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.

39 Books: 2000

In 1998 my friend John Harris mentioned that he was travelling to the US so I asked if he could pick up a copy of the new translation of Peter Handke's My Year in the No-man's Bay, not available over here. He was the first to tell me about this new website called Amazon. This is also how I bought this year's book.

If buying books not published in the UK had then the minor thrill of the exotic, it is now routine. Sometimes I buy the US edition even if there is a British one, such as when the British edition of Vila-Matas' Montano's Malady deleted a key word from the title. 

But now the routine is a problem, with highly recommended books, new and old, appearing on social media like a stampede of cupcakes. Even if the books are put through one's highly developed filter, it is still impossible to keep up, leading to bingeing or starvation reading patterns, equally unhappy. Reading Infernal Incipits: The Poetics of the New, the second chapter of Teodolinda Barolini's The Undivine Comedy, it's not difficult to regard this as the modern reader's contrapasso, the concept that a soul's punishment in Hell corresponds to the sin it committed on earth. 

The chapter is especially illuminating on Dante's invention of the terza rima rhyming scheme. She observes how it mimics the unceasing forward motion of the pilgrim's journey while also including recurrent backward glances, which means it also mimics our existence in time, our "essential middleness" between beginning and ending. Our desire, however, as experienced in sickening after the next book, and the one after that, and the pang of longing for the perceived joy of books read long ago, is precisely for some kind of beginning or end. Contrapasso becomes "less a theological device, as it is usually considered, than, in Dante's hands, a narrative stroke of genius" as the reader is driven to descend alongside the pilgrim to see who the next soul is and the diabolical punishment meted out to it. In this way we have an innate desire for newness and as such act like the damned in Canto 3 who have the paradoxical desire to cross the Acheron into Hell:

they are eager for the river crossing
because celestial justice spurs them on,
so that their fear is turned into desire.

Is our desire for the next book really fear instead; the fear of not keeping up? Proof may appear in the lamentably regular use on social media of "I confess, I haven't read [insert book title]". Perhaps we wish, albeit subconsciously, to be like the angels in Paradiso who:

since they first were gladdened by
the face of God, from which no thing is hidden,
have never turned their vision from that face,

so that their sight is never intercepted
by a new object, and they have no need
to recollect an interrupted concept.

Contra Borges, Heaven could be the absence of the book. However, Heaven could also be Hell: as Barolini points out, while for Dante on his journey there are ever new sufferers and sufferings, for the sinners it is "as for the angels, but for opposite reasons, and with opposite results – there is no difference, nothing is ever new."

Notes

1: I have written about Dante's Vita Nuova in what I like to think is one of the best posts on this blog: Dante on the Beach.

2: Columbia University's Digital Dante website is a remarkable resource, containing not only Teodolinda Barolini's commentary on the Commedia but also film of her Dante Course.

Dante on the beach

This sumptuous Folio Society edition of Dante's Vita Nuova translated from the Italian by Mark Musa arrived with the suggestion that I post photographs to accompany anything I wanted to write. So here it is, bathed in marine light.

What I wanted to write was unclear to me, and feeling incapable of adding anything worthwhile to the centuries of studies, I began with the basics.

The book was published in 1295 and comprises 31 poems and a prose narrative described by Robert Harrison as juxtaposing "quasi-hallucinatory dreams and visions with pedantic commentary on the poems"; an unusual genre for us, with one familiar forerunner in Boethius' Consolations of Philosophy and no obvious descendants. TS Eliot describes it as a mixture of biography and allegory "according to a recipe not available to the modern mind"; closest perhaps to a modern scholarly edition of selected poems edited and annotated by the poet himself, and so perhaps even outside of our time given the suspicion or regret we feel towards that which is not the thing itself. Here the distance from the thing itself is everything.

The book tells of Dante's love for a woman he saw first when they were both children and with whom he had only the merest acquaintance throughout the rest of her short life, but whom he regarded from the start as "a miracle manifest in reality", as a sign of God's presence on earth, causing "the most secret chambers" of his heart to tremble and for his eyes to weep uncontrollably; a joy indistinguishable from distress. The new life of the title is one in which Dante would praise Beatrice in the very book we're reading; poetry being the gift that could not be taken from him once she had died.

While the Vita Nuova sprang from the tradition of troubadour love poetry, Eliot says Dante was following "something more essential than merely a 'literary' tradition". This might be what that I would like to write about here. What is it that makes the Vita Nuova "something more" than an exercise in genre, and what can reveal to us about the literature of our time?

