UNDERNEATH THE BUNKER

[Oa Aayorta (1917- ) is Andorra's leading novelist. In this article Jinpes Terenk tackles, with evident frustration, his second novel, 'The Endless Winter Night']

The cliché of the elderly struggling with new technology does not sit comfortably with the Andorran novelist Oa Aayorta, a man who at the tender age of eighty-nine understands and embraces all the latest inventions with the enthusiasm of an affluent adolescent. Whilst some younger writers still talk up the wonders of the ‘pencil and paper’ in the vain hope of being hailed as heroic purists, Aayorta proudly lays claim to having been the first person ever to have word-processed a novel. Even when one considers the fact that this claim is in fact false (the first man to word process a novel was Guy Watmore Jnr of Springfield, Ohio) Aayorta is still ahead of his age, if not his time. No less than five years ago he produced what has to be one of the more remarkable novels of the late twentieth century – released not in book-form, but as a DVD.

‘I am always looking for new ways of doing things and technology is always coming up with them,’ he was to write in the accompanying notes, adding: ‘it makes perfect sense to me that a writer should be interested in technology. Any other approach would be parochial and naïve’. The work to which I refer is, of course, Silence with Subtitles, the first ever piece of art (that I know, anyway) to be a prize-winner in two entirely different categories, receiving the Gordon Lasseny award for Best Novel of 1999 and the Bronze Bull Award at the Twenty-Seventh Catalono Film Festival Festival. Though various commentators christened it the first ever ‘novilm’ or ‘filmvel’, Aayorta has always maintained that it is a straight novel (though he is happy to concede that it is quite unlike any other novel he knows). If I am to be lured into the perilous pastime of categorization, I would say that it is more film than novel – though I am intrigued to hear that it is now available in book form, albeit in unlicensed pirate copies.

One thing is for sure: Silence with Subtitles was a wholly new experience. Originally showing at small cinemas, it lasted several hours and contained no sound whatsoever, consisting merely of footage shot by one man as he walked from one end of Andorra to the other. Subtitles revealed the workings of this man’s mind, and were to be read as though you were reading a novel (which you potentially were, albeit one accompanied by images).  The project required from its viewers, therefore, a certain amount of concentration. This is important: Aayorta does not use modern methods to make his art any easier to digest (a crime of which the mediums of film and television are often accused). If truth be told, Aayorta is altogether less ‘progressive’ than you might think he is. He is by no means a spokesperson for twenty-first culture; if anything, his is a rigidly romantic sensibility, simply one that speaks through the voice of twenty-first century technology – like feeding Auld Lang Syne through a vocoder. Beneath its film-school framework and Joycean approach to plot, Silence with Subtitles is essentially a sentimental epic, with brief moments of melodrama belying the supposed modernity of its form. If anything, Aayorta’s fervent faith in technology seems to be diminishing. Whilst his most recent work The Endless Winter Night continues, like Silence with Subtitles, to employ self-consciously modern methods, it does so with less confidence, suggesting that the ancient Andorran might soon find himself admitting that the writer’s best friend may, after all, be mere words.

One hates to say it, but this lack of confidence may have its roots in financial matters. For all the critical acclaim that Silence with Subtitles received, the decision to release it in cinemas alone was not the best one – partly because there were few cinemas willing to show it, and partly because there were even fewer people queuing up to see it. The fact that it was marketed as a novel but sold as a film led to widespread confusion within the cultural community. The response was to ignore it altogether. In such circumstances, novelists of Aayorta’s ilk tend not to give in to the pressure and continue to plough their unprofitable furrow, whilst their publishers tear enough hair to make a winter coat for a moose. On some occasions, however, even the most determined novelists consider a compromise.

Under-confident, confused and compromised. As a project The Endless Winter Night is all of these things. Only when we step back and consider it purely as a novel, free from all the trappings of technology, does it gain in stature. The question is – are we justified in doing this, or should we take it or leave it as it was originally conceived?

Were you to buy yourself a copy of The Endless Winter Night, you would receive three objects. Firstly, a book entitled The Endless Winter Night. Secondly, a DVD disc, similarly named. Thirdly, a twenty-page instruction booklet, in which the author attempts to set down a group of rules, in a tone that suggests he has little faith in any of them being kept.

