A letter to the TLS about an obscure and experimental novel

From this week's TLS letters page.

Sir, – Apropos Justin Beplate’s essay on James Joyce (April 29): looking for a book to keep me busy over a weekend in my first year at the University of Cape Town in 1958, I found a fat green book among the novels of the Jagger Library, by someone I hadn’t then heard of. I read it through, not quite in one sitting, but in twenty-four hours. On Monday, I sought out Professor Guy Howarth to tell him I had found this marvellous novel, Ulysses, by an Irish writer called Joyce. Did he know it? Howarth was as always very kind: yes, he had heard of it – and he was glad I had enjoyed it. Thank goodness no one had told me it was difficult; and ever since then I have tried to persuade pupils to read Ulysses just like that, as fast as they can, sliding over anything they can’t at first understand, without worrying about any critical expositions; my hope is that some of them will have reacted as I did all those years ago: with delighted hilarity.

JONTY DRIVER 
Northiam, East Sussex.

Revolution? What revolution?

One wonders what the media outcry would be like if Uzbekistan was an official enemy. The blogosphere seems untroubled by it too. Perhaps it's a state too obscure and experimental to matter?

RSB is France, I'm Germany: on the LitBlog Co-Op

The Lit Blog Co-Op (LBC) unites "the leading literary weblogs for the purpose of drawing attention to the best of contemporary fiction, authors and presses that are struggling to be noticed in a flooded marketplace."

So now the literary blogosphere is like the World Series and the United Nations.

Yesterday, many of us were perplexed by the LBC’s landmark first Read This! nomination because it signally failed to meet the one criterion that is empirically demonstrable. In addition to its own, The Complete Review lists fifteen reviews of the nominated novel in major publications. It is ironic that this abandoned criterion is why those of us excluded from membership of the LBC by geography were keen to give the LBC a warm welcome.

In defence of the choice, the LBC’s impresario TEV dismisses criticism by qualifying the criterion with another unprovable one. Apparently enviable amounts of press attention does not equal a readership. One can only wonder why.

In an off-hand expression revealing a distressing intolerance, TEV adds that if the project had "picked some obscure, experimental novel" it would have been "pilloried for being pedantic and elitist". We will never know what this obscure, experimental novel is, nor who would do the pillorying or why it would matter. Perhaps it only exists in manuscript, struggling to be noticed by those too busy pillorying?

But all novels are obscure and experimental. All novels are sui generis. Or should be. The rest is just the bland fodder of the Reading Group and the marketplace.

Aftermath: Grumpy Old Bookman and The LitBlog Co-Op on Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

It is evident that Grumpy Old Bookman (aka GOB) loves reading. He gets great enjoyment out of prose narrative. He also knows where it is guaranteed. "The genre writer" he says "is required, by both publisher and readers, to make the book interesting, exciting, accessible, and rewarding." One can rest easy then. This is why he reads genre fiction and not "literary writers". These people "apparently feel themselves under no such obligation, which is why I, for one, don't bother with them much."

Evidence for this last point is his response to Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories. He finds it hard going. In the end he does see virtues: "if the material had been organised differently [it] could have been an impressive novel indeed. But it would have been an impressive crime novel. And that, I suspect, is something that Kate Atkinson and her publisher would rather die than admit."

The puffs he quotes for the novel suggest he is right. The publisher (if not the author) seems to want to attract the ready audience of crime fiction with its statutory interest, excitement and accessibility. Yet it also wants the obscure rewards of Literary Merit. GOB is rightly contemptuous. The author, he says, should "just put aside all fancy-pants notions, stopped believing what the critics say about her, and concentrated on doing a good professional job for the reader."

One could unpack GOB’s assumptions until the cows come home. I would like to. But it would be futile. His definition of what is "interesting, exciting, accessible, and rewarding" is definitively circular. I could not make him recognise a literary novel. Yet his blindness usefully reveals the problems of the taxonomy of novels. What is it about literary fiction that is specifically literary?

ReadySteadyBook tells us that Case Histories is "as interested in the after effects of violence as in the acts themselves". This not usually the province of narrative. A review published today says of a new memoir that "[it] is rare to read about the aftermath". In another, older review, I write about my fascination with the subject and how it has manifested in literary form in one particular novel.

