In Flight From a Fixed Identity
On Jenny Erpenbeck's "Not a Novel" and Dubravka Ugrešić's "The Age of Skin"
It’s hard to downplay the fortuitous timing. Here we are in the age of Brexit, with all that that entails for the European project, and now we’re offered not one but two collections of essays, as if in tandem, by two of the most acclaimed writers to have come of age in the Eastern bloc, to have wrestled with the meaning of its dissolution. Despite circumstantial similarities, though, there are important differences between them. One is older than the other, fully a generation ahead, and fiercer in her opposition to the political status quo of her younger years. One is better-known for her fiction than for her essays, even if her turn to prose followed a training in theatre. Most importantly, while both are deeply interested in the place of refugees in contemporary Europe, they view the situation from distinct standpoints. One is concerned with the way her homeland fails its responsibilities in processing claims for asylum. The other witnessed the collapse of her homeland and was herself moved to flee for her safety, to seek asylum abroad.
It’s clear that the title of Jenny Erpenbeck’s essay collection, Not a Novel (trans. Kurt Beals), is a sort of provocation. What’s less evident is that it’s an evasion as well: disappointingly so. Erpenbeck’s novels are among today’s most celebrated German literature, and with the English editions translated by Susan Bernofsky—especially Visitation (2010), The End of Days (2014), and Go, Went, Gone (2015)—those novels have also won acclaim among Anglophone readers. So Not a Novel is not a novel, and makes a point of announcing itself as such: that’s the provocation. If Erpenbeck has an existing fan base, it has developed almost entirely around her novels, so that the title has the ring of a gauntlet thrown down: here’s something brazenly different, but not the sort of thing that’ll interest you. But then, if Not a Novel is not a novel, what exactly is it? The via negativa of the title is the evasion, because what Not a Novel is is a raw miscellany. It’s a compendium of Erpenbeck’s occasional writings over the decades—prize acceptance speeches, print media contributions, lectures by invitation—thrown together without revision. It’s erratically paced, as the pieces vary in length and mode of address, and at the same time it’s often sluggish, as multiple reports of the same events become repetitive rather than reflective. Ultimately, it’s difficult to figure out what sort of reader Not a Novel is looking for. Unless you’re a rusted-on admirer of Erpenbeck’s novels to date and you’re interested in the biographical conditions of her writing process—not her creative ambitions and decisions, but simply what she wrote and how she felt while writing it—Not a Novel is better thought of as not of much interest.
This is deeply unfortunate, because Erpenbeck’s novels wrangle with issues at the nexus of ethics and aesthetics, to an extent that most other novels shy away from. To read them is often to conduct a shadow dialogue with the author in which one wants to beg her to explain why she made this choice rather than that one, how she came to feel that her exploration of certain concerns was appropriate to her aims, whether she anticipated all the criticisms she might receive when publishing work in various thorny contexts. In particular, while the narrative of Go, Went, Gone poses burning questions about the ethics behind the administration of asylum claims in the European Union, Erpenbeck’s aesthetic choices also raise questions about the ethics of dramatising the ordeals of claimants. But readers of Not a Novel will find nothing on these subjects, almost nothing on this book, and little of any new insight into the experiences of asylum seekers in Europe today. What we’re given instead is mostly pseudo-profundity on the nature of writing and reading. “Writing was a game in which I encountered myself,” Erpenbeck says of her early efforts—hardly a revelatory notion. And when she muses on the characterisation of a protagonist unlike herself, she asks, simply, “Does that mean that I’m hiding behind a character who’s very different from the person I am, or was? And aren’t we allowed to hide ourselves in literature?” How disappointing it is to see a novelist of Erpenbeck’s calibre coming out with middlebrow pabulum like this: “Literature is indiscreet, its purpose is to be intimate, to tear secrets wide open—not for the sake of selling more books, but rather to allow us, the readers, to see and to perceive as much as possible, to perceive more than one person alone normally can.” The most intriguing thing she says about her process amounts to little more than an aside:
When I was talking about writing as an attempt to make a collage out of various materials, I mentioned that the last and first lines of successive paragraphs produce a certain concordance, that they organize themselves, like particulars in a magnetic field, around a kernel of truth that I don’t want to think through all the way to its conclusion. I try not to name what’s at the center of this field…
I, for one, would like to hear more about this force—the force that compels the act of writing, but forces the writer to preserve it in silence—but Erpenbeck doesn’t go deep enough into herself to say more about it. What she really wants to talk about, it seems, is biography rather than metaphysics, and mostly the biographical aspects of her youth in a country that no longer exists. “My own conscious life begins at the same time as the socialist life of Leipziger Strasse, which today leads to Potsdamer Platz, though back then it came to an end at the wall,” she writes in one biographical sketch, describing her childhood in the flat from which a family of citizens of the GDR could peer into an enclave of the West:
[W]hat I remember most of all, gray or not, was an almost small-town sense of calm, as a child it gave me a strong impression that I was at home—in a world that was closed off, and thus completely and utterly safe. Seen from the outside, our everyday life under socialism might have seemed exotic, but we weren’t a wonder or a horror to ourselves, we were the everyday world, and in that everyday world we were among ourselves.
