{"id":89851,"date":"2015-10-01T11:00:05","date_gmt":"2015-10-01T15:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=89851"},"modified":"2015-10-01T16:13:10","modified_gmt":"2015-10-01T20:13:10","slug":"the-nonessential-on-marianne-fritz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/01\/the-nonessential-on-marianne-fritz\/","title":{"rendered":"The Nonessential: On Marianne Fritz"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Marianne<\/a>

Marianne Fritz\u2019s apartment in Vienna. Image from Marianne Fritz Archiv Wien. Eine Dokumentation<\/em>, edited by Klaus Kastberger and Helmut Neundlinger.<\/p><\/div>\n

In an interview published three months before his death, W. G. Sebald referred to his aversion to the systematic and to his faith in the haphazard: \u201cIf you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he is looking for. I think that, as I\u2019ve always had dogs, I\u2019ve learned from them how to do this.\u201d Though my own aversion to structure is less an outgrowth of any faith in serendipity than a temperament both indolent and indecisive, rooting around has at times for me, too, yielded benefits that a single-minded approach to literature wouldn\u2019t have afforded. And it is particularly fitting, in light of the quotation above, that I should have hit upon Marianne Fritz\u2014whose novel The Weight of Things<\/a><\/em> I have just translated\u2014by following up on a footnote from Sebald\u2019s posthumously published Across the Land and the Water<\/em>, a selection of poems translated by Iain Galbraith.<\/p>\n

In the late poem \u201cIn Alferm\u00e9e,\u201d named for a Swiss commune where Sebald twice visited the scholar Heinz Schafroth and where the ashes of the poet G\u00fcnter Eich are scattered, the following two stanzas appear:<\/p>\n

\n

Threading sleep
letter by letter
comes a language
you do not understand<\/p>\n

The exhausted eyes
of the writer the fingers
of one hand on the
keys of her machine<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

In the notes to the poem, Galbraith quotes Schafroth as saying that his conversations with Sebald would certainly have touched on Marianne Fritz, author of two prodigious novels totaling some ten thousand pages: Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst <\/em>(Whose language you don\u2019t understand) and Naturgem\u00e4\u00df<\/em> (Naturally, or, following the usage of several Bernhard translators, In the nature of things). Schafroth, one of the few critics to have addressed Fritz\u2019s work, informed Galbraith, in a private communication, that it would not be \u201cgoing too far\u201d to call Fritz the writer in the poem.<\/p>\n

Web searches on Fritz revealed surprisingly little. She wrote four published novels, three of which are out of print (Naturgem\u00e4\u00df I <\/em>and II<\/em>, each consisting of five volumes, are still available on the Suhrkamp Web site for \u20ac256 and \u20ac298, respectively); she is the subject of one article in English, one in Spanish, and a handful of reviews, essays, and obituaries in German; and there is Fritzpunkt<\/a>, a theater collective devoted to her work, whose Web site hosts a PDF version of the unfinished Naturgem\u00e4\u00df III<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

As a translator, I always have my eyes open for striking authors who are little known in English; as a reader, I often find something particularly alluring about outsiders. Much as I might admire Wallace Stevens or Henry James, there is something off-putting about the idea of the gentleman writer with his club dinners and harmless predilections. As Fritz\u2019s compatriot Josef Winkler writes, recalling the favored authors of his youth,<\/p>\n

\n

And in those days, if a writer had not shattered himself against his own sentences and died while doing so, I could not believe a word of what he wrote. If I did not sense, when reading, that language lay in the balance, suspended, sentence by sentence, between life and death, then the book held no interest for me.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

