It's not just me then

At this precise moment, something happened that was very important for me. I don't know how, but I was reminded of a sentence by Nietzsche that I have always read in a thousand different ways, it depends on the meaning I wish to give it each time. It is a sentence I apply to a whole range of circumstances: “One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous - a crisis without equal on earth.”

One cannot go against one's imagination, and at that instant, on the terrace of the Brighton [Hotel], I imagined my name and surname in a few years' time evoking the brutal memory of a crisis in literature that humanity will have overcome - the imagination, when it's very powerful, is capable of these things - thanks to my heroic conduct, Quixote, spear in hand, against the enemies of the literary.

From the wonderful Montano's Malady by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Jonathan Dunne.

Sunday supplement

Mark of RSB says he's taking the new Malamud biography with him to North Wales. This is a very special book, so I hope he doesn't waste time enjoying the countryside. Subtitled "A Writer's Life", it uses close analysis of successive manuscripts to demonstrate, among other things, that literature was not merely an adjunct to Malamud's life - the thing that made him worthy of serious gossip, as James Atlas' biography of Bellow seemed to assume - but constitutive of his being. Malamud comes across as a mildly conservative writer. He's quoted as saying he didn't have it in him to be an "experimentalist". But Philip Davis shows how hard he worked to get the books right as he saw it: “My gift is to create what may be deeply felt" he's quoted as saying, which is the only good reason for such experiment anyway. In his last book, Dubin's Lives, this meant a book about - horror upon horror - a writer.

Being faced with this, the demand to create what may be deeply felt, has led JM Coetzee toward his literary uniqueness, and in her review of his new novel and the recent essay collection, Elizabeth Lowry expresses surprise that, in his reading of Nadine Gordimer, “[t]he gourmet's choice in metafiction grumbles at being served up too meagre a portion of realism“. But where in Coetzee's fiction is realism absent? Coetzee is this gourmet's choice of fiction, fullstop. Lowry's naive surprise reminds me of Michael Wood's words on the last line of Nabokov's novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight:

The last sentence of the novel doesn't, as Nabokov himself may have felt, and as many binary-minded critics have certainly thought, release us into 'mere' fiction, a world that turns out to have been 'only' a book. It points precisely to the precarious but possibly continuing life of whatever has been thoroughly, painfully or ecstatically imagined.

Ah yes, the imagination - is that real?

Elsewhere, Lee Rourke wishes for more lessness in novels. I want to agree at very great length.

And I've just remembered that Nicola Barker, now on the Booker longlist for Darkmans, had a short story published in June on The Mad Hatters' Review. I had mentioned the magazine in June.

Finally, I always read “This Week's Contributors“ in the TLS (unless I'm included and then I'm too embarrassed) because it always throws up interesting information. This week's edition tells us that Tim Dee is "co-editing a new ... book of bird poetry". Well I thought this has been done before, but it's good to see sexism still being resisted...

Smuttering retreats

In writing of "snobbery about smutty books" Sam Jordison complains that we haven't escaped from "the assumption that clever people can cope with raunch and others, well, it might give them bad ideas!". It's probably true - I mean, the assumption is probably true. After all, it has given Sam bad ideas. One is that of a straw man: "If Ian McEwan fills healthy portions of his books with awkward young men's masturbatory fantasies, it's art. When Jilly Cooper glories in no holds barred rutting, it's a cheap attempt to shift units and titillate her (by implication rather pathetic) readers." Who is making these judgements? Nowhere in the blog is the claim that "one deserves more respect than the other, elevated as it is by art" attributed to anyone. Perhaps "the mysterious invisible authorities" who canonise these specious oppositions and producing so much snobbery are closer to home than Sam imagines.

