An anniversary appeal

On this day last year I began posting every day for 39 days to commemorate 39 years since I began reading books. I dug out a folder of book lists I'd kept since 1986, chose one book from each year that I'd not written about before and wrote what ever the book suggested to me. Most of it came easily but a problem arose when I reached the mid-nineties. I discovered there were no paper records of what I'd read from 1996 to 1999. This threatened to end the project just as it was gaining momentum. I was dismayed because I have never stopped making the lists. Where had they gone? 

It turned out that technology had disrupted the tradition. I had saved Word documents onto a floppy disk and had not printed them out, and now had no means of accessing the contents. Salvation arrived when I realised I could search old diaries for mentions of books I had been reading. I could also check the inside pages of books for dates of acquisition written on the inside cover – a practice I stopped along with writing a diary soon into the new century.

Perhaps it would have been better for my self-esteem to have stopped the project too. This Space has never had many visitors so I thought adding quantity to quality would change that. It did: the viewing figures plummeted. I had hoped the book blogging community would respond with surprise and enthusiasm, perhaps with its own OuLiPo-like projects, or at least showing an interest in certain books discussed along the way, but of course there is no book blogging community (not anymore). In consolation, I discovered that committing to post every day was its own reward. The relentless schedule gave shape to otherwise empty days, reminding me of the cycling routine I once kept traversing the rolling hills of the Sussex countryside such as the one below.

The reason why the days were empty and I was able to commit to the work was also due to technological disruption and will be the subject of a forthcoming post. The exponential growth of artificial intelligence in the last eighteen months has wiped out the job role I had had for fourteen years in an industry in which I have worked for thirty. This is why I have added a variant on the 'Buy me a coffee' button to the top of the page. In the twenty years of writing This Space, I have neither used advertising nor asked for support, so please try to ignore the stain on the page. 

Meanwhile, if you need an essay, thesis, non-fiction book, short story or novel proofread for a very modest fee, do get in touch. A fellow worker wrote that I am "the best proof reader l've met and he finds everything". (Of course, 'proof reader' should be one word and the 'and' would be better replaced with an em-dash or semi-colon.) My motto is ATTENTION TO DETAIL IS PARAMONT.

A measure of forever

For me, fiction is a space of plainness and excess.
            Amina Cain

When TS Eliot read Dante for the first time, he noted a discrepancy between his enjoyment and his understanding, leading to the famous claim that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood". He warns potential readers against two extremes: believing one has to master the theology, structure and historical context of the Commedia to appreciate its poetry or that knowledge is irrelevant to further enjoyment, which is why he thinks many readers' enjoyment is limited to the local thrills of Inferno. The warning holds today as we remain uncertain about the role literature plays in our lives: is it a repository of instrumental knowledge, cod liver oil for the soul, or pure escapism? "All three" is the public answer, except the distinctions are never clear and never overtly discussed despite fueling an entire literary culture, manifesting in, for example, the Guardian's Where to start with series in which pellets of one are slipped inside morsels of another. (Dante started with a dark wood lacking a branch of Waterstone's.) 

In the months before I read the sentence in Amina Cain's A Horse at Night, I had stopped enjoying novels. I picked up several hailed as modern-day masterpieces and, despite their mutually incompatible variety, there was no spark. I bought and borrowed more seeking to break the cycle. Nothing worked. It is easy to deceive oneself into a rhetorical enjoyment, such as one reads every day in reviews, and I have often done that myself only later to reflect and regret, but I couldn't deny something was missing. Be assured this isn't a prelude to announcing the death of the novel and a call toward the tethered blimp of non-fiction, as I maintain faith in the indefinable potential of formal adventure. So if my loss of enjoyment was not the dulling of age, I wondered if there was a common absence. A answer came in that sentence.

