Oracle Night – Paul Auster

See all books by Paul Auster at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Oracle Night is the first Paul Auster novel I’ve read since Leviathan in 1992. Until then, I had read every book. This was not a difficult feat. Auster is supremely readable. In fact, I am afflicted by an unusual inability to stop reading him once a book is begun.

However, in the end, with Leviathan, I felt this was too much. I read it abnormally quickly, devouring each page with less and less concern for what was written on it than for getting beyond that page and to the next page, and the next, to see what was there.

After the last page I was mentally exhausted, nursing a headache. It seems significant that I have no memory of the narrative except for the mental image of a forest to which a character – perhaps the main character – removes himself. The proliferation of anecdotes – or stories within stories – means one can’t see the wood for the trees.

The experience of reading Oracle Night is very similar. It’s almost impossible to put the book down as there are so many compelling stories, one after the other, even though this is a relatively compact novel (240 pages). I’m sure I’ll forget most of the stories, but that isn’t important. Nor is Auster’s distinctly unpretentious prose style important. If you wince at clichés like back in the swing of things and to all intents and purposes that appear on the first half page alone, think of them as stablisers for the roller coaster ride ahead. (Elsewhere, I read that Auster breaks through his writer’s block by typing regardless of the banality of the prose.)

There are two central narratives in Oracle Night – both told by Sidney Orr, a New York writer recovering from an unnamed illness that was expected to kill him. He hadn’t written anything in a year until discovering a blue notebook in a small stationery shop (that isn’t stationary at all in fact. It disappears overnight.) Anyway, the new notebook somehow enables Orr to write a story. Much of Oracle Night is that story.

I don’t want to summarise the plot here as it is characteristically involved and would also detract from the essential element of Auster’s novels. The essential thing is something impossible to convey outside of the narrative itself: the evocation of possibility. At each step in the story – when Orr enters the stationery store to discover the blue notebook, when he returns to his writing den, when he begins to write the story in the blue notebook as if compelled by an occult power, and when, in the story within the story, the character makes a life-changing decision – there is a thrilling, uncanny sense of freedom. I mean, for the reader. A freedom in infinite possibility; innumerable futures present themselves. I have not experienced this so acutely with any other writer.

It’s there too in the opening lines of The Music of Chance: Jim Nashe driving away from his past after a windfall of cash. After that, the story takes shape and the sense diminishes. Until then, however, no particular story is attached to the sense of freedom. Anything can happen. We are free. The beginning of the story is our windfall.

So why is do we feel an urge to continue reading rather than to throw the book aside and live that freedom? Probably because we prefer the illusion of freedom, the possibility of freedom rather than the real thing. We read to enjoy the specific story that replaces the vertigo of infinite freedom. As with a horror movie, we aren’t really horrified. Horror is only the playful withdrawal of a guaranteed safety. And narrative is the guarantee. With a novel, we know we have a circumscribed adventure before us.

Yet that narrative also makes our freedom come true for a moment, even if it is only an illusion. The open future may contain infinite possibilities but it never seems to happen for real. Consumed by habit, we lose contact with our freedom. Reading, or watching a film, reminds us of possibility even as it is removed. And in that reminder, it comes true. The obscure attraction of a book or a film might be, then, the pleasure of contact with possibility and relief in its withdrawal.

But such pleasure has a double edge of course. Indulgence in stories removes us from life; takes us to the end of possibility. Auster’s narrative is, as I’ve said, compelling. It is compelling but in the end doesn’t satisfy the indulgent reader. Oracle Night could go on for another thousand pages. Perhaps it does as Auster’s complete oeuvre. Yet it does stop. Although, actually, it doesn’t quite. The story within the story is not concluded. It is shocking and frustrating for the reader. One wants to know how the author Sidney Orr and the author Paul Auster resolve a chilling situation. At the end though Orr explains why it is left hanging and we realise that it stops precisely for the reason we don’t want it to stop. It is difficult to accept, yet not because it is wrong.

This has angered and confused naïve readers; those untroubled by stories. For instance, Aaron Hughes asks the right questions but asks them only of Oracle Night rather than literature in general. What does it mean, for example, to say that Oracle Night “is not a success” when the nature of success in literary terms is fundamental to the narrative itself? The answers present themselves in the novel under review. When you pick up a novel you become a reader, not a consumer.

Orr describes burning the blue notebook in order to escape its mysterious power; in order to flee the nightmare of possibilities it summoned. Indeed, the end of the novel seems overladen with terrible events. Orr writes: “The true story started only then, after I destroyed the blue notebook.”

We might compare this with something Auster – or should we say Orrster? – wrote in The Invention of Solitude at the very beginning of his career following after death of his father:

For the past two weeks, these lines from Maurice Blanchot echoing in my head: ‘One thing must be understood: I have said nothing extraordinary or even surprising. What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of it.’ [from Death Sentence]
To begin with death. To work my way back into life, and then, finally, to return to death.

In Oracle Night, we joined Sidney Orr working his way back into life from the brink of death – working, that is, by writing. Yet the main symptom of his unnamed illness was dizziness, where the world became blurred and incoherent: a world without form. Almost as if language and meaning had been removed from his life. It took the discovery of the blue notebook and the writing of the new story to return him to both. But that only returns threatens another death, the death of possibility. It is Auster’s rare achievement to keep possibility alive and kicking even as it suffers a death by a thousand plots.

Why are W.G. Sebald’s novels so flat? Why – when the books refer to events of utmost horror and disaster, sometimes dwelling on pain and death with a fascination and regularity verging on schadenfreude – are the events themselves always placed at a distance, always prior to the narrator’s present, as if only ever to be experienced second-hand, as stories?

The first part of The Emigrants, the first of Sebald’s novels to be published in English, is exemplary.

It begins with a photograph of a graveyard. Below it is a date and, below that, a description of a journey to a large house situated in a village in East Anglia. The narrator and his partner are to view accommodation there. There is little or no tension. It could be mistaken for a straight memoir, particularly as there are so many photographs accompanying the words. Without pleasure or discomfort, the reader can follow the litany of precise natural details provided by the narrator – oak trees, Scots pines, a grassy graveyard, a thick shrubbery of hollies, Portuguese laurels, dry, rustling leaves. One expects it to lead somewhere, and a story of sorts does get told eventually. However, once it is, these details seem excessive. In the end all we are told is of the narrator’s brief acquaintance with the melancholy Lithuanian emigrant Dr Henry Selwyn, and the curious coincidence that emerged later. In summary (though this is barely any shorter than the original) Selwyn lost his Swiss mountain guide in the early years of the century; he went missing on the Aare glacier. Selwyn, we’re told, remarked on how deeply this loss affected him, even more than separation from his wife. The fact doesn’t take up much space in the book. But seventy years after the loss, when visiting Switzerland, the narrator sees a news report of a body being given up by a glacier. It turns out to the same mountain guide. Selwyn could not be told of the discovery because, by then, he had killed himself with a hunting rifle. In fact, his suicide is a footnote. It is not presented as a great tragedy. There is no speculation on what he was thinking as he prepared to pull the trigger, or even why he chose to end his life. The narrator’s journey to Switzerland isn’t detailed either. It’s tacked on the end without the precise details provided at the beginning, while the chapter itself ends with these lines:

And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair hobnailed boots.”

It’s an oddly glib reflection; a flat reiteration of a Proustian epiphany that doesn’t, in fact, happen. There is no richness, no sense of revelation. The presence of the past is down to its bare bones. Another writer, perhaps with an eye for the main chance, might have expanded this into an ambitious tale across the dark decades of the 20th century, involving mountaineering, forbidden love, religious persecution, exile and war, all framed by the giant sky of the East Anglian countryside.

But not Sebald. One might say that in this story not only is there no violence, there is nothing much at all. The presence of the dead is always at one step remove, never quite a full presence in the narration, and though his later work does go into more detail, giving a chance for that lost time to re-emerge, the flatness continues. Jacques Austerlitz, for example, is said to have grown up in Wales, but there is no rising inflection in his words, no lilt; just Sebald’s familiar, formal prose. At best this can be described as uncanny. Otherwise, there isn’t much for reader to indulge in. The fiction vacates rather than fills the space of literature.

So why has Sebald been hailed – by Susan Sontag among others – as a literary great? Well, Sontag points to the “passionate bleakness” of “a restless, chronically dissatisfied mind” that offers us “moral fervency and gifts of compassion”. But this doesn’t tell us much really. She also says that the accompanying photographs provide “an exquisite index of the pastness of the past.” Again, so how does that make Sebald great? Pastness is a great attraction to a culture that fetishises old objects. Indeed, Sebald’s style is called “Antiquarianism” by Daniel Johnson in the TLS: deriving from, he says, “a peculiar synthesis of English eclecticism and German perfectionism” where “the past has a more powerful presence than the present”. That presence is precisely its pastness, which is present only as an index of what’s not actually there. A curious paradox – one that would probably leave the experts of Antiques Roadshow nonplussed. Like their punters, they would probably prefer just to accumulate more and more of it. Hence perhaps why much is made of the variety of subject matter in Sebald’s novels, like a lumber room in a rundown mansion ready for an enthusiast’s rummage.

It is also likely that the popularity of Sebald’s fiction is due to a nostalgia for works that deal seriously with the most serious of subjects – all four Sebald novels might be misconstrued as Holocaust Literature. Certainly, Sontag desires something to counter “the ascendancy of the tepid, the glib and the senselessly cruel as normative fictional subjects”. A nostalgia, too, perhaps, for black and white distinctions: Nazis evil, victims good. When we listen to the story of a Jewish refugee, such as Max Ferber in The Emigrants, who lost his parents in the camps, the obscure hurt has to be acknowledged even if it remains beyond us. In comparison to the moral confusion of the present, it is much easier for the reader to feel something. However, Sontag herself doesn’t see things as so clear cut. She ends her review of Verigo with Sebald’s own curiosity with “the mysterious survival of the written word”; the dead, as it were, returning to us here too, again and again.

