Contra Mundum is a New York-based independent publishing house expressly committed to Modernist work and principles. Its catalog includes the dramatic writings and theatre criticism of Robert Musil; Celan’s posthumous prose as translated by Pierre Joris; two “pre-heteronymic” works from Pessoa; the generously-illustrated Letters of Otto Dix; and a late film script from Marguerite Duras. Preference is given texts with limited circulation, the under-translated and outré in particular.
In 2012, for instance, Contra Mundum published Marginalia on Casanova, Tim Wilkinson’s rendering of Volume 1 in Miklós Szentkuthy’s cathedral-commentary-catalogus rerum, St. Orpheus Breviary. Contra Mundum is now five books into its tremendous project, bringing into English an immense cosmophagic-and-collapsing body of prose from a modernist still known as the “sacred monster” of Hungarian letters. In addition to works from the Breviary, Contra Mundum has so far contributed translations of Prae and Toward the One & Only Metaphor (also translated by Wilkinson, who died in October of 2020) and Chapter on Love (translated by Erika Mihálycsa, who will continue as translator for subsequent Szentkuthy works). That CMP should be the publisher to finally give Anglophone readers an adequate Szentkuthy is fitting: press and author share an understanding of zeitgeists alive—in art, in language—across history, unthreatened by chronology or multilingualism. Contra Mundum too experiences its periodic connection to modernism(s) without—or with different—temporal allegiances. In addition to Musil and Pessoa, CMP has published not only Baudelaire and Wordsworth and the Ghérasim Luca of Mary Ann Caws, but also Iceberg Slim, a new Gilgamesh (Stuart Kendall’s), Ahmad Shamlou, Maura Del Serra, and the collected prose of Robert Kelly. Many texts converge around performance, whether onstage, on screens, or in person(ae): CMP has published Elio Petri, Richard Foreman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Rédoine Faïd, and Carmelo Bene. Adjacent to this swirl of codexical text and idea is Hyperion, CMP’s in-house and aptly subtitled journal: On the Future of Aesthetics.
Rainer J. Hanshe is the founder, editor, and publisher of Contra Mundum Press, as well as the author of two CMP titles, Shattering the Muses and The Abdication, and the translator of its three works by Baudelaire. We spoke recently about the nature of (his) modernism and its role in contemporary literature. Deviation, ambition, and heteroglossia were our major subthemes.
Rachel Allen (RA): How does Contra Mundum understand “modernism”? How do you recognize modernist work when you encounter it? (Is modernism limited, temporally? Geographically? Relationally? Formally? To whom is it available to be modernist?)
Rainer Hanshe (RJH): Although Modernism does occur within a specific epochal moment, I don’t see it as bound to that cluster of time, nor do I see it in absolute or purist terms. There is no kind of totemic Modernism with a unified set of precepts that every modernist abides by. Any kind of doctrinaire, sectarian, or dogmatic form of something cannot be abided. We are advancing modernism more as a kind of mobile act or event, like a type of living roving machine (not in a mechanistic sense but as a generative force) or combustion furnace and monster of energy. It is a question of extracting from any period, any event, any moment, its active, productive elements, like taking an arrow shot by Nature, picking it up where it has fallen, and shooting it in new directions, as Deleuze said of Nietzsche.
In that way, art is no different from science in terms of advancements—once a certain insight or knowledge has been developed, there is no reason to abandon it, let alone restrict it to its original moment. Modernism (let’s avoid the term neo-Modernism) is to us protean and metamorphic, an open, indeterminate constellation. Beyond seeing it solely as a specific movement in time then, consider its principal elements as if they were discoveries: a conscious break with tradition (abandoning outmoded elements of classicism); a rejection of historicism and the grand narratives of Western metaphysics, not to speak of its morals and values; the displacement of reason as a ruling force (the curse of the Enlightenment) and fostering in its stead a chiasmic fusion of the rational and the irrational; an abandonment of bankrupt forms of art, such as naturalism and realism (and so representation), which different scientific developments essentially undermined, and Enlightenment-type encyclopaedic projects of totality; related to consciousness and new conceptions of the self and the indeterminacy of the human: interior monologues; stream of consciousness; perspectivalist viewpoints; fracturedness, fragmentation, heteroglossic language, en plus.
