Hello Gentle Reader,
Time is experienced and rarely observable. Its passage is the thread stitched into daily life. While routinely checked and even brushed against, it’s never explicitly observed with great intensity. The tick and tocks of clocks ripple through many lives. In unison they fall back and spring forward. An individual’s relation to time is impersonable, all the while being the defining and guiding structure of their lives. No longer just the stitch of order, but the scaffolding of governance, the conductor of days, the accountancy of the hours and minutes, scrutinizer of seconds, the auditor of the rhythm of one’s life. Time and age are primordial components of the material and corporeal universe. Human beings have only provided it a shape and form beyond the celestial cycle and seasonal nature. What follows is both adaption, evolution, ingenuity and advancement. The old is not merely cast off. Not easily erased. Instead, it is readily abandoned. Its vanguard marches towards new horizons. What’s left behind is ghost and remnants. Eroded memories of former gilded ages. What immediately springs to mind is Detroit, the poster child of the post-industrialist and post-capitalist society as the world entered a new globalized era and domestic defenses and protective measures were chipped away and sold off or resourced and outsourced elsewhere (cynically of course, to locales where safety and labour laws were either non-existent or unenforced). Detroit has become that haunted city of glory and ruin. Photographic evidence, documentaries, reports, statistics, everything describes a city in continued and sustained collapse. An apocalyptic landscape of neglected infrastructure. Abandoned public works. Warehouses remain as tombstones of echoed emptiness. Homes (once beautiful thriving communities) are entombed, boarded up, haunted by memories of their past occupants, now housing squatters and the equal dispossessed and despondent within their walls. The soul of the city in palliative care. Those otherwise kind and well-meaning hands prone to fumbles and apologies. This decay. This concrete rot. This urban decomposition is not exclusive to the cities. Though remarkable in photographic evidence, conjuring the dark poetic romanticism of Poe, the capture of that otherwise urban gothic with its broken windows, water-stained concrete, bright, brilliant, and vulgar graffiti. This stillness and collapse mark the past and apprehensively looks to the horizon with uncertainty. The prairies are full of decay and desolation. The difference, where cities—beautiful urban centres of light and life—exist within their defined borders and city limits, and as beacons brighten the path and light up the sky, beckoning for all night time travelers to hither; the prairies are lost within their own all-consuming expanse. Their endless nihilistic nothingness of long blue skies and herds of clouds, to grasslands or farmlands that stretch ever forward and always onward, remaining out of the way not as a point of exclusivity, but as a mere fact of reality. Out there is the periphery. Littered amongst the afterthought of the urbane, are buildings and communities in minor key, collapsing in on themselves. Homes left abandoned. Gardens overgrown. Business closed up and boarded. Those once great cathedrals of the prairies (grain elevators) are out of step and out of time. Demolished and destroyed. Now reduced to memories and afterimages. Further along are barns and homesteads pock marked amongst the vastness as skeletal remains or fossils. In their exaggerated German expressionistic poses, they remain. This is also the world of Wolfgang Hilbig as depicted in his novel “Old Rendering Plant,” an East German community that exists in various states of industrial and post-industrial decay, in a communist society that not only facilitates this decay but orchestrates, engineers, and designs it. The social structure can only be described as one in routine deterioration.
Before Krasznahorkai László was dubbed the master of the apocalypse, the title would have easily been applied to the Wolfgang Hilbig, whose prose is dense as it is darkly lyrical, an uncontrolled monologue of stream of consciousness prose with a penchant for metaphor and repetition, refining the imagery into further and further layers, providing both observations and impressions of a community of no defining features or character, but one that exists within a state of sustained decline. Wolfgang Hilbig’s narrator is an unnamed and unidentified man, whose place within time is never placeable. At first a child left to his own devices explores further and further into the landscape, into the reaches until its dark:
“I recalled a brook outside town whose current, strangely shimmering, sometimes milky, I once followed for miles all autumn or longer, if only hoping to emerge one day from a territory confined, I’ll admit it at last, by the bounds of my weariness.
Each exploration, each journey takes him further and further into the industrial landscape, overgrown with vegetation, and always darkening upon his return home, where in the facelessness of the apartment, he makes his excuses for routinely tardy defiance of curfew and parental parameters. Chided, scolded, and remanded to his room without supper, his childlike Odessey into the post-industrial landscape continues, taking on increasingly surreal and vicious form:
“The willows . . . seemed to metamorphose into fantastic creatures, the spawn of some freakishly fertile subsoil, ugly crippled excrescences that through their degeneration had come into power and evil.”
