Tancredo Pavone's Six Sixty-Six

Musician John Harmer writes: "I read in Gabriel Josipovici's wonderful novel Infinity: The Story of a Moment about a piece composed by the fictional hero of the book Tancredo Pavone called Six Sixty-Six. I had to play it when I read about it."

Also available via Soundcloud, where you can read the relevant passage from the novel.

Light is the lion: My Struggle – Book 2 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

The focus of the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's six-book series My Struggle is in the foreground of its narrative and in the title of the UK edition – A Death in the Family – which for the book-devouring industry mitigated such a prolonged presentation of one man's relatively ordinary childhood and youth. And you can expect the content of the second – A Man in Love – to do the same: the author's romance, marriage and parenthood will occupy review coverage alongside doubts as to the value such indulgence has now that the initial hit has been absorbed. Isn’t this now going a bit too far? What purpose can repetition serve?

It should at least contradict the impression that My Struggle is a traditional bildungsroman, a genre in which the book we are reading is the vantage point from which all the missteps and miseries, all the highways and byways of the individual on his path to the summit, can be surveyed: the relief of a landscape. Knausgaard is not an old man; a knowing distance is not an option.

Archipelago Books’ bold decision to place the original title in the foreground of the US edition enables us to focus on what's key to Knausgaard's struggle: the background. After all, in terms of the writing there is little difference between volumes one and two: in both the prose is straightforward, the characters memorable and the chronology clear, even when Knausgaard interrupts a domestic cliffhanger to plummet back in time only to resolve the issue in one sentence 236 pages later. The writer himself vindicates the impression when he says the length and speed of the writing were important formal constraints. Let's be clear: My Struggle is not about the life of Karl Ove Knausgaard. The interminable specifics of the content are superficial necessities for an experiment in stretching the everyday to such a degree that it becomes translucent, for light of a kind to shine through.

Light is a constant in book two. When the writer falls in love “everything was light”; his new girlfriend was “filled with an inner light” and, when their daughter is born, “she was the light”. Light reveals something otherwise absent. He sees it elsewhere in the “endless summer nights, so light and open”. He sees it in his father-in-law’s face, so “utterly open; it was as though there was nothing between him and the world”. Too easily, the light fades and habit shadows his life. He sits on a balcony of an evening and ponders: “the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle.”

He turns to literature and reads Hölderlin’s poetry and Dostoevsky’s novels and discovers “that was where the light was. That was where the divine stirred”. Light and the divine were also the focus of the fictional speculations in Knausgaard’s remarkable novel A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven. As a child Antinous Bellori witnesses two angels at the riverside in a dark forest and spends the rest of his life pursuing the nature of their existence on earth. The task of My Struggle might be similar. Why does Knausgaard respond so powerfully to works art and literature? It wasn't always this way. The angel of poetry was once closed to him.

The poems looked into another reality, or saw reality in a different way, one that was truer than the way I knew, and the fact that it was not possible to acquire the ability to see and that it was something you either had or you didn’t condemned me to a life on a lower plane, indeed, it made me one of the lowly. The pain of that insight was immense.

This is perhaps a common experience if not a common revelation. Knausgaard realises it is “entirely possible to stay afloat in that world without literature ever opening up to you”, but he does not want to settle for this world. A Man in Love covers the same time as Knausgaard was writing the angels novel and it’s disconcerting to read of his determination to write at all costs; he is willing to sacrifice his marriage and family life in order to pursue the work. Clearly My Struggle follows the same personal imperative, only more explicitly. But in this personal element lies its danger. For the fictional Bellori, writing had conjoined the world with human concepts of the world rather than revealing the one beyond the other. “Christ never wrote”. The incarnation of divinity is abstracted by writing; literature takes possession of God. For Knausgaard, however, writing can resist this self-confirming circularity, and provides a precise example:

Paul Celan’s mysterious, cipher-like language has nothing to do with inaccessibility or closedness, quite the contrary, it is about opening up what language normally does not have access to but that we still, somewhere deep inside us, know or recognize, or if we don’t, allows us to discover. Paul Celan’s words cannot be contradicted with words. What they possess cannot be transformed either, the word only exists there, and in each and every single person who absorbs it.
      The fact that paintings and, to some extent, photographs were so important for me had something to do with this. They contained no words, no concepts, and when I looked at them what I experienced, what made them so important, was also nonconceptual. There was something stupid in this, an area that was completely devoid of intelligence, which I had difficulty acknowledging or accepting, yet which perhaps was the most important single element of what I wanted to do.

