The Quest for Christa T. is the narrator’s quest to understand another woman who is possibly the narrator’s friend, but more likely is a version of Wolf herself, which makes this novel a complicated narration of self and other.
At this moment in my writing, I am coming from poetry toward fiction. The whole idea of “characters” and their relationship to the self has been an object of my interest, consideration, and joy lately. My current project, entitled LABOR, requires bodies moving around inside institutions—and I need a variation of responses, a range of possibilities. I need bodies to also do things that are impossible for me to imagine doing. So, in comes fiction, but from what I can tell, autobiography still lurks.
Broadly, reading The Quest helped to reinforce the idea that characters are often versions of ourselves. Christa T. is a writer; Christa T. shares Wolf’s first name; Christa struggles explicitly with writing the “I.” All of these are clues to one of the most important aspects of fiction: the possibility that through imagination, we create versions of ourselves and new windows into self-awareness. I can say with absolute certainty that the characters in my book, LABOR, are versions of myself, my own psyche. Yet imagination also allows me to have these characters perform acts and display certain responses that seem impossible or unlikely for the realistic “me.” This reminds me of something Susan Sontag said—and I am paraphrasing: “Art strengthens the adversarial consciousness.”
For me, in the face of power at the workplace, fiction has been a liberating and expansive tool, helping me to decide literally how I want to be, how to create myself, my work life, my responses. I wonder about Wolf: in East Germany, it is quite likely that fiction would provide a kind of veil between the writer and her story, a veil as a place of fiction in which to express the doubts of the artist, the purpose of art, and a woman writer interacting with state institutions—The Quest performs these interactions with subtlety. Fiction, I would argue, allows for this.
But Wolf’s approach to this narration—using the 1st person to relate to another character without building long and realistic scenes of interaction—is useful to me and my project, a project where up until now, I have struggled with the narrative act of having characters relate to each other. I am not interested in a linear, realistic, “real time” narrative. Yet I want moments of contact between characters in my book. Wolf’s novel gives me a way forward.
Following are what I take to be five key elements of Wolf’s narrative approach, as well as narrative structure:
1. Using documents to speculate about Christa T. The narrator mentions her diaries, manuscripts, short stories left behind, and certain passages indicate that she is researching Christa actively: “The institute sent me the thesis” (94). This is very compatible with “going in to the archive” to learn about a character, or perhaps even to conjure a sense of a person, beyond what writings they leave behind. This is very applicable to my project that started in the archive, and began, really, with a discovery of a labor activist named Sadie Van Amter.
2. Using death as a narrative device that drives the quest. In the very first pages of the book, the reader learns that Christa T. will die a somewhat early death. This serves as a motivation, almost, for the reader as well as the narrator to learn what they can, to try to understand where her life meant, even if it seems to be “a film of shadows” (4).
3. One event, one action, can structure a book. In chapter 1, the narrator notes an action that attracted her to Christa, that made her want to get to know her: “she blew her trumpet” (9) and again, much later in the book, this event is a touch stone, a way of marking the narrator’s interest in a woman who makes such a loud noise. This might also be a metaphor for writing, for saying something that breaks through the hum of everyday life, for authorship.
4. Touching lightly on the larger social context and the individual’s relationship to state power and ideology. I enjoyed The Quest for this lesson. The context, at the onset, is war—and this is clear in the earlier, childhood portions of the book, in the very arrival of this new person, Christa T., in the village. The event of her arrival points to the larger trend of folks needing to move about during war. And when Christa T. announces that “the forest” is her favorite subject, Wolf later describes a scene where a “rotting gas mask in the forest” is found (22). I think this is brilliant—a light touch, a delicate way to provide social, historical context—but with an image that is quite memorable and astounding. Later in the novel, posters on walls are featured (42), and the building’s “falling masonry” could be read as a critique of institutions or the institution embodying an ideology (46).
5. The narrator speculating about a character; folding this speculative language into the book itself. The narrator actually addresses Christa, her creation, directly, asking, “What are you going to be?” (34). There are times, also, that the narrator revisits her own memory, and questions the way she has constructed Christa T. in the writing itself. For example:
When I got up I saw the sheet of paper there with my own eyes; but now it has disappeared. Writing means making things large. Yes, it’s possibly so: she didn’t say it, I read it. (169)
This quote is also a key into the text that merges autobiography and fiction—and of a narrative stance that questions the solidity of the position of “I.” In fact, “The Difficulty of Saying I” appears as a phrase again and again toward the end of the book, and seemed to be one of Christa T.’s central intellectual problems as a writer—a quest that the narrator then takes up, via Christa. In the East German context, Wolf might be undertaking something political; that within communism, the indulgence of autobiography is something to question, and yet Wolf has created a text where a woman engages in the discovery of self, through writing, and through “the other.”
