The end of literature, part one

The saints were uneducated. Why, then, do they write so well? Is it only inspiration? They have style whenever they describe God. It's easy to write from divine whispers, with one's ear glued to his mouth. Their works have a superhuman simplicity. But they cannot be called writers, since they do not describe reality. The world won't accept them because it does not see itself in their work. 
                                                     EM Cioran, Tears and Saints

A surprising conclusion: realism, the new narcissism.

It might explain why I prefer to read non-writers. But what do they write about if God no longer whispers in their ears?

Peter Handke called Thomas Bernhard a "secular Austrian saint" and also endorsed his status as a non-writer when he noted that it was only in his final novel Extinction that he saw "the rudiments of description, of enthusiastic description of locales and spaces" which for him "is the most important thing in literature". (Note here the bogus diversity that remains acceptable to British literary professionals.)

What does Bernhard write about instead then? It's hard to say without misdirection; content is the impurity in his form. He compared what he did to a pianist perfecting his skill:

what some do with notes, I do with words. Simple as that. I'm not really interested in anything else. Because getting to know the world happens anyway, by living in it, as soon as you walk out the door you're confronted with the world directly.

Self-education then; an ear glued to the music of sentences, with the world as refuge.

To where does this lead; what is such writing for? We might ask the same of the superhuman simplicity of JS Bach's non-writing, which does not describe reality either. How might we describe what Tatiana Nikolayeva's Ich ruf zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ stirs in us?


Cioran again: Bach: languor of cosmogony; a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend; architecture of our fragilities, positive dissolution—the highest of all—of our will; celestial ruin in Hope; the one mode of destroying ourselves without disaster, and of disappearing without dying. . . .

Such writing is as distant from us now as the saints'; alien even. Could we be witnessing the endgame of realism, in which content has triumphed? The end of literary history.Whatever we do, whatever we write, genre takes possession of it.

Time and the unthinkable

A review of Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Ingvild Burkey


Karl Ove Knausgaard stands in front of a 14th century Swedish castle speaking to a film crew from Melvyn Bragg's South Bank Show. "I don't understand what time is," he says. "Place I can relate to. We are here now and the castle's there now. But I don't understand what it is that someone was there 700 years ago". There is a pause before the camera pans over the castle walls, as if performing a token search for long-dead Swedes. It's an oddly innocent moment in what is otherwise a predictable portrait of a successful author, in which mastery and control of a subject is invariably a given. Other documentaries confronted by such a moment might have rushed to interview physicists and cosmologists and then illustrated their theories with colourful animations and lens flare. Here, there is only innocent utterance.

Knausgaard's new book is this utterance developed over book length. Framed as collection of short essays on diverse subjects written for an unborn daughter, they are suffused by an innocence for time and for when time is apparently in abeyance, as in this hesitation before birth. Knausgaard describes digging a hole in waterlogged ground and seeing a plastic bag "Swollen with water, handles up [hanging] a few feet down in the water" and how, in that moment, he sensed the inexhaustible, something transcending its ephemeral appearance, then adding the date of the sighting, as if to bring it into human time. He senses it in early photography when exposure times meant the human form left no trace and only unmoving objects could be captured on film, so a practice that at first appears to be a straightforward representation of the human realm reveals a world altogether outside of it. When exposure times improved, people became visible and this uncanny experience disappeared. Knausgaard says he thinks the first human to appear in a photograph is actually the devil because his permanence allowed him to be seen. This wonderfully perverse suggestion is reminiscent of the small boy in volume one of My Struggle who sees a face in the sea and the son in A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven who understands that seagulls are devolved angels. It reemphasises how Knausgaard is a writer deeply affected by the disenchantment of the world and willing to resist the recourse to the rational in order to bring attention to what has been submerged by modernity.

It needs to be said again: the features of Knausgaard's writing that have led to his public success and drew Melvyn Bragg to interview him are only a superficial by-products of its true subject. When the Norwegian stands before the countryside in the deep south of Sweden telling of how that, as soon as he arrived, he felt at home, it has nothing to do with a personal soap opera and everything to do with the absence the landscape evokes, which, again, is due to time: "everything I see is more or less the same as it must have been in the nineteenth century. Churches, villages, far-flung fields, great leafy trees, the sky, the sea. And yet everything is different". The landscape provokes a powerful nostalgia because "utopia is vanished from our time" and a longing for it can only project backwards onto the past. The churches, he says, are "feats of spiritual engineering" representing "another level of reality" which stood "open to the future, when the kingdom of heaven would be established on earth". If such a feeling suggests a conservative mindset, perhaps one wishing for the imposition of more hierarchical relationships, his perversity reappears to disarm:

That no one seeks the divine level of reality anymore and that the churches stand empty means that it is no longer necessary. That it is no longer necessary means the kingdom of heaven has come. There is nothing left to long for other than longing itself, of which the empty churches I can see from here have become the symbol.

It's a perplexing statement, as if utopia is at best a wilderness, at worst a waste land. But it is also a statement necessary to the form it takes, for if churches are symbols of what has departed, then so too is writing. If the divine is the inexhaustible and the foundation of language, writing can no longer reach for it without departing from common sense and, as a result, appearing quaintly absurd. The inexhaustible might appear in the world, materialising in moments like that of the plastic bag, but the neat opposition of science and superstition means there is nowhere for it to pass into common discourse. In recent years we have seen how the preciously affected language and sentimentality of 'nature writing' has directed what Knausgaard diagnoses as nostalgia for utopia or the divine into popular history and vicarious travel, thereby giving good reason why Knausgaard's writing is generally misconstrued. What he writes toward is almost unthinkable.

The majority of essays are structured to lead a young spirit to think in the open. 'Frames' follows the pattern: an everyday item is described as simply as possible – we all know what frames are but Knausgaard tells us anyway – whose effect is then applied in a more general sense – frames categorise what we can see – before it becomes a metaphor for human striving: the search for authenticity and truth is the wish for "a life, an existence, a world unframed". Potential gifts of the process are also noted: Knausgaard observes that all the chemicals necessary for photography were available in medieval times but the thought of photography was unthinkable and it was only "the slow turn of thought toward the material world" that enabled the discovery. Therefore, if we open ourselves to unframed modes of thinking, perhaps something other than what is expected might emerge. So while at first it is understandable that English reviewers have dismissed Autumn with such knee-jerk language as "the most colossal load of old cobblers" and "brain farts", it does suggest Knausgaard's consciously naive approach is necessary to combat rote thinking. But perhaps we no longer have the strength to let them come to us in their innocence.

It's notable that in the latter of the English reviews, the essays are criticised for being "rough sketches by a man who doesn’t know how to draw" while throughout the value of such knowledge is challenged, and challenged explicitly in an essay on Van Gogh's struggle to commit his life to anything in particular. Painting did not come easily to him; he wasn't a natural and his early paintings lack technique. But Knausgaard says the lightness in his landscapes "resembles nothing else" and comes not from finally acquiring painterly technique but from relinquishing it, adopting instead "a carelessness that allows the world to appear unfettered by how we happen to have conceived of it". He argues that only by committing himself to death does Van Gogh find the conditions to live and to paint as only Van Gogh could paint, with each work dependent "on the look he casts...really being his very last".

Such a commitment could explain why Knausgaard often specifies a date for an experience, as it thereby depends on what happened or what was felt in a human life, resisting a turn toward sterile abstraction. It also points to the influence of Peter Handke, especially in his prose collection Once Again for Thucydides, in which each transcription of an observation is given a precise date and location, and to the long poem To Duration in which "the most fleeting of all feelings" is sought in concrete experience. It is an influence that has, as far as I'm aware, gone unrecognised in the English reviews, despite Knausgaard's stated regard for the author. Given time, both books should become better known.

The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett by Jeff Fort

"My compulsion to write does not occlude the uselessness of filling pages with words" writes Fernando Sdrigotti. "I know that what I do is pointless, one more message in a bottle in a moment when everyone else around me is also casting messages adrift". He expresses sadness at the sight of so many washed up on the shores of labyrinthine bookshops and, to mitigate the condition, offers a mutated version of Borges' infinite library in which an infinite number of alphabets are postulated with their own infinity to be filled, leaving more spaces than even Borges allowed for: "We go after those gaps, selfish that we are".

