Josef Winkler
Författare till Natura Morta: A Roman Novella
Om författaren
Foto taget av: Photo by Manfred Werner / Wikimedia Commons
Verk av Josef Winkler
Flowers for Jean Genet (Studies in Austrian Literature, Culture, and Thought Translation Series) (1994) 19 exemplar
Das wilde Kärnten: Menschenkind. Der Ackermann aus Kärnten. Muttersprache. Drei Romane (suhrkamp taschenbuch) (1995) 12 exemplar
Die Realität so sagen, als ob sie trotzdem nicht wär oder Die Wutausbrüche der Engel (2011) 6 exemplar
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Allmänna fakta
- Födelsedag
- 1953-03-03
- Kön
- male
- Nationalitet
- Austria
- Bostadsorter
- Klagenfurt, Austria
- Yrken
- Schriftsteller
- Organisationer
- Grazer Autorinnen Autorenversammlung
- Priser och utmärkelser
- Georg Büchner Preis (2008)
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Recensioner
Review published in Numéro Cinq: http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2014/02/02/the-flood-of-recollected-images-begins-...
Until recently, Anglophone readers wanting to investigate the fiction of Austrian writer Josef Winkler faced only one option: the exacting and elliptical novel The Serf (1987/1997; trans. Michael Mitchell). Published in English by Ariadne Press, The Serf joined Winkler's Flowers for Jean Genet (1992/1997; trans. Michael Roloff), his biographical and readerly homage to the French writer Jean Genet, whose influence is felt throughout Winkler's own fiction, as the only works available in English
But the reader requires an immersive education in Winkler before undertaking The Serf. And even Flowers for Jean Genet, while critical to comprehending Winkler's aesthetic—his queer appropriation of high camp, religious and perverse imagery; and his homoeroticism (I would suggest, from Ronald Firbank as well)—fails to give the reader a cogent glimpse into his creative output, an oeuvre for which Winkler has garnered many accolades including the Alfred Döblin Award in 2001, the Grand Austrian State Prize in 2007, and the Georg Büchner Prize in 2008.
Luckily, two additional fictions by Winkler were published in the past year by Contra Mundum, When the Time Comes (1998/2013) and Natura Morta: A Roman Novella (2001/2014), both translated assiduously by Adrian West, who, to use his own words (as applied to Winkler's prose), is able to render the painstaking "visual detail" and "attention to the musicality of phrases" found in the original German texts with a skill that honors Winkler's writing as a "writing-against."
Winkler eschews a traditional plot; instead, narrative fragments work together by means of repetition to complicate his vision of modern life. But single scenes can also be understood on their own terms, if one considers the images and their relation to the overall thematics of the text.
Subtitled A Roman Novella, Natura Morta is less a novella than a series of poetic vignettes, a succession of glimpses of life around the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele in Rome where various figures appear, disappear, and then reappear: people "festooned" with commodified and locally popular "colorful plastic pacifiers"; "two teenaged Moroccan rent boys"; and a man whose "eyelids and eyelashes [are] painted black with mascara" and who is taunted with the homophobic "Sida!" There are plenty of "bloody chicken heads and yellow chicken feet" in the marketplace juxtaposed with iconographic images like "a doll of the Christ child" parked in bowl surrounded by "dried pineapples, dates, and figs" and "the Virgin Mary ... look[ing] over the fingertips of her clasped hands toward a box of Mon Chéri chocolates." These images constitute a fixed yet fluid tableau, a natura morta, a still life echoing its literal translation: dead nature.
Winkler is primarily concerned with the fig vendor's son Piccoletto, "[a] black-haired boy, around sixteen years old, whose long eyelashes nearly grazed his freckle-studded cheeks." Piccoletto's function is to join the seemingly disparate images of the city and its inhabitants in a way that allows Winkler to explore the religious history of Rome, particularly as it deviates from contemporary vice and greed. "Sacred kitsch" litters the city; the text works by juxtaposing religious iconography and a marketplace saturated with "one crucified Lord after another," juxtapositions that in turn inform and reflect the distorted sexualities, the myriad "perversions" and vices paraded before the reader and the young, impressionable Piccoletto: from "[t]wo nuns ... lick[ing] the chocolate toes of an ice cream bar shaped like a child's foot" to Michelangelo's Pietà, "framed with bulletproof glass," an icon fetishized by "[a] toothless Pole" with the desire "to clasp the mother of God in her fingers."
Winkler's imagistic prose shows debts to the cinema. In one scene, Piccoletto spies a videocassette of "the film Sciuscià by Vittorio de Sica ... [a]top the apricots and white peaches" carried in a plastic bag by an anonymous woman on a streetcar. This mention of de Sica's first major work as a director—filmed in 1946 and translated in English as Shoeshine—reveals how images in Winkler function similarly to those in a neorealist film; not only do many of the series of images contain potent mixtures of the sacred and the profane, but they overvalue the image itself (in its repetition and in its recurrence) in ways also reminiscent of auteurs such as Michelangelo Antonioni.
