Alien Minutia

Peter Weiss’s novella, The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body, begins in an outhouse – the narrator notes the ‘lava-like mound’ of excrement beneath him – and ends amidst copulating shadows. It is a plotless fiction in which the body’s functions exert grotesque forces on an inert world. We follow the nameless narrator through a series of enervated, dreamlike scenes set in a dreary rural boardinghouse. His encounters with the other boarders – the captain, the housekeeper, the father, the boy, the eponymous coachman and so on – offer brief and reticent dramas ruthlessly mined for their black comedy. The narrator, a failed writer and consummate voyeur, is an immaterial figure. He doesn’t live his life so much as passively perceive it. The confines of his sight, in particular – colour, space, shape, motion – continuously calibrate the text. While lying in bed, he applies grains of salt to his eyes in order to induce the blurred images that stimulate his memory. These recollections are neither fantastic nor interesting in themselves: work, rest, meals, accidents, arrivals and departures.