Passion and the passion for writing

Gerd Hammer
Universidade de Lisboa / Centro de Estudos Comparatistas

Nothing great has

been accomplished
without passion, nor
can it be accomplished
without it.
G. W. F. Hegel

Passions such as love and hate often appears together with the
diminution or absence of reason. In other fields such as religion, sport, or
politics, we also find passion or enthusiasm and devotion. But if this passion
ends fatally, then strong feelings such as love, which as we know can make
you blind, are usually behind it. In the arts, the femme fatale is probably the
best-known figure for this passion. Ever since Eve and the expulsion from
paradise, it has been impossible to imagine literature and cinema without
this form of femininity  1. Whether she serves the head of the Baptist on a
silver platter, seduce politicians and the military as Mata Hari or seduce
detectives into adventurous, usually highly dangerous capers, it is always
the passion provoked by them and the fading out of reason that becomes a
danger to those in their thrall and sometimes literally makes them lose their
heads.

1. A good overview of the femme fatale and its various manifestations can be found in
Hanson 2010. At the same time, it becomes clear how much the femme fatale eludes a clear
definition: «The femme fatale is thus read simultaneously as both entrenched cultural stereo-
type and yet never quite fully known: she is always beyond definition». (p. 1)
100 GERD HAMMER

However, the woman so shaped and described in literature and the loss
of control of the other protagonists caused by her can certainly also be an
image for writing and the author himself. The femme fatale then reflects a
special attitude between author and work, in which the literary passion may
well shift comparably to other, no less dangerous addictions such as alcohol
or writing itself  2. Here, this (deadly) passion for writing will be shown in the
case of three authors, in chronological order, Heinrich von Kleist, Malcolm
Lowry, and Philippe Djian. Certainly, they are not the only ones who prac-
tise this form of passionate writing, authors like Jack Kerouac or, as a more
recent example of German literature, Clemens Meyer in «Als wir träumten»
or in his short stories want to show, to write life as it is, they set themselves
apart from the aesthetics of their colleagues such as Paul Auster or Daniel
Kehlman, whose literature - no matter how good, interesting, and successful
- has something constructed, a little desk or office smell attached to it. The
authors presented here, however, are rather examples of how much literary
truth or authenticity also requires the artificial. Historical and aesthetic dif-
ferences between these forms are not to be levelled out; they are similarities  3,
not identical.

HEINRICH VON KLEIST

Among Heinrich von Kleist’s female characters, it is above all Penthesilea

and the scenes of violence it contains, the mauling of Achilles by the Queen
of the Amazons and her dogs  4, which cause particular disturbance or
fascination among readers and viewers.
When Kleist wrote the knightly drama Käthchen von Heilbronn /
Kate of Heilbronn, the tragedy Penthesilea and the national drama Die
Hermannsschlacht / Hermann’s Battle in 1807 and 1808, he was just in his

2. The difference between addiction, dependence and passion is not relevant for this
article. Passion is understood here as a loss of control, as a victory of the emotions over the
mind, which is quite comparable to various addictions. For the term passion, see the Ger-
man dictionary by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm: http://woerterbuchnetz.de/cgi-bin/WBNetz/
wbgui_py?sigle=DWB&mode=Vernetzung&lemid=GL04231#XGL04231
3. Cf. on the still undervalued idea of similarity: Funk, 2001.
4. Cf. on rage and anger in literature Lehmann 2012, 25: «And in modernity, for
example in Kleist, Hoffmann and Storm, it is still wolves, dogs and bears that appear in texts
of rage». Penthesilea is not mentioned here, but Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Hermannss-
chlacht are.
Passion and the passion for writing 101

early thirties, and it would be only three years before he ended first Henriette
Vogel’s life and then his own on 21 November 1811 at the Kleine Wannsee
in Berlin  5. In his famous farewell letter to his sister Ulrike, he writes: «(...)
the truth is, there was no help for me on earth. And now good-bye. If Heaven
would grant you a death half as full of joy and inexpressible serenity as my
own, it would fulfil my most heartfelt and sincere wishes for you»  6.
Kleist is not filled with the deepest despair, but with «joy and inexpressible
serenity». He accepts his fate like some of his protagonists, Michael Kohlhaas,
Thusnelda or Penthesilea. What is difficult above all are the decisions and
deeds; once they have been done, they are accepted as unchangeable and the
consequences are carried out rather with equanimity, cheerfully, extremes
that are equally present in Kleist’s work and in his life. Odysseus also describes
Penthesilea as: «Confus’dly, proudly, almost wildly»  7. A deadly mixture  8.
Penthesilea, the queen of the Amazons, succumbs to her predetermined
fate, as her mother Otrere had prophesied to her on her deathbed. She falls
in love with Achilles and thus violates the law of her people, which tolerates
men only for procreation and kills the male offspring.
After the queen has been hit by an arrow, Prothoe, her closest confidante,
asks Achilles to pretend to be defeated, and he himself wants to lose in
another mock battle, since only men defeated in battle may be chosen by the
Amazons. Penthesilea, however, kills Achilles, falls upon him with her dogs
and «She whom a woman’s womb did bear, and rends- / His limbs she rends
and mangles into shreds!»  9,  10 Penthesilea herself becomes one with her pack:

5. Cf. Blamberger, 2013: 232: «Kleist’s staging of his death is a final experiment, a feat
of calculation on the threshold of the incalculable». Blamberger also points to parallels in
formulations from the «Käthchen» and the farewell letters.
6. Miller, 1982: 205
7. Kleist, 1982:169.
8. Cf. on the oscillation between extremes Lehmann, 2001: 93: «Suddenly, heightened
tension turns and Penthesilea becomes an “animal”, Thusnelda exults over the bear that tears
Ventidius apart. Suddenly the sense of right turns to its immanent fanaticism. The stagnation
is the moment of the catastrophic emergence of a latency which, however, does not represent
development, disintegration, but rather gives the constellation, to speak with Walter Benja-
min, a shock and in the process a grimace, an animal, an “in-human” violence to light».
9. Kleist, 1982: 254
10. Cf. Kleist’s (Kleist-digital.de) letter to Adolfine von Werdeck of 29.11.1801(Miller
1982: 136): «To represent one feeling, bit with all its power: that is the highest goal of art, and
in this respect too Raphael is a favourite of mine». Here, however, Kraft means the intensity
102 GERD HAMMER

... a bitch / in company of dogs -one grips his breast, / Another’s jaws close
on his neck-drags him / To earth, that far around the ground re-echoes  11.

Penthesilea is the perpetrator and at the same time the victim of an

intrigue, but intrigues belong to the realm of reason, of calculation; they
must necessarily collide with passion.
Penthesilea’s descriptions exclude her from the rational community of the
warring parties, hyena / raging fury / hedged round with horror / impetuous
girl she is called by the other Amazons, who do not seem convincing in their
mediating role, even somewhat stuffy, after all Penthesilea’s radicalism is the
law of the Amazons. After the deed, she slowly awakens, unable to remember
what happened. She is enlightened by the high priestess:

High Priestess: He loved thee still, O happless girl! He came / To give

himself to thee, thy prisoner. / That his intent when he did challenge thee!
/ He came to thee, dreaming sweat dreams of piece, / Eager to follow thee
to Dian’s temple. / But thou- / Penthesilea: Was it so?  12.

What Penthesilea was unable to achieve in life, she wants to achieve in the
afterlife; she renounces the law of women and follows «this youth» with her
suicide. She could not be helped on earth either. Penthesilea is rather soft,
gentle, has small hands like Käthchen - «With these my tiny hands they say
I could-?»  13, but like the Käthchen she embodies something unified, beyond
reason and tactics. The intrigues fail for different reasons: in Thusnelda’s case
it is revenge, in Käthchen / Kate’s it is the recourse to the fairy tale.
Achilles remains peculiarly pale in comparison with Penthesilea. He
seems more like a conqueror of female hearts than a war hero: «Achilles:
You know yourselves, since first my beard began / To show, gladly I’ve stood
at each one’s service. / And if from this one I have still refrained, / By Zeus!
there’s but one cause: I’ve not yet found / That bush-girt spot where, as
her heart desires, / Unhindered I can enjoy her, bedding her / On the hard
pillows of our mailed suits»  14.

of representation, not just violence as an aesthetic concept. See also (Badura, 2013) on rage
and passion.
11. Kleist, 1982: 254.
12. Kleist, 1982: 265.
13. Kleist, 1982: 265.
14. Kleist, 1982: 185.
Passion and the passion for writing 103

For the bon vivant and womaniser, for whom love is a game «since first
my beard began to show», there can be no place at Penthesilea’s side. Parallels
to the femme fatale can be seen in her power of seduction, and for Achilles
it ends fatally. But otherwise, Kleist’s Amazon Queen hardly conforms to the
scheme of the femme fatale. Carola Hilmes pointed out as early as 1990 how
blurred this concept is, how little it stands up to closer scrutiny:

The femme fatale seems familiar, the reference to this type of feminini-
ty is taken for granted. But if one takes a closer look at the female figures
described as femme fatale, confusion and irritation arise. Schickedanz alone
names, among others, Medea, Penthesilea and Lulu, Eva, Jezabel, Delila,
Judith and Salome, as well as Messalina and Cleopatra, Isolde, Genoveva
and Francesca, Vittoria Accoromboni, Lucrezia Borgia and the Countess
of Challant. This assemblage of mythological and historical female figures
would have to be supplemented by a number of modern female artists with
Sarah Bernhardt at the forefront and a number of well-known film vamps
from Theda Barra and Louise Brooks to Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn
Monroe  15.

