More disconnection

When, the other day, I quoted two bloggers' headline summaries of Thomas Bernhard and his work in order to report on the dedicated PEN event, and then said I didn't recognise my Thomas Bernhard in their descriptions, it wasn't meant as a criticism. Only after Bill Marx replied did I hear negative overtones. (One thing that annoys me about my hampering passion for concision is the countervailing demand for clarification and qualification flaring from every bloggin' sentence). Instead, I wrote it as an expression of puzzlement. Another example:

The novel seems the perfect form to examine what has happened in real life, the things that have deeply affected ordinary people and reflected the times they lived in.

David Peace quoted in The Guardian. Disconnection perhaps because the novel is also the absence of time; an eternal interval, and therefore unease with such apparent trust in stories (necessary no doubt to be eligible for the Potato Head British Book Awards). I've written before about the deep affect of stories.

In the margins with Jean Paulhan

In the last couple of days, wood s lot has offered links to downloads of very desirable books in PDF. One of them contains a translation of Blanchot's "How is Literature Possible?", his landmark review-essay of Jean Paulhan's The Flower of Tarbes or, Terror in Literature.

As Michael Syrotinski explains in his profile of Paulhan, the book explores the opposition between Terror in literature - summarised as "the endless necessity of writing against the literature and language of one's predecessors" - and Rhetoric - "conventional language, commonplaces, and literary clichés". It's an opposition that still inspires English-speaking writers. For example, Mark Sarvas in his interview with Bat Segundo expressed solidarity with Martin Amis' war against cliché. The trouble with this position is, as Blanchot explains, that:

Anyone who wants, at every moment, to be absent from words, to be present only at the ones he reinvents, is endlessly preoccupied with them, so that of all the authors, those who strive most keenly to avoid the reproach of verbalism are also precisely those who are most exposed to this reproach. "Run away from language, it comes after you”, says Paulhan, “go after language, it runs away from you". We might think of Victor Hugo, the writer par excellence obsessed with words, who indeed did everything he could to triumph over rhetoric, and who said: "The poet must not write with what has already been written (that is, with words) but with his soul and his heart."

Yet, while this might suggest the hope for literature to be more than dry abstraction is futility itself, Blanchot says:

The same is true of those who, by prodigious asceticism, deluded themselves into thinking that they set themselves apart from all literature. Because they wanted to rid themselves of conventions and forms, in order to be in direct contact with the secret world and the profound metaphysics that they wished to reveal, they were ultimately content to use this world, this secret, this metaphysics as conventions and forms, which they complacently presented, and which constituted both the visible framework and the basis of their works. As Jean Paulhan remarks decisively on this point: "Castles that come tumbling down, lights in the night, ghosts and dreams (for example) are . . . pure conventions, like rhyme and the three unities, but they are conventions that we happily take for dreams and castles, whereas no one has ever thought they have seen the three unities." In other words, for these kinds of writers, metaphysics religion and feelings take the place of technique and language. They are a system of expression, a literary genre, in a word, literature.

So we are now in a position to give an answer to the question: how is literature possible? It is in fact by virtue of a double illusion - the illusion of some writers who fight against commonplace expressions and language by the very same means which engender language and commonplace expressions; and the illusion of other writers who, in renouncing literary conventions or, as they say, literature itself, cause it to be reborn in a form - as metaphysics, religion, etc. - which is not its own. [Translated by Michael Syrotinski]

We might add science to that list.

By the way, you can read more about the encounter between Paulhan and Blanchot in Allan Stoekl's The Agonies of the Intellectuals (if you can find a copy) and, at ReadySteadyBook, Michael Syrotinski's introduction to The Flowers of Tarbes. But there's more - in June, the University of Illinois Press is publishing On Poetry and Politics, a collection of Paulhan's essays in translation. The promotional material says he published his own work in a manner that deliberately kept it inconspicuous, or as Maurice Blanchot put it, "in the margins." Enough perhaps to explain why he, Blanchot and other French writers more worth our while now tend still to be overshadowed by biography-friendly writers.

Only disconnect

Corny trash, vulgar clichés, philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature.

Yes, welcome to PEN World Voices!

