Genese Grill, Portals: Reflections on the Spirit in
Matter, 2022
https://genesegrill.wixsite.com/website
We live in a world that abounds with all manner of material things. Unfortunately, while the most lovingly crafted objects are still esteemed and cherished - the original canvas, the handbound volume - materiality has often been disparaged because of its association with less lovely things, and an anti-sensual suspicion of the physical has elevated the value of the spiritual. But what if the distinction between materiality and spirituality were not so absolute? Could we look anew at the world around us and find it opening onto infinite others?
In her mind-bending essay collection Portals, Genese Grill asks us to reappraise our habits of apprehending material and spiritual experiences. Blending the arch with the esoteric, the wicked with the arcane, she shows us how everything available to our senses can be a spur towards another way of being: a stimulus for sensation, contemplation, reverie. The result is an experience of reading that itself feels like a plunge into a portal - deepening into a whirl of provocations and ecstasies, headlong into a flurry of pages that will stir your soul.
GENESE GRILL IS a true renaissance woman. A scholar of Germanic literature (and a student of Burton Pike’s), with a special focus on Robert Musil, she’s written a critical book, The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, whose cover carries one of her drawings. She is also the translator of two books from Musil’s oeuvre: Thought Flights (short prose pieces) and Unions (two novellas), with a third forthcoming in November, Theater Symptoms (including translations of his plays, fragments, and theatrical criticism), all published by Brooklyn-based Contra Mundum Press, who specializes in publishing Modernist writers. In addition, she has penned many wonderfully fecund essays on art and literature that she is currently gathering into a collection exploring the tension between Spirit and Matter. Grill’s world is the word, and her explorations of Musil, literature, and art and its limitless possibilities keep impelling her on. We recently emailed about many of these topics, including her construction of a room-sized accordion book while investigating the history of books for one of her essays.
GREG GERKE: You once wrote that you’d dedicated your life to Robert Musil. You’ve written your dissertation on him, translated two books of his writings, and are working on a third. Why Musil? How did this magnetism between his work and yourself come about? In your book The World as Metaphor, you talk about his “fascination with the mystical idea of the criminal act as a portal to new spiritual experiences,” something detailed in The Man Without Qualities, but already apparent in the two early novellas comprising Unions, “where acts that are normally considered abhorrent or anti-social are seen as possibly beneficial.” How does this idea play into your relation to Musil’s aesthetic possibilities?
GENESE GRILL: I remember first hearing Musil, in translation, at a reading given by Burton Pike at CUNY Graduate Center. It was the passage from The Man Without Qualities where Clarisse and Walter are playing the piano, their duet compared to the violent rush of two competing locomotives! In just a few sentences, the words had transported me from the concrete to the cosmic and back again, opening up multiple worlds and illuminating subtleties and contradictions in brilliant, rhythmically astounding prose. I went to the original German and began reading. At first, I was confused. It was like nothing else I had ever read. But in no time, Musil had gotten inside me, to the extent that all the questions his characters were asking seemed to be the very questions vital to my own existence. Here were characters who were not only searching for answers to the modern predicament of how to live ethically in a world of uncertain moorings and morals, but who were not satisfied with simplistic solutions that left out the aesthetic dimension of dynamics and chiaroscuro, the human need for a tension between what is given (status quo) and what might be (possibility) — a duality that Musil also configured as that between repeatability and crime.
As I continued to read, I followed these questions to an essential crux, and concluded that Musil — like his mentors Nietzsche and Emerson — envisioned the ethical-aesthetic universe as a field of fruitful tension between natural, recurring realities and the human being’s creative collaboration and agency in co-creating new realities. Aesthetic possibilities, then, are ethical opportunities to see anew what is already given in reality, and to bring these new visions into focus. Insofar as new seeing leads to new ways of being in the world, and new action, art can be seen as a sort of crime against the status quo. Art as ethical — quasi-criminal — co-creation of the ever-changing world.
This task became more and more important to me, both for my writing about Musil and my own writing, as I strained against those postmodern nihilisms that denied the possibility of shared meaning and denounced the Enlightenment belief in what is sometimes ridiculed as “aesthetic redemption.” Musil, despite all his skepticism and sophistication about society and culture, believed strongly in the important social role of art and education. Instead of just smashing the idols and questioning old values, Musil and Nietzsche were committed to salvaging some older pre-Christian values and also experimenting with the creation of new ones.