Dante would go on to place Beatrice as his guide in heaven in his most famous work, which Borges argues was composed solely to manufacture another meeting with the object of this "unhappy and superstitious love". If in the Paradiso she is celebrated as "one of the beautiful angels of heaven", Charles Singleton says we recognise this in the Vita Nuova "not from a poet's extravagant rhetoric in rhyme, but from a sober and solemn and reasoned prose". This might come as a surprise given Dante's reputation as a poet. Except Borges also observes that what happened to Dante's vision "is what often happens in dreams: they are stained by sad obstructions". So we might see such prose here as another sad obstruction, and this is what Teodolinda Barolini argues when she says that a central purpose of Dante's commentary is "to divest the poem of any residual temporal immunity", thereby creating a tension between the physical and metaphysical elements of the story, which may correlate to the tension between distress and joy Dante experienced in Beatrice's presence.

Much of Barolini's own work, she says, is "finding ways to understand ... the deep meaning of the lyric/narrative contaminatio" in which the lyricism and fragmentariness of one form seeps into the regular linearity of the other, and vice versa. This is something that also fascinates me, for less focused reasons, but which emerges from what Barolini goes on to say about the 'excessive narrativity' that attracted later generations of writers in the form, thereby losing the lyric side, something that we can see today in the tendency of modern fiction toward graphomania.

Perhaps that "something more essential" appears in this contamination. There are others in the Vita Nuova in addition to that between lyric and narrative: there's the oscillation that Harrison notes between "Cavalcantian nihilism and Christian evangelism", in which the afflictions of romantic infatuation and the redemptive promise offered by Beatrice create what to us is an odd mix of pathos and piety; a mix that is also present in the light she radiates that acts in the opposite way to the Eurydicean darkness of pagan myth, looking into which nevertheless has a devastating impact on Dante. The nearest equivalent in modern writing to such contamination might be a book that 'plays with genre' or has multiple styles. Except this would also be furthest from equivalence because, as has been said, in the Vita Nuova the forms are necessary to the story rather than there to dazzle the reader with the writer's generic learning.

We might find a modern equivalent in Beatrice's role as mentioned by John A. Scott. She reflects the Christian Neoplatonic view of the human being as the midpoint of creation – a link between heaven and earth and between "pure intellect and brute matter". Her death acts as a challenging opposition to the lover left behind, just as narrative time challenges lyric timelessness. Beatrice in her absence is like the Untergeher featured in many of Thomas Bernhard's novels: the one who goes under, leaving the writer/narrator on the shore looking out into the unknown, between life and death; "between statis and conversion" as Barolini says of the form of the Vita Nuova. This is not as contrived a leap forward in literary history as it might seem. Singleton reveals how unusual the opening of the Vita Nuova was for its time, somewhat like the 'found text' theme of modern novels, including Bernhard's:

In that part of the book of my memory before which there would be little to be read is found a chapter which says: Here begins a new life. It is my intention to copy into this little book the words I find written under that heading – if not all of them, at least their significance.

Singleton says handwritten works of this age did not announce the presence of the scribe copying the words from another book, so immediately there is an unusually self-consciousness intervention. The book becomes two books and the poet becomes two people: the writer is a protagonist in the story and the one who lived through what happened and is now looking back, giving the narrative another opposition: "the principle of a then and a now, so mercury jumps like a spark". There is no staged innocence here as in the modern Bildungsroman: the story is already over – "Beatrice will not happen again".

If the unusual mix of genres in the Vita Nuova reveals that we are not as modern as we think we are, writing of a young woman as a kind of vernacular Jesus is by contrast more or less unintelligible to us, and thereby easily dismissed as a museum exhibit. I was prompted to wonder about this question by the seductively intimidating presence of this Folio Society edition with its decoration proclaiming an arcane value but also, it seemed to me, standing in for it. The poems and commentary work against the solemnity, cultural worth and demand for dutiful respect that we associate with canonical works, replacing them with anxiety, reflexivity and self-abasement. And while its unintelligible aspects also mean it's tempting to dismiss Dante's elevation of Beatrice as sublimated sexual obsession bordering on the pathology of a stalker, with her death relieving him of the possibility of her ideality becoming tainted, this would also be our form of relief, enabling us to dismiss a disconcerting resistance to our self-ratifying assumptions. Nor would it be original: Scott reports that a contemporary to whom Dante sent the poems told him to rid himself of such visions by "giving his balls a good wash".