Penthesilea, Käthchen and Thusnelda bear clear traits of their poet; in

their devotion and radicalism they are his spitting image. To Marie von
Kleist he writes:

[Dresden, Late autumn 1807]

Indiscribably moving, all that you write me about Penthesilea. It is true,
my deepest nature is there, and you have caught it like a seeress: all the
filth and radiance of my soul together. Now I am courious what you will
think of my Kate of Heilbronn, for she is the reserve side of Penthesilea,
her opposite pole, a being quite as great in her complete submission as the
other is in her self-assertion  16.

As if in a frenzy, Kleist also seems to have written the 24 scenes in blank

verse of his Penthesilea. When he reports the completion of the tragedy in
a letter to Marie von Kleist, he seems strangely surprised by the outcome,
as if he had not planned the ending himself: «[Dresden, Late autumn,

15. Hilmes, 1990: 2

16. Miller, 1982: 175. Kleist also emphasises this similarity in his letter to Heinrich
von Collin of 8 December 1808: «For whoever loves Kate cannot find Penthesilea utterly
incomprehensible; they belong together as the + and - of algebra, and are one and the same
nature, but imagines under opposite circumstances» (Miller, 1982: 181).
104 GERD HAMMER

1807] I have finished my Penthesilea, of which, if you recall, I wrote you so

enthusiastically when the idea first struck me. She actually ate him up, her
Achilles, out of love. Do not be alarmed, it reads well enough»  17.
And he is immediately aware that this play will not be performed in this
way: «Whether it can be played, considering the public’s expectations from
the stage these days, time alone must decide. I rather think not, nor do I wish
it, while the talents of our actors are practiced only in aping the characters of
a Kotzebue or Iffland»  18.
Even Goethe’s alienation when Kleist sent him the first edition of the
journal Phöbus, published by him and Adam Heinrich Müller, with the
«organic fragment» of the play  19, did not lead to a revision of the drama.
Kleist knew that this play was hardly bearable for his contemporaries, not
only for Goethe. It was not until 65 years after its publication that Penthesilea
was first performed in Berlin on 25 April 1876.
In Hermannsschlacht / Herrmann’s Battle, the writer Kleist also stood in
the way of the patriot. And again, Kleist seems to know this very well, the
motto of the play is:

«Wehe, mein Vaterland, dir! Die Leier, zum Ruhm dir, zu schlagen
Ist, getreu dir im Schoß, mir, deinem Dichter, verwehrt»  20.
«Woe, my fatherland, to thee! The lyre, to thy glory, to strike
Is, true to thee in thy bosom, denied to me, thy poet.»

Written in 1808 after Prussia’s defeat by Napoleon, printed in 1821 and

not premiered until 1860, the play was long regarded in the 20th century
as the drama of a German nationalism  21. During the period of German
fascism, it became one of the most frequently performed stage plays. This

17. Miller, 1982: 175

18. Miller, 1982: 175
19. Kleist an Goethe (Miller, 1982: 178 - 179): «I present it to you “on the knees of my
heart...”» «Goethe’s astonishment in the face of Penthesilea is clear: Goethe to Kleist, Weimar,
1 February 1808: “To Penthesilea I have as yet been unable to warm. She is of so singular a
race, and inhabits so alien a region, that I shall need time to find my way to both”» (Miller,
1982: 179).
20. Kleist, 2002: 3. Cf. Michelsen 1987, who explores the question of whether this play
contributes at all to the glory of the Fatherland.
21. Kleist writes to Heinrich Joseph von Collin, «But, how is it, my dearest friend, with
the Hermannsschlacht? You can easily imagine how much the performance of this play, which
was calculated solely for this moment, is close to my heart. Write to me soon: it will be given;
every condition is indifferent to me, I give it to the Germans; only make it be given» (1809).
Passion and the passion for writing 105

was probably one of the reasons why it was not performed for a long time.
It was only performed again in the GDR in 1957, as an anti-American
propaganda drama, and in Bochum in 1982, directed by Claus Peymann,
as an anti-imperialist liberation theatre with Hermann in Che Guevara look.
Kleist’s nationalist-propagandist intentions were particularly disturbed
by Thusnelda, the bear scene was cancelled at the premiere, and she was
not allowed to be called «Thuschen». Peymann didn’t know what to do with
her either, and in his performance, she came across as petit-bourgeois and
simple-minded.
The blonde Thusnelda becomes a femme fatale for the Roman legate
Ventidius. And she is the victim of an intrigue that she herself helps to set up,
but then can no longer control. The Roman cuts off a lock of her hair, and in
an intercepted letter promises the Empress Livia Thusnelda’s hair:

Here I send you some of the hair I intended for you,

And that immediately, when Hermann sinks,
The scissors will reap for thee,
«A sample of which I have wisely procured for thee  22.

