Apostle of impassioned sincerity: My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard

“It is not every day one is sent a masterpiece to review”,  wrote Gabriel Josipovici in reviewing WG Sebald's The Emigrants; “(I suppose one is lucky if it happens more than once or twice in a lifetime)”.

I started writing reviews in the year Josipovici's review was published (1996) and had not read a book by an author entirely new to me that I believed was a masterpiece. As I read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, I thought that this is perhaps the closest I will ever get. Such is the reach of the word masterpiece beyond craft and industry considerations, my instinct was not to review at all but to thrust the book into the hands of friends for whom reading is absolutely central to their lives (not many).

But I must write something. Reading My Struggle was often like reliving fragments of my own life – an intensity resonating in a void – and a review would mean explicating this in formal terms, and that wouldn’t be right. Yet the terms available seemed too personal, something to be shared only by handing the book over in silence. How then to recommend? This is perhaps the gift of reading: others can open doors. Josipovici spends most of his Sebald review describing a twenty-page short story rather than racing through a summary of all four:

Like all good art, the form and the style bring into being what would otherwise have remained in darkness and silence for ever, so that a mere account of what the story was ‘about’ would not have begun to do it justice.

This is good advice for any reviewer: stick to what you believe is important. My Struggle (published in the UK as A Death in the Family) is 471 pages long and is ‘about’ the relatively normal, middle-class life of a Norwegian male born in 1968, so even an extended account would say very little (almost nothing), and while Knausgaard’s ability to make the unremarkable resound means the detail is vital, it is its framing that brings the book to vivid life. 

Knausgaard has explained how his difficulty in writing led to the specific form of the book: “I was looking for language ... to tell the story about my father.” His father had left his family, began a new relationship and then became an alcoholic. Before Knausgaard had “tried to write a kind of regular, realistic but fictional work about his death. Nothing worked.” Then he found the solution: “Eventually I just started to write it as it was. I gave up all ambition, I didn’t try to be clever or anything: I just tried to write as fast as I could.” Except the book does not begin with regular memories nor, as in so many careless novels nowadays, drops the reader in medias res into a voice-world providing its own alibi. Instead it begins with a confrontational prologue about dead bodies in modern society. Death, he writes, is all around us and we even consume media in which violent death is the main attraction, yet its physical reality is repressed.

A town that does not keep its dead out of sight, that leaves people where they died, on highways and byways, in parks and car parks, is not a town but a hell. The fact that this hell reflects our life-experience in a more realistic and essentially truer way is of no consequence. We know this is how it is, but we do not want to face it. Hence the collective act of repression symbolised by the concealment of our dead. What exactly it is that is being repressed, however, is not so easy to say.

He contrasts the physical reality of bodies in basement mortuaries with their digital abstraction: “One is associated with concealment and gravity, earth and darkness, the other with openness and airiness, ether and light.” The images of death, no matter how graphic, “have no weight, no depth, no time and no place, and nor do they have any connection to the bodies that spawned them. They are nowhere and everywhere.” What is the purpose of this severe opening full of examples with which we are all familiar? Knausgaard finally includes one we're unlikely to know, a news report of a fishing boat lost off the coast of Norway in which the crew of seven drown, which he then blends seamlessly into a childhood episode because he saw news footage from a helicopter flying over the scene (with his emphasis):

I stare at the surface of the sea without listening to what the reporter says, and suddenly the outline of a face emerges. I don’t know how long it stays there, a few seconds perhaps, but long enough for it to have a huge impact on me. The moment the face disappears I go to find someone I can tell.

The only person nearby at the time is his father, a stern man, a head teacher after all, who tells him not to give it another thought. For many, not giving it another thought is no problem, and My Struggle will probably leave them nonplussed (the allusive title is likely meant for those who may regard the whole enterprise as arrogant and self-indulgent), but for Karl Ove Knausgaard it is the beginning of thought. What did he see?

Throughout the book there are variations of the face-in-the-sea incident and for Knausgaard and the reader each one has the promise and terror of an imminent revelation, which never in fact occurs (much like Roberto Bolaño's 2666, though the similarities end there). From a distance, they can appear banal. Sometimes he is able to identify windows on the experience and provide an interpretation. Looking at a book of Constable’s paintings for instance:

I didn’t need to do any more than let my eyes skim over them before I was moved to tears. So great was the impression some of the pictures made on me. Others left me cold. That was my only parameter with art, the feeling it aroused. The feeling of inexhaustibility. The feeling of beauty. The feeling of presence. All compressed into such acute moments that sometimes they could be difficult to endure.

Another is when the elderly poet Olav H. Hauge reads a poem on his driveway to a youthful Knausgaard and his mates. He finds it in music, having at one time a poster of John Lennon – “the apostle of impassioned sincerity” – over his desk. The epithet suits Knausgaard himself and Don Bartlett’s translation is especially convincing and memorable in evoking such passion and sincerity.

The immense and visceral detail describing Karl Ove’s family and friends has contributed to the news media controversy surrounding the book and will no doubt detract from the necessity of its form, as will summarising the face-in-the-sea experience as “religious” or “mystical”. Like his grand amour for a girl called Hanne, it is the everyday unknown. Also in the same movement of distraction, Proust is invoked as the main precursor, though only Boyd Tonkin has singled out the reason as Knausgaard’s “microscopically detailed account of how [the book] came to be written”. The other major influence would seem to be Thomas Bernhard, whose father also died in mysterious circumstances and who also describes each turn of his life with preternatural precision. The collective title of his great five-book memoir Gathering Evidence is a good pointer as to why, as well as Knausgaard’s expressed admiration. The author’s need to understand his father’s trajectory from family man to squalid drunk requires access to the unknowable, to the physically dead, and the only alternative he discovers is to piece together evidence of his own experience – experience of his father and of everything else – and, now as his father’s equal in age and social position – to try to pinpoint the origin of the descent. Only then might something remarkable emerge from darkness and silence. And it does.

