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Clemens J. Setz, Sons and Planets (Söhne und Planeten), 2007, Residenz
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This is why I read books, this is why I follow contemporary literature. Söhne und Planeten, Clemens J. Setz’ debut novel is stunning in its accomplishments, announcing the presence of a writer whom we will not hesitate to call ‘great’ one day. In 2009, Setz published his sophomore novel Die Frequenzen, a quirky, smart, engrossing read of a book, some 700 pages of writing that was both accessible and assuredly literary; it was also a long book overflowing with stuff that was maybe a tad less disciplined than one could have wished it to be, continuing an intriguing trend in contemporary German-language literature. If his second novel was indulgent and effusive, his debut novel is strict and dark. Although, as a whole, it merits being called a “novel”, it consists of four shorter novellas, each of which is taut and cunningly crafted. The novel is emotionally moving, yet almost blindingly clever in its structure and slyly original. It has not been translated, so far, despite what Conversational Reading‘s Scott Esposito sees as a good time for translation, and despite a series of mediocre German writers already translated. This is one of the best debuts published in German in the past decade, and Setz is shaping up to be the finest novelist of his generation, and one of the best novelists of these past years in German in general, with fellow Austrian genius Thomas Stangl (also untranslated into English, so far, see here my review of Stangl’s shockingly great third novel) and the German prose wizards HartmutLange and Marcel Beyer (Beyer at least has been, partly, translated. Don’t miss out on his work). Although Clemens J. Setz’ second novel is flashier and maybe even livelier, his first novel is a much better candidate for translation and maybe the better novel, as well.
Steeped in German and American literature, Söhne und Planeten is a largely realist chamber play, set in the reasonably well off middle class, and is based on the tensions inherent in many father-son relationships, something that connects Setz to readers everywhere, regardless of language and culture. The book’s basic references are to writers like Kafka, Ashbery, Bernhard, Delillo, Stifter, Turgenev and Handke, i.e. American writers and those well known and translated in the US. Few of its strengths are specific to its original language; Setz’ characters’ ruminations on writing and literature, their fears and neuroses, their difficulties as fathers, as sons, with each other; their failings as writers, as persons, all these would make immediate, powerful sense in any skillful translation, well, as far as anything in the book makes ‘immediate’ sense. Reading Söhne und Planeten, which literally means ‘Sons and Planets’, means reading attentively, re-reading even, yet the book is not difficult, obscure or forbidding in any way. Like the aforementioned Hartmut Lange, Setz combines cleverness and craft with an accessible, fresh and clean language. In Söhne und Planeten (though somewhat less so in his second novel), Setz writes with an amazing literary sophistication, slipping in and out of various literary voices and modes; at the same time, he never loses sight of the simple basic story he’s got to tell, of men and their fears. This simple basic story is conveyed with simple enough words, and the closer the novel moves to its emotionally bruising finish, the clearer the language becomes. This book would be just as impressive in translation; what’s more, unlike writers like Thomas Bernhard or Andreas Meier, this book could almost be viewed as bestseller material, despite its author’s obvious literary finesse. It’s an excellent book, and one that should be translated.
I already mentioned the fact that Söhne und Planeten is composed of four sections that could be seen as separate novellas. As a novel, the book is devastatingly coherent, revealing its overall concerns and ideas only slowly, yet each of the four novellas is extraordinarily well crafted, and each of the four novellas is vastly different in the way it’s made, from each of the others. There’s no repetition, no sentimental whimsy, each of the novellas’ means are perfectly chosen, each novella is perfectly placed. The first and the last novella are relatively straight narratives of young men, the first focusing on the up-and-coming young novelist René Templ, the last focusing on Victor Senegger, whose suicide prior to the events of the book cast a shadow over everything that happens within the novel. The two middle novellas are composed of several points of view, providing more complex narratives, none of which, however, lacks the tautness and discipline characteristic of the German novella (think of Zweig, Storm or Lange). Like a finely composed piece of music, Setz aligns all of his characters, their thoughts and actions in a music that rises, in the end, to a moving crescendo. The last novella, a coda of sorts, the most sentimental, the most unvarnished piece of the whole novel, turns out to be a perfectly fitting capstone to a book where everything really is in its right place. In the middle novellas, in many ways, Setz pays homage to the vast canon of modern and postmodern American literature, somewhere between early-ish Don Delillo and Philip Roth, but it’s really the first section/novella that shows us the way, although it turns out to have been the least characteristic part of the whole book.
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That first novella, called “Kubische Raumaufteilung” (~ Cubic Room Layout), and presented with a prefatory quote by a “V.S.”, presumably Victor Senegger, is basically an exercise in angst-ridden soliloquy massively influenced by Franz Kafka, although the book doesn’t restrict itself to obvious influences or homages. It also contains both pastiches and long, extended quotes, sometimes from surprising sources. “Kubische Raumaufteilung”, for example, borrows from Kafka more than the surreal manifestations of its protagonist’s neurotic fears; it also borrows, inconsistently, his exquisitely simple yet literary language, sometimes offering almost a direct likeness of Kafka’s tone and his turns of phrase. All this is coupled with a narrator who is often coarse, desperately coarse, even. René Templ is a fearful individual, a young father, an aspiring writer, a husband who cheats on his wife with another woman to feel better about himself, yet whenever he feels pressured or afraid, he shrinks to the size of a child, or at least he thinks he does. Fear, another character says, later in the novel, is just another way to deal with one’s own body, just as Celine maintained (quoted by Setz) that philosophy is just another way to deal with one’s fear. Templ is obsessed with his own body and its inadequacies. He masturbates thoroughly, and his obsession with his genitalia and bodily fluids isn’t just communicated plainly to the reader, it’s also part of why he appears to be failing as a father and husband. Templ attempts to locate himself in his own body but he can only find decay, piss and blood. A writer, his mind is only as strong as the weakest part of his body, and as a result, his writing, at least the one small bit of Templ’s work we’re offered near the end of the second novella, is a gleaming but useless prosthesis, bereft of any muscle or genuine substance.
