The artist’s reticence

Things that have mattered emotionally, often for the quality of their pattern, their beauty, their emotional shape, things that are not necessarily traumas, lodge in the mind, becoming shadows until you sit at a desk and begin to work out a pattern of words and images and then they become substantial and they block the way of narrative progress until they are allowed onto the page, or they offer the narrative great body and substance until they become the secret subject of the book.

Colm Tóibín quoted in an Irish Times review of All a Novelist Needs: Colm Tóibín on Henry James.

Christmas hit

Neither fantasy nor realism

Ramona Koval: You say modernists look with horror at the proliferation in modern culture of both fantasy and realism, both Tolkien and Graham Greene, both Philip Pullman and VS Naipaul, out of respect for the world. Tell me what this horror entails. Why?

Gabriel Josipovici: The last part of that phrase is something that I touched upon when I was saying that this is not simply a clever modernist trick that springs from a desire to make the reader see that everything that can be said about the world is still going to leave a lot unsaid which is there in the world. So, in a way, they are trying to make you ... just as much as the lyric poets are trying to make you ... see the world itself as it is out there, and what I was saying there was I think this proliferation of fantasies from Tolkien through to the Harry Potter books and Philip Pullman and so on, is a curious sort of indication of the way in which we would rather just turn away from the world and live in pseudo myths and mythologies, and they are pseudo, they're not the real thing as they were in cultures that really had myths and really believed in them. And similarly I think straightforward realism also stops you actually recognising this mysterious thing that our lives are open, are not going to be subsumed in a narrative we can easily tell, but we are constantly going to come up against something which is much more mysterious, much stranger, much more un-inchoate than we imagine.

Part of a transcript from interview on ABC Radio National of Australia about Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism?

Zone by Mathias Énard

In order to describe a novel to someone who has not read it, you can simply summarise the story it tells, excluding by necessity perhaps hundreds of pages presenting a unique authorial voice, rich and memorable characters, exotic locations and significant pivots of plot. Yet, if asked to describe a poem, you could merely recite the words, arriving at the destination immediately; no need for any bright signposts.

In general we can accept the failings of the former method as a necessity, perhaps even desirable because keeping distance can save time and trouble. But the distinction presents itself with unexpected urgency when charged with describing Mathias Énard's novel, his fourth book and the first to be translated into English. Zone needs to be recited; one needs to be submerged in the disturbing pace of its narrative and disruptive power of its detail to appreciate why a summary is both easy and impossible.


Zone is an account of a train journey between Milan and Rome made by Francis Servain Mirkovic, a Croat in the pay of French intelligence, with a view to selling an archive of documents packed in a suitcase. The documents contain "names and secrets", testimonies from the terrible history of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean – the Zone of the title; events of which Mirkovic is both part and partly responsible as, in his youth, he fought in the civil war that tore Yugoslavia apart. In those days he was immersed in youth, in the thrilling moment of war, in violence and in comradeship, yet now, a paid informer with a false identity, he is not only friendless but separated even from himself.

Trapped in the "moving cage" of a train, he plans instead "a brilliant future paid for with the dead the disappeared the secrets in this suitcase". It's a risky strategy because, as he discovers, "everything is harder once you reach man’s estate, everything rings falser a little metallic like the sound of two bronze weapons clashing they make you come back to yourself without letting you get out of anything it’s a fine prison". These are the first words of the novel because writing begins in memory, when consciousness is displaced. Mirkovic is thereby exposed to a world of ghosts just as a train journey exposes him to landscapes: "two thousand killed and wounded, two thousand Hapsburgians fallen in a few hours lie strewn across the river’s shore, two thousand bodies that the Lombard peasants will strip of their valuables, baptismal medals, silver or enamel snuffboxes, in the midst of the death rattles of the dying and the wounded on that night of 21 Floreal 1796 Year IV of the Revolution two thousand ghosts two thousand shades like so many shapes behind my window". Scenes from the Zone like this, and from Mirkovic's own past, cascade into view: 

you don’t forget much in the end, the wrinkled hands of Harmen Gerbens the Cairo Batavian, his trembling moustache, the faces of Islamists tortured in the Qanatar Prison, the photograph of the severed heads of the Tibhirine monks, the reflections on the cupolas in Jerusalem, Marianne naked facing the sea, the squeals of Andrija’s pig, the bodies piled up in the gas trucks of Chełmno, Stéphanie the sorrowful in front of Hagia Sophia, Sashka with her brushes and paints in Rome, my mother at the piano in Madrid, her Bach fugue in front of an audience of Croatian and Spanish patriots, so many images linked by an uninterrupted thread that snakes like a railroad bypassing a city, the possible connections between trains in a station

Mirkovic's voice, despite tumbling headlong onto the page in a continuous sentence, is still that of writing, both light enough to carry us forward, above the fray and relieving us of the past and future, yet also heavy with all that the words signify. The archive is heavy on the soul of Mirkovic the traveller, the escapee, because he discovers history is not temporal – all our yesterdays – but spatial. Ghosts from innumerable wars appear and disappear like disused stations, and tortured lives and gory deaths reverberate through the cage of narrative like thousands of sleepers. It is an experience of history explored most notably by WG Sebald, as highlighted by Will Self, and, if pushed to further the comparison, Zone has the quality of a highly fevered Sebald. But its other antecedents are clearer.

The novel's title comes from Guillaume Apollinaire's 1913 poem which shares the novel's decapitations, stream-of-consciousness narrative and drunken narrator and its 24 chapters match the number in that other great story of war, the Iliad. Zone is a literary novel because the documents themselves are literature and because the names that arise in Mirkovic's memory and discussed throughout the novel, authors as various as Ezra Pound, Malcolm Lowry, Robert Walser, Genet, Proust, Celine and William Burroughs, are his fellow travellers. Literature is heavy because of its objectivity, the manner in which human life flares and disappears in a moment. But Zone is literary in a less abstract sense too. Mirkovic sits opposite a Czech businessman feverishly consulting a thick paperback, what turns out to be a catalogue of timetables giving precise details of where and when every single train stops. Like the archive, it is a record that "allows you to know what we could have done, what we could do in a few minutes, in the next few hours, even more, the little Czech man’s eyes light up, all eventualities are contained in this schedule, they are all here". All eventualities will end somewhere. Everything in the world exists in order to end up in a book. The rigour of the catalogue's certainty is bracing and there are those, like the Czech, who relish the cold and those, like Mirkovic, who shiver. This is dramatised at the start of the journey by the cry of viva la muerte, long live death, uttered by José Millán-Astray, the one-eyed Falangist general, in his famous exchange in 1936 with Miguel Unamuno, the Catholic philosopher and "strict high priest of culture" who, in a futile speech against the coming massacre, warns the fascist that "You will succeed, but you will not convince". Mirkovic succeeded too, surviving the civil war and with the prize of an independent Croatia, but he's not convinced.

I regret I don’t know why I regret, you regret so many things in life memories that sometimes return burning, guilt regrets shame that are the weight of Western civilization

The weight of the Zone's history dragging Mirkovic down is a reminder of Nietzsche's essay On the Use and Abuse of History for Life that argues in favour of a history that serves life rather than binds it to erasable memory. It's why Mirkovic's reading matter may prompt the accusation that the book is nothing more than a pathological indulgence in others' misfortunes. Nietzsche resisted monumental and antiquarian forms of history, giving equal importance to forgetting in the lives of individuals, communities and cultures. Mirkovic's nonstop narrative might then be seen as an unhealthy Schadenfreude and self-pity over what his pursuance of war and profit has cost him and others. Yet while we may take this view, we too are implicated in being provoked to prefer forgetfulness over remembrance and the repetition of history this threatens. Zone draws our attention to the web stories weave when its stream-of-consciousness is interrupted by chapters of another book that Mirkovic has in his possession. A writer called Rafael Kahla tells the story of Intissar, a Palestinian fighter resisting the Israeli onslaught in Lebanon. Her lover Marwan has been killed in a firefight and she has to carry on, rifle in hand, lamenting his death whilst remaining true to the cause in the tradition of warriors fighting for a nation's independence. It's a sad and dignified story written with familiar punctuation and in free indirect speech; a work of fiction within a fiction reminding the reader of the longing to make something redemptive in death that overtakes both people and novels. (In fact, Intissar's story is very similar to From A to X, John Berger's grossly sentimental novel of 2008 celebrating the stifled lives of revolutionaries on either side of a prison wall.) However, the contrast to Mirkovic's narrative and to the Iliad is not in its style but its boundless pathos. Where Zone's pages leap over rows of headless bodies and the Iliad describes violent death with swift and terrible lyricism, Intissar does not let go, wanting to retrieve Marwan from death, going so far as to risk another firefight to recover and then bathe his stiffening body.