The danger here is revealed in the form: Knausgaard is merely describing this in essayistic fashion, and no matter how aware the author is of the contradictory direction he has taken, the familiar mode of discourse envelops the world, casts a shadow on the open. “Everyone can write essays! It’s the easiest thing in the world” his friend Geir complains. But Knausgaard is not a painter or photographer, and he certainly isn't Paul Celan. For this reason he must fill his books with the sensory particulars of existence – the storm blowing through our world, as he puts it – as a means of approaching the nonconceptual. So while Knausgaard contextualises and investigates his experience with exceptional clarity and intensity – which alone justifies My Struggle as a project – it is a struggle lost in advance. “Come on! Into the open, my friend, as Hölderlin had written ... But how, how?”.

A book review pursues the same circular path without asking the same question, tending to light upon statements and notable events as an alibi for disregarding the silence within writing. It is the regrettable fate of literary genre. Knausgaard’s method then is to use length and speed to evade the tyranny of form, and speed is the best method for the reader too, enough to appreciate that dwelling on the author's life and opinions is to close the door upon the light.

Across the Border: WG Sebald writes about Peter Handke

In Repetition, Handke allows the peculiar light which illuminates the space under a leafy canopy or a tent canvas to glisten between words, placed here with astounding caution and precision; in doing so, he succeeds in making the text into a sort of refuge amid the arid lands which, even in the culture industry, grow larger day by day.

WG Sebald's remarkable essay Across the Border, on Peter Handke's 1986 novel Die Wiederholung, translated by Ralph Manheim in 1989 as Repetition, has been made available in English by Cannon Magazine. You can download it as a PDF. Even better news is that The Last Books press is reissuing the translation later this year alongside Scott Abbott's translation of Handke's book-length poem To Duration, published in the same year.

This is especially gratifying for me as Handke was one of the first writers to reveal the potential for writing beyond the shameful lowlands of contemporary English literature, and Repetition one of the most rapturous reading experiences of my life. A quarter of a century or a day later, I tried to write about this in an essay. 

The consternation of philosophy: Exodus by Lars Iyer

So then, Lars Iyer's Exodus, the third in a trilogy of enchantingly morbid novels. Let me start by saying that a review might be the wrong response, heedless of how the form disarms the reader even as it provides generic options in which to contain what is otherwise a very odd book.

As readers of Spurious and Dogma will know – and will delight in the knowledge – this is a series in which monologic perorations, complaints and lamentations over the state of contemporary philosophy and the destruction of academic philosophy by the forces of capital constitute the bulk of its content. Impotent outrage propels the narrative. A review might then resort to judging specific qualities: how funny or sad one finds the overall effect (it is very funny and quite sad), how resourceful the writer is in the detail (inspiringly so), or how the book "succeeds" in whatever the reviewer has decided it seeks to achieve (I haven't decided yet), with some comparisons thrown in to demonstrate archival awareness: Laurel & Hardy, Waiting for Godot, Beavis & Butt-head. A trilogy of comparisons! And this is the thing: the trilogy itself operates in the light and shadow of such double acts, suggesting a certain generic inheritance and continuity. But not one of them features impassioned speeches featuring Kierkegaard, Franz Rosenzweig and Philip K. Dick's gnosticism. How does it inherit from them?

