Patrik Ouředník, Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, Translated by Gerald Turner (Dalkey Archive, 2005) «Ourednik, a Czech who emigrated to France in the 1980's, has written a ponderous-sounding, textbooklike monologue that accomplishes a literary sleight of hand. Europeana, translated from the Czech, has no protagonist and essentially no plot. Instead, Ourednik piles on lists, statistics and a hodgepodge of social theory - an annotated Harper's Index that gradually takes the shape of a bizarre narrative, a frenetic tour through the absurdities and horrors of the past century. Touching on subjects and events as disparate as the invention of the bra, Barbie dolls, Scientology, eugenics, the Internet, war, genocide and concentration camps, it unspools in a relentless monotone that becomes unexpectedly engaging, even frightening.» - Anderson Tepper
«Patrik Ouredník's Europeana defies categorization. At first glance, it gives the impression of disjointed excerpts from the author's reading furnished with comments and modest commentaries. These might serve as a basis for a lucid essay on the recent past in the spirit of the mediaeval chroniclers who interspersed their accounts of real events with invented stories, wondrous statements by miraculous sages, obscure teachings and religious doctrines, and unverifiable hearsay. But Ouredník doesn't even respect the procedures of the old chronicler and refuses to string the events he refers to onto a time axis, allowing them instead to wander freely through the space of the entire century like liberated atoms touching each other, disappearing and returning, colliding and fusing no distinction being made in terms of importance. The invention of the brassiere is ranked equally with the discovery of nuclear fission.
The apparently spontaneous testimony is reminiscent of Uncle Pepin's monologues in Hrabal's Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age. However, the narrator of Europeana is no rhetoricist rambling on in orgies of endless self-expression. There is not the slightest hint of his involvement in events and he is present solely in the tone of the language; we simply sense him, which makes his desperate irony all the more poignant. Apparently devoid of composition, the text achieves its effect by a discreet construction principle akin to Kolár's 'rollages', where two pictorial reproductions cut up into narrow strips blend into each another. Ouredník has 'cut into strips' two basic thematic levels. The first of them consists of information about the frightful brutality of wars and revolutions, the collaboration of science and technology with evil, bizarre games with liberated sex, the misrepresentation of reality by the media, the madness of redemptive utopias, and other phenomena associated with human hysteria. The second basic 'picture' consists of an outline of various intellectual theories that Ouredník denudes of their speculative magic by re-formulating them laconically and laying bare their foundations, which often betray emptiness, confusion or sterile striving for effect. The result of this blending of the two worlds is a grim burlesque, in which the picture of life in the mirror of intellectual interpretation appears even paltrier than in the first place.
Europeana may be seen as an attempt to cleanse social memory. The author has created a narrator who has broken free from all particular loyalties, knee-jerk attitudes and adopted standpoints in order to relate afresh the general experience of the twentieth century. To a certain extent the reader shares that reality with him, knowing it from school, the press, books and TV documentaries, and one would think that its narrator would need some unusual opinion or provocatively sharpened attitude to draw attention. But that would run counter to the sense of the text, in which striving for a sharpening of attitude and a radical departure from common sense appears as one of the main causes of the tragic events. Instead, the author places the narrator in the position of a kind of Martian, approaching human history with the detachment of an impartial researcher, whereby the reader is enabled to view notoriously well-known events as if for the first time. Fresh light is also shone on them by placing them in unexpected contexts and providing revealing, though maybe fictitious detail.
