'Foreign to the resources of literature'

In the early days of blogging, I often wrote about book prizes. At that time I trusted the aura of a shortlist, drawn by what I assumed was the light of Literature shining down and carving deep relief into the profile of an otherwise flat novel. But I also often complained precisely because once read the books themselves didn't seem to deserve such attention, while others that did were ignored. After a while, in fact after serving on a jury, it became clear that I was fascinated instead by the aura of the impersonal force of a collective honour rather than in the books themselves. The books themselves are incidental, as a glance at the titles of previous winners will confirm. For me the aura now illuminates only the book equivalent of the picture of Dorian Gray decaying in an attic while below literary professionals in brightly lit rooms swoon over its prettified worldly companion. Yes, prize-winning literary novels are a genre in themselves: rhetorical exercises, inbred descendents of mummified classics rather than sui generis acts of writing. Nothing to see here. But sometimes the shock of what prizes overlook is a revelation.

Last week the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist was announced. At the time I took even less notice than usual, indifferent to the predominance of predictable titles and their keeny blurbs, but I then discovered that Mathias Énard's Zone, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, was eligible and had been entered and yet is not featured. This astonished me. I found out only because its absence prompted an unofficial shadow jury of bloggers to add it to their longlist. For a detailed review, see Max Cairnduff's, which includes links to other coverage.

The shock is a minor one and this is not a post to complain of its omission or to speculate on the competence of the judges – in 2013 the prize didn't go to Vila-Matas' sublimely light Dublinesque, so hope has long flown – and instead to wonder if the failure of such novels to walk away with such a title is a sign of the necessity and vitality of no-genre writing, in which form and content struggle into existence on their own merit rather than rushing to adopt a generic mould for safe passage, and that it is only committed amateurs on the sidelines, those not on a career path or with corporate sponsors to appease, who are able to subject themselves to the full force of writing as a presence in itself.

No-genre is most noticeable when conservative responses to innovative literature are raised, hence the value of prizes. It is nothing new: at the beginning of Samuel Beckett's life writing in French, Maurice Blanchot recommended him for a major award, and failed:

In a way, when Molloy, then Malone Dies first appeared in France, it was naïve of us (Georges Bataille, Maurice Nadeau and myself) to hope to alert the Prix des Critiques to these texts, even though so many remarkable writers and critics were on that committee, admittedly still as members of the 'literary establishment', when it was clear that even Beckett's early books were foreign to the resources of 'literature'.

And, after his death, Anthony Burgess predicted Beckett's reputation would descend, no doubt as a sign that his renown was an aberration in literary appreciation. In his posthumous tribute, Blanchot seeks to distance Beckett from the greats to whom he is compared in obituaries (Proust, Joyce, Musil, Kafka), regarding his work (but "there is no work in Beckett") as something less (or more) than literature; that is, what I call no-genre. So we might dwell on that phrase Foreign to the resources of 'literature' and wonder what it might mean when browsing the conveyor belt of recommended good reads.

Without doubt Dublinesque and Zone are very literary novels in the obvious sense: full of explicit allusions – the first to Beckett himself, the second to Apollinaire's poem Beckett had translated – but literary in another, less recognised sense too. As my review of the latter argues, the value and meaning of writing is never a given, is always under question within the work itself – is indeed an accelerant for its own flame – and its gifts doubted or resisted even as they are received. Of course, as Beckett's example suggests, even the most resistant to the gifts only burden us with more, becoming a resource itself, with the lamentable genre label Beckettian. Blanchot's claim, however, is Beckett's writing is "simply an attempt to keep within the limits of literature that voice or rumble or murmur which is always under the threat of silence", which might be a voice from the inside – "When you listen to yourself, it's not literature you hear" – or something from the outside – which is how I read the first two volumes of Knausgaard's My Struggle. So the paradoxical imperative to speak when speaking drowns out the murmur is the great challenge for whoever senses its demand; a challenge that might (still paradoxically) require passivity and weakness rather than mastery and strength, and perhaps inevitably, necessarily, wonderfully never prize-winning.

Albertine Asleep

For a short time, I stayed up most of the night. In the long summer months between years at school, there was no all-night radio let alone all-night television. Instead I would listen to the BBC World Service on unreliable Medium Wave reception. One night around two in the morning, an actor with a mellifluous voice read an extract from what I now know as Swann's Way. This was before Terence Kilmartin had updated Scott Moncrieff's original translation.

Next day, as I played football in the local park, I told my friends of this book that spent half an hour to describe someone (Swann) ringing a doorbell. Inside, however, my amused tone was tempered. Secretly, I was impressed. The following week there was an extract from another part of the novel, of which I have no memory, and in the third and final week, he read the section known as Albertine Asleep (which Anne Carson has had some fun with recently). And I taped it. The tape still exists.

