Gert Jonke, The System of Vienna, Trans. by Vincent Kling (Dalkey Archive, 2009)"Gert Jonke opens The System of Vienna, an ostensibly autobiographical work, with the following: “Allow me first of all, in the interest of facilitating the greatest possible understanding, just a few brief words concerning the methodology of the working process I have adopted, thereby also expending a few more words on myself and my academic development.” Jonke then relays a short account of the hours before his birth, an account that can't be anything but fiction, without ever returning to discuss his “methodology,” which has of course already been demonstrated through this tale of his “beginnings.” Jonke emphasizes this with the compound distance of a synoptic description: “The story begins with a description of that cold winter night and how my mother allegedly started out not being able to find her shoes...”
In this way, The System of Vienna offers an older Gert Jonke a platform on which to compose the scattered pieces of his younger self, a “working process” that takes the reader along on a playful tour of the imaginative landscape where he grew up. Most writers spend the majority of their lives inside their own head, so, when writing an autobiography, it makes sense that Jonke would treat being-in-the-world and being-in-the-mind as inextricable. In The System of Vienna, he inhabits many modes: comic, ironic, metafictional, musical, romantic, sublime, absurd, surreal, fantastic, etc., all while meeting many paranoid and/or delusional characters, some of them Jonke’s own alter egos. It quickly becomes clear that Jonke can’t really—and does not intend to—write his “autobiography” without fictionalizing and outright inventing. For example, the first lines of “The Small City on the Lake”:
You know, I always make a connection between this small city, which I grew up in, and streetcars, even though no streetcars are in service there. Which leads to the conclusion that streetcars must have operated at one time, because how else would I ever have hit on the idea of connecting this place with streetcars?
Yes, there were streetcars traveling through this city at one time... if I think really hard...
Rather than simply recording the impressions that certain people, places, and things left on his consciousness, Jonke allows the alchemy of imagination to transform details from his life and express a world unmistakably infused with his DNA. While the notion of faulty human memory rearranging reality and fabricating to fill in the gaps is not new or groundbreaking, Jonke’s movements are more musical composition than critique of narrative memory. The early pieces follow a roughly chronological order through his childhood, but it’s with the jump into adulthood that the fog thickens, as events begin to swirl back into themselves while people and situations get increasingly strange and fantastic. Jonke’s tales resemble holding a mirror up to another mirror, the reflections drilling infinitely deep into labyrinthine corridors where some minotaur of meaning may or may not await, in the same way fractals appear to be so complex, but are in fact an image barnacled with infinitely receding miniatures of itself, a repetition, a refrain that becomes something different.
Another passage into Jonke’s labyrinth is “Opera Seminar—Metternich Grasse,” where the narrator agrees to assist a professor’s ridiculous and irrelevant slide show seminar even though he doesn’t want to. Inside the “opera department of the Music Academy,” the professor leads him “through the courtyard entrance, pointing out the elaborately wrought windows, interprets the meanings of all the stucco figures, the caryatids and atlantes along the walls...” and up along a “bewildering, twisting system of staircases and corridors,” finally arriving at the classroom where the lecture is to take place. But the professor has forgotten his slides and sends the narrator back down to find them. And, of course, the narrator gets lost, always taking the wrong corridor after mistaking the correct one for “a niche carved deep into the wall,” until eventually he finds an empty theater, sits down, and “[falls] asleep while thinking, no, don’t fall asleep.” When he later finds his way back to the classroom, he sees the professor had not forgotten the slides after all and is already halfway through his lecture.
Other of Jonke’s fractal characters and narrative mazes include a piece where the narrator attends a furniture show, not out of interest in furniture, but simply because the furniture is being displayed out in the open rather than in a room. He is hailed as the hundred thousandth visitor to the show and the Chancellor’s representative treats him to a beer. The Chancellor’s confidant confides in the narrator that he, the Chancellor’s confidant, does not feel like he is the Chancellor’s confidant, and then goes on to say how the Chancellor himself told his confidant that he, the Chancellor, sometimes cannot fathom that he is the Chancellor, of all people (from which he, the Chancellor bounces back into firm belief in his Chancellorhood, and then the Chancellor’s confidant also rebounds in the present conversation to affirm that he is indeed the Chancellor’s confidant.) The narrator is given a copy of a book entitled The System of Vienna, which he promptly leaves in a trashcan.
This and other repetitions may grate on some readers, but it is worth following Jonke through his dizzying loops of language and narrative, a representative example of which is the piece entitled “Jörger Strasse Prelude and Hernals Beltway Fugue,” a comedy ad absurdum taking the form of a letter recounting a story told to the letter-writer by his father, addressed to a man, an unwitting participant in the story of the letter-writer’s father leaving a confectionery shop and falling down on the sidewalk where “quite a large group of people gathered” and among them was the man to whom the letter is addressed.
Jonke’s finale, funny and moving, is the piece entitled “Caryatids and Atlantes—Vienna’s First Guest Workers,” with its dreamlike atmosphere and narrator softly deluded with the grandeur that his prodigious ability to sleep (with the help of pills, eventually) enthralls the stone statues upholding the buildings throughout the city:
My sleep performances soon came to be esteemed as a wondrously exotic, serenity-inducing form of Gesamtkunstwerk or all-encompassing work of art matchlessly flung high aloft by me, in all its incalculable vastness, into the air of those day-nights and night-days, aided by the sheer force of my individual personality.
That’s why my body was passed along the line... for the purpose of disseminating my sleep concerts, slumber plays, dreamer serenades, fatigue tragedies, exhaustion comedies, all to be marveled at...
In The System of Vienna, Gert Jonke creates what could be a literary image of Bach’s Goldberg Variations: the substance of each moment shifts and grows with each repetition, building on and yet changing everything before and after it at the same time, and the work as a whole would not be what it is without playing each repetition. Excess becomes essential to The System of Vienna, as the journey, especially the strange and sometimes pointless digressions, are what enrich and enliven the work. Finally, translator Vincent Kling’s afterword offers an insightful orientation to the place of The System of Vienna in Jonke’s body of work, suggesting that from the chaos of Jonke’s abundant imagination and playful innovation in narrative emerged the brilliantly ordered craftsmanship seen in later work like Geometric Regional Novel and Homage to Czerny. Gert Jonke was one of the great innovators of late 20th and early 21st Century literature—especially with his incorporation of music and mathematics into fiction—and, for the English-speaking world, each additional translated work is more supporting evidence that Jonke’s place is secure." - Josh Maday
"In his essay “William James and the Case of the Epileptic Patient,” Louis Menand critiques the practice of taking an individual’s life and whittling it down to the convenient “crisis-resolution” narrative. Problem is, writes Menand, the second you start trying to impose a narrative structure on the complexity of human life, that’s when the gaps get filled with however many subjective theories different biographers can think up and argue over. In other words: any attempt to impose order only leads, ironically, to chaos.
Gert Jonke (1946-2009), one of Austria’s most original modern authors, was deeply concerned with entropy, particularly by the tendency of artificial systems of order to crumble and scatter. The System of Vienna, an autobiographical novel and one of his final works, tells of a double journey: a physical one through the city of Vienna and a psychological one through age. From the start, The System of Vienna also sets up the puzzle that is at the basis of all creative endeavors: how the artist/autobiographer intends to control, channel, and understand the universe’s chaos and translate that understanding into something coherent. Beyond that bare-bones outline, however, Jonke’s narrator is never quite able to work out a system through which to organize and articulate the chaotic vastness of his life.
The System of Vienna, with its broad expanse of characters and internal ruminations, could have easily ended up a sprawling chaos itself. Instead, this is where Jonke’s mastery of language comes in, and the result is an experimental yet accessible narrative that handles some hefty ideas in an elegant, readable, and even comic manner.