The question of whether this is a good thing is left, as it is in Sebald’s novels, unanswered. Yet could the flatness be a means of trying to mitigate that survival?

2.

Sebald himself is survived by four novels for which we can be thankful. The Rings of Saturn followed The Emigrants, then came Verigo, written before the other two, and finally, Austerlitz. The first and last in this sequence can crudely be called a pair: both contain stories framed by the narrator’s relation to individuals exiled from their origins. The middle two novels are framed by the narrator’s own wanderings, although they too involve telling others’ stories, usually an historical figure like Stendhal or Casanova. The trajectory is unsatisfactory. As I suggested in a review of Austerlitz, the author seemed to be painting himself into a corner. A new path is required.

We can only imagine what that path might have been. Yet that sense of loss and lack of development is oddly in keeping with the fiction. It’s as if the novels exist to deal with the inadequacy of resolutions. What I mean is described at the end of Verigo.

The narrator returns to the German village that he left as a youth. This is his first visit for 30 years. It gives him the chance to talk about all the goings-on, all the characters and intrigues that make up childhood memories with which he seems to be preoccupied. He meets friends from that time, now suddenly aged. One takes him to an attic room packed high with antiques and curios. Amongst the junk is an old tailor’s dummy dressed in a 17th-century soldier’s uniform. The narrator recognises it as the origin of a terrible threat that awaited him should he enter a forbidden room of his childhood. As he used to dream of this ghostly figure, his curiosity is stirred and he reaches out to touch the cloth, as if to make some kind of contact with that nightmare. The cloth crumbles away into dust. In subsequent dreams, he also reaches out and touches the soldier: “And every time, I then see before me the fingers of my right hand, dusty and even blackened from that one touch, like the token of some great woe that nothing in the world will ever put right.”

While the dream takes the place of that childhood nightmare, perhaps offering the end of years of unconscious terror of the unknown, what replaces it is itself a troublesome lack. One dark thing dissimulates into another. Knowledge is gained yet, while this is apparently a progress, it buries the expected dissolution of the child’s fear in another darkness. Sebald’s writing is precisely this progress; a token of some great woe that is present only in the trace of its absence. Not progress enough perhaps. The “restless, dissatisfied mind” of the writer becomes our own experience of reading. We look for some concluding knowledge to get us beyond this apparent impasse, and we continue reading as the narrators continue on their wanderings, from one place to the next, from one book to the next. They are always getting over some undescribed illness or having just gone through “a particularly difficult period” or are feeling just plain empty. It is a neurasthenic condition familiar to other distinguished quasi- autobiographical writers: Proust and Kafka. Like Sebald, they sensed a world beyond their own restless, dissatisfied minds. Kafka first:

It is entirely conceivable that life’s splendour forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come. This is the essence of magic, which does not create but summons. (Diaries 18 October 1921)

And Proust:

What the intellect gives us back under the name of the past is not it. In reality, as happens with the souls of the departed in certain popular legends, each hour of our lives, as soon as it is dead, embodies and conceals itself in some material object. Unless we meet with that object it remains captive there, captive for ever. We recognise it through the object, we summon it, and it is released. (Against Sainte- Beuve)

Both continued writing, as if this would bring life’s splendour. But if the right words summons what was hidden, wouldn’t the means of seeking it also be a means of missing the time where its advantage could be lived? Both writers’ unhappy, hypochondriac real lives suggest as much. Or perhaps their manner of seeking itself was at fault; Kafka certainly felt that way. How can one tell though? When can one know if the manner is correct until life’s splendour has passed and has become words only, mere history?

Perhaps, though, that is the advantage.

There’s a famous scene in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time when Marcel returns to the Grand Hotel in the northern seaside resort of Balbec (locations familiar to readers of Verigo). He bends down slowly to remove his boots and suddenly, he says, undergoes “a convulsion of my entire being”. His chest is filled by “an unknown, divine presence” which shakes him to tears. It turns out to be the sudden return in his memory of his late, beloved grandmother; “a complete and involuntary memory”. It is only as her presence fills him like this does he realise that she is really gone. Nothing in fact really happens but it is an exquisite moment for Marcel. At last, his mourning can take its course. The novel has many such incidents, spread across seven volumes as if to ensure that each appears with an appropriate intensity to the reader, and so, in the same way, to the writer. In both cases, they exist as a passionate report; moments of felt distance. It is only in this way that movement forward is possible. The same is true in Kafka’s most powerful stories, where the death of the protagonist, in for example The Judgement or Metamorphosis, is the means of returning writing to life. The paradox, of course, is that this can happen only in writing – a space that is neither fully alive nor fully dead – a condition actually embodied (or disembodied) in Kafka’s great story The Hunter Gracchus.

While Kafka’s stories and Marcel’s epiphany are in stark stylistic contrast to each other, and both to the Henry Selwyn chapter of The Emigrants, there is the same toward into life that requires a movement closer to death. How can we make sense of this?

3.

In 1874, Nietzsche published a long essay On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life in which he argued against the obsession with history. He recognised that there is something pathological in the pursuance of the past for its own sake.

Instead, Nietzsche says, forgetting is necessary, at least for a time. Otherwise we cannot let go; we cannot sleep.

He divided historical explanations into three types: monumental, antiquarian and critical. While all served life, both history and life suffer if they are abused, “Monumental history” he writes “deceives with analogies: with tempting similarities the courageous are enticed to rashness, the enthusiastic to fanaticism”. It’s the kind of history where the phrase “Never forget” is cried out and becomes itself a monument obscuring what needs to be remembered. Antiquarianism, on the other hand, cherishes every little detail of the past rather than the big picture. But this means it is unable to distinguish between what is and what is not important. The result is the utter veneration of the old because it is old, and the rejection of anything new. Meanwhile, critical history is used to deal with both: “to shatter and dissolve something to enable [life]“. While critical history is useful to enable movement forward, it can also be a means of avoiding its lessons: but in both forms it is a means of moving on.

Applying this to Sebald, one could say he takes the monument of the disasters of civilisation and exposes them to the gaze of Antiquarianism. Yet while the latter is present in the fiction in what Sontag calls the “spaciousness and acuity of the details”, they refuse the harmlessness of antiques. In fact, they have that potential to summons described by Kafka and Proust (perhaps what Sontag means by “spaciousness”). This does not seem to lend itself to moving on. Each detail in the story of Henry Selwyn begins to speak to its narrator: the grassy graveyard, the thick shrubbery of hollies, the Portuguese laurels, the dry, rustling leaves. As they build, there is a sense of some great woe that nothing in the world will ever put right. Wouldn’t it be better to leave it be?

Forty years after Nietzsche, Freud offered an understanding of the process of dealing with the weight of history that might explain. In Mourning & Melancholia there is an uncanny outline of Sebald’s apparent fictional procedure. As Tammy Clewell summarises,

The work of mourning entails a kind of hyperremembering, a process of obsessive recollection during which the survivor resuscitates the existence of the lost other in the space of the psyche, replacing an actual absence with an imaginary presence. This magical restoration of the lost object enables the mourner to assess the value of the relationship and comprehend what he or she has lost in losing the other.

In Sebald’s case, the space is writing and not the psyche, replacing an actual presence with a fictional one. Still, Freudian psychoanalysis would accommodate this as a cathartic process, whereby the gift of writing is the freedom from loss. The melancholic energy demanded of the work itself enables the ego’s release.

However, in both Nietzsche and Freud, the problem of discussing these issues is not itself an issue. Yet if one is to move on, then how much work is involved and how much is that work responsible for the need itself? To clarify, Clewell points out that Freud’s original theory was in the same vein as his earlier essay On Narcissism, and she detects “something self-serving about [Freud’s] description of mourning as a process of detachment and consoling substitution”. There is a sense of that self- serving element in Sebald’s relentless pursuit of stories of others’ lives and suffering, particularly the suffering. It’s as if the more stories the narrator is able to tell, the freer he becomes, yet also the more he needs the stories for that freedom. The written word mysteriously survives in the lives of the writer, and reader also. Everything becomes imbued with the spaciousness that we have to escape.

The danger of such “referential mania” is embodied in a story by another great modern stylist, Vladimir Nabokov in the story Signs & Symbols. For the institutionalised son of the elderly parents:

everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. […] Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.

While such extremes of paranoia are not present in Sebald’s novels, his work does share this story’s unease with its expressive self: that is, how much is the writing implicated in creating the problems it seeks to solve or escape? Signs & Symbols‘ power comes not only in what it tells us – of mental illness and the ravage of the parents – but the way in which fear and anxiety is evoked in each step into the story; not in what is explicitly said but in what words portend. Nabokov’s florid sentences evoke forces bearing on all our lives – forces that can move us to aesthetic pleasure as a reader, and that make the son go mad. It is a dangerous confrontation, one that Proust, Kafka and Sebald make in their different ways too.

Incidentally, Nabokov appears, another sign of something, as a butterfly catcher in The Emigrants.

4.

With the publication – now in paperback – of a collection of lectures under the title On the Natural History of Destruction we can now begin to appreciate even more that Sebald’s project was beyond melancholy reflection. And far from being yet more Holocaust literature, work seeking to recover history for the present and future, it is fiction as a search for an end, of having done with ghosts at last.

