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                           Embers

     A very thought provoking assignment

     Shouldn't my comments wait until yours and Neds have
been registered?

     Style: "In the middle of the desk stood a green-shaded
lamp, which the General switched on, as the room was dark."
My stylistic prejudice is that the text should be a model of
the experience. After the lamp is switched on, the room is
light.

     I have ordered the German translation from the Newton
Library.

     Compare with Hermann Bang Die Vaterlandslosen; the
cultural gap as the nidus of tragedy.  That the clash of
Magyar and Roman cultures created a class of indivudals who
were lost in their homelands and alienated abroad. The
description of the General's mother's advent to the castle.
The fact that the castle itself seems to be geographically
lost.

     The stylistic compositional issue, from the concept of
the plot to its fleshed out display. Here the plot is the
authors creation which the reader has to guess.

My technique (and I think Dostoyevsky's as well) is to
proceed empirically, i.e. to let the plot (the theory) grow
out of experience).  To lead the reader through life and let
him or her determine what it all means. (The Hippocratic
approach)

Marai's approach is to invent a scheme, thesis, a plot; and
his literary skill is in making it plausible. The skillful
implementation of the plot is what makes the novel so
impressive: that the author is able to make his formula
(plot) plausible. That is why Die Zeit calls it "great
literature". The limitation of the novel is that the artist's
skill, in the end, can't make the plot plausible to _every_
reader, and when examined more closely, prehaps in the end,
to _no_ reader.  Because human beings aren't like that.
Friendships arne't like that.  Men aren't like that and women
aren't like that.

Krisztina cannot be the sensitive conscientious woman who
keeps a confessional diary and is able to conceal the
unavoidable conflict of emotions, the spiritual turmoil of
her divided loyalties.  The General cannot be the pensive,
reflective man in whom the tragedy of his life smoulders for
41 years, without having some inutitive apperception of the
nature of his friend and of his wife, or, for that matter of
Konrad's erotic needs.

     The translation issue; whether the story can be divorced
from the language in which it is told; whether it does not
become a different story in a different language; Whether
stories are not ultimately untranslatable.

     It is inconceivable that Hebrew should not have mutated
in the course of the millenia of the Bible's composition,
that the "original" meaning is irretrievably lost; that the
meaning which we now ascribe to it is in fact the linguistic
invention of the authors of the Septuagint whose literary
culture was not Hebrew but Greek.

     So far as Embers is concerned, my father's "Das hat mit
mir nichts zu tun."  I don't understand it. The rejection,
but not without the shadow of a fear that I might be like
that. That pity and fear of tragedy, that I might have done
it. Merges into sensationalism, the satisfaction deriveds by
the detective story afficianado from contemplating brutality
and vice.

     Krisztina as Mephistophela, who destroys the two friends
(because ultimately they love each other rather than her?)
Although presented in the novel almost as the passive victim
for which the two men compete.

     The contrived nature of the intended murder, indicative
of the power of thought, of imagination. This in the context
of the hunting culture and the callousness to suffering that
it reveals. cf. Turgenev's Hunting Sketches.

     "So what?" Cosi fan tutte. Viel Geschrei und wenig
Wolle.  The issue of possessiveness vs promiscuity.  The
meaning of faithfulness.  Don Alfonso: Ripetetel con me: Cosi
fan tutte.

     It is neither edifying nor constructive.  There is no
occasion with respect to any of the characters as a role
model so say: go and do thou likewise.

     Is it a tragedy? Only to the extent that the three
friends have been crippled by the events.  If one is
naturally faithful, that's fine.  If one is naturally
unfaithful, that's not so awful as its made out to be.  Man
kann keinen zur Liebe zwingen.  Man kann keinen zur Treue
zwingen.  Denn Treue ist ja letzten Endes nur eine Spezies
von Liebe.  I'm impressed by the extent to which tragedy is
created by human custom, by human thought. There is no
tragedy in nature.

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Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
