Perhaps Josef K will get to testify in the ongoing wrangle over Kafka’s manuscripts in an Israeli court. The Czech author instructed his friend Max Brod to destroy his papers, instead two-thirds eventually made its way to the Bodleian Library via Kafka’s niece. The remainder ended up, after Brod’s death in 1968, with Esther Hoffe. When Hoffe herself died in 2007, the National Library of Israel disputed her will, claiming it contravened Brod’s original intention to bequeath the material to them. Elif Batuman tells the whole story in an excellent article at The New York Times. It’s going to make a wonderful novel. The case has already influenced a piece in the London Review of Books by Judith Butler, entitled ‘Who Owns Kafka?’, in which the ideological stakes are explored:

“The National Library’s most powerful adversary is the German Literature Archive in Marbach, which, interestingly, has retained Israeli lawyers for the purposes of the trial. Presumably, with Israeli counsel, this does not have the appearance of a German-Jewish fight, and so does not recall that other trial – Eichmann’s in 1961 – in which the judge suddenly broke out of Hebrew and into German to address Eichmann directly. That moment caused a controversy over the question of what language belongs in an Israeli court of law, and of whether Eichmann should have been accorded such a courtesy.”

Butler’s article was widely discussed and provoked a response from Michael Stein at Czech Position. ‘The Uses of Kakfa’ accuses her of a partisan reading of history:

“For Butler, with Israel occupying the role of chief villain, there is no room for mention of Kafka’s sisters, nor of Auschwitz, nor of the reasons Brod and Esther Hoffe and her daughters were all forced to flee Prague with those boxes of now (monetarily) valuable papers. Butler mentions that Brod ‘fled’ Europe just as she mentions Eichmann’s trial, yet in both cases without any context, as if there was nothing all that sinister about them, just ordinary, everyday fleeing and a man in the dock for embezzling funds.”

Whilst it is tempting to deplore this intractable and seemingly irresolvable state of affairs, there was perhaps something inevitable about it. Kafka’s own Trial was based on real-life litigation. His writings will only accumulate meaning and this court case is perhaps their ultimate verification.

Trials and Tribulations
2006: Samuel Beckett Estate / Pontedera Theatre: Beckett’s estate is notorious litigious, withdrawing permission whenever performers adapt the writer’s scrupulous stage directions. However, when twin sisters stepped in at the last minute to play Vladimir and Estragon, the court ruled in their favour.

2009: J.D. Salinger / Fredrik Colting: Lawyers for the reclusive author of Catcher in the Rye got an injunction against the proposed sequel. Whilst Colting argued that his book was a parody, the judge ruled that Sixty Years Later: Coming Through The Rye was too close in style to the original to support the claims of the defence.

2009: Edwyn Collins / Warner Bros: Although Collins owns the copyright to all his material, his manager and wife Grace Maxwell was prevented from uploading songs to MySpace by Warner Bros, who claimed they had the rights. In fact, it is record labels who have been selling the tracks online without his permission, a situation Robert Fripp has also complained about on occasion.

2009: Widow of Philip K. Dick / Daughters of Philip K. Dick: The world of sci-fi is rife with litigation and claims of plagiarism. Not a year goes by without Harlan Ellison claiming that the latest blockbuster has been ripped off from one of his stories. Similarly, Sophia Stewart has claimed that both The Terminator and The Matrix have come from her screen treatment The Third Eye. But the affairs of PKD always seem to bring a suitable air of paranoia. In 2009, his fifth wife filed suit against Electric Shepherd, the production company set up by Laura Leslie and Isa Dick Hackett to deal exclusively with their father’s works.

2010: The Estate of Philip K. Dick / Google: Isa Dick Hackett and estate issued a cease-and-desist letter over use of the name Nexus One for their Android phone. The Nexus line of replicants originally appeared in Dick’s famous Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

2011: Karin N. Calvo-Goller / Thomas Weigend: In 2007, Mr Weigend published a review of Ms Calvo-Goller’s The Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court on the Global Law Books website, calling into question some of the author’s “conceptual grasp”. Israel-based Calvo-Goller took New York-based critic Weigend to court in Paris for criminal libel. The case was dismissed.

2011: Jay-Z / Terry Miller: The former winner of ITV’s Hell’s Kitchen and Tyneside chef has been in legal dispute with the music tycoon since 2006 over rights to the name ‘Rockafella’. Lawyers have been successful in banning the name from Miller’s Newcastle catering firm. I’ve got 99 problems, but a chef ain’t one.

PART TWO: THE PRESENT AUGUSTAN AGE

A desert landscape flattened by positivism, by the belief that everything begins and ends in mechanics, forces and particles, can acquire meaning only with questions about eternity, the fall, entrapment and the individual’s perverse capacity to conceive of something better. But this is not the spirit of the age. The utilitarianism of the internet and of the market runs in everyone’s blood like a virus. “The reach of liberal capitalism has extended over minds,” writes Houellebecq; “in step and in hand with it are mercantilism, publicity, the absurd and sneering cult of economic efficiency, the exclusive and immoderate appetite for material riches… The value of a human being today is measured in terms of economic efficiency and erotic potential.”

Here, surely, is the kingdom of the Demiurge, a twilight world in which the sleep of bland acceptance discourages protest? That is why Houellebecq hates literary realism the way Baudelaire despised the 19th century idealization of nature; literary realism, like love of creation, takes our condition for granted, describing everything and questioning nothing as if it were all somehow good and suffering a consequence of occasional error. This is the triumph of Western culture, what passes today for ‘world culture’. As Houellebecq suggests in Platform: “For the west, I do not feel hatred. At most I feel a great created system in which it has simply become impossible to live, and what’s more, we continue to export it”.

A discourse of hard science along with the media’s tidy packaging of ideas comprise what the esoteric tradition would recognize as cosmic entrapment; a dead end where, in Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles, “the world is equal to the sum of the information we have about it” or, in Beckett’s Molloy, “a place devoid of mystery, deserted by magic”. Mundane Reason strengthens its grip as number, epitomized in the vogue for metrics in health, in dating profiles and indices for happiness and customer satisfaction. The immeasurable becomes quantifiable. Rating replaces discrimination. Technology and wealth, increasing hand in hand, outstrip ideas, causing a spectacular flowering of mediocrity as museums and art galleries are directed by CEOs and marketed like movies. The atomization of taste and discernment in the multiplicity of product choice provides a fake democracy in which anything can wear the mask of distinction simply by posing as an alternative. Here we have the idolatry not of knowledge but of information, facts rather than understanding, a carnival midway where everything from medical diagnostic manuals to best seller lists is dispensed with the breathlessness of the Learning Channel, even as many of those nodding off at their computers and plasma screens hope, vaguely, to find The Answer.

The desperate search for some sort of revelation in the last reaches of matter has stopped, perhaps in exhaustion, at the fad for biology, the handmaiden of metrics. If Houellebecq himself speaks the language of biology it is because he is attacking the very positivist materialism it supports. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, with its biotechnological solutions to happiness, is, according to Houellebecq, being taken to heart, with or without its irony. Here, happiness is merely arithmetic: the stark remainder after suffering has been subtracted. Houellebecq quotes Lovecraft: “All rationalism tends to minimalize the allure and importance of life, and to decrease the sum total of human happiness.” This is the heir to Christian rationalism, in the words of Hannah Arendt: “the calculus of pleasure of the puritan moral bookkeeping of merits and transgressions to arrive at some illusory mathematical certainty of happiness or salvation”. The same rationalism that supports hard science leads Houellebecq’s characters to a dead end, while Nietzsche warns that it will ignore man’s need for the irregular and the perverse: “It is only all-too-naive people who can believe that the nature of man can be changed into a purely logical one; but if there were degrees of proximity to this goal, how many things would not have to be lost on this course!” In the inimitable words of Dostoevsky’s underground man: “All human actions, of course, will have to be worked out by those laws (of nature) mathematically, like a table of logarithms, and entered in the almanac; or better still, there will appear orthodox publications, something like our encyclopaedic dictionaries, in which everything will be so accurately calculated and plotted that there will no longer be any individual deeds or adventures left in the world”.

The rationalizing thrall of the Demiurge has penetrated the body itself: the fitness craze that began in the 1970s and measures life in kilos shows no sign of ending. Even holistic sciences become ends in themselves, serving success or survival in an unquestioned world. Having occupied the body, the alien power of the Demiurge has breached the last bastion as it rationalizes the personality. Quirks, eccentricities, charm, individuality, vulnerability are medicalized as curable deficiencies. The relentless detection of pathology, the rage to nurture perfect babies and high-scoring children, the empty concept of the psychologically ‘whole’ person not to mention the ‘healthy, loving relationship’ run directly counter to what Gnostic ideas valued in the individual, in the rebel: her very distinction from the world in which she lived, that cosmic defiance which Baudelaire understood as character.

It’s not just by means of reason but through illusion pure and simple, the Gnostics suggest, that the Demiurge hides from us the knowledge of the divine fire that makes us unique and our situation dramatic. Illusion renders the fallen world tolerable and dull. Indeed, it is has almost won the day: “Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition?” Nietzsche writes, “Gods too decompose”. In proliferating best sellers and documentaries, the corpse of God reeks in the words ‘secret’, ‘mystery’, ‘lost’ and ‘unlocking’ – in which pop archaeology provides a counterfeit spirituality with easy answers. Postmodern and post colonial studies along with the lingering mania for deconstruction are almost as comforting. Much as the age of the city state and its divine mysteries decayed into the splintering nominalism of a hundred philosophies, the problem of existence is anaesthetized by a thousand national, cultural and gendered identities. Today, the Augustan wasteland remains occupied by Postmodernism which itself is a wilderness of solipsisms.

A consummate illusionist, the Demiurge masks the emptiness with euphemisms and buzz-words. The term ‘community,’ in the sense of residential proximity and close acquaintance, is nearly obsolete. Now it’s any agglomeration of people, whatever the purpose – the ‘policing community’, the ‘dot com community’. The colder and more impersonal the world, the greater the illusion of intimacy. The same forced sense of closeness has arrived with the death of rhetoric and speech and their replacement by the casual ‘living room’ friendliness of all forms of public address, a tone that assumes, somehow, that we are all neighbours, as reasonable and nice as the news anchor. Yet another palliative is the masochistic self-consciousness that soothes moral inadequacy. Self-satire and knowing references litter the art world, not to mention television. Innocent spontaneity, awe and grandeur are killed by irony. This is the groping, navel-gazing civilization that is supposed to give backbone to human rights. Here, surely, is the feeble residue of Christianity, what Nietzsche called bad conscience. It is Nietzsche who tells us, in Beyond Good and Evil that in a nobler time, actions were judged by their consequences and it was a sign of inward-looking decadence when they came to be judged by their intentions. Here we have Afghanistan, indeed the penultimate graveyard of those same good intentions.

Awareness of the pneuma, the shock of Gnosis, is best avoided through narcissism; that is, to look the other way and see one’s ego as an embodiment of the social ideal and conversely, the social ideal as an embodiment of one’s ego, whose watchwords remain autonomy, transience, convenience. In contrast, Houellebecq’s conception of sexual love suggests pneuma as union with the divine fire: abandon, dependency, selflessness. But tragically, “we have become cold, rational, acutely conscious of our individual existence and our rights; more than anything we want to avoid alienation and dependence.” The narcotic of self-absorption has many faces. Therapy as an end in itself is one. Work as careerism, where salary and position trump conviction or genuine interest is another, blinding one to the pneuma not so much as ego but as uniqueness. As Nietzsche puts it: “Behind the glorification of ‘work’ and the tireless talk of the ‘blessings of work’ I find the same thought behind the praise of impersonal activity for the public benefit: the fear of everything individual”.

One of the Demiurge’s most effective weapons against a proper sense of self is the false collectivity of ideology. Houellebecq, though vulgarly called “right wing” has infuriated both the right and the left precisely because he recognizes that the political cosmos is itself left and right; his repudiation of multiculturalism along with movements of personal liberation, indeed his political incorrectness, are deemed ‘right’ while his compassion for women, children and the elderly, like his anti-capitalism, are deemed ‘left’. Left and right, of course are dying ideologies and they leave in their wake a no man’s land, where the last piety is lukewarm belief in a democracy still run by elites. And yet this narcotic may itself be the biggest obstacle not just to the taming and rebuilding of failed states but to a coordinated attempt to deal with the deterioration of the planet. In the end, the exiled individual looks up and asks, who is responsible? It might appear to be the United States or perhaps the West. And yet, with the creep of a global culture, it becomes impossible to attribute authority or responsibility. This is the Demiurge’s finest trick of all. It’s what is meant by the term ‘Alien Power’.

This essay is concluded here

Links:
Parts One and Three of Philosophy in Rags
Hugh Graham’s History in the News blog
Michel Houellebecq’s official site

Deserts creep and sea-levels rise. Populations expand and resources are depleted amid poverty, wealth, and intractable war. Under these lowering skies it seems astonishing that we live in a world void of profound ideas. Religion is weak or on the defensive; Marxism is dead and capitalism is a stubborn, standing ruin. Toward the end of Michel Houellbecq’s novel, The Possibility of an Island, one of the last humans wanders a planet where nothing remains but a technological limbo and its alternative, death. Human mortality and the destruction of the natural world, in short, human nature, seem without a prominent place in philosophy; instead they seem to find their strongest expression in art.

Meanwhile, at the heart of humanity’s most spectacular farce, its degradation of the planet, there endures philosophy’s oldest paradox, that of the whole and the parts. Never has the conundrum of the individual’s responsibility for the whole been so overwhelming; for the whole, now, is the planet itself. The re-making of man as one who is both whole and part has become the elephant in the room – our  greatest and least acknowledged task. As philosophy splits hairs about things like democracy, identity and language meanwhile, the individual is reduced to a carbon footprint, a shareholder, a stakeholder, a gender, an abstract holder of rights. The mechanics of the brain and the reduction of existence to biology are the new shibboleths, idols in an intellectual desert. Metrics replace contemplation. Statistics pass for argument. Individual culpability is measured in metric tons of carbon per capita. In the novel, Platform, Houellebecq’s narrator remarks of his father: “I was convinced that he had managed to go through his whole life without ever questioning the human condition”. So too, the postmodern world. Philosophy, conceived as reflection on life, has been professionalized out of existence or diluted and popularized as self-help. The world religions have amounted to little but desperation to stay relevant, hysterical reactions against modernity, platforms for chauvinistic revenge or ludicrous entanglements in identity politics. Where, in the end, can we find reflection on man’s most fundamental dilemma: an animal body endowed with the power to conceive an ideal?

Once, very long ago, yet not far from our own moral circumstances, a kind of thinking loosely called Gnosticism dealt with the lone individual possessed of a spirit in a world of suffering, evil, and an absent god. Gnostic thought had its roots everywhere in pagan antiquity. It re-emerged in philosophies of individual existence in the 19th century and flourished in our own time as existential thought before being effaced by the triumph of the free market. The latter’s masquerade as a philosophy of life has indeed helped to discourage philosophy itself. But the old philosophy of man and his existence in the world is not dead; it is only asleep.

