Jean-Luc Champerret - collection of the oldest poetry yet discovered, as written down or runed in the Ice Age in Lascaux and other caves in the Dordogne, and now translated—tentatively—into English (but the author and his poems are inventions)

 

Jean-Luc Champerret, The Lascaux Notebooks,

Trans. by Philip Terry, Carcanet, 2022

read it at Google Books

This newest Carcanet Classic collects the oldest poetry yet discovered, as written down or runed in the Ice Age in Lascaux and other caves in the Dordogne, and now translated—tentatively—into English for the first time. The translation is at two removes, from French versions by the mysterious linguistic genius Jean-Luc Champerret, and then from the striking originals that retain such a sense of early human presence. Philip Terry mediates between the French and those hitherto inscrutable originals. Jean-Luc Champerret's unique contribution to world literature is in his interpretation of the cave signs. And Philip Terry's contribution is to have discovered and rendered this seminal, hitherto unsuspected work into English. The translated poems are experiments, as the drawings may have been to the original cave poets composing them as image and sound. While archaeologists maintain that these signs are uninterpretable, Champerret assigns them meanings by analogy, then—in an inspired act of creative reading—inserts them into the frequent 3 x 3 grids to be found at Lascaux. The results—revelation of Ice-Age poetry—are startling.

Lascaux, a placename standing for the abyssal revelation of the cave paintings discovered there after millennia in darkness, and Notebooks, suggesting a private endeavour, preparation, a work to come. While neither is secret as such, neither was meant for the light. Two intrigues then for the price of one.

Of the notebooks, Philip Terry explains that he was offered a dusty crate found in a chateau under renovation that contained the disintegrating papers of an obscure French poet who had scouted the Lascaux caves as a possible hideout for his wartime Resistance cell in which he worked as a codebreaker (a cell that included “a tall wiry Irishman”). The poems found among the papers are Terry's translations from the French of Champerret's translation into contemporary poetic forms of the signs and symbols painted or carved alongside the famous paintings of animals.

According to The First Signs by the paleoarchaeologist Genevieve von Petzinger, there has been little attention given to the meaning and significance of the signs and, while she doesn't offer a translation herself, she does say they could be humanity's first writing system. This gives retrospective mitigation to Champerret and he uses the freedom to gradually augment their spartan form to create the atmospherics of a domestic Ice Age scene. There are numerous others: descriptions of mountainous landscapes, the killing and butchery of prey, burial rituals, and ceremonies performed by shaman. As the poems follow the seventy signs listed in the back of the collection, the vocabulary is limited and over 380 pages this can be a monotonous read, enlivened by occasional use of prose and the patterning Mallarmé used in Un coup de dés. Even so, in the movement of each poem we sense from a state of deathless being in the world to one of displacement and distance – storytelling – stimulating in the reader an awareness of the profoundest moment in human evolution, which one cannot say of most other books of poetry.

"Movement" and "evolution" may be deceptive words here because everything changed as the first sign was simultaneously carved and read. A space opened in that instant, differing from the animal paintings because they are recognisable as representations of animals, whereas what the signs represent retreats behind their appearance, opening a beyond to their purely communicative value. Yes, the scholars say that the signs must have meant something to those who created them except, in such an act, a world apart was exposed. This is the great secret of the signs; an open secret which nevertheless remains.

What is also an open secret is that there was no Jean-Luc Champerret, no crate of papers, no poems in French. It’s curious then that of the four reviews of that I’ve found of The Lascaux Notebooks only one of them is aware that the author and his poems are inventions. Despite this, two reviewers take on face value Terry’s origin story, which one might think too literary to be true, with the hint of Champerret's connection to Beckett removing the benefit of the doubt. Of course, one cannot expect a reviewer to know an author's previous publications but one might hope they would look up Terry's name and discover that he edited The Penguin Book of Oulipo as well as works by the most renowned Oulipean of all, if not also notice that the blurb for his 2021 novel Bone announces that it was written without “letters with descenders (g, j, p, q, y)”. This prison narrative is in the spirit of the linguistic exercises by which the uninvented Dr Edith Bone maintained her sanity while solitary confinement for seven years; a literary embodiment of the prison-house of language and the unexpected spaces confinement might open, marvellously independent of authorial intention, all of which may have led reviewers to hear the echo of “Sham Perec” in Jean-Luc’s surname. [Update: I now understand one of the reviews didn't mention it in order not to spoil the effect.]

Missing this is perhaps an insignificant detail, a mere point of order, as is the fact that the story of the discovery of the Lascaux cave is itself an invention. Melvyn Bragg's introduction to the recent BBC's In Our Time episode on cave art repeats it and goes uncorrected by his expert guests. In a lecture in 1955, Georges Bataille tells his audience that the story of a dog called Robot falling down a hole and whose rescue led to the discovery was either made up by a journalist or local gossip and that the true story is that a storm uprooted a pine tree and a woman decided to put her dead donkey in the hole that had opened up, telling a local boy she thought it may be the entrance to a tunnel rumoured to lead to a château. Later, the boy and a couple of wartime refugees decided to explore the hole when some other refugees they had arranged to meet in order to give them "a good thrashing" failed to appear.

As I wrote, perhaps insignificant. But at the end of the In Our Time episode, one expert says there is still lots of learn about cave art and while "we're still in the dark to some extent" recent developments in radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology should help to illuminate what's left to learn. For the ancient people, descent into the Stygian darkness of the caves is where they discovered, invented, themselves, and us. Philip Terry's transformation of the signs into poetry and dissimulating its origin may in turn be the proper means to turn our eyes towards that darkness. As Bataille writes elsewhere in a book of poetry and in opposition to poetry:

Poetry was simply a detour: through it I escaped the world of discourse, which had become the natural world for me; with poetry I entered a kind of grave where the infinity of the possible was born from the death of the logical world.

As it is, we're still in the light. - Stephen Mitchelmore

http://this-space.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-lascaux-notebooks-by-jean-luc.html

Although The Lascaux Notebooks is the twenty-first book published by Belfast-born poet and translator Philip Terry, he is a shadowy figure as far as American readers are concerned. He may be best known in the U.S. as the anthologizer of The Penguin Book of Oulipo (2019) or the translator of Georges Perec’s I Remember (Godine, 2014). His own poetry projects have involved virtuosic reformulations of the European canon, among them, Ovid Metamorphosed, 2009; Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 2010; Tapestry, 2013 (the Norman invasion as described by the Bayeaux creators); Dante’s Inferno, 2014 (with Ted Berrigan taking the role of Virgil); and Dictator, 2018 (Terry’s revisiting of Gilgamesh). Besides his translations of Perec and Raymond Queneau, Terry has also produced original poetic works employing their methodologies (Oulipoems 1, 2007 and Oulipoems 2, 2009), most remarkably and successfully in Quennets (2016).

With his latest offering, The Lascaux Notebooks, Terry takes an even more ambitious step backward into the literary gloaming. The book’s premise is the discovery of the notebooks of the French “linguistic genius” Jean-Luc Champerret, author of the forgotten Chants de la Dordogne (1941). Champerret is presented as a mysterious individual who broke the code of signs found on the Dordogne’s most famous prehistoric cave walls. (That he was also a member of the Resistance during WWII ostensibly explains his deciphering facility.) Champerret’s French “translations” of these discovered Upper Paleolithic symbols have been rendered by Terry into English. Terry’s fascinating introduction reads like fiction, which it almost certainly is.

I say “almost,” as Carcanet, the book’s publisher, is presenting the volume with a perfectly straight face. Part of Terry’s introduction was published in the London Review of Books in January without qualification. The online launch on May 18 involved Terry reading from the book, along with an introduction and question-and-answer with the distinguished Marina Warner. Only at times did Warner seem to have trouble keeping her giggles stifled. There is also a truly brilliant faux documentary “preview” for the book in French (both recordings are available on YouTube). Terry’s performance has been so good, I myself sometimes wondered whether I might be wrong about his project’s complete lack of authenticity.

For me, the first textual clue that this might all be an Oulipean-inspired creation had to do with my familiarity with Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, published in 1975, where from his cafe table Perec describes in exact detail the comings and goings on the Place Saint-Sulpice, particularly those of Bus 84 which ends at Porte de Champerret. The train line that begins at Porte de Champerret now ends at the Metro stop Bobigny-Pantin-Raymond Queneau. This dual coincidence of Perec/Queneau with the name of Terry’s French hero seemed to me unlikely to be an accident.

I also found it suspicious that there are no actual photographs of Champerret’s notebooks, “for conservation reasons,” only charcoal renderings by Lou Terry (presumably Phillip’s relative or spouse). Clearly, Terry did his research on prehistoric sites. But though Terry thanks Pierre LeBlanc at the Pôle d’Interprétation de la Préhistoire at Les Eyzies (an extensive research facility on France’s prehistoric caves), there is no mention of him or Champerret through the website’s search engine, despite Terry’s assertion that that is where the Champerret materials are currently stored. Terry also makes reference to an article in the “Proceedings of the Oxford Prehistorical Society,” a publication, as well as an organization, that doesn’t seem to exist.