We might begin to recognise what it means by raising yet another contamination, noted this time by Alison Cornish: "One of the most important and original aspects of Dante's literary project is his recuperation of sensual, earthly love ... as salvific and educational". This could be adapted to describe Proust's In Search of Lost Time with its two unhappy and superstitious loves from which Marcel learns and Swann doesn't, and the salvation of unredeemed time by the famous Proustian moments, not to mention its heady mix of description and commentary. The lineage suggests that unintelligibility is a function not of religion or cultural distance but the rarity of literary works set in motion by the interaction of such contaminations. We're used to one or the other dominating a novel (inevitably labelled a tour de force), but not both working alongside, distinct yet inseparable.


In the remarkable final volume of My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard suggests this is the case when he repeats the standard complaint that Dante's Inferno lives for its readers because it is populated by real people but dies in Paradiso because of the "non-human or beyond-human" nature of the divine. The comment arises from a discussion of what he learned when he had to delete his father's name from the first volume to placate his irate uncle. He discovered it robbed the presence in the book of the unique individual he had felt compelled to write about. From this Knausgaard recognises that this robbery recurs in our lives with the proliferation of screens – TV, laptops, smartphones – piping images into our lives in every conceivable location: "all kinds of people and places present themselves before us with nothing in common but being somewhere other than where we are". Everything has become fiction or is seen as fiction, causing the world to vanish because it is always somewhere else from where we are.

This is why he felt the job of the novelist had changed and would have to be "about the real world the way it was, seen from the point of view of someone who was trapped inside it with his body, though not his mind, which was trapped in something else". It is notable however that Knausgaard's own literary project, so saturated in the details of sensual, earthly life, nevertheless begins, like the Vita Nuova, in the aftermath of a death, and why Dante's precise naming of Beatrice is a necessary materialisation of the abstract 'Lady Philosophy' of Boethius, thereby maintaining a nameable midpoint in creation with which to relate earth to the heavens. It is Knausgaard's (and our) misfortune that his midpoint is the endpoint. My Struggle may be so long because the search for a midpoint cannot end without the mystery of life and death resolving into a name. (Even a phrase such as 'the mystery of life and death' seems unintelligible now.)

Perhaps the midpoint is writing itself. There is in certain volumes of My Struggle an approach to something more essential that is present in the writing of Dante, Proust, and many others, which is a product of this strange compulsion to approach what is not there, "to look to death for what life cannot give", as Eliot says is a lesson of the Vita Nuova. It is a compulsion that is itself a product of writing and its contamination of the world. After writing the final sonnet of his book, Dante says "a miraculous vision" appeared to him that made him resolve to say no more about Beatrice until he was capable of writing about her "in a more worthy fashion". It is notable that he does not describe the vision, but we know what he went onto write.

Links "too intellectual, too obscure, too foreign"

Thomas McGonigle offers some advice on how to sift through the "avalanche of shit" scheduled for publication this year, an avalanche set in motion by "a large core of six figure salaried pencil pushers who have to be wined and dined to suit their personae as wise leaders who know what is good for the reading public." We need help like this all of the time. In the second part of his blog, he recommends books by publishers who have "never forgotten what their job really is". As blogs seem to be the main way to promote and discuss such publications, here are a few additional forthcomings behind the avalanche:

Alma Books' Bloggerel takes delivery of its new edition of Dante's Rime and posts a sample from the book. They reckon it's a disgrace that this volume - "compared, in many ways, to that of Shakespeare’s Sonnets" - is the only mainstream edition available in the English market. I concur, though do wonder why have they not sent a review copy to Britain's most prominent litblogging Dante fan or even included him on the flippin' blogroll.

Continuing with poetry, for some time Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet was a touchstone for literary bloggers. Now Shearsman Books is to publish the Collected Poems of Álvaro de Campos Vol. 2 : 1928–1935. De Campos "along with Ricardo Reis and Alberto Caeiro is one of Pessoa's most important poetic heteronyms". With uplifting eccentricity, volume one follows next year.

In the same month, and turning to fiction, Schocken publishes Aharon Appelfeld's Laish: "A caravan of Jews wanders through Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. [...] Among them is Laish, a fifteen-year-old orphan, through whose eyes we observe the interactions within this ragtag group of dreamers, holy men, misfits, and thieves as they battle with one another."

Not in English yet, but Gwilym Williams reports on Suhrkamp Verlag's presentation of Thomas Bernhard's Meine Preise, featuring readings from Burgtheater actor Gert Voss. See also Bureaucratic Imagination's link to a scholarly paper on American Writers Reading Thomas Bernhard.

