Marcellus Emants' Posthumous Confession: Notes on life as a dirty brown spot

Arresting from its first stark sentence (“My wife is dead and buried”), nearly relentless in its catch-all combo of misanthropy and self-loathing, yet consistently compelling and perversely insightful, A Posthumous Confession (NYRB Classics, $16), Dutch author Marcellus Emants’ 1894 novel, newly back in print, translated and with an introduction by J.M. Coetzee, with a perfectly chosen detail from Edvard Munch’s Self-portrait in Hell as its cover art, is as elegantly wrought as it is deeply repulsive. So, in other words, a must-read.

By the time he finally sets down to write about his life—to confess, as it were—Willem Termeer (a name that fittingly prompts images of termites) is 35, friendless, and, having been recently widowed, “free again.” But free to do what? He says he’s killed his wife, Anna, though the circumstances are unclear. By his own claims Termeer, a man without profession, whose biography is encrusted with botched attempts at hedonism, is hopelessly apathetic. How did he manage to become a murderer? Until we reach the final pages, all we’re given to speculate upon are cryptic summaries: “one thing followed from another far too gradually.”

Termeer’s chronically mistrustful, solipsistic, a compulsive liar. His sense of inferiority, even to those whom he despises, is paralyzing. In one especially memorable anecdote, he meets a student who he instantly dislikes, only to realize that they’re exactly alike, and Termeer befriends the younger man so as to enjoy feeling superior on account of his elder status. In another episode he develops a middling interest in a Swedish pianist (Anna also would play the piano) that becomes a blazing desire only with the appearance of a rival. He gradually resolves that the only way for him to function socially is to perform: “if it was impossible for me to become a good man I would at least aspire to live like a good man.”

Emants worked predominantly as a playwright, and part of what makes A Posthumous Confession so readable is the momentum and intimacy of its monologue. Termeer’s vulnerability sometimes yields emotional colours he might not even be cognizant of. His descriptions of fumbling teenage courtship are surprisingly tender, even sweet. Perhaps this sweetness helped to facilitate the profound sourness to come: “my love disappeared like a raindrop in hot sand: all that was left was a dirty brown spot.” Elsewhere, his wild pessimism is conveyed with such throttle that it actually becomes really funny: “O death, death—how frightened I have always been of it! Yet I have so often asked myself, ‘Were you unhappy before you were born?’”

Coetzee notes that A Posthumous Confession is a singularly pure example of the confessional genre, and Emants indeed invests an unusual degree of attention to developing Termeer’s distinctive literary voice and approach to self-analysis. His reasons for wanting to write become incrementally lucid and may even represent the most altruistic impulse Termeer is capable of feeling. “Who knows how many there are who are just like me,” he wonders, “yet will realize it only when they have seen themselves mirrored in me.” Yet there is also a sly bit of preternatural postmodernism emerging here. Termeer goes to see a play entitled Artist by one Marcellus Emants. It “made a deep impression on me because of the many features of resemblance between the artist and myself.” He even goes on to critique Emants’ play.

A Posthumous Confession’s most obvious antecedents are Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground and certain tales of psychological frailty by Poe. The novel also bears a certain likeness to early work by Emants’ Norwegian contemporary Knut Hamsun. But where do we find this underground figure in more recent decades? Perhaps in the work of Thomas Bernhard. Or perhaps we need to go to the movies. “I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention,” Travis Bickle confesses in Taxi Driver. “I believe that someone should become a person like other people.” If only becoming “a person” were that simple.

The Voice Imitator: 104 opportunities to encounter Thomas Bernhard in one page or less

I have recently endeavoured to compel fellow readers to explore the works of the late Austrian novelist, playwright and poet Thomas Bernhard, whose novels I have only recently begun to explore and whose plays and poems I hope to explore imminently, yet I have been reminded over the course of this endeavour that it may prove difficult to compel fellow readers to explore the works of Thomas Bernhard due to their (in)famous prose style, distinguished by very long sentences that seem to ramble, mesmerize and merely repeat themselves while they are in fact building a seductive and compelling rhythm and tension and secretly working to reward the reader with the utmost narrative clarity and an arresting sense of voice. My endeavour has been aided by the recent reprinting of many Bernhard’s novels, such as The Loser, about suicide, genius, and Glenn Gould, and Correction, about suicide, genius, and a cone-shaped edifice, by the recently published Prose, and by the even more recently published My Prizes: An Accounting, though none of these has filled me with as much hope of compelling fellow readers to explore the works of Thomas Bernhard, despite their very long sentences that seem to ramble, mesmerize and merely repeat themselves, as The Voice Imitator (University of Chicago Press, $12 US), whose darkly comical, anecdote-like stories, about suicide, murder, accidents, governments, and generally peculiar behaviour, are so short as to never exceed a page’s length and thus diminish the potentially off-putting effect of those very long sentences that seem to ramble, mesmerize and merely repeat themselves. There is additionally something ironic about a work from Thomas Bernhard being called The Voice Imitator since I can think of few other late 20th century writers whose writerly voice has been more closely imitated or, as it were, paid homage, by writers whose work I’d already come to adore, such as W.G. Sebald, Geoff Dyer, and Horacio Castellanos Moya, who have done such inspired work of imitating or, as it were, paying homage to Thomas Bernhard’s writerly voice that I will with this sentence cease my own pale imitation or, as it were, homage, to the writerly voice of Thomas Bernhard.

