Tônu Õnnepalu | Border State / 2000

borders without borders

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tônu Õnnepalu Border State, translated from the Estonian by Madli Puhvel (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2000)

 

The narrator of Õnnepalu's excellent short novel Border State claims to live in a world without borders or where borders are meaningless. Born in the so-called border state of Estonia, which shares actual borders with Russia and Latvia and speaks a language similar to that of Finland, the narrator tells the story of his life while in Paris in halting French. "All geography is just a dream, a fantasy," he claims. "In reality, all countries have become imaginary deserts of ruins where crowds of nomads roam from one attraction to the other, sweeping over nations, skipping like fleas from continent to continent." But in truth he is deluded, a delusion responsible for his murdering his wealthy male lover.

     For the contrite and philosophic narrator of Border State encounters "borders" almost wherever he goes, and actual blockades in his attempts to blend into and be assimilated into the new European society he encounters. His own past, lived in the dark and bleak cold of the Estonian world, has also imbued him with a sense of deprivation, particularly during the Soviet control and occupation of his country. Although neither narrator or author speak of politics, it is clear that the years of hardship have taken their toll on him and his people; like Péter Nádas's character in his great novel A Book of Memories, the experience of a closed world of secrecy and fear have transformed utterly the people suffering those conditions. While he can only embrace the wealth and beauty of the Paris shops and homes, and he often speaks negatively of his birthplace, there is also a great love and longing for his country. His inability to be express this longing and embrace this love further accentuates his own consciousness of difference and cripples his abilities to openly love anything or anyone. Raised by a "grandmother" who was really his mother's stepmother from Poland, the narrator has grown to adulthood surrounded by old age and imminent death. He and his lover alike speak of his homeland as if it were a strange outpost to which no sane person could want to return, and that rejection translates into a personal one as well. In short, he is himself a border state, a man who both hates and loves his own past, who desires the west but recognizes its often hollow and crass aspects. As he tells his story to Angelo—an imagined stranger, an angel, an other self—he exists in a condition between sanity and madness, innocence and absolute guilt. Just as his credit card runs out, so too does his spiritual "credit," and he has no choice but to return to the desolate and cold world which has made him.

     Õnnepalu's short work is a powerful statement of a condition that many a victim of imposed physical and emotional deprivation must suffer: a self that denies itself all the joys of life, a self so deeply in pain that it can only seek to destroy its own being.

 

San Francisco, 2000

Mati Unt | Things in the Night / 2006

singing the body electric

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mati Unt Things in the Night (Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2006)

 

The Estonian writer Mati Unt published his fiction Öös on asju in 1990, and Dalkey Archive has just released an English translation by Eric Dickens of this masterwork, Things in the Night.

     Rather than a novel, the work might be described as a kind of loosely knit fictional journal covering a certain period of the author/narrator’s life and Estonian history. The central figure undergoes a series of rather unpleasant and interrelated events, all connected in some way with his secret hobby, a passion for electricity. And, indeed, the fiction holds together like a series of positive and negative ions ready to take on an electric charge. There are approximately eight “events” that make up the substance of this book.

      Unt begins with sections from an uncompleted novel focused on a young, disaffected Estonian (not unlike himself) who has decided that instead of committing suicide he will endeavor to perform an immediate deed that will wake up the world and, possibly, make it temporarily a better place. Determined to blow up a small electrical station in Liikola, the character, we perceive, is a comic one, who recognizing his own ridiculousness, still hopes, as he puts it, to at least go out “with a bang. Or at least make a fool of myself, such a great fool of myself, such a fool that people would snicker for a hundred years to come… The man wanted to blow up machines here in Northern Europe, wanted to become a new Luddite, a new Herostratus: naïve, but justified in his actions; crazy, but interesting, banal, but a man of his time….” The figure, however, falls to sleep instead, and upon awaking, realizes just that the plan alone is perhaps enough. He throws his rucksack full of weapons into a river and returns home. So too does the author realize that he has no novel to write. The book is left halfway finished—although part of it is published in a local newspaper.