It’s only slowly that we comprehend that Victor is really the book’s central character, his absence an important part of three of the four novellas. In some ways, the first novella centers on René, the one character that, in a skewed way, has taken Victor’s place with his father, old Mr. Senegger; at the same time, René’s about to enact a relationship with his son that has an uncanny similarity to the one, we gather, Victor and his father had. The second novella, then, moves closer to Victor by focusing centrally on death and loss. The setting of that novella is a dinner party at the house of Ernst Mauser, a friend of Senegger’s and Templ’s, who’s recently lost his wife. Present are a handful of writers, including both Senegger and Templ. It’s the most complicated and elaborate of the novellas; each of its chapters offers, Rashomon-like, a different account of the events at Mauser’s house, in different genres, from a chapter written as an essay, to one entirely composed of letters. Not that really a whole lot happens, per se; instead, the novella, called “Fuge zu Ehren des Sonnensystems” (~ Fugue in Honor of the Solar System), examines the shape of loss in a writer’s life, and the impact this can have on the way he deals with his art, and with other people. It also helps us to better understand each of the other characters, especially Templ and Senegger, both of which emerge from this novella as somewhat farcical, tentatively ridiculous characters, both laughably self-centered and devoid of self-criticism. Additionally, the novella continues Setz’ interrogation of fear and masculinity. All this, while tragedy -and victor’s story- is waiting in the wings. But there is no pressure within the careful pages of Setz’ novel, no urgency in the narrative, nothing that really tells to reader what to look for, what’s to come; instead, we often seem to be led into a pointless exercise in cleverness.
Upon rereading, the dense novel yields its complexities in a way that might not be obvious to the first time reader. The relatively autonomous nature of the novellas, their self-contained arcs and structure can seduce us into reading them on their own terms, without the larger connecting context (although that does eventually become rather difficult as the novel progresses). The impression of largely pointless cleverness is exacerbated by the way that Setz uses quotes, paraphrases and pastiches of other writers, from various literary contexts. We catch a phrase from Pound’s Cantos here, a lilting note from Musil, a whole page from Defoe and much, much more. I’m certain I haven’t caught the half of it, but the fact of the matter is that the book crawls with these. And lists, of course. The best poets to read in the spring (answer, by the way: “Jaroslav Seifert, Vicente Aleixandre und Ezra Pound”), favorite novelists, etc. As it turns out, the novel uses devices like that in order to mirror the poetical principles of Victor Senegger himself, and towards the end of the novel, Victor Senegger, lover, friend, and suicidal son, bleeds into and merges with Victor the writer, and ways to write and ways to live become comparable and interchangeable, even. In all of this, if we disregard the odd Kafkaesque interlude, Setz’ book is solidly conventional realism. The characters and their neuroses are often derived from or references to stock characters developed in a century of psychoanalytically influenced fiction. In its long quotes and giddy pastiches, Söhne und Planeten is almost contemptuous of the idea of producing something original, in the Romanticist sense of the word. But contempt is too strong a word.
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The fact is, Setz often doesn’t seem to care where, within the gay mirror cabinet of literary genres and traditions, his novel can or should be placed. It’s overt simplicity does allow for easy pigeonholing, yet it seems to me that any closer look, any deeper analysis (and I haven’t even mentioned in how many ways Setz takes up the novel’s titular planetary metaphor and what use he makes of it) makes any honest attempt to do so impossible. The most remarkable thing however, and the last issue I’ll mention here, is the place it has within the corpus of Austrian literature. When Handke, Bernhard, Innerhofer and the other great post-war Austrian novelists and playwrights emerged and became a viable literary phenomenon in the 1960s, quite a few studies and essays pointed out how their kind of writing was a kind of anti-Stifter literature, a new tradition opposed to the massive influence of that titan of Austrian letters, Adalbert Stifter. And indeed, one can place a great deal of literary Austrian fiction in relationship to Stifter, yet some younger writers, especially Setz, don’t seem to fit that mold any more. In passing, Setz demolishes Bernhard just as calmly as he rejects Stifter’s ideas of order. Söhne und Planeten is a marvelous novel, one that’s worth reading and re-reading. It’s not perfect, but for a debut novel, it’s absolutely dazzling. Clemens J. Setz proves himself to be a master craftsman, even though, when he published the book he was no older than 25. The novel’s scope is small, its focus turned inward rather than outward, its basic story swaddled in several layers like an onion. If Setz keeps up his craft, care and attention, and adds vision and scope, he will become one of the best Austrian writers of our time. His second novel, however, much I love it, is not exactly encouraging.- shigekuni
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Clemens J. Setz, Sons and Planets (Söhne und Planeten), 2007, Residenz
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
In 2007 Austrian writer Clemens J. Setz entered the literary spotlight with a much appreciated debut novel. In four loosely connected episodes he transposed the peculiar and sometimes tragic relationship between fathers and sons into the astronomical and surrealist allegory of Sons and Planets (Söhne und Planeten, 2007, Residenz)[1]. The rhetoric span between modernist dichotomies, scientific juxtaposition and postmodern play has been Setz’s program ever since. As such it cannot be explained in mere postmodern terms but has to be viewed in a new way that in Setz’s case has to do as much with the ambition of the historic avant-gardes as with the insight into their irreversible descent into the museum of artistic movements. Setz shows that the historic development does not necessarily mean that contemporary literature is able to deal with pre-postmodernist concepts only by way of irony and the constant reference to its symbolic constitution and discursive strategies. But, on the contrary, to move beyond postmodernism we need to take a look at the basic goals and structures of literary endeavour and to relocate it in a broader context of a communicative act from which meaning can be gathered only in front of a painful but inevitable social horizon.
