No safe landing

A review of A Winter in Zürau and Partita by Gabriel Josipovici

 

Gabriel Josipovici has said that as a critic he is conservative but as a novelist he is radical. The second claim may not be controversial but the first will come as a surprise to those who remember what he said about the big-name contemporary novelists in What Ever Happened to Modernism?. This novel and non-fiction combination offers an opportunity to experience the two in close proximity – two sides of an LP, as Nick Lezard put it. 

Side one is is a study of the eight months Franz Kafka spent in the Bohemian countryside after a diagnosis of TB and in particular the collection of notes he wrote there known as the Zürau Aphorisms. On the other side, Partita is a novel written mostly in dialogue following Michael Penderecki on the run after a death threat in which he spends most of this time chasing a lover who herself keeps running away. The threat of death and the promise of escape are two links between the sides that otherwise seem to have little in common. Josipovici's two claims, however, provides another.

Before he left for Zürau, Kafka told Max Brod he intended to use the time to "become clear about ultimate things". Josipovici follows him through each day as recorded in the collection known as The Blue Octavo Notebooks. At first the entries include short stories, regular first-person diary entries and legalistic and theological speculations, the latter of which Josipovici is impatient as they lead Kafka into uncharacteristically "clunking" prose. But then the first aphorism appears:

The true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked along.

Every edition dedicated to the aphorisms begins here but, Josipovici claims, this is deceptive. On that day in October 1917, Kafka writes a long and indeed clunking paragraph before interrupting himself with the line translated as "I digress". He then writes the aphorism. Every edition deletes this line. Reiner Stach's recent The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka is the exception but relegates it to an aside in his commentary, with the rest discussing the rope motif. Josipovici points out the original German is "Ich irre ab", which he translates as "I'm on the wrong track", backed up when I checked using Google Translate which has "I'm going astray". This he says marks a decisive change and relates directly to the form of the rope entry, which he describes as "the melding of fiction and discursive prose in extremely compact pieces". 

"Ich irre ab" is thereby closer to Dante's "I had lost the path that does not stray" before he begins his journey and gives the first aphorism a similarly salvific imperative. The difference is that Kafka has no Virgil or Beatrice to guide him; belief in God has gone and the means of salvation uncertain, and the word possibly meaningless. By removing the line, the editors place the existential peril at a safe distance from which a critical apparatus can flourish. The generic distinction of 'aphorisms' is therefore inappropriate as Kafka's notes are not the witty or pithy sayings of a wise man but "the anxious jottings of a man under sentence of death". Kafka's digression was not then playing with genre for the sake of it or to show off his talent as a writer but, as he said, to "become clear about ultimate things". 

The rope motif stands for Kafka's ambivalence about writing and Josipovici is rare in Kafka studies by bringing it into the foreground. Kafka recognised the grace it affords when in his diary he describes writing as "a merciful surplus of strength at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being", but then he wonders "what kind of surplus is it?". In a letter to Brod, the doubts are expressed even more succinctly: "Writing sustains me, but is it not more accurate to say that it sustains this kind of life?" – a life in which he felt distant, a spectator unable to enjoy join in, as he described in a passage in his diary. Josipovici also shows how doubts about writing are dramatised in his stories. The officer in In the Penal Colony tells the traveller to read the sentence the machine has written on the body of the condemned man but he sees only "a labyrinth of lines crossing and recrossing each other". The machine takes twelve hours to kill so the engraving of the sentence has to be embellished to fill the time:

In so doing it brings out the paradox of the machine: meant to make the accused feel in his own body the justice of the punishment, it only helps to bring out that language can never be 'true' or 'just', that it will always contain flourishes.

In Zürau among simple farmers and labourers, Kafka saw no flourishes. He observed the centuries-old traditions embedded in daily life of the villagers governed by the seasons and centred on the church and recognised he was living the consequences of a society wrenched from such roots. Tradition had to be there already and could not be back-engineered. The best he could do as a writer was to distance himself from literary flourishes, to get as close to what Josipovici describes as "the unthinking life-activity that produces the works of Homer", in effect to disappear as a writer and for writing to disappear as a means of constructing ideas about the world. This was a common theme in the writers of the time. Josipovici cites Eliot's Prufrock and Wallace Stevens's snowman:

What they are all searching for in their art – and in their lives, actually – is a kind of perfect anonymity, something that is the opposite of the image of the entrepreneur, the figure of Progress, linked to capitalism in society and, in art, to fictions with beginnings, middles and a nice resolution at the end.

