The disaster of writing: My Weil by Lars Iyer

"When a plane crashes, a bomb explodes, a city floods or a pandemic begins, Lucy Easthope's phone starts to ring" says the blurb to her recent book subtitled Stories of Love, Loss and Hope from an Expert in Disaster, and goes on to report rapturous praise from critics and common readers alike, that it became a Sunday Times bestseller, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and was chosen as a book of the year by The Telegraph and New Statesman. Disaster is good for business.

It's also good news for academic departments assailed by reform in the public sector, as studying disasters provides an ideal opportunity to supply measurable outputs demanded by university management. The journal Disaster Studies for example publishes papers "that examine how disasters are anticipated, experienced, governed, and understood". The range of events listed suggests a disaster can be more than atom bombs and asteroids, leaving room for all kinds of events requiring examination. In Lars Iyer's latest novel, the Philosophy department of a Manchester university has been rebranded as The Centre for Disaster Studies to surf the neoliberal Tsunami. For its PhD students, this is fine.

The new title has the double advantage of more accurately describing philosophy not as a love of knowledge and the pursuit of wisdom but recognition that the stars have fallen (the etymology of 'disaster'), and also of concealing the abyss between Philosophy and Business Studies, the pseudo-academic discipline gradually replacing the Humanities, allowing the students to remain hidden within the system despite their opposition. Indeed, two of them are called Marcie and Valentine, hinting at a Gnostic hope of another world, a better world, an intellectual equivalent of Lucy Easthope's practical redemption. While their studies may lead nowhere but back into Manchester's destitute working-class districts, it is resistance to the demonic world embodied by Business Studies. They look at its students – keen, smartly dressed, actually writing their theses – and ask: "Where’s their doom? Where’s their crushedness? Their diseases of the soul? There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with them."

Readers of Lars Iyer's two previous novels Wittgenstein Jr and Nietzsche and the Burbs will relish the familiar chorused voice of hyperbole as the students seek to distinguish their studies from the banality of their everyday lives, as well as recognise the passive sentences describing the students' location – The Ees. A clearing. A long-sunken basin. Water, ankle deep. – situating the students as italicised observers of a world indifferent to their hysterics. The Ees is a swampy wasteland in the city used as a dump by locals but has a mystical aura for the students: "You come to the Ees to lose yourself. To be forgotten."

Also as in the previous two novels, an intellectual doppelgänger of a long dead philosopher enters to shake things up. In this case it's a new student calling herself Simone Weil, a convert to Christianity, challenging the students' incipient paganism. "Isn't God dead?" the students ask, and she says, yes, the "God of the philosophers is dead". Instead, God withdrew from the world in order to create it and evil, the very thing that appears to prove his non-existence, is "the very thing that reveals him in his truth". God's goodness shows himself through what we do, so rather than reject the world, we should seek to do good in the world, as she does by giving money to the homeless, speaking calmly to the madman on the bus, and praying for the addicts and the drunks. 

Such selflessness, however, a giving oneself over to something unknown, something outside, is also the promise of the Ees. In this way the novel appears to set up a debate about the best way to deal with what's missing from our lives and from the world – indulgent escape or self-sacrifice? – and it would have taken place if My Weil was not itself subject to disaster. What's missing from our lives and the world is precisely what the novel as a genre seeks to provide: a space filled with presence that is also, like a literary equivalent of Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit illusion, saturated in absence. We cannot see one without the other. The anxiety this provokes is everywhere in novels, the blurbs of novels and the review pages promising all kinds of events ("an act of shocking violence") and special information contained within a novel to mitigate absence, which must go without saying. 

For James Joyce, said Beckett, "there was no difference between the fall of a bomb and the fall of a leaf”. For us, too, in reading. The intensity of My Weil's bombing campaign of ideas and expression is matched only by its leaf-like lightness, the futility of which we cannot ignore even as we lose ourselves in its comedy. The effect is to open a space, a clearing like the Ees, for the presence of the black and empty sky to be raised in a novel. 

