This Space

The Meritocracy Quartet by Jeffrey Lewis

2012-01-27T15:10:00.005Z

"Dream is a second life." Nerval's Aurélia begins with these words and in an instant the reader is pulled into the reverie of the imagination even as the narrator pushes back by explaining his announcement.

The first moments of sleep are the image of death: a hazy torpor overcomes our thoughts, and it is impossible for us to determine the precise instant when the I, in another form, resumes the creative work of existence. Little by little an obscure underground cavern grows lighter, and the pale, solemnly immobile figures that inhabit the realm of limbo emerge from shadows and darkness. Then the picture takes form, a new light illumines and sets in motion these old apparitions: –the world of Spirits opens before us.

A further paragraph cites the second-century novelist Apuleius, the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and the poet Dante as examples of those who have followed the visions of second life. Like Dante's, Nerval's began with a heart's privation:

A woman whom I had loved for a long while, and whom I shall call Aurélia, was lost to me. The circumstances of this event, which was to have such a great effect on my life, are of little importance. Each one of us can search his memory for the most heart-rending emotion he has known, the most terrible blow that fate has inflicted on his soul. It is a question of deciding whether to go on living, or die.

Jeffrey Lewis also makes an announcement in the foreword to his quartet of romans à clef now collected in a single edition.

I had in mind to write a kind of 'meritocracy' series, novels that would chart the progress of my generation, or anyway the narrow slice of it I knew well. The first book, in retrospect, came easily enough. Nothing ever comes easily enough, but I had a story to tell that was clear and seemed true enough, and I had feeling to put into it that had never gone away. It was the story of my hero in college, Harry Nolan, who might have been president of the country one day, and his wife Sascha Maclaren on whom I had a crush. My sixties book, so to speak.

Seventies, eighties and nineties books follow. However, this announcement is a quotation from the third book Theme Song for an Old Show. So, like Aurélia, the expedition begins by seeking justification in itself and thereby places a curious pressure on the quartet's overt narrative.

Harry and Sascha are apparently invented names though the narrator Louie is overtly Jeffrey Lewis, a Jewish outsider to the old money, Ivy League class of Christians we recognise from the days of the Kennedys; the diminutive forename, the Irish surname. George W. Bush and John Kerry are said to have emerged from the same year at Yale. The first novel Meritocracy: A Love Story begins with the couple, Louie and other graduates, Adam Bloch, Cord and Teddy – again, the names are enough – travelling for a weekend of sailing in Clements Cove on the Maine coast. You can picture the screenplay with Morgan Freeman's maudlin voiceover as the group drive through the New England countryside: banter, laughing, wind in blonde hair. Narration here takes the appearance of an American rite – a million bildungsromans now. There follows wonderfully evoked fog-bedeviled boat trip and an evening at a country fair. But the voiceover inevitably cloaks such light in the shadow of time passed, and, to the reader's dismay, the love story ends abruptly with a terrible event and the book we had been seduced to expect dies. In the seventies novel, The Conference of the Birds, the glowing prose of nostalgia becomes an agitation as Louie joins a new age community in New York. The cast changes, the sentences become shorter and the story becomes darker, unhappier, as various troubled souls pursue careers, relationships and spiritual enlightenment. Louie seeks precise awareness of what happened with mantra phrases mimicking cultish teaching: "Go back. Calm down. Sense. [...] Go back. Gently. Sense. Look. Listen. Broadway. Wind whipping the trash." Once again, the novel ends with a terrible event as a narrative full stop.

Jeffrey Lewis made his name as a writer on the hit eighties cop show Hill St. Blues which, in the third novel Theme Song for an Old Show, becomes (inexplicably), Northie. However, those of us with happy memories of the show will be disappointed if they expect a behind-the-scenes exposé, for it sits rather in the background to the story of Louie's relationship with his distant father. Even his marriage is a sideshow to a broken-home mom & pop novel. Again, a death punctuates the story.

While the three novels to a degree chart the progress of a narrow slice of a generation, the rite is dispiriting and oddly distant from the novel Haus Publishing alludes to in its promotion. It claims The Meritocracy Quartet is "set against the backdrop of four decades of changing American landscape" and that "America is the central character". This is both true and disingenuous. Recent history appears less often than weather reports and there are few pop culture references. America as the central character is absent or, better, the central character is absence. The novels present the gifts of worldly success as an ephemeral distraction from what looms and what demands to be addressed:

I told [my father] that in a matter of years I would take my winnings and quit and go write my books even if I had no idea yet what my books would be. I just thought, somehow, they must be there.

Why are these books so obscurely sought away from public life and public success? Perhaps it is because, in a meritocracy so presented, the ability rewarded is the ability to write a generic TV drama, something depending on contingent application; mere opportunism. The quartet's implicit question seems to be: after progress, what remains?

The final novel, Adam the King, is Louie's definitive attempt to resist this tendency, to remain on this side of sleep. It tells the story of Adam Bloch's return to Clements Cove to complete a trajectory from outsider to apparent insider as billionnaire businessman. For thirty years ago his role in Sascha's death remained unresolved but now he has married her sister and has built a mansion their future. Louie narrates as an observer otherwise uninvolved in the story. He even includes lengthy reports on the life of local blue collar workers living nearby in trailers. Their dialogue is repeated without his presence. Adam's physical redemption is confirmed with another moment of contingent application that is so unconvincing we can only be reminded that this is fiction and subject to generic laws; it does round things off very neatly. Bloch is Jewish too and, rather like his namesake Albert Bloch in In Search of Lost Time, entirely secular. He may therefore be Louie's alter ego just as it is said Albert is Proust's: the one who seeks redemption in the world, as opposed to in art or religion. Rounding things off with varnish, Adam embraces Judaism before his narrative-punctuating death, and thereby, as it happens, also reversing its suppression by Proust's Bloch's. Yet his redemption is also very Christian: the freest generation in history seeks its justification in death.

While Louie's crush on Sascha is not on the same neurotic scale of Nerval's Jenny, Proust's Albertine or Dante's Beatrice, it shares their embodiment of an enchantment that never dies. Her death is a question to meritocracy. We suspect Louie, and by extension Jeffrey Lewis, sought to write novels akin to the disaster of her death while remaining in thrall to the worldly subject, to the novels “America” demands by virtue of being America. Perhaps this is a cultural necessity competing with the creative work of another existence. It is possible that Sascha's presence is a mere mark on a chart of progress, but her presence pulls the writer and reader toward the first moments of sleep. Writing is a second death.

Victor Halfwit: A Winter's Tale, by Thomas Bernhard

2011-11-07T08:00:00.000Z

As a child I didn't read books. At least, I have no memory of doing so. My teacher in primary school once read to us James & the Giant Peach, and I enjoyed that, so why didn't I rush straight to Roald Dahl's other books? I don't know. Still, it can't be true that I didn't read because, a few years ago browsing in a small shop dedicated to children's books, I found a display of Ladybird Books' Well Loved Tales, reprints of editions I recognised as part of my childhood.

The moment I saw the cover of The Gingerbread Boy, involuntary memory washed over me. My fascination with the image of the gingerbread boy himself is particularly distinct. I can see now that he is running away but then, as a child, it wasn't so clear. I could see only a two-dimensional figure, though of course "two-dimensional" meant nothing to me. His odd way of running must have made me wonder what he was doing exactly; it didn't look like running. And why is he smiling? I'm sure I didn't know, and this is why I found it mysterious and captivating. But the distance between the content of my innocence then and my knowledge now is almost impossible to close outside of that momentary wash.

Other features in the series have a similar if slightly dimmer aura: the size of the elves against the shoes in The Elves and the Shoemaker, the presence of the pea beneath the layers of blankets in The Princess and the Pea, the contemplative demeanor of the ape in The Beauty and the Beast and the disdainful remove of the black goat in The Three Billy-Goats Gruff (which looks like it influenced the cover of U2's October). I should be clear: these are not Proustian reveries in which remote times and places merge into one, but something less grand, a fleeting sensation, a shadow of memory. I have no memory of the stories, only the images and the fascination they summoned then returns to me in placeless, wordless memory.

I am now fascinated by this fascination: what is its cause? If the gingerbread boy's oddness stands out, the others are not so clear. With adult knowing one may apply Freudian analysis to the blankets, aligning perhaps with Kafka's disgust at his parents' unmade bed, but I think the explanation is much simpler: they each manifest the part of the story that writing cannot contain. That is, the fascination created by storytelling itself; the inexplicable enchantment of the imagined world. Perhaps this is why graphic novels are so popular now, and my own puzzlement at this popularity – and an inability to share in it – is due precisely to my lack of childhood reading. This is no doubt true, but I think there's a deeper reason.

In 1837, Soren Kierkegaard wrote there were two ways of telling stories to children with "a multitude of false paths in between".

The first is the way unconsciously adopted by the nanny, and whoever can be included in that category. Here a whole fantasy world dawns for the child and the nannies are themselves deeply convinced the stories are true […] which, however fantastic the content, can’t help bestowing a beneficial calm on the child. Only when the child gets a hint of the fact that the person doesn’t believe her own stories are there ill-effects – not from the content but because of the narrator’s insincerity – from the lack of confidence and suspicion that gradually develops in the child. The second way is possible only for someone who with full transparency reproduces the life of childhood, knows what it demands, what is good for it, and from his higher standpoint offers the children a spiritual sustenance that is good for them. [Trans. Alastair Hannay, the ellipsis is in the original]

I suspect with graphic novels the problem for me is that the graphical content cannot bestow a beneficial calm, and this is because, put as simply as possible, the novels that drew me into reading (and thereby bestowed calm) were adult novels aware of what they cannot contain, an awareness necessary to form and content (Proust's would be the earliest example) which nevertheless sought that lack against nature. And the addition of graphics to a text is a shortcut, an unwitting act of insincerity. Perhaps I was too far from childhood fascination to maintain ready access to it, while those readers with an uninterrupted passage from the freedom of childhood books to reading for social integration and acceptance feel drawn to the beneficial calm afforded by the gesture of sincerity implicit in graphic novels, even if that means they are told, inevitably, by someone who knows the stories are not true.

Kierkegaard contrasts the two paths of storytelling to the false paths which "crop up by coming beyond the nanny position but not staying the whole course and stopping half-way". But how can modern writers stay the whole course if full transparency means knowingness inimical to fascination? It can't be a coincidence that the most popular children's books of recent years – JK Rowling's and Philip Pullman's – are enjoyed by many of the same readers, albeit "ironically". Postmodernists need sincerity too.

Thomas Bernhard's story for children, Victor Halfwit: A Winter's Tale, first published in Austria in 1966 with the subtitle "a winter's tale not just for kids", and now translated by Martin Chalmers and published by Seagull Books in an extraordinarily extravagant illustrated book, may be an example of Kierkegaard's false path. Had it been closer to a graphic novel, it may have found one of the other two.

The story itself is typical Bernhard: dark and charming, brutal and funny, moving and disturbing, all at the same time. That is, not in all these in turn but all at the same time. A doctor in Traich is walking to Föding through the "high forest" late one night – "this is what you have to picture" he says, the time of night is important – on his way see a patient with "an ailment of the head", when he stumbles upon a man lying in the snow, unable to move. From his prone position he introduces himself as Victor Halfwit, a man with two wooden legs: "the locomotive tore them from my body!". Victor is delighted as, had the doctor not arrived just then, he would surely have died of the cold and, "as you know, the most horrible death occurs when one freezes to death." You can expect children to love this. The rest of the very short story is taken up with Victor's explanation of how he came to be trapped in the high forest and what the doctor does to help him.

From Victor Halfwit illustrated by Sunandini Banerjee

I've noted before how interrupted routines, particularly interrupted walking routines, recur in Bernhard's fiction: the early novel Gargoyles and the later novel The Cheap-Eaters are not included there but suit comparison with Victor Halfwit, the first featuring a doctor on his rounds meeting grotesque characters, the second a scientist missing one leg changing restaurants on a whim. So what difference does having illustrations make to the Bernhardian experience? One particularly effective feature is emphasis of the comedy. The doctor notices that Victor is even more delighted when he learns of his rescuer's profession. He is happier than if he had been a plumber, an electrician, a baker or a farmer. In a normal book, this information would take up two lines of text, three at most, which one would scan without pause. Here it covers ten pages! Two pages count for the doctor's comments, then there are two for each profession mentioned. On first reading, each page provokes smile upon smile as the unnecessary excess increases. Each page-turning pause is a perfectly-timed caesura. Yet while the collages representing each profession in the abstract are impressive and fun, they seem more decorative than illustrative. (You can see more at Sunandini Banerjee's Facebook page.) Had each been related directly to the story and the interaction of characters, I wonder how much more captivating they would be. A regular graphic novel reader, one for whom illustration itself is a narrative, would be a better judge. Perhaps they would be enchanted by the illustrations just as I was by the Ladybird books. However, I longed for the straightforward representation offered by the latter. In the former, nowhere is the doctor or Victor Halfwit depicted. Sometimes there was little compulsion to look at anything but the words before turning the page. Perhaps, however, if they had been depicted, each caesura would have been missed as one studied the relation of one character to the other before reading the text.

Late on, there is a two-page spread featuring eight wooden grotesques in a distinctly medieval Germanic style, one of whom I decided looks like Victor Halfwit. This emphasised to me what the rest refuses and which I missed. Perhaps though, as the doctor says: "this is what you have to picture".

“I am no longer capable of writing about”: The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956

2011-10-26T07:03:00.002+01:00

Soon Beckett’s stipulation that only letters with a bearing on his work can be published will be repeated as often as Kafka’s request to Max Brod. The difference is that we may regret Beckett’s executors were not so disloyal. What ever the riches the letters contain, we will always wonder about those bearing on the life. However, the latest volume stresses the unavoidable and indeed necessary nature of such wonder.

The cover of volume two announces letters from 1941 to 1956, yet the first letter is dated 17th January, 1945. The missing years were those of war, most of which Beckett spent living and working in a farming community deep in the “free zone” having escaped occupied Paris on the brink of arrest. From there he sent postcards to his family in Ireland, which they didn’t receive and, on January 12th 1941, he sent a “pre-printed lettercard” to James Joyce. A facsimile is shown in the introduction. Joyce died the next day.

If we cannot have direct access to what Beckett experienced in that time, it remains indirectly sensible. The anxious verve of the brilliant young writer is replaced by a quieter man, still gravely lyrical yet less prone to hyperbole, much more forgiving of third parties (unless it’s Alexander Trocchi) and more focused on writing, just writing. What makes the editors’ task particularly daunting (that is, in persuading the executors to publish) is Beckett’s reluctance to discuss the detail of his work. When he does mention what he has written, he is excessively dismissive. So, rather than offer a review of the letters, I want to focus on this apparent oddity.

It is odd because Beckett was exceptionally learned and eloquent – the letters to Georges Duthuit, the major highlight of this collection, are proof enough of both – and before the war published critical essays, including the monograph on Proust. There is strong evidence of diverse learning in his fiction too: Molloy likes anthropology because of “its inexhaustible faculty of negation”. This is no divine innocent at work. One expects at least one letter to raise local decisions made during his famous “siege in a room” while writing Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. Yet the nearest he gets is to comment on the possibility of an overall title: “this work is a complete whole only in so far as one takes for granted the impossibility of going on”. So much, at least, for Beckett’s alleged pessimism. What he tells the German translator Hans Naumann suggests it was nothing new: when he knew James Joyce they “seldom talked literature, he didn't like doing it, neither did I.”

He has to be more open about the plays: while Waiting for Godot is in production, the director Roger Blin learns “the spirit of the play ... is that nothing is more grotesque than the tragic”. Otherwise he avoids all requests for insight and interviews and makes a only one public statement about his relation to the play: “All that I have been able to understand I have shown.” Silence, then, Beckett claims, is not due to having anything to hide, but ignorance. “You may put me in the dismal category of those who, if they had to act in full awareness of what they were doing, would never act.” Is this disingenuous? The answer, which can be neither yes or no, may reveal the uncommon nature of Beckett’s non-method.

Once he is famous Beckett receives letters from enquirers curious about the origins of his work. Hans Naumann again: “Has the work of Kafka ever played a part in your spiritual life?”. He apologises for his response: “I am not trying to seem resistant to influences. I merely note that I have always been a poor reader, incurably inattentive, on the look-out for an elsewhere. And I think I can say, in no spirit of paradox, that the reading experiences which have affected me most are those that were best at sending me to that elsewhere.” Reading Kafka, he says, “I felt at home – too much so”. He didn’t finish The Castle because it did not offer this elsewhere: “I remember feeling disturbed by the imperturbable aspect of his approach. I am wary of disasters that let themselves be recorded like a statement of accounts.”

As this suggests, the letters bear on the work most powerfully when Beckett is looking away. And indeed he is most expressive as only Beckett can be when talking about an entirely different art form. The painting of Bram van Velde is, he tells Duthuit, “the afterbirth of the unfeasible”. His art “is new because it is the first to repudiate relation in all its forms. It is not the relation with this or that order of opposite that it refuses,” he says, “but the state of being in relation as such, the state of being in front of.” In this we can recognise the remove in which Beckett’s narration operates and in which the reader experiences it.

I think continually of those last paintings, miracles of frenzied impotence, streaming with beauties and splendours, like a shipwreck of phosphorescences, decidedly one is a literary all one’s life, with great wide ways among which everything rushes away and comes back again, and the crushed calm of the true deep. [Trans. George Craig]

Beckett admits what we suspect: “bear in mind that I who hardly ever talk about myself talk about little else.” He goes as far to call Bram van Velde his soul-mate:

The further I sink down, the more I feel right beside him, feel how much, in spite of the differences, our ventures came together, in the unthought and the heartrending.

The reason for Beckett’s critical silence after the war is perhaps best expressed when he ends a letter about van Velde: “I am no longer capable of writing about.” Such thought, such writing, is mere relation. The contradiction inherent in making such statements cannot go unnoticed: “To write is impossible but yet impossible enough”. There is also a need to speak. To Thomas MacGreevy he writes of his “feeling of helplessness ... and of speechlessness, and of restlessness also I think, before works of art”.

In contrast, Beckett’s references to contemporary literature are few and far between: Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye he liked “more than anything for a long time”. For me, however, the great revelation of the letters is Beckett’s occasional engagement with the work of Maurice Blanchot. As early as October 1948, he acknowledges receipt of an unspecified essay sent by Duthuit, presumably for translation. Three years later Duthuit has Beckett translate passages from what is presumed to be Sade’s Reason and “the foreword” to Faux Pas which just happens to contain this passage:

The writer finds himself in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothing to write, of having no means with which to write it, and of being constrained by the utter necessity of always writing it.

Compare this to the famous passage in Beckett's Three Dialogues with Duthuit:

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.

No trace of these translations remain, not even the name of the journal for which they were intended. In April 1951, he also translates The “Sacred” Speech of Hölderlin collected in The Work of Fire and complains of the “very badly translated” extracts from Heidegger. The same applies. That same month Molloy was published and was nominated for the Prix des Critiques, for which Blanchot was a judge. He supported the novel “without reservation” and tried to persuade the jury to award it the prize. Beckett’s partner Suzanne wrote to Jérôme Lindon that “[to] have been defended by a man like Blanchot is the main thing for Beckett, whatever the outcome”. In 1954, when Peter Suhrkamp was preparing a journal dedicated to Beckett and requested French reviews, Beckett told him that the those by Maurice Nadeau and Georges Bataille were the best “but the big thing, for me, is the recent piece by Maurice Blanchot”. He means “Where Now? Who Now?” published in the NNRF in October 1953. This is the extent of his comment, understandable given the formality of the letter, yet he doesn’t mention the review to more casual correspondents let alone responds to its analysis. If such reticence is not disingenuous, we may recognise a reason in Blanchot’s words:

What first strikes us is that here someone is not writing for the worthy purpose of producing a good book. Nor does he write in response to the noble urge we like to call inspiration; or to say the significant things he has to say; or because this is his job; or because he hopes by writing to penetrate into the unknown. Is it then so as to get it over with? [...] What is this vacuum which becomes speech in the inwardness of he whom it engulfs? [trans. Sacha Rabinovitch]

The vacuum may then be a stuporous passivity; an elsewhere engulfing.

Art requires that he who practises it should be immolated to art, should become other, not another, not transformed from the human being he was into the artist with artistic duties, satisfactions and interests, but into nobody, the empty animated space where art’s summons is heard.

What must a writer do in order to inhabit this space? If we search these letters in the hope of finding Beckett’s secret, we betray our admiration and need. The question assumes the mastery it must divest to discern an answer. One of the final letters in this volume is to a young writer seeking guidance and consolation from a writer he revered: “Don't lose heart” he tells Robert Pinget, “plug yourself into despair and sing it for us.”

In “Oh All to End”, his obituary tribute to Beckett, Blanchot remembers Molloy's failure to win the Prix des Critiques, and recognises his naïvete in trying to alert members of the literary establishment to its deserve. Beckett's early novels, he says, were after all “foreign to the resources of 'literature'”. Even today one cannot imagine such a novel winning anything but the label unreadable. Blanchot then compares Sartre’s theatrical soliciting and refusal of the Nobel Prize with Beckett’s distance: “he had neither to accept nor refuse a prize that was for no particular work (there is no work in Beckett) but was simply an attempt to keep within the limits of literature that voice or rumble or murmur which is always under threat of silence”. The aside prompts reassuring disquiet: there is no work in Beckett. Blanchot continues by quoting from his own work Awaiting Oblivion “because Beckett was willing to recognize himself in that text”. Does this mean Beckett corresponded with Blanchot? How else did he find out? Perhaps volumes three and four will disabuse us.

The Meridian: Final Version–Drafts–Materials, by Paul Celan

2011-10-05T18:20:00.000+01:00

Poetry, ladies and gentleman: an expression of infinitude, an expression of vain death and of mere Nothing.

These were the first words I read from The Meridian, a speech given by Paul Celan on October 22nd 1960 in the German city of Darmstadt on reception of the Georg-Büchner-Prize, as quoted by Maurice Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster, translated by Ann Smock. The excess of specification is deliberate. On a provincial train twenty years ago I read the words in the dizziness of discovery and recognition. At that time it was fragment of a speech not readily available in full – at least not available to me – found in amongst the dizzying fragments deconstituting Blanchot’s own work. Blanchot understands this enigmatic juxtaposition to mean that “the final nothingness ... occupies the same plane as the expression which comes from the infinite, wherein the infinite gives itself and resounds infinitely.” This would then afford poetry an extraordinary lightness as its social weight evaporates.