Winkler has likened his authorial role to that of a human camera[2]: he would undoubtedly have had Antonioni's famous montage of images in mind—I am thinking of Antonioni's L'Eclisse (1962), with its stress on images as storytelling vehicles—when compiling his own scenes of natura morta. Consider the following two passages:
Even more crucial to Winkler's sexual vision of modernity is Piccoletto's interest in soliciting both male and female gazes, and how he can arouse and also express sexual interest across the gulf of gender. Winkler's aesthetic construction of modern-day Rome conjoins sex and the city, forcing individuals to confront the past in a present whose greed, lusts, and sensual pleasures—e.g., "Frocio wrapped fistfuls of ice chips in tin foil, pressing them into the form of a phallus, held the cold fetish at his hips, and squeezed the ice chips out of the tin foil in front of the fig vendor's son, as though releasing kilos of ejaculate"—contrast with the iconographic and architectural reminders of latter days: "a stone phallus" in the Piazza San Vittorio the scene where an ambulance "pick[s] up a young drug addict, passed out and foaming at the mouth"; "the exit of the papal tombs" of Saint Peter's Cathedral "leaking blood in the filthy streets," streets littered with pages of the Cronaco vera, "in which tragedies from throughout Italy—illustrated with hearses, eyewitnesses, chesty women, and Mafiosi...—are reported every week."
In contrast with Natura Morta's portraits of city life, Winkler's When the Time Comes takes rural Austria as its focus (Winkler's native Carinthia). But like Natura Morta, When the Time Comes centers on a young boy whose intellectual and sexual maturation are influenced by his attempts to compile the stories of those who have come before him. In When the Time Comes, the storyteller is "the bone collector" Maximilian, whose "black bone stock ... smell[s] of decay" and yet, because it contains the bones of the dead, has within it a history to decipher, record, fathom. Maximilian is Winkler's anchor point; other characters' stories are woven into his "clay vessel" of bones, creating a portrait of life in rural Austria spanning generations.
The town's pastor has erected a terrifying painting representing God's judgment at the town center, an icon that oversees the lives and deaths of the townspeople in a "town built in the form of a cross." It depicts a man "who dragged a life-sized statue of Jesus through the forest before the Second World War and threw it over a waterfall," causing Jesus to lose both arms; the painting shows the man's retribution in life, since he "lost his own arms in Hitler's war," and after, in the fires of Hell. The often vindictive Old Testament God's relationship with his flock, one built on fear as much as veneration, is a paradigm that repeats at the secular and personal levels. One is never free from one's history, and even rewriting history, placing bones upon bones—as is the bone collector's iterative, inscriptive task—cannot pry the individual from his or her community and the repressive social and religious structures of the past.
Winkler inverts the famous "begat" passages in the book of Genesis, opening the sections of When the Time Comes with his characters' often tragicomic deaths rather than with their births; because of this, their lives seem to take on a more purposeful and even allegorical meaning. For example,
Most of the narrative in When the Time Comes, however, is taken up with the story of two boys, Jonathan and Leopold, names that allude to religious and popular examples of queerness—the first, a reference to Jonathan's homoerotic relationship with David in the book of Samuel, and the second recalling Leopold of the Leopold and Loeb murder scandal in 1920s Chicago. It is typical of Winkler to fuse extremes: love alongside fear, pleasure alongside pain, and loyalty alongside greed: in this case, Jonathan and Leopold achieve an extreme jouissance combining pleasure (mutual masturbation) with pain (autoerotic asphyxiation):
W. G. Sebald notes that Winkler's use of repetition points to something personal in his work, an act of self-definition that requires sifting through and making sense of one's origins:
"Josef Winkler's entire, monomaniac oeuvre ... is actually an attempt to compensate for the experience of humiliation and moral violation by casting a malevolent eye on one's own origins." If repetition is the sole way to work through trauma, as Freud has suggested, the rural portraits in When the Time Comes suggest that trauma is as endemic to everyday life as is a kind of quiet joy, and the ways in which collective and personal traumas are eventually reconciled with one another are mediations intrinsically bound to the storyteller's sociocultural function.
Sebald's remarks on Winkler's work also point to a moral complicity that individuals need to recognize, one that carries the weight of the past and also points toward a future—though, just what that future constitutes is bleakly uncertain. The teleological aim of the future, as Winkler sees, points only toward death. Thus, the reader meets each character in When the Time Comes at the moment of his or her death, the narrative then working backward through the character's life. Winkler's vision privileges the figure of the artist as conduit between past origins and present traumas, interpreting "the flood of recollected images [as it] begins," but just what the artist or storyteller figure does with these "bones" is undefined, as is who will replace Maximilian when his own time comes.
Like Sebald and like his own Austrian compatriots Peter Handke, Elfriede Jelinek, and Thomas Bernhard, Winkler flags memory and history—collective and individual—as inescapable traps that affect present experience. Winkler is concerned with the individual's role in history, how it is necessary to acknowledge complicity with the past, and how one must grapple with the external forces of inhumanity, greed, and immorality and ultimately reconcile with that past. And yet, while it is essential to remember the stories of the dead, sadly, we erase all memory of them before we have had time to absorb all that they can offer us:
Until recently, Anglophone readers wanting to investigate the fiction of Austrian writer Josef Winkler faced only one option: the exacting and elliptical novel The Serf (1987/1997; trans. Michael Mitchell). Published in English by Ariadne Press, The Serf joined Winkler's Flowers for Jean Genet (1992/1997; trans. Michael Roloff), his biographical and readerly homage to the French writer Jean Genet, whose influence is felt throughout Winkler's own fiction, as the only works available in English
But the reader requires an immersive education in Winkler before undertaking The Serf. And even Flowers for Jean Genet, while critical to comprehending Winkler's aesthetic—his queer appropriation of high camp, religious and perverse imagery; and his homoeroticism (I would suggest, from Ronald Firbank as well)—fails to give the reader a cogent glimpse into his creative output, an oeuvre for which Winkler has garnered many accolades including the Alfred Döblin Award in 2001, the Grand Austrian State Prize in 2007, and the Georg Büchner Prize in 2008.
