It had paused next to the mirror on the edge of the trunk and was staring at me with its tiny black eyes. The lamplight had given them two gleaming golden spots, which pierced me deeply and peered into my own eyes for several seconds with such intensity that they seemed to penetrate my brain. Perhaps the creature was searching for a curse to call down on me or perhaps for a mere reproach. . I was certain the doctor had come to spy on me.
This supposition was confirmed that very evening as I took my quinine. . I found it perfectly acceptable: the quinine was bitter. The doctor had seen the pleasure Clara could give me in the back room and to get even he had prescribed the nastiest medicine on earth. .
A few months after he first treated me, he was found dead in his attic: he had put a bullet through his brain.
The first thing I asked myself when I heard the gruesome news was, ‘Were there mice in the attic?’ I needed to know. Because if the doctor was well and truly dead, a band of mice would have to set upon his corpse and extract all the mouse matter he had borrowed during his lifetime to be able to carry on his illegal human existence.
“All imitations make an analogous impression on me,” says the narrator. From the incest with the things, we learn from Blecher that the objects owe their existence to the imitation of themselves, that they need nothing apart from the ready, knowing material in order to make us totally besotted. And we are by no means spared by the fact that they are imitation, “artificial ornamentation,” filled with “boundless melancholy.” Because precisely therein lies their guile. The place where they reside and the time in which we behold them make us vulnerable. The things have “a perfidious sign of furtiveness and complicity.” And in the moment of the confrontation we have no choice but to adapt, the external world is thrust under our skin, we must bear its inert or lasciviously vegetating material, even though we’re not made for that. The world’s imitation of itself is a trap set to ensnare its own intricate originality. The things have the advantage, because unlike us, they don’t need to protect their flesh when they spring the trap. “It was what was most humdrum and familiar in the objects that disturbed me most. The habit of being seen so many times must have worn out their thin skins, and they sometimes looked flayed and bloody to me — and alive, ineffably alive.”
One rainy day the vagabond hero wanders to the edge of town, where he succumbs to the glistening mire of the wasteland. He steps into the slime, plunges his hands into the muck, smears mud in his hair, on his face, with no care for his clothes. It’s an intoxicating rush but that soon becomes a bitter disgrace when the glistening dries on his body as mere cold filth. The usual disgrace when, after the act of incest, the things quit the body so abruptly and return to themselves. “Such is what I had to struggle with, what implacably opposed me: the ordinary look of things.” And “the world was so limited by its petty passion for precision.”
In Blecher’s book the word KNOWLEDGE appears in italics. And this KNOWLEDGE is not achieved by reason, but by SENSATION. It is thought by means of the flesh. For Blecher, KNOWLEDGE is a trace left by the body. What’s astounding about Blecher’s language is the mixture of words laden with feelings and phrases so technical they sound like machines. Every sequence is infected by a form of mechanization. The emotional upheavals are stretched across a geometric frame. Reading the book we get the impression that Blecher’s words don’t merely describe the objects — they dig their talons into the things and hoist them high, straight into the sentences. About the suitability of a particular word, Blecher has his protagonist say: “It would have to contain something of the stupefaction I feel watching a person in reality and then following his gestures in a mirror, of the instability accompanying the falls I have in my dreams and the subsequent unforgettable moment of fear whistling through my spinal chord, or of the transparent mist inhabited by the bizarre decors of crystal balls I have known.”
There are three times in this book where relationships to women are compared with the effect of words. With Clara from the sewing machine shop the act of vice “involves a complicity more profound and immediate than any verbal communication.” The second woman is the dead woman mentioned above, lying in the glass coffin of the wax figure gallery, whose image “remained lodged inside me, still vague, like a word I wished to recall.” And the third woman is Edda. Newly married to the Webers’ rakish son, she moves into the family’s house. Because the narrator has been visiting there for years, and knows every nook and cranny, Edda becomes “one more object, a simple object whose existence beleaguered and tormented me like a word repeated many times.” The sexual arousal that she stirs inside the narrator intimidates him, while on the outside it petrifies his body like wood.
Precisely because words are elevated to the rank of love for women, the dialogues in this book are so tight they couldn’t be any shorter. The tone is gruff. All the conversations have a hint of reluctance, because the talking comes too late. Either the words sat too long on the tongue, or else they were swallowed too often. Speech comes as a last resort, long after the reason for speaking in the first place has passed. For every person in the book, sentences shrink whenever feelings take the upper hand. Communication follows this rule: the more feverish the feeling, the colder the word. This reduction condenses the dialogues to their most rudimentary, giving them the pithiness of sayings, aphorisms that pepper the entire text. The author can leave out the dialogues because they are repeated unwritten throughout the text, and constantly enter the mind of the reader.
Blecher’s question “Who am I” leads to a world eroticized by inner chafing. Adventures in Immediate Irreality is a study in observation. And it takes the reader where one generally arrives when one looks at things impartially — to a place of calm and composed resignation. In his words: “All things and all men were hemmed in by their petty, pathetic obligation to be precise, nothing more than precise.” “Exasperating as it was, I was forced to admit that I lived in the world I saw around me.”
HERTA MÜLLER
(translated by Philip Boehm)
Adventures In Immediate Irreality
Chapter One
Staring at a fixed point on the wall, I occasionally have the feeling I no longer know who or where I am. At such times, I experience the loss of my identity from a distance: I feel for a moment that I have become a complete stranger, this abstract personage and my real self vying for authenticity with equal strength.