Diotima, or The Happiness Gap and Nausicaa's Lucid Dream by Elfriede Czurda (review)

Austrian literature of the past fifty years has been a locus for experimentalism and innovation, a long tradition that dates back at least to Meyrink and Schnitzler and more recently includes figures like Elfriede Jelinek and Peter Handke. For Elfriede Czurda (b. 1946), this tradition of Austrian experimentalism continues with prose that is avant-garde, insightful, and what might be described as a literary "word bath."

The two stories here are new translations by Kathleen Thorpe and were first published in 1982 and 2009, respectively. The timing is fortuitous. As a female monologue and a harsh critique of patriarchal hegemony and the complexities of gender relations, reading Czurda in this fresh translation dovetails with a resurgence of interest in, and a critique of, patriarchal structures in the midst of the #MeToo Movement.

In the first story, Czurda transforms the Homeric Odysseus, hero of the Trojan War, into "an eccentric workman who considers himself to be a great theoretician." No longer is he, under Czurda's pen, Homer's "man of twists and turns" but rather another chauvinistic archetype, a man who washes ashore, "a touching clumsy tourist." There are many classical transformations in Czurda's story. The land of the Phaeacians, where Odysseus is shipwrecked in Book Five of Homer's Odyssey, is altered to resemble an imaginary landscape of sea and desert, akin perhaps to ancient Carthage and evoking, here and there, the style of J.M.G. Le Clézio. There are other unexpected transformations here too: The god Poseidon coexists with modern airplanes, for instance, commanding the forces of nature with equal ferocity.

It is also a story of obsession. The narrator, Nausicaa, is transfixed with her "O." or Odysseus. She exists in a state of ponderous erotic contemplation, ruminating on his likes and dislikes, his every mental peregrination. Her conjuring of him and his mental states—"thoughts rage deliriously in O.'s head they release a fireworks of words"—reinforces her omniscience, which is the source of her power. The story is a long monologue, the words spoken are articulated mentally, an internal dialogue, and there is strong agency in the narrator's physical silence—an agency that is never subsumed under male dominance.

Czurda is a smart and very conscious writer. Her language blends that cerebral precision and tactile imagery that has come to define much of Austrian literature since Musil. "I disappear," she writes, "as the disembodied appendage of my thoughts" (although her prose lacks the comic levity and playfulness of her fellow Austrian Robert Menasse, who does not take himself quite so seriously as Czurda does). The more apropos comparison would be Virginia Woolf, whose stream of consciousness Czurda is clearly influenced by, though with less of that English quality of prosaic order and narration and a more Austrian tendency to explore pariah psychological states. After all, she writes, "Everything happens in the head." The female voice, so vital and animate in her writing, is compared to a serpent: "My thoughts have [ … ] become snakes. They coil." There is also a smart inversion of gender roles. If the narrator's thoughts are as fierce and pointed as a coiled serpent, O.'s words are softer, labile, less striking. "If I were a woman," O. proposes, then falls silent, opening and closing his mouth like a fish. The narrator shows command over this "complicated man" as Homer describes him: "O. always believed to be that one step ahead [but] he was actually behind me. I let him believe it."

Like Nausicaa, the second story in this volume, Diotima, or The Happiness Gap is a surreal homage to that famous and eponymous instructor of love in Plato's fourth-century dialogue Symposium who teaches Socrates to value ideas over bodies. This work too explores ecstatic conditions and how internal dialogue can escape the trap of coerced feminine silence through a kind of psychological rapture. More experimental...