Georg Büchner (1813–1837)
Dantons Tod (1835)
translated into English as Danton’s Death (1971) by Victor Price

#18:

930: Danton’s Death

This was a satisfying morsel of seriousness, like a dark piece of meat. This is exactly the sort of theater I would never buy tickets for: historical, political, grim, long. But on the page and in my mind, it impressed me with its consistent intelligence. Every moment brings a new idea, either in content or form. Büchner wrote it at the age of 21, never having written for the stage before (and possibly never having seen a play?), and it feels wonderfully free from the influence of theatrical standard practice.

It’s clear that he wrote because he was personally invested in the issues (being a cynical revolutionary himself), not because he considered himself “an artist.”

Many writers seem to write principally because they are writers. The occupation and habit of writing demands subject matter, rather than the subject matter demanding its being written. Their desire to communicate is merely a habit, not an imperative. This state of affairs isn’t inexcusable, but once I recognize it, I often lose interest. I want to be caring about the same thing the writer cared about, feeling the same way he felt. If he was thinking about writing more than about life, chances are so will I. The catch is that passionate, unwriterly writing is usually ineffective; writers, unfortunately, are generally the only people who write well.

Here we have a rare and invigorating case of an author motivated more by his subject than his craft, and yet still having an excellent and original talent for that craft. Or at least for literary art. It’s not clear how realistically Büchner was thinking about theatrical productions. This play calls for a really huge cast (30 named roles plus assorted others), many of the characters making only one appearance each. It contains several heavily populated scenes requiring a large stage, and also many extremely short scenes that demand quick changes. Obviously, these things are all possible, but in combination they create the impression of a play written to be produced in the imagination rather than by paid professionals. Considering how heady and depressing it is, it’s awfully expensive. Not a promising combination from a business perspective.

It can be produced, and has been — not during Büchner’s brief lifetime, of course; not for many decades afterward — but at heart it’s not really crying out to be performed, at least not to my mind. It’s really just literature that happens to be written down as drama, I think because Büchner felt that the form of drama closest approaches the artistic ideal of recreating life. This piece borrows the notation of drama to be something rather different, a different kind of literature — just like that chapter of Ulysses that is written like a play but is manifestly unperformable.

I just read someone’s blog saying that Büchner invented cinema aesthetics 70 years too early: his successions of very brief scenes read like edited film. One succession, in fact, is like a reverse cut, where the scene set outside the prison wall, with a character seen in the prison window, is followed by the scene inside the prison, with the same character looking out the window. This is a neat point, but of course what Büchner was writing was not cinema because it couldn’t be. It was his own fresh aesthetic, driven above all by his desire to be true to life and not to convention.

Here’s an excerpt, in which Büchner decries the mass audience that lacks the imaginative capacity to comprehend sincere and conscientious portrayals of life, such as… this play. How right he was! This speech would not get anywhere near that audience for years. If a writer describes a tree falling in the forest, but nobody ever reads it, is it still standing?

CAMILLE. I tell you, if they don’t get things in wooden copies, all neatly labelled, in theatres, concerts, or art shows, they’ve got neither eyes nor ears for them. But carve a puppet, show them the hole where the string goes in, give it a pull so that its joints creak in blank verse with every step it takes — and then, what character-drawing, what verisimilitude! Take a little scrap of sentiment, an aphorism, a concept, dress it up in coat and trousers, give it hands and feet, paint its face and let it attitudinize through three acts till at the finish it gets married or blows its brains out — and lo, idealism! Fiddle out an opera that bears as much relation to the ups and downs of life as a clay pipe blowing bubbles to a nightingale — high Art. Turn people out of the theatre and on to the street — and oh dear me, how pitiful reality is! They forget God Almighty for his bad imitators. Creation, red-hot creation thunders and lightens in and around them at every moment; they hear and see nothing. They go to the theatre, they read poems and novels, they grimace like the puppets they find in them and turn up their noses at God’s creatures. ‘My dear, how commonplace!’ The Greeks knew what they were talking about when they said that Pygmalion’s statue came to life but bore no children.

