Hello
Gentle Reader
When
some people discuss the act of writing and its literary endeavors, they at
times make the comparison of a writer being the closest mortal being to god. Or
the profession being the closest occupation to that of a divine deity. Who can
blame them for their opinion though? With a stroke of their pen or a few taps
of some keys; a writer can create and devastate. They haphazardly construct
worlds without a second thought. They give birth to characters without
consequence. Both character and world are treated with mere playful regard.
When they have served their purpose or have reached their amusing capacity,
they are left to drift and spin into the blind eternities of nothing; or merely
killed off, where they are denied both happiness and love; their story
unfinished and lacking resolution. If writers are like god(s), then surely they
are the most celestial capricious characters, convicted of their own narcissism
and self-importance, which is more often than not, denied in their realistic
lives and world. This lack of importance or unjust disregard to their talents
and character ensures they resign themselves to their worlds embraced in
scaffolding, and crafted with bubble fragility. There they arbitrarily deposit
their unsuspecting victims, their imagined characters; who at one moment were
drafted and molded with care and concern, and the next tiresome and tedious and
discarded with irritation and resentment. Those abandoned characters find
themselves lost and forgotten in a landscape unfinished. The unseen
construction workers are busy laying bricks, paving roads, installing windows,
and setting up street lights. When they run out of materials and there is
nothing on order, they pick up chalk and scribble the necessary implants for
urban living on the half-finished landscape. For the characters lack the
industrious purpose allocated to the construction crew, they must find a way to
fit into their new landscape. Their fate had not been developed. They act the
best they can in a logical order, but the landscape is inconsistent in varying
stages of completion. A house may have walls and a roof; but it has neither
furniture nor appliances. They sleep on dirt floors, and build fires in random
rooms. It is here they must scrap some existence and some purpose, which has
now only dwindled down to survival, as they have been abandoned to a
half-finished world, which will slowly decay and decline, into a further state
of refuse, at which point it will drift further and further away from
acknowledgement and thought, until in the outer edges of amnesiac awareness, it
will implode. The final end will be subtle and quiet, without bang or boom. All
that will remain will be dust and a few bit of ruins littered about. Someday
these little remnants will be trawled and brought back from the wastes of the
afterthought and be repurposed in creating a new world, until the writer turned
Prometheus, discards this world with monotonous boredom. There the unfinished
heaven will drift further and further away until it too implodes and its ruined
afterimage risks being lost to oblivion.
In
the case of Fleury Jaeggy, she does not absent mindedly forget about her
envisioned worlds. They do not generate long enough to become bored or
tiresome. Right out of the gate, she immediately shatters and smashes her newly
formed creations. From there, she extracts splinters, shards, and fragments,
and rearranges these glistening obsidian and sapphire gems, into a twisted,
complex and gothic mosaic, depicting her unique worlds in all their twisted and
tortured glory. The world of Fleur Jaeggy is populated by solitary landscapes:
isolated boarding schools, remnants of mansions smoldering at dusk, squandered
apartment complexes, concrete low-income housing facilities, or homes for
pensioners and the geriatrics (or for those who are merely waiting). These brutalist and gothic settings are
populated by the disenfranchised, forgotten, marginalized, and deranged. When
charity or goodwill or even human decency is offered or displayed, the kindness
is returned with malice, discontent, and extreme forms of violence, which
includes but is not limited to: murder and arson.
The
melodramatic histrionics of her subjects and themes would easily snare and
drowned a lesser writer. Yet, Fleur Jaeggy undermines these pitfalls through
her style. Where other writers would pick up pen and write long convoluted
sentences, in memory of an author of the Victorian era, complete with tracery
and the dramatic martyrdom of madness, seeking redemption and reveal; Jaeggy’s
prose and style is clipped and terse. They are etched with steel and iron,
deprived of any display of emotion. Yet beneath the cool metallic surface, lies
a brewing molten undercurrent of violence, resentment, and madness. Her
characters are always on the edge of eruption; even if no one is around to
witness their final act of life. For her characters exist in the lonely snow
peaked steep mountains; or a mansion precariously built on a cliff, hanging
above the void; or the emotionally stunted world of boarding schools, where
life’s rigid itinerary leaves no room for any grand displays of discontent or
distress. The expectation is everything is left to simmer under the surface.
This tension is slowly revealed through her lyrical prose, which only offers an
inclination or a brief glimpse into the hellfire lurking beneath the cold
façade of her characters, who seek refuge in their hermitages or willfully
imprison themselves in solitary confinement. This immediate distrust towards
life makes itself apparent quickly and early on. In the titular story (“I am
the Brother of XX,”) the narrator, a young boy at the time, answers his
grandmothers prodding question of what he would like to do when he grows up:
“’[
. . . ] I want to die. I want to die when I grow up. I want to die soon.”