Blanchot calls this a "combat of passivity, combat which reduces itself to naught". Of course, that naught is still not disappearance as it is a combat for literature, an irony one aphorism melding fiction and discursive prose recognises:

Like a path in autumn: scarcely has it been swept clear than it is once more covered with dry leaves.

Josipovici notes how odd it is not to be told what is the path is like and admits that he's not sure why but the line "would be much weaker if it started with: 'I feel like' or 'My life is like a path in autumn'". The question of why it would be weaker is fascinating and maddening. Josipovici says "this is what Kafka’s best fictions and images do to you: in a few plain and simple words they set your imagination going and refuse to provide it with a safe landing". This is the gift of Kafka's quest to become clear about ultimate things, "a gift we do not receive" as Blanchot says in the same passage. The gift of A Winter in Zürau is that it makes us aware of the distance between us and Kafka, a distance between us and awareness of distance, a distance from the loss of tradition, a distance between us and ultimate things, and so a distance from the deep roots of fiction, as one of Kafka's melded commentaries on myth describes:

There are four legends about Prometheus. According to the first, because he betrayed the gods to men he was chained to a rock in the Caucasus and the gods sent eagles that devoured his liver, which always grew again. According to the second, Prometheus in his agony, as the beaks hacked into him, pressed deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it. According to the third, in the course of thousands of years his treachery was forgotten, the gods forgot, the eagles forgot, he himself forgot. According to the fourth, everyone grew weary of what had become meaningless. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily. What remained was the inexplicable range of mountains.

The great books by the great writers is an inexplicable mountain range we admire only from a distance. We hurry to name contemporary equivalents but we know something is missing. For Kafka, the horror and the undivine comedy of modern life was close enough in time to contrast with village life to sense what was lost so there remained a tension: "From the true antagonist boundless courage flows into you" he wrote in Zürau, a single sentence that many of us would pass over without pause but for the close attention Josipovici provides: "the agon or trial of strength was the fulcrum on which Kafka’s imagination turned" and cites the father in The Judgment, but then adds a crucial note: "The question is whether for modern man such an antagonist exists." Side two of this edition offers an answer.

While Partita's features an Englishman with a Polish name on the run across Europe to escape a threat of death and then pursuing an unpredictable lover in variously dark, comic and surreal episodes, the title points away from the content just as music points away from itself. It has a non-musical meaning too: in Italian verb 'partire' means to leave, to go away, and the noun in the feminine describing someone who has left is 'la partita'. There are seven chapters each named after parts of the musical form; variations on a theme. In the Praeambulum, music is in the foreground when Michael Penderecki's host insists on playing Yves Montand singing Les feuilles mortes (Autumn Leaves) on his fancy record player:

A quiet voice of great beauty begins to tell a story. It tells of memory and of those happy days when the sun always shone, days when we were friends; it tells of the dead leaves of autumn swept up into piles, like our memories and regrets.

The dead leaves echo the fate of Kafka's true way, in this case one cleared by feet running into the future soon covered again as it becomes the past. The song recurs throughout the novel; a literary earworm reminding us that what ever joy we have, what ever hope we maintain, goes away. Everything passes. Perhaps this is modern man's only potential antagonist, the one we confront in every waking moment while music and dreams are the ineffable reminders of escape, the promise and impossibility of escape that we seek anyway in flight from death and in pursuit of love; poles of the same earth. We exalt both with all kinds of rationales from the purely subjective to the purely technical, except music is heard and love felt differently to how we spell it out. In the novel it has a comic equivalence in Michael Penderecki's surname: his name may be spelled Penderecki but he irritates people by telling them it is pronounced Penderetzky. And with two otherwise incompatible books, we have two versions of the name. A Winter in Zürau spells out Josipovici's advocacy of formal adventure in writing as he follows Kafka sounding out the losses and paradoxes that haunt its necessity, while in Partita the antagonist can only be experienced in its pronunciation; it is experienced as it leaves us, forever there and forever out of reach. In this sense, Josipovici is radical as a critic and conservative as a novelist.

Twentieth anniversary post

On this day in 2004, I posted the first entry on this blog. 