To begin with Aayorta asks that the novel should either be read ‘in one sitting or not at all’. Later on, however, he withdraws this (possibly frightened that most readers might go for the latter option) and requests instead that the reader should  make a ‘concerted effort’ to read the book  ‘in as few sittings as possible’. A similar conciliation takes place in his discussion of the DVD, which he claims, intially, ‘must be shown on a large screen on the wall in front of where the reader is sitting’, only to request, later, that it ‘should be playing at all reading times, on whatever device the reader has at hand’. For a brief moment, one expects him to finally concede that the DVD would be better off thrown into the nearest dustbin. Unfortunately, he does not go quite this far.

It must be said that the DVD of The Endless Winter Night is a repetitive affair, consisting as it does of a two-hour loop of film showing different views of the author’s bedroom ceiling at night, filmed (it so happens) during a sleepless night very like the one mentioned in the associated novel. But then of course, repetition is very much what Aayorta is looking for: he is after all seeking to remind us of what hell a sleepless night can be. All those hours staring at the same dull ceiling. The strange mental anguish into which you slip; the parade of unwanted thoughts that marches with mud-encrusted boots through the dark valley of your post-midnight mind. All the same, you wonder why he couldn’t have described this feeling in the novel, rather than rely on a supplementary device to portray it. I can only presume that the answer is the same one that he gave in the notes to Silence with Subtitles:

‘I don’t care for descriptions. How very tedious they are! I use words only to describe the workings of the mind. External landscapes need not encroach on this venture – they can be managed in other ways.’

This works to very good effect in Silence with Subtitles, which successfully juxtaposes beautifully filmed images of a journey through the actual Andorran landscape with eloquent written images from the fictional landscape of a walking man’s memory. However, the filmed sequence that accompanies the text of The Endless Winter Night not only doesn’t cover the time that it takes to read the book – falsifying this link – but it is almost impossible to concentrate on, offering nothing more than the same image again and again.  Where Silence with Subtitles presented the perfect marriage between image and text on the same screen, The Endless Winter Night requires you to hold the book in one hand and after every sentence or so, peer over it to stare at your television screen. It is a deeply frustrating experience.

Ah, but isn’t that the point? Isn’t the project designed to replicate the experience of a maddeningly sleepless night?

This is certainly the view of my fellow critic Sebastian Cheraz, whose recent Pocketbook of Andorran Literature argued that the ‘deliberately clumsy design of the project consistently invokes the turgid atmosphere of exasperation with which the text is primarily concerned’. Personally I am unconvinced. This so-called ‘turgid atmosphere of exasperation’ is indeed present in the text -  but this is precisely why the ‘clumsy design of the project’ deserves not to be excused, serving as it seems no obvious purpose, except to accentuate this atmosphere (which it barely does, in my view).

It will come as no surprise to you, therefore, when I suggest that readers of The Endless Winter Night might be better off ignoring the the instructions that the author has supplied and getting on with reading the novel as if it were just that: a simple novel. This may not be quite ‘towing the party line’ (contributors to ‘Underneath the Bunker’ have a habit of allowing fussy authors to have their wicked way when it comes to peculiar reading methods) but I am inclined to believe that my views correspond to a category of the purest common sense. It is one thing to support writers that might otherwise be overlooked; it is quite another to allow said writers to dictate the way that critics go about the business of reading. The trajectory of this very review supports this argument; after almost two thousand words I have yet to get to grips with a significant portion of prose, finding myself obliged to waste words navigating my way through the complex accoutrements that surround both this novel and, I must say, so many others. If we critics insist on being drawn in by the ring around the bull’s nose, we will run the risk of ignoring the bull itself. And if you take the bull away, what are you left with?

Let us return, yet, to The Endless Winter Night which, despite the aforementioned faults, retains the ability to thrill readers in no small measure. Aayorta’s ability to follow the winding valleys, steep straight inclines and copious dead-ends of the average human’s thought processes remains second to none. Furthermore, his aptitude for imitating said thought processes and arranging them in such a way as to create something that is actually readable is almost superhuman. In light of this, The Endless Winter Night is, in its book form, a remarkable achievement. For those who still set their hopes on the possibility of inhabiting someone else’s mind (I fancy that I am among them) this proves a worthy alternative.