Mirkovic's present might be said to be one in which unresting death is faced when the attenuated husks of religious or nationalist myth have been breached. Mirkovic is the exposed core and the choice between memory and forgetting is impossible; a brilliant future depends on both. His existence in writing – sustained, incessant, brutal, resourceful to the brink of insanity – thereby becomes necessary for survival. Everything is coursed into a recital, a unique poetic ritual of mourning to reach the destination that is itself. Zone is indeed soaked in trauma yet, in Mathias Énard's hands and Charlotte Mandell's fluid translation, it is exhilarating, and has to be read.

Then the controlled letting go: Peter Handke on American literature

Peter Handke has given a wide-ranging interview (in German) to Die Zeit prompted by his latest book Ein Jahr aus der Nacht, made up of 365 "dream notes" written upon waking, and the play Immer noch Sturm (Still Storm, apparently alluding to King Lear) "concerning the USA's disputed commitment in Bosnia". He also has much to say about contemporary US literature. To the latter I shall have to limit this post. What he says is worth comparing it to the critique offered by Gabriel Josipovici in What Ever Happened to Modernism? which, as if it were idiosyncratic, has been placed in quarantine by UK literary gatekeepers.

As the interview has yet to be translated, we will have to rely on web translations. (Were he only a mediocre Peruvian neo-conovelist instead it would be on the Guardian Books pages tomorrow!). I shall update the translations should anyone be so kind enough to correct or explain (ij. van den berg of boeklog has already helped me so far).

Speaking about witnessing domestic abuse as a child, Handke says it did not take it too badly:

The sorrow of people is so great! If you could only hug them all! But there is no one to embrace them all. We are talking only about my stepfather, and so on: One of the most beautiful sentences I've read is by John Cheever: telling is not retelling. To tell a story is a revelation. In every story, even if it is very real (i.e. avoiding the word 'realistic'), there must be a revelation. You have to be able to see something other than the canonical. The  reader must discover something of the human what he may have known yet was not clear. Otherwise there is no book, no story. I am telling you this because I have the feeling that you're leading me down the trail of retelling. Revelation is telling, even for one who tells. He, too, must be surprised by what he says.

He goes on to say "There is nothing as intimate as the religious prose of John Cheever in his diary."

Die Zeit then asks whether he likes American literature.

Not the younger writers. Again and again I think: How nice literature would be without all of these journalistic, family and society novels. Fontane was perhaps able to do these, but today it is a sunken form. I have translated Walker Percy's novels The Last Gentleman and The Moviegoer; he is a great author. And I love Thomas Wolfe's novel Look Homeward, Angel. These books have something lyrical, which is essential. In Jonathan Franzen's novels, however, it does not happen at all. He follows a knitting pattern. Even Philip Roth is ultimately only a funny MC. Reading should still be an adventure. In a book, even in a social novel, the language must be the movement in search of it. Epic literature needs a lyrical element. But that has totally disappeared from American literature. Eruptions are needed, a controlled letting go, not this prescription-like writing. It must come from the author, whether from his fornlorness or from his pain. When you see the author do this only to avoid word-mongering, it is not enough.

A curious coincidence is that another Austrian great Thomas Bernhard was, in his youth at least, greatly impressed by Thomas Wolfe and even translated a play.

Finally, Handke responds to the interviewer comparing the humour of the dream notes to that of Kafka, an author to whom Handke has not always been sympathetic.

It is always said that Kafka's readers laugh because his prose is so humorous. No, they laughed not at the joke, but at the truth. If something is striking, then one laughs. Humour is, after Goethe, an indication of a declining art. Kafka's art is so pure that it is true. At this, one must laugh.

For Handke, a paragraph is enough. Worth bearing in mind when enduring the hair-raising wrongheadedness of Prospect Magazine on the same subject.

Limited means

From an interview at Big Other conducted by Greg Gerke with James Longenbach, poet and author of Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things.

Gerke: At the end of your book you write about Stevens’ warning to young poets about being too much in books and not experiencing the world [...]. Stevens sent out this quote from Henry James’ notebooks to a young poet:

“To live in the world of creation–to get into it and stay in it–to frequent it and haunt it–to think intensely and fruitfully–to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation–this is the only thing.”

It seems the upshot of this is to do one’s own thinking instead of filling one’s head with more ideas–to live in the world, to experience people and nature and have these experiences inform one’s writing. Do you think Stevens counseled this because of the great sadness of his own life–though his isolated existence did provide for him in terms of his own art?

Longenbach: This is a hard question, and I’m not sure if today I’d answer it the same way I would have twenty years ago, when I wrote my book about Stevens. One person’s intense engagement with the most visceral aspects of life is inevitably going to look to another person like retreat or denial.  Somebody like Jim Morrison represents one kind of lived intensity, but somebody like Wittgenstein represents another. I think Stevens had real doubts about the shape his life ultimately took; increasingly, his poems seem to me at times unbearably sad: “Her mind will never speak to me again.” (Sixth line of “Farewell to Florida” – a gorgeous pentameter!) But he also made something extraordinary from the limited means of himself, and that’s what we all do, or try to do. In some ways, Stevens lived with an intensity that terrifies me.

It has been a circle

What we are speaking of here is unfathomable, we are not properly alive, our existence and suppositions are all hypocritical, we are cut down in our aspirations at the final, fatal conclusion of our lethal misunderstanding with nature, into which science has led us and abandoned us; appearances are deadly and all the hundreds and thousands of hackneyed words we play with in our heads in our loneliness, the words that are recognizable to us in any language and within any context as the monstrous truth revealed in monstrous lies, or better, monstrous lies revealed within a monstrous truth, the words we say and write to one another and the ones we dare suppress, the words that come from nothing and go to nothing and serve nothing, as we know and keep secret, the words to which we cling because our impotence makes us insane and our insanity makes us despair, these words merely infect and ignore, blur and aggravate, shame and falsify and cloud and darken everything; by mouth and on paper they abuse by means of their abusers; the very character of words and their abusers is an outrage; the spiritual condition of words and their abusers is that of helplessness and catastrophic good cheer.

This is the first part of Thomas Bernhard's speech accepting the Büchner Prize in 1970, to be found in My Prizes translated by Carol Brown Janeway. See also David Auerbach's telling response to Michael Hofmann's review of Old Masters. Enough of Bernhard as ranter.

Ten years earlier, Paul Celan gave an acceptance speech for the same prize which we know as The Meridian. You can download extracts from Pierre Joris' forthcoming translation of the critical edition at Jacket Magazine. And we English wonder why some accuse our literature of interminable mediocrity!

Enlarge art? No, on the contrary, take art into your innermost narrowness. And set yourself free. I have taken this route with you today. It has been a circle.

Saying what counts: Saul Bellow writes to John Cheever

All sorts of pleasant and intelligent people read the books and write thoughtful letters about them. I don’t know who they are, but they are marvelous and seem to live quite independently of the prejudices of advertising, journalism, and the cranky academic world. Think of the books that have enjoyed independent lives. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Under the Volcano. Henderson the Rain King. A splendid book like Humboldt’s Gift was received with confusion and dismay, but hundreds of thousands of people went out and bought hardcover copies. The room where I work has a window looking into a wood, and I like to think that these earnest, lovable, and mysterious readers are in there.

This is John Cheever describing to The Paris Review how he imagined his readers. Forty-one years later, his mysterious readers may be now online, posting blog reviews and discussing books disdained elsewhere. For Cheever, one such reader was Saul Bellow, as one of the most moving letters in the new collection attests.

