Houellebecq: any possibility of a literary review?

David Coward's long review of the Michel Houellebecq's new novel is curiously lacking. It was the first thing I read when opening the TLS this evening. I was willing to be convinced he's an interesting novelist. And Coward is very enthusiastic about his subject. Except he doesn't say why MH is interesting as a novelist. Plot summaries are supplied, but there's little sense of what it is like to read the novels. Of course he's interesting as a cultural phenomenon (which seems enough to many) but as a novelist? We're not told. Worse still, in the final paragraph Coward conflates what's said in the narrative with MH's opinions. Perhaps they're obviously the same, but that would suggest he's not a very interesting artist.

Nothing said before this review had persuaded me to read Houellebecq, so it was especially disappointing. On Monday I read David Sexton's feature on him in the book pages of London's Evening Standard (not online). A lot of what he says looks like the kind of journo-gossip that would have featured in a profile of Thomas Bernhard in his prime: that he's hated by the mythical literary establishment, that the po-faced middle classes love to hate him, that he's a cantankerous old bugger, and that he's a massive seller across the continent. Yet one thing is missing: the overwhelming local-level joy of reading Bernhard's unique prose is not mentioned. The pleasure in Houellebecq seems to be two-dimensional; like the sniggering at a teenager's tag on the headmaster's wall.

Sexton says MH is a cynic only because he's a hopeless romantic. This rings true. Both positions are essentially the same. It's easy to be one or the other, just like it's easy to be a Communist one decade and a Neocon the next. It takes a great artist to move beyond these tired false oppositions. But it seems there is no space in the papers to talk about them.

Dreams we share

Without ever addressing it, I realise that, for a long time, the experience of dreams has preoccupied me. Not their events and narratives – which seem to be random variants of the same scenario – but the experience. The purity evoked in dreams unsettles me. One wakes reeling from the experience; an experience which soon drifts into insignificance yet also seems to contain the essence of all experience; the teleology of experience. What is the nature of this purity - truth or illusion? As dreams are, by definition, unreal, does this make the purity unreal?

In online searching for a means of forming these questions, I note that, among the new age guff and dry, disingenuous science, a translation of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams is available online. [All links broken]

After I’d given up the search, I saw 43 Folder’s link to a long blog entry by Phillip J. Eby. In The Multiple Self, he uses a programming metaphor to discuss self and self-help. He offers "the ultimate answer, not to life, the universe, and everything, but the ultimate answer, I think, to the nature of the human condition: ‘You’ are not ‘yourself’ today. For that matter, you were not yourself yesterday, and you will not be tomorrow. You never have been, and never will be, because ‘you’ and ‘yourself’ are distinct neural subsystems which do not overlap."

Apart from unease with the programming jargon, which I don’t follow, and my suspicion that many cognitive science types don’t actually see it as a metaphor, the basic idea has the ring of truth. (Eby admits from the start that the ideas have been expressed before in many alternative forms.)

How this relates to dreams might be in that they are contained engagements with ‘you’ and ‘yourself’. They are pure because they are contained narratives dense with meaning; well, more than dense – they are made of meaning; everything is there for a reason. Meaning fills the dreamworld like sunlight, even when it is dark. Dreams are stories. And what Eby recommends in terms of self-help is, if I understand right, for a creative engagement between ‘you’ and ‘yourself’. As it happens, this is also my ideal in literature too. Stories are pure.

One writer who approaches the ideal is Aharon Appelfeld. His work is a raid on the inarticulate: “The palms of one’s hands, the soles of one’s feet, one’s back and one’s knees remember more than memory” he writes. This quotation comes from Theo Richmond’s perceptive review [link broken] of Appelfeld new memoir The Story of a Life. Despite admiring the book, he worries about ‘curious gaps’. There is a lot of information missing from Appelfeld’s narrative. Perhaps this reveals that memoir isn’t his true form. He’s always resisted it before. Still, there are chapters that make up for frustrated nosiness. They are extremely moving. I’ve written about this book before, in the process suggesting a reason why they are so moving; more particularly why they are also unsettling. Like dreams, they are full not only of the past but of potential.

It’s a shame then that Appelfeld's novels have not received equal attention. For instance, why wasn’t the new Penguin Modern Classics edition of Badenheim 1939 reviewed too? It was published on the same day! It’s a negligence that tells us something about the British preoccupation with gossip. Take this feature on Vikram Seth [link broken]. Always the nudge and wink about the private life of the writer. One senses they’d rather have a confessional book. Indeed each book is read as if in lieu of a confessional. Still, the occasional insight is allowed. Seth develops obsessions that drive him to write: “each of his books has come about because it could not not have been written. They announce themselves with an urgency to him that he cannot resist.”

This is how every book should be written. Any book not written with such urgency is worthless and contemptible. However, Seth’s novels haven’t attracted my interest because they merely discharge the obsession; they do not explore obsession (hence, perhaps, their prolix and conservative form). This is like telling the story of a dream by feigning sleep. Such denial frustrates me; just as genre fiction frustrates me; it is too intellectual. I shall have to come back to this.

Well, I never wondered: on Rushdie's style

I was so impressed with Marco Roth's review of Salman Rushdie's new novel that I looked up the This Week's Contributors notes in the back of the TLS. Turns out he's one of the 'founding editors' of n+1 magazine. So that's promising, for literary criticism if nothing else (but there is nothing else).

