AOnly Jacques Derrida succeeded, and only once. In “The Postcard” (1980), a kind of all-encompassing, self-referential correspondence between Socrates and Freud, he sparkly bent postmodernism together with the mail. In itself, however, the most analogue and oldest of all communication media is essentially premodern. It cannot do without auratic realities, written paper that another person, ideally a loved one, previously held in their hands. Even in the case of Thomas Pfenninger, a Swiss author who is as witty as he is sharp-eyed and who has so far appeared in public with poems, the post has nothing in common with the hyper-nervous chatter in digital networks. To be on the safe side, the author has dated his laconic and warm-hearted postman novel “Equal, Later, Tomorrow” back to the early 1990s.
And yet this is not about nostalgia, but about anthropological constants. Everything that Pfenninger’s nameless postman, an unreliable, clumsy and slightly removed, but extremely empathetic hero, experiences in the tranquil south-west of Zurich could probably just as well be playing today. Loneliness and longing, over-indebtedness and affairs, drug addiction and narrow-mindedness, strokes of fate and block warden mentality, the talk and the gossip, after all, all of that still exists in every better neighborhood. Whoever commutes back and forth between the people who live so closely together, constantly observe one another and yet ultimately know little of substance about one another and has astonishingly intimate insights into their lives – “Because the mail that someone receives reveals a lot: sender, interests, involvement” -, this is the postman who makes his rounds every day but is usually overlooked as a human being.
At first it’s just individual letters that the protagonist withholds, an official letter to the former postal clerk Schweizer, who always boasts and openly despises the Yugoslav Jozo, or a condolence card to the embittered old Kälin, but his encroachment soon expands. The hero is driven, at least according to his own estimation, by empathy. He no longer wants to send bills to an over-indebted couple, preferring instead to pay them from his savings. He forges letters from her distant daughter for an abandoned mother. He quickly gets overwhelmed by it all, but with persistence and skill (a trailer with double bottoms) he pulls through until the whole neighborhood is in an uproar. The house of cards finally collapses, but in a different and more tragic way than expected. The hero also fell in love.
Thomas Pfenninger: “Right away, later, tomorrow”. Commode Verlag, Zurich 2022. 280 p., hardcover, €22.
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Image: Commode Verlag
As harmless as the plot may seem, the novel is told in a pointed, laconic and warm-hearted manner. How the ever-slipping hero, derided by Schweizer as the “worst postman of all time” (but actually the best?), constantly stabilizes himself with apodictic statements – “Time brings advice”; “In disgrace lies the harshest of all punishments”; “Weaklings can’t hide their emotions” – that has style. The comedy does not trump in the book, but always resonates when, for example, the majestic fanning through of the letters with the index and middle fingers is described as “one of the outstanding distinguishing features of a great postman”. The slightly malicious descriptions of the Zurich affluent petty bourgeoisie and their secret lusts are formidable in their sympathetic irony.
The fact that Kafka is mentioned is, however, too high a reference. Some descriptions also seem too enamored with their own creativity: “Piano sounds trickled down from the upper floor, streaked with mistakes like a roast beef with fat.” Watching cherries rot on the tree and starting half a civil war when some guys steal the fruit from the tree. Parody is a trap, the postman would probably say to himself in his monologues here.
So the book remains a good-humored, stylish debut about the futility of wanting to deliver only good messages to society out of love, and the respect for it when someone tries anyway. Where the famous role model, the self-intoxicated postal clerk in Charles Bukowski’s “The Man with the Leather Bag” – in 1971 also the prose debut of an author who had previously only appeared with poetry – met the “system” with unrestrained excess, that hardly shows less pronounced individuality of Pfenninger’s “born postman” half a century later in the undermining of all habitualized end consumer excesses in neat Swiss front-yard capitalism. Where weakness is despised, breaking through emotional isolation with almost imposing weakness is lived resistance. The tough Socrates would never have written it like that, but Freud might still have read it out of it if the postcard hadn’t gotten lost in the double bottom of postmodernism.
Thomas Pfenninger: “Right away, later, tomorrow”. Commode Verlag, Zurich 2022. 280 p., hardcover, €22.