In December 1981, Cheever spoke to Bellow over the telephone and, from the valedictory tone of Bellow's following letter, it's clear they both knew about the cancer that would kill Cheever's seven months later. "We didn't spend much time together" Bellow writes, "but there is a significant attachment between us"; an attachment because, he continues, "we put our souls to the same kind of schooling, and it's this esoteric training which we had the gall, under the hostile stare of exoteric America to persist in, that brings us together."

You were engaged, as a writer should be, in transforming yourself. When I read your collected stories I was moved to see the transformation taking place on the printed page. There's nothing that counts really except this transforming action of the soul. I loved you for this. I loved you anyway, but for this especially.
        Up and down on these rough American seas we've navigated for so many decades; we've had our bad trips, too–unavoidable absurdities, dirty weather, but that doesn't count, really. I've been trying to say what does count.

Tallis is dead (from the neck up)

There have been several misinterpretations of what I and other deconstructionists are trying to do. It is totally false to suggest that deconstruction is a suspension of reference. Deconstruction is always deeply concerned with the "other" of language. I never cease to be surprised by critics who see my work as a declaration that there is nothing beyond language, that we are imprisoned in language; it is, in fact, saying the exact opposite. The critique of logocentrism is above all else the search for the "other" and the "other of language." Every week I receive critical commentaries and studies on deconstruction which operate on the assumption that what they call "post-structuralism" amounts to saying that there is nothing beyond language, that we are submerged in words—and other stupidities of that sort. 

Jacques Derrida in an interview with Richard Kearney, printed in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers published in 1984.

In the 1980s I came across post-structuralism, post-modernism, literary theory and the works of characters such as Jacques Derrida, and disillusionment was replaced with rage. These people wanted to tell us that ‘there is nothing outside of the text’ – that the linguistic representation of an extra-linguistic reality was an illusion. “Tell that to a junior doctor responding to the message ‘Cardiac arrest, Ward 6’” I thought.

Raymond Tallis in the August/September 2010 edition of Philosophy Now.


NB: The post title alludes to the final line of this song.

The beginning of something

To celebrate its fifteenth year, Spike Magazine has created a 600-page PDF book sampling its online output. You can download it for free from the website. Unfortunately, there are many contributions from me.

Reading Chris Mitchell's introduction, I was reminded of a work-related car journey to Luton in which we discussed possible names for the proposed ezine. "Spike" was not mentioned as I would have surely objected to its lack of gravitas. This was symptomatic because, despite my presence, I was always an outsider to the project of "picking the brains of popular culture", Spike's subsequent tagline. Unpopular culture is more my scene and raising the profile of an alternative book culture was always the aim.


In the mid-Nineties, Chris says, "there was very little about books or literature on the web" and so "it seemed like a chance to get in at the beginning of something". Looking back, we can see how online publication mimicked newspapers – reviews, features, interviews – and could only be in their shadow. My first contribution was a review of two Beckett biographies. I had not written like this before but the medium was public only in name; who was going to read it? Chris offered me freedom to write anything, so I bashed out essays on EM Cioran and Thomas Bernhard, both of which give me nightmares now but, at the time, gave a direction to writing it had previously lacked. The beginning had begun, so what came next?

Phantoms on the Bookshelves

Henderson, the Rain King has disappeared from my bookshelves. The sixties Penguin paperback with exposed binding and a dog-eared cover may have been thrown out, yet Humboldt's Gift remains despite the detached first 32 pages. Searching in boxes has yielded only two other neglected Bellows: The Actual and The Viking Portable Library collection. So where did Henderson go?

Perhaps it's no coincidence that my search began while I was reading Jacques Bonnet's Phantoms on the Bookshelves, a short, relaxing book about the author's library of 20,000 volumes. The phantoms of the title are not missing books but "sheets or cards inserted to mark the place of a book removed from a library shelf". So the book is about the reading of his books and the practical problems of owning so many - storages, organisation, protection - as well as the more abstract, biographical issues of ownership; why, for instance, this bibliomania? Bonnet's response is deflected by anecdotes and light-heartedness: even if a book on his shelves has not been read and, like the essay on Slovenian grammar he possesses, may not be quite essential, it still may come in useful one day. The inevitable breaking of the promise of a possible future is perhaps Bonnet's blindspot and there is no anxiety in the shadow of no more time to read.

The very first is (unfortunately) my favourite anecdote because it proves immediately that Bonnet is no dilettante. He tells the wistful story of Fernando Pessoa's failed application of 1932 to become the librarian of a museum outside Lisbon; a story that emerges from a reproduction of the poet's stiffly impersonal letter in a 1981 Portuguese book of photographs Bonnet found in a bookshop two years later. Bonnet compares it to two other editions of the book before reprinting the letter in translation. We can then begin to appreciate why Pessoa was not given the museum post and perhaps also why he died three years later, still stuck in a boring, low-paid job in the capital: shelves of bottles attracted when shelves of books retreated.

Reading the letter, I am reminded of how moving it is to look at the cover of Pessoa's 1918 collection 35 Sonnets. What is it about the paratext, the colouring, the spots and the stamps that provokes the need to hold, examine and read? While I don't share Bonnet's bibliomania, I do feel something. In fact, I have the opposite urge to Bonnet. Removing books, giving them away, is often a relief if only because it means there is room for new books. In comparison, Bonnet's acquisitions are on an imperial scale: "Every region on earth is represented there somewhere," he says, "the continents with all their landscapes, their climates and their ways of life". His library is "a concentrate of space" which gives him "the feeling of being all-powerful". While it's clear his remains a working library rather than a collector's, it does seem to have a pathological aspect: "The library protects us from external enemies," he says, it "filters the noise of the world, tempers the cold winds around us".

So why, with this, does the author become a stranger? If it can be said, for me books offer unexpected, often ineffable transformations, far from protection, and, after a certain time, one begins to discern the signs of promise. Those that signal nothing can go; must go. I am foreign to a certain kind of ownership. For example, watching this video of Nicholas Basbanes showing a film crew around his enviable library – handling the books, flipping through the thousands of pages and returning them to the company of hundreds of other, unopened books still in pristine condition – triggers an unexpected melancholy in me. Certainly there's discomfort in the company of ageing hands in amongst all those young glossy jackets, but it is the same melancholy I experience when, in Derrida: the movie, the great man reaches for two vampire novels by Anne Rice given to him by a student: specifically, the noise as they clunk against the wooden shelving and then Derrida's response when asked if he has read or will ever read them. Is it only from this perspective that one recognises the cruel remove of books; when they become silent masters of their own prison?

Henderson remains elusive. Now I see the latest Penguin Modern Classic edition is £14.99; a cruel price for a great novel. England needs a Reclam Verlag.

Nobody home

My entire life seems to have disappeared in a movement of seeking that is perhaps the experience of writing, the responsibility for which I try to bear, poorly but absolutely.

Maurice Blanchot, letter to Elio Vittorini, 1963.

The 'scandal' and the importance of the [Berlin] wall is that, in the concrete oppression that it embodies, it is essentially abstract and that it thus reminds us – we who forget this constantly – that abstraction is not simply a faulty mode of thought or an apparently impoverished form of language but rather our world, the one we live and think in on a daily basis.

"Berlin", 1964.

Both in Political Writings (1953-1993).

Rainbow shatterings: What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici

The title of this book is a question asked by a professor of English and answered by a practising novelist. Apart from Milan Kundera, no other living writer has engaged with modern fiction with such depth of learning and lightness of touch. I have been reading Gabriel Josipovici's fiction and non-fiction for over twenty years but little prepared me for the sustained focus and force of this remarkable book. Until now his literary critical works have been collections of essays, even his book on the bible, The Book of God, is a series of discrete essays. Given this back catalogue which includes the lectures given at UCL and Oxford University, it's predictable that the new book has been characterised by some as an academic treatise rather than an accessible essay in the classic sense. The deceit needs to be countered not only because it is wrong but because it also confirms Josipovici's verdict on English literary culture as "narrow, provincial and smug". This can be demonstrated by bitter and dishonest reactions, as well as some more respectful if condescending assessments.






