Bamberging in the Bamberg.
Friday, July 04, 2008
When Oscar Wilde cautioned that, "it is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious," he obviously sided with the charming. Being a fairly tedious person (I write poetry) I can agree with the letter of this aphorism but not with its emphasis. Because isn't it true that, once some genius like Wilde sets the bar on charm, the effect afterward becomes merely inflationary? And with that inflation, don't the charming soon find one another and pretty much stay in that rarified company? So, yeah, charm becomes as superfluous as yachts. Sooner or later, perhaps even now, there will be but one charming person left in the world, an impeccable person who can communicate, in a type of preternaturally gentile super-language, to the three or four also-rans able to decipher her charming jibberish. (Almost all literary fiction, incidentally, aspires to this penultimate state, but never to the top spot. The reason for this? I think it's that novelists are proud of being able to explain the workings of these horribly afflicted, charming circus freaks to the rest of us, and because we sometimes, in our tedium, pay them for privilege.) The rest of us must distinguish among types of tedium -- bulimia, Democratic politics, hedge-fund-management, "interesting" sexual positions, bowling, the eating of pro-biotic yogurts, etc., ad nauseum. The charming are no longer capable of describing this world at all: only the tedious can speak with the prerequisite dull articulation. Except, it happened one time. One time only, as far as I can tell. This rare event was called Cosmos. It's a novella by Witold Gombrowicz.
I'll bore you with the set-up. The narrator, Witold, and an acquaintance met by chance, named Fuchs, meet outside of a remote boarding house in order to get away from the pressing concerns of family and work. Both men are so utterly tedious they find no legitimate way to occupy their time while on vacation. Lucky for them, the discovery of a hanged sparrow, a bit of wood dangling in a decayed bit of masonry, and a few arrows possibly (but not actually) scrawled on the ceiling send them out on a mission to discover their provenance. They closely observe the family -- a stout, tedious, fairly stupid middle class bunch -- for further clues. Witold, in his one act of heroism, gets so frustrated watching the married daughter of the family patriarch interact with her housekeeper and her husband -- so tediously attentive is he in his search for "clues" that a phantom sensuality begins to surround her -- that he eventually strangles her cat. There is a fairly uneventful suicide at the end of the book, but that's pretty much it. It's one of your plotless kind of deals.
Boring, yes? I can't deny it. But consider this: Witold is not really the protagonist. I mean, how could he be, since all protagonism in this novel is charmless and therefore un-literary? Who cares about protagonism among the tedious? So, then, I choose as my protagonist, my hero, (because I have nothing better to do on this July 4th, except maybe write a few poems) Leo the patriarch. It's true, he does takes a long time to reveal himself. The description of him comes early, at the dinner table. "Leo Wotjys was like a gnome. His head was like a gourd, and his bald pate, reinforced by the sarcastic flashing of his pince-nez, dominated the whole table." Leo hums constantly, talks wistfully and abstractly of the past, and lets loose a constant, thin stream of what the narrator calls "verbal monstrosities," as when he wants his daughter to pass him the radishes: "Pray papass to your papakins a radiculous radicule, my precious bulbul."
He is justifiably ignored by the narrator in favor of the unutterable minutia of his daughter's mouth, its particular ghostly relation to the housekeeper's mouth, the arrows on the ceiling, etc. Yet Leo comes to the fore now and again, humming his little songs and rolling up little crumbs of soft bread and lining them up in neat little rows. So far this probably sounds a little sub-Beckettian and you're probably right. It's funny like Beckett, themed like his work, and all written at just about Beckett's level (which, whatever, probably makes it top-notch). Yet Leo becomes more persistent throughout, hums more, suggests a family trip to the mountains. Once there, Leo starts humming like a lunatic, his hands start to flutter, he takes on an aspect of almost manic self-satisfaction. In sight of the mountains, he corners Witold and gives him something akin to a manifesto. It beginns with a word, "Berg," an utter nonesense word which immediately deports Witold to the back of the narrative, and he reacts with ineffectual anger, for "Berg" is the summation of Leo's life, a fully self contained system, encompassing even the narrator, a world in which tedious Leo rules with absolute authority. "So," says Leo, "you are a bamberger, then. You're a sly one. I'm a bamberger too. We shall bamberg happily together."
He elucidates by telling a story. "Once, while we were living at Drohobycz, an actress came to the town on tour, she was a superb creature, absolutely superb," he says (and here he's describing perhaps the only charming personality to ever intersect with his life, someone who, even then, one had to pay to see). He continues,
...and one day I happened by pure chance to touch her hand on the bus, oh, what heaven, what ecstasy, oh, to be able to start life all over again, but it's no good, you can't put the clock back. I felt bitter and resentful, but I ended by pulling myself together and deciding there was no point in wasting time thinking about touching someone else's hand when you had two hands of your own. Believe it or not, after a certain amount of practice you can get quite expert in touching one hand with the other, under the table, for instance...So, I can't complain, I have managed to get something out of life. If others have managed to get more, well, good luck to them.
His manifesto continues. "You can enjoy ourself like a pasha at the dinner table making little bread pellets...Epicurism, or voluptuousness," says Leo, speaking directly to Wilde, "can be of two kinds, it can be like a wild boar, a buffalo or a lion, or it can be like a flea or a mosquito." This is Bergery. I'll get nutty here and say that New York -- charmless, pleasureless New York, defined at every block by bank branches dressed up to look like nurseries -- is full of this bambergery, shameless bambergism. It began with the receptionist at the front of the cubicle block, with all of her little fuzzy-headed trolls lined up on her computer monitor and her teddy bear sweaters and bits of flair, but it has since spilled out everywhere, on the lips of those with liprings, in those disgusting Maori earlobe-holes the punks wear, in the "Gettin' Lucky in Kentucky" T-shirts worn by otherwise healthy-looking Midwestern college boys. Bergery exists in sideburns, flip-flops, Deicide T-shirts, vintage dresses with puffed shoulder sleeves. The five-dollar-bill now shows the Bergery of our treasury by taking on a purplish hue. New York is the epicenter of Berg, its pleasureless people, out brunching or fetishizing new bands with cute new sounds, its foremost ideologues.
I took a lot of pleasure the other day in helping out a pretty, fresh faced worker, a likely example (I see them all the time now that I've read the book), someone with the effronterous Bergery of an Obama pin tacked to the lapel of her grey business ensemble. Someone so white she had little pink blotches on her cheeks, as if her whole body were screaming for Bergism. She said she wanted something for a long weekend trip, and that the last book she read "and really liked" was Michael Chabon's "Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay." I suggested Cosmos to her -- "it's a little unusual," I said. "I think you'll like it very much." So triumphant and small did I feel at that moment, I did not even look back at her as she made her purchase and walked outdoors to the perfect little weekend I had designed for her. Cue fireworks, illuminating my face through the window as I sit home, contemplating the small.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:44 PM,
