Authors: Malcolm Bradbury
Soon I was landing at Stuttgart, city of Schiller and Hegel, Mercedes-Benz and Bosch. A strange foetid heatwave had fallen across southern Germany all that summer, no doubt thanks to the
universal atmospheric pollution that was beginning to cloud the entire world. Car fumes flickered in the urban air, sticky heat hung in the pedestrianized streets, clothes filled with sweat.
Following my brief, I crossed the city through its great squares and well-stocked commercial passages, and found my way to the famous postmodern Staatsgalerie (
britische Architekt
), James
Sterling’s sloping sandstone building, a tease of hidden entrances and shifted hierarchies. A Malaysian bride in white, gown thrown high above her thighs, sat astride a Henry Moore statue for
her nuptial photographs. Inside, where I hovered for a while in front of the frantic moderns, Nolde and Kirschner, wealth and art sat easily side by side. I talked to a reverential guide who
explained to me that everything in the building was the quotation of a quotation, the pastiche of a pastiche, and then I went outside to find a taxi to take me to Schlossburg.
It was a long, expensive ride, out of the booming post-industrial city and into the Swabian countryside, but I was on expenses. Economic-miracle-unified Germany looked as
economic-miracle-unified Germany does: very neat. The streets of Stuttgart, old and new locked firmly together, were neat. The new towns spreading out endlessly over the hillsides were neat. The
grey concrete shopping centres rising everywhere were neat. The wealthy, solid Swabian villas were neat. The well-tilled fields were neat. The long strips of vineyard that descended down the steep
banks of the River Neckar were definitely neat. The Autobahns were neat (and packed); the cars were neat (and expensive); the people were neat (and well dressed). When I got to the small town of Schlossburg, with its great baroque palace and its
formal French gardens, all was neat. And when I reached the Gothic
romantischer
hunting lodge on a craggy hill in wild woods over a deep cleft of river, even that wilderness was neat
too.
Though the Archdukes of Württemberg had been famed for their philosophical reverence for nature, this had plainly not prevented them attacking it violently from time to time. The tusked
heads of angry boar, the soft eyes of tender does, the beady gaze of predatory buzzards, stared down from the Gothic walls beside the weaponry that had engineered their slaughter. Down below the
Postmoderns were already gathering: dusty Eastern Europeans, exhausted from their journeys on wandering Mitteleuropean trains or obscure airlines that timed their departures not by the minute but
the day; our feisty Americans, filled with jouissance and clad in the designer sports clothing that tells us ours is an age of play. The heat hung heavy, but there were tables in the courtyard
where you could battle dehydration with good Swabian wine.
We started that night with a candelit dinner in the great hall. There were no candles, thanks to strict German fire regulations, but the East Europeans did not mind. As one of them explained,
what they usually have is a candlelit dinner with no dinner. They were just as pleased over the following days, as the lectures and seminars unfolded. As they told me, when I interviewed them,
after forty-five years of grim old unreality they were delighted to learn of the bright new unreality. Our postmodern Americans did truly Sterling work: we covered everything, Chaos Theory and
commodity fetishism, glitz architecture and depthless art, computer culture and cyberpunk, dead irony and global gentrification, the literature of exhaustion and the literature of replenishment.
And when we, too, were exhausted, we replenished ourselves, out in the courtyard, drinking the Swabian wines in the unending heat.
There were blips and aporias, of course. Professor Henri Mensonge failed to arrive, even though when his office was phoned we were told he had left. No message of explanation ever came, though
his name remained in the programme as the sign of his absence. In the event, a jolly boat-trip down the Neckar River proved an effective substitute, a relief from the deeply unpleasant weather. It
remained too hot to sleep at night (but who, at a congress, wants to?), too hot to think, too hot to shave. Then, on the fourth day, when the sun rose yet again in the murky sky like, well, why not
a bright and unburnished shield (simile was not entirely an acceptable trope at Schlossburg), deliverance came, and Bazlo Criminale stepped among us.