The collection’s title itself, while at first appearing to be the loose pretence of a marketing department unchecked after the death of the author, directs us to the biological sciences where natural history is the precise eyewitness description of empirical data and events (an incipient Antiquarianism). The specific destruction under examination here is, according to Sebald, under-described: the carpet bombings of 131 German cities and towns, such as on Hamburg on 27 July 1943 in which at least 50,000 civilians died.

Sebald sketches the natural history of the firestorm. What happened that night is summarised by the unnamed reviewer at The Complete Review as “(huge numbers of dead, enormous amounts of bombs, rubble, etc.)”. The parentheses are symptomatic. Sebald does not try to wrench human detail from these, as it were, a priori euphemisms but to analyse the response with a view to opening debate about the subject. The lectures are surprisingly provisional, and wouldn’t amount more than notes if it wasn’t for Sebald extraordinary ability, as seen in his fiction, to embed the deepest themes in the apparently superficial.

The title places the clarifying words ‘On the’ in front of ‘natural history’ so that the subject becomes the attempt at recording and, implicitly, the attempt at forgetting. The latter is inevitable, hence the need for history. But what kind? How can we remove others’ experiences from its bracketed containment without crippling ourselves – in Nietzsche’s sense – in the process? For sure, Sebald finds the attempts to approach the air war unsatisfactory, almost without exception. Not that there were many attempts in the first place. We can assume two main reasons for their rarity and unsatisfactory manner: the eyewitnesses who weren’t killed had to use all their energy to survive their survival. For example (my example), Jorge Semprun’s account of his own survival of the concentration camp at Buchenwald is called Literature or Life; he had to choose the latter in order to be able to write this very book much later.

The second comes in Sebald’s reference to Lord Zuckerman’s abandonment of his plan to write an article for a British journal following his visit to Köln, another firebombed city. Simply, he couldn’t find the words: “All that remained in [Zuckerman's] mind” Sebald tells us “was the image of the blackened cathedral rising from the stony desert around it, and the memory of a severed finger that he had found on a heap of rubble.” The experience was incomparable, and so words, the very means of communication through the tacit repetition of comparisons, fail too.

Zuckerman’s remaining memory is significant for Sebald’s project. One might assume that if there was a photograph of the finger, he would have placed it on the page. But not out of prurience. James Wood, in his perceptive essay on Sebald’s novels, refers to the tragedy of fact evoked by the captionless images placed throughout his books. They are not supplementary to the words but confirmation of mutual inadequacy. However, it is an inadequacy that contains much referential potential. The single memory is an equivalence; it orientates us toward the traumatic impact of experience even if we can have no real appreciation of what it means. Indeed, the impact exceeds experience. Zuckerman was only passing through and what remained for him was only an image. For the survivors, the ravage seems to have gone much deeper. Accounts following the raid on Hamburg tell of the majority of the surviving population – over a million – wandering through the country, without any apparent destination. They were seen everywhere, aimless and torpid. Sebald tells the apocryphal story of a woman waiting at railway station whose suitcase fell open depositing its contents on the platform, including the charred corpse of a baby.

Many millions went through this and it is more or less absent from post-war German novels and non-fiction. It was also absent from acknowledgement in everyday life. As he grew up, Sebald felt that something was being kept from him: “at home, at school and by the German writers whose books I read hoping to glean more information”. He says it hung over his life like a dark cloud. The silence had its advantages of course: “the economic miracle” of Germany after the war “has its source in the well-kept secret of the corpses built into the foundations of our state, a secret that bound all Germans together in the post-war years”.

Undoubtedly, the reconstruction required a focus on the future rather than the past and, inevitably, literature would reflect this. While those in charge were removed, the mindset of nation remained: they continued to work hard without questioning, and the companies that supplied gas to the death camps continued their capitalist success stories. German industry became a byword for efficiency (precisely what prompted the invention of the death camps). However, on the cultural front, German literature faded behind the fresh new talents of North America. One must assume that forgetting is incompatible with great literature. Appropriate recognition of the genocide of the Jews was delayed. The same happened to their own experience of the air war. For this reason, Sebald accuses modern Germany of being “strikingly blind to history and lacking in tradition. We do not feel” he writes “any passionate interest in our earlier way of life and the specific features of our own civilisation, of the kind universally perceptible, for instance, in the culture of the British Isles. And when we turn to take a backward view, particularly of the years 1930 to 1950, we are always looking and looking away at the same time.”

He makes this movement clear in this analysis of the few accounts of the raids themselves by listing the kind of phrases used throughout:

‘On that dreadful day when our beautiful city was razed to the ground’

‘a prey to the flames’

‘that fateful night’

‘all hell was let loose’

‘we were staring into the inferno’

‘the dreadful fate of the cities of Germany’

In other words, endless cliché. Sebald says they are no more than gestures “sketched to banish memory”. The words slide by without gaining any purchase on the past. The truth has not been hidden, but it hasn’t exactly been registered. But should this be regretted? Well, when the lecture was first delivered, in 1997, Sebald felt it was appropriate to remind Germans that this forgetting remained part of:

the project of creating a greater Europe, a project that has already failed twice [and] is entering a new phase, and the sphere of the Deutschmark – history has a way of repeating itself – seems to extend almost precisely to the confines of the area occupied by the Wehrmacht in the year 1941.

He claims that the “psychic energy” of this project remains in the nation. If it is not brought into the open, it will carry on into the future. And that is certainly something to be regretted.

This is not to say there was complete silence about the air war. In the post-war years, fiction did try to approach what had happened. Sebald refers us to three writers who wrote about the destruction and were published. While he finds the novels superficially admirable for at least broaching the subject, he is disturbed by their form and content. For example, Hermann Kasack’s novel Die Stadt hinter dem Strom (The City Beyond the River) envelops the bombing raids and death camps into part of one big expressionist allegory. Sebald’s literary analysis is objective but his appalled disdain is also clear, particularly as, at the time of the novel’s publication, it was considered of “epoch-making significance”. Sebald suspects it was judged so because it appealed to the pre-war obsession with grand, utopian visions. In this way, they look away just like the clichéd reportage. But worse than that, in repeating pre-war fantasies of mysterious metaphysical worlds possessing transcendent truth, all these novels display “a profound ideological inflexibility”. Sebald says that the culture was still “in the midst of that pedagogic province which, in the German tradition, extends from Goethe … through Stefan George … and on to Stauffenberg and Himmler”.

So of what, one wonders, does he approve? Well, he welcomes Hubert Fichte’s novel Detlev’s Imitations, set in 1968, because it is “not too abstract in character” and includes “concrete and documentary” investigations into the raid on Hamburg. Specifically, the novel has genuine medical reports by a pathologist into the victims of the raids. They are straightforward autopsies of mummified corpses. All fiction pales before such documents. The gruesome facts make any imaginative effort seem evasive and pretentious. Stories become only a means of sustaining value where there is only flesh and bone. As it is, only clinical objectivity has the words for the calamity. Sebald, of course, doesn’t accept this. While he concedes that the reports were written in the interests of science, he does say that, within the narrow focus of its specialist language, the report “opens up a view into the abyss of a mind armed against all contingencies”. In the end, it is only another example of avoidance masquerading as proximity. He sets scientific analysis alongside the journalistic clichés and novelists’ fantasies. The pathologist’s rationality clings to a tradition in order to pass through the catastrophe untouched.

In order to bring out how the catastrophe made its mark on his own work, Sebald quotes extensively from his own. But that was in the German edition. It is excised from the English. This is a perverse decision. Sebald’s excuse is that the original subject of the lectures was poetics and it would inappropriate to repeat them now that the subject is the air war. I don’t see why these lectures don’t count as poetics still. Each of Sebald’s stories continues that sense of being kept from something, of the observer’s isolation, which is precisely the relation to the air war. The reticence of the narratives is really a patience. There is no aggressive push to imagine beyond what the narrator can see and what he hears at second-hand. Words and pictures remain orientated toward. It continues in us too, his readers. Perhaps, though, this isn’t enough. When we bandy around phrases like “literary greatness”, we contain past greatness, everything we understand to be great: the expansiveness of epic, the microcosm of theatre, the language-making power of poetry, the encyclopaedia of narrative fiction. Sebald cannot be included here. At least, not on those terms. If Sebald is great, it is in his refusal of such supremacy. The word greatness is changed if he is indeed great.

Sebald’s success, however, beyond such chatter, is in finding a form appropriate that investigates his deepest concerns in the most appropriate way. This is perhaps a mark of greatness.

5.

It is curious then that not one of Sebald’s fictional works approaches the air war. Not one character is a survivor of those events. As I noted, the fiction is generally misconstrued as Holocaust Literature, perhaps gaining more attention as a result. Austerlitz, for example, features a visit to the remains of Theresienstadt concentration camp in the Czech Republic. The tragedy is once again illuminated. This has a fine and necessary tradition. Aharon Appelfeld – himself a survivor – approves of fictional representation of the Holocaust because “the numbers and the facts were the murderers’ own well-proven means. Man as a number is one of the horrors of dehumanisation.”

One wonders what the response would have been if a novel had focussed entirely on individual survivors of Hamburg or Dresden? We might wonder again because as Sebald’s book appeared in paperback, so did Frederick Taylor’s study of the most infamous raid: Dresden: Tuesday, 13 February. It has been received with acclaim in the British press. In the Daily Telegraph, James Holland writes “with this fine, highly readable and scholarly work, we can finally view the terrible destruction of Dresden with renewed objectivity”, while David Cesarani in The Independent, after highlighting Sebald’s implicit comparison of the bombings to Nazi mass murder, calls Taylor’s an “authoritative and moving account” that “provides a truer, more fitting memorial” to those who died. Authority, objectivity and memorials is perhaps most welcome to those who were not on the receiving end. But how would it appear fictionally?