More to the point, she says, the very ordinariness of life in the GDR, the taken-for-grantedness of her childhood environment, was the basis for a schism in the progression of time when the Berlin Wall collapsed and Germany ran towards reunification. “[E]verything that had been called the present up until then was suddenly called the past,” she writes:
It was simply time, time that really did pass in this way that I knew, and that was preserved in those rooms. Time that was once the present, a shared present that included my own personal present.
Now, unable to believe in the continuity of time, she finds herself plagued by visions of decay where no decay presents itself to the eye:
Even today, without thinking too much about it, I automatically transform all shopping malls into the ruins of shopping malls, I see clouds of dust rising up in luxury boutiques, I imagine the glass façades of office buildings shattering and crashing to the ground, revealing the naked offices behind them where no one is working anymore.
Whether or not you respond to Not a Novel probably depends on how interested you are in Erpenbeck’s rather unremarkable misgivings about the end of the Soviet Union and then about the supposed blessings of capitalism. She was not a revolutionary, not invested in the downfall of totalitarianism: “I didn’t want to go ‘across’,” she says of her time in Berlin in 1989. “Across the border, just like that. To have my ID card stamped at one of those laminate tables that had been set up as a provisional measure and then take a look at the West. I needed time. I didn’t want to let myself get dragged along with the tide.” Equally, though, she found herself nonplussed by her new liberties as a citizen of a unified Germany, and so she has come to critique the rhetoric of freedom:
Freedom to travel? (But will we be able to afford it?) Or freedom of opinion? (What if no one cares about my opinion?) Freedom to shop? (But what happens when we’ve finished shopping?) … How free can we actually be, as individuals, even when we are outwardly, politically free? Whose opinions are they really that we call our own?
But this critique is familiar, almost rote. So, too, is Erpenbeck’s critique of its logical extension, whereby refugees from totalitarianism are revered for their pursuit of freedom, whereas contemporary refugees are vilified for supposedly seeking to exploit Western largesse. “Why do we still hear laments for the Germans who died attempting to flee over the wall,” Erpenbeck asks,
but almost none for the countless refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean in recent years, turning the sea into a giant grave? … What is the difference between these two groups of people who aspire to a new life, to this thing we call “freedom”?
Why indeed? Erpenbeck has no answers, nor any suggestions; only a lament. A lament in itself can be powerful, stirring, warranted. But there are countless laments out there for those with ears to hear, and Erpenbeck’s quickly fades into the chorus. Should we not expect better from a writer of such skill and sensitivity? This is, in a sense, the question that Not a Novel dare not ask, lest it invalidate itself. What if it is the case that we can sincerely expect better from a writer like Erpenbeck, but only in the form of the novel? What if that form alone is the one that allows her to realise her skills and sensitivities to the full? How would Not a Novel shrink in relation to her body of work if it were to know its own form as one that stunts the talents that would flourish in the very form it stands against?
