I excuse my own taste in public. Ah, it’s not so interesting, I’ll say of this or that book. He’s a writer in whose works almost nothing happens, I’ll say, and by doing so keep his work more deeply in its own secrecy, in the distance it seems to draw to itself and maintain. And it’s true – I wonder at the journey that led me here that is scarcely a journey, but a kind of slowing down, a walking in place, until I discovered – what? A narrative that does not move; a telling that catches everything up and nothing.
Books in which telling seems to summon itself from a lost darkness. That seems to recall the epic form – even the parody of the epic, its becoming comic as in Handke’s rewriting of Cervantes in Crossing the Sierra des Gredos as he allows his protagonist journey back to the village from which Don Quixote set out. Recalls it but by halting it, drawing on that breath upon which Homer drew. Drawing deep on that power of inspiration granted by the Muses. And speaking from them – from the gods, the half-gods, from that darkness the gods conceal. As if that were enough, the wind from another time, the divine afflatus. From another time, but as it fills the sails of a modern story, a contemporary one.
I excuse my own taste – nothing happens in the books I like I will say. Dwelling, my Visitor calls it, and laughs. She is amused by my films in which nothing happens and my books in which nothing happens over again. She makes the daft gestures of Pocahontas from The New World and laughs. And I wonder whether the power of telling that I want is not a kind of kitsch and what remains of the epic, as Handke presents it, has not hollowed itself out to nothing. Or that its repetition is a postmodern gesture, without commitment, without depth, in the flashing impermanence of the present. And who are the gods, anyway!
Sometimes I shrug, ‘it’s just my taste …’, or ‘reading … what does it matter, anyway?’ And laugh at the idea that to read a modern work – a book for which narration itself is a problem (but then Cervantes is already a modern …) – is to find oneself in the position of its author: without a model. I am struck reading Anne Atik’s exceptional memoir of Beckett, How It Was at the depth of his acquaintance with an older, ‘classical’ culture – with Schubert, say, with Dr Johnson …
Beckett had stars to steer by, I tell myself. And Handke too, with his translations from ancient Greek. Stars to steer by – but isn’t a book like Crossing the Sierra des Gredos what the Greeks (how laughable – to write ‘the Greeks’; to be able to write serenely and all at once: ‘the Greeks’ …) would call a wandering star?
We call them planets, those errant stars the Greeks identified, and know they only seem to wander across our skies. They, too, are in orbit just as surely as the disparate matter that makes up the asteroid belt. Even a comet moves in orbit of the sun. By what, then, is my reading steered? By the fantasy I project back as the Greeks, as old India … and by the fantasy of the origin from which the gods would come and disappear: the starless darkness from which nothing shines.
Sometimes I think I lack a vital faculty – that my taste has failed (perhaps it fails because I can still speak of taste, of the unity of taste) in some central way, and I’m drawn to books at the end of something rather than at the beginning. That Crossing the Sierra des Gredos is also an aberration of a book, a wandering that is not a planet, but that cuts across all orbits and will lose itself in the darkness beyond the last planets.
Who would read such a book? Who would have waited for it, advance-ordered it? Who would keep it book-marked beside his bed? Who would think of it as an anchor, who return to it in search of something, of some lost power of telling, or some power that never manifested itself, that the Greeks could not find, nor the Indians. The power of telling, of narrative that gives itself only now, when history seems to have ended, a million rivers spilling into the same indifferent sea?
What would Bourdieu say? What kind of distinction am I trying to establish? From what would the book protect me? What spell does it cast, by what ward does it prevent others crossing its threshold (my threshold)? What private space does it keep ring-fenced? What measure of time does it preserve even as it sits there, the book – lies there, heavy, 400-paged and patient?
No stars to steer by. Only the uncertainty of this body (science fiction readers call them Big Dumb Objects: Vejur of the first Star Trek film, Rama of Clarke’s novel …): what’s it for, what does it do? As it reaches me without context, wrapping itself spuriously in a whole history of the epic, of telling? How can you actually like this book?, I ask myself. Because you are a reader without culture, I tell myself. Because you read without history and without understanding.
Vejur was of course Voyager – the first probe to leave the Solar System (as a child, I would know where it was, waiting for 1986, say, for it to reach Jupiter, 1990 to reach Saturn, 1995 to leave the orbit of Pluto behind …) Rama was a spaceship sent by another civilisation towards our own sun. But what sent Crossing the Sierra des Gredos to me? How could I receive it as something sent? Who are you, unqualified for modernism?
Perhaps it is only in reading the book that I know certainty and a kind of repose. I am at home in this book. The sentences bear me along. It doesn’t get better than this, I tell myself. Relish it, I tell myself. Read more slowly. And then, invasively: who could like such a book? who are you, without culture, to like it?
Lars Iyer's Blog 