Aris Fioretos on the variety of shades of gray

The rebellious poet Arthur Rimbaud assigned colors to all vowels and wrote that the “I” was “red” and “the last cry in the murderers’ cells.” Around a hundred years later, the critical 1968 German studies students in Berlin demanded that “the blue flower of Romanticism,” the poet’s dream raised by Novalis, “must become red.”

The writer Aris Fioretos, who has lived in Berlin for a long time, has dedicated a book to gray. It appeared in the Swedish original more than 30 years ago. Thanks to Fioretos’ translator Paul Berf and the Vienna publisher Sonderzahl, German-speaking readers can now also explore the gray realms of poetry. Provided you tilt the stylish handmade brochure a little, because that’s the only way you can see the title and author’s name on the cover. The first few lines of text remain unreadable until, line by line, the grayscale of the font becomes dark enough to make letters visible. On the last page the text gradually becomes illegibly light.

“The Gray Book” also serves as a book that illustrates what it means to be gray. But it’s not that easy to grasp what the subject of the book is. The sections are titled “Tears,” “Smoke,” “Grain,” “Clouds,” and the first, which deals with pencil stubs and graphite, has no title at all due to the printing process described. Fioretos is best known as an author of novels.

Most of his works are based on research, which Fioretos converted into fiction in which he tells of an unheard-of life. His novel “The Thin Gods,” published in 2023, was about an almost forgotten rock star, while his previous book was “Mary B.” about a German aviation pioneer. But Fioretos is also a literary scholar and studied at a time when deconstruction was fashionable.

How literature “preserves volatility”

In his early work, Fioretos traces phenomena that only exist in transition. He shows how literature “preserves volatility” across eras. Using the example of In Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Fioretos deals with the mist that cannot be grasped but is capable of swallowing the world.

A diary entry by Kafka from the early 20th century links the writers’ desire to stay – and its sheer futility: “Some people stay afloat with a pencil. Stays alive? Dreams of rescue as a drowned man.” He is fascinated by gray figures between life and death in Kafka’s stories. In the tears of the hero Achilles, the author finds a sign of individuality in ancient times. In medieval poetry he shows how smoke becomes an image of anger.

Again and again, Fioreto’s sentences are disarmingly clear: “Tears give clarity without having to explain themselves.” He touches on Beckett’s prose and the art of stretching time in Nabokov’s novels. As readers, we follow elegant associations, but contemporary historical or biographical contexts that would help to classify his observations remain obscure. Fioretos shades ideas, presupposes accents and knowledge. He draws attention to processes that no one pays attention to, who reads, thinks and looks at the world in a goose-step manner.