Eliot defined his enjoyment. He called it "poetic emotion". The quotation marks are his own as the phrase refers to his earlier essay on Hamlet and its definition of the Objective Correlative in which "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events" elicit a particular emotion. This suggests literature must stick to generic templates through which a skilled writer can provoke a response immanent to the work, and Eliot more or less confirms it by reckoning Hamlet an "artistic failure" because Shakespeare did not find an objective correlative for Hamlet's behaviour that he superimposed onto the "cruder material" of earlier plays: "Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear." He dismisses the emotion as adolescent. However, if we go back to the essay on Dante, Eliot mitigates the mixture of autobiography, lyric poetry and allegory comprising the Vita Nuova because it is a recipe "not available to the modern mind", the one that assumes biographical detail is an exposé of a personality. Instead, in Dante's case it is a report of personal experiences that were important not because they happened to Dante but because they had "philosophical and impersonal value". We might ask in response: when did a change occur that makes such a recipe unavailable to us? Perhaps it was changing in Shakespeare's time and that is precisely what makes Hamlet an excessive play. For Dante, the inexpressible and excess of facts took the form of Beatrice, a childhood love who becomes a personification of the divine and leads to a religious commitment. For Hamlet (the man), the opposite is the case. What presents itself to him is not an undoubted human presence and its gift of beatitude but a ghost he may have hallucinated and yet whose demands press upon him. Can he trust the experience? If it is false, how can he trust himself? If it is genuine, how can he trust the world? If Eliot thinks Hamlet's angst is adolescent, it may be because such introversion is now firmly embedded in the modern mind (as embodied by a certain J. Alfred Prufrock) and so easily dismissed, whereas in Shakespeare's time it was only just emerging and out of joint with what was firmly embedded then and responsible for the plays Eliot judged as "assured" artistic successes. 

The Vita Nuova and Hamlet are anomalies in literary history (anomalies define literary history), and what they both exhibit and what they both emerge from is excess and deprivation. The combination plays out differently in each: for Dante, the excess of emotion caused by Beatrice's presence and the deprivation experienced when she withheld her greeting and then when she died is transfigured into a mystical apocalypse and a key to salvation. His new life will be one of praise. For Hamlet the excess of ambiguity and subsequent deprivation of trust leads to behaviour that nowadays might be considered signs of a breakdown. What they also have in common is a meeting of the personal and the other-worldly. William Franke says the Vita Nuova is modelled on the New Testament gospels in which the experience of the apparent son of God remains central to the life of the writer. Beatrice was Dante's path to God and lyric poetry was his witness, the only proper means of communicating the revelation, with the prose commentary grounding the divine in everyday experience. The phenomenon of transcendence that Beatrice was for Dante became possible "only by the instrumentality of the lyric, specifically by virtue of its powers to express registers of personal experience in which subjective response and feeling are constitutive parts or aspects of objective events, not secondary and less real". Franke compares this to Christ's beatitudes that "lend themselves...to liturgical recitation and serve as kernels inviting supplemental elaboration in the form of illustrative narratives or parables and edifying doctrinal discourses". Hamlet does not have this resource and the very different form the play takes from Dante's little book indicates stages in a long process in which lyric poetry and literary prose finally become divorced, as described by Robert Alter, cited by Franke.

The progressive narrativization of verse specifically in the refashioning and transmutation of biblical poetry into epic narration...describes a natural evolution starting from poetry, as the original form of literary expression, and moving to prose as its extension and elaboration.

The process follows the incremental secularisation of Western society and the decline of the effects of revelation. It may explain why certain phrases in Hamlet have become embedded in everyday life in the same way as lines of poetry have (and so the apocryphal story of someone complaining that the play is full of quotations), while passages of novels, the exemplary form of disenchantment, have not (and indeed why poetry and plays have become minor forms in literary culture). Of course, novels are often common reference points, but nobody has lines running through their heads or recites passages off the cuff. They neither lend themselves to recitation nor to the rituals of performance. By becoming wholly extension and elaboration, prose has freed itself from its roots in lyric poetry and in the process that which exceeds the everyday, divine or otherwise.