The word 'clearing' has to be noted as an allusion to the translation of Lichtung, the word used by Heidegger as he sought to return philosophy to its beginnings in ancient Greece. It is in those beginnings, however, that he also saw the end of philosophy as the sciences that developed "within the field that philosophy opened up" turned philosophy into "the empirical science of man" governed by systems of method, what he calls cybernetics:

This science corresponds to the determination of man as an acting social being. For it is the theory of the regulation of the possible planning and arrangement of human labor. Cybernetics transforms language into an exchange of news. The arts become regulated-regulating instruments of information.

It has led to a culture in which its "technological-scientific-industrial character" has become "the sole criterion of man's world sojourn". A clearing for such a return would be the equivalent of a dead end of a forest path apparently leading nowhere that opens into the light where trees have been removed. But, Heidegger says, "philosophy knows nothing of the clearing", hence his turn towards poetry as the potential for such light.

We may see here discussion of the death of the novel in a similar context rather than one of quality and cultural relevance, as the contemporary literary novel has little more to offer than an exchange of news by other means, while the popular genres offer a happy escape into the repetition of storytelling. The end of literature follows the end of philosophy as it is usurped by the unendlicher Verkehr of information. 

In a dark night in the Ees, Valentine announces that "Only French prose-poetry philosophy can save us now" and so they read aloud from Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster, a book whose own blurb sells it relevance to modern literature "haunted by world wars, concentration camps, [and] Hiroshima", the familiar examples of disaster, and that a new academic study applies to a reading of recent novels because in them "an understanding of critical events – death, ecological catastrophe, pandemics – is possible", but what the students read suggests something else entirely:

Between the disaster and the other there would be the
contact, the disjunction of absent meaning—friendship.

Marcie, reading (just able to make out the words):

It is in friendship that I can respond . . . a friendship
un . . . un . . . shared . . . without reciprocity . . . friendship
for that which has passed leaving no trace . . .

The relation to the other is disastrous: that’s what this book argues,
Ismail says. It’s a break with what we know. With earthly order.
Like Simone . . . , I say.
Is Simone disastrous? we wonder.
She dresses disastrously, Gita says. Those nun-shoes . . .

The novel is in this sense the disaster for us, as Simone is for the group, and as Wittgenstein and Nietzsche were before, and as is indeed the bathos of Gita's remark; for a brief time there is a loosening of the ties that bind us not only to the earthly order and that of the stars, the cosmic order, but also to the order of philosophy and literature. But what follows? The lost soul of the group, Johnny, seeks to push friendship into something more with Gita, which she says is not a wise idea. "Why not? I say. Why—really—not? Don’t you see—this might be a chance. A chance for what? Gita asks."

For the same not to be the same, I say. For one day not to follow another. For the inevitable not to be inevitable. For cog not to be locked into cog . . . Wouldn’t you like to think that we’re on the brink of something? That something’s about to happen?

A phone, ringing.

Nietzsche and the Burbs by Lars Iyer

Imagine every novel published the last twenty years as part of an urban landscape, rising up against the horizon as you approach the outskirts of town, sometimes standing alone, as brash as a neo-Georgian mansion, sometimes piled high, storey upon storey, as imposing as a tower block, but mostly just rows and rows of near identical terraces. You wander through the streets imagining the lives of people in their rooms, what goes on behind their windows. Some look welcoming, others forbidding, but mostly indistinct, just rows and rows of near identical terraces. We speak of the death of the novel even as new estates pop up, too many to explore by foot, so we rely on drone footage to confirm that, yes, they're all the same, more or less. It is a kind of death, but one we struggle to recognise.

