This Space's books of the year 2009

Why should one novel be my favourite of the year rather than any other? When I read this list in a comment on John Self's Asylum, I found an answer. If reading a book prompts only Publisherspeak – disturbing, intriguing, insightful – then it can be discounted. Each summary there is like a bullet in the neck of each book. 

I choose Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones as my favourite novel of the year because it was a shock to the literary system; a shock in three ways. First, the intense, almost overpowering gravitational pull of the narrative. It affects not only the reader but the novel itself. It is the furious axe for its own frozen sea. Second, the reception in the mainstream of literary USA was a shock not so much for its cluelessness – such books are necessarily misunderstood – but for the imbecilic, self-blinding character of the reviews.  Michiko Kakutani's contempt probably emerges out of America's repressed awareness of its pressing need for denazification, with Ed Champions' video offering the best argument ever made against literary blogging.

The third shock was to recognise how a contemporary work of such length and about such a subject can also be as intimate as Proust's. My habit-formed assumption that only brief novels engineered like tiny, intricate timepieces could achieve this was shattered. Still, my next two favourite novels were like that: Dag Solstad's Novel 11, Book 18 and Jean Echenoz's Ravel. Distance as intimacy.

Of course, my non-fiction choice has to be The Letters of Samuel Beckett, but I'd also like to mention Kevin Hart's The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. It was published five years ago but I re-read it this year and was surprised by how much we had changed. Looking forward rather than back, Hart has edited the forthcoming collection of Blanchot's Political Writings. It's scheduled for April, so take Gary Barlow's advice and have a little patience.

Hope and oblivion

Daily for these final weeks of the year, I have listened to The Morning Paper, the opening song to Smog's 1997 LP Red Apple Falls. Usually this is done as I walk twice a day to and from an office. It's a short song of only forty-one words set to piano, acoustic guitar, hurdy-gurdy drone and reticent trumpet. It sings something simple:

The morning paper is on its way
It's all bad news on every page
So roll right over
And go to sleep
The evening sun will be so sweet

I roll right over
And I have this thing

Red apple falls





(These are the words as I hear them. The CD sleeve adds one or two that Bill Callahan's vocal elide.) The song isn't outstanding in the manner of those that follow – Blood Red Bird, Red Apples and To Be of Use – so why do I return to it with such apparent need? Clearly there's the lyrical turning away from the routine toward dream – emphasised by both the uplift of the music as it breaks out of stuck-needle repetition, and by the uncharacteristic tenor of Bill's vocals. It is also a prelude to a sequence of songs in which dream and sleeplessness play across one another. For this reason I'm sure it provides succour. However, this isn't because the song issues an explicit recommendation of withdrawal. Rather, there's something about the two final lines and how they stir me. And I have this thing / Red apples falls. It's difficult to put into words because I am stirred by what is probably wordless. So I suppose it's a sense of exposure to something buried, something otherwise passed over.

So what is this thing, red apple falls? For Bill Callahan I assume it is the inspiration and creation of this sequence of songs; their emergence from somewhere other than himself yet also inseparable. In this way The Morning Paper plays the same role in the LP as Earthy Anecdote by Wallace Stevens does at the beginning of his first collection Harmonium and at the beginning of the Collected Poems, and the role of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Borges' story which he placed at the beginning of Ficciones. Both poem and story preface collections that maintain themselves in the pressured air between reality and imagination – the world and the book – and each introduction is a microcosm of the book to come. Yet each is also more than a microcosm because each is also part of a collection, both separate and inseparable. Stevens' poem ends when the firecat sleeps and allows the bucks freedom of movement, which would be the writer writing without threat from the bristling real. Without a threat, the poem can go on forever or stop right there – choices which are essentially the same – whereas, when the firecat wakes, the bucks have to swerve to the left and to the right in swift, circular lines to create the poem we're reading and, by extension, the rest of the book. In Borges' story, the narrator resists the usurpation of the world by the idealism of Tlön merely by writing a history of the change, making connections and thereby introducing causation into a world where causality had otherwise been eliminated. We wouldn't be reading this story or that poem but for the exposure of sovereignty to what threatens it. It's no coincidence that the second song of Red Apple Falls begins with a waking to the cry of a blood red bird. Red Apple Falls then is itself an exposure; this thing cannot be contained; it is just the beginning.

*

I cited him after Smog but I began to think about my response to The Morning Paper while listening to a discussion about Borges on the Entitled Opinions podcast feed between Robert Harrison and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. The first half-hour of the show concentrates on Borges' poems and Gumbrecht's wish to renew focus on the specificity of Borges' writing – its attention to detail local to streets in Buenos Aires – against the "philosophical reading" of Borges as a writer of "the plurality of worlds", a reading, according to Gumbrecht, that originated in Foucault. Gumbrecht says this reading overlooks the short narratives and poetry which are instead "epiphanic".  Harrison joins in, finding the poetry to be "confessional" and "individuated in place and time". The other, well-known reading he brushes aside as "brainy". However, prompted by a listener, he challenges the happy agreement by quoting from The False Problem of Ugolino, the second of Borges' nine Dantesque essays  in which Borges adjudicates over the debate about whether Ugolino in Dante's Inferno cannibalised his children or not. As Harrison admits, it ends with a paragraph that belies the epiphanic interpretation:

In real time, in history, whenever a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates and loses the others. Such is not the case in the ambiguous time of art, which is similar to that of hope and oblivion. In that time, Hamlet is sane and is mad. In the darkness of his Tower of Hunger, Ugolino devours and does not devour the beloved corpes, and this undulating imprecision, this uncertainty, is the strange matter of which he is made. Thus, with two possible deaths, did Dante dream him, and thus will the generations dream him.

Gumbrecht's reaction is uncharacteristically impatient. He says this is literature trying to do philosophy's job with a general definitions of literature and, as we have philosophy already, literature should stick to what it does best. Literature, he explains, "is much more concrete than other texts" and this concreteness should take precedence in our reading. Again Harrison agrees and calls "banal" the  "deconstructionist notion of the essential undecidibility of literary texts". Gumbrecht goes as far to say that Borges "isn't doing himself any favours" in writing this essay and, in particular, choosing Dante as an example: "Dante is not someone who leaves things in suspension"; he too is a poet of epiphany.  Presumably still avoiding general definitions, Gumbrecht insists that "each time you read [a book], you read it in one way". This is the strength of literature so, if you "suspend" Ugolino between verdicts, you drain literature of its strength. He concedes the reader is always aware of the possibility of the multiplicity of meanings but "the strength is not to stay there but to go back and say 'No! This is what Achilles was like' – this what he was like in the very moment you read him, and this is what I call epiphanic". Note that he doesn't say what Ugolino is like in the very moment of reading.

Before the discussion moves on, Gumbrecht once again contrasts the epiphanic to what he calls "excessively cerebral" readings. But let's look back at what Borges says. Maybe this will show what's so cerebral about it: Thus, with two possible deaths, did Dante dream him, and thus will the generations dream him. Dante's writing and our reading then is characterised as dreaming. Dreams are entirely cerebral in that they are products of the sleeping brain, except our experience of dreaming is not brainy; it is real and uncanny. Events in dreams are experienced as stories; singularly real in the time of sleep, yet also charged with enough mystery to make one return to the details, to read it again, forever unsatisfied. This is why it can never be epiphanic in the sense Gumbrecht argues for: strength in going back. The reading one goes back to is never a single moment of certainty but, as Borges says, "similar to that of hope and oblivion". When I listen to The Morning Paper, hope and oblivion are both promised. The promise is enough for each to be delivered and withdrawn in a moment and for the moment itself to be promised and withdrawn. Such is the epiphanic in art.

The Two Lönnrots: new Josipovici story online

Litro, the free monthly literary magazine distributed in London, has published The Two Lönnrots, a new story by Gabriel Josipovici.

As Borges lay dying his mind filled with images of lakes, of vast forests of spruce and pine, an enormous sky. He knew this was Finland, a country he had never visited, but which in these last years had been closer to his heart even than the streets of Buenos Aires in which he had grown up and about which he had written so much and so well.