It wasn’t until 20 or more years after the war that Germany began to acknowledge the effect of its “psychic energy”. Certainly, one cannot claim that national awareness of the Holocaust is repressed. Indeed it has become commonplace in our idea of modern Germany: think of Daniel Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, or Harry Enfield’s contrite yet overbearing comic stereotype Jürgen the German, apologising for the war at every opportunity. The latter is not a figure that would have been possible when Primo Levi or Jean Améry began writing. Améry is the subject of one of three essay appended to the main lecture. He was a resistance fighter tortured by the Nazis. After the war, he concentrated on his paid work without attempting to write (for the same reason as Semprun). It was only in the 1960s that he published autobiographical essays reflecting on his terrible experience. What interests Sebald particularly is that he found a form to orientate the reader toward, to look but not look away at the same time. Where Sebald used a restrained style, Améry is more personal and polemical; he writes with “an implacable resentment”. Sebald is impressed that his work manages to “dispense with any kind of literary stylisation which might encourage a sense of complicity between writer and his readers.” Cliché and ingratiation are not present. Sebald compares Améry to the great Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard who, as a teenager, witnessed the bombing of Salzburg and later wrote with ferocious contempt for the institutionalised forgetfulness in his country. (NB: it is a shame Sebald’s essays on Bernhard are not already translated – and edition is required).

Such a comparison indicates that Sebald is not, as The Complete Review accuses him, contemptuous of the imagination; entirely the opposite. He is keen only to find a form that conveys the process by which the imagination dispenses with contact with its environment, as in Kasack’s highly imaginative novel. The task is more complex than the crude opposition between imagination and reality. Améry’s description of his shoulders being dislocated under torture is written without ornament. He does not try to convey the pain with the force of adjectives. Above all, his aim is to show that, as Sebald writes:

the practice of persecuting, torturing and exterminating an arbitrarily chosen adversary [is] not as a lamentable but incidental feature of totalitarian rule but, unreservedly, [...] its essential expression.

One cannot read Améry’s essays without confronting the possibility of wider implication of the events of his life. They cannot be read for the find out what happened only. In this way, autobiography becomes a means for furthering life.

For Sebald, Améry remains “the only one who denounced the obscenity of a psychologically and socially deformed society, and the outrage of supposing that history could proceed on its way afterwards almost undisturbed.” Indeed, he was so angry that he criticised Primo Levi for being too forgiving. It is Sebald’s thesis that the air war is as much part of that deformation as anything. It too has to be worked through: repression is not a healthy option. Sebald’s fiction demonstrates the need for patience required for Germany’s “coming to terms” with the Nazi era; how it had to empathise with the victims of its crimes from a distance. The same can be said for victims of the air war. Imagination is required rather than objectivity.

6.

After delivering the lectures Sebald and receiving press attention, he received many letters from distressed Germans, children at the time of the raids, whose traumatic memories have had no place to go. One can only imagine the scale of the trauma. However, seven years on from the lectures, there has been a more sustained attempt to bring this into public discourse. It reached a peak with the publication in 2002 of Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945, a book of several hundred pages describing the raids in relentless detail. It prompted an outpouring of blocked memories across Germany, becoming part of a nation debate about the subject. There was also a lot of anger, resentment and claims that the raids were war crimes. Sebald received letters from a middle-class neo-Nazis proclaiming Germany as the self-defensive victim, not the aggressor. Sebald is contemptuous. The process, he accepts, has to confront such danger. In this way, the responses to Sebald’s book become part of the literature.

It is a terribly instructive coincidence that many reviewers were writing in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. In the Boston Review, Susie Linfield tells of demonstrators equating the bombing of Dresden with the forthcoming Shock & Awe campaign on Baghdad. “I can think of few worse analogies” she writes.

The propagators of such analogies would say they are using historic knowledge to heighten moral awareness and thus prevent the commission of present and future horrors. But I fear that the opposite is true: The reliance on historic analogies is an evasion of the particular, indeed novel, political complexities that face us now, complexities that have emerged since (but are not solely the result of) September 11th. Like photographs of starving children or grieving mothers or blasted buildings, such analogies create instant, Pavlovian moral equivalencies. They shut down critical thought and ultimately, therefore, stifle moral acuity.

This is certainly true. It is why Sebald’s complained about the clichés of the accounts of the raids. They were a careless means of expression and abuse history. However, Linfield doesn’t offer an alternative, except by telling us to use “critical thought” and “moral acuity”. Maybe these elegant phrases tell us more than the protestors’ banners, though I’m not sure what. They too seem like gestures to banish unpleasant thoughts. With what Susie Linfield would compare the imminent bombing, I wonder? How would she demonstrate her feelings about it?

Meanwhile, Daniel Johnson, reviewing Friedrich’s Der Brand alongside Sebald, expresses his opinions about the demonstrators’ comparisons more forcefully. He calls it “moral cowardice” and blames Friedrich for aiming “his bombshell of a book at the ageing edifice of the Atlantic Alliance”. He says the book it enabled the German government to exploit “anti-Americanism”. While he accepts that the comparison of the Nazi Holocaust to the air war is “never spelt out” by Friedrich and Sebald – he does say that the “impassive accumulation of gruesome detail serves a rhetorical purpose: to demonstrate the utter inhumanity of the air war.” (If there was a humanity in the air war, Johnson doesn’t spell it out.) It all means that the Germans “might still be capable of repeating the mistakes of the past”, and he explicitly means the opposition to the invasion.

Christopher Hitchens also uses his review to support the invasion. He is suspicious of the language used by those recovering the air war, such as Sebald’s “weak qualifier” in the reference to the German population’s “vague feelings of shared guilt” about the Holocaust. “Vague?” he says “Remember what we are talking about”. Indeed. But perhaps “vague” means unspoken and unformed – which is certainly plausible. In conclusion, Hitchens himself refers to Iraqi exiles’ “infinite pain” in supporting the invasion when it is obvious they would not be running the gauntlet of US cluster bombs, or their children to endure the legacy of depleted uranium. So much for remembering what is being talked about.

While the majority of the reviewers referred to here use the air war to support or to excuse the Shock & Awe blitzkrieg, and all remain suspicious of Sebald’s project of imaginative empathy, they have nothing but admiration for his fiction. Hitchens says Sebald’s early death is “mourned by all who love writing for its own sake” (whatever that means) and Daniel Johnson says that had Sebald lived, he would “hardly have been able to avoid the attentions of the Swedish academicians”, though exactly why isn’t explained. In fact, they write next to nothing about the fiction. It’s as if they do not know what it is so prefer to keep it in the safe enclave of entertainment or salutory token of “some great woe that nothing in the world will ever put right” (so long as it’s the right kind of wrong). Remember it is Johnson who used the convenient half-truth of describing Sebald’s work as “a highly literary form of antiquarianism”. Perhaps it is fairly explained by the fact that they are reviewing a work of non-fiction. But, as I hope to have made clear here, On the Natural History of Destruction is a coda to Sebald’s extraordinary fiction, and for such prominent and serious critics to overlook this is curious indeed. But I would go further. These reviewers, mere literary critics, have used book reviews to become accessories to the crime of killing innocent people, and their fingers are stained not black, but red.

Links:
Stephen Mitchelmore’s review of Austerlitz
Vertigo: Collecting and Reading Sebald

Nowhere Without No – Maurice Blanchot

See all books by Maurice Blanchot at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Not half way through the year but already a book has come along that, at the end, I will say: this is it — the book of the year.

I am aware that there is something desperate about such a pronouncement. It reveals a need to fulfil empty time with an evasive monument. That is the nature of monuments after all. The bigger the monument the more it evades — hence the respect given to a new 800 page novel spanning generations, the collected works of a writer or a definitive biography of a tyrant. Yet the book I’m holding is a fragile 53 pages and is published by a small press in Sydney, Australia.

Nowhere Without No is, ironically, a collection of thirteen memorials by translators, academics and poets (sometimes a combination of all three) in honour of Maurice Blanchot, the French novelist and philosopher, who died in February 2003 aged 95.

The introduction by editor Kevin Hart explains the title. It comes from Rilke’s eighth Duino Elegy in which the poet writes of ‘a space that has been freed from ordinary time’ as experienced by children, animals and the dead:

It is always world
and never nowhere without no:
that pureness, that unwatched, which one breathes and
endlessly knows and never wants. But a child
might lose himself inside the quiet and become
shaken. Or someone dies and is.
For near to death one sees that death no more
and stares ahead, perhaps with a beast’s huge glance.

Blanchot’s gift is to reveal to us how literature is also nowhere without no. His work pursues writing to where it disappears into this space, as it separates itself from the reader and writer. Hart reminds us that Blanchot wrote (in the third person) of his own experience of this separation as he faced a firing squad in 1944. Waiting to die, there was:

"a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of beatitude (nothing happy, however) — sovereign elation? […] In this place, I will not try to analyse. He was perhaps suddenly in invincible. Dead — immortal. Perhaps ecstasy. Rather the feeling of compassion for suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal or eternal. Henceforth, he was bound to death by a surreptitious friendship." (from The Instant of My Death, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg)

The shots didn’t come; he was told to run and thereby regained a life where, from then on, he writes, "the instant of my death [was] henceforth always in abeyance". Later, he discovered that a manuscript had been taken from his room by enemy officers believing it to contain military secrets. Instead of the death of the author, there was the death of the text.