Finally, any new discovery that adds a chapter to the nation’s cultural patrimony would not have gone unnoticed and uncelebrated by France’s cultural bureaus. That someone from the UK provided first publication of France’s earliest work of literature would certainly cause alarm and extensive discussion in French academic and intellectual circles. There had been none that I, at least, had been able to find through online searches. Terry does note (and it feels an awful lot like track-covering) “that there are discrepancies between Champerret’s signs and those at Lascaux today is beyond question.” A long and rather dubious explanation follows, concluding with this philosophical sleight-of-hand: “Many have testified that what we see when in a cave, and what we see in a photograph, are ontologically different.”

My mounting suspicions, however, have only served to increase my delight in Terry’s wonderful book. (And, in fact, he himself “came clean” about the book in a July 6 piece for The Irish Times.)

The fun begins with Terry’s preface which, in diabolically Nabokovian manner, tells us considerably more than we need to know about the circumstances of his discovery. He unnecessarily explains why it took him so long to translate and publish his Champerret findings. A footnote on the book’s second page provides the text of a satirical lyric Terry composed about the vice-chancellor of his university (modeled on Mandelstam’s poem to Stalin) which forced Professor Terry to “lie low” for a few years: “The broad-breasted boss from the north / savours each early retirement like an exquisite sweet.” (If this stab at academic politics doesn’t sound funny to you, then The Lascaux Notebooks isn’t your kind of book.)

The box of Lascaux materials were given to Terry some years before, so he relates, by an architect friend who was renovating a chateau in Southwest France in which Champerret had once resided. There follows the story of Terry’s rediscovery of the yet-unopened box in a dusty corner of his garage. “This time, I opened it — partly out of curiosity, partly to determine whether or not I should throw it in the skip that was taking up the drive.” Among the assortment of colored boxes, notebooks and papers were drawings on postcards, “a little like some of the graphic work of Henri Michaux.” Other visual poems, proposes Terry, recall the work of Apollinaire and Mallarmé.

His interest piqued by the discoveries, Terry then meets up with an elderly French maid who years before had worked at the chateau. He asks her for biographical details about the almost-forgotten figure. When the Lascaux caves were discovered in 1940, it is explained, Champerret of the French Underground went (literally) underground to survey a possible hideout for his anti-Nazi cell. Two years later the chateau was raided by the Gestapo, and Champerret disappeared, never to be heard of again. It was during these clandestine wartime visits, before archaeologists arrived, that Lascaux’s Ice Age poems were first discovered. “During his long, lonely, nervous nights at the chateau,” Terry proposes, “Champerret must have ruminated on what he had seen in the cave, bringing his skills as a code-breaker to bear on the ancient drawings and signs.” (A pseudo-glossary of some of these is provided as an appendix.)

Terry’s elaborate introduction is only the beginning of his ambitious project. Ahead of the 350 pages of translated poems, Terry describes Champerret’s process, setting them out as occurring in five distinct stages. The method involves first identifying each sign’s meaning, then placing each ideogrammic “word” into a heraldic 3×3 grid also found in the caves. A third step produces stanzas of three lines each in Terry’s English. With the next set of versions/revisions, each of the triplet’s successive syllabic lines grows longer. And then in its fifth and “final” verse rendering, there is poetic elaboration or “embellishment,” as well as Dantean terza rima indentation. Terry, significantly, does not provide any examples of Champerret’s original, though the chapters are identified by French nomenclature, such as “Boîte Noire,” “Carnet Bleu,” and “Feuilles Détachées.”

All this sounds, at least for a while, vaguely plausible. In his translation of Champerret’s stages three, four and five (as in this example given in his introduction), the reader is presented with

The eye

of the bison

is the sun

which becomes

The eye

of the bison

is like the bright sun

and ends up as

The white eye

     of the black bison

          is like a star at night

But by poem three of the first notebook/section (beginning with nine identical signs of stacked circumflexes: ^^^ / ^^^ / ^^^ ), chuckling takes over. In this poem, each teepee-shaped sign is “translated” either as bison, mountains, huts, or crossing, all leading to

A herd of bison

     came down from the mountains

          leaping and dancing over the crossing

As the book proceeds, inclusion of the all the variants (some now with Champerret experimenting with other grid structures and procedures) is mercifully abandoned, leaving the narrative more readable and swift-moving. Possible line breaks are now sometimes only marked by vertical lines. By page 121, we come to true narrative prose, a sixth stage of Terry’s “translations,” four pages describing the aftermath of a devastating wildfire. The interlude comes at a welcome moment, for it requires a certain determination to work one’s way through several hundred pages of repeated images. The effort is worth it, however, as it reveals gems such as this set of descending similes:

The winking black eye

     of the cave’s dark [entrance]

          is like the eye of a needle of bone

the impenetrable dark

     of the cave’s black heart

           is like a night with no moon

the hidden place

     where the cave divides

           is like the branching of the stag’s antler

Through it all, this poet remains a serious prankster. And Terry’s made-up verses can be extremely amusing. One suggests that truffle hunting in Périgord is an activity reaching back many millennia, a proposal not unlikely to be historically accurate. When we get to the eye-winking “Too many men beside the cooking pot and the fish will burn,” or when the ideogrammic “birdhandhand / birdbushbush” becomes “A bird in the hands is like two in the bushes,” the pull on a reader’s leg becomes undeniable. Declaring dead-pan in a footnote that “the consonance between Paleolithic parietal art and the art of modernism is beyond doubt,” he defends the use of collage technique in his and Champerret’s poems. Some of the more farcical poems display familiarity with the modernist canon:

To say I have eaten

    the fruit that

      you were keeping in the hut

you will have to

     make do with

         roots when you break fast

eating the fruit

    I thought

        how delicious how cold

For me, the poetic lesson of W.C. Williams — how the graceful unrhymed line may capture the simple immediacy of human experience — carries over, despite all the allusive joking involved. The book comes to a close with a series of poems describing the creation of “Paleolithic poetry,”

The man takes

the track leading

to the cave

holding a flint to

the wall he carves

antlers trees

he carves dots

a single feather

a bear’s paw print

finishing up with this poetic statement about the subject matter of Lascaux’s cave art:

So much depends

    upon the red bison …

For as page after page of Ice Age poems keep coming, the playfully conceived series of vignettes acquire a poetic reality that is quite moving, touching on matters of love both romantic and familial. In their accretion of repeated detail they forcefully imagine what life and death in Paleolithic hunter society might have been like. (Certain images convincingly “presage” Homeric simile, as “when dawn comes with cold hands.”) What Terry has produced are genuine poems, whatever their source; and the book ends up as something close to a masterpiece. Through Terry’s cinematic imagination, readers experience the sensibility of early man, as though the wall paintings of an archaic hunting culture have indeed come alive:

by the flickering

light of a lamp

he makes out

the brightly coloured

forms of horses

galloping across the

vertiginous walls

of the cave

he looks in

wonder and with

longing at the horses

flying overhead

Terry’s skilled verbal recreation bears comparison to the replicated Lascaux IV that paying tourists are allowed to visit. It is a reconstructed leap, of course, but “taking a leap of the imagination, a leap in the dark,” asks Terry, “is this not quite literally what the bounding Chinese horses lining the ceiling of Lascaux’s Axial Gallery ask us to do by example?”

In his University of Essex biography, Terry describers one of his teaching interests as “a widening of the definition of translation as traditionally and rigidly conceived.” Experimental translation is indeed a significant form of creative writing, in and of itself. But by producing the target text as well as its English rendering, Terry challenges received ideas about the origins, nature and function of the lyric poem; the received poetic canon also becomes subject to radical revision. In short, with this book (as well its experimental predecessors), Terry performs the role of the avant-garde artist.

His radicalism is both conceptural and procedural. He speaks of the need to “trust in the grid” in Carcanet’s recorded event, and one hears in this exhortation something of Oulipo methodology. Another “framing device” employed (at least as Terry indicates in the book’s promotional interview) is the introduction of aleatory procedures. A version of John Cage’s indeterminacy, it would appear, is also part of the Champerret/Terry mode of creative translation. Terry’s seemingly random allusion to the I Ching in his introduction, therefore, is not accidental; it’s a kind of clue. Terry also mentions Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dès, a reference followed up mid-book by pages of oversized graphics, all explained as mimicking Champerret’s “playing freely with line spacing and font size.”