In
another story a lonely old woman who has suffered the claustrophobic confines
of her solitude, which has gifted her with a greater perspective and charitable
heart, decides to take in an orphan girl. After a while she bequeaths her
estate and fortune to her newly acquired humanistic project. The orphan,
however, has other desires and plans. She has neither care nor desire for
money, and kills her benefactor and burns the mansion down. This transgression
is done simply for the enjoyment of the destruction itself, which is described
in Fleur Jaeggy’s cool and dispassionate prose, deprived of histrionics or
other exaggerated forms of sentimentality, or pantomime carnivalesque colours.
Not
all of the stories collected in “I am the Brother of XX,” are filled with
extreme and sudden acts of violence and destruction. There is, however, a
continual atmosphere of dread and simmering rage which moves throughout the
collection. It’s just not always unleashed or released upon the world, or the
unsuspecting victims and other collateral damage; which comes in complete
contrast to her early short story collection: “Last Vanities,” where violence
quickly explodes forth, with neither justice nor redemption in sight. There is
a uncertain relationship directed towards life. The characters are not entirely
sure what life and living entails. Though not as severe as the young boy in the
titular story, who stated he only wishes to die when he grows up; they have an
uneasy relationship with the act of living. A realization which is best
explained by the nymphs who come down from their painting in order to get a
taste of life only to question their decision:
“[
. . . ] having descended to earth, they
realized they were ill-disposed to living.”
Other
stories—at times the most telegraphic in the collection—depict memories and
reminisces of friends, as well as imagined scenes of their lives. These stories
have a different mood from the others. Yet they too avoid the pitfalls of
nostalgia; and retain the restrained austere steel like severity found in her
fictional narratives. There is, however, a breath of fresh air presented in
these stories, as she remembers her dear friend Ingeborg Bachmann, who is
described as having needed: “little encouragement not to speak.” The late
Italian author and folklorist, Italo Calvino, also makes an appearance; though
he appears less quirky as one would care to envision him; but almost
oppressively eccentric, his presence awkward and foreign. Another takes stock
of Joseph Brodsky (though he is never named) on a silent solitary winter night
in New York, where the famous poet reflects on his forlorn and resentful
homeland, which had seen his removal. Upon them are other stories which read
like short lyrical essays offering thoughts on life, with a tepid caution,
always on the verge of distrust. Once
again they follow in the same vain as the boy from the titular story when he
states:
“The
importance of succeeding in life is a noose. It’s nothing but a noose.”
Emily
Dickinson once wrote: “To live is so startling it leaves little time for
anything else.” Fleur Jaeggy and her characters would agree; life is
startlingly, but to live is not an immediate action; but rather than an
unwelcome and even frightening curse, which they seek to continually remove
themselves from; or seek escape and refuge from. Her characters are not
entirely sure what it means to live, and what life entails, and they have no
desire to explore the idea any further. Life is an iniquitous affair, as well as
ubiquitous in its oppression.
The
stories in “I am the Brother of XX,” proudly display the jagged and inescapable
crystalline prose of Fleur Jaeggy, but one should be hesitant in calling all
the stories collected as traditional stories. Some are stories, in the lose
confines of conventional narrative; while others are essayistic in form and
delivery. This collection is not as concrete as her earlier collection “Last
Vanities,” whereupon madness and murder exist under a frail and tense surface,
which is wrapped in a cellophane atmosphere of malice. These stories varying in
pitch and rhythm and are often disconnected from each other in presentation,
but not in preoccupation. The austere and severe authors hand can always be
found on the page; where she guides with detached apathy their course and
route, whereby the characters are led to their eventual shipwrecks. What is
appealing about Fleur Jaeggy though, is her complete objection to all matters
considered literary conventional or familiar. She eschews these otherwise
standard obligations for a form and style all her own. She inhabits her corner
with assured confidence, while remaining impassive and opaque about recognition
and praise. Her perspective on the world and its human inhabitants is one with
measured ironic amusement, where she has no issue in exploring and exposing the
dangers of life, and the ideas of salvation. When a woman steals a wooden cross
from a corpse to find comfort; the object of holy relief, tortures her to
madness. Another woman—a mother of the narrator—is photographed when she meets
the pope, but rather than finding hope or reprieve from existence, she looks on
with hopelessness and resignation. In this Fleur Jaeggy states the most
apparent reality of what it means to live, which is merely the long process of
rotting.
It
should be noted; one should not read Fleur Jaeggy for her enjoyment of life,
but rather for her crystalline prose, her lyrical language and for her unique
perspective as it defies literary conventions, theories and schools. If one is
seeking a writer who exists on her own terms, and writes on her own terms, it’s
Fleur Jaeggy. Just be hestitant in seeking some moral uplifting message in the
vein of a self-help book; or other inspirational driven book, about laughing,
loving, praying, and living.
Thank-you
For Reading Gentle Reader
Take
Care
And
As Always
Stay
Well Read
M.
Mary
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