We follow Jonke’s narrator as he encounters a surprising array of unusual individuals and sorts through his own varied and whimsical interpretations of the world around him. We learn that random events, for example, can be set as the effect of a cause in a larger system. The narrator wants to jump off a bridge but the bridge he wants to jump off collapses first. His desire to jump off that bridge must have meant that the bridge had “simply locked me out, took off just as I was getting there, ran away from me at a mad dash, at the last minute, head over heels, wanted nothing to do with me...” Taken even further, attempts to “order” real life only end in paranoia or delusion, as seen by a wholesale fish dealer by the Danube, who thinks he controls all of Austrian politics and is next in line for the Chancellorship.
Although Jonke’s narrator is likely Jonke himself, The System of Vienna is ultimately a work of fiction. If, as Menand reminds us, (auto)biography (and particularly autobiography) is actually a subjective interpretation of an individual’s life – the “summing up” of a whole vortex of thoughts, ideas, emotions, events, and so forth – then “the very act of describing a life turns it into fiction.” So allowing for subjectivity, how much fantasy can we accept in (auto)biography? And if narrative informs how we view the world, then how do we understand reality? Jonke’s narrator can only attempt to write an autobiography, but his life story is inevitably reprocessed through his imagination and, as a result, he can never quite stay on track or even in the real world. At one point, Jonke uses the image of walking in an untamed landscape and becoming distracted by its riotous natural beauty until one finds oneself distracted from the task at hand, and finally lost in an “utter entanglement that keeps multiplying itself over and over in constant mutual duplication.” In looking for a system – a structure or guide by which to organize life into a tidy beginning-middle-end story – Jonke, ironically, only finds himself exploring why such a system would be nothing but a fabrication that will never sufficiently contain all that he is.
In his Afterward, translator Vincent Kling describes to the artist as an individual who defies the universe’s chaos and creates “a thing of beauty” that will be “a joy forever.” It is self-conscious arrangement, aware of its own artifice yet unable to exist without it. (M.C. Escher’s Drawing Hands comes to mind.) Jonke seeks to parody this artistic “consciousness of arrangement,” without which coherent expression is impossible. So maybe it is possible that while we think we are living and interacting, our existence is actually “a single, unmitigated act of endlessly walking back and forth for hours in this enclosed space,” and reality itself, filtered through each individual’s eyes, is a kind of fiction that we invent as we go. Here, Gert Jonke asks us to examine the boundaries of, and interactions between, fantasy, reality, and understanding. The System of Vienna is a short book, but a provocative one, and the perfect send-off for one of Austria’s greatest modern writers." - Eileen Fay
"There is plenty fresh about Gert Jonke’s The System of Vienna. Like the bulk of his work, this novel is musical, innovative, and difficult, not in a dusty academic way, but as a delightful puzzle, as a well-constructed argument, as a challenging game of chess... The System of Vienna is a sprawling autobiographical novel (some describe it as a collection of linked stories) full of outrageous characters bustling through even more outrageous scenes. Beginning with a recounting of the narrator’s birth, and how his skin was tinged blue, the novel proceeds with descriptions of events that helped shape his personality, his consciousness, his obsessions: he encounters a man who thinks the French Embassy was built in the wrong place; he meets another who is unsure whether he is or isn’t the Chancellor’s confidant; he bumps into an eccentric stamp collector in the woods he thinks was imitating a tawny owl’s call; he meets another man (perhaps Jonke’s tribute to André Gide’s The Counterfeiters) who hands him a book called The System of Vienna; and he meets a paranoid fish merchant who believes that he masterminds Austrian politics from his stall.
Jonke is adept at blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. And he ably navigates metafictional and musical composition elements with comedic and fabulist registers while also experimenting with language, with unique syntactic strategies that convincingly depict a person’s psychology, particularly one that is in crisis, on the page. The reading of the novel is hurried along by expressive hyphenations like “wrinkled-lined-shriveled” and “sheen-glinting,” and brimming with portmanteaus like “eveninglikemorningishly afternoonnight” and “opendoorclosedoorslyness.” These neologisms visually capture the speed in which the character experiences his rush of thoughts and sometimes even threaten to take over the narrative:
And were you not then actually inside the bakery and suddenly seated on the padded red plastic chair, and did you in all likelihood not even really take notice of the closingtheglassdoorbehindyou, your enteringthecoffeehouse-aroma, lookingforandchoosingaseat, goingovertooneofthosepaddedredplasticchairs and the seating of your person in such a way that it seemed to you as if nothing like this had ever occurred before…
And the rush of cumulative sentences, insane, qualifying and self-correcting sentences that collapse upon each other, perfectly mirror the narrator’s decreased confidence, his fragmented consciousness, his quickly devolving sense of self:
Therein was to be sought the reason and the cause why things are sometimes, mostly sometimes, rather often, sometimes rather often, mostly sometimes rather often, mostly rather often, sometimes mostly mostly, mostly mostly not as they should be.
As the novel progresses, the narrator falls into endless repetitions. It reaches its apotheosis in “Philosophy of Household Management”:
Since that time I don’t put flowers out onto the hallway window any more; I’ve given up putting flowers onto the hallway window, because it makes no sense to put flowers onto the hallway window, no, it’s not just senseless, but impossible, for that matter, since it’s not a common thing to set flowers onto hallway windows, and setting flowers onto hallway windows can even be grounds for having your lease canceled.
And so it continues for pages. In less accomplished hands these repetitions would prove tiresome, but the voice here perfectly meshes with the narrator’s desire to get things right, captures his tendency to get lost in mundanities and life’s day-to-day minutiae, and also reflects his mind’s slow dissolution.
As much as the novel is a series of progressions from one trolley-stop to another, many of its encounters are driven by digressions, that is, characters are likely to deliver tangent-filled monologues that go all over the place. Jonke’s meeting with the sculptor in “Furniture Show—Main Promenade in the Prater” is as stunning as it is baffling, where the sculptor’s speechifying is marked by constant qualifications, apologies, and all kinds of circuitous asides.
The narrator is plagued by his dreams. At one moment he dreamed he saw his great-aunt flying over hills “powered by two gigantic wings of a nose out of her shoulder blades.” But as bizarre as his dreams are, his waking life is sometimes just as vivid and overwhelming:
I look down at the dark spots with which the sidewalks and streets here are strewn, as if I were being drawn to the ground by these faint patterns of glinting mica eyes in the paving material.
At first I believe they are the remaining marks of large raindrops fallen out of the night onto the sidewalks and streets. But when the spots have not been absorbed by the heat of midday, I can only think that the sidewalks and streets are constantly being spit on in profusion by the burning sky of the given day or much likely, by the good people of Vienna themselves, the latter speculation making it no surprise at all to me that these blotches never disappear.
We find the narrator increasingly losing control of his hold on reality, where at one point he asks: Is it not altogether possible that the course of our life in its entirety is determined by nothing other than an unremitting and regrettable or even lamentable captivity founded on a curious aggregation of altogether ceaseless and incredibly unremitting post-hypnotic suggestions?
But it is the novel’s penultimate chapter wherein we observe the fullness of Jonke’s imaginative, visionary writing. In “Caryatids and Atlantes—Vienna’s First Guest Workers,” the narrator discovers that he is able to commune with stone sculptures. He learns that they “apprehended” time “as a physically concrete reality” and that they “required eternity-dimensional masses of time clouds” in order to exist. But their relationship isn’t one-sided: he teaches them about sleep and dreams. His “sleep performances came to be esteemed” by the stone sculptures as a
wondrously exotic, serenity-inducing form of Gesamtkunstwerk or all-encompassing work of art matchlessly flung high aloft by [him], in all its incalculable vastness, into the air of those day-nights and night-days, aided by the sheer force of [his] individual personality.
It is an imaginative end to a highly experimental and visionary novel.
