Transcendent Trivialities: Utopian Space and Fallen Things in Gerhard Meier’s Toteninsel SAMUEL FREDERICK Pennsylvania State University Introduction In a letter to Louise Colet from 1852, Gustave Flaubert famously expressed his desire to write a «book about nothing»: […] a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing for its support; a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing were possible. (The Letters 154) 1 What Flaubert apparently has in mind is not a book of blank pages, in the manner of some of Richard Brautigan’s poems, which provide a title, but nothing more. 2 That would be a book of nothing. Instead, Flaubert dreamt of writing a book about nothing (sur rien), by which he appears to mean a book emptied of its conventional content, but still full - full of words. This would be a book that did not owe its existence as a single, unified work to what it might tell (in the manner of a narrative) or impart to the reader as advice, observation, or argument. Such a book, rather, would self-reflexively call attention to itself as a collection of words that ask to be appreciated in and of themselves, without the need to refer to - and thus be said to be about - something else. One might say that what Flaubert imagined was a book unencumbered by the need to signify any single thing, a self-generating book that performed the free play of the sign in a celebration of the multiplicity and irreducibility of signification. In such a case, nothing would turn over into everything. In not being tied to the need to convey a cohesive collection of ideas, events, or arguments, the book could unravel itself as style, which would hold it together in a manner usually expected of content, something now on the verge of disappearing entirely into the background, reduced to serving no structural role whatsoever - the mere stuff that occasions linguistic play. But Flaubert in fact suggests that the ideal book would lack even this stuff. «The finest works are those that contain the least matter,» he goes on to write in the same letter (The Letters 154). 3 In thus wanting to purify the literary 70 Samuel Frederick work so that it might ascend beyond matter to pure form, Flaubert evokes a kind of literary Platonism. The most real and ideal book is one that floats above things, «suspended in the void,» existing apart from the stuff of this world. In this image Flaubert treats style as an instantiation of the hypostasized Forms, «dependent on nothing external,» unified, self-sufficient, eternal. And yet his point of comparison is «the earth» itself - matter in all its thisness. The vehicle of Flaubert’s metaphor (earth), that is, appears to pull its lofty, ethereal tenor (pure style) back down to solid ground. This tension between matter and form, something and nothing, content and style that complicates Flaubert’s dream also animates the work of the Swiss writer Gerhard Meier (1917-2008). Meier’s 1979 novel Toteninsel, in particular, which uses as its epigraph an excerpt from this same section of the 1852 letter, announces itself as a programmatic response to Flaubert’s ideal of the «book about nothing.» 4 Toteninsel, however, although on one level an attempt to realize Flaubert’s dream, is also deftly critical of the Platonic assumptions that give rise to it. 5 Meier’s ambivalence turns on the aporia of Flaubert’s metaphor, its dual division and interlinking of matter and form, in which pure form is postulated on the basis of matter’s insignificance, even though matter stubbornly persists as a central image of form’s desire for immateriality. Meier’s response is at once to try to write Flaubert’s impossible book, to manifest in his prose some kind of «immateriality» by jettisoning the conventional content of narrative. But in the process he also reveals that such a project is untenable, not least because it neglects the very matter it (ostensibly) needs to cast off for its realization. Meier’s novel suggests that precisely this matter - mere stuff, the ordinary thing - is of critical importance, after all. In this article I will thus read Meier’s undertaking as a literary-metaphysical answer to Flaubert’s Platonism. By «metaphysical» I mean, specifically, the dual act of critique and rescue, «die Anstrengung des Denkens, das zu erretten, was es zugleich auflöst,» that Adorno, in his lectures on Aristotle, articulates as the philosophical endeavor of metaphysics as such (35). Toteninsel’s metaphysical project, I maintain, which is at the same time its literary program, is to expose Flaubert’s dream of a «book dependent on nothing external» as an impossibility even as it attempts to rescue the moment of transcendence aimed for in that dream. Meier carries out this dual critique and rescue first by means of an attempted spatialization of his novel, which is at once a method for overcoming narrative’s most fundamental - because ineluctable - content (its temporality), but also ultimately a means to show up the impasse created by such an attempted overcoming. In this way, the novel performs the failure of what it begins by aspiring for. Meier’s achievement, I aim to show in the first section of this article, is deeply bound up in this para- Transcendent Trivialities 71 dox. The dream of a narrative about nothing, that is, can only be realized by means of the very structures it would need to dispense with in order to reach this goal. How, Meier seems to ask, does one write a narrative about the dissolution of narrative without thereby affirming and re-inscribing what one means to erase? His answer dovetails with the second «metaphysical» impulse of his novel, which is one of rescue. Instead of merely revealing the failure of Flaubert’s ideal, Meier attempts ultimately to redeem it through the very stuff that seems to make it impossible. Instead, that is, of casting off the «matter» of his narrative, Meier homes in on it with renewed attention in the attempt to find transcendence where there is apparently only triviality: in the overlooked things of the everyday. It is in and through these things, as I show in the article’s second main section, that Meier is able to renegotiate the formal and metaphysical conundrum posed by Flaubert’s wish. Things on the one hand provide his book with the mere stuff - as opposed to time-bound actions - needed to populate his newly spatialized narrative. But they also become the locus of poetological reflection on the virtues and vices of privileging form (as «style») over matter (as «content»). The complex literary and philosophical ways in which Toteninsel mobilizes ordinary materiality suggest, in the end, that only if this binary (form/ matter) is recalibrated to allow for transcendence in things can literature (and narrative in particular) grant access to «no-thing,» to Flaubert’s ideal of nothing. 6 The primary impetus of this article, therefore, is to undertake a theoretical investigation of the inconspicuous, forgotten, and discarded thing as a feature of literary representation. How do mere things - necessarily bereft of interiority and situated outside the nexus of instrumentalized objects - become critical to a literary project that wants, above all, to transcend things? In answering this question I borrow insights from various (and diverse) thinkers, most importantly Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin, to broaden and complexify the conceptual framework that Meier’s work opens up. 7 I approach this framework at the outset with a conception of the thing that comes from Bill Brown, who, using Heidegger, draws an important distinction between objects and things: «You could imagine things […] as what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects - their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence» (5). Meier’s work confronts us precisely with such excess in objects, though this excess importantly refuses to stay put on either this side of sensuous or that side of metaphysical presence. Meier’s things, rather, point to the inextricability of the sensuous and the metaphysical, so that the «force» that epiphanically interrupts the everyday to allow for transcendence coincides 72 Samuel Frederick with the force that draws us closer to the everyday in all its mundaneness. Things in Toteninsel, that is, reside on the threshold of something and nothing, of mere content and pure form, of the mundane and the transcendent. Their oscillation between these realms describes the philosophical content of Meier’s novel just as much as it informs its narrative project, its apparently conflicting attempts to access some realm beyond things in things themselves, to achieve the transcendent status of «pure style» not by disposing of matter, but by embracing it. Because Meier’s «literary metaphysics» makes the originary philosophical problem of matter and form inseparable from questions of literary production and representation, this article also considers Toteninsel as a work of experimental fiction that demands we reevaluate the fundamental categories of content and form (or fabula and sjuzhet) at the basis of conventional mimetic narration. 