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 the evasion. 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. 

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

My disappointment with the contemporary novel has been an occasional feature on this blog. Fourteen years ago I asked myself whether I had a genuine interest in that kind of book. Later, I wondered if JM Coetzee's Jesus trilogy was an attempt to put an end to the novel as the genre knows it and, most recently, two posts identified features that might explain what was missing: first, citing Genette's Narrative Discourse, most novels' "temporal stability", and then in A measure of forever the absence of existential consternation infecting the form in contrast to a non-contemporary book that broke the cycle of disappointment. But perhaps these are just symptoms of a deeper problem. Byung-Chul Han, a Korean philosopher based in Germany, insists there is and it has little to do with the ingredients I identified. He says we're living in "a post-narrative time" with proof coming in the discussion of the subject itself: "Narrative consciousness, allegedly rooted in the human brain, is a conception that is possible only...outside of the narrative spell."

The evidence suggests the exact opposite: from the #VSS hashtag on social media to multi-volume Harry Potter novels and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not to say the rows and rows of supermarket fiction, we are saturated in narrative. But this is his point: "At the heart of all the noise of storytelling, there is a narrative vacuum that expresses itself in a lack of meaning and orientation." For Han, as it was for Walter Benjamin, the not-so-secret sharer of this volume, the earliest sign of the decline in narration is precisely the rise of the novel, a rise coinciding with the decline of faith:

Christian religion is a meta-narrative that reaches into every nook and cranny of life and anchors it in being. Time itself becomes freighted with narrative. In the Christian calendar, each day is meaningful.

This is what he means by meaning and orientation: a faith "narrates contingency away...turning being-in-the-world into being-at-home". If the Christian calendar is still followed, it has been hollowed out by commercial interests. Each festival a marketing opportunity. Narration, Han says quoting Benjamin, comes from a distance: "what gets the readiest hearing is no longer intelligence coming from afar, but the information which supplies a handle for what is nearest". The availability and accessibility of stories is presented as an unqualified good, but they act like newspaper reports upfront, in our face, battering us one after another, and we're unable to slow down to listen and to contemplate. "The modern reader has lost the long, slow, lingering gaze." 

Many contemporary novels appear to challenge the condition with engrossing and informative stories about social and political issues – Ryan Ruby calls it "narrativized punditry" – but this is only a free-form variant of audience-seeking journalism. The alternative appears to be found in monumental or 'experimental' novels noisily hailed as renewing the aura of a bygone era – "already being compared to Nabokov and Proust" – yet really only forming pyramids in the desert visited by archaeologists and puzzled tourists; essentially nostalgic. What they lack Han says is the "revolutionary pathos" and "spirit of departure" of the narratives of the early twentieth century in which a different future is permanently on the horizon. Instead, modern narratives have no future and have settled into "a mode of 'on and on'". 

BREAKING NEWS: the Booker Prize shortlist has been announced...

In general culture, narration has been replaced by rampant storytelling devoured by those desperate for a communal anchor: "Populist, nationalist and right-wing extremist or tribal narratives, including conspiracy theories, cater to this need." Even those appalled by the idiocracy remain subject to the same need:

'stories' shared on social media fill the narrative vacuum. They are merely forms of pornographic self-presentation or self-promotion. Posting, liking and sharing content are consumerist practices that intensify the narrative crisis.

The Crisis of Narration is also a passionate denunciation of digital culture. Our brains have adapted to the sensory overload by dulling perception; we should remember an addiction goes on and on, which is why Han says that taking selfies is not a sign of narcissism but of "inner emptiness". What's curious about this short book with short chapters and Han's prolific output of short books is that he appears to be intensifying the crisis, just as this blog's information-heavy discussion is more or less a selfie with the book (hey, buy me a coffee!). 

So what does Han recommend for resistance? Despite his avowed Catholicism, a return to a meta-narrative is not possible, so he advocates slowing down and contemplation, and taking risks to achieve both: "A little bit of patience for narration, please. And then: patience through narration!" This, the book's epigraph, is from Peter Handke, an author who features in Han's other books. Elsewhere Handke describes his grammar as "conservative, almost epically so":

It comes from distance, as Dante said. In his case, people approach on a kind of country road and he says of them: they walked slowly and they came as if they came from far, far away. I too want to write sentences that come from a great distance.

