All to end (the year)

One clear memory I have of David Lodge's review of The Book of God is that he described its author as being "a novelist deeply influenced by Beckett". It stuck in my mind because, at the time, in my very early days of reading books, I wondered how on earth a novelist could be influenced by such an author; it was, I thought, like being influenced by a field or a cloud. This was 1988. In March 1989, Beckett published Stirrings Still and I began to appreciate what it might mean. Later that year, thirty years ago today, Beckett died (I saw the news on Ceefax). So, as with my post on the thirtieth anniversary of Bernhard's death earlier this year, here are a few links to what I've written about Beckett on this blog.

However, the first thing I ever wrote for the internet was a review not for this blog but for Spike Magazine of the two biographies of Beckett published that year, and though I am reluctant to hyperlink (empathising with Beckett for his own reluctance to allow early work to be reprinted), I do so because the first line prefigures a theme in what I've written ever since: that it has not been easy assimilating Beckett into our culture in the way his mentor Joyce has been assimilated. The reason can be explained via a post from 2008 in which I quote Beckett explaining why his work changed at the time of Molloy following what he calls a revelation:

I simply understood that there was no sense adding to the store of information, gathering knowledge. The whole attempt at knowledge, it seemed to me, had come to nothing. It was all haywire. What I had to do was investigate not-knowing, not-perceiving, the whole world of incompleteness.

Such an understanding remains alien to English-language literary culture. Popular book discussion still promotes writing that offers knowledge: Ten books you need to read. Imagine being told you need to read the authors who Beckett admired for the flame that burns away filthy logic.

This year I discovered that the book in which Beckett said this was published without Beckett's approval; he thought the conversations were private. But it does include his important refutation of the label 'theatre of the absurd' for his plays. He was also filmed without his knowledge talking about a television play, perhaps the only time he ever spoke on film.

The longest posts on Beckett appeared in 2011, on his silence and on the second volume of letters. 

But going back to Stirrings Still: ten years ago, I wrote about its initial publication in Oh all to publish, a post that includes a photograph of the full text as it appeared on the front page of the Guardian. Around the same time BBC Radio 3 broadcast a reading by Barry McGovern, which I recorded on a C90 cassette at the time and whose words – such and much more – still echo in my mind. Here it is, digitised in three parts.

Nietzsche and the Burbs by Lars Iyer

Imagine every novel published the last twenty years as part of an urban landscape, rising up against the horizon as you approach the outskirts of town, sometimes standing alone, as brash as a neo-Georgian mansion, sometimes piled high, storey upon storey, as imposing as a tower block, but mostly just rows and rows of near identical terraces. You wander through the streets imagining the lives of people in their rooms, what goes on behind their windows. Some look welcoming, others forbidding, but mostly indistinct, just rows and rows of near identical terraces. We speak of the death of the novel even as new estates pop up, too many to explore by foot, so we rely on drone footage to confirm that, yes, they're all the same, more or less. It is a kind of death, but one we struggle to recognise.

The modern novel has become the suburb of itself, its lawns of genre stretching to the horizon, parasitic on trade from the UNESCO world heritage site in the city centre to which tourists and connoisseurs flock, but is itself without stature, unsure of itself, constantly seeking validation. Lars Iyer's Nietzsche and the Burbs is where the teenage gang you often see wandering its streets hang out, bored out if its collective mind, full of loathing for the "dead-eyed boxes for the dead" that surround them – they live in Wokingham, after all; a placename that evokes so much to those of us who come from the south of England (so much of nothing) – and resort to drink and drugs to enliven an interminable present in which nothing happens. When asked by their Economics teacher about where the current financial system is heading, they cheerfully speculate:

Global economic collapse, miss, Paula says.
Hyperinflation, then a new Weimar, possibly a new Hitler, miss, Art says.
Stagflation, then another world war, to boost production, leading to mutually assured destruction, miss, I say.

Chandra is the gang's amanuensis and self-styled death-poet, quoting himself and the others as they sing parts of the chorus. They hang out together because they're members of a nameless, singerless band whose progress is frustrated because everything they play sounds like something that's been done before. "We can play anything we like" Paula says. "All this freedom, and we don't know what to do with it." Typical teenagers. But then a new boy joins the school whose composure and assurance intrigues them.

I think he has charisma, Art says.
I think he knows he has charisma, Paula says.
I think he doesn't care whether he has charisma, I say. That's what gives him charisma.
What's charisma?, asks Merv.

They see him write NIHILISM across his notebook and Paula decides he looks like Friedrich Nietzsche, so from then on is known as 'Nietzsche'. They read his blog with its dark aphorisms, quotations from Cioran, Beckett and the original Nietzsche, and with its forceful affirmation of life in its apparent meaningless. “Affirmation?, Paula asks. What does Nietzsche have to affirm? He lives in Wokingham, right?”

But his words begin to have an effect. They realise they have fallen unwittingly into nihilism. "We used to believe in music, we agree. What happened to us?". They envy the fish in the local river, able to live "drunk on pure water", much like Nietzsche's oblivious herd of grazing animals in his essay on history, and imagine a river of vodka: “A river into which you cannot step sober.” It’s the suburbs, they decide, that's happened to them, and only a philosopher of the suburbs can help overcome their predicament, and that philosopher is right before them. Nietzsche is persuaded to become the frontman of their group, which Chandra names Nietzsche and the Burbs. They proclaim that they will find a way forward with Nietzsche's philosophy channelled through their music. “But don’t the suburbs defeat philosophy?" they ask. "Don’t the suburbs mean the impossibility of philosophy?”

These are key questions, and not just for the teenagers. How can the ultimate questions of life be asked in the suburbs of the novel, where everything has been settled, where what happens is only a faint echo of crashing waves in a desert. As one of their teachers tells them: “Your hair keeps growing after you die. Things happen, but so what?”. The only way the big questions can be approached is through absurdity and hyperbole, which is why Nietzsche and the Burbs is narrated by awkward, angst-ridden teenagers, lightning rods for the approaching storm insensible to others, which for Nietzsche is the storm of speech, the speech of thought which rages through the novel. But as teenagers they are also saturated in the innocence and arrogance of the suburbs, a time and place in despair, without art, without philosophy. As such they are always ready to undercut pretention even as they aspire to it, such as when Paula asks Chandra what his poetry is for:

A rose has no why, I say. Nor does poetry.
The word twat has no y, you mean, Paula says.

'Nietzsche' is the necessary anachronism to spark something in the teenagers, in a similar way Wittgenstein is necessary to Thomas Bernhard's story Goethe Dies in which the dying poet demands the presence of the philosopher fifty-seven years before his birth. Indeed, it's worth comparing Lars Iyer's style with Bernhard's. As we are so used to the suburban novel, we've become used to suburban prose – show-don't-tell, free indirect discourse, etc. – so the philosophical hyperbole and choral singing come as a wonderfully invigorating downpour. Though quite different to Bernhard's prose, it shares its intensity of music and the rare quality of ambiguity; we are never sure if its serious or comic, because it is both at the same time. Its permanent present tense, while also running through Iyer's Spurious trilogy and Wittgenstein Jr, is especially effective here in amplifying the mute horror of suburban life, such as when the gang visits the local pub:

   Mild suburbanites, all around. Mild surburbanites, mildly chattering—about what? Mild suburbanites, standing about, sipping their pints.
   Young men in shirts, in jeans. Young women in jeans. Young surburbanites, enjoying a quiet drink. Young surburbanites at play—looking just like young suburbanites at work. Young suburbanites, smiling and nodding, just as they smile and nod at work.