Burton Pike influenced my thinking here, as well, by clarifying the Modernist project, not as a wholesale rejection of meaning, but a much subtler attempt to find formal strategies (metaphor, fragmentation, syntactical experiments) to approach the new consciousnesses of relativity, subconscious processes, psychology, and perspectivism. Meaning(s) and truth(s), while much more complex than had formerly been conceived, were still worth scrambling for. One was called upon to approximate, approach, and attempt, as aesthetic-ethical imperative. In my own essayistic work, this developed into a study of the ways in which the material world is and is not created or changed by the spiritual processes of thought, imagination, or constructs. I maintain that our most life-affirming approach to existence is one which honors the reality of the material world — beauty, gravity, death, change — and empowers what Nietzsche called “creative subjects” — i.e., all human beings — to be agents of necessary reality-renewal.
In the introduction to Unions, you write, “A translator must work especially hard […] to resist unjustified guessing at meanings, over-articulation of vagueness, or the addition of explanatory words where the author has intentionally left the meaning vague; to resist smoothing out or ameliorating recurring ticks and oddities.” Along with this, what is your process of translation? Do you go sentence by sentence or might something that comes through later affect how you will see a previous section, image, or word?
Burton Pike was my professor at CUNY Graduate Center and also my Doktorvater for my Musil dissertation. He taught me how to think about literature, both within cultural contexts and by reading closely and analytically. One of his courses on literary criticism was conducted via translation. We were asked to translate a few short texts every week and then to parse and explicate their syntax, the kinds of images used, their tempo, and other particularities, and to comment on how these details did or did not correspond to the movements with which these works might be associated. This extremely close reading seemed for me the greatest training in translation possible.
As to my current process of translation, it is important to my work that I know Musil’s work as a whole intimately, so that I can hypothesize about where he might be going in times of ambiguity. But that also means that I sense when it might be important to leave something open or suggestive, rather than making the classic translator mistake of polishing or completing what was not meant to be explicit. Because Musil was obsessed with the difference between dead and living words, it is most important to avoid rendering his very fresh language and very unexpected ideas into old pigeon-holed phraseology or style. Thus, while there is word-by-word work, the rendering of each word is informed by my own reading of the vast oeuvre and, whenever possible, by Musil’s expressed intentions for the particular work. Last but not least, I also learned from Burton Pike to think about rhythm, that particular tempo and melody of a Musil sentence, trippingly light and elegant on the surface, but often carrying a very potent explosive in its vest pocket.
In your other Musil translation, Thought Flights, a collection of smaller fiction and nonfiction fragments, you write in the introduction how “Musil and many of his contemporaries wrote brief, often light, discursive, observational pieces for newspapers and journals,” mixing many modes into them. Reviewing an author who has enjoyed such a renaissance in our time, Robert Walser, Musil writes that his pieces are written, “with much softness, dreaminess, freedom, and the moral richness of one of those seemingly unprofitable, lazy days.” Yet, Musil’s pieces are nothing like this — they are much more pungent, diving into their subject matter, grabbing attention like a boxer’s first quick jab. Your own prose pieces are more long-form essays; explications of art and self — how we see the world and how we use language and written in an ornate, Teutonic manner:
All of us, men and women, are constantly in conflict with the undifferentiated mass of everything-ness, and all of us, sons and daughters, are caught in an ongoing process of individuation away from our mothers (and fathers), learning from and also rejecting parts of what we are given, accepting or changing nature and culture, but always acknowledging all parts of the past as our complex beloved and hated heritage.
Assuming you wrote them contemporaneously with these translations, do you feel Musil’s style, which includes sentences that, as you write, “complexify along the way [...] [a]nd in so doing, they teach us how to think,” has transformed your own, which I view as more of a throwback to the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially Emerson and Thoreau, and little of the (no less superb) pivots of Walser, which gel with the more ellipsis-style more of our moment?
I think that anyone who is struggling with complicated ideas is challenged to articulate those ideas in sentences that are intelligible, without sacrificing their inherent complexities. Musil is a master of the elegant yet complex sentence — a feat of verbal legerdemain that one attempts to imitate at some peril. I can only aspire, helplessly, to such grace. Yet, yes, certainly, I was drawn to Musil because I myself also have some innate need to vivisect and parse, a “certain inclination toward the negative” — as Musil writes of his Ulrich — “a flexible dialectic of feeling that easily leads him to discover a flaw in something widely approved or, conversely, to defend the forbidden.” Musil enacts this analysis on the sentence level, educating the reader, phrase by phrase, in the complexities of any given idea. And, whether consciously or innately, I tend to do the same.
