The translator’s preface to the third volume of The Aesthetics of Resistance informs us that ‘Several deadlines came and went on the way to this translation’. That is quite the understatement. The German edition of Peter Weiss’s 1,000-page historical novel appeared in 1975. A full English translation has been in the offing for more than 20 years. In the meantime, Weiss has won just about every literary accolade Germany has to offer, and his play Marat/Sade has become known as the theatrical ‘starting gun’ of the 1960s. Whatever the translator Joel Scott has in store for us, it had better be worth the wait.
Weiss was moved to write his magnum opus by the same question that animated his great model Bertolt Brecht, who actually appears as a minor character in Volume II: how to make art that is simultaneously avant-garde and committed. Or, as another character puts it: how to ‘match up the intensity of revolutionary artistic and political actions… the irony of the one with the seriousness, the sense of responsibility, of the other’.
Weiss’s solution was to write a vast, meandering monologue, largely without paragraph breaks, of the kind that will be familiar to readers of later Germanic writers such as Thomas Bernhard and W. G. Sebald. Interlocutors are never quite afforded voices of their own. Instead, their wordy disquisitions on art and history remain imprisoned in free indirect constructions: ‘Such a structure, borrowing, said Coppi, from the ideas of Saint-Just, Babeuf, Proudhon, can only lead to anarchism…’
This endless, airless prose works through accretion. Nothing much happens for page after page. Conversations about dialectical materialism slide into long descriptions of the Pergamon altar or Géricault’s ‘Raft of the Medusa’ and back again.
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