Lately, since the decline of l’art pour l’art and Walter Benjamin’s essays on modernism, observers of the literary scene have argued that we have reached a point at which artistic means have become accessible as such in their historic total: as a catalogue of devices aimed not only at delivering a message or making the familiar look strange, but also critically at the very constitution of art itself. From Robert Musil to David Foster Wallace, writers have made use of this in an elaborate fashion, laying out and transcending the social, mental and artistic inventory of their respective times. The literary genre of the novel, which was sentenced to death several times, remained the predominant vehicle for their general approaches.
The ambitious project of Clemens J. Setz shows that it still is. He sets out his own novelistic stance with an epigram taken from Robert Musil’s Man without Qualitites: “Anything permanent loses its power to make an impression.” The things that constitute the backdrop of our consciousness, Musil argues, are bereft of their ability to play a role on the stage of our consciousness. According to that basic guideline, Setz not only puts our quotidian reality into question, but the literary development of the last century and the recent permanence of postmodernism. Setz’s oeuvre is a poetological quest and the overt quotation of literary father figures like his famous countryman Musil is already a part of it. The young author is as aware of the hubris of that attempt, as the critique of the alleged lack of coherence and the essayistic and seminar-like character of his second and so far most important novel, The Frequencies (Die Frequenzen, 2009, btb), was harsh.
We enter the voluminous novel via the (usually blank) very first page and an entry in the fictional “Dictionary of Afterlife-Myths”. It states Setz as the author of the book at hand and, besides giving a basic inventory of the novel’s characters, it designates the novel to be “a huge declaration of love to the non-linear character of time”. Accordingly, The Frequencies bursts open the linearity of narration and scrambles its numerous episodes across 700 pages. Setz uses the alternating stories of two school friends that lost sight of each other, and the murder of a therapist in today’s Graz to re-evaluate from a post-postmodernist perspective the avant-garde’s ambition to defamiliarize the quotidian and to destroy the conventional or organic work of art: how strong do the boundaries hold between art and life today? Can you combine the spiritualism of the surrealists with the anti-metaphysical stance of the postmodern period?
While you would expect the reunion of former schoolmates Alexander and Walter to be the story’s point of culmination, and the murder to initiate a crime story along which the plot gradually unfolds, neither the two times when the two adolescents accidentally stumble into each other, nor the whodunit offer any key to the novel. Rather, coherence lurks in the side plots and conspicuously arbitrary knots by which the characters (and episodes) are tied together: the childhood of Alexander and the sudden disappearance of his father; the second marriage of the father decades later; the famous family of Walter imposing pressure through a stunningly contemporary imperative to be creative and become an artist, or if that does not work at least a journalist. Alexander begins an affair with the therapist Valerie, whereas Walter seeks help in her “Institute for Conduct of Life”, and instead of getting a treatment there, leaves to pursue a job as an actor in one of Valerie’s unconventional sessions. Here he meets Gabi who suffers from a neurosis that reveals its tragic effects by being passed on like a baton, evolving symbolically until it recurs as a metal bar with which Valerie is beaten to death.
Although all the episodes seem to happen accidentally, Setz is a meticulous mechanic at the temporal motor of narration. It is here that he skillfully loosens the screws and manipulates our perception while the novel, once its narrative fundament shakes, strives towards the limits of unity and coherence in an avant-garde-like fashion, setting in motion the relationship of its constitutive elements to the whole. At the same time the text reflects upon its precarious composition in a way that would by and large go under the name of postmodernism. The realm beyond the work of art, the truth behind its sentences and words, which for the surrealists was supposed to be unmediated life itself, remains within the narrative frame and is not simply there to be discovered by those sensitive to it – “be aware of storytellers”, one of the characters says after summarizing the story of Scheherazade. In the nonsense-apparatus of the “Rube-Goldberg-Machine”, Setz found a poetological concept that comprises both the avant-garde aesthetics of chance and subconsciousness aimed at an unmediated truth, and the postmodernist awareness of the narrative frame and discursive field. In combining both, Setz subverts the ways in which we make sense of the world, showing the major role narration and literature – be it modernist or postmodernist – play in that process.
Along the way, Setz manages to turn the concept of the novel inside out. The countless coincidences dissipate the narrative logic and point to a connection of the different elements that lies in the deep structures of the text. They take on the prominent role in the text. The hidden becomes the meaningful, while the meaning in the obvious recedes to the swampy lands of nonsense as soon it is looked at closely, or any explanation asked of it. Just as with the razor blade cutting the eye in Buñuel and Dalí’s Le Chien Andalou, in this novel we are confronted with a biting miniature horse or a painful solar eclipse. The text exposes the mechanism of literature in connecting disparate events in a reality that constitutes no meaningful whole – thereby also affirming Frederic Jameson’s axiom of history and its constitutive elements lacking any meaning prior to their textualization. Setz shows that it is us, in the process of narrating, who make sense of the events that have no obvious causal or logical connection – in the text as in our lives.
