Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 3
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Translator's Comments: Albrecht Selge's "Losing Track" / Angela Flury
<1> In Wach, published by Rowohlt Berlin Verlag (and as yet unpublished in English translation), a man named August Kreutzer, unable to sleep, drifts through the city whenever he is not at work. At first he walks in the evenings hoping thereby to get over his persistent insomnia. Along the way, he has to deal with a Doppelgänger who uses August's legal name to blog elaborate, almost baroque pornography online. Gradually, walking grows into its own proper cause for August Kreutzer's sleeplessness. The more he roams, the less he sleeps. He loses weight, eventually forgets to eat. August's hypnopompic state of mind even jeopardizes his job as an assistant manager at an upscale shopping mall-The Pleasure Center Palace-where replicas of all the seven major boulevards of the world have been made to converge for the enjoyment of shoppers seeking a flânerie protected from the vagaries of street life. Occasionally, and in keeping with his official job as assistant overseer and with his private pleasure as observer, August Kreutzer leans on the railing high above the Center's global intersection of famous streets to observe the shopping pedestrians below. The grandeur of the state-of-the-art mall and the bombastic rhetoric of his boss, a man named Xerxes, are at odds with those drabber parts of the city where August strolls in his off-hours, when his semi-conscious observations illuminate the spatial minutiae of his ever-changing surroundings.
<2> Three summers ago, having just gone on sabbatical and moved to Berlin, the prickly lament of a literary review of Wach caught my attention: "Yet another Berlin novel / "Noch ein Berlinroman" [i]. I pricked up my ears because, for one, I had moved to Berlin hoping to write such a book myself. But I was equally, if not more, in the mood to translate a new book, especially one taking place in the city that inspired me.
<3> Berlin novels have a long history indeed and might include the following: Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, the 1929 go-to-account of the Weimar Republic; Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, published in 1939 and chronicling the city's decadence against the rise of fascism; John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, masterpiece of spy fiction from 1963 pivoting on the recently erected Wall as center of the cold war capital; Philip Kerr's 1989 March Violets, a detective story utilizing American hard-boiled noir but set squarely in Nazi Berlin; and London-based, Mexican-American novelist Chloe Aridjis' recent Book of Clouds (2009) about Berlin around the time of its unification in 1989.
<4> If the generic conventions of a proper Berlin novel entail landmarks-and the above cited books use them for navigation (How else should we know we are in Berlin?)-Albrecht Selge's Lucid eschews them. It takes a while before the novel gives away topographical clues allowing a discerning reader to identify Berlin as Schauplatz of its protagonist's flânerie-if that term aptly describes the compulsive walking of a man who can no longer sleep.
<5> As if anticipating the reviewer's prickly lament-Why would anybody want to write another Berlin novel-Selge avoids the potential trappings of the city's historical and socio-political iconography, or, put differently, its overdetermined spatiality. Berlin novels carry an allegiance to modernism and while Selge's does too, his book does not capitalize on the historical mystique of the city. Moreover, his allegiance to modernism is complex, as he both evokes and evaporates modernist motifs in his treatment of the Doppelgänger and flânerie. Layers, ruins, fragments, and signage-in short, the repertoire of themes and motifs in city writing-also make flickering appearances. What emerges is a distinctive vision of the urban. In the vision's exploration lies the novel's motivation.
<6> In their fixation on the unspectacular, from the geometric shapes of asphalt tiles to passing figures of people of no consequence, August's drifting eyes elevate the mundane. August's half-awake acuity casts a spell on his surroundings. Selge's pièce de résistance in Lucid lies in his perception of a city beyond famous sights and facile historization. If there were nostalgia, it's been dissolved in Selge's many minute observations. Selge's prose is keenly unassuming-perhaps a stylistic assimilation of August's fatigued yet intriguing observations. While the writing cannot be said to exaggerate the tension between, on the one hand, the spectacle that is the mall, and on the other, the city outside of it, there's nevertheless a distinction being explored: between a consumer eye, directed at the simulated marvels of boulevards like "Istiklal Caddesi,… Champs-Élysées, La Rambla, Oxford Street, 5th Avenue," and the cinematic eye, which finds asphalt tiles remarkable. August not only orients himself "by means of little knobs in the asphalt" but also allows his peripheral vision at times to become his central vision. Taking the tram to work, he has from the corner of his eye regularly caught sight of a home for old people and over time filled in the silhouette of this peripheral view by "piec[ing] together a picture" that can be narrated in the mind's eye: "on the glass porch a rubber plant with broad hanging leaves, probably covered in dust, and next to the plant, filling out the space except for a small entry way, a wicker chair with a motionless old woman; even in the summer with a wool blanket on her legs, she is always sitting there looking out on the street…In her sitting around all day long, she has gotten lost to the world." Even the object most in pursuit of linearity, the tram, offers possibilities for detours, as August applies his peripheral vision to recognize the static loneliness of an old woman stuck in time and space.
