Each new article by John Pilger about world politics is more or less the same. That is, each is always more or less true; exhilaratingly, painfully true. He describes what is happening right before my eyes. If it wasn’t for Pilger, I would wonder if my eyes were deceiving me. When I read a new article, I want everyone to read it and to say: yes, this is the truth! We can't let ourselves be deceived again; can’t let them, the professionals, deceive us anymore. But nothing happens.
Pilger writes more articles, they get published (I'm always surprised that he's published) and he makes the occasional, devastating late-night TV documentary (I'm always surprised he's allowed to do so). But nothing happens. The only exception was for his report on Cambodia’s ‘killing fields’ in which US culpability could be safely placed out of the frame. This didn't surprise me.
But sometimes he writes about literature. He’s done it before and I responded at the time. I hope nothing happens.
In the first line he quotes columnist DJ Taylor approvingly. In the late 80s, Taylor was calling for writers to explore 'the lumber room of experience' rather than write 'drawing room twitter' (whatever that is, McEwan's Saturday?). In yesterday’s Independent (subscription only), he made a similar call in an article entitled When will Philip Roth become a Nobel Laureate?.
He is appalled that Dreiser, John Dos Passos and Upton Sinclair were not chosen by the Novel committee, just as he is appalled that contemporary US Americans - Roth, Updike and Mailer - have so far been overlooked. He says To watch … Channel 4's recent History of the Novel is to appreciate the absolute dominance of American fiction over practically every other variety in the past century.
Well, perhaps. This might be true had the documentary (actually called The Story of the Novel) been remotely objective. But the series was supervised by a similarly philistine and narrow-minded critic: Professor John Carey. The episode on Ulysses in particular was a disgrace.
Taylor thinks that the Nobel has become too political. From the view that sees literature as literature rather than a sub-division of international powerbroking – the Nobel jury’s habit of looking the other way whenever Roth's name is brought to their attention is a grotesque dereliction of duty.
This should go without saying, and not just for Roth. But I would say that, in the last century, it was European fiction that dominated ideally every other variety, and many of its greatest exponents have failed to receive the prize, for reasons unknown: Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Paul Celan, Aharon Appelfeld (born and raised in Europe), Vladimir Nabokov, Marguerite Duras, Gert Hofmann, and, most glaringly of all, Maurice Blanchot. These authors' work is literature as literature; far more so than contemporary US fiction.
But what is literature? One wonders if the answer might be hidden by the debate engendered by the significance of a writer receiving that label – Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature? Why do we need it?
Within our indignation, there's a yearning for something more than words on a page. But the extra is also mere words: Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Everytime we try to get to something more elemental, we find only more words. Nothing happens. Literature is itself already the lumber room of experience; deadwood.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Friday, October 07, 2005
Photography, spilling into language
As I read, the Moleskine notebook is ready beside me. Too often I read without heeding the impulse to note things down. If the notebook isn’t there, I read on, headlong. I won’t note things down.
I’m reading Murat Nemet-Nejat’s beautiful little book The Peripheral Space of Photography, discovered in a remaindered shop last week. It's an edition so small that it won’t peek out of your back pocket (if you put it there). This also means recovering the desired quotation won’t take so long. For instance, ‘Photography is … a medium of reflection (reflection as image and as thought), intimately related to language’. That’s on page 10. But this was in fact noted down. I felt that it might lead me to understand why photography as an art form compels my interest. Some, like Roger Scruton, would argue that it isn’t an art form. Yet this uncertainty is perhaps precisely why it seems vital.
A chapter on light in 19th century photographs is particularly good. Nemet-Nejat says it is that each photograph from this era seems, from our perspective of technical mastery, slightly overexposed. So why do they have a power signally lacking (I believe) in 19th century literature? ‘The glow is a combination of lack and excess, lack because the reflection from the medium (the negative) is not perfect, and excess, the excess of light glow, trapped in, emanating from the print.’ The glow is, then, ‘a sign of the insufficiency of the medium. This insufficiency defines it.’
Insufficiency. Hardly what we expect from a powerful work of art! Few people would call Dickens’ representation of the same world insufficient. Yet perhaps this is where it lacks. The insufficiency of the medium is masked rather than revealed by an excess. It’s what Kafka called the ‘heartlessness behind [Dickens’] sentimentally overflowing style’. Without his ‘rude characterisations which are artificially stamped on everyone’, the great writer ‘would not be able to get on with his story even for a moment’ (Diaries, 8th October 1917). One can easily be seduced by this style, but only because it is the seduction of solipsism.