To be of use: The Art Kettle by Sinéad Murphy

An art book is a curious item. Lifting the unusually heavy cover and flapping ahead to the large colour plates, one anticipates pleasure not only in looking at the art itself without the peculiar unease of galleries – departure lounges without destination, waiting rooms without delay – and with all the attention enabled by languid time and solitude, but also reading about the art. This is where the gift may be fully unwrapped. Except one soon rediscovers that there nothing in books quite as awkward and unsatisfying as reading about art. Embarking on paragraph setting the scene of, say, an allegorical landscape, one is impatient to turn to the particular plate to see again for oneself. The same is true when the author discusses the technical properties of the work, its critical context and its family tree. In the identical original gallery movement, however, one's eyes leave the painting to seek the caption and, a moment later, the related text one had impatiently abandoned. The next impulse is to put the book away and visit the gallery again, or perhaps abandon the subject altogether. Art appreciation sometimes appears less a process of discovery and growth than an unsatisfying, moth-like fluttering between partial illuminations. Why this oscillation in the dark?

Sinéad Murphy’s dissatisfaction with art is of a different order entirely and she has no hesitation in providing an answer: by suppressing the question of what art is for, contemporary art colludes with liberal democracy in making “social, cultural and political life free of ... unpredictable, revolutionary capacities.” Moreover, this collusion is not a failure of certain contemporary artists or movements but its very mode of being:

“the manner in which art is constituted in our society – that is, what we understand art to be and to do, and the value we attribute to what art is and does – operates primarily as a mode of control.”

The Art Kettle's case is worth setting out in as much detail as a brief review allows in order to let its unusual resistance to art show through.

Despair all you can; it's a mistake not to: Dogma by Lars Iyer

I think we ought to read only books that wound and stab us. Kafka's letter, sent one hundred and eight years ago, is one I've quoted often enough and I'm reluctant to do so again. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us like a blow on the head, what are we reading for? Shouldn't its grave romanticism be left to teenage goths? But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. But we're all teenage goths now. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Perhaps I've quoted the letter so often because it demands answers, answers to "what are we reading for?" and what kind of book constitutes such an axe. Answering the latter may help to answer the former. What books come to mind? Even if my head is rent daily by literary blows, I find it difficult to answer because knowing is the answer's contradiction: knowing is the fridge freezer for ideas.

For sure, there are books we can say we love and books we can say we admire, books we think we ought to know better, better appreciate, and books we would like others to know better, better appreciate; citing them is easy – bookchat parrots the familiar names and titles, and while one knowing reader reminds us that "it's all subjective anyway", another expresses a need. This is less about objectivity and sharing than a need to understand the effect a book has on the one and not the many; a need to externalise, to actualise a recurring dream.

Maintaining the secret protects us from the risk of such an occurrence. There are risks. A hatchet is invariably buried beneath public mitigation of a private function: a book's debatable controversy, its relevance to TV news, its prize-winning status, its bestsellerdom. (I remember a work colleague recommending Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind because "it was a best seller in Spain". Was this, I wondered, really why she liked it?). A romance is disfigured.

The first axe-nomination to occur to me was Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, because its reading provoked a demand to spend hours sitting on a beach staring at the horizon. Except this is probably easily explained: the subject matter given such prolonged and intense attention is bound to stir dark pool. The same could be said, in their own way, more or less, for all of the titles I paused over: Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas, James' Beast in the Jungle, Duras' Malady of Death, Bernhard's Gathering Evidence, Rosalind Belben's Is Beauty Good, Jacques Roubaud's Great Fire of London, Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle. Duras' short novel is a companion piece to James' long story, so perhaps a connection can be made more explicit; the ostensible task of literary criticism of course. Yet, again, the necessary connection is likely sidestepped in analysis of influence and engagement; the discourse of gender power relations and such like. How strangely this discourse sounds to me.

In the short or long hours waiting for an answer, I cannot get close to the necessary connection. Perhaps this axe-idea is after all only the illusion of a promise arising from a haphazard accumulation of generic effects; occasional recognition of unconscious susceptibility to buttons pushed. What suggests itself then is that what has really abandoned us is Literature itself; the disaster that affects is the death of Literature.

Literature is a corpse and cold at that. Intuitively we know this to be the case, we sense, suspect, fear, and acknowledge it. The dream has faded, our faith and awe have fled, our belief in Literature has collapsed.

Lars Iyer's manifesto after the end of literature and manifestos confirms the suspicion. We read in a forest far from everyone. But what was Literature when it was alive?

It was the literature of Diderot, Rimbaud, Walser, Gogol, Hamsun, Bataille and most of all Kafka: revolutionary and tragic, prophetic and solitary, posthumous, incompatible, radical and paradoxical, a dwelling for oracles and outsiders, it was defiant and pathetic, it sought to break and alter, to describe, yes, but in describing, shatter, it was outside the culture looking in, and inside the culture looking out. Works of this nature, works in this spirit, no longer exist. Or rather, they still exist, but only as a parody of past forms. Literature has become a pantomime of itself, and cultural significance has undergone a hyperinflation, its infinitesimal units bought and sold like penny stocks. 

The hyperbole is familiar from Kafka's letter and similarly enchanting. Unlike Kafka, Iyer offers a fresh breadcrumb trail out of the forest:

Write about this world, whatever else you’re writing about, a world dominated by dead dreams. Mark the absence of Hope, of Belief, of Commitments, of high-flown Seriousness. Mark the past from which we are broken and the future that will destroy us. Write about a kind of hope that was once possible as Literature, as Politics, as Life, but that is no longer possible for us.

The manifesto marks the publication of his new novel Dogma, which follows Lars and W., two hysterical and hapless academic philosophers, as they travel to the American South and initiate their new rules for giving papers at conferences, the dogma of the title. You should know Lars and W. from their first appearance on the blog Spurious and the subsequent novel with the same title. Lars and W. pursue the big themes of philosophy and literature from the disadvantage point of dead dreams, absence of hope and seriousness, with some inadequacy and redundancy added, just for them.

W. is the Oliver Hardy figure, berating Lars for Stan Laurel-like innocence and passivity. W. by contrast has grand ambition and dedicates his life to learning from philosophical greats: Spinoza, Franz Rosenzweig and the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen, and admiring the seriousness of filmmakers like Werner Herzog and Béla Tarr, all the while submitting to the disastrous company of Lars: "You should never learn from your mistakes, W. says. He never has, he says, which is why he associates with me." As this, the consummate opening line, suggests, the novel is narrated by Lars, so W. is trapped anyway. His contribution to Philosophy can only ever be filtered through a gauze crusted with Lars' pop culture references and fast food consumption, and, more ominously, the spores of damp spreading through his flat.

