Black holes

I watched this video twice, in fascination.


I became fascinated by Dr Becky's faith in data, maths and code in order to claim knowledge of that which fascinates us as a species gazing into the night sky; a faith here that is guaranteed, formalised and rewarded by society. Of course, this faith supports many fields, including my own. Literary studies also seeks knowledge to have done with fascination: knowledge of formal literary technique, knowledge of psychology, knowledge of sociology, knowledge of post-colonialism, class, race, gender; knowledge provided by scientific method, knowledge of z-scores, principal component analysis, clustering coefficients. Its power is unassailable.

But in aversion and resistance I think of its subject and the overwhelming absence opened by writing, and the bad faith we depend on for such knowledge. This experience of writing becomes a narrative in Blanchot's Writing of the Disaster. A small boy draws a curtain aside to see a wintry garden scene and then looks upward to "the ordinary sky, with clouds, grey light—pallid daylight without depth".

What happens then: the sky, the same sky, suddenly open, absolutely black and absolutely empty, revealing (as though the pane had broken) such an absence that all has since always and forevermore been lost therein—so lost that therein is affirmed and dissolved the vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond.

At the end of the video, Dr Becky goes to a lecture by the scientist who took the first photograph of a black hole. She takes extensive notes and reports that over four billion people have since looked at the image.


Except, photography is the writing of light, so this no more a photograph of a black hole than a photograph of a novel is a photograph of its void of fascination (as revealed by the anxiety underlying discussions of book covers). Theories of the night sky and of writing may be intelligible but the conceptions on which they are based are not. Dr Becky's notebook is the black hole.

Smothered Words by Sarah Kofman

Sarah Kofman wrote nearly thirty books between 1970 and her suicide in 1994. The majority have not been translated into English and those that have include titles on Kant, Nietzsche and Freud, which is enough to demonstrate range and seriousness. Derrida and Levinas admired her work so much they joined a campaign to get her the academic recognition she had been denied. However, I want to draw attention to one short book from late in her career.  

Parole Suffoquées was published in 1987 and translated by Madeleine Dobie as Smothered Words, an edition of less than 70 pages comprising commentaries on a short story by Maurice Blanchot and Robert Antelme's The Human Race, an account of his deportation to a Nazi work camp. But that description is not enough if it suggests another scholarly monograph, as the title alludes to the great tragedy of her life. She was a small child when her father, the rabbi Berek Kofman, was arrested by the Nazis and deported to Auschwitz, where he was beaten and buried alive for refusing to work on the Sabbath, a fact that until the opening pages of Smothered Words had remained unspoken throughout her life as a writer: "How can it not be said? And how can it be said? How can one speak of that before which all possibility of speech ceases?"

If the fact is now in the open, the trauma is spoken in response to other texts, interspersing commentary with quotation to such a degree that a single voice becomes a chorus. The other writers enable speech. Smothered Words begins by stating that if one is to adopt Adorno's injunction "to arrange one's thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen" then:

it behooves me, as a Jewish woman intellectual who has survived the holocaust, to pay homage to Blanchot for the fragments on Auschwitz scattered throughout his texts: writing of the ashes, writing of the disaster which avoids the trap of complicity with speculative knowledge, with that in it which is tied to power, and thereby complicit with the torturers of Auschwitz.

(A passage that ought to be noted by those who accuse Blanchot of anti-semitism.) 

Given her record of publications, one would expect a more formal, scholarly approach, keeping any personal stake out of the study, but Kofman recognises such speech is compromised and it is Blanchot's example that enabled her to speak of "this event, my absolute", and so mitigate any mastery:

To speak: it is necessary without (the) power [sans pouvoir]: without allowing language, too powerful, sovereign, to master the most aporetic situation, absolute powerlessness and very distress, to enclose it in the clarity and happiness of daylight.

Kofman uses Blanchot's 's 1935 story The Idyll as an example of how writing exercises such mastery. It is the story of a stranger entering 'the Home', a community in which differences between individuals are smoothed out or erased, and in which processes occur that prefigure the camps: welcoming the newcomer by sending him to communal showers, giving him a new name (if not a number) and directing him to a shed where other men live. Kofman discusses the story alongside quotations from Blanchot's post-war reflections on the story to emphasise the idyllic nature of fiction even as it describes terrible things. Storytelling basks in "the 'glory' of the narrative voice 'that speaks clearly, without ever being obscured by the opacity or the enigma or the terrible horror of what it communicates' – not even by death". This is why Blanchot removed the label 'story' from his post-war narratives, famously ending The Madness of the Day with "A story? No. No stories, never again".


Robert Antelme's account of his time in the Gandersheim work camp had to confront this issue. After being rescued by his friend François Mitterrand, he experienced what other survivors experienced: "No sooner would we begin to tell our story than we would be choking over it." And so Kofman asks "How can testimony escape the idyllic law of the story?" Her answer goes directly to her father's act of prayer, which was:

the revelation of the word as the place in which men maintain a relation to that which excludes all relation: the infinitely Distant, the absolutely Foreign. A relation with the infinite, which no form of power, including that of the executioners of the camps, has been able to master, other than by denying it, burying it in a pit with a shovel, without ever having encountered it.

A prayer re-establishes "in this situation of extreme powerlessness and violence, a relation beyond all power", offering resistance to the ethic of productivity at the heart of western culture, which Blanchot claimed had reached its apogee in the production of death in the camps. We have only to read something as routine as Tim Lott's recent demand that novelists tell stories to recognise how deeply this ethic is still embedded in our culture. If Antelme's book is not quite a prayer, it is an extremely patient and remarkably self-effacing description of a system of power that worked and starved campmates to death but could never destroy their membership of the human race, that which unified them with their oppressors. Kofman says it is because no community was possible with the SS that there was also the strongest community, the community (of those) without community:

It is not founded on any specific difference or on a shared essence – reason – but on a shared power to choose, to make incompatible though correlative choices, the power to kill and the power to respect and safeguard the incommensurable distance, the relation without relation.

The Nazis justified their attempt to create an idyllic community by, among other things, appealing to Nietzsche's necessarily ambiguous aphorism "Man is the yet undetermined animal". Kofman says Antelme's response would emphasise that ambiguity with a yes and no: "No, if we must take this to mean that a transformation of the species is possible; yes, if this aphorism signifies that in man there is a multiplicity of powers, none of which is ever sure to triumph." She ends the book by emphasising that this is a new humanism, one based on "the infinitely Distant, the absolutely Foreign".

Writing Smothered Words did apparently determine something in Sarah Kofman. As Madeleine Dobie explains in her superb introduction to her translation, after it was completed "she was no long able to write in the language of mastery". Later, as this website reports, she "became unable to do the things she loved most dearly—reading, writing, listening to music, watching films and looking at works of art". Unfortunately, as far as I know, only one of her remaining books has been translated into English, so I cannot say what form they take. The one book, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is a "plain and unadorned" (TLS) memoir of her childhood and teenage years, moving from the house in one street from where her father was arrested and to another where she became torn between her mother and a Christian woman who had taken them in. The first page suggests that all reflection and analysis, if not writing, had come to an end, and why.