 And interweaving fascination and distance, such as when Nietzsche attends band practice:

Nietzsche, picking up the mic. Nietzsche, holding the mic to his lips. Nietzsche, opening his mouth just a little. Nietzsche, talking though not really talking. Singing, though not really singing. Something suspended between the two.

Each observation or action becomes one pulse in a series, with the effect of reducing agency and knowingness in the characters as they act and in the narration as it describes; something suspended between iteration and innovation. This is why Nietzsche and the Burbs is a clearing in the suburbs of the novel, neither part of the suburbs nor apart from it. It is where the lawns of genre become pockmarked by desperate moles, where the terraces begin to sink into the marsh. The end of the novel suggests that larking around in the light and shade of a clearing is the best response to the suburbs, and we realise as readers that's exactly what Nietzsche and the Burbs does, to glorious effect.

The River Capture by Mary Costello

A friend read my walk in the park post with its interjections of 'I thought' and its sarcastically italicised clichés and warned me to stop reading Thomas Bernhard: he is a zombie who takes control over writers who read him, she said winningly. Of course she is right – Geoff Dyer cheerfully admitted as much recently – and I didn't really need telling. While A walk in the park felt like a happy release from dreary blogmode and entirely natural – it's how I handwrite in my Leuchtturms – it emphasises how compromised my dissent of genre writing is. I replied saying that I should also stop reading Maurice Blanchot, as the post, with its focus on writing, absence and death, owed as much to him as it did Bernhard.

Influence is a minefield in which nothing explodes. A late friend who wrote thrillers once told me that, fearing undue influence, he never read other novels when in the middle of writing one, and also that he never wrote when hungry because he would inevitably start writing about food. And I once heard an intellectual historian saying that a thinker may claim to have been influenced by X, Y or Z, but knowingly or unknowingly they always repress two major influences. If that's the case, perhaps I should stop reading entirely from now on, as my style is bound to be infected whether I know it or not. But how pretentious even to refer to my style! Where are you or I in all this that we share with the writing dead? Given our preoccupation with influence and originality, the only worthwhile writers might be those who from birth have been prevented from reading and come to writing in the way Kaspar Hauser came to town. The walk in the park piece ought to be entirely sarcastically italicised.

With all this in mind, I read Mary Costello's novel The River Capture notable for the overt presence of Joyce's Ulysses in its pages. Its central character Luke O'Brien has a fascination with Joyce's novel and Leopold Bloom in particular which runs parallel in his mind with the events of his life deeply embedded in family and community. The novel is full of textual allusions and direct references to Ulysses, and adopts the free indirect discourse of the Calypso chapter for most of the novel and the question and answer format of Ithaca for the disarming conclusion, as well as the lyrical interweaving of the corporeal and the metaphysical, notably absent in British fiction, which may distinguish Irish novels in general rather than being specifically Joycean. Indeed, but for the Ithaca section, The River Capture might otherwise be recognised as a familiarly sentimental and occasionally melodramatic story of family life in modern-day Ireland. Free indirect narration has embedded itself so deeply in literary culture that readers accept it without question as the regular form of the novel and, having read most of the novel, nobody would tell authors to stop reading Joyce, while the Ithaca section is still so unfamiliar that one Guardian reviewer says it holds back "the natural development of the story" [my italics], while the other finds it "baffling".

The meaning of the title is key to dispelling any bafflement. A river capture is when, as the novel explains, "a river erodes the land and acquires the flow from another river or drainage system, usually below it, the first river is said to have captured the second in an act of piracy. The waters of the captured river are usurped by the captor and, at this point, the two become one." This is a clear metaphor for the presence of Ulysses in the novel, once described by John Banville as an “Easter Island effigy of the Father” looming over those who follow, while here it is the great river potentially draining the liffey out of all future novels (though perhaps ironised here by the allusion to the Spice Girls). It is also a metaphor for the ghosts of Luke's family and friends.

Mary Costello's achievement is to include and implicate the form of The River Capture in its investigation into the various strands of inheritance: literary, familial, and bodily. Luke is troubled by the possibility that the singular form and content of Ulysses and especially Finnegans Wake were informed by syphilis, which he suspects infected Joyce and was passed down to Lucia, his daughter, who died young in an institution. What would it mean for the ambitions of writers inspired by Joyce if bacterium influenced the form and content of a novel to whose greatness they aspire? But this isn't idle speculation for Luke, as it has profound implications for his future happiness, in which as readers we have invested our concern. Despite the implied formality, the questions and answers that conclude The River Capture contain the novel's most overtly lyrical prose as Luke speculates on the properties of water suggested by modern science and how it may affect his fate, as it undermines assumptions about selfhood and agency. It suggests something other than his conscious self will inform the big decision he has to make, so the dissolution of a traditional conclusion which qualifies the praise of reviewers is entirely in keeping with the metaphor.

Perhaps we are drawn to particular writers' styles because they speak to a deeper self than that addressed by other writers, catalysing a mutation in our thought we can never reverse, enabling more than just the publicly acknowledged benefits of reading narratives and instead something approaching the opening of spaces in the mind mentioned here in relation to other novels. This is why I dissent on the value of genre fiction: not because of the quality of its products but because of the disposition of the author to inheritance. Not only is the author untroubled by inheritance but positively embraces its given forms and features, using them as a forged passport to a land of perceived literary talent and value. It is dead writing and content in its tomb. So-called experimental writers can be as guilty of this as any others, finding safety in word-doodling mode. As my friend's warning revealed to me, a style that appears to set one free is also the brink of a grave, and we must remain dwellers on the threshold.

Distance from Ballard

This is an interview with JG Ballard published in the NME in October 1985. It lives in a scrapbook of articles I kept as my interest shifted from music to books.


According to my records, 1985 was the year before I started reading novels; my records being a slip of paper from 1986 with twenty-four books listed and scored, not one of which is by JG Ballard. And yet I know in that library spree I read The Drowned World (which I first typed as The Drowned Sea, a more intriguing title), The Crystal World, High Rise, The Unlimited Dream Company, Hello America, Empire of the Sun, and the story collection Vermillion Sands. Back then the interview stirred me with the idea of a novel that watches England from a train window. I borrowed these books hoping for a narration from this vantage point, and was always disappointed, no doubt because it is not meant to describe Ballard's novels literally. I soon realised, though not soon enough, that I was allergic to hyperrealism, indeed to genre fiction in general. It was the word distance that stirred me, and that word has recurred in my writing many times since.

In 1986 my list began with the novel that set me on the path that I knew at once was mine to take, but still I think of the interview each time I travel by train to stare vacantly at the landscape and the objects and lives within it. I glimpse a thousand curtained windows of homes and with each one, or all of them combined, I imagine a retreat from the relentless pressure of a journey and the infernal genres of human busyness; a quiet room where one can be at peace, thinking, reading, listening to the stillness; a room somehow nothing like my own. Bill Callahan's song suggests this thought is not unique.


The last JG Ballard book I read was The Day of Creation in 1987, reviewed here by Martin Amis.

