Re: [ejlist] DIE SCHERE #44: Notes 1

[Rene de Bakker <rbakker@mail.uba.uva.nl>]

At 19:39 29-11-99 +0100, you wrote:
>DIE SCHERE #44:  Notes by Gary Kern
>
>It seems to me that certain problems of this section clear up
>when you read the cited passage in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's THE
>IDIOT (part II, chap. XI, a page from the end).  FD describes
>the light as hard to see through, even though it is a white
>night in St. Petersburg.  EJ's calls the light "durchlässig," a
>word which the dictionary tells me can refer to the
>penetrability of a substance or to the transmission of light. 
>Either it means that under the impact of death one cannot see
>through the light or that the dim light is transmitting
>information through the dark.  EJ might have said which, but he
>likes to be cryptic. 

Gary,

I don't know. When light is "durchlaessig", what else can go through than
darkness?

 Similarly FD writes that the longer the
>Prince looked, the quieter it seemed to become; I think this is
>what the curious "die Stille versickert" ("seeps out") means
>here.  "Umkreis des Todes," as I see it, does not mean in the
>vicinity of death, but rather in the immediate presence of it: 
>Nastasya lying in bed, her white foot barely detectable in the
>dark.  The Russian is interesting as regards the phrase "toten
>Schweigen":  it is "v mertvom molchanii."  This means "in the
>dead silence," but the word "silence" (molchanie) means "keeping
>quiet, not speaking."  That is, it is silent because the person
>is dead, not speaking.  I suppose the German captures this
>pretty well.

Indeed, "schweigen" is a very strong word, for which, I've been told, there
is no real English equivalent. But "Totes Schweigen" is, as I feel it, not
primarily the being silent of the dead person. It is the silence, that
reigns around the dead, the silence of death.  

  As Günter notes, the curious "heart beats against
>the wall" does not occur in FD; it is EJ's invention.  I think
>the translation should leave it as such, unexplained.
>In the second paragraph EJ writes that time stands still, but
>also "brandet an."  I think the idea is that it heaves, like
>water that crashes on the shore, rather than water that runs
>down a river, which is what time was before it stopped still. 

Yes! Maybe a reference to the wave in #12. Then time is the wave, that goes
"without quality" through everything, till it crashes on the timeless. Then
death is for life, what the coast is for the sea.    

>I do not have the story by Thomas Wolfe, but will try to
>remember to look it up at the library.

I have here Thomas Wolfe: "Short stories". In it is a story: "Death the
proud brother", which is about 4 deaths, the narrator has been witness of.
Three more or less violent accidents and one, quiet, death in the
underground, so probably it's the one, Juenger means. Very powerful story.
The dead man is described as insignificant, a man like million others. But
the "grand brother Death" singles him out for a moment. A small crowd
remains "staring insatiably at the dead man." [...] By this time an
astonishing thing had happened. Just as the dead man's figure had appeared
to shrink and contract visibly within its garments, as if before our eyes
the body were withdrawing out of a life with which it had no further
relationships, so now did all the other properties of space and light, the
dimensions of width, length, and distance that surrounded him undergo an
incredible change.
And it seemed to me that this change in the dimensions of space was
occurring visibly, and momently under my eyes, and that just as the man's
body seemed to dwindle and recede so did the gray cement space around him
grow tremendously. The space that separated him from the place where the
police stood, and the gray space which separated us from the police,
together with the distance of the tiled subway wall behind, all grew
taller, wider, longer, enlarged themselves terrifically while I looked. It
was as if we were all looking at the man across an immense and lonely
distance. The dead man looked like a lonely little figure upon an enormous
stage, and by his very littleness and loneliness in that immense gray
space, he seemed to gain an awful dignity and grandeur.
And now, as it seemed to me, just as the living livid gray-faced dead men
of the night were feeding on him with their dark and insatiate stare, so
did he return their glance with a deathless and impassive irony, with a
terrible mockery and scorn, which were as living as their own dark look,
amd would endure forever."        

I read in the very good biography of Paul Noack, that Wolfe was in Berlin
shortly before 1930, and that he and Juenger visited the literary café
"Café Grössenwahn" (megalomania)

>So what does it all mean?  The experience of witnessing a dead
>person cuts the ground out from under you:  the silence is
>"bodenlos" and time is "abgründig."  The normal commotion of
>life ceases, or rather goes on but seems frozen and meaningless. 
>Literature can transmit such moments, so it does not belong to
>the false world of noise and bustle, the world of denial.  It
>and EJ put you in contact with the other side.

As in Wolfe, it breaks into the world of everyday and shakes its
foundations. That was the attraction of these everyday-stories of American
writers, like Wolfe or Hemingway, for Juenger, who said in these days that
nothing is more instructive than standing at a crossing for fifteen minits. 

regards,

René



-----------------------------------
drs. René de Bakker
Universiteitsbibliotheek Amsterdam
Afdeling Catalogisering Faculteiten
tel. 020-5252368