And this hasn’t even covered the narrator’s grappling with suicidal thoughts, his synesthetic experiences where he often feels like he were hearing with his eyes, his repeated anthropomorphizing of the elements and inanimate objects, or how the narrative, even with its many bifurcations, still closely resembles the structure of the hero’s quest wherein the hero meets and overcomes numerous challenges and emerges victorious. The System of Vienna, with its commanding cadences, self-absorbed insistence, and entrancing repetitions, not to mention its childlike surrender to fantasy, is boundless fiction that both puzzles and entertains." - John Madera
"When Austrian dramatist, poet, and author Gert Jonke died from pancreatic cancer at age 62 last year, British journalist Guy Dammann lamented that he passed just as his readership was finally beginning to match his reputation: "At its height his reputation was grounded principally on the widespread misapprehension about the severe difficulty of his writing. Despite winning the first ever Ingeborg Bachmann prize in 1977, and later the Franz Kafka and Berlin Literature prizes, among numerous others, people tended to respect rather than read Jonke. Which makes it all the more ironic that, just as his reputation was once again on the up—a resurgence based this time on a real and growing readership—he has died."
The resurgence Dammann refers to was presumably taking place among Jonke’s German-language readership. But English-speakers got some help catching up on Jonke’s quirky brilliance when the Dalkey Archive Press published Vincent Kling’s highly enjoyable translation of Jonke’s novella-in-stories, The System of Vienna.
This richly imaginative book fits fifteen chapters into ninety-eight pages (minus an elegant afterword by Kling). Most chapters in this autobiographical novella focus on a spot in Vienna, and they’re recalled in sequence from the narrator’s birth through adulthood as he meets odd people who strive to convey knowledge about politics, society, love, and human perception. Jonke’s writing isn’t difficult, though his sentences can stretch on into multi-page masterpieces, and he’s a fan of word games and surreal imagery. But beneath these formal surfaces and experimental style (some have called Jonke a “text composer”), these stories are frequently tender and funny; for all the book’s curiosities and through-the-looking-glass moments, System proves Jonke was that rare thing: a huge, rebellious talent with tremendous heart.
In the first chapter, “Beginnings in a Small Southern Austrian City,” a mere two pages in length, Jonke chats about “myself and my academic development” as if he were a well-known author, using a punchy, casual tone that is comforting yet deceptive (considering the philosophical flourishes in the stories ahead). Regarding his birth in “the district hospital” in Klagenfurt, Jonke tells “as you probably already know” of how his mother trudges alone through the cold and tries to get in the side door of the hospital, but can’t due to regulations upheld by the night porter. After enough berating—”why else would strict instructions like these exist if they weren’t important”—the porter relents and lets her in to have her baby, the final sentence reading, “After that I—as the concluding expression goes—’turned up in no time,’ and, bringing the story to its end, there’s a description of my skin, at that point completely blue.”
This tiny monologue sets the tone and lays out a major theme of the book. Beneath the ensuing layers of the narrative, using a close or distant voice that changes from story to story, a deliberately unsettling playfulness is in high gear.
Jonke aims to convey the idea that this kind of rebellious play is a serious skill people must nurture in themselves if they’re ever going to keep the world’s inanity from ruining their spirits. After all, as “Beginnings” shows in its precise and offhand way, even mothers giving birth in small towns will be made to suffer fools in a society more concerned with rules than well-being. It’s as if Jonke is saying, Make me wait, will you? Keep me out in the cold until I’m blue—before I’m even born, will you? All right then, you fuckers. It’s on.
Jonke worked this sort of lemme at ‘em territory at greater length in his social satire Geometric Regional Novel, first published in English in hardcover in 1994 and then in paperback in 2000 by the Dalkey Archive. As a classically trained pianist, Jonke also wrote about music (and based stories on musical forms), as shown in his other books available in English, Blinding Moment: Four Pieces About Composers, and the novel Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique.
As System continues, Jonke’s self-as-narrator grows up. “Childhood in the Country” brims with happy and Eden-like language. As if helping to get the reader in shape for the enormous sentences to come, Jonke offers this relatively short gem (cut in half here), describing his early wonder at the natural world:
I spent the hot summers back in those years mostly at the house of a great-aunt in the country, though, where I would sink down into her garden as if into a subtropical rain forest, in the shadows of the larkspur along the trailers and stalks of vegetables with pods and hulls bursting open in the heat, planted all the way out to the twilit place where menacing stands of horsetail and hemlock woods lined a pondoceanswamp in the sour-smelling surf of which the afternoons coursed along . . .
That “pondoceanswamp” shows Jonke satirizing mile-long, German compound words, and the final portion of the quote contains a common Jonke technique wherein units of time, in this case “afternoons,” become objects moved by the mind through metaphor, where they can be manipulated in the physical world, side by side with our bodies, just as vulnerable to being moved as we are by nature and chance.
When the book moves from nature into Vienna, however, the action frequently retreats into his mind as microadventures in thought. As the narrator ages he becomes justifiably confused by the foolishness and emptiness and banality of modern urban life. As if to dramatize this, “Wholesale Fish Dealer by the Danube Canal” spins in annoying circles, forcing readers to ask, Why all this stuff about the guy not being a fish dealer? Three pages later, Jonke answers: “Therein was to be sought the reason and the cause of why things are sometimes, mostly sometimes, rather often, sometimes rather often, mostly sometimes rather often, mostly rather often, sometimes mostly mostly, mostly mostly not as they should be.” Jonke isn’t making a point so much as observing the follies of human communication; to Jonke’s great credit, that distinction—observing, not teaching—is carefully maintained throughout the book.
This approach, which lets the reader reach conclusions without unnecessary moralizing or preaching, lends power and conviction to the author’s driving belief: we’re alive and we’re adventurous and the world so often thwarts us in our pursuits to understand more and see more.
Yet if there are moments of humanity here, there’s also plenty of formalism. In “Attempt to Break Out to Klosterneuberg,” Jonke lets the story end like a poem, with short line breaks and all lower-case letters. At another point Jonke adds extra spaces between the letters of each word in a key phrase. (And Dalkey does an admirable job of integrating these typographical devices.) Far from being cold puzzles, though, these tactics mirror the daily challenges of perception and communication that people face. And his use of repetition and layers, as with music, mirror the emotional sequence of how we experience things, remember them, and assemble memories.
Jonke does all this while keeping his readers’ best interest in mind. His chapters are compressed without being impenetrably dense, and he uses standard plot elements to frame his greater ambitions, making something new and surprising in the process. This fusion of the traditional and the experimental is exemplified in the wonderful epistolary story, “Jörger Strasse Prelude Hernals Beltway Fugue,” where Jonke tucks a moment of human vulnerability into a complex narrative structure, in this case a son caring for his elderly father.
“Fugue” and the next two stories form a thematic downward arc that turns abruptly heavenward at the end of the novel. A nadir is reached in the trio’s middle story, with the narrator’s suicidal tendencies in “Danube River Bridge.” Here Jonke’s language demonstrates that he takes depression seriously, even as comedy threatens:
[I] would often walk from bridge to bridge along the banks of the Danube . . . looking down into the river’s eyes as they drifted past below, and then spitting down into the river before I resumed my crossing. To this day I am absolutely certain that my spitting down into the water from the bridge was in no way connected with its bringing good luck, as a simplistic folk belief would have it, but was rather a kind of substitute for my not spitting my bodily self in its entirety over the railing along the firmament. Instead of a complete plunge into the river, then, I let drift downward just a few words or sentences, now rendered unutterable through liquefaction, dissolved in my oral cavity from keeping silent so long . . .
The sadness bottoms out then surges upward into the glad but gloomy romantic fantasy, “Caryatids and Atlantes—Vienna’s First Guest Workers,” which concludes the trio. The story shows Jonke giving fame the finger, imagining himself as “a creative sleep artist,” not a writer hounded by the urge to self-promote but “a sleep interpreter engaged with the completed creation.” Throughout this trio Jonke repeats phrases like chords, whole pages of narration stuttering ahead upon rising and falling rhythms, using musicality as a guide for word choice.
