Cited in Full

I. From a review in The Quarterly Bulletin of Comparative Letters, Vol. 39, No. 2

Hermanns’s fourth novel, The Sextant Dialogues, arrives after a silence of eleven years and does not explain the silence. This is characteristic. Hermanns has never explained anything — not the abandonment of his academic career in 1997, not the withdrawal of Planisphere from his German publisher six days before its release, not the rumored third draft of The Lacuna Variations that, according to his translator (see Okafor-Whitley, below), bore no resemblance to the published version. He does not give interviews. His author photograph, reproduced in every edition since 1993, shows a man standing with his back to the camera in what appears to be a rail station.

What can be said about The Sextant Dialogues with any confidence is this: it concerns a woman named Lise who is attempting to reconstruct a conversation she had in a hotel lobby in Trieste in the winter of 1985. The conversation may have been with her husband. It may have been with a stranger who resembled her husband. (Hermanns is characteristically unhelpful on this point.) The novel — if it proceeds as the first three chapters suggest — appears to be structured as a series of Lise’s attempts to transcribe the conversation from memory, each attempt differing from the last, until the question is no longer what was said but whether the conversation occurred at all.

I say “if it proceeds” because I have not finished the book. I was sent a proof copy in September, read two hundred pages in one sitting, put it down, and have not been able to pick it up again. Not because the book is bad. Because I am afraid that if I finish it I will discover that the first two hundred pages were not what I thought they were. Greta Okafor-Whitley, Hermanns’s English translator, warned me of this in her note accompanying the proof: “You will want to go back. Don’t.” I have not gone back. I have also not gone forward. I am writing this review from the middle of a book I may never finish, and I suspect Hermanns would consider this appropriate.

What I can say about the pages I have read is that they are, sentence by sentence, among the finest Hermanns has written. There is a passage in which Lise describes the quality of the light in the hotel lobby — not the color or the angle but its weight, the way it pressed the furniture into the marble floor — that I have read four times and each time found something in it I had not noticed before. There is a scene in which she opens her notebook and discovers that someone has written in it, in her own handwriting, a sentence she does not remember writing, and her confusion is so exact that I felt my own hands tighten on the proof copy, as if the words might rearrange themselves while I held them.

But I do not trust my memory of these passages. I have not checked them against the text. It is possible that I am describing not what Hermanns wrote but what I have, in the weeks since reading, constructed from the residue of what he wrote. This may be the book’s subject. I am not certain enough to claim it.

II. Translator’s note, appended to the English edition of The Sextant Dialogues (Okafor-Whitley, trans.)

A note on the translation.

In the original German, Hermanns uses the word Gespräch — conversation — forty-one times in the first hundred pages. I counted. I counted because by the thirtieth use I had begun to feel that the word was changing, not in its dictionary meaning but in its texture, the way a face you stare at too long becomes unfamiliar. By the forty-first use, I was no longer certain that Gespräch meant what I had always understood it to mean, and this uncertainty bled into my translation of everything around it. A Gespräch is an exchange between two people. But Lise’s conversation in the hotel lobby may have been with herself. It may have been with no one. The word assumes two participants, and the novel quietly removes one of them.

I translated Gespräch as “conversation” in every instance. I considered alternatives — “dialogue,” “exchange” — and rejected them because the repetition is the point. The English reader should feel the word wearing thin, should begin to hear its insufficiency. If I had varied the translation, I would have hidden the damage Hermanns is doing to the concept, and the damage is the novel.

A further note. Sections 4 through 7 of the original contain passages that do not appear in the proof copy sent to reviewers. I know this because I have compared them. The reviewer for The Quarterly Bulletin — whose piece I read in draft — describes a passage about the quality of light in a hotel lobby. This passage does not exist in the edition I translated. I do not mean it was cut. I mean it is not present and, as far as I can determine from Hermanns’s manuscripts, was never present. The reviewer may have invented it, or — and I consider this more likely, knowing how Hermanns’s prose operates — the reviewer may have read it, genuinely read it, in text that produced it without containing it. Hermanns’s sentences have this property. They generate images that are not in the words. You finish a paragraph and carry away a scene the paragraph did not describe.

I asked Hermanns about this. He replied — the only direct communication I have received from him in three years of translating his work — with a postcard bearing a single line: The lobby had no windows. The light came from the reading.

