Mehr Nichts: Alice by Judith Hermann

In his essay for the TLS, Tim Parks wonders what kind of literature will reach the international public after “what is now an industrialized translation process”. He points out that, while authors from English-speaking nations can include meticulous detail on every aspect of everyday life, to reach a global audience a writer from, say, Serbia, the Czech Republic or Holland “must come up with something impressive and unusual in terms of content and style. Five hundred pages of Franzen-like details about popular mores in Belgrade or Warsaw would not attract a large advance.” He cites the struggles of editors in various European countries to sell foreign rights for their authors. Worse, for readers less concerned with popular mores (such as the size of advances) than discovering novels exploring content and style, what Parks calls “direct, unmediated contact between a writer and reader” may not survive such translation because “the final product will be flattened and standardized”.


A case study may be Alice, a translation by Margot Bettauer Dembo of Judith Hermann’s 2009 German novel. It is published by The Clerkenwell Press, a new imprint of Profile Books, publishers of such mainstream favourites as Alan Bennett and Susan Hill. Hermann’s work is very popular in Germany, so cannot be accused of pandering to the foreign image of Germany. Her 1998 volume of short stories Sommerhaus, später sold a quarter of a million hardback copies in Germany and, according to The Independent, its translation revealed “a master storyteller”. When Alice was published in Germany, Katy Derbyshire reported that “the press are (sic) going absolutely wild” and Irish novelist Hugo Hamilton says “Alice has the breadth of an epic novel”. Might local appreciation indicate a writer of her time and place, and thereby allay Parks’ disquiet?

The answer is no, probably, but this has very little to do with the translation. Alice is an effortlessly readable sequence of five linked stories each named after a man who is dying or dead: Misha, Conrad, Richard, Malte and Raymond. The novel itself is named after the woman to whom they are related either by love or blood. In the first three chapters, Alice visits the men on their death beds. They are almost entirely silent and their deaths occur off screen, implied in the description of a hospital room being cleared or guessed interpretations from words in a foreign language. Instead, the narrative consists of descriptions of Alice’s thoughts, actions and polite interaction with the dying men’s relatives and carers. There is almost no backstory or passages of nostalgic reminiscence. A certain chill pervades:

That morning Alice sat at Misha’s bedside until noon. First on one side of the bed, then on the other. The room was utilitarian, fitted cupboards, a sink, the door to the toilet, a bare area of painted linoleum where a second bed had stood in which another patient had been lying. Some days ago the nurses had pushed him elsewhere, without giving any reasons. To some other place.

The abrupt division of the final sentence, which we must assume is a feature of the German original, mimics the pauses in speech; an aural semi-colon adding a peculiar stress to the banality of the information it contains. It stands for Alice's experience in general.

Sitting on the left-hand side of the bed, she’d be next to the IV drip stand for the morphine, but leaning back against the wall unit, she could look out of the window and see the hills when she could no longer bear to look at Misha. To look at his face. Misha slept with his eyes open. The entire time. Like a plant, he had turned to the light, towards the grey but bright day.

The technique is soon dropped, yet the motifs hinted at here continue and begin to dominate the content: light on walls, distance – physical and psychological – water for drinking and swimming in, and insects. Alice describes how, in her final days with Misha, a spider built a web between their two beer bottles which they had to destroy in order to share a drink. Later, questions about a dead relative are described as threads of spider webs broken as soon as one seeks an answer. Back in the present, Alice moves close to the hospital and notes that she can see his room from her window: "Misha's there. And we're here". In the second story, she lies in Conrad’s empty bed and watches a spot of light on the wall, realising Conrad would have seen it too. In the next story, there is more light on another bedroom wall and then later, as Alice travels to Richard’s Berlin home, she thinks: "In a room in that apartment in this house on this street, a man I know is dying. Everyone else is doing something else." So, rather than Franzen-like details about popular mores in Germany, we have stories drained of the usual personal histories and emotional struggles and instead the distance felt between one living on and another on the brink of a grave. The reader lives with Alice on the surface of the narrated moment like the pond skater, unsure if it is over a millennia-old ocean floor or a transient puddle.

The incommensurability of death then is the dominant theme and determines the style and content. Alice avails herself of the modern world, phoning for taxis, visiting cafés and state-of-the-art hospitals, yet these are the limits of reference. There is only one reference to literature, an unnamed SF novel being read by her husband. It is as if the loss of religious context has also emptied art and literature of consolation; the fate of art has followed the fate of theology. It has disappeared, more or less. However, while characters have bland, pan-European names and live in bland, pan-European cities, as if to emphasise the universality of the incommensurable, there’s only so much that can be drained from the particulars of place and time before it disappears into silence. As well as evoking obscure pathos, such motifs and metaphors inevitably invoke a tradition.