Considering Terry’s interest in French literature and thought, his most important source of inspiration must be Georges Bataille’s Lascaux or The Birth of Art (1955), based in part on his 1952 lecture “A Visit to Lascaux.” Immediately pertinent to Terry’s project is Bataille making note of the “coat of arms” grid on the cave walls, as well as the presence of various writing-like signs. Bataille wonders whether these “obscure symbols,” and others like them, might be ideograms. But perhaps more profound is Bataille’s philosophical proposition concerning the power dynamic between humans and animal, a relationship of mutuality he infers from Lascaux’s wall painting. In his art, the Cro-Magnon painter recognizes in animals a shared presence of “mind,” or in Bataille’s French, “esprit.” Despite the apparent frivolity of Terry’s project, much of this respectful and yet fearful interspecies acknowledgement comes through in his recreations. Post-war Bataille was also especially conscious of the fact that the discovery of the caves occurred at the time of Auschwitz. An echo of this historical awareness may be detected in Terry’s imagined narratives, as in this footnote:

“This poem, with its sinister references to captives being led off into the hills, given the historical context of the compositions, cannot fail to evoke the Nazi roundups which were frequent in both the occupied and non-occupied zones in France during the Second World War.”

And then finally, and most relevantly, Bataille identifies the sanctuary as place of ritual preparation for the Paleolithic hunt. Analogously, formalism (the use of rules of “constraints” in the production of texts) is itself a kind of ritualistic process, so that these repetitive texts effectively recreate some sense of preparatory observance. With its ancient forms of charms and spells, poetry (and certainly the “trick” of literacy) is a form of magic. The shaman is ancestor to the poet; he is one who hears and reports the voices of the past.

I do take issue with two elements of Terry’s proposed narrative of Ice Age poetry. Writing, I would argue, comes very late in the poem’s history, as the first written form of the art dates from the time of Sumer. Even now, the chant and hymnal nature of the poem as we know it continues to refer back to a fundamentally oral tradition. In Terry’s created prehistoric chronology, literacy — even a primitive form of cave-wall literacy— is anachronistic. But this is a quibble, as I acknowledge that such an anachronism is central the book’s imaginative premise.

Which brings me to another canonical problematic: As the oral tradition of early women’s poetry existed, and for the most part continued, outside of written form, their voices have remained mostly unrecorded. While many admittedly have no “lyric gender,” a majority of Terry’s poems are written in what could only be a man’s voice. It has generally been assumed that prehistoric cave painting was the work of male humans, though recent discoveries in France and Spain have brought this received idea into question. A majority of painted outlines of hands at numerous sites in Spain and France are distinctly female; women, therefore, likely painted most of the various images we associate with “the birth of art.” If women form even a portion of the era’s visual art, then the long oral tradition of “women’s poetry” (songs of weaving, as one genre that extends into the Middle Ages) would also find its presence there. And so I’m disappointed that more of the poems in Terry’s collection are not clearly in a female voice, especially given Terry’s wonderful recreation of the voices of the Bayeux Tapestry weavers. There is this lovely triplet in Terry’s Lascaux:

We sit with our sharp needles of bone

     round the warm glow of the fire

         making necklaces from pierced seashells

And while I hate to deaden the joke with a call for gender correctness, it would have been nice to have some sense that Paleolithic women made more than jewelry. (A footnote pointing out recent archaeological discoveries and something about Champerret’s chauvinism and authorial assumptions, for example, could have been both droll and point-making.)

In any event, through Terry’s shamanism the contemporary reader does seem to encounter the esprit of Paleolithic humans. He dances as a shadow-throwing — if not feather- and antler-headdress wearing — bard. As the word for imagination in French is fantaisie, the English adjective “fantastic” well describes the sum of these poems. (In a sort of Game of Thrones prequel, in fact, a cave-inhabiting, talon-snatching dragon makes an appearance.) Terry quotes a pseudo-letter from the Director of the Musée de L’Homme director to Champerret in 1941, “Your work is pure fantasy.” Exactly. Terry’s observation of Champerret’s purported use of the “Mallarméan breakthrough” summarizes even more perfectly the accomplishment of his own Lascaux Notebooks: “Scientifically, this proves nothing, poetically, it is a tour de force.” - Mary Maxwell

https://www.ronslate.com/on-the-lascaux-notebooks-by-jean-luc-champerret-edited-and-translated-by-philip-terry/

Who are we? Where do we come from? Who or what were the people, the land, the gods who made us? These questions have perplexed and haunted us ever since human beings evolved.

One of the heartlands of our understanding of Upper Palaeolithic man is the southwest of France – more precisely, the courses of the Vézère, Dordogne, Lot and Aveyron and their tributaries. There are several reasons for the density of ancient sites in this region: the plentiful supply of water, which attracted both humans and game animals between thirty thousand and ten thousand years ago; the high plains through which these rivers run, which at that time formed steppe, providing grassland for the untold numbers of reindeer and other migratory animals that moved across them seasonally; and the limestone bedrock through which over millennia the waters have carved enormous and complex underground cave systems. It is this last fact that has impressed itself most firmly on the public imagination, in large part because of the spectacular discoveries of cave art that have been made in this region over the last 160 years.

Of these cave networks, Lascaux is the best known. The story of its discovery is in many ways typical: it was stumbled upon by non-specialists who spotted an unusual hole and decided to explore further. What made this case different is what the individuals encountered. In the very dark days of September 1940, a group of adolescent boys found themselves standing in the great Axial Gallery, surrounded by depictions of wild horses and now-extinct aurochs, depictions so remarkable that this space has been dubbed ‘The Sistine Chapel of Prehistory’.

Within a week, two of France’s most distinguished cave art experts, Henri Breuil and Denis Peyrony, had arrived and embarked on a systematic investigation of the complex. It is in this very short timeframe that The Lascaux Notebooks also has its origin. Jean-Luc Champerret was a local poet who managed to get into the cave almost before the archaeologists, apparently while carrying out reconnaissance for the regional Resistance group (at least according to a now-elderly housemaid who was working in a chateau nearby and whom Philip Terry, the editor of these texts, was able to interview). Champerret, like so many before and after him, was not only impressed by the astonishing artistic achievements at Lascaux but also fascinated by the signs that accompany the paintings. These take many forms: aligned dots, crosses, harpoons, parallel straight and curved lines, tridents, spear throwers, so-called ‘tectiforms’ (hut shapes) and, especially, square grids or lattices.

Subsequent researchers have established definite patterns of distribution of these signs, both in Lascaux and elsewhere, but learned arguments have gone back and forth ever since as to what they signify. That they signify something is not in question. Yet how to interpret the symbols of a long-vanished society? What would the inhabitants of the 50th century make of the ubiquity of crosses in Europe, erected over thousands of years, with no texts or oral tradition handed down to explain them?

The impossibility of the task has not deterred people from trying. We are, after all, a species that specialises in meaning. Champerret was convinced that the signs he saw were a primitive form of writing, and started assigning meanings to the shapes, creating his own personal dictionary of ideogrammatic vocabulary. Intrigued by one of the commonest signs, a grid with nine spaces, he suggested that these might have acted as frameworks for the other symbols, a filled grid being used to convey messages. Acting on this hypothesis, he began devising grids of his own, peopling them with symbols suggestive of how he envisaged Palaeolithic society and beliefs.

It is these grids that are the basis for the poems, notes and prose poems that make up this book. Terry was serendipitously given them in 2006 in a moth-eaten state when visiting a friend near Lascaux. It has been a labour of love to decipher, transcribe and translate them. What emerges is at once idiosyncratic and evocative.

Champerret worked with little or no knowledge of the archaeological research already done in the region and elsewhere – at least, Terry gives us no indication that he had any, though he does give us the dismissive response of Paul Rivet, director of the Musée de l’Homme at the time of the caves’ discovery, to whom Champerret sent his thoughts: ‘Your work is pure fantasy.’ Champerret was of course working without the benefit of all the developments in scientific stratigraphy, ethnoarchaeology, palaeobotany, palaeozoology, field archaeology and radiocarbon, thermoluminescence and uranium-thorium dating that have taken place since the 1940s. Each of these has helped to give a fuller idea of what the world of the hunter-gatherers in southwest France was like.

That’s true also for the signs. For a long time they were, understandably, regarded as incidental to the depictions of fauna, which so astonish us with their beauty and accomplishment. Yet over the last thirty years, extensive, though in some circles controversial, work has been done by leading archaeologists, such as Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams, comparing these signs to similar ones in other parietal art traditions among hunter-gatherers in South Africa, the Americas and Australia, and even interviewing those who still practise wall art. They have concluded that the signs have symbolic shamanic significance. They are not writing exactly, but are certainly pregnant with meaning.