PART ONE: THE UNDERGROUND TRADITION

Our times recall the twilight mood of the late Augustan epoch. The age of the city state was crumbling and with it the Olympian religion and the great philosophies the city state had supported. In its wake grew an intellectual no man’s land. The new wastes turned out to be the seedbed of Roman Stoicism, a philosophy which might, at the time, have seemed provisional for it dealt primarily with suffering. Stoicism held that the body was a prison for the soul, which was a way of saying that the soul was nevertheless, in its essence, free. Around the time of Christ, Stoicism helped to explain suffering as entrapment in a world falling away, indeed alienated from god. God was, literally lost. It was a subversive idea that thrived throughout the Greek diaspora of the Levant in secret, or underground offshoots of Judaism, Christianity and the pagan mystery cults. These heterodox forms of  Neoplatonic, Jewish, or Christian belief tended to link up below the surface rather like twitch grass having, in the end, more in common with one another than they did with their counterparts above. Sometimes they even produced syncretistic varieties such as the pagan-Christian cult of the Naassenes. This new form of religion was later named Gnosticism. Gnostic cults drew influence from Plato’s doctrine of a world of ideal forms and the inferior, shadow world of man along with pagan myths in which wisdom, the image of a lost ideal, was acquired through birth, death and rebirth; the result was an essential, radical myth in which the world was the work of a defective or evil god. Here, in antiquity, was an account of a flawed, destructible environment at the mercy of malign powers. Here also was a representation of the individual not as a member of a tribe, religion or caste, but standing alone between world and god.

Condemned by the Catholic Church as heresy, Gnosticism died out; but a powerful underground current of Gnostic ideas survived to work its way into western civilization in art, poetry and philosophy. The idea of man, once pure, falling from a forgotten ideal world into a hostile cosmos has re-emerged in Pascal, Blake, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Beckett, Camus and Sartre. It also re-emerges in the work of Michel Houellebecq. And now, it finds a natural subject in the empty materialism of modernity and the waste of the planet. It is always experienced as a fall from something better and memory of the former ideal. In short, the Gnostic scheme is psychology pure and simple, the structure of the human mind expressed in myth.

The myth has many variations, but the essential markers are clear:

• The Ideal: Primordial, perfect unity in divine fire of the original god which contains a prototype of man, the Anthropos (our ideal, better Self).
• The Fall: A defect develops in the creation and part of it falls away to form the corrupt material world (think: modernity). During the Fall, fire from the divinity showers the into the substance of the fallen cosmos.
• Spirit or Pneuma: The fallen sparks (spirit, whatever drives us) of the lost god.
• Alienation: The sparks of god are imprisoned in matter, clothed in successive shells of a soul, a body, gender, family, society and so on. The imprisoned spark of divinity or pneuma (‘breath’) from the original fire of heaven still bears the imprint of the ideal Self, the Anthropos.
• The Demiurge: The Fall has spawned a lower god as well: the Demiurge, the architect and tyrant of the fallen world (in a modern sense: capitalism, socialism, the system, status quo, world order) maintains the state of alienation. The planets are his ‘guardsmen’ or Archons, who act as fate, restricting human freedom.
• Forgetting, longing: Under the spell of the Demiurge, man has forgotten (in blind material progress) his origins. The original god of divine fire is lost and alien but still, man feels a vague sadness and longing for ‘home’.
• Gnosis: The key to his liberation is consciousness that his divine spark or pneuma is part of the original divinity. By means of strict asceticism or the descent of the Anthropos as saviour, the revelation arrives as gnosis, Greek for knowledge. Aware of his divinity man becomes free, defying the Demiurge by withdrawing from society or breaking the law as a rebel. The motif is simple: fall from the ideal, entrapment, alienation and liberation.

In the novels of Michel Houellebecq, the longed-for ideal is a unity of earthly pleasures in love and the absence of loneliness, an ideal impossible in the contemporary world since pleasure, epitomized as sexual pleasure, is inextricably linked to its absence in loneliness, an ultimate paradox that science will never resolve. Houellebecq was first inspired by the science fiction horror of H.P. Lovecraft. In Lovecraft, the morality of higher unity and worldly separation is inverted but the scheme is the same. The primordial unity is Evil itself and it is better that its original coherence not be discovered; in The Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft remarks, “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents”. For Baudelaire, another strong influence on Houellebecq, the faint shadow of primordial divine unity is positive: the flâneur’s pleasure in rubbing shoulders with the crowd.

In what he called his system of ‘correspondences’, Baudelaire suggested that the five senses have a hidden, higher, poetic unity, for example a colour with a sound. As his biographer, Alex De Jong describes it: “beyond perceived reality lies true reality and its nature may be divined by detecting the analogous patterns which inform the world and tell us of the world beyond”. In the world below, reality is shattered and the artist recovers the shards and restores them, providing a glimpse of the ideal in a work of art. This is not far from the Gnostic idea in which shattered traces of the original divine unity are found in creation itself: the Gnostic Gospel of Philip declares that “truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in types and images”. Even good and evil are merely facets of God before they fall and are refracted into virtue and vice: “O Beauty!” asks Baudelaire, “Do you visit from the sky / Or the abyss? Infernal and divine, / What difference then, from heaven or from hell”.

The divine unity is man’s real home; its essential humanity is expressed in the figure of the ‘Perfect Man’ or  the Anthropos. In Gnostic Jewish and Christian ideas the ideal is ‘the Son of Man’, often described as bisexual or asexual: gender unified. Christ is seen as an emanation of the Anthropos. He/she is represented on earth as one’s higher, unified Self, secretly stamped in their spirit or pneuma, an invisible twin or double not unlike the hooded figure on the white road in Eliot’s The Waste Land (“I cannot tell whether it is a man or a woman.”) In his dark novel, Whatever, Houellbecq’s narrator has “for years [...] been walking alongside a phantom who looks like me, and who lives in a theoretical paradise strictly related to the world. I’ve long believed that it was up to me to become one with this phantom”. When Houellebecq refers to the “possibility of an island” in the eponymous novel, he means the hope that a specifically human sort of happiness which we have tasted as humans – rather than oblivion or nirvana – exists in the afterlife, much like the Anthropos, in the divine unity beyond death.

The central event in the Gnostic drama is the Fall. In the Naassene rite, the Anthropos himself falls into bondage and is imprinted in matter. In the Egyptian Heremetic cult, the Anthropos, like Narcissus, falls from vanity, in love with his reflection in the material world below. The Anthropos of Ophite Gnosticism falls and is multiplied into the human race. The fall from Platonic divinity to disintegration in blind darkness is well summarized by Baudelaire in The Irremediable:

A Being, a Form, an Idea
Having fallen from out of the blue
Into the Stygian slough
Where no eye of the sky ever sees.

The experience of the Fall is described in the Gnostic tradition as being “thrown” and then of “wakening” abandoned. Wakening to a shock is a leitmotif of the present age: 1945 awakened to  a world of nuclear war; in 1989, with the sudden collapse of Communism, the world awakened to a political wilderness; in September 11, 2001 it awakened to rage against the West;  wakening to one’s own degradation of the environment. Wakening  entails not knowing how one got there. In Beckett’s Molloy,  the eponymous hero lives in a room that was once his mother’s: “it is not the kind of place where you go but where you find yourself”. In Malone Dies, the protagonist’s room feels coterminous with a life which seems not to have had any beginning.

Wakening involves lonely disillusionment. In Parisian Dreams, Baudelaire experiences a paradise and wakens to find that ”from the misty sky a gloom / Poured through the torpid universe.” Beckett’s tramps wander a plain with nothing above but a grey firmament, “a frozen world under a faint, untroubled sky, enough to see by, yes, and frozen too”; in the words of his biographer, James Knowlson, it’s an “uncompromising vision of human separateness and loneliness”. Our essential condition is that of the fallen ‘spark’ or pneuma, stripped, like Beckett’s people, of status and possessions save for the attachments, compulsive and symbolic, of hats, overcoats, etc. The divine spark is suffocated in a material world, like Winnie in Happy Days, buried to her neck in sand. Separation and loneliness return at the heart of Houellebecq’s work where women and children especially, are abandoned. Houellebecq’s compassion for women, children and the elderly, marooned in a world of male egotism, stands out in an otherwise harsh, often malevolent view of the world.

But who or what is responsible for this confusion, loss, separation? The Demiurge, the lower god often depicted as Jehovah, ensnares man in the laws of nature and of society, meaning bondage and death. Beneath its occasional pleasures, life is a burden, a sentence. This lower, defective god makes occasional appearances in Houellebecq; in Platform, he writes: “Our genitals exist as a source of permanent, accessible pleasure. The god who created all our unhappinesses, who made us short-lived, vain and cruel, has also provided this form of meagre compensation”. In Whatever, a protest against synthetic sex is conveyed in the pathos of a cow forced to endure artificial insemination: “The breeder of course symbolized God [...] The pathetic mooing of the ruminant would prove incapable of swaying the judgement of the Great Architect.” Even in Lovecraft, the outer absolute of death and horror appears to have a perverse designer. A classic document of modern esoteric rebellion is Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground in which the narrator curses the Demiuge as a ‘jester’ for causing a toothache: “a law of nature for which, of course, you feel the utmost contempt, but from which you nevertheless suffer while she doesn’t […] Well it is from these [...] practical jokes of an unidentifiable jester”. Since man would rebel if he had knowledge of his divine origin, the Demiurge makes him forget, imprisons him under the authority of the orthodox churches and clothes him in a defective human nature, a reflection of the Demiurge himself. In Beckett’s Molloy, the narrator muses, “What I liked in anthropology was its inexhaustible faculty of negation, its relentless definition of man, as though he were no better than God”. In his Malone Dies random emanations of light recall the Archons – the planets and cosmic forces that keep us in thrall to the Demiurge: “absurd lights, the stars, the beacons, the buoys, the lights of earth”. A world in which reason terminates in dead ends of chaos and illusion.

Indeed, the next shock, after fall and abandonment to the cosmos of the Demiurge, is the absence of meaning: Beckett’s Molloy speaks of “my ruins”, “a place with neither plan nor bounds”, “whether it is not a question of ruins than the indestructible chaos of timeless things”, “a place devoid of mystery, deserted by magic”. In Houellebecq’s Whatever, the narrator remarks, “Maupassant went mad [...] because he had an acute awareness of matter, of nothingness and death – he had no awareness of anything else”. In H.P. Lovecraft – Against the World, Against Life, Houellebecq paraphrases Lovecraft: “The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition toward chaos”. Humanity’s compulsive, minute dissection of matter furthers the process, as Houellbecq suggests in The Elementary Particles: “materialism had a historic importance: to break down the first barrier, which was God. Man, having done this, found himself plunged into doubt and distress. But now a second barrier had been broken down – this time at Copenahgen. Man no longer needed God, nor even the idea of an underlying reality”. As in Eliot’s Waste Land, Beckett’s unspoken concern is religious. It is, as the critic Helene Baldwin remarks, “the territory of the lost, fragmented modern world, uneasily conscious of a missing dimension”. The missing dimension is the higher, unknown god, the divine fire. Nietzsche speaks of that very absence when he says, “God is dead.” It is not just the fallen cosmos but our own machinations that have hidden the divine fire which is why he adds, “and we have killed him”.

The Gnostic traditions express the loss of God as a generalized, amnesiac nostalgia. It appears in the modern world as longing for the past. In The Swan, Baudelaire speaks of “Exiles fallen from memory paradise / And likewise in the forest of my exiled soul”. It is no accident that Houellbecq’s Bruno, in The Elementary Particles finds himself “increasingly drawn to Baudelaire. Here were real themes: death, anguish, shame, dissipation, lost childhood and nostalgia – transcendent subjects”. Elsewhere, he quotes Lovecatft: “There is too much wistful memory [...] for the fleeting joy of  childhood [...] Adulthood is hell” and Houellebecq adds: “given the values of the adult world, how can one argue with him? The reality principle, the pleasure principle, competitiveness, permanent challenges, sex and status – hardly reasons to rejoice”. It is union in intimacy that we somehow remember: “Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is difficult to give up hope”.

Tenderness seems to be somewhere in the past or far away: “What was outside the world?” Houellebecq asks in The Possibility of an Island. One’s home in the ideal has left a longing, diffuse and nagging; his narrator quotes Aristophanes on love, from Plato’s
Symposium: “It is obvious that the soul of each desires something else,  what it cannot say, but it guesses, and lets you guess”. In Beckett, an inaccessible omnipresence subsists in a grey, sourceless light. For Baudelaire, in Benediction, it is distorted further
by the senses:

Since it is perfect luminosity,
Drawn from the holy hearth of primal rays,
Of which men’s eyes, for all their majesty,
Are only mournful mirrors, dark and crazed!

The same faint distortion of the ideal appears in Beckett’s Watt: the protagonist works as a servant for the elusive deity, personified in Mr. Knott: “the few glimpses caught of Mr. Knott, by Watt, were not clearly caught, but as it were in a glass, not a looking-glass, a plain glass, an eastern window at morning, a western window at evening”.

The impression is vague and fleeting, for existence is a death-like sleep or illness; in the Gnostic Nassene rite the Self falls from Primal Mind to chaos and into the soul in deep waters, briefly sees the light and becomes emotional before falling into forgetfulness. For Beckett, life itself is less than consciousness: Malone remarks, “Coma is for the living”. Hope in the midst of forgetfulness is the essence of existence, a fact mostly hidden from the well-off. In the desiccated landscapes of Darfur, the eastern Congo and Somalia it is all too present: life at its default like the parched world of Waiting for Godot. There is nowhere to go.

The successive entrapments by soul, body, society, nature, world and cosmos, like so many concentric walls imprisoning the pneuma, form the geography of Gnosticism. The grey firmament of Beckett also imprisons Baudelaire. In The Pot Lid he writes: “The sky above! This wall that stifles him / A ceiling lit by dramatic farce [...] / The Sky! Black lid of the enormous pot / Where vast, amorphous Mankind boils and seethes”. The great vaulted prisons engraved by Piranesi are brought to mind, an image that Houellebecq links to the vision of Lovecraft: “The demented cyclopean structures [...] shock the spirit [...] more so even than [...] the magnificent architectural drawings of Piranesi”. In Beckett, Malone’s room is a separate cosmos, cut off from the sun and moon which he suspects to be the property of the outside world. Then there is the confining shell of the body itself. In Whatever, Houellebecq’s narrator confides: “I feel my skin again as a frontier, and the external world as a crushing weight. The impression of separation is total; from now on I am imprisoned within myself” like Baudelaire’s Wretched Monk:

– My soul’s a tomb that wretched coenobite [...]
I travel in throughout eternity;
Nothing  adorns the walls of this sad shrine.

For Baudelaire, the imprisoned self is faced with nature where forests “howl like organs” and have “damned hearts” and the ocean has “mad laughter, full of insults and of sobs”. The laws of the Demiurge, of nature, are brutal. As Houellebecq remarks in Whatever: “Of all economic and social systems, capitalism is unquestionably the most natural. This already suffices to show that it is bound to be the worst”.