I have often wanted to write something about Smothered Words, not because of its subject matter – which at best I feared had attracted me because of the common assumption that extreme experience is a guarantee of value or, at worst, as some kind of Schadenfreude – but because of how the subject matter affected its writing. It is written in the voice of a person subject to her own experience. As one embedded in academic methods, this was especially intriguing. While the seamless inclusion of quotations has been mentioned, Dobie notes that "a significant number" of these in the French text are erroneous, suggesting it had been written with some urgency, as if the Scotch tape patching up her pen was disintegrating by proxy. A notable example is on the very last page where the quotation "after Auschwitz there is no word tinged from on high...that has any right unless it has undergone a transformation" is attributed to Antelme rather than Adorno. I half-wish the errors had been repeated in the translation, as this would maintain and perhaps further the movement away from mastery, and may even reveal more. Blanchot is known for quoting from memory and not caring to amend where it is mistaken.

Kofman's mastery of scholarly writing and its transformation in Smothered Words is a profound example of what I sense is necessary on our own very mundane level. I have always been aware that my writings on this blog are written under the light of one subject or experience filtered through the prism of books, becoming present to me only in the colours emerging in this way. The epigraph to the very first essay I posted online makes this clear with its qualification that the revelation is also its own eclipse. Much of my disappointment and frustration with reviewing and critical writing has come from when I stray from this light in favour of engagement with a literary culture that is preoccupied with consumer evaluations and magisterial labelling rather than more fundamental questions about the presence of writing in our lives. So I present this post as a recommendation, both of Sarah Kofman's work and the direction it offers to those seeking to eclipse their own light.

The walled and the book

What draws me back to Thomas Bernhard's novels is the wish to appreciate again how each is set in motion. The Loser begins like this.

Even Glenn Gould, our friend and the most important piano virtuoso of the century, only made it to the age of fifty-one, I thought to myself as I entered the inn.
Now of course he didn't kill himself like Wertheimer, but died, as they say, a natural death.  [Translated by Jack Dawson]

There is the familiar subject matter of early death pressing on the narrator, which is compelling in a regular way and enough to distract one from the form, but the pressure is there too in the in medias res pulse of "Even", an unusual word with which to begin a novel ("Auch" begins the original, in case you're wondering), which gives a sense of urgency or desperation to the narration, but then there's the displacement of its immediacy in "I thought to myself" and the sarcastic italics around the cliché. It's an odd combination: dark thoughts and qualifying pedantry. In 1974, Gabriel Josipovici recognised the same dynamic in another author: "When we think of Saul Bellow's work, we think of a certain tone of voice, a tone of voice that combines the utmost formality with the utmost desperation." This is also what draws me back to Saul Bellow's novels.

Formality and desperation together – this is what I am drawn too. One alone might lead to muso chin-stroking over craftmanship, and the other alone might lead to down-to-earth endorsements for a tour de force of expressive brillance, but when alone neither is quite able to acknowledge their limits: one coats suffering in layers of well-wrought sentences while the other masks literary artifice by turning it up full blast with extremes of language or subject matter. By combining the two, one shows up the weakness of the other, as one end of a see-saw shows up the lightness and the heaviness of the other. In beginning The Loser like that, Bernhard sets the see-saw in motion, something that is both light and heavy, comic and terrible, and impossible to pin down. For me at least, reading like this becomes as fun as riding a see-saw. But not only fun.

George Shaw: Scenes from the Passion: Wednesday Week

The combination of formality and desperation also drew me to this painting, especially as it captures the experience of a provincial working-class English childhood: the straight lines, the brick patterning, the muted colours, the limited horizons. The title is said to provide "echoes of the melodrama and self-importance often characteristic of the adolescent" but it also echoes the latent holiness in Winter Landscape with Church by Caspar David Friedrich and, in terms of experience, Trees and Bushes in the Snow.

Trees and Bushes in the Snow (1828)

As Joseph Koerner puts it:

You do not stand before a ‘landscape’ since the thicket blocks any wider prospect of its setting; nor do the snow and alders, pushed up against the picture plane, quite constitute the monumentality of a 'scene’, for they provide no habitat for an event.

Looking back, it doesn't seem to be a coincidence that, when I visited the Kunsthalle Bremen, the only postcard I came out with was one of Friedrich's Das Friedhofstor. Could formality be the echo of enchantment and desperation the wall?

The question lurking behind these attractions and choices is not one of enchantment but: how does one overcome the wall? But perhaps this question is misleading. When discussing his early frustrations with writing, the author who described Saul Bellow's tone of voice talks about what he learned from certain authors:

Proust had given me the confidence to fail, had driven home to me the lesson that if you come up against a brick wall perhaps the way forward is to incorporate the wall and your effort to scale it into the work. I had read Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras, and been excited by the way they reinvented the form of the novel to suit their purposes – everything is possible, they seemed to say. But when you start to write all that falls away. You are alone with the page and your violent urges, urges, which no amount of reading will teach you how to channel. ‘Zey srew me in ze vater and I had to svim,’ as Schoenberg is reported to have said. That is why I so hate creative writing courses – they teach you how to avoid brick walls, but I think hitting them allows you to discover what you and only you want to/can/must say.

What draws me back to Bernhard is to appreciate his discovery and how he incorporated the brick wall. Re-reading his first novel seems to have helped with that. Frost was published in 1963 but was the last to be translated into English. This might be because it isn't quite like those that define his style and certainly not as economic. It is the narrative of a medical student visiting the ageing painter Strauch who has lived for many years in an Austrian mining town. The student's task is to report back to the Strauch's estranged brother, and the novel takes the form of a diary of his encounters with Strauch, who is prone to monologues. The book is divided into twenty-six chapters representing twenty-six days. Compare the following paragraph from the day seven with the one from The Loser.

from Frost, translated by Michael Hofmann

Bernhard has always displaced the dominant character's voice in a novel – Prince Saurau who appeared four years later in Gargoyles is the most memorable. Yet even when the dominant character is the narrator, as it tends to be in his later novels, it too is displaced, either in time, as in the "I thought to myself as I entered the inn", or in writing, as in the "writes Atzbacher" in the first line of Old Masters. But earlier works like Frost and Gargoyles are relatively routine in terms of style and are distinguished mainly for the eloquence of their expression of existential despair. Strauch describes paranoid hallucinations and the student is reporting back; nothing unusual here. Seven years after Frost, however, in a film also divided into days, Bernhard more or less repeats Strauch's experience as his own, which offers an insight into the shift in style.

On day two, he says he prefers to be alone.

from 3 Days, translated by Laura Lindgren

For Strauch the wall held Technicolor horrors from which he turned away, and perhaps they were for Bernhard himself and this is a displaced expression of that. For the slightly older writer, however, the horrors became a source. Wall and page are 'perfectly alike', so his books are made of walls, not their overcoming. There is no wider prospect because a singular voice blocks the reading plane. Here's the dominating voice of Old Masters, the music critic Reger, who spends his days studying each painting in the Kunsthistoriches Museum just as Bernhard studied each wall in his house.

