Josef WinklerRecensioni
Autore di Natura Morta: A Roman Novella
Recensioni
Until recently, Anglophone readers wanting to investigate the fiction of Austrian writer Josef Winkler faced only one option: the exacting and elliptical novel The Serf (1987/1997; trans. Michael Mitchell). Published in English by Ariadne Press, The Serf joined Winkler's Flowers for Jean Genet (1992/1997; trans. Michael Roloff), his biographical and readerly homage to the French writer Jean Genet, whose influence is felt throughout Winkler's own fiction, as the only works available in English
But the reader requires an immersive education in Winkler before undertaking The Serf. And even Flowers for Jean Genet, while critical to comprehending Winkler's aesthetic—his queer appropriation of high camp, religious and perverse imagery; and his homoeroticism (I would suggest, from Ronald Firbank as well)—fails to give the reader a cogent glimpse into his creative output, an oeuvre for which Winkler has garnered many accolades including the Alfred Döblin Award in 2001, the Grand Austrian State Prize in 2007, and the Georg Büchner Prize in 2008.
Luckily, two additional fictions by Winkler were published in the past year by Contra Mundum, When the Time Comes (1998/2013) and Natura Morta: A Roman Novella (2001/2014), both translated assiduously by Adrian West, who, to use his own words (as applied to Winkler's prose), is able to render the painstaking "visual detail" and "attention to the musicality of phrases" found in the original German texts with a skill that honors Winkler's writing as a "writing-against."
Winkler eschews a traditional plot; instead, narrative fragments work together by means of repetition to complicate his vision of modern life. But single scenes can also be understood on their own terms, if one considers the images and their relation to the overall thematics of the text.
Subtitled A Roman Novella, Natura Morta is less a novella than a series of poetic vignettes, a succession of glimpses of life around the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele in Rome where various figures appear, disappear, and then reappear: people "festooned" with commodified and locally popular "colorful plastic pacifiers"; "two teenaged Moroccan rent boys"; and a man whose "eyelids and eyelashes [are] painted black with mascara" and who is taunted with the homophobic "Sida!" There are plenty of "bloody chicken heads and yellow chicken feet" in the marketplace juxtaposed with iconographic images like "a doll of the Christ child" parked in bowl surrounded by "dried pineapples, dates, and figs" and "the Virgin Mary ... look[ing] over the fingertips of her clasped hands toward a box of Mon Chéri chocolates." These images constitute a fixed yet fluid tableau, a natura morta, a still life echoing its literal translation: dead nature.
Winkler is primarily concerned with the fig vendor's son Piccoletto, "[a] black-haired boy, around sixteen years old, whose long eyelashes nearly grazed his freckle-studded cheeks." Piccoletto's function is to join the seemingly disparate images of the city and its inhabitants in a way that allows Winkler to explore the religious history of Rome, particularly as it deviates from contemporary vice and greed. "Sacred kitsch" litters the city; the text works by juxtaposing religious iconography and a marketplace saturated with "one crucified Lord after another," juxtapositions that in turn inform and reflect the distorted sexualities, the myriad "perversions" and vices paraded before the reader and the young, impressionable Piccoletto: from "[t]wo nuns ... lick[ing] the chocolate toes of an ice cream bar shaped like a child's foot" to Michelangelo's Pietà, "framed with bulletproof glass," an icon fetishized by "[a] toothless Pole" with the desire "to clasp the mother of God in her fingers."
Winkler's imagistic prose shows debts to the cinema. In one scene, Piccoletto spies a videocassette of "the film Sciuscià by Vittorio de Sica ... [a]top the apricots and white peaches" carried in a plastic bag by an anonymous woman on a streetcar. This mention of de Sica's first major work as a director—filmed in 1946 and translated in English as Shoeshine—reveals how images in Winkler function similarly to those in a neorealist film; not only do many of the series of images contain potent mixtures of the sacred and the profane, but they overvalue the image itself (in its repetition and in its recurrence) in ways also reminiscent of auteurs such as Michelangelo Antonioni.
Winkler has likened his authorial role to that of a human camera[2]: he would undoubtedly have had Antonioni's famous montage of images in mind—I am thinking of Antonioni's L'Eclisse (1962), with its stress on images as storytelling vehicles—when compiling his own scenes of natura morta. Consider the following two passages:
A dog on its hind legs with a protuberant member snapped over and over at the small crucifix hanging from the wrist of an exhausted woman leaning with her eyes closed against the wall. A kneeling girl bumped her forearm against the thigh of a young monk holding a clear plastic bag of freshly watered cherries.And:
Aroused, staring into the girl's leg holes and sniffing at her map, the boy [Piccoletto] bit down on his tongue, coated in bits of fruit bar, then stopped as he became aware of the taste of blood filling his mouth and glanced self-consciously as the mincing red feet of the pigeons. Piccoletto stood, daubed his lip with a handkerchief, passed the city map of Rome to the girl with the words "Mille grazie!" and looked for the toilet.Winkler wants us to regard a teenaged boy, who is always "playing with his sex," as a Christ for our times, in a world comprised of tourists, clergy, tradespeople, sex workers, and drug addicts. The fragmentary glimpses of city life in Natura Morta are refracted through the sexualized consciousness of Piccoletto whose observation of two other boys "gnawing on a fig, fresh and purple" is followed up immediately by "[t]he two boys huddl[ing] together, whispering and giggling, eyeing Piccoletto's broad buttocks."
Even more crucial to Winkler's sexual vision of modernity is Piccoletto's interest in soliciting both male and female gazes, and how he can arouse and also express sexual interest across the gulf of gender. Winkler's aesthetic construction of modern-day Rome conjoins sex and the city, forcing individuals to confront the past in a present whose greed, lusts, and sensual pleasures—e.g., "Frocio wrapped fistfuls of ice chips in tin foil, pressing them into the form of a phallus, held the cold fetish at his hips, and squeezed the ice chips out of the tin foil in front of the fig vendor's son, as though releasing kilos of ejaculate"—contrast with the iconographic and architectural reminders of latter days: "a stone phallus" in the Piazza San Vittorio the scene where an ambulance "pick[s] up a young drug addict, passed out and foaming at the mouth"; "the exit of the papal tombs" of Saint Peter's Cathedral "leaking blood in the filthy streets," streets littered with pages of the Cronaco vera, "in which tragedies from throughout Italy—illustrated with hearses, eyewitnesses, chesty women, and Mafiosi...—are reported every week."
