DRAGON: The Austere Fiction of Fleur Jaeggy

Monday, August 21, 2023

The Austere Fiction of Fleur Jaeggy

Fleur Jaeggy

The Austere Fiction of Fleur Jaeggy

Her work sees little point in exploring happiness, productivity, or self-understanding. Her focus is the void.

Sheila Heti
September 18, 2017

Unlike many writers Jaeggy mounts an aesthetic resistance to the soul laid bare.

Few writers push the reader away with the coolness, dignity, and faint melancholy of Fleur Jaeggy. In her new story collection, “I Am the Brother of XX” (New Directions), she praises her friend Ingeborg Bachmann, one of the most celebrated Austrian writers of the twentieth century, for needing “little encouragement not to speak.” Similarly commendable is a suicidal man, in one of her novels, who lives near a church, and who makes sure that “the striking of the hour coincided with the revolver shot. That way no one heard.” Elsewhere, we meet nymphs who have stepped down from their paintings into a darkened museum; they wish to try out life. But, “having descended to earth, they realized they were ill-disposed to living. . . . They abhor all manner of effusion.” How embarrassing to read Jaeggy’s stories, and to see one’s own life through her eyes. Yes, it’s “all manner of effusion.”

Jaeggy is seventy-six years old. She was born in 1940, into an upper-middle-class family in Zurich, and grew up speaking French, German, and Italian. In Italy, where she has lived the past five decades, she has won nearly every literary prize of note—she writes exclusively in Italian—and is acknowledged as one of the country’s most original authors. She is also one of its most reclusive. Gini Alhadeff, who translated the new collection, describes her as a “monumental loner,” who “has few friends, rarely goes out, and turns down practically every request for an interview.” At home, Jaeggy writes on a swamp-green Hermes typewriter, which she goes to, she says, “as though to a piano. I practice. I do scales.”

Jaeggy spent her childhood and adolescence in boarding school, before modelling, gloomily, for several years in the United States and Europe. Then she moved to Rome, a period she describes in a characteristically distilled way: “I went out with some boys. I rode horses. A pleasant and at once meaningless existence.” It was in Rome that she met Bachmann, who was to become a lifelong friend, and the writer Roberto Calasso, whom she married, in 1968, before moving to Milan. Calasso went on to become the editor of Adelphi Editions, which under his watch became one of Europe’s most highly regarded publishing houses, its authors including Bachmann, Djuna Barnes, and Thomas Bernhard.

Jaeggy’s fourth novel, “Sweet Days of Discipline” (translated by Tim Parks), made her name, in 1989. She has described writing the book, which is semi-autobiographical, as “an exercise in self-punishment.” The story is set in the nineteen-fifties, at a Swiss boarding school, where life is repeatedly portrayed as a penitential, even psychosexual condition. The girls wash quickly, like prisoners; there is “a faint mortuary smell to even the youngest and most attractive” of them. For those living there, “a sort of senile childhood was protracted almost to insanity.”

The plot follows the teen-age narrator’s relationship with a new girl, Frédérique. Frédérique is the daughter of a banker in Geneva and, being new to boarding school, she bears markers of the outside world—a male friend, elegant style. Her looks are “those of an idol, disdainful.” The narrator’s desire to win her friendship is immediate and strong. But, when she does, the dynamic is unsettling. In conversation, there is “an atmosphere of punishment,” and spending time with Frédérique entails “becoming accomplices, disdaining all the others.” In loving this new girl, the narrator transfers the object of her submission from boarding school, which she didn’t choose, to Frédérique, whom she did.

And, while some take a dark pleasure in being cut off from their nature—in being unable to be fully, because of the domineering beloved—the narrator is conflicted. Besides, she and Frédérique have never touched, never kissed. When another girl arrives—the giggling, spontaneous Micheline—the narrator more or less dumps Frédérique, and reacts defensively to her silent disapproval: “What Micheline wanted from life was to have a good time, and wasn’t that what I wanted too?”

Yet here she tragically misunderstands herself—the way we do when we believe that we must want what everybody else wants. (Why should we be singled out to be so different, so perverse?) She cannot enjoy the simple happiness that Micheline offers. She has been in boarding schools for seven years. She has been altered: what she needs from love is something chillier, more strict. When Frédérique is withdrawn from the school on account of her father’s death, the narrator’s small, secret dream of rekindling their friendship dies. She realizes, “I had lost what was most important in my life.”

This figure, or her outline, emerges again and again in Jaeggy’s work. The father is from a once wealthy house; the mother leaves the father and begins another family. The daughter remains in Swiss boarding schools from eight till eighteen. She is drawn to both women and men, sexually and romantically. She is emotionally isolated, an insomniac, and preoccupied with death.