This search for music and freedom in language yields eloquent results at the end of the “Klosterneuberg.” With its broken lines, like a poem, even in translation we see how the words on the page had to yield to what Jonke was pursuing. It’s dreamy stuff that lets his adult narrator feel momentarily ageless. Jonke risks sounding terribly sentimental, but because of the risk he achieves instead the defiant tone of a soul too proud to let time have its way.
and I do go away at once, not without having said goodbye; but no, I don’t go, I run, ride back at once on one of those days that have ended before they even began,
on this eveninglikemorningishly afternoonnight;
in fact, this day hasn’t even dawned yet." - Matthew Jakubowski
«READ (red) v. – 1. To comprehend or take in the meaning of (something written or printed). 2. To utter or render aloud (something written or printed).—Oxford English Dictionary
Consider the above entry from the OED. Readers applying the second definition to The System of Vienna, by Gert Jonke, will, I believe, more readily meet the condition of the first. Jonke’s prose is fun to read, but not always easy to understand. It helps to ‘render aloud’ his words, much the same way that, say, Finnegans Wake is served by recitation, all the better to hear Joyce’s musicality. With Jonke, an oral reading brings out the obsessive vocal twitter of Vienna’s denizens such as this one that we meet early on in a chapter entitled “Autumn Mist—Rose Hill.”
I bet you believe I’m a sculptor, the sculptor said, but that’s a mistake. You believe I’m standing here under this tree and busying myself with admittedly unusual sculpture, but that is not at all how things are, no, and that you are now standing here beside me is also purely a matter of your imagination, just as it goes without saying that we’re always quite naturally located somewhere other then circumstances would make it appear, so listen carefully, for in all probability we are located in no place other, of yes indeed, than in a—how do you say it—more or less enclosed space, a room that has a suspiciously familiar appearance to us, you won’t think it possible, but what are we doing here after all, well now you won’t even believe it….
A semi-colon appears a few lines later, but it’s a full page and half before a period hits us. Jonke’s translator, Vincent Kling, who must be signaled out for his bravery and commitment in translating Vienna, notes in his afterward that Jonke creates “clausal monstrosities that postpone the verb for so long that it sometimes never appears.”
If this makes Jonke sound intimidating, let me assure you that The System of Vienna, once you discover its pattern, is entirely accessible. This late Austrian novelist shares Joyce’s desire to experiment with the novel’s structure and language, while simultaneously launching an exploration of his homeland. Just as Joyce walked us through the streets of Dublin, Jonke opens the door on Vienna and the nature of the Austrian character. His novel stakes its claim early, announcing loudly that the reader is no longer in the cozy arena of “narrative structure” or “character” or “linear arcs.” Jonke does not mock these literary conventions, but applies them in his own fashion, and holds up the results for the reader to inspect.
While it can certainly be called “experimental,” Vienna offers a pair of familiar organizing principles for its slim 98 pages. Autobiography (ostensibly) is the first, with Jonke asking the reader to take it on faith that no matter how fantastic his narrative becomes, it’s all taken from real events. (Although his first paragraph promises to explain his “methodology… and academic development” he typically never gets around to it.) The second device is a tour of the titular city by streetcar, with each chapter a different stop not only in the city but also in the author’s life, from birth to death. Each stop, while part of the greater city, is self-contained. The author even notes that the segments were published separately as stories (one chapter, “Danube River Bridge,” first appeared on an album cover). There is no “plot” to speak of, even as the segments trace the linear pattern of life. You don’t read The System of Vienna so much as you hop on and hop off the trolley car, admiring what you like and taking pictures were it suits you, and so, too, might you skip around the remainder of this review, as it reflects how I found myself reading Jonke’s book.
I took great pleasure in reading Jonke’s first entry, “Beginnings In A Small Southern Austrian City,” as he relates the story of his mother, pregnant with him, arriving at a hospital in the middle of a frigid winter night only to find, “that she wasn’t permitted to enter the hospital by that door, but by the main entrance instead, because it wasn’t the usual practice to enter the hospital by any of the side entrances, and moreover it wasn’t even possible to open this particular one, whereas the main entrance, on the other hand, was open all night long, so she could certainly go in that way if she absolutely had to….”
And so on for half the page, until the disgruntled guard finally opens the side gate and lets in the expecting mother. Represented in prose, this hyperactive bureaucracy takes on an element of the fantastic and ridiculous; we who live in the modern world may be all too familiar with the channels and paperwork and hierarchy and adherence to the rule of law that can overwhelm common sense and human decency. Jonke’s first book, Geometric Regional Novel, tackled this head on, the best example in that work being a form that needs to be filled out in order to take a walk in the woods. (Sample questions: “Where are you going?” “What do you want there?” “Why don’t you want to go somewhere else?” “Why don’t you just stay home?”)
Lambasting these systems is a literary tradition. Kafka pioneered the method, and Jonke is one of his many heirs.
Tragic comedy reigns supreme in Jonke’s world. Each time he (or his fictional alter ego) introduces us to a new area of the city it’s not more then a few paragraphs before a neurotic voice of worry or anger or frustration at the Austrian way of conducting everyday life takes over. A stopover at Nussdorf station becomes an opportunity to observe the pissoirs (public urinals) and how “yellow lime clings to the tar paper walls, torn prophylactics are often found in the grates over the drains, the drains are often stopped up so the whole pissoir is flooded with diluted urine… while all around… people have scratched their names and their depictions of human sex organs—transfigured through the simple grace of unsophisticated folk art.”
With the chapter “In the Course of My Courses…” Jonke admits that his years “spent so far at the University of Vienna have been a fantastic fraud, an unparalleled swindle…” Academic lectures are given “over and over, exactly the same, word for word, every two years since the end of the Second World War…” and when he substitutes for a professor, the man insists on Jonke using a metronome set to the tempo of the “Waldstein” sonata “so as to be able to execute his text with authenticity before the empty seats in the lecture hall.”
Home offers the author no comfort either. In the chapter “Hernals-Style of Household Management,” Jonke feels forced to adhere to said style, in which he does not “put flowers out onto the hallway windows any more… because it makes no sense… it’s not just senseless, but impossible… as it can be grounds for having your lease cancelled.” Neighbors are suspicious and “take their doormats into their apartments… so to be completely sure no one can steal their doormats.”
Then there is the chapter “Wholesale Fish Dealer By The Danube Canal.” Here, Jonke is subjected to the tirade of the said dealer who is convinced he is directing all of Austrian politics from his fish stall. “I’m the real Chancellor,” he says. “Everything proceeds… according to my decisions… If you believe, that politics are run by those people who call themselves political figures, then you have fallen victim to a serious mistake! Because for those who call themselves political figures, being in charge of politics represents a mere deception, a tremendous cover-up perpetrated on the public.”
Jonke and his characters are building fictions about themselves, perhaps to mask the true misery behind provincial life. It’s both sad and funny. Everyone is swallowed up in their nervous, self-made contortions of invention.
I found it impossible to read Jonke without thinking of his countryman, Thomas Bernhard. Both men have perfected the art of the Austrian flavored rant. I find Jonke funnier, more playful and easier to read, whereas if you don’t tackle Bernhard’s unbroken brick walls of prose from the first page, you can easily get lost. Jonke is the playful sprite to Bernhard’s grumpy wizard.» - Matthew Mercier
Gert Jonke, Homage to Czerny (Dalkey Archive, 200 )"No sooner is an (almost) new writer introduced to us than he disappears. Homage to Czerny, by the Austrian Gert Jonke, was published by Dalkey Archive in November; two months later the author died. Jonke’s foothold in English letters had been precarious, and belated. His very first book appeared — again from Dalkey, as Geometrical Regional Novel — in 2000, over three decades after it was published. With this new book, his second to come out in English, the gap has been maintained almost exactly. At this rate we can expect to see Jonke’s later works in the 2030s.