By contrast, Champerret was working alone, relying on intuition and creativity. His method for the most part consisted of choosing nine signs, for instance:

deer deer river

antlers water trees

eyes bush spears

He then worked them up into two short poems:

A herd of deer

are crossing

the river

their antlers

above the water

like trees

we watch

from the bushes

spears raised

*

A herd of deer

are swimming over

the river crossing

their black antlers

rise above the water

like a moving forest

we watch in silence

from amidst the bushes

our tall spears raised

This example is clearly inspired by the famous frieze of reindeer in Lascaux, which do indeed have the appearance of swimming across a river, though the presence of the hunters is Champerret’s own invention.

Elsewhere, Champerret conjures up the day-to-day activities of the hunter-gatherers – cooking, scouting, trapping, making huts and tents, sewing – and, of course, their sacred rituals, dances and the entry into the dark, the underworld, the otherworld of the caves. The cumulative effect of the poems is slowly to build an atmosphere that evokes both the strangeness and the familiarity of the Palaeolithic world:

We sit with our needles

round the fire

making necklaces

snow

has fallen

everywhere

a single mammoth

by the crossing

as night falls

Champerret may indeed have been fantasising when he thought he saw early writing systems, but, surrounded by the hell of occupied France, he succeeded in entering into another reality, another way of being human, led by the extraordinary, leaping, living signs of Lascaux. - Hilary Davies

https://literaryreview.co.uk/poems-of-the-underground

Whilst dedicated cavers continue to dive and squeeze further and further underground, mapping new networks and entering underground ‘rooms’ no-one else has ever seen, others have always preferred to consider archaeological and anthropological findings in depth rather than simply move on. Jerome Rothenberg has translated and anthologised texts under the term ethnopoetics; Clayton Eshelman has synthesized theology, psychology, creative writing and what would now be called eco-criticism to explore the ‘Upper Paleolithic Imagination’; whilst the first (and for a long time only) monograph about the Lascaux caves was written by Georges Bataille.

Much, of course, was made of the 20,000 year-old art found (or re-rediscovered) in 1940 at Lascaux and other caves in the Dordogne region. It fed into fine artists’ obsessions with ‘primitive’ cultures, as well as providing an argument that art had always been important, perhaps pre-dating spoken language, and allowed much conjecture about art as magic, celebration, wish-fulfilment, prophecy, celebration and documentary. What seemed to be missing was any coherent study of the smaller marks in the caves, which were overshadowed by many larger animal images and silhouettes of hands.

Enter Jean-Luc Champerret, an obscure and largely forgotten French author, who took it upon himself to document the symbols found in Lascaux, eventually producing a set of 70 Ice-Age hieroglyphics. He had visited the caves as a member of the Resistance soon after they were found, and upon returning soon after the war was able to translate the groups and grids of marks into word clusters, and then extrapolate them into more and more complex texts or poems. Ignored at the time, Champerret’s neglected research was eventually given to Dr. Terry, a translator and Oulipean writer, when visiting an architect friend in the Dordogne region who had found a crate of Champerret’s papers in a chateau he was then remodelling.

It wasn’t until a few years later, when moving house, that Terry realised what he had been given: a highly original and invaluable work which had not been widely disseminated in its original language, let alone translated and published elsewhere. His academic inquisitiveness and imaginative prowess facilitated this marvellous 400-page edition, which reproduces in full the original cave markings, as well as translated versions and reversions of the cave texts produced by Champerret.

Many are first translated from the images – often found in a 3 by 3 grid, a kind of visual magic square – into simple language, which provides a basic word pattern to build on:

call   birds     trees

call   deer      plain

call    bear    mountains (p 82)

It is then a small step to work this up into a denser, more complex work:

the call

of the birds

fills the trees

the call

of the deer

fills the plain

the call

of the bear

fills the mountains

and on, through a third version to the more poetic fourth and final text:

The shrill song

of the birds

fills the swaying trees

the hoarse bellow

of the red deer

echoes in the river valley

the rasping roar

of the cave bears

fills the black mountains

There is, of course, an element of authorial assumption and intervention, not to mention poetic licence here, something Terry notes he is aware of, but the effect of ‘filling out’ the basic written utterances of our ancient ancestors offers us a new and invigorating insight into our past.

Elsewhere, there are texts expanded into prose poems or stories, as well as more fragmented works (sometimes reminiscent of the works of Sappho) which spill across the page. It is an exhilarating and thought-provoking book that foregrounds the world of Ice Age people, a world that is, as one of the poems says, ‘still etched in the dark earth’. This book will, I am sure be of interest to not only poets but all those interested in history, shamanism, ethnography, codes, caves, dissimulation, creative writing and the roots of documented utterance. It will, I am sure, become an influential and seminal book, one which will illuminate the previously dark and shadow-filled caves of formative language. - Rupert Loydell

https://tearsinthefence.com/2022/04/17/the-lascaux-notebooks-jean-luc-champerret-ed-tr-philip-terry-carcanet-press%EF%BF%BC%EF%BF%BC/

David Wheatley - a text so intricately figured, made out of the tones and notes and embellishments of family life and of work and the many-faceted elements of the imagination, that it reflects precisely the impetus and forward motion of the musical movement its title describes

 

David Wheatley, Stretto, CB Editions, 2022

Stretto is both a story of travel and migration, moving between Ireland, England and Scotland over a twenty-year period, and an exploration of the nature of self and reality. A stained-glass window in a country church offers a portal of light in the darkness, and the narrator follows wherever it leads. Reconnecting with the modernist energies of Joyce and Beckett, Stretto is a radical and audacious debut novel.

‘David Wheatley has composed a text so intricately figured, made out of the tones and notes and embellishments of family life and of work and the many-faceted elements of the imagination, that it reflects precisely the impetus and forward motion of the musical movement its title describes. Each section is a bar of poetry both fitted within and overlaying the prose that describes it; each page and a half is measured to sing out exactly in the key and time signature to which it has been set. Wondrous.’– Kirsty Gunn

‘A notable poet, David Wheatley has filled his first novel, Stretto, with music and light. It opens with the speaker contemplating a Harry Clarke stained glass Virgin Mary, whose body “gives way to ... jewels”. Stretto itself is a kaleidoscope of Ciaran Carsonesque intellectual gems, fascinating in themselves but also reflecting on his whole project. Stretto divides into page-and-a-half “bars” rather than chapters: its many interlacing motifs include migrant experience such as Wheatley’s own in these islands, encountering their quirky histories. Time shifts, moving “now fast, now slowly, sometimes both at once” he observes regarding Bach’s stretto technique. Similar patterning replaces conventional narrative in the novel. Wheatley’s autism theme, though, proves vital to a text illuminated by “the flare of neurodivergence burning through my own thought processes”. A brilliant debut.’– Ian Duhig, Irish Times

‘There’s no plot to speak of; this is, rather, the record of a consciousness, one that proceeds by a kind of meditative free association. Each section resonates with others through cross-reference and repetition, while the endnotes, or “Vectors”, with which the text concludes suggest another layer of cultural and intellectual reference points. And so we are treated to glimpses from the life of the author-protagonist, who both is and isn’t David Wheatley, in something of the same way a poem may present a voice that both is and isn’t that of the poet. Like Wheatley, this notetaker has left Ireland to work abroad, first in the north of England, then in northeast Scotland, where he teaches poetry to university students, reads, thinks, raises his children and writes. Along the way he muses on Bach, on the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, on his cat, on bagpipe music, on children’s games, on university bureaucracy and on church windows. The result is a kind of intellectual inquiry that takes its bearings less from the novel than from the philosophical discipline of phenomenology ... this is also a book of luminous detail and careful attention to the texture of everyday life.’ – James Pardon, Literary Review

Oltermann has caught a curious thread of the Cold War culture war in this tiny page-turner, with a dive into the “Working Group of Writing Chekists”, a creative writing class organised in East Germany by the Stasi (the GDR’s secret police). A Red Poets Society, if you will. He does a good job fitting pieces together for an engaging narrative, tracking down most of the group (I enjoyed the delicious irony of his using social media to form a person’s identity). It’s a diverting footnote in Cold War history; a book feels a stretch, though. I did hope for some unintentional, absurdist hilarity from such a subject. But typical totalitarian bastards, dry to the end. One Communist love poem is a treasure, however: “I hope you never be nationalised”. NJ McGarrigle

When the history of the pandemic we’re living through is written the truest moments will be revealed in the smallest of stories. Emily Edwards’s new novel is not set during the pandemic but it brings the questions the past few years have raised about individual choice, collective responsibility and social solidarity to the fore by placing them at the core of a small story. Elizabeth and Bryony are the best of friends, despite their differences. But their divergence on the issue of vaccinating their children results in consequences neither could have imagined. Edwards has, perhaps bravely, chosen to set her challenging and thought-provoking novel in the most intimate of domestic spaces – a relationship between two mothers who each see the world in a fundamentally different way. Luckily, for the reader the emotional depth of her writing withstands the intensity of the story she deftly tells. - Becky Long

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2022/08/20/stretto-by-david-wheatley-the-stasi-poetry-circle-by-philip-oltermann-the-herd-by-emily-edwards/

The boom in prose writing by contemporary poets has been one of the most surprising and welcome recent developments in literature. There’s nothing new about poets venturing out of verse, of course, whether as writers of prose poems or as moonlighting novelists. But there does seem to be something distinctive in this body of recent work, which makes a virtue of its generic hybridity and plays freely, if self-consciously, with the conventions of fiction, criticism and memoir. Notable examples include the fiction of Ben Lerner (whose success as a novelist could be credited with kick-starting the trend), as well as prose works by Sam Riviere, Oli Hazzard, Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Rosa Campbell.

