that has been moved into a separate volume of plays, and the editors have added the uncollected prose piece "Friedhof in B."
(I wondered if there could be a concealed joke here, because "Friedhof in B." opens with the cemetery in Nancy, and directly follows, "Rahels Kleider", which talks about an English schoolgirl called Peggy. It's unlikely that Aichinger could have been a Swallows and Amazons fan, but maybe the editor was...?)

The pieces clearly show how Aichinger was exploring ways of getting beyond the forced connections and causality of ordinary narrative: she generally starts out with an innocent-looking phrase, something random she has seen, overheard, or has just popped into her head, e.g. "the balconies of the home-countries are different", or "lovers of the western columns", or "the forgetfulness of St Ives", or just a nonsense word, like "Hemlin". Then she chases this phrase through a semi-controlled network of free associations to see what will happen to it. I assume she must have thrown a lot of such pieces away when they didn't lead anywhere interesting, but those she actually published are never simply random gibberish, but always give us some sort of new light on the way our minds and language and the world we live in work. Sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, always rather beautiful.

I first read Ilse Aichinger's The Bound Man when in college and felt a deep, instant connection with this powerful tale. I reread The Bound Man in my early 30s. And here I am, in my early 60s, drawn once again to this amazing short piece. The story opens with the main character, a man who remains nameless, waking up with the sun on his face and under the buzz of flies; however, "when he tried to whisk them away, he discovered that he was bound." Bound by a thick rope, that is. "His legs were tied all the way up to his thighs; a single length of rope was tied round his ankles, crisscrossed up his legs, and encircled his hips, his chest and his arms." He reflects, "perhaps children had been playing a practical joke on him." We are only given a few hints of his character, but one I especially enjoy is his sensitivity to natural beauty. "A few paces away lay the path across the plateau, and in the grass were wild pinks and thistles in bloom. He tried to lift his foot to avoid trampling on them, but the rope round his ankles prevented him." Here we have a man who wakes up bound in rope, struggles to his feet, can move only in hops, yet still is mindful of not destroying flowers in bloom!

A circus proprietor/animal tamer sees the bound man moving down a path. We read, "He moved slowly, to avoid being cut by the rope, but to the circus proprietor what he did suggested the voluntary limitation of an enormous swiftness of movement. He was enchanted by its extraordinary gracefulness." How impressed was the circus proprietor? The author writes, "The first leaps of a young panther had never filled him with such delights." So, we understand the bound man is sensitive and extremely graceful. It doesn't take that much imagination to see the bound man has the qualities of an artist, which adds to the charm and power of this fable-like story. The next thing we know, the bound man is the main attraction in the circus. The bound man's movement are nothing short of stupendous. "His fame grew from village to village, but the motions he went through were few and always the same; they were really quite ordinary motions, which he had continually to practice in the daytime in the half-dark tent in order to retain his shackled freedom. In that he remained entirely within the limits set by his rope he was free of it, it did not confine him, but gave him wings and endowed his leaps and jumps with purpose." Here we have metaphorically an artist working within set boundaries, say, for example, like a composer working within the framework of a string quartet.

The bound man's art reaches such a zenith, the author writes, "The result was that every movement that he made was worth seeing, and the villages used to hang about the camp for hours, just for the sake of seeing him get up from in front of the fire and roll himself in his blanket." Wow! The bound man is such an extraordinary artist he transcends the boundaries of simply performing as an artist for a set audience; for him, all of life is art. And to underscore how the bound man's art can be viewed as bound up (no pun intended) with life and death issues we read, "He was just the opposite of the hanged man--his neck was the only part of him that was free." Further on, the author notes how the circus proprietor's wife would see how much free play the rope allowed the bound man and also touch his tender wrists and ankles and how "he told her that sometimes he felt as if he were not tied up at all."

Toward the end of the tale, a wolf roams the countryside, killing livestock and terrorizing the countryside. The circus performers join the villages in an attempt to hunt down the wolf but their efforts fail. The bound man makes his way out to a distant hill and, predictably, encounters the wolf. The wolf pounces and the bound man seized the wolf by the throat. The author writes, to my mind, one of the most beautiful lines in all of literature:"Tenderness for a fellow creature arose in him, tenderness for the upright being concealed in the four-footed." Unbelievably, the bound man kills the wolf. The language the author uses to portray the struggle is pure poetry. Rather than tell how this magnificent tale ends, let me simply conclude by mentioning how, after learning how the bound man miraculously killed the wolf, the audience turns on the bound man. The circus proprietor's wife takes his side. "She shouted back at them that they needn't believe in the bound man if they didn't want to, they had never deserved him. Painted clowns were good enough for them." As in literature, as in life: the general population with their middle brow artistic values doesn't deserve the bound man-creative artist; for them, painted clowns are quite good enough. Existentialism? Surreal fable? Magical realism? This is a tale defying category.

