3am magazine logo

defamiliarising reality

By Timothy Kennett.

Clemens J. Setz, Indigo, trans. Ross Benjamin (Serpent’s Tail, 2014)

Jorge Luis Borges writes of a map so accurate that it covers the whole of an empire; by contrast, the Austrian novelist Clemens J. Setz writes in the hinterlands of verisimilitude, the area where the overlap between reality and fiction frays just enough to perceive a difference. Setz’s 2012 novel, Indigo, has recently been translated into English by Ross Benjamin and published in the UK by Serpent’s Tail and in the US by Liveright; to date, it is the first of his works to appear in English. Indigo is concerned with a condition known as the “Indigo syndrome”, which afflicts children: those who go near these Indigo children begin to suffer worsening and soon unendurable dizziness, nausea, and migraines, which are alleviated only when they return to a safe distance. There is some uncertainty in the novel about whether the Indigo syndrome is real, or whether it is an extreme response to the pressures of parenthood and modernity experienced as a sort of psychosomatic mass hysteria.

To further emphasise the novel’s sense of uncertainty, Setz has written himself into the narrative, much of which follows the attempts of a writer and maths teacher, Clemens J. Setz, to investigate the nature of the Indigo syndrome and the mysterious disappearances of Indigo children. Clemens J. Setz is, we are told, a murderer. He flayed alive “a man from Romania” who severely abused some dogs he had kept “in a dungeon for years”. Setz was acquitted of the crime, but not declared innocent (I think of The Trial: actual acquittal, apparent acquittal, or protraction). He makes a living now as a writer, mostly of “science fiction novels”. The reader can perhaps be sure that Setz, the author of Indigo, is not himself a murderer – although it is not unknown for European writers to write postmodern novels that reveal their own violent crimes – but it is otherwise easy to see the similarities between the author and his character. Setz himself even trained to be a maths teacher.

A second strand of the narrative, set fourteen years later in 2021, relates the attempts of Robert Tätzel to investigate the circumstances in which Setz was accused and acquitted of murder. Tätzel is a former pupil of Setz’s at an institute for Indigo children in the mountains, the Habianau Institute; he is now grown up and no longer suffers from the Indigo syndrome, for reasons that are not entirely clear – perhaps he grew out of it; perhaps Tätzel had been misdiagnosed; perhaps the Indigo syndrome never existed at all. Tätzel still retreats into the corner of the room when someone else enters, as he learnt to do as an Indigo child. Tätzel’s narrative is told in the third person, and there are hints that it might be the work of Setz, who is encouraged by his girlfriend to “pick one of them [the children at the Institute] and imagine how he’ll behave later on”.

The reality of each of the novel’s core components, then, is in doubt: the Indigo syndrome may not exist; the fictive Setz has a kind of ghostly half-reality; and Tätzel’s narrative could well be a fabrication. It can be difficult to build on such shifting and uncertain foundations, but this is of course the point. The reader is forced to focus on Indigo as a fiction and as a fabrication – but the effect, perversely, is not to call into doubt the fiction, but rather to call into doubt reality, or, more precisely, the ability to distinguish between what is real and what is fictional. Indigo suggests that it is possible for the Borgesian map of the empire to be so perfect that it covers the whole of the empire, but it goes further, suggesting that where there seem to be holes and tears and tatters in the fabric of the map there may in fact be holes and tears and tatters in the fabric of reality itself.

Setz appropriates real stories for his fiction as part of his strategy for defamilarising reality. (This is a strategy Setz also adopts in his poetry: he writes poems based on stories he has collected of bizarre deaths or based on reorganised text from Wikipedia.) These stories sound unbelievable, but turn out to be true. There is, for example, the story of a sword swallower from Bonn who “tried to swallow an umbrella [and] accidentally pressed the button that opened the umbrella and died,” which appears, after some internet research, to have verifiably happened (and not just once: there have been copycat tragic umbrella-swallowing incidents). Nick Richardson, reviewing Ned Beauman’s Glow, describes “a species of hysterical realism in which the world itself is shown to be so hysterical that it makes the most preposterous fiction look less unlikely.” Indigo is akin to this species of hysterical realism, but it is not preposterous: it is quietly strange and slightly unsettling. Its strangeness is realised in perception and minor details that, out of the corner of the eye, seem innocuous at first: “We turned onto a path that ran along the pond. On a meadow a few teenagers were playing soccer with an old black hat.” (This black hat, or at least a black hat, appears in a number of contexts in the novel.) “When we stepped outside through the door, I saw at some distance from the building two teenagers talking with each other. Like two land surveyors they stood facing each other and gesticulated.” In a classroom – and the classrooms at the Institute must be very large, because the students cannot get too near to one another without starting to feel ill as a result of the Indigo syndrome – there is a “pale female face in the highest row. She held little opera glasses up to her eyes, which made her feel incredibly elegant.”

