A fundamental deprivation: Montevideo by Enrique Vila-Matas

Perhaps all novels seek to converge on a single point. 

The thought occurred to me as I read Vila-Matas' Montevideo, translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott. A random thought, apparently, but also the kind of thought provoked by the passion of observation, anecdote and speculation in Vila-Matas' novels, each of which, however distinct, may be said to ask the question in the epigram to Montano's Malady: "What will we do to disappear?". If the single point is disappearance, from what do we disappear? 

The passion of observation, anecdote and speculation perhaps. If the writer and reader wishes to disappear from writing, to be free from the guile of games and the interval of abstraction, finally to be present to the world as it is, an answer is to give a firm "No!" to writing, as done by those featured in Bartleby & Co or, in a slight variation, to be forced into the world by writer's block. This is Montano's malady, a predicament similar to the literary publisher in Dublinesque who fears the disappearance of what has been his life's work. The alternative is to leave the world behind by disappearing into writing, which is what reading the epigram placed before the usual content of the novel promises and immediately threatens. Which kind of disappearance is it then?

It's significant that the epigram is taken from L'Entretien infini, Maurice Blanchot's essay collection translated as The Infinite Conversation. As Susan Hanson explains in the foreword to her translation, 'Entretien' has a nuance the English lacks, as it can mean "a between that is rigorously held to". We're between question and possible answer. The gift of everyday language and genre fiction is to be excused the question as words and world disappear into one another. 

Rigorously holding between is the comedy of Vila-Matas' novels and why regular readers become exasperated with what they see as "writing about writing", and especially because the comedy is not comedy as in Commedia in which one begins in Hell, passes through Purgatory and ends in Paradise. The novel is the by-product of disenchantment and as such maintains only the residue of the promise of another life. Recognition of the residue may be what defines the literary in literary fiction. The gift of genre fiction is to fulfil that promise, for a time. 

A clone of Vila-Matas narrates Montevideo because the quest for disappearance is personal. He goes in search of it in chapters each named after a city: as a young man he travels to Paris with the romantic notion of becoming a writer only to write nothing and find himself instead disappearing into "the seedy side" of the capital, going to boozy parties and dealing in drugs. Rather than the novel disappearing into a titillating account of crime and debauchery, the reader is pointed to Lucy Sante's The Other Paris before carrying on writing about writing. 

In the title chapter, the other form of disappearance is sought in a hotel room in the Uruguayan capital, the setting of The Sealed Door, a story by Julio Cortàzar that fascinates the clone. He books the same room  (no pun intended) to open the eponymous door, perhaps finally to enter the origin of literature. The Spanish book cover suggests what he finds. While it's a pity the Yale UP edition doesn't also use Hammershøi's painting, the unlovely digital adaptation reminds us of an artificiality holding disappearance at arm's length.

We might ask at this point: why do we have novels like Montevideo? Shouldn't they provide more serious investigations into life in the world? Even the anxiety expressed is done in such an insouciant manner that nothing can be taken on face value. In contrast, we have seen in recent years a remarkable surplus of very serious novels full of "heartstopping beauty...sumptuous prose [and] philosophical depth" ¹ invariably spanning several hundred pages and hailed as up there with the accepted greats of modernism, so calling books like Montevideo a novel appears to be not only a category error but an insult to the common reader. 

To answer, we need to reflect on a question Kafka asked in his diary. If writing expansively on his unhappiness appears to him as "a merciful surplus of strength" when he is in the depth of suffering, "what kind of surplus is it?".²

There's a short story by Jean Paulhan collected in the translation above called Aytré who gets out of the habit, written in 1910 but published in 1943, which can be described only incidentally as a murder mystery. It begins with an adjutant in the French colonial army in Madagascar writing a private diary discussing a French woman, Raymonde, with whom he was having an affair and who has been stabbed to death. While he deals with the aftermath, his sergeant Aytré takes over writing the official log of their journey escorting 300 Senegalese women from one side of the island to the other, and the diary is interrupted to include the log. For a time Aytré notes down the simple details demanded by the form – the distance covered each day, the condition of the women, the cost of chickens, etc. – which makes for less interesting reading than the diary but, after a couple of weeks, he begins to digress by writing up his own opinions, noting down cultural differences, including a long passage detailing the seven modes of transport he has witnessed on the island. As the title says, Aytré is getting out of the habit of military life. The story then returns to the adjutant's diary and ends with his discovery that Aytré killed Raymonde in a fit of jealousy. 

