Reading, ignorance

The papacy, people say, counts in centuries, and perhaps never even thinks of counting, because its goal is eternity.¹

 
It has been a pleasure every few months to buy the latest volume in the new translation of À la recherche du temps perdu. I've now read the third, by Peter Bush. The Oxford World's Classics paperbacks are affordable, easy to hold open and, while the typeface is small, it's not too small. Overall, this is the ideal edition for those planning to read Proust in English for the first time and for those wanting to read a translation more faithful to the original than Scott-Moncrieff's, bountiful as it is.

The contents for each volume suggests another reason to recommend, coming as it does with extensive background information. Excluding Proust's titles, the table of contents looks like this:

• General Editors' Preface
• Translator's Note
• Introduction
• Note on the Text 
• Select Bibliography
• A Chronology of Marcel Proust
• Explanatory Notes. 

Compare this to the Penguin Classics paperback from the 1980s in which I first read Proust: while The Guermantes Way is 100 pages longer because of the larger typeface, it also includes Cities of the Plain, making it a bulky 1,100 pages.² Also, the table of contents lists (again, in addition to Proust's) only Notes, Addenda and Synopsis, with the notes filling three pages. The new edition has sixty-seven. The reader is directed to each note by an asterisk placed after a word. In a flurry of black snowflakes, there are often several to a page. If some provide detail of Proust's life to align the fiction to his biography, most explain the narrator's allusions, cultural references and the contemporary and historical events mentioned. This includes a veritable Who's Who of the fin de siècle French aristocracy, which is of course almost entirely unfamiliar to modern English readers. 

In two previous posts on the first volumes new translation, I express dismay at the unfamiliarity of the details, which I assumed exposed the shallowness of my first reading.³ In the new translation, Marcel's visit to the barracks at Doncières, his grandmother's decline and death, Albertine's brief visit to his home, his attendance at the salons of Mme de Villeparisis and the Duchesse de Guermantes, and the surprising turn taken in his call on the Baron de Charlus at the very end, are each very clear and memorable, yet almost entirely new to me. And then there is the seismic presence of the Dreyfus Affair splitting high society into two camps, which I do remember. But what did I know of it back then? Perhaps only visions of Steve McQueen in Papillon.

Nearly forty years later then, it was a different experience, a kind of disappointment, in that it was mostly intellectual, if not lacking the usual pleasures of reading, including laughs. In discussing de Charlus' excessive grieving over his late wife, the Princesse de Parme notes that "we sometimes do for the dead what wouldn't have done for the living", with which Mme de Guermantes concurs: "For one thing...we go to their funerals, which we never do for the living!" 

What this meant was that the breadth of space opened in my mind by Proust's long, luscious sentences as rendered, perhaps misleadingly, by Scott-Moncrieff, with, as Julia Kristeva puts it, their "odors, sounds, colors, shapes, tasty delicacies, and tactile pleasures", as well as arcane references proliferating across clause and sub-clause, in which one's thinking turns from a slog into a waltz, was not repeated.⁴ Had my young self been seduced then by the mere flourishes of an arch stylist? If I am appalled at myself for not being more attentive, for seeing the novel not only as a transcendent presence but as a guide to a life to come and the value of art, it is a recognition reflected in Marcel's own journey. I see that now. From a distance, he falls in love with the Duchesse de Guermantes solely on account of her family name only to be disillusioned upon getting to know her and the world she inhabits. We become enchanted with a certain work like In Search of Lost Time and wish to pursue it beyond the covers, perhaps by reading biographies and literary studies, by reading philosophers who influenced its ideas and the novelists inspired by its example or, if that isn't enough, by visiting the writer's house if they're dead or going to hear them talk at a literary festival if they're the living dead. 

What The Guermantes Way makes plain is that much of this research is unsatisfying, a dissatisfaction blurred like the sun through oceanic depths of information, and is also why many common readers will struggle with this part of the novel: there are hundreds of pages full of the twitterings of dinner parties, part of what Gilles Deleuze called the narrator's "apprenticeship to signs".⁵ According to him, there are four signs: worldly signs, the signs of love, sensuous signs, and the signs of art. The Guermantes Way offers a prolonged exposure to the first. Worldly signs constitute the language of an in-crowd. Maintaining one's place within it depends on making the right signs.

Nothing funny is said at the Verdurins', and Mme Verdurin does not laugh; but Cottard makes a sign that he is saying something funny, Mme Verdurin makes a sign that she is laughing, and her sign is so perfectly emitted that M. Verdurin, not to be outdone, seeks in his turn for an appropriate mimicry.

Deleuze is referring to another salon here but the signs apply across high society. While these signs are empty, their emptiness nevertheless "confers upon them a ritual perfection" in which everything is clear and known.  The signs of love, by contrast, confers a ritual of anxiety. The loved one "expresses a possible world unknown to us", one that we wish to enter and study with the intensity of a codebreaker. Nothing about the loved one is clear and knowledge is sought with trepidation. We seek facts as a painkiller only for it to turn into a knife under the ribcage, as we remain excluded, even, and especially, when the loved one gives us signs of preference. Thus, "the means we count on to preserve us from jealousy are the very means that develop that jealousy". We see this in serial form across the novel, from Swann's love for Odette, St Loup's for Rachel, and Marcel's for Gilberte and Albertine. The sensuous signs are those that have made In Search of Lost Time famous: the petite madeleine, the loose paving stone, etc. presenting an ecstatic truth without intellectual agency. Beckett guesses there are 12 or 13.

