Like the Surface of the Sea

Jenny Erpenbeck (Wikipedia)

Jenny Erpenbeck’s new book ends with a dialogue by Richard, its central character and a retired classics professor: “The things I can endure are only just the surface of what I can’t possibly endure.” His interlocutor, Khalil, replies, “Like the surface of the sea?” Actually yes, says Richard, “Exactly like the surface of the sea.” This characteristically pithy exchange broadly defines our relation to history. When we surf the surface, we do so with a sense of agency, control and meaning. But plumb the depths of our relationship with history, even a little bit, and life and a sense of agency is replaced quickly by our sense of powerlessness to shape the world; a sense of control is replaced by the sheer accidental nature of what makes us who we are and the possibilities we have, and a sense of meaning is replaced by doubts about the futility of it all.

This theme has marked all of Erpenbeck’s novels. The house in which Visitation (2010) is set seemed to be more enduring than the characters ravaged by history. The stunningly inventive The End of Days (2014) is an account of the various possible lives of one human being. In one version, she barely survives her birth; in another, she survives Stalin’s Russia to end up in Berlin. It had the audacity to ask whether in the end, the meaning of a full life was at all more clear or profound than a life that had barely existed; nature and history both are pitiless in the way they subvert human purposes.

The consistent brilliance and magic of Erpenbeck’s writing is hard to convey. Her sentences are rapier-sharp and consistently jolt you out of any existential complacency. Her descriptions are always haunting and conveyed with an artful economy. Most contemporary novelists take as their setting the ways in which history unravels individual destiny. But none does it with as much psychological acuteness as Erpenbeck. But while her history is without consolation, she achieves a moral clarity that is marvellous in its precision.

In Go Went Gone, her latest novel translated by Susan Bernofsky, you find almost a similar combination of historical futility and moral compassion. Like all her novels it is short, brilliant, haunting, moves briskly and makes you sit up at every other page. Its story line is structured around Richard, a retired and lonely university professor who accidentally encounters scores of refugees and ends up trying to help them. The novel charts his encounter with the refugees, and through the process of helping them, with the law. It is a novel that speaks to the times — the refugee crisis in Germany and elsewhere. It is at one level, a moral indictment. Even the unsentimental Tacitus had written that “it is accounted a sin to turn any man away from your door. The host welcomes his guest with the best meal that his means allow.” But now that idea of hospitality as central to civilisation has been replaced by paragraphs of the Residence Act, where under sovereign legalese, refugees are turned away.

But the moral indictment gets it power from its acute psychological portrayal. The refugee characters, in deft description, are all given an individuality. And it is against the backdrop of their individual histories that the subtle psychological depredations of being a refugee are articulated. Without a state that accepts them, can anything that gives their lives meaning be possible? Work is not an option, friendships vulnerable to being snapped by deportation, and time itself seems to have no direction.

But as always with Erpenbeck, the moral and the psychological always ascend to a lightly carried meditation on the human condition. There are historical observations of the kind that Hannah Arendt would have been proud of: “Must living in peace, so fervently wished for throughout human history and yet enjoyed only in a few parts of the world, inevitably result in refusing to share it with those seeking refuge, defending it instead so aggressively that it almost looks like war?”

But her way of opening up to this moral response is through conveying a profound sense of the contingency of our own being. Our privilege is as much an accident as anything. Richard, the classics professor and Seneca scholar, finally discovers the meaning of Plato: “Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave has kings among his ancestors. The flight of time, with its vicissitudes, has jumbled all such things together, and Fortune has turned them upside down.” It is only in our illusion of being in control of the surfaces, that we convert borders into moral rights, the contingency of citizenship into the claims of humanity. If we plumb our own depths, our certainties all vanish.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta is vice-chancellor, Ashoka University