“It is true, Berta dear. Yes. Indeed. The fortress has heeded your wishes. It is speaking to you now. It speaks to you before God and the saints. They hold the keys to your redemption. Yes. Indeed. Hear us now, Berta Schrei. You have been chosen for eternal peace. I bless you: Ego te absolvo.”
Berta giggled.
“Dear Berta, you owe this to the fortress. The fortress alone listens to you. It alone loves you. It understands you. It feels what you feel. It speaks for you before God and the saints.”
Berta giggled.
AFTERWORD. On Marianne Fritz
Of all the crooked arrows in the critic’s quiver, the one labeled “genius” seems to fly most erratically. Rather than a substantive gesture of praise, in its normal application it tends to serve as an aggrandizement of the critic himself, who thereby claims the capacity to appreciate this ethereal property. Yet beyond able craftsmen of the Richard Ford stamp or crowd-pleasers whose affability calls their integrity into question, there is a class of artists whose work is so strange and extraordinary that it eschews all gradations of the good and the mediocre: genius and madness are the only descriptors adequate to its scale.
Such is the case of the Austrian novelist Marianne Fritz (1948–2007), whose work is little known outside a small but fervent circle of admirers. Praise, though scant, is neither tepid nor inconsiderable: from 1978, when she received the inaugural Robert Walser Prize for the unpublished manuscript of The Weight of Things, her first novel, to her winning the highly prestigious Franz Kafka Prize in 2001, her writing was repeatedly honored with awards and stipends. Regarding Naturgemäß1, Fritz’s unfinished magnum opus, Elfriede Jelinek commented, “It is a singular work, before which one can do nothing but stand, like a devout Muslim before the Kaaba.” W. G. Sebald also dedicated to her a section of the late poem “In Alfermée.” Here the image of Fritz working through her exhaustion, “one hand on the keys of her machine,” recalls the passage in The Rings of Saturn on the melancholy of scholars and weavers, “harnessed to the machines we have invented.”
A contrasting view was held by Thomas Bernhard, who addressed his esteemed publisher, Siegfried Unseld, with characteristic charm in 1986:
Before my departure I have had another glance at your recent publishing catastrophe: the 3,000 pages you have had printed and allowed to appear are the greatest embarrassment I have been acquainted with to this day. To print and bind over 3,000 pages of mindless proletarian trash with all the bombast of a centenary event belongs, quite frankly, in the record books: as a world record of stupidity. I am not speaking so much of the begetter of this idiocy, but of the fact that the publisher has handicapped himself by releasing this fatuous vulgarity.
The project that inspired these extremes of reverence and ridicule began with The Weight of Things, which was followed two years later by The Child of Violence and the Stars of the Romani. Whereas The Weight of Things covered the years 1945–1963, in her second novel Fritz would approach the period she saw as the key to understanding the disaster of Western civilization: the years surrounding the First World War. The action of the book centers around Kaspar Zweifel, a sensitive young man who dreams of moving away to America. In 1914 he loses his beloved and is sent away to fight for the Austro-Hungarian army in the suicidal battles on the Isonzo front in present-day Slovenia. When he returns to the village of Gnom, he takes over his father’s farm, makes a conventional marriage, and begins to complain of the “mongrelization” of the Austrian countryside. One night, drunk, he rapes a gypsy woman, and she and her community flee the area in fear of further violence. The woman returns in June of 1923 to leave Zweifel’s child in the village parish house.
The novel went nearly unnoticed. While its rancorous subject matter and its convoluted structure were unsuited to a broader readership, its failure to engage with the more self-consciously avant-garde aims of the famous Grazer Gruppe writers left it adrift with respect to Vienna’s literary establishment. Yet it proved a turning point for Fritz, for its stylistic departures and the broadening of the author’s vehemence and scope.
Only five years later, she would publish the provocatively titled Whose Language You Don’t Understand, the 3,392 page prodigy that was the object of Bernhard’s derision. It was natural that critical discussion surrounding a book of such proportions would not be confined to its literary import. Fritz’s neologisms, intentional misspellings, and readiness to violate the rules of grammar in favor of the construction of her own eccentric poetic idiom left the text unfit to be fed through the computer her publisher used to weed out errors, and her proofreader gave up after a thousand pages, saying it was impossible to distinguish mistakes from the distortions characteristic of the author’s style. Critics began to talk of classifying books by their weight, and spoke openly of the point at which they had abandoned their reading.
Whose Language You Don’t Understand is the chronicle of the Nulls, a poor family residing in Nullweg, number 0, in the village of Nirgendwo2, in June and August of 1914. Thomas K. Falk, in World Literature Today, points out that the date is significant not only for its proximity to the Great War, but also as a marker for a period in which the traditional agrarian economy gave way to industrialization, when those who had previously worked the land became a despised and neglected appendage to the modern capitalist state. It is in this book that Fritz’s partiality toward the insulted and injured becomes explicit: the patriarch, Josef Null, is killed in a worker’s demonstration, as is his third son, Josef II; one of his brothers, the Dostoyevskian August, is a farmhand and an anarchist and murders the landowning parents of his girlfriend Wilhelmine; another becomes a deserter and is chased down by the military and shot. Their mother is confined to the fortress first mentioned in The Weight of Things, and their home is destroyed, lest it serve as a remembrance of the possibility of resistance.
Eleven years later, Naturgemäß began to appear: five volumes in 1996, another five in 1998, just shy of 7,000 pages reproduced directly from Marianne Fritz’s typescript. Set largely in Przemyśl, an “eternal death-territory” in southeastern Poland, it examines the lives of many of the characters in her previous books over the war years of 1914–15. Her publisher found setting the book’s first part impossible; the printed version consists of a bound facsimile of the typescript. At first, Fritz limited herself to employing a variety of fonts, spacings, margins, and unusual typographical markers, but when she learned how the book was to be released, she began to incorporate drawings, maps, coded marks meant to establish links between various characters and situations, and copies of the innumerable notecards — her second memory, in the words of her partner Otto Dünser — that she used to keep track of the hundreds of characters and place names and thousands of events that made up her novel. (One critic complained the reader was forced to turn the book back and forth like a steering wheel.) In her refusal of unilinear narrative, Fritz had largely dispensed with the traditional paragraph; text was often inverted or written at an angle, or a central letter would form the axis for three words that would be based on it, their letters curved to fit inside a drawing that appears to represent an oblique phase of the waning moon.
The comparison with Joyce is both obvious and inapposite, and has been made by critics within and beyond the German-speaking world. Against the clear dissimilarities in tone, subject matter, and working method stands the male genius as the archetype against which the female author is to be compared. If she passes muster, she may be crowned a “female Joyce”; if she falls short, her work is disqualified as an extravagance. A further injustice to a female writer of such staggering ambition is the lack of a feminine analogue to the stereotype of the “mad genius”: women’s madness cannot invoke the dignity of the late Nietzsche or Thomas Chatterton, but is classed with the aberrations of hysterics and cat ladies.