Thusnelda sets a date with Vestidius for a love meeting, lures him into
a bear enclosure and leaves him there to die cruelly. After the deed, she
faints  23. Only in the last, twenty-third performance does she appear again
briefly, Hermann notices how pale she is. She will not recover.
If we consider the Kleist characters mentioned here as close relatives
of their author, interesting aspects emerge for their interpretation: they all
develop according to an inner logic, not following any external, rational plan,
but rather failing to reason with each other. Just as thoughts are gradually

22. Kleist, 2002: 47

23. Cf. on fainting in Kleist Genanzino, 2007: 20 «The Marquise of O.... faints three
and a half times; the hopeless foundling only arouses the pity of Antonio Piachi, a travelling
goods merchant, by fainting. Michael Kohlhaas sinks into a swoon when he has to explain
“who he is”; and his antagonist, the Junker von Tronka, even falls “from one swoon into
another”, although Kleist does not reveal how we are to think of such a series of swoons
technically. To this day, the vulnerability of the subject is considered a private event and is
therefore hardly communicable. In this respect, in Kleist’s work, powerlessness is an attempt
by individuals to escape the pull of the traumatic through publicity. Individuals are marked
by powerlessness, and as marked, one may address them to their powerlessness, that is, to their
mortification».
106 GERD HAMMER

manufactured as they are spoken, so it is with these characters  24. This is true

of Kohlhaas, Penthesilea, Käthchen and Thusnelda. And with the exception
of Käthchen, who is saved by a cherub, it ends fatally or in confusion. And
they all resist intrigues, plans and mind games, they are something absolute,
but they are not meant for this earth and for this time. Kleist’s writing style,
his passion for writing ultimately determines everything.
And recognizable in this attitude is the absoluteness of his protagonists,
he becomes, as if God’s own Chisel   25. And Kleist does not go back behind this
truth arising from the characters and «calmly» accepts the consequences; the
desire for a patriotic festival play is shattered by Thusnelda and Penthesilea
cannot be performed. Kleist’s heroes represent a truth that is specific to them,
that disturbs the others, and he would rather renounce the performances
than compromise; after all, like Penthesilea, they are the «filth and radiance
of his soul». This truth, reflected in his characters, is probably also that of
his life. The «serenity» with which he goes to his death is to be found in
the realization that he has tried everything. If it does not work, if time and
circumstances are not yet ripe, it must be accepted, but self-assurance is not
affected.
Kleist’s passionate and consistent pursuit of this style of writing, the
decision to become a writer in the first place, may be due to the Kant crisis  26,
but it also reveals the pursuit of a decision once made; he fleshes out the
characters right down to the final consequences.
This principle of writing can be found later in Kafka, who is known to
be an enthusiastic reader of Kleist’s work, in a much cooled but comparable
form, when the land surveyor crosses the bridge, the trial is initiated or, as in
the case of the Country Doctor, the wrong path is chosen for once, because:
«A false alarm on the night bell once answered - it cannot be made good, not
ever»  27. Kleist seems to have known this already.

24. Kleist, 1805 (Hamburger, 1951: 43), On the gradual fabrication of thoughts during
speech: «I believe that, at the moment when he opened his mouth, many a great orator did
not know what he was going to say. But the conviction that the neccessary wealth of ideas
would be provided by the circumstances and by the resulting excitement of his mind, made
him bold enough to pick the opening words a trandom».
25. The lightning that strikes the gravestone of the Polish countess in Kleist’s anecdote
God’s own Chisel and forms the letters of ore with the verdict on the deceased.
26. Mandelartz 2006 argues this thesis: «One is more likely to assume the other way
round, that the insolubility of the questions of truth and the “right life” in science and philos-
ophy at least helped trigger the turn to a career as a writer».
27. Kafka, 1952: 156
Passion and the passion for writing 107

MALCOLM LOWRY

«Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen. / Whosoever
unceasingly strives upward... him can we save.» Malcolm Lowry chose the
verses from Goethe’s Faust II  28 as the motto of Under the Volcano, this great
novel of the 20th century  29. In German and in English, these lines stand at
the beginning of a book in which redemption has no place and at the end
of which there is a murder and a sentence that can only be compared to
the conclusion of Kafka’s The Trial in terms of its deep, desolate sadness:
«Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine»  30.
The novel is set on the Day of the Dead, 1 November 1938 in the Mexican
town of Quauhnahuac, and recounts the last day in the life of the English
consul and alcoholic Geoffrey Firmin. The motto, however, is probably above
all the passionate efforts of its author to finish the book; Geoffrey Firmin
himself is no longer fighting his fate, he is staggering, drunk, melancholy
and resigned and knows what the hour has struck. The reasons for his despair
are certainly not to be found in alcohol  31.
Lowry wrote Under the Volcano intensively for about ten years, and many
parallels between the novel and its author’s life are obvious, the references to
Mexico, the alcoholism, the similarity between Yvonne and Jan Gabrial  32,
Lowry’s first wife, but the book cannot be reduced to his biography or an