All the while the vanished and the disappeared (speculated to be victims of the Stasi), become a silhouette of a shadow that routinely flints in and out of the narrators’ recollections. His family members (faceless and shapeless shadows unto themselves) sit at the dinner table, listening to the radio rattle on the list of those who have disappeared. The last fact of their presence and existence being the recitation of their names, which in one instance form as an incantation for the narrator as they drift to sleep:
“All this time the name had failed to come, remained missing…all this time other names murmured away at me, similar, barely distinguishable names, identical names that bored and sapped me, following me into my dreams to bring void and vertigo—but I knew they were still there when I woke, studding the ceiling, fading only for seconds in the darts of light that shot through the curtains, giving me a second time to fall asleep with sonorous sawing that scarcely differed from the from the sawing and rasping of the names…rasping like small but assiduous waves on the shore, trickling up the far-too-large adult bed in which I lay crosswise and head down in a swaying, spinning voyage beneath the twilight of letters impossible to dim as, beneath the moon’s burning baby-face, I drifted out on the empty, watery fields of my dreams:…seeking Schiller, Frank…Shiller, Franz. . . schiller, Franz Heinrich. . .Schiller, Franz Otto…Schiller, Friedrich…seeking Schiller, Fritz…Schiller, Gustav…”
There is no real answer for the narrator’s childhood sojourns into the landscape. One rationale provided is childhood fascination with times transition. These threshold moments of the days when the predefined expire and transfigure into a new entity. This disembodiment of time fascinates and compels in how it warps the landscape and changes the perspective. Then of course is the physical exploration for getting to the matter of the heart of darkness, the wretchedness and labourious bedrock which secures this otherwise dead society. First forays of course, provide an inventory of losses or abandonment: an old coal mine; a watermill which provides refugee for savage Easterners; but finally, the actual old rendering plant, a hellscape in its own right, encircled in a reputation that immediately evokes disgust in other residents, the workers of the plant looked upon with revulsion due to the nature of their work. They are cast out and alienated. The plant itself spews greased smoke and pollutes the brook. Despite being a manufacturing facility to render cleaning agents, the workers of the plant are described as having a particular perfume a scent all their own. As an individual with no further prospects for further education, our narrator is adrift when it comes to discussions of his future, his prospect being technical training or apprenticeship, and instead, as if by rebellion or pure carelessness decides to work in the rendering plant (Germania II). To lower himself further into the ruin, the grease smoked air of rendered and reduced animal parts, establishing himself as an outsider. What follows suit is a monologue and protest, a revolt against the communist system and the party, and all the workers of the world it supposedly represents.
Wolfgang Hilbig is a master of atmosphere, curating and disorienting it. Sentence by long sentence weaves through this slim novel, twisting and looping back on itself. “Old Rendering Plant,” is an onion like narrative, continually being peeled and returning to some dissembled focal point, before branching in another path or falling down another hole. At the heart of it lies a core rotten, greasy ridden and rendered into a noxious poison, which ironically produces the required cleaning agents to maintain the cleanliness of good home and health. Hilbig’s prose easily eclipses both Krasznahorkai László and Jon Fosse’s, being the forefather and progenitor, while happily plunging into the darkness of the existential, finding neither hope nor salvation within its darkness, but merely the parts worth reduction into the process of repurposing. “Old Rendering Plant,” is not an easy read, despite its physical length being quite consumable, Wolfgang Hilbig proves himself to be a master and wielder of the sentence, delighting in changing the form or disrupting perspective or introducing some new image and exploring its exaggerated components with frightening detail. I look forward to re-reading “Old Rendering Plant,” again in the future, and this time sitting down with the intention of reading it out loud, in order to follow and flow with the with the narrative, its cadences, its rhymes, and as well as marveling at Wolfgang Hilbig’s mastery of longwinded sentences, breathtaking in their extended strokes, the complete opposite to the pointillism of Herta Müller. It is interesting to wonder, if “Old Rendering Plant,” is allegorical in its composition? Hilbig of course denied the charge, refuting the claims that it allegorized or metaphorized the former East German state and the Stasi or the Holocaust; and while it’s easy to say that allegory is lazy interpretation, “Old Rendering Plant,” does appear to render and boil down German history from the Third Reich to the Holocaust to communist East German, as a way of expunging the past in order to greet the future, with all its grease smoke filled skies.
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
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