This is of course unremarkable and there's no apparent reason to disinter such an obscure story from a writer more or less unknown in English. So what is the point of all this? 

In an essay on the story published the same year, Blanchot claims that Aytré is a man who has felt an emptiness in himself: "a defect, a lack of something decisive, whose absence becomes, little by little, unbearable". Perhaps he was driven to an extreme act because for him the unbearable feeling took the form of a woman. This makes sense and leaves us with the question of toxic masculinity, thereby helping the common reader to disappear from literature into the world of socio-political considerations. For many, this is the literary in literary fiction. Blanchot takes a different path by arguing that the digressions in the log also constitute an attempt to fill the emptiness with the excess of language. This has unforeseen consequences. 

From this little story, it does not follow that literature must necessarily begin with crime or, failing that, with flight. But that it does imply a caving in, a kind of initial catastrophe, and the very emptiness that anxiety and care measure; yes, we can be tempted to believe that. But let us note that this catastrophe does not fall only on the world, the objects one handles, the things one sees; it, extends also to language[:] all the thick layering of words, the sedimentation of comfortable meanings that move off, detach themselves, become a slippery and dangerous slope. The threat spreads to anyone who allows himself to answer it. ³

After finding something decisive missing from his life, Aytré loses the habit of straightforward notation and tries to fill the absence with a thick layering of detail, only for the absence to reveal itself as part of writing too. Writing gets out of the habit of regular meaning. 

for [Aytré], recourse to the most literary or beautiful language signifies only the irreparable loss of the only language that was certain for him, that in which it was enough for him to write, "We are doing twenty kilometers a day." 

Blanchot points out that, following Mallarmé, every word consists of absence and, for this reason, questions whether Kafka is correct to think his extemporising on unhappiness with flourishes and ornamentations is in fact a surplus. The effect of being able to express unhappiness with as much eloquence as one can muster means that colloquial language, in which the words disappear into the world, is replaced by poetic language, which, as it does not allow for translation into other words, becomes paradoxically "a kind of poverty" because all other words cannot properly say the same thing. Kafka's unhappiness is, in its finest expression, entirely separate from the experience, even to the one suffering it. Yes, we understand what 'unhappiness' means in general, but what does Kafka's unhappiness mean? This paradox, in which the exultation of self-expression and the gift of literature becomes "the first stirring of a fundamental deprivation", is, for Blanchot, the beginning of literature. The surplus of maximalist novels in recent years, rather than renewing modernism, can only evade the implications of the paradox, and evasion becomes the means of its critical reception; the longer the book, the better to forget. ⁴ The beginning may be the single point on which Vila-Matas' novels seek to converge. There is never any end to the novel.

 

Notes 

¹ From a tweet by Krapp's Last Vape. 

² From 19th September 1917.

³ From The Paradox of Aytré in The Work of Fire, translated by Charlotte Mandell. 

⁴ It cannot be a coincidence that in Kafka's The Judgment Georg Bendemann's revelation that his friend in Russia to whom he writes with a freedom founded on evasion is in fact his father. He has the final word.

Transfiguring the immanent domain

This isn't the usual novel-author interview. As a reader of novels listening to interviews with novelists I'm almost always disappointed because they almost always take the novel as a given and stop there, like a mountaineer who gets to the summit and never looks at the sky.

Part one is fairly straightforwardly biographical. Lars Iyer tells Nemanja Mitrović about the dole culture of the 80s and 90s that gave him time to explore, in this case in Reading University's library which was then open to the public and where he discovered the philosophy and literature that would change the direction of his life – a lifestyle and discoveries we happen to share – and the 'Madchester' he felt no part of when he went onto formal study, expressing more affinity to the autodidact Mancunians who came before: Ian Curtis, Mark E. Smith and Morrissey. 

