tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84700942024-03-19T12:36:04.963+00:00This Space<ul><li>Britain's first book blogger</li><li>"<i>Perhaps the best resource in English on European modernist literature</i>" – <a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/has-the-age-of-instant-access-finally-put-an-end-to-the-critic-1.2925362">Irish Times</a></li><li><a href="https://bit.ly/3vi6qxO"><i>This Space of Writing</i></a> book</li><li><a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-opposite-direction-book.html"><i>The Opposite Direction</i></a> ebook</li></ul>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.comBlogger957125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-62458176260307495692024-02-28T13:03:00.036+00:002024-03-16T18:10:04.050+00:00"A mighty, contagious absence"<p>The number of obituaries, tributes, backhanded compliments and overt smears in the corporate news media following the death of John Pilger reveal the state of journalism in our time. <a href="#footnote-1">[1]</a> Can you name one living Anglophone journalist whose loss would prompt such widespread notice? That the obvious one, who had worked with <i>The Guardian</i> and <i>New York Times</i> to expose the biggest stories of our time, is held without charge in a high-security prison and close to death without outrage let alone industrial action from his colleagues, should be evidence enough of a profound shift in news media culture. <a href="#footnote-2">[2]</a> Those who walk in John Pilger's footsteps are now to be found working independently, funded by public appeals, and often, like Julian Assange, frequently denied the label of journalist by those appropriating its authority. <a href="#footnote-3">[3]</a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFC276gSCdjpUzuMQC6hrSwkhZxFQf6814fR6z_vIrPE7iJOzLh5FZvtfxtzFQirVGOlAfR2XkAyiRQEL6YpySW9V2GthvwhpnySw5x1UAOvQ7hdMvsIvXDeWbDE1YJ1Hin4SOuBrsgKuiBeFPoSMDkRwUBoGEQBjNkWJfO8sm_JN7WrlL9cuj/s1280/MediaistheEnemy_colour.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="The Media is the Enemy on a bottle bank" border="0" data-original-height="1238" data-original-width="1280" height="388" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFC276gSCdjpUzuMQC6hrSwkhZxFQf6814fR6z_vIrPE7iJOzLh5FZvtfxtzFQirVGOlAfR2XkAyiRQEL6YpySW9V2GthvwhpnySw5x1UAOvQ7hdMvsIvXDeWbDE1YJ1Hin4SOuBrsgKuiBeFPoSMDkRwUBoGEQBjNkWJfO8sm_JN7WrlL9cuj/w400-h388/MediaistheEnemy_colour.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p>The shift has not been limited to journalism, as dissent from prominent artists has become rare, with only an 80-year-old musician and an 87-year-old filmmaker paying the price for publicly challenging the political narrative. <a href="#footnote-4">[4]</a> Novelists have escaped censure. Twenty years ago, with characteristically bitter passion, <a href="https://johnpilger.com/articles/john-pilger-laments-the-silence-of-the-writers" target="_blank">Pilger lamented</a> the silence of writers over contemporary political events, comparing it to the noise and organisation of their forerunners in 1935. He wanted them to be outspoken in public and producing works that "illuminate...the shadows of rapacious power". He wished for public utterance and the production of novels as imaginative reportage, citing among others Timothy Mo's novel <i>The Redundancy of Courage</i> set in East Timor during the western-backed genocide about which Pilger made <a href="https://johnpilger.com/videos/death-of-a-nation-the-timor-conspiracy" target="_blank">one of his most harrowing documentary</a> (not mentioned in the ITV news obituary, the network on which it was broadcast). He complains that instead of dissent from writers appearing in the newspapers, "Column after column is devoted to the Martin Amis cult: he who ... sneers at the great anti-capitalist and anti-war demonstrations". Twenty years on only the quality of the cult writer has changed, with JK Rowling leading the sneers at a "<span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/912287055409041408" target="_blank">solipsistic personality cult</a>" when opposition to rapacious power threatens to be successful. </span><a href="#footnote-5">[5]</a> Other genre novelists – John le Carré, Fay Weldon, Frederick Forsyth, Tony Parsons and William Boyd – also <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/14/concerns-about-antisemitism-mean-we-cannot-vote-labour" target="_blank">wished to distance themselves</a> from opposition, and perhaps slightly higher taxes.<br /></p><p>The pitiful literary horizon onto which this sextet opens emphasises how diminished the calibre of public-facing writers is compared to 1935, with film and television dominating public consciousness and which is itself, as <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/james-meek/do-anything-say-anything" target="_blank">James Meek describes</a>, rapacious power in action. This suggests literature needs a form that is not a storyboard, one that goes in the opposite direction and opens an entirely new and different space, only what hope is there if even an <i>experimental</i> writer presented as doing precisely this joins in with the rest? <a href="#footnote-6">[6]</a> <br /></p><p></p><p>John Pilger's lament has stayed with me over the years as a sometimes distant, sometimes insistent hammering on the door, disturbing the hallowed silence of this empty church. What, after all, is the point of sitting here with all these books of prayer? If Pilger challenges the responsibilities of the author by dismissing the distinction between what's inside and what's outside, between novels and journalism, he does so with ease, as easily as submission to a story. Except the experience of one is very different to the experience of the other: the first is an encounter with the noise of both a particular time in everyday language, with an empirical outside investigated by a particular person or organisation
that implicitly contains evidence of its truth and value and which, if done properly, provokes a sense of urgency for action in the world, while the second is an encounter with the outside of time, aside from experience, an encounter with something that has not happened, will not happen, and will not happen over and over again, and for which the writer has no
responsibility to provide evidence for its truth or value, provoking in its audience an unfocusable need and so a unique presence in our lives – a perennial absence beyond our lives – and so the interminable anxieties it generates about its meaning, authority and place in society. <a href="#footnote-7">[7]</a> </p><p></p><p>If his article is not quite a manifesto, Pilger inadvertently reminds us that these anxieties constitutes a fundamental part of the experience of literature, which lately <i>has</i> led to a manifesto expressing similar concerns. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6eWRH5Luzu7FRuogthUi9KQznSKtl49jJKsvhuUSpMzEJZzKaHSbuF14WwHZYYBG7zdZDGSfPTFtX88IWWThR1cIJvaWmNEl27CYCWOGmqA4bTERZOZ-0YAl9JsKrDiSMcwqSaKwi_iUkn0_nvIX66KulZ1pgxp6TTfrhUqCbPa99AkjOYOYB/s1280/QA-sick.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="914" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6eWRH5Luzu7FRuogthUi9KQznSKtl49jJKsvhuUSpMzEJZzKaHSbuF14WwHZYYBG7zdZDGSfPTFtX88IWWThR1cIJvaWmNEl27CYCWOGmqA4bTERZOZ-0YAl9JsKrDiSMcwqSaKwi_iUkn0_nvIX66KulZ1pgxp6TTfrhUqCbPa99AkjOYOYB/w458-h640/QA-sick.jpeg" width="458" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Vomit on concrete, England 2023<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>In <i>Counterblast! (a manifesto for poetry)</i>, her final lecture as <a href="https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/people/alice-oswald" target="_blank">Oxford Professor of Poetry</a>, Alice Oswald claims that "whatever keeps mattering makes a form" and so poetry must be "like the spirals of the inner ear shaped by sound, or a stoop shaped by shyness". What keeps mattering for her is the profusion of the world and she proposes a poetry that alters the imagination by immersion in "the deep grammar of the situated self among other selves", with simile being poetry's form of profusion. Homer is her prime example: "we would like to discover the inmost manifesto of Homer, meaning the mattering which makes his fall and claim it as our own". This is "a manifesto of likeness", she says: "We like this word 'like'. It is a stitch between things". The Greek word for stitchwork is rhapsody, with simile – similarity – stitching the world together, and she opposes rhapsody to lyric poetry: "We declare that modernism with all its isms was essentially a lyric voice because it described the problem of perception rather than the profusion of being." She reads the first stanza of TS Eliot's poem <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44215/rhapsody-on-a-windy-night" target="_blank">Rhapsody on a Windy Night</a> ending in the lines "Midnight shakes the memory / As a madman shakes a dead geranium" and describes the similes as "hallucinations" rather than stitches revealing "not other selves but the poet's own self over and over". <a href="#footnote-8">[8]</a></p><p>Living geraniums become the touchstone for the manifesto as Alice Oswald sees the culmination of the modernists' dead flower in "the genre of the artificial geranium" in which poetry is created by a computer. She examines a poem created in ChatGPT using her instruction "to write a poem about an eagle and a hare in the style of Shakespeare", which you can hear from 38:30 below. After commenting favourably on the algorithm's choice of meter she notes how the poem's images are impressionistic "whereas as a poet sees sharply before summoning words". It is impressionistic "because it is not situated". The presence or absence behind the words is her primary concern:</p><p></p><blockquote>Each time the algorithm uses the word 'I', it does not mean the same situated self that we mean and this difference spreads through the grammar, altering first the meaning of 'we' and then the meaning of 'this' and then the meaning of 'that' and then the meaning of 'near' and then the meaning of 'love' and then the meaning of 'death' and then the meaning of 'with' and then the meaning of 'like', and so on and so on until the poem reveals its mighty contagious absence in that final line.<i> Each meeting fated, each parting brief in life's great stage infernal</i>, which is a malicious demon's manifesto with no understanding of actuality. <a href="#footnote-9">[9]</a><br /><br />Why is each parting brief? Is it because AI operates in unextended space in which parting has no meaning. Does that imply that death doesn't exist and is that why the hare is gambolling in fear. Is death brief, in which case please decide whether this is a poem about fate or resurrection and adapt the form accordingly since the gambolling rhyming heptameter implies constraint but this poem implies no awareness of constraint because it is not about <i>things which are</i>, since things which are must suffer the constraints of place. But in the genre of the artificial geranium there is no place and therefore no point of view, no topological self, no resistant other, no matter and therefore no mattering and therefore no meaning, no death, no flesh, no weight, no love, no life. <br /></blockquote><center><iframe allow="fullscreen" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="400" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" msallowfullscreen="" scrolling="off" src="https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/embed/7c0ec37c-884f-48bf-b644-50b51dc35fd8" title="Counterblast! (a manifesto for poetry)" width="640"></iframe></center><p>The curious thing with this complaint is that in citing Homer as the
manifesto's poetic hero it follows the reasons Socrates gives for
rejecting the recitation of poetry as a means of truth-telling and is as such a danger to civil society. Alice Oswald's questions
for the AI poem receive the same replies as Socrates: <br /></p><p></p><blockquote>The
fact is, Phaedrus, that writing involves a similar disadvantage to
painting. The productions of painting look like living beings, but if
you ask them a question they maintain a solemn silence. The same holds
true of written words; you might suppose that they understand what they
are saying, but if you ask them what they mean by anything they simply
return the same answer over and over again. <a href="#footnote-10">[10]</a></blockquote><p>Socrates
is happy that younger people with their "modern sophistication" are no
longer satisfied with messages from "an oak or a rock", which were the
earliest forms taken by <a href="https://ancient-greece.org/history/dodona.html" target="_blank">the oracle at Dodona</a>,
and prefer a living, speaking person who can answer back once they have
spoken. A footnote tells us that rustling of an oak's leaves were
interpreted by priests or priestesses as sacred enlightenment. As daft as this may appear to us now, we can see the reverend
recitation of poetry as modern-day rustling, returning the same answers
over and over with literary critics and professors of poetry as priests
and priestesses processing its meaning and value. <a href="#footnote-11">[11]</a> </p><p>The crucial element of AI poetry is the human input for the program to
produce a poem. As we have seen, Alice Oswald specified it must be "in
the style" of Shakespeare; that is, <i>like</i> Shakespeare. But perhaps
its likeness did not satisfy for this reason. While some elements are familiar, others are not, giving the impression of AI's resistance to needs and human control. When we talk about a poem or play that Shakespeare has
produced, we call it <i>a work</i>, but there is no work in AI, or, rather, there is the work of absence, and so two-and-a-half thousand years later, Alice Oswald remains
alongside Socrates midway between ancient and modern worlds, between the
sacred and the secular, because a mighty, contagious outside opens in poetry. <a href="#footnote-12">[12]</a> Our humanist horror arises at the AI poem's disobedient likeness to something other than human, to <i>that which is not</i>, or to what is <i>situated elsewhere</i>, and its failure to be a resource for exploitation (King Leopold's Nongo). What if, however, in sutbly altering the meaning of words, by unworking meaning word by word, AI poetry reveals the possibility of another actuality, or at least that the actuality of which it is accused of having no understanding is the malicious demon?<br /></p><p>The threat of AI literature may also be its potential by failing to act like <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2011/10/meridian-final-versiondraftsmaterials.html" target="_blank">Paul Celan's <i>Gegenwort</i></a>, translated by Rosemarie Waldrop as "a word against the grain" but more generally as a 'counterword', and yet also failing to be enough <i>like</i> Shakespeare, et al., so at the same time to act as one. Celan's example is spoken by Lucile in Büchner's play <i>Danton’s Death</i>, who, upon seeing her husband led to scaffold, cries "Long live the king!" not only guaranteeing her own
execution but spoken when the king is already dead. For Celan, her cry "is the word that
cuts the 'string,' the word that no longer bows down before 'the bystanders and old war-horses of history'. It is an act of freedom. It is a step." Stephen Dowden widens its meaning as a word "against exhausted narrative ploys and poetic forms, against inherited cultural complicity in the horrors of the twentieth century" <a href="#footnote-13">[13]</a>. </p><p>It is perhaps then notable that when Celan's friend Hubert Hoppert visited him in Paris in 1966 and read some of Celan's recently published poems and commented that they were "indescribably abstract" and "imponderably spiritual" <a href="#footnote-14">[14]</a>, Celan's responded:<br /></p><blockquote>I'm glad that you say 'abstract;' and 'spiritual' is also fitting. I hope that the information in my verse is spiritual. [...] Formerly, in Vienna, I experimented with psychic mediums of communication. I was playing hide and seek behind the metaphors. Today, after twenty years of conflict between inner and outer worlds, I have banished the word 'like' from my workshop. One of my poems, 'Speech-Grille,' became the title of an entire collection of poems. Do you know what a 'grille' can be? In that book I used, for a nearly final time, 'like' in the following four lines. <p></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">Were I like you. Were you like me.<br />Did we not stand<br />under <i>one</i> tradewind?<br />We are strangers.<br /></p><p>That was my farewell to the treacherous 'like'. I stand at another point in time and space than my reader – who can only understand me 'from afar,' cannot get hold of me, can only grasp the grille bars between us. <br /></p></blockquote><p>Celan's poetry faces the same accusations directed at AI poetry because it is the epitome of its inverse. <a href="#footnote-15">[15]</a> However, the example of his counterpoetry may help us to see the exploitable value of literature produced by artificial intelligence in <i>its</i> example of likeness. Another word for likeness is <i>genre</i>. Everything produced by AI depends on the example of what already exists fed into its program. When Amazon <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/22/amazon_ai_book_publishing_limit/" target="_blank">limited an account holder's uploads</a> of AI-produced novels to three a day, it only emphasised the conveyor-belt nature of book production, appealing always to likeness, mascerating everything into easily digestible pulp. Even reviews of a novel <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2023/06/wall-by-jen-craig.html" target="_blank">seeking escape from such inheritance</a> claws it back with likenesses. The world becomes trapped by the rapacious power of likeness. The end of genre is the daybreak of literature. What keeps mattering is the absence of another world; a mighty, contagious need for that which is not.<br /><br /></p><p></p><center><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b39CfCN2bNE?si=_qQTPdkB1jQaDGV_" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></center><br /><p></p> <p> <br /></p><p><b>Footnotes</b><br /></p><p id="footnote-1">[1] <a href="https://www.medialens.org/2024/john-pilger-a-majority-of-one/" target="_blank">Media Lens addresses</a> an example of the latter in a tribute in keeping with Pilger's critical legacy.<br /></p><p id="footnote-2">[2] <a href="https://theguardian.fivefilters.org/assange/" target="_blank">Look at what his ex-colleagues said instead</a>. Clues about how and why can be found this article <a href="https://www.declassifieduk.org/how-the-uk-security-services-neutralised-the-countrys-leading-liberal-newspaper/" target="_blank">on what happened at <i>The Guardian</i></a> post Snowden, and then there's <a href="https://www.palatinate.org.uk/peter-oborne-client-journalists-become-dupes-in-the-political-process/" target="_blank">Peter Oborne on the rise of client journalism</a>, but it is also as simple as regular groupthink as demonstrated in the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRh5qy09nNw" target="_blank">Asch Conformity Experiment</a>. </p><p id="footnote-2">This infects the entire British media class: for many years I listened to the Kermode & Mayo film review podcast then hosted by BBC Radio, and one day among the various titles was <i>XY Chelsea</i> about the US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. In the first 15 seconds of his review <a href="https://youtu.be/JzBjZ-2V9ss?si=5mpNCpbeVzIO29xq" target="_blank">Kermode states</a> that Manning "released classified information that were then released in unredacted form on Wikileaks". In fact it was <i>The Guardian</i> that released the passwords, as a <a href="https://wikileaks.org/Guardian-journalist-negligently.html" target="_blank">Wikileaks editorial</a> explains. Kermode was the <span class="kY2IgmnCmOGjharHErah" style="-webkit-line-clamp: 3;"><span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/profile/markkermode" target="_blank">chief film critic</a> </span></span>for <i>The Guardian</i>'s sister paper at the time. The comment would be forgivable were it not for Kermode's outburst that <i>XY Chelsea</i> is not a film about Julian Assange "much as he wants to be the centre of every story". This wasn't the first time the presenters had made impromptu digs at Assange, but none as bitter. So in order to be <i>the centre of every story</i> did Assange expose himself "to progressively severe forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the cumulative effects of which can only be described as psychological torture"? These are <a href="https://twitter.com/NilsMelzer/status/1134391934372503552" target="_blank">the words of Nils Melzer</a>, at the time the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. I emailed the show with this information and quotation but, of course, I didn't receive a reply and I didn't hear any correction on the podcast as, after all those years, I unsubscribed. <br /><br />Read <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/assanges-final-appeal?publication_id=778851&post_id=141775601&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=dfpq5" target="_blank">Chris Hedges' hair-raising summary</a> of the facts behind the prosecution of Julian Assange before his final appeal against extradition. <br /></p> <p id="footnote-3">[3] Glenn Greenwald is an "<a href="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1745106779522974031" target="_blank">online influencer</a>", while Seymour Hersh, who in the <i>New Yorker </i>exposed the massacre at My Lai in 1969 and torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, as soon as he <a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2023/2/15/nord_stream_sy_hersh" target="_blank">reported</a> how the Nord Stream pipeline was sabotaged, suddenly became that epitome of vanity and irrelevance, "<a href="https://twitter.com/johnnyjmils/status/1623769986756931585" target="_blank">a blogger</a>". In the UK, Craig Murray, who as a UK Ambassador blew the whistle on intelligence gained through torture, has been <a href="https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/07/calling-all-nuj-members/" target="_blank">denied membership</a> of the NUJ and was gaoled for reporting the case for the defence in the trial of Alex Salmond while those in the mainstream who he says did more or less the same were left alone. (Salmond was acquitted; there was a jury, unlike in Murray's trial). And, as with others outside of the club, such as <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/author/kit-klarenberg/" target="_blank">Kit Klarenberg</a> and <a href="https://azvsas.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Tony Greenstein</a>, Murray has <a href="https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2023/12/attacking-journalists-as-terrorists/" target="_blank">been detained</a> under the Terrorism Act. </p><p id="footnote-3">Incidentally, <a href="https://twitter.com/keir_starmer/status/965346834603560960?lang=en" target="_blank">the tweet below</a> that followed expulsion of the son of a rabbi from the Labour Party was for me the first indication of Sir Keir Starmer's perfidy. <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNifCGLWuaVsfi2ikqJaSIqTy3a4re9ecsDPy37go6PMDOJeLfzZnK6stzHkuPvEeByrb9WFY2cSyJENVx-XTm3yr2NmIlZPOr5Z6B7w9nn7WEhednz3QEj60JT3b62EeLwTmgxVoUcM1diNu69_VEGTOwvA_fMikFSG-umdqNh4DumhmO74rT/s1324/Starmer%20on%20Tony%20Greenstein.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1036" data-original-width="1324" height="313" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNifCGLWuaVsfi2ikqJaSIqTy3a4re9ecsDPy37go6PMDOJeLfzZnK6stzHkuPvEeByrb9WFY2cSyJENVx-XTm3yr2NmIlZPOr5Z6B7w9nn7WEhednz3QEj60JT3b62EeLwTmgxVoUcM1diNu69_VEGTOwvA_fMikFSG-umdqNh4DumhmO74rT/w400-h313/Starmer%20on%20Tony%20Greenstein.png" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p id="footnote-3"></p><p><i>The Labour Files</i> documentary series has provided ample confirmation since, <a href="https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmer-joined-secretive-cia-linked-group-while-serving-in-corbyns-shadow-cabinet/" target="_blank">though it doesn't end there</a>. <br /></p><center><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/elp18OvnNV0?si=b7Teqcjjp0_OgkDG" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></center><p></p><p>In addition to those mentioned above, for commentary and investigations, I recommend following the work of among others <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/" target="_blank">Chris Hedges</a>, <a href="https://www.aaronmate.net/" target="_blank">Aaron Maté</a>, <a href="https://www.declassifieduk.org/" target="_blank">Mark Curtis, Matt Kennard</a>, <a href="http://theempirefiles.tv/" target="_blank">Abby Martin</a>, <a href="https://www.mintpressnews.com/author/alan-macleod/" target="_blank">Alan MacLeod</a>, <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/users/peter-oborne" target="_blank">Peter Oborne</a>, <a href="https://www.jonathan-cook.net/" target="_blank">Jonathan Cook</a>, and frontline reporter <a href="https://ingaza.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Eva Karene Bartlett</a>. <br /></p> <p id="footnote-4">[4] <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2024/02/19/adl-bmg-to-drop-roger-waters-nazi-past/" target="_blank">Roger Waters</a> and <a href="https://youtu.be/PVP6PlX_UUA?si=mTXAynXRz6ihH0pC" target="_blank">Ken Loach</a>. In my teenage years, I was a fan of Pink Floyd to the point of nerdily cataloguing my LP and bootleg collection and typing up attempts at music criticism. Many years later and after I had moved on, I heard a song by them whose title I didn't recognise and to which I exclaimed "What the hell is this crap?!". It turned out to be post-Roger-Waters Pink Floyd – a velvet glove limp without its iron fist. I realised then why it was Pink Floyd of the 1970s, especially <a href="https://youtu.be/4QA30qkRYy8?si=EhQSkXuFu0Iez1st" target="_blank">Dogs</a>, appealed to me above all. <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-65716550" target="_blank">The recent claims</a> that the theatrical performance of <i>The Wall </i>in which a fictional rock star becomes a demogogue, a performance I saw live on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVkCE7Xhcsk" target="_blank">June 16th, 1981</a> and that has toured the world without controversy since, meant that Waters himself was promoting fascism and should be banned from live performance would be hilarious if it weren't so disturbing in what it revealed about the powerful people who made them and the solemnity with which they were reported. <br /></p><center><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RPk33BZNCOM?si=g2165KOsyynlZ_C6" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></center><p></p><p id="footnote-5">[5] She's right, o<span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;">f course, as we must regret the </span>luring of millions into a cult of infantilising fantasy and wish fulfilment. <br /></p> <p id="footnote-6">[6] From an interview in <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2020/02/eimear-mcbride-interview-strange-hotel-grief-politics-fiction" target="_blank">The New Statesman</a>: </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtk-c2IcCoZdILY7zdjqahaG_B_U3MR2bpXr4B3UFLxhyhWOIkp57qiG4yD_LqgAD2xpYVp_yw3Yelz7wI4PLuTC3Q02Zoeo9u1DWuWGuKNZGXte6ThAI7-pAYc6ntiTZwX9TZDH8qmcEWuJ3X-d7QolP1r-4C13_cbrFpK6-4qq9MKXXBc5R1/s1200/Eimear%20McBride%20New%20Statesman.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="315" data-original-width="1200" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtk-c2IcCoZdILY7zdjqahaG_B_U3MR2bpXr4B3UFLxhyhWOIkp57qiG4yD_LqgAD2xpYVp_yw3Yelz7wI4PLuTC3Q02Zoeo9u1DWuWGuKNZGXte6ThAI7-pAYc6ntiTZwX9TZDH8qmcEWuJ3X-d7QolP1r-4C13_cbrFpK6-4qq9MKXXBc5R1/w640-h168/Eimear%20McBride%20New%20Statesman.png" width="640" /></a></div><p>Even if it is presented as an alternative, Eimear McBride's novel <i>A Girl is a Half-formed Thing</i> is a prime example of what Rachael Allen diagnoses as an issue in the publishing industry in her superb essay <a href="https://tlth.co.uk/difficultandbad" target="_blank">Difficult and Bad</a>: an industry dominated by a middle-class patting itself on the back for its patronage of writers who may otherwise be dismissed as inaccessible but in reality gain industry traction because of its promotion of identity politics, a <a href="http://this-space.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-end-of-literature-part-four.html" target="_blank">virtue-hoarding disguise</a> for privileging their class interests. The novel's publisher may be independent but its director worked at <i>The Guardian</i> for many years and <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=Corbyn%20(from%3Asamjordison)&src=typed_query" target="_blank">conformed to its offensive</a> on Corbyn's mildly social-democratic programme. <br /><br />For a hugely enjoyable satire on the centrists' favoured writers, I highly recommend Ellis Sharp's novel <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Concrete-Impressions-Ellis-Sharp/dp/1838489894" target="_blank">Concrete Impressions</a>, reviewed here by <a href="https://www.themodernnovel.org/europe/w-europe/england/sharp/concrete-impressions/" target="_blank">The Modern Novel</a>. <br /> </p><p id="footnote-7">[7] In my earliest days of reading, attracted by elevated titles, I borrowed a library copy of Adorno's <i>Aesthetic Theory</i> in the 1984 translation by C. Lenhardt and was very taken with a passage preceded by Adorno's observation that reason subsumes suffering under concepts but can never express it: "Therefore, even when it is understood, suffering remains mute and inconsequential":</p><p id="footnote-7"></p><blockquote>What recommends itself, then, is the idea that art may be the only remaining medium of truth in age of incomprehensible terror and suffering. As the real world grows dark, the irrationality of art is becoming rational, especially at a time when art is radically tenebrous itself. What the enemies of modern art, endowed with a greater sensitivity than its timid apologists, call the negativity of modern art, is the epitome of all that has been repressed by the established culture. That is indeed the direction in which modern art is moving. By cathecting the repressed, art internalises the repressing principle, i.e. the unredeemed condition of the world, instead of merely airing futile protests against it. Art identifies and expresses that condition, thus anticipating its overcoming. It is this, and not the photographic rendition of the unredeemed state or a false sense of beatitude, that defines the position of authentic modern art towards a gloomy objectivity. Everything else is worthless mawkishness.</blockquote><p></p><p id="footnote-7">I understand that Lenhardt's translation is considered problematic and Robert Hullot-Kentor's 1997 version includes references to Hegel and Brecht featured nowhere above. Compare the final sentences: </p><p id="footnote-7"></p><blockquote>That art enunciates the disaster by identifying with it anticipates its enervation; this, not any photograph of the disaster or false happiness, defines the attitude of authentic contemporary art to a radically darkened objectivity; the sweetness of any other gives itself the lie.</blockquote><p></p><p id="footnote-7">This version leaves me cold. The passage's said faithlessness to the original may also anticipate an overcoming, which in turn suggests a value in theory beyond rational understanding.<br /></p><p id="footnote-8">[8] Which will be news to those who think Joyce's <i>Ulysses</i> is the key modernist novel. <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2011/07/joyce-division.html" target="_blank">It isn't</a> – it has other qualities – so perhaps she's right. Either way, we declare this is another example of the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of modernism endemic in English-speaking literary circles. Cf. <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2010/10/rainbow-shatterings-what-ever-happened.html" target="_blank">an alternative understanding</a>.<br /></p><p id="footnote-9">[9] Mention of a malicious demon suggests Alice Oswald imagines the threat of Gnosticism behind AI poetry. I've <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-withdrawal-of-novel.html" target="_blank">written about this</a> in relation to the novel.<br /></p><p id="footnote-10">[10] Plato's <i>Phraedrus</i>, translated by Walter Hamilton (Penguin Classics, 1973). Socrates goes on to say "once a thing is committed to writing it circulates equally among those who understand the subject and those who have no business with it; a writing cannot distinguish between suitable and unsuitable readers", a sentiment echoed much later by <span class="expandableItem">Lichtenberg in his famous line: "A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it, don't expect an apostle to peer out." <br /></span></p> <p id="footnote-11">[11] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_0VBS9AOhE" target="_blank">Judi Dench's performance</a> of a Shakespeare sonnet on a chat show is a fine albeit cringeworthy example.</p> <p id="footnote-12">[12] According to <a href="https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/massimo-recalcati/the-night-in-gethsemane/" target="_blank">Massimo Recalcati's account</a>, this distrust of absence finds its culmination in God, by way of Christ: </p><blockquote>From Jesus’ perspective, there is, in effect, no possible truth without its testimony. That means that the truth of the Word consists in its incarnation alone. It’s the radical ethical hermeneutics of Christianity: the letter without testimony is a dead letter; without heart—without desire—the meaning of the Law can’t be understood.</blockquote><p></p><p id="footnote-13">[13] In <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-opposite-direction.html" target="_blank">Thomas Bernhard's Afterlives</a>. This is cited in Lars Iyer's <a href="https://spurious.typepad.com/spurious/2023/08/the-opposite-direction-taubes-bernhard-and-the-gnostic-imaginary.html" target="_blank">The Opposite Direction: Taubes, Bernhard and the Gnostic Imaginary</a> in which he suggests a rewrite of Beckett's famous lines: "The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express" to "nothing to say in <i>this</i> world, nothing to express in <i>this</i> world, no means of expression in <i>this</i> world – nothing, except the obligation of the counterword, the questioning of what is and what is not complicit with the horrors".<br /></p><p id="footnote-14">[14] In <a href="https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/translating-tradition-paul-celan-france/author/benjamin-hollander/used/" target="_blank">Translating Tradition: Paul Celan in France</a>.</p><p id="footnote-15">[15] Notably <a href="https://praxisblog.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/clive-jamess-cultural-amnesia/" target="_blank">from Clive James</a>.</p>
Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-26896941852368720282023-12-28T12:34:00.047+00:002024-01-09T12:05:26.258+00:00Notes from overground<p>Seventeen years ago my copy of Richard Ford's <i>The Lay of the Land</i> was delayed in the post and arrived long after the novel had been reviewed in all the big newspapers so, instead of riding the wave of publication, I was dragged under by its backwash. I had to answer a question not one of the reviews asked: <i>Why is Frank Bascombe writing this?</i><i><br /></i></p><p>However, one question my readers might like answered first is: <i>Why are <b>you</b> reading Richard Ford?!</i> His work is hardly a paragon of the short, aesthetically constrained European Modernist novel this blog champions, and in fact appears to be a prime example of the dreaded lyric first-person narration dominating <i>prize-winning</i> British and American "literary fiction". Indeed, the Wikipedia entry for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Day_(Ford_novel)" target="_blank">Independence Day</a> says it is written in "Harold Brodkey-style" – not that, please, not that! I don't have an answer except that, prompted by a review in the NME I read in 1986 <a href="#footnote-1">[1]</a>, I bought <i>The Sportswriter</i> and read it three times <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2016/08/thirty-years-of-reading.html" target="_blank">in my first years of reading</a> and never became disillusioned with it as I did with the novels of John Updike and Philip Roth, the big name American authors of the time.</p>
<p></p><p>The reason why I'm writing about Frank Bascombe again is because my answer to the initial question was glib. I realise this now. It appropriated a phrase Frank uses that is typical of the man himself, also glib. (The review is no longer online but is the first chapter of <a href="https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/zer0-books/our-books/this-space-writing" target="_blank">this book</a>.)<i> </i>And while I began to reread <i>The Sportswriter</i> and <i>The Lay of the Land</i> without any intention of raising the question again and only for pleasure and happy anticipation of <i>Be Mine</i>, the unexpected fourth volume (fifth if you include the short stories), I nevertheless found a scene that raised it for me.</p><center><table><tbody>
<tr><td><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRjNkeP4jlumsD6ersjgFEZwH3_0EPLDjeeplIT3BZemQKrdIdEnOj8VxZDY5tBmEcpvbaoGCrAVgYXE36RqWhp1Nqq5Ypyts_dL4OJUcSfjFCLWNgHVAM57qXtLfiSjGM2tsOk4ybNpJhzNojKHJ94pMfj6gL2fl7Tdw2Cm1G1XNdsSCWuSzX/s1280/Richard%20Ford%20%E2%80%93%20The%20Sportswriter.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="914" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRjNkeP4jlumsD6ersjgFEZwH3_0EPLDjeeplIT3BZemQKrdIdEnOj8VxZDY5tBmEcpvbaoGCrAVgYXE36RqWhp1Nqq5Ypyts_dL4OJUcSfjFCLWNgHVAM57qXtLfiSjGM2tsOk4ybNpJhzNojKHJ94pMfj6gL2fl7Tdw2Cm1G1XNdsSCWuSzX/s320/Richard%20Ford%20%E2%80%93%20The%20Sportswriter.jpeg" width="229" /></a></i></div>
</td><td><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk4M4ujOTjdEsX-ktRRI4hvEFjc4o-9yrHnFhcD1a0fPj9jYd9xowyVyAtfbxQoaHvevHCb6pLjBlc6vyvS-KK0abab6Ww9v0xN7mY1zbhr6IrMOFG18y3W0tkA80xERHh3ghAncyrtc8nuFnSRLpFksfryhbX9IIsvBuaD5htT8Z1oQXAPRWo/s1280/Richard%20Ford%20%E2%80%93%C2%A0Lay%20of%20the%20Land.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="970" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk4M4ujOTjdEsX-ktRRI4hvEFjc4o-9yrHnFhcD1a0fPj9jYd9xowyVyAtfbxQoaHvevHCb6pLjBlc6vyvS-KK0abab6Ww9v0xN7mY1zbhr6IrMOFG18y3W0tkA80xERHh3ghAncyrtc8nuFnSRLpFksfryhbX9IIsvBuaD5htT8Z1oQXAPRWo/s320/Richard%20Ford%20%E2%80%93%C2%A0Lay%20of%20the%20Land.jpeg" width="243" /></a></div>
</td></tr></tbody></table></center><p></p><p>Frank visits a widow called Marguerite as a "sponsor", a friendly stranger willing to listen to someone who is either lonely or just needs someone to talk to. In their initial introduction Frank half-remembers a one-night stand years they had had when he showed her around a house but isn't absolutely sure and isn't sure if she's half-remembering the same thing. They settle down for a serious chat and she tells Frank she has an urge to confess something but cannot imagine what exactly. However, she reckons that if there is something buried in memory, like "you once fucked your realtor" Frank thinks to himself, it's best left that way:</p><p blockquote="" style="text-align: left;"></p><blockquote>"I call it a need to confess. But maybe it's something else."<br />"What else could you maybe call it?<br />Marguerite suddenly sits up even more erectly, her softened features alert. "I haven't really thought about that."<br />"You might just have to make it up, then."</blockquote><p></p><p>Isn't this condition precisely what constitutes Frank Bascombe's presence, his need to write, and explains why Richard Ford keep returning to makes things up with this character? Both would have to stop if Frank (or Richard) had a decisive act to confess. We are sponsors for both. How had I missed this before? I could point to the stupefaction induced by <i>The Lay of the Land</i>'s 726-page first-person narration, but it was really that I wanted to say something profound about writing that turned out to be glib. </p><p>The exchange jumped out this time because confession is a key word in Gabriel Josipovici's essay <i>Act and Action </i>in the Spring 2022 edition of <a href="https://raritanquarterly.rutgers.edu/issue-index/all-volumes-issues/volume-41/volume-41-number-4" target="_blank">Raritan</a> (not online). The inconspicuous title conceals a brief history of a rich literary tradition in which Bascombe is now part, and for me explains what is missing from the almost-univeral praise given to the novel series. </p><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSFx1J8dZz9gLtztq5cFaTnuVr0qtV7PnI0A2Nkn77BBVj-fDVkI_sm_XsW9_1kRvSkyKQw2wmPQbgNscXAMeN_dsJ9mfcq_kIHKikKTaHA_ZM-V3WNHHoDxZKQ-QVg6EpPLpaGVS6atE0rTT-dwhauvyr9hmOFkuphNkk6bMyLcwAdX4-J7o5/s1280/Gerontion.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="903" data-original-width="1280" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSFx1J8dZz9gLtztq5cFaTnuVr0qtV7PnI0A2Nkn77BBVj-fDVkI_sm_XsW9_1kRvSkyKQw2wmPQbgNscXAMeN_dsJ9mfcq_kIHKikKTaHA_ZM-V3WNHHoDxZKQ-QVg6EpPLpaGVS6atE0rTT-dwhauvyr9hmOFkuphNkk6bMyLcwAdX4-J7o5/w400-h283/Gerontion.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><p>Not that Bascombe features in the essay at all, with the most recent literary character cited being TS Eliot's "little old man" <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47254/gerontion" target="_blank">Gerontion</a>, the first few lines of whose poem provides an epigram. He is looking back on his life and expressing a sense of its unreality. He had not been part of any great event of history to give it that meaning and instead "has spent his entire life waiting for some kind of life-giving rain which never comes". Josipovici shows that expressions of the same sense emerged before this in different ways in different characters: in Melville's Bartleby, in Henry James' John Marcher, and in the indecisive young man in Kierkegaard's <i>Either/Or</i> who, like Bartleby, can see no reason to do one thing because he could just as easily do the opposite. The condition is traced back to the Protestant revolutions of the 16th century that eroded a sense of community, a condition intensified after the French Revolution when it seemed that anyone whatever their social status could rise to become a leader like Napoleon or a billionaire like Rothschild. "Still most people were neither, nor were they ever likely to be. This realization led not just to resentment but to melancholy and depression". Josipovici draws a comparison with Hannah Arendt's discussion of slaves in the ancient world fearing they would live and die without leaving a trace of their existence:</p><p></p><blockquote>Though slavery was abolished in the West in the course of the nineteenth century, the curious fact is that it was in that precise period that many people began to feel that they themselves had in a strange way been deprived of freedom and visibility, that they too were destined to pass away leaving no trace that they had ever existed.</blockquote><p></p><p></p><p>We don't have to think for too long before recognising its presence in the way Reality TV and social media promises visibility and meaning to people, but it's not something that we see in contemporary novels, which tend to be seeking visibility and meaning by appealing to marketable social and political fashions rather than exploring why both are in demand. The essay finds its pathological effects especially clear in Dostoevsky's early novels featuring minor civil servants involved in drudge work, with its most extreme expression found in the spite and despair of <i>Notes from Underground</i>. Whenever the Underground Man tries to forge an identity, to become someone in the world, he is appalled to find it is always an act. No matter what he does, he remains an actor. The disconnect is why he has to write "because only in this way can he get close to his particular condition, which is one of perpetual volatility, unable to anchor himself in the world". Of course, his narrative is also an act, leading to the silence and invisibility he feared most.<br /></p><p>One hundred and twenty years later, Frank Bascombe expresses the same condition: "I was always able to 'see around the sides' of whatever I was feeling", he says in <i>The Sportswriter.</i> "If I was mad or ecstatic, I always realized I could just as easily feel or act another way if I wanted to." It infected career as a novelist:<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>'Seeing around' is exactly what I did in my stories (though I didn’t know it), and in the novel I abandoned, and one reason why I had to quit. I could always think of other ways I might be feeling about what I was writing, or other voices I might be speaking in. In fact, I could usually think of quite a number of things I might be doing at any moment! And what real writing requires, of course, is that you merge into the <i>oneness of the writer’s vision</i>—something I could never quite get the hang of...</blockquote><p>Oneness of vision is he says "a minor but pernicious lie of literature" and by falling into conventions fails to tell the truth of 'seeing around'. Nevertheless, there is irony in Frank's post-abandonment career in the convention of sportwriting because he likes to think athletes have a oneness of vision and "probably think and feel the fewest things of anyone at important times". He can spin upbeat stories out of their victory or defeat, leaving readers satisfied. One of the most distinctive qualities of the novels is the way Frank defines by people their activity, as if they're disappearing into whatever they do: "the slow joggers, the single-dog walkers, the skinny men with metal detectors—their wives in the van waiting, reading John Grisham", each of whom he is both contemptuous and envious. He feels the promise and threat of disappearance entering a hardware store and smelling "the cardboard and corrugated-metal and feed-store aromas of all the dervish endeavors a human can be busily up to". This is not far from the young man in <i>Either/Or</i>, though Frank is no longer young. When he interviews a sportsman who doesn't fit the visionary template and instead wants to share his anxiety and despair, Frank refuses to admit to him that he feels the same. To us, his sponsors, it's clearly a front, an act. So the narration might then be said to be the actor stepping off the stage. At last, literature is not falling for the pernicious lie. </p><p>This may be a good thing for literature, but what use is it for Frank, for us? Unlike Dostoevsky's characters, Frank has a busy work and family life, he has no money worries, and he's respected in both professions he takes up; in effect he is the Overground Man, seen and heard by all. The same can be said of Richard Ford, and yet the sickness continues; both are seen and heard precisely because of the sickness. If Frank seeks oneness in romantic relationships, they never last. He tells Vicki Arcenault he wants to marry her but instead of feeling happy anticipation of a romantic weekend citybreak what he feels is "in a word: a <i>disturbance</i>". <a href="#footnote-2">[2]</a> Across the series, the only women with whom he seems to have uncomplicated relationships are Mrs Miller, the fortune-teller he pays to make banal, generalised predictions, and Betty, the Asian masseuse, with whom he becomes infatuated. He owes them nothing but money and they give him what he wants as far as that money goes. Both echo the Underground Man's encounter with the prostitute Liza, a relationship also based on playacting. It seems the more a civilisation is centred on commerce, the more people become actors and reality a script. It's no coincidence both "Mrs Miller" and "Betty" are not their birth names. This is may explain why one typical sentence in <i>The Sportswriter</i> stands out as exemplary of Frank's condition, the condition of the modern actor, the condition of the modern world, and so the contemporary novel. He is driving through his hometown after visiting Mrs Miller and comes to one particular road:<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>I idled down Seminary Street, abstracted and empty in the lemony vapor of suburban eventide.</blockquote><p>Frank's lonely self is wandering, blank and unengaged down a street named after a college building that trained clergy in the theology and protocols of a transcendence, a oneness, both of which are no longer ongoing though each maintains a presence in the street's name and the unnamable, abstract longing in those who live in its vaporous shadow. The building has been replaced by suburban houses designed for a middle-class professionals to enjoy a polite atmosphere as they drift into the eventide of their lives. I quoted this line in my 2006 essay as an example of "fancy phrasing", a caricature of what distinguishes "literary fiction" from overtly commercial genre fiction, and I expressed regret for Richard Ford's resort to the "event glamour" <a href="#footnote-3">[3]</a> of a robbery and shooting at the end of the third novel without realising how it epitomises literary fiction's concentrated expression of the human condition and the frustration with "opaquely written novels" as <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2006/09/despair-of-popular-authors-part-1.html" target="_blank">Nick Hornby called them</a>, those said to prioritise style over story, a frustration that drives publishers to offer bad faith mitigation to the reader with promises of titillating transgressive action. Ultimately, however, such action is as unsatisfying as fancy phrasing, as both are formed by words and words only. What can be done?<br /></p><p>Josipovici's answer comes when he turns to Dostoevsky's next novel in which the familiarly desperate lead character acts more decisively. Raskolnikov kills the pawnbroker and her sister in order "to be someone rather than the no one he feels himself to be". And has the same realisation that it hasn't transformed his life at all and has in fact made it worse. Josipovici turns again to Hannah Arendt and how she contrasts the Greek and Roman concept of action with the modern, found in the distinction of action with and without accompanying speech. Without speech, action would be done effectively by performing robots: "Speechless action would no longer be action because there would no longer be an actor, and the actor, the doer of deeds, is possible only if he is at the same time a speaker of words." Actions on their own, then, such as Frank idling along a street, are meaningless in themselves, and so Raskolnikov's dreadful act is meaningless without his confession.</p><p></p><blockquote>Arendt both helps us to understand the underlying logic of <i>Crime and Punishment</i> and frees us from having to see it, as Dostoyevsky himself and most of his commentators ever since have seen it, in purely Christian terms. For when Sonya insists that he must give himself up and confess his crimes … she is merely putting in a popular Russian form what, according to Arendt, the classical world perfectly understood. It is only when Raskolnikov can speak to others, telling them what he has done, that he can move beyond playacting and finally find some kind of peace. For the first time he is fully something: not “a criminal who has confessed,” but one who <i>confesses</i>. Confession, the finding of words for his deed, is an action, not a state. But that too is where the book has to end, for speech/action cannot of its nature be permanent.</blockquote><p></p><p>This is not the end of the essay however, as Josipovici believes Arendt places too much stress on the bond between word and deed, and provides an example from his own life of an action in which "we can retain the idea of self-disclosure, of the actor surprising him or herself in the act they perform, of something radically new appearing...without needing to make speech crucial to the situation". It's a story of his mother's decision as she sought to escape the clutches of the Gestapo with her small son in tow, one that readers of <a href="https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=2394" target="_blank">100 Days</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Life-Gabriel-Josipovici/dp/0904388891/" target="_blank">A Life</a> won't forget. Indeed, the latter title is indicative of Josipovici's practice as a writer: in his novels there is a concern for shape and, in his critical writing, an ambivalence for strict oppositions, such as playacting and the essential self. It's something caught in one line of <i>Be Mine</i> in which Frank says "I don’t believe I have an essential self, though if I have one it is always on display". If his sense of apartness causes him despair, he also relies upon it to exist; as a fictional invention, his display is essential for his self. For Josipovici, this is the case for every novelist, as it enables something radically new to appear, hence why those who suspect novels are thinly disguised autobiography entirely miss the point and shouldn't be reading or reviewing them. For Dostoevsky this means "dramatizing multiple falsehoods to reach the point where something that is not falsehood emerges". It is the shape of a life, of a novel, that requires attention:<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>a shape made up of many tragedies and many triumphs but that is somehow more than the sum of all these. But neither they nor we can fully grasp it until it is over—while we live we can only grope, trusting in time. </blockquote><p></p><p>The length of Frank's narration is an attempt to find its end in order to grasp the sum of its meaning, but does it just "grind to a halt" without discovery as one of "the most scathing reviews of the year" claimed? <a href="#footnote-4">[4]</a> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsD0Xgb7zwamQwNrNLDZdLoXcAr8lQu1_AGTSCytQDOPvkEZN8ZGooeS0Tf-3g-lTUYR88Pk_yxDzSUyT2oHxGT0vcmLY2y8YH-yJBmAq5a6oRBj5wX1_tAylsrpjjoyytVBQ6foNdmLrGiQWqTYAxrAUKNPOiYMccSXeB6AzD09S9tsKGkh50/s1280/Richard%20Ford%20-%20Be%20Mine%20cover.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1142" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsD0Xgb7zwamQwNrNLDZdLoXcAr8lQu1_AGTSCytQDOPvkEZN8ZGooeS0Tf-3g-lTUYR88Pk_yxDzSUyT2oHxGT0vcmLY2y8YH-yJBmAq5a6oRBj5wX1_tAylsrpjjoyytVBQ6foNdmLrGiQWqTYAxrAUKNPOiYMccSXeB6AzD09S9tsKGkh50/w358-h400/Richard%20Ford%20-%20Be%20Mine%20cover.jpeg" width="358" /></a></div><p>It's appropriate that Josipovici's essay begins with a quotation from TS Eliot, as the end of the Frank Bascombe novels can be found in its beginning. In the opening scene of <i>The Sportswriter</i> Frank is in a cemetery awaiting his ex-wife to mark merely by their silent presence what would have been the birthday of their first-born son Ralph and, at the end of <i>Be Mine,</i> he's taking his second son 47-year-old son Paul towards a grave, albeit rather like the novel series itself, by a roundabout route. Paul has a terminal diagnosis and the novel follows father and son on a valedictory road trip to Mount Rushmore, repeating a trip Frank made in as child with his parents. Much of the drama and comedy comes from the patient, organised father dealing with his otherwise-engaged, incapacitated son. And then, after the long build up to the journey and the long journey itself with all of its detours and digressions, as they enter the park Paul exclaims "Oh wow" when he sees all the attractions supplementing the mountain sculptures: "This is great. I love this". Suddenly for Frank his son is not only the cranky lump in a wheelchair but also the enchanted boy we saw in <i>The Sportswriter</i> sending notes by pigeon to his dead brother he imagines is still alive and living far away. "How often do anyone's best-laid plans work out?" Frank asks. "How often are promises kept and destinations arrived? Buddhists profess all is the journey. Abjure arrival. But what do they know?"</p><p>Frank, and perhaps Richard Ford, has finally found peace as he dedicates his time and effort to someone else without expecting anything in return; an end to commerce. The narrative enacts a movement towards his own death, off-stage like Ralph's and Paul's, and so a literary death, one that will never arrive, as we can return to the beginning of <i>The Sportswriter</i> and start the journey all over again, a beginning which is also an arrival.</p><p><br /></p><p></p><p></p>[1]<p class="separator=" div="" gt="" id="footnote-1" lt="" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5Qx71M_rvt1K0zGY-4f88KWms44UU19W7J88QfY2-KlrcQZ4G9kD9FdjyRsCPiXe__nDP3aizjkIXyU1sfWIvC203GuJpfXrXtFGb2kkJW-RurfzAjL3WafwQosv3Z8klSXxoF2gm0Q2t51VUHitdhMBtSbm1NaT4vRNunWabkyiJCF4ECGIY/s1280/NME%20review%20of%20Ford%20Sportswriter.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="562" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5Qx71M_rvt1K0zGY-4f88KWms44UU19W7J88QfY2-KlrcQZ4G9kD9FdjyRsCPiXe__nDP3aizjkIXyU1sfWIvC203GuJpfXrXtFGb2kkJW-RurfzAjL3WafwQosv3Z8klSXxoF2gm0Q2t51VUHitdhMBtSbm1NaT4vRNunWabkyiJCF4ECGIY/w282-h640/NME%20review%20of%20Ford%20Sportswriter.jpeg" width="282" /></a></p><p></p><p id="footnote-2">[2] Note for what it's worth that the title of Thomas Bernhard's second novel <i>Verstörung</i> (published in English as <i>Gargoyles</i>) translates as <i>Disturbance</i>.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p id="footnote-3">[3] A phrase of Saul Bellow's, or perhaps Martin Amis'.</p><p id="footnote-4">[4] One of the most scathing reviews of the year <a href="https://bookmarks.reviews/the-most-scathing-book-reviews-of-2023/" target="_blank">according to Book Marks</a> is <a href="https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/be-mine-richard-ford-book-review-claire-lowdon/" target="_blank">this one</a> in the TLS, which begins with literary gossip and moves on to suspicion of the author's intentions and the people who "favour fiction that showcases the mundane" (it cites Knausgaard as well as Ford). It wonders if it's because "the swathes of mediocre prose..are quite easy to read". Even if one doesn't enjoy it, Ford's prose is anything but mediocre – I am reminded reading the novels of <a href="https://theasylum.wordpress.com/2011/01/20/adam-mars-jones-cedilla/" target="_blank">John Self's description</a> of Adam Mars-Jones' <i>Cedilla</i> as "a coral reef made of a billion tiny Crunchie bars" – and Knausgaard's workmanlike prose puts stress on such ease with <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo180607347.html" target="_blank">the fleeting presence of the infinite</a>. The review quotes passages of scatological dialogue and says "It is hard to tell whether Ford thinks these moments are funny". In what way would an answer change the book? Most bizarrely, the review is "certain" that "Frank’s hokey, homespun wisdom is offered to us entirely without irony". This must be one of the strangest comments ever made by a professional reviewer. The existence alone of the four novels is ironic, as every expression of such wisdom is ironised in its performance. The review ends by wondering why Richard Ford "is taking up fresh shelf space in 2023". Perhaps a more pressing question is why the august TLS continues to include such defiantly narrow-minded criticism.</p><p id="footnote-4"> </p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-33983572259813051032023-12-05T12:29:00.016+00:002023-12-08T13:56:24.771+00:00The enigma for criticism<p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>To this day, I can learn only from bad films. The good ones I watch in the same spirit in which I watched when I was a kid. The great ones, even when I see them many times, are just an enigma. </i></blockquote><p></p><div>Werner Herzog describes a few "bad films" in <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/447206/every-man-for-himself-and-god-against-all-by-herzog-werner/9781847927248" target="_blank">his autobiography</a>, all from his childhood, but neither names them nor the "great" films he's seen many times. The absence of titles enhances the aura of greatness as we are left to imagine numinous light oozing into each frame of an imaginary film. By naming, we focus on particulars: director, actors, subject matter, scenes, cinematography, soundtrack, awards, controversies; lyrics of the sirens' song drawing us to the innocent doom of criticism. But what else can be said about the greatness of enigma, the enigma of greatness?<br /></div><div> <br /></div><div>If the lack of titles appears to be a cop out, as it does to me and <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/david-trotter/go-for-it-losers" target="_blank">David Trotter</a>, with Herzog threatening to become "a dilettante of intangible sensations" as Charles Swann is described in Proust's novel, his legend as a filmmaker appears to depend on such reticence, with his career owing much to instinct and chance. The book is a catalogue of bizarre decisions, coincidences, and outrageous fortune, good and bad. On filming a prehistoric image in the Chauvet Cave discovered in 1994, he recognises similarities with lithographs made by Picasso in the 1930s, and asks: "are there images that slumber within us and are sometimes set free by some sort of jolt?". He believes there are, and "somehow all my works have pursued such images". He cites the 10,000 windmills in <i>Signs of Life</i> and the steamship being hauled over a hill in <i>Fitzcarraldo</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div>What is the value of such images? Again, Herzog doesn't specify, but it must be related to the concept of "ecstatic truth" he says requires another book to explain (another apparent cop out), but is, essentially, the shadowed illuminations of creativity, the familiar technique of defamiliarisation. If that is the case, what is the value of such truth?<br /><br />"The image is always sacred", <a href="https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823225415/the-ground-of-the-image/" target="_blank">writes Jean-Luc Nancy</a>, standing apart from "the world of things considered as a world of availability". For this reason, the sacred should not be confused with the religious. The religious is "the observance of a rite that forms and maintains a bond" while the sacred "signifies the separate, what is set aside, removed, cut off". Understanding the sacred in this sense is enough to excuse Herzog's reticence and to distinguish his films. The cave wall paintings in <a href="https://www.documentaryarea.com/video/Cave%20of%20Forgotten%20Dreams/" target="_blank">Cave of Forgotten Dreams</a> are available to us in the obvious, visual way, but we're also set aside, removed and cut off. This is what distinguishes them. </div><div><blockquote>The greatness, or part of the greatness, of an <i>Aeneid</i>, of a <i>View of Delft</i>, of a <i>Don Giovanni</i>, of a <i>Ulysses</i>, rests in the fact that they are, in an essential way, <i>closed</i>.
