Balloon Journey

Gabriel Josipovici

2011-06-24T01:07:00.000-07:00

From page seventy of What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici:

I walk down the road, he says, my life is open before me. I do not know what will happen to me, and if my life so far is anything to go by, nothing will. Even if something dramatic happens, if a car, say, runs me over and kills me, that will not have conferred meaning on a meaningless life, only brought it to an end. But if I open a novel and read in its first pages that the hero is walking down a deserted road I know that this is the beginning of an adventure, of love perhaps, or espionage, it does not matter, it is an adventure. I feel the comforting thickness of the remainder of the novel between the thumb and index finger of my right hand and I settle back with satisfaction. This, after all, is why I am reading the novel in the first place. Not, as the banal view has it, in order to entertain myself, but to give myself the feeling that meaning exists in the world, even if I have not yet found it. That is the secret power of novels: the look like mirrors held up to the world, but what they are is machines that secrete spurious meaning into the world and so muddy the waters of genuine understanding of the human condition.

André Breton

2011-04-24T00:34:00.000-07:00

"Need I add how differently I regard Huysmans from all those empiricists of the novel who claim to give us characters separate from themselves, to define them physically, morally - in their fashion! - in the service of some cause we should prefer to disregard! Out of one real character about whom they suppose they know something they make two characters in their story; out of two, they make one. And we even bother to argue! Someone suggested to an author I know, in connection with a work of his about to be published and whose heroine might be too readily recognized, that he change at least the color of her hair. As a blonde, apparently, she might have avoided betraying a brunette. I do not regard such a thing as childish, I regard it as monstrous. I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys. Happily the days of psychological literature, with all its fictitious plots, are numbered." Nadja, 1928.

From 1907, Le scarabée d'or:

James Joyce

2011-04-03T07:07:00.000-07:00

For each of the quotes below, the subject is Ulysses.

Borges:

He is a millionaire of words and styles. Aside from the prodigious funds of voices that constitute the English language, his commerce spreads wherever the Irish clover grows, form Castilian doubloons and Judas's shekels to Roman denarii and other ancient coinage. His prolific pen exercises all the rhetorical figures. Each episode exalts yet another poetic strategy, another private lexicon. One is written in syllogisms, another in questions and answers, another in narrative sequence. [...] Joyce is as bold as the prow of a ship, and as universal as a mariner's compass.

Eliot:

In using myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigation. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility of and anarchy which is contemporary history.

Nabokov:

If you have ever tried to stand and bend your head so as to look back between your knees, with your face turned upside down, you will see the world in a totally different light. Try it on the beach: it is very funny to see people walking when you look at them upside down. They seem to be, with each step, disengaging their feet from the glue of gravitation, without losing their dignity. Well, this trick of changing vista, of changing the prism and the viewpoint, can be compared to Joyce’s new literary technique, to the kind of new twist through which you see a greener grass, a fresher world.

Fernando Pessoa

2010-12-07T10:32:00.000-08:00

From The Book of Disquiet [link], by Fernando Pessoa:

I have to choose what I detest – either dreaming, which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes; either action, for which I wasn’t born, or dreaming, for which no one was born.

Detesting both, I choose neither; but since I must on occasion either dream or act, I mix the two things together.

George Steiner describes The Book of Disquiet [link] with style:

[...] The fragmentary, the incomplete is of the essence of Pessoa's spirit. The very kaleidoscope of voices within him, the breadth of his culture, the catholicity of his ironic sympathies - wonderfully echoed in Saramago's great novel about Ricardo Reis - inhibited the monumentalities, the self-satisfaction of completion. Hence the vast torso of Pessoa's Faust on which he laboured much of his life. Hence the fragmentary condition of The Book of Disquiet which contains material that predates 1913 and which Pessoa left open-ended at his death. As Adorno famously said, the finished work is, in our times and climate of anguish, a lie.

It was to Bernardo Soares that Pessoa ascribed his Book of Disquiet, first made available in English in a briefer version by Richard Zenith in 1991. The translation is at once penetrating and delicately observant of Pessoa's astute melancholy. What is this Livro do Desassossego ? Neither 'commonplace book', nor 'sketchbook', nor 'florilegium' will do. Imagine a fusion of Coleridge's notebooks and marginalia, of Valery's philosophic diary and of Robert Musil's voluminous journal. Yet even such a hybrid does not correspond to the singularity of Pessoa's chronicle. Nor do we know what parts thereof, if any, he ever intended for publication in some revised format.

What we have is a haunting mosaic of dreams, psychological notations, autobiographical vignettes, shards of literary theory and criticism and maxims. 'A Letter not to Post', an 'Aesthetics of Indifference', 'A Factless Autobiography' and manual of welcomed failure (only a writer wholly innocent of success and public acclaim invites serious examination).

If there is a common thread, it is that of unsparing introspection. Over and over, Pessoa asks of himself and of the living mirrors which he has created, 'Who am I?', 'What makes me write?', 'To whom shall I turn?' The metaphysical sharpness, the wealth of self-scrutiny are, in modern literature, matched only by Valery or Musil or, in a register often uncannily similar, by Wittgenstein. 'Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other's presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.' This very scrutiny, moreover, is fraught with danger: 'To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving.' These findings arise out of a uniquely spectral yet memorable landscape: 'A firefly flashes forward at regular intervals. Around me the dark countryside is a huge lack of sound that almost smells pleasant.'[...]

Mario Vargas Llosa

2010-11-26T07:32:00.000-08:00

Sixteen years ago, the NYRB ran an article called The Bitter Education of Vargas Llosa [link], by Alma Guillermoprieto, which was both a book review, of A Fish in the Water [link], Llosa's account of running for President in Peru, and a loose précis of the political situation in Peru at the time. And, even though the facts of the matter have dated, the article is still, I think, an informative one:

[...] “Perhaps saying that I love my country is not true. I often loathe it,” Vargas Llosa states in his memoir. And, “Although I was born in Peru, my vocation is that of a cosmopolitan and an expatriate who has always detested nationalism.” This, in the course of explaining how he happened to decide to run for president. Can such a man triumph in politics? Should he?

[...] Barnstorming the country, addressing Amazonian Indians in Iquitos, Quechua-speakers in the Andes, mulattoes and mestizos on the coast, everywhere braving crowds he had no appetite for (“I had to accomplish miracles to conceal my dislike for that sort of semihysterical pushing and pulling, kissing, pinching and pawing”), Vargas Llosa eschewed facile promises in his speeches and campaigned instead holding aloft the banner of reason. He might have known better, but, after all, rationalism, and cordura—level-headedness—had been the ropes he had used to pull himself out of his own Peruvian chasm: although A Fish in the Water skips over the author’s middle years, we know that by the time he gets into politics the disorder of his earlier life has been replaced by an orderly contemplative existence in which reading and discussion have their scheduled places. Why now should he not offer the same salvation generously to his compatriots? In the early part of the memoir he describes his extended flirtation with Marxism and the world of clandestine conspiracy so beloved of the Latin American left, but rationally, over the years, he had concluded that Marxist movements were doomed. He had evolved into a neoliberal who admired Mrs. Thatcher, and it was as a Thatcherite neoliberal that he campaigned in Peru.

[...] One hardly knows whether to wince or laugh at his description of some of his rallies. Addressing the country’s largest labor confederation toward the end of his campaign, he instructs his listeners on the evils of job security, which make it impossible for Peru “to attract investment and stimulate the creation of new businesses and the growth of ones that already existed.” The workers who benefit from job security are a tiny minority, he points out gently to his audience—to those very beneficiaries, that is, of job security, men and women clinging with their nails to the last raft in the economic shipwreck. “It was not a happenstance that the countries with the best job opportunities in the world, such as Switzerland or Hong Kong or Taiwan, had the most flexible labor laws,” he tells them. And then he adds, describing this scene, “I don’t know if we convinced anyone.”

Guy Davenport

2010-11-19T05:09:00.000-08:00

Another extract from a fascinating interview I found in the Paris Review archives, this time with Guy Davenport [link]:

[...]

INTERVIEWER

Is it the application of the theory that you take issue with?

DAVENPORT

No, I think what upsets me is that I know good and well that these academics are sheep following the sheep in front of them, and I doubt if the people who throw around the names Bakhtin and Foucault have really read more than four or five pages of either or understand what's going on. The French adore ideas. They've been playing with them since Thomas Aquinas. They sit in their cafés, and the more outrageous, the more clever you can be (like Derrida or whoever else at the moment), the more you are loved. But they don't really take these things seriously. The young French student at the Sorbonne, excited by Lacan and Bakhtin and whatnot, his whole idea is to outdo these people, you know, in two or three years to publish his own book, explaining that everything we think is rightside up is actually upside down. Americans don't possess this sense of play.

[...]

INTERVIEWER

Let's move on to your own books. You have experimented quite a bit with formal design—the stanzaic paragraph, for instance. I think for one of your books you actually inked in rows of identical black rectangles on sheets of paper and wrote only what would fit inside them. Can you talk about what draws you to these arbitrary constraints?

DAVENPORT

Not unless I talk for the rest of the day. About abstraction as scaffolding in any work of art, about the Dogon concept of toy (the ideal shape of a house, or village, of which the actual house, or village, is an approximation). The Shaker “love to lay a good foundation in the line of outward things.” When Albert Barnes was showing his collection of paintings to Horace Pippin, Pippin said, “That Matisse, he put the red in the wrong place.” At a showing of Clouzot's film about Picasso at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, a child's voice could be heard in the audience: “Mama! He's ruining it!” Such sound criticism is hard to come by, and has absolute authority. So there are all sorts of comments about works of art. Maurice Leenhardt said that the intelligible is first of all beautiful. I would say interesting or attractive. I doubt that there are more than two people who can read the first page of Ulysses; that is, give an account as to what's going on, who's doing what, yet it's a beautiful, magical page with as much on it as Rimbaud could pack into a poem. No illustrator could paint it, nor a film depict it. It is a new way of writing, approached afterwards only by Eudora Welty. For all Pound's saying that Joyce's technique was une affaire de cuisine, it's ultimately the technique that's making it all beautiful. Getting the red in the right place.

[...]

INTERVIEWER

What about this interest in utopias, which is everywhere in your work?

DAVENPORT

I don't think it's there, in the abstract. My interest is in Fourier, who I think was one of the great analytical sociologists of all time. Practically everything Freud got hold of Fourier had already divined, and drawn different conclusions. So I became fascinated, and this percolated and percolated. Every once in a while, of an evening, I will take down one of the volumes and read around in it. You always find delightful things, such as parades of four-year-olds riding on German shepherds.

Fourier's great word was harmonie, and his perception was that we have made a mess of what we had absolutely no need to make a mess of, that we can live far more successfully in human relations. First of all we must decide on a unit in which to live. He said the family is a suffocating, murderous unit; a biological unit, he called it, for begetting and feeding children, which could be done much better by a “phalanx.” He approved of all the vices. Greed, for instance, could be a marvelous thing. He saw that religion was a childish myth. Yet the Harmony had a church in it, for those people who wanted a church. The church was facing a theater. He felt that somehow the church and the theater were answering the same need. The thing that made him so interesting to nineteenth-century Americans was work. Work should be play; work should be the supreme joy.

He's a very complex person, and of course he is not coherent. There is really no scholar who has sat down and tried to figure it all out. Tony Vidler, a professor at Cooper Union, came to visit once; we had a lovely time talking about Fourier's architecture, which Vidler says is the most revolutionary ever known. Vidler had been to the Bibliothèque nationale, and they'd shown him a room of cardboard boxes. In the boxes were manuscripts of Fourier's, unpublished, unread. They showed him a page that laid out which houseplants you were to put in your windows in the Harmony, 365 days a year. For each day he'd prescribed the appropriate plant.

The whole world, he said, is a correspondence. And everything comes in a chord. The chord contains eight items. The center of the chord is the pivot. At one end of the chord is the avant-garde, and at the other end is the arrière-garde. In a fruit chord, let's say, you have at one end the ripest golden pear, and at the other end is the quince, which never ripens. It remains as hard as a rock. And all of these corresponded with personalities (I've know plenty of quinces). Fourier felt that monogamy is simply one mode in the sexuality chord; I don't think it's even in the middle. At one end is what he calls the butterfly, the man who has to have a different woman every hour. And at the other end is chastity, which he correctly saw as not a denial of sexuality but another of its modes. For Fourier there were people who could live a life perfectly satisfied with a best friend, with whom they'd play checkers, and there was a place for this as there was for prostitution, which he considered a noble trade.

Fourier was constantly saying, “I do not want to change human nature,” while saying under his breath, “because it's impossible.” He simply wanted to accommodate it. Everybody has different desires. And in the Harmony, you have a society that is either tolerant or wise enough to allow for that. One of the really satisfying dimensions is his belief that all children are geniuses, and that in the world we live in we systematically stifle the little Beethovens and Einsteins. But in the Harmony their talents would be spotted, and the little Beethoven would be given a violin. Every Harmony is run by a twelve-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl, and they have to retire at thirteen. I think he was right that at twelve the mind is as bright and intelligent as it will ever be.

He was very, very lonely. There are people who say he had no sex life at all apart from masturbation. He lived with his plants and his cats, and was desperately poor. He worked as a clerk, like Bartleby, in Lyon. He died in Paris, where he had begun to collect disciples, including lots of young socialists. Both Marx and Lenin read Fourier.

[...]

The Paris Review interviews are always prefaced by a short, idiosyncratic biography written by the interviewer (I assume), which act as a introduction. Guy Davenport's profile is so good that I want to repost it here:

On first picking up a copy of Guy Davenport's Tatlin! (1970), his first of eight volumes of stories and the book that initiated the major (and ongoing) phase of his career, you find on the cover a lovely, rather conventional telescopic photograph of the moon, three-quarters full, its craters and mares starkly discernible. Yet when you flip the book over, before so much as cracking the spine, you read—beneath a photograph of the author seated at a Greek ruin, his face, like that of the moon, partly obscured by shadow—this note: “front jacket: The Face of the Moon, 'painted from nature' by John Russell, c. 1795. Birmingham, The City Museum and Art Gallery.”

You will have stumbled, unwittingly though not by accident, onto the author's method, for this is a writer who, in the classic modernist style, is incessantly sending us back, reminding us that what seems newest is old, if not beyond time, and that what appears, or is, most radical in art and culture often has for its source “the archaic,” as Davenport has said in a previous interview, “the dawn of things, before betrayals and downstream mud.”

Davenport has published forty-six books of fiction, essays, and poetry, not counting the many to which he has contributed chapters and introductions, and for fifty years he has supplied magazines and newspapers with articles and reviews. He has translated Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman, Herakleitos, Diogenes, Anakreon, Poliziano's Stanze, the Mimes of Herondas, and in his fiction one can find translations of Rilke, Cocteau, and others. He is also an accomplished visual artist. Six years ago Erik Anderson-Reece's A Balance of Quinces, a study of Davenport's graphics and paintings (and one of the most useful and perceptive introductions to his writing), was published by New Directions.

