Anna Funder’s recent presentation on ‘The Art of Fiction’ at the Melbourne Writers Festival was very impressive and well-received. The highlight for me was when she spoke about her 2014 long short story or short novella ‘The Girl with the Dogs’. I’ve only read her nonfiction set of interlinked narratives about the surveillance apparatus of the East German state, ‘Stasiland’. Despite recommendations, I’ve held back on reading ‘All that I Am’, her novel about the fate of left-leaning artists under Hitler, for no good reason other than my intense admiration for Hans Fallada’s ‘Alone in Berlin’, which is no excuse whatsoever. Why on earth I should allow allegiance to one book to impede my reception of another is beyond me but I do know that in this as in many other respects I am an imperfect reader.
Back to ‘The Art of Fiction’. Funder explained the peculiar position she found herself in when she was requested by the Paspaley Group of companies whose primary area of production is pearling to write a piece of fiction on commission. Despite her initial reservations she decided to take the opportunity to do something she had been thinking of for some time; to write a piece of short fiction rooted in our time and place and inspired by Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. I was hooked and a thousand other English teachers in the auditorium swooned! If you are a senior English teacher in the state of Victoria the new word on everybody’s lips is ‘comparative’. The expectation that VCE students be able to compare two texts of literary merit is now entrenched in the course all the way through to the final end-of-Year-12 examination. Funder had just bequeathed to us a pair of texts that would make perfect sense for a Year 11 English or Literature comparative task. Notebook pages were flipping and smart phone screens were flashing.
That many of the people in the audience were senior English teachers I have no doubt. Most of the questions raised at the end were about ‘Stasiland’, a current VCE Year 12 text. Funder spoke of the lingering damage to the lives of people such as Miriam whose husband died in Stasi custody and of Miriam’s initial but unrealised willingness to provide some visual material for the forthcoming Folio edition of the book. Another forthcoming publication is the single volume edition of Anna Funder’s novella and Anton Chekhov’s short story.
The book signing session after her presentation gave me the opportunity to speak to her about my own problematic relationship with ‘Stasiland’. As a socialist I was distrustful of what I perceived to be an anti-left bias in Funder’s perspective and I was predisposed to disbelieve the claims she made about the East German state. At the very least I wanted there to be some acknowledgement of why the Stasi may have been as paranoid as they so obviously were, the encirclement of the Eastern Bloc by NATO, for example, or the propaganda pedalled by the capitalist West that attempted to establish as fact the proposition that all the acts of aggression during the Cold War were instigated by the communist side. I was also able to explain how a second and third reading of ‘Stasiland’ had enabled me to come to a deeper understanding of her purposes in the text. Far from being surprised by what I told her, Funder told me that she has heard the same response from other readers and she reassured me that the book was not intended to be an anti-socialist narrative but a depiction of an actual Orwellian society.
I am not good at reading books recommended to me by my friends. I love them, my friends that is, but I long to preserve the secret intimacy that belongs between the reader and the book. Perhaps I long to preserve the illusion of that intimacy, the misguided belief that the books you need will seek you out. In addition to this slightly narcissistic streak, I also crave the enthusiasm of the hunt, the compulsive desire that comes upon me when I learn that there’s a book which has recently come into existence that I simply have to have, to know, to read. There you have it, the imagination of this reader is fired by longing and craving, by desire and possession. Whilst I’ve emphasised the intimacy, I think an essential aspect of this predisposition is also the secrecy, the sense of reading as an activity with a clandestine aspect to it. And, in addition to that, the sad truth is that whilst I am capable of going into ecstatic overdrive over a newly made discovery in a second hand bookshop – learning for the very first time that a volume called ‘Dictionary of the Khazars’ exists in the world – or letting my heart race at the encounter with either familiar or unfamiliar names in book reviews – Hans Fallada and Haruki Murakami – I am less than likely to read the books my own beloved friends have recommended to me.