By this I do no mean to say that these works of art are difficult, or
obscure – what could be more limpid than the light that hovers over
Delft? – but that they are <i>mysterious at their core</i>. <br /></blockquote>In historical terms, compared to cave paintings, the works John Banville cites <a href="https://archive.org/details/jamesjoyceartist0000unse" target="_blank">in an essay</a> were completed yesterday, and in naming them Banville tempts us toward the gossip of particulars, with <i>greatness</i> becoming a critical cliché. Once again, how can criticism look beyond them? The title of <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=2034" target="_blank">Blanchot's collection</a> <i>La Part du feu</i> suggests it can by referring to the share of a work taken by fire, the uninhabitable side of a firebreak, and yet the essays focus on particular authors and particular works, and particular elements in those works, means either that the particulars are precisely what leads us toward what's closed, or to awareness that there <i>is</i> something closed. Herzog's images are also the result of extreme patience and tenacity with particulars: </div><div><blockquote>I never see the truth as a fixed star on the horizon but always as an activity, a search, an approximation.</blockquote></div><div>The appearance of a new star fixed in the sky sets Karl Ove Knausgaard's novels <i>The Morning Star</i> and <i>The Wolves of Eternity</i> apart even as the content becomes increasingly prosaic: the latter has 400 pages dedicated to a short time in a teenager's small-town life. The star is closed to the characters, its presence looming without meaning over their local concerns. As such the star becomes an image of the novel as it relates to its content, which in <i>The Wolves of Eternity</i> gradually becomes the force generating its content, which, as I argued in <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-morning-star-by-karl-ove-knausgaard.html" target="_blank">my review</a> of <i>The Morning Star</i>, correlates to the withdrawn presence of the Book in our lives. </div><div> </div><div>Perhaps works become great by generating images their content dissimulates, and this is why they appear to be closed, mysterious at their core. A star is, of course, a fire.</div><div> </div><center><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/k1W5wAGzCpU?si=NhvpMZEAA7ypMxhk" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></center>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-78419775523537463152023-10-25T11:39:00.039+01:002023-12-26T18:36:32.452+00:00Proust regained<p>I recommend very highly for anyone who has read or not read <i>In Search of Lost Time</i> Brian Nelson's <i>The Swann Way</i>, the first volume in a new translation of the entire novel by diverse hands, in this fine and very affordable paperback from Oxford World's Classics. His translation of the chapter <i>Swann in Love,</i> a novel in itself more or less, was <a href="https://global.oup.com/ukhe/product/swann-in-love-9780198744894?q=Proust&cc=gb&lang=en" target="_blank">published separately</a> in 2017, so this edition includes <i>Combray</i> and <i>Place Names: The Name</i>. </p><p>This is the fourth translation of <i>Du côté de chez Swann</i> following Scott Moncrieff/Kilmartin, James Grieve's, and Lydia Davis', and the third version of the title. It's a pity (no doubt for publishing reasons) they can't all be <i>Swann's Way</i>, as the flow of the two esses and double double-u into the final wye has the mellifluous quality of Proust's prose. <br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiabjeAL4vzVzo_zqqU9GIK9EQr53wuIrAFEkxouXCLTkhfxxbfYuU5pb5v42uvYG-ZkMi57sAf80pK2E1Wkvb-ekPnDF_UTKxY153ZH_dA7024dzPWVhdwhAqE0zOGCqzFO0Kr2vqyve652aDwtwp4SQP8fZLPkFMKxk1H-tUNqo5fhZbDY-Yl/s1280/Proust%20-%20The%20Swann%20Way.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="912" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiabjeAL4vzVzo_zqqU9GIK9EQr53wuIrAFEkxouXCLTkhfxxbfYuU5pb5v42uvYG-ZkMi57sAf80pK2E1Wkvb-ekPnDF_UTKxY153ZH_dA7024dzPWVhdwhAqE0zOGCqzFO0Kr2vqyve652aDwtwp4SQP8fZLPkFMKxk1H-tUNqo5fhZbDY-Yl/w456-h640/Proust%20-%20The%20Swann%20Way.jpeg" width="456" /></a></div><p></p><p>I don't have any French (not since the ransom was paid anyway), so I can't judge it <i>as</i> a translation, but reading this version was like rediscovering Proust, puffing away the dust of Great Literature. I found the narrative clearer, the scenes funnier, the characters more distinctive – Aunt Léonie, Dr Cottard, Swann and Odette in particular – and the existential pressure of perception closer to the surface. And Proust's study of Swann's jealousy – "the shadow of his love" for Odette – is simply breathtaking.<br /></p><p>Over the years I've written about Proust, most of it (like this) bookchat ephemera, but here, bar the final one, is a short list of longer, more in-depth posts:</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2013/07/extratemporal-meditations-proust-as.html" target="_blank">Extratemporal meditations</a>, on Miguel de Beistegui's <i>Proust as Philosopher</i>.<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2019/03/encountering-fabulous-point.html" target="_blank">Encountering the fabulous point</a>, indirectly on Józef Czapski's <i>Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp</i>.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2022/04/when-now.html" target="_blank">When now?</a> on Gerard Genette's <i>Narrative Discourse</i>. </p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2022/07/can-there-be-pure-narrative.html" target="_blank">Can there be a pure narrative?</a> is also the question opening Blanchot's essay <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Book_to_Come/jPwJbePDacQC?hl=en&gbpv=1" target="_blank">The Experience of Proust</a>, not included in selected bibliography for <i>The Swann Way</i> despite it being undoubtedly the best essay on Proust's novel and Brian Nelson having edited Leslie Hill's <a href="https://udpress.udel.edu/book-title/after-blanchot-literature-criticism-philosophy/" target="_blank">After Blanchot</a>.<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">Perhaps most enjoyably, <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2015/02/albertine-asleep_21.html" target="_blank">Albertine Asleep</a>, my recording of a reading of a passage from <i>The Captive</i> broadcast in the early hours of the morning on the BBC World Service in 1978 that marks my discovery of Proust. It also includes the word <i>mellifluous</i>. </p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"></p><p></p>And talking of my discovery of Proust: a few years after the radio broadcast, I watched the Channel 4 series <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLe2IBzgSeT1ol-he0Q90pR2_zDECiucHe" target="_blank">The Modern World: Ten Great Writers</a>, which also had a huge impact on me, if only then of atmosphere. In the episode below Terence Kilmartin says that Proust is the most intelligent man who ever wrote a novel (obviously, this was long before Tony Parsons). The episode also features Michel Butor. <p></p><center><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Oh7HI6xXSeU?si=BKlIxY7BV4Vxc-2I" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe></center><p>Finally, if we needed a guarantee of equal quality for the second volume, <a href="https://www.charlottemandell.com/" target="_blank">Charlotte Mandell</a>'s name would be enough, and the good news is that I understand her translation is due in 2024. </p><p></p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-35804760426776623552023-10-23T16:30:00.008+01:002023-12-08T14:07:03.800+00:00Kevin Hart and the outside<p>There are two reasons why listening to Kevin Hart's interview on the Hermitix podcast, and reading <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/maurice-blanchot-on-poetry-and-narrative-9781350349056/">his new collection</a> and <i>The Dark Gaze</i> for the second time, has helped me to recognise what I have forgotten, missed, misconstrued or misunderstood in Maurice Blanchot's writing or, rather, setting all that side as inevitable, what has been a distraction from what matters to me in his writing and in reading generally.<br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyZzxWvfjbSsoprBBRREVFopsmEP0AWB87hftqiuqWBWhLtraqEcTUpDhBHeq7XzhWVC_Lz6KLOQKyjvf4NbhaRSQ23sF9hfVLr8xRyZN71SYQ97rX06Z_VYkfnOsutT3rvALWgThCmEdzJ9KQcA3xsD0FZqhkT8DR5HJ7ctTNGF2SEMYsmZ-2/s1280/Kevin%20Hart%20%E2%80%93%20Two%20Blanchot%20book%20covers%202.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="912" data-original-width="1280" height="456" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyZzxWvfjbSsoprBBRREVFopsmEP0AWB87hftqiuqWBWhLtraqEcTUpDhBHeq7XzhWVC_Lz6KLOQKyjvf4NbhaRSQ23sF9hfVLr8xRyZN71SYQ97rX06Z_VYkfnOsutT3rvALWgThCmEdzJ9KQcA3xsD0FZqhkT8DR5HJ7ctTNGF2SEMYsmZ-2/w640-h456/Kevin%20Hart%20%E2%80%93%20Two%20Blanchot%20book%20covers%202.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div>
<p></p><p>The first is the signal clarity of Hart's summaries whose presence in the source is shrouded in paragraphs as long, seductive and mind-expanding as Proust's. And while Proust's prose is bright and Blanchot's "darkly incantatory", the implications of what he writes, felt with a palatial intensity, often vanish as soon as one of Marcel's ecstatic instants. Such vanishing is also the product of what Blanchot calls "the light, innocent Yes of reading", which is not worth losing in favour of knowledge.<br /></p><p></p><p>The other reason is that Hart is a theologian, unique in Blanchot studies. Most scholars constrain their discussion to Blanchot's relation to writers and philosophers of the last 200 years, but Hart includes medieval Christian mystics. For Blanchot, he says, belief in God is a belief in an original unity, a belief in oneness and, for him, to do away with God means doing away with unity of the Self, of the Book, and of the Subject (all of which he gives leading capitals). He is prepared to accept a world without such grounding in unity. Except Blanchot's atheism is something other than a straightforward deletion: "As Heidegger warned," Hart writes in <i>The Dark Gaze</i>, "the absence of God is 'not nothing' but on the contrary is the fullness of a vast and complex heritage, and...that 'The flight of the gods must be experienced and endured'":</p><p></p><blockquote>If Blanchot interprets this experience by way of atheism, he acknowledges that the deity returns as a ghost in the assumptions of philosophy and in the reserve on which literature calls. [...] To deny God is not thereby to eliminate transcendence; it is to see how that question is transformed and where it takes up its new abodes.</blockquote><p></p><p>Its apparent abode in modern literature has been a recurring theme on this blog in recent years, slowly turning it away from bookchat and straightforward reviews as I discovered what drove both and what both concealed. But I may have misconstrued the presence of the not-nothing permeating the books I have written about here in those years. Even as someone entirely untouched by religious observance, instruction and practice, and certainly not new age "spirituality", have I made of it something more than it is, "acceding to a secular occult" to use Hart's words, going in the opposite direction to Blanchot's "anonymous, distracted, deferred, and dispersed way of being", appropriating petty escape as quasi-mystical, projecting the possibility of gnosis onto the blank intuitions of reading? <br /></p><p></p><p> An answer of sorts comes when the presenter of the podcast assumes Blanchot would not be sympathetic to a religious thinker like Meister Eckhart and Hart replies that it's not that simple: Blanchot thought that Eckhart and other theologians concerned with apophatic thought and
negative theology were onto something, only he thinks it wasn't God they were approaching but "the outside, the neutral, or the impossible". </p><p></p><center></center><center></center><center><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cnTS09B3V1Y?si=QL36lB20DWiHjb6H" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></center><p></p><p>It's unclear whether each word is meant as an equivalence of the other two, but I will assume they are. In the new collection he says the outside "can be discerned in
"intransitive writing", which he says for Blanchot means "literary writing". Writing poetry and narrative can be defined as "something that happens when we respond to the outside", when the singular 'I' is displaced, as writing replaces the object with an image, as a portrait replaces the sitter. In the new collection he describes the process as "the perpetual passing of being into nothingness<i>" </i>and in<i> </i><i>The Dark Gaze</i>: "To write is to transform the instant into
an imaginary space, to pass from a time in which death could occur to an
endless interval of dying." If we still regard a work of literature is a product of mastery, this should challenge us, as should the recent proliferation of novels created by AI that have <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/ai-generated-books-force-amazon-to-cap-ebook-publications-to-3-per-day/" target="_blank">swamped the Amazon bookstore</a> as it dispenses with the encounter with the presence and biography of an author.<br /></p><p>On the side of the reader, we might see the effects of displacement in the focus in reviews on story, a stylistic <i>tour de force</i> and subject matter or, in literary criticism, on technical analysis and the tracing of an author's <i>oeuvre</i>. Nevertheless, the experience of something other than being in familiar time and space forms the cultural awe and reverence for books, but which in these displacements is immediately instrumentalised out of recognition; defining it <i>as</i> an experience is evidence enough of domestication. It is instead closer to a non-experience, and so the demand for it to mean something in the world, to be made real in some way; hence the vacillation between passion and ambivalence for books, more often than not patronising the act of reading as an indulgence, an escape, at best a tool with which to <i>tackle</i> current affairs. For some, however, a grave resonance remains: the eponymous character in Saul Bellow's novel <i>Mr Sammler's Planet, </i>who, like Blanchot in real life, survived a firing squad in the second world war, is captivated by Meister Eckhart: "Mr Sammler could not say that he literally believed what he was reading. He could, however, say that he cared to read nothing but this." Blanchot may provide understanding of such care as an experience of, as Hart writes, "the ceaseless oscillation of being and nonbeing", an awareness of "a neutral state that can only fascinate us and, in doing so, bind us to itself". <br /></p><p>Despite all this, Hart complains that Blanchot is "less than clear" on the definition of the outside, though "perhaps we should not expect someone who mainly writes literary columns in journals to supply rigorous answers". He must surely know already that Blanchot mainly wrote literary columns because the outside can only be approached indirectly, intransitively, often in a performative mode (the light, innocent Yes of writing), so the answers may be considered rigorous in respect of the outside.<br /></p><p>Hart also notes that "it is odd that many of his readers who work in colleges and universities have not sought clarification". Well, there is at least one book published in the same imprint whose title suggests otherwise. However, William Allen writes that "Blanchot never precisely defines what he means by the outside, because its status as the outside makes definition impossible", so perhaps this can be included under Hart's note. Nevertheless, the book does contain a description of how the experience of literature at least <i>raises</i> the question of the outside. <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUMTPMsuEsLAzZrcbc4IXmd_CqizUQaKgZ-mPiA1hWnbZY6sAUOEAv2ZqWb6MBKmyK24C2wdICC2JI1Pocm8BWf0yclkqHG1yhsDhf8ngcsa5jN2dE-ucDFwcIKAQD1m_-6rHlRFTUmwVCNdx3Ur90Y4BHx82bDOLdbZCMJ2YP8wAEMIatHG4g/s615/Allen_Outside_cover.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="615" data-original-width="420" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUMTPMsuEsLAzZrcbc4IXmd_CqizUQaKgZ-mPiA1hWnbZY6sAUOEAv2ZqWb6MBKmyK24C2wdICC2JI1Pocm8BWf0yclkqHG1yhsDhf8ngcsa5jN2dE-ucDFwcIKAQD1m_-6rHlRFTUmwVCNdx3Ur90Y4BHx82bDOLdbZCMJ2YP8wAEMIatHG4g/w274-h400/Allen_Outside_cover.jpg" width="274" /></a></div><p>While the book comprises close readings of Blanchot's novel <i>The Most-High </i>and<i> </i>the récit<i> The one who was standing apart from me</i>, I have to constrain my attention to the introduction in which Allen addresses Blanchot's image of the "two slopes" of literature found in the essay <i>Literature and the Right to Death</i> (an image and title that Allen says is also unclear). There is the slope familiar to us all with its uncomplicated, common sense representation of things in the world – the kind that "protests against revelation" as Blanchot puts it – and there is the other slope "by which things are separated from themselves and destroyed in order to be known, subjugated, communicated". In the hyperbolic terminology of the essay, there is the revelation of death in the enabling of things in the world to be communicated. Only it's a death that never quite occurs, as language never quite appears in itself nor disappears into its object, and in this impasse each slope is exposed to the other "without however converging on it, leading to an endless ambiguity about the presence of meaning"; we cannot locate meaning solely in language or in the world so there is an anxiety we overcome only in the violence of denial or by seeking sanctuary in the hypotheses of scholarship. </p><p>Allen provides an example of ambiguity in a bravura passage on the consequences of the slogan "Liberty or Death!". In pronouncing it, the revolutionary impresses us with their heroic stance, but also frightens us by placing themselves at a distance from everyday values. In doing so, death becomes a part of everyday life, "coextensive" with liberty: <br /></p><p></p><blockquote>If the claim initially appears as <i>all or nothing</i>, then it quickly transforms into <i>all and nothing</i>, insofar as both outcomes are the same at this extreme, and this leads to its further transformation as <i>all is nothing</i>. But...this is not nihilism, as the status of the two terms has changed utterly in being so removed from ordinary values. What is exposed is a netherworld beyond their simple alternation or negation, a world that presents itself absolutely and also removes itself leaving neither a presence nor an absence.</blockquote><p></p><p></p><p>I imagine we could apply the political "Liberty or Death!" to the literary "War on Cliché!", in which what we experience as a defamiliarising phrase liberating us from habit soon becomes a cliché itself deadening its impact, which thereby demands endless war and endless dying. Martin Amis' later writing became <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-authorisation-to-invent.html" target="_blank">obsessed by death cults</a> only because they revealed his own.<br /></p><p>If I have been distracted from what matters to me in reading, it may be in seeking an accommodation of exposure to this netherworld within a culture that recognises only power and control. This blog is a prime example.<br /></p><p></p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-31960225504599161012023-09-19T15:28:00.004+01:002023-09-19T15:48:15.483+01:00Further in the opposite direction<p></p><blockquote>Modernity is supposed to be the moment when religious claims and systems of authority reveal themselves to be human-all-too-human fictions that lack divine legitimation. Religion is supposed to <i>wither away</i>. But this itself...can be understood as a religious claim: the very groundlessness, the very contentlessness of the messianic call is what makes it religious. Modernity, on this account, might be understood as the fulfilment of messianic thinking. The relation to the divine can now be revealed in its contentlessness as an <i>empty transcendence</i>. And when that happens, a whole theological vocabulary puts itself out of use, ready for new appropriations outside traditional religious practice.</blockquote><p></p><p>This is from <a href="https://spurious.typepad.com/spurious/2023/08/the-opposite-direction-taubes-bernhard-and-the-gnostic-imaginary.html" target="_blank">The Opposite Direction: Taubes, Bernhard and the Gnostic Imaginary</a>, an exceptionally rich essay by Lars Iyer. </p><p>The title offers a marvellous advancement on my haphazard post on Bernhard, also entitled <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-opposite-direction.html" target="_blank">The opposite direction</a>, and another on Gnosticism called <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-withdrawal-of-novel.html" target="_blank">The withdrawal of the novel</a>, both of which can be found on this blog but also in my <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-opposite-direction-book.html" target="_blank">unfallen from no press freely downloadable epub or PDF</a> collection.</p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-64747192558614007412023-08-29T10:35:00.020+01:002023-09-01T18:01:28.624+01:00The disaster of writing: My Weil by Lars Iyer<p><span class="dcr-4hero5"><i>"</i></span><span class="a-text-bold">When a
plane crashes, a bomb explodes, a city floods or a pandemic begins,
Lucy Easthope's phone starts to ring" says the blurb to </span><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/When-Dust-Settles-Stories-Disaster/dp/1529358248" target="_blank">her recent book</a> subtitled <i class="dcr-4hero5">Stories of Love, Loss and Hope from an Expert in Disaster</i><span class="dcr-4hero5">, and goes on to report rapturous praise from critics and common readers alike, that it became a <i>Sunday Times </i>bestseller, a BBC Radio 4 <i>Book of the Week</i>, and was chosen as a book of the year by <i>The Telegraph</i> and <i>New Statesman.</i></span><span class="dcr-4hero5"> Disaster is good for business.</span></p><p><span class="dcr-4hero5">It's also good news for academic departments assailed by<i> reform</i> in the public sector, as studying disasters provides an ideal opportunity to supply <i>measurable outputs</i> demanded by university management. The journal <a href="https://jds.pennpress.org/home/" target="_blank">Disaster Studies</a> for example publishes papers "that examine how disasters are anticipated, experienced, governed, and understood". </span>The range of events listed suggests a disaster can be more than atom bombs and asteroids, leaving room for all kinds of
events requiring examination. <span class="dcr-4hero5">In Lars Iyer's latest novel, the Philosophy department of a Manchester university has been rebranded as <i>The Centre for Disaster Studies</i> to surf the neoliberal Tsunami. For its PhD students, this is fine. <br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXDBY0NI6Jy_ushyjOyXsIBydS62f2A3a532PQmMzYoLfq98XQEXhaeiRzqGSAOtTI7k6TRr7GxtnG22_kWuJR2Kh8_7D-Fu2KcfWpk3hduiRihlBL8I9NYKlVhwKNShSXLi2bFhnVE1LfESBHAhWrfMfzoptQW1WJLA8EoT_SYYuLo-75GO8F/s1280/Lars%20Iyer%20%E2%80%93%20My%20Weil%20front.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="932" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXDBY0NI6Jy_ushyjOyXsIBydS62f2A3a532PQmMzYoLfq98XQEXhaeiRzqGSAOtTI7k6TRr7GxtnG22_kWuJR2Kh8_7D-Fu2KcfWpk3hduiRihlBL8I9NYKlVhwKNShSXLi2bFhnVE1LfESBHAhWrfMfzoptQW1WJLA8EoT_SYYuLo-75GO8F/w291-h400/Lars%20Iyer%20%E2%80%93%20My%20Weil%20front.jpeg" width="291" /></a></div><p><span class="dcr-4hero5">The new title has the double advantage of more accurately describing philosophy not as a love of knowledge and the pursuit of wisdom but recognition that the stars have fallen (<a href="https://www.etymonline.com/word/Disaster" target="_blank">the etymology </a>of 'disaster'), and also of concealing the abyss between <i>Philosophy</i> and <i>Business Studies</i>,</span> the pseudo-academic discipline gradually replacing the Humanities<i>, </i>allowing the students to remain hidden within the system despite their opposition. Indeed, two of them are called Marcie and Valentine, hinting at a Gnostic hope of another world, a better world, an intellectual equivalent of Lucy Easthope's practical redemption. While their studies may lead nowhere but back into Manchester's destitute working-class districts, it is resistance to the demonic world embodied by Business Studies. They look at its students – keen, smartly dressed, actually writing their theses – and ask: "Where’s their doom? Where’s their crushedness? Their diseases of the soul? There doesn’t seem to be anything <i>wrong</i> with them." <br /></p><p></p><p>Readers of Lars Iyer's two previous novels <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-lawn-of-genre-wittgenstein-jr-by.html" target="_blank">Wittgenstein Jr</a> and <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2019/12/nietzsche-and-burbs-by-lars-iyer.html" target="_blank">Nietzsche and the Burbs</a> will relish the familiar chorused voice of hyperbole as the students seek to distinguish their studies from the banality of their everyday lives, as well as recognise the passive sentences describing the students' location – <i>The Ees. A clearing.</i> <i>A long-sunken basin. Water, ankle deep. </i>– situating the students as italicised observers of a world indifferent to their hysterics. The Ees is a swampy wasteland in the city used as a dump by locals but has a mystical aura for the students: "You come to the Ees to lose yourself. To be forgotten." <br /></p><p>Also as in the previous two novels, an intellectual doppelgänger of a long dead philosopher enters to shake things up. In<i> </i>this case it's a new student calling herself Simone Weil, a convert to Christianity, challenging the students' incipient paganism. "Isn't God dead?" the students ask, and she says, yes, the "God of the philosophers is dead". Instead, God withdrew from the world in order to create it and evil, the very thing that appears to prove his non-existence, is "the very thing that reveals him in his truth". God's goodness shows himself through what we do, so rather than reject the world, we should seek to do good in the world, as she does by giving money to the homeless, speaking
calmly to
the madman on the bus, and praying for the addicts and the drunks. </p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4-T3zTBuFSZKNRDGkyadEzdaljkKj-shjKO233iWfMMfYL5_Xlx_RZiG1N4jmM_Vqh3zv5A3B4TNtaZvWeBqV2G2LMTQ-4cXyrlRuMRj9cEdkMe5ugGqQw2yv3yRDRA_eZUP6nkW6KWnZbdtOrom7jliTISU3vlSKpMpGhrraHyfZqaVVj0Jz/s1280/Wittgenstein%20Duck%20Rabbit.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="845" data-original-width="1280" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4-T3zTBuFSZKNRDGkyadEzdaljkKj-shjKO233iWfMMfYL5_Xlx_RZiG1N4jmM_Vqh3zv5A3B4TNtaZvWeBqV2G2LMTQ-4cXyrlRuMRj9cEdkMe5ugGqQw2yv3yRDRA_eZUP6nkW6KWnZbdtOrom7jliTISU3vlSKpMpGhrraHyfZqaVVj0Jz/s320/Wittgenstein%20Duck%20Rabbit.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Such selflessness, however, a giving oneself over to something unknown, something outside, is also the promise of the Ees. In this way the novel appears to set up a debate about the best way to deal with what's missing from our lives and from the world – indulgent escape or self-sacrifice? – and it would have taken place if <i>My Weil</i> was not itself subject to disaster. What's missing from our lives and the world is precisely what the novel as a genre seeks to provide: a space filled with presence that is also, like a literary equivalent of Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit illusion, saturated in absence. We cannot see one without the other. The anxiety this provokes is everywhere in novels, the blurbs of novels and the review pages promising all kinds of events ("<a href="https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=%22an+act+of+shocking+violence%22" target="_blank">an act of shocking violence</a>") and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/24/no-one-dies-yet-by-kobby-ben-ben-review-a-bold-and-provocative-debut-from-ghana" target="_blank">special information</a> contained within a novel to mitigate absence, which must go without saying. </p><p>For James Joyce, said Beckett, "there was no difference between the fall of a bomb and the fall of a leaf”. For us, too, in reading. The intensity of <i>My Weil</i>'s bombing campaign of ideas and expression is matched only by its leaf-like lightness, the futility of which we cannot ignore even as we <i>lose ourselves</i> in its comedy. The effect is to open a space, a clearing like the Ees, for the presence of the black and empty sky to be raised in a novel. </p><p>The word 'clearing' has to be noted as an allusion to the translation of <i>Lichtung</i>, the word <a href="https://grattoncourses.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/22the-end-of-philosophy-and-the-task-of-thinking22.pdf" target="_blank">used by Heidegger</a> as he sought to return philosophy to its beginnings in ancient Greece. It is in those beginnings, however, that he also saw the end of philosophy as the sciences that developed "within the field that philosophy opened up" turned philosophy into "the empirical science of man" governed by systems of method, what he calls cybernetics:</p><p></p><blockquote>This science corresponds to the determination of man as an acting social being. For it is the theory of the regulation of the possible planning and arrangement of human labor. Cybernetics transforms language into an exchange of news. The arts become regulated-regulating instruments of information.</blockquote><p></p><p>It has led to a culture in which its "technological-scientific-industrial character" has become "the sole criterion of man's world sojourn". A clearing for such a return would be the equivalent of a dead end of a forest
path apparently leading nowhere that opens into the light where trees have been removed. But, Heidegger says,
"philosophy knows nothing of the clearing", hence his turn towards poetry as the potential for such light.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMazlKZ-ABwyU0l51QeYGxiaUAGmBbdXy_zqSE5KIEkB5LquCAidFthTf3eN2ogoOcPZolZOnoq9YQa6asEnCqnROfEaLiWerdM0BMLlGNd9DOAXY0_x-A4mFBKV3wl9byC-wu0t6kvz10-7qFx8njcc5OlMogmAI6AuNeqbY-QswZjsxW-2s6/s500/Blanchot%20Writing%20of%20the%20Disaster%20cover.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="329" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMazlKZ-ABwyU0l51QeYGxiaUAGmBbdXy_zqSE5KIEkB5LquCAidFthTf3eN2ogoOcPZolZOnoq9YQa6asEnCqnROfEaLiWerdM0BMLlGNd9DOAXY0_x-A4mFBKV3wl9byC-wu0t6kvz10-7qFx8njcc5OlMogmAI6AuNeqbY-QswZjsxW-2s6/s320/Blanchot%20Writing%20of%20the%20Disaster%20cover.jpg" width="211" /></a></div><p>We may see here discussion of <i>the death of the novel</i> in a similar context rather than one of quality and cultural relevance, as the contemporary literary
novel has little more to offer than an exchange of news by other means, while the popular genres offer a happy escape into the repetition of storytelling. <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20end%20of%20literature" target="_blank">The end of literature</a> follows the end of philosophy as it is usurped by the <i>unendlicher Verkehr</i> of information. </p><p>In a dark night in the Ees, Valentine announces that "Only French prose-poetry philosophy can save us now" and so they read aloud from Blanchot's <i>The Writing of the Disaster</i>, a book whose own blurb sells it relevance to modern literature "haunted by world wars, concentration camps, [and] Hiroshima", the familiar examples of disaster, and that <a href="https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-blanchot-ecology-and-contemporary-fiction-hb.html" target="_blank">a new academic study</a> applies to a reading of recent novels because in them "an understanding of critical
events – death, ecological catastrophe, pandemics – is possible", but what the students read suggests something else entirely:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>Between the disaster and the other there would be the<br />contact, the disjunction of absent meaning—friendship.</i> <br /><br />Marcie, reading (just able to make out the words): </blockquote><p></p><p></p><i></i><blockquote><i>It is in friendship that I can respond . . . a friendship<br />un . . . un . . . shared . . . without reciprocity . . . friendship<br />for that which has passed leaving no trace . . .<br /><br /></i>The relation to the other is disastrous: that’s what this book argues,<br />Ismail says. It’s a break with what we know. With earthly order.<br />Like Simone . . . , I say.<br />Is Simone disastrous? we wonder.<br />She <i>dresses</i> disastrously, Gita says. Those nun-shoes . . .</blockquote><p>The novel is in this sense the disaster for us, as Simone is for the group, and as Wittgenstein and Nietzsche were before, and as is indeed the bathos of Gita's remark; for a brief time there is a loosening of the ties that bind us not only to the earthly order and that of the stars, the cosmic order, but also to the order of philosophy and literature. But what follows? The lost soul of the group, Johnny, seeks to push friendship into something more with Gita, which she says is not a wise idea. "Why not? I say. Why—<i>really</i>—not? Don’t you see—this might be a chance. A chance for what? Gita asks."<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>For the same not to be the same, I say. For one day not to follow another. For the inevitable not to be inevitable. For cog not to be locked into cog . . . Wouldn’t you like to think that we’re on the brink of something? That something’s about to happen?</blockquote><p>A phone, ringing.<br /></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-32235074090406299062023-07-23T15:17:00.014+01:002023-11-21T11:02:58.750+00:00A loss of problems<p>Martin Amis' novels were among those I read when I began reading novels – one read what was being talked about on television and in newspapers. <i>Money</i> was the first quickly followed by each and every one that preceded it, including the journalism in <i>The Moronic Inferno</i>, which I may have read twice, and<i> London Fields</i> in the year it was published. This was when I realised that reading Amis had been time well spent; time that from then on I would no longer waste. This was forgotten and reaffirmed several years later when I borrowed copies of <i>The Information</i> and <i>Experience</i>, and it was only out of duty that I read <i>The Zone of Interest</i> <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-authorisation-to-invent.html" target="_blank">when I wrote something</a> about Claude Lanzmann's <i>Shoah</i>. <br /></p><p>The same can be said of the novels of Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, and JG Ballard, the big names of Britain’s literary scene in the 1980s and 90s, and Philip Roth and John Updike of the USA’s (the exception was Saul Bellow). Why did I feel mild indifference reading their novels compared to the entirely different feeling I got reading various European novels (and Saul Bellow)? To my surprise, the names of <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/search?q=Amis" target="_blank">Amis</a>, <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/search?q=McEwan" target="_blank">McEwan</a> and <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/search?q=ballard" target="_blank">Ballard</a> have appeared several times on this blog over the years, often as I seek an answer to this question. The news of Amis’ death brought those early days back to me and now, with the death of Milan Kundera whose <i>Unbearable Lightness of Being</i> was the <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2006/09/voice-comes-to-one-in-dark.html" target="_blank">catalyst of recognition</a>, I am thinking about it again. </p><p>I read various postmortem articles invariably focusing on Amis' style, many of which <a href="https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/body-and-soul" target="_blank">Jack Arden says in an excellent piece</a> create "the impression that style was also more than this – something supra-personal”. I was certainly seduced by Amis’ style in <i>Money</i> – I remember the effect of reading the verb "sharking" on the first page (coincident no doubt with the "Martian" poetry I was reading at the time) – but evidently there wasn’t, for me, much more than style, and while I could assume this was because, <a href="https://unherd.com/2023/05/the-liberal-complacency-of-martin-amis/" target="_blank">as Terry Eagleton says</a>, Amis "was the great poet of the postmodern metropolis", subject matter that sparks nothing in me, one could also say Proust was a great poet of the modern metropolis (in <i>Sodom and Gomorrah</i> at least), and <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2015/02/albertine-asleep_21.html" target="_blank">my discovery of Proust</a> never became a waste of time. Eagleton’s article would also suggest my lack of interest in their novels follows distaste for the liberal politics of "the Amis group" – to which he adds Christopher Hitchens, James Fenton and Clive James – except the writers whose work excited me did not do so for political reasons; Saul Bellow’s reactionary tendencies being evidence of that. But it’s here that Eagleton gets closer to the difference when he describes the rightward trajectory of the group: Hitchens, for example, moved from being a "practising Trotskyist at Oxford" to "dining with the architects of Western butchery in Iraq". But, he says, "the relation between politics and letters is more complex than that, as a glance at the great modernist writers would suggest":</p><blockquote>Joseph Conrad was a deep-dyed conservative and misogynist with a virulent hatred of the political Left. Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis supported the fascist cause, while W.B. Yeats, a champion of plans to stop the poor from breeding, flirted with fascism as well. D.H. Lawrence was racist, sexist, homophobic and antisemitic, while T.S. Eliot was a high Tory who championed a quasi-fascistic French movement. Yet all of these figures were radicals — radicals of the Right rather than the Left — and the fineness of their work is related to the depth and breadth of their challenge to a liberal democracy in profound crisis. Besides, there were plenty of modernist experiments on the political Left as well.