In recent years many posts have reflected on the past and present of literary blogging (it has no future) so I will not go over that waste land again except to wish more had followed the example of This Space. One of the very few, in fact the only one I can think of, has been Dan Fraser's Oubliette, which he appears to have forgotten, but he has continued writing elsewhere, such as at A Personal Anthology and Radical Philosophy, the latter reviewing a book that has influenced the direction taken by this blog over the years; one might say the opposite direction.

I'm always impressed by writers like Dan who can summarise a book with apparent ease. It's the one thing that slows me down, often to a frazzled halt. Although I see this as a personal failing, it may be a sign of what distracts from my true interests. With this in mind, last week Donald Clark, the learning theory guru who is himself very adept at summarising, posted a blog about Google's AI tool NotebookLM, which summarises books for you. I pasted my notes taken from various non-fiction books and was stunned by the breadth and clarity of what it delivered. If writing about literature can survive such technology it has to be in pursuing what rational exposition conceals, which in a literary blog may be found in its haphazard and discontinuous non-procedure.

One feature of NotebookLM which Donald Clark says will blow your mind is its automated podcast featuring two chirpy American voices discussing what you have uploaded. Here's what they've got to say about my recent ebook: The Opposite Direction. I apologise in advance.

The end of literature, part five

"Stupid" and "a marketing exercise" were the first two descriptions I saw of the New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century polled from hundreds of "literary luminaries" offering ten choices each, and while it is both of those things, "parochial" is the first word that comes to this non-American mind, and not only in the predominance of books written by Americans. The word also applies to "best", quietly amended in the standfirst to "the most important, influential books of the era", which is something else entirely. 

A discussion of how "the best" may be defined would have led to a far more interesting feature, but of course it is the business of newspapers like the New York Times to contain critical thought, hence a billion social media responses such as "I agree with many choices, disagree with many others", a statement whose crippling banality highlights the crisis of authority hidden beneath such lists, with "the best" finding its foundation in the infinite shallows of personal taste. "It's all subjective, isn't it" an anxious friend of mine often said to shut down discussions of the merits of various books. Well, if reading is an encounter with something other than oneself – even if the other is within and there is an uncanny homecoming – reading then becomes a dislocation of the subject, so perhaps a book can be judged according to the quality of dislocation, something lacking in the home comforts of the New York Times list. The person who made the banal comment goes on to suggest as much:

nobody picked a reviled book—a disturbing book—a book that is only loved by a few—a book that might resurface in 20 years as an unheralded and forgotten classic.

Such a large poll makes this impossible. Even when an individual's choices are revealed, the selections are conservative (or hilarious in Sarah MacLean's case, demoralising in Karl Ove Knausgaard's). Many years ago James Wood was right to decline to take part in a poll to find "the best novel" in the final 25 years of the 20th century as he said people tended to choose the book they assumed worthy of such an accolade – a serious book with a serious subject – rather than apply some independent thinking to the question (Beloved came top). Especially shocking here is that the "literary luminaries" have chosen not only worthy books but those they merely enjoyed or admired – someone has chosen a novel published so recently they may not have even finished reading it. Imagine instead if someone from another time had written the email: 

Hi, the New York Times here. Hope you're well. We'd like you to list ten books from this century that affected you like a disaster, that grieved you deeply, like the death of someone you loved more than yourself, like you were banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. By Thursday if possible.

Kafka's proclamation is easily dismissed as teenage angst or, with more attention given to the historical conditions, an expression of the confusion and despair of a society metamorphosing from one world into another, but it raises the spectre of a book alien to a literary professional compiling a list. The same media that produces Best Book lists celebrates Kafka's novels as definitive of a certain time and assumes that by asking around like this it can recognise the books that define our own, except Kafka was only a peripheral figure in 1924, with his friends Franz Werfel and Max Brod much more likely to have made a Best Books of the 20th Century list in that year but whose work is more or less forgotten now. What this suggests is that the writing of such significance is untimely.

Apart from the enjoyable and admiring kind of reading – industry-friendly reading – how might we recognise the untimely? In the book of fragments known as The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot described three possibilities:

◆ There is an active, productive way of reading which produces text and reader and thus transports us. Then there is a passive kind of reading which betrays the text while appearing to submit to it, by giving the illusion that the text exists objectively, fully, sovereignly: as one whole. Finally, there is the reading that is no longer passive, but is passivity’s reading. It is without pleasure, without joy; it escapes both comprehension and desire. It is like the nocturnal vigil, that "inspiring" insomnia when, all having been said, "Saying" is heard, and the testimony of the last witness pronounced.