So far, so postmodern. Then what makes Setz’s young oeuvre go beyond? Many contemporary authors are masters in “surpassing each other in putting metalevel upon metalevel”, as the German critic Jörg Magenau remarked in 2011. In the end it is “nothing but a game that runs empty because it only aims at the text as a text and never at the society in which it emerged.”[2] In The Frequencies, Setz discards the endless play of self-referentiality as “a ghost writing: something that has to occur in every novel”. It has become a backdrop of our current situation that lost its ability to make an impression on the reader. At the same time, the historic example of the avant-gardes shows that we cannot simply discard postmodernism’s insights altogether. Instead, one could argue, Setz uses a metamodern strategy of oscillation between “a modern desire for sense and the postmodern doubt about the sense of it all”.[3]
In Setz’s prose, the notion of subjectivity is jeopardized in the face of a world that seems governed by chance; an overwhelming destiny that “plants its coordinates into the here and now and leaves us behind stupid, without any help”. In consequence, Setz uses his novels as an interrogation in the ways in which we still generate a coherent picture of ourselves and the ties to our environment. There is help, we could say in Setz’s terms, The Frequencies showing that we do not need to turn into helpless tragic figures like Walter, who struggle to develop an identity of their own. Rather it is a question of a consolidation of two sides. When Alexander remembers his childhood, he realizes his social side that longs for recognition, while at the same time an “earth turned away side” is further ahead and sees through the mechanisms of life. Alexander’s musings on how these two sides are joined together leads to the concept of the “as if”: “These two inconspicuous words, as if– maybe they were the keyhole through which you had to look at my life”.
While in Metamodernism the as if is turned positive as a way to accept the narrative character of history and still “progress morally as well as politically”[4], Setz shows the difference between the knowing inside (“that always was a bit cleverer than the visible side”) and the expression, i.e. behavior which is oriented towards society. In poetological terms, subjectivity in Setz’s novels is located between Brecht’s concept of “estrangement” (something Alexander had to learn in school as the text informs us) and Heinrich von Kleist’s “Marionettentheater” (“In front of whom should I have been ashamed, if my puppet theater [Marionettentheater, A.W.] was what everyone called Alexander Kerfuchs?”). While Brecht undermines cathartic effects by establishing a distance between actor and role, Kleist one hundred years earlier criticizes the self-awareness of modern man, who loses his gracefulness as soon as he recognizes himself as being watched. In other words, Setz’s concept of subjectivity is an oscillation between the acknowledgement of playing a role and a self-identical, immediate being. The social is Setz’s corrective here; in order not to turn away from the Other, individuals have to negotiate between their self-aware distance and a naïve grace in their longing for social recognition – echoing Vermeulen and van den Akker’s suggestion of the metamodern sensibility being an “informed naivity” and “pragmatic idealism”.[5]
Then what do we make of our current situation? How do we deal with the distance once established by Brecht and extended to the inevitable by postmodernism? For Setz it belongs to the overabundance of information and meaning the world has to offer. It leads in the wrong direction in a Nietzschean sense as pure knowledge. Setz, who began to make a name for himself also as a poet, seems to have an infinite source of analogies for this stance: Like a rainbow has many “sub-bows” in the ultraviolet and infrared ranges we cannot see, some birds can see these frequency ranges and “maybe that is the reason why so many of them lose their minds. Out of fear of that vast colorful spider web.” The title-giving frequencies, as Gabi illustrates in her vain attempt to identify the cause of her noise-neurosis, do not offer any meaning in themselves. Instead, Setz locates their significance in the space between two persons, where the medium still is the message, and a son can understand his mother just by the tone of her voice: “for any situation there was a particular pitch and in it the meaning was contained.”
The postmodern has shown the loss of a telos behind social and historic development together with the self-referentiality of any symbolic act. Setz knows about the ever-retreating chain of the signifier and a constructivism that seems to relativize everything once it enters the realm of language. The younger Setz finds poetic allegories and simple answers where the Setz of TheFrequencies elaborates on the problem in narratological intricacies. The trick is to do it like the sponge in the puddle. In Sons and Planets, it says in an anonymous letter to the editor of a literary magazine:
Under these preconditions, Setz can install the postmodern at the heart of his prose as one perspective of the “Möbius strip”, yet another concept in his cabinet of poetological figures. Like the two sides of subjectivity, literary endeavor can be seen from at least two angles that nonetheless run together on the möbius strip, that is non-orientable: as a questioning of the narrative generation of meaning and as a communicative act itself, art as an exchange between human beings. Setz’s metamodern quality lies in his ability to first make all the poetic devices accessible in their historic dimension, and second to refer them back to a social context in which they take on another meaning. They account for aesthetics as much as for ethics. In an award acceptance speech he says, “in a certain sense any literature consists of nothing but letters from someone misunderstood.”[6]
In all its plethora of reflections on literature’s proceedings, one of the novel’s successes on the rediscovered stage of our mind is its ability to illustrate family ties while directing our attention to the poetological connections between part and whole, sense and nonsense. The transparent structure of the novel, in other words, is one angle from which we look at the Möbius strip. Looking at it from a second angle, we start to fathom the hidden workings of familial relations: “the most extreme case of cling together, swing together”. Like the text is a mesh of hidden and overt narrative ties that holds everything together, “the family is a mesh within which everyone pulls everyone else down with him when he falls”, so it says in the second part of the entry in the “Dictionary of Afterlife-Myths”. With it the book ends on the (usually blank) very last page. That these ties do not account for a happy end, as the sinister rhetoric shows, is the result of a careful handling of pathos and an insight into the human abyss that keeps good family novels from being boring. It is that which constitutes the “steady background noise” of the novel. Setz’s project was to put these Musilian latencies on our consciousness’ agenda again. And it is his metamodern sensibility that, at the same time, gives us a glimpse of what a post-postmodernist literature could look like.
-www.metamodernism.com/Clik here to view.