This may explain why Handke's novels in recent decades have been for me so difficult to read; not for any complexity or experimental obtrusions but simply their patience, in which the hamster wheel of consumption turns too slowly. While 'narration' in Han's book applies to the wider culture and not specifically to novel-writing, his injunction to take risks does. The on and on of contemporary literary fiction is due in part to it settling into recognisable forms. Han cites the fate of philosophy but it applies equally to novel production:

Once philosophy claims to be a science, an exact science even, decay sets in. Conceived as a science, philosophy denies its original narrative character and it loses its language. Philosophy falls silent. An academic philosophy that limits itself to the administration of its own history is unable to narrate. It does not run any risks; it runs a bureaucracy. 

This may be why the most stimulating writing takes place outside, evading Head Office.

Philosophy, in the form of ‘poetry’ (mythos), takes a risk, a noble risk. It narrates – even risks to suggest – a new form of life and being. Descartes’s ego cogito, ergo sum introduces a new order of things that represents the beginning of modern times. By leaving the Christian narrative of the Middle Ages behind, the radical orientation towards certainty risks something new.  

Byung-Chul Han's use of italics throughout is reminiscent of another Germanic scourge in which repeated assertions open a void in language, indicating at once that narration is untimely – "all literature is the literature of the end of time" Blanchot says – and that there is possibility of something new in that void. 

If I started with disappointment, I ended with The Crisis of Narration renewing my faith in the novel. It did what most of the novels I try to read fail to do: it was unputdownable and immediately rereadable. While each page bristles with passion and ideas, merely raising the question of narration seemed to be enough. Perhaps this is what the novel of the future must do, otherwise a very short story is never short enough and a 1,000-page doorstop never long enough.

Reading, forgetting

When John Updike read À la recherche du temps perdu after having read Scott-Moncrieff's translation, he was surprised to find Proust less Proustian, the epithet we associate with flowery prose blossoming over prodigious sentences proliferating clause within clause. While I cannot read French, this was also my experience of reading the new translations, first The Swann Way by Brian Nelson and now In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom by Charlotte Mandell. In the glow of remembering the experience of reading Within a Budding Grove, the prose of the new translation is noticebly less ornate, one might say more colloquial, at least no longer at arm's length from the decadence of fin de siècle France, an impression created perhaps by Scott-Moncrieff's grandiloquence. This worried me, as I've often described Proust to those who haven't read the novel as mind-expanding; one begins to follow thoughts into their depths of variation and reversal, suggesting that the recognition and interpretation of the signs of the world offers more to life than a novel's notable events, and I wondered if the overripe vocabulary and unusually generous size of the original typeface had something to do with this. With the new translations, one is sobered up enough from Scott-Moncrieff-intoxication to draw alongside Marcel the man himself, realising only too painfully one has failed to heed the lessons in love he presents with such eloquence and precision. With some shame, the reader comes to identify with Swann and Marcel.

In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom is a novel written in shade and sunlight. In the first part, Marcel's frustrated love for Swann's daughter Gilberte is given a long post-mortem, much as The Swann Way is a post-mortem for Swann's jealous love for Gilberte's mother Odette, while in the second Marcel has moved on from Gilberte and is spending Summer in a high-end hotel in Balbec on the Normandy coast. There he becomes infatuated with a "little band" of teenage girls he sees cycling around the resort, getting up to minor mischief. He describes their clothes and features lit by sunlight brightened by the sea, trying to discern their secrets, longing to get closer. Each day is charged by the thrill of catching a glimpse. The evocation of teenage kicks is hard to beat, provoking memories and melancholy shared by the reader.

It comes so quickly, the time when you have nothing left to look forward to, when your body is fixed in a state of immobility that promises no more surprises, when you lose all hope at the sight of faces that are still young framed by hair that's falling out or growing grey, like a tree in full summer with leaves that are already dead; it is so short, this radiant morning, that one comes to love only very young girls, the ones in whom the flesh, like a precious dough, is still rising. They are nothing but a pliable flow of matter, constantly moulded by whatever passing impression dominates them at the time. 