Despite threats of giving up writing after his receipt of the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 1992, Davenport has continued during the past decade to generate, if less prolifically, short stories and essays. His books have never been widely read, by popular standards, but they tend to be deeply read by those lucky enough to find them; he is perhaps as close to being a cult writer as one can come while having been singled out for praise by George Steiner in The New Yorker, yet his work has none of the thinness of the cult writer. For all its strangeness, it seems destined to endure.

Born in South Carolina in 1927 and having lived the past thirty-nine years in Lexington, Kentucky, Davenport has spent most of his life in the American South, but it would be hard to imagine a writer for whom the regional tag embraced by, or forced upon, so many of his contemporaries is less appropriate. His milieu has always been the world, his period the span of time between the Aurignacian, when the first daubs of pigment were applied at Lascaux, and this morning; his characters come from wherever people have fought to assert feeling and intelligence against tyranny and “illiteracy,” a word that Davenport repeatedly uses in the somewhat specialized sense of cultural oblivion. These characters, with few exceptions, are artists and philosophers, but Davenport's heroes are most often the crushed, the silenced, the annihilated, those whose triumph consists solely in the survival of some fragment of their ideas or of their example.

A painterly perception is one of the constants in his writing. It is Davenport who notices that if you set any of James Joyce's books on its spine and let gravity open it to the center, you will find a verbal allusion to “The House that Jack Built” and thereby (as Davenport shows) to the Labyrinth. It's he who writes, in A Balthus Notebook (a short volume singled out by the painter himself as “an exception among the texts about him” for its sharp, non-moralistic eye), that “in all of Balthus I find no clocks.” He is a master of the idiomatic sentence that seems commonsensical until it is read with the concentration that went into shaping it, at which point it reveals its depths, as when he writes, in the postscript to his Twelve Stories, “Making things is so human that psychology and philosophy have gotten nowhere in trying to account for it.” Another recurrent Davenport theme: that what is most essential to humanity lies at the point furthest from conventional scrutiny, where it remains inaccessible to minds bent on categorizing and, in the end, controlling it—safe, and sacred, in its unknowability.

This interview took place over the telephone and during three evenings in front of the fireplace at Davenport's house in Lexington, throughout which he drank black coffee and smoked Marlboro Reds, “not inhaling.” His tomcat, Ejnar (the name reflecting Davenport's confessed “Danophilia, or -mania,” a regular feature of his work) spent the hours in Davenport's lap or weaving through his legs. The living room is well described by Erik Anderson-Reece as “a monument to high modernism.” Books and paintings go from floor to ceiling, and several times during our conversations Davenport suddenly popped up from his chair, pulling down a book from one of the shelves in order to illustrate a point. Off to the right, as one enters the door, is an open study containing a table built according to a Rietveld design, on which sits an electric typewriter. Also in the study is the color copier used by Davenport in making his illustrated letters, a custom he borrowed from his old correspondent, James Laughlin. (The first page of a letter from Davenport will typically have, in the place of letterhead, a photograph or drawing—either one of his own or an image from somewhere that has interested him—followed by a short caption expanding on or explaining it.)

A politely but stubbornly private man, Davenport's reluctance to express himself publicly other than in his work could account for the relatively few published interviews with him. Frequently, when some question strayed too close to what he deemed personal, he would interrupt by saying, matter-of-factly, “I thought we were talking about my work,” a boundary that was respected throughout. “Live unknown” (Epicurus) is one of his mottoes. Suffice it to say that he is not married but has been sharing his life for the past thirty years with Bonnie Jean Cox, whose name pops up occasionally in the books. He maintains a vigorous and far-flung correspondence. Davenport's tone in conversation tends to be not pedantic but didactic, as befits a man who made his living lecturing to undergraduates. In spite of that, he does suffer fools, as demonstrated by his graciousness and cooperation during the months it took to complete this interview.

James Laughlin

2010-11-17T07:57:00.000-08:00

I recently discovered that the entire archive of the Paris Review [link] is available online. Since then, I have become almost addicted to reading the interviews. One of the best I have come across is with James Laughlin [link], the famous American publisher who founded New Directions [link]. Reading the interview, which acts as something as an early history of New Directions, I couldn't help wondering how the list of authors (recently, for instance: W. G. Sebald, Roberto Bolaño, Javier Marías, Anne Carson, Robert Walser, Enrique Vila-Matas, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, and so on) who have been published with New Directions, might compare the list those who have won the Nobel Prize (or any other prize for that matter).

[...]

INTERVIEWER:

What were your impressions of Stein?

LAUGHLIN:

She had great natural charm, tremendous charisma. Marvelous head. Those wonderful flashing eyes. A deep, firm voice. So I couldn't help but be very much impressed by her at times, except that often she'd erupt with crazy ideas. She thought Hitler was a great man . . . this before the war, of course, but how a Jewess could be attracted to such a notion at any time is difficult to understand. She was certainly a woman of strong opinions—indeed to the point of megalomania. She felt she had influenced everyone. We had a big fight one day when I mentioned I was reading Proust. She said, “How can you read junk like that? Don't you know, J., that Proust and Joyce both copied their work from The Making of Americans?” She finally cooled on me. I simply didn't accept everything she said. That was disrespectful.

INTERVIEWER:

And then you met Pound that same year?

LAUGHLIN:

Dudley Fitts, my old teacher at Choate, who had been corresponding with Pound for a number of years, gave me a letter of introduction to him. Fitts was a great linguist; he'd read everyone. He was a wonderful letter writer—his letters entranced Pound because here was someone who'd read in all the languages. Pound must have remembered. Because that fall, after my experience with Gertrude Stein, I went up to Paris, lived in a tiny room in an insurance office which I rented for seven dollars a month, and after a while, I wrote to Ezra, not expecting a reply, really, just asking if I could come down to Rapallo to see him . . . and to my astonishment he sent me a telegram: “Visibility high.” So I went down then to Rapallo. Ezra and I hit it off immediately. He found me an eager student, and certainly he was the thwarted professor. He found a room for me in the flat of an old German lady and I was enrolled in what he called the “Ezuversity.” No tuition.

[...]

LAUGHLIN:

I think that perhaps in earlier interviews or talks I may not have sufficiently stressed the way that Ezra completely changed, to use one of his phrases, my forma mentis, my way of looking at the world. I went to him with fairly conventional views about almost everything, and I left him with either very eccentric or radical views about everything— views which have persisted with me to the present day.

INTERVIEWER:

Social Credit?

LAUGHLIN:

Social Credit, political things, literary concepts. Poets whom I still like to read for my own pleasure are the ones he told me I should, the Pound canon as you find it in the ABC of Reading. Pound pushed me away from the kind of literature which was embalmed in the “beaneries” to a much more interlingual, international literature. That has persisted to this day. A great deal of what we do now at New Directions is still translations of foreign books. Last winter we did a Swedish novel, a Hungarian novel, and a Brazilian novel. And if you look at our annual anthology you'll find that often a third of it is made up of translations of foreign poets from all over the world. That concept came largely from Ezra, who in his critical writings was always saying that you could not understand poetry if you only worked with one language. He was a comparatist in the good sense of actually looking at texts in different languages and seeing what the writers were doing with them and comparing them one with another. He loved to compare Flaubert with Henry James, for example. He made judgments of that kind. To him it was all one world literature, even including the Chinese.

[...]

T. S. Eliot

2010-11-12T08:33:00.000-08:00

Joesph Epstein, whose writing I appreciate, has a new article about the very gradual publication of T. S. Eliot's letters [link], which continues, with a lordly disregard for the passing of time.

[...] Far from its being accidental, Eliot’s fame was planned for, carefully cultivated, and nurtured once it arrived. From the first volume of Eliot’s letters, newly revised and just released in Great Britain*, we learn that, in 1919, when he was 31, he wrote to J.H. Woods, his philosophy teacher at Harvard: “There are only two ways in which a writer can become important—to write a great deal, and have his writings appear everywhere, or to write very little.” He chose the latter: to write very little but always to dazzle. “My reputation in London is built upon a small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year,” he wrote. “The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event.”

Eliot worked at Lloyd’s Bank between 1917 and 1925 as the head of a small department stationed in the basement and assigned the translation of foreign documents and overseeing the analysis of the economic behavior of foreign governments. When friends formed a foundation of sorts to bail him out of what was thought drudgery taking him from his creative work, or when he was offered a sub-editorship on the Athenaeum magazine, he eschewed both, preferring to remain at the bank. He felt that, as he put it, he could “influence London opinion and English literature in a better way” by remaining slightly outside of things. The bank, moreover, with its distance from the standard literary life, lent him, as he noted, “aura.” He wrote to his mother in 1919: “I really think that I have far more influence on English letters than any other American has ever had unless it be Henry James. I know a great many people, but there are many more who would like to know me, and [working in the bank] I can also remain isolated and detached.” Those are the words of a man carefully but decidedly on the make. [...]

Daniël Robberechts

2010-11-10T07:44:00.000-08:00

The writing below is the opening passage from Arriving in Avignon [link]by Daniël Robberechts, which was first published in Flemish in 1970, and has just appeared in English. I cannot appraise the book, because I haven't read it, which would normally prevent me from mentioning it, however, I can't help myself. There is something about the passage below, which attracts me (and quite a lot more of the book can be read at G oogle Books [link]). Besides, I have ordered my copy...

In the diary that he has kept since he was eighteen, the name of the town is mentioned explicitly at least ten times within a period of four years. An investigation of the routes that he probably followed on the various journeys documented in the same diary and spread over eight years, including the abovementioned four, leads one, moreover, to the conclusion that he must have got into or out of a train in that town's station, or else must have traveled through that station on a train, or traveled in some other vehicle through or around the edge of that town, about twenty times. These are facts and figures that are difficult to argue with, and yet it’s quite possible that he’ll nonetheless maintain that Avignon means little or nothing to him. In response to that one should say that he ought to know better; that it is unlikely at best for someone who is not a professional traveler "just happening" “with impunity” to be repeatedly in the same place, about nine hundred kilometers from his hometown, on average three or perhaps four times a year over a period of eight years, and whose view of that place, because of his various visits, their dates often falling outside the usual holiday periods, must of course have differed considerably from that of those tourists for whom this town is just the first leg of a trip through the South of France, and then too from that of the vacationers who stop in at the town on their way to the Mediterranean coast and are only urged on to greater haste by all its southern features; and given, finally, that Avignon, though primarily a transit hub, has none of the cosmopolitan neutrality of other such cities—for instance, Paris, which he had to pass through whenever he traveled by rail—that it is, again, unlikely at best for someone like him, and a northerner to boot, to be so often in the same town and have it make no impression upon him. Alternatively, one could ask him curtly: Have you been to the town or not, yes or no?—“Of course I have.”—On more than one occasion?—“Definitely.”— Including at times of the year that for most of us would be unusual?—“Certainly.” Though actually, the main thing is to get him to accept that his experience of Avignon as an essentially arbitrary town (which could thus be replaced either by Prague, a town he’s never set foot in, or indeed by his hometown) and perhaps even as an arbitrary object (just not so central an object, so exclusively personal, that any statement about it would become problematic)—however fragmentary and unsystematic this experience, however inadequate for a historian, a geographer, an economist, a sociologist, an archaeologist, a compiler of travel guides, or even a tourist—precisely because of its randomness, its physical, synthetic innocence, offers the chance of an exploration, of course lacking the thoroughness of a scientific research project, but being therefore a report that would have room for everything that scientists must neglect for the sake of objectivity: an ordinary human statement that might satisfy in us precisely what all scientific literature fails to satisfy.

And then it turns out that his very first contact with the town on the Rhone (apart from a purely verbal one, when as a toddler he had learned to sing the dance tune that goes: Sur le pont / d’Avignon / on y danse, on y danse / sur le pont d’Avignon / on y danse tous en rond—and it was only recently that he’d heard that the lyrics originally went Sous le pont d’Avignon, when the Pont Saint-Bénezet still spanned the river and people crossed in the shadow of its arches to dance on the île de la Barthelasse) actually predates the earliest entries in the preserved diary by several years: He was fourteen, and the first and ultimately last full-force family trip in the first post-war car through Southwest France and Northern Spain had been interrupted at the start of the return journey in the village of Remoulins (near Pont-du-Gard on the right bank of the Rhone) by a breakdown requiring the replacement of parts that in the France of the time were obtainable only in Paris; for him, however, since he had passed the entrance exam to a boarding school where the academic year began earlier than elsewhere, a speedy return to Brussels was required, so it was decided that he would travel home with his mother by train, his older brother accompanying them as far as Paris, while the father, sister, and younger brother would stay in Remoulins. That’s as far as the anecdote goes.

Dalkey Archive Press, the publishers of Arriving in Avignon, have a small biography of Robberechts on there website [link], which I have copied below:

The Flemish writer Daniël Robberechts (1937-1992) refused to identify his books as novels, stories, or essays, according them all equal status as, simply, writing. This liberation from genre gives his work, for all its apparent simplicity, an elusive, hypnotic quality, and no more so than in his debut, Arriving in Avignon, which records a young man's first encounter with that labyrinthine city, and his likewise meandering relationship with a girl from his home town--and indeed virtually every woman he meets. Hesistant and cautious, unable quite to enter nor turn away, the young man seems to circle Avignon endlessly, in the process attempting to delay his inevitable descent into maturity and monogamy. What seems at first like a cross between a memoir and a guidebook comes in time to be the story of a young man's dogged yet futile quest to know his own mind--unless it's the ancient city of Avignon itself that is our real protagonist: a mystery that can be approached, but never wholly solved.

Marguerite Duras

2010-11-03T09:44:00.000-07:00

[...] Before her cure, she was holed up in her château dictating one much-worked-on line a day to Andréa, who would type it up. Then they would start uncorking cheap Bordeaux and she’d drink two glasses, vomit, then continue on till she’d drunk as many as nine liters and would pass out. She could no longer walk, or scarcely. She said she drank because she knew God did not exist. Her very sympathetic doctor would visit her almost daily and offer to take her to the hospital, but only if she wanted to live. She seemed undecided for a long time but at last she opted for life since she was determined to finish a book that she’d already started and was very keen about. [...]

The passage above is from the article, "In Love with Duras," by Edmund White [link], which I read out of curiosity, provoked by a strong admiration for Duras's novel The Lover[link].

Péter Nádas

2010-10-23T06:35:00.000-07:00

To begin, I will hardly mention that The Book of Memories, by Péter Nádas, is technically perfect, because, as rare as technical perfection (and, of course, I am being slightly excessive) is, in prose, or anything else for that matter, this book, which is overpowering, impressed me in many ways, and I want to start by mentioning those ways that are the most personal, and, in my mind, the least obvious and, probably, the least important. I will begin with the author's note:

It is my pleasant duty to state that what I have written is not my own memoirs. I have written a novel, the recollection of several people separated by time, somewhat in the manner of Plutarch's Parallel Lives. The memoirists might be conceivably all be me, though none of them is. So the locations, names, events, and the situations in the story aren't real but, rather, products of a novelist's imagination. Should anyone recognize someone, or - God forbid! - should any event, name, or situation match actual ones, that can only be a fatal coincidence, and in this respect, if in no other, I am compelled to disclaim responsibility.

