The new age of anxiety

Evidence for a widespread anxiety about art abounds. In any one week you can read articles drenched in concern for its future. On the 2nd, Edward Rothstein (via TRE) observed that "art music has become almost quaintly marginal". On July 5th, John Freeman worried that the audience for the novel has been usurped by a TV series. On the 9th, Donari Braxton wrote that he can’t remember seeing anyone "pull out a collection of poetry on the subway and read through just for the sheer pleasure of doing so". It's a staple of print and blogs. On the 4th, there was a variant in Chris Wiegrand's call for "more respect" to be paid to Crime writers.

Of course, not one of these is really concerned about the future of art. They're concerned about the public life of art. Somehow, if "art music" meant something to those to whom it doesn't mean anything, if the viewers of The Sopranos would read "writers with plenty of lively ideas", if poetry critics didn't exclude the "layman" ... i.e the ninety-nine percent of the human-race who hasn't studied the intricate theoretical systems of Italian philosopher Agamben, and if genre fiction was given the same status as literary fiction then ... then ...then what?

Why is it that, from the conservative New York Times, to the liberal Guardian, to the "edgier waters" of 3AM Magazine, a personal engagement with a piece of music, a novel, a poem, is replaced by a search for wider cultural worth?

Perhaps it is the channeling of the true anxiety behind the public face. The art they wish more could experience involves not only the enchantment promised in all art, but also an exclusion. The Eden of modern art is a cold and bitter place. Mitigation of the sense of exclusion from the real thing is sought. Ian Rankin seeks it in the "biting exploration of contemporary social issues" offered by his crime novels. Might sociological studies be seen on future Booker Prize shortlists then?

The two together, enchantment and exclusion, constitute modern art and our experience of it. No matter how much one might embrace escapist art, the experience of exclusion remains - hence the denial inherent in nostalgia for the mythical golden era of Victorian fiction.

What we see every week is anxiety about personal exclusion. It would be better if critics, rather than hiding, mitigating or condemning the exclusion, brought out how the dual experience is liberating. However, this requires a certain amount of patience. Studying the intricate theoretical systems of Italian philosopher Agamben might also help too. Why protect people from it? I certainly recommend The End of the Poem and The Man Without Content. One trick I've found when reading supposedly difficult books is to, well, just read them.

Shakespeare without Company

Lee Rourke visits the Shakespeare & Co bookshop in Gay Paree.

It was horrible. So horrible in fact that I spent no more than five minutes in there. Just enough time to wander up and down the shoddy stairs and browse the shelves for Maurice Blanchot and Blaise Cendrars titles (of which they were disappointingly bereft).

Enough said. A bookshop in Paris without Blanchot is like a Waterstones without a 3 for 2 display.

Speaking of Blanchot, does anyone know anything about a rumoured translation of Christophe Bident's Maurice Blanchot: Partenaire invisible, an "essai biographique"?

In and outside the stories they tell

At last, Tim Parks makes the important distinction between Elfriede Jelinek and her influential predecessor:

The extremity of Jelinek's tirades soon won her comparisons with Thomas Bernhard, who had also remorselessly attacked the residual fascism of modern Austria. Seeking, in an interview with Gitta Honegger, a respected theater critic and biographer of Bernhard, to distinguish her approach from his, Jelinek claimed that as a man Bernhard "could claim a position of authority," projecting an identity with which readers could relate and giving a coherent, rhetorically convincing account of Austrian society, whereas, being a woman, even this form of "positive" approach was denied her; a woman working in a man's world and language could not present a coherent identity. [...]

However, one hardly need resort to feminist theories of language to see more obvious differences between the two writers. Bernhard's narrators are firmly placed within the stories they tell and a certain pathos attaches to the damage they do themselves with their constant negativity. In many of Bernhard's works (Frost for example, or the later Correction) we see a narrator drawn into the orbit of a strikingly negative figure and are invited to feel all the danger of his being seduced and destroyed by the other's despairing vision. There is never, that is, any complacency about what it means to see the world so darkly, nor a conviction that withdrawal is any solution.

Jelinek's narrator may constantly make her presence felt, addressing the reader directly and voicing the fiercest invectives, yet she remains resolutely outside the story, invulnerable in her sardonic detachment, her avoidance of experience. This separation is occasionally reinforced by reminding us that her characters are "only" creations, something Bernhard never does.

With apologies to Half Man Half Biscuit

They came for the Ian McEwan fans but I wasn't an Ian McEwan fan, so I did nothing.