In all these pictures, if we study them intensively, we sooner or later discover an awkwardness, or indeed, even in the very greatest and the most important creations, a flaw, if we are uncompromising a serious flaw which gradually makes us dislike these pictures, probably because we pitched our expectations too high, Reger said. Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact, it is, time and again, just an attempt — an attempt that seems touching even to our intellect — to cope with this world and its revolting aspects, which, as we know, is invariably possible only by resorting to lies and falsehoods, to hypocrisy and self-deception, Reger said.      [Translated by Ewald Osers]

George Steiner felt that Bernhard lapsed into a 'monotone of hate' in his later work, which is understandable given how close Bernhard gets to the wall here, and also given Steiner's highly pitched regard for what is a necessary part of that proximity. But while Reger's critical mania is easily conflated with Bernhard's own, it too is placed at a distance, with Reger's opinions noted down by his friend Atzbacher and orchestrated by Bernhard, and therefore contained within what could be included among "the very greatest and the most important creations" that Reger treats with such suspicion. Such displacements might be considered a serious flaw in a modern novel, as they evade positivist claims about the world and decline to tell convincing, realistic stories to reflect the world back to us, or conversely they might be celebrated by those who see only a pass-the-parcel game of attribution. But what we have is walls in motion, something as fun as riding a see-saw. But not only fun.

How does writing fulfil itself?

Jesus was not your everyday literary critic. Luke tells of his teaching in a synagogue:

And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read.
And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written,
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,
To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.
And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him.
And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.

We're so used to commentary on literature as secondary, basking in the glow of the object's aura, that the idea of fulfilment is almost impossible to comprehend. This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears. How does writing fulfil itself?

The question relates to my two previous posts, the second of which concludes with Slavoj Žižek's wish to act like the characters in Ágota Kristóf's The Notebook, reading the novel as a guidebook or thought-experiment. Imagine instead Žižek proclaiming himself the ethical monster the novel embodies: this day this novel is fulfilled in your daily paper. If we did, we'd see something other than a "Book that changed me" article. Actually, we'd see something like The Notebook. This is why I expressed surprise that Žižek chose not to include any discussion of the form taken by the novel. Its absence helps one forget while remembering this is a novel he's talking about.

We regard Jesus' pronouncement as a given, an act fundamental to Western culture, and we regard Kristóf's novel as part of an endless footnote to the main work, or we would if it were not a footnote now so vast that it has broken free to bob along on a sea without shore. We can no longer see the continent from which contemporary fiction and critical discourse embarked and from which it mined ballast to keep it afloat. In other words, our reading is an evolved model of that sabbath ritual. Despite the claims of escapism and education, the assumption of healing the brokenhearted, offering deliverance to captives, sight to the blind and liberty to the bruised can be found everywhere in literary discussion, for instance that Guardian series title: A book that changed me.

The first of my two most recent posts approached the problem of this reading evolution with the question: where is the horizon of narrative? The premise was that in a landscape our eyes are drawn to the horizon and this somehow guarantees the presence of what we see and delivers its gift of possibility in an infinity of light. For Christians, the landscape might be Jesus' death on the cross and the horizon his resurrection. However, it's that word light I want to focus on, as it invokes Heidegger's Lichtung, commonly translated as clearing, an open space you might wish for while traversing an otherwise impassable forest and, in Heidegger's terms, a metaphor for where beings are revealed, for truth to emerge from concealment. In terms of narrative rather than Christology or ontology, the horizon or clearing is obscured by solid facts, the trees and foliage, allowing us to bury ourselves in dendrology: who among us prefers the sycamore over the horse chestnut, and why? Or should we be more open to the boabab and the gingko biloba now admirably transplanted into our woods? But most of all, where is the next Great American Sequoia?

So, instead, to rephrase the question, where is the clearing in a novel? Each new book has the clearing as its potential and its self-evidence might explain why I am drawn to a certain reading experience that otherwise goes unexamined in routine reviewing and criticism, mainly because it is both haphazard and subjective. Fortunately online reviewing and criticism has the freedom to bring the work into the orbit of the reader as a body and a life rather than as a consumer.

The experience seems to occur at the level of the sentence rather than the story, though it occurs only within a narrative. Many years ago, I was too early for an interrogation over my unemployment and, passing time browsing a bookshop in the least cosmopolitan city in England, I chanced upon two novels by an Austrian author whose work I was interested in reading but who was then difficult to find in translation. (It was so long ago that both paperbacks were priced £3.95.)

In the gloom and tension of the situation, I opened Across and read the first lines:

I shut my eyes and out of the black letters the city lights took shape. Not the lights of the Old City, but the streetlamps that had just gone on in one of the many housing developments on the southern periphery. The development, consisting of two-storey single-family houses, is situated on the big plain at the foot of the Untersberg.
(Translated by Ralph Manheim)

And, as I did so, the gloom lifted and the tension disappeared, replaced by calm and relaxed concentration. At least, that's the story. At the time, a miraculous one. So why did this passage have this effect? The three sentences are straightforward and do not state anything profoundly meaningful about life. Not even close. Apart from the opening sentence, they could be from a local council planning document. Of course, it is the first sentence that makes it fiction: that odd, contradictory movement of eyes shutting to blackness and light taking shape as a result (there it is again, light), which might explain the transformation of my state into a story: the sense that narrative is parallel rather than subordinate to the conditions of life and one can easily step aside without abandoning one or the other. Among other things. This is how a modern novel might fulfil itself, by creating a clearing for this to be absorbed by the reader.

The effect appears to be a combination of chance and design, which should offer anyone an excuse to start writing. No need for a story. Milan Kundera says "dramatic tension is the real curse of the novel, because it transforms every thing, even the most beautiful pages, even the most surprising scenes and observations merely into steps leading to the final resolution". For a clearing, resolution is hacked away and a path opened. This has happened for me in many places, and these examples come from my early days of reading fiction (the dates are when I first read them). First from Kundera himself and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1986):

I have been thinking about Tomas for many years. But only in the light of these reflections [on the opposition of lightness and weight] did I see him clearly. I saw him standing at the window of his flat and looking across the court-yard at the opposite walls, not knowing what to do. (Translated by Michael Henry Heim)

Second, in the preface to the first volume of Jacques Roubaud's The Great Fire of London (1995): 

By consigning to paper today the first lines of this prose (manifold in imagination) I am perfectly aware of administering a mortal, definitive blow to what I conceived on turning thirty as an alternative to self-chosen extinction, and which served for over two decades as the project of my existence. (Translated by Dominic di Bernardi)

Certainly there is a quality of valediction here but at the beginning, which surely changes matters. In Kundera's paragraph the narrative is set forth on uncertainty, intellect and imagination. And third in Gabriel Josipovici's novel Distances (published in In the Fertile Land, 1988).

A woman.
The sea.
She begins to walk.
She walks.
She walks.

The staccato rhythm here was like nothing I'd read before and, as each sentence and section built in length, it became like breathing itself. Reading, breathing, walking, clearing. This might be how writing fulfils itself.