8 While working through the ways Meier deploys things in his novel opens up new avenues for rethinking narrative’s foundational categories, it additionally reveals how Meier’s aimed-for «transcendence,» in the end, also straddles something and nothing in the guise of interpersonal companionship. I will therefore conclude the article with a brief coda in which I propose reading Toteninsel as a novel of (though importantly not about) friendship, one that does not so much represent as enact a mode of togetherness that is only made possible by means of its formal experiments with space and things, as well as in the philosophical resonances with which these experiments coincide. I. Forging Utopian Space The situation of Toteninsel is fairly straightforward, even if its form is highly idiosyncratic. Two older men - one named Baur, the other Bindschädler - are taking a walk through the Swiss town of Olten. Bindschädler narrates this walk, quoting at length the discourse of Baur, who talks nearly incessantly from the start of the novel to its close. The form and frequency of these two sets of otherwise simple actions (walking, talking), however, complicate the novel’s levels of narrative priority and, in turn, its status as narrative. Take, for instance, the difficulty of determining the novel’s primary narrator. Since two-thirds of the text consists of Baur’s direct discourse, and some portion more of his indirect discourse, Bindschädler might be seen as the extradiegetic narrator. He is the one, from this perspective, who provides the narrative frame in which in fact Baur functions as the main (homodiegetic) narrator. And yet Baur does not really tell much of a story. He rambles. Thinking aloud, he lets his thoughts stray from topic to topic and back again, without Transcendent Trivialities 73 any central cohesion or final resolution that would grant his reminiscences and reflections any kind of unity, let alone mere sequenciality. It would be difficult, that is, to reconstruct a series of interconnected events from the fragments of memory and observation that make up his discourse. Yet if we treat Bindschädler, instead of Baur, as the primary narrator, we encounter a similar problem, since Bindschädler does not tell much of a story, either. The event that he narrates is that of the walk and of his friend’s loquaciousness during that walk. Nothing more. Furthermore, the walk itself - to which I will turn in more detail below - is sparsely narrated: nothing much happens. The two men move south-by-southwest into the center of Olten, first following the river Aar, then some side streets that lead them to a church, which they briefly enter; then to a museum, which they also briefly visit; and then to a shopping center, where they stop, for only a short time, to eat. Having eaten, they continue their walk, which even on the last page of the novel is still underway. These actions may be classified as fulfilling the minimal requirement of a narrative in strictly structural or formal terms. Indeed, in his standard Dictionary of Narratology, Gerald Prince allows for narrative to be realized as the representation of merely one event, such that even «such possibly uninteresting texts as […] ‹The goldfish died›» would, for him, fulfill the minimal requirement of narrativity (58). These three words might constitute a miniature narrative of sorts (since they describe a change of state), but they lack sequentiality and causality, both of which are fundamental to nearly every theory of narrative, and both of which emerge from narrative’s deep connection to temporality. This is precisely what is at stake in Toteninsel. 9 Meier empties his novel of causally motivated events, and thereby reduces it to the slowly unfolding action of a single event - the walk - that, as we will see, has no teleological shape, even though it is unmistakably temporal in its linear movement. But this linearity alone does not ground the narrative in time so much as reduce the overall impact of temporality, leaving a skeletal sequence of action onto and from which spatial details can be built. This spatialization of the narrative may be made possible by means of the novel’s sparse eventfulness, but it is realized by means of its geographical precision. Bindschädler’s narration is so detailed with regard to the urban landscape in particular that the reader can trace almost every move made by the two men through the streets and alleys of Olten. 10 The coordinates of their town stroll, furthermore, reveal movements that have neither center nor goal, de-emphasizing teleology and thus temporality. As soon as something like a pattern to their walk appears to take shape, their course shifts in a different direction. Assuming their starting point is somewhere to the north of the town (since, when the novel begins, we find them walking southward into Olten’s 74 Samuel Frederick downtown), they do not, for instance, take the most direct path to the church (the first stop). Rather, they at first walk further east, then double back before seeming to head back in the direction from which they came, only later to be found heading again into the town center. It is not even clear that they have planned to stop at the church. This brief pause in their perambulations appears to be an improvised stopover that becomes part of the walk’s meandering shape by virtue of its proximity to the otherwise spontaneously unfolding route. Only the visit to the museum (which lasts a mere half page) seems to be partly motivated by the desire to see the paintings of Max Gubler. Therefore, if there is an intention to the single action of the friends’ walk, it is this museum visit, which is hardly narrated at all. But very little is narrated to begin with. The (textual) space allotted to the fragments of observation and memory that interrupt the narration of the walk far outweighs that granted the representation of this walk itself. The reader is thus denied any sense of a narrative design governed by end-oriented motivation so that the spatial features of the walk dominate starkly over its otherwise self-evident temporal character. 11 Despite this neutralization of temporality and teleology as determinants of the narrative, time still remains critically present throughout the novel, in part because most of Baur’s discussion concerns memories of the past. And yet these memories are stripped of their temporality by being presented as static moments that become, as Baur repeatedly says, pictures «an den Wänden der Seele» (e.g., 34). Baur’s metaphorical notion of remembering as looking at paintings hanging on the walls of his soul is fundamentally connected to how the novel forges narrative space, as well as to its extended discourses on various spaces and their representations in the visual arts. The title of the novel, for example, refers to the famous painting by Arnold Böcklin, discussed near the end of the book. 12 Bindschädler repeatedly mentions Picasso, in particular his Woman with a Rooster, as well as Caspar David Friedrich. Bindschädler also describes a Pietà that he sees in the church they enter; and the two friends visit the Olten museum to look at Gubler’s paintings. Finally, there is Alfred Anker’s Mädchen auf rotem Grund, which Baur mentions, and which the narrator returns to again and again in his reflections. 13 Meier aligns these explicitly non-narrative, spatial artworks not only with the act of remembrance, but also with the landscape traversed by the two friends - «Unser Landstrich gab sich nun gleichsam als Aquarell» (132) - and, ultimately, with the novel as literary form itself, which Bindschädler figures as a tapestry: «[F]ür mich [ist] der Roman einem Teppich vergleichbar, einem handgewobenen, bei dessen Herstellung besonders auf die Farben, Motive achtgegeben wird, die sich wiederholen […]» (81). It takes time to make such a tapestry, and time to walk through the landscape, but this time is repeatedly transformed into spatial Transcendent Trivialities 75 forms, which dominate the discourse of the novel. These spatial forms, furthermore, only reveal the traces of time as something to be overcome. 