DRAGON: The Monumental Lonerism of Fleur Jaeggy

Tuesday, August 22, 2023

The Monumental Lonerism of Fleur Jaeggy

BY NORA SHAALAN

21 FEBRUARY, 2022

The Water Statues
by Fleur Jaeggy
tr. by Gini Alhadeff
New Directions, pp 96, 2021

The suggestion that there is something dignifying about solitude appears to consume the imagination of Swiss novelist Fleur Jaeggy, whose short novels have recently been translated into English. Though she was friends with literary figures like Ingeborg Bachmann, Joseph Brodsky, and Italo Calvino, who sometimes appear as characters in her stories, Jaeggy's translator describes her as a 'monumental loner', reclusive and frustratingly reticent. It should come as no surprise, then, that the latest of her works to appear in translation, The Water Statues (trans. Gini Alhadeff), takes a platitude—solitude as enriching, loneliness as debilitating—and reanimates it in order to consider what solitude gives and takes from us.

The Water Statues is a slim book that defies easy classification: Is it a short novel, a play, or a series of vignettes? Abandoning a traditional plot in favour of a fragmentary narrative, it reconstructs the life, encounters, and relationships of the emotionally hermetic Beeklam, a strange flaneur who keeps statues in the flooded basement of his villa. In this narrative, we can make out a few things: that Beeklam's mother has died; that his father, Reginald, has disappeared; and that he lives with Victor, alternately described as his 'servant', 'friend', and 'slave'.

The novel's (let's just agree to call it that) form is jarring, experimental. It opens with a list of cast members as in a dramatic work, closes with an epilogue, and alternates between two different modes: short prose sections narrated in the third person, and dialogue and stage directions as in a play. Sometimes it switches modes to signal a shift in time or focus. At other times the two registers flow into one another, as in a stretch where a character named Katrin recalls the events that led to her friend Eleanor leaving her childhood home:

KATRIN: Eleanor has dwelled in my memory for the past few hours; on the path that leads me towards the dunes, the rocks seem dressed in her suits: the colour's the same, ashen.

Before Katrin's eyes lay the earth where she was perhaps born and where she lived, a gigantic fatal hotel for unaccompanied children who chewed on boredom, and maybe the land of her childhood was really down there, steeped in shadow where the cliffs end, where the water starts to move, shielded from the oppression of celestial light.

These switches interrupt any semblance of continuity. Equally unsettling is the way that the novel oscillates between past and present with little warning. The Water Statues is telegraphic, disjointed. It could be described as a modernist novel, except that it also contains elements of magical realism: there's a dreamlike sequence where one character has a bewildering conversation with a crow that has been watching her. It is a novel that, like its author, eludes scrutiny, cultivates opacity. A toad, addressing Beeklam, croaks that 'a slaughterhouse aesthetic must exist'. Jaeggy hacks to pieces generic, formal, and affective conventions with irreverence. But this is not an act of gratuitous violence, nor is the intention mere destruction. Out of her slaughterhouse aesthetic comes a creation that stuns.

* * *

Philosophical meditations on solitude beg the question: When we talk of solitude, what is it we are really endorsing or objecting to? Do we crave the physical absence of others? Are we averse to the social relations we are forced into? Or do we hope to evade language and the conversations that allow us to form and maintain these bonds? Interviews with Jaeggy often leave me with an even more fractured understanding of her than I begin with, but her comments on solitude from a few years ago are instructive: 'One should be in one's own void. Void is silence. Solitude. An absence of relationships...,' she said. 'The void is a plant that must continually be watered'. For Jaeggy, these categories—solitude, absence, silence—often shade into one another; they are all part of 'one's own void'.

In The Water Statues, there is a begrudging admission that true, sustained solitude is preferred though not attainable. If sociability is an inevitable condition of human nature, then Jaeggy's cast of misfits certainly sees it as an inconvenient one, if only because it forces them to sustain conversations that create and exacerbate the rifts between them. Neither an excess nor a dearth of conversation, for example, ameliorates the relationship between Beeklam and his father. Beeklam reflects that although the two men 'talked a great deal in those years', he is certain that his father has never responded to him with much warmth. At the same time, the gap between them widens when their conversations are elliptical. Even when Beeklam 'gingerly travelled the paths of conversation, like a lady who walks along a muddy path holding up her skirts', the men remain 'radically alien to one another'. When Beeklam meets Katrin, he addresses others 'as if he were a confessor,' as though he is disclosing something shameful, under duress. Beeklam speaks 'with a sibilating sound that often spells spite. If he said that it was a magnificent morning, his tone seemed to suggest that it was deplorable that the morning should be magnificent'. Even outside of the strained relationship with his father, Beeklam's utterances are hypocritical, hateful, and further alienate people from him.

If conversations emphasise rifts between characters, then it makes sense that they mourn the loss of solitude. Kaspar, one of the characters that flits in and out of the narrative and whose relationship to Beeklam is unclear, laments the 'impatience we feel when forced to suspend the enchantment of solitude'. Solitude is a state of rapture, a refuge from the tedium of relation, a holy grail, but one that must always be interrupted. This creates a problem: if companionship is inescapable, how do we approximate the magic of solitariness?

The work-around, for a character named Lampe, is to befriend a mute. 'But when I realised I needed silence and friendship, I looked for a mute companion. [...] Peacefully, the mute companion sits on the bench, almost as though there might be an obscure pleasure in taming oneself'. In doing so, Lampe retains at least some aspects of what Jaeggy calls the 'void'. In a short prose fragment midway through the novel, this dynamic is recreated between two other characters: 'After a few months the loners, the girl and Kaspar, became friends to a degree; reticent in speech, they tolerated brief and stinting evening conversations'. By minimising conversation even as they share space, Kaspar and the girl evade the pitfalls of social relations.