His suggestion that Ballard's novels "address a different–a disused–part of the reader's brain" rings true and must be close to what Victoria Best calls the "extraordinary elasticity" of some narratives that she says "open up spaces" in her mind, which is something other than flights of the imagination, and not quite Proustian reveries either, but something like a clearing in the forest. This would mitigate the otherwise lamentable influence Ballard has on the current generation of British writers, but this, what seems to be the most valuable and most obscure gift of the novel, is not something that can be easily discussed from a distance, from within the forest. However, as demonstrated by my apparent need to note down the first novel on my first book list, it is the only thing worth writing about.

Peter Handke is the ideal Nobel laureate

I've been reading Peter Handke for thirty years and have described before how a chance reading of the opening lines of Across in 1989 was a revelation. So when October comes around and speculation begins about who should receive the Nobel Prize, I remember this moment and Alfred Nobel's will stating the prize should be awarded to a writer who has produced “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”, wishing only that the agitations about the race, gender or otherwise of the potential recipient could be replaced by a discussion of what this might mean and to which authors it might then apply. After all, as we have seen with Olga Tokarczuk receiving the 2018 prize, the agitations carry on regardless. Commentators want the candidate to be ideal rather than the work because the work...well, the work appears to be irrelevant.

As Kjell Espmark of the Swedish Academy shows, the interpretation of Nobel's 'ideal direction' has a history of its own. If the stipulation can be understood to be recommending those authors who investigate or whose work embodies the relation of the idealism of literature to the empirical world, then Peter Handke's work would be top of the list of those meeting it, with Across the Border, WG Sebald's stunning essay on Die Wiederholung, translated as Repetition, providing plenty of evidence. There are two more links on that page providing more.

I have written at length only twice about my years of reading and re-reading Peter Handke, with Sebald's profundity justifying my trepidation. Three steps not beyond is about Across, Repetition and The Afternoon of a Writer, the three great novels of the 1980s, and Kingdoms of recurrence is about the book-length poem To Duration from the same era, which leaves the latter span of his career untouched. I have to admit that I found his subsequent novels very disappointing. As this article by Scott Abbott suggests, this may be due in part to the death in 1992 of Ralph Manheim who had translated all but one of the four books, but may also be due to his apparent ambition to produce an epic.

In the golden era of blogging, I quoted from interviews and briefly tried to explain why Repetition had such a unique impact on me, but many posts were short-order responses to the smear campaign against Handke and his lament over the destruction of a multi-ethnic socialist state (whose presence is discovered in Repetition) but his translators Scott Abbott and the late Michael Roloff, who wanted so badly for Handke to receive the Nobel, ought to be read instead. As Scott writes: "Peter Handke has spent a lifetime attacking the kinds of ideological absolutisms that produce nationalism, hate, and war" – an ideal evident in everything he writes.




UPDATE: Sunday, October 20th

An example of the smears is the Irish Times' editorial in which this is reported:

Two subsequent editorials in the New York Times repeated the line. The first from the novelist Aleksandar Hemon, who at least is familiar with Handke's work, and Bret Stephens, who says he isn't:

This certainly presents an unpleasant person, and provoked handwringing from those open to alternative perspectives to that provided by corporate media. I hadn't heard the quotation before so couldn't say anything about it until Gerald Krieghofer's blog provided the detail of where the quotation was first uttered and then reported. He includes a video of the event. Someone in the audience suggested the journalists on the Bosnian side of the conflict were more dismayed by suffering than him, to which Handke replies: "Betroffenheit! Das kann ich schon überhaupt nicht hören. Gehen Sie nach Hause mit Ihrer Betroffenheit, stecken Sie sich die in den Arsch!". Which my limited German translates as "Dismayed! I'm not listening to any of that – go home with your dismay, stick it up your arse!" So no corpses (die Leichen) are mentioned. It seems to me to be a reasonable response to all these corporate commentators who can only repeat other corporate commentators.

Krieghofer has since replied to Hemon on Twitter:

As of today, it hasn't been corrected.  

The Guardian has now joined in and, despite being told, is also yet to correct the article.

Once again, to regain some sanity and more evidence of Handke's eminent suitability for the Nobel (for peace as well as literature), I recommend the work of Scott Abbott who has just posted his essay Peter Handke's Yugoslavia Work parts one and two, and Suhrkamp's detailed response.


UPDATE: Thursday, October 24th:

Some good news: the quotation has been removed or corrected in two of the above-mentioned articles, with only the Irish Times and the Bret Stephens article as yet uncorrected. 

A unique and solitary home: Pharricide by Vincent de Swarte

The French for lighthouse is phare, so the title for this novel is a witty pun. It takes the form of a journal written by Geoffroy Lefayen, a French lighthouse keeper. It was first published in 1998 as Vincent de Swarte's first novel and in 2013 Nicholas Royle chose it as the first in a top ten of first novels, adding that it was his ambition to translate and publish it, in part "to honour the memory of De Swarte, who died in 2006 at the tragically young age of 43". Now it has been translated and published by Cōnfingō Publishing, Royle's faith in the book has been bolstered by an admiring foreword by the celebrated 'gothic novelist' Patrick McGrath and an afterword by Alison Moore who, of course, has written a celebrated novel called The Lighthouse. The object attracts writers, it seems.

Perhaps it attracts writers because they identify with the apocryphal story of lighthouse keepers going mad because of the isolation, monotony and constraints of the role. Lefayen himself is not immune to the threat of madness and Patrick McGrath observes nicely that Geoffroy is "a keeper of no kind of light, but of a great darkness", even if the origin of the psychological disturbance we learn about through his journal precedes the lighthouse, and indeed the prospect of isolation led him to become a lighthouse keeper in the first place. But, wait, pharricide means lighthouse-killing – what could that mean for the novel? Curiously, neither foreword nor afterword address the significance of this odd title.

In mitigation, it goes without saying that a lighthouse in a novel acts a metaphor for the novel itself: an imaginative work shining a light into an expanse of night, perhaps as a warning of its dangers, but also illuminating the allure of the unknown, while also being a beautiful and impressive object in itself, as beautiful and impressive as the Cordouan lighthouse in which Pharricide is set undoubtedly is. But both novel and lighthouse can also be places of interminable solitude and disarming silence, in which those drawn to them are both released from the gravity of the land and held captive by an unbound sea. Moreover, while both lighthouse and novel are regularly celebrated for their gift of light and beauty, they are regularly suspected of dubious practices concealed by their public values, suggested by, among other things, the phallic profile of a lighthouse and the novelist's profile as a caddish seducer of minds. So the title remains ambiguous, as it could mean either Geoffroy wishes to kill the bright side of the lighthouse or the dark side. His dubious practice might give us an answer: we might call it proactive taxidermy. The journal describes in detail how he captures creatures to stuff, decorate and stage in tableaux vivant. Alison Moore says this may be a wish to bring his victims back to life and fill the void of his existential solitude, without mentioning that this is also a novelist's modus operandi: for a character to live, the novelist must first kill it. Anyway, the answer remains elusive.

While Geoffroy's tales of isolation and evisceration evoke the taste of the salty sea, the pressure of gale force winds, the stench of bodies, blood and entrails, the form it takes is comparatively mundane, which might be seen as a generic cop out – a found-text acting as an alibi for otherwise impossible access to a character's thoughts. Except the journal form serves two functions: for the reader it makes the development of Geoffroy's hobby even more surprising and disconcerting when it happens, and, for the lonesome lighthouse keeper, it represents a natural recourse: a beacon to cast light over his own expanse of darkness, a stuffed creature able to listen to his innermost secrets and accept without resistance that he may indeed be the kind man he claims to be. Even when it tells of the arrival of a woman who promises to break the vicious circle of Geoffroy's solitude, she turns out to be a mirror image, both of Geoffroy and his journal, which cannot tolerate the third person. The answer still remains elusive.