    The second “event” is the author’s encounter with a young woman, Susie, who with the narrator leaves a party and freely gives herself in sex, proclaiming the next morning that she is determined to have a child with him. The narrator is appalled and quickly escapes what he sees as the woman’s “assault.”     

    In a third such “event,” a woman delivers to the narrator 100 or so cacti, evidently moving in with them for a period of time. This woman remains quite shadowy throughout the book, but apparently the narrator has a longer relationship with her; clearly the cacti remain in his possession.

     A fourth “event” occurs as the hero determines to go mushroom hunting, even though he knows clearly it is not yet the right time of year. In the forest where he has been left by a taxi, he becomes impossibly lost, and, more and more disoriented as he proceeds, he nearly gives up. Suddenly other hikers appear, and ultimately he finds his way back to Tallinn, recognizing that he is near the home of his friend, the noted Estonian explorer, documentary author and filmmaker, Lennart Meri (who, in the real world, would ultimately become the Foreign Minister of Estonia in the period between the fall of the Soviet Republic and Estonian freedom in 1990-1991). The pleasant conversation between himself and Meri is interrupted by the appearance of a gnome-like shaman, an old woman patiently sitting in a nearby chair. Upon leaving this noted figure’s house, the narrator hides, witnessing the appearance of two other such old women, dressed in black. As he waits even longer, another seems to appear—the mystery of which sends him running off.

     On his way home, his taxi is stopped by the police who have cordoned off a street where, it appears, they have captured a cannibal who has been the subject of various stories passing throughout the city for months. The narrator observes the cannibal as he sits on Yablochkov Street, his hands tied behind his back.

     A visit from an old school friend, Tissen, results in a long series of monologues about problems facing the world and, in particular, Estonia. Although the narrator attempts to enter the one-sided conversation, he is quickly shut up, as he is forced to listen to vague descriptions of Tissen’s scientific project and his threats of “something big to come.”

     On New Year’s Day, the narrator’s birthday, the city suddenly loses its power and for that day and the next there is a ghastly silence over the city as a cold storm blows through. The city remains without heat or light. The narrator leaves his home, eventually, in the ice-cold air, encountering another being who tells him of events—including the Communist party’s attempts to solve the crisis. As the narrator returns home, he encounters a vision of Susie on the stairwell, now a kind of feminine deity who cuts off his head. He awakens in a hospital, having suffered erysipelas or “rose-face,” an infection that spreads through the lymphatic vessels resulting in streaking of the face, fever, chills and pain.

     The narrator is later told that the power failure was due to his friend Tissen’s “Conscience” machine, which overloaded the transformers and might have caused an outage over the whole of Europe. Because of his own writings about just such a figure and his friendship with Tissen, the narrator is suspected of being involved with Tissen’s acts, but ultimately is found innocent—innocent of knowledge and act.

       If these “events” seem unrelated and fragmentary, they are presented as such. What connects them is a series of recurring images, themes, and issues that create within the text a kind of ‘Ring Cycle”-like coherency: images of pigs, mushrooms, cacti, destructive and disenchanted beings, darkness and light, and all things connected with electricity from “the body electric” of Whitman to lightning and other electric discharges, fields of electrical forces, the “electric” relations between human beings, etc. There is, indeed, a kind of energy to this book that is not unlike that of the “Ring Cycle,” the Walsung-like Estonian folk desperately seeking out the “ring” in the form of the power of electricity, with all of its positive and extremely negative consequences, the narrator serving as a kind of oafish Siegfried—a hero without a true battle to fight.