Involuntary memory is explosive, 'an immediate, total and delicious deflagration.' It restores, not mere the past object, but the Lazarus that it charmed or tortured, not merely Lazarus and the object, but more because less, more because it abstracts the useful, the opportune, the accidental, because in its flame it has consumed Habit and all its works, and in its brightness revealed what mock reality of experience never can and never will reveal–the real.⁶

As with the signs of love, they demand interpretation and the signs of art constitute the 'Search' of Proust's title. The goal is to recover time wasted at dinner parties and time lost in love. Deleuze notes that the first three types of signs depend on material conditions while art is immaterial. In this way it is not subordinated to the experience of an individual and as such enables us to recognise its place in the plurality of experience. 

If Deleuze's analysis helps us to understand why it is especially challenging to maintain attention throughout The Guermantes Way, it may also help us to appreciate the difference between novels in general and the essential novel. That is, by applying Deleuze's signs to the culture of reading and writing about novels. We can see the critical apparatus given in the Oxford World's Classics edition as the worldly signs of reading novels. They enable us to place the reading experience in the context of literary history, the macro history of the author's time and the micro history of the author's life. They offer knowledge we can use to accommodate our response to the work and express it in public. We can see the overall series as a worldly sign: the edition presents world's classics and everything that phrase implies, acting like the bright pastel colours of supermarket fiction or the gothic filigree of YA Fantasy. Genre fiction makes a sign of pleasure and the reader makes a sign of enjoyment. Both are empty. This is why booklovers claim with an addict's panicked fervour that they devour books. We can also see the worldly signs in the framing of novels in The Guardian newspaper's book coverage.

What then are the signs of love? The stack above of Proust studies and Proust's writings in addition to the novel itself indicate my attempts to interpret the signs given by a reading of Albertine Asleep I heard in 1978 and the beloved beaten-up secondhand copy of volume one of Remembrance of Thing Past bought in 1987 for £3:10 (the minutae of infatuation). The means to travel closer to the work may be the very means of increasing distance. A magnificent distance nonetheless. Those who do not seek to get closer are not in love.

The sensuous signs of reading are the most difficult to describe. It should consitute the focus of critical response. Gabriel Josipovici spoke of what Proust's novel does that other forms cannot.

I have never wanted to write poetry. So there must be things fiction can do that poetry can't.....This 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. 

This is close to my own experience of the essential novel. On a summer's day browsing bookshelves, anxious and passing time before a meeting, I picked up Peter Handke's Across and, reading the first line, I felt the dense air evaporate. Time disappeared, replaced in miraculous moment by time's essence. It's happened since in different ways and in different novels by different authors. One cannot seek them. They cannot be guaranteed. We forget them by losing ourselves in worldly signs. What Proust's example shows us is that we must create our own work, equivalent to In Search of Lost Time however feeble our resources in comparison to his. Weakness in this case should be considered the greatest strength. 

 

Notes

1: from The Guermantes Way. 

2. The title is Scott-Moncrieff's bowdlerised version of Sodom and Gomorrah. Proust's original title is restored in the Oxford World's Classics edition translated by Helen Constantine, published in June 2026.

3.  The Swann Way and In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom respectively.  

4. In Time & Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, translated by Ross Guberman. 

5. In Proust & Signs, translated by Richard Howard. 

6. In Proust by Samuel Beckett.

 

Invasion of the Universe

I wonder how many of those of us who write exclusively on literature and read only novels, poetry, literary criticism and occasionally into related subjects, have an otherwise unaccountable curiosity with another beyond the literary horizon. Many, I imagine. I'm not talking about an enthusiasm like Colchester United or clay pigeon shooting but an area of fascination, something studied with no view to an output. 

In my case it's Easter Island. I read books on Easter Island, I watch documentaries on Easter Island and look at webpages on Easter Island. While this isn't quite the revelation – fourteen years ago I wrote about Nicolas Cauwe's Easter Island: The Great Taboo, the best book I've read on the subject – I have yet to find anything that addresses let alone answers the question that fascinates me. Despite getting tired of seeing the same archeological facts repeated and the same popular legends raised, examined and debunked, I still look out for new books. The latest is Mike Pitts' Island at the Edge of the World featuring a history and archeology of the island, mostly familiar enough to me, but distinguished for the story it tells of Katherine Routledge's pioneering expedition to the island in 1914 and its hidden archives, a subject in which Pitts is strongly invested.

 But why Easter Island? John Dos Passos said his explanation was simple:

When I was a small boy forlornly attending an English preparatory school...some kind of person took me to the British Museum. There I saw a statue. This was a huge rough darkgray statue with a long sad darkgray face. As I remember it stood under some sort of arcade. I stopped in my tracks and stared at it through the sooty London drizzle. The statue stared back out of deepsunken eyes. What was it trying to say? To this day I can remember the feeling it gave me of savage brooding melancholy.

This appears in his complilation of accounts by visitors: from Jacob Roggeveen, the sea captain who named the island after the day in 1722 on which his fleet first sighted it, to Pierre Loti, the French travel-writing sensation, who visited 150 years later, and ending with Passos' own in 1969.