The author's note, of The Book of Memories, I read before anything else: before the blurb; before the first page; before the glorious Susan Sontag quote – The greatest novel written in our time […] – on the front cover of the recent Picador reprinting; and, before reading even a page of the novel, picked at random, from somewhere inside the enormous book, which is a long-standing and unselfconscious practice of mine that I almost always adhere to when I am contemplating a new book purchase. I'm not sure exactly what I knew of Péter Nádas – I knew his name at least, that is certain – before the day I bought his book, although I suspect that when I saw the title on the shelf, spine-out, something registered with me: perhaps the memory of an article I once read, or a friend’s remark from long ago? To be clear, it was not a book I had planned to read. And, yet, for whatever reason, recently, in a crowded (!) and fashionable (!!) bookstore, I pulled The Book of Memories from the shelf, and turned to the author's note, which, I think, was a good and proper introduction to Nádas, and I am very glad it happened.

In his author’s note, Nádas establishes, with typically delicate precision, as he sidesteps the possibility of his book being confused with fact, his refusal to take for granted anything at all, which is characteristic of The Book of Memories. Turns of phrase that might seem to protrude, or to be excessive, are irreplaceable to Nádas, whose subject is consciousness, and whose setting is Communist Eastern Europe. History is at its most severe and hard-nosed, and is experienced with rare sensitivity and sensuality; the kind of drawn-out, aesthetic, and prosaic reflection that is characteristic (normally, or, more precisely, in Proust) of the bourgeois drawing rooms of twentieth century, modernist literature.

This vision is delivered by a narrator, in fact, by multiple narrators, for whom there is no limit to the number of times a human experience – sexual desire, mistrust, jealousy, disgust – can be broken down into smaller and smaller units, considered and reconsidered until the moment itself, which just seemed under thorough investigation, about to give up answers and offer meaning, has become impossibly distant, and vertiginously far below. Nádas rises to heights that few authors, which I have ever read, can reach.

Come to think of it, he never set foot in the house on Stargarderstrasse either; we were forever hiding or, more precisely, we were trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, which was something I was quite adept at, it came easily to me, a sort of behaviour that alluded, unpleasantly, to my past: once, on a Sunday afternoon in front of the building, when Stargarderstrasse was all but deserted, though anyone could have concealed himself behind drawn curtains, on a dull-gray November afternoon when everyone was sitting at home watching TV, drinking coffee, and we both felt we could not say goodbye, we didn’t really have to, we could have stayed with each other, except that we’d been together for three days and our protective shell which kept everything and everyone out was getting thicker and thicker and we had to break out of it, we had to part, spend at least one night alone – I wanted to take a bath, and Melchior’s flat had no bathroom, you had to use a washbowl or the kitchen sink, I felt dirty, wanted to be alone for the afternoon and evening at least, catch my breath, and then, before midnight, run downstairs and call him from a public phone, hear his voice while leaning against the cold glass of the booth, and perhaps go back to his place – and we agreed that he would walk me to the corner of Dimitroffstrasse, and then he’d buy cigarettes at the tobacco shop under the elevated that stayed open on Sunday, but we couldn’t tear ourselves away from each other; first he said he’d walk me only one more block, then I asked him to walk another; we couldn’t just shake hands, it would have been ridiculous, awkward, and cowardly, but we had to do something; we avoided looking at each other, and then he held out his hand, if only because we wanted to touch some part of each other, and so we kept holding hands; there was no one on the street, but this was not enough, it was his mouth that I wanted, there, in front of the house, that Sunday afternoon.

So, I might say that it feels appropriate that I started my relationship with The Book of Memories, in which the question of authorship poses itself, almost by force, with a reading the author’s note. Nádas’s central narrator is an author; he is the author of the memoir at the centre of the novel, which could almost be said to constitute the novel, and he is also the author of a partial novel, set in the previous century, that is within, or alongside, and which interacts with, explains, and compliments, the story of his own life. Time is a permeable membrane, through which the two narrators, one the product of the other’s imagination, move. Nádas allows the present to glide decades into past, mimicking the natural behaviour of memory. And then appears a third voices that announces itself with a shock, intruding into the narrative in such a way that the novel changes, not in shape or in form, but as if appearing to shed its skin.

I will bring to a close this attempt to convey admiration and explain something that I found very difficult to understand myself: The Book of Memories is great, in every sense of the word, and grand, and beautiful, and my sentences cannot describe its own, which, as I mentioned at the start, I found, in some ways, perfect.

–

And, although I am not sure if I should try anymore to communicate the essence of this book, there are others who have written articles on Péter Nádas, and reviews of his work:

Eva Hofmann, in her review of The Book of Memories, “The Soul of Proust Under Socialism” [link], in which a good summary of the plot can be found (I didn’t have the heart or the ability to attempt one myself), wrote:

The many parallels between the two writers -- they are both prone to incestuous longings and schizophrenic splitting, both become involved in bisexual triangles -- suggest a reiteration of archetypal urges, situations and scenarios, in history as well as in individual lives. Recurrence is inscribed in the novel's form, which mimics the movements of memory and glides effortlessly from the present into successive strata of the past. For the contemporary narrator, his adult affairs revive recollections of growing up in postwar Budapest, and the impetuous, multivalent infatuations of his adolescence, especially with a compellingly beautiful boy named Krisztian. The youthful narrator -- detached, precocious, aware of every stirring of his own impulses -- feels both magnetically attracted to and painfully excluded by his schoolmates, whose bondings and hostilities he observes with an almost preternatural sensitivity. At the same time, he is electrically alert to currents of affection and conflict within his own family. His charismatic, intimidating father is the state prosecutor in the Stalinist regime, and may have heinously informed on a friend who is also his wife's lover. The narrator himself engages in slyly sadistic games with his retarded sister and in vengeful rummagings through his father's secret papers. His most poignant feelings are reserved for his terminally ill but charming mother, with whom he shares nearly forbidden tenderness.

There is a also a notable review of Fire and Knowledge by Deborah Eisenberg [link], and a profile of Nádas on the New York Times website [link].

And what of his other books? Susan Sontag, the great champion of Nádas in English, in a short article on his plays [link], had the following remark to make:

Péter Nádas has written in a variety of forms since his ﬁrst book, a collection of stories published in 1965; anglophone readers had to wait until 1997 to discover him, when A Book of Memories (1986), his maximal masterpiece, ﬁnally appeared in English. To start one’s reading of a major writer with that writer’s most ambitious, most accomplished, bulkiest book is bound to foster misreadings. There are sizable peaks surrounding this Everest. But it will take time to take their measure.

Milan Kundera

2010-10-20T04:51:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure yet whether I will read Milan Kundera's new book of criticism: Encounter. I remember reading The Art of the Novel very fondly and I suspect that, at the time it had a strong influence on my reading, the effects of which may still be visible - I don't know. In fact, to this day, every time I cross paths with his opinions, he always seems to be saying things I find interesting (and, more importantly, readable), even if I do not agree with him. But, what does it matter if I agree with him, or not? Take the comments in the interview bellow as an example.

The Dalkey Archive website [link] has a catalog of interviews, with authors such as Julio Cortazar, Jose Donoso and William Gaddis, available on its website. Those which I have read, I have enjoyed. I have copied an excerpt from the interview of Kundera, conducted by Lois Oppenheim.

[...] Lois Oppenheim: This seems entirely reasonable to me. In fact, I can’t see what more could be wanted than the guarantee of authenticity that the copyright provides. You have provoked many discussions about Central Europe, All of your fiction takes place in Czechoslovakia and even in your theoretical work, The Art of the Novel, Central Europe is very important. Would you mind clarifying just what this notion of Central Europe represents for you, just what its real perimeters are?

Milan Kundera: Let’s simplify the problem, an enormous one, and limit ourselves to the novel. There are four great novelists: Kafka, Broch, Musil, Gombrowicz. I call them the "pleiad" of Central Europe’s great novelists. Since Proust, I can’t see anyone of greater importance in the history of the novel. Without knowing them, not much of the modern novel can be understood. Briefly, these authors are modernists, which is to say that they are impassioned by a search for new forms. At the same time, however, they are completely devoid of any avant-garde ideology (faith in progress, in revolution, and so on), whence another vision of the history of art and of the novel: They never speak of the necessity of a radical break; they don’t consider the formal possibilities of the novel to be exhausted; they only want to radically enlarge them.

From this as well there derives another rapport with the novel’s past. There is no disdain in these writers for "tradition," but another choice of tradition: they are all fascinated by the novel preceding the nineteenth century. I call this era the first "half-time" of the history of the novel. This era and its aesthetic were almost forgotten, obscured, during the nineteenth century. The "betrayal" of this first half-time deprived the novel of its play essence (so striking in Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot) and diminished the role of what I call "novelistic meditation." Novelistic meditation—let’s avoid any misunderstanding here: I’m not thinking of the so-called "philosophical novel" that really means a subordination of the novel to philosophy, the novelistic illustration of ideas. This is Sartre. And even more so Camus. La Peste. This moralizing novel is almost the model of what I don’t like. The intent of a Musil or a Broch is entirely different: it is not to serve philosophy but, on the contrary, to get hold of a domain that, until then, philosophy had kept for itself There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize. This said, these novelists (particularly Broch and Musil) made of the novel a supreme poetic and intellectual synthesis and accorded it a preeminent place in the cultural totality.

These authors are relatively little known in America, which I have always considered an intellectual scandal. But really it is a matter of an aesthetic misunderstanding that is quite comprehensible when one considers the particular tradition of the American novel. In the first place, America didn’t live through the first half-time of the history of the novel. In the second, at the same time that the great Central Europeans were writing their masterpieces, America herself had her own great "pleiad," one which would influence the entire world and which was that of Hemingway, Faulkner and Dos Passos. But its aesthetic was entirely opposed to that of a Musil! For example: a meditative intervention of the author into the narrative thread of his novel appears in this aesthetic as a displaced intellectualism, as something foreign to the very essence of the novel. A personal recollection: The New Yorker published the first three parts of The Unbearable Lightness of Being—but they eliminated the passages on Nietzsche’s eternal return! Yet, in my eyes, what I say about Nietzsche’s eternal return has nothing to do with a philosophic discourse; it is a continuity of paradoxes that are no less novelistic (that is to say, they answer no less to the essence of what the novel is) than a description of the action or a dialogue.

According to the promotional material, Kundera takes the following people (and their work) as his subjects in Encounter: Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Anatole France, Curzio Malaparte, Francis Bacon, Leos Janácek, Federico Fellini, and Dostoyevsky.

Elif Batuman

2010-10-15T05:55:00.000-07:00

Lately, I have enjoyed reading anything by Elif Batuman [link].

First, there was her debut book. A collection of essays called, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them:

Batuman writes well about great books (most of her writing can be accessed via her website [link]). I can't help thinking that it is (almost) always a pleasure to read an author, or critic, writing about something they love (not admire, love). Not because love might improve the quality of criticism - probably the opposite, if anything - but because the willingness of the writing sings from the page. The first essay in the book, "Babel in California", is full of humour and affection (and, I think, love) for Issac Babel. And, it is a good example of Batuman's eye for absurdity and her cleverness:

The first time I read Issac Babel was in a college creative writing class. The instructor was a sympathetic Jewish novelist with a Jesus-like beard, an affinity for Russian literature, and a melancholy sense of humor, such that one afternoon he even "realized" the truth of human mortality, right there in the classroom. He pointed at each of us around the seminar table: "You're going to die. And you're going to die. And you're going to die." I still remember the expression on the face of one of my classmates, a genial scion of the Kennedy family who always wrote the same story, about a busy corporate lawyer who neglected his wife. The expression was confused.

The New York Times review of The Possessed [link] neatly described what makes the book wonderful:

Elif Batuman is clearly one of those people whom Babel described, in one of his Odessa stories, as having “spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart.” Her autumnal impulses are balanced by jumpy, satirical ones. It’s a deep pleasure to read over her shoulder.

But, Batuman does not always write with love. Some of the most eyebrow-raising moments in take place when she targets (perhaps that is a bit strong) the institution of Creative Writing. In the introduction to The Possessed, she writes about an experience at a writer's workshop:

I wanted to be a writer, not an academic. But that afternoon, standing under a noisy tin awning in a parking lot facing the ocean, eating the peanut-butter sandwiches I had made in the cafeteria at breakfast, I reached some conclusive state of disillusionment with the transcendentalist New England culture of "creative writing." In this culture, to which the writing workshop belonged, the academic study of literature was understood to be bad for a writer's formation. By what mechanism, I found myself wondering, was it bad? Conversely, why was it automatically good for a writer to live in a barn, reading short stories by short-story writers who didn't seem to be read by anyone other than writing students?

In the second example of her writing I came across, Get a Real Degree, published in the London Review of Books [link], she returns to this topic, this time as part of a book review:

Like many aspiring writers in America, I enrolled in graduate school after college, but I went for a PhD rather than an MFA. I had high hopes that McGurl, who made the same choice, might explain to me the value of contemporary American fiction in a way I could understand, but was disappointed to find in The Programme Era traces of the quality I find most exasperating about programme writing itself: oversophistication combined with an air of autodidacticism, creating the impression of some hyperliterate author who has been tragically and systematically deprived of access to the masterpieces of Western literature, or any other sustained literary tradition. [...]

To my mind, the real cause of shame here is the profession of writing, and it affects McGurl just as much as it does Carver and Oates. Literary writing is inherently elitist and impractical. It doesn’t directly cure disease, combat injustice, or make enough money, usually, to support philanthropic aims. Because writing is suspected to be narcissistic and wasteful, it must be ‘disciplined’ by the programme – as McGurl documents with a 1941 promotional photo of Paul Engle, then director of the Iowa workshop, seated at a desk with a typewriter and a large whip. (Engle’s only novel, McGurl observes, features a bedridden Iowan patriarch ‘surrounded by his collection of “whips of every kind”, including “racing whips”, “stiff buggy whips”, “cattle whips”, “riding crops” and one “endless bullwhip”’.) The workshop’s most famous mantras – ‘Murder your darlings,’ ‘Omit needless words,’ ‘Show, don’t tell’ – also betray a view of writing as self-indulgence, an excess to be painfully curbed in AA-type group sessions. Shame also explains the fetish of ‘craft’: an ostensibly legitimising technique, designed to recast writing as a workmanlike, perhaps even working-class skill, as opposed to something every no-good dilettante already knows how to do. Shame explains the cult of persecutedness, a strategy designed to legitimise literary production as social advocacy, and make White People feel better (Stuff White People Like #21: ‘Writers’ Workshops’). [...]

