The Sixth Sense

by Konrad Bayer, Malcolm Green (Translator), Günter Brus (Illustrator)

"One of the finest flowerings of this impassioned quest is the sixth sense, the novel Bayer had all but finished at the time of his suicide. In it he creates a metaphysical theatre of the word that wryly undermines the very language from which it is constructed. Time and identity are turned inside out in a series of elaborately interwoven episodes set against a backdrop of riots and cataclysms, labyrinths of stone or throbbing meat, and bucolic scenes populated by toyland figures… and not forgetting the inevitable bars of Vienna."

Genres: Fiction

160 pages, 15 x 17cm

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Konrad Bayer (17 December 1932 – October 1964) was an Austrian writer and poet. A member of the Wiener Gruppe, he combined apparently irreconcilable elements—violence, hermeticism, pessimism, ecstasy, banality—and influences (dadaism, surrealism, pataphysics, Wittgenstein, Stirner, Sade et al.)—into a bizarre[citation needed] linguistic solipsism which has held increasing fascination for German writers of the last few decades. His most important works are the novels Der Kopf des Vitus Bering (The Head of Vitus Bering) and Der sechste Sinn (The Sixth Sense), published posthumously in 1965 and 1966, respectively. Bayer committed suicide in October 1964 at the age of 32.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Konrad Bayer sculpted a singular literary vision—one which dissolved with the departure of his spirit from this world at age 32, after he lay down on the floor of his girlfriend’s Vienna flat and turned on the gas. This novel was published posthumously, though Bayer had already secured a publisher for it prior to his death. Reading the book is somewhat of a hypnotic experience—turning the pages in a trance, every once in a while triggered by a repetitious element into recalling some elusive strand of narrative since mislaid in a recent blur of linguistic mischief. And then suddenly passages like this arrive:

he sat there before the open window as if before a curtain with these two hills in front of his nose sagging at the middle like the mattress on his bed with this sky like the old rug in front of the stove round like the trees in front of him out there or in there with this branch like the glowing stovepipe at this position of the sun this landscape like a box with the outside painted on the inside the doors open the shutters warmly heated this room in the hotel is it winter?

Time progresses, sometimes in a linear fashion, but most definitely not always—it is hard to tell due to immersion in a dreamlike logic, where disorientation passes for normal to the point where total surrender is the only way to experience the prose.

even as a child goldenberg had had a morbid yearning for perfection. today the photo transparency was somewhat faded at the edges, but had descended distinctly enough over his perceptual apparatus, a guillotine had put an end to his powers of perception, and the stream of his consciousness flowed electrically through now-porous walls of deduction, trickling into channels where once smooth isolators had continued to dictate simple routes.

It would seem that even while Bayer is describing the life and times of a group of friends, he is also digging deep into goldenberg’s psyche, rotating between the external and the internal seemingly at random, as day continues to turn into night and some form of life moves on.

the night pales, ulcers—gray at first—burgeon in from the dark on all sides, assume colour, become distinct, turn into houses, the city, his friends, the tram that will drive him away. someone places some money in his hand and he and his apparition disappear. a butcher takes goldenberg’s place in space and moves about in his stead, dragging along blood-stained baskets.

Throughout the book characters announce they have ‘the sixth sense’—the perception of a transcendent state beyond linear time and fixed identity. It is a recurring question of who has it (and what has it—at one point goldenberg wonders if bats do) but also of the veracity of these claims. What does seem to be the case is that ‘the sixth sense’ might be wished for but does not appear to be attainable through willpower—it arrives (and departs) without warning. Once granted it seems to offer a way to leave behind the paradox of how the awareness of our existence and the passage of time does little to help us grapple with the meaning of life and our place in the world.

what is left of me? a sound of flowing water. obviously i know that it’s night and presumably my body’s lying there somewhere. but what does that help?

The questions never resolve themselves in this book, as it should be. Likewise, there is no change over time to Bayer’s tacit acknowledgment of the lingual inability to properly parse the questions. And yet throughout his modest literary output, Bayer didn’t permit these limitations to stop him from still stretching the elasticity of language in his inquiries. With his own specialized tools he approached fundamental questions of philosophy, and the literary works his efforts yielded were often strange, yet irrigated by that familiar dark stream running underneath us all.

time is a solid body in which we move, goldenberg had known when he was still alive.

or is it an allegory of ourselves that we gradually become aware of? dobyhal pondered.

