Odd content

A discomforting reading experience is re-reading a favourite novel, one I've already read a few times, only to discover something unexpected, something that fades its aura of formal perfection. Example: Thomas Bernhard's Concrete. On page 67 the narrator Rudolf visits Niederkreut, a veteran Cavalry Officer from the First World War. Soon talk turns to Niederkreut's Will. The old man explains that he intends to leave his fortune to a name chosen at random from the London telephone directory.

I open it at random ... and with my eyes closed, I put the index finger of my right hand at a certain spot. When I opened my eyes I found that the tip of my finger was resting on the name Sarah Slother. I don't know who Sarah Slother is - her address is 128 Knightsbridge.

While the name is only odd and the address plausible (Knightsbridge is a road as well as a district), it appears to me as a false note. Perhaps I should regard it as Reger regards the flaws he seeks in Old Masters in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum: an imperfection necessary to art. But I'd rather it wasn't there. Any other examples?

A different kind of success

The Sharp Side tells the seductive story of Rimbaud the modern poet, the story he sought to end:

The inner logic of modernism is silence. But whereas almost all modernists attempt to write about their engagement with that logic, seeking out 'a different kind of failure', Rimbaud accepted it. He gave up on literature.

Well, to paraphrase that old rejoinder to people who say they are not interested in politics, Maurice Blanchot says literature is interested in Rimbaud's silence. The silence depends on an interest in literature; indeed the most passionate interest and engagement in the promise of communication offered by literature.

Rimbaud's abandonment of poetry is, it seems, his supreme literary act. And he's a modernist first and foremost because literature mattered to him; mattered enough to provoke such a revolt.

I've quoted from Blanchot's essay before and, having forgotten about it until reminded by Google, wish to quote from it again. The wish is due not to Rimbaud's poetry - with which I'm not familiar - but with a preoccupation with what is revealed by literature; what it promises to reveal and the contradictions this preoccupation evokes.

Blanchot discusses the contradictory movements of A Season in Hell and Illuminations, asserting in typically paradoxical fashion that though the latter may have been written last, they are anterior to the former. The poems of Illuminations, he writes, have as their movement the most direct and most decisive attraction toward a possible centre; a lightening flash that in illuminating draws back to its originary site.

The Season on the other hand, a simultaneous affirmation of all the contradictory positions held to and an ordeal undergone with the most acute contrariety, is the experience of a thought driven and expulsed from its centre; a centre it discovers to be 'the impossible' and to which it draws impossibly near, precisely in the divergence that pushes it away, dispersed, toward the outside.

The impossible being everything we want literature to reveal, the centre to which we wish to draw closer. By not writing, Rimbaud merely approached the centre differently; in part by imposing silence on his work to the utmost degree. Is it ironic that our fascination with this silence demands that we break it?

Links that get longer

"Some of us cannot help but follow the natural rhythm of what we enjoy doing." Ed Champion writes movingly about his famous blog in connection with a shamefully edited book.

Dinah Burch tells us that Arthur Conan Doyle was a "founder member of Portsmouth Football Association Club's team" and that "he also played cricket well into middle age. Other ventures" however "were more serious". What on earth could be more serious than Portsmouth Football Club?

James Longenbach reviews the Hollanders' new translation of Dante's Paradiso. He calls it a "clear, untroubled guide" but then says "if you want to read a poem ... then you're wise to revert to the blank verse translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1867) or the terza rima translation by Laurence Binyon (1933)." I'm not sure if this is wise. Apart from the content, what caused me to feel that Dante was my poet and not some "great" I had to read to gain intellectual brownie points, was the relatively simple or colloquial language used by the modern translators. Such antiquated versions lack the exigency of Dante's journey. Of course, Dante broke with tradition himself by writing in the vernacular; hence perhaps the need for new translations. And you know, Christmas isn't far off.

Sickening words

I can't forget Ted Hughes' private comments about how he believed writing prose had weakened his immune system. No matter how nutty it seems when the connection is made so plain, I can't help but imagine language has a physical power. A friend once referred to my *visceral* response to novels, the way novels are written; on a sentence-by-sentence level and by the framing - or lack of it - of the narrative. Visceral seems right. It's why I tend to stop reading literary novels after a few lines. It's also why I'm suspicious of genre fiction, because it relies on conventional elisions to maintain itself rather than by undoing the elision.