14 Indeed, existence itself is primarily spatial in Toteninsel, and that spatiality becomes a figure for a kind of ideal mode of being, sealed off from time. Baur’s repeated metaphor for remembering - hanging a picture on the walls of his soul - provides its governing trope, reminding Bindschädler of an article he read about a house in Warsaw on the Ulica Dabrowiecka in which every possible space on walls, ceilings, even floors, is used to display works of art. There are so many paintings, sketches, and woodcuts in the house - over 7,000 - that no part of wall or ceiling is visible anymore. The owner calls it a «paradiesischer Käfig» (41-42). It is a cage because any inhabitant would be trapped in an enclosed space that no longer functions as a house, having instead become a grotesque museum. And it is paradisiacal for the same reason: the Dabrowiecka house is unlivable not just in a practical sense, but also in a utopian sense. Made up of static images, the house represents a timeless space that is no longer available to us, a paradisiacal space from which we have fallen in our everyday, time-bound lives. 15 This museum house, then, becomes the literal manifestation of the paradox central to the novel: the only way to recover memories is to narrate them, but to do this is to give time to something that has lost time. The best we can do is to abstract our memories, to turn them into static images, so that the temporal loses grip as the spatial takes over. To fully inhabit the spaces opened up in this way may be impossible - but trying may be as close as we get to something paradisiacal. This notion of the paradisiacal is reinforced by the only work of art from the Dabrowiecka house that Bindschädler singles out with any detail, a woodcut by the folk artist Jozef Lurka called Eve with Trout in Paradise: Da gebe es zum Beispiel von Jozef Lurka, der in Holz die Frohbotschaft verkünde, dabei in schlichter Frömmigkeit theologische Kühnheiten hervorbringend, eine Eva mit Forelle im Paradies, womit Lurka aber nicht auf das altchristliche Fischsymbol für Christus habe hinweisen wollen, sondern ihm sei es darum gegangen, das Paradiesische des Paradieses anschaulich zu machen: Wenn sich ein Löwe streicheln lasse, das sei noch nichts, aber eine Forelle - wo je, seit dem Sündenfall, habe eine Forelle sich streicheln lassen? (42) This art piece serves as the foil to what Bindschädler calls Picasso’s most beautiful painting, Woman with a Rooster, which depicts said animal on its back in a woman’s lap, its feet bound, the woman’s left hand holding its wings tight, and a knife within reach of her right hand. Picasso’s painting shows how we take an animal in hand in order to take its life. Lurka’s shows what ought to be the same situation: a fish has been removed from water so that it will die and can then be eaten. But Lurka turns this image into a paradisiacal setting 76 Samuel Frederick of pure innocence and creaturely peace: the fish is not food, but a companion. Bindschädler gives voice to this strange picture by asking not «when,» but «where» since the Fall has a trout ever allowed itself to be pet, highlighting with this word a crucial distinction in a novel obsessed with space: paradise was a place, not a time. More importantly, it was a place outside of time; and our distance from it is as much a result of being trapped in time, being unable to reclaim a space where time does not reign. Bindschädler is reminded of the Dabrowiecka house and Lurka’s paradisiacal woodcut not just by Baur’s repeated reference to his memories as paintings to hang on the walls of his soul, but also because of the following remark, which the usually silent Baur makes only a page before Bindschädler describes the house-museum in Warsaw: Und alles, Bindschädler, alles dreht sich. Und bald ist das eine oben und bald ist das andere unten. Und da fischt man nach einem Pünktchen, einem einzelnen Leben in diesem Durcheinander, um es herauszustellen zusammen mit anderen Pünktchen, anderen Leben, wie man Fische, Forellen zum Beispiel, heraushebt an der Angel, mit dem Effekt freilich, daß ihr Leben in Zuckungen verebbt. (40) On first glance this image of confusion seems all too familiar, almost clichéd: we seek order in our world, desperately grasping at points with which to orient ourselves in the helter-skelter. But in the context of Toteninsel’s themes the image assumes new, more complex registers of meaning. The little points that we «fish» for are the static points analogous to Baur’s memories as paintings. These are the moments that free us from temporality, the constant spinning we experience as life. But as much as we desire to hold on to one little point, in order to connect it with others, this feat is impossible. The best we can do is to move from one point to the next, shuffling about in the temporal flux. That Baur means to evoke time with these spinning points becomes clear later when he describes the vanity of his cousin’s many clocks as they race not just to measure time, but to get a hold of it for themselves: «während also die vielen Uhren […] durcheinander tickten, die Zeit gleichsam um die Wette messend, aus einer Eitelkeit heraus, diese für sich herauszunehmen.» As these clocks tick away in vain, Baur imagines his town, too, participating in Earth’s spinning: «[es] machte die ausladende Bewegung aller benachbarten Punkte der Erdoberfläche mit, ritt durch das Weltall, drehte sich in der großen Drehung, drehte sich mit um die Erdachse um die Sonne» (53; my emphasis). These are the grand cosmic movements that we try to measure with clocks. But clocks are merely devices that chase after and try to grasp - even to abstract from (another meaning of herausnehmen) - something that cannot be overtaken. Baur’s image of fixing one of the little points would be that moment of overcoming it - everything would stand still, becoming meaning- Transcendent Trivialities 77 ful only in terms of space. But without movement (temporality) everything would also cease to be. Thus to actually succeed in grasping a point would be akin to catching the fish, pulling it out of the environment in which it subsists, and then watching it die. Trout cannot be held - let alone pet - without succumbing. Except in the paradise imagined by Lurka. 16 And that seems to be Meier’s point. To escape from temporality would both be paradisiacal and, therefore, impossible, indeed fatal. Meier’s novel expresses both of these consequences. In its attempt to represent the potential utopian space opened up by the interaction of two friends, Toteninsel reaches for the paradisiacal. Their main action consists of mapping out space while engaged in the most non-productive and causally neutral activity possible: walking. Meier thus makes palpable his novel’s positive, utopian impulse by emptying it of action, and allowing friendship - a state of being, not any single action - to unfold. But he tries to achieve this emptying out via narrative itself, a mode of representation that depends on time to be at all recognizable as narrative. Furthermore, we read in a succession of temporal moments, typically from the beginning to the end of a book, so that our experience of the narrative - whether or not its design is starkly teleological - is a temporal experience. Indeed, time inescapably permeates our existence. To escape from it would be to escape from the world-- effectively to die. Thus in Toteninsel the utopian aspirations embodied in the spatializing walk always carry with them a resignation to time’s ineluctability. The title’s allusion to Böcklin’s painting, an allegory depicting a man being brought to an island representing death, tells us that, on the one hand, this novel is quite literally about nothing: the void, i.e., mortality. It therefore tells not only of two older men who are nearing the end of their lives (Baur lies in his deathbed in the third part of the tetralogy and has died in the fourth); it is also a novel that frames its own utopian aspirations in terms of failure and - especially in the image of the dying fish - fatal impossibility. Gerald Prince’s example of the minimal narrative - «The goldfish died» - here takes on a whole new meaning. Part of the novel’s paradox hinges on the impossibility of recognizing the paradisiacal utopia as a world outside of time without already living in a world governed by time. Paradise is only possible because we have fallen from it - if we hadn’t, there would be no other world from which to understand «das Paradiesische des Paradieses.» For the epigraph to the third novel of the tetralogy to which Toteninsel belongs, Meier expresses the problem via a quotation from Proust: «Die wahren Paradiese sind Paradiese, die man verloren hat» (290). In Toteninsel Meier seems to admit to this impasse, choosing 78 Samuel Frederick the form of narrative as the only means to make palpable a world without narrative (that is, without time). To actually enter this utopian space would be to lose time along with the narrative that allowed for this place to be imaginable in the first place. Meier’s strategy for writing a «book about nothing» is to suggest the undoing of narrative itself in the very process of narrating - thereby constantly reminding us of its impossibility. Theoretical Interlude In the introduction to his Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard defines his central notion of the «new poetic image» in terms of Eugène Minkowski’s «reverberation,» which, as Bachelard specifies, represents «the opposite of causality»: «In this reverberation, the poetic image will have a sonority of being. The poet speaks on the threshold of being» (xvi). Reverberation is a spatial metaphor intended to capture the nature of the change a poetic work can trigger in our being. With this term, Bachelard means to identify how a poetic work communicates to us. He aims to explore this new kind of dynamism in terms of the «phenomenology of the imagination,» which, he stresses, cannot be explained in terms of cause and effect. The poetic image opens up spaces in which reverberations literally take place. But if these reverberations are somehow outside of the realm of causality, then they must take on the characteristic of immediacy. One does not read a poem, and then feel its reverberations. The reading of the poem, rather, coincides with these reverberations, which so alter one’s being that one can no longer speak of a before or after in terms of the aesthetic experience. The poetic image has «take[n] root» (xix) and become one’s own, transforming one’s basic ontological makeup in such a way as to call into question the very temporality that appears to have made it possible. For there was a change, was there not? - and change implies both temporality and causality. But the change effected by reverberation essentially erases the causal original of that change in triggering its transformation. With reverberation, being takes on the characteristics of space. This peculiar, paradoxical logic - which is less Bachelard’s than my reading of Bachelard’s reading of Minkowski - can be found at work in Meier’s Toteninsel, where, as I have attempted to show thus far, fundamentally temporal narration is the vehicle by which that temporality is attempted to be overcome. What «reverberates» in Toteninsel, specifically, are its many things, its inventory of mere stuff, the seeming trivialities observed by Baur and Bindschädler which have little or no impact on the novel’s exiguous action, but emerge instead as static images and recurring motifs. Transcendent Trivialities 79 Attention to such things, leading as it does to a preponderance of static images, can be detrimental to the conventional, temporally grounded narrative. It is Georg Lukács who best articulates why this is typically the case. In his 1936 essay «Erzählen oder Beschreiben? » Lukács argues against those modes of narrative fiction in which «das Zufällige» is not dialectically integrated into «die Notwendigkeit» of the whole. He focuses in particular on the ekphrastic tendencies of nineteenth-century novels, in which he sees the dominance of the descriptive leading to the static image, such that the reader does not read any meaningful sequence of action so much as observe «eine Reihe von Zustandsbildern.» Descriptiveness, for Lukács, becomes «ein schriftstellerischer Ersatz für die verlorengegangene epische Bedeutsamkeit» (213). The «danger» of description is that it can gain meaning independent of human action, which is to get outside of meaningful human time. For description «macht alles gegenwärtig,» and this «räumliche Gegenwart verwandelt Menschen und Dinge auch in eine zeitliche Gegenwärtigkeit» (216). For Lukács, such presence is a kind of stasis akin to the reified subject and, ultimately, to death. Thus the temporal presence afforded by attention to trivial or incidental things is for him a «mere succession» (bloßes Nacheinander) of states - a kind of false temporality in the face of meaningful historical time. We may here be reminded of E.M. Forster’s «story» (as opposed to «plot»), the sequence of states without causally determined connections. Indeed, for Lukács such mere story - a sequence of incidental and thus seemingly unnecessary states or even actions - can turn into «a sequence of static images» that are only connected in terms of their materiality as things in a spatial realm, not as meaningful, human acts that move a plot forward: «Die sogenannte Handlung ist nur ein dünner Faden, an dem die Zustandsbilder aufgereiht werden.» The weak plot, Lukács insists, «schafft eine oberflächliche, […] dichterisch zufällige zeitliche Aneinanderfolge der einzelnen Zustandsbilder» (230). These images may be «temporal» by virtue of their succession on the page, but they appear, finally, as «einzelne Bilder, die im künstlerischen Sinne so unverbunden nebeneinander hängen wie die Bilder in einem Museum» (220). 17 Lukács’s insights into the tendency of descriptions or unconnected acts to become spatialized «static images» similar in their arbitrary sequentiality to paintings on the walls of a museum gets right to the core of Meier’s novel, both thematically (in the image and the painting) and formally (in Meier’s refusal to provide a necessary sequence of actions). For Lukács, everything in such works becomes «present,» which presentness then ceases to be an indicator of temporality - the moment now - and becomes instead a space of being. Meier’s novel, I have been arguing, does something similar - though it is positively valued. 18 Toteninsel presents a world freed from the need for things to happen, 80 Samuel Frederick a world in which past and present collapse into a set of static images that draw attention to the spatial dimension of the narrative (and of existence). This dimension, furthermore, takes on utopian resonances via the «paradisiacal cage» of the Dobrowiecka house and Bindschädler’s metaphor for memory - both involving spaces that, like Lukács’s conception of spatial narrative, are characterized by static images that are hung on walls. And, ironically, what Meier writes has to be narrative, because this form always already invokes the time that one needs to escape from in order to access this utopian space. Narration, in Meier’s novel, is thus always a kind of negation. In a sense it is narrative itself that is in the way of returning to a state of pure togetherness. But it is also narrative that is our only way of returning to that state. Meier’s novel shows a remarkable sensitivity to this paradox, performing its own failed overcoming in order to make palpable the space that would open up in that overcoming. II. Redeeming Fallen Things Critical to this performance are the very things - the static images and incidental stuff - that populate the novel in place of what Lukács calls «meaningful action.» I wish to show in this second part of the article how Meier mobilizes these things for his narrative experiment. They are not only critical to his formal needs, but also to the philosophical project of the novel, which I defined at the outset as a «metaphysical» undertaking (a dual critique and rescue). Having shown the formal impossibility of Flaubert’s «book about nothing,» Meier still wants to redeem it, not through «style,» but through content, through the very «matter» Flaubert saw as an impediment to its achievement. Meier does this by setting in motion a peculiar dialectic of nothing and something, which takes the following shape. Something, usually just some thing, a merely trivial object or even situation, is revealed as exactly such «nothing» of importance, but in this disclosure of its seeming worthlessness (it being closer to nothing than something) that thing grants access to something transcendent: the infinite, the paradisiacal, what Meier himself calls «das Unstoffliche,» which is yet another «nothing» (indeed, it is Flaubert’s «nothing»). The seemingly incidental and ordinary thing in Toteninsel thus bears resemblance to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the fallen object of the Baroque Trauerspiel, which is redeemed in the process of allegorical transformation. Below I will briefly pick up Benjamin’s reflections to help us come to terms with the theological dimension of Meier’s metaphysical project of critique and rescue. This dimension is indispensible to grasping properly the fundamental ways in which Meier maps these problematic binaries (matter/ form, something/ nothing, critique/ rescue) onto the formal experiments of his work. Transcendent Trivialities 81 The things in Toteninsel come in all shapes and sizes, from the feathers on the head of the last of the Mohicans (as imagined by Baur) to a leaf that Baur holds in his hand and then drops, from the sound of crickets to the scrapped railway parts in an abandoned field, and from Baur’s shoelaces to the sewage pipes underneath the earth and the excrement they carry. These and other inconspicuous and (often) discarded things join in a network of trivial, ordinary, or overlooked stuff mentioned by Baur or described by Bindschädler, things that serve, on the one hand, as motifs, the reappearing props in a narrative without action, and the naturalistic reminders of the concrete world in which our characters have been placed. As such, they retain their fundamental thingness, which Meier himself calls the «ordinary» (das Gewöhnliche) or «banal» (das Banale), and which with Roland Barthes we might say participate in the «reality effect,» that which has no apparent symbolic or structural value except to announce «the real.» In discussing the importance of Joyce’s Ulysses for his own work, Meier begins by articulating precisely such a «view of things» («seine Sicht der Dinge [ist] auch meine Sicht der Dinge»), placing emphasis on his shared interest in «diesem Gewöhnlichen […] diesem Banalen, Nichtigen, Unscheinbaren» (Das dunkle Fest 146). 