“Our Winter issue features fiction by Alexander Kluge: “In Medieval Angelology, There Are Nine Orders of Snow,” twenty-two stories on some lines from Ben Lerner’s The Lichtenberg Figures. Kluge made a rare trip to New York a few months ago, appearing in conversation with Lerner at the Goethe Institute and at Princeton. Afterward, they talked over sushi. The interview below is excerpted from their conversation. They continue to send poems and prose back and forth to each other.”
“LERNER
The current issue of The Paris Review includes stories you wrote in response to The Lichtenberg Figures, my first book of poems. How did you encounter the book?”
“KLUGE
A coworker found the bilingual German translation. He said, “Here’s a book you cannot buy anymore. The title is The Lichtenberg Figures.” He knew that I was very interested in Lichtenberg, particularly The Waste Books.”
“Your book costs seventy-eight euros because it’s out of print. German publishing houses always prefer fiction to poetry. Lyrics are concentrated forms. It’s a much better way to express yourself. In all these deserts of information we need some oasis, and that’s what the lyric is.”
“LERNER
And so how do you think about your short prose forms in relation to lyric poetry?”
“KLUGE
My language is not as beautiful as lyrics. This is something that you have to know how to do. Poets are diamond polishers. But there are also collectors of raw diamonds—I am a good archaeologist.”
“LERNER
But you also are a master of montage, which is very similar to enjambment in poetry—the startling juxtaposition. Do you think of yourself as a poet of a sort?”
“KLUGE
I cannot judge that myself but I like to hear it. I think what we are both doing is creating constellations. We deal with moving bodies. Moving reality. And this is something that you cannot present in a linear way, but in the form of constellations. There are suns, moons, planets. There are also the dust particles, tiny particles that orbit around the sun for centuries according to physical laws. And there’s no hinge, no screw that connects them. Invisible connections. Concentrated prose and lyrics have that in common.”
“LERNER
Can we talk about angels a little bit? The angels in these stories—it’s not that they don’t exist, it’s that they’re poorly organized. In a lot of your work you take the language of metaphysics—angels, spirits, whatever—and combine it with the language of what I’ve heard you call “planification.” The language of administration, bureaucracy.”
“KLUGE
And the language of the heart.”
“LERNER
All in one space. Are these poorly organized angels a reason to hope—there are, after all angels—or a reason to despair—they don’t get much done?”
“KLUGE
I myself am not the judge of the angels. And I by myself am not a subject either. I have the rabbis in Babylon. They stayed there after Nebuchadnezzar. The more sophisticated, deeper form of theology. The rabbis in Jerusalem are influenced by Rome, they’re a little bit more cautious, but the genuine theologians, the genuine philosophers, are the rabbis in Babylon. Sholem is the bridge between them. He has big ears, very big ears. The fiftieth birthday of Habermas he talked to my wife and I think that my son was created because of him. Because she had confidence about the way he was talking. This is how I am connected with the angelology. Because these angels do exist in reality because there are these rabbis, these authors, that you have to take seriously and they talk about them. It would be arbitrary to say that we cannot know anything about angels just because they very rarely come into laboratories.”
“LERNER”
“You make me think of the Kabbalah, the complicated numerology, the concern with numbers has always been there—maybe it’s always been a question of angels and administration.”
“KLUGE
Yes and with the lyric, too. Numbers and animals. Suddenly the number seven is flying, something strange in quantum physics—half and whole numbers represent the little reality that we have in the world. But if somebody says to me, “Angels don’t exist,” then I would answer, How would you have observed that?”
“KLUGE”
“poetry doesn’t depend on what you think, it depends on what you write. You have to listen to inner voices, something that does not lie. But without religion you would not have an ear.
If you ask me whether I come from the rib of Adam, that I would deny. I would say I come from the rib of Eve.”
“KLUGE
Some words, some sentences are images. Others are texts. Text is something like a net, yeah? Like a spider’s net, a web. It doesn’t create images. But some images are really writing emblems. So on the coat of arms of Achilles on the shield you have the entire Iliad. Is it a text or is it an image?”
“KLUGE
As a poet I’m actually creating differences, as many differences as possible. And it doesn’t matter if I do this by sequencing images, by putting them up to each other, or by composing text, but it’s always best when I switch between them. I’m a patriot of books because books are very patient. My connection to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, this is something that I cannot create in a film. And also I cannot put it into music. If I had my way, I would move between speech, text, moving images, music, still—the work would always change, switch between them.”