Enough news for now. In the ancient past, newspapers' book pages were our only means of protection from the avalanche. Some, such as the recent edition of the TLS that, in its fiction pages, ran reviews of untranslated non-English language novels only, still warm frozen hope. However, McGonigle's anecdote, of writing for the Washington Post's Book World, suggests the mountain of Purgatory awaits for those relying on print:

The last book I reviewed for them in 2002, commissioned by Michael Dirda, was Maurice Blanchot’s Aminadab. I never reviewed for them again and when I asked I was told that Marie Arana and the younger editors at the paper decided that my review of this novel by the most influential French critic of the 20th century was exactly the sort of book they never wanted reviewed in the paper. It was too intellectual, too obscure, too foreign. It sent the wrong message as to what they were really interested in.

Proust ... Dante ... Bruno ... Handke

Proust

A hundred years ago French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922) lost money in the stock market, too. And as he would in the epic In Search of Lost Time, he converted the stuff of life into art.

Robert Hilferty explains the origin of Pastiches et melanges, translated for the first time into English as The Lemoine Affair. Is this really the first review of the book?

Dante
If Proust's pastiches are late into English, then what about Dante's Canzoniere? In January, Oneworld Classics is publishing Dante's Rime which, it claims, is the first time the collection has been translated in its entirety into English. The book "charts his poetic evolution and displays the ground on which his Vita Nova [sic] and Divine Comedy developed". Elsewhere and online, you can read translations of Dante's Lyric Poems.

Bruno
Last week, the offline TLS had a diverting review of Ingrid Rowland's Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic. Here's The New Republic's instead. Both contain one memorable detail; an almost literal punctum. I knew that Bruno was burned at the stake but not that "his tongue [was] spiked to prevent him from speaking or crying out".

Handke
One thing that has puzzled me over the years has been my unwillingness or inability to write about certain favoured authors. Peter Handke's name has appeared here often enough yet not once have I begun to examine in detail why The Afternoon of a Writer and, in particular, Repetition had such an impact on me nearly twenty years ago. I have read the latter novel at least six times. In this case, re-reading was not a self-deceiving comfort read but another raid on inarticulacy. I have been relaxed about my failure, with agitation rising only when I discovered that those responsible for publishing Sebald's works in translation had not included in Campo Santo his essay on Die Wiederholung. But now Edmond Caldwell has stepped into the breach with The Handke-Effekt II, the second of his eye-wideningly close readings.

Dante by numbers

Podcast favourite In Our Time this week discusses Dante's Inferno. After ten minutes Melvyn Bragg asks Claire Honess, Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Leeds, why there are nine circles in Hell. I was surprised by her answer ("I don't know"). Isn't it common knowledge (among Dante readers) that the poem is structured in honour of the Trinity - nine being the square of three? William Anderson explains in more detail in Dante the Maker, a book not included in the further reading guide. Nor, incidentally, are two of the best books on Dante: Freccero's The Poetics of Conversion and Barolini's The Undivine Comedy. However, it redeems this by providing a useful link to the Leeds Dante Podcast.

Meanwhile, lurking numerologists might like to explore Dante's Commedia's Mathematical Matrix.

The Stroker? Kafka's "porn" stash

What more can be said about the revelation that Kafka owned some erotica except: please, no more? Anyone familiar with his work and with the secondary literature won't be in the least bit surprised. Even if you've read only Metamorphosis, the magazine image that Gregor Samsa had framed for display showing "a lady, with a fur hat on and a fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a huge fur muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished" is enough to suggest a unusually stimulated imagination. But there's much more. So why has the British media used the find to misrepresent Kafka with the same shameless inattention to reality as it has with recent events in Georgia?

Dalya Alberge claims without evidence that the erotic material has been "studiously ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the iconic writer's saintly image" and Hawes himself says "while academics pored over every postcard or diary entry written by the writer, the graphic collection of pictures was virtually unknown." The poring over every postcard and diary entry might be due to them containing words written by the writer. If we're making literary and biographical assumptions based on mere ownership, can we assume that the presence in Kafka's library of an edition of Dante's Göttliche Komödie means he was a closet Catholic with an interest in cruel and unusual torture or that he was, like Dante, concerned to find salvation in an eternity enveloped by divine light? Have scholars "studiously ignored" Dante's place in his library to preserve the writer's image as a secular jew, or is it because it provides only anecdotal evidence of influence? A scholar might see a connection between the bespoke fates of the damned in Inferno with Samsa's transformation, but that is quite different from assuming Kafka had an S&M fetish. No wonder German experts are appalled at Hawes' claims.