Into this company comes David Wheatley, whose beguiling Stretto announces itself, in the cover copy, as a novel. This proves something of a flag of convenience, however. ‘Notes’ is the term that keeps cropping up in the body of the text, and that seems both more accurate and more suggestive, not least because the ambiguity keeps in view Stretto’s double themes of music and memory. Stretto, Wheatley explains, is a technique used in fugue composition, in which ‘the melody – the subject – is repeated in another voice … before the statement of the original subject has finished’. (Think, if musical theory is not your thing, of how ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ can be sung in a round.) In a fugue, stretto can produce a sense of acceleration or heightening intensity, as the music begins to tumble over itself, but it could also be thought of as a kind of layering, with each new iteration of a sequence of notes superimposed in counterpoint on the previous one. - James Purdon

https://literaryreview.co.uk/songs-in-the-key-of-life

David Wheatley was born in Dublin and is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently The President of Planet Earth (Carcanet). His other publications include a critical study, Contemporary British Poetry (Palgrave), and, as co-editor with Ailbhe Darcy, The Cambridge History of Irish Women’s Poetry. He has written for London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Literary Review and Poetry Review. He lives with his family in rural Aberdeenshire. Stretto is his first novel.

Carl Einstein - The novel charts the young Bebuquin’s hallucinatory journey through the Museum of Cheap Thrills in search of a way to smash the boundaries of logic and causality. Exploding all narrative conventions it is an experimental tour de force, indispensable to understanding the development of literary Expressionism

 

Carl Einstein, Bebuquin: or the Dilettantes of the

Miracle, Trans. by Patrick Healy,

November Editions, 2017 [1912]

‘I am a mirror, a motionless puddle glittering with reflected gaslight. But has a mirror ever mirrored itself?’ Bebuquin is the first and only novel of Carl Einstein, arguably the most influential art critic of the early-twentieth century. An anarchist, street fighter and European intellectual of astonishing range, Einstein was hailed as the ‘prophet of the avant-garde’. The novel charts the young Giorgio Bebuquin’s hallucinatory journey through the Museum of Cheap Thrills in search of a way to smash the boundaries of logic and causality. Exploding all narrative conventions Bebuquin is an experimental tour de force, indispensable to understanding the development of literary Expressionism, Dada and Surrealism. Translated into English by Patrick Healy, the present edition also features an introduction, a chronology of Einstein’s life and the original German text, first published in 1912.

‘Einstein had it, he really was at the top.’ - Gottfried Benn

Charles Haxthausen: An Optics of Fragmentation [On Carl Einstein's 'Bebuquin']

download at academia.edu

Hermann Burger - a collection of 1046 suicide-focused aphorisms, observations, quotes, and claims, presented as a study in 'mortology': "the doctrine and philosophy of the total predominance of death over life"

Hermann Burger, Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis:

On Killing Oneself, Trans. by Adrian Nathan

West, Wakefield Press, 2022

“Hermann Burger is one of the truly great authors of the German language: a writer of consummate control and range, with a singular and haunting worldview.” –Uwe Schütte

In the tunnel-village of Göschenen, a man named Hermann Burger has vanished without a trace from his hotel room, suspected of suicide. What is found in his room is not a note, but a 124-page manuscript entitled Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis: an exhaustive manifesto comprising 1,046 “thanatological” aphorisms (or “mortologisms”) advocating suicide.

This “grim science of killing the self” studies the predominance of death over life, in traumatic experiences such as the breakup of a marriage, years of depression, the erosion of friendships and the disgrace of impotence―but the aphoristic text presents something more complicated than a logical conclusion to life experience. Drawing inspiration from such authors as Wittgenstein, Cioran and Bernhard, Burger’s unsettling work would be published shortly before the author would take his own life.

Hermann Burger (1942–89) was a Swiss author, critic and professor. Author of four novels and several volumes of essays, short fiction and poetry, he first achieved fame with his novel Schilten, the story of a mad village schoolteacher who teaches his students to prepare for death. At the end of his life, he was working on the autobiographical tetralogy Brenner, one of the high points of 20th-century German prose. He died by overdose days after the first volume’s publication.

Hermann Burger's Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis is basically a collection of 1046 suicide-focused aphorisms, observations, quotes, and claims, presented as a study in 'mortology' (so Burger's coinage): "the doctrine and philosophy of the total predominance of death over life". The text is introduced, however, in a prologue of sorts, recounting an episode from mid-January 1988, in a remote and desolate Swiss village where the locals grow concerned about a person who seems to have gone missing, with: "evidence of a capital crime committed by the missing person against the missing person himself"; i.e. they worry that he has committed suicide. Finding the unsigned manuscript of this Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis in the desk drawer in his hotel room certainly does nothing to reässure them.

A local doctor learns more from the missing "lowlander's psychiatric counselor" and explains to the locals that, while this Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis is an: "exhaustive manifesto of 1,046 mortologisms", based on the author's own traumatic experiences and psychological issues:

one who expounds so exhaustively on the subject of self-murder is hardly in a position and may not even desire, to carry out this unhinged act.

The missing author does (re)appear, and identifies himself, as Hermann Burger, and the mix-up is cleared up -- he was, indeed, not a suicide (and can then get on with his writing).

In the text-proper then is also noted:

247. No one need die after reading our Tractatus, because the tension of expectation vanishes into nothing -- into mortology.

248. Not every suicidal opus is contagious.

It's also noted that authors such as Goethe -- whose: "Werther unleashed a wave of suicides all round" -- and Thomas Bernhard, this: "poeta doctus suicidalis" with his fiction filled with "suicide-orgies", never: "took the step themselves". Yet Burger was to take his own life just a year later, a fact that then hangs very heavily over this text.

Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis is an obsessive('s) engagement with death and suicide: "Death is the strongest addictive substance of all," Burger writes, and: "Suicide is the one and only absolute act a person may commit without ifs, ands, or buts".

He suggests:

539. Suicide is never a way out, it is an abyss - it is not grounded, it is the absence of all ground.

540. Still less is suicide the solution to a problem. It blows all solutions to bits and pieces.

He takes suicide also as empowering:

450. I and I alone am master of this highest of all sufferings: death, killing, and being killed. Me, not some malignant tumor.

451. I am the most malignant tumor of all.

Burger only occasionally uses Freitod, one of the German terms for suicide -- comparing it also to Freispruch ("an acquittal") -- but this way of seeing the act as a 'voluntary death' allows him also to suggest:

189. Voluntary death is an affirmation of dignity and humanity, against the blind progress of nature -- freedom in its most extreme form, the last freedom we can ever know.

But, he continues, in fact: "there is no voluntary death, just as there is no natural death". (Among other German terms for suicide the most commonly used is Selbstmord -- literally 'self-murder' --, and he also considers the act as such.)

Repeatedly, there is rather disturbing romanticizing of the act -- "His example is so courageous, so momentous, that we must ask why every suicide that comes to light fails to inspire a wave of imitators" (though, in fact, it is well-documented (e.g.) that reports of suicide do lead to an increase in suicides) -- as Burger also suggests:

243. In view of the nuclear and ecological disasters, the looming omnicide, that the world faces, the suicide's solution is an artistic and revolutionary act: he anticipates -- pars pro toto and for mortology's sake -- a fate the entire world must sooner or later undergo. This resolute step puts him leagues ahead of the chronically healthy clinging hungrily to life.

Burger takes suicide seriously; he is amusingly dismissive of simplistic explanations and excuses:

154. I cannot bear to live anymore is not a theory, it's just pissing and moaning.

So also:

675. Frequently, we find the most wretched suicide notes accompanied by whole file folders full of attempts to document the path down which none may follow. Frankly, this is a dilettantish approach to suicidalism.

Yet, in a sense, this Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis is nothing but such a collection of attempts .....

Still, Burger understands that:

343. We seldom understand a suicide, because his reasons are not objectively transparent and his existential pain cannot be shared.

Burger invokes and quotes from suicide-literature -- both by authors who merely treated the subject (Bernhard, Goethe, Cioran) as well as those who went through with the act (Jean Améry, Kleist, Trakl). He ranges from Camus and his claim that suicide is the: "one truly serious philosophical problem" to Kafka to the terminally ill Fritz Zorn's approaching-death account Mars (Burger suggesting: "If we defined a terminal illness such as cancer as organically assisted suicide, then Fritz Zorn, author of Mars, may also be considered a suicide").

