Stupefiction

What is the inverse of the bildungsroman?

The stillness of midnight

The fact that there is fear, grief and desolation in the world is something he understands, but even this only in so far as these are vague, general feelings, just grazing the surface. All other feelings he denies; what we call by that name is for him mere illusion, fairy-tale, reflection of our knowledge and our memory. How could it be otherwise, he thinks, since after all our feelings can never catch up with the actual events, let alone overtake them. We experience the feelings only before and after the actual event, which flits by at an elemental, incomprehensible speed; they are dream-like fictions, restricted to ourselves alone. We live in the stillness of midnight, and experience sunrise and sunset by turning towards the east and the west.

Kafka, 2nd February 1920.

The future shouldn't be Orange

Natasha Walter says that we still need the female-only Orange Prize for Fiction because "judges of book awards still tend to see male writers as the safer, more authoritative choice". She laments that

the most prestigious prize-giving culture in Britain still often shows itself weirdly unable to recognise and reward the greatest writing, and for some reason books by women are still often the ones that lose out.

She insists that she not saying that this is because judges "consciously prefer work by men". So is it unconscious then? It's plausible I suppose, though ultimately indefensible. After all, one could say women unconsciously write lesser novels and justify this by pointing to how few women have won big book prizes.

More plausible is Walter's contention that an easy consensus is preferred: "The differing opinions [among the judges] tend to cancel each other out". Yet this is also an ultimately vague reason why certain novels win prizes and others don't. Booker winners Keri Hulme and Penelope Lively fit the bill for each side of the argument. Neither novel has lasted. And the most outstanding miscarriage of literary justice in recent times was Elfriede Jelinek winning the Nobel ahead of fellow Austrian Peter Handke - even the winner said so.

What seems really to trouble Walter is that her favourite novels didn't win:

When Zadie Smith's ferocious and heartfelt novel On Beauty lost out in the Booker race last year to John Banville's desiccated The Sea, it was only what one has come to expect from the Booker prize.

So here it is. Now that we're beyond the generalised complaints, we get literary critical judgement, which is far more interesting. Of course, other critics have said quite the opposite about these two novels. And what about Ali Smith's novel? Shouldn't that have won - if not, is Walter herself unconsciously denegrating a woman writer?

The larger issue here then is nothing to do with gender but authority itself. Prizes have replaced critical judgement. This is what literary journalists should be discussing. Why do we attach such an aura to prizes? Even if we claim, as I do, to take no great interest in the results, the blue spine of Banville's little hardback does glow a little bit bluer. I feel obliged to read it (and not chuck it aside as I did before it won). Yet the same could be said for all novels around which a fuss is made, such as On Beauty. If the reasons why a novel deserves a prize could be identified and examined then maybe each of us we'll find our own way to choose and judge novels. We could then persuade others to read them rather than rely on vague appendages such as "prize-winning".

Short views

Philip Roth says his work in progress is as relatively short as his latest work not in progress Everyman. In the same interview he says the latter was inspired by Saul Bellow's funeral. Coincidentally or not, around the age as Roth is now (73) Bellow published two novellas - A Theft and The Bellarosa Connection.

Elsewhere, I'm reminded that The Litblog Co-op has also recently been discussing issues of novel length. I'm all for shorter novels. Bellow himself referred at the time of his novellas to the "congestion of modern consciousness" and his own preference for taking, by way of Sydney Smith, short views. I think this should be encouraged. Indeed, some writers should not only write less but not write another word, while others should actually unwrite their novels.

Everynovel

Douglas Kennedy compares Philip Roth's "brilliant new novel" Everyman with Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. While the latter, he says, anaesthetises loss "with a bucket-full of balm", Everyman "confronts the nullity towards which we all travel"; "Roth spares us little when it comes to detailing the minutiae of disease". It seems to be strong contrast. Yet after reading the review and an extract (link via Rake's Progress), I wonder how different they are really; for what does that particular confrontation mean when it comes to narrative? Kennedy says:

Roth is not the sort of writer who trades in elegant metaphysical ruminations about death and its attendant mysteries. If anything, this novel is rooted in the realpolitik of human transience, and the horror of growing old.

But perhaps narrative is itself a kind of metaphysical rumination (even if it isn't the writer who does the thinking). It circles death as words circle silence. Is it impolite to mention this? For how can storytelling confront the end of life when it is itself something that never ends? After all, every novel can be read again and again. If Roth doesn't let his protagonist live on in heaven, as Sebold does, he cannot really kill his everyman. He is born again with each reading.

So, while Roth appears to resist Sebold's naive projection of the impossibility of narrative death into metaphysical hope, every novel he writes implicitly shares it. When Kennedy says

the genius of [Everyman] stems from the way that Roth turns his desolate assessment of death into something bracing: an angry acceptance that mortality is the price we pay for the sheer wonder of this thing called life

it suggests that the contrast he began with is only one of tact. Acceptance of death is the same whether it's angry or meek.