In contrast with Natura Morta's portraits of city life, Winkler's When the Time Comes takes rural Austria as its focus (Winkler's native Carinthia). But like Natura Morta, When the Time Comes centers on a young boy whose intellectual and sexual maturation are influenced by his attempts to compile the stories of those who have come before him. In When the Time Comes, the storyteller is "the bone collector" Maximilian, whose "black bone stock ... smell[s] of decay" and yet, because it contains the bones of the dead, has within it a history to decipher, record, fathom. Maximilian is Winkler's anchor point; other characters' stories are woven into his "clay vessel" of bones, creating a portrait of life in rural Austria spanning generations.
The town's pastor has erected a terrifying painting representing God's judgment at the town center, an icon that oversees the lives and deaths of the townspeople in a "town built in the form of a cross." It depicts a man "who dragged a life-sized statue of Jesus through the forest before the Second World War and threw it over a waterfall," causing Jesus to lose both arms; the painting shows the man's retribution in life, since he "lost his own arms in Hitler's war," and after, in the fires of Hell. The often vindictive Old Testament God's relationship with his flock, one built on fear as much as veneration, is a paradigm that repeats at the secular and personal levels. One is never free from one's history, and even rewriting history, placing bones upon bones—as is the bone collector's iterative, inscriptive task—cannot pry the individual from his or her community and the repressive social and religious structures of the past.
Winkler inverts the famous "begat" passages in the book of Genesis, opening the sections of When the Time Comes with his characters' often tragicomic deaths rather than with their births; because of this, their lives seem to take on a more purposeful and even allegorical meaning. For example,
Willibald, who had worked for decades in the Heraklith factory on the other bank of the Drava, was dead from long cancer. His hands in the air and his pants around his ankles, he stepped out of the bathroom and called [to his wife]: Hilde! Hilde! Help me! then fell over and died on the spot."Death is my life's theme," Winkler has stated, and its presence—impending or otherwise—is felt on every page of When the Time Comes.
Most of the narrative in When the Time Comes, however, is taken up with the story of two boys, Jonathan and Leopold, names that allude to religious and popular examples of queerness—the first, a reference to Jonathan's homoerotic relationship with David in the book of Samuel, and the second recalling Leopold of the Leopold and Loeb murder scandal in 1920s Chicago. It is typical of Winkler to fuse extremes: love alongside fear, pleasure alongside pain, and loyalty alongside greed: in this case, Jonathan and Leopold achieve an extreme jouissance combining pleasure (mutual masturbation) with pain (autoerotic asphyxiation):
The two boys tied the two ends of rope behind their ears and jumped into the emptiness, weeping and embracing, a few meters from the armless Christ who had once been rescued from a stream bed by the priest and painter of prayer cards. ... With their tongues out, their sexes stiff, their semen-flecked pants dripping urine, Jonathan in pajamas and Leopold in his quicklime-splattered bricklayer's clothes, they hung in the barn of the parish house until they were found by Jonathan's sixteen-year-old cousin...Neither the bone collector Maximilian nor the townspeople condemn the boys for their homosexuality; instead, the townspeople grumble about the senseless act itself, not its queer connotations ("those two idiots who did away with themselves together!" in "this godless village"), and Jonathan's mother Katharina grants her dead child unearthly powers, certain that he will return like the resurrected Christ to be again among his family. Whereas "[i]n death they were separable," the intermingling of "their tears, their urine, and their sperm" in life had rendered them inseparable: they can now be mourned as individuals, despite the fact that, curiously, "Leopold was buried in Jonathan's death mask."
W. G. Sebald notes that Winkler's use of repetition points to something personal in his work, an act of self-definition that requires sifting through and making sense of one's origins:
"Josef Winkler's entire, monomaniac oeuvre ... is actually an attempt to compensate for the experience of humiliation and moral violation by casting a malevolent eye on one's own origins." If repetition is the sole way to work through trauma, as Freud has suggested, the rural portraits in When the Time Comes suggest that trauma is as endemic to everyday life as is a kind of quiet joy, and the ways in which collective and personal traumas are eventually reconciled with one another are mediations intrinsically bound to the storyteller's sociocultural function.
Sebald's remarks on Winkler's work also point to a moral complicity that individuals need to recognize, one that carries the weight of the past and also points toward a future—though, just what that future constitutes is bleakly uncertain. The teleological aim of the future, as Winkler sees, points only toward death. Thus, the reader meets each character in When the Time Comes at the moment of his or her death, the narrative then working backward through the character's life. Winkler's vision privileges the figure of the artist as conduit between past origins and present traumas, interpreting "the flood of recollected images [as it] begins," but just what the artist or storyteller figure does with these "bones" is undefined, as is who will replace Maximilian when his own time comes.
Like Sebald and like his own Austrian compatriots Peter Handke, Elfriede Jelinek, and Thomas Bernhard, Winkler flags memory and history—collective and individual—as inescapable traps that affect present experience. Winkler is concerned with the individual's role in history, how it is necessary to acknowledge complicity with the past, and how one must grapple with the external forces of inhumanity, greed, and immorality and ultimately reconcile with that past. And yet, while it is essential to remember the stories of the dead, sadly, we erase all memory of them before we have had time to absorb all that they can offer us:
Tomorrow morning or the day after, they will scrape it [candlewax] off with a kitchen knife and sweep it up with the leftover flowers strewn about, then there will be no more traces of a dead man in the house, the mourning house will smell no more of rotten flowers, burnt spruce twigs, and wax candles.
Winkler's book is one of the odder I've read so far this year. The first sixth consists entirely of weird and disturbing tales of horrifying folk-Catholic practices, or crimes perpetrated by the peasantry of Italy or Austria, or the far more horrifying practices of the Catholic hierarchy. They're undated, but I recognize a few of the more outrageous tales of nepotistic Renaissance popes, so I'm assuming that some of this stuff is from Winkler's own experiences in Italy and Austria, and some are from the research he very obviously did for this book. The last sixth of the book is like this, too.
In the middle, we're given to believe, is a notebook recording Winkler's wanderings around Rome, as well as some reminiscences of his childhood. This is all far more interesting than the average 'walking novel' stuff, because Winkler's looking at Rome's underclass, markets, and rent-boys (he also ingests a large volume of rent-boy semen). This is more like an author's diary than a novel. Anything goes. There's the rent-boy blowjobs, yes, but there's also a little comic novella about Winkler's landlord in Rome, who seems to think he's a respectable writer just trying to get out a novel; Winkler presents himself, of course, as the scum at the very bottom of a dry barrel. His landlord's viewpoint is probably more accurate.
