Death and the Martin

[Islamicism] is a tremendously radical enemy because, for them, defeat is not defeat and death is not death. Turn on your television and you'll see Islamicism is shaping world events. That's all there is on CNN. And it's having a huge wave, thrust of success. And that's because, I think, the casting off of reason, the embrace of death, is very energising ... for a while.

In the week The Lancet reports that deaths in Iraq as a consequence of the Christian invasion have reached an estimated 655,000, these comments from Martin Amis in a recent BBC Radio 3 interview, suggests he's just a chip off the xenophobic old block. But I don't want to leave it there. There's something about the intensity of Amis's current preoccupation with Islam[icism] that reveals something about his novels.

Twenty years ago, just after the success of Money, Amis spoke about the threat of nuclear annihilation and what he saw as its insidious affect on society: "It is the one great underlying uncertainty" he said. The latter part of the 20th Century was "the most dangerous era .. without compare".

We find ourselves at this moment having the fate of the Earth in the hands of .. an old actor and a prison warden. I get a great sense of discrepancy from that.

He went on to say that the discrepancy "declasses" us as human beings and that "it would be extraordinary if we didn't respond to it in violent ways".

I have remembered these lines because at the time it seemed both plausible and ridiculous. Could it be both? One violent response, Amis suggested, was that anger had become a legitimate form of political expression. He cited the riots in English in the early 80s and "certain forms of insurrection" (perhaps alluding to the Miners' Strike) that had just ended. Before then, of course, it had been all sweetness and political light. Anyway, the discrepancy, as he saw it, informed his next two fictions: Einstein's Monsters and London Fields. Yet now, although the nuclear threat remains, with Earth's fate still in the hands of another born-again cretin and any number of prison wardens, it all seems rather dated. Were we ever so affected by the nuclear threat? Maybe it was just transference.

Amis's attention has since returned to the discrepancy presented by death itself, which seems much more plausible, even if, as Bernhard famously observed, everything is ridiculous when one thinks of death. The Information in the novel with that title is precisely the fact of death. In that old interview, Amis said described death as "the dark backing a mirror needs before it can give off a reflection". An uncanny situation with which the writer is familiar: the anonymous realm of negativity bringing life, as it were, to life.

This focus on death might explain one thing about Amis' career that has puzzled me. After making his name with novels about British life, why did he then write novels about the distant past, about Nazi Death Camps and the Soviet Gulag? At first it seems that Amis is being, as Tibor Fischer describes it in his review of The House of Meetings, "an atrocity-chaser ... on the prowl for gravitas-enlargement offers". But really it's Amis looking from the other side of the mirror. "Death was very central to both [Nazism and Stalinism]" he says. "In both it was imagined that a beautiful future would be built on a field of dead bodies". So while the comedy (in the older sense of the word) of the British novels emerged in the return of the repression of death, in the camps death it was normality that was repressed. So what might that return? Maybe another reviewer will enlighten us.

Another puzzling aspect of that choice was also remarked upon in the BBC interview: the obvious discrepancy between the author's personal experience and the subject matter. Amis says he had done a great deal of reading about the Gulag but had not written about it because, due to "a strategic sin of omission", he wanted the facts to sink in so that he could return to it at length, i.e. fictionally.

He claims that the only way he could gain legitimacy for the novel was not through "wringing [my] hands about the suffering of the poor bastards in penal servitude above the arctic circle" but through "the suffering of the study, when things aren't going easily with the work ... all I could do was the writerly suffering." It's an unusual thing to say, very much against the cult of experience still dominant in literary reception. It emphasises his trust in literature, for the negative to reflect the positive, for the necessary absence in literature of the world to reinforce its presence. But that trust isn't total. Amis's famously inventive prose style is a vigorous resistance to that absence, an endless war on the pleonasm of clichéd language. Death must resist death. Defeat must be defeated.

Amis sees Islamic fundamentalism in the tradition of the 20th Century's totalising ideologies: "To throw off reason, everything becomes possible for a while. Then the ground turns swampy beneath your feet. The rejection of reason cannot hold." Yet he could also be speaking of writing. Reason is writerly suffering, the long haul of attention and empathy. A writer might instead let his imagination run wild, bringing an entirely new world into existence and winning the admiration of escapists, but ultimately would be bearing forth only death. In contrast, Amis prose style is the crusader's sword beside his shield of reason.

With this in mind, it shouldn't be a surprise that he spends a good deal of time in the interview expressing contempt, not only for Islam[icism], but also those who see it in the context of what you're unlikely to see on CNN:

It's rationalist naivete to look for reasons when an ideology becomes very virulent, as Islamicism has become. It's much more pleasant to look for reasons and to historical justifications ... 'our unhingeing cruelty in that region has, you know, tipped them over the edge', but one also has to be capable of identifying something that is pathological. The Ken Livingstone response, that this is what people do ... when there is an unfair balance, you know they haven't got F16s ... they use their bodies ... I think that's sentimental rubbish ... and appeasement.

. The slight of hand where reasons of historical fact becomes "historical justifications" is rather perplexing after the implicit injunction against unreason. But it's a strategic omission consistent with his fiction.

In his recent story The Last Days of Muhammad Atta (which seems to have been taken offline), Amis chose to make the suicide pilot an unbeliever.

If you make him an apostate, his thoughts are still independent, and they're worth exploring. There are contradictions and resonances that you don't get in what Atta probably was ... a hachet-faced fanatic. I made him more accessible. He's pretending to be religious. What interests him is the killing. The contribution towards death he'll make.

Since the story was published, Atta has been revealed to be a more accessible figure anyway than the grim passport photograph which inspired Amis's portrait. But the embrace of fiction is very energising ...

A loss of problems

Martin Amis' novels were among those I read when I began reading novels – one read what was being talked about on television and in newspapers. Money was the first quickly followed by each and every one that preceded it, including the journalism in The Moronic Inferno, which I may have read twice, and London Fields in the year it was published. This was when I realised that reading Amis had been time well spent; time that from then on I would no longer waste. This was forgotten and reaffirmed several years later when I borrowed copies of The Information and Experience, and it was only out of duty that I read The Zone of Interest when I wrote something about Claude Lanzmann's Shoah.

The same can be said of the novels of Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, and JG Ballard, the big names of Britain’s literary scene in the 1980s and 90s, and Philip Roth and John Updike of the USA’s (the exception was Saul Bellow). Why did I feel mild indifference reading their novels compared to the entirely different feeling I got reading various European novels (and Saul Bellow)? To my surprise, the names of Amis, McEwan and Ballard have appeared several times on this blog over the years, often as I seek an answer to this question. The news of Amis’ death brought those early days back to me and now, with the death of Milan Kundera whose Unbearable Lightness of Being was the catalyst of recognition, I am thinking about it again. 

I read various postmortem articles invariably focusing on Amis' style, many of which Jack Arden says in an excellent piece create "the impression that style was also more than this – something supra-personal”. I was certainly seduced by Amis’ style in Money – I remember the effect of reading the verb "sharking" on the first page (coincident no doubt with the "Martian" poetry I was reading at the time) – but evidently there wasn’t, for me, much more than style, and while I could assume this was because, as Terry Eagleton says, Amis "was the great poet of the postmodern metropolis", subject matter that sparks nothing in me, one could also say Proust was a great poet of the modern metropolis (in Sodom and Gomorrah at least), and my discovery of Proust never became a waste of time. Eagleton’s article would also suggest my lack of interest in their novels follows distaste for the liberal politics of "the Amis group" – to which he adds Christopher Hitchens, James Fenton and Clive James – except the writers whose work excited me did not do so for political reasons; Saul Bellow’s reactionary tendencies being evidence of that. But it’s here that Eagleton gets closer to the difference when he describes the rightward trajectory of the group: Hitchens, for example, moved from being a "practising Trotskyist at Oxford" to "dining with the architects of Western butchery in Iraq". But, he says, "the relation between politics and letters is more complex than that, as a glance at the great modernist writers would suggest":

Joseph Conrad was a deep-dyed conservative and misogynist with a virulent hatred of the political Left. Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis supported the fascist cause, while W.B. Yeats, a champion of plans to stop the poor from breeding, flirted with fascism as well. D.H. Lawrence was racist, sexist, homophobic and antisemitic, while T.S. Eliot was a high Tory who championed a quasi-fascistic French movement. Yet all of these figures were radicals — radicals of the Right rather than the Left — and the fineness of their work is related to the depth and breadth of their challenge to a liberal democracy in profound crisis. Besides, there were plenty of modernist experiments on the political Left as well.