A world without feeling

I don't know how people can read an emotional novel. Unless the reader is hoodwinked into thinking the novel can deliver 'real' emotion.
— Lee Rourke (@LeeRourke) August 14, 2013

Twitter is an unreliable arena for literary debate because terms cannot be defined – What is an emotional novel? What is a real emotion? – and one can only misunderstand by assuming answers. Better to move away. Displacement is therefore precisely Twitter's value for literary debate. Lee's rightful distaste for button-pushing novels displaced me to remember a passage in Saul Bellow's More Die of Heartbreak in which the narrator recalls the existential troubles of his uncle Benn Crader, a botanist, an expert in arctic lichens:

Benn once told me that when he landed by helicopter on the slope of Mount Erebus to collect samples, he had felt that he was very near the end of the earth, the boundary of boundaries. "Of course, there's no such thing," he said, "but there's such a feeling."

A scientist, a rationalist, Benn appears to have been hoodwinked into distress by a combination of reality and illusion, and yet, while he knows this, the feeling haunts him. What does it mean that he can't dismiss this illusion? The question might be familiar to keen readers of novels. We are surrounded by such events teasing us with unwarranted emotion, and not just in novels. Beckett's unnamable has bitter fun at the construction of emotion:

They love each other, marry in order to love each other better, more conveniently, he goes to the wars, he dies at the wars, she weeps, with emotion, at having loved him, at having lost him, yep, marries again in order to love again, more conveniently again, they love each other, you love as many times as necessary, as necessary in order to be happy, he comes back, the other comes back, from the wars, he didn't die at the wars after all, she goes to the station, to meet him, he dies in the train, of emotion, at the thought of seeing her again, having her again, she weeps, weeps again, with emotion again, at having lost him again, yep, goes back to the house, he's dead, the other is dead, the mother-in-law takes him down, he hanged himself, with emotion, at the thought of losing her, she weeps, weeps louder, at having loved him, at having lost him, there's a story for you, that was to teach me the nature of emotion, that's called emotion, what emotion can do, given favourable conditions, what love can do, well well, so that's emotion, that's love, and trains, the nature of trains ...

Love and trains, mere mechanics. Beckett had begun writing in French in part to get away from the sentimentality of English, so this – even when translated back – and the headlong nature of the prose, begins to dismantle the mawkish tendency of storytelling. And yet the rough grains of narrative remain and so too the seeds of emotion. The fatal dangers are present in the title of Bellow's novel, taken from a passage in which Benn discusses a journalist questioning him over his botanical research and his sense of guilt over the death of a neighbour:

... he wanted a statement about plant life and the radiation level increasing. Also dioxin and other harmful wastes. He was challenging about it. Well – I agreed it was bad. But in the end I said, 'It's terribly serious, of course, but I think more people die of heartbreak than of radiation'.

Why do we embrace such narratives in which unhappiness is amplified? In his 1920 diary, Kafka wrote a series of entries in the third person, one of which presents a diagnosis:

The fact that there is fear, grief and desolation in the world is something he understands, but even this only in so far as these are vague, general feelings, just grazing the surface. All other feelings he denies; what we call by that name is for him mere illusion, fairy-tale, reflection of our knowledge and our memory. How could it be otherwise, he thinks, since after all our feelings can never catch up with the actual events, let alone overtake them. We experience the feelings only before and after the actual event, which flits by at an elemental, incomprehensible speed; they are dream-like fictions, restricted to ourselves alone. We live in the stillness of midnight, and experience sunrise and sunset by turning towards the east and the west.

The distance of "he" is Kafka's freezer next to Beckett's microwave and extends Lee's twitter statement to affirm that we experience 'real' emotion only by elective agency. We turn to books in order to have emotion in the first place. Otherwise the chimes of midnight are all that we hear.

This kind of existence is deeply unsettling – reading fiction to fabricate meaning, to provide a telos for the interminable, even if we are reading a novel like The Unnamable. As readers, we are like Benn later in More Die of Heartbreak when, stuck in an apartment away from his research, this self-proclaimed "plant visionary" seeks solace by contemplating an azalea and gains emotional stability for weeks communing with its plant nature, only to discover that it is a fake, made of silk from Japan. More comedy, more distress. Yet if we believe this reveals human gullibility, we are correct only to the extent that we too are hoodwinked, because this is only a story, made of silk from Chicago. Benn Crader is an invented character who never visited Mount Erebus, never had such a feeling and never mistook a silk plant for a real one. There is no such thing.

But there is such a story, and we condemn susceptibility in the act of succumbing. Modern writers might suggest that, once cleared of sentiment, the novel has the potential to be the ground of truth, of clinical analysis, a place in which we are no longer hoodwinked; a world without feeling. Except of course this is maintained on a contradiction: storytelling is the means to this world. Beckett's comedy confirms that even the most constricted, stripped-down story is emotional. Even the most overtly heartless, realistic novel relies on a certain kind of sentiment. Swooning under the gaze of its gritty beloved, it refuses the possibility of error or unknowing. Contemporary fiction's impatience with this paradox and its refusal to confront it in form and content actually constitutes the bulk of contemporary fiction, and might thereby trace the fate of humanism. Apparently free of heavenly abstraction, humankind still struggles to ground its story and still swims in a sea without shore, and so, to save itself, clings like Pincher Martin to one remaining outcrop, repressing its fate.

Can the novel let go? The question is the starting point of Vila-Matas' Montano's Malady with its epigraph: What will we do to disappear? The writer's block suffered by the title character suggests it is necessary. He must stop writing in order to write. The author of the epigraph has emphasised that there is nothing negative in 'not to write': "it is intensity without mastery, without sovereignty, the obsessiveness of the utterly passive". If letting go is then obsessive passivity, how might that be written?

Passivity is what's notable in Ágota Kristóf's The Notebook, a novel recently celebrated by Slavoj Žižek and soon to be reissued. What's notable in his description of the story and his wish to be like the "ethical monsters" whose words we read, the twin boys who behave with "blind spontaneity and reflexive distance" promising a world "in which sentimentality [is] replaced by a cold and cruel passion", is that he doesn't mention the form the novel takes: a notebook written by the twins in the first person plural and the present tense. It lacks both the usual ornaments of novelistic prose, has no psychological or emotional description and offers no relief or guidance from a third person. The twins state that the notebooks consist only what they know to be true: "We must describe what we see, what we hear, what we do". This means the writing does more than "tell the story" as Žižek says, it embodies their behaviour and becomes their passion, their obsession, their passivity. The question then becomes: what do we do with this illusion? 

The horizon of narrative

The first time Hans Henny Jahnn's trilogy Fluß ohne Ufer came to my attention was in Reiner Stach's biography of Kafka. I noted that of the "five monumental unfinished ruins of modern German-language prose" that includes two by his subject, River Without Shore is the only one still to be translated into English. A few years later, China Miéville recommended The Ship, the first part of the trilogy that had been translated over forty years ago. Imagine a longer, more expressionist version of The Stoker and you have a good idea of what it's like. It made me wish the rest was available in English, not out of some generalised curiosity but an unfocused yearning, as if the German volumes resting on a bookstall stood for the generalised promise of all unread books, the fulfilment of which also remains untranslated.