I first read Ilse Aichinger's The Bound Man when in college and felt a deep, instant connection with this powerful tale. I reread The Bound Man in my early 30s. And here I am, in my early 60s, drawn once again to this amazing short piece. The story opens with the main character, a man who remains nameless, waking up with the sun on his face and under the buzz of flies; however, "when he tried to whisk them away, he discovered that he was bound." Bound by a thick rope, that is. "His legs were tied all the way up to his thighs; a single length of rope was tied round his ankles, crisscrossed up his legs, and encircled his hips, his chest and his arms." He reflects, "perhaps children had been playing a practical joke on him." We are only given a few hints of his character, but one I especially enjoy is his sensitivity to natural beauty. "A few paces away lay the path across the plateau, and in the grass were wild pinks and thistles in bloom. He tried to lift his foot to avoid trampling on them, but the rope round his ankles prevented him." Here we have a man who wakes up bound in rope, struggles to his feet, can move only in hops, yet still is mindful of not destroying flowers in bloom!

A circus proprietor/animal tamer sees the bound man moving down a path. We read, "He moved slowly, to avoid being cut by the rope, but to the circus proprietor what he did suggested the voluntary limitation of an enormous swiftness of movement. He was enchanted by its extraordinary gracefulness." How impressed was the circus proprietor? The author writes, "The first leaps of a young panther had never filled him with such delights." So, we understand the bound man is sensitive and extremely graceful. It doesn't take that much imagination to see the bound man has the qualities of an artist, which adds to the charm and power of this fable-like story. The next thing we know, the bound man is the main attraction in the circus. The bound man's movement are nothing short of stupendous. "His fame grew from village to village, but the motions he went through were few and always the same; they were really quite ordinary motions, which he had continually to practice in the daytime in the half-dark tent in order to retain his shackled freedom. In that he remained entirely within the limits set by his rope he was free of it, it did not confine him, but gave him wings and endowed his leaps and jumps with purpose." Here we have metaphorically an artist working within set boundaries, say, for example, like a composer working within the framework of a string quartet.

The bound man's art reaches such a zenith, the author writes, "The result was that every movement that he made was worth seeing, and the villages used to hang about the camp for hours, just for the sake of seeing him get up from in front of the fire and roll himself in his blanket." Wow! The bound man is such an extraordinary artist he transcends the boundaries of simply performing as an artist for a set audience; for him, all of life is art. And to underscore how the bound man's art can be viewed as bound up (no pun intended) with life and death issues we read, "He was just the opposite of the hanged man--his neck was the only part of him that was free." Further on, the author notes how the circus proprietor's wife would see how much free play the rope allowed the bound man and also touch his tender wrists and ankles and how "he told her that sometimes he felt as if he were not tied up at all."

Toward the end of the tale, a wolf roams the countryside, killing livestock and terrorizing the countryside. The circus performers join the villages in an attempt to hunt down the wolf but their efforts fail. The bound man makes his way out to a distant hill and, predictably, encounters the wolf. The wolf pounces and the bound man seized the wolf by the throat. The author writes, to my mind, one of the most beautiful lines in all of literature:"Tenderness for a fellow creature arose in him, tenderness for the upright being concealed in the four-footed." Unbelievably, the bound man kills the wolf. The language the author uses to portray the struggle is pure poetry. Rather than tell how this magnificent tale ends, let me simply conclude by mentioning how, after learning how the bound man miraculously killed the wolf, the audience turns on the bound man. The circus proprietor's wife takes his side. "She shouted back at them that they needn't believe in the bound man if they didn't want to, they had never deserved him. Painted clowns were good enough for them." As in literature, as in life: the general population with their middle brow artistic values doesn't deserve the bound man-creative artist; for them, painted clowns are quite good enough. Existentialism? Surreal fable? Magical realism? This is a tale defying category.