All of which is to say that this isn't the kind of thing you sit down and read through in one go, anymore than you really want to sit down and read anyone's diary in one go. It's well worth dipping into, though. West's translation is very readable, there's lots of incident, and there's plenty to think about. Contra the publisher's back cover copy, and for all I know contra Winkler's own wishes, this is in not way a simple, anti-religion book. It is, rather, an unveiling of human suffering. Sometimes Catholicism contributes to that suffering. Sometimes it expresses it. Sometimes it helps to salve it.
I'm double-reviewing because the recent Penguin edition of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is actually kind of similar. Much of it consists in stories of baffling, grotesque, disturbing folk-catholic practices--with the singular difference that in The Life, those practices are rewarded immediately by God. It's also got some dismal back-cover publisher copy, though with slightly more reason. The Life is the first known instance of the "blood libel," the claim that Jewish people, e.g., kill and eat Christian babies at passover. William, we're told, was killed by Jews for nefarious Jewy reasons.
This book is almost 200 pages long, and almost none of it deals with this. It's salutary to be reminded that history can often be misused, and that's more or less what happened with this saint's life. Thomas wanted William to get canonised as a martyr. He takes the 'martyr' part of that for granted, but his description of the legal process makes it pretty obvious that this wasn't a simple "Christian community comes together to purge the Jews" situation; many of the more important members at Norwich intervene to help the Jewish community, which Thomas attributes to greed, but which any sane person can see was probably due to, you know, not being lunatics. Making it seem that this is some horrible, outdated instance of crowd insanity gets us off the hook far too easily; consider the current attitude towards Muslims in many parts of the world (not least in avowedly Muslim parts of the world), and you'll see that this "blood libel" story isn't unique to Judaiphobes.
As for the canonisation, Thomas he gathered a truly impressive and unlikely collection of miracles wrought by William. I suspect everyone in Norwich who got sick prayed to William, and some of them got better, as people do, and that let Thomas put them all in his book. The really interesting bits of these stories are the really irreverent bits: people steal parts of William's body, they steal parts of his tomb, they steal whatever they can get their hands on. Thomas himself gets in on the act, and isn't ashamed to record it here, since when he gets caught, it's just another miracle of William's. Speaking of whom: William is kind of a dick. He routinely appears to people with childish, selfish, unpleasant requests and demands. He was, we're told, twelve when he died, and even saintly dead William acts like a spoiled little turd of a twelve year old.
Blood libel aside (presumably we're all aware that that is both false and inhumanly stupid), the Catholics in Thomas's book are very much like the Catholics in Winkler's book: they're just trying to cope. Our two authors use very similar forms to show us that, albeit Winkler does so more directly, and they succeed much more often in the 12th century than they do in the 20th.
But, armed with that Sebald quote, I came into NM expecting something just like 'When the Time Comes,' a book about how we're all ultimately just bones for the bone broth pot. To be flippant, this one is more about the meat than the bones, and "meat" said in many ways: avian, bovine, porcine, piscine, amphibian (i.e., much of the book takes place in the market at Piazza Vittorio Emanuele), old man, teenage girl, teenage boy, young child, nun, edible, sexual, and above all, meat worthy to be worshiped (much of the book takes place in the vicinity of St Peter's).
Like 'When the Time Comes,' NM is formally interesting--it is a still life, inasmuch as it starts off simply describing person after person, object after object. But where a lesser writer would have stuck with the conceit, Winkler fairly quickly gives up on it, and starts building character, and even, in a small way, plot--because literature, for better or worse, involves time passing. The language is repetitive, in a Bernhardian (i.e., it provides rhythm) and a Gaddisian (i.e., quasi-Homeric motifs are used to alert the reader to the identity of the person in question, and the details involved are astonishing) way.
Also, this was surprisingly heart-breaking and beautiful, whereas 'When the Time Comes' was unsurprisingly bleak and depressing. I'm glad to know that, despite the fact that we're all just overgrown children playing with our dummies, Josef thinks life is more or less worth living. Even if it's only made worthwhile by the sight of a young man's testicles dangling out of his yellow shorts.
The drive in Winkler's book is pretty weak, though the conceit is glorious. He tells the history of a small Austrian town from the nineteenth century through to the, roughly, 1980s, but he does so by describing the ways in which the town's inhabitants have died. After they die, they're put into a cooking pot, and the resulting goo is used to keep flies away from horses' orifices. That's pretty grim.
So are the individual tales, and I should, by all rights, have found this a pretty easy book to skim. But Winkler, and his translator Adrian West, have done something special. The repetitions and other structuring devices (snatches of a Baudelaire poem; Catholic songs and prayers) work as a good refrain or poetic form should work, helping the reader forward rather than making her roll her eyes; many of the individual stories are heart-breaking and/or hilarious; and the book's narrator is filled with both loathing and almost superhuman compassion for a group of people who are oppressed by their religion, but also find their only consolation in it.
Initially it must be noted that this Josef Winkler text reminds this reader of particularities similar to a film shot in long, still takes, at times moving in for a close-up of a somewhat remarkable occurrence, none of which would make the evening news but nonetheless important enough to encompass in total the first half of this very fine novella. Every scene focuses on some corner, bench, market kiosk, or alcove located in the vicinity of the park of Piazza San Vittorio. The main character is the fig vendor's son, Piccoletto, with the long black lashes who seems, as other Winkler characters are most often themselves wont to do, obsessed with his genitals and whether others are also noticing it too. Tiny inconsequential incidents occur simultaneously and often enough to resemble a compulsively detailed written report listing anything of note coming to the attention of the spectating author who seems to move about as if attached to the slowly swiveling camera that rolls along as an eavesdropping machine on its well-oiled and quiet dolly.
The sixteen-year-old fig vendor's son with the long black lashes, in a white Beatles T-shirt, stood in front of the streetcar just beside the conductor. When the teenager lifted his right hand to grab a handrail as the streetcar moved jerkily ahead, the young woman with the plastic bag of apricots & peaches glanced into his wooly armpit. Taking a step down in the doorway, squatting slightly, she bent forward, so that she could not only observe the boy's armpit but also smell his sweat.
The observer narrating these numerous events pays close attention to every detail imaginable within and throughout the vicinity of the park of Piazza San Vittorio. There are numerous characters coming and going, vendors and customers alike, and there is no lack it seems for something to say in noticing anything these occasions could deem remarkable on the page.
Near the entrance to the market bathrooms, Piccoletto pulled a splinter from the elbow of the alimentary owner's son and smeared his spit over his friend's wound.
