Week of January 27, 2005, Issue #484
FRONT
Print Culture
By CHRISTOPHER WIEBE
Blood and Götz
When you encounter fiction of the first order, you know it immediately, within
a matter of sentences. The words are ordinary enough, but somehow they resonate
beyond themselves, giving a sense of the fictional work as a whole. Götz
and Meyer (Harvill), by Calgary’s David Albahari, is just such a book.
It unfolds as the breathless monologue of a present-day Belgrade schoolteacher
intent on reconstructing the lives of his dead Jewish relatives. The Jewish
men of the city were shot by the Nazis in 1941. The 5,000 women, children and
elderly, however, were killed in the summer of 1942 in the back of a large truck
whose sealed compartment could be filled with exhaust. The Jewish prisoners
died as the truck drove through Belgrade from the city fairgrounds (which had
been converted into a prison camp) to the mass graves of Jajinci.
The narrator becomes obsessed with Götz and Meyer, the two SS officers
who drove the truck. He imagines the conversations they had in the truck’s
cab, how one had dreamed of being a fighter pilot and owned a fluffy poodle
named Lilly, how the other handed out chocolates to the Jewish children. They
typify the “banality of evil” Hannah Arendt saw in Adolf Eichmann.
Only by understanding them completely, the narrator concludes, can he recover
his family: “I resemble to myself that old rabbi of Prague who built a
man-like creature of clay and breathed life into it, with the difference that
I am trying to construct Götz and Meyer out of airy memories, unreliable
recollection and crumbling archival documents.... The moral, however, of the
Prague story is clear: no one should play God, not a rabbi, not a writer, not
a narrator, and words, no matter how powerful, can never replace the silence
of God’s creation.”
The dark, absurd humour that shimmers throughout Götz and Meyer seems,
at first, irreverent. But on reflection, it is the only way to give life to
this horror. By disrupting the gravity of its telling and eliciting the reader’s
laughter, the novel breaks down the textual barrier, the “fourth wall”
referred to in theatre. Albahari’s astonishing novel exposes a life bobbing
dismally in the wake of inhumanity.
Mr. Big
While Calgary’s poetry scene has been a garden of earthly delights for
the past decade, some of the strangest and most provocative poetry has been
that of Ian Samuels. Formerly an editor of Filling Station, and currently an
artistic associate at Wordfest, Samuels has been quietly retooling the Canadian
long poem with his first collection Cabra and his latest, The Ubiquitous Big
(Coach House). These are books full of ellipses, non sequiturs and metaphorical
shoving matches, dense with historical and pop culture references that leave
a reader grasping at straws. Samuels creates the perfect illusion that his writing
is out of control.
Cabra (Red Deer) gathers together scraps of voices from colonial Brazil, particularly
from the repression of the 17th-century slave revolts and the founding of communities
of escaped slaves (Quilombo) in the interior. These 50-odd poems wander from
the words of colonial lackeys and priests to the punishing music of the cat-o’-nine-tails
and African worship practices. It’s fragmentary, yet comprehensible. Words
become separated from their footnotes, and we get Don Pedro’s half of
a conversation: “What has been planted this week?/Send twenty negroes
tomorrow morning. What/more? The cachorro! Put the iron collar/around his neck./The
mill begins work tomorrow./Call the negroes now!/Salta para a resa!”
By now, we all know on an intellectual level that history is narrative, that
its coherence is ideologically generated, not real. The genius of Cabra is that
by continually raising questions in the reader’s mind such as, “What
is this about? What does this mean?”, by letting the reader fumble blindly
in search of narrative order, the collection shows how the past feels without
the scissors and glue—it’s all raw material with no architecture,
a jumble of disembodied voices uprooted in time.
With The Ubiquitous Big, Samuels extends this off-kilter ambience and disjunctive
style into new territory. It is the kind of searching, polemical material one
saw in Di Brandt’s Now You Care (2003), without the lyricism. “Arcana,”
the first of three sections, shows how America’s pop culture and its blood-and-guts
military-industrial complex are indivisible: “Somewhere under the town,
all the vanished children gathered over the ancient bones of dynamited coolies
communion style under a cleave-wielding stone image of Our Lady of the Primal
Rib, proving this was meat country pillaged straight from an emperor’s
gut.” “Personality” finds links between the warped discourse
of personal fulfillment and ruthless foreign and environmental policies: “Beautify
your heart murmur: become quality, become yourself.” The title section
is a series of monologues by hard-boiled film noir types. These sinister poems
could be described as bricolage; they resemble architectural follies built of
the rubble of demolished buildings—each part is finely made, but as before,
a broader meaning eludes capture.
So much of contemporary literature is self-contained and needs nothing to be
brought to it by the reader. Historical fiction, for instance, is often judged
on how artfully it integrates historical detail, how “effortlessly”
it raises and furnishes its literary circus tent. Am I arguing for the return
of a sort of earnest modernist difficulty? Perhaps. Samuels’s sharp and
uncompromising writing provides a powerful antidote to a complacent society’s
complacent reading habits. V