This doesn’t seem quite right. Born in 1946, the same year as Elfriede Jelinek, Jonke wrote novels, plays and radio plays. Music was evidently important to him, his novels including The Distant Sound (taking its title from Franz Schreker’s best known opera) and The Head of George Frederick Handel. Homage to Czerny is, of course, a musical book, too. It comprises two pieces, related in length roughly by the ratio 2:1 (an octave) and both featuring a composer as the rather passive narrator — so passive that he could easily be the same character in both, though need not be. The longer piece is set at a fantastical party in a fantastical city with quite a number of fantastical characters; the shorter has the narrator and his brother stuck in the attic of a music school, with 111 decrepit grand pianos, this being the opus number of Beethoven’s last sonata.
Jonke titled this curious pairing of stories after the Op.299 of the great piano pedagogue and Beethoven pupil Carl Czerny: School of Velocity. Dalkey’s renaming is fair enough, though it is a pity that we lose the word ‘velocity’, which seems important to Jonke’s thinking and our response to it. His party piece, as it were, starts out with a couple of nice conceits. Anton Diabelli (by no means the only character to share a name with someone else) has decked his gardens with paintings that reproduce the scenes they block (never mind what problems of perspective this might entail), and has also determined that his annual soirée will unfold in every detail exactly as it did the year before. Here, one might think, are ideas ripe for unmasking. But no, Jonke whips on through a sequence of bizarre dialogues, in which Diabelli’s guests reveal themselves as having little familiarity with the city in which they live or with common probability. Buildings, one person thinks, may be made of smoke. No, others contend, the smoke falls from chimneys, which, however high they may be built, can never quite catch the wind, which rises to escape them. The most appealing character is the painter of the substitute landscapes, who, our narrator is advised, should be approached only when his eyes are closed, because when they are open he will be observing and will not tolerate disturbance. Even so, caution is needed. When his eyes are closed he may easily be asleep.
Perhaps everyone is asleep in this bizarre tale, though there is nothing dreamy about Jonke’s language (as translated by Jean M. Snook), which is clear and exact, even when evoking the mysterious, magical music the narrator finds emanating from a pond in Diabelli’s garden:
...I had the sensation of overlapping wandering clouds of notes and gathering mists of tones that shifted into one another, surging forward and back, a very quiet, barely audible, devastatingly beautiful music, such as I had never experienced before, very high, but at the same time very low, agreeably subdued, slightly blurry gossamer-thin aerial chordal expanses...
So it is in the other piece, which bears a separate Czernian title, Gradus ad Parnassum. The narrator’s brother here is a Bernhardesque ranter, but on a small scale, and the piece again is nicely and neatly odd. Its conservatory — with an attic full of disused pianos: culture turned to junk — might be an allegory of the current state of the world (in 1977, when the book was originally published, or now), of Austria (ditto) or of a person (ditto, too), this last suspicion echoing through the closing lines:
...for a long time now I’ve barely been able to feel that I was a person at all, but instead only a (more or less miserable) condition that was being communicated to me via my head..." - Paul Griffiths
"The premise of HOMAGE is that two siblings are preparing for their annual garden party. They hang paintings that are perfect realism, mimicking the scene behind it so exactly that it seems they had simply hung an empty frame. But the brother is walking around taking photos of the setup and comparing them with photos from last year's party so that they can exactly reproduce it; not simply a reproduction, but a
REPETITION OF THE PARTY that we had last year on the same day at the same time. It's supposed to be exactly the same party again . . . The same guests, said Johanna, are going to have the same conversations at the same time and tell the same stories they did last year, with the same movements, the same gestures, same looks, same sentiments.
Except they haven't mentioned this to any of the guests.
We have to see if it's possible to establish a congruity of chronologically sequential feelings, sensations, thoughts, relationships, inferences, and insights, explained Diabelli--possibly not just conguity, but identity. Don't you see what we're after? Whether people can still feel, sense, think, experience, and discover exactly the same things one year later.
And so the novel begins. The central word/concept is obviously "Repetition". As I read these passages I immediately thought of Kierkegaard's book REPETITION (subtitled "A Venture in Experimental Psychology). Yeah, really tough, I know. Except there's more than simply the word Repetition. It's the entire concept of attempting to recreate the exact same "feelings, sensations, thoughts, relationships, inferences, and insights" that echoes (repeats?) Kierkegaard's character's return to Berlin in an attempt to relive exactly his time there the previous year. Whether or not Jonke had Kierkegaard's book in mind at all, it's a striking coincidence that got my attention.
HOMAGE TO CZERNY, what with the siblings' exact painting of the entire garden, recalls for me Borges's stories like "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" and "On Exactitude in Science", also obviously stories dealing with the idea of perfect repetition." - Josh Maday
"Homage to Czerny is a two-part novel, its Studies in Virtuoso Technique essentially two different stories, episodes narrated by Fritz, a composer - "one of our most promising", his old professor claims - who also has a serious binge-drinking problem. The premise of the first is brilliant, and the second quite good too, but Jonke doesn't focus quite enough on these (and falls back too readily on his narrator's alcohol-dependency-caused confusion to present the surreality of the situations).
In the first story, The Presence of Memory, Fritz show up early at the annual garden party the photographer Anton Diabelli and his sister Johanna throw at the height of summer. They let him in on a secret: the plan is to duplicate the previous year's party. Without telling the guests, the hosts hope to arrange everything so that:
The same guests, said Johanna, are going to have the same conversations at the same time and tell the same stories they did last year, with the same movements, the same gestures, same looks, same sentiments.
Fritz has his doubts, but the siblings are excited about their experiment:
We have to see if it's possible to establish a congruity of chronologically sequential feelings, sensations, thoughts relationships, inferences, and insights, explained Diabelli -- possibly not just congruity, but identity. Don't you see what we're after ? Whether people can still feel, sense, think, experience, and discover exactly the same things one year later.
Yes, it's déjà-vu all over again... But it's a clever premise, and begins well, with a set of oil paintings hung in the trees all around - oil paintings that: "portrayed exactly those parts of the garden that were covered by the surfaces of the respective picture" - so exactly, in fact, that people would constantly confuse reality and the paintings and not be aware which was which.
Instead of focussing on repetition and echoes, however, Jonke then describes the party for the most part just as any other party might unfold -- though with more than its share of surreal conversation and confusing events. It's an entertaining send-up of (Austrian) society, but digressions on, for example, the mysterious smokestacks in the north of the city (constantly made higher, to no avail) or the calmly related horror stories of how: "people are still getting swallowed up by the bog with alarming regularity" and then the more bizarre turns of dialogue (a truffle... no it's a Brusssel sprout, bounding away at the buffet, "and now it's starting to flutter", lifting off and flying away) make for uneven entertainment (admittedly: exactly as such parties generally are).
Music plays a role throughout, and at one point Fritz desperately tries to capture what he's heard - futilely, since: "it was music performed on unknown, unmanufacturable instruments, a music that had to be thought." Complete abstraction - and yet it has been performed there. At the same time, a writer jots down a story and then insists on reading it, but it is too much - too close to their reality - for the assembled audience, leading them to turn on him.
Fritz comes to consider the party a success, at least in terms of achieving exactly what the hosts had set out to do, but Jonke turns the tables nicely in the end, too. As already pointed out to him earlier, Fritz doesn't always see things exactly like everyone else does:
But I really did experience everything exactly as I've told you, I replied.
Yes, I'll gladly believe you, said Johanna, because even reality is often a good invention.