DANTON. And artists treat nature as David treated the murdered Septembrists when they were thrown out of La Force on to the streets. He sketched them in cold blood and said: ‘I’m catching the last spasm of life in these scoundrels.’

[He is called away.]

CAMILLE. What do you say, Lucile?

LUCILE. Nothing, I so love watching you when you speak.

CAMILLE. Do you listen as well?

LUCILE. Of course!

CAMILLE. Well, am I right? Do you really know what I said?

LUCILE. To tell you the truth, no.

That deflated after-beat demonstrates what makes the play so brilliant. Büchner’s essayistic speechifying, which is always fascinating in its own right, is never allowed to forget that it too is just part of a real, fallen world, in which the pretensions of essayistic speechifying pale next to the love and pain and confusion around them. This is, in fact, the philosophical point of the play; just causes and noble actions are important, revolutions cannot be ignored, but they reduce life and death to political currency, and anyone who can see that death is another sort of thing entirely is bound to become disenchanted. A revolutionary with his eyes open will always be a cynic about his own cause.

What’s exceptional here is that Büchner takes equally seriously both the politics and the undercurrent of anti-politics. There’s no writing off the political intrigues of the plot as just so much breast-beating; everything that happens is very important for both the characters and for their country; but neither is there any writing off the sense that it is all an ugly, deluded game. Danton’s ambivalence is genuinely Büchner’s and it becomes ours as we take it all in. That, I think, is a great achievement. It’s so easy for a work of art to purport to struggle with philosophical issues even as it sits comfortably within larger and more fundamental philosophical assumptions. This play refuses to get comfortable; it lives right within the issues that drive it.

Among the major speeches of the play, most of them by boasting, feuding, scheming revolutionaries, there is one very earthy, personal one given to a whore, which ends on this remarkable note:

MARION. … Other people have Sundays and week-days, they work six days and they pray on the seventh. Every year they look forward to their birthday, and to the New Year, and they feel sentimental. I don’t understand all that. I know nothing about divisions or changes. I’m all of a piece, just one big longing and clinging. I’m a fire, a river. My mother died of grief. People point their fingers at me. That’s stupid! The only thing that counts is what you enjoy — bodies, holy pictures, flowers, toys. The feelings are just the same. Enjoy yourself — that’s the best way to pray.

This is really Molly Bloom incarnate, 80-some years before her time. The whole play feels like an outburst of very modern philosophical clarity, from an isolated soul who came to it with no particular help from the culture around him. I’m not enamored of “genius” any more than any other artistic mode d’être, but in this case I found the aesthetic self-sufficiency of the work and its author very compelling.

What, I can say raison d’être and modus operandi but I can’t say mode d’être? Well, screw you. And anyway, it’s still not actually what I mean. I really want a word for the type of story that is told about a given person — a mode of being talked about or dramatized, a pre-packaged quasi-narrative identity that can be imposed by a historian. “Tortured genius,” or “renaissance man” or “free spirit,” or “ahead of his time” — each of these is a what? They’re all a little phony because they’re all blithely reductive. Word suggestions please.

I wanted to say something about how naturalism is relative and the speeches aren’t actually “realistic” at all to the way people talk. The atmosphere created by playwriting that is observant about life but is artificially dense with thought always reminds me of Shakespeare, but surely that’s because I haven’t read enough plays. Though the introduction does seem to think drawing connections to Shakespeare is specifically merited here. So… there, I said something. The shorter the better.

A lot of standout lines and moments — I want to mention that the deeply evil speech that Saint-Just makes to the assembly, in particular, is absolutely riveting — and a richly idiosyncratic overall conception makes for a very satisfying read. But even knowing that, I’m not sure I would want to see this performed. I’m not sure it makes enough deliberate enough use of time — real, tangible time, sitting-in-a-crowd-in-the-dark-being-quiet time — that it wouldn’t just feel like a cruel way of turning this intriguing text into a tedious ordeal. There are plenty of very good books that I wouldn’t want to hear performed aloud. I think this might be one of them. Stage directions be damned.