However, there are rational reasons for resistance to the book's argument, even if they are expressed from the corner of the mouth. For Josipovici, Modernism reanimates the doubts and confusions about the authority of art that have been with us since the Enlightenment; doubts and confusion that he shows are present as dynamic forces in the great, paradigmatic works of western literature and essential to the reasons why they became great. For cultural gatekeepers, accommodating doubt and confusion rather than quelling their disruptive presence is anachronistic, the stuff of romantic legend or, worse, against the spirited positivity of modern culture. Peter Aspden says Modernism has "found its dancing shoes and lightened up". Surely literature is here to bring clarity and sense, to reveal the world in all its variety, intensity and, above all, reality?

Perhaps. But this is an understanding from a watchtower, from outside of writing. When a novel, good or bad, is complete, it creates and embodies unity – even if it relies for this impression on stories of the ultimate rupture of terror, violence and death – and gratitude is expressed by the reader. For someone then to come along to point out that it is an artificial and constructed unity, we are bound to be irritated; yes, we know it is only a novel. Except, however commonsensical this statement may be, it has always to elide the uncanny experience of reading; the sense that it is only within the ideal space of the greatest novels that we feel most engaged with the world, where the doubts and confusions of our lives abate and we become able, for the time of reading at least, to maintain understanding and equilibrium. This is our gratitude but also our guilty secret. We know it is only a novel and the world has thereby been distorted and we need more art to maintain the illusion. Bad faith kindles doublethink.

The problem for the critic is that this essential experience of reading cannot be easily discussed outside the special conditions bestowed by reading itself, removed from the pressures of commerce and fashion. The concealed problem explains why literary debate is dominated by personalities and political issues rather than an engagement with books themselves and why, as a consequence, attention turns to forms more congenial to disposable debate. Perhaps only a practising artist willing to analyse what's hidden can elaborate on the enduring presence of the forces of doubt and confusion. Josipovici's book certainly suggests this is the case and that only by recognising and embracing their urgency for each one of us – and not just as artists but as readers – can literary fiction renew itself both on the public and personal level.

So, the book's purblind reception in England is really a symptom of an institutionalised instinct to repress and deny doubt and confusion. This is why in what follows I intend to address occasional misrepresentations of the book. Anyone who has read What Ever Happened to Modernism? cannot but be amazed at how some reviewers have deceived their readers in summarising the book as an attack on contemporary English novelists in favour of difficult, joyless avant-garde texts, while failing to mention the central theme of the book: the disenchantment of the world. For this reason, as best I can I shall summarise Josipovici's definition of Modernism before ending with a description of the quality or qualities of the art it seeks to encourage.

The disenchantment of the world

The phrase from Max Weber out of Schiller can lead a rough headline summary of Josipovici's genealogy of Modernism:

1. The disenchantment of the world
2. The inward debate of authority 
3. The elimination of choice 
4. The imitation of an action

The first point is perhaps the most difficult to discuss because the state of disenchantment excludes the possibility of knowing what enchantment is exactly. Instead we have to turn to familiar historical terms:

Weber argued that the Reformation was part of a historical process, ‘the disenchantment of the world’, whereby the sacramental religion of the Middle Ages was transformed into a transcendental and intellectualised religion, which led to the removal of the numinous from everyday life.

What was lost in this process is, for Josipovici, the elephant in the living room of modernity. "Weber’s argument is neutral" he adds, "but the assumption is that not only was this great historical shift inevitable, it was, since it ushered in the Enlightenment and helped to banish superstition, what the authors of 1066 and All That would have called A Good Thing." For Josipovici, unlike his enlightened critics, it is not necessarily A Good Thing.

The concern to acknowledge what has been lost since the Enlightenment has long been present in Josipovici's non-fiction. On Trust from 1999 provides,  in the opening scene of Shakespeare's Richard II, a literary example of Weber's disenchantment. When Richard interrupts the ritual duel between Harry of Hereford and Thomas Mowbray, he is interrupting the public spectacle which "demonstrated to a non-literate society through the forms of ceremony how things really stood, and it did so in a highly dramatic way, so as to imprint it on the memory of the community." What is overwritten here is the community ordered by ritual replaced by secular hierarchy. But, as he shows elsewhere, there is something more fundamental going on than a disintegration of divine right. In The Mirror of Criticism (1983), Josipovici is drawn to the art critic Meyer Schapiro's observations on a mousetrap in the Mérode Altarpiece:

In the Middle Ages the notion that objects in the physical world were an allegory of the spiritual did not necessarily entail the representation of these objects as the signs of hidden truths. 'The mousetrap,' [says Schapiro] like other household objects, had first to be interesting as part of the extended visible world, before its theological significance could justify its presence in a religious picture.'  However, even as a piece of still-life, the mousetrap is more than an object in a home: 'it takes its place beside the towel and the basin of water as an instrument of cleanliness or wholeness [...]'. What Schapiro is doing here [Josipovici writes] is to open our minds to the possibility that the alternatives are never simply either that objects are symbolic or that they are not: the very way the painter has brought them together makes objects in a naturalistic painting inevitably symbolic."

This is what Weber means by the numinous: an interplay of physical and metaphysical that eliminates polarity. Transcendental and intellectualised religion polarised art and community with the consequences of a loss of heaven's guide and thereby the guarantee of a work's authority.

How and why this happened is a question for other books. Nor does Josipovici claim this is his history: as well as Weber, he points to the examples of established European thinkers such as Hans Blumenberg, H-G Gadamer and Erich Heller of writers who have discussed the process and its consequences. In the main, however, What Ever Happened to Modernism? is a book about modern fiction. "[It] is no coincidence" he says "that the novel emerges at the very moment when the world is growing disenchanted". The Novel dramatises the emergence of the self not under God, yet who nevertheless seeks enchantment however secularly it is defined. The book's earliest example is Rabelais' Gargantua & Pantagruel but the most telling is perhaps Cervantes' Don Quixote.  What Josipovici identifies as modern here is not only the comedic critique of the Knight's idealism but that the novel makes us aware that its critique relies on "the primal idealisation in the conception and execution of the very work in which the critique is made."

The profound irony of Don Quixote is ... that as we read about the hero's obvious delusions we believe that we are more realistic about the world than he is, less enchanted, whereas we are of course ourselves in that very moment caught in Cervantes' web and enchanted by his tale.

The novel's overt self-reflexive awareness of its status as an invention "dramatises the way we as readers collude in this game because we want, for the duration of our reading, to be part of a realised world, a world full of meaning and adventure, an enchanted world." This is both very clear and unsettling. As soon as we believe we're on firm ground, amused at the follies of others, we find that instead we were engaged in the biggest folly of all. English critics' inability to follow Cervantes' looping paths into such uncertainty leads them to celebrate the novel in their own Humanistic image. They can see the numinless utility of towels, basins and mousetraps but not what has been lost. It leads Philip Hensher to bluster that "it’s absurdly naive of Josipovici to think that [Dickens'] Bleak House could have been written without a constant self-questioning". Josipovici's point, which Hensher evidently refuses to see, is that doubt and self-questioning are present in Cervantes as part of the narration just as they are conspicuously absent in Dickens. Hensher demonstrates the blindspot in English fiction (with Sterne as its proving exception) and why, in turn, Josipovici defines modernism as "the coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities". This is more or less where the inward debate of the authority of art begins.

The inward debate of authority

For all its picaresque comedy, Don Quixote is also "an exploration of the nature of novels and their ontological status". Of course, one might easily say it is an exploration because of the comedy. Laughter often relies on paradox just as melancholy relies on its absence. The latter would explain the melancholy Proust experienced whilst reading a classic French story in the simple past tense, something Barthes comments on also:

Even engaged in the most sober realism, [the simple past tense] reassures, because, thanks to it, the verb expresses an act which is closed, definite, substantive. The story [récit] has a name, it escapes the terror of a speech without limit. Reality grows thinner and becomes familiar.

