The aura of books

Sitting here all weekend with an iBook on my lap, reading online, hoping for emails to arrive, waiting for RSS feeds to update, the TV on uselessly, an iTunes playlist running, a work-in-progress in the background awaiting attention, I often wonder why those objects over there on the table should radiate such an incomparable aura.

A woman who wrote to me last year to deride this blog asked: "Have you ever managed to get a BOOK actually published? I doubt it". I remember my bafflement. Why would that make any difference to what is written here? Is it because books go through a process to be published and, along the way, absorb editorial and commercial authority, thereby transferring it to the words within, something a blog, even a blog of a book, could never absorb? It seems that way. Of the dozen or so reviews I've written that have been published on paper, only a few satisfy the need to speak that this space embodies, yet somehow they offer a guarantee, however small, to these notes, as gold in the Bank of England guarantees Sterling.

"What would be at stake in the fact that something like art or literature exists?" This question is extremely pressing, and historically pressing, but it is a question that a secular tradition of aestheticism has concealed, and continues to conceal.

Blanchot wrote that nearly 40 years ago. Last week, Andrew Bissett asserted that "Art exists for one reason: to bring pleasure", as if pleasure was one thing. He falls back on fashionable philistinism because the god of art fails to show himself. Nothing is at stake anymore but our boredom. Others instead might herald an imminent new age, the age of the internet, streaming media, instant access to escape, the end of patience. That at least has been happening for some time, and is often equated with a change of epoch, as Nick Tosches says, quoting Erich Auerbach:

"European civilisation is approaching the term of its existence," he stated bluntly near the end of his own days. We live now in what with a straight face is called the information age. Not enlightenment, not knowledge, surely not wisdom, but bits and bytes of meaningless ephemera.

And in the TLS, Stephen Burn quotes Italo Calvino at the beginning of his reassessment of Infinite Jest.

It has been the millennium of the book, in that it has seen the object we call a book take on the form now familiar to us. Perhaps it is a sign of our millennium's end that we frequently wonder what will happen to literature and books in the so-called post-industrial era of technology

Burn doesn't claim that Foster Wallace's novel is an example of the affect of the millennium on literature as literature - in fact from his description of Infinite Jest it seems very old-fashioned. Instead he discusses the social resonance of the date-change for American writers. This innocent evasion suggests a blind spot as we wonder. In the same passage quoted above, Blanchot offers a reason why. His words have always stirred me, even if I don't understand what's he's saying exactly. It gives the kind of pleasure Andrew Bissett would either not recognise or, if he did, would dismiss for social reasons.

If one ceased publishing books in favour of communication by voice, image, or machine, this in no way change the reality of what is called the "book"; on the contrary, language, like speech, would thereby affirm all the more its predominance and its certitude of a possible truth. In other words, the Book always indicates an order that submits to unity, a system of notions in which are affirmed the primacy of speech over writing, of thoughts over language, and the promise of a communication that would one day be immediate and transparent.

Now it may be that writing requires the abandonment of all these principles, that is to say, the end and also the coming to completion of everything that guarantees our culture - not so that we might in idyllic fashion turn back, but rather so we might go beyond, that is, to the limit, in order to attempt to break the circle, the circle of circles: the totality of the concepts that founds history, that develops in history, and whose development history is. Writing, in this sense - in this direction in which it is not possible to maintain oneself alone, or even in the name of all without the tentative advances, the lapses, the turns and detours whose trace the texts [in The Infinite Conversation] bear - supposes a radical change of epoch: interruption, death itself - or, to speak hyperbolically, "the end of history". Writing in this way passes through the advent of communism, recognised as the ultimate affirmation - communism being still always beyond communism. Writing thus becomes a terrible responsibility. Invisibly, writing is called upon to undo the discourse in which, however unhappy we believe ourselves to be, we who have it at our disposal remain comfortably installed. From this point of view writing is the greatest violence, for it transgresses the law, every law, and also its own.

Failing as utopians

The tenth issue of the online journal ATOPIA reflects "on the space left for literary, philosophical and artistic journals today." In the only original contribution in English, Lars Iyer discusses the attempt by Blanchot, among others, to set up a transnational journal in the 1960s.

The Revue Internationale was the Italian novelist’s Elio Vittorini’s idea, Blanchot remembers in 1996; he recalls that Italo Calvino, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Günter Grass, Ingeborg Bachmann and Uwe Johnson being associated with the project; Louis-René des Forêts was its secretary, and Maurice Nadeau and Roland Barthes were also involved.