Ultimately, only three times in her non-fiction does Erpenbeck plumb the depths she reaches routinely in her novels. The first two instances emerge from her strengths as a novelist, in her considerations of empathy and the political conscience. With regard to empathy, Erpenbeck takes the view that, in the final analysis, each of us is epistemically alone, since other people are much like “the spongy sea monsters that may have been squeezing themselves into the deepest, darkest trenches of some ocean or other for the past two hundred years.” “[W]ith other people,” she says, “we only know what’s floating on the surface, in fact we probably don’t know much more about ourselves than the things we’ve told other people so many times that we’ve finally begun to believe them.” This is easy enough to say in the abstract, but harder to commit to when theory becomes practice:
We have to recognize that someone who tortures people from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. can still be a loving father at home. We can’t close our eyes to the fact that love can also take an unformed child and shape that child, at a certain point, into someone who crosses over to the other side, someone who begins to take the side of hate, despite knowing better. … When we read—and when we write, too—we have to live with the fact that the world can’t be divided into good and evil, into wins and losses, that the truth is made up of many layers, that most things can be read from both sides, that some questions can’t be answered. We have to live with the fact that certain questions are met with silence.
To her credit, Erpenbeck accepts the silence, admits it into the moral position she stakes out here; she doesn’t attempt to resolve the difficulties of her views, or redeem those views from the discomfort they are liable to cause anyone who takes them seriously. On the flipside, when it comes to political conscience, what she tries to live with isn’t silence so much as knowing, wilful contradiction. On the one hand, like the protagonist of Go, Went, Gone, Erpenbeck recommends listening attentively to other people, to their stories, hopes, grievances, voices, in order to reduce the blind spots in one’s political consciousness. This is not easy, she concedes. It’s not easy, first of all, to decide to do it, since it risks exposure to a disturbance of one’s soul: “Why should someone who’s doing just fine want to know what’s happening in the blind spot of his consciousness? Is it possible, in the end, to take a vacation from the good fortune of one’s own birth…?” Nor is it easy thereafter to sustain it as a practice, since the listener continually faces an incentive to turn aside again:
[Our] blind spots hide our own guilt and impotence. Even things that go wrong in other people’s lives make us begin to fear for our own because it means that misfortune as such has not yet been cast out of our universe, and may be infectious.
But then, in reflecting on the utility of maintaining blind spots, Erpenbeck also counsels her readers to determinedly look past that which they cannot abide, for survival’s sake. “Sometimes,” she writes, “when I read a poem by Goethe or Hölderlin, I am jealous of the worlds that Goethe and Hölderlin knew, where they didn’t have to know what an assembly point was, or a gas wagon, or Zyklon B.” And yet, she adds, channelling earlier provocations of the consciousness by George Steiner and W.G. Sebald,
for us, today, as we go for a walk, eat, drink, write, have conversations, dig up a flower bed, go shopping, take a child by the hand, lie in the sun, listen to music, we have to know the whole time where the enormous piles of eyeglasses or shoes came from [and] that experiments were conducted in the use of human bones to produce soap. We always know it. Fundamentally. And since we know it, we cannot simply live, we must live past this knowledge—it doesn’t stop us from going for a walk, eating, drinking, and so on.
Can we really have it both ways? Is it possible to will ourselves to look into our blind spots when it suits us, and to look past them—or indeed to look past those disturbances of which we are aware—simply in order to muddle through our daily lives? Erpenbeck admits the contradiction, but again does not try to resolve it or to redeem her views from it. There is, in this position, a messiness of experience, and a moral instability, that Erpenbeck has the courage to hold to scrutiny, without purporting to know how to hold it all together.
That said, the third occasion on which Not a Novel is briefly the equal of Erpenbeck’s novels is when Erpenbeck comes closest to writing a novel in miniature. What she actually produces is a brief essay entitled ‘Open Bookkeeping’—a mere seven pages in length, though it contains the material of a lifetime. Its subject is the death of Erpenbeck’s mother, or the aftermath of her death. But rather than laying bare the emotional turmoil of the loss of a parent, Erpenbeck describes, very simply, the process of disbursing the contents of her mother’s apartment, itemising that which is to be kept and that which is to be disposed of. Her account is cold, dispassionate, and all the more so when she deals less with the physical holdovers from her mother’s life than with abstractions, commitments, and money:
I cancel my mother’s subscription to the daily newspaper that she always read while drinking her afternoon tea, I receive a confirmation that the remaining balance of €202.07 will be refunded. The reason given for the cancellation is: deceased. I send my mother’s rail discount card back, the railway company refunds €91.66 of the €110 that my mother had paid two and a half months earlier. I have her telephone service cut off and request that her name be removed from the telephone book. Her final bill, the balance for her last phone calls with me, comes to €16.99.
