Another beginning: the 500th post

She wished this were her last journey.

This is the first line of Peter Handke's 472-page Crossing the Sierra del Gredos, as translated by Krishna Winston. My copy finally arrived today! I'm pleased to report the typeface is generous, certainly compared to the edition of Handke's last doorstop.

The sentence also begins the 500th post on this blog. I wish it too were the last. From the first entry in September 2004 (though not my first blog, that was Spike Magazine's Splinters, my contributions beginning in November 2000, followed by the year-lasting In Writing) I've tried to say something that would change the way people read. No matter how absurdly ambitious this is, and no matter how meagre my resources (there are many important books I've not read), I've wanted to define and share a particular experience of reading, one that tends to be ignored when literature is discussed on these islands; ignored not least by me. It's taken this long and I believe I still haven't defined it. If I have, I did so a month after the first blog in Struck by Death, an attempt to summarise Blanchot's short essay on the Lascaux cave paintings. It remains one of my favourites, though it drew little attention. (That's one of the oddest things about blogging. One works relatively hard on long posts, such as this one on Martin Amis and it receives no comments, yet one throwaway remark can provoke a storm).

Yet, if Blanchot is right in another essay, "What is the Purpose of Criticism?" (found in this book), then the continuation of this blog (and every other literary blog) is necessary to that experience:

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.

That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

A vessel in vain

The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential loneliness of my life. This loneliness [is] deeper about me, at any rate, than anything else: deeper than my genius, deeper than my 'discipline,' deeper than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep countermining of art.

Henry James, letter to Morton Fullerton, 1900.

In vacant space

When I have time to read, I love [Wladimir] Wiedlé as much as I love Maurice Blanchot, another man of whom you ought to know.

Wallace Stevens, letter to Peter H. Lee, April 1955.

Creative writing

Despair, more than any other feeling, establishes a correspondence between our being and the environment. In fact, despair requires a corresponding environment to such an extent that, if need be, it creates it. It invokes beauty only to pour the void into it. The emptiness of the soul is so vast, its cruel advance so inexorable, that any resistance to it is impossible. What would be left of paradise if were seen from the viewpoint of despair? A graveyard of happiness.

EM Cioran Tears & Saints.

Duras' other texts

Emilie Bickerton reviews Marguerite Duras' Cahiers de la Guerre et Autres Texts and finds what is timeless in her work.

Comparisons with Beauvoir are striking. Duras's fictions exist in a world dominated by ennui, a sense of otherness from the world, full of intense emotions, but mostly internal experiences. When events and a historical context are required, there is a blandness to the writing that means one layer separates from the other; reality and how that reality is experienced become two distinct things. In Beauvoir’s work, the two remain soldered together because her literary aim was to present her protagonists as actors in the world.

This rings true. I happened to have just read The Square and was surprised at the intense emotion rising from the ennui and otherness of the narrative.

Standard literary histories have tended to bracket Duras together with other intellectuals of the period. But not only did Duras personally dislike Camus, Sartre and Beauvoir, it is unclear what she contributed in terms of ideas, given that she was preoccupied rather with abstract questions of style.

This perhaps pushes Duras too far from political engagement. Above all, The Square reminded me of Blanchot's novels and, as Lars Spurious relates in his wonderful rue Saint-Benoît series from 2004, she was close to Blanchot and Bataille among others, all far more interesting in literary and political terms than the usual suspects of standard literary histories.

Open Letter / Three Percent

Some promising news for those of us who rely on translations for providing what our own literary culture lacks.

In conjunction with its developing literary translation programs, the University of Rochester is launching Open Letter, a new publishing house dedicated to international literature. Beginning in fall 2008, Open Letter will publish twelve works of international literature a year, focusing on modern classics and contemporary works of fiction.

While we wait for that: "In addition to publishing trade books, Open Letter will oversee Three Percent, a new website featuring an international lit blog, reviews of untranslated books, sample translations, and a calendar of grants and prizes for translation."

Of those reviews of untranslated books, one isn't Josipovici's Only Joking. This book hasn't been translated into English because it was written in English in the first place! Still, it's good to have a summary and appreciation of the book.