And later, Piccoletto cuts his own head wide open on a fan blade rotating above the fish stall. His friend, the fish monger Principe, called Piccoletto a "bambino stupido" because of it. He continued waiting listlessly on customers the remainder of the day, head-stitched with bandaid, finally biting into a white peach while stroking his buttocks as a young, slim Chinese woman in peach-colored panty hose strolls past the fish stand.
When the now-doctored Piccoletto went to call his parents' house to report his injury, a girl in a skintight outfit stood in an open telephone booth stroking her genitals, which were visible through her tights, and told her listener she would be stepping off the train at nine in the evening at Stazione Centrale in Napoli. When she noticed that her aroused state had caught the eye of the young man with the bandaged forehead, she laughed & tugged several times at her yellow tights so he could better make out the swell of her labia.
Winkler certainly does love to play with himself and his characters. But what strikes me most of all in this text, even more than the obsession with sex, is the teeming life also engaged in the butchering of farm animals and fish, the hawking of these vendors' wares and their sales of bloodied flesh, the sweat and piss and blood of wounds to the head and otherwise. And then the almost spontaneous and accidental death of Piccoletto caught crossing the street in the rain in the commerce of procuring a daily pizza for his friend, the fat butcher, Frocio.
Frocio placed the point of the small, bloody filet knife with the curved blade against the belly of the fig vendor's son, pressed a ten thousand lire note into his hand and, pointing at the thick black cumulus cloud, ordered him — as everyday — to pick up a salami pizza at the nearby pizzeria for the fishmongers' midday meal.
And thus, in the pouring rain and speeding firetrucks our Piccoletto is no more, crushed and bloody broken, and the pages that follow describe in great detail the scrambling and stumbling fat Frocio as he carries the boy's limp body among the stalls and hanging carcasses of dead, or soon to be butchered flesh, and discarded heads of eels and fish, moldy peaches, yellow chicken's feet, flowers and eggs, scavenging rats and cats, and the butchers' blood-spattered aprons laid aside and behind the stands in the park of Piazza San Vittorio.
In the church where the requiem was read…sat Frocio, Principe, and countless other well-known faces from the market:...
It is true that the well-attended funeral service was vigilant in its mourning, and full of suffering for those who did survive his death. His fat friend Frocio, perhaps relying too much on heavy tranquilizers, wanders about in his short-sleeve shirt of blue and yellow butterflies aimlessly searching for a clod of fresh earth that should be discovered covering the newly dug grave of Piccoletto. And thus completes a novella written by none other than Josef Winkler which actually has, in fact and surprisingly, a beginning, middle, and an end. A novella rich in detail, exquisitely language-driven, and perhaps too real for most, but I would rather want us all to attempt, at least, to think otherwise. It is quite difficult to do justice to such a fine book as this is. Josef Winkler deserves a larger audience.
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MSarki | 2 altre recensioni | Jan 24, 2015 |
MSarki | 2 altre recensioni | Jan 24, 2015 | 
A disclaimer should be offered here in case anyone reading this review might think I personally have an agenda supporting the homosexual community or even the sexual trappings of the awful members of the flamboyant and disgustingly demonstrative heterosexual community. In general my wish is that all personal sexual escapades be left to the privacy of one's own bedroom or dining tabletop. But here I sit with fresh cum on my face, it dripping off my chin, and coating my teeth and tongue after devouring this book. It wasn't what I had planned on after sitting down to what I wished would be an enjoyable read, and I am surprised I actually found a way to wade my mind and body through this dirty mess. You cannot escape the liquid violations inflicted on you as you read this extravagant measure of a soiling unequaled by any other novel I have ever read throughout my sixty years and counting. I might try below to explain myself a bit for those still interested.
The audacity, always, of the speaker's father, The Tiller of the Soil, sitting on his milking stool in the calving barn with his gold monstrance fitted to his head, tied under his chin with the dried umbilical cords of two mares, and the hosts imprinted with his own father's face and placed in the catcher awaiting his holy prayer and communion. The violence of the old man, his hateful and jealous nature, all the hard work and injustices wrought on The Tiller of the Soil, with his no-good sons and a daughter given to her anti-depressants. The oldest son, the speaker, and one who is more interested in his own words and writings than hard farm labor, who imagines all sorts of disgusting affairs in the commerce of his sex concerning both his mouth and organ, and then his murderous tendencies. As if this son is caught inside a disease that has no cure, trapped in a home of hateful, unhappy people, and flagellating himself almost constantly with his throbbing sex organ and hungered wish to taste the semens and flesh of young teenage boys. And the onslaught is unending. There is no relief ever from the invasion of these bloody thoughts. The barnyard tastes of dusty straw and dried-out hay, manure-stained and dripping from the droppings made by execution of the farmer's trade. The stalls smeared with entrails and sour milk, ejaculations, and the piss sprayed from hanging corpses swinging from the rafters above the heads of saddened onlookers. There is no peace but through death in this tale. And even the graves are desecrated and blasphemed to death. It flat wears a reader out, but still one presses on to find its end no matter the consequences to one's own soul and rising-dreadful personality. It is where fate takes hold its deathly grip and in due time shall leave no prisoners. But not before the undying gait of a very long and arduous journey through the life of the speaker and all his acquaintances. His own family holds no higher ground than any other throughout this tale of misery. There are no raging tears. Only a perpetual violence meant to assuage this ungodly pressure, the evil deluge of all sorts of liquids, ass-filled and coming from almost every orifice known of man or beast. The hope for some eventual emergence of grace is all that keeps a reader like me from going insane. It is a very hard world these people live in, and one they must escape from, but still they find it difficult to not exist, though this dying is the driving force behind their inclinations. Suicide and murder their only way out of this pitiful and exhausting existence. This is not a book for the faint-of-heart. The language exquisite in its absurd demonstrations. There is no bragging over its size on the page but instead a revealing, a full-frontal exposure, a harsh fountain of flying sperm hitting us in the face constantly. There is no towel absorbent enough for this flooding horizontal rain. Only a pleading and almost desperate search for the final period that might signify its end.
In the mornings and evenings, while he is working in the cowbarn, the Tiller of the Soil, who is eighty years old, wears a gold monstrance on his bald head, which he fastens underneath his bristly chin with two dried mare's umbilical cords. In the lunula of the monstrance is a consecrated wafer, which doesn't have the body of Christ impressed on it as a watermark, but the head of his own father.The beasts in the barn are his sacred objects, the body of his father, which has been decaying in the graveyard soil for more than twenty years, is his Blessed Sacrament. Each time he finishes his work in the cowbarn, he lifts the monstrance off his head, takes the host out of the lunula, holds it up with both hands, saying, before he places his father's body on his tongue and eats it up, Olord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst enter under my roof: but speak the word only, and my soul shall be healed.