A blog comes to one in the dark

What follows the break wasn't going to be posted. I wrote it last week and decided it would be more effective to summarise on my Tumblr blog and then publicise on Twitter. To my surprise, bar one message of support, there was no response. The silence was instructive.

In the early days of February 2015, 3AM Magazine advertised an event in London to celebrate "the recent boom in online criticism" and to encourage readers "to get involved in the growth of digital literary culture". My interest was piqued, as the subject is close to my heart and is rarely discussed in fleshy public, for the obvious reason that those who produce it must do so from their disparate basements in Terre Haute.

Indeed, the event was to be held in big London and I was unable to attend. Still, as I have been writing online about books, mainly on blogs, since as recently as 1996 and am familiar with many of those who do the same, I was keen to see who was speaking and what the reference points might be. It turned out I had heard of one of the six panellists and knew one other personally.

It was to discuss:

• the implications for contemporary literary culture 
• the distinctive challenges and opportunities facing the new generation of online literary journals 
• the democratisation of criticism in the online landscape: in a world without journalistic gatekeepers, can anyone be a critic? 

While the first is so vague as to mean nothing and the second as euphemistic as a corporate press release (challenges = redundancies, opportunities = bend over), the third is very clear. The third is ... well, everything. This is because the panel includes only one person who is a recognised literary critic and not one who has ever been a literary blogger, that is, not one who might be able to talk about the form from the inside.

As soon as I read about the panel, I tweeted a question concerning this curious situation. There was, after all, still time to invite a London literary blogger for their insight. I didn't get an answer. The only response was for a well-known US critic to favourite the tweet. However, Flowerville noted what I had overlooked wearing my blogger-goggles:

As you can see, there were no responses to this either.

On the day itself, the event was publicised on a webpage and the link retweeted by a panellist.

Once again I tweeted, only this time with the bitter assumption that nobody would respond. I was then blocked by the same panel member. Still, while there was no woman on the panel, at least naked female mannikins were on display.

While this is a storm in an espresso cup, it is exemplary of a distinct campaign of middle-class revanchism in British culture. Where amateurs and outsiders had dominated, professionals are taking their place. The great Morrissey, the finest bloom of the flowering of postwar British culture borne on a welfare state won by an organised and compassionate working class, has noticed this in his own field:

In the guise of serving the public, the Brit Awards have hijacked modern music in order to kill off the heritage that produced so many interesting people, to such a degree that we could not imagine anyone who has ever truly affected the course of British music to be on stage at the 02 collecting a deserved award.

The major music TV event of the year is now about marketing "acts" manufactured by talent managers, business managers, brand managers.

With this in mind, note the labels given to each of 3AM's panellists: Co-editor in Chief, Contributing Editor, Senior Editor, Founder and Editor, Novelist and Publisher, Digital Publisher. The titles are impressive and I have no argument with them or the talent and hard work they signify, but contrast them with the titles of those who laid the foundations for online criticism's "recent boom": plain Blogger. It appears we must now submit to a professional hierarchy. So in addition to there being not one woman and not one blogger on the panel, there is not one person without a CV of such note; not one non-professional, working-class voice. Blogging for years and building a reputation and audience counts for nothing. Again.

Of course, this person could get involved, sans CV and anonymously, that is, they could perhaps buy a train ticket, travel to the big city and spectate. They might not be blocked and might even be allowed to speak, if invited, but what they say would always remain secondary, always dependent on permission from the high table.

Sugar Aping

This is an unexpected consequence of online literary magazines usurping the space blogs once occupied, and rather than reinventing the form, they mimic the broadsheet book pages from which the internet was meant to liberate us. For many years writers developed an audience relying solely on the quality of their work. For them, as it was for TS Eliot, criticism is as natural as breathing, or indeed necessary for breath. Blogging was about paying attention, exploration, discovery and sharing. Now editorial patronage is key and replaces radical possibilities with gatekeeping.

The host of this event, 3AM Magazine, is a prime mover. The step change became clear to me when the "Reviews editor" launched a personal attack on three unnamed but clearly identifiable working-class writers whose work is "exclusively online (their writing is so tedious that no editor would commit it to print)" under the cover of a review that didn't even address the book's contents with anything like good faith. In fact, it repeated the condescension and misrepresentation the book drew in the corporate print media. The reviewer's bracketed aside, even if it were true (and there are numerous examples to refute it), demonstrates the instinct to appeal to professional authority, where power and money relieves any need for justice. As 3AM's pages lack a comments section, attempts to challenge such calumny are stifled at birth. So much for "getting involved".

Later, the same reviews editor posted another review of a debut novel summarised as "an awful book", one that prompted the reader to want "to hurl the fucking thing across the room" (James Wood this is not). The author of the novel subsequently tweeted the news that there may be more than literary motivations at work here (though on his side such motives might have been strongly at work in relation to a certain "full-length novel" not having yet seen the light of day). When concerns were put to the "Editor in chief" that privileged access to its pages was being used to pursue undeclared personal grudges, the reply came back that 3AM was "open to different points of view" (apart from those it isn't) and indeed any requests for basic decency, honesty and fairness would only encourage more such reviews "for the sheer hell of it".