The elimination of the work's responsibility to the reality of its subject leads to 'a past without density, freed of the trembling of existence'. These stories, recognisable as a staple of mainstream English fiction, have nothing at stake except the mastery or otherwise of the novelist over his or her material; a mastery that is enough to convince many that what they're reading is great art. Yet, if this isn't enough, how can an artists inject the trembling of existence into art? Well, as Cervantes has demonstrated already, a very modern way is to place that question at the heart of the work itself. Josipovici uses Wordsworth's early poetry and Caspar David Friedrich's landscape paintings as further examples of where the question was raised. Both poet and painter are closely associated with the experience of nature and both can easily be categorised as comforts for aesthetes. What makes them modern and takes the story of Modernism forward is that both question the validity of turning an experience into art. They knew that the experience of nature is sublime because it overwhelms and transcends the individual consciousness, so, if one has the ability to write and to paint in response, to celebrate, to express awe, then that sublimity is thereby obscured and perhaps even denied. How can a work of art claim authority when only its absence could do justice to what has been glimpsed while wandering lonely as a cloud? We can go further and apply the questions of art to the individual. It seems only self-annihilation can express fully what has been sensed: death is present yet beyond comprehension and direct representation. Josipovici shows how Friedrich and Wordsworth place the question of experience and the representation of nature at the centre of the work.

Caspar David Friedrich - Winter Landscape, 1811

Friedrich's distinctive human figure within a vast landscape stands for the viewer viewing, the painter painting and thereby the limits of our vision, and Wordsworth describes the dialectical process of a vision of the moon and clouds during a late night walk. The contrast again enables the experience to be sensed in its obscurity and distance rather than as merely a sentimental gesture toward the unknown. And again, as in Don Quixote, the self-consciousness and reflexivity usually associated with the insouciance of postmodernism appears here in more subtle, troubled form. "Friedrich and Wordsworth", Josipovici says in a memorable sentence, "are not so much visionaries as explorers of what it means to see and what it means to paint or write".

By presenting diverse figures as Rabelais and Cervantes, and Romantics like Wordsworth and Friedrich alongside the Modernists of the 20th Century, Josipovici may seem to be diluting the radical power of Modernism. One soon begins to wonder about the unique qualities of modern art and literature. Perhaps, however, this is a positive. It emphasises the longue durée necessary for a proper understanding of how and why, according to Virginia Woolf, human nature changed in or about December 1910, as well as to reveal the deep tradition Modernism follows and in which we still move. An understanding such as this may thus provoke a revolutionary revision of the time in literary history – the Victorian era – that has otherwise seriously occluded English perceptions of art. Still today, as Josipovici has often lamented, English novelists wish to write like Dickens as if this were the pinnacle of literary achievement; the end of literary history. Dickens' novels are frequently used as examples of the compatibility of a mass readership and literary greatness while authors such as Amanda Craig and Ian Rankin receive widespread attention and praise for promoting fiction as a neo-Dickensian form of journalism, reporting on current affairs without the constraints of fact. The only surprise is that the major awards for 2009 went to a huge historical novel instead, perhaps indicating where the true feelings of English critics lie; real life preferred at a comfortable distance.

Despite this, Josipovici's critique of Dickens is unexpectedly mild. After comparing the wish-fulfilling coincidences that "oil the wheels of the plot" of Oliver Twist with the terrifying trajectory of Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas, in which injustice and terror are not redeemed or resolved by God or plot, he concludes: "Whether [Dickens' coincidences] are merely a small example of bad faith and a price worth paying, or whether the cost in terms of repression and falsification is simply too great, is a question each reader has to answer for himself."

The elimination of choice

Repression and falsification, however, are not so easily noticed let alone resisted by the self. Kafka notes the "heartlessness behind [Dickens'] sentimentally overflowing style" and, as Oscar Wilde said, sentimentality is "the luxury of an emotion without paying for it". Dickens stands out as the obvious antagonist to writers who were not seduced by the guarantee of popular acclaim. Rather than the masses, they sought to exclude only repression and falsification. We need art to expose itself; to be, as Kafka said, the axe for the frozen sea inside us. Art's failure to be the axe, its settling down happily into the modern era of entertainment and commerce, spread dissatisfaction among artists with higher standards. This is why we should regard Modernism not as a period in artistic history but as a molten rock lurking beneath the surface, occasionally erupting into the landscape of culture. What causes its eruption is a big question but, in short, we may see the complacency of contemporary fiction, the fuss of its competing genres and its succumbing to commercial pressures from television, cinema and the internet, as promising potential for another explosion.

Josipovici cites Kierkegaard's opposition of possibility and necessity as key to "the troubled heart and soul of 19-C man," that led to the last great eruption, the man "who has been given freedom twice over, first by God and then by the French Revolution, but who does not know what to do with it except torment himself with the sense that he is wasting his life." For artists at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, one answer was to eliminate the freedom of possibility, for the art that they made to be a necessary object in the world. By taking the constraints of art to the extreme, removing artistic choice and wish-fulfilment as much as possible, something else, something unexpected may appear. (Of course the Surrealists pursued the same end by doing the opposite, but this amounts to the same thing). Josipovici's prime examples are Mallarmé whose words in Un Coup de Dés are (in Malcolm Bowie's description) "a gravitational centre around which possible meanings of the entire sentence gathers", and Marcel Duchamp who presented the bare implications of art's arbitrary nature by entering a readymade Fountain into a show. Though neither are mentioned by Josipovici, we might add Schoenberg's development of twelve-note composition and Joyce's arrangement of Ulysses' diversity around Homer's Odyssey as if to open the everyday of 20th Century Dublin to Epic enchantment. Josipovici's favourite example is Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual, the classic of OuLiPo constraint discussed at length in the 1992 collection Text & Voice.

The danger with these examples is that they soon become monuments for lesser artists to adopt and then claim their forerunners' radicalism as an alibi. We see this most clearly with Duchamp in contemporary visual art and in compendious novels "about" a city or a nation. While Josipovici argues that the novel emerged when the world was growing disenchanted, the implication suggesting itself to the contemporary reader is that the novel is itself irredeemably generic and that its fake enchantments have embedded themselves so firmly in familiar forms that a resurgent modernism is almost unthinkable. The perennial debate about the exclusion of Crime novels, SF and Romantic fiction from literary prize shortlists, and David Shields' call for more unpolished fact in novels and less generic invention, confirms the impression. The literary novel has itself become a genre and the room for manoeuvre pitifully limited. So what new form can Modernism take?

The imitation of an action

Josipovici's answer to this conundrum is surprisingly inclusive: it takes as many forms as there are artists. As an example of Modernism's variety of forms, he chooses Wallace Stevens' character Crispin, Kafka's horse Bucephalos and Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even as "sad clowns" who each found their own ways to live within the condition of loss. Each form – poem, story, sculpture – pursues a similar awareness of failure and absence without falling into despair. Bucephalos was once Alexander the Great's warhorse but now, in Kafka's story, he's seen trotting up the steps of the courthouse in his new role as an advocate. Having no king to carry, he has studied law books by lamplight and changed his career. Perhaps, the narrator says, this is the best thing we can all do in post-heroic age. While there is no "formal experiment and linguistic daring" here, it maintains a contact with an enchanted past by means of its absence. So, in addition to Rabelais and Cervantes, these three make it all the more bizarre that Ian Jack assumes the book wishes for punishing difficulty and Max Dunbar for "some monochrome wasteland, with a Beckett-style narrative intone of disjointed words and phrases and perhaps the odd glimpse of Afganistan [sic] drone attacks flashing up on the screen".

Another facet of Kafka's New Advocate is its lack of psychology. We don't enter Bucephalos' mind as it comes to terms with the change but see it from a distant observer. This is perhaps an understated element of Modernism and Josipovici addresses it in perhaps the most stirring part of the book, the chapter on Greek theatre; Sophocles and Euripedes in particular. The difference between the two forms a fascinating pattern we can recognise in our own time.  Josipovici again follows Kierkegaard, this time his comparison in Either/Or of ancient and modern tragedy:

The hero of Greek tragedy was not an autonomous individual. He was caught in and made by a whole web of different interpenetrating elements. These were what led to tragedy but also what absolved him from full responsibility. Terrible things might happen to him, but he could not blame himself, or, to put it in terms of Greek tragedy itself, he might be polluted but he was not guilty. In modern tragedy, on the other hand,  ‘the hero stands or falls entirely on his own acts’.