Almost all of these writers thought deeply about politics, philosophy and the shape of a whole civilisation, which is hardly true of Clive James. Some of them were powerful visionaries, which is not quite how one would describe Julian Barnes or Ian McEwan. This is one reason why their work, taken as a whole, has never been equalled in the century or so which has passed since it appeared, and certainly not by the Amis group.

While I would dispute that the work of "the great modernist writers" has not been equalled, it's understandable that it appears this way, especially if one's focus is on the Anglophone sphere, as thinking deeply here has been replaced by a condition Wittgenstein defined in his own time:

Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called “loss of problems”. Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world becomes broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial. (Translated by GEM Anscombe)

One can discern this condition across the entirety of Britain's public discourse. Behold in awe and reverence the deep thought underwriting this insight from an honorary member of the Amis group:

Amis himself said he never finished either one of Kafka's novels, but then again neither did Kafka. Very witty, of course, and characteristic: George Steiner once said an Englishman's corner-of-the-mouth "come off it" would have stopped Michaelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel and Beethoven composing the Fifth Symphony. Kafka's "failure" is thereby judged in the context of literary mastery rather than in relation to anything larger; Walter Benjamin, for example, said "it is the fact that his books are incomplete which shows the true working of grace in his writings".

One may object and point out the novels of Amis and McEwan address important issues, with former's books about terrorism, Stalin's Gulag and the Shoah (although curiously not one about crimes closer to home), and the latter's narrativised punditry drawing attention from literary journalists like never before; hardly shallow and trivial. Except the larger questions have been settled, as the Pope of scientism and Cardinal Hitchens insist, which leaves the novel seeking relevance in terms of a public profile, in an absurd war on cliché – the eternal return of a goldfish in its bowl – and in ambulance-chasing pseudo-journalism.

One might characterise the form of the novel as a search for an authority for itself, with genre providing prefab solutions, so a focus on parochial animations is an inevitable development of its Humanism; it demands constant movement to keep up with the times. But the shock of Martin Amis' death should remind us of the thin ice upon which such movement proceeds. Amis described the impulse behind his 1995 novel The Information as "an hysterical overreaction to the certain knowledge that you're going to die" and Julian Barnes, said to be the Gwyn Barry of that novel, wrote a book on the same knowledge. The horror of the self before the ultimate problem is an intensification of the writer's anxiety before the blank page, hence the blossoming of autofiction in the confluence of both. 

The problem of the recognition of the death for writers was addressed by Kierkegaard in his 1848 book On Authority and Revelation, an appropriate title given the expressed impulse and subject of those two books:

Since our age … is supposed to be an age of movement, it then is not unlikely that many people's lives go on in such a way that they have premises for living but do not arrive at any conclusion – just like the age, which is an age of movement that has set the premises in motion but is also an age of movement that has not come to the conclusion. The lives of such people go on until death comes and puts an end to life, yet without, in the sense of a conclusion, bringing the end with it.     [Translated by Hong and Hong]

The revelation of death provides authority from the outside for the lack of ultimate meaning in one's life.

Such a person can, in proportion to his gifts...go on and become an author, according to his opinion of it. But this opinion is an illusion. For that matter, he may...possess extraordinary talents, exceptional knowledge, but he is not an author, even though he produces. His writing will be just like his life, material; perhaps this material will be worth its weight in gold, but it is only material. ... No, although he writes, he is not essentially an author; he can write the first part, but he cannot write the second part; or, lest there be misunderstanding, he can indeed write the first and second parts, but then he cannot write the third part – the last part he cannot write.     

What then is to be done to complete a work?

In order to find the conclusion, it is first and foremost necessary to perceive very vividly that it is lacking and thereby in turn very vividly to miss it. 

No doubt giving up on Kafka's novels is in keeping with what one aspect of what their incompletion reveals, but it also suggests an unwillingness to face the other because of what it would mean for authoring novels, and perhaps a wish for novels to face the other is why I turned away from the Amis group and why, for me at least, Kafka's fragments remain a living presence despite the increasing obscurity of his problems.

More Amis fiction

Confronted this morning with Martin Amis' 12,000-word essay on "Islamism", I felt a tremendous urge to respond. I had to in order to return to the unique calm of Sunday. But it's all too much to absorb and reply in full with any coherence without ruining the entire day. But the day is ruined now anyway.

For Amis, it isn't just Sunday that's threatened. For quite a time I have felt that Islamism was trying to poison the world. So never mind messianic fundamentalists in charge of the most powerful army in world history, never mind greenhouse gases, global corporate capitalism and Simon Cowell, the problem is isolated, violent resistance to Western hegemony in far off lands (with oil). He says the virulence of the poison made him abandon a satirical novel (so it does have its plusses!).

Islam [...] is a total system, and like all such it is eerily amenable to satire. But with Islamism, with total malignancy, with total terror and total boredom, irony, even militant irony (which is what satire is), merely shrivels and dies.

He still managed to write about the last days of Muhammed Atta, which is sullenly, despairingly satirical. Failure is always good for fiction.

Amis compares what has happened in the world with what might:

On our side, extraordinary rendition, coercive psychological procedures, enhanced interrogation techniques, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Mahmudiya, two wars, and tens of thousands of dead bodies. All this should of course be soberly compared to the feats of the opposed ideology, an ideology which, in its most millennial form, conjures up the image of an abattoir within a madhouse. I will spell this out, because it has not been broadly assimilated. The most extreme Islamists want to kill everyone on earth except the most extreme Islamists; but every jihadi sees the need for eliminating all non-Muslims, either by conversion or by execution.

So, on our side the reality of invasion and occupation, on their side the fantasy world of a few. Which do you think worries him? The answer suggests the feats of Islamic ideology are not the only ones that haven't been "broadly assimilated".

Later on, Amis mentions the derangement of Mao to show how institutionalised irrationalism can take over a country. A figure of 70 million Chinese dead is used. No doubt this will become a mantra like so many other figures circulating among empire loyalists. But there's no mention anywhere in the 12,000 words of the very long history of the ideology of capitalism and the number of dead it has caused and is still causing. 70 million would be a conservative estimate, for the post-war period at least. Who's counting? Maybe it doesn't count because it's a coldly rational ideology.

As you plough though Amis' essay, it's worth bearing in mind Jason Burke's (mercifully) shorter piece on Islamism in the same edition of Guardian Books.

The question now, five years after the atrocious day of the attacks, is has al-Zawahiri ["the poster boy of al-Qaeda"] succeeded? It is tempting to point to the bombs in London and elsewhere, to the hideous mess in Iraq, to recent victories of Islamists, to the violent and polarised rhetoric and answer yes. But though a growing number may be answering the call of al-Zawahiri and others, the total remains minimal and the great uprising of the Muslim masses that he hoped to spark has not occurred. His most recent interventions have had a defensive, almost peevish and frustrated air. Yet he and bin Laden are still in Afghanistan - or just over the border in Pakistan - apparently easily evading the clumsy attempts to catch or kill them.

(Why on earth would the enemy not want to catch them? Gosh, that's a tough one). If Burke is correct, where does this leave Amis' fetishistic focus on Islam and "horrorism"? Well, the caricature of reality that constitutes his fiction gives a good indication.

UPDATE: Ellis Sharp has some intriguing links about Amis, Updike and research into Islam.

And here's proof, if proof be need be, that Richard Seymour is Amis's and Hitchen's polemical equal.

Amis's irrational attachment to a racist state in the Levant is only a logical corrolary of the passionate intensity with which he embraces the capitalist Herrenvolk. Its crimes must be externalised.

The last days of fiction?

In his new book The Sight of Death, TJ Clark is moved to write about a painting by Nicolas Poussin, yet, in doing so, asks:

Can it be that there are certain kinds of visual configuration, or incident, or play of analogy, that simply cannot be retained in the memory, or fully integrated into a disposable narrative of interpretation; so that only the physical, literal, dumb act of receiving the array on the retina will satisfy the mind?