Luckily, two additional fictions by Winkler were published in the past year by Contra Mundum, When the Time Comes (1998/2013) and Natura Morta: A Roman Novella (2001/2014), both translated assiduously by Adrian West, who, to use his own words (as applied to Winkler's prose), is able to render the painstaking "visual detail" and "attention to the musicality of phrases" found in the original German texts with a skill that honors Winkler's writing as a "writing-against."
Winkler eschews a traditional plot; instead, narrative fragments work together by means of repetition to complicate his vision of modern life. But single scenes can also be understood on their own terms, if one considers the images and their relation to the overall thematics of the text.
Subtitled A Roman Novella, Natura Morta is less a novella than a series of poetic vignettes, a succession of glimpses of life around the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele in Rome where various figures appear, disappear, and then reappear: people "festooned" with commodified and locally popular "colorful plastic pacifiers"; "two teenaged Moroccan rent boys"; and a man whose "eyelids and eyelashes [are] painted black with mascara" and who is taunted with the homophobic "Sida!" There are plenty of "bloody chicken heads and yellow chicken feet" in the marketplace juxtaposed with iconographic images like "a doll of the Christ child" parked in bowl surrounded by "dried pineapples, dates, and figs" and "the Virgin Mary ... look[ing] over the fingertips of her clasped hands toward a box of Mon Chéri chocolates." These images constitute a fixed yet fluid tableau, a natura morta, a still life echoing its literal translation: dead nature.
Winkler is primarily concerned with the fig vendor's son Piccoletto, "[a] black-haired boy, around sixteen years old, whose long eyelashes nearly grazed his freckle-studded cheeks." Piccoletto's function is to join the seemingly disparate images of the city and its inhabitants in a way that allows Winkler to explore the religious history of Rome, particularly as it deviates from contemporary vice and greed. "Sacred kitsch" litters the city; the text works by juxtaposing religious iconography and a marketplace saturated with "one crucified Lord after another," juxtapositions that in turn inform and reflect the distorted sexualities, the myriad "perversions" and vices paraded before the reader and the young, impressionable Piccoletto: from "[t]wo nuns ... lick[ing] the chocolate toes of an ice cream bar shaped like a child's foot" to Michelangelo's Pietà, "framed with bulletproof glass," an icon fetishized by "[a] toothless Pole" with the desire "to clasp the mother of God in her fingers."
Winkler's imagistic prose shows debts to the cinema. In one scene, Piccoletto spies a videocassette of "the film Sciuscià by Vittorio de Sica ... [a]top the apricots and white peaches" carried in a plastic bag by an anonymous woman on a streetcar. This mention of de Sica's first major work as a director—filmed in 1946 and translated in English as Shoeshine—reveals how images in Winkler function similarly to those in a neorealist film; not only do many of the series of images contain potent mixtures of the sacred and the profane, but they overvalue the image itself (in its repetition and in its recurrence) in ways also reminiscent of auteurs such as Michelangelo Antonioni.
Winkler has likened his authorial role to that of a human camera[2]: he would undoubtedly have had Antonioni's famous montage of images in mind—I am thinking of Antonioni's L'Eclisse (1962), with its stress on images as storytelling vehicles—when compiling his own scenes of natura morta. Consider the following two passages:
A dog on its hind legs with a protuberant member snapped over and over at the small crucifix hanging from the wrist of an exhausted woman leaning with her eyes closed against the wall. A kneeling girl bumped her forearm against the thigh of a young monk holding a clear plastic bag of freshly watered cherries.And:
Aroused, staring into the girl's leg holes and sniffing at her map, the boy [Piccoletto] bit down on his tongue, coated in bits of fruit bar, then stopped as he became aware of the taste of blood filling his mouth and glanced self-consciously as the mincing red feet of the pigeons. Piccoletto stood, daubed his lip with a handkerchief, passed the city map of Rome to the girl with the words "Mille grazie!" and looked for the toilet.Winkler wants us to regard a teenaged boy, who is always "playing with his sex," as a Christ for our times, in a world comprised of tourists, clergy, tradespeople, sex workers, and drug addicts. The fragmentary glimpses of city life in Natura Morta are refracted through the sexualized consciousness of Piccoletto whose observation of two other boys "gnawing on a fig, fresh and purple" is followed up immediately by "[t]he two boys huddl[ing] together, whispering and giggling, eyeing Piccoletto's broad buttocks."
Even more crucial to Winkler's sexual vision of modernity is Piccoletto's interest in soliciting both male and female gazes, and how he can arouse and also express sexual interest across the gulf of gender. Winkler's aesthetic construction of modern-day Rome conjoins sex and the city, forcing individuals to confront the past in a present whose greed, lusts, and sensual pleasures—e.g., "Frocio wrapped fistfuls of ice chips in tin foil, pressing them into the form of a phallus, held the cold fetish at his hips, and squeezed the ice chips out of the tin foil in front of the fig vendor's son, as though releasing kilos of ejaculate"—contrast with the iconographic and architectural reminders of latter days: "a stone phallus" in the Piazza San Vittorio the scene where an ambulance "pick[s] up a young drug addict, passed out and foaming at the mouth"; "the exit of the papal tombs" of Saint Peter's Cathedral "leaking blood in the filthy streets," streets littered with pages of the Cronaco vera, "in which tragedies from throughout Italy—illustrated with hearses, eyewitnesses, chesty women, and Mafiosi...—are reported every week."