According to this criterion, Fritz easily passes muster. Born in modest circumstances in Styria in 1948, she studied clerical sciences before marrying the functionary and writer Wolfgang Fritz and moving to Vienna. At age thirty, she published her first novel, The Weight of Things<\/em>, which was awarded the Robert Walser Prize. From then on, she devoted herself entirely to her writing. In 1979, she and her partner Otto D\u00fcnser moved to a small apartment in Vienna\u2019s Seventh District, stripping it of virtually every modern convenience (her sole luxury was said to be a second typewriter, in case the first one failed her) and lining it from floor to ceiling with shelves packed with the books, file boxes, maps, and index cards essential to Fritz\u2019s increasingly elaborate and dense work. She worked fourteen-hour days, seven days a week, oblivious to the date or the season, save for the occasional \u201cphilosophical pause for thought,\u201d as D\u00fcnser described her infrequent outings. Though she would publish some eight thousand pages of writing between 1980 and 1998, when the second volume of Naturgem\u00e4\u00df<\/em> was released, she was hardly an advocate of the rushed approach C\u00e9sar Aira describes as the \u201cflight forward,\u201d and edited her work scrupulously. \u201cHow would we ever get anywhere if we held onto everything?\u201d D\u00fcnser quotes her as saying.<\/p>\n

The Weight of Things<\/em> is written in a jaunty, albeit acerbic German that presents few difficulties for the average reader. Her second novel, Das Kind der Gewalt und die Sterne der Romani <\/em>(The child of violence and the stars of the Romani), which begins with a supple, lyrical prose bordering on poetry, soon dispenses with the rules governing German syntax in favor of a highly rhythmic, almost incantatory phrasing, rife with unwieldy neologisms, which left the few critics who dared to examine it perplexed. As a consequence, she was released by her publisher, Fischer; her third book, the 3,400-page Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst<\/em>, was picked up by Suhrkamp, whose director, the legendary Siegfried Unseld, hoped to market Fritz as a \u201cfemale Joyce.\u201d The book was a minor scandal: her proofreader gave up a third of the way through, declaring it impossible to distinguish errors from the author\u2019s own idiosyncratic orthography, and reviewers spoke openly of the point at which they\u2019d abandoned reading it. Bemusement gave way to open hostility in the nineties, when Naturgem\u00e4\u00df I<\/em> appeared: in one of the scant reviews, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung <\/em>described it as a \u201cDisneyland of Deconstruction,\u201d a \u201cprovocation,\u201d a game of Legos played with the detritus of the horrors of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

Manuscript pages from Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst<\/em> (Whose language you don\u2019t understand). Image courtesy mariannefritz.at.<\/p><\/div>\n

Yet Fritz\u2019s experimentation is neither idle nor random, and the rewards it harbors for patient readers are perhaps unique in world literature. In The Weight of Things<\/em>, the sparseness of Fritz\u2019s language reflects the oppressiveness of the commonplace in the modest lives of a family torn between obedience and rebellion. Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst<\/em>\u00a0sought to eliminate the nonessential, to shatter the strictures of grammar, which, according to Fritz, constituted the limits of thought. The German language, as the bedrock of the worldview of the German-speaking peoples, had been an essential actor in the horrors of the First and Second World Wars, impeding the development of independent consciousness on the part of the lower classes and subsuming them in a state that thrived on annihilation. For Fritz, the violence she records was inseparable from the cultural and historical background that gave rise to it, and hence, a reconciliation of her project with \u201clife as such,\u201d as she calls it in The Weight of Things<\/em>, was out of the question. What was necessary was a new world, built from the bottom up, founded on new kinds of words and new ideas. There were no shortcuts: for the writing of her second novel, she built a scale model of the town of Gnom, where the action takes place, \u201cto get a natural orientation\u201d; she worked extensively with maps and photos, invented hundreds of characters, pursued the inner logic of her undertaking until all traces of convention were swept away. A body of work reminiscent at times of Beckett, at times of Brecht, at times of Rabelais terminates, in the later volumes of Naturgem\u00e4\u00df<\/em>, in something unprecedentedly strange and fascinating.<\/p>\n