The story is an excerpt from Heart's Wings a selection of stories to be published by Carcanet next year. In addition to stories from Mobius the Stripper (1974) and In the Fertile Land (1987), the volume will include previously uncollected stories such as the one above.

PS: ReadySteadyBook also has his essay Borges and the Plain Sense of Things.

Writing the real thing: on Zadie Smith's essay on novel nausea

Samuel Johnson's definition of "the essay" is a good place for Zadie Smith to begin. She uses it in an introduction to her new book of essays. The opposition presented is between the well-made work and the messy real: one being unreal and anaemic, the other being full of life's "truthiness" – itself a messy word – which Johnson's quotation reveals was once applied to the essay and to which Smith appeals as an apologia for the essays to come. I have sympathy with this and do not want to pick apart her essay – despite my many quibbles and queries – because I found it a relief to follow a prominent mainstream literary figure follow her own nose (or James Wood's according to Andrew Seal) like this rather than parading the populist canards one sees every week in the broadsheets' literary pages. She is evidently struggling to find the right form for her own work following the early success of White Teeth, and such struggles tend to produce more interesting work than that of someone who churns out basically the same formally unchallenging novel each year to the delight of middlebrows everywhere (except Stockholm).

One of the canards is of course that Philip Roth is unjustly overlooked for the Nobel Prize, while another is that genre fiction is looked down upon and does not receive the "recognition" it deserves. Yet in Zadie Smith's essay I find the genre versus literary fiction debate continuing in other words and thereby offering more hopeful directions for authors seeking an audience without compromise. She expresses both love and impatience with the Novel, seeking to break free of the familiar gestures and crafted perfection in order to find authenticity. However, the opposition of formal perfection and messiness – which is the argument of David Shields' book discussed in the essay – tends to conceal the individual choices artists have to make and replaces them with generic forms that mean something only to a consumer; in this case, messy or formal novels. These could easily be replaced by genre and literary fiction. Samuel Johnson can help here too.

His famous impatience with Milton's decision to express grief at the death of a friend in the form of a pastoral elegy deserves to be still better known.

Lycidas is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of rough satyrs and fawns with cloven heel. Where there is leisure for fiction, there is little grief.

Johnson isn't saying Milton didn't experience grief, nor that his craft is in question, but that the unreflective use of genre betrays the inspiration of the work; as Smith puts it, the form "traduces reality". The debate then should be not be about genre and literary fiction but that which traduces the explicit inspiration of the work.

Late in the essay she refers to JM Coetzee's post-Nobel writing in negative terms and seems to believe he has eschewed the imaginative novel in favour of the "essayistic and self-referential". Yet these novels are great examples of inspiration taking priority over generic repetition. In Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year there is less fiction and more grief.  Both investigate the relation between writing and life, between writing and truthfulness, which both lead to the adoption of adventurous forms; not for the sake of adventure but in order to follow the logic of the inspiration (e.g. what it means to have singular opinions in a plural universe). It's a great thing that, rather than generating more novels out of writerly mastery (more Disgrace), Coetzee has continued to challenge himself and the form of the novel. It's also revealing that Smith sees the products of this seeking as "anaemic", as if choosing to write about the favelas of Rio would be somehow more real than writing about an aging Australian novelist. All writing, by virtue of being writing, whether it is formally perfect or messy, already submits to a unity independent of the physical world, even if it is only that of the book itself (this is why "book" has such an aura; the hope of containment). The writer who seeks to erase the well-craftedness of novels by producing a book such as David Shields' Reality Hunger is still appealing to a Platonic realm. Coetzee is aware of the irony and it is partly out of this that his novels emerge. His novels keep the wound of their isolation open.

In contrast, Smith praises The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek as a novel that presumably – despite its bloodletting – is not anaemic. Like Coetzee, Jelinek has also won the Nobel, but that's about all they have in common. In a piece about the Prize, Gabriel Josipovici comments on this particular award and reveals the important distinction:

The Nobel committee made the point that, in awarding [Jelinek] the prize, they were honouring a radical tradition of Austrian writing, and specifically mentioned Bernhard. But that is typical of the misleading generalisations committees are prone to make. Bernhard has nothing in common with Jelinek except a hatred of post-war Austria. His masters are Montaigne and Beckett, not [Jelinek's] Bataille and Adorno. His greatness stems from his ability to give voice to a wide variety of marginal figures, to harness comedy and vitriol, and to accept that he, too, is implicated in his own criticism, like another of his masters, Kafka ("In your quarrel with the world, back the world"). For Jelinek, as for Adorno, on the other hand, all are rotten and guilty — except the observer/writer.

This last point then is crucial. Coetzee, like Bernhard, implicates the observer in his investigations. It takes imagination to do that; perfection and messiness are beside the point.

In mitigation, Smith also mentions the Austrian who should have won the Nobel instead of Jelinek but now never will. She approves of the "sophisticated, beautiful and aphoristic side roads" that include Peter Handke's journals collected as The Weight of the World. On page 16 of this book, Handke sums up the anxiety, the pressure and the wonder of writing in the world:

Tense, unnerved, and close to madness before writing – and when I read what I've written it looks so calm.

In this one moment, in one apparently offhand diary entry, Handke opens a vertiginous space in which the process of stating how one feels and then reading it reverses everything. The sentence is already perfect. He doesn't add to it. This isn't a side road, this is the real thing. Perhaps with Zadie Smith on its side, writing like this will no longer be consigned to the wilderness.

UPDATE: My review of Reality Hunger has now been posted.

"Watered-down Modernism" and watered-down watered-down Modernism

In 1997, Michael Hofmann expressed despair about the prospects for foreign literature in English translation. He does so in a review of a book heralded as in the tradition of Proust and Mann and 'one of the great novels of modern times'. However:

[Péter Nádas's A Book of Memories] is a bastard of romantic schlock and watered-down Modernism. To describe this as 'claiming and extending the legacy of Proust and Mann' is quite breathtaking. Yes, Nádas’s sentences are long and relatively abstract, but they have none of Proust's openended inquisitiveness or the purpose and design of Mann. They are without risk, without discovery, without grandeur. Far from resembling or – ha! – outdoing Proust and Mann, this is utterly epigonal writing, a third-generation Zweitaufguss for middlebrows.

Another writer whose three volumes are said to "constitute one of the great novels in modern European literature" and are also "already being compared with Proust" is reviewed by Margaret Drabble in this week's TLS (not online):

[Javier Marías's Your Face Tomorrow] has been compared to Proust ... But the trilogy also suggests an upmarket James Bond.

A profound conjunction

I've just discovered the London Review of Books' archive, access to much of which demands subscription. However, the letters archive is open. This gives me the chance to share an important moment in my early reading.

In 1988 I'd been reading seriously for only a year and a half, trying everything and, more often than not, being secretly disappointed. By "secretly" I mean that disappointment was held secret from me. I might have enjoyed a prize-winning author's prize-winning book, but something was missing. Deep down I knew these books weren't what I'd hope for yet kept on reading novels by the big names assuming I had missed something. What drove me back to the big city library and to read the Sunday review pages and journals like the LRB was the hope of isolating the decisive factor in those rare books that got beneath the surface. So this is why in November of that year I read Barbara Everett's review of Hugh Kenner's A Sinking Island, his highly-critical critical book about Modernism and modern English authors. Two issues later I read Gabriel Josipovici's letter in response. This is what I can repeat here. As you may notice from some of the names mentioned, things would never be the same again.

He begins by praising the review as "thoughtful, often profound" before getting on to the issues at hand:

Barbara Everett is right to insist that Eliot's impact depends on the interconnection of the aesthetic and the moral in his work, and that 'the inward debate of authority' is crucial to our sense of him. The same is true of Beckett, and the attempt to see both as ‘high priests of Modernism’ does a disservice to them and to Modernism, suggesting as it does that they wish to substitute art for religion. But the mere introduction of Beckett into the picture makes one see the weakness of Everett's attempt to see [Kingsley] Amis’s work as in some way akin to Eliot’s and as unjustifiably slandered by Kenner. Those novelists who are highly regarded in their own countries and in the rest of Europe, but not in Britain, such as Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke, Claude Simon and Marguerite Duras, Yaakov Shabtai and Aharon Appelfeld, have all, like Eliot and Beckett, sensed that to speak 'with the voice of a person subject to his own experience, like everyone else: not a preacher, not a poet' (Everett’s words about Larkin) requires a formal adventurousness, a willingness to take risks with the manner of speaking, which is quite absent from the work of Amis and the other much-touted English writers of the present.