We can see the first two kinds of reader – the connoisseur and the consumer – competing in the New York Times list, often difficult to distinguish one from the other, but what of the third? The experience of the list may be its revelation: overwhelmed by possibility, exhausted before even having begun to read, stalled in sleeplessness, the consumer can consume no more, not even a wafer-thin novella. We experience it elsewhere as the stack of 800-page novels grows a book higher every week, each an apparent summit and summa of art and civilisation, heralded by one and all as the incontrovertible refutation of The Death of the Novel and yet, in its maximal, long, approaching shadow, its terminal desire. The third is the testimony of a silence from and to which these books lead, and us its mute, impatient witness. The open, silent spaces of Blanchot's fragmentary writing may be their correlate, each novel straining to share the testimony of eternity – the untimely – in a merciful surplus of strength Blanchot calls the disaster.

In the next entry, Blanchot says:

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). Hölderlin, Mallarmé, so many others, do not permit this.

We see a great deal of elegance and good taste on the New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list, but is there a glimmer of those that do not permit it? 

Without commitment, without wishing to speak of "the best", and only out of propriety, I would point to the example of books written this century in which the philosophical horizon presents itself in form and content: well-known works like Jon Fosse's Septology, perhaps more accurately an anti-work seeking its own end, Coetzee's Jesus trilogy, and Knausgaard's My Struggle, all untimely in their way and one of which appears on the list, and lesser known works of fiction such as Tao Lin's Eeeee Eee Eeee, Dag Solstad's Novel 11, Book 18, Josipovici's Infinity, Vila-Matas' Bartleby & Co, Sam Pink's The Ice Cream Man and other stories, and non-fiction books presenting the horizon in more formal terms: Jeff Fort's The Imperative to Write, Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism?, Quentin Meillassoux's The Number and the Siren, and Willem Styfhals' No Spiritual Investment in the World. Not one here, I suppose, that may be reviled or disturbing, so perhaps comment with your own suggestions of those otherwise unheralded, loved by a few.

Kafka's great fire

The centenary of Kafka's death was marked twelve years late. His diary records it in September 1912:

This story, The Judgment, I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22nd-23rd, from ten o'clock at night to six o'clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water. Several times during this night I heaved my own weight on my back. How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again. How it turned blue outside the window. A wagon rolled by. Two men walked across the bridge. At two I looked at the clock for the last time. As the maid walked through the anteroom for the first time I wrote the last sentence. Turning out the light and the light of day. The slight pains around my heart. The weariness that disappeared in the middle of the night. The trembling entrance into my sisters' room. Reading aloud. Before that, stretching in the presence of the maid and saying, I've been writing until now. The appearance of the undisturbed bed, as though it had just been brought in. The conviction verified that with my novel-writing I am in the shameful lowlands of writing. Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.   [Translated by Joseph Kresh]

The story and its importance for Kafka has always intrigued me because its mundane setting and the petty concerns of the protagonists are hardly earth shattering, with the Freudian red flags, the extremity of the father's sentence and Georg's immediate self-execution suggesting a drama overdetermined in its compression: social realism and absurdity squash up and cancel each other out. What is left?

Gabriel Josipovici's review of the recent book collecting Kafka's drawings offers an understanding of what distinguishes The Judgment from what came before. He shows that the drawings are in keeping with his writing of the time such as in Betrachtung/Contemplation in which "what happens is governed not by the conventions of fin-de-siècle storytelling but simply by the feelings of the protagonist". In the drawings it takes for the form of "ludicrously tall or squat people stretching, twisting, leaning from or away from one another". What's notable for Josipovici is that Kafka more or less stopped drawing after that September night. Until then both writing and drawing came relatively easily, but it was precisely such ease that was the problem: 

Writing [dependent on feelings] may initially feel promising, but it soon palls. If I have simply to write something down to summon it into being, if everything depends entirely on my mood as I write, then what is the point of writing anything at all?

The point of writing for many is to win the world's favour, to be admired, fêted at literary festivals. Kafka had recognised it himself when as a child he tried to impress his family by writing a story in front of them, which, after some overt attention seeking, was dismissed by an uncle as "the usual stuff".