For example, in an otherwise insignificant moment, an unidentified, “multi-legged” insect drowns in Alice’s latte macchiato. The readerly impulse here is to recognise a possible allusion to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, and thereby to appreciate the implications of this absurd event. We may ask: is German literature drowning in consumer culture? Instead, or in addition, we ought to admit the tension this moment generates, when literature tries to exhaust literature by means of literature. Rather than having been flattened and standardised by translation, Alice is flattened and standardised in its quest for an impossible loss of meaning. The plaintive death of the insect is a small manifestation. In his review of Hermann’s first book of stories, Zulfikar Abbany says the word “Nichtssagend”, meaning empty or meaningless, “describes a host of young German literary lights who, aside from a smattering of cute observations, have nothing to say”. The leading light of Nichtssagend, he says, is Judith Hermann. The problem for them and their admirers is that the cute observations say more than they may wish.

In Hermann’s case, North American minimalist realism is the clearest influence; Alice’s husband is called Raymond. Perhaps this indicates the loss of tradition in German fiction concurrent with multinational cultural homogeny; the odd translation decision suggests as much: American English such as “liquor bottles” and “fat bugs” appear alongside “centre”. Yet no matter how much the stories appeal to an international audience, the contradictions within Nichtssagend are distinctly European. It was Kafka, after all, who said the true artist is someone who has nothing to say. In October 1921, Kafka wrote about the essence of Moses’ wandering in the wilderness and death before he can enter the promised land.

It is incredible that he should see the land only when on the verge of death. This dying vision of it can only be intended to illustrate how incomplete a moment is human life, incomplete because a life like this could last forever and still be nothing but a moment.

Alice’s reticence about the past and preoccupation with the distance between herself and the dying men is a fascination with this moment.

The fourth story is unique among the five in that Malte, Alice’s uncle, is already long dead and Alice never knew him. He killed himself decades ago and she seeks out Frederick, Malte’s lover, to learn more about his death. He gives Alice the letters he received from Malte, which, however, she does not read before the chapter ends: "It didn't matter what was in them - it wouldn't change anything. But it would add something - one more ring around an unknowable permanent centre." The reader is both disappointed and relieved. The centre is his death and, while an addition may be welcome, it is merely a surplus of strength. This is confirmed in a nice, metafictional moment when Frederick, who has no contact with Malte's family since his death, asks after Malte’s mother, who happens to share the protagonist’s name: "Alice has been dead a long time, Alice said."

On reaching the final page of Alice, the reader appreciates why it has to end without epiphany, unless that epiphany is its own absence, an appreciation that neither diminishes nor improves upon re-reading. Alice is dead. It is a prime example of what the defunct blog Life Unfurnished calls the Emperor’s New Clothes of contemporary literature: "writing in a manner to give the appearance alone of literature", and wishes someone would cry: "But they aren't writing anything at all!" (To which we may respond: if only!)

Reading Alice we can only wonder if this is a failing of living writers or a necessary characteristic of literature itself to which they are admirably faithful. Perhaps the failing is that writers do not strive more determinedly for Mehr Nicht (rather than Mehr Licht). What does it mean to acknowledge the limits of writing? After his own wandering in the wilderness, Kafka concluded, “Moses fails to enter Canaan not because his life is too short but because it is a human life."

Joyce Division

Adam Mars-Jones' review of a new biography of James Joyce begins by claiming that Joyce has "lost a little ground" to Proust in terms of popularity. This would be a pleasant surprise to me if true. "People like to read about the rich" he says, adding another dubious claim. Do people read such writers for such reasons? Before this can be answered, Mars-Jones returns to fact: "No one in [Joyce's] books ... is worth more than a thousand pounds all told". But then we're back with an odd construal:

Even Gabriel Josipovici, a stubbornly brilliant critic, seemed to short-change Joyce in his recent polemic What Ever Happened to Modernism? He was more attracted to writers with a high rating of aesthetic anguish, to Kafka's writhings and incompletions, to Beckett's long campaign against his own charm and eloquence, which is a rather romantic way of responding to an anti-romantic movement. In his books, Joyce shed the 19th-century cleanly and decisively, and had a great gift for generating rich new material from arbitrary scraps of patterning. The interval between his realising that a certain way of writing the world was bankrupt and finding a new one seems to have been enviably short, however long it took him to get the words exactly as he wanted them.

I emphasise Mars-Jones' assertion because it is in direct opposition to Josipovici's reasons for short-changing Joyce. (The "high rating of aesthetic anguish" is closer to these, as will become clear.) Of course, the assertion is axiomatic in the history of Modernism. Almost every review of What Ever Happened to Modernism? presents Joyce as its prime representative and Ulysses as the definitive Modernist novel without noticing that Joyce is mentioned in the book only in passing and Ulysses not once. This reading impairment encapsulates the unfortunate confusion in the reception of What Ever Happened to Modernism?, even in reviews sympathetic to the project of the book; the project has not been appreciated fully for its revisionism.