19 In this way Toteninsel’s attention to mere stuff is part of Meier’s program for writing the «book about nothing.» Since style on its own is impossible and Meier is stuck with having to narrate something, he chooses as this something that which is closest to nothing: the inconspicuous and unspectacular. But on the other hand this indexicality of the ordinary is not an end in itself for Meier. 20 In the same discussion of Joyce, he clarifies that, «Genau in diesen Banalitäten oder Lappalien sehe auch ich die Größe oder das verkappte Pathos der Welt» (148). The Swiss writer’s interest in things in their very ordinariness, that is, coincides with these things’ capacity to evoke something «great,» something not at all ordinary. Werner Morlang suggests that Meier uses materiality to make spirituality «dingfest,» to which Meier responds: Da [in Toteninsel] werden scheinbar lediglich Banalitäten ausgebreitet, aber diese Banalitäten erscheinen auf dem Hintergrund der Stofflosigkeit um so schöner, um so bewegender, um so rührender, um so anrührender, weißt du. Da muß man sich gar nicht scheuen, solche Banalitäten aufzuzeigen, denn darin zeigen sich jene irdisch-schön-verspielten Angelegenheiten, die scheinbar nicht der Rede wert sind und doch für unser Leben von großer Bedeutung sein können. Es geht um Federn auf dem Haupt, es geht um Schuhe, Schuhbänder, Knöpfe und andere kleine Lebensdinge, die auf diesem Hintergrund eine wunderbare Leuchtkraft bekommen. Wenn man sie aber zu ernst nimmt, offenbaren sie nur ihre Banalität, und man erreicht gerade das Gegenteil. Wenn man also Materialität zu stark betont, wird sie läppisch. (287-88) 82 Samuel Frederick Meier here reveals his ambivalence towards the very things that he «disperses» in his prose. Although he claims to find them beautiful and moving in and of themselves, he also suggests that this quality really only emerges on account of a «background» that permits them to appear in the first place. That background of «immateriality,» then, assumes a position of ontological priority over merely «material» things, which, by themselves, are only significant insofar as they enable us to become aware of this background. Seen in this way, things merely carry out a semiotic function - exactly the opposite of Barthes’s «reality effect.» What is of «great importance» is not their ordinary materiality as such, which should not be emphasized, but only the fact that this materiality points beyond itself to something immaterial and transcendent. Such apparent devaluation of things in the face of some more important «beyond» complicates the special value Meier wants to bestow on them as things. In Toteninsel and in his discussions with Morlang, Meier on the one hand privileges things over the background they supposedly make knowable. It is the things, after all, that «light up» («eine wunderbare Leuchtkraft bekommen»; elsewhere Meier uses aufleuchten [289] and aufscheinen [307]), not the background, which serves not as any immaterial goal, but only as the condition of the possibility for seeing things in their transfiguration. The background, from this perspective, can only be known because it allows things to appear in the foreground, as the ambient light in a room allows one to see the features of and things in that room, but is itself imperceptible. In this way, it is the things themselves, ultimately, that are the locus of «Pathos» and «Größe» (68, 148), the true matter of importance. Having enabled things to emerge into view, the immaterial recedes into the background, subservient to primary materiality. Further complicating matters is not only Meier’s repeated invocation of the «immateriality» (Meier uses variations on das Unstoffliche or die Stofflosigkeit) behind things, but also his insistence that things be transfigured so as to become «great» (groß). Yet with this sentiment Meier seems to contradict himself. For once things have been transfigured, as he describes it, they would cease to be mere things, having turned over from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from inconspicuous matter to something that radiates in a special kind of metaphysical glow. This contradiction, however, is at the heart of Meier’s literary-metaphysical undertaking. Since his wish to convey the immaterial (which is also Flaubert’s wish) keeps coming up against the ineluctability of a world whose representation and representability will always involve matter, Meier does not reject that matter, as Flaubert wants to, but embraces it. He may ultimately desire the «immaterial,» but it by definition has no substantial reality, despite being the «most real» (Das dunkle Fest 446). As such, and to Transcendent Trivialities 83 echo Flaubert again, it is really just «nothing.» In order to access this nothing, this transcendent immateriality, Meier has to mobilize mere things, which then stand in as ciphers for that which themselves fail to attain. The things in Toteninsel thus take on an allegorical resonance in the Benjaminian sense. Their very materiality is a negative trace of an immateriality no longer accessible to us - but as such also the only means left for knowing that immateriality. Meier wants both to redeem the thing and to find redemption beyond things, but without the one cancelling out the other. This effort importantly parallels his attempt to spatialize narrative, to find a space beyond temporality through fundamentally temporal narration. Put in terms of the metaphysical project of critique and rescue: Meier wants to show how seeking transcendence at the expense of things is a mistake, even as he tries to save that very moment of transcendence - in things themselves. We might usefully inflect this metaphysical model with a more theological one, a move consonant with the novel’s concern with Edenic space. Because the transcendent background is only available to us negatively - as that which allows things to appear, but cannot itself appear - its inaccessibility takes on the characteristics of the paradisiacal: that which only exists by virtue of being inaccessible. These inflections can be found in the ways Meier figures the things of his novel as fragments in a larger narrative of redemption. «Für mich ist das Ästhetische viel tiefer verankert, verhängt mit dem Unstofflichen schlechthin, mit dem bewegend Kleinen, Verschrobenen, Hinfälligen, Anfälligen, Unauffälligen» (290), he says to Werner Morlang. Later in the same discussion he claims to be interested in the «small occurrences» (kleine Ereignisse) that are both «banal» and (paradoxically, by virtue of being banal) «unusual» (ausgefallen [308]). Meier’s language here does not just draw attention to the fragility, marginality, and triviality of these things. By virtue of the repeated root -fall (hinfällig, anfällig, unauffällig, ausgefallen), he links these scraps of useless stuff to a cosmological narrative as «fallen things,» i.e., lapsarian objects. These things embody the qualities of the postlapsarian world, serving as constant reminders of our distance from any originary paradisiacal state, in which there was no gap between subjects and objects, in which things therefore were perfectly integrated into our way of being. In Toteninsel, this distance is especially palpable in the repeated references to the manure that the figure Joachim Schwarz used to fertilize the egg dealer’s field. Here the postlapsarian stuff of the world is revealed as more than just trivial. It is a special kind of waste product, one caught up in the process of recirculation and regeneration: 84 Samuel Frederick Im Apfelgarten dieser Matte gab’s großblütige Vergißmeinnicht. Das hatte vermutlich mit dem Hühnermist zu tun. Joachim Schwarz hielt darauf, seine Matten zu jauchen. Und er hatte auch Jauche; denn er verwendete Schlächtereiabfälle (Blut, Eingeweide) zur Jauchebereitung, das heißt, er reicherte die anfallende Jauche aus dem Landschaftsbetrieb mit besagten Abfällen an, was den Gehalt der anfallenden Jauche steigerte… (63-64) The language of the novel in this passage anticipates Meier’s own discussion of his interest in trivialities, in particular in the repeated root -fall that emerges from the twice-used words «Abfälle» and «anfallende.» Schwarz takes the derived (anfallende) manure and mixes it with the byproducts (useless animal parts: Abfälle) from his slaughterhouse. One animal’s excretions