28. Cf. on the Faust motif in Under the Volcano, see Walker, 2017: 1: «Marlowe’s Doc-
tor Faustus has long been recognized as the crucial antecedent of Under the Volcano. As
Anthony R. Kilgallin demonstrated as early as 1965, passages from the play are repeatedly
quoted or otherwise echoed in the novel, key images and characters recur, and the underlying
tone (especially as the “one bare hour” approaches, with its confirmation of eternal doom) of
novel and play is apposite».
29. The novel is included in several lists of the best novels of the 20th century, e.g. Mod-
ern Library’s 100 Best English-Language Novels or Time’s All-Time 100 Novels.
30. Lowry, 1983: 376
31. Cf. e.g. Sherril, 1982: 37: «Why is it that lovers become “two mute unspeaking
forts”? Why do countries destroy each other in the name of peace? Why can a man abhor
his corruption and yet, like John Bunyan’s sinner, be unwilling to fight it? These are the large
questions which Lowry raises, and his great theme, for which alcohol is a metaphor, is human
isolation and the collapse of Western culture. Under the Volcano is, in Lowry’s words, “pas-
sionate poetic writing about things that will always mean something”» (Selected Letters, 80).
32. Not only was the difficult marriage the template for the relationship between Firmin
and Yvonne, Lowry also used letters from Jan Gabrial for his novel. Cf. Gabrial, 2000: 178:
«(In Volcano, Male excerpted portions of my letter with the caustic query: “had Yvonne been
reading Heloise and Abelard?”».
108 GERD HAMMER

example of drunk literature  33. Lowry is not like Brendan Behan «the drinker
with a writing problem». There is no shortage of drinking writers in the
history of literature  34, such as Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Dylan
Thomas, Hans Fallada or Ernst Herhaus.
But the consul’s alcoholism is a symptom, not the occasion for the novel,
and Malcolm Lowry is primarily a writer, not an alcoholic  35, just as Geoffrey
Firmin is not «the spokesman of John Barleycorn»  36: «John Barleycorn was
on a truth-telling rampage of alcohol, giving away the choicest secrets on
himself. And I was his spokesman». In Under the Volcano, it is not alcohol that
speaks, the consul resigns himself to the downfall of culture, love, the values
of classical education as a whole. And because alcohol is not the decisive
factor, the 1st chapter has the special, explanatory significance for the novel
as a whole. The fascination with Lowry’s lifestyle, which on closer inspection
can hardly be considered enviable, promoted the autobiographical reading
of the novel. Wolf Wondratscheck’s songs are a particular example of this  37.
Certainly, the rescue of the manuscript from the flames of his burning hut
on the beach at Dollarton in June 1944 also contributed to transfiguring the
author and the book into a myth in literary history.

33. Cf. e.g. Klepuszewski, 2017: 30: «Much as The Lost Weekend, Lowry’s novel became
a classic of the alcoholic genre, also additionally popularised owing to its successful film ver-
sion directed by John Huston in 1984. (...) Lowry’s novel is so much soaked with alcohol
that Sam Jordison wonders whether there has been “a more alcoholic book than Under the
Volcano?” (2013)». (ibid.: 30).
34. See Leslie Jamison, 2018, for example, who praises sobriety after addiction in her
book and also mentions fellow writers such as Denis Johnson and David Foster Wallace. But
that is precisely what Under the Volcano is not about. Also worthy of mention in this genre
is Jack London’s autobiographical novel John Barleycorn, published in 1913, which tells of
drinking and the problems associated with it.
35. In principle, Grace, 1982: 35: «Because Lowry’s obsession with dipsomania is usu-
ally overemphasized, Volcano is too often described as a novel about drinking. As Lowry slyly
remarked in “Work in Progress”, “in the Volcano, you will be right to suspect that drinking
is a symbol for something else, wrong to imagine that to the drinker, while drinking, a drink
is symbolic of anything else but the next drink” (16). But Volcano is not exclusively about
alcohol any more than its author was absolutamente borracho while writing it, and the book’s
vision of hell is not limited to the mescal bottle any more than the collapse of human com-
munication and the destruction of love and sanity are caused by drinking».
36. Jack London, 1913: 5.
37. Cf. on Wondratschek Grace, 1982: 14: «Wondratschek’s Lowry Lieder celebrate not
so much the writer’s achievement as the man’s life and death - his drinking, his loneliness, his
betrayals, and his self-destruction».
Passion and the passion for writing 109

Lowry not only prefaces the novel with three «epigraphs», but also with
a first chapter, a kind of introduction to the Consul’s life and the events of
1 November 1938. Jaques Laruelle, director and childhood friend of the
Consul, and Dr. Vigil are sitting in a bar, drinking and recapitulating the
events of a year ago. On the way home, Laruelle recalls a time he spent as a
teenager with Geoffrey and his host family:

It was difficult at first to understand what «that Firmin» was doing at

all with such an unlikely family. He had no tastes in common with the
Taskerson lads and he was not even at the same school. Yet it was easy
to see that the relatives who sent him had acted with the best of motives.
Geoffrey’s «nose was always in a book,» (...) surely these fine hearty fellows
would be «just the thing» to help poor Geoffrey over his shyness and stop
him «wool-gathering» about his father and India  38.

