Campo Santo (Modern Library Paperbacks) (7 page)

The merciless education of Kaspar obeys the laws of language. The reason why the play could be described, says Handke, as “speech torture” is not just that other people talk to Kaspar until he loses what might be called his sound animal reason. More precisely, in this learning process, speech itself features as an arsenal containing a cruel set of instruments. Kaspar’s very first sentence helps him, as the prompters explain, “learn to divide time into time before and time after uttering of the sentence.”
¹⁶
Tension arises, and with it a foretaste of the torture. Kaspar learns to hesitate as he speaks, and the voices show him how that hesitation can make painful incisions where they do not belong, separating the parts of a sentence: “The sentence doesn’t hurt you yet, not one word. Does hurt you. Every word does. Hurt, but you don’t know that that which hurts you is a sentence that. Sentence hurts you because you don’t know that it is a sentence.”
¹⁷
What the prompters demonstrate through speech can be transferred, becomes an act of incision, the vivisection of reality and ultimately of a human being. Within it, the diffuse pain of being unaware becomes the keen torment of experience. In the obsessive attempt to find a reason for the animation of life, a world of images is divided into its anatomical components. This is the nature of speech operating successfully. Its grammar can be perceived as a mechanical system that gradually carves the crucial terms on the skin of the torture victim, and the torture
arises from the combination of its apparatus with the organism. Kafka described the prerequisites for this process in his story “In the Penal Colony,” and Nietzsche, in discussing mnemonic techniques in the
Genealogy of Morals
, thought there was nothing more sinister in the prehistory of mankind than the combination of pain and recollection to construct a memory. But what is taken from the living substance of the individual in the long process of his training to become an articulate, moral human being adheres to the linguistic machine until in the end the parts become interchangeable in function. Lars Gustafsson, who designed an image of the grammatical machine, wonders whether the symbolical value of machinery does not perhaps lie in the fact “that it reminds us of the possibility that our own lives could be something simulated, in a sense resembling the life of machines themselves.”
¹⁸
A human being, then, is a Stymphalian creature of metal screws and springs, stamping accepted patterns out of the metal of communication, and speech is an apparatus run out of control and beginning to lead a sinister life of its own. Model sentences such as those suggested to Kaspar are reflexes of the cruel treatment to which his sensory apparatus is submitted by its linguistic shaping. “The door springs open. The skin springs open. The match burns. The slap burns. The grass trembles. The fearful girl trembles. The slap in the face smacks. The body smacks. The tongue licks. The flame licks. The saw screeches. The torture victim screeches. The lark trills. The policeman trills. The blood stops. The breath stops.”
¹⁹
The prompters
know this too. At the beginning of the second part, when the injured Kaspar has split by simple division into two contented entities, the prompters utter an apologia for the process that initiates the candidate into a society where everything is regular. “Intermittent smashing / of a stick / on your jug / is no balm / nor a reason / to bewail the lack of law and order / this season / a sip of lye / in your mug / or a prick / in the guts / or a stick / in the nuts / being wriggled about / or something of that order /only pricklier / fearlessly / introduced in the ears / so as to / get someone hopping / and pop in order / by all means / at your command / but chiefly / without being / overly / fussy / over the means— / that / is no reason / to lose any words / over the lack of order.”
²⁰

Kaspar is thus systematically socialized. He makes visible progress. But then suddenly he finds himself in crisis. His identity is undermined by the passing of time. “When I am, I was.”
²¹
He formulates this problem of shifting phases in the most confusing variations, constantly mixing up the grammatically possible and the grammatically impossible, his reality and his irritation constantly becoming confused. When he finally says, “I will have become because I am,” we can no longer tell if he has it the wrong way around or is simply expressing hopelessness.
²²
Kaspar, now uncertain of himself, three times repeats the magical formula “I am the one I am.” But the affirmation sounds wide of the mark. In its abstraction it does not offer anything sufficient to counter Kaspar’s growing doubt of what he represents. As if
in alarm he stops rocking and cries, “Why are there so many black worms flying about?” It is an image of the utmost distress. Kaspar is in danger of regression. The stage darkens, and once more the prompters must try persuasion. It grows light again, and they begin to speak. “You have model sentences with which you can get through life.” The light grows brighter. “You can learn and make yourself useful.”
²³
And the brighter it becomes, the quieter Kaspar is; he is all right again, enlightened, ready for the shock of confirmation, for the test of a total blackout, in which a prompter tells him, “You’ve been cracked open.”
²⁴
This time the darkness of the stage is not a fear that Kaspar already has but one that is instilled into him. Only after a long moment does a voice suggest, in the darkness, “You become sensitive to dirt.” When it is light again, Kaspar’s socialization finally seems complete. His alter ego enters with a broom, sweeping the stage. Kaspar is now his own matrix, with unlimited powers of reproduction. More Kaspars appear, clones of his reformed person. But now Kaspar will begin to suffer from this fact, from everything that is repeated, and thus not least from himself. “I was proud of the first step I took, of the second step I felt ashamed: I felt ashamed of everything that I repeated.”
²⁵
Only with speech was it the other way around, for, says Kaspar, “I felt ashamed even of the first sentence I uttered, whereas I no longer felt ashamed of the second sentence.” Speech, as it were, had removed his shame, teaching him to become accustomed to identities. The fact that he still remembers it is the beginning of the
story he tells of himself toward the end of the play. This story is the clear signal that all is not yet right with him, for “an object is orderly when you don’t first have to tell a story about it.”
²⁶
Kaspar’s education thus seems to have failed. He remembers, but too well. He knows not only about himself but about his origin and development, about his indoctrination, the prelude to his despair.