<br /><br /><b>Almost all of these writers thought deeply about politics, philosophy and the shape of a whole civilisation</b>, which is hardly true of Clive James. <b>Some of them were powerful visionaries</b>, which is not quite how one would describe Julian Barnes or Ian McEwan. This is one reason why their work, taken as a whole, has never been equalled in the century or so which has passed since it appeared, and certainly not by the Amis group.</blockquote><p>While I would dispute that the work of "the great modernist writers" has not been equalled, it's understandable that it appears this way, especially if one's focus is on the Anglophone sphere, as thinking deeply here has been replaced by a condition <a href="https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Zettel#450" target="_blank">Wittgenstein defined</a> in his own time:</p><p></p><blockquote>Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called “loss of problems”. Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world becomes broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial. (Translated by GEM Anscombe)<br /></blockquote><p></p><p>One can discern this condition across the entirety of <a href="https://twitter.com/jewdas/status/1684690653798608896" target="_blank">Britain's public discourse</a>. Behold in awe and reverence the deep thought underwriting <a href="https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1401239365678997506" target="_blank">this insight</a> from an honorary member of the Amis group:<br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNqVZXHnBlsth6nSCXuCgTc6yA_Xihd6c2hh3TRvO_ttF443cb_gaxPsm0U5UOEYtcxMFaDURQyxe2ULVNWLx0DZG4Bk0DwmW_c7Lrd7yqUNYmlCXvhxg-AJSFCLJijF6-7P54MB7o9hm_CCJzLqgnhLQ7nxFtkrmkg5VkOYJHb_Hf0tnC-9km/s1336/Dawkins%20Kafka%20Tweet.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="478" data-original-width="1336" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNqVZXHnBlsth6nSCXuCgTc6yA_Xihd6c2hh3TRvO_ttF443cb_gaxPsm0U5UOEYtcxMFaDURQyxe2ULVNWLx0DZG4Bk0DwmW_c7Lrd7yqUNYmlCXvhxg-AJSFCLJijF6-7P54MB7o9hm_CCJzLqgnhLQ7nxFtkrmkg5VkOYJHb_Hf0tnC-9km/w640-h229/Dawkins%20Kafka%20Tweet.png" width="640" /></a></div><p>Amis himself said he never finished either one of Kafka's novels, but then again neither did Kafka. Very witty, of course, and characteristic: George Steiner <a href="https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/9986eda5fbae472faf94587a0615116e" target="_blank">once said</a> an Englishman's corner-of-the-mouth "<i>come off it</i>" would have stopped Michaelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel and Beethoven composing the Fifth Symphony. Kafka's "failure" is thereby judged in the context of literary mastery rather than in relation to anything larger; Walter Benjamin, for example, said "it is the fact that his books are incomplete which shows the true working of grace in his writings". </p><p>One may object and point out the novels of Amis and McEwan address important
issues, with former's books about terrorism, Stalin's Gulag and the
Shoah (although curiously not one about <a href="https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/" target="_blank">crimes closer to home</a>), and
the latter's <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-criticism-of-lessons-lessons-of.html" target="_blank">narrativised punditry</a> drawing attention from <a href="https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/july-2023/the-elegant-extremist/" target="_blank">literary</a> <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/the-weekend-essay/2023/06/restless-storyteller-essay" target="_blank">journalists</a> like never before; hardly shallow and trivial. Except the larger questions have been settled, as the Pope of
scientism and Cardinal Hitchens insist, which leaves the novel seeking relevance in terms of a public profile, in an absurd <i>war on cliché</i> – the eternal return of a goldfish in its bowl – and in ambulance-chasing pseudo-journalism.</p><p>One might characterise the form of the novel as a search for an authority for itself, with genre providing prefab solutions, so a focus on parochial animations is an inevitable development of its Humanism; it demands constant movement to keep up with the times. But the shock of Martin Amis' death should remind us of the thin ice upon which such movement proceeds. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Information_(novel)#Themes" target="_blank">Amis described</a> the impulse behind his 1995 novel <i>The Information</i> as "an hysterical overreaction to the certain knowledge that you're going to die" and Julian Barnes, said to be the Gwyn Barry of that novel, <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2008/03/in-times-john-carey-reports-on-julian.html" target="_blank">wrote a book</a> on the same knowledge. The horror of the self before the ultimate problem is an intensification of the writer's anxiety before the blank page, hence the blossoming of autofiction in the confluence of both. </p><p>The problem of the recognition of the death for writers was addressed by Kierkegaard in his 1848 book <a href="http://www.sorenkierkegaard.org/book-on-adler.html" target="_blank">On Authority and Revelation</a>, an appropriate title given the expressed impulse and subject of those two books:<br /></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Since our age … is supposed to be an age of movement, it then is not unlikely that many people's lives go on in such a way that they have premises for living but do not arrive at any conclusion – just like the age, which is an age of movement that has set the premises in motion but is also an age of movement that has not come to the conclusion. The lives of such people go on until death comes and puts an end to life, yet without, in the sense of a conclusion, bringing the end with it. [Translated by Hong and Hong]</p></blockquote><p>The revelation of death provides authority from the outside for the lack of ultimate meaning in one's life. <br /></p><blockquote><p>Such a person can, in proportion to his gifts...go on and become an author, according to his opinion of it. But this opinion is an illusion. For that matter, he may...possess extraordinary talents, exceptional knowledge, but he is not an author, even though he produces. His writing will be just like his life, material; perhaps this material will be worth its weight in gold, but it is only material. ... No, although he writes, he is not essentially an author; he can write the first part, but he cannot write the second part; or, lest there be misunderstanding, he can indeed write the first and second parts, but then he cannot write the third part – the last part he cannot write. </p></blockquote><p>What then is to be done to complete a work? <br /></p><blockquote><p>In order to find the conclusion, it is first and foremost necessary to perceive very vividly that it is lacking and thereby in turn very vividly to miss it. </p></blockquote><p>No doubt giving up on Kafka's novels is in keeping with what one aspect of what their incompletion reveals, but it also suggests an unwillingness to face the other because of what it would mean for authoring novels, and perhaps a wish for novels to face the other is why I turned away from the Amis group and why, for me at least, Kafka's fragments remain a living presence despite <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2022/09/ultimate-things-aphorisms-of-franz-kafka.html" target="_blank">the increasing obscurity of his problems</a>.<br /></p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-90669305363128853672023-07-09T12:52:00.022+01:002023-07-25T11:23:21.317+01:00The end of something<p>Thirteen years ago I posted <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2010/10/beginning-of-something.html" target="_blank">The beginning of something</a> to mark the fifteenth anniversary of <i>Spike Magazine</i> (not to be confused with <i>Spiked Online</i>), which I helped to found when the world wide web was forming, and to comment on the direction online literary culture had taken. By that point, the magazine was moribund and I was writing for (the unfortunately named) <i>Ready Steady Book</i>, which has become worse than moribund. There is no significance in the curious fact that both editors now work in businesses that specialise in underwater activities and that I used to work in one, but I would like to think there is.<br /></p><p>When I read <i>Ulysses</i> for the first time, I made a list of words Joyce uses that were also used to name British submarines in the first half of the 20th century: <i>Stoic, Spartan, Sybil, Selene</i>. I found forty-five more. As these names indicate, ancient Greek and Roman culture was very familiar to the officer class of the empire and the names suggest a wishful continuity with mythical and martial traditions. Another submarine was called <i>Telemachus</i>, a word that doesn't feature in Joyce's novel despite its title. Officers would have pronounced it <i>Tell-em-ackus</i>, while those on the lower decks pronounced it <i>Telly-mackus. </i>Nowadays, the officers are likely to be more familiar with another Homer.<br /></p><p></p><p>If such rambling is leading anywhere, it is to note the end of something. Not online literary magazines but their potential as an alternative to corporate literary coverage, as resistance to a tradition of consumerism, gossip, aesthetics and neutralisation. This may explain why they become moribund and those that remain lack any apparent vision or purpose, becoming landfills of reviews, essays, interviews, poetry and fiction "without truth or necessity", the words Blanchot used in a letter to Sartre quoted in my original post.</p><p></p><p><a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2015/02/a-blog-comes-to-one-in-dark_21.html" target="_blank">In the past, I have argued</a> that it was because the form has been usurped by the same professional managerial class that took over British politics and media circa 1997. But that may be only half the story, as the form does not lend itself to a sustained approach to the unique space of writing. That is, the distinction we recognise, appear to know instinctively, between the everyday and literature, between criticism and its object, and yet which endures as a oracular presence we habitually avoid. Indeed, the culture demands that we avoid it despite relying on its aura. Hence my call for the solitary mutiny of blog writing. It's<span class="module--definitions__singular"> why I insist on continuing in this damned wilderness. But even book-reviewing blogs tend toward the same inherited format and clichés. With no expectation at all, I suggest adapting Lars Iyer's <a href="https://spurious.typepad.com/spurious/2006/09/dogma.html" target="_blank">Dogma rules</a> for academic papers, as set out later in <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2012/03/despair-all-you-can-its-mistake-not-to.html" target="_blank">the novel with the same title</a>. So, Review Dogma:</span></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span class="module--definitions__singular">No character names</span></li><li><span class="module--definitions__singular">No plot summaries</span></li><li><span class="module--definitions__singular">No quotations<br /></span></li><li><span class="module--definitions__singular">No genre labels</span></li><li><span class="module--definitions__singular">No reference to <i>isms</i></span></li><li><span class="module--definitions__singular">No comparisons </span></li><li><span class="module--definitions__singular">No moralising</span></li><li><span class="module--definitions__singular"><a href="https://www.thereadingexperience.net/tre/2021/07/personally.html" target="_blank">Contra Dan Green</a>, no dispassionate analysis<br /></span></li><li><span class="module--definitions__singular">No keeping to at least one of these rules <br /></span></li></ul><p></p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-68323331241627838952023-06-27T11:33:00.005+01:002023-06-28T11:52:24.109+01:00This kingdom by the sea<p></p><blockquote>Published in 1912, it’s about the fall of the repressed writer Gustav
von Aschenbach, when his supposedly objective appreciation of a young
boy’s beauty becomes sexual obsession. <br /></blockquote><p></p><p>This is how BBC Radio 4's <i>In Our Time</i> sets up <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001mt6l" target="_blank">a discussion of Thomas Mann's <i>Death in Venice</i></a> among three academics and Melvyn Bragg. </p><p></p><blockquote>It explores the link between creativity and self-destruction, and by the
end Aschenbach’s humiliation is complete, dying on a deckchair in the
act of ogling. </blockquote><p></p><p>Soon after the introduction, Karolina Watroba goes to the heart of why the novel (I suggest we stop using "novella") is the subject of a prominent British arts programme when she says that readers find the novel "very disturbing" because the narration goes from describing Tadzio's body in minute detail to a "very high abstract theoretical level of ideas", isolating the boy from his surroundings and transforming him into an object. It's a double whammy: British prurience channelled through a suspicion of intellectuals. </p><p>Getting closer to the form of the novel, Sean Williams says it addresses "a long-standing problem in art" about how much the artist needs to suppress in order to be productive, especially if the desires involved are morally questionable, and how much they live out these desires in order to flourish as a person, which echoes Erich Heller's 1958 <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thomas-Mann-Ironic-Erich-Heller/dp/0521280222" target="_blank">book on Mann</a> in which he summarises the subject as "the war between form and chaos, serenity of mind and consuming passion". </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnFFHOgTB040CIBItXAU1VRRDGsU_a6bicsfHSWoPcUXNkAoT8Rx00ihDb5N5XgXsVwKlfMjy38YkJQp6Usp9IGfwOxfKbF7pcQDZXB1_TgAwsKI-5p8_LA7zbe-6ryC4jp63U5IKjvPRjiyIKtJoIjIvJ4ljm7BcpLLsq6qzpoJi3TFyie-Bk/s1280/BrightonBeach_10122020_a%20(1).jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1112" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnFFHOgTB040CIBItXAU1VRRDGsU_a6bicsfHSWoPcUXNkAoT8Rx00ihDb5N5XgXsVwKlfMjy38YkJQp6Usp9IGfwOxfKbF7pcQDZXB1_TgAwsKI-5p8_LA7zbe-6ryC4jp63U5IKjvPRjiyIKtJoIjIvJ4ljm7BcpLLsq6qzpoJi3TFyie-Bk/w556-h640/BrightonBeach_10122020_a%20(1).jpeg" width="556" /></a></div><p>There's nothing that isn't insightful, informative and stimulating in the discussion, and yet this disturbance in the reader remains unexamined once it has been used to generate interest. As I listened, I wondered if this apocryphal reader's hand-wringing about Aschenbach's behaviour and intellectual justification for that behaviour, and thereby suspicions about the private life of the author, is a projection of the reader's concern for their own behaviour <i>as</i> a reader, which is, as Bragg says of the novel, "greatly about the gaze, the look". </p><p>The pleasure of reading novels is generally considered a form of escapism, but publically justified as a means of gaining knowledge, appreciating aesthetic form and developing empathy for other people, otherwise unattainable outside of the work, whether it is a social-realist novel about three generations of Polish miners or philosophical musings generated by a Polish minor. If it has to be justified, it's because it's also a beach holiday in which one lounges between the form of the land and the formlessness of the sea, gazing through mirrored sunglasses, warmed by a sun that burns others, and in control, a witness and judge without consequence. <br /></p><p>So imagine a novel in which questions of knowledge, aesthetic form and empathy are overt features and necessary to the plot. What might it look like? <i>Death in Venice</i> of course, as the form is foregrounded in contrast to its content, not to mention its setting in a literal holiday and literal beach. In the story itself, there's the carefully repressed desire for a certain kind of knowledge, displaced by its mitigation in Platonic appreciation, while others are in the form: the <i>In Our Time</i> discussion remarks on the comparatively excessive description of physical attributes in what Erica Wickerson calls "an incredibly cinematic text", both of which imply voyeurism, emphasised by the fact that Tadzio is not given a voice in the novel, which also draws attention to its want of empathy in (Wickerson again) its "manipulated narrative perspective". If all narrative is manipulation, its perspective is rarely so blatant. It's blatant in Nabokov's <i>Lolita</i> and Nicholson Baker's <i>The Fermata</i>, both comparable to <i>Death in Venice</i> in this and other, fairly obvious ways. What disturbs the reader in <i>Death in Venice</i> in particular is that they become Aschenbach's double, a position we project onto Mann; that we share a fascination for what is beyond us. <br /></p><p>The war Erich Heller refers to above takes place, he says, "with Death presiding over it as judge and ultimate conqueror", and Karolina Watroba points out that, if you include the title, <i>Death in Venice</i> begins and ends with the same word. She also points out that the original German adjective for the "abandoned" camera that sits on the shoreline as Aschenbach dies in his beach chair is "herrenlos", which she says means "without master" and is used by Mann to move away from subjectivity to objectivity. I wonder then if "unmanned" may be a more appropriate translation. Perhaps this is what <i>losing oneself</i> in a work means; the wish for an end, to go beyond the end. <br /></p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-13449308050573830382023-06-18T19:56:00.008+01:002023-06-18T20:10:34.753+01:00Wall by Jen Craig<p></p><blockquote><p>“This novel gives the reader one of the best depictions of thinking in fiction that I have read in a long time” – <a href="https://www.thevisionarycompany.net/blog/second-hand-versions-of-me-a-review-of-jen-craigs-wall-2023" target="_blank">Talking Big</a></p><p>"... combines exactitude and vagueness, immediacy and distance, to approximate how scatty, worm-like human thought might be represented on the page" – <a href="https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/culture/books/2023/06/30/wall" target="_blank">The Saturday Paper</a> <br /></p><p>“the skeletal frames of [Craig’s] narrative plots are barely visible beneath the roving stream of consciousness that encases them” – <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/hoard-borczyk-craig/" target="_blank">Sydney Review of Books</a><br /></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote>"Craig’s work constructs an idiosyncratic monologue …. that traces the thoughts of a London-based artist whose father, a hoarder, has died in Sydney" – <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/exploring-the-borderlands-between-art-and-life-and-a-story-of-stalking-20230609-p5dfg2.html" target="_blank">Sydney Morning Herald</a><br /></blockquote><p><br />Such appreciations of Jen Craig's third novel testify to a distinctive remove from the default facility of the anglophone novel, with an incremental intensification of the narrative form taken in <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2015/05/panthers-and-museum-of-fire-by-jen-craig.html" target="_blank"><i>Since the Accident</i> and <i>Panthers and the Museum of Fire</i></a>. However, I'm doubtful of the reviews' characterisation of <i>Wall</i> as a relocation of thought from mind to page, not only because the novel is presented as a letter, but also because it ignores the tension generated by inheritance that constitutes the novel in its basic plot content: between daughter and parents, anorexia and hoarding, the artist and the art world, and its form: the inheritance from literature, in which thought is already writing. <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaBszdOeJ1ocUsfnYMaTiLbS4XetQG9DctFVAAaXoBN9y3aPz_cQbBw9dtmXfXnDE-EZ8y0g0gt6SF1oTmXfwFkaehiU4-Da7hy-2QklNVvzarOXhcffNUtUaTKrTKHfDAtfl7jRTrB-QJiqjHk8w6ZtPG7DQdmhIFS5qO1d88Osj7olIMuQ/s450/Jen%20Craig%20Wall.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="295" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaBszdOeJ1ocUsfnYMaTiLbS4XetQG9DctFVAAaXoBN9y3aPz_cQbBw9dtmXfXnDE-EZ8y0g0gt6SF1oTmXfwFkaehiU4-Da7hy-2QklNVvzarOXhcffNUtUaTKrTKHfDAtfl7jRTrB-QJiqjHk8w6ZtPG7DQdmhIFS5qO1d88Osj7olIMuQ/s320/Jen%20Craig%20Wall.jpg" width="210" /></a></div><p>The reviews also testify to their own concern for inheritance. While the foreground purpose of comparing Jen Craig's prose style to that of David Foster Wallace, Henry James, Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, Gerald Murnane, László Krasznahorkai, Jon Fosse and Mathias Énard and, most commonly, WG Sebald, who <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20050907113440/http://www.inwriting.org/weblog/archives/000160.html" target="_blank">voiced his own anxiety</a> about literary inheritance, is to situate an author in a market bustling with reading choices, the background noise, made clear in the excess of the list, is anxiety about the value and meaning of art <i>going forward</i>, perhaps in the hope that the future of the novel lies in its past. It's no coincidence that a similar anxiety generates the narration of <i>Wall. </i>The purpose of the letter is to announce that its writer, an installation artist, has given up on making a version of Song Dong's installation (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Not" target="_blank">about hoarding</a>) which had promised art-world success and thereby relief from the impossibility of completing an original installation (about anorexia) in recognition that, rather than in opposition, one is the correlate of the other. Without explicit awareness, we realise we are reading in a space outside of such possibility and impossibility; a space set aside from the ambition and despair, from success and failure, from value and meaning, from <i>going forward</i>; a space often shared by Thomas Bernhard's narrators, such as the two brothers in <i>On the Ortler</i>, recently translated in <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/R/bo184789630.html" target="_blank">The Rest is Slander</a>, which also takes the form of a letter. While the names listed are valid comparisons, this may be <i>Wall</i>'s most significant inheritance, one in which the will contains the unthinkable.<br /></p><p></p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-4582332695016052272023-05-15T13:39:00.007+01:002023-06-20T11:30:28.830+01:00Literature likes to hide<p>Last December I was fortunate enough to borrow a copy of <a href="https://archive.org/details/unmediatedvision00hart" target="_blank">The Unmediated Vision</a>, Geoffrey Hartman's first book, published in 1954. It is difficult to find a copy now but you can download a digital version of the book via the link. The opening chapter is a 50-page study of "Tintern Abbey" in the context of Wordsworth's work as a whole, focusing on the comparative simplicity of its language and imagery, and the problem of the agency of poet's imagination in the presence of the trees, rocks, rivers and waterfalls of the Wye Valley. He says Wordsworth strove "toward the expression of a mystic feeling...that no amount of thought can explain, and no feature of these objects considered in themselves can justify".</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCT1v8_3UW3J_M3DzAg4mh7nRcqgXzm8gyl7-rWlXzpG-rRlNKNClMMOYZHor09kb5g1XWwh8PqBUDLxKDC4pJ-1Sg_2OFVnAGlViZ_S47Hg5cZO9HGF7zmMzl14cx8vOIcmkhp6xkVQVsAms1-jbEgyJlSSiUQscoLMqUO9t0e-TpIdokrg/s470/Geoffrey%20Hartman%20%E2%80%93%20The%20Unmediated%20Vision.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="470" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCT1v8_3UW3J_M3DzAg4mh7nRcqgXzm8gyl7-rWlXzpG-rRlNKNClMMOYZHor09kb5g1XWwh8PqBUDLxKDC4pJ-1Sg_2OFVnAGlViZ_S47Hg5cZO9HGF7zmMzl14cx8vOIcmkhp6xkVQVsAms1-jbEgyJlSSiUQscoLMqUO9t0e-TpIdokrg/s320/Geoffrey%20Hartman%20%E2%80%93%20The%20Unmediated%20Vision.jpg" width="204" /></a></div><p>I was very moved by the essay, not least because, in addition to a close reading of the poetry, Hartman is deeply aware of the philosophical and cosmological tradition in which the poet worked. I realised that Nature as it was experienced in the time of the Romantics has certain parallels to my experience of literature in this unnamable time: the apprehension of something that is intimately our own and yet from which we are set apart. "The general body of Wordsworth's imagery" Hartman summarises "may be related to the idea of an inland ocean partially ebbed from the face of the earth, but visible in the distance, and audible everywhere—even to the top of the mountains." <br /></p><p>What do we see and hear from the literature of our time? Everything, it seems, but a sense of that which enables and that which impends. Or should that be the <i>literary criticism</i> of our time?<br /></p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-36307497354441339982023-04-20T11:31:00.019+01:002023-06-22T11:20:34.687+01:00Atheism of the novel"Here it comes: the information dumping..."<p>From section 237, page 185 of Ellis Sharp's <a href="https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Month-of-the-Drowned-Dog-by-Ellis-Sharp/9781838489878" target="_blank">latest novel</a>, the part that is commentary on his attempt to write a commercially successful novel emulating "the style that <i>The Guardian</i> liked and promoted": <br /></p><p></p><blockquote>The narrator is a young woman, a publicist for a London publishing house. Her name is Jane Tain. She is trying to solve the mystery of her father's death. In the course of achieving her goal she falls in love and finds happiness which had eluded her father. The story ends on an uplifting note. The writer imagined seeing it in paperback, with a bright cheerful cover and a multiplicity of praise from the reviewers of the corporate press. [...] The novel was called <i>The Professor's Wife</i>.<br /></blockquote><br /><p></p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-3moE4csFjnRNB-592bqeJDBV2zWBVrpr6yE-htJCDrOcwKU5az22Rpm5rCRGEt7pnzllBNi2GmwdXcgbQV4gxFDQRmcpam2irdp4cgEOMbl8YnWinTfmlhaFRNa91aIRis9CkG45I0yq87z4JLf9n1h18zPRERTJUQ26cA8Qh5hHNaqteQ/s1524/Ellis%20Sharp%20MoDD.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1524" data-original-width="1000" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-3moE4csFjnRNB-592bqeJDBV2zWBVrpr6yE-htJCDrOcwKU5az22Rpm5rCRGEt7pnzllBNi2GmwdXcgbQV4gxFDQRmcpam2irdp4cgEOMbl8YnWinTfmlhaFRNa91aIRis9CkG45I0yq87z4JLf9n1h18zPRERTJUQ26cA8Qh5hHNaqteQ/w263-h400/Ellis%20Sharp%20MoDD.jpg" width="263" /></a></div><p>And this is the novel we read when not interrupted by the writer's contempt for the "dull, attention seeking prose", for the back stories and the layers of characterisation he has written, for what he feels is the dishonesty of the whole enterprise. He picks up another novel, Peter Handke's <i>The Afternoon of a Writer,</i> which <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2011/05/three-steps-not-beyond-peter-handkes_25.html" target="_blank">he'd seen recommended</a> online, and discovers this is the kind of prose he wishes to read: "It has honesty." But rather than destroy <i>The Professor's Wife</i> completely, he disfigures its sentences. </p><p></p><blockquote><p>The car drove past and [deleted].<br />My heart beat wildly at what I'd just witnessed. Was this [deleted].</p><p></p></blockquote><p>Curiously, in spite the writer's vandalism, we follow Jane Tain's quest with interest, relishing along the way her caricatures of the contemporary literary scene: the zombie series author pandering to an audience of "fifteen-year-olds with spots", the literary <i>enfant terrible</i> "McCartney" who combines "experimental physics and Joyce's modernism" and the columnist Bryony Flappe whose fans are "either ardent young fogeys in tweeds, with a penchant for luminous yellow ties, or elderly, angry men with florid cheeks and check shirts". The missing words not only fail to get in the way but somehow enhance our anticipation of a revelation, thus reviving the drowned dog of the title. As Jane points out when a friend fails to notice a discrepancy in the
evidence of her father's final journey: "It's the dog," I said. "The dog
that didn't bark in the night, or however it goes. Look at what <i>isn't there</i>." </p><p>Does this mean that, despite the writer's contempt for his efforts and horror at what gets celebrated around the country, even the most cynical, button-pressing novel partakes of something that always <i>isn't there</i>? We might see this as the persistence of the life of the novel despite the insistent herald of its death, much as the assertion of the death of God is the persistence of religious energies in an otherwise entirely secular culture. </p><p>What isn't there in <i>The Professor's Wife</i> is Jane's father, which enables her to discover the truth of his life. The father's death is the tain of her story, necessary for her presence just as the dark backing of a mirror is necessary for our presence before it, albeit in the inevitable dishonesty of a reversed image. <i> </i></p><p><i>Month of a Drowned Dog </i>ends with the birth of the writer's daughter, an uplifting note apparently apart from <i>The Professor's Wife</i>, apparently resisting the darkness of the tain. She reaches out to hold the writer's little finger: "The grip is surprisingly strong" he says, leaving readers unsure whether this loosens or strengthens the grip of what isn't there.<br /></p><p> </p><p>In 2015, I wrote about Ellis Sharp's novel <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2015/11/lamees-najim-by-ellis-sharp.html" target="_blank">Lamees Najim</a>, which in this case <i>begins</i> with the birth of a baby.<br /></p><p></p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-86221905850847595182022-12-24T09:18:00.011+00:002023-10-27T16:22:27.925+01:00The Opposite Direction, a book<p>Please use a link below to download an ebook of posts selected from over the last seven years of this blog. </p><p>This is the second collection after <a href="https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/this-space-writing" target="_blank">This Space of Writing</a> and the title comes from the adolescent Thomas Bernhard's phrase repeated to an
official at the labour exchange as he resisted the best options for his
future; self-sabotage as a career move. </p><p>Some comments from readers of the first book:<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">Mitchelmore writes at a level unparalleled, in my opinion, and is one of
the most acute thinkers about which books and writers really deserve
our fullest attention and why. He has made me a much better reader. <br /> Terry Pitts, <a href="https://sebald.wordpress.com/2022/12/19/18-notable-books-from-my-2022-reading/" target="_blank">Vertigo blog</a> </p><p></p><p></p><blockquote>[He]
is particularly attuned to the form, the feel and the voice of a piece
of writing … and that the sum of all these encounters makes his own
writing here as tremulously alive and clear as so many of the works he
writes about. <br /> <a href="https://beinginlieu.blogspot.com/2016/01/this-might-be-how-writing-fulfils-itself.html" target="_blank">Jen Craig</a>, author of <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/panthers-and-the-museum-of-fire-186008/" target="_blank">Panthers and the Museum of Fire</a></blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote> Reading
him, one senses an engagement and curiosity that aren’t primarily
motivated by passing judgement. Rather, he sees literature as a living
encounter in which something is at stake for both writer and reader.