The second story, Gradus ad parnassum finds Fritz and his brother visiting the Conservatory where they had studied music, and winding up getting locked up in the attic, among 111 pianos. Their old professor - now the institute's director - and a caretaker find them, but it takes a while to get everything sorted out.
The setting and situation allow for some interesting riffs on failure and expectation, with Fritz's brother Otto, once also among the most promising of piano students, reduced to being a piano mover. He's very successful and has built up a big business, but obviously it's a far cry from the artistic career everyone had imagined for him. Meanwhile, Fritz is a complete alcoholic - and, as Otto observes: "you're projecting your predicament onto your environment".
The use of alcoholism (or mind-altering-drugs abuse) as a crutch by writers, allowing them to blur the lines between the real and imagined and hallucinated, as well as of memory and forgetting, is a cheap trick that's hard to utilize effectively. It may be a valid issue to raise and use in a story, but especially with such potentially rich material as Jonke has in the first story it's a shame that he has to let it sink into an alcoholic haze and stupour.
There's something of Thomas Bernhard in Homage to Czerny, but much of that is due simply to the cruelly accurate description of a certain slice of Austrian society - artists and those more or less claiming to be cultured (bureaucrats and doctors here) - from the 1960s and 70s. (There's also the musical angle, which Jonke shares with Bernhard as well.)
The writing is sharp and often amusing, even as some of the events spin slightly out of control, and it's an intriguing entertainment - but especially in The Presence of Memory doesn't do all one might have hoped for." - The Complete Review
"Ack! That title! It’s enough to send you running from the bookshop screaming in horror at the awful pretentiousness of translated European fiction.
Don't! Austrian playwright Gert Jonke’s novel (with its even more off-putting subtitle, Studies in Virtuoso Technique) is a fantastically madcap exploration of perception and reality which circles round and round before landing somewhere equally odd. You won’t find any answers to the big questions of life here, but you’ll have a good time (and even a laugh) as Jonke’s wild vision unravels before your eyes.
The novel actually comprises two parts. In the first, The Presence of Memory, a brother and sister decide that they want to replicate their previous year’s garden party in every way. They commission paintings of the garden, which they hang in the exact space represented by them, and they invite the same people. Only the siblings and the sceptical narrator know of the scheme:
‘You’re trying to change memories back into the present moment, I said, but the laws of nature won’t allow that.
'The laws of nature, Johanna replied, are you really talking about the laws of nature? Isn’t it a law of nature that not only has next to nothing changed in the past year but in fact that everything has remained just the same, and is exactly as unbearable, unjust, and miserable now as then?’
Thus the party begins. The city’s finest artists and administrators are assembled: an undertaker who buries artists for free; an architect whose insane asylums likewise admit artists gratis; a city gardener and a building inspector – Mr Jacksch and Mr Jagusch – who, like a sort of anti-Thompson and Thomson from Hergé’s Tintin books, can’t agree on whether the weather one summer was hot and dry even though the ground was soaking wet or vice versa; a poet who repeatedly demonstrates that he can empty a bottle of beer faster by drinking it than by pouring it on the floor.
And so it goes on, the stories and conversations looping and flowing in a mesmeric and curious (yet somehow completely normal) way. Like the instruments of an orchestra, each character comes to the fore, then retreats, making room for another as the symphony proceeds, until we find ourselves recognising the initial refrain at the end of the piece.
The second story, Gradus Ad Parnassum, is just as odd. Two brothers revisiting the Conservatory where they studied music ‘years, much more than a decade, in fact almost twenty years’ ago, get stuck in an attic of abandoned pianos when they fail to find the lift door from which they emerged. That Jonke doesn’t merely say ‘twenty years ago’ sums up the remarkable nature of his writing, which plays continuously with our perceptions and expectations.
First published in 1977 as Schule der Geläufigkeit, Homage to Czerny reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s more recent The Unconsoled in its ability to utterly displace the reader in an illogical world that nevertheless makes sense; also, the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day (it certainly shares its humour); and filmmaker Stephen Poliakoff’s obsession with photographs and what they tell us about the past and the present. I don’t know whether Jonke has been an influence on any of these artists, but his crazy slant on reality deserves to be read in a world that is becoming increasingly unreal by the day." - James Smith
Gert Jonke, Geometric Regional Novel (Dalkey Archive, 2000)"Geometric Regional Novel is an innovative satire on the process by which bureaucracy and official regimentation insidiously pervade society. In a deadpan, pseudo-scientific tone, the nameless narrator takes us on a tour of a bizarre village whose inhabitants lead such habitual, regulated lives that they resemble elements in a mathematical equation. The traditional village leaders—the mayor, the priest, the teacher — uphold the status quo with comically exaggerated attention to ceremony and trivia, and nearly every aspect of life has been codified. Contrasting with the mathematical descriptions of village life are flashes of colorful, surrealistic writing, exemplifying the power of the imagination to counter the monotonous routines of daily life."
"When the book arrived I read it from cover to cover without moving off my sofa. Jonke's rendering here of a ridiculous 'region' where science and law are so askew it is as if someone has taken a smear eraser to the city's face was something I had been looking to read for a long time coming. From page to page, literally, I was in awe of how Jonke was able to meld so many high concept ideas together into a narrative so immensely readable and downright funny. For every inch in that he is innovative (with paragraphs that recurse on their own logic in the mist of themselves, weird Frank Stanford-imagery of bulls and hollow trees and bridges that stretch on and on, sudden 'new law' attached to the community in the midst of its rendering that continue to skew the perspective, descriptions of traveling artists performing impossible tasks, etc.) he is also downright amusing and hilarious. This isn't one of those books that are so brash in their innovation that the reader is made to slog along: every page is literally one you find yourself want to read again as soon as it is over, if not to see how the hell he did it so smoothly, but just for the pure pleasure of it.
I could go on about the new new of the executions made in this book, such as the absolutely amazing questionnaire that is placed in the middle the book as a thing that must be filled out by the geometric region's citizens who wish to cross through a forest (before Barthelme did it with SNOW WHITE, as well as elsewhere). His employment of double-speak questions and Kafkaesque bureaucracy in form I literally had to stop and read aloud. I've never seen a questionnaire in a book work so well, and that is not to mention the other strange and amazing tactics employed here: the diagrams, the weird city ordinances, the disjoined post-fairy-tale language, the amazing logic, and etc.
I find it pretty interesting, too, that this book was originally published in German in 1969, predating Calvino's INVISIBLE CITIES by three years, and pretty much accomplishing everything Calvino set out to do in that book, but tenfold, and with even more zeal and audacity I think.
That more people in English do not know this book is something that should change. Fans of other curious books in such as a Jesse Ball, Matthew Derby, Brian Evenson, and Kelly Link, as well as Borges, Robert Pinget, Beckett, and others of the magic weird camp should most certainly check him out. It's literally been a thing I've not been able to get out of my mind, a book I've continued to carry with me every day since I read it just to touch and hold and open just to look. It's gotten so into my mind that literally the same day I started writing a book out of the mind Jonke's awoke in me, and haven't been able to stop fixating on it since." - Blake Butler
"In her contribution to a collection of critical essays, Gert Jonke's fellow dramatist and novelist Elfriede Jelinek compares his writing to an ant farm excitedly being displayed to Donald Duck by his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie. They are thrilled by the intricate, functional passageways, the labyrinthine tunnels, the surprisingly elaborate network of crosscuts and interconnections the ants have made, all visible, to the boys' fascinated gaze, through the glass walls of the container. Donald does not respond in the same spirit of captivation or even appreciation, though; he is dismayed, even horrified. Not that he's afraid of ants, Jelinek notes, but he’s worried about the mess they might make if they get loose in his tidy room or in the farm itself. A different idea of order from the one the boys have been observing blinds him to any sense of the daunting but beautiful complexity before him. The nephews, receptive and alert, are looking directly at the right thing; Donald, praiseworthy in his desire for neat surroundings, is too conventional and skittish, so he misses both the point and the beauty (Jelinek 17).