The lyrical state is a state beyond forms and systems.
                                       EM Cioran

So it was when I read Amina Cain's sentence that I recognised my problem with novels. Plainness and excess has become prosaic. Plainness has also become unimpeachable by making the everyday consequential in itself, though this has constantly to be renewed with critical hype – Dirty Realism was all the rage when I got into reading – and yet the residue of lyric and its promise of something other than the everyday remains: revelation has become a ghost in popular features such the 'twist in the tale' and the resolution of a plot, while in more refined circles, the possibility of revelation is present in the value afforded to 'experimental' writing which seems to promise that "under the myopic scrutiny of a good close reading" as Catherine Liu puts it "an obdurate, clam-like text [would] give up its iridescent pearl of gorgeous meaning". Meanwhile, excess is converted into maximalist world-building breezeblocks telling stories spanning continents and centuries, packed with history, adventure, romance, horror and fantasy. Each, however, remains undisturbed by the excess of its own presence, the incomprehensible revelation that with one sentence, however plain, however excessive, something has been added to the world, in the world as a product of a culture, yet not completely of the world. The surprise of distance. This has an effect comparable to that which Beatrice had on Dante and the ghost had on Hamlet; comparable but distinct, as it goes unnoticed. You can see the return of the repressed in "lyrical humanism", the form Lee Rourke diagnosed as the default mode of 'literary fiction', poised uneasily between popular and elite culture. With 'poetic' prose, it seeks to enchant a world without transcendence, standing in for that transcendence, and while it is ultimately empty, drawing the contempt of popular authors, it comforts the reader as much as the cushions on their conservatory armchair. (Dirty Realism is lyrical humanism in black and white.) We overlook its origins because the reception of contemporary novels follows Eliot by using contemporary mutations of the objective correlative to contain the terms of evaluation. 

The sparkless cycle was broken when in a desultory search I picked out Thomas Bernhard's 1967 novel Verstörung, unfortunately translated as Gargoyles (it means Disturbance or Derangement) and began to read it for the first time in 25 years. I had regarded it as an also-ran among his novels, perhaps because the first of its two chapters is a plain story. A doctor's son home from college is listening to his father describing his rounds in a handful of small Austrian towns. There was a schoolteacher in Salla who he found dying and then a child in Hüllberg who fell into a tub of boiling water. The visits wear him down and the death of his wife and his daughter's suicide attempt hang over him. Despite this, the son's presence gives him cheer and he speaks of the restorative effects of nature. They prepare for a walk along the local river but are immediately interrupted by an urgent call to attend an innkeeper's wife in Gradenberg who has been bludgeoned by a drunken miner. The son accompanies the father to the inn and then the hospital, where she dies. 

Crime, sickness, psychological distress and death pervade the region with son and father like Dante and Virgil on a travelogue through Hell, only without Dante's contrapasso placing the suffering in God's design. Purgatory of sorts is suggested when they reach the father's friend Bloch, an estate agent. The father finds some equilibrium by discussing political and philosophical issues with him and borrowing the big books of European thought from his library: Pascal, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche. He says Bloch resists despair by "seeing his life as an easily understood mechanism" he can adjust as necessary to practical ends. The son, a student of mining, agrees: "It was worth making the maximum effort to shake off a tendency to despair". Next they visit a wealthy industrialist who also seeks to make the maximum effort, in his case by shutting himself up in a hunting lodge to write on a literary work on a "purely philosophical subject". Father and son enter the lodge and walk on wooden floorboards through dark and barely furnished rooms. The son wishes to scream and throw open the shutters, but makes the effort to check himself. 

Throughout the first half then the tension between mind and body, between self and world, is held in place by the firebreak between the observer and observed. The son is part of the world, partly outside. The plain act of description maintains literary sanity, with its correlative in the story being the father's commentary on the cases in the sanctuary of the car as they drive towards the summit of the purgatorial mountain. It is here that they meet Prince Saurau on the outer wall of Hochgobernitz Castle perched high above the surrounding countryside, a paradise of sorts. It is also where the second chapter begins and is what led Italo Calvino to call Gargoyles one of the great novels of the 20th century. 

