The Brooklyn Rail

There are works of literature that so acutely respond to the moment in which they were written that they can be said to paradoxically appear “before their time.” Time, in other words, must do what it does best in order to catch up with the literary work and the moment and material experiences it has crystallized as composition, or anticipated as unreciprocated touch, through the intimacy of reading.

Michel Foucault called such authors capable of producing more than texts but the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts “transdiscursive.” Though he was thinking about titans like Sigmund Freud and Ann Radcliffe, who, in being so available to and celebrated by a literary public, might be thought of, in regard to the pursuit of a hidden face of modernity or a cultural undercurrent of literature, as suspect—the possibilities of other texts as the conditions for an otherwise literature. Ronald M. Schernikau’s SMALLTOWNNOVELLA, translated into English by Lucy Jones, is a testament to a literary corpus that trades in possibility, both the reconnection of the present to a future and, aesthetically, the reorientation of the novel to the scattered depths and marginalized spaces of the notebook. The aim of Ugly Duckling Presse’s Lost Literature Series—while not exactly devoted, in Walter Benjamin’s words, to the memory of the nameless—is to publish neglected and scarcely available works of poetry and prose, many of which have been translated into English, as is the case for SMALLTOWNNOVELLA, for the first time.

Schernikau’s book—his first, written and published before he’d even graduated secondary school—follows “b,” whose name, like every word in SMALLTOWNNOVELLA, is set in lowercase, a grammatical reprocessing carrying political valency, particularly in German, which, given the language’s four possible sentence structure patterns, systematically denotes nouns and personal pronouns from other words through their capitalization in order to prevent ambiguity. The effect is slippage, dispersal, polyglossia, a melting of perspectives, bodies, voices, which might resemble the intimacy b longs for and which, “in a society that encourages everything, just not social behavior,” is relegated to the realm of teenage daydream. SMALLTOWNNOVELLA, though, wants to reclaim ambiguity, insecurity, instability, the intrinsic need to be both and, the re/covery of the self through intensive layering.

b has just written a good paper which they are now discussing in class after lirus arrives late. read it aloud, says lirus, and b does: he has nothing to lose. what this feminist, verena stefan, has experienced is conformist sexuality, which for me was only ever a transitional stage to my identity. my needs are not, and never have been, the ones that society finds acceptable. that’s why, while i have never undervalued the significance of sexuality, i’ve always viewed it as fluid, simply because i exist: the world belongs to the perverse. because my feelings were different, i never felt the need to forget or exclude sexuality; it has always been far too clearly enmeshed in my overall circumstances for that. in the text, an experience is presented that the homosexual has to learn early on: that being homosexual, or even bisexual, is a no-go!, at best curable. regaining her polymorphous sexual identity is not a liberation, but a step toward it. b says this aloud and only then realizes to whom: his teacher, who is watching him. dress rehearsal for later. only now does b start worrying about this afternoon where he will be the subject of a school committee meeting to talk about the incident, which is an invasion of privacy. it’s a mystery to me how you’re going to get through this, with two more years of school to go. how come? you look so fragile. the same old song.

Narrative evaporates into intertextual recital; privacy is raided by the public; inner and outer dialogue commingle, fuse; readers can (happily) confuse one with the other, b’s internal reflections and the sad-faced projections of his image by others. SMALLTOWNNOVELLA’s textual qualities anticipate the rolling chatter of digital copresence; this is why, as Jorge Luis Borges knew (writing about Franz Kafka), each writer creates his precursors but also the conditions for their reproduction; the creation of the new modifies the past as it will modify the future. For a character who is both drawn to and drawn by the looks of others, the kind of slippage cited in the passage above is formally alluring and semantically brilliant. Schernikau’s hypnotic prose—exuberant, concise, acerbically intelligent—exposes the hypocrisy and absurdity of social and moral norms and the incompetence and complacency of political fronts and small-town factions alike. In the background, hovering, hardly mentioned but always there as both god and machine: the threat of nuclear war, a latent existential terror that finds its textual leitmotif in b’s relentless condemnation of the patriarchal rearing of both women and men, straight and gay, a cultural condition that seems cosmic—still, half a century later—in which b, like the other characters that populate SMALLTOWNNOVELLA, like us, feel, too often, as if we are forced to play along.