Already in his youth, then fifteen years old, the consul was an outsider,
his mother had died, his father had disappeared without a trace in Kashmir,
in addition to being a reader and poet in a sports-loving milieu, «the strange
little Anglo-Indian orphan»  39. In the Cervecería XX, the innkeeper returns
a book on Elizabethan plays to Laruelle; the consul had lent it to him 18
months earlier, Laruelle wanted to make a modern film of the Faust material,
and he had forgotten it in the bar. In this book Laruelle finds a letter from
the consul to Yvonne, but he probably never meant to send it either. Rather,
it served to reassure himself, to take stock. In essence, this letter already
contains the whole of the following novel. Laruelle will accidentally burn
this letter, unlike Max Brod Kafka’s work  40.
A mixture of world-historical and private tragedies determines the fate
of the consul  41. Yvonne  42 takes on the characteristics of a femme fatale, but

38. Lowry, 1983: 25.

39. Lowry, 1983: 22.
40. Allusions to Kafka canKleist, Heinrich von (2002).
41. The enormous density of meanings was also pointed out by Tony Bareham in his
biography of Lowry: Bareham, 1989: 41: “ Levels and layers of meaning are thickly encrusted
onto its narrative line. It creates its own poetical rhythm, and calls for many readings before
it yields up its overlapping strands of associative meaning.
42. In the 1940 version, Yvonne is still the consul’s daughter. Cf. on the different versions
of the novel Asals, 1992: 95, who foregrounds the literary-artistic experiment: «Where the
1940 Volcano fails is in its most immediate impact as literary experience: it fails as art. In
the years that followed, Lowry’s private warning, his own handwriting on the wall, printed
like the Consul’s garden notice in black capitals, was this admonition: “ABJURE THE
110 GERD HAMMER

at the same time she becomes a symbol for the end or impossibility of love
in general:

Since December 1937, and you went, and it is now I hear the spring of
1938, I have been deliberately struggling against my love for you. I dared
not submit to it. I have grasped at every root and branch which would help
me across this abyss in my life by myself. Yvonne but I can deceive myself
no longer. If I am to survive, I need your help. Otherwise, sooner or later,
I shall fall». (Lowry, 1983: 43) (...) «I will stop drinking, anything. I am
dying without you. For Christ Jesus’ sake Yvonne come back to me, hear
me, it is a cry, come back to me, Yvonne, if only for a day...»  43

The day of her return is the day of the consul’s death.

The same tragedy applies to the German submarine officers taken prisoner
of war, who were burned alive in the ship’s oven and for whom the consul
takes responsibility:

For whereas the submarine’s crew became prisoners of war when the
Samaritan (which was only one of the ship’s names, albeit that the Consul
liked best) reached port, mysteriously none of her officers was among them.
Something had happened to those German officers, and what had happe-
ned was not pretty. They had, it was said, been kidnapped by the Samari-
tan’s stokers and burned alive in the furnaces. (...) But the fact remained
the Germans had been put there and it was no use saying that was the best
place for them. Someone must take the blame.

At the centre of the catastrophe is the downfall of the consul and his ideal
world. It is not the entire Occident that is seen off in Under the Volcano,
Laruelle, Yvonne, the Consul’s half-brother Hugh, the policemen, they all
live on. With Kafka, the consul could say, «There is infinite hope. Just not
for us». All the Consul’s education, readings and experiences, historical and
private, condense into a worldview from which there is no escape: «This
is like an ultimate denial —oh Geoffrey, why can’t you turn back? Must
you go on and on for ever into this stupid darkness, seeking it, even now,
where I cannot reach you, ever on into the darkness of the sundering, of the

PLATITUDE OF STATEMENT. FOR IN ART WHAT IS MERELY STATED IS NOT

PRESENTED, WHAT IS NOT PRESENTED IS NOT VIVID, WHAT IS NOT VIVID IS
NOT REPRESENTED, AND WHAT IS NOT REPRESENTED IS NOT ART”».
43. Lowry, 1983: 46.
Passion and the passion for writing 111

severance!—Oh Geoffrey, why do you do it!»  44. But not only Yvonne knows
it, the consul himself is aware of it.

And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has
discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give
his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell  45.