It wasn't until I read Landscape as the Origin of Music, Noor de Winter's essay published in the first edition of Reliquiae, that the content of the trilogy revealed itself and suggested in part why it remains untranslated: "full of reflections on music, nature and the creation of art", Fluß ohne Ufer "tells the story of fictional composer Gustav Anias Horn and his friend Tutein, their travels and friendship". This is a long way from an uncanny thriller and much closer to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. No wonder publishers have shied away. "Anias" the essay explains, "is haunted by the possibility of permanent pain without salvation" to the extent that, on a trip to Norway, he empathises with the suffering of birch trees whose leaves are used to feed livestock. He develops "a supernatural longing" to "capture the melody of the soil, the song of the gravel on which the birches grew".

De Winter describes Anias as an artist-as-listener rather than "someone who imprints his vision upon his surroundings"; he is "someone through whom a vision of something else can be transported, translated, transformed". In this way the landscape is an unread book whose translation takes another form. The literal nature of this transformation is revealed when Anias discovers that birch bark looks very much like mechanical piano rolls whose growth rings can be transliterated into written music.

Ever-changing interpretations braided themselves into each other, appeared like a deluge of strange harmonies suddenly dissolving, falling apart to lamenting antiphonies. [...] When I had played this music I knew it didn't originate in me, it came to me. A miraculous telluric power of disclosure had used me.

However miraculous, the essay concludes by acknowledging that such music "can express only something of the wonder that [Anias] experienced in the birch grove" and that it is "perhaps the lot of the artist-as-listener to acknowledge the deficiency of any particular realisation of their theme".

This final point reminds us of the closeness we have to the book and distance to its object. While we read of Anias' project and perhaps become enchanted by his example and practice, what we read is the opposite of any epiphanic vertigo we might experience before a landscape or listening to a piece of music. Any lyricism the narrative might have is a result of the animation of the distance between itself and its subject. Music is its own unmediated presence; literature is entirely mediation. We are like Anias himself with the only difference being that our realisation of deficiency is itself the experience of art. An impoverished experience, we might think. So what does this mean for the novel if, as Walter Pater wrote, "all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music"?

The difference between the novel and music appears like that between sociology and sleep: the first only a matter of comprehension and density and, the second, a matter of their absence. The curious thing about "the condition of music" is its lack of content. Music can lead one to sense an elemental pressure irreducible to notation or lyric sheet. If we compare it to a vision of nature, the condition is equivalent to where a landscape leads: the blank horizon. From stoney escarpment and dense copse to lush meadow and glistening stream, the eye is drawn to the empty sky in the distance; an epiphany without manifestation. The urge to capture the experience can be seen in the incessant and forlorn posting of heavily filtered nature photographs.

In contrast, there is no visible horizon of the novel. The reader experiences the book by descending into a literary landscape: walking along a dirt path, sheltering in a dappled grove, paddling in a stream. The horizon is obscured. Poetry, which may be thought more tuneful, is elevated by being set to music – think of Blake's Jerusalem – while a novel turned into an opera has no bearing on the original. What's closer might be the Proustian epiphany in which time opens and collapses like a concertina, except, again, this is narrated like Anias' experience of telluric power. We might therefore assume that even closer is dreamlike, automatic writing taking precedence over conscious mastery, allowing the chance effects of music to occur. But this would seem to diminish the form, at best subordinate it to music and nature. Notice that the distance between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake is immeasurably greater than that between a Bach fugue and a Schoenberg piano piece. Yet what if you read novels to approach that horizon? Where is the horizon of narrative?

Perhaps merely asking these questions defines a particular experience of reading and indicates a fundamental disconnection with the prevailing mode of reading fiction, which focuses on the foreground and, if it is aware of something more, misplaces the horizon, like Bach admirers seeking the true Goldberg among all his variations. What's lacking from literary criticism is the expression and investigation of this experience and even though, for me, this must be its primary purpose. It's why Knausgaard's My Struggle is such a remarkable work. He is able to unite the banality of a life with the unaccountable experience of art. So perhaps indirection is the necessary future of the form, although, as Fluß ohne Ufer demonstrates, it has always been the form, waiting to be translated, a song waiting to be heard, a clearing waiting for daylight.

Extratemporal meditations: Proust as Philosopher: the art of metaphor by Miguel de Beistegui

We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns
That fall upon it out of the wind. *

Since its publication three years ago, David Shields' manifesto Reality Hunger has helped focus my thoughts on writing: why it still matters, why anyone should still read or write beyond daily utility. That is, the premise of the title and the author's brief commentary has helped rather than the pinched miscellany of the book's content. In fact, to renew that help I need go no further than the very first line, written by the compiler before he expresses his celebrated disillusionment with the routine gestures of contemporary fiction:  

Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.

Let us pause before prose so rich in cliché and poor in soul.

At first I questioned the assumptions embedded in this line and then presented miscellaneous examples indicating that the hunger is not for reality as such and that Shields' disillusion is the dismal light shining through the twin cataracts of modernity – journalism and scientific positivism – both impermeable to deep history, philosophy, theology and art. Reality Hunger is thereby the literary correlate of New Atheism, a displacement of monotheism mitigated only by its failure to attract the heresiographers infecting the latter phenomenon (though this might be coming to an end).

It has to be said my efforts to resist outweigh anything a refutation might bring forth, no matter how fine the examples. They are untimely. Despite Reality Hunger comprising quotations and brief reflections that might have easily fallen into a Tumblr void, it commands influence precisely because it is a book. The form of a book, any book, transcends the sum of its contents by appealing to a coherent unity and the promised land of truth. The title is that unity. Corporate journalists found the premise congenial of course and the common reader was thereby tuned in to the buzz. A student correspondent of mine reported "energised" discussions on the library steps as his fellows passed the book around; after all, the food metaphor of writing's relation to the world is a tasty, bite-sized morsel.

This power to influence so many with what is effectively a literary gesture is intriguing because Reality Hunger relies on an apparent contradiction more or less identical to that of New Atheism. Implicit in both is a suppressed relation to its zone and manner of expression. In both, radical materialism is demanded from the immaterial space of mind and word, with expression demanding an a priori sufferance of the contradiction. For example, Shields pursues without irony the non-book in the one form that provides an aura of weight and promise to the demand (i.e. the Book). You may say this is a mere point of order perhaps, one casually set aside as one reads and thinks in pursuit of worldly answers to worldly concerns, and easily dismissed as a product of art-for-art's sake aestheticism or ignorant of recent theories of consciousness. Except the point remains because of how these responses are expressed; the light of consciousness does not illuminate itself.

What all this reveals is that the ancient objection to writing remains embedded in western literary culture. In the Phaedrus, Plato reports how Socrates compared written language to figurative painting, impersonal and with no guarantee of a living speaker.

The productions of painting look like living beings, but if you ask them a question they maintain a solemn silence. The same holds true of written words; you might suppose that they understand what they are saying, but if you ask them what they mean by anything they simply return the same answer over and over again.