To redress this, here are the final paragraphs of a Sunday Times review of Hugh Kenner's Joyce's Voices from 1978. (It also shows that Josipovici's iconoclasm has not changed in the last 33 years.) "This is criticism of the very highest order" he says. "Nevertheless, a doubt remains":

Not about Kenner, but about Joyce. No objective style, Kenner rightly insists, can be said to exist; no truth can be discovered by aligning so many words to so many things; every attempt to simulate such a Truth will, as in the case of Hemingway, itself quickly become a 'style'. 'The True Sentence, in Joyce's opinion, had best settle for being true to the voice that utters it.' Yet what Kenner fails to see is that in the end Joyce does, against his own deepest insights, cling to one unquestioned Truth, that of the completed work. If there is no True Sentence, then why is there is a True Work? This, it seems to me, is a major weakness of Joyce, his refusal to recognise the vulnerability of the Muse, his insistence, against the evidence, that to make a book is itself a valuable activity.

Compared with Proust and Beckett, Kafka and Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Joyce presents a strangely rigid attitude; he refuses ever to let go, to trust the work to take him where it will. Every 'letting go' has to be carefully fitted into its place in the overall design, even though there is no longer, by his own admission, any authority for the pattern the design itself assumes.

It is perhaps a weakness of Joyce and not just a fact about him that he is such a godsend to the academic community. For there is ultimately something cosy and safe about Ulysses: underlying it is the belief that the mere accumulation of detail and complexity is an unquestioned good. Far from being 'the decisive English-language book of the [twentieth] century,' as Kenner suggests, it is perhaps the last great book of the nineteenth.

"as well as weakened by his fear of approaching death"

Hands up who can identify this new book, the first graphic novel on my bookshelves.

Answer: it's Victor Halfwit – the link goes to my review.

Two paths for absolutising failure

Scott Esposito calls it an odd takedown. "I’d been expecting an inspired reaction to an inspired book," he writes "but that is not what I found. Weinberger clearly did not like the book, but I cannot figure out quite why." Scott anyway gives plenty of examples to demonstrate Weinberger's misreading. The book is Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism? and the review is in the New York Review (subscriber access only). The reasons are intrinsic to the book's question and Weinberger's aggressive reply confirms Josipovici was right to assign much of the blame to critics. What happened to modernism is its betrayal by those who should know better than to, for example, swoon at books like Némirovsky’s Suite Française.

To respond to Scott's perplexity: I think Weinberger doesn't like the book because he's a postmodern optimist, much like the character Josipovici describes at the beginning of the book kicking the wainscoting of a lecture hall to rebut the works of various tortured artists. This is the prideful innocence Josipovici detects in English and American culture and one of the symptoms confirming that England has largely escaped the exponential spread of "the disenchantment of the world" (the "of" is important) and retains a bucolic innocence . Scott says Weinberger comes close to a real rebuttal at the end of the review:

But it is astonishing that his is a Modernism without the rise of the city, with its factories, crowds, and anonymity; without the devastation of the Napoleonic and First World Wars; without the ideological ardors of communism and fascism, the thrill of speed, the new symbolic language of the telegraph, the international voices of radio, mass migrations, the representational “reality” of photographs and the collapse of time in film montage, anthropological investigations of tribal cultures, or the beauties and terrors of industrial products.

What is astonishing is that Weinberger misses Josipovici's reasons for what is apparently missing. He wonders if Britain is relatively innocent of Modernism precisely because it wasn't touched by the Napoleonic and First World Wars, the ideological ardors of communism and fascism, and mass migrations. At least, not to the same extent as Europe was touched. Of course, hundreds of thousands of Britons died in WW1, only it took place on the other side of the English Channel and has always been somehow unreal; told rather than experienced. As the Battle of the Somme turned the sky dark and scorched the landscape, in England the sun still shone and birds still cheeped. It still does, they still do. It explains why we still write and reward novels about a century-old war.

Weinberger's review has lazy asides that need to be addressed. Does he really believe that Perec and Bernhard have received anything like the adulation and attention Némirovsky continues to receive? And Claude Simon's Nobel wasn't awarded by a British jury. The point made clear in the book is that these writers may have admirers in Britain, and indeed one has received more attention lately, but the formal adventurousness of their style has been ignored and everyone more or less still writes like Némirovsky. Also, the final line is astounding: how can he read the chapter on Wordsworth and accuse the book of an agoraphobic interiority? What Josipovici says in his Berfois interview matches what he says in the book:

[My argument] may make it sound terribly introverted and art-for-art’s-sake-y, but it is just the opposite. The artists I see as Modernist, from Rabelais and Cervantes through Sterne to Wordsworth, Holderlin and Kleist and on to Mallarme, Eliot, Kafka, Proust and the rest, are all primarily concerned with exploring the world, but they also recognise that to do so effectively is to grasp that to write is to work with words, to write music is to work with sounds, etc. Thus, for the writers one key strategy is to make clear to the reader where the boundaries fall between the book and the world.