In an old notebook, I found this from James Joyce: "Pornography is kinetic. It has aims and is therefore bad art." (I've no idea where this comes from by the way.) Yet what is bad art? We've all heard enthusiasts recommending Shakespeare with reports of extreme violence in Coriolanus and King Lear or humour in so many of the rest. The suggestion is that thrills and laughs give convenient access to better things - "great art", whatever that is. But what this great art is meant to provide has never trickled down in the same way as the concurrent suggestion: that Shakespeare is no better than wish-fulfilling entertainments - Joyce's bad art. No wonder happy consumers of these are confused and offended when not afforded the same "respect" as those who are stroking only their chins.

One commenter on the blog tries to make the distinction between stories that "explore something about the dysfunctionality of the characters" and bodice-rippers in which "the sex is just there to be sex". Unfortunately this makes literature sound like a branch of sociology and, worse, gives the impression that it is further removed from reality than penny dreadfuls. More bad ideas! Direct access to the real is the hope of art; it wants not ideas about the thing but the thing itself. This hope is soon dissolved, and indeed reality is kept at bay with distancing ideas and the tight control of genre (hence reviewers proudly claiming to enjoy potboilers as much as Pulitzer winners). In contrast, the drama of great art emerges as both ideas and genre are questioned, destroyed even.

For example, Shakespeare's Richard II animates the tension between trust in ritual and growing suspicion. The King undermines authority in the ritual of trial by combat by halting the fight between two noblemen. It all leads eventually to the destruction of faith in his divine right and he is overthrown; superstition can no longer protect him. Richard's death marks a change of epoch. One thing the play doesn't do, however, is doubt the ritual of the art itself. But perhaps doubt is implicit; something we can see from a distance breaking the power of theatre after Shakespeare's time as much as it broke King Richard. (So, if Shakespeare were alive today, he wouldn't be Shakespeare.) Yet it's a trust Sam Jordison tries to maintain. It's understandable as it's constitutive of the products that drive discussion in dominant cultural forums. And it does, after all, have a mysterious cultural authority. The trouble is, it is an artistically empty maintenance. It has no artistic authority. It leads to pointless chatter about respectability, as if that was all great art had to offer! But I don't want to pick on Sam. I've defended him elsewhere and there are others maintaining the dead space more deserving of criticism: Ian McEwan and Jilly Cooper for instance.

Philosophy and the Novel

Today, Descartes would probably be a novelist; Pascal certainly. A genre becomes universal when it seduces minds which have no reason to embrace it. But, ironically, it is just such minds that are sapping the novel from within: they introduce problems heterogeneous to its nature, diversify it, pervert and overburden it until they make its architecture crack. If the future of the novel is not close to your heart, it should please you to see a philosopher writing one. Whenever philosophers insinuate themselves into Letters, it is to exploit their confusion or to precipitate their collapse.

EM Cioran in The Temptation to Exist (1956).

To write in ignorance of the philosophical horizon - or refusing to acknowledge the punctuation, the groupings and separations determined by the words that mark this horizon - is necessarily to write with facile complacency (the literature of elegance and good taste).

Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster (1980).

It is perhaps instructive that one of our most elegant writer of novels displaying the utmost good taste should concern himself with Science writing - a philosophy without doubt in itself. Where, then, can we find the true philosophical horizon?

More Handke nonsense

In this weekend's NY Times, Neil Gordon says he lost faith in the work of Peter Handke from the point his career at which mine was discovered (albeit retrospectively as I began in the late 1980s). From Slow Homecoming onward, his novels illuminated a world darkened by the ordnance of a wrongheaded war against cliché. The earlier works seemed dated in comparison.

Gordon complains that since then "his exacting gaze, with its strange combination of compassion and accusation, turned on and began to consume itself." Yet the only evidence he supplies for this is a negative review of his latest novel in translation. He bypasses Across, Repetition and The Afternoon of a Writer, which just happen to be the soaring highlights of Handke's career, if not the newsworthy ones. As William Gass (correctly) regards Repetition one of the great novels of the past hundred years, you might expect at least a mention. Has Gordon read them?

In keeping with his role as literary editor of the Boston Review, Gordon soon brings up Handke's distance from the party line and spins his attempt to amend western perceptions of the Balkans conflict as a "baffling defense of — or, at least, unwillingness to condemn — Serbian atrocities". Handke has stated regret for all atrocities in a war that destroyed a country he loved, which includes those committed by official enemies. Gordon's focus on "Serbian atrocities" suggest he is himself unwilling to condemn as many as Handke. Who's baffling now?

