Ransmayr

Christoph Ransmayr

Christoph Ransmayr was born in 1954 in Wels, Upper Austria. He studied Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna and began work as a journalist (a number of Ransmayr’s journalistic writings were later published in the collection Der Weg nach Surabaya ; The Path to Surabaya (1997)). Ransmayr is a retiring figure and his public appearances have been relatively rare. In many ways he identifies strongly with his Austrian homeland and its mountainous, sometimes isolated, landscape. But Ransmayr has also always been drawn to other, more extreme or remote places. This preoccupation with place and its relation to identity finds expression in Ransmayr’s texts and their inhospitable landscapes. Ransmayr is a keen mountaineer (although he prefers to call himself a tourist) and has undertaken expeditions in his native Austria, as well as through the Himalayas with his mountaineer friend, Reinhold Mesner [Interview with Günter Kaindlstorfer http://www.kaindlstorfer.at/index.php?id=196]. For many years, Ransmayr lived in relative isolation in West Cork, but returned to Austria in 2006, when he married and moved to Vienna.

Ransmayr’s first book was published in 1982. Strahlender Untergang ; Glowing Decline is a report in unrhymed verse about an experiment carried out in the desert which observes the effects of human dehydration (the book carries the subtitle Ein Entwässerungsprojekt oder Die Entdeckung des Wesentlichen ; A Dehydration Project or The Discovery of the Essential). Scientists watch as a human subject is exposed to the sun and slowly reduced to blistering skin and bones. Both the form of the report and the reduction of the human subject to a body to be acted on are reminiscent of Kafka, whose work is certainly an important point of reference for Ransmayr. He is particularly interested in how acts of narrative might literally inscribe the human subject in history or, conversely, overwrite him, that is, obliterate him. This first book sets out what will be an enduring preoccupation for Ransmayr, and his choice of the desert as an extreme, ultimately indifferent, environment is fundamental: by setting his subject outside any social order, Ransmayr can investigate how narrative can produce, but equally erase, human presence. If literature existed as a hermetic, fantasy realm, then this experiment might be of limited interest, but Ransmayr is keen to examine how literature is related to history (the word Geschichte of course means both ‘story’ and ‘history’), how fiction relates to fact: if a fictional author writes about a historical event, he cannot change the course of that event, but perhaps he can change how, historically and culturally, that event is remembered. This is something Ransmayr takes up in his second book (his first novel) Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis ; The Terrors of Ice and Darkness (1984).

Ransmayr’s next novel appeared four years later to great critical acclaim. Indeed, Die letzte Welt ; The Last World (1988) is the text for which Ransmayr became famous; it has been translated into many languages and received much scholarly attention. Critics are particularly fascinated by the way Ransmayr returns to an ancient text, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and reworks it to include the media technologies of the twentieth century. This is not to say the novel is merely a contemporary version of Ovid’s older work; rather, it uses the trope of transformation which underlies these founding myths of the Western literary tradition in order to interrogate the very ideas of myth and literature and the claims they make for understanding the world. For this reason, amongst others, Die letzte Welt; The Last World has been described as postmodern. Although Ransmayr draws on an ancient text for his novel, he engages with the specific problem of our age, namely, how to represent the postmodern subject. Whilst the notion of the ‘postmodern’ is a very complex one, it is arguably linked to the way that our understanding of what it means to be human and of how this might be represented has changed radically since 1945. The violence of the twentieth century, in particular, the Holocaust, has challenged conventional categories of understanding and, for many, questioned the capacity of art, literature, or even language, to give expression to experiences at the limit of humanity. Ransmayr does not write explicitly about National Socialism, but, through a return to post-apocalyptic topographies and to the question of how his subjects can be inscribed in, or indeed out of, narrative, he makes more oblique reference to this violent period of history and to its after-effects.

Ransmayr is a painstaking writer and he has become notorious for the long breaks between his novels. Indeed, it was to be seven years before Morbus Kitahara ; The Dog King (1995) was published. In interview, Ransmayr has talked about the amount of time it took him to craft the novel’s all-important first sentence; the weight of the whole book hangs from these lines and they must be able to bear its load (see Sigrid Löffler, reading list below). Although Ransmayr was working on other projects (see below), eleven years then passed before the appearance of his most recent novel, Der fliegende Berg ; The Flying Mountain (2006). Written in unrhymed verse, the form of this work resembles that of his first. Ransmayr calls this ‘Flattersatz’, meaning unjustified text; but, literally meaning ‘fluttering type’, it refers here to the way the layout of the text reflects the flying mountain of the title. The novel is set in Ireland and the Himalayas, and the isolation of these environments is a reinscription of the extreme topographies (real and imagined) which have preoccupied Ransmayr throughout his career.