Just last week I was first introduced to the work of Josef Winkler in his brilliant title When the Time Comes. Until finishing this title today I had not ever had any exposure to Jean Genet. Flowers For Jean Genet provided a vehicle for my introduction to him and a further study of the work of Josef Winkler. What I was not aware of when first diving into this book was the construction behind it being a bit of a travelogue in the spirit of W.G. Sebald as well as a biographical piece on Jean Genet made up of consulted texts written by Genet himself and other of his biographers and critics. Interspersed throughout all this was Winkler's anecdotes of similar personal experiences or parallel lives having a proximity of sorts with Genet. There were times Winkler retold an anecdote regarding Genet who Winkler never met in the flesh but certainly has some spiritual connection to him. If this sounds confusing, it was, but only in the beginning as I left these pages from time to time to do some research on my own regarding both of these characters.
The basic premise behind Flowers For Jean Genet was Winkler's quest to find his grave in a Spanish cemetery in Larache about an hour-and-a-half from Tangiers. He took a trip from Austria in which to do this, and had a special notebook he kept and referred to from time to time in his travels. There was never any text within this book actually footnoted for its source, and it is highly doubtful the publishing editor "fact-checked" this information. As biographical and autobiographical as this entire book was in regards to both Jean Genet and Josef Winkler this reader must assume this work would be designated a fiction, much as Sebald and that Australian rapscallion Gerald Murnane enjoy marking their own quite personal work with the same brand as well. It is a classification I am noticing of late as getting more and more legs, and it encourages me to do more of the same in my own published pieces. All of the source books used in Flowers For Jean Genet were noted in the back of the book, but it is up to the reader to do her own footnoting and fact-checking if she deems it necessary and useful. I do not. But this fine piece of literature has gotten my interest curled for reading all of Winkler's work now and even delving a bit more into the already dead Jean Genet.
Each of the fifteen chapters in this book has a roman numeral and a significant title. I love great titles to poems and take exhaustive cumbrance in providing them in my own work. This great fiction is riddled with long and fascinating titles to each chapter and I am not particularly sure they actually have anything to do with the text that follows them. But my titles don't generally either, and I consider these types of titles separate artworks of their own and an added benefit to reading these books. It is again quite possible that Winkler did not "make up" his own titles but instead lifted each title from a text of Genet's, but I would be hard-pressed to prove it and really not willing to go the distance to do so. But then, what sort of lout would even care? Some sort of book police or Nazi-type I guess. Or somebody who might consider Winkler a bit to "rebarbative" as I have seen him described as such. But I see no such thing, but wouldn't mind at all if he was. If the titles actually are valued loot lifted from the bountiful Genet then take it as reverence for the man and the artist made. As for me, I cannot wait to receive the next paginated issuance of Winkler's in the mail and I look forward to reading it and learning more about this interesting man my age from Austria.
It has been widely enough reported that Josef Winkler is scornful to a degree I think I can be enamored with. He despises the Catholic church, and I would think most religions because of it. He feels contempt toward the Germans, specifically Nazis, and any authority meant to restrain and contain its populace. He is definitely not a lover of hard labor, and farming he despises. He did not like his dad, and in one article written by translator Adrian West it was reported Winkler was only hugged once by him and that was for helping to exterminate all the rats in the cellar of their farmhouse. I have yet to discover if Winkler has had any children of his own in which to alter the family history into something a bit more palatable for those yet to come. Josef Winkler is well-versed in tragedy and his family and acquaintances are riddled with it. What he believes and remembers he feels important enough to keep repeating. And history, he shows, is his great reminder.
It is true that in this book When the Time Comes there is no clean plot and no readily identifiable characters in which to relate to. But I took notes. Three legal pages full of my scribbling. I began to construct a pattern and soon was amazed at the number of names Josef Winkler used to produce his gargantuan ossuary. Pleasantries within these lives escaped my reading of this vast collection of family, friends, and acquaintances who all would find their place among the other many dead with none no longer left near dying. In approaching the end of my reading it supposed on me the awful truth that none of us escape this final act, and the categorical reporting here was supersaturated to the extent that the reader should come to accept the same fate would happen, and specifically in my case, to me. And it did, and does for my time being on the page and for the remaining moments left for me to ponder this fate before getting back to the object for my living on this earth and developing in my own mind its meaning.
Josef Winkler regularly employs in his writing the use of repetition. He is not the first to do so and it is an effective way to make ones point clear even in the face of ambiguity of which there is none too little of in this book. Instead of naming names outright Winkler instead writes the person out by signifying them with phrases such as, "Lazarus with the fat earlobes" or "my fat and toothless grandmother". So these became my notes, and at some point along the text a name would occur to him and be applied mysteriously to one or another of his secret characters. There would be no possible result of my remembering or keeping these people straight without my taking thorough notes. And in the process of my taking them I wondered why and the reason for this seeming nonsensical behavior. It felt early on I had come too far to stop, and it wasn't until I neared the end of the book that I knew I no longer needed to take them. Which was my hope in the first place, and now the proof of my lost time and possibly useless labor.
The title When the Time Comes reveals the essence of the book as it applies to all of us the same. There will come a time and we, or others in our stead, should come prepared for it. I shan't bore you with all of the details, but I do believe the following information will be of use to you, the next reader, of this tale. In no way does what follow ruin anything for you, the reader, or act as a spoiler of sorts as there really is no rhyme nor reason for any plot or accounting except an almost complete listing of the dead and how they got that way. I am still not even sure of what I read.
The bone collector, Maxmilian Kirchheimer, is the main character. His youngest brother is Reinhard Kirchheimer. These boys are both still living, getting on in age, and almost everybody else isn't except for their dad whose name the best I can figure, given the abundant labyrinth of information, is Oswald Kirchheimer. The most seriously important details you need to know about Maxmilian is that he was an acolyte who took iron pills and read Karl May books. He also spit in his cousin Egon's face but also enjoyed playing football with him. There is nothing of note about his little brother Reinhard other than he is one of five children born to father Oswald and a mother who for some reason remained nameless and for the most part unmentioned throughout the text. Her parents were Paula and August Rosenfelder. August was an alcoholic and mean enough that his daughter-in-law bleached his throat. At some point old August discovered his wife Paula strangled by a calf halter up in the attic. Some time after this grave event August hung himself as well.
