Leavetakings

While Ed Champion complains about the focus on the length of Paul Anderson's debut novel rather than its literary qualities, he also admits to being drawn to 'these mammoth affairs'. Well, I want to say the exact opposite. I'm drawn to brevity. While Ed enjoys ‘the pleasure of getting lost within a world, the specifics of characters or a particular vernacular’, I like being pitched back into the shining solitude of this world. The best online example I know of is Josipovici’s short story A Glass of Water. It takes my breath away. There’s a leavetaking in progress that never stops being in progress. Suddenly, one’s own world becomes richer in the process. A 500-pager would struggle to do that without becoming tiresome and exhausting.

It's also a leavetaking of itself.

That said about brevity, I’ve read In Search of Lost Time three times. This too, I suppose, is a story of leavetakings. Marcel letting go of his mother's goodnight kiss. Marcel letting go of his grandmother after her death. Marcel letting go of Albertine after she leaves him. It's curious then how the original English title – Rememberance of Things Past – should appeal to complacent nostalgia when it is really about the joys of the present - the place where paradise is lost. I suppose the inaccuracy of the first title indicates the negative side of getting lost in a book.

Gilles Deleuze corrects this assumption: “Proust’s work is based not on the exposition of memory" he writes "but on the apprenticeship to signs.” In particular for the young Marcel, the signs of love.

To love is to try to explicate, to develop [the] unknown worlds which remain enveloped within the beloved.

We might regard this as similar to reading a book. The trouble is, it leads to a contradiction.

We cannot interpret the signs of a loved person without proceeding into worlds that have not waited for us in order to take form, that formed themselves with other persons, and in which we are at first only an object among the rest. The lover wants his beloved to devote to him her preferences, her gestures, her caresses. But the beloved’s gestures, at the moment they are addressed to us, still express that unknown world that excludes us. The beloved gives us signs of preference; but because these signs are the same as those that express worlds to which we do not belong, each preference by which we profit draws the image of the possible world in which others might be or are preferred.

Marcel sees Swann experience this as he is crippled with jealousy over Odette. It prefigures his own relationships. They seem very familiar to me too.

So the contradiction of love consists of this: the means we count on to preserve us from jealousy are the very means that develop jealousy, giving it a kind of autonomy, of independence with regard to our love.

I think this is why, for me, reading is never as carefree or as pleasurable in the way commonly described (mainly because, I think, we are not true to our own experience of the autonomy of reading). In this way, ‘loving a book’ takes on a whole new meaning.

David Markson's Reader's Block, page 49

"Björnstjerne Björnson. Rudolf Eucken. Frans Sillanpää.
Verner von Heidenstam. Halldór Laxness. Pearl Buck. Karl
Gjellerup.
Toni Morrison."

Of course, this is unfair. On Halldór Laxness.

Once again at last

My jaw cannot drop any further. Erica Wagner writes 'At last, a literary award where the consumer votes'. But imagine it has.

She's covering the Quills book awards in New York for the London Times. It's the usual stuff: celebrating the democracy of consumer choice; bemoaning the predictability of more established awards; charging the Booker, in particular, with elitism for not including Nick Hornby's latest confection (whether it's a good or bad book seems to be irrelevant; that it is popular is enough apparently).

She goes on: "there’s often a 'type' of Booker book. Literary critics, and panels of judges, have tastes, prejudices, opinions just like everyone else. Listen to them by all means, but trust your own opinions too. And if you can find a prize that enables you to do so, go and vote."

She's right of course, in the way advising us to breath in and out is right.

But a literary award already points beyond tastes, prejudices and opinions. It is an award for literary excellence. One can define literary. It is a 'type' of book. The question of the definition is the question begged by all of these interminable articles each proclaiming the end of the need to question.

Blessed are the media workers ...

I was mildly surprised in June when the editors of the BBC's Newsnight Late Review chose to discuss James Meek's A People's Act of Love rather than its staple of popular trash and established literary names. You will know that it has now made the Booker Longlist. However, today's Observer reveals the likely reason for its unusual rise to prominence: "Two years ago [Meek] was foreign reporter of the year."