Not Thomas Bernhard's words - though they suit him - but Nabokov's (quoted in link via The Literary Saloon). The Millions and The Arts Fuse report on The Art of Failure, the panel discussion of Bernhard that hasn't quite received the coverage as those featuring our finest purveyors of said pseudo-literature.

As a confessed newcomer to Bernhard, Garth Risk Hallberg on The Millions can be forgiven for accepting unchallenged phrases like "Bernhard's misanthropy". Only, whenever I read such casual summaries - "a man who turned his ferocious hatred of his native Austria and obsession with misery and failure into literature" as Bill Marx puts it on The Arts Fuse - I don't quite recognise the author to whose work I feel so close. (Nor indeed "Bernhard is a snake. He has rattles. He has poison." from Horacio Castellanos Moya in the panel discussion itself). Perhaps Bernhard has "so many loving fans" - those who turned up to this event despite it clashing with an audience with Ian McEwan - because there remains a readership for whom a work of art that manages to produce aesthetic bliss while facing the worst for what it is and what it does (to literature as much as to us) is far more vital to their lives than incontinent exoticism or polite novels "about global warming".

My unwritten blogs

In February, I said here that I hoped to be back to normal within two weeks. In March, the medical estimate was closer to six months. The paucity of posts confirms who was right. And while returning to work and the unrelenting fatigue associated with a serious brain injury are the obvious causes, there is another.

It's not like there haven't been provocations to post. From Nigel Beale's continued defence of literary biography, to Jeremy Adler's review-essay on Novalis and, most recently, the middlebrow fear of literature at PEN World Voices in New York, the blogging throb was felt. And, while each of these might have maintained the pleasant momentum of blogging, I held back. Writing these unwritten blogs would, I sensed, dissipate the pressure of the essential question pulsing around my damaged head.

"But surely" says Nigel, resisting alternative readings of Proust's Contre Sainte-Beuve, "the 'essence' which makes Shakespeare Shakespeare, Picasso Picasso etc., although obviously important, is something beyond description, or comprehension." Well, yes. But not quite. We comprehend it every time we watch a Shakespeare play, look at painting by Picasso or read novels like Proust's. Everyone can comprehend the essence, just as everyone can frown over the painter's behaviour or gossip about the writer's sexuality. Yet comprehension is also the intoxication of reading. It ends as soon as the encounter is over. From then on, we begin to read backwards, towards the mirage of origin. No wonder biography sells: after all, the moi profond won't fill The Guardian's book pages.

Yet, if comprehension flits by, what can we do other than bury our reveries inside the platitudes of public discourse? This might be the question maintained in the blogs I will not write.

hold on

the end of the book

I talk about the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah and Amos...
He nods, and murmurs thoughtfully:

-- And Job...

I mention the mystics: Saint John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Ruysbruck..., and ask him if he ever rereads them, if he likes the spirit of their writings.

-- Yes... I like... I like their... their illogicality... their burning illogicality... that flame... that flame... that burns away filthy logic.

the death of the reader

It's good to see the attention drawn by the Blogging the Classics debate at the beginning of the week. A civil war in literary criticism has been averted.

In a recent review of Rónán McDonald's The Death of the Critic, one of the panellists expressed sympathy for the book's general complaint about the dearth of "expert evaluative critics" from academia: "In the English departments of British universities" writes John Mullan, "the professors have been strenuously denying the value of literature" and have thus waived their critical authority. If the lack is true, it is also true of novelists. There are very few writers of fiction who are also noted critics. As the Guardian Book Blog might ask: "Where are our Henry James'?".

Perhaps novelists are content to rest on the alibi of the innocence and purity of creativity even if, as seems incontrovertible to many of us, it has long lapsed. And for sure, there are plenty of readers for them who seek potato-headed delight to still the shimmering of the philosophical horizon. Witness another Blogging the Classics panellist sneering at one of the last century's great critics despite having not heard of him before let alone read a word. I have to admit this apparently harmless post has troubled me ever since I had the misfortune to read it (there is no RSS feed unsubscribe for pained memory); its disingenuous self-deprecation and withering contempt for another's "erudite literary argument" when only brief off-hand comments are quoted. So perhaps the reason for the critical dearth is more to do with the perceived unwillingness of "the market" to engage with anything other than cheerful chat about Victoriana and little Englander pre-Modernist nostalgia. What are publishers and newspapers supposed to do in this climate?