     But what most strikes the reader of this fiction is not so much the events I have outlined above, but the relationship between those events, the often comic and yet terrifyingly consequential effects of the seeming series of plots, not one of which is complete in itself.  A novel is begun and left unfinished; a woman desires a child from a man who believes the world is already overpopulated; a man is lost and then found; a great world figure is perhaps consorting with magic; an enemy of the people is captured; a scientist reveals some of his mad secrets; a dire catastrophe is narrowly averted. Like a series of outlines for various fictions, Unt’s “events” become fascinating because of their multiple linkings, the numerous possibilities of meaning: there is no one solution, no one meaning proffered.

     Unlike Wagner’s great series of operatic events, moreover, Unt’s work ends in a sort of redemption, as the light plays across the simple beauty of the landscape. Despite the desire and need of humans to get involved in some way in the various events of the day—small and large, comic and tragic—there is also a Candide-like possibility of tending one’s own garden. “We could be as free as pigs who ran in the fields. Those were beautiful years, beautiful autumn days.”

      In this fascinating recounting of the dark final years of Estonia’s Communist rule, we recognize that Unt had an enormous talent for revealing the human side of history, and it is sad to know that he died this past August at the age of 61.   

 

Los Angeles, November 28, 2005

(Reprinted from The American Book Review, vol. 27, no. 4 (May/June 2006)

 

Jane Bowles | In the Summer House / 1954

the necessary remedy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jane Bowles In the Summer House (New York: Random House, 1954)

 

It was the year of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, the year that saw the first color television set, the great flood in the North Sea and “great” tornadoes in Michigan (the storms killing more than 200 people). The Platters and The Four Tops began their musical careers. The year saw the deaths of two great theater legends, Eugene O’Neill and Lee Shubert (one of the three legendary Shubert brothers).  Broadway saw productions of Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and Leonard Bernstein’s Wonderful Town. I was six years of age. Despite all these facts and my long-standing conviction that the 1950s is today a highly misunderstood decade—more sophisticated than we imagine it today—I am still trying to comprehend what it must have been like to encounter Jane Bowles’ play that year of 1953, which ran for only 55 performances on Broadway.

 

    The play actually had a history that went back to the late 1940s. Bowles’ friend Oliver Smith evidently had been trying to convince Jane to write a play for several years, and in 1946 and 1947, in Vermont and Paris, she wrote much of the play, the first act of which was published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1947. In 1951 the play was performed at the Hedgerow Theater in Moylan, Pennsylvania, with Miriam Hopkins in the lead. Just before the Broadway production, Jane’s husband Paul came from Morocco to New York and wrote music for the work, seeing it through rehearsals and production.

     How could actors and audiences of that time be prepared for such a work? Bowles’ writing is so original that it is hard to compare it with any other writer of the day—or perhaps even now. The expressionist and fantastic aspects of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire might be described as the work closest in tone to Bowles’ play. Williams, in fact, was a close friend of Jane’s. Bowles’ work, however, is far more comically surreal than even the “campiest” of Blanche’s observations in Williams’s 1947 production.

     If Paul Bowles is to be believed, it is clear that the lead actor of the play, the great Judith Anderson, did not know what to make of the character. “Who am I? Who am I supposed to be?” she often asked in her frustrated interruptions of rehearsals. Evidently even the onstage psychoanalyst could not answer her. No one seemed to understand what the play was about.

    Bowles herself clearly wanted actors that could play their roles in the grand manner of highly theatrical performance. She hand-selected both Judith Anderson for the role of Mrs. Eastman Cuevas and the divine Mildred Dunnock for Mrs. Constable. A young actor named James Dean was rejected for the lesser role of Lionel because he was too “normal.”