Might the ideal of ‘creativity’, taken as a supremely valuable, supremely human faculty, be harmful to a writer’s formation? It seems ominous that the role of creativity in American education originates, as McGurl observes, in Cold War rhetoric: through creativity, America was going to prevail over its ‘relentlessly drab ideological competitor’ and ‘outdo the group-thinking Communist enemy’. The value placed on creativity and originality causes writers to hide their influences, to hide the fact that they have ever read any other books at all and, in many cases, to stop reading books altogether. One telling result of this value is a gap in quality between American literary fiction and non-fiction today. Many of the best journalistic and memoiristic essays in the world today are being written in America. I think of myself as someone who prefers novels and stories to non-fiction; yet, for human interest, skilful storytelling, humour, and insightful reflection on the historical moment, I find the average episode of This American Life to be 99 per cent more reliable than the average new American work of literary fiction. The juxtaposition of personal narrative with the facts of the world and the facts of literature – the real work of the novel – is taking place today largely in memoirs and essays. This is one of many brilliant observations in David Shields’s recent manifesto Reality Hunger, in which he argues that we had best give up the novel altogether. But I don’t think the novel is dead – or, more accurately, I don’t see why it has to be dead. It’s simply being produced under the kinds of mistaken assumption that we don’t make when it comes to non-fiction. Non-fiction is about some real thing in the world, some story that someone had to go out and pursue. It’s about real people and real books, which are, after all, also objects in the world. Why can’t the novel expand to include these things, which were once – in Don Quixote, for example – a part of its purview? [...]

In the final pages of his book, drawing up the merits of programme writing, McGurl ultimately falls back on the one thing the programme really does teach: technique. Countering Eliot’s dictum that ‘art never improves,’ he proposes that literature might, rather, resemble technology or sport, in which ‘systematic investments of capital over time have produced a continual elevation of performance.’ Hasn’t ‘the tremendous expansion of the literary talent pool’ and its systematic training in the ‘self-conscious attention to craft’ resulted in ‘a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period’? It has. If you take ‘good writing’ as a matter of lucidity, striking word combinations, evocative descriptions, inventive metaphors, smooth transitions and avoidance of word repetition, the level of American writing has skyrocketed in the postwar years. In technical terms, pretty much any MFA graduate leaves Stendhal in the dust. On the other hand, The Red and the Black is a book I actually want to read. This reflects, I believe, the counterintuitive but real disjuncture between good writing and good books. [...]

What really made me fall for Batuman's writing, however, was not her scorn for the craft of writing (although I found myself making small noises of agreement as I read...), but a recent article in the New York Times called Kafka's Last Trial [link]. Her subject is the bizarre legal goings-on that have been taking place in Israel; people are trying to decide what to do with the things Kafka wrote. Batuman's article is great:

[...] One afternoon during my stay in Tel Aviv, I headed to Spinoza Street on the off-chance that Eva Hoffe was home and felt like talking to the press. I was accompanied by Avi Steinberg, an American writer living at the time in Jerusalem. I had become acquainted with Steinberg two months earlier, when he mailed me the galleys of a memoir he wrote about his experiences as a prison librarian. In subsequent correspondence, I mentioned my impending Kafkaesque assignment to report on a “Kafka archive kept for decades in a cat-infested Tel Aviv flat,” confessing to some apprehensions that I would be unable to locate the apartment. Steinberg promptly replied that the address was 23 Spinoza Street, that he had recently rung the doorbell himself but had no answer and that “last week in court, Eva Hoffe’s sweater was covered in animal hairs, possibly originating from a cat or cats.”

Walking through the city center, we discussed the mystery of Kafka’s testament. Steinberg saw in Kafka’s cryptic letter to Brod another version of the parable of Abraham and Isaac. (Kafka wrote several retellings of this story in 1921, the same year he first mentioned to Brod that he wanted his work to be burned.) Kafka, Steinberg suggested, wanted to prove that he was ready to incinerate the child of his creation, simultaneously knowing and not knowing that Brod would step in and play the role of the angel.

“The thing is,” Steinberg said, “we only have Brod’s word for any of this. What if Kafka never even told him to burn his stuff? Has anyone ever seen that letter? What if this is all some big idea Brod had?”

Similarly paranoid thoughts cross the mind of nearly everyone who studies Kafka. At a certain point you realize that everything — even the picture of Brod as a good-natured busybody who ignored Kafka’s wishes — comes from Brod himself. “Don’t write this down — I don’t want to be the laughingstock of the academic community,” one scholar told me, having ventured the idea that Brod himself had composed all of Kafka’s writings and, alarmed by their strangeness, attributed them to a reclusive friend who worked at an insurance office.

Spinoza Street is in a quiet residential neighborhood lined by flat-roofed stucco buildings. The dingy off-pink stucco facade of No. 23 was partly obscured by a tree with enormous glossy leaves that were apparently being eaten away by something. Parked under the tree were a broken shopping cart and an old bicycle. Behind a large protruding window, enclosed by two layers of metal grillwork, lay an indistinct heap of cats. Some commotion involving a blackbird took place in one of the trees, causing six or so cats to look up in unison, elongating their necks. The breeze turned. A terrible smell wafted toward us. [...]

Hans Fallada

2010-08-28T08:54:00.000-07:00

Rudolf Ditzen, who wrote under the name Hans Fallada, lived a chaotic life. Born in 1893 in Greifswald in north-east Germany, he was the son of a lawyer who was later appointed a judge. At the age of 18 he killed a schoolfriend in a duel, and spent much of his career in psychiatric hospitals and drying-out clinics or in prison for thieving and embezzlement to support his morphine habit. In between, he worked on the land, wrote a couple of novels and held down jobs for a period on newspapers.

Fallada married in 1929, and for a while straightened out. His 1932 novel, Kleiner Mann - was nun? ("Little Man - What Now?") brought him praise from Thomas Mann, international success, a Hollywood film and a small farm. Under the Nazis, Fallada wrote and published a series of gritty novels of the type that German critics call neue Sachlichkeit, or new objectivity. In 1944, he shot at his wife in a quarrel and was confined again to a psychiatric hospital.

At the end of the war, Fallada was embraced by the new East German literary authorities. In 1947, he published with Aufbau-Verlag Jeder stirbt fuer sich allein ("Each dies only for himself") which is here called Alone in Berlin. It was the first novel by a German author to take as its theme the small-scale domestic resistance to the National Socialists. The same year, weakened by years of alcoholism and drug-taking, Fallada died of a heart attack.

Traces of this unruly life are scattered through Alone in Berlin: brawling, delirium tremens, clinics and drying-out establishments, country idylls, theft, blackmail, morphine, and a vivid world of sub-proletarian swindling that exploits and is exploited by the Nazis. It is remarkable that Fallada, just months before his death, could compose a long novel that, after an overcrowded beginning, advances so confidently to its conclusion.

The paragraphs above are the open lines from the Guardian's review of Alone in Berlin [link], which Primo Levi called, The greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the Nazis. Those paragraphs are also a neat introduction to the incredible life of Hans Fallada, who was run over by a horse when he was 16 and, during the Second World War, recruited by Goebbels to write an anti-Semitic tract (he never did). There is also an article about Fallada at Tablet Magazine [link] and a good review of Every Man Dies Alone [link] (the US title) at the New York Times [link], which opens with this line: A signal literary event of 2009 has occurred [...].

Denis Johnson, the publisher at Melville House who rediscovered Fallada [link], did a radio interview recently with Leonard Lopate, for a segment called "Underappreciated Literature" [link]. He speaks well, giving some new and incredible details, about Hans Fallada's life and his republication in English (for example, Hans Fallada changed his name to avoid shaming his father who was a supreme court judge). It's a great interview, the date of which would have coincided with Fallada 117th birthday (he was born the 21st of July 1893).

Denis Johnson on Hans Fallada:

The "Underappreciated Literature" [link] series includes some brilliant interviews with authors, critics, scholars, translators etc. about obscure writers. The episodes on Louis Couperus, Henry Green, Robert Musil, Paul von Heyse and Andre Bely are the highlights.

Vladimir Nabokov

2010-08-24T06:20:00.000-07:00

On an afternoon not long ago, I read Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov [link]. I suspect that there is no need for me to write anything about the book - the Internet is already saturated with Nabokov criticism [link] - but Pale Fire is so uncannily good, so beautifully intricate that I am compelled to write something brief, in the vague, optimistic hope of understanding this book better or, more precisely, of coming closer to a work of art that is seemingly (and brilliantly) so unknowable.

Pale Fire impressed me in a way that none of Nabokov's other books ever have before (I haven't read all of his work: a selection of his English novels, a translation of one of his Russian novels, The Luzhin Defense [link], and some of his Lectures on Literature [link]). It is typically clever and verbally inventive, but, formally, it is exceptionally inventive. The form is parodic; the book presents itself as a volume of poetry, published posthumously (the alliteration is unfortunate). Rather than narrowing the scope for the novel, this form - which divides the book into four pieces: Forward, Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos, Notes, and Index - opens up the narrative to an endless sequence of imaginative possibilities, which are hilarious and tragic. A narrator, Charles Kinbote, attends whimsically and ironically to stern, intellectual responsibilities. He is the editor of Pale Fire, a poem by John Shade, a recently deceased friend, and, almost out of nowhere, a story appears, full of thought and personality:

I am choosing these images rather casually. There are purists who maintain that a gentleman should use a brace of pistols, one for each temple, or a bare botkin (note the correct spelling), and that ladies should either swallow a lethal dose or drown with clumsy Ophelia. Humbler humans have preferred sundry forms of suffocation, and minor poets have even tried such fancy releases as vein tapping in the quadruped tub of a drafty boardinghouse bathroom. All this is uncertain and messy. Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your stool or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound in weird contingencies, and tragedy ought not culminate in a record dive or a policeman's promotion. If you rent a cell in the luminous waffle, room 1915 or 1959, in a tall business center hotel browing the star dust, and pull up the window, and gently - not fall, not jump - but roll out as you should for air comfort, there is always the chance of knocking clean through into your own hell a pacific noctambulator walking his dog; in this respect a back room might be safer, especially if giving on the roof of an old tenacious normal house far below where a cat may be trusted to flash out of the way. Another popular take-off is a mountaintop with a sheer drop of say 500 meters but you must find it, because you will be surprised by how easy it is to miscalculate your deflection offset, and have some hidden projection, some fool of a crag, rush forth to catch you, causing you to bounce off it into the brush, thwarted, mangled and unnecessarily alive. The ideal drop is form an aircraft, your muscles relaxed, your pilot puzzled, your pack parachute shuffled off, cast off, shrugged off - farewell shootka (little chute)! Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded life, with the earth's green seesaw now above, now below, and the voluptuous crucifixion, as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body's obliteration in the Lap of the Lord. If I were a poet I would certainly make an ode to the sweet urge to close one's eyes and surrender utterly unto the perfect safety of wooed death. Ecstatically one forefeels the vastness of the Divine Embrace enfolding one's liberated spirit, the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the minuscule unknown that had been the only real part of one's temporary personality.

In an article (well worth reading), entitled The Problem with Nabokov [link], that coincided with the publication of The Original of Laura [link], Martin Amis attempted bravely to describe the essence of Nabokov:

They call it a "shimmer" – a glint, a glitter, a glisten. The Nabokovian essence is a miraculously fertile instability, where without warning the words detach themselves from the everyday and streak off like flares in a night sky, illuminating hidden versts of longing and terror.

Recently, Penguin decided to reissue all of Nabokov's work, including the books he wrote in Russian, living as an exile in Berlin. There is an thorough article by Leslie Chamberlain, called Nabokov in Berlin, on the Standpoint page [link].

And, this is a good excuse to post the well-watched video of Nabokov discussing Lolita with Lionel Trilling (who very nearly steals the show: "We can't trust a creative writer to say what he has done. He can say what he meant to do, but even then, we don't have to believe him!" And: "All great love affairs are tragic"), and a man in a tuxedo with a pencil mustache. At one of my favourite moments in the video, the three men stand up, simultaneously and spontaneously, and move from the desk to the couches, which I have always interpreted as a homely, comforting gesture.

It should be mentioned that this video also includes the famous moment when Nabokov revealed his inspiration for Lolita. And then there are the clouds of cigarette smoke...

Frank Kermode

2010-08-22T05:16:00.000-07:00

Frank Kermode's essays and criticism have always struck me as shockingly (I use this adverb almost literally) calm, sensible and thoughtful, and, accordingly, I rarely ignore an opportunity to read him. Last week, Kermode, who was often and very eagerly called Britain's greatest literary critic, died. The New York Times ran an obituary [link] (as did many publications: The Guardian [link] and The Washington Post [link]), which included the following remark, made by Kermode, in a recent interview, describing quite neatly what, in my eyes, was so impressive about his writing:

What I do is despised by some younger critics, who want everything to sound extremely technical. I spent a long time developing an intelligible style. But these critics despise people who don’t use unintelligible jargon.

Many of Kermode's essays can be read the London Review of Books website [link]. Last year, Kermode reviewed a biography of William Golding for the LRB [link], which included a curious and shadowy story, which I have copied below. I smiled as I read:

Somewhere about 1961 or 1962 there occurred this episode. At the time I was teaching at Manchester University, and I answered an unexpected summons to lunch from two very eminent physicists. These men lived constantly aware of a horrific but ill-defined threat from ‘certain structures’, of the existence of which, they said, their work daily reminded them. They could not understand why there seemed to be no real public awareness of this immediate threat, and had decided that it must be given wide and powerful publicity. To whom should they turn for advice? Naively, they chose the professor of English. Of course they were not asking me to sound the alarm myself, but to nominate for the job a literary personage highly esteemed by both his professional peers and the general public. There was plenty of money available to fund the enterprise, and it seemed that nothing but good could come of it.

Various names were mentioned, but Golding’s easily prevailed. Having agreed, not cheerfully, to give the idea a try he came north and was given a dinner, during which he said almost nothing. The physicists talked and drew sketches and finally remarked that if you threw six dice you can be pretty sure they will not all come to rest with the sixes on top. But if you threw them thousands of times it might well happen at least once, and the odds on the catastrophe that was troubling them were as good as that.

Golding said little and was still silent as we drove back to my place, but when we were settled in he complained a bit about being dragged into a position in which his false reputation for wisdom had betrayed him. After much thought he offered a solution that depended on the availability of copious television advertising time. One of the professors should be shown, live, every half-hour or so, rolling his dice. Perhaps there would be suitable music, a few well-chosen and alarming words, or other inducements to listen and watch. It was a rotten idea, and he knew it, and I was sorry to have let him in for it. It was an odd part of the price he paid for innocently radiating wisdom, for somehow allowing himself to be treated as the sort of sage he had no ambition to be. For, as he wrote in one of the pieces in A Moving Target, he was, when all was said, ‘an ageing novelist, floundering in all the complexities of 20th-century living, all the muddle of part beliefs’. Better still, he was just an artist, that was his job.

And, for a less sympathetic, somewhat ideologically skewed, although convincingly fiery view of Kermode's writing and life, see Joseph Epstein's blood-spilling essay, A Passage to Forster [link], which was published earlier this year, in honour, so to speak, of Kermode's most recent book, Concerning E. M. Forster [link]. Even though I do not agree with the article, I had intended to quote, but it would be so hardhearted; yes, Epstein is merciless.