Of course one can go on playing the game of who 'really' is in the Modernist tradition and who isn't. I myself, like Everett, would make Auden rather than Bunting central. But that, as I understand it, is not the main thrust of Kenner’s argument. In this country, today, 'ambitious' tends to mean 'long'; 'wildly imaginative' tends to mean 'working in the minor mode of fantasy'; 'sensitive' and 'compassionate' to mean 'this author still writes like Hardy.' Instead of the ambition of an Eliot, a Kafka, or Beckett, to speak the truth at whatever cost in terms of popularity, we have variants on Hemingway's absurd boast that he could take Tolstoy to 15 rounds, or the even more debased ambition to win a major prize. What I find absent from the bulk of contemporary English fiction and poetry, clever and witty as much of it is, is precisely that sense of the voice of a person subject to his or her own experience, which Everett finds in Larkin. 'Defeated, the poet starts to sound like a person: unique,' she writes. I think she is right, and not just about Larkin: there is a profound conjunction between the acknowledgment of defeat – as a writer, as well as as a person – and the quality of art. But the implications of that have not, it seems to me, ever really been taken on board in England. I don't think American letters have all that much to boast about at present, but unfortunately more of Kenner's critique of English writing holds than Everett is prepared to accept.

But it wasn't the names alone that stuck in my head, it was phrases too, from the original article and the letter: "the inward debate of authority", "the acknowledgment of defeat", "a person subject to his or her own experience", "formal adventurousness" and "a willingness to take risks with the manner of speaking". Simple summaries of now familiar ideas but then entirely new to me; new yet precisely those factors I had sought.

One still can't imagine such phrases being uttered by the gatekeepers of English literature in their Sunday Supplement columns, let alone being understood. Even the LRB has long since given up any interest in fiction.

Not Even Past: Conjunctions 53

Not Even Past is the title of the 53rd and latest edition of Conjunctions, Bard College's literary journal. This edition's special features deserve attention:

• Beckett's US publisher Barney Rosset contributes Remembering Samuel Beckett including "the Beckett/Rosset Correspondence about Waiting for Godot". 
  
  
• An extract from Roberto Bolaño's Antwerp
  
  
• Thomas Bernhard's poem Ave Virgil  translated by James Reidel "appearing in English for the first time, with a postscript note by Bernhard"

Of course, the last of these excites my interest. It is mentioned in passing in the Sign & Sight interview of 1986. Bernhard explains its 1981 publication, 21 years after he wrote it: Well, I found it and I thought to myself, this is actually a good poem, from that period, and that was it. [My publisher] publishes everything I give him.



As I'm likely to buy everything Bernhard published, I'll have to get this too, although currently it is not currently available at The Book Depository or Amazon.

But not everything is withheld: Web Conjunctions has published The Will of Achilles, a long poem by Robert Kelly.

An isolated note on Everything Passes

Over the Summer I was asked to contribute to a symposium on Gabriel Josipovici's novel Everything Passes and its relation to contemporary English-language literary fiction (a relation of distance). For various reasons the symposium never happened, so I'm posting my short essay below. It should be read with this context in mind. For another view, you can read Richard Crary's contribution at The Existence Machine.

An isolated note on Everything Passes

The first thing that strikes one about Everything Passes is its austerity. Unlike most other contemporary novels, it offers little in the way of framing information; no names, no faces, no time or place. It begins:

A room.
He stands at the window.
And a voice says: Everything passes. The
good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow.
Everything Passes.

A room.
He stands at the window.
Silence.
He stands.
Silence.

Readers of contemporary literary fiction – even those who relish what Nick Hornby calls "opaquely written novels" – are unlikely to feel at home here. It is as if writing is denuding itself. Where is this room? Who is "he", why is he standing at a window? And whose voice is speaking? So few words yet so many questions. Isn't it the job of fiction to fill in these blanks?

Given this beginning, there is an inevitable impulse to seek genre distinctions and so gain purchase on the smooth surface. "A novella" is the simplest label, though there are very few novellas like this. "Narrative poetry" perhaps; the short lines and caesura certainly suggest that. Yet the prose style does become more expansive later on, so perhaps it is more accurate to compare it to a piece of music; a string quartet perhaps. Josipovici has himself said the inspiration for the novel was to make a writerly version of Schoenberg's String Trio Op. 45. Also, the rhythmic repetitions of words and phrases provides the mesmerising experience of music. This direction of enquiry offers more clarity because, as questions of context and meaning are raised in music, they are answered at the same time, soothing the listener, diminishing anxiety, even if the music is by turns anxious and mournful as is the Schoenberg.

He stands at the window.
Cracked pane.
His face at the window.
Greyness. Silence.

And again the room.
The window.
He stands at the window.
Silence.

In listening to music, the reader is plunged into a world without distance or contradiction; feeling and movement are everything. Could Everything Passes then be affirming Walter Pater's submission that 'All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music'? Answer yes and, for 18 pages, the issue is settled. The unidentified man at the window is met by memories of a woman no longer present and by visits from his fussing children. It is as if the novel is developing a theme framed by the voice telling him that everything passes; a theme of memory and its permanence in what passes, our everyday lives. In this way we can place the novel as part of literary fiction, an idiosyncratic part – an experimental part perhaps – and thus more readily assimilated. We can then hurry back to the mass of more detailed novels in which backstory and expressive words fill in the gaps left open here. We may deem it a worthy failure too because, if Everything Passes aspires to the condition of music, doesn't its form admit to an inherent failure?

What happens on page 18 provides the answer. A literary scholar called Felix interrupts the stream of memories to begin a conversation over a cup of coffee with his girlfriend Sal. He talks about how Rabelais had recognised the consequences for authorship by the advent of prose fiction. Until then authors knew their audience: for example Chaucer read to a royal court and Shakespeare had London theatre-goers. He also cites Dante who, in Purgatorio, meets an old friend Casella. Three times Dante tries to embrace him but, as a spirit, he is incorporeal and Dante's arms meet only themselves. Dante then asks if it is possible for Casella to sing one of Dante's poems he sang on earth. Felix sings it to Sal:

"Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona"
cominciò elli allor si dolcemente,
che la dolcezza ancor dentro mi suona.

The answer is that the narrative is as isolated as the man at the window, as bodiless as Casella. The interruption indicates a determination to face the issue. What Felix's scholarly musings in a café then turn us toward are the consequence in the loss of this connection with an audience. It is a loss of community, of a guiding tradition and the loss, thereby, of writerly authority. It meant Rabelais, one of the first modern novelists, "was the spokesman of no-one but himself. And that meant that his role was inherently absurd. No-one had called him. Not God. Not the Muses. Not the monarch. Not the local community. He was alone in his room, scribbling away". Nothing has changed. Sal listens.

— How did it go again? she asks, looking at him across the table.
— What?
— The Dante.
— Love that discourses in my mind (that’s the first line of his old poem), he then began so sweetly that the sweetness still within me sounds.
He smiles at her: — Che la dolcezza ancor dentro mi suona, he says.

Despite the subject matter of the conversation, this is more what we expect from an English novel. Except it is the subject matter that turns Everything Passes from what might be dismissed as a mood piece into a challenge to English fiction. The sweetness sounding in Dante has an equivalence in the voices streaming through the man at the window. Opposed they reveal the duality at the heart of fiction: an experience that stills our daily disquiet yet also delays our progress, just as it delays Casella and Dante from climbing Mount Purgatory. Together they constitute our experience of art – its joy and its sorrow – whether it is poetry, music or fiction. Yet it is only poetry and fiction that can reflect on its own status and include this reflection in the experience. It's nothing new and radical. We see it in the scene with Casella, a 14th Century poem.