Nemet-Nejat says the excess of light in 19th Century photographs, over which the photographers had limited control, is their ‘constant source of power’. The glow is something ‘the medium can not completely hold or integrate’. The glow causes ‘a blurring, a failure creating an excess of sadness, turning the photographic object, a piece of paper, like a bottle, holding the light of a hundred years ago, into an object of meditation on time, on mortality, the sadness of light surviving the object from which it emanated, the image, in this production of excess, turning, spilling into language.’ This from pages 47 and 48.
If I hadn’t have noted these quotations in my Moleskine, I might well have forgotten them. The book, once devoured, would have been returned to the pile of other books waiting to be read and re-read, and I would have only this vague recollection of having been moved and impressed by an idea, soon forgotton, that spurred me on, helping me to say what I need to say, still unsaid.
Yet also, I feel that the notebook slows me down, defeats the apparent pleasure of reading, which is to read, to move forward today unhindered by questions, by doubts and by a third thing for rhetoric’s sake. Thinking, reflecting, writing, are perhaps excesses of reading. It spills into more language.
I’m reading Murat Nemet-Nejat’s beautiful little book The Peripheral Space of Photography, discovered in a remaindered shop last week. It's an edition so small that it won’t peek out of your back pocket (if you put it there). This also means recovering the desired quotation won’t take so long. For instance, ‘Photography is … a medium of reflection (reflection as image and as thought), intimately related to language’. That’s on page 10. But this was in fact noted down. I felt that it might lead me to understand why photography as an art form compels my interest. Some, like Roger Scruton, would argue that it isn’t an art form. Yet this uncertainty is perhaps precisely why it seems vital.
A chapter on light in 19th century photographs is particularly good. Nemet-Nejat says it is that each photograph from this era seems, from our perspective of technical mastery, slightly overexposed. So why do they have a power signally lacking (I believe) in 19th century literature? ‘The glow is a combination of lack and excess, lack because the reflection from the medium (the negative) is not perfect, and excess, the excess of light glow, trapped in, emanating from the print.’ The glow is, then, ‘a sign of the insufficiency of the medium. This insufficiency defines it.’
Insufficiency. Hardly what we expect from a powerful work of art! Few people would call Dickens’ representation of the same world insufficient. Yet perhaps this is where it lacks. The insufficiency of the medium is masked rather than revealed by an excess. It’s what Kafka called the ‘heartlessness behind [Dickens’] sentimentally overflowing style’. Without his ‘rude characterisations which are artificially stamped on everyone’, the great writer ‘would not be able to get on with his story even for a moment’ (Diaries, 8th October 1917). One can easily be seduced by this style, but only because it is the seduction of solipsism.
Nemet-Nejat says the excess of light in 19th Century photographs, over which the photographers had limited control, is their ‘constant source of power’. The glow is something ‘the medium can not completely hold or integrate’. The glow causes ‘a blurring, a failure creating an excess of sadness, turning the photographic object, a piece of paper, like a bottle, holding the light of a hundred years ago, into an object of meditation on time, on mortality, the sadness of light surviving the object from which it emanated, the image, in this production of excess, turning, spilling into language.’ This from pages 47 and 48.
If I hadn’t have noted these quotations in my Moleskine, I might well have forgotten them. The book, once devoured, would have been returned to the pile of other books waiting to be read and re-read, and I would have only this vague recollection of having been moved and impressed by an idea, soon forgotton, that spurred me on, helping me to say what I need to say, still unsaid.
Yet also, I feel that the notebook slows me down, defeats the apparent pleasure of reading, which is to read, to move forward today unhindered by questions, by doubts and by a third thing for rhetoric’s sake. Thinking, reflecting, writing, are perhaps excesses of reading. It spills into more language.
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
At home with the Kafkas
Reading this very enjoyable extract from the forthcoming biography of Kafka by Reiner Stach, I wondered why I am drawn to read every biography of Kafka. I know the scene the extract covers: Kafka’s noisy homelife; his nausea at the sight of the rumpled bedsheets in his parents’ room. It's all very familiar, yet I can’t wait to read it again in book form. The table of contents whets my appetite even more, particularly the chapter on the visit to Weimar, just before he wrote The Judgement.
Perhaps I should worry that biographies of writers tempt the fallacy of biographical readings. Having read so many biographies of Kafka, I must be wide open to that temptation! But, you know, my literary criticism has nothing to do with my life.
Anyway, rather than biography bringing the author and work closer together, it makes them even more distinct. This is why I like reading them; the same thing over and over. It brings the distance to life.
Perhaps I should worry that biographies of writers tempt the fallacy of biographical readings. Having read so many biographies of Kafka, I must be wide open to that temptation! But, you know, my literary criticism has nothing to do with my life.
Anyway, rather than biography bringing the author and work closer together, it makes them even more distinct. This is why I like reading them; the same thing over and over. It brings the distance to life.