The key word here is satisfy; and I think of the line: It can never be satisfied, the mind, never, the final line of Stevens' poem; an insistence opposed only unsatisfactorily. The mind goes on. It cannot know death. Hence a fascination with what precedes it, what lies beyond, and the eminence attached to pure experience, free from all mediation, reflection or repetition, and so an impatience with art, perhaps even an unacknowledged hatred, particularly of the literary art, the anything-but-dumb act.

Martin Amis' already famous story The last days of Muhammad Atta, printed in this weekend's Observer, is really an extended delay before its inevitable failure to know. The moment the story ultimately seeks to illuminate - the time of life before death, the moment of life becoming death, in this case as Atta's plane hits the tower, the sight of death we have all (unsatisfactorily) witnessed - remains in fascinating darkness.

Atta, Amis writes, didn't expect paradise in death but he did expect oblivion: "And, strange to say" he adds "he would find neither." I presume this means Atta lives on in world history, in this fiction, in our obsessing minds. This might be, I suppose, Amis' way of refusing him oblivion, the only punishment now possible, yet probably the worst. A small act of revenge.

Apart from that, it certainly seems odd to claim that Atta was committed to the crime because, in addition to the jihad, he also needed desperately to separate mind and body. He "had not moved his bowels since May" we're told. Where did that come from? If it isn't fact, I suppose it enables Amis to have some desolate fun with the pathetic corporeality of the idealist. Just before Flight 11 takes off, Atta needs the toilets because just then he is assailed by "the popping, the groaning, the creaking, as of a dungeon door to an inner sanctum - the ungainsayable anger of his bowels". But the doors are locked. It's a neat inversion of that great, liberating moment in modern fiction (liberating from Victorianism at least) when Leopold Bloom loosens his bowels in the jakes, described with relish by Joyce and loved by Amis. Here, Atta can only void himself.

But the fiction can't follow him, and so we remain, unsatisfied. What the story needed was perhaps a frame for the investigation, if it is indeed an investigation. My dissatisfaction with Amis' fiction in general (and most of the big British literary names) is the sense that brilliance obscures an essential satisfaction with the form. Fiction becomes less a source of discovery than an entertainment with pretentions to comment on world events. In Amis' case, the distinction comes in the confidence of the voice and the familiarly arcane choice of words - depilation, marfanic - rather than an engagement with the question, the question of the possibility of engagement. Maybe fiction has to take this route in order to find its own oblivion. After the final no there comes a yes ...

Books of disquiet

Two references to Thomas Bernhard made last month by two of Britain's most prominent novelists are unremarkable in themselves, yet still surprising. Eleven years ago, when I wrote an introductory essay for Spike Magazine, such references by such people were unthinkable. On Radio 3's Nightwaves, following up his impressive and moving lecture, Will Self acknowledges that WG Sebald has strong affinities with "the lapidary monologuing" of Bernhard, yet also different because he moved to England in the Sixties. "If he had remained at home", Self wonders:

might he not have become – at the very least – a German version of Thomas Bernhard, a refusenik, an internal exile, his solipsism not modulated by melancholy but intensified until it became a cachinnating cynicism? Instead, Sebald’s writing is anecdotal in feel, and furnished with plenty of English quotidiana – Teasmades and coal fires, battered cod and dotty prep schoolmasters, branch line rail journeys and model-making enthusiasts; enough, at any rate, to submerge any disquieting philosophizing.

A modulated solipsism is nice way of putting it: no cure here, only mitigation; palliative care. The centrality of melancholy to Sebald's work is probably the equivalent of Bernhard's cynicism; manifestations, that is, of contingent facts of life: the peace of the East Anglian landscapes, for example, compared to the venal denial of Vienna. Writers become who they are for many reasons, some more obvious than others. Self's thesis is that distance from Germany and closeness to the Jewish community in Manchester guided Sebald's determination to bear witness to the Holocaust and thereby help to remove the taint on Germany. But more than that: to bear witness to the presence of destruction in the peace of the English present. He writes about the destruction of German cities by the Allies and the destruction of nature in the abattoir of industry. Self's lecture is particularly welcome for bringing the English taint to our attention:

Sebald had no need of a Holocaust Remembrance Day – and I believe that if we read him rightly nor have we English. In Germany a Memorial Day for the Victims of National Socialism is indeed an appropriate response – if not an atonement – for crimes committed, but here Tony Blair might have done better to inaugurate a Refusal to Grant Refugee Jews Asylum Memorial Day, or an Incendiary Bombing of German Cities Memorial Day, or even – casting the shadow forward – an Iraqi Civilians Memorial Day, for these are deaths that more properly belong at our door. For Sebald and for those of us who hearken to his work, there is no need to remember, because the Nazis’ Holocaust is still happening in an interlocking space, while before us are the poisoned seas, the glowing piles and the cold putrefaction of an environmental one.

The blind eye we turn to the implications of Sebald's novels is emphasised by the disproportionate attention given to his least best novel Austerlitz. Had this been less explicitly about the Holocaust, as the three others are, one wonders if this novel would be regarded so highly. When he turned his attention to the Allied bombing of German cities, reviewers used it as a stick to beat opponents of the invasion of Iraq, to align them with 1930s appeasers. Self says "it is hard to imagine Sebald subsuming the emotional reality of the Holocaust to an intellectual abstraction", yet not subsuming the live incineration of Iraqi families is precisely what agitates the cognitive dissonance of mainstream gatekeepers like Daniel Johnson. A cachinnating cynicism would be required instead perhaps. Which brings me to the second mention of Bernhard. In Prospect Magazine, the house paper of the English liberal intelligentsia, Martin Amis caused a fuss by dismissing JM Coetzee by claiming "his whole style is predicated on transmitting absolutely no pleasure":

Amis: People assume that it’s the gloomy buggers that are the serious ones — but in fact, anyone who has ever been anywhere in fiction is funny. Yet there are whole reputations built on not being funny. Who’s that German writer doesn’t even have paragraph breaks?

Tom Chatfield: I don’t know him, I don’t tend to read that kind of German writer.

Steven Poole was the first to point out that "Amis might have been thinking of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, who in my opinion is extremely funny". Are there any other writers in German who don't use paragraph breaks? Perhaps Amis is being funny himself; after all, who ever gets pleasure from paragraph breaks ("Hit return, baby, one more time")?  My own bewilderment at comments like this – another one would be Jonathan Jones' dismissal of Saul Bellow in favour of a much lesser writer – suggest that Will Self is right to raise the biographical influence on Sebald's fiction. I wonder if this could be the reason why Amis' novels leave me cold, books written by a stranger in a strange land. I have to say the same of Will Self's novels and those by almost every other big name in current English fiction, whereas Sebald and Bernhard and so many other European novelists give me the air in which to live and breathe. Perhaps it's something to do with internal and external exile. High modernism in English is peopled by exiles and aliens: Conrad, Eliot, Joyce, DH Lawrence and Woolf in their own ways, while contemporary writers whose novels have moved me also tend not to be inward with the culture in which they live and work: Sebald himself, Hugo Wilcken, Tao Lin, Jonathan Littell, Agota Kristof, JM Coetzee, Aharon Appelfeld. Of course it doesn't hold entirely and, Colin Wilson-like, one can overplay Outsider art, but what it does offer is an initial diagnosis of the long-term malaise in English fiction. Whereas Sebald and Bernhard expose their fellow countrymen to the taint, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan seem happier to criticise the official enemy than the genocide being perpetrated in their name by young Christian white men (it's not just Amis displaying "­narcissism and [an] inability to empathise"). What is to be done? I'm not implying that English fiction needs to address this subject as such but, to quote another writer not of his land, to find words for what would otherwise remain wordless.

The authorisation to invent

The BBC marked Holocaust Day 2015 by showing the nine hours of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah over consecutive Sunday evenings. I had seen the film almost thirty years before when Channel 4 showed it in full with, as a mark of respect and good taste, a placeholder instead of ad breaks. The decades haven't erased memories of steam trains, lush Polish meadows and crease-faced locals nonchalantly recalling a time when there was a death camp on the doorstep. So why did I watch it all again, hour after hour?

