Something is taking its course

Good philosophical discussion of Samuel Beckett's works at K-Punk (thanks to Spurious for the link). The writer "Infinite Thought" was unhappy at the Barbican's Beckett Post War panel.

The problem lay in the staleness of the set-up, which contextualized Beckett in terms of 'existentialism', as if not only had the last forty years of Beckett reception in philosophy - Deleuze, Derrida, Blanchot, Badiou - not happened, but also that existentialism could still be understood in the same way that it was half a century ago.

The centenary excesses were continued on Newsnight Review too, only with slightly less focus on philosophy. It enabled Ellis Sharp to bask in the glory of NR regular Julie Myerson's critical acuity as she responded to Rockaby live at the same Barbican. It's not the first time we've had the pleasure.

PS: Channel 4 is reported to be showing the 19 films after having failed the first time. Let's hope some royal doesn't snuff it and spoil it like last time. Well, maybe it's a sacrifice I could make.

Possibility and actuality

This week's TLS runs a short review of a 25 year old novel, Christopher Priest's The Affirmation. It is a novel about autobiography, alternate worlds, obsessive love, grief and madness. So, right up the street parallel to mine. In summary, Sam Thompson writes that as the main character cracks up:

it becomes clear that [Priest] is not merely using his alternate world as a figure for schizophrenia, nor writing the sort of self-regarding metafiction that evaporates into a comment on its own evanescence. Instead, with distressing plausibility, The Affirmation implies that the human tendency to make stories is itself a kind of madness. Bringing home the power of narrative to steal reality, affirming nothing, it abandons us mid-sentence, poised between page and world, discomfited and hyper-aware.

It's the kind of book that offers to me both the suppression, through reading it, of the desire to write something like it, and the arousal of the sense of being able, at last, to write that book.

The same can be said of Borges and the Plain Sense of Things, Gabriel Josipovici's remarkable essay about fiction, possibility and actuality taken from his new collection The Singer on the Shore. If you have the slightest concern with the interaction of these three worlds, do not miss.

Writing, naturally

Composing a piece of writing feels unnatural. Even a relatively short entry on this page is wrung out. Never mind how it appears. Never mind the typos.

The urge to write a blog entry is usually to release what's lodged inside my head, what's swirling about as words, phrases, fragments of sentences, themselves forming ill-formed ideas. The dream of writing is to make all this a coherent whole. Then those phrases and fragments are submerged in the astringent wash of rhetoric. Sometimes they stick above the surface. The dream remains, hence more writing is urged.

There are examples of success to cling to. Beckett's 'siege in the room' during which he wrote three novels of the Trilogy.

Molloy and what followed became possible the day I became aware of my stupidity. Then I began to write the things I feel.

At first this statement seems like a licence to let go, to write out those phrases, fragments of sentences and ill-formed ideas without apparent mediation; mitigated as raw feeling. But reading the Trilogy seems only to reveal that what Beckett felt included the failure of feeling and the failure of the dream.

And then there's the example of Thomas Bernhard; the Glenn Gould of the typewriter. Those late novels like Bach fugues, each giving the impression of having been written with virtuosic grace and speed. This is perhaps why I prefer these novels (Concrete, Yes, The Loser, Old Masters, Extinction) rather than earlier works such as Correction, recently reviewed by David Sepanik in the The Quarterly Conversation. It perplexes me why this novel receives such disproportionate attention. It is uncommonly weighty, as dense as the forest in the Aurach valley in which it is set. Yes, it's deep, awesomely-crafted and important, but to me, compared to the others, it seems too constructed, perhaps even forced, unnatural.

I suspect Correction is regarded so precisely because it is heavier - 'demanding' as Sepanik says - thus resembling the ambitions of more-traditional novels and fitting in with conservative hopes and expectations. The curious thing is, the novels I prefer are probably less radical and experimental in composition than this one. Yet each differs radically from the traditional novel; they seem to flow more directly from the living mind. So perhaps we should regard the traditional novel, written slowly and deliberately, with each sentence composed with utmost care, as experimental, and those which seem to fall onto the page like steady rain as the more natural form of the novel; the novel, perhaps, of the future.

But of course, such definitions are all made by the reader. Without scholarly attentions, we cannot know how much care was taken to write what we're reading. So, what's the difference between 'experimental' and 'traditional' reading?

Patrick Giles

It's happened to me twice now. Googling a friend's name only to find that they're dead.

Patrick Giles wrote to me four years ago. He said he liked what I wrote. We exchange emails, chatting about mutual interests. He passed on links to examples of his published work and countless recommendations of novels. It seemed we both loved the same authors and reservations about the same big name novelists and critics. He expressed regret that it wasn't easy – more or less impossible – to publish the sort of things we both wrote or wanted to write. Keith Gessen suggests it was a long-standing regret. There were also the not-so-mutual interests. I'm nonplussed by opera and musicals. He loved both. And I can't forget when he spoke of a baseball pitcher who "when he bends over to pick up a ball you can practically tell how dilated his sphincter is". I told him I preferred cricket.

After a break of some time, I heard from him again, this time in a comment on The Elegant Variation. I knew he had cancer and told him I was pleased to see from the comment that he was firing on all cylinders. But he said the ravages of the illness made the post more intemperate than it might otherwise have been. The comment was then elevated to a wider public by James Wood who quoted it in his defence of Realism in the New Republic, recently reprised in Prospect Magazine. I was touched that he asked me for advice on how to reply. I hadn't a clue. I'm not sure if he ever did write a response. In his last email on July 24th last year he said his health seemed to be improving, but he died on October 13th. I found out on Wednesday only because I picked up a book he once reviewed and wanted to find the link again.