Monday, October 03, 2005
I feel despair filter through me
Susan Hill tempts us with a rhetorical question: Try to think of a great novel that does not have a story, memorable characters, vividly evoked settings.
Her own 'random list' of great novels prompts a question to myself: do I want to read great novels?
The first question is raised in a report on the 3,741 manuscripts Hill received after setting up Long Barn Books (a subsidiary to Pear Tree Productions?). She hasn’t been impressed by the quality: “Most of the hopefuls ought to be doing anything but try to write. Most seemed to have written the same (bad) novel.”
It didn’t take her long to see a pattern:
Most of the worst novels were written in the first person narrative present tense. "I open one eye. My eyeball hurts. I look around a dim room strewn with unwashed plates, dirty cups, stained underwear. I feel despair filter through me. I do not know where I am."
Reads like the opening of Swann’s Way as rewritten by Michel Houellebecq!
My first reaction was one of embarrassment for the people who write this kind of stuff, and disappointment that they haven’t thought through what it means to write fiction. And then I thought: actually, I feel this embarrassment and disappointment reading the opening lines of most published novels from which I read extracts or browse in the library.
Yet Hill says in order to be published, it is essential that a writer has “some sense of what makes a novel appeal to readers”. She thinks the fault of her hopeless hopefuls is to write fiction as "self-therapy". She equates it with those of us for whom commercial success is a by-product rather than an aim. “If you despise commerce in general or believe literature should be outside and above it” she says “the only thing to do is put up your books to be read free on the internet.”
Like our journalism perhaps? Anyway, to paraphrase Jung on the existence of God, I do not believe that literature should be outside or above commerce, I know it is.
There’s something unspoken here that seems to be troubling Hill. It seems to be a fear that literature is selfish, solipsistic even, but that this mustn’t be admitted. The pretence is the achievement. The pretence is the craft. Yet perhaps all those naïve writers, by trying to draw fiction into the voiceless, private world of the self, are unwittingly expressing the failure of fiction; a failure a craftswoman like Hill sees as a success. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that she also writes childrens' books.
If my suspicion is right, her fear is unnecessary. Writing is already public. Your diary is as public as The Da Vinci Code; even if is read by no-one, not even you, its keeper. Hence my embarrassment and disappointment with those who fail to notice the bottomless crevasse between oneself and writing. The crevasse is everything (and nothing).
Hill alludes to the impossibility of the problem when she says that “a love of writing books should spring from a love of reading”. Indeed, but one loves reading for the reason one hates it. It's out there. It resists.
Her own 'random list' of great novels prompts a question to myself: do I want to read great novels?
The first question is raised in a report on the 3,741 manuscripts Hill received after setting up Long Barn Books (a subsidiary to Pear Tree Productions?). She hasn’t been impressed by the quality: “Most of the hopefuls ought to be doing anything but try to write. Most seemed to have written the same (bad) novel.”
It didn’t take her long to see a pattern:
Most of the worst novels were written in the first person narrative present tense. "I open one eye. My eyeball hurts. I look around a dim room strewn with unwashed plates, dirty cups, stained underwear. I feel despair filter through me. I do not know where I am."
Reads like the opening of Swann’s Way as rewritten by Michel Houellebecq!
My first reaction was one of embarrassment for the people who write this kind of stuff, and disappointment that they haven’t thought through what it means to write fiction. And then I thought: actually, I feel this embarrassment and disappointment reading the opening lines of most published novels from which I read extracts or browse in the library.
Yet Hill says in order to be published, it is essential that a writer has “some sense of what makes a novel appeal to readers”. She thinks the fault of her hopeless hopefuls is to write fiction as "self-therapy". She equates it with those of us for whom commercial success is a by-product rather than an aim. “If you despise commerce in general or believe literature should be outside and above it” she says “the only thing to do is put up your books to be read free on the internet.”
Like our journalism perhaps? Anyway, to paraphrase Jung on the existence of God, I do not believe that literature should be outside or above commerce, I know it is.
There’s something unspoken here that seems to be troubling Hill. It seems to be a fear that literature is selfish, solipsistic even, but that this mustn’t be admitted. The pretence is the achievement. The pretence is the craft. Yet perhaps all those naïve writers, by trying to draw fiction into the voiceless, private world of the self, are unwittingly expressing the failure of fiction; a failure a craftswoman like Hill sees as a success. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that she also writes childrens' books.
If my suspicion is right, her fear is unnecessary. Writing is already public. Your diary is as public as The Da Vinci Code; even if is read by no-one, not even you, its keeper. Hence my embarrassment and disappointment with those who fail to notice the bottomless crevasse between oneself and writing. The crevasse is everything (and nothing).
