Patrick, Your mention of boring and language takes me back to Anna Seghers' "Transit," a novel I picked up recently on your prompting (it seems you spoke about it in one of those ephemeral Instagram posts). If a talented but less creative writer should fear boring their readers, it seems that a similar fear pervades her entire work, from page 1: the boredom the narrator feels he will bring about in his second-person interlocutor by telling his particular story of risk and trouble in a world so full of tragedy and suffering and death that it can offer little new, little to enthrall and be of the slightest interest to the man he will tell it to. He tells it anyway ! - perhaps excusing the nevertheless by later suggesting that only when telling one’s story does the experience become real. Still, within his story he shows restraint with Paulchen and does not tell him how he swam across the Rhine to escape a KZ. How many others have swum across rivers to escape? Thousands. No, he will not subject Paulchen to another such story.
But Seghers seems to have a different answer than you do in your piece concerning boredom and writing and language. The narrator seems to have slipped into a deadly world-weariness (eine tödliche Langeweile) as he becomes more and more uprooted from anything meaningful or permanent, where he can longer rely on aspirations or simple plans to see fulfillment. His ennui is all-consuming. Sitting with Weidel’s suitcase in his room in Paris, however, out of sheer boredom, he begins reading the book manuscript it contains. And suddenly, his boredom vanishes. Weidel’s talent is present (“der hat seine Kunst verstanden”) and he quickly focuses on the language as the source of his pleasure, his mother tongue, not the brutal language of the Nazis, but the language he remembers from more innocent times when he was growing up at home, his language. It is really quite a beautiful passage (p. 30 out of 310 pages in my edition). Telling, however, is when he is about to summarize for his friend what Weidel’s story is all about, he refrains, he doesn’t want to bore him, his friend has certainly read plenty of stories in his lifetime. (In this Seghers shares your view, I think, where you say “reading a great novel . . . is generally its own fulfillment, its own satiation.” Retelling a story that brought you pleasure is not worth the effort and likely boring.) But there seems to be no intermediality here, no music or visual art or whatever, no border crossings to spur or enable a creative newness. As the narrator confesses, the newness in Weidel’s work for him was the newness of literature, of reading itself, finding things within it he could relate to from his own past and even finding a character he felt was similar to himself.
At any rate, your piece here was stimulating, as always. I found it interesting that several things you brought together were things that Seghers brought together in Transit. Were you thinking at all of her novel when you composed it?
Patrick, Your mention of boring and language takes me back to Anna Seghers' "Transit," a novel I picked up recently on your prompting (it seems you spoke about it in one of those ephemeral Instagram posts). If a talented but less creative writer should fear boring their readers, it seems that a similar fear pervades her entire work, from page 1: the boredom the narrator feels he will bring about in his second-person interlocutor by telling his particular story of risk and trouble in a world so full of tragedy and suffering and death that it can offer little new, little to enthrall and be of the slightest interest to the man he will tell it to. He tells it anyway ! - perhaps excusing the nevertheless by later suggesting that only when telling one’s story does the experience become real. Still, within his story he shows restraint with Paulchen and does not tell him how he swam across the Rhine to escape a KZ. How many others have swum across rivers to escape? Thousands. No, he will not subject Paulchen to another such story.
But Seghers seems to have a different answer than you do in your piece concerning boredom and writing and language. The narrator seems to have slipped into a deadly world-weariness (eine tödliche Langeweile) as he becomes more and more uprooted from anything meaningful or permanent, where he can longer rely on aspirations or simple plans to see fulfillment. His ennui is all-consuming. Sitting with Weidel’s suitcase in his room in Paris, however, out of sheer boredom, he begins reading the book manuscript it contains. And suddenly, his boredom vanishes. Weidel’s talent is present (“der hat seine Kunst verstanden”) and he quickly focuses on the language as the source of his pleasure, his mother tongue, not the brutal language of the Nazis, but the language he remembers from more innocent times when he was growing up at home, his language. It is really quite a beautiful passage (p. 30 out of 310 pages in my edition). Telling, however, is when he is about to summarize for his friend what Weidel’s story is all about, he refrains, he doesn’t want to bore him, his friend has certainly read plenty of stories in his lifetime. (In this Seghers shares your view, I think, where you say “reading a great novel . . . is generally its own fulfillment, its own satiation.” Retelling a story that brought you pleasure is not worth the effort and likely boring.) But there seems to be no intermediality here, no music or visual art or whatever, no border crossings to spur or enable a creative newness. As the narrator confesses, the newness in Weidel’s work for him was the newness of literature, of reading itself, finding things within it he could relate to from his own past and even finding a character he felt was similar to himself.
At any rate, your piece here was stimulating, as always. I found it interesting that several things you brought together were things that Seghers brought together in Transit. Were you thinking at all of her novel when you composed it?
Pat
Yes yes good