As Flowerville has shown elsewhere, this policy isn't restricted to 3AM Magazine, and has nothing to do with democracy, pluralism or a commitment to free speech but the very nature of "dudenation" editorial policy; one must share the "gatekeeper's mostly adolescent male mind" for the sheer hell of being published. The aspiring critic must realise that compromising to further a career – even one as lacking in reward as writing online – and thereby winning the protection and authority of a magazine title, means compromise becomes that career.

It would be too much to expect this state of affairs to prompt a Peter Oborne-like gesture from the co-editor in chief who blocked me, let alone a document like the September Statement produced by professional philosophers concerning the behaviour of an influential academic. But internet literary magazine culture certainly requires serious attention to renew its radical beginnings.

Oh, and by the way, guess who 3AM is publishing now.


An indication to the cause

Why is this happening? While I have argued that it is down to professionals moving into the domain where amateurs flourish, it is also perhaps a product of literature and how we respond to it. This is suggested in volume two of My Struggle, in which Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about how, as a young man, poems never opened themselves to him: "When I approached them I felt like a fraud, and I was indeed always unmasked, because what they always said as well, these poems, was: Who do you think you are, coming in here?". Not knowing how to open poetry, he felt a judgment had been passed and his literary dreams were pathetic mirages on the horizon: "I was an ordinary man who would live an ordinary life and find meaning where I was, nowhere else". One alternative, he explains, is to deny your feelings and "to stay afloat in that world without literature ever opening up to you".

You could write a whole dissertation about Hölderlin, for example, by describing the poems, discussing what they dealt with and in what ways the themes found expression, through the syntax, the choice of words, the use of imagery, you could write about the relationship between Hellenic and Christian modes, about the role of the countryside in his poems, about the role of the weather, or how the poems relate to the actual politico-historical reality in which they had arisen, independent of whether the main emphasis was on the biographical, for example, his German Protestant background, or on the enormous influence of the French revolution. You could write about his relationship to other German idealists, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Novalis, or the relationship to Pindar in the late poems. You could write about his unorthodox translations of Sophocles, or read the poems in light of what he says about writing in his letters. You could also read Hölderlin’s poetry with reference to Heidegger’s understanding of it, or go one step further and write about the clash between Heidegger and Adorno over Hölderlin. You could also write about the whole history of his work’s reception, or of his works in translation. It was possible to do all of this without Hölderlin’s poems ever opening themselves up. The same could be done with all poets, and of course it has been.   (Translated by Don Bartlett)

This is surely the experience of so many of us seeking to deal with the judgment literature passes down. Many of us have accepted fate and sought to stay afloat in denial. (Some are so floaty that they are invited onto panels.) But I have never been able to square admiration for such scholarship with the fact of literature, the utter remove onto which writing sometimes opens, something that I sense opening in Knausgaard's own work despite the ostensibly banal, terrestrial focus. How is such work possible and why does criticism avoid this space? How can it indeed approach the void opened by its own practice?


Reinvention

One answer is for criticism to seek to literature in criticism itself. That is, to seek the space in which critical writing opens onto this remove. This is how the online literary magazine might be reinvented. I have a dream in which the content of such a site is determined by constraints, as in Lars Iyer's Dogma, in which Lars and W. constrain the writing of conference papers: Dogma is spartan (don't use quotations). Dogma is full of pathos (rely on emotion). Dogma is sincere (speak with seriousness). There are many others. I have a dream in which this magazine has only a homepage, with two or three discrete columns, each one written by a different person but each discussing the same subject, the same thinker, the same event, the same poem, the same book. The focus would then be on the subject and the quality of writing and each writer would be writing beside and against their fellows in the same space.

A similar project was pursued by Maurice Blanchot with the Revue Internationale, a failed utopia described here by the same Lars Iyer, in which "total critique" was the goal. Perhaps it is inevitable that such attempts lead to a neutralising blandness, if not also to 3AM's reactionary hit pieces. So instead, I would recommend those of you who share Knausgaard's experience to pursue your own work on a solitary or small group blog with a focus on truth and necessity rather than reception, to seek your own identity as a writer, to wait for literature to open, however long and lonely the journey; to lie down in the dark and, like Beckett's narrator, listen. A blog comes to one in the dark. Imagine.

In daylight, we can all then watch wide-eyed as the literary internet is otherwise expropriated, with the events such as Literature 2.0 providing a fig-leaf for the banality and careerism to come.

