{"id":136566,"date":"2019-05-22T11:00:14","date_gmt":"2019-05-22T15:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=136566"},"modified":"2019-06-05T11:59:13","modified_gmt":"2019-06-05T15:59:13","slug":"dasa-drndics-eeg-and-the-joys-of-pessimism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/05\/22\/dasa-drndics-eeg-and-the-joys-of-pessimism\/","title":{"rendered":"Da\u0161a Drndi\u0107’s \u2018EEG\u2019 and the Joys of Pessimism"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Da\u0161a Drndi\u0107<\/p><\/div>\n

The most convincing literary pessimists are superior stylists. They smooth their nihilistic impulses into pleasing shapes. Despair is largely inimical to art, while melancholy\u2014its pensive, perfumed cousin\u2014makes of the void something paradoxically seductive. I think of Albrecht D\u00fcrer\u2019s Melencolia I<\/em> with its horizon of bats and comets, its alchemical implements and carpenter\u2019s tools laid in disarray. This extends, perhaps extends especially, to literary art. If the negative radiance of Giacomo Leopardi or Fernando Pessoa arises from a certain nihilism\u2014that existence is evil, say, or without meaning\u2014that message is nonetheless palliated by the intrinsic beauty of their craft. This is a kind of strategic enticement. If we are to follow the pessimistic artist into his annihilating vision, a little poetry goes a long way.<\/p>\n

The Croatian novelist Da\u0161a Drndi\u0107, who died of lung cancer last June, gives her readers no such poetry. She would have us take our medicine straight. \u201cLes belles lettres<\/em>\u00a0is a heavily outdated term,\u201d Drndi\u0107 told me in a 2017 Paris Review<\/em> interview<\/a>, \u201ctherefore today a concept with hardly any weight. Art should shock, hurt, offend, intrigue, be a merciless critic of the merciless times we are not only witnessing but whose victims we have become.\u201d Her novels, several of which have been translated into English by Celia Hawkesworth, orbit the criminal violence of European authoritarianism. An archival impulse animates much of the work. Trieste<\/em>\u2014the best-known of her books\u2014features a forty-four-page list of some nine thousand Jews who were killed in Italy between 1943 and 1945. (The names, stacked four-wide across each page, are tragic in how little they ask of us.) Whatever she rescues from obscurity\u2014photographs, courtroom testimony, case files, maps, scraps of song\u2014achieves an uncanny wavering quality, as if already at home in the immaterial. Like those of W.\u2009G. Sebald, to whom she has been favorably compared, Drndi\u0107\u2019s fictions creak beneath the weight of their own reclamation. They are load-bearing structures whose formal wonder is how such a painfully burdened edifice could remain standing upright in the first place.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In her final novel, EEG<\/em>, published posthumously in English this April, the protagonist, Andreas Ban, is a writer and clinical psychologist reprised from Drndi\u0107\u2019s earlier work Belladonna<\/em>. Ban is aged, ailing, whip smart, comically brusque, and almost Bernhardian in his inexhaustible enmity. His screed-like digressions leap across decades and continents, alight on war criminals and ex-patients, rummage through national and personal histories, and rage (often quite funnily) against what he sees as the gross indecency of our times. He is like sentient amber, compulsively fixated on what has been caught in the hardening resin of his memory. As might be expected from its title, the novel enacts something like a scan of Ban\u2019s brain function. It unfolds in a series of loosely connected micro-histories, which, taken together, delineate their cantankerous author\u2019s obsessions.<\/p>\n

