New Blanchot collection

For those of you with French, Chroniques littéraires du Journal des débats: Avril 1941-août 1944 is a new, 685-page collection from Gallimard of weekly reviews written by Blanchot.

A third of the reviews have already appeared in the English translation of Faux Pas and this collects the rest. It includes pieces on, among others, Dante, Rabelais, Descartes, Blake, Joyce, Mallarmé and Valéry.

The rest of us will have to wait for a translation :(

A crucial moment in the history of art

Adam Kirsch redeems himself from scorning book blogs by noting the utter wrongheadedness of Peter Gay's new book Modernism: the lure of heresy. Along the way, Gay writes "the modernist novel is an exercise in subjectivity" and "for Mondrian subjectivity was all". This "subjectivity", Kirsch writes

... is precisely what is missing from the most genuinely modern artwork. Where is the self in "The Waste Land," a poem that notoriously has no "I," and whose speakers seem to follow one another like voices overheard in a crowd? What could be more "objective" than the geometric grids of a Mondrian painting, which could almost be generated by an algorithm?

Gay's gross misunderstanding suggests that this grand overview of Modernism is worse than unreliable. Yet many other reviews have been respectful if not also full of praise. Rupert Christiansen notes only two "significant" errors, not one being Kirsch's, and says "one could recommend the book wholeheartedly to a bright A-level student or undergraduate in search of a broader picture", Sophie Ratcliffe hails it as "an enormous achievement" and Terry Teachout calls it a success and Modernism "a thing of the past".

What stands out in the reviews is the coverage given to the artists' extra-artistic opinions and behaviour. As Tim Rutten explains, Gay spends time assessing "T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism and Charles Ives' homophobia" and Knut Hamsun's "chilling idolatry of Hitler". While this is certainly relevant to Modernism, it isn't unique to it, as we know from Peter Ackroyd's biography of Dickens, so why the fuss? In this light it's significant for this history that Gay is, as Rutten also explains, "unsympathetic - even slightly uncomprehending - in his treatment of Samuel Beckett". Perhaps this is because Beckett doesn't offer such easy assimilation with biographical nuggets. He was above all an artist.

I've now got a copy of Gabriel Josipovici's review of the book hidden behind the Irish Times' pay wall. He calls the book "appallingly bad" and offers far more errors:

The Rite of Spring dates from 1913, not 1911; The Waste Land is not ‘five poems assembled under one title’, and to believe it is surely disqualifies one from speaking at all on the subject of Modernism; the figure with the enormous penis in Baselitz’s early painting, Great Night Down the Drain is not female (Baselitz tells us he was thinking of an image of Brendan Behan); L’Année dernière à Marienbad is not taken from a novel by Robbe-Grillet. And so on and on.

But his critique differs from all the others by arguing that Gay's discussion of Modernism as "a single historical epoch" is inadequate to the subject:

The book is a wonderful example of Walter Benjamin’s theses on history and his argument that because positivist history does not question it cannot get a handle on the multiform events that form the past. To compare Gay’s plodding 500 pages with five pages of Barthes or Blanchot or Erich Heller is illuminating: for them Modernism is not a period, like Mannerism, but a crucial moment in the history of art, when art arrives at an understanding of itself, a degré zéro beyond which there is only silence. Grasping this they can see what it is Modernist artists were really up to, from Mallarmé to Beckett, and they can see the relations of Modernism to Romanticism and beyond, to that first modern European intellectual and spiritual crisis, the Reformation. In so doing they are at one with the authors they are looking at. Compare Gay’s bland, ‘No doubt Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the choral last movement had much to answer for,’ with Wendell Kretschmar’s impassioned lectures in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus on why Beethoven never composed a third movement to the piano sonata opus 111 and on Beethoven and the fugue. In a few pages Mann succeeds in conveying the issues that faced Beethoven and have faced composers ever since, while Gay cops out comprehensively with his ‘much to answer for’. The best that can be said for this sorry production is that it provides us with a lesson on the poverty of a certain kind of history, but, at 500 pages, that is a lesson that most students will be happy to dispense with.

Poetic injustice

What's more absurd than a 15-day prison sentence for breaking blasphemy laws in Sudan? Well, a liberal democracy giving a nine-month suspended sentence to a naive young woman for writing bad poetry. Clive James must be really worried.

Scorning book blogs: replacing a deleted post

Apparently all my scorn in the post this replaces should have been directed at Adam Kirsch and not Gail Pool. Profuse apologies to Gail Pool. In mitigation, Wolcott's review is ambiguous about where the quotation comes from, though seeing as it's a review of a specific book, you would have thought such a long quotation would be from there. I deleted the post and replaced it with this near identical version, and though I'm sure it was covered at the time of publication, it still deserves a kicking.

Literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity, and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve.

The key words here being "I know". This is James Walcott quoting from Adam Kirsch's attack on book blogs. Kirsch fails to provide any specific examples of book blogs, but he wouldn't have written that sentence if he knew Dan Green's The Reading Experience or Richard Crary's The Existence Machine. And if he doesn't know either, then he is unqualified to generalise about book blogs. Not that it stops him.

The only useful part of most book blogs, in fact, are the links to long-form essays and articles by professional writers, usually from print journals.