This admittedly contrived excuse to continue is one response to a problem that has confronted writers for over a century, with perhaps Samuel Beckett's response to Joyce being emblematic, though curiously it's a problem that fails to affect filmmakers, composers or painters. At least, it isn't visible in what they produce. While biographical material might reveal Alfred Hitchcock self-harmed in the presence of so many other psychological thrillers, what he produced does not bear its scars; or, rather, those scars are indistinguishable from perfectly powdered skin. For writers, however, consternation at the pointlessness of adding to an infinite number of books leads to at least three outcomes, the last of which is perhaps unique to writers: first, silence, in the form of never writing again, or at least never being published; second, denial or indifference, in the form of publishing regardless, and third, subjecting the writing to the condition. The last is unstable ground for sure, threatening idiosyncratic, fragmented structures invariably prompting disillusion and contempt from marketing departments and consumers wandering the aisles. Why not give up writing to make a living in what everyone says is the art form of the modern era? Well, if you need to ask, you might be free of the compulsion.

So what are the details of this pathological condition exactly? Sdrigotti does not analyse, preferring to leave the personal need to write in the shadow of the shelves, and given the historical conditions in which the publishing industry has come to define literature, setting mass market genre fiction and celebrity biographies alongside Beckett's novels and the poems of Paul Celan, it should be no surprise. Yet, as soon as the industry in the form of conglomerate publishing, chain bookshops and careers as a bestselling author is recognised as inimical to the compulsion, as soon as its shadow is removed, that sadness, that sense of pointlessness, is replaced by something much more interesting.  

God, goodness and silence 

Jeff Fort does this in his study of three writers who experienced "the literary vocation as an all-consuming task" when the time for such a vocation had apparently long passed. What results is a revision of the focus and purpose of modern fiction and should be vital reading for the sad writer. He begins by examining each author's stated reasons or excuses for writing. Kafka's grand self-torment is familiar to us – “God does not want me to write, but I, I must” – as is Beckett's self-deprecating manner – Bon qu'à ça; writing is "all I'm good for" – but the third less so. Maurice Blanchot's author biography heading his collection of essays The Book to Come includes the line: "His life is entirely devoted to literature and to the silence that is proper to it”. As this is both hyperbolic and self-effacing, it embodies Fort's contention that all three keep a flame alive however faint for "unparalleled satisfactions, not to say ecstasy" in writing and, what's more, some kind of transcendence, and this is what makes them stand out among so many others. The need for goodness is easily missed in the "good" of Beckett's statement, as is the need for salvation in Kafka's letter, but they are there, and both are sought in silence.

All three expressions are included in Fort's "downward displacements" of intellectual history following Luther's stand at the Diet of Worms and Kant's philosophy, making it clear The Imperative to Write places the predicament of the modern fiction writer in deep history and seeks to confirm the significance of these writers' work through its modesty, as it completes a trajectory from church pulpit through university lectern to solitary writing desk.

All three writers trail in the wake of the Kantian revolution in which reason replaced divine authority, disabling in its wake the religious function of art. In what Fort calls a cruel compulsion, but might also be called a categorical imperative, the artist, philosopher or scientist, is nevertheless left with reason's immanent drive to colonise what is beyond its limits, what we might call the ideal or the sublime. In doing so the imagination substitutes an image for the departed authority (hence words like 'ideal' and 'sublime'). In art this appears to have no more than a decorative function, while in more rational discourse it is a means of dismissing what cannot be contained. Resisting both, Fort argues the specific condition – the imperative to write – is the echo of the sublime behind the attractive images, which makes the impulse to write fiction significant. The echo is heard in as the uncanny space of Kafka's castle village, Beckett's 'timeless void' and Blanchot's 'literary space'; images haunting the pursuit of the ideal into the fictional void:

What is “real” in this radically fictive space has nothing to do with representational realism, but emerges rather from the sort of insistent and irreducible drive ... that stubbornly inhabits literary speech.

He calls this habitation "a literary alterworld," one that punishes the writer as much as rewards, as it "separates language from the world it names" and sets the author at "an irreducible remove" from the everyday world, perhaps embodied by the unpublished writer traipsing the aisles, where a book has at least an alibi for its emptiness in its physical, commercial reality. While this is also the celebrated freedom of creative writing – let your imagination run wild – it is also never far away from real world contempt and its timid apologists with their so-called Reality Hunger. However, writing fiction is not quite reality and it is this 'not quite' that is the "irritating breach, a hollow kernel in the language that cannot be voided" and one that "opens the spaces of an imperative that cannot be fulfilled". Such a residue, Fort says, "is all that is left of writing's sublimity".

Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett 

It is this residue that the three writers pursue in their own ways. Fort's three central chapters present close readings of their fiction in order to see how the imperative compels or structures specific works of fiction. These chapters were extremely difficult for me to summarise, so what follows is a crude outline that leaves out a great deal and may misrepresent as a result, for which I apologise in advance.

Fort characterises Kafka's cries of despair and defiance, anxiety and guilt, as a means of heightening the value of writing and dramatising his position when, in his time, as in ours, writing is essentially a discipline, an office job with all the conventions and competencies that this entails. When Kafka is not writing, he is defying the earthly powers who employ him and yet, when he is writing, he is going in the opposite direction, against society's grain, which may perhaps get him closer to God or what God forbids. The fictions of trial and punishment that result from this risk are those we know so well: the innocent one who is also guilty, the salesman who becomes a giant vermin and the son sentenced to death by his father. What sets Kafka apart from his precursors or those who might now be labelled Kafkaesque is that in these stories writing is at war with the writer:

The protagonists of these stories must plead a case for innocence before a hostile, aggressive, or at the very least highly skeptical judge; and the failure of their self-defense casts into doubt the very medium in which Kafka himself struggled to conjure them: language as the persuasive presentation of an otherwise occluded interiority.

The enigma of Gregor Samsa is that his innocence remains "invisible and unpresentable," as he is visible only in his socially beneficial role, which correlates with writing as a means of interactive and commercial utility rather than an extension into the voided sublime. Kafka's great task then is to mount a self-defence in the very form taken by the accusation; with Fort's emphasis: "to take hold of power in speech, in such a way as both to appropriate and undo that power in the very grounds of its possibility". The imperative in these works, which Fort gathers together as "judgment stories", is to present the inner reality of an individual against the law or as part of a sublime law now out of reach.

The later fiction is notable for being less melodramatic and more clearly projecting 'the destitution of the sublime' into writing. In A Hunger Artist, Kafka's great talent is presented as a negative, with showmanship displayed as a withdrawal from showmanship. This is the paradox in which his fiction must breathe. The story ends with the artist saying he didn't starve himself out of choice but because couldn't find the food he needed. But this is only another image of the void where there is no image: "the hunger artist's search is not for a food he 'never found' but rather for the nothing that he cannot grasp or make graspable". The sublime is as destitute as the showman.

What distinguishes Blanchot from what has passed so far is the premise that, in using language, we are already subject to "the abyssal fault by which 'the world' and 'life' are always already removed, remote, distanced". For our everyday reading and writing lives, the astonishment of this separation invariably passes by unnoticed, so it's one of Blanchot's great gifts in his critical writings to reanimate this revelation:

Apparently we read only because what is written is already there, laying itself out before our eyes. Apparently. But the first one to write, the one who cut into stone and wood under ancient skies, was hardly responding to the demands of a view requiring a reference point and giving it a meaning; rather, he was changing all relations between seeing and the visible. What he left behind was not something more, something added to other things; it was not even something less – a subtraction of matter, a hollow in relation to a relief. Then what was it? A gap in the universe: nothing that was visible, nothing invisible. I suppose the first reader was engulfed by this non-absent absence, but without knowing anything about it. And there was no second reader ...
                    (from The Infinite Conversation translated by Susan Hanson)

But it is in Blanchot's fiction that Fort wonders whether "ghostly returns" might traverse this gap, "an unloseable something that is not a thing", specifically something left behind by the 'feminine specters' in the récit Death Sentence, and present as we gaze at the death mask of l'inconnue de la seine, an image that Blanchot displayed on the wall of his study in Èze and is on the cover of this book. The separation is present in the movement of writing fiction, with the abyssal fault borne in these figures so that their presence in a life evokes "an extreme mode of loss". It is the imperative to write that provokes the haunting of these fascinating images, with fiction originating in the ghostly encounter rather than something reported after the event, not a confession projected into genre features but "something yet to come, an imminence whose lack of reality awaits its realization in the récit itself".