One can imagine Jack or Dunbar praising a different story in Bucephalos is ridiculed, his absurdity held up for laughs – a horse in court, whatever next?! – or with gossip, rather than the mystery alone but for a little wistful resignation. There are reasons for these knee-jerk reactions:

Our age is more melancholy than that of the Greeks, and so more in despair, says Kierkegaard. The reason for this is that today each person is deemed to be entirely responsible for his actions while ‘the peculiarity of ancient tragedy is that the action does not issue exclusively from character, that the action does not find its sufficient explanation in subjective reflection and decision.’

Tragic drama, then, was, as Aristotle wrote, "an imitation not of human beings but of action and life". It's significant that Josipovici quotes here the critic John Jones on the mistranslations of the plays by Romantic scholars who could only see solitary individuals in their isolation, a tragic hero like Hamlet, at the centre of the story. Like our contemporary critics, they read what isn't there because they can see only personalities and the weighing of personal responsibility. It's a habit of mind we see in conventional fiction beginning and ending in a solitary consciousness even as it is reported in the third person, and also in the persistent contempt for the Nouveau Roman which presents description as an experience in itself; not about something, it is that something itself. To receive its gifts, Josipovici urges us to abandon "our mistaken search for what lies behind instead of focusing on what lies before us" and thereby learn "to live with impenetrability, to relax and savour it".

Like the essays on the Bible in The Singer on the Shore (2006), Greek drama begins to tell us more about modern fiction than discussion of modern fiction. From the play's descriptions in the book, I noted down features of Sophoclean drama which help to show this:

• Masking as a form of revelation rather than concealment
• A single event unfolding slowly
• Each moment has the same weight
• Not a fiction or reconstruction but a re-enactment
• Death is regarded not as end-point but a sea surrounding life

When Josipovici turns to Euripides we begin to see the remarkable similarities between early Greek drama and Modernism and between its later manifestations with art from the Renaissance onward. These are the notable features of Euripidean drama:

• Inwardness replaces the mask
• Complicated plotting
• An emphasis on realism
• A fascination with those on the margins of society
• Who and what we are defines us rather than what we do

However, even this straightforward chapter causes Sam Leith in The Sunday Times to criticise Josipovici for arguing for Euripides as a "proto-modernist" when he's doing the exact opposite. As the comparison above makes clear, Euripides was the Dickens of his time, Sophocles the Beckett. Why this kind of misreading continues is an issue worth pursuing. The dominance of reason and humanism in English culture, wedded to an awed reverence for commercial success, is one obvious cause. What cannot be said is not so much passed over in silence by contemporary culture as ignored or branded out of order. In his original lecture, Josipovici wondered if this cultural narrow-mindedness (he calls it innocence) is because, unlike most European nations, England was never invaded or occupied (at least not since 1066) and is intolerant of the compromises and ambiguities occupation demands. I would add that English culture has also never appreciated what Maurice Blanchot called "the absolute event" of the Nazi holocaust; in London, the positivity of the Enlightenment still reigns. To resist this dominance, we need to isolate the alternatives What Ever Happened to Modernism? suggests.

Duchamp's Large Glass

Rainbow shatterings

With the two lists of features of Greek theatre in mind, we can appreciate Nietzsche's recognition of the subtle but drastic transitions in a culture. Our experience has always been one of being torn between the two forces of 19th and 20th Century art. However, dissatisfaction with the conservatism of many well-known practitioners of the novel (Ian McEwan's Saturday being the prime exhibit) may provoke another distinct era of destructive Modernist renewal. Not that this should concern us; individual works matter more than movements. And Josipovici's contention is that exceptional, breath-giving works are present anyway; it's just a matter of recognising them. He lists relatively neglected authors in his article in The New Statesman and the final chapter of What Ever Happened to Modernism? contains as much criticism of literary critics for hyping middlebrow novels by Irène Némirovsky as it does the works of contemporary English novelists.

What should be sought instead is perhaps underplayed in What Ever Happened to Modernism? yet does appear as one of Josipovici's sad clowns. Marcel Duchamp was an example of an artist who raised the problem of the arbitrary nature of creation by applying the name "art" to a urinal. The question here should not be "Is it art?" but "Can art be art?". In "The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even" – also known as The Large Glass –  we see this token to melancholy ends as an "ironical self-portrait as an artist in troubled times", "a delay in glass"  in which multiple artists as multiple bachelors enact "the futile, mechanical, masturbation" that "will never lead to any congruence with the Bride, far less to any offspring". Duchamp spent eight years working on what, Josipovici says, is an "extremely beautiful and meticulously made" object. The length of time taken to make it indicates dissatisfaction with the freedom inherent to the form; the arbitrary choice of features to be engraved, the shape and dimensions of the panels, might all be different. What difference does it make what the artist does? Something had to intervene to bring it to life, but that something never arrived. Duchamp wrote boxes of detailed notes on physics, alchemy and metaphysics to accompany the sculpture, as if these might perform the role of animator. Eventually, however, he let the work go. It's then Josipovici adds the coda:

In transit from Philadelphia to New York ... the two glass panels, which had been laid one on top of the other and not well enough insulated from each other, ground against each other and, when the work was removed from its packaging on arrival, both panels were found to be shattered. Duchamp was immediately summoned to see if he could repair the damage, but when he looked at it he let out a whoop of joy, for the work now had a giant rainbow of cracks on the top panel mirrored by a similar pattern on the lower one. And one can see why he was so delighted. For years he had been trying to bring chance into his work, but chance brought in by the artist is never exactly chance. Now chance had led to an unexpected copulation in the back of a van and the result was a beautiful pattern which bound the top panel to the lower, while, amazingly, leaving all the main elements of the object perfectly visible and the whole still capable of standing up. He could not have asked for more from the gods. [...] Today far more visitors see Richard Hamilton’s copy (made for the great English Duchamp exhibition of 1966, since the Large Glass could never be moved again) than ever see the original in Philadelphia. They think they are seeing it all, but of course they are not. The work they see is still very beautiful – but it is, somehow, dead. In Philadelphia, with its rainbow shatterings, it lives.

This passage is central to Josipovici's manifesto. When he made the news for saying English literary culture is permeated by "petty-bourgeois uptightness," a "terror of not being in control," and a  "schoolboy desire to boast and to shock" he could also be describing Marcel Duchamp but for this element of chance, the ghost of the outside haunting the solipsism of the work. Again, one can easily imagine his smug critics giggling at the news of the panel breakage, perhaps labelling it God's wrath at the pretentions of modern art, at best an unfortunate accident that has ruined a potential masterpiece. However, for the viewer alone before the object, the experience is different to its public expression.

The experience is also different for the reader of fiction. Josipovici has spoken of the unique, living quality of fiction which, he says, "has something to do with time, with how human beings respond to time, with what time does to us, the losses it brings, and the sense of possibilities unrealized, but also the Proustian sense of sudden loops in time and the way our lives are sealed off to us but suddenly, in time, open up momentarily.”  While he says this in a brief interview, it features throughout his critical writing. In What Ever Happened to Modernism? it features as the possible re-enchantment of the world through a reckoning with what disappeared in the nightmare of reason. Always he has championed fiction that breaks through layers of self-protection – the self of the work and the self of the reader – to reveal loss without nostalgia and potential without self-deceit. Proust's In Search of Lost Time is Josipovici's keenest example and so it is appropriate that the first essay of his first essay collection The World and the Book is an essay on Proust's novel: "the most subtle, tenacious and profound exploration ... ever undertaken"  of the relation between the writer and what is written.  Still, I feel this is aspect of fiction requires more attention than What Ever Happened to Modernism? is prepared or able to give it, to become the overt subject of a book rather than left to the margins. But perhaps this is why Josipovici writes fiction and why we should turn to his novels and short stories for more. The new collection Heart's Wings & Other Stories is an ideal place to start.

Kafkaesque: an ordinary morning in Newhaven

Eight days ago, a note was pushed through my door. My surname and house number were printed on it in biro. The suggestion was that a parcel awaited me because I wasn't in when the van driver called.

I couldn't guess what the parcel might contain so was keen to get it delivered. I'd not heard of the Home Delivery Network before but hoped it would be as straightforward as collecting a parcel through Royal Mail: wait 24 hours and then pick it up after queuing for a few minutes at the local depot. First, I went to the website which Firefox warned me was dodgy and that I shouldn't visit. Then the site insisted my postcode was invalid, so I couldn't access the system there. While the call centre – which I called to have the delivery rescheduled – had a record of the parcel, it had no delivery address and no tracking data. I put the phone down with the mystery unresolved.