The Prince greets the visitors and immediately begins talking about the three applicants for the job he had advertised that morning, commenting on their dress, their demeanour, their background, their family, the towns they come from and, leaping from one subject to another, doesn't stop talking for the next 140 pages. He is enraged by the "idiotic bureaucratic rabble" that runs the Austrian state who have "expropriated" everything. He repeats variations of "expropriated" several times, and then "empty" several times: "Everything is empty!". In his analysis he comes across as intensely sensitive, lucid perhaps, and in the repetitions on the edge of madness. As is familiar in Bernhard's novels, the conditions cannot be separated. If the Prince hasn't descended entirely it is because the repetitions of words and phrases coalesce to maintain him in an oscillation above his abyss, even if it is an oscillation in which anger, loneliness, alienation, distress and despair comprise its dynamo. The Prince's compulsive repetitions form a lyricism in the absence of meaning, a revelation of sorts. Gershom Scholem called it the nothingness of revelation: "a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance. A state in which the wealth of meaning is lost and what is in the process of appearing...still does not disappear." It is a state we recognise in the process of reading Gargoyles. A more straightforward reader may interpret the condition as purely medical and the novel merely a case study, while admiring Bernhard's skill in capturing the symptoms. Lyricism has its place in these conditions, as Cioran observed:

It is significant that the beginnings of all mental psychoses are marked by a lyrical phase during which all the usual barriers and limits disappear, giving way to an inner drunkenness of the most fertile, creative kind. This explains the poetic productivity characteristic of the first phases of psychoses. Consequently, madness could be seen as a sort of paroxysm of lyricism.  [Translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston]

Except the condition enabling such a diagnosis is not an uncontaminated onlooker: rationalism could be seen as a paroxysm of psychic catalepsy, the checked scream in recognition of the eternal silence of infinite space beyond the shutters of science, unwilling to confront the utter mystery of conscious existence. Pascal's famous line is the appropriate epigram to Gargoyles. With this in mind, we may turn to German Idealism and the intellectual history of the deus absconditus to recognise that the Prince is in a "delirium of loss" whose philosophical and theological ground is set out by Alina Feld in Melancholy and the Otherness of God. The unhappy consciousness is "torn between finitude and the infinite, between the fallen and the ideal, between the human self and transcendent God". And while this condition appears to be conclusive, the form it takes remains part of the possible paroxysm, with lyric-free catalepsy its cure. The lack of satisfaction in rational codefication is why we turn to novels, to its excess of the world, to writing that has an openness to an apparent outside, made apparent by writing, however deceptive. What is revealed in reading Gargoyles, and by extension in all novels, is a relation to what does and at the same time does not exist. The Prince's disturbance of this novel in particular is a disturbance of the novel in its generic safety and its readers seeking knowledge, cod liver oil for the soul and escapism. It is the revelation of the novel as an other-worldly presence in our lives, plain as day, an enjoyment in excess of our understanding.

 

Douglas Robertson has translated Peter Handke's When I Read Gargoyles by Thomas Bernhard.

Books of the year 2024

In order of being read.

Giorgio Agamben – What I saw, heard, learned…

One night, along Venice’s Zattere, watching the putrid water lap at the city’s foundations, I saw that we exist solely in the intermittence of our being, and that what we call I is just a shadow continuously bidding farewell and saying hello, barely mindful of its own dissipation. All the machinery of our body serves solely to provide that break, that inversion of breath in which dwells the I—the intercessor of its own absence, unforgettable, neither living nor speaking, but the only reason we’re given life and language.   [Translated by Alta L. Price]

This book has 72 pages. On each of the first 61 there is a single paragraph. Reading them in sequence is like springing from stone to stone to cross a river. Sometimes one gives way. 

The final 11 pages have a negative version of the title and whose content is comparable to Blanchot's A Primal Scene? in The Writing of the Disaster.

Holly Langstaff – Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot

The unprepossessing title disguises a brilliant and beautifully written analysis of the subject, and perhaps timely given the step-change in Artificial Intelligence currently wiping out sources of income (including my own). What I learned is that Blanchot's vision of literature is much more radical than I had previously allowed, no doubt enchanted by the romanticism of Blanchot's keywords without facing up to their implications, all due to an unyielding humanism. He may have welcomed the AI-generated novel because it undoes instrumentality and exposes us to "the abyssal non-foundation of art" in which we might find "something profoundly affirmative ... where nothing is predetermined, neither by an all-powerful God nor by the teleological progress of history".

In February, I wrote about AI-generated poetry as criticised by Alice Oswald.

Wade Davis – Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest

There are hundreds of pages in this book telling the story of a generation of amateur mountaineers in the years before, during and after the Great War that have a resonance similar to Max Aue's fictionalised account of the Babi Yar massacre in Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones. The reader also enters into the silence.