There is, however, also an aesthetic element. Those of us who marvel at complexity and are unsatisfied with one-sided pronouncements may revel in the sheer spectacle of even unintelligible displays of brilliant-seeming mappings of ideas, allusions, digressions. Pictures of such complexity, whether decipherable or not, do say something about an artist’s vision of the world. They warn us, or celebrate the fact, of complexity itself. Nevertheless, I do strive, with more or less success, for clarity, and do not approve of writers who aim to obfuscate for the sake of seeming profound. When I was in graduate school, Burton Pike wrote this on the margin of one of my papers: “A paragraph utterly devoid of meaning.” I was duly and memorably scolded.
As to Emerson and Thoreau, yes, they are important influences in my essay writing. Musil, of course, esteemed Emerson, and seems to have read some Thoreau. I also include Walter Pater and Yeats as my inspirations, writers who complexified and digressed in their own sumptuously ornate, nonlinear ways. While I delight in the light touch of Walser, I am afraid I have a hard time keeping my mind trained on small discrete subjects or momentary haiku-like glimpses. I am always making connections and also divisions, and I am always tempted to include everything in every piece. Form and content, as for Musil, are one here. The fact that the world is made up of so many interconnected, yet invariably divaricating and distinct singularities, that no one thing can be understood without seeing it in relation to all other things — moving and changing even as we observers move and change our perspectives — is itself at the heart of the delightful and frightful matter. - Grg Gerke
read more here:
Genese Grill, The World as Metaphor in Robert
Musil's The Man without Qualities: Possibility
as Reality, Camden House, 2022
Robert Musil, known to be a scientific and philosophical thinker, was committed to aesthetics as a process of experimental creation of an ever-shifting reality. Musil wanted, above all, to be a creative writer, and he obsessively engaged in almost endless deferral via variations and metaphoric possibilities in his novel project, The Man without Qualities. This lifelong process of writing is embodied in the unfinished novel by a recurring metaphor of self-generating de-centered circle worlds. The present study analyzes this structure with reference to Musil's concepts of the utopia of the Other Condition, Living and Dead Words, Specific and Non-Specific Emotions, Word Magic, and the Still Life. In contrast to most recent studies of Musil, it concludes that the extratemporal metaphoric experience of the Other Condition does not fail, but rather constitutes the formal and ethical core of Musil's novel. The first study to utilize the Klagenfurter Ausgabe (Klagenfurt edition) of Musil's literary remains (a searchable annotated text), The World as Metaphor offers a close reading of variations and text genesis, shedding light not only on Musil's novel, but also on larger questions about the modernist artist's role and responsibility in consciously re-creating the world.
Grill's meticulously researched study offers a persuasive and original interpretation of [Musil's] novel. . . . [T]his book is highly recommended for a deeper understanding of Musil's brilliant and still relevant modernist work. - JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN STUDIES
Grill's book is a careful meditation on the poetics of metaphor that she finds organizing Musil's novel. Grill has mined the Nachlaß to good effect, making available important material and new considerations of the novel. - GERMAN QUARTERLY
[A] worthy contribution to international Musil research. Grill obtains with it the rare status of a researcher who at one and the same time explains a thesis and carries it out in her own writing. For her painstaking work in the archive the study earns the particular praise and interest of those who want to concern themselves more deeply with the canonical works of modernism such as The Man without Qualities. - MUSIL-FORUM
[P]rovides an invaluable structure - the best I've encountered - for assessing the later sections and unfinished draft material of The Man Without Qualities. . . . Grill's major achievement is in bringing together the disparate, unpublished material of Musil's last years into a structure that clarifies, at least somewhat, Musil's ambitions. . . . For illuminating the join between the earlier and latter sections of [Musil's novel] in a way that gives real shape to the whole, Grill's book is tremendous. - DAVID AUERBACH, WAGGISH.ORG
[I]nspired and textually knowledgeable . . . . [A] spirited and enthusiastic defence of the creative literary act as a kind of utopian 'révolution permanente' . . . forever avoiding closure . . . . The reader is led through a rich textual landscape, from quotation to quotation (including material from the Klagenfurt electronic edition . . .), but the overall impression thus generated is of a self-referential and secular artistic universe that is loaded with theological expectations - something that would surely have made Musil smile. - MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW
How do you see the relationship between style, form, plot and storytelling – and how would you rate their importance for you, respectively?
My essays do sometimes involve storytelling and plot, I suppose, and certainly style and form are extremely important to my writing. The ideas sometimes (often) threaten to make an essay unreadable, but the whole point is to form-ulate them in such a way as to make them intelligible, memorable, felt, at least temporarily held in the vessel of the essay.