Gnostic beliefs held that reason itself further manacled the prisoner. Dostoevsky’s underground man declares: “reason is only reason and satisfies only man’s intellectual faculties, while volition is a manifestation of the whole of life, I mean the whole of human life, including both reason and speculation”.  Faced with the stone wall of reason, the individual is truly free only in his will: “The point is […] not to reconcile yourself to a single one of the impossibilities and stone walls if the thought of reconciliation sickens you”. Freedom in perversity will release you even from the shackles of your own best interests. In the same way, Baudelaire reserves “the right to contradict myself”.

Worldly reason, the dimensions of time and space, the poet and novelist would hold, are an illusion. The adepts of the underground Gnostic tradition would concur: it is from the truth of divinity, not from reason, that we have fallen. Reason and the world are drunkenness or dream. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus “found all of them intoxicated”. In the Apocryphon of James, “Your heart is drunken, do you not desire to be sober?” In the sobering revelation of modern physics, multiplicity, time, space and ordinary reason are themselves illusions masking some underlying unity preceding creation. Dostoevsky’s underground man detects the penetration of his very personality by illusion: “My anger, in consequence of the damned laws of consciousness, is subject to chemical decomposition. As you look, its object vanishes into thin air, its reasons evaporate”.

The kernel of being, at last, is the pneuma, the divine spark, identical with the lost divine unity beyond. In Baudelaire’s profane metapahor, Hymn, an adored woman is a “Grain of musk ineluctably hidden / In the holiest centre of me!” Sex, in Houellebecq, is the heart of the life force and the pneuma’s liberation takes place through the extremes of sexuality. Like its associated cults, however, liberation produces the very loneliness it was meant to end. Love, if separated from sexuality, is blocked and becomes painful. “If you bring forth what is within you,” counsels the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, “it will save you. If not, it will destroy you”.

Rebellion against the Demiurge takes the very modern form of blasphemous perversity in which the serpent becomes the messenger of the lost god. In a Jewish Gnostic inversion of the Book of Genesis, man has a right to the tree of knowledge which is, literally, Gnosis. The Garden of Eden is not on earth but is part of the primordial unity; the tree stands for knowledge of man’s original divinity (not moral knowledge of good and evil, as in the orthodox tradition). In a further inversion, the serpent is a hero for tempting man to eat of the fruit and attain knowledge of his  divine origin. As punishment for eating of the tree, for attempting to unlock the secret of his true identity, man falls to the Demiurge, Jehovah and is forced to submit to the Law. Sometimes the good serpent of knowledge is even named Satan. As Baudelaire has it in Prayer: “Glory and praise to Satan, where you reigned / [...] may my soul take rest beneath the Tree Of Knowledge with you”. It is the Serpent who rebels against the Demiurge, the familiar God of the Bible; and so Cain too, is a hero for breaking the Law, a moral inversion which will return frequently in  modern radicalism.

The pneuma is the internal presence of the eternal. In Baudelaire’s poem The Beacons, the works of the great masters are distant echoes of God, “respoken by a thousand labyrinths, / An opium divine for hungry mortals’ hearts!” Knowledge of its presence is freedom. This is not faith, doctrine, or ritual. It is a knowing beyond certainty. Again, Baudelaire knows it, intuitively, in Parisian Dreams:

No star from anywhere, no sign
Of moon or sunshine, bright or dim,
Illuminate this scene of mine
Glowing with fire from within!

Here we have an intimation of man exalting the ‘god’ inside himself, the modern anthropomorphization of the divine spark. Only a couple of decades later, Nietzsche asks, “Is not the greatness of this deed (killing god) too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it?” In the following calamitous, tragic century Beckett writes in Watt of something like the pneuma, but languishing: “of the dim mind wayfaring / through barren lands / of a flame with dark winds / hedged about / going out / gone out”.

In modern life, the concern is new: not only the weakening presence of the divine spark but its utter solitude and possible death.  With knowledge of one’s own trapped divinity comes alienation. As Houellebecq asserts in Whatever: “Maupassant went mad [...] because he had an acute awareness [...] of nothingness [...] Alike in this to our contemporaries, he established an absolute separation between his individual existence and the rest of the world. It’s the only way we can conceive of the world today”. Later, in the same novel, “I get the impression everybody must be unhappy [...] There’s a system based on money, domination and fear – a somewhat masculine system, let’s call it Mars; there’s a feminine system based on seduction and sex, Venus let’s say. And that is it. Is it really possible to live and to believe that there’s nothing else?”

Here we have a picture of entrapment. In the Gnostic tradition, release is obtained by breaking upward through the laws of the Demiurge, or by Jesus breaking downward to save fallen man with knowledge. The crucified saviour in The Elementary Particles is a scientist who believed that “love, in some way, through some still unknown process, was possible” and who, at the time of his discovery, disappears and is presumed dead.

Some varieties of Gnosticism held that reunion with the higher god guaranteed the immortality of an individual self. Conceptually, however, reunion implies dispersal. Vague sensations of divine union recur in the work of Samuel Beckett:  scarecrow figures, reduced to the most decrepit, elemental existence feel themselves, at moments, indistinguishable from the totality of creation. Houellebecq says as much in The Possibility of an Island: “There is no love in individual freedom, in independence, that’s quite simply a lie, and one of the crudest lies you can imagine; love is only the desire for annihilation, fusion, the disappearance of the individual”. And indeed, his protagonist’s transition to a new life through a technological process of immortalization involves complete disintegration. Here we have one version of reunion with the divine.

This essay is continued here

Links:
Parts Two and Three of Philosophy in Rags
Hugh Graham’s History in the News blog
Michel Houellebecq’s official site

There are many remarkable facts about the long life of the French novelist and philosopher Maurice Blanchot. The strident – perhaps Fascist – nationalism of his pre-War journalism; his near-death at the hands of the Nazis during the war; his reclusive devotion to writing that is similar to, but more significant than, Pynchon’s and Salinger’s; his deep influence on more famous French thinkers (Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze). And, finally, in this list, his return to public life to oppose French colonialism in Algeria and then to support the May 1968 student uprising, during which he drafted pamphlets released by those opposing General de Gaulle’s autocracy.

But to concentrate on these facts, relevant as they are, would be to ignore what Blanchot offers, which is a return to the fundamental mystery of literature. That is, why do written words have so much power over us, yet also seem completely estranged from the world they supposedly refers to? When we say that literature takes us to “another world”, we say more than we might imagine. It is an asymmetry that Blanchot presents to us relentlessly. “There is an a-cultural aspect to art and literature which it is hard to accept wholeheartedly” he says. In this age of shortcuts, in which the value of literature is judged by how well literature effaces itself, so that the asymmetry is denied, avoided, denounced even, Blanchot’s resistance makes him, in my opinion, one of the most important writers.

In my opinion. What is that worth? The question of authority – mine, Blanchot’s or anybody else’s – is the invisible centre of our cultural ideology. We all know that Liberal Democracy is based on choice; each individual is free to choose and each individual’s choice is as good as any other’s. So, when I write in my opinion, I remove all weight from the judgement. The complete opposite is equally valid. Despite this, we still make definite choices in what to read, watch or listen to, as if hoping, despite everything, for something more than nothing. The act of choice itself speaks of a need: for nourishment, entertainment or distraction, or all three combined. But we have little guidance on what and why to choose. Perhaps the recent proliferation of award ceremonies and prize competitions for each art form is no coincidence: the award-winning novel, the platinum-selling album, the blockbuster movie. We want a guarantee of value. Each offers a mitigation of one’s apparently random choice. At the same time, however, we know, like a General Election, it is meaningless. Nothing changes. Such is the totality of Liberal Democracy.

Worse still, the condition has a retrospective affect. Nothing escapes its scything action. History is flattened too, shorn of meaning. Even critiques of the condition become just an opinion under the smiling curve of the scythe. Blanchot does not propose an answer. Rather, he looks at how this condition might have arisen, offering in the process a startling revision of our understanding of what literature is. Might the asymmetry of art and world be what makes it vital and important? In a short essay from 1953, published in a new translation by the Oxford Literary Review, Blanchot goes back to the beginnings of modern thought to investigate this possibility, specifically to ancient Athens, and Socrates’ preference for speech over writing.

In the Phaedrus, Socrates says that speech has the guarantee of the living presence of the speaker. One can ask questions and receive answers; there is always the movement of dialogue with those involved always mindful of truth. In dialogue, progress is possible. On the other hand, written words can only maintain a solemn silence: “if you ask them what they mean by anything,” he says, “they simply return the same answer over and over again.” The philosopher links this to religious superstition, when Greeks listened to “the sacred voice” emerging from a stone or the stump of a tree. Blanchot compares this to the silent confrontation with written words:

“Like sacred language, what is written comes from no recognisable source, is without author or origin, and thereby always refers back to something more original than itself. Behind the words of the written work, nobody is present; but language gives voice to this absence, just as in the oracle, when divinity speaks, the god himself is never present in his words, and it is the absence of god which then speaks.” (trans. Leslie Hill)

If, as Blanchot says, the voice of the divine and the voice of literature are comparable, they are effectively indistinguishable, thereby doubling the threat to the human project represented by Socrates. What can be done if the oracular voice develops an alternative outlet in literature, luring truth into “the abyss where there is neither truth nor meaning nor even error”? Blanchot reminds us what was done: “both Plato and Socrates are quick to declare writing, like art, a simple pastime which does not jeopardise seriousness and is reserved for moments of leisure”. Of course, Socrates went on to pay with his life for his commitment to the more serious matter of debate. And while his sacrifice remains emblematic of our notion of the freedom of speech, his dismissal of writing and art sounds very familiar, very now, particularly to anyone searching for truth in art. We can see the correlation between postmodernism (no truth, no meaning), popular culture (no error), and the ancient philosophers’ dismissal of art. It is attractive as there is another correlation, perhaps the most important: both are also liberations. In each case, freedom is granted to those previously enslaved to truth. Writers can let their imagination run wild; there is no comeback.

Instead of celebrating or lamenting this development, Blanchot considers the silence of the gods revealed in the written word. He wonders what it is that disarms Plato and Socrates so much that they deny it is even relevant, and compels us, their descendants, to fill the empty space with reductive theories: social, psychological, post-colonial. For a possible answer, he turns to Heraclitus, the first poet-philosopher, pre-dating Socrates, the first rationalist. In one of his enigmatic fragments, Heraclitus says the oracle “neither speaks out nor conceals, but points”. From this Blanchot deduces that the “language in which the origin speaks is essentially prophetic.” However, he clarifies the final word:

“This does not mean that it dictates future events, it means that it does not base itself on something which already is … It points toward the future, because it does not yet speak, and is language of the future to the extent that it is like a future language which is always ahead of itself, having its meaning and legitimacy only before it, which is to say that it is fundamentally without justification.” (trans. Leslie Hill)

It does not base itself on something which already is. This could be the cry of the opponents of the kind of literature that does not engage with current events or familiar social relations, and where the style, language and subject matter – or lack of it – resists the utility of common understanding. Is modern literature, then, prophetic?

The nature of the question means the answer cannot be stated as such, only experienced. The moment it is answered, the language of the future is negated and drawn into Socrates’ dialogue of utility. However, this is not to distinguish experience and literature. Contrary to popular opinion, literature is intimate with daily experience. Blanchot puts it this way:

“Upon the background noise constituted by our knowledge of the world’s daily course, which precedes, accompanies, and follows in us all knowledge, we cast forth, walking or sleeping, phrases that are punctuated by questions. Murmuring questions. What are they worth? What do they say? These are still more questions.” (trans. Susan Hanson)

We don’t experience the world without this murmuring, a kind of voice-under codifying and animating an otherwise uniform world. Yet we spend most of our lives avoiding or sedating it with entertainment-distraction, drugged socialising, or plausible theories of hominid brain development. It is Blanchot’s unique attunement to these murmuring questions – to what resists the Socratic demand – which distinguishes his work. When he reviews a book, rather than judging it within set external criteria, such as the persuasiveness of character or plot, or its relevance to the breaking news of the moment, he asks certain questions that emerge from the experience of reading the book itself.

This is clear in an exemplary essay on Samuel Beckett’s trilogy of novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable [see note at bottom of page]. Here is a book that has no justification. It has no sensitive social analysis. It is scornful of polite taste and ridicules all notions of the redeeming power of art. It makes much fun of its struggle to efface the author with the usual means of the suspension of disbelief, before spiralling into a calamitous verbal free fall. Blanchot asks, “Who speaks in Samuel Beckett’s books? … Who is the tireless ‘I’ who seems always to say the same thing?” At first, the answer is clear: it is Samuel Beckett. But it by asking this deceptively simple question he opens us to the novel’s terrible dynamic.

Molloy is narrated by a man telling of a past full of cities, forests and seascapes, while stuck in his absent mother’s room. This is the usual displacement of the author’s own voice. Molloy could be Beckett writing in his own room. Eventually, Molloy invents another narrator, Moran, a police detective, who narrates his own story, in this case the pursuit of Molloy. Blanchot says this a “slightly disappointing” allegory of the author’s search for something more original than itself. Beckett is having fun with the conventions of the novel – which is why so many readers see only absurdity in his work. Yet at the same time Molloy and Moran offer a reassuring presence like normal characters in a novel speaking through their all-powerful master, and so protecting us from what Blanchot calls “a greater threat”.

That threat begins to appear in Malone Dies. Malone’s death would provoke the “ultimate disaster which is to have lost the right to say I”. Malone is bedridden, having only a pencil for company. Nonetheless, it enables him to turn his room into “the infinite space of words and stories.” He tells stories – a simple pastime – to fill the imminent vacuum of death. It is a recipe for farce, grotesque tragicomedy and outrageous lyricism; everything that makes Beckett great entertainment:

“All I want to do now is to make a last effort to understand, to begin to understand, how such creatures are possible. No, it is not a question of understanding. Of what then? I don’t know. Here I go none the less, mistakenly. Night, storm and sorrow, and the catalepsies of the soul, this time I shall see that they are good. The last word is not yet said between me and – yes, the last word is said. Perhaps I simply want to hear it said again. Just once again. No, I want nothing.”

And so on, until Malone dies. Well, almost dies, we’re never quite sure, for how can death occur in a first-person narrative? The Unnameable begins without his support for the stories. So really, it cannot continue.