In 2007 Austrian writer Clemens J. Setz entered the literary spotlight with a much appreciated debut novel. In four loosely connected episodes he transposed the peculiar and sometimes tragic relationship between fathers and sons into the astronomical and surrealist allegory of Sons and Planets (Söhne und Planeten, 2007, Residenz)[1]. The rhetoric span between modernist dichotomies, scientific juxtaposition and postmodern play has been Setz’s program ever since. As such it cannot be explained in mere postmodern terms but has to be viewed in a new way that in Setz’s case has to do as much with the ambition of the historic avant-gardes as with the insight into their irreversible descent into the museum of artistic movements. Setz shows that the historic development does not necessarily mean that contemporary literature is able to deal with pre-postmodernist concepts only by way of irony and the constant reference to its symbolic constitution and discursive strategies. But, on the contrary, to move beyond postmodernism we need to take a look at the basic goals and structures of literary endeavour and to relocate it in a broader context of a communicative act from which meaning can be gathered only in front of a painful but inevitable social horizon.
Lately, since the decline of l’art pour l’art and Walter Benjamin’s essays on modernism, observers of the literary scene have argued that we have reached a point at which artistic means have become accessible as such in their historic total: as a catalogue of devices aimed not only at delivering a message or making the familiar look strange, but also critically at the very constitution of art itself. From Robert Musil to David Foster Wallace, writers have made use of this in an elaborate fashion, laying out and transcending the social, mental and artistic inventory of their respective times. The literary genre of the novel, which was sentenced to death several times, remained the predominant vehicle for their general approaches.
The ambitious project of Clemens J. Setz shows that it still is. He sets out his own novelistic stance with an epigram taken from Robert Musil’s Man without Qualitites: “Anything permanent loses its power to make an impression.” The things that constitute the backdrop of our consciousness, Musil argues, are bereft of their ability to play a role on the stage of our consciousness. According to that basic guideline, Setz not only puts our quotidian reality into question, but the literary development of the last century and the recent permanence of postmodernism. Setz’s oeuvre is a poetological quest and the overt quotation of literary father figures like his famous countryman Musil is already a part of it. The young author is as aware of the hubris of that attempt, as the critique of the alleged lack of coherence and the essayistic and seminar-like character of his second and so far most important novel, The Frequencies (Die Frequenzen, 2009, btb), was harsh.
We enter the voluminous novel via the (usually blank) very first page and an entry in the fictional “Dictionary of Afterlife-Myths”. It states Setz as the author of the book at hand and, besides giving a basic inventory of the novel’s characters, it designates the novel to be “a huge declaration of love to the non-linear character of time”. Accordingly, The Frequencies bursts open the linearity of narration and scrambles its numerous episodes across 700 pages. Setz uses the alternating stories of two school friends that lost sight of each other, and the murder of a therapist in today’s Graz to re-evaluate from a post-postmodernist perspective the avant-garde’s ambition to defamiliarize the quotidian and to destroy the conventional or organic work of art: how strong do the boundaries hold between art and life today? Can you combine the spiritualism of the surrealists with the anti-metaphysical stance of the postmodern period?
While you would expect the reunion of former schoolmates Alexander and Walter to be the story’s point of culmination, and the murder to initiate a crime story along which the plot gradually unfolds, neither the two times when the two adolescents accidentally stumble into each other, nor the whodunit offer any key to the novel. Rather, coherence lurks in the side plots and conspicuously arbitrary knots by which the characters (and episodes) are tied together: the childhood of Alexander and the sudden disappearance of his father; the second marriage of the father decades later; the famous family of Walter imposing pressure through a stunningly contemporary imperative to be creative and become an artist, or if that does not work at least a journalist. Alexander begins an affair with the therapist Valerie, whereas Walter seeks help in her “Institute for Conduct of Life”, and instead of getting a treatment there, leaves to pursue a job as an actor in one of Valerie’s unconventional sessions. Here he meets Gabi who suffers from a neurosis that reveals its tragic effects by being passed on like a baton, evolving symbolically until it recurs as a metal bar with which Valerie is beaten to death.
Although all the episodes seem to happen accidentally, Setz is a meticulous mechanic at the temporal motor of narration. It is here that he skillfully loosens the screws and manipulates our perception while the novel, once its narrative fundament shakes, strives towards the limits of unity and coherence in an avant-garde-like fashion, setting in motion the relationship of its constitutive elements to the whole. At the same time the text reflects upon its precarious composition in a way that would by and large go under the name of postmodernism. The realm beyond the work of art, the truth behind its sentences and words, which for the surrealists was supposed to be unmediated life itself, remains within the narrative frame and is not simply there to be discovered by those sensitive to it – “be aware of storytellers”, one of the characters says after summarizing the story of Scheherazade. In the nonsense-apparatus of the “Rube-Goldberg-Machine”, Setz found a poetological concept that comprises both the avant-garde aesthetics of chance and subconsciousness aimed at an unmediated truth, and the postmodernist awareness of the narrative frame and discursive field. In combining both, Setz subverts the ways in which we make sense of the world, showing the major role narration and literature – be it modernist or postmodernist – play in that process.
Along the way, Setz manages to turn the concept of the novel inside out. The countless coincidences dissipate the narrative logic and point to a connection of the different elements that lies in the deep structures of the text. They take on the prominent role in the text. The hidden becomes the meaningful, while the meaning in the obvious recedes to the swampy lands of nonsense as soon it is looked at closely, or any explanation asked of it. Just as with the razor blade cutting the eye in Buñuel and Dalí’s Le Chien Andalou, in this novel we are confronted with a biting miniature horse or a painful solar eclipse. The text exposes the mechanism of literature in connecting disparate events in a reality that constitutes no meaningful whole – thereby also affirming Frederic Jameson’s axiom of history and its constitutive elements lacking any meaning prior to their textualization. Setz shows that it is us, in the process of narrating, who make sense of the events that have no obvious causal or logical connection – in the text as in our lives.