That tentative arrangement is a station for pause, for a certain peace; it is a formal respite from the jangling and jagged edges of confusion and chaos. And such a respite is best created through the artful arrangement of elements: the rhythm of words, the dynamic of short and long sentences, lyrical and analytical, narrative and abstract parts, by shifting between personal and “objective,” between experience and research.
Sometimes I am very aware of the way that rhetorical devices can make something seem more true than it may actually be; but I mostly believe that I am using the emotive forces of style and poetry in the interest of truth(s)!
Observation and research are often quoted as important elements of the writing process. Can you tell us a bit about your perspective on them?
As mentioned above, I do an enormous amount of research before beginning a piece. I read much more than I write. And I take copious notes. I look for details that will illustrate or challenge what I intuited when I started exploring some question. I look for complexifications and relationships between ideas. I look, in a sense, for a certain number of analogous situations or fields of study or images that illuminate the knot or problem at the heart of whatever it is I am exploring. I weave the book-research in with life-research, with observation and personal experience.
When I am working on an essay, I carry the questions around with me for months and months (sometimes years), and everything I read, see, hear, observe becomes material for the essay.
Read more here:
https://15questions.net/interview/fifteen-questions-literature-interview-genese-grill/page-1/
Genese Gril, Almandal Grimoire: The Book as
Magical Object, Lulu.com, 2018
Almandal Grimoire is an essay about the history of books as magical objects and contemporary discourse on virtuality and materiality. The essay has been inscribed and illuminated into a room-sized accordion book in egg tempera and images from this Book Portal are included in this book. Both the essay and the Book Portal are incitements towards making ideas real. In multi-colored type with full-color images.
Almandal Grimoire: The Book as Magical Object
MATTER and MAGIC is a show about books, their making, and the spirit behind them. Genese Grill's painted work "Almandal Grimoire: The Book as Magical Object" is a large-scale set of written and drawn on wood panels, while Diane Gayer's "Of Earth and Being" is a book of photographs at the intersection of man and nature and was printed on the Heidelberg Press at Villanti Printers, Milton, VT. While very different in production and finished entity, both books speak to the magical realms of existence. (scroll for more photos below).
https://www.therupturemag.com/rupture/almandal-grimoire-the-book-as-magical-object
From Genese Grill:
About six years ago I had the idea that I wanted to make a gigantic book that one could walk into, a portal, perhaps with doors inside doors, opening up to rooms beyond rooms, with passageways that one only discovered when reading one or another passage. It would be inscribed with an essay I had written on the history of books as magical objects and the current discourse about their virtuality and materiality (published in The Georgia Review)—an essay that was the first I would write over the next five years in a collection of others on the tension between spirit and matter (now finished). I thought and thought: how could I build such a thing; perhaps it would be better just to write about it; certainly it would be easier and reading a book is sort of like walking through the kind of portal I imagined anyway. But I felt compelled to make this giant book, to push up against the weight of matter and feel its challenges. I had made many smaller books before, but never had I built anything large enough to have to wonder about whether it might stand up or fall down. At first I tried papier-mâché, but the mice in my studio began to nibble away at it. Then I opted for paper on wooden panels, with cloth and wooden hinges: an accordion book. I dispensed with the doors within doors and hallways and tunnels, and settled for ten boards (eight feet by four feet), cut on their tops like onion domes, inscribed with my essay, illuminated with images inspired by the history of manuscript illumination. It was really unclear how long it would take to write the essay that was printed in The Georgia Review long before the book portal was finished, and to illuminate it all with images. I used tempera pigments, ground into egg yolk, and coated each piece of paper on both sides with hot rabbit-skin glue (an awkward and difficult process involving smoothing wrinkles and wet corners of giant pieces of paper falling down upon me while I smoothed other corners down). I lovingly painted each letter and often went over each one again, painting around them and then having to repaint them again . . . getting lost in the intricacies of my own entanglements, imagining myself a medieval monk, caught in a loop of timelessness. Madness. But the inconvenience, the trouble, the time spent, and the complications were the point. It would be difficult to transport too. Heavy and awkward. Maybe it would take all my life. And it could have. But I chose to finish it this summer for a show in North Hero, Vermont, at the GreenTARA Space. The Almandal Grimoire Book Portal is rife with imperfections—to make it perfect would have taken decades, and there are other things I want to do with my life—and there are parts that are already beginning to show wear and tear, the traces of time. But were it ideal, it would not be real. And that is the beauty and tragedy of matter.
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