The answer comes when we recognise that, if the lighthouse is a metaphor for the novel in which it is housed, the lighthouse keeper and his journal stand for the novelist free to do as he pleases and miserably alone in his freedom – devising it all for company – which is indeed what Geoffroy may be doing, not killing and stuffing anything at all; and his mirror image does call him an artist. (We're all artists nowadays.) The wish then appears to be the wish to kill not the good side of the lighthouse or the bad side, or even the lighthouse, but the metaphor; all metaphor. The wish of the novel is the ultimate possibility of the novel: to kill the novel. And if this sounds like an excessively literary reading, both McGrath and Moore place Pharricide in a literary pedigree with uncomplicated comparisons to Poe, Melville and Lawrence which only emphasises the despair of the writer in his lofty cell as once again he lights up the unbound sea in all its violent glory wishing only that for once he could be a sailor plotting a course for the rocks. 

A walk in the park

After days stuck indoors, I went for a walk in a park and, rather than listen to myself, I listened to Michael Silverblatt's interview with Ariana Reines about her new book. Bookworm is an oasis of public discussion of novels and poetry because it discusses novels and poetry.

Reines says A Sand Book is unusually long for a poetry title because she loves long books, books that "go beyond themselves", and she wanted to write a work that bore witness to her experience of many, various cultures, and for that experience to stay with her. Silverblatt tells the listener that Reines "travels the world seeking revelation" and her poems take the reader by the scruff of the neck to be "shocked, horrified, filled with joy". At four minutes into the show she reads a poem called Bohemian Rhapsody. Perhaps you could listen and comment below with your thoughts in response (if only to conceal my own).

Despite wanting only to listen and not respond, when Reines said she loved books that go beyond themselves, I muttered out loud the book is the beyond, and then couldn't help but explain this assertion to myself. Sometimes I long for the desert.

I am going for a walk, I thought, to do nothing else but stretch my legs and clear my head. I was not expecting the walk to go beyond itself. What would that even mean? I could break into a run, I suppose, but that would mean only walking faster. Perhaps to go beyond itself walking needs to become flying. I would need a jetpack for that, I thought. The park has swings for children, which imitate flying, sort of, I thought, which would be safer. Going high and low, back and forth, in complete safety, like reading a poem perhaps, unless someone pushes too hard and frightens you, like JH Prynne, I thought.

It was at this point I remembered that the park began as a communal garden for surrounding villas which were never built so, I thought, a garden has gone beyond itself to become a park. Perhaps then a book is more likely to go beyond itself the bigger and longer it is, perhaps to become more than one book, and then possibly more than two, maybe even a shelf of books, which might then become a library, which might then become a building, a part of the world to visit for revelation.

You're being disingenuous, I thought. It is clear in what Ariana Reines means. The book goes beyond itself by describing the world in all its variety, by exploring what's out there. That is what she means. And the more of the world it goes into, the better, hence all the towns and cities featured in the book, which Michael Silverblatt asks Reines to list as a guarantee of such going beyond.

This is the entirely normal, I thought, nothing to get worked up about. It merely continues Plato's ancient distrust of the voice from elsewhere, since intensified by the scientific revolution in which what enables truth to appear, that which makes it true, is never discussed, emerging more recently in less coherent form as Reality Hunger. And yet despite this common-sense suspicion, there is also a reverence for the written word, evident in the heightened tone adopted when Reines reads Bohemian Rhapsody and the peculiar practice of pronouncing the title after a respectful pause with the same wistful solemnity as the poem despite the introduction making it clear what the title is, as if the words had an almost sacred power. What is going on? I asked myself.

As I continued along the perimeter path, forming sentences in my head and no longer listening to what was being said, I realised that the garden became a park because of the absence of surrounding villas, and so too, I thought, the book. The book comes into being only in the absence of the world. It exists only in the absence of the world just as the park exists only in the absence of the villas. For a book to go beyond itself is therefore unintelligible, because the beyond is necessary to the book. It is always already beyond, I thought, immediately regretting having thought of that critical cliché. Don't ever use that phrase, I told myself. So the question is not how does a book go beyond itself, I thought, but how does the world go beyond itself?

By becoming a book, of course, I thought, disappointed with the banality of the answer, although it was then I realised with pleasure that the writer who first made that claim shares my initials. It is the anxiety and discomfort caused by the consequences implied by this condition that bothers me, as it explains why the book is always subordinated to the world. You've written about this before, I thought, so you're going over familiar ground, the same old ground. Over the years you've seen many books promoted with a promise of going beyond the page, tempting the reader with a story interrupted by an act of shocking violence, and of course people are forever writing bucket lists of all the things they'd like to before they die: bungee jump or visit the Grand Canyon, swim with dolphins or get a tattoo. Acts of shocking predictability, I thought. A bucket list is a curious literary genre: an autobiography ghostwritten in advance, written over a life in which nothing happens except life itself, just as nothing happens in a book except a book, I thought; each entry a chapter heading to a series of CORGI-registered adventures; labels pasted over a void.

Seeking an end to this train of thought, I decided to sit by the pond and stare at the concrete. Why does the world need to go beyond itself? I thought anyway. Bucket lists never include develop a serious illness, or experience sadness without respite for years on end, or lose the only person you will ever love. These things happen anyway, I thought, as confirmed by the benches lining the boundary of the park, each displaying a plaque engraved with a dedication to a person who had, they all said, enjoyed the park in their lifetime. How did this enjoyment manifest? I wondered. Did they leap around with a grin on their faces the moment they stepped over the boundary, or were they overwhelmed by tears of happiness as they trod on the grass?

Neither, probably. Every experience is a word on a plaque, I thought. I remembered a line copied from a book of essays years before: "Experience deserves its name only if it transports us beyond what constitutes our nature". What constitutes our nature, I thought, is distance: distance from everything; the benches, the trees and grass, the ducks and pigeons, and from distance too. It is an experience of distance, I thought, which is why I'm taking these photographs, which record only distance. The people named on the benches are ghosts here, but they always were, I thought, more or less, along with everyone walking around the park now with their dogs, and maybe their dogs too. If an experience has taken us beyond our nature, it would mean a death of sorts, if not death itself, which is why the unwritten bucket list is more appropriate.

This is why we read so many books, I thought walking out through the park gate, and why we feel the need to talk about them, and why I listen to Bookworm, because we are fascinated by this revelation of distance, without knowing what it is, what it means, or even that it has occurred, in which everything goes beyond itself, becoming itself in its absence.

Yesterday by Ágota Kristóf

In 2009 Tim Parks warned of the Dull New Global Novel in which "culture-specific clutter and linguistic virtuosity have become impediments" to commercial success. "From the moment an author perceives his ultimate audience as international rather than national, the nature of his writing is bound to change". "What" he asks "are the consequences for literature?".

Dullness, apparently. Parks offers a handful of examples of authors whose novels have been planed to removed the jagged edges of a specific culture, and while he doesn't include Ágota Kristóf, her novel Yesterday might well be the apotheosis of smooth. First published in 1996 and now reissued in a translation by David Watson published a year later, it has only the most mundane features of modern life, and character names vaguely suggesting a generic European state. Otherwise there is nothing specific. No reader will feel confused or alienated by the detail, what there is of it. This is the ghost of the novel Tim Parks feared, only this has nothing to do with the author having an eye on an audience.