     For Bowles narrative does not function in a traditional manner. There is no straightforward “plot” to this play, nor any of the tightly knit interconnecting patterns of scenes and acts that make up most so-called Broadway plays. Indeed the set changes in every scene of Act One—as it moves from a garden in Southern California to the beach and back to the garden—and Act Two, which occurs in the nearby popular restaurant. The characters shift focus throughout, as the major figure of Act I disappears—along with numerous other characters, including husband, sister-in-law, her daughter, and servants—from the very center of the play. Casual figures such as Lionel, whom we first encounter carrying an advertising placard displaying Neptune, become central characters. A young girl who appears briefly in two scenes (becoming a victim of either accident or murder) is “replaced” by her mother, who ultimately becomes perhaps the central figure in the play. A restaurant worker—Jean Stapleton in the original production—is later introduced, becoming an important voice of the second act. In short, the play moves forward through a near structureless series of “surprises,” twists, and turns in characters, plot, and meaning.

       It is the emotional states of its figures that drive this work forward—and, at times, backward. Act One establishes the central character’s role and symbolic position immediately as Gertrude Eastman Cuevas stands upon the balcony of her beach home calling to her daughter below : “Are you in the summer house?....Are you in the summer house?” wherein her daughter indeed has sequestered herself. Although she is front and center in the scene, Mrs. Eastman Cuevas is equally removed from all, even from the man whom she admits she may marry, Mr. Solares, who soon enters with sister, her daughter, and servants in tow. The comical picnic that follows—with Solares and family in the garden, Gertrude on the balcony, and Molly hidden away—sets the tone of the entire work: absurdity, imperiousness, humility, and complete acceptance of all of these are its matter.

    Solares, the courtier of the haughty Mrs. Eastman Cuevas, politely attempts to present the strange scene as one of normality, while his sister, Esperanza, crudely pokes holes in the pretense of both. When Mrs. Eastman Cuevas expresses her love of the ocean, Esperanza declares that she “hates it.” When Gertrude (believing her first husband was not sufficiently interested in his job) asks Solares if he likes his work, Esperanza interrupts: “He don’t like no business—he likes to stay home and sleep—and eat.” Later, upon Gertrude’s disapproval of such a heavy meal in the middle of the day, the overweight Esperanza quickly catalogues the heavy breakfasts and lunches she and her family consume: “For breakfast: chocolate and sugar bread: for lunch: soup, beans, eggs, rice, roast pork with potatoes and guava paste…Next day: soup, eggs, beans, rice, chicken with rice and guava paste—other day: soup, eggs, beans, rice, stewed meat, roasted baby pig and guava paste. Other day: soup, rice, beans, grilled red snapper, roasted goat meat and guava paste.” So much for normality!

     Enter Lionel and friends bearing placards of Neptune and a mermaid to advertise the local restaurant, The Lobster Bowl. Molly, called out of her hideaway to give them water, is delighted by the marvel of their costumes, and Lionel, clearly attracted to her, gives her a little plastic lobster as a gift. As if the stage were not filled enough as it was with its strange assortment of characters, Gertrude’s new lodger, Vivian, suddenly appears. She is as enthusiastic and excitable as Esperanza has been sarcastically honest. As quickly as she is whisked away into the house, her mother, Mrs. Constable, appears, worried about her overwrought daughter’s mental health.

     In short, within a single scene Bowles has spilled 14 characters onto the stage—all but one in the play—expressing their various emotional states as if midway through a grand opera. And, in this sense, no further scenes can quite compare with the play’s first. The rest of the work, scene by scene, explores the various relations between these bigger-than-life figures.

    Scene two presents Molly one month later, temporarily out of hiding, as she encounters the vivacious and avaricious Vivian skillfully attempting to take her place in the hearts of both Gertrude and Lionel. The scene ends with Gertrude, Solares and his extended family, and Mrs. Constable in search of her beloved “bird.” The audience can only suspect what—through her slightly hysterical interrogations of her daughter—Gertrude clearly also suspects, that Molly has pushed Vivian over the cliff.