Back at the hotel, the family becomes acquainted with the painter Elstir who, impressed by Marcel, invites him to his studio, but Marcel keeps putting it off because he cannot bear to miss an opportunity to spot the little band. This proves to be an error.

It is decades since my reading of Terence Kilmartin's revision of Scott-Moncrieff's Remembrance of Things Past and then Penguin's retitled re-translation, and I was alarmed by how much detail was unfamiliar; I had forgotten entirely Madame Swann's little salon and images of train journeys, visits to Elstir's studio and sightings of the little band were only vague. What I do remember very clearly is fresh air and brilliant light, as if the novel itself is a holiday in the sun. While this exposes dilettantish tendencies, it may be fairer to compare the condition to the narrator's experience of enchantment with the group of girls. Likewise, we are enchanted by certain books and, like Marcel, we can be "profoundly surprised" each time we are in their presence, which in his case he puts down to "the multiplicity of each individual" compared to when "we are left alone with the arbitrary simplicity of our memory". Our relationship to a book can also follow the via dolorosa of disenchantment and Marcel's post-mortem commentary bulks out that path, accessorising what is otherwise an unremarkable story, so perhaps I had become jaded over the decades. Except, commentary does not constitute forgotten detail, as the winding sentences unconsciously nourish the growth of the reader's quality of perception, acting at a crude level like a prose exposition of a poem or to the summary of a dream minus the purity of its experience. Purity shines like the Balbec sun. 

Seeking to recover the dream, to give the purity of the experience a presence we might hold and share, we turn to plot summaries, biographies, scholarly monographs, documentaries, film adaptations, even blog posts, leaving us in a state of literary insomnia comparable to a night in the hotel in which an exhausted Marcel tosses and turns in bed, kept awake by the dread of sleeplessness.

All of a sudden I did fall asleep; I fell into that deep sleep that opens up for us a return to childhood, the rediscovery of years past and emotions once felt, disincarnation, the transmigration of souls, the recollection of the dead, the illusions of madness, regression to the most primitive forms of nature (for it's said we often see animals in our dreams, but we forget that, almost always when we dream, we ourselves are animals deprived of the rationality that projects the light of certainty onto things; on the contrary, all we can direct at the spectacle of life is an uncertain gaze constantly being obliterated by forgetfulness, each reality vanishing before the next takes its place like the ever-shifting projection of a magic lantern as the slides are changed) all these mysteries we think we don't know but into which we are actually initiated almost every night, just as we're introduced to the other great mystery of annihilation and resurrection. 

The places to which we are taken in this passage and the music in Charlotte Mandell's beautifully invisible translation is reminiscent of the unrelenting procession of the dreams of which it speaks, and in this we might recognise that literature is, like dream, in excess of the world. We cannot access its mysteries by day.  

Blanchot notes that modern literature has "a preoccupation with a profoundly continuous speech" giving rise "with Lautréamont, with Proust, then with surrealism, then with Joyce...to works that were manifestly scandalous". Scandalous not because of the content but because an "excess of continuity unsettles the reader, and unsettles the reader's habits of regular comprehension". Again, like dreaming. The excess of continuity draws us close to what is discontinuous of habitual life, to what remains stubbornly unfamiliar and yet into which we are initiated in certain books, the axe-books Kafka said we needed. This may in turn explain why novelists like Beckett and Bernhard, as different from Proust as one can imagine, are nevertheless closer companions than those who write regular novels of time and memory. If we compare this to Heidegger's claim that the measure of a great poet is to the extent they are able to commit to "one single poetic statement", a statement that is not explicit, we can appreciate that such continuousness is the outpouring of what cannot be stated and that our attachment to a particular book is not something we can properly articulate without becoming novelists ourselves. Marcel recognises this once he is initiated into friendship with the little band:

It was on them that my thoughts contentedly dwelled when I thought I was thinking of something else, or of nothing. But when, even without realizing it, I thought of them, at an even deeper level of unconsciousness they were the hilly blue undulations of the sea, a procession silhouetted against the sea. It was the sea I was hoping to find again, if I went to some town where they might be. The most exclusive love for a person is always love for something else.  