<7> The neglect to make the locale-Berlin-recognizable is also in keeping with August's state of mind: it is reflected in his inextricable drifting. Put differently, his meandering eyes and feet are traversing an urban space unlike that of the visitor-tourist, and the ingenuity of Selge's novel is in not making the city recognizable, which is not the same as saying unrecognizable. About seventy pages into the novel, for instance, first the Dominican monastery St. Paulus, then a series of street names cross his visual fixation field. August's eyes are led to the latter through "something white [that]shines from up the street," something that "radiates without wrinkles," which turns out to be the tunic of a monk who directs August's pursuing eyes towards the street signs intersecting: Wiclefstreet, Waldenserstreet, Zwinglistreet. August recognizes the streets to be associated with the Reformation: "It's like this: Over a century ago, the Dominican monastery was kettled in by reformation names, a narrow path religious feud; even then already a thing of yesterday, this constellation is today doubly summoner of the past." More than half way through the book, August's attentive, non-hierarchical, associative gaze, comprising the descriptive fluidity of Selge's prose, finally hits on an indisputable landmark but carefully keeps from naming it: "The government district is surrounded by spots that by their mere existence deride all that is representative. A bar, with nobody in it, is called Capital Hermitage. The back wall of a takeout place is adorned with the painting of the famous city gate, the city's landmark, only in place of the six Doric columns, there are six curved sausages." It may be possible here to ignore even the simulated landmark, the Brandenburg Gate.
<8> Center and periphery relations are brought into question rather than taken for granted as in traditional scopic regimes. Selge's mapping of August's movements brings the latter to an awareness near what could be called the novel's "climax," when deep into the night he stumbles upon the locked up mall, The Pleasure Center Palace, by happenstance. Through the image of the "palace" merging with its surrounding lights, he begins to understand that "the city isn't only encircled by an unforeseeable periphery but speckled through and through with countless peripheries and that even the innermost center has its thousands upon thousands of peripheries." In his appreciation of this recognition-"how beautiful, actually"-he implicitly deposes the artificially constructed centrality of urban spatial regimes (with The Pleasure Center Palace as throne room). August's nocturnal epiphany suggests that such regimes need not be imposed on a passive reader but that everyone can potentially rewrite them-the flaneur as author as errant city planner.
<9> In his evergrowing "need to wander" and to stay awake, "August goes neither right nor left but in a roundabout way, on small side streets and detours." Everything is interesting. He invents games like setting out from a "semi-familiar [street] corner," then "making two turns, three turns, still thinking you know where you'll end up but already lost in unfamiliar territory and then you continue walking, no longer certain where what stands, happy that it all exists and has always existed […] and now you have finally, finally arrived." Steering clear of teleological trajectories to arrive in the unknown perhaps can be construed as August's unconscious search for an exit from the telos of capitalism and utilitarianism. August is here walking in the footsteps of modernist protagonists in the work of writers like Rhys, Breton, and Sebald. Yet his vision is distinctly cubist, which could be seen as a détournement of Lefebvre's concept of capitalist space as "pulverized"-not through "magic" transformation but lucid attention. Selge's book invokes a rich literary tradition of walkers and stalkers, from the 19th century on. While his kinship to Dickens may seem slight, Dickens' outings in the dark (and London was then a badly lit place) were plainly the basis for his intricate knowledge of the city's every corner [ii]. Just as Selge reinvents nocturnal wandering for the 21st century, Dickens' hauntings precede the 20th century peripatetic experiments of writers whose narratives are gathered on foot, driven to discover incidentals, coincidentals, secrets, and happenstance.
<10> In neglecting to eat and sleep, August is in a way emblematic, as if he were himself a ghostly presence of modernist writing's past, and the desire to describe and narrate on the move, its most important convention. Following August's contemporary version of flânerie reminds us that the great flaneurs of writing were themselves moving through city space in unorthodox ways-whether Dickens risking the backstreets of London at night or Sebald wearing out his shoes in interminable circles. In letting us follow him, August's pathways and visions produce an accumulative effect in the manner of a palimpsest. The density of what happens takes precedence over sustaining and unfolding plot. Perhaps not surprisingly, August is reproached by his friend Manja for not being able to tell a proper story. "Your story," she tells him, "is turning again into a theory." Indeed, what constitutes an "intelligent story" is a question August asks himself. In return, Selge raises the question of what is an intelligible story. Putting aside socio-political considerations for the moment, we may wonder whether it comes down to what, as Barthes put it, constitutes the "pleasure of the text": is it narrative alacrity, descriptive jouissance, or some as yet unnamed angle cut through the text by someone like August.
Notes
[ii] Exhibition "Dickens and London," Museum of London, December, 2011 - June, 2012
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