[ExI] authors, italian and otherwise

[Damien Broderick]

On 5/17/2010 10:50 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote:

<lots of good stuff>

In my ignorance of all those writers and books, I am tempted to suggest 
as well Stanislaw Lem's HOSPITAL OF THE TRANSFIGURATION. Here's my 
comments on the book from my study TRANSREALIST FICTION:

<In his first published novel, Hospital of the Transfiguration,
Lem’s beautifully observed vignettes fold together, with exquisite 
placement,
like the elements of a ritual, perhaps an exorcism, holding the past
even as it purges its unbearable grief. This is territory trodden more
recently, of course, by such writers as D. M. Thomas and Martin Amis,
using much the same transgressive apparatus.

Stefan Trzyiecki, like Lem himself at the time a student doctor (though
slightly older, so that he begins his practice in wartime), attends an 
uncle’s
funeral in a village where his family have been minor notables for
centuries. As distant and alienated from his kin as Joyce’s Stephen 
Dedalus,
Stefan watches the obsequies with a certain distaste: all this confused
bustle of life, family politics, evasion and warmth. By the novel’s
end, Stefan is lying in the arms of a cool, lovely woman whose name he
does not know, in the hay of a stable, “as blank and empty as the moment
of his birth” (p. 207). That journey to nativity is Poland’s funeral 
rites as well,
his nation’s uncertain rebirth into a condition of internal exile that 
it took
fifty years to challenge.

Although Hospital of the Transfiguration was completed in 1948, it was
not published until 1955—victim of the hegemony of “socialist realism”—
nor translated into English until the late 1980s with the fall of the
Soviet system. Yet it is not easy for us to see what the Polish communist
authorities found technically offensive in the book, which evades realism
only in its structure, and then only to the attuned eye. Even in his 
twenties,
though, Lem was clearly struggling with those questions of form
and narrative strategy that were to turn him away from the quotidian
and into landscapes of the cognitive imagination. More recently he has
written: “Those days have pulverised and exploded all narrative conventions
that had previously been used in literature. The unfathomable
futility of human life under the sway of mass murder cannot be conveyed
by literary techniques in which individuals or small groups form
the core of the narrative.”

If Thomas Mann found a tuberculosis clinic an apt metaphor for the
decline of the West, many writers since have looked to a more extreme
figure: the lunatic asylum, the cuckoo’s nest. Almost by accident Stefan
takes a job in a mental hospital named, with grotesque irony, for Christ
in his transfigured state after the resurrection. There is little enough 
hope
of rebirth for these poor souls. In the era before sophisticated 
psychoactive
medication, Lem’s site is the customary Bedlam of heedless, untrained
orderlies and medical staff themselves on the verge of craziness.
Each is sketched with precision and wit as Lem puts his carnival through
its paces before the authentic madness begins, when the SS arrive to
murder the doctors’ charges, those supposedly less-than-human victims
of disease, stress and the accidents of genetics.

At the heart of the novel is a truly horrifying Foucauldian rebus of the
whole, a clinically described operation to remove a tumor from the brain
of a patient who has been deteriorating under the enthralled gaze of his
surgeon. Kauters (a suitable emblematic name) is the sole German physician
among these Poles, destined to cower and blubber before his triumphant
countrymen. At the operating table he delves and tears into
the naked brain like a mining engineer dredging a sacred site, scorching
tissue when an artery is cut, scooping out the cancer until, to his 
exasperation,
the patient lies dead. Beyond the walls of the asylum, in a local
power station, Polish patriots smuggle arms to partisans and brood upon
the bodies of suicides charred black by electricity. Lem’s world in this
apparently realist first novel is at once pitiless and aching with pity, a
small gem of a book gleaming across the decades like a drop of blood
caught in a spotlight.>

Damien Broderick