Burger devotes significant space to the example of constantly death-defying and -challenging 'parasuicidarian' Harry Houdini -- suggesting, however, that even his death can ultimately be considered suicide, Houdini's insistence on performing despite a doctor's "unequivocal diagnosis", a ruptured appendix that killed him: "call it suicide with organic assistance".

Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis is not merely a disquisition about death, but a call to engage with the subject -- which Burger sees as the subject of all subjects (and which becomes here, in every sense, all-consuming). So, early on, he even clamors: "We must found schools for suicides, exitus institutes !" while the final summing up has him state (and then essentially underline):

1044. I die. Therefore I am.

1045. Quod erat demonstrandum.

1046. Finis.

Central to the book is also the dichotomy:

67. Death is private, a path down which none can follow, but also public, because each death is simultaneously the end of the world.

Burger's own suicide, so soon after publishing this, colors every aspect of a text in which it is already practically impossible to separate work and author (Burger presenting himself in the opening section not just by name but giving his passport number) and forces the question of whether, as intellectual exercise (or whatever kind you want to see it as), it was a success or failure.

His suicide also makes some of the poignancy then all the more pointed -- not least:

145. Every suicide leaves behind the insipid sense that he could have been saved, if only ...

Burger's suicide gives the text a greater immediacy, and it makes it difficult not to read it (also) as the author wrestling with (or, it must be said, wallowing in ...) his many demons. Both as such, or read (if you can) extra-autobiographically, as it were, Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis is a fascinating -- and discomforting -- addition to the body of suicide-literature, grappling with that greatest of all issues, death itself. - M. A. Orthofer

https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/suisse/burgerh_tractatus.htm

Hermann Burger (Menziken, 1942) is one of the truly great authors of the German language: a writer of consummate control and range, with a singular and haunting worldview. Yet it is not surprising that he fell into obscurity after his death, from an overdose of barbiturates at age forty-six. He shares this fate with many of the most august names from the peripheries of German-language literature who, never managing to escape from the ghetto of Austrian or Swiss publishing, either gave up in exhaustion, or went on writing and were forgotten nonetheless.

Burger might have seemed the exception at first: by 1979, with his third book of fiction, he signed with S. Fischer Verlag, making the leap into the higher echelons of German publishing. He would later break with them publicly in favor of Suhrkamp, which would release his finest novel, Brunsleben, as the first volume of the projected tetralogy Brenner. Had he finished, it would likely have cemented his reputation as one of the late twentieth century’s most important writers. That Brenner had represented from the start a losing struggle between the author’s ambition and his waning attachment to life was evident in the second chapter of the incomplete second volume, Menzenmang (1990). There, after recounting his hospital admission for depression and suicidal ideation, the narrator—recollecting his toy car, the “time-annihilation machine” that is one of the ciphers for evanescence in the novel—decides to buy himself a Ferrari 328 GTS because, “as my life has a maximum duration of two to three years, there’s no point in saving, in restraint, in squirreling away.” And indeed, Burger, who had bought himself the same car, and posed with it in a famous photograph wearing a driving cap with a cherry-red scarf, was dead three days after volume one of Brenner hit the shelves.

Depression

Burger’s suicide was the endpoint of a life of torment, which he wrote through under the mercilessly stern tutelage of depression. He was bipolar, and never made a secret of his illness. Rather, with real passion, though reluctant to make a show, he railed against fate, which had marked him out for a premature end—as the author never doubted. The ineluctable specter of suicide left him no choice but to view his life from the perspective of tragedy: one whose denouement had an uncertain date, but a definite form. It was natural, then, that he would place himself in a long line of author-suicides situated on the outskirts of the German language, from Georg Trakl to Paul Celan, the subject of his doctoral thesis, to Jean Améry.

Tipping his hat to Wittgenstein, Burger entitled his 1989 apologia for suicide Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis. This sinister hint at the approaching disaster comprises 1046 “thanatological” aphorisms. With characteristic relentlessness, Burger exposes his private thanatology (“as we term the precepts and philosophy of the total dominion of death over life”) and “the grim science of killing the self” also known as suicidology.

Unlike Jean Améry’s On Suicide, which might serve as a companion piece, Burger’s book is suffused with an irony that provides, as in all his texts, a counterweight to a sorrow that it never manages to completely subsume. Reading it, one frequently shudders, as with mortologism number 109: “The sufferer of endogenous depression ought to be praised every day he forgoes taking his own life. Instead people wait patiently for him to do so, and then console those who remain behind.”

Defense Reaction

Unusually, Burger’s suicide seems to have played a significant role in his disappearance from publishers’ catalogs and bookstores and thus, inevitably, from the consciousness of the reading public. Whereas a spectacular end of this sort often gives rise to voyeuristic curiosity about an author’s work, Burger’s pitiless candor as he openly contemplated his doom provoked a defense reaction in many. In his work, the parade of prospective suicides and aficionados of death were not simply a literary conceit, but rather the avatars of an existential balancing act in which eloquence and vigor in the artistic approximation of suicide become a strategy for eluding it.

Thomas Bernhard as Exemplar

Burger never denied that his reading of Thomas Bernhard had been decisive for the composition of his work. Burger encountered Bernhard in his twenties, after he’d changed his program of study from architecture to German literature. He had already published one volume of verse and another of short fiction, both stamped with an extraordinary sensory awareness and a refined feeling for detail; but the evolution from these early works to his first novel, Schilten, could not be more dramatic. The idea for the novel came to Burger during a visit to the writer and schoolteacher Jannis Zinniker in Schiltwald, the model for the village of Schilten in Burger’s book. Surprised to find his friend out of class, Burger asked where the children had gone. “I had to send them home,” Zinniker said. “Today there is an Abdankung, that’s our word for funeral.” “Do you know,” Burger replied, “you’ve just hit on the subject of a novel? The burial ceremony pushes the lessons aside, the cemetery takes precedence.”

In a series of twenty quarto notebooks delivered as a School Report Addressed to the Inspectors’ Conference, to use the novel’s subtitle, Schilten tells the story of Armin Schildknecht, a former schoolteacher who has been relieved of his duties on account of the distressing nature of his lessons. After losing his employment, Schildknecht buys the schoolhouse, moves into the attic, and composes a report to justify his actions. Rather than prepare his students for the life ahead, Schildknecht has tutored them in cemetery lore and death science, and commanded them to practice suspended animation, forcing them to lie in a covered hole in the floor reciting poetry to themselves while preparing for the eternal nothingness that awaits. Modeled on such Bernhardian chroniclers as Prince Sarau in Gargoyles or the painter Strauch in Frost, Schildknecht is the first in a long series of deranged protagonists who will voice Burger’s misgivings about the futility of habituating oneself to life.

A hallmark of Burger’s work was exhaustive engagement with his material. Schilten was the product of years of research into Schiltwald and its surroundings, architecture, local funerary customs, and the ins and outs of the Swiss educational system. Similar work would go into his collection Diabelli, the titular story of a “disillusioned illusionist” determined to make himself disappear and to end an acclaimed but futile career. Burger was familiar with the prestidigitator’s art, and had even taken the magician's oath in the course of his investigations. Though he dazzled journalists, publishers, and critics with his tricks, he never revealed their secrets, whether verbally or in his texts. In a prize lecture, Burger would state, “I gladly admit that the circensian matters more to me than everyday normalcy, that magic fascinates me incomparably more than the true physics of things.” Behind this was something darker: Burger’s conception of life itself as an elegant deception, a ruse rendered more or less plausible by the elaborate distractions that overlay it.

Ailment and Indulgence

Burger’s second novel, Die künstliche Mutter, is significantly more autobiographical than one might suppose, given its fantastic setting. In this glum but sardonic account of a specialist in German Literature and Glaciology, Burger took up the theme of his own psychosomatic affliction, his “genital migraines,” as the protagonist terms them. The book takes place in an otherworldly institution where patients, lying on beds in tunnels carved in a massif, absorbing the heat and moisture, are subjected to a battery of bizarre therapeutic measures. To devise his hero’s elaborate medical history, Burger devoured reams of psychiatric literature and even took a cure himself near Bad Gastein, in Austria, where guests rest in underground caves to enjoy the allegedly salubrious effects of the area’s high radon concentration.

Even in the early tale “Die Notbremse,” where an Epicurean in a dining car reflects on the consequences of pulling the brake, Burger’s sybaritic inclinations were already evident, and it was only natural that his masterwork would attempt “to reconstitute, through the medium of cigars,” the sensual world of childhood, which had vanished into air like smoke. Early in Brenner, Burger affirms:

There are ur-phenomena of tone, color, and scent that are often predestined, so to speak, irrespective of their contingent nature, to tune an existence like a stringed instrument; and the adult, when he attends a concert, an exhibition, a theater opening, searches, as though after a lost picture book, for the traces of these earliest magical impressions.