They came for the Booker Prize committee that chose Vernon God Little but I wasn't on the Booker Prize committee that chose Vernon God Little, so I did nothing.

They came for the critics who claim Peter Handke "argued that the Srebrenica massacres never happened" but I wasn't a critic who claimed Peter Handke "argued that the Srebrenica massacres never happened", so I did nothing.

They came for the readers who think literary fiction should be more "accessible" but wasn't a reader who thinks literary fiction should be more "accessible", so I did nothing.

They came for the journalists who argue that Crime Fiction deserves to be taken "seriously" but I wasn't a journalist who argues that Crime Fiction deserves to be taken "seriously", so I did nothing.

They came for the soap fans who say if Shakespeare were alive today he'd be writing Eastenders, but I wasn't a soap fan who says if Shakespeare were alive today he'd be writing Eastenders, so I did nothing.

They came for Richard & Judy's Book Club and I think I'm right in saying I applauded.

They came for the bloggers who "confess" they haven't read each and every book in the entire history of English language publishing, but I wasn't a blogger who "confesses" he hasn't read each and every book in the entire history of English language publishing, so I did nothing.

They came for the admirers of The Intellectuals and the Masses but I wasn't an admirer of The Intellectuals and the Masses, so I did nothing.

They came for Julie Myerson and I said she's over there behind the wardrobe.
 

Sometimes it's best to turn a blind eye.

 

 

 

 

 

The nightmare of reason

Today is Kafka's 124th birthday. Here's the final paragraph of Ernst Pawel's biography from 1984 with the winning title: The Nightmare of Reason:

The world that Kafka was 'condemned to see with such blinding clarity that he found it unbearable' [a quotation from Milena's obituary] is our own post-Auschwitz universe, on the brink of extinction. His work is subversive, not because he found the truth, but because, being human and therefore having failed to find it, he refused to settle for half-truths and compromise solutions. In visions wrested from his innermost self, and in language of crystalline purity, he gave shape to the anguish of being human.

A little excessive perhaps, though accurate enough, even if I'd say his "innermost self" was his innermost non-self too and that giving shape to anguish is the opposite of anguish. Anyway, for Kafka, reason was as problematic as faith. Earlier in the book, Pawel writes of how this manifested in his work:

Obedience to the spirit of the law presupposes knowledge of its letter. But knowledge breeds doubt, and as the letter of the law began yielding up the infinite ambiguities of its spirit, interpretation became the task of a lifetime, an endless “process” to which each generation contributed its share, expanding and refining the interpretations of the previous one, heaping comment upon commentary ad infinitum, a way of life by which reason seeks to justify faith.

This tension between faith and reason, the dynamic, ever-precarious balance between essentially irreconcilable opposites, is at the heart of Jewish tradition and a source of its enduring vitality. And the struggle of Joseph K., incapable of compromise like his creator, to reason his way to faith owes its inspiration far more to that heritage than it does to neurosis, literature, or politics.

(Let it pass that 'literature' is inseparable from K's struggle).

Lately, the loudest champions of reason have refused to respect let alone justify faith. And while Dan Hind's new book from Verso entitled The Threat to Reason does not seem to redress that imbalance exactly, it does confront "the great machinery of deception" reason has set up to deny its reliance on the unquestioning faith. For further chat around the subject, see Dan's blog and the ongoing interview at ReadySteadyBook.

New Gert Hofmann paperback

It still hasn't been published in the UK, but later this month New Directions is already issuing a paperback of Gert Hofmann's sublime Lichtenberg & the Little Flower Girl. If - like at least one journalist - you thought Kehlmann's Measuring the World was an outbreak of Germanic lightness and storytelling, then this should help open new literary vistas. As the translator says: It's probably the zaniest, gloomiest, and funniest thing you've read in a long time, if not ever. Do yourself and literature in general a favour and read it.

John Carey Watch

Dan Green reads Prof John Carey's latest circular to the masses:

What Good Are the Arts? is a very strange book. Its first half seeks to demonstrate that art doesn't really exist and that, if it does, it doesn't do anyone any good. The second half essentially ignores the case that Carey has just made and asserts that art does indeed exist after all and does some people quite a lot of good.

A Sunday afternoon ramble around the ramparts of authority

I hadn't taken much note of Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur. From the reviews and blogs, I had assumed the book was just another liberal apologia for turning back the tide of democracy. It's been on the fast track to the top of review pages and radio shows like Nick Cohen, Melanie Philips, Clive James and Christopher Hitchens in recent months. Hence his appearance on Radio 3's Arts podcast last week, which is where I heard his creepy, Clive Barkeresque mid-Atlantic drawl. I had assumed right. But I don't wish to counter his arguments. One need only read James Marcus' "tiny codicil" to his LA Times review to realise the book contains more than lazy assumptions.

