Imagining the price: the inevitability of Thursday

Many people have spoken of the strange sense of inevitability pervading our response to Thursday's events. It has been reflected in reports by survivors. We knew it was coming. For those of us who grew up knowing only regular IRA bomb attacks, the emotion is familiar; nostalgic even.

We’ve been expecting it for so long. When it happened, it didn’t seem real. It could have happened on the other side of the world. Iraq, for instance. And of course, it did.

What lies behind this feeling is the subtext of public comment. Some repeat, as if in a trance, that discussing it is defeatist or compounds the agony. But suppressing it now is to beg a question to which we already know the answer. Some have dared say it aloud.

Wednesday's surprise good news, in contrast to Thursday's, reminded me of the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics following its invasion of Afghanistan.

Why did the Mujahadeen want the Soviets to leave the country?

When a dove was released during the Games' opening ceremony, the famous British sports commentator David Coleman declared: 'What a hollow gesture that is considering events in Afghanistan'. Four years later, in Los Angeles, he did not refer to events in El Salvador and Nicaragua that were at least as bad as in Afghanistan. He probably didn't even know about them.

Of course the US wasn't exactly inactive back in Afghanistan either. The CIA trained, funded and gave succour to the Islamic militants who regularly captured and beheaded Russian conscripts. This didn't stop the latter getting invited to garden parties at Number 10 to be hailed as 'freedom fighters' by Margaret Thatcher. And who remembers Sandy Gall of ITN running around with these brutes dressed up as an Afghan? His book Afghanistan: Agony of a Nation has a foreword by the Prime Minister of the day. Oddly, it seems to be out of print!

What does their ambivalence toward the barbarity of the Islamic fighters tell us now?

It all seems so distant.

Yet it takes only a brief act of the imagination to relate to that ambivalence, and how it might be shared now by Arabs as they resist an alien ideology, occupation, humiliation and mass murder. Indeed, we feel the same way ourselves about the war crimes in Fallujah, barely reported in the press. It requires deliberate imagination. There is a blank however. We can only feel intellectual disgust. There is no story.

Many believe that to acknowledge the reasons for the London attacks is to give in to the terrorists. It's unclear though what 'giving in' looks like. Perhaps it refers to the Stockholm Syndrome, where 'giving in' would be to take sides with the enemy. For a long time I thought this was a cheap way of avoiding the issues. Now I realise that it isn't. Only we must not misidentify the kidnappers.

The BBC reports today that Tony Blair says the underlying causes of terrorism must be pulled up by the roots. He’s quite right.

He might remember that he was warned by security services that there would be a sharp rise in the risk of terrorism if Britain invaded Iraq. Against an overwhelming lack of evidence justifying the invasion, and against overwhelming public opinion, he decided it was a price worth paying. Three years ago, Tony Blair said told us we would pay 'the blood price'. On Thursday we began to pay it.

Justice, like charity, begins at home. Impeach Blair; arraign him for war crimes.

Criticism for the wilderness: Josipovici on Grimm

Regular browsers of this space will know of my enthusiasm for the fiction and criticism of Gabriel Josipovici. Other favourite authors of mine were often discovered following his reviews and recommendations. I think my original attraction to his work was due to his fascination with writing itself. He isn't ashamed to discuss the personal confrontation with the silence of writing. When I was reading seriously for the first time, English literary coverage invariably rehearsed a no-nonsense attitude, dismissing any reflexivity as ‘experimental’ at best and self-indulgent at worst. It still does. John Carey recently criticised the lack of English translations of world fiction but his criticism and prize jury chairmanship has encouraged this little Englander attitude.

Josipovici ignores fashionable concerns and writes about contemporary writers in the light of the entire European literary tradition. One can read about them in the same way one reads about Rabelais and Chaucer, Dante and Shakespeare. One begins to sense how similar they all are, and how utterly distant.