In contrast with Natura Morta's portraits of city life, Winkler's When the Time Comes takes rural Austria as its focus (Winkler's native Carinthia). But like Natura Morta, When the Time Comes centers on a young boy whose intellectual and sexual maturation are influenced by his attempts to compile the stories of those who have come before him. In When the Time Comes, the storyteller is "the bone collector" Maximilian, whose "black bone stock ... smell[s] of decay" and yet, because it contains the bones of the dead, has within it a history to decipher, record, fathom. Maximilian is Winkler's anchor point; other characters' stories are woven into his "clay vessel" of bones, creating a portrait of life in rural Austria spanning generations.
The town's pastor has erected a terrifying painting representing God's judgment at the town center, an icon that oversees the lives and deaths of the townspeople in a "town built in the form of a cross." It depicts a man "who dragged a life-sized statue of Jesus through the forest before the Second World War and threw it over a waterfall," causing Jesus to lose both arms; the painting shows the man's retribution in life, since he "lost his own arms in Hitler's war," and after, in the fires of Hell. The often vindictive Old Testament God's relationship with his flock, one built on fear as much as veneration, is a paradigm that repeats at the secular and personal levels. One is never free from one's history, and even rewriting history, placing bones upon bones—as is the bone collector's iterative, inscriptive task—cannot pry the individual from his or her community and the repressive social and religious structures of the past.
Winkler inverts the famous "begat" passages in the book of Genesis, opening the sections of When the Time Comes with his characters' often tragicomic deaths rather than with their births; because of this, their lives seem to take on a more purposeful and even allegorical meaning. For example,
Willibald, who had worked for decades in the Heraklith factory on the other bank of the Drava, was dead from long cancer. His hands in the air and his pants around his ankles, he stepped out of the bathroom and called [to his wife]: Hilde! Hilde! Help me! then fell over and died on the spot."Death is my life's theme," Winkler has stated, and its presence—impending or otherwise—is felt on every page of When the Time Comes.
Most of the narrative in When the Time Comes, however, is taken up with the story of two boys, Jonathan and Leopold, names that allude to religious and popular examples of queerness—the first, a reference to Jonathan's homoerotic relationship with David in the book of Samuel, and the second recalling Leopold of the Leopold and Loeb murder scandal in 1920s Chicago. It is typical of Winkler to fuse extremes: love alongside fear, pleasure alongside pain, and loyalty alongside greed: in this case, Jonathan and Leopold achieve an extreme jouissance combining pleasure (mutual masturbation) with pain (autoerotic asphyxiation):
The two boys tied the two ends of rope behind their ears and jumped into the emptiness, weeping and embracing, a few meters from the armless Christ who had once been rescued from a stream bed by the priest and painter of prayer cards. ... With their tongues out, their sexes stiff, their semen-flecked pants dripping urine, Jonathan in pajamas and Leopold in his quicklime-splattered bricklayer's clothes, they hung in the barn of the parish house until they were found by Jonathan's sixteen-year-old cousin...Neither the bone collector Maximilian nor the townspeople condemn the boys for their homosexuality; instead, the townspeople grumble about the senseless act itself, not its queer connotations ("those two idiots who did away with themselves together!" in "this godless village"), and Jonathan's mother Katharina grants her dead child unearthly powers, certain that he will return like the resurrected Christ to be again among his family. Whereas "[i]n death they were separable," the intermingling of "their tears, their urine, and their sperm" in life had rendered them inseparable: they can now be mourned as individuals, despite the fact that, curiously, "Leopold was buried in Jonathan's death mask."
W. G. Sebald notes that Winkler's use of repetition points to something personal in his work, an act of self-definition that requires sifting through and making sense of one's origins:
"Josef Winkler's entire, monomaniac oeuvre ... is actually an attempt to compensate for the experience of humiliation and moral violation by casting a malevolent eye on one's own origins." If repetition is the sole way to work through trauma, as Freud has suggested, the rural portraits in When the Time Comes suggest that trauma is as endemic to everyday life as is a kind of quiet joy, and the ways in which collective and personal traumas are eventually reconciled with one another are mediations intrinsically bound to the storyteller's sociocultural function.
Sebald's remarks on Winkler's work also point to a moral complicity that individuals need to recognize, one that carries the weight of the past and also points toward a future—though, just what that future constitutes is bleakly uncertain. The teleological aim of the future, as Winkler sees, points only toward death. Thus, the reader meets each character in When the Time Comes at the moment of his or her death, the narrative then working backward through the character's life. Winkler's vision privileges the figure of the artist as conduit between past origins and present traumas, interpreting "the flood of recollected images [as it] begins," but just what the artist or storyteller figure does with these "bones" is undefined, as is who will replace Maximilian when his own time comes.
