learning to pray: a review
a version of this essay appeared in chimurenga chronicle
There’s a twofold appositeness in reading Gonçalo Tavares’ Learning to pray in the age of technique while living in Germany.
Tavares has given the characters in his loosely linked Kingdom quartet unerringly old-fashioned Teutonic names—Spengler, Buchmann, Walser—and archetypally German characteristics, even as he elides precise reference to the world(s) they inhabit.
But the aptness is partly accidental. Germany, as it happens, has been much in the news at the time of this writing, with comparisons being drawn between its national “character,” and those of southern Europe’s floundering economies. Implicit in these analogies is a question, how can others emulate German success, to which can be appended an unspoken rider, without becoming too much like her.
Learning to Pray’s protagonist, his health fading, perceives that his surgical skill is conflated with the quality of his character. “He didn’t mind being competent but that this competence should be confused with a sort of goodness…was unacceptable.”
The tension between the two Germanys has long made other Europeans wary. I’m aware, when in Germany of being in Mitteleuropa, with its faith in the significance of blood and a deeply etched weltanschauung. As far as such generalizations are useful, Germany’s estimation of itself is immanent and grounded in very different earth than France’s. France has succeeded in peddling itself beyond its borders. Today, its stature rests in part on a preserved-in-aspic foreign adulation of its manners, language, customs. History too is significant; not for nothing does Francafrique endure.
Germany lacks colonial clients and Gallic dash but its contributions to art, philosophy and science are underrated. Take nothing away from Pasteur, Rousseau and Sartre, but Germany’s contribution to science, philosophy, theology far outranks its neighbour’s. Viewed from Germany, France comes to seem sham, respectable certainly but overpraised. It is impossible, for instance, to imagine a German BHL. Germany has birthed the modern world.
Lenz Buchmann, the novel’s aforementioned protagonist, is endowed by an esoteric (yet recognizable) ubermenschish quality, a blend of intellectual clarity and almost inhuman dispassion. Buchmann alone recognizes that his life is disordered as any other. He’s compelled by the same lusts as ordinary men, but these are, in him, coexistent with a capacity for dissociative scrutiny of his environment. His relation to his fellow man, his own brother included, struck me as paralleling Germany’s with France or Tavares’ Portugal.
But Germany has another, less apparent foil in the world than Greece or France. America features not at all in Learning to Pray, but if it did it would stand for technology whereas Germany signifies technique. That word (Technica in the original Portuguese title) is well chosen for its adjacency to technology, i.e. circuitry, or computation, while still carrying a strong implication of manual praxis, of the idiosyncratic perfectibility of human handiwork.
The technique of the title, which belongs obliquely to Buchmann, is surgical. The tactility of surgery, of medicine, separates it from the other modern professions—banking, for instance or the programming of microchips, neither of which are particularly German strengths.
The USA is in the grip of utopianism, visions of shining cities on hills that approximate the afterlife, or the promise of salvation as an iterative ascent, successive upgrades of the human firmware. Germany tends in a broadly different direction; its dominant strain, Romanticism, looks rearward, viewing with skepticism modernity and blind impartial reason. The Teutonic Romantics, Wagner, even Nietzsche, reserved for nature and the pagan myths of the past the awe that Americans offer God or Science, sometimes both at once.
Germany fabricates, buildings, machines, is in fact very good at this, anomalously among western nations. The homocentric processes on which machine shops and scale models depend are being sharply overtaken. The goals of automation and robotism are at once commercial and Utopian (and thus anti-Romantic): satisfying a mass hunger for shiny and inexpensive toys of convenience while also securing for humanity an immortality free of disease.
Both movements, Romanticism, Utopianism are abundant with inward paradox, and are not necessarily inimical one to the other. Nazism married romanticism, that is, a faith in nature’s immutable hierarchy, with the utopianism of the final solution.
Another trite-seeming but unavoidable observation: Deutschland contains not only America’s beginnings but also its future. The country that owes its rehabilitation in the world to the Marshall Plan, manages to be both parent and offspring to Uncle Sam, and demonstrates its gratitude with good-natured forbearance, in contrast to France, toward America’s cultural imperialism.