I seem to remember choosing to withdraw his 1977 collection The Lessons of Modernism from the local library because of the title of the first essay. I’d not heard of some of the essay subjects (Walter Benjamin, Fernando Pessoa) but the first is called An Art for the Wilderness: Franz Kafka. I thought: here is someone writing about what concerns me! I wasn’t wrong. However, once I got to know more of his work, I did wonder about his fascination with folk tales. I thought this was rather too close to the simple-minded fiction and literary criticism that had revolted me when I had started reading. (This can still be seen in my impatience with the blogosphere’s interest in graphic novels and cod-Victorian fiction). It seemed a world away from the ultra-sophistication of those influencing his fiction, such as Robbe-Grillet and Thomas Bernhard, Schoenberg and Harrison Birtwistle. (Incidentally, Book World is reading his 1994 novel Moo Pak and says it's "astonishingly good").

In the latest edition of the TLS, Josipovici explains the apparent opposition. He reviews a new edition of Grimm’s Tales and discusses the history of the Brother’s constant rewriting of the Tales as they became more and more popular:

[W]hat happened to the Grimm Tales in the course of their fifty years of tinkering with them was that they were transformed from tales told by speakers who, in one way or another, were deeply convinced that they were true (whatever meaning one assigns to the term true) into tales told by writers (Wilhelm Grimm, in effect) who did not believe in them and therefore substituted scene-setting, morality and psychology for truth. It also gives us a hint as to why a novelist like Dickens had the effect he had on his readers (and still does): he was one who knew ‘how to be a child’ [a reference to a comment by Kierkegaard]. However, it was perhaps Kleist alone among the writers understood what was really at issue here. His great novella, Michael Kohlhaas takes many of the elements that go to make up the Grimm tales and stands them on their head, bidding an anguished goodbye as it does so both to community values and to wishful thinking. But Kleist had no successors and, by and large, nineteenth century novelists and storytellers took the path of midrash and romance, still the staple diet of readers of twentieth century fiction, with neither writer nor reader quite believing in what they are doing, but under a strange compulsion to pretend that they do.

Perhaps the fascination with graphic novels, with genre fiction, and the wide readership of the Harry Potter series, is really the latest, desparate gasp of those compelled to pretend that they believe in romantic wishful thinking.

Lost in translation, part 94

The Guardian follows up John Carey's speech condemning the lack of new foreign translations by asking "some experts" for recommendations. Unfortunately, the last person one should ask, after John Carey himself, is the only one to nominate THREE names. Of course, not one of my pet names is mentioned.

Apropos of this, I thought, despite the many books I have already on the go, I would read Thomas Bernhard's Extinction again, for the fourth time. So I read the first page, with its long, exquisite, wrenching opening sentence. After that, the narrator goes on to list five books he wants his pupil to read. I realised that three of them don't seem to have been translated: Jean Paul's Siebenkäs, Robert Musil's The Portuguese Woman and Broch's Esch or Anarchy. At least, I couldn't find any editions.

The other two are Kafka's The Trial and Bernhard's own Amras, the latter of which can be found in the recently-published (though not in the UK mind) Three Novellas.

You are the murderer you seek

"Britain's literary scene is so parochial that there is virtually a conspiracy against readers experiencing the best of the world's literature". Yes, and I agree with John Carey's speech. "If such laxity had applied 50 or 60 years ago, "that would have meant, for the English reader, no Kafka, no Camus, no Calvino, no Borges," he said.

Funny, I don't recall seeing translations of the inheritors of such Modernist greats (Handke, Bernhard, Appelfeld, Hofmann, to name but four) getting much attention from the chief literary critic of the Sunday Times.

Kafka and Berlin

Mark Harman's essay Missing Persons: Two Little Riddles About Kafka and Berlin is full of interest. Kafka's reaction to watching Hamlet, the untranslated letters from Berlin to his parents and (especially) the mystery of the letters he wrote for a little girl found in a park weeping over the loss of a doll.

Reading Appelfeld's The Story of a Life

The very short seventh chapter of Aharon Appelfeld's memoir begins with a simple sentence: I met wonderful people during the long years of the war. 

He cannot recall many of them because "it went by in such a blur". Appelfeld was still only a child after all. "Children were like the straw on which everyone trod." 

The chapter remembers one particular woman who helped an abandoned four-year-old child as they awaited, with hundreds of others, Appelfeld among them, transportation from a Ukrainian railway station. 

With simple observation, description and dialogue Appelfeld revives a forgotten moment and makes it unforgettable. It is one of the most distressing things to read. 