Weinberger's approach is in contrast to Wordsworth: he doesn't see any problem about taking possession of the world with words. As befits his nation, he is a literary imperialist. While he doesn't offer any examples of "what's happening" to refute the book, if the smugness on display in What I heard about Iraq is anything to go by, it's not worth hearing.



Postscript: Some years ago Ed Champion expressed disappointment at the "near silence from the litblogosphere" about Adam Thirlwell's Miss Herbert (entitled The Delighted States in the US). Here was a book he assumed we would love because "it speaks of literature in a giddy, informed, and near intoxicated manner". I assumed the same would be the case with What Ever Happened to Modernism?, only for different reasons. Giddy, near intoxicated criticism is indeed Thirlwell's virtue and I enjoyed the book as much as I disagreed with its optimism and oppostions (I approached a response in a review of another book). But I think the book didn't receive attention precisely because of this virtue. There was only pleasure to be had and not much inspiration. Josipovici's book addresses Thirlwell's reading of Don Quixote and in doing so perhaps reveals why there has been only slightly less silence in response to his book. What Ever Happened to Modernism? offers a huge challenge to the aspiring author, yet not to one demanding the creation of a world-historical 800-page tome "tackling" the great questions or producing yet another ghost of the Great American Novel, but one which shows how the writers to whom we look up created their greatest works by including their own sense of failure and impossibility rather than transcending it. We're asked to fail better; that is, Beckett's injunction as glossed by David Winters:

'Try again. Fail again. Fail better', surely the most misread sequence in all of Beckett. He would have been horrified to see it appropriated as a catch-all stoic maxim (e.g. 'OK, you're destined to fail, but never mind, keep trying, keep failing in such a way that your failures come closer to success'). Beckett would have poured scorn on this sort of chocolate-box philosophy. The intended meaning is, directly and literally, 'fail more fully, more catastrophically. Absolutize your failure.'

Writing Beckett's Letters by George Craig

In September, Cambridge UP publishes volume two of The Letters of Samuel Beckett covering the years 1941 to 1956. The wait has been long since volume one ended immediately after and just before major events in Beckett's life. George Craig can help as we wait. As one of the four editors, he has also translated many of the letters into English. (Fifteen years ago, he was my tutor on an MA course at university and I remember seeing a photocopy of illegible text he happened to be working on.) Now in association with Sylph Editions he has produced an account of this extraordinary work:

Highly personal and at the same time informed by a lifetime of experience of movement between languages, this cahier offers an insight into the ‘task of the translator’ – when the writer being translated was himself a master translator.

You can find out how to buy the edition at the site dedicated to The Cahier Series and a list of London, Parisian and New York bookshops where they can be found.

Three steps not beyond: Peter Handke's trilogy of thresholds

Ever since the time when he lived for almost a year with the thought that he had lost contact with language, every sentence he managed to write, and which in addition left him feeling that it might be possible to go on, had been an event. Every word, not spoken but written, that led to others, filled his lungs with air and renewed his tie with the world. A successful notation of this kind began the day for him; after that, or at least so he thought, nothing could happen to him until the following morning.

The opening paragraph of Peter Handke's Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers, as translated by Ralph Manheim, is a marvel in a book of marvels. Even in English, or perhaps only in English, the sentences, not written but spoken, verify their meaning by enacting the same experience of renewal in the reader. The Afternoon of a Writer is only 85 pages long and not a great deal occurs in terms of narrated event, yet the same can be said of the whole. It is a clearing in a forest of books.

When the novel was published by Methuen in 1989, with the paperback of the translation following two years later in the superb Minerva imprint, it completed a series of three consecutive clearing novels: it was preceded in 1986 by Across and by Repetition in 1988. All three are long out of print and a new work by Handke has not been issued by UK publisher since Absence in 1990. Perhaps this fact explains the reason for my sudden need to revive attention for these books and this particular moment twenty years on. The more likely reason is that I want to understand how a quiet, reticent book like The Afternoon of a Writer can mean so much more than the overtly worldly and eventful novels that are published instead. How is literary renewal possible?

Until now I have not written about this unofficial trilogy because their significance to me at the time of reading was apparently held in suspension beyond the expressible content of the narrative. I returned to them recently only out of nostalgia and regret following the uncertain disappointment of each subsequent novel, with only My Year in the No-man's Bay (1998) coming close to air. Like the three other novels, the opening passage is one of the greatest in European literature. This is not to say the novels since – On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House (2000), Crossing the Sierra de Gredos (2007), Don Juan: His Own Version (2010) (all published by FSG in the US) – have been anything other than unique, virtuosic even, except that they seem too novelistic, fixed in facility, admirable certainly, yet only in a rhetorical understanding. And if this response appears excessively personal and limited, it is only because the trilogy appears more personal and limited itself, formed of brief moments from outside a career, moments in which the promise of a magnum opus is a threat.