The same dizziness occurred with the line of Rene Char’s that Blanchot also quotes: The poem is the realized love of desire still desiring. Years of familiarity may have calmed the dizziness, and the sediment of acquired understanding buried recognition, but each time I read these sentences, the vertigo of those moments returns like a jolt of a train and a green light from the countryside.

Does it have to be these words precisely? In Carcanet’s Collected Prose, until this year as far as I know the only English version of speech available, Rosmarie Waldrop translates the line as: Poetry, ladies and gentleman: what an externalization of nothing but mortality, and in vain. James K. Lyon, in his study of Celan’s dialogue with Heidegger, translates it in passing as: this endless speaking of nothing but mortality and gratuitousness, and in Pierre Joris’ extraordinary new edition entirely dedicated to the speech – not only a new translation of the speech but of its drafts and materials, based on the German critical edition – the line is: Poetry, ladies and gentleman: this infinity-speaking full of mortality and to no purpose!

When I read these new translations, the experience is one of distance. It is certainly not a problem of translation; the fidelity of each is not in question – try putting Die Dichtung, meine Damen und Herren -: diese Unendlichsprechung von lauter Sterblichkeit und Umsonst! into Google Translate. It happens with Char’s line too: both Kevin Hart and Susan Hanson translate Le poème est l'amour réalisé du désir demeuré désir as The poem is the realized love of desire that has remained desire. Nor is it a problem of amended meaning: the lines that moved me do not necessarily assert a demonstrable, objective truth that any fair translation or paraphrase can repeat with ease. So why this distance? Is it anything other than the melancholy romance of nostalgia?

The Meridian itself may offer an answer in that it addresses specific people on a specific date and in a specific place. What follows then is an attempt to summarise the speech in all recognition of the violence of such an attempt.

The counterword

Celan begins the speech by using words and metaphors from three plays by the author after whom the prize is named to situate art as the subject of a conversation taking place within works of art. For Celan it is an eternal problem that in Danton’s Death, the French Revolutionaries Camille and Danton are able to string together word upon word just as he can in this speech: “It is easy to talk about art”. Such is the complacency into which culture can fall, to be welcomed by art-peddlers – those who Celan compares to carnival barkers. “But whenever there is talk about art,” he goes on, “there is also always someone present who ... doesn’t really listen”. In Danton’s Death it is Lucile, who, upon seeing her husband led to scaffold, cries “Long live the king!” thus guaranteeing her own execution. For Celan, her cry “is the counterword, it is the word that cuts the ‘string’ [...]. It is an act of freedom. It is a step.”

This, ladies and gentlemen, has no name fixed once and for all, but I believe that this is ... poetry.

He is quick to distinguish the precise, political meaning of the words from their authenticity in face of what Lyon calls “the empty rhetoric and poetizing of the revolutionaries”. The point is: “Homage is being paid to the majesty of the absurd as witness for the presence of the human.”

Against mere wordplay

The speech seeks such witnessing. Celan admits one can read the words “Long live the king!” in various accents, accents one may place over or under a letter: the acute of today, the grave of history, and the circumflex of literary history. The latter places an obstacle to Celan destination in the speech so, to follow Lucile, he says: “I give it–I have no other choice–the acute.”

To explain further he turn to another work of Büchner’s. In Lenz, the title character, in the midst of a breakdown, relates a vision of two country girls which sometimes prompts him wish to have Medusa’s power to turn the vision to stone so that others might experience it. The obstacle is how Celan may be seen to be orientating himself within the folds of a movement between Idealism to Naturalism that is present in Lenz’s own words. But this is no literary-historical debate. He wonders instead if with this example Büchner may be calling art into question, the art of automata, “wooden puppets”, a “stepping beyond what is human” into “an uncanny realm turned toward the human” and where art seems to be at home. The art-peddlers would be the first to call us to see the tableaux of country girls. He accepts the idea of Büchner’s intention may be far-fetched. Still, Celan asks where, against the route of automata, can poetry instead move toward this realm without losing its humanity?

His suspicion is that it can move with Lenz himself, the person who “on 20th January walked into the mountains” and who was sometimes annoyed that “he could not walk on his head”. On this date and in this state of mind, the authentic human being steps into literature. For someone who walks on his head, Celan reminds us, the sky is an abyss. The narrative itself is Lenz’s “Long live the king”. Reading Lenz today we notice an extraordinary modernity for a novella from 1835, thus perhaps obscuring its radical expression. However, this is an example of what moves poetic art away from elegant wordplay or social realism in favour of finding the words for an authentic human moment. The poem might then be "one person’s language-become-shape …[in its] presentness and presence”. We may compare this moment with Blanchot’s “writing of the disaster”, in which the disaster is a rare and hopeful act of communication.

And it should be noted what Celan need not: January 20th was decisive for him and so many others in that it is also the date of the Wannsee Conference.

Towards an encounter

Despite this connection with Lucile's cry, Büchner’s Lenz’s has, Celan says, gone a step further: “His ‘Long live the king’ is no longer a word, it is a terrifying falling silent, it takes away his–and our–breath and words”. I presume this is because the story is one of mental breakdown and the narrative describes Lenz’s walk into such a land without authorial knowingness or narrative redemption. Celan thinks this may be where the Medusa’s head shrinks and the automatons break down if only for a “single short moment”. And it is here Celan introduces his famous neologism, later used for a title of a collection, to describe such a moment: Atemwende, a breathturn. Such moments still demand a certain turning away from the self toward a certain darkness. “The poem wants to head toward some other, it needs this other, it needs an opposite”. In Under the Dome, his memoir of his friendship with Celan, Jean Daive observed how this need affected the man and his poetry: “The imprenetrable–inhuman–distance between him and the Other. A distance where the remains of the world may accumulate”.

In an implicit response to the impatient reaction to his own poetry, Celan says turning away is a submission for the sake of such an encounter. “Attention”, he says, quoting Benjamin’s essay on Kafka, “is the natural prayer of the soul”. Impatience speaks only for itself.

For an example of such attention, read Peter Szondi’s remarkable essay Eden on Celan’s transfiguring of personal experience in an untitled poem about his brief visit to Berlin in 1967.

The route of the impossible

What Celan has argued for then is simply the inclusion of the human in poetry; that is poetry in which the poet speaks within the puppet show of art “under the angle of inclination of his Being, the angle of inclination of his creatureliness”: “The attention the poem tries to pay to everything it encounters … is a concentration that remains mindful of all our dates.” Jean Daive again: “Paul always kept his watch on his wrist. He told me: the day I take off my watch I’ll have decided to die.”

This emphasis on “radical individuation” leads to the end of the speech and a memorably declarative line: “Enlarge art? No, To the contrary: go with art into your innermost narrows. And set yourself free.” Public art lives on, yet inside it the breathturn is its poetry “due to the attention given to thing and being” in which “we also [come] close to something open and free. And finally, close to utopia. Poetry, ladies and gentlemen: this infinity-speaking full of mortality and to no purpose!”.

Perhaps I should now see this line as slightly and cheerfully sarcastic. The purpose, after all, he suggests, is a kind of homecoming. Yet included in the new edition is a draft of a letter to the president of the prize committee with another version of the same line: Celan asks:

Aren’t words, especially in the poem, aren’t they–aren’t they becoming and–decaying–names? Aren’t poems exactly this: the infinite-saying of mortality and nothingness that remains mindful of its finitude? (Please excuse the emphasis: it belongs to that dust that sets free and receives us and our voiceful-voiceless souls.)

So not sarcasm but awareness of the double movement recognised by Blanchot.

Celan ends the speech by expressing a wish to avoid misreading Büchner – something that I will have to express here with regard to The Meridian as I have no doubt warped the speech in trying to summarise it – and by emphasising the impossibility of talking about the breathturn. However, he adds:

I find something that consoles me a little for having in your presence taken this impossible route, this route of the impossible. I find something–like language–immaterial, yet terrestrial, something circular that returns to itself across both poles while–cheerfully–even crossing the tropics: I find ... a meridian.

***

Celan’s reluctance to assert, almost to the point where hesitation, qualification and doubt undo the occasion of a prize rewarding mastery, reminds me of Blanchot’s observation about Celan’s poems: that however hard, strident and shrill his language, it “never comes to produce a language of violence, does not strike the other, is not animated by any aggressive or destructive intention: as if the destruction of self has already taken place so that the other is preserved, or so that a sign borne by obscurity is maintained” (translated by Charlotte Mandell).

Pierre Joris’ edition of The Meridian, translated over seven years, reveals to us how much learning, reflection and patience went into maintaining such a permeable presence. It is a staggering document in that regard alone. In the drafts we can read innumerable versions of familiar passages from the final speech, and many more that did not find their way there. Of the latter, in writing of the encounter with the poem:

It is ... the second at the core and in the casing of your desperation.–
It stands with you against infamy. It stands against Goebbels and Goll.–

The first name needs no explanation but second is Claire Goll, the woman who persecuted Celan with falsified evidence of plagiarism spelled out in a German literary magazine. It was enough to trigger the mental breakdown that led eventually to his suicide. We need not consider its deletion from the final version as ironic or contradictory because The Meridian is not a call for the confessional but for the pursuance of the single short moment of dizziness of discovery and recognition. What is exceptional about The Meridian is that it continues this work of poetry, Celan's poetry, rather than being merely an adjunct to it.

UPDATE: I've since been reminded that John Felstiner's Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan from 2000 has a translation of The Meridian. The specific line as discussed above is: “Poetry, ladies and gentlemen–: this speaking endlessly of mere mortality and uselessness!” and that Jerry Glenn produced the first translation in the early 1970s. I presume in this rare edition.

See also my review of The Celan-Bachmann Correspondence.

The Lost Art of Walking by Geoff Nicholson

2011-09-25T13:06:00.000+01:00

The prospect of a planned, solitary walk can often become off-putting. At first the distance seems daunting, the landscape predictable and the destination uninspiring, so, sitting down, one thinks: what's the point? Better to stay indoors and do something productive, like, say, read a book. But then reading too seems like too much intellectual effort and one has to get out.

For a while I let Geoff Nicholson's The Lost Art of Walking wait because it looked like a solemn work of study; 264 pages on a mundane subject. Moreover, Lost and Art threaten a New Agey cris de coeur from beneath the rails and road of modernity – all very justified, yet depressingly futile. And then there's the subtitle: what does The History, Science, Philosophy, Literature, Theory and Practice of Pedestrianism suggest to you? But then one starts and the doubts fall away. Happy, necessary amnesia is the gift of both walking and reading, and this book is a pleasure to read.

It helps that Geoff Nicholson is almost the perfect walking companion: never boring, cheerfully opinionated but not self-obsessed, and full of engaging examples and personal anecdotes. I say 'almost' because Nicholson is not really a companion; he is the walk, its distance, its landscape and its destination, which is a little odd, so the comparison is not entirely appropriate. The full title is not entirely appropriate either because it suggests an academic procession across the subject rather than what it is: a ramble – an often moving ramble – through various landscapes. The cover design is a better guide to its contents. A review would normally summarise, share some favourite stories and dissent from one or two opinions, but this would miss the nature of the subject. One doesn't criticise cloying mud on a riverside path for not being asphalt, so I won't criticise the careless errors early on – Eliot's poem isn't "The Wasteland", "Oliver Sachs" is not the famous neurologist, it's Sacks; and "Stuart Home" is not the founder of the London Psychogeographic Society, it's Stewart – or gripe about how those with otherwise fine literary judgement inexplicably value JG Ballard's fiction (Ballard's house features in the book), or wish Nicholson had mentioned other novels in which walking is key to its style and content (Bernhard's Walking, Handke's Repetition and, in the London chapter, Josipovici's Moo Pak – the list, after all, may be endless). I want only to point the reader toward the path and recommend one just walks, listens and enjoys the words flying and dissolving in the fresh air.

What I will note is an interesting tension in the book, which may also relate to its apparent lack of interest in literary experiment. Nicholson is unfussy about where he walks and is interested in all ideas about it – he covers Guy Debord's inaugural definition of psychogeography, and then gives Iain Sinclair prolonged respectful attention, yet he is dismissive of the "jejeune philosophising" of the "walking in nature brigade", invariably American New Age mystics writing in Oprah-friendly clichés about "the wonder of creation", how nature "is full of surprises, always changing" and how "the soul is renewed and called to open and grow". "You want to be called upon to open and grow?" Nicholson asks, "Go take a walk through the Isle of Dogs on a Saturday afternoon when Millwall are playing, lady." He decides he lacks the "spiritual gene" because he does not limit his walking to floating through the local wildlife sanctuary. But his earlier impatience with Debord's attempt to unify and communalise what he agrees is unique and ambient experience confirms a love of surprise, a need for change, and a willingness to open himself to both. The New Agers he dynamites in a barrel are, like him, not a brigade but individuals striving to put into words what necessarily escapes them. And what the lady says holds for all landscapes.

How one defines renewal and growth then becomes the important question, a question both begged and resisted by writing. As Nietzsche and Marc Augé have argued, forgetting is as necessary to a healthy life as memory. Walking would then be forgetting and writing memory. Nicholson's fine company thereby has to betray the title's promise of unity in order to do justice to his subject, which he does. Any quibbling can take a hike.

To set the lost afire: The Roving Shadows by Pascal Quignard

2011-09-08T12:31:00.001+01:00

In his essay On Reading, Proust says great writers prefer old writing, the works of the ancients, and finds two reasons: first, that they are “more easily diverted by different ideas” and second, that they recognise “the beauty which the mind that created them was able to put into them.” Both standard observations of course. But, as is Proust’s habit, he doesn’t stop there: “They receive another beauty, more affecting still, from the fact of that their substance, I mean the language in which they were written, is like a mirror of life.”

He compares the experience to walking through a 15th Century hospice that has been preserved in tact into the 20th: “its well, its wash-house, the painted panels of its wooden ceiling, the tall gabled roof, pierced by dormer windows surmounted by frail finials of beaten lead”. Walking here is like reading a tragedy by Racine or Saint-Simon’s memoirs because they “contain all the lovely suppressed forms of a language that preserve the memory of usages or ways of feeling which no longer exist, persistent traces of the past unlike anything in the present and whose colours time alone, as it passed over them, has been able further to enhance.”

In this sense Pascal Quignard’s The Roving Shadows is the project of a great writer. In the first few chapters there is an extract from a letter written in Latin by Descartes, a passage from Chin P'ing Mei, a novel of the Ming Dynasty, and the story of Syagrius, the last king of the Romans, as told by Gregory of Tours. But this is not a waterfall to disrupt Proust’s deeper current: each chapter is a discrete approach to suppressed forms and persistent traces, the shadows of the title. “I seek only thoughts that tremble” he writes, “a flush interior to the soul”. This does not always require many pages, as short stories and poetry attest. The Roving Shadows seeks its own form – Quignard insists the book, published in 2002 as Les Ombres errantes, is not a novel or an essay but “a sequence of beginnings of novels, stories, landscapes, autobiographical fragments” – and yet yields similar rewards.

It is still very Proustian quest, as Ombres suggests: to experience the presence of Time Past (he capitalises the phrase throughout) not as the past but as “a ceaselessly active actuality”. Our access is frustrated by the blinding light of modernity. In chapter 15, he describes Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s 1933 work In Praise of Shadows which laments, of all things, the loss of old Japanese toilets; places once hidden in near darkness now illuminated with “dazzling, puritanical, imperialist ... neon light”. He goes on to present a list of what has passed from Japanese life: peeling paint on wood, tarnished metal objects and “freer or dulled or vacillating thought that arises in the human head when it buries itself in shadow”. Suddenly a culture that seems to run ahead of modernity like sanderlings happily taking advantage of a foaming wave, diminishes and becomes more pathological as one recognises the millennia of tradition from which it has been wrenched. This is a Proustian moment of universal consciousness.

The structure of The Roving Shadows – 55 chapters in 223 pages, with the chapters themselves divided into fragments of story, aphorism, anecdote, reference and citation – plunges the reader into open water in which one can never fully breathe nor fully drown in the comforts of narrative: “Fish that still rise to the surface”, he writes. “A gulp to stave off death. That gulp: reading.” The hyperbole is a necessary misstep of the form, as David Shields’ Reality Hunger confirmed in 2010, and the two books share the goal of overcoming their book misfortune: “Books that can be said to be touched by the reflection of the sun, of which they know nothing, are even more silent than purely literary ones.”

Except Quignard’s predates Shields by eight years and is far more aware of the contradictions of writing towards such a goal: “One can't offer a visible counterweight to the domination of light”. It is thereby more literary. What this means, and as this aphorism asserts, is that The Roving Shadows is in constant battle with its own accomplishment. After all, by writing in commonly intelligible French to a contemporary audience about ways of feeling which no longer exist, translated and contextualised in notes at the end of the book, he has also endangered them; risking exposure of the pale beast to imperial neon light. Chris Turner’s translation, which has to accept the impossibility of containing the double meaning of ombre – both shadow and shade – is thus a double threat.

Alerting us to the danger, chapter 39 tells the story of the imprisonment of the Abbé de Saint-Cyran, a 17th Century Jansenist who spoke “of the vanity of books that are merely books. Of gods that are mere phantoms. Of ideas that are merely desires.” Emerging from months in darkness he wrote: “after the greed for wealth, honours and worldly pleasures has been destroyed, there arise in the soul – out of those ruins – other honours, other wealth, other pleasures that are not of this visible world, but of the invisible world.” Quignard comments: "It is dreadful to think that, after destroying within us the visible world, with all its trapping, as much as it can be destroyed on this earth, another invisible one is immediately born, a world more difficult to destroy than the first." Dreadful perhaps, and of course Quignard is contributing to our sensitivity to the invisible, yet it is why Proust loved ancient works and why reading was so important in his life:

Often, in St Luke's Gospel, when I come upon the ‘colons’ which punctuate it before each of the almost canticle-like passage with which it is strewn, I have heard the silence of the worshipper who has just stopped from reading out loud so as to intone the verses following, like a psalm reminding him of the older psalms in the Bible. This silence still filled the pause in the sentence which, having been split into two so as to enclose it, had preserved its shape; and more than once, as I was reading, it brought to me the scent of a rose which the breeze entering by the open window had spread through the upper room which the Gathering was being held and which had not evaporated in almost two thousand years.

As with Time itself, reading gives access to what habit and the violence of modernity obscures; no phantoms or mere desires here. Even if he shares Proust’s vision, he does not entirely share his optimism: “To set the lost afire with loss – this, properly speaking, is what it is to read.” Yet to accept on face value the statements and assertions peppering The Roving Shadows is to fall back into the positivism its form and content resist. The contradiction is always present; a fish rising briefly to the surface reaffirming the depths.

The Roving Shadows is the first of a sequence of books called Le Dernier Royaume, The Last Kingdom. So far, five books have been published in France and this is the first to be translated into English. Seagull Books has been admirably adventurous in its translation policy and we can only hope it continues with Quignard among others. This review hardly touches the range and richness of The Roving Shadows: the book rewards and defeats re-reading. We have more than enough to be going on with.

Mehr Nicht: Alice by Judith Hermann

2011-07-21T13:57:00.011+01:00

In his essay for the TLS, Tim Parks wonders what kind of literature will reach the international public after “what is now an industrialized translation process”. He points out that, while an authors from English-speaking nations can include meticulous detail every aspect of everyday life, to reach a global audience a writer from, say, Serbia, the Czech Republic or Holland “must come up with something impressive and unusual in terms of content and style. Five hundred pages of Franzen-like details about popular mores in Belgrade or Warsaw would not attract a large advance.” He cites the struggles of editors in various European countries to sell foreign rights for their authors. Worse, for readers less concerned for popular mores (such as the size of advances) than discovering novels exploring content and style, what Parks calls “direct, unmediated contact between a writer and reader” may not survive such translation because “the final product will be flattened and standardized”.

A case study may be Alice, a translation by Margot Bettauer Dembo of Judith Hermann’s 2009 German novel. It is published by The Clerkenwell Press, a new imprint of Profile Books, publishers of such mainstream favourites as Alan Bennett and Susan Hill. Hermann’s work is very popular in Germany, so cannot be accused of pandering to the foreign image of Germany. Her 1998 volume of short stories Sommerhaus, später sold a quarter of a million hardback copies in Germany and, according to The Independent, its translation revealed “a master storyteller”. When Alice was published in Germany, Katy Derbyshire reported that “the press are (sic) going absolutely wild” and Irish novelist Hugo Hamilton says “Alice has the breadth of an epic novel”. Might local appreciation indicate a writer of her time and place, and thereby allay Parks’ disquiet?

The answer is no, probably, but this has very little to do with the translation. Alice is an effortlessly readable sequence of five linked stories each named after a man who is dying or dead: Misha, Conrad, Richard, Malte and Raymond. The novel itself is named after the woman to whom they are related either by love or blood. In the first three chapters, Alice visits the men on their death beds. They are almost entirely silent and their deaths occur off screen, implied in the description of a hospital room being cleared or guessed interpretations from words in a foreign language. Instead, the narrative consists of descriptions of Alice’s thoughts, actions and polite interaction with the dying men’s relatives and carers. There is almost no backstory or passages of nostalgic reminiscence. A certain chill pervades:

That morning Alice sat at Misha’s bedside until noon. First on one side of the bed, then on the other. The room was utilitarian, fitted cupboards, a sink, the door to the toilet, a bare area of painted linoleum where a second bed had stood in which another patient had been lying. Some days ago the nurses had pushed him elsewhere, without giving any reasons. To some other place.

The abrupt division of the final sentence, which we must assume is a feature of the German original, mimics the pauses in speech; an aural semi-colon adding a peculiar stress to the banality of the information it contains. It stands for Alice's experience in general.

Sitting on the left-hand side of the bed, she’d be next to the IV drip stand for the morphine, but leaning back against the wall unit, she could look out of the window and see the hills when she could no longer bear to look at Misha. To look at his face. Misha slept with his eyes open. The entire time. Like a plant, he had turned to the light, towards the grey but bright day.

The technique is soon dropped, yet the motifs hinted at here continue and begin to dominate the content: light on walls, distance – physical and psychological – water for drinking and swimming in, and insects. Alice describes how, in her final days with Misha, a spider built a web between their two beers bottles which they had to destroy in order to share a drink. Later, questions about a dead relative are described as threads of spider webs broken as soon as one seeks an answer. Back in the present, Alice moves close to the hospital and notes that she can see his room from her window: "Misha's there. And we're here". In the second story, she lies in Conrad’s empty bed and watches a spot of light on the wall, realising Conrad would have seen it too. In the next story, there is more light on another bedroom wall and then later, as Alice travels to Richard’s Berlin home, she thinks: "In a room in that apartment in this house on this street, a man I know is dying. Everyone else is doing something else." So, rather than Franzen-like details about popular mores in Germany, we have stories drained of the usual personal histories and emotional struggles and instead the distance felt between one living on and another on the brink of a grave. The reader lives with Alice on the surface of the narrated moment like the pond skater, unsure if it is over a millennia-old ocean floor or a transient puddle.