Hill alludes to the impossibility of the problem when she says that “a love of writing books should spring from a love of reading”. Indeed, but one loves reading for the reason one hates it. It's out there. It resists.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Milestones: a first anniversary post
It was this day in 2004 when this blog began. To mark it, I shall break from tradition and write about … books. Had you worried there.
Bookworld recently took up a challenge to write about the books which "have shaped, or even defined, the reader". How can one resist such a challenge? Yes, it would easy for me to join in. However, regular readers can guess what authors I am bound to select. The list in the last entry would cover it, in terms of authors at least. So I thought I’d do something different.
When I began reading (circa 1985), I looked everywhere for what I was looking for. Guidance came mainly through reviews and events such as the Booker Prize (though it didn’t take me long to get disillusioned!).
Elsewhere I’ve written about patiently and perplexedly going through JG Ballard’s back catalogue after I had read an article in the New Musical Express. And thinking back to that time, I recall reading a novel that was one of the greatest novels in the whole world ever, or something, so I read it. And that Malcolm Bradbury was hilarious, so I read Rates of Exchange. They were, to say the least, not what I was looking for. (I soon realised that the London newspapers were full of such middlebrow hyperbole).
I was also influenced by specific publishers. I thought Faber & Faber was fab because it published a book on my forthcoming list, so I was attracted to its books. Maggie Gee’s Light Years rather reversed that judgement. Eventually, my judgement became more discerning (I like to think). This list includes milestones along the way. I might have stopped and set up camp, but I no longer live there.
So, the list.
Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
First of all, this surname must be pronounced Kun-dur-uh. Death to those who say ‘Kun-dare-er’!
What drew me to this novel, of course, was its extraordinary title. I remember reaching for it on the library display in January 1986, the day of my birthday in fact. The book could easily have been like the movie: shallow and pretentious. And it probably got its notoriety anyway for its promiscuous sex and political sexiness rather than its literary daring. What made the book extra special for me - took it beyond the merely fashionable - was the way it began. Yes, there’s the opening section on Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence (which I didn’t understand), but more importantly for me there’s also the passage where Tomas is introduced looking out of a window, introduced, that is, looking out of a window as seen through the writer’s imagination; not as an obvious figment or a postmodern plaything, but a living presence who begins the narrative. This simple moment of honesty felt like a gift; the key to the door.
Noam Chomsky: Turning the Tide
I used to make a round cycle journey of eight miles to visit the nearest-town-to-my-town’s library. When Robert Wyatt mentioned (in another NME article) that he was reading Noam Chomsky, I looked him up despite my conservative assumptions. Turning the Tide, subtitled United States Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace was new on these shelves. Nowadays his books are everywhere but then, only here. It was more than a political realignment. What Chomsky did for me was to compare word and action. The result was an unexpected juxtaposition revealing that, in the case of those who had influenced me until that point, one obliterated the other. Everyone around me began to speak in code. In political terms, one can hear it everyday. The invasion of Iraq was ‘a mistake’, for example, or President Bush’s delayed response to Hurricane Katrina was ‘a mistake’. Both of these ignore the quite deliberate rationale for each: both invasion and delay were done to enable Bush to carve the reconstruction up among his corporate sponsors. For Katrina, see this article. No mistake at all. Apparent criticism of power, then, is seen to be really the profoundest kind of support. In literary terms, one way among many that we can see this in action is in the infantilisation of novels – symbolised by the rise of JK Rowling. It’s the bad faith of people who read the most simplistic, reductionist fiction and then insist they do it only for escapist purposes when really it only reinforces the conditions from which they feel the need to escape, and to which they are also deeply wedded.
Henry James: The Beast in the Jungle
I don’t remember when I read this for the first time. Actually, it feels like I’ve never read it. In this way it’s like Blanchot’s Death Sentence, which coincidentally I’ve also read three times. This is perhaps because it’s a story that never really gets beyond its beginning. This isn’t a criticism! The stifling restraint of the relationship between John Marcher and May Bartram is matched by the way the story is told. Marcher’s misunderstanding of his fate – which is really also a terrible appreciation – is present also in the logic of our reading. We get to the end only to find the deep ravage is in the face of the other, not in the story. It is outside. We have held ourself apart in reading a book.
In the introduction to my story collection, the editors (including a pre-fame Tom Paulin) sneer at Marchers disdain for reality and his ‘retreat’ into a morbid imagination. They include the story for contrast. But really Marcher’s response is one of excessive respect for reality! He allows the mythical beast to dominate his life. His morbidity emerges in the projection of a world elsewhere. Instead, he needed to be more selfish. James is aware of the irony, hence the necessity of form and content: life always lives in the ironic denial of life.