In this chapter, Fort takes issue with Blanchot's insistence on the separation of the biographical facts of a writer's life and the work, and this is also the focus of the chapter on Beckett, whose fiction lives in a similar relation to Blanchot's but differs in "the carefully cultivated melancholy, and even nostalgia" in responding to the loss of the world, which in Beckett's case maintains clear parallels to his life. Fort is especially good on the tension between formal precision of Beckett's fiction, which might hold these at a distance, and the "lyrical transports" that bring them close. The latter evidently allows what others call Beckett's experimentalism an alibi into mainstream appreciation. In July 2015, the actor Richard Wilson presented a documentary in which he conceded that Beckett's work "can be difficult and obscure" but added "there is one heartbreaking play that he wrote...his most autobiographical", so that his work is received as displaced self-expression alone, whereas it is according to Fort precisely the incompatibility of the abstract character of the fictive voice with the particularities of a singular life that sets Beckett's work apart. If the condition of possibility of such fiction is "the loss of the world" in the destitution of the sublime, the voice is also driven "by the indescribable charge produced by the unbridgeable distance from what has been left"; a distance, as we have seen, that is opened by language. And it is with this in mind that Fort makes a key point when he says "the words we read when we read The Unnamable are written words, and not the supposed stream of a supposed consciousness". It is in this novel that fiction is divested of characters and events, making it rely on its sources in the now-destitute sublime, which nonetheless, in an apparent paradox, allows the intrusion of reality "in a way that is impossible in more conventional or 'realistic' fictions".

Ending

We've come a long way from the initial compulsion to write, with the image of an infinite library replaced by an infinite nothing beyond its infinite shelves, and perhaps as a result a greater sense of the uselessness of writing. Except it is in the denial of reality in its widest sense as characterised in The Unnamable that our sad and frustrated compulsion to write persists. What excites me about The Imperative to Write is that it presents a perspective on what we carelessly call experimental writing that might catalyse many a writers' despondency and turn it into the work they were born to write. It is certainly one of the most extraordinary books about literature that I have ever read, one that has compelled me to write about in order to raise awareness of its ideas.

In the months it took me to read (the text including the notes reaches a quarter of a million words) I couldn't help but wonder about its own relation to the destitution of the sublime, and this intensified during my troubled attempts to summarise such a complex and detailed book, steeped as it is in philosophy and close readings of all three writers in their original languages. That is, what relation does this have in terms of literary history to the works under discussion, or, more specifically, are the works under discussion themselves kinds of summaries, albeit a highly stylised, of what such a profound study thickens and fills out, so that critical exposition is not so much secondary text feeding like a parasite on the larger organism but a continuation of the same movement in the form specific to our time, much as Luther and Kant might be considered as part of the genealogy of modernism despite the forms taken by their writings? In one aside, Fort refers to modernism as "a name for the sounding and unfolding of depth and interiority, its radical externalisation: inwardness as boundless exteriority," which happens to be a good way to summarise the first two volumes of Knausgaard's My Struggle, books that transcend their rather mundane, non-experimental form because they reach toward the distant horizons of a life. And remember, the writings by which we know Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett take many different forms – diaries, letters, short stories, novels, plays, poems, even critical essays and book-length studies – with not one demanding any fundamental priority. In contrast, contemporary works of such dispersed singularity and focus appear to be impossible, as if the disenchantment of the world, which might be another name for the destitution of the sublime, has been internalised to such an extent that fiction in particular is content to be trapped in its own freedom, its own blank space of infinite invention.

A book like The Imperative to Write might be able to jolt some writers out of such complacency, though I wonder if another version might be necessary to do that, one that is abridged to make it more financially accessible, much as My Struggle requires its excessive length to achieve its unexpected goal. Fort himself wonders if Blanchot "did not work too hard to maintain his noble manners" while Beckett’s "bawdiness and vulgarity" allowed for "a more palpably painful scattering of remains," and, when discussing Blanchot's preoccupation with dates and numerology, he inserts a moving footnote pointing out that Blanchot's fifth birthday on September 22, 1912 is the day Kafka famously wrote The Judgment, and that it is also the birth date of his late brother, to whom he pays "discrete homage" each time this date arises in his reading. What this latter signifies is left open to speculation and leaves one wanting more. What it also does is to reveal the possibilities of alternative forms that may be open to us to explore this strange imperative. As the contrast of noble manners and vulgarity suggests, the form of such explorations is also subject to the chance conditions, and perhaps only in submitting to the initial compulsion to write allows us to transcend them, a suggestion that itself contains the paradox in which writing must begin.

No help at all

Painting is practical day-to-day thing I think. One might say something clever, one might say something big, but one does something limited. It’s a serious thing – like religion – like love – one does the persistent thing, and then the really remarkable happens when something’s there that wasn’t there before.

Frank Auerbach's words from fifty years ago were pasted above my student work desk without ever prompting attention. Inspirational quotes are there to be ignored, after all. Only lately has the contrast between his trust in a modest routine and apparent wonder in the presence of art demanded examination. After so much striving, after so much art, what is this something there?

The answer is obvious: a rectangle with colours. Except not all paintings are 'really remarkable', as confirmed by Auerbach's fame for regularly scraping the paint from the canvas to start again and his recent description of "laying siege to the subject" in order to "work through [draughtmanship] to something deeper". How this depth works through practical components is unclear, but it would at least mean the value unique to a painting is never reducible to physical matter despite only ever being physical matter. We all know this already without worrying for too long about its implications, especially as it is safer to chatter about content than to ask, again, what is this something there?

How indeed can we talk beyond content, especially lately when content has become everything? Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle novel sequence and Mark Kozelek's recent LPs are prime examples of a zeitgeist in which oddly mundane content takes precedence, salinising poetic abstractions. Not, that is, fictionalised autobiography or misery memoir in which every description, anecdote and incident is a necessary part of a whole and leads somewhere in more or less artful fashion, but a focus on the apparently random and indeterminate.

Since at least the presumption of David Shields' Reality Hunger that the primary motivation for artists is to get closer to reality, the remove of art has been placed under quarantine, suspected of infecting readers with unhealthy deceit and indulgent fantasy, and in response these artists appear to be in the vanguard of an extreme supersession to the everyday.

(This is where one is supposed to cite examples – he writes about changing a nappy! he sings about building a house! – but this would make both sound like stunts, literary or musical readymades. So let a song sing for itself.)



Kozelek explains his new mode of songwriting as part of a wish to let go ("I wanted to give my first instincts a chance without shooting them down immediately"), while Knausgaard famously dispensed with attempts to write a novel and just wrote about his life, thousands of words a day for three years. Both appear to be shortcuts to "something there", and certainly their improvised and headlong nature never allow content and form to resolve, thereby disconcerting critical expectations of transcendent mastery.

Why is this happening? In Kozelek's case, it might easily alienate his core audience, used to swooning to the chiming sentiments of Carry Me Ohio, and Knausgaard's critical and sales success has come at the price of abasing himself before the world, so cynical career moves they are not.

Perhaps they have turned toward the quotidian because they recognise a subtler malady, so while the zeitgeist appears as only the latest cure for a virus whose quack remedies have included a 21st century Charles Dickens and HBO serials written by Shakespeare, the most notable symptom is revealed here as the ache of what escapes content, the earworm nagging at us all, that which infects even as the lock snaps shut on the quarantine cell. If this movement is toward anything then, it is toward the remove of the everyday; a conclusion that helps no one and prompts only the same question and demands the same response: not an ontology of art to be erected inside a critical, philosophical or theological apparatus, because this would be content too, but instead writing, and writing alone. A serious thing.

Extratemporal meditations: Proust as Philosopher: the art of metaphor by Miguel de Beistegui

We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns
That fall upon it out of the wind. *

Since its publication three years ago, David Shields' manifesto Reality Hunger has helped focus my thoughts on writing: why it still matters, why anyone should still read or write beyond daily utility. That is, the premise of the title and the author's brief commentary has helped rather than the pinched miscellany of the book's content. In fact, to renew that help I need go no further than the very first line, written by the compiler before he expresses his celebrated disillusionment with the routine gestures of contemporary fiction:  

Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.

Let us pause before prose so rich in cliché and poor in soul.

At first I questioned the assumptions embedded in this line and then presented miscellaneous examples indicating that the hunger is not for reality as such and that Shields' disillusion is the dismal light shining through the twin cataracts of modernity – journalism and scientific positivism – both impermeable to deep history, philosophy, theology and art. Reality Hunger is thereby the literary correlate of New Atheism, a displacement of monotheism mitigated only by its failure to attract the heresiographers infecting the latter phenomenon (though this might be coming to an end).