As the title suggests, it is a story of what has passed. Sandor is living in exile having gone on the run as a child after stabbing his mother's lover. He changed his name to avoid detection and was brought up in an orphanage. As an adult he crossed some mountains into a different country and got a job in a factory staffed by fellow exiles who speak in their native language rather than "the language of here". Much like Ágota Kristóf's own story, he experiences "days of dismal work, silent evenings, a frozen life, without change, without surprise, without hope". But his dreams are haunted by Line, the girl he left behind and the daughter of the stabbed lover, whom he still loves and hopes will reappear in his life. "In the evenings, I write" he says. As well as the usual daily intrigues and expressions of pain, he records poetic reveries which write allegorical tales over the blank page of his life. It is here that yesterday rises up and torments. Eventually Line does reappear, and yesterday promises to become today. However, Sandor's experience only ever reiterates that while physical exile from one's homeland and one's true love is particular, exile from yesterday is universal.

Yesterday appears following the success of Kristóf's The Notebook, a book that shares with the new one a minimalist prose style, a lack of geographic and cultural specificity, and the conditions of its narrators' childhoods. However, it lacks that novel's formal constraint in which the twin narrators speak as 'we' and only ever report what they see and hear rather than speculate or assert impressions or emotions, which is matched by the ethical imperative they adopt, and which impressed Slavoj Žižek so much. The effect is to exile the reader from the comfort of a first- or third-person perspective, prompting a dynamic of familiarity and distance, recognition and horror. In contrast, Yesterday contains only the subjectivity of the first-person that tends toward self-pity, and its allegorical reveries and acts of violence, whether physical or emotional, are futile attempts to mitigate writing's naturally anhedonic state, which is also the natural state of the exile, so its promise of excitement only ever delivers literary dullness and indifference to the reader.

What content then should a novel seek to end its exile? Perhaps there is none, as action of culture-specific content and linguistic virtuoisity may be significant only as resistance to literature's exile, producing the same indifference. Resistance to literature may indeed be the definition of the form. After all, the novel began with Robinson Crusoe as a resistance to genre and in Don Quixote as a send-up of its idealistic or anhedonic tendency. Crusoe's shipwrecked state might itself be a metaphor of the novelist's exile, which he resists by colonising the foreign land and turning it into a model of yesterday. But the novel, like the island, only ever remains an idealism. In effect, Flaubert's wish to write a book dependent on nothing external is granted with every book.

Why I still read and write

Giorgio Agamben tells the story of the Greek neoplatonist Damascius in exile and close to the end of his life setting out to write a book addressing the largest question of them all, the question concerning God, the One, the Supreme Being, whichever word is appropriate. And it is precisely the uncertainty of the name that raises the demand for an answer. If the object of each name precedes names, questions, answers, and everything else, how can we know it? It becomes more than unknowable because "it doesn't even have the nature of being the unknowable, and it is not by declaring it unknowable that we can delude ourselves that we know it since we do not even know whether it is unknowable".

He struggles to complete his work for three-hundred days and nights until words are replaced by an image that reminds Damascius of the white stone yards of his youth on which the peasants threshed wheat from the chaff: a perfectly empty space "in which only image, breath, or word might eventually take place". Then he remembers how a philosopher had compared the potentiality of the intellect to a tablet on which nothing is written: "The uttermost limit thought can reach is not a being, not a place or thing...but rather, its own absolute potentiality, the pure potentiality of representation itself: the writing tablet!" Why hadn't he thought of it before?

What he had until then been taking as the One, as the absolutely Other of thought, was instead only the material, only the potentiality of thought. And the entire, lengthy volume the hand of the scribe had crammed with characters was nothing other than the attempt to represent the perfectly bare writing tablet on which nothing had yet been written. This was why he was unable to carry his work through to completion: what could not cease from writing itself was the image of what never ceased from not writing itself. In the one was mirrored the ungraspable other. But everything was finally clear: now he could break the tablet, stop writing. Or rather, now he could truly begin.

This is the latest reminder of why I still read and write. A moment of vertigo releases me from the gravity of habit and the assumptions habit forms about what matters. The accumulated sludge of dutiful reading and writing is washed away to reveal not what really matters but the possibility of identifying what does. It has little to do with the specific goal of Damascius's study and everything to do with the aporetic confrontation of necessity and impossibility.

I've been reminded as often as I've read books that contain a reminder, only for clarity to be then smothered by the silt of the book business and all the pressing issues of current affairs or literary-critical apparatuses to which we revert in face of a great silence. Understandably so, for it is a lesson that cannot form itself into a theme or genre because, given that each book is an enclosure, potentiality is borne by that which corrals potential (which is why Agamben's book is resistant to its own unifying force). And it is not a lesson either but breath and blinking as one emerges from confinement into a clearing, such is the paradox of the confrontation.

The reminders are rare and cannot be predicted, and are perhaps too diverse, too vague or too personal to define, even if the next example suggests a thread and perhaps a clearer definition: I read a study of Martin Luther which states that he believed it is the true task of theologians to concern themselves with the specifics of God's self-disclosure rather than constructing preconceived notions of what He is. Those who construct the latter, Luther says, forfeit their right to be called theologians. Except, and here the confrontation arises, the revelation of God must be regarded as indirect and concealed, with the prime example being Christ's torture and death on the cross. The cross shatters illusions about the capacity of human reason to discern God. Revelation requires faith.

If there is a thread, it is not that of a latent Christian faith but the wish to read works in which everything is at stake for the author – in this case Luther and his salvation – even if it appears entirely absurd. This is why theology often stirs me in a way that the staples of my reading – philosophy, novels and literary criticism – rarely do; the writer wagers everything, even if it is a wager lost in advance, while in general the latter have lapsed into jargonised nit-picking, games in the genre sandpit, and consumer evaluations dependent on fashionable concerns. They risk nothing and reveal nothing.

This would explain why metafiction appeals to me, as it seeks implicitly the specifics of writing's self-disclosure. In Gabriel Josipovici's story The Hand of God, Victor, a prolific young author with a promising career, suddenly abandons writing because one day sitting at his desk in an attic room he feels himself falling from the window. He realises it is the end and accepts his fate, even feeling some relief, but, before he hits the ground, he is grabbed by a hand and returned to his desk. It was the hand of God, he says, and now that he knows he cannot fall without being caught, there is no point in going on.

Victor's fall is what Krzysztof Michalski identifies as a revelation of eternity, defined not as the opposite of time but its essence, an "irremediable fissure" or interval in life such as death and love interrupting the continuity of lived time, something always present, characterising our everyday lives but obscured by habit.

In this interval, briefer than any moment one can measure, in this crack, this fissure, this tear—in the blink of an eye—everything is left to question, and a chance for a new beginning arises. This is "eternity."     [Translated by Benjamin Paloff]

If God's hand revealed to Victor that what he sought in writing is present throughout each day of his life, then pouring out literary works is at best superfluous and at worst a pathological negation of life: "to fill this gap with concepts, to patch the fracture of every moment with some piece of knowledge, to remove that internal diversification of life with the help of some truth underlying it, and thus to render our lives consistent and comprehensible. It is precisely this pathology that Nietzsche calls 'nihilism'."

