Ludwig Harig, The Trip to Bordeaux.

Translated from German by Susan Bernofsky. Providence: Burning Deck Press, 2003. 103 pp. $10

Utterly unassuming, lively, droll, The Trip to Bordeaux comprises roughly thirty short, stylistically and structurally distinct chapters, through which a narrator, with his friends, family, and dog, spends a summer holiday in Bordeaux, house-sitting for an acquaintance's father-in-law, partaking enthusiastically of the father-in-law's wine cellar, sitting, talking, reading Montaigne, visiting the city's historical museum, engaging with the locals in conversations about de Gaulle in bars, reading Flaubert and Mme de Savigny, going to the beach, sunbathing, contemplating finitude, and generally enjoying the coordinates of space and time.

Descriptively these coordinates emerge in syntax, in place names, and in the subjunctive:

 if we'd kept going straight we'd have wound up driving down the
 tours Victor Hugo, who said that France was a republic that
 encompassed all the world, to where it intersects the rue Sainte
 Catherine, who did not say the human was something to overcome, and
 then would have followed it south along the edge of the place du
 general Sarrail, who said something to the effect that in the end
 victory was the greatest good ...

Space and time are likewise played with through collage, in juxtapositions and interpolations of texts that diverge widely in terms of style, effect, perspective, and provenance. In the chapter in the bar, the narrator's mordant calculation of how much the bartender would succeed in gypping his patrons over time is interrupted now and then, as if he were returning to where he'd left off in his reading and the reader's attention were at that moment consonant with his, by excerpts from Madame Bovary. A report of Pito the dog's wanderings around Place Simiot is cross-cut with a chronicle of the finely appointed house there of M. Desgrange (whose great-grandfather had "swapped glass beads for Senegalese and, in their place, brought home a shipload of rum from Guadeloupe"). Several whole chapters in the book are clearly pastiches of Montaigne's Essais, linked to other chapters by virtue of the shared "I," but also by the suggestion that, as with the Flaubert reading, the author has simply redirected his and the reader's attention elsewhere for the moment. These subtly composed, dynamic juxtapositions give one the sense of being in more than one place at the same time, or in different times at the same place. It is in such "antitheses of thought," playfully, that The Trip to Bordeaux unfolds.

Harig's formal play and his distinctly personal voice and sense of humor may remind American readers of two writers in particular: Harry Mathews and Gertrude Stein. Like Mathews, he belongs to that international generation of literary experimenters that achieved prominence in the 1960s and has continued to exert influence on literary cultures to the present-day, with few exceptions free of attention from mainstream publishers. Born in the Saarland, a region that like Alsace and Lorraine was passed back and forth between France and Germany and at the time was under French administration, Harig was a member of an elite corps of Hitler youth and apparently quite militant during the war: his first

published story, from 1941, dealt with the sinking of the entire English fleet by a single German submarine. After the war, he became increasingly involved with French culture, no doubt at least in part as a way of coming to terms with Germany's recent past and his own complicity in it. (It must be noted that unlike many Harig never denied his past; the bulk of his work has been devoted to dealing with it.) Along with a childhood friend, the translator Eugen Helmle, Harig translated Raymond Queneau's Exercices de Style in the mid-1950s, and began publishing his own work in the Stuttgart literary journal augenblick, which was edited by Elisabeth Walther and Max Bense, a physicist, aesthetician, and professor of Philosophy, who in Stuttgart in the 1950s and 1960s influenced and collaborated with a number of younger writers, Harig, Helmut Heissenbuttel, and Reinhard Dohl in particular.

Few of these writers' works are available in English. In German literary histories, the "Stuttgart School" around Bense is usually mentioned in a single breath with the other German or Austrian avant-garde constellations of the time: the Wiener Gruppe, the Darmstadter Kreis, the Forum Stadtpark. While distinctions between these groups were often fuzzy, the Stuttgart folks saw themselves in dialogue with contemporaries like the Italian Gruppo 63, the theorists and writers surrounding Tel Quel in Paris, and the international movement of Concrete poetry (especially in Brazil), as well as with the prewar German avant-garde, Dadaism in particular, and the work of Gertrude Stein. Much of the impetus for the group's work came directly from Bense. He was one of the first theorists to draw connections between art and information theory and semiotics. His 1934 dissertation included a chapter on "Mathematics and Beauty"; and in the 1950s and 1960s he was busy writing--and practicing--a theory of aesthetics (published between 1954 and 1992 as the five-volume Aesthetica) that, based on Charles Peirce's semiotics and influenced by Norbert Wiener's cybernetics and Claude Shannon's statistical theory, conceived of the work of art as semiotic artifact and of the aesthetic process itself as the formal one of decision-making rather than as the production of semantic content.

More importantly, Bense was himself a creative writer. And he was one of the first people anywhere to write about and produce computer-generated texts. The most famous of these, "The Monologue of Terri Jo," the plot of which is based on a news report of an American woman, saved from drowning, whose incessant, garbled speech while comatose gradually reveals details of a crime at high sea, uses for her utterances nonsense texts of random letters and punctuation marks that by way of a computer-programmed statistical operation--equivalent presumably to whatever speech function was operative in the original Terri Jo's brain--become increasingly probable and significant. Five years later, in 1968, Harig reworked Bense's text into a radio play, inserting documentary material between Terri Jo's digitally produced locutions, which were performed by a vocoder.

Given the doubts that computer-generated writing, like automatic writing before it, casts on the role of an intending subject in the production of texts, Harig's close involvement with this aspect of Bense's work--and with the experimental ethos of those years--may seem contradictory if seen from the perspective of his later works, which have been mainly travel diaries and a multi-volume autobiography (the fifth volume came out last year). Yet engaging and representing one's own experience in writing is hardly the same thing as asserting the unity or authority of the individual subject; and the scientific coolness of Harig's descriptions of events is certainly in keeping with a structuralist's treatment of even quite loaded content. Harig's autobiography, according to one critic, is grounded consciously in the difference between unreliable memory and otherwise inaccessible fact, between what was and what very well could have been. The Trip to Bordeaux, which was written based on a vacation Harig took with the painter Hans Dahlem in 1964, in fact anticipates the later work, and not only in its formal engagement with the problem of indeterminacy. The book's last section, which takes place as they're all driving back out of the city and involves a circular meditation on the "names that remind you of events fathers speak of with pride and reverence, you hear the names and remember the events which you cannot remember because you weren't there when they happened and you've only heard about them from fathers and you wonder why you ought to remember them," resonates rather differently when read alongside Harig's autobiography, which in fact begins with his father's experiences on the Western Front during the First World War. I initially suspected The Trip to Bordeaux of being a lovely aberration; but the more I've discovered of Harig's work, the more it strikes me as representative: as an "autobiographical" text, a reflection on personal and collective histories, a travel diary, an encounter with France, an exercise in enjoying life.

So, the book is an excellent choice for Harig's debut in English translation, and--the translation itself is superb. I read it carefully and, as is typical when reading a translation, unconsciously kept waiting to stumble, for a word or passage or moment of syntax to feel off or flawed. But I did not stumble, or catch or snag, even once. Bernofsky has managed to render with impeccable precision the text's frequent and wide-ranging shifts in register, its playfulness, subtlety, rhythms, and syntax into a flawless, alive English. It occurs to me that Bense's theory of artistic process as decision-making could be useful in supporting arguments that translation itself is a literary art. But the proof is in the pudding; and this is it.

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Author:	Martin, W.
Publication:	Chicago Review
Date:	Jun 22, 2003
Words:	1458
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