Across is the testament of Andreas Loser, an amateur archeologist and translator of ancient poetry who, while estranged from both his job and his family, begins to see images in nature, beginning with a "warming emptiness" rising from an Austrian swampland plain surrounded by mountains and low-rise housing developments which prompts him to discover what that emptiness allows:

Under its impulsion, everything (every object) moved into place. "Emptiness!" The word was equivalent to the invocation of the Muse at the beginning of an epic. It provoked not a shudder but lightness and joy, and presented itself as a law: As it is now, so shall it be. In terms of image, it was a shallow river crossing.

Successive images are then witnessed of the primordial given form in a language otherwise saturated by artificial light. Against the resistance of habit, he expresses anger at the casual, careless repetition of words bleeding images of enchantment, contrasting them to Virgil's Georgics, the ancient poems he translates in his rooms above a supermarket. It leads to a violent encounter, but this is a novel of attention not action. Loser's patient narrative leads him to the threshold of a new knowledge of reality. He wonders if one could speak of "the possibility of repetition" as opposed to its danger:

Shine for me, hard hazelbush. Glide hither, lithe linden tree. Rounded elderbush, prosper under the protection of the willows. Here is my other word for repetition: "rediscovery".

Across is full of such epiphanies and one can certainly caricature the affectations of Loser's attention to nature, yet the novel and our reading of it is a means to fuse perception and imagination without yielding to the expedience of language as public utility. To do so it must risk disdain to reach that threshold.

Die Wiederholung continues such a quest and is perhaps the most beautiful and remarkable of his novels. The connection with Across is explicit in Manheim's translation of the title: Repetition. Filip Kobal travels across the border from Austria into Slovenia to find his missing brother Gregor, whom he has never met. He travels light and often sleeps in the open, living close the landscape of the Karst region. In his rucksack he carries two books his brother owned, a notebook from agricultural college and a German-Slovene dictionary and, instead of a person, Filip discovers a language and through it a means to write about the land in which his brother lived. By acknowledging and including the experience of absence (his brother is never found), he recovers what had apparently been lost forever. The Guardian's reviewer called it "one of the most dignified and moving evocations I have ever read of what it means to be alive". This is no overstatement.

The inherent paradox of storytelling – a gift dependent on withdrawal – is a dynamic throughout the trilogy. Loser’s journey in his encounters with images is his narrative description of the images themselves, and Kobal ends his narrative with a song of praise to the "all-appeasing And then ... " of storytelling, thereby confirming that there is no crossing of the threshold if that threshold is a portal to a transcendent realm – such as one in which his brother is brought back to physical life – but the patient response of helplessness before evanescence. So, even if both novels imply that storytelling is immanent to a disenchanted world, it at least offers an acute awareness of what may have disappeared. “Long live my storytelling!” Kobal writes. “It must go on.”

It’s ironic then that Handke has become the focus of disapproval from literary conservatives for whom impatient grasping is the sole gift of writing. They share an intolerance of reading attentively, or even fairly, with his politically conservative critics. The Afternoon of a Writer risks reinforcing prejudices because it is explicitly metafictional; a novel about an unnamed writer living in an unnamed town. The caricature of metafiction as self-regarding, self-obsessional is countered here by an obvious but subtle moment: the use of the third person; not “Ever since the time since I lived” but he. By virtue of writing, the writer is already distant and so is his success. This gives this opening paragraph a peculiar status. If the notation that began the writer’s day is a success only because this distance is recognised and the writer is able to maintain awareness of the apparent disjunct of imagination and life, then the metafictional step is the first toward genuine fiction. The alternative is "straying beyond the frontiers of language" into a realm where the figures of the imagination maintain their power only in a perpetual, award-winning illusion of presence.

This latter condition forms the nightmare from which Handke’s writer suffers: that what he had written  was "irrelevant and meaningless" and, as a result, "he had been banished from the world for all time", a nightmare shared earlier in the century by another great poet of alienation, Franz Kafka. The task of both writers then becomes an exploration of the withdrawal of writing, how it may enable a fuller life without delusion. It is a task shared by Enrique Vila-Matas who has received similar critical disdain yet, as Nick Caistor writes, for him too "the quest to create literature is a metonym for the ability to live a life that has some meaning". They begin by raising the issue.

As Handke’s writer soon realises, writing is, after all, a part of our lives as much as anything else – “loving, studying, participating” – only less subject to the utile words of which it consists, a contemporary no-man's land that, for us, is redeemed only by a relation to chronology; otherwise, it disappears into a common void. Even as we seek that relation, writing escapes and opens into a timeless solitude. Writing is something whose elements, the writer reflects, "hold one another in suspense; something open and accessible to all, which cannot be worn out by use". The utility of writing is gifted, uselessly. The dynamic of the paradox can be witnessed every week in the popular book review pages: a perpetual motion between celebrating the "imagination run wild" of consumer escapism and solemn concern for "state of the nation" realism. Handke’s writing is a voice from elsewhere. In this light, the kneejerk timidity and intolerance directed toward him and Vila-Matas is less a rejection of solipsism than a fear of an uncanny force. Writing remains taboo, and recognition of the direction in which it moves is an unspeakable danger only very few writers dare pursue.