Like Sebald and like his own Austrian compatriots Peter Handke, Elfriede Jelinek, and Thomas Bernhard, Winkler flags memory and history—collective and individual—as inescapable traps that affect present experience. Winkler is concerned with the individual's role in history, how it is necessary to acknowledge complicity with the past, and how one must grapple with the external forces of inhumanity, greed, and immorality and ultimately reconcile with that past. And yet, while it is essential to remember the stories of the dead, sadly, we erase all memory of them before we have had time to absorb all that they can offer us:
Tomorrow morning or the day after, they will scrape it [candlewax] off with a kitchen knife and sweep it up with the leftover flowers strewn about, then there will be no more traces of a dead man in the house, the mourning house will smell no more of rotten flowers, burnt spruce twigs, and wax candles.… (mer)
I'm trying a pretty weird double review here, but bear with me, I think it's going to work. I'm pairing this 20th century Austrian book with a twelfth century saint's life.
Winkler's book is one of the odder I've read so far this year. The first sixth consists entirely of weird and disturbing tales of horrifying folk-Catholic practices, or crimes perpetrated by the peasantry of Italy or Austria, or the far more horrifying practices of the Catholic hierarchy. They're undated, but I recognize a few of the more outrageous tales of nepotistic Renaissance popes, so I'm assuming that some of this stuff is from Winkler's own experiences in Italy and Austria, and some are from the research he very obviously did for this book. The last sixth of the book is like this, too.
In the middle, we're given to believe, is a notebook recording Winkler's wanderings around Rome, as well as some reminiscences of his childhood. This is all far more interesting than the average 'walking novel' stuff, because Winkler's looking at Rome's underclass, markets, and rent-boys (he also ingests a large volume of rent-boy semen). This is more like an author's diary than a novel. Anything goes. There's the rent-boy blowjobs, yes, but there's also a little comic novella about Winkler's landlord in Rome, who seems to think he's a respectable writer just trying to get out a novel; Winkler presents himself, of course, as the scum at the very bottom of a dry barrel. His landlord's viewpoint is probably more accurate.
All of which is to say that this isn't the kind of thing you sit down and read through in one go, anymore than you really want to sit down and read anyone's diary in one go. It's well worth dipping into, though. West's translation is very readable, there's lots of incident, and there's plenty to think about. Contra the publisher's back cover copy, and for all I know contra Winkler's own wishes, this is in not way a simple, anti-religion book. It is, rather, an unveiling of human suffering. Sometimes Catholicism contributes to that suffering. Sometimes it expresses it. Sometimes it helps to salve it.
I'm double-reviewing because the recent Penguin edition of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is actually kind of similar. Much of it consists in stories of baffling, grotesque, disturbing folk-catholic practices--with the singular difference that in The Life, those practices are rewarded immediately by God. It's also got some dismal back-cover publisher copy, though with slightly more reason. The Life is the first known instance of the "blood libel," the claim that Jewish people, e.g., kill and eat Christian babies at passover. William, we're told, was killed by Jews for nefarious Jewy reasons.
This book is almost 200 pages long, and almost none of it deals with this. It's salutary to be reminded that history can often be misused, and that's more or less what happened with this saint's life. Thomas wanted William to get canonised as a martyr. He takes the 'martyr' part of that for granted, but his description of the legal process makes it pretty obvious that this wasn't a simple "Christian community comes together to purge the Jews" situation; many of the more important members at Norwich intervene to help the Jewish community, which Thomas attributes to greed, but which any sane person can see was probably due to, you know, not being lunatics. Making it seem that this is some horrible, outdated instance of crowd insanity gets us off the hook far too easily; consider the current attitude towards Muslims in many parts of the world (not least in avowedly Muslim parts of the world), and you'll see that this "blood libel" story isn't unique to Judaiphobes.
As for the canonisation, Thomas he gathered a truly impressive and unlikely collection of miracles wrought by William. I suspect everyone in Norwich who got sick prayed to William, and some of them got better, as people do, and that let Thomas put them all in his book. The really interesting bits of these stories are the really irreverent bits: people steal parts of William's body, they steal parts of his tomb, they steal whatever they can get their hands on. Thomas himself gets in on the act, and isn't ashamed to record it here, since when he gets caught, it's just another miracle of William's. Speaking of whom: William is kind of a dick. He routinely appears to people with childish, selfish, unpleasant requests and demands. He was, we're told, twelve when he died, and even saintly dead William acts like a spoiled little turd of a twelve year old.
Blood libel aside (presumably we're all aware that that is both false and inhumanly stupid), the Catholics in Thomas's book are very much like the Catholics in Winkler's book: they're just trying to cope. Our two authors use very similar forms to show us that, albeit Winkler does so more directly, and they succeed much more often in the 12th century than they do in the 20th.… (mer)
Winkler's book is one of the odder I've read so far this year. The first sixth consists entirely of weird and disturbing tales of horrifying folk-Catholic practices, or crimes perpetrated by the peasantry of Italy or Austria, or the far more horrifying practices of the Catholic hierarchy. They're undated, but I recognize a few of the more outrageous tales of nepotistic Renaissance popes, so I'm assuming that some of this stuff is from Winkler's own experiences in Italy and Austria, and some are from the research he very obviously did for this book. The last sixth of the book is like this, too.
In the middle, we're given to believe, is a notebook recording Winkler's wanderings around Rome, as well as some reminiscences of his childhood. This is all far more interesting than the average 'walking novel' stuff, because Winkler's looking at Rome's underclass, markets, and rent-boys (he also ingests a large volume of rent-boy semen). This is more like an author's diary than a novel. Anything goes. There's the rent-boy blowjobs, yes, but there's also a little comic novella about Winkler's landlord in Rome, who seems to think he's a respectable writer just trying to get out a novel; Winkler presents himself, of course, as the scum at the very bottom of a dry barrel. His landlord's viewpoint is probably more accurate.