This is easy to say. There's a tendency toward masochism and Schadenfreude in reading about those times. How is it really distressing? 

When I put the book down, I got on with my day. I have read such things before and carried on. Lawrence Langer's Holocaust Testimonies: the ruins of memory is full of similar stories where past or future are not provided for narrative enclosure. Langer's thesis is that video testimony offers a truer account of the holocaust (in psychological terms if not also historical) as the testifiers are less likely to engage in literary conventions (beginnings, middles and ends). 

As I got on with my day, one psychological effect that struck me was that I responded to the story in the way I respond to fiction. This is not to say I don't believe Appelfeld. It is not a question of belief. To answer it so would be to avoid the story itself. The story is only ever potential. This is distressing.

On the solitude of the long-distant blogger

Why did I add 'the fire's blog' to the title? (Actually, I'd prefer it to be lower case but the strip is hard-coded. If anyone knows how to change it without reloading a new template, please advise!)

I changed it because This Space is too bland. At first, I liked it bland. It is supposed to focus on the space of writing rather than what is apparently beyond it; a beyond that many other blogs, professing to be literary, assume to be literature's salvation.

So, thinking of Blanchot's La Part du Feu, I added the added bit. So what does that mean?

I'm not sure. In her introduction to the translation of Blanchot's book, Charlotte Mandell says the title The Work of Fire is 'inadequate to all portended' by the original. And a lot is portended! (In his review in th TLS, Gabriel Josipovici says he prefers The Fire's Share).

What I take it to refer to is the various roles of fire: to lighten, to heat and to destroy. The essays are about that part of literature incinerated when appropriated or adapted to culture. Most, if not all, of that which lightens and warms is destroyed when turned into cultural capital.

We soon turn our reading experience into cultural capital. Dan Green provides the resistance to its common manifestations, while Sandra of Book World links to an amusing and sinister example of its excesses. But the peculiarity of the literary experience makes such examples inevitable in sociopathic publications.

(This evanescent quality of literature also prompted the blog's title in the first place, as Blanchot wrote in Lautréamont & Sade: Critical discourse is this space of resonance within which the unspoken, indefinite reality of the work is momentarily transformed and circumscribed into words. And as such, due to the fact that it claims modestly and obstinately to be nothing, criticism ceases being distinguished from the creative discourse of which it would be the necessary actualization or, metaphorically speaking, the epiphany.)

There is still, however, in the rest of us, the sense of something other than chat about fashion, plot and character; of something burned away that cannot be spoken of and ordered so readily. It's there in the same people who write such nonsense as linked to above. Hence a near-universal frustration with literary discussion; a sense of inadequacy; a preference for silence, the carefree distress of inertia, the resort to cynicism and, more lately, infantilism, or as alternative to all these that is, in fact, no different: productivity.

I have practised most myself.

Perhaps this thing burned away is solitude; the movement of abandon in reading and writing that seems to be the precise opposite; a solitude experienced where solitude ends. But vice versa too.

A solitude that is not loneliness but the time when one is suddenly – slowly as a narrative proceeds and yet, all at once, in the first sentence – adandoned. Here, culture appears as the relief-giving fire break.

The limited experience: Laura Cantrell's new LP

This mp3 blog called Borrowed Tunes (presumably a reference to Neil Young's song) provides links to two songs from Laura Cantrell's gorgeous new LP Humming by the Flowered Vine. One is possibly the best upbeat track on the record, the other is the only dud (probably covered as a nod to the woman Laura is supporting on tour).

Borrowed Tunes tells us that her voice is somewhat limited. It's probably true. But is it really a criticism?

With this in mind for a moment, I thought of my favourite authors and remembered how James Wood called Thomas Bernhard "a drastically limited artist" (scroll to the entry for The Loser) - and I think: so what? My favourite writers are all limited: Blanchot, Josipovici, Appelfeld, Handke and, yes, Bernhard.

There's something about knowing your limits and making the most of them. Appelfeld does not go where others go. And I’d rather have the 154 pages of Concrete, and read it ten times, than read an expansive talent’s 1500-page soap opera even once.

And it's also why I'll listen to Merle Haggard rather than Wagner anyday.