So far, so postmodern. Then what makes Setz’s young oeuvre go beyond? Many contemporary authors are masters in “surpassing each other in putting metalevel upon metalevel”, as the German critic Jörg Magenau remarked in 2011. In the end it is “nothing but a game that runs empty because it only aims at the text as a text and never at the society in which it emerged.”[2] In The Frequencies, Setz discards the endless play of self-referentiality as “a ghost writing: something that has to occur in every novel”. It has become a backdrop of our current situation that lost its ability to make an impression on the reader. At the same time, the historic example of the avant-gardes shows that we cannot simply discard postmodernism’s insights altogether. Instead, one could argue, Setz uses a metamodern strategy of oscillation between “a modern desire for sense and the postmodern doubt about the sense of it all”.[3]
In Setz’s prose, the notion of subjectivity is jeopardized in the face of a world that seems governed by chance; an overwhelming destiny that “plants its coordinates into the here and now and leaves us behind stupid, without any help”. In consequence, Setz uses his novels as an interrogation in the ways in which we still generate a coherent picture of ourselves and the ties to our environment. There is help, we could say in Setz’s terms, The Frequencies showing that we do not need to turn into helpless tragic figures like Walter, who struggle to develop an identity of their own. Rather it is a question of a consolidation of two sides. When Alexander remembers his childhood, he realizes his social side that longs for recognition, while at the same time an “earth turned away side” is further ahead and sees through the mechanisms of life. Alexander’s musings on how these two sides are joined together leads to the concept of the “as if”: “These two inconspicuous words, as if– maybe they were the keyhole through which you had to look at my life”.
While in Metamodernism the as if is turned positive as a way to accept the narrative character of history and still “progress morally as well as politically”[4], Setz shows the difference between the knowing inside (“that always was a bit cleverer than the visible side”) and the expression, i.e. behavior which is oriented towards society. In poetological terms, subjectivity in Setz’s novels is located between Brecht’s concept of “estrangement” (something Alexander had to learn in school as the text informs us) and Heinrich von Kleist’s “Marionettentheater” (“In front of whom should I have been ashamed, if my puppet theater [Marionettentheater, A.W.] was what everyone called Alexander Kerfuchs?”). While Brecht undermines cathartic effects by establishing a distance between actor and role, Kleist one hundred years earlier criticizes the self-awareness of modern man, who loses his gracefulness as soon as he recognizes himself as being watched. In other words, Setz’s concept of subjectivity is an oscillation between the acknowledgement of playing a role and a self-identical, immediate being. The social is Setz’s corrective here; in order not to turn away from the Other, individuals have to negotiate between their self-aware distance and a naïve grace in their longing for social recognition – echoing Vermeulen and van den Akker’s suggestion of the metamodern sensibility being an “informed naivity” and “pragmatic idealism”.[5]
Then what do we make of our current situation? How do we deal with the distance once established by Brecht and extended to the inevitable by postmodernism? For Setz it belongs to the overabundance of information and meaning the world has to offer. It leads in the wrong direction in a Nietzschean sense as pure knowledge. Setz, who began to make a name for himself also as a poet, seems to have an infinite source of analogies for this stance: Like a rainbow has many “sub-bows” in the ultraviolet and infrared ranges we cannot see, some birds can see these frequency ranges and “maybe that is the reason why so many of them lose their minds. Out of fear of that vast colorful spider web.” The title-giving frequencies, as Gabi illustrates in her vain attempt to identify the cause of her noise-neurosis, do not offer any meaning in themselves. Instead, Setz locates their significance in the space between two persons, where the medium still is the message, and a son can understand his mother just by the tone of her voice: “for any situation there was a particular pitch and in it the meaning was contained.”
The postmodern has shown the loss of a telos behind social and historic development together with the self-referentiality of any symbolic act. Setz knows about the ever-retreating chain of the signifier and a constructivism that seems to relativize everything once it enters the realm of language. The younger Setz finds poetic allegories and simple answers where the Setz of TheFrequencies elaborates on the problem in narratological intricacies. The trick is to do it like the sponge in the puddle. In Sons and Planets, it says in an anonymous letter to the editor of a literary magazine:
The argument of relativity is strangely pointless to me. It might simply be a privilege that I assume, like I make use of my privilege as a Catholic to go in the cold in the earliest morning hours to the first mass. Or like the privilege of the sponge, that lies in the puddle and thinks it’s soaking with the clouds and treetops that are mirrored in the dirty water.Simple is that. But for the sake of paraphrasing it: the possibility of transcendence refused by postmodernism lies within an individual pragmatism that turns the admittedly and a priori impossible into a privilege.
Under these preconditions, Setz can install the postmodern at the heart of his prose as one perspective of the “Möbius strip”, yet another concept in his cabinet of poetological figures. Like the two sides of subjectivity, literary endeavor can be seen from at least two angles that nonetheless run together on the möbius strip, that is non-orientable: as a questioning of the narrative generation of meaning and as a communicative act itself, art as an exchange between human beings. Setz’s metamodern quality lies in his ability to first make all the poetic devices accessible in their historic dimension, and second to refer them back to a social context in which they take on another meaning. They account for aesthetics as much as for ethics. In an award acceptance speech he says, “in a certain sense any literature consists of nothing but letters from someone misunderstood.”[6]
In all its plethora of reflections on literature’s proceedings, one of the novel’s successes on the rediscovered stage of our mind is its ability to illustrate family ties while directing our attention to the poetological connections between part and whole, sense and nonsense. The transparent structure of the novel, in other words, is one angle from which we look at the Möbius strip. Looking at it from a second angle, we start to fathom the hidden workings of familial relations: “the most extreme case of cling together, swing together”. Like the text is a mesh of hidden and overt narrative ties that holds everything together, “the family is a mesh within which everyone pulls everyone else down with him when he falls”, so it says in the second part of the entry in the “Dictionary of Afterlife-Myths”. With it the book ends on the (usually blank) very last page. That these ties do not account for a happy end, as the sinister rhetoric shows, is the result of a careful handling of pathos and an insight into the human abyss that keeps good family novels from being boring. It is that which constitutes the “steady background noise” of the novel. Setz’s project was to put these Musilian latencies on our consciousness’ agenda again. And it is his metamodern sensibility that, at the same time, gives us a glimpse of what a post-postmodernist literature could look like.