     Scene three, one month later, presents the aftermath (celebration is an incorrect word) of the double weddings of Gertrude and her daughter. As the women each prepare to leave their homes and face separation, with neither one seeming to perceive any future with her new husband, the dramatic attention shifts to the drunken Mrs. Constable, who, with her daughter’s death and no other purpose in life, has stayed on in the beach community. The interchange between these strong women, where Mrs. Constable expresses her preference for the sharp-tongued truth-teller Mrs. Lopez over the imposing bitch-liar she perceives in Mrs. Eastman Cuevas, presents a stunning encounter between a being who struggles to keep in control and another who has freed herself from nearly all constraints. It is as comical as it is shocking.

    Act II, made up of two scenes, is nearly emptied of the first act’s dramatic force. The Lobster Bowl, where Lionel works, has become merely another “summer house” for Molly, as she passes the time with card games and reading and rereading her mother’s letters from Mexico. The witty interchanges between Inez, waitress in the restaurant, and Mrs. Constable are what saves these dark and dreary scenes from bringing the play to a near standstill. Yet, the play does begin to unwind, and Lionel, recognizing the need for change, suddenly becomes courageous enough to demand that he and Molly move away to St. Louis, where his brother is involved in selling barbecues. The hilarious irony of his shift from boiler to barbie is almost lost in the darkly comic, but often wise, discussions between Mrs. Constable and Molly, and the older woman’s attempts to convince her to follow Lionel, to escape the dark confines of her life.

     Molly, however, has word that her mother is returning, and she awaits her arrival with joy and consternation. Her mother’s entry and her declarations of the horrible (and to the viewer/reader, hilarious) life with the family in Mexico merely point up her selfishness. She is happy nowhere, neither on the balcony of the vine-covered beach house nor the highly peopled rooms of her husband’s abode. Now nearly powerless, she is must again find someone she can control. But just as the view of the garden was altered with her mother’s departure, so does her mother now seem changed in Molly’s perception. As her mother desperately tries to rein in her daughter by telling Mrs. Constable that Molly killed Vivian (which, interestingly enough, Mrs. Constable denies), Molly suddenly recognizes that she must escape, that she must leave with Lionel. Mrs. Eastman Cuevas, like Mrs. Constable, is left without a purpose, almost a child again herself, recalling some horrible unnamed event that we suspect was probably centered around an attempt to gain love.

     Without wishing to sound as if I have undergone too many viewings of The Wizard of Oz (a movie, I admit, I saw again quite recently), I might suggest that Bowles’s characters could be compared with the three friends of Dorothy in search of a heart (Mrs. Eastman-Cuevas), a brain (Mrs. Constable), and courage (Lionel) in order to save the young heroine from the mistakes of their lives. The poignant conversation between Mrs. Constable and Molly near the end of the play point up the problems of nearly everyone involved in Bowles’ fantastical journey.

     Warned in her mother’s letters not to dream, Molly is nearly ready to give up her life and submit again to her mother’s control. “Why shouldn’t you dream?” asks Mrs. Constable (I can hear Mildred Dunnock’s voice in the very question). “I used to waste a lot of time day-dreaming,” answers Molly. “Why shouldn’t you dream? Why didn’t she want you to?” Mrs. Constable persists. “Because she wanted me to grow up to be wonderful and strong like she is,” responds the young girl. Mrs. Constable and we, the audience, know that her mother—having abandoned all dreams—is neither wonderful nor strong. Like Vivian at the cliff, the balcony is merely a height from which one can easily fall. And so too is the ephemeral surf Mrs. Constable prefers—the foam on her face that makes her believe, momentarily, that life is beginning once more—insufficient to help one go on living. The needs of the heart and mind alone are never enough. One must have the courage to act. As Lionel puts it, the longer one puts off acting the harder it is to do so. “Suppose I kept on closing that door against the ocean every night because the ocean made me sad and then one night I went to open it and I couldn’t even find the door. Suppose I couldn’t tell it apart from the wall any more. Then it would be too late and we’d be shut in here forever once and for all.” Jane Bowles describes the necessary remedy simply as a stage direction: Molly’s flight is sudden.

    

Los Angeles, July 14, 2005