To discover something else, we might ask: how can we sleep? This may be the question for the literature of our time.

Note

In Proust Regained, I wrote about Brian Nelson's translation The Swann Way and included links to other posts of mine on Proust and In Search of Lost Time.

Reading, detachment

In an in-between time in which nothing begins or ends, in which blank patience takes the place of activity, I picked two books from my shelves stubbornly remote from utility, lacking the intimacy of possession, and a third in which I had never read a key section. The first was Peter Handke's Crossing the Sierra del Gredos, a 472-page novel narrated by a writer employed by financial operative to write something about her and which I abandoned eighteen years ago retaining no memory of its content. This time, I read page after page in a reverie of detachment. ¹

Then there was Geoffrey Hill's collected poems Broken Hierarchies, a book whose word choice and subject matter is fiercely English and Christian or, perhaps more accurately, Protestant and Anglo-Saxon which, despite being English and culturally Christian, remains alien to me. Why did I think a huge edition like this presented and read in chronological order would enable something previously declined? No doubt I assumed from immersion some sort of knowledge or at least familiarity was to be gained. Perhaps I might draw closer to the psychic distinction of my ancestral lands. Reading from where I left off provoked the same cool reverie and with it the assumption of gain fell away.

Thirdly, there were the pages prefacing Maurice Blanchot's Infinite Conversation: italicised dialogue and commentary I have always skipped, or read without memory of having read, in a book otherwise opened so often it is held together by masking tape; skipped not only because of the tightly-bound typeface – why do italicised paragraphs repel our eyes? – but because they are abstract and anonymous; there is no listing in the table of contents and no names or titles cited to orientate us within a recognisable discourse, only mundane and hyperbolic expressions of weariness and what weariness means in context. If I were to insert an example quotation here it would only to betray what I began writing this to say, and indeed to name these books let alone describe their contents obscures what I experienced. 

In this empty time such reading, hardly reading at all actually, closer to passive looking, attentive only to the space opening before my eyes in the steady progress of lines and sentences, I chanced upon what felt like the pure mode of literature, an experience apart, an effortless drift from rational comprehension into the enchantment of a pale expanse, with no wish continue and no wish to stop.

 

Note 

1. The original title is Der Bildverlust, oder, Durch die Sierra del Gredos. Why FSG chose to exclude the first part of the title, coined it appears by this novel and which translates as The Loss of Images, is unknown, but predictable (later we saw it with Vila-Matas' Montano's Malady reduced by Jonathan Cape to Montano). Imagine a German edition of Melville's novel abridged to Der Wal.↩

The way of arrival

Two intellectual memoirs dominated my reading over Spring, three if WG Sebald's Silent Catastrophes can be included given that its analysis of the careers of various Austrian writers illuminates Sebald's own literary trajectory.¹ Peter Brown's Journeys of a Mind: A Life in History is over 700 pages but remains fascinating upto and including the final page, and while Giorgio Agamben's Self-Portrait in the Studio is over 500 pages shorter, reading it again only multiplies the pleasure. All three writers display a commitment to their research not limited to a 9-to-5 academic career. It is embedded in their lives;² the two surviving authors are still working in their 80s. 

But why did they dominate my reading? I wondered if it was a vicarious living of an alternative life, the one in which I was able to dedicate my time to reading and writing, perhaps to enable a more satisfying production. I daydream of the garden offices advertised on my Instagram feed in which I might escape distraction and finally concentrate after decades of superficiality. The archive of this blog reveals a movement from naive enthusiasms and bitter agitations to more ambitious content that doesn't quite escape the original form and may in fact diminish its strengths. At its best, blog writing glances at subjects, whether that is a new book or literary current affair, acting as the corner of an eye catching sight of something regular coverage blanks out, while, at its worst, it merely imitates.³ Ultimately, however, it remains a dilettantism. It doesn't nourish.