It is a literature of incommensurabilities, of a dynamism in signification, of a rejection of absolute truths, of an embracing of dissonance. A literature that is aware of language’s limits, of its fissures, of its cul-de-sacs and cracks, and it vigorously pursues such. Flaubert’s book about nothing; Mallarme’s Le Livre; Beckett’s search for a literature of the unword; et cetera. Modernism understands language as Bakhtin spoke of it: a dynamic entity consisting of an interplay between centripetal and centrifugal discursive forces. The combustive furnace. Heteroglossia. An amalgam of linguistic registers. The Tower of Babel is not a curse.
Modernism to Contra Mundum is not then limited in any of the senses you asked; it is radically indeterminate and mutable. As Blanchot succinctly put it, “only the book matters, such as it is, far from genres, outside of categories—prose, poetry, novel, testimony—under which it refuses to be classed, and to which it denies the ability to assign its place and determine its form. A book no longer belongs to a genre; every book belongs to literature alone, as if literature possessed beforehand, in their generality, the secrets and formulae that alone allow what is written to assume the reality of a book. It seems as if genres have vanished, and literature alone asserted itself . . .” I see this as a literature of hybridity. I call it Marsyan art.
RA: A press description on your website promises special attention to modernists whose experiments deviate significantly from “the programmatic and spurious,” as these “attest to the volatile nature of modernism.” Can you say more about the deviance and the volatility that interest you? Are you concerned about a gentrified modernism?
RJH: What you make me realize is that, unwittingly, I seem to have been sculpting, or seeking to foment, a modernist renaissance of sorts, as part of some tacit war with the ruling or dominant forces of our era. The précis on our site is I guess an incipient or embryonic manifesto, a feud in nucleus, and your question is a provocation to outline in more detail the philosophy.
By “volatile nature of modernism,” the chemical sense of the word is meant, as in that which is changeable and mercurial, though its other sense is apt, for out of violent shatterings, out of explosions, out of mutations, other entities—new entities—are potentially born. Make it New, as Pound said, through his Chinese mask. And by deviance, let’s see: work that turns aside or wanders far from any sectarian or ruling mode of writing; work that uses form in conscious, knowing ways, or pushes it to an extreme, a limit; work that raises searching questions, exceeds conventions, plays an unsettling role in the predominant and staid confines of culture; makes language into a strange kind of foreign language; disrupts it with a multitude of different registers; makes it dissonant, but all with a knowledge of the continuum in which one is writing. There are some instances of experimentation (itself an overused, much-abused word) that are empty; experimentation simply for the sake of it, without being born of some other more volcanic source and experience or event. It is instrumentalized and programmatic; there is a schism between the work and its form. Experiment added like a dressing. When his work was deemed by critics to be avant-garde, Carmelo Bene railed against the association for he found much of the avant-garde amateurish and ignorant.
What we’re ultimately concerned with is language, with the word, with writing, pushing it to a limit or threshold, making it into sound, into music, into silence, and, with form, with how scientific developments have altered our perception of our selves and of time, and thus of how narrative is conceived, altered, mutated, made prismatic and kaleidoscopic, which is not to say we no longer love reading Cicero. If there is no questioning of form in such works, if writing does not embody or enact such questions as modernism brought to bear against literature, and it is an agonistic relation, if it contains no ambivalence about reality or the self, if it is obsessed with identity, with subjectivity, with the mirror, it seems willfully anachronistic. A continuum has been lost; the connection with it, severed. In one of his lectures, George Steiner said that “literature has scarcely begun to do minimal homework, hence its thinness and domesticity, hence the belief that adultery in Long Island is an interesting subject. It has scarcely begun to be serious.” Twenty years later, the observation remains pertinent for, still, we’re riddled with endless novels about personal experience, love stories, and so on. A surfeit of narcissism, a surfeit of Oedipal dramas, a surfeit of iPhone versions of reality that barely escape a frame where nothing else exists and nothing else is interesting save for an infinite and ever-recurring and endless repetition of the self, with nary a bit of depersonalization. The apes must be happy not to have reached our stage of evolution. I’ll be your mirror? No, I’ll be your dynamite.