This is our condition; we're all W. and Lars now. For all the comedy of failure and despair, however, there remains a tension as the shape of a glacier is outlined by the moraine of a shattered intellectual culture. Here at least it cannot be ignored. One form it takes is with a fascination with Kafka. Their inaugural Dogma presentation seeks to express the affect on their miserable lives of discovering his writing:

...the room was packed, and W. spoke very movingly of his encounter with The Castle in a Wolverhampton library. I spoke rather ineptly (W. said afterwards) about my encounter with The Castle in a Winnersh Triangle warehouse. – 'What were you on about?'

Lars and W. also have a thing for Kafka's friend Max Brod. W. suspects fat Lars is his contemporary equivalent:

'I bet Brod was fat'. Definitely, I agree. He drank too much, that's why he got fat. – 'Why do you think he drank?', W. says. Because he knew he was stupid, I tell him.

Max Brod is the truly modern figure: pouring out populist kitsch from the shameful lowlands of writing as his friend wasted away on the summit. What can Lars and W. do but carry forth his unwitting shame? In Dogma, in order to renew the revolutionary and tragic, the radical and paradoxical, they formulate rules for conference papers.

First rule: Dogma is spartan. Speak as clearly as you can. As simply as you can. Do not rely on proper names when presenting your thought. Do not quote. Address others. Really speak to them, using ordinary language. Ordinary words!".
Second rule: Dogma is full of pathos Rely on emotion as much as on argument. Tear your shirt and pull out your hair! And weep–weep without end!

Further rules demand sincerity, collaboration, reticence and affirmation (the latter seems especially apt: "Ignore those with whom you disagree. There's no point! Never let the critic teach you the cloth, says W. quoting Burroughs). This aligns them to Iyer's rules set out in the manifesto, and the connections are multiplied when we read the author telling Full Stop magazine that Spurious "was written to be straightforwardly readable. It is not supposed to be ‘literary’."

So we can read both novels as a Dogma presentation extended beyond the academy. It doesn't matter that Dogma breaks the first rule on the same page as it is announced! Dogma is paradoxical after all. Yet while W. thinks the disastrous Lars prevents him from scaling philosophical heights, he does enable his despair to reveal itself. This is also the despair of the contemporary waste land. Adam Kotsko has better explained how the form of the book creates "a strangely co-narrated novel" that "takes on a life of its own beyond the control of either partner". This is why Spurious and Dogma, while seeming to disengage purposely from the high purpose of Literature, just as with their rules W. and Lars disconnect from the task of academic philosophy, are overtly literary, even if the rhapsodic rhythm of the narrative, the learned references and the timing of the laughs wasn't enough already to betray the author's claim.

The irony is that the reality of W.'s and Lars' despair is palliated as it is affirmed and actualised. Writing alone opens a space in which a cure becomes possible, but only if despair is acknowledged. Dogma saturates despair with despair with disingenuous charm; a sly disavowal of despair.

In the end, after all: Suicide by Edouard Levé

                "Suicide calculated in advance, I thought, no spontaneous act of desperation"

The secret of this calculation and the auratic horror of the act sets narrative in motion, in the mind and on the page.

One Saturday in the month of August, you leave your home wearing your tennis gear, accompanied by your wife. In the middle of the garden you point out to her that you've forgotten your racket in the house. You go back to look for it, but instead of making your way toward the cupboard in the entryway where you normally keep it, you head down into the basement.

Eduoard Levé's Suicide begins with a description of the subject's act, unforgettable for its nonchalance, and continues with evidence of what may or may not be its calculation: the subject's taste for the unknown, for taking the elevator up but never down, for dead authors still in print, for reading a dictionary like a novel, for collecting unusual names.

During the week you sometimes thought it was Sunday. You didn't like to travel. You rarely went abroad. You would spend your time in your bedroom. It seemed useless to you to travel for miles in order to stay in a place less comfortable than your own. To think up imaginary holidays was enough for you. [trans. Jan Steyn]

Such apparently random facts occurring to the narrator begin to cohere into a story, and, in the end, after 118 pages, a book.  

The Meritocracy Quartet by Jeffrey Lewis

"Dream is a second life." Nerval's Aurélia begins with these words and in an instant the reader is pulled into the reverie of the imagination even as the narrator pushes back by explaining his announcement.

The first moments of sleep are the image of death: a hazy torpor overcomes our thoughts, and it is impossible for us to determine the precise instant when the I, in another form, resumes the creative work of existence. Little by little an obscure underground cavern grows lighter, and the pale, solemnly immobile figures that inhabit the realm of limbo emerge from shadows and darkness. Then the picture takes form, a new light illumines and sets in motion these old apparitions: –the world of Spirits opens before us.

 


A further paragraph cites the second-century novelist Apuleius, the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and the poet Dante as examples of those who have followed the visions of second life. Like Dante's, Nerval's began with a heart's privation:

A woman whom I had loved for a long while, and whom I shall call Aurélia, was lost to me. The circumstances of this event, which was to have such a great effect on my life, are of little importance. Each one of us can search his memory for the most heart-rending emotion he has known, the most terrible blow that fate has inflicted on his soul. It is a question of deciding whether to go on living, or die.

Jeffrey Lewis also makes an announcement in the foreword to his quartet of romans à clef now collected in a single edition.

I had in mind to write a kind of 'meritocracy' series, novels that would chart the progress of my generation, or anyway the narrow slice of it I knew well. The first book, in retrospect, came easily enough. Nothing ever comes easily enough, but I had a story to tell that was clear and seemed true enough, and I had feeling to put into it that had never gone away. It was the story of my hero in college, Harry Nolan, who might have been president of the country one day, and his wife Sascha Maclaren on whom I had a crush. My sixties book, so to speak.

Seventies, eighties and nineties books follow. However, this announcement is a quotation from the third book Theme Song for an Old Show. So, like Aurélia, the expedition begins by seeking justification in itself and thereby places a curious pressure on the quartet's overt narrative.