The modern novel has become the suburb of itself, its lawns of genre stretching to the horizon, parasitic on trade from the UNESCO world heritage site in the city centre to which tourists and connoisseurs flock, but is itself without stature, unsure of itself, constantly seeking validation. Lars Iyer's Nietzsche and the Burbs is where the teenage gang you often see wandering its streets hang out, bored out if its collective mind, full of loathing for the "dead-eyed boxes for the dead" that surround them – they live in Wokingham, after all; a placename that evokes so much to those of us who come from the south of England (so much of nothing) – and resort to drink and drugs to enliven an interminable present in which nothing happens. When asked by their Economics teacher about where the current financial system is heading, they cheerfully speculate:

Global economic collapse, miss, Paula says.
Hyperinflation, then a new Weimar, possibly a new Hitler, miss, Art says.
Stagflation, then another world war, to boost production, leading to mutually assured destruction, miss, I say.

Chandra is the gang's amanuensis and self-styled death-poet, quoting himself and the others as they sing parts of the chorus. They hang out together because they're members of a nameless, singerless band whose progress is frustrated because everything they play sounds like something that's been done before. "We can play anything we like" Paula says. "All this freedom, and we don't know what to do with it." Typical teenagers. But then a new boy joins the school whose composure and assurance intrigues them.

I think he has charisma, Art says.
I think he knows he has charisma, Paula says.
I think he doesn't care whether he has charisma, I say. That's what gives him charisma.
What's charisma?, asks Merv.

They see him write NIHILISM across his notebook and Paula decides he looks like Friedrich Nietzsche, so from then on is known as 'Nietzsche'. They read his blog with its dark aphorisms, quotations from Cioran, Beckett and the original Nietzsche, and with its forceful affirmation of life in its apparent meaningless. “Affirmation?, Paula asks. What does Nietzsche have to affirm? He lives in Wokingham, right?”

But his words begin to have an effect. They realise they have fallen unwittingly into nihilism. "We used to believe in music, we agree. What happened to us?". They envy the fish in the local river, able to live "drunk on pure water", much like Nietzsche's oblivious herd of grazing animals in his essay on history, and imagine a river of vodka: “A river into which you cannot step sober.” It’s the suburbs, they decide, that's happened to them, and only a philosopher of the suburbs can help overcome their predicament, and that philosopher is right before them. Nietzsche is persuaded to become the frontman of their group, which Chandra names Nietzsche and the Burbs. They proclaim that they will find a way forward with Nietzsche's philosophy channelled through their music. “But don’t the suburbs defeat philosophy?" they ask. "Don’t the suburbs mean the impossibility of philosophy?”

These are key questions, and not just for the teenagers. How can the ultimate questions of life be asked in the suburbs of the novel, where everything has been settled, where what happens is only a faint echo of crashing waves in a desert. As one of their teachers tells them: “Your hair keeps growing after you die. Things happen, but so what?”. The only way the big questions can be approached is through absurdity and hyperbole, which is why Nietzsche and the Burbs is narrated by awkward, angst-ridden teenagers, lightning rods for the approaching storm insensible to others, which for Nietzsche is the storm of speech, the speech of thought which rages through the novel. But as teenagers they are also saturated in the innocence and arrogance of the suburbs, a time and place in despair, without art, without philosophy. As such they are always ready to undercut pretention even as they aspire to it, such as when Paula asks Chandra what his poetry is for:

A rose has no why, I say. Nor does poetry.
The word twat has no y, you mean, Paula says.

'Nietzsche' is the necessary anachronism to spark something in the teenagers, in a similar way Wittgenstein is necessary to Thomas Bernhard's story Goethe Dies in which the dying poet demands the presence of the philosopher fifty-seven years before his birth. Indeed, it's worth comparing Lars Iyer's style with Bernhard's. As we are so used to the suburban novel, we've become used to suburban prose – show-don't-tell, free indirect discourse, etc. – so the philosophical hyperbole and choral singing come as a wonderfully invigorating downpour. Though quite different to Bernhard's prose, it shares its intensity of music and the rare quality of ambiguity; we are never sure if its serious or comic, because it is both at the same time. Its permanent present tense, while also running through Iyer's Spurious trilogy and Wittgenstein Jr, is especially effective here in amplifying the mute horror of suburban life, such as when the gang visits the local pub:

   Mild suburbanites, all around. Mild surburbanites, mildly chattering—about what? Mild suburbanites, standing about, sipping their pints.
   Young men in shirts, in jeans. Young women in jeans. Young surburbanites, enjoying a quiet drink. Young surburbanites at play—looking just like young suburbanites at work. Young suburbanites, smiling and nodding, just as they smile and nod at work.