For me, the explanation is not simple. Asking what the statues are trying to say has never occurred to me. I have no interest how the islanders moved them into place or the purpose they served, and no interest if it was indeed the islanders who raised them and not some lost race as argued by Graham Hancock or alien visitors as proposed by Erich von Däniken. Unlike Thor Heyerdahl, I have no interest in where the islanders sailed from to populate the island, and I have no interest in the use to which the collapse of the island's ecosystem has been put by popular science writers as a microcosm of Earth's disastrous ecological trajectory. I have no interest in the rongorongo writing script or the birdman cult. I have no wish to visit the island. And while like Dos Passos I have stood before Hoa Hakananai'a on its platform in the British Museum, I felt no savagery or melancholy. I felt nothing. 

What is it then?

Awareness of Easter Island began over forty years ago when I saw a cartoon of an irritated man with the profile of an Easter Island statue posing for a bust as a sculptor chips away at a block. There are Easter Island statues (known as 'moai') in the background trailing off into the distance, and the caption says: "Get it right this time!". 

OK, not especially funny, but around the same time as I saw the cartoon, and in the same vein of bathetic cynicism, I stuck two Matisse-like cutouts to my bedroom wall and gave it the same title as this blogpost. For all I know the cartoon may have been the catalyst for recognising how a created object becomes something in excess of the world, which is also the repetition of the world in human consciousness ¹ and recognition that 'mind' is in the world but not of the world (not quite), to which writing forms an externalising and sublimating counterpart. Both are directed toward an object, whether that is a real object, an idea or a story. Just as we don't register the pane of glass when looking out of a window, we overlook consciousness and writing in order to see. 