Jaeggy equivocates on the matter of solitude in her other works. In 'I Am the Brother of XX', the opening short story of the eponymous collection published by New Directions in 2017, the narrator conspiratorially tells us that solitude is 'the worst evil that can befall anyone', or so he has heard. At the outset, Sweet Days of Discipline seems very much to privilege and to lament the loss of the tumultuous and fleeting relationship that the narrator forms with Frederique, an enigmatic classmate whom she loves, observes, obsesses over. Yet the narrator's obsessive rumination on Frederique is punctuated by her solitary walks. Like Beeklam, she is actively in search of solitude. The narrator calls her conversations with Frederique 'profound' but, in the same breath, admits that they 'sapped [her] energy'.

Jaeggy's fiction holds us at arm's length. In some cases, this anti-identificatory impulse takes the guise of topical attention to solitude. But Jaeggy also achieves this effect through her style, an aspect of her writing that critics have marvelled at. Many reviews of her work describe her prose as 'spare', 'austere', 'economical', or 'savage'—this last one a ringing endorsement from Susan Sontag included on the blurb of nearly every Jaeggy book in translation. In reality, however, these various thematic and stylistic elements of Jaeggy's writing fit into a mosaic of detached writing: Jaeggy's work (and the persona that Jaeggy has cultivated) is brutally unsentimental. This isn't to say that Jaeggy isn't interested in describing love, desire, or affiliation but that her representations attend to these affects and relations through the negative space that surrounds them.

Because her works are so singularly strange and estranging, these various descriptions of Jaeggy's style, by Sontag and others, do not situate Jaeggy's work as part of a larger aesthetic movement. But Jaeggy's interest in the cruel, cold underbelly of intimacy fits squarely into a tradition (or countertradition) that Deborah Nelson describes in Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil, a collection charting the aesthetic and ethical commitments of a number of women writers, critics, or photographers working since the mid-twentieth century. Nelson groups these women together based on 'similarities of style and outlook they shared on the questions of suffering and of emotional expressivity that preoccupied the late twentieth-century United States and, in many ways, continue to do so now'. She argues that these seemingly stylistically and politically disparate women share in common a tough mindedness that is not just an aesthetic stance or performance, but an ethical imperative that foregrounds resilience and fortitude in the face of pain, grief, and destruction.

For these women, as for Jaeggy, there is a 'preference for solitude over solidarity' that accords with their stylistic preferences—shorn sentences, paratactic constructions, a relative absence of modifiers. Nelson's book provides a number of women to place Jaeggy in conversation with, but we might also think of Natalia Ginzburg, Jaeggy's contemporary, as a European participant in this tradition. (Ginzburg, on not anonymizing the individuals in her autobiography, Family Lexicon: 'Perhaps someone will be unhappy to find themselves so, with his or her first and last name in a book. To this I have nothing to say'.) Or we might find a more contemporary and less verisimilar iteration in Anne Serre's absurd fable The Governesses, which charts with a keen eye the relationship between cruelty and desire.

But Jaeggy is perhaps the most consistent and innovative inheritor of this tradition, the elements of which resonate across her entire oeuvre. In Sweet Days, description, elaboration, and apposition (when they do appear) come in grammatical fragments. Just when we think the thought, description, or sentence is over, Jaeggy's narrator revises it in the following sentence, which is often a fragment, an act of perpetual revision.

In The Water Statues, formal innovation contributes to this feeling of detachment. Rarely do people talk directly to one another in the work. This is especially strange in the sections that read as part of a play, because it means that they are often monologic. At most, these sections feature two characters, and even when there is real dialogue, it is recursive and circuitous, as in an instance of Katrin and Lampe's conversation:

KATRIN: What do you want? [she said turning her slow gaze with something in her eyes that was a fraction less than a smile]
LAMPE: Night is falling much faster than the twilight might have led one to suppose.

These exchanges are phatic: they don't convey useful information, but perform a relationship. The sense that all conversations are staged performances is exacerbated by the fact that Jaeggy structures these sections as a play.

Of Nelson's cast of tough women, the most salient interlocutor for Jaeggy is Arendt, who doesn't just share Jaeggy's preoccupation with stylistic disaffection, but also shares her specific disposition to solitude and loneliness. Loneliness, for Arendt, is the origin of totalitarianism; solitude (which Arendt sometimes refers to as isolation) is a necessary precondition to thinking. 'All thinking, strictly speaking', Arendt writes, 'is done in solitude and is a dialogue between me and myself'. But crucial to Arendt's understanding of the loneliness-solitude poles is that solitude is a temporary position, one that must eventually give way to collectivity or companionship. 'For the confirmation of my identity,' she writes, 'I depend entirely upon other people; and it is the great saving grace of companionship for solitary men that it makes them "whole" again'. This is similar to the conclusion that Jaeggy's characters reach: that solitude is necessary but that one 'needs', to use Lampe's word, a friend. For Arendt, the oscillation between solitude and loneliness has political import. Solitude is necessary for us to constitute ourselves, but uninterrupted loneliness and isolation detach us from any common sense, estrange us from a shared morality. Perhaps we might see Jaeggy's desire for but ultimate equivocation in the face of solitude as a way to smuggle in the kind of political beliefs that Arendt stood for in a book that, on its vitreous surface, seems so apolitical.

In a recent interview, Jaeggy professes that she and Bachmann, whom she calls her 'lifelong friend', had 'great fun together', and that she wishes Bachmann were still alive. (This, from the same writer who claims the void should be watered.) It makes sense that The Water Statues opens with a dedication to Bachmann, for it reminds us that regardless of what distance, detachment, and solitude give or take, art is not, as Samuel Beckett once wrote of Proust, 'the apotheosis of solitude' but of sociality.

THE OXONIAN REVIEW