The portrait of a realist

Philosophy and Animal Life is spearheaded by Cora Diamond's essay, "The Difficulty of Life and the Difficulty of Philosophy," in which she reads [JM Coetzee's] The Lives of Animals, not as a kind of argument in favor of animal rights, but as a study of "a woman haunted by the horror of what we do to animals. We see her as wounded by this knowledge, this horror, and by the knowledge of how unhaunted others are. The wound marks and isolates her". What kind of knowledge is this, and what can philosophy say about it? Not much, it appears. The difficulty, Diamond says, is that such knowledge "pushes us beyond what we can think. To attempt to think it is to feel one's thinking come unhinged. Our concepts, our ordinary life with our concepts, pass by this difficulty as if it were not there; the difficulty, if we try to see it, shoulders us out of life, is deadly chilling". Diamond notes that neither the philosophers inside Coetzee's story, nor those in real life who responded to the Tanner lectures, see any difficulty here. Instead they convert the difficulty of Costello's experience into a philosophical problem about the moral status of animals – a problem that arguments can allegedly resolve. Diamond, however, seems to take Costello's side against philosophy as a practice of moral evasion. At all events, for her Costello is a portrait of someone in a condition of undeflected exposure to the world and to others in it – a true realist.

From Gerald Bruns' review of Philosophy and Animal Life and Stephen Mulhall's The Wounded Animal.

The book to come in 2666

Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is an obsessive and world-shifting epic. When I read it, I will be completely absorbed by it. It will be all I think about. It will affect my daily life in ways I can’t fully understand, and when I finish it I will have come to profound revelations about the nature of existence.

There's a reason for Kirsty Logan's future tense: she's describing the joy of a certain kind of book, one that: 

contains all possible characters, styles, genres, turns of phrase, metaphors, speech patterns, and profound life-changing revelations. An unread book exists only in the primordial soup of your imagination, and there it can evolve into any story you like. An unread book – any unread book – could change your life.

She goes on to imagine the possibilities of a handful of other novels she hasn't read. Apart from 2666, I haven't read them either. Yet, even though I have read all 893 pages of the British Picador edition and was absorbed enough to believe I would not forget each highway and byway of the long journey, I find that now, looking back from beyond the final page, all the roads have concertinaed to form an impenetrable block.

Roberto Bolaño's 2666 has not affected my daily life, it has not caused any profound revelations, and the world remains unshifted. But for the complete absorption, everything of which Kirsty Logan dreams about 2666 didn't come pass, unless, that is, for all of its characters, adventures, ideas and slow-burning narrative tension, for all of its richness of colour and texture, the revelation is that the nature of existence will remain unclear and will never be resolved into coherence, not even in the most lengthy work of literature with all of its innumerable interconnections and possible all-embracing overall design.

Of course, if this is the revelation, it is certainly not profound. As well as the encyclopaedic power to capture life, the aura of modern literature is borne on the promise of such revelatory exegesis in which something more will emerge, so one is bound to be disappointed. The persisting presence of an aura explains the range of readerly reactions from obsessive dedication of those who see revelation in the mathematical system underpinning Dante's Commedia to Book Groups chatting about "issues" in the latest Jodi Picoult unit.

A banal point perhaps: the reader is always seeking more than the book itself. After all, it is a form of information storage and retrieval. With the incommensurability of modern literature, the violence of interpretation becomes necessary if it is to mean something other than an increasingly minor branch of the entertainment industry. It certainly needs to be forgotten in order to read. If we begin reading knowing incompletion will be the ultimate experience – perhaps even disharmony and disunity – then what are we reading for? We begin with the idea, as Kirsty Logan suggests, of the novel we are about to read as the Platonic Form of its kind, an ethereal presence in which all stories coalesce and conclude. Here it is, in our hands! So, when I say: "I've read Roberto Bolaño's 2666", do I know or care what I am referring to other than the same possible book Kirsty Logan has imagined? As I announce my reading, a whiff of cultural-oneupmanship begins to circulate. It alludes to secret knowledge, new power over those who have not read it and potentially over those who have read but have not comprehended its message. But I don't have that knowledge or power. What have I missed?

Nabokov said that the second reading of a book is always the first. The first is a blind reading. You have to read the book a second time in order to have read it once. So perhaps I should re-read Roberto Bolaño's 2666 in search of a subtler experience in which the disparate details begin to reach out to one another more clearly and the revelations become more profound. However, if Heraclitus is right, then that second reading is impossible. The second reading will always be the first and therefore blind. The second reading will always be the book to come. I have not read Roberto Bolaño's 2666. I will never read Roberto Bolaño's 2666.

Bernhard begins

While the new tutor has until now remained silent during our lunchtime walk, which to me has already become a habit, today from the start he had a need to talk to me.

This is the first line from Thomas Bernhard's story Two Tutors as it appears in Martin Chalmer's translation in the imminent volume Prose. The extra good news is that we can read it in full right now at Little Star, a new magazine of poetry and prose.