This is an exception and I am very grateful to two dear friends of mine for the recommendation. I have just finished reading Asne Seierstad’s investigative account of the July 2011 terrorist attack in Norway. Seierstad’s approach to literary journalism is very different from Anna Funder’s genre-blended mixing of objectivity and subjectivity in her account of the East German surveillance authority in ‘Stasiland’. Indeed, Seierstad retains her investigative objectivity with a sometimes frightening distance comparable in its own strange way to the distance from humanity represented by her subject, the perpetrator of those twin attacks. This forensic distance is never more evident than in the chapter devoted to the shooting of the children on Utoya Island. The trajectory of the bullets as they enter and depart from the bodies and limbs of the victims, the organs ruptured, bones, skulls and faces shattered, the last words and life wishes spoken in vain, the sound of shots being fired, the distance and proximity of the murderer from his targets, the sequence of events, the order of the children’s deaths, the mental and physical sensations of the murderer; all of these are stated – I do not want to use the word ‘described’ – with a brutal clarity, with the certainty of factual detail.
Seierstad’s epilogue provide us with an essential coda to the text in terms of her method, purpose and meaning. It is here that we discover that her documentary reconstruction of the sequence of events on Utoya Island is based on her reading of every available witness and survivor statement, every available police record of interview and investigation, every forensic report on the injuries and deaths of the victims and – in terms of his own mental and physical experience of the day – the perpetrator’s testimony as given on several occasions during the investigation and trial. Another significant achievement of the epilogue is to clarify for the reader the ethical purpose that motivated Seierstad to write her account. She explains how she asked the parents of every victim to read her account of how their child died and for their permission to publish this account in ‘One of Us’. I cannot imagine being one of those parents and being confronted with this request but I applaud her methodology. The point she is making is that she wanted the parents to know that she had no intention of exploiting or taking advantage of their children’s deaths. Indeed, she wanted them to be the first readers to understand that she has written this terrible account of those events specifically for those children, for them to be remembered by those who did not know them, for their deaths to have meaning, substance and weight for those of us who will never be a part of their immediate world.
I am such a reader. I will never be a part of the immediate world of these families. I will probably never travel to Norway and I have never been to Scandinavia. So, apart from the recommendation, what could possibly draw me into reading a 500 page account of a truly repulsive cold-blooded neo-fascist hate crime committed by a perpetrator with the one-dimensional personality of a pixelated avatar in an online game? Having said that, my interest in Norway has been piqued over the last year and a half by the first five volumes of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘My Struggle’. In addition to that I remember being asked by the secretary of my local Labor Party branch to write a letter of condolence in July 2011, which I did:
Dear Comrade Members of the Norwegian Labour Party,
The recent attack against the Labour government and the Labour Youth Movement in Norway cannot go without comment from the members of the Clayton South Branch of the Australian Labor Party.
First of all, we extend our sympathy to all who have been affected by this act of terror and fanaticism. To the survivors who will struggle in the future to come to terms with what has happened and to the families, friends, colleagues, comrades and compatriots of the victims, we send you our heartfelt sympathy and love. We were very moved to read in our newspapers here the words of one of the young survivors: ‘If one person can show so much hatred, imagine how much love we can all show together.’
Secondly, we offer you our solidarity as you stand resolute in your values and beliefs in peace, progress, democracy and social justice. We understand that this act of terrorism was aimed ideologically at the government of the Norwegian Labour Party, in particular at your policies on immigration, multiculturalism and racial tolerance. We also understand that it was deliberately aimed at the Youth Movement of the Norwegian Labour Party as a means of intimidation and fear. As such and on both counts, the perpetrator has acted out of hatred. Let us all observe what the politics of hatred and intolerance leads to. It leads to terror. If allowed to fester and grow it will lead to tyranny.
We hope that all good citizens in both our countries will be resolute in their defence of democracy and social justice and that they will all resist the politics of hatred.
Yours in Solidarity…
If you are unlikely to have the time or the inclination to read Asne Seierstad’s ‘One of Us’, could I at least suggest that you read the following two articles from ‘The New Yorker’? The first is a very recent article by Asne Seierstad herself in response to the recent finding of an Oslo district court that the perpetrator’s human rights had been violated by the terms of his incarceration:
The second is an attempt by Knausgaard to comprehend the emotional void of an individual capable of planning and executing such a terrorist attack and the impact on the victims’ families. I particularly appreciated the humility with which he invested his own persona in this piece and the modesty with which he described the everyday culture of life in Norway:
Coming once again to the end of Anna Funder’s ‘Stasiland’ and finding – once again, as so often with literary reading – that it’s the structural features of the text, the symmetry and order of the structure, that I find so satisfying and from which I infer so much meaning.
