"Proust, Blanchot and a Woman in Red"

In April, I drew attention to The Cahiers Series from Sylph Editions. Details of the fifth, due next month, have just been released, and it looks particularly desirable:

The cahier comprises three linked pieces by the translator and short story writer, Lydia Davis. First is 'A Proust Alphabet', which gives an account of several words and issues of particular interest, encountered during the author’s recent translating of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. There follows a short article on the French thinker and novelist Maurice Blanchot, entitled 'The Problem in Summarising Blanchot'. Finally comes a series of dreams and dreamlike moments, recounted in 'Swimming in Egypt: Dreams while Awake and Asleep'. The cahier is accompanied by photographs by Ornan Rotem.

Syntactical healing

He could tell, just from reading the plays, that Shakespeare "obviously" suffered from irregular heart rhythm. Poetry, like the "magnetism" of a faith healer, could repair damaged cells, whereas prose could do the opposite. After being diagnosed with cancer, he came to think that writing his prose treatise ... had destroyed his immune system.

Peter Stothard reports on Ted Hughes' "somewhat eccentric views" and an exchange of letters with Prof John Carey. Add your own punchline.

Always beginning again: Blanchot on Beckett

Scott Pack recently repeated his call for the literary pages of newspapers to "reflect the books their readers actually read" and "for a more interesting and diverse range of titles". While to me these are contradictory demands, I'm all for the latter as it might influence the former. If the literary pages of newspapers don't tell their readers about new books, who - apart from bus shelters - will?

The literary editor of the New York Sun seems to agree. For instance, has Pascale Casanova's Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution been reviewed elsewhere? Benjamin Lytal covers it in under 200 words but that's better than nothing. Casanova, he says, "explains Beckett's anxieties of influence vis-à-vis Yeats and Joyce, and pins his aesthetic breakthrough to his contact with abstract painters". Nothing controversial so far then. James Knowlson revealed as much in his biography. But apparently this is "in opposition to the famous French philosopher Maurice Blanchot". Huh, how's that? The answer is that Casanova "accuses Blanchot of carelessly annexing Beckett, reducing him to the passive, archaic function of inspired mediator, charged with 'unveiling being.' Blanchot made Beckett into a prophet, speaking in a vacuum."

Needless to say this is a gross caricature of one of Blanchot's finest essays. Yes, Casanova is writing against a single, eight-page essay! As far as I know, Blanchot wrote only two essays on Beckett: "Where Now? Who Now?" in The Book to Come (1959) and a short tribute "Oh All to End" a year after Beckett's death in 1989. Despite this, according to Lytal's summary, "Blanchot's hierophantic gloss was ... fatally influential in France".

Casanova concentrates on the "social context" of literature. Her previous book offers "the first systematic model for understanding the production, circulation, and valuing of literature worldwide". This is certainly in opposition to Blanchot's critical procedure, yet nowhere in "Where Now? Who Now?" is there "hierophantic gloss" ("the interpretation of sacred mysteries or esoteric principles" says my dictionary). He merely asks why Beckett's Trilogy has this particular form and content.

Why, for instance, does Molloy start off with the "reassuring form of a story" yet has "a movement of unsettling disintegration"? An answer can follow only in the second part, Malone Dies where the proliferation of characters ends and we have one man in a bed openly making up stories, admitting their artifice in order "to fill the void into which [he] feels he is falling." The void, that is, of death. For this reason, Blanchot argues, the book isn't just a rollicking postmodern farce like Flann O'Brien's relatively neglected novels. For Malone's urgency means "the book is no longer just a means of openly lying". Instead it sets up "a clash of artifices where experience is lost". The stories become detached from the experience of the dying man and he becomes detached from the work. He dies to himself and us.

In The Unnamable, we continue without "characters under the reassuring protection of their personal name" or even with a story, it's just "phantoms without substance, empty images revolving mechanically around an empty center that the nameless 'I' occupies". This is "experience lived under the threat of the impersonal". Surely this is straightforward explication of a text; nothing hierophantic at all. Perhaps Blanchot irritates the positivists a little too much next though.