Tony Judt

2010-08-09T15:04:00.000-07:00

I have admired Tony Judt's recent articles, which can be read at the New York Review of Books website [link]. A brilliant series of biographical pieces from a writer who knew he was dying. The passage below is from the article Girls! Girls! Girls!:

[...] This story is revealing. When discussing sexually explicit literature—Milan Kundera, to take an obvious case—with European students, I have always found them comfortable debating the topic. Conversely, young Americans of both sexes—usually so forthcoming—fall nervously silent: reluctant to engage the subject lest they transgress boundaries. Yet sex—or, to adopt the term of art, “gender”—is the first thing that comes to mind when they try to explain the behavior of adults in the real world.

Here as in so many other arenas, we have taken the ‘60s altogether too seriously. Sexuality (or gender) is just as distorting when we fixate upon it as when we deny it. Substituting gender (or “race” or “ethnicity” or “me”) for social class or income category could only have occurred to people for whom politics was a recreational avocation, a projection of self onto the world at large.

Why should everything be about “me”? Are my fixations of significance to the Republic? Do my particular needs by definition speak to broader concerns? What on earth does it mean to say that “the personal is political”? If everything is “political,” then nothing is. I am reminded of Gertrude Stein’s Oxford lecture on contemporary literature. “What about the woman question?” someone asked. Stein’s reply should be emblazoned on every college notice board from Boston to Berkeley: “Not everything can be about everything.”[...]

The Guardian has published an obituary [link] and n+1 has published an article entitled On Tony Judt [link].

Charles Baudelaire

2010-08-09T09:54:00.000-07:00

That Edvard Munch was commissioned to illustrate Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, whilst living in Paris, in 1896, is, I suspect, quite well known, even if, to me, this moment of Symbolist history is novel.

The events of the day are described superstitiously, pointedly and, at times, excitedly, by Sue Prideaux, in her biography, Behind the Scream [link], which can be browsed, in part, online [link].

[...] It was probably as a result of the contacts he met chez Mallarmé that Munch received a commission to illustrate Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, which, though first published forty years earlier, remained a seminal work for the Symbolists. Munch was approached with the commission by Monsieur Alfred Piat, the chairman of Les Cent Bibliophiles, an association of book lovers halfway between a publishing house and a private book club. These bibliophilic societies were a phenomenon of the time. They were devoted to the production of ‘the beautiful book’, which had become decidedly less beautiful as a result of the nefarious effects of mass-production since the 1870s, when the cheaper mechanical processes arrived using etched zinc plates. […] Les Cent Bibliophiles specialised in production of Symbolist texts illustrated by contemporary artists. Like Munch, they believed in the synthesis of the arts and they took great care in marrying the artist and the text, convinced that the sum of a text and its sympathetic illustrations could achieve far greater resonance than each taken separately. Very beautiful and very expensive limited editions were produced, after which the plates were broken, and this too was part of the Symbolist principal of the enclosed, inaccessible, hermetic text.

Monsieur Piat died quite soon after approaching Munch, and so the Fleurs du Mal commission was never completed. There remain a few of Munch’s sketches. They have been married up by later hands to the texts whose grave-reek spirit they catch admirably, but one cannot help but suspect that a higher agency had a hand in the timing of Monsieur Piat’s death. The commission was bringing out everything that was self-conscious and over-drawn in Munch, who did not respond well to the stinking-lily quality of decadent Symbolism with its edge of Satanism.

Enrique Vila-Matas

2010-07-31T05:26:00.000-07:00

As I read Montano (or, Montano's Malady, if you refer to the New Directions edition, which, by the way, has a much more attractive jacket than the washed-out, asexual Harvill Secker one), by Enrique Vila-Matas [link], two thoughts stuck with me loyally throughout the clever, talkative and, above all, obscenely literary novel, which is more prosaic than novelistic.

The first thought, I will describe with a frivolous parody of Vila-Matas' own style:

Novels, which experiment formally, tend to be received with hesitation, which is a shame, because the words of this book glow, I thought, as I read Montano, which is a formally experimental novel, by Enrique Vila-Matas, who defies those who wish to destroy literature.

If I seem faultfinding, I have been cruel; Montano is a teacherly, fascinating novel and I suspect that Bartley & Co . [link] (which I haven't read but which is the more celebrated of his novels) is, probably, even better. This is my point: Vila-Matas writes, at times, like a scholar who has gone mad. His prose is meticulously punctuated, he has no fear of pointed repetition or of a sentence containing half-a-dozen, non-restrictive relative clauses, which is not as nightmarish as it may sound (although, I did have to reread a handful of passages), and his references, which are almost always other writers, are shamelessly (and charmingly) high-brow and obscure: Claudio Magris, Witold Gombrowitcz, W. G. Sebald, Jacques Vaché and others, many of whom I had never heard of and who may not even be real, not that it matters. (Just to be clear: there is no correlation between those last two points; I'm certainly not suggesting that they may not be real because I haven't heard of them). His style is beautiful, although unstable, and, in my eyes, risks becoming unpalatable, but does not. What redeems his prose - or, what saves it from disappearing from reality entirely (incidentally, his epigraph, from Maurice Blanchot, is: What will we do to disappear?) - is that his book is very formally inventive; Montano is shaped like an encyclopedia (perhaps map would be a better word) of the journals kept by great writers, within the diary of writer-narrator, which is a clumsy description, but I can only approximate. And, he has no interest in plot or character whatsoever, which was noticed by Jane Smiley, in her somewhat defensive review for the Guardian [link], where she takes Vila-Matas to task for the claim that his narrator lives in, 'a slum called Spain, where a kind of traditional, 19th-century realism is encouraged and where it is normal for a majority of critics and readers to despise thought.'

Also, there is an thoughtful review of Montano on the blog Vertigo [link] and an essay at The Quarterly Conversation [link], which includes the following, relevant paragraph:

Befitting an author who entertains the notion that contemporary literature amounts to scribbling in the margins of the great works, Vila-Matas seems to be pioneering a strange new genre: the literary essay as novel. The first two of his books to appear in English, Bartleby & Co. and Montano’s Malady, are fine examples. Both translated by Jonathan Dunne and recently published in paperback by New Directions, these books, as any well-written essay might be, are positively saturated with quotes, references, glosses, and other signs of deep research; what’s more, the obvious scrupulousness (even exhaustiveness) with which Vila-Matas has looked into his subject matter seems more appropriate to a critical work than a novel. At a time when more and more novels are including lists of sources and footnotes, Vila-Matas’s books stand out both for their rigor and for making their sources an integral part of the text. [...]

The second thought was that Vila-Matas - who, not for the first time, chose a narrator obsessed with literature and who, I venture, may be just as obsessed himself - has a very clear vision of a family of (admittedly, mostly male and European) writers, comprised, in part, by the names listed earlier as his reference points, but also including Walser, Musil, Kafka, Perec, and Pessoa, of which he may, or may not, be vying, admirably, for membership. What makes this notable, for those interested in these authors, is that Vila-Matas has wonderful, unclassifiable things to say about them:

A sudden silence descended on a place as rowdy as this and I felt that even the invisible beings were hiding. Mystery at dusk. Then the din of people from the ferries returned. Nightfall, which seemed to have abruptly frozen, has now gathered strength. I am still in Lisbon's Cafe Atinel, thinking about Herminio, my disappeared friend. I am still here by the Tagus, at my table by the river, at my waterside table. The Baixa, the Chiado, the crowds, Europe, everything has been left behind, at my back. I am at the world's end, free of time like a dead man. A seagull flies by and I follow it, and I am reminded of certain remarks made by W. G. Sebald on mystery and the impact of the fantasy genre on eccentricity, certain remarks also about supposed coincidences and chances that might not be so, were we to possess better means of perception, were it not because, centuries ago, we became mentally very limited after shots were heard in paradise: 'I prefer to write about fairly eccentric people, and eccentricity is somewhat fantastical. These things happen to us as well. For example, recently I visited a museum in London to see two paintings. There was a couple behind me who I think were speaking Polish. A very strange-looking man and woman, they seemed from another age. Later, in the afternoon, I had to go to the tube station furthest from the center of London, a city of fifteen million inhabitants. There was nobody. Except these two from the museum.'

The novel, in the hands of Vila-Matas (who, incidentally, is a founding member of the Order of Finnegans, whose members are obliged to venerate the novel Ulysses, its author, James Joyce, and, if possible, attend Bloomsday each year in Dublin) is primarily a means of thought, particularly thought about the relationships between life and writing and reading:

Sebald is a great reader of Borges, whom he always praises for understanding early on what a mistake it was to expel metaphysics from philosophy. Because in fact, Sebald claims, there are things we cannot easily explain away, and because it is part of our human condition, not just social, with those who came before us. The commemoration of the dead is something that distinguishes us from the animals.

I am a covert and assiduous reader of Sebald, of his long walks à la Robert Walser, of his exploration the world of the dead, of his fantastical forays into the space of the eccentrics. Referring to the strange case of the Poles in the faraway station, Sebald said, 'These are not coincidences, somewhere there is a relation that from time to time sparkles through a worn fabric'.

If, here and there, the tone of the prose begins to feel like a critical essay, it simply changes, which is the reason Vila-Matas succeeds. Montano does not, by any means, resemble a book of literary criticism, anymore than it resembles a traditional novel, made from characters and plot. It is unviolated by convention, free to search out its subject, which, by surveying the diaries of these particular and great writers, it defines: the mysteries of the private mind.

Here I am in Cafe Atinel, at dusk, next to the ferry passengers, working away on this dictionary of writers private journals in an attempt to relate it to Montano's Malady, to mend the worn fabric of relations between the two different texts, for something to sparkle again and remind us that there was once a young and perfect fabric, with a serene thread and logical language in which coincidences had no meaning because everything was cleanly coincidental.

Franz Kafka

2010-07-27T17:07:00.000-07:00

Franz Kafka wanted all his manuscripts to be burned after his death, but his friend Max Brod disregarded the request, seeding a complex legal battle over thousands of manuscripts that has the literary world agog. That legal tussle takes a new twist today as four safety deposit boxes in a Zurich bank containing the manuscripts are opened.

The boxes are believed to contain thousands of manuscripts by Kafka and Brod, including letters, journals, sketches and drawings, some of which have never been published and could provide literary detectives an insight into one of the 20th century's greatest writers.

The move in Zurich follows similar action at two Tel Aviv banks, which were ordered by an Israeli tribunal to extract Kafka's works from their vaults. [...]

The writing above is an extract from an article published on Monday, the 19th of July, 2010, by the Guardian [link]. More Kafka has been found.

Kafka's diaries [link], which, in my eyes, are just as uncanny as his fiction, include an entry dated Sunday, the 19th of July, 1910, one hundred years earlier, to the day. I have copied the entry, which is pleasingly to the point, so to speak, and a small part of the passage that follows directly afterward.

Sunday, 19 July, slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

-

When I think about it, I must say that my education has done me great harm in some respects. I was not, as a matter of fact, educated in any out-of-the-way place, in a ruin, say, in the mountains - something against which in fact I could not have brought myself to say a word of reproach. In spite of the risk of all my former teachers not understanding this, I should prefer most of all to have been such a little dweller in the ruins, burnt by the sun which would have shone for me there on the tepid ivy between the remains on every side; even though I might have been weak at first under the pressure of my good qualities, which would have grown tall in me with the might of weeds. [...]

Needless to say, Kafka's vision of himself, as represented in this small fragment of his private thoughts, is as far removed, from the world of Zurich safety deposit boxes and Tel Aviv tribunals, as seems humanly possible.

David Shields

2010-06-29T14:22:00.000-07:00

Hamlet, dying, says, "If I had the time, I would tell you all." The entire play is the Hamlet Show, functioning as a vehicle for Hamlet to give his opinion on everything and anything, as Nietzsche does Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The play could easily be broken up into little sections with headings like "Hamlet on Friendship," "Hamlet on Sexual Fidelity," "Hamlet on Suicide," "Hamlet on Grave Diggers," Hamlet on the Afterlife." Hamlet is, more than anything else, Hamlet talking on a multitude of different topics. (Melville's marginal comment on one of the soliloquies in the play: "Here is forcibly shown the great Montaigneism of Hamlet.") I find myself wanting to ditch the tired old plot altogether and just harness the voice, which is a processing machine, taking input and spitting out perspective - a lens, a distortion effect. Hamlet's very nearly final words: "Had I but the time... O, I could tell you." He would keep riffing forever if it weren't for the fact that the plot needs to kill him.

This quote, fragment No. 455 from Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, a book that I admired and enjoyed, reservedly, is a neat example of the bravado and conviction with which David Shields attacks the novel, the plot and contrivance of contemporary fiction in general.

Reality Hunger presents itself as a manifesto, 'for a burgeoning group of interrelated artists in a multitude of forms and media,' which means: I (Shields) will talk about whatever I so choose; which he does, pleasantly. The scope of the book is vast; a wobbly, zigzagging line, tracing the evolution of narrative art. Nevertheless, Shields is picky about what he mentions and to what extent; he moves quickly from Proust, to music piracy, to Oprah, to memoir, to Reality TV, to Hip-Hop... The list goes on and on.

And, accordingly, what it is, precisely, that Shields wishes to advocate remains unclear, or at least obscure (to me), although deliberately so I suspect, and, at times, the lack of visible parameters of his artistic movements makes the book feel less like, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto and more like, Reality Hunger: A List of Stuff I Like. What is clear, however, is that, according to Shields, the current conventions of writing must be removed: "I want books to be equal to the complexity of experience, memory and thought." The writing of today disappoints.

Not long before I read Reality Hunger, I read an article, entitled The Pleasures of Imagination by Paul Bloom [link], which gives fiction a little more credit, even more than people, or sex. I have selected some passages that seem relevant:

How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends, participating in sports, or relaxing with the family. While people sometimes describe sex as their most pleasurable act, time-management studies find that the average American adult devotes just four minutes per day to sex.

Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want, we retreat to the imagination—to worlds created by others, as with books, movies, video games, and television (over four hours a day for the average American), or to worlds we ourselves create, as when daydreaming and fantasizing. While citizens of other countries might watch less television, studies in England and the rest of Europe find a similar obsession with the unreal. [...]

Why do we get pleasure from the imagination? Isn't it odd that toddlers enjoy pretense, and that children and adults are moved by stories, that we have feelings about characters and events that we know do not exist? As the title of a classic philosophy article put it, how can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina?

The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept—and I'm sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling'sHarry Potter series led to similar tears. (After her final book was published, Rowling appeared in interviews and told about the letters she got, not all of them from children, begging her to spare the lives of beloved characters such as Hagrid, Hermione, Ron, and, of course, Harry Potter himself.) A friend of mine told me that he can't remember hating anyone the way he hated one of the characters in the movie Trainspotting, and there are many people who can't bear to experience certain fictions because the emotions are too intense. I have my own difficulty with movies in which the suffering of the characters is too real, and many find it difficult to watch comedies that rely too heavily on embarrassment; the vicarious reaction to this is too unpleasant. [...]

In the end, though, those brought to tears by Anna Karenina are perfectly aware that she is a character in a novel; those people who wailed when J.K. Rowling killed off Dobby the House Elf knew full well that he doesn't exist. And even young children appreciate the distinction between reality and fiction; when you ask them, "Is such-and-so real or make-believe?," they get it right.