Of course, those concerned with "doing a good professional job" will not be troubled by what proceeds from the events they describe let alone what proceeds from writing itself. This is the reward of genre fiction. The moment you are distressed by what you're reading or writing, the moment you realise that instead of telling a story it conceals it, that instead of revealing truth it buries it in lies, that instead of expressing an emotion it kills it, is the first moment of the aftermath. Literature proceeds from here. It takes as many forms as there are great writers. For example, it is the revelation of Kafka’s The Judgement. One can understand why this is resisted: it seems to destroy literature. Resistance is part of The Judgement, but it cannot ignore what is beyond.

Case Histories is also featured by the Lit Blog Co-Op. The encomium from Old Hag displays the repression of distress at the predicament of the aftermath: "Each paragraph, each page, each chapter unfolds with perfect precision, the prose and pacing fully shaped. There's nothing flowery about the words, but no stripped-down drama either." So is this what constitutes the literary element - mere shapeliness? If it is, don’t worry: "The reader can also luxuriate happily in the plot." Apparently "there’s a distinct pleasure in watching someone handle what is essentially a stock murder mystery with expert literary precision". But where’s the difference? This is criticism that raises vagueness to a level of perfection. No wonder GOB thinks it is "fancy-pants".

PS: The Lit Blog Co-Op’s aim is to promote contemporary fiction "struggling to be noticed in a flooded marketplace". A necessary good! I look forward to it beginning.

The first immensity: "How Art Made the World"

Last night the BBC began to broadcast a new documentary series How Art Made the World. There's a long questionnaire on the site called Art and Personality. It allows you to take part "in an experiment designed by UK psychologists" by giving your response to visual art.

The documentary itself was irritating, formulaic and horribly padded ("To answer this question we must go to [insert exotic location]"). It almost ruined the fascinating story it had to tell. And, as is usual with the BBC, there was not one living artist or philosopher in sight; only archeologists and a psychologist called VS Ramachandran.

I wondered what this series might be like if those who made it had any real feeling for art. I thought of Maurice Blanchot's eleven-page essay The Birth of Art and dug out my notes from the last time I read it (in preparation for last October's entry Struck by Death). He's writing about the cave paintings of Lascaux.

- Commanding presence; a space almost intentionally devoted to the brilliance and marvel of painted things.
- The place from which art shines forth.
- The first ray, first and yet complete.
- Art is revealed to change infinitely, ceaselessly renew itself but cannot improve. Its perpetual birth.
- This thought is an illusion, but it is also true. It propels our admiring search.
- Coming from a world with which we have nothing in common, the barest outline of which we cannot suspect … yet an intimate space of knowledge.
- The power of art is close to us everywhere … but escapes us.
- Why this need for origin, why this veil of illusion with which all that is originary seems to envelop itself?
- A mocking, essential dissimulation; perhaps the empty truth of first things.
- Why does art let us believe in the enigma but also put an end to it?
- Magical rites expressing a mysterious relation between hunters and animal kingdom.
- Natural, joyful, prodigiously clear in the darkness of the caves.
- Carefree, without ulterior motive.
- Nothing archaic about the cave paintings, nothing like the contorted, overburdened art of today’s “primitives”.
- Mysterious but not an art of mystery or of distance.
- The only happiness of artistic activity: the celebration of the happy discovery of art.
- Prohibitions broken “exalting him far beyond his original existence”.
- The infinite time when the pre-man, before being a man, becomes a worker.
- We are ignorant of the “feeling” experienced by that worker occupying, for the first time, a place apart.
- Everything seems to indicate that man retained a memory of distress and horror of his first steps into humanity.
- Everything forces us to think … latent man always felt himself infinitely weak in everything that made him powerful. Either because he sensed the essential lack which alone enable him to become something completely other, or because he experienced as a mistake everything that led him to fail nature.
- The separation revealed destruction and death.
- He used the void to deepen his weakness to become stronger.
- Prohibitions around sex, death and murder. Barriers preventing the being who goes beyond them from coming back, forcing him to continue along the dangerous, doubtful path, a dead end, and thus to protect us from all forms of activity that are tedious and against nature and have their final form in work and through work.
- What is Neanderthal man lacking? The ability to break the rules.
- Two leaps, two moments of transgression.
1) Fortuitously does violence to the natural givens, but which did not suffice.
2) The transgression is an instant; the time of difference when prohibitions are violated; the gap between man and his origin is put into question once again, recovered, explored, experienced; a prodigious contact with all of anterior reality, and this is a return to the first immensity.
- Becomes tumultously conscious of this impossible return.
- No dream of total existence but affirms himself as added to existence and becomes master of everything, appropriate it symbolically.
- The consciousness of this distance as it is affirmed, abolished, and glorified.
- Art brings a feeling of communication at a distance and yet immediate; an affirmation no particular meaning can attain or exhaust.
- The disconcerting thought that man does not become a man through all that is human in him.
- The paintings are set apart by the impression they give of appearing only momentarily; not nocturnal but rendered visible by night opening up.
- Presence made up of certainty and instability. More certain that any other visible thing.
- Always a lacuna where origins lie.
- The origin always veiled by what it produces.
- The mutation that could not occur without having already occurred.
- Art comes after man but art is man’s contact with the power of beginning.
- The little human figure who feels seriously threatened by this work and perhaps already struck by death.