Certainly there is a mesmeric quality. Lanzmann dispensed with overt narration, dramatic re-enactment, period footage and photographs to concentrate on interviews with survivors and ex-guards, sometimes in formal settings, sometimes in cafés, sometimes accompanied by slow tracking shots over forest clearings. You wait as answers are given in Polish, German or Hebrew and then repeated in French, which is when the subtitles in English appear. Perhaps it is the patience this demands that allows for a certain ease to extend between you and the terrible stories being told. Until, that is, a farmer in the village of Treblinka repeats the cut-throat gesture he made to those arriving in cattle trucks. The gesture erases time and space: this man's finger going across this man's throat was seen by those inside desperate to learn their fate. While there is nobody to describe it from their angle, there you are, the viewer, trapped in this a moment of impossible proximity. You wait for something to emerge and imprint itself on the landscape. As nothing ever does, why do we watch?

Perhaps the answer is plain Schadenfreude; a horror film thrill from a safe distance. There is of course the alibi of knowledge, and we might make the claim that Shoah helps us to remember that such events came to pass in otherwise bucolic pastures, in an otherwise civilised society, and so helps to maintain vigilance in our own. But this is a retrospective if not disingenuous reason when, apart from Raul Hilberg's brief analysis of Nazi bureaucracy, the film presents only the spoken words of survivors, with all the hesitations and struggles common to one-sided interviews. Shoah tells rather than shows. Or, rather, if something is shown, it appears in those hesitations and struggles, in those peaceful woods and meadows, and our knowledge is embedded in the experience of listening to a single person in their struggle to speak; an experience of distance rather than of the consumption of facts downloaded for future use. The film thereby submits itself to the domineering rhetoric of those who aim to debunk testimony, and indeed within seconds online you can find hectoring accusations directed one survivor in particular. This great weakness is its great strength. Repeated listening does not so much reinforce belief in the facts related by the survivors as heighten sensitivity to what is being communicated, which might not be so readily accommodated.

At least one question is raised from this conclusion: is the experience of watching Shoah uniquely dependent on sight, sound and enduration? That is, how might a form such as the novel create similar demands and effects on a reader when, in contrast to the form of Shoah, control and unity are considered key to its success and value? The question might at first appear arbitrary or naïve, but the consequences for the novel are profound.

The plea to listen to what escapes accommodation is central to Ethical Loneliness, Jill Stauffer's study of testimony. While its principal focus is commissions of national truth and reconciliation, a key example of the failure to hear is taken from Yale University's video archive of holocaust testimonies. Hanna F. is interviewed twice and, in the first recording, describes how she felt alone in the world after twice tricking her way out of Auschwitz. Sadness weighs heavily on her words so, perhaps to counter the mood, the interviewers call her 'plucky' and appear to dismiss her own response that it was stupidity rather than bravery that saved her. It takes another interview seven years later for her to explain what she meant: it was blind hope that someone else from her family would also survive and be reunited with after the war. She was able to take chances to escape only because of that single hope. But there was no one left and it had been stupid to think otherwise. Being plucky and brave led to nothing but being alone in the world. Stauffer writes that the interviewers' natural assumption of a redemptive feature thereby misses "a deep source of harm that no amount of time, love, or justice could fully repair". Despite this, at the end of the second interview, Hanna says she "unloaded a bit", for which she seemed grateful. Noting the patience of the second batch of interviewers, Stauffer concludes that if hearing is meaningful "it has to be embedded in an openness where what is said might be heard even if it threatens to break the order of the known world for those who listen". This is the break each victim has endured and struggles to repair, and which accounts for the patience necessary to the form of Shoah.

Stauffer frames this particular experience of loneliness in Levinasian phenomenology, his ethics as first philosophy. Loneliness is a revelation that the formation of the autonomous self depends on the cooperation of the other person in every encounter, and the revelation occurs only when that cooperation is withdrawn. For another victim of the Nazis, Jean Améry, the first blow in the prison dungeon revealed that his previous acceptance of what torture might mean was merely rhetorical. The clubbing by his Gestapo torturers was the moment of revelation. Common humanity became what Améry calls a "codified abstraction". He discovered that torture dehumanises the victim more than it does the torturer. This is what Stauffer means by 'ethical', as the victim experiences an ontological loneliness, something more fundamental than injustice. And it is not just physical torture: she describes how prisoners held for years in solitary confinement are afflicted by hallucinatory paranoia due to a lack of human contact. The lonely individual must then seek to regain trust in humanity from "a place of utter silence" and an acute awareness of how easily the fiction can break down. The difficulty in doing so was compounded in Hanna F.'s case by not being properly heard precisely by those whose aim was to listen.

Ethical Loneliness is particularly aware of the ironies involved in patching the exposed fiction – the first being that "institutions aiming to adjudicate loss may impose loss of a different kind". As Hanna F.'s also revealed, there is an asymmetrical relationship so that often when "a speaker speaks in an institution designed for hearing...an audience empowered to listen hears something other than what she says". Repairing the damage thereby unwittingly shores up the system that inflicted it in the first place.

Stauffer suggests replacing the notion of culpability with "the duty to respond or to be responsive" within the relationship in order for other possibilities to present themselves, which might be as basic as making room for what is lost in such a communication, perhaps such as expressed in Walter Benjamin's observation that friendship is not the abolishing of distance but the bringing of distance to life. This is certainly the possibility of Shoah, in that the speakers are given time to speak at length in their personal space.

But what does it mean for what is assumed to be the great civilising art form of what Steven Pinker calls the Humanitarian Revolution? That is, the one raised at the beginning: the institution of the novel. While this is outside the scope of Ethical Loneliness, here is a form also empowered to listen within a relationship that is asymmetrical in a similar manner. In a chapter of his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker cites a study that suggests the humanitarian reforms of the 18th century were preceded by the rise of literacy and the reading of realistic fiction. Novels with "characters unlike oneself exercises the ability to put oneself in other people’s shoes, which turns one against cruel punishments and other abuses of human rights".

Uncle Tom’s Cabin mobilized abolitionist sentiment in the United States, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) and Nicholas Nickleby (1839) opened people’s eyes to the mistreatment of children in British workhouses and orphanages, and Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea (1840) and Herman Melville’s White Jacket helped end the flogging of sailors.

In these examples, a writer is also someone sitting on a truth and reconciliation committee listening to testimony from the floor in order to produce a report with a view to enabling peace and justice. To write a novel then is an enterprise of humanism. Martin Amis' defence of the novel in general and his novel set in Auschwitz-Birkenau in particular rests on this civilising potential, and in his interview with Michael Silverblatt he cites Pinker's book as evidence that "the world is becoming less violent" partly because of the novel. The first thing to note here is that Pinker's examples all come from 19th century and are novels written about subjects close to each author's home, and he goes on to quote 20th century examples that are written by authors with similar proximity to their subject matter. So Amis' choice to focus on real events over 70 years ago in a different continent seems peculiar given this defence. His recent books about Stalin and the Gulag confirm the impression. Aren't there ongoing scenarios in the world more demanding of our attention?


Silverblatt and Amis agree however that the holocaust is 'the tone of our times' and stands for other 'adventures of ethnic cleansing', with the examples offered being notable for its circumspection. I'll come back to this, as Amis mentions that a theme in the memoirs of holocaust survivors and perpetrators is that each of us is unaware of what we are capable of, whether that is resilience in Hanna F's case or evil in the case of Franz Suchomel, a guard drafted to Treblinka who complained in Shoah that the soldiers lacked proper winter clothing. The tone of our times does indeed seem to be the frightening ease with which normal, decent people assent to the first blow against the prisoner and remain not only unaware of what they're capable but oblivious to what they have already accomplished.