Yesterday, having no more news, no more notes through the door, I decided to cycle to the nearest depot in Newhaven, the continental ferry port nine miles east of Brighton (Royal Mail's is within walking distance). Although it would be the furthest I'd cycled since my accident nearly three years ago and, worse, along a busy, severely undulating clifftop road, I wanted to guarantee taking possession of the parcel. By now I had guessed it was Mathias Énard's Zone and was even more keen. However, the call centre said it could be picked up only between eight and twelve midday on Saturday. So, today instead, I set off in hope and a bright orange rain jacket. Waves were crashing over the marina cobb as I passed and, as the cliffs began, a new sign offering counselling to potential suicides blocked the view over the supermarket car park below. I could tell it wasn't going to be easy.

Newhaven is an English town familiar to those born and raised outside London: low-rise, run down and apparently uninhabited. It is parasitic of the mouth of the river in which Virginia Woolf drowned and, where I crossed on the swing bridge, the thick paste of mud on the banks held in place a rusty, delapidated fishing boat covered in torn and flapping tarpaulin. The best thing about the town is the shell of the Conservative Club gutted by fire.

When I found the depot down a concrete road on an industrial estate, I became part of a small crowd of fellow parcel collectors. We queued in a narrow hall outside a window in a wall with décor from the 1970s except for the digital clock. One woman couldn't stay there because the flickering flourescent light threatened an epileptic fit. The receptionist called for our tickets and we handed them over with proof of identity. "We don't have your address", I was told, so I handed over an envelope addressed to me.

– Don't you know it?
– Yes. It's there, on the paper.
– But you don't seem to know your address.
– What?
– You had to get a piece of paper to show your address.
– Yes, you asked for proof of address, so I brought some.
– What's your postcode?

I spoke my full address and postcode without looking at the paper and the person left to descend into the bowels of the building. In the twenty or thirty minutes we waited for our parcels there was unanimous criticism of HDN's customer service. "I work long hours so how can I be at home all day waiting for a delivery?"; "Why don't they deliver on a Saturday - we could guarantee being in"; "The website says my postcode is invalid"; "You can't blame the staff but they don't have to be rude."

Miraculously, my parcel was found. Only it wasn't Mathias Énard's Zone. However, given all that went before, it seems appropriate that it was this beautiful book instead.

Folio Society

England and Modernism

So far I have resisted commenting here about the reviews of Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism?. Tom McCarthy's in The Guardian (and now Michael Sayeau's in The New Statesman) are by far the most attentive to the book itself and should take priority over the others which only – and it takes some effort not to write more here – confirm Josipovici's thesis that the mainstream critical culture in this country has lost its way.

To redress the balance, let's not ignore what the blogosphere has said. Anthony at Time's Flowed Stemmed says the book has "redefined [his] literary appetite". He goes on: "What Ever Happened to Modernism? enables me pin down just why some writers and artists electrify me and others leave me cold. It has given definition to what I had previously thought an almost arbitrary, random collection of preferences."

I hope more bloggers can add their thoughts because Josipovici has provided tenfold more food for thought about the future of fiction than David Shields' monumentally wrongheaded Reality Hunger.

Another reason to commend Tom McCarthy's review is that he does not take umbrage at Josipovici's dismissal of contemporary English fiction. By contrast, John Sutherland is particularly annoyed and wonders:

[W]hy has he not ... engaged at any length with critics who have defended unregenerate 'Englishness'? Donald Davie, for example, who eloquently argued that the main strand in our national poetry is not Eliot, or Pound, but Thomas Hardy (a naif on whom Josipovici will not waste a single sentence).

It's a question worth asking, particularly if the book did not include a chapter on Wordsworth and discussions of the novels of Muriel Spark and William Golding, while also expressing admiration along the way for John Donne, Harrison Birtwistle, PG Wodehouse, Virginia Woolf and Ivy Compton-Burnett. But it does. Perhaps for Sutherland these are not good examples of 'unregenerate Englishness'. Yet what is Englishness – unregenerate or otherwise? It's not the subject of Josipovici's book so it seems unfair to expect him to answer there. Yet, had Sutherland done more homework with the colleagues to whom he alludes in this review, he may have discovered that Josipovici has indeed engaged with one of the most indefatigable defenders of Englishness and that his book implicitly demonstrates it.

I was fortunate enough to have been taught at the University of Sussex by Stephen Medcalf and remember well the character described in Brian Cummings' funny and moving obituary. But, in those days, I didn't appreciate that his love of English literature was not identical to the little-Englanderism displayed by Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin of old, and Philip Hensher and DJ Taylor of new. I know better now because, earlier this year, The Spirit of England, a collection of Medcalf's essays, was published by Legenda Press. It contains some remarkable pieces on very English writers (even if one is also American): Langland, Shakespeare and Golding, Kipling, Betjeman, GK Chesterton, PG Wodehouse and TS Eliot, among others. What Medcalf does here that is relevant to the question of Englishness is that he shows how there was a profound engagement by many of these writers with other, non-English literatures. The essay on Kipling, for instance, is a close reading of his response to Horace's Odes, while another reads Eliot's The Waste Land alongside Ovid's Metamorphoses. In their introduction to the volume, Cummings and Josipovici explain how Medcalf's conception of Englishness did not exclude modernism because, as they put it, "the move of self-consciousness, the reflexive turn – is there in Virgil, in Ovid, in Augustine, in Chaucer, in Shakespeare":

This also distinguishes Medcalf's complex conception of Englishness. For England is never in Medcalf a little England, a place of mere nostalgia or retreat or homeliness. Great and generous though his admission was of a certain kind of old-fashionedness in himself [...] he meant of Englishness something both more open and more sensuous. For one thing, his Englishness participates in this same culture of mimesis – of imitation of the literatures of the past. But also, he saw literary Englishness as entirely in communication with the other languages of Europe. Englishness reaches back to Virgil not in Edwardian fancies that the Empire is the true home of Aeneas, but in the more challenging sense that Virgil forces the English language to live up to an ideal higher and deeper than itself. Medcalf himself was a praeceptor of literature on a truly European scale. He loved England but he loved it as a European nation and culture. A central manifesto of this was 'seeing European literature as whole in which the ancient literatures interpenetrate the English and other modern literatures'. Perhaps only a mind as capacious as his could see so much of this at one time.

As we can see more clearly now, Stephen Medcalf's influence lives on in works such as What Ever Happened to Modernism?.

Stepping into the poem: the Celan Bachmann Correspondence

This week I finished reading the Ingeborg Bachmann Paul Celan Correspondence in Wieland Hoban's translation presented in Seagull Books' smart, square edition. If there is a review to be written, Shigekuni has written it, and more. So go there for his clearer reading. I will write something else.

It was not the collection I had expected. There is little discussion of poetry and only brief references to works in progress or responses to published work. Unlike the first volume of Beckett's letters, there is little to make the reader pause to copy down lines or phrases. To mine for quotations would probably discolour the character of reading the correspondence as it follows the arc of a lifelong friendship. Reading across over twenty years of haphazard communication is to share in what we may call an infinite holding-between between two lovers now separated for ever. It is an uncomfortable sharing, even more so than Kafka’s loving and distressed letters to Felice, though perhaps only because of the proximity in time. For the most part, however, the letters are reticent approaches by two people who maintain long-term relationships with other partners and express no wish to end them, yet who also remember the brief flaring of an affair as if it expressed the essence of something purer, perhaps of poetry itself. Much is discussed in the letters in a context that can only be guessed at, so impressions like mine are inevitable and, to their credit, the editors do not attempt to report the background any more than evidence allows.

Despite the lack of poetry, the first letter is in fact an original poem: Celan sends In Ägypten (you can read a translation via the link) and dedicates it to Ingeborg on her 22nd birthday. Andrea Stoll describes it as "a love poem that announces nine commandments of love and writing after the Shoah". Later Celan says: "Every time I read it, I see you step into the poem: you are the reason for living, not least because you are, and will remain, the justification for my speaking."

