The Supermarket Mirror

1.

The freedom to tell is given, not taken. The same with the freedom to read.

Yesterday, Steve of This Space reflected on a claim by Jason Cowley in The Observer, who argues 9/11 was an event that should change literature. Fiction is no longer to be irrelevant; its aim must now be to offer a convincing representation of a changed world. As Steve objects, this is to assume the events of 9/11 are more significant than others when it comes to writing, to telling. According to what criteria can Cowley make his claim? One which foregoes the event to which literature is bound – which is to say each event, any event as it allowed to bear the pressure of the outside. But what does this mean?

2.

Doubtless we all have events which haunt our imagination in the same way 9/11s, to which we return and cannot help but return. Better to say those events have us and that we are as though magnetised by what happened once and seems to press forward to give itself again. As though they occurred not once, but several times over. Or at least, that when they occurred they were not felt to occur, and it was necessary, later, to feel one’s way back to them – to follow the winding course of associations to their inception.

But behind these events, there is another kind of freedom, that is no longer the correlate of that which would allow us to pick up a novel in idle interest. A freedom, a potency, which reveals itself only in the telling that belongs to literature (and in different ways, to film, to music, to art). I can only unfold this by telling of my encounter with telling in turn.

3.

Telling. This is how Across accounts for its existence. At its heart, the narrator says, is the vision he has of himself in the mirrored ceiling of a supermarket. Who does he see? Not the one his son resembles, he writes, but rather the one who resembles his son. But what does that mean? 

The narrator speaks of a kind of liberation – he has been given leave from the school where he works as a teacher to complete an academic article – but this does not account for the significance of the event in question. If the movement of narration is granted by the mysterious density of this event, it is not because it is a mystery to be solved. Indeed, the event is said to happen only towards the end of this volume and it comes unexpectedly, casually, not as an awaited climax. Is it, then, that the telling allowed the event to come forward? Did the event make itself known only because of that telling?

4.

Such events, measured against Cowley’s post 9/11 literature, disappoint because of their banality. What are they, after all, compared to the great events of our time? Literature’s voice is too quiet. But in that quietness something else occurs.

In an earlier post in the aftermath of the London bombings, Steve reflects on a novel called Incendiary about a terrorist attack on London written before the bombings of the 7th July. The major marketing campaign to promote was already distasteful, he says, appealing to a simple Schadenfreude on behalf of the credulous and sensation-seeking public who would believe themselves to be engaged in reading with contemporary life.

After the bombings, the marketing campaign for Incendiary was pulled, but the bombings on the underground, Steve notes, provided it with another kind of puff.

5.

A fortnight ago, I spent time in London just after the bombings. I had little to do; I was on holiday; I brought a few books with me, and one of them was Handke’s Across. In the tabloids there was the predictable celebration of British solidarity and the spirit of the Blitz. The Sun crowed when what they thought was one of the terrorists was shot. 1 down, 3 to go. But the wrong man was shot, and this was predictable, too.

Against these events, in tension with them, was the quietness of the novel which I read without knowing why. The story unfolded, and I found the level at which I could approach it. That is how I came to the event at the heart of its telling. This was not a revelation. It happened quietly – as, it would seem, one among other events in the book. I forgot the scene and the story continued. Then I turned away and closed the book.

But it returned to me, that event. I remembered it, or rather, it remembered itself within me. It turned to me and I turned back – not to the passage in question, but to the beginning of Across. The book asked to be reread not because I possessed its secret but because I sensed the event as it came to me had changed what I had read. The book had altered; I needed to read it again in order to experience what it meant that for its narrator to claim the encounter with the supermarket mirror was its centre. And hadn’t I, too, changed? Hadn’t I crossed and thereby remade a threshold, meaning stepping back was impossible and there was only stepping forward?

In a sense, the event in the supermarket became equivalent to the others the narrator recounts – that each of the events this novel tells exists at the same level, substitutable for it, and that Across is only an account of how any such an event might be a threshold. But I know this is not right and I will have to read it again, for a third time. There are minute movements to which I will have to attend; I have underlined passages to which I will need to return. Yes, yes, but that experience of each event existing on the same plane, dispersing the work, giving it multiple focii is everything and I will have to return to this, too.

On my second reading, I reread Across not in order to experience the reassurance of knowing what was to come. I knew that no event would solve the mystery of what was told. Each detail brought forward that unsolvability and made it tangible in the descriptions of the natural world and the streets of Salzburg. The narrator, I thought, tells of what cannot be told and he does so as he experiences its opacity and his own opacity.

Who is he? The one who resembles his son. Not the father, now, but his son’s son. Who is he? Cast adrift from his job, murderer and  outcast, he is one in whom the opacity of the world is concentrated. Opaque to himself, he discovers the opacity of the world. Opaque, he begins to write and writing brings up against what resists the measure of the capacities with which he once identified. Freed from his job, he is free to move. But also to experience the freedom of things as they press towards him. That potency born of the resistance of the world, its opacity. And it is the experience of this opacity that gives itself to be told and as the freedom to tell.

6.

There is much more to be written about Across. Here, I only want to say that the freedom to tell is given, not taken. The same with the freedom to read. I might think I exert freedom in picking up Incendiary, but in fact I have relinquished it. Only when freedom is engaged by the outside, by forces untrapped by my power, does reading happen.