It continues anyway. And according to current understanding, this is where “the real” author should reveal himself, the one “behind the scenes”. Again, it is no coincidence that when producers of “Reality TV” proclaim that nothing is hidden, they nonetheless rely on spin-off books and DVDs promising details of “what really went on” – endless promises of a definitive intimacy. The Trilogy, on the other hand, doesn’t. In The Unnameable phantoms and visions encircle a consciousness stuck in an ornamental jar at the entrance to a restaurant. Words circle on the page too, stumbling on without even the relief of punctuation. For Blanchot, this is the “malaise of one who has dropped out of reality and drifts forever in the gap between existence and nothingness, incapable of dying and incapable of being born.” As readers we undergo:

“[an] experience experienced under the threat of impersonality, undifferentiated speech speaking in a vacuum, passing through he who hears it, unfamiliar, excluding the familiar, and which cannot be silenced because it is what is unceasing and interminable.” (trans. Sacha Rabinovitch)

This is the language of the future. It is “a direct confrontation with the process from which all books derive”: language itself. By asking the simple question of who is speaking in the Trilogy, Blanchot reveals how Beckett reveals language as a form of death, a place where we meet the limits of subjectivity. In reading the Trilogy, we confront the anonymity at the heart of communication, and thereby the limits of our power in the world. Liberal culture sees this as good up to the point where we are taken to another world (“transported” as so many naïve readers put it, neglecting the recent history of the word). Beckett’s Trilogy exceeds this point. It exposes us to the infinite within the confines of novel. The author’s great achievement is to take us to the brink of complete breakdown and yet to stay this side. To declare his work ‘absurdist’ or that it ‘mirrors the breakdown of religious belief’, as might be heard wherever Beckett’s books are discussed, is unwittingly re-inhabiting what is the novel is always in the process of vacating. This suggests why the Trilogy has never been accepted into our culture in the same way as, say, Joyce’s Ulysses.

[Note: Blanchot's essay on Beckett, "Where now? Who now?" can be found in The Sirens' Song: Selected Essays of Maurice Blanchot, edited by Gabriel Josipovici, translated by Sacha Rabinovitch, and in Samuel Beckett: the Critical Heritage in a translation by Richard Howard. However, both are long out of print. You could always try the Marketplace sections of Amazon.co.uk in the UK and Amazon.com in the US to find a used copy.]

Blanchot’s own novels, such as Thomas the Obscure, have a kinship with Beckett’s work; there is constant dissimulation and wandering. In many ways though, they are closer to Kafka’s; there are many mysterious landscapes, doors and rooms. Only they lack both these authors’ humour. His narratives are often insipid. However, in the late 1950s, the critical writing and the fiction began to merge, creating perhaps an entirely new genre. As the fiction clarified into analysis, the analysis developed the opacity of the fiction. In the massive essay collection The Infinite Conversation there are occasional dialogues between two friends (assumed to be Blanchot and Georges Bataille). Then in 1962, a novel appeared called L’attente l’oubli (Translated as Awaiting Oblivion). It is an almost eventless narrative of an unnamed man and a woman sharing a hotel room. Each fragment of text is denoted and separated from the rest by a printed diamond or star (like this: ). The spaces disrupt straightforward narrative progress.

She was present, already her own image, and her image, not the remembrance, the forgetting of herself. When seeing her, he saw her as she would be, forgotten.
Sometimes he forgot her, sometimes he remembered, sometimes remembering the forgetting and forgetting everything in this remembrance. (Trans. John Gregg)

In a recent interview, the novelist Ian McEwan says that novels “show the possibility of what it is like to be someone else”. Awaiting Oblivion faces a complication to this: narrative progress tends to look straight through that someone else. As we begin to understand the person in front of us, the understanding takes his or her place; it becomes only a means of furthering narrative. No wonder we love to be alone with a page-turner! Perhaps significantly, McEwan’s latest novel Atonement is about the guilt felt by a writer. The other person, like language, resists simple closure to one clear meaning. In the case of Awaiting Oblivion, however, it also resists compulsive interest.

Why did Blanchot go down this route rather than continuing to write novels and critical works? Perhaps he found that once defined, a genre of literature closes in on itself. When infected with another however, not only is the comfort of reader disturbed, but literature itself becomes a question. As Derrida later detailed in The Law of Genre – a close reading of Blanchot’s very short novel The Madness of the Day – this infection is necessary and happens to all genres; in fact, a genre is basically the effacement of that infection. As the dynamic of absence and presence that frequently drives Blanchot’s writing, the direction was necessary.

In a remarkably condensed early essay, How is Literature Possible? this movement is prefigured. In it, Blanchot reviews a critical work by Jean Paulhan about the opposition of what we might call traditional and rebellious literature. The idea of overthrowing cliché and the tired generic forms (that is, Tradition) has dominated our conception of literature for 150 years. Blanchot mentions Victor Hugo’s rejection of rhetoric, Verlaine’s denunciation of eloquence and Rimbaud’s abandonment of “old-hat” poetry. Sixty years on, it hasn’t changed that much. Think of Martin Amis’ famous “war against cliché”, JG Ballard’s expressed distaste for literature and Steven Wells of ATTACK! Books thumping the table of the high-chair with his spoon. Indeed, Beckett’s Trilogy could itself be called a work of terrorism against the citadel of tradition. Yet the rebels themselves are divided into two camps. Those, like Wells, who are keen to dispense with literature altogether in an amphetamine-fuelled auto-de-fe and so destroy the complacent world of bourgeois stolidity, and those, like Amis, who want to prune language of its deadwood so that a consciousness can be experienced in all its grotesque, singular richness. What Blanchot (and indeed Paulhan) does is to point out that in order to do either requires a scrupulous attention to language. “Whoever wants to be absent from words at every instant or to be present only to those that he reinvents is endlessly occupied with them so that, of all authors, those wo most eagerly seek to avoid the reproach of verbalism [i.e. using cliché] are also exactly the ones that are most exposed to this reproach.” Does this, then, destroy all hope of what literature might offer us? Yes, according to those who do not consider themselves writers, because writing is a work of distance from the “ecstasies” of the human condition. Not so fast, says Blanchot:

“It is the same for those who through the marvels of asceticism have had the illusion of distancing themselves from all literature. For having wanted to rid themselves of conventions and of forms, in order to touch directly the secret world and the profound metaphysics that they meant to reveal, they finally contented themselves with using this world, this secret, this metaphysics as they would conventions and forms that they complacently exhibited and that constituted at once the visible framework and the foundation of their works. […] In other words, for this kind of writer metaphysics, religion, and emotions take the place of technique and language. They are a system of expression, a literary genre – in a word, literature.” (trans.Charlotte Mandell)

The experience of these systems of expression, however, allow a chink in the armour of literature. For readers, the opposition of cliché and a virgin phrase is perhaps more troublesome; all phrases become “monsters of ambiguity” when we read. How are we, as readers, meant to know what an author intended? It is precisely this ambiguity, the unremitting silence of the oracle, Blanchot argues, that gives literature the tense dynamic demanded by the rebels. In effect, literature is a vampire rising in the dark to suck the blood of life to continue while the victims are all dependent on the vampire myth for their living. And the other way around. Blanchot takes us a long way in this short essay, yet leaves us more or less stranded as before: authenticity and originality are present, it seems, only in the inscrutibility of their presence.

If literature relies on comforting demarcations of genre to procede, yet demands a naked openness to the world for the sake of authenticity, then the apparence of the printed star in Blanchot’s work is perhaps not just a typographical convenience. It is used again in Blanchot’s famous late work, The Writing of the Disaster, a book made up of fiction and philosophical fragments designated by the same symbol. An appropriately obsolete definition of the word disaster is “an unfavourable aspect of a star”. The star helps us to grasp the possibility of meaning, which we return to at the end of each section, while at the same time threatening break down. The book is in part about how one deals with disaster, the trauma of past disasters and the knowledge of the disaster to come, specifically our own death, where the very concept of ownership is meaningless. It is also about the disaster of language itself:

The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience – it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes. Which does not mean that the disaster, as the force of writing, is excluded from it, is beyond the pale of writing or extratextual. (trans. Ann Smock)

That is, the disaster itself writes. To write is to partake of the disaster, no matter how much one asserts oneself through opinion or style. Blanchot’s impersonal voice, so cold and yet so seductive, abides in the disaster.

To write (of) oneself is to cease to be, in order to confide in a guest – the other, the reader – entrusting yourself to him who will henceforth have as an obligation, and indeed as a life, nothing but your inexistence.

We are absent from one another as the disaster writes through communication. We are absent even from ourselves as the I belongs not to itself but the disaster. We saw this emerge in Beckett’s Trilogy. Yet it is precisely this absence that Blanchot says can bring us together. The paradox is essential: language gives voice to this absence. And art, where the play of the paradox is central, remains the only medium for the possibility of a community, even if it is a community of those who have no community. The growth in sales of intimate self-portraits and revelatory biographies of public figures, and the pathological obsession with personalities and gossip, masquerading as debate, betrays how liberal democracy functions by removing an effective public life. As in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother, or at least one’s biographer, is always watching. It is a political environment that has redefined politics into a means of how best to smooth the way for corporate oligarchies to manage capital. We need art to raise the absent voice of a community denied by a misreading of absence. It requires the reader to trust, despite the apparent emptiness of art:

Reading is anguish, and this is because any text, however important, or amusing, or interesting it maybe .. is empty – at bottom it doesn’t exist; you have to cross an abyss, and if you do not jump, you do not comprehend. (trans. Ann Smock)

The artist faces a similar challenge. Blanchot says at the end of his essay on Beckett:

“Art requires that he who practices it should be immolated to art, should become other, not another, not transformed from the human being he was into an artist with artistic duties, satisfactions and interests, but into nobody, the empty, animated space where art’s summons is heard.” (trans. Sacha Rabinovitch)

But how is this done? The fragmentary work, perhaps the apogee of 20th Century Modernist literature and philosophy, is Blanchot’s approach. Its refusal to insist on narrative or theoretical completion, as well as, in the process, weakening the voice of authority, means both reader and writer are constantly moving toward understanding, toward what is absent, yet never assuming the nihilism of no truth, no meaning even as it encroaches on each clearing. Blanchot calls it, speaking of Kafka but also of himself, “a combat of passivity – combat that reduces itself to naught”. Some might see this as needlessly equivocal or pretentious, preferring, instead, the apparent clarity of rational progress, even if this, in the end, leads to the bland relativism of modern culture. Yet in his essay from 1953 with which we began, Blanchot says that art’s summons might not have been lost on Socrates – the great emblematic thinker of positivistic Western culture. He might also have sensed the empty, animated space pulling like a black hole at the Light of Reason. While he accepted the only guarantee for speech was the living presence of a human being, he also “went as far as to die in order to keep his word.”

Routledge Critical Thinkers: Martin Heidegger – Timothy Clark

See all books by Timothy Clark at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

The Routledge Critical Thinkers series is turning into something special. Maurice Blanchot by Ulrich Haase and William Large, published last year, is a profound and miraculously lucid guide to the French writer’s work. This year we have Timothy Clark’s introduction to the work of a major influence on Blanchot: the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). The high quality is maintained.

Undoubtedly, this has a great deal to do with the subjects. Both writers are not only seductively poetic, but make of poetry itself something much more than is commonly permitted. Yet there are innumerable introductions to Heidegger, and a growing number of works on Blanchot. What makes these significant is the series’ focus. Routledge’s general subtitle is “Essential guides for literary studies”. While this would seem limiting, or merely instrumental to passing an exam, it in fact reminds us of the true fascination of philosophy and literature; not as means to an end, but a necessary presence.

Surprisingly, Clark begins by questioning the policy of Routledge’s Series Editor. In the general introduction, Robert Eaglestone says the series aims to see the thinkers idea placed “firmly back in their contexts.” Such an aim, Clark argues, blocks off precisely what Heidegger’s ideas question. “Imagine”, he asks:

” that the whole of Western thought, since the time of the first philosophers in ancient Greece, has been in the grip of a prejudice affecting all its aspects and even what seems self-evident.”

If this is the case, then the demand for an historical context is part of the “unavoidable heritage into which we are all born”. It confirms to us, before an alternative view has a chance to be heard, that our assumptions are correct. As a consequence, Heidegger can be placed into a safely distant past, his ideas categorised, filed away, to be quoted later in an airy repudiation. This is exacerbated in Heidegger’s case by a large dose of political infamy. We’ll come to that later.

Before that, what is this “unavoidable heritage” exactly? Heidegger calls it “deep history”. Its deepness conceals the history of self-evident truths:

“the truly decisive events in history are not battles and the rise and fall of dynasties. They are little noticed changes, behind our backs but affecting everything […] Such shifts are not something any individual or society can direct: they are where they already find their existence.”

However, with infinite patience, the changes can be uncovered. This is the important point. Heidegger’s intense preoccupation with the literature of ancient Greece was due to his detection of a decisive shift in human consciousness at the time of Plato. Rather than being the “guiding spirit of Western thinking” in a positive sense, Heidegger regards Plato as an early symptom of decline. His philosophy began an

“intensification and hardening of ‘theoreticism’, the drive toward technical and objectifying modes of knowledge and, with it, the oblivion of any more primordial or more reverential kind of existence”.

This shouldn’t be too difficult for us in the 21st Century to recognise. What is higher praise or justification now than “it is scientifically provable”; and what is sterner criticism is there than to be labelled “unscientific”, “irrational”? Ancient Greek philosophy is not as ancient as we might imagine. If Plato is the beginning of Western thought, then that beginning, Heidegger says, is still with us. Indeed it is “before us” like a predestined future. We still see the world as an object of knowledge to be understood, manipulated and utilised. It is an anthropocentric attitude that has profound consequences. Heidegger claims it set us on course toward nihilism.

Eventually, everything is geared towards selfish aims with no regard for the earth or the people in it. This seems to contradict our faith in progress. As while we celebrate humankind’s progress in science, medicine, technology, culture, we also lament the sublime disasters that have interrupted it. Yet “interrupted” is one of those evidences of “self-evident” truths we adopt to avoid the possibility that these disasters were a necessary part of “progress”. Slavery, Imperialism, World War I, the Holocaust, Stalinism, among many others: these terrors inflicted upon the world are excused as atavisms we must resist when perhaps, instead, they were, and will be, inevitable. This was recognised in the early part of the Twentieth Century and led to a crisis in confidence with the logic of Western Civilisation. We can see it in the Modernist crisis in the arts. While cultural critics (such as the lamentable John Carey) blames Modernism on a few privileged writers’ opposition to mass emancipation, Heidegger widens the cause to two Millennia of history!

Interestingly, this critique correlates with Gabriel Josipovici’s in his book On Trust. There, Plato’s dismissal of Homer is seen as a watershed in literary history. He saw The Odyssey and The Iliad as part of a tradition of mystification keeping us from the light of reason. Since then art shrunk to only a medium of aesthetic pleasure, a distraction from the Real World. Heidegger says art died (and turned into aesthetics and business) because it was unable to preserve its “world-soliciting force”. This means the work NOT as a re-presentation of the world but as the revelation, the disclosure, of that world in the first place.

Heidegger detects such a disclosing force of Greek temples (see his famous essay “The Origin of the Work of Art”). But it also applied to the other arts. Both Josipovici and Heidegger analyse how writers managed to cope with the death of art. While Josipovici looks at a range of works from the Bible to Samuel Beckett, Heidegger focusses on the major German poets: Hölderlin, Stefan George, Rilke, and even Paul Celan (who was also a student of his work). Clark says that Heidegger was interested in these writers not because they wrote about nihilism but because “poetry is itself a mode of language that engages [nihilism] by enacting the possibility of other, non-appropriative ways of knowing”.