I should point out that this is not Roth's fault. Every novel does it. It's just that not all novels wish to recognise let alone confront it.

We're constantly being told that literature is not a substitute for life. That constancy should tell us something. We keep on having to remind ourselves. We retreat from life to reiterate its primacy.

Roth's acceptance of this might be why the narrative details of Everyman focus on the corporeal rather than explicit "metaphysical ruminations". What would his numerous fans - keen to present literary fiction with a human face - say if the novel included any reference to its contradictory status? How indeed might one include that status in form and content? I ask this question each time when confronted with the maddening immortality of literature.

The material of expression

My late night reading is Wallace Stevens' Collected Poetry and Prose. Last night, I reached the end of his 1942 collection Parts of a World and was surprised to see that it ended with a passage of prose not in Faber's Collected Poems. It has no title except "The Immense Poetry of War" added, it seems, by the editors:

The immense poetry of war and the poetry of a work of the imagination are two different things. In the presence of the violent reality of war, consciousness takes the place of the imagination. And consciousness of an immense war is consciousness of fact.

I knew this in slightly different form as an aphorism used by Paul Auster in The Invention of Solitude. He opened Opus Posthumous at random and read: In the presence of extraordinary reality, consciousness takes the place of the imagination. I quote this from memory of a book I last read in 1988. (Appropriately, in a pile of books I searched through, Stevens' poetry was found immediately below The Invention of Solitude but I can't yet find the Stevens reference).

The prose passage continues by doubting that such consciousness of fact is readily available to us in works of the imagination.

We leave fact and come back to it, come back to what we wanted fact to be, not to what it was, not to what it has too often remained. The poetry of a work of the imagination constantly illustrates the fundamental and endless struggle with fact. It goes on everywhere, even in the periods that we call peace. But in war, the desire to move in the direction of fact as we want it to be and to move quickly is overwhelming.

Putting the book down, I thought that maybe this helps explain my lack of enthusiasm for any young writer that I've read lately and the unease I also feel about banging on about writers long dead. I long for more fundamental struggles with the material of expression.

Stevens' words need not have been deleted for the Collected Poems even if they were meant for a wartime audience. Since that time, as he predicted, the desire for fact has been overwhelming. It ranges from VS Naipaul's vain rejection of fiction to young writers resort to self-consciously 'raw' subject matter in unconsciously dead prose. It's not a new thing but the misreading of a perennial failure. It's also a failure of nerve.

Another one of these dead writers to whom I'm always returning is Beckett, and this week's TLS provides another opportunity. It has Until the gag is chewed, Dan Gunn's marvellous essay (not online) on the correspondence of which he's an associate editor. He makes it very clear that when (and if) the four volumes are published they will "consitute a major addition to the Beckett corpus". Just one quotation from a 1960 letter to an Israeli writer is confirmation enough. It also reiterates Stevens' words whilst also pointing a way forward:

But the material of experience is not the material of expression and I think the distress you feel, as a writer, comes from a tendency on your part to assimilate the two. The issue is roughly that raised by Proust in his campaign against naturalism and the distinction he made between the "real" of the human predicament and the artist's "ideal real" remains certainly valid for me and indeed badly in of revival. I understand, I think no one better, the flight from experience to expression and I understand the necessary failure of both. But it is the flight from one order or disorder to an order or disorder of a different nature and the two failures are essentially dissimilar in kind. Thus failure in life can hardly be anything but dismal at the best, whereas there is nothing more exciting for the writer, or richer in unexploited expressive possibilities, than the failure to express.

NB

On the train, I read The Following Story, a short novel, chosen for that reason. The narrator says he read some Tacitus.

After that I read something about Java, for since losing my job I have written travel guides, a moronic activity whereby I earn my living, but not nearly as moronic as all those so-called literary travel writers who can't resist pouring out their precious souls over the landscapes of the entire planet, just to amaze the middle classes.

Checking Amazon, hoping to see news of a new novel, I see that instead there's Nomad's Hotel, published in February. In it:

Nooteboom gives us his unique view of the world, using his penetrative observation to show us the strangeness in places we thought we knew and the familiarity of places most of us will probably never see. A whimsical, hilarious, heartbreaking tour of the world.

The same sky

If I mark Spurious' 1000th phenomenal post, it will be only to regret the form the marking takes: this facile resort to critical comment.

I thought about it on Saturday afternoon as I looked out at the rain through the conservatory windows. A puddle forming on the slatted patio table reflected camellia flowers blooming above it - and the sky above them. Deadheads were rotting on the paving stones below. In those moments, I knew it had to end.