Ethical Diversions by Orbán Katalin

Author:Orbán, Katalin.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Open-ended as Abish’s text is, I think it is a mistake to cast it as a “self-begetting novel” that “‘begins again where it ends,’” comprising a cycle as a whole. This argument of Saalmann’s—made in the framework of reader response theory—seems valid, however, on the more microscopic level of narrative forgetfulness where the text indeed presents “projection [s] which nee[d] ceaselessly to be remade.”57

Most importantly, what such narrative forgetfulness makes visible is a convulsive production of memory and forgetting: both memory and forgetting as ceaselessly renewable assignations. Once forgetting is understood through forgetfulness, a traumatic past has to be forgotten over and over again. Once approached through forgetfulness, memory is similarly a retaking of the past that calls for ceaseless renewal. If one insists on the calm of forgetting rather than this convulsion, How German Is It will be a different novel indeed. It will offer solid lacunae of “ellipsis and mystery,” which prompt a “‘filling-in process” and the reader’s perception of “the noumena or basic truths underlying West German reality.”58 Once the novel is read as a novel of forgetting, the solidity and stability of the “withheld information” will inevitably imply a potential for the solid and stable restoration of truth, “the actual shape of things,” not to mention “desensitized moral conscience.”59

What a forgetful How German Is It offers, however, is a “Holocaust” and a concomitant problem of ethical response that, as soon as they are formed, are always undone through the obsessive, compulsive reinvention that removes them from the sphere of the already-familiar. It is as if “Remember Holocaust” were included among reminders of quotidian (narrative) life, ephemeral diary jottings in which memory and reminder become indistinguishable: “He didn’t keep a journal. He just jotted things down in an office diary. Dinner with Daphne. Jägerschnitzel mit Pilzen. That seemed adequate for his purposes. Also mention of the newsflash. Two dead in an explosion at the post office. 7th of June accepts responsibility. Coffee and Fürst Pückler Torte. Watch the late news on TV. Make love” (HGI 41). This notion of remembrance is both more frivolous (in its quotidian ephemerality) and grave (in its excessive need for repetition and renewal) than a monumental memorialization of the Holocaust.

The gravity of forgetfulness so understood is demonstrated on a different level by what seems like Abish’s compulsion to keep reiterating, renewing and reinventing this work.60 The extent to which “The English Garden,” “The Idea of Switzerland,” How German Is It, and most recently the work in progress House on Fire, taken together, constitute a rewriting goes well beyond the “familiar” genres of version and sequel or the common phenomenon of an author’s interest in a particular topic. In House on Fire, the text recreates “Germany” once again through the twin towns of Selten [“rare”] and Altneu [“oldnew”], through Brumhold and the German language, once again exploring the problematic German relation to the past and history, the embrace of perfection and (im)perceptibility of change. The recently built modern edifices, like the Stalh-Einz building

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