It's no coincidence that Sal asks Felix to repeat Dante's own repetition of the song (that is, sung first in Purgatory itself and then in his poem of the same name). In it she is prompted to recognise the love discoursing over the café table. So, by describing Rabelais' recognition, Felix has opened a space in which communication becomes possible. His own isolation is implicated in his scholarly proposition, yet it also offers a promise of its end: Sal has become his audience, his community. Very soon after, she agrees to marry him. Here the distance between art and life — which is also the distance between Felix and Sal — is given measure. However, we must now realise that the conversation is also streaming through Felix as he recalls a happy time in the wretchedness of Sal's absence. He has lost his community, perhaps driven it away with a selfish focus on his own scholarly concerns, or perhaps the ultimate failure of communication, and thereby of art.

Everything Passes then is not so much a metafiction reflecting with postmodern knowingness on the elemental opening 18 pages than an Orphic gaze into the underworld of art and our inner lives. In exploring the issue within a novel, Josipovici implicates itself and our reading in the same process. The voices we hear resonate uncannily in our mind, offering the possibility of real expression and dialogue outside of all constraints imposed by the genre of the novel, yet also threatening to reinforce them with yet another beginning, middle and end. It is difficult to distinguish between the pathway and the cul-de-sac. To do so, we have to read, listen and write again. For the man standing at the cracked window things begin to look brighter as, toward the end of the novel, he finds release in creative life, only to make a discovery that seems to reverse all progress. Everything Passes risks such failure as no other English novel dare fail.

Thomas Bernhard's Prose

In May 2010, the first translation of Thomas Bernhard's early stories is due from Seagull Books, distributed by the University of Chicago Press. The website provides the following information: "First published in German in 1967, these stories were written at the same time as Bernhard’s early novels Frost, Gargoyles, and The Lime Works, and they display the same obsessions, restlessness, and disarming mastery of language. Martin Chalmer’s outstanding translation, which renders the work in English for the first time, captures the essential personality of the work. The narrators of these stories lack the strength to do anything but listen and then write, the reader in turn becoming a captive listener, deciphering the traps laid by memory—and the mere words, the neverending words with which we try to pin it down. Words that are always close to driving the narrator crazy, but yet, as Bernhard writes 'not completely crazy.' "


Next May was looking Bernhard-Good already as Penguin Classics is reissuing his great late novel Old Masters. And, to keep to the theme of new books from genuinely great Austrian authors never to win the Nobel Prize, in February FSG is publishing Peter Handke's Don Juan: His Own Version in Krishna Winston's translation: "a book about storytelling and its ability to burst the ordinary boundaries of time and space." Do you think they is going for the Audrey Naffeneggernogger market?

UPDATE: Thanks to Gwilym Williams who provides news of the exhibition Thomas Bernhard and the theatre opening next month in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna where, of course, Old Masters is set. The exhibition features:

Numerous documents from the estate of Thomas Bernhard, as well as composition drawings and stage photographs, help to illustrate one of the most exceptional careers in the history of Austrian literature and theatre – one that alternated between spectacular triumphs and headline-grabbing scandals.

The secret centre: Blanchot and The Turn of the Screw

An essay that has stirred me lately is Blanchot's on the importance of Henry James' notebooks in relation to his development as a writer and in particular to his story The Turn of the Screw; "As the years pass", Blanchot writes, "and as James moves in a more deliberate way toward himself, he discovers the true significance of this preliminary work that is precisely not a work."

Endlessly, he speaks of these hours of preparation as "blessed hours," "wonderful, ineffable, secret, pathetic, tragic" instants, or even as a "sacred" time, when his pen exercises "an enchanted pressure," becomes the "deciphering" pen, the magic needle in movement, whose turns and detours give him a premonition of the innumerable paths that are not yet traced.

Blanchot asks: "Why this joy, this passion, this feeling of a wonderful life, which [James] cannot evoke without tears, to the point that his notebooks, "the patient, passionate little notebook becomes ... the essential part of my life"?".

This question and Blanchot's answer stirs me because I have noticed with surprise how much enjoyment I take in making notes; how much more, that is, than in the actual production of a work.  Against initial assumptions, I sensed it is too easy to dismiss this as an eternal delay of the real thing or as the unobtainable carrot of perfection, but have never really appreciated why. We all know about Bruce Chatwin's attachment to his Moleskine notebooks, and how he offered a reward to anyone who could return one lost, but this reliance on the information contained within is something other than that addressed by Blanchot. The essay is so rich that it is difficult not to quote from every page, so this will be the betrayal of even a potted summary. In mitigation, the essay itself offers a good summary of the essence of Blanchot's form of engaged reading; a reading that does not lead to or from any theory.

The beginning of the essay looks at possible subjects of The Turn of the Screw before concluding, after various detours, that the subject remains a secret. However, it is not a secret to be found outside the story, in biographical anecdote or in speculation, but at the very centre of the story: its words, or, better, its writing. The subject, Blanchot says, "is – simply – James's art, the way he has of always circling round a secret that, in so many of his books, some anecdote sets in operation, and that is not only a real secret – some fact, some thought or truth that can be revealed – that is not even a detour of the mind, but one that escapes all revelation, for it belongs to a region that is not that of light." The anecdote – which may on the surface be the subject of a traditional reading – appears then only as a means to produce the experience "not of the narrative that he must write but of its reverse, from the other side of the work, the one that the movement of writing necessarily hides and about which [James] is anxious". This then is why notes produce an enchanted pressure. The other side of the work, the secret centre, is written and not written.

What can then be called the passionate paradox of the plan with James is that it represents, for him, the security of a composition determined in advance, but also the opposite: the joys of creation, which coincide with the pure indeterminacy of the work, which put it to the test, but without reducing it, without depriving it of all the possibilities that it contains (and such is perhaps the essence of James's art: each instant to produce the entire work present and, even behind the constructed and limited work that he shapes, to make other forms felt, the infinite and light space of the narrative as it could have been, as it is before any beginning).

How difficult that is, to subject a narrative in each instant to the pressure of its secret centre! Perhaps the ability to do this – perhaps rather to let it occur, involving both guile of craft and stubborn resistance to the easy gifts of craft – is the secret of great writing.

All this may seem typically cranky. Oh yes, here we go, Blanchot is turning a famous ghost story into  metafiction. Except Blanchot ends with a remark piece of evidence. What, he asks, does James call "this pressure to which he submits the work, not to limit it but on the contrary to make it speak completely, without reserve in its nonetheless reserved secret, this firm and gentle pressure, this pressing solicitude ... ?". The answer is to be found in the notebooks themselves. James calls it "the very name he chose as title for his ghost story: The Turn of the Screw. 'What can my case of K. B. [a novel that he will not finish] give, once submitted to the pressure and to the turn of the screw?' " "Revealing allusion" Blanchot says:

It confirms to us that James is certainly not unaware of what the "subject" of his story is: this pressure that the governess makes the children undergo in order to tear their secret from them and that they also perhaps experience on the part of the invisible, but that is essentially the pressure of the narration itself, the wonderful and terrible movement that the deed of writing exercises on truth, torment, torture, violence that finally lead to death, in which everything seems to be revealed, in which everything, however, falls back again into the doubt and void of the shadows. "We are working in darkness – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion, our task. The rest is the madness of art."

An amusing irony for me is that this essay is one that has produced not one note in my Moleskine. Re-reading only a few sentences begins to close down the everyday busyness of thought and instead demand a renewed attention to the region that is not that of light, that escapes all revelation. Indeed, having read Blanchot with a patience one can gain only through reading Blanchot again and again, one begins to see this region illuminated both in every creative work and in one's own work to come. More prosaic, shorthanded, ideological, historical or psychological readings, readings of which this blog is inevitably and apologetically one, no matter how convincing they are in their own way, rarely casts the reader so far and so deeply into the sovereign realm of writing.

Note: all quotations are from The Book to Come.

Zone and literary translation

Introduced by Chad Post of Open Letter Books, Charlotte Mandell reads from her new translation of Mathias Énard's ZONE. From part four onward she talks about literary translation with EJ Van Lanen, also of Open Letters.

Ramifying into life

Dan Green, his country's most durable defender of the merely literary, has some tough things to say about Ron Rosenbaum's response to Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura.

It expresses more interest in the "process of creation" than the creation itself. [...]