Alfred Metraux, a close friend of Georges Bataille's, led an expedition to Easter Island in 1934.  This book club edition with embossed rongorongo symbols was published in 1965. Mike Pitts' history of the island demonstrates this empiricism and reminds us that the reason why the titles of books about Easter Island contain the words 'Enigma', 'Forgotten' or 'Mystery' is because the population of the island was more or less wiped out by disease caught from European visitors and then by kidnapping for slavery. Its folk memory was seriously degraded, if not erased. Our harmless wonder has its origins in violence, as Beverley Haun sets out in detail. Imperial exploration was replaced by imperial possession as the male islanders were captured for slavery, the land was taken over for sheep grazing, and the monumental cultural expressions carved in stone were extracted for European and American collections and museum display. Increasingly, as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the island was constructed as a site of impenetrable mysteries. When the reasons for particular creations are obscure, their presence becomes a question. It is this presence that fascinates me, with Easter Island only exemplary, a microcosm of humanity's ritual and artistic compulsions. On a speck of land floating in a vast ocean, there are nearly 900 statues. What effect does the presence of such objects have on those living in their shadow? One moai in a museum thousands of miles away was enough to provoke strong feelings in Dos Passos, so how about nearly 900? I have sought out books about Easter Island hoping one would address the question. Jennifer Vanderbes may have chosen the ideal vehicle for such an investigation with her novel of 2004, but it uses the island merely as the backdrop to a feminist potboiler. Cauwe's book came closest with its focus on the archeology of the moai and why they were lain down (not toppled), reminding us that the moai were supulchral. On a visit in 1886, William Thomson saw Easter Island as "one vast necropolis" while Pierre Loti noted it seemed "impossible to scratch the ground without stirring human remains". For the islanders, it was like being born into a cemetery. Perhaps this is part of what holds our fascination.   How can we live without the unknown before us?   René Char The most distinctive feature of the moai is the human likeness in coarse volcanic rock, primal material in opposition to the soft machine of human flesh. The other distinctions are the statues' repetition and colossal size. In his book on the colossal, Peter Mason points out that the adjective comes from the Greek kolossos for which size was not of primary importance while characteristics such as "immobility and sightlessness, singleness and verticality" were, each of which can be attributed to the moai, with singleness reoccuring nearly 900 times. He cites Jean-Pierre Vernant's chapter on Greek burial culture in which the kolossos functions as a double for the soul of the deceased person. When a kolossos is used in a tomb as a substitute for the corpse, it is not meant to reproduce the features of the dead man or to create the illusion of his physical presence. What it embodies in permanent form in stone is not the image of the dead man but his life in the beyond, the life that is opposed to that of living men as the world of night is opposed to the world of light. The kolossos is not an image; it is a "double," as the dead man is a double of his living self. 2  'Easter' thereby becomes more than a chance name for the island; the dead individual is resurrected in the moai, only what the viewer sees is not the living person as Christ was seen at Emmaus but that which stands apart from the familiar. The moais' correspondence to the Greek kolossos is confirmed in a report from The Economist about hauntings in The British Museum. Hoa Hakananai'a is a four-tonne statue of a human figure hewn from brownish lava rock, with deep-set eyes, pursed lips and a gentle pot belly. The Rapa Nui, the indigenous people of Easter Island...consider it to be an actual living entity. "This is no rock," the president of the Rapa Nui Council of Elders said last year. "It embodies the spirit of an ancestor, almost like a grandfather." The kolossos is not a likeness because, Vernant continues, it "plays simultaneously on two contrasting planes: at the moment when it shows its presence it reveals itself as not being from here, as belonging to an inaccessible elsewhere", which, Mason adds, "could be applied equally well to an Easter Island moai". So after reading so many books about Easter Island, I found an answer to my question in Vernant's even though it mentions Easter Island not once. That said, the book that drew my attention to it does discuss the various interpretations of the moai's existence. Peter Mason concludes that their failure to put an end to the debate "is a sign that the invention of narratives will not take us very far in trying to grasp the nature of the moai". This may be what fascinates me: resistance to narrative. Mason believes this is because "they fail to do justice to a presence that reveals itself as not being from here".  What is this presence? Vernant asks a question suggesting an answer:  What is it about the kolossos that makes it stand in such contrast to the world of the living that it seems to introduce into the earthly landscape where it has been erected not simply a stone, a familiar object, but the very power of death, in all its uncanny strangeness and terror? If the young Dos Passos wondered what Hoa Hakananai'a was trying to say, for me, standing in his place, it is the utter refusal of speech, the imposition of an unbreakable silence. There is no terror, only silence. Perhaps then Easter Island stands for the inverse of a fascination with books – that which does not resist approach because it allows one to deep dive into their pages, enabling speech of a kind in response – thereby acting as a negative counterbalance. Nevertheless, the two phenomena remain as one, as books share the features of kolossai: when closed and shelved, books are immobile, sightless, singular and vertical. We have only to look at social media to see photographs of bookshelves; standing there row upon row, evoking something in us that we feel, perhaps intensely, without being able to articulate, aware of an elsewhere we assume becomes accessible in reading but is never quite satisfied, hence the compensating move in literary culture to instrumentalise content: novels as entries into a contemporary debate, books as encyclopaedia, books as a humanism; fucking storytelling. Reading and writing is, however, "a profession of mute things" as Poussin said of his art. 2 The invention of narrative means we can drown out the silence books present to us, just as the narratives of archeology, anthropology and postcolonial studies drown out the presence of moai; a bookshelf, an island of statues: plenitude of the singular.   Just look at that 3D typeface. The question posed above by the poet René Char prompted me to wonder why the unknown is almost entirely absent in contemporary literature, specifically novels. It would explain the poverty in the paradoxically maximalist direction of the modern literary novel, something I discussed in a post about Enrique Vila-Matas' latest novel in translation. That is, if the unknown in the novel is thought of not as the McGuffin in crime and horror fiction, something demanded to become known by the end, compelling the reader to turn the page, but that which maintains itself before silence. Char's question is quoted by Maurice Blanchot in his essay on the poet and "the thought of the neutral", a key word in Blanchot's writings. He cites the language of Heraclitus as an example of Western thought speaking in the neuter and Char's poetry a modern-day equivalent. Heraclitus' words, he says, "are not concepts in the sense of either Aristotelian or Hegelian logic, nor are they ideas in the Platonic sense or, to be precise, in any sense at all". Modern modes of thinking are incapable of accommodating thought like this without sublimation. [O]ne can recognize in the entire history of philosophy an effort either to acclimatize or to domesticate the neuter by substituting for it the law of the impersonal and the reign of the universal, or an effort to challenge it by affirming the ethical primacy of the Self-Subject, the mystical aspiration to the singular Unique. The neutral is thus constantly expelled from our languages and our truths. 4  We mustn't confuse the neutral with a secret. It is not a revelation waiting to occur but a silence with nothing to say. "The unknown is always thought in the neuter", he says. If I detect something of the neutral in the presence of the kolossos, I can perhaps put an end to my fascination with Easter Island. Perhaps I have written this in that hope. To speak at all of an inaccessible elsewhere that has been "introduced into the earthly landscape" is an exceptional task (a task apart from all others). We might see it in Knausgaard's series of long novels premised on the sudden presence of a colossal object in the sky. We live now without the unknown as neuter and Knausgaard's books make this known. There are many more examples of novels that place the unknown before us but, like Knausgaard, remain unable to evade the checkpoints of instrumentalising criticism and reviewing. So while there is no need to herald the death of the novel, the demand must be for critics to turn away from ostensible content, from the about novel, and edge toward the unknown, to death in the novel, on the understanding that death is mute.      Notes 1  Unlesbarkeit dieser    Welt. Alles doppelt.     Illegibility    of this world. All things twice over.         – Paul Celan in Schneepart/Snow Part (and Michael Hamburger's translation) 2 Translated by Janet Lloyd and Jeff Fort.  3 Quoted in TJ Clark's The Sight of Death, a book apparently relevant to this post but, as it is about looking and discovery over time, it moves in the opposite direction.

⁴ In The Infinite Conversation, translated by Susan Hanson.

 

 

A fundamental deprivation: Montevideo by Enrique Vila-Matas

Perhaps all novels seek to converge on a single point. 

The thought occurred to me as I read Vila-Matas' Montevideo, translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott. A random thought, apparently, but also the kind of thought provoked by the passion of observation, anecdote and speculation in Vila-Matas' novels, each of which, however distinct, may be said to ask the question in the epigram to Montano's Malady: "What will we do to disappear?". If the single point is disappearance, from what do we disappear? 