Despite this, the mystery has been acknowledged in the general current of literature in "the recent rise to prominence of the biographical-novel-about-a-writer". As the review of A Man of Parts, David Lodge's novel about the life of HG Wells, explains, Lodge himself has attempted to identify the reasons why this subgenre has produced fine novels from, for example, JM Coetzee (Dostoevsky), Penelope Fitzgerald (Novalis) and, Lodge's own nemesis, Colm Toibin (Henry James). They are mixed:

Some ... echo the rationale behind the New Journalism of the 1960s and 70s; they also echo David Shields’s assault on the novel in Reality Hunger (2010). The turn towards the biographical novel ... could be a symptom of a “declining faith” in “purely fictional narrative”; or “a characteristic move of postmodernism” in its assimilation of past art; or “a sign of decadence and exhaustion” in fiction; or “a positive and ingenious way of coping with the ‘anxiety of influence’."

All are certainly plausible, particularly given that each of these novels is founded upon the recovery of the author, his time and his company, and thereby accommodate and veil the secret of writing in more writing. The recent rise in such fiction would then be a repressed return of the repressed. The Afternoon of a Writer fits into this subgenre but also escapes because of the writer’s mysterious namelessness. Here the secret is pursued even as the work frees itself from the "purely fictional" by describing the washing on his roof terrace, the cat looking for food, the smell of sweat in his study.

[He] told himself ... not to lose himself in his work the next day, but on the contrary to use it to open up his senses. Instead of taking his mind off his work, the shadow of a bird darting across the wall should accompany and clarify his writing, and so should the barking of a dog, the whining of a chain saw, the grinding of trucks shifting gears, the constant hammering, the incessant whistle blowing and shouts of command from the schoolyards and drill grounds down in the plain.

No matter what he experiences, the shadows, the movement, the noises, writing takes possession of it, and so Handke’s framing of the writer’s story in the third person is necessary in order to begin an exploration of the paradox. By beginning with a celebration of writing and, at the same time, questioning its success, Handke is literally making a move to leave the house much as Descartes’ Cogito leaves unreflective being. What the writer finds then is perhaps more disturbing than failure.

Beneath his letterbox he finds "advertising circulars, political flyers, free samples and invitations to art galleries or so-called town meetings", a postcard from a friend and "grey envelopes all addressed in the hand of the same unknown individual". The envelopes contain fragmentary sentences referring to a private life with no apparent relevance to the writer's. He regrets having answered the first ten years previously but had done so for a strange and telling reason: "he had mistaken the stranger's handwriting for his own". He dumps the letters unread in a wastebasket and leaves the house. But it follows him through the door. Walking by a riverbank, he bumps into an old man who introduces himself as a fellow writer and, unbidden, begins to recite a poem at loud volume. The writer endures it and moves on. He passes a road crossing at which a man sits haranguing the traffic, his words drowned by the noise. In both cases we're reminded of Kafka, his dissimulating letter writer Georg Bendemann throwing himself from a bridge in an attempt to bind himself to the continuous stream of traffic passing overhead. The poet and shouting man, however, are indifferent to the outside; their words are of desperate opposition not approach. A driver asks the writer for directions then, at the roadside, he discovers an elderly woman trapped amongst branches. She can't remember her name or address but, as paramedics place her in an ambulance, she gabbles her life story "in a few fragments, unintelligible to the others".

It is as if everyone he encounters is dealing in their own way with the polarity of dream and world. The writer’s initial impulse to reply to his correspondent is a possible clue that the author of the letters is a doppelgänger, the writer-as-stranger, the person our writer is in danger of becoming. Perhaps he was initially drawn to replying to the correspondent because he felt it might begin contact with the other writer, the “he” left at the desk. But he didn’t need to go that far. On the other side of the threshold, he witnesses many writers straying beyond the frontiers of language, working deeper grooves of an infernal circle.

Seeking relief, the writer takes the postcard from his pocket but is unable to decipher his friend's writing. It is covered with blots, dots and wavy lines, a "mutilated cuneiform" suggesting “the writer had repeatedly and vainly assaulted the paper". So he takes refuge in a bar and drifts off into imagining a joyful summer of writing, and so once again risks becoming one of the wandering doppelgängers imposing his fantasies on the world, except here the third person intervenes to offer rescue: “Did such imagining in a procession of forms take him out of present reality? Or did it, on the contrary, disentangle and clarify the present, form connections between isolated particulars, and set his imprint on them all, the dripping beer tap and the steady flowing water faucet behind the bar, the unknown figures in the room and the silhouettes outside?” Yet even this doubt becomes a circular daydream as he is interrupted by a drunk who sits next to him, rambling incoherently and grabbing the writer’s notebook to scrawl more dots and wavy lines over the pages.