What makes it unusual is the unique path he describes to writing novels. As a young academic, he was constrained by the demands required to secure a permanent contract and found blogging to be the ideal form to continue the movement of the philosophy and literature that had got him to a point that was also an impasse. He injected comic episodes between long philosophical posts and by chance found the form of Spurious, his first novel. This is where I recognised my unease. While so many of the novelists who mean most to me are comic, this element has always been the slick and sting of snow rather than the blue of the sky; a distraction, beside the point. This is why I am fed up with people claiming Thomas Bernhard novels are "hilarious" and assume that is enough. However, I realise this denies something significant. Iyer cites Walter Benjamin's letter to Gershom Scholem citing a comic writer: "the key to Kafka's work is likely to fall into the hands of the person who is able to extract the comic aspects from Jewish theology" [his italics].

 
Part two expands on this even if Benjamin himself doesn't. In a way, Benjamin not expanding on the subject is part of comedy: at best it is a brief remark, a momentary diversion, a rip in the fabric of common sense – comedy in theology! – a moment in which everything is spun around, inverted, but cannot last; a moment which is also a part of theology in that one cannot think the possibility of transcendence (or its absence) without momentary vertigo. While writing may sustain a rational bedrock, calming vertigo, especially in the procedural nature of academic philosophy but also in genre and most literary fiction, Iyer uses comedy and hyperbole as a means of resistance, however futile, to prose determined by a world without transcendence, a world diminished by writing, a world in which human potentiality is promoted to lubricate a corporate treadmill. Iyer says the intensity of his writing an attempt to wear through "about" novels to something else, an attempt to "transfigure the immanent domain", to pass through the horror of the eternal return of the same, hence the persistence of a style across six novels – no wish to be eclectic, no wish for anyone to say he is playing with genre. Comedy and hyperbole is a means of living against the world as it is; "Gnostic living" he calls it, which links back to his fascinating essay on the Gnostic imaginary. This is why it isn't usual. But perhaps writing is that transfiguration in the first place and we have only to become aware of its presence, to write and speak only in relation to that rather than everything that detracts from it, to wear through "about" novels in criticism, too.

 

Left on the Shelf

My old and very best of friends Mark Thwaite has taken over at the Left on the Shelf bookshop, so if you're at all interested in any of the subjects listed in the poster below, please consider subscribing to his newsletter, checking out the listings on Abebooks, and the offers on eBay. The shop also has Instagram and Facebook accounts.

Given time, he may become the Jeff Bezos of the revolution. 

 

 

The intimate outside

 

When this post from Max Cairnduff appeared I had been reading Heidegger's lectures on Hölderlin's poetry and books and essays studying Heidegger's lectures on Hölderlin's poetry in a bid, however incongruous, to articulate an experience unique to reading novels, so I was perplexed by the adjectives he uses to characterise Eliot's sequence. I suppose Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats is more accessible, but "dense"? Four Quartets is surely spaciousness itself. ¹  How can such anxiety and suspicion when faced by works with a cultural aura be dissolved without the infantilisation of "accessibility"? They are feelings not limited to the common reader: Karl Ove Knausgaard expressed something like it in My Struggle 2 when he notices that he could perform an understanding of Hölderlin's poetry in innumerable ways without it ever opening up to him. Coming to a work without preconceptions is preferable, as one reader of Ulysses explained in a charming anecdote. For this reason Gabriel Josipovici says the quartets should be read "not as a philosophical examination of the problem of time but as the narrative of a person talking to himself at four o'clock in the morning".²  The opening of Burnt Norton makes this uncannily obvious.

        Time present and time past
        Are both perhaps present in time future,
        And time future contained in time past.
        If all time is eternally present
        All time is unredeemable,
        What might have been is an abstraction
        Remaining a perpetual possibility
        Only in a world of speculation.
        What might have been and what has been
        Point to one end which is always present. ³ 

Josipovici points to the "simple parataxis" ("and...and...and") and the "pervasive conditionals" ("perhaps… if…what might have been…") to show how Eliot achieves this. In this way the reader joins the poem's speculation, slowly advancing in uncertainty alongside the words. In effect the reader becomes TS Eliot; not the Great Poet, not the Nobel Prize winner, but one on their back in the dark. In this sense, we might ask: how accessible are we to ourselves? 