The incommensurability of death then is the dominant theme and determines the style and content. Alice avails herself of the modern world, phoning for taxis, visiting cafés and state-of-the-art hospitals, yet these are the limits of reference. There is only one reference to literature, an unnamed SF novel being read by her husband. It is as if the loss of religious context has also emptied art and literature of consolation; the fate of art has followed the fate of theology. It has disappeared, more or less. However, while characters have bland, pan-European names and live in bland, pan-European cities, as if to emphasise the universality of the incommensurable, there’s only so much that can be drained from the particulars of place and time before it disappears into silence. As well as evoking obscure pathos, such motifs and metaphors inevitably invoke a tradition.

For example, in an otherwise insignificant moment, an unidentified, “multi-legged” insect drowns in Alice’s latte macchiato. The readerly impulse here is to recognise a possible allusion to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, and thereby to appreciate the implications of this absurd event. We may ask: is German literature drowning in consumer culture? Instead, or in addition, we ought to admit the tension this moment generates, when literature tries to exhaust literature by means of literature. Rather than having been flattened and standardised by translation, Alice is flattened and standardised in its quest for an impossible loss of meaning. The plaintive death of the insect is a small manifestation. In his review of Hermann’s first book of stories, Zulfikar Abbany says the word “Nichtssagend”, meaning empty or meaningless, “describes a host of young German literary lights who, aside from a smattering of cute observations, have nothing to say”. The leading light of Nichtssagend, he says, is Judith Hermann. The problem for them and their admirers is that the cute observations say more than they may wish.

In Hermann’s case, North American minimalist realism is the clearest influence; Alice’s husband is called Raymond. Perhaps this indicates the loss of tradition in German fiction concurrent with multinational cultural homogeny; the odd translation decision suggests as much: American English such as “liquor bottles” and “fat bugs” appear alongside “centre”. Yet no matter how much the stories appeal to an international audience, the contradictions within Nichtssagend are distinctly European. It was Kafka, after all, who said the true artist is someone who has nothing to say. In October 1921, Kafka wrote about the essense of Moses’ wandering in the wilderness and death before he can enter the promised land.

It is incredible that he should see the land only when on the verge of death. This dying vision of it can only be intended to illustrate how incomplete a moment is human life, incomplete because a life like this could last forever and still be nothing but a moment.

Alice’s reticence about the past and preoccupation with the distance between herself and the dying men is a fascination with this moment.

The fourth story is unique among the five in that Malte, Alice’s uncle, is already long dead and Alice never knew him. He killed himself decades ago and she seeks out Frederick, Malte’s lover, to learn more about his death. He gives Alice the letters he received from Malte, which, however, she does not read before the chapter ends: "It didn't matter what was in them - it wouldn't change anything. But it would add something - one more ring around an unknowable permanent centre." The reader is both disappointed and relieved. The centre is his death and, while an addition may be welcome, it is merely a surplus of strength. This is confirmed in a nice, metafictional moment when Frederick, who has no contact with Malte's family since his death, asks after Malte’s mother, who happens to share the protagonist’s name: "Alice has been dead a long time, Alice said."

On reaching the final page of Alice, the reader appreciates why it has to end without epiphany, unless that epiphany is its own absence, an appreciation that neither diminishes nor improves upon re-reading. Alice is dead. It is a prime example what Life Unfurnished calls the Emperor’s New Clothes of contemporary literature: "writing in a manner to give the appearance alone of literature", and wishes someone would cry: "But they aren't writing anything at all!" (To which we may respond: if only!)

Reading Alice we can only wonder if this is a failing of living writers or a necessary characteristic of literature itself to which they are admirably faithful. Perhaps the failing is that writers do not strive more determinedly for Mehr Nicht (rather than Mehr Licht). What does it mean to acknowledge the limits of writing? After his own wandering in the wilderness, Kafka concluded, “Moses fails to enter Canaan not because his life is too short but because it is a human life."

Joyce Division

2011-07-02T22:36:00.010+01:00

Adam Mars-Jones' review of a new biography of James Joyce begins by claiming that Joyce has "lost a little ground" to Proust in terms of popularity. This would be a pleasant surprise to me if true. "People like to read about the rich" he says, adding another dubious claim. Do people read such writers for such reasons? Before this can be answered, Mars-Jones returns to fact: "No one in [Joyce's] books ... is worth more than a thousand pounds all told". But then we're back with an odd construal:

Even Gabriel Josipovici, a stubbornly brilliant critic, seemed to short-change Joyce in his recent polemic What Ever Happened to Modernism? He was more attracted to writers with a high rating of aesthetic anguish, to Kafka's writhings and incompletions, to Beckett's long campaign against his own charm and eloquence, which is a rather romantic way of responding to an anti-romantic movement. In his books, Joyce shed the 19th-century cleanly and decisively, and had a great gift for generating rich new material from arbitrary scraps of patterning. The interval between his realising that a certain way of writing the world was bankrupt and finding a new one seems to have been enviably short, however long it took him to get the words exactly as he wanted them.

I emphasise Mars-Jones' assertion because it is in direct opposition to Josipovici's reasons for short-changing Joyce. (The "high rating of aesthetic anguish" is closer to these, as will become clear.) Of course, the assertion is axiomatic in the history of Modernism. Almost every review of What Ever Happened to Modernism? presents Joyce as its prime representative and Ulysses as the definitive Modernist novel without noticing that Joyce is mentioned in the book only in passing and Ulysses not once. This reading impairment encapsulates the unfortunate confusion in the reception of What Ever Happened to Modernism?, even in reviews sympathetic to the project of the book; the project has not been appreciated fully for its revisionism.

To redress this, here are the final paragraphs of a Sunday Times review of Hugh Kenner's Joyce's Voices from 1978. (It also shows that Josipovici's iconoclasm has not changed in the last 33 years.) "This is criticism of the very highest order" he says. "Nevertheless, a doubt remains":

Not about Kenner, but about Joyce. No objective style, Kenner rightly insists, can be said to exist; no truth can be discovered by aligning so many words to so many things; every attempt to simulate such a Truth will, as in the case of Hemingway, itself quickly become a 'style'. 'The True Sentence, in Joyce's opinion, had best settle for being true to the voice that utters it.' Yet what Kenner fails to see is that in the end Joyce does, against his own deepest insights, cling to one unquestioned Truth, that of the completed work. If there is no True Sentence, then why is there is a True Work? This, it seems to me, is a major weakness of Joyce, his refusal to recognise the vulnerability of the Muse, his insistence, against the evidence, that to make a book is itself a valuable activity.

Compared with Proust and Beckett, Kakfa and Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Joyce presents a strangely rigid attitude; he refuses ever to let go, to trust the work to take him where it will. Every 'letting go' has to be carefully fitted into its place in the overall design, even though there is no longer, by his own admission, any authority for the pattern the design itself assumes.

It is perhaps a weakness of Joyce and not just a fact about him that he is such a godsend to the academic community. For there is ultimately something cosy and safe about Ulysses: underlying it is the belief that the mere accumulation of detail and complexity is an unquestioned good. Far from being 'the decisive English-language book of the [twentieth] century,' as Kenner suggests, it is perhaps the last great book of the nineteenth.

"as well as weakened by his fear of approaching death"

2011-07-01T12:18:00.002+01:00

Hands up who can identify this new book, the first graphic novel on my bookshelves.

Answer: it's Victor Halfwit.

Two paths for absolutising failure

2011-06-09T12:11:00.014+01:00

Scott Esposito calls it an odd takedown. "I’d been expecting an inspired reaction to an inspired book," he writes "but that is not what I found. Weinberger clearly did not like the book, but I cannot figure out quite why." Scott anyway gives plenty of examples to demonstrate Weinberger's misreading. The book is Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism? and the review is in the New York Review (subscriber access only). The reasons are intrinsic to the book's question and Weinberger's aggressive reply confirms Josipovici was right to assign much of the blame to critics. What happened to modernism is its betrayal by those who should know better than to, for example, swoon at books like Némirovsky’s Suite Française.

To respond to Scott's perplexity: I think Weinberger doesn't like the book because he's a postmodern optimist, much like the character Josipovici describes at the beginning of the book kicking the wainscoting of a lecture hall to rebut the works of various tortured artists. This is the prideful innocence Josipovici detects in English and American culture and one of the symptoms confirming that England has largely escaped the exponential spread of "the disenchantment of the world" (the "of" is important) and retains a bucolic innocence . Scott says Weinberger comes close to a real rebuttal at the end of the review:

But it is astonishing that his is a Modernism without the rise of the city, with its factories, crowds, and anonymity; without the devastation of the Napoleonic and First World Wars; without the ideological ardors of communism and fascism, the thrill of speed, the new symbolic language of the telegraph, the international voices of radio, mass migrations, the representational “reality” of photographs and the collapse of time in film montage, anthropological investigations of tribal cultures, or the beauties and terrors of industrial products.

What is astonishing is that Weinberger misses Josipovici's reasons for what is apparently missing. He wonders if Britain is relatively innocent of Modernism precisely because it wasn't touched by the Napoleonic and First World Wars, the ideological ardors of communism and fascism, and mass migrations. At least, not to the same extent as Europe was touched. Of course, hundreds of thousands of Britons died in WW1, only it took place on the other side of the English Channel and has always been somehow unreal; told rather than experienced. As the Battle of the Somme turned the sky dark and scorched the landscape, in England the sun still shone and birds still cheeped. It still does, they still do. It explains why we still write and reward novels about a century-old war.

Weinberger's review has lazy asides that need to be addressed. Does he really believe that Perec and Bernhard have received anything like the adulation and attention Némirovsky continues to receive? And Claude Simon's Nobel wasn't awarded by a British jury. The point made clear in the book is that these writers may have admirers in Britain, and indeed one has received more attention lately, but the formal adventurousness of their style has been ignored and everyone more or less still writes like Némirovsky. Also, the final line is astounding: how can he read the chapter on Wordsworth and accuse the book of an agoraphobic interiority? What Josipovici says in his Berfois interview matches what he says in the book:

[My argument] may make it sound terribly introverted and art-for-art’s-sake-y, but it is just the opposite. The artists I see as Modernist, from Rabelais and Cervantes through Sterne to Wordsworth, Holderlin and Kleist and on to Mallarme, Eliot, Kafka, Proust and the rest, are all primarily concerned with exploring the world, but they also recognise that to do so effectively is to grasp that to write is to work with words, to write music is to work with sounds, etc. Thus, for the writers one key strategy is to make clear to the reader where the boundaries fall between the book and the world.

Weinberger's approach is in contrast to Wordsworth: he doesn't see any problem about taking possession of the world with words. As befits his nation, he is a literary imperialist. While he doesn't offer any examples of "what's happening" to refute the book, if the smugness on display in What I heard about Iraq is anything to go by, it's not worth hearing.

Postscript: Some years ago Ed Champion expressed disappointment at the "near silence from the litblogosphere" about Adam Thirlwell's Miss Herbert (entitled The Delighted States in the US). Here was a book he assumed we would love because "it speaks of literature in a giddy, informed, and near intoxicated manner". I assumed the same would be the case with What Ever Happened to Modernism?, only for different reasons. Giddy, near intoxicated criticism is indeed Thirlwell's virtue and I enjoyed the book as much as I disagreed with its optimism and oppostions (I approached a response in a review of another book). But I think the book didn't receive attention precisely because of this virtue. There was only pleasure to be had and not much inspiration. Josipovici's book addresses Thirlwell's reading of Don Quixote and in doing so perhaps reveals why there has been only slightly less silence in response to his book. What Ever Happened to Modernism? offers a huge challenge to the aspiring author, yet not to one demanding the creation of a world-historical 800-page tome "tackling" the great questions or producing yet another ghost of the Great American Novel, but one which shows how the writers to whom we look up created their greatest works by including their own sense of failure and impossibility rather than transcending it. We're asked to fail better; that is, Beckett's injunction as glossed by David Winters:

'Try again. Fail again. Fail better', surely the most misread sequence in all of Beckett. He would have been horrified to see it appropriated as a catch-all stoic maxim (e.g. 'OK, you're destined to fail, but never mind, keep trying, keep failing in such a way that your failures come closer to success'). Beckett would have poured scorn on this sort of chocolate-box philosophy. The intended meaning is, directly and literally, 'fail more fully, more catastrophically. Absolutize your failure.'

Writing Beckett's Letters by George Craig

2011-05-30T22:31:00.005+01:00

In September, Cambridge UP publishes volume two of The Letters of Samuel Beckett covering the years 1941 to 1956. The wait has been long since volume one ended immediately after and just before major events in Beckett's life. George Craig can help as we wait. As one of the four editors, he has also translated many of the letters into English. (Fifteen years ago, he was my tutor on an MA course at university and I remember seeing a photocopy of illegible text he happened to be working on.) Now in association with Sylph Editions he has produced an account of this extraordinary work:

Highly personal and at the same time informed by a lifetime of experience of movement between languages, this cahier offers an insight into the ‘task of the translator’ – when the writer being translated was himself a master translator.

You can find out how to buy the edition at the site dedicated to The Cahier Series and a list of London, Parisian and New York bookshops where they can be found.

Three steps not beyond: Peter Handke's trilogy of thresholds

2011-05-25T16:59:00.018+01:00

Ever since the time when he lived for almost a year with the thought that he had lost contact with language, every sentence he managed to write, and which in addition left him feeling that it might be possible to go on, had been an event. Every word, not spoken but written, that led to others, filled his lungs with air and renewed his tie with the world. A successful notation of this kind began the day for him; after that, or at least so he thought, nothing could happen to him until the following morning.

The opening paragraph of Peter Handke's Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers, as translated by Ralph Manheim, is a marvel in a book of marvels. Even in English, or perhaps only in English, the sentences, not written but spoken, verify their meaning by enacting the same experience of renewal in the reader. The Afternoon of Writer is only 85 pages long and not a great deal occurs in terms of narrated event, yet the same can be said of the whole. It is a clearing in a forest of books.

When the novel was published by Methuen in 1989, with the paperback of the translation following two years later in the superb Minerva imprint, it completed a series of three consecutive clearing novels: it was preceded in 1986 by Across and by Repetition in 1988. All three are long out of print and a new work by Handke has not been issued by UK publisher since Absence in 1990. Perhaps this fact explains the reason for my sudden need to revive attention for these books and this particular moment twenty years on. The more likely reason is that I want to understand how a quiet, reticent book like The Afternoon of Writer can mean so much more than the overtly worldly and eventful novels that are published instead. How is literary renewal possible?

Until now I have not written about this unofficial trilogy because their significance to me at the time of reading was apparently held in suspension beyond the expressible content of the narrative. I returned to them recently only out of nostalgia and regret following the uncertain disappointment of each subsequent novel, with only My Year in the No-man's Bay (1998) coming close to air. Like the three other novels, the opening passage is one of the greatest in European literature. This is not to say the novels since – On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House (2000), Crossing the Sierra de Gredos (2007), Don Juan: His Own Version (2010) (all published by FSG in the US) – have been anything other than unique, virtuosic even, except that they seem too novelistic, fixed in facility, admirable certainly, yet only in a rhetorical understanding. And if this response appears excessively personal and limited, it is only because the trilogy appears more personal and limited itself, formed of brief moments from outside a career, moments in which the promise of a magnum opus is a threat.

Across is the testament of Andreas Loser, an amateur archeologist and translator of ancient poetry who, while estranged from both his job and his family, begins to see images in nature, beginning with a "warming emptiness" rising from an Austrian swampland plain surrounded by mountains and low-rise housing developments which prompts him to discover what that emptiness allows:

Under its impulsion, everything (every object) moved into place. "Emptiness!" The word was equivalent to the invocation of the Muse at the beginning of an epic. It provoked not a shudder but lightness and joy, and presented itself as a law: As it is now, so shall it be. In terms of image, it was a shallow river crossing.

Successive images are then witnessed of the primordial given form in a language otherwise saturated by artificial light. Against the resistance of habit, he expresses anger at the casual, careless repetition of words bleeding images of enchantment, contrasting them to Virgil's Georgics, the ancient poems he translates in his rooms above a supermarket. It leads to a violent encounter, but this a novel of attention not action. Loser's patient narrative leads him to the threshold of a new knowledge of reality. He wonders if one could speak of "the possibility of repetition" as opposed to its danger:

Shine for me, hard hazelbush. Glide hither, lithe linden tree. Rounded elderbush, prosper under the protection of the willows. Here is my other word for repetition: "rediscovery".

Across is full of such epiphanies and one can certainly caricature the affectations of Loser's attention to nature, yet the novel and our reading of it is a means to fuse perception and imagination without yielding to the expedience of language as public utility. To do so it must risk disdain to reach that threshold.

Die Wiederholung continues such a quest and is perhaps the most beautiful and remarkable of his novels. The connection with Across is explicit in Manheim's translation of the title: Repetition. Filip Kobal travels across the border from Austria into Slovenia to find his missing brother Gregor, whom he has never met. He travels light and often sleeps in the open, living close the landscape of the Karst region. In his rucksack he carries two books his brother owned, a notebook from agricultural college and a German-Slovene dictionary and, instead of a person, Filip discovers a language and through it a means to write about the land in which his brother lived. By acknowledging and including the experience of absence (his brother is never found), he recovers what had apparently been lost forever. The Guardian's reviewer called it "one of the most dignified and moving evocations I have ever read of what it means to be alive". This is no overstatement.

The inherent paradox of storytelling – a gift dependent on withdrawal – is a dynamic throughout the trilogy. Loser’s journey in his encounters with images is his narrative description of the images themselves, and Kobal ends his narrative with a song of praise to the "all-appeasing And then ... " of storytelling, thereby confirming that there is no crossing of the threshold if that threshold is a portal to a transcendent realm – such as one in which his bother is brought back to physical life – but the patient response of helplessness before evanescence. So, even if both novels imply that storytelling is immanent to a disenchanted world, it at least offers an acute awareness of what may have disappeared. “Long live my storytelling!” Kobal writes. “It must go on.”

It’s ironic then that Handke has become the focus of disapproval from literary conservatives for whom impatient grasping is the sole gift of writing. They share an intolerance of reading attentively, or even fairly, with his politically conservative critics. The Afternoon of a Writer risks reinforcing prejudices because it is explicitly metafictional; a novel about an unnamed writer living in an unnamed town. The caricature of metafiction as self-regarding, self-obsessional is countered here by an obvious but subtle moment: the use of the third person; not “Ever since the time since I lived” but he. By virtue of writing, the writer is already distant and so is his success. This gives this opening paragraph a peculiar status. If the notation that began the writer’s day is a success only because this distance is recognised and the writer is able to maintain awareness of the apparent disjunct of imagination and life, then the metafictional step is the first toward genuine fiction. The alternative is "straying beyond the frontiers of language" into a realm where the figures of the imagination maintain their power only in a perpetual, award-winning illusion of presence.

This latter condition forms the nightmare from which Handke’s writer suffers: that what he had written was "irrelevant and meaningless" and, as a result, "he had been banished from the world for all time", a nightmare shared earlier in the century by another great poet of alienation, Franz Kafka. The task of both writers then becomes an exploration of the withdrawal of writing, how it may enable a fuller life without delusion. It is a task shared by Enrique Vila-Matas who has received similar critical disdain yet, as Nick Caistor writes, for him too "the quest to create literature is a metonym for the ability to live a life that has some meaning". They begin by raising the issue.

As Handke’s writer soon realises, writing is, after all, a part of our lives as much as anything else – “loving, studying, participating” – only less subject to the utile words of which it consists, a contemporary no man's land that, for us, is redeemed only by a relation to chronology; otherwise, it disappears into a common void. Even as we seek that relation, writing escapes and opens into a timeless solitude. Writing is something whose elements, the writer reflects, "hold one another in suspense; something open and accessible to all, which cannot be worn out by use". The utility of writing is gifted, uselessly. The dynamic of the paradox can be witnessed every week in the popular book review pages: a perpetual motion between celebrating the "imagination run wild" of consumer escapism and solemn concern for "state of the nation" realism. Handke’s writing is a voice from elsewhere. In this light, the kneejerk timidity and intolerance directed toward him and Vila-Matas is less a rejection of solipsism than a fear of an uncanny force. Writing remains taboo, and recognition of the direction in which it moves is an unspeakable danger only very few writers dare pursue.

Despite this, the mystery has been acknowledged in the general current of literature in "the recent rise to prominence of the biographical-novel-about-a-writer". As the review of A Man of Parts, David Lodge's novel about the life of HG Wells, explains, Lodge himself has attempted to identify the reasons why this subgenre has produced fine novels from, for example, JM Coetzee (Dostoevsky), Penelope Fitzgerald (Novalis) and, Lodge's own nemesis, Colm Toibin (Henry James). They are mixed:

Some ... echo the rationale behind the New Journalism of the 1960s and 70s; they also echo David Shields’s assault on the novel in Reality Hunger (2010). The turn towards the biographical novel ... could be a symptom of a “declining faith” in “purely fictional narrative”; or “a characteristic move of postmodernism” in its assimilation of past art; or “a sign of decadence and exhaustion” in fiction; or “a positive and ingenious way of coping with the ‘anxiety of influence’."

All are certainly plausible, particularly given that each of these novels are founded upon the recovery of the author, his time and his company, and thereby accommodate and veil the secret of writing in more writing. The recent rise in such fiction would then be a repressed return of the repressed. The Afternoon of the Writer fits into this subgenre but also escapes because of the writer’s mysterious namelessness. Here the secret is pursued even as the work frees itself from the "purely fictional" by describing the washing on his roof terrace, the cat looking for food, the smell of sweat in his study.

[He] told himself ... not to lose himself in his work the next day, but on the contrary to use it to open up his senses. Instead of taking his mind off his work, the shadow of a bird darting across the wall should accompany and clarify his writing, and so should the barking of a dog, the whining of a chain saw, the grinding of trucks shifting gears, the constant hammering, the incessant whistle blowing and shouts of command from the schoolyards and drill grounds down in the plain.

No matter what he experiences, the shadows, the movement, the noises, writing takes possession of it, and so Handke’s framing of the writer’s story in the third person is necessary in order to begin an exploration of the paradox. By beginning with a celebration of writing and, at the same time, questioning its success, Handke is literally making a move to leave the house much as Descartes’ Cogito leaves unreflective being. What the writer finds then is perhaps more disturbing than failure.