Finally, he meets a translator of his own books, an elderly ex-writer with advice for his client. He explains how he turned to translation after suffering the same nightmare that his writing was meaningless and, worse, that his magnum opus, “the Ur-text of his innermost being”, was original sin. By translating, however, he feels part of the world. "Don't cross the threshold" he cries.

Even back at home indoors the writer cannot escape the presence of those on the other side. A newscaster reading the midnight news breaks down mid-report as if despairing of anonymous language. The writer wonders what could possibly have afflicted the poor man but the answer can only be withheld. In seeking it, the writer risks the siren call of imagination, so instead he merely airs possibilities. Except, of course, in inventing the newsreader he has already succumbed to the call. Handke’s writer began with the joy of having written, having renewed his tie with the world, only to find when he leaves his house that the world itself is populated by other solitaries with the same delusion and imposing it on the outside. Worse, we realise by necessity that all the doppelgängers are mere characters too, workroom fantasies, and the writer is the deviser devising it all for spurious company. And he too is a fantasy. That initial separation of the time of the writer and the time of narration is a sleight of hand; renewal is a fantasy like any other work of fiction, meta- or otherwise.

The illusion of separation is exposed on the penultimate page on which the writer described retreating to his bedroom and gazing at the stars through the window. “What am I?” a voice cries:

Why am I not a bard? Or a Blind Lemon Jefferson? Who will tell me that I’m not nothing?

The words appear without introduction. No "he says", no quotation marks. Who has spoken and who is asking these questions? We may answer: the writer of Handke's story, or we may go further and assume: Peter Handke himself breaking through the façade. This may take us one step closer to the aim of allowing experience to accompany and clarify writing. And as if suddenly aware of this possibility, the speaking voice regains confidence or resignation.

I started out a storyteller. Carry on. Live and let live. Portray. Transmit. Continue to work the most ephemeral of materials, my breath; be its craftsman.

Perhaps this is how literary renewal becomes possible, but this is where the story ends.

...

“I do not understand,” said Moro, “why this country lets all the people who amount to something run away, expels them, brazenly propels them to other continents…I do not understand this…but of course this country is dominated by the most appalling conditions, conditions that one cannot imagine, an unimaginable feeble-mindedness is winding the key of the machinery of our State…one must concede that much, indeed everything in this country is laughable…pathetic of course, theater…such that one is quite conscious here that one is dying, withering away, [that one] has decayed and must wither away…and such that I shudder whenever I think about it, my dear Zoiss…but everything is help– and powerless…when one cannot sleep under such appalling arrangements, cannot fall asleep and says to oneself that the fatherland is nothing more [or] other than an ordinary, brutal [idiotic] idiom…out of shamelessness…the children,” he said and looked down at the street, “play and live entirely alongside events, while the adults are brutalizing, withering away, are actually not present at all any longer…whoever succeeds in writing a comedy or a pure farce on his deathbed has succeeded in everything. Within the insane asylums is the universally recognized insanity, your esteemed guardian said, outside the insane asylums is the illegal insanity…but everything is nothing but insanity.”

From Ungenach by Thomas Bernhard, as translated by Douglas Robertson.

A question: do you really have an interest in novels?

I ask because, when happening upon websites for budding writers recommending craft laxatives to ease the passage of a trapped bestseller, you realise a cold, alien world. In the presence of expertise, you assure yourself that you have no interest in plot, no interest in protagonists, no interest in major themes, no interest in dialogue, in clothing, in colours or in descriptions of any kind. You have no interest in the chronology of events, no interest in a cast of characters, no interest in anyone's tone of voice, in linguistic verve or in graphic accounts of a controversial nature, and you say you wish only ever to avoid dramatic situations. What's more, you have no interest in shifts of tone, in register, in settings, in scenes, in twists, in revelations or insights into the human condition, and the prospect of a well-written, page-turning, award-winning novel, one which tackles an important social issue, stimulates in you only grief. Yet still you read novels. Why?

Metaphors are one among many things which make me despair of writing. Writing's lack of independence of the world, its dependence on the maid who tends the fire, on the cat warming itself by the stove; it is even dependent on the poor old human being warming himself by the stove. All these are independent activities ruled by their own laws; only writing is helpless, cannot live in itself, is a joke and despair.