But if these poets renewed art, it is clear that it is, in its Lazarus state on the web and marketplace stall, still close to death. Literature has been appropriated by the very forces it should be resisting: technology and capital. Clark’s book is welcome in reminding us that there is more to art than lifestyle accessory or a alternative social commentary. Instead, at it best, art “presents its own unique and ultimately inexplicable mode of being, something for the reader, beholder or listener to dwell within and not merely something to decode.” Blanchot defines the true artist as he or she who can “see the potential disclosive force of a work, and to follow it through” rather than one with all the accepted craft techniques and friends in the Media.

So where might this disclosure of the world lead us? Well, there are dangers. Heidegger made a telling misjudgement when he made a speech, in 1933, as Rector of Freiburg University, praising Hitler and the Nazi Party, which he had just joined. He announced the beginning of an emancipation from two thousand years of gathering nihilism. Of course, Nazism was the very embodiment of that nihilism, and Heidegger soon resigned as Rector. But one has to wonder whether there isn’t something inherently destructive in the idea of “another life” even after we have rejected that offered by religion.

There is a shelf of books dealing with Heidegger’s short political life and its relation to his philosophy. Clark summarises the debate without diminishing its import. I was struck by the idea that anti-Semitism, to which Heidegger paid lip service, was due to Judaism’s inherent challenge to the Platonic project of Modernity; it retains an ancient relation to the finitude of life and knowledge. Clark isn’t convinced by this idea, but it certainly helped me to understand why a disproportionate number of the great European writers and artists are Jewish: Kafka, Proust, Benjamin, Celan, Appelfeld. Otherwise, it is easy to assume these writers are deemed great by the aura of the Holocaust or by some tortured Outsider status. I’ve never accepted this. Perhaps such an assumption is a natural outcome of Plato’s attitude to literature; that the work itself is never significant in itself. It would take a raft of great critics to articulate how the specifics of these writers’ work disclose the deep history of Western Civilisation as it enters a third millennium. But reading the work in the first place is the important thing.

One great critic of the last century, perhaps the greatest, the aforementioned Maurice Blanchot, developed a Heideggerian approach to literature in The Space of Literature (a breathtaking book by the way) which Clark quotes regularly. It is particularly interesting when dealing with Heidegger’s notion that our alienation from nature is due to instrumental theoreticism, and that only poetry can redeem the situation. For Blanchot, rather than a “homecoming” to the earth as Heidegger saw it, “the [poetical] work does not enter … the realm of meaning, disclosure, cultural debate and truth. It remains with the darkness of the earth.” Whilst remaining with Heidegger’s radical revision of the possibility of art, Blanchot makes it much darker. Art may not be dead but we are exiled from it. Only a violent misappropriation can bring it into the Real World. Yet that is precisely why artists like Kafka, like Celan, like Aharon Appelfeld are worth reading, and the literature of the instrumental moment not at all.

“With a variable key
you unlock the house in which
drifts the snow of that left unspoken.
Always what key you choose
depends on the blood that spurts
from your eye or your mouth or your ear.

You vary the key, you vary the word
that is free to drift with the flakes.
What snowball will form round the word
depends on the wind that rebuffs you.”

This is a poem by Paul Celan translated from the German original by Michael Hamburger. The original was written in the early 1950s. Its title is the first line. We assume a translation is second-hand and only the original can provide definitive clarification. But clarification of what? Isn’t our sense of the opacity of translation also the sense of the rebuffing wind in Celan’s poem? Searching for the key to this poem, and being resisted, we sense the climate the poem reports. As we watch the snow gathering, pursuing an answer to explain why Celan chose this particular key – and there are grim details one can point to – prompts only a return journey to the poem.

It is an uncomfortable fact that the bar to a poem’s key – this poem’s key – is the key to the poem itself. Some might dismiss this as tiresomely reflexive; a poem about poetry. It is clear, I think, that this is an insensitive reading. The metaphors are too close to experience to dismiss it as abstract. Indeed, can they get any closer?

Celan’s friend, the French poet Yves Bonnefoy, wrote: I believe that Paul Celan chose to die as he did so that once, at least, words and what is might join. He had drowned himself in the Seine in late April 1970, six months before his fiftieth birthday. What is Bonnefoy talking about? Surely death by drowning and words are as far apart as one can get? Bonnefoy is alluding to his friend’s peculiar linguistic heritage and how it affected his life and poetry. Celan was grew up in the city of Czernowitz, then part of Romania, now within Moldova. Its political geography meant many languages were spoken among its inhabitants. In the poet’s home, the language was High German, while the wider community generally used the more latinate Romanian. There were many others in circulation, including Yiddish.

The last is significant as Celan was part of a large Jewish community. There was anti-Semitism, for sure, but German culture was the pinnacle of Western civilisation. It promised something better than feudal sniping. Inspired by his mother’s deep love for it’s poetry, he wrote lyric poems in the tradition of Hölderlin and Rilke. It is said that as a youth he had a remarkable affinity for it too. His taste moved him toward the contemporary symbolist and surrealist movements, and despite his polylingual abilities, he always wrote his poetry in German; his muttersprache.

Then war came. Celan was, by chance, separated from his parents on the day the Nazis arrived and deported the city’s Jews. He never saw his parents again. They were taken to a Ukrainian labour camp. His father died of disease; his mother was shot. After this, as Hugo Gryn said, Celan was in the position of being a writer in the language of his mother and of his mother’s murderers. He could not renounce the latter’s language without renouncing the former’s. Celan was robbed of his parents’ death as well as their lives. Bonnefoy implies the same goes for his müttersprache.

“We can say of Celan as of no other poet: his words did not recover his experience. The loss was felt,” he says, “like a discharge without origin or end.” And as a result: “nothing real could authentically respond to this flux or be its equal, in the absolute, as referent: only the river itself … seems to fold in on itself (losing itself) like the only thing signified on the scale of so much absence.”

So for Bonnefoy, an avowed Christian, another death becomes another metaphor of hope. If his explanation is exemplary, we remain in what Maurice Blanchot calls “the civilisation of the book”, where literature takes possession of everything – that is, submitting it to a pre-established unity symbolised by the enclosing covers of a book. Even Bonnefoy’s sensitive appraisal leaves too strong a trace of the dubious correlation of life and art. Its presence allow us to keep the discomposing reality at a distance, within the inexorable logic of a narrative with a beginning, middle and, most importantly, an end.

This article on Celan will tend toward that logic too. Perhaps it must. But whereas the industry surrounding Sylvia Plath, for example, regards the poetry as an expert witness to judging the case of her tormented life and suicide, with Celan, this would be to miss everything.

Seamus Heaney begins his essay on Sylvia Plath by stating the potential of poetry:

“the poet’s need [is] to get beyond ego in order to become the voice of more than autobiography. At the level of poetic speech, when this happens, sound and meaning rise like a tide out of language to carry individual utterance away upon a current stronger and deeper that the individual could have anticipated.” (Note the pervasive river theme!).

He then goes on to examine how Plath developed her poetry yet never moved beyond “the dominant theme of self-discovery and self-definition”. Nowadays, of course, that theme is enough to launch ten-thousand poems beginning with ‘I’. But what does moving beyond this theme mean? Celan was ambivalent, to say the least, about that rising tide out of language. Indeed, it caused him to lose trust in his most famous poem, “Deathfugue”. This is how that poem ends; the subject, you will notice, is explicit:

“Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we
drink you

death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from
Germany

your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith” (trans. Michael Hamburger)

If any help is needed, the line “a grave in the air” can be read as the smoke rising from the camp chimneys; plain fact as much as metaphor. Overall, the poem emerged from reports of small Jewish orchestras playing tangos within concentration camp fences, often accompanying gravedigging and executions. The poem mimics the pace and rhythm of the dance that had captivated carefree Europe between the wars. Its first title was indeed ‘Death Tango’. In placing such lightness within the realm of such darkness, an entire culture is incriminated. The change to ‘Deathfugue’ recalls the divine lightness of Bach, while ‘Margarete’ alludes to the tragic heroine in Goethe’s Faust, forgiven by God despite everything. (It is a bizarre but telling fact that Goethe’s famous oak tree outside Weimar was protected by the SS as the Buchenwald concentration camp went up around it.) Margarete is contrasted with Shulamith, the female symbol of Jewish hope in the Song of Solomon, who is not forgiven.

In post-war Germany the poem became part of the curriculum for schools and was acclaimed by numerous critics in the new Federal Republic. However, praise tended to be for what was called the poem’s “mastery” of what had passed – the Holocaust; enabling a reconciliation of sorts. Germany wanted to move on. It welcomed the rising tide out of language as it bore guilt away. The worst was confirmed when schoolteachers discussed the use of the poem in class. They agreed it was excellent in teaching how poetry might follow a musical pattern like a fugue but, they felt, the teaching should not be side-tracked by talk of the Holocaust. Celan’s subsequent distress led him to refuse to perform readings of the poem again. Perhaps he also felt there was a tendency toward the dark romance of a ‘terrible beauty’ in its aesthetic effects. Above all, it faced the progressive movement of the civilisation of the book, enveloping discordance like the resolving refrain of a Beethoven sonata.

Where did go Celan after this? Does it matter? What does poetry matter in our time anyway? If it is merely a means of reminding us of what has happened and what it means, then one wonders why the facts have not been enough. Perhaps that is the point: the facts have never been enough. Aharon Appelfeld, another writer-survivor, reminds us that “the numbers and the facts were the murderers’ own well-proven means. Man as a number is one of the horrors of dehumanisation.”

Celan does not offer the facts. Poetry is something else, something more than the facts. But, in general, that ‘something else’ remains under suspicion even more than the dehumanising facts because ‘something else’ seems to be only self-regarding gymnastics with a dictionary. Indeed SPIKE quite rightly announces itself to be “violently prejudiced” against poetry. What is the alternative? Celan’s poetry is an answer.

“A word – you know:
a corpse.

Let us wash it,
let us comb it,
let us turn its eye
towards heaven.”

This, the end of a poem, advocates the inversion of literature’s gaze. It moves in the opposite direction to most post-war poetry and prose, which sought practicality, matter-of-factness, accessibility. The quoted words come as a dark reflection at the end of the poem Nocturnally Pouting, itself a dark reflection on a bus journey over an alpine road in Austria. The presence of those departed is perceived in the landscape: in the “greyed moss”, in the “crossed and folded shafts of the spruces” and in “the jackdaws roused to endless flight over the glacier”. All are keys to those who “stand apart in the world”, each one “surly, bare-headed, hoar-frosted”, each one discharging “the guilt that adhered to their origin . upon a word that wrongly subsists, like summer.”

The polemic is striking and memorable, but for that reason perhaps begs the question: how does one turn a word heavenward? Isn’t this a rhetorical gesture? Celan’s title for the collection in which the two quoted poems appear is “From Threshold to Threshold”, and this just about sums up the “failure” of these two poems to cross the threshold to heaven. As readers we tend to grasp moments of manifesto-like clarity such as these; but assertion is not enough. Despite its practical matter-of-factness, it betrays failure. This is not to criticise. Failure is central to the history of modern poetry, although such failure is now usually misunderstood.

To simplify, the concern of the Romantic-Enlightenment poets of the 18th Century – the beginning of the modern age – was humanity’s relation to nature. We are familiar with this in Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the greater Europe, Hölderlin’s inspiration was also “To be one with all that lives, and to return in blessed self-forgetfulness into the All of Nature“. While he pursued it in poetry, others, such as his friend Hegel, turned to philosophy. But where philosophy feeds off distance, allowing the goal of the Absolute – which would be the end of philosophy, the end of history etc. – to be preserved indefinitely as a self-aggrandising rhetorical device, poetry demands the end without delay: if poetry remains, distance remains. Where today’s celebration of nature uses language in an unironic slideshow of clichés (see any New Age CD, website or poetry book made of recycled paper) the Romantics recognised only failure: words, corpses.

Worse, Enlightenment promises actually inaugurated the manifold growth of science and technology that sought (and still seeks) to conquer nature rather than to respect it. The consequence of Enlightenment was at once to liberate us of the fetters of medieval society and to destroy the traditions by which society kept its body and soul together. The contradiction remains with us, and the agitation of modern culture can be summed up as the tension between accepting the wilderness and our instinctive rejection of its freedom. A Celan poem reflects the struggle:

“Should
should a man
should a man come into the world, today, with
the shining beard of the
patriarchs: he could,
if he spoke of this
time, he
could
only babble and babble
over, over
againagain”

(Trans: Michael Hamburger)

He speaks but only just. It is poetry with aphasia. How might a man speak of this time, this ‘destitute time’, as Hölderlin called it, without using destitute words? Celan renews the question.

If for every Hölderlin there is a philosopher like Hegel, then for Celan there is Martin Heidegger.

His analysis of the modern age had a profound influence on Celan’s work, offering a theoretical apparatus to his own poetic one. Simplistically, Heidegger sought a new mode of thought to counteract the mechanistic tendency of the modern world. He believed that humanity had become separate from its harmony with the rest of nature, as he believed was in place in Homer’s Greece. This separation was due, he thought, to the rise of dualistic ways of thinking set in motion by Plato.

Concentrating on the concept of ‘being’, Heidegger argues that ‘human being’ is not a thing like other things (objects in the world as we know it) but a clearing (a non-thing, a nothingness) in which those things are presented, where they actually become things. And rather than this being an argument for solipsism (the world as function of one’s mind), it means our knowledge of the world is not a product of boxed-in consciousness. Instead of minds making thoughts possible, it is the ‘being’ preceding mind that makes it possible for us to regard ourselves as minds having thoughts distant from ‘the real world’.

This is a major challenge to the Cartesian tradition that has dominated Western thought for the last four centuries. But the clearing depends on a temporal and linguistic aspect. Things appear in the three dimensions of time, enabling us to categorise it in language and so differentiate it from the rest of the world. Such categorisation, however, is restricted by our need for control, and so the thing disappears from view. We become blinded to the discourse of the world; to what is revealed. The world becomes an object. This is a necessary tendency but one that can and must be counteracted by the function of the clearing.

Heidegger argues for the truth of the clearing by pointing toward the mood of anxiety that seems to characterise our everyday existence. We spend most of our time avoiding this mood, of course. He says we try to become totally absorbed in ‘the real world’, as defined by such dead language, in order to avoid facing up to our mortal nothingness as revealed in anxiety. So, rather than liberating us, the techologocally-advanced modern world opens a rift between the public self – the one in which we have in order to live without becoming paralysed by anxiety – and the ‘anxious’ self in the so-called clearing. Heidegger says that opening ourselves to anxiety by giving up our need for egoistic certainty will reveal the world in its abundant nature. It will set one free. The French existentialists of the post-war era adopted this theme from Heidegger, although their ‘absurd’ freedom was foreign to him. A French philosopher more in tune with Heidegger, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, sums up the condition for the present era:

“Today, everywhere … remaining reality is disappearing in the mire of a “globalised” world. Nothing, not even the most obvious phenomena, not even the purest, most wrenching love, can escape this era’s shadow: a cancer of the subject“.