Thomas Bernhard – Gargoyles

At the midpoint of the year I became seriously jaded with reading. Everything was routine and a chore. I bought books assuming the author and subject matter would guarantee the old spark of new life, only to set them aside after a handful of pages. They piled up like a gambling debt. Then, in desultory scanning of bookshelves, I picked out Bernhard's second novel. It had never been a favourite but I hadn't read it for many years and fancied bathing in Prince Saurau's speech that usurps the novel halfway through (the novel should be reissued with a better translation of the German title Verstörung. I suggest 'Disturbance', in part to refer to the Prince's state of mind). Before that speech arrived, however, it became one of my favourite novels of all time (why do people use that stupid phrase?), and not just of Bernhard's, which are among the best novels of all time. Someone on Twitter puts it well: "Though his style got more refined, the melancholy and poetry of his earlier works were never matched again, not even by him." Soon after, I would read a book that helped me to appreciate why melancholy and poetry sparked new life. But first, something completely different.


Nicholas Rooney – Talking to the Wolf: the Alexander Dugin Interviews

Alexander Dugin's reputation goes before him and I began to read these interviews as a means of bypassing received opinion. Once started, I didn't stop. There are over 500 pages covering philosophy, theology and politics. His focus in theology is often on the need for a relation to eternity:

The distance between us and eternity is growing and it demands more and more effort in our life in order to return to eternity. So we go out of eternity and fall. Time is a kind of radical sin and not a kind of progress; it’s something completely opposite. We should make time something other than it is, and that is precisely why when Christ was baptised the river Jordan went in the opposite direction. So that is precisely what we need to do. We need a kind of revolution of time. We need to direct time in the opposite direction.

Eternity is also a topic for Tancredo Pavone in Gabriel Josipovici's interview-novel Infinity in which the composer speaks a fusion of profundity and bullshit. Whether 'also' should appear in that sentence is up to the reader of these conversations to decide. The question must be why I enjoyed them almost as much as Gargoyles (so not completely different after all). When Dugin turns to politics, his deeply conservative opinions do not preclude proposals for a multipolar world order. This was unexpected and hopeful, which must be why he is demonised by the unipolar West.

William Franke – Dante’s Vita nuova and the New Testament: Hermeneutics and the Poetics of Revelation

Some years ago Lee Rourke, a fellow scourge of Establishment Literary Fiction, identified and criticised the default mode of the contemporary novel as 'lyrical humanism'. As he has written for the New Humanist, I assumed this was because lyricism appeals to a residual irrational and thereby religious inclination in secular society and, contra Mallarmé, he seeks to purge literary language of anything beyond functional utility. I may have assumed too much, but reading Bernhard's Gargoyles and especially Prince Saurau's gloriously disconsolate aria, I realised that I am travelling in the opposite direction. This is not a religious turn but faithfulness to an experience that cannot be recorded by a chronicle of facts. For Dante the experience was the incarnation of eternity in time in the form of Beatrice, conveyable only in lyric. William Franke's book helped to appreciate the prose 'explanations' in the Vita Nuova alternating with the lyrics were necessary to avoid the latter becoming absorbed by a literary and rhetorical tradition rather than the voice of an individual seeking to convey a unique vision. In this way the Vita Nuova becomes a contemporary gospel, risking blasphemy in doing so. Prince Saurau's speech may be its recurrence in a secular time, hence its paradoxical glory.

I have written before about the Vita Nuova in Dante on the Beach.

Gabriel Josipovici – A Winter in Zürau and Partita

I wrote about this two-book edition in October, so all there is to do here is to reiterate the gift of the first part is its case for formal adventure in writing and of the second its enactment. It is one Josipovici has made throughout his career, but never with such focus. He makes clear that what distinguishes Kafka is that his experimentation in the Bohemian countryside was not a means to impress critics, not a noodling with sentences, not playing with genre, but a means of relating to "ultimate things" borne on a deeply felt existential anxiety.