Anna’s reunion with Miriam at the end of the narrative counterbalances their meeting at the beginning of Anna’s research into the Stasi surveillance of the GDR. Miriam’s current job working at a radio station in Leipzig reminds us of Anna’s initial impetus to research the forty year history of East Germany when she was working at a radio station in Berlin. Miriam’s refusal to produce a programme on Ostalgie nostalgia parties for the GDR reminds us of Anna’s radio boss’ initial refusal to allow her to produce material about people’s experiences of the postwar division of Germany from the Eastern point of view. And then there’s the figurative ‘china stare’ of a porcelain doll on its crucifix of strings that Anna sees in the middle of the night in Miriam’s flat alongside the pierrot description of Miriam sleeping: ‘so slender and crumpled… strings cut, in the spotlight’ of the moon.
Some of us who read look to the structures of language to give literature its meaning. Some of us look to literature to give life meaning. And some of us do both.
Am currently re-reading Anna Funder’s ‘Stasiland’. As you might well be aware, this particular text has been the subject of a quite anguished webpage published on this WordPress site. Coming back into it yesterday I found myself experiencing that joy of the reader coming back to a text when the pleasure emanates from an enhanced understanding of the relationship between the structure and the meaning of the text. It’s that moment when you reconfirm that the first reading was anything other than a waste of your time and that a second reading is only going to increase your admiration for the writing.
In this case, I was always impressed by the way Funder begins her non-fiction narrative in the throbbing haze of a hangover. It’s a terrific preparation for the Alice-in-Wonderland disorientation she will experience as she begins to uncover more information and evidence about life under the constant surveillance of the Stasi in the totalitarian GDR. What I noticed yesterday about the opening chapters were the fragments embedded in the hangover haze, fragments that will be returned to and examined at greater depth later on in the text. There’s mention, for instance, of Miriam whose torment and tragedy will become the bedrock firsthand account of what the security police in police state can do to your life. Leipzig’s role in the fall of the GDR is referred to as is the transformation of the Stasi headquarters in that city into a museum. Anna visits the underground toilet in her own rendition of falling through the rabbit hole. Revisiting these fragments she will weave her narrative account.
I published a new page this morning containing my comments about Anna Funder’s ‘Stasiland’ and I felt that it was incumbent on me to include the following Prefatory Note:
I am posting this response to Anna Funder’s ‘Stasiland’ as a salutary lesson on the dangers of a single reading. I came to this non-fiction narrative about the surveillance state of the GDR during the Cold War with a negative predisposition on two fronts. The first was on the basis of my own politics. As a leftist democratic socialist I was uncomfortable with Funder’s portrayal of communism as a failed god of the twentieth century. I disliked her apparent mockery of Karl Marx whose critical and analytical tools have enabled us to see, understand and deconstruct the political and social world in which we live. The second was my disapproval of Funder’s deliberate blurring of what I perceived to be the line between objectivity and subjectivity. When I first wrote down these notes I thought of them as an example of a resistant reading. It was only when I read the book a second time that I realised that what I had in fact subjected ‘Stasiland’ to was an aberrant and incorrect reading. So far as my politics is concerned, why would I ever want to pose as an apologist for the state terror of Stalinist socialism? It is incumbent on those of us whose politics belong to the left to acknowledge the abuse of human rights and the denigration of individual freedoms that occurred under the guise of state communism during the twentieth century and to promise both ourselves and those whom we might seek to persuade that we would never again resort to such conditions of state terror. The socialism of the future will have to be democratic, collective and inclusive or not at all. A second reading of ‘Stasiland’ also opened my eyes to Funder’s bravery and brilliance in deliberately blurring the so-called lines between subjectivity and objectivity. Knowing what something was like from the point of view of someone who experienced it is no less important than knowing that something happened. How easily I had forgotten one of the mantras of my own formative years, in this case the feminist revelation that, ‘The personal is political and the political is personal’. The experience of that second reading has reminded me that sometimes the best reader is the one who can reserve judgement and that the best writing is often informed by the interplay of multiple narrative perspectives.
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