Perhaps it is because we're so used to the confessional first person in contemporary poetry and novels that we read Four Quartets' impersonality as exclusionary. However, if we put Josipovici's suggestion into practice, the poem opens like a door. The issue then becomes: what is on the other side of the door? The metaphor appears quite simple: if the door is unlocked, the room beyond will reveal previously unknown treasures. If it remains locked, we shall remain forever excluded, unenlightened. This is why literary-critical discourse often seems to consist of the rattling of door knobs and of peeping through keyholes. 

My copy of Four Quartets, bought for 2p in a church sale circa 1987. ⁴ 

Giorgio Agamben points out that the metaphor isn't quite that simple because there are two kinds of door. One is an empty space created by frame in a wall – he calls it a threshold-door – while the other is the same threshold blocked by panel attached to the frame by hinges, which he calls a panel-door. The first we can pass through unhindered, hardly noticing the divide, while progress through the second depends on whether we are allowed to open it and carry on through: it may be locked or there may be a sign warning against opening.⁵ In terms of a novel or poem, the threshold-door would be the language in which it is written. Four Quartets is in English, so a native-speaker cannot complain of any restriction. However, the epigram from Heraclitus in ancient Greek may nudge them in the back. Why is Eliot fronting a poem in English with lines from a dead language without offering a translation? Agamben provides a possible answer by adding a variant door. 

When the architect Carlo Scarpa was commissioned to design an entrance to a university in Venice, he was asked to include an Istrian stone panel-door from a convent. He did so by laying it flat and covering it with water. This seems an odd thing to do but Agamben recognises it as a considered act and draws attention to horizontal doors that were a familiar feature in the classical world as a connection between the living and the dead, between world and underworld. Some were panel-doors, some were threshold-doors. The former, he says, were invented to control entry and is the reason for "endless ranks of guardians of the door, angels or doormen, latches and digital codes, that must ensure that the device functions correctly and permits entry to no one who does not have the right". We can recognise the correlation with literary culture: reviews judging functionality and readers as cowering supplicants seeking entry to the otherworld of literature (and perhaps authors hoping to be let out). Agamben notes that this supernatural feature dismissed by modern world as irrational has devolved into legal affairs, with the law acting as a panel-door placed in the threshold of relations between men: "As Kafka's parable unequivocally shows, the law coincides with its own door; it is nothing other than a door." Hence no doubt the otherworldly aura of court judgments.

What kind of door then is Scarpa's? Agamben says it submergence alludes to its location, in that instead of city gates as a panel-door Venice has a lagoon as a threshold-door, so the city is accessed only by water, but one cannot pass through Scarpa's door since it is horizontal. It is therefore neither panel- nor threshold-door. 

If the door is not a place but the passage and entranceway between two places, here it seems to become a place unto itself—perhaps the place par excellence, whose possible use is, however, not yet clear. In [this] case, the horizontal door now defines a space in which it would be possible to walk, pause to think, hesitate, perhaps even live—but not to close it or simply go across. 

An ideal space, then, for a university. The parallels to books and reading are also very clear. Agamben encourages the impression further after discussing the four terms in Latin for door that leads to his "decisive point" that the person before the door is always on the outside and as such "experiences the outsideness of the door". We see this in the delight of anticipation before a book-door we can be sure will open and provide a welcoming space, hence the popularity of genre fiction and first-person novels and poetry, and in the trepidation before a book-room whose contents we suspect will be cold and forbidding, such as a book-length philosophical examination of the problem of time. 

It is, then, possible to think of the door as neither an entranceway that leads to another place nor simply a space around which one could walk. It is rather the event of an outside, which is nevertheless not another place but, as in Kant's definition of the thing-in-itself, a space that must remain absolutely empty, a pure exteriority. 

With this in mind, the Heraclitan epigrams could be seen as the horizontal door beneath the water of Eliot's uncomplicated English. Adding an approximate translation, as this site does, while appealing to accessibility and knowledge, dissolves the door. In unease before a book like Four Quartets, we should perhaps welcome that its possible use is not yet clear. Otherwise, what disappears from experience is experience itself; "for experience deserves its name only if it transports us beyond what constitutes our nature." ⁶ Or perhaps part of our nature to which we had yet to be exposed. Agamben says Scarpa's door allows one to live in a space that does not necessarily lead anywhere "but faces the sky and dwells in a pure taking place, showing the intimate outsideness of every door". 

 

Notes 

¹ The title is Four Quartets; that is, without the definite article, just as The Waste Land is three words not two. As I've always said, and it is especially true of poetry: Attention to detail is paramont.