The passion of observation, anecdote and speculation perhaps. If the writer and reader wishes to disappear from writing, to be free from the guile of games and the interval of abstraction, finally to be present to the world as it is, an answer is to give a firm "No!" to writing, as done by those featured in Bartleby & Co or, in a slight variation, to be forced into the world by writer's block. This is Montano's malady, a predicament similar to the literary publisher in Dublinesque who fears the disappearance of what has been his life's work. The alternative is to leave the world behind by disappearing into writing, which is what reading the epigram placed before the usual content of the novel promises and immediately threatens. Which kind of disappearance is it then?

It's significant that the epigram is taken from L'Entretien infini, Maurice Blanchot's essay collection translated as The Infinite Conversation. As Susan Hanson explains in the foreword to her translation, 'Entretien' has a nuance the English lacks, as it can mean "a between that is rigorously held to". We're between question and possible answer. The gift of everyday language and genre fiction is to be excused the question as words and world disappear into one another. 

Rigorously holding between is the comedy of Vila-Matas' novels and why regular readers become exasperated with what they see as "writing about writing", and especially because the comedy is not comedy as in Commedia in which one begins in Hell, passes through Purgatory and ends in Paradise. The novel is the by-product of disenchantment and as such maintains only the residue of the promise of another life. Recognition of the residue may be what defines the literary in literary fiction. The gift of genre fiction is to fulfil that promise, for a time. 

A clone of Vila-Matas narrates Montevideo because the quest for disappearance is personal. He goes in search of it in chapters each named after a city: as a young man he travels to Paris with the romantic notion of becoming a writer only to write nothing and find himself instead disappearing into "the seedy side" of the capital, going to boozy parties and dealing in drugs. Rather than the novel disappearing into a titillating account of crime and debauchery, the reader is pointed to Lucy Sante's The Other Paris before carrying on writing about writing. 

In the title chapter, the other form of disappearance is sought in a hotel room in the Uruguayan capital, the setting of The Sealed Door, a story by Julio Cortàzar that fascinates the clone. He books the same room  (no pun intended) to open the eponymous door, perhaps finally to enter the origin of literature. The Spanish book cover suggests what he finds. While it's a pity the Yale UP edition doesn't also use Hammershøi's painting, the unlovely digital adaptation reminds us of an artificiality holding disappearance at arm's length.

We might ask at this point: why do we have novels like Montevideo? Shouldn't they provide more serious investigations into life in the world? Even the anxiety expressed is done in such an insouciant manner that nothing can be taken on face value. In contrast, we have seen in recent years a remarkable surplus of very serious novels full of "heartstopping beauty...sumptuous prose [and] philosophical depth" ¹ invariably spanning several hundred pages and hailed as up there with the accepted greats of modernism, so calling books like Montevideo a novel appears to be not only a category error but an insult to the common reader. 

To answer, we need to reflect on a question Kafka asked in his diary. If writing expansively on his unhappiness appears to him as "a merciful surplus of strength" when he is in the depth of suffering, "what kind of surplus is it?".²

There's a short story by Jean Paulhan collected in the translation above called Aytré who gets out of the habit, written in 1910 but published in 1943, which can be described only incidentally as a murder mystery. It begins with an adjutant in the French colonial army in Madagascar writing a private diary discussing a French woman, Raymonde, with whom he was having an affair and who has been stabbed to death. While he deals with the aftermath, his sergeant Aytré takes over writing the official log of their journey escorting 300 Senegalese women from one side of the island to the other, and the diary is interrupted to include the log. For a time Aytré notes down the simple details demanded by the form – the distance covered each day, the condition of the women, the cost of chickens, etc. – which makes for less interesting reading than the diary but, after a couple of weeks, he begins to digress by writing up his own opinions, noting down cultural differences, including a long passage detailing the seven modes of transport he has witnessed on the island. As the title says, Aytré is getting out of the habit of military life. The story then returns to the adjutant's diary and ends with his discovery that Aytré killed Raymonde in a fit of jealousy. 

This is of course unremarkable and there's no apparent reason to disinter such an obscure story from a writer more or less unknown in English. So what is the point of all this? 

In an essay on the story published the same year, Blanchot claims that Aytré is a man who has felt an emptiness in himself: "a defect, a lack of something decisive, whose absence becomes, little by little, unbearable". Perhaps he was driven to an extreme act because for him the unbearable feeling took the form of a woman. This makes sense and leaves us with the question of toxic masculinity, thereby helping the common reader to disappear from literature into the world of socio-political considerations. For many, this is the literary in literary fiction. Blanchot takes a different path by arguing that the digressions in the log also constitute an attempt to fill the emptiness with the excess of language. This has unforeseen consequences. 

From this little story, it does not follow that literature must necessarily begin with crime or, failing that, with flight. But that it does imply a caving in, a kind of initial catastrophe, and the very emptiness that anxiety and care measure; yes, we can be tempted to believe that. But let us note that this catastrophe does not fall only on the world, the objects one handles, the things one sees; it, extends also to language[:] all the thick layering of words, the sedimentation of comfortable meanings that move off, detach themselves, become a slippery and dangerous slope. The threat spreads to anyone who allows himself to answer it. ³

After finding something decisive missing from his life, Aytré loses the habit of straightforward notation and tries to fill the absence with a thick layering of detail, only for the absence to reveal itself as part of writing too. Writing gets out of the habit of regular meaning. 

for [Aytré], recourse to the most literary or beautiful language signifies only the irreparable loss of the only language that was certain for him, that in which it was enough for him to write, "We are doing twenty kilometers a day." 

