(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Curzio Malaparte. Kaputt. Pelican Publishers, 2015
How to describe the cruelty of war? Should it be shown directly or should we approach it via side roads? This has been based on at all times. Many have thought that direct confrontation causes the recognition of the cruel to eventually slip away, either because we set up a defense against the excessive, or because exposure to brutal images in the long run makes us immune to what they actually show us, like Susan Sontag argued in About the photograph.
One way to circumvent immunization can be found in literature and the arts. Here we can find a level of precision with more lasting effect than many portrayals that invoke realism. Literature and art are, so to speak, not commitment-free enjoyment, but a manifestation of an intimate connection between seeing and thinking well about what we consider.
Thinking war making. I have hardly read a book that creates such a finely tuned look at the war as Curzio Malaparte's strange Kaputt, which came in Norwegian for the first time in 1948, but which is now in new – and far better – translation. Malaparte traveled around as a journalist during World War II, and much of his experience from these journeys can be found in kaputt. The main character is the same as the author, but he has taken many liberties, as Marcel Proust did when he wrote On the trail of lost time, in which also the protagonist has the same first name as the author (Marcel). Proust is an obvious role model for Malaparte, who still quotes the French author indirectly and directly.
"In a sense, the war is syntax error."
Another aspect of Kaputt is how Malaparte moves as close to the war, on mud and death, as the higher social strata. He usually deals with Swedish princes and communist leaders just as naturally as he shares a pigsty and a bottle of champagne with Nazi generals. He is witty and talks people by mouth to stay in with all the camps, but does not go out of his way to make biting remarks.
Empathetic portrayal. His descriptions of the Nazis he encounters are not filled with contempt, but by thinking wonder, which unfolds in a range of metaphors that open an analytical field, keeping evil open to further investigations rather than closing it.
Just listen to his encounter with a Nazi at the beginning of the book: “His left eyebrow was raised toward his temple. Cold contempt and cruel arrogance stood straight out of this raised eyebrow. But what bound his features, all the signs and movements of his face, was this suffering cruelty, this strange and sad loneliness. " Here he is not looking to locate evil, to fix it, but to understand it by presenting its constituents. His portrayal is empathetic, not judgmental.
The echo chambers of war. The war puts pressure on the depiction, and on the sensory apparatus, which pushes on the identity of things, also in the marginal zone the immediate impression of the war: “I opened my eyes, it was morning. The room was interspersed with cobwebs of faint whitish light, the objects gradually emerging from the darkness with a slowness that seemed to distort them, lengthen them. like objects being pulled through a bottleneck. ” In the war's experiential pressure cooker, things and experiences open up for other important layers at Malaparte.
This ends up in a network of correspondences between different things, people and experiences: the world is indeed hollowed out through the war, but is replenished, given substance, in Malaparte's exploration of alternative meanings. Yes, they are so close to each other that Malaparte describes the war itself as a failure in the language towards the end of the book. "Language is very important […] not only for writers, but for peoples and states. In a sense, war is a syntactic error. "
Stinky steel. In a scene where he talks with the Swedish prince Eugene, Malaparte finds a correspondence between the landscape and horses. The starting point is the mentally disturbed artist Carl Hill – an outstanding artist – and his paintings of animals and landscapes. «It is not only in the large, leisurely and deep green trees in the forest that the Swedish landscape's equine nature and equestrianism appear, but also in the silky luster of the lakes, forests, islands and clouds […] The Swedish landscape is like galloping horses. Hear how the horse squeaks in the leaves and grass. "
It is rare to see such a successful use of art to strengthen the connection between sensing and history and violence.
In another scene, the cross-connection between the senses – the synesthesia – is more directly expressed, as a shadow of the war: "The smell of rotten steel trumped the smell of people and horses (the smell of the old wars), even the smell of grain and the sweet and penetrating scent of sunflowers drowned in the harsh smell of sweaty iron, decaying steel and dead machines. "
The senses archive of art. Elsewhere, Malaparte uses art as a reservoir to describe the landscape. In a fantastic scene, Albrecht Dürer's graphics are used as an optical model to penetrate deeper into the senses – to create a connection between the immediately visible and the reality of war that permeates everything and everyone, and thus structures reality on a more fundamental level: «It was somewhat dure about the Gothic care for the details that the eye immediately perceived, as if the engraver had stopped and rested for a moment so that the weight of his hand had left a deeper mark in the copper right on the dead horse's open jaws, on the wounded the man dragging himself away between the bushes down there. "
It is rare to see such a successful use of art to strengthen the connection between sensing and history and violence.
Respite. Malaparte's nuanced, but first and foremost exceptionally poetic language means that the question of how war and evil can be described as thinking is drawn throughout kaputt. He is close to the cruel, but still cultivates an optics that is far richer than the shock of the moment allows. Much of the thinking melancholic's gaze lies with him, for the brutality creates a sadness in Malaparte, a meekness, which he still is not overpowered by. He defends himself through language, which acts as a shield and medium for testimony that we, long afterwards, can enjoy.
Sometimes hope is dramatized as something other than thinking language, as in a heartbreaking scene with a train of dead Jews on their way to a concentration camp. When the door is opened, the emaciated corpses fall out, one by one. But in the innermost corner, there is a small child that the mother has kept alive by holding him between her thighs in front of a small gap in the wooden wall. In the midst of desperation, a future was created – we can only imagine how the woman has fought to make room for the child. Through this small room, the boy, as the only one, has survived the trip.
But this is not all. The breathing space that saved the little child cannot be individualized within Malaparte's universe: By telling the story, the breathing space is recreated in language and becomes a glimmer of hope – not only for the child, but for all of us.
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