Author: Lars Iyer

We mustn’t be afraid to see our world in cosmological terms, W. says. In religious terms. The language of apocalypse is wholly appropriate for these times.

That’s what Krasznahorkai understands, W. says. It always amazes him, my inability to read Krasznahorkai. Didn’t he send me his own copies of The Melancholy of Resistance, and War and War? Didn’t he send me email after email, encouraging me to read them?

I didn’t get far with The Melancholy of Resistance, I told him. There’s nothing in War and War for the reader. The books are too boring, I told him. Boring!, W. exploded. Life is boring!, he says. Literature is not a celebrity magazine, he says. It should be boring.

W. has always thought that Krasznahorkai was the closest of contemporary authors to me. – ‘Except he has talent’. I’ve seen Béla Tarr’s adaptations of Krasznahorkai’s books, of course. W. forced me to watch them. But the books themselves … They’re too hard, I told W. The sentences are too long.

Hasn’t he dreamt that I could become a Krasznahorkai of philosophy, just as he could become a Béla Tarr of philosophy? Hasn’t he dreamt that, drawing from my Krasznahorkai-like blog posts about my life in the suburbs, my life in the warehouse, my life with damp and my life with rats, that he might write a Béla Tarr-like philosophy?

Dogma reviewed at The Answer is Probably No.

The fundamental charm of Withnail & I lies in the dialogue, whose wit and eloquence have a redemptive capacity: we maintain dignity within ruin through the grace of our rhetoric. Perhaps this is the only way open to us when we are left with nothing but language. The pathos of the final scene hinges upon this idea. Withnail is utterly destitute, forsaken by everything but one of the most beautiful passages in Hamlet, which he bellows to the wolves. There’s a kind of dignity here very similar to Vladimir and Estragon’s, to Hamm and Clov’s. It’s also very similar to that of Lars and W on their inebriated lecture tour. However much they might fail as thinkers or writers, they can nonetheless acknowledge their inferiority with a crystalline deadpan humour; they have still encountered great beauty and flashes of truth, discussing Rosenzweig over a dive bar’s pooltable. W’s glorious insults of Lars are also a perverse form of esteem, as well as self-assertion. In this sense, the books seem to me as much about dignity as they are about friendship. Dignity achieved by a certain poise.

Fascinating meditation at Lexipenia on Spurious, Dogma, interviews I've done, taking in Withnail and I, Beckett, the question of non-male friendships, etc. … 

Short review of Dogma by Alice at Moving Under Skies.

I will be contributing to the following events at the HowTheLightGetsIn Philosophy and Music festrival at Hay-on-Wye:

Wednesday 6th June at 5PM

Reading event: Dialogue, Fiction and Philosophy. I will be reading from and discussing Dogma.

On Thursday 7th June at 10.30am

Authors in the Age of Celebrity – a discussion about writers as gods, asking whether punditry and promotion are as important to the figure of a writer as their books, or whether authors should be heard but not seen.

With Scott Pack (Harper Collins publicist), Elaine Feinstein (poet and novelist), with Gabriel Gbadamosi in the chair.

On Thursday 7th June at 5.30pm.

Tomorrow's Word – a discussion about the future of the novel
With Leo Robson and Joanna Kavenna.

I have no real idea how to read, W. says. No idea how to approach the oeuvre of a great thinker. He knows that it would be too much for me to approach such an oeuvre head on, as he does, simply reading the primary text in the original, line by line, looking up difficult words in a dictionary. And he knows that it’s even too much for me to approach it crabwise, though the work of others, by way of fellow thinkers, contemporaries, who were wrestling with its ideas as they emerged? I have no idea that it might be appropriate to approach an oeuvre from upstream, as it were, gaining a knowledge of the tradition of which it is a past, of the thinkers that influenced its author. Nor, for that matter, have I any clue that I might approach it from downstream, so to speak, reading backwards from the thinkers it influenced in turn.