One might say: but this is written in the third person; it is either fiction or Blanchot is writing about another person — perhaps literature itself. That lost manuscript certainly has the convenience of fiction, standing for the agency and meaning as it withdraws. However, such a distinction is impossible. By writing in the third person, Blanchot emphasises the distance inherent to such reminiscence — itself already literature, already intimate with death.

Ten years later, Blanchot’s The Space of Literature is saturated with this experience:

- to write is to break the bond that unites the word with myself.
– to write is to withdraw language from the world.
– to write is to surrender to the fascination of time’s absence.
– the writer never reads his work. It is, for him, a secret.
– in the solitude of the work … we discover a more essential solitude.
– art is the power by which night opens
(trans. Ann Smock)

Throughout this extraordinary book, Blanchot traces the impact of the night on the work of various authors — Rilke, Mallarmé and Kafka in particular. If, for Kafka, "there exists only the outside, the glistening flow of the eternal outside" what does that mean for his world of expression, of escape, of liberty that is writing? The question is part of the work itself. In this way, reading Blanchot is frustrating: there is at once the assertiveness of the phrases quoted above and a resistence to actually saying anything in the usual manner. His assertions serve to obscure what was previously clear. Rather than offering an alternative to, say, a Freudian or Marxist reading of Metamorphosis, Blanchot reveals how each reading has to make a leap over the abyss.

For the reader, it is intoxicating, yet almost impossible to then put to use. Lydia Davis — pioneering translator of the récit Death Sentence — says she can follow the argument line by line yet summary is resisted. "Somehow the experience of reading had to take place moment by moment". This resistence, she finds, is experienced by most other readers. It is not a criticism.

Charlotte Mandell — translator of The Work of Fire and The Book to Come — recalls how she felt a need to write to Blanchot to thank him for the silence in his words — for the revelation of the space. Her gratitude then is not for the man himself but for his absence, such is the perversity of his gift. Mandell doesn’t say whether he replied — though others report replies of exceptional courtesy and concern. Only Jacques Derrida — in the address given at the cremation — tells of the man himself: brief meetings in a university office throughout which Blanchot wore a gentle smile, and then breathless on the phone toward the end. He seems ghostly even in life.

One wonders how much this effacement contributes to the unique aura of his works? Not much, if the attempts to imitate him are any guide. The poet Jacques Dupin writes that in Blanchot’s fragmentary writing:

"his speech yielded a conductive wire of an extreme delicacy in search of the ultimate meaning, that which was well beyond one’s grasp and which indicated from very high up how to pass over the precipices, how to master the turbulance and the proliferation, of the forces of discolation that exhaust the text, that strangle the voice."

While Blanchot’s prose can be said to be poetic — and Dupin is surely right to detect a "demanding poet" behind the prose – it is not flighty and impressionistic. The silence of the words is achieved by the extreme patience and attention to the weight of words — a patience frequently expressed in doubt. Blanchot’s disciples have a remarkable confidence to use key word and oxymorons that appear throughout Blanchot’s work — passivity, sovereign relation, forgetfulness without memory, the impossible real, motionless retreat, purposiveness without purpose — in the assumption that they automatically plumb the depths as they do in Blanchot. Curiously, they don’t. As Blanchot himself wrote:

"Desire of writing, writing of desire. Desire of knowledge, knowledge of desire. Let us not believe that we have said anything at all with these reversals."

The merit of Nowhere Without No is that, unlike so much Blanchot-related material, it doesn’t strain to say too much. Such is the silence brought by death perhaps. The latter also means the distance between the author and his work is foregrounded, if only in the reader’s mind.

Michael Holland emphasises the distance in a remarkable, two-page analysis of science-fiction. The genre, he says, necessarily "hangs back from thinking the totality of what it projects – which is to say total transcendence in the here and now". He means it denies mortality. And that means such transcendence is pure violence: "Sci-fi is thus essentially nihilistic" because it cannot accommodate bodily death on the level of its narrative. He urges us to read and re-read Blanchot in order to hold off such nihilism. This is how we can learn from Blanchot. There is no need to adopt his style. Blanchot himself did exactly that in his own learning.

Mark C. Taylor remarks on Blanchot’s neglected kinship with an earlier enigmatic philosopher-writer: "It was …Kierkegaard" he writes "who first realised that philosophy can be itself only by becoming literature; and it was Kierkegaard who insisted tht the only way to be truly in the world is to withdraw from it." Taylor asked for a meeting to discuss it but got a note saying: "Though I might wish it otherwise, the conditions of my work make it impossible for us to meet". Still, he confirmed to Taylor that Kierkegaard was indeed a secret sharer. He helped Blanchot find his own way. This collection, modest in size and character as it is, offers Blanchot as a guide to us, placing the emphasis firmly on the writing:

"I have long thought that some things are so intimate that they can never be said but must be written. Writing does not merely create distance but also allows one to draw closer than any spoken word. This closeness must not be confused with presence. Writing brings the remote near by allowing presence to withdraw. The lasting lesson of Blanchot is that withdrawal opens up the space-time of desire whose absence is death. Though he has been taken from us, he will continue to give what is never ours to possess."

The Great Fire of London: A Story with Interpolations and Bifurcations – Jacques Roubaud

See all books by Jacques Roubaud at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

I have tried to write about Jacques Roubaud’s novel The Great Fire of London many times.

No, that’s not true. I have not written anything. Rather, I have felt many times the need to write about The Great Fire of London.

But that’s not true either. I have felt the need to remove this need; that’s all.

I have assumed that writing would remove the need. There seems to be no other way. But what is there to write? The Great Fire of London is a fearfully complex book. There are pages betraying the influence of Roubaud’s academic career as a mathematician. I cannot understand a great deal of it. But maybe that is a good thing. If I wrote about the novel by trying to unravel its fearful complexity, I might ruin what makes it so persistently memorable, which isn’t a result of its fearful complexity. It is something to do with its underlying simplicity and intimacy. But such a statement is itself too simplistic. Either way, it is deeply moving and inspiring book.

Not that I would unequivocally recommend rushing out to get a copy. It is not an easy read. The subject matter is frequently incomprehensible, occasionally boring and evasive. All these aspects, however, seem fundamental to it; that is, not errors of art and craft. So, to look beyond these, to direct one’s steady gaze at the essence of the novel might be to repeat Orpheus’ error when retrieving his wife Eurydice from the underworld. He looked back as he led her from the darkness, so breaking his vow to the God of the underworld. He was not meant to look. She was then condemned to remain in the dark and he was ripped apart. Orpheus’ dismembered head sings of his loss as it floats down a river. Similarly, perhaps, if one attempts to retrieve art from the darkness of its book-loneliness by bringing it into the brightness of public discourse, its essence might well get left behind too. What’s left would be the beauty of its dissembling architecture; the words of Orpheus’ song. This is not what makes it beautiful.

So what is it? One helpful aspect of The Great Fire of London is that Roubaud’s narrator also assumes that writing is his only recourse. Perhaps there is something to learn about this impulse, or at least how might affect what is written.

In the opening chapter, the narrator – who is Roubaud himself, more or less, although more or less is perhaps an infinity I can only hope to overlook here – is at his desk at five in the morning, drinking coffee. He listens to the running motor of a delivery truck in the street below. Immediately, we are with him in the cool solitude of dawn. We reflect in isolation from the world in motion; it becomes five o’clock in the morning for us too. (Scott Fitzgerald says “In the real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day“; at five o’clock, one begins to write about it). The narrator tells us that he writes:

in minute, close-packed letters, without deletions, regrets, reflection, imagination, impatience” and that he is writing “only in order to keep on going, to elude the anguish awaiting me once I break off.

His anguish is inevitable, for a reason that soon becomes clear. Writing holds anguish at bay. Reading and sleep help too, he says. They provide the local palliative of “escapism”. What we read, though, is not in the form of traditional writerly escapism; a crime thriller, perhaps, or maybe a philosophical abstraction cast from an ivory tower, or even the “talking cure” of confessional memoir. It’s difficult to say what kind of book it is. Yes, it is a novel, even if I found my copy in the History section of a remaindered bookshop. Yet while it partakes of the liberating playfulness of fiction, it also looks back – ever so obliquely, yet ever so insistently – into his pool of anguish: the sudden, premature death of Alix, his wife. And this really happened. It’s no fiction.

Death And The Penguin – Andrey Kurkov

See all books by Andrey Kurkov at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

This book is a page-turner. The simplicity and overt plainness of the prose combine with the perverse congeniality of the foreground subject matter to make one carry on, ignoring worldly concerns. And while the plot is complex it is also strangely unimportant, compared, that is, to the foreground.

Viktor, a 39-year-old journalist, lives in a tenement block in Kiev, captial of the relatively new nation of Ukraine (not The Ukraine). Like many of us in the Deregulated World, he doesn’t have a permanent job and relies instead on contacts to bag the odd journalistic assignment. There is a lot of time off. We join him as he tries to make use of his empty time by writing fiction, something he’s always dreamed of doing on a permanent basis. He wants to escape the teasing ghostliness of the short story and write what the real world thinks is the real thing: a novel. Instead, he sits at his kitchen table and writes another short story, later hawking it around a few newspapers.

This might be the beginning of many other worthy, socially accurate novels portraying post-Soviet economic "reform". But Viktor has a saving grace for the reader: his pet Misha, the penguin of the title. Misha came from an impoverished local zoo when they offered its animals as pets to anyone who could provide food for them. Viktor took the penguin because, abandoned by his girlfriend the week before, he had been feeling lonely: "But Misha brought his own kind of loneliness", we’re told, "and the result was … two complementary lonelinesses".