Brief though it may be, ‘Open Bookkeeping’ deserves a place among Erpenbeck’s greatest works. It finely maintains its stylistic understatement and tonal equipoise from beginning to end, while also zeroing in on the impersonality of estates management—all those Euro signs, those transactions—in a way that becomes, via accumulation, strangely intimate. And in spite of its radically compressed form, it also manages to raise the largest questions of human existence. What is the lasting worth of a life if it is destined to be erased, quite consciously, by the survivors of the deceased? What worth if it is to be measured by others in the soulless terms of credit and debt? What worth if it finally takes the form of the detritus of everyone else’s life—“I inherit frozen roasts and frozen zucchini, 2 cans of lentils, 1 half stick of butter, 1 lemon, 3 cups of probiotic yogurt”—so that one’s being survives largely in mundane possessions stored up for a future that will now not arrive?
Throughout Not a Novel, Erpenbeck finds much to say about the enigmatic nature of borders and border crossings, and especially the personal phenomena that follow a shifting of political borders. When it comes to discussing her own experience of November 1989—“I had known this border all my life, but when it disappeared… it went very quickly”—she presents it largely as an unwilled, externally-directed redefinition of her selfhood. “Ever since then,” she writes, “there has been a border between the two halves of my life: a border made of time [which entails an] experience of transition, from one world to a very other one.” And a key element of this transition is its involuntary nature: in fact, Erpenbeck finds the genesis of her work as a writer in her lifelong “reflections on borders, reflections on how we change over the course of our lives, voluntarily or involuntarily, reflections on what identity is, and how much we can lose without losing ourselves” (emphasis mine). So, in this view, the borders of nation states slip and slide and suddenly—presto!—the people displaced to a new land, though stationary all the while, have become new people.
Dubravka Ugrešić would probably approve of Erpenbeck’s intimations. When she says, “I left my country,” she is quick to correct her misformulation: “Or I should say my country left me.” Born in Yugoslavia in 1949, in a part of what is today Croatia, she watched the Balkans fragment in the early 1990s. The outbreak of war prompted her to take a pacifist and anti-nationalist stance in the press, which in turn earned her enough enemies to spur her to flee in 1993; she has been settled in Amsterdam since 1996. Her work as a writer of fiction is greatly varied—she has written romance novels, magical realism, political satire, and straight-up realism—but she is must more consistent in her preoccupations as an essayist. In The Culture of Lies (1998), her subject is the folly of the Balkan War; in Thank You for Not Reading (2003), it’s the shallowness of the European literati; in Nobody’s Home (2008), it’s the impossibility of speaking with moral force in a post-literary world; and in Europe in Sepia (2012), it’s the crassness of Western capitalism after the fall of Communism. Throughout her non-fiction, then, her overriding concern is the corruption of entire cultures via the ineptitude and complicity of their intelligentsia. The Age of Skin (trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać) is of a piece with this body of work: the epoch of the title is the present day, which Ugrešić sees as besotted with superficial entertainments whose allure is really only skin-deep.
For all her pessimism, though, admirers of Ugrešić will already know what The Age of Skin shows again and again: she is an acerbic, uncompromising, and tireless agitator who not only critiques her subjects but lacerates them, sparing them no mercy. Imagine, if you can, one of Svetlanta Alexievich’s interviewees speaking in the mode of Thomas Bernhard, with all the vituperation and comic denunciations giving oblique expression to the bone-deep melancholy of displacement and the bitterness of thwarted hopes. The disparity is clear to see even in the titles of her essays, peppered as they are with exclamation marks—‘Slow Down!,’ ‘Long Live Work!,’ ‘Good Morning, Losers!,’ ‘An Archaeology of Resistance!?’—so that they walk a fine line, tonally, between despair and swivel-eyed enthusiasm. And if the Bernhard comparison itself sounds exaggerated, behold these lines from ‘Unhappiness’:
For years I have been dwelling in an empire of stupidity. Stupidity has become, over time, far too burdensome for me. I am finding it difficult to breathe under its weight and cannot shake free of it. I tried for a while with laughter, and, to be sure, that helped. But now stupidity has barged in, made itself at home, and soaked up all the oxygen.