Book of forgotten dreams

For eighteen years I have wanted the English translation of Georges Bataille's book La Peinture Préhistorique: Lascaux ou la naissance de l'art, ever since Maurice Blanchot's review essay appeared in the collection Friendship published in 1997. A strange yearning because Blanchot had summarised the content, so there was apparently nothing to gain and, what's more, I have never been a big Bataille reader, much preferring at university Blanchot's unparalleled prose to the jargon-scarred theory beloved of my fellow students who thought "transgression" meant wearing rubber.

Still, there was something withheld by this book, the actual thing, the physical object, in its absence. Unfortunately, the edition from Albert Skira's Great Centuries of Painting series, described by one scholar as a "highbrow coffee table book", has been out of print since 1955 and secondhand copies have always been too expensive, often approaching three figures. Until late one night last November when desultory book searching revealed one in good condition for under £50. In a moment of madness, I clicked Buy Now and sat back to dwell on the extravagance.

Taking delivery of a desired book often signals the end of possibility and the settling of melancholy in the prospect of the real thing finally arriving and dissolving the aura. And then there are the heavy demands of procedural content. Reading is bound to kill the possible book, the Platonic form revolving in your head, the edition of Bolaño's 2666 Kirsty Logan described a few years ago. So it was my good fortune that Prehistoric Paintings: Lascaux or the Birth of Art got lost in the post. For two weeks I waited, anticipating each furtive visit from the postman and panicking once he had left. How could I have been so careless to waste fifty quid?! Wasn't this punishment for transgressing the line between desire and its realisation?

In hope I walked to the post office depot to enquire. A queue lined the pavement outside. After fifteen minutes of standing around and shuffling forward in the cold, they said, Yes, they had a package for me but they couldn't hand it over because I didn't have a red card from the postman. What? But I'm here, now, so why not hand it over? No, that can't be done. At least let me see the parcel to prove to myself that it exists. No, that wasn't possible. They said they would have to redeliver it. Would tomorrow be OK? Yes, it would. This was good news, and I went home happy. Of course, the following day nothing arrived. I walked the post office depot again. The queue was even longer and, after half an hour of standing around and shuffling forward in the cold, the man behind the counter just shrugged. I went home unhappy and eventually gave up caring.

A few days later the bell rang and the postman handed over an A3-sized package. Having ordered a Radio Times holder as a gift for a telly addict, I had my doubts about what it contained and tore at the parcel carefully. The first thing exposed was the spine of a book. So just look at it for a moment, shining there.

The bright colours suggested a brand new book rather than one published sixty years ago. So this is what its absence withheld! On removing the cardboard slipcase and opening the book, five black and white postcards with serrated edges fell out.

Pasted on the inside cover were three visitor tickets to three different caves. Souvenirs of another life. When the previous owner visited is unclear, but Lascaux was closed to visitors in 1963.

These small discoveries were the prelude to the content.

A miracle occurred at Lascaux, Bataille says, a miracle that remains before us in the "clear and burning presence" of these paintings. His rapture is evident, and it is rare for a world-weary reader to feel he shares in the author's wonder, lifting the pages to see what's next and reading the words so large and clear that they could have been typed directly onto the page. A similar edition written by Captain Cook or Neil Armstrong might compare. The production values are such that the illustrations are separate items, pasted onto the page.

"What transfixes us is the vision, present before our very eyes, of all that is most remote. Of our presence in the real world."

The paradox in the words of the caption, that being close to ourselves whilst in proximity to what is most remote, is explained here as the "strong and intimate emotion" of religion or, better, "the sacred", to which the cave paintings are "more solidly attached to than it has ever been since". This is not religion as one more additional theory but as the catalyst of humankind, when the creature wandering the icy plains descended into the caves and, in the remove of darkness and solitude, set itself apart from the animal kingdom and discovered itself, codifying the cosmos with paint. As Richard White puts it, this is "not the sacred as the beyond, another realm of being that exists in opposition to this one—but the sacred as the deep reality of this life that we are typically alienated from". So we shouldn't include these moments perusing the book with the usual "Oh I like that" pleasures of the art gallery but as the kindling of the effects of art was it when born; that is, when we were born, perhaps the deeper feeling we have in galleries we have since been socialised to restrain. Whatever, the miracle is foundational.

Bataille says that in looking at the cave paintings in Lascaux "we are left painfully in suspense by this incomparable beauty and the sympathy it awakens in us", and something close to this is what I experience looking at the book, if this can be called an experience. One is not transported in awe towards fantastical otherness but toward a fog-bound interior, as comforting as it is alien. "It is as though paradoxically our essential self clung to the nostalgia of attaining what our reasoning self had judged unattainable, impossible." This is where I ask: what can be done with this suspense and sympathy if our reasoning self is how we measure experience?