Writing is thereby aligned to the uncanny authority of sacred places and objects. Both refer to an existence more original than themselves yet all the while pronouncing on the most pressing issues of everyday life, thereby posing problems for those promoting faith in reason and realism. The original has no presence. The premise of Reality Hunger merely echoes Socrates' anxiety about the silence of writing and, moreover, what provides Shields' solution is the same too – a physical guarantee. The cultural phenomenon we are witnessing is the laboured repetition of an attempt to reconcile our expectations with profound uncertainty.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves. **

This is why I keep returning to Reality Hunger. Like any obsessive oppositional stance, it is too close for comfort. I share Shields' disillusionment with contemporary literary fiction, especially its ossification into a Booker-winning genre. The difference is that while Shields recommends that novels seek "deliberate unartiness" and include "raw material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered", I believe the only way to go is through literature, by becoming apparently more literary, to provoke perhaps even more anxiety, which is why the books I've written about in the last few years confront the remove of writing within the work itself, a risk invariably condemned by conservative critics as self-indulgent theorising.

So what we appear to have is competition between demands differing on mere matters of taste. However, I know my shudder over for the first line of Reality Hunger quoted above is more than a connoisseur's disdain for commonplace phrases and metaphors; sentences affect my experience of the world. Beginning of time, figure out, what the artist thinks – these are cold, shallow words evoking a cold, shallow world. And while this may seem unduly subjective and impressionistic, Socrates' objection to writing suggests a deeper reason, something fundamental to the impulse to read and write and the paradoxical gifts of the novel. What recommends itself then is an alternative model for the relation of writing to the world.

Miguel de Beistegui's book Proust as Philosopher offers just that. Set aside the dry title for now. It is an unfortunate consequence of the title of the French original, Jouissance de Proust. A literal translation – The Joy of Proust – conjures an image of a bearded man grappling sweatily with a curvaceous fountain pen, and those involved were right to reconsider the title. However, jouissance is key because for Proust's narrator the proper search is for a relation to reality that might enable essential knowledge and genuine happiness, even.

The book begins by outlining the fundamental problem of Marcel's life, which may seem familiar: a present of disappointment, frustration and suffering with a future of profundity and joy promised in the form of romantic love, great art and the natural world. When fulfilment appears imminent, disappointment, frustration and suffering remain, only in different forms: the object of his love provokes intense jealousy, what he understood as great art fails to lead him into the world of truth he had awaited so keenly, and the beautiful, fragrant hawthorn bushes he adores give him asthma attacks. Worse, when he wants to requite this condition by producing a work of "infinite philosophical meaning", everything he writes, whether richly imaginative or solidly realistic, dies on the page.

In Search of Lost Time takes its form in the revelation that a key reason for such a condition is that Marcel neglected to include the failure of infinite philosophical meaning as part of infinite philosophical meaning. Fantastic and realistic modes of creativity are both provisional, merely epiphenomenal, and always trumped by solitude and the external world. Once Marcel begins to explore and animate the space opened by experience and the expectations it refuses to fulfil then a different world begins to unfurl and, what's more, enables him to write something of infinite philosophical meaning. The exploration is embodied in the opening scene of the novel as Marcel wakes up and negotiates the boundary between dream and reality, much like Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis. Waking to change then becomes a constant.

De Beistegui presents Marcel's discovery in philosophical terms: there is a lack at the heart of being – "an ontological deficiency" – that is original and fundamental to the structure of experience. The actual world escapes us because such distance is constitutive of human experience, with the real being "its very own self-absence". What Marcel experiences as hunger are the signals of what lies beyond this condition. The epiphanic moments we all know from the petite madeleine episode enable Marcel to realise his unhappiness is a form of inattention to these signals and impatience to grasp what they indicate. The signals correspond to a unity much like rhymes in a poem and the deficiency can be redeemed only by attention to rhymes across time and space. What made Marcel unhappy were the attempts to fill the lack by "a strategy of compensation"  – physical possession, genre craft or Dionysian indulgence – or by "recapturing or reproducing the 'thing' that's lacking" – reality, realism. Joy is possible only in searching for the enchanted experience of time's absence, as presented in the book we are reading, which takes time.

De Beistegui follows Maurice Blanchot in the uncontroversial claim that the main subject of In Search of Lost Time is the possibility of writing, but offers a less hazardous reason. While for Blanchot writing is situated in the lack and the novel's content is a translucent density penetrated very occasionally by rapturous singularities that make such density possible, for de Beistegui writing is a means of seeing reality differently. It "transfigures life, reversing it, not into its opposite but into its other or flip side":

Literature is the flip side of the side that coincides with reality, the wrong side or the inside of the real and the sign of another meaning of experience. Far from fleeing the real ... literature actually tracks it and weaves it, spinning and following its thread. The threads that make up its text or its fabric ... are the threads of the real itself, and its mission is to trace and disentangle them. In the process, literature lets itself be carried off to where the real flees its own self-presence. (Translated by Dorothée Katz and Simon Sparks)

From this we can see that to respond to the signals of the real requires a certain kind of writing, not one of lyric reverie or bureaucratic notation but precarious combinations of both. If the real is its own self-absence, it is not self-sufficient and thereby reliant on the literary project. This is why de Beistegui highlights the art of metaphor in Proust, with a wonderfully provocative rider: "Metaphor is not fancy or mistress of error and falsehood but the figure of the real in its self-transposition or transfiguration. The conversion of matter into spirit but only as an implicit dimension of matter itself".

It is a paradoxical situation, one that worries at habitual commonsense: life is elsewhere, or, in Marcel's terms: the only true paradise is a paradise lost. Marcel's life is pierced by signals that, enabled by metaphor, set off a chain of correspondences opening to a unified experience. However, if metaphor is "rooted in the very structure of experience and not simply a rhetorical trope" then the quality of that life resides in the quality of those metaphors, the quality of attention and the quality of writing. It makes literature all the more demanding. In Search of Lost Time is a kind of bildungsroman leading to the challenge of this discovery. Marcel shows that the true paradise relies less on formal memory than on chance recognition, those rapturous singularities. It is not a direct product of masterful agency and is therefore always on the brink of falling back into petrifying genres. It's why the novel does not follow the overt facts of Proust's life, and explains why he did not publish the 800-page Jean Santeuil and why one reader quoted in Reality Hunger insists Proust is "at base an essayist" and In Search of Lost Time is "not fiction". She is in the hotel but blocks her ears to the hymns.

If we recognise metaphor as the key to unlocking the temporal prison cell, we can then also appreciate why the central stories of In Search of Lost Time concern romantic love: Swann's pathetic obsession with Odette, Saint-Loup's for Rachel, and Marcel's own for Gilberte and Albertine. "The real significance of love" de Beistegui writes "is epistemological: it drives us to imagine what we're unable to know". But, as a character in John McGahern's Amongst Women says: "Nothing is so bad as having to imagine". Marcel first meets Albertine as part of a "little gang" of young women he watches from afar in the seaside town Balbec. In fact, it is the gang that attracts him; he wants to be amongst young women in flower. They exist for him like the summer landscape of beach, sea and sky: a larger existence he cannot attain. Eventually Albertine becomes his lover but her other life – "the vague and non-existent universe" of her excursions with Andrée, another member of the little gang – provokes jealousy so much that she becomes the title of the fifth volume: The Captive. 