It wasn't clear to me in which order the children born to Florian and Elisabeth Kirchheimer came other than the first being a son Lazarus and the last also a son named Friedham. There were only two girls, those being Hildegard and Helene. Somewhere stuck in the middle of the lot were Maxmilian's father Oswald and another brother Eduard. Aunt Waltrid owned a pastry shop and was married to Eduard. She died two days before Christmas and Eduard was too drunk to attend her funeral. Friedham grew up to be a war correspondent and also at some point threatened to cut off Maximilian's genitals with a knife. Oswald's hunchback sister Hildegard was childless and married to Willibald Zitterer who smoked a pipe and died of lung cancer. Hildegard had arthritis and in her old age urine would constantly stream down her legs. Sister Helene was married to a carpenter who revered Hitler. The couple had a daughter named Karin who would run to her Aunt Hildegard and Uncle Willibald to escape her violent and fascist father. As a child, Oswald had a finger cut off while working in the hay fields and he also almost died in a nasty fall from high up in a hayloft. Oswald's uncle Ingo took a bullet in WWII and ended up in an insane asylum. Oswald's father Florian, brother to Ingo, commissioned the first power plant in Pulsnitz. He had cancer of the gallbladder and enjoyed dressing Maxmilian before school until the young boy complained of improprieties enough that his mother told her father-in-law to stop.
Maxmilian's father Oswald had many relationships that were southerly at best especially when he was chosen to take over the farm ahead of his older brother Lazarus who was described as having fat earlobes and who also drove a Mercedes. George Fuhrman pissed in some sausage meat and pushed Oswald's face in it. Otmar Hafner was Oswald's best friend who didn't walk until he was six years old. Otmar had a brother named Klaus who had a son Roman who hung himself in a hayloft with a calf halter which set off the rash of suicides in the first place. Klaus went on to try killing his own self twice before finally succeeding by being poisoned, trapped within his car's exhaust.
I am not sure what it was about the Hasslacher family but after young Leopold hung himself along with his friend Jonathan Stinehart by using the same rope, two of his other brothers decided to do likewise albeit separately it is assumed. Adam the Third Philippitsch was unlucky and found Leopold and Jonathan hanging from the rafters and was good enough to cut them down and notify their families. The mother of Jonathan, Katharina Stinehart, had her breasts removed as did Anita Felfernig who was the village's first television owner despite having seven hungry children and who also died of breast cancer despite her own actions taken to control the disease. It just dawned on me that Anita was most likely the mother of Ludmilla Felfernig who at fifteen years old started her first menstrual period and not knowing what it was began to run when the other schoolchildren teased her. She smeared the blood that was drifting down her legs on Calvary which was erected in the center of town by the pastor and painter Balthasar Kranabeter. Ludmilla then proceeded in her frantic despair to hurl herself off the Drava Bridge. She drowned caught in the grating far below. In addition, a friend of Katharina Stinehart's was struck by a truck while riding her bicycle to the Stineharts. Her name was Ms. Lakonig who was married to Mr. Lakonig who went by the name of Wilfried.
And there are just so many others to list and profile such as Miss Dorflinger who was a sorceress who refused to die, standing outside, being pelted by hail, and I would be remiss if I did not mention at least Leopoldine Felsberger, daughter of Paula and August Rosenfelder, married to Matthias Felsberger and mother to Maximilian's mother as well as brothers Kajetan and Michael who died in WWII as did so many others also worth mentioning but out of time to do so now.
One thing all of these fine people had in common was that religion did not save them. In fact, much was done in the name of religion to harm them. And keeping the family farms profitable and working was not always the best of ideas given the number of fingers and lives lost in the process. But my reading of this history was great fun, but hardly a laugh a minute. It was instead a piling up of bones. "In the clay vessel in which, from the bones of slaughtered animals, the putrid-smelling bone stock was distilled, to be painted on the horses with a crow's feather in the summer heat, around the eyes and nostrils, and on the belly, to protect them from the pricking and bloodsucking horseflies and mosquitoes...."
Perhaps not wrapped as tight as the text I read, it still feels as if the effort was justified, though not so convinced enough to bet another life on it. But I would certainly be interested in hearing what any others not willing to hide behind their mother's skirts might have to say about their reading of this too. The closest reading of late that I can compare this fine work to would be [b:John the Posthumous|18002361|John the Posthumous|Jason Schwartz|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1378832049s/18002361.jpg|25264166] by Jason Schwartz. Both writers seem to lyrically compile major lists and study their history in words that make it an awful lot for a body to consume. Even in light of several balanced servings.
1 MSarki | 2 altre recensioni | Oct 27, 2013 |
MSarki | 2 altre recensioni | Oct 27, 2013 | Winkler kann zweifellos genau beobachten und präzise schreiben. Aber das, was er da unbarmherzig mit einer ISBN Nummer versehen auf dem Buchmarkt deponiert hat, muss erst einmal unbeschadet verdaut werden. Das ist meiner Meinung nach nur möglich, wenn man einen guten Magen hat und das Geschehen aus der nötigen Distanz betrachtet. Dass gerade das den Kameringern, die in Winklers Büchern vorkommen, nicht einfach gelingen kann, ist nicht direkt eine Überraschung. Bei jeder Seite denkt sich ein Leser wie ich unwillkürlich: Ich bin froh, dass ich nicht in seiner Haut stecke." In diesem Buch erfährt man über das wilde Innenleben eines äußerlich womöglich unauffälligen Menschen. Innen zerrissen und unvollständig vernarbt. Er beschreibt unheimliche Albträume. In seinem Heimatdorf gibt es immer wieder Selbstmorde, vorzüglich durch Erhängen.
Winkler zeigt dem Leser die Welt, insbesondere die Stricher-Szene Roms, durch die Augen eines schwulen, von der nach sexueller Entspannung bei Römische Straßenjungen, vorzüglich dunkelhäutig und von tunesischer oder marokkanischer Herkunft, strebenden Autors, der von seinem Elternhaus, seinem Dorf, den Bauern und dem Klerus schwer, genau genommen existenziell geschädigt ist und einer magischen Anziehung der Selbstzerstörung und des Todes ausgesetzt ist. Die Berichte von seinen triebgesteuerten Stadtspaziergängen an den Schattenseiten der heiligen Stadt spickt der Erzähler mit Vorwürfen und Schuldzuweisungen an andere. Ich frage mich, was für ein Schaden dem Kind durch die fanatische Heiligenverehrung der Kameringer angetan wurde? Verwesung, verwelkte Blumen, Leichen, alles, was mit dem Tod in Zusammenhang gebracht werden kann, durchzieht seine Schilderungen. Versucht er eine Befreiung von Schuldgefühlen? Er war Ministrant in seinem kreuzförmig angelegten Heimatdorf. Im Laufe der Erzählung stellt sich schließlich heraus, dass der mehrfach erwähnte Selbstmord-Jakob" als Kind sein homosexueller Freund war. Dieser Jakob hat sich 17-jährig gleichzeitig mit seinem Freund Robert im Pfarrhof-Stadel erhängt. Na endlich. Ein Geschenk für den Leser, der sich seitenlang gefragt hat, worauf die vielen Fragmenten und Andeutungen hinauslaufen werden. Von dieser Stelle her betrachtet, wird dann der hervorragende dramaturgische Aufbau erkennbar. Der Protagonist hat auch den 16-jährigen Pjotr verführt, den Sohn einer ins Heimatdorf Kamering verschleppten Ukrainerin, die ihm ihre Geschichte erzählt hatte und nach der Publikation den Hass des Dorfes zu spüren bekam.