The remainder of Prehistoric Paintings examines each area of the cave to elaborate the author's theory that art served as a channel for the animality enduring in the human community provoked by the taboos of death and sexuality. One reader, stepping forth with good reason, describes the book as "a lot of flowery writing that implies interpretations not necessarily supported by evidence", and it is this inevitable doubt and the scientific innocence that seems to me where the book is worthwhile. In his review, Blanchot suggests that it is from this subterranean overflow that humankind appears, because it reveals our separation from animals, over which we now recognise our power of life and death, and yet, at the same time, exposes us to a death blissfully unknown to animals, thereby weakening us. However, we modern humans value this unique quality over everything, so much that what Blanchot says weakened us is now what we believe makes us stronger.

"The marvelous never loses its impact"

Bataille criticises the "timidity" of scholars who speak "with undue reserve" of what they see in the caves and thereby neutralise the effect of the marvelous on their studies. The "marvelous" then is that which is "not necessarily supported by evidence", and it is only an accredited scholar's book, such as The Mind in the Cave (2002) that can provide such evidence. However, while David Lewis-Williams is a professor emeritus of the Rock Art Research Institute in Johannesburg, his book suggests Bataille's wonderment is vital for appreciating the caves, or at least to get closer to their creation. He explains that they were not created in sober rationality, not in the light of day but in states of consciousness we have devalued.

He prefaces his study by presenting "the greatest riddle of archeology – how we became human and in the process began to make art" (my italics), so we see that becoming human is the lacuna. There were Neanderthals in the Middle Paleolithic era who did not make art and then there are Homo Sapiens in the Upper Paleolithic who did. What caused the transition between animal consciousness and that of Homo sapiens?

Lewis-Williams runs through the intellectual history of attempts to explain the transition – Darwinian, Marxist, Structuralist and Evolutionary Psychological, though not Bataille's – before setting out studies of the art and beliefs of the San of southern Africa that were made before they were swallowed up by modernity. Homo sapiens have a higher consciousness than that of the Neanderthals, which allowed us to develop a fully modern language system, enabling us to "fashion...individual identities and mental 'scenes' of past, present and future events". But, crucially, we also have access to the lower end of the spectrum, altered states of consciousness such as dreams and trance states, brought on by communal rituals, dance and hallucinogens. Language enabled us to see these alternative realities, to hear inner voices and to articulate them to others. The cave paintings, Lewis-Williams argues, are attempts to fix these visions, to enable those who made them to touch "what was already there" in the spirit world. They are not representations of spirits but the spirits themselves.

These dreams, sounds and visions revealed a cosmological order. Humanity's creation of the sacred was thereby possible only because of altered states of consciousness. And while Lewis-Williams' prefatory sentence implicitly rejects Bataille's thesis that art as practised by early humans precipitated its own emergence, he is as critical of Western scientists as Bataille for neglecting what he calls "the autistic end" of the spectrum of consciousness. As a result, their studies follow a positivist route in which intelligence and rationality become the defining characteristics of humanity and the manifest destiny of early people was grow to become "more and more like Western scientists". They are made in their own image.

Yet we have the same neurological structure as early humans and, as Bataille reports, we respond with a curious, even painful sympathy to an art that transcends aesthetic pleasure. Cave painting, according to both Bataille and Lewis-Williams, is then not an addition to human society but constitutive of it. Lewis-Williams writes of the San that hierarchies developed according to those who had better access to the spirit world governing all life: "Art and religion were therefore socially divisive". Every member of a community had access to dreams and were keen to learn more, so were influenced by male and female "shamans" and took part in their rituals. Art and religion, art and the sacred, were indistinguishable and "image-making did not merely take place in the spirit world: it also shaped and created the world."

It is a world we have long left behind, with commonsense and the insomnia of scientific method having replaced superstition and shamanic dreams in shaping our universe. To most modern minds, this is an unquestionable good. But it leads to a troubling question: if humankind emerged and grew to be itself out of reverence for what was revealed in realms of consciousness we now not only neglect but regard with suspicion, even as intellectual taboo, is our existence vitally impoverished?

Perhaps my unaccountable wish to own a copy of Bataille's highbrow coffee table book reveals a buried giant of a need for the elemental in art more generally sublimated into gushing about "the wonder of nature". Such eruptions of the old fascination with dreams to be found in our confused response to art and artists, books and writers, movies and directors, and invariably contained by the intervention of biographical exposés, won't go away even in their diminished state, and indeed occasionally break through into polite society. It is implicitly approached in what has been recently labelled the Hard Problem of consciousness, itself a controversial outgrowth of cognitive science, and the explicit paradox of a debate dependent on its own immaterial space yet able to address it only in the autism of empirical discourse is the elephant in the room. However, to continue to the wildlife theme, it is suppressed, like moles on a bowling green, with the back of a humanist's spade. With this proscription of the sacred, however it is defined, deeply in place, it would seem a new kind of transgression is required. Except this is precisely the realm of true art. As Bataille writes: "only art expresses the prohibition with beseeming gravity, and only art resolves the dilemma [of proscription]. It is the state of transgression that promotes the desire, the need for a more profound, a richer, a marvelous world, the need, in a word, for a sacred world".

A year in (hardly) reading

This has been the worst year for reading, ever. In quantity that is: only a suitcase of books finished, with a communal binful for those abandoned. The reason is the same as four years ago, only worse, and has little to do with the quality of the books. Medical opinion quoted Beckett: nothing to be done.

Still, I've never been one to devour books and I maintain a certain amount of disgust for the conveyor belt of recommended reads. In trust I have opened novels much praised by bloggers to sample the first paragraph and invariably it is like walking into soft sand: the sudden dip of the first sentence, the cinematic swoop of graceful atmospherics, the psychic mind-tap of the lead character for some comforting intimacy, and then the drama heavily flagged by the titillating blurb. Trudge, trudge. Only another 400 pages of these thrills to go.

Lars Iyer's Wittgenstein Jr and Tao Lin's Taipei stood out as relief from such embedded protocols, both narrating from a position of fascination, uncertainty, weakness, anxiety, horror, even, rather than from confidence borne on generic mastery. So too is Hotel Andromeda by Gabriel Josipovici, and I was disappointed (but not surprised) that it didn't get more reviews. David Winters' superb appreciation made up for their general absence. The reviewer's own new book of essays will be that rare thing in contemporary English literature: a serious non-academic book about fiction. There should be more.



The lack of satisfactory novel-reading made 2014 unusual for me in that rather than rush toward the New Atheists' fundamentalism and read books of science and journalism, I began to read German theology. While I am used to what it resembles in continental philosophy, the focus and references in Jürgen Moltmann's The Crucified God (1973) and Karl Barth's Dogmatics in Outline (1946), are alien to someone from an entirely secular background. Despite or because of this foreign nature, it was here that I found the pressure and urgency missing from philosophical procedure and literary criticism, as the actuality, meaning and significance of Christ's execution provided a visceral centre to what might otherwise descend into debates about how many angels one can download to a Pinterest account. This means it points toward the necessary direction and purpose of fiction better than most criticism.

The Christian faith which once 'conquered the world' must also learn to conquer its own forms when they have become worldly. It can do so only when it breaks down the idols of the Christian West, and, in a reforming and revolutionary way, remembers the 'crucified God'.

As these books are not exactly easy to write about, this blog will not be taking an overtly theological turn. Two other works of non-fictional, one new, one 60 years old, have made a huge impression recently and I'll be writing about them next year. But in the meantime, back to what I read last year.

Stepping out of the present once again, I bought Galley Beggar's "Digital Classics" reissue of Denton Welch's A Voice Through a Cloud because it is a memoir of the author's slow recovery from a cycling accident, and I indulged self-pity even if he doesn't. As the world returned to him through a cloud of bedridden pain, Welch's warming "bathetic gloom" – Alan Bennett in a black roll neck – made his condition seem like a necessary correlate to the condition of England in the 1930s, and thereby of our own low, dishonest decade as we appease another fascist putsch, this time in Kiev. Unfortunately that book remains unfinished because a PDF is easily neglected and bookmarks don't easily stick to the screen.

Books I had high hopes for, Damon Galgut's Arctic Summer, Krzysztof Michalski's The Flame of Eternity and Knausgaard's Boyhood Island, were ultimately disappointing, perhaps because they are content with the familiarity of their individual forms (I've since changed my mind The Flame of Eternity). Yet one book that remained solidly within what it says it is on the cover was the most moving I read all year, so perhaps this wasn't the reason for these disappointments. An entry written in Virginia Woolf's Sussex cottage in 1926 after reading Maurice Baring's novel C speaks to the same doubts and impatience expressed above and ends with characteristic trust in the imperative to write:

Easy to say it is not a great book. But what qualities does it lack? That it adds nothing to one's vision of life, perhaps. Yet it is hard to find a serious flaw. My wonder is that entirely second rate work like this, poured out in profusion by at least 20 people yearly, I suppose, has so much merit. Never reading it, I get into the way of thinking it nonexistent. So it is, speaking with the utmost strictness. That is, it will not exist in 2026; but it has some existence now, which puzzles me a little. Now Clarissa [Dalloway] bores me; yet I feel this is important. And why?

 

No help at all

Painting is practical day-to-day thing I think. One might say something clever, one might say something big, but one does something limited. It’s a serious thing – like religion – like love – one does the persistent thing, and then the really remarkable happens when something’s there that wasn’t there before.

Frank Auerbach's words from fifty years ago were pasted above my student work desk without ever prompting attention. Inspirational quotes are there to be ignored, after all. Only lately has the contrast between his trust in a modest routine and apparent wonder in the presence of art demanded examination. After so much striving, after so much art, what is this something there?