Beneath his letterbox he finds "advertising circulars, political flyers, free samples and invitations to art galleries or so-called town meetings", a postcard from a friend and "grey envelopes all addressed in the hand of the same unknown individual". The envelopes contain fragmentary sentences referring to a private life with no apparent relevance to the writer's. He regrets having answered the first ten years previously but had done so for a strange and telling reason: "he had mistaken the stranger's handwriting for his own". He dumps the letters unread in a wastebasket and leaves the house. But it follows him through the door. Walking by a riverbank, he bumps into an old man who introduces himself as a fellow writer and, unbidden, begins to recite a poem at loud volume. The writer endures it and moves on. He passes a road crossing at which a man sits haranguing the traffic, his words drowned by the noise. In both cases we're reminded of Kafka, his dissimulating letter writer Georg Bendemann throwing himself from a bridge in an attempt to bind himself to the continuous stream of traffic passing overhead. The poet and shouting man, however, are indifferent to the outside; their words are of desperate opposition not approach. A driver asks the writer for directions then, at the roadside, he discovers an elderly woman trapped amongst branches. She can't remember her name or address but, as paramedics place her in an ambulance, she gabbles her life story "in a few fragments, unintelligible to the others".

It is as if everyone he encounters is dealing in their own way with the polarity of dream and world. The writer’s initial impulse to reply to his correspondent is a possible clue that the author of the letters is a doppelgänger, the writer-as-stranger, the person our writer is in danger of becoming. Perhaps he was initially drawn to writing back because he feels it may open up contact with the other writer, the “he” left at the desk. But he didn’t need to go that far. On the other side of the threshold, he witnesses many writers straying beyond the frontiers of language, working deeper grooves of an infernal circle.

Seeking relief, the writer takes the postcard from his pocket but is unable to decipher his friend's writing. It is covered with blots, dots and wavy lines, a "mutilated cuneiform" suggesting “the writer had repeatedly and vainly assaulted the paper". So he takes refuge in a bar and drifts off into imagining a joyful summer of writing, and so once again risks becoming one of the wandering doppelgängers imposing his fantasies on the world, except here the third person intervenes to offer rescue: “Did such imagining in a procession of forms take him out of present reality? Or did it, on the contrary, disentangle and clarify the present, form connections between isolated particulars, and set his imprint on them all, the dripping beer tap and the steady flowing water faucet behind the bar, the unknown figures in the room and the silhouettes outside?” Yet even this doubt becomes a circular daydream as he is interrupted by a drunk who sits next to him, rambling incoherently and grabbing the writer’s notebook to scrawl more dots and wavy lines over the pages.

Finally, he meets a translator of his own books, an elderly ex-writer with advice for his client. He explains how he turned to translation after suffering the same nightmare that his writing was meaningless and, worse, that his magnum opus, “the Ur-text of his innermost being”, was original sin. By translating, however, he feels part of the world. "Don't cross the threshold" he cries.

Even back at home indoors the writer cannot escape the presence of those on the other side. A newscaster reading the midnight news breaks down mid-report as if despairing of anonymous language. The writer wonders what could possibly have afflicted the poor man but the answer can only be withheld. In seeking it, the writer risks the siren call of imagination, so instead he merely airs possibilities. Except, of course, in inventing the newsreader he has already succumbed to the call. Handke’s writer began with the joy of having written, having renewed his tie with the world, only to find when he leaves his house that the world itself is populated by other solitaries with the same delusion and imposing it on the outside. Worse, we realise by necessity that all the doppelgängers are mere characters too, workroom fantasies, and the writer is the deviser devising it all for spurious company. And he too is a fantasy. That initial separation of the time of the writer and the time of narration is a sleight of hand; renewal is a fantasy like any other work of fiction, meta- or otherwise.

The illusion of separation is exposed on the penultimate page on which the writer described retreating to his bedroom and gazing at the stars through the window. “What am I?” a voice cries:

Why am I not a bard? Or a Blind Lemon Jefferson? Who will tell me that I’m not nothing?

The words appear without introduction. No "he says", no quotation marks. Who has spoken and who is asking these questions? We may answer: the writer of Handke's story, or we may go further and assume: Peter Handke himself breaking through the façade. This may take us one step closer to the aim of allowing experience to accompany and clarify writing. And as if suddenly aware of this possibility, the speaking voice regains confidence or resignation.

I started out a storyteller. Carry on. Live and let live. Portray. Transmit. Continue to work the most ephemeral of materials, my breath; be its craftsman.

Perhaps this is how literary renewal becomes possible, but this is where the story ends.

...

2011-05-02T18:20:00.003+01:00

“I do not understand,” said Moro, “why this country lets all the people who amount to something run away, expels them, brazenly propels them to other continents…I do not understand this…but of course this country is dominated by the most appalling conditions, conditions that one cannot imagine, an unimaginable feeble-mindedness is winding the key of the machinery of our State…one must concede that much, indeed everything in this country is laughable…pathetic of course, theater…such that one is quite conscious here that one is dying, withering away, [that one] has decayed and must wither away…and such that I shudder whenever I think about it, my dear Zoiss…but everything is help– and powerless…when one cannot sleep under such appalling arrangements, cannot fall asleep and says to oneself that the fatherland is nothing more [or] other than an ordinary, brutal [idiotic] idiom…out of shamelessness…the children,” he said and looked down at the street, “play and live entirely alongside events, while the adults are brutalizing, withering away, are actually not present at all any longer…whoever succeeds in writing a comedy or a pure farce on his deathbed has succeeded in everything. Within the insane asylums is the universally recognized insanity, your esteemed guardian said, outside the insane asylums is the illegal insanity…but everything is nothing but insanity.”

From Ungenach by Thomas Bernhard, as translated by Douglas Robertson.

A question: do you really have an interest in novels?

2011-04-12T12:06:00.001+01:00

I ask because, when happening upon websites for budding writers recommending craft laxatives to ease the passage of a trapped bestseller, you realise a cold, alien world. In the presence of expertise, you assure yourself that you have no interest in plot, no interest in protagonists, no interest in major themes, no interest in dialogue, in clothing, in colours or in descriptions of any kind. You have no interest in the chronology of events, no interest in a cast of characters, no interest in anyone's tone of voice, in linguistic verve or in graphic accounts of a controversial nature, and you say you wish only ever to avoid dramatic situations. What's more, you have no interest in shifts of tone, in register, in settings, in scenes, in twists, in revelations or insights into the human condition, and the prospect of a well-written, page-turning, award-winning novel, one which tackles an important social issue, stimulates in you only grief. Yet still you read novels. Why?

Metaphors are one among many things which make me despair of writing. Writing's lack of independence of the world, its dependence on the maid who tends the fire, on the cat warming itself by the stove; it is even dependent on the poor old human being warming himself by the stove. All these are independent activities ruled by their own laws; only writing is helpless, cannot live in itself, is a joke and despair.

So, mastering the craft obscures writing's helplessness, except you didn't mention metaphor, perhaps because it is the unextended mode of allegory, and you're interested in allegory, aren't you? Metaphor casts flickering light on dependence while heightening singularity and presence with borrowed meaning, while allegory hypostatises metaphor, is a sun burning through stained glass. That's why you cite Kafka, isn't it? Yet the vast majority of readers and writers know that writing's helplessness is its greatest strength; it's a miraculous window on the world where no window would otherwise exist. Metaphor refines our vision and makes writing not only helpful but necessary to illuminate, to separate and to connect. Otherwise, without writing, while the world would stand before us plain as day, we would see only universal night. And anyway, Kafka despairs of writing in his diary, a wastebasket for words slung into the air last thing in the evening, words he never dreamed would be published. He published contra despair. Kafka is right only if you resist connections, fixate upon isolation ("I'm much worse than Kaspar Hauser. I'm as lonely as ... as Franz Kafka") and ignore the foundations of your very ability to despair. You can't bypass the paradox by satisfying a sententious reality hunger by, say, dispensing with craft to write a novel in the form of an inventory.

In the left-hand corner of the room there is a large modern armchair made of a huge hemisphere of steel-ringed Plexiglass on a chromed metal base. Beside it an octagonal block of marble serves as a low table; a steel cigarette lighter stands on it, as does a cylindrical pot-holder from which there emerges a dwarf oak tree, one of those Japanese bonsai plants whose growth has been so controlled, arrested, and altered that they show all the symptoms of maturity and even of old age without having grown at all, and about which growers say that their perfection depends less on the material care given to them than on the concentrated quality of meditation devoted to them. Lying directly on the light-coloured woodblock floor, slightly to the front of the armchair, is a wooden jigsaw puzzle of which virtually all the edges have been assembled. In the lower right-hand third of the jigsaw some additional pieces have been put in place: they depict the oval face of a sleeping girl, whose blonde hair is would in plaits around her head and held over her forehead by a double band of plaited cloth; she leans her cheek on her cupped right hand as if in her dream she were listening to something.

This is from Georges Perec's novel Life: A User's Manual and is a description of Madame de Beaumont's rooms at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. Not quite an inventory. The painstaking procession of detail is unusually objective for a novel, yet, because it appears in a novel, cannot be read objectively, free of context. We cannot help but hear each object sing in the absence of Madame de Beaumont. Although Life: A User's Manual isn't like genre fiction, our un-novel expectations remain in place and we read the passage as if it were from a crime thriller in which evidence of an event or the guilt or innocence of a character lurks behind each word. Our attention is held only in expectation. However, here, because there is no genre, the plot has no soil. Nothing grows. This is why you cannot read Perec's novel without soon being invaded by a profound melancholy, the words used by Proust to describe the imperfect indicative: "that cruel tense which portrays life to us as something at once ephemeral and passive, which, in the very act of retracing our actions, reduces them to an illusion, annihilating them in the past without leaving us with the consolation of activity". Through Perec's cool eye, while the objects do suggest activity, they appear eternal and passive, annihilated by independence. And while Proust's melancholy arose from storytelling sentences – 'Nothing about her at that time recalled … She was a small woman whose figure had somewhat collapsed beneath her weight..." – that are all too familiar to modern readers, here annihilation is unforced, natural, rather than assumed by a careless author. The overall effect of Perec's teeming fictions is double edged – full of activity and possibility yet at the same time emptying, threatening to envelope the world in narrativeless darkness. (This compilation of Google Street View images does something very similar.)

So writing relies on the world's guarantee for the metaphors you believe – Kafka believed – lack independence and are parasitic on the world, but that our faith in the world's independence is itself a metaphor, otherwise we wouldn't see it. Every time we proclaim a reality beyond words, in despair or in delight, we take refuge in a literary convention and thereby re-affirm the world's dependence. This is why Kafka wrote as two people, part of the world and banished from it, and why his stories are both absolutely lucid and unfathomable. Let us read into this relation.

Once I projected a novel in which two brothers fought each other, one of whom went to America while the other remained in a European prison. I only now and then began to write a few lines, for it tired me at once. So once I wrote down something about my prison on a Sunday afternoon when we were visiting my grandparents and had eatch an especially soft kind of bread, spread with butter, that was customary there. It is of course possible that I did it mostly out of vanity, and by shifting the paper about on the tablecloth, tapping with my pencil, looking around under the lamp, wanted to tempt someone to take what I had written from me, look at it, and admire me. It was chiefly the corridor of the prison that was described in the few lines, above all its silence and coldness; a sympathetic word was also said about the brother who was left behind, because he was the good brother. Perhaps I had a momentary feeling of the worthlessness of my description, but among relatives to whom I was accustomed, I sat at the round table in the familiar room and could not forget that I was young and called to great things out of this present tranquility. An uncle who liked to make fun of people finally took the page that I was holding only weakly, looked at it briefly, handed it back to me, even without laughing, and only said to the other who were following him with their eyes, 'The usual stuff,' to me he said nothing. To be sure, I remained seated and bent as before over the now useless page of mine, but with one thrust I had in fact been banished from society, the judgement of my uncle repeated itself in me with what amounted almost to real significance and even within the feeling of belonging to a family I got an insight into the cold space of our world which I had to warm with a fire that first I wanted to seek out.

What are we looking for?

2011-04-07T12:30:00.005+01:00

The appearance of these texts in English [described by Derrida as ‘some of the finest political tracts ever written’] is immensely valuable, and will enable readers not so much to see what Blanchot’s work would have looked like had it been completed, but to grasp that the notion of completion is only part of the fragmentary writing he was beginning to explore in this period. This can be seen in his own discussion of the posthumous editing of Nietzsche, when he asks: ‘What are we looking for in these fragile texts? Something that cannot be found in any text, the hors-texte, the word that is de trop, in order that it should not miss its appointment with the completion of Complete Works, or on the contrary, in order that it should be forever missing?’.

John McKeane reviews Maurice Blanchot's Political Writings: 1953-1993.

The voyage out

2011-04-03T18:05:00.008+01:00

When I open the garden door, I enlarge the garden so far as Mount Caburn. There I walk in the sunset, when the village climbing the hill has a solemn sheltering look . . . emblematic.
Virginia Woolf in her diary, 1920.

I took the photograph above at the end of March 2011 as I cycled toward Southease in the East Sussex countryside (almost identical, it turns out, to Google Street View's from the same road). It marks the end of the first half of a regular journey.

Less than a mile further on is Monk's House, Virginia Woolf's final home and where she wrote Mrs. Dalloway. I notice now that a week later was the seventieth anniversary of the author's suicide. She would have walked out of the cottage into the meadows to the right of this picture, meadows surrounding the River Ouse flowing left to right towards the port of Newhaven. In the background is Mount Caburn.

La lecture des amis

2011-04-03T13:24:00.000+01:00

He fears "the long read is a dying art ... Very literate people admit they can't read books any more."

Martin Amis interviewed in The Observer, April 2011.

If I write all this in defence of Flaubert, whom I do not much like, if I feel myself so deprived at not writing about many others whom I prefer, it is because I have the impression that we no longer know how to read.

Marcel Proust writing in the Nouvelle Revue Française, January 1920.

of Resonance

2011-04-03T00:24:00.004+01:00

While you're not here, please do check out my new Tumblr blog of Resonance.

It was begun last week as a repository for quotations that demand release while leaving this space uncluttered but for reviews and other, longer posts. The title, by the way, completes what may have been this blog's fuller title taken from a passage in "What is the Purpose of Criticism?", Blanchot's preface to his book Lautréamont and Sade which, six and a half years ago, seemed ideal for my first solo blog.

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.

As a blog goes on, unable to rest in the spurious unity of a book and always in danger of collapsing for want of a conclusion, I want to look forward with the help of perhaps the one quotation on the new blog of which I feel a commentary is demanded yet in its absence may well establish This Space's renewed purpose in this nether time: to distinguish between fiction of rhetorical interest or power and novels which, as we read, "enact a desperate movement in the inner reaches of one's being".

The Marketplace of Ideas

2011-03-21T18:09:00.004Z

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

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

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

Dans le noir du temps

2011-03-18T21:09:00.002Z

Hesitation before rebirth

2011-03-12T18:50:00.016Z

Kafka stays awake during the gaps when we are sleeping.

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

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

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

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

(Original link found via Perverse Egalitarianism).

Beckett's silence

2011-02-16T09:58:00.009Z

"Maurice Nadeau once told me that Beckett is quite capable of meeting somebody and sitting for two hours without uttering a word". Charles Juliet remembered the warning when he met Beckett for the first time and Beckett is indeed silent. "I study him covertly. He is grave, sombre. Frowning. An expression of unbearable intensity." In her rich and moving memoir Anne Atik contrasts loud, drunken nights she and her husband Avigdor Arikha shared with Beckett with "entire evenings when he didn't say a word. "It was", she says "like being in a tunnel with someone dear whose face you suddenly couldn't see. Or who couldn't see you."

Even though Sam's was not an aggressive silence directed against anyone, but rather a sinking into his private world with its demons, or so we imagined, those present suppressed their acute discomfort and feelings of ineptitude when it happened. His intimate friends learned how to cope with his struggle.

I have been thinking of Beckett's silence lately without knowing why; that is, why have I been thinking about his personal silence? The reason is no doubt personal too. Throughout January I sought silence. I put books aside, I closed the glowing notebook, I kept curtains drawn against the light and left the television unplugged. Writing was out of the question. I sought not conditions for contemplation nor of peace, because peace of a kind came with noise. So what was it?

In another meeting, Beckett tells Juliet that he often sat through whole days in silence in his cottage in Ussy-sur-Marne. With no paper before him, no intent to write, he took pleasure in following the course of the sun across the sky: "There is always something to listen to" he says. So Beckett didn't experience silence as silence: it was attention.

Juliet forced himself to break the first silence by telling Beckett of how his appreciation of his work changed after reading Texts for Nothing: "what had impressed me most" he says "was the peculiar silence that reigns... a silence attainable only in the furthest reaches of the most extreme solitude, when the spirit has abandoned and forgotten everything and is no more than a receiver capturing the voice that murmers within us when all else is silent. A peculiar silence, indeed, and one prolonged by the starkness of the language. A language devoid of rhetoric or literary allusions, never parasitized by the minimal stories required to develop what it has to say."

– Yes, he agrees in a low voice, when you listen to yourself, it's not literature you hear.

Perhaps this is why Beckett's silence is on my mind. In the silence, if it is true silence, there are no stories to fabricate happiness or distress. Silence would then be a place where there is no beginning, no middle and no end. No literature. In silence one is protected from the violence of the turning page; nothing new, no surprises. Beckett's silence in particular also suggests a need beyond material and artistic success; a need one psychoanalyst claims to have identified and, whether he is right or irrelevant, one in which writing and not writing were unceasing and competing necessities.

We can see why reading Texts for Nothing now. It's a struggle to block the noise of literary allusions and not to glimpse minimal stories blossom and decay across each page. Text for Nothing IV refers to "a vulgar Molloy, a common Malone". Text for Nothing V asks (without a question mark) "Why did Pozzo leave home", while Text for Nothing VIII says "in the silence you can't know" which, on the final page of The Unnamable, becomes: "in the silence you don't know". In the tight swirl of hesitant intimacy, biblical lyricism and philosophical allusion, Texts for Nothing reveals Beckett as his own precursor. It becomes a cultural masterpiece for general consumption; writing that was to Juliet beyond literature is now literature itself. Where is Beckett's silence now?

Moreover, what Juliet said about Texts for Nothing has been said about the Trilogy. Martha Nussbaum writes [PDF link] about how the voices in Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable "make increasingly radical attempts to put an end to the entire project of storytelling and to the forms of life that this practice supports":

They ask us to see their forms of feeling as a pattern that can be unraveled, a writing that can be unwritten, a story that can be ended – not by bringing it to the usual happy or unhappy ending but by ending the storytelling life. If stories are learned, they can be unlearned. If emotions are constructs, they can be dismantled. And perhaps the silence onto which this deconstructive project opens is an opening or clearing in which human beings and animals can recognize one another without and apart from the stories and their guilt. And perhaps, too, the longing for that silence is itself an emotion of and inside the stories. Perhaps the negative project is a happy-ending story trapped, itself, inside the very thing that it opposes.

Worseover, what is said about the Trilogy is said about the effacement of writing itself. Silence too is assimilated into culture.

When we admire the tone of a work, when we respond to its tone as to its most authentic aspect, what are we referring to? Not to style, or to the interest and virtues of the language, but to this [effacing] silence precisely, this vigorous force by which the writer, having been deprived of himself, having renounced himself, has in this effacement nevertheless maintained the authority of a certain power: the power decisively to be still, so that in this silence what speaks without beginning of end might take on form, coherence, and sense. The tone is not the writer's voice, but the intimacy of the silence he imposes upon the word.

Worse because the intimacy of Beckett's silence goes on without Beckett, and writing is out of the question.

Gehen

2011-01-25T23:10:00.000Z

My friend

2011-01-14T16:17:00.003Z

And how lonely this man had suddenly become, that shocked me most deeply. Especially one who had been born as a so-called sociable person and grown up and grown big and eventually grown middle-aged and old. And then, how I had come to know this person, who had truly been my friend, who had made my, by no means in itself unhappy but nevertheless most of the time difficult, existence so often so very happy. Who had enlightened me about so much that had been totally unfamiliar to me, who had shown paths to me that I had not previously known, opened doors for me which had previously been totally locked to me, who had at the decisive moment, when I might possibly have gone to seed in Nathal, in the country, led me back to myself. The fact is that during that period, before I came to know my friend, I had for years been struggling against a pathological melancholia, if not indeed depression, and had actually then regarded myself as lost, for years I had not done any work of any significance and most of the time started and ended my days with total uninterest in them. And I had very often then been close to putting an end to my life by my own hand. For years I had escaped into nothing other than a terribly soul-killing speculation on suicide, which had made everything intolerable to me, myself most intolerable of all, against that pointlessness of everything that enveloped me day after day and into which I had probably, out of general weakness but primarily out of my weakness of character, plunged myself. For a long time I had been unwilling to imagine that I could go on living, or even go on existing, I had been unable to accept any purpose in life and unable therefore any longer to control myself, and, when I woke up in the morning, I had irresistably been subject to that suicidal thought mechanism from which I had not freed myself all day. I had also, at that time, been abandoned by everybody because I had abandoned everybody, that is the truth, because I did not want them any more but was too cowardly to put an end to myself. And it was probably at the peak of this despair, I am not ashamed to utter this word because I have no intention of deceiving myself or glossing over in a society or in a world where everything is being continually glossed over and, what is more, in the most revolting manner, that Paul had emerged, that I had made his acquaintance in Blumenstockgasse at our mutual friend Irina's. At that moment he was such a totally different, new, person for me, moreover associated with a name I had, for some decades, admired more than any other, that I immediately felt that here was my saviour. On that seat in the Stadtpark I once more clearly realized all this and I was not afraid of my pompous words, not of the great words which I now forcibly admitted to myself, words which I had at no other time admitted, and now they were suddenly doing me good in some tremendous way and I did not tone them down in the least. I let these words come down upon me like refreshing rain.

Thomas Bernhard in Wittgenstein's Nephew, translated by Ewald Osers.