It's also why I've stopped following the news, if I can help it. The other day, the morning news headline on BBC Radio 5 was that President Musharraf of Pakistan had gone on TV "to explain why he had introduced emergency rule". So the story is not about his latest assault on democracy but whether or not he is right or wrong; that is, whether there is an "emergency" or not. Compare the respect and calm on this with the hysteria displayed when a re-elected leader removed a seditious, coup-plotting TV station from terrestrial availability.

There are examples daily. This, again from the BBC: "Civilians have often been the victims of the violence in Afghanistan - not only in attacks by insurgents, but also in strikes by the foreign NATO and US forces in the country." Of course, there's a subtle difference between an "attack" and a "strike", but not one the victims can detect.

Fresh air from France

Lucy Dallas' wonderful review of five French literary novels published recently gives a enticing flavour of a parallel universe; so different from the stifling conservatism of the British scene. I wonder what the Booker committee would make of Louise Desbrusses's Couronnes, boucliers, armures? It tells the story of two sisters, neither of whom are named (which is a fine start):

The novel is structured round three main episodes ... during the course of a large family celebration. The narrative voice hovers around the two sisters and captures their thoughts; the language is richly worked and dense. Desbrusses inverts word order and uses repetition and rhyme, which gives the text an almost poetic quality. The claustrophobic, hostile nature of the family's obsessions and prejudices is revealed little by little...

The central subject of each of the ten chapters of another of the novels is "a discarded shoe". As the reviewer says: It may take only two hours by train from London, but Paris is still a world away.

Gray vistas

A friend has been reading John Gray lately, and has told me the book he was reading, while generally unremarkable, is also full of statements that are either fatuous or just plain wrong. An academic, I was told, should be ashamed of writing such things. Until today I hadn't read anything by Gray but wood s lot links to his review of a biography of John Cowper Powys, who has, he says, "an intensity reminiscent of Proust".

As in Proust, Powys's central protagonists are introverted, almost solipsistic figures, who find relief from the sense of being 'contingent, mediocre, mortal' in sudden epiphanies, which they try to preserve in memory. However, whereas Proust's epiphanies occur always indoors in a self-enclosed human world, Powys's were found in the open fields and coastal vistas of his native Dorset - a more-than-human landscape that frames his greatest novels.

So, we can only assume the car that nearly knocks Marcel down in the Guermantes' courtyard, causing him to step back sharply on the uneven paving-stones and to experience another epiphany, was driving indoors.

Individual acts of reckoning

When you consider how the work of bloggers echoes the more-or-less personal essays of Samuel Johnson, Charles Lamb, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, or Joan Didion, you can see how the individual act of reckoning the world through writing poses many of the same challenges as literary creation, and also provides a foundation for substantial political and philosophical debates.

Joseph Kugelmass expresses something I've long suspected. His post is part of a series on academic blogging, mentioning me along the way. He says I write "in a style reminiscent of the great literary reviews of the 20s and 30s". Which is nice. I've not yet read any reviews from that era! And I'm not quite sure if it is understood that I am not an academic. But I'm open to job offers ...

Relating to another

In A world about to be lost The Existence Machine has followed up a superb post on the work of Gabriel Josipovici with a response to On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion, in particular the chapter on Shakespeare.

These links remind me that I should have posted one to Ismo Santala's review of Josipovici's novel The Inventory nearly 40 years after its publication! But it's more than a review; it's a call to the act of creation.

For a more recent work, the first issue of The International Literary Quarterly has a very short piece He Contemplates a Photo in a Newspaper. Among many others, there's also work by Lydia Davis and Daniel Gunn.

Finally, news has arrived that a play by Peter Handke - an author I happen to know Josipovici admires - is scheduled for its British premiere: The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other from 1992 requires 25 actors to play 450 characters. Oh, and there's no dialogue. The director says:

The script is a long, beautifully written stage direction detailing life in a town. Handke's theory is that all stories are happening elsewhere. It's about how we don't relate to one another.