<br /> <a href="http://www.alexandercarnera.dk/" target="_blank">Alexander Carnera</a> in <a href="https://www.lmd.no/2016/04/sensibilitet-for-det-usynlige/" target="_blank">Le Monde Diplomatique</a> </blockquote><p></p><div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">He writes with an intensity of focus that either sucks you in or makes you scornful.<br /> <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2017/06/a-commentary-on-myself.html" target="_blank">Robert Minto</a>, writer and critic</div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"> </p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ADmrDwfm-jqbZwyssuIgPLYzpni-FDuD/view?usp=drive_link" target="_blank">EPUB</a> <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E3gFSIi_cguN_6NhckDjqyUOmP4Ww8pJ/view?usp=drive_link" target="_blank">PDF</a> <br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCX_9BH_njOi2WV0nOTDRjO_uImMagAh_pgoqOY-z_7v2j6welFJ-eCH5DuxfA5mB8x6rX7xYHbSohU8EEfaYt4NsibjpPPzP4OxFkhlytIh_j7pHshDlJhIgw0rV9hyXl2qweydexOsGQZCN7fb-D-qxvo5LEtWcKrRKicpabeO7Gfto7xg/s1220/OppositeDirection%20cover.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1220" data-original-width="794" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCX_9BH_njOi2WV0nOTDRjO_uImMagAh_pgoqOY-z_7v2j6welFJ-eCH5DuxfA5mB8x6rX7xYHbSohU8EEfaYt4NsibjpPPzP4OxFkhlytIh_j7pHshDlJhIgw0rV9hyXl2qweydexOsGQZCN7fb-D-qxvo5LEtWcKrRKicpabeO7Gfto7xg/w416-h640/OppositeDirection%20cover.jpeg" width="416" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>For the record, I did contact two small presses that I admire about publishing it as a real book, but one had too much on already and the other didn't reply, so I gave up; self-sabotage as a publishing move.<br /></p><p>If you do read the book, I'd be grateful if you post a response or a link to a response either in an email or in the
comments section below. Comments are moderated to resist spam so will appear after a short delay and, barring abuse, I will allow every one through, even if your name is <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2016/04/flame-at-last.html" target="_blank">Claire Lowdon</a>.<br /></p><p></p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-32611807099278397172022-12-12T10:16:00.004+00:002022-12-12T10:22:30.911+00:00Favourite books 2022<p>This selection does not include those books <i>I enjoyed</i>, that asinine dilution poured into innumerable books of the year lists, though <i>I enjoyed</i> those not included in this selection. <br /></p><p>Jon Fosse – <a href="https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/septology" target="_blank"><i>Septology</i></a></p><p br="">Thomas Bernhard – <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/R/bo184789630.html" target="_blank"><i>The Rest is Slander</i></a></p><p br="" style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">"we are concealing a secret, a secret of which the Englishman is incessantly speaking, a secret that is actually directly opposed to what he supposes it to be." </p><p>Marjorie Perloff – <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo50842349.html" target="_blank"><i>Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics</i></a></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">'The “auditory imagination,” let’s recall, is defined by Eliot as “the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word.” One cannot prove that Eliot consciously chose to produce the dense verbal-sonic-visual structure I have been describing, but the drafts suggest that in fact he did revise words and phrases in the interest of sonic and visual density as well as semantic subtlety.'<br /></p><p>Giorgio Agamben – <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/W/bo156865921.html" target="_blank"><i>When the House Burns Down</i></a></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">"Reflection – the 'I think' – is … the point where the speaker who is about to discover himself unwillingly to be witness and poet finds a mirror in which to escape solitude, a last refuge from which he can still somehow offer meaningful discourse and propositions. We all cling to an 'I' in order to escape from the solitary encounter with language, in order not to be constrained to poetry. This is the meaning of Hölderlin's stubborn critique of reflection<i>..." <br /></i></p><p>And, unexpectedly, three books on the Bible: <br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg<i> – <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40665630-the-beginning-of-desire" target="_blank">The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis </a></i></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">'The "rebellion" of the generation around the Flood can be understood as a failure to speak, to communicate with God – or, indeed, with each other. There is a pathology is the very "openness" of the Flood generation which converts openness to a dumbness, a dumbness of the babble rather than of silence.' <br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">Gabriel Josipovici – <i><a href="https://www.yalebooks.co.uk/page/detail/the-book-of-god/?k=9780300048650" target="_blank">The Book of God: A Response to the Bible<br /></a></i></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><i>"</i>The man in the field [Genesis 37: 15-17] and the young man in the <i>sindōn</i> [Mark 14: 51-52] stand for the primacy of narrative over interpretation. How they came to be there will never be known. That they are there cannot be gainsaid. To interpret them away, to provide explanations as to why they are there, is to do away with the whole Joseph story, the whole Passion narrative, and, in the wake of this, with the whole of Genesis, the whole of Mark, the whole Bible – and, in the end, with the whole of literature."<i></i><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">Massimo Recalcati <i>– <a href="https://www.europaeditions.com/book/9781609456221/the-night-in-gethsemane" target="_blank"><i>The Night in Gethsemane: On Solitude and Betrayal</i></a><br /></i></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">“From Jesus’ perspective, there is, in effect, no possible truth without its testimony. That means that the truth of the Word consists in its incarnation alone. It’s the radical ethical hermeneutics of Christianity: the letter without testimony is a dead letter; without heart—without desire—the meaning of the Law can’t be understood.”<br /></p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-36790034198610315462022-11-14T14:10:00.014+00:002023-05-19T14:02:38.989+01:00The Lascaux Notebooks by Jean-Luc Champerret<p><b>Lascaux</b>, a placename standing for the abyssal revelation of the cave paintings discovered there after millennia in darkness, and <b>Notebooks</b>, suggesting a private endeavour, preparation, a work to come. While neither is secret as such, neither was meant for the light. Two intrigues then for the price of one. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR8tbfeduBmW464tumEWRK8d2YU9RRTaxh3dA0KQA6tfoVB3-Kz9s4kQc_yUUPbkc7VQghPbTXglFS51CffJFvPkPlo7IWfF8zDZqofxCXCl8LgMjcX_DkAf_6Vv2EZfN5Fbw4UKaXzGVXqq6fCsdEoyWuq7O82IvBOR9grVjy2qhigxxH_w/s1280/Philip%20Terry%20%E2%80%93%20Lascaux%20Notebooks.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="862" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR8tbfeduBmW464tumEWRK8d2YU9RRTaxh3dA0KQA6tfoVB3-Kz9s4kQc_yUUPbkc7VQghPbTXglFS51CffJFvPkPlo7IWfF8zDZqofxCXCl8LgMjcX_DkAf_6Vv2EZfN5Fbw4UKaXzGVXqq6fCsdEoyWuq7O82IvBOR9grVjy2qhigxxH_w/w270-h400/Philip%20Terry%20%E2%80%93%20Lascaux%20Notebooks.jpeg" width="270" /></a></div><p></p><p>
Of the notebooks, Philip Terry explains that he was offered a dusty crate found in a chateau under renovation that contained
the disintegrating papers of an obscure French poet who had scouted the
Lascaux caves as a possible hideout for his wartime Resistance cell in
which he worked as a codebreaker (a cell that included “a tall wiry
Irishman”). The poems found among the papers are Terry's translations from the French of Champerret's translation into contemporary poetic forms of the signs and symbols painted or carved alongside the famous paintings of animals. <br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqr8dxh4LB62xUOpfVzMCOewNXLXcAksvkRz1TCNwk9j0IVjLup3ft5dtYHqzdGyjgPCRZgliAXpn6coe0hN_lbdGyHp3krte64qGjeUqtV5fZu89H-h9olK6mQr48MHihK7ObIM5PzESpv5XFdMtkqenl-sPGhYgjr71tieB83p4rj2y86w/s1280/Terry%20Lascaux%20Notebooks%20example2.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="741" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqr8dxh4LB62xUOpfVzMCOewNXLXcAksvkRz1TCNwk9j0IVjLup3ft5dtYHqzdGyjgPCRZgliAXpn6coe0hN_lbdGyHp3krte64qGjeUqtV5fZu89H-h9olK6mQr48MHihK7ObIM5PzESpv5XFdMtkqenl-sPGhYgjr71tieB83p4rj2y86w/w370-h640/Terry%20Lascaux%20Notebooks%20example2.jpeg" width="370" /></a></div><p></p><p>According to <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25814327-the-first-signs?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=aGYDUZnB6c&rank=1" target="_blank">The First Signs</a> by the paleoarchaeologist Genevieve von Petzinger, there has been little attention given to the meaning and significance of the signs and, while she doesn't offer a translation herself, she does say they could be humanity's first writing system. This gives retrospective mitigation to
Champerret and he uses the freedom to gradually
augment their spartan form to create the atmospherics of a domestic Ice Age scene. There are numerous others: descriptions of mountainous landscapes, the killing and butchery of prey, burial rituals, and ceremonies performed by shaman. As the poems follow the seventy signs listed in the back of the
collection, the vocabulary is limited and over 380 pages this can be a
monotonous read, enlivened by occasional use of prose and the patterning Mallarm<span>é</span> used in <span><i>Un coup de dés</i></span>. Even so, in the movement of each poem we sense from a state of deathless being in the world to one of displacement and distance – storytelling – stimulating in the reader an awareness of the profoundest moment in human evolution, which one cannot say of most other books of poetry. <br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO8dYqhm1ajXWdloTgMOqFtejQA4Je3U8cCxJeK4KzqV1u50Zafj4Y-WVKiVKvhA8SIX0DotGFGwAS-TEYNdVfGTHgKyXMIYnNLzgQEHJQIWR3fBvKhN_NGAyfNxGUc2aAPuFO1GBDwxLFQQNbMR53Yaau7e0eO8-M7ZcgxQbX1gSSSwYrGg/s1280/Terry%20Lascaux%20Notebooks%20example3.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="935" data-original-width="1280" height="293" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO8dYqhm1ajXWdloTgMOqFtejQA4Je3U8cCxJeK4KzqV1u50Zafj4Y-WVKiVKvhA8SIX0DotGFGwAS-TEYNdVfGTHgKyXMIYnNLzgQEHJQIWR3fBvKhN_NGAyfNxGUc2aAPuFO1GBDwxLFQQNbMR53Yaau7e0eO8-M7ZcgxQbX1gSSSwYrGg/w400-h293/Terry%20Lascaux%20Notebooks%20example3.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p>"Movement" and "evolution" may be deceptive words here because everything changed as the first sign was simultaneously carved and read. A space opened in that instant, differing from the animal paintings because they are recognisable as representations of animals, whereas what the signs represent retreats behind their appearance, opening a beyond to their purely communicative value. Yes, the scholars say that the signs must have meant something to those who created them except, in such an act, a world apart was exposed. This is the great secret of the signs; an open secret which nevertheless remains.</p><p></p><center><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/c0f1bZP-Id8" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></center><p></p><p>What is also <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2022/07/20/lascaux-notebooks-ice-age/" target="_blank">an open secret</a> is that there was no Jean-Luc Champerret, no crate of papers, no poems in French. It’s curious then that of the four reviews of that I’ve found of <i>The Lascaux Notebooks</i> only one of
them is aware that the author and his poems are inventions. Despite this, two reviewers take on face value Terry’s origin story, which one might think too literary to be true, with the hint of Champerret's connection to Beckett removing the benefit of the doubt. Of course, one cannot expect a reviewer to know an author's previous publications but one might hope they would look up Terry's name and discover that he edited <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/312110/the-penguin-book-of-oulipo-by-philip-terry-ed/9780241378458" target="_blank">The Penguin Book of Oulipo</a> as well as works by <a href="https://belgraviabooks.com/philip-terry-on-the-endless-fascination-of-georges-perecs-i-remember" target="_blank">the most renowned Oulipean of all</a>, if not also notice that the blurb for his 2021 novel <a href="https://www.grandiota.co.uk/philip-terry.php" target="_blank">Bone</a> announces that it was written without “letters with descenders (g, j, p, q, y)”. This prison narrative is in the spirit of the linguistic exercises by which the uninvented <a href="https://3seaseurope.com/edith-bone-solitude-hungary-prison/" target="_blank">Dr Edith Bone</a> maintained her sanity while solitary confinement for seven years; a literary embodiment of the prison-house of language and the unexpected spaces confinement might open, marvellously independent of authorial intention, all of which may have led reviewers to hear the echo of “Sham Perec” in Jean-Luc’s surname. [Update: I now understand one of the reviews didn't mention it in order not to spoil the effect.] <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXGf7wEah6Oerasvjs-YTZ0jhL0mUWN9P-raDTDuOMrXGrBPF47JwmgCSKAK7WhQkLV2XrxKHBup0wYv8EdgyRqEnxGWySiXuCE_E5EMEGRjlbMSUOKEABuv1Oo0UzWcPrnWu_jc2xqDPvn-TWRyYK2m7eGQzXDMUPmoU02xcu8gz-xvxI8A/s1280/Philip%20Terry%20%E2%80%93%20Bone.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="864" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXGf7wEah6Oerasvjs-YTZ0jhL0mUWN9P-raDTDuOMrXGrBPF47JwmgCSKAK7WhQkLV2XrxKHBup0wYv8EdgyRqEnxGWySiXuCE_E5EMEGRjlbMSUOKEABuv1Oo0UzWcPrnWu_jc2xqDPvn-TWRyYK2m7eGQzXDMUPmoU02xcu8gz-xvxI8A/s320/Philip%20Terry%20%E2%80%93%20Bone.jpeg" width="216" /></a></div><p></p><p>Missing this is perhaps an insignificant detail, a mere point of order, as is the fact that the story of the discovery of the Lascaux cave is itself an invention. Melvyn Bragg's introduction to the recent BBC's <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mqn7" target="_blank">In Our Time episode</a> on cave art repeats it and goes uncorrected by his expert guests. In <a href="https://www.zonebooks.org/books/30-the-cradle-of-humanity-prehistoric-art-and-culture" target="_blank">a lecture in 1955</a>, Georges Bataille tells his audience that the story of a dog called Robot falling down a hole and whose rescue led to the discovery was either made up by a journalist or local gossip and that the true story is that a storm uprooted a pine tree and a woman decided to put her dead donkey in the hole that had opened up, telling a local boy she thought it may be the entrance to a tunnel rumoured to lead to a ch<span>âteau. Later, the boy and a couple of wartime refugees decided to explore the hole when some other refugees they had arranged to meet in order to give them "a good thrashing" failed to appear. </span></p><p><span>As I wrote, perhaps insignificant. But at the end of the <i>In Our Time</i> episode, one expert says there is still lots of learn about cave art and while "we're still in the dark to some extent" recent developments in radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology should help to illuminate what's left to learn. For the ancient people, descent into the Stygian darkness of the caves is where they discovered, <i>invented</i>, themselves, and us. Philip Terry's transformation of the signs into poetry and dissimulating its origin may in turn be the proper means to turn our eyes towards that darkness. As Bataille writes <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/C/bo184789622.html" target="_blank">elsewhere</a> in a book of poetry and in opposition to poetry:<br /></span></p><blockquote><p><span>Poetry was simply a detour: through it I escaped the world of discourse, which had become the natural world for me; with poetry I entered a kind of grave where the infinity of the possible was born from the death of the logical world.</span></p></blockquote><p><span>As it is, we're still in the light.</span></p><p></p> Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-2787979768123710202022-10-19T13:58:00.021+01:002022-10-26T12:22:02.359+01:00The criticism of Lessons, the lessons of criticism<p>I give thanks to Ryan Ruby for his <a href="https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-pundit" target="_blank">review of <i>Lessons</i></a>, Ian McEwan’s latest novel. It brings to our attention that rare thing, joy of joys, a novel telling the story of a life remarkably similar to the author’s own <i>set against the backdrop</i> of recent history. Ruby shows how the novel is the inevitable conclusion of a path he has followed for many years as, in all but two novels McEwan has produced since <i>The Innocent</i> in 1990, the “subject matter has been ripped from the headlines”: </p><blockquote>As befits a regular of the international festival circuit with the occasional byline in the Guardian opinion page, [McEwan’s] treatment of issues such as the Iraq War, climate change, euthanasia, artificial intelligence and Brexit could be described as narrativized punditry.</blockquote><p> In the hope of killing off the genre, the final two words should enter the critical lexicon alongside James Wood’s “hysterical realism”. Both are symptoms of the loss of confidence in the novel as an art form, as something in itself, something apart. Ruby spells out brilliantly how McEwan's concern for political virtue has the side-effect of neutralising real change, which conveniently aligns him with <a href="https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2022-10-11/assange-corbyn-monbiot-left/" target="_blank">columnists at the news organisation</a> that has championed his work. Only Ellis Sharp has spelled this out at length before now, in a blogpost sadly deleted, but reprinted in <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sharply-Critical-Ellis-Sharp-ebook/dp/B08643HN6D/" target="_blank">Sharply Critical</a>. And of course there is John Banville's <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2005/05/26/a-day-in-the-life/" target="_blank">review of Saturday</a> which, despite its prominence, doesn't seem to have taught McEwan ... a lesson.<br /></p><p>The English novel scene epitomised by what Ruby shows to be the predictabilty and complacency of <i>Lessons</i> is the literary equivalent of the herd of independent minds currently sporting little badges of a blue and yellow flag who felt no compunction to wear one displaying (in chronological order) the Serbian flag, the Iraqi flag, the Afghan flag, the Libyan flag, the Syrian flag, or the Yemeni flag, and certainly not the flag of a certain part of Europe that has been <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/EvaKBartlett/videos" target="_blank">under bombardment</a> <a href="https://player.vimeo.com/video/696528534?h=b6a324c5d7" target="_blank">since 2014</a>. This is not to say they supported the crimes done in their name – if they knew of them – but the culture doesn't demand awareness, and certainly not action, so for reasons <a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/07/john-pilger-silencing-the-lambs-how-propaganda-works/" target="_blank">John Pilger explains</a>, their unimpeachable virtue disables any practical opposition to endless war: <br /></p><blockquote>In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Fuhrer. </blockquote><blockquote>She told me that the “patriotic messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the German public.
Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. “Yes, especially them,” she said.</blockquote>
<p></p><p> For his narrativised punditry, the Leni Riefenstahl of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Britannia" target="_blank">Cool Britannia</a>:<br /></p><blockquote>has been rewarded with increasing extra-literary prominence. In 2000, he was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire by the late Elizabeth Windsor; in 2016, the Daily Telegraph named him ‘the 19th most powerful person in British culture’, an honour at once dubiously conferred and comically specific.</blockquote><p>We can assume James Kelman is nowhere on that list. <br /></p><p></p><center> </center><center>***</center> <p></p><p> <br />And I give thanks to Ryan Ruby for his commitment to reviewing such an uninspiring novel; a thankless task for the most part. Indeed, no thanks is often to be preferred. I've often received abusive comments or emails. Suspicion of reviewers and critics is a natural by-product of the aura of art, arising wherever anxiety reigns; Twitter being the go-to for examples:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ArchivalDaze/status/1576568800082001920" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="632" data-original-width="1344" height="188" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJAzvYxEqW9WyUKSW9nx_vmUQNHaPoZ1aczRllP1c84Lq6MWjUsafsAgyqR5l4-iELuo10r63xO64zj223RKEpvkG56S_7XT2zDfP_VWgsU_B_mjPga9OAEfFKtn8-MrV_F7npnzCPfoxQgRXD27PHPeZhjMVsCur46YTPC2E2_QFUAqtPWg/w400-h188/Ryan%20Ruby%20Ian%20McEwan%20blog.png" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/JonGordon11/status/1578375031532703744" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="616" data-original-width="1336" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX0aSuY7cA1YF_iwlaZSYDqxkjvJsH-T6P7GjXn6m5_tqfgFOKc3Xl5qu7ASubHYg6M6N1HNS12ARgcDnXIElcv90BT5fHDWg0HloQ2_0QEUZfKmWvCuHCCyAGq4ITUqrIzCL66bG7G1t9W-ltQs9y80jJ5x-vJiQ20OplbqtHDCxfO37Qfw/w400-h185/History%20doesnt%20remember%20the%20critic.png" width="400" /></a></div><p>Of course, many animals rely on parasites to maintain good health,
and human life depends on bacteria living in us, so why not art? "Almost"
may then be the most damning word here. And I wonder how Mr Gordon, <i>best-selling author</i> of 26 books "inspiring people and organizations to work with more vision, passion, positivity, and purpose", might explain how something great comes to be recognised <i>as</i> great. Anyway, why is <i>he</i> being so critical? Presumably critics should ignore him to accomplish something great.</p><p>This is not to say I don't have any problems with reviewing and criticism. The meagre output on this blog this year is the result of an overwhelming reluctance to follow the sirens that draw one inexorably toward the clichés of the form ("deals with", "tackles", "we meet"). It has become a process of "arduous vulgarization", a phrase used in <i>What is the Purpose of Criticism?,</i> <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=1730" target="_blank">a short essay</a> by Blanchot from which this blog gets its name, though this is only one definition of criticism he suggests without committing to it. While I recognise my reluctance as an unwillingness to <i>do the work</i>, at the same time the purpose Blanchot offers helps me to recognise that it may also be a problem with the guidelines <a href="https://biblioklept.org/2010/04/14/john-updikes-rules-for-reviewing-books/" target="_blank">John Updike set out</a> that otherwise dominate. <br /></p><p>The purpose he commits to adapts Hölderlin's metaphor of the poem (made more famous by Heidegger) as a bell in the open air that becomes out of tune as it is coated by snowfall, with the snow standing for unpoetic language, which for Heidegger is the language of commentary. For Blanchot, however, criticism is the sound of the snow becoming nothing "within the heated agitation it instigates". It is this nothingness that allows the literary work to be what it is:</p><p></p><blockquote>Critical discourse is this space of resonance within which the unspoken, indefinite reality of the work is momentarily transformed and circumscribed into words. And as such, due to the fact that it claims modestly and obstinately to be nothing, criticism ceases being distinguished from the creative discourse of which it would be the necessary actualization or, metaphorically speaking, the epiphany. <span style="font-size: x-small;">[Translated by Stuart Kendall]</span><br /></blockquote><p>But what does "the unspoken, indefinite reality of the work" mean? As readers, we know this as the basic fascination of reading a creative work (however labelled), that which agitates a need to speak what is unspoken and make definite what is indefinite. Except we resort to descriptions of overt subject matter ("deals with", "tackles") and protagonists ("we meet"), to the language of evaluation and social utility, making Blanchot's hyperbolic abstractions appear uselessly pretentious, or at least anachronistic. The impression is backed up when at the end of the essay he asks why there are complaints that criticism no longer knows how to judge, a complaint that certainly cannot be made today, as novels are judged by their own quality of judgement; specifically, to judge for us, <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-end-of-literature-part-3.html" target="_blank">to reflect our virtue back at us</a>, and so burying the experience of the unspoken and the indefinite: "It is not criticism that lazily refuses to evaluate," Blanchot says, "it is the novel or the poem that shirks evaluation because it seeks affirmation outside every value system." Criticism as it disappears thereby becomes "closely related to one of the most difficult, but most important tasks of our time", which is "preserving and ... liberating thought from the notion of value". <br /></p><p>I'm not sure what this means, at least how to express what it means, nor how might be done today, but I give thanks for these words in which there is a profound distance from industry standards as they go in the opposite direction to the utilitarian and the technical, the journalistic and the academic; <i>untimely</i> would then be a more accurate characterisation. In this way it exposes itself to the space outside of time, or just an outside, to which as readers we are exposed to in creative works (however labelled); not <i>another world</i> in terms of a facile escapism but "<a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-world-as-refuge-re-reading-space-of.html" target="_blank">the other of all worlds</a>", in which we encounter a part of what it is to be human, that which we do not recognise, cannot recognise, refuse to recognise, or that which frightens us, and from which we flee to narrativised punditry for refuge<i>. </i>Perhaps instead it is the novel that has become anachronisitc.</p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-87814711592039997462022-09-19T16:11:00.015+01:002023-08-04T17:22:07.414+01:00Ultimate things: The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka<blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Although we are unmusical, we have a tradition of singing</i></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /> <span> <span>Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk</span></span></span></blockquote></blockquote><p></p><p>The first reason to celebrate Shelley Frisch’s new translation into English of Kafka’s short prose written in the village of Zürau, now <a href="https://goo.gl/maps/y2LZVVG5kiGLtmFG9" target="_blank">Siřem in the Czech Republic</a>, is that this is the first time they have been presented in book form alongside the German. The original is lacking from previously published translations into English:
the Muirs’ in 1946, Kaiser’s and Wilkins’ in 1954, Malcolm Pasley’s in
1994, and Michael Hofmann’s in 2006. The second reason is that it is the first time they have been
accompanied by a commentary, in this case by Kafka’s <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/kafka-years-of-insight-by-reiner-stach.html" target="_blank">esteemed biographer</a>
Reiner Stach.</p><p>An exception to both is <a href="http://zurauaphorisms.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Michael Cisco’s blog</a> and subsequent <a href="https://solutioperfecta.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/g8-cisco2.pdf" target="_blank">260-page PDF</a> made available in 2013, which is perhaps more faithful to the original as Kafka also never published them as a book. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLfYsoJB83G9HhduoLTqAkmN_oRlqfRPSjimSNGcuRsnaGLLcsP5eqeAsNZQFbpHYPVhTQ2r2DbuDn7Uy-3-7_huJNJjngPFMZqGkVs4AwN3hBhUJENAIq6hOlwsAd-rR8xfSEy63dAXiguQzldMW5KYIpvqK9zReeNB-ANQgOemrGxYiLgQ/s1280/Kafka%20Aphorisms.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="848" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLfYsoJB83G9HhduoLTqAkmN_oRlqfRPSjimSNGcuRsnaGLLcsP5eqeAsNZQFbpHYPVhTQ2r2DbuDn7Uy-3-7_huJNJjngPFMZqGkVs4AwN3hBhUJENAIq6hOlwsAd-rR8xfSEy63dAXiguQzldMW5KYIpvqK9zReeNB-ANQgOemrGxYiLgQ/w265-h400/Kafka%20Aphorisms.jpeg" width="265" /></a></div><p>All this should remind us of the disorder in which Kafka’s work has been otherwise presented in English: multiple editions in multiple translations with only the occasional a sniff of scholarship. Germany has had <a href="https://www.fischerverlage.de/buch/reihe/franz-kafka-schriften-tagebuecher-briefe-kritische-ausgabe" target="_blank">a critical edition</a> for over thirty years and in France this year a two-volume <a href="https://www.la-pleiade.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Bibliotheque-de-la-Pleiade/OEuvres-completes-I-II10" target="_blank">Pléiade boxed set</a> was published in a new translation with everything Kafka wrote presented in chronological order. It is a minor scandal that an equivalent is lacking in English. Ross Benjamin's <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612561/the-diaries-of-franz-kafka-by-franz-kafka/#" target="_blank">new translation</a> of the diaries will provide some mitigation when it's published in January next year. <br /></p><p>It is a disorder, however, that was there from the start: disordered chapters of unfinished novels, stories published and unpublished, sketches and parables, letters, <a href="https://www.yalebooks.co.uk/page/detail/franz-kafka/?k=9780300260663" target="_blank">doodles</a>, the diaries of course, and, in the case of the aphorisms – Stach describes them as a "chaotic set of notes" – covered in corrections and crossings out. Or, rather, disorder was there from the end – of Kafka's life that is, although he didn't see it quite that way, as the aphorisms reveal. </p><p>No doubt the disorder is why the Zürau aphorisms are nowhere near as well known as the novels and stories, though their brevity and generic uncertainty must be the main factor. In his preface to the Penguin Syrens edition pictured below, Gabriel Josipovici says the notes aren't really aphorisms, and while they may remind readers of "maxims, or parables, or reflections...or tiny stories", they aren't quite any of these either. Such labels, he adds, imply authority and control while the disorder in which they have come down to us and the biographical conditions under which they were written imply the opposite of both. This led to <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=2034" target="_blank">Maurice Blanchot's suggestion</a> that Kafka instructed Brod to destroy his manuscripts because he saw his work “condemned to increase universal misunderstanding”. Destruction is itself a form of order and explains why our fascination with the instruction and its betrayal runs parallel to our fascination with finding order in the work. </p><p>The aphorisms were written in the aftermath of the bloody eruption of TB, the
breaking off of his engagement to
Felice Bauer, and in the shadow of a negligible literary career. On a
visit back to Prague, Kafka told Max Brod that his task in Zürau was to "Become clear about
ultimate things". Stach says this is an allusion to Otto Weiningers 1904
book <i>Über die letzen Dinge</i> "with which he was definitely
acquainted" and which approaches "the pinnacles that defined western
metaphysics", listed here as <i>evil</i>, <i>truth</i>, <i>belief</i> and <i>the world of the spirit</i>, and which he did by seeking, as Stach says, "the pithiest linguistic formulation". </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj09YXepK4GctwE13s2_cDuZjrrNPC7iUIpiMLlb1HNpfbvvm70FURZmLvsEipOxGiZXcB7I5KJMK7J9_cnFidFVkAYzXn4Ydr1sAnKK6gKVsG7er0Hvu1ZFNusYgYyJsqyTSaUstI6UMCemLn8YP0XkN5F0-pBzFONijqSp33uSeZv4m2AhQ/s1280/Kafka%20Penguin%20Syrens.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1127" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj09YXepK4GctwE13s2_cDuZjrrNPC7iUIpiMLlb1HNpfbvvm70FURZmLvsEipOxGiZXcB7I5KJMK7J9_cnFidFVkAYzXn4Ydr1sAnKK6gKVsG7er0Hvu1ZFNusYgYyJsqyTSaUstI6UMCemLn8YP0XkN5F0-pBzFONijqSp33uSeZv4m2AhQ/s320/Kafka%20Penguin%20Syrens.jpeg" width="282" /></a></div><p></p><p>Not that this creates an order, as many of the aphorisms don't obviously fit a metaphysical category. Here's Aphorism 2 in Kaiser's and Wilkins'
translation:<br /></p><blockquote>All human errors are impatience, the premature breaking off of what is methodical, an apparent fencing in of the apparent thing.</blockquote><p>I was very taken with this when I copied it into an exercise book during the excited naivete of youth. I don't know why it meant so much then, nor where I read it, as I had access only to the novels, stories and a disintegrating copy of the diaries. While the enchantment of those days has dissipated, the repetition of "apparent" has an appeal I recognise from my later discovery of Thomas Bernhard; a repetition acting, I suspect now, as a reflexive delay to interrupt impatience. Read in isolation like this, an aphorism can lodge in one's memory. Here's another, this time in Frisch's translation:</p><p></p><blockquote>How can one take pleasure in the world other than when fleeing to it? </blockquote><p></p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i>Wie kann man sich über die Welt freuen, ausser wenn man zu ihr flüchtet?</i></p></blockquote><p>Which I need to compare to Pasley's: <br /></p><p></p><blockquote><p>How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge? <br /></p></blockquote><p>The first translation is more accurate because the German for 'refuge' (<i>Zuflucht</i>) is not in the original. The second I had already memorised and without the extra words I have a curious sense of loss. I borrowed that part for the title of <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-world-as-refuge-re-reading-space-of.html" target="_blank">a post on re-reading</a> Blanchot's <i>The Space of Literature</i>,
as it challenged the rote understanding of literature as an unproblematic escape, thereby offering a renewed appreciation of the relation of book and world. <br /></p><p>Here are the previous translations of Aphorism 2:<br /></p><p>Michael Hofmann's: <br /></p><p></p><blockquote>All human errors stem from impatience, a premature breaking off of a methodical approach, an ostensible pinning down of an ostensible object.</blockquote><p></p><p>The Muirs':<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>All human error is impatience, a premature renunciation of method, a delusive pinning down of a delusion.</blockquote><p></p><p>And Malcolm Pasley's:</p><p></p><blockquote>All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking-off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue. </blockquote><p>Perhaps instead multiple translations condemn a work to universal disenchantment. <br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHgZ_IrdFvhXfEKj_NtfkW5ub4Jje-ZevgjbfRi3GDGNBNyTR3FqO4xmv9tfiwlBNM_I-GAzUz3Y7PX5zVxOyYt67pjSQo2mJS5MFmZUhr97wKAraUTjsoS1K8JColc6UmnXDSyWv1ccSo1plbWzVWk0N_AHH9-c7uYC8vnMwKP-OwLjPjRQ/s768/Kafka%20in%20Zurau.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="558" data-original-width="768" height="291" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHgZ_IrdFvhXfEKj_NtfkW5ub4Jje-ZevgjbfRi3GDGNBNyTR3FqO4xmv9tfiwlBNM_I-GAzUz3Y7PX5zVxOyYt67pjSQo2mJS5MFmZUhr97wKAraUTjsoS1K8JColc6UmnXDSyWv1ccSo1plbWzVWk0N_AHH9-c7uYC8vnMwKP-OwLjPjRQ/w400-h291/Kafka%20in%20Zurau.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Kafka in Zürau</span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>What's new with Shelley Frisch's translation and Reiner Stach commentary is that the aphorism is given a precise context: <br /></p><blockquote><p><i>Alle menschlichen Fehler sind Ungeduld, ein vorzeitiges Abbrechen des Methodischen, ein scheinbares Einpfählen der scheinbaren Sache.</i> <br /></p><p>All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking-off of a methodical approach, an apparent use of posts to prop up the apparent objective.</p></blockquote><p>In this case, market gardening in Zürau, which Kafka had witnessed and taken part in during his eight months there. <i>Einpfählen</i> we're told is a word used in horticulture and means "to prop up and stablize young fruit trees ... or as posts to enclose a pasture". (Note the faint repetition of <i>Fehler</i> in <i>Einpfählen</i> in addition to the other one.) As a blogger, I'm well aware that a series of posts may well be an error as they likely prop up <a href="http://this-space.blogspot.com/2022/07/a-modern-heretic.html" target="_blank">a tree of misunderstanding and misappropriation</a>. Such facetiousness is meant not only in jest, as the appropriation of the double meaning leads back to <i>ultimate things</i>. </p><p></p><blockquote>When a historical category loses its meaning and threatens to disappear, an opportunity arises that has a strange consequence.</blockquote><p>The first sentence of <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=25285&i=Introduction.html" target="_blank">The Yield</a>, Paul North's book on the Zürau aphorisms, to which he gives order by calling the notes a "treatise", refers to the category "Jew" in Kafka's time as "becoming too diverse to signify one thing" and prompted Kafka and others such as Franz Rosenzweig to rethink it. The general observation is not new: in 1938 <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674017467" target="_blank">Walter Benjamin told</a> Gershom Scholem that "Kafka's work represents a sickening of tradition" and "Only the products of its decomposition are left", both of which echo Weber's notion of modernity's disenchantment of the world. The lack of metaphysical overtones in Aphorism 2 would explain my excited connection as it can be applied to any "apparent thing" of the moment, with the new context giving it a specific action. Aphorism 3, however, takes the theme to a pinnacle:</p><p></p><blockquote>There are two cardinal human sins, from which all other derive: impatience and laxity. Impatience got them expelled from paradise; indolence keeps them from returning. Perhaps, though, there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Impatience got them expelled; impatience keeps them from returning.</blockquote><p></p><p>This is certainly worthy of a commentary, but what can the category <i>Paradise</i> and those listed above mean to readers now if decomposition is complete and the presence of what
constituted <i>ultimate things</i> in Kafka's time<i> </i>has
disappeared in ours? We may imagine paradise via the old masters, but a tropical beach is more likely to be to
the fore in our minds than the Garden of Eden. Reading Aphorisms 2 and 3 thereby encapsulates the experience of reading the 109
aphorisms together, oscillating between intimacy and rejection. </p><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0LDtpam1c-ftZ4ogxzANrUoltJlOm7Bxg4elq-wlHiTmsF3DB2JMvmeFJ9J6nbiaFz3KYBBsbGU-m78iyiBW7QPxMYJ-7YEFUqTi93qwWclZFANtwQjBKkbKYr5D7zz2WaLtF0OBEchU2VH7IzxlG5LJ1QXLtSe6GC29Yyl17syLWOhQqEQ/s1280/Kafkas%20aphorisms%20blank%20pages.jpeg"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0LDtpam1c-ftZ4ogxzANrUoltJlOm7Bxg4elq-wlHiTmsF3DB2JMvmeFJ9J6nbiaFz3KYBBsbGU-m78iyiBW7QPxMYJ-7YEFUqTi93qwWclZFANtwQjBKkbKYr5D7zz2WaLtF0OBEchU2VH7IzxlG5LJ1QXLtSe6GC29Yyl17syLWOhQqEQ/w400-h300/Kafkas%20aphorisms%20blank%20pages.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p>In recalling my first reading of Aphorism 2, I associated it with Josipovici's essay <i>An Art for the Wilderness</i> written to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Kafka's death (and published in <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Lessons_of_Modernism/6eFPAQAAIAAJ?hl=en" target="_blank">The Lessons of Modernism</a>). But it isn't there. Instead, decades after first reading it, I rediscovered <i>his</i> experience of such an oscillation. The essay begins by discussing the discovery of the books we love and those that pass us by because they came at the wrong time. With those we love, "there is always the sense of an instinctive understanding, an awareness that what is lacking is really only the ability to make such understanding fully conscious":<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>Kafka is the only author I know to whom this does not apply. My own experience may be special in this respect, but I have found that, from the moment I began to read him, I felt at once infinitely close to him and infinitely distant. And ever since that time, as I have read and reread his novels and stories and diaries and notebooks and more and more of the voluminous correspondence that is slowly being made available, I have never had any sense of a gradual growth in understanding.</blockquote><p></p><p>This experience is one that deserves more attention, and not just in Kafka. The furthest we may find ourselves is in Aphorisms 6 and 54, incidentally closer to the traditional form of aphorism:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>The
decisive moment of human development is everlasting. That is why the
revolutionary movements grounded in intellect, which deem invalid
everything that has gone before, are correct, for as yet nothing has
happened.</p><p>There is nothing other than a world of the spirit; what
we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual realm, and
what we call Evil is only a momentary necessity in our eternal
development. </p></blockquote><p>As with Paradise, we are far removed from Evil with a leading capital and that of an
everlasting spirit, let alone the latter taking precedence over the world of the senses. The ultimate things present to us as literature only; echoes from words become hollow. We may move closer to Kafka if we follow what he expressed in Kafka's
famous letter to Brod post-Zürau that writing is "the reward for serving
the devil", which then becomes a lament about having spent so much of his
life writing and not living: "I died my whole life long and now I will
really die." What, we wonder, albeit silently, off the literary stage, is the point of writing in respect of living and dying? Our impatience to answer has become literary appreciation, commentary, interpretation, blogging indeed; a frantic search for labels to prop up what has long since withered. For Kafka, at the end, at the apparent end, writing is an engagement with the sickening categories, their meaning and lack of meaning. The "pithiest linguistic formulation" is then not so much a genre choice as an undoing of authority and control, his words and theirs. Benjamin highlights the form of when criticising hasty theological readings of Kafka's work, such as the castle in <i>The Castle</i> being the seat of grace: </p><p></p><blockquote>it is the fact that his books are incomplete which shows the true working of grace in his writings. The fact that the Law never finds expression as such – this and nothing else is the gracious dispensation of the fragment.</blockquote><p></p><p>Reading the aphorisms and the commentary prompted me to wonder if this oscillation between infinite closeness and infinite distance, an oscillation that is a single experience, explains the comparatively immobile experience of reading much of contemporary literature. When I think of the new publications that have meant most to me over the years, those that prompted a need to speak in response, to understand what the experience meant for me, and by extension for writing, I recognise, despite my confusion about this need – embarrassment even – a pattern of opening onto "ultimate things" albeit in variously indirect and necessarily incomplete manner – <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/search/label/Knausgaard" target="_blank">Knausgaard's books</a> are the prime example – when I was unmoved by those I supposed I <i>ought</i> to be given how similar they are in many ways (curiously, another author whose surname begins with K may be the prime example here). As modern readers, we are like the mouse folk in the final
story Kafka prepared for
publication gathering to listen to Josefine sing or, rather, apparently
sing, because the narration tells us it may not be singing at all but a "piping" expressing nothing distinct from the common piping of the populace who nevertheless gather to listen in silence (Kafka is almost as explicit about questioning the value of art in his work as in his letters). We seek order and understanding to convince ourselves that the song is real and ongoing, even if both are proof of the opposite. In the aphorisms, nevertheless, we can sense something in the distance, not only in the otherwise decomposed nouns and in the play of images and ideas, but perhaps more deeply in the delay of impatience produced by<i><i> </i>apparent</i> and <i>apparent</i> – <i><i>scheinbares </i>and<i> scheinbaren –</i></i> and in the quiet echo of <i>Fehler</i> in <i>Einpfählen, </i>now in an English edition for the first time.<br /></p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-19664721173756195282022-07-15T16:52:00.007+01:002022-07-23T10:26:37.376+01:00A modern heretic<blockquote>Literature can be defined by the sense of the imminence of a revelation which does not in fact occur.</blockquote>
I used this line, apparently from Borges, as an epigram to <a href="https://spikemagazine.com/0299bernhard/" target="_blank">an essay in the early days</a> of online writing. I can't remember what book it came from and after searching I found a line from an essay in <i>Selected Non-Fictions</i> that only comes close. Not long before that, I used an entry from Kierkegaard’s journals in the same way: <blockquote>It is part of my nature to hide my inwardness, and this is part of inwardness.</blockquote>While this one is at least accurate, I wince now at the ease and innocence with which I plucked lines like these to claim authority for what lacks it without appreciating let alone understanding the background of the key words. I may have half-known that one alluded to the rupture of a profound religious experience and the other to a search within oneself for the divine, but probably not even half. If I had contempt for religious faith, it was from a position of an equivalent faith in secular groupthink that unwittingly appropriates religious experiences and practices, hollowing them out to become baubles on a plastic Christmas tree. In mitigation, I used Borges’ supposed line to suggest what it's like to read the anti-narrative of a Thomas Bernhard novel as it propels itself towards its own fulminating void, while Kierkegaard’s line exemplifies my fascination with the performance of a secret or paradox that reveals and resolves nothing, which I suppose amounts to the same thing. <br /><p>
Perhaps such appropriations are early indicators of a subsequent inward revelation whose occurrence depends on how persistent one is in following the telos of one's buried needs as expressed and concealed by apparently superficial pursuits (reading novels, writing about novels). At least, I like to think this explains why I have been drawn to reading books with theological themes, specifically Gnosticism, such as Willem Styfhals’ book <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-withdrawal-of-novel.html" target="_blank">that I wrote about</a> last year. Perhaps it’s due partly to the romance of the noun distinguished by its superfluous double consonant at the start and mix of <i>know</i>, <i>no</i>, and <i>non-stick</i> – the latter leading to one scholar to complain that the word accommodates too many contexts and different meanings – and partly because of <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2017/06/a-commentary-on-myself.html" target="_blank">Robert Minto's review</a> of my book. (Incidentally, what ever happened to Robert Minto?)<br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj-LWULn233moHDv6UBt3C2W4gTKl7LiBkvlvTMzHUJn3wS0vdjixWuaGEqHD9oD4qib1plj2TeYa2zyz-QGzyISb7XPw7G37rar4EQgelEEboa9XT03_0EcYnLd9G-C8LIkmYULJdN7jP9osUKsYWulIi4_rNqzN22SetFPEXQdYCkDqgxg/s500/Muller_Taubes.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="331" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj-LWULn233moHDv6UBt3C2W4gTKl7LiBkvlvTMzHUJn3wS0vdjixWuaGEqHD9oD4qib1plj2TeYa2zyz-QGzyISb7XPw7G37rar4EQgelEEboa9XT03_0EcYnLd9G-C8LIkmYULJdN7jP9osUKsYWulIi4_rNqzN22SetFPEXQdYCkDqgxg/w265-h400/Muller_Taubes.jpg" width="265" /></a></div><p>However, Gnosticism attracts me for a specific reason: the idea of tsimtsum, of creation as an act of abandonment by God; an idea that I first encountered in Blanchot's <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-infinite-conversation" target="_blank">chapter on Simone Weil</a>: <br /></p><p></p><blockquote>In creating the world God does not set forth something more, but, first of all, something less. Infinite Being is necessarily everything. In order that there be the world, he would have to cease being the whole and make a place for it through a movement of withdrawal, of retreat, and in "abandoning a kind of region within himself, a sort of mystical space" [Gershom Scholem]. In other words, the essential problem of creation is the problem of nothingness. Not how something can be created out of nothing, but how nothing can be created in order that, on the basis of nothing, something can take <i>place</i>. <span style="font-size: x-small;">[Translated by Susan Hanson]</span></blockquote>This may explain that the sense of absence or sense of a revelation withheld remains even as one accepts the psychological and scientific explanations of its presentiment as an epiphenomenon to the evolution of the human brain; an imminence that becomes more pressing when one suspects that such explanations are themselves dependent on such an epiphenomenon. No wonder Van Morrison spits out <i>empiricism</i> in the song. <p></p><p>Even if I struggle to follow the scholarly discourse on Gnosticism, and have no inclination towards deeper engagement, I have read books with titles like <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Flight-Gods-Philosophical-Perspectives-Continental/dp/0823220354/" target="_blank">Flight of the Gods</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Religious-Philosophy-Simone-Weil-Introduction/dp/178076796X" target="_blank">The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil</a> (highly recommended by the way), and <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/God-Interrupted-European-Imagination-between/dp/069113670X/" target="_blank">God Interrupted</a>, and am drawn to others such as <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tsimtsum-Modernity-Lurianic-Philosophy-Perspectives/dp/3110684284/" target="_blank">Tsimtsum and Modernity</a> in a way that I used to be attracted to novels, the latter attraction now painfully diminished as <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2022/04/when-now.html" target="_blank">new, much-touted publications</a> have almost without exception led to disappointment or indifference (a novel should only ever be an exception). <br /></p><p> </p><center><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UknL1ALHDFk" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></center><p>It is also why I was keen to read Jerry Z. Muller's <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691170596/professor-of-apocalypse" target="_blank">biography of Jacob Taubes</a>, a prominent and notorious figure in the revival of interest in Gnosticism in the 20th century and whose quip gives <a href="https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501731006/no-spiritual-investment-in-the-world/#bookTabs=1" target="_blank">Styfhals' book its title</a>. As a biography, it promises a less demanding introduction to the scholarly landscape, and Muller excels in summarising ideas, such as Taubes' interpretation of tsimtsum (in one of its variant spellings) and why it remains relevant to secular thought:</p><p></p><blockquote>[He took] God’s self-imposed withdrawal...and turns it from a cosmological image into a process within man himself. Zimzum becomes a divine concealment within human reason, such that doubt about God is part of God’s creation. Doubt and heresy are the natural way of human reason. Reason and faith are thus truly irreconcilable... </blockquote><p></p><p>Getting to such passages, however, means riding the rollercoaster of Taubes' personal and academic life through 600 pages (including bizarre facts such as that he knew Noam Chomsky <i>and </i>EM Cioran). Many will know already of his first wife Susan Taubes and her novel <a href="https://www.nyrb.com/products/divorcing?_pos=1&_sid=7e4cf54a6&_ss=r&variant=32752575676553" target="_blank">Divorcing</a> in particular, in which Jacob appears in fictionalised form, and her suicide soon after publication, which Muller says was long planned and not a direct result of Hugh Kenner's harsh review of the novel. You can read more gossip from the biography in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/17/books/review/professor-of-apocalypse-jerry-z-muller.html" target="_blank">Mark Lilla's NYT review</a> and a more in-depth appraisal of his thought <a href="https://itself.blog/2015/09/20/review-of-jacob-taubes-occidental-eschatology-and-from-cult-to-culture/" target="_blank">by Adam Kotsko</a>. </p><p>What sets Taubes apart is that he challenged the very notion of theology, only not from the angle we have become used to <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching" target="_blank">in the dürftiger Zeit of Richard Dawkins</a>. Theology arises, he says, out of a religious crisis brought on by "a change in circumstances and consciousness [that] rendered the central doctrines, symbols, and myths of a faith less plausible" and a need to make them plausible again. Such a crisis occurred in Christianity when the expected second coming of Christ failed to happen, so what had begun as an "a small group of people awaiting the imminent coming of the Messiah and the end of days" was transformed. <a href="https://www.commentary.org/articles/jacob-taubes/against-the-stream-by-karl-barth/" target="_blank">Taubes again</a>:<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>Jacob Burckhardt once remarked that all relation to external reality breaks down if you take certain passages of the New Testament in dead earnest; in these, a spirit is reflected that considers the world to be a strange and alien place. Church and theology have done their best, however, to mitigate and obscure this original Christian experience of total alienation from the world; in nineteen centuries they have transformed an originally ‘nihilistic’ impulse into positive ‘social’ or ‘political’ action. </blockquote><p></p><p>Christianity in its original form becomes a forgotten heresy as the transformation proceeds, and Taubes wanted to recover the original: "to be truly religious was to be on the verge of heresy." If I am to continue misusing ideas and quotations, we might see this process of crisis and transformation in the individual and collective experience of contemporary literature, I mean novels, in which the sense of an imminent revelation is there in its essence as a book, a narrative to come, in the object itself in the near distance and the linearity of sentence upon sentence we read with varying degrees of expectation; an essence that is also a crisis. Most novels render the crisis as part of the story, which may be why crime fiction is so popular as it elevates and erases the crisis in the pure movement of genre, while what is called literary fiction seeks purity itself, attempting to partake in the unique crisis-value of literature, but which now lacks any sense of crisis in itself, which may also be why we see social and political issues <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-end-of-literature-part-3.html" target="_blank">brought to the fore in literary prizes</a>. The transformation of the crisis is thereby complete and has become the preserve of critics and reviewers, a secular priesthood who turn towards worldly concerns to protect themselves from apparent irrelevance – think of Beckett's Molloy using copies of the TLS to keep warm in Winter as it has "a never-failing toughness and impermeability. Even farts made no impression on it". When I said that a novel should only ever be an exception, perhaps that means they should be heretical. Thomas Bernhard's writing, for example, if his name and his work is allowed to stand for all outlying writers, is heretical less in its apparent misanthropy, which is a superficial feature anyway, than in its disturbing and exhilerating alienation from the world, albeit without any adventist hope.<br /></p><p>What might heretical mean in a more general literary sense? Bernhard's alienation has often been labelled nihilistic or life-denying, but nihilism needs to be clarified to refute and reverse the label. In his book, <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691162195/the-flame-of-eternity" target="_blank">The Flame of Eternity</a>, Krzysztof Michalski writes of the threat that "in every moment of our lives all meaning may become suspended". These moments are intervals in regular life but occur so rarely that habit takes over (which links back to my <a href="http://this-space.blogspot.com/search/label/Proust" target="_blank">two most recent posts</a> on Proust's <i>In Search of Lost Time</i>). "In this interval," Michalski says, "briefer than any moment one can measure, in this crack, this fissure, this tear—in the <i>blink of an eye</i>—everything is left to question, and a chance for a new beginning arises." This, he says, is the presence of eternity. <br /></p><p></p><blockquote>From the perspective of life as a sequence of interlinked moments—from birth to death, from breakfast to dinner—this interval, this fracture, this momentary breathlessness is naturally a threat, a sickness, a pathology. We’re sick with eternity: its chronic state is time, its crisis—love and death. But, on the other hand, isn’t it also pathological that we see sickness in the very thing that constitutes the meaning of life, that determines what it means to live? That we take the essential discontinuity of our lives—the fact that life "passes away," "becomes," "flows"—for a sickness to be treated? That we try 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." <br /></blockquote><p>Nietzsche recognises this pathology in the study of history, in science and in Christianity, which contrasts with Bernhard's novels as they go in <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-opposite-direction.html" target="_blank">the opposite direction</a> to concepts and continuity and invariably begin in fractures and fissures. Each novel is an exception. In this understanding, regular fiction is nihilistic as it seeks to render our lives consistent and comprehensible, and with the help of critics, to patch our lives with labels. It's not such a stretch then to compare Bernhard's formal dissidence of modern-day Austria to the ancient gnostic rebellion against the prevailing morality. "The Gnostic spirit that described the <i>cosmos</i> as the place of all evil" Taubes writes "also discovered the limit of the <i>cosmos</i>".</p><p></p><blockquote>The <i>cosmos</i> is like a prison, but there is a chance to escape from it: there is an exit, there is a way of redemption. The deprivation of all the positive attributes of the <i>cosmos</i> was not simply pessimistic lamentation about a general state of affairs, but a revolutionary act permitting the existence of a beyond: Gnosis was a way to salvation.</blockquote><p></p><p>What Bernhard presents is something against, even beyond, the limits the world has set, even if his novels do not offer salvation or the inward knowledge of spiritual mysteries. They are instead intervals in Michalski's terms, fascinating in their unwavering committment to fascination, revolutionary acts permitting the existence of something other than the cosmos that engulfs us, sick with habit. And it's not just Bernhard: in another novel by another Austrian (Peter Handke), <a href="https://thelastbooks.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Sebald_Across_the_Border.pdf" target="_blank">WG Sebald recognised</a> a "peculiar light which illuminates the space under a leafy canopy or a tent canvas to glisten between words". What glistens, what seems incomprehensible but is <i>there</i>, despite habit, despite all the explanations, is what novels can present to us as intervals, and yet they also "mutely resist what we project on them", as Peter Sloterdijk says of <a href="http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl.html" target="_blank">the gnostic gospels</a>, hence the attempts to transform them into utilities for action. </p><p>It is because of such resistance Sloterdijk says the "two towering works" of modern scholarship in Gnosticism that enabled some sense of the "foreignness we are [otherwise] scarcely in a position to appreciate" did so via modern continental philosophy. <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gnostic-Religion-Hans-Jonas/dp/0807058017" target="_blank">Hans Jonas</a>, for example, "was able to find the structures of Heideggerian fundamental ontology in the documents of Hellenistic and eastern Gnosticism". I want to suggest something similar: that in order to appreciate the crisis of contemporary literature – the transformation of a crisis – it may help to recognise first that it retains however faintly "the traces of metaphysical revolt" found in the gnostic gospels and to have patience before what is mute rather than allowing the projections of a secular priesthood to transform it. Sloterdijk says Gnosticism presents a "revolutionary new formula for localizing human existence: 'in the world, but not of the world'":<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>[It] can take place only after the discovery of a 'place' that would not be of 'this world' – still 'here' and yet already 'there,' still in the world and yet already at the non-place. </blockquote><p>All of which sounds oddly familiar to what has been transformed into <i>booklovers' escapism</i>.<br /></p><p>Quoting or misquoting like this appears to be a long way from the secular groupthink that once possessed my thinking. But perhaps not so far. Muller's biography shows in sometimes shocking detail how Jacob Taubes spent more time stirring things up in his personal and academic life than producing a coherent body of work. He was preoccupied by the writings of St Paul, aspiring to do for his thought "what Heidegger had done for Kierkegaard", but <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=891" target="_blank">his book on the subject</a> is very short and was recovered only after his death as transcriptions of a lecture series. </p><p>What surprised me to read about Taubes was that, for all his focus on St Paul's thought, he was not interested its theological claims: '"I do not think theologically," he pronounced. "I work with theological materials, but I think of them in terms of intellectual history and actual history. I inquire into the political potential of theological metaphors."' This might be why I am drawn to such books despite having no great interest in religion. And, as an amateur whose work is produced haphazardly and exists on a free-to-air platform, I related to Taubes' failure or refusal to produce of a coherent body of work let alone a Major Work. It was self-destructive, but as he said: "I have no spiritual investment in the world". Willem Styfhals says that when he began studying less canonical German thinkers such as Taubes at a Catholic university, he felt "like some
