you street-level slum Samaritans, you gutter tourists, on the hunt for the next aesthetic wonder, the next imagination-whetting, titillating larva, the next grub who, anticipating metamorphosis, crawls around in the dung covering itself in whatever grot emerges from its orifices, . . . [people like you] hound the homeless, the beggars, pissheads, junkies, the criminals, they’d skin a creature alive just cos their still life is crying out for a splash of carmine red, they’ve got no problem asking the suicide case to throw themselves in front of the train fifty metres further along, so they get the fairground in the background.
The texts on trial range from the prisoner’s records to Tupac’s lyrics to the Bible, Marx, and German philosophy, but the question for each is the same: how can we ethically produce or consume art about human suffering? And at the same time, how can we not?
Wretchedness—understood both as a philosophical proposition and as the novel by Andrzej Tichý that Nichola Smalley has translated from Swedish into stunning, polyphonic English—offers a labyrinthine yet somehow also precise answer to these questions. Although it might initially suggest a rock bottom of condition and fortune, wretchedness also connects to the idea of contradiction. As Simone Weil explains in Gravity and Grace, which offers just one possible philosophical and spiritual glossary for Tichý’s otherwise relentlessly corporeal text, “Contradiction alone is the proof that we are not everything. Contradiction is our wretchedness, and the sense of our wretchedness is the sense of reality. For we do not invent our wretchedness. It is true. That is why we have to value it. All the rest is imaginary.” The hint she drops in this quote serving as the novel’s epigraph—that wretchedness contains lighter notes than we might suppose—is fully explored by Tichý as he develops Cody and the other characters around him.
At the novel’s outset, a meeting between Cody and a junkie triggers a series of memories and reflections that jump between timelines and bodies, marrying the reverent sanctuaries of high culture with the chaos and viscera of the streets. The Weilian theory of wretchedness and contradiction plays out first in this meeting and then repeatedly throughout the events, both past and present, of the rest of the novel: I am also my opposite, I am contradiction, and so I am wretchedness itself; I am wretchedness itself, but neither simply nor damningly. In the present, Cody goes to a concert with colleagues who share his enthusiasm for music, but there is a palpable distance between them caused by their distinct social backgrounds and emphasized by how thoroughly they disappear when Cody enters the realm of memory, which is the novel’s most prevalent setting.
Like Tichý, Cody is a Czech immigrant to Sweden. However, he identifies not with any community organized around nation, language, color, or class, but rather with a different sort of group: that of the “failed abortions,” which is to say the sons and daughters of hardworking immigrants who are so disenchanted with the dreams of security and comfort their parents sacrificed their bodies and hours for and who have so internalized Swedish society’s disdain for them that each one flails to discover how to spend their time on the streets of Malmö. At one point, Cody and a friend discuss a disparaging newspaper article they read as youths about the immigrant neighborhoods where they grew up: “it didn’t just say RUBBISH DUMP, it said more than that, it said much more, there were so many words, they were black on white, and the words were HUMAN and RUBBISH DUMP . . . and you know, my dad said to me that now we’ve come to PARADISE, but in the paper they wrote that it was a HUMAN RUBBISH DUMP.” Somewhere in this contradiction between paradise and a rubbish dump lies the community that raised them and that can be their only source of a sense of self, even if it is an impoverished one.
Cody, now a classical musician with a coin and a cigarette to spare, has often been in the position of the junkie he meets, who just got into a fight and does not know where he will sleep. These apparently contradictory characters tumble around, head over heels, inside of Cody in a version of the spiritual struggle that Weil refers to when talking about wretchedness and contradiction. Tichý, however, makes this theory more concrete as contradiction in the novel is neither binary nor dialectical but circular and generative, like a Celtic knot. The connection between opposites is more intimate than Marx would allow—and there’s plenty of half-rejected Marxism here—but also more interdependent than other political projects normally conceive of it. Wretchedness sits at the limits of what a human can tolerate, but it is also located within human inadequacy and inconsequentiality—sites where one could just as well find truth, divine love, and even saintliness. Tichý does not glorify wretchedness for the simple reason that it is not redemptive by itself. It is instead an unalienable fact that, once realized, can force one to confront oneself and play an active role in that relationship rather than letting one’s environment determine it. Cody takes advantage of this opportunity, and while Weil argues that the existence of God gives this process its redemptive power, Tichý remains agnostic on this topic, only mentioning God in the context of swearing or when equating its reality with that of unicorns.