Another element of the agon has to do with that great bugaboo difficulty. It is a dilemma regarding the tyranny of consonance, of the desire that is for the easily comprehensible, for harmony, in myriad ways, even among more intelligent and sophisticated readers, who will speak of a book (whether its language, form, or subject matter) being difficult or heavy (a typically American observation), implying that ease, harmony, lightness, consonance, is expected, is the sine qua non. What too many prefer is piano key or stop-and-fret literature. The easily played-upon, the easily digestible. Consonance has been, for millennia, the primary authority or rule of law in the arts, a given for creating signification and knowledge, or serving as the foremost benchmark of valuation. If one ventures outside of the consonant, especially morally, one is in danger of condemnation, or worse, expulsion. We are too dominated by notions of consonance, in a multitude of ways, of the incessant need to identify, with things or ‘characters,’ which betrays a persistent faith in the subject and in outmoded or hackneyed modes of being. Alternatively, we say to read for difference, for dissonance; read not to identify, or to sympathize, but from a principle of fascination, why not, of terror even, of repulsion. Go to the edge of oblivion; seek the bristling impossibilities; embrace alienation and estrangement. Test the boundaries of thought and experience.
RA: I was going to say that I’m reminded of Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris and their Poems for the New Millennium—they too seem to be interested in a living and variegated modernism—but that may be inapt: their project is about expansion through ever-greater acceptance of what(-ever) is. Yours seems more oppositional. Contra Mundum is against the world. Do you see opposition to dominant culture as a primary aim, or is it complementary to a positive program? What is the role, do you think, of oppositionality in publishing?
RJH: Rothenberg and Joris are more democratic; as expansive as it is, we might have less people than they around our fire. Still, for Contra Mundum, opposition is not a conscious action; the agonistic force is inherent in the embodiment of the vision. If one sees and thinks in certain ways, one is naturally at odds with others, without a chosen expenditure of energy. Simply in creating the music that he did, Harry Partch was by virtue in another hemisphere. It is vital to preserve and direct energy primarily toward what one is constructing.
As perhaps other deviations out there, we seek, at a deeper, more subterranean level, to play an unsettling role within the predominant and often staid confines of Anglo-Saxon, if not world, culture. To act as a contagion and give rise to mutations; to alter the genealogical lines. Or to be a host for certain exiled writers; to bring them to our table, and so the world. In our eyes, the introduction of the foreign—understood in the provocative, volatile, and experimental sense—is a vital act of opposition in a globalized world that is less cognizant of or interested in foreign endeavors, or which seeks to swiftly neutralize and absorb them. Here then is a bit of dark matter to trouble the depths, stir the senses, and, to whatever degree possible, disrupt any ossified cultural paradigms. A lightning bolt for the soul. To reach one nascent Claude Cahun, or Artaud, or Maya Deren, or to open a pathway to some desolate person, isolated amidst the maelstrom of cazzate that dominates the world, and to show them that there are other constellations of possibility—however fractured—is to manifest a feracious root. The right seed can become a redwood; a mole can burrow underground and unearth an entire new world; a dragonfly can provoke us to perceive in entirely new ways.
We could also be writing and publishing for the dead, or the unborn, for those to come, the posthumous, for unfathomed futures, and thinking not merely in terms of our brief fraction of history, of the topical and ultimately disposable, but of a far more extended timescale, back aeons of time, and forward just as far. Not of what is considered relevant, a ruling barometer that betrays no intimacy or relation with a greater span of history, as if only our own short speck of time is the thing of consequence. If, as Ezra Pound said, it takes a culture twenty to forty years to get serious literature (Stendhal said eighty), the timescale has to broaden. We remain Classical and Baroque and Romantic and Modernist and so on. The delusion of the contemporary human is that it has seen through and moved beyond the entire past. It confuses technological development with progress. When Picasso and other visual artists were confronted with the reality of Lascaux and Altamira, they realized that they had learnt nothing in fifteen hundred years.
