Currently Reading: Fugue States

Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters
The thing about close reading is that it's a skill you acquire for life. The other thing about close reading is that it will sometimes show up when you don't otherwise expect it.

I had attempted Bernhard 15 or so years ago, and found the meandering sentences to require too much work for too little payoff. So my expectations were low going in to Old Masters, except that it involved people mostly talking about art, a subject I am comfortable indulging in at great length. As I read, I had the distinct feeling of having encountered this style of writing before. Since my last attempt I 'got into' Henry James and Proust and Javier Marias: long sentences and minimal plotting were no longer technical issues I could not overcome. 

It's with Marias in particular that this Bernhard novel seemed to have an affinity, the way in which certain words, phrases, and sentences would repeat at regular cadences. But in Marias the words function as a motif that runs throughout the novel--there is one idea and the plot and characters and observations return to it because memory has shaped all of those events, and their telling, around that idea. In Bernhard, one set of words, ideas, and concepts would arise, repeat for awhile, and then fade out of the text never to return. It was less of a motif and more of a fugue. Which makes sense, because the main character is a music critic lecturing on the history of the fugue. Score another one for close reading.

 

Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance
One thing that I think is genuinely difficult for people to realize is that in whatever state we find ourselves, people have been there before. 

In volume II of The Aesthetics of Resistance, Weiss leaves aside the artistic analysis that was a major feature of part I. Instead, he dedicates a lot of time to Bertolt Brecht and a play he is gathering research for on Margaret I of Denmark and opposition to the Hanseatic League in the century following, in the 15th and 16th centuries. The limits of my research access mean that I can't confirm any of this as historically accurate, but Weiss was there in Stockholm with Brecht in 1939-1940 and they both knew each other, and Brecht started a lot of things that were never finished, so who knows?

But a large section of the book is devoted to Denmark's attempts to fend off the Hanseatic League, and subsequent uprisings in Sweden, set alongside similar events in attempting to fend of Nazi Germany when no one is quite prepared to oppose them. A reminder, I suppose, that it's less "history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme" and more "the past isn't dead. It's not even past." If you were looking for a vague message of encouragement, you could do worse than realizing humanity can survive and win in unpropitious circumstances.