² In The Singer on the Shore.

³ Paul Scofield's reading of the poem corroborates the advice; annoyingly, only the first part of Burnt Norton is not included on YouTube.

⁴ Signed by Eliot scholar Helen Gardner, confirmed by this signed photo found online. If it was her copy, it is not annotated. I've also signed it, so it's doubly unvaluable.

⁵ In 'Door and Threshold' from When the House Burns Down, translated by Kevin Attell.

 

⁶ From 'Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity' in Levinas' Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by Alphonso Lingis.

End of year post

A year of limited reading. Three books stood out: Peter Brown's Journeys of the Mind, Giorgio Agamben's Self-Portrait in the Studio, and WG Sebald's Silent Catastrophes. All feature in a post from July. Of the last, I was appalled by two reviews. In the FT, John Self says one should be pleased it exists "as long as you don't have to read it". Well I read it twice in short succession and wished it had existed sooner. And then there was John Banville's "surfeit of sheer banality", a review as mirror, reminiscent of Anthony Burgess' claim following Beckett's death that his reputation would plummet. I shouldn't have been surprised: Banville has previously admired the work of Roger Scruton. 

A year of limited writing. I wanted to write about the morbidity Sebald finds in so many Austrian writers and their work; the prevalence of "ill-starred lives". One example is Stifter and his "pessimism extending to the cosmos as a whole", his remarkable gluttony,¹ and the perversity of his works Sebald says was noticed neither by him nor his audience. I wonder whether the apparent lack of morbidity in contemporary English and American literature is what distinguishes its novels from Austria's rich array and European literature in general. On Hofmannsthal's fragment Andreas, written in "the rampant erotic fever of the time", Sebald comments:

In his interpretations of so-called perverse attitudes, Freud notes that it is usually said that someone has become perverse, when really it would be more accurate to say they have remained perverse. From this, one may extrapolate that mankind's erotic utopia consists in the possibility of remaining perverse in all innocence.

Perverse in all innocence. This curious condition may explain why British and the USA literature lacks a morbid undertow, reflected in the disdain of high-profile reviewing.²  I was taken by that phrase because it captures what I have come to see as necessary to the novel. It is present in Amina Cain's sentence used as the epigram to A measure of forever looking at that necessity; a post that justifies the persistence of this blog to me; justifies reading and writing.

Talking of which, twenty years ago I began to read Jonathan Coe's Like a Fiery Elephant, a biography of the BS Johnson, but stopped after 150 pages. Earlier this year I found a copy on a stall and this time will continue until the end. Johnson had a passion for making fiction new, which he saw as concomitant with the struggle for an egalitarian society. Coe reports in painful detail Johnson's bitter, unkind letters to agents and publishers who he saw as gatekeepers blocking both. He took everything personally and suffered for it. Twenty years on, I identify with Johnson as I didn't before: his melancholia of class, his self-defeating passion, notwithstanding his sense of entitlement and a differing literary stance. "To me the novel is a form in which I may write truth or fiction" he writes in a letter, to which I respond that the novel opens a space other than both. But such differences only emphasise the apparent futility of such agitations outside of the clearing. Fifty-two years after his death, they carry on. 

In my first year at the University of Sussex, I borrowed Albert Angelo from the library – the novel with a hole in it, mentioned in the Pernice Brothers' song – and copied the line "And we talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. As though it could make some difference" into a notebook. No doubt the repetition of 'talk' that appealed to me as much as the sentiment, confirmed many years later in This business of speech, a discussion of Gabriel Josipovici's novel In a Hotel Garden felt at the time to be the culmination of everything I had begun the blog to say, and still does. And yet I carry on. Is repetition all we have? 

Josipovici's portrait appears next to Johnson's on the cover of the book pictured above published in 1975 ³ which Johnson had agreed to edit with Giles Gordon, but when Gordon called to discuss the project, the phone was permanently engaged. Johnson had killed himself hours earlier. The book is dedicated to him and Ann Quin who drowned herself a few weeks before. Thinking of Johnson, I think of Cioran's remark: "It's impossible to read a line of Kleist without thinking that he killed himself. His suicide was one with his life; he had been committing suicide all along."