Born in the East (Magdeburg) in 1960, and smuggled, ninety miles away, into the West (Hanover) as a six-year-old, Schernikau was always already an interloper, the circumstances of his childhood prefiguring his ability, in literature and life, to destabilize borders and their production of in and out, either/or securities. Likewise, b is effervescent, variable, a floating signifier, a roving camera that, as narrator, not only captures people’s resemblances but registers their interiorities; “is it obvious when b’s gaze follows people around the school yard? there goes leif, under his gaze. how does it seem to someone who’s watching? pathetic? cheesy?” Schernikau’s b is both the gaze and the look reflected back upon the voyeur, and also the bystander filming, producing an archive of non-encounters. Is this not so often the case for those of us who have had to love in secret and thus to never be for the world who we are to ourselves? “[B] sometimes fantasizes about picking a boy, going up to him, embracing him, kissing, smiling at him afterwards. so far he’s never done it and yet has done it countless times. i exist, b thinks, when a passersby’s gaze lingers on him.” Schernikau’s fugitive narration elucidates what it feels like to want to be invisible to others with the knowledge that one’s existence requires, nevertheless, being looked at. When the actual moment of physical consummation occurs in a string of yearnful scenarios, it’s singular; the narrative briefly explodes; the personal determiner leaks out—it’s stunning, it’s beautiful, it’s painful, it’s too short-lived:

love, whatever that is: leif has tried it, and gave in when b touched him. the room in berlin after breakfast was filled with the two of them when they embraced. they didn’t know what was happening, were both speechless and lost and very close. they went downstairs to the others in silence, separated from them by an experience which they tried to repeat for weeks: the experience of another. what eyelashes can be, a look and eyes closing, chapped lips on my skin. then, calm below, the feeling of being known. the desire to say: my love! darling.

Not a page later, still inside and outside leif, b’s narrative also zooms out, characteristic of the text’s threading of social commentary, poetry, philosophy, and narrative exposition, an elasticity and expansiveness that adjusts the dimensions of novella to the absorbent corridors of the notebook:

what’s left are a few moments, a slap in the face. no support, hoping, tenderness, fighting. just smile. leif doesn’t even get to experience everyday squabbles with b; they are never considered a couple like babsi and roland, sebastian and magdalena, aki and tita. leif and b won’t get around to savoring their difficulties. for that, they would have to come out in the open, not stay apart at all costs; they would have to feel for the other’s hand not just in private, would have to be able to laugh at the stares, laugh together, kiss in the movie theater, not care, be confident, say: my boyfriend. here is where the first endurance test begins, not in the no-entry-zone of b’s childhood bedroom. the fact that they can’t bear each other’s caresses even here shows how far the contempt of the human race extends—into people themselves. who wants to dance with me? you decide. happiness doesn’t come for free, happiness still has to be fought for: we know this. … i love myself, i hate myself, i’m waking up.

I want to linger on these two moments, set in such close proximity as they are in SMALLTOWNNOVELLA, because together they represent both glimmers of resistance and, ultimately, the failure of the systems to which we belong and that we reproduce, daily, in turn; b’s vulnerable, poignant acknowledgment here limns the book’s broader denunciation on the usual order of business, the twinning of desire and violence, social and political orders, the impotence of education and its machinations as a protonationalist engine, and most of all, the society of a free world that teaches us to hate ourselves. It is not incidental that, forty-five years after Schernikau’s book debuted in West Germany, and thirty-four years after his passing of AIDS in 1991, the US’s National Endowment for the Arts began terminating many existing and previously committed grant awards, including creative writing fellowships and programs for underserved communities, in order to align with the new presidential administration’s priorities, which currently include celebrating American independence, supporting military causes, and fostering AI competency. It is not incidental that humanities departments across the country are today being wiped from institutional budgets by third-party consultants, a solution for the problem of a decline in growth created by the preexisting cutting of courses, the diminishment of programming for students, and the hiring freeze of faculty to teach them; one hand washes the sins of the other until what’s resolved is wiped clean; things and people disappear. “[N]othing,” b inwardly remarks, “is more self-destructive than the patriarchy ridiculing the conditions it has produced.” And later: “so, it’s a fight against mockery for failure, against being written off; don’t stand out, take minutes, and learn by rote. it’s indoctrination through inhumanity, perfection enhanced by the experience of the rapist.”

What’s at stake is not just the past and the present or even the future but their interactivity; the hypostatic charge of education as the transmission of knowledge across generations. Schernikau knew this well before he died, though he continued fighting for it even as he was dying. Reading SMALLTOWNNOVELLA with the knowledge that the life of its once-wunderkind author (the first edition of Kleinstadtnovelle went out of print a few days after its publication, though much of Schernikau’s later work was unpublishable in East Germany as well as the West, and remained untranslated and largely unfamiliar to readers outside of the newly reunified German state years after he died) was mercilessly cut short reminds us that any idea about a past that never fully came to be is also a vision of a possible future; that to lose something and someone in the present is yet to find the possibility of their undefeatable reconnection to the horizon, activated by the outstretched circuits of such cultural forms that shape our understanding of the new when glimpsed as the flipside of the unknown; what, in the end and at the very beginning, is made possible as a vector of change.