Amis is troubled that "something quite supernatural happened in Germany...the most educated nation that [had] ever been" undertook this "pedantic exploration of baseness". There are times, he says, when the value of human life collapses (using the Russian Revolution as an example rather than, say, events in California where the interview took place) except in Germany he thinks there was something extra in which "death ... appeared and got going and seemed to gather its own momentum". He points out that while the holocaust was meant to be self-financing – evacuees paying their train fare to Auschwitz, their bones ground for fertiliser, POWs used for hard labour – an "Aztec hunger for death" overwhelmed the bureaucracy and became a drain on the war economy. This goes someway to mitigate the safety of hindsight in his recent work because this suspicion does justify a more imaginative study of this sudden inversion of civilisation. It is revealing then that Amis goes against his own current and says ISIS would be an equivalent if it "got going on a vast scale". But why this sudden leap into the future when the past has been the dominant focus and there are plenty of examples closer to home and closer indeed to Auschwitz-Birkenau, ongoing on a vast scale?

Steven Pinker's book and its claim that “we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species’ existence” has received high praise from people in high places, such as Bill Gates, who chose it as his book on the BBC's Desert Island Discs. However, Edward Herman and David Peterson note that Pinker’s "lovable theme" coincided with his nation's engagement in wars "on at least four separate continents".

Whereas in Pinker's view there has been a “Long Peace” since the end of the Second World War, in the real world there has been a series of long and devastating U.S. wars: in the Koreas (1950-1953), Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (1954-1975), Iraq (1990-), Afghanistan (2001- or, arguably, 1979-), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1996-), with the heavy direct involvement of U.S. clients from Rwanda (Paul Kagame) and Uganda (Yoweri Museveni) in large-scale Congo killings; and Israel’s outbursts in Lebanon (1982 and 2006), to name a few. There were also very deadly wars in Iran, invaded by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (1980-1988), with Western encouragement and support. And with the stimulus-excuse of 9/11, the U.S. political and “defense” establishment was able to declare a global “War on Terror,” open-ended and still ongoing, to assure that the “Long Peace” would not be interrupted by a conflict that met the Pinkerian standards for a real war.

Only one of these wars is mentioned in the BookWorm interview when, in passing, the inability to get warm clothing to soldiers in Afghanistan is noted. My intention in raising Herman and Peterson's book-length refutation Reality Denial, which is freely available as a PDF or as a summary on a webpage, is to emphasise the horrifyingly pervasive dangers of civilisation raised by Shoah and Ethical Loneliness and, more pertinent here, how they are reinforced by the novel.

Such subject matter would seem to be difficult to approach given its extent and variety, and Amis is aware of the argument that novels must respect certain boundaries, but regards this is "a philosophical non-starter" because "fiction is freedom, and freedom is indivisible, so there's nowhere that you're forbidden from going". Anyway, he asks, "at what point does something become so terrible that you can't write fiction about it?" Well, The Zone of Interest provides an answer. One of the camp admin staff witnesses an intake of new prisoners, who at this early stage are given a polite reception and deceived into thinking the camp is a kind of sanatorium, only for the façade to be broken when a truck trundles by with the limbs of bodies dangling over the side. Thinking on his feet, the Nazi distracts the arrivees by ordering musicians to start playing: "It was just as I had instinctively sensed: our guests were utterly incapable of absorbing what they had seen."

Speaking of which: last year, Middle East Eye reported that the Washington DC-based Physicians for Social Responsibility had released a study concluding that "the death toll from 10 years of the 'War on Terror' since the 9/11 attacks is at least 1.3 million, and could be as high as 2 million" yet observes that "most people have no idea of the true scale of protracted terror wrought in their name". The recent ComRes survey of the British public's awareness of casualties in Iraq confirms the observation.

And more relevant to the interview: "Undisputed UN figures show that 1.7 million Iraqi civilians died due to the West’s brutal sanctions regime, half of whom were children. The mass death was seemingly intended. [...] A secret US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) document discovered by Professor Thomas Nagy of the School of Business at George Washington University amounted, he said, to “an early blueprint for genocide against the people of Iraq”.

With this in mind, read how Martin Amis described some feelings he had following terror attacks on the UK: "There's a definite urge – don't you have it? – to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan." While he soon clarified this by saying "I was not 'advocating' anything. I was conversationally describing an urge – an urge that soon wore off," the contrast with his profound and plainly heartfelt empathy for the victims of the holocaust is stark.

The interview draws to a close with a return to the supernatural element in the growth of the camps. When Primo Levi asked a transportation guard why he was not allowed to quench his thirst, he was told: "Here there is no why." Auschwitz was "not human activity and humans cannot really understand it" because "the Nazi hatred was anti-human, really counter-human. It is a hatred that is not in us, it is outside man".

What is also outside man is the indivisible freedom of writing as indulged in novels and celebrated by its readers. It is also unhindered by 'why', an absolute freedom as embodied by an event that coincided with the rise of the novel. This might be why the question of writing fiction set in places such as Auschwitz causes such anxiety and confusion, not because it raises ethical or aesthetical questions but because it destabilises both categories, if not erases them altogether. For Maurice Blanchot, this horror is personified in the writing of one novelist:

he writes, all he does is write, and it does not matter that freedom puts him back into the Bastille after having brought him out, he is the one who understands freedom the best, because he understands that it is a time when the most insane passions can turn into political realities, a time when they have a right to be seen, and are the law. He is also the man for whom death is the greatest passion and the ultimate platitude, who cuts off people's heads the way you cut a head of cabbage, with such great indifference that nothing is more unreal than the death he inflicts, and yet no one has been more acutely aware that death is sovereign, that freedom is death.
                            [from Literature and the Right to Death, translated by Lydia Davis]

Writing justifies itself in this Reign of Terror because it promises an answer to its own strange relation to life, gaining from death "the possibility of speaking and the truth of speech". This might be the reason why crime fiction is so popular and may also be justification for pursuing events that are not current to newspaper headlines.

I say, "This woman." Hölderlin, Mallarmé, and all poets whose theme is the essence of poetry have felt that the act of naming is disquieting and marvelous. A word may give me its meaning, but first it suppresses it. For me to be able to say, "This woman," I must somehow take her flesh-and-blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost being – the very fact that it does not exist.

Sade is thereby the utmost novelist, following writing into its darkness. For all the presumed humanism of the rise of the novel, there is within it this non-human momentum, an Aztec hunger for annihilation, so that people are seen and heard in their great joy and happiness and in their great pain and suffering only when raised like Lazarus from the silence of the tomb, accompanied by the rhapsodic chants of humanist critics.

A recent example of how the novel seeks to approach socially pressing issues is the 2015 winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish, which follows the lives and thoughts of two people, Zou Lei, a Muslim woman from China illegally resident in the US and living precariously on fringes of society, and Skinner, a veteran of the Iraq war suffering from PTSD and wandering in New York, with whom she has a relationship. The response from readers has been almost universally positive: "a masterpiece of empathetic characterization" says one, a "beautifully grim depiction of life at the bottom" says another, one that "stays true and honest to real life" and a "really powerful novel that shows us people who we don't see a lot of in literature", while the Guardian says that Lish's "tough lyricism ultimately works to dissolve the barrier between book and reader, co-opting us into a great, multi-ethnic nomadic clan". By coincidence, Michael Silverblatt read it too and says it contains "transcendental writing."

It is certainly disturbing taken at face value like those readers above, but also disturbing for how such revelations and consequent concern depend on each character being manipulated like a rat in a maze. (It can only be a coincidence that BF Skinner's surname is present.) Not only are their movements described in detail but those of their inner lives too: "She felt the whole earth traveling across the cosmos" and "Then Skinner came back from wherever he had been and she thought, God was with us." How does the author know what they were feeling or thinking? A naïve question of course, given this is how the majority of novels proceed, but this is not without a troubling precedent, as Blanchot says of the Terror: "No one has a right to a private life any longer, everything is public and the most guilty person is the suspect – the person who has a secret, who keeps a thought, an intimacy to himself".

The transcendental prose might be in other such sentences: "Her chest looked like lasagna", "The sugar flashed inside her like sunshine in the desert", "Immortality flowed back into her like the juice in a plant stem" or "He called her at four in the morning and started talking, his voice like a loud ant coming out of the cell phone". Of course, this is the style that dominates fiction in English, creating a sense of place and the self's place within it:

Broadway in the daylight. People streaming out of the subway, moving in clusters that broke apart into fragments and passed through other columns of people like a strainer. He smelled pretzels. A black Denali with the driver’s hand visible, resting on the steering wheel, an athlete’s hand, an expensive watch. All the girls wore Eskimo boots. Their hair bounced behind them. There were so many it was unbelievable.