Johnson felt that action was necessary and made agitprop documentaries opposing anti-union legislation in what he saw as incipient state fascism. Britain in the early 1970s looks like a paradise compared to corporate coup d'état accelerated by the authoritarian bureaucrat currently in power, examined in horrifying detail on EuropeanPowell's substack, and in recent books such as Paul Holden's The Fraud and Peter Oborne's Complicit, each of which is subject to an oath of omertà by the British media. 

    All this is sickening. 
    Not words. An act. I won't write any more.

The final words of Cesare Pavese – another anti-fascist – in his diary before his own suicide.⁴ The reason for the unsettling relation of writing to suicide – to which I will add my review of Edouard Levé's novel with the single word as its title – indicates a fascination not with death but with the incomprehensible silence of both.

 

Notes 

¹ "Ate beef, baked kid, roast chicken, hazel grouse, pigeon, roast veal, ham, liver with onions, roast pork, sardines, paprika chicken, baked lamb and partridge, much beef (dry); noodle soup, some beef and mutton, baked rice, brains with sour beets, potted veal, schnitzel with anchovy sauce, a snack of tea with hazel grouse, a snack of tea with chicken (ample portions), snack of tea with ham, snack with much chicken, thick herb soup with egg and so on."  Translated by Jo Catling. Select the back button to return.

² In What Ever Happened to Modernism? Gabriel Josipovici puts this down in part to differing experiences: "England was just about the only European country not to be overrun by enemy forces during the Second World War, which was a blessing for it, but which has left it strangely innocent and resistant to Europe and thrown it into the arms, culturally as well as politically, of the even more innocent United States. This has turned a robust pragmatic tradition, always suspicious of the things of the mind, into a philistine one."

³ The others authors apart from those mentioned are, from top to bottom, Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Elspeth Davie, Eva Figes, Robert Nye, David Plante, Ann Quin, and Maggie Ross.

⁴ Not uncoincidentally entitled This Business of Living, translated by Murch and Molli.  

This Space of Writing ten years on

Today in 2015 my blog-collection This Space of Writing was published as a book. An ideal Christmas gift. Not a happy memory to be honest; an editor would have made it a better book. However, I can't fault the cover design, and I was lucky to have Flowerville's permission to use her photograph. I'm also grateful for Lars Iyer's introduction.

Turning a blog into a book always seemed like a bad idea, implying unity where there is only the haphazard, but I take some reassurance in "Paths, not works", Heidegger's motto for his Gesamtausgabe, and Blanchot's practice of publishing essay collections focusing on specific authors and books rather than a general theme in a monumental magnum opus. In the photograph on the right, the book features on the enviable bookshelves of Andrew Hurley, an Irishman living in Paris, a friend made through the blog. He died young last year. The last I heard from him was in an email from Thomas Bernhard's favourite café in Vienna. 

One learns, as reflected in my second collection The Opposite Direction available as a free ebook, also published at Christmas. Reading again, I am happy to recommend the essays on (in order of appearance) Lanzmann's Shoah, Thomas Bernhard's Goethe Dies, Gabriel Josipovici's In a Hotel Garden, Peter Handke's To Duration, Coetzee's Jesus novels, Willem Styfhals' book on Gnosticism and German philosophy, Dante's Vita Nuova, and the title essay, also on Thomas Bernhard. I can fault the design for being rudimentary, as it's by me, with a random photograph taken on the edge of Kemptown. 

 

The future of literary criticism

Much of online activity related to literature involves posting quotations from novels, invariably without commentary and attributed to the book's author with the implication that it is a statement of personal belief, sometimes as an authoritative comment on current affairs but mainly as a piquant insight into the human condition. That it is spoken in a specific context by a particular character, or by an anonymous narration protected by aura of the book, is tacitly ignored. This may be an innocent pursuit and not one to censure, but such innocence doesn't end there. Almost every discussion of a novel assumes the book under discussion offers access to something relatable and is the statement of the author enabled by free indirect discourse, the familiar mechanism unique to the novel in which the thoughts of a character are immediately available to third-person narration, comforting the reader like a safety blanket under which there is a secret to be found. Note how often reviews of literary fiction begin with the words About halfway through or Towards the end as if a chink in its book-armour has been discovered through which the secret can be disclosed. Genre fiction doesn't require such attention as the revelation of a secret defines it, which is why genre fiction should be read and not reviewed. Again, there is nothing to censure here. However, Timothy Bewes' Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age cites contemporary novelists for whom the lore of literary fiction has become a problem. He quotes an interview with Rachel Cusk in which she says she is not interested in character because she believes character no longer exists, and another with WG Sebald who found the "modes of certainty" in fiction tedious and unacceptable, and while he did not stop writing novels, his narrators do not indulge in omniscience, leading to a perpetual delay of generic revelation. The problem, Bewes says, is not biographical as problems are necessary to the novel, but with what he calls 'instantiation', that is, how ideas in works of fiction are instilled without being explicit:

Just as the color red or green, a quality or attribute, is not named but instantiated by the presence of an apple in a bowl…so ideas in novels have no need of being espoused by a speaker within the work to transport their normative power to the outside.

In order to work, such qualities and attributes must not be explicit ("show don't tell"). What concerns these authors then is the assumptions instantiation brings, assumptions considered necessary to the form but, as Sebald claims, become a self-deceiving knowledge, mere inventions of "a straight line of a trail to calm ourselves down". To seek a less assumptive mode, a withdrawal from the modes of certainty becomes necessary, hence critical doubts about whether certain writers' novels are really novels, with the common rebuke that they have removed fiction from the novel, are lightly disguised autobiography, or the greatest blasphemy of "writing about writing". This is what Bewes means by "postfictional", not perhaps an end to the novel so much as a development in which the constraints have become more challenging. When the abstraction of instantiation breaks down and fails to correspond to something universal and thereby relatable, it leaves something Bewes defines as the "free indirect" element of a novel. The third author cited in the introduction provides a good example. As a writer and a visual artist, Renee Gladman found that her drawing has the same relation to thought as writing, except the thought of drawing is "conducted by the hand". She wrote but what was produced were drawings.

"I wasn't writing. I was decidedly not-writing; even as I held this pen in my hand, I swore I wouldn't write. I didn't." At the same time, the writing continues by means of a transformation in the relation between its material and immaterial aspects. 

(Trusting to the movement of the hand over the page is something Gabriel Josipovici says in his 1999 book On Trust that writers such as Beckett did when faced with doubts and suspicion about their work.) The product of the Gladman's hand provides the 'thought' of a novel that Bewes is concerned with. If there is "no more fundamental question in literary studies than what a work means, whose thought it is voicing, what it is really saying", what does it mean when "the thought of the work is seen as fundamentally eluding 'the straight line of a trail', how can it become the object of a critical study? How is literary exposition possible?". 

Towards an answer Free Indirect focuses on the work of Lukács and Bakhtin, and while close attention is given to JM Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, Deleuze's study of cinema provides the theoretical lead, with "free indirect" in cinema being what appears in the frame of the picture. With that comparison in mind, I have to say much of what I have written here gives only a pinhole view of the book. I cannot give an in-depth discussion of the book. Instead, I want to select elements of the book that relate to my concerns and respond to them in future posts. For instance, I wonder if there is confirmation of a crisis in the modes of certainty more generally in the recent proliferation of novels about novelists. I noticed it first when David Lodge and Colm Tóibín produced two novels with Henry James as their subjects. Before that, there were two novels with Dostoevsky as the central character: Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg and Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin. Damon Galgut's Arctic Summer is about EM Forster, and Lodge and Tóibín have since written biographical novels about HG Wells and Thomas Mann respectively. Moreover, just last month I read Paul Theroux's 2024 novel Burma Sahib following a young Eric Blair as a colonial policeman and the incipient novelist George Orwell. And not just novelists: there also many recent novels about artists, musicians and philosophers. I have written about one or two: Jean Echenoz's Ravel and Lars Iyer's philosophers trilogy featuring surrogates of Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Simone Weil. While the latter are not biographical they do seek to connect the thought of all three with life in the contemporary world. The turn, if it is one, may indicate awareness of an experience of art that floats free of exposition, something we experience when immersed in a work of art but troubles us because it enables only vague, unsatisfactory definition. As a result, we feel we must tether it to the ground, turning us into either potatoheaded booklovers, knowing reviewers or academics paring their fingernails. A purely fictional artist wouldn't do this because their reported work has only a reported aura. The trend continues accompanied by an increase in critical anxiety with the rise of autofiction in which a version of the living author replaces the biographical figure. If this indicates the future of the novel, what is the future if literary criticism? Perhaps we can respond without reference to any novels or novelists and without any reference to theories or theorists. But perhaps that is exactly what a novel is.