Eigentlich ist es niemals Hass allein, sondern immer eine Hassliebe, die den Autor beschäftigt.
Immer wieder kommt im Erzähler die katholische Erziehung durch, die ihm sagt, was man tun darf, und für alles andere Schuldgefühle parat hat. Man spürt in dem Erzähler eine Angst vor allem, was nicht tot ist. Er schreibt: Bei den Toten bin ich gerne. Sie tun mir nichts und sind auch Menschen." Das sind die Worte eines Menschen, den die toten Angehörigen mit festem Griff zu sich ins Jenseits ziehen wollen, der sich dem Griff fast nicht mehr entziehen kann. Es ist nur mehr eine Frage der Zeit. In seinen Träumen haben sie schon vollends von ihm Besitz ergriffen. Er kann den Lockrufen aus dem Jenseits schwer widerstehen.
Manches, was Winkler schreibt, ist an der Grenze des Erträglichen. Seine Hassliebe und Faszination betrifft die Zeremonien, Gewänder, Rituale der Kirche und ihre Symbole. Er scheint sich gleichzeitig am betäubenden Geruch des Weihrauchs zu ergötzen und im brennheißen Wachs der Kerzen Todesqualen zu erleiden.
Wonach soll man ein Werk und einen Autor beurteilen? Die einen haben einen wohl strukturierten, spannenden und interessanten Plot, unverwechselbare Charaktere, eine wunderbare Sprache. Winkler skizziert eigentlich nur einen Charakter, sich selbst. Seine Erzählkunst zeigt sich in der Genauigkeit, mit der er die sonst unbeachteten Typen beschreibt und in der scheibchenweisen Aufdeckung der lebensbedrohenden Probleme des Protagonisten. In seinen detaillierten Beschreibungen der römischen Stricherszene nimmt der Erzähler selektiv das wahr, was dem Leser wahrscheinlich ohne ihn verschlossen bliebe.
Der im Titel erwähnte Friedhof der bitteren Orangen ist der Ort, an den er am Ende des Buches die unzähligen Toten geistig überführt.
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Until recently, Anglophone readers wanting to investigate the fiction of Austrian writer Josef Winkler faced only one option: the exacting and elliptical novel The Serf (1987/1997; trans. Michael Mitchell). Published in English by Ariadne Press, The Serf joined Winkler's Flowers for Jean Genet (1992/1997; trans. Michael Roloff), his biographical and readerly homage to the French writer Jean Genet, whose influence is felt throughout Winkler's own fiction, as the only works available in English.
But the reader requires an immersive education in Winkler before undertaking The Serf. And even Flowers for Jean Genet, while critical to comprehending Winkler's aesthetic—his queer appropriation of high camp, religious and perverse imagery; and his homoeroticism (I would suggest, from Ronald Firbank as well)—fails to give the reader a cogent glimpse into his creative output, an oeuvre for which Winkler has garnered many accolades including the Alfred Döblin Award in 2001, the Grand Austrian State Prize in 2007, and the Georg Büchner Prize in 2008.
Luckily, two additional fictions by Winkler were published in the past year by Contra Mundum, When the Time Comes (1998/2013) and Natura Morta: A Roman Novella (2001/2014), both translated assiduously by Adrian West, who, to use his own words (as applied to Winkler's prose), is able to render the painstaking "visual detail" and "attention to the musicality of phrases" found in the original German texts with a skill that honors Winkler's writing as a "writing-against."
Winkler eschews a traditional plot; instead, narrative fragments work together by means of repetition to complicate his vision of modern life. But single scenes can also be understood on their own terms, if one considers the images and their relation to the overall thematics of the text.
Subtitled A Roman Novella, Natura Morta is less a novella than a series of poetic vignettes, a succession of glimpses of life around the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele in Rome where various figures appear, disappear, and then reappear: people "festooned" with commodified and locally popular "colorful plastic pacifiers"; "two teenaged Moroccan rent boys"; and a man whose "eyelids and eyelashes [are] painted black with mascara" and who is taunted with the homophobic "Sida!" There are plenty of "bloody chicken heads and yellow chicken feet" in the marketplace juxtaposed with iconographic images like "a doll of the Christ child" parked in bowl surrounded by "dried pineapples, dates, and figs" and "the Virgin Mary ... look[ing] over the fingertips of her clasped hands toward a box of Mon Chéri chocolates." These images constitute a fixed yet fluid tableau, a natura morta, a still life echoing its literal translation: dead nature.
Winkler is primarily concerned with the fig vendor's son Piccoletto, "[a] black-haired boy, around sixteen years old, whose long eyelashes nearly grazed his freckle-studded cheeks." Piccoletto's function is to join the seemingly disparate images of the city and its inhabitants in a way that allows Winkler to explore the religious history of Rome, particularly as it deviates from contemporary vice and greed. "Sacred kitsch" litters the city; the text works by juxtaposing religious iconography and a marketplace saturated with "one crucified Lord after another," juxtapositions that in turn inform and reflect the distorted sexualities, the myriad "perversions" and vices paraded before the reader and the young, impressionable Piccoletto: from "[t]wo nuns ... lick[ing] the chocolate toes of an ice cream bar shaped like a child's foot" to Michelangelo's Pietà, "framed with bulletproof glass," an icon fetishized by "[a] toothless Pole" with the desire "to clasp the mother of God in her fingers."
Winkler's imagistic prose shows debts to the cinema. In one scene, Piccoletto spies a videocassette of "the film Sciuscià by Vittorio de Sica ... [a]top the apricots and white peaches" carried in a plastic bag by an anonymous woman on a streetcar. This mention of de Sica's first major work as a director—filmed in 1946 and translated in English as Shoeshine—reveals how images in Winkler function similarly to those in a neorealist film; not only do many of the series of images contain potent mixtures of the sacred and the profane, but they overvalue the image itself (in its repetition and in its recurrence) in ways also reminiscent of auteurs such as Michelangelo Antonioni.