W. is an academic philosopher clinging to the hope that philosophy can be reborn, to live as it had once done according to the legends about which he declaims to his fat friend Lars, another academic philosopher: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze. Look to the gods of Old Europe, he cries. Except W. believes that Lars is not up to the task; he'll never produce an original idea to justify his position let alone soar to the heights of Old Europe. Quite the opposite in fact. W. says Lars is a prime example of what is wrong with contemporary thought: rampaging through the history of philosophy like a bull in a china shop, producing cliché and commentary to contaminate great thought with careerism. Meanwhile, W. has been sacked. For all of W.'s disgust, readers of Dogma will remember that it was he who charged Lars with recording everything he says and then reporting it to the post-apocalyptic world. Lars is thereby not only Plato to W.'s Socrates, Boswell to his Dr Johnson but also Theoderic to his Boethius, metaphorically throttling him at dawn.

In Exodus, as the title suggests, they go out into the world – well, towns and cities in England and Scotland – to attend conferences in an attempt to resist the decline and seek signs of renewal. Plymouth, Oxford, Colchester, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh. Except everything is told through Lars' reports: W.'s neurotic exclamations, demands and defeatism lard any sensuous presence in their locations. This is a novel in which only the Last Philosophers are described in their natural habitat. W. wants to imbibe the behaviour of his heroes, to become a method thinker. On a picnic, he insists they drink schnapps, specifically Aalborg akavit, which Kierkegaard might have drunk, and herrings and crispbread, which Kierkegaard might have eaten. Then the writing might start to open itself:

We begin with the finished product ... and we work our way back to the mind of the thinker who produced them. But not only to the mind! To the cultural world of the thinker; in this case, to the cultural world of nineteenth century Denmark. And to the physiognomy of the thinker; in this case a melancholy disposition, a heaviness of the soul. We must move from the outward to the inward, W. says. Only then, having reached the secret centre of the work, having come to its engine room so to speak, might we work our way back out again.

But would Kierkegaard ever have picnicked?

This then is a wandering in the outward. W. quotes Marx saying exactly this about his own generation, which must sacrifice itself for those who may be able to enter a new world free of capitalism. So, in order to renew philosophy, W. and Lars must sacrifice themselves, which might mean getting blind drunk on Aalborg akavit rather than studying Kierkegaard's complete works.

Of course, one mustn't start reading too soon. W. is adamant about that. One mustn't simply devour an oeuvre, tempting as it may be, the many-coloured spines of Kierkegaard's works in the Hong and Hong edition, lined up on my windowsill, as inviting as boiled sweets.
               One cannot just begin at page one, and then read one's way to the end, W. says. There must be a kind of pause before reading, a dwelling in the space opened by the fact of Kierkegaard, by the fact of his writing, by the fact that he lived.
              That Kierkegaard wrote: we should pause before that, mulling it over.

The Spurious Trilogy as it must now become known might be this pause before the fact of philosophy, revealed here as a pause itself, a dwelling inside this space of writing, the secret centre of all work. Perhaps this is the location of W.'s despair and why he asks Lars to record everything he says, knowing it too will fall into the silence of writing, a silence which only Lars can betray.

An everyday afterlife: Knausgaard revisited

A question arises from my breathless response to volume one of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: have I contradicted my exasperated review of David Shields’ Reality Hunger? At least, this is a question I ask myself. After all, as the author explained, this autobiographical work was written only when fiction failed him. He had published two novels but:

I wanted to write something completely different, and I wanted to write about my father ... About his fall, how he somehow changed from being a father, a perfectly ordinary teacher, a local politician, to a divorced, dead alcoholic. For three years I tried to write a kind of regular, realistic but fictional work about his death. Nothing worked. ... And [then] I started just writing it as it was: the truth, no artifice, no cleverness. Reality.