I do not know what this means. I have included it here so that others may not know what it means alongside me.

III. From a letter, Lise Brogan to Eli Fournier, dated 11 March 2009, reproduced in The Collected Correspondence (Auerbach, ed.)

Eli,

You asked me once whether I had read the novel, and I told you I had, and this was not a lie exactly but a statement whose accuracy depends on what you mean by “read” and what you mean by “the novel.” I have held the book. I have opened it. I have looked at the pages and understood the words on them individually and in sequence. What I have not done — what I am not sure I have ever done, with any book — is arrive at the thing the words are about. Do you know that feeling? You read and read and the sentences are clear and the scenes are vivid and you turn the pages and somewhere behind the reading there is a meaning you can sense the way you sense weather changing — a pressure, a dimming — and you keep reading because the next sentence will surely be the one that converts the pressure into rain, into something that falls on you and wets your skin. And it never comes. And you close the book and you have understood everything and felt nothing, or felt everything and understood nothing, and you put the book on the shelf and the shelf is full of books you have read this way, adjacently, almost, and the almost is where you live.

I am not writing about Hermanns. Or I am, but only because Hermanns is the most recent instance of a condition I have carried for longer than I can identify. You asked me if I had read the novel and what I should have said was: I have read about the novel. I have read reviews and a translator’s note and a critical essay by Palombo (see below) and each of these has told me something about the book that the book itself — when I hold it, when I open it — does not seem to contain. The review describes a passage about light. The translator’s note describes a word repeated forty-one times. The critical essay describes a structure I cannot detect in the chapters I have read. It is as though each commentator is reading a different book, or the same book in a different language, and I am reading a third thing that is neither the book nor the commentary but the space between them.

You are always reading the letter, never writing it. You are always in the audience, never on the stage. And the terrible thing — the thing I wanted to tell you and could not find the sentence for, which is why I am writing it here, in a letter you may not read, about a book neither of us may have read — is that I am no longer sure the stage exists. I am no longer sure there is a primary experience underneath all the descriptions of it. What if the descriptions are all there is? What if the review and the letter and the translator’s note are not pointing at something but are, themselves, the thing? What if there is no novel, only the conversation about the novel, and the conversation is where I have been living?

I’m sorry. I know this is not what you asked.

IV. From “The Hermanns Recursion: Structure and Absence in The Sextant Dialogues,” by R. Palombo, in Modern Fictions, Issue 114

It has become conventional, in the modest critical literature surrounding Hermanns’s work, to describe The Sextant Dialogues as a novel about a conversation. This is inaccurate. The novel is a conversation about a conversation about a conversation, and at no point does any of its participants — Lise, the unnamed clerk at the hotel desk, the woman in Room 412 who may or may not be a younger version of Lise — succeed in having the conversation they describe having had.

The structure is easier to diagram than to experience. (This is always the difficulty with recursive structures, and it is why Hermanns is a greater artist than the critical literature has acknowledged: his recursions are experienced before they are understood, and the understanding arrives too late to prevent the experience from having already altered the reader.) Lise attempts to transcribe the Trieste conversation. Her transcription references a letter she wrote to a friend describing the conversation. The letter, in Section 6, references a review of an earlier Hermanns novel that Lise claims shaped her memory of the conversation. The review, when we locate it in Section 9, references the critical essay you are now reading. I do not mean a critical essay like this one. I mean this one. Hermanns cites me by name, quotes a sentence I published in Modern Fictions in 2006, and attributes to it an interpretation of his work I do not remember making.

I have checked. The sentence he quotes does appear in my 2006 essay. The interpretation he attributes to it is not what I intended, but I can no longer read my own sentence without seeing his reading of it, which means his reading has become mine, which means I have lost access to what I originally meant.

This is the mechanism of the novel. Not recursion as a formal trick but recursion as a lived condition — the experience of discovering that your own thoughts have been cited by someone else, in a context you did not choose, and now you cannot uncite them. Every reader of Hermanns becomes a character in Hermanns. Every commentary on the text is absorbed into the text. This essay will be no exception. I am aware, as I write it, that I am producing material for a future edition’s footnotes, and that my reading of the novel is already being read by the novel, and that the self-consciousness of this awareness is itself a theme Hermanns has anticipated and described with more precision than I can manage here.