Richard Ford: The Sportswriter
It still amazes me now. I read this novel three times in the late 80s. I also loved its successor Independence Day. Everything else Ford has written has left me non-plussed. What I liked here was the voice of failure seeking and refusing to seek. I liked the flatness of it all. It is a flatness that isn’t as smug and precious as in Raymond Carver’s stories. Apparently Ford is working on the third volume.
Colin Wilson: The Outsider
I have no memory of the content of this book except wondering why the Henri Barbusse novel it discusses wasn’t available. But it certainly excited me. I read dozens of Wilson’s other books, all of them products of cynical hack work and/or English philistinism. It embarrasses me to mention it.
Bookworld recently took up a challenge to write about the books which "have shaped, or even defined, the reader". How can one resist such a challenge? Yes, it would easy for me to join in. However, regular readers can guess what authors I am bound to select. The list in the last entry would cover it, in terms of authors at least. So I thought I’d do something different.
When I began reading (circa 1985), I looked everywhere for what I was looking for. Guidance came mainly through reviews and events such as the Booker Prize (though it didn’t take me long to get disillusioned!).
Elsewhere I’ve written about patiently and perplexedly going through JG Ballard’s back catalogue after I had read an article in the New Musical Express. And thinking back to that time, I recall reading a novel that was one of the greatest novels in the whole world ever, or something, so I read it. And that Malcolm Bradbury was hilarious, so I read Rates of Exchange. They were, to say the least, not what I was looking for. (I soon realised that the London newspapers were full of such middlebrow hyperbole).
I was also influenced by specific publishers. I thought Faber & Faber was fab because it published a book on my forthcoming list, so I was attracted to its books. Maggie Gee’s Light Years rather reversed that judgement. Eventually, my judgement became more discerning (I like to think). This list includes milestones along the way. I might have stopped and set up camp, but I no longer live there.
So, the list.
Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
First of all, this surname must be pronounced Kun-dur-uh. Death to those who say ‘Kun-dare-er’!
What drew me to this novel, of course, was its extraordinary title. I remember reaching for it on the library display in January 1986, the day of my birthday in fact. The book could easily have been like the movie: shallow and pretentious. And it probably got its notoriety anyway for its promiscuous sex and political sexiness rather than its literary daring. What made the book extra special for me - took it beyond the merely fashionable - was the way it began. Yes, there’s the opening section on Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence (which I didn’t understand), but more importantly for me there’s also the passage where Tomas is introduced looking out of a window, introduced, that is, looking out of a window as seen through the writer’s imagination; not as an obvious figment or a postmodern plaything, but a living presence who begins the narrative. This simple moment of honesty felt like a gift; the key to the door.
Noam Chomsky: Turning the Tide
I used to make a round cycle journey of eight miles to visit the nearest-town-to-my-town’s library. When Robert Wyatt mentioned (in another NME article) that he was reading Noam Chomsky, I looked him up despite my conservative assumptions. Turning the Tide, subtitled United States Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace was new on these shelves. Nowadays his books are everywhere but then, only here. It was more than a political realignment. What Chomsky did for me was to compare word and action. The result was an unexpected juxtaposition revealing that, in the case of those who had influenced me until that point, one obliterated the other. Everyone around me began to speak in code. In political terms, one can hear it everyday. The invasion of Iraq was ‘a mistake’, for example, or President Bush’s delayed response to Hurricane Katrina was ‘a mistake’. Both of these ignore the quite deliberate rationale for each: both invasion and delay were done to enable Bush to carve the reconstruction up among his corporate sponsors. For Katrina, see this article. No mistake at all. Apparent criticism of power, then, is seen to be really the profoundest kind of support. In literary terms, one way among many that we can see this in action is in the infantilisation of novels – symbolised by the rise of JK Rowling. It’s the bad faith of people who read the most simplistic, reductionist fiction and then insist they do it only for escapist purposes when really it only reinforces the conditions from which they feel the need to escape, and to which they are also deeply wedded.
Henry James: The Beast in the Jungle
I don’t remember when I read this for the first time. Actually, it feels like I’ve never read it. In this way it’s like Blanchot’s Death Sentence, which coincidentally I’ve also read three times. This is perhaps because it’s a story that never really gets beyond its beginning. This isn’t a criticism! The stifling restraint of the relationship between John Marcher and May Bartram is matched by the way the story is told. Marcher’s misunderstanding of his fate – which is really also a terrible appreciation – is present also in the logic of our reading. We get to the end only to find the deep ravage is in the face of the other, not in the story. It is outside. We have held ourself apart in reading a book.
In the introduction to my story collection, the editors (including a pre-fame Tom Paulin) sneer at Marchers disdain for reality and his ‘retreat’ into a morbid imagination. They include the story for contrast. But really Marcher’s response is one of excessive respect for reality! He allows the mythical beast to dominate his life. His morbidity emerges in the projection of a world elsewhere. Instead, he needed to be more selfish. James is aware of the irony, hence the necessity of form and content: life always lives in the ironic denial of life.
