Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness is a novel in two parts. The first part is a fictional monograph on the life of the Austrian modernist composer Anton von Webern (1883-1945). The collage-work monograph unfolds in a Webernian sequence of events and silences combining quotes from Webern, his friends and associates, and various historical and literary figures with short scenes, monologues, dialogues, newspaper articles, and theater and film scripts. The result is a lyrical panorama of early twentieth century Vienna, the unsettled and unsettling Mitteleurope that gave birth to both the fascinatingly esoteric, influential, and dogmatic methods of the Second Viennese School and the inexplicable Fascist horror of the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler. Through intermingling nodes of history, science, biography, and music, Webern and Hitler are brought together both physically and thematically, illustrating a simultaneously progressive and regressive vision, the apotheosis and cataclysm of the Enlightenment project.

The second part of the book takes place in Vienna on May 1st, 1986, shortly before the election of Kurt Waldheim as President of the Austrian Republic and shortly after the Chernobyl disaster. The three simultaneous, intertwining monologues of an archivist, a retired opera singer, and the author of the monograph, revisit the themes and events of the first part, commenting on postwar conceptions, analyses, and revisions of the period during which Webern lived, while continuously haunted by the spectres of Waldheim and Chernobyl, the persistence of crimes that are immanent, unpaid for, or only dimly, disingenuously recalled.