In reflecting on the changes that have happened to him, Kaspar breaks out of the role that he was given to play. His inquiries take him back to a point when, entering paradise through the gateway of thought, he regains the naïveté of his pre-existence. He remembers uttering his first sentence, and in the nostalgia of such memories he encounters the unconscious perfection of his lost self. “Then once I took a look into the open, where there was a very green glow, and I said to the open: I want to be someone like somebody else was once?—and with this sentence I wanted to ask the open why it was that my feet were aching.”
²⁷
Sinking into such reminiscences, he gauges time, seeks the darkness of his life, which is now almost stripped of any mystery, until he comes upon things that are identical with his own reality, not just the reality he has assimilated. He remembers the snow that stung his hand, the landscape that “at that time was a brightly colored window shutter” and was then like a colorful shopwindow, and a gloomy legacy of “candles and bloodsuckers; ice and mosquitoes; horses and pus; hoarfrost and rats; eels and sicklebills.”
²⁸
These images, retrieved and re-created from his pre-existence, images
in which Kaspar’s earlier life shows a relationship with Sigismund’s in Hofmannsthal’s
Der Turm
, seem to him like authentic documents of his being. Thanks to them he can say, “I still experienced myself.” The training to which he has been subjected could not entirely obliterate his memory of his beginnings. He can still go back behind what he has learned. The wild metaphors he brings back from such excursions are, in their disparate nature, like the “metaphors of a paranoia … a poetic protest against the invasion of others.”
²⁹
The crystallization point of this sign of intended rejection comes at those moments when, as Handke says in
Wunschloses Unglück
(“A Sorrow Beyond Dreams”), “the utmost need to communicate comes together with the ultimate speechlessness.”
³⁰
However, where images escape that paralytic confrontation, they feature, being impenetrable ciphers, as examples of broken rebellion. Their structure is that of the myth in which fact and fiction are, so to speak, inseparably linked together. And like that myth, they “involve the same sort of outrageous distortion … all symbolism harbors the curse of mediacy; it is bound to obscure what it seeks to reveal. Thus the sound of speech strives to ‘express’ subjective and objective happening, the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ world; but what of this it can retain is not the life and individual fullness of existence, but only a dead abbreviation of it.”
³¹
Literature can transcend this dilemma only by keeping faith with unsocial, banned language, and by learning to use the opaque images of broken rebellion as a means of communication.

To this day there is no adequate explanation of why the destruction of the German cities toward the end of the Second World War was not (with those few exceptions that prove the rule) taken as a subject for literary depiction either then or later, although significant conclusions could
certainly have been drawn from this admittedly complex problem. It might, after all, have been supposed that the air raids very methodically carried out over the years and directly affecting large sections of the population of Germany, as well as the radical social changes resulting from the destruction, would have been an incitement to writers to set down something about such experiences. The dearth of literary records from which anything might be learned of the extent and consequences of the destruction which is so obvious to a later generation, although those involved clearly felt no need to commemorate it, is all the more remarkable because accounts of the development of West German literature frequently speak of what they call the
Trümmerliteratur
(the literature of the ruins). Heinrich Böll, for instance, says of that genre in a book written in 1952: “And so we write of the war, of homecoming, of what we had seen in the war and what we found on returning home: we write of ruins.”
¹
The same author’s
Frankfurter Vorlesungen
(“Frankfurt Lectures”) contains the comment “Where would 1945, that historic moment in time, be without Eich and Celan, Borchert and Nossack, Kreuder, Aichinger and Schnurre, Richter, Kolbenhoff, Schroers, Langgässer, Krolow, Lenz, Schmidt, Andersch, Jens and Marie Luise von Kaschnitz?
²
The Germany of the years 1945–1954 would have vanished long ago had it not found expression in the literature of the time.”
³
One may feel a certain sympathy for such statements, but they hardly offset the near incontrovertible fact that the literature cited here, which is

sufficiently known to have dealt primarily with “personal matters” and the private feelings of its protagonists, is of relatively slight value as a source of information on the objective reality of the time, more particularly the devastation of the German cities and the patterns of psychological and social behavior affected by it. It is remarkable, to say the least, that up to Alexander Kluge’s account of the air raid of April 8, 1945, on Halberstadt, published in 1977 as Number 2 in his series of
Neue Geschichten
(“New Stories”), there was no literary work that to any degree filled up this lacuna in German memory, which is surely more than coincidental, and that Hans Erich Nossack and Hermann Kasack, the only writers who attempted any literary account of the new historical factor of total destruction, embarked upon their works in that vein while the war was still in progress, and sometimes even anticipated actual events. In his reminiscences of Hermann Kasack, Nossack writes: “At the end of 1942 or the beginning of 1943 I sent him thirty pages of a prose work which after the end of the war was to become my story
Nekyia
. Thereupon Kasack challenged me to a competition in prose. I didn’t understand what he meant by that; only much later did it become clear to me. We were both dealing with the same subject at the time, the destroyed or dead city. Today it may seem that it was not too difficult to foresee the destruction of our cities. But it is still remarkable that before the event two writers were trying to take an objective view of the totally unreal kind of reality in which we had to spend years at the time, and in which
we fundamentally still find ourselves, accepting it as the form of existence allotted to us.”
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