On Baron Munchausen

Few people knew the writing of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky during his lifetime, virtually none outside the samizdat readership of Soviet Russia, and really not many more know him now. He was not translated into English until about 10 years ago, and I largely discovered his work by accident, via the New York Review Books catalog, one of the best, most consistent sources of works by long-forgotten Hungarian and Sicilian writers, and dove in with the near-guarantee that a writer with a name that unfriendly to non-Slavic mouths and a habit for writing books with names like Autobiography of a Corpse would be someone I'd dig.

But when I read his Adventures of Munchausen not long ago, I was at something of a loss. Not because it was badly written, or anything like that, but because I was so absolutely not the intended readership. As with so many novels from that rough time period in that region of the world, there were the intertextual links to poems and novels popular among the Russian intelligentsia of the interwar period (it should be noted that the very concept of a writing that takes place in dialogue with other pieces of writing crystallized in interwar Russia, with the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin), clever allusions to Bolshevik phraseology, and wordplay from a language I don't speak. All of these facts were dutifully explained in the footnotes, which, like explanations of jokes, do a great deal to increase understanding of the context, but radically fail to place the reader actually within the context.

I felt a bit like the students of Nabokov's Professor Pnin, who sit there in respectful confusion as Pnin makes a point to laugh out loud at the satirical poetry he's reciting, and tries to pretend he still lives in a land and a time period in which the targets of that satire were relevant.

More importantly than that specificially Russian milieu, though, Krzhizhanovsky's novel engages with one of the most persistent storylines of post-Enlightenment Europe, that of Baron Munchausen, who first entered the world of print in 1785, with the publication of The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen by Rudolf Erich Raspe. This, in turn, was based on a baron by the name of Freiherr Hieronymus Karl Friedrich von Münchhausen who gained a reputation as a teller of elaborate, exaggerated stories of military prowess. In his tall-tale adventures, whether going to the Moon or wrestling bears with his hands or pulling himself out of a swamp by his own hair or whatever, the literary version of Munchausen (always transcribed into English in that decidedly less Germanic fashion) describes the goings-on stone-faced, as if he was casually mentioning that he ran into Jenny from Accounting at H&M. Whether we are supposed to believe that Munchausen is a master raconteur, utterly self-deluded, or a pathological liar is up to the reader, I suppose.

As the Munchausen character became a standard fixture of European literature, his stories changed and multiplied. They were modified for different audiences, different languages, for children, for adults. Like the Bible, the Greek myths, or Shakespeare, they became part of a common narrative tradition across Europe, a sort of folklore for the nascent middle class following the Industrial Revolution. From Raspe's original text, tales were added, subtracted, embellished, and diminished, until the name could be applied to any situation in which fantastical events with straight-man delivery.

But, like most Americans, and I'm guessing most people in this century, my knowledge of the Munchausen tradition comes from (a) the Terry Gilliam movie featuring the dude with the creepy mustache – a symptom of the 1980s fetish for campy Victoriana – and (b) the familiar tabloid TV bogeyman of Munchausen's syndrome by proxy, whereby parents or caregivers would keep their dependents sick as a way of drawing attention to themselves (à la the puking girl in The Sixth Sense), frequently covered by big-haired anchors with reels of grainy footage of poisonings and dramatic sound effects.

And in this way, the Munchausen concept has again become re-defined, until it's something that, in case (a) bears a great deal of similarity in terms of context, but little in terms of effect, and in (b), bears absolutely fucking nothing in common in terms of context, but in terms of being a legend that we tell ourselves to bring order to our perception of the world, delivered with deadly earnestness, is spot on.

So the modern-America Munchausen is a morph of the many morphs that sprung from the original Munchausen novel, which is a series of within-that-world false tales told by a within-that-world real narrator, which is a morph of Baron Münchhausen, and his supposedly similar habits. Rather like the metamorphosis in Munchausen's stories themselves.

This is the game of Chinese whispers that we call culture.

I started by wanting to write about a book and how I didn't understand it, and how it referred to a story I didn't know much about, and it turned into a different story altogether. What stories have I read, participated in, inhabited? What stories do I tell myself? And what echoes will reverberate into the future?