In Jaeggy’s world, characters don’t change or have epiphanies—unless a sudden cruelty, a murder, or a suicide counts. They are as they are, and much of what they are is related to where they’re from—the soil in which they were planted. This is especially true in Jaeggy’s stories, where social position, citizenship, and class confer on everyone a sort of generic character: foreigners en route to visit Auschwitz are laughing and “arrogant with everyone,” but, as they approach their destination, “they instantly put on an air of decorum . . . an ostentation of grief.” Young farmhands have “meek, stubborn skulls . . . . They were like brothers to the cattle.” These are reminiscent of the archetypal characters one finds in the Brothers Grimm. Particularly in Jaeggy’s earlier work, objects and settings are generalized, rarely pinned to a specific time and place: we encounter a house with a garden, a wooden cross, a pastor, incestuous twins, crystal glasses, a gauzy blue dress.

Where does Jaeggy’s recurring narrator fit into this carrousel of types? Not quite anywhere. Abandoned to life as a boarder, she is effectively homeless, and also orphaned spiritually, having spent little time with her parents—those symbolically fixed poles we use to understand ourselves. Even her social class is uncertain: she might have been rich, but her father lost his fortune. “A sense of identity . . . I have never experienced it,” Jaeggy once said. “At times I think of myself as a person without personality.”

There is, though, one characteristic she will admit to: “An internal cold. Frost within.” Elsewhere, she has written that “frost makes the poet.” In her writing, this trait expresses itself as a kind of withholding. While many writers wish to make their humanity felt, the strenuous precision of Jaeggy’s work reveals an aesthetic resistance to the soul laid bare. She is like the suicidal man who times his gunshot to the striking of the hour. Most authors want us to hear the gunshot; Jaeggy conceals it with church bells.

Yet the more she sustains this strict decorum of language and sentiment, the more feeling presses against its surface: her stories are emotionally taxing, despite their reserve. Only in her mentions of Ingeborg Bachmann is there a note of warmth, of uncomplicated tenderness. She once said, “It is perhaps the only friendship I miss.”

The stories in “I Am the Brother of XX” are less gothic, less portentous, and less extreme in their cruelties than those in “Last Vanities,” Jaeggy’s earlier collection. Some are fantastical; others seem drawn from life, reflecting on friends such as Bachmann and Joseph Brodsky. Few are more than four pages long, and they do seem more like “scales” than stories. Scales: the exercise suggests duty, repetition, an order imposed from without. It is not Jaeggy’s imagination that is being applied at the typewriter but something more exacting, an attempt to be in concert with some mysterious void.

The book’s title story, which follows a boy undone by his older sister’s values, is especially affecting. On a rare visit to him at boarding school, she can’t stop talking “about the importance of succeeding in life, about the importance of a degree.” As an aspiring poet, he doesn’t understand this obsession, yet out of love he follows her wishes—“studying, graduating, succeeding.” But here, as in other stories, there is no progress, only a return to a conviction that should never have been shed. The brother, who seems to be narrating the story after his suicide, falls back on what he always suspected: “The importance of succeeding in life is a noose. It’s nothing but a noose.”

For Jaeggy, there are nooses everywhere, in the form of the upper-middle-class values that bind and sustain families. “Families are so strong,” one character laments. “They have all of advertising on their side. A person alone is a shipwreck.” Jaeggy’s shipwrecked alter egos have little use for self-understanding, wholesome productivity, and virtuous happiness. They see no point to sucking the marrow from life, because for Jaeggy there is no marrow. “What does she care about what is inside?” one of her characters asks. “Inside where?”

It’s tempting to connect this detachment to Jaeggy’s description of what happens when you are discarded by someone who is meant to love you. “S.S. Proleterka,” perhaps the most interesting of her five novels, recollects a cruise she took with her now deceased father. She writes:

Children lose interest in their parents when they are left. They are not sentimental. They are passionate and cold. In a certain sense some people abandon affections, sentiments, as if they were things. With determination, without sorrow. They become strangers. Sometimes enemies. They are no longer creatures that have been abandoned, but those who mentally beat a retreat. . . . Parents are not necessary. Few things are necessary. Some children look after themselves. The heart, incorruptible crystal.

“Incorruptible crystal” is an apt description of Jaeggy’s style. Her sentences are hard and compact, more gem than flesh. Images appear as flashes, discontinuous, arresting, then gone. Connective sentences are excised; there is sometimes a struggle to know where one is. But this feels appropriate for a writer who is a “stranger” and an “enemy” to the familial. Literary concessions—narrative clarity and catharsis, techniques as simple as moving a character from room to room—are an inheritance, a dutiful part of learning to please the reader. They seem, at least for Jaeggy, the aesthetic equivalent of a family obligation—tedious, and entirely for others.