The answer is obvious: a rectangle with colours. Except not all paintings are 'really remarkable', as confirmed by Auerbach's fame for regularly scraping the paint from the canvas to start again and his recent description of "laying siege to the subject" in order to "work through [draughtmanship] to something deeper". How this depth works through practical components is unclear, but it would at least mean the value unique to a painting is never reducible to physical matter despite only ever being physical matter. We all know this already without worrying for too long about its implications, especially as it is safer to chatter about content than to ask, again, what is this something there?

How indeed can we talk beyond content, especially lately when content has become everything? Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle novel sequence and Mark Kozelek's recent LPs are prime examples of a zeitgeist in which oddly mundane content takes precedence, salinising poetic abstractions. Not, that is, fictionalised autobiography or misery memoir in which every description, anecdote and incident is a necessary part of a whole and leads somewhere in more or less artful fashion, but a focus on the apparently random and indeterminate.

Since at least the presumption of David Shields' Reality Hunger that the primary motivation for artists is to get closer to reality, the remove of art has been placed under quarantine, suspected of infecting readers with unhealthy deceit and indulgent fantasy, and in response these artists appear to be in the vanguard of an extreme supersession to the everyday.

(This is where one is supposed to cite examples – he writes about changing a nappy! he sings about building a house! – but this would make both sound like stunts, literary or musical readymades. So let a song sing for itself.)



Kozelek explains his new mode of songwriting as part of a wish to let go ("I wanted to give my first instincts a chance without shooting them down immediately"), while Knausgaard famously dispensed with attempts to write a novel and just wrote about his life, thousands of words a day for three years. Both appear to be shortcuts to "something there", and certainly their improvised and headlong nature never allow content and form to resolve, thereby disconcerting critical expectations of transcendent mastery.

Why is this happening? In Kozelek's case, it might easily alienate his core audience, used to swooning to the chiming sentiments of Carry Me Ohio, and Knausgaard's critical and sales success has come at the price of abasing himself before the world, so cynical career moves they are not.

Perhaps they have turned toward the quotidian because they recognise a subtler malady, so while the zeitgeist appears as only the latest cure for a virus whose quack remedies have included a 21st century Charles Dickens and HBO serials written by Shakespeare, the most notable symptom is revealed here as the ache of what escapes content, the earworm nagging at us all, that which infects even as the lock snaps shut on the quarantine cell. If this movement is toward anything then, it is toward the remove of the everyday; a conclusion that helps no one and prompts only the same question and demands the same response: not an ontology of art to be erected inside a critical, philosophical or theological apparatus, because this would be content too, but instead writing, and writing alone. A serious thing.

Ten years in this space

This week marks ten years since this blog was born. Appropriately, the first post was about beginnings. As I tell Mark Thwaite in this interview about literary blogging, it wasn't the first blog I'd written for, but this was the first solo effort:

Almost immediately I recognised This Space as my true home, a miraculous release into a limitless expanse in which writing could be explored in the direction demanded by the work under discussion. The editorial identity was soon established and gave me what I had lacked until then. My only responsibility was to sustain that exploration.

Perhaps ten years suggests a certain relentlessness, an unwillingness to develop going forward. To which I respond: "Blogging is a singular project because it goes nowhere and can only keep going in that direction".

The lawn of genre: Wittgenstein Jr by Lars Iyer

In the relaxed confines of the LRB Bookshop on a warm August evening, Lars Iyer marked the publication of his fourth novel by telling an audience that as a youngster he had been drawn to philosophy rather than fiction as a means to find a way to live, to think his way to life. It's an old question – how to live? – and one often so pressing that philosophers have made it central to their lives. This indeed used to be the definition of a philosopher: someone who lived consistently with their beliefs. Ludwig Wittgenstein is one example. For his character Wittgenstein Jr, Iyer says philosophy is also "a kind of spiritual progress", with Socrates and Augustine as his own key figures. So why did Iyer himself turn from philosophy to writing fiction?

How to live? is a simple question too of course, as light as a falling leaf and easily brushed aside as you join a queue to have your copy signed. Without noticing, you're soon dealing with ephemeral demands and the question is answered for you. Iyer said that by the time he was established as an academic in the subject, teaching and supervising, researching and presenting papers at conferences, publishing books, philosophy itself had been displaced. The pressure of having to justify every turn in an argument with references and footnotes covering all contributions and all angles meant the youthful quest was replaced by bureaucracy and career concerns in which "spiritual progress" equalled redundancy. How then to ask the question again?

Fiction marks his answer, a form defined by a lack of pressure, by freedom, so we shouldn't be surprised that the drama of each novel he has written persists in the distressing absence of a philosophy by which to live; a certain weight. In the Spurious trilogy, it is found in the double-act despair of W. and Lars as they float like schlubby cherubim in search of God's anchor while, in Wittgenstein Jr, the drama emerges from the asymmetry of a troubled Cambridge philosophy tutor and his lightweight, hedonistic students. The philosopher perplexes, irritates and fascinates them in equal measure with his silences and gnomic remarks. I will teach you differences. Philosophy stands between us and salvation. They decide he has modelled himself on the real Ludwig Wittgenstein, and so the fun begins. "When will he present an actual argument? – Mulberry's taking bets."

