The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the CArds

 

The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards: by Emil Szittya
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked up this collection of Emil Szittya's prose poems(?) on a lark while visiting my favorite bookstore in the state of Wisconsin, Within Things. I had gone up there to pick up an album by new-to-me experimental ambient artist Elodie and came away with the album, a copy of Damian Murphy's The Bastion Overwhelmed, a friendship with the owner and his wife, and a copy of The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards: (A Novel against Psicho-Analise). A nice little haul on a wonderful summer day up in Door County.

As is usual with Wakewood Press offerings, we start with another great intro by translator W.C. Bamberger. I have been impressed with their opening essays time and time again. I would love to see a collection of Bamberger's short essays, each of which is a gem of information and erudite literary analysis. I could read his essays all day long, they're that good.

With Szittya's work, we begin in the border regions of Surrealism, with Dada on the horizon, but not quite free of the grasp of "traditional" writing. In short, it's getting weird, but not weird enough to be really interesting or compelling.

Out of my sadness I paint garish posters for illuminated dilapidated houses. My train has just steamed off with a spring landscape. It is hateful to be a clown.

"Gabriele's Opinion of My Hashish Hours" is the first section of this book that lives up to the promise of the surreal as a mechanism for breaking through to a more honest world by crashing through the gates of semi-structured nonsense into the ridiculousness of existence. This is over halfway through the volume, so it's a slow start. I'm fine with slow starts, in fact there are places where I prefer them. But for such a short book, the velocity just isn't fast enough for this reader.

"The Bordello," following immediately, is a more coherent prose poem. I had hope that the book might be picking up some speed.

The work gained momentum (and elicited more emotion) as it went along. "A Stroll (for Rita Kirsten)" is particularly moving. The sense of melancholy is not stilted, as in the earlier pieces, by absurdity for the sake of absurdism.

And this highlights my biggest problem with the work. Szittya sometimes wears his heart (or intellect) on his sleeve too much. It's as if he referred to The Dada Manifesto every other paragraph to make sure he was staying "on message," though said manifesto didn't appear in print for another two years. Perhaps he wasn't adhering to the party line so much as inventing it.

Regardless of provenience, the work shows hints of "soul," but often times lacks just that. If you are looking to jar your brain into discovering new ways of thought, by all means, you've found it. I just want a little more flow to my explorations, something with a bit more soul.

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