Harry and Sascha are apparently invented names though the narrator Louie is overtly Jeffrey Lewis, a Jewish outsider to the old money, Ivy League class of Christians we recognise from the days of the Kennedys; the diminutive forename, the Irish surname. George W. Bush and John Kerry are said to have emerged from the same year at Yale. The first novel Meritocracy: A Love Story begins with the couple, Louie and other graduates, Adam Bloch, Cord and Teddy – again, the names are enough – travelling for a weekend of sailing in Clements Cove on the Maine coast. You can picture the screenplay with Morgan Freeman's maudlin voiceover as the group drive through the New England countryside: banter, laughing, wind in blonde hair. Narration here takes the appearance of an American rite – a million bildungsromans now. There follows wonderfully evoked fog-bedeviled boat trip and an evening at a country fair. But the voiceover inevitably cloaks such light in the shadow of time passed, and, to the reader's dismay, the love story ends abruptly with a terrible event and the book we had been seduced to expect dies. In the seventies novel, The Conference of the Birds, the glowing prose of nostalgia becomes an agitation as Louie joins a new age community in New York. The cast changes, the sentences become shorter and the story becomes darker, unhappier, as various troubled souls pursue careers, relationships and spiritual enlightenment. Louie seeks precise awareness of what happened with mantra phrases mimicking cultish teaching: "Go back. Calm down. Sense. [...] Go back. Gently. Sense. Look. Listen. Broadway. Wind whipping the trash." Once again, the novel ends with a terrible event as a narrative full stop.

Jeffrey Lewis made his name as a writer on the hit eighties cop show Hill St. Blues which, in the third novel Theme Song for an Old Show, becomes (inexplicably), Northie. However, those of us with happy memories of the show will be disappointed if they expect a behind-the-scenes exposé, for it sits rather in the background to the story of Louie's relationship with his distant father. Even his marriage is a sideshow to a broken-home mom & pop novel. Again, a death punctuates the story.

While the three novels to a degree chart the progress of a narrow slice of a generation, the rite is dispiriting and oddly distant from the novel Haus Publishing alludes to in its promotion. It claims The Meritocracy Quartet is "set against the backdrop of four decades of changing American landscape" and that "America is the central character". This is both true and disingenuous. Recent history appears less often than weather reports and there are few pop culture references. America as the central character is absent or, better, the central character is absence. The novels present the gifts of worldly success as an ephemeral distraction from what looms and what demands to be addressed:

I told [my father] that in a matter of years I would take my winnings and quit and go write my books even if I had no idea yet what my books would be. I just thought, somehow, they must be there.

Why are these books so obscurely sought away from public life and public success? Perhaps it is because, in a meritocracy so presented, the ability rewarded is the ability to write a generic TV drama, something depending on contingent application; mere opportunism. The quartet's implicit question seems to be: after progress, what remains?

The final novel, Adam the King, is Louie's definitive attempt to resist this tendency, to remain on this side of sleep. It tells the story of Adam Bloch's return to Clements Cove to complete a trajectory from outsider to apparent insider as billionnaire businessman. For thirty years ago his role in Sascha's death remained unresolved but now he has married her sister and has built a mansion their future. Louie narrates as an observer otherwise uninvolved in the story. He even includes lengthy reports on the life of local blue collar workers living nearby in trailers. Their dialogue is repeated without his presence. Adam's physical redemption is confirmed with another moment of contingent application that is so unconvincing we can only be reminded that this is fiction and subject to generic laws; it does round things off very neatly. Bloch is Jewish too and, rather like his namesake Albert Bloch in In Search of Lost Time, entirely secular. He may therefore be Louie's alter ego just as it is said Albert is Proust's: the one who seeks redemption in the world, as opposed to in art or religion. Rounding things off with varnish, Adam embraces Judaism before his narrative-punctuating death, and thereby, as it happens, also reversing its suppression by Proust's Bloch's. Yet his redemption is also very Christian: the freest generation in history seeks its justification in death.

While Louie's crush on Sascha is not on the same neurotic scale of Nerval's Jenny, Proust's Albertine or Dante's Beatrice, it shares their embodiment of an enchantment that never dies. Her death is a question to meritocracy. We suspect Louie, and by extension Jeffrey Lewis, sought to write novels akin to the disaster of her death while remaining in thrall to the worldly subject, to the novels “America” demands by virtue of being America. Perhaps this is a cultural necessity competing with the creative work of another existence. It is possible that Sascha's presence is a mere mark on a chart of progress, but her presence pulls the writer and reader toward the first moments of sleep. Writing is a second death.

Victor Halfwit: A Winter's Tale, by Thomas Bernhard

As a child I didn't read books. At least, I have no memory of doing so. My teacher in primary school once read to us James & the Giant Peach, and I enjoyed that, so why didn't I rush straight to Roald Dahl's other books? I don't know. Still, it can't be true that I didn't read because, a few years ago browsing in a small shop dedicated to children's books, I found a display of Ladybird Books' Well Loved Tales, reprints of editions I recognised as part of my childhood.

The moment I saw the cover of The Gingerbread Boy, involuntary memory washed over me. My fascination with the image of the gingerbread boy himself is particularly distinct. I can see now that he is running away but then, as a child, it wasn't so clear. I could see only a two-dimensional figure, though of course "two-dimensional" meant nothing to me. His odd way of running must have made me wonder what he was doing exactly; it didn't look like running. And why is he smiling? I'm sure I didn't know, and this is why I found it mysterious and captivating. But the distance between the content of my innocence then and my knowledge now is almost impossible to close outside of that momentary wash.

Other features in the series have a similar if slightly dimmer aura: the size of the elves against the shoes in The Elves and the Shoemaker, the presence of the pea beneath the layers of blankets in The Princess and the Pea, the contemplative demeanor of the ape in The Beauty and the Beast and the disdainful remove of the black goat in The Three Billy-Goats Gruff (which looks like it influenced the cover of U2's October). I should be clear: these are not Proustian reveries in which remote times and places merge into one, but something less grand, a fleeting sensation, a shadow of memory. I have no memory of the stories, only the images and the fascination they summoned then returns to me in placeless, wordless memory.