But of course I don’t know — a good director could easily surprise me. I have an open mind and would like to sample a production on video or radio, except there doesn’t seem to be any easy way of doing so. There is a fairly well-regarded opera of Dantons Tod, which seems to have been a career-maker for composer Gottfried von Einem. Oddly enough, you can listen to most of it right here (a few tracks are missing). I actually got the score out of the library and followed through about half of it. The adaptation seems respectable and thoughtful, certainly, and the music seems fine… but I think I just don’t speak opera. As with Richard Strauss a few months back, I don’t know how to listen to a succession of moments of little to no inherent drama each being given big-time musical emphasis. This may well have to do with my mongrel musical upbringing, as I was saying earlier this week. But to go there would be really and truly off topic. Halt.

I got out the ratty library copy above even though they also had two successively cleaner and newer reprints, because 1) more fun to get something that reminds me of the 70s than something that reminds me of the bookstore, right? and 2) the new editions, being offset from the old edition, had slightly thicker, weightier letters. I bet if they cared about it, the technology exists to reprint old editions without any detectable loss of fidelity. But they obviously don’t care, and so they print these ever-blurrier editions, even though the crisper, more delicate letterforms are always more satisfying. AM I RIGHT, PEOPLE?

I’m thinking of building this observation into my standup routine.

Actually I think Demetri Martin already has, right after his hilarious bit about n factorial, and his brilliant riff about how 3 looks like a backward E, and his sestina about how awesome a perfectly sharpened pencil is. That shit cracks me up.

But seriously folks, Demetri Martin is probably a cool guy. I’m gonna end this entry before anything else happens.

Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
Доктор Живаго (1957)
translated into English as Doctor Zhivago by Max Hayward and Manya Harari (1958)

Roll #17:
1748: Boris Pasternak.
1749: Doctor Zhivago

I had been writing a tremendously long entry about this book over many days, but I started to feel nauseated looking at it so I just now wiped it clean. From the top again, boys, this time with feeling, and don’t drag!

I’ll start with the confession: I’m not as proud of this reading as I have been of my others in this series. The book took me by surprise by turning out to be hard. It’s sort of a stealth hard book. You don’t realize what it demands of you until you’re halfway through. I get the impression that some critics have had a similar experience and settled for sizing it up in a superficial way, emboldened to do so, I’ll bet, by the existence of the movie. But it’s not a superficial book. It is an ambitious work of art that asks to be taken seriously. It aims high. Or wide, anyway.

The difficulty is that there are several things going on here, braided together and alternating, and while it’s easy enough to track them separately, it’s not clear how to synthesize and unify them. The descriptive imagery, the historical panorama, the philosophical digressions, the love story, and the life story are all in complex negotiations with one another for airtime. Given 550 pages, they each get enough room to have their say, and they manage to coexist stylistically without too much jostling. But the things they’re saying don’t seem quite consistent with one another. The ungenerous way to resolve the resulting complexities is to conclude that Pasternak didn’t have enough control for so large a work, wasn’t a natural novelist and so ended up writing something philosophically and aesthetically diffuse. It’s also possible that he thought of internal tension and heterogeneity as aesthetically valuable; rich soil for the mind — this certainly seems to be an attitude shared by many poets. The other possibility that I have to consider is that the various elements do resolve into a coherent field of meaning, but that I just haven’t seen how.

On the one hand we have something a bit like The Plague: people’s lives are overturned and threatened by great tidal forces beyond their control, and our good doctor goes among them trying to do the right thing and live according to humble principles, a heroic figure of humanism in a vast landscape of cruel abstractions. But a revolution is not a plague from above; it is a congregate expression of human will. The panorama of struggle and suffering through which Zhivago wanders is the product of his society, not of indifferent nature. Of course it’s admirable that Zhivago loves life, but surely so too do the desperate people around him; the real question is, what is this mess and how did they end up in it? All Quiet on the Western Front, which I read recently but didn’t write about, was about the inhumanity of war but also about the nature of war. It took it upon itself to address “what is this mess and how did we end up in it?” But Zhivago, and Doctor Zhivago, with its poet’s-eye-view of the world, seems skeptical of any kind of analysis, anything that would have a whiff of sociology or history about it. The only “big picture” Pasternak is willing to show us is the alien force of fate, manifested as a dense web of meaningless coincidences that intertwine all these lives; the big picture is a realm of inscrutable mystery.