Rosenbaum makes this more or less plain when he suggests that "Encrypted within [Nabokov's] words, encoded indecipherably, ambiguously, is the equivalent of the secret of lightning. Something akin to the secret code of higher human consciousness, the DNA, the genome of genius." I have difficulty believing Nabokov himself would have had much patience with this sort of pomposity. He made fun, in his work, of the notion of "codes" ("Signs and Symbols," Pale Fire) and he was always critical of interpretation that wandered outside the text itself, into biography or psychology or "intention." "Higher human consciousness" was not the subject of Nabokov's books, encrypted or not. The manipulation of language in aesthetically pleasing ways was his concern.

While I agree with everything Dan says, the final sentence waved a red flag at me: "The manipulation of language in aesthetically pleasing ways was his concern." Moving closer, I think it's clearer why it stands out.

If Nabokov warned against biography, psychology and intention, then his particular concern for language should be of no undue concern to his readers. Instead, we must attend to what appears before us and examine how, if at all, this concern manifests inside the text. Dan writes that Nabokov "made fun" of codes in Signs and Symbols, a story of two parents' relationship with their grown-up son. Here's the opening paragraph:

For the fourth time in as many years they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to bring a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind. He had no desires. Man-made objects were to him either hives of evil, vibrant with a malignant activity that he alone could perceive, or gross comforts for which no use could be found in his abstract world. After eliminating a number of articles that might offend him or frighten him (anything in the gadget line for instance was taboo), his parents chose a dainty and innocent trifle: a basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars.

There's already something comic about fruit jellies in such a scenario, and something pathetic about the son who, like a zealot obsessed with scripture, sees signs and symbols where there are none, or at least not as many as he suspects. But isn't this as horrible and disastrous as it is anything else, such as fun? Pleasure in the story comes from the tension evoked by the distance between text and reality; yes, an aesthetic pleasure. Only it's more than that. It ramifies into life. We are, like the son, condemned to interpret. After you read the final line, the next ringing phone will not be the same.

What this leads to is awareness of the ambiguity and ambivalence of reading. An awareness that enables Nabokov the writer to exceed his reputation as merely a beautiful prose stylist. The tragedy recurs when Humbert Humbert cries out in his prison cell: "Oh my Lolita, I have only words to play with". This is more than making fun of a criminal; it traces the tragic in writing – a tragedy that is tragic inasmuch as it is indistinguishable from fun. Humbert writes his memoir in such ornate language that only the most literal-minded reader (most probably the one more interested in the bedroom scenes than the story) can fail to realise that what is before him are words, and words alone.

So why is this – no pun intended – significant for reading and writing? What Dan's righteous take down of Rosenbaum emphasises for me is the absence of the disastrous in contemporary US literature, the disaster that ramifies out of fun or beauty and into life. At present US literary culture appears to be one in which gushing pieces that grab the most convenient alibi for discussing literature can guarantee themselves the front pages and the ability to set the literary agenda. (In this way it is identical to Britain). There seems to be a huge gulf between say, on the one hand, the studiously pitched levity of Steven Augustine's comment to Dan's post and, on the other, David Foster Wallace's suicide note, yet very little in-between. Tao Lin's novel Eeeee eee eeee, for example, may be an exception to the rule.

Deforming the medium: Summertime by JM Coetzee

[G]reat, groundbreaking books teach you how to read and good books remind you how. The best book to teach you how to read Proust's In Search of Lost Time is Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

Mark Thwaite's assertion is as simple and true as it is difficult to accept. After all, for the clearest understanding one has nowhere to go except back into the book. The claim prefaces a review of JM Coetzee's latest novel Summertime and, in listening to how the book asks to be read, it stands alongside the majority of reviews. The final line of The Complete Review's summary for example expresses the difficulty of its acceptance with a disconcerting conjunction: "Summertime is fascinating, but leaves one very uneasy -- about everything from Coetzee himself to the very idea of fiction and autobiography." Shouldn't that "but" be "and"? Isn't it fascinating precisely because it shudders the earth beneath one's reading seat?

However confounding the "but" is, it may offer an insight into the apparent schism in contemporary literary appreciation. That is, not between genre fiction and the genre that dare not speak its name – what China Miéville calls LitFic – but over something more specific. In the same paragraph as the one quoted above, The Complete Review offers another curious judgement: "Coetzee is an incredibly talented writer and a master craftsman -- and, yes, this is a meticulously crafted book, and one of [Summertime's] weaknesses is that it is so obviously a construct." The key words here being "so obviously". Perhaps the schism then is between those who are troubled by fiction as a construct and those who are not. One has to ask the question begged: how might this novel have been less of a construct; so obviously less of a construct? Of course, one can ask it of every novel.

The question is clearly one that troubles JM Coetzee, the writer currently living in Australia. In contrast, it seems not to be a question that troubled John Coetzee, the dead object of this novel's attention. His ex-lover and ex-colleague Sophie Denoël, one of the people interviewed by his fictional biographer, offers her opinion of the man's novels:

I did not read all of them. After Disgrace I lost interest. In general I would say that his work lacks ambition. The control of the elements is too tight. Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing. Too cool, too neat, I would say. Too easy. Too lacking in passion. That's all.

Such withering criticism is perhaps the clearest guidance to the reader and to the novel itself. By including it, spoken from the mouth of someone both close and distant to the author, the critic is disarmed. How can one criticise a book that pre-empts the worst one can offer? Perhaps this is why the consensus has been welcoming albeit distracted by a witless need to tease out the differences between author-writer and author-character.

The consensus is a conspicuous reversal of that on Coetzee's previous novel Diary of a Bad Year which is, however, similar in many ways to Summertime, only more formally adventurous. Despite technical differences, Diary of a Bad Year is also driven by the relation between the self and the world; specifically, and to paraphrase my own review, an investigation into what it means to be singular in a plural universe. To put it another way, it investigates the demand made by Sophie Denoël for a deformation of the constructed medium in order not only "to say what has never been said before" but also to minimise the construction of a literary defensive wall in order to say what he cannot say in any other form.

Unsurprisingly, Diary of a Bad Year failed to make the shortlist for Man Booker Prize and was criticised for including apparently self-indulgent mini-essays under the title "Strong Opinions". Giles Foden's shocking inability or refusal to read the book as it asks to be read was the extreme representative of its negative reception; a reception that would be fair were it able to comprehend the prolepsis inherent to the novel itself. But such a reading is apparently beyond respectable literary discourse. The schism revealed then seems to be simpler, more straightforward, and thereby somewhat more demanding if it is to be closed. While at first the bizarre suggested answer is that Coetzee should become less talented, less of a craftsman, and thereby enable his books to match genre expectations, it is rather that the reader must do as the author has done, to open himself to the force and logic of writing.

On

Five years ago today I posted the first blog in this space, on John Banville's Shroud. I have no memory of the book and little more sense of the self who wrote it. For this I am grateful. Perhaps this is the one clear advantage of writing about books; or just writing.

In the indeterminate space prompted by this thought, I wonder how closely sleep and forgetting are necessary to the experience of reading and writing; that is, necessary and paradoxical. To live critically in the wake of such sleep, in order to understand it, in order to make worldly use of it, becomes a betrayal; a misunderstanding and a misuse. For this I am not grateful. Yet one can't live any other way.

Two books, one recent, one brand new, may offer some paradoxical help: Harald Weinrich's Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting and Jean-Luc Nancy's The Fall of Sleep (translated by Charlotte Mandell).

Before this blog, I had for another five years written the Splinters blog at Spike. So that's ten years of blogging. The rounded figure suggests a corresponding need to move on to other places, in other forms, to redeem the misunderstandings and misuses. Literary blogging isn't a moving business however; it's forgetful and repetitious, just like its subject. So, on.