Bernhard’s micro-fictions are often founded in personal experiences, often shared with a small group of anonymous friends. He seems attracted to precisely those strangers who go out of their way not to attract attention—twice in The Voice Imitator a story begins when Bernhard and his companions become fascinated by a solitary figure in a tavern made conspicuous by his “taciturnity.” Just as often, Bernhard’s stories seem culled from truncated news reports or hearsay: the lavish mountainside hotel abandoned by its grieving owner and left to the elements having never once been occupied; the fortune teller murdered for failing to provide a philanderer with an accurate prophecy of his wife’s death; the postman consigned to an insane asylum who asks that he be able to continue wearing his postman’s uniform so as to not go insane; the discovery of a giant skeleton in a village always thought to be inhabited solely by very short people; the fireman who pulled away a safety blanket just as a suicidal jumper jumped because he was overtaken by “an inner compulsion.”

Bernhard seems drawn to these stories for their grave ironies and subtle insights, though so often it’s difficult to discern what’s based on fact and what is pure invention. Not that it matters. The Voice Imitator is filled with deliciously unqualified generalizations and assumptions. In ‘Genius’ Bernhard writes that in Vienna, “lack of consideration and impudence towards thinkers and artists has always been greater than anywhere else.” If Bernhard’s legendary loathing of his home country renders such a claim highly suspicious it in no way diminishes its power to evoke a singular psychological landscape. Characteristically, these stories keep circling themes of suicide and despair, but they also return again and again to tales of unlikely connections between people. With any luck, The Voice Imitator might even forge new connections between Bernhard and those readers willing to give this extraordinary author a chance.

Out of Sheer Rage: the road not taken

Geoff Dyer, not writing about D.H. Lawrence

Geoff Dyer negotiated with the inexplicable allure of great music by invoking moments in the lives of several giants of jazz through fiction-like prose in But Beautiful, one of my favourite books about music ever. Now back in print, Dyer’s 1997 book Out of Sheer Rage (Picador, $15 USD) takes a very different approach to writing about D.H. Lawrence, the writer who made Dyer want to be a writer. Dyer’s approach to Lawrence however is largely about avoiding any approach whatsoever. Out of Sheer Rage is a memoir of perpetual procrastination, addiction to anticipation, and despair. Steve Martin says it’s the funniest book he’s ever read. I’m rather fond of it myself.

D.H. Lawrence

Dyer’s considerable feat is to sustain our interest in something he’s promised from the beginning is going nowhere by actually going all over the place: to Italy, Greece, Mexico, to the US, and back home to England, to survive an island moped crash, illness, dubbed movies, the temptation to masturbate in public, and, echoing a choice passage from Don DeLillo's White Noise, the inevitable disappointment of standing in a place intended to radiate significance, or more precisely, to stand in the place where some dead admired person once stood, trying to conjure nonexistent emotions. This is something Dyer does especially well, dissecting conflicted responses to ostensible grandeur, always with a wit every bit the equal of Dyer’s titular rage.

There is of course plenty of literary commentary in Out of Sheer Rage, its belated arrival feeling almost subversive. Dyer considers his youthful reading and in some cases refusal to reread much of Lawrence—save the entire collected correspondence—as well as the work of Thomas Bernhard and Milan Kundera. He makes a compelling case for the writing of a book being only slightly ahead of the research for a book, for a writer’s notes for a novel sometimes being more valuable than the novels themselves. In one passage of just a few pages, Dyer eloquently sums up much of what David Shields spent all of Reality Hunger, his fascinating and frustrating manifesto-by-collage, trying to say—partially through pulling quotes from Out of Sheer Rage. This might explain Dyer’s own wry appraisal of Reality Hunger: “Reading it, I kept thinking, ‘Yes, exactly, I wish I’d said that,’ and then I realized I had.” Shields only included citations in his book because his publishers forced him to, so all readers who hungered for more of the reality Shields used as his source material owe the old farts at Knopf a great favour, because they at least had the courtesy to include the information that might lead us to read Out of Sheer Rage.