At least, that is what I have felt. Then I reread the passage in Self-Portrait in the Studio in which Agamben writes of a postcard on his studio desk of a 17th century painting depicting a woman feeding from her own breast.⁴ After acknowledging its 'cloying lineage', he argues for it as an allegory of the soul nourishing itself. He asks what it means to nourish oneself: "What is a light that feeds itself? A flame that no longer needs fuel?"

In the process of nourishing—in any kind of nourishing, spiritual or bodily—there is a threshold at which the process reverses direction and turns back towards itself. Food can nourish only if at a certain point it is no longer something other than us, only if we have—as they say—assimilated it; but this means—to the exactly the same degree—that we are assimilated to it. The same thing happens with the light of knowledge: it always arises from outside, but there arrives a moment when inside and outside meet and we can no longer tell them apart. At this point, the fire ceases to consume us, 'it now consumes itself'.⁵

This, I realised, was why these books had dominated. Each in its way marks multiple crossings of thresholds, the meetings of inside and outside, and I was drawn to these books because I was aware that I had been impatient for such a threshold to make itself known and wanted to know how others had climbed above the shameful lowlands of secondary writing. Like so many others, I had sought assimilation in the consumption of ideas, washing down the keywords and catchphrases of philosophy, literary criticism and critical theory like so many pills, using the convenient shortcuts technology offers, but which only reassert distance, separation. No meeting ever arrives.

Ten years ago when I read Nathaniel Davis' translation of 'Across the Border', Sebald's beautiful essay on Peter Handke's Repetition, a novel that had dazzled me in the late 1980s alongside Slow Homecoming, Across, and The Afternoon of a Writer, I was dazzled again. I had read the novel several times and was frustrated each time that I couldn't find words to express why it and the three other novels had stood out above almost everything else I had read,⁶ and Sebald's essay only deepened the frustration as it focuses on the novel's metaphysical ideas, its mythological scheme, and its relation to the theme of 'Heimat' in Austrian literature and Filip Kobal's quest for redemption from the inheritance of fascist violence; that is, nothing much to do with me, but did help me to understand "the particular light which filters through" the novel, the words Sebald uses to describe Handke's prose in Repetition. The light made "the text itself a place of refuge among the arid zones" and "by the power of words alone" made visible "a world more beautiful than this one".

Reading Jo Catling's translation of the essay in a book for which we have waited two decades and on which I hope to write more, I realised the larger issues had over those years become embedded within me, so familiar that I could set them aside to concentrate on what really nourishes, perhaps the words of refuge, beauty and redemption. This is another reason why the books dominated: they emphasised the value of finding such nourishment, felt by the body as much as the mind, rather than trying to assimilate the food that passes right through. Assimilation may take a lifetime to arrive, but, as Blanchot says: "The shortcut does not allow one to arrive someplace more directly (more quickly), but rather to lose the way that ought to lead there." 

Notes

1. Terry Pitts' two-part review of the collection is especially good on this.↩

2. This becomes clear in the remarkable final section of Agamben's What I saw, heard, learned in which he remembers a note he wrote as a child that "seemed to be the secret core of my philosophy".↩

3. All these years later I still cringe at the memory of when the Litblog Co-Op, set up to promote formally adventurous fiction and challenge the conservative coverage of print newspapers, announced its first 'Read This!' promotion as Kate Atkinson's best-selling novel Case Histories with the co-op member referring to the author as "a juicy pro", as if novelists were gymnasts and the novel a pommel horse.↩

4. The painting by Giovanni Serodine is given the title as Allegory of Science by the Kunsthistorisches Museum, but most other sources refer to it as Allegorical Female Figure.↩

5. Agamben is quoting Plato's Seventh Letter on which he bases the claim.↩ 

6. I wrote a blogpost on three of the four and another on Handke's book-length poem To Duration also written in the mid-1980s but which didn't appear in English translation for another 25 years.↩