I am now fascinated by this fascination: what is its cause? If the gingerbread boy's oddness stands out, the others are not so clear. With adult knowing one may apply Freudian analysis to the blankets, aligning perhaps with Kafka's disgust at his parents' unmade bed, but I think the explanation is much simpler: they each manifest the part of the story that writing cannot contain. That is, the fascination created by storytelling itself, the inexplicable enchantment of the imagined world. Perhaps this is why graphic novels are so popular now, and my own puzzlement at this popularity – and an inability to share in it – is due precisely to my lack of childhood reading. This is no doubt true, but I think there's a deeper reason.

In 1837, Soren Kierkegaard wrote there were two ways of telling stories to children with "a multitude of false paths in between".

The first is the way unconsciously adopted by the nanny, and whoever can be included in that category. Here a whole fantasy world dawns for the child and the nannies are themselves deeply convinced the stories are true […] which, however fantastic the content, can’t help bestowing a beneficial calm on the child. Only when the child gets a hint of the fact that the person doesn’t believe her own stories are there ill-effects – not from the content but because of the narrator’s insincerity – from the lack of confidence and suspicion that gradually develops in the child. The second way is possible only for someone who with full transparency reproduces the life of childhood, knows what it demands, what is good for it, and from his higher standpoint offers the children a spiritual sustenance that is good for them. [Trans. Alastair Hannay, the ellipsis is in the original]

I suspect with graphic novels the problem for me is that the graphical content cannot bestow a beneficial calm, and this is because, put as simply as possible, the novels that drew me into reading (and thereby bestowed calm) were adult novels aware of what they cannot contain, an awareness necessary to form and content (Proust's would be the earliest example) which nevertheless sought that lack against nature. And the addition of graphics to a text is a shortcut, an unwitting act of insincerity. Perhaps I was too far from childhood fascination to maintain ready access to it, while those readers with an uninterrupted passage from the freedom of childhood books to reading for social integration and acceptance feel drawn to the beneficial calm afforded by the gesture of sincerity implicit in graphic novels, even if that means they are told, inevitably, by someone who knows the stories are not true.

Kierkegaard contrasts the two paths of storytelling to the false paths which "crop up by coming beyond the nanny position but not staying the whole course and stopping half-way". But how can modern writers stay the whole course if full transparency means knowingness inimical to fascination? It can't be a coincidence that the most popular children's books of recent years – JK Rowling's and Philip Pullman's – are enjoyed by many of the same readers, albeit "ironically". Postmodernists need sincerity too.

Thomas Bernhard's story for children, Victor Halfwit: A Winter's Tale, first published in Austria in 1966 with the subtitle "a winter's tale not just for kids", and now translated by Martin Chalmers and published by Seagull Books in an extraordinarily extravagant illustrated book, may be an example of Kierkegaard's false path. Had it been closer to a graphic novel, it may have found one of the other two.

The story itself is typical Bernhard: dark and charming, brutal and funny, moving and disturbing, all at the same time. That is, not each of these in turn but all at the same time. A doctor in Traich is walking to Föding through the "high forest" late one night – "this is what you have to picture" he says, the time of night is important – on his way see a patient with "an ailment of the head", when he stumbles upon a man lying in the snow, unable to move. From his prone position he introduces himself as Victor Halfwit, a man with two wooden legs: "the locomotive tore them from my body!". Victor is delighted as, had the doctor not arrived just then, he would surely have died of the cold and, "as you know, the most horrible death occurs when one freezes to death." You can expect children to love this. The rest of the very short story is taken up with Victor's explanation of how he came to be trapped in the high forest and what the doctor does to help him.

From Victor Halfwit illustrated by Sunandini Banerjee

 
I've noted before how interrupted routines, particularly interrupted walking routines, recur in Bernhard's fiction: the early novel Gargoyles and the later novel The Cheap-Eaters are not included there but suit comparison with Victor Halfwit, the first featuring a doctor on his rounds meeting grotesque characters, the second a scientist missing one leg changing restaurants on a whim. So what difference does having illustrations make to the Bernhardian experience? One particularly effective feature is emphasis of the comedy. The doctor notices that Victor is even more delighted when he learns of his rescuer's profession. He is happier than if he had been a plumber, an electrician, a baker or a farmer. In a normal book, this information would take up two lines of text, three at most, which one would scan without pause. Here it covers ten pages! Two pages count for the doctor's comments, then there are two for each profession mentioned. On first reading, each page provokes smile upon smile as the unnecessary excess increases. Each page-turning pause is a perfectly-timed caesura. Yet while the collages representing each profession in the abstract are impressive and fun, they seem more decorative than illustrative. (You can see more at Sunandini Banerjee's Facebook page.) Had each been related directly to the story and the interaction of characters, I wonder how much more captivating they would be. A regular graphic novel reader, one for whom illustration itself is a narrative, would be a better judge. Perhaps they would be enchanted by the illustrations just as I was by the Ladybird books. However, I longed for the straightforward representation offered by the latter. In the former, nowhere is the doctor or Victor Halfwit depicted. Sometimes there was little compulsion to look at anything but the words before turning the page. Perhaps, however, if they had been depicted, each caesura would have been missed as one studied the relation of one character to the other before reading the text.

Late on, there is a two-page spread featuring eight wooden grotesques in a distinctly medieval Germanic style, one of whom I decided looks like Victor Halfwit. This emphasised to me what the rest refuses and which I missed. Perhaps though, as the doctor says: "this is what you have to picture".

“I am no longer capable of writing about”: The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956

Soon Beckett’s stipulation that only letters with a bearing on his work can be published will be repeated as often as Kafka’s request to Max Brod. The difference is that we may regret Beckett’s executors were not so disloyal. What ever the riches the letters contain, we will always wonder about those bearing on the life. However, the latest volume stresses the unavoidable and indeed necessary nature of such wonder.

The cover of volume two announces letters from 1941 to 1956, yet the first letter is dated 17th January, 1945. The missing years were those of war, most of which Beckett spent living and working in a farming community deep in the “free zone” having escaped occupied Paris on the brink of arrest. From there he sent postcards to his family in Ireland, which they didn’t receive and, on January 12th 1941, he sent a “pre-printed lettercard” to James Joyce. A facsimile is shown in the introduction. Joyce died the next day.