In the guise of his narrator, Hermann Arbogast Brenner, Burger, the cigar lover, composes an autobiography of ashes: part wish-fulfillment, part settling of accounts, with the languid, bitter feel of a last smoke before an execution. Here Burger reveals, in the rawest form to date, his sorrows, his rancor against his family, and his solitude in the aftermath of divorce; at the same time, his style sheds the last vestiges of his Bernhard-worship to arrive at a dense, crowded idiom, rife with dialect and ornate, Latinate turns of phrase that possess rare evocative power.

At twenty-three, on a road trip to Berlin with his friend Kurt Theodor Oehler, Burger had already pronounced death the most important part of life. A few years later, in “Das glücklichste Tag unserers Lebens,” he would write, with reference to the fairy tale “Hans in Luck”: “You can’t ride happiness and you can’t milk it, you can’t slaughter it and you can’t polish it, all you can do is forget it and in that way, hopefully, not disturb it.” Reading Brenner, it is hard to escape the sense that things were the other way around: that it was long-buried happiness that had come to avenge itself on the author in his late misery. Page after page in Burger’s magnum opus attest to his intense longing for temps perdu, giving sense to Ilse Aichinger’s phrase, “Nothing looks so much like homeland as the things one takes leave of.” The five hundred pages that exist give only a vague sense of the direction Burger’s work would have taken. Many questions remain open, particularly with regard to the novel’s autobiographical content. Only one thing is certain: for Burger, as for Kleist, there was no help in this world. - Uwe Schütte

translated from the German by Adrian Nathan West

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/special-feature/uwe-schutte-on-hermann-burger/

Hermann Burger, Brenner, Trans. by Adrian

Nathan West., Archipelago, 2022

“Hermann Burger was an artist who went the whole hog every time, didn't conserve himself. He was a man with a big longing for happiness.” --Marcel Reich-Ranicki

Appearing in English for the very first time, Brenner is a delightfully unusual novel full of dark humor tracing the childhood memories of the book's eponymous narrator, a scion of an ancient cigar dynasty.

Perpetually shrouded in a thick cloud of cigar smoke, Herman Arbogast Brenner, scion of an old and famous cigar dynasty, has decided to kill himself––but not until he has written down his forty-six years of life, in a Proustian attempt to conjure the wounds, joys, and sensations of his childhood in the rolling countryside of the Aargau region of Switzerland.

Estranged from his wife and two children, he decides there is no point in squirrelling away his fortune, so he buys himself a Ferrari 328 GTS, and drives around sharing cigars with his few remaining friends.

In this roman à clef, writing and smoking become intertwined through the act of remembering, as Brenner, a fallible, wounded, yet lovable antihero, searches for epiphany, attempting to unearth memories just out of reach, which spring forth from memories of a red toy car, the sound of a particular chord played on the piano, or the smell of the cigars themselves.

Brenner is the final work from Hermann Burger, who died by suicide in 1989. The book publishes days before what would have been the author’s 80th birthday

Swiss writer Burger (1942–1989) makes his posthumous English-language debut with the revelatory if sputtering story of a fallen tobacco empire and its despairing heir, Hermann Arbogast Brenner. Brenner, estranged from his wife, children, and siblings and fighting a yearslong battle with depression, buys a sports car, believing his life will end within a few years. As Brenner continually hints at his soon-to-come suicide, he drives around Switzerland, visits friends, and discursively muses on his intellectual interests, all while smoking cigars. He recalls his brief stay at a children’s home where he was viciously bullied: in Brenner’s recollection, his bully made him crouch for hours, attacking him when he tried to move, but the nuns who ran the home refused to believe that their star pupil could be so ferocious. However, when Brenner revisits the home, he also remembers people showing him great kindness, and now questions the veracity of his own memories. Taken in total, and thanks to West’s lucid translation along with a series of evocative photos, the chronicle offers a cogent view of a rambling man desperate to shape his life into meaning. It’s a bit of a slog, but fans of a certain style of discursive Euro fiction will find this pleasantly diverting. - Publishers Weekly

Neurasthenic tale of cigars and suicide by Swiss writer Burger.

“Distinctions collapse, existence has no feeling of proportion with regard to death, when your number comes up, it’s best to just slink off without disturbing anybody’s sleep….” So thinks Burger’s protagonist, heir to a minor cigar empire in a quiet corner of the Aargau—quiet, that is, until, having decided that there’s no point to keeping a healthy savings account given the nearness of death, he buys a “rossa corsa Ferrari 328 GTS with a removable hardtop and a maximum speed of 166 mph.” Not much happens in the book, though a cigar aficionado will learn a great deal about different kinds of tobacco, means of storage (“The cigar must be stored at the proper humidity, sixty to sixty-seven degrees is ideal, and sheltered from abrupt changes in temperature”), and additives that “impart the right aromas” to the tobacco. Add to that occasional disquisitions on the peculiarities of alpine weather, and Burger’s encyclopedic leanings are given room to roam. Burger’s smoke-filled narrative, each chapter headed by a different brand of cigar, is at its best when it’s at its most Proustian, a stogie triggering a memory and with it a philosophical observation, whether a defiant defense of smoking (“a privilege of the mind and of the senses”), a takedown of psychiatry (“Analysis—and this is the perfidy of it—robs us of our myths”), or a Susan Sontag–esque meditation on depression, which Burger calls a metaphor that allows the afflicted to proclaim, “This is how miserable I am!” It adds up to a slog of a tale that makes any given Dürrenmatt work look like a light comedy. The translator is to be commended, however, for his innovative rendering of Burger’s mix of Swiss German with Hochdeutsch, the former signaled by outlandish phrases in italics such as “he ken turn eh fine phrase too.”

Of some interest to students of postwar literature in German. - Kirkus Reviews

"There is, for the reader, a compelling claustrophobia in being immersed so thoroughly in such a warped subjectivity. It is this, ultimately, that Brenner shares with the best of Thomas Bernhard’s work: not merely the sheer bravura of a three-page sentence, but how such sentences capture the swerving freneticism and unreality of a mind in the act of consuming itself . . . Masterful and devastating . . . " --Charlie Lee, The Nation

"Narrated by a man on the brink of death, Brenner is a baroque – in places manic – extemporization, a profusion of extraordinary involutions and convolutions, of abrupt temporal and tonal shifts. A novel of multiple registers, it’s in part a recuperation of the intense pleasures and torments of childhood, in part a settling of scores. This is an astounding translation of an astounding book." --Jonathan Buckley  

Hermann Burger’s Brenner is an autobiographical novel about childhood traumas and the pleasures of smoking a cigar.

Hermann Arbogast Brenner is the heir to a Swiss tobacco empire who is approaching his own end. Wrapping up his affairs, Brenner drives in his newly purchased sports car to visit friends in the Swiss countryside. He wants to talk about life while also smoking his way through a case of cigars.

In a mocking celebration of Marcel Proust and his madeleine cookie-triggered involuntary memory, Brenner chooses which cigar to smoke in the hope of conjuring a particular event. He only starts reminiscing after the cigar is lit. Each chapter focuses on a specific cigar; some brands are real, others the imaginary products of Brenner’s company. The characteristics of each cigar are extolled before it is lit: Brenner compares them to women, life, the theater, and expressions of the human condition.

The memories conjured unfold similarly to how the cigar being smoked develops its “pneuma,” an Ancient Greek word for breath that Brenner appropriates to describe his experience. Among the memories that are conjured, Brenner revisits his complicated relationship to his parents, the bullying he endured during a traumatic stay at a children’s home, the significance of his favorite toy car, and the challenges of building a career while suffering from depression.

Brenner comes with a translator’s afterword, wherein the challenges of translating Burger’s prose are discussed, and suggestions for reading the text are given. The translation is excellent: it keeps the meandering sentences under control, solves the problems posed by the idiosyncrasies of Swiss German, and maintains Burger’s voice.

Complicated but rewarding (just like a fine cigar), the novel Brenner takes its time to get to where it is going. - Erika Harlitz Kern

https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/brenner/

This was to be the first of a tetralogy of novels about the life of Hermann Arbogast Brenner, a not very well-disguised portrait of the author himself. Sadly just three days after it was published, he took his own life. He had started but never finished the second part. The book had a certain amount of success but then, as all too often happens to Swiss German literary works, it faded away. We should be very grateful that the excellent Archipelago and translator Adrian Nathan West have made it available in English.

I read a brief review of the book and the reviewer complained that not much happens. Well, I suppose that not much happens in Proust or Joyce but, as in this book, a lot does happen if you read the book carefully. My only surprise on reading it was that I had not heard of the author before and, after reading it, that it really was a first-class book.