It should be made clear that such writing led one writer to the Nobel Prize, so any negativity implied here applies to a culture in which imaginative empathy has become speaking for rather than listening to, with the flights of transcendence swooping majestically like reconnaissance aircraft over a foreign land prior to an invasion.


These may be novels seeking to put into words what previously has not been put into words, but whose words are they?

As I said at the beginning, Shoah interviews one scholar, Raul Hilberg, an expert on the bureaucracy and logistics of the Nazi machine, and what he says is worth noting when thinking about this dominant mode of fiction. He speaks of the reliance on past experience for administration of anti-Jewish policy until, that is, they had to go beyond precedence. It was then that the bureaucrats became inventors. For the mass killing "one cannot find a specific document, a specific plan, outline or blueprint which states 'Now the Jews will be killed'. Everything is left to inference from general words". Goering's letter to Heydrich at the end of July 1941 charging him to proceed with the final solution was "an authorisation to invent. It was an authorisation to begin something that was not as yet capable of being put into words".

The words in novels are authorised by its form, its genre. You must invent. This is generally assumed to be a gift. What is the alternative? If instead a novel seeks to listen and for that hearing to be meaningful in the sense Stauffer outlines, how might it embed itself in openness and to escape the solipsism of genre? The recent excitement over Reality Hunger and 'creative non-fiction' would suggest it is necessary to include info-dumps in order to back up fictional devices with verifiable facts. Except we have seen how this doesn't explain the unique experience of watching Shoah, as it creates the same noise as lyrical flights around the silence of its object, and merely pays "homage to the superstition of fact", as James Wood wrote contrasting WG Sebald's fiction with his 'factional' counterparts: "For Sebald...facts are indecipherable, and therefore tragic".

If fiction and non-fiction appear to sustain themselves in this superstitious, supernatural power and in order to function must act on the authorisation given by generic form, then perhaps literature is also anti-human, counter-human, outside of man; the puppeteer above the puppet. The alternative might be to listen to writing, to challenge its power with infinite patience, the kind showed by Sebald; to apply the great strength of our weakness against instrumental power. Blanchot again: "Let us suppose that literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question."

Ballard: another last modernist

Rhys Tranter has posted several blogs in response to the death of JG Ballard. So far I have managed to avoid comment. However, the latest links to Chris Petit's appreciation The Last Modernist and now I have something to say.

What is it with this title? In 1996, Anthony Cronin published The Last Modernist, a biography of Beckett and, three years ago, James Wood wrote an article about Henry Green entitled The last English Modernist (to which I responded at the time). We can assume it's a muted overstatement to assert the importance of a writer even when writing - certainly in these three cases - means the erasure of the author as a distinct personality. Here though, in its blithely confident use, it reveals the anxiety with which British literary culture regards modernism (the case, by the way, is lower to maintain the present tense).

In the two tributes, the word is used in its most general sense: a modernist is a writer concerned with the modern world. Ballard was certainly that. What's more, he insisted that he was "not a literary man" - that is, uninterested in writing in itself. His concern instead was for precise representation of his subject: "He transcribed the images that unspooled in his head with an intense reverence and literalness, with no hint of po-mo irony, the last modernist." Petit places the focus on Ballard observation of "a world teetering on the brink of crash and catastrophe" and the epidemic of psychosis it provokes. This is reiterated in his tribute by Martin Amis:

[Ballard] kept asking: what effect does the modern setting have on our psyches - the motion sculpture of the highways, the airport architecture, the culture of the shopping mall, pornography and technology? The answer to that question is a perversity that takes various mental forms, all of them extreme.

This is certainly the climate of modernism and it cannot be denied that, in their novels, both Ballard and Amis raise a terrible caricature that might be called modern life and might thereby be called modernistic. Yet why isn't writing also subject to modernity as much as "our psyches"? In both appreciations, the writers demonstrate their own distance from the caricature. They are able to remove themselves from modernity in order to explain why its fictional presentation is worth celebrating. What does this tell us about the reach of modernity?

Amis refers to his father's friendship with the writer "did not survive Ballard's increasing interest in experimentalism" but the only forms mentioned are the perversely mental. Perhaps it was that Ballard's novels display "very little interest in human beings in the conventional sense" and are "remorselessly visual", both necessary symptoms of modernity. I suspect these are individual features of the author's style rather than experiment, although the unrelenting boredom of The Unlimited Dream Company might be an exception. So, again, what about the distance of the author; the remove from what is taking its course in the novel? Since his death we've read how Ballard himself was a very conservative character, in contrast to his imagination. This is told with a mixture of amusement and unreflective perplexity. Yet the refusal to investigate that separation is - for me at least - what finally limits such fiction; not interesting as fiction. Ballard's is a form in which the author and his means are not subject to the threat of chaos and castastrophe, always able to maintain a knowing distance. People in novels are never writers, just as characters in soaps never watch soaps. In this way, fiction can be more easily assimilated by the culture of journalism and presented as attention to the world while remaining a comforting escape.

We might compare all this to a classic modernist work, Kafka's The Judgment. The final action - in which Georg Bendemann leaps from a bridge into a river - returns the story to its origins or, rather, its pre-origins; its non-existence. Judgment has been made on the imagination that has produced the story and thereby betrayed the lie of its efforts to enter the world; the story is condemned to a release that is also a sentence of death. It is sentence that is, for the writer and reader, both swift and endless. "Last" is thereby also a misconstrual and misrepresentation of literary modernism; hence perhaps its popular repetition.

The shadow cast by writing

A common scene?

One day in the summer he was climbing a steep path toward a busy crossroads when, in an absent-minded daydream experienced by anyone walking familiar streets with only boredom and solitude to share, he saw among the cars and pedestrians the profile of a long-lost friend. It has to be a daydream, he thought, identical to the one back then, when they were still close. He had glimpsed her on the same street, except that time walking towards him and beside someone else. A shock enough for him to take refuge in the darkness of an adjacent shop, reeling from the revelation and hoping that neither had looked ahead, only to discover a few seconds later, as they passed, that it wasn't them at all, merely everyday strangers. So, he thought, it has to be an illusion, only now there is no need to hide. It wasn't her.

And what if it had been? No matter how well-attuned one is to the light, I think, life remains hooded by such fictions. They shadow the mundane present; stories overwritten mostly, sometimes flaring for a few hours, sometimes days, sometimes branded for years in a synaptic loop. Together they form a consciousness veiled by invention, hallucination and stupefaction. A good reason not to live, I think, if the alternative were not so much worse: a life exposed to the light. And then she turned toward me and smiled.

We chatted for five minutes, perhaps more. At the time, I knew it wasn't much. We exchanged small talk about work and health, queries about long-lost mutual friends and about our current activities; the usual stuff. It really wasn't much. We carried on to our destinations in opposing directions, slightly diverted, nothing more. What happened next is the source of what is written here.

Next is five months later, in the cocoon of winter. Late one night I began writing at the top of a blank page. Sometimes it is necessary to turn white to black. I began writing about that chance meeting. As I could not quite remember the conversation, I let the pen find the words. Except, rather than the words themselves, what emerged were memories of the physical shifts and gestures between us; the awkward corners and delicate pauses. Spaces grew around the words and resonated with the past we shared. Was this the person I had met, or even the person I knew back then? The questions staggered me. Was I imagining it? After one and half pages, the writing ended. I've written nothing like it since and perhaps never will.


[Moving beyond fiction]

This summer, the one and a half pages of notes became a fetish for me, offering the possibility of a more elemental form of writing, one which dissolves well-attuned habit and reveals an alternative life; not, that is, a different life but the one waiting to be discovered. Why else would a few hundred words scratched out in a brief, forgotten time stir me while all the intricate ideas, elaborate plans and laborious executions leave me blank and disconnected? On what does the appearance of its alternative depend? Chance alone it would seem.