At least, we might say a certain kind of writing is pathological and nihilistic: The Hand of God is narrated by Victor's perplexed friend and admirer who stands for every modern-day book lover cupped by the hand of The Guardian's book pages, unable to comprehend that the end of Victor's writing is where it truly begins; here, in this metafiction. But of course Victor never stopped writing, because his fall was not real: it was imagined; a form of writing as potentiality – what cannot cease from writing never ceasing from not writing. This is how contemporary metafiction and so-called autofiction, otherwise regarded as postmodern frivolity and onanistic indulgence respectively, might align with death and love as irremediable fissures, exposing us to an abyss over which we live or perhaps to its sublimity, however destitute.

The most profound experience of this for me – and of which Agamben's story is an echo – was re-reading the novel In a Hotel Garden after two decades away. Soon after posting my response, I remarked that it felt like the culmination of my years thinking and writing about literature on this blog. This is where it could end, I thought, and thereby, of course, truly begin. In March of this year I wrote sentences of my own that provoked the same vertigo, and I realised that this is what has been missing through all these years of blogging in the shameful lowlands. Only in this way can writing be done, I thought, only with such complete indirection and concealment. I now have no wish to read or write anything else.

Caroline's Bikini by Kirsty Gunn

At first glance Caroline's Bikini appears to be the fabled Adultery-in-Hampstead novel; the literary unicorn that provides a caricature of English middle-class fiction. It features Evan, a young London professional, who becomes infatuated with Caroline, the wife in a couple who give him lodgings in their attic flat in a wealthy district of London. Except, rather than setting out the expected love triangle drama of that fabled novel, this is about what happens when Evan insists that his copywriter friend Emily produce a novel as a record of his love and how she then struggles with the task when, in their many conferences in various artisan gin bars, there isn't much to report given that Evan never reveals his feelings to Caroline and, but for the physical effects of his lovelorn pining, life carries on more or less as normal. The major part of the novel is Emily's record of her attempt to record.

So it threatens to be about adultery in Hampstead only without adultery or Hampstead (the flat is in Richmond). One reader renamed the novel Waiting for Caroline because nothing happens more than twice over its 330 pages, while another reader in the same place says it feels less like a novel than "literary criticism of a piece of text" due to the second element that de-horns the unicorn: the author's introduction and the multiple appendices providing background to the characters and theoretical underpinnings of the book. Emily herself thinks the novel could be part of the tradition of courtly love poetry exemplified by Dante and Petrarch in which the work stands in for the love object; a form the introduction says "many regard as the largest kind of love story of all": the one that is unrequited. The link to Dante is clear, as the record of his love for Beatrice (a love returned only platonically) in the Vita Nuova is a combination of narrative, poetry and commentary on the poetry. 

Still, it's a disconcerting claim given that the comedic lightness of Emily's reporting is familiar from the tradition of metropolitan English fiction and has little in common with what Charles Singleton called the "sober and solemn and reasoned prose" of the Vita Nuova. Another difference is that Caroline remains alive during the novel's duration, which means, unlike Dante's and Petrarch's, Evan's love is never under the shadow of impossibility, so his feelings provoke impatient questioning from both Emily and the reader as he procrastinates and prevaricates in developing his story, which in turn emphasises two more major differences: that there is no lyric content to contrast with the narrative and commentary, and that the conditions of Evan's love are entirely secular.

One Dante scholar has argued that a central purpose of Dante's opposition of narration and lyric is to create a tension between the physical and metaphysical elements of the story, which meant contaminating timelessness with time. Emily's interminable detailing of gin bars and the various brands and flavours could stand in for the lyric dimension, except this also emphasises the quotidian absurdity of modern life, which is also the ground of modern fiction. It can place love such as Evan's only within recognisable social or psychological conditions, and those conditions within a generic format, which can only render Evan's love as deluded and futile, so lyricism could just as easily be attributed to the theoretical commentary, which at least offers some gravity to Evan's abjection.

So what about the secular conditions? Unrequited love is an experience, like grief, that sets the sufferer aside to contemplate their fate, which exposes them to an awareness of a larger process at work that isn't a staple of modern fiction, or at least a need for a larger process, and Evan does express the belief that fate led him to Caroline's door. It is a process that Dante in his love for Beatrice recognises as a sign of God's presence on earth. So while "the most secret chambers" of his heart trembled in Beatrice's presence just as Evan's does in Caroline's, it is because he senses that he is in the presence of "a miracle manifest in reality", that she is a midpoint between heaven and earth; a combination of pure intellect of God and the brute matter of bodies, a belief that emerged from Plato's account in the Timaeus of the harmony of the universe in which human nature in its best states – moral, philosophical, artistic – is said to be a microcosm of that harmony; an account that is more or less unintelligible to us. Perhaps then, rather than absurdity being the ground of the modern novel, it is the modern novel's inevitable product because eternity is never allowed to contaminate its narrative, though it does haunt each one. Evan's story concludes with an absurd act that is in keeping with the requirements of time.

At first glance then, Caroline's Bikini is a send up of the Adultery-in-Hampstead novel AND of the solemnity of the tradition to which it appeals, yet it is precisely in this distance and originality that it maintains the latter tradition. The ostensible story of unrequited love disguises the unrequited status of the novel itself; its existence standing in for a formal tradition that can never happen in the conditions in which the modern novel exists. Caroline's Bikini is thereby two novels: the novel we're reading with Emily's and Evan's gin bar conclaves and Kirsty Gunn's theological apologia in the form of metafictional appendices, and the impossible novel that Evan is unable to report. The one we're reading acts as a midpoint between the grounded material of Emily's report and our faith, however residual, in the metaphysical power of that ghost novel floating free in a realm of unintelligible harmony.

Encountering the fabulous point

When the postman delivered the book of Józef Czapski's lectures on Proust, I was slightly disappointed that it was such a slim volume, especially as 82 pages of actual text and a 25-page introduction cost me £10. Compared to the lack of moderation that Czapski says characterised Proust's commitment to his novel once he had abandoned his social and sentimental life, which had been marked by the same lack of moderation, the modesty here is extreme. However, given that the lectures were drawn solely from Czapski's memory of Proust's novel and personal experience of its Parisian milieu and delivered to fellow inmates in a Soviet labour camp, this is more than forgiveable. The mere occurrence of the lectures displays a lack of moderation, let alone their subsequent publication. And the introduction by their translator Eric Karpeles is excellent.

What's more, if I compare the page count to the one secondary work that more than any other has influenced not just my appreciation of what distinguishes Proust's achievement from all other novels but of my fascination with writing in general – the 13 pages of Maurice Blanchot's The Experience of Proust – it is immoderately long. So why this instinctive fuss with measuring? Why this concern for physique rather than metaphysique?

No doubt there is the concern for not being ripped off, but there's also embedded in this the anxiety about what any book amounts to before, during and after it's read, with its physical presence offering the most immediate authority. Once that is over, we seek further organisational information. Last year John Self was perplexed by the appearance of the Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: "What is a prose poem anyway?" he asked. "It’s something and nothing really, isn’t it? Neither use nor ornament." Later, after reading the book, he recanted and accepted the genre is valid. But this raises the age-old issue of labels. I was in Waterstone's this week and saw this table and its sign (with its inexplicable second leading capital).