We needn't be surprised as the Boston Review has a history of apologetics for terror; witness the the contortions over Iraq by Susie Linfield.

However, I have to say, after reading the first 120 pages of Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, I share his feelings about the book if not the reasons for them ("Perhaps Handke believes that only scholars and specialists should be allowed to share his secrets" - perhaps Handke writes in good faith and we should read the book itself rather than confect intentions?). Where the three great novels of the 80s were driven by the movement of patient investigation and epiphanic discovery, this novel (and to a lesser extent My Year in the No-man's Bay) is, at best, loose and unfocussed, at worst pointless and boring. Spurious has a post mitigating the book's apparent faults.

Another thing the three novels have in common is an evocation of the rhythm and wonder of walking across a landscape, and it's for this reason Michael Roloff calls Handke "the last great walker on the earth". Crossing the Sierra de Gredos is more like an interminable, fevered dream of a journey. I can only hope that Handke's recent, shorter novels - Don Juan, Kali and the forthcoming Samara - mark a return to form. And that they don't take an age to appear in English.

Make it new (again)

"I think it is possible that talent has moved to other things" he says, "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. You can't borrow somebody else's form, otherwise you can easily end up with absurdities like, shall we say, the story of a New Guinea chieftain cast in the form of a George Eliot narrative. One narrative goes with a particular kind of life, a particular moment in history; another narrative comes at another time, and you have to find the correct one. The one that feels true to you. Not the one that they teach you about. The minute that you can be taught about something, you know it's not real. All writing has to be new."

VS Naipaul in a Sunday Times interview, 8th May 1994.

The cycling tour

One reason I haven't posted very often this Summer is ownership of a new bike. For an hour each evening I pedal Pither-like the same scenic route uphill, inland and back along the seafront. But I don't escape literature. Not only do I listen along to podcasts from Santa Monica and Stanford, but at the furthest reach I pass the home of Rudyard Kipling (brother of the famous Ronnie Kipling) and then, nearer home, the abode of Terence Rattigan. No sign of Clodagh Rodgers yet.

Trojanow horseshit

In Sign & Sight's daily email I was drawn to a summary of what's in the news today: "Author Ilija Trojanow gets his creative writing students off ego-lit and into the world of the foreign". This sounded interesting enough to visit the "feuilletons" page (why does that word annoy me?) for further reading. I wasn't expecting what I got:

Jean-Michel Berg, a student at the Free University of Berlin, tells of his experiences in the seminar given by writer Ilija Trojanow. [..] 'I can't imagine anything more boring than one's own sensations,' Trojanow says, thus staking out the ground between him and Peter Handke, for example, and other explorers of internal worlds. That's why our first task was to avoid 'ego-lit' and write about something entirely foreign.

That's Peter Handke folks, author of Repetition about a 20-year-old Austrian man's journey from his home village to cross the border into a foreign land and "search" for his dead brother using his dictionary of Slovenian terms. And the author of On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House, about a pharmacist who abandons his apoteke to travel across Europe. And author of My Year in the No-Man's Bay in which a writer imagines the adventures of his friends in foreign lands. And the author of Crossing the Sierra de Gredos about a German woman who travels to somewhere probably not-German. All internal worlds avoiding the entirely foreign, apparently.

Of course, Handke's work displays a deep awareness of the paradox of reading and writing; a paradox that each enables both inwardness and exposure to the outside, which might lead some simplistic readers, and perhaps their creative writing teachers, to assume that one need only bypass acknowledgment of the former to achieve the latter, but that would be a fundamental misunderstanding both of literature and of Peter Handke, and would thus disqualify them from any undue attention from people who should know better.

PS: Handke is author of a book of poems called The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld, translated by Michael Roloff, which I haven't read but the title is enough to suggest the nonsense of a simple opposition.