He himself is not impressed with Rushdie's "pursuit of a signature style" at the expense of the tragic story; a story buried by "satire, old-fashioned revenge romance and Hollywood action movie". This story would be the chronicle of "the distress of people who are too far away or too hidden from our everyday life"; a political dimension it seems only "willfully sympathetic" readers can make stand out (can you guess who he means?). Instead, Roth says Shalimar the Clown "seems to flaunt its determination to put as much padding as possible between readers and feelings."

And this is where my appreciation was confirmed: Roth compares such padding with the West's "camp culture of violence that seeks to rationalize our obsession by emphasizing its safe unreality: gangster rap, John Woo’s slow motion bullet ballets, action hero slogans like hasta la vista baby and mission accomplished." So, "rather than explore the crossing points between Western civilization which aestheticizes violence and Islamic civilizations which sanctify it, Rushdie writes himself in on the side of the aestheticizers."

Overall, the novel makes us "wonder if all Rushdie’s loud insistence on a no limits position for his own work is a mask for a world-weary conservatism".

The wrong emphasis

My US American ex-housemate once showed us his open letter home. He told his family about his studies, his new partner, and how he liked England because, among other reasons, there was a general lack of religion. He also observed 'a learned helplessness' within the native population. I was rather flattered and encouraged by that, such was the ambivalence of my literary ambition. And then I realised the second syllable of 'learned' wasn't emphasised.

He lacks the words

From today's Observer, Richard Ford writes an elegy for New Orleans:

In America, even with our incommensurable memories of 9/11, we still do not have an exact human vocabulary for the loss of a city - our great, iconic city, so graceful, livable, insular, self-delighted, eccentric, the one Tennessee Williams believed care forgot and that sometimes - it might seem - forgot to care. Other peoples have experienced their cities' losses. Some bombed away (by us). Others gone in the flood. Here now is one more tragedy we thought, by some divinity's grace that didn't arrive, we'd missed. But not. Our inept attempts at words only run to lists, costs, to assessing blame. It's like Hiroshima a public official said. But, no. It's not like anything. It's what it is. That's the hard part. He, with all of us, lacked the words.

You know (for a moment) I thought he meant Fallujah.

Peter Ackroyd, the biography

Who is Tim Martin? What is he trying to hide? Why does he spend an entire interview with Peter Ackroyd effacing himself?

"He [Ackroyd] orders a glass of wine. A bottle is proposed. Yes! he says eagerly."

Was the bottle proposed by a third person? Did someone shout over Tim Martin's shoulder as he or she was passing? I think we should be told.

Lost books

Sebastian Faulks' entertaining review of Stuart Kelly's The Book of Lost Books makes it seem very entertaining. And it really is dizzying to comprehend the possible - though unlikely - discovery of a few dozen more plays written by Sophocles or a third work by Homer. They have all existed at one time, but now, apparently, they are lost.

However, I’m already dizzy as I regard every book as the record of its own loss. :)

More reading in the west

After my recent post surrounding Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, there's a response by Amardeep Singh. I'd like to reply here, although my reply extends beyond it as there is nothing in particular he says with which I disagree.

First, I have to say that I have yet to read the book. The copy in my local library is currently borrowed, unlike all the other literary critical works. Need we wonder why?! My concern, as this suggests, is with the ‘credulous critical reception’. I read many reviews when it came out and I don’t recall one mentioning the acknowledgement given to Paul Wolfowitz. I would have found that difficult to forget. This is why my interest was aroused.

Imagine the reviews of a similar book by someone unjustly-detained at Guantanamo Bay (though one doubts that they have access to a library) that included a dedication to a leading member of Al Qaeda. Would this be a side issue? For this reason I took the phrase ‘objectively pro-fascist’ (which I’d never heard before) to mean one who is not themselves fascist but who lends their support to fascists through expediency or complacency. Since then I’ve discovered that it was a phrase Orwell used to label pacifism in the face of Hitler. So I understood right. For pacifism, I now read the liberals who regard the manifold corruption and aggression of the Bush junta as part of the legitimate spectrum of opinion.

But back to the reception of the book. There’s an unspoken imperative running through its uncritical welcome, something that probably has little to do with the book itself. This is that literature must remain an escape. Reading Lolita in the west must remain happily meaningless; an indulgence afforded by our 'freedom'. (I’m not expecting Michael Wood’s brilliant book on Nabokov, for instance, to become a bestseller on the back of Nafisi’s success). It can mean something only when used as a defence against our official enemies. This is what I was thinking of when I referred to a possible ‘literary resistance’. Trying to think about it now after another long day of wage-slavery, I can only recall Elizabeth Costello (of the eponymous novel) trying to explain her distress to her son:

I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participating in a crime of stupifying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences.

What is thrilling about this novel is that there’s a moral and literary challenge in the story (though in effect they are the same) that includes itself and our own reading habits. The pages on Paul West’s novel are particularly chilling. As might be expected, Coetzee’s novel was patronised, ridiculed and dismissed by critics (I’m thinking of Jonathan Yardley in the US and Robert Macfarlane here in the UK) who don’t like to have the little people’s escape tunnel routed back into areas which they require fiction to keep at a distance. And I mean fiction in itself, not its subject.