39 Books: 2017

The list of books piles up, thirty-three now, and I'm reading fewer and fewer novels. Not through choice, but so little of what's new appeals. Instead, this year I read and reread books like Peter Handke's To Duration and Once Again for Thucydides, both of which escape helpful generic labels, which could be why I read and reread them.

Another book I reread was The Poetics of Singularity by Timothy Clark, published in 2005. I'd read three of his books before this – Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot; The Theory of Inspiration; and Martin Heidegger in the Routledge Critical Thinkers series, and knew for this reason it would be more valuable than the run of the academic mill. Clark gives clarity to improbable ideas without diminishing their intractability. 

This title appealed especially to a wish to understand why books such as Handke's stand alone. However, the reason may run counter to the motives suggested by compiling book lists, the progression of a patient accumulation of knowledge and cultural capital to be recorded, stored and deployed for social advantage.

Singularity names the specific being of a text or work, inflected so as to underline its resistance to being described in general categories or concepts. Its resistance may also be understood as upsetting the distinction between the realm of the conceptualisable, that which is masterable by thought.

Clark says among the best accounts of literary singularities is made in J. Hillis Miller's Black Holes from 1999, "black holes being known in physics as 'singularities', i.e. places where the natural sciences break down". In literary studies, this ties in with an essay cited by Clark that places singularity in relation to "a non-discursive, non-rational potential in language and signification". I wish I'd known about this when I wrote about black holes and writing a few years ago.

The idea of a singular work lurks in my antagonism towards genre fiction, especially that which plays with genre, though this demoralising commonplace reveals the common concern, the repressed concern, the generic concern, for singularity, the anxiety to distinguish by association, to appear by vanishing, by waving not drowning. But if there is something singular in a work, as a work, how does one approach it? My antagonism has passed through genre fiction and is closing in on review culture, if not also literary criticism in general, my own included, as it seeks to give breath to a singular work in a drowning discourse.

How can the unimpeachable critic aware of something singular in the experience of reading, the unique non-experience of reading, justify writing about it? When Thomas Bernhard was asked "to write something about Wittgenstein", whom he called "a thoroughally poetic brain", he said the difficulty of doing so was extreme:

The question is not: am I to write about Wittgenstein? The question is: can I be Wittgenstein for a single instant without destroying him (W.) or me (B.)? This question cannot be answered and therefore I cannot write about Wittgenstein.    [Translated by Douglas Robertson]

Bernhard even extends this to writing about himself, all the while effectively doing both. Perhaps from now on reviews can deny the possibility of saying anything about the book, or pursue what is non-generic, to establish the impossible genre, the genre of no-genre.