Blanchot points out that, following Mallarmé, every word consists of absence and, for this reason, questions whether Kafka is correct to think his extemporising on unhappiness with flourishes and ornamentations is in fact a surplus. The effect of being able to express unhappiness with as much eloquence as one can muster means that colloquial language, in which the words disappear into the world, is replaced by poetic language, which, as it does not allow for translation into other words, becomes paradoxically "a kind of poverty" because all other words cannot properly say the same thing. Kafka's unhappiness is, in its finest expression, entirely separate from the experience, even to the one suffering it. Yes, we understand what 'unhappiness' means in general, but what does Kafka's unhappiness mean? This paradox, in which the exultation of self-expression and the gift of literature becomes "the first stirring of a fundamental deprivation", is, for Blanchot, the beginning of literature. The surplus of maximalist novels in recent years, rather than renewing modernism, can only evade the implications of the paradox, and evasion becomes the means of its critical reception; the longer the book, the better to forget the evasion. ⁴ The beginning may be the single point on which Vila-Matas' novels seek to converge. There is never any end to the novel.

 

Notes 

¹ From a tweet by Krapp's Last Vape. 

² From 19th September 1917.

³ From The Paradox of Aytré in The Work of Fire, translated by Charlotte Mandell. 

⁴ It cannot be a coincidence that in Kafka's The Judgment Georg Bendemann's revelation that his friend in Russia to whom he writes with a freedom founded on evasion is in fact his father. He has the final word.

Transfiguring the immanent domain

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

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

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

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

 

Left on the Shelf

My old and very best of friends Mark Thwaite has taken over at the Left on the Shelf bookshop, so if you're at all interested in any of the subjects listed in the poster below, please consider subscribing to his newsletter, checking out the listings on Abebooks, and the offers on eBay. The shop also has Instagram and Facebook accounts.

Given time, he may become the Jeff Bezos of the revolution. 

 

 

The intimate outside

 

When this post from Max Cairnduff appeared I had been reading Heidegger's lectures on Hölderlin's poetry and books and essays studying Heidegger's lectures on Hölderlin's poetry in a bid, however incongruous, to articulate an experience unique to reading novels, so I was perplexed by the adjectives he uses to characterise Eliot's sequence. I suppose Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats is more accessible, but "dense"? Four Quartets is surely spaciousness itself. ¹  How can such anxiety and suspicion when faced by works with a cultural aura be dissolved without the infantilisation of "accessibility"? They are feelings not limited to the common reader: Karl Ove Knausgaard expressed something like it in My Struggle 2 when he notices that he could perform an understanding of Hölderlin's poetry in innumerable ways without it ever opening up to him. Coming to a work without preconceptions is preferable, as one reader of Ulysses explained in a charming anecdote. For this reason Gabriel Josipovici says the quartets should be read "not as a philosophical examination of the problem of time but as the narrative of a person talking to himself at four o'clock in the morning".²  The opening of Burnt Norton makes this uncannily obvious.

        Time present and time past
        Are both perhaps present in time future,
        And time future contained in time past.
        If all time is eternally present
        All time is unredeemable,
        What might have been is an abstraction
        Remaining a perpetual possibility
        Only in a world of speculation.
        What might have been and what has been
        Point to one end which is always present. ³ 

Josipovici points to the "simple parataxis" ("and...and...and") and the "pervasive conditionals" ("perhaps… if…what might have been…") to show how Eliot achieves this. In this way the reader joins the poem's speculation, slowly advancing in uncertainty alongside the words. In effect the reader becomes TS Eliot; not the Great Poet, not the Nobel Prize winner, but one on their back in the dark. In this sense, we might ask: how accessible are we to ourselves? 

Perhaps it is because we're so used to the confessional first person in contemporary poetry and novels that we read Four Quartets' impersonality as exclusionary. However, if we put Josipovici's suggestion into practice, the poem opens like a door. The issue then becomes: what is on the other side of the door? The metaphor appears quite simple: if the door is unlocked, the room beyond will reveal previously unknown treasures. If it remains locked, we shall remain forever excluded, unenlightened. This is why literary-critical discourse often seems to consist of the rattling of door knobs and of peeping through keyholes. 

My copy of Four Quartets, bought for 2p in a church sale circa 1987. ⁴ 

Giorgio Agamben points out that the metaphor isn't quite that simple because there are two kinds of door. One is an empty space created by frame in a wall – he calls it a threshold-door – while the other is the same threshold blocked by panel attached to the frame by hinges, which he calls a panel-door. The first we can pass through unhindered, hardly noticing the divide, while progress through the second depends on whether we are allowed to open it and carry on through: it may be locked or there may be a sign warning against opening.⁵ In terms of a novel or poem, the threshold-door would be the language in which it is written. Four Quartets is in English, so a native-speaker cannot complain of any restriction. However, the epigram from Heraclitus in ancient Greek may nudge them in the back. Why is Eliot fronting a poem in English with lines from a dead language without offering a translation? Agamben provides a possible answer by adding a variant door. 

