Perfectly pitched prose
D iving again into Chris Kraus’ lucid inner life, we find the landscape hasn’t changed much. Torpor, like her now- famous novels I Love Dick and Summer of Hate, has Kraus herself as the central character, still a hard- up, punkish filmmaker. Her husband is there too, the FrenchJewish cultural theorist Sylvere Lotringer, though in Torpor, they have been transposed as Sylvie and Jerome, and Kraus’ microscopic first person style pulled back to the third.
The torpor of the title is their relationship — wallowing, sexless, not even technically married — and the grim stricken vistas of Eastern Europe in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Soviet occupation, where the couple travel to procure one of the thousands of orphans left abandoned by the Ceausescu regime.
All around them in Paris and Berlin and Prague, and eventually Timisoara, is a sense of momentousness, of History coming down with the Wall, of something changing indelibly in the atmosphere. The former East Berlin now has “Body Shops on the Karl- Marx- Allee, Gaps and Benettons on Rosa- Luxembourg- Strasse”. And yet the couple are stuck within their part- sincere, part- pathetic squabbles: her lack of money, lack of recognition, lack of a child after three abortions and his obsession with the visceral violence- pornography of the Holocaust. Sylvie follows Jerome from one semi- infamous philosopher’s apartment to the next, divorced from their dense conversations because they don’t care to speak her language. Or, she suspects, because she is a woman.
Torpor is undoubtedly autobiographical but Kraus smudges the divide between fiction and embellished documentary. In a way, she removes herself from proceedings, performing the role of the critic and analyst, taking apart each anecdote and examining it from all sides.
Kraus has rightly been praised for her essayistic talent, yet what endures in Torpor is her sense of perfect pitch: exposition never obscures the fluidity of her prose. Every now and again, she flits between the past conditional (“they would have”) to the simple past and you can feel the deadening clang as desired dreams collide with the bitter rigours of reality.
Towards the end, the mood is not torpid at all, but melancholic — a warm wash of imagined nostalgies. “There is nothing metaphysical here,” Kraus writes,” only the developed world bouncing on air.”