Der Zuschauer

Dear Readers, We have had more than our fair share of Flegeljahre in the air hangers here on Guam Island. I am relieved, firstly, to let you know that both Max Klinger, here, and Stanley Richardson, back in New England, have returned to their domestic quarters after their seperate hospitalizations. We hope to publish articles from both of them shortly. The real reason for Klinger’s 2nd heart attack was the following as related by himself.

“I felt a unsettled heart throb as I was reading Samuel Beckett’s Watt. There is a stinging rebuke to hope and faith in the novel which is hard to ignore.”

And yet it is uselss not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it. The gluttonous castaway, the drunkard in the desert, the lecher in prison, they are the happy ones.

“Now this is heartbreaking but hardly life-threatening. Pessimism I can bear but fastidious repetition to what point can drive one to madness and death. Following hard upon the above is the lethal passage begining:”

And the poor old lousy old earth, my earth and my father’s and mother’s and my mother’s mother and my father’s father…
“After a further 13 lines of more father/mother variations we get finally to:”

Father’s father’s fathers and mother’s mother’s mothers…

“The finale of the first aria is: An excrement”

“At this point I felt I had had a stroke; my face grew dark crimson, then purple, my nostrils flared wide. I was barely able to comprehend the fineness of the following sentence:”

The crocuses and and the larch turning green every year a week before the others and the pastures red with uneaten sheep’s placentas…

“It was at then that I suffered a massive heart attack.”

“Stanley Richardson, thousands and thousands of miles away in the Commonwealth managed to keep his mind sound enough to read further…”

And the long summer days and the newmown hay and the wood pigeon in the morning and the cuckoo in the afternoon and corncrake in the evening and the wasp in the jam and the smell of the gorse and the apples falling and ithe children walking in the dead leaves and the larch turning brown a week before the others…

“…assuming more about uneaten sheep plaacentas would follow and ggetting instead…”

…howling winds and the sea breaking over the pier and the first fires and the hooves on the road and the consumptive postman whistling The Roses Are Blooming in Picardy…

“He too, Richardson, lost consciousness and suffered arrested cognition. That is all I have to say at the moment.”

I can tell you, Dear Reader, that Klinger will never touch Watt again and I would doubt whether he will venture upon any Beckett at all. Richardson says he will give Watt a third try. And thus the calumny against Grabbe and Degot has been withdrawn and we all continue to live in history.

One of the themes in Peter Weiss’ The Aesthetics of Resistance, is the question of why the working class is nowhere present in painting until the 19th century. Otherwise only as seen in the background, sidebar, or foreground but never central in focus. He writes about Menzel, Munch’s Workers Returning from the Factory, also Goya, Gericault, Delacroix. One wishes one could ask Weiss about Bregel and/or Bosch. Perhaps we have forgotten something in reading that demanding novel. There is an englished version of Volume One published by Duke University. We suggest you skip the preface by Fredrich Jameson. We are continuing on in the German.

But what occasioned these remarks was a paragraph we came across in Lessing’s Laocoon: An Essay upon the limits of Painting and Poetry. Suggesting the Greeks are right in demanding with civil law that all imitation in painting should surpass its models in nature and be more beautiful, he then goes on to discuss two bad boys of Greek painting.

“They had such painters, but meted out to them strict justice. Pauson, who confined himself to the beauties of ordinary nature, and whose depraved taste liked to represent the imperfections and deformities of humanity, lived in the most abandoned poverty; and Pyreicus, who painted barber’s rooms, dirty workshops, donkeys, and kitchen herbs with all the diligence of a Dutch painter, as if such things were rare or attractive in nature, acquired the surname of Rhyparographer, the dirt-painter. The rich voluptuaries, indeed, paid for his works their weight in gold as if by this fictitious valuation to atone for their insignificance.”

Laocoon, Chapter Two

Dr. Johnson, in his Rasselas, has Imlac say “To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire, is the business of a scholar.”

“I am alive..I am beautiful…what else is there?” The first volume (1947-1963) of an intended 3 volume set of Susan Sontag’s Journals and Noetbooks certainly gives reason to pause, and then, to get excited all over again. Revealing much about her sexual and intellectual experiences in her formative years, some of us startled and then delighted to learn she was bisexual, or perhaps, more to the point, a lesbian wiho also slept with men throughout her life–as many of us are want to do.
After her first experience with another woman she writes, “And what am I now, as I write this? My concept of sexuality is altered–Thank God!–bisexuality as the expression of a fullness of an individual–and an honest rejection of the–yes–perversion which limits sexual experience, attempts to de-physicalize it, in such concepts as the idealization of chastity until the ‘right person’ comes along–the whole ban on pure physical senation without love, on promiscuity.”

One of the preeminent American intellectuals of her time she was the author of Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography, and Illness as Metaphor.

“I know what to do with my life, all of this being so simple, but so difficult for me in the past to know. I want to sleep with many people–I want to live and hate to die–I will not teach, or get a master’s after I get my B.A.”

Although she went on to get a PhD, the agenda remains clear: “I don’t intend to let my intellect dominate me. I intend to do ev erything…to have one way of evaluating experience–does it cause me pleasure or pain, and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful–I shall anticipate pleasure
everywhere and find it, too, for it is everyhere.

Sontag was 16 when she wrote the above. Other striking remarks: “I am proud of being Jewish. Of what?”

“Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor for it is an institution committed to the dulling of feelings.”

There appears to have been a menage in Paris between Sontag, the woman “H,” and the tedious, self-regarding Cuban-American playwright, Maria Irene Fornes. No one can be perfect. She also writes:

“The orgasm focuses…I lust to write. The coming of the orgasm is not the salvation but, more, the birth of my ego.”

Of some of her influences and interests, such as Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, we can say little positive. Still her abiding interest in such writers as Conrad, Dosteyevsky, Hesse, Hopkins, Henry James, Kafka, Mann, Tolstoy and others more than makes up for the dubious Frogs.

“My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality…I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me.”

On the same day she writes: “I am just becoming aware of how guilty I feel being queer. Being queer makes me feel more vulnerable. It increases my desire to hide, to be invisible.”

One remember in the title essay of Against Interpretation she had written “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

So say we all on Guam Island. It is a heady, exciting book the editors can reccomend with unreserved enthusiam.

“I am alive…I am beautiful…What else matters?”

Clearly, as you will find upon reading the book, there was a great deal more. We write in earnest.

The Editors, Ekaterina Degot, et al.