If we cannot have direct access to what Beckett experienced in that time, it remains indirectly sensible. The anxious verve of the brilliant young writer is replaced by a quieter man, still gravely lyrical yet less prone to hyperbole, much more forgiving of third parties (unless it’s Alexander Trocchi) and more focused on writing, just writing. What makes the editors’ task particularly daunting (that is, in persuading the executors to publish) is Beckett’s reluctance to discuss the detail of his work. When he does mention what he has written, he is excessively dismissive. So, rather than offer a review of the letters, I want to focus on this apparent oddity.

It is odd because Beckett was exceptionally learned and eloquent – the letters to Georges Duthuit, the major highlight of this collection, are proof enough of both – and before the war published critical essays, including the monograph on Proust. There is strong evidence of diverse learning in his fiction too: Molloy likes anthropology because of “its inexhaustible faculty of negation”. This is no divine innocent at work. One expects at least one letter to raise local decisions made during his famous “siege in a room” while writing Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. Yet the nearest he gets is to comment on the possibility of an overall title: “this work is a complete whole only in so far as one takes for granted the impossibility of going on”. So much, at least, for Beckett’s alleged pessimism. What he tells the German translator Hans Naumann suggests it was nothing new: when he knew James Joyce they “seldom talked literature, he didn't like doing it, neither did I.”

He has to be more open about the plays: while Waiting for Godot is in production, the director Roger Blin learns “the spirit of the play ... is that nothing is more grotesque than the tragic”. Otherwise he avoids all requests for insight and interviews and makes only one public statement about his relation to the play: “All that I have been able to understand I have shown.” Silence, then, Beckett claims, is not due to having anything to hide, but ignorance. “You may put me in the dismal category of those who, if they had to act in full awareness of what they were doing, would never act.” Is this disingenuous? The answer, which can be neither yes nor no, may reveal the uncommon nature of Beckett’s non-method.

Once he is famous Beckett receives letters from enquirers curious about the origins of his work. Hans Naumann again: “Has the work of Kafka ever played a part in your spiritual life?”. He apologises for his response: “I am not trying to seem resistant to influences. I merely note that I have always been a poor reader, incurably inattentive, on the look-out for an elsewhere. And I think I can say, in no spirit of paradox, that the reading experiences which have affected me most are those that were best at sending me to that elsewhere.” Reading Kafka, he says, “I felt at home – too much so”. He didn’t finish The Castle because it did not offer this elsewhere: “I remember feeling disturbed by the imperturbable aspect of his approach. I am wary of disasters that let themselves be recorded like a statement of accounts.”

As this suggests, the letters bear on the work most powerfully when Beckett is looking away. And indeed he is most expressive as only Beckett can be when talking about an entirely different art form. The painting of Bram van Velde is, he tells Duthuit, “the afterbirth of the unfeasible”. His art “is new because it is the first to repudiate relation in all its forms. It is not the relation with this or that order of opposite that it refuses,” he says, “but the state of being in relation as such, the state of being in front of.” In this we can recognise the remove in which Beckett’s narration operates and in which the reader experiences it.

I think continually of those last paintings, miracles of frenzied impotence, streaming with beauties and splendours, like a shipwreck of phosphorescences, decidedly one is a literary all one’s life, with great wide ways among which everything rushes away and comes back again, and the crushed calm of the true deep. [Trans. George Craig]

Beckett admits what we suspect: “bear in mind that I who hardly ever talk about myself talk about little else.” He goes as far as to call Bram van Velde his soul-mate:

The further I sink down, the more I feel right beside him, feel how much, in spite of the differences, our ventures came together, in the unthought and the heartrending.

The reason for Beckett’s critical silence after the war is perhaps best expressed when he ends a letter about van Velde: “I am no longer capable of writing about.” Such thought, such writing, is mere relation. The contradiction inherent in making such statements cannot go unnoticed: “To write is impossible but yet impossible enough”. There is also a need to speak. To Thomas MacGreevy he writes of his “feeling of helplessness ... and of speechlessness, and of restlessness also I think, before works of art”.

In contrast, Beckett’s references to contemporary literature are few and far between: Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye he liked “more than anything for a long time”. For me, however, the great revelation of the letters is Beckett’s occasional engagement with the work of Maurice Blanchot. As early as October 1948, he acknowledges receipt of an unspecified essay sent by Duthuit, presumably for translation. Three years later Duthuit has Beckett translate passages from what is presumed to be Sade’s Reason and “the foreword” to Faux Pas which just happens to contain this passage:

The writer finds himself in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothing to write, of having no means with which to write it, and of being constrained by the utter necessity of always writing it.

 Compare this to the famous passage in Beckett's Three Dialogues with Duthuit:

There is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.

No trace of these translations remains, not even the name of the journal for which they were intended. In April 1951, he also translates The “Sacred” Speech of Hölderlin collected in The Work of Fire and complains of the “very badly translated” extracts from Heidegger. The same applies. That same month Molloy was published and was nominated for the Prix des Critiques, for which Blanchot was a judge. He supported the novel “without reservation” and tried to persuade the jury to award it the prize. Beckett’s partner Suzanne wrote to Jérôme Lindon that “[to] have been defended by a man like Blanchot is the main thing for Beckett, whatever the outcome”. In 1954, when Peter Suhrkamp was preparing a journal dedicated to Beckett and requested French reviews, Beckett told him that those by Maurice Nadeau and Georges Bataille were the best “but the big thing, for me, is the recent piece by Maurice Blanchot”. He means “Where Now? Who Now?” published in the NNRF in October 1953. This is the extent of his comment, understandable given the formality of the letter, yet he doesn’t mention the review to more casual correspondents let alone responds to its analysis. If such reticence is not disingenuous, we may recognise a reason in Blanchot’s words:

What first strikes us is that here someone is not writing for the worthy purpose of producing a good book. Nor does he write in response to the noble urge we like to call inspiration; or to say the significant things he has to say; or because this is his job; or because he hopes by writing to penetrate into the unknown. Is it then so as to get it over with? [...] What is this vacuum which becomes speech in the inwardness of he whom it engulfs? [trans. Sacha Rabinovitch]

The vacuum may then be a stuporous passivity; an elsewhere engulfing.