He arrived, alone, in a taxi, clad in one of his shining blue suits, hair splendidly bouffanted, mopping his brow. By the time he was out and climbing the lodge steps, a small but deeply
admiring crowd had gathered to greet him. I looked, and thought him decidedly jaded; the bounce had gone somehow from his step, there was weariness in his manner. Then I learned what was wrong. At
Frankfurt airport, where Otto Codicil had come to grief, as have others in the past, Criminale had lost touch with his luggage. Lufthansa had invented a whole new concept of airline travel, a new
aircraft that has no wings, never leaves the ground, runs on tracks and is tugged by an engine. Naive people might call it a train, but it had an airline flight number, boarding passes and flight
attendants who served microwaved food. Flying in from LA, Criminale, being human, had successfully made this unusual change of craft. His baggage, being inanimate and dumb, had not. Even now it was
either shuttling back home to LA or being blown up by the anti-terrorist squad as unattended luggage.
I looked at Criminale, and felt sorry for him: even sorrier, for him and all of us, when I learned that his suitcase not only contained more fine suits and distinguished shirts, eventually
replaceable, but notebooks holding his work of the last weeks, the draft of a new novel, successor to
Homeless
, which was not. Angry calls flew here and there; the airport reported that
nothing had been found. Criminale retired furiously to his upstairs suite; I learned from the conference organizers that he was cancelling all his onward engagements – his lectures in
Belgrade and Macerata, his honorary degree in Stockholm, and several diplomatic treats. He had decided to remain at Schlossburg, close to his German publisher, for as long as his missing luggage
took to reappear, which could well be many days, if at all. Dismayed for him, I now suddenly felt dismayed for myself. We were a small group, of around thirty, who breakfasted, lunched and dined
together; I could not go on avoiding him for ever.
My first thought was to leave, but something stopped me. Now Criminale was back in my sightlines, now he was writing fiction again, my curiosity revived. I wanted to find out how it was with
him, what he was up to, how he thought these days. In the end I chose the Ildiko strategy. Let him hold the foreground, where he liked to be; I would keep to the background, remaining as obscure as
I naturally was. And so when, later that afternoon, Criminale reappeared, and stood up on the podium in the Gothic hall to give his keynote lecture, simply and purely entitled ‘The Postmodern
Condition’, I was there, face in shadow, in the darkest flange of the very back row.
Criminale started seriously enough, singing the song of the names that always toll on these occasions: Habermas and Horkheimer; Adorno and Althusser; De Man and Derrida; Baudrillard and Lyotard;
Deleuze and Guattari; Foucault and Fukuyama. He reflected on all those things that cheer thinking spirits up these days – the end of humanism, the death of the subject, the loss of the great
meta-narratives, the disappearance of the self in the age of universal simulacra, the depthlessness of history, the slippage of the referent, the culture of pastiche, the departure of reality, and
so on. Then his manner grew more personal, his tone more sharply ironic; it had always struck me at Barolo that, for a philosopher, Criminale was somehow peculiarly personal. He reminded us of his
own famous phrase, that in such a time philosophy itself could only be ‘a form of irony’.
As he turned to this, I felt something was affecting him. Maybe it was the loss of his suitcase, and the manuscript with it; possibly it was the presence of so many of his fellow Eastern
Europeans in the audience in front of him. At one point I thought perhaps it was even my own presence there; several times in the lecture I thought I caught him staring straight at me, in what
seemed a questioning way. The postmodern condition, he now started to say, was something more than a post-technological situation, a phenomenon of late capitalism, a loss of narratives, or whatever
the interpreters called it. What it most resembled, he said, was his own situation now – jetlagged, culture-shocked, stuffed with too much inflight food and too much vacant inflight
entertainment, mind disordered, body gross, thoughts hectic and hypertense, spirits dislodged from space and time, baggageless, without normal possessions.
‘How to sum up?’ he asked at last, as we sweated grossly in the foetid hall, ‘Leibniz, a good man, once told the first question of philosophy is: why is there something rather
than nothing? We are more lucky, we have proved him wrong. Now we can honestly say: there is much more nothing, so how can you show me something? Here am I, a theoretical nothing, a dead subject. I
have travelled three thousand miles through a world of very little to lecture to you from the heartless heart of my nothing on the state of nothing as I understand it. So please, friends,
especially East European friends, who are not aware of all these affairs yet: let me welcome you, very personally, to the postmodern condition. Now thank you, one or two questions.’ As a few
bemused questions began arising from the floor, I slipped away.