Of course, one cannot just leave one’s family, home, and history for nowhere. Jaeggy’s characters often turn to Christianity. A maid steals a wooden cross from the hands of a corpse, hoping for comfort; it destroys her. A woman studies a photograph of her mother visiting the Pope, but the mother’s gaze, instead of suggesting rapture, is “cold and hopeless.” To those who renounce worldly things, Christianity promises riches a hundredfold. Jaeggy seems to abide by a similar gospel: she lives a frugal, ascetic life, and is monkishly patient with her illuminations. But what riches does she get in return? In one story, her outlook is succinctly expressed: “Aside from rotting, there’s little flowers can do, and in this they are not unlike human beings.” Flowers appear frequently in Jaeggy’s work, as the rare thing that a person might tend to with care. It’s not lost on the reader that the author was named (perhaps aspirationally) Fleur—then abandoned to boarding schools by her mother. A daughter is more difficult than a rose.

Stefan Zweig, in his 1941 autobiography, “The World of Yesterday”—one of the great accounts of life in Europe in the first part of the twentieth century—writes about the artists he met in Paris, three decades earlier, who were scattered and destroyed in the murders, exiles, and chaos of two world wars. He describes writers like Rilke, who wanted only “to link verse to verse perfectly in quiet yet passionate endeavor.” “You felt almost ashamed to look at them,” he writes, “for they led such quiet lives, as if inconspicuous or invisible.” This is the Mitteleuropa lineage that produces, in our day, a writer like Fleur Jaeggy.

Like the work of many of that era—Thomas Mann, Arthur Schnitzler—Jaeggy’s fiction is haunted by futility and loss. Yet she has a tenderness for death, while her predecessors often saw in it pure waste and destruction. In “These Possible Lives” (New Directions; translated by Minna Zallman Proctor), a new volume of abbreviated biographies, Jaeggy charts the lives of John Keats, Marcel Schwob, and Thomas De Quincey. She foregrounds the oddest and minutest of details but lingers attentively, and with narrative feeling, as each man approaches his end. On their sickbeds, De Quincey’s voice is “sweet and his expression radiant,” while Schwob’s face “coloured slightly, turning into a mask of gold.” Death is beautiful because it can be trusted: it promises nothing, while life promises everything, and betrays.

This reverence for death holds in Jaeggy’s own life. In “The Aseptic Room,” a story from the new collection, she recounts a conversation she and Bachmann had about old age. Jaeggy imagines spending it together, in “a house in the country,” and feels bewildered, and a bit hurt, by her friend’s reluctance to “foresee a future.” But she suggests that it might have been foreknowledge: Bachmann died in her mid-forties, in 1973, from burns suffered after falling asleep while smoking, and setting her nightgown aflame. It was rumored to have been a suicide, and Jaeggy was deeply wounded by the loss. She keeps few objects close, but one is a gift of a silver heart from Bachmann.

For Jaeggy, dying is the sincerest way of being in relation to others. In the story “I Am the Brother of XX,” the narrator notes that “one always dies because of someone else. I don’t know if it’s correct to say ‘because of.’ . . . On behalf of others, might be more correct.” Perhaps, in passing suddenly and prematurely, Bachmann won a fixed place in Jaeggy’s heart. Her death suggests, if not moral virtue, then a form of submission—and for Jaeggy it is through submission that a person, a relationship, existence itself, gains beauty and refinement. The unhappy narrator of “Sweet Days of Discipline,” once grown, thinks that she would sometimes “like to hear the sound of the school bell again.” Even the creation of art, which many artists experience as an exercise in freedom, is turned, by Jaeggy, into a study in obedience. It is playing scales.

In “Sweet Days of Discipline,” the narrator, years after graduating, fortuitously encounters her old friend Frédérique at a movie theatre. Frédérique invites her home. They wander through a dark labyrinth of stairs and hallways, and enter “a room carved out of nothing.” A sorry scene ensues—the room is bitterly cold, so Frédérique pours some alcohol into a saucepan on the ground, and lights it with a match. The two women stand there watching the fire. The narrator notices a gnawed candle and wonders if Frédérique is “living on wax.” But she does not pity her friend:

I thought of this destitution of hers as some spiritual or aesthetic exercise. Only an aesthete can give up everything. I wasn’t surprised so much by her poverty as by her grandeur. That room was a concept. Though of what I didn’t know. Once again she had gone beyond me.

It is hard not to be impressed by Jaeggy’s own spiritual and aesthetic grandeur, which casts her stories in such a compellingly cool light. She, too, has a startling ability to go beyond: beyond the sentimental heart, the writerly niceties, the conventions that bind us, and the messy effusions of contemporary life. She once said, in an interview, “One should be in one’s own void. Void is silence. Solitude. An absence of relationships. . . . The void is a plant that must continually be watered.” It is our good fortune that she sits at her swamp-green typewriter, watering it.

Sheila Heti is the author of, most recently, the novel “Pure Colour.”

THE NEW YORKER