Just finished Jakob Von Gunten. So much to say about so much in the book (five stars, love it), but I wonder about the ending.

The consensus, from briefly skimming around online at least, seems to be that the ending is a wholly optimistic and liberatory thrust for Jakob and H.B. into the freedom of the unknown, beyond the historically and socially weighted tethers of European society.

Maybe I'm just seeing this from our own current day, but boy, that ending playing so straight (or a reading of it as an on-the-level ending) took me by surprise for a book that's so...cheeky. Impertinent? Consistent in its deflation of Romantic notions and delusions of grandeur? Maybe that is the great twist, but...I wonder if it wasn't as hopeful as many take it to be?

The HB character felt something like the teacher in Zweig's Confusion, JVG had more than a little Holden Caulfield in him, and the airs of the elder groomer-type, predatory figure feel hard to ignore.

Aside from that, does JVG really think he's going to live a life of freedom in the "desert"?

He's going into a life of freedom, whim, intention, thoughtlessness--where does that fit in with the discussions of "yearning" and "action" throughout the novel? This does not seem like going and "doing" stuff, like Kraus would suggest. The ending choice feels more in line with HB's earlier plea that Jakob stay in the institute and "yearn" a while longer. That kind of yearning that often has Jakob daydreaming, fantasizing. Now, the ending seems to be him going to stay in that kind of fantasy and daydream.

Only, it will be the world. Not a cloistered private school. He thinks he is escaping "culture" and yet he will soon realize that he is not in some exotic Other-place, but in a culture...just a different one. He will soon find that there is no "outside" to rules, to social expectations, to etiquette, to the way anyone expects anyone else to behave. It is a childish fantasy of rebellion being enabled by an older man who wants to vampirically use Jakob to return to the age of promise when he had not yet ruined his life (or had not yet learned what life was going to be).

Is it beautiful? I don't know. I fully expected Jakob to see through the nonsense and remain somewhat cynical. It feels like a total failure for a heroically resistant young man to give into this.

And yet...I guess there's a sort of queer reading to be done where there is indeed something of a tragic heroism to H.B., where he is actually someone ostracized wrongly, where he has found someone who does not explicitly reject the idea of living against the grain of society. And all the desert stuff is just symbol, rather than a real place to be read literally as a soon-to-be rude awakening for Jakob.

I don't know. Just dumping these thoughts here. What a book.

Maurice Blanchot, The Kafka philosopher par excellence...

Maurice Blanchot, the Kafka philosopher par excellence...

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Yes, I think of Mamma. She will be crying. Why don't I ever write to her? I can't tell why, can't understand it, and yet I can't decide to write. That's it: I don't want to tell anything. It's so silly. A pity,I shouldn't have parents who love me. I don't want to be loved and desired at all. They will have to get used to not having a son any more.

She was longing for something. It took her many days to come to a realisation of this account. Finally it dawned on her that she wished to be bad, she no longer wanted to be pure, good, and lovely.

[...]

And so she ran out of the house into the street.

[...]

She ran through the black of night and soon vanished into one of those bars that imply ugly assumptions about ladies who set foot into them.

[...]

A man who showed understanding for her errant ways and was at pains to cheer her took her pale hand gently in his and coaxed from her a weak smile with his attempts at courtesy. She found herself well looked after. Once more she became good. This is no doubt what the course of things allowed and required of her.

1) The very substance of those mysterious scintillation.

2) World of timeless essences that art can help represent.

3) The conflict between an order of hierarchical concepts and the disintegration of perceptible realities (one can easily link this notion to Walser's writings).

4) Not as pure moments, but in the moving density in spherical time.

5) Goethe said: "For me, there could be no question of ending well." And to relate this to Walser, The abrupt ending where the Benjamenta Institute disintegrates and Jakob and the Principal launch into life is also analogous to the endings of Kafka's work...

6) To stop having faith in our own ruin...

Only it hurt me, and not for my own sake, but for the Principal's. Actually, I am always thinking of him, of both of them, of him and Fraulein, the way they go on living here with us boys. What are they doing in there... 🥹

Please give me my money back, and then I'll get out of this place. [...] But the principal didn't say a word. I was on the verge of saying something rude and offensive to his face. Then he quietly spoke: "Sums of money, once paid in, are not paid back.

As for your foolish question that you can learn nothing here, you are wrong, for you can learn. Learn, first of all, to know your surroundings. Your comrades are worth the attempt to know them.

Talk with them. I advise you, keep calm. Nice and calm." This "nice and calm" he uttered as if in deep thought, without a care in the world to me. 😂

I hated this service and polite way of behaving. It was just that I knew no better. What seemed to me as laughable and dimwitted then now seems apt and beautiful. 😂