The media reaction is something the author and his publishers must have banked on. They will have known it would be lapped up by the British reading public. It's an ideal opportunity for them to sublimate their philistinism further and to disguise their assumptions about Kafka and Kafka scholarship as commonsense knowingness. Kevin of Lincoln reacts to the story with these impressive thoughts:

Kafka wrote a load of overrated cobblers. That he was one of the worlds first porno pervs just shows how the academic world of literature is led by the emporers new clothes. It is about time someone dismantled all these great early icons of literature & show'd them to be all human beings not gods. [sic]

It is time indeed, just as it's about time Kevin stopped giving the impression that Lincoln is populated by illiterate philistines. While he's doing that, maybe he can have a word with Obooki over the garden fence.

I exclude Nicholas Lezard from all this as he is mercifully unfazed by the “news”. It's the array of assumption displayed in the comments to his blog that need to be addressed. However, the title of his post - "Kafka's guilty pleasures" (not necessarily chosen by the author) - repeats the Guardian's lazy standby usually employed when referring to the consumption of chick lit. By assuming Kafka felt not only guilt but pleasure too, it reveals what it really thinks about the relation between reader and work. As well as the Dante edition, Kafka also owned many books by Knut Hamsun. Was Kafka an incipient admirer of Hitler too then?

The assumptions keep coming: Gaviero informs us that Kafka "was a weedy, socially awkward loner with no talent for attracting women”. From where did he or she get this image? Certainly not from Mark Anderson's Kafka's Clothes which outs Kafka as a bit of a dandy concerned with his appearance as much as any metrosexual, or from Dora Diamant's account of her first meeting with the man she would eventually live with in which Kafka comes across as a matinee idol; tall, handsome and charming.

James Walton makes an interesting point in his review of Excavating Kafka. Nowhere does Hawes mention the "similar arguments" put forward in Milan Kundera's essay In the Castrating Shadow of Saint Garta (collected in Testaments Betrayed). Among other things, the essay summarises the presentation of sex in Kafka's novels, such as the "exuberant delight" of Brunelda in Amerika and the "act of love ... among the beer puddles and the other filth covering the floor" between K and Frieda in The Castle. Kundera was keen to retrieve Kafka from the saintly image portrayed by Max Brod (though this had started in the 1930s with essays by Walter Benjamin) and to distinguish Kafka from earlier writers like Dickens and Gogol despite superficial likenesses:

Masterful as they were at analyzing all the strategies of love, nineteenth-century novels left sex and the sexual act hidden. In the first decades of our century, sex emerged from the mists of romantic passion. Kafka was one of the first (certainly along with Joyce) to uncover it in his novels. He unveiled sex ... as a commonplace, fundamental reality in everyone's life. Kafka unveiled the existential aspects of sex: sex in conflict with love; the strangeness of the other as a condition, a requirement, of sex; the ambiguous nature of sex: those aspects that are exciting and simultaneously repugnant.

I first read this in the TLS in 1991 and it has been in book form since 1995. Perhaps James Hawes has been too busy poring over postcards and diaries to notice.

UPDATE: A report from the academy

Dante, Proust and Blanchot: more links!

A TV Dante
Ubuweb presents Peter Greenaway's and Tom Phillips' A TV Dante from those special early years of Channel 4. It features Bob Peck as Dante and John Gielgud as Virgil, with commentary along the way from Tom Phillips himself and, er, David Attenborough.

Untranslated Proust
Until now that is! The Lemoine Affair is a novella made up of Proust's pastiches of famous French writers published as part of Melville House Books' Art of the Novella series.

Translated: Sollers on Blanchot
In the previous post, I linked to Philippe Sollers' review of Blanchot's political writings. Now it's available in English courtesy of Maitresse. Interesting perhaps for the anecdotes it contains and - something one doesn't see often in relation to such a restrained writer - the violence of its journalistic summaries.

UPDATE: Two things have been pointed out to me by someone who read Sollers more closely. Sollers says: Blanchot speaks of "Comrade Castro", but does not seem to perceive the existence of Solzhenitsyn. But of course there are many references to the Gulag in The Writing of the Disaster. And then: let us not [forget?] that Freud is a glaring missing element in this apocalyptic vision. Perhaps he forgot that there's a major essay on Freud in The Infinite Conversation as well as allusions in The Writing of the Disaster, specifically the passages beginning: 'A Primal Scene ?'.

the death of the reader

It's good to see the attention drawn by the Blogging the Classics debate at the beginning of the week. A civil war in literary criticism has been averted.

In a recent review of Rónán McDonald's The Death of the Critic, one of the panellists expressed sympathy for the book's general complaint about the dearth of "expert evaluative critics" from academia: "In the English departments of British universities" writes John Mullan, "the professors have been strenuously denying the value of literature" and have thus waived their critical authority. If the lack is true, it is also true of novelists. There are very few writers of fiction who are also noted critics. As the Guardian Book Blog might ask: "Where are our Henry Jameses?".