Richard Ford: The Sportswriter
It still amazes me now. I read this novel three times in the late 80s. I also loved its successor Independence Day. Everything else Ford has written has left me non-plussed. What I liked here was the voice of failure seeking and refusing to seek. I liked the flatness of it all. It is a flatness that isn’t as smug and precious as in Raymond Carver’s stories. Apparently Ford is working on the third volume.
Colin Wilson: The Outsider
I have no memory of the content of this book except wondering why the Henri Barbusse novel it discusses wasn’t available. But it certainly excited me. I read dozens of Wilson’s other books, all of them products of cynical hack work and/or English philistinism. It embarrasses me to mention it.
Friday, September 23, 2005
Multiple volume madness
Because of Book World's post, because of Golden Rule Jones' post, I am posting a list of multiple volumes in my collection by or about single authors. It was difficult to compile as mine is not an orderly collection; I was always discovering additions in neglected locations. Cut-off point is double figures.
Franz Kafka - 28
Maurice Blanchot - 26
Dante - 25
Proust - 24
Gabriel Josipovici - 24
Thomas Bernhard - 20
Beckett - 20
Kierkegaard - 18
Heidegger - 16
Walter Benjamin - 16
Nietzsche - 16
Saul Bellow - 14
Peter Handke - 12
Aharon Appelfeld - 10
I would own more of Handke if the English-speaking publishing industry was half-decent (and had I not lost two novels), and far more Gert Hofmann if, indeed, there were more. Same with Celan.
What surprises me is not the amount of Heidegger and Kierkegaard, neither of whom I've read very much, but that of the 29 authors listed by Book World, I share only 9 (not necessarily from those above), and of the 36 listed by GRJ, I share only 10.
Finally, many might be astounded and appalled that not one woman author appears above. I think four is the maximum, by Rosalind Belben. But I am utterly indifferent :)
Franz Kafka - 28
Maurice Blanchot - 26
Dante - 25
Proust - 24
Gabriel Josipovici - 24
Thomas Bernhard - 20
Beckett - 20
Kierkegaard - 18
Heidegger - 16
Walter Benjamin - 16
Nietzsche - 16
Saul Bellow - 14
Peter Handke - 12
Aharon Appelfeld - 10
I would own more of Handke if the English-speaking publishing industry was half-decent (and had I not lost two novels), and far more Gert Hofmann if, indeed, there were more. Same with Celan.
What surprises me is not the amount of Heidegger and Kierkegaard, neither of whom I've read very much, but that of the 29 authors listed by Book World, I share only 9 (not necessarily from those above), and of the 36 listed by GRJ, I share only 10.
Finally, many might be astounded and appalled that not one woman author appears above. I think four is the maximum, by Rosalind Belben. But I am utterly indifferent :)
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Entering a world of pain
At work this afternoon I was asked to read part of a book in preparation for an imminent project. The book was left on my desk. I was horrified. The mere sight of Stephen R. Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People sent shivers of revulsion down my spine. A few weeks ago I had seen an advert for Anthony Robbins, of whom I had been blissfully unaware until that point. Anyone who pronounces the ‘th’ in Anthony has to be prick anyway, but the idea that success is, by turns, and all at once, square-jawed, fist-pumping and (to go by his ‘tribute’ to the hurricane victims) cloyingly insincere, sickened me. So I handled Covey’s tome with distaste. And I thought: anyone who uses the initial of their middle name …
Anyway, I looked first at the paratexts. I see it was published in 1989 and has sold 15 millon copies. Then there was the biography: Covey was once named one of Time magazine’s twenty-five most influential Americans. (Who then, I wondered, were the other twenty-four of Covey's time? JR Ewing? OJ Simpson? Michael Jackson? Ted Bundy? Mork & Mindy?). Then there’s some extraordinarily indulgent acknowlegdements, and a picture of Covey at a conference. Yes, in the Robbins mould: smart suit, ultra-cleancut, in control with microphone and humanising wooden staff in hand. At this point, I wondered about how one manages one's time in order to write a self-help book on time management? Such glorious reflexivity! I daydreamed of a joint-smoking layabout, like The Dude in The Big Lebowski, rocking back in a chair in a messy office doddling incomprehensible diagrams in between tossing off jargon-ridden paragraphs headed by epigrams swiped from the web.