The “rubbish dump” article, for instance, reminds Cody’s friend Soot, likely a lover as well as another junkie he’s nearly given up for lost, of how they used to dumpster dive
where people threw away things that weren’t totally broken, that hadn’t fallen apart, not completely anyway, things that could still be used, things that could be fixed, repurposed, used in some way or other, and one of us, or two of us, or all three, depending on whether we had to keep watch or not, jumped into the dumpster and lifted out junk and trash and looked for things that worked, and we were ashamed, it was that whole thing with the human rubbish dump and shit again, you know what I mean I think, and sometimes we didn’t find anything, and sometimes we found something, and if we happened to find something we could take home and make use of we got to feel ashamed every time we looked at the thing.
Soot connects the article to this experience of dumpster diving “because even if everyone knew it was a human rubbish dump, this place, you didn’t wanna look like a tramp.” But there is a more symbolic relationship between the article and the action: Cody and Soot have already established an equivalence, or at the very least the basis for a comparison, between human lives and discarded objects. Dismissed by society because they search for and recuperate inanimate objects whose value has been overlooked, Cody and Soot themselves lead the reader to consider how such a mission might be applied to animate “objects.” Yet even that mission never reaches the level of a redemption since neither the “object” nor the one recuperating it ever transcends the shame of disposability. This dance between worth and worthlessness, judged both internally and externally, for the elusive prize of being deemed valuable is precisely the understanding of wretchedness as contradiction that both Weil and Tichý articulate.
In this memory and others, Cody relinquishes his first-person voice, as if allowing himself to be possessed. No quotation marks separate dialogue from narration as other characters perform unstoppable monologues where they refer to themselves as “I” and to Cody as “you” or even occasionally use his name. In effect, Cody is dislocated—or rather, dislocates himself—from his person, which is another nod to Weil. This body-switching, by negating the dichotomy between subject and object, rejects a hierarchy of characters within both a work of art and society itself, and it can happen in an instant:
I was there when Laila, in pure desperation, cut her tongue out – swallowing blood in such large quantities is no good for the body, cos the body, the stomach, can’t handle it, it’s too much iron or something, you start feeling ill, you get nauseous, you get sick, and now my mouth is full of it, of that taste of iron and names and places, of events and movements, of memories and images, I have a mouth full of the tongue she cut off, I have a head full of blood, I see it the whole time, I have waking dreams about it in the day and I dream about it at night, my head is full of it, Cody, I have a mouth full of blood, I have a mouth full of earth, I have a mouth full of you.
Even though Soot is the “I” here, nothing distinguishes his speech from Cody’s, so it is easy to forget who actually speaks these words until Soot says Cody’s name. Blurring the boundaries between the two creates an affinity beyond empathy since Cody, too, has in his mouth the flavors of substances that are more metaphorical but no less toxic.
Elsewhere, Tichý deploys allusion to confront the challenge of creating a work that does not objectify suffering. But rather than transforming the text into a puzzle that is only decodable if the reader possesses a sufficient stockpile of cultural capital, these series of references have the unexpected effect of asserting the text’s radical accessibility. It’s rare that a reader will be familiar with the full range of his formidable personal canon, which includes both the Italian avant garde and Czech rap, but Cody poses a crucial invitation to the reader: “google it.” (Actually, Cody asks the reader to google “the final station” at the end of the train line in Prague where he comes from, the sort of place “decision-makers never come from.”) Once offered, the invitation stands to enter his world: one allusion becomes a dare to educate oneself about another, and in this way he bridges worlds while critiquing them, making them accessible instead of appropriating them.
For those of us who believe there are institutions and systems governing and safeguarding our lives, it can come as a shock—and one that is perhaps best forgotten quickly—to realize how fragile and inadequate they are. Such systems nurture within them their own weakness: the resistance of those of us who are not served by them, those often rejected by society who rely on more resilient modes of living that, however imperfectly, address real needs and value real skills. This is wretchedness on the broader scale of a nation or culture, and it is the endlessly regenerating, irresolvable, and often ugly contradiction to which this novel bears witness. Although wretchedness is often understood as the condition of those rejected as slackers, junkies, criminals, terrorists, and worse, Tichý retrieves it from the dumpster, restores some measure of its value, puts it to use, and, ashamed, continues to side-eye it.