kind of a modern heretic". This is certainly how I felt writing this, and I'm quite happy that burning stakes have been replaced by a deafening silence. On the basis of this nothing, perhaps something can indeed take<i> </i>place.<i><br /></i></p><p></p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-30309563781333054302022-07-04T11:53:00.031+01:002023-04-10T14:34:58.690+01:00“Can there be a pure narrative?”<p>The question opening Maurice Blanchot’s essay <i>The Experience of Proust*</i> has always drawn me back, not to secure a yes or a no, but to keep the question of pure narrative open in its initial uncertainty, perhaps, rather, in its impossibility, as it appears to make reading and writing more vital, more promising, to me at least, than the forms and issues that keep book reviewers and literary critics spinning like whirling Dervishes before a God long since disappeared. This is an attempt to understand why.<br /></p><p>First of all, what could <i>pure</i> mean this context? In the very next sentence, Blanchot writes "Every narrative seeks to hide itself in novelistic density, even if only out of discretion", which implies that pure narrative is narrative in itself – perhaps its Platonic form – but that would mean every narrative is pure until the writer begins to write; a form without content, which doesn't make much sense. Gérard Genette's study quoted at length <a href="http://this-space.blogspot.com/2022/04/when-now.html" target="_blank">in my previous post</a>, itself seeking answers via Proust, may help here, as it begins by offering three definitions of narrative: </p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>A statement telling of an event or series of events </li><li>The totality of actions and situations subject to such a statement </li><li>The act of narrating taken in itself <br /></li></ul><p>
Two are familiar in regular novel reviews (<i>We are taken from Europe to Persia during the political upheavals of the interwar years</i>) while the third prompts the image of an orator reciting the Iliad before an audience,
which is why Genette notes that this is the oldest definition and, we might assume, the purest. But there can be no degrees of purity here, and 'act' is a verb rather than an adjective, so the question remains open. <br /></p><p>Blanchot essays seeks to understand why the possibility of a pure narrative led Proust, otherwise “so desirous of making books and of being thought of as a writer”, to put a 750-page novel in the drawer and yet hurry to publish <i>Les plaisirs et les jours, </i>a comparatively insubstantial volume of short pieces not likely to make much of an impression – an apparent perversity similar to Kafka publishing <i>Betrachtung</i> that alone would never have led to the word Kafkaesque; a decision all the more curious because <i>Jean Santeuil</i> has so much in common with the novel that gave us the word Proustian: a long and detailed account of the life of a fin-de-siècle upper-class Frenchman that not only begins with the seven-year-old Jean anxiously seeking his mother's goodnight kiss but also descriptions of the famous instants and what they suggest:</p><p></p><blockquote>Could it be that beauty and joy for the poet resides in an invisible substance which may perhaps be called imagination, which cannot work direct on immediate reality, nor yet on past reality deliberately
remembered, but hovers only over past reality caught up and enshrined in
the reality now present? It is as though before the eye which sees it
now and saw it long ago, there floats divine imagination, which is
perhaps the source of all our joy, something that we find in books, but
only with the utmost difficulty in things around us. [...]</blockquote><blockquote>And is it not more beautiful we wonder, that the imagination, which
neither the present nor the past could put into communication with life
and so save from oblivion and the misinterpretation of thought and
unhappy memories, the varied, individual essences of life—trains and
hotel rooms, the fragrance of roses, the taste of stewed fruit,
washrooms and roads from which we can look at the sea while, as it were,
travelling elegantly in a carriage—is it not more beautiful that in the
sudden leap which follows on the impact between an identical past and
present, the imagination should thus be freed from time? For the
pleasure of that experience is a sure sign of its superiority, and in it
I have always put such trust that I write nothing of what I see,
nothing at which I arrive by a process of reasoning, or of what I have
remembered in the ordinary sense of remembering, but only of what the
past brings suddenly to life in a smell, in a sight, in what has, as it
were, exploded within me and set the imagination quivering, so that the
accompanying joy stirs me to inspiration. <br /> [Translated by Gerard Hopkins]</blockquote><p></p><p><i>Pure narrative</i> then would be the <i>divine imagination</i>. But, as these passages show, the problem for Proust is that these transports are presented as moments of reflection and speculation alongside the narrative rather than its divinely guided principle. The instants are neutralised, set beyond the linear progress
of Jean Santeuil's life, betraying its inspiration. This is one side of the "experience" referred to in Blanchot's title: the disappointment in writing by a process of reasoning outside of divine imagination – the other side, I presume, being the experience of the instants. If published, he says, "Proust would have been lost"<i>.</i><i> </i>A disconcerting thought given how easy it would have been for Proust to have settled on what he had produced<i>. Jean Santeuil</i> would have become only another grain of sand in
the desert of regular novels, with the events of Jean's life comprising "ordinary novelistic material" with the occasional <i>philosophical</i> interlude we have just read; events that are certainly beautifully written and moving to read but soon indistinguishable from other novels with yet more beautiful writing, more interludes, and more moving events borne on the desert winds. A desert may have its own majesty, but it relies on death for its power, which in terms of biographies and regular novels is its submission to a conclusion towards which as readers we hurry, invariably construing the compulsion as <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2005/05/resenting-real-thing-john-carey.html" target="_blank">pure pleasure</a> rather than as despair. <br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfp8pY1MbIn1Fri9aqKitY-ao5ftVpdFznqMl1VV3_DYq0ZP1eZE02UHZVdIRTEaX4LjQRXhGRHTsI8jBbzYdzExzV0SMs27CoxAVw7mzL6D-MprOrvyuTeXgnLl5bFORdeRafGTxRKujAZRQJZY8SSBMhdUEKyNROZH3Qt_3Gbdlhqor8Bg/s1280/Proust_JeanSanteuil2.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="895" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfp8pY1MbIn1Fri9aqKitY-ao5ftVpdFznqMl1VV3_DYq0ZP1eZE02UHZVdIRTEaX4LjQRXhGRHTsI8jBbzYdzExzV0SMs27CoxAVw7mzL6D-MprOrvyuTeXgnLl5bFORdeRafGTxRKujAZRQJZY8SSBMhdUEKyNROZH3Qt_3Gbdlhqor8Bg/w280-h400/Proust_JeanSanteuil2.jpeg" width="280" /></a></div><p></p><p></p><p>Instead, Proust needed to write a novel in which death is suspended and neutralised. As Jean Santeuil suggests above, this demanded a novel "without any other
matter than the essential"; a novel, in Blanchot's desert-contrasting simile, "made only of those points from
which it is formed, like the sky where apart from the stars there is only
emptiness". What form might such a novel take?<br /></p><p>Blanchot notes that Impressionism, a movement Proust admired in the visual arts, gave him a model. If had he followed the example, however, he would likely have produced a short novel we might now call <i>poetic</i>; appealing for its potential for cystalline beauty and the shining of something intangible absent in more garrulous novels, but one that soon palls as one stalls over yet another fussily worded sentence (<a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-munro-doctrine.html" target="_blank">see much-lauded</a> "very experimental" writers). Instead, of course, he produced one the longest novels ever published. Pure narrative as Proust conceived it had to be abandoned. But he found a way to justify the abandonment:<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>He discovered something about the space of the work that had to carry all the powers of duration at once, that had also to be nothing but the movement of the work toward itself and the authentic search for its origin, that had, finally, to be the place of the imagination.</blockquote><p>Pure narrative would then be the origin of narrative – the experience of pure time in Proust's case, accessible in the space of the imagination. Blanchot says that Proust came to think of this space as having the essence of a sphere engorged with the impurities of "novelistic density", with the instants passing from buried centre to the bright surface, revealing the origin in "joyful flashes of lightning". By filling the emptiness of the sphere with the material
we're familiar with from this and other novels, Proust created a turning world in which what on the surface appears settled only for the instants to disrupt and rewrite memory. We can see this from the very beginning as Marcel emerges from sleep and struggles to recall where he is. Everything around him that was immobile in wakeful hours revolves around him in the darkness – "things, places, years" – so that he has to form and re-evaluate his reality each morning, creating "a song of possibilities" suppressed by habit. It differs from "the unreality of a scintillating space" of purely imagined novels because it is a world very close to Proust's own life, except this is not a <i>roman à clef </i>requiring a biographer to tease out the connections to give us <i>the truth behind the novel</i> but one in which the narrative "happens as if it were fortunately superimposed onto the journey of his actual life". This is the best way to appreciate <i>In Search of Lost Time</i> as a novel: a form in which every apparent truth and every event is subject to re-evaluation as the sphere revolves. By superimposing its revolutions onto the movement of an actual life, it implicates the reader's own life and the potential for uncovering possibilities otherwise buried in their life.<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>In the one life there are many lives. Alternative lives. Some are lived and others imagined. That is the absurdity of biographies, he would say, of novels. They never take account of the alternative lives casting their shadows over us as we move slowly, as though in a dream, from birth to maturity to death. </blockquote><p></p><p>This passage from Gabriel Josipovici's 120-page novel <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-cemetery-in-barnes-by-gabriel.html" target="_blank">The Cemetery in Barnes</a> is, despite its length, very much in the Proustian tradition of countering the habits into which novels can fall. Our "actual life" can often become a worn-out genre.<br /></p><p>Blanchot ends his essay on what Proust produced to erase the memory of <i>Jean Santeuil</i> with another passage that also draws me back to ponder its implications: </p><p></p><blockquote>There is...something indescribably wonderful in this piece of writing, which has been brought back to daylight and which shows us how the greatest writers are threatened and how much energy, inertia, inactivity, attention, and distraction are needed to go to the end of what proposes itself to them.</blockquote><p></p><p>Does Proust count as one of Blanchot's "greatest writers" not because (or not only because) of his uniquely beautiful style – "this style of slow curves, of fluid heaviness, of transparent density, always in movement, wonderfully made to express the infinitely varied rhythm of voluminous gyration" – but because he was able to resist generic form despite being a master of it and, instead, in a combination of contradictions, follow the truth and logic of his inspiration – that which interrupts regular narrative and appears, bizarrely, to redeem a life otherwise wasted or lost – in contrast to those who build a foundation on habit and expectation, thereby finding an all-purpose literary alibi? <br /></p><p>This is why I am drawn back. The essay on Proust confirms <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Theory-Inspiration-Composition-Subjectivity-Post-Romantic/dp/0719059836/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=" target="_blank">Timothy Clark's statement</a> that Blanchot "offers what is surely the fullest, least idealizing and most detail theory of inspiration in Western literature" in which the "Romantic tradition of attempting to appropriate inspiration as form of human power may be said to come to an end", as "inspiration finds its provenance outside or beyond the consciousness of the writer"; the outside or beyond coming from "both the emerging work itself and, literally, nowhere".<br /></p><p>"Nowhere" may be pure narrative, the centre of the sphere; a less joyful version Proust's experience of pure time; "the giant murmuring upon which language opens" as Blanchot characterises it in <a href="http://this-space.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-world-as-refuge-re-reading-space-of.html" target="_blank">The Space of Literature</a>, "and thus becomes image, becomes imaginary, becomes a speaking depth, an indistinct plenitude which is empty". This alternative rendering of pure narrative helps me to understand my ambivalent relationship with narrative content, or at least with the sphere of contemporary literature as it bloats into an ever-expanding universe of <i>love and loss</i> so large no privileged instant can penetrate its happy and virtuous surface, and yearn instead for an acultural, ahistorical writing that puts everything into question, including itself. Except Blanchot's Proust confirms my undue haste, as this may require a paradoxical indulgence in both culture and history (which may also justify my advocacy for Knausgaard's struggle). Clark again:<br /></p><blockquote>The demand made by the work on the writer is...less to instrumentalize language in a certain way, than, suppressing the urge to personal expression, to impose a certain silence, form or limit upon that 'giant murmuring'.</blockquote><p> If I have written my own <i>Jean Santeuil</i>, I have at least the ability to abandon it, although I did hurry to publish <a href="https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/this-space-writing" target="_blank">my own</a> <i>Les plaisirs et les jour</i>. Yes, it has its moments, I think, and then realise that of course Proust’s novel has its moments too, and look what he made of them. </p><p> </p><p></p><p>*<i>The Experience of Proust</i> can be found in <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Book_to_Come/jPwJbePDacQC?hl=en&gbpv=1" target="_blank">The Book to Come</a> translated by Charlotte Mandell</p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-47118398455185036442022-04-13T14:47:00.025+01:002022-06-15T14:55:18.702+01:00"When now?"Out of curiosity, I read a few novels that over the last year have received the highest praise on social media and literary podcasts, and have appeared multiple times in newspaper Books of the Year choices and on prize shortlists, and one that even won a prize. I wanted to see what industry and independent opinion considers the very best of contemporary literature written in English, and was surprised to discover there was nothing special or distinct about them; nothing at all. What, I wondered, had thrilled others while, after thirty or so pages of patient reading, my eyes began to drift over words, sentences, and then whole pages? Once again, eleven years on, I asked myself: <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2011/04/question-do-you-really-have-interest-in.html" target="_blank">do you really have an interest in novels?</a><br /><p>I soon recognised it had nothing to do with the stories or the humour, passion, skill and intelligence with which they were told, each of which appears to be what draws the high praise, and no doubt deserved for these reasons, but instead the relentless temporal stability in the clear, taken-as-axiomatic delineation between the narration and what is narrated. It helped me to recognise that the foregrounding of the relation between the two is a key factor in what stirs me when reading novels: Dante in the <i>Vita Nuova</i>, for example, if we can overlook the generic uncertainty for a moment, moving between the time of writing and the lost time of a living Beatrice "so mercury jumps like a spark" (<a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2018/08/dante-on-beach.html" target="_blank">as Charles Singleton describes it</a>), or simply the clause in "A quarter of a century, or a day, has passed since I arrived in Jesenice on the trail of my missing brother", the opening line of Peter Handke's <i>Repetition.</i> While this may appear to be a small point, a matter of taste like a demand for realistic dialogue or "relatable" characters, I think it has implications for what fiction can offer and why so many contemporary novels written in English, whether the content relates to current affairs and thereby becomes "<span class="dcr-139bh9t">as real-time as novels get</span>" (a line used in a recent review), suggesting urgency and the potential for real-world awareness, or is deemed <i>experimental</i> and worthy of our attention and admiration because of the unfortunate cultural prestige this term has developed, nevertheless remain, to me, inert.
<br /></p><p>To explain why, it may to help to look at an excessive example from <a href="https://circleuncoiled.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/gerard-genette-narrative-discourse/" target="_blank">Narrative Discourse</a>, Gérard Genette's analysis of the temporal structure of Proust's <i>Remembrance of Things Past</i> which, in Scott Moncrieff’s translation of the title, has become an alibi for wistful nostalgia in the simple delineation of event and its confident narration. Instead, in a single passage, labelled alphabetically in this passage from <i>Sodom and Gomorrah</i>, he finds <i>fifteen</i> narrative sections:
</p><blockquote>(A) Swann now found equally intelligent anybody who was of his opinion, his old friend the Prince de Guermantes and my schoolfellow Bloch, (B) whom previously he had avoided (C) and whom he now invited to luncheon. (D) Swann interested Bloch greatly by telling him that the Prince de Guermantes was a Dreyfusard. "We must ask him to sign our appeal for Picquart; a name like his would have a tremendous effect." But Swann, blending with his ardent conviction as an Israelite the diplomatic moderation of a man of the world, (E) whose habits he had too thoroughly acquired (F) to be able to shed them at this late hour, refused to allow Bloch to send the Prince a circular to sign, even on his own initiative. "He cannot do such a thing, we must not expect the impossible," Swann repeated. "There you have a charming man who has travelled thousands of miles to come over to our side. He can be very useful to us. If he were to sign your list, he would simply be compromising himself with his own people, would be made to suffer on our account, might even repent of his confidences and not confide in us again." Nor was this all, Swann refused his own signature. He felt that his name was too Hebraic not to create a bad effect. Besides, even if he approved of all the attempts to secure a fresh trial, he did not wish to be mixed up in any way in the antimilitarist campaign. He wore, (G) a thing he had never done previously, the decoration (H) he had won as a young militiaman, in '70, (I) and added a codicil to his will asking that, (J) contrary to his previous dispositions, (K) he might be buried with the military honours due to his rank as Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. A request which assembled round the church of Combray a whole squadron of (L) those troopers over whose fate Françoise used to weep in days gone by, when she envisaged (M) the prospect of a war. (N) In short, Swann refused to sign Bloch's circular, with the result that, if he passed in the eyes of many people as a fanatical Dreyfusard, my friend found him lukewarm, infected with Nationalism, and a militarist. (O) Swann left me without shaking hands so as not to be forced into a general leave-taking.</blockquote>
Which he then aligns with <i>nine</i> temporal positions labelled this time with numbers:
<blockquote>(1) the war of 1870; (2) Marcel's childhood in Combray; (3) a time before the Guermantes soirée; (4) the Guermantes soirée, which we can place in 1898; (5) the invitation to Bloch (necessarily later than this soirée, from which Bloch is absent); (6) the Swann-Bloch luncheon; (7) the addition of the codicil; (8) Swann's funeral; (9) the war whose prospect Françoise envisaged and which, strictly speaking, occupies no definite position, since it is purely hypothetical, but which—in order to place it in time and simplify things—we may identify with the war of 1914-18. The formula of positions is then the following: </blockquote><blockquote>A4-B3-C5-D6-E3-F6-G3-H1-I7-J3-K8-L2-M9-N6-O4</blockquote><p>
<br />While this provides riches for those wishing to analyse the technical features of narration, such as the separation between an event and its narration, it obscures what presents itself in the separation, whose presence intrigues and stirs me especially when it is becomes a factor in narration, as it does across the expanse of <i>In Search of Lost Time</i>. The presence of the first is very familiar to readers and is indeed what we long for when opening a novel and reading the first line, yet is invariably camouflaged by all kinds of alibis, excuses and mitigations of which Proust's is an ideal example, as it contains the density of detail in its storytelling we expect from any great novel of society, enabling the reader seeking to instrumentalise the purely superfluous pleasure of reading for technical, cultural and sociological advantage. And yet it is also the poorest example, as we can also find in Proust that which Walter Benjamin recognised as "the rudiments of an enduring idealism". The reason why it is more than any great novel of society is its revelation of time, the famous instants in which time is erased, or, rather, in which time is transfigured in its erasure. </p><p>What presents itself then is the question of the time in which the narration of the novel takes place, and which the example above begs an answer. It's a deceptively simple question with an equally deceptive answer: the time the writer is
writing on the page. But in taking this answer for granted, we reveal to ourselves that what we demand of a book is an effacement of this time, which also means an effacement of the author. The regular fussing we see in reviews and social media over genre designations and features is a classic example of how narration is not in possession of the author but partakes of something shared; something outside of the jurisdiction of any single reader or writer no matter how much we try to anchor this outside by celebrating a particular author for their "genius". This is why writers prefer to dislodge such praise because they recognise more than anyone that the work is not their own. </p><p>So if in repeating the first two questions opening <i>The Unnamable, </i>Maurice Blanchot asks of the narrator of Samuel Beckett's books "Where now? Who now?", we can ask the third of the narrator of <i>In Search of Lost Time</i>: "When now?". And if Blanchot answers the second question with <i>the neutral</i>, we can answer<i> </i>the third with<i> eternity,</i><i> </i>if we understand the eternal not as the absence of time but time in its pure state, which is how <a href="https://shows.acast.com/transcendence-and-the-body/episodes/lecture9-nietzsche-and-eternal-recurrence" target="_blank">Nietzsche's eternal recurrence</a> has also been interpreted, a conception which itself presents an intriguing parallel to what is most familiar to us in the effacement of the separation of event and its narration. Indeed, it is what we long for when opening a novel: the unchanging, consoling content, stories recurring each time they are read, perhaps even without being read but recognised as recurring inside the covers lined up before us on a shelf, the awareness of which excites and inspires us with the promise of an escape from the ravages of real time while, at the same time, threatening a profound melancholy in the awareness of the remove of pure time, hence throwing anchors into the deep.<br /><br />The ability to arouse excitement and alleviate despair forgives the
recent novels, their writers and those who believe they are very best of our time and
following a great tradition, as they maintain trust in the dissimulation
necessary for novels to keep writers writing and for publishers to keep
publishing. Despite this, I think of Erich Heller's description of Kafka's <i>The Castle</i> as "a terminus of soul and mind, a <i>non plus ultra</i> of existence" and compare it with Jean Cocteau's recognition that Proust, writing at the same time as Kafka, was on a "blind, senseless, obsessive quest for happiness", and wonder if there are novels being written and published now subject to what presents itself in the time of narrative, whether understood as a terminus or as the possibility of happiness. Is such literature still possible?<br /></p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-16220624081099717352021-12-27T14:23:00.039+00:002022-07-08T16:56:01.103+01:00Favourite books 2021<p>If such things matter, and they don't, my book of the year is Peter Holm Jensen’s <i>The Moment</i>. <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2021/04/at-home-hes-tourist-moment-by-peter.html" target="_blank">As I wrote in April</a>, it’s one in which the writer seeks “a modest, self-effacing place within the intersection of time and eternity” and can be read again and again for this reason, as one's deepest concerns, otherwise diluted by public pantomimes, take form in the patience of attention. To recognise this again is always a surprise. <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgTyU-Adl-zAqzKFhC_IwVtpIYla2ZWgjTb5Y3SUqV3UMqPsHM25aNxwQ7D6NOZ9tNI5erDFtr_oPc1GWGnBXXRkXMlWlfWrKdkxKBFpTrM5rmNOFvrGsZyrzqgzmxkS3f9ILjEna_kx7MuETKYnY8ctGFexk21hQXichaAxRTo9Z5tkQeaWA=s1100" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1100" data-original-width="750" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgTyU-Adl-zAqzKFhC_IwVtpIYla2ZWgjTb5Y3SUqV3UMqPsHM25aNxwQ7D6NOZ9tNI5erDFtr_oPc1GWGnBXXRkXMlWlfWrKdkxKBFpTrM5rmNOFvrGsZyrzqgzmxkS3f9ILjEna_kx7MuETKYnY8ctGFexk21hQXichaAxRTo9Z5tkQeaWA=s320" width="218" /></a> </div><p></p><p>
Before and after such recognition, I'm often confused by how much Karl Ove Knausgaard’s writing
stirs me, embarrassed even, because his books are unremarkable in many ways (the public ways); not
remotely what others misunderstand as modernist or, that horrible word, <i>experimental</i>. But I can't deny the same recognition, and it's the intersection taking form in the otherwise straightforward narrative that <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-morning-star-by-karl-ove-knausgaard.html" target="_blank">explains my response</a> to <i>The Morning Star</i>, which stands out among the novels I've read this year. <br /></p><p></p><p>Time is a constraint on two other of my books of the year: Gabriel Josipovici's <a href="https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=2394" target="_blank">100 Days</a>, the result of a plan to write 100 essays in the 100 days of the first lockdown of 2020 (reaching 83 in the end), on subjects prompted by each letter of the alphabet, and Ellis Sharp's <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Twenty-Twenty-Ellis-Sharp/dp/1999735986/" target="_blank">Twenty-Twenty</a>, which presents itself as an autofictional chronicle of each day of the year, following Uwe Johnson's <a href="https://www.nyrb.com/products/anniversaries-volume-1?variant=36245563474088" target="_blank">Anniversaries</a> from which 'Ellis' quotes in the early months of the year. Apart from the calendar constraint, the two couldn't be more different: one "deceptively slight, disarmingly circumstantial...a joy to read" as <a href="https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/100-days-gabriel-josipovici-book-review-ben-hutchinson/" target="_blank">Ben Hutchinson says</a> in his review, the other bitter, unforgiving, bordering on monomaniacal. <br /></p><center>
<table><tbody>
<tr><td><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiHUuNEkoY2pscPxVQKKKGsFdrlmzWUwTVTfQ4sISpEm_LR8iaAQrNM4rq8eexdUoE4ciHwp6A8gl_NwTB7YnIhMv-C0fqBwc7qaokK7ufAzlkL-F6OvC-yxH3qRt-KwBu5VqZ7Q0miO5sRZBnkkIsXTXU8uWIA-JIeM-6q-HJX3uRGijsQdw=s1280" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="678" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiHUuNEkoY2pscPxVQKKKGsFdrlmzWUwTVTfQ4sISpEm_LR8iaAQrNM4rq8eexdUoE4ciHwp6A8gl_NwTB7YnIhMv-C0fqBwc7qaokK7ufAzlkL-F6OvC-yxH3qRt-KwBu5VqZ7Q0miO5sRZBnkkIsXTXU8uWIA-JIeM-6q-HJX3uRGijsQdw=s320" width="170" /></a></div><br /></td><td><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEimTWNpyfi3yYMspRITrw79IJF-fH-2YwoqMY3-ybJiXPu6dk07ViADa0aM5y7r0qlBUjI7z8FKclo_smJX7Z9wjnqntNYr9LdR7O5RZJBzFOFfKs3zNzaXbglW7S8VwdFNfvUrXs3gWXXwtx4neFLB6-v2IXVKXqgphjdgIfak8eYBv9HM8g=s1280" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="876" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEimTWNpyfi3yYMspRITrw79IJF-fH-2YwoqMY3-ybJiXPu6dk07ViADa0aM5y7r0qlBUjI7z8FKclo_smJX7Z9wjnqntNYr9LdR7O5RZJBzFOFfKs3zNzaXbglW7S8VwdFNfvUrXs3gWXXwtx4neFLB6-v2IXVKXqgphjdgIfak8eYBv9HM8g=s320" width="219" /></a></div><br /><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></center><p>They do have one more thing in common: opinions which will upset or confound many. A key understanding of Josipovici's work in general comes when he asks "Why does my heart leap when I see a sculpture (Giacometti) or a painting (Bonnard, Hammershøi) of a figure in a closed room?" And answers that what they have in common is the depiction of limits. He cites other works by Beckett, Sterne, Stravinsky and Stockhausen that affect him in the same way:<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>So that my equally visceral dislike of the piano music of Schumann and Chopin and the symphonies of Mahler may be explained by the feeling they evoke in me that they are trying to lull my spirits rather than awaken them. And the same with so many novels and realistic paintings and sculptures. But also with abstract art like Pollock’s and Rothko’s, however different they may be, and with purely OULIPIan creations like the novels of Harry Mathews.<br />What moves me then is the depiction of the outside world, of human beings, which <i>at the same time</i> recognises that it is depiction and not ‘life itself’ and is prepared to press hard to see how far that brings freedom and how far enslavement.<br /></blockquote><p>By coincidence<i>, Twenty-Twenty</i> begins with an epigram in which a prisoner in darkness touches the wall of his cell so that "his fingers may tell him what his eyes cannot", which happens to be from Josipovici's 1996 book <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300181067/touch" target="_blank">Touch</a>. So rather than art being, as is commonly presented and understood, a brief and illusory release from the closed room, it is for both in their own way, an enquiry into the possibility of freedom. In Ellis Sharp's case, it is freedom from the prison of British political and cultural life in which local escapism is fine but political possibility is not, hence the culture's elevation of middlebrow epigones to greatness, while those in the great tradition of dissent and art are marginalised. In an entry for February the first, Ellis is reading Ian McEwan's Guardian article on Brexit which, Ellis says, "oozed with the complacency of the globetrotting liberal intellectual". Later, he reads John le Carré's speech accepting the Olof Palme Prize: "Another smug, narcisstic writer, Ellis thought":</p><p></p><blockquote>'Palme loved being the irritant. Relished it. Relished being the outsider voice,' Le Carré remarked, adding 'And now and then, I have to say, it does the same for me.' David Cornwell an outsider? St Andrew's Preparatory School, Sherborne School and Lincoln College, Oxford. And what could be more banal and conformist than Cornwell's politics? Dutiful mention of North Korea, ISIS, Iran, Russia, China and talk of nuclear threats but complete silence about Israel's armoury, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, events in Yemen. A dutiful assault on 'Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party' which, had it been elected, would have meant David Cornwell paying a great deal more in tax. The usual generalised reference to Labour anti-Semitism without a shred of evidence. Agreeable reflections about his privileged life as a globetrotter. No mention of carbon footprints or climate catastrophe. A fabulously wealthy old man and potboiler king wallowing in self-satisfaction.</blockquote><p>There are 400 more pages like this. It reminds me of <i>Journey to the End of Night</i> when Bardamu says "Every virtue has its own indecent literature". We need more of such indecency in virtuous English literary culture.<br /></p><p>Le Carré of course was a prominent signatory of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/14/concerns-about-antisemitism-mean-we-cannot-vote-labour" target="_blank">this letter</a> saying he couldn't vote for Corbyn's Labour party because it would be "to surrender in the fight against anti-Jewish prejudice". Note the other signatories and see if you can find any complaints from them about who runs the party now and its treatment of its Jewish members <a href="https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/on-labours-purge-particularly-of-jewish-socialists/" target="_blank">like Diana Neslen</a> and Riva Joffe:<br /></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/andrewfeinstein/status/1474194734860185613" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1159" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg-EEA2gAgEuxq3Gb5woH21QUO8zYLowRh8KXtFBzU_NTmPbVbEWwBmcKD17KoSf2tcTespdHojsHLjLb66NZ2ZaVn1B_nmauHF5wBuuBJWrKmNZnTeVMuCxJpRc1xHfbKHrxLxUSbE2mlHHYka0p9XmVlFgdbsTLpFci38Bb87mdDEAGT4wg=w363-h400" width="363" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Click on the image to see the tweet</span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><br /></span><p></p><p></p><p>Look at the names again and you'll notice what else they have in common, which brings me to my final book of the year: Didier Eribon's <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/returning-reims" target="_blank">Returning to Reims</a>, a sociological yet often hair-raising memoir of how his sexuality alienated him from the working-class family and community in which he grew up, and how that background alienated him from the privileged intellectual community he moved into. It was published in translation several years ago but I read it alongside Cynthia Cruz's <a href="https://repeaterbooks.com/product/the-melancholia-of-class-a-manifesto-for-the-working-class/" target="_blank">The Melancholia of Class</a> and Catherine Liu's <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-end-of-literature-part-four.html" target="_blank">Virtue Hoarders</a>, both published this year. The former is <a href="http://criticalflame.org/erasure-culture-and-the-working-class-on-cynthia-cruzs-melancholia-of-class/" target="_blank">a study of artists</a> who also move away from their working-class backgrounds to find success but find the past casts a long shadow (including <a href="https://jasonmolina.com/" target="_blank">Jason Molina</a>, whose songs are also part of Emil's <a href="https://themorningstar.no/" target="_blank">playlist</a> for <i>The Morning Star</i>), the latter an analysis of the class who sign such letters to the Guardian. </p><center><table><tbody>
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What stood out for me in Eribon's book was his account of the "vast offensive" begun in France "to facilitate an organized shift to the right of the politico-intellectual field". Eribon's career at Libération, the daily newspaper founded with the support of Sartre and Foucault, came to end as a result.