Why, then, are we so moved by stories?

David Hume tells the story of a man who is hung out of a high tower in a cage of iron. He knows himself to be perfectly secure, but, still, he "cannot forebear trembling." Montaigne gives a similar example, saying that if you put a sage on the edge of a precipice, "he must shudder like a child." My colleague, the philosopher Tamar Gendler, describes the Grand Canyon Skywalk, a glass walkway that extends 70 feet from the canyon's rim. It is supposedly a thrilling experience. So thrilling that some people drive several miles over a dirt road to get there and then discover that they are too afraid to step onto the walkway. In all of these cases, people know they are perfectly safe, but they are nonetheless frightened. [...]

That many of the words (the fragments), in Reality Hunger, were originally said, or written, by others, is important; Shields argues, in the end, that the success of his manifesto depends on it enacting that which it advocates: writing that is appropriated, plotless, self-aware, self-referential, and, above all, representative of Reality (this word could be underlined, capitalised, italicised or written in wingdings... Take your pick; according to Shields, this is where art begins and ends). This argument, presented as it is, seems to work, unusually, in practice (the books presented as prototypes for the movement are, almost without exception, very, very good) but, perhaps, not in theory.

The arguments that cite James Frey, reality TV, and Hip-Hop, in my mind, overstate the importance of these relatively straightforward and transient cultural moments, to fiction. For example, that reality shows, "are a hybrid of mutant of documentaries, game shows, and soaps," does not seem like evidence that readers will naturally reject the categories of fiction and nonfiction, in favour of a larger, more all-encompassing type of writing. (By the way, I don't necessarily disagree with Shields, just his logic).

The style of the book is frustrating, at times (because it seems more interesting, I have described more of what I dislike, rather than what I like about Reality Hunger): the arguments, broken into fragments and pulled from hundreds of different sources, lose momentum as the voice changes; the tone (often too brash, as if shouted, to be convincing) changes constantly. And, yet, the book is enjoyable, easily read, even if the arguments do not stack up. Oh, and Shields quotes well: "I've never heard of a crime that I could not imagine committing myself." Goethe.

James Wood, taking the opportunity to speak freely about the nature of realism (which, in my opinion, is when he is at his best), reviewed the book for the New Yorker recently [link]. His introduction, represented selectively here, is long, but it says what Shields does not:

[...] So even if it’s hard to decide whether the novel can really progress it’s easy to see that it can congeal—that certain novelistic conventions grow steadily more conventional, and lose some of their original power. The French literary theorist Roland Barthes called this “the reality effect.” He was talking specifically about fictional detail (the kind that pretends to be quietly “irrelevant,” like Bob’s mole, in one of my hypothetical examples); his larger argument, made elsewhere in his work, was that realistic fiction, like ideology, tries to palm itself off as the most natural and real of literary modes but is in fact the most artificial and unreal. Barthes is ninety-nine per cent right. His rightness is felt every day by any novelist who sits down to a blank piece of paper or a computer screen and tries, despairingly, to think beyond the familiar grammar of narrative. All this silly machinery of plotting and pacing, this corsetry of chapters and paragraphs, this doxology of dialogue and characterization! Who does not want to explode it, do something truly new, and rouse the implication slumbering in the word “novel”? Avant-garde anti-realists probably err in assuming that realist novelists are just complacently or venally recycling convention; my experience is that many intelligent novelists are painfully aware of their bated means, their limitations and timidities and uncertainties, and look with writhing admiration at writers like Beckett or Saramago or Bernhard or David Foster Wallace, who seem to have discovered new fictional languages. All too often, conventional novelists find themselves producing a version of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg called, about fifty years ago, “kitsch”—that is, the following of established rules at a time when artists are calling those rules into question.

But Roland Barthes is one per cent wrong, too; and, like the one per cent that separates us genetically from chimpanzees, Barthes’s tiny wrongness is quite large. Convention may be boring, but it is not untrue simply because it is conventional. People do lie on their beds and think with shame about all that has happened during the day (at least, I do), or order a beer and a sandwich and open their computers; they walk in and out of rooms, they talk to other people (and sometimes, indeed, feel themselves to be talking inside quotation marks); and their lives do possess more or less traditional elements of plotting and pacing, of suspense and revelation and epiphany. Probably there are more coincidences in real life than in fiction. To say “I love you” is to say something at millionth hand, but it is not, then, necessarily to lie. All life is conventional in various ways, like narrative; postmodernists as different as Thomas Pynchon and Steven Millhauser use many conventional narrative elements (sometimes as parody, and sometimes not). [...]

Barthes often sounds as if he considered fictional narrative to be a fundamentally sneaky enterprise, in which bourgeois novelists were conspiring in smooth lies. In this sense, his critique of realism is religious in flavor, and joins a long tradition of religious anti-novelistic suspicion. With less élan than Barthes, but with some of his sacred zeal, David Shields makes a passionate plea for what he calls “reality-based art” in his new book, “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto” (Knopf; $24.95). Shields prosecutes an effective, if coarse, sub-Barthesian argument against the traditional novelistic machinery. He rants a bit, apparently fearful that if he were quieter we would not believe in his sincerity [...]

A. M. Homes

2010-06-14T07:00:00.000-07:00

A. M. Homes was, until recently, a writer I knew only by reputation; hers is darkly memorable (although, generally, good). Her writing had been recommended to me by people whose opinions I find most agreeable. I had read her article in the New Yorker, mourning J. D. Salinger (link); as far as the obituaries, and various outpourings of admiration, went, hers, in my eyes, was the pick of the bunch.

Then, more or less by chance, I saw her speak at a literary festival of sorts. She was part of a panel of four and the event had the usual script: anecdotes were followed by polite chortles; when political dissatisfaction was expressed, peopled frowned in agreement and nodded (meaningfully) in unison; mutual admiration abounded.

But, Homes stood out. Her style was effectively casual - there was no suggestion, at any point, that she wanted the audience's affection (just as her novel, The End of Alice, never tries to be likable) - and her subject matter was particular. In brief, she spoke about what should be considered unsayable in novels ("Nothing"); about the difficulty of writing a character, a murdering pedophile, who might share her taste in sandwiches (Homes said that her friends had, in the past, recognised that her most dreadful characters shared her own preferences in food); and, about the taboo of incest, in families where adopted children have been reunited with their biological parents. The last topic, I understand, relates to her recently published memoir, The Mistress's Daughter, which originally appeared as an article in the New Yorker. The article can be read, by subscribers, here (link). And, here is an excerpt from the book, taken from Homes's website (link):

Christmas 1992, I go home to Washington, D.C. ‘We have something to tell you,’ my mother says. ‘Someone is looking for you.’ After a lifetime spent in a virtual witness-protection program, I’ve been exposed. I am the mistress’s daughter. My birth mother was young, unmarried, and my father older with a family of his own. When I was born, a lawyer called my adoptive parents and said, ‘Your package has arrived. . . . ’ The fragile narrative, the plot of my life has been abruptly recast. In my dreams, my birth mother is the queen of queens, and she has made a fabulous life for herself, as ruler of the world, except for one missing link—me.

Homes, as a public speaker, ignores, politely (and mercifully), the banality of the questions posed by her audience and speaks freely about what she seems to consider relevant (which, I can't help thinking, is what the audience is there to hear), adding, with an ironic smile, at the end of her reply: I'm not sure if that answers your question. She laughs, sometimes without obvious explanation.

I resolved to buy her book:

The protagonist and narrator of The End of Alice (one of Homes's more notable works, I gather) is an aging pedophile. He is a Nabokovian character, not so much because he lusts over young girls (that he does, however, is not, in any way in question; he lusts, violently) but because he knows when to reference high culture, to scorn lowbrow America, and to deploy wordplays and neologisms.

Call me old-fashioned in that my concentration here is on an arrangement that according to many of my peers has long since passed. My fellow esthetes in this great colony of philes insist that I am a classicist. I am interested in the coupling that throughout history has propagated the human race. I realize that for many the real interest, the contemporary current, is in what some consider the greatest refinement, the linkage of related parties either by marriage, familial bonds, or the nearness and dearness of the same sex - the mind-bending adjustments, fascinating alterations, and gesticulations associated with the pairing of two like objects. But I ask that you bear with me, that you allow for this reconsideration of the more traditional of our species. All will not be lost.

And, as is the case with Humbert Humbert, the narrator (who remains unnamed) seems throughly unreliable. Homes, as a ironist, is deadly. Her powers are such that the reader asks, Is she an ironist at all?

What you should know is that in this rare case, it was she who took me. A seduction somewhere between a romance and a rape. I have no explanation for behavior such as this except a few theorems hinting at a sad sordid explanation for her apparent, if addled, understanding of adult desire. I'm hinting at the possibility of some previous acquaintance with goings-on such as this - perhaps we had that in common as well. I wouldn't doubt it. Details and the like, admittedly, I didn't want to know.

Speaking about her narrators, Homes made reference to Grace Paley, who she described as something of a mentor. Paley, if I heard correctly, taught Homes to pursue, 'The truth according to the character', which she achieves, stylishly, in The End of Alice.

A comparison with Nabokov, however, is not helpful for understanding the gory and terrifyingly graphic depths that Homes reaches. (I might add that Homes does not hold a candle to Nabokov as stylist, although that is hardly a criticism). The End of Alice is rough; the graphic (this word is not to be taken lightly) sexual violence is more in line with the transgressive literature written in French - Marquise de Sade, Georges Bataille - than anything that has been written in English. (Although, as is referenced on the front cover image above, Homes also borrows the motif of the butterfly collector from John Fowles's novel, The Collector).

For all the power in Homes's writing, however, she falls into a trap that must be difficult to avoid for a writer in pursuit of the truth according to a violent pedophile. By taking this man as her narrator, Homes implicitly rejects the suggestion that such criminals are inhuman, incomprehensible. And, yet, as his character is revealed, and as the reader is told about his familial sexual abuse, not to mention the finer points of prison sex, his nature becomes more and more unrecognisable, to the detriment of the novel.

As an epilogue, below is footage of Homes with Eric Fischl, at an event run by BOMB Magazine, although the quality is poor and Homes plays the role of interviewer, rather than interviewee.

Henry de Montherlant

2010-06-07T04:48:00.000-07:00

From the New York Review of Books, Chaos and Night by Henry de Montherlant:

[...] Nonetheless, it is evident that the wheel of fortune has turned, and Montherlant, as well as his almost exact contemporary and school friend, Louis Aragon, and other superb French writers no more than 10 years older, such as François Mauriac, Roger Martin du Gard (both Nobel Prize winners), and Georges Bernanos, are suffering a real decline in popularity. Have their reputations also declined? Certainly not among French readers who know their work, or among French literary critics capable of looking back beyond the fashionable novels of Michel Houellebecq. But for an author, the loss of readers, if it continues, is like a death sentence. In Montherlant's case, the time has come to lodge an appeal.

Montherlant was born April 21, 1895, in Paris, into a family of fairly rich, but, from a genealogist's point of view, obscure French nobility. His father — a royalist and reactionary to the point of despising the post-Dreyfus Affair army as too subservient to the Republic, and refusing to have electricity or the telephone installed in his house — lost most of the family's fortune speculating on the Paris Bourse. He died in 1914, unmourned by the family, and having communicated to his only son little beyond his taste for equitation and setting oneself in contemptuous opposition to society. [...]

The quote above is from Louis Begley's article, "The Pitiless Universe of Montherlant," which can be read in full at the New York Sun's website [link].

tout ce qui n'est pas littérature ou plaisir est temps perdu

And, from the publisher (link):

An astonishing modern take on Don Quixote, Chaos and Night untangles the ties between politics and paranoia, self-loathing and self-pity, rage and remorse. It is the darkly funny final flowering of the art of Henry de Montherlant, a solitary and scarifying modern master whose work, admired by Graham Greene and Albert Camus, is sure to appeal to contemporary readers of Thomas Bernhard and Roberto Bolaño.

A sales pitch, but still...

Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin

2010-05-31T10:02:00.000-07:00

In the middle ages, fishing from the Danube was a way of life but, now, it is rare.

Certain Romanian folk songs tell the story of a white monastery with nine priests, on a white island, on the Danube.

The Black Forest is the origin of the Danube, Europe's second longest river. From Germany, it flows eastwards, for almost 3000km, passing through, or forming, the borders of ten countries, into the Black Sea.

The river marked the border of the Roman Empire and the Danube basin is the site of some of the earliest examples of human civilization. In 3000 BC, for example, the Vučedol people, who are famous for ceramics, lived on the Danube.

The Bulgarian National Anthem extols the Danube as a symbol of the country's natural beauty.

The German tradition of landscape painting was developed, during the 16th century, in the Danube valley.

The Blue Danube was the name of the first British Nuclear weapon.

Homer and Hesiod refer to the lower Danube as the Okeanos Potamos. There is an island at the end of the lower Danube, Alba, where Apollo is said to greet the rising sun. Achilles, in one account, was buried on this Island.

In English, we have used the French word Danube, to name the river, since the Norman conquest of England.

The French word comes from Latin, in which the river was called Danubius, Danuvius, and (from the Greek word, Istros) the Ister.

The Ister

by Friedrich Hölderlin (trans. Michael Hamburger)

Now come, fire!
We are impatient
To look upon the Day,
And when the trial
Has passed through the knees
One may perceive the cries in the wood.
But, as for us, we sing from the Indus,
Arrived from afar, and
From the Alpheus, long we
Have sought what is fitting,
Not without wings may one
Reach out for that which is nearest
Like so
And get to the other side.
But here we wish to build.
For rivers make arable
The land. For when herbs are growing
And to the same in summer
The animals go to drink,
There too will human kind go.
This one, however, is called the Ister.
Beautifully he lives. The pillars’ foliage burns,
And stirs. Wildly they stand
Supporting one another; above,
A second measure, juts out
The roof of rocks.
No wonder, therefore,
I say, this river
Invited Hercules,
Distantly gleaming, down by Olympus,
When he, to look for shadows,
Came up from the sultry isthmus,
For full of courage they were
In that place, but, because of the spirits,
There’s need of coolness too. That is why that hero
Preferred to come here to the wellsprings and yellow banks,
Highly fragrant on top, and black
With fir woods, in whose depths
A huntsman loves to amble
At noon, and growth is audible
In resinous trees of the Ister,
Yet it seems
To travel backwards and
I think it must come from
The East.
Much could
Be said about this. And why does
It cling to the mountains, straight? The other,
The Rhine, has gone away
Sideways. Not for nothing rivers flow
Through dry land. But how? A sign is needed,
Nothing else, plain and honest, so that
Sun and Moon it may bear in mind, inseparable,
And go away, day and night no less, and
The Heavenly feel warm one beside the other.
That also is why these are
The joy of the Highest. For how
Would he get down? And like Hertha green
They are the children of Heaven. But all too patient
He seems to me, not
More free, and nearly derisive. For when
Day is due to begin
In youth, where it starts
To grow, another already there
Drives high the splendour, and like foals
He grinds the bit, and far off the breezes
Can hear the commotion,
If he is contented;
But the rock needs incisions
And the earth needs furrows,
Would be desolate else, unabiding;
Yet what that one does, the river,
Nobody knows.

Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770 – 1843) was a German lyric poet. He wrote his poem, Der Ister, about the Danube River, taking its ancient name for his title, before his madness reached its full height.

Hölderlin was a Romantic. He studied with Hegel and Schelling and was acquainted with Schiller, Goethe and Novalis. As a young poet, he worked as a tutor, a position from which he was dismissed for his intolerance of his pupils, and, briefly, joined the clergy. He struggled financially. He wrote in fragments, rewriting and remaking his older poems, leaving spaces and unfinished lines. He fell in love with an older woman, Susette Gondard, the wife of his employer. He wrote about his love for Suzette in his poetry, before she died of influenza. Not long after Suzette’s death, Hölderlin was declared mentally ill and became a patient of Dr. Ferdinand Authenrieth, who invented a mask that prevented his patients from screaming. When he was discharged, considered incurable but harmless, a sympathetic carpenter called Ernst Zimmer gave him a home. He stayed in a tower attached to the carpenter’s house for the next 36 years until his death. (There is a resemblance to the second half of Robert Walser’s life, a century later). He became something of a tourist attraction and would write short poems, off-the-cuff, for visitors.

The young poet Wilhelm Waiblinger, who would visit him in the tower, wrote at length about his friend’s sheltered life:

[…] For music had not yet abandoned him completely. He still played piano correctly, though in a highly eccentric style. Whenever he plays, he sits at the instrument all day long. He will follow a childishly simple notion, turn it around, and play it back hundreds of times all day until one can endure it no longer. And along with this come quick, spasmodic fits which force him to race like lightning across the keyboard with his long, overgrown fingernails clattering all the way. It is the greatest displeasure for him to have these trimmed, and he has to be tricked like a stubborn and capricious child into having it done. When he has played long enough to stir his soul, he suddenly closes his eyes, lifts his head and begins to sing as if he wanted to pine and waste away. As many times as I heard it, I could never figure out what language it was; but he sang with an excessive pathos, and it sent shivers through every nerve to see and hear him in this way. Melancholy and sorrow were the spirit of his song, and one could tell that he had once been a good tenor. […]

Part of Waiblinger’s essay, from which the above quote comes, "Friedrich Hölderlin's Life, Poetry and Madness" (1830), can be read at the Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate (link). It is fascinating.

Hölderlin felt the presence of the ancient Greek gods in his life and represented them in his poetry. J. M. Coetzee, in his article The Poet in the Tower (link), writes,

Hölderlin wrote enthusiastic, rather strident poems of a pantheistic bent celebrating the universe as a living whole infused with divinity. Their immediate model was Friedrich Schiller, but their philosophical underpinning was ultimately Neoplatonic. As his motto, Hölderlin adopted the Greek phrase en kai pan, one and all: life is a harmonious unity, our goal must be to merge with the All.

He was, in Coetzee’s eyes,

a déclassé intellectual alienated from church and state, aspiring toward a utopia in which poets and philosophers would be accorded their rightful due; more specifically, a poet constitutionally trapped in a backward-looking posture, mourning the passing of an age when gods mixed with men (“…My friend, we have come too late. Though the gods are living,/Over our heads they live, up in a different world./…Little they seem to care whether we live or do not”).

And, yet, Hölderlin was popular with Nazis. His poetry aroused, what was considered, a call to the German people. He was a poet, who, “could be made to speak for both a lost past and a National Socialist future.” Coetzee describes Hölderlin’s standing in Nazi Germany:

In Germany the Hölderlin centenary of 1943 was celebrated on a grand scale. Ceremonies took place across the country; hundreds of thousands of Hölderlin readers were printed and distributed to German soldiers. Why this philosopher-poet, elegist of the Greek past and foe of autocracy, should have been adopted as a mascot of the Third Reich is not obvious. Initially the line followed by the Nazi cultural office was that Hölderlin was a prophet of the newly arisen German giant. After the tide of the war turned at Stalingrad, that line was amended: Hölderlin now spoke for European values being defended by Germany against the advancing Asiatic, Bolshevist hordes.

O take me, take me up into the ranks,

so that I do not one day die a common death!

I do not want to die in vain, what
I want is to fall on the sacrificial mound
For the Fatherland, to pour out the heart’s blood
For the Fatherland.

As an example of Nazism appropriating writing, it has a particular sharpness because of the lecture course, entitled Hölderlin Hymn “The Ister”, delivered by Martin Heidegger at the University of Freiburg, in 1943. Without Heidegger, Nazism’s recruitment of the lyric poet might be dismissed without reflection. Nevertheless, Heidegger decided to deliver his most sustained thoughts on the essence of politics via Hölderlin’s poem The Ister. Here is Coetzee, on the relationship between Heidegger, Hölderlin and Nazism:

The fortunes of Hölderlin under the Nazis are intricately intertwined with his fortunes in the hands of his most influential interpreter, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s meditations on the place of Germany in history are carried out largely in the form of commentaries on Hölderlin. In the 1930s Heidegger saw Hölderlin as the prophet of a new dawn; when the Reich collapsed he saw him as the consoling poet for dark times when the gods withdraw. While in rough outline this account squares with the Nazi version, it does an injustice to the seriousness with which Heidegger reflects on each line of Hölderlin. To Heidegger in “the completely destitute time” of the present (he was writing in 1946), when the relevance of poetry is everywhere in doubt, Hölderlin is the one who articulates most clearly the essential calling of the poet, namely to speak the words that bring a new world into being. We read Hölderlin’s dark poetry, says Heidegger, not so much to understand him as to keep in contact with him until that future arrives when he will at last be understandable.

Heidegger is still infamous today for his support of Adolf Hitler and his membership of the Nazi party, from May 1933 until May 1945. And, yet, his book, Being and Time, is, I gather, one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th Century. The debate, over whether he was an anti-Semite and whether his politics complicated his philosophy, is long and was recently revitalised by an English translation of Emmanuel Faye's book, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, which I haven’t read. There are some good reviews online, however, which précis its argument, here, here and here (there are others). Martin Cohen, in his review for Times Higher Education (link), touching on Heidegger’s treatment of Hölderlin, said the following:

In 1942, the year of the Final Solution, Heidegger is to be found working on an idea in a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin. Faye notes that philosophers are ignorant of the significance of Hölderlin - but that the answer is very easily obtained by perusal of Nazi texts.

Heidegger uses Hölderlin as part of a theory explaining how the historic mission of Ancient Greece was passed to the German volk. Heidegger thinks that the Germans and the Greeks sprang from a shared root somewhere in the East. "The name Heraclitus is not the title of a philosophy of the Greeks long run dry, no more than it is the formula for universal humanity as such. In truth, it is the name of an original power of Occidental-Germanic historical existence.

Heidegger's development of Hölderlin is to add a kind of swastika symbol, as he outlines a new philosophical justification for racial purity based on passing via distress to light.

I don’t know how Heidegger should be read, but I can’t help thinking that in a speech made to the Heidelberg Student Association in 1933, he sounded, at the very least, cruel:

A fierce battle must be fought against this situation in the National Socialist spirit, and this spirit cannot be allowed to be suffocated by humanizing, Christian ideas that suppress its unconditionality.

Heidegger’s Ister lecture, on the other hand, as far as I understand it, discusses the meaning of poetry, the essence of politics, ancient Greece, modern Germany and Technology. He considered Hölderlin, as yet, unheard. The lecture is divided into three parts and can be read, in full, here (link). Nothing Heidegger wrote is, to me at least, easily understood, however, at the start of Part One of his lecture – “Poetizing the Essence of the Rivers” – he makes some remarks which, with literary criticism in general in mind, make considerable sense:

What this lecture course is able to communicate are remarks on the poetry it has selected. Such remarks are always only an accompaniment. It may there be that some, or many, or even all of these remarks are simply imported and are not “contained in” the poetry. The remarks, in that case, are not taken from the poetry, not presented from out of this poetry. The remarks in no way achieve what is in the strict sense of the word could be called an “interpretation” of the poetry. At the risk of missing the truth of Hölderlin’s poetry, the remarks merely provide a few markers, signs that call our attention, pauses for reflection. Because these remarks are merely an accompaniment to the poem, the poetry itself must in the first instance and constantly be present as what comes first.

And, putting aside sense, for the moment, his concluding statements have a mysterious and beautiful magnetism:

These relations have their own essential prevailing and flowing. The poet is the river. And the river is the poet. The two are the same on the grounds of their singular essence, which is to be demigods, to be in the between, between gods and human. The open realm of this between is open in the direction of the holy and that essentially prevails beyond gods and humans.

In 2004, a film tracing the path of Heidegger's 1942 lectures, following the path of the Danube, was released by David Barison and Daniel Ross. It is a beautiful thing.

The filmmakers travel upstream from the Black Sea, at a Sebaldian pace (although they approach their subjects much more directly than Sebald), interviewing philosophers - Bernard Stiegler, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe - and taking in the intellectual and political history of the river. Gracefully, the film moves from an archaeological site, to a concentration camp, to the lecture theatre at Friburg University where Heidegger spoke, and to the castle where Marshal Petain fled in 1945, without ever giving the impression of exerting itself. The style is elegiac, meditative and glowingly intellectual.

The highlight of the film is Steigler's interview, but at no point is it any less than hypnotically brilliant. At times, the river and the light become Romantic, sublime, and the spirit of Hölderlin is made cinematic. Barison and Ross illustrate philosophy. For a more in-depth review, see James Chamberlin's article, Draggin' The River: The Ister (link).

The film closes with an original recording of Heidegger reading, in German, Hölderlin's poem, Der Ister:

Jorge Luis Borges

2010-05-20T11:13:00.000-07:00

W. G. Sebald said,

My medium is prose, not the novel.

Which, I can't help thinking, is true also of Jorge Luis Borges. Although, applied to Borges, and if left unaltered, the quote loses some of its punch, given that he never wrote novels. Still, if you don't mind substituting 'short-stories' in the place of 'novels', it makes for an interesting comparison.

It helps, mind you, that Sebald was, overtly, influenced by Borges. One of the pleasures of reading either writer is puzzling over the references to literature, which fill their books. In The Rings of Saturn, Borges is one of Sebald's reference points: the short story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius", from Ficciones (1956), appears more than once. Indeed, Sebald borrows some actual prose from Borges towards the end of Chapter 3.

Both writers have a style that might be called documentary, although the word is not very helpful for understanding the singular beauty of either. It is difficult, and not necessarily very interesting, to classify either writer. Sebald's style, and, therefore, by extension of my comparison, Borges's style, I think, was well described by James Wood, in his review of The Rings of Saturn, where he also made some unrestrained comments about fact and fiction:

What is remarkable about The Emigrants and about The Rings of Saturn is the reticent artificiality of Sebald's narration, whereby fact is taken from the real world and made fictional. This is the opposite of the trivial "factional" breeziness of writers such as Julian Barnes or Umberto Eco, who take facts and superficially destabilize them within fiction, who makes facts quiver a little, but whose entire work is actually in homage to the superstition of fact. Such writers do not believe deeply enough in the fictional to abandon the actual world. They toy with accuracy; they are obsessed with questions of accuracy and inaccuracy, for even inaccurate facts, to such writers, have a kind of empirical electricity, since they connect us to a larger informational zealousness. This informational neurosis makes their fiction buzzingly unaffecting. Facts are a sport for such writers, a semiotic superfluity, ultimately quite readable.

In an interview, from 1977, recently published online (link), Borges described the relationship between his reading habits and his writing, which, I suspect, may be, inadvertently, relevant:

Encyclopedias have been, I’d say, my life’s chief reading. I have always been interested in encyclopedias. Well, I used to go to the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires — and since I was so shy, I felt I could not cope with asking for a book, or a librarian, so I looked on the shelves for the Encyclopædia Britannica. Of course, afterwards, I had that book at home, by my hand. And then I would pick up any chance volume and I would read it. And then one night I was richly rewarded, because I read all about the Druses, Dryden, and the Druids — a treasure trove, no? — all in the same volume, of course, “Dr–.”

Then I came to the idea of how fine it would be to think of an encyclopedia of an actual world, and then of an encyclopedia, a very rigorous one of course, of an imaginary world, where everything should be linked. Where, for example, you would have, let’s say, a language and then a literature that went with the language, and then a history with it, and so on.

As an aside, I guess that he had recovered from his timidity, by the time he was appointed director of the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires, in 1955.

Three days before he died, in the Autumn of 2001, Sebald gave a fiction workshop at the University of East Anglia. David Lambert and Robert McGill attended and their notes were published by Hamish and Hamilton in the fifth edition of Five Dials (link). Sebald, who shared Borges's writerly affection for encyclopedias, is reported to have told his students,

Look in older encyclopedias. They have a different eye. They attempt to be complete and structured but in fact are completely random collected things that are supposed to represent our world.

On the matter of fact and fiction, and, more specifically, the role of fact in fiction. His comments echo those of Wood:

It's always gratifying to learn something when one reads fiction. Dickens introduced it. The essay invaded the novel. But we should not perhaps trust "facts" in fiction. It is, after all, an illusion.

His advice, neatly laid out in dot points, is obscure, meandering, wonderful and personal. Everyone dot point is valuable reading material. This quote is one of my favourites:

There has to be a libidinous delight in finding things and stuffing them in your pockets.

What's more, the epigraph to The Rings of Saturn, a neat example of Sebald's eye for thoughtful (and somewhat documentary) prose, comes from the Brockhaus Encyclopedia:

The rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planet's equator. In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect.

I can think of two quotes from Borges, which, in my eyes, also ally him with Sebald. Both authors took pleasure in letting memory become fantasy, fantasy become memory.

It is a general rule that novelists do not present a reality, but rather its recollection. They write about real or believable events that have been revised and arranged by memory. (This process of course has nothing to do with the verb tenses that are being used).

And,

My story will be faithful to reality, or at least to my personal recollection of reality, which is the same thing. The events took place only a short while ago, but I know that the habit of literature is also the habit of interpolating circumstantial details and accentuating certain emphases.

I read the second quote, recently, in the opening paragraph of a short story, "Ulrikke", from The Book of Sand, which, I was interested to see (link), can be read at the expense of Argentinian government, provided one drinks coffee at the right places...

Finally, below is Part 1 of a documentary (the rest is also on YouTube) on Borges called The Mirror Man, which is written by Alberto Manguel, no less. Manguel, now a celebrated homme de lettres, worked in the Pygmalion Anglo-German bookshop in Buenos Airesas when he was a young man, where he, famously, read out loud to Borges, who could no longer see, in the 1960s.

Édouard Levé

2010-05-09T05:19:00.000-07:00

I can't help wondering how Édouard Levé spent his last days. At the age of 42, he was a writer and artist who, from a distance, seems to have been working regularly. His fourth literary work, Suicide, had just been completed and submitted to his editor (the reputable Paul Otchakosky-Laurens). He had published books of his photography and conceptual art. Then, on the 15th of October 2007, at the age of 42, he hung himself at his apartment. Editions P.O.L. published his final work in France the next year, in 2008.