While it would not be presumptuous to dismiss such writing as occasional autobiographical digressions carrying its charge in the singular impact it has on the writer, this would obscure what needs to be isolated as unique to writing. But how can it be maintained or codified into a public form?

I was reminded of these questions as Geoff Dyer and Lee Siegel added to the surge of voices condemning the worldly disappointments of contemporary fiction and instead advocating creative non-fiction. Both arguments rest on the notion of the novel as a means of narrating events in the empirical world and of engaging readers with company, information and meaning. The novel may be the apotheosis of "characterisation, observation and narrative drive" but now it has a more worldly equal. Given the examples offered, it's no wonder the war reportage Dyer celebrates appears more vital, exciting and relevant, while Siegel's call (couched in tabloid sneer) for literary fiction to be more commercial and realistic in order "illumine the ordinary events of ordinary lives" also seems fair if we assume that war and peace are the poles between which real life spins; a roadside bomb and a divorce spraying shrapnel into flesh and spirit. So how can the writing that stirs me – haphazard, unworldly – respond to these rousing condemnations?

First, we have to recognise the limits of the prevailing distinction between fiction and non-fiction. Both Dyer and Siegel appeal to cultural relevance to justify the relegation of contemporary literary fiction. For one, war is "the big story of our times – the al-Qaida attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan" means that "long-form reporting ... has left the novel looking superfluous" while, for the other, a fast-tracked biography of Barack Obama is "overflowing with sharp character portraits," has "keen evocations of American places" and is, moreover, "a ripping narrative". Both cite novels from the past as exemplary and now impossible because, according to Dyer, "the time has passed" when "human stories contained within historical events ... could only be assimilated and comprehended when they had been processed by a novel". Siegel makes perhaps the more telling observation that novel writing has become a profession rather than a vocation, thereby producing novels in which "carefulness ... cautiousness [and] professionalism" are considered desirable literary attributes rather than "existential urgency and intensity". Certainly these latter qualities are to the fore in war reportage and in Janet Malcolm's article cited by Siegel but, from the evidence supplied, they appear to rely on familiar techniques of genre fiction. The old-fashioned quest to tell a story drives these books rather than for anything beyond themselves, a connection, for instance, with what escapes the rhetoric of style and technique. Indeed, Dyer says one war book is "like a traditional third-person novel" giving "the chaos of events ... narrative shape" with "scrupulous observation and phrasing" spiced with "damaged lyricism" (a soldier's ruptured skull echoes an earlier description of the moon). In raising voices against the new type of book, Dyer first offers the straw man of an unnamed "fiction lobby" who say it's "too soon to tell" if the novel is out-dated, and, second, the fact-checking culture of the New Yorker. Deviation from the latter – a "willingness to digress" from strict factual accuracy – seems to be the only border war reportage shares with fiction. That's it. The "new" form involves arguing for this small creative licence. It is only right at the end of the essay that Dyer introduces a more challenging voice of opposition in the form of Martin Amis' thirty-year-old critique:

Amis claims that the non-fiction novel, as practised by Mailer and Capote, lacks "moral imagination. Moral artistry. The facts cannot be arranged to give them moral point. There can be no art without moral point. When the reading experience is over, you are left, simply, with murder – and with the human messiness and futility that attends all death." The essay is an old one, and the point can now be seen to contain its own limitation and, by extension, refutation. We are moving beyond the non-fiction novel to different kinds of narrative art, different forms of cognition. Loaded with moral and political point, narrative has been recalibrated to record, honour and protest the latest, historically specific instance of futility and mess.

Dyer is right that Amis adds little weight to counter his argument. Moral point is an inevitable consequence of all writing. However, its lightness may be deceptive because Dyer's dismissal appeals only to taste over judgement and immediacy over vintage. I would suggest Amis is wrong, instead, only because the new books seek to eliminate art (if not craft), or at least our perception of it, and this would be, in its ambition, the very height of art and, thereby, the height of morality, even if it is a studied amorality. "Art always throws off the appearance of art" according to Adrian Leverkühn in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. We should remember who helped guarantee his art throw off its appearances.

Despite the respectable ambition, it's hard to see from what has been presented how these invariably America-focussed war books are in any way "moving beyond" anything or in any way different from the careful, cautious and professional fictions of which Lee Siegel is so contemptuous. Their "existential urgency and intensity" emerges first from their subject matter and then, more significantly, from a fiercely limited perspective. Death lurks around each corner; soldiers can live or die in the next sentence. Unlike in the novel, the author here has no control over life and death. In this – perhaps paradoxical – way, war reporting has erased chance from writing. Paradoxical because, while chance fills the lives of the soldiers, it is erased in the telling: everything is necessary, already written in nature. This is of course a particularly thrilling reading experience – the illusion of extreme chance while one is safely removed, at rest with a book. While these narratives may appear to represent a "different form of cognition", it is merely a symptom of the triumph of genre. The only essential difference Dyer offers between it and Kathryn Bigelow's fictional confection The Hurt Locker is in its credibility. One we know is fiction because it is presented as such even if, in the telling, we are persuaded to believe, while the other is presented as truth "with multiple layers of dreadful, unresolved irony". But how can we know which is credible and which not without first having been convinced of non-fiction? We have, after all, not been soldiers in the front line. The issue is one of trusting the sincerity of the author. What is happening here is the familiar trajectory of a loss of suspension of disbelief followed by a knowing cynicism eager to be seduced again. Except, the only thing that has changed is that the magical force of fiction has been renewed elsewhere, in light disguise. Behold, the Emperor has new clothes.


[A realm beyond light]

I began this piece with a run-of-the-mill story of memory and imagination skewing an ordinary experience and then how its reconstruction in words changed the perspective, enabling the writer to loosen the self's armour of habit, perhaps opening it to danger, perhaps to relief. While I recognise its banal nature, I think it offers an insight into a more worthwhile, time-independent distinction between fiction and non-fiction or, better still, between formal adventure and storytelling. Next I need to describe more respectable examples.

It is well known that after initially resisting the idea, Henry James used a notebook to develop plots for stories and novels. Often these ideas were taken from anecdotes heard in drawing rooms or salons. The Turn of the Screw is a famous example, taken from an outline given by the Archbishop of Canterbury who himself was only relating a story told by "a lady who had no art of relation". The notebook repeats the outline and adds that the story "is all obscure and imperfect" yet recognises "a suggestion of strangely gruesome effect in it". Such obscurity may have convinced a lesser writer to abandon the story or to develop it to the point where it becomes a familiar ghost story. Indeed, the editors of the notebooks insist this latter project is all the writer intended. Of course James does neither. He makes the decisive move to have the story told "by an outside spectator, observer", in this case the governess who takes a job in the house where the events unfold.

But why decisive? In his short essay on the notebooks, Maurice Blanchot uses The Turn of the Screw as an example to show how the development in the notebook of the obscure and imperfect aspects of the story led to its unique qualities. By deciding to place a step between the narration and the events in the form of the governess' letter, the plot of the story becomes the lucidity and obscurity of the governess' experience. James uses the distance between the real words and the real world to create the ambiguity of the children's innocence ("one of his most cruel effects"):

... an innocence which is pure of the evil it contains; the art of perfect dissimulation which enables the children to conceal this evil from honest folk amongst whom they live, an evil which is perhaps an innocence that becomes evil in the proximity of such folk, the incorruptible innocence they oppose to the true evil of adults.
                             [from The Sirens' Song, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch]

The complexity of this ambiguity may be easily correlated to the narration of writers embedded in an occupying army among the ghostly, recalcitrant servants of Afghanistan. The governess becomes the imperial force invading an alien land, seeing danger and evil everywhere except in itself. In fiction, however, the reader is astute enough to recognise the governess may not be reliable:

It is she who talks about [ghosts], drawing them into the imprecise space of narration – that unreal beyond where everything is apparition, slippery, evasive, present and absent – that symbol of a lurking Evil which is, according to Graham Greene, James' subject matter and is perhaps only the satanic core of all fiction.