together with other animals’ innards and blood become a rich food for the flowers in the egg dealer’s field. Otherwise useless waste, thrown away stuff, is made integral to a larger cyclical process of growth. This transformation of useless things significantly takes place in the shadow of apple trees, which allude directly to the paradisiacal garden from which we have «fallen.» Because we ate from one of these trees we can no longer return to paradise; because, in other words, we now have an awareness of things at all, an awareness that separates - indeed, alienates - us from the world by dividing it into subjects and objects. Meier appears to want to rescue this fallen stuff. The process of regeneration evident in the egg dealer’s field, in which useless things are made useful again, presents one image of such redemption, but ends up being a grotesque parody of paradise. How, Meier asks, might one rescue these fallen things while also preserving them in their useless, postlapsarian state - without, that is, transforming them into their opposite? Benjamin describes one such form of redemption through props, objects, and fallen things using the term «Umschwung,» a dialectical process in which the profane world is «lifted up» and «devalued» at the same time (e.g., 351, 401, 405). Only negatively, by way of the fragments and disjecta of the postlapsarian world, can salvation be attained. Indeed, only because we have been banished from paradise to a world in which name and thing no longer correspond is the restitution of that paradise a possibility. For Benjamin, it is precisely the profane and forsaken stuff of the world in ruins that contains the hope for redemption. And the realization of that hope is only possible because things are «mute,» unable not just to speak, but to be meaningful in and of themselves (398). On the one hand, Benjamin’s insights help us to better understand how trivial things function in Meier’s literary-metaphysical project, which appears to involve work similar to that undertaken by Benjamin’s allegorist. But on the other hand, one crucial distinction stands out. For Benjamin, the allegorist is ultimately not concerned with the thing as such, which is only Transcendent Trivialities 85 instrumentalized in his hands. 21 Because Meier desires to preserve the thing’s triviality, he does not grasp, appropriate, or even transform things. Rather, he lets them fall. As he puts it in reference to Joachim Schwarz’s special manure, he saves such seemingly inconspicuous things from being lost, «aber, um Gottes Willen, nicht bewußt im Sinne von: Das will ich jetzt aufbewahren und nicht fallenlassen» (Das dunkle Fest 308). These things, then, are purposefully not captured or held fast. And yet this refusal serves as a method, indeed the only possible method, for their preservation. For any other type of appropriation would turn the fallen thing into its opposite, halting its fall and making it meaningful or useful. Meier wants to preserve these things in their fallen state as postlapsarian things that enact their and our loss of originary meaning. (The parody of Eden that Meier gives us in the egg dealer’s field brings this point home in the name of the flower that grows there, Vergißmeinnicht, warning us not to forget the fallen things that have here been made «productive.») Only as such fallen things can they «light up» and «become grand,» full of «pathos,» precisely because they are revealed for what they are: negative manifestations of the paradisiacal. Like the fish that would die were one to lift it out of the water, one has to let these things simply be, or with Heidegger, «das Ding […] in seinem Dingsein auf sich beruhen lassen» (21). In Eden, as with Lurka’s Eve and trout, we might take it in into our laps without killing it; but in the fallen world such appropriation would only be fatal. The appropriate metaphor, then, would be one in which catching the fish would coincide with letting it swim away, in recognition of our fallen state, our inability to catch the fish without it succumbing. Meier provides precisely such a metaphor in his conversation with Morlang: Ich bin wahnsinnig glücklich darüber, daß ich sozusagen als Netz dienen und etwas davon festhalten konnte, damit es nicht zerrinnt in einem fernen, unbekannten Ozean: etwas von diesen herrlichen Lappalien, die sich abspielen auf unserer harten, weichen, schönen und grausamen Erde. (309-10) In Meier’s peculiar syntax net and catch merge so that the tool for fishing and the thing being fished become one and the same. The word Meier uses here for trivial, fallen things is «Lappalien,» «trifles» or «mere nothings,» from the word for a throwaway scrap of fabric or rag. Although originally (as Lappen) a tool for ridding the world of its surplus of insignificant and useless stuff, to clean up and throw away refuse, «Lappalie» is here aligned with the very stuff it - in that original form - helped dispose. Meier retains both (opposite) meanings by referring to these «mere nothings» as net and that which this net captures, evoking the peculiar image of a net that is trying to catch itself, to hold fast that which is neither part of the «hard earth» nor of the water that 86 Samuel Frederick slips between our fingers. Thus even though he here expresses fixing or holding onto these trivialities, Meier also betrays that such appropriation is only possible in its necessary failure. No net can catch itself. We hold on to triviality as triviality by performing a failed appropriation of it. Only in this way can Meier overcome the paradox of representing trivialities without either elevating them to a status that cancels out their thingness or reducing them to the merely «petty.» And only in this way can he gesture toward the moment of transcendence that he sees contained in or made possible by these things, without that transcendence eclipsing the things themselves. Making present the thing as - to borrow Bill Brown’s language again - excess materiality and that which exceeds materiality, as on the threshold of something and nothing, allows Meier both to make them «light up» as matter and to let them reveal the «immaterial» light around them. What they light up, then, is themselves as well as the world that makes them possible, a world that may be «fallen,» but that might be transfigured by virtue of a newfound attention to the banal. For this reason, Meier’s narrative project involves less the relating of events as - in a long tradition from Homer through Rabelais to Joyce - the creation of a list, an inventory of fallen things that shimmer in utopian potential: «das Auflisten dessen, was uns trotzdem noch geblieben ist jenseits von Eden» (Das dunkle Fest 177). And so, as the characters and events of Toteninsel recede into the background, we are presented with this inventory of «mere nothings,» including smells, sounds, shadows, light, and movement. Even the central event of the walk and the conversation between Baur and Bindschädler become forces of movement and sound, respectively. Speech, Meier says, represents the «immaterial» itself - despite its concretizing into printed words in the medium of the book (Das dunkle Fest 286-87). In allowing these «mere nothings» to draw attention to «immateriality,» Meier also - inescapably - draws our attention to these trivialities as more than just trivialities, but as remnants of the postlapsarian world. They may on the one hand evoke a nostalgia for that which they reveal («das Heimweh nach Eden,» as Meier puts it [177]), but they are also reminders of our distance from that paradise - reminders of our own «nothingness.» Ultimately, they are also reminders of the medium which Meier has chosen to convey these ideas. Art - specifically, the novel - is a thing, too, after all. And in the grand scheme of things, it, too, as something «ordinary,» is as such actually closer to «nothing»: «es ist etwas Paradoxes, daß gerade ein Kunstwerk […] letztlich das Gewöhnliche selber ist» (143). But herein also lies Meier’s final answer to Flaubert, and in a sense his ultimate metaphysical move, as I have defined it. If Flaubert had elevated style to an insubstantial Transcendent Trivialities 87 Form so as to jettison «things» in the hope of attaining «nothing,» Meier turns that binary on its head. Style is not some ethereal Form, he insists, something that might be made more pure by ridding it of its content. Style, rather, is the substantial stuff of writing itself. All we are left with, in the end, are the words on the page. And that which these words convey is not some material «content» that might be disposed of. That content, not - as Flaubert assumes - style, is the insubstantial and thus invisible element of literature, that which can only appear in the concrete form of style. Put another way, we typically think, as Flaubert had, of what a novel is «about» as its substantial content, which is shaped by a writer’s style or manner of telling, its otherwise invisible form. Without this content, from this perspective, style as such does not and cannot really exist. It is a mere how waiting for a what. Meier’s response to Flaubert is to reverse this priority of content over form (as style), so that the how becomes a what itself. In this way the concrete matter of his novel is to be found in its telling, its incarnation of a particular style. It then follows that the «insubstantial,» which is purely dependent on this particularity, is what the story is «about» and only really exists when made manifest in and as style. 