A little later, from the balcony of my room, I looked down at the courtyard and saw Criminale. The usual crowd of admirers was around him; he was mopping his brow, his suit evidently far too
heavy for the sultry weather. He went and stood by a wooden balustrade; a group of conferees pressed all round him. Criminale straightened his body nobly, raised his eyes, and seemed to stare
directly at the sun. What was happening? Nothing at all significant, I realized. All the conferees had brought their cameras; and Criminale was simply having his photograph taken. I slipped
downstairs and went out, to take a quiet, I hoped cooling, walk in the vast
romantischer
grounds, and gather up some questions for an interview I wanted to do with a Romanian participant
just before dinner. The informal gardens quickly gave way to thick trees and wilderness, the rough path sloped down towards the river.
I turned a bend, and there on a rough wooden bench were two people. They too offered a familiar
romantischer
prospect, sitting close together, male and female. One was Criminale, still in
his now sagging blue suit; he was talking warmly with, graciously grasping, now and then, the hand of, one of the more attractive members of our band, a Russian lady. She fluttered at him; he bowed
and nodded at her. A sexy bounce had come back into his manner. Remembering the Ildiko strategy, I changed course, through the trees, to pass them by. The Russian lady looked through the branches
and saw me. ‘Oh, see, the journalist,’ she said. ‘So sorry,’ I said, ‘Just walking.’ ‘Come,’ said the Russian lady encouragingly, ‘We were just
comparing our laptops.’ ‘Really?’ I said. ‘This lady has a German laptop and I have an American laptop,’ said Criminale, looking me up and down. ‘Good, enjoy
yourselves,’ I said, and turned to walk off down the twisty path.
‘Wait,’ said Criminale. I turned; he had risen and was staring after me. ‘Excuse me, I was thinking,’ he said, ‘Somewhere in another place we met before, no?’
‘It’s possible,’ I agreed. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘Barolo, then Lausanne.’ ‘I was there,’ I said. ‘You were in love with Ildiko
Hazy,’ he said triumphantly, ‘And why not, it is perfectly natural. A vivid person.’ ‘I didn’t know you’d noticed,’ I said cautiously. ‘Now I know
who you are exactly,’ he said, ‘Valerie Magno told me. You are that young man from Britain who likes to make a story of me, yes?’ ‘Once,’ I said, ‘Not now, that
whole idea’s been dropped.’ ‘You dropped my life?’ asked Criminale, looking at me, ‘What a thing! I hope you were not influenced by Otto Codicil.’ ‘No, not
Codicil,’ I said, ‘In the end it was money.’ ‘Money, that is all?’ he said, ‘We know it is important, but not everything. I hope I am more important than
money.’
You should know, I thought, and saw he was looking at me keenly. ‘You are here now,’ he said. ‘That’s pure chance,’ I said. ‘You think chance is pure?’
he asked. ‘I mean our being here together is completely random,’ I said, ‘I just came to write a magazine piece on Po-Mo.’ ‘What is Po-Mo?’ asked Criminale.
‘Postmodernism,’ I said. ‘Ah, what follows Mo,’ said Criminale, nodding, ‘Why do all these people come for it? Are there no women? What is wrong with drink?’
‘Well, they do have both here,’ I said. ‘So, it is entirely random we meet again,’ he said. ‘Entirely,’ I said. Now Criminale turned with a flourish of courtesy
to the Russian lady, seated patiently, contemplatively, on the bench. ‘My dear Yevgenya, may we examine our laptops another time?’ he asked, ‘I like a serious talk with this young
man. I will meet you in the lobby in one half-hour, and we will do what we agreed.’ ‘Of course, Bazlo,’ said the lady, rising. ‘It’s all right, I have an interview to
do,’ I said hastily. ‘Another time will do,’ said Criminale, putting his heavy arm across my shoulders, ‘Let us turn round the lake.’
A large gloomy lake lay in the centre of the woods, a piece of artifice. Stone ruins, mostly constructed, stood on little islands and promontories; the water was green and stagnant. Swans and
geese swam lazily in the weeds, angry flies buzzed up from the undergrowth as we approached. ‘It is true perhaps your programme was not so good idea,’ said Criminale, ‘A person is
not interesting, only his thought. And how can you show such impossible, improbable things with little moving pictures?’ ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘It is also
true,’ said Criminale, ‘that nobody likes to be investigated without his knowledge. Even though where I come from I am used to this, I am surprised. Are there no ethics of these
things?’ ‘We were just scouting the programme,’ I said, ‘Going ahead of the story to see if there really was a story.’ ‘Was there?’ he asked, ‘I see
there was not.’ ‘Not the kind of story we were looking for,’ I said.