Saturday, Late Afternoon, Middle Sukhumvit

It's late afternoon on a strip of Middle Sukhumvit. I'm out for a day of shopping-- looking through discount paperbacks at a used bookshop and glossy coffee table books I can't afford at Kinokuniya, idling over a cup of tea, ogling the expensive liquor selection at Villa.

The solitary walker in Bangkok will occasionally encounter sections of utter loveliness-- there are the rotting old canalside neighborhoods near near the river, the procession of white bridges with spilling bougainvilleas over the Khlong Prem Prachakon, the broad, tree-lined plaisances of Ratchadamnoen Nok and Phaya Thai, the old hyper-specific neighborhoods-- districts of luthiers and tanners, flower markets and Afghan jewellers, that dot the more antique sections of the city.

But there are also countless neighborhoods that make your skin crawl. A neighborhood like that around the Phrom Phong metro stop seems fine in the evening-- the shop windows are brightly lit, the bars and restaurants are just starting to fill up, and you might be a bit drunk yourself, you might be on your way to meet friends, you might have a date.

It's in late afternoon, during the smoggy, saffron-colored stage an hour or two before sunset, that it is at both its most horrifying and its most pathetic. The sois are exhaust-choked canyons lined with '60s shophouses, some of them left to rot, carrying the scars of typhoons, car crashes, smashed windows. Others bear garish renovations-- there is nothing more uniquely atrocious and tasteless than plaster Corinthian columns framing blue tinted-glass windows. Tourist restaurants-- the sign says THAIFOOD WESTERN FOOD VERY CHEAP-- serve up watery curries and thin, limp cheeseburgers with wilted lettuce. And above all else, there is the omnipresence of the sexualized industries-- whether as direct as strip clubs, or as indirect as sports bars with waitresses in skin-tight dresses advertising Beer Chang. And for the clannish Japanese businessmen that make their homes in this neighborhood, cracked signs indicate karaoke bars where Thai girls in bunny ears and schoolgirl outfits get felt up by Johnny Walker-soaked keiretsu functionaries.

The architecture and the commerce of the area are mirrored by the denizens. A sickly red wet-season twilight sets in. Stringy backpackers with serious suntans and filthy t-shirts cross the intersection in swift-moving twos and threes. A small group of heavily made-up young women in lacy white dresses have just finished doing a promotion for a brand of skin cream and they sit down, exhausted from having spent the day standing and smiling in four-inch heels. Toadlike white men, sweating through their shirts and their buzz cuts, mill about, led on invisible leashes by squat, flat-nosed Northeastern Thai wives with rusted complexions and knockoff Gucci bags. The beggars go out of their way to degrade themselves for extra pity. Aiming squarely for the tourist market, the legless drag themselves on their bellies across the rough pavement, and the armless wave their stumps like flags at a parade.

I often tell my friends in more northerly climes that the character of Thailand is rather Mediterranean-- Vespas and great food, coups and messily parked cars, ancient civilizations and primary colors, guitarists and prizefighters. But in the humid, sighing, late afternoon around here, Bangkok reminds me more of Weimar-era Berlin-- likewise a decadent society in perennial economic and political chaos, a furious nightlife catering to those rich enough to be insulated from this chaos, its streets filled with disfigured panhandlers and cackling streetwalkers.

And for this very reason, I've felt powerfully drawn, lately, to the expressionists and their fellow travelers.

The leering faces make up the carnival masks of James Ensor.



Half the amphetamine-riddled faces I see on the street could be in Egon Schiele paintings.



And the slum children, the old ladies, the hunchbacks, inhabit the woodcuts of Käthe Kollwitz.



It should be said that this sense of decadence and decrepitude is by no means unique to Bangkok-- plenty of places from Rome to New Orleans to Prague to Shanghai to Buenos Aires have similar reputations. But I've rarely been any place that has the same sense of innate rot, a flagging ferroconcrete sigh of a place sinking into the salt marshes.

