“Not Literature, or, Epiphany on a Sunday Evening” by Ingo Schulze
Or, Not Epiphanic At All.
A stilted, banal story about the little moments that jar one of out of the quotidian and into awareness. The trigger, in this story, is an orange peel. But read this:
We both gazed at the orange peel and, along with it, the miracle that there are orange peels and us and everyone and everything, the whole miracle of it. There’s nothing more for me to say. We understood the miracle that we exist. Period. Should I say I saw us in the womb of the universe? But I saw not just us, but everyone and everything. Each man, each woman, each child, each thing, but not as some sort of panorama, but each man, each woman, each child, each thing up close. We were all at the mercy of horrors and of all things human, of every ugliness and every beauty. I wasn’t standing apart from it, there was nothing in between—between me, us, and everything else.
Even the epiphany is banal. It’s a concatenation of clichés about epiphanies. OR!
Here is my suspicion. This story is so banal that I have to believe that the banality itself is intentional. That Schulze, one of Germany’s finest writers, is trying to bore me to death within 5 pages to show me that…what? Life is so banal that even thinking about life is banal? And then there’s the title, “Not Literature.” This is true: writing an entire half a page about how drinking a beer is a great thing to do while grilling sausages on a hot day (glad to know some things transcend national boundaries) is not literature. So is this story actually a shrewd statement about how life, when accurately depicted, is not the stuff of literature? And conversely, that literature is a lie? Now I’m confused.
So either I’ve read the most boring story of the year or the greatest story of the year.