"If the idea proves to be utopian" Blanchot wrote to participants, "then we should be willing to fail as utopians". They failed. You can find the full text of Blanchot's notes in Literary Debate: Text and Contexts. He also wrote four articles for the journal, and ATOPIA republishes a translation of The Conquest of Space (from The Blanchot Reader) commemorating Gagarin's journey into space, which, as in all Blanchot, is uncannily similar to a journey into literature:

[It] is extraordinary, we have left the earth. Herein lies ... the true significance of the experience: man has freed himself from place. He has felt, at least for a moment, the sense of something decisive: far away - in an abstract distance of pure science - removed from the common condition symbolized by the force of gravity, there was a man, no longer in the sky, but in space, in a space which has no being or nature but is the pure and simple reality of a measurable (almost) void.

Reviewers' block

Here its comes again, the herd. Treading the same old ground, their own ground, churning it, thick, brown and sticky. The collective incontinence. So, Melissa McClements in the Financial Times: "Vila-Matas seems determined to make his readers go intertextually insane":

Some of the other writers and literary thinkers referred to in just the first 25 pages include Spanish poet Justo Navarro, Argentine novelist Ricardo Piglia, Mexican writer Sergio Pitol, French surrealist Jacques Vache, Italian humorist Achille Campanile, Marxist literary critic Walter Benjamin, New York literary critic Harold Bloom, Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas, French poet Arthur Rimbaud, Czech writer Franz Kafka, American poet Ezra Pound and, most tellingly, Jorge Luis Borges, the giant of 20th-century Latin American literature, famous for his self-reflexive, labyrinthine fiction.

Is she trying to drive us insane too or don't her references count? "Czech writer" indeed.

Montano’s father is also suffering from his own kind of 'literary disease'. He is so steeped in literature that he can only see the world in terms of it - he walks around a particular park in Nantes because the surrealist Andre Breton wrote about it; and he sees his son’s erratic behaviour in terms of Hamlet’s mood swings.

Whereas mainstream reviewers see literature only in terms of the world, the world of fashion, the smug falsifications of realism and the demands of idle gratification.

At one point its narrator angrily throws aside a biography of the philosopher Thomas Browne - something readers not in the middle of a doctorate on literary critical theory might well find themselves emulating with this book itself.

The book itself - what an idea!

Poetry of Constraint competition

Task: in no more than five verses write a poem mentioning the following birdies in the following order: moorcock, partridge, plover, woodcock, hern, cushat, thrush and linnet.

Also, include a passionate critique of blood sports, a lyrical evocation of nature's sublime riches and one's personal feeling for a bonnie Scottish lass called Peggy. Do not mention haggis.

Winner just in: Robert Burns.

For big toe dipping

3:AM Magazine has undergone a redesign. Loads of stuff to discover or rediscover: frinstance, Andrew Stevens' interview with Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press and Tom McCarthy on Alexander Trocchi's Cain's Book.

And while I'm paddling in the edgier waters, radical independent publisher Peter Owen has a blog. Check out its Modern Classics list for an impressive impression of its output.

Heavy novels

I didn't know of Enrique Vila-Matas' Montano, his new novel in translation, until I saw this absurdly short review in The New Statesman. I read Bartleby & Co in a day sometime ago, and forgot it immediately. But there was something attractive in its quiet but insistent preference not to be a normal novel; to be true, instead, to its own internal logic. In her 207 words, Nadia Saint reminds us that Bartleby & Co was "challenging", which it wasn't, so then warning that Montano is "really heavy stuff" doesn't put me off - and I hate heavy novels (The Da Vinci Code and the Harry Potter series, that sort of thing).

Philistinism, bis

The Guardian's Andrew Bissett asks:

I have a first-class degree and a masters in English Literature, and I've read plenty of difficult books, so if I can't enjoy Finnegan's Wake [sic], or large parts of Ulysses, where does the fault lie? With me? Or with an author who was lucky enough to write baffling, unreadable prose during a period in which it was the vogue to elevate baffling, unreadable prose? Ditto various other modernist works designed principally to exclude the masses.

Neither. The fault lies in the culture of our mainstream arts media, in which it is the vogue to display faux simplicity and crass philistinism (some of its employees don't seem to understand the intentional fallacy), partly to look cool to their audience and colleagues, but principally to make a viable career even when that means betraying precisely what they claim to promote.

Bernhard at the KGB

New Yorkers, open your diaries. Everyone else, your wrists. On the 18th of February at 7pm, the KGB Bar hosts an evening of readings from the work of Thomas Bernhard. The organiser Jonathan Taylor writes that "several American writers who admire Bernhard or have been influenced by their encounters with his work will read and discuss chosen selections - bringing favorite Bernhardian monologues to life as performances, and exposing a wider public to the qualities that have drawn many innovative writers to his work."

The readers will be Wayne Koestenbaum, Rhonda Lieberman, Ben Marcus, Geoffrey O'Brien and, to my surprise, Dale Peck. Has he ever written on Bernhard? Jonathan Taylor says of Peck that his "favorite Bernhard novels are Old Masters, Concrete, and Woodcutters, although not always in that order."