Winkler has likened his authorial role to that of a human camera[2]: he would undoubtedly have had Antonioni's famous montage of images in mind—I am thinking of Antonioni's L'Eclisse (1962), with its stress on images as storytelling vehicles—when compiling his own scenes of natura morta. Consider the following two passages:And:Winkler wants us to regard a teenaged boy, who is always "playing with his sex," as a Christ for our times, in a world comprised of tourists, clergy, tradespeople, sex workers, and drug addicts. The fragmentary glimpses of city life in Natura Morta are refracted through the sexualized consciousness of Piccoletto whose observation of two other boys "gnawing on a fig, fresh and purple" is followed up immediately by "[t]he two boys huddl[ing] together, whispering and giggling, eyeing Piccoletto's broad buttocks."
Even more crucial to Winkler's sexual vision of modernity is Piccoletto's interest in soliciting both male and female gazes, and how he can arouse and also express sexual interest across the gulf of gender. Winkler's aesthetic construction of modern-day Rome conjoins sex and the city, forcing individuals to confront the past in a present whose greed, lusts, and sensual pleasures—e.g., "Frocio wrapped fistfuls of ice chips in tin foil, pressing them into the form of a phallus, held the cold fetish at his hips, and squeezed the ice chips out of the tin foil in front of the fig vendor's son, as though releasing kilos of ejaculate"—contrast with the iconographic and architectural reminders of latter days: "a stone phallus" in the Piazza San Vittorio the scene where an ambulance "pick[s] up a young drug addict, passed out and foaming at the mouth"; "the exit of the papal tombs" of Saint Peter's Cathedral "leaking blood in the filthy streets," streets littered with pages of the Cronaco vera, "in which tragedies from throughout Italy—illustrated with hearses, eyewitnesses, chesty women, and Mafiosi...—are reported every week."
In contrast with Natura Morta's portraits of city life, Winkler's When the Time Comes takes rural Austria as its focus (Winkler's native Carinthia). But like Natura Morta, When the Time Comes centers on a young boy whose intellectual and sexual maturation are influenced by his attempts to compile the stories of those who have come before him. In When the Time Comes, the storyteller is "the bone collector" Maximilian, whose "black bone stock ... smell[s] of decay" and yet, because it contains the bones of the dead, has within it a history to decipher, record, fathom. Maximilian is Winkler's anchor point; other characters' stories are woven into his "clay vessel" of bones, creating a portrait of life in rural Austria spanning generations.
The town's pastor has erected a terrifying painting representing God's judgment at the town center, an icon that oversees the lives and deaths of the townspeople in a "town built in the form of a cross." It depicts a man "who dragged a life-sized statue of Jesus through the forest before the Second World War and threw it over a waterfall," causing Jesus to lose both arms; the painting shows the man's retribution in life, since he "lost his own arms in Hitler's war," and after, in the fires of Hell. The often vindictive Old Testament God's relationship with his flock, one built on fear as much as veneration, is a paradigm that repeats at the secular and personal levels. One is never free from one's history, and even rewriting history, placing bones upon bones—as is the bone collector's iterative, inscriptive task—cannot pry the individual from his or her community and the repressive social and religious structures of the past.
Winkler inverts the famous "begat" passages in the book of Genesis, opening the sections of When the Time Comes with his characters' often tragicomic deaths rather than with their births; because of this, their lives seem to take on a more purposeful and even allegorical meaning. For example,"Death is my life's theme," Winkler has stated, and its presence—impending or otherwise—is felt on every page of When the Time Comes.
Most of the narrative in When the Time Comes, however, is taken up with the story of two boys, Jonathan and Leopold, names that allude to religious and popular examples of queerness—the first, a reference to Jonathan's homoerotic relationship with David in the book of Samuel, and the second recalling Leopold of the Leopold and Loeb murder scandal in 1920s Chicago. It is typical of Winkler to fuse extremes: love alongside fear, pleasure alongside pain, and loyalty alongside greed: in this case, Jonathan and Leopold achieve an extreme jouissance combining pleasure (mutual masturbation) with pain (autoerotic asphyxiation):Neither the bone collector Maximilian nor the townspeople condemn the boys for their homosexuality; instead, the townspeople grumble about the senseless act itself, not its queer connotations ("those two idiots who did away with themselves together!" in "this godless village"), and Jonathan's mother Katharina grants her dead child unearthly powers, certain that he will return like the resurrected Christ to be again among his family. Whereas "[i]n death they were separable," the intermingling of "their tears, their urine, and their sperm" in life had rendered them inseparable: they can now be mourned as individuals, despite the fact that, curiously, "Leopold was buried in Jonathan's death mask."
W. G. Sebald notes that Winkler's use of repetition points to something personal in his work, an act of self-definition that requires sifting through and making sense of one's origins:
"Josef Winkler's entire, monomaniac oeuvre ... is actually an attempt to compensate for the experience of humiliation and moral violation by casting a malevolent eye on one's own origins." If repetition is the sole way to work through trauma, as Freud has suggested, the rural portraits in When the Time Comes suggest that trauma is as endemic to everyday life as is a kind of quiet joy, and the ways in which collective and personal traumas are eventually reconciled with one another are mediations intrinsically bound to the storyteller's sociocultural function.
Sebald's remarks on Winkler's work also point to a moral complicity that individuals need to recognize, one that carries the weight of the past and also points toward a future—though, just what that future constitutes is bleakly uncertain. The teleological aim of the future, as Winkler sees, points only toward death. Thus, the reader meets each character in When the Time Comes at the moment of his or her death, the narrative then working backward through the character's life. Winkler's vision privileges the figure of the artist as conduit between past origins and present traumas, interpreting "the flood of recollected images [as it] begins," but just what the artist or storyteller figure does with these "bones" is undefined, as is who will replace Maximilian when his own time comes.
Like Sebald and like his own Austrian compatriots Peter Handke, Elfriede Jelinek, and Thomas Bernhard, Winkler flags memory and history—collective and individual—as inescapable traps that affect present experience. Winkler is concerned with the individual's role in history, how it is necessary to acknowledge complicity with the past, and how one must grapple with the external forces of inhumanity, greed, and immorality and ultimately reconcile with that past. And yet, while it is essential to remember the stories of the dead, sadly, we erase all memory of them before we have had time to absorb all that they can offer us: