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?