It is one of the clichés of our time that we all have our stories to tell. But Kafka tells us here that such stories are always self-serving, created by us to protect ourselves from reality and out of the desire to "shine"...

Kafka wanted something less tangible, as his reticence to follow the paths of his celebrated writers among his friends suggests:

What he is after in his writing, he notes in January 1911, is "a description in which every word would be linked to my life, which I would draw to my heart and which would transport me out of myself."

If Kafka was "made of literature" as he told Felice, then the story and Georg's suicide is Kafka's transport out of literature:

He has discovered that while words are far more recalcitrant than drawing, it is only in the art of words that narrative can be produced and can then turn against itself and uncover its corrupt origins and motivations. By so doing it reveals its beneficent and healing power: the power to speak the truth about our desires and the world of others. By writing stories that dramatize writing and the fantasies of the imagination and then dramatizing their destruction, he escapes the realm of fantasy, of solipsism.

The final sentence here compresses a question that has preoccupied me for a long time: how does one escape genre? In Kafka's terms, how does one turn out the light of the self for the light of day?

Four years ago I wrote that JM Coetzee's The Death of Jesus might be characterised as the last novel, as it took form and content into a limbo of indeterminate clarity. It dramatises the fantasties of genre fiction in which otherwise we find freedom and safety, and does so to the point of sabotaging both, hence the consternation of professional critics. Could it be in its own way a three-volume decompression of The Judgment? The trilogy leaves us exposed to the open much as Kafka's story does; a kind of metaphysical exile, as Robert Pippin's calls it. It may also follow Josipovici's description of The Judgment as "a ritual of exorcism", reinforced by the name in each title. This potential to strip literature of its layers of protection from the outside is invariably missed, repressed or misunderstood because it is soon absorbed into the process of literary evaluation. We can see it in the celebrations of the belated centenary in collections such as this one subtitled Ten Kafkaesque Stories.

What happens when some of the most original literary minds of today take an idea, a mood or a line from his work and use it to spark something new?

How about a great fire for the vanities of fiction in a complete opening out of body and soul?

From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting.

Oh right, the usual stuff.

39 Books in one

For anyone interested (you there in the phone box), here's a PDF of the 39 Books series.

• 39 Books: PDF
  

As the introduction explained, the books were chosen from those on my books-read lists that I hadn't written about before. I thought it might be instructive to contrast the books I did write about for each year. Before 2007, I wrote elsewhere and almost all reviews are now behind paywalls or offline due to webzines becoming defunct. After 2006, I wrote exclusively on this blog, barring Tao Lin's first novel which I found on Wayback Machine; included because I like the review's title. 

2007
JM Coetzee – Diary of a Bad Year
Tao Lin – Eeeee Eee Eeee

2008
Jeanette Winterson – The Stone Gods
Thomas Glavinic – Night Work

2009
Dag Solstad – Novel 11, Book 18
Jonathan Littel – The Kindly Ones
Jean Echenoz – Ravel
Nick Cave – The Death of Bunny Munro
JM Coetzee – Summertime

2010
Gabriel Josipovici – What Ever Happened to Modernism?
Paul Celan / Ingeborg Bachmann – Correspondence
Mathias Énard – Zone
Thomas Bernhard – My Prizes

2011
Peter Handke – Across, Repetition, and The Afternoon of a Writer
Judith Hermann – Alice
Pascal Quignard – The Roving Shadows
Geoff Nicholson – The Lost Art of Walking
Jeffrey Lewis – The Meritocracy Quartet
Thomas Bernhard – Victor Halfwit
Samuel Beckett – Letters 1941-1956

2012
Lars Iyer – Dogma
Gabriel Josipovici – Infinity
Edouard Levé – Suicide
Karl Ove Knausgaard – My Struggle vol. 1
Sinéad Murphy – The Art Kettle
Enrique Vila-Matas – Dublinesque
Karl Ove Knausgaard – A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven
Nicolas Cauwe – Easter Island: The Great Taboo
Paul Auster – Winter Journal

2013
Lars Iyer – Exodus
Karl Ove Knausgaard – My Struggle vol. 2
Miguel de Beistegui – Proust as Philosopher
Michel Laub – Diary of the Fall
Reiner Stach – Kafka: The Years of Insight

2014
Ágota Kristóf – The illiterate
Karl Ove Knausgaard – My Struggle vol. 3
Lars Iyer – Wittgenstein Jr
Tao Lin – Taipai
Georges Bataille – Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux or the Birth of Art