It has to be said my efforts to resist outweigh anything a refutation might bring forth, no matter how fine the examples. They are untimely. Despite Reality Hunger comprising quotations and brief reflections that might have easily fallen into a Tumblr void, it commands influence precisely because it is a book. The form of a book, any book, transcends the sum of its contents by appealing to a coherent unity and the promised land of truth. The title is that unity. Corporate journalists found the premise congenial of course and the common reader was thereby tuned in to the buzz. A student correspondent of mine reported "energised" discussions on the library steps as his fellows passed the book around; after all, the food metaphor of writing's relation to the world is a tasty, bite-sized morsel.

This power to influence so many with what is effectively a literary gesture is intriguing because Reality Hunger relies on an apparent contradiction more or less identical to that of New Atheism. Implicit in both is a suppressed relation to its zone and manner of expression. In both, radical materialism is demanded from the immaterial space of mind and word, with expression demanding an a priori sufferance of the contradiction. For example, Shields pursues without irony the non-book in the one form that provides an aura of weight and promise to the demand (i.e. the Book). You may say this is a mere point of order perhaps, one casually set aside as one reads and thinks in pursuit of worldly answers to worldly concerns, and easily dismissed as a product of art-for-art's sake aestheticism or ignorant of recent theories of consciousness. Except the point remains because of how these responses are expressed; the light of consciousness does not illuminate itself.

What all this reveals is that the ancient objection to writing remains embedded in western literary culture. In the Phaedrus, Plato reports how Socrates compared written language to figurative painting, impersonal and with no guarantee of a living speaker.

The productions of painting look like living beings, but if you ask them a question they maintain a solemn silence. The same holds true of written words; you might suppose that they understand what they are saying, but if you ask them what they mean by anything they simply return the same answer over and over again.

Writing is thereby aligned to the uncanny authority of sacred places and objects. Both refer to an existence more original than themselves yet all the while pronouncing on the most pressing issues of everyday life, thereby posing problems for those promoting faith in reason and realism. The original has no presence. The premise of Reality Hunger merely echoes Socrates' anxiety about the silence of writing and, moreover, what provides Shields' solution is the same too – a physical guarantee. The cultural phenomenon we are witnessing is the laboured repetition of an attempt to reconcile our expectations with profound uncertainty.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves. **

This is why I keep returning to Reality Hunger. Like any obsessive oppositional stance, it is too close for comfort. I share Shields' disillusionment with contemporary literary fiction, especially its ossification into a Booker-winning genre. The difference is that while Shields recommends that novels seek "deliberate unartiness" and include "raw material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered", I believe the only way to go is through literature, by becoming apparently more literary, to provoke perhaps even more anxiety, which is why the books I've written about in the last few years confront the remove of writing within the work itself, a risk invariably condemned by conservative critics as self-indulgent theorising.

So what we appear to have is competition between demands differing on mere matters of taste. However, I know my shudder over for the first line of Reality Hunger quoted above is more than a connoisseur's disdain for commonplace phrases and metaphors; sentences affect my experience of the world. Beginning of time, figure out, what the artist thinks – these are cold, shallow words evoking a cold, shallow world. And while this may seem unduly subjective and impressionistic, Socrates' objection to writing suggests a deeper reason, something fundamental to the impulse to read and write and the paradoxical gifts of the novel. What recommends itself then is an alternative model for the relation of writing to the world.

Miguel de Beistegui's book Proust as Philosopher offers just that. Set aside the dry title for now. It is an unfortunate consequence of the title of the French original, Jouissance de Proust. A literal translation – The Joy of Proust – conjures an image of a bearded man grappling sweatily with a curvaceous fountain pen, and those involved were right to reconsider the title. However, jouissance is key because for Proust's narrator the proper search is for a relation to reality that might enable essential knowledge and genuine happiness, even.

The book begins by outlining the fundamental problem of Marcel's life, which may seem familiar: a present of disappointment, frustration and suffering with a future of profundity and joy promised in the form of romantic love, great art and the natural world. When fulfilment appears imminent, disappointment, frustration and suffering remain, only in different forms: the object of his love provokes intense jealousy, what he understood as great art fails to lead him into the world of truth he had awaited so keenly, and the beautiful, fragrant hawthorn bushes he adores give him asthma attacks. Worse, when he wants to requite this condition by producing a work of "infinite philosophical meaning", everything he writes, whether richly imaginative or solidly realistic, dies on the page.

In Search of Lost Time takes its form in the revelation that a key reason for such a condition is that Marcel neglected to include the failure of infinite philosophical meaning as part of infinite philosophical meaning. Fantastic and realistic modes of creativity are both provisional, merely epiphenomenal, and always trumped by solitude and the external world. Once Marcel begins to explore and animate the space opened by experience and the expectations it refuses to fulfil then a different world begins to unfurl and, what's more, enables him to write something of infinite philosophical meaning. The exploration is embodied in the opening scene of the novel as Marcel wakes up and negotiates the boundary between dream and reality, much like Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis. Waking to change then becomes a constant.

De Beistegui presents Marcel's discovery in philosophical terms: there is a lack at the heart of being – "an ontological deficiency" – that is original and fundamental to the structure of experience. The actual world escapes us because such distance is constitutive of human experience, with the real being "its very own self-absence". What Marcel experiences as hunger are the signals of what lies beyond this condition. The epiphanic moments we all know from the petite madeleine episode enable Marcel to realise his unhappiness is a form of inattention to these signals and impatience to grasp what they indicate. The signals correspond to a unity much like rhymes in a poem and the deficiency can be redeemed only by attention to rhymes across time and space. What made Marcel unhappy were the attempts to fill the lack by "a strategy of compensation"  – physical possession, genre craft or Dionysian indulgence – or by "recapturing or reproducing the 'thing' that's lacking" – reality, realism. Joy is possible only in searching for the enchanted experience of time's absence, as presented in the book we are reading, which takes time.

De Beistegui follows Maurice Blanchot in the uncontroversial claim that the main subject of In Search of Lost Time is the possibility of writing, but offers a less hazardous reason. While for Blanchot writing is situated in the lack and the novel's content is a translucent density penetrated very occasionally by rapturous singularities that make such density possible, for de Beistegui writing is a means of seeing reality differently. It "transfigures life, reversing it, not into its opposite but into its other or flip side":

Literature is the flip side of the side that coincides with reality, the wrong side or the inside of the real and the sign of another meaning of experience. Far from fleeing the real ... literature actually tracks it and weaves it, spinning and following its thread. The threads that make up its text or its fabric ... are the threads of the real itself, and its mission is to trace and disentangle them. In the process, literature lets itself be carried off to where the real flees its own self-presence. (Translated by Dorothée Katz and Simon Sparks)

From this we can see that to respond to the signals of the real requires a certain kind of writing, not one of lyric reverie or bureaucratic notation but precarious combinations of both. If the real is its own self-absence, it is not self-sufficient and thereby reliant on the literary project. This is why de Beistegui highlights the art of metaphor in Proust, with a wonderfully provocative rider: "Metaphor is not fancy or mistress of error and falsehood but the figure of the real in its self-transposition or transfiguration. The conversion of matter into spirit but only as an implicit dimension of matter itself".

It is a paradoxical situation, one that worries at habitual commonsense: life is elsewhere, or, in Marcel's terms: the only true paradise is a paradise lost. Marcel's life is pierced by signals that, enabled by metaphor, set off a chain of correspondences opening to a unified experience. However, if metaphor is "rooted in the very structure of experience and not simply a rhetorical trope" then the quality of that life resides in the quality of those metaphors, the quality of attention and the quality of writing. It makes literature all the more demanding. In Search of Lost Time is a kind of bildungsroman leading to the challenge of this discovery. Marcel shows that the true paradise relies less on formal memory than on chance recognition, those rapturous singularities. It is not a direct product of masterful agency and is therefore always on the brink of falling back into petrifying genres. It's why the novel does not follow the overt facts of Proust's life, and explains why he did not publish the 800-page Jean Santeuil and why one reader quoted in Reality Hunger insists Proust is "at base an essayist" and In Search of Lost Time is "not fiction". She is in the hotel but blocks her ears to the hymns.