After a while the stand-in Wittgenstein becomes more talkative. He implores his students to dispense with Cambridge cleverness and Cambridge pride in order to face the challenge of his philosophical lesson. The anxious silences are due to paranoia. He believes the Cambridge dons are out to destroy him, as he seeks a utopia of "after philosophy" in which "the light on a particular afternoon will be as rich as the collected works of Kant". Cambridge University stands for what obscures such light, it stands for the hegemony of English philistinism, English parochialism, for a landscape flattened by the English steamroller.

All of England was once a lawn, Wittgenstein says. The whole of the country, with its uplands and lowlands, with its suburbs and towns, was once the quintessence of lawn. [...]

And it was in the name of the English lawn that the enemy within was kept down, Wittgenstein says. The Peasants' Revolt was crushed for seeking equality on the English lawn. The Diggers were transported for declaring that the English lawn was part of the commons. [...]

But never was the English lawn so lush as in the great universities of England! Wittgenstein says. Old expanses of lawn, strewn with meadowsweet and buttercups in high summer. Crocuses blooming in spring.

The numbers soon dwindle to the handful of students whose comments and exchanges narrate the novel, including the aristocratic Ede, convinced of his own destiny, the sore-thumb Benwell, a working-class boy from up north, the Kirwin twins lost without a war in which to die a futile death and who instead throw themselves into vigorous sports, Mulberry in his obscene T-shirts and the self-effacing Peters, the shy Yorkshire boy with a crush on his tutor and who records what everyone says. His cartoon of campus life is one of the joys of Iyer's new-found freedom. Wittgenstein Jr takes a walk on the lawn:

Posh students everywhere. Rah boys in gilets and flip-flops, with piles of bed-head hair. Rugby types, as big as fridges, all red-cheeked health, their voices booming. Rah girls dressed in gym gear and pony-tails. English roses in horse-and-hound clothing, as though fresh from the gymkhana. Yummy-not-yet-mummies in fur-lined Barbour. Ethno-sloanes, with string tops and slouch bags. Sloane-ingénues with big cups of coffee, sweater sleeves half pulled over their hands.

But why is it so pleasurable? At first this sounds like the classic and contemptible English light comedy in which characters are ridiculed for the Schadenfreude of harassed commuters, generic personas dancing on the end of the author's strings before a garishly painted state-of-the-nation backcloth. Perhaps because such hyperbole is counterbalanced by Wittgenstein Jr's apocalyptic vision of philosophical rapture. Combined and in opposition they have a peculiar effect on the reader, both ecstatic and deflating, so that even as one savours the possibility of another life, another world, there is also the absurd present. While Iyer convinces us of Wittgenstein Jr's spiritual yearning and captures the aura of his namesake with minimal brush strokes, the madcap students remind us it is of course only a novel and that the characters are inventions, that the stifling conformity of Cambridge is an exaggeration and that Wittgenstein Jr is not Ludwig Wittgenstein. Everything is weightless. But this is also necessary, because lightness enables flight. When Tibor Fischer judged the book "too long" he might have added that such airborne hyperbole is always too long and even one excessive, declaratory fictional sentence might already be too much, popping up like a molehill on the lawn over which the donnish greenkeeper might then stand, tutting.

Wittgenstein Jr comes to an end as the carefree life of a student comes to an end. Salvation of a sort is offered to Wittgenstein Jr, but he disappears. A clue to his whereabouts was seen earlier when students go to his room to check on his well-being and spy scraps of paper tacked to the wall with only one word visible: APERION, Anaximander's word for the eternal or cosmological infinity (also spelled "apeiron" but this is how it appears in the novel). Perhaps this is an additional mark of excess to the one Derrida says signifies the participation in a genre without membership, a mark that is itself not part of the genre yet necessary for its distinction and recognition. Aperion then is the mark of a universal principle of existence, an abstraction outside of life that nevertheless makes life possible and is apparently sensible only in the light of a particular afternoon and in the freedom, lightness and excess of writing, and yet which, as Fischer's cavil confirms, must also succumb to the ever-encroaching English lawn.

Back in the LRB Bookshop, the event drawing to a close, the audience was given a chance to ask questions. As hands went up and a microphone passed around, I wondered what it would mean for the lightness of fiction to become as heavy as academic philosophy, with its own bureaucracy and career demands, for it to be a kind of spiritual regression, for aperion to be only a word tacked to a wall, and then how a writer might evade the lawn of genre. But I didn't ask the question. Perhaps Wittgenstein Jr's disappearance is the answer.