When the architect Carlo Scarpa was commissioned to design an entrance to a university in Venice, he was asked to include an Istrian stone panel-door from a convent. He did so by laying it flat and covering it with water. This seems an odd thing to do but Agamben recognises it as a considered act and draws attention to horizontal doors that were a familiar feature in the classical world as a connection between the living and the dead, between world and underworld. Some were panel-doors, some were threshold-doors. The former, he says, were invented to control entry and is the reason for "endless ranks of guardians of the door, angels or doormen, latches and digital codes, that must ensure that the device functions correctly and permits entry to no one who does not have the right". We can recognise the correlation with literary culture: reviews judging functionality and readers as cowering supplicants seeking entry to the otherworld of literature (and perhaps authors hoping to be let out). Agamben notes that this supernatural feature dismissed by modern world as irrational has devolved into legal affairs, with the law acting as a panel-door placed in the threshold of relations between men: "As Kafka's parable unequivocally shows, the law coincides with its own door; it is nothing other than a door." Hence no doubt the otherworldly aura of court judgments.

What kind of door then is Scarpa's? Agamben says it submergence alludes to its location, in that instead of city gates as a panel-door Venice has a lagoon as a threshold-door, so the city is accessed only by water, but one cannot pass through Scarpa's door since it is horizontal. It is therefore neither panel- nor threshold-door. 

If the door is not a place but the passage and entranceway between two places, here it seems to become a place unto itself—perhaps the place par excellence, whose possible use is, however, not yet clear. In [this] case, the horizontal door now defines a space in which it would be possible to walk, pause to think, hesitate, perhaps even live—but not to close it or simply go across. 

An ideal space, then, for a university. The parallels to books and reading are also very clear. Agamben encourages the impression further after discussing the four terms in Latin for door that leads to his "decisive point" that the person before the door is always on the outside and as such "experiences the outsideness of the door". We see this in the delight of anticipation before a book-door we can be sure will open and provide a welcoming space, hence the popularity of genre fiction and first-person novels and poetry, and in the trepidation before a book-room whose contents we suspect will be cold and forbidding, such as a book-length philosophical examination of the problem of time. 

It is, then, possible to think of the door as neither an entranceway that leads to another place nor simply a space around which one could walk. It is rather the event of an outside, which is nevertheless not another place but, as in Kant's definition of the thing-in-itself, a space that must remain absolutely empty, a pure exteriority. 

With this in mind, the Heraclitan epigrams could be seen as the horizontal door beneath the water of Eliot's uncomplicated English. Adding an approximate translation, as this site does, while appealing to accessibility and knowledge, dissolves the door. In unease before a book like Four Quartets, we should perhaps welcome that its possible use is not yet clear. Otherwise, what disappears from experience is experience itself; "for experience deserves its name only if it transports us beyond what constitutes our nature." ⁶ Or perhaps part of our nature to which we had yet to be exposed. Agamben says Scarpa's door allows one to live in a space that does not necessarily lead anywhere "but faces the sky and dwells in a pure taking place, showing the intimate outsideness of every door". 

 

Notes 

¹ The title is Four Quartets; that is, without the definite article, just as The Waste Land is three words not two. As I've always said, and it is especially true of poetry: Attention to detail is paramont.

² In The Singer on the Shore.

³ Paul Scofield's reading of the poem corroborates the advice; annoyingly, only the first part of Burnt Norton is not included on YouTube.

⁴ Signed by Eliot scholar Helen Gardner, confirmed by this signed photo found online. If it was her copy, it is not annotated. I've also signed it, so it's doubly unvaluable.

⁵ In 'Door and Threshold' from When the House Burns Down, translated by Kevin Attell.

 

⁶ From 'Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity' in Levinas' Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by Alphonso Lingis.

End of year post

A year of limited reading. Three books stood out: Peter Brown's Journeys of the Mind, Giorgio Agamben's Self-Portrait in the Studio, and WG Sebald's Silent Catastrophes. All feature in a post from July. Of the last, I was appalled by two reviews. In the FT, John Self says one should be pleased it exists "as long as you don't have to read it". Well I read it twice in short succession and wished it had existed sooner. And then there was John Banville's "surfeit of sheer banality", a review as mirror, reminiscent of Anthony Burgess' claim following Beckett's death that his reputation would plummet. I shouldn't have been surprised: Banville has previously admired the work of Roger Scruton. 

A year of limited writing. I wanted to write about the morbidity Sebald finds in so many Austrian writers and their work; the prevalence of "ill-starred lives". One example is Stifter and his "pessimism extending to the cosmos as a whole", his remarkable gluttony,¹ and the perversity of his works Sebald says was noticed neither by him nor his audience. I wonder whether the apparent lack of morbidity in contemporary English and American literature is what distinguishes its novels from Austria's rich array and European literature in general. On Hofmannsthal's fragment Andreas, written in "the rampant erotic fever of the time", Sebald comments:

In his interpretations of so-called perverse attitudes, Freud notes that it is usually said that someone has become perverse, when really it would be more accurate to say they have remained perverse. From this, one may extrapolate that mankind's erotic utopia consists in the possibility of remaining perverse in all innocence.

Perverse in all innocence. This curious condition may explain why British and the USA literature lacks a morbid undertow, reflected in the disdain of high-profile reviewing.²  I was taken by that phrase because it captures what I have come to see as necessary to the novel. It is present in Amina Cain's sentence used as the epigram to A measure of forever looking at that necessity; a post that justifies the persistence of this blog to me; justifies reading and writing.