The artist’s reticence

2010-12-18T08:29:00.001Z

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

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

Christmas hit

2010-12-18T08:29:00.000Z

Neither fantasy nor realism

2010-12-16T18:46:00.004Z

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

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

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

Zone by Mathias Énard

2010-12-12T17:07:00.002Z

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

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

Zone is an account of a train journey between Milan and Rome made by Francis Servain Mirkovic, a Croat in the pay of French intelligence, with a view to selling an archive of documents packed in a suitcase. The documents contain "names and secrets", testimonies from the terrible history of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean – the Zone of the title; events of which Mirkovic is both part and partly responsible as, in his youth, he fought in the civil war that tore Yugoslavia apart. In those days he was immersed in youth, in the thrilling moment of war, in violence and in comradeship, yet now, a paid informer with a false identity, he is not only friendless but separated even from himself. Trapped in the "moving cage" of a train, he plans instead "a brilliant future paid for with the dead the disappeared the secrets in this suitcase". It's a risky strategy because, as he discovers, "everything is harder once you reach man’s estate, everything rings falser a little metallic like the sound of two bronze weapons clashing they make you come back to yourself without letting you get out of anything it’s a fine prison". These are the first words of the novel because writing begins in memory, when consciousness is displaced. Mirkovic is thereby exposed to a world of ghosts just as a train journey exposes him to landscapes: "two thousand killed and wounded, two thousand Hapsburgians fallen in a few hours lie strewn across the river’s shore, two thousand bodies that the Lombard peasants will strip of their valuables, baptismal medals, silver or enamel snuffboxes, in the midst of the death rattles of the dying and the wounded on that night of 21 Floreal 1796 Year IV of the Revolution two thousand ghosts two thousand shades like so many shapes behind my window". Scenes from the Zone like this, and from Mirkovic's own past, cascade into view:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then the controlled letting go: Peter Handke on American literature

2010-12-03T15:43:00.010Z

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

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

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

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

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

Die Zeit then asks whether he likes American literature.

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

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

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

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

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

Limited means

2010-12-03T15:42:00.002Z

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

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

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

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

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

It has been a circle

2010-12-01T11:36:00.004Z

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

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

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

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

Saying what counts: Saul Bellow writes to John Cheever

2010-11-10T20:26:00.003Z

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

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

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

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

Tallis is dead (from the neck up)

2010-10-27T20:12:00.006+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

The beginning of something

2010-10-22T14:17:00.015+01:00

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

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

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

In 2000, Chris set up Splinters, the Spike blog, and the newspaper model changed. The space allowed short, daily posts with comment, links and, above all, action. It drew visitors to the vaults of material and dressed the site in verbal art direction. My first post was on November 2nd of that year and soon my voice began to dominate. (Was I the first to mention WH Auden's poem on that unspeakable day in 2001?). I'm glad the blog has not featured in the PDF. However, its absence points to the lack of confidence in what had begun.

If blogging was next, it may also have been a step back. The aura of reviews and features glowed brighter as blogging came to depend on flippant humour, political and cultural ephemera and bland bookchat. In 2003, I began writing for the collaborative blog In Writing (now offline) that sought to combine the contingency of blogs with the weight of reviews and essays. In the twelve months of its existence, we published 140,000 words. Various factors in late 2004 caused it to fracture into two new blogs: This Space and Spurious. The former you're reading and the latter is soon to metamorphose into a novel. Not a great deal has changed since then, so can there be another step for online writing?

Dan Green, author of a singular literary blog, had high hopes that online criticism would become a "vehicle for serious writing" but has recently expressed dissatisfaction with its direction: "Literary blogs", he says, "have become not an alternative to the established critical order but part and parcel of it".

Mostly devoted to superficial appraisals of potboilers and best-sellers, these blogs actively seek to be conduits of publishing propaganda (in the guise of "promoting" books). They have apparently become the most popular type of "literary" blog, and if "book blog" eventually becomes the name applied mostly to such weblogs, the future of literary criticism online is bleak indeed. But even those still self-identifying as "literary blogs" have settled in to an overly cozy relationship with both publishers and the print reviewing media. (Many of the bloggers have themselves sought out reviewing opportunities in the print media, as if the ultimate purpose of creating a literary blog was after all to attract enough attention to catch on as a newspaper reviewer).

This is borne out by an article in The Bookseller magazine proclaiming "Indie Literary Sites Start Coming of Age" and also the establishment-friendly reviews one sees now at supposedly radical literary websites like 3AM. This precisely why they have become "the most popular" and why the newspapers are now mimicking their potatohead musings. Critical writing is still to find its way into the mainstream.

I have to admit that for years I was mystified why my blog writings have gone apparently unnoticed, at least in terms of page views. While the most popular blogs were getting thousands a day, I was lucky if This Space gathered 300. I thought, isn't my review of Littell's The Kindly Ones better than almost all the others, and didn't my post on a road traffic accident say more about life's relation to literature than any journalist's exposé of an author's life? Perhaps, however, these explain why it is relatively unpopular. Anyway, I have a difficult relationship with praise and criticism, with self-effacement vying for dominance with aggressive resentment. It is probably best to write, as in those early days of Spike, as if nobody is watching. After having published a dozen or so reviews in print media, I'm nowadays genuinely happier to work for weeks on long reviews or essays and have them disappear into the gaping void. Finding a way to talk about the reading experience is, I've realised, the greatest pleasure of writing; where it ends is of no importance. Still, over the last fourteen years of online work, I've seen the names of my key writers – Thomas Bernhard, Maurice Blanchot and Gabriel Josipovici – become familiar whereas before they were marginalised. If I have had only a minor role in this, it has made the effort worthwhile.

Yet I still like to imagine an ideal literary website in which the design, the writing and, most of all, the editorial vision offers a unique and dynamic approach to literature and culture in general, countering the banalities of commercial literary sites. So what might it look like? I have an idea but it requires an exceptional amount of work by people who have to earn a living elsewhere. Perhaps such a website is only ever the green ray as the sun sets on one's hopes. Such a feeling is nothing new and we may learn something from previous attempts in strikingly similar times.

Exactly fifty years ago, a letter was sent by Maurice Blanchot addressed to "My dear Sartre" concerning plans for a new print review. This was in the immediate wake of the Manifesto of the 121, a declaration on "the Right to Insubordination in the War in Algeria". "You reminded me" he tells Sartre "of what I must have said at times and what I have always thought privately: that the Declaration would find its true meaning only if it were the beginning of something."

He expresses doubt that the established reviews can effect the rupture he seeks: "What will we end up with? Finally, seen from the outside, a more literary Temps Modernes, a more political Lettres Nouvelles". Old habits died hard, he says, so, instead: "I believe that if we want to represent the change that we are all sensing, as we should unequivocally, if we want to make it more real and to deepen it, in its moving presence, in its new truth, we can do so only by means of a new instrument."

I do not really believe it is of the greatest interest to have a review in which one finds beautiful literary stories, beautiful poems, political commentaries, social or ethnological investigations etc.; this mixture always risks being ambiguous, without truth or necessity. I believe, rather, in a review of total critique, critique where literature would be understood in its own meaning [...], where scientific discoveries, often poorly explained, would be put to the test of holistic critique, where all the structures of our world, all the forms of existence of this world, would enter into the same movement of examination, scrutiny, and contestation, a review where the word critique would once again find its meaning, which is to be global. [Translated in Political Writings by Zakir Paul]

The journal failed.

Phantoms on the Bookshelves

2010-10-11T21:02:00.007+01:00

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

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

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

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

So why, with this, does the author become a stranger? If it can be said, for me books offer unexpected, often ineffable transformations, far from protection, and, after a certain time, one begins to discern the signs of promise. Those that signal nothing can go; must go. I am foreign to a certain kind of ownership. For example, watching this video of Nicholas Basbanes showing a film crew around his enviable library – handling the books, flipping through the thousands of pages and returning them to the company of hundreds of other, unopened books still in pristine condition – triggers an unexpected melancholy in me. Certainly there's discomfort in the company of ageing hands in amongst all those young glossy jackets, but it is the same melancholy I experience when, in Derrida: the movie, the great man reaches for two vampire novels by Anne Rice given to him by a student: specifically, the noise as they clunk against the wooden shelving and then Derrida's response when asked if he has read or will ever read them. (Though right now I cannot find the part of the movie where this occurs; have I imagined it?). Is it only from this perspective that one recognises the cruel remove of books; when they become silent masters of their own prison?

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

Nobody home

2010-10-03T16:06:00.002+01:00

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

Maurice Blanchot, letter to Elio Vittorini, 1963.

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

"Berlin", 1964.

Both in Political Writings (1953-1993).

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

2010-10-02T14:11:00.012+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

The disenchantment of the world

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

The disenchantment of the world
The inward debate of authority
The elimination of choice
The imitation of an action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The inward debate of authority

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

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

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

Caspar David Friedrich - Winter Landscape, 1811

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

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

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

The elimination of choice

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

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

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

The imitation of an action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Duchamp's Large Glass

Rainbow shatterings

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

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

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

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

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

Kafkaesque: an ordinary morning in Newhaven

2010-09-11T19:01:00.022+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Folio Society

England and Modernism

2010-09-04T16:41:00.005+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stepping into the poem: the Celan Bachmann Correspondence

2010-08-28T21:51:00.017+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A vast horizon of tiredness

2010-08-14T12:50:00.051+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A life that has some meaning: Vila-Matas & Modernism

2010-08-13T08:48:00.004+01:00

English readers may view Vila-Matas as too self-absorbed, too self-referential in his choice of the pursuit of literature as the exclusive subject of his fiction. Modernism in fiction may be acceptable, but such postmodern games still seem too much of a Continental fashion. Yet Vila-Matas's obsession shows that the quest to create literature is a metonym for the ability to live a life that has some meaning, rather than being entirely absurd. His creations suffer because of their obsessions, and all risk ending up like Herman Melville's scrivener, locked away for their refusal to compromise with "normality".

Nick Caistor reviews Enrique Vila-Matas' Dublinesca, his new novel in Spanish.

Vila-Matas insists that there is a "moral contract" between writer and reader, and that the reader should be active, showing a "capacity for intelligent emotion, a wish to understand the other person, and to get closer to a language that is different from that of our daily tyrannies". He goes further, declaring that: "the same skills needed to write are also needed to read. Writers can fail readers, but the reverse is also true, and readers fail writers when all they look for in them is a confirmation that the world is exactly how they see it". In spite of all the playfulness therefore, the game of literature is the most serious and urgent there is.

The review is behind the TLS' subscriber paywall yet, for such diligence, sensitivity and happy seriousness, it is worth the outlay. Elsewhere in the paper, Gabriel Josipovici provides the background to his unhappy attempt to speak about such issues to a few of our daily tyrannies and concludes:

[T]hough critics and reviewers in the English language today pay lip service to T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and even Beckett and Borges, they seem not to have grasped what it was these writers were up to, the radical nature of their critique of the arts in our time. That is what [What Ever Happened to Modernism?] is about, though it seems that in England today journalists are only interested in raking mud.

The shadow cast by writing

2010-07-29T13:05:00.002+01:00

A common scene?

One day in the summer he was climbing a steep path toward a busy crossroads when, in an absent-minded daydream experienced by anyone walking familiar streets with only boredom and solitude to share, he saw among the cars and pedestrians the profile of a long-lost friend. It has to be a daydream, he thought, identical to the one back then, when they were still close. He had glimpsed her on the same street, except that time walking towards him and beside someone else. A shock enough for him to take refuge in the darkness of an adjacent shop, reeling from the revelation and hoping that neither had looked ahead, only to discover a few seconds later, as they passed, that it wasn't them at all, merely everyday strangers. So, he thought, it has to be an illusion, only now there is no need to hide. It wasn't her.

And what if it had been? No matter how well-attuned one is to the light, I think, life remains hooded by such fictions. They shadow the mundane present; stories overwritten mostly, sometimes flaring for a few hours, sometimes days, sometimes branded for years in a synaptic loop. Together they form a consciousness veiled by invention, hallucination and stupefaction. A good reason not to live, I think, if the alternative were not so much worse: a life exposed to the light. And then she turned toward me and smiled.

We chatted for five minutes, perhaps more. At the time, I knew it wasn't much. We exchanged small talk about work and health, queries about long-lost mutual friends and about our current activities; the usual stuff. It really wasn't much. We carried on to our destinations in opposing directions, slightly diverted, nothing more. What happened next is the source of what is written here.

Next is five months later, in the cocoon of winter. Late one night I began writing at the top of a blank page. Sometimes it is necessary to turn white to black. I began writing about that chance meeting. As I could not quite remember the conversation, I let the pen find the words. Except, rather than the words themselves, what emerged were memories of the physical shifts and gestures between us; the awkward corners and delicate pauses. Spaces grew around the words and resonated with the past we shared. Was this the person I had met, or even the person I knew back then? The questions staggered me. Was I imagining it? After one and half pages, the writing ended. I've written nothing like it since and perhaps never will.

[Moving beyond fiction]

This summer, the one and a half pages of notes became a fetish for me, offering the possibility of a more elemental form of writing, one which dissolves well-attuned habit and reveals an alternative life; not, that is, a different life but the one waiting to be discovered. Why else would a few hundred words scratched out in a brief, forgotten time stir me while all the intricate ideas, elaborate plans and laborious executions leave me blank and disconnected? On what does the appearance of its alternative depend? Chance alone it would seem.

While it would not be presumptuous to dismiss such writing as occasional autobiographical digressions carrying its charge in the singular impact it has on the writer, this would obscure what needs to be isolated as unique to writing. But how can it be maintained or codified into a public form?

I was reminded of these questions as Geoff Dyer and Lee Siegel added to the surge of voices condemning the worldly disappointments of contemporary fiction and instead advocating creative non-fiction. Both arguments rest on the notion of the novel as a means of narrating events in the empirical world and of engaging readers with company, information and meaning. The novel may be the apotheosis of "characterisation, observation and narrative drive" but now it has a more worldly equal. Given the examples offered, it's no wonder the war reportage Dyer celebrates appears more vital, exciting and relevant, while Siegel's call (couched in tabloid sneer) for literary fiction to be more commercial and realistic in order "illumine the ordinary events of ordinary lives" also seems fair if we assume that war and peace are the poles between which real life spins; a roadside bomb and a divorce spraying shrapnel into flesh and spirit. So how can the writing that stirs me – haphazard, unworldly – respond to these rousing condemnations?

First, we have to recognise the limits of the prevailing distinction between fiction and non-fiction. Both Dyer and Siegel appeal to cultural relevance to justify the relegation of contemporary literary fiction. For one, war is "the big story of our times – the al-Qaida attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan" that means "long-form reporting ... has left the novel looking superfluous" while, for the other, a fast-tracked biography of Barack Obama is "overflowing with sharp character portraits," has "keen evocations of American places" and is, moreover, "a ripping narrative". Both cite novels from the past as exemplary and now impossible because, according to Dyer, "the time has passed" when "human stories contained within historical events ... could only be assimilated and comprehended when they had been processed by a novel". Siegel makes perhaps the more telling observation that novel writing has become a profession rather than a vocation, thereby producing novels in which "carefulness ... cautiousness [and] professionalism" are considered desirable literary attributes rather than "existential urgency and intensity". Certainly these latter qualities are to the fore in war reportage and in Janet Malcolm's article cited by Siegel but, from the evidence supplied, they appear to rely on familiar techniques of genre fiction. The old-fashioned quest to tell a story drives these books rather than for anything beyond themselves, a connection, for instance, with what escapes the rhetoric of style and technique. Indeed, Dyer says one war book is "like a traditional third-person novel" giving "the chaos of events ... narrative shape" with "scrupulous observation and phrasing" spiced with "damaged lyricism" (a soldier's ruptured skull echoes an earlier description of the moon). In raising voices against the new type of book, Dyer first offers the straw man of an unnamed "fiction lobby" who say it's "too soon to tell" if the novel is out-dated, and, second, the fact-checking culture of the New Yorker. Deviation from the latter – a "willingness to digress" from strict factual accuracy – seems to be the only border war reportage shares with fiction. That's it. The "new" form involves arguing for this small creative licence. It is only right at the end of the essay that Dyer introduces a more challenging voice of opposition in the form of Martin Amis' thirty-year-old critique:

Amis claims that the non-fiction novel, as practised by Mailer and Capote, lacks "moral imagination. Moral artistry. The facts cannot be arranged to give them moral point. There can be no art without moral point. When the reading experience is over, you are left, simply, with murder – and with the human messiness and futility that attends all death." The essay is an old one, and the point can now be seen to contain its own limitation and, by extension, refutation. We are moving beyond the non-fiction novel to different kinds of narrative art, different forms of cognition. Loaded with moral and political point, narrative has been recalibrated to record, honour and protest the latest, historically specific instance of futility and mess.

Dyer is right that Amis adds little weight to counter his argument. Moral point is an inevitable consequence of all writing. However, its lightness may be deceptive because Dyer's dismissal appeals only to taste over judgement and immediacy over vintage. I would suggest Amis is wrong, instead, only because the new books seek to eliminate art (if not craft), or at least our perception of it, and this would be, in its ambition, the very height of art and, thereby, the height of morality, even if it is a studied amorality. "Art always throws off the appearance of art" according to Adrian Leverkühn in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. We should remember who helped guarantee his art throw off its appearances.

Despite the respectable ambition, it's hard to see from what has been presented how these invariably America-focussed war books are in any way "moving beyond" anything or in any way different from the careful, cautious and professional fictions of which Lee Siegel is so contemptuous. Their "existential urgency and intensity" emerges first from their subject matter and then, more significantly, from a fiercely limited perspective. Death lurks around each corner; soldiers can live or die in the next sentence. Unlike in the novel, the author here has no control over life and death. In this – perhaps paradoxical – way, war reporting has erased chance from writing. Paradoxical because, while chance fills the lives of the soldiers, it is erased in the telling: everything is necessary, already written in nature. This is of course a particularly thrilling reading experience – the illusion of extreme chance while one is safely removed, at rest with a book. While these narratives may appear to represent a "different form of cognition", it is merely a symptom of the triumph of genre. The only essential difference Dyer offers between it and Kathryn Bigelow's fictional confection The Hurt Locker is in its credibility. One we know is fiction because it is presented as such even if, in the telling, we are persuaded to believe, while the other is presented as truth "with multiple layers of dreadful, unresolved irony". But how can we know which is credible and which not without first having been convinced of non-fiction? We have, after all, not been soldiers in the front line. The issue is one of trusting the sincerity of the author. What is happening here is the familiar trajectory of a loss of suspension of disbelief followed by a knowing cynicism eager to be seduced again. Except, the only thing that has changed is that the magical force of fiction has been renewed elsewhere, in light disguise. Behold, the Emperor has new clothes.

[A realm beyond light]

I began this piece with a run-of-the-mill story of memory and imagination skewing an ordinary experience and then how its reconstruction in words changed the perspective, enabling the writer to loosen the self's armour of habit, perhaps opening it to danger, perhaps to relief. While I recognise its banal nature, I think it offers an insight into a more worthwhile, time-independent distinction between fiction and non-fiction or, better still, between formal adventure and storytelling. Next I need to describe more respectable examples.

It is well known that after initially resisting the idea, Henry James used a notebook to develop plots for stories and novels. Often these ideas were taken from anecdotes heard in drawing rooms or salons. The Turn of the Screw is a famous example, taken from an outline given by the Archbishop of Canterbury who himself was only relating a story told by "a lady who had no art of relation". The notebook repeats the outline and adds that the story "is all obscure and imperfect" yet recognises "a suggestion of strangely gruesome effect in it". Such obscurity may have convinced a lesser writer to abandon the story or to develop it to the point where it becomes a familiar ghost story. Indeed, the editors of the notebooks insist this latter project is all the writer intended. Of course James does neither. He makes the decisive move to have the story told "by an outside spectator, observer", in this case the governess who takes a job in the house where the events unfold.

But why decisive? In his short essay on the notebooks, Maurice Blanchot uses The Turn of the Screw as an example to show how the development in the notebook of the obscure and imperfect aspects of the story led to its unique qualities. By deciding to place a step between the narration and the events in the form of the governess' letter, the plot of the story becomes the lucidity and obscurity of the governess' experience. James uses the distance between the real words and the real world to create the ambiguity of the children's innocence ("one of his most cruel effects"):

... an innocence which is pure of the evil it contains; the art of perfect dissimulation which enables the children to conceal this evil from honest folk amongst whom they live, an evil which is perhaps an innocence that becomes evil in the proximity of such folk, the incorruptible innocence they oppose to the true evil of adults.
[from The Sirens' Song, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch]

The complexity of this ambiguity may be easily correlated to the narration of writers embedded in an occupying army among the ghostly, recalcitrant servants of Afghanistan. The governess becomes the imperial force invading an alien land, seeing danger and evil everywhere except in itself. In fiction, however, the reader is astute enough to recognise the governess may not be reliable:

It is she who talks about [ghosts], drawing them into the imprecise space of narration – that unreal beyond where everything is apparition, slippery, evasive, present and absent – that symbol of a lurking Evil which is, according to Graham Greene, James' subject matter and is perhaps only the satanic core of all fiction.

The implications of these observations is that what we think of "plot" undergoes a change. From first being considered merely the thrilling sequence of empirical events orchestrated by a masterful author, plot is now the coercive presence of narration itself: "a presence seeking to penetrate the heart of the story where [the governess] is an intruder, an outsider forcing her way in, distorting the mystery, perhaps creating it, perhaps discovering it, but certainly breaking in, destroying it and only revealing the ambiguity which conceals it." The plot of The Turn of the Screw then is "quite simply James' talent", that is:

the art of stalking a secret which, as is so many of his books, the narration creates and which is not only a real secret – some event, thought or fact which might come to light – nor a simple case of intellectual duplicity, but something which evades elucidation because it belongs to a realm beyond light.

James is a peculiar case in literary history because his fiction was written at the height of the Victorian era and then over the cusp of the outbreak of Modernism. He lived in an era, as Blanchot says, "when novels were not written by Mallarmé, but by Flaubert and Maupassant". Except Mallarmé was writing then and, as Peter Brooks has made clear, James was infected by his time amongst the radical artists of Paris, however long the virus lay dormant. The attractive question for us is: are we living through a similar shift toward "different kinds of narrative art"? If there are indeed "different forms of cognition", then Geoff Dyer and, most prominently, David Shields in his Reality Hunger, are merely outriders for a new literary epoch.

[Masters of war]

Of course, it could be that they're just unwitting conservative backsliders unable any longer to tolerate the perennial challenge of the imagination. But how would this manifest? Perhaps in one of the most notable aspects in Dyer's piece about war reportage: its circumspect phrasing; this passage in particular:

August sees the publication of Jim Frederick's Black Hearts, which investigates the disintegration, under intolerable pressure, of a platoon of American soldiers of the 502nd Infantry Regiment in Iraq's "triangle of death" in 2005-06, culminating in the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the execution of her family by four members of the platoon.