Zhivago is an intellectual but his beatific humanism is old-school Russian: a little lyricism, a little Christianity, a little mysticism, a little folk. Fairy-tale-ish. That sort of thing, warm and loving though it may be, is no match for a force like the revolution. And Pasternak acknowledges as much: Zhivago’s life taken as a whole is pretty depressing, and after his family and then his mistress are torn from him by circumstance, he declines and dies in a kind of emeritus irrelevance, having had no real impact on events. But it’s also clear that Zhivago’s writing of poetry is meant to be seen as a heroic act. His poems capture the spark of humanism on the page and are like a seed of the human spirit, waiting to be reborn in society, or something.

To me, at least, the realistic descriptions of people starving, freezing, murdering one another, etc. etc. make the idea of poet-as-hero seem awfully flimsy. Isn’t this sort of romanticization of art and intellectualism just as ideological and removed from real life in its way as the sloganistic politics the book laments? The final paragraph, suggesting vaguely that perhaps from these poems, a new day will dawn in the cold Soviet Union, just seems like pie in the sky.

Seeing as Zhivago pretty much is Pasternak, it’s a little self-aggrandizing, as is the fairly overt implication that Zhivago is a Christ-like figure, his pure spirit having died for Russia’s sins. Also distasteful is the fact that the whole book, from a certain point of view, is a justification — sanctification, really — of cheating on your loving wife with the pretty blonde you met at work. The universe conspires to make Zhivago do it, of course, but the romance-novel aspect of the book starts convincing us that it’s fated and desirable long before it is morally excusable. And it’s Pasternak’s universe doing the conspiring, after all. Supposedly his wife and his mistress knew each other and got along well in real life.

Just as Zhivago embodies the values of the old-school Russian thought, the book is a throwback to (or a holdover from) the old-school Russian novel. Not having read War and Peace (which I suspect is the major forebear to Zhivago in substance and form), I feel ill-equipped to guess at Pasternak’s intentions — whether he was writing the only way he knew how, or was making a point by resurrecting a dead style, or was explicitly writing a modern echo of the classics, or what. But I suspect that such distinctions are different in Russia, where Tolstoy and Pushkin still play a far more central, scriptural role in contemporary national pride than, say, Melville and Twain over here in the US. On the issue of style, taste and anachronism, I was reminded of Rachmaninoff, whose music is often dismissed as over-the-top kitschy sentimentalism, but who was actually quite a serious and tasteful composer doing subtle things; he just happened to be one of the last men standing, still working within a frame of reference that was all but extinct, that favored heightened emotion and the intensification of beauty. Likewise, Doctor Zhivago has more than a touch of the soapy melodrama in it, but it comes by it honestly, by way of the craft of an earlier time.

I think. Then again sometimes Rachmaninoff does sound a little cheap even to me. And sometimes I had my doubts about whether Doctor Zhivago was really any more dignified or deep than the movie version that overshadows it. The question remains open. An AMC classic Hollywood movie can be “real art” too, if it’s done well enough. Maybe this book was that kind of achievement?

That Pasternak was a poet shines through very clearly, both for better and for worse. The images are conveyed with force and distinction; the prose, even in translation, is strong and rewarding. Most of the individual scenes are quite fine, and even the soapy, melodramatic stuff was full and well-crafted enough that I got into it. But the relationship between part and whole is always oblique, unstated, as in a poem, and so the whole never quite gelled for me; the murk never quite cleared. And I’m not going to read it again to make better sense of it, though I almost certainly would. It’s just too damn long. Since that’s my choice, I will in good faith grant that it’s entirely possible that this book is not flawed, but rather very rich, and that I have fallen short in exploring it. Probably that’s true… to some degree.

It is a worthy and impressive book. But my gut tells me that my problems with it were its problems, and this is my site, so what I say goes.