2015
Jen Craig – Panthers and the Museum of Fire
Jeff Fort – The Imperative to Write
Gabriel Josipovici – Migrations
Ellis Sharp – Lamees Najim
Jill Stauffer – Ethical Loneliness

2016
Thomas Bernhard – Goethe Dies
Charlie Hill – Stuff
Karl Ove Knausgaard – My Struggle vol. 5

2017
Enrique Vila-Matas – Vampire in Love
Mathias Énard – Compass
Gabriel Josipovici – In a Hotel Garden
Rainer J. Hanshe and Federico Gori – Shattering the Muses
Karl Ove Knausgaard – Autumn
Peter Handke – To Duration

2018
JM Coetzee – The Childhood and Schooldays of Jesus
Sarah Kofman – Smothered Words
Gabriel Josipovici – The Cemetery in Barnes
Dante – Vita Nuova
TJ Clark – Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come

2019
Josef Czapski – Lost Time: Lectures on Proust
Kirsty Gunn – Caroline's Bikini
Ágota Kristóf – Yesterday
Mary Costello – The River Capture
Lars Iyer – Nietzsche and the Burbs

2020
JM Coetzee – The Death of Jesus
Sam Pink – The Ice Cream Man and other stories
Gert Hofmann – Veilchenfeld
Willem Styfhals – No Spiritual Investment in the World

2021
Peter Holm Jensen – The Moment
Sam Riviere – Dead Souls
Darren Allen – Drowning is Fine
Karl Ove Knausgaard – The Morning Star

2022
Jerry Z. Muller – Professor of Apocalypse
Jean-Luc Champerret – The Lascaux Notebooks
Franz Kafka – The Aphorisms

2023
Ellis Sharp – Month of the Drowned Dog
Lars Iyer – My Weil
Jen Craig – Wall
Kevin Hart – Maurice Blanchot on Poetry and Narrative
Richard Ford – Be Mine

39 Books: 2023

This is the 39th and final post of this series. As the introduction explains, I began seeking a return to the short-form of the early days of blogging. And it started off well, with each entry written in no time, sometimes stirring up the sediment of initial enchantment. As I got to the later stages, however, questions arose, answers were inadequate, and freedom became confinement. In effect, 39 Books compresses twenty years of this blog into five weeks. There was also a secret hope that on completion I could put an end to this kind of writing, to escape the fortress that became a prison cell. Into what?

"Perhaps there are other forms of writing," writes Kafka to Max Brod, "but I know only this kind."

Except Kafka was talking about night writing:

This descent to the dark powers, this unshackling of spirits bound by nature, these dubious embraces and whatever else may take place in the nether parts which the higher parts no longer know, when one writes one’s stories in the sunshine.

The letter was written after a night in which Kafka had lain sleepless in the spa town of Planá during which he says it became clear to him "on what frail ground or rather altogether nonexistent ground I live". 

In 2023 I read Kari Hukkila's One Thousand and One translated from the Finnish by David Hackston, a novel written over such frail or nonexistent ground. The narrator is also in a spa. The cabin in the countryside in which he planned to escape finally to write what he needs to write had been damaged by fallen trees, so he sleeps in the sauna. What he writes from an uncertain elsewhere is patterned by such interruption. There are several in the first quarter of the book only: he visits Mara, a philosopher friend who has interrupted his life in Helsinki to live in Rome and who shares his ideas about Wittgenstein's life and work, itself full of self-imposed interruptions, a discourse interrupted by an irrational quest to find an Ethiopian illegal immigrant who had introduced lice into his bed after a one-night stand, both of which lead to a discussion of the poet Gunnar Björling who lost his life's work in a wartime bombing raid.

Readers may recognise that meandering between diverse and often melancholic stories of outsiders is a key technique of WG Sebald's novels, especially in The Rings of Saturn, as is the telescopic framing of the telling, notably in Austerlitz, itself a key technique of Thomas Bernhard's novels, as Sebald admitted with some concern, as is the displaced writer, such as Franz-Josef Murau also in Rome, so for those who revere Sebald's novels and reflect on what might have been had his life not been interrupted, One Thousand and One may provide the consolation of continuity. 

But for all of the pleasure of reading this novel and admiring Hukkila's weaving of the narrative strands, I couldn't help wonder what might interrupt the elegant spirals of the novel, or indeed if anything could.