All of the books below it were as slim as Czapski's, but I wondered how the shop workers decided which books count as novellas and which not. At which point does a novel becomes a novella, and vice versa? It's the old philosophical conundrum raised by Clov in Endgame: "Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap." At what page does the book become a novel? The same can be asked of Penguin's book. John quotes the introduction's definition of prose poetry, that it "flows by soft return from margin to margin, filling the empty field of the page" and is "unchecked by metre or rhyme", which means it's defined by the technical features of prose.

Aren't such genre distinctions a form of confiscating smuggled goods at the border? Once a book has been read, whether it's 90 pages or 900, such distinctions become irrelevant to the reader, as both have the quality of existing as a book, of being itself and not any other book, which then raises the question of what that quality is in itself; what precisely has been smuggled?

For many years I've been aware of how the end of a novel detaches itself from the rest, as some kind of token closure to what never closes, or token opening to what never opens. As one nears the end of a book, whether it is page 88 or 888, the weight of pages to come grows so light that a certain inner resignation and leave-taking takes place, and the kernel of the book, its essence as itself, attaches to what has passed; however, in the same awareness, I'm aware that it does not attach itself to the beginning, because the beginning needs to go beyond itself to become the book, and not to the middle either, because the middle exists only because the beginning and the end distinguish it as such. And where does the beginning end and the end begin?

Three years ago, I suggested Thomas Bernhard's novel Neufundland, which exists only as a beginning sentence and an end sentence, acts on us as a novel nevertheless because it conjures in the imagination what in other novels is conjured by memory, and the inner resignation or leave-taking not only occurs but is the entirety of the experience of the novel, thereby confronting us with what we might call the Platonic ideal of 'the Book' to which all books appeal, even as they dissemble in doing so. This points to why Proust's novel fascinates me, which has nothing to do its immodest length but because, as Blanchot says, it circles around "the fabulous point where he encounters the event that makes every narrative possible"; a point at the centre of Neufundland despite its extreme brevity.

I tried to imagine an alternative to the abrupt ending of the usual novel, in which this fabulous point might make itself felt, and in doing so I remembered the Pernice Brothers' 2003 LP Yours, Mine & Ours, whose final song ends in the normal way except, if one waits through 23 seconds of silence, a part of Water Ban, the LP's second song, a part which is a kind of ghost chorus, reappears as a ghostly refrain fading into infinity, something that has always intrigued me without my being aware of it. I wonder how this effect might transfer to writing. Perhaps this novel, which some have called a novella, is a good example.

All our (Bernhardian) yesterdays

Today's date means it is thirty years since Thomas Bernhard died. Twenty years ago I wrote a short introduction to his work for Spike Magazine to mark ten years since his death. In those days, Bernhard was more or less unknown in English-speaking countries, with subtitled documentaries like the one below unimaginable, and this was the first essay I had written for the new-fangled internet, so should be considered in that light. Below, I list what I've written about Bernhard on This Space, with a few other treats along the way.


Last year I was keen to write a longer piece on the consequences for the novel in general of Bernhard's going in the opposite direction, the phrase he uses in The Cellar: An Escape, part three of Gathering Evidence, to describe one of the many wilful or chance actions he took in life and which his novels' characters often take too. I mention this feature in Bernhard begins from 2010. I went in the opposite direction and wrote nothing.

In 2011, Bernhard appears in four posts. The first is a long passage from Wittgenstein's Nephew, which demonstrates that Bernhard is not the misanthropic ranter of bookchat legend and instead a writer of breath-giving sentences. In the second, I embedded this short, dark, peaceful film of a drive leading up to one of Bernhard's farmhouses in Upper Austria.



The third is another gift of the internet: I posted an extract from Douglas Robertston's translation of Ungenach, a novella still to be published in English book form. His blog is full of other, otherwise untranslated gifts, such as the short story Midland in Stilfs. (These are now offline.)

The fourth of that year is my review of Seagull Books' impressively excessive production of Bernhard's short story for children Victor Halfwit: A Winter's Tale.

Another three years passed before I posted on Bernhard again. This time it was to write about My Prizes, a collection of Bernhard's short essays on the prizes he had won and the speeches he gave. The second sentence of his notorious Austrian State Prize acceptance speech is one of his most famous sayings.

Two years later, I wrote Unfoundland about the minimal existence of Bernhard's unfinished novel Neufundland, and then what I think is one the best things I have ever posted on this blog, and certainly the best on Bernhard: a review of the title story of another of Seagull Books' productions, Goethe Dies.

Apart from this very post, the most recent was a more general post about writing in which I discuss The Loser, Frost and the film Drei Tage, an extract from which you can see below and whose full text in translation can be read here.

Finally, there are many more links on the English website dedicated to his work and on the official Austrian one, in German.

 

UPDATE: I made a mistake and eventually wrote The opposite direction.

On the death of book blogging (nothing unhappy)

The Indie Book Blog Is Dead says The Vulture, a commerical culturesite I may or may not have seen before – they all look and sound the same – focusing on another commercial culturesite that looks and sounds pretty much the same but one I had definitely seen before though had never considered to be a book blog, which has been sold to another commercial culturesite, signalling, apparently, the end of indie book blogs, a distinguishing phrase that stood out – independent of what, I wondered; any feeling for literature?

The article prompted a bemused shrug from Anthony as he celebrated ten years of Time's Flow Stemmed, a brilliant and cutting response from Juliana of The Blank Garden and, most recently, Flowerville's reflections on why she continues to blog after all these years. I've written about the form a couple of times in The beginning of something and A blog comes to one in the dark, so I repeat myself now only to observe that such repetition indicates why book blogging maintains itself in a state of precarity: it offers an infinite and apparently meaningless freedom. It is like the novel in this sense and, like a novelist who embraces genre, the blogger can constrain themself by mimicking the culturesites with enthusiasm for new publications, offering consumer reports, prizechat and local agitations about diversity, but the longer one pursues such writing, the more nagging questions or feelings present themselves and demand to be explored.

"I understand less than I thought I knew about literature at the time" says Anthony looking back at his first post, echoing my own experience. In the early days especially I was contemptuous of the prevailing literary scene and impatient for it to change direction, until I realised I needed to do that myself. Pursuing questions about the strange familiarity of literature – pursuing one's ignorance! – is not to be found on respectable platforms, so no wonder The Vulture chooses to mention only those bloggers who have moved on, as if blogging is only an unpaid internship on more familiar career path; profitability is the guiding light. Meanwhile, the book blogger looks into the night sky to find a billion guiding lights engulfed in darkness.

Lately, I've been reading for the third time in thirty years VS Naipaul's novel The Enigma of Arrival and learning, perhaps for the first time, the lesson Naipaul learns himself: that a writer's true subject is often hidden in plain sight and takes a certain amount of luck or misfortune to recognise (a lesson curiously similar to Proust's, a very different writer). Naipaul's recognition came in middle age when he rented a cottage on a manor estate near Stonehenge to recover from years of travel journalism. What at first seemed like bucolic peace in ancient and eternal landscape peopled by succeeding generations of the same families, turned out to be as precarious as the one he'd left behind: the farm workers he gets to know as neighbours lose their jobs, their marriages, their homes, their lives, and the landscape changes according to the demands of the farming economy. The manor itself, a symbol of empire and class hierarchy, loses its aura of permanence and authority. It leads him to reflect on his own beginnings, coming to England from Trinidad as an 18-year-old with ambitions to be a writer in the home of the authors he grew up admiring, but failing to write about the chaos of postwar London, in particular his fellow transients in the austere lodging house in which he lived, in favour of the elevated subjects he believed necessary to a literary career. It's an exceptionally moving and disconcerting book, not least because it is a deeply felt essay on his own life and work rather than what it asserts on the cover. Perhaps Naipaul needed to call it a novel to protect himself from the misfortune of the discovery that his true subject was not other people, countries and cultures but the search for his own true subject.

