Adam Siegel
 

Some Notes on
Der Platz der Gehenkten

 

A peculiarity of Marak'sh (sic) is that the streets being all of sand no footfalls are heard--yet it is the noisiest of all the cities owing to the fearful and hideous clamor of the central market-place--the most abominable spot in all Africa. --Alys Lowth "The Place el Djemaa"  A Wayfarer in Morocco   London : Methuen & Co., Ltd. 1929   Hubert Fichte's Der Platz der Gehenkten (Marrakesh's main square, El-Djemma el-Fna) was published in 1989, three years after Fichte's death.  It was intended as the sixth volume of his projected 19-volume roman fleuve, Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit (The History of Sensitivity).  It was put together in Agadir and Hamburg in May-July 1985; it was the last complete typescript Fichte prepared for publication. Der Platz der Gehenkten (PdH): example of what might be called salvage literature, in which the author attempts to retrieve something from an incomplete, or incoherent body of work. Some archeology: in 1970 Fichte takes a trip to Morocco, spending time in Marrakesh.  In 1985, dying, he vacations in Agadir, and begins to assemble the notes from 1970, placing them within the context of the Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit (see also: the literature of shoehorning).  He revises and reshapes notes, jottings, diaristic entries, sorts them, organizes them, and submits them to an arbitrary compositional principle: ostensibly modeling different sections of the novel on different surahs of the Quran. According to Gisela Lindemann's afterword to the novel: "Verses from four of the Quran's 114 surahs function as abutments in the novel: Surah 17 ("The Night Journey"), verse 1; Surah 7 ("The Heights"), verses 80-84; Surah 26 ("The Poets"), verses 165-173 and 224; and Surah 81 ("The Folding Up," translated by Fichte as "The Coiling), verses 1-13 and 15." (p. 220) What is left is a novel that barely budges from the square itself, and what Fichte sees, hears, and overhears there.  Following the relevant Quranic verse, the action proceeds. Fichte's compositional principle: I translate from the Pléiade edition. A kind of Luther German in my head. The Koran on bible paper impractical. The ink bleeds through. The text of the Koran gets shorter from surah to surah. The text of the Platz der Gehenkten gets longer. I'd like to balance the law of the contracting member with the law of the expanding member. How am I to measure the long and the short? As the Greeks did, through long and short marks? But pauses? Nothing? Dr. Bahlmann said that the poetic principle of the Bible is repetition. Pity he did nothing more with it. (PdH, p. 13)   What Jäcki (Fichte's alter ego) sees is how to write a novel: In the morning the scribes sit there, writing on amulet paper. Inventories, love letters. Tourists want to take their picture. The scribes hide behind their lecterns. (PdH, p. 44)   What Jäcki sees: A boy carrying goat heads by the horns: five in the right hand, two in the left.  He ties the heads to his bicycle.  (p. 45) What Jäcki sees: A group of Moroccans parading a trained monkey, one that performs somersaults and handstands.  They cuff the monkey when it fails to perform; they pull its hair.  An ugly old man with a bag of pastries walks over and feeds the monkey.  He smiles.  (p. 54) What Jäcki sees: A black boy smoking kif. A black woman hitting her child. A hippie mother in black Jugendstil clothing, hennaed hair, walking across the plaza.  She hits her child; she yells, "Go away!" (pp. 58-60)   What Jäcki sees:   A man beating his wife, punching her in the stomach until she doubles over.  Onlookers laugh.  (p. 61)   What Jäcki hears: The gay western European tourists he calls the Ricardtanten (the old aunties) say: --Antonioni was here the other week. --Yves St. Laurent just left yesterday. --Have you talked to Arndt yet? --Paul Getty throws sybaritic parties. --The two evil Parisian aunties at the Hotel Tazi. --They're not letting any more Arabs go up to their room. --There could be some real difficulties. --They're expecting a literary congress. --The Beat Generation: Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, Ferlinghetti--everyone from the sixties. --Alain Robbe-Grillet.  Le Nouveau Roman.  