22 Meier’s novel thus mobilizes the notions of form and content as they were originally understood by Plato and revised by Aristotle. «Content,» or matter (hyle), is the less real, unformed stuff that has no independent existence without first being given shape. Form (morphe), on the other hand, does have an individual existence, and it essentially bestows this existence onto matter by granting it - content - particular contours. The novel as genre is, from this perspective, always about nothing, since - as the Russian formalists knew - its fabula (story content) is the unformed story stuff that has no independent existence outside its concretization in sjuzhet (its telling, its style). Indeed, we only posit the existence of this story content as a theoretical construct, abstracted from the material artifact of the text. Meier subtly plays with this notion of narrative’s constituent elements in his critique of Flaubert’s pure style, and in doing so redeems the project of Toteninsel as a «concrete thing» whose primary claim to utopian potential lies in the materiality it makes manifest in and as the very stuff of its style. In this way Meier also rescues Flaubert’s notion of the «book about nothing» even as he critiques it, locating its dream of «pure style» not in any ethereally suspended realm above things, but in things themselves, most importantly, in the matter of writing. Coda: Utopian Friendship But lest that writing be seen as an end in itself, as some kind of self-reflexive linguistic play or mere «Sprachwirklichkeit» (Spiegelberg), which is what I 88 Samuel Frederick speculated at the very beginning of this article, Flaubert’s unmoored «book about nothing» could end up being, it behooves us to remember that Meier sought transcendence both in and through things. Thus in Toteninsel transcendence is not figured as any kind of escape from or renunciation of the world, but rather as a renewed attention to its very things, to its fallen objects, which are capable of disclosing to us a way of being in this world that might activate its and our utopian potential. Meier’s notion of transcendence is therefore, as we have seen, firmly rooted in the ordinary, not just in the matter of writing, but also in the banal activity of friends that this writing conveys. That activity takes the particular form of walking, which becomes more than just the occasion and celebration of togetherness, as Peter Handke rightly expresses it («das Fest des gemeinsamen Redens, des gemeinsamen Spaziergehens» [39]). Walking also expresses a fundamental attunement to the world of things in terms of corporeal presence among these things. The primary condition for this attunement is less the walk in and of itself than it is the friendship between Baur and Bindschädler, which reveals a deeper structure of togetherness in which bodily movement, observation, reflection, speech, and writing become productively intertwined. The interpersonal connection between the novel’s two main figures, however, is not expressed in the form of an affective bond or shared past experience. The representation of their friendship is thus a highly idiosyncratic one, not anchored in subjectivity or shared memories, not directly thematized or even addressed, but only emerging in and as the concrete, corporeal activity of walking and its accompanying conversation, in the rhythm (bodily and linguistic) in which these men interact. 23 Only in passing do we learn the simple and unelaborated fact that both men were in the active service together during the war. Their shared past remains otherwise inaccessible. As such, their experience of companionship resists being defined - as it typically is in narratives about friendship - by past actions and their attendant present consequences. 24 Theirs, rather, is a shared experience of togetherness that unfolds as spontaneously and mundanely as the walk itself - in space. Meier’s technique of eschewing the temporal structures of narrative so as to open up a utopian spatial realm therefore parallels how the novel maps out this space of friendship. Instead of narrating their friendship by delineating its distinct path along the trajectory of time, their friendship is enacted in space, extended in contiguity with the things around them. Baur and Bindschädler are not just granted this space, however; their bodily movement through Olton creates it. 25 In shifting their activity from the sphere of plotted action to the coordinates of space, Meier insists that friendship is fundamentally distinct from what Lukács identifies as the only proper realm of the novel, «[das] Transcendent Trivialities 89 Schicksal der handelnden Menschen» (218). Meier’s experiment exposes such a narrative framework as insufficient to portray his characters’ companionship, suggesting that a narrative requiring «fate» and «plotted action» would only lock friendship into the structures of give and take that are fundamentally antithetical to it. 26 Instead, Meier allows friendship to take shape in a space unencumbered by the economy of exchange. 27 Like the things around them, their friendship does not have instrumental, but rather existential, significance. Baur and Bindschädler therefore do not need to profess their friendship, let alone make superficial gestures to confirm it; neither shared history nor expectations for the future are of consequence - only the present moment of togetherness matters. Friendship in Toteninsel, that is, does not take place, but rather has place. In this way the novel is not really about friendship, since it does not tell the story of these two men and what connects them. Rather, it ought to be read as a novel of friendship, because, although not directly (or conventionally) represented, the connection between these two men becomes uniquely present in the space their being-together, in turn, makes possible. 28 This space opened up by Baur and Bindschädler is just as much the actual space of the provincial town as it is a utopian space of togetherness beyond the demands of exchange or interpersonal expectation. Indeed, these two realms mirror each other in the novel, such that attuned activity rooted in immediate experience is revealed as the closest we can get to occupying a space of ideal, even utopian, togetherness. The novel, finally, reveals this space of friendship as the region this side of eternity where transcendence might be cultivated in the seemingly trivial matter of the everyday. Notes I wish to thank Paul Buchholz for reading and providing helpful comments on a draft of this article. 1 Letter dated 16 January 1852. The original reads, «Ce qui me semble beau, ce que je voudrais faire, c’est un livre sur rien, un livre sans attache extérieure, qui se tiendrait de luimême par la force interne de son style, comme la terre sans être soutenue se tient en l’air, un livre qui n’aurait presque pas de sujet ou du moins où le sujet serait presque invisible, si cela se peut» (Correspondance II 31). 2 E.g., «A 48-Year-Old Burglar from San Diego» and «1891-1944» from Rommel Drives Deep into Egypt. The musical equivalent would be John Cage’s 4’33» (1952), in which a pianist performs three movements that consist of exactly zero musical notes. 3 «Les œuvres les plus belles sont celles où il y a le moins de matière […]» (Correspondance II 31). 4 The quotation appears in German translation: «Was mir schön erscheint und was ich machen möchte, ist ein Buch über nichts» (6). Toteninsel is the first volume in what 90 Samuel Frederick would end up being a tetralogy. The other three novels are Borodino (1982), Die Ballade vom Schneien (1985), and Land der Winde (1990). 5 In the literature on Meier critics usually assume that he uncritically embraces Flaubert’s wish in an attempt to write a book whose primary «content» is language itself. See Sośnicka 49, 59, 106 and Hoffmann 59-60. 6 In examining this paradox I am also examining - and thus highlighting - the work of a relatively obscure writer. Although this article is not meant as any kind of introduction to Meier’s writing, I do hope it will draw some attention to his output, which has been severely neglected both in Anglo-American scholarship (where there exists no literature on Meier at all) and in continental Europe (where he is still a marginal figure). Meier’s somewhat conservative provincialism has had no small part in his outsider status, which has not changed much, even though his work has been championed by such recognized writers as Peter Handke and Karl Krolow, among others. A recent, award-winning English translation of Toteninsel by Burton Pike will, I hope, draw attention to Meier in the English-speaking world. 