Blue-Eyed Attention

For William Gaddis, reality was “nothing other than circulating speech.” Hanns Zischler speaks of “asynchronous elective affinity.” The “murmur of America swept under the carpet” by Henry James, Gaddis made “audible.” In the 1990s, the German book market was busy establishing yet another genius; they had settled on Gaddis, just as in another year they had settled on Göttle, Gabriele. Gaddis came to the Frankfurt Book Fair; Goya was supposed to paint his portrait. The Gaddis clan had been influential in New York since the days of Peter Stuyvesant; at least that was the suggestion. Gaddis represented his class down to the filigree details. He appeared like a cliché of a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant with suspenders. He looked like an invention by Tom Wolfe.

Charles Darwin believed in a swing between female mate choice preferences and male selection pressure. The British statistician and evolutionary theorist Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890–1962) took up Darwin’s idea of natural optimization in order to contradict it. Fisher established sexual preference as a complementary category to natural selection. According to the Sexy Sons Hypothesis, the preference for certain traits leads to the spread of male-coded colors and shapes. What is interesting here is the slightness of a color advantage that, in evolutionary processes, is driven forward with great force without necessarily improving the survival chances of those who carry the trait. Fisher called this curious process the Runaway Process. Along this path, selection disadvantages (such as cumbersome plumage) continue to be passed on until vital impairments stop the experiment.

Thus, the female sense of beauty can be led astray. The peacock-splendid follower-males of her father trigger a healthy skepticism in Nana. The designated successor and best-placed candidate for top academic positions orients herself, with pleasure, toward human submarines on stealth missions, who hide their advantages beneath a cloak of shadow.

Nana’s friends favor extremely conspicuous males whose performance is geared toward maximum visual and acoustic stimuli. A feathered female’s preference for long tail feathers produces so-called positive feedback, which soon has paradoxical effects.

“The coupling process quickly leads to extreme trait expression.”

Excessively long tail feathers in peacocks are so costly that they represent a clear survival disadvantage due to high energy consumption and impaired mobility.

This is called self-reinforcement. “The female’s color preference ensures the selection of male genes that do not have to offer any further advantages (Axel Buether).”

Nana first reacts to a smell just short of cat piss, and only then to the husky-blue eyes of the undoubtedly American, Scandinavian-style handsome bartender. He masters coffee preparation according to the barista canon. But his movements lack the legendary somnambulistic quality. His local colleague seems as if he had been conceived and long nursed by a coffee machine. That is a completely different performance.

Nana is looking for blue-eyed attention. She picks up the relevant name — Clark. The philologist examines the syllabic garment of Clark’s Anglo-German and perceives a joy in the foreign-language abrasions that amuses her. She feels strongly attracted by the fun Clark is having. Two hours later she knows that he …

Nana is intelligent, good-looking, earns well, keeps her life in order, and has many orgasms. She swims in a hotel pool. This is the latest craze in the small North Hessian university town. The pool is embedded in a rooftop terrace. The fifteen non-academic high potentials on site enjoy the view. Nana balances on a high-voltage wire. At the same moment, Goya lectures on early depictions of homosexuality. He talks about Balzac’s weak hero Pons (in Cousin Pons). Pons is despised by his relatives. They see in the representative of a non-hegemonic subculture “a parasite” and compensate themselves with insults. Personally, Pons lives modestly in a shared apartment with the German musician Schmucke, whom he appoints as his heir. This is the key constellation. In it, the character of a relationship is revealed that has no prospect of recognition.

In front of Goya sits Ariane, demonstratively idolizing him. Her cleavage is a first-rate eye-catcher. With this detail as erotic loot, Goya withdraws to his office. He cannot reach Nana but finds a message from her:

“I want to lose myself with you in the chimeras we have created.”

Goya thinks of Ariane’s décolleté and of the noncommittal porn line: Please, come all over me. The mix is enough for an immediate release. To drive away the post-coital melancholy, Goya does push-ups and pull-ups. Pumped up, he presents himself in a seminar room to the next group of aspiring female philologists. The topic is Samuel Beckett. In the 1950s, Beckett began translating his own work into his mother tongue. He translates himself out of French, just as in the 1920s he began translating himself into French. He synchronizes his thinking languages, at first with the ambition to be able to clean house in French completely unselfconsciously. He looks for words that are equal to reality. Ornament and crime — mere linguistic furnishings are an abomination to him. He wants to strip the slipcovers from the word sofas.

Clark wants to write “sovereign monstrosity” (Georges Bataille) on Nana’s buttocks. Maybe she would like the idea, but Clark does not tell her. Finally, she turns around.