Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

“You know your Bible, Solomon, you know it’s written there that on the sixth day God created man, but where does it say anything about the nationalist? Isn’t that right, Solomon?”

“Quite right, Count!” Piniowsky said.

One day, in the middle of the climate of general collapse — the Austro-Hungarian Empire having disappeared, causing a breakdown of secular institutions — the Count asked Piniowsky for his opinion of the world.

“Count, I no longer think anything at all. The world has perished,” replied the tavernkeeper.

The world had gone to hell. In that apocalyptic climate, what could an individual like Piniowsky do, disappointed in the world, but still holding on to certain private convictions that endured within him?

For me, these convictions could be synthesized by writing the word Art. In some way, I resemble Piniowsky. Because on the subject of the sinking world, I no longer had anything to say, though I noticed that something endured within me: eagerness, toil, the old convictions, the same ones that led me at that moment to celebrate what I’d seen so far in Kassel and the fact that I seemed to incorporate some of the works I’d seen there into my own personality, injecting them into my own spirit.

I knew, as Piniowsky did, that the world had perished and was already disintegrating, and only if one dared to show it in its dissolution was it possible to offer some plausible image of it. I knew that the world had gone to hell, but also that art created life, and this path, contrary to what ominous voices said, was not exhausted. So I decided to change my name and call myself Piniowsky. Autre would drop his provisional surname and become Piniowsky. As him, I wouldn’t have any opinion on the world (which had so disappointed us), but on art I would.

I soon felt an immense sense of well-being at having left behind the name that had accompanied me for sixty-odd years and of which I was so bored, among other things because it was the name I’d had during my youth (which I’d devoted myself to protracting far too long).

I logged in to Spotify and, thinking of Marguerite Duras, looked for the soundtrack to her film India Song . Listening to the music composed by Carlos D’Alessio, I returned to my past in Paris. It seemed odd: now being called Piniowsky, I resembled myself more. I’d been in Kassel all the while without being entirely me, and now that I was called Piniowsky, I was at last starting to be myself.

I amused myself reflecting on Untilled , the installation by Huyghe I’d already seen and that seemed to create an idea of a return to the prehistory of art — though it only seemed to, I wasn’t at all sure. In any case, the installation seemed to be talking about the necessity of learning how to stand apart , to situate oneself on the metaphorical outskirts of the outskirts. Like me, Huyghe was attracted to fog and smoke, at least that’s what Pim had told me. If there was a scene characteristic of my humble poetics, it would be a foggy atmosphere where a solitary man walked down a lonely road and smoke always got him thinking.

I evoked that characteristic fog sequence evident in so many of my stories. I perceived I was increasingly seized by the most extraordinary happiness, maybe just because of being Piniowsky: for calling myself by that name liberated me from the pressures of my own, and that allowed me, moreover, to cheerfully ponder a possible final dimension remaining to the avant-garde. Since becoming Piniowsky I resisted burying this dimension, seeing it as connected to some misty concepts that, as soon as the fog cleared, might have a future. Art could be a forest conspiracy in the outskirts of the outskirts, a flight from moral bewilderment, always discreet, not to mention invisible.

Now that some time has passed, I see that intuition has taken root in me, to the point where I would dare say that the more avant-garde an author is, the less he can allow himself to be labeled as such and the more he must be on guard not to be pigeonholed by that cliché.

This is what I wrote at the beginning of this novelized account of my participation in Documenta. Then, they were words that gave the impression of having little to do with what I planned to tell. They were just a sounding out, perhaps just a McGuffin. Now I see that what’s happened over the course of this account — like Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein, which she eventually came to look like — is that my narration (in my books, the axis tends to be the journey about a writer who travels, writing of his displacement) has brought me back around to that phrase, now spoken with greater conviction. Now, I sense that a way to not be pointed out as avant-garde is to turn oneself, in broad daylight, into a sort of agile, very mobile forest conspiracy, as light as the most invisible breeze in the Fridericianum.

I thought, no one will ever know how obsessively I’m devoting myself to memorizing the route from my hotel to the Osteria restaurant; but it shall be known, because I’m going to confess. I won’t tell it entirely, for fear it won’t be believed. It was an exaggerated, meticulous, almost insane preparation.

I left the Hessenland and simply began to walk along the spacious sidewalk, up Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse, passing in front of the Trattoría Sackturm, and not turning left on Königstor but turning at the next corner, which was an alleyway I had to take briefly to get to Jordanstrasse.

It was a very easy route; in fact I already knew part of it. Nevertheless, I was afraid I’d get lost even though I’d spent a while memorizing it.

What kind of fear was making me act like that? Where did it come from? These questions reminded me of Tom Thumb, that tale of a tiny boy who left a trail of breadcrumbs along the path to be able to find his way back home again. It was the first story I ever heard in my life. In fact, my parents had made me learn it by heart and, at the age of four, when we had visitors, they’d make me recite the Catalan version out loud.

I was shocked to discover that Tom Thumb — or Pulgarcito, originally Daumesdick —the German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm had been written in Kassel; they’d written it in a long-demolished house that once stood a few steps from where I was that very moment. It could be said that, instead of traveling to Kassel in search of the very center of contemporary art, I had actually traveled there to discover the exact place where the first story I’d ever heard in my life had been thought of and written down, the first of a series of tales I would go on to listen to over the course of many years.

You can’t understand Tom Thumb’s story without taking into account the terror or fear of getting lost. It was strange to see how that fear had just returned to me unexpectedly at dusk, sixty years after first discovering its existence.

My childhood fear had been summoned up as I left the hotel, as I walked along Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse toward my dinner with Chus. Although I already knew this fear of getting lost from the story of poor Tom Thumb, I remembered my discovery of the very essence of this fear one day in the summer of 1953, in a small coastal town north of Barcelona (a town with a long name, but known to everyone as Llavaneres). My grandfather’s Swiss-style villa had been requisitioned as the Chilean Consulate during the Spanish Civil War. Later, the family recovered it, and in the fifties we spent all our summers there. In that town, on Sunday evenings, it was the custom for Barcelona families to go to the cinema. The first movie I went to see with my parents was a western. I don’t remember the title or the plot. After all, I was only four years old. But I do remember, as if I were seeing it now, that we watched, up on the screen, the daily life of a happy family of farmers: an affectionate mother, an upright father, and a boy my age. Suddenly, normality was transformed by the appearance of a few strangers — later I would learn they were Cheyenne Indians — whose faces were painted and who wore feathers on their heads and communicated with one another using incomprehensible words; they were tremendously agitated, showing clear signs of hostility toward the poor, peaceful family of honorable white folks.