Perhaps novelists are content to rest on the alibi of the innocence and purity of creativity even if, as seems incontrovertible to many of us, it has long lapsed. And for sure, there are plenty of readers for them who seek potato-headed delight to still the shimmering of the philosophical horizon. Witness another Blogging the Classics panellist sneering at one of the last century's great critics despite having not heard of him before let alone read a word. I have to admit this apparently harmless post has troubled me ever since I had the misfortune to read it (there is no RSS feed unsubscribe for pained memory); its disingenuous self-deprecation and withering contempt for another's "erudite literary argument" when only brief off-hand comments are quoted. So perhaps the reason for the critical dearth is more to do with the perceived unwillingness of "the market" to engage with anything other than cheerful chat about Victoriana and little Englander pre-Modernist nostalgia. What are publishers and newspapers supposed to do in this climate?

For what it's worth, below is a selection compiled from memory of critical and philosophical books about literature that I've enjoyed in recent years - many written by professors - some of which just might not have been mentioned in print thanks to that blessed editorial filter. Be warned though, they may contain erudite literary argument.

Michael Wood - The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction
Eduardo Cadava - Words of Light
Malcolm Bowie - Proust among the stars
Stanley Corngold - Kafka: The Necessity of Form (I'm reading Lambent Traces at the moment)
Teodolina Barolini - The Undivine Comedy: Detheogolizing Dante
John Freccero - Dante: The Poetics of Conversion
Lacoue-Labarthe - Poetry as experience
Timothy Clark - The Theory of Inspiration and Martin Heidegger
Christopher Ricks - Beckett's Dying Words
William Large & Ullrich Haase - Maurice Blanchot

I might add more as memory whirrs on. It should go without saying that I include Blanchot's non-fiction and Josipovici's On Trust and The Singer on the Shore, the latter currently being enjoyed at BookWorld. But now I have to ask if you have any such recommendations. Feedback is one of the advantages the blogosphere has over other forms. Apparently :)

Saving a book from its readers

So, back to our favourite subject. Last week I asked what a science fiction novel would look like if it could "think the totality of what it projects". That is, in the words of Blanchot scholar Michael Holland, "total transcendence in the here and now". To my surprise, not one comment arrived despite the frenzy when sci-fi was discussed elsewhere. Anyway, my own answer was "Literary fiction".

This needs clarification. By literary fiction, I don't mean the kind of books you see on the Man Booker Prize shortlist. It is unfortunate that these frequently very conservative novels are classed as literary fiction when really they are part only of the calcification called Establishment Literary Fiction. Genuine literary fiction escapes genre, including its own. Now "escapes" needs clarification.

It's been said that Cormac McCarthy's literary prize-winner The Road could not have been written without the tradition of post-apocalyptic science-fiction novels which has been ignored by literary prize committees. No doubt this is true. The inference is that what the literary readers regard as unique in The Road is actually very common and that lack of recognition for what came before is due only to ignorance or snobbery. (It might be conceded that McCarthy is distinct because of his prose style yet, ironically, this is what threatened to ruin it for me as I explained at the time. And anyway, fine writing is hardly worthy of a major literary prize. If it was, plenty of genre writers should have won a top literary awards by now.)

What makes a novel like The Road different, however, is its attempt to think of the totality of what it projects. In this case, the apocalypse has destroyed narrative as much as it has destroyed the landscape. Very little remains. The father and son seek a future as the reader seeks narrative comfort. My doubts about some passages in the book point towards where McCarthy loses conviction. Perhaps this is an inevitable failure. Beckett's post-apocalyptic Endgame, however, is an example of where the author's nerve never falters. Does it say something that sci-fi fans have never tried to adopt this play as their own?

This is the trouble with the debate. Genre fans, such as those mentioned above, seem to be drawn to the specific features of genre: the technological changes of the future, space travel, the particulars of forensic science, the horror in Horror, homo-eroticism in Westerns, and when they appear in fiction called Literary, they can't see the distinction. Hence Wikipedia's indignant summary of the perceived differences. Yes, Crime & Punishment is a psychological thriller but that does not mean that the latest hackwork with a disturbed young male protagonist is Crime & Punishment. Fortunately, Dostoevsky's book doesn't need to be saved from such readers. But others do.

