A stupid phrase has been floating around my stupid head for some time now. A stupid phrase: Post-Literature Literature. Capitalised. Literature that comes after Literature, after the whole thing, the whole edifice, has come crashing down. A post-apocalyptic Literature, a Literature that knows the game is up, that it's all finished, that the real world is a greater work of fiction than any particular fiction, and that what's left is to press Literature, what remains of Literature, towards that Reality, to hope it catches fire.
The madness of the 'Credit Crunch' (stupid, prosaic name), the madness of the whole of Capital whose body turns like a Chinese dragon … A post-Literature Literature that you find in Bolano and in Vila-Matas (they were friends, I discovered after reading them both: no surprise). Literature in whose books you can laugh at a man in jail who draws dwarves with giant cocks. In which humour has become puerility … in which wit has decayed into innuendo, and there's only bad taste.
What happens when a page of Blanchot reappears in Vila-Matas's Montano? What happens when it reappears in this mad context? Something has ended, a whole seriousness has disappeared. Something has ended: literary substance has lightened, the airship's unmoored. There it goes, drifting into the sky. It's lost, gone, and what remains? Our Real world, our Fiction-Reality, our mad world through which affects pass at great speed, in which words and money and moods flow fast as lightning.
They don't speak like people in books, these characters. They're like us – like me – on this side of literature, of the great mountain range, that far plateau. They're like us, with us, where the range's shadow doesn't reach. How many people read Lautreamont before us? And Breton? And all the old avant-garde stuff. It's old, old, it's for young people, they're naive enough, unread enough and meanwhile we know there's a thousand books on Lautreamont and books on books about Lautreamont and books on books on books on Lautreamont.
Lautreamont's eternally young, so is Rimbaud, yes, yes, but that eternity, that infinitely pure flame, the flame that burns everything up except itself burns too far away for us, remote star, on this side of Literature capital 'L'. Meanwhile, there's all the time in the world to read, not to read, to write, not to write, none of it matters, and the great snake loops of Capital writhe all about us.
Montano, Montano: the book's too long, two thirds too long. It's absurdly verbose, madly verbose, doubling and then tripling itself, satirising itself and then exhausting satire and then exhausting everyone, all its readers. Who hasn't put the novel down in exasperation? Only to pick it up again, to finish it … out of a sense of duty to what began so dizzingly in those opening pages? To those flashing pages … with their laughter, in a laughter that takes everything, even itself as its object. That refuses to limit itself, laughter falling into laughter, lost in it, Literature on fire, Literature boiling …
Lars Iyer's Blog 