The word for this feeling is not vertigo. Vertigo implies a stable ground you have lost sight of. The word is closer to grief — the grief of discovering there was never a ground floor, that you have always been falling, that the falling is not what happened to your life but what your life was.

V. Excerpt from an interview with Eli Fournier, The Paris Review, No. 247

Interviewer: You were close to Lise Brogan for many years. Did she ever talk about the Hermanns novel?

Fournier: She talked about it the way people talk about a country they’ve visited in a dream. She knew the streets, certain faces. But when you asked for specifics — what happens in chapter three, who is the woman in Room 412 — she’d get this look. Not confusion. Something more private.

Interviewer: Did you read it yourself?

Fournier: I tried. Three times. The first time I read it straight through and arrived at the end with the sense that I had been somewhere important but could not say where. The second time I read it alongside Lise’s letter — she wrote me a letter about the book, which has since been published — and the letter changed the book. Not metaphorically. The sentences were the same but they did different work. Things I had read as descriptions of a hotel lobby became descriptions of Lise’s loneliness, or my loneliness, or the loneliness of reading itself. The third time I tried to read it without the letter and couldn’t. The letter was already in the book. It had gotten in somehow.

Interviewer: Okafor-Whitley, the translator, has suggested that Hermanns’s prose generates scenes that aren’t literally present in the text.

Fournier: Yes. That’s right. And it’s not a metaphor, what she’s saying. There are things I remember from that novel — a woman standing at a window, the sound of a train — that I have looked for in the text and cannot find. They are not on any page. But they are in the book. The book put them in me and now I cannot give them back.

Interviewer: Do you think the novel is about what the critics say it’s about? The recursion, the absent primary text?

Fournier: I think the novel is about a woman who had a conversation she can’t recover and spends the rest of her life trying to recover it and the trying becomes her life. That’s not recursion. That’s just — that’s Tuesday. That’s everyone. You had a moment once when you were fully present, fully in the thing, and you have spent every day since then trying to describe it, and the describing has replaced it, and you keep describing anyway because the alternative is to admit that the moment is gone and all you have is the description, and the description is — I’m sorry. I need a minute.

Interviewer: Take your time.

Fournier: The description is beautiful. That’s the thing nobody says. Hermanns is described as difficult, as cerebral, as formally innovative. He is all of those things. But the sentences are beautiful. Each one is a small, finished thing, like a stone you can hold in your hand. And you hold them one after another and they are all beautiful and none of them is the thing you are looking for, and the beauty is what keeps you looking, and the looking is the book, and the book is the loneliest thing I have ever read.

VI. From a review in The Quarterly Bulletin of Comparative Letters, Vol. 41, No. 1

I have now finished The Sextant Dialogues. My earlier review, published in this journal two years ago, should be disregarded. Not because it was inaccurate but because the book I described in it is not the book I finished. Something happened in the second half that retroactively rewrote the first, and the passage about the quality of light in the hotel lobby — which my translator colleague informs me does not exist in the text — I can no longer find either. It was there. I am certain it was there. I have a note in the margin of page 87 that says the light, the weight of it, and the margin note is in my handwriting, and page 87 is a blank page between sections, and I do not know what I was annotating.

What I can say about the finished novel is less than what I said about the unfinished one. I know the conversation in the hotel lobby. I have read six accounts of it — Lise’s, the clerk’s, the woman in 412, Palombo’s, my own, and one I cannot attribute, which may be Hermanns’s or may be mine — and each account is precise and internally coherent and completely irreconcilable with the others. The conversation happened. Something was said. But the something changes depending on who is remembering it and when and for whom, and by the end of the novel the reader holds not a conversation but a constellation of conversations, each one casting the others into shadow, and the shadow is shaped exactly like a novel, and the novel is the shadow.

I would like to tell you what The Sextant Dialogues is about. I have read it in its entirety. I have read the translation, the translator’s note, a personal letter by one of its apparent subjects, a critical essay the novel appears to have anticipated and absorbed, and an interview with a man who loved a woman who read the book differently than I did. I have all of this. I have six accounts of something that happened once in a hotel lobby in Trieste, and yours will be the seventh, and it will not agree with the others. The book is in the weight of every description pressing against every other description, and the space that remains when they fail to agree. I keep thinking I am about to say what the space is. I have been about to say it for the length of this paragraph. I do not think I am going to say it.