If we recognise metaphor as the key to unlocking the temporal prison cell, we can then also appreciate why the central stories of In Search of Lost Time concern romantic love: Swann's pathetic obsession with Odette, Saint-Loup's for Rachel, and Marcel's own for Gilberte and Albertine. "The real significance of love" de Beistegui writes "is epistemological: it drives us to imagine what we're unable to know". But, as a character in John McGahern's Amongst Women says: "Nothing is so bad as having to imagine". Marcel first meets Albertine as part of a "little gang" of young women he watches from afar in the seaside town Balbec. In fact, it is the gang that attracts him; he wants to be amongst young women in flower. They exist for him like the summer landscape of beach, sea and sky: a larger existence he cannot attain. Eventually Albertine becomes his lover but her other life – "the vague and non-existent universe" of her excursions with Andrée, another member of the little gang – provokes jealousy so much that she becomes the title of the fifth volume: The Captive. 

Some of the most rhapsodic passages in In Search of Lost Time are dedicated to Marcel's fascination with the distance at which Albertine holds herself, even when he has her within his four walls. It is here that Proust's unique blend of lyricism and intellectual reflection is especially powerful. They are also problematic for contemporary readers. De Beistegui highlights one in particular in which Marcel watches Albertine asleep:

Stretched out at full length upon my bed, in an attitude so natural that no art could have devised it, she reminded me of a long blossoming stem that had been laid there, and so in a sense she was: the faculty of dreaming, which I possessed only in her absence, I recovered at such moments in her presence, as though by falling asleep she had become a plant. In this way her sleep realised to a certain extent the possibility of love. Alone, I could think of her, but I missed her; I did not possess her. When she was present, I spoke to her, but I was too far absent from myself to be able to think. When she was asleep, I no longer needed to talk. I knew that I was no longer observed by her. I no longer needed to live on the surface of myself. 

By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped off, one after another, the different personalities with which she had deceived me ever since the day when I had first made her acquaintance. She had called back into herself everything that lay outside, had withdrawn, enclosed, reabsorbed herself into her body. In keeping it in front of my eyes, in my hands, I had an impression of possessing her entirely, which I never had when she was awake. Her life was subjected to me, exhaled towards me its gentle breath. I listened to this murmuring, mysterious emanation, soft as a sea breeze, magical as a gleam of moonlight. ... What I felt then was a love as pure, as immaterial, as mysterious as if I had been in the presence of those inanimate creatures that are the beauties of nature. And indeed, as soon as her sleep became at all deep, she ceased to be merely the plant that she had been. Her sleep ... was to me a whole landscape. [Trans. Scott Moncrieff]

Recently Anne Carson had fun at Marcel's expense, with the audience appreciative of the comedy of Marcel's apparently sexist solipsism, treating Albertine as an object of play in his fantasy. But we can see in this passage how Albertine changes from plant to breeze, from moonlight to landscape, and how then she is like everyone, separate, herself, and yet part of a larger universe. Encountering her escape is as important for Marcel as anything else. For him, the possibility of love appears in the revelation of the correspondences her deep self exhibits:

Albertine's complete throughout all her metamorphoses; she's a bird, a plant, a landscape, she's Odette, Andrée, Marcel, all of them at once and even simultaneously, while we can never say what she truly is, essentially. Like the world in general she's always in a state of becoming, a composition of matter that connects with others and, doing so, becomes something else entirely.

This is what de Beistegui means by "the conversion of matter into spirit but only as an implicit dimension of matter itself". The real is always revealed in something else with no need to privilege one over the other and no need to rage for one order or the other. In this sense, the transcendent is immanent to our own lives, so much as we can write, and write well.

I'm aware that De Beistegui's ontology and theory of metaphor have their own genealogy in European thought, for example Gilles Deleuze – another philosopher who wrote on Proust – and Hans Blumenberg. But this is a review not a patent office and I shall leave tracking those threads to others. Reading Proust as Philosopher reminded me of the personal value of critical analysis of single works, how it can crack open the carapace of a classic work of art without bleeding it dry: adding rather than cancelling. It stands alongside last year's translation of Quentin Meillassoux's The Number and the Siren as a work that corresponds to what is apparently most untimely.


* Wallace Stevens, from part IX of An Ordinary Evening in New Haven
** from part IV of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

Light is the lion: My Struggle – Book 2 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

The focus of the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's six-book series My Struggle is in the foreground of its narrative and in the title of the UK edition – A Death in the Family – which for the book-devouring industry mitigated such a prolonged presentation of one man's relatively ordinary childhood and youth. And you can expect the content of the second – A Man in Love – to do the same: the author's romance, marriage and parenthood will occupy review coverage alongside doubts as to the value such indulgence has now that the initial hit has been absorbed. Isn’t this now going a bit too far? What purpose can repetition serve?

It should at least contradict the impression that My Struggle is a traditional bildungsroman, a genre in which the book we are reading is the vantage point from which all the missteps and miseries, all the highways and byways of the individual on his path to the summit, can be surveyed: the relief of a landscape. Knausgaard is not an old man; a knowing distance is not an option.

Archipelago Books’ bold decision to place the original title in the foreground of the US edition enables us to focus on what's key to Knausgaard's struggle: the background. After all, in terms of the writing there is little difference between volumes one and two: in both the prose is straightforward, the characters memorable and the chronology clear, even when Knausgaard interrupts a domestic cliffhanger to plummet back in time only to resolve the issue in one sentence 236 pages later. The writer himself vindicates the impression when he says the length and speed of the writing were important formal constraints. Let's be clear: My Struggle is not about the life of Karl Ove Knausgaard. The interminable specifics of the content are superficial necessities for an experiment in stretching the everyday to such a degree that it becomes translucent, for light of a kind to shine through.

Light is a constant in book two. When the writer falls in love “everything was light”; his new girlfriend was “filled with an inner light” and, when their daughter is born, “she was the light”. Light reveals something otherwise absent. He sees it elsewhere in the “endless summer nights, so light and open”. He sees it in his father-in-law’s face, so “utterly open; it was as though there was nothing between him and the world”. Too easily, the light fades and habit shadows his life. He sits on a balcony of an evening and ponders: “the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle.”

He turns to literature and reads Hölderlin’s poetry and Dostoevsky’s novels and discovers “that was where the light was. That was where the divine stirred”. Light and the divine were also the focus of the fictional speculations in Knausgaard’s remarkable novel A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven. As a child Antinous Bellori witnesses two angels at the riverside in a dark forest and spends the rest of his life pursuing the nature of their existence on earth. The task of My Struggle might be similar. Why does Knausgaard respond so powerfully to works art and literature? It wasn't always this way. The angel of poetry was once closed to him.

The poems looked into another reality, or saw reality in a different way, one that was truer than the way I knew, and the fact that it was not possible to acquire the ability to see and that it was something you either had or you didn’t condemned me to a life on a lower plane, indeed, it made me one of the lowly. The pain of that insight was immense.

This is perhaps a common experience if not a common revelation. Knausgaard realises it is “entirely possible to stay afloat in that world without literature ever opening up to you”, but he does not want to settle for this world. A Man in Love covers the same time as Knausgaard was writing the angels novel and it’s disconcerting to read of his determination to write at all costs; he is willing to sacrifice his marriage and family life in order to pursue the work. Clearly My Struggle follows the same personal imperative, only more explicitly. But in this personal element lies its danger. For the fictional Bellori, writing had conjoined the world with human concepts of the world rather than revealing the one beyond the other. “Christ never wrote”. The incarnation of divinity is abstracted by writing; literature takes possession of God. For Knausgaard, however, writing can resist this self-confirming circularity, and provides a precise example:

Paul Celan’s mysterious, cipher-like language has nothing to do with inaccessibility or closedness, quite the contrary, it is about opening up what language normally does not have access to but that we still, somewhere deep inside us, know or recognize, or if we don’t, allows us to discover. Paul Celan’s words cannot be contradicted with words. What they possess cannot be transformed either, the word only exists there, and in each and every single person who absorbs it.
      The fact that paintings and, to some extent, photographs were so important for me had something to do with this. They contained no words, no concepts, and when I looked at them what I experienced, what made them so important, was also nonconceptual. There was something stupid in this, an area that was completely devoid of intelligence, which I had difficulty acknowledging or accepting, yet which perhaps was the most important single element of what I wanted to do.

