The System of Vienna: From Heaven Street to Earth Mound SquareBy Gert Jonke
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Reviewed by Josh Maday
Gert Jonke opens The System of Vienna, an ostensibly autobiographical work, with the following: “Allow me first of all, in the interest of facilitating the greatest possible understanding, just a few brief words concerning the methodology of the working process I have adopted, thereby also expending a few more words on myself and my academic development.” Jonke then relays a short account of the hours before his birth, an account that can't be anything but fiction, without ever returning to discuss his “methodology,” which has of course already been demonstrated through this tale of his “beginnings.” Jonke emphasizes this with the compound distance of a synoptic description: “The story begins with a description of that cold winter night and how my mother allegedly started out not being able to find her shoes ...”
In this way, The System of Vienna offers an older Gert Jonke a platform on which to compose the scattered pieces of his younger self, a “working process” that takes the reader along on a playful tour of the imaginative landscape where he grew up. Most writers spend the majority of their lives inside their own head, so, when writing an autobiography, it makes sense that Jonke would treat being-in-the-world and being-in-the-mind as inextricable. In The System of Vienna, he inhabits many modes: comic, ironic, metafictional, musical, romantic, sublime, absurd, surreal, fantastic, etc., all while meeting many paranoid and/or delusional characters, some of them Jonke’s own alter egos. It quickly becomes clear that Jonke can’t really—and does not intend to—write his “autobiography” without fictionalizing and outright inventing. For example, the first lines of “The Small City on the Lake”:
You know, I always make a connection between this small city, which I grew up in, and streetcars, even though no streetcars are in service there. Which leads to the conclusion that streetcars must have operated at one time, because how else would I ever have hit on the idea of connecting this place with streetcars?
Yes, there were streetcars traveling through this city at one time...if I think really hard...
Rather than simply recording the impressions that certain people, places, and things left on his consciousness, Jonke allows the alchemy of imagination to transform details from his life and express a world unmistakably infused with his DNA. While the notion of faulty human memory rearranging reality and fabricating to fill in the gaps is not new or groundbreaking, Jonke’s movements are more musical composition than critique of narrative memory. The early pieces follow a roughly chronological order through his childhood, but it’s with the jump into adulthood that the fog thickens, as events begin to swirl back into themselves while people and situations get increasingly strange and fantastic. Jonke’s tales resemble holding a mirror up to another mirror, the reflections drilling infinitely deep into labyrinthine corridors where some minotaur of meaning may or may not await, in the same way fractals appear to be so complex, but are in fact an image barnacled with infinitely receding miniatures of itself, a repetition, a refrain that becomes something different.
Another passage into Jonke’s labyrinth is “Opera Seminar—Metternich Grasse,” where the narrator agrees to assist a professor’s ridiculous and irrelevant slide show seminar even though he doesn’t want to. Inside the “opera department of the Music Academy,” the professor leads him “through the courtyard entrance, pointing out the elaborately wrought windows, interprets the meanings of all the stucco figures, the caryatids and atlantes along the walls ...” and up along a “bewildering, twisting system of staircases and corridors,” finally arriving at the classroom where the lecture is to take place. But the professor has forgotten his slides and sends the narrator back down to find them. And, of course, the narrator gets lost, always taking the wrong corridor after mistaking the correct one for “a niche carved deep into the wall,” until eventually he finds an empty theater, sits down, and “[falls] asleep while thinking, no, don’t fall asleep.” When he later finds his way back to the classroom, he sees the professor had not forgotten the slides after all and is already halfway through his lecture.
Other of Jonke’s fractal characters and narrative mazes include a piece where the narrator attends a furniture show, not out of interest in furniture, but simply because the furniture is being displayed out in the open rather than in a room. He is hailed as the hundred thousandth visitor to the show and the Chancellor’s representative treats him to a beer. The Chancellor’s confidant confides in the narrator that he, the Chancellor’s confidant, does not feel like he is the Chancellor’s confidant, and then goes on to say how the Chancellor himself told his confidant that he, the Chancellor, sometimes cannot fathom that he is the Chancellor, of all people (from which he, the Chancellor bounces back into firm belief in his Chancellorhood, and then the Chancellor’s confidant also rebounds in the present conversation to affirm that he is indeed the Chancellor’s confidant.) The narrator is given a copy of a book entitled The System of Vienna, which he promptly leaves in a trashcan.
This and other repetitions may grate on some readers, but it is worth following Jonke through his dizzying loops of language and narrative, a representative example of which is the piece entitled “Jörger Strasse Prelude and Hernals Beltway Fugue,” a comedy ad absurdum taking the form of a letter recounting a story told to the letter-writer by his father, addressed to a man, an unwitting participant in the story of the letter-writer’s father leaving a confectionery shop and falling down on the sidewalk where “quite a large group of people gathered” and among them was the man to whom the letter is addressed.
Jonke’s finale, funny and moving, is the piece entitled “Caryatids and Atlantes—Vienna’s First Guest Workers,” with its dreamlike atmosphere and narrator softly deluded with the grandeur that his prodigious ability to sleep (with the help of pills, eventually) enthralls the stone statues upholding the buildings throughout the city:
My sleep performances soon came to be esteemed as a wondrously exotic, serenity-inducing form of Gesamtkunstwerk or all-encompassing work of art matchlessly flung high aloft by me, in all its incalculable vastness, into the air of those day-nights and night-days, aided by the sheer force of my individual personality.
That’s why my body was passed along the line...for the purpose of disseminating my sleep concerts, slumber plays, dreamer serenades, fatigue tragedies, exhaustion comedies, all to be marveled at...
In The System of Vienna, Gert Jonke creates what could be a literary image of Bach’s Goldberg Variations: the substance of each moment shifts and grows with each repetition, building on and yet changing everything before and after it at the same time, and the work as a whole would not be what it is without playing each repetition. Excess becomes essential to The System of Vienna, as the journey, especially the strange and sometimes pointless digressions, are what enrich and enliven the work. Finally, translator Vincent Kling’s afterword offers an insightful orientation to the place of The System of Vienna in Jonke’s body of work, suggesting that from the chaos of Jonke’s abundant imagination and playful innovation in narrative emerged the brilliantly ordered craftsmanship seen in later work like Geometric Regional Novel and Homage to Czerny. Gert Jonke was one of the great innovators of late 20th and early 21st Century literature—especially with his incorporation of music and mathematics into fiction—and, for the English-speaking world, each additional translated work is more supporting evidence that Jonke’s place is secure.