On this page of condolences, you get the sense of the man and his emails from the picture alone. Most of the comments include variants the phrase "I never met Patrick in person". The same goes for me. But if it wasn't for this extraordinary friendship medium, not one of us would have had got even this far. And that's something for which I'm grateful.

Mid-March miscellany

Four things. Ready Steady Book adds to its unique series of interviews by asking unique British writer Gabriel Josipovici about, among other things, the three new books he has out this year. The line that sticks in my mind: I find myself being much more ‘radical’ in my writing, simply driven by the demands of the work, than I am in my tastes.

Elsewhere in our merry blogosphere, be aware that George Galloway's gotta new blog. Perhaps he'll tell us about what really went on in the Celebrity Big Brother house?

Thirdly, John Pistelli, lately of the excellent commonplacebook, has also begun a 'live journal' with the self-consciously grand title Maxims and Reflections.

Meanwhile, on a more established blog, the editor of the TLS Peter Stothard mentions me! Well, I was excited. It's about my frustration with the local library. Looking back, I was probably a little unfair. The new fiction selection is actually very good, except it seems there ain't much good fiction around. This might explain my lack of enthusiasm in the three novel reviews I've written for Sir Peter's publication.

Oblivion stands between us

It's impressive that Ellis Sharp has exercised his considerable critical attention on an instance of Paul Celan's apparent moral inattention. It's not something one sees very often. Celan has a critical aura of protection about him. One cannot read his long account of the poet's brief relationship to Israel without unease. He begins with Celan's more famous - and more famously ambiguous - relationship with Heidegger, the lapsed-Nazi. We hold him to account for his actions - that almost goes without saying in critical circles - so what about Celan?

Well, if the attention is for sound reasons, the only useful and meaningful way to do hold a poet to account would be to hold him to account according to poetry, just as the only meaningful way to hold Heidegger to account would be according to philosophy (as many have done - Timothy Clark for instance).

Sharp approaches this by insisting that one poem (Denk Dir) despite being "a cryptic, elusive poem ... is surely in essence a Zionist poem", one that "under its abstractions and ambiguities" is "on the side of Israel, and hence of imperialism and sectarian persecution". He extracts John Felstiner's analysis to confirm what seems to me, in both, a rush to judgement. Ian Fairley, in his knotty introduction to Fathomsuns, reads the abstraction and ambiguity of the same poem as essential to its meaning rather than obstacles to it. He suggests - though my understanding is fraught with uncertainty - that the poem is an implicit warning to Zionism and, more generally, the yearning for a homeland; a similar yearning - for clarity, for certainty, for an impossible homecoming - that we experience in reading poetry.

Instead (i.e. instead of a homestead), he writes that we must live in "the conflicted liminality of ... an unhousing which demands that we live ... with, or in, what is without." This seems to locate the brutalism inherent in patriotic utopianisn and enacts, instead, an imaginative engagement with a meridian - "the connective which, like the poem, leads to encounters". Denk dir; think of it.

What Sharp doesn't address, and which perhaps might offer more pertinent insights arising from his critique, is why someone else - anyone else - someone with apparently impeccable ethical credentials, is not automatically a very good artist; often quite the opposite?

PS: And speaking of Celan, I was intrigued to discover through Buzzwords that a young writer called Donari Braxton has, in addition to writing prolifically his own work, translated Celan's collection Die Niemandsrose. He extracts one of my favourites Soviel Gestirne, translated here as So Many Stars.

Steven Pinker, philistine

In an excellent edition of The Quarterly Conversation, Dan Green provides a shocking insight into the philistine world of Steven Pinker, popular science writer and darling of the liberal media.

[In] the chapter on the biological origins of art and the appreciation of art [...] Pinker comes close to suggesting that art and literature are necessarily restricted to fulfilling biological functions assigned by human nature and that any artists or writers failing to meet the terms of these requirements are thereby derelict in their duties.

In [his] account, the culprits here are not merely the usual postmodern suspects so frequently identified by critics of contemporary art and literature, but can be traced all the way back to the early modernists: the painters and their “freakish distortions,” the fiction writers, with their “disjointed narration and difficult prose,” the poets who “abandoned clarity,” the “dissonant” composers unable to appreciate rhythm and melody, the whole lot producing nothing but “weird and disturbing art.” Given the public’s presumptive preference for the familiar and comforting, the work of modernists and postmodernists alike is characterized not only as artistic failure but as a kind of moral decadence as well.

I remember upsetting some of Pinker's fans when I expressed disgust at his recommendation of John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses, the literary critical equivalent of such narrow-mindedness. At the time, I wondered if I had gone too far. But Dan's review-essay convinces me otherwise, and I'm grateful for his informed resistance to presumptuous scientific approaches to art. (I made an indirect attempt myself on this blog some time ago).

Elsewhere, discussing the same work, Harold Fromm quotes Pinker about our recent past:

The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the twentieth century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship.

Well, rather pretentious and unintelligible than ignorant and plain wrong.

Not much

Edna O'Brien writes very surely about Beckett, ever nearing that significant date.

[He] often spoke of darkness and what made him tremble before the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and Jack Yeats was illumination wrested from darkness and the void.

Ah, it's a good thing now we have the electric light switch instead.