Misha’s presence in the novel is glorious. Whatever Viktor does, Misha is somewhere in the background asking for attention by not asking. We always want to know what he’s doing, how he is, what he’s feeling. Whenever we read of Viktor’s exploits, and they are copious, we think of Misha standing somewhere in the background, his emotions, if he has any, concealed by his expressionless exterior. The only hint of an answer comes when Viktor runs him a cold bath and he flops into it happily, or when he is taken to a frozen lake during the winter months and he disappears into a fishing hole for ages, bewildering alcoholic fisherman when he pops out again.

In my fictional experience, only Karenin in Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Balak in SY Agnon’s Only Yesterday do pet animals (in this case both dogs) appear so accurately and memorably. However, Misha is a suffering penguin: he has depression. An elderly penguinologists, as he calls himself, tells Viktor that Misha is superheated under his two layers of fat, and nobody would be happy feeling like that, would they? Viktor feels sorry for his pet but doesn’t seem to make much effort to cheer him up except to ply him with lots of seafood.

Misha remains in the background as most of the novel is taken up with Viktor’s life. He gets a job writing obituaries for the main Kiev newspaper. He makes a name for himself with the philosophical flourishes and elegiac, allusive nature of his obelisks, as he calls them. His editor pays him well in US dollars. The plot revolves around the behind-the-scenes ramifications of these obituaries. This is also why we turn the pages, though more in agitation than pleasure. We want to find out what is going on and how it all works out.

In the meantime, and the meantime seems to last most of the entire 227 pages, we live in Viktor’s world, full of events suggesting something dark going on elsewhere, waiting to spring into his life with violence, yet also quite flat. A man, touchingly known to us as Misha-non-penguin, leaves his young daughter Sonya with Viktor and then disappears. A man turns up and says he’s taking Sonya away with him, but he soon disappears too, and then Viktor is hired by a mobster to attend funerals with Misha at $1000 a time. But nothing is revealed; Viktor worries, relaxes, worries again. Time passes, that’s all. A friendly militiaman offers Nina, his niece, as Sonya’s nanny, and she promptly becomes Viktor’s lover without, it seems, any passion passing between them (that "complementary loneliness" again). Life carries on as dully as usual and Viktor continues with his obelisks at his kitchen table.

So what makes this such an amusing, affecting, readable novel? Well, if Misha the penguin is so attractive to us in his silence, mystery and apparent sadness, then the "death" of the title is his abstract equal – standing behind the action, waiting, inscrutable, not asking for anything, yet preying on one’s mind (in fact, I’m told that the Russian original means "Death of a Stranger"). The pleasure it affords us as we read is the same pleasure Viktor gets from his writing. It is an oddly comforting voyeurism on life in general, a life which is elsewhere, the subject of endless conjecture (the "plot" we are all in search of). We watch it all from the perspective of a place where nothing happens – Viktor’s mind, the obituaries he writes, this novel in particular and literature in general. We watch it all with death and the penguin blinking impassively in the corner, and we are oddly moved. We don’t want it to end, no matter how plainly written or routinely translated it is. It complements our loneliness.

All Souls’ Day – Cees Nooteboom

See all books by Cees Nooteboom at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

"The shortcut does not allow one to arrive someplace more directly (more quickly), but rather to lose the way that ought to lead there."  Maurice Blanchot

How does one deal with trauma? It’s a common question. Arthur Daane, roving documentary cameraman and protagonist of Cees Nooteboom’s latest novel, asks it too. He thinks of some of the traumatic events of his time:

"The woman who happened to be passing by when the bomb exploded in Madrid, the seven Trappist monks whose throats were cut in Algiers, the twenty boys gunned down before their parents’ eyes in Colombia, the entire trainful of commuters hacked to death with machetes in a five-minute burst of orgiastic fury in Johannesburg, the two hundred passengers on the plane that exploded above the sea, the two, three or six thousand men and boys killed in Srebrenica, the hundreds of thousand of woman and children slain in Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Angola."

The list could go on and on. And that fact, Daane thinks, is perhaps the worst. "For one moment, a day, a week, they were front-page news, for several seconds they flowed through cables in every part of the globe, and then it began, the black, delete-button darkness of oblivion." Amnesia sets in "as if … humanity wasn’t interested in individual names, only the blind survival of the species."

Daane is, as you might have guessed, a melancholy soul. But his otherwise mundane ruminations have a traumatic resonance. Some time before the novel begins, his wife and child were killed in a place crash. Alone, in time between jobs, he wanders the streets of Berlin with his camera, recording quiet moments at dawn or dusk in a city full of ghosts. This is his way of resisting amnesia, and yet it is also his way of forgetting ("dealing with" one might say) the permanent absence of his family. The paradox is central to his melancholy and to this novel. How can he move on without obliterating their individual names? The temptation is to dive into work, into experience and other forms of forgetfulness, but to do that, he thinks, would, in turn, lead to the sleep of reason, thereby summoning up the nightmares already spoken of.

In first half of the novel, we follow Arthur on his wandering. He visits friends in a bar, gets caught up with dying tramp on the snow-covered streets, visits a gallery with two paintings by Caspar David Friedrich that he is fascinated by, and a library that will, in the second half, change his life. Many reviewers have referred to this wandering with, at best, condescension. In particular, they disapprove of Arthur’s "intellectual posturing", which seems to mean any mention of anything other than that which will take the story "forward" into forgetfulness. This is a form of criticism that avoids the very issue addressed by the novel. Arthur is searching for an. He talks with his living friends, and listens to those who are dead, which take the form of memories, books, paintings, films, science and philosophy. It helps him. It helps his friends. But like all friends, they have their limits. And he knows it. They are useful only in their uselessness. This novel is a part of that scheme too. It has this wonderfully strange quality of enabling us to maintain contact with what is important to us, that which otherwise seems inaccessible, in that which takes us further away (i.e "escapism"). Indeed, the All Souls’ Day of the title is the Catholic holiday (November 2nd) commemorating the souls of the dead; another form of fiction in which one has to place one’s trust in order to cross the abyss.

On a ferry crossing the Baltic, thinking of the 1994 MV Estonia disaster, Arthur reflects that there is a thin membrane between him and chaos, as thin as the window he presses his face to, looking out to sea. The more ignorant of the reviewers (i.e. Julie Myerson of The Guardian) would rather we weren’t reminded of this and be allowed to plunge into forgetfulness, as if it were possible without denial. Nooteboom’s achievement is to open the abyss of history out of these everyday thoughts. He does this by showing how the rich heritage of speculation in the arts and sciences derives from the same confrontation with trauma as experienced by Arthur. This is seen as a failure by those, like Myerson, who can see learning only as a trophy to be displayed. Nooteboom wears his learning lightly but it seems one can’t escape the philistine thought-police of English literary criticism.

In terms of the plot, Arthur contrives to meet a history research student beginning a project on an obscure Spanish queen of the 12th Century. From what little is revealed, she appears, like Arthur, to be taking a roundabout route in resolving personal trauma. Despite this, both Arthur and readers of the novel seem to be on the brink of relief from endless speculation by falling into a love story. But the student, Elik, a fellow Dutch ex-patriot, remains mysteriously private despite their physical intimacy. Through her silence, she prompts even more fevered questioning. After a date, she disappears without warning and, when they meet again, refuses to reveal very much of herself. She prefers to argue about historiography with one of Arthur’s scholarly friends. The novelist doesn’t fill in the blanks for us; she remains a figure in the shadows at the edge of the prose. We have to speculate as much as Arthur, another reason for lazy readers to complain. Indeed, this novel is, despite its conventional, conversational surface, packed full of implicit allusions to its own provisional status in relation to its own research. There’s Arthur’s private film project (that Myerson selfishly misreads as "solipsistic" when it is precisely the opposite); there’s Elik’s research project much-criticised by her supervisor; and there’s the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich quietly expressing a latent trauma much like that of Munch’s much noisier The Scream. However, the most obvious correlation is Arthur’s half-requited infatuation with Elik. While for Myerson all this is inadmissibly reflexive, it creates a stimulating vertigo for the reader. We’re not allowed to forget for very long that the novel, and so its reader, is subject to the same problems of knowledge and its refusal.

This final point is emphasised by the occasional chapters in which a kind of Greek chorus intervenes in the narrative, looking down on the events with cool compassion. It’s unclear who is speaking. Perhaps it’s the voice of all that which cannot be included in what is, necessarily, a circumscribed narrative. Perhaps it’s Arthur’s late wife keeping a concerned eye on her husband. But most likely it is the voice from 500 years from now, when the past-as-tragedy has become the past-as-absurdist-comedy, just as the life of the Spanish queen seems to us now. Elik’s project was to rescue the queen from such a fate. Her supervisor warns her it might take a decade and be, in the end, futile; no one is likely to read the results. But she continues anyway, perhaps because of that, just as Arthur will continue to pursue Elik. For many, this novel will be similarly futile, slow-moving, overlong and provisional, but I’m very grateful that Cees Nooteboom has taken the long way round and rescued something precious from the traumatic inferno.

“Translating is only a more intense and more demanding form of what we do whenever we read” – JM Coetzee

Coetzee might also have added “whenever we live”. Unless, like the dead, one is perfectly at home in the world, a close reading of one’s environment is required to navigate and negotiate oneself through the day. To reduce the pressure, however, we choose to organise a predictable world. This goes for what we call our leisure time also. If we don’t read the same books, watch the same films or listen to the same music over and over, at least we choose that which offers a guarantee of familiarity – which is what its generic format is anyway – with a façade of newness. There is a primal fear of the new and no amount of pretending to openness changes that. There is, however, at the same time, an incessant desire for the new.