Perhaps my enthusiasm was relief at the abolition of the generic niceties that even the most impressive novels observe and, like David Shields, I mistook disillusionment for truth. Here was something elemental, I thought, the word Thomas Bernhard uses to describe Dostoevsky's The Demons after he had read the novel on his teenage deathbed. But, in my review of Reality Hunger, I argued that such reality cannot enter into the work without conforming to the pressure of the conceptual unity imposed by a book, and that writing plainly about plain things is no more a guarantee of realism than – following Wittgenstein – rain experienced in a dream is a guarantee of its wetness, even if it is connected to noise on the bedroom window.

Of course dream rain does mean something: meaning fills the dreamworld like sunlight, even when it is dark. We can only speculate on the meaning. This is our experience of dreams, and our speculation never feels quite enough, never proportionate to the generic purity of the dream. The quality of My Struggle I perceived is precisely a persistent analysis that maintains a propulsive force because it is aware that is never enough. Had Knausgaard written a regular, realistic novel instead, it might have appeared to be enough: a function of mastery and controlled distance, hence his writer's blockage and compulsion toward "no artifice, no cleverness". However, My Struggle is something other than reportage and the fundamental error of Reality Hunger is to conflate the aims of journalism with those of literature.

For this reason, Mark Thwaite makes a very good case for treating My Struggle as a novel, arguing that the relentless focus on “quotidian dreariness” is its method of seeking the meaning of its dream, to engage with the presence of “something numinous [that] lies just beyond sight, beneath grief, [what] lies always beyond language”. He aligns this to Freud’s shifting definition of the uncanny: “He finds something deeply strange, something Unheimliches, during this work: secretly, heimlich is not the antonym of unheimlich at all, but rather its sometime synonym”. Words are thereby always in excess of themselves and “the yearned-for mot juste doesn't get us any further than just our everyday yearning". This is well put. Knausgaard must focus on "the stink, the misery, the pain, the boredom, the embarrassment" of everyday life in order to open up onto what it cannot name. "The subject here" he continues, "is death and whether writing/language has anything to say about this commonplace disaster that haunts and harries and shapes us everywhere we turn". Knausgaard himself is explicit that this can happen only when writing yields to literature's demand:

everything has to submit to form. If any of literature’s other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these overtake form, the result suffers. That is why writers with a strong style often write bad books. That is also why writers with strong themes so often write bad books. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called “writing.” Writing is more about destroying than creating.

Writing as destruction is a striking contradiction and serves Mark's reading well, but "bad books" is vague and self-serving. He names no names here but My Struggle inevitably provokes comparisons with at least two. Who has stronger styles than Proust and Bernhard and what books have stronger themes than In Search of Lost Time and Gathering Evidence? (They are also named in My Struggle, Knausgaard having "virtually imbibed" one.) I regret mentioning them in my review, not because Proust and Bernhard cannot be usefully discussed in comparison but, in my case, they weren't usefully discussed and because doing so threatens the error that Marcel himself describes: when one hears of a great book, one can imagine only an assemblage of the great books one has already imbibed. It is only when one reads the new book that one becomes aware of its otherness and perhaps also its weakness in comparison. This has happened with three friends of mine who have read My Struggle, and it has caused me great consternation.

To compound this error, I shall now compare Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle to the work of Franz Kafka.

We can say Kafka’s work has more in common with Knausgaard’s in terms of style, that is, in its comparative disconnect from style. In both we are drawn more to the specific events described, their curious and horrific banality, rather than to immersion in aesthetic bliss, while at the same time we feel compelled to draw back and seek an organising principle, to imagine such events as part of a containable world view, and then to resubmerge in a newly configured aesthetic bliss. However, Kafka’s is the prime example of a body of work that is never quite enough, a lack into which it is impossible to submerge. The deluge of secondary texts does this for us. Maurice Blanchot asks what needs to done to rescue Kafka from this fate, one to which Kafka himself contributed, and his answer is to recommend regarding his work as Kafka had wanted: in its absence. He observes that, with the publication of the Diaries, Kafka the writer was placed in the foreground and he is the one we look for in the work. He wonders if Kafka foresaw such a disaster and that is why he wanted his work destroyed. The opposite is true of My Struggle: knowledge of Knausgaard life saturates the page and the interviews and reports of the scandalised response in Norway offer no room to move away in relief: there is nowhere else to look but the work. But what then is the work?