Mara's talk of Wittgenstein reminds the narrator of how for the latter "the ideal and the self-destructive are irreparably intertwined". During his composition of the Tractatus, he deliberately put himself in extreme danger on the eastern front during the first world war:

And it was over the course of those days and nights, Mara believed, that the Tractatus started to change, though its exact wording only burst onto the page a month or two later. As though it had a life of its own, Wittgenstein's work had expanded from the foundations of logic to the very essence of the world...As if the foundation of logic itself had been the target of nocturnal enemy fire and was transfigured by something that helped it survive. There were things in the world that simply made themselves manifest, they could not be put into words. Life is the world, and the meaning of life is the meaning of the world.

A novel is neither life nor world, so what does it make manifest? Perhaps an ideal that, despite the descent to the dark powers, despite the many violent stories and stories of violence, can neither interrupt nor destroy itself. What helps it to survive?

39 Books: 2022

"Hölderlin...asked only that we accept silence as the one meaningful syllable in the universe."

This line from Paul Stubbs' remarkable essay collection The Return to Silence is not an epigram to Marjorie Perloff's Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics, but it might have been.

After being invited to talk about Eliot's Four Quartets, about which she is not overly keen except for parts of 'Little Gidding', Perloff wonders what accounts for their continuing popularity. She rejects their 'musical' structure as the reason because other modernist poets wrote fugues and quartets without such acclaim, and she rejects the Christian symbolism as not being especially original or memorable. Instead:

It is, I would submit, at the microlevel that the brilliance of ‘Little Gidding’ manifests itself. As an examination of the revisions bears out, every phoneme, every morpheme, word, phrase, rhythm, and syntactic contour has been chosen with an eye to creating a brilliant verbal, visual, and sound structure.

She asks us to consider the famous opening line "April is the cruellest month":

Suppose it were ‘April is the darkest month’ or the ‘harshest month’ or the ‘worst month of the year’? Would the effect be the same? And if not, why not?

The questions are disconcerting because while we can answer the second with ease, the third is impossible, and impossibility of definition leads to the title of the book. It comes from Marcel Duchamp's neologism he said can be defined only by example. Here is a handful:

• The warmth of a seat (which has just been left) is infrathin.
• Sliding doors of the Metro—the people who pass through at the very last moment/infrathin.

Others, Perloff says, "raise larger issues about time, space, and especially language": 

• In time the same object is not the same after a one-second interval.
• The difference (dimensional) between two objects in a series (made from the same mould) is an infrathin one when the maximum (?) of precision is attained. [sic]

In each case Perloff says "the case is made for difference, however minute". So the difference of 'cruellest' is another example of infrathin. This may sound like a variation of New Criticism's close reading, but Perloff distinguishes micropoetics from that practice because for the most part New Criticism concentrates on a larger meaning conveyed by "metaphor, irony, and paradox" and ignores "rhythm, sound structure, visual patterning, etymology". Eliot is relevant here again as he criticised Matthew Arnold "for being insufficiently sensitive to the 'auditory imagination,' namely,"

the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back.

In the same passage Perloff quotes Eliot in a letter to Stephen Spender: "My theory of writing verse is that one gets a rhythm, and a movement first, and fills it in with some approximation to sense later."

Rather than go any further and address more of the content, which in addition to Eliot includes exceptional studies of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Beckett, and John Ashbery, I wonder if infrathin goes some way to help me understand the uncertainty in my experience not of poetry, which as mentioned in the entry for 1992 I tend not to read anyway, but prose works. Why is there a profound distinction between my experience of some works that are nominally the same, in the same genre, as others that leave me indifferent, wondering whether I should give up reading novels? Is it the rhythm and movement of a long prose work that connects those writers I return to despite differences in overt form and content, because they penetrate "far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling", that is if rhythm and movement of micropoetics can be applied to the macro level, a level that Perloff says cannot explain what makes Four Quartets so "intensely memorable", in which repetition and echoes invigorate a constrained and relentless attention across hundreds of pages, and which demand to be reread, as Perloff says of poetry that "can’t just be read and deleted like the most recent Instagram"? 