These were a nice few moments of smiling vacantly. But onward and sideways: I opened to the relevant section of the book. The epigram was enough to stop me in my tracks. It is from that well-known management consultant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
Things which matter most
Must never be at the mercy of things which matter least
OK. The first question I asked was: what matters most to me? Is it writing? I have many things I want to write for sure, but is it the most important? Maybe I need find time to think about it? Time needs to be found to write a blog in response to Book World’s challenge. Time also needs to be found for non-writing domestic things, such as re-installing the wireless router I bought this week. Probably not a good purchase for a technophobe. It's gone horribly wrong. And there’s more: time needs to be found to continue the longer writing project that currently relies on the haphazard arrangements of casual employment. Actually, this last is perhaps what matters most. A longer work should surely take priority over the daily distraction of a blog. Arrogant eternity demands it!
Yet it could also matter least. I've finished it three times and abandoned it three times. What is the point of spending hundreds of hours working on something to be read by nobody? I might have spent the time more productively writing hundreds of blindingly good blogs! (It would be good to start somewhere).
There are too many questions begged by these self-help books. Too many to go into tonight. Anyway, after 2040 every day, I look at the wall for an hour and dribble.
And there’s that caesura in the Goethe quotation: it suggests that it is from a poem or a play, which itself suggests it isn't Goethe's personal opinion. So where does it come from? Who says it? Could it be the devil in Faust?
Anyway, I looked first at the paratexts. I see it was published in 1989 and has sold 15 millon copies. Then there was the biography: Covey was once named one of Time magazine’s twenty-five most influential Americans. (Who then, I wondered, were the other twenty-four of Covey's time? JR Ewing? OJ Simpson? Michael Jackson? Ted Bundy? Mork & Mindy?). Then there’s some extraordinarily indulgent acknowlegdements, and a picture of Covey at a conference. Yes, in the Robbins mould: smart suit, ultra-cleancut, in control with microphone and humanising wooden staff in hand. At this point, I wondered about how one manages one's time in order to write a self-help book on time management? Such glorious reflexivity! I daydreamed of a joint-smoking layabout, like The Dude in The Big Lebowski, rocking back in a chair in a messy office doddling incomprehensible diagrams in between tossing off jargon-ridden paragraphs headed by epigrams swiped from the web.
These were a nice few moments of smiling vacantly. But onward and sideways: I opened to the relevant section of the book. The epigram was enough to stop me in my tracks. It is from that well-known management consultant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
Things which matter most
Must never be at the mercy of things which matter least
OK. The first question I asked was: what matters most to me? Is it writing? I have many things I want to write for sure, but is it the most important? Maybe I need find time to think about it? Time needs to be found to write a blog in response to Book World’s challenge. Time also needs to be found for non-writing domestic things, such as re-installing the wireless router I bought this week. Probably not a good purchase for a technophobe. It's gone horribly wrong. And there’s more: time needs to be found to continue the longer writing project that currently relies on the haphazard arrangements of casual employment. Actually, this last is perhaps what matters most. A longer work should surely take priority over the daily distraction of a blog. Arrogant eternity demands it!
Yet it could also matter least. I've finished it three times and abandoned it three times. What is the point of spending hundreds of hours working on something to be read by nobody? I might have spent the time more productively writing hundreds of blindingly good blogs! (It would be good to start somewhere).
There are too many questions begged by these self-help books. Too many to go into tonight. Anyway, after 2040 every day, I look at the wall for an hour and dribble.
And there’s that caesura in the Goethe quotation: it suggests that it is from a poem or a play, which itself suggests it isn't Goethe's personal opinion. So where does it come from? Who says it? Could it be the devil in Faust?
Sunday, September 18, 2005
The sorrow of living
I was told they’d come in the afternoon to pick up the clapped-out washing machine. So at midday, when afternoon begins, though I’m sure they meant one o’clock, I was indoors waiting for the buzzer to sound, just waiting. Four hours later, I was still there. Each successive moment might have brung that urgent electronic exclamation. I had to be there. I had to sit and wait. Each new moment, however, was as silent as the rest.
From the armchair, as I waited, I looked at the bookshelves. Too many unread and, more importantly, never-to-be-read books! So I decided to pass the time by putting my books through a selection parade. One pile to keep, one pile for Oxfam. I put the first book, a book about Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra, on the Oxfam pile. I have not read Also Sprach Zarathustra let alone this. I remember standing in a secondhand bookshop and wondering whether to buy it. One often buys books out of hope. One day, one will have time to read all that is necessary. One day, everything will come together. Now, six years later, that hope must be abandoned. I will not read a single page. I know this. There are loads of other such books; so many futures to be dissolved.
The next book to be judged was Jorge Semprun’s autobiographical narrative Literature or Life. Actually, I read this eight years ago when it appeared in the university library. I bought the paperback in 1999 because it was so impressive. But I never read it again. The covers feel like soft blackboards smeared with chalk and, worse, the opening pages appalled me. I didn’t recognise the book. Second time round it came across as mannered and smug. This time, I had another look. The Oxfam selection process was abandoned. I’ve now read two-thirds of its 310 pages. For sure, it's still mannered and smug, but there is gravity too.