I sometimes find the proximity of horror in Bangkok to have a certain comforting quality-- stare the devil in the face every day and blow him a raspberry. I can claim that I'm living comfortably in a contradiction, willing to confront the miseries that define the lives of vast numbers of working people haunted by the specter of capitalism, living without first-world blinders. I can maintain my world-weary edge, and posit myself as not one of those foreigners in Thailand, the mindless horde who refuse to face themselves or their place in the world. And while there is at least a grain of truth in these stances, they are also postures of self-deception. I construct a narrative for myself in an attempt to justify my own uncertainties, insecurities, and instabilities.

All of which leads me to something of a dead end. Now, I'm sitting here in front of a coffee, feeling glum. The sun has finally fallen behind the rain clouds, leaving only a smudge of light on the far horizon.

This neighborhood at night seems jet-black at times. Certain roads are lined with brightly lit white towers, while others project a rather jankety but homey street carnival mood with their food stalls and machinists' shops. But this stretch of Sukhumvit right now is only empty restaurants and dirty signage, the steely glare of emptied office buildings and an architecture that, after sunset, absorbs the blackness of night into its steel and masonry armature.

But some stories, I'm afraid, have no resolution in real life. No matter what stories I try to weave about where I am and where I am going and why I am here, I'm left with more questions than answers. The city yields nothing. No theme, no plot, and no real sense of character, but the streetlights do line up to form an ellipsis in the soft rain.

The Rooms of My Life

It's one of those nights when I can't fall asleep, which occur with a dismal regularity these days. I turn a light on and think maybe I should try to read myself to sleep.

But somehow I can't. I pick up a notebook or a glass, and it's transformed, as if it is a simulacrum of the original object. There is something there, something in the way the lamplight casts across the room, something in the angles of the shadows that come in off the street, something in the dull reflection off the cheap leatherette sofa that came with the apartment. I don't know where I am. Suddenly I am transported. On one hand, I know I'm in my room, those are undoubtedly my books on the shelf, that's my handwriting on the grocery list on the counter. But something else has slipped in, and I'm seeing my room as through a veil.

I've been here before. I know it. Maybe you could call it déjà vu, but it's more complex than that. I could tell you everything about this place: the stacks of worn-down cardboard boxes mouldering under the stairs, the cerulean-colored industrial carpeting, the walls of exposed cinder block painted semi-gloss off-white, the 1970s encyclopedias with faux-gilt-edged pages. the rows of books on dark metal shelves, cloth-bound in bright colors with codes of letters and numbers tamped on their spines in white ink. And somewhere, on the other side of a cool, shadowed room, is a plate glass window that faces a little sculpture garden on a vast lawn that runs down to a wide road with traffic shuttling back and forth. Even on a muggy tropical night, its cool, dry climate control chills my arms.

But I don't know whether or not it is a real place. What I know is that inside my head, this room exists, an imaginary library made up of countless other libraries, countless other rooms that I may have once set foot in. The memories have coalesced into a cogent place that I call the library. It needs no further definition.

And it is one of countless spaces that lie embedded in my mind. There is the library. There is the museum, and the billiard room with red wallpaper, the basement, the cabin in mid-winter, the white room and the black room that sit next to each other on a darkened hallway, the sunny terrace by the sea, and so on. These are the spaces I revisit again and again, as familiar as my childhood home. I know them in my earliest memories, in my dreams, on long walks, and on fitful nights when I'm in an odd mood and can't sleep and have nothing else to do but to cycle through the vaguer parts of conscious thought.

Someone like Freud or Jung might try to ascribe meaning to these places, to connect them to specific memories, to complexes, to a mythology of archetypes, to the structure of id, ego, and superego. But I'm not so sure how valid those ideas are.

And there are the various schools of cognitive science that suggest that we have certain evolved capacities that lead to certain aesthetic sensibilities, or at the very least, that our brains have evolved to process information is fairly specific ways. And I find these ideas just as groundless and speculative as those of the analysts.

