29

And thus the years wore by, highly esteemed Mr. Brodny; autumn leaves and calendar leaves flit through the images left in my memory. Soon those leaves will be as dense as the leaves of the countless manuscripts I have gathered for my book, rejected and abandoned, ripped up and patched together, shredded and stored away for later use in folders, cartons, and cases—for nineteen years, to be precise. And meanwhile, the other half of my split personality served the movie piglets and snickered derisively whenever the future author of the novel of the era, the potential Nobel laureate, gnashed his teeth in envy at the expressive devices of cinema, its immediate visuality, its freedom from place and time, its multidimensionality. . . and all these things merely to present pulp novels and granny fairy tales! . . . Pop art indeed, governor . . . but what inexhaustibility in raw material, in the immediately pictographic, vivid . . . while our sort are supposed to depict the most sublime, the most complex, the most multivocal, the most fragile things in pale words within the rail network of grammar. (A snort of protest from Schwab. He turns red with anger at such statements; the blood drains from his cheeks as, in annoyance, the thrust of air driven from his nostrils loses strength, eventually being taken back in a ponderous sigh.)

In those days, when brooding on the problems of writing novels, even far below the intellectual stratosphere of Messrs. Lukács and Robbe-Grillet, I (and my brother Schwab) did not find those problems as childish as perhaps you do, esteemed Djakopp Djee. Being fed up with theory and ideology, we did not tackle the issue on the soaring level of the essayists but rather on the pedestrian level of the pragmatic writer, usually ending up at the dead point where the psychology of the writer coincides with the question of the significance of what is to be written. Why bother with a novel today? What else remained to be said? And was it of any importance how it was to be said? The aesthetic was indisputably of secondary interest.

There was one thing we did agree on, though, Schwab and I: it was no longer possible not to include the author when writing. Even in scientific experiments, after all, the person of the experimenter is largely taken into account nowadays. Intensifying our self-observation, we soon realized that it was probably this it (Nagel’s it, presumably borrowed from Freud’s It, or Id) that urged us to write. To put it in plain terms: what it urges a fair and honest writer to write is himself.