Suicide is, at least formally, an unusual, experimental novel. Levé's style resembles his photography (as seen above, on the cover of the Folio edition), disciplined, sterilised, piercingly monotone and, almost cynically, unsentimental. The tone is resigned, downcast. This technique, however, is effective and, impressively, he brings to life a character, who was already dead on the first page.

The subject is an anonymous, twenty-five year old man who has, suddenly, wilfully, killed himself. He is on the way to play tennis with his wife but turns back at the last minute, he has forgotten something; he shoots himself. (A scenario, which had appeared at the end of Levé's earlier work Autoportrait). The novel opens with a description of that day and, thereafter, unfolds as a something of a character portrait, composed of fragments of memory, without any obvious pattern in their telling. These memories are framed by the voice of an older, also anonymous, friend. The narrator (je) addresses himself to the dead (tu), a technique that, often, succeeds in unsettling the reader: as if it were addressed to us, after our death.

The reader learns little about the narrator, who remains, more or less, a discorporate voice. Instead, we discover more about his dead friend than we might have expected, from a second-person narrator. The young man was a serious, sensitive and uncertain person, to whom the world seemed disturbing, even frightening: "Tu n'aimais pas voyager. Tu es peu allé à l'etranger. Tu passais ton temps dans ta chambre." He lives, as though, engaged in an ongoing aesthetic, existential resistance. He is displaced, on the outside of a society, of which he is, almost indiscernibly, in defiance: "Tu croyais qu'en vieillissant tu serais moins malheureux, parce que tu aurais, alors, des raisons d'être triste. Jeune encore, ton d'ésarroi était inconsolable parce que tu le jugeais infondé." The narrator describes his life anecdotally, recalling, portentously, his wife, his tastes, his antisocial habits, not to mention a dinner party with a psychoanalyst and his mother. The characterisation becomes progressively more inward, more psychologically intimate, and, also, more assertive:

"Tu ne craignais pas la mort. Tu l'as devancée, mais sans vraiment la désirer: comment désirer ce que l'on connait pas? Tu n’as pas nié la vie, mais affirmé ton goût pour l’inconnu en pariant que si, de l’autre côté, quelque chose existait, ce serait mieux qu’ici."

The narrator refers to real moments of companionship between the two men, but, more frequently, to details of his friend's life that are impossibly personal, complicating the narrator and the subject. The voices become, seemingly, two halves: the outspoken, the timid and the curious, in opposition to the silent, the fearful, suicidal - the brave? But, two halves of what? An impulse, a mind, a soul? Levé leaves the relationship unarticulated and vague: "Si tu vivais encore, tu serais peut-être devenu un étranger. Mort, tu es aussi vivant que vif." A sort of narrative schizophrenia appears: the narrator, at one moment, speaking for himself, then, the next, speaking on behalf of the dead. (The book ends with a long poem, composed as series of tercets, a sort of unorthodox epilogue, which is closest Levé comes to a union of the two halves, to a voice without a character). The thoughts of the two men become increasingly indistinct and, in the end, the narrator seems to have the answers to his own questions: "Des regrets? [...] Cet égoisme de ton suicide te déplaisait. Mais dans la balance, l'accalmie de ta mort l'emporta sur l'agitation douloureuse de ta vie."

It would be too simple (perhaps, boring even) to consider Levé's own suicide as the subject of his writing, but it is too difficult to think of the two as mutually exclusive. Even if, to attempt to reconcile his death with his fiction, is viscous. It is not a question, as it might be with other authors, of unfairly reading him with preconceived notions about his life (and death). Readers of Suicide cannot ignore the question, or problem, of the author's death. The pages of his book reflect his suicide, almost paradoxically; to see them individually is to find them suspended between to parallel, facing mirrors: an infinite series of receding images. Was the book a manifestation (an attempt at self-administered therapy, perhaps) of his would be suicide? Was his suicide the product of having sunk too deep into the subject of self-annihilation? Or, are they both symptoms of a much darker, troubled, something, within Édouard Levé? Perhaps, the more important question is, should the suicide of writer who wrote, "Ton suicide fut d'une beauté scandaleuse," be treated as an aesthetic act? Their relationship is, almost, nuclear, as if to disentangle them would be like splitting an atom. Suicide, as a work of literature, is remade, enigmatically, by the death of the author: "Expliquer ton suicide? Personne ne s'y est risqué."

I don't know when, or if, Suicide might appear in English but the start of the book is available for free, in French, from the P.O.L website, as is some information about upcoming translations in other languages. Below, I have written my own translation of the first two paragraphs.

"On a Saturday in August, you leave your home, dressed in tennis gear and accompanied by your wife. Halfway across the garden, you remark to her that you have left your racket in the house. You return to get it, but instead of heading towards the cupboard near the front door, you go down to the cellar. Your wife doesn’t notice anything, she stayed outside, it’s warm, and she’s enjoying the sunshine. A few moments later, she hears a gunshot. She rushes inside, she shouts your name and, noticing that the door to stairs that lead to the cellar is open, she goes down stairs and finds you there. You’ve shot yourself in the head with the gun that you had carefully prepared. On the table you’ve left a comic book open to a double page. Overcome, your wife leans against the table; the book tumbles, reclosing on itself before she can understand that this was your last message.

I never went inside that house. Yet, I knew the garden, the ground floor and the cellar. I have replayed the scene hundreds of times, always in the same setting, which I imagined the first time they gave me an account of your suicide. That house was on a street; it had a roof and a rear façade. But none of that exists. There is the garden, where you walk out in the sunshine for a final time and where your wife waits for you. There is the façade toward which she runs when she hears the gun shot. There is the entrance, where the tennis racket sits, the door to the cellar and the stairs. Finally, there is the cellar where your body lies. It is intact. Your skull didn’t explode like they told me. You are like a young tennis player, resting after a match on court. It could be said that you are sleeping. You are twenty-five. You know more than me now about death."

There is a good profile, in English, of Édouard Levé at the Berlin Review of Books, which provides some more biographically information, as well a slew of media available online in French from, to name a few, Le Magazine Littéraire, Télérama, and Le Figaro.

And, finally, here is a video of the writer, reading a passage from his first work of prose, Oeuvres.

Robert Walser

2010-05-06T07:08:00.001-07:00

Fortunately, Robert Walser (whose short story, Balloon Journey, lends its name to this page) is published more and more, these days, in English. As a matter of fact, some of his prose has been made available online, by Harper's Magazine, in the images below.

The first piece opens in a way that is beautifully characteristic of Walser's style and, more than faintly, touched by the madness, which, towards the end, became him.

"Jaunts elegant in nature now lay in the past for this sorrowful man, who in the course of time might well have amassed quite respectable skills in crossing his arms and gazing pensively at the ground before him."

Immediately, there is a mood of uncertainty ("might well"), of unfulfillment and disappointment about the past and about life. This mood, however, is, just as quickly, undermined by an image that describes the triviality, or emptiness, of ambition and status ("skills in crossing his arms and gazing pensively"). To be unrealised, or disappointing, might be tragic, but to be "respectable" and self-important is, it seems, just a little, ridiculous.

The story resembles two character portraits: father and son. The father lives in a stark, unpeopled, world, ruled by obligation. The description is hesitant: "His youth had been framed, as it were, by severe, naked, tall, blue, I mean to say joy-deficient cliffs." Walser's narrator has no compunction about realigning a metaphor, mid-way through a sentence, or emphasising, tautologically, an unsettling detail: "He was constantly pondering how to earn his daily bread, which, being rare, was difficult to come by." The condition of the world is anthropomorphic; the father is, not just, "favored" by fortune but, "followed" and "prompted" by deprivation, and "befriended" by loneliness. He turns his back on pleasure, entertainment, a "young beautiful woman who served him well by making a good impression on his arm," and remains, "incapable of emerging from his worries". He is a character to whom the world happens, but who accepts the conflict inherent in existence, and, all-in-all, who is rendered firmly in the image of his maker.

The son, on the other hand, is very different case: "a certain precious entity - by which I mean the worrying - was not imparted to him." There is something untoward in the son's approach, which has the narrator at a loss, afraid, it seems, even to describe him: "my pen can scarcely find the courage to depict him or sketch his portrait." The willful self-sacrifice, of the father, is absent in the son, "who sat in his room reading, at pains to consider himself happy." The longing to be agreeable, to appear happy, is the mark of immaturity; of a saccharine and offensive naivety. There is the hint of a challenge to anyone, who may share this longing: Admit your insincerity. The world is a hard, all-defeating place; to act otherwise, is deceitful.

With his hesitance, to describe the son, stated, the narrator launches, with wonderful perversity, into an ornate, extended metaphor, for that very purpose. This is the zenith of the story: an Arcadia, which, "in an illusion-promoting manner", is replete with, "meadows, trees and paths, fountains splashing in pavilions", "swans with plumage that appeared to singing", and, even, a figurative "bride" and "bridegroom". It is a friendly, unrealistic vision of material bliss, with which, Walser disagrees. The metaphor is, above all, ironic. The son does not embody paradise, he answers to the demands of other people, who, "limited his activities to well-mannered comportment". He is, pleasingly, vapid and will suffer no indignity. Is this a response to the father's own downtroddenness? Above all, however, he is doomed:

"What people expected and almost found appropriate to wish for, in light of his preciousness, came to pass. An illness took hold of him, and he let it bear him away until he departed."

This final sentence, delivered in the passive voice, enacting the nature of the son's existence, turning against, and colouring with irony, the rest of the narration, makes its point: to be pleasant, thoughtless and indifferent, is a terminal condition.

The reason for this publication from Harper's, I would guess, is that a new volume of Walser's writing, Microscripts, from which the stories above have been taken, is being published by New Directions this month.

The "microscripts" were written in a minute scrawl, according to Susan Bernofsky, who translated them (as well two recently published novels by Walser, The Assistant and The Tanners). She said the following about them, in an interview on the New Directions Blog:

"Leaving aside the difficulty of the stories as texts, the handwriting they were written in was so tiny that when these manuscripts were first discovered after Walser’s death in 1956 they were thought to have been written in secret code. In fact they were written in a now-antiquated form of German handwriting shrunken down to a height of between one and two millimeters. What’s more, Walser wrote them in pencil, and his pencil was not always sharp. Two scholars in Zurich devoted 12 years to deciphering six volumes’ worth of these texts [...]"

More from, and about, The Microscripts, can be read at Molossus and at Quarterly Conversation. And, short fiction by Walser can be read at Vice Magazine, who have published three other, newly translated, stories.

James Joyce

2010-05-05T05:48:00.001-07:00

There had been no mass for the dead in the chapel and no procession. He had not died but had faded out like a film in the sun. He had been lost or had wandered out of existence for he no longer existed. How strange to think of him passing out of existence in such a way, not by death but by fading out in the sun or being lost and forgotten somewhere in the universe.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Joyce was less elegant when he wrote to his wife, Nora, in 1909, and more like the depraved manic that he appears to be on this cover of Time (The Weekly Newsmagazine) on the 29th of January, 1934. They agreed to exchange erotic letters [link] - which, if you follow the link, to a somewhat brassy website, you will discover, do not disappoint - while they were separated for some months. He was in Dublin, she was in Trieste. The letters Joyce wrote are gloriously Dionysian; jealous, gory, downright hotblooded, and, frankly, at times, borderline rabid. I would, really, like to be able to read Nora's replies...

Raul Hilberg

2010-05-04T08:51:00.000-07:00

A remarkable article, on the Holocaust historian, Raul Hilberg, who appeared in Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, and, to a lesser extent, Hannah Arendt, can be read at the website of the Nation.

I was able to watch all six-hundred and thirteen minutes of Shoah, recently, whilst hospitalised and confined to my bed. Bluntly put, the film is collection of interviews with people who, Lanzmann judges, are in possession of, historically, a word that he stresses, invaluable knowledge of the Holocaust, interspersed with footage of the different places that are referenced. The sheer length, and beauty, no less, of the film and the ineffably terrible subject matter, have a strange, disorientating effect on the viewer, upsetting his, or her, ability to measure time or understand emotion. To watch the film is to feel at the center of something, which cannot be understood by the soul or quantified by the mind. (Watching the film, I was reminded, a little, of The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell, which, despite all its peculiarities, had a similar effect on me.) Lanzmann, as the réalisateur, harasses his subject matter, whilst, as the interviewer, he harasses the people before him (and before us), in the name of disclosure. In turn, the film itself harasses the viewer to face, not only, History, at its most unpalatable, but also the very people in which it lives. The people interviewed were all present for the Holocaust, either as perpetrators, bystanders, or victims, with the very important, and notable, exception - given that, according Lanzmann, it seems, History resides, not in books, but in people - of Raul Hilberg, a historian. Here is some footage, from what is a vast and brilliant film, of Hilberg talking with Lanzmann.

Hilberg is fiercely convincing and there is something relentless about his manner and his intelligence, which gives his interview in Shoah a certain magnetism. His major book, The Destruction of the European Jews, I suspect, is the basis of much of what is known about Nazism today.

As the aforementioned article states, Hannah Arendt called it, "the first clear description of (the) incredibly complicated machinery of destruction," even if, she also said that Hilberg,

"is pretty stupid and crazy. He babbles now about a 'death wish' of the Jews. His book is really excellent, but only because it is a simple report. A more general, introductory chapter is beneath a singed pig."

Still, the same article, by Nathaniel Popper, suggests Arendt may have plagiarised him, in order to write Eichmann in Jerusalem, all the same...

Also, I think the entire film of Shoah (all eight, or so, hours!) is available on YouTube in ten minute clips.

Penelope Fitzgerald

2010-05-04T07:02:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, I read The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald, which seemed, almost, perfect. It is a historical novel: Novalis, the Romantic poet, is in love with a twelve year-old girl. His love is doomed and tragic. Fitzgerald writes with an absolute minimum of show and a beautiful, unadorned neatness. The writing is delicate, thoughtfully ironic, wry. The third-person voice blends the voices of character and narrator gently and effectively. Her touch is soft and, yet, for this reason, all the more arresting. Michael Hofmann's review, "Nonsense Is Only Another Language," says it right.

This week a nice article, by Hermione Lee, appeared in Guardian - a biography of Fitzgerald, from the same author, is on the way - which gives Fitzgerald's endless and dizzying cleverness a context and shape, outside of her novels. As well as summarising, affectionately, Fitzgerald's life, and family history, Lee describes, with contagious fascination, Fitzgerald's marginalia. Her books, it seems, accumulated her thoughts. As Lee writes:

'Every so often she kicks up her heels. Her copies of Joyce and Beckett (in whom she is deeply interested) are full of little jokes to herself, as when the citizen in the "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses goes out "to the back of the yard to pumpship", and she notes: "Has to pee just like Bloom. We're all human." In Molloy, in the early passage about "Ma", the line "I got into communication with her by knocking on her skull" has the marginal note: "How to communicate with your parents."'

Which reminds me, off-topic but on the subject of the libraries of great authors, of a fascinating website, dedicated, entirely, to Melville's surviving marginalia...