Soar point: on a review of a Serbian novel

I was pleasantly surprised to find the latest online edition of the LRB includes a review of a translated Serbian novel. Usually, if this journal reviews a novel (there are a mere two in the print edition!) it discusses a novel that has already got plenty of attention elsewhere (Gilead was the most recent). I had not heard of Svetislav Basara before, but he’s not that famous in Serbia either so the reviewer Daniel Soar says. I assumed that the author must be a favourite of the reviewer, as how would such a book get a longish review in a prestigious publication without special pleading? But no. It seems Soars is using the novel to poke some gentle fun at the small European novel that isn’t like the "supercharged literature" of Anglo-America. He makes it clear that the novel is tiresomely self-satisfied. However, the apparent ease with which Soars dismisses the novel means he also succumbs to the same thing. The review features the traditional reference to an unnamed suave elite chattering among themselves (hence the title of the review) and ends with a glib comment that helps no-one (except the reviewer to meet his deadline). I would welcome review space being given over to more in-depth discussions about what is otherwise concealed in snide comments. (I have to say though, I do appreciate his comments about John Berger!). As Daniel Soar is an editor at the LRB, perhaps he can have an influence.

As an alternative, I’d recommend Enrique Vila-Matas’s Bartleby & Co, a charming collection of notes about writers who stop writing. It has the same lightness as David Markson’s This is Not a Novel and reiterates Blanchot’s fragment: Not to write: what a long way there is to go before arriving at that point!

Paratexts and the inexpressible nothing

What meaning have yesterday’s conclusions today? They have have the same meaning as yesterday, are true, except that the blood is oozing away in the chinks between the great stones of the law. Franz Kafka, Diaries 19 January 1922.

Even before I knew it was a specialism in literary studies, paratexts fascinated me. Paratexts are the material of a book other than the actual text: blurbs, titles, subtitles, dedications, epigrams, that sort of thing, even the author’s photo or lack of it. When I began a PhD thesis on literary distance (Blanchot calls it "the silence unique to literature"), I used a digression on epigrams to delay the main work. I asked: how should one regard these thresholds of texts? Who is speaking in them and why? Is an epigram being used to clothe an otherwise naked text? Were they meant only to direct our reading, or are there deeper issues involved? The questions piled up. (At the time I didn’t know they were called paratexts. In fact, I didn’t know they were called paratexts until about two weeks ago when I read about Gérard Genette’s book Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. I emphasise that I read about it; the book is over £30 to buy and impossible to borrow. Is the price a paratext?).

I abandoned the PhD for the same reason as I began it: distance. There was too much of not enough to say. But mainly, I didn’t want to write within the contraints demanded by scholarship. I felt that it repressed the real, existing nausea within the subject under discussion. Repression seemed to be the reason for the constraints. The spaces within that discussion remained undiscussed. They remained distant. Paratexts seem to offer a way in to these spaces, but take one look at an example of the specialist literature and nausea will likely become liquid filling your mouth too.