[1] All quotes and titles in the text are translated from German, translation mine, A.W.
[2] J. Magenau: „Hier bin ich und leg dich flach“. In Süddeutsche Zeitung, 6.12.2011, P. V2/9.
[3] Notes on Metamodernism P. 6.
[4] Ibid. P. 5.
[5] Ibid.
[6]„Dankesrede von Clemens J. Setz“, in: Bremer Literaturpreis 2010, 26. Januar 2010, Rudolf-Alexander-Schröder-Stiftung, www.rudolf-alexander-schroeder-stiftung.de [28.7.2012].
Photo: Clemens J. Setz by Lukas Beck © www.lukasbeck.com
Photo: Clemens J. Setz by Lukas Beck © www.lukasbeck.com
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This is why I read books, this is why I follow contemporary literature. Söhne und Planeten, Clemens J. Setz’ debut novel is stunning in its accomplishments, announcing the presence of a writer whom we will not hesitate to call ‘great’ one day. In 2009, Setz published his sophomore novel Die Frequenzen, a quirky, smart, engrossing read of a book, some 700 pages of writing that was both accessible and assuredly literary; it was also a long book overflowing with stuff that was maybe a tad less disciplined than one could have wished it to be, continuing an intriguing trend in contemporary German-language literature. If his second novel was indulgent and effusive, his debut novel is strict and dark. Although, as a whole, it merits being called a “novel”, it consists of four shorter novellas, each of which is taut and cunningly crafted. The novel is emotionally moving, yet almost blindingly clever in its structure and slyly original. It has not been translated, so far, despite what Conversational Reading‘s Scott Esposito sees as a good time for translation, and despite a series of mediocre German writers already translated. This is one of the best debuts published in German in the past decade, and Setz is shaping up to be the finest novelist of his generation, and one of the best novelists of these past years in German in general, with fellow Austrian genius Thomas Stangl (also untranslated into English, so far, see here my review of Stangl’s shockingly great third novel) and the German prose wizards HartmutLange and Marcel Beyer (Beyer at least has been, partly, translated. Don’t miss out on his work). Although Clemens J. Setz’ second novel is flashier and maybe even livelier, his first novel is a much better candidate for translation and maybe the better novel, as well.
Steeped in German and American literature, Söhne und Planeten is a largely realist chamber play, set in the reasonably well off middle class, and is based on the tensions inherent in many father-son relationships, something that connects Setz to readers everywhere, regardless of language and culture. The book’s basic references are to writers like Kafka, Ashbery, Bernhard, Delillo, Stifter, Turgenev and Handke, i.e. American writers and those well known and translated in the US. Few of its strengths are specific to its original language; Setz’ characters’ ruminations on writing and literature, their fears and neuroses, their difficulties as fathers, as sons, with each other; their failings as writers, as persons, all these would make immediate, powerful sense in any skillful translation, well, as far as anything in the book makes ‘immediate’ sense. Reading Söhne und Planeten, which literally means ‘Sons and Planets’, means reading attentively, re-reading even, yet the book is not difficult, obscure or forbidding in any way. Like the aforementioned Hartmut Lange, Setz combines cleverness and craft with an accessible, fresh and clean language. In Söhne und Planeten (though somewhat less so in his second novel), Setz writes with an amazing literary sophistication, slipping in and out of various literary voices and modes; at the same time, he never loses sight of the simple basic story he’s got to tell, of men and their fears. This simple basic story is conveyed with simple enough words, and the closer the novel moves to its emotionally bruising finish, the clearer the language becomes. This book would be just as impressive in translation; what’s more, unlike writers like Thomas Bernhard or Andreas Meier, this book could almost be viewed as bestseller material, despite its author’s obvious literary finesse. It’s an excellent book, and one that should be translated.
I already mentioned the fact that Söhne und Planeten is composed of four sections that could be seen as separate novellas. As a novel, the book is devastatingly coherent, revealing its overall concerns and ideas only slowly, yet each of the four novellas is extraordinarily well crafted, and each of the four novellas is vastly different in the way it’s made, from each of the others. There’s no repetition, no sentimental whimsy, each of the novellas’ means are perfectly chosen, each novella is perfectly placed. The first and the last novella are relatively straight narratives of young men, the first focusing on the up-and-coming young novelist René Templ, the last focusing on Victor Senegger, whose suicide prior to the events of the book cast a shadow over everything that happens within the novel. The two middle novellas are composed of several points of view, providing more complex narratives, none of which, however, lacks the tautness and discipline characteristic of the German novella (think of Zweig, Storm or Lange). Like a finely composed piece of music, Setz aligns all of his characters, their thoughts and actions in a music that rises, in the end, to a moving crescendo. The last novella, a coda of sorts, the most sentimental, the most unvarnished piece of the whole novel, turns out to be a perfectly fitting capstone to a book where everything really is in its right place. In the middle novellas, in many ways, Setz pays homage to the vast canon of modern and postmodern American literature, somewhere between early-ish Don Delillo and Philip Roth, but it’s really the first section/novella that shows us the way, although it turns out to have been the least characteristic part of the whole book.