7 My intention is neither to conflate these theorists’ often divergent thinking nor to suggest that they somehow express a single conception of thingness. 8 It would be illuminating to situate Meier’s novel historically in the development of German-language experimental fiction, though time and space (as well as the primary focus of the article) prohibit this undertaking here. Furthermore, Meier positions himself more frequently within a broader European context of modernist literature that includes, especially, Proust, Joyce, and Woolf. These are the writers whom Meier sees, above all, as having grappled with Flaubert’s wish. 9 Fernand Hoffmann correctly notes that narrative without time is not possible, but goes on to claim that what Meier achieves is precisely such a non-narrative timeless space that is the space of language itself: «Was er anstrebt, ist nichts mehr und nichts weniger als die radikale und totale Versprachlichung der Außen- und Innenwelt» (59-60). I would caution against such a reading, which too easily assimilates Meier’s project with the «pure style» of Flaubert’s dream, thereby ignoring its rootedness in the things of the world. 10 It thus makes no sense for Rosmarie Zeller to claim that the reader is unable to orient herself in Meier’s depicted world (165). 11 For contrasting readings, see Sven Spiegelberg’s argument that the novel takes place in the space of memory (89) and Dorotea Sośnicka’s similar suggestion that it takes place in spaceless and timeless consciousness (203, 221) or memory (269). 12 Böcklin painted five different versions of Toteninsel. Meier’s characters discuss the one painted in 1880 and housed in Basel. 13 For a discussion of the recurring paintings in Meier’s work, see Christoph Vögele’s article. 14 Cf. Sośnicka’s reading of the «Teppich» metaphor as an image for the collapse of past and present in a nontemporal «Fläche» (282). 15 The notion of the utopian that I employ here emerges directly from Meier’s novel and his conversations with Werner Morlang, and is only indirectly informed by the rather vast literature on utopia. As I hope to show, for Meier the utopian is an Edenic and thus inaccessible space outside of the corrupting time of the modern world that is available to us only by recognizing this inaccessibility and resolutely embracing the potential for transcendence in the everyday (including literature itself). Sośnicka also points to the destructiveness of «objective time» in the novel, and suggests it might be overcome: «Der utopische Drang, die Zeit zum Stillstand zu bringen» (275). She, however, sees «inner time» - that of memory and consciousness - as the space of this utopia. For an overview Transcendent Trivialities 91 of the major theories of social and literary utopianism see Bloch 547-728 and 929-81. For more recent theoretical approaches to utopia, see Moylan and Baccolini. 16 Lurka’s woodcut is pictured in Das dunkle Fest des Lebens (311), and appears to depict Eve petting the trout in the water. This detail of the woodcut seems to have been left out of the novel intentionally, so that coming soon after Baur’s «wie man Fische, Forellen zum Beispiel, heraushebt an der Angel, mit dem Effekt freilich, daß ihr Leben in Zuckungen verebbt,» the image evoked is of Eve lifting the trout out of the water. In this way it also functions as a perfect foil to Picasso’s painting. 17 This static effect results from descriptions of characters’ inner states as much as from descriptions of external states or things. Lukács here echoes Lessing’s famous distinction in Laokoon between the «neben einander» of painting (in space) and the «auf einander» of epic poetry (in time). See in particular chapter XVI (116-23). 18 As Tamara Evans writes, contrasting Meier’s novel with Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän, «Die Aufhebung einer linear und teleologisch konzipierten Zeit […] wird hier […] nicht als Katastrophe, als Sturz in die ‹Unzeit,› sondern als ein Aufgehobensein in den Strukturen der Gegenwart erlebt» (363). 19 Peter von Matt notes that Meier must have learned his «Lehre vom Wesen der Dinge» from «jahrzehntelanger Anfertigung von Dingen,» by which he means Meier’s twentyyear-long work in a lamp factory (260). In fact, Meier did not begin writing seriously until he had completely given up the daily activity of making everyday household lamps. 20 In her fascinating book on the ordinary in modernism, Liesl Olson argues along these lines that modernism’s innovation was to succeed in representing the ordinary as ordinary. Joyce’s work is one of Olson’s primary examples. 21 See, in particular, Richard Wolin’s reading of the Trauerspiel book: «the allegorist is never interested in the thing itself, but only in its allegorical meaning - i.e. its significance in relation to the theological concept of salvation» (72). 22 Style is not simply content plus expression, or merely a how that depends on a what. Thus, in my reading, the Flaubertian (and also commonplace) notion of style as the way in which language expresses something (some content) is less important than the concrete existence of this language as a material medium of expression and the fact that this medium is itself more fundamental (it is both what matters and what is matter) than anything it might succeed in expressing. 23 See Peter von Matt’s refutation, with which I agree, of readings of the novel that want to see these characters escaping into some kind of «Innerlichkeit»: «Sie heben nie ab in ganz andere Räume, sondern arbeiten an der Gegenwart. Immerzu arbeiten sie an der ungeheuren Gegenwart dessen, was da ist» (262). Although Wilfred Schiltknecht rightly notes the strangeness of «Zusammensein» in Meier’s work in general, which often comes hand in hand with «eine gewisse Distanz» (77), he does not consider how this apparent distance might be part of Meier’s strategy for portraying a deeper mode of togetherness. 24 Critics frequently conflate the two figures as dual aspects of one person. See Pike (v), Wysling (240), Sośnicka (22, 223-24), and Spielberg (90). For Spielberg, this conflation becomes symptomatic of a lack of communication, the split ego «Baur/ Bindschädler» carrying out an isolated «Diskurs in der Leere.» Such a reading, it seems to me, takes what is undoubtedly a strange feature of the text (lack of shared memories) and interprets it in a way that conflicts with the novel’s core concerns. 25 Alternately and complimentarily, the other activity of the two men, their conversation, opens up this space. Wilfred Schiltknecht makes this claim, and also argues that the mode of communication we find in Meier is a particular kind of resistance (77-78). 92 Samuel Frederick 26 I do not have the space here to elaborate a theory of friendship, but suffice it to say that I conceive of it in part following Aristotle in its ideal form as a relationship not determined by the need to be productive, and thus as a special mode of human interaction that subsists on togetherness without the expectation of gaining anything beyond the (immaterial) pleasure afforded by this togetherness. 27 That Lukács’s normative model for a plotted narrative of human activity relies on the logic of exchange fundamental to capitalism seems to me highly ironic. And yet it is clear that he needs these structures both as that against which human activity can be made meaningful, and also as the model for the means by which one engages in a classconscious struggle against these very structures. Lukács would call the «presence» of the friends in Meier’s novel a kind of «falsche Gegenwärtigkeit» (218). 28 As Dorotea Sośnicka writes in reference to the novel’s fundamental structure, «es bedarf immer beider Figuren, damit das Erzählen überhaupt realisiert werden kann» (138). Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Metaphysik: Begriff und Probleme (1965). Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Nachgelassene Schriften. Abteilung IV: Vorlesungen Vol. 14. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Barthes, Roland. «The Reality Effect.» The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1986. 141-48. Benjamin, Walter. «Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels.» Abhandlungen. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 1. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1991. Bloch, Ernst. Das Prinzip Hoffnung: In fünf Teilen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1985. Brautigan, Richard. 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