Talking of which, twenty years ago I began to read Jonathan Coe's Like a Fiery Elephant, a biography of the BS Johnson, but stopped after 150 pages. Earlier this year I found a copy on a stall and this time will continue until the end. Johnson had a passion for making fiction new, which he saw as concomitant with the struggle for an egalitarian society. Coe reports in painful detail Johnson's bitter, unkind letters to agents and publishers who he saw as gatekeepers blocking both. He took everything personally and suffered for it. Twenty years on, I identify with Johnson as I didn't before: his melancholia of class, his self-defeating passion, notwithstanding his sense of entitlement and a differing literary stance. "To me the novel is a form in which I may write truth or fiction" he writes in a letter, to which I respond that the novel opens a space other than both. But such differences only emphasise the apparent futility of such agitations outside of the clearing. Fifty-two years after his death, they carry on. 

In my first year at the University of Sussex, I borrowed Albert Angelo from the library – the novel with a hole in it, mentioned in the Pernice Brothers' song – and copied the line "And we talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. As though it could make some difference" into a notebook. No doubt the repetition of 'talk' that appealed to me as much as the sentiment, confirmed many years later in This business of speech, a discussion of Gabriel Josipovici's novel In a Hotel Garden felt at the time to be the culmination of everything I had begun the blog to say, and still does. And yet I carry on. Is repetition all we have? 

Josipovici's portrait appears next to Johnson's on the cover of the book pictured above published in 1975 ³ which Johnson had agreed to edit with Giles Gordon, but when Gordon called to discuss the project, the phone was permanently engaged. Johnson had killed himself hours earlier. The book is dedicated to him and Ann Quin who drowned herself a few weeks before. Thinking of Johnson, I think of Cioran's remark: "It's impossible to read a line of Kleist without thinking that he killed himself. His suicide was one with his life; he had been committing suicide all along."

Johnson felt that action was necessary and made agitprop documentaries opposing anti-union legislation in what he saw as incipient state fascism. Britain in the early 1970s looks like a paradise compared to corporate coup d'état accelerated by the authoritarian bureaucrat currently in power, examined in horrifying detail on EuropeanPowell's substack, and in recent books such as Paul Holden's The Fraud and Peter Oborne's Complicit, each of which is subject to an oath of omertà by the British media. 

    All this is sickening. 
    Not words. An act. I won't write any more.

The final words of Cesare Pavese – another anti-fascist – in his diary before his own suicide.⁴ The reason for the unsettling relation of writing to suicide – to which I will add my review of Edouard Levé's novel with the single word as its title – indicates a fascination not with death but with the incomprehensible silence of both.

 

Notes 

¹ "Ate beef, baked kid, roast chicken, hazel grouse, pigeon, roast veal, ham, liver with onions, roast pork, sardines, paprika chicken, baked lamb and partridge, much beef (dry); noodle soup, some beef and mutton, baked rice, brains with sour beets, potted veal, schnitzel with anchovy sauce, a snack of tea with hazel grouse, a snack of tea with chicken (ample portions), snack of tea with ham, snack with much chicken, thick herb soup with egg and so on."  Translated by Jo Catling. Select the back button to return.

² In What Ever Happened to Modernism? Gabriel Josipovici puts this down in part to differing experiences: "England was just about the only European country not to be overrun by enemy forces during the Second World War, which was a blessing for it, but which has left it strangely innocent and resistant to Europe and thrown it into the arms, culturally as well as politically, of the even more innocent United States. This has turned a robust pragmatic tradition, always suspicious of the things of the mind, into a philistine one."

³ The others authors apart from those mentioned are, from top to bottom, Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Elspeth Davie, Eva Figes, Robert Nye, David Plante, Ann Quin, and Maggie Ross.

⁴ Not uncoincidentally entitled This Business of Living, translated by Murch and Molli.  

This Space of Writing ten years on

Today in 2015 my blog-collection This Space of Writing was published as a book. An ideal Christmas gift. Not a happy memory to be honest; an editor would have made it a better book. However, I can't fault the cover design, and I was lucky to have Flowerville's permission to use her photograph. I'm also grateful for Lars Iyer's introduction.

Turning a blog into a book always seemed like a bad idea, implying unity where there is only the haphazard, but I take some reassurance in "Paths, not works", Heidegger's motto for his Gesamtausgabe, and Blanchot's practice of publishing essay collections focusing on specific authors and books rather than a general theme in a monumental magnum opus. In the photograph on the right, the book features on the enviable bookshelves of Andrew Hurley, an Irishman living in Paris, a friend made through the blog. He died young last year. The last I heard from him was in an email from Thomas Bernhard's favourite café in Vienna. 

One learns, as reflected in my second collection The Opposite Direction available as a free ebook, also published at Christmas. Reading again, I am happy to recommend the essays on (in order of appearance) Lanzmann's Shoah, Thomas Bernhard's Goethe Dies, Gabriel Josipovici's In a Hotel Garden, Peter Handke's To Duration, Coetzee's Jesus novels, Willem Styfhals' book on Gnosticism and German philosophy, Dante's Vita Nuova, and the title essay, also on Thomas Bernhard. I can fault the design for being rudimentary, as it's by me, with a random photograph taken from the edge of Kemptown.