European integration has been accompanied by intense efforts to replace traditional national historiography with the image of a shared history. Everything that divided the European nations in the past and led to conflict ought to take a back seat and allow the common features of a supranational European identity to assert itself. Over the centuries, many nations were encumbered with countless faults, each of them was guilty of war, genocide, enslavement of the defenceless and looting of weaker neighbours. In the relaxed climate of the new Europe, however, past transgressions cancel each other out and any remaining incongruities will be eliminated adminstratively after careful discussion in Brussels. Once more a splendid future awaits us, but we must come to terms with the past and call things by their proper names before putting it all behind us like so much useless junk. Who wouldn't be ready to assist in the achievement of such a hopeful vision? Only a dyed-in-the-wool prophet of doom, perhaps. Ouredník does not adopt a categorical attitude. His Europeana can be seen as Euro-optimistic or Eurosceptical. The text provides plenty of instances where bestiality resulted from the pursuit of national aims, but also demonstrates the frightful outcome of messianic ideologies and the pursuit of radical change with the help of various universal panaceas. The narrator does not join the chorus of enthusiasts who sing the praises of Europe as a delightful maiden. So far he tends to see it as an old Beast that Beauty can be enthralled by, but need not be. The book's message is a warning: even if Europe looks good in its new outfit, caution is imperative.» - Viktor Slajchrt
«Europeana is not judgmental: events are often baffling (genocide, wars, ideologies, fads), but the narrator does not presume to say what is good or bad. Europeana is an account-book, collecting facts and information. Contradictory ideas - especially that of bettering humanity by killing lots of people - are a constant, but the narrator does not even bother to spell out the contradictions for the reader, opting instead merely to list, describe, and juxtapose. Any inferences are to be drawn by the reader (though some are made fairly obvious by the presentation).
The book is divided into sections of a page or two in length, each a riff on some aspect of the twentieth century, or some specific events. The World Wars, various religions and ideologies, and technological advances are among the subjects frequently returned to, but from a variety of sides. A typical section progresses like this one:
Some historians preferred the Second World War to the First and said that the First World War was a national and patriotic war, while the second was for the defense of civilization. And in the First World War people were fighting for narrow-minded concepts that were already outdated, while in the Second World War they were defending a humanist ideal. After the Second World War people did not become pacifists and instead tended to speculate about whether a Third World War would occur between the democratic and the Communist countries. And there were spies snooping around everywhere. And the ministries of information pondered on ways of assisting the final victory. And scientists invented new weapons and new poison gas and atom bombs and warheads and carriers and bombs with parachutes and electromagnetic perturbations and neutron radiation and macromolecular cytotoxicity. And new words and expressions were invented to describe the new scientific discoveries and inventions, as well as the new social phenomena and theories, THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY and BLACK HOLE and TELEVISION and YUGOSLAVIA and CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY and RADIO and MODEM and DADAISM and SOCIOGENETICS and POSTMODERNISM and GENOCIDE and BIOETHICS and EUGENICS and TRANSGENETISM and CUBISM and EXOBIOLOGY and NUCLEAR DISINTEGRTAION and INTRA-PERSONAL RELATIONS, etc.
The wondering narrator does occasionally peek through - the observation that: "After the Second World War people did not become pacifists", for example, is a clear if subtle rebuke - but s/he generally offers only the facts themselves. The only other device of note: the tired: "etc." that's frequently used to cut off what otherwise could be a catalogue of endless variations and possibilities.
Any summary-description is bound to give the impression that Europeana is a very odd work - and it is. It may sound like an awkward mix of fiction and non-fiction - and lacking the best or at least vital qualities of each (plot and character in fiction, a clear, orderly presentation of facts in non-fiction) - and a tiresome one at that, but it's absolutely compelling. Most of what is related is familiar material, but this presentation does allow -- or even demand - the facts be reconsidered and recalled; especially in the connexions that are made as events, ideas, and fads are rattled off one after another. Compressing the century into so little space is also a reminder that while all these facts and events can be dissected and analysed at great length, and an endless number of motives and reasons can be found for every- and anything, they can also be reduced (largely in their foolishness) to such simplicity. Ourednik's novel is dry, but not without humour, and it's delightfully subversive without revelling in the absurdities and contradictions that defined the century too obviously.» - The Complete Review
«There are times when Europeana sounds oddly like something a bright-but-confused student would write in a high school class about world history. There are other times when it sounds like Vonnegut, others when it sounds like David Markson, and still others when it sounds like the sort of thing someone might ramble after waking up from a nightmare. Except so often the nightmare is true. Except so often truth is just a portrayal, a nightmare of itself.