So I am left with a set of lonely rooms, with their variations in color and light and shadow, inscrutable and omnipresent. I don't know where they come from, but I see their manifestations everywhere, in a fanlight, in a chess set.

Consequently, when I wander around the city, I am also wandering around in my own psyche. Even when I walk down a completely new street, it's already all silted up with nostalgia.

Our lives are couched in an invisible network of signs and cryptic meanings. The curvilinear font of a street sign, the gingerbread on the eaves of an old house, the angle of a roofline, a cluster of casuarina trees, each of them is imbued with a million narratives.

And, every once in a while, the vague, flickering images we carry in our minds harmonize with the stories of our built environment. We look up, and we are, for a few seconds, transported.

But it's only for a brief moment. I am in my library, my museum, my sunny terrace by the sea for only five seconds, and then it dissipates. Maybe it comes to me in waves, but each wave is only momentary, before they subside entirely, and I am again alone on a quiet street.

The Ruins of the Contemporary World

At least a couple times a week, I find myself on the highway that extends north from the Din Daeng area of Bangkok towards Don Mueang Airport, through a set of dismal, sprawling nowhere suburbs, past minor government ministries, bottling plants, overgrown cane fields, and gravel lots filled with abandoned buses. And immediately to the west, it is impossibly not to notice the concrete arches and columns that flank the railroad tracks. Most people assume at first that they are a project under construction-- a new highway, or a new metro line.

At first, they seem to be blank, geometric abstractions, their purpose uncertain. But as their function faded over the years, their form took precedence. One has a stencil at its base, another bristles with rusted, cement-daubed rebar. Like the terra cotta soldiers at Xi'an, their seemingly identical profiles reveal their personalities on close inspection, and you see the individual features of each pillar.



This, in the dizzy years of the Thai Economic Miracle in the late '80s and early '90s, was the first stage of the Hopewell Project, a planned high-speed rail and road route to link the Hua Lamphong Railway Station to what was then Bangkok's primary airport. The project was suspended under the Anand Panyarachun government, but was still considered a viable plan until 1997.

But after the 1997 devaluation of the baht and the accompanying collapse of most East and Southeast Asian economies, the remnants became a stark reminder of overexuberance and its consequences, an ugly precipitate of the business cycle.

But they aren't alone. Bangkok is a city of abandoned spires, of half-completed office towers and unfinished condos, its skyline broken by the gray hulks of stillborn development. And there are the projects abandoned in the earliest stages-- fields littered with concrete stakes, drained marshes with lonely cracked, asphalt roads leading into their depths-- that are as oblique and mysterious as pictographs in the desert.

It reminds me, rather, of California City-- the radically failed attempt at grand-scale modernist urban planning in the Mojave Desert. Or, more contemporarily, to the half-built suburbs that blight the edge of countless Sun Belt cities, my own home nation's equivalents of Bangkok's unfinished ruins. What could be lonelier, more fatalistic than those cul-de-sacs-- the heart of America's white-picket-fence collective fantasy-- falling to pieces amid an arid wasteland?




We don't want to see the vision of the contemporary world-- something so embodied by the image of the modern skyline (and, to a lesser extent, the superhighway and the mega-suburb)-- already going decrepit. It remind us too much of the not-too-distant era in the future when everything we inhabit will be relegated to the history books, or simply forgotten.

But it seems to me that these remnants are almost essential to contemporary life. In a neoliberal economic landscape marked by radical concentrations of wealth, abrupt crashes, and the celebration of massive fiscal risk as a healthy manifestation of the investor's animal spirit, they are in one way not images of our world destroyed, but our world distilled.

A final question: how long will the ruins remain where they are? Built with the latest techniques of concrete reinforcement, they aren't easy to demolish, and some of them remain quite structurally sound. Eventually someone will come along and clear them, no doubt. But part of me-- any pragmatic considerations of economics, safety, local wishes, and urban aesthetics aside-- wants the city to keep them as somber reminders. They are a network of monuments, commemorating this era's desire and greed, and ultimately, its fate.

Thailand: The Five Senses

What shocked me most when arriving at Suvarnabhumi International Airport was that there was no shock. It was as if the previous two years, two years so fraught with their own human dramas, had simply ceased to be.