We may be in the presence not of a book but rather something much more than a book: the pure approach of the impulse from which all books come, of that original point where the work is lost, which always ruins the work, which restores the endless pointlessness in it, but with which it must also maintain a relationship that is always beginning again, under the risk of being nothing. (trans. Charlotte Mandell)

The next two parts of the essay then compares the movement of the Trilogy to "the classical form" of literary experience, summed up by Blanchot with reference to the works of Genet and Lautréamont. These are works "in which one sees the writer happily deliver himself from the dark part of himself by a work in which that part becomes, as if by a miracle, the happiness and clarity stemming from the work itself, in which the writer finds a refuge and, even better, the flourishing of his lonely self in a free communication with the other".

Unfortunately, as also evidenced in Genet and Lautréamont "things are not always so simple" because, in the very means of their inspired escape, each writer is opened up to another level of experience. In the relief of becoming a writer, the writer loses the occasion and the means to write. There is no longer any struggle. They have to become non-writers again in order write. So where a socio-political analysis might see in Beckett's Trilogy the cultural echo of a post-war loss of old certainties, Blanchot is saying this experience is common to artists across time precisely because this loss means something; it isn't a line from a textbook. It's why they're artists after all and why (Blanchot's little joke?) they resist "the insignificance of an academic career". The other level of experience is "where we see Michaelangelo become ever more tormented and Goya ever more demon-ridden; we see the lucid, gay Nerval end up hanging himself, and we see Holderlin die to himself".

In the final part of the essay, Blanchot asks how all this came to pass, and suggests it is because the great artists experience the approach of the origin of art, an experience that is threatening both to the artist and the work. The threat is of absolute failure. The writer, now free to explore the infinite space of words and stories, falls outside of the world of his community, outside of any utility, and floats between life and death, "incapable henceforth of dying and incapable of being born, shot through with ghosts, his creatures, in which he doesn't believe and which tell him nothing". All this is evoked in The Unnamable. For this reason, Blanchot concludes, the Trilogy has much more importance for literature than most of the 'successful' works it offers every week. It takes literature as close to its origin without it disintegrating. If this is speaking from a 'vacuum', we have to wonder what positivist critics and reviewers really understand of art, or human life even. And in the month when yet another 'successful work' - Irish at that - was handed by a financial bureaucrat the most prestigious literary prize in the British Commonwealth, this fatal influence is as necessary as ever.

More Booker fallout

The Belfast Telegraph is one of the many newspapers having fun with the fallout from Sir Howard Davies "cocking a snook at the literary establishment", specifically its reviewing culture. David Lister enacts his name with entertaining examples of "literary love-ins" between reviewers and authors. But these reveal not so much the incestuous nature of literary culture as a sour view of friendship.

Back in the primary source, Sir HD complains that too many reviewers are not brave enough to say a novel doesn't work. Even if this were true, by what criteria is a novel deemed not to have worked? Is it by the logic of the novel under review or by the standard of the kind of novel Sir Howard wants to recommend to the public? We're not told. Of course, I think it's the former. As I argued in my blog-review of JM Coetzee's latest novel - a book the Booker judges singled out for criticism - is, on its own terms, a success; that is, a necessary failure. It reverses what it means for a novel to "work". And that, I would say, is one of the distinctions of a literary novel, certainly so late in the literary day. It staggers me that Booker prize judges are so insensitive that they can't see this.

In the next line of his complaints, Sir HD adds that reviewers "don't care whether [novels are] readable or not". Again, what is "readable"? Diary of a Bad year is, I would say, relatively easy to read. On the other hand, I found the opening chapter of On Chesil Beach unreadable - a novel that received a high number of respectful reviews and made the Booker shortlist. Clearly there are different opinions here, but reviewing isn't just about opinion; it's about patient attention to the work. This tends to even out the kind of judgements Sir HD wants. Maybe the chairman unwittingly disapproves of patience. There is evidence to suggest it.