But for what does America owe Germany? A subtler debt than the obvious one to Britain, and also France: culture certainly, but also a blueprint, going forward, for managing post-hegemonic decline. Deutschland—social democracy, an aging population, mass transit—may not tempt Americans very much but it is a vision, a best-case scenario, of what lies in store.
The four tenuously linked novels that make up the Kingdom Series are reticent about place and also maddeningly vague in terms of periodicity. Here, in Learning to Pray, the most recent, is a depiction of Germany perhaps during that period between World Wars. Whereas, the first book, Jerusalem, contains allusions to Arendt, to Buchenwald, hints that suggest a more contemporary time.
No matter: these worlds are familiar; it is the individuals trapped in them—incarnations of belief, suffering, knowledge— that are otherworldly. Tavares’ protagonists are prisms through which the reader glimpses strange and unrecognizable ideas or familiar ideas turned inside out. Learning to Pray possesses, in spades, an alienative quality that removes it entirely from the vast sea of contemporary prose in which tidy and redemptive resolutions are worked out.
Trying to work up comparisons to other writers (why?), I reached at first for Will Self and Kosinski. Cunning seditiousness rather than any stylistic or thematic similarity. Later, it seemed to me that Vian and the contemporary Israeli Castel-Bloom come nearer but both these writers cross a line into surrealist absurdity that never tempts Tavares.
And while Learning to Pray may appeal to readers of Ballard it is not dystopian. Ballard’s works function primarily as projections of a future ever more colored by man’s irresistible impulses: dominance, restlessness, self-immolation. Cocaine nights, for instance, is perceptive but its futurity limits its power; it cannot be mistaken for anything but a (faintly despairing) depiction of humans’ fate.
Whereas Tavares insists on never really telegraphing any standpoint. Sure, glints of misanthropy poke intermittently through (unsurprising from one who likely knows his Nietzsche and his Cioran) but so also does mirth.
Learning to Pray is forcefully philosophical. Aphoristic prose and Buchmann’s musings disclose a preoccupation with existence and perception, and the reader is continually enticed to revisit commonplace notions (delusions?): sentience in nature, human progress. “Man tries to resist [disease], finding allies in…centuries of medical and technical development, while on the other hand there is illness, likewise strengthened by centuries of its own particular history, to which men have no access. Illnesses have not stayed still.”
Parsing Buchmann’s reflections is akin sometimes to reading a novelisation of John Gray’s philosophical writing. In Straw Dogs, a work I return to repeatedly, Gray has written that, “though human knowledge will very likely continue to grow…the human animal will stay the same.”
Lenz is a pillar of society: successful physician, and thus curator of other men’s lives; bibliophile; (his name literally is book man) and man of action. From his father, Frederich, Lenz has absorbed an ethos grounded in natural law: force, antagonism, hierarchy. One rule of the household in which Lenz has grown up is that “fear is illegal.”
The German Romantics esteemed emotional responses to the natural world irrespective of whether the reaction was awe or terror, and Buchmann himself expresses great animus toward nature. “There was a new light in the cities…,” Tavares writes, “which had only increased the hatred that the most ancient elements in the world seemed always to have harbored for man.” He lives in town, but Buchmann, like a very few others, is a throwback, acting in accord with uninscribed laws older and more unbreakable than those written in any book.
Buchmann’s technique, his success with the scalpel, is owed to the precision of his hands but also to the acuity of his observations. His thought, fed by his father’s instruction, pierces to the essence of things. During an operation, for instance, to save the life of a man injured by the explosion of machinery, [Lenz] “felt with unusual intensity the struggle between the two extremes of medical technique: his scalpel embodying precision…morality and…on the sick man’s side…the clear results of an explosion provoked by technique…The two opposing sides were made of exactly the same substance. They were sons not of the same God but the same man.”
The novel moves in digressive lurches, forward and backward, tracing Buchmann’s childhood, his professional and political rise, and the subsequent (and inevitable) reverses. Some covers of the book even carry the subtitle: Lenz Buchmann’s place in the world.