This is not a conspiracy of others but a runaway part of our need to live in the world rather than be imprisoned by autism. Selflessness, of course, while admirable in most cases, can also descend into what we called inhumanity. One of the terrible ironies of this story is Heidegger’s own descent. In the early 1930s, he saw the Nazi party as a political movement capable of mediating the needs of the modernity with authentic existence, making Germany a modern-day equivalent of ancient Greece. In 1933, the Rector of Freiburg University, where Heidegger was a renowned young professor, resigned in protest at Hitler’s anti-Semitic laws. Heidegger took his place after an election among the Aryan lecturers. He soon resigned in disaffection but never revoked his party membership and referred to his regret for the Holocaust only in what Maurice Blanchot called ‘scandalously inadequate’ fashion.

Such facts make Celan’s interest in his work more compelling. Heidegger represents the dangers inherent in the Romantic project. Another example would be the terror following the French Revolution. What does this mean for poetry? Well, in his isolated time after the war, during his denazification, Heidegger came to believe poetry was the means to open up the world; it could rouse the revelation of things in the clearing. In fact, it was the revelation itself. His intense meditations on Hölderlin’s poetry is summarised by an essay title taken from a poem: “… poetically man dwells …”.

Elsewhere he wrote that “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.” If that is the case, and poets tend to feel it is, then it means, following the catastrophe of the Holocaust, language would have to change in order to rebuild the tainted home.

In the post-war era, this was an imperative for Celan as he was now living in Paris as a translator and tutor, physically and metaphorically exiled from his homes: Czernowitz, under Soviet rule, and German, under the weight of “murderous speech” as he called it. It was an imperative because, as his Paris contemporary Samuel Beckett put it: one writes not in order to be published, one writes in order to breathe. Celan could not breathe in the old language. The old language was saturated with the conditions by which an entire culture was able to produce the greatest art and thought in history and then produce death camps with the efficiency of a factory. No wonder Adorno said that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz was itself barbaric.

What Adorno didn’t say, and this has been ignored too often, is that poetry could still be written only not as we had known it. The new language, the new poetry, would be a way of turning us toward that which is absent in our everyday world, that which “stands apart in the world“. This formulation, like Heidegger’s clearing, betrays a religious sensibility. After Auschwitz, however, God was under radical question. The space left by Him, on the other hand, was not:

Psalm

No one moulds us again out of earth and clay,
no one conjures our dust.
No one.
Praised be your name, no one.
For your sake
we shall flower.
Towards
you.

A nothing
we were, are, shall
remain, flowering:
the nothing-, the no one’s rose.

With
our pistil soul-bright,
with our stamen heaven-ravaged,
our corolla red
with the crimson word which we sang
over, O over
the thorn.

(Trans: Michael Hamburger)

One can draw neither comfort nor despair from this poem, or rather, neither of them alone. It is a psalm and an antipsalm; sacred and bitter. What stands apart is palpable only in its absence; a void saturated by void, to use Blanchot’s phrase. Celan’s biographer John Felstiner has brought out the allusions within ‘Psalm’ to Jewish and Christian mysticism, both of which has to be bypassed here. But, to repeat Eliot on Dante, I think it communicates before any of these allusion are understood.

It may seem paradoxical that the writer of such a poem as ‘Psalm’ has a biographer (Heidegger says the author of every masterful poem is unimportant) and Felstiner’s book does indeed concentrate on the poems. Despite this, he uncovers the probable origin of the title of his 1959 collection “Sprachgitter” – Speech Grille.

Celan’s mother-in-law retreated to a convent and when the family visited her, she would remain behind a grill. Such a barrier holds also for poetry’s revelation. One must accept the limit for it to work; the limit is part of the experience. Or non-experience. Lacoue-Labarthe’s brief and powerful book on Celan is actually called “Poetry as Experience“. It characterises the poem as something always returning to its source, approaching the inaccessible, and, necessarily, inaccessibility. The poem returns to the experience itself – the revelation in the clearing – not ‘the stuff of anecdotes’ but the etymological origin of ‘experience’: a crossing through danger. It is a crossing resisted only in what the poem lets us consume as readers: “a poem has nothing to recount, nothing to say; what it recounts and says is that from which it wrenches away as a poem.”

So what, exactly, remains before and after this wrenching? Celan names it himself, in a speech upon receiving the prestigious Büchner Prize: “the poem has always hoped … to speak also on behalf of the strange – no, I can no longer use this word here – on behalf of the other, who knows, perhaps of an altogether other.” (translated by Rosemary Waldrop)

Perhaps the ‘strange’ can be used no longer because it is already too familiar, too homely. He had to seek another word or phrase: “the altogether other”. His speech, as much as his poetry, has to be attuned to the demands of experience. Celan also refers to the attempt to give each poem its own date, its own unique time, so that it speaks with supreme accuracy.

Deep in Time’s crevasse
by the alveolate ice waits,
a crystal of breath,
your irreversible witness

(trans. Michael Hamburger)

The difficulty is that language depends on generality; the more specific a word the harder it is to reach across time; we will not connect to the “altogether other” trapped in time’s crevasse. In fact, it could not be language anymore. Yet if it can connect despite risking such isolation, it would be all the more richer. In this respect, Celan requires a certain amount of patience on behalf of his readers. For example, a late untitled poem in full:

Illegibility of this world.
All things twice over.
The strong clocks justify the splitting hour hoarsely.
You , clamped into your deepest part, climb out of yourself for ever.

(trans. Michael Hamburger)

This is puzzling, but such puzzlement does not matter much once one sets the need for facts or conclusive harmony aside. Less sympathetic critics dismiss his work as ‘hermetic’, sealed from approach. They say only the writer could know what such a poem is about. Why is the world illegible? What is a strong clock?

I have no answers. Perhaps the lack of a title necessitates a certain blankness in the initial response. The moment one titles an experience the dangers lessen. Would a biography help us understand this? Probably not. Celan was adamant that his poetry was accessible: “As for my alleged encodings” he said “I’d rather say: undissembled ambiguity. I see my alleged abstractness and actual ambiguity as moments of realism.” It seems odd that a poet so keen – perhaps even desperate – to reach across time, to provide us with such realism, should do so by writing wilfully unreadable poems. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to assume it is the poetry’s problem.

Professor John Carey of Oxford would disagree. He is Britain’s foremost opponent of difficulty. In his best-selling book ‘The Intellectuals and the Masses‘, he argues that Modernism – the epitome of difficulty – was invented by intellectuals in order to alienate the so-called masses, who, newly emancipated from illiteracy, were seen as muddying the pure waters of literature. Celan indicates other reasons. In fact, the ‘enjoyment’ Carey demands is really a means of retaining a dualistic attitude to literature; of ‘talking eyes into blindness‘, to use Celan’s phrase. Of course, many Modernists were proto-fascists, yet this doesn’t mean difficulty equals Totalitarianism. It means, instead, a ‘crossing through danger’ is not mere rhetoric. The dangers led Heidegger to his great error.

It troubled Celan that the man he saw as one of the greatest of modern thinkers, so close to his own work, was a Nazi. One cannot even say ‘had been a Nazi’ because he never said anything that amounted to a renunciation. Late in life, Heidegger became interested in Celan’s work. He recognised him as the only living equal of Hölderlin. He attended public readings given by the poet, and in 1967 even invited him to his famous Black Forest retreat at Todtnauberg. Celan accepted. This was a significant move as Celan had developed an intense sensitivity (one might say ‘anxiety’) toward anti-Semitic tendencies in post-war Europe. When his dedicated publishers re-issued the work of a poet popular in the Nazi years, he left for another, and when German literary authorities exonerated him over plagiarism charges, he regarded it as a humiliation to be even under investigation. Yet here he was meeting a man in his most intimate home, a home in which, it is said, he had once run Nazi indoctrination sessions. Perhaps Celan never knew the full extent of Heidegger’s culpability.

Generally, not much is known about Celan’s reasons for accepting the invitation, nor what happened during the visit, but very soon after Celan wrote a poem called ‘Todtnauberg‘. The title reference is explicit; the place name is synonymous with the philosopher. This is the first half:

Arnica, eyebright,
the draft from the well
with the star-crowned die above it,
In
the hut,

the line
– whose name did the book
register before mine? -,
the line inscribed in that book about
a hope, today,
of a thinking man’s
coming
word
in the heart,

(trans. Michael Hamburger)

As Pierre Joris points out in his exceptional analysis of the various translations of the poem, ‘Todtnauberg‘ is barely a poem than single sentence divided into eight stanzas. The first of the three above display Celan’s extraordinary eye for nature, as noted earlier in “Nocturnally Pouting“. Arnica and Eyebright are flowers noted for their healing qualities, so right from the start there is the sense of what the meeting is all about. In the third, the poet signs the visitors book and makes plain his awareness of who might have signed it before – Germans being indoctrinated into Nazi ideology perhaps. He hopes for a word in the heart of the great man. Did the word reveal itself? The remaining five stanzas are:

woodland sward, unlevelled,
orchid and orchid, single,

coarse stuff, later, clear
in passing,

he who drives us, the man,
who listens in,
the half- trodden fascine
walks over the high moors
dampness,
much.

Almost certainly not. The two men walked across woodland each in his isolation: an orchid and an orchid. And the poem remained isolated as far as Heidegger was concerned. He displayed his special copy of the poem proudly to subsequent visitors to the cottage, seemingly unaware of its implications. Perhaps this is enough to indicate the blindness of a man, even one with genius, rooted in his familiar landscape – brought out here in Hamburger’s translation of log-paths as ‘fascine’, a word so close to ‘fascist’, the etymological origin coming, as Joris says, from the Latin ‘fasces’ – a bundle of wooden rods – the symbol of fascism.

‘Todtnauberg’ , therefore, cannot be regarded as a coded accusation, or as a shy expression of bitterness, or sentimental regret, or of pompous self-definition in contrast to a supposed intellectual superior, but rather the very openness Heidegger apparently lacked. As Celan once said: “Poetry does not impose itself, it exposes.” The lack of a second ‘itself’ in this sentence exposes.

Hubert Selby Jr is one of the most powerful American writers. Last Exit To Brooklyn, his first novel, was a best seller and the subject of an obscenity trial in England. The book was incendiary with its release in 1964. It’s a compassionate portrait of an overlooked America. A dark trip to the world of human beings driven to the limit. Supported by Anthony Burgess and Samuel Beckett in London, Mr Selby became a counterculture icon. (Last Exit To Brooklyn was released as a film in 1989, with actress Jennifer Jason Leigh.)

Featuring violence, social canker, madness, the world’s decay and raw sexuality, Selby’s novels (Last Exit, The Room, The Demon, Requiem for a Dream, Song of the Silent Snow) are just as devastating today. An uncompromising body of work that inspired such rock singers as Lou Reed, Henry Rollins, Bob Mould and even Kurt Cobain. A lightning strike on the retina…

Selby’s work is strong enough to change somebody’s existence. “I think the greatest tribute or compliment you can give a work of art, in any form, is not about how much you appreciate it, but how much you can’t wait to get out of there — to go home and do your own thing. Because the thing made you so crazy to write, or to paint or to do something. And Hubert Selby’s books was one of the first things I read that made me feel that way !” said Richard Price.

Selby’s latest novel, The Willow Tree, is a graceful and moving book, and the author now lives in North L. A., near the sleepy Hollywood Hill – writing to stay alive…

TB: The Willow Tree was your baby for a long while. Did you need reflection on it, or were you forced to wait under the circumstances ?…

HS: Every work goes through a period of reflection, gestation, but The Willow Tree was subjected to my physical condition. I had to wait until I had the energy to start writing, then periodically I was unable to continue. As a result the writing was stretched out over a long period of time. As there were long periodsof not writing, when I did get back to writing I spent a lot of time writing myselfback into the rhythm of he book, which meant there was a lot of repetition in the booknecessitating a lot of editing and re-writing.

TB: Is it the start of a new period in your work ?…

HS: I do not know if it is the start of a new “period”. These things are only known after the fact, after the “period” is over.

TB: Bobby and Maria have this special aura.Are you going about new characters with another view of the world ?…

HS: I am always thinking in terms of “new characters”. I suspect any ones view of the world is always changing even if it is fundamentally the same. I have had many views of the world, and hopefully I will have many more. We’ll see how many of them I will write about.

TB: In my opinion, something is characteristic in your new novel. Despite the savagery and the irrevocable pain, I have this recurring feeling that you’re bringing back the evocative power and the ethic of a tale…

HS: If you mean, story telling, I’m all for it. I am always trying to write the best story I can. It is the story of peoples lives that interest me and is so fascinating.

TB: By the way, why did you choose a willow tree ?

HS: I chose a willow tree because they are so comforting. They seem more animated than most trees. They’re huge, powerful looking, yet comforting and protective. They will shield you from all the elements, and hang low to greet you.

TB: “To come into conflict with the nature of things.” What do you think of this sentence ?

HS: Difficult to relate to a sentence out of context. I would say it is the basis of most, if not all, our troubles and problems. Instead of being willing to understand the nature of things and surrender to its flow, we try to bludgeon it to our will.

TB: When he talked about his personal style, Celine used to say: “I want my pages to be finely-worked as a piece of lace…” (His grandmother was a fine placemaker and that’s why he used a pseudonym after her first name.) Tell me about your style…

HS: I am not certain how you are defining “style”. I use and utilize various techniques to accomplish what I perceive as being needed in any particular piece of work. Basically, I want to put the reader through an emotional experience so I must endeavor to write from the inside out or I will not be able to accomplish my aim. I must be true to the people I create and allow them to live their own lives so the manner in which I tell their story must reflect their lives, their speech, the rhythm of their lives.

I write musically so I had to develop a typography that is in effect, musical notations. I want to keep everything as simple and obvious as possible. In simplicity is profundity. These are some of the things I concern myself with, and together they help form my, “style”. Obviously there are many other elements involved, some of which I am not aware of. All of me, all of my being contributes to my “style”, just as it does for everyone.

TB: I know you’re a jazz lover… Allow me to give you 5 words: the grace, look, core, rebellion, romanticism. Could you improvise a phrase for each one ? Like variations on a theme…

HS: Ah !… The grace to look at the core of the rebellion of romanticism allows me to truly experience and enjoy the results. Without that grace I am at the core of the rebellion and look beyond romanticism… but the romanticism of rebellion forces me to look past the core of grace… to look at the core of grace with the eyes of romantic rebellion ?!

To rebel gracefully at my core and look beyond the core of the core to grace the grace of looking beyond the romantic rebellion that imbues my romanticism at the core as I look at and with the light of grace !

TB: Soutine, Hopper, Bacon. You are a self-educated man (as Bacon was), and you always try to give a lucid and ruthless picture of the human condition. Reveal an inner truth to strive for an ideal… Those painters used colours to work in a similar way.What do you think of their works ?

HS: I think my first, penetrating experience, with color was an exhibit of Van Gogh’s work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the late 1940′s…At the time it was the largest exhibit of his work in this country. Some of his later work, like his bedroom with solid blocks of colors are very penetrating.

