Daša Drndić’s ‘EEG’ and the Joys of Pessimism

 

The most convincing literary pessimists are superior stylists. They smooth their nihilistic impulses into pleasing shapes. Despair is largely inimical to art, while melancholy—its pensive, perfumed cousin—makes of the void something paradoxically seductive. I think of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I with its horizon of bats and comets, its alchemical implements and carpenter’s tools laid in disarray. This extends, perhaps extends especially, to literary art. If the negative radiance of Giacomo Leopardi or Fernando Pessoa arises from a certain nihilism—that existence is evil, say, or without meaning—that message is nonetheless palliated by the intrinsic beauty of their craft. This is a kind of strategic enticement. If we are to follow the pessimistic artist into his annihilating vision, a little poetry goes a long way.

 

 

In another lengthy section, Drndić juxtaposes two very different formal rigors—chess and genocide—in a pocket history of Europe’s grandmasters of chess. We are told how a generation of eccentric geniuses leaped from windows, suffered heart attacks, threw themselves beneath trains, and dropped dead during international competitions. “There’s nothing abnormal about the fact that chess players are abnormal,” Nabokov, who wrote the wonderful chess novel The Defense, once said in an interview. But chess players were also seen as potential subversives. “Chess is imagination,” Ban reminds us, “the negation of rules, the negation of directives, it is art, challenge and autonomy.” Chess champions were murdered by the Nazis in appalling numbers. Drndić here blurs the boundaries between play and reality, the strategies of the game and those employed for slaughter. Chess was an elegant contest nested within a larger and far deadlier one: “Reality was so noisy (and bloody) that it suppressed the imagination,” Ban says, “reality imposed its own game, mercilessly and cruelly.”

 

 

www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/05/22/dasa-drndics-eeg-and-the-joys-of-pessimism/#more-136566