So speaketh the scourge of the superficial. But Ugrešić is multi-talented; in fact, though she doesn’t argue her case, there are a few layers to her evisceration of superficiality, only the first of which—itself the most superficial—takes the form of a rant. The rant begins in the title essay, which finds Ugrešić lambasting the practice of decorative tattooing, using it as a proxy for cultural habits of appraising the merit of a person or phenomena based on an appeal to the eye. From here, Ugrešić follows a train of thought that leads her to skewer the popular appetite for books by celebrities rather than writers, the judgment of women as people of no worth beyond a certain age, the mediocre governance of boosterish political leaders, the poetic aspirations of Balkan war criminals incarcerated in The Hague, and, à la Christian Lorentzen, the algorithmic pressure on individuals to “like” whatever trends the culture at large has been pressured into “liking.” Thereafter, The Age of Skin abounds with countless references to pop-culture mainstays of the aughts—Harry Potter, Girls, The Hunger Games, Fifty Shades of Grey, Planet of the Apes, and more—as well as analyses of specific social media memes and YouTube videos. Ugrešić’s view is that these sorts of things comprise a “new mythological field” whose consumers rely on them, become addicted to them, as an aid to “digest[ing] indigestible reality”—and this at the expense of obscure creative spirits and intellectuals making genuine, thoughtful contributions to a culture that would be healthier if it honoured them.
This last complaint carries some of the gravity of a critic like George Steiner, and sure enough, Ugrešić name-checks Steiner as a thinker to be appreciated and envied for his commitment to seriousness as a cultural ideal. But Steiner’s model of criticism is one that Ugrešić herself could never adopt; it would require her to suppress the urge to engage in textual play as an outlet for her frustration at the futility of serious criticism today. Here is another layer to her work, a layer of faux-seriousness glazing the crudity of her rants: from time to time, she turns her eye towards cultural flotsam and jetsam and writes of it as if it were worthy of sincere appraisal. In ‘There’s Nothing Here!,’ she decries the encroach of kitsch in public spaces by imagining “pink plastic flamingos, garden gnomes in all sizes, sunset-motif wallpaper, and all the people who own these flamingos, gnomes, wallpaper, embarking on a crusade against everything we have always thought of as ‘culture,’ jettisoning all the ‘furniture’ from MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Louvre, the British Museum… and moving them into the emptied space with the blessings of the powers that be.” Panicked though she is, she takes time to give serious consideration to the fact that kitsch does indeed speak to the aesthetic sensibilities of a sizeable crowd. And elsewhere, when she describes a viral video clip of a group of Turkish men dancing at a village wedding, she casts light on the indignity of the men specifically by doing them the dignity of watching their dance for its duration. Only by living through the excruciating length of the dance can she convey the true ridiculousness of the dancers—not in the manner of their dance, but in their obliviousness to the boredom of their onlookers and the glaring fact of their own insecure masculinity:
On they dance, holding hands, elderly, potbellied boys, they keep moving, they dance as if in a trance, time has stopped, they fire off their guns into the sky above their heads, they aren’t shooting to outdo one another, their shots are like love messages to each other. The aging boys spin their rumps, shimmy their shoulders, rear up, leaving behind them in the air foggy plumes of smoke.
Sometimes, of course, Ugrešić’s faux-seriousness takes other forms, even pushing through seriousness itself to emerge into a different kind of playfulness, akin to metafiction. Across two pages in ‘Artists and Murderers,’ for instance, she painstakingly describes her acquisition of materials with which to hang herself, and pretends that she really was on the verge of hanging herself. Then, at last, she reveals that the episode has been a fabrication, though the revelation comes after an equally fabricated scene in which she suffers a change of heart—a double about-face, a fiction that undoes the earlier fiction before the essay undoes all the fiction. And in ‘There’s Nothing Here!,’ she ruminates on the cultural significance of European hot springs and describes a visit to one before she breaks the fourth wall: “Here—a discreet wink to my potential literary interpreters; the hot springs are a literary device, a source of defamiliarization…” For the most part, though, Ugrešić’s idea of playfulness is to replace ranting with reverence—a reverence that in turn plays up the features with which her subjects make themselves unworthy of esteem.