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That first novella, called “Kubische Raumaufteilung” (~ Cubic Room Layout), and presented with a prefatory quote by a “V.S.”, presumably Victor Senegger, is basically an exercise in angst-ridden soliloquy massively influenced by Franz Kafka, although the book doesn’t restrict itself to obvious influences or homages. It also contains both pastiches and long, extended quotes, sometimes from surprising sources. “Kubische Raumaufteilung”, for example, borrows from Kafka more than the surreal manifestations of its protagonist’s neurotic fears; it also borrows, inconsistently, his exquisitely simple yet literary language, sometimes offering almost a direct likeness of Kafka’s tone and his turns of phrase. All this is coupled with a narrator who is often coarse, desperately coarse, even. René Templ is a fearful individual, a young father, an aspiring writer, a husband who cheats on his wife with another woman to feel better about himself, yet whenever he feels pressured or afraid, he shrinks to the size of a child, or at least he thinks he does. Fear, another character says, later in the novel, is just another way to deal with one’s own body, just as Celine maintained (quoted by Setz) that philosophy is just another way to deal with one’s fear. Templ is obsessed with his own body and its inadequacies. He masturbates thoroughly, and his obsession with his genitalia and bodily fluids isn’t just communicated plainly to the reader, it’s also part of why he appears to be failing as a father and husband. Templ attempts to locate himself in his own body but he can only find decay, piss and blood. A writer, his mind is only as strong as the weakest part of his body, and as a result, his writing, at least the one small bit of Templ’s work we’re offered near the end of the second novella, is a gleaming but useless prosthesis, bereft of any muscle or genuine substance.
It’s only slowly that we comprehend that Victor is really the book’s central character, his absence an important part of three of the four novellas. In some ways, the first novella centers on René, the one character that, in a skewed way, has taken Victor’s place with his father, old Mr. Senegger; at the same time, René’s about to enact a relationship with his son that has an uncanny similarity to the one, we gather, Victor and his father had. The second novella, then, moves closer to Victor by focusing centrally on death and loss. The setting of that novella is a dinner party at the house of Ernst Mauser, a friend of Senegger’s and Templ’s, who’s recently lost his wife. Present are a handful of writers, including both Senegger and Templ. It’s the most complicated and elaborate of the novellas; each of its chapters offers, Rashomon-like, a different account of the events at Mauser’s house, in different genres, from a chapter written as an essay, to one entirely composed of letters. Not that really a whole lot happens, per se; instead, the novella, called “Fuge zu Ehren des Sonnensystems” (~ Fugue in Honor of the Solar System), examines the shape of loss in a writer’s life, and the impact this can have on the way he deals with his art, and with other people. It also helps us to better understand each of the other characters, especially Templ and Senegger, both of which emerge from this novella as somewhat farcical, tentatively ridiculous characters, both laughably self-centered and devoid of self-criticism. Additionally, the novella continues Setz’ interrogation of fear and masculinity. All this, while tragedy -and victor’s story- is waiting in the wings. But there is no pressure within the careful pages of Setz’ novel, no urgency in the narrative, nothing that really tells to reader what to look for, what’s to come; instead, we often seem to be led into a pointless exercise in cleverness.
Upon rereading, the dense novel yields its complexities in a way that might not be obvious to the first time reader. The relatively autonomous nature of the novellas, their self-contained arcs and structure can seduce us into reading them on their own terms, without the larger connecting context (although that does eventually become rather difficult as the novel progresses). The impression of largely pointless cleverness is exacerbated by the way that Setz uses quotes, paraphrases and pastiches of other writers, from various literary contexts. We catch a phrase from Pound’s Cantos here, a lilting note from Musil, a whole page from Defoe and much, much more. I’m certain I haven’t caught the half of it, but the fact of the matter is that the book crawls with these. And lists, of course. The best poets to read in the spring (answer, by the way: “Jaroslav Seifert, Vicente Aleixandre und Ezra Pound”), favorite novelists, etc. As it turns out, the novel uses devices like that in order to mirror the poetical principles of Victor Senegger himself, and towards the end of the novel, Victor Senegger, lover, friend, and suicidal son, bleeds into and merges with Victor the writer, and ways to write and ways to live become comparable and interchangeable, even. In all of this, if we disregard the odd Kafkaesque interlude, Setz’ book is solidly conventional realism. The characters and their neuroses are often derived from or references to stock characters developed in a century of psychoanalytically influenced fiction. In its long quotes and giddy pastiches, Söhne und Planeten is almost contemptuous of the idea of producing something original, in the Romanticist sense of the word. But contempt is too strong a word.
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The fact is, Setz often doesn’t seem to care where, within the gay mirror cabinet of literary genres and traditions, his novel can or should be placed. It’s overt simplicity does allow for easy pigeonholing, yet it seems to me that any closer look, any deeper analysis (and I haven’t even mentioned in how many ways Setz takes up the novel’s titular planetary metaphor and what use he makes of it) makes any honest attempt to do so impossible. The most remarkable thing however, and the last issue I’ll mention here, is the place it has within the corpus of Austrian literature. When Handke, Bernhard, Innerhofer and the other great post-war Austrian novelists and playwrights emerged and became a viable literary phenomenon in the 1960s, quite a few studies and essays pointed out how their kind of writing was a kind of anti-Stifter literature, a new tradition opposed to the massive influence of that titan of Austrian letters, Adalbert Stifter. And indeed, one can place a great deal of literary Austrian fiction in relationship to Stifter, yet some younger writers, especially Setz, don’t seem to fit that mold any more. In passing, Setz demolishes Bernhard just as calmly as he rejects Stifter’s ideas of order. Söhne und Planeten is a marvelous novel, one that’s worth reading and re-reading. It’s not perfect, but for a debut novel, it’s absolutely dazzling. Clemens J. Setz proves himself to be a master craftsman, even though, when he published the book he was no older than 25. The novel’s scope is small, its focus turned inward rather than outward, its basic story swaddled in several layers like an onion. If Setz keeps up his craft, care and attention, and adds vision and scope, he will become one of the best Austrian writers of our time. His second novel, however, much I love it, is not exactly encouraging.- shigekuni