With the culture extremely familiar, what remained was to rediscover things. The ideologies and attitudes of the people seemed logical and comfortable. Yet the sheer sense-data of the built environment had the capability to jar me. Stepping off the plane, I was confronted with a completely different aesthetic experience. My understanding of the Thai weltanschauung is ultimately going to be mediated by this experience. Beliefs and assumptions express themselves in painted doors and wreaths of jasmine smoke.

Seattle is blue and gray and green. Restful tones for hushed people. The swampy outskirts of Bangkok are technicolor, red clay-tile roofs and grids of sun-kissed alleys separated by bottle-green canals. Moving into the heart of the city, I enter a maze without pattern or form. I walk down Rama IV Road, lined with steel and glass skyscrapers and the concrete walls that surround embassies and corporate headquarters. But then I turn down a side alley, and I am in a rural village, with children lackadaisically pedaling bicycles and old women sitting cross-legged on bamboo mats. Bangkok is a city without shape or form, but this doesn't make it monotone. It is like Borges' Aleph, every potential place swirled into a single point.

Bangkok, like all cities, has an entirely different sonic existence up in the air and on the ground. From high atop a skyscraper, or even on a sixth floor balcony, it's difficult to separate the city's sounds from those of any other. In the aerial city, you hear jackhammers, police sirens, the rumble of traffic, bird songs. There will be variations on this theme; the tone of the police siren and the species of bird will vary from country to country. But ultimately, it is a difficult thing to discern; even the maw lam beat of upcountry Thai music is hard to separate from the reggaeton blasted out of car windows in every city in the Americas. It is on the ground that the city sounds exotic to American ears. The frying of foods, the buzzing of tuk-tuks and motorcycle taxis, and the rapid polytonal patter of Thai conversation fill the streets. Locality and terroir emerge as one descends from the concrete towers.

Every country has a unique olfactory profile. Indians and Mexicans often describe the nostalgia they feel when they are suddenly struck by the smell of Delhi or Guadalajara on American city streets. Thailand is diesel, cockroachy sewer gas, and grilling meats-- the ubiquitous sticks of chicken and pork that roast on smoky fires on every street corner, tended by dark-skinned Isan women in straw hats and floral-print shirts. This is the background odor, punctuated by the odd top or base note: the raw alkaline smell of a fish market, the burning of joss sticks outside a Chinese temple, the rotten smell of curries in steam trays that have been sitting in the afternoon sun, and the eerie frigid scentlessness of the city's office towers and multistory shopping centers.

Newly arrived at Suvarnabhumi, I don't feel the city around me. Instead I feel the air conditioner, the same cool, dry 22 degrees Celsius that graces every international airport and shopping mall on every continent. As I step into the outdoor heat of Bangkok in the hot season, the heat drapes itself over me like a cloak. For the past week, I've carried this thin, sticky layer on my arms. Even in an air conditioned office, no sensation can occur without the heat, at least as a reference point. After a soft summer rain, the heat has waned somewhat, but now it pulses with the fetid smells of sewage that has been washed out and rearranged. The heat is not decreased, merely transformed.

The flavors of Thai food are linked with memories of the first time I had each dish, and with the dishes that I consider to be the best and worst examples of a dish. As I try to sample all my old standards-- khanom jeen gaeng khiao wan (green curry over cold rice noodles), khao man gai (chicken and rice with ginger sauce), hoi thawt (mussels fried with eggs)-- I am trying to fix these plates in front of me within the continuum of memory. Reacquainting myself with Thai food, I am not just eating, but corresponding my experience to memories of other plates of food and to something like the ideal form of the dish in front of me.

When I first came to Thailand three years ago, I was overwhelmed with sensation from every angle. Slowly, over the course of a year, I eventually located the critical points of what semioticians call the umwelt, the underlying network of signs that are omnipresent in human society. Coming back here, I am immersed in it, and it's like seeing an old friend at a cafe and finding that, while he might have a different haircut or a new job, is still his old self.