L'Immortelle! --Jean Genet is supposed to lead a hippie symposium! --They'll clean the town up for that. --In the Gay Guide they say: Grand Hotel Tazi--AYOR! --An acronym for At Your Own Risk.  (p. 139)   What Jäcki says about himself: Me. Jäcki. Transformed into letters. Burnt wool. Clotting ink. The Djemma el Fna passing through me. Like the ink bleeding through the bible paper of the Koran.(p. 85)   In the latter half of the book, the drive to conduct fieldwork, to do more than observe or overhear, asserts itself: assignations, encounters, and interviews. The student who knows "Koffka" lists the requirements of Islam for him: --The most important rules are: --Belief in the one god, prayer, fasting, almsgiving. --And the pilgrimage to Mecca. --Do you eat pork? --Yes. --Do you drink alcohol? --Yes. --Would a father kill his daughter if she were deflowered before marriage? --No!  Who told you that? --Is it forbidden to go to bed with a boy? --They stone both of them, along with the person who denounced them. --When I was young all my father's friends tried to fool around with me. --They tried to give me candy and money. --It's very masculine to sleep with a boy here. --I used to run home, lock myself in my room, and cry. (p. 167)   What the aunties say about the Morroccans: --They lie!  They lie!  They lie!  They lie!  They lie! --You can't believe anything they say. --Not a word that comes out of their mouths is true. --They introduce you to their wife, and it's their brother's wife. --They introduce you to their brother's wife, and it's their own. --No one knows why--not even them. --That's my son--it's not their son. --This is my mother--it's not their mother. --That's my best friend--they've never seen him before. --We know nothing of their lives. --Never say You have beautiful eyes!  He's afraid he'll go blind. --You can never say the word coal. --Coal is black; black brings bad luck. --You shouldn't say: I'm sleeping with so-and-so, meaning fucking them. --They say: eating confections.  They call girls pain du sucre. (p. 166)   Fichte uses the PdH as both guidebook and handbook: how to write a novel, how to see and write, and how not to see and write.  Replete with literary references, PdH leaves unnamed one of the primary objects of its critique: Elias Canetti's Die Stimmen von Marrakesch (The Voices of Marrakesh) (München: Hanser, 1995).* What Jäcki sees: The donkey bucks. The man hits him. No response from the donkey. The man hits him again. The donkey lets his enormous violet cock dangle against the ground. Then he pisses. The squat foreigner, face like Strindberg's, takes notes in a little leather notebook. The donkey-driver jumps on the donkey's back and tugs on his tail. The donkey lies down. The donkey-driver starts hitting him again. (p. 94)   What Canetti saw: Out of all the pathetic donkeys in town this donkey was the most pathetic.  His bones stuck out eveywhere, he was starving, his coat was mangy, surely he was no longer capable of toting even the smallest load.... (Canetti, p. 76) But then: He hadn't moved at all from that spot, but it was no longer the same donkey.  For between his hind legs, sticking out slightly, his suddenly monstrous member hung down.  It was more powerful than the stick that cajoled him.  In the instant my back was turned, an overwhelming transformation had taken place. (p. 77-78)   Thus Fichte's plaza: a tableau vivant of jugglers, lepers, beggars, hippies, tourists, merchants, police, thieves, children, monkeys, students, sexual partners; a locus for fieldwork (narrative, interview, folklore, ritual), compositional principles, and literary score-settling.  The Djemma el-Fna serves an organizing principle for what remains of his life's work, and around it spin all the constellations of that work: notes, memories, novels, guidebooks, languages, photos, recordings, sexual encounters, newspapers, plane tickets, bus tickets, tour guides.  On the move again, at the end of the novel, at the end of his life, obsessed with what he might have forgotten:  "Au revoir.  I'm taking the night bus."       *Thanks to Thorsten Teichert's "Herzschlag aussen": Die poetische Konstruktion des Fremden und des Eigenen im Werk von Hubert Fichte for bringing this to my attention (pp. 300-304).

  (c)Siegel 2006