It certainly isn’t the everyday content of life. This is as much the subject of My Struggle as ice is the subject of Scott’s journey to the South Pole. An overwhelming sense of imminence is evoked by Knausgaard so that its banality becomes, as James Wood says, celestial. For example, when he walks home in the dark after a day of writing and describes his route with such precision that only an event of great significance would seem to justify it. As the event doesn't occur, another world makes itself felt instead; a possible world, just out of reach. This imminence has itself been promised by occasional epiphanies, which appear to open the work to its final destination, as well to align the author with the experience of Proust. But they are frustrated epiphanies, without message, each one a scintillating blank. The face in the sea and the inexplicable tears evoked by a patch of sky in an old painting appear as offerings of transcendence, but not an affirmative transcendence. Why not?

Blanchot places Kafka’s work squarely in the era after the death of God: his stories are “among the darkest in literature, the most rooted in absolute disaster”. Only it is not an anguished expression of lament but one of uncertainty and anxiety. “God is dead, which may signify this harder truth: death is not possible”. We think of The Hunter Gracchus fallen into a ravine and happy to wait for death: “Then the accident happened”. Not the accident of death but that of not dying: “I am here. I don’t know any more than that. There’s nothing more I can do. My boat is without a helm—it journeys with the wind which blows in the deepest regions of death.”

The theme is also clear in Metamorphosis: like Gracchus, Gregor cannot die even as his body transforms and disintegrates. Despite the utter misery and solitude of his condition, he still seeks moments of reprieve – food from his sister Grete, protecting the portrait on the wall – until, finally, he does die, only then for Grete, free at last from the burden of her looking after her brother and on a family outing, to stretch her young body, signalling life’s revival; one more metamorphosis. “There is no end,” Blanchot writes, “there is no possibility of being done with the day, with the meaning of things, with hope”. God is thereby not deprived of his infinite authority: “dead, he is even more terrible, more invulnerable, in a combat in which there is no longer and possibility of defeating him”.

We are battling a dead transcendence, Blanchot says, and notes the prevalence of the powerful dead in Kafka’s stories: the emperor in The Great Wall of China and the former Commandant in In the Penal Colony. We might add Knausgaard’s father. An absurd battle perhaps, something embodied in the comedy of Kafka’s stories (“he could hardly keep from laughing”) and by Knausgaard's solemn attention to the mundane. Yet it is perhaps the only battle left worth fighting; a combat of passivity. Blanchot believed that Kafka recognised his presentation of death had instead dimmed and erased it, and that our reading "revolves anxiously around a misunderstanding": we think we have witnessed what has in fact been hidden. Kafka wanted to destroy his writing because it hadn’t failed enough.

Similarly, My Struggle has been welcomed with astonishment and great sales, much to the author's horror: "I have given away my soul". He must also wish to recommend his own absence. Western man, Blanchot observes, has tried to make this bearable by focusing on the positive: immortality, of an afterlife that would compensate for this life, perhaps the afterlife of fine writing: “But this afterlife is our actual life”.

His Books of the Year

This is the part of a books of the year entry you don’t read because you’re scanning to find the titles this writer has chosen. You haven't noticed his name but you'll check it once your own good judgement has been confirmed.

The first is Karl O. Knausgaard’s My Struggle, a popular one this year – you’ve registered the title already because he was chosen in that other list in that other place by that other guy – who was it? Visceral realism blah scandal in Norway blah full of profound insights blah. Oh look, there are the names of Marcel Proust and Thomas Bernhard again, the authors Knausgaard is already being compared to, neither of which you’ve read, though you keep meaning to. It makes you feel alienated and demoralised. Look, there are so many translations and editions of Proust to choose from. What was the title again? And which Thomas Bernhard novel is a good place to start?