Another review is of Vila-Matas' Montano's Malady, about which I've been interested since January. In the UK, this novel has been published as Montano only. I wonder if Harvill Secker feared readers would be put off by a book with illness suggested in the title? It hasn't discouraged a reader from my local library who has hogged the book for the last three months and has just renewed it until mid-August.

Writing about writing, part 494

My brow was particularly furrowed when I read Scott Esposito, in providing a link to the extract from JM Coetzee's forthcoming novel, saying that he's "a little concerned that it's a book about a writer writing a book". I wondered how many crime fiction blogs worry that PD James' new one will feature a murder, or a horror fiction blog that Stephen King's latest has supernatural elements, or that ... well, supply your own third.

Even the link Scott supplies has The Literary Saloon expressing unease "about the turn the book is described as taking" (that is, the text being in part contributions to a book called "Strong Opinions" - a title, I might point out, used by Nabokov for a non-fiction miscellany). I know literary novels cannot be defined as 'metafiction' alone - a term I barely recognise as every novel refers to itself and the whole of literature at every turn, to and fro; it's just a matter of acknowledgment - but it's a good starting point.

Scott adds that Coetzee's metafiction hasn't thrilled him, which is fair enough, though for me Elizabeth Costello was, in the Paul West section, one of the most thrilling books I have ever read. Slow Man, on the other hand, in which Ms Costello appeared again, left me unmoved. Metafiction seems to be a guarantor of nothing in itself, so there's no need to be concerned over it.

Nor perhaps to be drawn by it. Yet I wonder if I'm the only reader who experiences a frisson at the prospect of book about a writer by such a fine writer as Coetzee? Why should novels consciously avoid a subject by which we're otherwise so fascinated?

Narrative voice from book to book

The Guardian's excellent podcast interview with Andrew O'Hagan about his new novel Be Near Me began with an interesting opposition. The interviewer John Mullan says one might divide novelists into two groups, one represented by Henry Fielding, the other by Samuel Richardson. The first is "the kind of fiction where you hear the novelist's voice everywhere and all the time", while the second is about writing to find "strange, other voices, who are not yourself". O'Hagan's novels, he said, fell into the latter type. O'Hagan readily agreed and added that he thought finding such a voice distinguishes fiction from any other kind of writing: "Each novel absolutely defines the terms of its own announcement" he said, winning me over, "it can't just be yet another unloading of your narrative voice". Then he gets oh-so-close to naming names of unloaders:

There are some very good novelists who nevertheless have a deficiency for me, which is that they carry their style from book to book. They could be writing something in the voice of Bambi or something about their ex-wife, and they have the same tone, the same pace; the prose is the same.

I would put forward one obvious example even if O'Hagan won't. O'Hagan's interest in novel writing is precisely to avoid this tendency and instead to let a new character speak.

The opposition is a compelling means of defining one's relation to fiction. One might say Fielding's way is the fiction of control and Richardson's the fiction of discovery. But maybe there is another, obscurer path. There are many novelists who sound the same from book to book yet are nothing like my obvious example. For me, the obvious examples of this type of novelist are Bernhard and Blanchot. While Bernhard's novels are ostensibly narrated by separate individuals, they all happen to write like Bernhard, and Blanchot's fiction, particularly his later récit (which as I've made clear often enough aren't always to my taste) have a relentless anonymity and offer only fragments of a familiar world.

Reading Bernhard, one is eventually overwhelmed not only by the voice but also by what the voice is speaking in order to resist. And in reading Blanchot, language itself begins to speak separated from the individuals - author or character - who might otherwise have appropriated it. Both writers might be unloading the same narrative voice but it is not for reasons of control. Yet nor are they bringing to presence a strange other. It's something beyond both. Blanchot suggests what in After the Fact:

Prior to the work, the work of art, the work of writing, the work of words, there is no artist - neither a writer nor a speaking subject - since it is the production that produces the producer, bringing to life or making him appear in the act of substantiating him [...] But if the written work produces and substantiates the writer, once created it bears witness only to his dissolution, his disappearance, his defection and, to express it more brutally, his death, which itself can never be definitively verified: for it is a death that can never produce any verification.

Thanks to Lars Spurious for bringing this quotation to my attention.