From The New Statesman, September 7:
Alexander Kluge’s information epic and how the time for learning is running out.
Unlike most modern European languages, English designates book-length works of prose fiction with the term “novel”. Imported sometime in the mid-16th century from Italy – where novella had been coined to describe the short stories collected in Boccaccio’s Decameron 200 years before – and extended to its more or less current sense in the 17th century, the word retains a semantic filiation to that other child of the age of print, the newspaper, and thus to the concepts of information and modernity itself. Until the Austenite revolution of 1811 the novel often cloaked itself in the trappings of genres later classified as non-fiction – histories, biographies, travelogues, letters – in addition to descriptors derived from oral tradition like stories, tales and chronicles. Thereafter, newspapers provided it with an essential platform, where serialised fictional narrative existed on a continuum with scenes, sketches, feuilleton pieces and other genres of reportage. It is clear that one of the tangential pleasures of reading fiction during the golden age of the novel was akin to consuming “news”, whether it was about country life, factory conditions, adventures on the high seas, or scandalous crimes.
Over the course of the 20th century radio, film, television and digital media eroded print’s controlling stake in information transfer. Already in 1946 Gertrude Stein was complaining that “everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense”. The damage the deluge of information has done to common sense has probably been fatal, but that is another matter: its effect on the novel has not been salutary either. From the standpoint of information, fiction is always surplus; at a time when billions of humans – and now AI – are generating more linguistic information every minute than can possibly be consumed, it is surplus in extremis. What is the value of the fictional contract – wherein the reader treats the events described as if they were real – in a literary field hemmed in on all sides by rival media and glutted with professional and amateur texts that do not require a suspension of disbelief? The rise of prestige genre fiction – particularly science fiction – and the rise of autofiction could each be considered attempts at answering this question: the former eschews l’éffet du réal altogether, while the latter, which is arguably nothing more than a name for the novel in its terminal stage of decadence, bites the bullet and makes its central theme the tension between fact and fiction.
A third answer emerges in the work of the German writer, director, TV producer and public intellectual Alexander Kluge. Now 90, Kluge was born in Halberstadt, the Carolingian town in the Harz that was levelled by Allied bombers during the last month of the Second World War. The son of an obstetrician father, Kluge left Halberstadt, then part of the Bezirk Magdeburg in the German Democratic Republic, to live with his mother in West Berlin. He went on to study law and received his doctorate from the University of Frankfurt, where he met Theodor Adorno and became, for a time, the legal counsel of the Institute for Social Research. Through Adorno, Kluge got a job working as an assistant to Fritz Lang, the director of Metropolis and M, and embarked on a prolific career as a filmmaker. Though less well known to international audiences than Rainer Fassbinder, Werner Herzog or Wim Wenders, he was also a signatory of the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto that launched the New German Cinema movement. He has directed or co-directed dozens of short films, feature-length films, and documentaries, among them Yesterday Girl, which starred his sister Alexandra and won the Silver Lion at the 1966 Venice Film Festival, and the Golden Lion-winning Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed, and an eight-hour documentary about Eisenstein’s attempt to adapt Marx’s Capital, Notes from Ideological Antiquity. He is the founder and prime mover behind the production company dctp (Development Company for Television Programmes), which shows his own experimental documentaries, his freewheeling interviews with intellectual, political and even historical notables (played by actors), as well as other independent programming, mostly late at night.
This would be career enough for a lifetime, but....
....MUCH MORE