Die größere Hoffnung was Aichinger's only novel, developed out of her first published story, "Das vierte Tor" (1945 - included as an appendix in the 1991 edition of the novel). Aichinger was never really comfortable with long-form texts - she revised and considerably shortened the book in 1960, and she's quoted as saying that she wished she could have condensed the book into a single sentence. We should probably be grateful that her publishers stopped her from going so far: it's a magnificent, beautifully written and very moving novel, a book that follows its own rules in a kind of spare, abstract, nightmarish modernism that resembles nothing else I know of. If you could imagine how Kafka might have rewritten Emil and the detectives after reading Mrs Dalloway you would have a vague sort of idea, perhaps...

The book deals with the experiences of children of Jewish descent in Nazi Vienna, obviously drawing to a large extent on Aichinger's own experience (she was a teenager at the time of the Anschluss, and remained in Vienna with her Jewish mother and grandmother while her twin sister was able to get away to England on a Kindertransport). The children in the novel - obviously a bit younger than Aichinger was herself - have to learn to deal with a world in which they are hated, feared, humiliated, and excluded from most aspects of normal life merely because they have "the wrong kind of grandparents". Ellen, who has enough of the wrong sort of grandparents for her life to be messed up, but not enough to qualify to wear a star and share her friends' fate, has to struggle to win the trust and friendship of the other excluded children. At first they plot exotic schemes to get "over the frontier" or "over the sea", but as the story goes on they come to see that these plans for physical escape will not free them, but that there is a "greater hope" that they can aspire to through a kind of Christian-Existentialist understanding of their own humanity. As long as they know that they are able to love and be loved, to renounce what they have willingly, and to forgive, they have nothing to fear from their oppressors. I'm not sure how an Auschwitz survivor like Primo Levi would have felt about this, but Aichinger clearly believes that this is how she managed to live through the horror herself, and she makes a convincing case. And you don't need to agree with her to find that the book tells you something very direct about what it must have felt like to be a child in those times.½

I picked Kleist, Moos, Fasane off the shelf largely because of its intriguing title, without any clear idea of where it fits in Aichinger's work, and was immediately sucked in by the opening story, in which she looks back at her early childhood in her grandmother's kitchen in Vienna, in the years before the Nazis came to power, when she could still go to school like any normal little girl. Die Kräfte der Kindheit hielten die Welt zusammen. Und die Küche meiner Großmutter lag mitten darinnen. And she reflects on the arbitrariness of connections that only have meaning for the people who happen to have experienced them, like gym, needlework and singing (the three possibilities of afternoon school) or Kleist, Moss and Pheasants, which happened to be the names of three streets in the neighbourhood. Magnificent writing, in which everything is coloured by the grief we know is coming next, but nothing is twee or sentimental.

The book is in three sections, put together slightly arbitrarily (like Kleist, Moss and Pheasants). In the first part are half a dozen autobiographical short stories written between 1959 and 1982. In the second part are thirty years worth of notes from the author's diaries - sometimes a year gets a few pages, sometimes nothing. 1965 is represented by only one sentence: Einsicht bei Tageslicht, eine Hasengruppe. (Something like: "Insight by daylight, a playgroup."). Not all of them are so gnomic, and reading through them in sequence you can really start to make sense of Aichinger's growing doubts about the expressive possibilities of language.

In the third part of the book we get several essays about writers and writing. There's a hurried, but clearly very deeply felt, obituary tribute to Thomas Bernhard (added in the 1989 2nd edition), there are her thoughts on Adalbert Stifter and Georg Trakl, and there are tributes to Nelly Sachs and Franz Kafka in her acceptance speeches for their respective prizes - the Kafka piece is a wonderfully Kafkaesque conceit in which she describes how she once read a single sentence from one of Kafka's letters which filled her with a "strong dark happiness" that scared her so much that she never dared to read anything else he wrote.

A somewhat random taster, but definitely yet another writer I need to explore further.

Plot:
Ellen is a teenager in Vienna in the 40s. Her mother is Jewish and has fled the country, her father is Arian and doesn’t want to know Ellen anymore. So she lives with her maternal grandmother and dreams of finding a way to join her mother. But her days are mostly spent in isolation with a group of other children who are all Jewish and outcast.

Aichinger poured her own experiences of “having the wrong grandparents” into Die größere Hoffnung, an impressionistic, surreal novel in evocative, though not always literal and clear images. It’s one of the most harrowing novels about World War 2 I ever read, and one of the most beautifully written.

Read more on my blog: https://kalafudra.com/2016/04/12/die-grosere-hoffnung-herods-children-ilse-aichi...