Patrik Ourednik was born in Prague but has lived in France since 1984. We should not be surprised, then, that the items he returns to repeatedly in Europeana involve Communists and Nazis, neither of whom he much likes. The narrative also swings back to World War I, because it was supposed to end all wars, and to ideas of eugenics and perfection, religion and belief, science and progress. For instance, this passage from the beginning:
Some historians subsequently said that the twentieth century actually started in 1914, when war broke out, because it was the first war in history in which so many countries took part, in which so many people died and in which airships and airplanes flew and bombarded the rear and towns and civilians, and submarines sunk ships and artillery could lob shells ten or twelve kilometers. And the Germans invented gas and the English invented tanks and scientists discovered isotopes and the general theory of relativity, according to which nothing was metaphysical, but relative. And when the Senegalese fusiliers first saw an airplane they thought it was a tame bird and one of the Sengalese soldiers cut a lump of flesh from a dead horse and threw it as far as he could in order to lure it away. And the soldiers wore green and camouflage uniforms because they did not want the enemy to see them, which was modern at the time because in previous wars soldiers had worn brightly-colored uniforms in order to be visible from afar. And airships and airplanes flew through the sky and the horses were terribly frightened. And writers and poets endeavored to find ways of expressing it best and in 1916. they invented Dadaism because everything seemed crazy to them. And in Russia they invented a revolution. And the soldiers wore around their neck or wrist a tag with their name and the number of their regiment to indicate who was who, and where to send a telegram of condolences, but if the explosion tore off their head or arm and the tag was lost, the military command would announce that they were unknown soliders, and in most capital cities they instituted an eternal flame lest they be forgotten, because fire preserves the memory of something long past. And the fallen French measured 2,681 kilometers, the fallen English, 1,547 kilometers, and the fallen Germans, 3,010 kilometers, taking the average length of a corpse as 172 meters.
The remarkable thing about the book is its structure: so much of the above gets returned to, but with new twists, different perspectives and details, so that the writing gains a kind of music through repetition and revision. Gerald Turner's translation is remarkable for finding an idiom to convey such wit and weirdness without letting it all sound stupid and pointless.
An excerpt from the book on the back cover says it is "from the novel" - it is interesting to think of Europeana as a novel, because it only fits the most open definition of that form. Yet it would be dangerous to call this nonfiction, because it is so vehemently subjective. There are no footnotes or source notes, no attempt at a systematic representation of history - no, this is history as it unfolds in a mind, facts and fancies cobbled together in a single consciousness, the echo of a century stuttered by an inner voice. I'm perfectly comfortable with the book as a novel, because the narrative voice conveyed a character to me. As I read, I kept imagining an old man sitting alone in a dusty little apartment full of books, an insomniac nattering on and on to himself like Hamm in Beckett's Endgame. History requires more than accumulation, it needs nuance and perspective, but what we each do to history in our minds and imaginations is the real subject of Europeana, and such a subject is, like the twentieth century, both terrifying and absurd.» - Matthew Cheney
«In an interview on the Dalkey Archive website, Ouředník observes that “when you sell more than a few thousand copies [of a book]—no matter how big the market is—it is probably due to a misunderstanding”. A book such as Europeana stands little chance of such misunderstanding, and we are the poorer for it, as this is a book which should appeal to – and surprise – almost anyone who goes near it.