Right now I’m thinking of colour almost as subject rather than the colours of reality of the Impressionists. I am fascinated by the relationship of colours, how they effect each other and subsequently the entire painting. Certainly Soutine and Bacon go beyond “reality” with their colours. The effects of Bacon’s colours are powerful and physical. If you come across one of his paintings, unexpectedly, it can be like being hit on the head and in the stomach at the same time ! The effect is very powerful…

Then, after a few second, minutes, or however long, you start to see the forms of the painting. As I remember Soutine, his paintings were a little more gentle, though I am affected very strongly by the colours as well as the subject matter, and, as with all paintings, the juxtaposition of the objects…

Hopper I do not think of in terms of colour, but more in terms of clarity, a preciseness of realism that goes beyond realism. In a sense he reminds me of Rodin, especially The Thinker, in that I am always expecting him to stop thinking and get up and move ! The living potential for movement is always evident. I think of Hopper in the same way… No matter how static his people appear to be, I can feel their potential for movement…I live viscerally so these painters obviously appeal to me.

TB: Do you feel close to painters ? To some writers ?

HS: Yes, I feel close to some painters. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say I feel close to their work. Many whose name I dont remember or never knew. Hanging out with a few paintings can be extremely relaxing, stimulating and inspirational. Same with writers. In addition to my friends, I get great comfort thinking about Melville or Babel or Celine.

TB: You’ve written an introduction to Lydia Lunch’s Paradoxia. What do you think of young authors ?

HS: I have read a few young authors that I like very much, but I hesitate to mention any names because my memory is not very good for names and I’m certain to leave a lot of people out and will hurt some people feelings.

TB: What has become of your manuscript Wishing Star ?

HS: Wishing Star is still around somewhere. It needs to be re-written and all the people changed. I may get around to it some day.

TB: Now that Giuliani and Disney are parading through 42nd street with all the goofies… What do you feel about New York ?

HS: New York City is still a great city even if they did destroy 42nd street…It’s like Confucius said: “When you leave New York, you are camping out.”

TB: Do you really feel like an American citizen ?

HS: I don’t know if I feel like an American citizen. I have no idea how one is supposed to feel. I am certain I do not feel the same about this country as many people, but I do love its possibilities. However, I am disappointed in its realities from time to time. Perhaps I feel more like a New Yorker than an American, which means I feel more like a European than an American.

TB: You’ve always stared at “the Beast”… Going near to evil. With a hint of a smile. Or fierceness in the eyes ?

HS: I think a hint of a smile is necessary when you are looking the beast in the eyes with fierceness. Without it you might become the beast.

TB: What are your plans these days?

HS: My plans are to do the best I can with each day. I hope to be able to work each day, but I have to be willing to accept whatever happens, and not go crazy if I can’t work for a while.

TB: Werner is the conscience of The Willow Tree. Nowadays, is there a sliver of possibility of enlightenment ?

HS: Werner has been alive for a long time and has seen, and survived, many things, so has a vast area of identification with people. I think there is always a sliver of possibility for enlightenment. However, the human race being what it is, we will always try everything else before we try enlightenment…

Of course we convince ourselves that what we are doing is pursuing enlightenment but it is only when we find ourselves stoking the fires of hell that we realize we made a mistake. In this country we believe our form of economic democracy will save the world, we believe this is true enlightenment but of course it isn’t. Perhaps we will all become aware of the error of our ways before we destroy life on this planet !…However, it is useful to remember that whenever we feel we are locked in hell we are actually at the gates of heaven.

TB: When you take a stroll down on Beachwood Drive, are you more optimistic ?

HS: Beachwood… Haven’t been there for years… Actually I try not to use the word optimistic. It’s tantamount to saying everyhing is horrible but it may get better. I prefer to be willing not to judge the now of my life in any way at all and do what I can to simply be the best me I can be.

There are a lot of troubles in this world that need transforming. However, a transformed world comes about as a result of a transformed individual, and I’m the individual I must transform. That is my responsibility. So it seems to me I need to be aware of what is happening, but to focus on getting the darkness out of my heart, rather than what is wrong with you… So I can be a part of the answer.

TB: I have this metaphysical concern. You can’t avoid it. A typical Diogenes one !…Do you prefer chocolate bars with or without hazelnuts inside ?!

HS: Mmmm… Well… Diabolic…I prefer chocolate WITHOUT hazelnuts, but I don’t eat chocolate.It just doesn’t agree with me !

“Nothing is more irritating than those works which ‘co-ordinate’ the luxuriant products of a mind that has focused on just about everything except a system.”

What is there to know about Emile Cioran? He was born in Romania, in 1911, the son of a Greek Orthodox priest. In adolescence, he lost his childhood in the country and was moved to the city. He also lost his religion. For years he didn’t sleep – until he took up cycling. He passed sleepless nights wandering the dodgy streets of an obscure Romanian city. In 1937 he moved to Paris and wrote, producing what are generally classified as ‘aphorisms’, collected together under such titles as The Temptation To Exist, A Short History Of Decay and The Trouble With Being Born. He knew Samuel Beckett, who eventually lost sympathy with his pessimism. Late in life he gave up writing, not wanting to “slander the universe” anymore, and died a few years later after an encounter with an over-excited dog.

I hope none of this helps.

Cioran’s sentences are of little or no help. That is their worth. Just think of the aphorisms; each sentence has the company of only one or two others. The gaps between groups of sentences appear like sands of the desert encroaching on an oasis. Or is it the other way around? That the answer is so unclear is the worth of Cioran’s sentences.

His aphorisms are unlike the smug, bourgeois exponents of the Nineteenth century. They open wounds. Still, Cioran is not studied. This is the academic orthodoxy. And that’s fine. Scholars read texts like drivers read diversion signs. La Rochefoucauld 20 miles, Nietzsche 40, Existentialism, forever. Alternatively, just read the sentences.

“… lyricism represents a dispersal of subjectivity.”

The end of a sentence in this case; a place of especial elation and despair. (The want of elation and despair generating their presence in the vertiginous lack which is the peculiarity of consciousness. Reading is like consciousness in that nothing happens. ) Cioran is lyrical. His style is a varient on song. At the same time he is a writer of solitude and subjectivity. This last word has gained a pejorative meaning lately, akin to solipsism, selfishness, ignorance, certainly ‘untruth’. But let us wrest it back for as long as we can. Subjectivity is the state of struggle of one who is alive, within time: sleepless. “Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.”

A special type of sleeplessness being where one is oneself forever and knows it. It is also an indictment of lyricism. Lyricism is sleep; the suppression of subjectivity, the impossible denial of ‘three in the morning’. Adorno’s call for an end to lyric poetry after Auschwitz is a wish for the return of each subject destroyed by a revolution lyrical to its evil core. The Volk wanted to sleep. Then it was mass rallies at Nuremburg, now its anything you care to name: popular culture indeed. Cioran’s physical insomnia disallowed the easy contempt for those who craved such sleep. He needed it too, to stay alive. A familiar irony: Cioran’s tragedy was also his saving. “Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.”

When Cioran began to write in French he had, by then, conquered his insomnia. Exhausted by long bicycle rides, he slept. Still, the writing tries to abide in the old white nights of insomnia, only to collapse into the sleep toward which literature tends. Cioran’s writing tends to disperse the “three in the morning” in lyric expression. So, a bit of a disappointment, to say the least.

“As a general rule, men expect disappointment: they know they must not be impatient, that it will come soon or later, that it will hold off long enough for them to proceed with their undertakings of the moment. The disabused man is different: for him, disappointment occurs at the same time as the deed; he has no need to await it, it is present.”

To say again then, his disappointment with writing was inevitable. But this only drives one on, to divest words of their common usage and apply them to this moment. This one. In an interview, he tells of his disillusionment with writing’s other products, particularly those where disappointment is not an issue: ideas, grand narratives, systems. “Philosophers are constructors, positive men, positive, mind you, in a bad sense.” Elsewhere: “Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel – three enslavers of the mind. The worst form of despotism is the system, in philosophy and in everything.” Yet how can one write without constructing some system, even if it is negative?

“‘Optimists write badly’ (Valery). But pessimists do not write.” [Maurice Blanchot]

The violence of Cioran’s work, its verbosity and arrogance, results from a struggle with inevitable positivism. The use of aphorism is also borne of this. It demands our opposition. The blank following the sentences rises up before us. Our exasperation leaves the same silent space hovering there. This is the placeless heaven or hell Cioran is always returning us to. It is pointless to oppose or argue – or explain. One can scan the biographical parabola that gives shape to a life, thereby explaining it and the work, but something is left behind; this place he takes us to. The facts of a life help inasmuch as noise masks silence. But something is left behind. Generally, it seems students study, reviewers review, writers write and readers read in the hope of avoiding this. It’s what the people want, after all.

Cioran has also written essays. They demand the same kind of reading as the aphorisms. It just takes longer. In the landmark essays, the brilliance burns long and hard. Still, the tone remains more or less identical to the aphorisms. While the aphorisms give us the breathing space of a firebreak, the essays threaten suffocation. What is lost is the very sense of its inspiration, the surprise, the horror, the emptiness of the moment. Instead, Cioran has something to say. In ‘Beyond the Novel’, Cioran examines our self-conscious age with regard to what helped constitute it – the novel.

The essay develops out of the idea that the novel grew out of metaphysical poverty. It allowed us to understand our history and our psychology in a world where the old certainties were decaying. Yet now that the decay has reached a zero point, producing the kind of works bereft even of the certainty of the self as subject. If you don’t know what novels these are, they’re the ones NOT written by journalists. Yet however repulsively anachronistic the journalistic novel is (and virtually every novel published is a journalistic novel), Cioran wonders what is the point of writing more than one novel of absence:

“[the] implicit conception of this sort of art opposes to the erosion of being the inexhaustible reality of nothingness. Logically valueless, such a conception is nonetheless true affectively (to speak of nothingness in any other terms than affective one is a waste of time). It postulates a research without points of reference, an experiment pursued within an unfailing vacuity, a vacuity experienced through sensation, as well as a dialectic paradoxically frozen, motionless, a dynamism of monotony and emptiness. Is this not going around in circles? Ecstasy of non-meaning: the supreme impasse.”

This passage – representative of the whole – jerks the steering wheel as if to herald an eternal roundabout. But this will be Cioran’s own journey. Instead of condemning the novelist, and thereby commending his own judgement, Cioran gives him the benefit of the doubt. “Is [the novel] really dead, or only dying? My incompetence keeps me from making up my mind … I leave it to others, more expert, to establish the precise degree of its agony.”

Instead of only railing against repetitious failure, Cioran gives us the guidelines to which potential writers must abide if they are to create an art for the wilderness. In Kafka’s words, this is the help going away without helping. ‘Beyond the Novel’ adds to the demands of genuine creation, and thus the unexpected joy of what has been and might be achieved. Instead of postmodern cacophony – its sloppy apologia borne on positive negativism – we get to hear the silence behind the noise. One thinks of Beckett, of course, and the equally great Thomas Bernhard. To confirm this, Cioran pulls up in a lay-by and, in a passage one might describe as uncharacteristic, seems to hold back from hopelessness and bitter regret:

“Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful … Let us salute it, then, even celebrate it: our solitude will be reinforced, affirmed. Cut off from one more channel of escape, up against ourselves at last, we are in a better position to inquire as to our functions and our limits, the futility of having a life.”

Well, not uncharacteristic after all. This is as near to abstract celebration as Cioran gets. He leaves it to others with ‘the courage of dilution’ to give us the succour using the ‘banalities’ necessary for the novel. His admiration for other writers is due precisely to their ability use the banal surface to reach the subterranean. Cioran’s rapid lyricism will not spread into a delta plain of banality to allow such an exploration. This is his limit.

Despite this, he is able to prospect worth by refamiliarizing us with what is important. Perhaps his most worthwhile work apart from the aphorisms, we can find in his short pieces on other writers collected in Anathemas And Admirations . In particular, the essay on Scott Fitzgerald. Here is a writer one might otherwise ignore: sentimental claptrap elevated to art by a lazy world. Cioran lays this aside. What he concentrates on the time when Fitzgerald awoke from the American Dream into the intensity of lucid consciousness, something “that transcends contingencies and continents”.

By this time, Fitzgerald’s famous books have been written, the American definition of success achieved: fame, money and even requited love. “Literally and figuratively, [Fitzgerald] had lived asleep. But then sleep left him.” Why? Returning to the his deepest theme, Cioran answers: “Insomnia sheds a light on us which we do not desire but to which, unconsciously, we tend. We demand it in spite of ourselves, against ourselves.”

Fitzgerald’s inner experience remained despite worldly success, indeed was heightened as a result. On the heights of his despair, Fitzgerald wrote ‘The Crack-Up’. Cioran’s commentary on this non-work – it was a series of fragments – is like most of Cioran’s commentaries, a commentary on his own procedure, also a series of fragments. ‘The Crack-Up’ represents for Cioran the direction Fitzgerald should have pursued rather than regarding it as an aberration. He tried to overcome it by going to Hollywood to write screenplays. Fitzgerald is rightly judged inferior to what he discovered, unlike a Kierkegaard, a Dostoevsky or a Nietzsche.

“Fitzgerald admirers deplore the fact that he brooded over his failure and, by dint of ruminating so deeply upon it, spoiled his literary career. We, on the contrary, deplore that he did not remain sufficiently loyal to that failure, that he did not sufficiently explore or exploit it. It is a second-order mind that cannot choose between literature and the real dark night of the soul”.

In the same piece, Cioran equates loyalty to failure with sickness. The healthy, he says, keep a certain distance from our ‘contradictory and intense’ states, while to be sick is ‘to coincide totally with oneself’. The former allows us to act. But isn’t it precisely one’s distance from oneself a part of sickness; it is the part which can never act?

“When you imagine you have reached a certain degree of detachment, you regard as histrionic all zealots … But doesn’t detachment, too, have a histrionics of its own? If actions are mummery, the very refusal of action is one as well. Yet a noble mummery.”

The interaction of conditions is inevitable. Nobility is left to the silent and invisible. ‘The Crack-Up’ is called the work of a sick man, yet its impressive lucidity is a histrionics of detachment, more or less identical to Cioran’s own work, sick only inasmuch as it cannot achieve oneness with its subject. Oneness is barely human, hence our fascination with good and evil. Perhaps this sharp division between sickness and health is where Cioran lapses into the sentimentality Fitzgerald was prone to. It is a form of self-pity, trying to justify the inherent hubris of writing and publishing. Aware of this, Cioran tells us not to worry about those who are excessively self-pitying because an excess of self-pity preserves reason.

“This is not a paradox … for such brooding over our miseries proceeds from an alarm in our vitality, from our reaction of energy, at the same time that it expresses an elegiac disguise of our instinct of self-preservation.”

This helps answer a perennial question: why did Cioran live so long without killing himself? Sickness can increase self-pity, thereby reason, thereby self-preservation. To cross the abyss that is life, if that is our purpose, we must use both sickness and health, self-pity and detachment, the desert and the oasis. To deny either is either fatal or contemptible. Cioran shows by example, how various the tension between opposites is manifested. His examples have one thing in common it seems: the admittance of lucidity, that which lies behind all stories, all systems, all action, all help.

As academia eschews ambivalence and individualism, rewarding instead skills of memory and language, it might be worth stepping into the vanishing point Cioran occupied so tenaciously, if only to re-open the stagnant wounds of our lucidity.

“The ideally lucid, hence ideally normal, man should have no recourse beyond the nothing that is in him”.