In my personal canon, Proust, Beckett and Bernhard, obviously, but also Gabriel Josipovici, in Migrations among many others, Rosalind Belben already cited in this series, and in Aharon Appelfeld's novels, which survives translation. A micropoetics then of sentence and paragraph, and more;* works that sink below the surface of habit, of genre, enabling us to hear one meaningful syllable.

 

*If so, this would also explain why those works described as poetic, promising a narrative seasoned with meticulous nuance, are invariably unreadable, clogged with arcane and fussy word choices.

39 Books: 2021

I lived in Brighton for 30 years. One of the many painful aspects of leaving in 2021 was losing the many second-hand bookshops, all within walking distance. Many have closed over the years, such as Sandpiper, a remaindered bookshop in Kensington Gardens. It had a backroom in which every book was £1 and was where I found as-new hardbacks of Yaakov Shabtai's Past Continuous and SY Agnon's Only Yesterday, as well as the slim paperback of Sarah Kofman's Rue Orderner, Rue Labat. There was even a volume from Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics, but it was only the index. There are also cheerless memories of books seen but not bought that would cheer me up now to see: Jean Améry's On Suicide in Tall Storeys on St James' Street, and, back in Sandpiper, a four-volume selection of Luther's writings. Sometimes the price was prohibitive: in one of my last visits to Snooper's Paradise, there were the four small hardbacks comprising Heidegger's Nietzsche priced at £25 each.

For nostalgic Brightonians, here's a 2015 article* on closed Brighton bookshops, including Colin Page's, a shop I wrote about in my End of Literature series.

The nearest second-hand bookshop to me now is several miles away across a stretch of water and with a turnover of stock that can be measured by geological epoch. This situation is what makes reading Nicholas Royle's White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector both a great pleasure and bitterly sad.

Royle travels the country in search of white-spined Picador paperbacks to add to his collection, which his Instagram account confirms is a long-standing and serious affliction. Like me, his eye must be trained like a bird of prey's to pick out particular spines among the mass-market paperbacks, coffee-table cookbooks and celebrity biographies. The vicarious thrill of anticipation is aroused on every page. On page two, he finds the Picador edition of Nomad by Mary Anne Fitzgerald that he thinks he doesn't have but says the pleasure he gets from finding it has no direct link to the book's contents, as he's unlikely to read it. For me there is always a direct link. In Bow Windows in Lewes, I found Charles Singleton's commentary on Dante's Purgatorio in the Bollingen Series only to discover that, like Royle with Nomad, I had one already. But I bought it to read. I don't search for various editions and have no urge to complete sets.

My pleasure and envy in reading White Spines may indicate the difference is an illusion. Mine is a collecting urge for the mind, perhaps even the soul, and concealed there, whereas Royle's is on display, described in nerdy detail according to cover design and industry formats as I might fuss over the singularity of one book or another. Both seek to shore against the incoming tide. A single book is on its own an example of collecting, of containing within defined limits a totality to which we have no access otherwise. To fill a white bookshelf with white spines facing out is only an extension of this, as is my folder of book lists. Walter Benjamin diagnosed the condition in 1938:

Since the days of Louis Philippe, the bourgeoisie has endeavored to compensate itself for the fact that private life leaves no traces in the big city. It seeks such compensation within its four walls – as if it were striving, as a matter of honor, to prevent the traces, if not of its days on earth then at least of its possessions and requisites of daily life, from disappearing forever.
            From 'The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire', Selected Writings, volume 4

For reasons Benjamin describes in The Storyteller, the novel appears as a cultural force as the presence of death retreats:

In the course of modern times dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living. Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity, and when their end approaches they are stowed away in sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs. It is, however, characteristic that not only a man’s knowledge or wisdom, but above all his real life – and this is the stuff that stories are made of – first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death. Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end – unfolding the views of himself under which he has encountered himself without being aware of it — suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him. This authority is at the very source of the story.

In one of the charity shops now the only source of book-browsing, I found the Picador edition of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, and bought it because I thought it might be good to be immersed in medieval Europe and its theology. Instead, it was a bore. Nicholas happened to see a photo I posted of the four Picadors I own (five, actually, as I forgot Beckett's Mercier and Camier) and said he didn't have that particular edition. If you don't have it Nicholas, I'll be happy to send it on.

You can listen to Nicholas Royle discuss White Spines on the Rippling Pages podcast.

 

* It lives my head rent-free that this columnist also wrote that the BBC was "anti-Israel" and "pro-Palestinian". A closed shop of the mind.