 And interweaving fascination and distance, such as when Nietzsche attends band practice:

Nietzsche, picking up the mic. Nietzsche, holding the mic to his lips. Nietzsche, opening his mouth just a little. Nietzsche, talking though not really talking. Singing, though not really singing. Something suspended between the two.

Each observation or action becomes one pulse in a series, with the effect of reducing agency and knowingness in the characters as they act and in the narration as it describes; something suspended between iteration and innovation. This is why Nietzsche and the Burbs is a clearing in the suburbs of the novel, neither part of the suburbs nor apart from it. It is where the lawns of genre become pockmarked by desperate moles, where the terraces begin to sink into the marsh. The end of the novel suggests that larking around in the light and shade of a clearing is the best response to the suburbs, and we realise as readers that's exactly what Nietzsche and the Burbs does, to glorious effect.

The lawn of genre: Wittgenstein Jr by Lars Iyer

In the relaxed confines of the LRB Bookshop on a warm August evening, Lars Iyer marked the publication of his fourth novel by telling an audience that as a youngster he had been drawn to philosophy rather than fiction as a means to find a way to live, to think his way to life. It's an old question – how to live? – and one often so pressing that philosophers have made it central to their lives. This indeed used to be the definition of a philosopher: someone who lived consistently with their beliefs. Ludwig Wittgenstein is one example. For his character Wittgenstein Jr, Iyer says philosophy is also "a kind of spiritual progress", with Socrates and Augustine as his own key figures. So why did Iyer himself turn from philosophy to writing fiction?

How to live? is a simple question too of course, as light as a falling leaf and easily brushed aside as you join a queue to have your copy signed. Without noticing, you're soon dealing with ephemeral demands and the question is answered for you. Iyer said that by the time he was established as an academic in the subject, teaching and supervising, researching and presenting papers at conferences, publishing books, philosophy itself had been displaced. The pressure of having to justify every turn in an argument with references and footnotes covering all contributions and all angles meant the youthful quest was replaced by bureaucracy and career concerns in which "spiritual progress" equalled redundancy. How then to ask the question again?

Fiction marks his answer, a form defined by a lack of pressure, by freedom, so we shouldn't be surprised that the drama of each novel he has written persists in the distressing absence of a philosophy by which to live; a certain weight. In the Spurious trilogy, it is found in the double-act despair of W. and Lars as they float like schlubby cherubim in search of God's anchor while, in Wittgenstein Jr, the drama emerges from the asymmetry of a troubled Cambridge philosophy tutor and his lightweight, hedonistic students. The philosopher perplexes, irritates and fascinates them in equal measure with his silences and gnomic remarks. I will teach you differences. Philosophy stands between us and salvation. They decide he has modelled himself on the real Ludwig Wittgenstein, and so the fun begins. "When will he present an actual argument? – Mulberry's taking bets."

After a while the stand-in Wittgenstein becomes more talkative. He implores his students to dispense with Cambridge cleverness and Cambridge pride in order to face the challenge of his philosophical lesson. The anxious silences are due to paranoia. He believes the Cambridge dons are out to destroy him, as he seeks a utopia of "after philosophy" in which "the light on a particular afternoon will be as rich as the collected works of Kant". Cambridge University stands for what obscures such light, it stands for the hegemony of English philistinism, English parochialism, for a landscape flattened by the English steamroller.

All of England was once a lawn, Wittgenstein says. The whole of the country, with its uplands and lowlands, with its suburbs and towns, was once the quintessence of lawn. [...]