I have no sense of the reverence of reading, W. says. No sense that I’ve come across something ahead of me, wiser than me, and which should make me sink to my knees. I have no shame as a reader, no sense that of the limits of my comprehension, of the limits of my education. I lack an exegete’s sensitivity, the hermeneut’s delicacy. I lack the tenderness of approach that would allow me to approach an oeuvre as the work of one who has struggled with thought as I should have struggled with thought, as a thought-brother, as a thought-sister, who also sought to make sense of their time, who also sought to let the great questions resound.

In the end, I am only a ransacker of texts, a kind of reader-marauder, W. says. I pillage my way through them like a Viking raiding party. 

Origins of Silence, a review of Dogma by Toby Lichtig from The Times Literary Supplement, April 13 2012, p.22:

The epithet 'Beckettian' is perhaps the most overused in criticism, frequently employed as a proxy for less distinguished designations such as 'sparse' or 'a bit depressing'. But Lars Iyer's fiction richly deserves this appellation. His playfully spare – and wryly depressing – landscape, incorporating a bickering double act on a hopeless, existential journey, is steeped in the bathos, farce, wordplay and metaphysics of the man John Calder referred to as 'the last of the great stoics', its characters accelerating towards a condition of eternal silence, fuelled only by the necessity of speaking out. Other influences abound, self-consciously so, including Franz Kafka and Maurice Blanchot, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Antonio Gramsci; but it is what these thinkers share with Samuel Beckett that stands out: an interest in what might be termed the tragicomic flight of Zeno's arrow.

Following on from Spurious (also the name of his blog), Dogma is the second in Iyer's proposed trilogy of buggering-on-in-spite books, featuring a narrator also called Lars (half Danish, half Hindu) and his splenetic companion W. (half Jewish, half Catholic), vagrant philosophers (where Beckett was fond of philosophical vagrants) bound by a friendship of loving antagonism). Lars and W. shamble around the corridors of academe, attending ever-more futile seminars and lecture tours, and sinking with increasing resolve into degradation, alcoholism and insult. This bullying is superficially one-directional: W. ridicules Lars, but it is Lars who reports this ridicule to us.

Thus we learn that our narrator is (for W.) gauche in his emotions, simian in his manners, stone-age in his intellect, at best a 'savant', at worst 'Scandotrash', 'a squalid man amidst the squalor', a 'Homo Floresiensis of thought', 'an administrator of the spirit', 'fundamentally bureaucratic', 'a petty man, yes; a troubled man, no'. This tool of reported insult, as well as being entertaining, provides a curious sketch of the tormentor himself, a frustrated minor academic who cannot come to terms with the endless disappointments offered by the contemporary life of the mind. W.'s own sense of self-worth (despite his many self-acknowledged talents) is wavering at best, but perception, pace Derrida, being a system of relations, there is thankfully always Lars to buck him up: 'W. feels like Socrates, he says. And I am Diogenes, Socrates's idiot double'. At other times, our narrator merely appears to drag his friend down: 'Somehow I always stand in the way of his beatitude'. The endless affront also serves a higher purpose: it provides a language for the author's exploration of existential crisis.

With their souls in such a parlous state, there is clearly only one thing for it: they must found a new philosophical movement to while away the time between the morass and the apocalypse (an inevitability that Lars, with his Hindu's attitude towards cyclicality, cannot, says W., hope to comprehend). Taking their inspiration from the avant-garde realism of the filmmakers Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, as outlined in their 'Dogma 95' manifesto, W. (with dubious help from Lars) invents 'Dogma', a school of thinking rooted in spartanism, sincerity, collaboration and plagiarism, before expanding its principles to include reticence, alcoholism and something far more violent ('But we got scared and backed out'). The first Dogma presentation, on Kafka, goes well: 'W. spoke very movingly of his encounter with The Castle in a Wolverhampton library. I spoke very ineptly (W. said afterwards) …'. Further talks on love and friendship lead to fissures: by the eighth lecture 'we were almost incoherent' with drink and for the ninth 'we went to the pub instead'. The fifteenth presentation 'was for our benefit only. We gave it in secret, under cover'. In their babbling, beer-sodden hopelessness, they gradually, and failingly, approach what for Beckett, as for Wittgenstein and Blanchot, one always feels was the preferred option: silence.

