The Human Animal is a wonderful, terrible thing. We have accomplished so much over our millennia on earth, yet, our collective history is filled with tragic, horrendous disappointments. History’s arc, as captured by many historians, hopes for a positive bend. Well…..
The morning’s “frisson” came from viewing an interview with Martin Amis, a British author whose novels have offered his readers rich discourse and mind-enhancing ideas and images. His fictional works are built on much research in order to construct a paradigm and appearance from the past that both reflects that era but also inserts it into our present feelings and moments. In an interview with him years ago after he had written Zone of Interest, he used the word to describe how the source of his thoughts and plots sometimes come from a frisson.
One of the best modern authors able to conjure images and characters from constructing language was Martin Amis. I must admit to this as a recent fan, though, arriving at his feet to champion him only after his passing. As he succumbed at the age of 73, I find that alarming and much to my dissatisfaction. Losing a great mind and arbiter of human foibles while she still has stories to tell, ideas to bandy about, provocateuring to do is always a sad day for the rest of us who have benefitted from another artist’s, scientist’s, philosopher’s or historian’s point of view.. This interview about his recent book, Zone of Interest, will avail you of his wit, memory, craft and mind….and why he is also sometimes called, and embraces, the moniker curmudgeonly. Sad, his passing is.
It was in this interview about Zone of Interest that Amis described the various sources for his inspiration about themes and characters. We all must admit to being influenced by the occasional frisson, though for many of us we are often unaware of the nudge and simply let it pass unawares. It is the author, the artist, the actor, who best plucks them from the ether before their image dissolves to add weight, heft and history to their arrival on the scene. Thank heavens, or whomever or whatever, for this human conceit.
In his own quest for devising a world intentionally constructed through the written word with the cause of “War Against Cliche”, Amis found the theme of writing about the Holocaust from the perspective of the family of Rudolph Höss. Amis has his critics, but they cannot deny his attention to the loom of language skills. He apparently was bequeathed his curmudgeonly status from his father, though they gladly separated their approaches from each other in interviews. That the son was gifted is fully apparent by his success has been affirmed by both his admirers and critics. History and the anthologies of the future will determine the length of the legs he will have with future readers.
In the linked YouTube interview above with Amis, he mentions his compatriot writer, Sadie Smith; quoting her as saying literature, or was it the novel, will be dead by the end of her lifetime. We’ve all on the literary side of things lamented the sad demise of younger readers who have succumbed to the click or ding and the distractions of AI. Who knows, or will they even be able to discern, if AI in the future provides them with their “truths”.As any good student of literature must confront, there have been giants in the past, who stood on the giants of their own past and who wished to bend the conventions of literature in order to move “forward?” and offer a new construct for presenting ideas (It took me more than seventy years to reapproach and finally reap the benefits of Joyce in Ulysses.. Such conceit, such wisdom, such wealth proceeds from these exercises. Sometimes writers get it right…..sometimes they get bent into pretzels and pass away. Along the way, they at least provoke.
When I was first confronted with Zone of Interest, it was in its cinematic form. This was presented by another interview, sought out by me after the interview with Amis about his written version, to see how Jonathan Glazer would handle the topic of the Holocaust through a different approach. He, too, had ambition to use his artistic skills with the medium of film to address humans’ ability for cruelty, as perhaps best exhibited in the NAZI Final Solution. Yet, Glazer did not want to expose yet another example of this cruelty, this absolute epitome of evil, through visiting the camps from the inside. Still, he wanted his viewers to know the evil was there, in the frame, both in the characters’ minds and actions, but also in the ether of the surrounding sets and within the moments his audience would see and hear what was crossing the Fourth Wall. His own walls within the shooting process became a unique experience for the actors in the cinematographic masterpiece. He was fairly comfortable that many in today’s world have already availed themselves of the myriad opportunities to see the fotos and videos, or have read the versions like those in literature so well encapsulated by authors like Primo Levi. Within the pages of the books he wrote in his attempt to either purge or address his daemons which had been created within Auschwitz, we see the horror and the humanity Levi felt.
By the time I concluded the Glazer interview, in his case a panel discussion with the producer, cinematographer, main actors, and the other critical artistic contributors assembled to carry out the thoughts of Glazer that had been conjured over many years in his attempt to tell the story of how humans can construct barriers between the unpleasant stimuli in their lives in order for them to carry on a “normal” daily routine. The main purpose of the film is not necessarily to convey the entirety of Auschwitz, but to allow each of us to contemplate whether we are appalled at what we witness on screen or can commune in some way in how the daily lives of the Höss family members as they carry out mundane experiences in the garden, lounge, dinner table, or in family and professional meetings.
Rudolph, the Commandant, had married Hedwig Hensel in 1929. Between 1930 and 1943 they had five children: two sons and three daughters. It is the idyllic life they experience for the several years during which Rudolph was charged with orchestrating efficiency, profit and comprehensive abilities to manage the thousands of lives at his mercy. This was his whole “Zone of Interest”, including his family, which was utilized by Glazer to tell his story of the Holocaust. If you were previously unaware of Höss, though you understood there was certainly such a commandant at Auschwitz, I recommend a reading of his Wikipedia page and especially the letters he wrote to his wife and his elder son just before he was hanged by the Polish for his crimes against humanity..
Once you have engaged in the author, Amis’ accounts for his purpose in constructing his text as he did, and then the concert of collaboration that took this initial theme beyond the words and attempted to capture the very essence of family life virtually on the walls of Auschwitz’s camp, it was agreed none of what happened there would ever be witnessed by the movie audience when Glazer came to his own decision about the format of his own storytelling. Yet, the sound track is always reminding you, along with the script and the uniforms and dress, that you are in that period and place as you watch the Höss family carry out their “idyllic” lives on screen. In fact, it looks as brand new as it would have been in 1943.
The methods utilized by the cinematographers, from cast to custom designers, embraced by the composer of sounds and his technicians, the props and the set, were all meant to be experienced without the obvious intrusion of the film crew. Cameras were hidden on the set, with the technical side of the capture of images housed in the basement out of view and hearing from the actors. Scenes were filmed and collected from at times more than ten cameras stealthily placed around the set based on that day’s shooting requirements. The same for the microphone placement. The actors felt obligated and obliged in their attempts to embody the very moment of the conceit of action taking place in 1942 and 1943. What a wonderful attempt at a verismo approach. This excellent account in the Hollywood Reporter will avail you of how Glazer took Amis’s fictional family over and replaced them with the Höss family. If you’ve gotten this far, then you will be fascinated by the interview with Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel about their journey to becoming involved.
I hope you sometime in the future submit to its viewing. I will do so shortly and perhaps this musing with have another paragraph or two after this is accomplished……..
Maine Musing 