The implications of these observations is that what we think of as "plot" undergoes a change. From first being considered merely the thrilling sequence of empirical events orchestrated by a masterful author, plot is now the coercive presence of narration itself: "a presence seeking to penetrate the heart of the story where [the governess] is an intruder, an outsider forcing her way in, distorting the mystery, perhaps creating it, perhaps discovering it, but certainly breaking in, destroying it and only revealing the ambiguity which conceals it." The plot of The Turn of the Screw then is "quite simply James' talent", that is:

the art of stalking a secret which, as in so many of his books, the narration creates and which is not only a real secret – some event, thought or fact which might come to light – nor a simple case of intellectual duplicity, but something which evades elucidation because it belongs to a realm beyond light.

James is a peculiar case in literary history because his fiction was written at the height of the Victorian era and then over the cusp of the outbreak of Modernism. He lived in an era, as Blanchot says, "when novels were not written by Mallarmé, but by Flaubert and Maupassant". Except Mallarmé was writing then and, as Peter Brooks has made clear, James was infected by his time amongst the radical artists of Paris, however long the virus lay dormant. The attractive question for us is: are we living through a similar shift toward "different kinds of narrative art"? If there are indeed "different forms of cognition", then Geoff Dyer and, most prominently, David Shields in his Reality Hunger, are merely outriders for a new literary epoch.


[Masters of war]

Of course, it could be that they're just unwitting conservative backsliders unable any longer to tolerate the perennial challenge of the imagination. But how would this manifest? Perhaps in one of the most notable aspects in Dyer's piece about war reportage: its circumspect phrasing; this passage in particular:

August sees the publication of Jim Frederick's Black Hearts, which investigates the disintegration, under intolerable pressure, of a platoon of American soldiers of the 502nd Infantry Regiment in Iraq's "triangle of death" in 2005-06, culminating in the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the execution of her family by four members of the platoon.

The focus according to this summary is on the soldiers exposed to "intolerable pressure" rather than the monstrosity of their crime; that is, it is much like the bigger picture of the war according to official inquiries and polite opinion: a tragic procedural error for want of better management planning. One or two of the commenters to The Guardian's website where Dyer's essay appeared have already pointed out the warzones featured in these books are "home" to many and books about them are conspicuous by their absence. What is their experience, what "intolerable pressure" leads them to defend their sovereign lands with armed and political resistance, just as they did with our enthusiastic support less than thirty years before? Isn't this also "the big story of our times"? The nearest we seem to get is a brief mention of Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower in which "complex and developing individuals" bear "the weight of larger historical drives or circumstances". Except this is a history book, hardly a radically new kind of narrative art. So, then the issue becomes: how might a writer begin to approach "the enemy" with anything like the same embedded empathy as displayed for those with the "acronym-intensive argot ... worldview of the USMC"? It's a huge, intractable issue, perhaps necessarily so. For Dyer, however, "the biggest question mark about this [epic, ongoing, multi-volume work in progress] concerns the way in which it is illustrated".


[Shadows and shimmerings]

In these eye-level narratives, the moral point that Martin Amis sees as missing is the moral point precisely. Their evasion is as necessary to the books as it is to the military action itself. In their forensic attention to detail and narrative drive, they match the military's unflinching prosecution of executive orders. I'm reminded here of the standard efficiency and disinterested perception of Maximilien Aue, the narrator of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, as he pursues military orders. The reader of this book is forced to confront the contradiction of a deeply cultured and vigilant man with whom we are compelled to identify who also takes an active role in mass killings. Aue is aware that this is part of a necessary career path, even if he claims to find it unpalatable. Whilst massacring perceived enemies, he claims the alibi of the search for knowledge. (His modern, real life equivalent may be found in a character like General Stanley McChrystal for whom audiobooks replace Aue's Plato and Aeschylus). As The Kindly Ones is a novel, the narrative is able to implicate itself in its evasions by opening onto the consequences; the writing done by evasion. It has this in common with The Turn of the Screw: a luminosity terrifying for the shadows it casts.

The ambiguity of knowledge and ignorance, innocence and guilt, good and evil, plays its part in some of the great novels that Geoff Dyer, David Shields and others regard as supplanted by non-fiction. As I've described, Blanchot argues that the plot of The Turn of the Screw is the very stalking of a secret elucidated in a realm beyond light which, because it is thereby also beyond darkness, still irradiates each sentence. It means the story is potentially as evanescent as the ghosts haunting the governess. It takes a special writer to follow the chimera shimmering on the horizon without losing touch with it or his readers. Blanchot aligns such fragility with the plot of Kafka's The Trial, and includes a perfect formulation of the novel's soul: "The story of a man pursued by his own conscience as though by some invisible judge before whom, precisely because he is invisible, he cannot justify himself" which, he concedes, "can hardly be said to constitute a story, let alone a novel", yet it is for Kafka the essence of his life: "a guilt whose weight is overwhelming because it is the shadow cast by innocence."

Writing manifests both innocence and guilt; "a sweet and wonderful reward" he tells Max Brod in a letter, "the reward for serving the devil". Joseph K's adventures are then comical and disturbing in equal measure because the narrative moves between darkness and light without him or the reader being able to judge which is which. It is a story borne on its own anxiety for solace and closure. So, with this in mind, we can wonder again how non-fiction war reportage might partake of the apparently unique power of fiction to countenance the turning of the screw. Perhaps, if the genre in which they are constructed is, as Dyer explains, determined by a culture of magazine journalism in which "current events", the "big story of our times" and "characterisation, observation and narrative drive" replace the shimmering and shadows, it is a literary oxymoron and thereby inconceivable. If it isn't, then asking the question, merely wondering aloud, is perhaps the first step on the path.

Writing of the kind I have raised in contrast to war reportage also seems contingent on breaking certain silences and privacies. It often emerges from morbid isolation uncongenial to the security of public discourse to which Dyer and Siegel appeal. While we know about Franz Kafka's loneliness, Blanchot notes that James was like all artists in that he profoundly mistrusted himself – "Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task" – and wished only to be able to let go in order to enter that realm beyond light. Instead, distance became the necessary passion and in turn it generated the narration which enabled the cruel effects of The Turn of the Screw. It is also an effect of the "essential loneliness" James expressed in his letter to Morton Fullerton: a loneliness "deeper about me ... than anything else: deeper than my genius, deeper than my 'discipline,' deeper than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep countermining of art."  Yet he also appreciated his notebook as a magical arena in which chance rather than facts and experience enters the creative process. As he wrote in his little book, his became "the deciphering pen", and he experienced what Blanchot calls "the pure indeterminacy of a work"; a time full of possibility and hope; perhaps even an end to loneliness. For some, however, writing which enters and maintains itself in an abandoned space disturbed only by ghosts can no longer be justified. They turn instead to narratives "recalibrated" to accept the rewards underwritten by empire.

39 Books: 1986

In my second year of reading, I read four novels by DM Thomas, beginning with his most famous, The White Hotel, in the edition below with its very 1980s cover design. I look at the single-word titles of the others and can remember absolutely nothing about them.

Both the title and the three forgotten novels continue the theme of 1985, with the title following Martin Amis' guideline, adding a metafictional element for good measure: the novel as a temporary residence, a holiday in which one can escape, its whiteness offering a clean slate onto which one can watch the projection of another life, another world, but it was also throwing good money after bad as I sought something else these novels could never contain. Perhaps a book's title is the perfection we are seeking in novels, which the content can only spoil.

Fuss over titles is nothing new, nor is Amis' guideline. Early commentators on Dante's Commedia were either troubled by or ignored the comedy of the title when tragedy was considered the highest of styles, and by Dante in particular. Boccaccio came up with the answer:

On the grounds that the author was a most prudent man, I believe that he would have had in mind not the parts contained in comedy but its entirety, and that he named his book on the basis of this entirety, so to speak. And from what one can infer from Plautus and Terence, who were comic poets, the entirety of comedy is this: comedy has a turbulent principle, is full of noise and discord, and ends finally in peace and tranquillity. The present book altogether conforms to this model. Thus the author begins with woes and infernal troubles and ends it in the peace and glory enjoyed by the blessed in their eternal life. And this certainly suffices to explain how the said title suits this book.

This quotation is taken from Giorgio Agamben's The End of the Poem, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, in which Agamben assesses what he calls "an event" that led Dante "to abandon his own 'tragic' poetic project for a 'comic' poem".