Semprun was a Rotspanier, the label applied to him as a Spanish political prisoner at Buchenwald. He had been arrested as a resistance fighter in occupied France and deported. Before the arrest, he had also been a student at the Sorbonne, reading philosophy. He says he went without meals to buy Heidegger’s Being & Time after being inspired by Levinas’ essays. A good deal of the book is informed by such thinkers. He is much taken with the lines in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: ‘Death is not an event in life. Death cannot be lived.’ He is taken because, after Buchenwald, he felt that he had in fact lived through death.
Literature or Life was originally published in 1994 as L’ecriture ou la vie, which perhaps should be Writing or Life. That’s the choice Semprun had to make after a terrible discovery. Once the camp was liberated, he returned to Paris and began to write and live again. Just as you might expect. He found that his ‘crazed, ravaged gaze’ attracted women and he used it ‘without scruple’.
Clearly by the time these lines were written, the need to forget had dissipated. But the book infuriates because the narration is deliberately self-distracting. Reading it is like trying to keep up with a fast walker who is also talking a blue streak. Even now, nearly 50 years later, Semprun approaches his memories only in occasional glances over the shoulder of time. He learnt his lesson in Paris. ‘I should have been more wary, that night’ he says. ‘I shouldn’t have ignored the portents of le malheur de vivre. The sorrow of living.’
Which reminds me: back to the selection process!
From the armchair, as I waited, I looked at the bookshelves. Too many unread and, more importantly, never-to-be-read books! So I decided to pass the time by putting my books through a selection parade. One pile to keep, one pile for Oxfam. I put the first book, a book about Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra, on the Oxfam pile. I have not read Also Sprach Zarathustra let alone this. I remember standing in a secondhand bookshop and wondering whether to buy it. One often buys books out of hope. One day, one will have time to read all that is necessary. One day, everything will come together. Now, six years later, that hope must be abandoned. I will not read a single page. I know this. There are loads of other such books; so many futures to be dissolved.
The next book to be judged was Jorge Semprun’s autobiographical narrative Literature or Life. Actually, I read this eight years ago when it appeared in the university library. I bought the paperback in 1999 because it was so impressive. But I never read it again. The covers feel like soft blackboards smeared with chalk and, worse, the opening pages appalled me. I didn’t recognise the book. Second time round it came across as mannered and smug. This time, I had another look. The Oxfam selection process was abandoned. I’ve now read two-thirds of its 310 pages. For sure, it's still mannered and smug, but there is gravity too.
Semprun was a Rotspanier, the label applied to him as a Spanish political prisoner at Buchenwald. He had been arrested as a resistance fighter in occupied France and deported. Before the arrest, he had also been a student at the Sorbonne, reading philosophy. He says he went without meals to buy Heidegger’s Being & Time after being inspired by Levinas’ essays. A good deal of the book is informed by such thinkers. He is much taken with the lines in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: ‘Death is not an event in life. Death cannot be lived.’ He is taken because, after Buchenwald, he felt that he had in fact lived through death.
Literature or Life was originally published in 1994 as L’ecriture ou la vie, which perhaps should be Writing or Life. That’s the choice Semprun had to make after a terrible discovery. Once the camp was liberated, he returned to Paris and began to write and live again. Just as you might expect. He found that his ‘crazed, ravaged gaze’ attracted women and he used it ‘without scruple’.
Without scruple, most certainly, but not without some apprehension. Because each of these encounters, each of these adventures, pleasant though they were, revived the pain of memory for me. Each one of them reminded me of what I wanted to forget: death, whose shining darkness was the source of these pleasures.Writing had the same double edge.
All through the summer of my return, through autumn, up to the sunny winter’s day … when I decided to abandon the book I was trying to write, the two things I had thought would bind me to life - writing, pleasure - were instead what estranged me from it, day after day, constantly returning me to the memory of death, forcing me back into the suffocation of that memory.Paris is full of such memories of death, the dark side of Proustian reverie. He sleeps in an apartment with furniture wrapped in white winding sheets. During the night he wakes in a cold sweat, biting his clenched fists to keep from screaming. ‘Only forgetting could save me’ he writes.
Clearly by the time these lines were written, the need to forget had dissipated. But the book infuriates because the narration is deliberately self-distracting. Reading it is like trying to keep up with a fast walker who is also talking a blue streak. Even now, nearly 50 years later, Semprun approaches his memories only in occasional glances over the shoulder of time. He learnt his lesson in Paris. ‘I should have been more wary, that night’ he says. ‘I shouldn’t have ignored the portents of le malheur de vivre. The sorrow of living.’
Which reminds me: back to the selection process!
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