All of which is to say that this isn't the kind of thing you sit down and read through in one go, anymore than you really want to sit down and read anyone's diary in one go. It's well worth dipping into, though. West's translation is very readable, there's lots of incident, and there's plenty to think about. Contra the publisher's back cover copy, and for all I know contra Winkler's own wishes, this is in not way a simple, anti-religion book. It is, rather, an unveiling of human suffering. Sometimes Catholicism contributes to that suffering. Sometimes it expresses it. Sometimes it helps to salve it.
I'm double-reviewing because the recent Penguin edition of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is actually kind of similar. Much of it consists in stories of baffling, grotesque, disturbing folk-catholic practices--with the singular difference that in The Life, those practices are rewarded immediately by God. It's also got some dismal back-cover publisher copy, though with slightly more reason. The Life is the first known instance of the "blood libel," the claim that Jewish people, e.g., kill and eat Christian babies at passover. William, we're told, was killed by Jews for nefarious Jewy reasons.
This book is almost 200 pages long, and almost none of it deals with this. It's salutary to be reminded that history can often be misused, and that's more or less what happened with this saint's life. Thomas wanted William to get canonised as a martyr. He takes the 'martyr' part of that for granted, but his description of the legal process makes it pretty obvious that this wasn't a simple "Christian community comes together to purge the Jews" situation; many of the more important members at Norwich intervene to help the Jewish community, which Thomas attributes to greed, but which any sane person can see was probably due to, you know, not being lunatics. Making it seem that this is some horrible, outdated instance of crowd insanity gets us off the hook far too easily; consider the current attitude towards Muslims in many parts of the world (not least in avowedly Muslim parts of the world), and you'll see that this "blood libel" story isn't unique to Judaiphobes.
As for the canonisation, Thomas he gathered a truly impressive and unlikely collection of miracles wrought by William. I suspect everyone in Norwich who got sick prayed to William, and some of them got better, as people do, and that let Thomas put them all in his book. The really interesting bits of these stories are the really irreverent bits: people steal parts of William's body, they steal parts of his tomb, they steal whatever they can get their hands on. Thomas himself gets in on the act, and isn't ashamed to record it here, since when he gets caught, it's just another miracle of William's. Speaking of whom: William is kind of a dick. He routinely appears to people with childish, selfish, unpleasant requests and demands. He was, we're told, twelve when he died, and even saintly dead William acts like a spoiled little turd of a twelve year old.
Blood libel aside (presumably we're all aware that that is both false and inhumanly stupid), the Catholics in Thomas's book are very much like the Catholics in Winkler's book: they're just trying to cope. Our two authors use very similar forms to show us that, albeit Winkler does so more directly, and they succeed much more often in the 12th century than they do in the 20th.… (mer)
W. G. Sebald apparently described Winkler's work as monomaniacal, but whoever reported that saying to the world got it wrong. I've only read two of Winkler's books (compared to 4.5 of Sebald's) and I'm pretty sure that in fact it was Winkler describing Sebald, not the other way round. Or, at least, it should have been.
But, armed with that Sebald quote, I came into NM expecting something just like 'When the Time Comes,' a book about how we're all ultimately just bones for the bone broth pot. To be flippant, this one is more about the meat than the bones, and "meat" said in many ways: avian, bovine, porcine, piscine, amphibian (i.e., much of the book takes place in the market at Piazza Vittorio Emanuele), old man, teenage girl, teenage boy, young child, nun, edible, sexual, and above all, meat worthy to be worshiped (much of the book takes place in the vicinity of St Peter's).
Like 'When the Time Comes,' NM is formally interesting--it is a still life, inasmuch as it starts off simply describing person after person, object after object. But where a lesser writer would have stuck with the conceit, Winkler fairly quickly gives up on it, and starts building character, and even, in a small way, plot--because literature, for better or worse, involves time passing. The language is repetitive, in a Bernhardian (i.e., it provides rhythm) and a Gaddisian (i.e., quasi-Homeric motifs are used to alert the reader to the identity of the person in question, and the details involved are astonishing) way.
Also, this was surprisingly heart-breaking and beautiful, whereas 'When the Time Comes' was unsurprisingly bleak and depressing. I'm glad to know that, despite the fact that we're all just overgrown children playing with our dummies, Josef thinks life is more or less worth living. Even if it's only made worthwhile by the sight of a young man's testicles dangling out of his yellow shorts.… (mer)
But, armed with that Sebald quote, I came into NM expecting something just like 'When the Time Comes,' a book about how we're all ultimately just bones for the bone broth pot. To be flippant, this one is more about the meat than the bones, and "meat" said in many ways: avian, bovine, porcine, piscine, amphibian (i.e., much of the book takes place in the market at Piazza Vittorio Emanuele), old man, teenage girl, teenage boy, young child, nun, edible, sexual, and above all, meat worthy to be worshiped (much of the book takes place in the vicinity of St Peter's).
Like 'When the Time Comes,' NM is formally interesting--it is a still life, inasmuch as it starts off simply describing person after person, object after object. But where a lesser writer would have stuck with the conceit, Winkler fairly quickly gives up on it, and starts building character, and even, in a small way, plot--because literature, for better or worse, involves time passing. The language is repetitive, in a Bernhardian (i.e., it provides rhythm) and a Gaddisian (i.e., quasi-Homeric motifs are used to alert the reader to the identity of the person in question, and the details involved are astonishing) way.