Most readers, Jelinek implies, even good ones, are like Donald, by no means imperceptive to the orderly arrangement of literature, intelligently able to appreciate the expected sequence of beginning, middle, and end as applied to a discernible story line—even allowing for those parts to be lightly transposed—but able and willing to dedicate their effort only to structures to which they bring prior understanding. Any alternative to their prefabricated sense of proper arrangement is not just a challenge, but a threat. They'll try a stretch, but a slight one only. Readers who have made their way through the adventure of reading Gert Jonke, though—anything, in German or in English, for the first or the hundredth time—and who have found their way to this casebook are more likely to resemble the nephews than the uncle. Especially if they are new to Jonke, they marvel at the beauty of a complex patterning that they can see intuitively, but may need some help articulating." - Vincent Kling
"By the time our narrator, enmeshed in the fate of time and place, performs the keenly anticipated but endlessly postponed crossing of the village square in Gert Jonke's Geometric Regional Novel, the elaborate social order of the novel has re-duced freedom and logical comprehension to a program of predetermined re-sponses founded on deceitful subterfuges of communal exploitation. As the so-cial order unfolds across the whole plot, the structural arrangement sets up cer-tain characteristic features and devices—we stumble across them every few feet—that constitute the poetics of Geometric Regional Novel and so compose its meaning, both its substance and significance. Yet, all the while, it would appear as if the action of the novel were in no way progressing, as if, for some reason, the movement of the plot were being restrained, almost as if we, as outsiders, were being disbarred by some social force within the village from understanding the culture of the world unfolding before us. Jonke establishes a village for us, a social structure whose movement through time is represented in a fragmentary way in order to dramatize the psychological debility imposed upon its occupants while revealing to us certain truths about our own social situation.
Visitors to Jonke's village, after participating in perhaps only the first quarter of the novel, may feel the need to beat a hasty retreat, to regain those foothills by which they had entered, and escape. Sadly, though, "Before you reach the foot-hills, you have to cross the river" (Jonke 30) and wade through an endless wash of narrative derivatives, infinitely more hostile to our understanding than Hera-clitus' amorphous and indifferent stream could ever be. Indeed, flung into Jonke's unkind and untimely meditation, we must either sink or swim, with no assistance offered from any direction, unless, of course, we are willing to bribe the bridgekeeper. As we flail about, trying not to drown in the pathological grumblings of the almost inhuman citizenry, trying not to be seen, because we aren't supposed to be seen, we are led unawares into a space where language lacks meaning, where neither light nor truth exists, where, ultimately, all exis-tence in this remarkably absurd situation is almost too tragic for words. Not tragic enough, though, for in fact the social structure of the village is such that no tragedy could ever be staged, much less understood. Aristotle and the tradi-tional discourse of tragedy have no place in this village, where it is impossible for an individual to promote the common good fortune of all. It is equally im-possible, therefore, for an individual to accumulate an excess of pride through success in pursuing that enterprise. There is, then, no opportunity for anyone to establish a situation that will ultimately solicit its own reversal, that will prompt recognition of an imprudent drive for personal advantage, misconstrued as con-cern for the welfare of all. In other words, there can be no tragic fall whose oc-currence enables the continued evolution, the continued growth and develop-ment of a society and its culture. At the same time, just as Geometric Regional Novel lacks the basic elements of tragedy, so too does it lack the necessary re-quirements of comedy, whereby a community undergoes a moral apotheosis and regeneration through the recognition and removal of social ill or vice performed by some impudent member whose actions had earlier led the community astray. Within the village there is no one to correct or enlighten, no one whose instruction could educate the reader/visitor about the costs of lust, so that when we come together at the work's conclusion, all are made aware of the value of mutual satisfaction. One may say that here there is no place whatever for an individual agent to inhabit, no communal "mirror on which to dwell," in Elizabeth Bishop's words. One might even say that "Hier ist kein warum," to use a chilling totalitarian phrase, that any "Why?" is absolutely out of our hands, and that here the only law of the land is further stabilization of the power structure. This village merely exists, regardless of faculty, an inert entity, where inertia, being completely controlled, is as irrelevant as any other manifestation of energy.
Jonke's villagers, unable to recognize the oppression they are subject to,are incapable of any expression other than neutral description, pathos, or the un-controllable, delirious hysterics of the narrator, and seem to be suffering from the symptoms of what, in Nietzschean terms, might be described as "Last Man Syndrome." Here, for fear of spoiling their digestion, the villagers profess happiness and blink: "Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into the madhouse" (Nietzsche, Zarathustra). Besides this miserable affliction of imposed homogeneity, the novel is deficient in any sort of any identifiable or traditional plot line. Plot is a teleological construction, always moving toward some end, so that each element executes some function in the satisfaction of our "desire to see an enigma or problem resolved" (Culler). This "enigma or problem" is the one complete motivated action of Aristotelian thought, where the incidents of the text form a cycle of condensation, accumulation, and precipitation, a constant flux of establishment and movement between character disposition and decisive action. Neither is the direct cause or effect of the other, but we must recognize and un-derstand that
all human actions that are worked out to the end, passing through the unforeseeable contingencies of a "world we never made," follow a similar course: the conscious purpose with which they start is redefined after each unforeseen contingency is suffered; and at the end, in the light of hindsight, we see the truth of what we have been doing. (Fergusson 13)
Instead of linear development, this novel appears to be structured so as to perform simultaneously two parallel functions, neither of which works to expli-cate either character or action. The more basic function of the text is to structure the village as an immediate and tangible social world, something for us to read. However, the primary function is to construct our own world for us within the confines of this village. Jonke establishes a concentrated, microscopic recon-struction of our world, so that we do not just observe outwardly but are forced to examine ourselves thoroughly as well. We are called to measure our movements against those of the villagers and bear witness to the effects of social control and its sometimes imperceptible impact on our lives.
The two parallel levels converge continually upon one another in the form of an informal conversation between the reader as visitor to the village and the narrator, the two voices that discuss the action of the text, the crossing of the village square. We quickly become dumbfounded at our inability either to progress across the square or to understand why we cannot. It seems as if the narrator operates with no regard for narrative conventions. Narrative progression is re-placed with dialectic posturing, where we, as readers, must repeatedly request of the narrator to move the plot forward, must ask if we can "walk across the village square", only to be persistently dissuaded from our affinity toward conven-tional plot movement. The novel’s disregard of our reliance on convention quickly institutes itself as the standard when, in the course of the dialogue, the narrator states,
yes i remember you said
—i suppose we'll have to wait for the night listen as he with his assis-tants
and drummer leaves the inn very late the steps on the pavement
the steps in the grass they'll probably also light the lamp hang it in
front of the tent who knows they might forget to put the lamp out and
its glow will creep into the faces of our sleep.