This process has been happening to the British left, becoming blatant and successful after the election of Jeremy Corbyn, and is something Ellis Sharp reflects in his extensive quotation of dissent from regular civilians and independent journalists using social media and websites, which has been relatively free from this offensive, but now appears to be facing <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/anti-corbyn-blair-censorship-google-labour-uk" target="_blank">a similar threat</a>. Eribon's memories of his family's Communism are especially poignant in this regard, as he says of his mother: "her dreams in life were not of becoming rich, but rather of light and of freedom". When I read the names of those who signed such letters and promoted <a href="https://simonmaginn.medium.com/top-ten-labour-antisemitism-smears-f729646378e6" target="_blank">the scam</a>, I see them smashing lightbulbs and slamming prison doors. I hope one day they recognise what suffering and injustice they have enabled. As it is, these books are only small cracks in the wall my fingers found in 2021.</p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-54651948811809972642021-12-07T11:34:00.012+00:002021-12-09T16:01:57.548+00:00"Every day I have to invoke the absent god again"*<center><p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SNyoUCdQog8" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe> </p><p></p></center><p> I really enjoy <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/LikeStoriesofOld/videos" target="_blank">this YouTube channel</a> despite my general lack of interest in films. The presenter’s restrained voice-over is ideal for one approaching its concerns; imagine a lullaby sung by Werner Herzog. I envy him the medium for its music, its visuals, even its potential for income, but, above all, for the critic's ability to watch a film within a few hours. It often takes me several weeks to read and re-read a book and then another several to excavate something worth saying about it. I wish there were more literary critics (one, even) who asked questions of books as Like Stories of Old asks of films – in this case, why films about a character's crisis of faith resonates so deeply with someone who does not consider themselves religious – and produced something as graceful and moving as this.<br /></p><p>Vlogging about books, by contrast, is an abomination. I stare at the talking head and pity the book as its cover is flashed up to the camera like a packet of biscuits. Why do spoken words incline me to think nothing is further from the written word?</p><p>Such distance, however, is key. Like Stories of Old’s latest video quotes a critic’s statement that Terrence Malick’s <i>A Hidden Life</i> is a film “you don’t just watch; it’s a movie you enter”. No doubt this is true, as Malick's films tends to be exceptions to my negative opinions about cinema, but it does highlight the critic's instinct to mitigate the primary attraction of film: the passivity of the viewer. </p><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjPBEnJvH_jCipN--ybaNEj3YYZ10wW3cuXiEmIwws17_rQ-LlJ1MqpqGHn1ow1_BhhcZndxBp6GIXxLyI0DF1ARvCdRUDhKVTyRg5pQHqv3yKvlrjLugZ-wpHQRok37L_mqfFkMmNldFiNCOqdSph-d4tW1j9Ap-JTJOX_L8ttXfaoeZit2A=s1280"><img border="0" data-original-height="746" data-original-width="1280" height="234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjPBEnJvH_jCipN--ybaNEj3YYZ10wW3cuXiEmIwws17_rQ-LlJ1MqpqGHn1ow1_BhhcZndxBp6GIXxLyI0DF1ARvCdRUDhKVTyRg5pQHqv3yKvlrjLugZ-wpHQRok37L_mqfFkMmNldFiNCOqdSph-d4tW1j9Ap-JTJOX_L8ttXfaoeZit2A=w400-h234" width="400" /></a></div><p>In the shot of Liam Neesom's character crying out into the void (from which film, I'm not sure), I recognise the attraction of the form, and my doubts. We watch in a relaxed silence similar to that of the silence into which he is pleading. We are impressed by his talent for transformation, but we are not beside him; the anguish burning his face is rhetorical hyperbole to mitigate the necessary failure of the form. Contrast this with <a href="https://youtu.be/G36SmOpsbvM" target="_blank">Javier Bardem's recitation</a> of the old Irish prayer <a href="https://www.prayerfoundation.org/st_patricks_breastplate_prayer.htm" target="_blank">St. Patrick’s Breastplate</a> in Malick's <i>To the Wonder</i>. We watch there too, yes, but, as we are held at a distance from the character, seeing what he sees, we join his search and wonder (which is closer to the experience of reading). The sequence can stand for the entire film, its central relationship in particular, in which intimacy and distance are as one. Meanwhile, the <a href="https://youtu.be/b5DSxcpLjWc" target="_blank">BBC's cheerful film reviewer</a> wants things spelled out like in the press release.<br /><br /></p><p>*Hölderlin in a letter to Susette Gontard, June 1799</p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-67843067406645397302021-11-07T12:59:00.011+00:002023-10-07T16:34:19.237+01:00The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard<p>I began reading <i>The Morning Star</i> without any prior knowledge of the contents, just as I had begun reading every other book of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s since receiving an ARC of the first volume of <i>My Struggle</i> long before he shone above us like the morning star in this novel. This time, however, after having read the most of the opening chapter, a friend happened to mention Knausgaard had claimed it is a horror novel, following the example of Stephen King’s <i>The Stand</i> in which multiple characters narrate their experience of an apocalyptic event. I was then resigned to expect <i>drama</i> to enter the familiar world of everyday Norwegian lives narrated here much like the everyday Norwegian life in <i>My Struggle</i>, which until then I was enjoying in the same way. </p><p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UXyI8V_vaNM/YYecpBvTisI/AAAAAAAAE3k/01ux8qt8Vg05LSt3kKWlkYQWSgDpUcZjwCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Knausgaard_MorningStar.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1370" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UXyI8V_vaNM/YYecpBvTisI/AAAAAAAAE3k/01ux8qt8Vg05LSt3kKWlkYQWSgDpUcZjwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Knausgaard_MorningStar.jpg" width="214" /></a></div><p>However, now that I’ve read all 666 pages, I can say I continued to enjoy it in the same way, perhaps because no apocalypse occurs, at least in the sense we understand it. What drama appears is not vast destruction but closer to the Greek meaning of <i>apokalypsis</i>: disclosure in the everyday sense and revelation in the theological. In <i>The Morning Star</i> there are only uncanny events in the corner of each individual’s everyday narrative: from excessively warm weather and wild animals appearing in great number, to characters who are apparently alive when they're dead, and, of course, the appearance of a new star in the sky. So comparisons to the horror genre are deceptive, as <i>The Morning Star</i> more closely follows volumes one and two of <i>My Struggle</i> in which the apparent banality of a human life presents itself against a background of absent meaning which is nevertheless forever impending, never quite arriving, no matter how many events promise resolution of the questions they present, which is why it’s surprising that Sam Byers’ <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/01/the-morning-star-by-karl-ove-knausgard-review-bloated-and-inconsequential" target="_blank">very negative review</a> reckons Knausgaard has “enriched” the <i>My Struggle</i> project “with a new and welcome undertow: unnamed dread”. But <i>Unnamed Dread</i> could be <i>My Struggle</i>’s alternative title! It's unname is there in the face in the sea young Karl Ove sees in TV footage in volume one and the sky in Constable's painting in volume two over which he weeps in the realisation that it can be depicted, if not named.<br /></p><p>Naming what is unnamed in the novel – attaching public meaning where private meaning lacks – is not only expected by the reader and demanded by the reviewer but inevitable, as <i>a book</i> is defined by its submission to unity, from its title and all the way down through its sentences to its final full stop. The book differs from an everyday human life because the latter's meaning becomes a question only when it becomes a narrative, when <i>something happens</i>: a great love, a break-up, an illness, a bereavement, the loss of a football match; when what happens becomes something outside oneself; a genre narrative. This is why applying labels such as <i>autofiction</i> and <i>horror</i> by writer, reader or reviewer is an avoidance tactic, as it provides a name for the outside where its meaning is otherwise withheld. Byers is inadvertently on the right track when he calls <i>The Morning Star</i> “a literary supernova", which he uses as a metaphor for "the entire Knausgårdian project entering spectacular, all-consuming heat death”.</p><p></p><blockquote>This is not an idea that has fallen apart in the execution, it’s a novel
that dreams of having an idea, a novel that, over hundreds of pages,
seeks meaning in everything from the boiling of an egg to the passing of
a soul into the afterlife, only to come back empty-handed. <br /></blockquote><p></p><p>Indeed, what comes back is not an idea but the uncanny presence of the novel itself, emphasised here by what Byers calls its "bloated and inconsequential" content. That is, the novel and the Novel (if there is really any difference), an object of obscure fascination, an obscurity named to obscure it; the novel <i>as</i> the morning star, appearing in our heavens where heaven had previously retreated, further brightening what was otherwise already bright but which we could not see until it appeared, under whose blaze we sweat because nothing dies, hence the multiplication of animals and characters who remain alive despite their death, and an artist character whose most distressing symptom of mental illness involves resisting this fact, and in the final chapter an essay "On death and the dead" which nevertheless turns into a ghost story, as if the novel seeks its own end in vain, becoming the ghost of itself.</p><p>In 1969, <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-infinite-conversation" target="_blank">Maurice Blanchot observed</a> that:<br /></p><blockquote>Essays, novels, poems seem only to be there, and to be written in order to allow the labor of literature … to accomplish itself, and through this labor to allow formulation of the question "<b>What would be at stake in the fact that something like art or literature exists?</b>" <span style="font-size: small;">(Translated by Susan Hanson)</span></blockquote>The question is unintelligible to us because it is one, Blanchot says, the "secular tradition of aestheticism has concealed, and continues to conceal". Perhaps if we pay closer attention to the relentless, indeed interminable, presentation and inevitable evasion of the question, which Karl Ove Knausgaard fails to evade better than most, we may begin to hear what the ghost has to say.<br /><p></p><p></p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-82143247603827521292021-10-31T13:32:00.036+00:002022-07-26T11:08:18.886+01:00The end of literature, part four<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xUkw6K_Ga3A/YUMEObDgqcI/AAAAAAAAE0Y/r5RtQd4XE7cUZE0A5UksBpxFCsR7TJhXQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1312/Danielle%2BRose.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="656" data-original-width="1312" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xUkw6K_Ga3A/YUMEObDgqcI/AAAAAAAAE0Y/r5RtQd4XE7cUZE0A5UksBpxFCsR7TJhXQCLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h200/Danielle%2BRose.png" width="400" /></a></div><p><a href="https://twitter.com/danirosepoet/status/1433816027947839494" target="_blank">This tweet</a> has been seen thousands of times since it was posted on the 82nd anniversary of Britain and France declaring war on Germany. Not that the coincidence means much. At least, no more than what <i>the general population</i>, <i>interest</i> and <i>powerful</i> mean here, or indeed what <i>poetry</i> means. As the hundreds of responses attest, they are generalities enabling a culture to oversee the remnants of what escapes it; that which it either reveres, ignores or dismisses, with an equal lack of consequence. <a href="https://twitter.com/FCardamenis/status/1434500520211849220" target="_blank">One response</a> is from the Editor-in-Chief of the magazine where Danielle Rose is Poetry Editor. Or was. <br /></p><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vz6pTsgbE9E/YUMD3WhH_WI/AAAAAAAAE0Q/Lh9c9ISzDO8YNaWl-Z30d9ehcmi5dJVnQCLcBGAsYHQ/s828/Barren%2Bmagazine%2Bstatement.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="828" data-original-width="692" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vz6pTsgbE9E/YUMD3WhH_WI/AAAAAAAAE0Q/Lh9c9ISzDO8YNaWl-Z30d9ehcmi5dJVnQCLcBGAsYHQ/w534-h640/Barren%2Bmagazine%2Bstatement.png" width="534" /></a></div><p>If Paul Celan saw no difference between a poem and a handshake, this is the sucker punch. </p><p><i>Celebrate</i>, <i>community</i>, <i>passion</i>, <i>vision</i>:<i> </i>words desiccated by a thousand corporate press releases. The magazine's <a href="https://barrenmagazine.com/dog-days/" target="_blank">website</a> even refers to <i>world-class</i> volunteers. Words and phrases like this became so notorious under the New Labour administration that <i>robust</i> is now included under W in the UK's Civil Service style guide of <a href="https://www.gov.uk/guidance/style-guide/a-to-z-of-gov-uk-style" target="_blank">words to avoid</a>. </p><p>But why should I lump an arts magazine in with neoliberal technocrats? Isn't this an admirable project to spread the value of art as far as possible in society? Well, yes, it is, on first glance. </p><p><a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/virtue-hoarders" target="_blank">Catherine Liu writes</a> about another project admirable on first glance. After Barack Obama became US president, <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i> returned to the school curriculum. Here is the definition of literature we can accept as having genuine power, as it teaches readers "a critical lesson about literature and empathy". Obama was keen for the return because, he said, reading allowed him to put himself in "someone else’s shoes" and as such was paraphrasing the novel's hero Atticus Finch who despite the anger and hatred directed at him defends a black man accused of raping a white woman. The novel has become a document of the postwar progression towards a fairer society culminating in the election of a black man as president. The <i>New York Times</i>' chief book reviewer even called Obama the <i>reader-in-chief</i>: "He was liberalism’s dream come true", Liu writes, with the return of<i> To Kill a Mockingbird</i> to the curriculum emblematic of a return to progress: "Atticus was not just genteel and antiracist but he was the most virtuous member of his community...the ethical
center of a barbaric and racist world." And so Obama. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7mFNYfYO_1g/YWwJdv46JTI/AAAAAAAAE2Y/u32VdE3bKiYyY3xE_HiMuDNXo-Ke6svWACLcBGAsYHQ/s600/CatherineLiu_VirtueHoarders_cover.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="428" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7mFNYfYO_1g/YWwJdv46JTI/AAAAAAAAE2Y/u32VdE3bKiYyY3xE_HiMuDNXo-Ke6svWACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/CatherineLiu_VirtueHoarders_cover.jpg" width="228" /></a></div><p></p><p></p><p>Except, Liu observes, there was no "massive reinvestment in public schools and public universities" to match that of the past because the Obama administration "wanted to revive the early 1960s era of high liberalism, but in style only". And style, like Barren Magazine's managerial vocabulary, is everything. During Obama's presidency, he deported more undocumented immigrants than any other president before him, dropped over 100,000 bombs on eight different countries, <span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">including white phosphorus and depleted uranium, ramped up drone executions and the persecution of whistleblowers, bailed out Wall Street while thousands of his supporters lost their homes, overthrew the elected goverment of Honduras, put <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-america-armed-terrorists-in-syria/" target="_blank">white helmets</a> on <a href="https://21stcenturywire.com/2016/09/24/syria-white-helmets-staged-russian-bombing-scene-near-aleppo-lapped-up-by-mainstream-media/" target="_blank">the terrorists</a> destroying Syria, and continued military and financial backing of the apartheid state to the south. So while he outdid the crimes and brutal policies of his graceless Republican predecessor, his elegance and literary sensitivity enabled liberals to see only a reflection of their admirable intentions, just as the female secretary of state reflected their proud feminist principles despite her decisive role in the Honduran coup, as called out by indigenous activist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berta_C%C3%A1ceres" target="_blank">Berta Cáceres</a>, who was assassinated soon after. </span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">So, while there was the impression that the value of art was being used to <i>uplift</i> society, Liu says Harper Lee's novel fits in perfectly with the superficial stylings of liberalism as it "is filled with hatred of the angry, defiant, pleasure-seeking poor white people represented by the awful
Ewells", promoting "the idea of the deserving poor and the undeserving poor".
<span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Obama's
educational reform in which literature played its part was instead "a
euphemism for an ongoing war against unionized workers and the lower
ranks of white-collar professionals."</span></span></span></span></p><blockquote><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">With
more than half of American children having experienced public assistance at some point or another in their short lives, it seems sadistic to make them read a novel about a noble, virtuous lawyer and the evil public assistance–abusing poor people trying to kill his family. If poor ninth graders pay attention in their language arts classes, they must feel humiliated by their family’s willingness to take what the worthy poor of Harper Lee’s novel refuse.</span></blockquote><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">The perception of this administration's virtue is a classic case of vertical solidarity: a black man and a woman in positions of power received PMC backing because they were examples of enormous social progress that also enables them to unsee the profound suffering caused by their policies, or, no better, to blame the victims. Liu notes a truth obvious to everyone outside <a href="https://twitter.com/jrc1921/status/1452360670498988044" target="_blank">the liberal bubble</a> that the electorate's subsequent disillusionment with <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/welcome-to-the-violent-world-of-mr-hopey-changey" target="_blank">Mr Hopey-Changey</a> "hardened into reactionary antiauthoritarianism" soon exploited by Donald Trump</span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"> and, in the UK fed up with the neoliberal consensus, the campaign to leave the EU.<br /></span></span><p></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">The connection between this and the question of whether poetry has any power is that the literary arm of the PMC has slowly taken over online literary coverage to instrumentalise it for professional and virtuous purposes. Hence the title of Catherline Liu's book: </span></span></p><blockquote><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">The PMC as a proxy for today’s ruling class is shameless about hoarding all forms of secularized virtue: whenever it addresses a political and
economic crisis produced by capitalism itself, the PMC reworks political struggles for policy change and redistribution into individual passion plays, focusing its efforts on individual acts of “giving back” or reified forms of self-transformation. It finds in its particular tastes and cultural proclivities the justification for its unshakable sense of superiority to ordinary working-class people. If its politics amount to little more than virtue signaling, it loves nothing more than moral
panics to incite its members to ever more pointless forms of pseudo-politics and hypervigilance.</span></span></blockquote><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">This might be the job description of the editor of the Guardian's book pages, whose agenda, summed up by the final sentence, influences so many as they search for authority in an otherwise marginal medium </span></span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">(a white male announced not long ago that for the next twelve months he would "read only books by women of color"</span></span></span></span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">. Catherine Liu again: 'Liberal members of the credentialed classes love to use the word <i>empower</i>
when they talk about "people," but the use of that verb objectifies the
recipients of their help while implying that the people have no access
to power without them.'</span></span>)</span></span>. </span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">I've <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2015/02/a-blog-comes-to-one-in-dark_21.html" target="_blank">written before</a> about the takeover but have hesitated
to approach the subject again partly because it is a game lost in advance in a culture that is <i>passionate</i> about <i>celebrating</i> a diversity of <i>voices</i> guiding readers toward the rhetoric of humanism in which literature is vehicle for all the hyphenated selves: definition, expression, assertion; ideal for a form in search of a certain kind of power or a <a href="https://lithub.com/falling-out-of-love-with-modernist-literature/" target="_blank">mirror, mirror on the wall</a></span></span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">. <br /></span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4HcAK6eue8s/YXPdEyjsFuI/AAAAAAAAE24/ZYY7lfn4bRE2N1qjaG2PxJG_3rGWGbeDACLcBGAsYHQ/s1200/Blanchot_Friendship.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="765" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4HcAK6eue8s/YXPdEyjsFuI/AAAAAAAAE24/ZYY7lfn4bRE2N1qjaG2PxJG_3rGWGbeDACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Blanchot_Friendship.jpg" width="204" /></a></span></div><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"> </span></span><p></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">The other reason for hesitation is because it appears to be impossible to discuss the alternative. </span></span>In an essay on the rise of paperback culture in the 1960s, Maurice Blanchot notes that a culture always requires a limit leaving "an outside in relation to which and in opposition to which we come together and take refuge in our apparently limitless freedom". He summarises the outside as that which is resistant to universal comprehensibility, something "we reject without knowing it" but whose exclusion is necessary for assimilation to take place, enabling communal self-congratulation on an historic victory over elitism. The emergence of affordable paperbacks enabled the circulation of all kinds of ideas new and old. On first glance, this also appears to be a progressive move, but, as <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20050926100907/http://www.inwriting.org/weblog/archives/000163.html" target="_blank">Will Large explains</a> in more detail, it might not be so straightforward: </span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"></span></span></p><blockquote><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Today we feel that we can comprehend, debate and discuss everything. There is nothing that we could not publish, no idea that cannot be explained and made digestible to the public, from quantum mechanics to the late thought of Heidegger. Have we not thought more than ever before? Is not our culture a great thinking engine, and are not our
heads simply bursting with ideas? But the more we know, the more everything has become ‘clearly and accessibly written’, the less what really matters is thought. For everything that is difficult has to be stripped out by necessity. ‘Difficult’ here does not just mean complicated, so that all the mathematical equations have to be taken out of the introductions to modern physics, but what cannot be thought, or what is not allowed to be thought. This is not a question of censorship,
for there is no censorship on the great conveyor belt of books, but something much worse. The more we understand the less we understand what cannot be understood. </span></span></blockquote><p></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Culture is thereby a "powerful collective machinery that silently and imperceptively, day and night, pursues its task" of assimilation, even of the most unlikely work. Blanchot's topical example is the "happy surprise" of </span></span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">the top literary commentators when they reviewed</span></span> a translation of a book by Trotsky. They discovered not a dangerous revolutionary but a "true man of letters" like themselves and whose statement that "everything is permitted in art" could be used against the "communist exigency", which, Blanchot notes, thereby reduces the meaning of such freedom to nothing. A work's <i>power</i> becomes indistinguishable from </span></span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">the building blocks of genre fiction</span></span></span></span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">. <br /></span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">In recent years, the sense of what not being able to understand what cannot be understood has preoccupied my experience of reading and so the focus of posts such as <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2019/09/a-walk-in-park.html" target="_blank">A walk in the park</a> and <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-withdrawal-of-novel.html" target="_blank">The withdrawal of the novel</a>. It might be conveniently called <i>the outside</i>, but this is a miserable cliché and better defined by <a href="https://brill.com/view/title/54620" target="_blank">Joseph Kuzma</a> in his summary of Blanchot's characterisation of the Freudian unconscious "as a radical exteriority":</span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"></span></span></p><blockquote><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">something that is not only indeterminate and unknowable, but that pulls man outside himself, outside everything he believes himself to be, outside everything that would comprise for him a center point...an irreducible otherness that precedes any installation of identity – an obscurity more ancient than even the most primitive form of consciousness...an outside that is neither another world nor a hidden world. </span></span></blockquote><p></p><p>While we may recoil from such hyperbole as it is a long way from the everyday experience of reading, it does suggest that the literary pages' fixation on the social identity of an author and how a work <i>tackles</i> current affairs in its subject matter is a sublimated accommodation of the pull of the outside, with the subsequent proliferation of virtuous reading plans proving them right. The blurb for a <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/F/bo125059622.html" target="_blank">forthcoming book</a> expresses this reserve in terms of assimilating world events: </p><blockquote><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Durs Grünbein argues that we are faced with the powerlessness of writing and the realization, valid to this day, that comes from confronting history. As he muses, “<b>There is something beyond literature that questions all writing</b>.” </span></span></blockquote><p></p><p>For Blanchot, that<span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"> <i>something beyond</i> is literature itself</span></span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">: a work's "<i>irreducible</i> distance"</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span> is that which <span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">the culture of assimilation can grasp "only as a lack – a lack in ourselves, a lack in the work, and a void of language". We can see this in the anxious and patronising jurisdiction provoked by Danielle Rose's tweet. Blanchot suggests an alternative follows from Trotsky's claim that "the new art will be an atheistic art" but in which the God under whose protected we remain is Humanism. He wonders </span></span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">"(by which improbably heresy?)"</span></span> we may leave "the enchanted knowledge of culture". Perhaps the parentheses around the question as much as the question itself is where Blanchot opens a space for us to continue.<br /></span></span></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>Stephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.com1