Demonstrating the Breadth of Paul Scheerbart

The Paris Review Daily's Erik Morse spoke to Josiah McElheny, the co-editor (with Christine Burgin) of Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!: A Paul Scheerbart Reader. Not heard of Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915)? "Scheerbart, an eccentric, Danzig-born poet and architectural theorist, is best remembered through obscure citations from Walter Benjamin, Walter Gropius, and Bruno Taut. But in the spirited era of Berlin’s café culture, he was a popular serialist, publisher, and proto-surrealist. From the late 1880s to his premature death in 1915, he wrote prolifically on science, urban planning and design, space travel, and gender politics, often in the course of a single text." Morse and McElheny spoke about Scheerbart’s belated American reception, the cultural amnesia of World War I, and their mutual fascination with Utopian literature. Read an excerpt of their conversation below, and check out some of Scheerbart's phonic poems at Ubu Web.

How did you first come across Scheerbart’s writing?

The first major publication of his work in translation was Glass Architecture in 1972. I read that sometime around 1988, and I didn’t really know what to make of it. I came to it as though it were an architecture book, but it read to me like a piece of literature. I found it to be captivating and somewhat Borges-like—not in structure but in its spirit. Then around 2001, there was the publication of The Gray Cloth with Ten Percent White: A Ladies’ Novel. I was struck by its very unusual literary style—very sparse, thematic, and highly evocative—and fascinated by the entire novel, which is about people struggling over the political and spiritual meaning of aesthetics. I had never encountered anything like it in historical literature—the way it speaks in a proto-feminist voice but also with the deep undertone of misogyny that one associates with that era. It was a very disturbing book and it really bothered me—the way in which he demonstrates how aesthetics can have this implication about sexuality. I had so many questions about the translation itself. Later I learned that much of the strangeness of the language lay in the original German.

I had a similar experience with his outer-space novel, Lesabéndio, when it was first published in English. It’s such an epic text, and yet I really couldn’t discern in his writing voice whether it was a very genuine work of a doe-eyed Utopian or a long, laborious joke. All of this effort he put into detailing an asteroid planet and these ridiculous alien characters, the lead protagonist of which transforms into this omniscient, Kubrick-inspired, energy field at the conclusion. Needless to say, I was very confused. How did you come up with the title of the book?

We wanted to demonstrate the breadth of Scheerbart, from novelist to critic to theorist to humorist to philosopher to artist, while trying to situate him in the literary and radical politics of his day. So glass speaks to his forays into architecture as politics, love represents his literature focusing on gender relations, perpetual motion focuses on the poetics of his work in the world of engineering and technology. Our hope was to encourage new translations and further scholarship on him. That’s what my “poem” at the end of the book is about: highly edited groupings of his titles, hoping to inspire new Scheerbartians.

Find the rest of "Dreams from a Glass House: An Interview with Josiah McElheny" at Paris Review Daily.