Life performance: The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave

Nick Cave's new novel is an impressive performance. Two features stand out. The first is the pleasure it takes in words and vivid descriptions: Bunny Munro is a man of the world, a cosmetics salesman on the move and he's always swigging from a bottle of whiskey and emitting "furious tusks of smoke" from his Lambert & Butler cigarettes. It's a lifestyle that takes its toll: his eyes are always "granulated", yet he maintains his appearance: the curl of hair on his forehead is always "pomaded". In order to read his watch, Bunny "trombones" his wrist out of its sleeve. And Bunny never closes his mobile, he "clamshells it shut" or "castaneted the phone". Of course, this is very reminiscent not of Cave's darkly romantic songs but of Martin Amis in his moneyed pomp. Had Bunny Munro contemplated a haircut, he would no doubt instead have considered "a rug rethink". This is why The Death of Bunny Munro has a conspicuously anachronistic quality.

While the novel is set in the city in which I live and describes the fiery destruction of the West Pier in 2003 (which I also witnessed), it also evokes another Brighton, one trapped in the cartoon era of the early 1980s during which in another city John Self trampled triumphant for a time, flapping his flares into non-existence. Perhaps this is only a stylistic effect, except Bunny Munro is also himself a throwback. His seedy swagger and unrelenting, unobstructed appetites reawakens Lazarus-like an extinct species. When we meet Bunny tromboning and casteneting, he has just spent the night with a prostitute while his wife is suffering at home with an unspecified psychological condition requiring medication. Scenes like this pepper the novel and are rarely less than uncomfortable. A review could well fill itself by adumbrating the most hair-raising with discreet relish. However, the highly-worked prose is their true significance. It emphasises the strain under which Bunny places his everyday life; an intensity so great the threat of collapse becomes inevitable (though of course inevitability in a novel is itself inevitable). This is why the prose style is more than spice added to the high entertainment of Bunny Munro's dissolution. It is a necessary part of the story. This is the second feature: for Bunny, and for readers following Bunny, everything is outside; the trombone, the castanets, the tusks of smoke, granulation and pomade are all projections of Bunny Munro's self. As Bunny lives, his actions in effect sublate his paltry, transitory self into the world, just as a musician – perhaps one playing the trombone or even castanets – is sublated into music. For this reason, Bunny Munro has no inner life to report or, rather, his inner life animates the world. Soon it becomes almost impossible to distinguish between the two.

Bunny is therefore an aspirant solipsist; where "man of the world" seeks to be a tautology. His nine-year-old son, also called Bunny Munro, "thinks there is something about the way his father moves through the world that is truly impressive". Yes, he moves as if he is at home in the world; as if the world is a function of his ego. The novel we are reading is both a manifestation of this condition and its controverting action (perhaps all novels are). Shocking events occur throughout these 278 pages that demand Bunny's active remorse yet Bunny's projections are also attempted rejections of the self. His responsibility has no ground on which to settle.

Bunny's incipient solipsism is threatened by the stirring opening sentence: " 'I am damned,' thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who soon to die." This is Beckett's Malone Dies with Catholic supplements. Already, the world is revolting against his selfishness and will not cede. But the realisation passes and Bunny is immediately back to picturing a disembodied vagina – another repository for his self-projection – and glugging a bottle of vodka from the minibar. When he has to deal with the apparent suicide of his wife, he tries to contain his responsibility in his hurried escape. He takes his son on the road – the concert tour meaning is relevant here – and we see things from the boy's perspective. At first, the son's point of view works against his father's domination of the narrative, yet, as we know, he shares his father's name, so he too may be a projection of Bunny Munro. They travel across town to meet his dying and thoroughly unpleasant grandfather, who also just happens to be called Bunny Munro. The centrality and repetition of "un" in their name suggests the eventual negation of all selfhood, as well as the misery of its inheritance. And of course the triune of Bunnys also alludes to the Trinity. Perhaps the holy spirit is embodied by the youngest Bunny. His fascination with learning from the world – he studies an encyclopedia on the road trip – is not as blatant an indication of the possibility of redemption as the toy figure of Darth Vader he places on the dashboard is of the threat of genetic influence. But the symbolic content is a given from start, as this is a narrative borne on the struggle between Bunny's deranged imagination and the world. The death of Bunny Munro would then be the end of the struggle.

The end of the struggle would also mean the end of the novel. Death is preceded by a final night, a final performance on the road, in which Bunny walks on stage and makes a humble apology to an audience composed of those he has ill loved. Bunny is thrilled, suggesting that his life has really been only one long performance and this its apotheosis. Therefore any remorse he shows on stage also serves his self-regarding posture; it's still all about him. In this sense Nick Cave's stylised performance is necessary to its subject; the spotlight after all cannot illuminate anything beyond the stage. This is the fulfilment and insufficiency of The Death of Bunny Munro. If, as this novel demonstrates, life and art constitute a performance, then Nick Cave's is entertaining, memorable and stimulating. Only after the experience do we note that the performance of death is – in life and in writing – a striking absence.

Modernist charm and readability

Despite his reputation for formidable modernist impenetrability, these are effortlessly readable and charming works. They are written almost exclusively in dialogue, frequently of the frothy, cocktail-party sort. Josipovici is especially good not only when gently satirising the self-regard, banality and indirection of such chit-chat, but also in recognising that this is the only way we have of finding out about those we do not know, and unlocking the secrets of those we do.

The Jewish Chronicle offers the first review of After & Making Mistakes, Gabriel Josipovici's two new novels in one (very handsome) volume.


Additional review update: Tales from the Reading Room
Lee Rourke in The Independent

Blanchot at Harvard

In March of this year I reported a unique sale of Blanchot manuscripts from a bookseller in Ireland. Now Harvard's Modern Books and Manuscripts blog reveals the whereabouts of the most expensive item.

Houghton Library recently acquired page proofs of Blanchot's 1969 major work, L’Entretien Infini (The Infinite Conversation). Blanchot seemingly did not preserve the records of his literary work; these were (according to the dealer from whom they were purchased) salvaged from a rubbish bin by the husband of Blanchot's long-time housekeeper. [...]

An article providing an overview of the new material uncovered in the proofs, by Smith Professor of French Language and Literature Christie McDonald, along with a brief history of their journey to the Library by Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts Leslie Morris, will appear in the fall issue of Harvard Review.

The blog also includes four images of pages with Blanchot's annotations. (Found via Site Maurice Blanchot).

Lord of the Files

John Carey's revelation taken from William Golding private papers, preparing the way for his forthcoming biography, is not the first time he has been involved in divulging facts about the author. In 1986, Carey edited a volume of essays in which the late Stephen Medcalf describes how a dawn spent alone at Stonehenge prompted Golding to tell him a secret.

It seems a good way to have begun a Sunday the rest of which was spent drinking cans of beer with Mr Golding. I protested impotently that my upbringing constrains me to go to church on Sunday: he protested genially that we all have these difficulties with our upbringing but must learn to overcome them. It was that day that he said – swearing me, since 'the discovery should go to him who published it', to a secrecy which with his permission I now break – that he had seen the carving of a Mycenaean dagger on one of those stones before it was noticed and generally proclaimed. And didn't he remark that the moving thing about Stonehenge is that while its proportions, its entasis and geometry make it a piece of architecture, the rain has worn runnels in it and turned it back to nature? I think he did – and it matches another remark of his about the possible etymology of Arthur, artos a bear, something black, animal and inarticulate which seems to convey one dimension of the Arthurian stories, crossed at right angles by the white light of the Grail – 'that's what all my novels are about, only no one has seen it.'

I suppose it is what he is about too.

From Bill and Mr Golding's Daimon, in William Golding: The Man and His Books.

Of course, while I accept this hardly begins to satisfy the extra-literary demands of Carey's disclosure, it is perhaps more relevatory in regard of Golding's fiction in which we are moved by what (in a cursory manner) may be called the crossing of the white light of novelistic architecture with the something-black, animal and inarticulate of what lives within. And it's the fiction we're interested in, right?

"A great popular movement that's growing all over the world"

Two unwritten books

Like George Steiner in My Unwritten Books, I want to describe two (and a half) books that I would like to exist but that, for want of dedication, talent and a private income, I cannot write.