The focus according this summary is on the soldiers exposed to "intolerable pressure" rather than the monstrosity of their crime; that is, it is much like the bigger picture of the war according to official inquiries and polite opinion: a tragic procedural error for want of better management planning. One or two of the commenters to The Guardian's website where Dyer's essay appeared have already pointed out the warzones featured in these books is "home" to many and books about them are conspicuous by their absence. What is their experience, what "intolerable pressure" leads them to defend their sovereign lands with armed and political resistance, just as they did with our enthusiastic support less than thirty years before? Isn't this also "the big story of our times"? The nearest we seem to get is a brief mention of Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower in which "complex and developing individuals" who bear "the weight of larger historical drives or circumstances". Except this is a history book, hardly a radically new kind of narrative art. So, then the issue becomes: how might a writer begin to approach "the enemy" with anything like the same embedded empathy as displayed for those with the "acronym-intensive argot ... worldview of the USMC"? It's a huge, intractable issue, perhaps necessarily so. For Dyer, however, "the biggest question mark about this [epic, ongoing, multi-volume work in progress] concerns the way in which it is illustrated".

[Shadows and shimmerings]

In these eye-level narratives, the moral point that Martin Amis sees as missing is the moral point precisely. Their evasion is as necessary to the books as it is to the military action itself. In their forensic attention to detail and narrative drive, they match the military's unflinching prosecution of executive orders. I'm reminded here of the standard efficiency and disinterested perception of Maximilien Aue, the narrator of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, as he pursues military orders. The reader of this book is forced to confront the contradiction of a deeply cultured and vigilant man with whom we are compelled to identify who also takes an active role in mass killings. Aue is aware that this is part of a necessary career path, even if he claims to find it unpalatable. Whilst massacring perceived enemies, he claims the alibi of the search for knowledge. (His modern, real life equivalent may be found in a character like General Stanley McChrystal for whom audiobooks replace Aue's Plato and Aeschylus). As The Kindly Ones is a novel, the narrative is able to implicate itself in its evasions by opening onto the consequences; the writing done by evasion. It has this in common with The Turn of the Screw: a luminosity terrifying for the shadows it casts.

The ambiguity of knowledge and ignorance, innocence and guilt, good and evil, plays its part in some of the great novels that Geoff Dyer, David Shields and others regard as supplanted by non-fiction. As I've described, Blanchot argues that the plot of The Turn of the Screw is the very stalking of a secret elucidated in a realm beyond light which, because it is thereby also beyond darkness, still irradiates each sentence. It means the story is potentially as evanescent as the ghosts haunting the governess. It takes a special writer to follow the chimera shimmering on the horizon without losing touch with it or his readers. Blanchot aligns such fragility with the plot of Kafka's The Trial, and includes a perfect formulation of the novel's soul: "The story of a man pursued by his own conscience as though by some invisible judge before whom, precisely because he is invisible, he cannot justify himself" which, he concedes, "can hardly be said to constitute a story, let alone a novel", yet it is for Kafka the essence of his life: "a guilt whose weight is overwhelming because it is the shadow cast by innocence."

Writing manifests both innocence and guilt; "a sweet and wonderful reward" he tells Max Brod in a letter, "the reward for serving the devil". Joseph K's adventures are then comical and disturbing in equal measure because the narrative moves between darkness and light without him or the reader being able to judge which is which. It is a story borne on its own anxiety for solace and closure. So, with this in mind, we can wonder again how non-fiction war reportage might partake of the apparently unique power of fiction to countenance the turning of the screw. Perhaps, if the genre in which they are constructed is, as Dyer explains, determined by a culture of magazine journalism in which "current events", the "big story of our times " and "characterisation, observation and narrative drive" replace the shimmering and shadows, it is a literary oxymoron and thereby inconceivable. If it isn't, then asking the question, merely wondering aloud, is perhaps the first step on the path.

Writing of the kind I have raised in contrast to war reportage also seems contingent on breaking certain silences and privacies. It often emerges from morbid isolation uncongenial to the security of public discourse to which Dyer and Siegel appeal. While we know about Franz Kafka's loneliness, Blanchot notes that James was like all artists in that he profoundly mistrusted himself – "Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task" – and wished only to be able to let go in order to enter that realm beyond light. Instead, distance became the necessary passion and in turn it generated the narration which enabled the cruel effects of The Turn of the Screw. It is also an effect of the "essential loneliness" James expressed in his letter to Morton Fullerton: a loneliness "deeper about me ... than anything else: deeper than my genius, deeper than my 'discipline,' deeper than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep countermining of art." Yet he also appreciated his notebook as a magical arena in which chance rather facts and experience enters the creative process. As he wrote in his little book, his became "the deciphering pen", and he experienced what Blanchot calls "the pure indeterminacy of a work"; a time full of possibility and hope; perhaps even an end to loneliness. For some, however, writing which enters and maintains itself in an abandoned space disturbed only by ghosts can no longer be justified. They turn instead to narratives "recalibrated" to accept the rewards underwritten by empire.

Brod's suitcase

2010-07-21T10:35:00.006+01:00

What secrets about Kafka will emerge from Max Brod's suitcase? Probably very few. But Kafka's work is already a secret. If his novels and stories amount to "a symbol of 20th century totalitarianism" or mean he is "the patron saint of paranoia", then the lock on Kafka is still to be broken and whatever "letters, journals, sketches and drawings" are disinterred, they will only increase universal misunderstanding. Perhaps this is why Kafka wished his work destroyed.

(We should remember that Brod was not the only person who – as Kafka surely knew – would refuse his request. His girlfriend Dora Diamant, with whom Kafka lived in Berlin, away at last from the claws of Prague, retained twenty of his notebooks and held them for nine years after his death. His instructions were followed only when, in 1933, they were confiscated by the Gestapo; a fact that should put into perspective the moral ambivalence commonly attached to Brod's actions.)

The sad story of Esther Hoffe's legacy may at least help us to appreciate what it means for a work to be lost. Imagine the non-existence of The Judgement and The Trial. If you find it impossible, try imagining their existence.

Retrieving Blanchot's L’Entretien infini

2010-07-08T15:44:00.010+01:00

Harvard University's website offers for download in PDF a conversation between Christie McDonald and Leslie Morris about the acquisition of the proofs of Maurice Blanchot's L’Entretien infini [The Infinite Conversation] by Harvard's Houghton Library:

They were described by the seller: "[these] may be the only remaining materials reasonably describable as 'manuscripts' to have been preserved from among his effects at his death in 2003, and it was only by chance that these survived. They were salvaged from the rubbish-bin by the husband of Blanchot’s long-time housekeeper." All were priced accordingly.

An appealing story, and sure to whet the collector's appetite with its claim of extreme rarity, a 'last chance' to own a piece of one of France's most important literary theorists. Was it true?

You can read the answer yourself. It includes a description of the content of the book itself:

L’Entretien infini is a book largely constituted from work written between 1958 and 1969. The book crosses disciplines (literary criticism, philosophy, and political thought) and genres, presenting a series of fragmentary dialogues (with anonymous interlocutors), meditations, and complex arguments. It is widely considered his theoretical masterpiece, and the proofs bear witness to the reformulations of Blanchot’s thought during this period: his continuing search for a form through which to express them.

The conversation also reveals the minor, indirect influence a certain literary blog had in starting the process of acquiring the manuscripts. (Link via Charlotte Mandell).

Without exception

2010-07-06T19:04:00.005+01:00

I suspected once that any human life, however intricate and full it might be, consisted in reality of one moment: the moment when a man knows for all time who he is.
Borges in Other Inquisitions.

On June 29th, when I posted similar quotations from Beckett and Blanchot, I had a sense of déjà vu. Hadn't I raised the coincidence before? As it happens, yes, on December 29th, 2003 at In Writing, a short-lived shared blog that no longer exists.

There is one aspect of Kierkegaard's work that can never be taken over and carried forward, either by philosophers or theologians, and that is his incommunicable existence. Paul Riceour, in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader

Perhaps the moment is the moment one knows that moment can never be communicated.

Everyone would agree that the story of [Kierkegaard's] existence continues something quite unique in the history of thought: the dandy from Copenhagen, with his bizarre engagement to Regine, the devastating critique of Bishop Mynster, the unfortunate victim of the Corsair, the sick man dying in the public hospital – none of these characters can be repeated, or even correctly understood. But of course the same applies to any other existence as well. But the case of Kierkegaard is exceptional all the same: no one else has ever transposed autobiography into personal myth as he did. By means of his identifications with Abraham, Job, Ahasuerus and several other fantastical characters, he elaborated a kind of fictive personality which conceals and dissimulates his real existence. And this poetic character – like a character in fiction, or the hero of a Shakespearean tragedy – can never be situated with the framework or landscape of ordinary communication.

Looking at the In Writing archive, I note with surprise the 69,000 words attributed to me were written in a single year. Looking a little closer I notice quotations I have reused since with the same violence of appropriation. To try to resist this, I've copied quotations as they occur to me, taken from desultory scanning of my notebooks.

Of course, what is offered to our philosophical understanding, and withheld as well, is a character, a hero, created by his own writings; an author, the creature of his works, an existing individual who has de-realized himself and thus avoided capture by any known discipline. He does not even fit in with his own 'stages on life's way'. He was not enough of a seducer, a Don Juan, to be an aesthete. Nor did he succeed with his life of ethics: he was unmarried and childless, and he did not earn his living his profession, so he was excluded from the ethical existence described by Judge Wilhelm in Either/Or. But if Kierkegaard failed to live either an aesthetic or an ethical life, what then of religion, in this sense? Surely the Christianity he described is so extreme that no one could possibly practise it. The subjective thinker before God, the pure contemporary of Christ, suffering crucifixion with Him, without church, without tradition, and without ritual, can only exist outside of history.

To refer then to Kierkegaard as "the father of Existentialism" is a means of entering history and avoiding what makes his work exceptional.

We remained in the station on a wooden bench. We spent the night, and I left before him. Even now I find it really astonishing and very moving. It was a kind of madness, idiocy, to travel from Munich to the Jura to pass a few hours of the night with me. It was utterly inhuman to sit next to a being whom you sense desires you so much and not even to have been touched. Above all, I thought, I must be very careful with everything I say to him because he understands things in quite an alarming way, in an absolute way. Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia in Calvin Tomkins' Duchamp

Since that year, my two fellow In Writing bloggers have published five books, with two more forthcoming.

You cannot refute Kierkegaard: you must simply read him, consider, and then get on with your work – but with your eyes fixed upon the exception.

From blog to book suggests progress; from Hell to Purgatory. A book promises a system in its unity as a book between two covers. In contrast, literary blogging is a frenetic, damnable repetition. Each week, the same stories are raised by the same people:

Is the novel dead?
Why don't they write page-turners anymore?
Is non-fiction now more relevant?
Where is the Dickens of the Credit Crunch?
Has Theory destroyed literary criticism?
Who was God before Ian McEwan?

The same people are compelled to reply with the same futile points and refutations.

[There are] considerable similarities between Glenn Gould's musical views and Thomas Bernhard's prose style. [Both] artists appreciated the fugal nature of Baroque music, which mixes without dissolving the differences between two, three and even four distinct voices. Mark Anderson, afterword to The Loser

It has to be said that the avalanche of new books is also a crushing repetition; a hell of sorts. This isn't simply a hysterical comparison. Teodolinda Barolini has explained how, as in the experience of life, Dante's Inferno is narrative journey "predicated on a principle of sequentiality, on encounters that occur one by one ... in which each new event displaces the one that precedes it" and indeed that the entire Commedia is "informed by a poetics of the new". A poetics of the new is different from the new itself in that Dante seeks to untangle himself from the unseen loop. The pursuance of the new is, however, and as Dante discovered after leaving his dark wood, a form of despair.

WH Auden recognised the possibility that the gates of Hell are always standing wide open and that the damned are perfectly free to leave whenever they like, only they don't because it would mean admitting that the gates are indeed open and that another life is possible. They are addicted to their present existence in which suffering defines who they are and each moment of agony is a new event (necessarily so). Except, it isn't so straightforward. Barolini points out that the angels in Heaven remember nothing and nothing new ever occludes their sight. They remember nothing because they can see everything: "they have no need of memory / since they do not possess divided thought". Heaven can be hellishly boring.

It would be very unjust to say that you deserted me, but that I was deserted and sometimes terribly so, is true. Kafka, Diaries 1922.

What I notice in the quotations so far is their focus on an escape from history, from change: Borges' moment, Kierkegaard's existence without; his ineffable exception, Duchamp's "madness" and absolute understanding; the condition of the angels. I'm reminded of Cioran on Beckett: "He does not live in time but parallel to time". Then there's Kafka's sentence which does not seem to fit.

So would Paradise be the book with no memory, with a vision uninterrupted, unable to be distracted by the infernally new? Perhaps. But such a book is already the outside, an exception to the book. The same problem of writing remains.

After my death no one will find even the least information in my papers (this is my consolation) about what has really filled my life; find the inscription in my innermost being which explains everything and what, more often than not, makes what the world would call trifles into, for me, events of immense importance, and which I too consider of no significance once I take away the secret note which explains it.
Kierkegaard, Papers & Journals.

And yes, I've posted this quotation before.

Double-headed monster

2010-06-29T00:14:00.001+01:00

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.

Samuel Beckett – Three Dialogues, 1949.

The writer finds himself in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothing to write, of having no means with which to write it, and of being constrained by the utter necessity of always writing it.

Maurice Blanchot – Faux Pas, 1943.

Celeritas Octoberfest

2010-06-06T19:05:00.018+01:00

For fans of Gabriel Josipovici's fiction, Christmas comes two month's early this year. In the same week in late October two different publishers issue two different works. While Carcanet releases the new and selected stories in Heart's Wings with its perfect and appropriate jacket design, CB Editions has the novel Only Joking.

This is a novel with a curious publishing history, having been translated into German as Nur Ein Scherz (see the link for a translation of Der Spiegel's review) before appearing in English. Literary bloggers may also like to note that the front page blurb is from Tales from the Reading Room, one of our own. In the same review, Victoria Best makes the important point that "whereas most great literature calls on gravitas to give it authority, the weighty burden of hefty concerns, strenuously raised, Josipovici fuels his narratives with celeritas, the playful swiftness of sleight of hand. It's a daring trick he never fails to pull off."

Of course, a month or more before these, Yale UP is also publishing What Ever Happened to Modernism?

The portrait of a realist

2010-05-31T19:23:00.014+01:00

Philosophy and Animal Life is spearheaded by Cora Diamond's essay, "The Difficulty of Life and the Difficulty of Philosophy," in which she reads [JM Coetzee's] The Lives of Animals, not as a kind of argument in favor of animal rights, but as a study of "a woman haunted by the horror of what we do to animals. We see her as wounded by this knowledge, this horror, and by the knowledge of how unhaunted others are. The wound marks and isolates her". What kind of knowledge is this, and what can philosophy say about it? Not much, it appears. The difficulty, Diamond says, is that such knowledge "pushes us beyond what we can think. To attempt to think it is to feel one's thinking come unhinged. Our concepts, our ordinary life with our concepts, pass by this difficulty as if it were not there; the difficulty, if we try to see it, shoulders us out of life, is deadly chilling". Diamond notes that neither the philosophers inside Coetzee's story, nor those in real life who responded to the Tanner lectures, see any difficulty here. Instead they convert the difficulty of Costello's experience into a philosophical problem about the moral status of animals – a problem that arguments can allegedly resolve. Diamond, however, seems to take Costello's side against philosophy as a practice of moral evasion. At all events, for her Costello is a portrait of someone in a condition of undeflected exposure to the world and to others in it – a true realist.

From Gerald Bruns' review of Philosophy and Animal Life and Stephen Mulhall's The Wounded Animal.

The book to come in 2666

2010-05-30T18:05:00.011+01:00

Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is an obsessive and world-shifting epic. When I read it, I will be completely absorbed by it. It will be all I think about. It will affect my daily life in ways I can’t fully understand, and when I finish it I will have come to profound revelations about the nature of existence.

There's a reason for Kirsty Logan's future tense: she's describing the joy of a certain kind of book, one that:

contains all possible characters, styles, genres, turns of phrase, metaphors, speech patterns, and profound life-changing revelations. An unread book exists only in the primordial soup of your imagination, and there it can evolve into any story you like. An unread book – any unread book – could change your life.

She goes on to imagine the possibilities of a handful of other novels she hasn't read. Apart from 2666, I haven't read them either. Yet, even though I have read all 893 pages of the British Picador edition and was absorbed enough to believe I would not forget each highway and byway of the long journey, I find that now, looking back from beyond the final page, all the roads have concertinaed to form an impenetrable block.

Roberto Bolaño's 2666 has not affected my daily life, it has not caused any profound revelations, and the world remains unshifted. But for the complete absorption, everything of which Kirsty Logan dreams about 2666 didn't come pass, unless, that is, for all of its characters, adventures, ideas and slow-burning narrative tension, for all of its richness of colour and texture, the revelation is that the nature of existence will remain unclear and will never be resolved into coherence, not even in the most lengthy work of literature with all of its innumerable interconnections and possible all-embracing overall design.

Of course, if this is the revelation, it is certainly not profound. As well as the encyclopaedic power to capture life, the aura of modern literature is borne on the promise of such revelatory exegesis in which something more will emerge, so one is bound to be disappointed. The persisting presence of an aura explains the range of readerly reactions from obsessive dedication of those who see revelation in the mathematical system underpinning Dante's Commedia to Book Groups chatting about "issues" in the latest Jodi Picoult unit.

A banal point perhaps: the reader is always seeking more than the book itself. After all, it is a form of information storage and retrieval. With the incommensurability of modern literature, the violence of interpretation becomes necessary if it is to mean something other than an increasingly minor branch of the entertainment industry. It certainly needs to be forgotten in order to read. If we begin reading knowing incompletion will be the ultimate experience – perhaps even disharmony and disunity – then what are we reading for? We begin with the idea, as Kirsty Logan suggests, of the novel we are about to read as the Platonic Form of its kind, an ethereal presence in which all stories coalesce and conclude. Here it is, in our hands! So, when I say: "I've read Roberto Bolaño's 2666", do I know or care what I am referring to other than the same possible book Kirsty Logan has imagined? As I announce my reading, a whiff of cultural-oneupmanship begins to circulate. It alludes to secret knowledge, new power over those who have not read it and potentially over those who have read but have not comprehended its message. But I don't have that knowledge or power. What have I missed?

Nabokov said that the second reading of a book is always the first. The first is a blind reading. You have to read the book a second time in order to have read it once. So perhaps I should re-read Roberto Bolaño's 2666 in search of a subtler experience in which the disparate details begin to reach out to one another more clearly and the revelations become more profound. However, if Heraclitus is right, then that second reading is impossible. The second reading will always be the first and therefore blind. The second reading will always be the book to come. I have not read Roberto Bolaño's 2666. I will never read Roberto Bolaño's 2666.

Bernhard begins

2010-05-03T21:38:00.005+01:00

While the new tutor has until now remained silent during our lunchtime walk, which to me has already become a habit, today from the start he had a need to talk to me.

This is the first line from Thomas Bernhard's story Two Tutors as it appears in Martin Chalmer's translation in the imminent volume Prose. The extra good news is that we can read it in full right now at Little Star, a new magazine of poetry and prose.

Two Tutors is from 1967, early in Bernhard's career, yet in this beginning we can also see the end. As with the sublime first sentence of his valedictory novel Extinction, a pattern is broken, a new direction taken right from the start. In this story, the narrator repeats the necessity later in the story when describing how, on the regular walk, one of the tutors reaches a point and always goes to the right. "It is up to me," the narrator says, "one day to turn left". Franz-Josef Murau does it himself in Extinction when, out of exuberance after a good day, he takes a different route home and, once there, receives some news that will change his life. It's also present at the beginning, middle and end of Bernhard's autobiography Gathering Evidence: first in that famous childhood bicycle ride, then his determination to work in a grocery store rather than go to grammar school ("I found the other people by going in the opposite direction") and, finally, as a teenager dying of TB, when he refused further treatment, walked out of the clinic and never went back. Perhaps there is more to be said.

Beckett and "the absurd"

2010-04-21T19:13:00.008+01:00

A Piece of Monologue brings to my weary attention another one of The Guardian newspaper's effortlessly obtuse top ten literary lists. This time it's "top 10 absurd classics". Of course, it includes Waiting for Godot.

Beckett's remarks about this subject have been available in French for 26 years and in English translation for 15, yet still he is ignored. Charles Juliet's Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde was reissued five months ago by Dalkey Archive, so there should be no more excuses. Here is the specific passage, beginning with Juliet expressing his opinion:

Cautiously, I explain that I believe an artist's work is inconcievable without a strict ethical sense.
A long silence.
"What you say is true. But moral values are inaccessible. And they cannot be defined. In order to define them, you would have to pass judgement, which is impossible. That's why I could never agree with the notion of the theatre of the absurd. It involves a value judgment. You cannot even speak about truth. That's what's so distressful. Paradoxically, it is through form that the artist may find some kind of a way out. By giving form to formlesssness. It is only in that way, perhaps, that some underlying affirmation may be found.

This is what makes Beckett a far more complex artist than the label "absurdist" allows. Perhaps this why it remains despite the author's explicit statements and the evidence of the plays backing them up. He seeks an underlying affirmation – why else would he continue? – while all around him hacks and inattentive culture-vultures chatter about "the absurd"; a value judgement to speed their fiercely middlebrow lives beyond anything distressing like the inaccessible.

One of these stones

2010-04-20T22:31:00.000+01:00

Pierre Joris reminds us that it is now forty years since Paul Celan left his Paris apartment and "went into the water".

AT BRANCUSI'S, THE TWO OF US

If one of these stones
were to give away
what it is that keeps silent about it:
here, nearby,
at this old man's limping stick
it would open up, as a wound,
in which you would have to submerge,
lonely,
far from my scream, that is,
chiselled already, white.

Translation by Michael Hamburger.

What Ever Happened to Modernism?

2010-04-04T09:00:00.008+01:00

Book news from Yale University Press:

"The quality of today's literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing — a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why.

Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization or a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art coming to consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism.

With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism's key stages, from Dürer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected—including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions not only about national taste, but contemporary culture itself."

What Ever Happened to Modernism? is scheduled for a September publication. Read more on Yale UP's dedicated webpage. (Link via).

Update: My review is now online.

Where there is a book

2010-04-03T12:27:00.009+01:00

"Dante's Commedia ... and the medieval cathedrals were ... modelled on a book, the Bible, as that had been meditated to the West by the Church. And as the thinkers of the German tradition, such as Hegel and Nietzsche, understood, the fortunes of art in our time go hand in hand with the fortunes of theology."