Some of the most rhapsodic passages in In Search of Lost Time are dedicated to Marcel's fascination with the distance at which Albertine holds herself, even when he has her within his four walls. It is here that Proust's unique blend of lyricism and intellectual reflection is especially powerful. They are also problematic for contemporary readers. De Beistegui highlights one in particular in which Marcel watches Albertine asleep:

Stretched out at full length upon my bed, in an attitude so natural that no art could have devised it, she reminded me of a long blossoming stem that had been laid there, and so in a sense she was: the faculty of dreaming, which I possessed only in her absence, I recovered at such moments in her presence, as though by falling asleep she had become a plant. In this way her sleep realised to a certain extent the possibility of love. Alone, I could think of her, but I missed her; I did not possess her. When she was present, I spoke to her, but I was too far absent from myself to be able to think. When she was asleep, I no longer needed to talk. I knew that I was no longer observed by her. I no longer needed to live on the surface of myself. 

By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped off, one after another, the different personalities with which she had deceived me ever since the day when I had first made her acquaintance. She had called back into herself everything that lay outside, had withdrawn, enclosed, reabsorbed herself into her body. In keeping it in front of my eyes, in my hands, I had an impression of possessing her entirely, which I never had when she was awake. Her life was subjected to me, exhaled towards me its gentle breath. I listened to this murmuring, mysterious emanation, soft as a sea breeze, magical as a gleam of moonlight. ... What I felt then was a love as pure, as immaterial, as mysterious as if I had been in the presence of those inanimate creatures that are the beauties of nature. And indeed, as soon as her sleep became at all deep, she ceased to be merely the plant that she had been. Her sleep ... was to me a whole landscape. [Trans. Scott Moncrieff]

Recently Anne Carson had fun at Marcel's expense, with the audience appreciative of the comedy of Marcel's apparently sexist solipsism, treating Albertine as an object of play in his fantasy. But we can see in this passage how Albertine changes from plant to breeze, from moonlight to landscape, and how then she is like everyone, separate, herself, and yet part of a larger universe. Encountering her escape is as important for Marcel as anything else. For him, the possibility of love appears in the revelation of the correspondences her deep self exhibits:

Albertine's complete throughout all her metamorphoses; she's a bird, a plant, a landscape, she's Odette, Andrée, Marcel, all of them at once and even simultaneously, while we can never say what she truly is, essentially. Like the world in general she's always in a state of becoming, a composition of matter that connects with others and, doing so, becomes something else entirely.

This is what de Beistegui means by "the conversion of matter into spirit but only as an implicit dimension of matter itself". The real is always revealed in something else with no need to privilege one over the other and no need to rage for one order or the other. In this sense, the transcendent is immanent to our own lives, so much as we can write, and write well.

I'm aware that De Beistegui's ontology and theory of metaphor have their own genealogy in European thought, for example Gilles Deleuze – another philosopher who wrote on Proust – and Hans Blumenberg. But this is a review not a patent office and I shall leave tracking those threads to others. Reading Proust as Philosopher reminded me of the personal value of critical analysis of single works, how it can crack open the carapace of a classic work of art without bleeding it dry: adding rather than cancelling. It stands alongside last year's translation of Quentin Meillassoux's The Number and the Siren as a work that corresponds to what is apparently most untimely.


* Wallace Stevens, from part IX of An Ordinary Evening in New Haven
** from part IV of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

"But why call it a novel?"

In August 1987 I cycled to a small seaside town near to my own to check its small library. These were the days when shelves lined with free-to-borrow books arose like the New World. The image is of a bright western sky. On the fiction shelves was a pristine hardback of VS Naipaul’s novel The Enigma of Arrival, published only weeks before. I had not read Naipaul and the book attracted me, perhaps only because its black spine shined new. The object seemed enough in itself. But I did read all its 318 pages and have never forgotten Naipaul’s evocation of walks over the Wiltshire countryside around Stonehenge – not because the narrative is effusive or eventful but because it is so restrained. The narrator is seen only at an oblique angle, like the Rückenfigur in one of Caspar David Friedrich's landscapes. Wanting to find out how others responded I looked for reviews and found one in a now long-defunct magazine:

[Naipaul] makes us aware that most writing hurries much too much, and so misses what is essential: that nothing seems to alter, yet everything is in flux. Though this is a book almost without incident it catches unforgettably the transformation of rural England in our time. [...] It is a moving and beautiful piece of work, unlike any other book I know.

These lines corroborated my innocent enthusiasm and helped me to recognise and articulate what I had experienced. However, the review ends with a question I hadn’t considered: “But why call it a novel?”
Last month I considered it for the first time.

With no patience for any new novel, I reread The Enigma of Arrival and the response was the same, although Naipaul’s delicate self-exposure was far more impressive and moving this time round and darkened by a better appreciation that death is the motif of his story. In 1987 I had followed Naipaul, twenty-five years later I walked beside him.

Death is also the motif of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, which I read earlier this year with equivalent pleasure and perhaps the cause of Naipaul's novel floating back into my memory. The title of the British edition – A Death in the Family – makes the motif explicit. Both books are overtly autobiographical and rely on the life of the writer to infuse their narratives with authority, an authority that itself relies on a unique encounter with time, existence and non-existence. This suggests such authority has been depleted, perhaps because fiction relies too heavily on distance. What these books possess in contrast is a pressing proximity. A novel is anchored on generic safe ground even as the writer’s imagination flies high or plumbs the depths, but now that ground is loose and barren. So why is Naipaul’s novel subtitled “A novel in five sections” and the Norwegian and German editions of My Struggle labelled a novel?

Constable cloud study, 1822

There are clear differences in each author's approach, suggesting a lack of generic clarity, which is not given to autobiography but is familiar to the novel form. Where Naipaul's focus is on his journey from colonial province to imperial centre in classic bildungsroman fashion, Knausgaard is more concerned with the density of the moment, and where Naipaul is selective and respectful in his exposure of himself and others, never mentioning that his cottage has another occupant, his wife, or that the landlord he refers to throughout is the legendary Stephen Tennant, Knausgaard is famously inclusive. “[He] seems unable to leave anything out,” James Wood complained, quoting a novella-length description of a New Year’s Eve party: “After a few hundred pages of this, I started to grumble: I understood that this was ‘My Struggle,’ but did it also have to be my struggle?” He soon turns around and acknowledges that “the banality is so extreme that it turns into its opposite, and becomes distinctive, curious in its radical transparency”.

The need for totality that brings pages about playing the guitar, about drinking tea, about wearing his Doc Martens and listening to his Walkman [...] also brings superb, lingering, celestial passages, like the one in which Knausgaard cannot sleep, and paces his apartment.

This is the insomniac passage I quote in my comparatively feeble review and is worth returning to. It also returns us to the similarities with Naipaul. Knausgaard is moved to tears by a cloud formation he sees in a book of Constable’s paintings:

I kept flicking back to the picture of the greenish clouds, every time it called forth the same emotions in me. It was as if two different forms of reflection rose and fell in my consciousness, one with its thoughts and reasoning, the other with its feelings and impressions, which, even though they were juxtaposed, excluded each other’s insights. It was a fantastic picture, it filled me with all the feelings that fantastic pictures do, but when I had to explain why, what constituted the “fantastic,” I was at a loss to do so.