These invariably intersect with the twentieth century\u2019s archive of atrocities. Ban\u2019s own records\u2014patient files, family documents, a lifetime\u2019s ephemera\u2014serve as staging grounds for deeper inquiries into the horrors of Europe\u2019s recent past. Ban\u2019s research into the disappearance of his uncle\u2019s one-time fianc\u00e9e Frida Landsberg, for instance, gives Drndi\u0107 room to explore the occupation of Latvia. Fascism\u2019s disparate machinations blend with Ban\u2019s paranoia. He becomes convinced that the father of a woman he once loved, Arvids Mazais, a \u201clong dead Bavarian-Latvian with Hitler\u2019s medal in the bottom of a cardboard box,\u201d directly participated in Frida\u2019s killing. Such leaps are not conspiracy theories so much as attempts to make meaning. Ban\u2019s associative ramblings are a form of disguised longing. He reconstructs his skeletons from a boneyard heap of indistinguishable fragments.<\/p>\n

In another lengthy section, Drndi\u0107 juxtaposes two very different formal rigors\u2014chess and genocide\u2014in a pocket history of Europe\u2019s grandmasters of chess. We are told how a generation of eccentric geniuses leaped from windows, suffered heart attacks, threw themselves beneath trains, and dropped dead during international competitions. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing abnormal about the fact that chess players are abnormal,\u201d Nabokov, who wrote the wonderful chess novel The Defense<\/em>, once said in an interview. But chess players were also seen as potential subversives. \u201cChess is imagination,\u201d Ban reminds us, \u201cthe negation of rules, the negation of directives, it is art, challenge and autonomy.\u201d Chess champions were murdered by the Nazis in appalling numbers. Drndi\u0107 here blurs the boundaries between play and reality, the strategies of the game and those employed for slaughter. Chess was an elegant contest nested within a larger and far deadlier one: \u201cReality was so noisy (and bloody) that it suppressed the imagination,\u201d Ban says, \u201creality imposed its own game, mercilessly and cruelly.\u201d<\/p>\n

The materiality of the past\u2014its shocking, sickening thingness<\/em>\u2014suffuses Drndi\u0107\u2019s fictions. Every dusty record, every banal household object, represents an intricate network of unknown relations capable of arousing melancholy or horror. The inadequacy of memory is perhaps her great subject. \u201cI now name people fanatically,\u201d Ban says, \u201ctoo weightily for literature, that is, unnecessarily, obsessively, because I see more and more clearly that this, their name, is perhaps the last cobweb thread that separates them from general, universal chaos, from the cauldron of turbid, stale mash.\u201d<\/p>\n

The question of literary aesthetics is a thorny one for Drndi\u0107. Throughout EEG<\/em> we find hectoring asides on bourgeois literature\u2019s \u201cunwritten laws.\u201d Take Ban\u2019s dismissal of well-rounded characters: \u201cAm I \u2018rounded,\u2019 existentially and publicly? Who is ever and anywhere rounded, and is it necessary to be \u2018complete\u2019 and rounded in order to exist\u2014to live\u2014in a complete and rounded way? Unbelievable idiocies.\u201d Or the illogic of orderly literature: \u201cAll of that exists, the disorder, the fragmentation, the din, in reality and in dreams, but in literature and in life, the public and the market want order, harmony \u2026 simplicity<\/em>, so that the little gray cells empty tidily and painlessly.\u201d Or the tedium of continuity: \u201cA life of continuity, how tedious. How monotonous, monochrome. A tepid, limp flow in one direction. Like literary continuity.\u201d Drndi\u0107\u2019s prose\u2014hard, sneering, and aggressively, exhilaratingly ugly\u2014contorts itself to avoid the exigencies of beauty. Moral urgency dispossesses style.<\/p>\n

The highest distinction of pessimistic fiction is that it undermines its own project. As we do from the desolate, God-baiting novels of Hardy, the gaunt dramas of Beckett, or the post-national horror of late Bola\u00f1o, we emerge from Drndi\u0107\u2019s writing feeling both vanquished and invigorated. Such formidable intelligence and Homeric intention cannot help but thrill and exalt. Drndi\u0107 ends her final novel with a quote from Kierkegaard, the philosopher of angst and despair: \u201cMy misery is my castle which is set, like an eagle\u2019s nest, among the clouds on top of the mountain. No one can conquer it. From it I fly down into reality and snatch my prey.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dustin Illingworth is a writer based in Southern California.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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