It's interesting to read a short story collection that ends with a refutation of the work at the end. Hugo Von Hofmannsthal's collection is full of these gothic-esque stories of a lack of understanding, mysterious signs, failures of communications and the encounter with the unknown and unknowable. A miner encounters death in a carriage, a downwardly mobile merchant is haunted by specters of his servants, in the best story of the collection a French nobleman conducts an affair with a common woman in the midst of a plague and brushes up with the impermeable barrier of death itself. The commonality of the stories is a sense of bewilderment, of being unable to comprehend the signs and symbolism of life and a tragic end at the end of it. This comes to a head at the end of the book, where the famous Lord Chandos letter sits and leaps to the throat of the subject. Lord Chandos is a (fictional) wunderkind novelist who now cannot bear to write, feeling inadequacy in the realm of letters to describe the transcendental experiences he has in his quotidian life as he describes his predicament to Francis Bacon. This isn't to be mistaken as mere schmaltzy exaggeration about ordinary life, but a wrestling with the issue of language's limits to describing the depths of emotion and experience. In one particularly notable section Hofmannsthal writes:

I cannot expect you to understand me without an illustration, and I must ask you to forgive the silliness of my examples. A watering can, a harrow left in a ﬁeld, a dog in the sun, a shabby churchyard, a cripple, a small farmhouse—any of these can become the vessel of my revelation. Any of these things and the thousand similar ones past which the eye ordinarily glides with natural indifference can at any moment—which I am completely unable to elicit—suddenly take on for me a sublime and moving aura which words seem too weak to describe. Even an absent object, clearly imagined, can inexplicably be chosen to be ﬁlled to the brim with this smoothly but steeply rising tide of heavenly feeling.
Recently, for example, I had a generous amount of rat poison spread in the milk cellars of one of my dairy farms. I went out riding toward evening, thinking no more about the matter, as you might imagine. As I rode at a walk over deep, tilled farmland—nothing more signiﬁcant in the vicinity than a startled covey of quail, the great setting sun off in the distance above the convex ﬁelds—suddenly this cellar unrolled inside me, ﬁlled with the death throes of the pack of rats. It was all there. The cool and musty cellar air, full of the sharp, sweetish smell of the poison, and the shrilling of the death cries echoing against mildewed walls. Those convulsed clumps of powerlessness, those desperations colliding with one another in confusion. The frantic search for ways out. The cold glares of fury when two meet at a blocked crevice. But why am I searching again for words, which I have sworn off!

The issue Chandos has with the ineffectiveness of language seems to me to be at the heart of 20th century literature as well as beyond. Hofmannsthal's Chandos directly inspired Wittgenstein's own philosophical thoughts on language but recently I was reading an interview with Vladimir Sorokin in the Paris Review that brought to mind this Chandos problem:

It seems to me that the best novels are produced when authors creatively disrupt the form of the novel. We need simply recall Gargantua and Pantagruel, Ulysses, or War and Peace. These are referred to as great novels, even though, formally speaking, it’s almost as if they weren’t novels at all. They’re simply novels that are well suited to their time, which is why they turn out to be great novels. The contemporary world is so complex and protean that it is no longer possible to describe it with linear prose and squeeze it into a traditional novel’s structure. In order to conceive of the contemporary world, I make use of complex optics, which can be referred to as faceted vision, like what insects have. Keeping in mind that, today, in post-Soviet Russia, the imperial past, which was not buried in time, presses in on the present like a glacier, the question of the future is suspended. As young Russians admit to me, “We do not feel the future as a vector of life and development.” This is an absolutely pathological situation and a writer needs a special sort of vision in order to adequately re-create this on the page (you’ll notice I say “re-create” and not “describe”). For this, I make use of a system of mirrors set up on two platforms–one is the past and one is the future. You can call this postmodernism or grotesque metarealism, I don’t mind either way. But the grotesqueness of Russian life didn’t begin with post-Soviet Russia, we need only recollect the worlds of Gogol.

This is to say, that in Chandos Hofmansthal lays out the question, how can we depict reality now, is the literary stylings of the past enough to capture what is now our present (and the horrors and upheavals that would come in the decades after its publication in 1902). The answer found by authors afterwards as exemplified by the Sorokin quote above, is that instead of the direct it is now the realms of the oblique that the novel most occupy. Mirrors, and exaggerations are the methods now to capture the spirit of the times. Chandos' sense of aporia at how to reconcile the world with the page is the feeling of overwhelmed with the emergence of the modernist world Hofmannsthal was at the advent of, where the literary tradition of the romantics began to gave way to the new, and in that it is a fascinating document marking a time right before a watershed moment in literature. The stories are entertaining enough but the combination of them and the letter give a sense of a true struggle with the present and the future, and while it may be a conclusion of negation the whole that the parts form bring a philosophical completeness that the sum does not posses.

The Lord Chandos letter

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The Lord Chandos letter (1986)

The Lord Chandos letter (1986)

The Lord Chandos Letter (2005)

The Lord Chandos Letter (2005)

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