There by Lance Olsen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Written at the time he was in Germany, and perhaps inspired by the novels of David Markson (not sure if Olsen writes other works in the same kind of form), Olsen takes the aphorism as the implicit unit of narrative morphology.
Built from composites on his musings of history, other writers, autobiography Markson like many other post-structuralists approaches the creation of [[there.]] as a place of pure presence, neither explicable nor eminently reachable. In other words, Olsen resists naming this reference point all the while he constructs the place of it. Taken as a kind of “trash diary”/travelogue:
A week before you leave, you decide to keep a trash diary: a constellation of sense, thought, memory, observation, fast fact scraps.
Olsen insists on the event of being in Germany for a writing fellowship as the start of collecting this work together. So while the frame of the book subsists on this fellowship (much like how “there.” is doubly bracketed, the processing of placement: historic, personal and professional work off this justified event of being a travelogue, a venture into the another world.
The major trope of this work then, while often not explicitly stated (though stated often), hinges on being in another place. Olsen gives us vignettes not just his musings on Germany
A Polish saying: One German a beer, two Germans an organization, three Germans a war
Berlin feels disorienting because it is disorienting
In German, the noun gift means poison.
It shares the same Proto-Indo-European root as the English word gift–ghabh, meaning to receive–but German employs the origin meaning as a dark gesture: Gib ihm das Gift. Give him the poison.
The verb for to poison in German used to be vergeben, a word that now means to forgive.
(btw, here’s more germany)
I’ve been practicing my German for three months–ever since I received the news–in an attempt to bring it back to a semblance of life after more than 30 years in the mnemonic deepfreeze.
The block bearded graduate student with the wire-rimmed glasses who could read and speak sentences I can no longer even tangentially understand:
Who was that guy?
but also musings on travel itself
To walk is to lack a place, Michel de Certeau felt. It is the indefinite process of being absent
Traveling, I want to say, is like clicking a link on a website: a surge of disorientation followed almost immediately by a surge of reorientation.
Only in three dimensions.
Over and over again.
and
Traveling is a condition enabling recognition of the limits of human knowledge and mystery, inviting us to orient and re-orient our selves to an existence that will always exceed our grasp
It wasn’t until decades later the reason for that atomic commotion hit me: in addition to the obvious, that perfect novella is an allegory about continuous change, which is to say an allegory about travel.
Travel then, or at least being in an Other situation allows Olsen to begin to construct traveling, or the place of being in an unknown place. And I don’t mean just the situation of being in Germany, but also the situation of Other itself…not just a specific there, but a definite indeterminate [[there.]]
Olsen, however, isn’t content to let us sit still in an unknown situation. He uses this unknown situation much as he uses the aphoristic structure of his narrative, to jump anywhere.
(He didn’t know it would be his 9/11 novel. He’d been writing what he believed was a different book entirely when he looked up that glistening morning and saw the first plane explode into the World Trade Center.)
(The very next sentence he composed reconceived what he was doing and why.)
(His novel changed course in a breath of white space.)
Significant in this, is the use of the parenthetical, as if Olsen is filling in a gap, which would in some other case, may otherwise be left out. This corresponds to the metaphor of the journey, in which his trip to Germany at first alien slowly becomes familiar, blending in with what he knows until one day he isn’t there anymore, but here.
The here remains, however, an unspoken here, for one is always here. Reminiscent of traveling, one records the high points, photographs, destinations, but also the unexpected interruptions of how you get there. Travel, like life, Olsen reminds us, is the encounter of what is both familiar and unfamiliar. To sum it up quickly, Freud’s term in German is Das Unheimliche. Although most contemporary commentators would jump on unheimliche to speak of the “uncanny valley” Olsen supplies us with this critical framework for which to supply an attempt to name, to create a complete thing is to bracket it, as he unpacks unheimliche for us, thusly:
a construction that goes nowhere, teaches zip, embodies the purest form of Freud’s unheimlich: a term that contains within itself heim (home), unheim (not home), and heimlich (hidden, secret).
The unheimlich signifies what we know, yet has been made unfamiliar, a forever being-at-home that is also a never-being-at-home.
Which brings us back to the end of the opening vignette:
Being-at-home, Heidegger says, is not the primordial phenomenon. Not-being-at-home is more fundamental. To be not-at-home may mean to be AT HOTEL
the overriding travelogue nature of which, roughly takes us back to the topography of travel. More rightly speaking, both home and not home are elements of the familiar and the unfamiliar sitting together as one, on the edge of what is what we recognize.