One of the drawings made by Günter Brus for this edition:

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Time? said Goldenberg... it is just a cutting up of the whole, by means of the senses.

And so the experience of this book becomes somewhat arbitrarily cut up into episodes, highlighted by various linguistic or narrative dislocations, unfolding in bars or labyrinths where stuffed dogs snap their jaws. Taken apart, they each offer their own justifications and absurd pleasures, but time and the five senses have divided experience so as to mostly deny any kind of ordinary narrative progression. Because there isn't exactly a progression here, but nodes on a gestalt, perhaps. Facets of a mass.

Despite this, the novel never becomes lost in itself, forgotten in a slew of disparate and irreconcilable parts. Repetition here serves well, the cohering effect of recognition and repetition, though all at once un-cohering again: the dissociative effect of repetition, phrases recurring until they have changed meaning entirely. (And just try to be shaken by the hand again in the same way.)

Synopsis, then, what is it?: a group of young intellectuals cast adrift on the rhythms of life in Vienna, spiraling about the poles of love and death as one does, living out abstractions, absurdities, theater, and philosophical hypothesis. And what is life, to be so adrift upon? And what is?

We cannot penetrate the world, we have nothing to do with it, we create images of it that suit us, we establish methods by which to act in it and call it the world, or when things go wrong, me in the world, it is more than a little arrogant when we demand a painted backdrop which allows us to name and be tragic about our gestures and personal wishes which we normally designate as things, connections and the like.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is an oversimplification, but I have the feeling that one’s response to this book could likely be reduced to how they respond to the following quote:

suddenly large guinea-pigs appear on all sides.

That’s not a metaphor in the text.

Actually. No. Strike that.

Re-read that sentence. It’s one of the more straightforward statements of facts in the book.

I have a feeling that your enjoyment of this book is going to be much more driven by your reaction to all of that.

There is, in a way, a story going on in all of this. The introduction points out that, much as Bayer did with the structures of biography in The Head of Vitus Bering, what he is doing here is directed at the idea of memoir, or at least group-memoir. I referenced the The Vienna Group in my review of Vitus Bering and won’t go into details here again, but what Bayer is doing here is writing about that group, his wife, and their experiences in Vienna. Of course, most of this is unrecognizable as the reality we inhabit – riots and destruction dominate the background of the story, numeric representation after a while ceases to have meaning ( “the 3 ordinary-looking young men bring a million beers in a motorboat no one had seen before” “among all the 100,000 plants” “three million and eleven mounted police slowly approached” ), repetition is prevalent – it provides a touchstone throughout the book, phrases as purchase for the reader to grab hold of, until the phrases shift and slowly change meaning. Needless to say, this is all pretty surrealistic – and the joy of reading it is in fact simply the joy of reading it, of letting the language and phrases just kind of crash around you.

Through it all the book is populated by characters who have, or have and lose, or do not have and gain, or simply do not have, the sixth sense. It is the sense of everything, uncut up, uninterpreted, unfiltered through the other five senses. It is the whole, removed from perspective.

the perspective is a really perfidious trap!

“so if we had other lens in our eyeholes so that everything was distorted and when we raised our gazes the church spires shot up and when we dropped our gazes our feet went flying away and we could grasp the things and say this thing is exactly so long and would take the distance we had grasped hold of for this image than everything would be in order.”

“precisely” replied goldenberg, “we take in things just like that and just the amount we can manage to bear.”

But that idea – of what we can manage to bear – is important. Those with the sixth sense are burned up from the inside, skin and eyes cracking, fevers reaching 120 degrees. Now, mind you, in the context of the book this doesn’t stop them from continuing to participate in the narrative, but the occurrence is important nevertheless.

As with The Head of Vitus Bering this book is not for everyone – but it is quite good. Not quite as good as Vitus in my opinion, but deserving to be more widely read by the lovers of the odd and experimental.