Art requires that he who practises it should be immolated to art, should become other, not another, not transformed from the human being he was into the artist with artistic duties, satisfactions and interests, but into nobody, the empty animated space where art’s summons is heard.

What must a writer do in order to inhabit this space? If we search these letters in the hope of finding Beckett’s secret, we betray our admiration and need. The question assumes the mastery it must divest to discern an answer. One of the final letters in this volume is to a young writer seeking guidance and consolation from a writer he revered: “Don't lose heart” he tells Robert Pinget, “plug yourself into despair and sing it for us.”

In “Oh All to End”, his obituary tribute to Beckett, Blanchot remembers Molloy's failure to win the Prix des Critiques, and recognises his naïveté in trying to alert members of the literary establishment to its deserve. Beckett's early novels, he says, were after all “foreign to the resources of 'literature'”. Even today one cannot imagine such a novel winning anything but the label unreadable. Blanchot then compares Sartre’s theatrical soliciting and refusal of the Nobel Prize with Beckett’s distance: “he had neither to accept nor refuse a prize that was for no particular work (there is no work in Beckett) but was simply an attempt to keep within the limits of literature that voice or rumble or murmur which is always under threat of silence”. The aside prompts reassuring disquiet: there is no work in Beckett. Blanchot continues by quoting from his own work Awaiting Oblivion “because Beckett was willing to recognize himself in that text”. Does this mean Beckett corresponded with Blanchot? How else did he find out? Perhaps volumes three and four will disabuse us.

The Meridian: Final Version–Drafts–Materials, by Paul Celan

Poetry, ladies and gentlemen: an expression of infinitude, an expression of vain death and of mere Nothing.

These were the first words I read from The Meridian, a speech given by Paul Celan on October 22nd 1960 in the German city of Darmstadt on reception of the Georg-Büchner-Prize, as quoted by Maurice Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster, translated by Ann Smock. The excess of specification is deliberate. On a provincial train twenty years ago I read the words in the dizziness of discovery and recognition. At that time it was fragment of a speech not readily available in full – at least not available to me – found in amongst the dizzying fragments deconstituting Blanchot’s own work. Blanchot understands this enigmatic juxtaposition to mean that “the final nothingness ... occupies the same plane as the expression which comes from the infinite, wherein the infinite gives itself and resounds infinitely.” This would then afford poetry an extraordinary lightness as its social weight evaporates.

The same dizziness occurred with the line of Rene Char’s that Blanchot also quotes: The poem is the realized love of desire still desiring. Years of familiarity may have calmed the dizziness, and the sediment of acquired understanding buried recognition, but each time I read these sentences, the vertigo of those moments returns like a jolt of a train and a green light from the countryside.

Does it have to be these words precisely? In Carcanet’s Collected Prose, until this year as far as I know the only English version of speech available, Rosmarie Waldrop translates the line as: Poetry, ladies and gentleman: what an externalization of nothing but mortality, and in vain. James K. Lyon, in his study of Celan’s dialogue with Heidegger, translates it in passing as: this endless speaking of nothing but mortality and gratuitousness, and in Pierre Joris’ extraordinary new edition entirely dedicated to the speech – not only a new translation of the speech but of its drafts and materials, based on the German critical edition – the line is: Poetry, ladies and gentleman: this infinity-speaking full of mortality and to no purpose!

When I read these new translations, the experience is one of distance. It is certainly not a problem of translation; the fidelity of each is not in question – try putting Die Dichtung, meine Damen und Herren -: diese Unendlichsprechung von lauter Sterblichkeit und Umsonst! into Google Translate. It happens with Char’s line too: both Kevin Hart and Susan Hanson translate Le poème est l'amour réalisé du désir demeuré désir as The poem is the realized love of desire that has remained desire. Nor is it a problem of amended meaning: the lines that moved me do not necessarily assert a demonstrable, objective truth that any fair translation or paraphrase can repeat with ease. So why this distance? Is it anything other than the melancholy romance of nostalgia?  

The Meridian itself may offer an answer in that it addresses specific people on a specific date and in a specific place. What follows then is an attempt to summarise the speech in all recognition of the violence of such an attempt.

The counterword

Celan begins the speech by using words and metaphors from three plays by the author after whom the prize is named to situate art as the subject of a conversation taking place within works of art. For Celan it is an eternal problem that in Danton’s Death, the French Revolutionaries Camille and Danton are able to string together word upon word just as he can in this speech: “It is easy to talk about art”. Such is the complacency into which culture can fall, to be welcomed by art-peddlers – those who Celan compares to carnival barkers. “But whenever there is talk about art,” he goes on, “there is also always someone present who ... doesn’t really listen”. In Danton’s Death it is Lucile, who, upon seeing her husband led to scaffold, cries “Long live the king!” thus guaranteeing her own execution. For Celan, her cry “is the counterword, it is the word that cuts the ‘string’ [...]. It is an act of freedom. It is a step.”

This, ladies and gentlemen, has no name fixed once and for all, but I believe that this is ... poetry.

He is quick to distinguish the precise, political meaning of the words from their authenticity in face of what Lyon calls “the empty rhetoric and poetizing of the revolutionaries”. The point is: “Homage is being paid to the majesty of the absurd as witness for the presence of the human.”

Against mere wordplay

The speech seeks such witnessing. Celan admits one can read the words “Long live the king!” in various accents, accents one may place over or under a letter: the acute of today, the grave of history, and the circumflex of literary history. The latter places an obstacle to Celan destination in the speech so, to follow Lucile, he says: “I give it–I have no other choice–the acute.”

To explain further he turns to another work of Büchner’s. In Lenz, the title character, in the midst of a breakdown, relates a vision of two country girls which sometimes prompts him to wish to have Medusa’s power to turn the vision to stone so that others might experience it. The obstacle is how Celan may be seen to be orientating himself within the folds of a movement between Idealism to Naturalism that is present in Lenz’s own words. But this is no literary-historical debate. He wonders instead if with this example Büchner may be calling art into question, the art of automata, “wooden puppets”, a “stepping beyond what is human” into “an uncanny realm turned toward the human” and where art seems to be at home. The art-peddlers would be the first to call us to see the tableaux of country girls. He accepts the idea of Büchner’s intention may be far-fetched. Still, Celan asks where, against the route of automata, can poetry instead move toward this realm without losing its humanity?