In the surprise and discomfort of this discovery, the novel maintains itself in a state of precarity, and explains why in Sir Vidia's Shadow Paul Theroux is entirely correct in wrongly declaring The Enigma of Arrival to be the novel that marks the end of Naipaul's career as an important novelist ("a ponderous agglomeration of the dullest rural incidents") as it goes against the generic grain. If this is the case, the same could be said for Theroux's My Secret History, which stands as his own best novel, and why subsequent, ostensibly similar novels like Naipaul's A Way in the World and Theroux's My Other Life are so disappointing.

My own luck or misfortune has been to discover that I am intellectually not up to exploring the questions that have presented themselves to me, so I am happily stuck with the amateur hobbyism of blogging about extraordinary books like The Imperative to Write and the profoundly irrationalist literary apocalypse of Maurice Blanchot. But then I wonder how much it has to do with intellect than with luck or misfortune.

Axe-books of the year

 A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us, says Kafka in the famous letter.

I wondered what this might mean as the 'books of the year' lists began to appear last month. Imagine if each contributor constrained themselves to choose only axe-books. Each entry would likely remain blank and the value of what did appear would be extreme compared to the predictable logrolling we see each year. Or maybe they would be exactly the same, as the idea of such a book is so vague that it could include everything from everyday escapist relief to a silent version of Freud's talking cure.

For this reason, it is the second most abused quotation of modern literature, after Beckett's Fail better. While Beckett is encouraging deeper failure rather than one that is closer to success, its playful ambiguity has enabled it to become a motivational mantra for a million creative writing memes, allowing Beckett one more catastrophe as he fails to turn budding writers away from the sewer of success. Kafka's line may not be misunderstood but is preceded by flourishes that rather complicate its promise:

We ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. We need the books that affect us like a disaster. We need books that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide.

You can see why these words haven't become as popular. Yet as easily as such teenage-goth hyperbole is dismissed, the words do stir something beneath surface cynicism, which may be as slight as disappointment with everyday escapist relief, with Kafka's grim enthusiasm maintaining the promise of a future book that will allow us to bear the heaviest burdens without the lingering trauma, even if in doing so they retain the formula of disappointment: words that carry no weight.


My year of reading ended with four new books by or related to Maurice Blanchot, with one experienced with this kind of disappointment. I had been waiting twenty years for Christophe Bident's biography to be translated, as it promised a measure of the distance between Blanchot's life and his writing (what he discovered in writing). Several hundred pages later, the words Bident used to discuss key ideas and concepts became so light they floated free of any context that held any meaning for me: the absolute, the neuter, the unsayable, the avowable, the unavowable, the infinite, the impossible, the infinitely impossible. There is very little biographical detail, certainly not the trivia one might expect of the genre; his acquaintance with Brigitte Bardot as reported in L'Herne or the rumour that he learned Danish to read Kierkegaard in the original are not mentioned. As the book is a study of the work organised chronologically and written during Blanchot's lifetime, this is fair enough and mine is only an expression of disappointment and intellectual stupefaction. In reading hundreds of pages of commentary and analysis, I was reminded of Saul Bellow's narrator of Ravelstein who, when charged to read a philosophical article, felt like an ant who sets out to cross the Andes. Except, I was on the other side.

While it was no doubt disingenuous of me to hope for trivia from the life of this writer, there are two moments central to Blanchot's work in which the personal is exposed to the impersonal, suggesting there remains a navigable plain to be explored before the mountains rise up. Here is the first, in Ann Smock's translation of The Writing of the Disaster:

If the tears are evidence of an unfrozen sea, they are also evidence of disaster, grief and banishment, and so an experience much closer to Kafka's demands. And even if he is reading the sky and not a book, what happens then has the same ambiguous properties of reading, amplified here into a variety of religious experience; an experience that is repeated thirty years later.

The Instant of My Death describes how in the summer of 1944 a Nazi lieutenant ordered Blanchot out of the same house, perhaps to the same garden, to face a firing squad. As he awaits the order to fire, Blanchot writes that he experienced "a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of beatitude (nothing happy, however)". Distracted by noise of fighting, the lieutenant leaves the scene and the firing squad tells Blanchot to nip off. Fifty years later, Blanchot speculates that what he felt was perhaps ecstacy, defined by the OED as "the state of being ‘beside oneself’ in ... anxiety, astonishment, fear, or passion" or "the withdrawal of the soul from the body [in a] mystic trance". But then Blanchot says it was rather the feeling "compassion for suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal or eternal", notable for being the opposite of the familiar literary pursuit of living forever.



There is so much to say about such passages that Derrida has written a book on the latter, emphasising there what concerns me here: that both experiences are also non-experiences. The content of each is an exposure to that which is not there or that which didn't occur. Both correspond to the experience of reading and both are essentially literary experiences, with all the features of reading stories and the prejudices they encounter. Derrida argues that fiction haunts the project to be truthful in testimony and "is perhaps the passion of literature" – the Christian sense included: a suffering unto death in which death is not an end. In reading we are "close to a heart that beats no more": the instant of death has become literature, opening the mysterious distance necessary to itself and the peculiar value we place in it, as witnessed in the power of Kafka's letter.

Remember Kafka says there that books should affect us like a 'disaster', a key word in Blanchot's work. For Blanchot, the word means not only the terrible events in the news or the historical record but the breakdown of our relation to the stars, as reported in the 'primal scene'. The OED says "Disaster is etymologically a mishap due to a baleful stellar aspect". William S. Allen explains further in Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism that, without the guiding light of the stars, our existence lacks unity to ground meaning or knowledge. The resulting anxiety necessarily infects language, as it fails to take the place of the stars. This is felt especially by the writer seeking, in both a personal and public sense, to stabilise existence and thereby reduce existential anxiety. But writing only doubles down on ambiguity: "Does this sentence describe my situation, or make it into something else; is it expressing my anxiety, or displacing it?" :

The disaster is not an event. It does not take place in the order of things that happen but is discovered as that which has taken place, as the experience of this utter lack of grounds for meaning, the lack of any transcendental unity or order, an experience that language conveys but that is not limited to language, which is its other, mortal side.

An experience of the transcendental and mortal sides combined might be the best way to define axe-books. It is not necessarily a pessimistic definition. What Kafka's writing gives is a glimpse of light, even if is the light of a baleful star, and thereby the possibility of communication in the darkness. Either instant on its own is not enough (perhaps Bident's string of key words became weightless for me because they were drained of their mortal side).

I have no axe-books for this year. Like Marcel's miraculous, timeless instants, they appear very rarely, if at all, always unexpected, and easily confused with narrative excitements. The closest for me was two years ago. I have often recognised since that this post was the culmination of what I had to say here (by coincidence, 'culmination' also has its root in the stars). And yet I continue. Why? Thirteen years after his famous letter, Kafka characterised his ability to write as "a merciful surplus of strength at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being". The question he asks in the next sentence remains outstanding: "But then what kind of surplus is it?"