Along the way, there is much scope for garrulous reflection on the human condition, fuelled by the characters' (and author's) academic interests, including the (Henri) Lefebvrean conception of 'eternullity', the Blanchotian 'infinite wearing away', the Gramscian crisis ('the old is dying and the new cannot be born') and the Leibnizian differential: 'It is the infinite that founds the finite and not the finite the infinite – this is why the infinite is not a negative concept'. At times, Iyer's fiction feels more like literary philosophy than philosophical literature, and the relentless metaphysical hammering can wear thin. Ungenerous reviewers might even ask whether we need another quasi-Beckettian prober of the abyss, retreading the old ground between late modernism and poststructuralism with a pair of grim-gay revelation-awaiting no-can-ers and a series of disposable quotations from a doubtless impressive library (Iyer is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the author of two books on Maurice Blanchot).

Those critics, however, would be ignoring the countless charms of the text. Iyer's fiction isn't likely to change the world but perhaps that's the point, and in the meantime we can be diverted by its irreverence, intelligence and, perhaps above all, its darkly cheerful exploration of friendship. The real joke of the novel is less W.'s cruelty than the fact that Lars retains the upper hand by controlling the reportage. This opposition sustains it, and within it there is sufficient love almost to gesture towards something beyond the void.

Spurious and I: an Interview

 What is Spurious all about?

The novel relates the adventures of two would-be intellectuals, W. and Lars, who have an enthusiasm for the thought and literature of what they call ‘Old Europe’. They meet in their hometowns (Plymouth, Newcastle), undertake a foreign trip (to Freiburg) and head off to various parts of Britain, discussing matters by turn profound and trivial.

Spurious is also a story of ideas – the apocalypse, the Messiah and so on – and writers, Kafka, Rosenzweig and others. And then there’s the damp in Lars’s flat, which has its own story, like the decrepit landscapes the Hungarian film director Béla Tarr likes to film.

Tell me more about the characters of the novel.

There are really only two characters in Spurious: W., Jewish in origin, but a Catholic convert, who teaches in a college in Plymouth, and Lars, Danish-Indian in origin, and a Hindu, who teaches in a university in Newcastle. These friends and collaborators have a strong interest in philosophy and literature, but also a sense of inadequacy with respect to the great figures in these fields. W. thinks of Lars as a kind of failed protégé, who has been utterly unable to deliver on the task W. had set him, that is, to spur W. on to think original and relevant philosophical thoughts. What the characters have in common is a fascination with Old Europe, which names, for them, a kind of paradise, where certain ideas are taken seriously and form part of the intellectual conversations of an age. They look to figures like Kafka and Rosenzweig as exemplars of philosophical and literary commitment.

Why does ‘Old Europe’ mean so much to the characters?

Figures like Kafka and Rosenzweig, who W. and Lars admire, belonged to a culture that took ideas seriously, a culture in which intellectual life was valued, even lionized. Theirs was a period of great authors, and great ideas. The Britain of W. and Lars – the neoliberalised Britain of the 2000s – is very different. Their culture is not an intellectual one. It is not elitist – dfferences between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture have long since been erased. The charisma which surrounded older intellectual figures has disappeared. There is no longer an intransigent vanguard, no longer a securely reactionary bourgeois morality, no longer an academicist establishment for artists and thinkers to rail against. Culture, now, is populist and globalised. The high seriousness of modernism can only seem a posture. W., and, in particular, Lars, are part of this world. Lars seems to relish it: he reads gossip magazines (perhaps only to annoy W.), he plays Doom on his mobile phone. W. is more inclined to struggle against it.

Contemporary Britain isn’t greatly interested in ideas, in particular the ideas that interest W. and Lars, which belong to an entirely different, Old European, context. Nor is contemporary Britain interested in the integrity of Old European thinkers and artists, who seem to embody what they think and create, to live it, and to do so at a distance from conventional measures of success.