Book 1: Kafka's Animal
For a writer with such an extensive catalogue of secondary texts, there seems to be no full length study of the animals in Kafka's writings. Yet their centrality to his work needs no scholarly excavation; it's there for all to see. Dogs, horses, mice, jackals and apes populate his greatest stories, and there are many more elsewhere. Less obvious examples could include the creature Odradek in The Cares of a Family Man and even perhaps the flight of stairs in an aphorism. This latter non-animal will take me to the vermin in Metamorphosis as the ambiguity of Gregor Samsa's species provides the angle of my imaginary book: the ambiguous distance between human and animal, or, more accurately, between the human and non-human. It's something I saw in the songs and cover designs of Will Oldham ten years ago (when he was still worth listening to). In tracing the theme's intellectual lineage, I would shepherd Nietzsche into my book encampment with this Kafkaesque opening of his 1874 essay: On the Use and Abuse of History for Life:

Observe the herd which is grazing beside you. It does not know what yesterday or today is. It springs around, eats, rests, digests, jumps up again, and so from morning to night and from day to day, with its likes and dislikes closely tied to the peg of the moment, and thus neither melancholy nor weary. To witness this is hard for man, because he boasts to himself that his human race is better than the beast and yet looks with jealousy at its happiness. For he wishes only to live like the beast, neither weary nor amid pains, and he wants it in vain, because he does not will it as the animal does. One day the man demands of the beast: "Why do you not talk to me about your happiness and only gaze at me?" The beast wants to answer, too, and say: "That comes about because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say." But by then the beast has already forgotten this reply and remains silent, so that the man wonders on once more.

In fact, Kafka's Animal would be a detail of a larger study begun by my MA dissertation "The Stillness of Midnight: experience and literary distance", a title itself derived from Kafka.

Book 2: Sunday: a novel
Imagine a novel like Dante's Inferno in which a liberal novelist is guided through the hell enabled and at the same time obliterated by his "buttoned-up, over-wrought, mannered prose" (quote from Ellis Sharp). It would be a road-movie introducing the fêted writer to those who died off-camera, in the absence of "his dismayingly bad book" (quote from John Banville). Again then, the theme of distance.

Secret note

After my death no one will find even the least information in my papers (this is my consolation) about what has really filled my life; find the inscription in my innermost being which explains everything and what, more often than not, makes what the world would call trifles into, for me, events of immense importance, and which I too consider of no significance once I take away the secret note which explains it.

Kierkegaard Papers & Journals pages 154-55.

Beckett speaks again

Fear of reading

Eighteen months ago, in the monochrome sunlight of a January afternoon, someone close to me was involved in a road traffic accident. He sustained two obvious injuries: a cracked bone in his wrist and a whack on the back of the head a smile's width from his right ear. He has no memory of the accident, no memory indeed of the next four days in hospital. The cold air of the car park on the final day is all he feels now.

Since then, including another nine days in hospital after the skull fracture was discovered, I have wondered how to slough off this thick critical skin in order to ... in order to ...

And that is the problem, if there is one. There is no clear object of this wondering. In order, perhaps, to write differently. So what would it mean to write as one imagines writing rather than in this hesitant, potholed manner? As I waited in a hospital bed, I imagined this other life of writing in which the word disappears. Little has changed.

I have written before about those nine days, how listening to a documentary on the pharaoh Akhenaten caused an obscure epiphany which later I assumed was due to the morphine. However, recent events have challenged that assumption.

Akhenaten had ordered that the capital city be moved from Thebes into the desert 200 miles away. The documentary featured new archaeological discoveries that revealed the disastrous consequences for his subjects. What stirred me was not these human facts but the glorious and terrifying absurdity of Akhenaten's project. It demonstrates the same impressive or horrendous folly as those in fictional works: William Golding's The Spire for example, and Herzog's Fitzcarraldo and, more familiar to me, those of the many characters created by Bernhard: Roithamer who builds a cone-shaped house in the middle of a forest, Reger who studies every masterpiece in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna until he finds a flaw in each, even Bernhard himself aged eight deciding to cycle to his aunt's house in Salzburg, twenty-two miles away. A creative writer may respond by sketching a novel idea based on the crazy plans of an individual - perhaps Naguib Mahfouz's Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth is it as far as the pharaoh is concerned - but, in my sedated condition, I imagined a writing project that would itself be the absurdity, something itself animated by impossibility.


As I noted in that post, nothing specific came of my epiphany. Since then I have wanted to write about the accident and this strange time in hospital but have also felt uncomfortable about discussing an experience that seems hopelessly subjective. The details of the accident were also sub judice. The police were unable to release the witness statements until the case was resolved. I had to wait an indefinite period before I could find out what a buckled rear wheel couldn't tell me. In June this year, out of the blue, the case was concluded and, soon after, I received the statements in the post. This was a reality I had been unable to anticipate. It was unreal. For over a year I had imagined the permutations of what may have happened, but had failed. I couldn't imagine anything. Perhaps one day, I thought, I will experience a flashback to the shock of the impact. But no, nothing beyond the memory of an uncertain point in the road. (If this is what death is like, I thought, then it's fine; it's nothing.). And then I became uncomfortable about the possibility of the reports triggering such memories or, if they did not, then planting indelible images in my head. This would be experience without experience, I thought; history without event. But really, it already is. All I could do was to submit to more.

As I opened the envelope and flipped A4 sheets over and over to get through the formal police checklists and onto the handwritten and typed statements, I felt a slight derangement, an almost physical vertigo. This is the fear of reading. This is why I cannot read crime or horror novels; books which bring great suffering into being for no other reason than generic necessity. It is a terrible addition to actuality. Actuality occurs once but literature never ends; every moment in a novel is eternal, every character immortal. Fiction makes something happen forever. This is what stirred me when I heard the story of Akhenaten's new city: the real presence of the imagination.

Worse still, the addition to actuality - the repetition of what's not there - is never enough. No matter how resourceful the writer, the writing is never enough. Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, possibly the most remarkable novel published in our belated lifetime, was roundly condemned for its doubling of real massacres yet, in their industrial haste, the staff reviewers mistook the narrator's descriptive restraint, its reserve towards empathy, for the author's callousness toward others' suffering and, much worse, his capitalising on it. Except Aue is clear that his experience of the massacres is itself not enough and that the suffering and death he witnesses, and then inflicts, reveals an unavowable space he cannot traverse. It haunts him and his story. Aue describes a mass killing to his colleague Hohenegg: "the spectator can never fully grasp the experience of the deceased". Hohenegg replies: "But this gap exists only for the person who watches." Aue's narrative is the revelation of that gap; the reader watches. His punishment by those seeking vengeance might be said to be the narrative itself in which his crime and punishment recurs eternally. (Perhaps our punishment is to witness the extent of most professional reviewers' ineptitude.)

So I submitted and looked at the witness statements. One saw the cyclist fly into the air still holding the handlebars, then land to lie stock-still across the tarmac. The other witness got out of his car and ran over. After a minute or so the cyclist opened his eyes, sat up straight but did not respond to questions. Blood ran out of his right ear. Then he insisted on moving to the side of the road.

That was it really. I read the words with a forensic attention, as if each was an unrequited love letter, yet what I really wanted wasn't there. I wanted to see what was not seen. Why was the fracture below the overhang of the skull? If my head struck the tarmac (there is no curb), how was this part damaged rather than the crown? Perhaps it hit the frame of the car, but wouldn't that have been more damaging at such speed? Reading the statements has not been enough; answers have become questions.

What remains? The legacy of traumatic brain injury for one. My inner ear was damaged so I have had to retrain my sense of balance (this also has a weird side effect that mimics chronic fatigue syndrome). I may be able to cycle again as a result and so regain the freedom I lost. My sense of smell has gone and may never return - this also diminishes the sense of taste - while concentration and short-term memory levels are lower. On the plus side, I think my writing has improved; that is, has become more closely attuned to what concerns me and renews the fascination with books with which I began twenty-four years ago. This beginning and the time in hospital tell me that, while reading and writing are not enough, life isn't, either.

Ravel, a novel by Jean Echenoz

There is undoubtable pleasure in beginning to read the story of another's life. Whether it is in a novel or in the more formal context of a biography, we enjoy both the tremor of an imminent adventure and a profound sense of security. No matter what befalls the characters or the subject, however unfortunate they are, however cruel, brave, silly or dull, we are enveloped in the silence of a book, luxuriating in its unique serenity. After all, we know what is happening because we know what will happen in the end. Yet, while this peace is pleasurable in the simplest sense, it is also haunted. This is what makes it unique. In reading stories we reconcile contradictory forces.