And it was in the name of the English lawn that the enemy within was kept down, Wittgenstein says. The Peasants' Revolt was crushed for seeking equality on the English lawn. The Diggers were transported for declaring that the English lawn was part of the commons. [...]

But never was the English lawn so lush as in the great universities of England! Wittgenstein says. Old expanses of lawn, strewn with meadowsweet and buttercups in high summer. Crocuses blooming in spring.

The numbers soon dwindle to the handful of students whose comments and exchanges narrate the novel, including the aristocratic Ede, convinced of his own destiny, the sore-thumb Benwell, a working-class boy from up north, the Kirwin twins lost without a war in which to die a futile death and who instead throw themselves into vigorous sports, Mulberry in his obscene T-shirts and the self-effacing Peters, the shy Yorkshire boy with a crush on his tutor and who records what everyone says. His cartoon of campus life is one of the joys of Iyer's new-found freedom. Wittgenstein Jr takes a walk on the lawn:

Posh students everywhere. Rah boys in gilets and flip-flops, with piles of bed-head hair. Rugby types, as big as fridges, all red-cheeked health, their voices booming. Rah girls dressed in gym gear and pony-tails. English roses in horse-and-hound clothing, as though fresh from the gymkhana. Yummy-not-yet-mummies in fur-lined Barbour. Ethno-sloanes, with string tops and slouch bags. Sloane-ingénues with big cups of coffee, sweater sleeves half pulled over their hands.

But why is it so pleasurable? At first this sounds like the classic and contemptible English light comedy in which characters are ridiculed for the Schadenfreude of harassed commuters, generic personas dancing on the end of the author's strings before a garishly painted state-of-the-nation backcloth. Perhaps because such hyperbole is counterbalanced by Wittgenstein Jr's apocalyptic vision of philosophical rapture. Combined and in opposition they have a peculiar effect on the reader, both ecstatic and deflating, so that even as one savours the possibility of another life, another world, there is also the absurd present. While Iyer convinces us of Wittgenstein Jr's spiritual yearning and captures the aura of his namesake with minimal brush strokes, the madcap students remind us it is of course only a novel and that the characters are inventions, that the stifling conformity of Cambridge is an exaggeration and that Wittgenstein Jr is not Ludwig Wittgenstein. Everything is weightless. But this is also necessary, because lightness enables flight. When Tibor Fischer judged the book "too long" he might have added that such airborne hyperbole is always too long and even one excessive, declaratory fictional sentence might already be too much, popping up like a molehill on the lawn over which the donnish greenkeeper might then stand, tutting.

Wittgenstein Jr comes to an end as the carefree life of a student comes to an end. Salvation of a sort is offered to Wittgenstein Jr, but he disappears. A clue to his whereabouts was seen earlier when students go to his room to check on his well-being and spy scraps of paper tacked to the wall with only one word visible: APERION, Anaximander's word for the eternal or cosmological infinity (also spelled "apeiron" but this is how it appears in the novel). Perhaps this is an additional mark of excess to the one Derrida says signifies the participation in a genre without membership, a mark that is itself not part of the genre yet necessary for its distinction and recognition. Aperion then is the mark of a universal principle of existence, an abstraction outside of life that nevertheless makes life possible and is apparently sensible only in the light of a particular afternoon and in the freedom, lightness and excess of writing, and yet which, as Fischer's cavil confirms, must also succumb to the ever-encroaching English lawn.

Back in the LRB Bookshop, the event drawing to a close, the audience was given a chance to ask questions. As hands went up and a microphone passed around, I wondered what it would mean for the lightness of fiction to become as heavy as academic philosophy, with its own bureaucracy and career demands, for it to be a kind of spiritual regression, for aperion to be only a word tacked to a wall, and then how a writer might evade the lawn of genre. But I didn't ask the question. Perhaps Wittgenstein Jr's disappearance is the answer.