Tuesday 16 August 2011

Arno Geiger's "Es geht uns gut"


Recently I read a book by an Austrian writer Arno Geiger which is called “Es geht uns gut”. This is a wonderful novel about three generations of family Erlach settled in Vienna from the beginning to the end of the 20th century.

Narratives about each generation are intertwined like a patchwork so that linearity of the plot dissolves in a texture of “now” as if there were no past at all. Each part of the time is sense-giving to each other and it does not really matter which position within the time line the event occupies. Beside the fact that it is a wonderful piece of prose it made me think about couple of thing related to memory.
First, an immense role of materiality for memory retaining and developing. Here, I think not only about the “stuff”, although its meaning is not to underestimate, I think here first of all about a body as a witness of the past, bearer of memory and a representation of memory. I came with this thought when I was reading a passage where one of the main characters faces a woman in black and only after this he remembers that someone died. In this way, the woman served as an index of the past. This very much makes me think about Lefebvre’s discussion on body as a space, but for Lefebvre the point was the spatiality of body. My point is the remembrance and "representability" of body. Now I need to find who wrote about this body/memory relation. I remember a presentation on one of the conferences I attended several years ago there a researcher from Germany presented a paper on Varlam Shalamov’s "Kolyma Tales" and she looked at the body as a witness of the past, whereas body remembered tortures of the Gulag even if the mind refused to do so. I wish I could remember whose theories this researcher was referring to. Now, I remember Hayden mentioning, "Memory is also evoked through the bodily experience of the ceremony and its formal rituals, which is shared with others" (Hayden, 1999: 145)
Second, this novel made me think about the literature where the war is addressed in general. Such novels usually encompass three generations, this is their common feature. I did not read so many novels of this kind that were written in the post-Soviet countries, but when I think about the novels I read, the common feature is an immense role of imaginary and dreams that occupy the novel space (think about Oksanen’s or Zabuzhko’s novels, e.g.). In Zabuzhko’s novel “Museum of Abandoned Secrets” there is no direct transmitting of experience from one generation into the other, the past generation speaks to their ‘grandchildren’ exclusively through dreams, although these dreams are then proved to have been reality by the archival documents and the present. It is amazing how forms of representing the past seem actually being dependent on the past itself (there were literally few who could transmit the experience). And here I am not speaking exclusively about the UPA, I think about the Soviet framework of Great Patriotic War in general which did not allow any other schemes in transmitting the past except of glorious narratives of victory.
Third, while reading the novel I thought uninterruptedly on the question “Who needs the past?” The characters in the novel seemed reluctant to “know” what was going on in the past, what they were longing for, though, was coming back to the past where everything was better. So, past is not only a foreign country, it is a better country, which can never be reached.
PS: Just remembered the interview with Arno Geiger where he mentioned his father, who was seriously ill and did not always manage to recognize people or environment. Once he said to Arno Geiger: “Ich will nach Hause” (I want home), “Wo ist dein Haus?” (“Where is you home?” asked Geiger a bit perplexed as they were sitting in the father’s house), “Zuhause ist wie hier aber ein bißchen anders” (“At home is like here but a bit different,” was the answer).
A good ending for such a long and somewhat patchy post.

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