I say inevitable not to accuse the work of predictability. It is both fitting and null that the story unwinds as it does. Life is a matter of contingency, the author suggests, but he wishes us also to disregard denouement and rather enter fully into his experiment.
Like illness, nature has its own past if not a history, its own rules and triumphs, and is enduringly at odds with humans’ own course. And nature’s permanence (Nature hasn’t even invented fire yet.), its impermeability to history was [its] major weapon. Meanwhile if materials and the ways of transforming them had…evolved human passions had nonetheless been immobilized.”
Lenz has an older brother, Albert, with whom he shares nothing save a name. “There were no ties of indebtedness at all…they were separate constructions…” The two are in fact “rivals for a material heritage…” that consists mostly of the father’s book collection. At Albert’s funeral, Lenz thrills that he “could finally have exclusive use of the name that publicly proclaimed the strong bloodline from which he had been born.”
It is Lenz that detects the fatal sign of Albert’s illness in an x-ray scan. And during his brother’s burial, Lenz’s life is transfigured. At the funeral, he observes a shift in the demeanor of well-wishers after they’ve greeted him and are going on to address the president of the city. “condolences had been offered by individuals, and those same individuals…had greeted power in the position of soldiers…human elements canceling themselves out within a crowd. In that short journey...these men had lost their names. Lenz was never greeted like that…he’d only ever been greeted man to man.”
Attracted by curiosity and a wish to be accorded similar respect, Buchmann draws near the levers of power very quickly, becoming the right hand man of a party leader with ambitions to be the next president. From his quite new and elevated position, he’s afforded an even more sweeping vantage from which to cast his cold eye over the world.
The most potent writing in the book is concerned with the parameters and disposition of power, law and madness. In the city is a well-known madman, Rafa whom Lenz encounters while out walking one day with party leader Hamm Kestner (Lenz’s brother—with the advantage he did not bear the same surname). “The two men turned their faces toward him [and] so they paid the madman more attention than the dozens…of other people they passed. The madman…deserved more respect than all the others…in him the two men could discern a…personal pride, which, if not allowing him to command other men…did allow him not to obey them.”
A précis of modern power with its binary character; however they come by it, authority attaches solely to those that receive orders from no one. Rafa may appear to be of low status but is properly without rank, is outcaste.
Nor is Rafa the first persona non grata in Buchmann’s orbit. During his career as a surgeon, Lenz made a habit of inviting into his home an indigent, whom he taunts with questions about patriotic duty, and in whose presence he sexually penetrates his wife while the beggar waits to be fed.
Lenz encounters in the street this tramp “with whom he had signed a kind of secret contract” and feels shamed by the past interaction. The man is linked to him by his own mortality. Certain of his growing influence, he contemplates killing the man. “Really it wouldn’t be difficult…But Lenz couldn’t help thinking that even in the most equitable societies…powerful men only didn’t kill a tramp, right there in the street, in front of everyone else, with their bare hands or…a weapon because they didn’t want to humiliate the country’s laws in public…they were in some sense the guardians of those laws. An allusion one again to the pre-eminence of natural law, which serves a very different aim than does manmade law
Rafa’s role in the novel is small but his presence is outsize. Congruencies between Lenz (and Kestner) on the one hand and Rafa on the other absorb Buchmann’s attention. “The invisible weapon the madman carried…was not only insensible but also incommunicable” whereas “those two public men, those politicians…the strength of whose weapons resided…in the way their power could be understood immediately.”
Lenz conceives of Rafa’s madness as “the fundamental conflict between a pencil and an eraser, the latter “effacing what the pencil has inscribed in the outside world, casting a word or picture back into the world of the inexplicit. “This existence that ceases to exist without leaving behind a corpse or any remains—a blank page that moments earlier might have borne the most meaningful sentence in the world—had always fascinated Lenz.”
And the lunatic’s condition anticipates Lenz’s own fate. Buchmann himself sickens to a point at which he’s no longer an effective political actor. Throughout the protracted degeneration of his health and competence, Buchmann maintains his official post, inviting the same respect as before. His mind has become, in effect, the pencil and his body the eraser.