RA: You’ve written previously for Asymptote about the simultaneous possibility and threat in “world literature,” citing Auerbach’s remarks on Goethe as cautionary. I’m curious how Contra Mundum avoids the “single literary culture” of Auerbach’s warning. By what means do you seek translations that multiply and mutate, rather than sterilizing and singularizing?
RJH: Through being open and receptive to whatever is alien to oneself, to being adventurous in one’s reading, to publishing from as many languages as possible, including writers—like Lorand Gaspar—who embody a multitude of languages and cultures within themselves alone, and who don’t homogenize such but let the Tower of Babel sound in them. With the fixation on identity that rules our era, how would one refer to a writer such as Gaspar, who was born in Translyvania into a Hungarian family but raised speaking Hungarian, Romanian, German, and French, and who later learned English, Latin, Greek, and Arabic? Do we restrict him to being Hungarian alone? Does his embodiment of each of those languages not mutate and expand him in myriad ways? What is such a hybrid creature? Is the “Romanian” Gherasim Luca a French writer since he wrote primarily in that tongue, or a “surrealist”? And what is Emilio Villa, who read and wrote in over fourteen different languages, even Sumerian and Akkadian? Can we call him Italian? He is something entirely other.
All these nomenclatures are essentially ways of not seeing, if not perilous in their attachment to notions of solidity and purity. The self is far grander, more ambiguous, and more capacious than the circumscribed dimensions to which many try to tether it. It would be liberating to pursue Foucault’s wish of assessing books without knowing the identity of the author (if one truly believes in the death of the author, nothing else is possible, and in the epoch of quantum physics . . . ). So, it’s through seeking out writers of this nature, writers whose work isn’t bound by frontiers but moves beyond them (& often typographically), writers who sustain discord and dissonance in manifold ways, that one can sustain a many-tendrilled culture and evade a mono-culture, as well as the easily digestible newspaper prose that rules the town square. Immediate digestibility is the work of consumerism, not real literature. Literature is impossibility.
Cultivating the kind of translations in question is a challenging task. Sometimes, one is going to fail, but one has to be daring enough to take that risk, to chance folly even, and out of that discover the potentially unexpected. One has to trust in the translators one works with, and where necessary, without being invasive, if as an editor you think a translator is homogenizing a text, then you point that out. Some will be bolder than others, more daring, more open to hazard, to testing linguistic thresholds and not slavishly imitating a text but recreating its effect. Pierre Joris and Erika Mihálycsa are but two examples of translators who have global eyes and ears and who aren’t afraid to let a translation be as strange as possible, though not capriciously. To put this simply, if a book in its original language is dense and ambiguous or arcane, it shouldn’t be made more easily understandable in translation. If something is monstrous or grotesque, one has to let those atypical qualities sing too. If you order bucatini con sarde, don’t expect cacio e pepe.
RA: Perhaps you could say a bit about the lifecycle of a Contra Mundum publication—or set of publications, if you publish with an eye to the interrelations between texts over a given time period—from title-selection to publication. Contra Mundum has often published work composed from significant visual as well as verbal elements, and work strongly connected to performance, so I’m especially curious about how vision and performance figure in your editing and design processes.
RJH: In curating the press, I do in fact think of relations between books, of sculpting a catalog that is distinct and particular and which will endure. Maybe the title of that Tom Waits collection says it best—Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, & Bastards. The thing is to find dangerous books, books which have a certain power. There is a phrase, adopted from the book I created with Federico Gori, Shattering the Muses, which serves as a motto: Beware the Book! This speaks to the potency and charge of books, oft recognized by dictators as threatening, hence the frequent persecution of writers. The ultimate desire then is for books which have some kind of explosive power, books which can potentially transform reality and the world, or simply an individual, as the technology of the book has done since Gilgamesh.