As Sartre pointed out in Nausea, when we read a novel, we identify with the protagonist because we too face an imminent adventure, only, in the case of the novel, it has already occurred. It wouldn't be a novel otherwise. In reading of another's life then, our own becomes a narrative and afforded the same comfort of meaning given to a book by its necessary enclosure. Meaning is given by the end of possibility just as a mirror is afforded meaning by its dark backing. So, in one place, we have both the sense of infinity and its signifying limit. A novel is therefore pleasurable for only as long as it can maintain this reconciliation, hence the lingering disappointment at reaching the final page and the relief of beginning again.

However, the haunting extends beyond the book. Away from the page, never convinced by stories for long enough, we still wonder what meaning our lives may have. While many turn with relief to the invisible books of religion, science or politics in which meaning illuminates every distant corner, writers of fiction and their publishers pursue the reconciliation with a confidence guaranteed only by unease; a commercial foreboding of tenebrous insignificance. Some writers exhibit the unease more openly by examining the space between art and its creators.

The really important things in any biography are what someone thinks and feels and not what he has done.
          Glenn Gould

In recent years, biographical fiction has become almost a distinct publishing trend. Since the 1990s, there have been several novels in which the lives of real writers and artists - that is, historical figures – are the main subject. Colm Toibin's and David Lodge's novels about Henry James are two prominent examples. There is also JM Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg and Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin, both of which feature Dostoevsky as a protagonist. Notable others include Gert Hofmann's enigmatically cheerful novel about the aphorist GC Lichtenberg, Penelope Fitzgerald's story of Novalis and Joanna Scott's Arrogance about the painter Egon Schiele. And the latest edition of The Reader contains an extract from ∞ (a.k.a. Infinity), Gabriel Josipovici's novel-in-progress about Giacinto Scelsi, the eccentric Sicilian composer. There are surely many others (which you can tell me about in the comments).

If this is a sign of anything, it is that the mystery of the intimacy and distance between life and art has been noticed and is being addressed, even if its expression is misunderstood and misrepresented by the gatekeepers of reconciliation. They assert that writing about writers, art about art is at best an entertaining sideshow, at worst a form of navel-gazing – albeit someone else's navel – an absorption that is also a desertion of the socialising role of art. Each argument is valid if one has a particular understanding of the place of creation. However, if one has another, that art is, for example, a fundamental dream, an enabling illusion, then such demands only reaffirm the distress of harmony and the comforting rupture in the experience of fiction. So do these novels about artists merely seek to erase the distance between author and work, to describe the life from which it emerged and thereby explain both? Is the disenchantment of art all we have left to enjoy?

Another recent novel about a composer – Jean Echenoz's Ravel, an exquisite, lighthearted summary of the final ten years in the life of the composer of Boléro – offers a negative answer to both questions.

The time constraint in the novel is significant, particularly as it begins separated from time. Whereas In Search of Lost Time begins with Marcel in the timeless space of bed, Ravel opens with the regret of leaving another warm embrace.

Leaving the bathtub is sometimes quite annoying. First of all, it's a shame to abandon the soapy lukewarm water, where stray hairs wind around bubbles among the scrubbed-off skin cells, for the chill atmosphere of a poorly heated house. Then, if one is the least bit short, and the side of that claw-footed tub the least bit high, it's always a challenge to swing a leg over the edge to feel around, with a hesitant toe, for the slippery tile floor. Caution is advised, to avoid bumping one's crotch or risking a nasty fall. The solution to this predicament would be of course to order a custom-made bathtub, but that entails expenses, perhaps even exceeding the cost of the recently installed but still inadequate central heating. Better to remain submerged up to the neck in the bath for hours, if not forever, using one's right foot to periodically manipulate the hot-water faucet, thus adjusting the thermostat to maintain a comfortable amniotic ambience. (Translation by Linda Coverdale)

Yes, better to remain. Leaving the bath is not unlike returning to the world after reading a novel; if we are not uncertain on our feet, we still shudder in the cooler air. But we know that time will not relent and we have to make a journey. It's also significant that this opening does not quite specify who is in the bath. This immediately involves the reader rather than separating him or her from the subject of the novel. We are, as it were, in this bath together.

Echenoz follows Ravel as he dries himself and then delays his departure with preparatory rituals. He cleans his teeth, shaves, plucks his eyebrows, pares his fingernails, combs his hair, chooses which clothes to wear – he has an enormous wardrobe – and then goes around the house switching off appliances. The precision and swiftness of description is itself a bath-like pleasure. Time intervenes only when he leaves the house and "icy air suddenly buffets his backswept and still-damp white hair". One word and suddenly we realise Ravel is not young. This is a fine example of Echenoz's gift for inconspicuous concision: "white" here makes the presence of another life felt with an intensity that also passes by as a simple description.

No doubt Ravel feels the presence too though we are never told. Not being granted access to Ravel's inner life is also one of the novel's great pleasures. Glenn Gould may be correct except not knowing what someone thinks or feels can also be experienced by the subject of the biography. Assuming what they think and feel through their actions is the important mistake. It then becomes a matter of allowing for what we or the subject himself cannot know to resonate. Echenoz does this by sketching a translucent surface. While Ravel remains "Elegantly aloof, icily polite, not particularly talkative", we realise he may also be aloof from himself, not quite there except in what he can display to the world, particularly in his music. It may be why he is so keen to dress well, to reveal himself as only covering up can do. Before a concert, he mislays some patent-leather shoes and refuses to perform until they are found. Does he know why?

By the time the novel opens, Ravel is already world famous for his music. He has left his bath to journey to the harbour to board a transatlantic ship for a tour of the US. He is fêted and fussed over by everyone, though all he seems to be want to do is to lounge in solitude watching the landscape from an observation deck, perhaps to contemplate his next composition. When he is forced to socialise, such as at the Captain's table, Ravel entertains everyone with his tales of driving a military truck near Verdun in 1916.

One day, his vehicle broke down and he found himself on his own out in open country, where he spent a week à la Crusoe. Taking advantage of the situation, he transcribed a few songs from the local birds, which, weary of the war, had finally decided to ignore it, to no longer interrupt their trills at the slightest blast or take offense at the constant rumbling of nearby explosions.

Ravel is of course much like the birds. Weary of the worldly turmoil, he steps aside to write music. In the midst of a copyright dispute over music for a ballet, Ravel decides on a whim to write something entirely new: "it's only a ballet, no need for form strictly speaking or development, practically no need to modulate either, just some rhythm and the orchestra. The music, this time, is of no great importance. All that's left is to get on with it."

Back in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, early in the morning, here he is about to leave for the beach with Samazeuilh. Wearing a golden-yellow bathrobe over a black bathing costume with shoulder straps and coiffed in a scarlet bathing cap, Ravel lingers a moment at the piano, playing a phrase over and over on the keyboard with one finger. Don't you think this theme has something insistent about it? he asks Samazeuilh.

And this is how Boléro, his most famous composition, came into existence, at least here. No dramatic revelation as to what personal secret inspired this work – it was only a commission.

To those bold enough to ask him what he considers his masterpiece, he shoots back: It's Boléro, what else; unfortunately, there's no music in it.

Amusing anecdotes like this - and the novel is delightfully full of them - may give the impression that this novel is a mere confection. We may assume it can now be left to monographs and official biographies to lay the heavy meat on the scales and to win serious acclaim for helping us to understand Ravel in his musical and historical context. But this would be to deny what makes reading Ravel, and indeed listening to Ravel's music, an uncanny experience.

After Boléro, Ravel is seriously injured in a traffic accident and retires from public life. A brain injury means he forgets how to perform simple actions such as signing his own name and, more dangerously, how to swim. He is found floating far out to sea. At a concert of his own music, Ravel turns to his neighbour: "That was nice, he says, really nice, remind me again who the composer is. One is not obliged to believe this story." Echenoz's insouciance may be offhand yet here it reverberates with the essential mystery floating this novel. It began in the bath with the absence of time and now ends with the absence of Ravel from himself and his music.