This blending the opposites brings us to the limit of the expressible, in which what is nameable is also what isn’t nameable. Olsen in his metacritical way strikes upon the experimental in experimental literature:
The first definition of the word experimental is of a witness: having actual or personal experience of anything.
With this definite-ambiguity, Olsen pulls us towards the creation of the subject from a situation.
No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke, David Foster Wallace advanced: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle.
Our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
So it should come as no surprise that Olsen also runs alongside many different aspects of Wittgenstein. And through this frame, [[there.]] is another commentary on Wittgenstein:
How the aim of Wittgenstein’s work is to show us–by making us aware of the bottle’s presence, and thus its inherent limitations into which we are forever bumping our foreheads–the means by which to get out, no matter what we do, because the top is sealed, because we can’t think beyond language’s glass grammars, because our perceptions are meditated by what we imagine verbs, nouns, and the rest do.
How one gets out (by not getting out), not through applying a single philosophical method to all the linguistic knottinesses but by moving from topic to topic every which way in an ongoing calisthenics of inquisitiveness and alertness.
While at first graze through the first ten pages, one may wonder, where is he going with these quotes, these disparate angles, this decentralized narrative? Olsen definitely wants to say it all, force it together in a double articulation of brackets in which the second articulation is the dissolution of meaning found in the formality between the formulated white space. The latter pages of [[there.]] reflect heavily on death, suicide by authors, writers, thinkers. Death isn’t simply the ending of the text itself, where Olsen needs to find a resolution, but also a marked position within [[there.]], bracketed with the rest of life, travel, the human condition. Said simply:
[[That is here (or there).]]
So what is constructed in [[there.]]? How do we get to a point of caption to understand what Olsen has made? By breaking such oppositions such as here and there, home and un-home where has Olsen taken us?
In the end of Of Grammatology, Derrida’s placement of logocentricism on the Western tradition is mostly hinged on through the central figure of Rousseau (where Rousseau stands-in-for the Enlightenment tradition). Logocentricism isn’t simply the practice of anchoring language in writing, Derrida names the essence of logocentricism as the pure presence that speech, writing and culture refer as the penultimate mark of orientation. In this way, all discourse circumambulates pure presence as the crowned position that creates the space for endless linguistic play to work. Naming this pure presence as the supplement forced into metaphysics, Derrida writes:
[Rousseau] dreamed of the simple exteriority of death to life, evil to good, representation to presence, signifier to signified, representer to represented, mask to face, writing to speech. But all oppositions are irreducibly rooted in that metaphysics[…].
But what does that mean? The opposition of dream to wakefulness, is not that a representation of metaphysics as well? […] At the bottom of a page of Emile, after having once more cautioned us against books, writing, signs […] Rousseau adds a note: “…the dreams of a bad night are given to us as philosophy. You will say too I am a dreamer; I admit it, but I do what others fail to do, I give my dreams as dreams, and leave the reader to discover whether there is anything in them which may prove useful to those who are awake.”
This finding of ourselves in our travel, in our life, in our home-not-at-home takes us to the middle way, in which oppositions of what we recognize are also what is unrecognizable in us as we find each other and ourselves, find the collective I.
And so, Olsen notes the history of the program founded at the American Academy which was meant to foster greater understanding between Americans and Germans after the horror of our shared experience in the two World Wars.
On 4 July 1945, less than a month after entering Berlin, US Forces requisitioned Arnhold’s villa as an Officer’s Club.
Forty-nine years later, as the last American troops departed the city, German ambassador Richard Holbrooke proposed the establishment of a research and cultural institution designed to foster a greater understanding and dialogue between the people of the United States and Germany.
[…]
In 1998 the first class of fellows walked through the Academy’s doors.
Since then, more than 300 writers, artists, musicians, and academics in literature, humanities, politics, economic, law and philosophy have worked here: a dozen each spring, a dozen each fall.
Look: there [[I]] am.
So we can now end the review on this note, that writing is collective collaboration, as travel is the meeting of the familiar in the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar in our familiar selves. Olsen’s ambitions for this trash diary are actually quite high. Despite the seemingly random vignettes he holds together a larger vision of our shared experience using the formalism of white space itself to articular the layer, a pacing of where we would expect the next token.
This is why critics write criticism, why philosophers write philosophy, why theorists write theory: every critical monograph, theoretical essay, philosophical tome is ultimately no more than no less than an act of spiritual autobiography.
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