I have tried to save Richard Ford's trilogy from the Establishment Literary Fiction label by writing an essay on it. Tao Lin's Eeeee Eee Eeee needed to be saved from Cult Fiction, so I wrote a long review, while Roubaud's The Great Fire of London needed to be recovered from the Hypertext fiction basket and David Markson's This is Not a Novel from its solitude. I'm as open to genre as I am indifferent. For instance, I would like to help Nick Tosches' In the Hand of Dante up the purgatorial mountain of Crime fiction, but I need to re-read it. Save to say here, the ostensible "Crime fiction" chapters of the book are what helps it to escape the pile. No doubt some of you will think I have missed many others. Persuade me.

New Blanchot collection

For those of you with French, Chroniques littéraires du Journal des débats: Avril 1941-août 1944 is a new, 685-page collection from Gallimard of weekly reviews written by Blanchot.

A third of the reviews have already appeared in the English translation of Faux Pas and this collects the rest. It includes pieces on, among others, Dante, Rabelais, Descartes, Blake, Joyce, Mallarmé and Valéry.

The rest of us will have to wait for a translation :(

Links that get longer

"Some of us cannot help but follow the natural rhythm of what we enjoy doing." Ed Champion writes movingly about his famous blog in connection with a shamefully edited book.

Dinah Burch tells us that Arthur Conan Doyle was a "founder member of Portsmouth Football Association Club's team" and that "he also played cricket well into middle age. Other ventures" however "were more serious". What on earth could be more serious than Portsmouth Football Club?

James Longenbach reviews the Hollanders' new translation of Dante's Paradiso. He calls it a "clear, untroubled guide" but then says "if you want to read a poem ... then you're wise to revert to the blank verse translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1867) or the terza rima translation by Laurence Binyon (1933)." I'm not sure if this is wise. Apart from the content, what caused me to feel that Dante was my poet and not some "great" I had to read to gain intellectual brownie points, was the relatively simple or colloquial language used by the modern translators. Such antiquated versions lack the exigency of Dante's journey. Of course, Dante broke with tradition himself by writing in the vernacular; hence perhaps the need for new translations. And you know, Christmas isn't far off.

Show me the way to the fourth circle of Hell

The Wordsworth Trust has an exhibition up in Grasmere about "the rediscovery of Dante in the Romantic period and its lasting impact on British literature and art".

If Cumbria is a little out of your way, then the Trust has produced a book on the same subject. I've seen and held a copy and it's the definition of sumptuous. Not only that, it's the best-smelling book I've sniffed in a long while.

Unfortunately, it isn't available through the usual channels so can't be added to any (albeit futile) wishlist.

Weekend bleeding

Both the Inferno and, in particular, the Purgatorio glorify the human gait, the measure and rhythm of walking, the footstep and its form. The step, linked with breathing and saturated with thought, Dante understood as the beginning of prosody.

Lately, rather than write in my minimal spare time, I've gone out walking or cycling. Not in order to get away from writing but in order to get back to it. Mandelstam's words above reminded me. Not writing is when I feel that I am making headway; writing. One steps through doubt; the tyres hurtle on toward the completion of thought. Perhaps too fast.

The physical act of writing is itself a time of stasis, non-time. Almost non-thinking too. Anti-thought instead perhaps, thinking against the ease of movement. I don't like it. It's why I write so little and say the same thing, more or less, so often. I also walk and cycle the same few routes.

So, I was (somehow) thinking: are there any (literary) subjects you think I should write about instead?

Top ten European modernists

Hurray for Tom McCarthy's top 10 European modernists list. Who could imagine Blanchot getting an unfatuous mention in a national daily newspaper? Yet here is one. Thanks be given to Tom McCarthy (and the editor who didn't insist on a replacement). Maybe a reader will be inspired to drop On Chesil Beach and to pick up The Writing of the Disaster instead.

I have to agree with the statement that "Modernism is not a movement, nor even a way of thinking, but an event: an event with which any serious writer has, in some way or another, to engage, and to which they should respond." But. Always a but. But my list would coincide only with said Blanchot, Beckett, Kafka, Celan and Heidegger. I would replace the remaining five with Benjamin, Proust, Borges, Kierkegaard and ... Dante. The event is eternal, interminable.

Notice: two philosophers, two novelists, two poets, two short story writers, two literary critics. Modernism trespasses.

The Cahiers Series

Last year, the small press Sylph Editions received deserved recognition from the British Book Design & Production Awards, winning in the Literature category for its gorgeous edition Ten Poems from Hafez (where each animal is drawn using the words of the poem in Persian).


