Rainald Goetz's Insane
Insane in the membrain...
Rainald Goetz. Insane. Translated by Adrian Nathan West. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019 [1983]. 349 pp.
Over three years ago, I had the idea of starting an old-school style book blog here on Substack. The plan was to keep it simple: read a book, write about it, repeat: nothing fancy.
I thought it might be fun to treat it as a by-line for an imaginary newspaper, and for a weekly “illustration,” to make pictures based on the color palette and design principles of the covers, and made a few of books I’d intended to read, such as this one by Rainald Goetz.
In a very real sense, this “Comic Sans Editions” bit is the reason why Silent Friends exists in this form, 100+ letters later.
That being said, your host never got around to actually reading and blogging this text till now. We simply had to reserve an early spot for it in our “Ketchup” series on recently translated fiction. It felt good to finally insert this png file made so long ago. A lot better than how it was to read the book itself, as it turned out. But sometimes you gotta read a book not for its own sake but for the satisfaction of having had read it.
Born in postwar Munich, Rainald Goetz started publishing for West German magazines in the mid 70s while pursuing a history PhD. He reviewed novels by Thomas Bernhard, and apparently had a chance to be an editor for Der Spiegel.
His debut novel Irre, which we read for this letter, draws on real experiences from psychiatric institutions and the punk/techno scene. One such punk is Dr. Raspe, who takes off his studded leather jacket to don a white coat, and revolutionize the mental health practice.
Insane is divided into three parts. “Away” is a chopped up array of vignettes of different crazies. (“Dressed in red gym shorts and a sleeveless red jersey, countless cuts adorning his arms, legs, and neck, festooned with red rivulets of blood, Raspe, in good spirits, the razor dangling from a leather cord around his neck, showed up at his girlfriend’s party.”) “Inside” is a conventionally arranged narrative of Raspe on the caregiver side. “Order” swings back toward disintegration, full of ramblings and small pictures. The parts are separated by paintings by the author.
It’s a book full of whatever’s going on in the (slightly autobiographical) protagonist’s mind. There is a shoutout to Nora Joyce, a famous “madwoman.”
Again he had been reading, Andreas said, Joyce’s letters to his daughter, who suffered from schizophrenia, as is well known, I didn’t note this down as we’d discussed this theme before, and I’d already written in my notebook Joyce, schizophrenia, language, daughter, read the letters, but later I found the Joyce letters were only available in the hellishly expensive Frankfurt edition and thought, let’s wait and see, and Joyce, Andreas continued, had written to his daughter, concerning the fire he had managed to hold in his mind, that she, too, mutatis mutandis, had this fire in her mind, but was incapable of holding it in, and this was what made her ill. In terms of psychiatric categories, as Andreas said, this is known as a spectrum disease, a threshold mental state, verging on normality, which is common in schizophrenics’ relatives.
Meanwhile, in the working life of the second part, there’s a funny scene in the clinic library, where the morning conference is held. But for Raspe it’s just an atmosphere of gossip. Here circulates the economy of blather. (Notice also the topical ozone layer reference.)
This ambient chatter, which poisons the air, an aerosol aimed at the atmosphere, will drift up into the universe and be cast back a billion times, occasioning a global catastrophe.
In the third part there is a nice, meditative passage, captioning a picture of an atrophied brain:
A diffuse NEURODEGENERATIVEDISEASE like Alzheimer’s or Morbus Pick can afflict young people as well. While reading the symptomology, the fear gathers.
… The young man is immortal. If he sees a dead person, he heed not recognize himself in him. He does not yet carry around his own death inside him. He thinks: I am immune to weakness, to degeneration and infirmity. […] Some time, though, death will creep under this young man’s skin as well. Then the fear breaks loose, the CountingDownOfTheYears…
Goetz’s work is in the “pop literature” vein, striving for authenticity and gumption — like the Beats but more academic. Very telling is a discussion between Raspe, an anarchist, and his friend Wolfgang of the Marxist Group. Wolfgang asserts:
You are healing people whose sicknesses are a reaction to the twisted conditions they live in for the sole purpose of enabling them to function again amid the conditions that made them sick in the first place. […] Look, you don’t even need to daydream with political romantics like Marcuse about the revolutionary potential of the marginalized and outsiders, historical materialism on its own is enough to show how all of that is politically reactionary praxis, reactionary, get it, reactionary.
But Wolfgang’s “jovial self-assurance,” his way of “pursing his lips in narcissistic superiority” is too grating for Raspe. Raspe subscribes to an empiricism that is right at home with postmodern trends: “the visible suffering” of individuals is “the actual reality…that never showed up in Wolfgang’s theories.” Anarchists hate know-it-alls that dare to offer tutelage, and Marxists are the biggest know-it-alls of all (and they’re right). These interactions are mainly amusing as moments of mutual incuriosity.
But they also get to why Goetz’s work is not for me, ideology aside: the fragments, the spontaneous confessional jottings, the little cartoons, the posture of directly addressing issues of the day (as the only way to produce “social” or “political” fiction) — such is the path to petty-bourgeois navel-gazing. If what Raspe designates as “reality” doesn’t show up in the theory, how can we say that Raspe’s practice (or praxis as the academics like to say whether they’re German or not) really contains all of reality?
It’s the kind of “left” bohemian student attitude that likes to slum it with the proles in a northern Berlin suburb in the morning before going on German TV to give a reading while cutting yourself, as opposed to doing what’s necessary to raise the proletariat to transform themselves and all of society.
On top of that it’s all just kind of trendy.
Just to be clear: while I was underwhelmed by this text, that has nothing to do with the translation by Adrian Nathan West, which is excellent, maybe one of the best I’ve read by him. (Ever prolific, Nathan West also translated Garden of Seven Twilights by Palol, which your host reviewed last year.)