And then Stephanie Merritt, in her summary of the longlist, tells us that one of the nominees "was the producer behind some of the most successful television comedies of the past 15 years". No wonder she claims that "this year's Booker winner is unlikely to be a controversial choice".

Christa Wolf's In the Flesh: or, why Case Histories wasn't such a bad choice after all

My review of Christa Wolf's novel In the Flesh can be found on the new-look Ready Steady Book.

The review was written before the Lit Blog Co-Op controversy over the choice of Kate Atkinson's Case Histories for its first Read This! choice and The Complete Review's subsequent revelation that Wolf's novel was its nomination. Unfortunately, due to an administrative mix-up by an unnamed third party, it got lost. So here it is, four months late.

What I didn't say explicitly in the review, I shall say here: In the Flesh is one of the worst novels I have ever read.

While the greatest living writer of German (Peter Handke) is treated with scandalous neglect by English-language publishers, this edition adds insult to that injury.

From the inside: on 'a new life for the novel'

Jason Cowley's claim in today's Observer that there is 'a new life for the novel' in Britain is really just a fresh bunch of flowers on the tomb of the 19th Century novel.

He sets up the familiar scenario: after 9/11, the consensus was that 'fiction was either irrelevant or incapable of offering a convincing representation of a new, changed world.' Of course, this was the consensus of literary journalists writing in the shadow of large headlines. They agreed that 'a certain kind of literature was no longer possible'. Cowley does not provide examples of this kind of literature, only that 'so many of our novels were largely a reflection of the times in which we lived: safe, affluent, complacent, at ease.'

I don’t remember such times. Before 9/11 there were plenty of other events with powerful, metonymic status. In my life, I think of ‘General Belgrano’, ‘Orgreave’, ‘Lockerbie’, ‘Omagh’ . All these and many more. So where does one draw the line? How does one draw the line? Is it the number of deaths?

If so, the El Shifa bombing of 1998 that caused ‘the suffering and death of tens of thousands of innocent people all over Africa, many of them children, by depriving them of basic medicines against malaria, tuberculosis, and other easily curable diseases’ should be as significant as 9/11. That is, had journalists in the West given a shit. Perhaps it is definitive because they didn’t, and still don’t. But that would mean novelists, rather than journalists, would have to give such events symbolic power. This is unthinkable of course.

So one wonders whether fiction borders dangerously on irrelevance as Cowley characterises it. Perhaps it is journalism that is moribund. Like the unnamed fiction Cowley referred to, perhaps journalism is ‘safe, affluent, complacent and at ease’ as it expertly turns the world into a fearful caricature for its corporate bosses. Indeed, one can read articles and comments like Cowley's every week; only the byline changes. Is this consensus, wilful ignorance or censorship?

Cowley takes it as read that fiction needs to address the same issues as his newspaper in order to be relevant. He then slips in the claim that the unique quality of the novel is that only it 'can truly show, from the inside, how it feels to move through space and time, from one day to the next, with contradictory thoughts constantly clashing, over the narrative of a lifetime.'

Presumably, by marrying inner and outer, we would have a unique document that shows us what it was like to be alive at a particular time. This seems fair enough. But then he uses McEwan’s uniquely safe, affluent, complacent novel Saturday as the exemplum. (See Ellis Sharp’s and John Banville’s eloquent destructions of the book).

The problem with bringing the inner life into the equation is that we all have our own 9/11s. We all have events that haunt our imaginations. There is no rational prioritising of these events. We have to deal with them, away from all the chatter. Saturday is far too schematic to convince that it comes from anywhere but the intellect. As Banville says, it’s like a novel created by a government committee. Perhaps this is why journalists are in such awe.

Lars of Spurious approaches the alternative in a moving blog in which he also discusses a novel that addresses the largest of issues from a quiet, very personal angle without indulging in the Schadenfreude that passes for engagement in the kind of novel of which Jason Cowley approves. I pass the blogging baton to him.