Its latest project is The Cahiers Series - which seems to be printed on the same fine-smelling paper - seeking “to make available new explorations in writing, in translating, and in the areas linking these two activities.” The first of six editions is Richard Pevear's Translating Music. You might recognise his name as the translator of Oprah Book Club featured novel Anna Karenina. His latest book features facing translation of Pushkin's long poem The Tale of the Preacher and His Man Bumpkin with accompanying pictures drawn by Pushkin himself, followed by an essay about the translation.

The subscription page says future editions are likely to include translations from Rimbaud and reflections on Dante and his translators, and “original poetry from established poets”. The second in the series already exists however: Walking on Air commemorates Muriel Spark with some of her own writing: i.e. “one handwritten note on dream interpretation; one dream, recounted; two poems; an essay on Piero della Francesca and another on hotels; one note on translation; one short story; and several diary entries.”

In the age of Handke

Michael Roloff continues his essay of McDonald destruction, this time discussing the literary side of the American Scholar atrocity. He's also a great advocate of Handke beyond the critical disdain:

Think of Handke as composer with the inclinations of a Cezanne, to create alternative verbal worlds that stand in an unusual relationship to the world that we inhabit. Handke is also a didactician, a kind of activist Wittgenstein. To live in the age of Goethe is many a Germanist's pipe dream, I am glad to live in a world that at least has one Handke. He nourishes me as no other writer does. A few pages of Handke, one good analytic essay, my friends the smart crows and I forget all about the McDonalds of this world.

Elsewhere, and I had meant to mention this yesterday, Alok of Dispatches from Zembla reports on a perplexed reading of Handke's Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia while Antonia of the wonderful flowerville (link now broken) provides the necessary rejoinder.

In my current reading, I've been revising my opinion of Handke's massive My Year in the No-man's-Bay. First time I read it some years ago, boredom reigned. Now it's something like a lucid dream of a world incandescent with signs. By-no-means as great as Repetition, but I can't think of a more beautiful book than that beyond Dante or Proust. Really.

In einem dunklen Walde

In 1993, German artist Andreas Ammer teamed up with members of Einstürzende Neubauten and legendary DJ John Peel to produce a radio play of Dante's Divine Comedy. The result was Radio Inferno, with music by Einstürzende's F.M. Einheit, and starring Blixa Bargeld as Dante, Phil Minton as Virgil, and John Peel as "The Radio" (the narrator).

All 34 hair-raising cantos courtesy of WFMU's Beware of the Blog.

Storing images of stone

I’ve come to the conjunction of the wheel where the horizon as the sun goes down gives birth for us to the twin-governed sky, and Love’s own star is distant from us all because of the bright ray that crosses it in such a way that it becomes a veil. The planet that brings solace to the frost fully to us through the great arch appears wherein the Seven a small shadow cast; and yet not even one of all the thoughts of love that on me weigh relieves my mind, now harder than a stone in strongly storing images of stone.

From Poems for the Stone Lady by Dante, translated by Joseph Tusiani, part of a larger online series. Update 2022: both link destinations no longer online, so deleted.

A bursting unity of opposites

The Financial Times is a good source of quality book reviews. Yesterday it printed Mark Ford's of The Notebooks of Robert Frost.

[O]ne regularly comes across embryonic formulations that are both thought-provoking and pertinent to Frost’s poetics: “Metaphor may not be far but it is our farthest forth”; “The object of life is to feel curves”; “All a man’s art is a bursting unity of opposites”; “No surprise to author none to reader”.

All very interesting. So it's a shame that Ford (author of the wonderful Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams) should frame the review around the canard of "difficulty".

T.S. Eliot suggested that the complexities of contemporary civilisation meant that modern poetry in turn “must be difficult”. And, certainly, most American poets of the era - those we read today, anyway - subscribed to this view. The work of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and of Eliot himself, is formidably difficult. Even after decades, it often still baffles its explicators.

"The great exception" he adds "was Robert Frost", no doubt to sighs of relief from stockbrokers seeking some light verse on their commute. But Eliot also said that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood", which might explain why those named poets are "those we read today".

That line of Eliot's comes from his long essay on Dante in which he admits to have been "passionately fond of certain French poetry long before I could have translated two verses of it correctly" and that obtaining "an immense amount of knowledge" about Dante before reading him "is positively undesirable". So Ford's contention that "Eliot and Stevens shivered with distaste at the idea of writing poetry that was intelligible to the masses" is a snotty misrepresentation of the meaning of difficulty. Their poetry might puzzle its explicators but it still gives me, a mere reader, immense reading pleasure. Maybe, I think now after reading the review, it's because their poetry contains (and uncontains) that "bursting unity of opposites". One has to read the words - leap aboard the roller coaster of language - to experience those complexities in all their reality. There are few poets who do this. So why are we being constantly warned off?