The danger here is revealed in the form: Knausgaard is merely describing this in essayistic fashion, and no matter how aware the author is of the contradictory direction he has taken, the familiar mode of discourse envelops the world, casts a shadow on the open. “Everyone can write essays! It’s the easiest thing in the world” his friend Geir complains. But Knausgaard is not a painter or photographer, and he certainly isn't Paul Celan. For this reason he must fill his books with the sensory particulars of existence – the storm blowing through our world, as he puts it – as a means of approaching the nonconceptual. So while Knausgaard contextualises and investigates his experience with exceptional clarity and intensity – which alone justifies My Struggle as a project – it is a struggle lost in advance. “Come on! Into the open, my friend, as Hölderlin had written ... But how, how?”.

A book review pursues the same circular path without asking the same question, tending to light upon statements and notable events as an alibi for disregarding the silence within writing. It is the regrettable fate of literary genre. Knausgaard’s method then is to use length and speed to evade the tyranny of form, and speed is the best method for the reader too, enough to appreciate that dwelling on the author's life and opinions is to close the door upon the light.

An everyday afterlife: Knausgaard revisited

A question arises from my breathless response to volume one of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: have I contradicted my exasperated review of David Shields’ Reality Hunger? At least, this is a question I ask myself. After all, as the author explained, this autobiographical work was written only when fiction failed him. He had published two novels but:

I wanted to write something completely different, and I wanted to write about my father ... About his fall, how he somehow changed from being a father, a perfectly ordinary teacher, a local politician, to a divorced, dead alcoholic. For three years I tried to write a kind of regular, realistic but fictional work about his death. Nothing worked. ... And [then] I started just writing it as it was: the truth, no artifice, no cleverness. Reality.

Perhaps my enthusiasm was relief at the abolition of the generic niceties that even the most impressive novels observe and, like David Shields, I mistook disillusionment for truth. Here was something elemental, I thought, the word Thomas Bernhard uses to describe Dostoevsky's The Demons after he had read the novel on his teenage deathbed. But, in my review of Reality Hunger, I argued that such reality cannot enter into the work without conforming to the pressure of the conceptual unity imposed by a book, and that writing plainly about plain things is no more a guarantee of realism than – following Wittgenstein – rain experienced in a dream is a guarantee of its wetness, even if it is connected to noise on the bedroom window.

Of course dream rain does mean something: meaning fills the dreamworld like sunlight, even when it is dark. We can only speculate on the meaning. This is our experience of dreams, and our speculation never feels quite enough, never proportionate to the generic purity of the dream. The quality of My Struggle I perceived is precisely a persistent analysis that maintains a propulsive force because it is aware that is never enough. Had Knausgaard written a regular, realistic novel instead, it might have appeared to be enough: a function of mastery and controlled distance, hence his writer's blockage and compulsion toward "no artifice, no cleverness". However, My Struggle is something other than reportage and the fundamental error of Reality Hunger is to conflate the aims of journalism with those of literature.

For this reason, Mark Thwaite makes a very good case for treating My Struggle as a novel, arguing that the relentless focus on “quotidian dreariness” is its method of seeking the meaning of its dream, to engage with the presence of “something numinous [that] lies just beyond sight, beneath grief, [what] lies always beyond language”. He aligns this to Freud’s shifting definition of the uncanny: “He finds something deeply strange, something Unheimliches, during this work: secretly, heimlich is not the antonym of unheimlich at all, but rather its sometime synonym”. Words are thereby always in excess of themselves and “the yearned-for mot juste doesn't get us any further than just our everyday yearning". This is well put. Knausgaard must focus on "the stink, the misery, the pain, the boredom, the embarrassment" of everyday life in order to open up onto what it cannot name. "The subject here" he continues, "is death and whether writing/language has anything to say about this commonplace disaster that haunts and harries and shapes us everywhere we turn". Knausgaard himself is explicit that this can happen only when writing yields to literature's demand:

everything has to submit to form. If any of literature’s other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these overtake form, the result suffers. That is why writers with a strong style often write bad books. That is also why writers with strong themes so often write bad books. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called “writing.” Writing is more about destroying than creating.

Writing as destruction is a striking contradiction and serves Mark's reading well, but "bad books" is vague and self-serving. He names no names here but My Struggle inevitably provokes comparisons with at least two. Who has stronger styles than Proust and Bernhard and what books have stronger themes than In Search of Lost Time and Gathering Evidence? (They are also named in My Struggle, Knausgaard having "virtually imbibed" one.) I regret mentioning them in my review, not because Proust and Bernhard cannot be usefully discussed in comparison but, in my case, they weren't usefully discussed and because doing so threatens the error that Marcel himself describes: when one hears of a great book, one can imagine only an assemblage of the great books one has already imbibed. It is only when one reads the new book that one becomes aware of its otherness and perhaps also its weakness in comparison. This has happened with three friends of mine who have read My Struggle, and it has caused me great consternation.

To compound this error, I shall now compare Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle to the work of Franz Kafka.

We can say Kafka’s work has more in common with Knausgaard’s in terms of style, that is, in its comparative disconnect from style. In both we are drawn more to the specific events described, their curious and horrific banality, rather than to immersion in aesthetic bliss, while at the same time we feel compelled to draw back and seek an organising principle, to imagine such events as part of a containable world view, and then to resubmerge in a newly configured aesthetic bliss. However, Kafka’s is the prime example of a body of work that is never quite enough, a lack into which it is impossible to submerge. The deluge of secondary texts does this for us. Maurice Blanchot asks what needs to done to rescue Kafka from this fate, one to which Kafka himself contributed, and his answer is to recommend regarding his work as Kafka had wanted: in its absence. He observes that, with the publication of the Diaries, Kafka the writer was placed in the foreground and he is the one we look for in the work. He wonders if Kafka foresaw such a disaster and that is why he wanted his work destroyed. The opposite is true of My Struggle: knowledge of Knausgaard life saturates the page and the interviews and reports of the scandalised response in Norway offer no room to move away in relief: there is nowhere else to look but the work. But what then is the work?

It certainly isn’t the everyday content of life. This is as much the subject of My Struggle as ice is the subject of Scott’s journey to the South Pole. An overwhelming sense of imminence is evoked by Knausgaard so that its banality becomes, as James Wood says, celestial. For example, when he walks home in the dark after a day of writing and describes his route with such precision that only an event of great significance would seem to justify it. As the event doesn't occur, another world makes itself felt instead; a possible world, just out of reach. This imminence has itself been promised by occasional epiphanies, which appear to open the work to its final destination, as well to align the author with the experience of Proust. But they are frustrated epiphanies, without message, each one a scintillating blank. The face in the sea and the inexplicable tears evoked by a patch of sky in an old painting appear as offerings of transcendence, but not an affirmative transcendence. Why not?

Blanchot places Kafka’s work squarely in the era after the death of God: his stories are “among the darkest in literature, the most rooted in absolute disaster”. Only it is not an anguished expression of lament but one of uncertainty and anxiety. “God is dead, which may signify this harder truth: death is not possible”. We think of The Hunter Gracchus fallen into a ravine and happy to wait for death: “Then the accident happened”. Not the accident of death but that of not dying: “I am here. I don’t know any more than that. There’s nothing more I can do. My boat is without a helm—it journeys with the wind which blows in the deepest regions of death.”

The theme is also clear in Metamorphosis: like Gracchus, Gregor cannot die even as his body transforms and disintegrates. Despite the utter misery and solitude of his condition, he still seeks moments of reprieve – food from his sister Grete, protecting the portrait on the wall – until, finally, he does die, only then for Grete, free at last from the burden of her looking after her brother and on a family outing, to stretch her young body, signalling life’s revival; one more metamorphosis. “There is no end,” Blanchot writes, “there is no possibility of being done with the day, with the meaning of things, with hope”. God is thereby not deprived of his infinite authority: “dead, he is even more terrible, more invulnerable, in a combat in which there is no longer and possibility of defeating him”.

We are battling a dead transcendence, Blanchot says, and notes the prevalence of the powerful dead in Kafka’s stories: the emperor in The Great Wall of China and the former Commandant in In the Penal Colony. We might add Knausgaard’s father. An absurd battle perhaps, something embodied in the comedy of Kafka’s stories (“he could hardly keep from laughing”) and by Knausgaard's solemn attention to the mundane. Yet it is perhaps the only battle left worth fighting; a combat of passivity. Blanchot believed that Kafka recognised his presentation of death had instead dimmed and erased it, and that our reading "revolves anxiously around a misunderstanding": we think we have witnessed what has in fact been hidden. Kafka wanted to destroy his writing because it hadn’t failed enough.