Wolfgang Nagel, one of Fritz\u2019s more generous detractors, notes rightly that \u201cdetailed stylistic criticism is not possible here \u2026 One must either accept this language in its entirety, or reject it outright.\u201d This is undoubtedly true: what perplexes me is the near-unanimity with which the literary culture of Germany and Austria opted for the latter. In general, the detractors of long, complex, unorthodox, or vexatious books have their counterpart in a small but fervent cult of readers: Joyceans, Nabokovians, those who claim to think highly of William Burroughs. In many cases, the esteem that accrues to difficult authors has little to do with their being read; a genius is born not of resolute bookworms slogging through arcane texts but of that critical mass of reviews, essays, and dissertations required to generate the clich\u00e9s the reading public needs in order to sound intelligent\u2014to make the comparison, no less inept for its ubiquity, of Knausgaard to Proust, or to apply the adjective Kafkaesque<\/em> to any story about bureaucracy.<\/p>\n

My question is not so much why Fritz hasn\u2019t been read, but why she has been deprived of the regard showered on other writers people don\u2019t read. And the only answer I have arrived at is that, despite the successes of feminist criticism in inspiring a measure of guilty conscience on the part of readers, there is something fundamentally gendered in the concept of \u201cgenius\u201d and that the idiosyncrasies taken at face value in the case of male writers appear dubious in the case of their female counterparts, signaling a lack of restraint, a touch of hysteria, or mental instability. In Fritz\u2019s case, an early review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung<\/em> described her \u201cwriting and discourse compulsion\u201d as \u201cin medical terms, a phenomenon extraneous to language\u201d; M. Das Magazin<\/em> dismissed her work as the record of aberrant thought patterns, asking, \u201cWhence comes the misconception that this has anything to do with literature?\u201d It is not that women as a whole are deprived of genius status\u2014most readers have a token woman writer or two whose name they can trot out as proof of their alleged impartiality. It is rather that women, like blacks, like non-Europeans, tend more easily to be skipped over; that so often, there is something halfhearted and factitious in declarations of women\u2019s genius, a wavering or self-congratulatory note, that is absent when people talk about Byron or Proust.<\/p>\n

Translating The Weight of Things<\/em> was my own small attempt to help redress this circumstance. Less zany, more amenable than Fritz\u2019s later writings, it nonetheless contains the whole of her themes in miniature and serves as the keystone for her entire fictional project, which she referred to with the overarching title \u201cThe Fortress.\u201d The Weight of Things<\/em> tells the story of a poor young woman who loses her first love in World War II, who tries and fails to resign herself to domesticity and motherhood, and who is slowly consumed by the weight of circumstances outside her control; it presents, in succinct and unforgiving prose, a merciless indictment of postwar Austria, where the state\u2019s violence turned inward upon its most vulnerable citizens, declaring their worth or worthlessness according to their degree of productivity, without regard for the individual dignity of their lives.<\/p>\n

Adrian Nathan West<\/a> is a literary translator and the author of the forthcoming novel <\/em>The Aesthetics of Degradation. His translations include Pere Gimferrer\u2019s <\/em>Fortuny<\/a> and <\/em>Alma Venus<\/a>,<\/em> three novels by Josef Winkler, and Marianne Fritz\u2019s <\/em>The Weight of Things<\/a>, which publishes today<\/em>.
<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an interview published three months before his death, W. G. Sebald referred to his aversion to the systematic and to his faith in the haphazard: \u201cIf you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":876,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[5774,19457,19456,947,12395,687,19455,165,6833,530,9820,6183],"class_list":["post-89851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-cesar-aira","tag-heinz-schafroth","tag-iain-galbraith","tag-james-joyce","tag-josef-winkler","tag-language","tag-marianne-fritz","tag-poetry","tag-siegfried-unseld","tag-translation","tag-vienna","tag-wg-sebald"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOn Translating Marianne Fritz and redefining the idea of literary genius.<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Adrian Nathan West on translating the unknown genius Marianne Fritz.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/01\/the-nonessential-on-marianne-fritz\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Nonessential: On Marianne Fritz by Adrian Nathan West\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 1, 2015 \u2013 In an interview published three months before his death, W. 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