Dante’s Inferno correlates with this condition because, at every turn, as the pilgrim narrator walks through Hell, he finds its inhabitants enduring new and ever more terrible punishments. Horror and fascination merge. It also correlates with our entertainment choices because, unlike normal life, the pilgrim is relatively safe from danger. For example, one of the punishments of the eighth circle features the “barrators” (mercenaries, bribe-takers etc). They have to remain submerged naked in boiling pitch or else demons swoop down, hook them with pincers, carry them to the shore, and then tear them apart.

The pilgrim is very curious about the individuals behind their veils of suffering, and so, albeit reluctantly, the demons allow him to quiz one victim about to be filleted to find out whom he is and with whom he shares his punishment. The shade tells him, then uses the distraction to escape and dive back beneath the surface. The demons are not pleased, so the pilgrim and his guide hurry along unsure whether they are immune to their visceral justice, rather like us slyly putting a book back on the library shelf while using the alibi of knowledge to mitigate to oneself the schadenfreude implicit to reading books about others’ suffering. The pilgrim knows he is implicated in his action so doesn’t become complacent, or if he does is quickly put straight by his guide. Every detail of his journey adds to the overall understanding of his place in the greater scheme of things, where nothing is new under God. His journey is to the end of the new: that is, Heaven.

Inferno is only the first part of The Divine Comedy (called the Commedia by Dante, it gained the addition of “Divine” much later), and is followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso. Yet it is by far the most read of the three. As Peter Hawkins has said, this is “in part because of Dante’s titillatingly gruesome dissection of each fresh horror” but also because, and this perhaps the freshest horror, “we feel most at home here.” Hawkins explains: “in Hell the self is sovereign, cut off, frozen in obsession and monomania, always alone no matter how dense the crowd.” So it seems that rather than Dante showing us what awaits us if we do not obey God’s law, Inferno describes the crises that threaten our everyday lives, one we need to be on the look out to resist by translating, understanding and acting accordingly.

The pilgrim’s own story begins in a state of confusion and imminent breakdown; as newly translated by Michael Palma:

“Midway through the journey of our life, I found
myself in a dark wood, for I had strayed
from the straight pathway to this tangled ground.
How hard it is to tell of, overlaid
with harsh and savage growth, so wild and raw
the thought of it still makes me feel afraid.”

This is both real and allegorical. One needn’t be troubled with sorting the distinction. We sense the fictional space and the existential reality of mental anguish. But why should this particular means of expression be important? Why not just express it more directly? Well, if one is in the depths of despair “direction” is part of the problem; one is torn from all sides. One must seek the straight pathway. Dante’s poem is about how the pilgrim did this; or rather what helped him to do this. As the pilgrim tries the shortest (more direct) routes, he is blocked by three beasts: a leopard, a lion and a she-wolf. He is driven downward to escape evisceration and meets the ghost of Dante’s literary hero, the Roman poet Virgil, hoarse through long silence, waiting to show him the true way. And so begins the long voyage to heaven, guided, once Virgil is left behind in Hell, by Beatrice, the ideal love of Dante’s life.

Perhaps it is this potent mix of the formal and the authentic that has appealed to so many writers over the last century. Not only is it beautiful poetry and an exciting narrative, but for those struggling with their own writing, as so many still do, it offers an example of how to respond to the demands of craftsmanship and tradition while not falling into verbal sterility if one embraces them, or the empty freedom of expressionism if one rejects them. One can write of what is most important, that which seems inaccessible in normal modes of writing, within a strict structure of one’s own devising. A good many of those writers have been some of the greatest poets of that century: TS Eliot, WB Yeats, Eugenio Montale, Osip Mandelstam and Robert Lowell. Peter Hawkins has co-edited The Poets’ Dante, a new collection of essays by these, and many others, that discuss Dante’s influence on their own work.

Eliot discusses the problems of translating the rhyming scheme Dante invented for the Commedia: the famous Terza Rima. “A different meter is a different mode of thought” he writes, and therefore demands a translation faithful to the scheme to achieve the same “thought-form”. This is what Michael Palma has attempted, that is, rhyming in English aba/bcb/cdc. As I don’t understand Italian, I won’t comment on the quality of the translation, except to say in comparison with others it is unobtrusive. This is a good thing, as Eliot describes how before reading a translation in terza rima he is “always worried in anticipation, by the inevitable shifts and twists which I know the translator will be obliged to make, in order to fit Dante’s words into English rhyme.” Apart from “Meo the pixilated” for what others translate as “Bedazzled” in Canto 29, nothing much jarred. Indeed, the rhymes were very quiet. In that respect, it is like the original according to Eliot: “extremely easy to read”. As an edition, however, I still prefer Robert Pinksy’s perfect FSG paperback of 1996.

In one of the best books on Dante, The Undivine Comedy, Teodolina Barolini concurs with Eliot’s belief in the importance of the rhyming scheme because, she says, the terza rima “mimics the voyage of life by providing both unceasing forward motion and recurrent backward glances” thereby “imitating the genealogical flow of human history, in which the creation of each new identity requires the grafting of alterity onto a previous identity.”

Unfortunately, only half of the essays in The Poets’ Dante bring out this dynamic in the development of each individual poet or provide something else of interest. In the rest, either there is too much reverential bowing or too much sub-academic analysis (or plain nonsense in the case of WB Yeats). Osip Mandelstam’s long, sometimes caustic “Conversation about Dante” is, with Eliot’s contribution, an exception, and that’s probably because the Stalinist maelstrom into which he eventually disappeared gave his reading extra existential presence. However, my favourite writer in the collection is not really a great poet, although he did write poems: Jorge Luis Borges’ fame derives from his super-compressed stories, and as Eliot cites Dante’s “force of compression” as a major quality, it suggests there is a closer affinity between him and Dante than any of the other essayists. His love of the poem goes as far as any other of the contributors:

“I believe that the apex of literature, of all literatures, is the Commedia. This does not imply that I agree with its theology, or with its mythology, which is a combination of Christianity and pagan myth. What it means is that no book has given me such intense aesthetic emotions. And I am a hedonistic reader; I look for emotion in books.”

Borges’ deceptively light stories have a similar quality for the hedonist. They also give off the whiff of ancient libraries holding the arcane works of the Middle Ages when, Borges says “the idea of a text capable of multiple meanings” was predominant. It was a time that “gave us Gothic architecture, the Icelandic sagas, and the Scholastic philosophy in which everything is discussed.” It is perhaps the multiple meanings that provides the intensity of emotion, similar itself to the engagement of translating the world.

Borges accounts for our otherwise strange attraction to the Commedia by comparing it to the novel, and justifies this by pointing out that the origin of poetry is the epic narrative, and that Dante’s poem is, like the novel, sustained by narrative. (If this is the case, another collection called, this time, The Novelists’ Dante, would be very welcome.) “A contemporary novel,” Borges says, “requires five or six hundred pages to make us know somebody, if it ever does. For Dante, a single moment is enough.”

This seemed to haunt Borges. Elsewhere he writes: “Everyone is defined forever in a single instant of their lives, a moment in which a man encounters his self for always.” Perhaps this is the crisis that Borges recognised in the origins of the Commedia; the fear of being defined in this way, trapped for eternity in a frantic, and ultimately futile, pursuit of the new. Borges didn’t write another Commedia of course; he recognised there is a threat of anachronism in an excessive respect for tradition. For Borges, his Virgil was literature itself, while his Beatrice was, in the end, oblivion.

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.

What if everything we can be depends on playing a role? Where would that leave us? Well, first of all, it would mean that the public self, the one presented to the world, is not “a mask” but the original; the thing itself. Behind the scenes, alone, we live the mystery of self-consciousness. We wonder who it is that wakes at four to soundless dark. Alone, we dream of another life; the one in the biography. Perhaps the oppressive climate of our culture – as seen in the triumphant exposés of the press and the prurience of Reality TV – is due to our frantic need to remove in others what we see as a façade in ourselves. And as art is seen as an adjunct of this removal (“expressing the inner self”), so the inevitable disappointment in its resistant playfulness leads to a shift in preference to revelatory biography and memoir. Could this be stage fright on our part?

Early on in Thomas Bernhard: the making of an Austrian, the first English biography of the Austrian novelist, playwright and poet, Gitta Honegger says the apparatus of the theatre is an “annoyingly overused existential paradigm”, and she’s right. I’ve only used it once and it’s annoying me already. However, it is clear that her subject is the paradigm’s essential figure. There seems to be no private Thomas Bernhard. As such, Honegger says he is a particularly Austrian phenomenon. The nation, she says, transplanted the baroque theatrics of the old Hapsburg Empire into its cultural life, notably the Salzburg Festival, the state run Burgtheatre, and one man: Thomas Bernhard. Each provided an arena for Austria to conjure its self image.

In Bernhard’s case, it was invariably a negative image, as if Austria needed an impression of embattlement against a hostile world. For example, when Bernhard received a state prize and made critical remarks about the state in his acceptance speech, a Government minister stormed out and slammed a glass door so violently that it smashed. And just before his death in 1989, he was verbally attacked by the President (an ex-Nazi), and physically attacked on a bus by an old lady wielding an umbrella. Since his death, however, Bernhard has become a national treasure. His vitriol has been rebranded, Guy Fawkes-like, into a fireworks display. As a result, his description of Austria as a place with more Nazis in 1988 than in 1938 (the cause of the President’s and the old lady’s wrath) is safely consigned to history. Like the “Anschluss” and the President’s SS uniform, it is part of Austria’s rich cultural heritage. Perhaps this is why, in his will, Bernhard refused to allow the publication or performance of his work within the Austrian state for the duration of the copyright; he foresaw his place in the state circus. (The lawyers have since got around this.)