Ransmayr has a keen interest in visual art and has collaborated with photographers and artists. The first editions of Strahlender Untergang and Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis included photographs by Willy Puchner and Rudi Palla respectively, and he has written an essay to accompany a project by the German artist Anselm Kiefer: Der Ungeborene oder die Himmelsareale des Anselm Kiefer ; ‘The Unborn or Anselm Kiefer and the Tracts of Heaven’ (2001). When Kiefer was awarded the Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels (The Peace Prize of the German Book Trade) in 2008, Ransmayr used an interview with Der Spiegel to support the decision (some opposing voices had criticised the award, since Kiefer’s work often depicts destruction or the aftermath of destruction) [‘Es gibt eine Schmerzgrenze’, interview with Christoph Ransmayr, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-57359820.html]. He has also produced a collection of vignettes to accompany the marine painting of Austrian artist Manfred Wakolbinger, Damen & Herren unter Wasser ; Ladies and Gentlemen under Water (2007). In addition to his prose, Ransmayr has written two plays. His first, Die Unsichtbare. Tirade an drei Stränden ; The Invisible Woman. Tirade on Three Beaches (2001), premiered at the Salzburger Festspiele that year, and his second, Odysseus, Verbrecher. Schauspiel einer Heimkehr ; Odysseus, Criminal. A Homecoming Play (2010), was commissioned for the 2010 Ruhr Festival. Here, Ransmayr once again uses the formula which had been so successful in his prose, setting an ancient myth in modern, or perhaps postmodern, times. However, it received a rather lukewarm critical response at its premiere.

Since 1997, Ransmayr has produced a number of small volumes which form part of an experimental series, Spielformen des Erzählens ; Variations of Narrative. These often playful works have gone relatively unnoticed, but demonstrate Ransmayr’s sustained interest in the idea of narrative as act or performance. They include: his first play, Die Unsichtbare ; The Invisible Woman; Die Verbeugung des Riesen. Vom Erzählen ; The Giant’s Bow. On Narrative (2003); Geständnisse eines Touristen. Ein Verhör ; Confessions of a Tourist. An Interrogation (2004); Damen & Herren unter Wasser ; Ladies and Gentlemen under Water, and in 2011, he published a kind of double act with his fellow Austrian author, Martin Pollack, Der Wolfsjäger. Drei polnische Duette ; The Wolf Hunter. Three Polish Duets.

2012 should see the release of Ransmayr’s next larger project, Atlas eines ängstlichen Mannes ; Atlas of an Anxious Man which will combine his life-long interest in travel and narrative form in a compendium of personal experiences gathered on different journeys.

Works by Christoph Ransmayr include:

Strahlender Untergang; Glowing Decline (with 28 photographs by Willy Puchner) (1982)

Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis; The Terrors of Ice and Darkness (1984)

Die letzte Welt; The Last World (1988)

Morbus Kitahara; translated as The Dog King (1995)

Der Weg nach Surabaya; The Path to Surabaya (1997)

Die Unsichtbare. Tirade an drei Stränden; The Invisible Woman. Tirade on Three Beaches (2001)

Der Ungeborene oder die Himmelsareale des Anselm Kiefer; ‘The Unborn or Anselm Kiefer and the Tracts of Heaven’ (2002)

Die Verbeugung des Riesen: Vom Erzählen; The Giant’s Bow. On Narrative (2003)

Geständnisse eines Touristen. Ein Verhör; Confessions of a Tourist. An Interrogation (2004)

Damen & Herren unter Wasser: eine Bildergeschichte nach 7 Farbtafeln von Manfred Wakolbinger; Ladies and Gentlemen under Water (2007)

Der fliegende Berg; The Flying Mountain (2007)

Odysseus, Verbrecher. Schauspiel einer Heimkehr; Odysseus, Criminal. A Homecoming Play (2010)

(with Martin Pollack) Der Wolfsjäger. Drei polnische Duette; The Wolf Hunter. Three Polish Duets (2011)

Atlas eines ängstlichen Mannes; Atlas of an Anxious Man (2012)

Cox oder Der Lauf der Zeit; Cox or The passage of time (2016)

English Translations

Christoph Ransmayr, The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, trans. by John E. Wood (New York: Grove Press, 1991; London: Paladin, 1992)

Christoph Ransmayr, The Dog King, trans. by John E Woods (London: Vintage, 1997)

Christoph Ransmayr, ‘The Unborn or Anselm Kiefer and the Tracts of Heaven’, in Anselm Kiefer: the Seven Heavenly Palaces 1973-2001 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Kanz, 2001), pp. 11-25

Christoph Ransmayr, Atlas of an Anxious Man, trans by Simon Pare (Kolkata and Chicago: Seagull Books, 2016)

Christoph Ransmayr, The Flying Mountain, trans by Simon Pare (Kolkata and Chicago: Seagull Books, 2018)