When in 1988 I first read this passage from The Book of God, I was struck enough to note it down despite lacking any comprehension of its relevance to my experience. My upbringing had been Christian inasmuch as prayers were mumbled at school assemblies and fortifying stories read from a large book we knew had to be special because it had gold-edged pages, but also secular to the point where that term, lacking a meaningful alternative, became as pale and hollow as faith. God meant nothing to us, yet neither did art. Both were rumours, legends, items of reverence at which we nodded in passing as we might the coffin of a distant relative. Detachment from one probably followed from detachment from the other, but how could I appreciate this?

Since then reading and writing have become important to me in an excessive way; that is, more than it should do in order to get on in life, more than a source of organised information, more than escapism, more than craft mastery or self-expression. And yet not as a replacement for a lost tradition; there was, after all, nothing to replace. Is this excess subject to the fate of theology? How can I begin to seek an answer without immersion in the breach between tradition and its erasure? I am a child of that erasure; there is no way back.

Perhaps the excess is more banally explicable. It may be said that I am, like everyone else, psychologically predisposed to such a need, and that it might well have been met by any number of alternatives: politics, science, music, sport, drugs, living life to the full. Religion is just an old-fashioned lifestyle choice. However tempting this answer is, and it is the one most easily within reach, it is for this reason not enough. It too has to be subject to the same question of fate. This is probably why I am hesitant to admire the publishing phenomenon led by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens in which religious faith is resisted and atheism or scientific scepticism encouraged. Not because I tend toward faith but precisely because I do not. Dawkins rejects theology a priori, not even beginning to offer an immanent critique, a position that left Terry Eagleton rightly incredulous. Dawkins' science thereby looks like fundamentalist theology by other means.

I recognise its symptoms in the pursuit of the excess of writing. The enthusiastic reception of David Shields' Reality Hunger – a.k.a. The Novel Delusion or, Fiction is Not Great – is a small trace of the general desire for answers, judgement, for the Kingdom of God to be manifest on Earth as it is in Heaven. It is understandable, yet wrongheaded. In The Book of God, Josipovici argues for a reading that lives in the uncertain light of the Bible's stories; that is, does not seek answers to questions not posed by the supreme fiction. To solicit answers is to miss the experience of the narrative as a whole. The whole, however, can also appear as an absence. The importance of writing in my experience is not that it happens upon answers that justifies its existence and, in doing so, puts an end to writing, but that it brings to life the distance between tradition and its erasure, and makes writing all the more necessary. The distance is a space opened by all writing; a space in which absence becomes the model on which the modern equivalents of the Commedia, if not cathedrals, may be built.

All human errors are impatience, the premature breaking off of what is methodical, an apparent fencing in of the apparent thing.

Kafka's aphorism is a good example, and typical of this writer, in that it both condemns the rush to embrace an illusion – reality in books – while also implying that books themselves are an apparent fencing in of the apparent thing. He turns the accusation inwards even as it moves outwards. This dual movement is the paradox at the heart of Modernist writing. It's a paradox that can be seen as a problem, a fault demanding an evangelising manifesto to vindicate writing in a positivist, scientific culture.

The resistance we experience when faced with contradiction is natural, and yet it is also the fundamental experience of reading and writing. In The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot discusses Simone Weil's affirmation of God despite her natural atheism, and paraphrases the idea of an earlier Jewish mystic, suggesting there is a tradition below the carapace of contemporary resistance:

It is Isaac Luria (a saintly man and profound thinker of the sixteenth century, whose influence we know was great) who, interpretating an idea from the ancient Cabala ... recognised in the creation an act of abandonment on the part of God. A forceful idea. 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." 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 place. There must be nothing: that the nothing exists is the true secret and the initial mystery, a mystery that begins painfully with God himself – through a sacrifice, a retraction, and a limitation, a mysterious consent to exile himself from the all that he is and to efface and absent himself, if not disappear. (It is as through the creation of the world, or its existence, would have evacuated God from himself, posed God as a lack of God and therefore had as its corollary a sort of ontological atheism that could only be abolished along with the world itself. Where there is a world, there is, painfully, the lack of God.) A profound thought indeed.

The Orwellian Prizes

2010-03-27T19:08:00.004Z

"Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

The fate of famous quotations such as George Orwell's is to become a cliché, to lose meaning beyond their own historical reference points, themselves also by now a cliché. So to renew the observation, let's make it real again by looking at political prizes: the Orwell Prizes, no less. "The ambition of the prizes" we're told "is to reward, celebrate and promote work that helps nurture the discussion of politics and that contributes to the quality of public life." It is run "in association with The Orwell Trust ... and the Media Standards Trust". What more could guarantee objectivity and independence?

To begin we may ask what discussion does it seek to nurture? Looking at the archives, it has shortlisted books by Nick Cohen (twice!), Andrew Marr and (Tony Blair's press secretary) Alastair Campbell, each to varying degrees responsible for selling to the British public the solidity of Iraq's Weapons of Mass Distruction and respect to the murderous invasion of Iraq. Peek at its award for Journalism and you'll see the similar heroes of quality nurturing: Justin Webb, Johann Hari, Clive James, David Aaronovitch, Melanie Phillips, and Peter Hitchens (twice!). For the blog award, which began only last year, it has already included Oliver Kamm and Conservative blogger Iain Dale (twice!). Perhaps in scanning the lists I've skipped representatives of the Left and discussion isn't so constrained.

Of course, the prize has included some worthy authors, usually those writing about issues in lands safely out of range – this year the Arctic, Kenya and Zimbabwe (twice!). Yet what about those who have sought to elucidate Orwell's dictum in the nearest, the now and in England? Richard Seymour's Lenin's Tomb superbly written and often revelatory blog posts have yet to be recognised. His book was ignored too. It's a staggering truth also that John Pilger has not been nominated for the journalism prize. Here's his Welcome to Orwell's World. As for the book prize, the work from 2009 most overtly inspired by Orwell is surely Newspeak in the 21st Century by Davids Edward and Cromwell, "an exposé of the arrogance and servility to power of our leading journalists and editors". Yet it too is conspicuous by its absence from the longlist.

It is very fortunate then, that, due to the abiding example set by Orwell, the impeccably independent prize judges are free to resist the dead hand of political language in order to reward those who expose its lies and to hold to account those who make mass murder respectable. We can only assume the four writers mentioned above just didn't make the grade. After all, we can rest assured even those close to the power prefer freedom and independence to wealth and privilege. For this we give thanks, in association with the Media Standards Trust, of course.

For rivers make arable the land

2010-03-22T19:56:00.001Z

The Ister is a film based on Heidegger's reading of Hölderlin's poem Der Ister. Above is part two because it has a more restful preview image. Part one is the place to start again. (Via Enowning).

Reticent artificiality

2010-03-18T19:44:00.001Z

In another essay, developing his reasons for admiring W. G. Sebald, [James Wood] contrasts him with some of his more popular contemporaries:

What is remarkable about The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn is the reticent artificiality of Sebald's narration, whereby fact is taken from the real world and made fictional. This is the opposite of the trivial "factional" breeziness of writers such as Julian Barnes and Umberto Eco, who take facts and superficially destabilize them within fiction, who make facts quiver a little, but whose entire work is actually in homage to the superstition of fact . . . . Facts are a sport for such writers . . . . For Sebald, however, facts are indecipherable, and therefore tragic.

From James Wood's The Broken Estate as reviewed by Gabriel Josipovici.

More reverie hunger

2010-03-18T19:04:00.000Z

Someone who, dreaming, says "I am dreaming", even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream "it is raining", while it was in fact raining. Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain.

Wittgenstein, On Certainty, entry 676.

Reverie hunger

2010-03-15T19:11:00.000Z

There is, with Joubert, an entire physics and cosmology of dream [...] where he ventures forth, pushed by the necessity of reconciling the real and the imaginary, which tend less to negate the reality of things than to make them exist starting from almost nothing – an atom of air, a sparkle of light, or even only the emptiness of space that they occupy: "Observe that everywhere and in everything, what is subtle carries that which is compact, and what is light holds suspended all that is heavy." We see clearly, then, why poetic language can revive things and, translating them in space, make them apparent through their distancing and their emptiness: it is because this distance lives in them, this emptiness is already in them; thus it is right to grasp them, and thus it is the calling of words to extract the invisible center of their actual meaning. It is by shadow that one touches substance, it is by the penumbra of this shadow, when one has arrived at the oscillating limit where, without disappearing, it is fringed and penetrated with light. But, naturally, for the word to attain this limit and represent it, it also must become "a drop of light," and become the image of what it designates, image of itself and of the imaginary, in order finally to be confused with the indeterminate expanse of space, while still raising to the roundness of a perfect sphere the moment that, in its extreme lightness, it carries and, by its transparency, defines.

from Joubert and Space, translated by Charlotte Mandell.

From the lexicon of totalitarianism

2010-03-10T20:10:00.004Z

A notable feature of Latin America over the past ten years has been the emergence of a new kind of left-wing populism, of the paragon is Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. His regime and other usually include some or all of the following ingredients: massive handouts to the poor from the revenue of commodity exports; substantial but selective nationalization not only of foreign, but also of locally owned, companies; the astute use of carrot and stick to keep the existing armed forces in line, along with the creation of an alternative, or "popular", armed force of revolutionary guards; virulent anti-Americanism; and, last but by no means least, a genius for occasioning constitutional change through constituent assemblies, which allow the president to be re-elected indefinitely.

This is the opening paragraph of David Gallagher's review of The Priest of Paraguay in the March 5th edition of The TLS.

Let's run through this sinister catalogue again: the people of these countries get to have a say in the companies that had previously been run from other countries, have an army to protect their democracy, and, like other democracies such as the UK, they're allowed to elect an executive leader more than twice. What's more, the profit from the work of ordinary people goes to ... ordinary people. Don't they also have bankers in desperate need?

And what of this charge of "virulent anti-Americanism"? In what ways are Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela not American? Perhaps David Gallagher means a particular kind of Americanism that is exclusive to one country and is practised by only one country. So, we might ask: have any of the American regimes Gallagher mentions invaded their American neighbours, overthrown an elected American government, installed and supported brutal American dictatorships that use American military power to enforce American anti-democratic industrial relations? Evidently not.

This isn't the first time Gallagher has stained Britain's foremost literary review. (I'm pleased to see Richard Gott respond in the same pages).

For more background, here's an unpacking of the term "anti-Americanism" by someone often accused of it:

The notion “anti-Americanism” is a revealing one. It is drawn from the lexicon of totalitarianism. Thus people who think that the US is the greatest country in the world are "anti-American" if they criticize the acts of the Holy State, or join the vast majority of the population in believing that the corporate sector has far too much influence over government policy, or regard private corporate institutions created by state power and granted extraordinary rights as "a return to feudalism" (to quote old-fashioned conservatives, a category that now scarcely exists). And so on.

In totalitarian societies, the usage is standard. In the former Soviet Union, for example, dissidents were condemned as "anti-Soviet" or "anti-Russian." Where a democratic culture prevails, the usage would be regarded as comical. If people who criticize Irish government policies were condemned as "anti-Irish," I suppose people would collapse in ridicule in the streets of Dublin. At least they should.

The notion has an interesting history. It traces back to King Ahab, the epitome of evil in the Bible, who denounced the Prophet Elijah as an “ocher Yisrael” (a proper translation, now used in Israel, is "hater of Israel"). His reason was that Elijah condemned the acts of the evil King, who, like totalitarians since, identified the state (himself) with the population, the culture, the society.

People are entitled to revere King Ahab and Soviet commissars, and to adopt the term "anti-American," on their model. But we should have no illusions about how they are choosing to identify themselves.

Children and Journalists

2010-03-10T20:00:00.000Z

Some have criticised the lack of sophistication in Makhmalbaf's film, but it's a sobering reminder of the extent to which the harshness of life has enabled the Taliban influence to persist – even after the liberation – and of how children can be persuaded to accept anything as truth.

From The Radio Times.

The writer, his biography

2010-03-08T19:28:00.000Z

There are books that can never escape the circumstances of their creation. Suicide is one of them. French artist and author Edouard Levé submitted the manuscript of his novel on October 5th, 2007; three days later his editor at Editions P.O.L. called to tell him that he was utterly captivated by it, and they arranged to meet on the 18th to discuss publication. The meeting was not to be.

Hugo Wilcken continues the story at the Berlin Review of Books. Were it not for one outstanding exception, it's hard to imagine an English equivalent of Levé. It's no coincidence that Tom McCarthy's Remainder was first published in Paris by Metronome Press.

"A non-negligible minority"

2010-03-05T18:21:00.000Z

Typically, cattle are led down a chute to a "knocking box". Here, theoretically, a steel bolt is shot into the cow's brain. "Sometimes the bolt only dazes the animal, which either remains conscious or wakes up as it is being 'processed'." "Processing" continues with wrapping a chain around the animal's leg, and hoisting it into the air. Then, it is moved to a "sticker", who cuts its throat. If the knocking hasn't done its work, then, as one slaughterhouse worker put it: "They'd be blinking and stretching their necks from side to side, looking around, really frantic". Then they move on to the "head skinner", where the skin is peeled off the head of the animal. Some cattle, not the majority but a non-negligible minority, find themselves still conscious at this stage. Then, on to the "leggers", who cut off the lower portions of the animals' legs. At this point: "As far as the ones that come back to life \[go\] . . . the cattle just go wild, kicking in every direction".

It's a quick death, God help us all.

Play it again, Psalm

2010-03-05T06:01:00.008Z

‘The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence.’ [Psalm 115:17] On one level that is a truism: of course the dead do not praise the Lord – but what does it mean, ‘neither any that go down into silence’? It could be a mere synonym for ‘death’, but Hebrew parallelism often works in more interesting ways, as [Robert] Alter has shown, the second limb enriching and even questioning the first. The Psalmist is perhaps suggesting that silence, the inability or refusal to speak, is a kind of death, a psychological death. Such a psychological death is given many metaphors in the Psalms: silence, desert, being overwhelmed by the sea. [...] Most terrible of all perhaps is the devastatingly simple remark of the narrator of Psalm 88: ‘I am shut up, and I cannot come forth.’ The most interesting example from our point of view is the prayer or psalm in Jonah 2:

I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice / For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about; all thy billows and thy waves passed over me… .

Four years ago when Gabriel Josipovici published The Singer on the Shore, I said to anybody who'd listen that the opening three essays on the Bible were as much a rousing encouragement to the modern writer seeking a way forward as the later essays on TS Eliot, Kafka and Borges. For this reason I believed the book would gain a grateful readership wherever real writers sought inspiration and guidance. Yet how does one convince those so easily in thrall to well-marketed pap? Well, step forth the internet. I've just discovered that Singing a New Song, the third of those essays, is available online at PN Review (albeit in PDF). It offers an answer to why a great many of the Psalms "seem to ask to be sung":

It is as if simply opening your mouth, giving utterance to your voice, releases something in you; as if finding words to express your total despair and the sense you feel of being shut up, unable to come forth, of having been rejected by the whole world, God included, makes the water return to the desert, makes life return to the one who was dead. The fact that the Psalm in Jonah is embedded in a narrative allows us to verify the truth of this, for no sooner has Jonah finished speaking than ‘the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.’ [10] Of course it is important that Jonah and the ‘I’ of the other psalms on this topic cry out to God; but in a sense they only do so because God is the one who will always be prepared to listen. Simply giving voice, I would suggest, finding words for your anguish, is what in the first instance, makes it possible to overcome that anguish.

You can read the essay on Borges from the same book at ReadySteadyBook.

Solar Anus

2010-03-04T21:24:00.003Z

Brushing away what he has called "the dead hand of modernism", he believes that novels should tell stories, have strong plots and be exciting. He likes to surprise readers.

The Daily Telegraph profiles Ian McEwan.

Link via. See also.

Leave the Capital

2010-02-26T20:34:00.008Z

Finance, like other forms of human behaviour, underwent a change in the twentieth century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts - a break with common sense, a turn towards self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn't be explained in workaday English.

This is a quotation from John Lanchester's new book Whoops! about the crisis of capital as used in a review in this week's Times Literary Supplement. Perhaps it makes sense to a financier but it makes no sense to anyone with a feeling for Modernism, the revivification of art following the petrification of Romanticism; a petrification exemplified in literature by the Victorian ideal still idolised by contemporary commerical writers. Lanchester's makes more sense as a defintion of what Modernism is not. How about the notion of art as the search for truth at any cost? Workaday enough for you?

Following last Sunday's post, this is another small example of the abiding complacency at the heart of English literary culture. John Lanchester is a Contributing Editor of the London Review of Books.

Books of disquiet

2010-02-21T15:47:00.016Z

Two references to Thomas Bernhard made last month by two of Britain's most prominent novelists are unremarkable in themselves, yet still surprising. Eleven years ago, when I wrote an introductory essay for Spike Magazine, such references by such people were unthinkable. On Radio 3's Nightwaves, following up his impressive and moving lecture, Will Self acknowledges that WG Sebald has strong affinities with "the lapidary monologuing" of Bernhard, yet also different because he moved to England in the Sixties. "If he had remained at home", Self wonders:

might he not have become – at the very least – a German version of Thomas Bernhard, a refusenik, an internal exile, his solipsism not modulated by melancholy but intensified until it became a cachinnating cynicism? Instead, Sebald’s writing is anecdotal in feel, and furnished with plenty of English quotidiana – Teasmades and coal fires, battered cod and dotty prep schoolmasters, branch line rail journeys and model-making enthusiasts; enough, at any rate, to submerge any disquieting philosophizing.

A modulated solipsism is nice way of putting it: no cure here, only mitigation; palliative care. The centrality of melancholy to Sebald's work is probably the equivalent of Bernhard's cynicism; manifestations, that is, of contingent facts of life: the peace of the East Anglian landscapes, for example, compared to the venal denial of Vienna. Writers become who they are for many reasons, some more obvious than others. Self's thesis is that distance from Germany and closeness to the Jewish community in Manchester guided Sebald's determination to bear witness to the Holocaust and thereby help to remove the taint on Germany. But more than that: to bear witness to the presence of destruction in the peace of the English present. He writes about the destruction of German cities by the Allies and the destruction of nature in the abattoir of industry. Self's lecture is particularly welcome for bringing the English taint to our attention:

Sebald had no need of a Holocaust Remembrance Day – and I believe that if we read him rightly nor have we English. In Germany a Memorial Day for the Victims of National Socialism is indeed an appropriate response – if not an atonement – for crimes committed, but here Tony Blair might have done better to inaugurate a Refusal to Grant Refugee Jews Asylum Memorial Day, or an Incendiary Bombing of German Cities Memorial Day, or even – casting the shadow forward – an Iraqi Civilians Memorial Day, for these are deaths that more properly belong at our door. For Sebald and for those of us who hearken to his work, there is no need to remember, because the Nazis’ Holocaust is still happening in an interlocking space, while before us are the poisoned seas, the glowing piles and the cold putrefaction of an environmental one.

The blind eye we turn to the implications of Sebald's novels is emphasised by the disproportionate attention given to his least best novel Austerlitz. Had this been less explicitly about the Holocaust, as the three others are, one wonders if this novel would be regarded so highly. When he turned his attention to the Allied bombing of German cities, reviewers used it as a stick to beat opponents of the invasion of Iraq, to align them with 1930s appeasers. Self says "it is hard to imagine Sebald subsuming the emotional reality of the Holocaust to an intellectual abstraction", yet not subsuming the live incineration of Iraqi families is precisely what agitates the cognitive dissonance of mainstream gatekeepers like Daniel Johnson. A cachinnating cynicism would be required instead perhaps. Which brings me to the second mention of Bernhard. In Prospect Magazine, the house paper of the English liberal intelligentsia, Martin Amis caused a fuss by dismissing JM Coetzee by claiming "his whole style is predicated on transmitting absolutely no pleasure":

Amis: People assume that it’s the gloomy buggers that are the serious ones — but in fact, anyone who has ever been anywhere in fiction is funny. Yet there are whole reputations built on not being funny. Who’s that German writer doesn’t even have paragraph breaks?

Tom Chatfield: I don’t know him, I don’t tend to read that kind of German writer.

Steven Poole was the first to point out that "Amis might have been thinking of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, who in my opinion is extremely funny". Are there any other writers in German who don't use paragraph breaks? Perhaps Amis is being funny himself; after all, who ever gets pleasure from paragraph breaks ("Hit return, baby, one more time")? My own bewilderment at comments like this – another one would be Jonathan Jones' dismissal of Saul Bellow in favour of a much lesser writer – suggest that Will Self is right to raise the biographical influence on Sebald's fiction. I wonder if this could be the reason why Amis' novels leave me cold, books written by a stranger in a strange land. I have to say the same of Will Self's novels and those by almost every other big name in current English fiction, whereas Sebald and Bernhard and so many other European novelists give me the air in which to live and breathe. Perhaps it's something to do with internal and external exile. High modernism in English is peopled by exiles and aliens: Conrad, Eliot, Joyce, DH Lawrence and Woolf in their own ways, while contemporary writers whose novels have moved me also tend not to be inward with the culture in which they live and work: Sebald himself, Hugo Wilcken, Tao Lin, Jonathan Littell, Agota Kristof, JM Coetzee, Aharon Appelfeld. Of course it doesn't hold entirely and, Colin Wilson-like, one can overplay Outsider art, but what it does offer is an initial diagnosis of the long-term malaise in English fiction. Whereas Sebald and Bernhard expose their fellow countrymen to the taint, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan seem happier to criticise the official enemy than the genocide being perpetrated in their name by young Christian white men (it's not just Amis displaying "narcissism and [an] inability to empathise"). What is to be done? I'm not implying that English fiction needs to address this subject as such but, to quote another writer not of his land, to find words for what would otherwise remain wordless.

The double pressure: a review of David Shields' Reality Hunger

2010-02-02T22:08:00.010Z

Reading David Shields’ new book – but in what way is it a book? – is a frustrating experience. As demonstrated by the previous sentence, on almost every page of Reality Hunger the reader is interrupted by responses, doubts and questions. "Every artistic movement from the beginning of time" it begins, "is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art." Why, one asks, half-aware of the question because one is trying to get into the book, does he use "artistic movement" rather than "artist"? The answer is soon clear: he is seeking to galvanise a new artistic movement by expressing his own concern with the relation of art to reality. It has an impact on the form and content of the book, so much so that it fails to become a book yet, as a consequence, ends up enacting part of Shields’ manifesto. However, what remains betrays it.