On the Calculation of Volume 1 by Solvej Balle

The premise of this multi-volume novel is simple: a modern-day French woman called Tara finds herself stuck inside the eighteenth day of a November. The nineteenth never appears. On the 121st iteration of the same day she begins to write by describing the sounds made by her husband Thomas as he moves around upstairs. The same moves, the same noises every day. A simple premise and very promising, but very difficult to turn into a compelling narrative. If everything she sees and hears is going to be the same from one day to the next, variation or resolution can only undermine the conceit, making the novel the diary of an anecdote, essentially a ghost story,¹ but if there is no variation or resolution, boredom and impatience are inevitable. And the novel is indeed fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, as the premise gives the reader an existential thrill imagining what such a condition might entail while also wondering how the constraint on the story will develop, and perhaps even resolve, but frustrating because there are only so many meditations on a regular day one can read.

The novel is filled out with Tara's precise observations of her surroundings and descriptions of the events leading up to the "rift in time", a level-headed attention suggested by the title, all of which may be interesting in context, but not otherwise. However, any longueurs are mitigated when, longing for a world in which time passes, she tries to reach the nineteenth. She interrupts Thomas' routine and explains the situation in the hope that he will be able to lead her into the next day, but by morning he has to be told all over again. However, this does have its unique joys:

We woke in the morning, we went for walks, we sat down and had coffee somewhere on the eighteenth of November. For most of the day as intimately aware of one another as couples in the first flush of love or nearsighted creatures. We made the horizon vanish. We sought this giddy feeling. The distance between us was dispelled in the fog. We made the giddiness a part of our day. Created a bright space out of dazed, gray confusion.

The reader nevertheless is impatient for a resolution and spins the hands of the clock forward enabled by the smooth translation of Balle's uncluttered prose, only to discover on closing the book that there is a serenity in the stability of Tara's infinite crisis, and now that serenity is gone. This may be why there are several more volumes ahead, just as there is always another day ahead.

Translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland

Part one of On the Calculation of Volume has been reviewed widely and made the International Booker Prize shortlist and came top of the Shadow Panel's vote.² While many of the reviews place the novel within a generic tradition and cite one of the most famous novels about time as a literary predecessor, not one review that I've found recognises the significance of the apparently random date chosen for Tara to explore. Had they wondered why a Danish author chose to write a multi-volume novel about time from the perspective of a French woman, they may have discovered that the eighteenth of November is the day in 1922 on which the author of À la recherche du temps perdu died.³ There are other parallels, albeit travelling in the opposite direction: Tara's experience at the beginning of the rift is a neat inversion of Proust's narrator at the beginning of that novel: each morning he wakes in uncertainty to reconstruct reality from forgetful sleep, while she wakes to a sense of peace as the normality of another morning appears, only for its normality to dissolve. And when she tells Thomas everything and they stay awake all night hoping the nineteenth will appear in an entirely new dawn, a sudden imperceptible loss of concentration leads to him losing the memory of the day, a moment that reverses Proust's famous instants.

Perhaps then this is a novel written from the end of time, from the blank space of death or, less morbidly, from eternity. For Nietzsche, eternity is precisely the revelation of time. This is Tara's revelation. In the face of relentless change, the serene stability of the novel is the ideal form to enable an experience of time in relation to the horizon of eternity. This may explain why the rise of the novel coincided with the decline of faith and the disenchantment of the world. If poetry is the gift of eternity and the novel the gift of time, the novels of Proust and Solvej Balle seek to merge both in the flow of imagination and reality.⁴

 

^Notes 

1. David Lowery's movie A Ghost Story springs to mind here. A dead husband haunts the house he shared with his wife and watches from afar.↩

2. See the Booker Prize website and the Shadow Panel's Substack report. The latter tends to more reliable in purely literary terms as it's not driven by corporate demands.↩

3. A letter to the TLS mentions it in response to a review, but most is behind the paywall so I can't credit the correspondent for also being a clever clogs.↩

4. There is another connection, not film or book related. In the thinking of the experience of the same day and the fog obscuring the movement from one day to the next, I remembered seeing J Mascis and the Fog perform the song Sameday live in Brighton many years ago. The Fog that night featured Mike Watt of Minutemen (and later the underrated fIREHOSE) and Ron Asheton of The Stooges.

   ↩