Nevertheless, to isolate yet another layer of her work, Ugrešić can be serious when she finds a subject she deems worthy of respect, and The Age of Skin reaches its high point in an essay that allows her to do just that. In ‘Good Morning, Losers!,’ she returns to the problem of the cultural valuation of superficiality, but looks at the problem from the inverse perspective: that is, from the perspective of one who has refused the capricious demands of the culture and has accordingly been deemed a failure. What she produces isn’t exactly something that abjures her characteristic exaggerations, but something that places them in a new context whereby they generate pathos for those who stand outside them:
Where did I go wrong, a friend of mine asked, an astrophysicist. He was left jobless, and scrolled through his computer to find something, anything, to make ends meet. There before him on the computer screen loomed Kim Kardashian’s large, oiled butt. The butt wasn’t moving, it watched my friend like a meteorite, a glacier, a star. … Kim Kardashian’s butt came jumping off every website, the world over, wherever he clicked. My friend realized this butt was the final greeting from a civilization breathing its last, and he relaxed. The Kardashian meteorite came slowly closer, in another second it would crash into Earth and shatter into a million bits. Where have I gone wrong, asked the astrophysicist with the last vestiges of his brain.
If there’s a shortcoming to Ugrešić’s method, it’s that a tone that works well when she writes about friends like the astrophysicist doesn’t work so well when she tries to write about people outside her purview. It’s in this regard—on a point of empathy and political conscience—that Erpenbeck stands out as the better thinker. In ‘Invisible Europe,’ Ugrešić turns her thoughts to contemporary refugees granted asylum in Europe, though she struggles to understand—indeed, to imagine—the needs and wants, the motivations and obligations, of people who fall into this group. On the contrary, she writes that “[r]efugees and migrants serve as a mirror, a test, a challenge, a summons to confront our values.” This is arguably true—and Erpenbeck makes a comparable observation—but it cannot speak to the total value of refugees and migrants, since it in no way speaks to their experience as subjects. There’s something odd about Ugrešić’s inability, here, to see beyond herself and her usual preoccupations in order to acknowledge the independent validity of a swathe of people not entangled in her concerns. There’s something painful about it, too, given that Ugrešić is herself a refugee, albeit from a different political circumstance, and finds no use for her own tribulations in her thinking on refugees today. Erpenbeck, though not as wildly displaced as Ugrešić, demonstrates a much more capacious moral imagination on the basis of her experience as one who has lost a homeland—and the lack of such imagination in The Age of Skin doesn’t just feel like a missed opportunity; it feels palpably wrong.
All that being said, despite the contemporaneity of their concerns, there’s a sense in which both Erpenbeck and Ugrešić feel distinctly—and valuably—out of step with the times. This year has been one of panic, duress, clamour, and exhaustion, from the onset of the Covid pandemic to the imposition of lockdowns and the flare-ups of the protests for racial justice around the world. Each these upheavals has been clouded, in its own way, by dubious claims of moral clarity and spurious political certitude: by a pervasive impatience with ambiguity and equivocation that tends towards the simplistic, the reductive, the anti-intellectual. If Erpenbeck’s tentative explorations of empathy falter, and Ugrešić’s caustic critiques risk insularity, they nonetheless embody a commitment to multivalency, even self-contradiction, in a cultural climate where such qualities are endangered by the pressure to adopt a readymade stance. Read jointly, Not a Novel and The Age of Skin amount to a contrapuntal testament to the dissonance of human experience, especially the experience of being a political subject without a self-conception built around political agency. At the tail end of a year in which overt politics has supervened on all other aspects of life—in which every individual action is read as an expression of political agency—it’s refreshing to hear from not one but two such eloquent sticks-in-the-mud.