Bearing witness to the inferno (by proxy): Senselessness

Horacio Castellanos Moya

An unnamed writer arrives in an unnamed Latin American country to copyedit 1,100 pages of testimony taken from the survivors of atrocities committed against indigenous communities by their own military forces. Overseen by the Catholic Church and a small legion of international human rights workers, the incendiary report awaits only this final polish from the foreign writer before being made public. The writer’s job, as he sees it, is to “make sure that the Catholic hands about to touch the balls of the military tiger were clean and had even gotten a manicure…” The writer, recently slandered in his own country for politically correct misinterpretations of critiques he made of his country’s president in a national newspaper, has taken the work for essentially cynical reasons. He’s here for the remittance and to escape an unpleasant situation, and it behooves him to approach his work dispassionately.

Yet the writer immediately finds himself marveling at the primitive poeticisms of the Cakchiquel Indians who describe their trauma in curious phrases such as “I am not complete in the mind.” The writer jots down several such phrases in his personal notebook and even commits them to memory, repeating them to everyone he meets. He also however finds himself tormented by the sheer horror of what he’s charged with reading and revising, the steady, massive and dark waves of torture, rape and mutilation remembered by witnesses, one of whom even suggests that it is only with the forgetting the names of the victims that they will finally rest in peace.

The writer turns to drinking and cultivating sexual encounters to provide a balm to his agitated mind. His crudity and crassness with regards to the women he seeks to seduce makes a striking, blackly comic contrast to the ostensible solemnity of his task. Reading about violence perpetrated against human flesh only seems to make him crave more contact with human flesh, preferably when it covers a body roughly akin to that of Demi Moore. The contrast between the unimaginable suffering of many and the festering, petty, carnal obsessions of one might cause the reader to find kinship between Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness (New Directions, $17.50) and numerous novels by Martin Amis. But Castellanos Moya’s prose in this, his first novel to be translated into English, by Katherine Silver, isn’t quite as merrily misanthropic as Amis, bless his black heart, can often seem. As the writer’s paranoia balloons to terrifying proportions over the course of his work; as he realizes that the memories he’s being exposed to can’t be shut out through fleeting and typically less than satisfying pleasures; as he begins to acknowledge the titular senselessness of the supposed identification that he, a well-fed writer, feels with the impoverished survivors of massacres, to the point of appropriating their words to express his own feelings, Castellanos Moya imbues his protagonist—who bears more than a few similarities with his creator—with a certain sympathy. Who among us is capable of fully digesting, of making any sense of, stories of abysmal slaughter?

The prose style of Senselessness is actually most in keeping with that of Thomas Bernhard, especially its long, fluid sentences, which read not as leisurely digressions or opportunities for pedantry but rather as anxiety-riddled bursts of compulsive extrapolations from a guy on the verge of totally losing his shit. Written in the warts-and-all first person, Senselessness’ rambling sentences give a vivid sense of a protagonist utterly overwhelmed, tense as a wire designed to asphyxiate, with every period punching into the page like a drowning man coming up for air. The evocation of burgeoning madness can probably be most accurately aligned to Gogol or Kafka—whom we can also trace in the novel’s dichotomy of bureaucratic abstraction and looming threat of genuine violence. The short, sharp finale has the effect of reminding us that terror cannot be confined to the frontiers of the third world.

In a sly bit of self-referral, there’s a moment in Senselessness when the writer, already beginning to feel les than complete in the mind, declares his new goal of “not wallowing in any of the testimonies that I would never turn into a novel, because nobody in his right mind would be interested in writing or publishing or reading yet another novel about murdered indigenous peoples…” Well, so much for that idea. But Castellanos Moya’s contribution this genre, if we can call it that, is hardly a work of unbridled bathos and hand wringing. It doesn’t pretend to contain in any neat fashion the atrocities the writer reads about (which are presumably modeled after similar crimes committed in Guatemala). In fact Senselessness is about our inability to do precisely this, no matter what our proximity is to the events in question.

Castellanos Moya circa 1980

Castellanos Moya’s own proximity to atrocity has fluxuated vertiginously. Born in Honduras in 1957 but raised in El Salvador, he has been a citizen of Guatemala, Canada, Costa Rica, Spain, Germany, and Mexico, where he spent 12 years as a journalist and political analyst. He now lives in Pittsburgh, living in exile as part of the City of Asylum Project. In a recent interview he stated his intense distaste with being identified as a political novelist, though he admits that his earliest memory is of a bombing that destroyed the porch of his grandparents’ house back when his grandfather was the president of a nationalist party and conspiring the oust a liberal government, so perhaps politics is something he would be incapable of excising from his work if he wanted to. In any case his is another vagabond and unsentimental voice from Latin American literature that the rest of us would do well to listen to. As we stand back and try to comprehend the chaos that continues to unfold in the rest of the Americas Castellanos Moya can help us to decipher not only the experiences of those who live there, but of us too, in our watching.