Perhaps we can appreciate from these words the real, physical grip of Celan's terrible bind and therefore why poetry was so important to him. Put crudely then, Bachmann, the daughter of a Nazi party member, a Heidegger scholar and German poet, represented both Celan's love for the German language and hope for its homeland's atonement. In his letters, the progress of his writing stands for the health reports one might read anywhere else. He is often afflicted by silence due to private or professional hurts. The cumulative effects of both erupt late in the correspondence and turn the book into something much more harrowing than the reader had come to expect from what had preceded it. This is what has become known as The Goll Affair, a scandal in which the widow of the poet Yvan Goll accused Celan, who had translated his work into German, of plagiarism. Benjamin Ivry explains how "some postwar German literary critics took up cudgels on [Goll's] behalf, scorning Celan in reviews that reeked of subtle and not-so-subtle antisemitism, and alluding to his supposed greed for money or to his lack of originality".

Celan understood this as his personal Dreyfus Affair because he was as innocent of plagiarism as Dreyfus was of treason. It was later shown the widow had forged manuscripts to suggest direct thefts from Goll's work had gone into The Sand from the Urns, Celan's first collection. While Bachmann moved to defend him, Celan was nonetheless deranged by the persistent accusations. (We still await a translation of the book containing all documents relating to the case). It is unclear whether anyone could have counselled Celan before he too served a sentence at Devil's Island; what ever had been said by Goll and her supporters did the intended damage. Celan sees this as evidence of something perhaps worse than Nazis refusing to apologise. In 1959, he tells Bachmann:

I also think to myself, especially now, having garnered experiences with such patented anti-Nazis as [Heinrich] Böll or [Alfred] Andersch, that someone who chokes on his errors, who does not pretend he never did any wrong, who does not conceal the guilt that clings to him, is better than someone who has settled so very comfortably and profitably into the persona of a man with a spotless past, so comfortably that he can now – only 'privately', of course, not in public, for that, as we all know, is harmful to one's prestige – afford to indulge in the most shameful behaviour. In other words: I can tell myself that Heidegger has perhaps realized some of his errors; but I see how much vileness there is in someone like Andersch or Böll.

While it is understandable for Heidegger's philosophy to be still treated with contempt by narrow minds like Emmanuel Faye and his dupes, it is perhaps more shocking that Celan also receives condescension from a modern-day Böll or Andersch such as Clive James. Duncan Law summarises James' piece on Celan in what apparently passes for great essay writing in this country.

The volume ends with Gisèle Lestrange's warm letters to Bachmann following her husband's suicide aged 50. Bachmann herself would die in tragic circumstances three years later. Thinking over my experience of reading these letters armed with such knowledge, I recognised the dangers of writing in a literary world policed by gatekeepers like Clive James. I also wondered if this is perhaps necessary for writing such as Celan's to make its way into our lives. Let me explain: think of Georg Bendemann writing to his Russian friend in Kafka's The Judgement and how this unhurried, sunday morning politeness is disturbed when his father questions Georg's habitual dissembling to his innocent friend and denounces his betrayal of his mother's memory by getting engaged to that "nasty creature" who lifted her skirts. Georg's only means to continue, he realises, is to throw himself from the nearest bridge and to drown in the river. By continuing, he lives on in the real world, but it is a continuation borne on the pain of terrible transformation. And this is, of course, as I now realise, Paul Celan's story.

A vast horizon of tiredness

In most cases, fatigue is brought on most quickly by cognitive effort, desk work, reading, or any activity that needs attention.

This is taken from a website discussing the daily effects of brain injuries. It explains more to me than the NHS ever did. Apparently, patients suffering from a head injury report that at first they have a feeling of energy, "then, fairly suddenly," the website continues "like a curtain falling down, they find they are struggling to keep going; and can't make sense of what they're doing." This, to my surprise, matches a familiar pattern in my workaday life. It also explains why this blog has not seen the many book reviews that I had planned to produce in order to start more literary fires. Worse for me is that the website is describing the effects of a mild head injury, and mine was not mild.

For a long time, I've wondered how to write when the cognitive resources required have been already exhausted. Mostly I think it's an excuse: isn't this what real writers do all the time – work hard despite the damage it delivers? Think of Nietzsche and his headaches, Henry James and his tendinitis, the late Christopher Nolan. What ever the answer, the physical response is the same: the curtain sweeps down.

So, rather than keep on waiting for the same answer, I wonder if fatigue should be regarded as an obstacle. If work is the activity that shuts everything down, then can writing be done when it isn't work? Haven't I always found the most promising ideas arrive when I am farthest from purposeful thought: strolling along the seafront, sitting in silence waiting for a train, drifting off to sleep? These are times, I recognise, much like reading and writing, when only possibility is possible. I remember the artist Emma Sargeant describing how her best work emerged only when she was tired at the end of a long day, and how Stockhausen once stayed awake for a week to see what came into his mind. Don't these point the way? Except both painting and composing demand a certain loss of control and surely writing is nothing if not mastery over form and content. Could it be, however, that this mastery is precisely what hampers the breakthrough?

In 1989, Peter Handke published Versuch über die Müdigkeit, translated by Ralph Manheim as Essay on Tiredness (now collected in Quiet Places), and it answers the last question in the positive. In it he describes to an anonymous questioner various experiences of tiredness: from childhood midnight masses, searing boredom during lectures at university, long days of physical labour, to love affairs (the latter looking forward to his Don Juan). Then he recalls a journey from Alaska to New York in the late 1970s which, amid snow storms, required airport stopovers in Edmonton, Canada and then Chicago. When he arrived in Manhattan, he felt ill, cut off from the world after a night without sleep, air, or exercise and wanted to go straight to bed: "But then I saw the streets along Central Park in the early-autumn sunlight. People seemed to be strolling about, as though on a holiday. I wanted to be with them and felt I'd be missing something if I stayed in my room. Still dazed and alarmingly wobbly from loss of sleep, I found a place on a sunlit café terrace, with clamor and gasoline fumes all around me. But then, I don't remember how, whether little by little or all at once, came transformation." He watches people walk by:

I wanted nothing from them; just being able to look at them was enough for me. My gaze was indeed that of a good spectator at a game that cannot be successful without at least one such onlooker. This tired man's looking-on was an activity, it did something, it played a part; because of it, the actors in the play became better, more beautiful than ever – for one thing because, while being looked at by eyes such as mine, they took their time. As by a miracle, the tiredness of such an onlooker nullified his ego, that eternal creator of unrest and with it all other distortions, quirks, and frowns. [...] The action of this selfless onlooker encompassed far more than the beautiful female passerby and drew everything that lived and moved into its world center. My tiredness articulated the muddle of crude perception, not by breaking it up, but by making its components recognizable, and with the help of rhythms endowed it with form – form as far as the eye could see – a vast horizon of tiredness.

This may take us forward to My Year in the No-man's Bay, the novel which begins with the narrator's experience of metamorphosis, and to his screenplay for Wim Wender's Wings of Desire in which the vast horizon was surveyed by Bruno Ganz's angel. But such observations are themselves the weary reflex of a literary worldliness. His questioner asks what is so special about this gaze:

Because of my tiredness, the thousands of unconnected happenings all about me arranged themselves into an order that was more than form; each one entered into me as the precisely fitting part of a finely attuned, light-textured story; and its events told themselves without the mediation of words. Thanks to my tiredness, the world cast off its names and became great. I have rough picture of four possible attitudes of my linguistic self to the world: in the first, I am mute, cruelly excluded from events; in the second, the confusion of voices, of talk, passes from outside into my inner self, though I am still as mute as before, capable at the most of screaming; in the third, finally, life enters into me by beginning spontaneously, sentence for sentence, to tell stories, usually to a definite person, a child, a friend; and finally, in the fourth, which I experienced most lastingly in that day's clear-sighted tiredness, the world tells its own story without words, in utter silence, to me as well as to that gray-haired onlooker over there and to that magnificent woman who is striding by; all peaceable happening was itself a story, and unlike wars and battles, which need a poet or a chronicler before they can take shape, these stories shaped themselves in my tired eyes into an epic and, moreover, as then became apparent to me, an ideal epic. The images of the fugitive world meshed one with another, and took form.