Also, this was surprisingly heart-breaking and beautiful, whereas 'When the Time Comes' was unsurprisingly bleak and depressing. I'm glad to know that, despite the fact that we're all just overgrown children playing with our dummies, Josef thinks life is more or less worth living. Even if it's only made worthwhile by the sight of a young man's testicles dangling out of his yellow shorts.… (mer)
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Until recently, Anglophone readers wanting to investigate the fiction of Austrian writer Josef Winkler faced only one option: the exacting and elliptical novel The Serf (1987/1997; trans. Michael Mitchell). Published in English by Ariadne Press, The Serf joined Winkler's Flowers for Jean Genet (1992/1997; trans. Michael Roloff), his biographical and readerly homage to the French writer Jean Genet, whose influence is felt throughout Winkler's own fiction, as the only works available in English.
But the reader requires an immersive education in Winkler before undertaking The Serf. And even Flowers for Jean Genet, while critical to comprehending Winkler's aesthetic—his queer appropriation of high camp, religious and perverse imagery; and his homoeroticism (I would suggest, from Ronald Firbank as well)—fails to give the reader a cogent glimpse into his creative output, an oeuvre for which Winkler has garnered many accolades including the Alfred Döblin Award in 2001, the Grand Austrian State Prize in 2007, and the Georg Büchner Prize in 2008.
Luckily, two additional fictions by Winkler were published in the past year by Contra Mundum, When the Time Comes (1998/2013) and Natura Morta: A Roman Novella (2001/2014), both translated assiduously by Adrian West, who, to use his own words (as applied to Winkler's prose), is able to render the painstaking "visual detail" and "attention to the musicality of phrases" found in the original German texts with a skill that honors Winkler's writing as a "writing-against."
Winkler eschews a traditional plot; instead, narrative fragments work together by means of repetition to complicate his vision of modern life. But single scenes can also be understood on their own terms, if one considers the images and their relation to the overall thematics of the text.
Subtitled A Roman Novella, Natura Morta is less a novella than a series of poetic vignettes, a succession of glimpses of life around the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele in Rome where various figures appear, disappear, and then reappear: people "festooned" with commodified and locally popular "colorful plastic pacifiers"; "two teenaged Moroccan rent boys"; and a man whose "eyelids and eyelashes [are] painted black with mascara" and who is taunted with the homophobic "Sida!" There are plenty of "bloody chicken heads and yellow chicken feet" in the marketplace juxtaposed with iconographic images like "a doll of the Christ child" parked in bowl surrounded by "dried pineapples, dates, and figs" and "the Virgin Mary ... look[ing] over the fingertips of her clasped hands toward a box of Mon Chéri chocolates." These images constitute a fixed yet fluid tableau, a natura morta, a still life echoing its literal translation: dead nature.
Winkler is primarily concerned with the fig vendor's son Piccoletto, "[a] black-haired boy, around sixteen years old, whose long eyelashes nearly grazed his freckle-studded cheeks." Piccoletto's function is to join the seemingly disparate images of the city and its inhabitants in a way that allows Winkler to explore the religious history of Rome, particularly as it deviates from contemporary vice and greed. "Sacred kitsch" litters the city; the text works by juxtaposing religious iconography and a marketplace saturated with "one crucified Lord after another," juxtapositions that in turn inform and reflect the distorted sexualities, the myriad "perversions" and vices paraded before the reader and the young, impressionable Piccoletto: from "[t]wo nuns ... lick[ing] the chocolate toes of an ice cream bar shaped like a child's foot" to Michelangelo's Pietà, "framed with bulletproof glass," an icon fetishized by "[a] toothless Pole" with the desire "to clasp the mother of God in her fingers."
Winkler's imagistic prose shows debts to the cinema. In one scene, Piccoletto spies a videocassette of "the film Sciuscià by Vittorio de Sica ... [a]top the apricots and white peaches" carried in a plastic bag by an anonymous woman on a streetcar. This mention of de Sica's first major work as a director—filmed in 1946 and translated in English as Shoeshine—reveals how images in Winkler function similarly to those in a neorealist film; not only do many of the series of images contain potent mixtures of the sacred and the profane, but they overvalue the image itself (in its repetition and in its recurrence) in ways also reminiscent of auteurs such as Michelangelo Antonioni.
Winkler has likened his authorial role to that of a human camera[2]: he would undoubtedly have had Antonioni's famous montage of images in mind—I am thinking of Antonioni's L'Eclisse (1962), with its stress on images as storytelling vehicles—when compiling his own scenes of natura morta. Consider the following two passages:And:Winkler wants us to regard a teenaged boy, who is always "playing with his sex," as a Christ for our times, in a world comprised of tourists, clergy, tradespeople, sex workers, and drug addicts. The fragmentary glimpses of city life in Natura Morta are refracted through the sexualized consciousness of Piccoletto whose observation of two other boys "gnawing on a fig, fresh and purple" is followed up immediately by "[t]he two boys huddl[ing] together, whispering and giggling, eyeing Piccoletto's broad buttocks."