The picture made my insides tremble, but for what? The picture filled me with longing, but for what? There were plenty of clouds around. There were plenty of colors around. There were enough particular historical moments. There were also plenty of combinations of all three. Contemporary art, in other words, the art which in principle ought to be of relevance to me, did not consider the feelings a work of art generated as valuable. Feelings were of inferior value, or perhaps even an undesirable by-product, a kind of waste product, or at best, malleable material, open to manipulation. Naturalistic depictions of reality had no value either, but were viewed as naïve and a stage of development that had been superseded long ago. There was not much meaning left in that. But the moment I focused my gaze on the painting again all my reasoning vanished in the surge of energy and beauty that arose in me. Yes, yes, yes, I heard. That’s where it is. That’s where I have to go. But what was it I had said yes to? Where was it I had to go? (trans. by Don Bartlett)

This experience relates back to the beginning of the book in the narrator’s childhood, when watching a news report he sees a face in the sea. He rushes to tell the nearest person, his father, who says: “Don’t give it another thought”. Now you the reader becomes the author’s nearest person and you might respond in the same way as the father or, like me, suffer an intense identification.

This latter division is probably key to the original question: why call it a novel? The experience Knausgaard describes is both very personal and fascinatingly impersonal; that is, it draws attention and resists accommodation in narrative whether autobiographical or fictional because it is what is promised by narrative or what underlies it. The lengthy descriptions of the everyday in My Struggle become necessary to frame the urgency of the questions he puts to himself, much as the longueurs of Proust's In Search of Lost Time are necessary to enable the magical phenomena of time's absence. The indulgence and disruption of habit is a constant in both. My Struggle rides high on such experiences, of which Constable's cloud study is the incarnation; profound or prosaic yet always promising or threatening a climatic event or revelation. This is why both Knausgaard and Proust differ from generic autobiography and novel: they are witnesses.

Naipaul himself ascribes the beginnings of his novel to a painting by Giorgio de Chirico called The Enigma of Arrival:

I felt that in an indirect, poetical way the title referred to something in my own experience. [...] The scene is of desolation and mystery: it speaks of the mystery of arrival. [...] And in the winter gray of the manor grounds in Wiltshire, in those first four days of mist and rain, when so little was clear to me, an idea—floating lightly above the book I was working on—came to me of a story I might one day write about that scene in the Chirico picture.

Later he expands on the content of that narrative – a man on a journey to a Mediterranean city in classical times, although he didn’t think of it as an historical story “but more as a free ride of the imagination” – and explains why it never got written. It occurred to him that the story was “an attempt to find a story for, to give coherence to, a dream or nightmare” in which he was living through his own death. This is negative equivalent of Knausgaard's bewildered affirmation before the clouds.

A dream is much like a painting in that it consists entirely of resemblance. A self-portrait is the self as experienced in a dream: oneself and another, impossible to reconcile and infinitely beguiling; an eternally evanescent memory. Yet to write out a description of a painting is not only futile but as crushingly dull as telling the story of a dream. It can never be the thing itself, the experience which makes it essential to the self is impossible to convey; “A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself" as Milosz wrote, "a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees”.

For the writer, whether positive or negative, the encounter demands a response. He becomes a writer to respond. Naipaul’s resort to autobiographical material in The Enigma of Arrival was characterised by Salman Rushdie as a failure of strength for fiction, to which Naipaul replied with brahminical disdain: “I think it is possible that talent has moved to other things and that real writing is occurring elsewhere, rather than in novels. You have to be very clear about the material that possesses you, and you’ve got to find the correct form for it.”

But what if that form is not open? Robert Lowell’s famous poem Epilogue comes as you would expect at the end of the confessional volume Day by Day in which his experience of manic depression is laid bare, a fact which troubles him. He asks two rhetorical questions:

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?

Before the second question appears, he compares his poetry to a garish photographic snapshot in contrast to a painter’s eye that “trembles to caress the light”. Something imagined in writing, however, is “paralyzed by fact”.  

Yet why not say what happened?

Until I re-read the poem today I had assumed this line was Lowell's decisive call for “life writing”, for attention to be paid to the everyday rather than, as it seems now, a reluctant concession, an admission of defeat. In writing of what happened one must only “Pray for the grace of accuracy / Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination”. Reading yet again, however, the comparison with the visual arts seems to express less the poet’s anxiety over the superiority of imagination than over writing itself; even if he were to produce the most exquisite work of the imagination, it would be a failure. Indeed, by referring to the “poet’s anxiety” and by reproducing paintings here I confirm this fallen state.

Paintings can of course be appreciated by anyone with vision. Whether it is a surreal harbour scene or bucolic landscape, each painting is merely there: a unique object in the world. There is no fact or fiction to decipher: a painting merely is. An abstract painting does not provoke impatience in the same way as a so-called experimental novel does precisely because it is before the viewer in the same arena as a classical landscape. The dynamic relationship of the object to what it ostensibly represents or expresses is the encounter we displace only by means of the polite discourse lamented by Knausgaard.

By contrast, the poem or novel is immediately assumed to be the voice of one standing before the world, between us and its world; it is already a part of that polite discourse. As a poem, Epilogue is removed a priori from the relation enjoyed by painting; the process of understanding and interpretation is not only the foreground, it is the poem itself. (We might maintain with Eliot that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood” but that merely begs the question.)

What recommends itself then is silence or denial, and the latter does indeed constitute the bulk of literary output: the willed infantilism of popular fiction, the prissy connoisseurship of fine prose in literary fiction, and the po-faced empiricism of reality hunger. Each is after the Lord Mayor’s Show of television, film and print journalism, such that “crime novels can be used to analyse shifts in society” is recommended without irony.

Silence has less of a profile of course, but it is present. It’s present in the 800 pages of the two books discussed here. What distinguishes them from other famous novelists’ autobiographical excursions – JM Coetzee’s Scenes from Provincial Life and Thomas Bernhard’s Gathering Evidence being two outstanding examples – is a fascination with moments that resist narrative and a preoccupation with finding a way to make them present in narrative; moments experienced before paintings, in music, in a walkable landscapes and, in Knausgaard's case, even in a TV news report. But not in writing. Writing in fact dilutes these moments – much as a metaphor dilutes – presenting to the writer not only a paradoxical inspiration but a destructive one. The task for the writer then isn’t a matter of genre but of rinsing genre. 

The common assumption in literary reception is that the novel is the noise of mastery, a story well-told and constructed with craft and good judgement. In public we can affirm this of any given work as we know others will understand as a public does. A recent example is Peter Stothard’s speech recommending a genre novel to win what used to be a literary prize. Except the encounter with a novel, a short story or a poem is not a public experience but one of solitude and silence. Hence the violence of corralling reviews, good and bad, hence the popularity of book clubs, hence the national obsession with prizes. There is a need to mitigate or sublimate seclusion, rarely to explore. What I found that day of blue, empty sky and VS Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival and this summer with Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle were such explorations, attempts to open onto the space that makes narrative possible, the singularities that inscribe themselves on a life and agitate a certain enchantment, opening the past as much as the present and future, yet which cannot be made present to the work itself. For this reason, I would answer both books are more novels than most novels, willing as they are to listen to the silence.