So, mastering the craft obscures writing's helplessness, except you didn't mention metaphor, perhaps because it is the unextended mode of allegory, and you're interested in allegory, aren't you? Metaphor casts flickering light on dependence while heightening singularity and presence with borrowed meaning, while allegory hypostatises metaphor, is a sun burning through stained glass. That's why you cite Kafka, isn't it? Yet the vast majority of readers and writers know that writing's helplessness is its greatest strength; it's a miraculous window on the world where no window would otherwise exist. Metaphor refines our vision and makes writing not only helpful but necessary to illuminate, to separate and to connect. Otherwise, without writing, while the world would stand before us plain as day, we would see only universal night. And anyway, Kafka despairs of writing in his diary, a wastebasket for words slung into the air last thing in the evening, words he never dreamed would be published. He published contra despair. Kafka is right only if you resist connections, fixate upon isolation ("I'm much worse than Kaspar Hauser. I'm as lonely as ... as Franz Kafka") and ignore the foundations of your very ability to despair. You can't bypass the paradox by satisfying a sententious reality hunger by, say, dispensing with craft to write a novel in the form of an inventory. 

In the left-hand corner of the room there is a large modern armchair made of a huge hemisphere of steel-ringed Plexiglass on a chromed metal base. Beside it an octagonal block of marble serves as a low table; a steel cigarette lighter stands on it, as does a cylindrical pot-holder from which there emerges a dwarf oak tree, one of those Japanese bonsai plants whose growth has been so controlled, arrested, and altered that they show all the symptoms of maturity and even of old age without having grown at all, and about which growers say that their perfection depends less on the material care given to them than on the concentrated quality of meditation devoted to them. Lying directly on the light-coloured woodblock floor, slightly to the front of the armchair, is a wooden jigsaw puzzle of which virtually all the edges have been assembled. In the lower right-hand third of the jigsaw some additional pieces have been put in place: they depict the oval face of a sleeping girl, whose blonde hair is would in plaits around her head and held over her forehead by a double band of plaited cloth; she leans her cheek on her cupped right hand as if in her dream she were listening to something.

This is from Georges Perec's novel Life: A User's Manual and is a description of Madame de Beaumont's rooms at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. Not quite an inventory. The painstaking procession of detail is unusually objective for a novel, yet, because it appears in a novel, cannot be read objectively, free of context. We cannot help but hear each object sing in the absence of Madame de Beaumont. Although Life: A User's Manual isn't like genre fiction, our un-novel expectations remain in place and we read the passage as if it were from a crime thriller in which evidence of an event or the guilt or innocence of a character lurks behind each word. Our attention is held only in expectation. However, here, because there is no genre, the plot has no soil. Nothing grows. This is why you cannot read Perec's novel without soon being invaded by a profound melancholy, the words used by Proust to describe the imperfect indicative: "that cruel tense which portrays life to us as something at once ephemeral and passive, which, in the very act of retracing our actions, reduces them to an illusion, annihilating them in the past without leaving us with the consolation of activity". Through Perec's cool eye, while the objects do suggest activity, they appear eternal and passive, annihilated by independence. And while Proust's melancholy arose from storytelling sentences – "Nothing about her at that time recalled … She was a small woman whose figure had somewhat collapsed beneath her weight..." – that are all too familiar to modern readers, here annihilation is unforced, natural, rather than assumed by a careless author. The overall effect of Perec's teeming fictions is double edged – full of activity and possibility yet at the same time emptying, threatening to envelope the world in narrativeless darkness. (This compilation of Google Street View images does something very similar.)

So writing relies on the world's guarantee for the metaphors you believe – Kafka believed – lack independence and are parasitic on the world, but that our faith in the world's independence is itself a metaphor, otherwise we wouldn't see it. Every time we proclaim a reality beyond words, in despair or in delight, we take refuge in a literary convention and thereby re-affirm the world's dependence. This is why Kafka wrote as two people, part of the world and banished from it, and why his stories are both absolutely lucid and unfathomable. Let us read into this relation.

Once I projected a novel in which two brothers fought each other, one of whom went to America while the other remained in a European prison. I only now and then began to write a few lines, for it tired me at once. So once I wrote down something about my prison on a Sunday afternoon when we were visiting my grandparents and had eatch an especially soft kind of bread, spread with butter, that was customary there. It is of course possible that I did it mostly out of vanity, and by shifting the paper about on the tablecloth, tapping with my pencil, looking around under the lamp, wanted to tempt someone to take what I had written from me, look at it, and admire me. It was chiefly the corridor of the prison that was described in the few lines, above all its silence and coldness; a sympathetic word was also said about the brother who was left behind, because he was the good brother. Perhaps I had a momentary feeling of the worthlessness of my description, but among relatives to whom I was accustomed, I sat at the round table in the familiar room and could not forget that I was young and called to great things out of this present tranquility. An uncle who liked to make fun of people finally took the page that I was holding only weakly, looked at it briefly, handed it back to me, even without laughing, and only said to the other who were following him with their eyes, 'The usual stuff,' to me he said nothing. To be sure, I remained seated and bent as before over the now useless page of mine, but with one thrust I had in fact been banished from society, the judgement of my uncle repeated itself in me with what amounted almost to real significance and even within the feeling of belonging to a family I got an insight into the cold space of our world which I had to warm with a fire that first I wanted to seek out.