The entire text of the novel is suffused with ambiguous dialogic terms,unsubstantiated referential pronouns without discernible apposition, like this mysterious"you," not to mention innumerable "let's" and "we." Clearly, a con-versation is taking place, and it is this conversation that moves the plot along, almost as if this conversation were a device borrowed from Greek drama, where we, the readers, along with the narrator, form an informal chorus, repeatedly re-convening to question in strophic form the events occurring before us. Without this constant questioning, this constant expression of one party's expectations, this desire to move forward, we would remain with our cheeks pressed up against the blacksmith's walls. This desire is ours, as readers. We desire to witness the unfolding of the arrangement of incidents, to observe the completion of some motive in either success or failure, to see some "enigma or problem re-solved," to see what lies on the other side of the square. The narrative of Geometric Regional Novel is probing our need for convention, calling attention to the unconscious plot projection that all readers exercise throughout the reading of a novel. This supposition is the articulation, for us, of our reliance on convention, as well as a rendering of the consciousness that we all, unfortunately, share with the villagers. The light of the "artist or acrobat, or whatever such a man should be called" (18) will not allow the villagers to sleep comfortably, and by extension, by presenting this scene so early in the book, this light prohibits our dropping off, which, like all the sleepy and the blessed, is what we would most like. In this way, Jonke's novel captures complete control of our attention, forcing us, by way of the anxiety its radical structure inflicts upon us, to question everything, even the most rudimentary components of our lives." - J. F. Campbell
"The novel can be seen as linguistic parody of an illusory homeland and the presumed freedom of life in the countryside, in that it shows the continual narrowing of personal freedom and cultural horizons. The geometric subdivisions and plans for the village and surroundings, seemingly no more than gently ironic at the beginning, gradually lead to a total isolation of this world. Social criticism, criticism of a restrictive legal system, warnings about an all-paralyzing bureaucracy enveloping even the countryside, are created through means of powerful restricting language—a frightening condition. Similar to Handke's early efforts, but with stronger undertones of parody and even cabaret, Jonke shows the civilizing but also restricting force of language, which can deceive, oppress and even incarcerate human beings. With a gesture of relief the author Jonke suddenly turns away from this complex linguistic landscape. In a light vein he abandons the envisaged "totalitarian" horror, simply wrapping up the village and throwing it behind his back, leaving it all behind, but indicating that he is looking for a new landscape." - Maria Luise Caputo-Mayr
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Gert Jonke, Blinding Moment: Four Pieces About Composers (Ariadne Press, 2009) "Writing from his background as a conservatory-trained musician and his lifelong passion Gert Jonke has produced literary works in every genre involving the lives and works of various composers. The present volume includes four pieces in several forms - a prose poem in tribute to Olivier Messiaen's great piano work "Catalogue d'oiseaux," which gives the title to the piece; a short story in the form of recollections by George Frederick Handel during the last hours of his life; a play (Gentle Rage) in which Ludwig van Beethoven figures as the alternately despondent and triumphant main character; and a novella whose point of departure is the bizarre, accidental shooting death of Anton Webern in 1945 (Blinding Moment)."
"Gert Jonke is a difficult writer, though cunningly readable, as in this wonderful translation of four texts on composers, which, however, comes complete with 50 pages of critical exposition for 150 pages of text. This critical material could possibly defeat a reader, and it might have been better to include short biographical outlines of Blinding Moment's subjects: Anton Webern, Beethoven, Handel, and Olivier Messiaen. The piece on Messiaen is a sort of prose poem, the Beethoven is in the form of theater sonata, and Handel is caught in a moment of descriptive frenzy both inside and outside his own head. "Handel might well have been one of the few to whom it occurred that the last of the dead from the war now burned away were also the first of the dead from the new peace that had already taken fire." The piece on Webern (“Blinding Moment”) attempts to make sense, as they say, of the senseless death of the composer, shot by mistake by an American soldier in a small town in Austria in September of 1945. Webern is the most refined, the most complex, the most rewarding of twentieth-century composers, whose short pieces encapsulate the whole history of music in under three minutes, despite being written entirely within Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system... and yet he stayed in Austria during the rise of Hitler hoping that the postman would learn to whistle his tunes, and of course saw the new regime ban his music. Killed by a soldier who didn’t know whom he had killed—incapable of knowing who Webern was—Jonke tries to help console us in this loss with no blame apportioned, but with a pithy sense for appropriate quotation: “Yet another winter without composing, and when you don’t compose you don’t exist.”" - Thomas McGonigle
Gert Jonke, The Distant Sound, Dalkey Archive Press, 2010."A composer who has already given up composing - because of his inability to notate the music of the spheres - becomes increasingly fixated on capturing a mysterious, eerie, distant sound, which he soon equates with all the things he desires most: the perfect woman, the perfect city, the perfect work of art. Obsessed with his impossible quest, the man breaks out of the asylum and begins a series of comic, dreamlike, and ultimately haunting adventures as he tries to locate the source of the sound that consumes him... and instead finds the root cause of all his failures."
"An author who would go on to write rigorous experimental fiction, Gert Jonke was born in 1946 in Klagenfurt, Austria—Robert Musil's hometown. A talented pianist, he studied music but left the conservatory to be a writer, and found quick success with the 1969 publication of Geometric Regional Novel, a satire that Peter Handke praised in Der Spiegel. In fact many of his poems, novels, and plays reveal that his interest in music never subsided—they often feature characters lost in music, like the nameless composer who narrates The Distant Sound, his latest book to be translated into English. After Jonke died in 2009, his compatriot and fellow novelist Elfriede Jelinek, the 2004 Nobel laureate (and the author of The Piano Teacher), immediately issued a statement that touched on his abilities: "He could conjure a universe with two or three choice words. Like a great jazz musician, his improvisations refined as they branched out from a single theme."
"The Distant Sound feels gargantuan—a dark and dense barrage of riffs and arias, as if the author tried to pour a free-jazz opera into the mold of a three-hundred-page novel. There are no chapters, and no quotation marks. Published in 1979, The Distant Sound is part two of a trilogy that began with Homage to Czerny (translated in 2008), also narrated in part by a composer. It's difficult reading and also stunning, with a tongue-in-cheek style that is, to quote a minor character, "recklessly extravagant with the most economical means." Though a challenge, it is Jonke's richest and most inventive novel to be seen in English so far.
The plot begins after the composer has attempted suicide. This lands him in a psychiatric clinic from which he escapes into "a divinely celestial joking cosmedy" to pursue a woman he loves across a nameless city. He sees "the metamorphosis of the daylight into a solid body." A tightrope walker floats. The composer takes a circular train trip and strolls through an orgiastic revolution (in reality a ticker-tape parade and carnival). Like a concerto, the story proceeds with a thematic series of ominous sounds, hence the title. It beings with noise bursting from a house, features a vision of "a gigantic polyphonic mountain flute complex," and describes the "groaning" of a cornfield ravaged by insects. There is also a fantastical centerpiece about urban river control, ending with a lawsuit against the river. The broad metaphor of the composer's journey is that his own suicide attempt is a response to the grand suicide of civilization that surrounds him, in the form of rampant industrialization. This message probably sounded wise when the novel was first published three decades ago and, thanks to recent oil spills and other environmental problems, it's certainly still apt.
Much of Jonke's fiction operates as a sort of picaresque thought experiment. A character ventures out and we get to see a vision of how the world acts on his mind. By using a suicidal composer to narrate The Distant Sound, Jonke has found the perfect man for his storytelling model: an artist who'd rather destroy (himself, no less) than create. Introspection sends him spinning:
'I see myself as a sort of subject that I'm observing, as someone walking along beside me... Of course, it's strange that you can think about yourself the way one thinks about someone else—you think to yourself—because you've never been especially good at thinking about other people.'
Because the composer represents the human capacity for creativity and witnesses slow, widespread destruction, there is a moral heft to this adventure. When he is able to find humor ("I would like to feel that the world around me is a little more dependent on being perceived by me," he remarks), it feels like a small human triumph. Still, the arc of his story is grim. It begins with a vague memory of a violent act and ends with better knowledge of its specifics. Jonke is a playful writer, but given his topics, he wisely submits to the role of honest tragedian. The composer travels from a grand ambition—"to compose that music that has not yet even touched the farthest reaches of the imagination"—to a seriocomic complaint: "It is unpleasant for me to feel constantly caught up in my existence."
Jean M. Snook, who won the 2009 Austrian Cultural Forum's Translation Prize for this book, reports that the final part of the trilogy is titled Awakening to the Great Sleep War. I can't imagine what kind of world we'd live in if wars were fought using sleep as the primary weapon. But I'm glad Jonke can, and I am eager to see what else he's invented." - Matthew Jakubowski