The implications: James Wood on Saul Bellow

My bank balance has taken a serious hit with the renewal of my subscription to the TLS. However, this week's edition has eased the pain with James Wood's informative (and not too long) piece on Saul Bellow's prose; his 'Biblical English'. Wood also shows how Bellow was influenced by many English writers, and remarks how many contemporary English writers were to the fore in paying tribute when Bellow died: Amis, McEwan, Hitchens.

There is a negative side to reading about Bellow though. How can we begin to write ourselves in face of such world-renewing, world-creating prose? The same for the amateur critic too: Wood has absorbed so much diverse reading material, and is able to regurgitate it so usefully, that one feels equally impoverished in comparison.

Yet, for all the pleasure in, and admiration for, Bellow’s prose and Wood’s contribution to that pleasure and admiration, I ask: And? And? OK, I think to myself, Bellow was influenced by the King James Bible, and by DH Lawrence more than we might previously have acknowledged, but what then; what are the implications of such knowledge?

Waggish has posted a response to another recent TLS article that projects beyond its limits and answers my question. It would be helpful if the "useful, new abstraction" referred to here became a touchstone of literary discussion in the blogosphere.

As Mr Waggish points out, I cited the exact same extract of the exact same article that he does a couple of weeks ago (albeit rather less profoundly). Also coincidentally, when Bellow died in April, I cited the same author’s essay introducing The Portable Saul Bellow. Here’s the relevant extract:

Bellow has been described as a great realist; a follower of Dreiser and the American urban naturalist tradition; a great fantasist, especially in 'Henderson the Rain King'; and as the last of the Yiddish storytellers. But these are ways of shrugging off the demands of [Bellow’s] voice, of avoiding its implications by placing it safely in a literary or historical context.

Avoiding the implications of Bellow's voice is also something very English.

Life: a reading experience

'The Reading Experience' would be an appropriate title to this, my half-response to Dan Green's latest in-depth post on the illustrious blog of the same name. He himself is responding to a (characteristically) long essay in The New Republic by James Wood (not online) about ‘the major struggle in American fiction today’, which is ‘over the question of realism’.

I’ve read both now and feel oddly unengaged by it all. Very little seems to be about what is important to me. In the past, I might have struggled to join in, concealing my ambivalence with uncertain assertions. Nowadays I’m inclined to follow my ambivalence.

In this case, I realise that when I read stories – and I include non-fiction such as Aharon Appelfeld’s memoir The Story of a Life, which I read recently – questions of realism and anti-realism are central to the experience. They cannot be separate from what fiction is. To come down in favour of one or the other would destroy literature.

In a recent blog, I expressed a certain mild distress reading Appelfeld’s book. He describes terrible things that really happened - in the chapter in question, how a distraught child was caught up in a transport to a death camp. Yet I read the book as fiction. I didn’t mean to read it as fiction; it’s just that I couldn’t quite comprehend its reality. My distress was mainly a result of this rather than at the facts of the story.

While at first this seemed to be a cruel abandonment adding to that described in the chapter, I realised that what made it so powerful was the story’s repetition in the book; a repetition without echo, without recourse to closure, let alone justice.

For this reason, the part of the debate that stood out to me was when Dan quotes Wood’s use of non-realist fiction in his argument for a humane (and thereby) realistic fiction: "Kafka's Metamorphosis and Hamsun's Hunger and Beckett's Endgame are not representations of likely or typical human behavior; but they draw their power, in part, from their connection to the human."

“Well, of course they do. How could they do otherwise?” Dan says, rightly, but as he knows, it’s only half-right. They draw their power equally from the non-human; they engage with it rather than evade it in false oppositions. The ‘major struggle’, therefore, is really very limited; too parochial (like most things in US culture it seems, captured in Wood's unconscious limiting of 'American fiction' to one part of a massive continent).

When one reads, one is confronted by the disjunction between the mental construct of words on a page and the world – a disjunction that might just be everything. The struggle with that possibility is real.