The crisis of narration and the future of the novel, part two

Byung-Chul Han says in The Crisis of Narration that modernity "is animated by a belief in progress" and its narratives "radiate an aura because the future is a phenomenon of distance". This is evident in our reverence for the monuments of modernism, a reverence formed by wonder and anxiety inherent to distance. A new world remains on the horizon. We lack distance in contemporary narration because, Han says, we live "outside of the narrative spell". If we lived inside it, we would not recognise those monuments. According to Han, and Benjamin before him, the rise of the novel marks the undoing of the spell, with the modernist novel emerging in the tension of one world slowly and then very quickly becoming another. The promise of a new world with all its possibilities – scientific rationality, new technologies, political emancipation, and the waning of religious metanarratives essential to all three – determines the tension. What makes the great modernist novels great then is due less to formal or material distinction than a revelation of distance enveloped in aura of the future as the centuries of stony sleep come to an end. Now that new-world promises have been realised, memory of what came before have been erased, hence the interminable fuss about the accessibility of difficult novels and the marketplace dominance of epigonal infantilising narratives. The crisis of narration has arisen in late modernity because it "knows no longing, no vision, no distance". As critical readers we cannot sense distance because we do not know any tension. Instead, formal and material originality have been placed in the foreground and, if appealing to the "experimental" is not enough, we seek an aura in the authority of cultural excrescences such as the Nobel Prize for Literature.

As contemporary narration lacks a future, it has settled into "a mode of 'on and on'". Simon Okotie's The Future of the Novel published a year after Han's book suggests a paradoxical exploration of the future of no future, and this appears to be confirmed when the book lists several other works published from 1927 to 2012 with very similar titles. The first, John Carruthers' essay Scheherazade, or the Future of the English Novel presents a crisis present in the novels of Joyce and Woolf. They endanger the novel by moving away from "objectivity and towards increasingly minute and analytic explorations of inner life". Okotie sketches Arnold Bennett's support for this opinion and Woolf's responses. Criticism of what is now considered to be both a low-point and high-point for the novel reveals an obvious point: the novel's natural state is one of crisis, written on the crest of an era's wave and constantly debated as a vital sign of cultural health. 

The crisis for the novel in our time is that there is no crisis. There is no sense of one in Okotie's account of its history, which begins for him in the aftermath of the Great War and its first theorist, György Lukács. This may come as a surprise to readers of Michael Schmidt's The Novel: A Biography and Steven Moore's The Novel: An Alternative History both of which trace it back centuries. However, a crisis can be detected in Okotie's occasional digressions into autobiography. Inspired by "a vision of infinite possibilities" whilst listening to a performance of Bach cantatas and then reading Kerouac's On the Road, he resigns his office job and moves to Barcelona to pursue the life of a novelist. Against the desk-bound formality of the on and on routine of theory and criticism, there is here the whiff of an existential crisis in the imperative to write. This is always the future of the novel.

The only way we can recognise a crisis (and thereby welcome it) is in attempts to resist the on and on, for example when Giles Foden dismissed JM Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year as "a piece of radical literary theory" which, he blusters, "is not fiction" (a line that presents only a crisis in literary reviewing). Okotie includes Coetzee's earlier novel Elizabeth Costello, which received similar pushback, as an example (alongside some dubious others) of a new mode for the novel. I would have preferred a more polemical approach full of longing, visions and the invocation of distance, such as Lars Iyer's Nude in your hot tub, facing the abyss, or at least more of the personal digressions, but there is plenty of value in The Future of the Novel for its singular chronology and reference points. Coetzee's novel is discussed with quotations from Timothy Bewes' Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age, which I did not know about before and would have been put off by its title anyway, as I assumed it is a regular academic study of the dominant style of Literary Fiction, whose criticism has driven this blog for twenty years. But on reading, I discovered it really is "a piece of radical literary theory" and perhaps one of the most vital literary studies of our time, deserving of posts of its own. Watch this space.

See also part one.