As these moments accumulate throughout the novel, there is a growing sense that there is but a slight distance between the world as it is represented in the novel and the world as we might normally perceive it. This experience is likened to illness, which can itself defamiliarise the world, like a dream or a drug trip or being in love: “I […] suddenly know that I’m inside a migraine aura. It’s a strange world, a parallel universe, in which you can go through doors that are afterward no longer in their former place. You pronounce a word, and it’s the wrong color. Or you look at a tree and discover geometries in the arrangement of its branches.” This is a clever conceit because it happens to be quite true. Even a mild headache or a spell of dizziness or a stomach cramp can change one’s whole sense of being. Furthermore, it is clever within the context of Indigo‘s constant defamiliarisations: if the strangeness of fiction is the strangeness of illness, then it cannot be placed outside of any account of reality. Indeed, one German reviewer noted that “one can’t read the book without suffering an oppressive [beklemmend] headache”, giving the conceit a pleasingly concrete tangibility.

The similarity between fictional experience and the experience of illness, between the experience of reading the novel and the experience of having a headache, are important for the obvious reason that the novel is about a fictional illness. If we interpret the Indigo syndrome as a symbol of the experience of reading fiction, then we have to ask why we bother with it at all. Illness is not, after all, a particularly appealing metaphor, and the Indigo children are characterised by their distance and isolation. In answer, Indigo repeatedly suggests that the Indigo children might somehow benefit from their condition, that it might grant them a privileged perspective or an uncommon purity. This suggestion is mostly made by analogy. They are compared to steel from Scapa Flow, the site of the scuttling of the German fleet after the First World War, which is used to build spacecraft: “The rest of the steel in the world is – after Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and the numerous atomic bomb tests carried out in the earth’s atmosphere – too radioactive to be used in the production of such highly sensitive instruments.” Only this sad sunken steel can allow humanity to fly transcendently.

The Indigo syndrome might also, as the director of the Habianau Institute speculates, grant the children a resilience like that of Thomas Edison. The director details Edison’s failure to produce a talking doll using a wax record: “After it was played three or four times, the quality of the recording declined so steeply that the doll emitted only a horrible screech.” But, the director goes on, Edison wasn’t deterred: “He was fearless, really didn’t flinch from anything. In 1903 he killed an elephant from the Coney Island amusement park, an animal named Topsy, by high-voltage electrocution, in order to prove that direct current was better and more efficient than Tesla’s alternating current.” This success was cheered by a crowd of 1500; the elephant was executed because it had killed its trainer, who had been abusing it for years. Another sadness reimagined as a victory.

There are other analogies in Setz’s novel, far too many to detail fully here: the Indigo children might be like Kazakh mothers who want their irradiated children to have a high Geiger counter reading because they think the machine works by taking away the radioactive particles; they might be like a woman in Bavaria who is allergic to everything, and forces down food and medicine in agony three times a day; they might be like a rooster kept in darkness his whole life, which still crowed every morning, until  one day escaping into the “brightness of the world, which his cells had always told him actually existed, and he hadn’t been able to believe it.” There is commonality to all these analogies. They are all part of Setz’s overarching strategy of defamiliarisation, and exist somewhere on the boundary between reality and fiction. They are self-consciously textual, and therefore marked as unreliable: the story about the steel is condemned by its author (a specialist on the Indigo syndrome) for being inaccurate; the story about the Bavarian woman is criticised by the narrator for being “sloppily and unsympathetically written”. And, most importantly, they are all tragic, and painful, and contain a glimmer of hope, no matter how obscured.

This glimmer of hope is empathy, a quality that Setz displays in abundance – for animals and people, for criminals and victims, for distraught mothers and even for steel that has lain on the ocean floor. Tätzel, the Indigo child, has this same kind of empathy, as does Setz’s fictional namesake, who writes:

Ever since I was a child, my sympathy with things and animals had been stronger than with people. Lost scarves wept all night in the darkness, a busted umbrella felt like a raven with broken wings and was inconsolable about the fact that it would never again feel the fresh rain on its stretched skin, a bee buzzing along the inside of a window longed for the air and the sun and the nearness of its colony, and a tree from whose crown an old Frisbee was shaken was sad about the loss of its toy or jewelry.

It is this sensitivity – a bout of unbearable empathy for some suffering dogs – that causes Setz to murder the Romanian man. We should not rush to embrace empathy, then: it is a glimmer of hope, but it is only a glimmer, and may well be mistaken. It is a means of dignifying and aestheticising suffering, a way of finding pity and beauty in cruelty, misery and decay. It is an illness – both literally and metaphorically – because it perpetuates suffering, but it is also a gift in that suffering can yield to a moment of pleasure before one’s death. Indigo offers two conclusions, then: that reality can be a kind of fiction, and that fiction can be almost unbearably sad. This is why access to fiction is characterised as a kind of illness, and why this fictional syndrome lies at the centre of the novel. Experiencing the fictive and the defamiliarised is unpleasant, disorientating, and isolating, but it can inculcate a kind of empathy, and with that empathy comes hope. Setz writes that the Czech poet Miroslav Holub “of all writers in the previous century – with the exception of Sebald and Kafka – is perhaps the one with the most strongly developed but also most idiosyncratic capacity for empathy.” He may as well have been writing about himself.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Timothy Kennett is a writer based in London.

Share