You see there are still three paragraphs to go and you’re thinking: enough with the summaries already! You relax a little because the next choice is Enrique Vila-Matas’ Dublinesque. The title is so warm and attractive. You see that it’s set around Bloomsday, which is something you’ve wanted to attend for years. Admittedly, you tried and failed to read Ulysses for a university course, but you prefer Radio 4’s dramatisation because it cut through all the verbiage and made the book accessible. Anyway, the novel is about Dublin isn’t it? That should be enough. You had a city break there a few years back and had such a good time in the pubs. Everyone is so friendly! But what’s that he’s saying? It’s about the end of the Gutenberg Era, the end of literature as we know it? What nonsense: has he seen my shelf of Ian Rankin first editions?

You skip the third paragraph because he’s chosen Quentin Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren, a book by a French philosopher about a French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, specifically his poem Un Coup de Dés, which you’ve never heard of let alone read. It’s in French! What if it is a revelation and not what you might expect – a momentous study of the place and meaning of poetry in post-religious society? That’s just pretentious.

The final paragraph intrigues you and is the only one that you read in full because it is the shortest and the chooser is obviously passionate about Infinity: The Story of a Moment, Gabriel Josipovici’s novel based on the life of a real composer. That sounds more your kind of thing: you like biographies.

"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.

On his back in the dark: Winter Journal by Paul Auster

A “self-indulgent, ill-conceived, and poorly-edited disaster” is how J. Robert Lennon sums up Paul Auster’s companion piece to The Invention of Solitude from 1982, that remarkable book comprising two brief biographical pieces by a novelist still to make his name, in contrast to the new book which is, (Lennon again), “a rambling, informal collection of memories, musings, and minutiae” written by a prolific, internationally renowned bestselling author. It has to be said that Lennon’s review of Winter Journal is entirely fair and utterly misses the value of the book.

You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.

Winter Journal begins in the manner of the two earlier with a general statement, a valedictory welcome as it were, the first on the random event of death – his father’s – the second on the passing of the moment – his own:

He lays out a piece of paper on the table before him and writes these words with his pen. It was. It will never be again.

Actually, more than that: The Book of Memory – part two of The Invention of Solitude – is written in the third person as if to mark the passing of the moment against the guile of memoir. By becoming “He” and later “A.”, Auster enacts the implications of the statement. We can see how the peculiarity of his profession, which then included translation, prefigures the fiction he will go on to write.

Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months, if not years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude. A man sits alone in a room and writes. Whether the book speaks of loneliness or companionship, it is necessarily a product of solitude. A. sits down in his room to translate another man’s book, and it is as though he were entering that man’s solitude and making it his own. But surely that is impossible. For once a solitude has been breached, once a solitude has been taken on by another, it is no longer solitude, but a kind of companionship. Even though there is only one man in the room, there are two. A. imagines himself as a kind of ghost of that other man, who is both there and not there, and whose book is both the same and not the same as the one he is translating.

Auster writes Winter Journal in the second person and so becomes his own translator – his own ghost writer, the second man reasserting the solitude of the subject; a kind of paranormal activity we recognise from Oracle Night when Sidney Orr disappears into his study with the blue notebook and breaks his writer’s block. The proliferation of interrelated stories and digressions and the fascination with the act of writing are undoubtedly the most distinctive features of Auster’s fiction, the former attracting wide appreciation, the latter perhaps allowed as a concession to Auster’s European inheritance (The Invention of Solitude contains extracts from his translation of Mallarmé’s A Tomb for Anatole and Blanchot’s fiction; equivalents of which are disappointingly lacking in Winter Journal, the most notable memory of France here being an affair with a prostitute). The focus on the everyday and corporeal of which Lennon labels self-indulgent is then a necessary recourse for the ghost, however uncomfortable and unliterary it is.