I am moved by the formal idea of having the book end, but then to offer, as postlude, Zhivago’s poems. We’ve watched the man’s whole life and seen how these poems represent only the briefest few days of oasis in his existence, and yet here they are, still burning with the life of those few days on the page — apart from, but bound to, the book of his life. I was braced to be deeply moved by the poignancy. But, sadly, the poetry suffers in translation more than the prose and the experience is underwhelming.

I’m also interested in Pasternak’s attempt to write poetry “by Zhivago,” an issue discussed in the comments way back here. I think he does all right. But there’s still a sense of distance between the character in the novel and the author of this poetry, since the only thoughts we’ve heard in Zhivago’s head have been quite directly expressed, and yet here he is being oblique and allusive. Perhaps that’s simply what it is to be a poet? Or perhaps Pasternak hasn’t played the role of Zhivago quite well enough? Once again I’m not sure how to evaluate.

Introduction in this edition by John Bayley is very good, I thought, and makes a fine case for the book. But it should come with a spoiler warning!

Here’s a choice passage for you — the pivotal scene where Zhivago writes. But of course this is actually Pasternak the poet describing inspiration and the writing process, and it has a satisfying “Inside the Actor’s Studio” quality.

Last night he had tried to convey, by words so simple as to be almost childish and suggesting the directness of a lullaby, his feelings of mingled love and fear and longing and courage, in such a way that it should speak for itself, almost apart from the words.

Looking over these rough sketches now, he found that they needed a connecting theme to give unity to the lines, which for lack of it fell apart. He crossed out what he had written and began to write down the legend of St. George and the dragon in the same lyrical manner. At first he used a broad, spacious pentameter. The regularity of the rhythm, independent of the meaning and inherent of the meter itself, annoyed him by its doggerel artificiality. He gave up the pompous meter and the caesura and cut down the lines to four beats, as you cut out useless words in prose. The task was now more difficult but more engaging. The result was livelier but still too verbose. He forced himself to even shorter lines. Now the words were crammed in their trimeters, and Yurii Andreievich felt wide awake, roused, excited; the right words to fill the short lines came, prompted by the measure. Things scarcely named in the lines evoked concrete images. He heard the horse’s hoofs ringing on the surface of the poem, as you hear the ambling of a horse in one of Chopin’s ballades. St. George was galloping over the boundless expanse of the steppe. He could watch him, as he grew smaller in the distance. He wrote in a feverish hurry, scarcely able to keep up with the words as they poured out, always to the point and tumbling into place of themselves.

The resulting work is one of the poems that appears at the end of the book, but the same tight meter that made it exhilarating to write surely also made it very difficult to translate well, and the English version, at least, doesn’t make any very great impact. Sadly.

Oh, hey, look, someone made a movie out of this book I just read, even though it seems like nobody ever reads it! Hey, it’s got really high production values! I get to see all the scenes I just read come to life! Cool!

I had never seen it before — who ever wants to watch a sweeping epic, really? — and pairing it with this reading was ideal, since I was able to focus on the execution, which I think is the movie’s strong suit, rather than the content. I’m just not sure what this story is worth to anyone.

I was very impressed with the adaptation; respectful and thorough but also streamlining, clarifying. Of course, it clarifies the political question by falling decidedly against the revolution in a way the book never does; a few “bad guy” moments are added in that make all the difference. But it never goes outside the bounds of the book’s spirit; it just retouches it so that ambiguities are washed away. Having Evgraf narrating in flashback to the daughter, and having Zhivago’s poems be “the famous Lara poems,” both are, I thought, cleverly unobtrusive ways of giving a roundness to the form that the book never provides.

Music was a little silly. Good casting though — Rod Steiger was a more interesting Komarovsky than the one in the book. Alec Guinness gives a much-needed sense of wisdom to the whole endeavor. Klaus Kinski is in it!! Julie Christie is a lot less of a person than the Lara in the book but that’s how movies work — the prettiness is the message, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan. Likewise, Omar Sharif does exactly what he needs to do as our protagonist by smiling a little and having watery eyes, and that feels like it does justice to the book, which I think is exactly what’s wrong with this material.

Hey, who here wants me to stop talking about Doctor Zhivago? Show of hands? Okay then.