Sir Howard happily admitted to having read submitted novels at a rate of 80 pages per hour. Jeanette Winterson compares this to putting a record on at 78 instead of a 33: "if you've got some bloody idiot who thinks it's great to read at 80 pages an hour when it's not The Da Vinci Code, you're doomed! Well, I am." Sir Howard's responds by misquoting and misrepresenting the reason for her outburst.

Immaterial, my dear Watson

"Daunting tasks are what we live for" Franco Moretti tells John Sutherland in a Guardian interview (thanks to RSB for the link). The task of which he speaks is attempting to combine two things: "a history of literature that works with a much wider field of material".

Ah yes, material, that great literary problem. The interview starts off not with this but with another "problem" of English studies. It is, Sutherland claims, despite huge interest from students choosing to study the subject, "at a dead end". Isn't this where all literary study begins; at the dead end of literature's sublime immateriality? Whatever, let's suppose it is a problem for English studies and it is due, as Sutherland also claims, to "theory":

The new analyses of text that were introduced in the 1960s have rendered the subject, at its cutting edge, incomprehensible to all but the initiated. Semiotics, post-structuralism, marxist-feminism and, above all, deconstruction have split the critical establishment away from the reading public. Deconstruction indeed.

While having little time for the four named fields - particularly when their cutting edges detach any feeling for literature, I'm interested in why Sutherland brings in "the reading public" to create his problem. Since when was "the reading public" not split from academic criticism? And will Moretti's inclusive, socio-historical approach make any difference with volumes containing essays with alluring titles like "Toward a Database of Novelistic Topoi"?

Sutherland seems to think so. Find it on the 3-for-2 stalls tomorrow guys! Moretti, he explains, refuses "to observe the distinctions between high and low literature" and "can talk ... about Sherlock Holmes and Joyce's Ulysses in the same breath." (Joyce's Ulysses? Glad he pointed that out - but why not tell us who wrote Sherlock Holmes?). So, just like any critical theorist in any modern university then. In fact, just like every other voracious reader I know (even those who read only "low" literature). Sutherland seeks intellectual credence for Moretti's democratic tendencies by pointing out that he shares his fascination with Conan Doyle's creation with Umberto Eco, that famous semiotician! Didn't he just tell us there wasn't a problem until people like Eco came along? Maybe he's making an exception. But where will exceptions end? Perhaps when we reach the bedrock of no-names - just "post-structuralists", just "Marxist-feminists". We'll soon see it's individual books that are the problem in the study of novels.

A literary academic himself, Sutherland is author of the new-in-paperback How to Read a Novel. He's written many other critical studies, the majority of which are (apparently) entertaining essays about middlebrow novels from the good-old-days of Victorian fiction when everyone from the lady of the house in her drawing room to the urchin on the street was partaking of Dickensian novels and communing in spiritual harmony. However, at least one literary editor isn't impressed with Sutherland's attention to detail. But this, it seems, is why he's so keen on Moretti: "So large is the literary object, he argues, that reading individual works is as irrelevant as describing the architecture of a building from a single brick".

The daunting task then, to go back to that, is to build "intellectual models" that pose questions to the "mass of information" presented by novels. Information? Is this what novels offer? The "natural sciences and the social sciences have been trying to do [this] for decades" Moretti explains, which is, ironically, precisely how the academic study of English lost confidence in its unscientific procedure and turned, with relief, to semiotics, post-structuralism, Marxist-feminism, deconstruction and, now, it seems, to the New Empiricism. Thankfully, literature has nothing to fear from any of them.

Prize mediocracy

Sir Howard Davies, chairman of the Booker Prize committee, calls for "more diversity in the sort of people who review novels". While the literary editors get on with that, let's also have more diversity in people who judge literary prizes. In this particular case, how about a group of people who have the slightest clue about literature?

Hitchens watch

Martin Amis's buddy speaks at the Freedom from Religion Convention. Pharyngula provides the ghastly details: "Basically, what Hitchens was proposing is genocide."

Richard Seymour reckons he's been proven right. I wasn't arguing.

Current reading

When it had already grown late, Mother suggested that we retire; we wished each other goodnight in front of the weapons cabinet and went to bed.

I'll give you a clue: it's not Jane Austen.