His suspicion is that it can move with Lenz himself, the person who “on 20th January walked into the mountains” and who was sometimes annoyed that “he could not walk on his head”. On this date and in this state of mind, the authentic human being steps into literature. For someone who walks on his head, Celan reminds us, the sky is an abyss. The narrative itself is Lenz’s “Long live the king”. Reading Lenz today we notice an extraordinary modernity for a novella from 1835, thus perhaps obscuring its radical expression. However, this is an example of what moves poetic art away from elegant wordplay or social realism in favour of finding the words for an authentic human moment. The poem might then be "one person’s language-become-shape …[in its] presentness and presence”. We may compare this moment with Blanchot’s “writing of the disaster”, in which the disaster is a rare and hopeful act of communication.

And it should be noted what Celan need not: January 20th was decisive for him and so many others in that it is also the date of the Wannsee Conference.

Towards an encounter

Despite this connection with Lucile's cry, Büchner’s Lenz has, Celan says, gone a step further: “His ‘Long live the king’ is no longer a word, it is a terrifying falling silent, it takes away his–and our–breath and words”. I presume this is because the story is one of mental breakdown and the narrative describes Lenz’s walk into such a land without authorial knowingness or narrative redemption. Celan thinks this may be where the Medusa’s head shrinks and the automatons break down if only for a “single short moment”. And it is here Celan introduces his famous neologism, later used for a title of a collection, to describe such a moment: Atemwende, a breathturn. Such moments still demand a certain turning away from the self toward a certain darkness. “The poem wants to head toward some other, it needs this other, it needs an opposite”. In Under the Dome, his memoir of his friendship with Celan, Jean Daive observed how this need affected the man and his poetry: “The impenetrable–inhuman–distance between him and the Other. A distance where the remains of the world may accumulate”.

In an implicit response to the impatient reaction to his own poetry, Celan says turning away is a submission for the sake of such an encounter. “Attention”, he says, quoting Benjamin’s essay on Kafka, “is the natural prayer of the soul”. Impatience speaks only for itself.

For an example of such attention, read Peter Szondi’s remarkable essay Eden on Celan’s transfiguring of personal experience in an untitled poem about his brief visit to Berlin in 1967.

The route of the impossible

What Celan has argued for then is simply the inclusion of the human in poetry; that is poetry in which the poet speaks within the puppet show of art “under the angle of inclination of his Being, the angle of inclination of his creatureliness”: “The attention the poem tries to pay to everything it encounters … is a concentration that remains mindful of all our dates.” Jean Daive again: “Paul always kept his watch on his wrist. He told me: the day I take off my watch I’ll have decided to die.”

This emphasis on “radical individuation” leads to the end of the speech and a memorably declarative line: “Enlarge art? No. To the contrary: go with art into your innermost narrows. And set yourself free.” Public art lives on, yet inside it the breathturn is its poetry “due to the attention given to thing and being” in which “we also [come] close to something open and free. And finally, close to utopia. Poetry, ladies and gentlemen: this infinity-speaking full of mortality and to no purpose!”.

Perhaps I should now see this line as slightly and cheerfully sarcastic. The purpose, after all, he suggests, is a kind of homecoming. Yet included in the new edition is a draft of a letter to the president of the prize committee with another version of the same line: Celan asks:

Aren’t words, especially in the poem, aren’t they–aren’t they becoming and–decaying–names? Aren’t poems exactly this: the infinite-saying of mortality and nothingness that remains mindful of its finitude? (Please excuse the emphasis: it belongs to that dust that sets free and receives us and our voiceful-voiceless souls.)

So not sarcasm but awareness of the double movement recognised by Blanchot.

Celan ends the speech by expressing a wish to avoid misreading Büchner – something that I will have to express here with regard to The Meridian as I have no doubt warped the speech in trying to summarise it – and by emphasising the impossibility of talking about the breathturn. However, he adds:

I find something that consoles me a little for having in your presence taken this impossible route, this route of the impossible. I find something–like language–immaterial, yet terrestrial, something circular that returns to itself across both poles while–cheerfully–even crossing the tropics: I find ... a meridian.

Celan’s reluctance to assert, almost to the point where hesitation, qualification and doubt undo the occasion of a prize rewarding mastery, reminds me of Blanchot’s observation about Celan’s poems: that however hard, strident and shrill his language, it “never comes to produce a language of violence, does not strike the other, is not animated by any aggressive or destructive intention: as if the destruction of self has already taken place so that the other is preserved, or so that a sign borne by obscurity is maintained” (translated by Charlotte Mandell).

Pierre Joris’ edition of The Meridian, translated over seven years, reveals to us how much learning, reflection and patience went into maintaining such a permeable presence. It is a staggering document in that regard alone. In the drafts we can read innumerable versions of familiar passages from the final speech, and many more that did not find their way there. Of the latter, in writing of the encounter with the poem:

It is ... the second at the core and in the casing of your desperation.–
It stands with you against infamy. It stands against Goebbels and Goll.– 

The first name needs no explanation but second is Claire Goll, the woman who persecuted Celan with falsified evidence of plagiarism spelled out in a German literary magazine. It was enough to trigger the mental breakdown that led eventually to his suicide. We need not consider its deletion from the final version as ironic or contradictory because The Meridian is not a call for the confessional but for the pursuance of the single short moment of dizziness of discovery and recognition. What is exceptional about The Meridian is that it continues this work of poetry, Celan's poetry, rather than being merely an adjunct to it.


UPDATE: I've since been reminded that John Felstiner's Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan from 2000 has a translation of The Meridian. The specific line as discussed above is: “Poetry, ladies and gentlemen–: this speaking endlessly of mere mortality and uselessness!” and that Jerry Glenn produced the first translation in the early 1970s. I presume in this rare edition.


See also my review of The Celan-Bachmann Correspondence.