The Threshold and the Ledger E-Book

McCarthy Tom

• Herausgeber: Notting Hill Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 68

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Since her untimely death in 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann has come to be regarded as one of the twentieth century's most important writers. Unpacking a single Bachmann poem, novelist Tom McCarthy latches onto two of its central terms – the eponymous threshold and ledger – and takes off on a line of flight: through the work of Franz Kafka, David Lynch, Anne Carson, Sappho and Shakespeare.Can writing be understood as an experience of the threshold, a limit- or boundary-state? A condition of ecstasy or ec-stasis, standing outside of oneself? With identity ruptured and surpassed, how – and by whom – might such experience be recorded? Appearing on the eve of Bachmann's centenary, McCarthy's book argues for the centrality of her vision to the very act of literature itself.

Leseprobe

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Notting Hill Editions is an independent British publisher. The company was founded by Tom Kremer (1930–2017), champion of innovation and the man responsible for popularising the Rubik’s Cube.

After a successful business career in toy invention Tom decided, at the age of eighty, to fulfil his passion for literature. In a fast-moving digital world Tom’s aim was to revive the art of the essay, and to create exceptionally beautiful books that would be cherished.

Hailed as ‘the shape of things to come’, the family-run press brings to print the most surprising thinkers of past and present. In an era of information-overload, these collectible pocket-size books distil ideas that linger in the mind. ii

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THE THRESHOLD AND THE LEDGER

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Tom McCarthy

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To the staff and fellows – past, present and future – of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, of which both Ingeborg Bachmann and I have been beneficiaries.vi

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Contents

– Title Page –– Dedication –– 1 –– 2 –– 3 –– 4 –– 5 –– 6 –– Appendix One –– Appendix Two –– Bibliography –– Acknowledgements –– About the Author –– Copyright –viii

1

– 1 –

Ingeborg Bachmann was born in the provincial Austrian town of Klagenfurt in 1926 and died in Rome in 1973. In the short span of her lifetime, she managed to bag the lion’s share of the Germanophone literary prizes and get nominated for the Nobel; play a vocal role, through her lectures, radio work and membership of the influential Gruppe 47, in the cultural and political reshaping of German society after the catastrophe of World War Two; become romantically entangled with such luminaries as Paul Celan, Max Frisch and – improbably but truly – Henry Kissinger (whom she met when he organised a symposium for European intellectuals in 1955, although she seems to have cooled on him during his carpet bombing-advocacy phase); and, not least, publish two volumes of poetry that, by any reckoning, must take their place among the most important of the post-war period in any language, never mind German. I want to begin this book, written on the eve of her centenary, by 2homing in on a poem that appears towards the end of Borrowed Time, the first of these two collections, published in 1953.

In the second stanza of ‘Salt and Bread’, Bachmann writes (and here, as throughout, I turn to Peter Filkins’s excellent Zephyr Press translation):

Into the hand of my oldest friend

I place the key to my post; the rain man will now manage

my darkened house and lengthen

the lines of the ledger which I drew up

since I stayed less often.

The words, like so many of Bachmann’s, are obtuse, elliptical, reluctant to offer themselves up for instant comprehension. Nonetheless, they give us things to work with: images, contexts, allusions. The poem’s title points us to the German custom, known as Brot und Salz, whereby neighbours, friends and relatives bring bread and salt to welcome people into a new house. Bachmann, though, has inverted the ritual’s order: Salz und Brot. In her telling, salt comes first, then bread. The reversal extends to the whole scenario: the sequence being painted here is one of departure, not arrival; moving out rather than in; shutting up 3shop; closing a house down, passing its keys and general management over to someone else rather than assuming it oneself. But then, a few stanzas later, we get a second reversal:

So I gather the salt

when the sea overcomes us,

and turn back

and lay it on the threshold

and step into the house.

The poem’s narrator, the ‘I’-figure, seems to have had a change of mind, or at least destination, back to the home that she relinquished earlier. Returning to it, she takes on the role of, initially, welcoming neighbour, laying salt on its threshold, then, again, inhabitant, stepping across this threshold, back inside. Her re-entry, though, rather than restituting to her full domestic mastery, inaugurates a kind of joint-accommodation set-up. The poem’s final couplet reads:

We share bread with the rain;

bread, a debt, and a house. 4

You’ll notice that the ‘I’ has become ‘we’: this new arrangement is a general condition. What does it mean for us to share our house with rain? Symbolically, it implies a structural rupture: breach of a dividing membrane, an opening of inside to outside (private to public, individual to collective, human to inhuman or elemental). More basically, at the most literal level, it just means our roof is broken.

This book will be a slow unpacking of these twelve lines. It will involve, like Bachmann’s poem, a set of digressions, of departures and returns. To put it more viscerally (or perhaps eviscerally): as with the house that Bachmann invites us to imagine, the poem’s inside will be laid open to the many scenes and histories – collective, elemental, frequently inhuman – that amass, burst and drizzle, drive or hurtle down towards it from beyond its borders.

5

– 2 –

Let’s begin, then, by unpacking the poem’s central, overriding frame and setting – namely, the motif of the house. Near the outset of The Poetics of Space, his wonderful examination (published in 1958) of the many ways in which human experience is shaped – and haunted – by its topological and architectural substrata, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard informs us:

Now my aim is clear: I must show that the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind … Past, present and future give the house different dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another. In the life of a man, the house thrusts aside contingencies, its councils of continuity are unceasing. Without it, man would be a dispersed being.

That’s what the house is meant to do, at least. But I would supplement Bachelard’s observation 6with a contingent, or contending, one made by another figure from whom we’ll be hearing intermittently: the film-maker David Lynch, who, in an interview with the critic Chris Rodley (one of a series published in 1997 under the title Lynch on Lynch), deploying the equally wonderful surrealism-meets-gee-whizz-folksy idiom he made his own, sums up the starting premise of so much of his work with the simple line: ‘The house is a place where things can go wrong.’

Both Bachelard’s and Lynch’s propositions are, of course, true. Or, to phrase this assertion with logical preciseness: neither proposition is entirely true unless it comes in cohort with the other, even if they clash or pull in opposite directions. This ambivalent capacity of the house, its double-tendency towards shelter and integration (on the one hand) and (on the other) strife and destructiveness, has fuelled drama, poetry and the novel for centuries. It drives, for example, the entire corpus of Greek tragedy, which is never really about its various heroes but rather about the house of which these heroes are mere iterations, symptoms you could almost say: the House of Atreus (in Aeschylus’s Oresteian cycle, to which we’ll be turning shortly); the House of Thebes (in Sophocles’s 7Theban one) and so forth. Indeed, the Greek word for ‘house’, oikos, has a dual meaning: family over several generations and physical house, its bricks and columns. The one encloses or contains the other. (Oikos is also the root of the word economics, conceived at its outset as the reach and domain of a house or family, extended beyond the property’s physical boundary through trade and its attendant, expanded networks of credit and debt.)

And now, as promised, to the Oresteia. No matter how many times I think or write about this trilogy (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides, all originally performed in 458 bc