It has not been easy assimilating Beckett into our culture. While his mentor James Joyce made with ease the familiar journey from public outrage and bewilderment to universal love and admiration, Beckett, seven years after his death, remains as distant as ever. He wouldn’t have had it any other way. His fame is due to a play which he said was ‘misunderstood’. For a great Modern writer to become well known it seems he or she requires a degree of similarity to popular fiction to tempt people into reading them. Kafka has horror, Proust nostalgia, Lawrence pornography, Woolf niceness. Beckett seems to lack this. Only Waiting for Godot approaches such familiarity: Morecambe & Wise in a mortuary perhaps. The rest of the work lurks behind it like a black hole ready to swallow up any cheerful soul wanting something less than an enigma. This suggests we need a biography to help us through the artifice. And these two new biographies certainly do something like that.

After reading both Anthony Cronin’s The Last Modernist and James Knowlson’s Damned To Fame, one has a more rounded impression of the man, if not the writer. Reading the novels and plays one imagines a secular monk, yet the dominant impression from both of these biographies is of a drunken, womanizing, pretentious and self-pitying young man who was good at sport and languages. I say ‘young man’ because the older, wiser Beckett is left relatively untouched. We never get very close to him. This is a pity if not also inevitable. The pre-war work is discussed at length as it tends to follow the details in the turmoil of his growth: a manic-depressive mother, psychosomatic illnesses, premature death of a genial father, archetypal Oedipal love/sex dichotomy, unchannelled talent, etc.

The later works, however, do not lend themselves so readily to such links. And these, despite the protestations of the nosy, will be the ones he will be remembered for. They are passed over almost in silence. This is not because Knowlson and Cronin are hacks interested only in gossip and obvious life-work correlations, or because the later work is lifelessly abstract, but because they are both aware of the crassness of such an enterprise. The later work is the poetry of confinement, of disintegration and ending (that is, what comes before death, which never comes). How can the biographer write about that if the man himself was so active?

Beckett wrote about these things not so much because he experienced them, although he did, eventually, but because he observed and felt them impending all the time. A biographer can only try to understand why he felt this. In revising an apocryphal story, Knowlson gives us a hint. Krapp’s story of a Joycean epiphany on a storm-tossed shore in ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ was thought to be Beckett’s own experience. It turns out that an equivalent epiphany did occur but in his mother’s bedroom as he watched her suffer from Parkinson’s Disease. Krapp’s epiphany is traditionally romantic; the exaltations of nature provoking a grand idea in the individual. Beckett’s real one was less effusive.

He saw how nature has ‘a calm, secret hostility’ inflicting intense pain and suffering on loved ones with pause only for what we call life. It is nothing to be celebrated. The wordy flights of Beckett’s youthful writings (that is, before he reached thirty) side-step this awareness in favour of familiar channels of talent: show-off shock tactics and autobiographical plundering. So, it is no surprise that ‘Dream of Fair to Middling Women’, the novel Knowlson and Cronin mine most heavily for information, is only available because of the author’s death. He did not want it published during his lifetime because it was too clever and derivative. Cleverness tends to be derivative. As one critic said, Beckett ‘had a lot to unlearn’.

However, such bad art enables Knowlson and Cronin to present convincing portraits of Beckett in young adulthood. This is where he had most in common with his contemporaries; he was ‘a young man with nothing to say and an itch to make’, as he said of himself. Cronin is particularly dismissive of a lot of Beckett’s early itching. He often ends quotations with ‘Whatever that might mean.’ This is refreshing after the uncritical, if not also hagiographical tone taken by Knowlson, Beckett’s long time friend.

One thing Cronin didn’t have that Knowlson did was access to Beckett’s diaries from his wander around Nazi Germany in the Thirties. These provide an important revision of Deirdre Bair’s suggestion in her pioneering 1978 biography that Beckett was ignorant of, or chose to ignore the effect of Nazi rule. The diaries reveal his awareness and disgust at their attitudes. Indeed, the people he meets are distinguished by their sympathies. And the war itself seems to have been the watershed in Beckett’s life. If he had gone home to Ireland instead of staying to help his French friends, he may have continued along familiar lines – following the trends of the times and fading as fast. However, the stoicism and near-starvation of the war years seems to have had a lasting effect. His only concern from then on was to write, be published, and write some more. Popularity was not a confirmation of importance, but pure chance. He seems to have realized that what was important was the night sky of nothingness behind the pyrotechnics of culture (a phrase of his friend E.M. Cioran).

Beckett started to write in French to rid himself of as much English cultural baggage as possible. His style became radically spare. He refused the big picture. Indeed, the claustrophobia of later plays and prose is not far removed from the details of war, or at least impending war: terror, boredom, despair, confusion, gallows humour, and imprisonment. Being alone in a room with only thoughts and memories is not lifelessly abstract. It is the experience of millions of people. To label it solipsistic or elitist, as many people have, is narrow-minded in the extreme. To write from the perspective of ‘outside’, which many much-touted writers still do (Pat Barker, Irving Welsh et al.), is far more abstract and non-empathetic. Even if these claim to be the voice of the lost, silenced or the underclass, their conservative attitude to language annexes the ground where these voices might speak. Their sympathy is the cruelty of the sentimental that Wilde spoke of. They silence everybody in their powerful cries from the trenches of literary tradition.

Beckett is the writer par excellence of what it is to be totally alone, separate even from the self you thought you were. Inevitably, this leads to a different kind of language; neither formal nor colloquial. For Beckett, language is not so much the meadow where the self can frolic in freedom as a No Man’s Land where it is never safe. Beckett was not one of herd play ing at freedom-loving in the tenches, but wandered the No Man’s Land like Dante in Hell. It was not a deliberate exercise. He was often surprised at what he wrote. It is not purely intellectual. It was not ‘self-expression’, more ‘unself-expression’. If it was merely the surface self, fiction would be only disguised autobiography and these biographies would be even more superfluous than they already are. Both Knowlson and Cronin are aware of this and do not try to pin Beckett’s devastating later work to what was happening in his life or his world. At least, not directly. They are aware of the acultural provenance of his inspiration. The biographies are works borne of our literary culture’s desire for short cuts, yet carry that restriction with honour.

Beckett was aware of a saying in post-war literary French circles that if an Englishman were to write a book on a camel he would call it ‘The Camel’, while a Frenchman would call it ‘The Camel and Love’. A German, on the other hand, would call it ‘The Absolute Camel’. All the books, of course, would probably be the same. Both authors reviewed here are Irish, and perhaps it is inevitable they would think of something odd for the titles of their books. And they have. ‘Damned to Fame’, despite being a phrase from one of Beckett’s letters, is a peculiarly limited title, and Cronin’s ‘The Last Modernist’ is absurd. This tempts the assumption that Modernism is an historical event rather than a virus at the heart of culture. But this is unimportant; titles of books like these are for publicity purposes only. Beyond that, the books themselves help us filter our interests. If you want rollocking sub-Joycean romps, that is, Beckett and Love, read the early work. And in terms of these biographies, if you want encyclopaedic detail, read Knowlson’s, while if you want a less reverential and more speculative read, Cronin’s is for you. If you want the Absolute Beckett, read the novels; you’ll never get any closer.

The importance of names in literature has nowhere been more typified than in recent attempts to pin down the elusive etymology of Beckett’s Godot. Following that farrago you can be sure that the name ‘Godot’ is missing from any parental ‘Book Of Names’ (although I quite like the idea of pregnant women going around stroking their bellies and saying: “Yes, we’re waiting for Godot…”). One can imagine the bewildered child suffering an intolerable identity problem from having his peers forever arguing about what he ‘means.’

To some, ‘Godot’ has a kind of cosmic signifier in the duality ‘God/Eau’. Less Francophile readings have insisted it should scan as ‘Go.dot’, a reference to the mental and physical movement that must result from Existential inertia. Perhaps the least credible suggestion, although the most interesting and curious, comes from a bizarre triangular link between James Joyce’s Ulysses and the Tour de France. Some painstaking (or entirely serendipitous) research has discovered that a French cyclist by the name of, wait for it, Godot, rode through Dublin on the 16th June in the early part of this century, the exact day which Leopold Bloom spends milling around Dublin in Ulysses. To me this has a further curious affinity with the ‘Go.dot’ reading and one of cheery Norman Tebbit’s maxims: on yer bike! Evidence perhaps that Beckett really was a hilarious wag or, simply, a precognitive member of the Tory party?

Charles Dickens was one of the first to really let rip with overblown allusional comic sobriquets and it is in this tradition that a lot of modern and postmodern neologising is entrenched. Writers have always liked a name’s potential to succinctly allude to character and disposition, often spending months deliberating over the final choice. For me, one of the best examples of a truly great fictional name belongs to the central character in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces: Ignatius J. Reilly. The christian name is practically onomatopoeic, suggesting indignation and outrage which, for anyone who has read the book, will almost sound like a definition of our Rabelaisian hero going about his hatred of anything modern. (In a cinema Ignatius loudly proclaims: “This is an abortion!”) There is also the subtle use of the pompous, self-important middle initial that furthers our understanding of the character.

Philip K. Dick’s obsession with duality (probably originating from the fact that his twin sister died when only a few months old) led him to invent some gloriously unlikely names. In Valis one-half of the narrator (as with a lot of Dick’s novels, it is hard to tell) is called Horselover Fat. ‘Philip’ is Greek for ‘lover of horses’; ‘Dick’ is German for ‘Fat’. Similarly, for close watchers of Karaoke by Dennis Potter, the character of Nick Balmer, played by Richard E. Grant, immediately raised suspicion: N. Balmer = Enbalmer, a famous line from deranged Danny the headhunter in the film Withnail And I. Incidentally, this provides further evidence that Dennis Potter (or Pennis Dotter, as A.A. Gill waggish refers to the playwright) was taking the piss with his Channel 4/BBC 2 collaboration. A less subtle form of this codified obscurantism appears in the film Angel Heart, where Robert De Niro plays the character Louis Cyphre, who turn out to be, surprise surprise, Lucifer.

If there is one author who best exemplifies a predilection for names and games of the distinctly literary type it is Vladimir Nabokov. In Bend Sinister there is paronomasias (a ‘verbal plague’ as Nabokov describes it) in Padukgrad where everybody is merely an anagram of everybody else. Nabokov concedes that by their very nature these “delicate markers” will bypass the inattentive reader and that “well-wishers will bring their own symbols and mobiles, and portable radios, to my little party” and concludes that in the end “it is only the author’s private satisfaction that counts.” It was this “wayside murmur” that pleased him the most when rereading his own fiction for the purposes of correction. etc. Nabokov reminds us that reading is a bungee jump (especially first person narratives) where we may become so engrossed in the rush and thrill of the story that we forget we are tethered to the author. Nabokov had a kind of withering, yet paternalistic, disregard for kidding ourselves: he had a fondness for snapping on the ropes and shouting down, “You idiots!”

James Wood, in comparing young American and English writing, recently argued for a fiction of unknowingness and against one of omniscient authorial intrusion. But surely this is just the point that Nabokov is making: fiction is a conscious game where the author manipulates the proceedings. There is little escape from this fact (and why should we want to escape it?) What varies is authorial acknowledgement which sounds patronising or exhilarating, according to taste. Some people don’t like the pedagogical voice in modern fiction, don’t like being ‘lectured to’, and some don’t like being told they’re being ‘lectured to.’ Fine. But Woods, and even more recently, the children’s writer Philip Pullman, recent winner of the Carnegie Medal, goes too far in implying that any type of postmodern or self-conscious position cannot co-exist with what they conceive as a ‘pure storytelling’ form.

I can’t help but detect a very conservative sensibility here that has an analogue with the political rhetoric of the “Back To Basics” government campaign: a return to good honest readability, out with this leftie cleverness, elliptical narrative on yer bike! Note also the tedious cyclical nature inherent to both arguments, roughly appearing in the runup to the Booker Prize or a General Election. A recent Dillons survey of MPs’ reading habits (a thinly veiled attempt to annoy Jeffrey Archer, which is fine by me) reveals similarly conservative reading values. Most overrated novelist? Archer, of course, who goes down for obvious political reasons (though it begs the question: who is it that ‘rated’ him in the first place?) Next came Martin Amis, A.S.Byatt and Salman Rushdie, which sounds suspiciously like a list of people you are supposed to say are overrated. Either that or, dare I say it, a list of authors your average MP is a little too sentence-challenged to understand. Well, think about it: all those years of soundbite politics hardly indicates a love of Proust or Joyce, does it?

The importance of a name to plot structure is nowhere more comically heightened than in Martin Amis’ Money, where John Self finds himself the patsy in a financial conspiracy of moviemakers and money shakers. It is the character’s very name that is the source of his downfall. (Skip the next couple of paragraphs if you haven’t read the book). ‘John’ is, I think, the perfect name for invoking the bland anonymity of the giant financial institutions where, in Nabokovian terms, everybody is merely an anagram of everybody else. (Viz. Nick Leeson: a name that should have set alarm bells ringing in itself).

‘Self’ of course embodies the ultimate Eighties Thatcherite ‘ideas’ of individualism and survival. But the apposite brilliance of ‘John Self ‘ is in making it the central twist. Amis has subservient to the greater scheme of things (the plot), just as his character is made to serve the greed of the players around him. It transpires that Self has been signing company documents twice; once under co-signatory, once under ‘Self’: “It was your name.” This literary playfulness and close attention to detail can be traced from Nabokov through the American heavyweights Saul Bellow and John Updike to Anthony Burgess and most recently Amis.

The playfulness which employs hyperreal and ciphered names runs riot in the comic novel, best exemplified by Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Here the names are neither naturalistic or ciphered but faintly ludicrous (viz. Pulp Fiction:“This is America: names don’t mean shit”). There is a phonetic suggestibility of sedition and subversion in the name ‘Yossarian’ (which is noted by one of his paranoid superiors in the book). There is also the double ‘Major Major’ (which has recently been recycled as the title of Terry Major-Ball’s autobiography) and the sub-Dickensian ‘Chaplain Tapmann’. ‘Milo Minderbinder’ is a personal favourite, conjuring up an image of a kind of entrepreneurial mesmerist who also happens to be mentally ill. However, we also have Richard Ford’s ‘Frank Banscombe’, a name redolent of Updike’s great tragicomic figure Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom: thus a more naturalistic name could be said to suit the subtler pastiche and ironic metiers of Ford and Updike.

Names become their strangest when the demarcations between fiction and reality begin to merge into one another . Umberto Eco is a case in point. His non-fictional name is almost too literary, too good, to be the real name of an author. One of Eco’s short stories from Misreadings is entitled Granita and is a twist upon Lolita, where the subject of desire is an old lady. In the Nabokovian version the central protagonist is, of course, Humbert Humbert, the name once again being indicative of a double or split image. The similarity of Umberto to Humbert is striking, and ‘Eco’` sounds like an allusion to the fact that the first name is an echo of the first. Before knowing any better I found myself thinking that perhaps Will Self was a sly allusion to one of his mentors (and mates) Martin Amis. But that would be to confuse art with life. And we all know where that gets us….