Two Tutors is from 1967, early in Bernhard's career, yet in this beginning we can also see the end. As with the sublime first sentence of his valedictory novel Extinction, a pattern is broken, a new direction taken right from the start. In this story, the narrator repeats the necessity later in the story when describing how, on the regular walk, one of the tutors reaches a point and always goes to the right. "It is up to me," the narrator says, "one day to turn left". Franz-Josef Murau does it himself in Extinction when, out of exuberance after a good day, he takes a different route home and, once there, receives some news that will change his life. It's also present at the beginning, middle and end of Bernhard's autobiography Gathering Evidence: first in that famous childhood bicycle ride, then his determination to work in a grocery store rather than go to grammar school ("I found the other people by going in the opposite direction") and, finally, as a teenager dying of TB, when he refused further treatment, walked out of the clinic and never went back. Perhaps there is more to be said.

 

UPDATE: Indeed there is more to be said. I said it here.

Beckett and "the absurd"

A Piece of Monologue (a deleted blog) brings to my weary attention another one of The Guardian newspaper's effortlessly obtuse top ten literary lists. This time it's "top 10 absurd classics". Of course, it includes Waiting for Godot.

Beckett's remarks about this subject have been available in French for 26 years and in English translation for 15, yet still he is ignored. Charles Juliet's Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde was reissued five months ago by Dalkey Archive, so there should be no more excuses. Here is the specific passage, beginning with Juliet expressing his opinion:

Cautiously, I explain that I believe an artist's work is inconceivable without a strict ethical sense.
A long silence.
"What you say is true. But moral values are inaccessible. And they cannot be defined. In order to define them, you would have to pass judgement, which is impossible. That's why I could never agree with the notion of the theatre of the absurd. It involves a value judgment. You cannot even speak about truth. That's what's so distressful. Paradoxically, it is through form that the artist may find some kind of a way out. By giving form to formlesssness. It is only in that way, perhaps, that some underlying affirmation may be found.

This is what makes Beckett a far more complex artist than the label "absurdist" allows. Perhaps this why it remains despite the author's explicit statements and the evidence of the plays backing them up. He seeks an underlying affirmation – why else would he continue? – while all around him hacks and inattentive culture-vultures chatter about "the absurd"; a value judgement to speed their fiercely middlebrow lives beyond anything distressing like the inaccessible.

One of these stones

Pierre Joris reminds us that it is now forty years since Paul Celan left his Paris apartment and "went into the water".


AT BRANCUSI'S, THE TWO OF US

If one of these stones
were to give away
what it is that keeps silent about it:
here, nearby,
at this old man's limping stick
it would open up, as a wound,
in which you would have to submerge,
lonely,
far from my scream, that is,
chiselled already, white.

Translation by Michael Hamburger.

What Ever Happened to Modernism?

Book news from Yale University Press:

"The quality of today's literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing — a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why.

Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization or a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art coming to consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism.



With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism's key stages, from Dürer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected—including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions not only about national taste, but contemporary culture itself."

What Ever Happened to Modernism? is scheduled for a September publication. Read more on Yale UP's dedicated webpage. (Link via).

Update: My review is now online.

Where there is a book

"Dante's Commedia ... and the medieval cathedrals were ... modelled on a book, the Bible, as that had been meditated to the West by the Church. And as the thinkers of the German tradition, such as Hegel and Nietzsche, understood, the fortunes of art in our time go hand in hand with the fortunes of theology."

When in 1988 I first read this passage from The Book of God, I was struck enough to note it down despite lacking any comprehension of its relevance to my experience. My upbringing had been Christian inasmuch as prayers were mumbled at school assemblies and fortifying stories read from a large book we knew had to be special because it had gold-edged pages, but also secular to the point where that term, lacking a meaningful alternative, became as pale and hollow as faith. God meant nothing to us, yet neither did art. Both were rumours, legends, items of reverence at which we nodded in passing as we might the coffin of a distant relative. Detachment from one probably followed from detachment from the other, but how could I appreciate this?

Since then reading and writing have become important to me in an excessive way; that is, more than it should do in order to get on in life, more than a source of organised information, more than escapism, more than craft mastery or self-expression. And yet not as a replacement for a lost tradition; there was, after all, nothing to replace. Is this excess subject to the fate of theology? How can I begin to seek an answer without immersion in the breach between tradition and its erasure? I am a child of that erasure; there is no way back.

Perhaps the excess is more banally explicable. It may be said that I am, like everyone else, psychologically predisposed to such a need, and that it might well have been met by any number of alternatives: politics, science, music, sport, drugs, living life to the full. Religion is just an old-fashioned lifestyle choice. However tempting this answer is, and it is the one most easily within reach, it is for this reason not enough. It too has to be subject to the same question of fate. This is probably why I am hesitant to admire the publishing phenomenon led by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens in which religious faith is resisted and atheism or scientific scepticism encouraged. Not because I tend toward faith but precisely because I do not. Dawkins rejects theology a priori, not even beginning to offer an immanent critique, a position that left Terry Eagleton rightly incredulous. Dawkins' science thereby looks like fundamentalist theology by other means.

