The Marketplace of Ideas

There are so few podcasts worth listening to – Entitled Opinions, In Our Time (unless it's on science), KCRW Bookworm – that is worth drumming out news of a fourth. Colin Marshall's Marketplace of Ideas has been going for a few years but came to my attention only recently when Gabriel Josipovici was interviewed about What Ever Happened to Modernism? If you know of any others of equal quality, please let me know.

Delving into the archives, interviews with Scott Esposito, Robert Harrison and Michael Silverblatt have been excellent company on cycling tours of the Sussex countryside, and I'm hoping Steven Moore talking about his book The Novel: An Alternative History will be too. However, as my journey passes Virginia Woolf's home at Rodmell, I wonder if it will be in keeping with his professed love of long, encyclopaedic novels.

The latest interviewee is Lars Iyer, who you will all know as the blogger of legend and now author of the novel Spurious. The blog of the same name has an overview of the reviews of the novel, even one by a pile of shit.

Dans le noir du temps

Hesitation before rebirth

Kafka stays awake during the gaps when we are sleeping.

Elizabeth Costello says this while explaining to her son why Kafka's fantastic fiction is necessary to the project of literary realism. By remaining awake his writing follows "through to the end, to the bitter, unsayable end, whether or not there are traces left on the page."

It's been said that stories such as A Country Doctor are expanded metaphors but, according to the psychiatrist Aaron Mishara, Kafka's staying awake while others slept had a direct influence on his fiction and that Costello was literally correct; no metaphor is involved. Mishara's remarkable paper Kafka, paranoic doubles and the brain claims that Kafka suffered from dream-like hallucinations during a sleep-deprived state while writing and that his work "provides data about the structure of the human self. That is, it documents processes "that are not limited to the individual's experience of self in its historical context, nor the individual's 'autobiographical' memory, but reflect the very structure of human self as a transformative process of self-transcendence".

In the past I have been very critical of literary critics using scientific methods to justify itself, yet here a medical scientist allows literary creation to countermand the positivist inferences of science. Indeed, Mishara recognises that "literature documents and records cognitive and neural processes of self with an intimacy that is otherwise unavailable to neuroscience." One has to attend to literary writing as literary writing rather than only as clinical data. And while documented intimacy is Mishara's concern, for us it can teach us again how to resist dominant contemporary notions of literature as craft, as mastery, as memory, as a record of historical events, as social commentary, as a career, as something less than an impossible letting-go. "In a letter to Max Brod," Mishara notes, "Kafka writes that it is 'not alertness but self-oblivion [that] is the precondition of writing'". For Kafka, writing was a means of transformation, the seeking of an unsayable end, whether or not there are traces left on the page. His diaries are drenched in a sense of failure, of a pitiful hesitation before true transformation:

Kafka's apparent wish for rebirth is not addressed in the secondary literature but appears to inform Kafka's writings as if the writing itself were a kind of rebirth of self accomplished through its hypnagogic-doubling process. [...] Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis begins at Christmas (Christ's birth) and ends with his death around Easter (Christ's resurrection). Kafka's symbolic-images of journey or rebirth indicate a threshold between worlds or mental-states. To experience rebirth through writing, through the spontaneous, symbolic self-transformation of hypnagogic-imagery, requires a different mental-state, a trance-state open to the unconscious, symbolic formation of images as an inner (transformative) "journey" of the self.

(Original link found via Perverse Egalitarianism).