Reality Hunger's immediate resort to journalistic cliché establishes a workman-like, commonsense approach to its subject. It not so much smuggles reality as coshes writing over the head and replaces the body with a waxwork doll. And it doesn't stop. Why does he use the empty phrase "beginning of time" when it's more appropriate, realistic alternative is the "beginning of art" – so that we immediately think of, say, the caves of Lascaux? Cave art is of course a beginning separate from any "artistic movement" or even any notion of art and surely would be Shields' ideal. Yet it goes unmentioned. The absence of art known to those cave people and then obliterated by the paintings is like the absence of time in that it erases the conditions in which one is able to talk about it (or even talk fullstop), thereby implicating any reflection on art's supplementary character, the character of which is Shields' subject. Moreover, to raise the opposition of art and reality immediately raises the question of what both art and reality are in themselves. Reality Hunger does present ancient literary references: Homer, Thucydides, the New Testament, yet few rate more than a paragraph's attention. Entry 23 provides the following insight: "The Tale of Genji: an eleventh-century Japanese text about court life." This is on the level of Woody Allen's speed reading of War & Peace.

Cave art would be a good starting point. Perhaps though it is a poor example because its production in the want of natural light, its exertion of ritual pressure and its generation of the intense vertigo of time, is not the kind of reality Shields hungers for. He is keen on the notion that art has "retreated .. from the representational into the abstract", which would mean emerging from the caves into the light of day, away from art. To descend back, however, and, by the flickering light of burning torches, to witness the forms on the cave walls, reveals the poverty of such an opposition. If the caves reveal that art's presence enabled humanity to discover its unique power over life and death, a fundamental question is begged: in what way is a work of art distinct from human reality? If the work of art is itself part of the world, an addition inseparable from phenomena, then the idea of smuggling is not only bafflingly superfluous but counterproductive. Shields’ smuggled art would then be reality disguised as reality. Without this illusion, the task left for the artist/viewer is to have a relation to art that is distinct from his or her relation to reality. It would not be enough to claim membership of an "artistic movement".

Starting again

As this review has not got beyond the opening sentences of the book without crippling, unanswered questions, it will struggle to move any further unless it starts again. So, let’s go back to the book and Shields’ explicit statement of purpose:

My intent is to write an ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated … artists in a multitude of forms and media … who are breaking larger and larger chunks of 'reality' into their work.

Reality Hunger is a collage of quotations and Shields’ own work designed to enact the manifesto because very large chunks of borrowed text constitute the bulk of the 208 pages. While this is promising in theory, the raft of 'artists' cited on page four as examples doesn't encourage one to herald Shields as the Andre Breton or Wyndham Lewis of the 21st century. It includes American radio shows, cable TV comedies, and films of such avant-garde credentials as Open Water and Borat. Literature is slipped into toward the end when Billy Collins’ poetry is admired ahead of the "frequently hieroglyphic obscurantism of his colleagues" – though they're not frequent enough to warrant a name check let alone an example from the poetry – and, finally, a prose work: Dave Eggers' playful memoir. In fairness, this wince-inducing list of parochial and commercial ephemera may not be all Shields' own work. We have the quotations to consider. However, this is clear only after one has read the book or been alerted by other readers. If one reads from cover to cover without looking ahead, then each numbered entry – there are 617 – reads as a statement, an assertion, as part of a developing narrative forever delayed or contradicted, rather than a mere collection. One is bound to react with enthusiasm, impatience or hair-pulling frustration as one agrees, gets bored, or disagrees along the way. After the book has been read, the by-now-bald reader comes to this author’s note:

This book contains hundreds of quotations that go unacknowledged in the body of the text. I’m trying to regain a freedom that writers from Montaigne to Burroughs took for granted and that we have lost. Your uncertainty about whose words you’ve just read is not a bug but a feature.

It turns out the note to page four cites an article by a Soyon Im in Seattle Weekly, but it still doesn't explain who made the uninspiring selection. That said, it does explain the regular bouts of déjà vu. Entry 49 is a paragraph from Philip Roth's famous essay about the writer's embarrassment in the face of American newspaper reality. Reality Hunger shares in that reality in that it defies approach, at least in terms of critical summary. One can read half a dozen entries and have a dozen responses, all clamouring to be expressed because Shields refuses to explain or explore the implications of each entry. Entry 48, for example, cites Cynthia Ozick talking about William Gaddis's The Recognitions: "it was already too late" she says "to be ambitious in that way with a vast modernist novel". Shields comments "It's difficult to overemphasize how misguided her heroic (antiheroic) way of thinking is". Why is it misguided? Shields has already lamented a creative freedom that "we have lost" so we can presume he thinks ambition is never too late, yet rather than wring one's hands, wouldn't be instructive to investigate why we have lost that freedom? Elsewhere Shields declares that “Art evolves”, so might Ozick's comment be sensitive toward that evolution? We'll never find out reading this book. Overemphasis would do ahead of self-contradictory soundbites. Shields' apparent support for vast novels is also contradicted by other quotations:

The Corrections: I’d say: I couldn't read that book if my life depended on it. It might be a "good" novel or it might be a "bad" novel, but something has happened to my imagination, which can no longer yield to the earnest embrace of novelistic form.

So he (rather than we) has lost something; something has happened to him. What reality is this? The reader hungers for it. (To confuse matters the notes link this entry to an interview with Richard Serra in which, as far as I can tell, Franzen's novel is mentioned nowhere.)

Energy of delusion

Perhaps we need to start again, again.

Shields' key components for his new artistic movement include: "deliberate unartiness: 'raw' material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional." He wants to encourage: "Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone". He doesn't provide immediate examples except to add, in parentheses: "(What, in the last half century, has been more influential than Abraham Zapruder’s Super-8 film of the Kennedy assassination?)". Influential to whom and to what artistic end? American culture perhaps, yet there is nothing deliberate about this film, nothing "seeming" to efface: it is definitively unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional. The assassination itself could be said to be as equally influential in the same parochial sense. In itself, skull bone and brain matter flying across the boot of a car has nothing to do with art unless we recognise that reality is borne on human agency: that is, the influential aspect of the assassination is not its reality – which perhaps only JFK could said to have experienced (though the meaning of experience would then be under question) – but its distance from our grasp. Inherent, necessary distance would explain the looping repetition of the Zapruder film across these 47 years. In brutal contrast, the innumerable angles in the coverage of the 9/11 attacks still do not lessen our distance or tighten our grasp: the distance remains as fascinating as ever. Something happens to our imagination as we witness everything from art to atrocity: we recognise distance. No amount of 'raw' material makes any difference except, perhaps, to delude the consumer of the latest angle of attack. The critic, of course, should be the first not succumb to such delusion.

Shields, however, is drawn to it like a moth to a film of a flame. Entry 69, attributed to Saul Steinberg, is the dynamic beating the wrongheaded heart of his manifesto:

There are two sorts of artist, one not being in the least superior to the other. One responds to the history of his art so far; the other responds to life itself.

Two sorts and, by now, we know which we're meant to favour. Yet both respond only to distance. To ask what life is in itself is already to open an abyss. It's not a question that troubles this book because it knows that life is what is "actually occuring in the world" independent of the viewer. To achieve all Shields' favoured elements then one must discharge agency, which is strictly impossible for the artist; discharging is agency by stealth. So what Shields wants instead is for the artist to efface agency, risk nothing but being found out. His undue focus on the James Frey controversy – innumerable entries are dedicated to this singularly American phenomenon – reiterates the inconvenience of the question: "I'm disappointed not that Frey is a liar but that he isn't a better one."

Going through literature

The secret or mystery of art which Reality Hunger cannot resolve without denial goes back to its keenness on the false opposition of representation and abstraction. One of its most curious blindspots is a persistent misrepresentation of modernist fiction - that "retreat .. from the representational into the abstract" again. Entry 14, apparently quoting a conversation with Jonathan Raban, claims Henry James is responsible "for much of the modernist purifying of the novel's mongrel tradtion."

I see writers like Naipaul and Sebald making a necessary post-modernist return to the roots of the novel as an essentially Creole form, in which ‘non-fiction’ material is ordered, shaped, and imagined as ‘fiction. Books like these restore the novelty of the novel, with its ambiguous straddling of verifiable and imaginary facts, and restore the sense of readerly danger that one enjoys reading Moll Flanders or Clarissa or Tom Jones or Vanity Fair – that tightrope walk along the margin between the newspaper report and the poetic vision.

Much of Reality Hunger's unwitting conservative nostalgia is condensed in the whiny repetition of "return" and "restore"; one can sense the regret and the wish to get back to a golden age when readers and writers flourished in a literary garden of Eden untroubled by the beasts of Lascaux. Yet how do the four exemplars of literary modernism, which describe all aspects of life and more, and which contain all kinds of risk – Joyce's Ulysses, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Kafka's The Trial and, more recently, Beckett's Trilogy – present as acts of purification? Perhaps it is precisely the and more that is objectionable; each approaches areas we can't quite call reality. It is particularly revealing that the conversation with Raban identifies a "newspaper report" as an ideal for a writer of fiction. Shields is the son of journalists and it informs his literary values and assumptions. Entry 66 quotes Rachel Donadio: "Today the most compelling energies seem directed at nonfiction". A statement one would never expect from a journalist on the New York Times.

The purest form in modern literature is surely that of genre, which by definition prepackages reality. By no coincidence, the feature fiction review in the January 21st edition of the TLS is a long article arguing that "the crime novel and the thriller have a more direct power than their literary cousin to depict a society’s ills". It's no coincidence because every month similar articles appear in the popular press, such is the sublimated urge to mitigate or disguise the purity of craft. But of course criticising genre is a literary faux pas of the first order. Best to stick to blaming the most radical artists who have no "artistic movement" to protect them.

What's at stake?

It's not that purity of form and control over material isn't a strong feature in most of the great modernist novels: despite Marcel's fascination with them as he imagines returning to his love interest in Balbec on the Normandy coast, Proust does not – as one expects Shields would hope – reprint actual train timetables. Instead, In Search of Lost Time introduces reality by arranging for its absence to be long forgotten and then experienced again in habit-shattering fashion. This is why the novel is over three thousand pages long. The novel moves through literature rather than evades or effaces it. It moves toward what habit enables us to forget in order to know it again as if for the first time. In many ways Proust embodies everything Shields calls for, only, rather than features, attention to randomness, accident and serendipity are the gears turning at the centre of Proust's work.

In mitigation, there are several entries mentioning Proust without misunderstanding and Shields does seem to appreciate the value of the novel, but entry 182, attributed to Bonnie Rough, is an abrupt reversal:

In Proust, for example, who is to me at base an essayist, nothing ever happens. The only obstacles are that someone might rebuff someone else or someone might get sick or grow old, and even these are usually hypothetical obstacles. People get educations, travel, buy paintings, go on diplomatic missions, but the events are for the most part meetings between various people (or simply sightings of one person by another, sometimes thanks to a stroll or a ride in a carriage) and what these meetings bring out, on a psychological level, about life itself. How can a work be considered fiction when there’s no plot? Philosophy, perhaps, or criticism, but not fiction.

As this is clearly part of a larger piece we should not be hasty in responding with astonishment to the assumptions packed into this passage. But is her final question meant to lead to an explanation of why In Search of Lost Time is fiction and that here she is playing devil's advocate? Given that she believes Proust is "at base an essayist", we can assume the question is rhetorical. Perhaps Shields includes it as a corrective to the others in line with the lack of filtering demanded by his manifesto, or perhaps because throughout Reality Hunger he celebrates the "lyric essayist" and that to believe Proust is “at base an essayist” is not to be blind to the lesson of In Search of Lost Time. Yet Proust's writing career reveals the necessity of the novel's status as fiction. It is more than a label. Had it not been fiction, his first novel Jean Santeuil – a conventional bildungsroman – would have been published, In Search of Lost Time left unwritten and Proust consigned to comparative literary oblivion. So what is at stake when the question of fiction is raised: is it merely a definition of genre?

The double pressure

Shields has a surprising and relevant epigraph for his book: "All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one". It is taken from the first page of Walter Benjamin's essay The Image of Proust. Surprising because Benjamin is otherwise glaringly absent from Reality Hunger – his essay The Storyteller is not quoted at all; a perplexing omission – and relevant because this is also true of Proust's great work. But only half-true. Alone it exposes the innocence of entry 182's reading. Except, the sentence in which this line appears is truncated and leaves out (at least in my translation) "It has been rightly said" at the beginning and "that they are, in other words, special cases" at the end. Great works as special cases is an important idea. Each great modern work is a special case because it has been made from bottom up, not bolted onto the frame of genre. There is nothing "at base" from which to build except experience itself: experience of reality and experience of its absence. It is made, that is, from inside the distance between imagination and reality. What is at stake then in specifying that In Search of Lost Time is fiction is awareness that his novel attends closely to the pressure exerted on the space of writing; the double pressure of imagination and reality. Without opposing and supporting pressure, neither reality nor the imagination can have any vital presence in works of art: one is death, the other deathless. By writing imaginative fiction, Proust becomes able to open up his work to what haunts it, the outside, the unknown, reality. In order to do this, he did not need to include chunks of undigested reality into the work.

Perhaps Reality Hunger can be said to do the same in its own way given that it includes so much that is not David Shields' own work and so much that contradicts so much else within the work. Yet the restricted content – no inclusion of literary works of philosophy, criticism and genreless fiction consisting of short entries or fragments by writers such as (off the top of my head) Kierkegaard, Cioran, Blanchot, Pound, David Markson, Thomas Bernhard, Jean Paulhan and Félix Fénéon – and the frequent vapidity of the chosen content suggests stunted ambition. Of course, this is a product of its inbuilt unwillingness to develop insights with defensive reason, and there is logic and merit in such a refusal: it lets the work speak for itself. However, such a lack is experienced by the reader as a discharge of authorial responsibility. That is, responsibility toward the destiny of every book; its inevitable submission to unity. This is finally what, for all its local entertainments, betrays Reality Hunger. No matter how many chunks of reality David Shields or anyone includes in a work, it becomes something else: literature takes possession of it.

How then is reality possible? Recall Joseph K. in The Trial seeking the commanding reality of the law in order refute the charge that led to his arrest at the beginning of the book. The law could be said to be reality, the ultimate judgement passed on each mortal individual which, with the utmost seriousness and utmost absurdity, K. pursues to its origin. His quest ends, of course, with a terrible, half-noticed execution. Yes, absolute law is reality and perhaps The Trial, in its purity as pure fiction, retreats from the fatal, dominant X. Kafka was not unaware of it fate. On January 19th 1922, he turned to his diaries, that space in which we try to give witness and response to our real lives, and continued the fiction:

What meaning have yesterday's conclusions today? They have the same meaning as yesterday's, are true, except the blood is oozing away in the chinks between the great stones of the law.

This Space's books of the year 2009

2009-12-31T22:16:00.003Z

Why should one novel be my favourite of the year rather than any other? When I read this list in a comment on John Self's Asylum, I found an answer. If reading a book prompts only Publisherspeak – disturbing, intriguing, insightful – then it can be discounted. Each summary there is like a bullet in the neck of each book.

I choose Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones as my favourite novel of the year because it was a shock to the literary system; a shock in three ways. First, the intense, almost overpowering gravitational pull of the narrative. It affects not only the reader but the novel itself. It is the furious axe for its own frozen sea. Second, the reception in the mainstream of literary USA was a shock not so much for its cluelessness – such books are necessarily misunderstood – but for the imbecilic, self-blinding character of the reviews. Michiko Kakutani's contempt probably emerges out of America's repressed awareness of its pressing need for denazification, with Ed Champions' video offering the best argument ever made against literary blogging.

The third shock was to recognise how a contemporary work of such length and about such a subject can also be as intimate as Proust's. My habit-formed assumption that only brief novels engineered like tiny, intricate timepieces could achieve this was shattered. Still, my next two favourite novels were like that: Dag Solstad's Novel 11, Book 18 and Jean Echenoz's Ravel. Distance as intimacy.

Of course, my non-fiction choice has to be The Letters of Samuel Beckett, but I'd also like to mention Kevin Hart's The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. It was published five years ago but I re-read it this year and was surprised by how much we had changed. Looking forward rather than back, Hart has edited the forthcoming collection of Blanchot's Political Writings. It's scheduled for April, so take Gary Barlow's advice and have a little patience.

Hope and oblivion

2009-12-30T21:40:00.001Z

Daily for these final weeks of the year, I have listened to The Morning Paper, the opening song to Smog's 1997 LP Red Apple Falls. Usually this is done as I walk twice a day to and from an office. It's a short song of only forty-one words set to piano, acoustic guitar, hurdy-gurdy drone and reticent trumpet. It sings something simple:

The morning paper is on its way
It's all bad news on every page
So roll right over
And go to sleep
The evening sun will be so sweet

I roll right over
And I have this thing

Red apple falls

(These are the words as I hear them. The CD sleeve adds one or two that Bill Callahan's vocal elide.) The song isn't outstanding in the manner of those that follow – Blood Red Bird, Red Apples and To Be of Use – so why do I return to it with such apparent need? Clearly there's the lyrical turning away from the routine toward dream – emphasised by both the uplift of the music as it breaks out of stuck-needle repetition, and by the uncharacteristic tenor of Bill's vocals. It is also a prelude to a sequence of songs in which dream and sleeplessness play across one another. For this reason I'm sure it provides succour. However, this isn't because the song issues an explicit recommendation of withdrawal. Rather, there's something about the two final lines and how they stir me. And I have this thing / Red apples falls. It's difficult to put into words because I am stirred by what is probably wordless. So I suppose it's a sense of exposure to something buried, something otherwise passed over.

So what is this thing, red apple falls? For Bill Callahan I assume it is the inspiration and creation of this sequence of songs; their emergence from somewhere other than himself yet also inseparable. In this way The Morning Paper plays the same role in the LP as Earthy Anecdote by Wallace Stevens does at the beginning of his first collection Harmonium and at the beginning of the Collected Poems, and the role of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Borges' story which he placed at the beginning of Ficciones. Both poem and story preface collections that maintain themselves in the pressured air between reality and imagination – the world and the book – and each introduction is a microcosm of the book to come. Yet each is also more than a microcosm because each is also part of a collection, both separate and inseparable. Stevens' poem ends when the firecat sleeps and allows the bucks freedom of movement, which would be the writer writing without threat from the bristling real. Without a threat, the poem can go on forever or stop right there – choices which are essentially the same – whereas, when the firecat wakes, the bucks have to swerve to the left and to the right in swift, circular lines to create the poem we're reading and, by extension, the rest of the book. In Borges' story, the narrator resists the usurpation of the world by the idealism of Tlön merely by writing a history of the change, making connections and thereby introducing causation into a world where causality had otherwise been eliminated. We wouldn't be reading this story or that poem but for the exposure of sovereignty to what threatens it. It's no coincidence that the second song of Red Apple Falls begins with a waking to the cry of a blood red bird. Red Apple Falls then is itself an exposure; this thing cannot be contained; it is just the beginning.

*

I cited him after Smog but I began to think about my response to The Morning Paper while listening to a discussion about Borges on the Entitled Opinions podcast feed between Robert Harrison and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. The first half-hour of the show concentrates on Borges' poems and Gumbrecht's wish to renew focus on the specificity of Borges' writing – its attention to detail local to streets in Buenos Aires – against the "philosophical reading" of Borges as a writer of "the plurality of worlds", a reading, according to Gumbrecht, that originated in Foucault. Gumbrecht says this reading overlooks the short narratives and poetry which are instead "epiphanic". Harrison joins in, finding the poetry to be "confessional" and "individuated in place and time". The other, well-known reading he brushes aside as "brainy". However, prompted by a listener, he challenges the happy agreement by quoting from The False Problem of Ugolino, the second of Borges' nine Dantesque essays in which Borges adjudicates over the debate about whether Ugolino in Dante's Inferno cannibalised his children or not. As Harrison admits, it ends with a paragraph that belies the epiphanic interpretation:

In real time, in history, whenever a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates and loses the others. Such is not the case in the ambiguous time of art, which is similar to that of hope and oblivion. In that time, Hamlet is sane and is mad. In the darkness of his Tower of Hunger, Ugolino devours and does not devour the beloved corpes, and this undulating imprecision, this uncertainty, is the strange matter of which he is made. Thus, with two possible deaths, did Dante dream him, and thus will the generations dream him.

Gumbrecht's reaction is uncharacteristically impatient. He says this is literature trying to do philosophy's job with a general definitions of literature and, as we have philosophy already, literature should stick to what it does best. Literature, he explains, "is much more concrete than other texts" and this concreteness should take precedence in our reading. Again Harrison agrees and calls "banal" the "deconstructionist notion of the essential undecidibility of literary texts". Gumbrecht goes as far to say that Borges "isn't doing himself any favours" in writing this essay and, in particular, choosing Dante as an example: "Dante is not someone who leaves things in suspension"; he too is a poet of epiphany. Presumably still avoiding general definitions, Gumbrecht insists that "each time you read [a book], you read it in one way". This is the strength of literature so, if you "suspend" Ugolino between verdicts, you drain literature of its strength. He concedes the reader is always aware of the possibility of the multiplicity of meanings but "the strength is not to stay there but to go back and say 'No! This is what Achilles was like' – this what he was like in the very moment you read him, and this is what I call epiphanic". Note that he doesn't say what Ugolino is like in the very moment of reading.

Before the discussion moves on, Gumbrecht once again contrasts the epiphanic to what he calls "excessively cerebral" readings. But let's look back at what Borges says. Maybe this will show what's so cerebral about it: Thus, with two possible deaths, did Dante dream him, and thus will the generations dream him. Dante's writing and our reading then is characterised as dreaming. Dreams are entirely cerebral in that they are products of the sleeping brain, except our experience of dreaming is not brainy; it is real and uncanny. Events in dreams are experienced as stories; singularly real in the time of sleep, yet also charged with enough mystery to make one return to the details, to read it again, forever unsatisfied. This is why it can never be epiphanic in the sense Gumbrecht argues for: strength in going back. The reading one goes back to is never a single moment of certainty but, as Borges says, "similar to that of hope and oblivion". When I listen to The Morning Paper, hope and oblivion are both promised. The promise is enough for each to be delivered and withdrawn in a moment and for the moment itself to be promised and withdrawn. Such is the epiphanic in art.

The Two Lönnrots: new Josipovici story online

2009-12-13T15:23:00.001Z

Litro, the free monthly literary magazine distributed in London, has published The Two Lönnrots, a new story by Gabriel Josipovici.

As Borges lay dying his mind filled with images of lakes, of vast forests of spruce and pine, an enormous sky. He knew this was Finland, a country he had never visited, but which in these last years had been closer to his heart even than the streets of Buenos Aires in which he had grown up and about which he had written so much and so well.

The story is an excerpt from Heart's Wings a selection of stories to be published by Carcanet next year. In addition to stories from Mobius the Stripper (1974) and In the Fertile Land (1987), the volume will include previously uncollected stories such as the one above.

PS: ReadySteadyBook also has his essay Borges and the Plain Sense of Things.