Gone are the days «when an individual life held some value and was not
a mere misprint in a communiqué »  46.
The consul’s unfinished book also becomes a symbol of his failure, and it is
no coincidence that it deals with great questions of humanity: «Meantime do
you see me as still working on the book, still trying to answer such questions
as: Is there any ultimate reality, external, conscious, and ever-present, etc.
etc., that can be realized by any such means that may be acceptable to all
creeds and religions and suitable to all climes and countries?»  47,  48.
By letting the consul die, another possibility being impossible due to the
novel’s structure, Lowry saves his book as a work of art and also saves himself
as a writer. The striving effort, his emphatically persistent writing, Lowry
succeeds by letting the consul run into darkness, into death. He is the writer
that Geoffrey Firmin can no longer be. In a letter to the historian and critic
Jaques Barzun, 1947, he writes: «Sans blague. One wishes to learn. One
wishes to learn, to be a better writer, to think better, and one wishes to learn,
period»  49. The consul’s failed passion, of love and life, becomes the success
of Lowry’s writerly obsession. The Consul’s death is his affirmation as an
author. He was convinced of his novel as a work of art, as he sets out in the
famous letter to Jonathan Cape  50. Lowry did not succeed in writing a book

44. Lowry, 1983: 54.

45. Lowry, 1983: 41-42.
46. Lowry, 1983: 11
47. Lowry, 1983: 45.
48. For Yvonne, the book becomes an ineffective lifeline: «She would cook and clean and
Geoffrey would chop the wood and bring the water from the well. And they would work and
work on this book of Geoffrey’s, which would bring him world fame» (Lowry, 1983: 273).
The naïve desire for a new beginning is already inscribed with its failure in this scene, a scene
that almost seems deliberately kitschy with its fantasy of an ideal world.
49. Breit, 1965:147
50. Cf. e.g. Bareham 1989, 46: «Another way of exploring the tortuous gestation of
the book is through the monumental letter to Jonathan Cape which Lowry wrote in the
days following 2 January 1946, after receiving from Cape an intimation that the book was
possibly going to be rejected yet again. This letter constitutes a critique of supreme importance
112 GERD HAMMER

of even remotely the same intensity thereafter. But for Lowry, The Voyage
that Never Ends did not end with the death of the consul, even if Under the
Volcano was to form the centre of this unfinishable cycle  51.

PHILIPPE DJIAN, BETTY BLUE, THE STORY OF A PASSION

They were predicting storms for the end of the day, but the sky stayed
blue and the wind died down. I went to take a look in the kitchen—make
sure things weren’t getting clogged up in the bottom of the pot. Everything
was just fine. I went out onto the porch armed with a cold beer and stayed
there for a while, my face in the sun. It felt good. It had been a week now
that I’d been spending my mornings in the sun, squinting like some happy
idiot—a week now since I’d met Betty  52.

In 1985 Philippe Djian published Betty Blue, The Story of a Passion,

his on-the-road novel, a book like an homage to Kerouac and the Beat
Generation  53. Even though the book sold well, the 1986 film adaptation
by Jean-Jacques Beineix became more famous than the original; even in
Wikipedia, the novel, unlike the film, has not yet found its own entry until
2021. One may assume it has something to do with Djian’s literary models;
he is considered a kind of European epigone of American (pop) literature
and is not taken very seriously by the academic literary establishment. Djian
himself contributed to this assessment; in his book Ardoise (2002), he clearly
acknowledges crossover culture and American authors such as Jack Kerouac,

to understanding Under the Volcano. Chapter by chapter, image by image, hour by hour, Lowry
justifies what he has written against the threat of having it cut». Also Grace 1982, 36: «and sent
Cape, in one of the most fascinating letters of literary history, a chapter-by-chapter exegesis of
the form and theme of his masterpiece (Selected Letters, 57-88). He asked for belief in the book
based upon his painstaking efforts to make every detail integral to a work of art which “was
so designed, counter-designed and inter-welded that it could be read an indefinite number of
times and still not have yielded all its meanings or its drama or its poetry”» (Selected Letters, 88).
51. On this writing project cf. the chapter «The Voyage that never ends» in Grace 1982:
1-19.
52. Djian, 1998: 2.
53. Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, written in three weeks in April 1951, is the best-
known modern example of a raucous writing style that became a metaphor for a breathless
life. Representative of a European rejection of this writing is Hans Magnus Enzensberger,
1962: 305 - 306, who may not recognise more than barbarism between New York and San
Francisco in «Holy Jack» and its supposedly unreflective naivety.
Passion and the passion for writing 113

Richard Brautigan or Henry Miller as his literary role models or heroes.