Similarly, My Struggle has been welcomed with astonishment and great sales, much to the author's horror: "I have given away my soul". He must also wish to recommend his own absence. Western man, Blanchot observes, has tried to make this bearable by focusing on the positive: immortality, of an afterlife that would compensate for this life, perhaps the afterlife of fine writing: “But this afterlife is our actual life”.

Divinity hunger: A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven by Karl O. Knausgaard

Before I had even finished Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, I had ordered a copy of his 2008 novel A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven, an act more to do with wanting to remain in his company once the first was read than curiosity about what a novel by the author of a six-volume autobiography was like. The good news is that A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven fascinates like My Struggle. There is no bad news.

The novel begins in 1551 when late at night by a stream in a forest an 11-year-old boy Antinous Bellori stumbles upon two angels eating fish. Though terrified, he studies them: "Their faces are white and skull-like, their eye sockets deep, cheekbones high, lips bloodless. They have long, fair hair, thin necks, slender wrists, claw-like fingers. And they're shaking. One of them has hands that shake" (translated by James Anderson).







Bellori himself is so affected by what he sees that he spends the rest of his life studying the subject and takes six years to write On the Nature of Angels. On reading this far one may assume such a long novel would focus on Bellori's life and times, his struggle to publish an heretical thesis and to avoid burning at the stake. But no. The focus is instead a repetition of Bellori's investigation into the fundamental question: why have angels become mere animals, living in remote locations and avoiding contact with humans?

Bellori thereby disappears from the foreground and for over 400 pages is replaced by retellings of the stories of Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood and Lot and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, each narrated as if the characters where protagonists in a standard historical novel. They live in an indeterminate pre-modern time with the same hopes and fears as ours. Noah's sister Anna has a strained marriage to a man who owns a farm next to a fjord that turns out to be no more than a hut in a field. Yet angels and the threat of apocalypse are as present to them as dolphins and terrorism are to us. The prose follows the easy-reading pace of 500-page novels and Knausgaard is vulnerable to criticism for stamping out generic passages from a stencil:

"You've made it nice here," said his father, looking around.
"It's good enough for me at any rate," said Cain.
A shiver went through him.

Yet such prose in the context of biblical stories has the odd effect of naturalising events we would otherwise place at a distance. When Abel announces an expedition to the Garden of Eden, it is as supernatural as the North Pole. And when he is attacked by angels resisting his approach, they may as well be polar bears. Reading the novel late into the night I wondered if this is what genre fans enjoy in large volumes of speculative fiction, science fiction and fantasy: imaginary worlds presented in unadorned prose to evoke – albeit temporarily – an enchantment of the current, prosaic one. But the worlds and ideas they generate are weightless in comparison to this: our culture is founded on Bible stories. Every event becomes vitally real to us as they were for generations of Jews and Christians.

In Knausgaard's retelling, the space between a world with God and his angels and one without is recognised and felt in a manner that affects not only how we perceive the current world but how we perceive our perspective. Enthusiastic claims that "science fiction has emerged as the literature best able to articulate the relentless pace of social change" is faint mitigation when teleology is limited to this and the lives of characters in an exciting story. In A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven, the presence and degradation of angels becomes a question of the absence of meaning in the modern world, an absence over which Knausgaard's writing keeps watch. 

In a coda to the novel, the narrator following up Bellori's thesis reveals himself to be a young Norwegian man called Henrik Vankel who has isolated himself on a small island after an unspecified breakdown on shore. He describes a relationship with his father in terms with which readers of My Struggle will be very familiar. He is also fascinated by Bellori's book and why, after many years of intense work, he suddenly abandoned writing. His speculative answer emerges from an unforgettable interpretation of Giotto's Lamentation as seen through Bellori's eyes. He saw what the death of Jesus meant for the angels in the painting.

Christ never wrote, is an entry in one of Bellori's notebooks. It would have contravened the fundamental meaning of incarnation. The divine became a body: arms and legs, head and belly, heart and lungs. The divine lived in a specific place at a specific time. There was no universality about it, only a singularity. And that was where the meaning lay. That the meaning of Jesus' life lay in every single unique moment that he had been here was something churchmen didn't understand, they who had raised that bloody, crucified body into the language, and dissolved it in philosophy's abstractions. But the people understood. The hysterical medieval worship of relics was an expression of it: God was here, among us, like us. Not all the time, just once. And at that moment, when Pontius Pilate was procurator in Jerusalem and Augustus emperor in Rome, he'd set foot there, laid his head there, placed his hand there.

In this passage we can appreciate Vankel's turn to solitude in nature and Knausgaard's need to write the six-volume My Struggle: gathering evidence of the divine, right here, right now.

To set the lost afire: The Roving Shadows by Pascal Quignard

In his essay On Reading, Proust says great writers prefer old writing, the works of the ancients, and finds two reasons: first, that they are “more easily diverted by different ideas” and second, that they recognise “the beauty which the mind that created them was able to put into them.” Both standard observations of course. But, as is Proust’s habit, he doesn’t stop there: “They receive another beauty, more affecting still, from the fact of that their substance, I mean the language in which they were written, is like a mirror of life.”

He compares the experience to walking through a 15th Century hospice that has been preserved in tact into the 20th: “its well, its wash-house, the painted panels of its wooden ceiling, the tall gabled roof, pierced by dormer windows surmounted by frail finials of beaten lead”. Walking here is like reading a tragedy by Racine or Saint-Simon’s memoirs because they “contain all the lovely suppressed forms of a language that preserve the memory of usages or ways of feeling which no longer exist, persistent traces of the past unlike anything in the present and whose colours time alone, as it passed over them, has been able further to enhance.”


In this sense Pascal Quignard’s The Roving Shadows is the project of a great writer. In the first few chapters there is an extract from a letter written in Latin by Descartes, a passage from Chin P'ing Mei, a novel of the Ming Dynasty, and the story of Syagrius, the last king of the Romans, as told by Gregory of Tours. But this is not a waterfall to disrupt Proust’s deeper current: each chapter is a discrete approach to suppressed forms and persistent traces, the shadows of the title. “I seek only thoughts that tremble” he writes, “a flush interior to the soul”. This does not always require many pages, as short stories and poetry attest. The Roving Shadows seeks its own form – Quignard insists the book, published in 2002 as Les Ombres errantes, is not a novel or an essay but “a sequence of beginnings of novels, stories, landscapes, autobiographical fragments” – and yet yields similar rewards.

It is still a very Proustian quest, as Ombres suggests: to experience the presence of Time Past (he capitalises the phrase throughout) not as the past but as “a ceaselessly active actuality”. Our access is frustrated by the blinding light of modernity. In chapter 15, he describes Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s 1933 work In Praise of Shadows which laments, of all things, the loss of old Japanese toilets; places once hidden in near darkness now illuminated with “dazzling, puritanical, imperialist ... neon light”. He goes on to present a list of what has passed from Japanese life: peeling paint on wood, tarnished metal objects and “freer or dulled or vacillating thought that arises in the human head when it buries itself in shadow”. Suddenly a culture that seems to run ahead of modernity like sanderlings happily taking advantage of a foaming wave, diminishes and becomes more pathological as one recognises the millennia of tradition from which it has been wrenched. This is a Proustian moment of universal consciousness.

The structure of The Roving Shadows – 55 chapters in 223 pages, with the chapters themselves divided into fragments of story, aphorism, anecdote, reference and citation – plunges the reader into open water in which one can never fully breathe nor fully drown in the comforts of narrative: “Fish that still rise to the surface”, he writes. “A gulp to stave off death. That gulp: reading.” The hyperbole is a necessary misstep of the form, as David Shields’ Reality Hunger confirmed in 2010, and the two books share the goal of overcoming their book misfortune: “Books that can be said to be touched by the reflection of the sun, of which they know nothing, are even more silent than purely literary ones.”

Except Quignard’s predates Shields by eight years and is far more aware of the contradictions of writing towards such a goal: “One can't offer a visible counterweight to the domination of light”. It is thereby more literary. What this means, and as this aphorism asserts, is that The Roving Shadows is in constant battle with its own accomplishment. After all, by writing in commonly intelligible French to a contemporary audience about ways of feeling which no longer exist, translated and contextualised in notes at the end of the book, he has also endangered them; risking exposure of the pale beast to imperial neon light. Chris Turner’s translation, which has to accept the impossibility of containing the double meaning of ombre – both shadow and shade – is thus a double threat.