This kind of integrity – the attempt to live a serious life as a writer or a thinker – is something which the British have long been disinclined to admire. ‘Oh come off it!’, is the response of the Briton to continental seriousness. ‘What rot!’; ‘We don’t have to bother with any of that!’ – this kind of deflationary chirpiness can be a tonic when faced with pomposity or pretension. But it is too quick a response, I think, to continental attempts to address and remedy our situation.

This very British attitude is something which the critic and novelist Gabriel Josipovici discovers in the brand of literary realism characteristic of the contemporary novel, which ‘yields an impoverished view of life’. The work of celebrated contemporary novelists has made the world, he says, ‘smaller and meaner’. In my view, the genial self-confidence of the British novel – of ‘Establishment Literary Fiction’, in Mark Thwaite’s formulation – disconnects it from the disorienting conditions in which many of us work and live.

Does this tie in with your claims in your Manifesto about the contemporary British literary fiction?

It does. Josipovici worries that contemporary literary fiction impoverishes life. I agree with him. But I make another claim in my Manifesto: that life itself, under the conditions of neoliberalism, is becoming impoverished – and that existing forms of literary fiction have difficulties responding to and registering this impoverishment. This leads me to conclude that contemporary literary fiction risks disengagement from the literary traditions, of which literary modernism is a crucial part, due to British parochialism, but also that literary modernism itself will have to be remade in the face of contemporary conditions, due to the disastrous effects of neoliberalism. There is a further twist: the marginality of literary fiction, the fact that it is but one strand in our multi-braided culture, means that it may no longer have a role that is central enough to respond to its own crisis. That is, its marginality, which means the impossibility of taking itself seriously as literature, means that it cannot rise to its greatest challenge. Contemporary literary fiction, for me, has been displaced from the traditions that feed into it, and from the conditions of these traditions, to the extent that we can say it is premised on the death of literature. Whether we acknowledge it or not, as readers, as writers, we are posthumous with respect to literature. We’ve come too late. We can no longer believe in literature. But there is a ray of hope: once you accept this non-belief, once you affirm it in a particular way, then something may be possible.

Is this what Spurious tries to do?

I hope so. For me, Spurious marks its own distance from the conditions in which the great works of literature and philosophy of Old Europe were written. You can see this at the level of the content of the work: W. and Lars occupy the world of the present, and the world that valued the ideas they value, the world that sustained those ideas and nurtured their production, has disappeared. Much of the humour of the book comes from the fact that its characters are men out of time. But perhaps it also makes itself visible at the level of form: the way in which the novel largely eschews plot and character development – in which it ‘circles the drain’, as one critic has put it.

Isn’t this rather a gloomy view? Won’t it lead to depressing and unreadable literary fiction?

I hope not! Spurious is first of all a comic novel, a novel of black humour. Black humour, in general, has been defined in terms of its focus on the darker sides of life, on despair and death, but that does not quite capture it. Comic vision is often conservative, depending on a stable value-system, on an unshakable order of the world. A whole strain of genial British comedy is of this kind. Think of Dickens’s Mr Pickwick, or Mr Toad of Toad Hall, or of the friends who mess about in boats in Jerome L. Jerome’s novel: these characters are amiable eccentrics at whose foibles and quirks we can poke gentle fun. W. and Lars might seem to be lovable fools of this sort. But the comedy of their banter about murder, suicide, violent death and so on, their penchant for exaggeration and grotesquerie, as well as their fascination with financial and climactic apocalypse, is meant to stick in the craw. It is meant to capture a genuine sense of posthumousness that they share, and we, as readers and writers interested in literature, share with them. I try to have it both ways: the novel is supposed to be humorous, funny, in the manner of British TV comedy like Steptoe and Son, or British films like Withnail and I. It is supposed to be entertaining. But it is also supposed to be troubling, conveying the sense of the end of an older order of the world, with its accompanying values.

Spurious doesn’t have much of a plot. Was that intentional?

