Thoughts: When thinking about this book, it’s difficult to
not think back on our “normal framework” to try and make sense of the text.
Point being, I’m not entirely certain how to avoid doing a reading then
applying post hoc framework (as simplistic or complex as it may be).
The idea of time. Opens with the. Today only matters to those
who are to commit suicide and it ends with a line calling the death a “murder.”
I see the narrator as literally loosing her self—it’s
important to separate the self from
the being (and I suppose that I would use the term soul, if not for it’s
religious connotation) so that an entity can exists with a
shattered/dead/disappeared self. So, I don’t know if I can say that the
narrator committed suicide or was murdered. I think it’s possible to argue that
she’s alive, for all intents and purposes, but has become otherwise mental
obliterated (not a suggestion that she’s crazy, but instead that an another self exists within the “my”).
I’m not suggesting the classic mind/body disconnect in philosophy because I’m
fairly convinced there’s no actual reason to draw the difference—it’s just
easier to consume within their context.
The real firepower, in my opinion, comes in “the third man
section” with the long sequence of being in a dream state nightmare, to the
waking life. The long and beautiful condemnation of the him/he (to my first
point, the he “third man” can be widely interpreted knowing that she’s in
Vienna and the he can be anything from the holocaust to the Third Reich, to the
universal he male, to the God male, to the idea that’s reflected in the ending
essay that it’s something of a discussion of Jungian/Freudian gender). We, the
reader are seeing into the rawest emotion that she can convey (without getting
into a ridiculous level at which we’re debating sense data – although she’s
super aware of the senses).
She’s name her situation as “Angst” which seems like the
proper way to label the condition…
The use of letters, and torn up letters to convey messages
to the reader. The use of the imagined book which starts out to be about joy
and declines into horror.
Great moments (of
which there are many):
“Me: (più mosso) But even if there’s nothing to be done,
even if we are powerless to intervene, the question nonetheless remains: what
is to be done? It would be inhumane to do nothing.” (205)
Huge combinations of philosophy, languages, forms of writing
(play writing merges with “normal prose” merges with parenthetical musical
directions for how the speaker is to deliver the lines.
Raises the idea of “myself” vs “my self” (I’m wondering if
this is a Heideggerian Dasien thing), which is a notable and often unseen
philosophical move.
“Therefor I imagine the day when no one is dependent on
anyone, when I live by myself in my apartment where Lina will be replaced by
one or two small machines, when pushing a button will suffice to lift a desk
and move it, as if it were nothing. No one will keep saying thank you to
someone else, no one will help other people and be annoyed with them in secret.
No one will be advantage or disadvantaged.” (76)
Hilarious tear on children: enter Ivan’s children (56):
“You know, maybe abstraction isn’t my strong point,
immediately I start to see all of these mass accumulations, like for example
children at children’s playgrounds, granted, an agglomeration of children is
particularly horrifying to me, but it’s also increasingly incomprehensible to
me how children could stand to be around so many other children.”
The opening of the last section, the postman who could not
longer deliver the mail—because of its contents and his culpability—is going to
stick to/with me for a long time:
On the mailman from
158, “That one might feel called to
be a mailman, that delivering mail is not an occupation haphazardly chosen,
that it is a mistake to even consider it one, was proven by the famous mailman
Kranewitzer of Klagenfurt, who in the end was brought to trial and sentenced to
several years’ imprisonment for malfeasance and misappropriation of funds, a
completely misunderstood man, mistreated by the press as well as the court. I
have read the accounts … [like a half page ellipsis worth reading/won’t type
out in entirety] in recognizing the problem of mail, it’s problematic nature.
The mail section is intriguing by itself, but once contextualized
(as it comes shortly after the end of section two, it’s just an amazing
metaphor and device) it’s compelling on so many additional levels.
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