For what it's worth, below is a selection compiled from memory of critical and philosophical books about literature that I've enjoyed in recent years - many written by professors - some of which just might not have been mentioned in print thanks to that blessed editorial filter. Be warned though, they may contain erudite literary argument.

Michael Wood - The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction
Eduardo Cadava - Words of Light
Malcolm Bowie - Proust among the stars
Stanley Corngold - Kafka: The Necessity of Form (I'm reading Lambent Traces at the moment)
Teodolina Barolini - The Undivine Comedy: Detheogolizing Dante
John Freccero - Dante: The Poetics of Conversion
Lacoue-Labarthe - Poetry as experience
Timothy Clark - The Theory of Inspiration and Martin Heidegger
Christopher Ricks - Beckett's Dying Words
William Large & Ullrich Haase - Maurice Blanchot

I might add more as memory whirrs on. It should go without saying that I include Blanchot's non-fiction and Josipovici's On Trust and The Singer on the Shore, the latter currently being enjoyed at BookWorld. But now I have to ask if you have any such recommendations. Feedback is one of the advantages the blogosphere has over other forms. Apparently :)

“I'll buy no more books by this monster”

Patrick French has just published an unflinchingly honest biography of Nobel prize-winning writer VS Naipaul, who comes across as unpleasant and stuffed with conceit. That, I guess, is true of many other authors, too. But Naipaul is exceptionally malevolent, a man without grace or humanity, sadistic to those who have dared to love him. So why do we tolerate such behaviour in writers?

So asks the exceptionally humane Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the Evening Standard. Perhaps, we can answer, because vetting every single author's life and opinions before we read them would deprive us of some serious aesthetic bliss, and because, as Alibhai-Brown's column alone demonstrates, it throws up many questions. We also like a good laugh.

The first question is: how can the reader know the biography is "unflinchingly honest"? Does a focus on the distressing anecdotes of a individual's life equal honesty, or could it be an avid interest in extreme suffering is a pathological fear of life's uncertainty?

In her second paragraph Alibhai-Brown tells us Naipaul's first wife "was devoted until she died horribly of cancer". Perhaps it was Naipaul's fault it was horrible. No doubt. But can one die nicely of cancer? "It could be said that I killed her" Naipaul said. "Too late, sir" says our ever-punctual commentator. Only, isn't Naipaul's admittance as unflinchingly honest as his biographer? Is then Patrick French someone we should tolerate?

Once Alibhai-Brown has spent herself on the juicy gossip, she recalls wistfully the days she read and loved Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas. As she doesn't say, we can only guess why she loved his work at that time. Was he a nicer chap? "Since [Mr Biswas]" she complains "his books have got increasingly bigoted and nasty; he was moved more by hate than love, and an ugliness repeatedly broke through his beautifully written prose." We have to ask again: is it ugly hate or unflinching honesty? When I found out Naipaul was married, it was after I'd read and enjoyed the overtly autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival which does not (if a twenty-year-old memory serves) mention any other presence in the narrator's Wiltshire cottage. Does this demonstrate a protective love or contemptuous indifference? Such is the ambiguity of writing.

Alibhai-Brown is happy to bypass any doubt by revealing she shares more than a hyphen with Charles Sainte-Beuve: "The man and the writer are not as easily separated as critics would have us believe". Well, critics bar the dead Frenchman and Nigel Beale! Should we think otherwise, our intrepid journalist informs us that writers "don't have to be saints but they do have to have empathy and live as civilised beings within the rules that apply to us all". She's so appalled at the Nobel Prize winner that she says "I certainly will not buy another book by this egomaniac. The literary cabal can protest all it wants but Naipaul deserves the contempt many of us now feel for him." And if that wasn't hilarious enough, she asks:

What would we do if we found Richard Branson beat his mistress and drove his wife to death? Or if the BBC's director general spoke of his addiction to paid sex?

Let me guess: offer them loads of cash to write drivel in moronic London newspapers?