Marcus himself is an argument against Keen. Do readers afford authority to his blog because he also writes for the LA Times; does the blog diminish the authority of the LA Times? Keen's book is a product of this two-way question of authority. He wants to raise it for digital media only because he's content with the authority that has already buried the question. The book's subtitle (which Marcus calls "faintly hysterical") is revealing: "How the Democratization of the Digital World Is Assaulting Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values". It reminds me of those newspaper liberals putting on a serious face and asking: "Should we bomb Iran?". As if the decision had anything to do with us. The use of the word is there to corral readers into a false community. As if "culture" was in our possession. What would it mean for it not to be in our possession? Answer: the kind of anxiety Keen is keen to feed and exploit.

Narrowing the focus to literary culture, most books corral without raising their voice. A book gains authority through its mere bookness. But all writing appropriates authority. The trick it allows is generally overlooked, taken for granted. In everyday life, this is necessary. We don't sit around discussing newspaper articles as newspaper articles. We discuss the subject. We discuss the article's relation to an issue of reality. We might even question its veracity. But when a novel is celebrated, there is a curious vaccum. If we celebrate it for its existence as a novel - by definition, a literary book, existing solely as itself - what exactly are we celebrating? One can leap for the subject matter - post-apocalyptic USA for example - and praise it for insights into current social and political issues. But this isn't why anyone reads a novel. It's always a sop to social progress and education. Nabokov rightly called such readings "childish". Then there's celebrating it for being "a thumping good read", keeping the reader from enduring the real world for a few precious and harmless hours. But so would sleeping, having a bath or watching Pirates of the Caribbean 3. So why put a novel on a cultural pedestal? Instead we might tell how we luxuriated in the precision and beauty of the novel's prose. But is this anymore culturally-refined than a fresh pillow, the fragrance of apricot creme or Keira Knightley's bone structure? What is it that gives a novel a unique cultural authority?

No wonder genre fans are perplexed at the way brilliantly-orchestrated detective novels or horror tales or SF tetralogies fail to win the attention and respect given to Man Booker or Pulitzer winners. Last week, Matthew Cheney made a despairing attack on those who blame the failure on cultural commissars. He argues that there is no "literary establishment" keeping SF in its place; there is no "literary elite" scheming to promote Cormac McCarthy without giving similar credit to speculative fiction; there is no "literati" and it doesn't "dictate what books are in and out of the literary canon". All true but, by the same token, literature doesn't exist either. The paranoia behind the claims of Cheney's essay writer is evidence of a faith in the literary that is unable to appreciate its uncertain status. I'm sure the same "literary establishment" shares that faith, otherwise it wouldn't promote as "literary" deeply conservative writers. There really isn't a great deal of difference between genre writers and those who write sentences like "Between Edward and Florence, nothing happened quickly". Supreme confidence in the form is present in both. Literary fiction, the real thing, is full of doubt and ambivalence yet still manages to find a way to move forward.

Ellis Sharp is right to guess that I was unaware of the interview with the author of the sentence quoted above. In it he expresses gratitude to various US authors like Roth, Mailer and Bellow for showing "formal ambition, real sense of engagement, not cramped by modernism, really democratic in outlook" [sic] as opposed to Europe which "was still stifled by modernism, a rather detached form of elitist writing". It's always wonderful to discover writers who set one free. It's odd then that his own novels have remained so detached and stifling.

It's got to be a genuine freedom of course. One can't jettison doubt like an emigrant on Ellis Island leaving Europe behind. It has to be more like the freedom of Artur Sammler. Bellow is a great example of finding a way between the crippling self-consciousness of the exile and the promise of animal freedom, without denying either - a great modernist in other words. McEwan's contrast is as deceptive as his liberalism. Significantly, he doesn't name the detached elitists of Europe. Could he mean the great modernists still writing when he was studying at UEA: Nabokov, Bernhard and Beckett? One wonders if he was talking to a European journalist he'd say something different; praise the dazzling lucidity of Handke for example (see the rear cover of the UK hardback of Absence). The triumph of European modernism was to find a way to speak after the cataclysms of the 20th Century. The threat of being stifled was very high. It's no surprise that some took refuge in detachment. But you've got to do the filtering yourself, create your own personal canon, become your own literary establishment, form your own literary elite and then help others to do the same. It sets you free. There isn't much sense of community though, unless you count the internet.