“You would like to know who you are” Auster writes as a question to both ghost and subject, with only the latter able to reveal himself. The ghost must remain elusive for as long as the book is written. Auster is aware of this problem in The Book of Memory because he cites a line from Blanchot’s fiction: “What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop”. But here the choice is either not to write or to write too much. The proliferating memories engage yet lack the mystique and sense of possibility innate to fiction, and instead rely on the mystique of the author who writes it. As we inevitably associate what is written with the life of a flesh and blood individual suffering family bereavements and panic attacks in Brooklyn, New York, there is a need to relate it to the fiction that appears to redeem it. The reader will thereby feel most at home when reading what Lennon calls “a pointless 10-page précis of an obscure 1950s movie”, which reads very much like a plot from an Auster novel. But this is secondary to the subject of the book.

The Catch-22 of Winter Journal is outlined in The Book of Memory when Auster discusses the story of Jonah. Ordered by God to go to Nineveh to prophesy the city’s destruction, Jonah instead sailed to Tarshish, a journey that leads to what makes his story one of the most famous in the Bible. Eventually he does prophesy to the inhabitants and they save themselves with profound repentance. Thus Jonah complains that since God is merciful there was no need for him to prophesy, have his warning heeded and thereby be exposed as a false prophet. What ever Jonah does, he is condemned to isolation, trapped in the belly of the whale: “the shipwreck of the singular” as Auster describes it. So whereas The Invention of Solitude speaks of a singular life swimming in the ocean of human experience and stories, the new book is more Crusoe patrolling his island.

The shipwreck of Winter Journal is salvaged when Auster describes “the scalding, epiphanic moment of clarity that pushed [him] through a crack in the universe”, one that marks the transition between jobbing translator and cramped poet to prolific and popular storyteller. He attends the rehearsals for a dance choreographed by a friend and watches the dancers perform without the usual accompanying music:

[At] a certain point something began to open inside you, you found yourself falling through the rift between world and word, the chasm that divides human life from our capacity to understand or express the truth of human life, and for reasons that still confound you, this sudden fall through the empty, unbounded air filled you with a sensation of freedom and happiness, and by the time the performance was over, you were no longer blocked, no longer burdened by the doubts that had been weighing down on you for the past year.

While this provokes thrills by offering possibilities for our own personal release, the hyperbole prompts the readers to wish for a prolonged meditation on this experience; what doubts were these and how does it affect the writing of his novels? What is this crack in the universe and where might we squint through it? Perhaps it is fiction itself, where Winter Journal by definition cannot venture. Perhaps the clue as to why the epiphany forms only a climax to the book rather than its core is in Lennon’s summary of Winter Journal which I did not quote in full: “a rambling, informal collection of memories, musings, and minutiae presented in the second person”. The inclusion of the form as incidental, as if equivalent to the colour of the dust jacket, is surprising because it is the formal challenge that distinguishes Auster’s narrative and aligns it with another of those European inheritors unmentioned by Lennon: Samuel Beckett’s Company (1980), which John Pilling says, “gravitates more openly towards the genre of autobiography than anything before”. 

A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.

To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is said can be verified. As for example when he hears, You are on your back in the dark. Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is said. But by far the greater part of what is said cannot be verified. As for example when he hears, You first saw the light on such and such a day. Sometimes the two are combined as for example, You first saw the light on such and such a day and now you are on your back in the dark. A device perhaps from the incontrovertibility of the one to win credence for the other. That then is the proposition. To one on his back in the dark a voice tells of a past. With occasional allusion to a present and more rarely to a future as for example, You will end as you now are.

The connection is most explicit when Auster describes how he recalls his past during bouts of insomnia on his back in the dark: “For it is only in the darkness of solitude that the work of memory begins”. But, as The Invention of Solitude attests, the work of memory requires the distance between writing and what is written to be brought to life and, here, the second person eventually becomes a tic, employed as a device to win credence for straightforward memoir. The ghost and the subject become too cosy in each other's company. However, while Company focuses more on the veracity or otherwise of the voice in the dark and Winter Journal its sentimental revelations, both have in common the pursuit not of what is behind the writer but what lies in front of us all.