The overall effect is hypnotic, dizzying, funny and disturbing.. The cool distance which the book offers, amid so much seductively expressed barbarity, means that after a while, the reader is moved to wonder by all this absurdity: Who are these crazy people? Oh. It’s us.» - John Self
«In an interview, Ouredník called Europeana a “stylistic exercise,” making explicit the allusion to Queneau’s Exercises in Style. But Europeana is an exercise of an entirely different sort. It is a hilarious book, disturbingly so, and perhaps more disturbing than funny. Ouredník’s Europe is a strange and nasty place, as is evident from the book’s very first sentences:
The Americans who fell at Normandy in 1944 were sturdy young men and they measured an average of 173 cm tall, and if they were laid one after another, with the soles of their feet to the crowns of their heads, together they would measure 38 kilometers. The Germans were also sturdy young men, and the sturdiest of all were the Senegalese riflemen in World War One. They measured 176 cm, and so they were sent into the front ranks to scare the Germans. It was said that in World War One people fell like seeds, and later the Russian Communists calculated how much fertilizer a kilometer of corpses would yield, and how much they could save on expensive foreign fertilizer if they used the corpses of traitors and criminals.
Just who is speaking here? The voice is third-person, impersonal, businesslike, but this is not the disembodied objectivity of an omniscient narrator or, for that matter, a history textbook. The narrator is more deadpan than neutral, too quirky and unstable to be truly informative. His childlike naïveté begins to seem cunning as he leaps from topic to topic:
In the twentieth century there was a turn away from traditional religion because when people realized that they descended from monkeys and could travel by train and make telephone calls and go down in a submarine, they began to turn away from religion and go less and less to church and they said that no lord god exists and that religion maintains the people in ignorance and darkness and that they were for positivism.
It is as if a professor of history has mounted the podium to deliver not the usual lecture in his survey course on Western civ, but a half-mad harangue, pseudoscientific and yet somehow commanding, in a voice both droning and captivating, with undertones of scorn and helpless-ness. In a recent interview Ouredník suggested that the century itself might be speaking.
The book’s first sentences hand us, in a nutshell, the themes and technique of the work. First of all, the syntax: Ouredník’s favored conjunctions are and and but, joining without ordering. He will string together his statistics, anecdotes, and interpretations, one after the other, like the dead soldiers lined up head to toe; there is no underlying structure or hierarchy of interpretations; there are no whiles, whereases, unlesses, or thuses. Chronology is no help; thus the sudden shift, in those first sentences, from one World War to another, and then to the Stalinist purges. There are becauses, but rather than structuring and explaining, they merely throw into relief the narrator’s (feigned?) naïveté:
Then people began to compare languages and contemplate who had the most advanced language and who was furthest along in the civilizing process. Generally they decided it was the French, because various interesting things were happening in France and the French knew how to converse and used subjunctives and pluperfect conditionals and smiled seductively at women and their women danced the can-can and their painters invented impressionism.
It is almost as if the twentieth century were such a rhetorical exercise (“write a discourse using no subordinating conjunctions”), sucked up into its own breathless, thoughtless syntax, bordering on moral idiocy—an inability to distinguish high from low, important from trivial, and horrific from silly.
Nevertheless, if there is no hierarchy here, there is some organization, or at least some obsessions that run through the text like a red thread. One is the reduction of history to statistics. Numbers reflect the reign of science (the Big Bertha has a range of 128 kilometers, the V2 missile reaches speeds of 5,800 kilometers per hour) and pseudospirituality (the Age of Aquarius will last 2,160 years, 144,000 chosen Jehovah’s Witnesses will rule the earth from the heavens). The numbers of tortured, deported, and murdered embody not the calculability, but rather the incomprehensibility of genocide. And numbers accompany the division of people into the superior and the inferior: the eugenicists
said that an eighty-three-year-old alcoholic woman will have 894 descendants altogether, of which sixty-seven will be criminal recidivists, seven murderers, 181 prostitutes, 142 beggars and forty insane, altogether 437 asocial elements. And they calculated that those 437 asocial elements would cost society as much as the construction of 140 apartment buildings.
147 Asocial elements: as much as numbers, Europeana takes aim at words, the jargon and self-justifying phrases that power uses to disguise its own barbarity:
And in 1934 [in Russia] they thought up reservations for Jews and called all the Soviet Jews to move there. The reservations were on the border with China in the Chabarovka region and in winter the temperature fell to -40 degrees, and the Communists said that it was not a reservation but an autonomous region.