I recognise its symptoms in the pursuit of the excess of writing. The enthusiastic reception of David Shields' Reality Hunger – a.k.a. The Novel Delusion or, Fiction is Not Great – is a small trace of the general desire for answers, judgement, for the Kingdom of God to be manifest on Earth as it is in Heaven. It is understandable, yet wrongheaded. In The Book of God, Josipovici argues for a reading that lives in the uncertain light of the Bible's stories; that is, does not seek answers to questions not posed by the supreme fiction. To solicit answers is to miss the experience of the narrative as a whole. The whole, however, can also appear as an absence. The importance of writing in my experience is not that it happens upon answers that justifies its existence and, in doing so, puts an end to writing, but that it brings to life the distance between tradition and its erasure, and makes writing all the more necessary. The distance is a space opened by all writing; a space in which absence becomes the model on which the modern equivalents of the Commedia, if not cathedrals, may be built.

All human errors are impatience, the premature breaking off of what is methodical, an apparent fencing in of the apparent thing.

Kafka's aphorism is a good example, and typical of this writer, in that it both condemns the rush to embrace an illusion – reality in books – while also implying that books themselves are an apparent fencing in of the apparent thing. He turns the accusation inwards even as it moves outwards. This dual movement is the paradox at the heart of Modernist writing. It's a paradox that can be seen as a problem, a fault demanding an evangelising manifesto to vindicate writing in a positivist, scientific culture.

The resistance we experience when faced with contradiction is natural, and yet it is also the fundamental experience of reading and writing. In The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot discusses Simone Weil's affirmation of God despite her natural atheism, and paraphrases the idea of an earlier Jewish mystic, suggesting there is a tradition below the carapace of contemporary resistance:

It is Isaac Luria (a saintly man and profound thinker of the sixteenth century, whose influence we know was great) who, interpretating an idea from the ancient Cabala ... recognised in the creation an act of abandonment on the part of God. A forceful idea. In creating the world God does not set forth something more, but, first of all, something less. Infinite Being is necessarily everything. In order that there be the world, he would have to cease being the whole and make a place for it through a movement of withdrawal, of retreat, and in "abandoning a kind of region within himself, a sort of mystical space." In other words, the essential problem of creation is the problem of nothingness. Not how something can be created out of nothing, but how nothing can be created in order that, on the basis of nothing, something can take place. There must be nothing: that the nothing exists is the true secret and the initial mystery, a mystery that begins painfully with God himself – through a sacrifice, a retraction, and a limitation, a mysterious consent to exile himself from the all that he is and to efface and absent himself, if not disappear. (It is as through the creation of the world, or its existence, would have evacuated God from himself, posed God as a lack of God and therefore had as its corollary a sort of ontological atheism that could only be abolished along with the world itself. Where there is a world, there is, painfully, the lack of God.) A profound thought indeed.

The Orwellian Prizes

"Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

The fate of famous quotations such as George Orwell's is to become a cliché, to lose meaning beyond their own historical reference points, themselves also by now a cliché. So to renew the observation, let's make it real again by looking at political prizes: the Orwell Prizes, no less. "The ambition of the prizes" we're told "is to reward, celebrate and promote work that helps nurture the discussion of politics and that contributes to the quality of public life." It is run "in association with The Orwell Trust ... and the Media Standards Trust". What more could guarantee objectivity and independence?

To begin we may ask what discussion does it seek to nurture? Looking at the archives, it has shortlisted books by Nick Cohen (twice!), Andrew Marr and (Tony Blair's press secretary) Alastair Campbell, each to varying degrees responsible for selling to the British public the solidity of Iraq's Weapons of Mass Distruction and respect to the murderous invasion of Iraq. Peek at its award for Journalism and you'll see the similar heroes of quality nurturing: Justin Webb, Johann Hari, Clive James, David Aaronovitch, Melanie Phillips, and Peter Hitchens (twice!). For the blog award, which began only last year, it has already included Oliver Kamm and Conservative blogger Iain Dale (twice!). Perhaps in scanning the lists I've skipped representatives of the Left and discussion isn't so constrained.

Of course, the prize has included some worthy authors, usually those writing about issues in lands safely out of range – this year the Arctic, Kenya and Zimbabwe (twice!). Yet what about those who have sought to elucidate Orwell's dictum in the nearest, the now and in England? Richard Seymour's Lenin's Tomb superbly written and often revelatory blog posts have yet to be recognised. His book was ignored too. It's a staggering truth also that John Pilger has not been nominated for the journalism prize. Here's his Welcome to Orwell's World. As for the book prize, the work from 2009 most overtly inspired by Orwell is surely Newspeak in the 21st Century by Davids Edward and Cromwell, "an exposé of the arrogance and servility to power of our leading journalists and editors". Yet it too is conspicuous by its absence from the longlist.

It is very fortunate then, that, due to the abiding example set by Orwell, the impeccably independent prize judges are free to resist the dead hand of political language in order to reward those who expose its lies and to hold to account those who make mass murder respectable. We can only assume the four writers mentioned above just didn't make the grade. After all, we can rest assured even those close to the power prefer freedom and independence to wealth and privilege. For this we give thanks, in association with the Media Standards Trust, of course.