The Glebe 1914/03 (Vol. 1, No. 6): Erna Vitek

Three men. One woman. And no single truth about her. In this lean, radical novella from 1914, Erna Vitek exists only in the reflections cast by a painter, a writer, and a composer who each claim to know her. Through their competing testimonies, Kreymborg dismantles the fiction of objective knowledge, showing how desire, art, and memory distort even the people we think we love. Erna herself remains frustratingly present in her absence, a presence felt through the men's arguments about her virtue, her desires, her mysteries. The prose moves in currents of consciousness, lyrical and unsettled, capturing the way we construct and destroy each other in the act of looking. Published in The Glebe, the little magazine that helped define American modernism, this is a book about the violence of being seen and the incompleteness of seeing.