Mark Bowles – All My Precious Madness

The blurb I contributed to this wonderful novel is deceptive in that Mark Bowles is like Thomas Bernhard only in the narrator Henry Nash's exultant anger with the social and political conditions in which we live – more or less unheard of in the British novel – and the triangular relationships, as set out by Thomas Cousineau in his book on Bernhard, in the form of Nash himself, his father and Cahun, the ghastly representative of the professional managerial class. It may be described as the Bildungsroman of a Critical Theorist, only with the rebarbative prose of that movement replaced by luxurious sentences, something else he has in common with the great Austrian.

Blood Knowledge by Kirsty Gunn

"A novel is a kind of lazy way of writing a short story, a short story a lazy way of writing a poem" said Muriel Spark, adding by explanation: "The longer they become, the more they seem to lose value". We might wonder then if the most value is to be found in the shortest novels, the shortest short stories and the shortest poems, such as Christian Stevens's Hummingbirds / don't know the words and Giuseppe Ungaretti's Eternal.

However, these may be still too lazy for Muriel Spark. A single word instead then? A single letter perhaps, maybe even a punctuation mark? Such logic leads to a blank page as the least lazy and most valuable form, or no page at all, or even better, the space from which the page has been removed. But perhaps Muriel Spark is only cheekily inverting the common assumption that, as a lisping Kingsley Amis might have said, more means worth. If she is, it is only its inversion: the longer a work becomes, the closer it comes to such value in the abyss of prose. Collecting poems or stories into a book draws attention to the spaces between entries that inevitably invoke a value effaced by the writing. What can the writer do?

The question creates the tension in Blood Knowledge, the story opening Pretty Ugly, Kirsty Gunn's latest collection. Venetia Alton, a writer of bestselling historical romances, reflects upon a happy marriage and two successful careers, a beautiful home and garden, with children having flown the nest to find their own happy and successful lives. She publishes a novel every two years, alhough she admits they write themselves:

It was a case of doing the research, compiling the characters, and the contents would play out in the same way with every title: Tough times into good. Happy ever after. Wars could rage in Renaissance England, French coasts beset by 19th century piracy and highland estates overcome by rebellion...but all would come right in the end because it was what happened at home that counted; it was a story after all.

She sets all this against a disquiet often expressed to Richard, her husband, as a wish to build a different life elsewhere, perhaps abroad, but dismissed by him as "silly". How could it be better than here? She cannot say, not out loud anyway. She turns instead to writing on scraps of paper and hiding them from view. The scraps work in the opposite direction to the novels as they contain evidence of a rebellion against the genre she has lived, that she has been expected to live, as a wife and mother, and as a novelist. What counts for her is the space around what is present to everyone else, a space that cannot be addressed, cannot become part of a happy ever after story. And yet of course it it has been addressed, here, in this story. Venetia's secret was made public the moment it was written down, even if it remains forever hidden in a drawer. In keeping with the oxymoron of the collection's title, writing is an open secret.

If the ostensible value here is Venetia's affirmination of her sequestered self and as such appearing to submit to a familiar genre of contemporary critical discourse – it may be no coincidence that Venetia shares a seven-letter Latinate first name with Clarissa Dalloway and that her husband is also called Richard – its native value is that it pulses with the secret of storytelling, its blood knowledge, a secret nevertheless we have to keep. 

 

Notes

1: The reader's demand for the work to efface the ambiguity of value is revealed by the reliably execrable Hadley Freeman in her Times review of a book "described in the press release, rather untemptingly, as a short story collection".

2: It has become a pattern that, when I write about short story collections, I write about one story only. It happened first with Thomas Bernhard's Goethe Dies, then Enrique Vila-Matas' Death by Saudade, followed by Sam Pink's Blue Victoria, and most recently Gert Hofmann's Arno. This appears to be a critical cop-out and/or implicit criticism of the other stories in the collections. Instead, however, I hope it is best to avoid the value-free impressionism I remember from reading reviews in the NME in the 1980s in which tracks of LPs were summarised with adjective-noun combinations – "the upbeat freedom of X, the trenchant melancholy of Y" – as if that helped anyone. In this case, it is a nice coincidence that I'm reviewing a book published by Rough Trade which as a music label gave us records by Microdisney, The Fall, The Smiths and Robert Wyatt, each of which I bought at that time and still own.

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 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.