Even more crucial to Winkler's sexual vision of modernity is Piccoletto's interest in soliciting both male and female gazes, and how he can arouse and also express sexual interest across the gulf of gender. Winkler's aesthetic construction of modern-day Rome conjoins sex and the city, forcing individuals to confront the past in a present whose greed, lusts, and sensual pleasures—e.g., "Frocio wrapped fistfuls of ice chips in tin foil, pressing them into the form of a phallus, held the cold fetish at his hips, and squeezed the ice chips out of the tin foil in front of the fig vendor's son, as though releasing kilos of ejaculate"—contrast with the iconographic and architectural reminders of latter days: "a stone phallus" in the Piazza San Vittorio the scene where an ambulance "pick[s] up a young drug addict, passed out and foaming at the mouth"; "the exit of the papal tombs" of Saint Peter's Cathedral "leaking blood in the filthy streets," streets littered with pages of the Cronaco vera, "in which tragedies from throughout Italy—illustrated with hearses, eyewitnesses, chesty women, and Mafiosi...—are reported every week."
In contrast with Natura Morta's portraits of city life, Winkler's When the Time Comes takes rural Austria as its focus (Winkler's native Carinthia). But like Natura Morta, When the Time Comes centers on a young boy whose intellectual and sexual maturation are influenced by his attempts to compile the stories of those who have come before him. In When the Time Comes, the storyteller is "the bone collector" Maximilian, whose "black bone stock ... smell[s] of decay" and yet, because it contains the bones of the dead, has within it a history to decipher, record, fathom. Maximilian is Winkler's anchor point; other characters' stories are woven into his "clay vessel" of bones, creating a portrait of life in rural Austria spanning generations.
The town's pastor has erected a terrifying painting representing God's judgment at the town center, an icon that oversees the lives and deaths of the townspeople in a "town built in the form of a cross." It depicts a man "who dragged a life-sized statue of Jesus through the forest before the Second World War and threw it over a waterfall," causing Jesus to lose both arms; the painting shows the man's retribution in life, since he "lost his own arms in Hitler's war," and after, in the fires of Hell. The often vindictive Old Testament God's relationship with his flock, one built on fear as much as veneration, is a paradigm that repeats at the secular and personal levels. One is never free from one's history, and even rewriting history, placing bones upon bones—as is the bone collector's iterative, inscriptive task—cannot pry the individual from his or her community and the repressive social and religious structures of the past.
Winkler inverts the famous "begat" passages in the book of Genesis, opening the sections of When the Time Comes with his characters' often tragicomic deaths rather than with their births; because of this, their lives seem to take on a more purposeful and even allegorical meaning. For example,"Death is my life's theme," Winkler has stated, and its presence—impending or otherwise—is felt on every page of When the Time Comes.
Most of the narrative in When the Time Comes, however, is taken up with the story of two boys, Jonathan and Leopold, names that allude to religious and popular examples of queerness—the first, a reference to Jonathan's homoerotic relationship with David in the book of Samuel, and the second recalling Leopold of the Leopold and Loeb murder scandal in 1920s Chicago. It is typical of Winkler to fuse extremes: love alongside fear, pleasure alongside pain, and loyalty alongside greed: in this case, Jonathan and Leopold achieve an extreme jouissance combining pleasure (mutual masturbation) with pain (autoerotic asphyxiation):Neither the bone collector Maximilian nor the townspeople condemn the boys for their homosexuality; instead, the townspeople grumble about the senseless act itself, not its queer connotations ("those two idiots who did away with themselves together!" in "this godless village"), and Jonathan's mother Katharina grants her dead child unearthly powers, certain that he will return like the resurrected Christ to be again among his family. Whereas "[i]n death they were separable," the intermingling of "their tears, their urine, and their sperm" in life had rendered them inseparable: they can now be mourned as individuals, despite the fact that, curiously, "Leopold was buried in Jonathan's death mask."
W. G. Sebald notes that Winkler's use of repetition points to something personal in his work, an act of self-definition that requires sifting through and making sense of one's origins:
"Josef Winkler's entire, monomaniac oeuvre ... is actually an attempt to compensate for the experience of humiliation and moral violation by casting a malevolent eye on one's own origins." If repetition is the sole way to work through trauma, as Freud has suggested, the rural portraits in When the Time Comes suggest that trauma is as endemic to everyday life as is a kind of quiet joy, and the ways in which collective and personal traumas are eventually reconciled with one another are mediations intrinsically bound to the storyteller's sociocultural function.
Sebald's remarks on Winkler's work also point to a moral complicity that individuals need to recognize, one that carries the weight of the past and also points toward a future—though, just what that future constitutes is bleakly uncertain. The teleological aim of the future, as Winkler sees, points only toward death. Thus, the reader meets each character in When the Time Comes at the moment of his or her death, the narrative then working backward through the character's life. Winkler's vision privileges the figure of the artist as conduit between past origins and present traumas, interpreting "the flood of recollected images [as it] begins," but just what the artist or storyteller figure does with these "bones" is undefined, as is who will replace Maximilian when his own time comes.
Like Sebald and like his own Austrian compatriots Peter Handke, Elfriede Jelinek, and Thomas Bernhard, Winkler flags memory and history—collective and individual—as inescapable traps that affect present experience. Winkler is concerned with the individual's role in history, how it is necessary to acknowledge complicity with the past, and how one must grapple with the external forces of inhumanity, greed, and immorality and ultimately reconcile with that past. And yet, while it is essential to remember the stories of the dead, sadly, we erase all memory of them before we have had time to absorb all that they can offer us:… (mer)