In terms of book design, we respect the individual character of each work, honoring its DNA, unearthing what is right for it yet, at the same time, creating a Contra Mundum book, but without ever imposing upon an author anything that resembles a branding mark. If some design element has to be abandoned because it doesn’t suit the nature of a book, so be it. This analogy doesn’t correspond exactly, because books are especially different animals, but, when you see a Bugatti from afar, without having to check the logo, you know it’s a Bugatti. Or, when you move through a Louis Kahn building, you know that’s what it is, and nothing else. It’s got that feel; it doesn’t need a billboard. The vision is apparent, even if in as subtle a detail as an ampersand. From the beginning, despite existing in the digital age, our typographer Alessandro Segalini has sought to incorporate hand-cut elements in his typography, for we are nothing without the hand. And to honor all that work, it was vital to resurrect the colophon, which too many publishers no longer include in their books.
Vision and performance do figure in, and it is something that Segalini and I constantly think about and seek to refine and hone with each book, like chefs regularly sharpening their knives, whether at the atomic level of the typography, or at the surface level of spreads and covers, to even the godforsaken bar code—since it has to be present, at least make it as elegant as possible. There is perhaps a performative dimension to certain design elements, like our use of author signatures on covers, sometimes inside a book, to lend it an author’s personal graphic touch to a book. Once again, the presence of the hand. And, in ways, vision and performance are present in how text is displayed on the page, which isn’t always discernible to the untrained eye, though it is more evident with books like The Abdication, or Richard Foreman’s Plays with Films, or The Selected Poetry of Emilio Villa, or Shattering the Muses.
RA: What are you working on now? What do you have forthcoming? What are you looking forward to?
RJH: At this very second, we’re typesetting Honor Among Thieves, a book on the films of Jean-Pierre Melville, proofing several manuscripts (Ahab by Pierre Senges, Waiting for Fear by Oğuz Atay, Spirale by Rédoine Faïd, Vol. II of Szentkuthy’s Prae, Evelyne Grossman’s La Créativité de la crise), returning to a Hugo Ball project, pursuing a tractatus on suicide others are too fearful to publish, fielding a host of submissions, writing grant applications, and curating the next issue of Hyperion so, stabbing ourselves in the eye. Beyond that, to speak strictly of myself, I’m doing research on Shirley Clarke for a possible book of her interviews, and returning, after a long hiatus, to something of my own called Humanimality, as well as other translation and writing projects, including a long in the making Italian version of Shattering the Muses, and Closing Melodies, a book on Nietzsche and Van Gogh that may be another collaboration with Federico Gori.
What we’re looking forward to? Further developing with Emile Plateau our Agrodolce Series, a source of unorthodox books on food (Oyster was the first); ‘Peggy Guggenheim’ (the arrival of one or more benefactors); having veal couscous with Rédoine Faïd once he gets out of jail (A helicopter, a helicopter! My kingdom for a helicopter!); receiving the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (someone call the French Minister of Culture, my lapel is bare); a house on the Mediterranean (the light, the sun, the sea); staying at Casa Malaparte (an invitation is welcome); the resurrection of Ava Gardner (. . .); to be big in Japan; to get out of this damn ghost town; and publishing books for the next fifty years, if any of us live that long. Finally, if that isn’t enough, or if it was possibly immodest, although it’s not as rhythmic and punchy, instead of mehr licht, mehr licht, we’ll most be looking forward to: more negative capability, more negative capability, and a whole hell of a lot of oysters.
In lieu of Rainer Hanshe’s photo, we have used by his request René Magritte’s “The Pleasure Principle” (1937).
Rainer J. Hanshe is a writer and the founder of Contra Mundum Press and Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics. He is the author of two novels, The Acolytes (2010) and The Abdication (2012), and the editor of Richard Foreman’s Plays with Films (2013) and Wordsworth’s Fragments (2014). His translations include Charles Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare (2017; 2020), Belgium Stripped Bare (2019), and Paris Spleen (2021) as well as other works. Material of his has appeared in Caesura, Black Sun Lit, Sinn und Form, ChrisMarker.org, Asympto
Rachel Allen is a writer and a Pisces. She lives in New York, sometimes North Carolina.
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