Transfiguring the immanent domain

This isn't the usual novel-author interview. As a reader of novels listening to interviews with novelists I'm almost always disappointed because they almost always take the novel as a given and stop there, like a mountaineer who gets to the summit and never looks at the sky.

Part one is fairly straightforwardly biographical. Lars Iyer tells Nemanja Mitrović about the dole culture of the 80s and 90s that gave him time to explore, in this case in Reading University's library which was then open to the public and where he discovered the philosophy and literature that would change the direction of his life – a lifestyle and discoveries we happen to share – and the 'Madchester' he felt no part of when he went onto formal study, expressing more affinity to the autodidact Mancunians who came before: Ian Curtis, Mark E. Smith and Morrissey. 

What makes it unusual is the unique path he describes to writing novels. As a young academic, he was constrained by the demands required to secure a permanent contract and found blogging to be the ideal form to continue the movement of the philosophy and literature that had got him to a point that was also an impasse. He injected comic episodes between long philosophical posts and by chance found the form of Spurious, his first novel. This is where I recognised my unease. While so many of the novelists who mean most to me are comic, this element has always been the slick and sting of snow rather than the blue of the sky; a distraction, beside the point. This is why I am fed up with people claiming Thomas Bernhard novels are "hilarious" and assume that is enough. However, I realise this denies something significant. Iyer cites Walter Benjamin's letter to Gershom Scholem citing a comic writer: "the key to Kafka's work is likely to fall into the hands of the person who is able to extract the comic aspects from Jewish theology" [his italics].

 
Part two expands on this even if Benjamin himself doesn't. In a way, Benjamin not expanding on the subject is part of comedy: at best it is a brief remark, a momentary diversion, a rip in the fabric of common sense – comedy in theology! – a moment in which everything is spun around, inverted, but cannot last; a moment which is also a part of theology in that one cannot think the possibility of transcendence (or its absence) without momentary vertigo. While writing may sustain a rational bedrock, calming vertigo, especially in the procedural nature of academic philosophy but also in genre and most literary fiction, Iyer uses comedy and hyperbole as a means of resistance, however futile, to prose determined by a world without transcendence, a world diminished by writing, a world in which human potentiality is promoted to oil a corporate treadmill. Iyer says the intensity of his writing an attempt to wear through "about" novels to something else, an attempt to "transfigure the immanent domain", to pass through the horror of the eternal return of the same, hence the persistence of a style across six novels – no wish to be eclectic, no wish for anyone to say he is playing with genre. Comedy and hyperbole is a means of living against the world as it is; "Gnostic living" he calls it, which links back to his fascinating essay on the Gnostic imaginary. This is why it isn't usual. But perhaps writing is that transfiguration in the first place and we have only to become aware of its presence, to write and speak only in relation to that rather than everything that detracts from it, to wear through "about" novels in criticism, too.