Hermann Arbogast Brenner descends from a tobacco family but, as he will later explain, because his grandfather foolishly died at sixty-one instead of eighty-one, the firm passed to another branch of the family and our hero’s father, instead of being a tobacco magnate, was an insurance inspector. The firm is now in the hands of Hermann’s his second cousin, Johann Caspar Brenner. Hermann gets on well with Johann. Indeed Johann gives him a generous pension and also a seemingly unlimited supply of the finest cigars.

Yes, this book is about cigars as much as anything else. You will learn far more than you ever wanted to about the whole tobacco business: the history, the crop, the harvesting, the processing, the types of tobacco, the huge amount of cigar varieties, cigars vs cigarettes, social customs concerning tobacco products, even the role of tobacco after sex in French films and a lot more. Hermann may never have been very much directly involved in the tobacco business but he has a huge knowledge of it and is an an enthusiastic smoker. His only wish was to be a passionate cigarier. - The Modern Novel

Read more here: https://www.themodernnovel.org/europe/w-europe/switzerland/hermann-burger/brenner/

Hermann Burger, Lokalbericht, 1970-1972/2016

The Swiss writer Hermann Burger (1942–1989) wrote his first novel between 1970 and 1972, but it remained unpublished during his lifetime. The typewritten text is entitled "Local Report" and is now part of Burger's estate, along with its numerous preliminary stages. The aim of the research project is to reconstruct the genesis of this novel within 3 years and to make the result available online in cooperation with the Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH), University of Cologne as a text-genetic first edition in electronic form as well as the editorially developed version to publish the transcription in book form.  

Lokalbericht is Hermann Burger's first novel, written in 1970 but only posthumously published in 2016 (and online). It is basically a two-part novel; there is a short (five page) third part, but it functions essentially as a postscript (and neatly offers an explanation for why the novel was not published when Burger (more or less) completed it).

Lokalbericht begins with narrator Günter Frischknecht, a PhD student in literature, embarking on a -- this -- novel. He begins with the title, the novel beginning:

Lokalbericht – den Titel, das Schwierigste an einem Buch, habe ich schon. Fehlt mir nur noch der Roman.

['Local Report' -- I already have the title, the hardest part of a book. Now, I'm just missing the novel.]

As this already suggests, this will very much be a novel about writing a novel. With its protagonist whose name clearly echoes that of the Magister Ludi of Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (he is a fresh- (i.e. new-)Knecht) -- a work (and game) that is almost immediately alluded to --, Lokalbericht also promises to be ambitious in its reach, an attempt to show what literature can do (even as also its title promises a closely circumscribed focus, a very localized report).

Frustrated by the academic approach to literature, Frischknecht/Burger is looking to move beyond it -- albeit, much of the time, still from within: among the characters he engages with through much of the text is his doctoral advisor, Professor Kleinert; among the first things he does is suggest to Kleinert a new subject for his dissertation: fed up with interpretations of works that claim to know better than its author what a given novel is about, he figures why bother with basing interpretation on an actual novel in the first place and suggests writing an interpretation of an invented one. (His advisor is not amused.)

Exposition 'against interpretation' is just one of the novel's themes and purposes -- nicely realized in one of the novel's more vividly imagined scenes that involves an actual demonstration against interpretation, the poets rising up against it, with a whole canon's worth of long-suffering writers paraded out and, for example:

Rilke brach unter der Last der Fehlinterpretationen nieder und musste gepflegt werden; Hauptmann hetzte weiße Mäuse auf uns; Novalis leuchtete mit einer Taschenlampe schamlos in die unio mystica

[Rilke collapsed under the load of misinterpretations and had to be tended to; Hauptmann whipped up white mice against us; Novalis shamelessly shone ino the unio mystica with a flashlight]

Lokalbericht is a novel of a young author trying to figure out how to write a novel. As Frischknecht, the author moves back and forth into his own narrative; occasionally, even the first person voice is not sufficient and he addresses the reader even more directly and intimately, in 'letters to the reader'. Yet the layers of explanation he offers seem meant as much for him, as he actively explores what he is doing, and what he can do.

Even the actual writing-process -- the typing of the manuscript -- becomes subject-matter, Frischknecht describing the acquisition of not one but two typewriters, replacements for the old 'midwife' of so many of his poems, and their potential; among the pleasures of the first-rate edition of the novel and the superb website-presentation is being pointed to and able to see the different typefaces as Burger did indeed purchase said typewriters at this point in the (writing of) the text, suggesting also just how metafictional this exercise is. (There's even a photograph of Burger at work on the novel in front of his Hermes Media 3, one hand resting on a copy of Günter Grass' The Tin Drum, as if for reässurance.)

The chapters of the first part mainly explore, in a variety of ways, the literary, an attempt by the narrator to figure out purpose and possibilities. Among the things Frischknecht acknowledges is:

Angst, Angst habe ich natürlich, sonst würde ich nicht schreiben, Angst vor drei möglichen Existenzformen: Lehrer, Schriftsteller, Kritiker, Angst insgesamt vor einem Leben mit Literatur, für die Literatur.

[Fear, naturally I feel fear. Otherwise I wouldn't write. Fear of three possible forms of existence: teacher, author, critic. Fear, all in all, of a life with literature, in literature. ]

He can't imagine the life of a teacher, something he worries he might be reduced to. Other significant recurring characters warn of the dangers of the other alternatives: aside from the academic, Professor Kleinert, there's the critic Felix Neidthammer (a hint of jealousy in that family name, 'Neid hamma') -- at best (or worst) an interpreter of the literary whose directions for reviewing (a list is provided) are an author's worst nightmare -- or the bookseller Laubschad, who can barely stand anyone buying a volume from his store and does little but lose himself in the constant stream of books coming his way.

Reading is a central concern in Lokalbericht; in many ways it is more of a concern to the narrator than writing. Academia has shown him the dangers of reading being reduced solely to interpretation, while the critic Neidthammer's approach -- meant for a wider audience -- seems little better. At one point, in a late letter to the reader, Frischknecht describes the institute 'Legissima', which will take unwanted reading off your hands and do it for you (the service also then providing summary sentences for conversation-purposes, formulas that allow the non-reader to spout wisely about said book(s)).

As Frischknecht warns -- again in a letter addressed directly to the reader --:

Lesen ist gefährlich, viel gefährlicher als Schreiben. Deshalb wird je länger desto mehr geschrieben und immer weniger gelesen. Sie allein sind die Helden der Literatur, wenn es in der Literatur noch Helden geben darf.

[Reading is dangerous, much more dangerous than writing. That's why more and more is being written, and less and less read. You alone are the heroes of literature -- if literature can still have heroes.]

In looking for an ideal, Frischknecht hits upon the local editor for the daily newspaper: not only a secure writing position but one that offers a steady flow of work and a large readership, the work disposable but also covering the significant. The localized and specific of course also appeal to him -- and in the second part of the novel, roughly the second half, he offers a much less wide-ranging narrative, focused closely on place (the town of Aarau) and one event.

While the first part is untitled, the second part is presented as: 'The Celebration, or so-called reality' ('Das Fest, oder die sogenannte Wirklichkeit') -- suggesting that maybe he isn't quite going into it (or didn't come out of it) with quite the desired confidence, the presentation in literary form of reality. The focus is an annual youth-celebration; Frischknecht specifically recalls his eighteen-year-old self, and the crush he had on local dentist's daughter Isabelle von Arx -- an unfulfilled longing explaining also the repeated references to dentally-related dreams and fantasies, as well as additional possible interpretations thereof, a variation on purely literary interpretation.

The final part sees Neidthammer critique and comment on Frischknecht's novel, and his attempt at capturing the real. 'I wouldn't write this novel yet', he suggests to Frischknecht, in an amusing out that Burger wholeheartedly embraced: let it lie for one, or two, or ten years he suggests, there's no need to rush to publication. Distance is the best corrective, Neidthammer suggests, in a world where too much is flooded unthinkingly onto the market.

The conclusion is, of course, all the more poignant and convincing given the fate of the novel, as Burger did indeed not publish it, and it lay dormant for decades. It was, however, certainly worth resurrecting: Lokalbericht is not just a clever novel that considers what literature can do and its place in the modern world, but also an impressive display of writing. Yes, there are elements of apprentice-work here, experimentation with form and style -- but Burger already displays a very confident touch and style. His command of language, and the way he plays with it, alone make the novel worthwhile; beyond that, it's a whole lot of fun too, as Burger is a gifted comic writer.

It's worth noting, too, that the edition of this work is exemplary, with useful (and in-depth) supporting material and commentary, complemented further by the superb website, a great example of what can be done online to enhance the reading and study of a literary work. - M.A.Orthofer

https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/suisse/burgerh.htm