Alerting us to the danger, chapter 39 tells the story of the imprisonment of the Abbé de Saint-Cyran, a 17th Century Jansenist who spoke “of the vanity of books that are merely books. Of gods that are mere phantoms. Of ideas that are merely desires.” Emerging from months in darkness he wrote: “after the greed for wealth, honours and worldly pleasures has been destroyed, there arise in the soul – out of those ruins – other honours, other wealth, other pleasures that are not of this visible world, but of the invisible world.” Quignard comments: "It is dreadful to think that, after destroying within us the visible world, with all its trapping, as much as it can be destroyed on this earth, another invisible one is immediately born, a world more difficult to destroy than the first." Dreadful perhaps, and of course Quignard is contributing to our sensitivity to the invisible, yet it is why Proust loved ancient works and why reading was so important in his life:

Often, in St Luke's Gospel, when I come upon the ‘colons’ which punctuate it before each of the almost canticle-like passage with which it is strewn, I have heard the silence of the worshipper who has just stopped from reading out loud so as to intone the verses following, like a psalm reminding him of the older psalms in the Bible. This silence still filled the pause in the sentence which, having been split into two so as to enclose it, had preserved its shape; and more than once, as I was reading, it brought to me the scent of a rose which the breeze entering by the open window had spread through the upper room which the Gathering was being held and which had not evaporated in almost two thousand years.

As with Time itself, reading gives access to what habit and the violence of modernity obscures; no phantoms or mere desires here. Even if he shares Proust’s vision, he does not entirely share his optimism: “To set the lost afire with loss – this, properly speaking, is what it is to read.” Yet to accept on face value the statements and assertions peppering The Roving Shadows is to fall back into the positivism its form and content resist. The contradiction is always present; a fish rising briefly to the surface reaffirming the depths.

The Roving Shadows is the first of a sequence of books called Le Dernier Royaume, The Last Kingdom. So far, five books have been published in France and this is the first to be translated into English. Seagull Books has been admirably adventurous in its translation policy and we can only hope it continues with Quignard among others. This review hardly touches the range and richness of The Roving Shadows: the book rewards and defeats re-reading. We have more than enough to be going on with.

A question: do you really have an interest in novels?

I ask because, when happening upon websites for budding writers recommending craft laxatives to ease the passage of a trapped bestseller, you realise a cold, alien world. In the presence of expertise, you assure yourself that you have no interest in plot, no interest in protagonists, no interest in major themes, no interest in dialogue, in clothing, in colours or in descriptions of any kind. You have no interest in the chronology of events, no interest in a cast of characters, no interest in anyone's tone of voice, in linguistic verve or in graphic accounts of a controversial nature, and you say you wish only ever to avoid dramatic situations. What's more, you have no interest in shifts of tone, in register, in settings, in scenes, in twists, in revelations or insights into the human condition, and the prospect of a well-written, page-turning, award-winning novel, one which tackles an important social issue, stimulates in you only grief. Yet still you read novels. Why?

Metaphors are one among many things which make me despair of writing. Writing's lack of independence of the world, its dependence on the maid who tends the fire, on the cat warming itself by the stove; it is even dependent on the poor old human being warming himself by the stove. All these are independent activities ruled by their own laws; only writing is helpless, cannot live in itself, is a joke and despair.

So, mastering the craft obscures writing's helplessness, except you didn't mention metaphor, perhaps because it is the unextended mode of allegory, and you're interested in allegory, aren't you? Metaphor casts flickering light on dependence while heightening singularity and presence with borrowed meaning, while allegory hypostatises metaphor, is a sun burning through stained glass. That's why you cite Kafka, isn't it? Yet the vast majority of readers and writers know that writing's helplessness is its greatest strength; it's a miraculous window on the world where no window would otherwise exist. Metaphor refines our vision and makes writing not only helpful but necessary to illuminate, to separate and to connect. Otherwise, without writing, while the world would stand before us plain as day, we would see only universal night. And anyway, Kafka despairs of writing in his diary, a wastebasket for words slung into the air last thing in the evening, words he never dreamed would be published. He published contra despair. Kafka is right only if you resist connections, fixate upon isolation ("I'm much worse than Kaspar Hauser. I'm as lonely as ... as Franz Kafka") and ignore the foundations of your very ability to despair. You can't bypass the paradox by satisfying a sententious reality hunger by, say, dispensing with craft to write a novel in the form of an inventory. 

In the left-hand corner of the room there is a large modern armchair made of a huge hemisphere of steel-ringed Plexiglass on a chromed metal base. Beside it an octagonal block of marble serves as a low table; a steel cigarette lighter stands on it, as does a cylindrical pot-holder from which there emerges a dwarf oak tree, one of those Japanese bonsai plants whose growth has been so controlled, arrested, and altered that they show all the symptoms of maturity and even of old age without having grown at all, and about which growers say that their perfection depends less on the material care given to them than on the concentrated quality of meditation devoted to them. Lying directly on the light-coloured woodblock floor, slightly to the front of the armchair, is a wooden jigsaw puzzle of which virtually all the edges have been assembled. In the lower right-hand third of the jigsaw some additional pieces have been put in place: they depict the oval face of a sleeping girl, whose blonde hair is would in plaits around her head and held over her forehead by a double band of plaited cloth; she leans her cheek on her cupped right hand as if in her dream she were listening to something.

This is from Georges Perec's novel Life: A User's Manual and is a description of Madame de Beaumont's rooms at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. Not quite an inventory. The painstaking procession of detail is unusually objective for a novel, yet, because it appears in a novel, cannot be read objectively, free of context. We cannot help but hear each object sing in the absence of Madame de Beaumont. Although Life: A User's Manual isn't like genre fiction, our un-novel expectations remain in place and we read the passage as if it were from a crime thriller in which evidence of an event or the guilt or innocence of a character lurks behind each word. Our attention is held only in expectation. However, here, because there is no genre, the plot has no soil. Nothing grows. This is why you cannot read Perec's novel without soon being invaded by a profound melancholy, the words used by Proust to describe the imperfect indicative: "that cruel tense which portrays life to us as something at once ephemeral and passive, which, in the very act of retracing our actions, reduces them to an illusion, annihilating them in the past without leaving us with the consolation of activity". Through Perec's cool eye, while the objects do suggest activity, they appear eternal and passive, annihilated by independence. And while Proust's melancholy arose from storytelling sentences – "Nothing about her at that time recalled … She was a small woman whose figure had somewhat collapsed beneath her weight..." – that are all too familiar to modern readers, here annihilation is unforced, natural, rather than assumed by a careless author. The overall effect of Perec's teeming fictions is double edged – full of activity and possibility yet at the same time emptying, threatening to envelope the world in narrativeless darkness. (This compilation of Google Street View images does something very similar.)

So writing relies on the world's guarantee for the metaphors you believe – Kafka believed – lack independence and are parasitic on the world, but that our faith in the world's independence is itself a metaphor, otherwise we wouldn't see it. Every time we proclaim a reality beyond words, in despair or in delight, we take refuge in a literary convention and thereby re-affirm the world's dependence. This is why Kafka wrote as two people, part of the world and banished from it, and why his stories are both absolutely lucid and unfathomable. Let us read into this relation.

Once I projected a novel in which two brothers fought each other, one of whom went to America while the other remained in a European prison. I only now and then began to write a few lines, for it tired me at once. So once I wrote down something about my prison on a Sunday afternoon when we were visiting my grandparents and had eatch an especially soft kind of bread, spread with butter, that was customary there. It is of course possible that I did it mostly out of vanity, and by shifting the paper about on the tablecloth, tapping with my pencil, looking around under the lamp, wanted to tempt someone to take what I had written from me, look at it, and admire me. It was chiefly the corridor of the prison that was described in the few lines, above all its silence and coldness; a sympathetic word was also said about the brother who was left behind, because he was the good brother. Perhaps I had a momentary feeling of the worthlessness of my description, but among relatives to whom I was accustomed, I sat at the round table in the familiar room and could not forget that I was young and called to great things out of this present tranquility. An uncle who liked to make fun of people finally took the page that I was holding only weakly, looked at it briefly, handed it back to me, even without laughing, and only said to the other who were following him with their eyes, 'The usual stuff,' to me he said nothing. To be sure, I remained seated and bent as before over the now useless page of mine, but with one thrust I had in fact been banished from society, the judgement of my uncle repeated itself in me with what amounted almost to real significance and even within the feeling of belonging to a family I got an insight into the cold space of our world which I had to warm with a fire that first I wanted to seek out.