However, the important thing to remember is that it wasn’t Bernhard who said Austria was still full of Nazis, it was a character in his play “Heldenplatz”. And while everyone assumes Bernhard meant every word as his own, those words are part of a whole that, as JJ Long explains in his book The Novels Of Thomas Bernhard: form and its function, demands to be experienced not in isolation as preferred by the culture-vultures, but in real time. If this is done, irony leaks into the hyperbole and all attitudes become unstable, even irony. In effect, even after death, Bernhard still performs, refusing to become a museum piece. The man himself remains a mystery. So what, in fact, did Thomas Bernhard think? Who was he when alone, no longer dancing before the appalled Viennese bourgeoisie? These are questions for a biography.

But don’t get your hopes up. As Honegger’s subtitle indicates, there is a plea of mitigation. She says her book is a “cultural biography”; as much about Austria as about Bernhard. While this is disappointing, it is also understandable. Most correspondence is unavailable, and friends do not say anything particularly intimate. In fact, the one clear sexual revelation doesn’t alter the image of a performer: Bernhard liked to masturbate in front of a mirror! We’re told this on page 10, so it’s all over pretty quickly. Instead of a chronological narrative, we’re given themes in which Honegger makes frequent (and wearying) digressions into cultural history and their relevance to Bernhard, such as the notion of “Heimat”, and the significance of the theatre in Austria.

In connection with the latter, Honegger rightly makes much of Bernhard’s staging of his experience. In his compelling memoirs (written in five short volumes but collected in English as Gathering Evidence), Bernhard recalls events through the eyes of his younger self while he (the younger self) is also observing or reflecting. He observes his younger self observing from a vantage point separate from the “action”. One observation point leads to another and then another. We might see this as a prime example of Chinese-box Postmodernism where all facts are as hollow as the next, but in Bernhard’s memoir the gnawing question of origin is always there. The facts are plain: Bernhard’s father abandoned his mother before Thomas was born, and died during the war years in mysterious circumstances; he either killed himself or was murdered. He never met his son. Bernhard was later punished by his bitter mother who saw her humiliation in the inherited features of her boy. No amount of virtuoso storytelling and opinionating could prevent the author from being thrown toward the bitter facts of his birth, and its consequences, much as we wonder, whilst vomiting, what we had eaten to cause it.

Bernhard’s early life was also blighted by the Nazi era. He saw at first hand the terror of Allied bombing raids on Salzburg. Barely a teenager, death closed in from all sides. And after the war, when he tried to make his way in the world as a trained singer, he was struck down with tuberculosis after working in freezing conditions in a grocery store. In hospital, with his lungs full of breathtaking sputum, he was given the Last Rites. Miraculously, he survived when all around were dying. Honegger says he wrote the memoir as a record of his victory over that death and the attempts at metaphorical suffocation by his upbringing in particular, and Austrian society in general. Victory was the result of a decision to become himself, to live despite all that suffocated him, even though it was futile. I say “futile” because all that suffocated him also provided the oxygen. It is no coincidence that, despite the oppressive details, there is a sense of freedom pulsing out of the pages of Gathering Evidence. Later, the existential energy of Bernhard’s neurasthenic narrators will also emerge from this outrageous, paradoxical act of will.

Perhaps it because Bernhard provides the most useful guide to his life that Honegger does not attempt to take us through the minutiae of his daily existence. Yet while the analysis is very interesting, one longs for that minutiae. Recently, a BBC Radio 3 documentary on Bernhard revealed that his record collection consisted almost entirely of the 19th Century Romantic repertoire. One might have assumed this great Modernist would have preferred Schönberg and Webern, Bach and Haydn over Schubert and Brahms. Apparently not. (Curiously, this is similar to Beckett). I don’t recall Honegger mentioning anything like this. Nor does she mention the novel Bernhard had sketched out before his death. She prefers to skim over the surface, taking what is necessary for her themed coverage. When it comes to Bernhard’s sexuality, for example, there is an exhausting bout of Freudian analysis arising from his father’s absence and his mother’s maltreatment. It is unconvincing only because it is so persuasive. Actually the same is true of the opinions expressed by Bernhard’s narrators. Perhaps Honegger is having a laugh as our brows sweat over the complexities of Oedipal anxiety? I would like to think so. In the rest of the book, Freud gets barely a mention. It is very odd.

It is also vague. We don’t get a definitive answer as to whether Bernhard was hetero-, bi- or homosexual. Honegger says he “came between couples”, which suggests one conclusion, but what she means is that both sexes were drawn into an ambiguous relationship with the writer. It’s a living example of Bernhard’s elusiveness, and proof of nothing else. Another is the one major relationship outside his family. It was with a woman 39 years older than himself. She was a widow who befriended Bernhard when he was a young writer. She provided a home and material support when he was struggling. He called her his “Lebensmench” (Lifeperson); a word he invented. Understandably, Honegger doesn’t have much to give us on the details of this partnership. All windows are opaque. The same is true, more or less, for other areas of his life. Indeed, Bernhard is a phantom in his own biography.

JJ Long takes a firmer route by concentrating on the novels. Bernhard, he says, was “a writer of considerable diversity, profoundly concerned with the problems and potential of storytelling.” Originally a doctoral thesis, The Novels of Thomas Bernhard: form and its function uses the technical language of Narrative Theory to understand the unique qualities of Bernhard’s writing. Reading it requires a high level of patience and concentration. Moreover, it leaves the lengthy quotations in German untranslated. This is regrettable as those most likely to be drawn to the book – Germanless Bernhard fans – will be hampered. Presumably the costs involved are prohibitive. Still, even monolinguists can gain a good deal from what’s left. Whereas Honegger bizarrely accuses Bernhard of being a solipsist – someone for whom the world is merely a projection of their own mind – Long stresses the “narrative strategies” and “hermeneutic sequences” employed to undermine such narrow interpretations of Bernhard’s monological prose.

For example, he writes that the reflective form of the great, valedictory novel Extinction allows “an excavation of the past even as it moves forward into the future.” The novel’s narrator fires at familiar targets – particularly the repression of the Nazi past – even as he himself succumbs to the same temptation to repress the facts of his own life in order to resist the impending extinction of the title. Indeed, the targets are not only familiar but familial. Long shows how most of Bernhard’s novels – like his memoir – are concerned with “transgenerational transmission” (that is, inheritance). The narrator’s family consists of ex-Nazi parents, both sad and monstrous people, whom he loves and hates in equal measure, as well as grotesque siblings who have not resisted the legacy of repression. As the eldest, the narrator inherits the family’s country estate in darkest Austria when the parents are killed in a car crash. As he also feels that he has not got long to live, he decides he must return from his sunny life in Rome to redeem the legacy. We don’t get to find out how he does this until the final page. As he goes forward to do this, he reflects on why it is required.

Yet the reason why the narrator’s predicament compels our attention, and gives us pleasure, is his spirited unwillingness to complete the task. He is forever delaying the end in both the action as described (stalling outside the gates of the estate) and in the act of storytelling itself (spinning variations of anecdotes and opinions). Long says these delaying tactics are achieved through “embedded narratives” and “retarding elements”. As a successful doctoral candidate, “pleasure” is not an issue for him, but for those of us who turn to Bernhard for this reason, it is interesting to note how these techniques create an experience similar to the reading of a thriller or detective novel. In those genres, pleasure comes from the growth of mystery and suspense before the inevitable denouement.

Extinction is similar in that one reads to find out what happens next. However, the distinction is that the thriller cannot reproduce the same pleasure on re-reading. A new story is required every time. Extinction on the other hand positively demands to be re-read in order to enjoy that delay again and again. In fact it becomes more enjoyable as we join with the narrator repeating stories and opinions in order to delay our return to the mundane world. Unfortunately for him, the delay has more serious import for the narrator. For a time, we feel more alive even if our noses are “buried in a book”. This is the great problem and potential of storytelling. Long’s analysis, which is richer and more complex than I have space (or patience) to detail, manages to elucidate Bernhard’s method and highlight his remarkable technical achievement. One cannot go away from this book and still believe, as so many do, that Bernhard is merely a ranting egoist. Those who already know better will perhaps understand more clearly how Bernhard maintained his high-wire act, though we would still like to know more in physical detail.

In one brief insight to his working process, Honegger quotes Bernhard as saying he wrote “with full commitment”; his entire body took part in the creative process. Perhaps this is why he preferred to call his novels “prose texts” as this suggests a script for performance. Indeed, Bernhard’s many plays are not greatly different from the novels. It seems Bernhard himself felt most alive when writing, like an actor on stage even at his writing desk. Honegger observes that each work was a reassertion of that early decision to live. Appropriately, some way into Extinction, the narrator reflects on the frustrated lives of those stuck in small-town provincial misery from which he, the narrator, had escaped. He says they fail to better themselves, to “get away from their real selves” because

“they lack the intellectual energy, because they have not discovered the intellect – the intellect around them or the intellect within them – and have therefore not taken the first step, which is the precondition for taking the second.”

So, we might assume that in writing, Bernhard got away from his real self. But “full commitment” means he did it with his mortal body as well as his intellect. Despite his early escape from death, Bernhard was always seriously ill. He expected to die before reaching fifty. His half-brother, a doctor, claims to have kept him alive for an extra ten years after that. Mortality was an over-riding theme and writing was at once the escape from death’s imminence and its enactment. Barthes’ Death of the Author was more than a concept to Bernhard. In fact, in a blessed piece of minutiae, Honegger tells us one of his favourite games was “playing dead”. It’s a nice idea to think of the novels as the place were Bernhard plays dead for us. Nowhere else is he more alive.