There isn’t. The characters are continually led to confront their failure, in a manner reminiscent of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Beckett has his characters bicker and argue to pass the time – anything "to hold the terrible silence at bay". So too with W. and Lars. The ‘terrible silence’ in question is the death of Old Europe, the death of literature. This is coupled, in the novel, with the results of neoliberalism: to financial and climactic apocalypse. The characters’ philosophical interest in messianism (in the messianism of Kafka and Rosenzweig) is an attempt to resist this silence. It is fitting, therefore, that messianism is presented in Spurious as a kind of speech – as exactly that kind of speech which takes place between W. and Lars.

Spurious is part of a trilogy …

It is indeed. Dogma was published earlier this year, and sees the characters journeying through the southern states of the USA, as well as returning to their old haunts in Britain. Exodus, which will be published early next year, is an attempt at a final reckoning with neo-liberal Britain, and sees the characters take a final stand against the closure of W.’s philosophy department.

Interview for Lee Rourke & students at Kingston University

Interview with Anna Aslanyan for Radio Free Europe. Translated into Russian.

I am appearing with Kjersti Skomsvold at a 'fiction discussion' at the Town Hall Theatre Galway as part of the Cúirt International Festival of Literature this coming Wednesday (25 April at 6.30-8.00pm). Tickets priced €8 and €6 (available at the venue and at http://www.tht.ie.)

Declan Rooney, of the Galway Independent interviews me alongside Kjersti Skomsvold, in anticipation of our appearance at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, held next week.

The current issue of the Times Literary Supplement (not online) has a very interesting review of Dogma by Toby Lichtig.

I took my camera with me – which was the cause of another scene with Ludwig. We were getting on perfectly amicably – when I left him for a moment to take a photo. And when I overtook him again he was silent and sulky. I walked on with him in silence for half an hour, and then asked him what was the matter. I seems my keenness to take that photo had disgusted him – ‘like a man who can think of nothing – when walking – but how the country would do for a golf course’. I had a long talk with him about it, and eventually we made up again. He is really in an awful neurotic state: this evening he blamed himself violently and expressed the most piteous disgust with himself … I only hope that an out of doors life here will make him better: at present it is no exaggeration to sat he is as bad – (in that nervous sensibility) – as people like Beethoven were. He even talks of having at times contemplated suicide.

Ludwig was horribly depressed all evening. He has been working terribly hard of late – which may be the cause of it. He talked again tonight about his death – that he was not really afraid to die – but yet frightfully worried not to let the few remaining moments of his life be wasted. It all hangs on his absolutely morbid and mad conviction that he is going to die soon – there is no obvious reason that I can see why he should not live yet for a long time. But it is no use trying to dispel that conviction, or his worries about it, by reason: the conviction and the worry he can’t help – for he is mad. It is a hopelessly pathetic business – he is clearly having a miserable time of it.

He is morbidly afraid that he may die before he has put the Theory of Types to rights, and before he has written out all his other work in such a way as shall be intelligible to the world and of some use to the science of Logic. He has written a lot already – and Russell has promised to publish his work if he were to die – but he is sure that what he has already written is not sufficiently well put, so as absolutely to make plain his real methods of thought etc – which of course are of more value than his definite results. He is always saying he is certain he will die within four years – but today it was two months.

Excerpts from the diary of David Pinsent, Wittgenstein's close friend, with whom he travelled to Norway in 1913. Pinsent, with whom Wittgenstein was in love, died during World War One.

 

[…] all one has really is the posture of lament. Left with neither joy nor sorry, all that remains are the repetitions of gloom and palliative consolations; namely, for W. and Lars, drink and conversation while slouched over a bar. What I find interesting about this repetition, in light of Iyer’s manifesto concerning literature, is that it occurs purely for the enjoyment of others. We, the mostly university educated, some of  us vaguely professorial, derive the sort of pleasure these repetitions are patently designed in the book to avoid.

Very interesting review of Dogma by Brad Johnson at An und für sich.

The great David Winters has won a Critial Hit Award for his review of Dogma.