The key words here being "only", "professional" and "usually". A professional editor would demand examples and clarification of the other two words. Another obvious use of book blogs is to provide self-satisfied professionals with a straw man, and if those useful links are "usually" to print journals, what do the exceptions reveal?

It so happens I'm also a professional writer, though not in the field I would prefer. What I consider more important is that which I write out of a need to speak. The last "long-form essay" I wrote was a year ago, about Richard Ford's Sportswriter trilogy. The form suited what I had to discover. Usually, however, a shorter blog post is appropriate. It's often much more of a challenge to write short. Sometimes I wish James Wood used a fifth of the words he writes nowadays. (Which reminds me of a critic of Derrida's long-winded style, influenced, he said, by having to pad-out three-hour seminars. Compare this with the concise reviews and essays by his friend and mentor Blanchot, who remained outside professionalism.)

And it's early days: book blogging is a new form of criticism under restraint. It has good, bad and indifferent practitioners. As a reader, I make the same decisions online as I make in the bookshop and the library. I don't dismiss fiction because of Tom Clancy anymore than I dismiss online criticism because of Amazon customer reviews.

Literary parasitism

In these seemingly anti-literary times, authors tend to do all they can to support literature; Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas is the first I've seen to treat it like a disease.

Scott Esposito in the superb Quarterly Conversation on my favourite novel of the year. It's a deceptively simple book to follow but fiendishly difficult to summarise. Scott does a brilliant job at that, and is quite right to recognise that it falls away in the second half. But what a fall ...

Derrida - the movie

Today I have been mostly watching this fascinating fly-on-the-wall documentary about Derrida (via Fark Yaralari). Halfway through I remembered it was on December 1st, 2000 that I attended a lecture given by Derrida at Sussex University to mark the opening of the Centre for Modern French Thought. It was so cold in the lecture hall that Derrida wore a white scarf while his host wore a black one. He came across then as he does here: austere yet warm. From what I can remember, he lectured on hospitality, arguing that we must welcome strangers into our lives as if they were family (I think he even said "we should offer them our beds"!). The audience, made up of the cheerfully curious and of career-focussed tutors and postgraduates, tore into his arguments with demanding questions. He welcomed them in the spirit of his lecture; something I appreciated even if I couldn't follow the discussion. Sadly, both Derrida and the Centre for Modern French Thought (which hosted a video of the event) are now closed.

N-n-n-nineteen

Joyce Carol Oates still bothers people — in all kinds of ways. For more than forty-five years she has been steadily producing novels, short stories, poems, essays, plays. Between the beginning of 2000 and the end of 2005 she published nineteen books. She has written over seven hundred short stories, more than Maupassant, Kipling, and Chekhov combined.

So Michael Dirda begins his NYRB review of four new Joyce Carol Oates books, including her journal. I read the review hoping that the journal might reveal something about her productivity. I wasn't disappointed.

Her journal tells us that she writes from 8 till 1 every day, then again for two or three hours in the evening. And she revises and polishes and reworks page after page after page. Such commitment, coupled with her literary fecundity, unnerves many people. Surely so many books can't be that good, that deeply felt, truly authentic?

Dirda answers with an emphatic No: "there can be no question of [her major novels'] power and conviction". But he can't help but return to the reception!

Still, Joyce Carol Oates distresses more than a few writers and critics. She can raise doubts and misgivings ... in nearly any novelist or essayist. Similarly, critics — on the printed page or in conversation — all too frequently deride Oates's work for its copiousness; some suggest it is the product of obsessive-compulsive behavior. Often, I suspect, this crude reductionism derives from reviewer's angst.

Dirda is almost certainly right in this latter suspicion (though it would have been nice to have some evidence). How can any reviewer possibly have a grasp of this novelist's oeuvre without devoting himself to weeks of research? Yet no matter how accurate, to me this remains a superficial answer. All productive artists generate a despairing envy of some kind, even in those who love what they produce. They are loved because they both mark stages on the way to one's own realisation and resented because they also close off another route.

Joyce Carol Oates' work evokes the same paradoxical despair one feels in a library, or when faced by the list of classics one has failed to read. Precious hope for one's realisation in a book is not diminished but dispersed. The task then becomes to write in every genre and in every form, and then to write every book ever written. For only in this way can one realise the hope of the book, the hope to say everything at last. Yet if one of the most prominent self-realisers cannot achieve this, what hope is there for us?

More Remainder

Tom McCarthy talks to Ed Champion about Remainder and repetition in a rich, two part makes-you-feel-stupid-but-inspired-too interview. I was enacting my own repetitive behaviour as I listened: cycling the same 26-mile route which includes what the great Miguel Indurain called "the côte de Ditchling Beacon“, a fourth category climb on the 1994 Tour de France (beat that cycling litbloggers!).

Just after reaching the summit, Tom spoke of how trauma, noted by both Freud and anti-Freudian neuroscientists, "instils a propensity to repeat, to return to the traumatic scene". In my case, however, the obsessive following of the same route seeks merely to erase uniqueness; I want the same non-experience each time. If anything happens along the way, I change the route. But isn't that what the guy in Remainder is doing too? The question reminds me of an aspect of the novel the interview mentions only once and very briefly yet has always bothered me. How does the trauma from the sky at the beginning of the book relate to its end in the aircraft? It's another way of asking how artistic creation relates to its cause. To me, the ending hints of the traumatic remainder in art's unworldliness.