Writing song lyrics for the Swiss musician Stephan Eicher may also have
contributed to this distance from the academic establishment. It was not
until 2012’s «Oh... « and the film Elle by Paul Verhoeven (2016) based on
it and starring Isabelle Huppert, Djian is taken more seriously as an author.
But Betty Blue is not only an on-the-road novel according to the American
model; the novel is also an emphatic commitment to writing as a metaphor
for life.
Betty has many of the traits of a femme fatale; she robs the nameless
first-person narrator  54 - in the film version he is called Zorg - of his sanity
and immediately turns him into a «happy idiot». And there is no lack of
warnings: «Take my advice-get rid of that girl!» he yelled  55, which of course
fade away unheard.
The novel has a lot of narrative pace, including sex and crime, of course.
But the speed of the narration does not only result from changes of place and
car journeys; Djian’s aesthetic is created through reduction. He concentrates
the action entirely on Betty with her emotional fluctuations and the narrator.
In the end, he will suffocate Betty with a pillow in a psychiatric hospital after
she has torn out one of her eyes and is mentally terminally ill.
The characters in the novel have no biography, parents, friends,
acquaintances, education, studies, previous marriages, children, aunts and
uncles, all that social integration and development means and helps to explain.
They are unhoused, living on a campsite or staying with acquaintances,
like refugees on the fringes of society. By leaving out all these elements
that constitute a normal life, the plot focuses entirely on the relationship
between the two protagonists and, through the absence of explanations and
circumstances, intensifies the intensity of the relationship. In the psychiatric
admission, the narrator knows practically nothing and yet everything about
Betty: «’This woman you live with... you don’t seem to know her very well...’
But Betty, should I have known your blood type? The name of the one-horse
town you came from? All your childhood diseases? Your mother’s name?

54. Cf. on the fiction of authenticity, see also Bal, 2009: 60: «This difference between an
en (external narrator) and a cn (character-bound narrator), a narrator that tells about others
and a narrator that tells about him- or herself – such a narrator is personified – entails a dif-
ference in the narrative rhetoric of “truth”».
55. Djian, 1998: 41.
114 GERD HAMMER

How you react to antibiotics?»  56.

In Betty Blue, life and writing and writing as life become inseparable in
the course of the plot. The hero, 35 years old, a casual labourer and writer, is
a writer who does not quite believe in himself and has little ambition, who
fritters away his life. Only when Betty finds his notebooks does the author’s
rebirth begin: «“Gee, what are these?” she said. “Who wrote this? You?”»  57.
The protagonist’s passion shifts to literature: «All that was left was to batten
down the hatches and land in bed. But all she was interested in was my
notebooks, my BOOK-the hows and whys, this and that»  58. Betty types up
his novel, convinced of his quality as a writer: «Your employee? You poor
old, wasted slob… you happen to be talking to the greatest writer of his
generation. You get it…?»  59. The readers do not learn what the book tells or
what it is about at all, there is a certain pathos of emptiness and at the same
time, as the BOOK, it moves close to the holy scripture. Little by little, the
first-person narrator rediscovers himself as an author, even if he first has to
observe himself: «The plumber had trouble getting up in the morning after
the writer had gone to bed at three o’clock. He had to be careful not to wake
Betty up-to heat the coffee without his face falling in it».
Betty invests all her energy in the publication; she reacts aggressively to
rejections: «So, every time a publisher rejects my book you’re going to go
bombard his building with red paint, is that it?»  60.
Betty’s intensity, her great passion, in love as well as for the book,
finally lead to success. After dozens of rejections, the book is accepted for
publication by a small publisher, but by then Betty is already in the hospital
and too distraught to notice. Killing Betty with a pillow in the psychiatric
ward becomes an act of liberation, the writer finally resurrected: «My book
came out about a month after Betty’s death. My associate was a fast worker,
to say the least. He was still a small publisher. I must have come along when
he had little else to do. One morning I found myself with a book on my lap.
I turned it over in my hands. I opened it. I sniffed the paper. I slapped myself
on the thigh»  61.

56. Djian, 1998: 243.

57. Djian, 1998: 33.
58. Djian, 1998: 38.
59. Djian, 1998: 41.
60. Djian, 1998: 80.
61. Djian, 1998: 267.
Passion and the passion for writing 115

It is probably no coincidence that the scene is described like the first

contact with a new-born baby, the proud father with the child on his lap.
The mother, the femme fatale, has not survived the difficult birth, but the
child is well, the narrator now fully engaged with literature.
Most of the characters described here by Kleist, Lowry and Djian are
sacrificed by their authors. They must say goodbye to them so that literature
can live as a work of art and also because ecstatic love knows no eternity, its
representation must end, be it through turning away or death.  62
This emphatic way of writing, reflected in the protagonists, wants to
appear authentic, true. And as if to confirm this claim, Heinrich von Kleist’s
and Malcolm Lowry’s own lives are used as a pledge, writing and life merge,
and their deaths, however transfigured, idealised by the readers, testify to the
greatness of the undertaking and the tremendous passion for life or women,
alcohol and writing. This absoluteness of writerly ambition is mirrored in the
works of Kleist and Lowry. In Djian’s rushed, breathless style, it becomes a
bit of a pose; the closeness to the author evoked by the first-person narrator
is too clear, and the creative attempt to transfer American expansiveness and
lifestyle to European limitations is too obvious. Emphatic literature requires
the utmost concentration, must be artificial in order not to seem like desk
literature, but as if it came directly from life onto paper without detours.
Betty Blue always reveals the author’s intention. Ultimately, it would seem,
literary authenticity is due to the utmost effort on the part of the writer.

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