It is these stereotypes of power, above all, that the glosses in the margins reflect and repeat, like a yammering chorus on the sidelines, echoing the phrases of the age: from “dictatorship of the proletariat” and “bourgeois decay” to “interpersonal relationships” and “Peace will rule the world.” Official language is a target familiar from Ouredník’s earlier works, but there is less faith here in the resilience and inventiveness of popular language—notice how the “wooden language” of the communists inexorably filters down into everyday speech: “Gradually people learned to use it to talk about everything, the weather, vacation, television shows, or the fact that their wives had started drinking. . . .”
In fact, reading Europeana closely, we realize that it is less a book of history than a book of how people talk about history. There are fewer events than opinions, reports, hypotheses, interpretations: “The Germans said the French ate frogs and the Russians little children, and the French said the Germans ate little children and tripe,” “and British women on posters said WOMEN OF BRITAIN SAY—GO!,” and fascists said, and communists said, and Scientologists said, and Catholics said, and Jews said, and anthropologists said, and psycho-analysts said, and historians said, and people said... These endless reports emphasize the rhetorical nature of all our constructions of history and memory—and above all remind us how many times we’ve gotten it wrong, how many errors we have earnestly propagated, how many insanities we have persuaded ourselves were reasonable and necessary.
Against this endless chorus of deluded voices there stand out a few anecdotes, brief stories that do not “say” but rather form an eloquent commentary, outside language, on the chaotic events surrounding them: the young Jewish girl playing an aria from The Merry Widow in Dachau; the prisoner who has just returned from a concentration camp, dancing with the woman who has been scorned for sleeping with Nazi officers, leaning their shaven heads on each other; the World War One soldier trapped in the mud, who resembles no one so much as the friend growing in the field, but with a difference:
Near Courtai, a Belgian soldier got stuck in the mud up to his knees and four of his friends couldn’t pull him out and all the horses were already dead. And when they retreated along the same path two days later, the soldier was still alive, but only his head was sticking out and he wasn’t yelling anymore.
The human word is the most beautiful of gifts, indeed. To my mind, these anecdotes are the most powerful moments in the book, standing apart from the current of deceptive speech, a bit like the shells on the seashore when the tide of memory has ebbed. They are some of the few times when the narrator’s pitiless irony falters, if only for a moment.
What is compelling about Europeana is the way in which it mixes the light irony of the stylistic exercise with the effort to get beneath rhetoric, to approach what may be spoken about but always remains unspoken. Ouredník, lexicographer and rhetorician, helps us see language’s possibilities (for good or ill) by exploring its outer reaches. When the Czech literary magazine Host recently asked a number of critics and authors whether the function of literature had changed since 1989, Ouredník portrayed literature as a self-contained system, a kind of language game for those who happen to be interested in it—perhaps like chess, or, to use his own analogies: Literature, Masonry, and stampcollecting have at least one thing in common: they enable the initiated to communicate in a pre-arranged system of references and unspoken-nesses. Which is very pleasant and delightful, but doesn’t testify to anything further.? Which may be true, but it doesn’t testify to the skill with which Ouredník has enriched our field of references and our sense of what’s unspeakable.» - Jonathan Bolton
More excerpts:
«The first law on the sterilization of defective and asocial elements was enacted in 1907 in the United States. The law permitted the sterilization of hardened criminals and the mentally ill and in 1914, at the urging of psychiatrists, it was extended to recidivist robbers and alcoholics and in 1923, in Missouri, it was extended to chicken thieves of Negro and Indian origin, because in the case of chicken thieves of white origin, the opinion was that they could still find a way back and reintegrate themselves into the life of society through hard and conscientious work.»
«Historians concluded that in the twentieth century about sixty genocides had occurred in the world, but not all of them entered historical memory. Historians said that historical memory was not part of history and memory was shifted from the historical to the psychological sphere, and this instituted a new mode of memory whereby it was no longer a question of memory of events but memory of memory.»
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