I felt a similar nausea watching non-Nazi Pope Benedict XVI’s inauguration. As he intoned the Latin phrases, I got the impression of witnessing (no pun intended) a mass Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: rituals with no metaphysical bearing (anymore), yet because they are so deeply embedded, they afford the illusion of order and of hope. Paratexts do the same thing. Narrative does the same thing. No doubt this is a good thing: we read (or at least I read) to rediscover each time the gift of order and of hope. But the idea of this good thing is often ritualised itself and anything that might contradict or disrupt this idea has to be out-flanked by paratexts. It can take the form of introductions, blurbs, quotations from reviews, even the design of the cover. In this way the work itself becomes a paratext of its paratexts.

Example: I began to read a translation of Guiseppe Ungaretti’s poetry in the clean, seductive and beautiful edition published by Carcanet. It has a generous introduction by Andrew Frisardi, the translator. Yet after 19 pages of background information, commentary and a definition of Hermeticism, the first poem is only eleven words long (twelve if you count the title)!

Eternal
Between one flower plucked and the other given
the inexpressible nothing

The collection from which this is taken is called L’allegria or Joy. I smiled, at least, for this morning’s post brought Edith Grossmann’s much-praised translation of Don Quixote. It has 940 pages and – oh God! - an introduction by Harold Bloom. Yes, I want to read it, but I often think one cannot get much more out of literature than those eleven words on their own; twelve if you count the title.

The gift of narrative: why genre fiction is the new literary fiction

There are always two books by my bedside. Never one or three. Always two. However, I only ever read one before switching off the light. This is always a novel that I can sink into, similar to the way one sinks into sleep, but not the same way. The two mentioned in the entry below were consecutive bedside books (although they never constituted both bedside books). The entry about them was begun with the intention of wondering aloud about that sinking into and how it is not like sinking into sleep. I’m not sure that I did write about it. Maybe I was distracted from writing about it because it really is closer to sinking into sleep than I am aware, because in writing about it I did actually sink into something enough to forget it, even if, at the end, I did remark on how both novels present that sinking into as part of the narrative or background to the narrative. But I wanted to do more than remark. Why is that presentation important to me?

The other book on the bedside, the one that lay under the two novels mentioned below, is volume five of In Search of Lost Time. When I run out of a narrative to sink into, I resort to Proust. Currently, I am resorting to Proust. Volume five is the only multi-book volume in the new Penguin collaborative translation. It contains The Prisoner and The Fugitive; books five and six of the novel’s seven volumes. I’ve scaled 500 pages so far. It’s a joy.

Virginia Woolf said that in the months the novel takes to read, one feels more alive. This is because Proust writes so lightly and fluently about what seems so heavy and entangled; it brings light to one’s own heavy and entangled life. Not that the light is always soft; it is often glaring. Volume five is particularly harsh for those trying to still the anguish of an unhappy love. Marcel, the narrator, seeks normality too: I tried to think of nothing, to pick up the newspaper. But I found it insufferable to read all those articles written by people who felt no real pain.

Reading that, I thought: so would reading something written by a person in real pain (and writing with it in mind) be sufferable? Is this why reading Proust does not seem like other novels in general, because he writes with the constant threat of real feeling overwhelming the palliative of a contained narrative? (I won't detail how this occurs in the novel as I don't want to spoil it for anyone).

Mark Thwaite, tireless editor of ReadySteadyBook (which is fast becoming Britain’s premier literary website) has just started the long climb and rather confirmed this when he told me that he finds In Search of Lost Time "eminently readable, very gentle [and] wholly anti-novelistic". Perhaps that is what defines literary novels; that they are not literary.

When I read novels in general (genre-al), what troubles me is not what I believed it to be in the recent past - a lack of concern with form and language – but an over-concern. It’s a concern that manifests in a denial of what it cannot accommodate - the real feeling beyond the local palliative of the narrative order. Once established as a popular retreat, the form of the novel has become a world in itself to be mastered and exploited with all the talent and ingenuity that we've come to admire and which seduces the industry of reception (though the latter seems to come before the former). Here, we think, is the gift of literature. But it is a gift the greatest writers do not receive.