The mind in question, incidentally, is that of the novel’s unnamed hero, a lonely bachelor suffering from a bout of insomnia on the eve of an important cookery competition in which he has promised to create ‘the best omelette in Andorra’. The novel begins at ten o’clock, as our hero first lies down in his bed, and ends at eight in the morning, when he first moves from the bed, having barely slept a wink. Between these two points we find ourselves firmly entrenched in the man’s mind, following a rich assortment of thoughts, a good deal of them negative: almost all of them bent out of any recognisable shape by the frustrating situation in which he finds himself. Determined to be at his best for the cookery competition, he convinces himself that he must not let the sleeplessness defeat him (which, of course, it does). Other dilemmas that face him range from the reasonable (the sound of the wind outside his bedroom window) to the faintly ridiculous (his growing suspicion that there might be a nest of spiders under his pillow). Now and again, however, his thoughts range further field, towards friends, relations and failed love affairs, all of which are viewed through the prism of his presently perturbed mind.

The result of all of this is at turns amusing, deeply moving and bizarre, with brief moments of clear-headed realism puncturing the mood of frustration, slipping back in due time to fantastical panic, before settling into a more lyrical mode, betraying the author’s obvious love of a well-tempered sentence. Consider the now famous opening sentences of the book:

‘The wind is a choir of a thousand voices. It holds irregular concerts, to which we are all invited, though few of us wish to attend. Tonight, I am on the front row – and they won’t let me leave.

Damn it. I can’t sleep’

These first three sentences are by no means untypical. European prose doing the poetical with panache: we’ve seen it all before. But Aayorta is a wily old man, and he knows enough not to go over the top – which is why he tops off the lyrical stuff with a healthy dollop of slangy pragmatism (I refer the glorious ‘Damn it’). I’m not sure whether you could say that he continues to pull of this trick with aplomb – he almost certainly descends into the valley of unnecessary melodrama on one or two occasions – but on the whole he manages to mix up the tone enough to keep the reader satisfied.

The use of word ‘mix’, as you may have guessed, was not accidental. It refers, of course, to another review of The Endless Winter Night by a certain Jan der Lox. In the course of this callous little piece of criticism, der Lox accuses Aayorta of ‘writing two or three bad stories and mixing them together to disguise their innate inefficiencies’, as well as ‘being too damn lazy to write whole sentences’. The second of these insults must refer to those passages in which Aayorta lists the various types of wind noises, presenting them as ‘Wind Sound No.4: The Whistling Kettle’, ‘Wind Sound No.11: Howl, with added anguish’ and (my favourite) ‘Wind Sound No.8: The Gurgling Cry of a Eight-day-old Baby’

Though der Lox’s review was for some reason accepted as common wisdom. It would be better categorised as rare stupidity, failing as it does to understand even the basic tenets of modern literature, in which such devices as those he all too eagerly dismisses have played a significant role in rejuvenating the novelistic tradition. Another excerpt from The Endless Winter Night will suffice to remind the reader of how very ‘unlazy’ a writer Aayorta is, and of how his so-called ‘cut-and-paste’ technique enhances rather than devalues his narrative drive:

‘One.

Oh goodness. Now I’m counting.

Two.

When did counting ever help anyone sleep?

Three.

I’m already bored. Why are numbers so hideously dull?

Four.

Perhaps I ought to be thinking about omelettes.

Five.

How many red peppers should I use?

Six.

Oyster mushrooms or ceps?

Seven.

(Wind Sound No.5: ‘The Moderate Howl’)

Eight.

I haven’t rung my sister for weeks. She’ll never forgive me.

Nine.

What about yellow peppers for a change?

Ten.

What are you talking about? Stick with what you know.

Eleven.

(Wind Sound No.14: ‘Stepping on the Cat’s Tail’)

Got to stop counting.

Eleven.

Stop it, I said.

Eleven.

?

Good.’

All of which goes to show that you shouldn’t trust a German to write a review of an Andorran novel, especially not one who seems to have slept through all the major advancements in modern literature. And I say this, of course, as a man who is not unused to reserving judgment. Unlike one or two of my colleagues, I do not welcome modern methods regardless – though neither do I reject them off the cuff. There are limits. And Oa Aayorta sails perilously close to many of them; dangling one of his elderly legs over the waterfall of my reservations, whilst the other rests in clear and limpid waters. The Endless Winter Night is a great novel, but its delights are best savoured by a reader who is in control of his own procedures. Which is to say: the sooner that Oa Aayorta stops believing that a writer ought to be in full control of his readers, the better.

Review by Jinpes Terenk

Further Reading:

Afterthoughts: Cold Cold Modernity

The Party Line

The Young and the Old

Some Non-Novels (2)

Andorran Twitterings

Translating the Title

A Mural Of My Ascent

Admirably Grey